WASHINGTON—Saying that those were definitely some good times, a reflective President Obama told reporters Friday that the current scandals plaguing his administration have made him long for the deeply frustrating, often maddening political climate of his first term in office.

“Remember when I couldn’t get anything through Congress for two years and had absolutely no success reaching a grand bargain with John Boehner?” said a gently smiling Obama as he leaned back in his chair in the Oval Office and stared off wistfully. “I really miss that.”

“I wonder if it will ever be infuriating like that again,” he added. “Gosh, I sure hope so.”

Obama, who is currently facing three high-level political scandals that include the IRS’ unfair targeting of conservative groups, the Department of Justice’s questionable probe of the Associated Press, and the murder of a U.S. diplomat in Benghazi, said he can’t help but smile when he remembers his early, thwarted years as president when he was unable to bring Democrats and Republicans together on health care or lobby Congress to pass immigration reform.

The president then affectionately reminisced about when Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said his one goal as Senate Minority leader was to make Obama a one-term president, and told reporters that, with the current onslaught of criticism facing his administration, he often finds himself yearning for the tumultuous months in 2009 when unemployment was at 10.2 percent and his stimulus plan faced constant scrutiny.

The president also tenderly recalled his horrendous first debate with Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, saying that awful night now holds a special place in his heart.

“Just the other day, after a reporter compared me to Richard Nixon, I was sitting in my office and I was just sort of replaying a simpler, fairly annoying time in the beginning of my presidency when people were accusing me of being a Muslim and saying that I wasn’t born in the United States,” said Obama, chuckling to himself. “Man, those were the exasperating good ol’ days.”

According to sources within the White House, the president has been in a reflective mood since news of the various scandals broke, often taking aides aside and fondly recalling the hellish nightmare of his first term when he realized he couldn’t live up to anyone’s expectations and his once sterling approval rating dropped precipitously in mere months.

One high-level official said that after the White House was forced to release emails sent during the Benghazi terrorist attack, the president, in an effort to calm himself, mused warmly on how torturous it was dealing with House Minority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) during his first term, and how he actually thought about punching him in the face during many of his Oval Office visits.

“When the president talks about how he totally failed—from a public relations perspective—to sell the American people on his health care plan, it sort of takes him back to the beginning when everything was just grand, comparatively speaking,” one aide said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Completely and utterly discouraging memories like those from the first 100 days are pretty much the only things that take his mind off of how the IRS failed under his watch, or how gun control didn’t pass, or how he’s not gaining much traction on climate change.”

Staring out of the Oval Office window, Obama suddenly clapped his hands, smiled broadly, and said, “Hey, I just remembered a great story about the time people compared my handling of the BP oil spill to how Bush handled Hurricane Katrina.”

http://www.theonion.com/articles/obama-fondly-recalls-frustration-of-first-term,32487/

One of the most important untold stories of the Vietnam War was the Phoenix Program.

The few that have heard of it think that is was an assassination program whereby the US killed civilian Vietcong leaders “extra-judicially.”

But in fact, it was much more than that.

It involved widespread surveillance of the population without warrant, arrest and imprisonment without charges, and torture. Sound familiar?

It should.

The roots of Homeland Security in the Vietnam War’s Phoenix Program…

More info at: DouglasValentine.com

12-Minute Video: http://www.brasschecktv.com/videos/government-corruption-1/the-phoenix-program-and-homeland-security-.html

“As communities fragment under the weight of internal chaos and the increasingly dramatic changes cause by global warming and economic despair, they will face a difficult choice. They can retreat into a pure survivalist mode, a form of primitive tribalism, without linking themselves to the concentric circles of the wider community and the planet. This retreat will leave participants as morally and spiritually bankrupt as the corporate forces arrayed against us. It is imperative that, like the monasteries in the Middle Ages, communities nurture the intellectual and artistic traditions that make possible a civil society, humanism, and the common good.

Access to parcels of agricultural land will be imperative. We will have to grasp, as the medieval monks did, that we cannot alter the larger culture around us, at least in the short term, but we may be able to retain the moral codes and culture for generations beyond ours. As those who retained their identity during slavery or the long night of twentieth-century fascism and communism discovered, resistance will be reduced to small, often imperceptible acts of defiance. Music, theater, art, poetry, journalism, literature, dance, and the humanities, including the study of philosophy and history, will be the bulwarks that separate those who remain human from those who become savages.”

– Chris Hedges, “Death of the Liberal Class”, page 196.

A Bangladeshi who is a veteran of fighting poverty in his country wrote a recent op-ed for The New York Times in which he said that boycotts and other outside pressure aren’t going to help solve the outrageous labor conditions in his country.

No, Fazle Hasan Abed insisted, the atrocious unsafe working conditions that contributed to the deaths of more than 1,100 garment workers last month can only be changed by helping the working people in his country form strong unions that can stand up to their exploiting bosses.

Yes, American retailers need to stop squeezing factory owners for every last cent and realize that paying for workers’ safety is a legitimate cost, too, but things won’t change much unless those workers can play on an even playing field with their employers.

Students of the American labor movement understand exactly what Abed is saying. For it was terrible and unsafe working conditions in this country that caused working people to join together to form unions so that they had some leverage to protect their own lives on the job.

It was only 100 years ago, in the early 1900s, that unscrupulous employers still demanded as many as 12 hours a day for six days from their employees. Women and children worked in New York City factories from dawn to dusk. Much of the machinery they worked with was unsafe. Accidents were frequent and deaths were all too common.

In 1911, for instance, a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. on New York’s Lower East Side. About 150 employees, nearly all of them women, died when the fire roared through the building’s upper floors. Many burned to death, others jumped from windows and died.

Coal miners were often trapped when mines collapsed. Steel mills had few, if any, safety standards.

Maybe it wasn’t the Bangladesh of today, but it was close.

All too many Americans today aren’t aware of why or how it was that working people braved police beatings, National Guard actions (seven people at Milwaukee’s Bay View Rolling Mills were shot and killed in 1886 when the Guard was sent in to break up a strike), and the reprisals by bosses and politicians who believed workers deserved no rights of their own and needed to serve at the beck and call of their employers.

As the 1900s progressed, so did the unions. But while they signed contracts for their own members that brought on eight-hour workdays and five-day workweeks at fair wages and workplace safety, the movement also spurred Congress and state legislatures to enact safety requirements for all employees, minimum wage laws, workers’ compensation plans and other workplace rules to protect employees’ rights. The growth of the American middle class was the result.

Much of that past is forgotten in today’s economic climate. Unions have been losing ground for the past two decades and today are often vilified by many politicians, particularly here in Wisconsin, and even some working people who feel there’s no longer a need for unions because the bosses will take care of them just fine.

But it’s the demise of the labor movement, which was in full swing during most of the 1900s, that’s being blamed by many economists for the phenomenal growth in the nation’s wealth gap. Most recent figures show that as the U.S. began to emerge from the Great Recession in 2010, the top 1 percent of wage earners in America saw their income grow by 11.6 percent. In that same year, the rest of the 99 percent averaged an $80 increase in their annual pay. In other words, the middle class just got flattened.

And workplace safety hasn’t been a shining light either. The huge fertilizer plant explosion last month in West, Texas, exposed the lack of inspections and regulation enforcement that occurs when federal and state governments refuse to fund an adequate number of on-site inspectors. The BP oil rig that blew up and contaminated the Gulf of Mexico, taking the lives of several more workers, was another example.

America no longer need unions? Like Bangladesh, it needs them badly.

Plain Talk: In Bangladesh and here, we need unions : Ct.

Last October, senior Obama officials anonymously unveiled to the Washington Post their newly minted “disposition matrix”, a complex computer system that will be used to determine how a terrorist suspect will be “disposed of”: indefinite detention, prosecution in a real court, assassination-by-CIA-drones, etc. Their rationale for why this was needed now, a full 12 years after the 9/11 attack:

“Among senior Obama administration officials, there is a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade. Given the way al-Qaida continues to metastasize, some officials said no clear end is in sight. . . . That timeline suggests that the United Stateshas reached only the midpoint of what was once known as the global war on terrorism.”

On Thursday, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing on whether the statutory basis for this “war” – the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) – should be revised (meaning: expanded). This is how Wired’s Spencer Ackerman (soon to be the Guardian US’s national security editor) described the most significant exchange:

“Asked at a Senate hearing today how long the war on terrorism will last, Michael Sheehan, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, answered, ‘At least 10 to 20 years.’ . . . A spokeswoman, Army Col. Anne Edgecomb, clarified that Sheehan meant the conflict is likely to last 10 to 20 more years from today – atop the 12 years that the conflict has already lasted. Welcome to America’s Thirty Years War.”

That the Obama administration is now repeatedly declaring that the “war on terror” will last at least another decade (or two) is vastly more significant than all three of this week’s big media controversies (Benghazi, IRS, and AP/DOJ) combined. The military historian Andrew Bacevich has spent years warning that US policy planners have adopted an explicit doctrine of “endless war”. Obama officials, despite repeatedly boasting that they have delivered permanently crippling blows to al-Qaida, are now, as clearly as the English language permits, openly declaring this to be so.

It is hard to resist the conclusion that this war has no purpose other than its own eternal perpetuation. This war is not a means to any end but rather is the end in itself. Not only is it the end itself, but it is also its own fuel: it is precisely this endless war – justified in the name of stopping the threat of terrorism – that is the single greatest cause of that threat.

In January, former Pentagon general counsel Jeh Johnson delivered a highly-touted speech suggesting that the war on terror will eventually end; he advocated that outcome, arguing:

‘War’ must be regarded as a finite, extraordinary and unnatural state of affairs. We must not accept the current conflict, and all that it entails, as the ‘new normal.’”

In response, I wrote that the “war on terror” cannot and will not end on its own for two reasons: (1) it is designed by its very terms to be permanent, incapable of ending, since the war itself ironically ensures that there will never come a time when people stop wanting to bring violence back to the US (the operational definition of “terrorism”), and (2) the nation’s most powerful political and economic factions reap a bonanza of benefits from its continuation. Whatever else is true, it is now beyond doubt that ending this war is the last thing on the mind of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner and those who work at the highest levels of his administration. Is there any way they can make that clearer beyond declaring that it will continue for “at least” another 10-20 years?

The genius of America’s endless war machine is that, learning from the unplesantness of the Vietnam war protests, it has rendered the costs of war largely invisible. That is accomplished by heaping all of the fighting burden on a tiny and mostly economically marginalized faction of the population, by using sterile, mechanized instruments to deliver the violence, and by suppressing any real discussion in establishment media circles of America’s innocent victims and the worldwide anti-American rage that generates.

Though rarely visible, the costs are nonetheless gargantuan. Just in financial terms, as Americans are told they must sacrifice Social Security and Medicare benefits and place their children in a crumbling educational system, the Pentagon remains the world’s largest employerand continues to militarily outspend the rest of the world by a significant margin. The mythology of the Reagan presidency is that he induced the collapse of the Soviet Union by luring it into unsustainable military spending and wars: should there come a point when we think about applying that lesson to ourselves?

Then there are the threats to Americans’ security. Having their government spend decades proudly touting itself as “A Nation at War” and bringing horrific violence to the world is certain to prompt more and more people to want to attack Americans, as the US government itself claims took place just recently in Boston (and as clearly took place multiple other times over the last several years).

And then there’s the most intangible yet most significant cost: each year of endless war that passes further normalizes the endless rights erosions justified in its name. The second term of the Bush administration and first five years of the Obama presidency have been devoted to codifying and institutionalizing the vast and unchecked powers that are typically vested in leaders in the name of war. Those powers of secrecy, indefinite detention, mass surveillance, and due-process-free assassination are not going anywhere. They are now permanent fixtures not only in the US political system but, worse, in American political culture.

Each year that passes, millions of young Americans come of age having spent their entire lives, literally, with these powers and this climate fixed in place: to them, there is nothing radical or aberrational about any of it. The post-9/11 era is all they have been trained to know. That is how a state of permanent war not only devastates its foreign targets but also degrades the population of the nation that prosecutes it.

This war will end only once Americans realize the vast and multi-faceted costs they are bearing so that the nation’s political elites can be empowered and its oligarchs can further prosper. But Washington clearly has no fear that such realizations are imminent. They are moving in the other direction: aggressively planning how to further entrench and expand this war.

One might think that if there is to be a debate over the 12-year-old AUMF, it would be about repealing it. Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Lee, who heroically cast the only vote against it when it was originally enacted by presciently warning of how abused it would be, has been advocating its repeal for some time now in favor of using reasonable security measures to defend against such threats and standard law enforcement measures to punish them (which have proven far more effective than military solutions). But just as happened in 2001, neither she nor her warnings are deemed sufficiently Serious even to consider, let alone embrace.

Instead, the Washington AUMF “debate” recognizes only two positions: (1) Congress should codify expanded powers for the administration to fight a wider war beyond what the 2001 AUMF provides (that’s the argument recently made by the supreme war-cheerleaders-from-a-safe-distance at the Washington Post editorial page and their favorite war-justifying think tank theorists, and the one being made by many Senators from both parties), or (2) the administration does not need any expanded authority because it is already free to wage a global war with very few limits under the warped “interpretation” of the AUMF which both the Bush and Obama DOJs have successfully persuaded courts to accept (that’s the Obama administration’s position). In other words, the shared premise is that the US government must continue to wage unlimited, permanent war, and the only debate is whether that should happen under a new law or the old one.

Just to convey a sense for how degraded is this Washington “debate”: Obama officials at yesterday’s Senate hearing repeatedly insisted that this “war” is already one without geographical limits and without any real conceptual constraints. The AUMF’s war power, they said, “stretches from Boston to the [tribal areas of Pakistan]” and can be used “anywhere around the world, including inside Syria, where the rebel Nusra Front recently allied itself with al-Qaida’s Iraq affiliate, or even what Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) called ‘boots on the ground in Congo’”. The acting general counsel of the Pentagon said it even “authorized war against al-Qaida’s associated forces in Mali, Libya and Syria”. Newly elected independent Sen. Angus King of Maine said after listening to how the Obama administration interprets its war powers under the AUMF:

This is the most astounding and most astoundingly disturbing hearing that I’ve been to since I’ve been here. You guys have essentially rewritten the Constitution today.”

Former Bush DOJ official Jack Goldsmith, who testified at the hearing,summarized what was said after it was over: Obama officials argued that “they had domestic authority to use force in Mali, Syria, Libya, and Congo, against Islamist terrorist threats there”; that “they were actively considering emerging threats and stated that it was possible they would need to return to Congress for new authorities against those threats but did not at present need new authorities”; that “the conflict authorized by the AUMF was not nearly over”; and that “several members of the Committee were surprised by the breadth of DOD’s interpretation of the AUMF.” Conveying the dark irony of America’s war machine, seemingly lifted right out of the Cold War era film Dr. Strangelove, Goldsmith added:

Amazingly, there is a very large question even in the Armed Services Committee about who the United States is at war against and where, and how those determinations are made.”

Nobody really even knows with whom the US is at war, or where. Everyone just knows that it is vital that it continue in unlimited form indefinitely.

In response to that, the only real movement in Congress is to think about how to enact a new law to expand the authorization even further. But it’s a worthless and illusory debate, affecting nothing other than the pretexts and symbols used to justify what will, in all cases, be a permanent and limitless war. The Washington AUMF debate is about nothing other than whether more fig leafs are needed to make it all pretty and legal.

The Obama administration already claims the power to wage endless and boundless war, in virtually total secrecy, and without a single meaningful check or constraint. No institution with any power disputes this. To the contrary, the only ones which exert real influence – Congress, the courts, the establishment media, the plutocratic class – clearly favor its continuation and only think about how further to enable it. That will continue unless and until Americans begin to realize just what a mammoth price they’re paying for this ongoing splurge of war spending and endless aggression.

Related matters

Although I’m no fan of mindless partisan hackery, one must acknowledge, if one is to be honest, that sometimes it produces high comedy of the type few other afflictions are capable of producing.

On a related note: when Attorney General Eric Holder spoke about the DOJ’s subpoeans for AP’s phone records – purportedly issued in order to find the source for AP’s story about a successfully thwarted terror attack from Yemen - he made this claim about the leak they were investigating: “if not the most serious, it is within the top two or three most serious leaks that I have ever seen.” But yesterday, the Washington Post reported that CIA officials gave the go-ahead to AP to report the story, based in part on the fact that the administration itself planned to make a formal announcement boasting of their success in thwarting the plot. Meanwhile, the invaluable Marcy Wheeler today makes a strong case that the Obama administration engaged in a fear-mongering campaign over this plot that they knew at the time was false – all for the purpose of justifying the president’s newly announced “signature drone strikes” in Yemen.

The key lesson from all of this should have been learned long ago: nothing is less reliable than unchecked claims from political officials that their secret conduct is justified by National Security Threats and the desire to Keep Us Safe.

Read the Rest: Washington gets explicit: its ‘war on terror’ is permanent | Glenn Greenwald | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

“What on earth does that have to do with the job I was applying for? It was like something out of ‘Seinfeld.’ ”

American employers have a variety of job vacancies, piles of cash and countless well-qualified candidates. But despite a slowly improving economy, many companies remain reluctant to actually hire, stringing job applicants along for weeks or months before they make a decision.

Here’s a quick 4-Minute lesson in the realities of how modern day monopolies are strangling the market place — both consumers and entrepreneurs.

4-Minute Video: http://www.realecontv.com/videos/corporate-criminality–1/strangled-by-monopolies.html

During the past week, revelations about misdeeds by Internal Revenue Service employees have provoked widespread and understandable outrage and provided ammunition for those who like to tear down government and its employees.

Just last month, headlines told a far different story — one of public servants playing critical and, in some instances, heroic roles as the nation experienced a series of disturbing events in rapid succession: the Boston Marathon bombings; the ricin-laced mailings to the president and a U.S. senator; a deadly fertilizer plant explosion in West, Tex.; and severe flooding in the Midwest and, in the background, saber-rattling from North Korea.

(Editor’s Note: The following reader letter came in response to: Outlaw Sheriffs Sue to Block New Colorado Gun-Control Laws http://news.yahoo.com/colorado-sheriffs-sue-block-gun-control-laws-014650482.html . — Mark L. Taylor)

As I have often said while trying to keep our local law enforcement under civlian control, a gun and badge doesn’t make anyone better than anyone else but it can make someone more potentially dangerous. It is another travesty of justice that the FBI (who keeps the national crime stats doesn’t report the crime rate among law enforcement).  I have requested such data and am always told “we don’t have such data.” The correct answer is that they don’t want to release such data.  It is ridiculous that Sheriffs are opposing gun control. 

– Tom Kriegel

SAVAR, BANGLADESH—In the wake of a garment factory collapse last month that claimed the lives of more than 1,100 laborers, clothing factory owners throughout Bangladesh issued a joint statement Wednesday, pledging to spare every expense necessary to ensure that a tragedy like this definitely happens again.

“This terrible loss of life has not opened our eyes to the conditions for workers throughout Bangladesh, and we promise to take the proper inaction so that we can guarantee all safety hazards are completely and fully ignored,” wrote Wal-Mart contractor Sujon Majumdar on behalf of over 2,000 plant owners, who vowed to stand idly by and do absolutely nothing within their power to prevent another catastrophe. “In our opinion, the workers of Bangladesh are our least important resource and deserve nothing more than unsafe and inhumane working conditions. Rest assured, this will happen again on our watch.”

The statement from the owners concluded by urging readers to pledge to a relief fund to support the revenues that were tragically lost in the recent collapse.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/bangladesh-factory-owners-vow-to-change-nothing-so,32451/

Let’s take our money, our economy, and our power back.

Imagine if your only choice for food came from genetically-modified crops. You would likely suffer regular health problems, be at a higher risk for numerous crippling diseases, and have no choice but to accept that as a fact of life. But what if, one day, you came across a farmer’s market where you could buy locally-produced, organically-grown, healthy fruits and vegetables at a fraction of the cost of GMO food. Wouldn’t you switch immediately and never go back? Your body would heal and you’d feel great.

Similarly, most US states, with the exception of North Dakota (we’ll get there in a minute) have no choice but to depend on big Wall Street banks for the money necessary to build critical infrastructure, most of which comes with obscene interest rates and get-rich-quick schemes like capital appreciation loans. These are concocted by predatory bankers intending to bleed municipalities and counties dry, from Jefferson County, Alabama, to Napa Valley, California. But public banking could be the antidote to free us from our dependency on Wall Street and put monetary power in the people’s hands. In short, our economy would heal and we’d all feel great.

Despite its name, the Federal Reserve is a private corporation, unaccountable to our government and autonomous in its operation. Even though the president appoints the chairman and the board of governors, the Federal Reserve and its 12 regional branches in America’s major cities are dominated largely by Wall Street. Through the devious process of fractional reserve banking, it has complete control over our monetary policy, as well as responsibility for price control and establishing long-term interest rates. It shouldn’t be any surprise to anyone that this private corporation allows Wall Street to withdraw billions of dollars at 0.75% interest while homeowners and college students who depend on those same banks for loans have to pay far higher rates. The buddy-buddy relationship the Federal Reserve has with Wall Street was fully revealed after the Fed’s first official audit in 2011, when the Fed’s records showed they had dished out $16 trillion in bailouts to not just US banks, but foreign banks as well. That’s a trillion dollars more than the United States’ entire GDP for 2011.

The Fed posted a whopping $77.4 billion in profit in 2011. While, to its credit, the Fed gave almost all of their profits back to the U.S. Treasury, those profits were made while buying up the same toxic mortgage-backed securities that Wall Street intentionally created to fail while enriching themselves. The Fed’s quantitative easing policy, known as QE3, is simultaneously shoveling $40 billion per week into the black hole of Wall Street’s coffers to keep buying up these worthless, obtuse financial instruments. The Fed claims that quantitative easing has helped create or save almost 2,000,000 jobs since 2008, and while that may be true, the people could probably find a much better way to spend $40 billion a month and create and save far more jobs.

The Bank of North Dakota, while ensconced in a deep Republican stronghold, is one of America’s best kept secrets. It began in the early 20th century as a way for farmers to deposit and borrow money without having to depend on the big, corrupt banks in New York and Chicago. The BND holds the state’s tax revenues instead of Wall Street, and makes loans to the community at a reasonable rate through a partnership with 80 other community banks across North Dakota. And as a public bank, the BND has a policy of not engaging in Wall Street gambling schemes like derivatives trading, subprime mortgage lending or the credit default swap market. Because of that, North Dakota’s public bank will never need a bailout from the taxpayers.

Because the privately-operated Federal Reserve still has a monopoly on our money supply, the BND still has to ultimately borrow money from the private banking cartel. However, the BND still supplies tens of millions of dollars to the state treasury every year that can be used for badly-needed investments in things like schools, healthcare and transportation infrastructure. Imagine if we could nationalize the Fed and our money supply, using the BND’s model for all 50 states to safely deposit their money and make low-interest loans available to everyday homeowners and small business owners! It would bring Wall Street to its knees.

Luckily, the Public Banking Institute is teaching everyone how we can make that happen at their 2013 conference at Dominican University from June 2-4 in San Rafael, California. Birgitta Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a member of the Icelandic Parliament (and the Pirate Party), will be speaking about her fight to hold the Icelandic banks that ruined her country’s economy accountable. Investigative journalist Matt Taibbi, who has written extensively about Wall Street’s pillaging of local economies through obscure financial trickery, will be speaking as well. You can learn more about the conference by clicking here. Let’s take our money, our economy, and our power back.

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/279-82/17480-saving-our-economy-with-public-banking