OPINOINS BASED ON FACTS (OBOF)
THINGS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED (TYMHM)
YEAR ONE
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OBOF
YEAR FIVE INDEX
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OBOF
TYMHM
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Jan.
07, 2015
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OBOF
TYMHM Vol 15 - No 1
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Jan.
19, 2015
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OBOF
TYMHM Vol 15 - No 2
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Feb. 03, 2015
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TYMHM Vol 15 - No 3
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TYMHM Vol 15 - No 4
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Mar. 02, 2015
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Mar. 13, 2015
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TYMHM Vol 15 - No 7
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Mar. 23, 2015
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OBOF
TYMHM Vol 15 - No 8
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Mar. 28,
2015
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Agenda
1.
Flush Trans Pacific Partnership.
2.
Is there a new political system emerging?
FROM FLOYD:
I have been getting a few comments. If some of you want to send some comments, but
have trouble getting linked on, use Google and I
believe you will go right to the comment section.
ATTENTION
NATHIAN
MATHIAN, MY FRIEND,
PLEASE CALL - I have lost your tele number.
My num,ber is
918-260-4927
~
Flush the TPP
"Trans Pacific Partnership"
Authors: Amy Goodman
NationofChange
Op-Ed
Published:
March 21, 2015
President Barack Obama and the Republicans in
Congress are united. Yes, that’s right. No, not on Obamacare, or on the budget, or on
negotiations with Iran
The battle lines are being drawn over the TPP
and TPA. If you are confused, well, that is exactly what many of the most
powerful corporations in the U.S. U.S.
and 11 other countries in the Pacific Rim: Australia ,
Brunei , Canada , Chile ,
Japan , Malaysia , Mexico ,
New Zealand , Peru , Singapore
and Vietnam
The TPP negotiations have been held in
secret. Most people know what little they do because WikiLeaks, the document
disclosure and whistle-blower website, released several chapters more than a
year ago. Members of Congress also have been given limited access to briefings
on the negotiations, but under strict secrecy rules that, in at least one
instance recently, include the threat of imprisonment if details leak.
The TPP would be an expanded version of
earlier trade agreements, like NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement,
involving the U.S. , Canada and Mexico Seattle
The TPP, if passed, would implement trade
rules that make it illegal for governments to create and enforce regulations on
everything from environmental standards, to wage and labor laws, to the
duration of copyrights. A law prohibiting the sale of goods made in sweatshops in
Vietnam Malaysia
Lori Wallach of Public Citizen’s Global Trade
Watch program is one of the leading critics of TPP:
“It’s a delivery mechanism for a lot of the
things [Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell and the Republicans like. So,
for instance, it would increase the duration of patents for Big Pharma and, as
a result, give them windfall profits but increase our medicine prices. It could
roll back financial regulation on big banks. It could limit Internet freedom,
sort of sneak through the back door the Stop Online Piracy Act, SOPA,” Wallach
explained. “It would give special privileges and rights for foreign
corporations to skirt around our courts and sue the U.S.
The TPP, she went on, “was negotiated with
the assistance of 600 corporate advisers, official corporate trade advisers in
the U.S.
Grass-roots activists are organizing against
the TPP and fast-track. They work on diverse issues ranging from human rights
and Internet freedom to fair trade, labor rights and the environment. The
moneyed interests in Washington
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
~~~
Is a New Political System Emerging in This Country?
March 25, 2015
FROM FLOYD:
In posting 15-7, I told you about the plan
to provide Social Security benefits to Mexicans both illegal immigrants and
Mexicans in Mexico
Our government is even now having to put money from
the General fund into the SS fund just to make the present monthly payment. To give SS to Mexicans, particularly when
they have paid nothing into the program is ludicrous, absurd, and
ridiculous. With the many articles being
written about the "New Word Order." I just wonder if this is just a prelude to
joining the United States with
Mexico Mexico
and be the end of our great country, the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
The article below sets out a number of
developments over the past couple of decades leading us up to today and why the
author has the concerns he is articulating. It is long, but there seems to be more and
more concern along these lines, with more and more reputable analysis's setting forth there observations.
~
Have you ever undertaken some task you felt less than
qualified for, but knew that someone needed to do? Consider this piece my version of that and let
me put what I do understand about it in a nutshell: based on developments in
our post-9/11 world, we could be watching the birth of a new American political
system and way of governing for which, as yet, we have no name.
And here’s what I find strange: the evidence of this,
however inchoate, is all around us and yet it’s as if we can’t bear to take it
in or make sense of it or even say that it might be so.
Let me make my case, however minimally, based on five areas
in which at least the faint outlines of that new system seem to be emerging:
political campaigns and elections; the privatization of Washington through the
marriage of the corporation and the state; the de-legitimization of our
traditional system of governance; the empowerment of the national security
state as an untouchable fourth branch of government; and the demobilization of
“we the people.”
Whatever this may add up to, it seems to be based, at least
in part, on the increasing concentration of wealth and power in a new
plutocratic class and in that ever-expanding national security state. Certainly, something out of the ordinary is
underway and yet its birth pangs, while widely reported, are generally
categorized as aspects of an exceedingly familiar American system somewhat in
disarray.
1. One Percent
Elections
Check out the news about the 2016 presidential election and
you’ll quickly feel a sense of been-there, done-that. As a start, the two names
most associated with it, Bush and Clinton
The 2012 presidential campaign
was the first $2 billion election; campaign 2016 is expected to hit the $5
billion mark without breaking a sweat.
Take, for instance, “Why 2016 Is Likely to Become a Close
Race,” a recent piece Nate Cohn
wrote for my hometown paper. A noted
election statistician, Cohn points out that, despite Hillary Clinton’s
historically staggering lead in Democratic primary polls (and lack of serious
challengers), she could lose the general election. He bases this on what we
know about her polling popularity from the Monica Lewinsky moment of the 1990s
to the present. Cohn assures readers
that Hillary will not “be a Democratic Eisenhower, a popular, senior
statesperson who cruises to an easy victory.” It’s the sort of comparison
that offers a certain implicit reassurance about the near future. (No, Virginia
Cohn may be right when it comes to Hillary’s electability,
but this is not Dwight D. Eisenhower’s or even Al Gore’s America Iowa and New Hampshire
The early primaries, the ones that count, take place among
a small group of millionaires and billionaires, a new caste
flush with cash who will personally, or through complex networks of funders,
pour multi-millions of dollars into the campaigns of candidates of their
choice. So the early primaries — this
year mainly a Republican affair — are taking place in resort spots like Las
Vegas, Rancho Mirage, California, and Sea Island, Georgia, as has been widely reported. These “contests” involve groveling politicians
appearing at the beck and call of the rich and powerful and so reflect our new
one percent electoral system. (The main
pro-Hillary super PAC, for instance, is aiming for a kitty of $500 million
heading into 2016, while the Koch brothers network has already promised to drop
almost $1 billion into
the coming campaign season, doubling their efforts in the last presidential
election year.)
Ever since the Supreme Court opened up the ultimate
floodgates with its 2010 Citizens United
decision, each subsequent election has seen record-breaking amounts of money
donated and spent. The 2012 presidential
campaign was the first $2 billion election;
campaign 2016 is expected to hit the $5
billion mark without breaking a sweat. By comparison, according to Burton
In the meantime, it’s still true that the 2016 primaries
will involve actual voters, as will the election that follows. The previous election season, the midterms of
2014, cost almost $4 billion, a
record despite the number of small donors continuing to drop. It also represented the lowest midterm voter
turnout since World War II. (See: demobilization of the public, below — and add
in the demobilization of the Democrats as a real party, the breaking of
organized labor, the fragmenting of the Republican Party, and the return of voter suppression laws
visibly meant to limit the franchise.) It hardly matters just what the flood of
new money does in such elections, when you can feel the weight of inequality
bearing down on the whole process in a way that is pushing us somewhere new.
2. The
Privatization of the State (or the US
In the recent coverage of the Hillary Clinton email flap,
you can find endless references to the Clintons of yore in
wink-wink, you-know-how-they-are-style reporting; and yes, she did delete a lot of
emails; and yes, it’s an election year coming and, as everyone points out, the
Republicans are going to do their best to keep the email issue alive until hell
freezes over, etc.,etc.
Again, the coverage, while eyeball gluing, is in a
you’ve-seen-it-all-before, you’ll see it all again mode.
However, you haven’t seen it all before. The most striking aspect of this little
brouhaha lies in what’s most obvious but least highlighted. An American secretary of state chose to set up
her own private, safeguarded email system for doing government work; that is,
she chose to privatize her communications. If this were Cairo
Though the marriage of the state and the corporation has a
pre-history, the full-scale arrival of the warrior corporation only
occurred after 9/11. Someday, that will undoubtedly be seen as a seminal
moment in the formation of whatever may be coming in this country. Only 13
years later, there is no part of the war state that has not experienced major
forms of privatization. The US military could no longer go to war without
its crony corporations doing KP and guard duty,
delivering the mail, building the bases and being involved in just about all of
its activities, including training the militaries
of foreign allies and even fighting. Such warrior corporations are now
involved in every aspect of the national security state, including torture, drone strikes and — to
the tune of hundreds of thousands of
contract employees like Edward Snowden — intelligence gathering and spying. You
name it and, in these years, it’s been at least partly privatized.
All you have to do is read reporter James Risen’s recent
book, Pay Any Price, on how the global war on terror
was fought in Washington, and you know that privatization has brought something
else with it: corruption, scams and the gaming of the system for profits of a
sort that might normally be associated with a typical third-world kleptocracy. And all of this, a new world being born, was
reflected in a tiny way in Hillary Clinton’s very personal decision about her
emails.
Though it’s a subject I know so much less about, this kind
of privatization (and the corruption that goes with it) is undoubtedly underway
in the non-war-making, non-security-projecting part of the American state as
well.
3. The
De-legitimization of Congress and the Presidency
On a third front, American “confidence” in the three
classic check-and-balance branches of government, as measured by polling
outfits, continues to fall. In 2014,
Americans expressing a “great deal
of confidence” in the Supreme Court hit a new low of 23 percent; in the
presidency, it was 11 percent and in Congress a bottom-scraping five percent.
(The military, on the other hand, registers at 50 percent.) The figures
for “hardly any confidence at all” are respectively 20 percent, 44 percent and
more than 50 percent. All are in or near
record-breaking territory for the last four decades.
It seems fair to say that in recent years Congress has been
engaged in a process of delegitimizing itself. Where that body once had
the genuine power to declare war, for example, it is now “debating” in a desultory fashion an
“authorization” for a war against the Islamic State in Syria, Iraq and possibly
elsewhere that has already been underway for eight months and whose course, it
seems, will be essentially unaltered, whether
Congress authorizes it or not.
A president who came into
office rejecting torture and promoting sunshine and transparency in government
has, in the course of six-plus years, come to identify himself almost totally
with the US military, the CIA, the NSA and the like.
What would President Harry
Truman, who once famously ran a presidential campaign against a “do-nothing” Congress,
have to say about a body that truly can do just about nothing? Or rather,
to give the Republican war hawks in that new Congress their due, not quite
nothing. They are proving capable of acting effectively to delegitimize the
presidency as well. House Majority Leader John Boehner’s invitation to Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to undercut the president’s Iranian nuclear
negotiations and the letter signed by 47
Republican senators and directed to the Iranian ayatollahs are striking
examples of this. They are visibly meant to tear down an “imperial
presidency” that Republicans gloried in not so long ago.
The radical nature of that letter, not as an act of state
but of its de-legitimization, was noted even in Iran
In the 21st century, all that “small government”
Republicans and “big government” Democrats can agree on is offering essentially
unconditional support to the military and the national security state. The Republican Party — its various factions
increasingly at each other’s throats almost as often as at those of the
Democrats — seems reasonably united solely on issues of war-making and
security. As for the Democrats, an unpopular administration, facing constant
attack by those who loath President Obama, has kept its footing in part by
allying with and fusing with the national security state. A president who came into office rejecting
torture and promoting sunshine and transparency in government has, in
the course of six-plus years, come to identify himself almost totally with the
US military, the CIA, the NSA and the like. While it has launched an unprecedented campaign
against whistleblowers and leakers (as well as sunshine and transparency), the
Obama White House has proved a powerful enabler of, but also remarkably
dependent upon, that state-within-a-state, a strange fate for “the imperial
presidency.”
4. The Rise of
the National Security State
One “branch” of government is, however, visibly on the rise
and rapidly gaining independence from just about any kind of oversight. Its ability to enact its wishes with almost no
opposition in Washington
Meanwhile, the duplication to be found in the US
New reports regularly surface about the further activities
of parts of that state. In recent weeks, for instance, we learned from
Jeremy Scahill and Josh Begley of the Intercept that the CIA has spent years
trying to break the encryption on
Apple iPhones and iPads; it has, that is, been aggressively seeking to attack
an all-American corporation (even if significant parts of its production
process are actually in China). Meanwhile, Devlin Barrett of the Wall Street Journal
reported that the CIA, an
agency barred from domestic spying operations of any sort, has been helping the
US Marshals Service (part of the Justice Department) create an airborne digital
dragnet on American cell phones. Planes
flying out of five US
News also regularly bubbles up about the further expansion,
reorganization and upgrading of parts of the intelligence world, the sorts of
reports that have become the barely noticed background hum of our lives. Recently, for instance, Director John Brennan announced a major
reorganization of the CIA meant to break down the classic
separation between spies and analysts at the Agency, while creating a new
Directorate of Digital Innovation responsible for, among other things,
cyberwarfare and cyberespionage. At about the same time, according to the New York Times,
the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, an obscure State
Department agency, was given a new and expansive role in coordinating “all the
existing attempts at countermessaging [against online propaganda by terror
outfits like the Islamic State] by much larger federal departments, including
the Pentagon, Homeland Security and intelligence agencies.”
This sort of thing is par for the course in an era in which
the national security state has only grown stronger, endlessly elaborating,
duplicating and overlapping the various parts of its increasingly labyrinthine
structure. And keep in mind that, in a structure that has fought hard to keep what
it’s doing cloaked in secrecy, there
is so much more that we
don’t know. Still, we should know enough to realize that this ongoing process
reflects something new in our American world (even if no one cares to notice).
5. The
Demobilization of the American People
The New Robber Barons
In The Age of Acquiescence, a new book about
America’s two Gilded Ages, Steve Fraser asks why it was that, in the 19th
century, another period of plutocratic excesses, concentration of wealth and
inequality, buying of politicians and attempts to demobilize the public,
Americans took to the streets with such determination and in remarkable numbers
over long periods of time to protest their treatment and stayed there even when
the brute power of the state was called out against them. In our own moment,
Fraser wonders, why has the silence of the public in the face of similar
developments been so striking?
After all, a grim new American system is arising before our
eyes. Everything we once learned in the
civics textbooks of our childhoods about how our government works now seems
askew, while the growth of poverty, the flat lining of wages, the rise of the
.01 percent, the collapse of labor and the militarization of society are all
evident.
The process of demobilizing the public certainly began with
the military. It was initially a response to the disruptive and rebellious draftees of the
Vietnam-era. In 1973, at the stroke of a presidential pen, the citizen’s army
was declared no more, the raising of new recruits was turned over to
advertising agencies (a preview of the privatization of the state to come) and
the public was sent home, never again to meddle in military affairs. Since
2001, that form of demobilization has been etched in stone and transformed into a way of
life in the name of the “safety” and “security” of the public.
Since then, “we the people” have made ourselves felt in
only three disparate ways: from the left in the Occupy movement, which, with
its slogans about the one percent and the 99 percent, put the issue of growing
economic inequality on the map of American consciousness; from the right, in
the tea party movement, a complex expression of discontent backed and at least partially funded by right-wing operatives and
billionaires and aimed at the de-legitimization of the “nanny state;” and the
recent round of post-Ferguson protests spurred at least in part by the
militarization of the police in black and brown communities around the country.
6. The Birth
of a New System
Otherwise, a moment of increasing extremity has also been a
moment of — to use Fraser’s word — “acquiescence.” Someday, we’ll assumedly
understand far better how this all came to be. In the meantime, let me be as
clear as I can be about something that seems murky indeed: this period doesn’t
represent a version, no matter how perverse or extreme, of politics as usual;
nor is the 2016 campaign an election as usual; nor are we experiencing Washington US
While significant planning has been involved in all of
this, there may be no ruling pattern or design. Much of it may be happening in
a purely seat-of-the-pants fashion. In response, there has been no urge to
officially declare that something new is afoot, let alone convene a new
constitutional convention. Still, don’t
for a second think that the American political system isn’t being rewritten on
the run by interested parties in Congress, our present crop of billionaires,
corporate interests, lobbyists, the Pentagon and the officials of the national
security state.
Out of the chaos of this prolonged moment and inside the
shell of the old system, a new culture, a new kind of politics, a new kind of
governance is being born right before our eyes. Call it what you want. But
call it something. Stop pretending it’s not happening.
Out of the chaos of this prolonged moment and inside the
shell of the old system, a new culture, a new kind of politics, a new kind of
governance is being
born right before our eyes. Call
it what you want. But call it something.
Stop pretending it’s not happening.
The views expressed in this post are the
author’s alone, and presented here to offer a variety of perspectives to our
readers.
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American
Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as
well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He
runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His new book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a
Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World (Haymarket
Books), has just been published.
~~~
