Harper's contempt for Science and Canadian values

One of the fundamental differences between the previous Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney and the current Harper Conservatives (Reform-Alliance Party; i.e. CRAP) has been the complete abandonment of progressive environmental policies and investment in the basic sciences.

First, let us consider what Mulroney did in his two-terms that has lead some environmentalists to call him the "greenest Prime Minister" in Canadian history.

• In 1987, the Tories helped establish "The Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer".  The global treaty placed a ban on the destructive CFCs that were destroying the ozone layer and jeopardizing life on this planet.  
• Acid rain pollution was dramatically curtailed through cooperative legislation with the Americans.  
• A moratorium on fishing Cod, which twenty years later has yet to recover
• At the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, the United Nations Environment Programme was championed by Canada, and Canadians served as their leaders.

Whereas, Mulroney could be considered the high-water mark in environmental protection, the Harper government without any doubt is about as low and dirty as a clogged drainage pipe.

Plenty of people have talked of the Conservative's fealty to market based approaches, which is vaguely strange given that the current Prime Minster has never held a real job or career outside politics; his Finance Minister Jim Flahery was a motor vehicle accident and personal injury litigation lawyer (aka Ambulance chaser); and key Minsters Peter MacKay, Tony Clement, John Baird, and Jason Kenney have spent much of their adult lives as professional politicians.  So having established that none of these men has any experience in actually running anything but their mouths off, on the tax payers dime, it is less than obvious why anyone would believe that they understand what they are doing when it comes to making decisions about science funding in the public's interest.

Stephen Harper's desire to constantly control the message and limit the information that reaches the public has become legendary.  Like the Republican Party under George W. Bush, Harper has fought to manipulate the press and machinations within the government to serve his exclusive political goals.  The influence and taint of lobbyists peddling preferred laws, as it is done in Washington DC, is now the norm in his majority government.  Legislation is proudly rammed through parliament without adequate review or discussion from opposition parties or committee members input.  Through this unsightly metamorphosis into a corporate state, impediments such as empirical data, scientific facts, and international treaties to protect the environment have been removed.

Harper has pursued a global embargo on the speech of research scientists affiliated with the Government of Canada for the past few years.  For example, prominent scientists have been barred from granting interviews, providing opinions to the public on their subject of expertise, or discussing  their publications at conferences.  Environment Canada prevented  Dr. David Tarasick from "published findings about one of the largest ozone holes ever discovered above the Arctic."  Similarly, Kristi Miller was prevented from discussing her research into  a virus that might be killing British Columbia's wild sockeye salmon, despite her research being published in the journal Science.  An article in the scientific journal Nature further illustrates the problem:

Carefully researched reports intended for the public — Climate Change and Health, from Health Canada, and Climate Change Impacts, from Natural Resources Canada — were released without publicity, late on Friday afternoons, and appeared on government websites only after long delays.

The government demands that any information provided to the public must be vetted and cleared with a local propaganda officer from the Conservative party.

Science that offends the sensibilities of religious fundamentalists, the same group that makes up Harper's western base, is also edited from public disclosure.

When Scott Dallimore, a geoscientist for Natural Resources Canada in Sidney, British Columbia, reported evidence of the colossal flood that occurred in northern Canada at the end of the last ice age (Nature 464, 740–743; 2010), he was put through the message-moulding machine. As a result, Canada's taxpayers, who funded the research, were left in the dark. While the news broke elsewhere, journalists in Canada who had previously had open access to Dallimore, a gifted communicator, were left spinning their wheels while deadlines passed. The flood happened 13,000 years ago, so how can this work be construed as politically sensitive?

Recently, the Harper government changed the laws so that not-for-profit groups that engage in political criticism are penalized to prevent them for so-called abusing their registered charitable status.

The nearly paranoid and conspiratorial nature of these acts, stems from the Conservative's desire to prevent any information that may run counter to their pro-corporate or religious minded policies from reaching the public and interfering with their program.

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It is not just the message that Conservatives loath; it is the scientists that accumulate all these facts that make Conservative-backers so angry with the fact-based world.  Over the past year, the Harper government has engaged in a systematic withdrawal of funding for Environment Canada projects and the scientists involved in those research projects.  A student researcher at the University of  Toronto discusses his perspective:

Over the past several months we have seen major cuts to Environment Canada that are leaving it without any real scientific or research power. We have seen many prominent scientific jobs cut, research funding slashed, and our ability to effectively do environmental assessment and management largely neutralized.

Given that public funding is the main source of revenue for environmental sciences at Canadian universities, which has now evaporated, researchers are packing up and leaving Canada en mass.

In 2011-12 Environment Canada had its budget cut by 20% to 854 million dollars.   Eleven percent of the department personnel was cut last year, with a total of 776 employees told that their jobs may be terminated.  Those affected include engineers, meteorologists, scientists, chemists, and biologists. Given the extent of previous cuts imposed by previous budgets, the department is said to be barely functioning.  Treasury Board Minister, Tony Clement (aka Mr. hundred thousand dollar Gazebo),  facetiously told reporters that “Environment Canada is open for business, they’re doing their job, and they want to do it more efficiently.”

Canada was a pioneer in ozone monitoring technologies, which "led to the discovery that the world's ozone layer was dangerously thinning in the 1970s, which in turn led to the successful Montreal Protocol on Ozone Depleting Substances."  The internationally renowned ozone monitoring network, has about one-third of the ozone monitoring stations in the Arctic region. The data produced by this network is heavily relied on by scientists around the world.  A single person was running the entire archives, until the conservatives closed down the The Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory (PEARL) in Eureka, Nunavut.

Not convinced at stopping the flow of information, eliminating the funding of  researchers, and closing down research stations, the conservatives have decided to destroy Arctic ice core bores that provide evidence of the atmospheric gaseous concentrations for thousands of years.  Mark Twickler, director of the U.S. National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver, Colo said, “These ice cores are so valuable that the international community, including the U.S., will do whatever we have to to preserve these remarkable archives of past climate.”

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans is undergoing a similar budget slashing process. Budget cuts have lead to the closing of the Experimental Lakes Area. The program used a region of 58 freshwater lakes near Kenora, in western Ontario, where scientists conducted experiments on the effects of pollution.

The Environmental Lakes Area program was launched in 1968 and led to important discoveries about the effects of pollutants such as phosphates in household detergents and mercury on bodies of fresh water, prompting tighter regulation in Canada and the U.S.

Researchers from across the world are claiming disbelief at the action.  Harvard University aquatic sciences professor Elsie Sunderland said:

[she] was pretty shocked... This is one of the foremost research projects and places to do research in the world. To have it shut down is just appalling. It's just embarrassing. 

Cynthia Gilmour, a senior scientist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Maryland, said  she "was stunned".  Jim Elser an aquatic ecologist at Arizona State University said in an article in the journal Nature,  titled "Canada's renowned freshwater research site to close," that it was "completely shocking".  Elser said it was equivallent to the "U.S. government shutting down Los Alamos — its most important nuclear-physics site — or taking the world's best telescope and turning it off."

In a separate incident, 625 prominent scientists have written to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and warned him not to "gut fish-habitat protections they say would put species at risk and damage Canada’s international standing."  The legislation being implemented as part of the Fisheries Act in Bill C-38, the omnibus budget bill, would eliminate components of federal law that bans activity that results in "harmful" alteration, disruption or destruction of fish habitat.  The new law consists of a  prohibition against activity that results in "serious" harm to fish that are part of a commercial, recreational or aboriginal fishery, or any fish that supports one of those three fisheries.

David Schindler, ecology professor at the University of Alberta said the “pro-development” Conservative government was determined to abrogate long standing environmental protections.  Others are equally pessimistic of Harper's infringement on established environmental protections and resource management:

Nick Dulvy, a Simon Fraser University professor who worked formerly as a fisheries scientist in the British government, said the two moves add to his growing alarm about the Harper government's "misuse" of science.

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Hannah McKinnon of the Climate Action Network Canada (CAN Canada), an environmental NGO, made the comparison between funding essential scientific research that monitors the health of the nation versus providing 2-billion dollars to build ships for the Canadian Navy and Coast Guard and another 29 billion dollars allocated in a non-competitive and rigged bid for 65 F-35 fighter jets that don't even meet the Department of Defense's own minimal specifications.  The government can find billions of dollars to spend on pet projects, fighting Middle Eastern wars, and providing billions in subsidies to petrochemical companies -some of which are the most profitable in the world- yet it can't find the funds to monitor the environment or maintain reasonable scientific competency.

John Bennett, the executive director of Sierra Club Canada, puts it more bluntly, “It will give the polluters what they want, a toothless Environment Canada with no scientific or enforcement capability."

Chomsky on the Wall St. protesters, Bin Laden, & Israel

In this interview with Russia Today (RT) television Noam Chomsky discusses three main topics:

1. The current protests occurring in New York across from Wall Street and spreading throughout the world
2. The legal framework and international norms associated with kidnapping, torture, and murder
3. The current international versus American-Israeli perspective on the emergence of a Palestinian state.

For the most part I think what Chomsky has to say is true.

Criticisms leveled by Chomsky regarding economic matters and the control of the legislative process by corporations has been shown by this recent depression to have been wholly correct. America's political system is so badly broken that not even the greedy politicians can claim that the system works for anyone other than Goldman Sachs.

***

What I found disappointing about this interview is Chomsky's rather weak argument that America is a lawless country because it assassinated Osama Bin Laden, invaded the sovereign nation of Pakistan, then dumped Bin Laden's body at sea. Unlike a great number of person on the left, Chomsky has never claimed that there were grand conspiracies at work during the 9-11 attack. What he does do is make the rather odd legalistic argument that everyone under American jurisprudence is entitled to the claim of being "innocence" until found guilty. That statement is true, but misleading. Bin Laden was never after 9-11 a conventional criminal. Rather, Bin Laden was the leader of an international organization whose purpose was to engage in terrorism that indiscriminately killed as many people as possible to draw America into a wider conflict in the Middle East. Bin Laden freely admitted and repeatedly boasted of his multiple attacks on American assets abroad and on 9-11. If we are talking about US law, under public law 107-40, the US Congress authorized the president of the United States “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” Equally, under international law the UN charter provides nation states the right to use lethal force in individual and collective self-defense.

Second, Chomsky makes the error of claiming that the assassination has inflamed Pakistan's civilian population and enraged the quasi-military rulers of the state, thus exacerbating US-Muslim tensions and further destabilizing the Middle East. What Pakistan or its illiterate masses thinks about American killing of Taliban or Al Qaeda leaders on their territory is irrelevant. Pakistan exists because the United States for decades has been propping up this little Islamic wasteland run by kleptocrats and military dunces. The country is a failed state that exists as the central exporter of international terrorism across the world. What has become completely evident after the assassination is that individuals within Pakistan and its government have been hiding and protecting Bin Laden for years. Given the overall lawlessness and criminal actions of the Pakistani state, there is little reason anyone should consider anything that this country wants as legitimate.

Chomsky further states that Obama has become even more reckless than Bush in using drone attacks on targets. The problem with this statement is that is exactly what Obama didn't do when he sent military personnel to kill Bin Laden. Today Bin Laden's family members that were hiding with him in Pakistan are alive and not dead.  Something that Bin Laden's victims cannot claim.

I for one am in complete agreement with UN General Secretary Ban Ki-Moon, who said

“The death of Osama bin Laden … is a watershed moment in our common global fight against terrorism…Personally, I am very much relieved by the news that justice has been done.”

For all his faults, President Obama did the right thing and all civilized people should applaud his actions, instead of trying to score cheap rhetorical points in defending the indefensible.

Dick Cheney unrepentant in having destroyed America

Richard Cheney, the 46th vice-president of the USA, is about to release his memoirs next week titled, "In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir. 

According to a CBS News/New York Times poll conducted when Dick Cheney left office in January 2009 his approval ratings (13%) were less than that of George W. Bush's (22%).  At their departure both men received historic disapproval ratings and continue to be considered by the majority of Americans as having failed to improve America.  The Bush presidency is highlighted by some of the following:

• advancing the unconstitutional notion of a unitary presidency
• repeated and consistent withdrawal from international treaties and agreements
• pushing through the civil rights destroying PATRIOT act
• massive and illegal wiretapping and spying on American citizens
• using torture upon seized enemy combatants and prisoners of war
• the failure to prevent the 9-11 attack on New York City and the Pentagon
• failing to adequately neutralize Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda's terrorist network
• pursuing the Iraq war under bogus pretenses and then failing to contain the regional civil war
• the abandonment of New Orleans and its citizens after Hurricane Katrina
• allowing the housing bubble to expand and eventually cause the financial collapse of 2008
• promoting corporate-written legislation that bolstered special interest profits
• promoting a laissez-faire regulatory framework that allowed corporate crime to exponentially grow throughout his two terms
• advancing the interests of oil and gas companies and rejecting sustainable and renewable forms of energy production
• denying climate change was occurring
• doubling the national public debt
• cut taxes for the richest Americans, while expanding the deficit
• cut national science and engineering budgets to pay for his wars and tax cuts
• limited scientific investigations on subjects deemed controversial for religious supporters, such as stem cell studies and environmental assessment studies
• preventing any international agreement that would prevent rises in global warming gases, which in the end may possibly be his greatest failure if even conservative predictions about climate change prove true

Cheney undoubtedly represented the very worst elements of the Bush administration.  Although Bush's approval didn't collapse until after Katrina, Cheney's approval amongst most Americans was in the gutter early into his first term.  His approval was constantly in the twenty-percent area and never improved.  He represented to his base an unapologetic statist who wanted to project American hegemony to its fullest level.  Cheney famously stated that "deficits don't matter!"  He was responsible for pursuing an energy policy that promoted America's addiction to foreign fossil fuels.  And as former Secretary of Defense, he was very familiar with the nature of the Pentagon machinery and sought to project America's military power domestically and across foreign shores.

To the rest of America, Cheney represented a Machiavellian operator.  With his over-the-top rhetoric, war making bravado, riddiculous claims that 3rd world nations with 2nd rate militaries were a threat to America, and his continuous scowl, the public turned on this crypto-fascist.

Reviews of Cheney's memoirs indicate a man who controlled both the president and policies of the Bush presidency in it early years. During the infamous 9-11 attack, Cheney states, despite clear lines of command set forth in the constitution, that it was him and neither Bush nor Rumsfeld who was in command of immediate operations.  At that moment in history, Cheney made it clear that the president of the United States had been unofficially deposed and that he had assumed all the controls of commander-in-chief.

The NY Times review of the book further highlights a man who is completely unrepentant of his actions.  The Times describes the book as being

often pugnacious in tone and in which he expresses little regret about many of the most controversial decisions of the Bush administration — casts him as something of an outlier among top advisers who increasingly took what he saw as a misguided course on national security issues.

So it is clear that as Cheney's policy failures mounted, George W. Bush and others in the Bush administration became progressively unwilling to accept Cheney's worldview and provocations.  In the end, the rift was so great that Bush himself was unwilling to even grant full pardon to Cheney's Chief of Staff I. Lewis Libby for his acts of lying to prosecutors in order to protect Mr. Cheney.

What we know is Mr. Cheney is on his last legs and death is hunting him. This book is an attempt by a dying man to justify his evil by throwing sand in our collective faces. I'm sure Ozymandias would have done the same.

Obama, bagman for Bush's torture adventures

McClatchy Press has an excellent summary, through Wikileaks, of the Machiavellian maneuvers made by the Obama White House to undermine both international law and justice.

This blog has in the past described how the administration of Barack Obama over the past two years, has given "support and comfort" to the torturers and fiends of the Bush junta (here, here, and here). A number of prominent political and legal commentators have equally concluded that Obama, his AG, and members of his administration are now as culpable as their predecessors in concealing acts of torture, manipulating foreign governments to forsake investigations of American criminality, and failing to vigorously uphold constitutional prerogatives in prosecuting those who have violated domestic laws and international treaties, to which America is signature to.

In 2009, the Obama administration sent Republican Senator Mel Martinez to Spain to cajole the Spanish judiciary into abandoning investigations lead by Spanish magistrate, Baltasar Garzón into six Bush lawyers who laid, "the foundation for abuse of detainees in the months following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks." The Spanish investigations concerned Alberto Gonzales, who described parts of the Geneva conventions "quant" and "obsolete" after 9-11; Bush lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee; David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney's counsel; William "Jim" Haynes, Defense Department General Counsel; and Doug Feith, a Pentagon undersecretary who handled policy issues for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

The Spaniards were not swayed and told Martinez and the American ambassador to Spain, that "The independence of the judiciary and the process must be respected.''  Michael Ratner, a civil rights attorney affiliated with the Center for Constitutional Rights, states that "The U.S. prides itself on our own independent judiciary... But here you have the hypocrisy of the U.S. government trying to influence an independent judicial system to bend its laws and own rules.''

The timeline of the above diplomatic maneuvers coincides with Obama's attempt to marginalize Bush's crimes:

But by the time Spain's Association for the Dignity of Prisoners filed the torture complaint that U.S. diplomatic circles found so troubling, the Obama White House was resisting calls to set up a Truth Commission or assign a special prosecutor to examine the legal framework that set up Guantánamo and permitted "enhanced interrogation techniques'' that included waterboarding high-value detainees.

"Generally speaking, I'm more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards," Obama said on Feb. 9, 2009.

How Mr. Obama, a man who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, could become protector and defender of his predecessor's criminality, will be an issue that historians will grapple with for decades.  The emotional cheers of "change you can believe in" lie exposed as election based propaganda, told by the architects of Empire to confuse the guilible masses into believing that their opinion actually matters.

The continued ascent of the surveillance state

Recently Dana Priest and William Arkin of the Washington Post published another chapter into their ongoing investigation of America's secretive information gathering operations.  In the past series, they discussed the emerging nexus between corporate entities, clandestine information services, and the government.  A system so large that "Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications."  No single entity within the government is capable of understanding the totality or scope of the enterprise; not even the president's own top officials on the subject.

The most recent chapter to this story, involves the involvement of state and local police agencies.  Across the nation terrorism task forces have been created to capture information related to domestic threats that may arise in each jurisdiction in America.  The federal government has provided grants to this regional governments and police forces to purchase high-end military surveillance systems and communication networks to monitor and manage local populations.  In those cases where no terrorism related activities are identifiable, the new task forces are used to monitor criminal classes and/or any person or group the state deems of interest.

The most contentious aspect of the government surveillance lies in the collection of data on individuals who are completely innocent of any wrongdoing.  A Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, or SAR, has been established to collect data (personal, commercial, financial,...etc) upon any person the state determines suspicious.  Unlike the conventional system, where the state does not have the right to collect and horde every minuta of data about your life, the new terrorism laws and surveillance state network, casts a wide net.

As of December, there were 161,948 suspicious activity files in the classified Guardian database, mostly leads from FBI headquarters and state field offices. Two years ago, the bureau set up an unclassified section of the database so state and local agencies could send in suspicious incident reports and review those submitted by their counterparts in other states. Some 890 state and local agencies have sent in 7,197 reports so far.

The objective of the system is to amass as much information on each person within the United States as possible. The federal state has had a long and sordid history of monitoring, infiltrating, and undermining civilian populations engaged in nothing less than constitutionally sanctioned criticism of government practices. The following examples confirm the misuse of the current security state powers:

• In Virginia, the state's fusion center published a terrorism threat assessment in 2009 naming historically black colleges as potential hubs for terrorism.
• From 2005 to 2007, the Maryland State Police went even further, infiltrating and labeling as terrorists local groups devoted to human rights, antiwar causes and bike lanes.
• And in Pennsylvania this year, a local contractor hired to write intelligence bulletins filled them with information about lawful meetings as varied as Pennsylvania Tea Party Patriots Coalition gatherings, antiwar protests and an event at which environmental activists dressed up as Santa Claus and handed out coal-filled stockings

In America, the public has generally accepted the rise of the surveillance state. Trivialities such as civil liberties, the abuse of constitutional freedoms, the invasion of individual privacy, and the monitoring of lawful public assemblies, are glossed off by the mainstream media and the population as minor irritants that only affect those swarthy and obviously guilty dark-skinned persons with funny names. Glenn Greenwald expands on this asymmetric information relationship:

One of the hallmarks of an authoritarian government is its fixation on hiding everything it does behind a wall of secrecy while simultaneously monitoring, invading and collecting files on everything its citizenry does. Based on the Francis Bacon aphorism that "knowledge is power," this is the extreme imbalance that renders the ruling class omnipotent and citizens powerless.

The cabal of corporate fascists has extended its tentacles into every aspect and function of every person in the nation. Big brother is not just a metaphor, he is the state.

Dubya is Threatened with Arrest if He Visits London, UK!

From Scott Horton's blog over at Harper's comes this exquisite piece of news, from the city of London's conservative Mayor.  I usually do not repost entire posts of others, but this succinct and insightful post is too valuable to not be shared in its totality. Bold print has been added by me.

London’s Tory mayor, Boris Johnson, has some strong words of caution for former president George W. Bush: if you come to Europe to promote your book, pack heavily and be prepared for a long stay. In fact, you may “never see Texas again.” As he sees it, Bush’s book and statements he has made in efforts to market it constitute admissions of serious crimes.

Initial reports about Bush’s autobiography did not go over well in Europe, and Britain’s new Conservative government was particularly eager to push back against suggestions that their conservatism had any resemblance to the Bush variety. Bush insisted this his decision to use waterboarding and other torture techniques kept Britain safe. But British Conservatives are having none of it:

In the case of the three men waterboarded on Bush’s orders, British ministers are not aware of any valuable information they gave about plots against Heathrow, Canary Wharf or anywhere else. All the policy has achieved is to degrade America in the eyes of the world, and to allow America’s enemies to utter great whoops of vindication. It is not good enough for Dubya now to claim that what he did was OK, because “the lawyers said it was legal”.

As Johnson sees it, the torture debate is ultimately about America’s claim to leadership in the world and the Bush team’s sullying of the nation’s reputation:

How could America complain to the Burmese generals about the house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi, when a president authorised torture? How can we talk about human rights in Beijing, when our number one ally and friend seems to be defending this kind of behaviour? I can’t think of any other American president, in my lifetime, who would have spoken in this way. Mr Bush should have remembered the words of the great Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, who said in 1863 that “military necessity does not admit of cruelty”. Damn right.

***

I have been saying this for years.  In yesterday's blog on Republican corruption, I stated that it is only a matter of time before someone in the Bush junta is ensnared and eventually prosecuted for international legal problems arising from their years of legal misconduct.  Whilst America's media glosses over the fact that both Dick Cheney and George W. Bush have admitted to ordering torture, people around the world are looking carefully at the decider's words and movement and evaluating the possibility of bringing him or his henchmen in front of a magistrate to explain themselves in court.

What we have also seen is that Mr. Obama has made substantial efforts to collude with the former administration in shielding and protecting them from domestic and international prosecutions.  Andrew Sulivan states in his blog that the most recent WikiLeaks information dump, "reveal an extraordinary effort by the US embassy and the Bush and Obama administrations to cajole, pressure, redirect and try to rig legal cases that could reveal the war crimes of the previous administration."  Both administrations are bound by the pirate's ethic of evading responsibility and accountability for any action they or their Jolly-Roger-like counterparts may engage in.  The Obama administration is now culpable in the crimes of his predecessors, and needs to explain their actions, at the very least, to the voters who demanded change that they could believe in.

GOP's memo to America's unemployed: Drop Dead!

Stephen Pearlstein, business columnist for the Washington Post, recently wrote an enormously useful post in which he takes apart the Republican stance on the economy, the Federal Reserve, and the current unemployment situation across America.

He first establishes the governing philosophy of the party of 'no' since the mid-term elections:

Only two weeks after the midterm election, it seems clear that the 2012 campaign has begun. For too many Republicans, the aim is to politicize policy, trash the institutions of government and intimidate anyone who might disagree with their radical ideology.

The Republican party's public mantra has long been low taxes, smaller government, and accountability.  If anyone can find a Republican that has pursued this trifecta consistently while in congress I'd like to know, because the reality is that they have pursued low taxes for corporations and the very rich, while irresponsibly failing to engage in concomitant spending cuts.  Conservative economist Milton Friedman said, "for the government to spend is for the government to tax."  So, despite their claims, what Republicans are actually doing is shifting the tax burden, "explicitly or implicitly to tax somebody, either in the present or the future, either directly or indirectly, to pay for that purchase." They counter that that is not true, because the tax-cuts magically pay for themselves.  Again, this supply side voodoo-economics, has been shown to yield either no or minimal value to the economy and therefore do not pay for themselves.  For example, analysis of George W. Bush's tax cuts indicate that it produced an insignificant level of economic growth during his presidency. Hence, this is just the attempt of one group of people to evade paying taxes and force another group to subsidize their excesses.

Pearlstein recognizing the fallacy of the Republican tax-cut and spend mantra, estimates the impact of not extending the Bush tax cuts to small cash flow-through businesses and people earning beyond $250,000.

The macro view, from the forecasting firm Macroeconomic Advisers of St. Louis, is that not extending tax cuts for high-income households would reduce gross domestic product growth by - drumroll here - two-tenths of one percent in each of the next two years. And the difference in the unemployment rate? A whopping one tenth of one percent!

The impact of letting the richest people in the country pay the same taxes on the top tier of their income, as what they were paying during the Clinton administration in regards to the overall economy, is virtually negligible.

Regardless of the context, the same failed policies are trotted out as a panacea to every economic situation. And here is where the standard argument becomes exceptionally ugly. Knowing that their policies have failed and have lead to the harshest economic downturn since the Great Depression, Republicans are demanding that not only that their rich-friends, who have been on a tax vacation for the past decade, not be further taxed, but that those who are unemployed "drop dead."  In their devious minds, they are now attacking the Federal Reserve for pursuing monetary policies that leads to full employment. Whereas these same miscreants didn't attack the Fed when it was bailing out their fat-cat friends on Wall Street and creating a firewall of secrecy that concealed the extent of the criminality between big business and the government when Republicans were in power. Their hypocrisy is endless.

Get sick; drop dead.
Need help in paying for a family member's health care; let them drop dead.
Need to upgrade your skills at college to get a job; drop dead.
Cannot find a job and you've used up your savings; drop dead.
Need help preventing foreclosure on your home; drop dead.

Obama's failure and the floundering of the American economy is their ultimate objective. In their minds the death of the American dream is their stepping stone back into power. Republicans are traitors to everything that the country is supposed to represent.

Glenn Greenwald on why the Democrats lost

With that strategy, the Democratic Party now reaps what it has sown.  Its message and identity are profoundly muddled, incoherent, unclear, uninspiring, and self-negating.  Worse, its policies are mishmashes of inept half-measures that, with a handful of exceptions, produce little good for anyone (other than Wall Street, the Pentagon and other corporate interests).  They are perceived as -- and are -- beholden to Wall Street, special interests, and the corporations they vowed to confront.  They are without any ability to confront the massive unemployment crisis and financial decline the country faces.  And as a result of all of that, they lay in shambles.  Anyone who can survey all of that and cheer for the strategy which Democrats have been pursuing -- let's build our majorities by relying on GOP-replicating corporatist Blue Dogs -- or who thinks that this election loss happened because "Democrats are too liberal," resides in a world that has very little to do with reality.  And that's true no matter how many times they repeat the simplistic snippets of exit polls to which they've obsessively attached themselves.

Glenn Greenwald in a blog post at Salon.com, takes on MSNBC commentator Lawerence O'Donnell in his assertion that the Democrats lost because they are too "liberal" and the country simply prefers "conservative" candidates and governance.

Over the past decade, I too have excoriated those who babble about the fundamental divide between philosophical and political liberalism and conservatism in America.  The terms in themselves are inexhaustibly used incorrectly by both sides to impugn their opponents and distort the overall discussion.  Virtually no credible conservative government has existed at the federal level in the past forty years in America.  Ronald Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, and Dubya were pro-corporatist presidents who advanced statist agendas.  Government under each of these men was widely expanded; the national debt ballooned; war and the invasion of numerous countries in violation of international law was conducted; treaties were maligned and rejected at whim; established precedents in US constitutional law were regularly dismissed and abrogated with presidential approval; corporate take over of the executive and legislative branches was perfected under Republican rule over these decades.  At what point did the fanatics of conservative causes rally against these changes?

The pro-corporatist Democrats have always used the excuse that they could not execute a liberal agenda, that was and is favored by a majority, because of the stalking horse of conservatism amongst the population.  People now realize that because of gerrymandering, corporate donations and special interest meddling, and a two-party system that invalidates third party politics, that there is very little that they themselves can do to upend and change a system.  America has for the past decade not been a democracy, but  a plutocracy governed by people who are servants, not to the constitution or the people, but to multinational corporations: including bankers, insurance companies, the military-industrial complex, oil companies, and a bevy of special interests that are more than willing to bribe politicians into executing their agenda.

O'Donnell represents the liberal version of a cultural manager; a person who nonchalantly bemoans the tyranny of the left-wing of the Democratic party, but refuses to address the perennial failure and Pavlovian response of the Democratic party hierarchy in pursuing Republican-light policies once they are elected.  Clinton was elected to improve the economy, introduce health care, and end the brutal twelve years of Republican mismanagement.  Instead, he pursed a strategy of triangulation and capitulated to conservative policies of energy and financial deregulation, which has left the American economy broken and on unsound footing.  Obama in the face of aggressive citizen support has sought legislative capitulation to the banks, big oil, big-pharma, insurance companies, and the Military-Security state.  Obama's claims which he made during the 2008 election, of attacking special interests and the oligarchs appear little more than pleasant lies told to naive children.

Glaxo Guilty of Selling Tainted and Defective Drugs

GlaxoSmithKline, a British pharmaceutical company, has been forced to pay $750 million (USD) "to settle criminal and civil complaints that the company for years knowingly sold contaminated baby ointment and an ineffective antidepressant."

The case was initiated by a former employee and whistle-blower who sought penalties against the company.  The NY Times elaborates on the nature of the crimes at their Puerto Rico facility:

This was GlaxoSmithKline’s premier manufacturing facility, producing $5.5 billion of product each year. But Ms. Eckard [the whistle-blower] soon discovered that quality control was a mess: the water system was contaminated; the air system allowed for cross-contamination between products; the warehouse was so overcrowded that rented vans were used for storage; the plant could not ensure the sterility of intravenous drugs for cancer; and pills of differing strengths were sometimes mixed in the same bottles.

Instead of heeding FDA warnings about QA/QC inadequacies of the facility and their own internal people's advice, GlaxoSmithKline either ignored and/or dismissed concerns.  Ms. Eckard, who was initially sent to lead "a team of 100 quality experts to fix problems," was stonewalled by management and then dismissed once she began to demand that products be recalled.  She will now earn for her part in the whistle-blower case, "$96 million from the federal government, and she will collect additional millions from states."

The circumstances surrounding this particular case are unlike previous situations. 

Nearly all previous cases against the industry involved illegal marketing. This is the first successful case ever to assert that a drug maker knowingly sold contaminated products.

Whereas in the past, big-pharma was tagged for deceptive marketing and off-label sales tactics, GSK engaged in the willful and knowing dissemination of tainted, ineffectual, and potentially dangerous drugs to the public. This failure of both GSK and the American government to regulate the company is another indictment of the laissez-faire deregulatory approach that highlighted the conservative dogma prevalent in the Bush years.  Furthermore, it decimates any specious arguments that importation of Canadian drugs are a threat to consumers.

Given that the profit sources for big-pharma are waning and that numerous lawsuits have been asserted against big-pharma for misleading patients and "defrauding federal and state governments" the entire health care bills pushed through by both the Bush and Obama administrations reeks of corruption.  These companies are clearly unable to actually provide quality drugs that benefit people. So instead of ramping up their R&D base to find new drugs, they fire scientists and engage in legislative trickery to extend the patent life of their already questionable drug performers and push onto the market products that are ineffective and potentially lethal.  These people are just evil.  Sick and dying people shouldn't have to worry about whether their doctor is in collusion with the drug company to push a useless product upon them.  Patients shouldn't have to worry if FDA "approved" medication is actually effective or instead going to make them more sick or even kill them.

Is this all America is about? Lying, cheating, and using the government to swindle dying people out of their life savings. While congress subsidizes big-pharma, agriculture corporations, the military-industrial state, and bails out the banking industry for the umpteenth time, what are you getting? Maybe you can find it in your bonus that comes in the form of less take home pay, less benefits, less social mobility, more hours working, or more of your taxes going to maintain the lifestyles of corporate lobbyists and the "masters of the universe"-crowd.

Wake up people!

Take the red pill people, and fucking wake up!

***

This blog has previously dissected and listed other areas of fraud and corruption by big-pharma:

• Novartis fined $422 Million
• Big-Pharma, perennial fraud-mongers
• Pfizer on eminant domain and corporate welfare (NY Times)
• The corruption of university bio-medical research (NY Times)

Bruce Bartlett Calls Dubya's Tax Cuts Virtually Useless

Bruce Bartlett, a former Republican who served in both the Reagan and George H.W. Bush Administrations, has put forward a critique of the tax cuts implemented under Dubya (aka. George W. Bush)

To summarize, the original Bush tax cuts, although widely stated as a stimulative supply side tax-break, were in fact designed to offset the revenues the federal state was obtaining during the final years of the Clinton administration in the 1990's. A conceit articulated most prominently by Alan Greenspan, who at the time claimed that fiscal surpluses had grown too large.  Instead of creating sound fiscal policies, Mr. Bush's first term tax-cuts, rebates, and tax code "reforms" were determined by the Republican party to create, according to Bartlett, constituencies that would be grateful to the Great Leader's leadership. He outlines:

Bush proposed a doubling of the child credit to $1,000; higher limits on education savings accounts; a new deduction for two-earner couples; allowing a deduction for charitable contributions by those that don’t file itemized returns; a $400 deduction for teachers who buy unreimbursed school supplies; Individual Development Accounts to allow people to save tax-free for retraining; a refundable tax credit for health insurance; and a tax credit for financial institutions that matched savings by those with low incomes. The only supply-side element was a modest reduction in the top statutory income tax rate from 39.6 percent to 33 percent — higher than it had been during Bush’s father’s administration — that would be phased-in over a number of years.

However, in reviewing the actual impact of those tax cuts, Bartlett concludes that it is clear that:

there is virtually no evidence in support of the Bush tax cuts as an economic elixir. To the extent that they had any positive effect on growth, it was very, very modest. Their main effect was simply to reduce the government’s revenue, thereby increasing the budget deficit, which all Republicans claim to abhor.

As my previous post explains, everything the Bush-bots claimed that they were doing and predicted about the country's fiscal situation turned out to be incorrect.  Despite the hysterical reporting by the toadies of the Republican party and Wall Street in the MSM, the tax cuts provided limited or no economic value.  It is therefore complete nonsense that if America's wealthiest and most affluent aren't given even more perks through the extension of the tax breaks, that the entire country will disintegrate.  The plutocrats are the one's who have destroyed the American middle class through their low tax, militaristic, pro-China globalization trade policies.  In the wake of their recklessness, they have increased poverty, diminished social mobility, and promoted a culture of debt that will retard US economic growth for another decade.  Since they are the one's who have felt the least pain in an economic collapse caused by their antics, they should at least bear some of the burden in returning the nation to solvency.

Dan Gross on Tax Cuts

Daniel Gross over at Slate, has a few key words for those on the kool-aid about retaining the Bush junta's tax cuts.  He makes a number of points on why the entire "discussion" is but an election gimmick executed by Republicans, who have no interest in either fiscal solvency or reasonable management of the federal government.

Barry Ritholtz points out on his blog, The Big Picture, how ridiculous the whole debate has become and highlight's Gross' most salient point:

The bold and confident assertions made about the links between tax rates and economic growth, market performance, and prosperity are almost certainly wrong. Turn on CNBC or look at the Wall Street Journal op-ed page these days, and you'll learn that we must keep tax rates on capital gains, dividends, and income precisely where they are because shifting them to different levels will retard economic growth. Keep this in mind: The people who designed the current, unsustainable tax system promised us that lower marginal rates, and lower taxes on capital and dividends, would boost the economy, promote investment, create jobs, spur market performance, and raise everybody's income. They were wrong. (It's no coincidence that these same people also warned us that raising taxes in 1993 would kill market returns and the economy. They were wrong then, too. They're pretty much always wrong.) As I've pointed out, the years under the current tax regime have been a lost decade. Pick your metric—median income, employment, stock market returns, economic growth—the low-tax '00s sucked. Yet proponents of keeping the tax cuts persist in making the argument: To avoid a repeat of the past decade, we must have the exact same tax policies as we did for the past decade.

In other words, the economic svengali's of the Bush junta and the dimwits of the Republican Party didn't know what they were doing when Clinton was in office, they didn't know what they were talking about when their man Dubya was hectoring us on the benefits of supply-side economics, and they certainly don't have any meaningful insights into the economy now that their very policies and lack of regulation have thrown the entire financial world off kilter.

Quote of the Day: Tom Ricks on 9-11

Tom Ricks is an author and a Pulitzer award winning journalist who has covered the Pentagon and military affairs for the WSJ and the Washington Post.  In his Foreign Policy blog he succinctly summarizes the whole post-9/11 and Iraq debacle in one paragraph:

I've long thought that this country was knocked off balance by 9/11, and that instead of steadying us, as leaders should, President Bush and Vice President Cheney led the panic, and so intensified and lengthened the period of disequilibrium. The Iraq war was one result -- and also a cause -- of the length of this period, because the hundreds of billions of unnecessary spending led to a huge borrowing splurge by the federal government. Essentially China paid for the war, and our children and grandchildren are on the hook to pay it back.

Maybe the sheeple will remember that it was was their own intellectual laziness and dismal understanding of world affairs and economics that led to the election of a president who previously had never left the country, and permitted that same president to pursue two Middle eastern wars while cutting taxes; the latter a first in the history of the republic.  This morasses is as much the fault of the belligerents and corporate toadies in the White House and US congress, as it is the idiotic and feeble minded dolts who consistently failed to ask the right questions and hold those in power in check.  These red-baiting dunces, who decades ago were shrieking of the terror of global communism, have handed the butchers of Tiananmen Square and the communist hierarchy in Beijing the financial and political leverage that forty years of cold-war posturing could not accomplish.

Quote of the Day: Sullivan on Obama

Andrew Sullivan is one of the few persons who has constantly and unequivocally condemned Republicans and Democrats, under the Bush junta and the Obama administration, of condoning and actively participating in the torture and murder of war on terrorism detainees.  In a blog entry that addresses the Machiavellian undercurrent to American politics, he condemns Mr. Obama for his recent cowardliness in preventing those who have been wrongly "extraordinary renditioned" and tortured by American forces to seek redress in court.

Aggressively trying to prevent torture victims from having their day in court merely using unclassified evidence is active complicity in the war crimes of the past. And such complicity is itself a war crime. Either we live under the rule of law and the Geneva Conventions, or we don't. And when Obama says we don't - as he unmistakably is - the precedent he is setting all but ensures that torture will come again, that there will never be consequences for it, and that the national security state can cloak itself in such a way that the citizenry has no way of penetrating its power. Bush and Cheney remain the real culprits here; but watching Obama essentially surrendering to their trap is a betrayal of a core rationale for his candidacy.

Unfunded Liabilities: A Cost Profile of the Iraq War

Joseph E. Stiglitz (Columbia University) and Linda J. Bilmes (Harvard University) wrote in 2008, "The Three Trillion Dollar War."  It was an attempt to examine and describe the full costs of the Iraq war to the general public and contextualize the implications of the American public's decision to allow the Bush junta unfettered war making authority.  Although the original figures were met with usual hostility from cultural managers and propagandists on the right,  additional studies completed by the Joint Economic Committee of Congress and the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, concluded that the war would cost American taxpayers at least $3.5 trillion or between $1.4 and $2.2 trillion respectively.

Today they update the assumptions and cost profile of the cost of the Iraq war in a Washington Post opinion piece labelled, "The true cost of the Iraq war: $3 trillion and beyond." They briefly expand on four areas that have developed over the past two years: Afghanistan, the Oil market, the Federal debt, and the financial crisis. I've highlighted the most illuminating sections of the article below.

Afghanistan

The Iraq invasion diverted our attention from the Afghan war, now entering its 10th year... It is hard to believe that we would be embroiled in a bloody conflict in Afghanistan today if we had devoted the resources there that we instead deployed in Iraq. A troop surge in 2003 -- before the warlords and the Taliban reestablished control -- would have been much more effective than a surge in 2010.

Oil

We now believe that a more realistic (if still conservative) estimate of the war's impact on prices works out to at least $10 per barrel. That would add at least $250 billion in direct costs to our original assessment of the war's price tag. But the cost of this increase doesn't stop there: Higher oil prices had a devastating effect on the economy.

Federal Debt

There is no question that the Iraq war added substantially to the federal debt. This was the first time in American history that the government cut taxes as it went to war. The result: a war completely funded by borrowing. U.S. debt soared from $6.4 trillion in March 2003 to $10 trillion in 2008 (before the financial crisis); at least a quarter of that increase is directly attributable to the war. And that doesn't include future health care and disability payments for veterans, which will add another half-trillion dollars to the debt.

Financial Crisis

Saying what might have been is always difficult, especially with something as complex as the global financial crisis, which had many contributing factors. Perhaps the crisis would have happened in any case. But almost surely, with more spending at home, and without the need for such low interest rates and such soft regulation to keep the economy going in its absence, the bubble would have been smaller, and the consequences of its breaking therefore less severe. To put it more bluntly: The war contributed indirectly to disastrous monetary policy and regulations.

Nick Clegg, The Iraq Invasion was illegal!

During question period in the British House of Commons this week, Nick Clegg, the current Deputy Prime Minister of the UK coalition government, attacked the morally bankrupt and perennially dishonest Labour Party for its role in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.  He lashed out at Jack Straw by proclaiming, "We may have to wait for his memoirs, but perhaps one day he will account for his role in the most disastrous decision of all: the illegal invasion of Iraq."

No one outside the coterie of miserable propagandists who sold the lies advocating for the invasion of Iraq consider the facts in dispute.  Kofi Annan, as Secretary-General of the United Nations, told the BBC in 2004 that the US-led invasion of Iraq was an illegal act that contravened the UN charter.  The egregious falsehoods, exaggerations, and manufactured evidence posited by Tony Blair's Labour Party, Bush's bipartisan fraud-fest, and the usual suspects in the media and military-industrial complex now lie tattered and recognized for what it actually was.  The new UK coalition government, unlike the cowards in the Obama administration, have created an Iraq War inquiry to understand the details surrounding the decision to go to war.  Already, some startling details have been exposed.  For example, former MI-5 intel chief Baroness Manningham-Buller stated that "we regarded the threat, the direct threat from Iraq as low."

Tom Ricks summarizes on his Foreign Policy blog,

As for al Qaeda and Iraq, she said, "there was no credible intelligence to suggest that connection and that was the judgment, I might say, of the CIA. It was not a judgment that found favour with some parts of the American machine, as you have also heard evidence on, which is why Donald Rumsfeld started an intelligence unit in the Pentagon to seek an alternative judgment."

Furthermore, Baroness Manningham-Buller elaborated that the invasion of Iraq, instead of diminishing the overall risk and likelihood of terrorism on British soil, in fact exacerbated the threat from indigenous Muslim radicals.  The blowback of the 7/7 London transit system was not unexpected.  Most damning of all was her stated opinion that the intelligence on Iraq's threat was not "substantial enough" to justify the action.  Of course, much of this is old news.  Opponents and skeptics of the institutional claims have long been aware of Blair's dodgy dossier consisting of "sexed-up" warnings and memos disclosed by whistle-blowers describing how Mr. Blair and Mr. Bush had predetermined the outcome of invasion.

However, the above revelations were not what caught the attention of the press.  Rather, as the Guardian newspaper outlines, was that others considered Clegg's statement in parliament to be a 'gaffe' with the potential that Britain may face charges in some future International court.  The government, more interested in covering their collective asses, distanced themselves by saying that Clegg was expressing his "long-held view" about the Iraq conflict as leader of the Liberal-Democrats.  Downing Street further stated that the government would await the findings of the Chilcot inquiry prior to reaching a view on the war.  It's an odd statement, since Tony Blair's own attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, prior to the war explicitly said, "I remain of the view that the correct legal interpretation of [UN security council] resolution 1441 is that it does not authorise the use of military force without a further determination by the security council."

Quote of the Day: Palin is the "retarded" clone of Dubya

We have already given one obviously unqualified Western governor a chance to wreck the country in the last decade, and not even the Republican Party that continues to defend and like Bush is so clueless and self-destructive that it would go to the country with a female version of the disaster we just experienced.

According to Daniel Larson at the "American Conservative" magazine, the chances of Caribou Barbie (aka Sarah Palin) successfully gaining the nomination of the Republican party in 2012 is zero.  As the above quote elaborates, Palin represents the absolute worst aspects of George W. Bush: evangelical religiosity, ignorance of  both domestic and foreign policy, irrationality, pettiness when confronting criticism, and easily manipulated.  In addition, given establishment requirements, party support, and corporate influences, Larson concludes that it is near impossible to imagine her ascendancy.

It pains me to write about this ignoramus or any possibility that she and the maladroits around her may inflict even more damage to the world than has been done by the Bush Administration (i.e. denial of climate change, destroying the American economy, waging two unsuccessful wars in Middle Eastern countries... etc.).  Palin  herself is representative of both the mindless political theater and the absurd anti-intellectualism that defines so much of American life.  Like Seinfeld, she represents a reality that "nothingness" is somehow a virtue.  Instead of insightful discussions on different policies that may elevate millions out of unemployment and end the Great Recession, we are bombarded with fluff pieces over what Caribou Barbie will say next and whether the Teabag express and their racist invective will shutter the Obama presidency.

Paul Krugman on our Current Depression

a significant proportion of the economics profession has spent the last three decades systematically destroying the hard-won knowledge of macroeconomics. It’s truly a new Dark Age, in which famous professors are reinventing errors refuted 70 years ago, and calling them insights.

- Paul Krugman

In the fall of 2007, I read Prof. Paul Krugman's NY Times column with great interest, because in it lay the seeds towards understanding our current calamity.  In it he inveighed against the recklessness of the Bush junta's tax policy and their pro-corporate policies that had boosted big business' bottom-line, but failed to produce any meaningful or sustained growth for ordinary citizens.  The dismal jobs report that emerged earlier that month, in which Krugman referenced, was a precursor to the worst economic turn-down since the Great Depression of 1929.

Likewise in today's NY Times op-ed he re-iterates -what should be obvious to all who never bought the original green-sprouts argument offered by the high-priests of commerce- is that "we’re looking at a lost decade."  He proclaims that given the misaligned interests of governments across the globe, that we are witnessing the solidification of the Third Great Depression of the modern era.

To quote:

We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost — to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs will nonetheless be immense.

With the cumulative failures of modern finance and crony capitalism witness to all and the well anticipated onset of resource scarcity, climate change, and ecological collapse posed to overwhelm all nations, I'm quite confident that Malthusian arguments will dominate this last century of humanity.

Welcome to the beginning of the end...

That Strange Concept Called Accountability!

Something remarkable happened last month that the press seems to have thoroughly overlooked here in the Americas.  The newly formed Conservative-Liberal Democrats coalition government in Britain told the country that they were going to reform civil liberties that had been badly diminished under Labour and equally, hold the previous government accountable their years of participating in the kidnapping, rendition, and torture of persons across the globe.

Nick Clegg, Deputy Prime-Minister, made a speech declaring that the coming changes would be the biggest shake-up in UK democracy since 1832.  He railed against a litany of previous Labour government policies that formed the basis of Britain's surveillance state:

• ID Card schemes
• national identity registers
• biometric passports
• the storing of Internet and email records
• DNA databases
• proliferating security cameras
• repressive restrictions on free speech and assembly rights

Mr. Clegg's party before the election didn't mince words.  The Liberal-Democrats stated in their party platform that, "The Government believes the British state has become too authoritarian, and that over the past decade it has abused fundamental human rights and historic civil liberties."  He further inveighed against the current criminal justice system which imprisons too many citizens without improving public safety, and "pledged radical reform to empower citizens" over entrenched and wealthy interests.

William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, announced that an independent judge will investigate whether the British government was complicit in the torture of terror suspects.  The Guardian summarizes:

The judicial inquiry announced by the foreign secretary into Britain's role in torture and rendition since September 2001 is poised to shed extraordinary light on one of the darkest episodes in the country's recent history.

It is expected to expose not only details of the activities of the security and intelligence officials alleged to have colluded in torture since 9/11, but also the identities of the senior figures in government who authorised those activities. . . . Those who have been most bitterly resisting an inquiry -- including a number of senior figures in the last government -- may have been dismayed to see the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition formed, as this maximised the chances of a judicial inquiry being established.

Glenn Greenwald describes the mindset of Barack Obama, who claimed during the 2008 election that it was his desire to hold the Bush junta to account for their crimes.  To date the Obama administration has held none of the fiends who lied and took America to war on bogus premises, engaged in wholesale torture across the globe, and violated the Geneva conventions.  George W. Bush has already admitted that he knew his top national security advisers discussed and approved specific details of the CIA's use of torture.  Earlier this month, he further admitted that "Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was waterboarded by the US, and said he would do it again 'to save lives'." This is consistent with Dick Cheney's bold statement to the world, back in February,where he announced that he was a "big supporter of waterboarding."

Andrew Sullivan and Scott Horton have both said that president Obama and his AG are now obligated to prosecute both Messrs Bush and Cheney.

[T]he attorney general of the United States is legally obliged to prosecute someone who has openly admitted such a war crime or be in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention on Torture. For Eric Holder to ignore this duty subjects him too to prosecution. If the US government fails to enforce the provision against torture, the UN or a foreign court can initiate an investigation and prosecution.... Cheney himself just set in motion a chain of events that the civilized world must see to its conclusion or cease to be the civilized world. For such a high official to escape the clear letter of these treaties and conventions, and to openly brag of it, renders such treaties and conventions meaningless.

How far down the rabbit hole have we all gone, where the Conservatives of Britain are willing to hold their people to account, while the Obama administration gives the worst government in the history of the American republic another "get-out of jail" card and the press doesn't bother talking about any of it?

Torture me Slowly: Bush's Medical Experimentation Program

With each turn and further examination of the Bush Administration's institutional program of torture, the history becomes more surreal and terrifying.  According to a report issued by Physicians for Human Rights, the Bush Administration engaged in human experimentation with detainees across the globe in order to empirically assess the degree to which they could inflict pain on their prisoners without killing them.

Health professionals engaged in research on detainees, in violation of the Geneva Conventions and other international and domestic prohibitions against human subject research and experimentation. This research included monitoring the effects of abusive treatment, including waterboarding and sleep deprivation, in order to assess how far "enhanced interrogation techniques" could go and still be within the legal parameters and to guide the future application of the techniques.

James Risen, who exposed the existence of the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program in 2006, has written another article in the NY Times outlining the findings of the PHR report.

The data collected by medical professionals from the interrogations of detainees allowed the C.I.A. to judge the emotional and physical impact of the techniques, helping the agency to “calibrate the level of pain experienced by detainees during interrogation, ostensibly to keep it from crossing the administration’s legal threshold of what it claimed constituted torture,” the report said. That meant that the medical professionals crossed the line from treating the detainees as patients to treating them as research subjects, the report asserted.

This is not a triviality.  Medical physicians and psychologists, as the report, the Times article, and numerous others have pointed out, are prohibited by national and international codes in conducting human experimentation without informed consent.  There are no persons undecided as to if the Nazi's, the Imperial Japanese, or the Khmer Rouge were not criminal when they engaged in these heinous actions.  However, these practices also remind us of America's own dark history of eugenics, experimentation on black citizens and prisoners throughout the 20th century, and military/CIA studies on large scale groups, which has all been well chronicled.  It is therefore no surprise when these sadists rear their ugly heads and perversely claim that torture (or "wink" something like it) is a necessity required to protect Americans from foreign enemies.  What has been done is inexcusible; it is a war crime.

The authors provide evidence about the government's meticulous studies:

The report cites agency guidelines for health professionals involved in interrogations requiring that they document each time a detainee was waterboarded, how long each waterboarding session lasted, how much water was applied, exactly how the water was applied and expelled, whether the detainees’ breathing passages were filled, and how each detainee looked between treatments.

Andrew Sullivan asks, "where was the experimentation taking place? How many doctors and psychologists were involved? Was there a separate facility, as at Bagram, for experimenting with torture? Did these experiments ever go wrong?"

Whereas, Glenn Greenwald asks what is President Obama doing to investigate, prosecute, and prevent this from occurring again?  The horrible answer is obvious; nothing.  Obama has decided that the country and more importantly the American Empire cannot afford to be hijacked by squabbles over petty matters like constitutional law or war crimes committed by the executive.  Rather, the nation must boldly ignore the slight inconveniences of the previous Bush administration and get on with the business of voting for the next American Idol.

Quote of the Day: Ellsberg on Obama

Daniel Ellsberg, the legendary Vietnam era whistleblower, is now 79 and has a few choice words for Mr. Obama.  In the English edition of Der Speigel, Mr. Ellsberg says Mr. Obama,when it comes to "civil liberties, violations of the constitution and the wars in the Middle East" is nothing less than Dubya's third term.  He further elaborates:

He's a good politician. He said what he needed to say to get elected, and now he's just taking advantage of the office. Like any administration before, his administration caters to the profits of big corporations like BP and Goldman Sachs... His early campaign contributions, the big corporate contributions, came from Wall Street. They got their money's worth.

To those who are unfamilar with "The Pentagon Papers", here is a quick recap.  In 1971 Ellsberg, a former US military analyst, triggered a national crisis by releasing to the New York Times and other newspapers, what has now become known as the "Pentagon Papers."  The 7,000 page classified Pentagon document, commissioned by then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara,  revealed that the US government knew the Vietnam War was ultimately unwinnable. The Nixon White House fought the publication of the documents to the Supreme Court and when that proved unsuccessful, proceeded to smear and persecute Ellsberg.