Paul Craig Roberts wrote, March 13, 2011:

In his marvelous book, The Emotional Lives Of Animals, Marc Bekoff describes the devastating impact on animals of being kept in small cages. US soldier Bradley Manning has been kept illegally in an even smaller cage for eight months with no end in sight. At his press conference on March 11, one reporter found the courage to ask President Obama about the conditions of Manning’s confinement. The great and noble president of the united states replied that he had asked the Pentagon and was assured that the conditions of Manning’s confinement “are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards.” Only a George Orwell could do justice to an american president who thinks that keeping a US soldier in conditions worst than those that drive caged animals insane is “appropriate.”

Our Time of Universal Deceit Needs An Orwell
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=23688

I’m wondering: might Bradley Manning become America’s Mohamed Bouazizi? The Pentagon says it’s afraid Pfc. Manning might inflict “self-injury,” and is therefore keeping him in isolation. Farfetched as it is, the Pentagon’s fear must be that a Bradley Manning suicide would trigger a popular eruption of citizens outraged that this young soldier, whose only ‘crime’ is his embarrassment of United States officials, would be brought to suicide by his government’s actions.

When P.J. Crowley, the state department spokesman, was forced to resign for telling the world that Pentagon treatment of Pfc. Bradley Manning in military detention has been “ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid,” he stated:

The exercise of power in today’s challenging times and relentless media environment must be prudent and consistent with our laws and values.

Crowley’s firing is further evidence that the “laws and values” of the Obama administration continue the policies and practices of the prior administration, and that Obama will also defend those policies when given an opportunity to change them.

Make no mistake: the Obama administration wants to have it both ways: to say the release of secret cables “critically impact” national security; and at the same time to say that the release of secret cables is not such a big deal. Obama is either wholly complicit in Pfc. Manning’s torture by isolation and confinement, or he is wholly captive to rogue elements of the government detaining Private Manning. Either way, there is no change we can believe in.

The recent WikiLeaks release of State Department cables provides details showing Obama not only failed / refused to investigate Bush administration torturers, but actively worked to stop an investigation….

http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/12/wikileaks-cable-obama-quashed-torture-investigation

The only ‘change I can believe in’ is change founded on investigation of what is to be changed….

James Surowiecki [New Yorker Magazine, November 22, 2010] leaps to the conclusion that seniors are ‘greedy’ because we want to protect Medicare. What he neglects to point out is that the defense of Medicare is a defense of the only ‘single payer’ health care program in the U.S. Seniors may be current beneficiaries, but we are certainly not alone in thinking that single-payer is the preferred way to finance health care, as opposed to the private-proifit insurance scheme that dominates the U.S.

Polls before and after Obama’s election showed substantial support across the country and across age and class lines for a ‘public option’ — often referred to as ‘Medicare for all’ — in the debates about health care. Needless to say, Obama not only failed to capitalize on this broad support, but caved to the insurance industry without a struggle. It was left to seniors, the only section of the population with actual experience of the ‘public option,’ to defend against the industry juggernaut. That Obama ignored single-payer in the face of strong public sentiment can only be chalked up as another example of his overall failure to deliver (or even forcefully advance) any ‘change we can believe in.’

The fact that the health insurance industry is properly understood as a component of the financial sector of the economy, rather than as an aspect of health care per se, means that the ‘Affordable Care Act’ (a typical legislative misnomer) is but one part of Obama’s overall deference to and bailout of the financial sector, at the expense of everything else.

I didn’t vote Republican or tea-bag, and I am dismayed by the dysfunctionality of our party system that offered only these choices. Nonetheless, if there is an argument to be made about seniors and Medicare in relation to Obamacare, let us at least give credit where credit is due, to the recipients and defenders of a single-payer health care system.

Paul Krugman wrote (NYTimes, November 11, 2010):

… the main reason Mr. Obama finds himself in this situation is that two years ago he was not, in fact, prepared to deal with the world as he was going to find it. And it seems as if he still isn’t.

My take comes close to a liberal heresy…namely, that Obama is a product of ‘affirmative action,’ boosted and carried along through Harvard, etc., as a black face for the white system…. He never had to deal with outright racism or poverty in any significant way as a personal struggle. I can’t imagine what he did as a ‘community organizer’; my experience with that (in late 1960s New Haven especially) brought me close to people who had a strong capacity to confront the world as they find it. I have seen a Republican suggestion that Obama is a student of Saul Alinsky; this is bullshit, as anyone familiar with Alinsky’s methods knows. Alinsky was in-your-face; Obama is Stepin Fetchit by comparison….

Obama made a mistake in bringing Summers and Geithner into the administration, both culprits in the banking debacle; next, his mistake was to dump $$ into the banks w/o taking control of them (even George Soros said as much in an article in the November 11, 2010, NY Review of Books); after that, he was wrong to put aside calls for investigations into Bush malpractices (including torture and Iraq ‘intelligence’ manipulation)…. on all fronts, his mandate to ‘change’ things would have supported reviews of what was to be changed, i.e., what had been done to get into these various messes. By not uncovering the deep mess, he empowered the right-wing nuts by leaving their discourse unchallenged…. and they, sensing his weakness to confront, surged ahead.

My letter to The New York Review of Books in response to Michael Tomasky’s, “The Specter Haunting the Senate” [NYR, September 30, 2010], appears in the NYR, November 11, 2010, under the title, “Who’s Afraid of a Filibuster?”. It is accompanied by a reply from Mr. Tomasky.

I am flattered that Tomasky finds my argument “worthwhile”; he says it has been “much debated in Washington over the past two years.” I agree with his concluding assessment that “Counting on the Democrats to outdo the Republicans in [a filibuster] seems a tenuous hope.”

We gotta put them behind bars. Doing so requires we acknowledge the system that bred them, and in which they flourished, is a criminal enterprise….

When a . . . government desires to borrow money it must divest itself for the time being of all sovereign powers, and come before its subjects as a private corporation. It must bargain with those who have money to lend, and satisfy them as to questions of payment and security. . . . The broad theory of constitutional liberty is that the people have the right to govern themselves; but the historical fact is that, in the attempt to realize this theory, the actual control of public affairs has fallen into the hands of those who possess property. It follows from this that when property-owners lend to the government, they lend to a corporation controlled by themselves.

Henry Carter Adams, Public Debts: An Essay in the Science of Finance (New York: D. Appleton, 1887), pp. 7, 9

That’s as clear as one can state the matter! Sovereignty is undermined by ‘sovereign debt.’ The newly-revealed financial crisis in Greece is the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. [One wonders how long it will be before that phrase is meaningless. When the glaciers are gone, there will be no more icebergs.] The added revelation that the crisis results from toxic concoctions by Goldman-Sachs brings the circle to a close: the big financiers, not content to enjoy the governments they control, scavenge for deeper interventions and more problematic arrangements to feed their unquenchable greed.

The suicide note left by Joe Stack before he crashed his little plane into the Austin, TX, building where the IRS maintained offices may not be polished writing, but, as Christopher Ketcham says, “The coherence is there for all to see who have eyes to see it.” Stack went ballistic trying to grapple with a malicious tax code designed to foster what some refer to as ‘socialism for the rich,’ but which is better termed fascism: the integration of the government and economy into a single institution of power. I wrote about that in “Corporate Personality and Human Commodification,” Rethinking MARXISM Volume 9, Number 2 (Summer 1996/97), pp. 99-113.

FYI – This Senate bill apparently now goes to the House.

http://www.mass.gov/legis/bills/senate/186/st00/st00018.htm

I noticed a paragraph in Section 10 of the bill (amending chapter 111 by adding 2 sections) that would add a new section, 25L(c)(5), which includes the following in a separate paragraph:

The location of duty may be within the commonwealth, or may be in another state or a province of Canada if an official request for assistance has been received from such state or province.

The bill title refers to “Response in the Commonwealth,” but the possible mandatory deployment of voluntary personnel to anywhere in USA or Canada goes beyond that purpose.

Also, Section 25M includes provisions for control of “the market … product(s) or services(s) that are in short supply, and that … are essential to the health, safety or welfare of the people.”

A lot on the plate…..

p

Elizabeth Drew’s analysis of Obama’s 30 days [New York Review of Books, March 26] repeats the conventional, misguided, self-defeating notion that the Senate cannot do anything significant without 60 votes, “to ward off a filibuster, or even the threat of one.” To the contrary, perhaps the most significant action the Senate might now take is to call the Republicans’ bluff and let them go forward with a filibuster.

Please note: If Democrats had insisted on real filibusters at several junctures during the past several months they have been in the majority, instead of giving in after failing to round up cloture votes beforehand, Republicans would have been forced to display — in public on the floor of the Senate — their obstruction to Medicare financing, as well as to funding to combat AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis. Harry Reid had cots brought into the Senate for an all-night session in July when Republicans started to filibuster the Iraq pullout bill, but he caved when the first cloture vote was lost.

As I have written before: What is the reluctance of the Democratic majority to call the bluff of Republicans and force them to follow through on threatened filibusters? Is it cowardice, ineptness, or laziness? Rounding up cloture votes to forestall a filibuster is not the same as actually tackling a filibuster. It is ‘filibuster lite’ and the cloture vote becomes a virtual vote, empowering the minority rather than overwhelming it. As a result, Congress becomes ever more opaque and Americans become ever more suspicious of the legislative process.

In 1964, segregationist senators held up Senate business for 57 days, filibustering against the Civil Rights Act. Their filibuster revealed to America the mindset of the obstructionists and paved the way for successful actual cloture and passage of the Act. The civil rights filibuster educated people about the historic struggle and the landmark legislation. A writer analyzing the process of the Senate ought to be familiar with this history. A progressive writer today ought to understand the significance and the necessity of calling the right-wing obstructionists to account for themselves.

David RePass (emeritus professor of political science at the University of Connecticut), “Make My Filibuster,” [Op-Ed, New York Times, 1 March] used the phrase “phantom filibuster” to make the same point:

It also happens to make a great deal of political sense for the Democrats to force the Republicans to take the Senate floor and show voters that they oppose Mr. Obama’s initiatives. If the Republicans want to publicly block a popular president who is trying to resolve major problems, let them do it. And if the Republicans feel that the basic principles they believe in are worth standing up for, let them exercise their minority rights with an actual filibuster.