Obama Continues the Bush Policies of Secrecy

Some of us naively thought during the terrible Bush decade that if we could replace the heavy handed Security State of the Republican administration by electing a Democratic president and that we could reestablish our tattered democracy.  In hindsight how foolish we were.  We thought that Obama, who campaigned on government transparency and rolling back the Patriot Act would end the dominating control of the most powerful NSA/CIA Security State made strong by 8 years of zero oversight and an unlimited budget.  We were wrong.  How could we think that those in power would relinquish that power just because a new president was inaugurated?   Sadly, some here in DU think that’s exactly what happened in spite of the evidence otherwise.

In “The Nation” magazine of Oct 27, there is a good article, “The Government’s War on Whistleblowers.”  
http://www.thenation.com/article/173521/obamas-crackdown-whistleblowers

“To date, the Obama administration has charged nine people with violating the …… Espionage Act – far more that all other administrations combined.”

As bad as that sounds, that is the tip of the iceberg.  Many others have undergone Espionage Act “investigations” that didn’t result in prosecutions, but most likely destroyed careers.  Some see this as heavy-handed intimidation.  

“In its 2011 Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, the FBI formally authorized the use of national-security letters to obtain the call records of journalists who are witnesses to a crime. (NSLs are secret orders that the FBI can issue with no judicial review. Recipients are prohibited from telling anyone they’ve received such an order.)”

The article goes on to detail how Obama’s DOJ used subpoenas to gather records of 100 journalists exposing their sources whether or not the sources were relevant to the justification for the subpoenas.

It is apparent that our powerful NSA/CIA Security State, via the DOJ, has declared war on whisleblowers and investigative journalists.

When Obama became president he inherited a very powerful Security State from the Bush/Cheney administration that operated with an unlimited budget, carte blache authority and zero oversight.  It appears that Security State has grown even more powerful under President Obama.  This threat to our democracy should be obvious to all but those living in a state of denial.  And those that applaud the president for the gains we’ve made must realize that without democracy those gains can disappear quickly.  

Majority Say Brennan Violated Checks and Balances, and Must Go

Posted by Dan Froomkin Oct. 1, 2014 on “The Intercept”

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/10/01/majority-say-brennan-violated-checks-balances-must-go/

“According to a new poll, a sizeable majority of American voters believe CIA officials violated the constitutional system of checks and balances when they hacked into computers being used by Senate staffers investigating torture.”

“And by a two-to-one margin (54 percent to 25 percent, with 22 percent not sure) they believe that CIA Director John Brennan should resign on account of the misleading statements he made about the incident.”

“The poll found overwhelming public support for release of a long-completed report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The report is said to disclose abuse that was more brutal, systematic and widespread than generally recognized, and to expose a pattern of deceit in the Bush administration’s descriptions of the program to Congress and the public.”

“Calls for Brennan’s ouster emerged quickly after Feinstein’s floor speech in March, describing a blatant violation of the principle that Congress conducts oversight over the executive branch, not vice versa. Brennan quickly issued an angry denial whose qualifications were widely overlooked. A CIA Inspector General’s report, whose conclusions were made public in July, confirmed Feinstein’s allegations.”

Some might believe that Brennan has a higher pay grade than the President. Just sayin'.

In One Of The World’s Richest Countries, 17.5 Million Families Struggled To Afford Food Last Year

A recent study revealed that in 2013 17.5 million households in the USofA were food insecure.  This meant that they had difficulty at some time during the year providing enough food for all the household members.  Of that number 6.8 million households had very low food security. 

These numbers continue to grow every year.  We need a little "Hope and Change".

Read more at:  http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/09/03/3478328/food-insecurity-report/

See the study at this link:  http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/1565415/err173.pdf

Obamacare helps slash hospital charity costs in state (Washington)

"Washington hospitals provided nearly $154 million less in charity care in the first half of this year than in the first half of 2013, in many cases boosting the hospitals’ bottom lines."

"Hospitals attributed the plunge in charity care — about 30 percent — to the Affordable Care Act’s focus on reducing the number of uninsured patients."

"This year, for the first time, low-income and uninsured patients whose care was previously covered under hospitals’ charity-care programs were able under the ACA to qualify for Medicaid coverage or subsidized private insurance."

"Together, hospitals reported a 66 percent gain in total margin — the figure nonprofit hospitals report instead of profit — over the first half of 2013. For the first half of 2014, the aggregate margin for all hospitals reporting was nearly $720 million, compared with $435 million for the same period in 2013."

Read the article here:  http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2024542340_acacharitydropxml.html

Do You Believe In The FLYING SPAGHETTI MONSTER?

HE BOILED FOR YOUR SINS

(his balls are bigger than your god"s)

Will the result of the DoJ investigation in Ferguson be just a band-aid?

The Real News interviewed Glen Ford th Executive Editor of the Black Agenda Report.
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=12335
Mr. Ford points out that we need to look at the bigger picture. The problem isn't just Ferguson and fixing Ferguson, even if it's "fixed" won't touch the bigger problem. The problem is a system that is working fine and, "is accomplishing the mission of criminalizing a whole race of people, black folks,"

"The New York Times has a very interesting article out this week in which it notes that the state of Florida, which is not the worst, not the best, pretty indicative of Southern justice, certainly, the state of Florida has not even charged, much less tried, a single police officer in 20 years for using deadly force against a civilian. Not once in 20 years. And Florida doesn't really stand out too far from other states."

Mr. Ford says we shouldn't look at the problem as a "broken system":

"But my position is that the system works just fine. It does exactly what it was designed to do. It acts with uniformity all across the United States and delivers, like clockwork, millions of black bodies to be incarcerated in the biggest gulag in the world. It does it quite efficiently. It cost a lot of money, but the money that's spent is made by somebody. And it's the uniformity, again, the system that shows that it is a well-oiled machine that has been working at the highest possible speed for the last 45 years. That's not a broken system. If we look at it as a broken system, we're just going to tinker with it. If we understand that it is a system that is accomplishing the mission of criminalizing a whole race of people, black folks, then we have to look in a much more systemic, societal-wide way at what we do about a criminal justice system that is itself a criminal enterprise."

IMO Mr. Ford is pointing out that what we see in Ferguson is just an example of a culture that has developed over decades that criminalizes the Black Community and justifies that criminalization to the White Community. Why, one might ask? It is very profitable to those invested in the for-profit prison system. It also provides a good excuse for the militarization of the local police departments, which is very comforting to the paranoid American Aristocracy. And IMO the most important reason, it keeps the masses fighting among themselves instead of fighting the tyranny of the American Aristocracy. That is, when the Black Community stands up against the overbearing authoritarian dominance of the American Aristocracy will the White Community give support or look the other way. I bet the armed TeaBaggers will side with the American Aristocracy. I also believe that the Left will support the Black Community, but what will the Centrists do? Those that are so comfortable in their "status-quo"? Will they turn on the Black Community like they did OWS? Or will the simply hunker down and hope the Aristocracy won't see them and won't punish them? It's just like in the school yard: some side with the bully, some fight the bully, and some hide from the bully.

Who Rules America?

Who rules America?

    By Allan J. Lichtman, contributor

     http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/civil-rights/214857-who-rules-america

“A shattering new study by two political science professors has found that ordinary Americans have virtually no impact whatsoever on the making of national policy in our country. The analysts found that rich individuals and business-controlled interest groups largely shape policy outcomes in the United States.”

“The new study, with the jaw-clenching title of "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens," is forthcoming in the fall 2014 edition of Perspectives on Politics.”

“Rich individuals and business interests have the capacity to hire the lobbyists that shadow legislators in Washington and to fill the campaign coffers of political candidates. Ordinary citizens are themselves partly to blame, however, because they do not choose to vote.

America's turnout rate places us near the bottom of industrialized democracies. More than 90 million eligible Americans did not vote in the presidential election of 2012 and more than 120 million did not vote in the midterm elections of 2010.”

[Bold emphasis mine]