Kagan in Context: Shafting Progressive Values
by Norman Solomon
If President Obama has his way, Elena Kagan will replace John Paul
Stevens -- and the Supreme Court will move rightward. The nomination
is very disturbing, especially because it's part of a pattern.
The White House is in the grip of conventional centrist wisdom. Grim
results stretch from Afghanistan to the Gulf of Mexico to communities
across the USA.
"It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don't cause
spills," President Obama said in support of offshore oil drilling,
less than three weeks before the April 20 blowout in the Gulf. "They
are technologically very advanced."
On numerous policy fronts, such conformity to a centrist baseline has
smothered hopes for moving this country in a progressive direction.
Now, the president has taken a step that jeopardizes civil liberties
and other basic constitutional principles.
"During the course of her Senate confirmation hearings as Solicitor
General, Kagan explicitly endorsed the Bush administration's bogus
category of 'enemy combatant,' whose implementation has been a war
crime in its own right," University of Illinois law professor Francis
Boyle noted last month. "Now, in her current job as U.S. Solicitor
General, Kagan is quarterbacking the continuation of the Bush
administration's illegal and unconstitutional positions in U.S.
federal court litigation around the country, including in the U.S.
Supreme Court."
Boyle added: "Kagan has said 'I love the Federalist Society.' This is
a right-wing group; almost all of the Bush administration lawyers
responsible for its war and torture memos are members of the
Federalist Society."
The departing Justice Stevens was a defender of civil liberties.
Unless the Senate refuses to approve Kagan for the Supreme Court, the
nation's top court is very likely to become more hostile to civil
liberties and less inclined to put limits on presidential power.
Here is yet another clear indication that progressives must mobilize
to challenge the White House on matters of principle. Otherwise,
history will judge us harshly -- and it should.
For more than 15 months, evidence has mounted that President Obama
routinely combines progressive rhetoric with contrary actions. As one
bad decision after another has emanated from the Oval Office, some
progressives have favored denial -- even though, if the name "Bush"
or "McCain" had been attached to the same presidential policies, the
same progressives would have been screaming bloody murder.
But enabling bad policies, with silent acquiescence or anemic
dissent, encourages more of them. At this point, progressive groups
and individuals who pretend that Obama's policies merely need a few
tweaks, or just suffer from a few anomalous deficiencies, are
whistling past a political graveyard.
At the same time, with less than six months to go before Election
Day, there are very real prospects of a big Republican victory that
could shift majority control of Congress. Progressives have a huge
stake in averting a GOP takeover on Capitol Hill.
The corporate-military centrism of the Obama administration has
demoralized and demobilized the Democratic Party's largely
progressive base -- the same base that swept Nancy Pelosi into the
House Speaker's office and then Barack Obama into the White House.
National polls now show Democrats to be much less enthusiastic about
voting in November than their Republican counterparts.
The conventional political wisdom (about as accurate as the claim
that "oil rigs today generally don't cause spills") is that when a
Democratic president moves rightward, his party gains strength
against Republicans. But Democrats reaped the whirlwind of that
pseudo-logic in 1994 -- after President Clinton shafted much of the
Democratic base by pushing through the corporate NAFTA trade pact
against the wishes of labor, environmental and human-rights
constituencies. That's how Newt Gingrich and other right-wing zealots
got to run Congress starting in January 1995.
For progressives, giving the Obama administration one benefit of the
doubt after another has not prevented matters from getting worse.
At the moment, U.S. troop levels are nearing 100,000 in Afghanistan.
Massive quantities of oil are belching into the Gulf of Mexico.
The White House has signaled de facto acceptance of a high
unemployment rate for several more years, while offering weak
GOP-lite countermeasures like tax breaks for businesses.
Nuclear power subsidies are getting powerful support from both ends
of Pennsylvania Avenue, while meaningful action against global
warming is nowhere in sight.
The Justice Department continues to backtrack on civil liberties.
And now, if the president's nomination of Elena Kagan is successful,
the result will move the Supreme Court to the right.
Progressives should fight the Kagan nomination.
Norman Solomon is a journalist, historian, and progressive activist.
***
http://www.alternet.org/story/146750/
Why the Oil Spill May Be the Greatest Test of Obama's Presidency
By Bill McKibben,
AlterNet: May 5, 2010,
The river of Gulf oil welling up from BP's hole in the bottom of the sea
will be the great test of the Obama presidency--but not for the reasons
people are starting to suggest.
For one thing, it's not his fault, even if he did agree a month ago to lift
the moratorium on offshore drilling. That bad judgment hasn't had time to do
any damage yet.
And even if the administration was slow off the mark in responding, they're
clearly pouring every asset they've got into the fight to save the coastline
of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. That fight will be played out over
many months, and in the end there may be simply nothing anyone can do to
turn the tide.
So the real test will simply be this: can the president seize this moment to
move boldly on the biggest question facing the world: our endless addiction
to fossil fuel. Not foreign fossil fuel, but fossil fuel period.
Between last month's coal-mine disaster and this month's ongoing oil
catastrophe, he's got the ultimate in teachable moments. If he wanted to
launch a real offensive, here's how it would look: a series of urgent
speeches in which he explained that the damage visible on the beaches of the
Gulf is only the most dramatic of the problems we face from fossil fuel.
Just as bad is what happens when oil makes it safely out of the drilling
platform or coal out of the mine: its combustion is producing the carbon
dioxide now raising the temperature of the earth. And not just the
temperature--that same flow of carbon dioxide is now quickly acidifying the
planet's oceans. If you're worried about oysters in the Gulf, you should be
worried about oysters in general, not to mention coral reefs, plankton, and
pretty much the rest of the marine food chain. In every cubic meter of the
planet's vast seas.
Those speeches would need to come with a plan--a plan far bolder than the
watered down piece of legislation due to be released sometime in the near
future by Senator Kerry, apparently with the White House's blessing. That
bill (which, ironically, was originally going to dramatically increase
offshore drilling) offers no compelling vision of the world beyond fossil
fuel, and pays scant attention to the warnings scientists have given in
recent years. A real plan would set a truly stiff price on carbon so that we
would change our habits; that would sting, as it must. A real plan would
also rebate the money raised by those fees to consumers, so the sting would
be economically bearable. There's an embryonic, though also too-weak,
version of this plan offered by the bipartisan duo of Washington's Maria
Cantwell and Maine's Susan Collins--an engaged president could use it as the
starting point for a crusade.
My guess is he won't, because it would mean confronting the electric
utilities and big oil. Instead of letting them write the plan, he'd have to
dictate the terms. And he doesn't need to do it politically--because he
followed such an anti-environmental administration, the small gestures he's
made so far on green issues (and his inspired cabinet picks) are enough to
preserve his ecological credentials. But make no mistake--nothing he's done
so far represents a real shift in our use of fossil fuel. Better than his
predecessors? Sure. But I can win a footrace with my grandma and it doesn't
make me speedy.
So we're going to find out if Obama really wants to take on the most crucial
complex of issues the world faces. This is his moment, and it's the only
possible silver lining to that very black cloud spreading out from the
Deepwater drillhole.
Bill McKibben, a scholar in residence at Middlebury College, is the author
of the new book Eaarth and founder of the climate campaign 350.org.
© 2010 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
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