by BRIAN J. FOLEY

Tea Party crowd: countless layers of imbecility and confusion.

You’ve probably noticed that our government and corporate-owned media treat the Occupy Movement differently from the Tea Party.

Think back to how some Tea Partiers brought guns to their protests, where some protesters even suggested killing President Obama.  They weren’t pepper-sprayed.  They weren’t bashed in the head, and they weren’t even told to take their guns home.

I’m glad police didn’t stomp on the Tea Party. Even ill-informed, inane, racist protests should be permitted. The problem is that the First Amendment prohibits the government from choosing which protests it allows. Unfortunately, the government doesn’t seem to understand that.

Why such different treatment? Some people say it’s because the Tea Party didn’t camp out. But does camping and building a library (which, in a move reminiscent of the National Socialists in 1930′s Germany, the NYPD destroyed) and chanting and sitting-in merit more government attention than armed people threatening violence against the President?

An even more disturbing difference is that the Department of Homeland Security — which is supposed to use its broad powers to protect us from terrorism – may have helped coordinate a national crackdown on the Occupiers’ nonviolent protest. The Occupiers pitch tents, not grenades. They hang expressive signs on buildings – they don’t pilot airliners into them. The Occupy movement shouldn’t even appear on the DHS radar screen.

The mainstream media are similarly “fair and balanced.” The Occupy Movement is widely criticized (as if according to talking points) as lacking a “clear message.” There was no real criticism, however, of the Tea Party’s cacophony of self-contradictory idiocy. Obama is a fascist and a socialist! This Big Business-friendly President is “a Communist”!  Well, where’s my share of the bailout, comrade?

Mainstream media wondered when the movement will be “over” and suggested it would end when temperatures drop.  The Tea Party, which had no encampments, no library, and just a few short protests, was never seen as having an end; it’s been elevated to the status of a political party.

Remember how, after Obama was elected in late 2008, right wingers, believing Obama opposed gun rights, stocked up on guns and ammunition, as if arming themselves for revolution, or a race war? It was reported as just another interesting story. What would happen if Occupiers armed themselves?

The media would report it as foreboding a revolution. Pundits would muse that “we have too many gun rights.” There would be calls for a screening process for dealers. Gun dealers would discriminate.  The Occupy Movement would be designated a terror group – as it just was in London.

Or (perhaps more likely) gun rights would go untouched — the government probably would just shoot Occupiers, as Ann Coulter has suggested.

Recall last January, when Jared Loughner shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) and killed several others, including a federal judge.  The government and mainstream media seemed to dismiss the idea that Sarah Palin’s targeting Giffords on a map of Congressional districts – with a gunsight — could have motivated Loughner.  The media made it seem as if it were impossible to determine whether Loughner was politically left or right.

But what would happen if someone shot a Republican?  Politicians and pundits would assert that the shooter, even if he’d never actually rallied or camped with the Occupy Movement, was “influenced” by its “dangerous rhetoric,” no matter how vague.  The Occupy Movement would be declared a terrorist group.

The Giffords shooting isn’t the only violence by right-wingers. Death threats were made, and bricks were thrown through the windows of, several Congressional supporters of Obamacare — little media or government attention was paid.  But imagine if Republicans received death threats?

A lesson to be drawn from all this is that, unequivocally, we have a right wing government that’s supported by right wing media. (Can we finally declare dead the myth of the liberal media?)  If you’re right wing, you can protest all you like, in any way you like – apparently, the only way for you to get arrested is if you actually gun down a Member of Congress.

But if you oppose the right wing government, even nonviolently, well, you’re dangerous.

BRIAN J. FOLEY is a law professor, comedian, and author of A New Financial You in 28 Days! A 37-Day Plan (Gegensatz Press 2011).

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By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
From our Archives— 

Last March I reviewed Matt Taibbi’s important book Griftopia, an entertaining account of the through-going financial fraud that gave us the financial crisis.  Taibbi shows that the US “superpower” can match any third world backwater in the magnitude of greed and fraud that is endemic in business and government. Taibbi’s Griftopia was published last year. This year Henry Holt publishers have provided us with Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner’s Reckless Endangerment.  

Morgenson and Rosner tell the story again, but with less drama and provocation. Possibly, it might be more acceptable to those gullible Americans who wrap themselves in the flag and refuse to believe that their country could ever knowingly do anything that is wrong.

I am not suggesting that Morgenson and Rosner pull their punches.  To the contrary, the authors deliver enough knockouts to be contenders with Taibbi as world champions in exposing the reckless  fraud that the US financial sector and its regulators now epitomize.

The financial crisis, which is very much still with us, did not result from accident or miscalculation; neither did it result because of a flaw in Alan Greenspan’s theory, as he told Congress when a feeble effort was made to hold him accountable.   It was the intentional result of people motivated by short-term profits who wanted to get theirs and get out.

As Reckless Endangerment shows, fraud characterized every stage of the process from the fraudulent borrower incomes and credit scores that mortgage issuers gave to unqualified buyers, through the securitization of the mortgages and their triple-A investment grade ratings by the rating agencies (Standard & Poor’s especially, but also Moody’s and Fitch) to the investment banks that sold what the banks knew was junk to investors around the world as investment grade securities.  Indeed, Goldman Sachs was simultaneously betting against the mortgage derivatives that it was selling to clients.

Investment banks, such as Goldman Sachs, which once considered it a matter of honor to represent the interests of customers, took advantage of the trust that had been built up in the past to commit fraud against customers in order to advance the banks’ short-term profits and the out-sized multi-million dollar managerial bonuses that these fraudulent profits produced.

Morgenson and Rosner provide a number of unique accounts of how those benefitting from fraud were able to defeat laws that were passed that would have held them to account. For example, the state of Georgia passed perfect legislation that held predatory lending to account. William J. Brennan Jr. and Georgia Governor Roy E. Barnes got the Georgia Fair Lending Act through the state legislature. It was a model for other states.  As the federal regulators had thrown in the towel, the state laws would have prevent the worst part of the financial crisis, it not prevented the crisis altogether.

The Georgia law only lasted a few months, because the rating agencies saw that their enormous profits from issuing fraudulent investment grade ratings were threatened by the law. The corrupt rating agencies mischaracterized the consumer protection act as a jihad by regulators. Standard & Poor’s declared that it would no longer allow Georgia mortgages to be placed in mortgage securities that it rated.

In other words, Georgia mortgages could no longer be securitized.  This announcement banned Georgia  mortgage lenders from securitization. Thus, the law was overturned, and fraud ran wild.

These kind of mafia strong-armed tactics in order to protect at all costs the short-term mega-bonuses that drove the totally fraudulent system have never been held accountable or punished.  Totally innocent people are held indefinitely and tortured by the US government for no other reason than to convince the gullible public that they are endangered by terrorists, but those who wiped out the home ownership and retirement pensions of millions of Americans now hold high and honorable positions on corporate boards and US regulatory agencies.

Federal regulatory agencies totally failed. Brooksley Born tried to use her statutory authority to regulate over-the-counter derivatives, but she was blocked by the Federal Reserve chairman, the US Treasure secretary, and the SEC chairman and forced to resign. As University of Chicago Nobel economist George Stigler predicted, regulatory agencies are captured by those who are intended to be regulated.  This was the case.

Regulators turned a blind eye to obvious criminal fraud, and were rewarded with lucrative positions in the financial community. The same for the US senators and representatives who repealed Glass-Steagal and other financial regulations.

For example, former US senator Phil Gramm who spearheaded the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial from investment banking, the repeal of which set up the financial crisis, was rewarded by being made vice chairman of the mega-bank UBS, a Swiss global financial services company.

What Taibbi, Morgenson and Rosner make clear is that while monster criminals continue to collect their multi-million dollar annual incomes, depressed single mothers, deserted by the men who fathered their child, are sent to prison for having small quantities of illegal drugs to boost their depressed spirits, and their children are put out to adoption.

This is “justice” in America where there is “freedom and democracy.”

Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury.  His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

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By Stephen Lendman

Main Street Europe and America face protracted Depression conditions. As a result, millions lost jobs, homes, incomes, and futures.  Human misery is growing. So is public anger. Rage across America and Europe reflect it. Gerald Celente explains the stakes, saying:

Jonathan Turley expressed outrage, saying:

“I am not sure which is worse: the loss of core civil liberties or the almost mocking post hoc rationalization for abandoning principle. The Congress and the President have now completed a law that would have horrified the Framers.”

“Indefinite detention of citizens is something (they) were intimately familiar with and expressly sought to bar in the Bill of Rights.” 

Other legal scholars agree about all alleged criminals having habeas, due process, and other legal rights in duly established civil courts.

Military tribunals are constitutionally illegal. Since June 2004, America’s (conservative) High Court made three landmark rulings.  

In Rasul v. Bush (June 2004), the Court granted Guantanamo detainees habeas rights to challenge their detentions in civil court. Congress responded with the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act (DTA), subverting the ruling.

In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court held that federal courts retain jurisdiction over habeas cases. It said Guantanamo Bay military commissions lack “the power to proceed because (their) structures and procedures violate both the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the four Geneva Conventions (of) 1949.”

In October 2006, Congress responded a second time. It enacted the Military Commissions Act (MCA). It subverted the High Court ruling in more extreme form. 

Undermining fundamental rule of law principles, it gave the administration extraordinary unconstitutional powers to detain, interrogate, torture and prosecute alleged terrorist suspects, enemy combatants, or anyone claimed to support them. 

It lets presidents designate anyone anywhere in the world (including US citizens) an “unlawful enemy combatant” and empowers him to arrest and detain them indefinitely in military prisons. 

The law states: “no (civil) court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider any claim or cause for action whatsoever….relating to the prosecution, trial or judgment of….military commission(s)….including challenges to (their) lawfulness….”

On June 12, 2008, the High Court again disagreed. In Boumediene v. Bush, it ruled that Guantanamo detainees retain habeas rights. MCA unconstitutionally subverts them. As a result, the administration has no legal authority to deny them due process in civil courts or act as accuser, trial judge and executioner with no right of appeal or chance for judicial fairness.

Nonetheless, Section 2031 of the FY 2010 NDAA contained the 2009 Military Commissions Act (MCA). The phrase “unprivileged enemy belligerent” replaced “unlawful enemy combatant.” Language changed but not intent or lawlessness to assume police state powers.

So far, military commissions haven’t tried Americans. Henceforth, based on alleged national security concerns, they will be under draconian FY 2012 NDAA provisions.

Notably, Jose Padilla, a US citizen, was lawlessly held over three and a half years in military and civilian confinement as an alleged “enemy combatant.” Charges against him were spurious. Yet he was denied due process, tortured, brutalized, dehumanized, and transformed in solitary confinement to mush.

Emotionally destroyed ahead of his civil trial, his lawyer said he resembled “a piece of furniture,” unable to represent himself properly in court. In military detention ahead of his court martial, Bradley Manning’s barbaric treatment may have left him less than fully able. 

A Final Comment 

For years, America’s crept closer to totalitarian rule. Notably, the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act eased surveillance and death penalty restrictions, eroded habeas protection, and smoothed the way for repressive measures to follow. 

Post-9/11, they proliferated. Constitutional protections have been systematically eliminated. FY 2012 NDAA provisions destroy fundamental Bill of Rights ones, including Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment due process rights.

The Fifth Amendment says, “No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury..”

Moreover, no one shall “be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb….be compelled (to bear) witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law….”

The Fourteenth Amendment says, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are” US citizens.

“No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of (US) citizens..nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law….”

Overall, America’s Constitution protects against unreasonable, arbitrary, or capricious laws not based on rule of law principles. 

Supreme Court rulings affirmed Bill of Rights protections. In November 2008, Justice Anthony Kennedy sided with a majority ruling, saying:

“After carefully considering the relevance of the 10 inviolable rights that comprise the ideological foundation on which our nation is built, the court finds that these basic freedoms remain important for the time being, and should not be overturned.” 

“Until such time as it can be definitively proven that citizens no longer require the protections provided by the Bill of Rights, it shall remain the principal legal guidance for the United States of America.” 

Under Obama and the 112th Congress, inviolability no longer holds. Tyranny replaced it. America’s no different than other totalitarian states. As a result, no one challenging state power is safe.

Denouncing imperial lawlessness can be criminalized. So can defending right over wrong. Constitutional protections no longer apply. 

People power alone can restore them. There’s no other way.

Contributing Editor Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.   Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.       

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Codifying Big Brother

by RALPH NADER

Paraphrasing Shakespeare, something is rotten in the state of Capitol Hill. A majority of Congress is just about to put the finishing touches on an amendment to the military budget authorization legislation that will finish off some critical American rights under our Constitution.  Here is how two retired 4 star marine generals, Charles C. Krulak and Joseph P. Hoar, described in the New York Times the stripmining of your freedom to resist tyranny in urging a veto by President Obama:

“One provision would authorize the military to indefinitely detain without charge people suspected of involvement with terrorism, including United States citizens apprehended on American soil. Due process would be a thing of the past….

“A second provision would mandate military custody for most terrorism suspects. It would force on the military responsibilities it hasn’t sought”….”for domestic law enforcement….”

“A third provision would further extend a ban on transfers from Guantanamo, ensuring that this morally and financially expensive symbol of detainee abuse will remain open well into the future.”

All of Obama’s leading military and security officials oppose this codification of the ultimate Big Brother power. Imagine allowing the government to deny people accused of involvement with terrorism (undefined), including U.S. citizens arrested within the United States, the right to a trial by jury. Imagine allowing indefinite imprisonment for those accused without even proffering charges against them. Goodbye 5th and 6th Amendments.

On some government agency’s unbridled order: just pick them up, arrest them without charges and throw them into the military brig indefinitely. This atrocity deserves to be repeatedly condemned loudly throughout the land by Americans who believe in the rights of due process, habeas corpus, right to confront your accusers, right to a jury trial—in short, liberty and the just rule of law.

Some stalwart lawyers are speaking out soundly: They include Georgetown Law

Professor, David Cole, George Washington University Law Professor, Jonathan Turley, Republican lawyer, Bruce Fein, former American Bar Association (2005-2006) president, Michael Greco, and the always alert lawyers at the civil liberties groups. Their well-grounded outcries are not awakening the citizenry.

Where are the one million lawyers? Where are the thousands of law professors? Where are the scores of law school deans? Are they not supposed to be our first constitutional responders?

Where is the Tea Party and its haughty rhetoric about the sanctity of constitutional liberty? Most of the Tea caucus voted for tyranny. Presidential candidate, Rep. Ron Paul has been an outspoken critic of this attack on our civil liberties.

The majority also voted to ratify a dictatorial procedure in the Congress, as well. This indefinite, arbitrary, open-ended dictatorial White House mandate was never subjected to even a House or Senate Committee hearing, and was not explained with any rationale known as legislative “findings.” It was rammed through by the House and Senate Armed Services Committees without the Judiciary and Intelligence Committees invoking their concurrent jurisdiction for public hearings.

So extreme are these majority Congressional extremists, composed of both Republicans and renegade Democrats, the latter led by Senator Carl Levin, that the Obama Administration has to lecture them about the fundamental American principle that “our military does not patrol our streets.”

It is not as if the imperial presidencies of Bush and Obama need any more encouragement and legitimization to continue on their lawless paths to criminal wars of aggression, unlawful surveillance, arbitrary slayings of innocents, wrongful imprisonments, and unauthorized spending. Instead of Congress using its constitutional authority regarding the war, appropriations and investigative powers, it formalizes its impotence by handing the “go for it” power to the Executive branch with the vaguest of language boundaries.

Usually there are a few Senators whose upfront defense of our Constitution would lead them to stand tall against the “Senate Club” and put a “hold” on this pernicious amendment. Civil libertarians hope that, before the final Senate vote in the rush to get home for the Holidays, Senators Rand Paul, Tom Harkin, Al Franken, Richard Blumenthal, Ron Wyden, Bernie Sanders, Jeff Merkley, Tom Coburn or Mike Lee would step forth.

A “hold” could spark the demand for public hearings and floor debate to give the American people the time and information to react and ask themselves “how dare Congress take away our most fundamental rights?”

President Obama initially threatened to veto the entire bill and make Congress drop these pernicious dictates that so insult the memory and vision of our founding fathers. He is already signaling that he doesn’t have the backbone to reject the false choice “between our safety and our ideals,” that he asserted in his Inaugural Address. 

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer and author of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, forthcoming from AK Press.

[Editor’s Note: Ralph obviously wrote this before it was learned that Obama never intended to oppose this attack on our freedoms, in fact he proposed it; his noise about “opposing” the bill stemmed from the fact he was concerned about the Congress not certifying further expansion of the imperial presidency. See: Obama, Congress back legalization of a police state  and  Obama Won’t Veto the Defense Authorization Act: Welcome to Fascism with a Presidential Façade  —PG]

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by SAUL LANDAU and NELSON P. VALDES

“Los niños nacen para ser felices.”– José Martí

On November 19, 2011 NPR broadcast “Children Of Cuba Remember: Their Flight To America.” Reporter Greg Allen claimed the 1960-62 journey from Cuba to the United States of 14,000 plus Cuban children “was made possible because of a deal a priest in the Miami diocese [Father Bryan Walsh] … worked out with the US State Department. The agreement allowed him to sign visa waivers for children 16 or under.” Allen then interviewed several right-of-center Cuban Americans to offer “objective” perspective on the facts surrounding Operation Peter Pan.

Curiously, Allen omitted the CIA from his report, although ample evidence shows the Agency in the early 1960s conspired with the Church to spirit kids out of Cuba.

Once inside the nurturing borders of the greatest country in the world “Pedro Pan kids have done well,” Allen concluded, without explaining what “well” means. Now adult Pedro Pan kids remain “firmly opposed to any normalization of relations with the Castro regime, the regime that was responsible for breaking up their families and forcing them from their homeland.”

NPR staff might have discovered a more complex and sinister story – had they looked. The CIA refuses to release Peter Pan documents, but abundant testimony shows the Agency forging documents and spreading lies, with Father Walsh and the regional Catholic hierarchy. Their goal: separate elite children from parents (a Cuban brain drain) and generate political instability.

One Operation Peter Pan conspirator, Antonio Veciana, now living in Miami, told us how Maurice Bishop (aka CIA official David Atlee Phillips) recruited him in 1960 “to wage psychological war — to destabilize the government.” Veciana described how the Agency forged a law to make affluent Cubans believe the revolutionary government planned to usurp parental control. Bishop’s agents in Cuba spread this rumor, backed by a forged simulation of the supposed law, to members of the professional and propertied classes. The forgery “declared that parents would lose control of their kids to the state.”

Veciana recounted how “CIA agents claimed they’d stolen the document from the Cuban government.” This false document “created tremendous panic.” On October 26, 1960, CIA-controlled Swan island radio station, south of Cuba, broadcast breaking “news.” Cuba’s government, the radio asserted, planned to remove children from parents so as to indoctrinate them. Radio Swan reported another lie: the Cuban underground had obtained a copy of the forthcoming “law.”

Minimal research would have revealed that Leopoldina and Ramón Grau Alsina, niece and nephew of former Cuban President Ramón Grau San Martín, had confessed to Cuban security officials after being arrested in 1965 to having printed the false law in Havana, circulated it clandestinely and then lied to parents.

Article 3 of the apocryphal document stated: “When this law comes into effect, the custody of persons under 20 years of age will be exercised by the state via persons or organizations to which this power has been delegated.” Priests and CIA agents both recruited kids and persuaded parents to “trust us. The US government will care for them.”

The clergy circulated the phony document among their Cuban upper middle-class flock. Catholic school officials feared Castro’s rapidly expanding public instruction program would undermine their virtual educational monopoly among moneyed sectors.

In March 1960, President Eisenhower ordered the CIA to overthrow the Cuban government. Agency plotters designed Peter Pan to run alongside political propaganda and economic strangulation policies. These parallel tracks would weaken Castro’s government while US trainers prepared a Cuban-exile invasion force, which, in turn, would coordinate with CIA-backed urban terrorists and guerrillas.

Operation Peter Pan (recall the Disney film?) used Cuban kids and parents to further their goal: overthrowing the revolutionary government. NPR’s claim of “no evidence” of CIA involvement would have dissolved had they asked Veciana or questioned why the CIA still refuses to release its 1500 plus documents on that Operation  — while de-classifying archives on the Bay of Pigs and the 1962 Missile Crisis?

Writer Alvaro Fernandez’ father Angel Fernandez Varela, recruited by the CIA in Havana, taught at the Jesuit run Colegio Belen. Before he died in Miami, wrote Alvaro, Angel told his family “he had been one of those responsible for drafting the false law that gave rise to the hysteria.”

NPR’s report doesn’t ask: who obtained the kids’ visas, airplane tickets and contacts abroad and why did KLM and Pan American Airlines issue Peter Pan kids free tickets?

Nor does NPR Allen follow up. The US government didn’t maintain contact between parents and children, nor grant visas to most of the parents that remained in Cuba. The UN High Commissioner tried to reunite parents and children, but Washington didn’t back him.

Veciana helped facilitate this dirty trick, but later mused: “Afterward I wondered: was this the right thing to do? Because we did create panic about the government, but we also separated lots of kids from their parents.”

In fact, Cuba has won accolades for its treatment of children. “In Cuba, there are no children on the streets, no children out of school, no children without access to health services or culture, and there are no unprotected children without opportunities for development,” said Jose Juan Ortiz, UNICEF representative in Cuba.

Paradoxically, the CIA attributed its own objective to the Cuban government: separating children from their parents. Maybe, if NPR staff thought ironically they would’ve done a more accurate report on Operation Peter Pan. [Ver: Operación Pedro Pan, a site controlled by rightwing Cubans, documenting the lives of the no-longer “kids” in “freedom”.]

Saul Landau’s WILL THE REAL TERRORIST PLEASE STAND UP — available on dvd from cinemalibrestore@gmail.com. Counterpunch published his BUSH AND BOTOX WORLD.

Nelson Valdes came to Florida in Operation Peter Pan and is Professor Emeritus at the University of New Mexico.

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