Two graphs that illustrate realities of the big recession
contribution by David Malone
What has been gained these last two years and what has been lost? And how shall measure it value?
Here are two graphs, two measure of one reality. They both measure the huge surge in the number of Americans who rely on Food Stamps to feed themselves and their children. They are from articles both published this week
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After Gabrielle Giffords: violence in US culture
It wasn’t Sarah Palin’s finger on the trigger, it was Jared Loughner’s. It would be intellectually lazy to suggest a straight cause and effect read-off between a cartoonish graphic on Facebook and an unhinged individual’s decision to send a bullet through the head of Gabrielle Giffords.
The question is how far the American populist right in general – and its principle figurehead in particular – can be held responsible for last night’s mass murder in Tucson.
Why I’m comfortable with the Tea Party movement
contribution by Tim Fenton
I have a confession to make: unlike some observers of politics Stateside, I’m comfortable with the Tea Party movement. That’s because it demonstrates – unlike the assertions of some of its supporters – that fundamental freedoms still underpin the USA: if you want to start, support or work for a political movement, then you are free to do so.
Moreover, citizens of the Republic are also free to voice whatever opinions they hold, protected by the First Amendment.
So anyone who believes ACORN stole the 2008 Presidential Election, that Barack Obama is not a natural born US citizen (and/or a practising Christian), or that any factual analysis ever comes out of Fox News Channel (fair and balanced my arse) is entitled to their view.
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WikiLeaks reveals how far the US has fallen in its principles
contribution by George Potter
Here’s an extract from the BBC article on the latest wikileaks revelations:
In 2004, a German citizen was snatched in Macedonia and allegedly taken to a secret prison by the CIA. Agents had apparently mistaken him for an al-Qaeda suspect. A 2007 cable from the US embassy in Berlin details the efforts the US made to persuade Germany not to issue international arrest warrants for the CIA agents accused of involvement.
In an account of a high-level meeting between US and German officials, the cables states that US diplomats “pointed out that our intention was not to threaten Germany, but rather to urge that the German government weigh carefully at every step of the way the implications for relations with the US”.
This is the kind of thing that makes me very angry.
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Why the Democrats lost on Tuesday in the US mid-terms
This analysis of why the Democrats lost so heavily on Tuesday, by Drew Westen, is the best piece of commentary on the recent American elections.
It was actually written a year ago, but the points and predictions that he made were more than validated.
Two excerpts:
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US mid-terms: Republicans win but Democrats have bright spots
As I said yesterday morning, the first mid-terms are always bad for the President, especially one who’s party controls both Houses.
Here are some of the major results, with thoughts on how Obama could still win in 2012.
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Ignore the media, there are good reasons why Obama will lose today
Later today Americans vote in their mid-term election and Republicans are expected to win big.
The dominant media narrative is that President Obama is flailing and has lost momentum in the face of the Tea Party movement. This is rubbish for various reasons.
The other is that Obama is failing because he tacked too much to the left. This is also rubbish.
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Right-wing wars: establishment crazies vs Tea party crazies
contribution by Tim Fenton
It’s happened in the UK before: candidates splinter off from mainstream parties and end up fighting their former colleagues. Or, party’s workers won’t turn out to help their own candidates.
Now it’s happening in the US state of Delaware, following the result of yesterday’s primary for the GOP Senate nomination. Republicans reckoned they had, in Mike Castle, a candidate capable of taking the seat.
But Castle was challenged for the nomination by “Tea Party” Conservative Christine O’Donnell, who turned out the winner.
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The case of Linda Carty and her impending execution
contribution by Michael Ezra
Linda Carty is awaiting execution as she is on death row in Texas. She was sentenced to death in 2002 for her part in the kidnapping and murder of Joana Rodriguez, a 25 year old neighbour.
According to news reports, it was argued that the intent of the murder was so that Carty could steal Rodriguez’s baby and pass it off as her own. As the Guardian reports, the latter claim does seem somewhat dubious given that baby in question was a different ethnicity to that of Carty.
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Is it legal for Obama to have Awlaki assassinated?
contribution by Naadir Jeewa
Last week, Obama authorised the CIA to kill Anwar Al-Awlaki, though it seemed to have evaded the British blogs until this week.
Awlaki is not only an extremist, but has been an active recruiter for Al-Qaeda (AQAP), with evidence linking him with both Nidal Hasan and PantsBomber.
However, the Fifth Amendment confers the following rights to Awlaki as a US Citizen:
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 offence 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.
However, this is not to say that infringement of rights during wartime has not happened before, and these have even been upheld by the Supreme Court, in the notorious example of the internment of Japanese Americans. This derives from the war powers conferred on the executive by Article 1, Section 9 of the US Constitution.
Obama’s one-time colleague at the University of Chicago Law School, Cass Sunstein, has argued that the justification of the use of war powers against individual liberty requires the following components:
A requirement of clear congressional authorization or executive action intruding on interests with a claim to constitutional protection; An insistence on fair hearings, including access to courts, for those deprived of liberty…
Spencer Ackerman finds that there’s only one possible clear congressional authorisation that may justify the use of lethal force against a US citizen right of due process, and that is the AUMF -Authorisation of Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (2001):
That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.
This specifically targets terrorists involved in the 9/11 attacks, but the evidence is not clear with regards to Awlaki’s role in 9/11. Furthermore the Supreme Court overrid congressional authority in Boumediene v. Bush, where the court decided that Guantanomo detainees have a constitutional right to the writ of Habeaus Corpus that stands over and above procedures outlined in congressional legislation and executive orders.
Access to courts is within rights conferred by the Sixth Amendment requiring trial by jury, and by the Fourteenth Amendment requiring due process of law to deprive a citizen of life.
The major questions here involve the applicability of the constitution abroad. The Supreme Court has upheld the constitutional rights of citizens abroad, notably in Reid v. Covert, as Julian Ku notes. However, the weight of the precedent then relies on the extent to which constitutional protection of Awlaki would be “impracticable and anomalous.” This pretty much seems the only justificatory manoeuvre at the current moment.
As a further blow to Harry’s Place/Keep America Afraid Safe types, any evidence that was used to authorise the use of lethal force against Awlaki came from the civilian arrest of Abdulmutallab. No torture was necessary. Likewise, area specialist Greg Johnsen argues that the killing of Awlaki is unlikely to bring significant enhancements to national security.
Ackerman is correct in categorising the AUMF as an emergency power to be used only in war time, and should thus be rescinded. Especially as the DOD stopped referring to the Long War in its latest Defense Review.
My fear is not so much the targeting of a Muslim, in this instance at least, but the continual erosion of due process requirements that authorise a state to deprive an individual citizen of life, liberty or property.
PS: It’s not just the US Government that wants Awlaki dead. So do other terrorists…
PPS: Awlaki is not even Al-Qaeda’s top-spokesperson-who-is-also-a-us-citizen. That honour goes to Adam Gudahn.
Anxiety Britain
Los Angeles, a city of some 4 million inhabitants, is enjoying a blindingly good few years for crime. It looks like LA might have only 230 murders this year. Less than one per day! They may have to outsource their dramatic reality cop shows. Nirvanna, for the Los Angelenos. Which means a murder rate of only 6 per 100,000.
This trend has been widespread in the US since the mid 1990s, so that now one or two cities even seem to have a rate as low as the UK. Yes, after a couple of decades of improvement, the USA might aspire to having a murder rate in one or two of its many cities as low as the UK as a whole.
Incidentally, this question naturally leads to another one: if the UK is so much more murder-free than its Anglo Saxon cousin, why is it apparently so much more violent? continue reading… »
Welcome to Libertopia
Wondering what “savage cuts” in public spending would actually mean in practice, or what would happen if the government got out of the way of providing basic services? The residents of Colorado Springs are about to find out:
“More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.
The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.
Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two weeks. If that.
Water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead, brown turf by July; the flower and fertilizer budget is zero.
City recreation centers, indoor and outdoor pools, and a handful of museums will close for good March 31 unless they find private funding to stay open. Buses no longer run on evenings and weekends. The city won’t pay for any street paving, relying instead on a regional authority that can meet only about 10 percent of the need.”
“A budget crisis caused by the recession left Colorado’s second-largest city with a $28-million shortfall in its $212-million general budget. Residents — largely conservative, anti-tax and suspicious of their elected leaders — resoundingly voted against a proposal to triple property taxes and keep the city humming. Mayor Lionel Rivera said the city has no choice but to cut fundamental services.”
Deluded
Nick Cohen has not written anything on international issues for a while, but he was back on form in the Observer this week. “Opponents of the Iraq war are deluded if they think Chiclott will find the allied intervention was illegal” he thundered, The “central allegation that the second Iraq war was ‘illegal’ is unsustainable,” he concludes.
Uh huh.
An inquiry into the Netherlands’ support for the invasion of Iraq says it was not justified by UN resolutions. The Dutch Committee of Inquiry on Iraq said UN Security Council resolutions did not “constitute a mandate for… intervention in 2003″.
The inquiry was launched after foreign ministry memos were leaked that cast doubt on the legal basis for the war.
But what would they know, eh Nick.
Meanwhile the Economist has some reasonable questions for the inquiry to put to Tony Blair:
When they question Mr Blair about WMD, Sir John and his colleagues should concentrate on nuclear weapons—and in particular on the government’s assertion that Saddam might develop one “in between one and two years”. These nuclear allegations, which helped Mr Blair call the threat from Iraq “serious and current”, need further probing.
A second focus should be on how raw intelligence was changed. Mr Blair described as “extensive, detailed and authoritative” intelligence that was, in fact, patchy and old; he described conclusions that were speculative as “beyond doubt”. At the inquiry, Mr Campbell drew a distinction between shifting lines and paragraphs in dossiers and actually fabricating intelligence. . . . .
There is also a string of outstanding questions about the conduct and aftermath of the war. For instance, why did some British troops seem not to have been fully equipped for the task? . . . . Another concern is the increasingly vexed issue of when, precisely, Mr Blair committed British forces to the invasion—and whether he simultaneously said different things to George Bush and the British public. And why did he enter the war without much assurance that the Americans had a plan for post-war reconstruction?
Britain cannot let Haiti be pushed to ‘shock capitalism’
As political leaders there is much more Barack Obama and Gordon Brown could be doing to help Haiti. Above all they must make sure that the disaster is not compiled by the cynical exploitation of the current crisis.
In an article for The Nation Richard Kim details how Haiti has been crippled by its indebtedness to Western powers.
Following Haiti’s liberation from the French in 1804 it was forced by 1825, under threat of embargo from France and other Western powers, to pay 150 million francs in reparations to French slave owners. It turned primarily to Germany and the US for help.
However, it has never escaped from this spiral of debt and also has been subjected to the imposition of ’structural adjustment policies’ by the World Bank and IMF.
All of which have contributed to Haiti being not just the poorest but also one of the most unequal societies in the Western hemisphere.
According to a report;
It is second only to Namibia in income inequality (Jadotte 2006) , and has the most millionaires per capita in the region. Margarethe Thenusla, a 34-year old factory worker and mother of two said, “When they ask for aid for the needy, you hear that they release thousands of dollars for aid in Haiti. But when it comes you can’t see anything that they did with the food aid. You see it in the market, they’re selling it. Us poor people don’t see it”.
What happens now to Guantánamo?
Back in March, I published a four-part list identifying all 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo since the prison opened on January 11, 2002, as “the culmination of a three-year project to record the stories of all the prisoners held at the US prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.” Now updated (as my ongoing project nears its four-year mark), the four parts of the list are available here: Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four.
The first fruit of my research was my book The Guantánamo Files, in which, based on an exhaustive analysis of 8,000 pages of documents released by the Pentagon (plus other sources), I related the story of Guantánamo, established a chronology explaining where and when the prisoners were seized, told the stories of around 450 of these men (and boys), and provided a context for the circumstances in which the remainder of the prisoners were captured.
I’ve also been tracking the Obama administration’s stumbling progress towards closing the prison, reporting the stories of the 41 prisoners released since March, and covering other aspects of the Guantánamo story.
Overall, as it stood at December 31, 2009, 574 prisoners had been released from Guantánamo (42 under Obama), one — Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani — had been transferred to the US mainland to face a federal court trial, six had died, and 198 remained.
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Thoughts on the Christmas terror attempt
The attempted terrorist attack on an airliner on Christmas Day has attracted so much international press that it’s difficult to ignore. However, my thoughts are mainly in a jumble about the whole thing so rather than take time might a cogent think piece I thought I’d make a list of ‘things what occur to me’.
1. Fail to blow up a plane, you get wall to wall coverage for your cause in every nation on Earth. Actually blow up dozens or even hundreds in Pakistan, Iraq or Afghanistan and you’re lucky if you get into the inside pages once let alone over and over again. It’s obviously news but the response feels disproportionate.
2. What would the world be like if we rewarded non-violent protest with this kind of media coverage? Does the international media actually, inadvertently, make violence more attractive than democratic avenues? The media’s approach is certainly what leads Al Quaida to see airplanes as their targets of choice over other possibilities.
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After Abdulmutallab: the media outcry
Odds are that the 278 passengers on board the Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day represented a reasonably random demographic.
I’m guessing entirely, of course, but it also seems reasonable to assume that there will also have been quite a few Muslims on the plane. Statistically speaking, the numbers involved even make it quite likely that those travelling on the Airbus A330 included one or two of the kind of people who habitually resort to such formulas as ‘refusal to condemn’ when discussing terrorism that they would classify as anti-imperialist.
There is an old joke that runs ‘just because you are paranoid, it doesn’t mean the bastards aren’t out to get you’. Unfortunately, the same consideration now applies to sane, rational, left of centre civil libertarians.
However morally outraged us lot get when the US blitzes an Afghan wedding party to Kingdom Come, it’s a fair bet that Osama bin Laden and his mates do not reciprocate our sincere Guardianista indignation when their team clocks up a home run.
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How will this terrorist attempt affect liberties?
The attempted terrorist attack by Nigerian national Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on Christmas Eve presents some major policy headaches for President Obama just when he was beginning to grapple with them.
It’s a given that airport security will tighten further to near-ridiculous levels, even though some number-crunching by blogger Nate Silver shows that a person could board 20 flights a year and still have less chance of being caught in a terrorist attack than being hit lightning.
The attempted airborne attack will instead impact other issues too. For a start it will raise complications again about trialling terrorists in civil courts rather than military courts. President Obama attracted a storm of criticism from the right when his Attorney General announced that one of the architects of the 9/11 attacks – Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – will face a civil jury in New York.
That issue is likely to come to the forefront as the trial begins. But Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s capture will also raise questions on whether he should be charged in a civil court or by a military commission as KSM initially was.
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What’s our argument against bombing Iran?
On Christmas Eve, a time ostensibly meant for peace & goodwill, the New York Times ran an epic op-ed arguing for military action to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear technology. Should you have the stomach to endure Alan Kuperman’s belch of war-baiting, you can go here; it’s some real Deck The Halls shit.
Because I’m not particularly interested in the substance of Kuperman’s argument (there are already some excellent rebuttals by the likes of Marc Lynch & Matt Duss), I’m instead going to note Stephen Walt’s reaction. For Walt, this is but the opening salvo of a concerted campaign to pressure President Obama into taking military action. He warns that opponents of this action should start refining their arguments now because the march for war may soon become a deafening din.
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Anti-Christmas nonsense arrives earlier every year
So apparently in the US there are circular emails and facebook applications claiming that President Obama has renamed the Christmas Tree at the White House, a ‘holiday tree’.
The facebook application amused me. Much in the way of the age old question, “Have you stopped beating your wife?” it asks “President Obama says that they will have a Holiday Tree this year instead of a Christmas Tree. Do you agree with this?”
It’s popping up in discussion forums and on news sites like myFOX. It’s going up as a question on Yahoo.
It’s being posted about on right-wing blogs. No mainstream news organisation that I can see has picked it up yet, but you just know that Bill O’Reilly is waiting in the wings to condemn someone, somewhere for not being Christian enough, as he did with a hapless group of Seattle atheists last year.
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You can read articles through the front page, via Twitter or RSS feed.
» Tory MP Nadine Dorries’ aide quits; blames blogger for “smears”
» How Cameron’s new modernising advisor sees the Conservative party
» Claudia Aderotimi was the victim of something more universal than ‘hip-hop culture’
» The Chinese economic miracle could still come crashing down
» Big Society: what’s in a name?
» Why I’m opposed to Compass opening its membership beyond Labour
» How many disabled people are fit for work? Not as much as ministers claim
» There isn’t a clear separation between state and private money in the real society
» The Observer bravely stands up for punishment without trial
» Most Libdems have also started to shift against the cuts
» Four reasons why tax avoidance makes us all worse off
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