David Cameron’s No Poodle – He’s a New Breed

It was just like old times when British Prime Minister David Cameron came calling at the White House this month. Yes, the “Special Relationship” felt really special again just like back in the days when Tony Blair lined the U.K. up behind the Iraq War – when those French and Germans were having none of it – and made his reputation as “George Bush’s poodle.” For a couple of years in between, that sour old Gordon Brown was Prime Minister and obviously didn’t enjoy the sound of his master’s voice in Washington nearly so much. But now it seems that Barack Obama has his own pet at 10 Downing Street. Of course, Cameron’s Conservative, not Labour, so he’s an entirely different breed than Blair. But the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank seemed a bit off in characterizing Cameron as “serving as Obama’s guard dog.” Perhaps something more along the lines of a Yorkshire Terrier – Obama’s Yorkie.

It’s been a rough stretch for the president’s Afghanistan War policy: the Koran burnings; Afghan government soldiers and police killing NATO soldiers; American soldiers urinating on corpses; one soldier murdering sixteen civilians, Afghan President Karzai calling for the Americans to be confined to major bases. So when Cameron arrived and said of the war, “If you compare where we are today with where we’ve been two, three years ago, the situation is considerably improved,” it did suggest that the prime minister may have told his people not to brief him on the subject these past years. But oblivious support is better than no support at all and the White House loved it.

The prime minister also said “it would be hard to say that the al Qaida network is not effectively dismantled today.” Oh, wait a minute – wrong prime minister. That was Tony Blair talking – on February 6, 2003. But whatever the rationale of this war is supposed to be these days, David Cameron was here to say that he’s for it and that he and the president are “absolutely in lock-step” over the withdrawal process.

The real story here is, or ought to be, two leaders persisting in the pursuit of a ten year old war “increasingly unpopular on both sides of the Atlantic,” as the International Herald Tribune characterized the situation. An ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted earlier this month found Americans now consider the war “not worth fighting” by a 60-35 percent margin and 55 percent think “most Afghans oppose what the United States is trying to do in Afghanistan,” while only 30 percent believe they support it. Following the deaths of the 16 villagers, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found 61 percent of Americans supporting bringing the remaining U.S. troops home immediately, with only 17 percent against.

The war enjoys even less support in the United Kingdom, where an ITV1 News at Ten poll found 46 percent of respondents professing to have no idea why British troops were in Afghanistan, 55 percent thinking the threat of terrorism on British soil was increased by British forces remaining there, 57 percent not believing that the deaths of British soldiers in Afghanistan are justified by the cause they are fighting for and 73 percent considering the war “unwinnable.” 55 percent supported immediate withdrawal.

So, no surprise, Obama was thrilled with the Prime Minister’s visit, declaring that “in good times and in bad, [Cameron] is just the kind of partner that you want at your side. I trust him. He says what he does, and he does what he says. And I’ve seen his character.” Precisely the type of qualities you look for in man’s best friend.

To say that the two were joined at the hip during Cameron’s visit would be to employ too slight a metaphor. Joined at the brain is more like it: They went so far as to co-author an op ed for the Washington Post. So when Obama wrote about “imposing tough sanctions on the Iranian regime for failing to meet its international obligations” and warned that otherwise Iran would “face the consequences,” well, that was Cameron too. And when Obama failed to mention the corresponding U.S. obligations to reduce its nuclear arsenal – as U.S. presidents always do, it was also Cameron failing to mention U.K. obligations to reduce its own – as U.K. prime ministers always do.

Cameron separately told his American audience that “we take nothing off the table” when it comes to Iran, just the same as the president had said. So if any American were doubting the sanity of reserving the right to use nuclear weapons to ensure that Iran doesn’t acquire nuclear weapons, now you know that the Brits think just the same – at least the ones in power do. And, oh yeah, Cameron told us he thought Obama’s bombing of Libya was cool, too – and he said that on his own.

As a reward for being such a good political lap dog, Cameron not only got a hot dog and a basketball game from the president, but a state dinner at the White House – only the sixth of the Obama Administration. They even created a new dish in his honor – Bison Wellington, which, according to the menu, is “a perfect pairing of U.S. and U.K. cultures … a classic English dish given an American twist with the use of buffalo tenderloin.” News reports did not specify whether the prime minister ate from a bowl or at the table.

An Obama Primary Challenge?

The last thing I want to see happen in the 2012 election is a Republican take the White House.  But the next-to-last thing is pretty important to me, too: I don’t want to see the President’s military policies go unchallenged.  Barack Obama is, after all, authorizing illegal military drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen on top of running a war in Afghanistan that, among other things, even he has to know can’t succeed.  In real world terms these are not trivial matters – even if they go unmentioned in most assessments of how the President’s doing.  We – liberals, progressives, the left – can choose to ignore this if we want – that is, if we wish to be irrelevant in the next election.

It does look like there will be at least one candidate in next year’s presidential primaries opposing these policies – Republican Texas Congressman Ron Paul.  Paul, however, does not support the federal government taking a significant role in environmental protection, health care, reducing economic inequality and a lot of other things.  But unless antiwar Democrats do something, Paul’s libertarian campaign will represent the only significant 2012 primary season challenge to what he calls “America’s delusional foreign policy.”

It’s a year now since Harper’s Magazine publisher John R. MacArthur first publicly called for a challenge to Obama from the left.  And for a while the idea did gain a little traction, but it seemed to disappear when the President won a few legislative victories in the lame duck Congress.  Still, even those who hold fast to the Clinton-era “It’s the economy stupid” take on presidential politics can’t avoid asking to what better use the Afghanistan War’s $119 billion annual budget might be put in the midst of the greatest recession in seventy years.

The reason for the reluctance is, of course, to a great extent a legacy of Ted Kennedy’s 1980 primary challenge to Jimmy Carter followed by Ronald Reagan’s election.  Err in a hasty primary challenge and repent for a leisurely four years, the thinking goes.  Bill Clinton got a primary-free re-election in 1996 in some large part because of that take.  Longtime San Francisco community organizer Mike Miller sums up the current fear:

A perilous course being proposed by “progressives” that, if successful, will contribute to a Republican government—both houses of Congress and the White House—in 2012. That course is to nominate a ‘progressive’ to run against Obama in the primaries and, implicitly, sit out the election if Obama is the nominee.

If A, then B?  Is it impossible then to challenge the Administration in the way that really matters – electorally – without helping to usher in a President we’d find worse – both in domestic and foreign affairs?  Not an unreasonable fear, I’d say, yet not one that should prevent us from taking a broader look at the situation.

For one thing, while Clinton’s foreign policy may itself have left something to be desired (the U.S. did bomb Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan and Yugoslavia on his watch), nothing he did remotely approached the insanity of the current $1,000,000-a-year per soldier war with no perceptible goal other than to negotiate in the future with the Taliban enemy that we fight today.   So, in this case it’s not just nameless/faceless foreigners euphemistically referred to as “collateral damage”– there are Americans being asked to die.

As for the political dangers inherent in the enterprise, well Joe Biden ran against Barack Obama in 2008 and that seemed to work out all right.  To be sure, we would want a level-headed challenge, rather than one primarily fueled by personal anger at Obama.  Disappointment, sure, but even MacArthur’s initial appeal to those who “feel betrayed by Obama’s expansion of the war in Afghanistan and mercenary forces in Iraq” seems slightly off.  Those feeling betrayed by Obama’s expansion of the Afghanistan War really have only themselves to blame, in that he told us that this was precisely his intent.  But he also managed to accomplish what all successful presidential candidates do – he convinced a lot of voters that he really believed what they did, even when he said he didn’t.  People rationalized that he just said all that stuff about Afghanistan because he had to if he wanted to get elected.

Robert Naiman, Policy Director of the organization Just Foreign Policy, goes so far as to say that:

A key organizing principle of a progressive primary has to be something that many may find at first counterintuitive: it must not be directed against President Obama.

What it should be is directed at some of his policies and aimed at building and demonstrating a political base for a series of alternatives.

Over the last two years, many of us have heard more than one variation on the story of FDR telling those to his left that if they wanted him to do something, they had to go out and “make me do it.”  And surely there is something to that – you’ve got to somehow demonstrate a motivated constituency to be a political player.  This is precisely why we should be seriously thinking about what we can do during the upcoming primary season which seems, realistically, to be about the only time we’re going to have much chance of exerting pressure on Obama to rethink his wars.  What would be the goal of a primary challenge?  Several hundred delegates pledged to making the President do something different than he has been.

But, by the way, none of this is meant to suggest that foreign policy constitute the entire basis of a primary challenge, or even necessarily be its central element.  There seems little doubt that the basis for an antiwar candidacy exists – a December ABC News/Washington Post Poll found people answering “No” to the question “Do you think the war in Afghanistan has been worth fighting?” by a 60-34 percent margin (with only 25 percent of Democrats saying “Yes”) –  and this is with a minuscule amount of mainstream political opposition to the war.  Still, the cynical view that the domestic casualty rate – 500 U.S. military deaths and 4,500 wounded last year – is simply not high enough to turn this war into a mass issue may well be correct.

Either way, though, an ideal primary challenge would also take on the bank bailout, offer a broad government investment strategy and argue for improving the health care reform law as well.  And, of course, today’s wars represent only the tip of the iceberg: The U.S. currently maintains anywhere from seven hundred to a thousand foreign military bases and spends nearly as much as on its military apparatus as the entire rest of the world combined – because it is locked in a Cold War mindset in which Al Qaeda has replaced the Soviet Union.

In arguing that “Lefty focusing on Obama distracts us from the work we need to do,” New Left veteran Richard Flacks says:

Progressive organizations need to reinvest in college campus organizing.

And as far as focusing on Obama – the man goes, I think his critique is correct, but so far as certain of the President’s policies go, they seem to be precisely the thing that a progressive organization would organize against on a college campus.

As the man once said, “The times, they are a changing” and it seems a shame to let the libertarians be the only ones saying anything about that next year.

Transportation Apartheid: A Chicago Story

On an ice-cold morning before dawn, Charles Powell shuffles down the stoop of his parents’ bungalow on 104th Place, in Roseland, on the Far South Side of Chicago. Powell walks north to 103rd Street, passing neat little bungalows and boarded-up houses. At 23, he’s dressed for a day at the office, black slacks and blue dress shirt. Life on the South Side of Chicago requires an early rise. Like most Chicagoans, Powell uses transit to get downtown. But while train lines connect the mostly white North Side of Chicago to the Loop, on the predominantly black South Side, the train abruptly ends at 95th Street. If the Red Line train ran as far as 103rd, Powell’s trip downtown would take just 30 minutes. Instead, he starts out on a bus and his 14-mile commute takes an hour, door-to-door.

At the bus stop on 103rd,  a small group of bundled-up people mill in the cold. Their breath hangs in the air like small bursts of steam. “You never really know when the 103rd bus is going to get there,” says Powell, who despite a college degree remains at his parents’ place on the South Side to help make ends meet. After a short wait, the 103 comes on time, and he steps aboard his shuttle to the Red Line.

The Red Line is Chicago’s main rail artery, connecting the North Side with the South Side and carrying a third of the El system’s 600,000 riders each day. A lot of Chicagoans, especially on the North Side, look at the map of Chicago’s elevated train system and assume that the city just ends at 95th Street, the southern terminus of the Red Line. Most white North Siders seldom go as far south as the White Sox stadium at 35th Street. The Chicago Transit Authority’s Pink, Blue and Green lines all reach the western city limits. Howard Street, at the northern end of the Red Line, is the boundary between Chicago and Evanston, and from there the Yellow and Purple lines even extend north into the suburbs. But 95th Street is not the southern limit of the city. Not even close. Chicago carries on for another 40 blocks, another five miles south to the Altgeld Gardens housing project, the most isolated neighborhood in Chicago, and one of the city’s most impoverished areas. Even before the recession, unemployment in Altgeld hovered around 33 percent. That isolation and that poverty are not coincidental. The first black president may have worked its streets, but the black Far South Side of Chicago remains cut off from the rest of the city in a transportation apartheid. Barack Obama’s former community organizing group, Developing Communities Project, is working to change that, pressuring the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) to unite Chicago from the north end to the south end with a single Red Line.

Americans took 10.7 billion trips aboard public transportation in 2008, the most since 1956, when President Eisenhower signed the Federal Highway Act. Transit agencies, once decimated by the rise of the automobile, have responded to increased demand by laying down tracks, even in cities never associated with inner-city rail, like Phoenix. New York is finally proceeding with the Second Avenue Subway. Chicago has four major El expansions under consideration, including the Red Line extension. Washington, D.C., has plans for a 37-mile network of surface-level electric streetcars, complementing its existing Metro subway system. The streetcars would connect low-income areas along H Street and Benning Road to the National Mall while white, affluent Georgetown would remain disconnected.

But Washington is the exception to the rule. Most other cities expand transit service in the opposite way in regards to race and class. The lower the income, and the greater the minority populations, the worse the service, says Robert Bullard, an urban sociologist at Clark Atlanta University. Latinos are three times more likely than whites to ride transit and blacks are six times more likely than whites to take a bus or train than drive. But it’s rare for these populations to see transit expanded in their neighborhoods. In the 1990s, Bullard witnessed first hand unequal service in Atlanta, where the black part of town got the oldest, dirtiest buses and the affluent areas where whites lived got rail extensions. Transit agencies typically reach out to “choice” riders with the cushiest buses and the best rail service, hoping to lure them from their cars.

As the Red Line extension went through the early planning stages, the CTA seemed to put equal weight behind an extension of the Yellow Line farther into the comfortably middle-class north suburb of Skokie, Ill. The Yellow Line has only 4,000 daily passengers — fewer than any single stop on the Red Line except one. But with a new parking garage at its terminus, the extended route could tap into the mostly white north suburbanites, eager to get to downtown Chicago without a car. When Chicago cut service in early 2010, it cut bus service over rail service by a ratio of two to one. Not only does the busiest bus line — on 79th Street — cut across Chicago’s mostly black and Latino South Side, but like Charles Powell’s Roseland bus, the 79 crosses areas where the CTA offers no rail option. As Bullard says, the people who’ll ride no matter what will take whatever is given them. “It’s like they have a captive audience.”

Countering this trend has required grassroots action. New York’s subway system heavily favors Manhattan over the outer boroughs. Harlem-based WE ACT is pushing for rapid bus lines to connect underserved portions of Queens, Brooklyn, and The Bronx with job centers in Manhattan. Transit activist James Burke said that short of  costly expansion of the city’s subway network, bus rapid transit is the most effective means of getting these transit-dependent communities to jobs.

Car-friendly Los Angeles unveiled its first publicly funded light rail line in 1990, connecting downtown with South Central, Watts, Compton, and Long Beach along the old Pacific Electric Railway. The former railway to Long Beach closed in 1961, and poor transit access was no small cause of the Watts riots four years later. But as the L.A. Metro began to expand rail service in the 1990s, activists at the Labor Community Strategy Center successfully sued Metro, arguing that rail was being funded at the expense of bus service, which better served minority populations. “[Los Angeles] was built around wheels,” said Francisca Porches of the strategy center. “The most effective way to get people around the city is by bus.” The courts forced Los Angeles Metro to spend more than $1 billion improving bus service, and due to the pressure of the strategy center’s Bus Riders Union, the city’s diesel bus fleet has all but been converted to cleaner natural gas. Metro’s spokesman, Marc Littman said rail service had revitalized Hollywood, but also boosted service in minority areas. “You need a good bus system, but you also need rail,” Littman said.

But nowhere is the transportation apartheid greater than Chicago’s South Side, said Bullard. “That’s pretty blatant. For that line not to be extended into the South Side is long overdue.” Organizers at Developing Communities Project aren’t interested in any more buses from the CTA. Even if Los Angeles is a city of rubber wheels, Chicago is not. The tracks of the Loop are the heart of the city and the eight arteries of the El its lifeblood. DCP’s organizers want more of what the North Side has. They want rail.

Chicago has worked hard to scrub itself from a Rust Belt economy in the 20 years since Mayor Richard M. Daley took office, re-emerging as a cosmopolitan lakeside metropolis ready to rival any city on the nation’s coasts. The prosperity has run up El lines that crisscross the North and West sides from the Loop as a new generation of Chicagoans looks to live near transit. But Chicago is still heavily segregated and like two cities molded together: a vibrant North Side conjoined to a mostly black South Side more akin to Detroit, marked by disinvestment and high unemployment. One reason may be access to frequent, rapid transit. Almost all of the North Side is walking distance to the El. On most of the South Side, you take a bus.

Charles Powell rides the 103 into the terminal at 95th Street, and the driver has to jockey for position to enter. So many buses unload into the station that they create their own traffic jam. There are 14 bus routes spread out in every direction southward from the station as if Chicago were a great oak tree and these were its roots. In addition to the 103, there’s the 111 and the 34, which carries passengers from South Michigan Avenue and Altgeld Gardens. There’s also the 95E, 95W, 100, 106, 108, 112, 119, 352, 353, 359 and 381, most of them full of passengers who clamor to unload in wave upon wave. About 25,000 people pass in and out of the turnstiles at 95th Street each day — more than any station outside the Loop, and these buses carry 57,000 people daily.

Hopping off the bus, Powell quickly makes his way to the train platform, through a sea of people, all of them black, who flood the station each morning. The South Side branch of the Red Line goes right up the middle of I-90/I-94, the Dan Ryan Expressway. The construction of the expressway in the late 1960s coincided with the steep decline of many South Side neighborhoods, as the wide sterile swath now cut through them. The Dan Ryan is 14 lanes wide, but that’s still not enough capacity to meet the demands of commuters moving north, one automobile at a time.

Powell and the carfuls of black passengers leave the Red Line under the Loop,  mixing with an equal amount of mostly white passengers arriving on the Red Line from the North Side. He’s well awake by the time he reaches his office tower at 7:15 a.m., but his eyes are tired. “I’m looking to get somewhere closer to the Loop because waking up at 5 o’clock hurts.”

When Barack Obama was the same age as Charles Powell, he came to the Far South Side of Chicago to work as a community organizer. He helped residents in Altgeld Gardens persuade an obstinate Chicago Housing Authority to remove asbestos as well as keep up with basic maintenance. The Rev. Alvin Love, a minister recruited by Obama to join Developing Communities Project (DCP) more than 20 years ago, said one of their early successes was to get Altgeld residents trained to remove the asbestos themselves. “He really understood the passion behind what was being addressed,” said Love.

After Obama left for Harvard, DCP came to focus more and more on transportation. Job skills don’t do much good if you can’t get easily from here to there. “When the El stops, development stops at that point. Everything below that El stop is invisible,” said Bullard. The neighborhoods of the Far South Side of Chicago have an unemployment rate that never seems to go below 15 percent, even in good times. At the same time, one in four households have no access to a car, the same figure as the Ninth Ward of New Orleans.

Altgeld Gardens in particular is isolated by design. The projects are hedged in by five rail lines, but only one bus picks up passengers in the Gardens, and its nervous drivers have been known to skip Altgeld after dark. Originally built for black veterans after World War II, Altgeld was close to South Side steel mills but still segregated from white South Side neighborhoods. The Gardens are arranged as a labyrinth of barracks-style row houses all sitting within “a toxic doughnut,” an island of residential space surrounded by abandoned steel mills, the Lake Calumet dump, sewage treatment facilities, a Ford plant, a Sherwin-Williams paint factory and the dirty Little Calumet River. Residents must travel miles by bus to buy groceries and some take their chances eating fish from the poisoned river.

An extension of the Red Line to Altgeld at 130th Street has been on the CTA drawing board since 1973. “The history of this project is not to do it; it’s to pass it on,” said Lou Turner, a public policy consultant with DCP. “We looked for city officials… [but] if it wasn’t going to be us, it didn’t look like there was going to be anybody to push it.”

In 2004, DCP led an advisory referendum in the two South Side wards served by the Red Line extension. The measure passed with 39,000 votes. “If we put together a strong enough coalition, we can outflank the aldermen, and it would not be in their interest to oppose us,” Turner said. DCP worked with the University of Illinois-Chicago to study the benefits of better transit on the Far South Side. The CTA wanted to continue the El down the freeway, but the community organizers argued that the Red Line should follow a freight railroad that runs through the middle of Roseland. The organizers hope the new Red Line will have transit-oriented development like on the North Side.

“I think if we don’t get the Red Line, it will reflect on the fairness of the city of Chicago,” Love said. “[The Red Line] will cut out what I call the South Side tax — that is, taking a bus to get up to 95th and then paying again to transfer to go north into the city. It will cut down on extra time. It will bring millions if not billions of dollars of economic development into one of the most underserved areas of the city.”

For most of the first half of the 20th Century, a streetcar ran down the Roseland blocks of South Michigan Avenue, and brick commercial buildings sprang up along the tracks. The electric streetcars were abandoned in favor of dirty, diesel buses in the 1950s. The steel mills left, the neighborhood flipped overnight from all-white to all-black and only a few businesses survived, amid hair salons, discount clothing stores and payday lenders. “People won’t come into an area to shop that has one store here, and one store there, and blighted businesses in between,” says Eddie Davis, the owner of 80-year-old Bass Furniture.

Roseland now doesn’t even have a grocery store, and a 2005 University of Illinois-Chicago study found $22 million leaks out of the neighborhood each year as residents go out of the area to buy food. Davis believes a Red Line stop down the street would increase foot traffic to his store as well as allow for new business, a belief now shared by local Chicago Alderman Anthony Beale, who said plans for a new discount Aldi grocery store at 115th and Michigan would be transit-oriented. “It was because of the efforts of the elected officials that this project is on the agenda,” Beale said. “People want to get this riled up. It’s gonna happen. It’s gonna get funded.”

The core members of DCP took their cause to Washington in 2005 and lobbied the Illinois congressional delegation. After the meeting with U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., Love asked the former executive director of DCP, Debra Strickland, when they would be meeting with U.S. Sen. Obama. “I believe she took advantage of my friendship,” Love recalls. “She told me, ‘We were hoping to meet him at 2, but we haven’t actually told him — we were hoping you would call him.’” Love telephoned Obama, and he was on the Senate floor at the time. Although keenly familiar with the Far South Side, this was the first Obama had heard about the push to extend the Red Line. “He left the Senate floor and came down and met with us. Not only did he not know about [the extension], he didn’t know we were coming.”

When President Bush signed a transportation bill that year, it included a line item from Sen. Obama to fund the preliminary engineering for the Red Line.

The federal New Starts program for new rail and rapid bus service received a $740 million boost when President Obama signed the National Recovery and Reinvestment Act a year ago, moving to accelerate funding for 11 projects in 10 cities, including the Second Avenue Subway in New York and the East L.A. Gold Line. The New Starts funding was but a fraction of the $8.4 billion salve the Recovery Act crucially awarded to desperate transit agencies fighting to stay solvent in the recession. Chicago’s transit repairs were so backlogged, trains could travel only 15 miles per hour in its Blue Line subway, which received $88 million for new tracks.  If “shovel-ready” money could not be used directly for operations, cities such as Portland, Oregon, were able to avoid further fare hikes by using the money to repair buses — normally an operational expense.

Even with the stimulus, most transit agencies are suffering just to keep the buses running. In February 2010, the CTA laid off nearly 1,100 employees and cut rail service 9 percent and bus service 18 percent. Charles Powell’s 103 bus saw the steepest cuts in Chicago — the daily run is now shorter by four hours, with buses now sometimes only coming every 20 minutes. In St. Louis, a November 2008 sales tax levy failed forcing its transit agency to cut service 44 percent, hitting blacks commuting from the inner-city to the suburbs especially hard. Russ Carnahan, a Congressman from St. Louis, has proposed changing the transit funding formula in the new transportation bill to allow 30 to 50 percent to be used for operations.

WE ACT and the Labor Community Strategy Center are working ahead of the new six-year transportation bill, organizing transit advocates nationwide to pressure Congress to emphasize transit funding over highways. Less than 20 percent of the most recent bill, which expired last fall, went for transit. A proposal by the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) asks for transit funding of $123 billion, on top of the $50 billion marked for high-speed intercity rail in an early House draft. New Starts projects like the Red Line extension would receive $32 billion in the APTA proposal, up from $11 billion.

At the urging of the Obama administration and the Senate, the House has continued to put off its transportation bill, perhaps until March 2011. Instead, the president has been pushing Congress to pass a new job stimulus bill. The House version would pour $48 billion into infrastructure projects, but the version Senate finally passed was drastically pared down from that. “The jobs bill is no substitute for the six-year transit bill,” said Jim Berard, a spokesman for Rep. James Oberstar, D-Minn., the chair of the House transportation committee. The bill is held up because the Highway Trust Fund revenues fall short of expenses and the gasoline tax must be raised — a politically unpopular option in a recession and election year, Berard said. The new $500 billion measure dwarfs the last bill, which passed in 2003 at $286 billion. But that bill was inadequate even seven years ago. “We have really neglected our infrastructure for decades,” Berard said. “We’ve patched things together rather than did overhauls.” He said President Bush knocked $100 billion off the last transportation bill because he would not consider raising the gas tax, which now should be raised five to eight cents a year for the course of the bill, then indexed to inflation, according to a 2008 congressional report.

Oberstar’s draft would devote about $100 billion towards inner-city transit projects, which falls short of APTA’s proposal but still dedicates a greater amount and greater percentage of the transportation bill to transit than ever before, at 22 percent.

In Chicago, DCP won their latest victory in August 2010. The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning named the Red Line extension their number one transit expansion priority in a tentative release of their long-term plan. The CTA has begun an environmental review and the engineering process. If Chicago can get federal funding to build most of the six-mile, $1.1 billion transit line to Altgeld Gardens, operations could start in 2016, possibly in time for the end of President Obama’s second term.

The CTA’s plans currently call for the route to go to Altgeld, providing the Red Line with a new switching yard and a large parking garage at 130th Street to serve commuters from the south suburbs. But last summer the authority released an alternative that would end the route at 115th Street. If an extension is built, and it serves Roseland but not Altgeld, it’s hard to see how it would ever be extended a second time just to serve the projects. “Read my lips: We’re going to 130th,” said Alderman Beale.

American Foreign Policy Scripted by Dead German Writers?

A recent headline, “Snuff out militant Islam’s lethal spark – kill bin Laden,” brought to mind a friend’s story about a graduate student he’d once had. This student had felt himself seriously wronged somewhere in the academic process and appeared obsessed with vindication. My friend’s prescription was that he should read “Michael Kohlhaas,” a novella by German writer Heinrich von Kleist.  Since the student’s field was modern American history, the main concern was not the study of literature but the story’s theme – the potential self destructiveness of the drive for revenge, even if a person is actually in the right. Joel Brinkley, the author of the article with the inflamed headline, looked like he might benefit from the same medicine.  And, unfortunately, he’s far from the only one.

When the legal system fails to provide Kleist’s protagonist (based on a real life figure of 250 years earlier) with proper redress after he is wronged by a minor noble, Kohlhaas decides to take matters into his own hands. Eventually he will burn the noble’s house down and raise a private army to repeatedly attack the city of Wittenberg in his attempt to capture the man. His wife will die of injuries sustained in the pursuit of his goal and Martin Luther and the Kaiser in Vienna will become personally involved in the matter. At the very end, he does find that some measure of justice has been done. Unfortunately, that realization comes as he is being led to his beheading.

There was a point when Brinkley, a former New York Times writer now teaching journalism at Stanford, would have raised few eyebrows in writing, “Right now, the most effective thing the United States could do to turn the tide in the so-called war on terror is to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, the terrorists’ shining symbol.” But that point was eight years, two wars, ten of thousands of casualties, and a trillion dollars ago. Today, such writing conveys the obsession of a real-life Michael Kohlhaas who wants to go on and on and on in pursuit of his concept of justice. Of bin Laden he writes, “We know where he is, more or less [sic],” but “Pakistan refuses to go after him.” His solution?  “I’m not talking about an invasion. Infiltrate the region with special-operations forces.”

How many countries can there be, I wondered, where a journalist writing that sending armed personnel into another country does not constitute an invasion will not be asked to seek professional help? But at least Brinkley does recognize that the Pakistanis might see things a little differently: “Let them scream,” he writes, “Over almost a decade, we have given Pakistan every chance to do the job. Now it’s time to do it ourselves.”

What seems to bother Brinkley most is that “Today, bin Laden must wake up every morning with a smile on his face for all he has inspired.” This he may well do, but probably not quite for the reasons Brinkley thinks.  Bin Laden’s stated goal, let us remember, it to maneuver the United States into a global war against Islam that will spiral out of control. So he’d have every reason to smile if he read an article like Brinkley’s. Ultimately, it’s not columnists like Brinkley who matter, though, but the Kohlhaasian spirit that seems to drive our foreign policy.  After all, while much of the country once dismissed George W. Bush as a hopeless, misguided warmonger and embraced Barack Obama as a peace candidate, this second post-9/11 President appears at least as committed to globalizing this war as his predecessor, if perhaps in somewhat different directions.  From the point of view of tying the U.S. down in endless war, what’s not to like?

But if the strategy of that war seem like something Kleist might have imagined, the tactics bring to mind a far better remembered German writer – Franz Kafka, the rare author influential enough to have his name turned into an adjective. While there are probably as many different definitions of “Kafkaesque” as there are readers of Kafka – and maybe more – “incomprehensibly complex, bizarre, or illogical” will probably do as well as any.  But whatever your personal definition of Kafkaesque may be, American military operations in and over Pakistan will probably fit it.

The current centerpiece of that campaign appears to be a program of missile strikes aimed at “terrorist leaders” from unmanned “Predator” drone planes flying above the country. Officially, though, there is no such program and as a spokesperson for the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says, “We do not discuss current operations one way or the other, regardless of their nature.”

The New York Times reports the strikes are “carried out from a secret base in Pakistan and controlled by satellite link from C.I.A. headquarters in Virginia.”  The government of Pakistan regularly denounces them as a violation of its sovereignty. Unnamed U.S. officials claim there is an understanding under which the Pakistani government allows the U.S. to carry out the strikes while the U.S. allows the Pakistanis to publicly denounce the attacks. The government of Pakistan denies this.

Unnamed U.S. intelligence officials frequently name figures they claim have been killed in the strikes. A recent target was Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, whom, the Washington Post says, “a senior U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity” called “one of the worst people on the planet.”  As you might expect, this non-existent program is rather unpopular among the people of the country where its targets live: a Gallup Pakistan poll found it with 9 percent support among the Pakistani population.

The uncertain level of civilian casualties is a growing concern. A United Nations rights investigator complains that “the Central Intelligence Agency is running a program that is killing significant numbers of people and there is absolutely no accountability in terms of the relevant international laws.” Unnamed sources within the U.S. government privately assure reporters that civilian deaths are lower than reported. One unnamed government official told the New York Times that the drone strikes are “the purest form of self-defense.”  The C.I.A. had no comment on a report that the private security contractor formerly known as Blackwater – now Xe Services LLC – was involved in the work of actually placing the bombs on the drones.  An unnamed defense official denied it to The Nation magazine – “on background.”

In response to repeated questions about the unacknowledged drone strike campaign at a press conference in Pakistan, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would only say that “there is a war going on.” She did not specify to which war she referred. The United States Government acknowledges being at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, but not in Pakistan. Appearing at a memorial service for seven CIA operatives killed in Afghanistan, some of whom were thought to be involved in the planning of the Pakistan drone strikes, President Barack Obama exhorted hundreds of their colleagues “to win this war.”  He also did not specify of which war he was speaking.

In regard to the acknowledged war in Afghanistan, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently said, “The Taliban, we recognize, are part of the political fabric of Afghanistan at this point.” He did not say at exactly which point this recognition occurred; the U.S. overthrew the Taliban government eight years ago and has been at war with the organization ever since. Gates went on to say that “The question is whether they are prepared to play a legitimate role in the political fabric of Afghanistan going forward, meaning participating in elections, meaning not assassinating local officials and killing families.” He did not say whether a simple denial of involvement in assassinations and other killings – on or off the record – would suffice in place of an actual cessation of such activities. Nor did he speak to the question as to when various Taliban officials might be removed from the United Nations “terrorist blacklist” that currently prohibits the Afghanistan government from negotiating with them.

I have to think Kleist and Kafka would have loved this material.

Oh, Massachusetts!

There’s sure been enough harsh talk around the health care bills coming out of the House and Senate – and I mean from people who support universal health insurance – forget the Tea Baggers and the Rush Limbaugh audience for the moment. On the one hand, you’ve got people calling for unseating Representative John Conyers because he voted for the final House bill – and he was the prime sponsor of the single payer bill! On the other, there’s people dismissing any objections to the bills’ shortcomings as the cavalier nitpickings of a privileged group that already has health insurance and doesn’t really care much about anyone else who doesn’t. But the hyperbole crown has got to go to the blogger who produced the headline “Raul Grijalva Flirting With History’s Greatest Monster Status.” And what crime did the Arizona Representative and Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair commit to join the ranks of Hitler, Stalin, and Attila? Why, he said that instead of passing the Senate bill as is, the House should send the Senate smaller individual bills that wouldn’t include items such a tax on pre-existing health insurance plans. Imagine that!

The voters of Massachusetts have lately become notorious for forcing a total tactical regrouping on the national health care debate by electing a Republican to finish Ted Kennedy’s Senate term. But the politics of that New England state also hold some interest in this debate in a largely unrelated way – the similarity between the ongoing quandary faced by advocates of expanded government services there and the dilemma that the current national health bills have posed for supporters of health insurance reform.

The “Massachusetts problem” stems from the fact that it is not only one of just seven states in the nation with a “flat” income tax but it also has a constitutional prohibition against establishing a graduated income tax – i.e., the kind we’re all familiar with on the federal level, with rates that climb in higher income brackets – and numerous efforts to amend the state constitution have failed. The flat income tax, combined with the state’s sales tax, has the effect of making the state’s overall tax structure regressive, which seriously hinders any attempted redirection of resources within the state. You may be able to steer services and goods to the poor, but the money to do so will come from the middle rungs on the economic ladder and not the top. The Massachusetts dilemma, then, has generally boiled down to this: Do you ignore real needs or do you address them in a manner likely to eventually lead to a “middle class” taxpayer revolt such as the state’s 1980 “Proposition 2 ½” property tax limitation or California’s more famous Proposition 13.

The national health care debate has faced no similar constitutional barriers, but the political barriers have proven every bit as formidable. The President and congressional leaders could have put forth a bill offering a more serious solution to the problem – whether single payer, another type of universal nonprofit health insurance, a government-run health care system, or something else entirely – but they chose not to. The $20 million in campaign contributions the health care industry gave Barack Obama (nearly three times the amount given John McCain) may not have in themselves bought a non-health insurance industry-threatening proposal, but it was probably at least a good predictor of the type of bill we would ultimately see.

So far as the debate within the left goes, both sides might do well to simply concede the other’s central point: It is both true that the bills that came out of Congress would expand health insurance coverage significantly, although not universally, and that they would not fundamentally alter the expensive and wasteful private for-profit health insurance industry that lies at the root of the problem – except to further entrench it by mandating the purchase of its services.

If we’re willing to grant the significance of both the bills’ strengths and their weaknesses, we might find ourselves then able to sympathize with the votes of both of the individuals who are arguably the most left-wing members of each congressional branch, even though they voted the opposite way: Senator Bernie Sanders was a “Yes” when one more “No” would have brought the Senate discussion to a halt, while Representative Dennis Kucinich voted “No” when there were a few House votes to spare and he could thereby highlight the vast gulf between the bill as it was and what it ought to be.

Just a couple of weeks ago, concern about the potential downside of passing the Senate or House bill as currently written might have been dismissed as academic, but it can’t be now – or at least it shouldn’t be. And for the fact that we now know that, we are indebted to MoveOn.org and Democracy for America for having the foresight and wherewithal to secure the services of the Research 2000 polling company to ask a few questions of the Massachusetts electorate. What they found was so at odds with the general “anti-big government” or “anti-insider” interpretations that dominate the mainstream media as to demand the closest attention from anyone with a serious interest in finding a real solution to America’s health care problems.

The poll’s target group was people who had voted for Barack Obama for President but did not vote for Martha Coakley, the Democrats’ Senate nominee; and further divided into those who had actually voted for Scott Brown, the Republican winner, and those who stayed home. When asked if they favored or opposed “the health care reform proposal recently passed by the U.S. Senate,” not terribly surprisingly, both groups opposed it – the Brown voters by a 48–32% margin and the non-voters by a 43-34%. And here’s where things veered from the accepted norms of political discourse: when those opposed were asked if they thought the Senate bill “goes too far or doesn’t go far enough,” the 2008 Obama voters who’d taken a pass on the Massachusetts election said it didn’t go not far enough, by 53-8% margin. And so did those who voted for Obama in 2008 and Brown in 2010 – by a 36-23% margin!

And just so there wouldn’t be any misunderstanding as to what going “far enough” might mean, the pollsters also posed the question “Would you favor or oppose the national government offering everyone the choice of a government administered health insurance plan — something like the Medicare coverage that people 65 and older get — that would compete with private health insurance plans?” Both groups said yes – the Obama voters who stayed at home by a 86-7% margin and those who came out and voted for Brown by 82-14%.

Probably we shouldn’t entirely blame the mainstream pundits for the difficulty of incorporating the results of this poll into the national analysis. The fact is that the poll’s results are counterintuitive – people just don’t expect voters who felt the Senate health care bill did not go far enough to vote for a Republican. Counterintuitive, but true, however. Undoubtedly, some will simply reject the messenger like one woman who described her response to reading the MoveOn data thusly: “All I could do is roll my eyes. This is the second time I’ve been ready to unenroll.”

Others may find fault with the electorate itself, like one who thought, “I guess people do not measure the consequences of their vote.” But voters must deal with the choices they are presented as best they see fit (or stay at home) and the choices they have are not always logical. After all, there was no candidate on the Massachusetts ballot advocating going further than the Senate bill, now was there? It’s not just the voters who need to deal with the consequences of their actions – so do the members of Congress who gave us the bills currently at hand.

On January 1 of this year, a Rasmussen Reports poll found voters nationwide opposing the Congressional plans by a 58-39% margin. The poll also found a majority opposed to a single-payer health care system by a 52-34% margin. In other words, the spread against the Congressional plan – 19 points – was greater than the 18 point spread against a single payer plan, even though single payer has never had the benefit of so much as a single Congressional hearing or vote! Although it was dismissed as a non-starter from the outset, at this juncture it’s hard to see how the White House and Congressional leadership would have done worse if they’d had the political will to stand up to the insurance industry with a plan of which the President once said, “The truth is that unless you have a what’s called a single-payer system in which everybody is automatically covered, then you’re probably not going to reach every single individual.”

Opponents would have derided it as “big government,” to be sure, but it would have had the substantial asset of offering an actual solution to a major problem. Instead, the Democratic leadership chose to offer another type of “big government” solution, one that would involve ever more complex regulation of potential insurance company abuses, along with subsidies to allow lower income individuals to pay the bloated premiums those companies demand. And that’s big government that we can’t all believe in. As they’ve long known in Massachusetts, there’s consequences to these things.

Full disclosure: Tom Gallagher, Demockracy senior writer and columnist, served six years in the Massachusetts House of Representatives.

GOP Demands to see Nobel Committee’s Birth Certificate

When the news broke earlier that sitting American (or is it Kenyan or Indonesian?) President Barack Obama was bequeathed with the Nobel Peace Prize, I naturally assumed that the Rush Limbaugh’s head would explode and the Republican Party would be stuck with a gargantuan body instead of a party head. Moreover, I instinctively knew that the blogosphere would be buzzing with more Republican and Conservative invective than Democrat or Liberal encomium.

Am I really that prescient or do Republicans really hate Barack Obama that much that many would put breathing oxygen in abeyance in order to vituperatively criticize President Obama?

“This fully exposes the illusion that is Barack Obama,” said conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh. Rush continued: “And with this ‘award’ the elites of the world are urging Obama, THE MAN OF PEACE, to not do the surge in Afghanistan, not (sic) take action against Iran and its nuclear program and to basically continue his intentions to emasculate the United States…. They love a weakened, neutered U.S and this is their way of promoting that concept. I think God has a great sense of humor, too.”

Oh Rush, did you run out of Oxycontin refills again? While we rational Americans have grown accustomed to the bile invective spewed daily from Mr. Limbaugh more effortlessly than potato chip crumbs, some Republicans decided that Rush Limbaugh is just too understanding and flirted with invective of their own.

Eric Erickson of the ever-so enlightening Red State.com had these encouraging words to say:

I did not realize the Nobel Peace Prize had an affirmative action quota.

Knee-jerk vitriol and racist commentary notwithstanding, the award is baffling some on the left as well.

Michael Moore, for example, offered his congratulations but boldly declared action as well.

Congratulations President Obama on the Nobel Peace Prize–Now earn it! Freedom can not be delivered from the front seat of someone else’s Humvee. You have to end our involvement in Afghanistan now. If you don’t, you’ll have no choice but to return the prize to Oslo.

Indeed, Obama may have made such lofty pronouncements such as closing Guantanamo, bringing the troops home from Iraq, wanting a nuclear weapon-free world, admitting to the Iranians that we overthrew their democratically-elected president in 1953, etc. But he has yet to follow through any of his pronouncements with concrete action and, worse yet, is risking escalating a lost cause in Afghanistan by extending our outstretched and vitiated troops in a purposeless battle.

Don’t believe me, just click here to read about the growing numbers of troops suffering from PTSD.

I realize that President Obama is looking to make up for the fact that Afghanistan and the “just war” was abandoned by the ruthless Bush Administration to pursue a petty vendetta in Iraq and make billions of dollars in no-bid contracts for their cronies. However, 6 years have passed since troops were shifted away from the Afghanistan conflict, and the situation has grown increasingly dire for our supposed mission. After all, the primary objective for going into Afghanistan was to kill and capture Osama bin Laden and his key associates, disrupt the vast Afghan terror network, and prevent Afghanistan from becoming another hotbed for terrorism.

Has blowback and the situation in Iraq taught us anything? The U.S. is  not in Afghanistan to police a nation beset by tribalism and internal conflicts. We cannot naively expect to train a miserably incompetent army at the aegis of a corrupt government,  an army that may ultimately joins the Taliban anyway.

Barack Obama winning the Noble peace prize–something that not even he expected–is certainly momentous and naturally is being lauded by the sane world. But it is imperative that we do not allow ourselves to get stuck in the warm and fuzzy clouds of this achievement as many did immediately following the election of Barack Obama. Intelligent critics must ensure that President Obama does in fact earn this prestigious prize.

Copernicus and the Search for God

I started my search with hope, but in the end there was nothing, but that’s OK. My search spanned many years, many books, and many miles traveled. It is a journey made in some way by all of humankind, an effort to correlate religious belief within the parameters of authenticated history and science. While I was never a regular Church goer, after a brush with cancer, I decided to explore the options.

Just as man has developed over the centuries, so have religions evolved and developed to mirror man’s progress. In the very beginnings were the worship of the sun, natural phenomena, and the spirits of the animals. With the establishment of city states, so came the idea of King/Gods to give strength and courage to their soldiers in battle, by convincing them that the sacrifice, even of their lives, would be rewarded by their God/Kings. [This theory is explained by Jared Diamond in his best seller Guns, Germs and Steel.] The Gods were depicted as enhanced versions of themselves, living in improved versions of our cities, suspended above us in the sky.

From those early beginnings, education, philosophy, and the sciences emerged. With more knowledge of the known world, the old City Gods seemed primitive, and all encompassing religions with one God became the norm. The first of these monotheist religions that grew around the Indus valley in India was Hinduism. The beginnings of Hinduism in India occurred around 2,000 B.C.E. Much of its beliefs were imported with the Dravidians, who entered India from the North already with many of the basic beliefs of what was to become Hinduism. It retained the old Gods at a base level, but assumed the belief that at a higher level, God was one, but man was too lowly to comprehend the higher complexities. Buddhism, which in many ways is more of a philosophy, was then born with the Buddha in 563 B.C.E . Many devout Hindus claim to this day that Buddhism is really just an offshoot of Hinduism.

The area where all our western monotheisms or one-God beliefs started was the Middle East. There Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all arose with very similar and overlapping histories. Jerusalem is of course central to all of those faiths. It is intriguing that some of the main beliefs of our Abrahamic faiths are taken directly from the pre-Abrahamic Gods.

Validation of the Faith

For as far back as faith has been around, humankind has attempted to validate that faith through the scientific philosophical approach. [Here I am indebted to Karen Armstrong for her amazing book, A History of God.] Thousands have sought over the ages to prove the existence of God. Indeed, probably all of us have at some point. The Greeks were probably the earliest recognizable true philosophers. They rejected mythological answers to solve the basics questions of heaven and earth. Probably the most intense and prolonged questioning occurred in Iberia during the 700 years it was under Arab rule, while Europe was still deeply mired in the Medieval mud. It was there that the sharpest religious minds from Judaism and Islam cooperated closely to try to reach a proof, any proof. From all of this evolved the most elaborate theories, doctrines, and suppositions, all as improvable as the original question. The mystic approach, where students look deeply within their own being, has proven more successful to its adherents. Christian Mystics, Muslim Sufis, and Hindu Sadhus have all turned their focus inward through a variety of modes of contemplation. Sufis whirl in concentric circles; Sadhus contemplate, often in poses for hours or days on end in positions that would be extremely uncomfortable for most of us for even a few seconds. Some Monks go without speaking for years on end in an attempt to hear the small inner voice. Even hippies have tried this approach, perhaps the easy way with Mescaline, LSD, Magic Mushrooms, and other mediums. Unfortunately, these approaches probably reveal more about the complexity of the human neurology than the nature of God.

Religious opinions change almost on a daily basis in an attempt to remain pertinent to societies own changes. For right or wrong, it has been essential to keeping stability in many societies by helping keep a promise of a better life after death for those who live indigent livelihoods and as a mechanism for keeping a people united under a common tribal identity against a common enemy with supposed lesser beliefs.

Should Have Religion Died in 1543?

In 1543 Copernicus’s seminal work, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), posited that the heavens did not revolve around the earth, but the other way around. Arab and Indian scholars had of course knew that for centuries, but this was the first time it was proven to the Christian world. Before this, everything was about us and our planet. Our earth was the center of the universe, all things revolved around us, and, of course, our God overlooked us, judged us, rewarded us, and helped us out in times of trouble. After 1543 we were an immeasurably tiny part of billions of galaxies that extend outward for millions of light years.

The End of My Journey

So is this the end of this journey that I strangely found very satisfying?  The question then is what drives us to religion, and how it is sometimes used to manipulate us. It is a truism that all of us, from the age where we first have a brush with death, be it the death of a relative, friend, or pet, feel the need for a power that makes it alright. The need for religion makes talented salesmen of religion rich, powerful, and influential in every society around the globe. In areas where religion is strongest, it is essential that our leaders adhere to the true faith. Barack Obama would have stood no chance of election if he had declared himself agnostic, yet reading his autobiographical book Dreams From My Father suggests that he valued the works of the church in their help to the poor in Chicago and the dedication of some of the ministers. However, nowhere is there any statement of his own faith. Although I have no doubt that is he a Christian, the fact that he doesn’t seem to wear it on his sleeve, but rather seems to live it through shared values is probably one of his greatest strengths.

Once we accept that belief can transcend evidence, we are programmed to accept without question what those good Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and Hindu leaders tell us. That is why religion has caused so many conflicts over the ages. Today, of course, medieval tortures have been reinvented to use on those lured into battle by their own deluded religious teachers and leaders.

Religion in one form or another has been with us from the beginning of time and will probably be with us until the end. Einstein himself believed in no formal religion, but thought that their must be some master equation which could be used to harmonize all things. It was this equation which he saw as God’s design. He did not believe that humankind played any role, above being a tiny part in “the equation.” Alas Quantum mechanics, whose theories Einstein opposed vehemently throughout the latter part of his life, with its basis being a lack of any order, has moved physics further from any such unifying equation.

The final question then must be: Has mankind benefited from religion, or has all of it been a chain around our necks. Clearly, as mentioned before, it has been a necessity for stability in many societies. Without this stability, the conditions for economic growth and progress may not have been sufficient. Also, it has been a solace to many in times of great stress or sorrow. It has helped countless people through times of intolerable hardship, famine, plague, and wars. Religion left alone and not seized upon by power hungry individuals, states, or countries, can and has been a power for good. I look on the Dalai Llama, Mahatma Gandhi, and the Aga Khan as shining lights in that respect.

Unfortunately, where religions have evolved into powerful advocacy groups on their own behalf, with their leaders’ power-hungry egos inflated by their own sense of gravitas, they inevitably do more to divide and deride than to resolve, pacify, and heal. Religion will continue to hold sway for many more millennia, so it essential for us to understand in an historical rational way the damage that can be caused by the lack of separation between state and religion. In the end, that was the main lesson of my personal journey.

You Can Indefinitely Detain Some of the People Some of the Time

One of the larger problems in my life is that, whenever I want to write about a civil liberties issue, Glenn Greenwald has already beaten me to it. And written it better than I could have. Greenwald is a former civil liberties attorney and number one defender of The Constitution. He is not a Democratic apologist. He heavily criticized President Bush. And he is now heavily criticizing President Obama. In Greenwald’s opinion, suggesting that enforcing our laws is “radical” or “extreme” or “left-wing” is disgusting. When did enforcing the law become a partisan issue? He also writes about the media and how he believes that the media are beholden to the political class in a horrible, symbiotic relationship that ensures that the Fourth Estate will never actually hold our leaders accountable for anything.

And I agree with him on all of it. Absolutely all of it. Darn him! Darn him to heck!

For example, Glenn and I were furious this last week when Sen. Harry Reid kept using a verb that could just as easily have been crafted by Karl Rove. The verb was “release,” as in, “Terrorists from Guantanamo Bay will be released into the U.S.” Many pundits, and even Obama himself, used the verb “release” to describe what the government will do to detainees in Guantanamo Bay now that the administration has re-iterated its desire to close the prison there. “Release” evokes images of terrorists approaching the shore on boats and then merrily skipping off, free of shackles and permitted to wander throughout the country, blowing up whatever they please.

Let it be known: terrorists will not be released into anything. They will be shackled, they will be monitored, they will be in our custody and under guard as they are transported from Cuba to the mainland. And once on the mainland, they will continue to be monitored and under guard as they are moved to whatever prison they will occupy next. Those who believe that terrorists will be “released” in the United States are either negligently ignorant, willfully stupid, or maliciously misrepresentative. One guess as to which one describes Harry Reid.

Prior to September 11, 2001, we believed in something called “due process.” It’s a Fifth Amendment guarantee:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation. [Emphasis mine.]

The Supreme Court has ruled before that, since the Constitution uses the word “person” and not “citizen”; and since it would have been very easy to use the word citizen, but person was used instead; and since the author of the Bill of Rights, James Madison, was a lawyer by trade and a very smart man and probably not prone to misusing words; that it therefore follows that the Bill of Rights was intended to apply not only to U.S. citizens, but anyone in the United States. This is affirmed in the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits a state to “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Again, note the use of the word person where citizen could have been used, but wasn’t.

In 1993, the World Trade Center was bombed by a group of terrorists led by Omar Abdel-Rahman, better known as The Blind Sheik. The bomb damaged a parking garage and did kill some people, but it didn’t come close to bringing the building down. Abdel-Rahman and three other accomplices were indicted by civilian prosecutors, accused of breaking publicly-accessible laws, tried in open court inside the United States, under the guidelines of the Constitution and the rules of U.S. civil procedure, and sentenced to U.S. civilian prisons. After 1993, the nation was not less safe because Abdel-Rahman and his accomplices were being imprisoned inside the United States. Abdel-Rahman is housed at the federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.

In 1995, Timothy McVeigh and his accomplice Terry Nichols parked a rental truck containing a homemade fertilizer bomb in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The bomb exploded, killing 168 people, injuring 800 others, and destroying the building. Nichols and McVeigh were indicted, again by civilian prosecutors, accused of breaking publicly-accessible (that is, not secret) laws, tried in open court, and sentenced to U.S. civilian prisons. McVeigh was given the death penalty. The nation is not less safe because Terry Nichols is housed inside the United States.

I think you get the point. Eric Rudolph, the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bomber; Wadih el-Hage, accused of involvement in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings; Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber; Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber”; Jose Padilla, the “dirty bomber.” All of these people are being held inside the United States right now, and no one — no one! — is arguing that the United States is less safe because of it. To suggest that allowing Dangerous Criminals inside our borders is silly; there are already more dangerous criminals here!

It’s also worth noting that, with the exception of Reid and Padilla, all of the above criminals were convicted using the 200-year-old, civilian due process proscribed by the Constitution. Reid and Padilla were held incommunicado in U.S. navy brigs. The government eventually dropped its terrorism charge against Padilla, who was alleged to be making a “dirty bomb” (a traditional bomb filled with radioactive material; it would not cause a nuclear explosion, but it would spread radiation). Since the government didn’t have enough evidence to prosecute the terrorism charge, the charge was dropped. Padilla, nevertheless, was sentenced because even though terrorism is a crime, all the things that terrorists do are already illegal, anyway! Blowing up a building is no more illegal because it was done with a political agenda in mind.

The assertion that Terrorists need to be tried in a special, extra-Constitutional way, held without charge, subjected to torture, and perhaps never afforded a trial is ludicrous. In the paragraphs above, we have ample evidence proving that trying terrorists in civilian courts, using civilian rules, does work. The United States is not less safe. And furthermore, housing convicted terrorists in civilian prisons does work. And furthermore, charging them and trying them does work. For people like Vice President Cheney to suggest that using due process makes us less safe just goes to show us how out of his mind the man is. He would probably be happier living in Iran, where the executive has unlimited power to imprison people for made-up reasons, or no reason at all. Here in the United States, we do not convict people merely on the confidential say-so of the executive branch; that’s the way dictatorships (you know, those countries that we purport to be fighting against — unless your name is “Saudi Arabia”) behave. Here in the United States, it is up to the executive to prove that the accused is guilty. Guilt is never assumed — unless, apparently, you committed a terrorism-related crime after September 11, 2001. Or you were linked to terrorism, no matter how specious the link or how questionable the evidence. Or you associated with terrorists, even if you didn’t know they were terrorists. Or you were planning on committing a terrorism-related crime, even if “terror” wasn’t your goal. Or, as Obama articulated yesterday, the government is afraid you might commit terrorist crimes in the future. Yes, the possibility of future law-breaking is now grounds not only for detaining someone, but for never giving them a trial or even a preliminary hearing to prove that they did what they were accused of doing. As long as the government says “Terrorist,” an individual’s guilt is implicit and that person will never, ever be released. (More likely, as Greenwald observed, you will be imprisoned indefinitely if the government can’t guarantee that it will win a trial. Do show trials sound like the hallmark of a vibrant democracy or a repressive despotism?)

Obama’s plan is definitely a step in the right direction, but it’s not nearly enough. In order to restore the rule of law to this out-of-control country, he must admit that there is no situation in which a person should be held indefinitely; habeas corpus is a right guaranteed to anyone in U.S. custody, and the U.S. Supreme Court has affirmed as much. Obama apologists have used exactly the same rhetoric President Bush used to support Obama’s case; namely, “we are at war.” And these prisoners are prisoners of war; therefore, they do not have the right to contest their detention, and they may be detained until the end of the conflict. Seeing as how we’re waging a war on an abstract idea, it’s hard to see exactly when (or if) this war will be over.

Are we now in the business of imprisoning people indefinitely? What does that say about us as a nation? What will historians say fifty years from now? Today, we regard the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II as deplorable and appalling, but at the time, it made sense to our political leaders. We have the ability to stop lawlessness right now instead of musing, decades later, about the mistakes we made, and saying, “We’re so sorry. We’ll do better next time.” Unfortunately, every time “next time” comes up, we fail again (we began failing as early as the John Adams administration, with the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts). Obama offers the promise of actually living up to our ideals as a country. Rather than fumble to attempt to explain and excuse his actions, we must ask, “Is what he is doing right? Is it legal?” And, as Glenn Greenwald wonders, “What would I have said if George Bush and Dick Cheney advocated a law vesting them with the power to preventively imprison people indefinitely and with no charges?”

Please do read Glenn’s article. It is a thorough, lucid, and amazing analysis of Obama’s position on these detainees, with some very tough questions and conclusions that must necessarily follow from that position. I do not believe they are questions that Obama and his supporters want to ask, because they lead to the very same places formerly occupied by previous administrations. At the end of the day, Obama & Co. are saying, “Yes, it is okay to detain some people indefinitely, without the government ever having to prove that they committed a crime.” Not only is that assertion illegal, it’s un-American, and if we continue down that road, it makes this country not only less safe, but less worth defending.

Constitution 7, Limitless Executive Power 0

Every time — every single time — that President Bush asserted some unlimited executive power in the name of “national security” or “terrorism,” a federal court has shot him down. Let’s take a walk down memory lane.

2004 marked the first big loss for the Bush administration in the judiciary branch. Hamdi v. Rumsfeld was the first major challenge to President Bush’s self-asserted national security powers. In that case, the Bush administration asserted that Hamdi, an alleged terrorist captured in Afghanistan, had no right to contest his detention. The U.S. Supreme Court disagreed and said that Hamdi, an “enemy combatant,” did have the right to contest his detention before a neutral decisionmaker. In Boumediene v. Bush (2008), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay did have the right to habeas petitions, and the Military Commissions Act’s hearings were unconstitutional. In Rasul v. Bush (2004), the Court struck down legislation that ostensibly prevented the federal courts from ruling on whether or not Guantanamo detainees were wrongfully imprisoned. Judge Anna Diggs Taylor,of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, ruled in 2006 that the Bush administration could not use the state secrets privilege to dismiss evidence in a case involving warrantless wiretapping and surveillance of U.S. citizens. In 2006, the Supreme Court ruled, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, that Congress did not intend to use the Detainee Treatment Act to strip the Supreme Court of its authority to hear pending habeas petitions from prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. Also in 2006, Judge Vaughn Walker of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, refused to dismiss a civil suit against AT&T for warrantless wiretapping. The Bush administration had again asserted the state secrets privilege.

And now we come back to present day. President Obama’s Justice Department has, much to my chagrin, continued — and in some cases, exceeded — the use of the state secrets privilege. It even wanted to have an entire case dismissed on the grounds that the evidence to be used was classified under the state secrets privilege. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals down on Hyde Street in San Francisco — right across the street from the public library — ruled today that Obama could not have the case dismissed due to “state secrets.”

Judge Michael Daly Hawkins, writing the unanimous opinion of the three-judge panel, didn’t buy the Justice Department’s argument that “the very subject matter” of the case was so confidential, and could be so potentially damaging to national security, that it couldn’t even be discussed in court. The “subject matter” was Jeppesen Dataplan’s involvement in the “extraordinary rendition” of terrorism suspects in U.S. custody to CIA “black sites” around the world, where they would be presumably tortured. (Jeppesen Dataplan is an oddly-named subsidiary of Boeing, whose airplanes were used to transport suspects to other countries for torture.)

The Ninth Circuit was quite strong in its affirmation that the Obama administration was making things up (the judges rejected the “very subject matter” argument because “it is unsupported in the case law”; i.e., Justice Department lawyers made it up). It was also strong in its affirmation of the separation of powers principle. The job of the courts is to interpret the law. The job of the executive is to enforce the law. For Obama to assert that there exists a scenario in which the court cannot be allowed to interpret the law is a gross overreach of presidential power that violates the separation of powers principle.

Oh, and they took time out of their busy schedule to say that “arbitrary imprisonment and torture under any circumstance is a ‘gross and notorious … act of despotism.’” (Bonus points: that was part of Justice Scalia’s dissent in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld).

What’s interesting about Obama’s argument here is that he wants to use the state secrets doctrine to prevent even the confirmation or denial of the fact that people were extraordinarily rendered. We’re not even talking secret evidence here; Obama says that it is detrimental to national security to say merely that something happened or not. Judge Hawkins will have none of this: “The state secrets privilege has never applied to prevent parties from litigating the truth or falsity of allegations, or facts, or information simply because the government regards the truth or falsity of the allegations to be secret,” he writes. Sure, the state secrets privilege can be used to suppress evidence, but not to suppress the fact that something happened. To go into the nitty-gritty of how extraordinary rendition works (which would be evidence) might be damaging to national security, but merely stating that it happens is not damaging to national security. (What it is damaging to is the country’s public image, and it opens up the government to litigation. Let’s be clear, here: this has nothing to do with actual national security and everything to do with damage control, something the Ninth Circuit hints at in the opinion.)

Finally, the Ninth Circuit addresses the fine distinction between “classified” and “secret.” Classified information is ipso facto subject to a whole host of laws, many of which give the executive branch the authority to decide what to classify and declassify. The distinction becomes important to this case because the government argues that courts should defer to the executive, per the Freedom of Information Act, regarding what should or should not be “secret,” since all secret things are also necessarily classified. The government cannot seriously argue, says the court, that information that has been made public (as this was; The New York Times reported years ago on the existence of this rendition program) is still “secret,” and by way of “secret,” therefore “confidential.” It does not follow that, because the executive says something is confidential, the courts must necessarily accede and declare that confidential thing to be secret within the scope of a judicial proceeding.

The court emphasized that its ruling was limited only to the issue of whether or not the state secrets privilege could be used to dismiss the case wholesale. The case will be remanded back to the district court from whence it came, with the understanding that Obama may use the state secrets privilege to have certain evidence excluded, but he may not have the whole case dismissed. Even then, it will be up to the court to decide whether to actually exclude the evidence or not.

Given that seven cases over five years have all declared absolute executive power to be unconstitutional, you’d think that the executive branch would take the hint. And I’m especially disappointed by Obama, who wrote in a January memorandum to all executive agencies:

The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears. Nondisclosure should never be based on an effort to protect the personal interests of Government officials at the expense of those they are supposed to serve.

Are they just empty words? We’ll see.

If Republicans Won’t Play Along on Health Care, Who Cares?

The Republicans bluffed and lost in February when they complained that the stimulus bill wasn’t “bi-partisan” enough. Okay, so House and Senate Democrats acquiesced to some of their demands, including tax cuts for businesses and removing provisions for “family planning” (the euphemism that refers to things like abortion and contraception). The Republicans responded to these concessions by voting against the bill.

Not a single House or Senate Republican voted in favor of the stimulus bill. They apparently believed that this would demonstrate to the American people their opposition to wasteful spending and fiscal irresponsibility. Trouble is, the American people didn’t much care what the Republicans thought; they’re in the midst of a financial crisis, where hundreds of thousands of jobs are being lost each month. Hell, yes, they want a stimulus!

Republicans were using a two-pronged approach to sway the public: (1) tax cuts are superior to government spending when it comes to stimulating the economy; and (2) the government is spending way too much. I won’t go into the merits of the arguments here, but suffice it to say that those were the counter-arguments to the Democratic spending bill (yes, “stimulus” = “spending.” Recall President Obama’s statement: “What do you think a stimulus bill is?”).

The public doesn’t much care for tax cuts when those tax cuts would benefit only the top earners in the country. Now, what does look like a good idea is investment in public works projects that have been long-neglected by Reaganites who believe that the government shouldn’t spend any money on anything that isn’t national defense.

Those four paragraphs were a flashback.

Interior — White House, Present Day.

President Obama is meeting with GOP leaders, reminding them that when they clamored for “bi-partisanship,” they abandoned it just as much as they accused Democrats of abandoning it. Between 2003 and 2009, Republicans were used to getting their way every time. Sure, Democrats have controlled Congress since 2007, but for some reason, Democrats spent those two years perfecting the fine arts of cowering and acquiescing. Whenever Republicans talked about “bi-partisanship,” they meant, “Give us everything we want or we’ll call you names. We’ll say you’re soft on terrorism. We’ll say you’re engaging in pork-barrel spending. And if that doesn’t work, then we’ll call you socialists and say that you hate America and want the terrorists to win. So you’d better give us all the things we demand, and if you ever try to put your own agenda forward, we’ll slap you down so hard you’d think Mike Tyson had taken Trent Lott’s seat.”

Well, the tables have certainly turned. And I’m pleased that Obama is prepared to shut Republicans out if they refuse to play ball. Hypocrisy? Not at all. I believe in universal health care. I think it’s absolutely necessary and I think it’s nothing but good. If Democrats are willing to embrace it and make it law, then I support them. When Republicans tried to stop SCHIP, I disagreed with them. It’s a matter of not only agreement and disagreement, but also of what’s good for this country. Quite honestly, the Republicans are not interested in governance. They’re interested in stalling until 2010. They want the wheels of government to grind to a halt so that they can then go back to their constituents in November, 2010 and say, “Look at what the Democrats have done for you! Nothing, that’s what! Aren’t you sorry that you voted them into office?”

And therein lies the fundamental difference: Democrats, including President Obama, are interested in doing something constructive. I will frequently disagree with the methods they use, but I largely agree with their philosophy that the government is going to need to spend money to improve the country. I agree that the wealthy should pay for the impoverished. And I agree that health care should be our right not only as citizens, but as human beings. I think the Democrats’ approach is superior to the Republicans’ approach, and that is why I believe that if Republicans are unwilling to reach an actual compromise with the Democrats, then they should be left behind. It is not the Democrats who should have to bend to appease the Republicans; the Democrats won, their ideas are better, and if the Republicans don’t want to go along with them, then it’s their own funeral. Congress doesn’t even need the Republicans.

I’m not the only one who believes this. The American people would rather the Democrats get on with their agenda instead of watering it down to please Republicans whose sanction they don’t need and whose contempt they will get in return for their efforts. In the New York Times/CBS poll referenced above, 56% of those surveyed said that they thought Democrats should stick to their policies, but 79% thought that it was Republicans who should be bi-partisan. That says a lot: not only do Americans want Democrats to do whatever it is Democrats want to do, but they simultaneously think that Republicans should do whatever it is the Democrats want to do.

Health care reform is way too important for Democrats to be chicken about. The last significant health care reform we had in this country was the prescription drug bill from 2005, which funneled a lot of money directly from the government into the hands of prescription drug companies. Sure, the bill could have included a provision for the government to use its significant bargaining power to get better deals on drugs — but then, that would hurt the drug companies’ revenue, wouldn’t it? At approximately the same time, Congress passed a bankruptcy bill that offered terrific terms for banks, credit card companies, and the very wealthy, but left middle- and low-income people in the dark.

The relationship between bankruptcy and health care is quite close; President Bush declared, in 2005, that we needed the bankruptcy bill so as to stop people from gaming the system and trying to get the rest of us to pay off their debts. To listen to him, you’d think Americans were going bankrupt after buying too many Faberge eggs. At the time he said that, though, fully half of bankruptcies in American were being caused not by frivolous over-spending, but by health-care spending. People were — and still are! — spending themselves into tremendous debt in order to stay healthy and alive. And since our health care system discourages regular check-ups, people are guaranteed to see a doctor only when the condition is serious, which means that it will cost more money to fix than it would have if a doctor had caught the condition earlier, during a regular check-up.

It shouldn’t be surprising that Republicans see health care as a political issue instead of a humanitarian one. In 1993, Bill Kristol wrote that Republicans couldn’t afford to let the Clinton health care plan survive; if it did, then the Republicans would be finished. Let me re-iterate that: to Bill Kristol, it was more important that heath care get defeated so the Democrats wouldn’t win re-election in 1994 than it was for people to have universal access to health care.

That’s what we’re up against. And that’s why I support the Democrats. And if Republicans don’t want to join, who cares? Let them explain to their constituents in 2010 about how they didn’t want those same constituents to have universal health care, all so that the free market could survive.

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