From the “Balkinization” blog of Jack Balkin, provided evidence that validated his 2006 prediction that the next president, whether Democratic or Republican, would ratify and continue many of President George W. Bush’s war on terrorism policies.

What he called the National Surveillance State features huge investments in electronic surveillance and various end runs around traditional Bill of Rights protections and expectations about procedure.

These end runs [include] public private cooperation in surveillance and exchange of information, expansion of the state secrets doctrine, expansion of administrative warrants and national security letters, a system of preventive detention, expanded use of military prisons, extraordinary rendition to other countries, and aggressive interrogation techniques outside of those countenanced by the traditional laws of war….

Barack Obama has largely confirmed [the prediction], much to the dismay of many liberals who supported him. After issuing a series of publicly lauded executive orders on assuming office (including a ban on torture), he has more or less systematically adopted policies consistent with the second term of the George W. Bush Administration, employing the new powers granted to the President by Congress in the Authorization of the Use of Military Force of 2001, the Patriot Act of 2001 (as amended), the Protect America Act of 2007, the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 and the Military Commissions Acts of 2006 and 2009. These statutory authorizations have created a basic framework for the National Surveillance State, and have made Obama the most powerful president in history in these policy areas….

It’s worth noting that if Private [Bradley] Manning were a prisoner of war, his treatment at the hands of the Obama Administration would violate the Geneva Conventions; indeed, if he were an non-uniformed enemy combatant, his treatment would probably violate Common Article III. Apparently, President Obama has gone Attorney General Alberto Gonzales one better. Not only must he believe that the protections of the Geneva Conventions are quaint, he must also think the same of the Bill of Rights, at least as applied to leakers–or at least, leakers whom the President and his associates did not authorize….

Unless there is a public outcry, we have no guarantee that this exceptional incident will prove truly exceptional. After all, if a liberal Democratic President is willing to look the other way in this case, what can we expect of future presidents of either party?

From Firedoglake is this article (with photo) from CodePink activist Logan Price, who, clad only in jock strap in front of the State Department on March 14, 2011, protested the inhumane treatment of Bradley Manning.

Our military has sent so many of my peers – idealistic young Americans – to die painful and horrible deaths or come home wounded and traumatized from a war founded on lies.

Rather than pursue the criminals who lied over nine-hundred times to get us into Iraq, the Obama administration is bent on taking it all out on Bradley — a shy young private who may have been the only person courageous enough to give us anything close to the full truth about these horrible wars.

Bradley Manning is being tortured in pre-trial detention. He has lost his rights and he is constantly humiliated, denied sleep or exercise, and spends 23 hours a day in single, small cell….

In the last two years, Obama has decided to prosecute more whistle blowers than all previous administrations combined. He does so regardless of the fact that these acts push him closer to the despots that have fallen –and will hopefully continue to fall, in part thanks to WikiLeaks—to democracy in the Middle East. And to claim that the leaks did more harm than good — is just another stupid lie…..

It is a shame that our leaders don’t have the courage to face the hard truths of our time. Instead, they strip Manning of his rights and leave him to stand cold in his cell, for 7 hours, naked. When one of their own speaks out, they fire him. Abusers project their own shadow. Without even being convicted of a crime, Bradley is already serving the sentence of all the criminals he is blamed of exposing.

From the Atlantic, the U.S. will ultimately spend $1 trillion for 2,443 F-35 fighter planes. Where’s the outrage over Washington’s culture of waste?

Money is pouring into the F-35 vortex. In 2010, Pentagon officials found that the cost of each plane had soared by over 50 percent above the original projections. The program has fallen years behind schedule, causing billions of dollars of additional expense, and won’t be ready until 2016. An internal Pentagon report concluded that: “affordability is no longer embraced as a core pillar.”…

And it’s hard to square the military largesse with our rampant debt. Republicans want to slash billions from programs like early education, in Representative Jeb Hensarling’s words, to “save our children from bankruptcy.”

So where is the outrage at the F-35’s outlandish cost?

Some just don’t seem to care. When it comes to defense, Republicans are the champions of big government and massive expenditure. The F-35 is too big to fail.

Check out this, and see the video of Carlin saying these things in 2005:

The reason education sucks and will never, ever, ever be fixed is because the owners of this country don’t want that. … I’m talking about the real owners, the big, wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. They got the politicians. The politicians are there to make you believe you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have owners. They own you.

They own everything: the best land, corporations, you name it. Well before the Citizens United decision of last year, Carlin was proclaiming the owners have

long since bought and paid for the Senate and Congress, the statehouse, the city halls. They have the judges in their back pockets…. They own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear.

The owners spend billions every year lobbying to get what they want.

You know what they want? They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking: well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interest. They want obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shitty jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears as soon as you come to collect it…. And now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know what, they’ll get it. You know why? It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I ain’t in the big club.

They don’t care about you at all, at all, at all, you know, and nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. That’s what the owners want. Call it the American dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.

And my friend Tarak Kauff, the Veterans for Peace activist who this very day is in D.C. protesting the never-ending war and tomorrow in Quantico protesting the barbaric, immoral treatment of prisoner Bradley Manning, had this to add:

George Carlin said it like it was and is. What is truly funny and ironically sad, however, is that the audience is, as George would have said, “so fucking stupid” that they don’t even get that he is telling them that they are gutless, brainless, sleeping cowards. I don’t want to use the word sheep because I have nothing against sheep. He is trying to wake them up. If they had any guts or brains, after Carlin’s talk they would have stormed Wall Street or something but they just go home and have a drink while the American military machine continues to kill in their name.

If there was a vengeful god, or even a god of mercy and love and if that god had even one iota of power or compassion, would he/she not destroy this evil country? Thankfully this type of godhead is just another fantasy that people have dreamed up to comfort and delude themselves–or, worse, to gain power over others because there are still some very decent and courageous (the natural human state) people left here. You may be one of them. Of course, there is God but thankfully it is nothing like the deluded American public dream it to be. When they start to step forward and act for the good of others, because of the love and empathy they have for others, and they forget about their own petty, infinitely small selves, even for a brief moment, they will begin to see and feel that God. (Sort of adapted from Tolstoy’s “What Men Live By”)

Ralph Nader, the former presidential candidate and longtime consumer advocate, and Daniel Ellsberg, perhaps the country’s most famous whistleblower, who in 1971 leaked the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, were interviewed on Democracy Now! (click here and here).

Both men plan to participate in a major protest in Washington, D.C., on March 19 to mark the 8-year anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Ellsberg plans to risk arrest by participating in nonviolent civil disobedience actions against the ongoing occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Here are some of the points they made:

• About Bradley Manning. Ellsberg: “State Department spokesman P. J. Crowley noted that the conditions under which Manning is being held were ‘ridiculous, counterproductive and stupid.’ And that seems an accurate description, as far as it goes. The words ‘abusive’ and ‘illegal’ would go beyond that and are equally appropriate…. [The conditions] clearly violate the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, even for someone being punished and having been convicted (and here we have someone, who has been charged but not yet tried or convicted). He is being held essentially in isolation, solitary confinement, for more than 9 months, something that is likely to drive a person mad and may be the intent of what’s going on here. “The WikiLeaks revelations that Manning is charged with having revealed, having to do with Iraq, reveal that in fact we–that is, the U.S. military, in which Manning was a part–turn over suspects to the Iraqis with the knowledge that they will be and are being tortured. This is a clear violation of our own laws and of international law and makes us as much culpable in doing that as if we were doing the torture ourselves. Moreover, the WikiLeaks logs show the order is given: ‘Do not investigate further.’ Now, that’s an illegal order, which our President could change–and should change and must change–simply by picking up one phone and changing it.

  “Reportedly, Manning was very strongly motivated at one point to try to change this situation, because he was involved in it actively and knew that it was wrong and found that it was not being investigated within the government and that it was not being dealt with at all. …

  “I was very dismayed that the President, faced with accusations at such a high level from his assistant secretary for public affairs… was satisfied with having asked the Defense Department whether the conditions were, quote, ‘appropriate’ and met reasonable standards, basic standards, and he was assured that they did. It was very like President Nixon asking the White House plumbers or his counsel, John Ehrlichman, ‘Was it appropriate and did it meet our standards for you to be burglarizing Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in Los Angeles? Did that meet our basic standards?’ and when told by Howard Hunt or G. Gordon Liddy, ‘Yes, no problem,’ that’s the end of that matter….”

• About Julian Assange. Ellsberg: “He’s appealing a decision to extradite him to Sweden, with the rather clear subtext here that the U.S. hopes, or might find it easier even, to extradite him from Sweden, with its current relatively right-wing government, than from England, which has stronger restrictions on extraditing for political motives. He is concerned about that…. “He could be subject to the kind of special forces operation that the WikiLeaks revelations show they were doing on a very wide scale in Iraq and Afghanistan. And now, it turns out, in Pakistan. One of the major revelations of WikiLeaks that I found in the Afghan war logs was that we are already doing offensive ground operations of a special-forces nature in Pakistan. This is one of the most dangerous possible operations we could be doing, since it might destabilize the government there and lead to a government in which nuclear weapons were in the hands of allies, literal allies, of al-Qaeda and of the Taliban.”

• Our ongoing wars in the Middle East. Nader: “The protest on the 8th anniversary is important because the Veterans for Peace, who include World War II veterans all the way to the present Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, are making a powerful statement for the rule of law, for advocating peace, for getting out of Afghanistan and Iraq. If you took a poll of the soldiers in Afghanistan (as a poll was taken in Iraq in January 2005), the majority would say, ‘Let’s get out of here. It’s a quagmire. All we’re doing are creating new enemies, slaughtering innocents, spending huge amounts of money that can be spent back home to create jobs, and violating our constitutional processes.’ “You know, let’s be very forthright: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney committed war crimes. They authorized illegal surveillance of American. They unconstitutionally pursued wars in Asia. They slaughtered innocents. And they have been considered war criminals by many people, including Republican former judge Andrew Napolitano, author of four books on the Constitution, and Republican Bruce Fein. Now, Barack Obama is committing the same crimes–in fact, worse ones in Afghanistan. And innocents are being slaughtered. We’re creating more enemies. He’s violating international law. He is not constitutionally authorized to do what he’s doing. He’s using state secrets. He’s engaging in illegal surveillance. The CIA is running wild without any kind of circumscribed legal standards or disclosure….

  “Why don’t we say what’s on the minds of many legal experts? That the Obama administration is committing war crimes. And if Bush should have been impeached, Obama should be impeached.”

  Ellsberg: “More than a $120 billion a year [is] being wasted, hurting the welfare, really, of the people of Afghanistan and of Iraq. It’s outrageous that this is continuing and that [politicians are] talking about removing fuel from elderly during the winter here, [about cutting] health aid and education aid, while we’re spending this money on the wars, these totally wrongful and unnecessary wars….

  “Just as the President is unwarrantedly accepting assurances from the Defense Department that there are no human rights violations,… the media and the public have been accepting unwarrantedly assurances for years now that the President’s policy is to get out of Afghanistan and to get out of Iraq even sooner. I’ve been saying for several years that I think those assurances are almost worthless, that there is essentially no chance that the President means to get us all out of our bases in Iraq by the end of this year, no matter what they say. And indeed, I think that we’ll have tens of thousands of troops there, if Pentagon plans proceed as they’re expecting right now in Iraq, indefinitely. And the same in Afghanistan, that the idea that we’re going to be out of there even by 2014, under current plans, I think has no basis. So people, as they did under Nixon, when they thought the war is ending, turned their attention away from it at a time when in fact almost half of American casualties had yet to be suffered. This is quite unwarranted. These wars are on, and, as WikiLeaks shows, they’re actually expanding into Pakistan and, we know now, Yemen….

  “President Obama is a former community organizer, that that’s very far behind him, just as I’m a former Cold Warrior. And really, what we see in connection with the expansion of these wars and with—but especially with the human rights, in general, the detention and the state secrets, the rendition and the torture, the torture in Iraq and the torture of an American citizen here in Virginia, we see that President Obama is a former constitutional scholar. In fact, the man who wrote the torture memos and all the other memos on presidential power, John Yoo, of University of California, Berkeley Law School, I think would be very comfortable in this administration. I see no real difference in his perspective on presidential powers—unlimited, essentially monarchical presidential powers—from this administration. They do say in Washington here that where you stand depends on where you sit. Well, the man who sits in the Oval Office—or woman, some day—seems to believe very quickly that they’re sitting on a throne. And we see the effects of that in these unnecessary wars.”

• About the assault on labor unions. Nader: “It’s a very concerted one, not only by governors, but by the Republican Party, in particular, and the corporatists that run it. And the idea is, after the Wall Street collapse drove us into a deep recession, which reduced tax revenues everywhere, especially with the Republican insistence that the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy be continued, it was the stage for saying, ‘Well, there are a lot of deficits in the state government in Wisconsin and Indiana and Ohio and elsewhere.’ Therefore, they have to go after the public employee unions, not only to make them concede on their salaries and benefits, but also to break their human right to collectively bargain. “And let’s not be fuzzy about this. The right of collective bargaining is part of the United Nation Declaration of Human Rights. Whenever we analyze the level of democracy in other countries, one of the signal yardsticks is: Are the workers able to form independent labor unions? They are not in Mexico. They are not in China. They are not in many other countries that U.S. corporations are shipping jobs and entire industries to, day by day.

  “So, the response has been unexpected but necessary. There were 100,000 people rallying last Saturday in Madison. There are other rallies in other states.

  “The question is whether the AFL-CIO is going to put money, and whether the United Auto Workers and others, who have a lot of money in their strike fund reserves, into mobilizing workers, union and non-union, all over the country into a major political movement that refuses to go for the least worst between the Republican and Democrat and that demands that Obama fulfill his campaign pledge in 2008 to raise the minimum wage to $9.50–it’s now $7.25–and also to push openly and transformingly for the card check and for repeal of Taft-Hartley, so workers can have the same rights to organize as they do in Western Europe and Canada….

  “How can they say that the public employees’ claim on the treasury has to be cut back–firefighters, police, teachers, civil servants–when there’s hundreds of billions of dollars of corporate welfare in these states–tax abatements in New York City, for example, subsidies, handouts, giveaways? I mean, it’s insinuated into the structure of state, local and national government…. Corporate welfare should go first, before you start cutting back on people’s standard of living.

  “And the Governor of Wisconsin… provided $140 million in corporate tax welfare, for starters, added on to all the other corporate welfare systems in Wisconsin…. Workers take the brunt, but not these corporate supremacists, not these corporate freeloaders that we have to guarantee and support….

  “We have to get over this idea of making the least powerful pay the price for the corporate criminality that started, in the latest stage, from the Wall Street crooks and speculators who looted and drained trillions of dollars of pension funds and mutual fund savings, while they enriched themselves, tanked their companies, their banks, and sent them to Washington to be bailed out by the same workers in their role as taxpayers. It’s really time to raise our level of informed indignation, break our routine, and get involved as voters and citizens at the local, state and national level.”

Stop the Republican attacks! from
Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter
by Jack A. Smith, editor of the newsletter

Republican politicians in Washington, DC, and the nation’s state houses are virtually wilding in the streets. It’s as though they are drunk with power, even though the Democrats actually are stronger by virtue of controlling the White House and Senate.

The actions by Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker to crush the public unions in the name of closing the budget deficit–after first gifting state businesses with tax breaks and programs amounting to $117 million–are just the leading edge of a broad national assault on worker rights, union rights, women’s rights, abortion rights, minority rights, and civil liberties.

The ultra-conservatives enthusiastically attack all government programs that benefit working people, oppose environmental protection, fight against measures to halt climate change, and cater exclusively to the forces that actually guide America’s destiny: big money, big business, big finance, and big military–all the while whining about “big government.”

Why are they acting like feudal Crusaders besieging a Muslim fortress? They won the House and account for 29 governorships, but that’s hardly a mandate to implement their most extreme proposals–and they know it.

But they also know something else: The Obama Administration, which sets the pace for the Democrats, would always rather compromise than fight. The Wisconsin public unions were encouraged by Democratic supporters to agree to substantial pay and benefit cuts to ward off stiffer punishments, but Wisconsin’s Republican Senate voted last night to strip them of most collective bargaining rights, and the state’s Assembly is set to do more damage today.

Having miniaturized their moderate wing and neutered the neoconservatives, the Republican high command evidently believes the time has finally come to overturn some of the social advances gained through the struggles of the 1960s and the Great Depression. They are taking a page out of Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by cynically exploiting the economic disaster to implement regressive economic and social policies.

Right-wing politicians are now fallaciously claiming that the federal government is “going broke,” or “facing bankruptcy” due to the high federal deficit, and therefore “deep cuts are required” in spending programs intended to benefit working people and the poor. This is an old GOP canard, which the New York Times defined March 2 as “obfuscating nonsense.”

The sky-high deficit is largely the product of three things:

• The Bush Administration’s huge tax reductions, especially for the rich ($1 trillion extra to the richest 2% in the last 10 years)
• The economic recession (caused by the banks, Wall St. greed, and government deregulation)
• Vast increases in military and national security spending during the last decade

The unnecessary wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, for instance, are paid for by borrowing money. The amount spent just on these two wars this year alone could easily wipe out all the state budget deficits in America.…

President Bush knew exactly what he was doing by increasing the deficit because President Reagan before him did the same thing: They railed against taxes while boosting spending, the outcome of which inevitably leads to demands to cut programs for the people. One difference between the Reagan era and today is that many Congressional Republicans in the 1980s were not willing to trash the social safety net. This time, however, that safety net is the target, along with the unions.

Now the emboldened conservatives preposterously blame public service workers and their unions for state deficits. For example, private sector workers in Wisconsin earn 4.8% more per hour than comparable public employees.

The real point is that Big Business has been trying to destroy the union movement for well over 100 years, and now their minions in government are trying to finish the job in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, Iowa, Florida, and Tennessee by adopting or planning anti-union legislation.

The GOP governors and members of Congress claim they are “doing what the voters want,” but that’s nonsense. The March 1 New York Times/CBS Poll, among others, shows that the public opposes weakening public service union bargaining rights by a margin of 60%-33%. Polls show that majorities favor hiking taxes on the rich to lower the deficit. For instance, in New Jersey, which has a budget-cutting Republican governor, a March 1 Rutgers-Eagleton poll showed that voters supported a tax surcharge on “very high income residents” by 72% to 26%.

It has reached the point where Tea Party-backed Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) declared that “collective bargaining has no place in representative democracy.” This is an attack timed to coincide with high unemployment and the effects of recession upon the relatively weakened American union movement of 15.3 million workers, and scores of millions more nonunion workers whose wages are higher because of comparative union standards and organizing efforts.

The right wing is out to win the class war in America. Its every move is intended to deprive the working class and middle class while privileging wealth and power. However, the attack isn’t so much because of the Republican Party’s strength but of the Democratic Party’s political weakness, despite its great power and financing. This is an important factor impelling the conservative politicians to go for broke. It adds to their strength.

Right-wing populist Tea Party nationalists, reactionary take-no-prisoners freshmen Republicans in Congress, and ultra-conservative icons such as Palin, Beck, and Limbaugh intimidate the old-line GOP establishment, which both embraces and fears the upstarts. They and their followers–including the far right and loony fringe–are infuriated by the presence of a “foreigner” (i.e., African American) and a “socialist” (i.e., Democrat) in the White House, an incentive to keep propelling the Republican Party ever further to the political right.

And sure enough, the Democratic Party, acting the part of a helpless giant, is dutifully trudging ten steps behind and one small step to the left, just enough to retain the dubious honorific of The Lesser Evil.

This two-party shift toward the right has been taking place for decades, but it’s been accelerating since the Obama Administration made it clear that it would govern from the center-right and compromise with the opposition. The White House conciliated on everything, even when it had large majorities in both Congressional chambers. For instance, the Democrats had the power to overturn Bush’s shameful millionaire tax cuts 2 years earlier, during President Obama’s first few “honeymoon” months in office, but he allowed them to expire as intended in 2 years, then compromised to extend them an additional 2 years.

The GOP knows it can gain political ground by aggressively attempting to obstruct legislation and fighting dirty. But the right wing’s unstinting combativeness is only partially based on its own limited power. The other part is lodged in awareness of the Democratic Party’s spineless passivity and vacillation combined with a political perspective resembling what was once termed moderate Republicanism, not the liberalism of yesteryear.

Here’s a current example: In the midst of the most assertive right-wing assault in modern history, the New York Times reported that President Obama was “road-testing his new message of bipartisan cooperation” in Miami March 4 “with Jeb Bush, the former Republican governor, and then used his first stump speech of the 2012 season to call on Democrats to ‘find common ground'” with the GOP.

At the “risk” of sounding partisan, we must ask: When the center-right searches for common ground with the right-far right, isn’t it likely to be discovered equidistant between the two polarities, that is, clearly closer to the right than the center, much less to the left?

There are, however, two hopeful signs in this bleak political picture.

One is that the Republicans and their Tea Party vanguard are foolishly overreaching. If this continues much longer, public revulsion toward right-wing fanaticism probably will punish the conservatives in the 2012 elections. But there’s a downside. The conservative Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision now permits corporations to invest limitless funds in election campaigns, and that kind of money not only talks but it screams, perhaps loudly enough to buy the election for the conservatives despite the shenanigans of the rabid right.

Another sign, the most hopeful of all, is that the Wisconsin public workers and the union movement–supported by tens of millions of Americans throughout the country–are shouting their opposition to those who degrade democracy by attacking working families. They recognize the impending devastation implicit in this assault by corporate wealth being carried out by the politicians.

The big question is will this combative spirit take hold and spread? The more there are mass struggles and strikes for people’s rights–in the workplaces and at the seats of power, in the streets, and at public meetings–the more the rights of working Americans will be upheld and extended.

The best response to this sharp turn to the political right in America is a sharp turn to the left. It’s time to unite, get organized behind a determined leadership willing to wage a true struggle, and fight back.