The Largest Minority

September 11th, 2009 @ 1:47pm by Manila Ryce

Remember when Obama denounced Iran’s suppression of free speech? We’re doing the same for the G20.

Attorneys Call Denial of Permits to Activist Groups Bogus

PITTSBURGH, PA - September 11 - Today, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania (ACLU-PA) filed a complaint in the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania on behalf of groups seeking to hold peaceful demonstrations in downtown Pittsburgh where the Group of 20 summit (G-20) will take place later this month. The complaint charges the U.S. Secret Service, the Department of Homeland Security, the City of Pittsburgh and the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources with violating the groups’ constitutional rights to free speech.

The plaintiffs include: CODEPINK; Pittsburgh Women For Peace; 3 Rivers Climate Convergence; Thomas Merton Center; Pittsburgh Outdoor Artists; Bail Out The People and G-6 Billion. The complaint was filed after repeated efforts to negotiate with the city regarding the permits.

“The City is unjustified in denying permits to these peaceful protestors,” said CCR Vice President Jules Lobel. “We hope the court will uphold and protect the core American values of free speech and the right to dissent.”

“Despite working in good faith for weeks to resolve G-20 demonstration permits with the City of Pittsburgh and federal officials, demonstration organizers can wait no longer and will now pursue permit remedies in Federal Court,” said ACLU-PA Legal Director Witold “Vic” Walczak.

“This is a struggle for our First Amendment rights,” said Francine Porter, CODEPINK Pittsburgh Coordinator. “Refusing these permits takes away our right to educate the public about the G-20 agenda and how it relates to war, war funding and war’s impact across the globe on mostly women and children.”

“The G-20 is gathering in the midst of a worldwide economic crisis,” said Molly Rush, co-founder of the Thomas Merton Center in Pittsburgh. “Unrestrained profit-making by financial institutions and the deregulation and privatization of public resources have led to disaster for the vast majority of the world’s people. Yet the people lack a voice in the proceedings.”

The complaint alleges violations of the Constitution based on the following actions by the defendants: 1) refusal to issue permits to demonstrators for the use of Point State Park during the week of the G-20; 2) failure to issue permits for First-Amendment-protected activities in Pittsburgh’s downtown; 3) refusal to issue a permit for a march by the Thomas Merton Center within a reasonable distance from the Convention Center on one day during the summit; and 4) refusal to allow demonstrators permission to stay overnight in several Pittsburgh parks.

To read the full complaint, click here.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, membership organization dedicated to defending and expanding individual rights and personal freedoms throughout the entire state of Pennsylvania. Visit www.aclupa.org.

###

The Center for Constitutional Rights is dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Founded in 1966 by attorneys who represented civil rights movements in the South, CCR is a non-profit legal and educational organization committed to the creative use of law as a positive force for social change.

source

September 10th, 2009 @ 2:34am by Allison Kilkenny

During his speech before a joint session of Congress, President Obama called for the creation of insurance exchanges, a system designed to allow consumers to see varying prices and programs so they can comparison shop. Obama only mentioned the P-word once, and even then the public option name drop was immediately followed by the caveats “We should remain open to other ideas that accomplish our ultimate goal,” and the public option is only a “means to an end.” Read: It’s a nice idea, but drop it.

Elsewhere, Obama recycled the usual reasons for why single-payer healthcare, the Progressives’ other favored solution, just isn’t possible right now (at the mere mention of single-payer sporadic cheers broke out in the audience.) “I believe it makes more sense to build on what works and fix what doesn’t, rather than try to build an entirely new system from scratch,” said the president. This dismisses Marcia Angell’s idea of a gradual expansion of Medicare, a slow transition that wouldn’t have violently jolted our beloved system of privatized healthcare.

But nevermind. Back to the insurance exchange idea. Obama means citizens will be required by law to purchase their coverage from private insurers. Similarly, Max Baucus’s disastrous recent proposal calls for mandates that will literally force individuals and families to purchase insurance from the enemy — and one of the great culprits of the entire reform debate — Big Insurers. Without a serious public option (and not the “I’m humoring them, have they shut up yet?” approach Obama seems to be suggesting,) the insurance industry has a captive market, the American people, who will be held hostage in a for-profit health insurance scheme.

Read the rest of this entry »

August 31st, 2009 @ 2:56am by Guest

It’s time to get angry about the fact that an opportunity for health care reform is slipping through our grasp, writes Nancy Welch.

THE MORNING after the November election, I visited my father in a Cleveland rehab hospital. Weak from surgery to reinforce his disintegrating spine, he was nevertheless grinning as I walked in. “We’re going to get national health care,” he said.

My father was not a radical, not even a lifelong liberal. But having suffered through a layoff in the mid-1970s, he later watched with helpless frustration as his children struggled with multiple layoffs, a home foreclosure, loss of health insurance and mounting debt.

What I should say, then, is that my father was not born a radical, but if supporting a national health program is a radical position, he–like millions of others–had become one by the time he died, 101 days into Obama’s presidency.

My father didn’t live to see the resurrection of the lunatic far right, nor the sad confusion–”Keep government out of my Medicare!”–that results when we debate health care just once every 20 years, and without any mobilization to counter the misinformation that the intractable opponents of reform are bound to spread.

My father would also never learn that well before the corporate deployment of angry mobs to derail the August town hall meetings, President Obama had promised the pharmaceutical industry not to seek lower drug prices for “public option” beneficiaries nor allow the re-importation of cheaper drugs from Canada. If he had lived, my father might have concluded that Obama, like the Clintons in 1992, had been routed by an industry lobby whose power is too great, an American “your-health-your-problem” individualism too deeply entrenched.

But before any of us exchange “Yes, we can” for “No, we can’t,” consider:

– With rising unemployment swelling the ranks of the uninsured toward 50 million, with medical costs the leading cause of personal bankruptcy even for people with insurance, and with thousands lining up in a single day in one Los Angeles suburb for the free care offered at a M.A.S.H.-style clinic, the desperate need is plain.

– With all credible studies demonstrating that public insurance provides better care to more people at less cost than our government is already spending on health care, and with Medicare’s 44-year track record, an affordable–and popular–solution to this crisis is at hand.

– With clear Democratic majorities in the House and Senate and a national economic meltdown that forced even Alan Greenspan to admit his free-market faith was mistaken, Obama should have been well poised to advocate not merely for limited reform of private insurance accompanied by a public option, but for a government-administered, taxpayer-funded national health insurance program–single-payer or “Medicare for All.”

– With 556 union organizations in 49 states endorsing Congress’s Medicare for All bill (introduced by John Conyers in the House and Bernie Sanders in the Senate), joined with the grassroots army of Obama volunteers whose aspirations for change soared beyond getting their candidate elected, the means to launch a mass popular campaign for single-payer was–and still is–at hand.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

IF 2009 seems like déja vu, it’s because Obama took a page from the Clintons’ sorry playbook. Like Hillary Clinton, who in 1992 told Physicians for a National Health Program’s David Himmelstein that she had no interest in polls showing 70 percent of Americans favoring national health insurance, Obama and the congressional Democrats barred single-payer from consideration, going so far as to arrest 13 doctors and nurses in May who sought a place for single-payer at the Senate’s “public roundtables.”

Like Bill Clinton, who struck a deal with the “Jackson Hole” insurance-industry insiders not six weeks into his presidency, Obama asked corporate insurers to help Congress draft the various bills.

Yet even a bill that would expand the private insurance market by requiring people to purchase high-deductible policies and that would hand corporate insurers public dollars to peddle skimpy polices to the young and poor doesn’t satisfy industry lobbyists and the “Blue Dog” Democrats tucked in their pockets.

Meanwhile, in the vacuum created by Democratic Party leaders when they shut out single-payer advocates lest they frighten the big business “stakeholders,” the Republican far right has staged a comeback.

Where we should have seen thousands demonstrating for the services urgently needed in an economic crisis, we have hundreds holding signs that aren’t only ridiculous, but vilely racist and, especially when accompanied by firearms, frightening. My father was shaken by the rabble who turned out for Klan-like Palin rallies across Ohio last summer. He would have been stunned to witness their return from November’s defeat.

I suspect, however, that my father would also have been–like his favorite commentators–righteously angry. Consider Rachel Maddow castigating Obama for his “collapse of political ambition,” and Bill Maher calling for a progressive party to “represent the millions of Americans who aren’t being served by the Democrats.” What a welcome change from 1992 when most commentators blamed a supposedly government-phobic American public for the demise of a national health plan Clinton never sought.

Maher’s call for a party of the people is reminiscent of the mid-1930s, when burgeoning support for a labor party spurred a reluctant Roosevelt into delivering much of the New Deal. Even more welcome are signs of stirring among activists on the ground, from the boycott against Whole Foods, whose CEO opined against health care reform in the Wall Street Journal, to Vermont’s Health Care Is a Human Right campaign, whose carpools carried hundreds–many carrying “Single-Payer Now!” signs–to August’s town-hall meetings.

An Oregon group called “Mad as Hell Doctors” plans a September cross-country caravan to demand “Health Care for People–Not Profit!” Imagine them joined by “Mad as Hell Nurses,” by “Mad as Hell Patients”–and also by “Mad as Hell Women” demanding, with “Medicare for All,” the repeal of the Hyde Amendment so we finally have full reproductive health care rights.

My father may not have been a radical, but he understood radical action might be needed for winning health care, reversing the Bush tax cuts, stopping the wars. In November, he said, “See what he does. Then you can say, ‘To the barricades.’” I think he’d agree: The time is now.

h/t Socialist Worker via Vermont Woman

August 28th, 2009 @ 3:45pm by Manila Ryce

Jimmy Carter said that he had received a call from Khahamat religious Jews in the United States who told him that they had already begun fasting once a week in solidarity with Gaza and its people, and asked him to join them. But he and his wife had decided that they would do so alone and had already started fasting.

Carter’s speech came during iftar, the evening breakfast, held at the Grand Park Hotel in Ramallah. It included members of the Elders organization, a group of world leaders founded by Nelson Mandela, and a number of Palestinian intellectuals, businessmen and representatives of civil society institutions.

During the meal to break the day’s Ramadan fast, the group exchanged views. Desmond Tutu said, “I’ve heard many Palestinian and Israeli youth. I have heard things that are very impressive, but I felt the presence of hope in spite of the occupation and the suffering of the Palestinians that it causes, which is very important.”

Speaking of politics, Carter said, “We must not forget that all the Israeli settlements to the east of the Green Line are illegal, how can you talk about a settlement freeze” in a clear reference to what is being talked about these days by the current US administration led by Obama.

h/t IMEMC

August 27th, 2009 @ 2:01pm by Manila Ryce

We know that single payer works, and is the only option that ever has. Way back in 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which declares that health care is a human right. Profit can not play any role in deciding who is afforded that right. So why are hardly any Democratic representatives or their constituents pushing for a single payer system?

Any American liberal that accepts anything less than a single payer system is not a true liberal, period. Poor people are dying because liberals of privilege continue to capitulate to big money. The real problem with America is not its crazy Right, but its cowardly Left which never achieves anything truly progressive for the masses. They are complicit in the continued violation of the human right to health in the United States.

August 20th, 2009 @ 11:03pm by Manila Ryce

An Israeli comes to the painful conclusion that it’s the only way to save his country.

Israeli newspapers this summer are filled with angry articles about the push for an international boycott of Israel. Films have been withdrawn from Israeli film festivals, Leonard Cohen is under fire around the world for his decision to perform in Tel Aviv, and Oxfam has severed ties with a celebrity spokesperson, a British actress who also endorses cosmetics produced in the occupied territories. Clearly, the campaign to use the kind of tactics that helped put an end to the practice of apartheid in South Africa is gaining many followers around the world.

Not surprisingly, many Israelis — even peaceniks — aren’t signing on. A global boycott can’t help but contain echoes of anti-Semitism. It also brings up questions of a double standard (why not boycott China for its egregious violations of human rights?) and the seemingly contradictory position of approving a boycott of one’s own nation.

It is indeed not a simple matter for me as an Israeli citizen to call on foreign governments, regional authorities, international social movements, faith-based organizations, unions and citizens to suspend cooperation with Israel. But today, as I watch my two boys playing in the yard, I am convinced that it is the only way that Israel can be saved from itself.

I say this because Israel has reached a historic crossroads, and times of crisis call for dramatic measures. I say this as a Jew who has chosen to raise his children in Israel, who has been a member of the Israeli peace camp for almost 30 years and who is deeply anxious about the country’s future.

The most accurate way to describe Israel today is as an apartheid state. For more than 42 years, Israel has controlled the land between the Jordan Valley and the Mediterranean Sea. Within this region about 6 million Jews and close to 5 million Palestinians reside. Out of this population, 3.5 million Palestinians and almost half a million Jews live in the areas Israel occupied in 1967, and yet while these two groups live in the same area, they are subjected to totally different legal systems. The Palestinians are stateless and lack many of the most basic human rights. By sharp contrast, all Jews — whether they live in the occupied territories or in Israel — are citizens of the state of Israel.

The question that keeps me up at night, both as a parent and as a citizen, is how to ensure that my two children as well as the children of my Palestinian neighbors do not grow up in an apartheid regime.

There are only two moral ways of achieving this goal.

The first is the one-state solution: offering citizenship to all Palestinians and thus establishing a bi-national democracy within the entire area controlled by Israel. Given the demographics, this would amount to the demise of Israel as a Jewish state; for most Israeli Jews, it is anathema.

The second means of ending our apartheid is through the two-state solution, which entails Israel’s withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders (with possible one-for-one land swaps), the division of Jerusalem, and a recognition of the Palestinian right of return with the stipulation that only a limited number of the 4.5 million Palestinian refugees would be allowed to return to Israel, while the rest can return to the new Palestinian state.

Geographically, the one-state solution appears much more feasible because Jews and Palestinians are already totally enmeshed; indeed, “on the ground,” the one-state solution (in an apartheid manifestation) is a reality.

Ideologically, the two-state solution is more realistic because fewer than 1% of Jews and only a minority of Palestinians support binationalism.

For now, despite the concrete difficulties, it makes more sense to alter the geographic realities than the ideological ones. If at some future date the two peoples decide to share a state, they can do so, but currently this is not something they want.

So if the two-state solution is the way to stop the apartheid state, then how does one achieve this goal?

I am convinced that outside pressure is the only answer. Over the last three decades, Jewish settlers in the occupied territories have dramatically increased their numbers. The myth of the united Jerusalem has led to the creation of an apartheid city where Palestinians aren’t citizens and lack basic services. The Israeli peace camp has gradually dwindled so that today it is almost nonexistent, and Israeli politics are moving more and more to the extreme right.

It is therefore clear to me that the only way to counter the apartheid trend in Israel is through massive international pressure. The words and condemnations from the Obama administration and the European Union have yielded no results, not even a settlement freeze, let alone a decision to withdraw from the occupied territories.

I consequently have decided to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement that was launched by Palestinian activists in July 2005 and has since garnered widespread support around the globe. The objective is to ensure that Israel respects its obligations under international law and that Palestinians are granted the right to self-determination.

In Bilbao, Spain, in 2008, a coalition of organizations from all over the world formulated the 10-point Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign meant to pressure Israel in a “gradual, sustainable manner that is sensitive to context and capacity.” For example, the effort begins with sanctions on and divestment from Israeli firms operating in the occupied territories, followed by actions against those that help sustain and reinforce the occupation in a visible manner. Along similar lines, artists who come to Israel in order to draw attention to the occupation are welcome, while those who just want to perform are not.

Nothing else has worked. Putting massive international pressure on Israel is the only way to guarantee that the next generation of Israelis and Palestinians — my two boys included — does not grow up in an apartheid regime.

August 10th, 2009 @ 10:55am by Guest

You’ve gotta respect Chris Hedges. He doesn’t dilute his message by adding sugar to the bitter truth. Originally posted on Truthdig. h/t Dandelion Salad

The American empire has not altered under Barack Obama. It kills as brutally and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as it did under George W. Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury to enrich the corporate elite as rapaciously. It will not give us universal health care, abolish the Bush secrecy laws, end torture or “extraordinary rendition,” restore habeas corpus or halt the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of citizens. It will not push through significant environmental reform, regulate Wall Street or end our relationship with private contractors that provide mercenary armies to fight our imperial wars and produce useless and costly weapons systems.

The sad reality is that all the well-meaning groups and individuals who challenge our permanent war economy and the doctrine of pre-emptive war, who care about sustainable energy, fight for civil liberties and want corporate malfeasance to end, were once again suckered by the Democratic Party. They were had. It is not a new story. The Democrats have been doing this to us since Bill Clinton. It is the same old merry-go-round, only with Obama branding. And if we have not learned by now that the system is broken, that as citizens we do not matter to our political elite, that we live in a corporate state where our welfare and our interests are irrelevant, we are in serious trouble. Our last hope is to step outside of the two-party system and build movements that defy the Democrats and the Republicans. If we fail to do this, we will continue to undergo a corporate coup d’etat in slow motion that will end in feudalism.

We owe Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney and the Green Party an apology. They were right. If a few million of us had had the temerity to stand behind our ideals rather than our illusions and the empty slogans peddled by the Obama campaign, we would have a platform. We forgot that social reform never comes from accommodating the power structure but from frightening it. The Liberty Party, which fought slavery, the suffragists who battled for women’s rights, the labor movement, and the civil rights movement knew that the question was not how do we get good people to rule—those attracted to power tend to be venal mediocrities—but how do we limit the damage the powerful do to us. These mass movements were the engines for social reform, the correctives to our democracy and the true protectors of the rights of citizens. We have surrendered this power. It is vital to reclaim it. Where is the foreclosure movement? Where is the robust universal health care or anti-war movement? Where is the militant movement for sustainable energy?

“Something is broken,” Nader said when I reached him at his family home in Connecticut. “We are not at the Bangladesh level in terms of passivity, but we are getting there. No one sees anything changing. There is no new political party to give people a choice. The progressive forces have no hammer. When they abandoned our campaign, they told the Democrats we have nowhere to go and will take whatever you give us. The Democrats are under no heat in the electoral arena from the left.

“There comes a point when the public imbibes the ultimatum of the plutocracy,” Nader said when asked about public apathy. “They have bought into the belief that if it protests, it will be brutalized by the police. If they have Muslim names, they will be subjected to Patriot Act treatment. This has scared the hell out of the underclass. They will be called terrorists.

Read the rest of this entry »

August 6th, 2009 @ 1:58pm by Manila Ryce

Rachel Maddow does a terrific service here, exposing the corporate players and PR firms behind this so-called “grassroots” movement against health care reform. Nothing gets old white people riled up to defend their way of life (aka privledge) like the words “socialism”, “liberty”, and of course “founding fathers”. Astroturf campaigns were perfected overseas decades ago as a way for corporate America to justify the overthrow of democratically-elected governments who threatened their rule.

My one addition to Maddow’s commentary is the same for any commentary which points the finger squarely at Republicans. BOTH parties are preventing meaningful health care reform through PR and manipulation, both work for the benefit of drug and insurance companies, and both claim their pro-corporate plan is what average Americans are screaming for. One case in point is Obama’s reliance on the pharmaceutical industry to shape a plan he claims average Americans want.

While this particular PR campaign against health care reform is directed towards Republicans, PR firms often target both parties. One PR firm working for the “clean coal” industry actually seemed surprised that they found no political resistance to their agenda by either candidate during the presidential election.

Back to health care. What polls have shown for years is that Americans want a single-payer system. Democrats and Republicans are two wings of the Business Party who share the common goal of violating the most basic of human rights for the benefit of big business. By taking sides with either party in this faux debate we’re once again fighting against our own interests.