Obama Attacks His Political Base
By Randy Shaw
Beyond Chron: December 2, 2010
http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=8714#more>
President Obama's unilateral decision to suspend federal pay hikes for two
years primarily targets a federal workforce that has a higher percentage of
African-Americans, Latinos, other racial minorities and disabled workers
than the private sector. In other words, Obama has attacked a key component
of the Democratic Party's political base. Meanwhile, Republicans are adamant
about protecting tax breaks for their own base of those annually earning
over $250,000, and never in the presidency of George W. Bush did he take
unilateral action that primarily hurt the finances of key Republican
constituencies. Even Obama's most steadfast defenders will have a hard time
rationalizing this action, which now gives private sector employers "cover"
for demanding pay freezes for their workers as well.
I've acknowledged that my upbeat 2008 assessments of Barack Obama's
political skills have proved way wrong. But after his decision to freeze
federal salaries – not as part of any broader budget and tax deal, but
unilaterally – it's clear that the President is far more politically
clueless than previously thought.
*Accepting Republican Framing*
A President who won election by brilliantly framing issues now accepts
Republican framing on almost every issue. This is true on Afghanistan, the
budget deficit and now to the notion that federal employees earn too much
money and need to be those first targeted for economic pain.
Imagine, if you can bear it, what Obama's reaction would have been to John
McCain offering such a proposal during the 2008 campaign. Obama would have
attacked McCain for "punishing working people" while "protecting the
wealthy" at every campaign stop, and would not have changed the subject
until McCain withdrew the plan.
Those were the days when we couldn't wait for Obama to take his framing
skills to the White House. But those days seem like long ago.
We now have a Democratic President who talks more about the deficit than
unemployment, and who bypasses a powerful message of Republicans protecting
tax breaks for millionaires to shift the news cycle to freezing wages for
federal workers.
Wasn't David Plouffe supposed to prevent such framing errors?
Barack Obama has just done more to make the case that federal employees are
well compensated, if not overpaid, than any Republican.
And good luck for unionized and non-unionized private sector workers when it
comes to seeking pay hikes; employers will simply say that what's good for
federal workers should be fine for them.
And if workers contest this, employers will say that their argument is with
the President.
*Obama's Unilateral Conservatism*
While Obama's progressive agenda has been hampered by Republican
obstructionism, his record when acting unilaterally is quite conservative.
This includes such major decisions as escalating a costly and pointless
Afghanistan war, unilaterally creating a budget deficit commission and
putting a Republican conservative and Democratic neoliberal in charge, and
now the federal pay freeze.
Obama did finally make (under strong AFL-CIO pressure) pro-union recess
appointments to the NLRB, and unilaterally appointed progressive Elizabeth
Warren, but the once widely shared notion that left to his own devices he
would be a solid progressive is no longer credible.
Lacking the political will or confidence to fight for progressive policies,
Obama
seems more content than ever to hone an image of national mediator. Obama
may see announcing a federal worker wage hike in exchange for no Republican
concessions as part of this mediator role, but it is certainly not what
federal employees, the middle-class and progressives thought they were
getting when they backed Obama's drive to the Democratic nomination and then
to the White House.
***
http://www.thenation.com/article/156755/wikileaks-vs-empire
WikiLeaks vs. The Empire
Tom Hayden
The Nation: November 30, 2010
Leading US human rights lawyers Leonard Weinglass and Michael Ratner have
joined the defense team for Julian Assange and Wikileaks. US officials are
employing cyber-warfare and prosecutorial steps to deny any safe haven for
the Wikileaks operation with a fervor comparable to their drone attacks on
Al Qaeda havens in Pakistan and Yemen. WikiLeaks' Julian Assange was placed
on Interpol's "most wanted" list as US authorities intensified efforts to
suppress the whistleblower organization's deluge of classified US diplomatic
cables. Assange's location was not immediately known. His choices are to
turn himself in or be tracked down by local police. If outside of Sweden, he
could face extradition on charges to stand trial there. Or the US could seek
his extradiction on charges of espionage or theft of classified documents.
Two cyber-attacks have been reported against WikiLeaks servers this week.
The Justice Department is seeking indictments on espionage charges from a
grand jury quietly impaneled this week in arch-conservative Alexandria,
Virginia. Assange is in London, facing rape and sexual harrassment charges
in Sweden, which he denies. Extradition could be sought by the United States
at any time from either venue.
Why is this drama important? Not because of "life-threatening" leaks, as
claimed by the establishment, but because the closed doors of power need to
be open to public review. We live increasingly in an Age of Secrecy, as
described by Garry Wills in Bomb Power, among recent books. It has become
the American Way of War, and increasingly draws the curtains over American
democracy itself. The wars in Pakistan and Yemen are secret wars. The war in
Afghanistan is dominated by secret US Special Operations raids and killings.
The CIA has its own secret army in Afghanistan. Gen. Stanley McChrystal's
entire record in Iraq was classified. And so on, ad nauseam.
And what is the purpose of all the secrecy? As Howard Zinn always
emphasized, the official fear was that the American people might revolt if
we knew the secrets being kept from us. In Rolling Stone's expose of
McChrystal's war this year, one top military adviser said that "if Americans
pulled back and started paying attention to this war, it would become even
less popular." McChrystal himself joked about sending out Special Forces
units to kill at night then having to "scold" them in the morning.
And revolt we should, against those who would keep the affairs of empire
shrouded. We should not be distracted by the juicy tidbits that may or may
not be better left unreported. The focus of Congressional hearings and
journalistic investigation should be on matters of public policy in which
the American people are being lied to, most notably these:
a.. "We'll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours"-Yemen's Ali
Abdullah Saleh to Gen. David Petraeus.
b.. One document confirms that the top Afghan leader in Kandahar, the
brother of President Karzai, is a corrupt drug dealer: "Note: while we must
deal with AWK [Ahmed Wali Karzai] as the head of the Provincial Council [of
Kandahar], he is widely understood to be corrupt and a narcotics
trafficker."
c.. Another document reveals that the US embassy regarded the military
coup in Honduras was completely illegal, although the US came to support a
coalition with the coup-makers. "The Embassy perspective is that there is no
doubt that the military, Supreme Court and National Congress conspired on
June 28 in what constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup against the
Executive Branch.. There is equally no doubt from our perspective that
Roberto Micheletti's assumption of power was illegitimate."
Without public outcry, don't expect anyone to be following up on these
shocking revelations. Instead, there will be a continuing escalation of the
cyber-warfare and legal persecution of WikLeaks and Assange.
The Washington Times is calling for "waging war" on the WikiLeaks web
presence. The new chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, Rep.
Peter King, wants to designate WikiLeaks as a foreign terrorist
organization, which would block credit-card donations to the organization
and criminalize any civic support or even free legal advice under the
Patriot Act, according to King. The military already holds Pfc. Bradley
Manning in isolation on charges of having downloaded the files.
The Pentagon's Cyber Command is allowed to conduct "full-spectrum military
cyberspace operations in order to enable actions in all domains"-which
author Declan McCullagh of CNET says "includes destroying electronic
infrastructure as thoroughly as a B-52 bombing would level a power plant."
This may sound alarmist, but does anyone seriously expect the US government,
and its global allies, to permit more revelations to leak out week after
week, month after month, in what Der Spiegel already calls "nothing short of
a political meltdown for US foreign policy"?
What can be done?
First, activists and the independent media can intensify a de facto
teach-in, or national town meeting, to discuss the content of the documents
far and wide.
Second, civil society must be persuaded through widespread discussion that
this controversy is about the security of the elites, not national security.
Third, civil liberties lawyers need to join Weinglass and Ratner in the
legal defense of Assange, Manning and the organization as a whole. An
Ecuadorian official has offered his country as safe haven; others should
follow.
Finally, activists should demand immediate investigations of such issues as
the cover-up of American bombing in Yemen, and oppose the current official
mood of killing the messenger.
And remember: there are 250,000 more cables to go. This may be a long and
strange campaign.
Tom Hayden
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