From Tom Dispatch
By Chalmers Johnson

However ambitious President Barack Obama’s domestic plans, one unacknowledged issue has the potential to destroy any reform efforts he might launch. Think of it as the 800-pound gorilla in the American living room: our longstanding reliance on imperialism and militarism in our relations with other countries and the vast, potentially ruinous global empire of bases that goes with it. The failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment and the profligate use of it in missions for which it is hopelessly inappropriate will, sooner rather than later, condemn the United States to a devastating trio of consequences: imperial overstretch, perpetual war, and insolvency, leading to a likely collapse similar to that of the former Soviet Union.

According to the 2008 official Pentagon inventory of our military bases around the world, our empire consists of 865 facilities in more than 40 countries and overseas U.S. territories. We deploy over 190,000 troops in 46 countries and territories. In just one such country, Japan, at the end of March 2008, we still had 99,295 people connected to U.S. military forces living and working there — 49,364 members of our armed services, 45,753 dependent family members, and 4,178 civilian employees. Some 13,975 of these were crowded into the small island of Okinawa, the largest concentration of foreign troops anywhere in Japan.

These massive concentrations of American military power outside the United States are not needed for our defense. They are, if anything, a prime contributor to our numerous conflicts with other countries. They are also unimaginably expensive. According to Anita Dancs, an analyst for the website Foreign Policy in Focus, the United States spends approximately $250 billion each year maintaining its global military presence. The sole purpose of this is to give us hegemony — that is, control or dominance — over as many nations on the planet as possible.

Read more Liquidation

From TruthDig
By Gore Vidal

For those of us who had hoped that the Obama administration would present us with a rebirth of the old republic that was so rudely erased a few years ago by that team of judicial wreckers, Bush and Gonzales, which led, in turn, to a recent incident in Cambridge, Mass. that inspired a degree of alarm in many Americans. But what was most alarming was the plain fact that neither the president nor a “stupid” local policeman seemed to understand the rules of behavior in a new America, where we find ourselves marooned as well as guarded (is that the verb?) by armed police who have been instructed that they are indeed, once armed, the law and may not be criticized verbally or in any other way and are certainly not subject to any restrictions as to whom they arrest or otherwise torment.

This is rather worse than anyone might have predicted, even though the signs have been clear for some years that ours is now a proto-fascist nation and there appears to be no turning back; nor, indeed, much awareness on the part of our ever-alert media. Forgive me if you find my irony heavy, but I too get tired of carrying it about in “the greatest nation in the country,” as Spiro Agnew liked to say.

I was first made aware of this development in 1946 when I was limping around in army uniform in New York City and noticed that the local police (admired by none) were beginning to run wild, possibly because so many of the able-bodied young had, like myself, been serving for some years overseas. I recall that some sort of parade was being held and what looked to be a thousand or two citizens were trying unsuccessfully to cross Fifth Avenue. I waited on a street corner for an hour in my uniform, limping from my disability earned by my service in the war. But after nearly an hour of waiting, I stopped a policeman who was wandering idly around and asked him politely when I’d be able to cross Fifth Avenue. He shrieked at me, “Go call da mayor!” And I said, “Oh I will, I will.” Actually, I did know the mayor at that time, but he was not available on that sacred day. I did make a protest as a veteran who had mustered out with a disability for life, but this seemed to be a cause of great merriment. In any case, that was my first experience of a Nazi-like police force in New York City, a city pretty much home to me from childhood on.

Read more Police State

From Salon
By Glenn Greenwald

I’ve written several times before about the amazing quest of Binyam Mohamed — a British resident released from Guantanamo in February, 2009 after seven years in captivity — to compel public disclosure of information in the possession of the British Government proving he was tortured while in U.S. custody. At the center of Mohamed’s efforts lie the claims of high British government officials that the Obama administration has repeatedly threatened to cut off intelligence-sharing programs with the U.K. if the British High Court discloses information which British intelligence officials learned from the CIA about how Mohamed was tortured. New statements from the British Foreign Secretary yesterday — claiming that Hillary Clinton personally re-iterated those threats in a May meeting — highlight how extreme is this joint American/British effort to cover-up proof of Mohamed’s torture.

In August 2008, the British High Court ruled in Mohamed’s favor, concluding in a 75-page ruling (.pdf) that there was credible evidence in Britain’s possession that Mohamed was brutally tortured and was therefore entitled to disclosure of that evidence under long-standing principles of British common law, international law (as established by the Nuremberg Trials and the war crimes trials of Yugoslav leaders, among others), and Britain’s treaty obligations (under the Convention Against Torture). But as part of that ruling, the Court redacted from its public decision seven paragraphs which detailed the facts of Mohamed’s torture — facts which British intelligence agents learned from the CIA — based on the British Government’s representations that both the Bush and Obama administrations had threatened to cut off intelligence-sharing with Britain if those facts were disclosed, even as part of a court proceeding.

Read more Threats

From True Blue Liberal
By Sherwood Ross

Some in Congress are stung by charges that former Vice President Dick Cheney ran an international assassination op from the White House without telling them about it. They say he told the CIA to withhold the facts from Congress. This raises the question of how much power Cheney actually wielded—and the answer apparently is plenty.

In (Bush lawyer) John Yoo’s version of events, writes Jane Mayer in her book “The Dark Side”(Anchor) “the impetus to break out of Geneva’s strictures…came from the CIA. Many at the Agency, however, saw this differently, suggesting it was Cheney and his lawyer, (David) Addington, who pushed the Agency to take the path toward torture.” A few days after 9/11 Cheney observed the CIA had gone over “to the dark side,” but whether he starred in the role of Darth Vader needs to be established or denied.

The record appears to weight the case against him. Cheney has a long history of yeoman service to the Dark Side. To begin with, he is an unapologetic advocate of force, stating that force “makes your diplomacy more effective going forward, dealing with other problems.” When the first President Bush failed to swing Panama’s voters against General Manuel Noriega with $10 million in cash bribes, he called on Cheney, then his defense secretary, to crush Panama. Cheney did. During Christmas week of 1989, writes Tim Weiner in “Legacy of Ashes”(Anchor), “smart bombs blasted Panama City slums into rubble while Special Forces soldiers fought their way through the capital. Twenty-three Americans and hundreds of innocent Panamanian civilians died in the two weeks it took to arrest Noriega and to bring him in chains to Miami.” That was an example of Cheney’s work.

Later, as Vice President, Cheney led the charge for war on Iraq’s Saddam Hussein by asserting there was “no doubt” he had WMD. “Many of us are convinced he will acquire nuclear weapons very soon,” Cheney told the VFW in Nashville in August, 2002. Read the rest of this entry »

From The Washington Post
By Carrie Johnson

Political adviser Karl Rove and other high-ranking figures in the Bush White House played a greater role than previously understood in the firing of federal prosecutors almost three years ago, according to e-mails obtained by The Washington Post, in a scandal that led to mass Justice Department resignations and an ongoing criminal probe.

The e-mails and new interviews with key participants reflect contacts among Rove, aides in the Bush political affairs office and White House lawyers about the dismissal of three of the nine U.S. attorneys fired in 2006: New Mexico’s David C. Iglesias, the focus of ire from GOP lawmakers; Missouri’s Todd Graves, who had clashed with one of Rove’s former clients; and Arkansas’s Bud Cummins, who was pushed out to make way for a Rove protege.

The documents and interviews provide new information about efforts by political aides in the Bush White House, for example, to push a former colleague as a favored candidate for one of the U.S. attorney posts. They also reflect the intensity of efforts by lawmakers and party officials in New Mexico to unseat the top prosecutor there. Rove described himself as merely passing along complaints by senators and state party officials to White House lawyers.

The e-mails emerged as Rove finished his second day of closed-door-testimony Thursday about the firings to the House Judiciary Committee. For years, Rove and former White House counsel Harriet Miers had rejected efforts by lawmakers to obtain their testimony and their correspondence about the issue, citing executive privilege. The House of Representatives sued, igniting a court fight that was resolved this year after discussions among lawyers for former president George W. Bush and President Obama.

Read more Heavy Handed

From The Guardian UK
By Naomi Klein

The US bailout is a robbery in progress, the greatest heist in monetary history. But consider for a moment: what if it actually works, what if the financial sector is saved and the economy returns to the course it was on before the crisis struck? Is that what we want? And what would that world look like?

The answer is that it would look like Sarah Palin. Hear me out – this is not a joke. We’re so busy laughing at her we may not have given sufficient consideration to the meaning of the Palin moment. Think about it, Sarah Palin stepped on to the world stage as vice presidential candidate on 29 August 2008 at a McCain campaign rally. Exactly two weeks later, on 15 September, Lehman Brothers collapsed, triggering the global financial meltdown.

So in a way Palin was the last clear expression of capitalism-as-usual before everything went south. That’s quite helpful because she showed us – in that plain-spoken way of hers – the trajectory the US economy was on before its current meltdown. By offering us this glimpse of a future, one narrowly avoided, Palin provides us with an opportunity to ask a core question: do we want to save that pre-crisis system? Or do we want to use this crisis, and the electoral mandate for serious change delivered by the last election, to radically transform the system? Progressives need to get clear on our answer now because we haven’t had the potent combination of a serious crisis and a clear progressive democratic mandate for change since the 1930s. We use this opportunity, or we lose it.

So what was Sarah Palin telling us about capitalism-as-usual before she was so rudely interrupted by the meltdown? Let’s first recall that before she came along, the US public, at long last, was starting to come to grips with the urgency of the climate crisis, with the fact that our economic activity is at war with the planet, that radical change is needed immediately. We were actually having that conversation, and polar bears were on the cover of Newsweek magazine. And then in walked Sarah Palin. The core of her message was this: those environmentalists, those liberals, those do-gooders are all wrong. You don’t have to change anything. You don’t have to rethink anything. Keep driving your gas-guzzling car and keep going to Wal-Mart. The reason is a magical place called Alaska.

Read more Environment

From The NY Observer
By Joe Conason

In his struggle to change the nation’s health care system, Barack Obama again faces certain obstacles that almost stopped his amazing march to the presidency. Aside from the Washington chattering class and the right-wing media, which always oppose progressive reform, Mr. Obama is losing his grip on the middle class and working families in swing states. He is losing Democratic senators and members of Congress in places like Florida and Arkansas. He is losing the propaganda war with his professorial style of explanation.

So perhaps he should stop trying to walk this treacherous path alone. Perhaps the time has come, if it isn’t already too late, to look for a companion who went here before, and fell. Perhaps he ought to ask for help from Bill Clinton.

The current president and his Democratic predecessor are not exactly close, even now, despite the presence of Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Obama cabinet. The friction burns of the 2008 primary campaign never completely healed, despite efforts on both sides. And the idea of bringing on the president, whose health care reform failed so dramatically, as an advocate for the Obama plan may seem counterintuitive even if they were best friends forever.

But Mr. Clinton remains popular and credible in precisely the places where the president is suffering politically—and he could achieve traction with the same Democrats who see no cost in undermining the Obama administration. Moreover, he has a capacity to communicate complex ideas in plain terms that would serve Mr. Obama well at this perilous moment.

Read more Bill Clinton

From AlterNet
By Joshua Holland

If you can frame the terms of a debate, you’ve gone a long way towards winning it before you’ve begun. Tragically, Republicans, the health care industry and business-friendly Blue Dog Democrats have largely been able to do exactly that, with a substantial assist from the corporate-owned media.

They’ve successfully focused the health care debate on the short-term costs to the federal government’s bottom line, obscuring the potential impact that a meaningful realignment of the health care system would have on the economy as a whole. In so doing, opponents of reform have hoodwinked much of the public into believing that investments in America’s national health care system will wind up costing individuals more than they’d gain from the effort.

In fact, they’ve done such a good job that much of the discourse has revolved around what is arguably one of the least relevant aspects of the proposals being debated in Congress: whether they “cost too much” or are “deficit neutral” in terms of their impact on the federal budget over the next 10 years.

Much of that discussion has been fueled by a series of estimates issued by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) — estimates based on incomplete drafts of the legislation now moving through Congress. Yet by and large the mainstream media have dutifully repeated the spin without mentioning that the critics are touting the CBO’s preliminary projections as definitive and final.

Read more Health Care Debate

From TruthDig
By Robert Scheer

What a hoot. The Chinese Communists invaded Washington on Monday demanding not that we sacrifice our freedoms but rather that we balance our budget. Creditors get to make that kind of call. And the Marxists of Beijing, who have turned out to be the world’s most prudent bankers, are worried about their assets invested in our banana republic.

“China has a huge amount of investment in the United States, mainly in the form of Treasury bonds. We are concerned about the security of our financial assets” was the way China’s assistant finance minister put it. Briefing reporters at the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, he added, “We sincerely hope the U.S. fiscal deficit will be reduced, year after year.” Quite sincerely, one suspects, given a U.S. budget shortfall this year that is slated to reach $1.85 trillion.

Suddenly, it was U.S. officials who were promising deep reform to their disgraced economic system rather than demanding it from incompetent foreigners. President Barack Obama’s economic team of Clinton-era holdovers, who a decade ago had hectored China on the virtues of fiscal responsibility, now were falling over themselves to reassure the Chinese that their $1.5 trillion stake in U.S. government-issued securities is safe, and that they should buy more at this week’s $200 billion Treasury auction. If they don’t, we’re in big trouble.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner promised to behave, saying the U.S. is “committed to taking the necessary measures to bring our fiscal deficits down to a more sustainable level once recovery is firmly established.” Now let’s hope that the Chinese Communists and their natural allies among congressional deficit hawks will be able to keep him to his word.

Read more China

From Information Clearing House
By John Miller

Although you have to dig into the statistics to know it, unemployment in the United States is now worse than at any time since the end of the Great Depression.

From December 2007, when the recession began, to May of this year, 6.0 million U.S. workers lost their jobs. The big three U.S. automakers are closing plants and letting white-collar workers go too. Chrysler, the worst off of the three, will lay off one-quarter of its workforce even if it survives. Heavy equipment manufacturer Caterpillar and giant banking conglomerate Citigroup have both laid off thousands of workers. Alcoa, the aluminum maker, has let workers go. Computer maker Dell and express shipper DHL have both canned many of their workers. Circuit City, the leading electronics retailer, went out of business, costing its 40,000 workers their jobs. Lawyers in large national firms are getting the ax. Even on Sesame Street, workers are losing their jobs.

The official unemployment rate hit 9.4% in May—already as high as the peak unemployment rates in all but the 1982 recession, the worst since World War II. And topping the 1982 recession’s peak rate of 10.8% is now distinctly possible. The current downturn has pushed up unemployment rates by more than any previous postwar recession (see Table 1).

Read more Real Unemployment