Failure to prosecute: why Obama is having trouble passing health care reform

By Don Smith

President Obama apparently believes that prosecuting Bush Administration officials for torture and other crimes would be a “distraction” from more important matters, such as health care reform.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The reason President Obama and the Democrats are having so much trouble passing health care reform is that they failed to hold conservatives accountable for their many misdeeds. The Democrats thereby empowered conservatives to continue their ample mischief. (I write “conservatives” rather than “Republicans” because some Democrats are amongst the conservatives who promoted harmful policies.)

Conservative misdeeds range from the unspeakably evil — such as torture, rendition, lying about the reasons for going to war, and the deaths of up to a million or more civilians — to the merely despicable — such as politically motivated prosecutions, reckless deregulation, suppression of evidence, tax cuts for rich folks, stolen elections, inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina, dirty tricks, and rampant corruption.

Had Democrats pursued impeachment early on they would have exposed the many lies, crimes, and dirty tricks of the conservatives to the light of day. Democrats would have even bigger majorities in Congress, and the ability of conservatives to influence public opinion would have been greatly diminished.

Instead, the Democrats, and President Obama in particular, have tried to be “bipartisan”.

What a stupid policy!

Conservatives in Congress have no intention of compromising on health care reform or on any other substantive issue. They continue to defend Bush Administration officials and policies in order to protect themselves and the GOP. This was discussed in Bipartisanship porn and Obama’s Trust Problem, where Paul Krugman writes:

It’s hard to avoid the sense that Mr. Obama has wasted months trying to appease people who can’t be appeased, and who take every concession as a sign that he can be rolled.

Indeed, no sooner were there reports that the administration might accept co-ops as an alternative to the public option than G.O.P. leaders announced that co-ops, too, were unacceptable.

The Democrats will continue to have trouble passing a reform agenda until they decisively confront the misdeeds of the recent past by rejecting bipartisanship and pursuing prosecution of Bush-era officials. This will have the triple effect of (1) bringing criminals to justice, (2) exposing the truth to the public, and (3) weakening the influence of conservative politicians and ideology.

Alas, failure to prosecute may not be the main reason why Obama and the Democrats are having trouble passing health care reform. There is evidence that the Democrat leadership never intended to pass real health care reform. This grim conclusion was sketched in Squandered Opportunity and Follow the Money. The Democrats may be too corrupted by money and power to follow through on their promises.

Progressives’ impatience with Obama is reaching a boiling point, not just over accountability but also over the bailouts, health care reform, militarism, and other issues. As Paul Krugman observes, “A backlash in the progressive base — which pushed President Obama over the top in the Democratic primary and played a major role in his general election victory — has been building for months.”

Indeed, we progressives have power over Obama. We are his base. If we turn against him — or, better yet perhaps, just threaten to turn against him — the news media will pick up on the story and Obama will be in trouble. Let us use that power wisely. If progressives appear too pushy, the effort might backfire. Recall that Congress voted to condemn MoveOn.org in 2007 when the group published their ill-fated New York Times ad questioning whether Gen. David Petraeus would “betray us” (MoveOn.org ad controversy).

For years progressives have been criticizing Democrats for appeasement. Maybe it’s time for progressives to follow our own advice and hold Obama accountable by saying, basically: either you stop protecting these torturers, stop continuing Bush era policies, and stop compromising on health care reform, or we on the left will withdraw our support and condemn you too. Progressives need to tread carefully, lest they be dismissed as radicals, but they need to demand their due.

“I want you to hold our government accountable. I want you to hold me accountable” — Barack Obama (September, 2008). Let us hold him accountable. Let us do our part to get the word out about how America is being screwed. And let us do our utmost to ensure that progressive Democrats such as Dennis Kucinich and brave independents such as Bernie Sanders prevail.

Oil lobby to fund campaign against Obama’s climate change strategy

The US oil and gas lobby are planning to stage public events to give the appearance of a groundswell of public opinion against legislation that is key to Barack Obama’s climate change strategy, according to campaigners.A key lobbying group will bankroll and organise 20 ”energy citizen” rallies in 20 states. In an email obtained by Greenpeace, Jack Gerard, the president of the American Petroleum Institute (API), outlined what he called a “sensitive” plan to stage events during the August congressional recess to put a “human face” on opposition to climate and energy reform.After the clamour over healthcare, the memo raises the possibility of a new round of protests against a key Obama issue.”Our goal is to energise people and show them that they are not alone,” said Cathy Landry, for API, who confirmed that the memo was authentic.The email from Gerard lays out ambitious plans to stage a series of lunchtime rallies to try to shape the climate bill that was passed by the house in June and will come before the Senate in September. “We must move aggressively,” it reads.The API strategy also extends to a PR drive. Gerard cites polls to test the effectiveness of its arguments against climate change legislation. It offers up the “energy citizen” rallies as ready-made events, noting that allies – which include manufacturing and farm alliances as well as 400 oil and gas member organizations – will have to do little more than turn up.”API will provide the up-front resources,” the email said. “This includes contracting with a highly experienced events management company that has produced successful rallies for presidential campaigns.”However, it said member organizations should encourage employees to attend to command the attention of senators. “In the 11 states with an industry core, our member company local leadership – including your facility manager’s commitment to provide significant attendance – is essential,” said the email.Greenpeace described the meetings as “astroturfing” – events intended to exert pressure on legislators by giving the impression of a groundswell of public opinion. Kert Davies, its research director, said: “It is the behind the scenes plan to disrupt the debate and weaken political support for climate regulation.”The rally sites were chosen to exert maximum pressure on Democrats in conservative areas. The API also included talking points for the rallies – including figures on the costs of energy reform that were refuted weeks ago by the congressional budget office.The API drive also points to a possible fracturing of the US Climate Action Partnership (Uscap), a broad coalition of corporations and energy organizations which was instrumental in drafting the Waxman-Markey climate change bill that passed in the House of Representatives in June.Passage of the legislation is seen as crucial to the prospects of getting the world to sign on to a climate change treaty at Copenhagen next December.Five members of Uscap are also in API, including BP which said its employees were aware of the rallies. Conoco Phillips, which was also a member of the climate action partnership, has also turned against climate change, warning on its website that the legislation will put jobs at risk, and compromise America’s energy security. The company is also advertising the energy rallies on its website, urging readers: “Make your voice heard.”However, Shell, also a member of both groups, said it did not support the rallies. Bill Tenner, a spokesman, said: “We are not participating.”

Once again it will remain to be seen how many of the blind followers will jump on Corporate America’s bandwagon? Your interests ARE NOT theirs!

HOLD WAR CRIMINALS ACCOUNTABLE

GEORGE W. BUSH

Work Experience

LAW ENFORCEMENT: I was arrested in Kennebunkport, Maine in 1976 for driving under the influence of alcohol. I pled guilty, paid a fine, and had my driver’s license suspended for 30 days. My Texas driving record has been “lost” and is not available.

MILITARY: I joined the Texas Air National Guard and went AWOL. I refused to take a drug test or answer any questions about my drug use. By joining the Texas Air National Guard, I was able to avoid combat duty in Vietnam.

COLLEGE: I graduated from Yale University. I earned a lot of “gentleman’s C’s,” which means F’s that are turned into C’s for sons of prominent Americans.

PAST WORK EXPERIENCE: I ran for U.S. Congress and lost. I began my career in the oil business in Midland, Texas in 1975. I bought an oil company, but couldn’t find any oil in Texas. The company went bankrupt shortly after I sold all my stock.

I bought the Texas Rangers baseball team in a sweetheart deal that took land using taxpayer money.

With the help of my father and our right-wing friends in the oil industry (including Enron CEO Kenneth Lay), I was elected Governor of Texas.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS GOVERNOR:
I changed Texas pollution laws to favor power and oil companies, making Texas the most polluted state in the Union. During my tenure, Houston replaced Los Angeles as the most smog-ridden city in America.

I cut taxes and bankrupted the Texas treasury to the tune of billions in borrowed money.

I set the record for the most executions by any Governor in American history.

With the help of my brother, the Governor of Florida, and my father’s appointments to the Supreme court, I became President after losing by over 500,000 votes.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS PRESIDENT:
I invaded and occupied two countries at a continuing cost of over one billion dollars per week.

I am the first president in U.S. history to enter office with a criminal record.

I spent the U.S. surplus and effectively bankrupted the U.S. Treasury.

I shattered the record for the largest annual deficit in U.S. history.

I set an economic record for most private bankruptcies filed in any 12-month period.

I set the all-time record for the biggest drop in the history of the U.S. stock market.

I set the all-time record for most days on vacation in any one year period. In my first year in office, after taking off the entire month of August, I presided over the worst security failure in U.S. history, resulting in the disaster of 9-11.

I am supporting development of a nuclear “Tactical Bunker Buster,” a WMD. In my State Of The Union Address, I lied about our reasons for attacking Iraq, then blamed the lies on our British friends.

I set the record for most campaign fund-raising trips by a U.S. president.

In my first year in office more than 2-million Americans lost their jobs, and that trend continues every month.

I set the all-time record for most foreclosures in a 12-month period.

I appointed more convicted criminals to my administration than any president in U.S. history.

I set the record for the least amount of press conferences than any president since the advent of television.

I presided over the biggest energy crisis in U.S. history, and refused to intervene when corruption involving the oil industry was revealed.

I presided over the highest gasoline prices in U.S. history.

I have cut health care benefits for war veterans, and I support a cut in duty benefits for active duty troops and their families in war time.

Internationally, I have set the all-time record for the most people worldwide to simultaneously protest me in public venues (15 million people), shattering the record for protests against any person in the history of mankind.

I have broken more international treaties than any president in U.S history.

I am proud that the members of my cabinet are the richest of any administration in U.S. history. My “poorest millionaire,” Condoleeza Rice, has a Chevron oil tanker named after her.

I am the first president in U.S. history to order an unprovoked, pre-emptive attack and the military occupation of a sovereign nation. I did so against the will of the United Nations, the majority of U.S. citizens, and the world community.

I created the Ministry of Homeland Security, the largest bureaucracy in the history of the United States government.

I am the first president in U.S. history to have the United Nations remove the U.S. from the Human Rights Commission.

I withdrew the U.S. from the World Court of Law. I refused to allow inspectors access to U.S. prisoners of war detainees, and thereby have refused to abide by the Geneva Convention.

I am the first president in history to refuse United Nations election inspectors. (during the 2000 U.S. presidential election).

I am the all-time U.S. and world record-holder for receiving the most corporate campaign donations.

My largest lifetime campaign contributor, and one of my best friends, Kenneth Lay, presided over the largest corporate bankruptcy fraud in U.S. history, causing hundreds of thousands of Americans to lose their retirement funds. My political party used the Enron private jets and corporate attorneys to assure my success with the U.S. Supreme Court during my election decision.

I have protected my friends at Enron and Halliburton against investigation, or prosecution. In the meantime, more time and money was spent investigating the Monica Lewinsky affair than has been spent investigating one of the biggest corporate rip-offs in history.

I garnered the most sympathy for the U.S. after the World Trade Center attacks and less than a year later made the U.S. the most hated country in the world, the largest failure of diplomacy in world history.

I am first president in history to have a majority of Europeans (71%) view my presidency as the biggest threat to world peace and security.

I changed U.S. policy to allow convicted criminals to be awarded government contracts.

RECORDS AND REFERENCES: All records of my tenure as Governor of Texas are now in my father’s library, sealed, and unavailable for public view.

All records of SEC investigations into my insider trading and my bankrupt companies are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public view.

All records or minutes from meetings that I, or my Vice-President, attended regarding public energy policy are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public review.

And on top of all that, he and his lackeys representing the Military-Industrial Complex orchestrated 911 resulting in untold lost of life and the endless draining of your wallet. But don’t worry Dick Cheney is now a muti-millionaire as well as his family and friends.

Keating Economics | Watch the Video and Share It with Your Friends

Eight years of supporting Bush Doctrine and before, the legacy is mind boggling.

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JOHN MCCAIN STRAIGHT TALK!

Another look at the man who would be President!

On the edge of a long night

By Charlie Reese

Have you ever wondered how human beings can be so cruel? And how cruelty crosses all the bound­aries — national, racial and ethnic? I have. Rereading an autobiog­raphy published in 1941 by a communist agent re­minded me of the dark side of human nature.

The book, “Out of the Night,” was written -under the pseudonym “Jan Valtin” — by a Ger­man who lived through the chaos of the collapse of the Weimar Republic ~ and the rise of Nazism. Broken by Gestapo torture, he ended up being pursued by both the Nazi and the communist man hunters and killers. Murders by these two forms of so­cialism are measured in the mil­lions during the 20th century. That alone should warn all people off any form of collectivism, because all of those millions, in the minds of their killers, were sacrificed “for the greater good.” They — flesh-and-blood individual human beings — were all murdered in the name of an abstraction, a stupid theory of how society should be organized. I doubt if the head thugs on both sides actually believed the theories. What they really believed in was power over their fellow man.

If you look at the French Revolu­tion and the Bolshevik Revolution, the message is clear: Intellectuals and the common people can pro­duce a blood bath. Latching on to some “ism” for justification, their greed for power and de­sire for revenge can run amok. Butchering women and children be­cause they were born into the “wrong” class is surely insane.

In our time, when peo­ple are saying we must sacrifice liberty for secu­rity, that scrapping the Constitution is necessary to win the “war” against terrorism, I would suggest “that you take your choice of genocides in the past 100 years and remind yourself what happens when people buy into the false proposition that the end justifies the means. People who preach that are always more interested in the means than in any end.

The only safe environment for a human being is under a weak gov­ernment with very restricted pow­ers. Normal people don’t need much to be happy — food, shelter, dignity and freedom from maraud­ers. They need a rule of law that ap­plies to everyone equally and at all times and in all circumstances. In established societies, legislators should meet rarely—perhaps once every two or three years—because a continuing cascade of new laws will eventually drown freedom.

The Founding Fathers, whether through luck, wisdom or divine guidance, gave us an almost perfect form of government, and we’ve been busy ever since trying to take it apart. Human beings are .danger­ous predators and cannot be trusted with power over their fellows. Many Americans have forgotten that the power of government comes out of the barrel of a gun. Governments coerce; they don’t persuade.

There are people living among us at this very moment capable of the cruelty so evident in the Holocaust All they are waiting for is the op­portunity. No greater opportunity exists than when a government en­lists such people and says whatever you do is now justified for the sake of the “greater good.”

Who would have guessed that George W Bush, who seemed to be a genial good old boy, would turn out to be a tyrant, launching wars of aggres­sion, arresting and confining people without charges or access to a lawyer, condoning torture and lying to the American people? A government that can without trial destroy you by sim­ply putting on a list your name or the name of an organization with which you are associated is a tyranny. A government that invades other countries and that feels free to murder people in any country it chooses is a tyranny.

Americans are on the edge of a long night. We had better wake up and step back before it’s too late.

40,000 Signatures for Immediate Cheney Impeachment Hearings (and Counting)! Come on People!

by DaveLindorff

It’s not being reported in the corporate media, which also refused to publish an opinion piece penned by six-term Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL), Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL), and Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI).But the truth is that these three members of the House Judiciary Committee who are calling on Committee Chair John Conyers (D-MI) to start immediate hearings on Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s (D-OH) bill, House Res. 799) to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney, have already gotten 36,000 people to sign a petition at WexlerWantsHearings.com calling for action now.Wexler has said he wants at least 50,000 signatures, and it seems certain he’ll have at least that many by the end of today. But why stop there. If everyone at DailyKos were to go to the site and sign on (all it takes is 30 seconds of your time), he’d get closer to 500,000 signatures.And if each of us were to send out a call to sign to ten of our friends, then we’d have half a million signatures, which would be hard for Conyers and the Democratic leadership, Speaker Nancy Pelosi included, to ignore.So let’s do it!

Go to WexlerWantsHearings.com and sign the petition!Kucinich’s impeachment bill was filed on April 24 and has been ignored now for almost eight shameful months. On Nov. 7, a bipartisan majority of 218 members of the House voted to send it from the floor of the House back to the Judiciary Committee for action. Now it’s sat there for over four weeks.We need to tell Congress, and particularly the Democrats who are stalling on this important defense of the Constitution and of democracy itself that  time’s up. We the American People want action! We want impeachment hearings!

http://www.thiscantbehappening.net

Dave Lindorff, a columnist for Counterpunch, is author of several recent books (“This Can’t Be Happening! Resisting the Disintegration of American Democracy” and “Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal”). His latest book, coauthored with Barbara Olshanshky, is “The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office (St. Martin’s Press, May 2006). His writing is available at http://www.thiscantbehappening.net


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