Has the 1 Percent Committed Treason?

Robert Reich (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Robert Reich | RobertReich.org | AlterNet | July 15, 2013

Permit me an impertinent question (or three).

Suppose a small group of extremely wealthy people sought to systematically destroy the U.S. government by (1) finding and bankrolling new candidates pledged to shrinking and dismembering it; (2) intimidating or bribing many current senators and representatives to block all proposed legislation, prevent the appointment of presidential nominees, eliminate funds to implement and enforce laws, and threaten to default on the nation’s debt; (3) taking over state governments in order to redistrict, gerrymander, require voter IDs, purge voter rolls, and otherwise suppress the votes of the majority in federal elections; (4) running a vast PR campaign designed to convince the American public of certain big lies, such as climate change is a hoax, and (5) buying up the media so the public cannot know the truth.

Would you call this treason?

If not, what would you call it?

And what would you do about it?

US Government Assessment of BP Oil Spill ‘Will Not Account for Damage’

Suzanne Goldenberg | Guardian UK | Reader Supported News | July 15, 2013

Efforts to put a price on damage from disaster fails to capture full extent of environmental losses in Gulf waters.

The US government cannot hope to arrive at a full accounting of the environmental destruction caused by the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico using its current methods, an expert panel has said.

A report from the National Research Council said the US government’s efforts to put a price on damage from the April 2010 disaster failed to capture the full extent of the environmental and economic losses in Gulf waters and coastal areas, fisheries, marine life, and the deep sea caused by BP’s runaway well.

Compiled by a team of 16 scientists at the request of Congress, the study went on to call for a sweeping overhaul of methods for putting a price on environmental losses – especially after an event on the scale of the BP disaster.

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The Latest Effort to Distract From the NSA Revelations

Glenn Greenwald | Guardian UK | Reader Supported News | July 14, 2013

The latest effort to distract attention from the NSA revelations is more absurd than most

When you give many interviews in different countries and say essentially the same thing over and over, as I do, media outlets often attempt to re-package what you’ve said to make their interview seem new and newsworthy, even when it isn’t. Such is the case with this Reuters article today, that purports to summarize an interview I gave to the daily newspaper La Nacion of Argentina.

Like everything in the matter of these NSA leaks, this interview is being wildly distorted to attract attention away from the revelations themselves. It’s particularly being seized on to attack Edward Snowden and, secondarily, me, for supposedly “blackmailing” and “threatening” the US government. That is just absurd.

That Snowden has created some sort of “dead man’s switch” – whereby documents get released in the event that he is killed by the US government – was previously reported weeks ago, and Snowden himself has strongly implied much the same thing. That doesn’t mean he thinks the US government is attempting to kill him – he doesn’t – just that he’s taken precautions against all eventualities, including that one (just incidentally, the notion that a government that has spent the last decade invading, bombing, torturing, rendering, kidnapping, imprisoning without charges, droning, partnering with the worst dictators and murderers, and targeting its own citizens for assassination would be above such conduct is charmingly quaint).

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PRISM: NSA Just As Guilty As Manning

Juan Cole | Informed Comment | Reader Supported News | June 8, 2013

Bradley Manning, who spilled the beans on the US blowing away of unarmed Iraqi journalists and overlooking war crimes by the US military and allied Iraqi troops, released thousands of low-level cable messages. He has been charged by the US government with thereby being a traitor, giving aid and comfort to the enemy. It is not clear which enemy benefited from the catty remarks in some embassy cables, or how exactly their revelation harmed national security. What did happen was that millions of people in the US and around the world discovered some of the more egregious sins of commission and omission of the US government, especially with regard to Iraq. The treason charge against Manning is outrageous, and has been pursued because otherwise what he did is not obviously very serious and even a military judge might not return a severe sentence. While the scatter shot character of his revelations may be troubling, some of what he revealed was government crimes, for which Americans should thank him.

It turns out that Manning, in making government correspondence available for us to read, was just turning the tables on the US government, which The Guardian and the Washington Post today reveal has a back door called PRISM into all our internet communications (emails, over-the-internet phone calls, browser search history, etc.) with 9 major companies, including Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! (but not, interestingly, Twitter). The program is detailed in a Powerpoint slide presentation for initiating new NSA employees into its workings.

The sordid police states that have a paltry few tens of thousands of domestic spies monitoring the activities of ordinary citizens turn out to be minor players in this game compared to the home of the brave and the land of the free. Eat your hearts out, North Korean secret police and Baathist mukhabarat in Syria!

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US Army Court-Martials Constitution

William Boardman | Reader Supported News | June 6, 2013

As readers here know, the U.S. has set about to lynch Bradley Manning.

The Bradley Manning court-martial that began June 3 looks like another defining moment for America – another indication of whether we are becoming the nation of supine toadies our government wants, or whether we still have enough devotion to the common good to behave in ways as decent and risky as Bradley Manning.

The U.S. government is going to extraordinary lengths to persuade us that Private Bradley Manning, 25, is a dangerous enemy of the state.

Even though Manning pled guilty to 10 of 22 charges last March, the U.S. Government is going ahead with all its charges, without providing a credible rationale. One charge, under the 1913 Espionage Act, could carry the death penalty.

There is reasonable likelihood that the military judge presiding over Manning’s military trial will agree with her government employer, find Manning guilty as charged, and sentence him to life in prison, or possibly death. (Even though the prosecution isn’t seeking the death penalty, the judge might have the power to impose it.)

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Reader-Funded Journalism

Glenn Greenwald | Guardian UK | Reader Supported News | June 5, 2013

any news outlets around the world, in the age of the internet, have struggled to find an economically sustainable model for supporting real journalism. The results, including for some of the largest, have been mass lay-offs, bureau closures, an increasing reliance on daily spurts of short and trivial traffic-generating items, and worst of all, a severe reduction in their willingness and ability to support sustained investigative journalism. All sorts of smaller journalistic venues – from local newspapers to independent political blogs – now devote a substantial portion of their energies to staying afloat rather than producing journalism, and in many cases, have simply ceased to exist.

Virtually all aspects of real journalism have been negatively affected by these difficulties. Economic suffering, of course, plagues an endless number of realms beyond journalism. But there are special dangers when true journalism cannot find a means to fund itself.

As governments and private financial power centers become larger, more secretive, and less accountable, one of the few remaining mechanisms for checking, investigating and undermining them – adversarial journalism – has continued to weaken. Many of these large struggling media outlets don’t actually do worthwhile adversarial journalism and aren’t interested in doing it, but some of them do. For an entity as vast as the US government and the oligarchical factions that control it – with their potent propaganda platforms and limitless financial power – only robust, healthy and well-funded journalism can provide meaningful opposition.

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Torture Report

Matthew Duss | American Prospect | April 19, 2013

As Americans grapple with the tragic bombings in Boston on Monday and the U.S. government works to track down those responsible, a new report on detainee treatment after 9/11 sheds important light on some of the measures adopted by the U.S. government in response to that attack.

Issued by a panel convened by the Constitution Project, and chaired by two former members of Congress, Republican Asa Hutchinson and Democrat James R. Jones, the 577-page report looks at the broad range of policies and practices that were adopted by the U.S. to deal with detainees after the September 11 attacks. “Perhaps the most important or notable finding of this panel,” the report’s opening states, “is that it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture.”

The new report states that in addition to methods that qualify as torture, “American personnel conducted an even larger number of interrogations that involved ‘cruel, inhuman, or degrading’ treatment. Both categories of actions violate U.S. laws and international treaties” (Emphasis added). Such conduct, the report concludes, was “directly counter to values of the Constitution and our nation.”

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