So, Now Obama Will Have Filibuster-Proof Majority in the Senate

So, with the recent party switch of Arlen Spector to the Democratic Party and the projected seating of Al Franken as the Democratic Senator from Minnesota, the Democrats will have 58 seats in the U.S. Senate. Along with the two independents (Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a democratic socialist, and former Democrat Joe Lieberman of Connecticut), both of whom regularly vote parallel to the Democratic caucus on a range of issues, the Democrats essentially now have the 60 votes to prevent a filibuster in the Senate. The filibuster is a procedural tactic that minority parties have historically used when they know they will lose a straight vote on the Senate floor on an issue particularly contentious to their party constituents (or, more likely, the corporate interests to which their party is most indebted). With that magic anti-filibuster number of Democratic and allied senators established, now Obama can be the practical progressive his supporters still believe that he is without fear of Republican obstructionism in the Senate. Let's see what he does with his newfound power.

The only worrying aspect of all this is Joe Lieberman's bordeline insane support of every form of militarism against Arab (and Persian) nations in the Middle East, which means that he may choose to caucus with the Republicans to filibusters attempts to prevent further killing of brown people in that region, even when the initial auspices for doing so are specious, to say the least (lies about non-existent weapons) or start new conflicts based on unsubstantiated allegations that nation-states would (against every proliferation pattern in modern military history*) supply a rogue agent with a nuclear device (as neo-cons allege nonsensically about Iran).

Cross your fingers for sanity.





* No country in the nuclear age has provided nuclear technology to anything other than a fellow nation-state, so why would someone seriously believe the Iranians would give one away to a proxy agent they have no real control over? Who would they give it to, Hezbollah? The Israelis would rain nukes on them in response to any nuclear attack on their soil. I wish people in the corporate media would ask questions that showed any type of understanding of military history, proliferation as regard proxy armies, etc. For example, Reagan didn't give the Contras nuclear submarines (LOL). Nation-states *never* give their most potent weaponry to proxy armies (they sensibly keep them for their own militaries).

The Absurdity of the Afghanistan Policy

By now, millions of people have seen the footage of individuals allegedly affiliated with the Taliban flogging a young woman, allegedly for exiting a home of a man who was not her husband. Violence of this type is naturally abhorred, but what about the violence inherent in war? Why is there no video of what U.S. forces are doing in Afghanistan and (illegally) in Northwest Pakistan? There is no military solution to abuse against women. You don't call in the Marines to improve gender relations. Imagine if domestic disturbance calls in the U.S. resulted in a military response, where black clad Special Forces invaded a home with flash-bang grenades and M-16s? The thought is it is absurd, so why are people implicitly using this instance of assault to justify the wholesale military occupation of an entire country? Why did people regularly ask about President Bush's exit strategy in Iraq (he had none), yet no one asks about President Obama's exit strategy in Afghanistan (he has none)? Both military adventures burn billions of dollars to no recognizable end. One cannot kill one's way out of political extremism; violence only begets more political extremists, because it shows by example the use of violence for political ends.

When will people realize that war is almost never the answer, in 99.9% of most scenarios, war only serves to enrich a few who sell weapons systems and military paraphernalia? So sad to see the same con game played on generation after generation, yet the deeper questions never receive media attention: what is the purpose of this and how can violence create peace?

Obama Convinces Russians to Reduce Nukes/What YOU Can Do

This is excellent news. President Obama and Russian President Medvedev met and agreed that we need to reduce our mutual warhead numbers below the level agreed upon in 2002 (possibly even lower than 1700, which is still enough to incinerate the human population many times over, unfortunately). This is a great step, since in the current economy, neither country can afford to maintain its current number of warheads, anyway, nor does our current level of warheads serve any national security purpose (since even 10% of 1700 warheads is enough to pretty much wipe out humanity).

BUT THERE'S SOMETHING THAT ***YOU*** CAN SUPPORT OBAMA ON:

(from the article)

"Obama also pledged to work for ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which the Senate rejected in 1999. Senate aides said Wednesday that trying to bring the treaty to a vote probably would take time, and they predicted that it does not currently have enough votes to pass."

PLEASE LOBBY YOUR SENATORS TO SUPPORT OBAMA BY RATIFYING THE COMPREHENSIVE NUCLEAR TEST BAN TREATY. Contact information to email or call your Senator can be found at www.senate.gov in the upper right hand corner (the "find your senator" search box). As much as it probably pleases the arms industry for us to randomly detonate nuclear weapons in superfluous tests (so we have to buy more to replace the ones detonated), this does not serve the interest of the U.S. taxpayer in an era of ballooning deficits and financial crisis. Further, and of equal importance, tests will invariably have a negative environmental impact, so the fewer there are, the better. I'm not sure if there is some worst case scenario where a test procedure could mistakenly be viewed as aggressive, but even a miniscule possibility of this should be reduced as much as possible (the fewer tests that occur, the less likely this is, if it is likely at all) (although traditional missile tests are more likely to cause such a misunderstanding than what I imagine would be underground detonations that are probably standard for nuclear testing).

PLEASE FORWARD THIS MESSAGE TO PERSONS OF CONSCIENCE AND SUPPORTERS OF PEACE IN YOUR CIRCLE!

The Celebration Is Over

Two months after the inauguration, people still send me pictures of obama and the first family smiling and looking all cutesy. Apparently no one got the memo. The celebration is over.

It's time for work.

Romantic sentiment about obama is over for me. the troops are still in Iraq and Afghanistan. not one soldier has come home as near as I can tell and he hasn't event given banks hundreds of billions of dollars while befgrudgingly giving the auto industry a few billion even though that industry employs working people throughout the midwest (and allowed a lot of working people to break into the middle class and make a better life for their kids). He has refused to attend the U.N. Conference against Racism in South Africa because he doesn't want to discuss reparations or Zionism (discuss, not act on...he doesn't even want to debate the
issue). If he disagrees with people's positions on Zionism or reparations, why can't he send a State Department envoy to represent his administration's position on those matters?

I don't want to see any more pretty smiling pictures. I want the change that was promised.

Fox News Attempts to Distract From Post Controversy

Those clever lads at Fox News (TV arm of the Newscorp hydra) have found yet another way to distract attention from the latest scandal at Newscorp owned New York Post, this time by insisting that civil rights leaders boycott alleged domestic abuser Chris Brown instead of the Post in a recently published opinion piece. Of course, there is no disclaimer accompanying the piece that explains that Fox News and the New York Post share the same parent company, because that would display the type of traditional journalistic ethics for which Newscorp, as a company, has never been known. Even a post-piece disclaimer would have been appropriate. The piece author does not note Fox News' failure to cover domestic violence in any measurable capacity, for that would be to bite the hand that publishes. Sigh.

New York Times Still Refuses To Question Illegal Action

The New York Times continues its running failure to contextualize illegal U.S. military aggression in foreign countries as a violation of international law, in this case referring to a bombing campaign inside Pakistan's borders as a breach of sovereignty. Of course performing covert bombing raids inside a foreign country is a breach of sovereignty, but absent UN Security Council resolutions authorizing such acts, they are also flagrantly illegal under the UN Charter, to which we are a signatory*.

Neglecting to place U.S. military acts within an international law context are only the beginnings of the failure of the Times to report on matters involving U.S. intervention, there is a routine failure to attempt to objectively measure claims regarding anti-American sentiment. In the same article, the Times reports (without attributing a named source) on the presence of an "increasingly powerful anti-American segment of the Pakistani population". The Times also more crucially fails to attempt to substantiate this claim with any objective means of measuring the size of this "segment" or to measure whether its size was actually, in fact, "increasing", say, with polling data, as they would when making any similar claim about sentiments of the U.S. population on any given issue.

It is somewhat of a tradition to report a rise in anti-American sentiment whenever U.S. military or paramilitary (C.I.A., etc) forces engage in actions that kill civilians, but the continuous failure to back such claims with actual statistical evidence or any real evidence at all is a stunning failure in journalism. Can world politics be reported on accurately when U.S. journalists report on the unsubstantiated hunches of unnamed officials about what any given set of untold millions of people in foreign nations may be thinking?

There are numerous polling companies engaging regularly in measuring the attitudes of populations in a variety of countries, including Pakistan. It's a shame that reporters don't dig deeper to find objective data to back their reporting on these sensitive issues.



* Students of history may recall Nixon's illegal "secret bombing campaign" in Cambodia. Although civilian casualties and U.S. military casualties in the Afghanistan/Pakistan military aggression are distinctly lower than the Vietnam/Cambodia military incursion by U.S. forces, several observers are beginning to make parallels.

Bank Bonuses Unquestioned In Corporate Media

President Obama, following the lead of Senator Claire Maskill of Minnesota (who perhaps introduced the idea to provide political cover for her ally?) recently decided to propose that executives at banks who accept TARP funds should have their compensation capped at $500,000 a year

This corporate media account of course neglects to put much emphasis other than a clause at the end of a 43 word sentence:

Under Obama's plan, any executive of a company accepting federal aid will be able to increase their $500,000 basic pay through the award of shares but they will not be able to cash these in until all taxpayer funds have been paid back.

The fine print at the end of this long-winded piece of prose is that executives can accept stock-based bonuses that they cannot cash in after TARP funds are repaid, i.e. after those stocks are worth much, much more than they are currently, which is not much of a "cap". And it still allows for performance bonuses for people whose "performance" has sunk the world into a global financial crisis.

Bank representatives have wisely been quiet on this issue, but corporate media sources have frequently quoted financial experts about the alleged threat that capping bonuses presents, alleging that capped execs may leave the country in protest to work for foreign banks. Few voices are presented to illustrate the ludicrousness of this claim (as prior attempts to limit executive pay or even generally increase taxation on the wealthy have almost never resulted in any significant exodus). This is customary when an official source is quoted from the corporate elite, as heads of corporations and individuals critical of corporate power are almost never treated equally (or given anything close to equal time) in the corporate media.

Of the few critical voices given room to speak on this issue in the corporate media, former JP Morgan investment banker and author William Cohan discredits the criticism that bonuses will lead to "banker flight" the best:

“There’s this fallacy that everybody will leave” if bonuses are restricted, said William Cohan, a former investment banker at Lazard Ltd. and JPMorgan and author of “The Last Tycoons” about Lazard. “What do they do? They push paper around. Where else can you get paid $500,000 to do that?”

Notably, autoworkers were not given the same amount of airtime and inches of newsprint to question whether their benefits should have been limited under the auto bailout terms that much richer (and much more incompetent) banking executives are given to vent about their bonuses being capped at a "mere" 1000% of the median salary of the average American worker.

Any critic of the banking industry might have been quick to note that (1) beggars can't be choosers and if banks want taxpayer funds, they have to accept pre-conditions just like they would from any other massive equity investor (2) executives whose pay is capped still have the benefit of a wide range of performance bonuses (even though their performance so far has led to a global banking crisis and thereby their performance barely justifies their base salary, let alone a bonus) and (3) due to layoffs throughout the banking industry globally, executives whose pay is capped have nowhere else to go. The third point is key. Arguing that caps on salary will prevent Bank of America from tapping quality banking talent is erroneous on its face because layoffs have resulted in a massive pool of very talented, currently unemployed people in the banking industry.

Ken Lewis, who runs Bank of America, received $20m in 2007. BoA needed federal aid after its takeover of Merrill Lynch.

Considering that B of A bought Merrill Lynch for pennies on the dollars and will write down any bad assets they have, it's hysterical to assert that Bank of America needs financial assistance *and* must pay its top executives millions of dollars. If these top executives had made smart business decisions worthy of earning the bonuses they are taking home, their company's profitability would have been high enough to absorb the underpriced Merrill Lynch purchase without missing a step. As is, B of A is loaded down with its own share of bad debt and absorbing Merrill only exasperates the problem, thanks to poor judgment by the same Bank of America execs asserting their right to earn performance bonuses. Rewarding ineptitude is the *opposite* of how the free market is supposed to operate.