Many thanks to EarthAction/Mha-Atma for this far-ranging revue of critical issues. Ed
_____ From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, December 20, 2011 7:44 PM To: [email protected] Subject: ACTION + Who Is Government For + Unpaid Bills of the Iraq War Last week, Congress gave final approval to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), despite the fact that it allows the president to put "any person who has committed a belligerent act" in military detention. By giving Obama and any future president the power to imprison anyone indefinitely and without trial on the basis of accusation-even without proof-of a "belligerent act," the NDAA is a direct assault on the Bill of Rights. President Obama had previously said he would veto the bill, but last Wednesday he backpedaled. He hasn't yet signed the bill, though, so there's still time for us to act. Call the White House at (202) 456-1414 and demand that President Obama veto the NDAA. Your actions have already made a real difference. Only seven senators opposed the NDAA in a vote December 1, but after dozens of actions across the country, the number of Senators opposing the bill nearly doubled to 13 by late last week. So hit the phones today and tell the president to veto indefinite detention. President Obama has until December 26 to either sign or veto the bill, but he hasn't taken any action yet. Time is running out, but you can still make a difference. Defend the Constitution. Call (202) 456-1414 now and tell President Obama that We the People are counting on him to veto this un- American law. Shahid Buttar Executive Director Bill of Rights Defense Committee 8 Bridge Street, Suite A, Northampton, MA 01060 www.bordc.org [email protected] Telephone: 413-582-0110 Fax: 413-582-0116 ----------------------- http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/279-82/9000-focus-the- defining-issue-who-is-government-for The Defining Issue: Who Is Government For By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog 20 December 11 The defining political issue of 2012 won't be the government's size. It will be who government is for. Americans have never much liked government. After all, the nation was conceived in a revolution against government. But the surge of cynicism now engulfing America isn't about government's size. The cynicism comes from a growing perception that government isn't working for average people. It's for big business, Wall Street, and the very rich instead. In a recent Pew Foundation poll, 77 percent of respondents said too much power is in the hands of a few rich people and corporations. That's understandable. To take a few examples: Wall Street got bailed out but homeowners caught in the fierce downdraft caused by the Street's excesses have got almost nothing. Big agribusiness continues to rake in hundreds of billions in price supports and ethanol subsidies. Big pharma gets extended patent protection that drives up everyone's drug prices. Big oil gets its own federal subsidy. But small businesses on the Main Streets of America are barely making it. American Airlines uses bankruptcy to ward off debtors and renegotiate labor contracts. Donald Trump's businesses go bankrupt without impinging on Trump's own personal fortune. But the law won't allow you to use personal bankruptcy to renegotiate your home mortgage. If you run a giant bank that defrauds millions of small investors of their life savings, the bank might pay a small fine but you won't go to prison. Not a single top Wall Street executive has been prosecuted for Wall Street's mega-fraud. But if you sell an ounce of marijuana you could be put away for a long time. Not a day goes by without Republicans decrying the budget deficit. But the biggest single reason for the yawning deficit is big money's corruption of Washington. One of the deficit's biggest drivers - Medicare - would be lower if Medicare could use its bargaining leverage to get drug companies to reduce their prices. Why hasn't it happened? Big Pharma won't allow it. Medicare's administrative costs are only 3 percent, far below the 10 percent average administrative costs of private insurers. So why not tame rising healthcare costs for all Americans by allowing any family to opt in? That was the idea behind the "public option." Health insurers stopped it in its tracks. The other big budgetary expense is national defense. America spends more on our military than do China, Russia, Britain, France, Japan, and Germany combined. The basic defense budget (the portion unrelated to the costs of fighting wars) keeps growing, now about 25 percent higher than it was a decade ago, adjusted for inflation. That's because defense contractors have cultivated sponsors on Capitol Hill and located their plants and facilities in politically important congressional districts. So we keep spending billions on Cold War weapons systems like nuclear attack submarines, aircraft carriers, and manned combat fighters that pump up the bottom lines of Bechtel, Martin-Marietta, and their ilk, but have nothing to do with 21st-century combat. Declining tax receipts are also driving the deficit. That's partly because most Americans have less income to tax these days. Yet the richest Americans are taking home a bigger share of total income than at any time since the 1920s. Their tax payments are down because the Bush tax cuts reduced their top rates to the lowest level in more than half a century, and cut capital gains taxes to 15 percent. Congress hasn't even closed a loophole that allows mutual-fund and private-equity managers to treat their incomes as capital gains. So the four hundred richest Americans, whose total wealth exceeds the combined wealth of the bottom 150 million Americans put together, pay an average of 17 percent of their income in taxes. That's lower than the tax rates of most day laborers and child-care workers. Meanwhile, Social Security payroll taxes continue to climb as a share of total tax revenues. Yet the payroll tax is regressive, applying only to yearly income under $106,800. And the share of revenues coming from corporations has been dropping. The biggest, like GE, find ways to pay no federal taxes at all. Many shelter their income abroad, and every few years Congress grants them a tax amnesty to bring the money home. Get it? "Big government" isn't the problem. The problem is big money is taking over government. Government is doing less of the things most of us want it to do - providing good public schools and affordable access to college, improving our roads and bridges and water systems, and maintaining safety nets to catch average people who fall - and more of the things big corporations, Wall Street, and the wealthy want it to do. Some conservatives argue we wouldn't have to worry about big money taking over government if we had a smaller government to begin with. Here's what Congressman Paul Ryan told me Sunday morning when we were debating all this on ABC's "This Week": If the power and money are going to be here in Washington, that's where the influence is going to go . that's where the powerful are going to go to influence it. Ryan has it upside down. A smaller government that's still dominated by money would continue to do the bidding of Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, oil companies, big agribusiness, big insurance, military contractors, and rich individuals. It just wouldn't do anything else. If we want to get our democracy back we've got to get big money out of politics. We need real campaign finance reform. And a constitutional amendment reversing the Supreme Court's bizarre rulings that under the First Amendment money is speech and corporations are people. -------- The Unpaid Bills of the Iraq War By Charles P. Pierce, Esquire 17 December 11 http://www.readersupportednews.org/opinion2/265-34/8946-the- unpaid-bills-of-the-iraq-war f you don't count the contractors, and the embassy the size of Rhode Island, the fact that an awful lot of non-Iraqi someones are making a buck over there, and the long, bloody folly of it lodged in our historical memory like a kidney stone, the Iraq War pretty much ended on Wednesday with the president's speech at Fort Bragg. Or, at least, events were arranged so that whatever happens in Iraq henceforth can be more conveniently ignored. As the ever-essential Marcy Wheeler points out, Rand Paul tried to end the war officially a while back and two-thirds of the Senate voted against him, and the war never will truly be "over" until the authorization to start it in the first place is expunged from the law books. We owe some terrible bills over this. We owe them to ourselves, for letting ourselves get duped and fooled by a passel of profiteers and geopolitical magical-thinkers into a war that we kept saying, over and over again, that we didn't want. We owe them to ourselves because of the ongoing wreck we've made out of the constitutional order. (If it weren't for the Iraq war, torture wouldn't be a topic for Serious Discussion in this country.) We owe it to ourselves because, confronted with the crimes and savage maladministration that led us into this mess, we have resolutely declined to hold any of the criminal bastards who perpetrated it responsible for their offenses against this nation. That's why they're out there on Fox, telling everyone how terrible it is that their pet war is allegedly coming to an end. To borrow a line from Bruce Springsteen, to thousands of dead and wounded servicepeople, and their families, and for turning the name "Walter Reed" into a synonym for dysfunction and neglect, we owe debts no honest man can pay. We owe some terrible bills to the world for blundering around like a blind ape with a bazooka in the most volatile section of the planet. We owe them to the world for sneering at the French and laughing at the Canadians when they wouldn't follow us into the quagmire just because we said they should. We owe them to the world for our belief in our invincibility. If we'd armor-plated our Humvees as thickly as our politicians armor-plated their self-righteousness, a lot of soldiers would still be alive. We owe them to the world for re- electing C-Plus Augustus and his soulless vice-president in the middle of what we already knew was a hubristic bungle of historic proportions. We owe some terrible bills to the Iraqis. We slaughtered their citizens, demolished their infrastructure, and touched off a godawfully predictable civil war in which more of those first two happened. We left them refugees in their own country. We left them refugees in a whole lot of other countries. We should at least make a proper, humble accounting of all of this for ourselves. On Wednesday, the president said that the Iraq War belongs to history. This, of course, is true. So, for that matter, does whatever he had for breakfast that morning. But history is not just all the stuff that happened in the past. It's why all that stuff happened in the past. It's who made all that stuff happen in the past. Until that accounting takes place, the war does not belong to history. Vietnam doesn't even fully "belong to history" yet. Our politics are still fought out over the fault lines created during that previous exercise in waste and treachery. I suspect - nay, I fear - that a great effort will be made among our political elites not to let that happen again here. Nobody will want to be "divisive." We will move forward. It will not be allowed to affect our current politics, except as a handy tool with which the war-hungry claque in our conservative foreign-policy elite can bang the president over the head a few times. The Iraq War will "belong to history" in the sense that it will be buried there. That will not pay all the bills. And until those bills are paid - until the proper people pay the proper recompense for what they did to this country, to that country, and to the world - the Iraq War is not over. -- You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, option D (occasional emails and up to 3 emails/day). To be removed, or to switch options (option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know! If someone forwarded you this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to [email protected] and tell us which option you'd like. For more info on Earth Action Network go to www.earthactionnetwork.org and for more info about Mha Atma see www.drmhaatma.com. "We are dealing with a far more ominous threat than sickness and death. We are dealing with the dark side of humanity -- selfishness, avarice, aggression. All this has already polluted our skies, emptied our oceans, destroyed our forests and extinguished thousands of beautiful animals. Are our children next? . It is no longer enough to vaccinate them or give them food and water and only cure the symptoms of man's tendency to destroy everything we hold dear. Whether it be famine in Ethiopia, excruciating poverty in Guatemala and Honduras, civil strife in El Salvador or ethnic massacre in the Sudan, I saw but one glaring truth; these are not natural disaster but man-made tragedies for which there is only one man- made solution - Peace." ~Audrey Hepburn, April 1989, in a speech given while serving as goodwill ambassador for Unicef No virus found in this message. 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