Bradley Manning convicted of "espionage" but not "aiding the enemy."

My take on Bradley Manning is that he is the poster man for courageous whistle-blower resistance and an American Hero. There aren't many real heroes anymore in the age of mindless distraction, media distortion, blind obedience, and Orwellian government surveillance.  When I told the government to stick it 45 years ago, when they wanted me to kill Vietnamese people ("kill, kill, kill" was drilled into our heads as soldiers) fighting for their own sense of self determination during the Vietnam war, it wasn't as if I didn't realize that they would come after me and imprison me in conditions much worse than the LA County jail--you know what they are going to do--and you hope that you can survive it, and that you will be home within a few years. But Bradley Manning didn't just tell them to stick it, he exposed and brought transparency to the whole imperial, dirty, insane, and criminal U.S. foreign policy enterprise. He did it with the release of videos like "Collateral Murder" showing the senseless American killing of Iraqi civilians, and with his release of thousands of State Department emails that revealed the duplicitous nature of our dealings with other countries. That took the kind of real courage that is sadly lacking in America today. My hat is off to the Bradley Mannings and Edward Snowdens who risk everything--their long-term liberty and potentially their actual lives--to inform the American people about what their government is doing to them and the people of the world.

So after three years of abuse in a military prison, confinement called cruel, inhuman and degrading by the UN, Bradley Manning has been convicted of the crime of telling the truth in yet another kangaroo military court dead set on setting an example to others who would have the courage to follow their ethical convictions and resist the developing American fascist state.

Here are several articles, statements, an audio, and video, about the conviction of Bradley Manning for reporting the truth to the world concerning the behavior of our military and foreign policy establishment.
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The Moral Verdict on Bradley Manning: A Conviction of Love in Action

By Norman Solomon

July 30, 2013 "Information Clearing House -  

The sun rose with a moral verdict on Bradley Manning well before the military judge could proclaim his guilt. The human verdict would necessarily clash with the proclamation from the judicial bench.

In lockstep with administrators of the nation’s war services, judgment day arrived on Tuesday to exact official retribution. After unforgiveable actions, the defendant’s culpability weighed heavy.

“Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house,” another defendant, Fr. Daniel Berrigan, wrote about another action that resulted in a federal trial, 45 years earlier, scarcely a dozen miles from the Fort Meade courtroom where Bradley Manning faced prosecution for his own fracture of good order.

“We could not, so help us God, do otherwise,” wrote Berrigan, one of the nine people who, one day in May 1968 while the Vietnam War raged on, removed several hundred files from a U.S. draft board in Catonsville, Maryland, and burned them with napalm in the parking lot. “For we are sick at heart…”

On the surface, many differences protrude between those nine draft-files-burning radical Catholics and Bradley Manning. But I wonder. Ten souls saw cruelties of war and could no longer just watch.

“I prefer a painful truth over any blissful fantasy,” Manning wrote in an online chat. Minutes later he added: “I think I’ve been traumatized too much by reality, to care about consequences of shattering the fantasy.” And he also wrote: “I want people to see the truth … regardless of who they are … because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.”

Those words came seven weeks after the world was able to watch the “Collateral Murder” video that Manning had provided to WikiLeaks. And those words came just days before military police arrived to arrest him on May 29, 2010.

Since then, huge numbers of people around the world have come to see Bradley Manning as personification of moral courage. During the last several months I’ve read thousands of moving comments online at ManningNobel.org, posted by signers of the petition urging that he receive the Nobel Peace Prize. The comments are often stunning with heartfelt intensity of wounded idealism, anger and hope.

No verdict handed down by the military judge can change the moral verdict that has emerged from people all over the world, reciprocating what Bradley Manning expressed online a few days before his arrest: “I can’t separate myself from others.” And: “I feel connected to everybody … like they were distant family.”

The problem for the U.S. government was not that Bradley Manning felt that way. The problem came when he acted that way. Caring was one thing. Acting on the caring, with empathy propelling solidarity, was another.

Days ago, in closing argument, the prosecutor at Fort Meade thundered: “He was not a whistleblower, he was a traitor.”

But a “traitor” to what? To the United States … only if the United States is to be a warfare state, where we “cannot make informed decisions as a public.” Only if we obey orders to separate ourselves from the humanity of others. Only if authoritative, numbing myths are to trump empathy and hide painful truth.

Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”

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Scott Horton Radio

7/30/13 Daniel Ellsberg
Exclusive: the first reaction of Daniel Ellsberg, author of Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, to Bradley Manning’s acquittal on charges of “aiding the enemy,” but conviction under the espionage act, why journalism is still threatened, Manning’s motives, the positive consequences of his leaks — for instance ending America’s occupation of Iraq once [...] Download

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 Democracy Now! Special Coverage on the Bradley Manning Verdict.
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Glenn Greenwald OWNS Toobin (CNN) Over Snowden, Manning  

 

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Statement by Julian Assange on Verdict in Bradley Manning Court-Martial
30 July 2013, 19:30 UTC

Today Bradley Manning, a whistleblower, was convicted by a military court at Fort Meade of 19 offences for supplying the press with information, including five counts of ’espionage’. He now faces a maximum sentence of 136 years.

The ’aiding the enemy’ charge has fallen away. It was only included, it seems, to make calling journalism ’espionage’ seem reasonable. It is not.

Bradley Manning’s alleged disclosures have exposed war crimes, sparked revolutions, and induced democratic reform. He is the quintessential whistleblower.

This is the first ever espionage conviction against a whistleblower. It is a dangerous precedent and an example of national security extremism. It is a short sighted judgment that can not be tolerated and must be reversed. It can never be that conveying true information to the public is ’espionage’.

President Obama has initiated more espionage proceedings against whistleblowers and publishers than all previous presidents combined.

In 2008 presidential candidate Barack Obama ran on a platform that praised whistleblowing as an act of courage and patriotism. That platform has been comprehensively betrayed. His campaign document described whistleblowers as watchdogs when government abuses its authority. It was removed from the internet last week.

Throughout the proceedings there has been a conspicuous absence: the absence of any victim. The prosecution did not present evidence that - or even claim that - a single person came to harm as a result of Bradley Manning’s disclosures. The government never claimed Mr. Manning was working for a foreign power.

The only ’victim’ was the US government’s wounded pride, but the abuse of this fine young man was never the way to restore it. Rather, the abuse of Bradley Manning has left the world with a sense of disgust at how low the Obama administration has fallen. It is not a sign of strength, but of weakness.

The judge has allowed the prosecution to substantially alter the charges after both the defense and the prosecution had rested their cases, permitted the prosecution 141 witnesses and extensive secret testimony. The government kept Bradley Manning in a cage, stripped him naked and isolated him in order to crack him, an act formally condemned by the United Nations Special Rapporteur for torture. This was never a fair trial.

The Obama administration has been chipping away democratic freedoms in the United States. With today’s verdict, Obama has hacked off much more. The administration is intent on deterring and silencing whistleblowers, intent on weakening freedom of the press.

The US first amendment states that "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press". What part of ’no’ does Barack Obama fail to comprehend?

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What Does the Manning Verdict Mean for Edward Snowden?

Posted By Elias Groll Tuesday, July 30, 2013

In a statement, the American Civil Liberties Union described the Manning prosecution as nothing but an exercise in intimidation. "Since he already pleaded guilty to charges of leaking information -- which carry significant punishment -- it seems clear that the government was seeking to intimidate anyone who might consider revealing valuable information in the future," said Ben Wizner, the director of the group's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. If those activists are looking for confirmation of their fears, they need look no further than a joint statement from Reps. Mike Rogers and Dutch Ruppersberger, the chairman and ranking member, respectively, of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence: "There is still much work to be done to reduce the ability of criminals like Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden to harm our national security. The House Intelligence Committee continues to work with the Intelligence Community to improve the security of classified information and to put in place better mechanisms to detect individuals who abuse their access to sensitive information." 

Click on title above for entire article. 

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 Bradley Manning Cleared of 'Aiding the Enemy' but Guilty of Most Other Charges
• Manning convicted of multiple Espionage Act violations
• Acquitted of most serious 'aiding the enemy' charge
• Army private faces maximum jail sentence of 130 years

By Ed Pilkington at Fort Meade

July 30, 2013 "The Guardian" - Bradley Manning, the source of the massive WikiLeaks trove of secret disclosures, faces a possible maximum sentence of more than 130 years in military jail after he was convicted of most charges on which he stood trial.

Colonel Denise Lind, the military judge presiding over the court martial of the US soldier, delivered her verdict in curt and pointed language. "Guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty," she repeated over and over, as the reality of a prolonged prison sentence for Manning – on top of the three years he has already spent in detention – dawned.

The one ray of light in an otherwise bleak outcome for Manning was that he was found not guilty of the single most serious charge against him – that he knowingly "aided the enemy", in practice al-Qaida, by disclosing information to the WikiLeaks website that in turn made it accessible to all users including enemy groups. ....See "The Guardian"
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Snowden Interview, part 2, Egypt links

The Guardian - New Interview with Edward Snowden in Hong Kong--Part 2

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Glenn Greenwald: "Rogue" Actions of U.S. in Snowden Row

Yield Latin American Offers of Asylum

GLENN GREENWALD: I think this is really the critical point that has to be understood. The reason that Edward Snowden came forward, the reason that we’re reporting on this so aggressively, is because—and this is not hyperbole in any way; it’s a purely accurate description—the NSA is in the process, in total secrecy, with no accountability, of constructing a global, ubiquitous surveillance system that has as its goal the elimination of privacy worldwide, so that there can be no electronic communications—by telephone, Internet, email, chat—that is beyond the reach of the United States government. They are attempting to collect and store and monitor all of it, and that they can invade it at any time they want, no matter who you are or where you are on the planet. This has very profound implications for the kind of world in which we live, for the kind of relationship the United States has to the rest of the world, the way in which individuals feel free to communicate with one another, use the Internet. And that, I think, is why the story is resonating as much as it is.

AMY GOODMAN: Times reporting, "In more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation’s surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans while pursuing not only terrorism suspects, but also people possibly involved in nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks, officials say." Your response to that revelation this weekend in The New York Times?
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, it shows what a complete joke the argument has been from NSA defenders in the Democratic Party that there is robust oversight on this surveillance. What you actually have is a completely warped and undemocratic institution, this court that meets in complete secrecy, where only the government is allowed to attend. And unlike previously, when it really was confined to just issuing individual warrants about particular targets of terrorism, it is now issuing sweeping, broad opinions defining the contours of our constitutional liberties, of the Fourth Amendment, of the government’s power to spy on us—and it’s all being done in secret. What kind of a country has a court that defines the Constitution in total secrecy and forces us to live under truly secret law in which the government can do all sorts of things to us that we’re not even aware of, that it’s claiming the right to do and being given the power to do it? So I think the New York Times article highlighted what has long been known about the joke called the FISA court, but it’s good to seeThe New York Times doing some reporting on these stories and hopefully bringing some more attention to this. 

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Glenn Greenwald: Edward Snowden "Satisfied" by Global Outrage over U.S. Surveillance Operations

AMY GOODMAN: Did he talk about his preference for where he wants to go?
GLENN GREENWALD: He didn’t. I didn’t really speak very much with him about his quest for asylum. I think that he has always been fairly consistent about the fact—and there’s a fantastic article, an op-ed by Daniel Ellsberg in The Washington Post today making the same point—that the crucial objective that Snowden has, just like Ellsberg had, was to make sure that he’s able to participate in the ongoing debate that he triggered. And that means staying out of the custody of the United States government, which will not only put him in prison, but render him incommunicado. And so I think wherever he ends up, as long as it’s somewhere that he can be heard and his voice can be heard, I think he’ll be happy and fine.
AMY GOODMAN: What, Glenn, is Edward Snowden most encouraged by as he follows the debates and the continued revelations online?
GLENN GREENWALD: The very first conversation I ever had with him, Amy, online, he said that his only fear—he only had one fear, and that was that he would sacrifice his life and take these enormous personal risks in order to make these disclosures possible, and then have the world react with indifference and apathy, a kind of fear that they would just simply say, "OK, well, I assumed this was happening, and I don’t really mind." None of that has happened. There’s been an incredibly intense debate inside the United States over these disclosures, all kinds of movements of reform, movements against the United States government, and in many, many other countries around the world, as we previously discussed. So he feels like what he set out to do is exactly what has happened. He said he didn’t set out to destroy these systems—that’s not his place; he set out to make people around the world realize what the United States’s government is doing to them, to enable them to decide whether that’s the kind of thing they are willing to tolerate. And he sees those debates happening, and he’s extremely enthused and satisfied that his objective has been fulfilled. . . . .

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Glenn, it’s not only the revelations that you have put out in The Guardian and that have come out other places, but they’re sparking even others, I think, to go down this track. The latest NSA spying issue, another headline today, U.S. Postal Service now under scrutiny for a surveillance program of its own, The New York Times revealing the postal service has been carrying out a Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program [link update 7/9/13), which photographs every piece of mail in its system—around 160 billion envelopes, packages, postcards documented last year. The contents never read without a warrant, but they allow investigators to learn key information including names, addresses, return addresses, postmark locations. The information reportedly used to nab the suspect recently accused of mailing ricin-laced letters to Obama and New York Mayor Bloomberg. Leslie James Pickering, the former activist with the Earth Liberation Front who now owns a small bookstore in Buffalo, recently learned his mail was being monitored after a surveillance order was accidentally delivered to his door. Can you respond to this?
GLENN GREENWALD: There’s a fantastic article by the journalism professor at NYU, Jay Rosen, who has written a article entitled "The Snowden Effect." And what he argues is that the revelations about the surveillance state go far beyond the specific revelations enabled by the documents that he disclosed to us, that we’re now disclosing to the world in our reporting, that instead he completely refocused—Snowden did—worldwide global attention on the abuses of the surveillance state. And so, not just that article about the postal service monitoring, but the one you mentioned earlier about theFISA court—there’s articles in Le Monde last week about how the French are mass surveilling their own citizens’ electronic communications. All sorts of revelations coming forward, one in The Washington Post today about how the Pentagon is engaged in domestic propaganda, monitoring websites for what they consider to be extremist political activity—this tidal wave of revelations that clearly have come from the sea change that has resulted in how we think about surveillance as a result of Mr. Snowden’s whistleblowing and the reporting of ours that it enabled then. And I think that that’s really ultimately going to be the most profound effect. People are thinking differently about how their government spies on them, the nature of government secrecy, whether they want to trust their government, why journalism has failed to uncover these sorts of things, why we needed someone like Mr. Snowden to risk his life and throw away his liberty in order to come forward and bring it to our attention. I think this is all going to have very profound repercussions for a long time to come. 

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Statement from Edward Snowden in Moscow

Monday July 1, 21:40 UTC

     

One week ago I left Hong Kong after it became clear that my freedom and safety were under threat for revealing the truth. My continued liberty has been owed to the efforts of friends new and old, family, and others who I have never met and probably never will. I trusted them with my life and they returned that trust with a faith in me for which I will always be thankful.

On Thursday, President Obama declared before the world that he would not permit any diplomatic "wheeling and dealing" over my case. Yet now it is being reported that after promising not to do so, the President ordered his Vice President to pressure the leaders of nations from which I have requested protection to deny my asylum petitions.

This kind of deception from a world leader is not justice, and neither is the extralegal penalty of exile. These are the old, bad tools of political aggression. Their purpose is to frighten, not me, but those who would come after me. [i.e., other whistle blowers]

For decades the United States of America has been one of the strongest defenders of the human right to seek asylum. Sadly, this right, laid out and voted for by the U.S. in Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is now being rejected by the current government of my country. The Obama administration has now adopted the strategy of using citizenship as a weapon. Although I am convicted of nothing, it has unilaterally revoked my passport, leaving me a stateless person. Without any judicial order, the administration now seeks to stop me exercising a basic right. A right that belongs to everybody. The right to seek asylum.

In the end the Obama administration is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned, or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised — and it should be.

I am unbowed in my convictions and impressed at the efforts taken by so many.
Edward Joseph Snowden
Monday 1st July 2013

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The Original Fascist Defines Fascism

"Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism as it is a merger of state and corporate power": Benito Mussolini

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Links on Developing Egyptian Civil War

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Mursi role at Syria rally seen as tipping point for Egypt army

Tue, Jul 2 2013

By Yasmine Saleh and Tom Perry

CAIRO (Reuters) - Army concern about the way President Mohamed Mursi was governing Egypt reached tipping point when the head of state attended a rally packed with hardline fellow Islamists calling for holy war in Syria, military sources said.At the June 15 rally, Sunni Muslim clerics used the word "infidels" to denounce both the Shi'ites fighting to protect Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the non-Islamists that oppose Mursi at home.Mursi himself called for foreign intervention in Syria against Assad, leading to a veiled rebuke from the army, which issued an apparently bland but sharp-edged statement the next day stressing that its only role was guarding Egypt's borders."The armed forces were very alarmed by the Syrian conference at a time the state was going through a major political crisis," said one officer, whose comments reflected remarks made privately by other army staff. He was speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not permitted to talk to the media.The controversy surrounding the Syria conference pointed to a crippling flaw in the Mursi presidency: though the constitution names Mursi as supreme commander of the armed forces, the military remains master of its own destiny and a rival source of authority to the country's first freely elected head of state.The army's dramatic ultimatum demanding Mursi and other politicians settle their differences by Wednesday afternoon caught the presidency completely off guard. Triggered by mass protests against Mursi's rule, it amounted to a soft coup by a military that has been a major recipient of U.S. aid since the 1970s, when Egypt made peace with neighboring Israel.

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Egypt braced for more violence after 'massacre' of Morsi supporters

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Massacre in Cairo

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When is a Military Coup Not a Military Coup? When it Happens in Egypt, Apparently

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Ron Paul--New Egyptian War: Americans Lose, Again
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Virginia Judge Rules Mandatory Health Insurance Unconstitutional; also: Obama Tax Deal Update & WikiLeaks

In This Issue:

- Virginia Judge Rules Mandatory Health Insurance is Unconstitutional

- Two Articles From Dean Baker at CEPR on Tax Deal

- Black Caucus Opposes Tax Deal, Wants Relief for 99ers

- Entertaining Video--Ellsberg Talks WikiLeaks on "The Colbert Report"
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Virginia Judge Rules Mandatory Health Insurance is Unconstitutional

This is one aspect of "Obamacare" that got stuck in the craw of many across the political spectrum, including myself.
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Virginia health-care ruling strikes down key provision of Obama's plan
By Rosalind S. Helderman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 13, 2010; 2:39 PM

RICHMOND - A federal judge in Virginia ruled Monday that a key provision of the nation's sweeping health-care overhaul is unconstitutional, the most significant legal setback so far for President Obama's signature domestic initiative.

U.S. District Court Judge Henry E. Hudson found that Congress could not order individuals to buy health insurance.

In a 42-page opinion, Hudson said the provision of the law that requires most individuals to get insurance or pay a fine by 2014 is an unprecedented expansion of federal power that cannot be supported by Congress's power to regulate interstate trade.

"Neither the Supreme Court nor any federal circuit court of appeals has extended Commerce Clause powers to compel an individual to involuntarily enter the stream of commerce by purchasing a commodity in the private market," he wrote. "In doing so, enactment of the [individual mandate] exceeds the Commerce Clause powers vested in Congress under Article I [of the Constitution.]

Hudson is the first judge to rule that the individual mandate is unconstitutional. He said, however, that portions of the law that do not rest on the requirement that individuals obtain insurance are legal and can proceed. Hudson indicated there was no need for him to enjoin the law and halt its implementation, since the mandate does not go into effect until 2014.

See original article for all.

December 13, 2010
Judge Voids Key Element of Obama Health Care Law
By KEVIN SACK
New York Times

A federal district judge in Virginia ruled on Monday that the keystone provision in the Obama health care law is unconstitutional, becoming the first court in the country to invalidate any part of the sprawling act and ensuring that appellate courts will receive contradictory opinions from below.

Judge Henry E. Hudson, who was appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush, declined the plaintiff’s request to freeze implementation of the law pending appeal, meaning that there should be no immediate effect on the ongoing rollout of the law. But the ruling is likely to create confusion among the public and further destabilize political support for legislation that is under fierce attack from Republicans in Congress and in many statehouses.

In a 42-page opinion issued in Richmond, Va., Judge Hudson wrote that the law’s central requirement that most Americans obtain health insurance exceeds the regulatory authority granted to Congress under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. The insurance mandate is central to the law’s mission of covering more than 30 million uninsured because insurers argue that only by requiring healthy people to have policies can they afford to treat those with expensive chronic conditions.

The judge wrote that his survey of case law “yielded no reported decisions from any federal appellate courts extending the Commerce Clause or General Welfare Clause to encompass regulation of a person’s decision not to purchase a product, not withstanding its effect on interstate commerce or role in a global regulatory scheme.”

Judge Hudson is the third district court judge to reach a determination on the merits in one of the two dozen lawsuits filed against the health care law. The others — in Detroit and Lynchburg, Va. — have upheld the law. Lawyers on both sides said the appellate process could last another two years before the Supreme Court settles the dispute.

Find entire article here.
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Obama Tax Deal Update

Two Articles From Dean Baker at CEPR

The Tax Deal and the Apocalypse

Excerpt:

To be an important person in Washington these days requires a solid record of failure. That is why we have 25 million people unemployed, underemployed or out of the labor force altogether. And those who got us into this disaster are still overwhelmingly the ones calling the shots. So people who want a realistic assessment of what the defeat of this tax package means for the economy may not want to rely on the usual suspects.

Dean Baker
Truthout, December 13, 2010

See article on original website

The proponents of the tax deal that President Obama and the Republicans negotiated last week have gotten out their TARP and Iraq War hysterics. All the important people are now telling us that if Congress doesn’t approve the package it will be the end of the world!!!!!

To be an important person in Washington these days requires a solid record of failure. That is why we have 25 million people unemployed, underemployed or out of the labor force altogether. And those who got us into this disaster are still overwhelmingly the ones calling the shots. So people who want a realistic assessment of what the defeat of this tax package means for the economy may not want to rely on the usual suspects.

As I have noted before, the major risk of this deal is that it would undermine Social Security. The deal temporarily lowers the Social Security tax by 2 percentage points. In principle the tax rate will go back to its current rate after the end of next year.

However, several prominent Republicans have already made it clear that they will call the expiration of this tax cut a tax increase. And they will point out that it is an extremely regressive tax increase that disproportionately hits low and moderate-income workers.

At the end of the 2011 the unemployment rate is virtually certain to be well above 8.0 percent and quite likely above 9.0 percent. In this context does anyone seriously believe that President Obama will refuse to go along with efforts by the Republicans in Congress to continue the tax cut beyond the scheduled deadline?

If the payroll tax is indefinitely lowered by 2.0 percentage points, then Social Security’s finances will appear much more shaky. As it stands, Social Security is fully funded through the year 2037, but that doesn’t keep the Washington Post and National Public Radio from running endless scare stories about the program’s funding crisis.

If the payroll tax is permanently reduced by 2.0 percentage points it would double the program’s projected 75-year shortfall. This would give far more ammunition to the Social Security fear mongers.

While Obama’s deal ostensibly provides for general revenue to be placed into the trust fund to make up the lost payroll tax revenue, there is little reason to believe that this funding would persist beyond the first year. Again, does anyone believe that President Obama will stand up for Social Security on this point?

In short, this deal is a very large first step toward cutting and/or privatizing Social Security. If the President wants to remove this risk he can simply arrange to have the exact same tax cut given to workers from general revenue. There is no legitimate reason for the Republicans to reject this change in structure, unless their intent is to destroy Social Security.

It’s really that simple. The structure of the deal would be changed unless the point is to undermine Social Security.

What about the threatened apocalypse if we don’t do the deal? Well, the deal would provide a net stimulus to the economy and also give money to unemployed workers who really need it. Not getting this boost would be bad news.

But it is hard to stomach the whining from people who were too damned lazy or incompetent to think about the consequences of the collapse of an $8 trillion housing bubble. These workers are unemployed because the folks calling the shots messed up.

In other words, the reason that we have 25 million people unemployed or underemployed is that people like Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers messed up royally on their jobs. Fortunately for the folks on top, employment is not dependent on performance.

More to the point, this will not be our last chance to extend unemployment benefits or get additional stimulus. Unemployment benefits are hugely popular across the political spectrum. Even conservatives understand that the reason people are unemployed is because the economists messed up, not that the workers themselves lack the necessary skills or desire to work.

Congress will feel considerable pressure to extend benefits. In the same vein, the Republicans in Congress know that they will be evaluated in large part on the state of the economy in 2012. This means that they will have incentive to support additional stimulus, under whatever name they choose to give it.

In short, the train is not leaving the station. If this deal goes down, there will be other deals in the months ahead.

Remember, it was the Gingrich Congress that gave workers the first increase in the minimum wage in more than 15 years. They needed something to show for the 1996 elections. This Republican Congress is likely to feel the same pressure. [Bold Emphasis Added]

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Social Security Tax Cut: A Deal Breaker

Dean Baker
The Hill, December 9, 2010

Exerpt:

In principle there is nothing wrong with financing a portion of Social Security benefits with money from general revenue. This was in fact the original intention of President Roosevelt when he designed the program. However, the fact is that the program has always been financed exclusively by the Social Security tax that is taken from workers’ wages. This makes the tax regressive, but it has the advantage that workers can quite legitimately say that they have paid for their benefits. This will be to some extent less true if a portion of the funding comes from general revenue rather than payroll taxes. In short, getting funding from general revenue opens a new line of attack on the program.

The prospect of this tax cut being the basis for a renewed attack on Social Security could be dismissed if the program had defenders in high places, but this does not appear to be the case. Most of the Republicans would almost certainly like to privatize Social Security.

Unfortunately, the Obama Administration cannot be counted on to defend the program either. In fact, top officials in the administration seem to view attacks on Social Security and its supporters as a way to prove their manhood. President Obama’s decision to appoint two arch-enemies of Social Security to chair his Fiscal Responsibility commission certainly does not inspire confidence among supporters of Social Security.

In short, supporters of Social Security have good reason to oppose the tax deal. It is easy to have the same stimulus with an expanded version of President Obama’s Making Work Pay tax cut. Supporters of Social Security should reject the latest deal and tell President Obama to stand behind his own tax cut. This is what presidents are supposed to do.

See entire article on original website
Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of False Profits: Recovering from the Bubble Economy. He also has a blog, "Beat the Press," where he discusses the media's coverage of economic issues.
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Black Caucus Opposes Tax Deal, Wants Relief for 99ers

December 12, 2010 - by Donny Shaw

Hot on the heels of Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee’s [D, TX-18] statement Thursday on the House floor that an extension of unemployment insurance for 99ers should be added to Obama’s tax deal, the Congressional Black Caucus has announced that adding 99ers relief is essential for winning the support of their members.

“The CBC has reached a consensus on three areas that we believe we can unite behind, ”http://www.opencongress.org/person/show/400364_Robert_Scott">Rep. Bobby Scott [D, VA-3] said at a press conference on Friday. “First, we support the 13-month extension of unemployment insurance benefits, but we all agree that we also ought to extend benefits for the so-called 99ers — those who are exhausting the benefits they have.”
View the full press conference here.

The deal brokered by Obama and congressional Republicans would extend the four tiers of unemployment benefits that expired on December 1st, but would not create a new tier of benefits for those who have moved through those tiers and are still unemployed. The four tiers provided up to 99 weeks of benefits in some states, and we’re now more than 99 weeks out from the brunt of the ‘08 financial crisis. That means that, before the tiers expired, a wave of people who lost their jobs as a direct result of Wall Street recklessness and regulatory incompetence began being dropped off the backend of the federal insurance programs. There’s no official estimate of how many 99ers there are already, but most estimates put the number around 5 million.

The Congressional Black Caucus has 42 members, which might not be enough to force a change in the tax deal. If all House Republicans vote for the bill, only 39 Democratic votes would be needed to secure passage. In September, 31 conservative Blue Dog Democrats wrote a letter to the leadership advocating for all of the Bush tax cuts to be extended, so they can be counted as likely yeses. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Obama Administration is currently working to round up the final votes they need by lobbying lame duck Democrats in the House who lost re-election in November and are no longer accountable to voters.

Ultimately, whether or not additional weeks for 99ers can be added to the bill is up to Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi [D, CA-8] and the House Democratic leadership. The Senate is expected to pass the bill early this week, and Pelosi and crew have the choice of passing it as is, or passing it with an amendment. Even if Pelosi goes with an amendment, it’s possible that it would address other items — the estate tax or the length of the extension of the existing unemployment tiers — and not seek to add anything for the 99ers. As the WSJ reports today, Pelosi is “walking a perilous path” by attempting to satisfy her Democrats, who strongly oppose the deal, while at the same time trying to shepherd some form the deal into law so the tax cut debate is not pushed back to the next, more Republican, session of Congress.

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Video--Ellsberg Talks WikiLeaks on "The Colbert Report"

Daniel Ellsberg on Colbert Report: Julian Assange is Not a Criminal Under the Laws of the United States

"[Daniel's segment starts at 4:06]

ELLSBERG: Julian Assange is not a criminal under the laws of the United States. I was the first one prosecuted for the charges that would be brought against him. I was the first person ever prosecuted for a leak in this country—although there had been a lot of leaks before me. That’s because the First Amendment kept us from having an Official Secrets Act. . . . The founding of this country was based on the principle that the government should not have a say as to what we hear, what we think, and what we read. . . .

If Bradley Manning did what he’s accused of, then he’s a hero if mine and I think he did a great service to this country. We’re not in the mess we’re in, in the world, because of too many leaks. . . . I say there should be some secrets. But I also say we invaded Iraq illegally because of a lackof a Bradley Manning at that time."

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Billy Bragg and Wilco-- "The Unwelcome Guest"
By Woodie Guthrie