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Thursday, August 28, 2014

Pentagon Demanded a War on Syria, now a War on Syria's Enemy, ISIS

Let's Treat Assad Fairly - Like Any Other Pro-West Dictator in the Middle East

Wednesday, 27 August 2014 14:39By Robert Naiman, Truthout | Op-Ed

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A portrait of President Bashar al-Assad on a street in Homs, Syria, March 23, 2014. (Photo: Sergey Ponomarev / The New York Times)

Glenn Greenwald thinks it's funny that while a year ago, we were told that it was an absolute emergency to bomb Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and arm insurgents fighting to overthrow him, now we're being told that it's an absolute emergency to bomb Assad's main military opponents. Greenwald concludes that the mainconstant of US foreign policy is that we always have to bomb people; exactly whom we have to bomb right now is much less important.

I don't dispute Greenwald's thesis as far as it goes, but there is another important way to look at the situation, which is that appearing to commit the US government to the project of overthrowing the Syrian government was a poorly-thought through and deeply immoral strategic blunder in the first place, and now we have a strategic opportunity to correct that historic blunder. "Never let a good crisis go to waste," as the saying goes; this crisis is a good opportunity to "shake the etch-a-sketch" on the foolish and dangerous idea that the US government had an obligation to overthrow the Syrian government.

If we take the statements of US government officials and members of Congress about non-democratic US allies in the region at face value, or even if we look at actual US engagement on democracy and human rights with these allies, it's a lie to say that the only choices in Syria are "overthrow the Syrian government" or "forget about human rights and democracy."

I will pass over, as Cicero said, the question of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.

Consider instead cases that are more obvious from the point of view of the majority of Americans: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Bahrain are not democracies by any meaningful definition of the term; they are all committing grave violations of human rights, and yet we are not seeking to overthrow their governments. Turkey is a democracy with severe human rights issues. Iraq and Iran are "majority rule" countries (more than you can say for Bahrain) that have severe human rights issues, which in the case of Iraq, are generally conceded to be a key cause of the fact that the Iraqi government has lost control of Sunni Arab areas to Sunni Arab insurgents.

If we were to ask US officials, "Does the fact that the United States is not seeking to overthrow these governments mean that the United States is not trying to promote democracy and human rights in these countries?" they would say no, and they would not be lying. They would, if they were being fully honest, say that we are dealing with these countries on a case-by-case basis, and subject to the constraints of the facts that our "national security concerns" take first priority, and the fact that our ability to influence these countries varies, we are doing what we can to promote democracy and human rights in these countries.

We can and should dispute whether the United States is doing everything it can in these countries to promote democracy and human rights subject to those constraints - fuzzy constraints which are notoriously subject to tendentious interpretation. But suppose we take it as a given that this is how US officials and people who have influence on them view the situation. Why would it be a moral outrage to view Syria the same way?

Suppose that, from now on, we adopt the following policy with respect to democracy and human rights in Syria: "Subject to the fact that our national security concerns take first priority, and subject to the degree of influence we have in Syria, we will do what we can in Syria to promote democracy and human rights." That is, suppose we were to adopt the same policy in Syria that we have with respect to other non-democracies and human rights abusers in the region. Why would that be a moral outrage? Why should our unwillingness to commit to overthrowing the Syrian government be a litmus test of our commitment to promoting democracy and human rights?

In particular, given what happened in Libya (among many other examples) after the United States helped overthrow Libya's government, shouldn't we question the automatic assumption that US overthrow of a government automatically leads to an improvement in the human rights situation in the country from the point of viewof the country's residents? And what other point of view should have greater weight than the views of the country's residents?

Finally - and perhaps most importantly - recall that a year ago, the argument that was supposed to be trumping inside Washington for bombing the Syrian government was that it was necessary to "confront Iran."

Well, Iran is our most powerful ally on the ground right now on the issue of the day, confronting the so-called "Islamic State" Sunni Arab insurgency. Haggling over boring technical details continues indefinitely in the negotiations over Iran's nuclear program. What's the urgency now, or in any future that we can see, to "confront Iran" by overthrowing the Syrian government?

ROBERT NAIMAN

Robert Naiman is policy director at Just Foreign Policy and president of Truthout's board of directors.

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Elizabeth Warren Far More Progressive than Killary Klingon

Clinton vs. Warren: Big Differences, Despite Claims to the Contrary

By David Sirota

Hillary Clinton’s political allies want Democratic primary voters to believe that the former secretary of state is just like populist Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, and they’ve been claiming that there are no differences between the two possible presidential contenders. There’s just one problem: That’s not true.

Clinton last week filled in for George W. Bush at an Ameriprise conference, continuing a speaking tour that is raking in big money from Wall Street. One of her aides later downplayed the idea that Clinton’s relationship with the financial sector could be a political liability for her, should she face Warren in the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries. The aide defiantly insisted that the two are exactly the same.

“Ask any so-called ‘left’ or ‘liberal’ critic of Hillary to name a single vote or position (on) which Elizabeth Warren and Hillary would disagree,” said the Clinton strategist to The Hill newspaper.
OK, fine. I’ll take the challenge - there are many differences between these two politicians.

For example, in her book, “The Two Income Trap,” Warren slammed Clinton for casting a Senate vote in 2001 for a bankruptcy bill that ultimately passed in 2005. That legislation makes it more difficult for credit card customers to renegotiate their debts, even as it allows the wealthy to protect their second homes and yachts from creditors. According to a 2009 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the bankruptcy bill’s provisions changing debt payback provisions played a central role in the foreclosure crisis, as the new law forced homeowners to pay off credit card debts before paying their mortgage.

“As first lady, Mrs. Clinton had been persuaded that the bill was bad for families, and she was willing to fight for her beliefs,” Warren wrote. “As New York’s newest Senator, however, it seems that Hillary Clinton could not afford such a principled position. ... The bill was essentially the same, but Hillary Rodham Clinton was not.”

Additionally, Warren has been a critic of so-called free trade deals, which create regulatory protections for patents and copyrights, but remove such protections for workers, consumers and the environment. Clinton, by contrast, was a key backer of NAFTA and voted for various free trade pacts during her Senate tenure.

Clinton was also a prominent supporter of the 1996 welfare reform legislation that made it more difficult for poor families to receive government benefits. With a new study from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities showing that law coinciding with a rise in extreme childhood poverty, Clinton’s position may open her up to criticism from Warren, who has positioned herself as a champion of the poor.

There is also Clinton’s vote for the Iraq War. During her 2012 Senate campaign, Warren was an outspoken critic of the War. As a Senator, Warren is a co-sponsor of a new bill to repeal the original authorization for war in Iraq that Clinton supported.

Clinton, of course, has attempted to distance herself from her previous positions. In 2008, she said, “I should not have voted for that bankruptcy law.” That year, she also said she believes the NAFTA free trade model needs to be “adjusted.” And in her 2014 book, “Hard Choices,” Clinton says of her Iraq War vote: “I wasn’t alone in getting it wrong. But I still got it wrong. Plain and simple.”

The reversals certainly position Clinton closer to the base of the Democratic Party. But, as then-Sen. Barack Obama’s criticism of Clinton on these issues proved in 2008, her retrospective apologies and admissions do not necessarily wipe the record clean for Democratic voters, especially when she’s raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars from financial firms.

If she does face Warren in 2016, Clinton’s record will likely once again be center stage, regardless of the recent contrition.

David Sirota is the best-selling author of the books “Hostile Takeover,” “The Uprising” and “Back to Our Future.” Email him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.

Governments Reject Regulators Questions About Hedge Funds

Journalists on the

Government's Blacklist

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American Redaction. (Image: <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/truthout/6163866838" target="_blank"> Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t</a>)

American Redaction. (Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t)DAVID SIROTA ON BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

As states move to hide details of government deals with Wall Street, and as politicians come up with new arguments to defend secrecy, a study released earlier this month revealed that many government information officers block specific journalists they don't like from accessing information.

The news comes as 47 federal inspectors general sent a letter to lawmakers criticizing "serious limitations on access to records" that they say have "impeded" their oversight work.

The data about public information officers was compiled over the past few years by Kennesaw State University professor Dr. Carolyn Carlson. Her surveys found that 4 in 10 public information officers say "there are specific reporters they will not allow their staff to talk to due to problems with their stories in the past."

"That horrified us that so many would do that," Carlson told the Columbia Journalism Review, which reported on her presentation at the July conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

Carlson has conducted surveys of journalists and public information officers since 2012. In her most recent survey of 445 working journalists, four out of five reported that "their interviews must be approved" by government information officers, and "more than half of the reporters said they had actually been prohibited from interviewing [government] employees at least some of the time by public information officers."

In recent years, there have been signs that the Federal government is reducing the flow of public information. Reason Magazine has reported a 114 percent increase in Freedom of Information Act rejections by the Drug Enforcement Agency since President Obama took office. The National Security Agency has also issued blanket rejections of FOIA requests about its metadata program. And the Associated Press reported earlier this year that in 2013, "the government cited national security to withhold information a record 8,496 times - a 57 percent increase over a year earlier and more than double Obama's first year."

Those revelations foreshadowed a recent letter from more than half of the government's inspectors general saying that Federal agencies' move to hide information from them represents a "potentially serious challenge to the authority of every Inspector General and our ability to conduct our work thoroughly, independently, and in a timely manner."

In that letter, the inspectors general assert that agencies are saying information is "privileged" and therefore must be kept secret.

That is one of many increasingly creative rationales that public officials are now citing as reason to keep government information secret.

In Chicago, for example, officials in Mayor Rahm Emanuel's administration rejected a request for documents about an opaque $1.7 billion fund that is often used for corporate subsidies, some of which have flowed to the mayor's political donors. In a letter explaining the rejection, the officials said it would take too much staff time to compile the data and that therefore the request was "unduly burdensome."

Likewise in Rhode Island, Democratic State Treasurer Gina Raimondo rejected a newspaper request for information about the state's hedge fund contracts on the grounds that she wanted fund managers to "keep this information confidential to help preserve the productivity of their staff and to minimize attention around their own compensation."

That denial was one of many similar rejections from states seeking to keep the details of their Wall Street deals secret.

Carlson's polls from 2014 show that three-quarters of journalists surveyed now agree that "the public is not getting the information it needs because of barriers agencies are imposing on journalists' reporting practices."

That's the whole point of government secrecy, of course - and the ramifications are predictable. In an information vacuum, the public is being systematically divorced from public policy, which is exactly what too many elected officials want.

---

David Sirota is a staff writer at PandoDaily and the best-selling author of the books "Hostile Takeover," "The Uprising" and "Back to Our Future." Email him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.

Education Reformers Omit Effect of White Supremacy

Elite Attackers of Public Schools Don't Admit the Impact of Economic Inequality, Racism on Education

Wednesday, 27 August 2014 09:56By Mark Naison, Haymarket Books | Book Excerpt

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(Image: Nick Thompson)Wayne Au, editor of Rethinking Schools and co-editor of Pencils Down: Rethinking High-Stakes Testing and Accountability in Public Schools, writes of the book, Badass Teachers Unite: "In this powerful collection of essays, education activist and historian Mark Naison offers teachers, parents, students and anyone else concerned with the health of public schools in this country some invaluable tools in the fight against corporate education 'reform.'

Badass Teachers Unite is a clarion call for all of us to reclaim public education in the name of social justice."

Naison's broadside attack on the co-opting of public schools is in the same vein as Jose Vilson's This Is Not a Test: A New Narrative on Race, Class and Education (previously featured as a Truthout Progressive Pick).

Education Reformers and the New Jim Crow

If somebody told me 15 years ago, when I was spending many of my days working with community groups in the Bronx and East New York, dealing with the consequences of the crack epidemic, that you could solve the problems of neighborhoods under siege by insulating students in local schools from the conditions surrounding them and by devoting every ounce of teachers' energies to raising their test scores, I would have said, "What planet are you living on?" Students were bringing the stresses of their daily lives into the classroom in ways that no teacher with a heart could ignore, and these stresses created obstacles to concentrating in school, much less completing homework. People living in middle-class communities couldn’t imagine these forces. To be effective in getting students to learn, teachers had to be social workers, surrogate parents, and neighborhood protectors, as well as people imparting skills. At times, the interpersonal dimensions of their work were more important than the strictly instructional components.

The leaders of the education reform movement, from Secretary Arne Duncan - to the head of Teach for America, to Michelle Rhee, to the heads of almost every urban school system - regard discussions of neighborhood conditions as impediments to the quest to achieve educational equity and demand that teachers shut out the conditions they are living in. Teachers must now inspire, prod and discipline their charges to achieve results on standardized tests that match those of their middle-class counterparts living in more favorable conditions.

The position they are taking, that schools in depressed areas can be radically improved without doing anything to improve conditions in the neighborhoods they are located in, flies in the face of the common sense of anyone who lives or works in such communities, so much so that it represents a form of collective madness!

The idea that an entire urban school system (not a few favored schools) can be uplifted strictly through school-based reforms, such as eliminating teacher tenure or replacing public schools with charter schools, without changing any of the conditions driving people further into poverty is contrary to anyone’s lived experience and has in fact, never been accomplished anywhere in the world.

Let me break down for you what the no excuses approach to school reform

means in commonsense terms.

Basically, reformers propose to raise test scores and radically improve graduation rates in urban school systems without doing anything to:

1. Reduce homelessness, residential instability and housing overcrowding as factors in student’s lives.

2. Deal with hunger, poor diet and obesity as factors impeding education performance.

3. Challenge racial profiling and police violence in student’s lives, not

only in their neighborhoods, but in the schools.

4. Deal with unemployment, underemployment and wage compression

as factors in the lives of students and their families.

5. Deal with the impact of the prison industrial complex on students and

their families, particularly the psychic and economic stress of having close

relatives in prison and having them be unemployable when they return.

6. Deal with the trauma of domestic violence and peer violence as it impacts

students’ lives and their educational performance.

7. Deal with the way students are profiled by police, store owners, and ordinary citizens when they leave their neighborhoods and go into downtown business districts or middle-class neighborhoods.

Essentially, reformers are asking everyone involved with schools in

under-resourced communities, especially teachers and administrators,

to block out all the conditions that Michelle Alexander has highlighted

in her book The New Jim Crow. Not only will this approach fail miserably,

it gives a free pass to economic and political elites whose policies helped

create the very conditions that lock people into poverty.

No wonder billionaires love these policies. It takes the onus off of them for concentrating so much of the nation’s wealth in the top 1% of the population.

No wonder politicians love it. It absolves them of responsibility for building the largest prison system in the industrialized world, filling it with poor people and people of color, and creating huge police forces and drug

enforcement policies that assure such prisons are filled.

Essentially, current school reform policies represent a brilliant tactic

to avoid dealing with the real causes of poverty and

inequality in society, while finding a convenient scapegoat

in public school teachers and their unions. These policies

are transparent, ill considered and immoral. And over time, people in the communities most targeted by these reforms will

rise up in protest.

Copyright of Mark Naison (2014). Not to be reprinted without permission of the publisher, Haymarket Books.

MARK NAISON

Mark Naison is, professor of African American studies and history at Fordham University, is author of many books and articles including Communists in Harlem During the Depression and White Boy: A Memoir. The founder of the Bronx African American History project, Naison has emerged in the past five years as a passionate defender of America's public school teachers and students.