By William Fisher
“In an admission that took the intelligence community and its critics by surprise, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair acknowledged in a congressional hearing Wednesday that the U.S. may, with executive approval, deliberately target and kill U.S. citizens who are suspected of being involved in terrorism.”
That’s the lead paragraph of the news story I wrote for InterPress News Service last Friday. Since then, I just haven’t been able to get this thing out of my mind.
Think about it: “…may, with executive approval, deliberately target and kill U.S. citizens who are suspected of being involved in terrorism.”
That means that the president of the United States can decide who lives and who doesn’t. Not a court. Not a jury. Just the president.
The proposition is overwhelming in its simplicity. And in its stupidity. And in its cavalier abandonment of our most precious principle: the rule of law. That quaint tradition we always cite as the root of our American “exceptionalism.”
The key word here is suspected. Killing U.S. citizens who are suspected of being involved in terrorism.
That means we must all believe that our intelligence mavens are perfect, infallible, incapable of error.
But common sense and history should tell us this cannot be true. Our intelligence folks make mistakes all the time. They are humans and humans cannot be infallible. And their performance in recent years has not been all that stellar. Think WMD. Think 9/11. Think Maher Arar. Think Brandon Mayfield. Think Richard Jewel and Steven Hatfill.
Lots of little slipups here!
But those errors are correctible. After we go ahead and kill someone, there’s no do-over. There’s nothing more final than death.
I found Admiral Blair’s revelation so troubling that I consulted some of the country’s most respected Constitutional scholars to see if I was missing something.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t. As Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois Law School, told me, “This extrajudicial execution of human beings constitutes a grave violation of international human rights law and, under certain circumstances, can also constitute a war crime under the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949. In addition, the extrajudicial execution of U.S. citizens by the United States government also violates the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution mandating that no person "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."
He said, “The U.S. Government has now established a ‘death list’ for U.S. citizens abroad akin to those established by Latin American dictatorships during their so-called ‘dirty wars’. The Bush Administration reduced the United States of America to a Banana Republic waging a "dirty war" around the world in gross violation of international law, human rights law, and the laws of war.”
And where is the outrage? Mostly, it isn’t. Our elected officials are driven by fear or actively trying to drive us with fear, or both. And we who elected them are busy being terrified and looking the other way while we try to find jobs and pay the mortgage and feed the kids.
But even in good times, we Americans are not the best-informed citizens. We are far more likely to rail inchoately against “government interference” in our lives. Witness the tea-baggers.
Well, doesn’t it seem to you that killing American citizens represents a tad more than “interference” in our lives? Surely the killed would think so.
Maybe people just think Barack Obama would never, ever order any American citizen targeted and killed. Even if that were true – and we don’t know that – we ought at least to be worried about Obama’s successors.
Suppose it’s a Dick Nixon? Or a George W. Bush? The powers Obama enjoys today will be used – and likely misused – by others later on. And we can’t know what champions of The Imperial Presidency will emerge in our uncertain future.
Some of us thought George Bush should be impeached for eavesdropping on our phone calls and emails without a court order. That violated our Fourth Amendment right to be free from illegal searches. That was about our privacy; this is about our murder!
And collectively we all decide to go to the mall!
Our silence keeps reminding me of Pastor Martin Niemöller’s 1946 speech, in which he famously said,
First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.
Saturday, February 06, 2010
Friday, February 05, 2010
Attention: American Citizens
By William Fisher
Civil liberties advocates and legal authorities struck back today at what they describe as the “deliberate targeted killing of American citizens far away from any active hostilities, as long as the executive branch determines unilaterally that they meet a secret definition of who the enemy is."
In an admission that took the intelligence community and its critics by surprise, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair acknowledged in a congressional hearing Wednesday that the U.S. may, with executive approval, deliberately target and kill U.S. citizens who are suspected of being involved in terrorism.
The American Civil Liberties Union is among those who expressed serious concern about the lack of public information about the policy and the potential for abuse of unchecked executive power.
Attorney George Brent Mickum, who has defended a number of Guantanamo Bay detainees, told IPS, "I guess my sense is that it's just more fear mongering. They kill somebody and don't need to offer any justification. We have killed thousands of innocent civilians while attempting to target alleged operatives. And let us not forget how frequently our intelligence has been wrong about alleged operatives.”
He added, “My clients Bisher al Rawi, Jamil el-Banna, Martin Mubanga, abu Zubaydah, and Shaker Aamer all are alleged to have been operatives based on intel. In every case that intel was incorrect. I don't have any expectation that our intel with respect to alleged American operatives is likely to be any better."
Another Constitutional scholar, Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois Law School, told IPS, “This extrajudicial execution of human beings constitutes a grave violation of international human rights law and, under certain circumstances, can also constitute a war crime under the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949. In addition, the extrajudicial execution of U.S. citizens by the United States government also violates the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution mandating that no person "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."
He said, “The U.S. Government has now established a ‘death list’ for U.S. citizens abroad akin to those established by Latin American dictatorships during their so-called ‘dirty wars’. The Bush Administration reduced the United States of America to a Banana Republic waging a "dirty war" around the world in gross violation of international law, human rights law, and the laws of war.”
The human rights advocacy community was equally forceful in its pushback. Daphne Eviatar, an attorney with Human Rights First, told IPS, “The short answer is that combatants can be targeted and civilians cannot under international law. Their citizenship isn't relevant. But just being a ‘suspected terrorist’ doesn't necessarily mean they're a combatant.”
She added, “The key question, and where there may be serious disagreement, is whether the person targeted is ‘directly participating in hostilities’. If not, and they're targeted, it's a war crime.”
And Chip Pitts, president of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, said told IPS, “As with its embrace of the Bush approach to indefinite detention, the Obama administration’s even greater reliance on targeted extra-judicial killing (including of US citizens) is a tragic legal, moral, and practical mistake.”
“Even for those who accept the legitimacy of the death penalty, this further undermines the rule of law that is our best weapon in the fight against true terrorists, while completely subverting due process and constitutional rights of US citizens (including but not limited to the Fourth Amendment right to be ‘secure in their persons’ and the Fifth Amendment right not to be ‘deprived of life . . . without due process of law’)” he said.
He added, “The US government and judiciary has historically and rightly condemned such acts – sometimes explicitly as acts of terrorism -- when conducted by governments ranging from Israel to Iran, Chile, Cuba, and Libya; it is even more damnable when perpetuated by the US government itself today. This is another attempt to sidestep constitutional and human rights (as well as the usual laws of war as to target and proportionate means) by blurring those questions in the fog of the so-called ‘global war on terror.’ Citizens should protest and Congress should act to condemn such actions.”
Ben Wizner, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project, said,
"It is alarming to hear that the Obama administration is asserting that the president can authorize the assassination of Americans abroad, even if they are far from any battlefield and may have never taken up arms against the U.S., but have only been deemed to constitute an unspecified 'threat.'
Testifying before the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, Blair said, "We take direct action against terrorists in the intelligence community." He said US counter-terrorism officials may try to kill American citizens embroiled in extremist groups overseas with "specific permission" from higher up.
In response to questions from the panel's top Republican, Representative Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, Blair said, if "we think that direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that."
Blair's remarks followed a Washington Post article reporting that US President Barack Obama had embraced predecessor George W. Bush's policy of authorizing the killing of US citizens involved in terrorist activities overseas.
The Post reported that "After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, (President George W.) Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said. The evidence has to meet a certain, defined threshold. The person, for example, has to pose 'a continuing and imminent threat’ to U.S. persons and interests.”
The Obama administration appears to have adopted exactly the same policy as its predecessor.
The Post, citing anonymous US officials, said the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Joint Special Operations Command have three Americans on their lists of specific people targeted for killing or capture.
Blair said he was offering such unusually detailed information in public because "I just don't want other Americans who are watching to think that we are careless."
Blair didn't specifically articulate the standards he used, saying only that "We don't target people for free speech. We target them for taking action that threatens Americans."
Hoekstra cited an incident in 2001 in which Peru's air force shot down a plane carrying US missionaries, killing a woman and her seven-month-old daughter, after the aircraft was misidentified as a drug-smuggler.
"We were careless and we were reckless," Blair replied. "I want to make sure that this committee does everything that it can and within its power that it does not allow the community to be reckless and careless again."
The Washington Post story, by Pulitzer Prize-winner Dana Priest, revealed that, “In November 2002, a CIA missile strike killed six al-Qaeda operatives driving through the desert. The target was Abu Ali al-Harithi, organizer of the 2000 attack on the USS Cole. Killed with him was a U.S. citizen, Kamal Derwish, who the CIA knew was in the car.”
The article says, “Word that the CIA had purposefully killed Derwish drew attention to the unconventional nature of the new conflict and to the secret legal deliberations over whether killing a U.S. citizen was legal and ethical.”
Civil liberties advocates and legal authorities struck back today at what they describe as the “deliberate targeted killing of American citizens far away from any active hostilities, as long as the executive branch determines unilaterally that they meet a secret definition of who the enemy is."
In an admission that took the intelligence community and its critics by surprise, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair acknowledged in a congressional hearing Wednesday that the U.S. may, with executive approval, deliberately target and kill U.S. citizens who are suspected of being involved in terrorism.
The American Civil Liberties Union is among those who expressed serious concern about the lack of public information about the policy and the potential for abuse of unchecked executive power.
Attorney George Brent Mickum, who has defended a number of Guantanamo Bay detainees, told IPS, "I guess my sense is that it's just more fear mongering. They kill somebody and don't need to offer any justification. We have killed thousands of innocent civilians while attempting to target alleged operatives. And let us not forget how frequently our intelligence has been wrong about alleged operatives.”
He added, “My clients Bisher al Rawi, Jamil el-Banna, Martin Mubanga, abu Zubaydah, and Shaker Aamer all are alleged to have been operatives based on intel. In every case that intel was incorrect. I don't have any expectation that our intel with respect to alleged American operatives is likely to be any better."
Another Constitutional scholar, Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois Law School, told IPS, “This extrajudicial execution of human beings constitutes a grave violation of international human rights law and, under certain circumstances, can also constitute a war crime under the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949. In addition, the extrajudicial execution of U.S. citizens by the United States government also violates the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution mandating that no person "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."
He said, “The U.S. Government has now established a ‘death list’ for U.S. citizens abroad akin to those established by Latin American dictatorships during their so-called ‘dirty wars’. The Bush Administration reduced the United States of America to a Banana Republic waging a "dirty war" around the world in gross violation of international law, human rights law, and the laws of war.”
The human rights advocacy community was equally forceful in its pushback. Daphne Eviatar, an attorney with Human Rights First, told IPS, “The short answer is that combatants can be targeted and civilians cannot under international law. Their citizenship isn't relevant. But just being a ‘suspected terrorist’ doesn't necessarily mean they're a combatant.”
She added, “The key question, and where there may be serious disagreement, is whether the person targeted is ‘directly participating in hostilities’. If not, and they're targeted, it's a war crime.”
And Chip Pitts, president of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, said told IPS, “As with its embrace of the Bush approach to indefinite detention, the Obama administration’s even greater reliance on targeted extra-judicial killing (including of US citizens) is a tragic legal, moral, and practical mistake.”
“Even for those who accept the legitimacy of the death penalty, this further undermines the rule of law that is our best weapon in the fight against true terrorists, while completely subverting due process and constitutional rights of US citizens (including but not limited to the Fourth Amendment right to be ‘secure in their persons’ and the Fifth Amendment right not to be ‘deprived of life . . . without due process of law’)” he said.
He added, “The US government and judiciary has historically and rightly condemned such acts – sometimes explicitly as acts of terrorism -- when conducted by governments ranging from Israel to Iran, Chile, Cuba, and Libya; it is even more damnable when perpetuated by the US government itself today. This is another attempt to sidestep constitutional and human rights (as well as the usual laws of war as to target and proportionate means) by blurring those questions in the fog of the so-called ‘global war on terror.’ Citizens should protest and Congress should act to condemn such actions.”
Ben Wizner, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project, said,
"It is alarming to hear that the Obama administration is asserting that the president can authorize the assassination of Americans abroad, even if they are far from any battlefield and may have never taken up arms against the U.S., but have only been deemed to constitute an unspecified 'threat.'
Testifying before the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, Blair said, "We take direct action against terrorists in the intelligence community." He said US counter-terrorism officials may try to kill American citizens embroiled in extremist groups overseas with "specific permission" from higher up.
In response to questions from the panel's top Republican, Representative Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, Blair said, if "we think that direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that."
Blair's remarks followed a Washington Post article reporting that US President Barack Obama had embraced predecessor George W. Bush's policy of authorizing the killing of US citizens involved in terrorist activities overseas.
The Post reported that "After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, (President George W.) Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said. The evidence has to meet a certain, defined threshold. The person, for example, has to pose 'a continuing and imminent threat’ to U.S. persons and interests.”
The Obama administration appears to have adopted exactly the same policy as its predecessor.
The Post, citing anonymous US officials, said the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Joint Special Operations Command have three Americans on their lists of specific people targeted for killing or capture.
Blair said he was offering such unusually detailed information in public because "I just don't want other Americans who are watching to think that we are careless."
Blair didn't specifically articulate the standards he used, saying only that "We don't target people for free speech. We target them for taking action that threatens Americans."
Hoekstra cited an incident in 2001 in which Peru's air force shot down a plane carrying US missionaries, killing a woman and her seven-month-old daughter, after the aircraft was misidentified as a drug-smuggler.
"We were careless and we were reckless," Blair replied. "I want to make sure that this committee does everything that it can and within its power that it does not allow the community to be reckless and careless again."
The Washington Post story, by Pulitzer Prize-winner Dana Priest, revealed that, “In November 2002, a CIA missile strike killed six al-Qaeda operatives driving through the desert. The target was Abu Ali al-Harithi, organizer of the 2000 attack on the USS Cole. Killed with him was a U.S. citizen, Kamal Derwish, who the CIA knew was in the car.”
The article says, “Word that the CIA had purposefully killed Derwish drew attention to the unconventional nature of the new conflict and to the secret legal deliberations over whether killing a U.S. citizen was legal and ethical.”
Monday, February 01, 2010
Haiti After the Cleanup!
By William Fisher
In the wake of the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti, prominent advocacy groups are calling on the U.S. and the international community to reverse decades of racial and political discrimination and build relief and reconstruction efforts on human rights principles, transparency, and respect for the dignity of all Haitians.
The director of one of the groups, Monika Kalra Varma, Director of the RFK Center for Human Rights, told IPS, “Over the years, help for Haiti has been shaped by ideological politics and broken promises.”
She charged that, “Generally the international community has made pledges to Haiti and not fulfilled them. Donor states have human rights obligations in Haiti as well -they must do no harm. When states pledge funds to Haiti which the Haitian people and government rely on in figuring out how to meet the needs of its people, particularly when you're talking about monetary pledges to strengthen water, education, and health systems and that money doesn't come in, the donors have violated their human rights obligations.”
Some development experts who have worked in Haiti for years have talked with IPS on condition of anonymity because they have friends and family members involved in the relief effort. They say that “There have been hundreds of millions of dollars in development assistance that has gone to benefit Haiti’s elites -- government, business and the military – at the expense of the country’s common people.”
“These elites have abused international aid, and have done nothing to create an education system, a public health system or any meaningful infrastructure,“ they say.
They add that racial politics has always played a significant role in Haiti’s history. Haitian elites “tend to have lighter skin color than their darker-skin brothers and sisters who make up the vast majority of Haitians,” they say.
They note that at one point in its storied history, Haiti was divided into separate sections for lighter and darker-skin citizens. In 1806, Haiti consisted of a black-controlled north and a mulatto-ruled south. That was a mere five years after a former black slave, Toussaint Louverture, became a guerrilla leader and overthrew French rule, abolished slavery and proclaimed himself governor-general of an autonomous government. For decades afterward, Haiti was crippled by reparations it was forced to pay to former slaveowners.
Another Haiti expert, Prof. Robert Maguire of Trinity College in Washington, D.C., told IPS that the history of aid to Haiti has been a complex combination of corruption among the government and business elites of the country and the selfish interests of private sector international investors who “wanted to maintain the status quo” and who viewed Haiti only as “a low-wage and stable distatorship” able to manufacture basic garments and other textile products.
He is proposing a 700,000-strong national civic service corps made up of Haitian youth, who he calls the wellspring of creativity, talent and potential.”
“A civic service corps would get the young and able out of the tent cities in and around Port-au-Prince and into work. They could start with the once-iconic center of the capital, but also could begin planting trees, working the fields and providing services in Haiti's countryside,” said Maguire, who is an advisor at the U.S. Institute of Peace.
Eric Michael Johnson, a post-grad student at the University of British Columbia, writing in The Huffington Post, notes that “Haiti has a historically unhealthy dependence on foreign commerce and finance, from the colonial days of the sugar trade to the current assistance provided by developed countries.”
“Now the same politicians and financial elites that helped create this mess are proposing an even larger program following the same mode,” he says.
Johnson writes that “since 2004 Haitian exports to the United States increased by 32%while, during the same period, the Haitian minimum wage declined by 36%. “
The Kennedy Center’s Kalra Varma noted that multilateral aid has frequently been marked by stop-start-stop politics, with aid stopping when Haiti elects a leader not favored by donors. She cites the refusal of the Inter American Development Bank (IDB) to release funds earmarked for water projects, which would have benefited the poor. “The IDB is controlled by its largest donor, the U.S. and the U.S. did not like Haiti’s government of the day,” she said.
She added, “All too often, aid has been slow to arrive, uncoordinated, and planned with no input from the people most affected -- that legacy must and can end today. We have an opportunity to break with the past and ensure that assistance is given in a way that strengthens Haitians’ fundamental rights to food, water, and health. The Haitian people deserve no less.”
The other groups include the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ), the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), Partners In Health/Zanmi Lasante, and TransAfrica Forum.
Loune Viaud, Director of Strategic Planning and Operations at Zanmi Lasante, a health organization, cautioned, “The only way to avoid escalation of this crisis is for international aid to take a long-term view and strive to rebuild a stronger Haiti—one that includes a government that can ensure the basic human rights of all Haitians and a nation that is empowered to demand those rights.”
The groups cited past relief efforts in Haiti that were uncoordinated, unpredictable, and lacked community participation, often leading to increased suffering. They called on the international community to seize on this opportunity to advance human rights and sustainability in the ravaged country.
“The magnitude of the catastrophe is not entirely a result of natural disaster but rather, a history of deliberate impoverishment and disempowerment of the Haitian people through a series of misguided polices,” said Brian Concannon Jr., Director of IJDH. “Lack of donor accountability and continued aid volatility will only guarantee even greater suffering.”
In an editorial prepared for distribution, Kalra Varma and Kerry Kennedy, wrote, “ As international aid begins to pour into Haiti, we have a brief moment to break with past mistakes and bring real change to Haiti.” U.S and international aid efforts “could be characterized, at best, as unsustainable and, at worst, deliberately harmful,” they wrote. Kerry Kennedy is the daughter of Robert F. Kennedy.
The editorial continues, “In 2000, the U.S. and the Inter-American Development Bank approved millions of dollars of what would have been lifesaving loans for improvements to water, health, education, and road infrastructure, only to later withhold these funds because they opposed then President Aristide. While the loans were eventually released, the communities where the very first water projects were to be financed still lack access, ten years later, to reliably clean drinking water, contributing to countless deaths due to waterborne illness.”
It adds, “In 2004, the international community pledged $1 billion to support Haiti. The RFK Center, along with the health organization Zanmi Lasante and the NYU Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, tried to track the fulfillment of those pledges, but never received clear and consistent answers from donor states on the status of the aid. With no transparency or coordinating body to turn to, the Haitian people had no hope of knowing if that money ever got to Haiti, much less where it was directed and how it could be used to improve their communities. Haitian government sources later confirmed that most of the pledges had never been fulfilled.”
In the wake of the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti, prominent advocacy groups are calling on the U.S. and the international community to reverse decades of racial and political discrimination and build relief and reconstruction efforts on human rights principles, transparency, and respect for the dignity of all Haitians.
The director of one of the groups, Monika Kalra Varma, Director of the RFK Center for Human Rights, told IPS, “Over the years, help for Haiti has been shaped by ideological politics and broken promises.”
She charged that, “Generally the international community has made pledges to Haiti and not fulfilled them. Donor states have human rights obligations in Haiti as well -they must do no harm. When states pledge funds to Haiti which the Haitian people and government rely on in figuring out how to meet the needs of its people, particularly when you're talking about monetary pledges to strengthen water, education, and health systems and that money doesn't come in, the donors have violated their human rights obligations.”
Some development experts who have worked in Haiti for years have talked with IPS on condition of anonymity because they have friends and family members involved in the relief effort. They say that “There have been hundreds of millions of dollars in development assistance that has gone to benefit Haiti’s elites -- government, business and the military – at the expense of the country’s common people.”
“These elites have abused international aid, and have done nothing to create an education system, a public health system or any meaningful infrastructure,“ they say.
They add that racial politics has always played a significant role in Haiti’s history. Haitian elites “tend to have lighter skin color than their darker-skin brothers and sisters who make up the vast majority of Haitians,” they say.
They note that at one point in its storied history, Haiti was divided into separate sections for lighter and darker-skin citizens. In 1806, Haiti consisted of a black-controlled north and a mulatto-ruled south. That was a mere five years after a former black slave, Toussaint Louverture, became a guerrilla leader and overthrew French rule, abolished slavery and proclaimed himself governor-general of an autonomous government. For decades afterward, Haiti was crippled by reparations it was forced to pay to former slaveowners.
Another Haiti expert, Prof. Robert Maguire of Trinity College in Washington, D.C., told IPS that the history of aid to Haiti has been a complex combination of corruption among the government and business elites of the country and the selfish interests of private sector international investors who “wanted to maintain the status quo” and who viewed Haiti only as “a low-wage and stable distatorship” able to manufacture basic garments and other textile products.
He is proposing a 700,000-strong national civic service corps made up of Haitian youth, who he calls the wellspring of creativity, talent and potential.”
“A civic service corps would get the young and able out of the tent cities in and around Port-au-Prince and into work. They could start with the once-iconic center of the capital, but also could begin planting trees, working the fields and providing services in Haiti's countryside,” said Maguire, who is an advisor at the U.S. Institute of Peace.
Eric Michael Johnson, a post-grad student at the University of British Columbia, writing in The Huffington Post, notes that “Haiti has a historically unhealthy dependence on foreign commerce and finance, from the colonial days of the sugar trade to the current assistance provided by developed countries.”
“Now the same politicians and financial elites that helped create this mess are proposing an even larger program following the same mode,” he says.
Johnson writes that “since 2004 Haitian exports to the United States increased by 32%while, during the same period, the Haitian minimum wage declined by 36%. “
The Kennedy Center’s Kalra Varma noted that multilateral aid has frequently been marked by stop-start-stop politics, with aid stopping when Haiti elects a leader not favored by donors. She cites the refusal of the Inter American Development Bank (IDB) to release funds earmarked for water projects, which would have benefited the poor. “The IDB is controlled by its largest donor, the U.S. and the U.S. did not like Haiti’s government of the day,” she said.
She added, “All too often, aid has been slow to arrive, uncoordinated, and planned with no input from the people most affected -- that legacy must and can end today. We have an opportunity to break with the past and ensure that assistance is given in a way that strengthens Haitians’ fundamental rights to food, water, and health. The Haitian people deserve no less.”
The other groups include the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ), the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), Partners In Health/Zanmi Lasante, and TransAfrica Forum.
Loune Viaud, Director of Strategic Planning and Operations at Zanmi Lasante, a health organization, cautioned, “The only way to avoid escalation of this crisis is for international aid to take a long-term view and strive to rebuild a stronger Haiti—one that includes a government that can ensure the basic human rights of all Haitians and a nation that is empowered to demand those rights.”
The groups cited past relief efforts in Haiti that were uncoordinated, unpredictable, and lacked community participation, often leading to increased suffering. They called on the international community to seize on this opportunity to advance human rights and sustainability in the ravaged country.
“The magnitude of the catastrophe is not entirely a result of natural disaster but rather, a history of deliberate impoverishment and disempowerment of the Haitian people through a series of misguided polices,” said Brian Concannon Jr., Director of IJDH. “Lack of donor accountability and continued aid volatility will only guarantee even greater suffering.”
In an editorial prepared for distribution, Kalra Varma and Kerry Kennedy, wrote, “ As international aid begins to pour into Haiti, we have a brief moment to break with past mistakes and bring real change to Haiti.” U.S and international aid efforts “could be characterized, at best, as unsustainable and, at worst, deliberately harmful,” they wrote. Kerry Kennedy is the daughter of Robert F. Kennedy.
The editorial continues, “In 2000, the U.S. and the Inter-American Development Bank approved millions of dollars of what would have been lifesaving loans for improvements to water, health, education, and road infrastructure, only to later withhold these funds because they opposed then President Aristide. While the loans were eventually released, the communities where the very first water projects were to be financed still lack access, ten years later, to reliably clean drinking water, contributing to countless deaths due to waterborne illness.”
It adds, “In 2004, the international community pledged $1 billion to support Haiti. The RFK Center, along with the health organization Zanmi Lasante and the NYU Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, tried to track the fulfillment of those pledges, but never received clear and consistent answers from donor states on the status of the aid. With no transparency or coordinating body to turn to, the Haitian people had no hope of knowing if that money ever got to Haiti, much less where it was directed and how it could be used to improve their communities. Haitian government sources later confirmed that most of the pledges had never been fulfilled.”
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Those Pesky Drones!
By William Fisher
The Obama Administration is ramping up its use of drone unmanned aircraft to execute targeted killings in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and perhaps in other locations – and in the process killing civilians along with insurgents and risking the compromise of US moral imperatives and foreign policy goals.
That’s the view of a leading civil rights organization, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which has filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) calling on the president to lift the curtain of secrecy and level with the American people.
The increase comes on the heels of the “double-agent” attack on a CIA forward base camp in Afghanistan earlier this month that killed seven central Intelligence Agency (CIA) personnel. The CIA was reportedly working with a Jordanian who they thought was infiltrating Al Qaeda on their behalf. But when he arrived at their camp, he detonated a bomb, killing himself and seven others.
The ACLU is asking the government to release basic information about its use of drones to execute targeted killings. The group believes that “the use and proliferation of this tactic must be the subject of public scrutiny and debate.” The strikes are reportedly being carried out both by U.S. military forces and the CIA.
The request is seeking information, including who may be targeted and the geographical limits on where drone strikes may occur. It wants information about the scope and consequences of drone strikes, including a breakdown of the total number of people killed, the civilian casualty toll and the number of people killed who were fighters with the Afghan Taliban, or al Qaeda in Afghanistan, or who had some other terror-related affiliation or status.
“The public has been kept in the dark and is therefore unable to assess the wisdom or legality of the strikes,” the group claims.
"The use of drones to conduct targeted killings raises complicated questions – not just legal questions but policy and moral questions as well. These are not questions that should be decided behind closed doors. They are questions that should be debated openly, and the public should have access to information that would allow it to participate meaningfully in the debate," according to Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU’s National Security Project.
One of the unmanned vehicles, known as the Predator, is capable of flying, armed or unarmed, for hours remotely controlled by pilots who are stationed thousands of miles away. The Predator is part of a growing number of similar craft that includes the Reaper and Raven as well as a new, high-tech video sensor system called the Gorgon Stare, which is being installed on Reapers.
The ACLU charges that the Obama administration has stepped up the use of drones to target individuals not only in Afghanistan, but also in Pakistan and perhaps other countries that are not active theaters of war.
“The use of unmanned drones to target and kill individuals is a profoundly new way of waging war. For the first time, military and intelligence officers can observe, track, and launch missiles at targeted individuals from control centers located thousands of miles away, without any significant U.S. presence on the ground. The technology also permits the United States to target individuals nearly anywhere in the world,” the organization claims.
The number of civilian casualties caused by drone attacks varies from the dozens to the hundreds. Human rights organizations are particularly concerned that drones could be used to target criminal suspects rather than legitimate military targets. Criminal suspects should be arrested and tried in civilian courts, the ACLU contends, adding that failure to do so could amount to “unlawful extrajudicial killings.”
The ACLU also raised concerns about the wisdom of using drones on policy and moral grounds.
“We hope that the Obama administration will live up to its professed commitments to transparency and openness in government and release this essential information in a timely manner,” the group said.
The increasing use of drones by the US has drawn sharp criticism from President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and other high Pakistani officials.
Pakistan says the strikes against suspected al Qaeda and Taliban militants along its northwest violate its sovereignty. The attacks have resulted in serious anti-American feelings in Pakistan, which Washington sees as a critical ally in its war on extremism.
Gilani has told the press that drone attacks carried out on Pakistani soil were “counter-productive.” He said, “If the drone attacks had been useful, then we would have ourselves supported them.”
Gilani said the militants in the northwestern tribal areas bordering Afghanistan are strengthened by U.S. missile strikes. “Our policy is to isolate militants from the local tribes, but drone attacks unite them,” he said.
His view was echoed by Pakistan's foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, who told Reuters that intensified U.S. drone aircraft attacks against Islamist militants in Pakistan could endanger relations between the two allies.
But when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, she told a news conference the US was standing “shoulder to shoulder” with Pakistan in its military offensive. And the increased use of unmanned Predator drones is one of the highest-profile ways the US is doing that.
The White House authorized an expansion of the C.I.A.’s drone program in Pakistan’s tribal areas to parallel the president’s decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. The Anew York Times reports that American officials are talking with Pakistan about the possibility of striking in Baluchistan for the first time — “a controversial move since it is outside the tribal areas — because that is where Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to hide.”
US strategy for eliminating safe havens for militants in the region turns on
increasing covert pressure on Al Qaeda and its allies in Pakistan while ground forces attempt to reverse the Taliban’s advances in Afghanistan.
Investigative reporter Jane Mayer of The New Yorker magazine has revealed that the number of US drone strikes in Pakistan has risen dramatically under President Obama. During his first 9.5 months in office, Obama authorized at least forty-one CIA missile strikes in Pakistan, a rate of approximately one bombing a week. President Bush sanctioned approximately the same number of attacks in his final three years in office.
The attacks have killed between 326 and 538 people, according to Mayer. She writes, “there is no longer any doubt that targeted killing has become official US policy.”
One of the most high-profile critics of the US drone program has been the United Nations human rights envoy, Philip Alston, the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions.
Alston told Amy Goodman of the Democracy Now radio program that the US government’s use of Predator drones may violate international law. He also raised the issue in a report to the UN General Assembly’s Human Rights Committee and said the US should explain the legal basis for using unmanned drones for targeted killings.
In June, Alston presented a critical report on the drone program to the UN Human Rights Council, but he says US representatives ignored his concerns.
He says, “If you’re a Defense Department person, it’s a very attractive proposition. One can use the Predators without putting US servicemen in any harm. They are very effective. They can kill very significant numbers of people.”
But, he adds, “The problem is that we have no real information on this program. What Jane Mayer exposed in her New Yorker piece is probably the most detailed information we have. She herself said that the CIA provides no information. It’s extraordinary that it’s the Central Intelligence Agency which is actually operating a missile program, which is actually deciding who to kill, when and where.”
Alston added, “There’s no accountability for it. There’s no indication of the rules that they use. So, I said before, there are rules, that it’s possible to justify a particular killing, but the CIA has never tried to do that. They have simply issued a general assurance: ‘No, no, everything’s fine. We really follow the rules, and we’re very careful.’ Well, if Israel or some other country that we’re scrutinizing says that, we say, ‘Sorry, guys, it’s not enough. We need to get the details’.”
Alston has called on the American government to make clear the details of the program; the legal basis, under US law, on which they are relying; the rules that they have put in place which govern the CIA actions, assuming there are rules; and what sort of accountability mechanisms they have. Do they review what they’ve done? They identify an individual. Often these identifications are very vague. But they say, ‘OK, we’ve got X in our sights’. Did they actually kill X? Did they kill someone else? How many other civilians did they kill? There’s never any accounting of that. And we need that sort of retrospective analysis, as well.”
He adds that, in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, “The United States has not done nearly enough, even today, to make sure that private military contractors do not carry out virtually all tasks, including, it seems, running a part of the drone program.”
But the drone program also has its fans. One of them is John Yoo, the former Office of Legal Counsel deputy who wrote the so-called “torture memos. ” Yoo appeared at the conservative American Enterprise Institute recently.
He said that in some areas, President Obama has gone beyond George W. Bush when it comes to the use of executive power. Yoo pointed towards the Obama administration’s increased use of predator drones overseas as an example.
“If we were still in peacetime, and this were the criminal justice system, police are not allowed to shoot missiles at people who might be criminals, might be about to commit a criminal act or might have committed a criminal act, even if we have a hard time finding and arresting them,” said Yoo. He added that in this area Obama has gone beyond Bush.
He said figuring out how to target terrorists is much more difficult because they do not wear uniforms or have territories. “It’s a complicated process that we had not had to think about before, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a war.”
Two leading U.S. senators are also strong supporters of the drone program. They are Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Joe Lieberman, Independent of Connecticut. Their recent visit to Islamabad underscored tensions between the anti-terrorist allies caused by strikes unmanned aircraft strikes against suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda targets.
"Friends don't always agree on every issue," Sen. McCain said at a news conference in Islamabad, adding that the United States will "try to find common ground" with Pakistani leaders on the drone issue but that "we have to do everything we feel is necessary to protect Americans from the attacks of terrorists who may be based here."
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari asked the senators to seek a halt to the drone attacks. He said they are undermining domestic support for the war against Islamist militants and asked that the United States give Pakistan the technology to carry out such strikes on its own.
Following the Dec. 30 suicide bombing at a US base in eastern Afghanistan that killed seven CIA officers and contractors, Washington has also increased its use of the controversial strikes near the Afghan border. Suspected US missiles killed four people and injured three in the latest raid on the North Waziristan tribal area. That was the sixth attack in the region in a week, the Associated Press reported. The AP quoted two Pakistani intelligence officials, who said a pair of missiles struck a house and a vehicle in a village near the town of Miran Shah. They did not identify the victims.
It is the civilian deaths that are giving US policy-makers serious headaches. The strategy outlined by Gen. Stanley McChrystal – and supported by Obama with the deployment of 30,000 additional troops – centers on protecting the Afghan people. It is unclear how killing civilians with drone attacks furthers that goal.
In a related development, military observers have revealed – and their revelations have been confirmed by the U.S. military – that a new, “stealthy” US drone, nicknamed “The Beast”, is operating out of Kandahar, Afghanistan.
But they question what it’s doing there. One military website wrote, “Since the Taliban do not have radar, why deploy an expensive, stealthy drone when conventional models like the Predator and Reaper work so well? And what’s the point of having a high-level, strategic craft in that theater?”
It says the speculation is that “The Beast” may be carrying out missions outside of Afghanistan, with Iran and Pakistan both being possible candidates.
The Air Force has confirmed “The Beast’s” existence to Aviation Week magazine. “Officially, it’s an RQ-170 Sentinel, developed by Lockheed and flown by the flown by the 30th Reconnaissance Squadron at Tonopah Test Range in Nevada,” the magazine reported.
And, in something of an embarrassment for the US military, The New York Times reported that insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan have hacked into live video feeds from Predator drones, a key weapon in a Pentagon spy system that serves as the military’s eyes in the sky for surveillance and intelligence collection.
Though militants could see the video, The Times said there is no evidence they were able to jam the electronic signals from the unmanned aerial craft or take control of the vehicles, according to a senior defense official speaking on condition of anonymity.
Obtaining the video feeds can provide insurgents with critical information about what the military may be targeting, including buildings, roads and other facilities. The military has reportedly known about the vulnerability for more than a decade, but assumed adversaries would not be able to exploit it.
The Obama Administration is ramping up its use of drone unmanned aircraft to execute targeted killings in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and perhaps in other locations – and in the process killing civilians along with insurgents and risking the compromise of US moral imperatives and foreign policy goals.
That’s the view of a leading civil rights organization, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which has filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) calling on the president to lift the curtain of secrecy and level with the American people.
The increase comes on the heels of the “double-agent” attack on a CIA forward base camp in Afghanistan earlier this month that killed seven central Intelligence Agency (CIA) personnel. The CIA was reportedly working with a Jordanian who they thought was infiltrating Al Qaeda on their behalf. But when he arrived at their camp, he detonated a bomb, killing himself and seven others.
The ACLU is asking the government to release basic information about its use of drones to execute targeted killings. The group believes that “the use and proliferation of this tactic must be the subject of public scrutiny and debate.” The strikes are reportedly being carried out both by U.S. military forces and the CIA.
The request is seeking information, including who may be targeted and the geographical limits on where drone strikes may occur. It wants information about the scope and consequences of drone strikes, including a breakdown of the total number of people killed, the civilian casualty toll and the number of people killed who were fighters with the Afghan Taliban, or al Qaeda in Afghanistan, or who had some other terror-related affiliation or status.
“The public has been kept in the dark and is therefore unable to assess the wisdom or legality of the strikes,” the group claims.
"The use of drones to conduct targeted killings raises complicated questions – not just legal questions but policy and moral questions as well. These are not questions that should be decided behind closed doors. They are questions that should be debated openly, and the public should have access to information that would allow it to participate meaningfully in the debate," according to Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU’s National Security Project.
One of the unmanned vehicles, known as the Predator, is capable of flying, armed or unarmed, for hours remotely controlled by pilots who are stationed thousands of miles away. The Predator is part of a growing number of similar craft that includes the Reaper and Raven as well as a new, high-tech video sensor system called the Gorgon Stare, which is being installed on Reapers.
The ACLU charges that the Obama administration has stepped up the use of drones to target individuals not only in Afghanistan, but also in Pakistan and perhaps other countries that are not active theaters of war.
“The use of unmanned drones to target and kill individuals is a profoundly new way of waging war. For the first time, military and intelligence officers can observe, track, and launch missiles at targeted individuals from control centers located thousands of miles away, without any significant U.S. presence on the ground. The technology also permits the United States to target individuals nearly anywhere in the world,” the organization claims.
The number of civilian casualties caused by drone attacks varies from the dozens to the hundreds. Human rights organizations are particularly concerned that drones could be used to target criminal suspects rather than legitimate military targets. Criminal suspects should be arrested and tried in civilian courts, the ACLU contends, adding that failure to do so could amount to “unlawful extrajudicial killings.”
The ACLU also raised concerns about the wisdom of using drones on policy and moral grounds.
“We hope that the Obama administration will live up to its professed commitments to transparency and openness in government and release this essential information in a timely manner,” the group said.
The increasing use of drones by the US has drawn sharp criticism from President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and other high Pakistani officials.
Pakistan says the strikes against suspected al Qaeda and Taliban militants along its northwest violate its sovereignty. The attacks have resulted in serious anti-American feelings in Pakistan, which Washington sees as a critical ally in its war on extremism.
Gilani has told the press that drone attacks carried out on Pakistani soil were “counter-productive.” He said, “If the drone attacks had been useful, then we would have ourselves supported them.”
Gilani said the militants in the northwestern tribal areas bordering Afghanistan are strengthened by U.S. missile strikes. “Our policy is to isolate militants from the local tribes, but drone attacks unite them,” he said.
His view was echoed by Pakistan's foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, who told Reuters that intensified U.S. drone aircraft attacks against Islamist militants in Pakistan could endanger relations between the two allies.
But when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, she told a news conference the US was standing “shoulder to shoulder” with Pakistan in its military offensive. And the increased use of unmanned Predator drones is one of the highest-profile ways the US is doing that.
The White House authorized an expansion of the C.I.A.’s drone program in Pakistan’s tribal areas to parallel the president’s decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. The Anew York Times reports that American officials are talking with Pakistan about the possibility of striking in Baluchistan for the first time — “a controversial move since it is outside the tribal areas — because that is where Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to hide.”
US strategy for eliminating safe havens for militants in the region turns on
increasing covert pressure on Al Qaeda and its allies in Pakistan while ground forces attempt to reverse the Taliban’s advances in Afghanistan.
Investigative reporter Jane Mayer of The New Yorker magazine has revealed that the number of US drone strikes in Pakistan has risen dramatically under President Obama. During his first 9.5 months in office, Obama authorized at least forty-one CIA missile strikes in Pakistan, a rate of approximately one bombing a week. President Bush sanctioned approximately the same number of attacks in his final three years in office.
The attacks have killed between 326 and 538 people, according to Mayer. She writes, “there is no longer any doubt that targeted killing has become official US policy.”
One of the most high-profile critics of the US drone program has been the United Nations human rights envoy, Philip Alston, the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions.
Alston told Amy Goodman of the Democracy Now radio program that the US government’s use of Predator drones may violate international law. He also raised the issue in a report to the UN General Assembly’s Human Rights Committee and said the US should explain the legal basis for using unmanned drones for targeted killings.
In June, Alston presented a critical report on the drone program to the UN Human Rights Council, but he says US representatives ignored his concerns.
He says, “If you’re a Defense Department person, it’s a very attractive proposition. One can use the Predators without putting US servicemen in any harm. They are very effective. They can kill very significant numbers of people.”
But, he adds, “The problem is that we have no real information on this program. What Jane Mayer exposed in her New Yorker piece is probably the most detailed information we have. She herself said that the CIA provides no information. It’s extraordinary that it’s the Central Intelligence Agency which is actually operating a missile program, which is actually deciding who to kill, when and where.”
Alston added, “There’s no accountability for it. There’s no indication of the rules that they use. So, I said before, there are rules, that it’s possible to justify a particular killing, but the CIA has never tried to do that. They have simply issued a general assurance: ‘No, no, everything’s fine. We really follow the rules, and we’re very careful.’ Well, if Israel or some other country that we’re scrutinizing says that, we say, ‘Sorry, guys, it’s not enough. We need to get the details’.”
Alston has called on the American government to make clear the details of the program; the legal basis, under US law, on which they are relying; the rules that they have put in place which govern the CIA actions, assuming there are rules; and what sort of accountability mechanisms they have. Do they review what they’ve done? They identify an individual. Often these identifications are very vague. But they say, ‘OK, we’ve got X in our sights’. Did they actually kill X? Did they kill someone else? How many other civilians did they kill? There’s never any accounting of that. And we need that sort of retrospective analysis, as well.”
He adds that, in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, “The United States has not done nearly enough, even today, to make sure that private military contractors do not carry out virtually all tasks, including, it seems, running a part of the drone program.”
But the drone program also has its fans. One of them is John Yoo, the former Office of Legal Counsel deputy who wrote the so-called “torture memos. ” Yoo appeared at the conservative American Enterprise Institute recently.
He said that in some areas, President Obama has gone beyond George W. Bush when it comes to the use of executive power. Yoo pointed towards the Obama administration’s increased use of predator drones overseas as an example.
“If we were still in peacetime, and this were the criminal justice system, police are not allowed to shoot missiles at people who might be criminals, might be about to commit a criminal act or might have committed a criminal act, even if we have a hard time finding and arresting them,” said Yoo. He added that in this area Obama has gone beyond Bush.
He said figuring out how to target terrorists is much more difficult because they do not wear uniforms or have territories. “It’s a complicated process that we had not had to think about before, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a war.”
Two leading U.S. senators are also strong supporters of the drone program. They are Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Joe Lieberman, Independent of Connecticut. Their recent visit to Islamabad underscored tensions between the anti-terrorist allies caused by strikes unmanned aircraft strikes against suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda targets.
"Friends don't always agree on every issue," Sen. McCain said at a news conference in Islamabad, adding that the United States will "try to find common ground" with Pakistani leaders on the drone issue but that "we have to do everything we feel is necessary to protect Americans from the attacks of terrorists who may be based here."
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari asked the senators to seek a halt to the drone attacks. He said they are undermining domestic support for the war against Islamist militants and asked that the United States give Pakistan the technology to carry out such strikes on its own.
Following the Dec. 30 suicide bombing at a US base in eastern Afghanistan that killed seven CIA officers and contractors, Washington has also increased its use of the controversial strikes near the Afghan border. Suspected US missiles killed four people and injured three in the latest raid on the North Waziristan tribal area. That was the sixth attack in the region in a week, the Associated Press reported. The AP quoted two Pakistani intelligence officials, who said a pair of missiles struck a house and a vehicle in a village near the town of Miran Shah. They did not identify the victims.
It is the civilian deaths that are giving US policy-makers serious headaches. The strategy outlined by Gen. Stanley McChrystal – and supported by Obama with the deployment of 30,000 additional troops – centers on protecting the Afghan people. It is unclear how killing civilians with drone attacks furthers that goal.
In a related development, military observers have revealed – and their revelations have been confirmed by the U.S. military – that a new, “stealthy” US drone, nicknamed “The Beast”, is operating out of Kandahar, Afghanistan.
But they question what it’s doing there. One military website wrote, “Since the Taliban do not have radar, why deploy an expensive, stealthy drone when conventional models like the Predator and Reaper work so well? And what’s the point of having a high-level, strategic craft in that theater?”
It says the speculation is that “The Beast” may be carrying out missions outside of Afghanistan, with Iran and Pakistan both being possible candidates.
The Air Force has confirmed “The Beast’s” existence to Aviation Week magazine. “Officially, it’s an RQ-170 Sentinel, developed by Lockheed and flown by the flown by the 30th Reconnaissance Squadron at Tonopah Test Range in Nevada,” the magazine reported.
And, in something of an embarrassment for the US military, The New York Times reported that insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan have hacked into live video feeds from Predator drones, a key weapon in a Pentagon spy system that serves as the military’s eyes in the sky for surveillance and intelligence collection.
Though militants could see the video, The Times said there is no evidence they were able to jam the electronic signals from the unmanned aerial craft or take control of the vehicles, according to a senior defense official speaking on condition of anonymity.
Obtaining the video feeds can provide insurgents with critical information about what the military may be targeting, including buildings, roads and other facilities. The military has reportedly known about the vulnerability for more than a decade, but assumed adversaries would not be able to exploit it.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Obama and the Banks
By William Fisher
On the heels of a stinging defeat in the Massachusetts Senatorial race that dealt a major blow to passage of health care legislation, President Obama abruptly pivoted yesterday to change the subject to the state of the U.S. economy and to back sweeping regulatory reforms on “too big to fail” banks.
The president noted that it was those “too big to fail” banks that brought the U.S. financial system to the brink of total collapse a year ago by taking “reckless risks” to generate profits and bonuses.
Clearly struggling to channel the populist anger sweeping the country, he proposed legislation that would govern how big the big banks can become and what lines of business they would be permitted or forbidden to run.
Bank holding companies – which include the major commercial and investment banks – would be prohibited from engaging in the hedge fund or private equity fund fields.
The legislation Obama outlined would also seek to place limits on industry consolidation. It would achieve this by curbing the growth of the market share of liabilities at the biggest firms. The New York Times reported that an existing cap, put in place in 1994, put a limit of 10 percent on the share of insured deposits that can be held by any one bank. That cap would be expanded to include liabilities other than deposits.
Bank Holding Companies would also be barred from proprietary trading – using bank funds to invest on behalf of their own accounts, often resulting in banks taking investment positions against the interests of their shareholders.
Calling this “the Volcker Rule,” the president said commercial banks needed to get back to their core business -- taking customers’ deposits and lending money. Former Federal Reserve chairman Paul A. Volcker has long advocated this position.
Volker -- who reportedly fell out of favor with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and former Treasury secretary Larry Summers, now chairman of the president’s National Economic Council -- has long championed barring commercial banks from using deposits to finance trading in financial securities such as mortgage-backed securities. The losses sustained by commercial banks active in this kind of trading is generally thought to be a major cause of the 2008 crash and subsequent taxpayer bailout.
Most of the regulatory changes Obama proposed require legislation by Congress. This will not be easy, particularly since Republicans have already telegraphed their intention to oppose change – and since, as of Tuesday, the Democrats have lost their filibuster-proof 60-vote majority.
That loss came in the defeat of Democrat Martha Coakley in her quest to win the Senate seat occupied by the late Ted Kennedy for decades. Victory in the race went to Scott Brown, a conservative Republican, who bragged about being the Republicans’ 41st vote against the health care bill. He will be the 41st Republican in the senate, reducing the Democratic caucus to 59. Major legislation in the senate usually takes a super-majority of 60 votes to pass.
In a reliable poll, conducted the morning after the election, fifty-one percent of those Obama supporters backing Brown "said that Democratic policies were doing more to help Wall Street than Main Street."
In an interview with ABC News, Obama said Americans have a "feeling of remoteness and detachment" from Washington. "I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are and why we have to make sure those institutions are matching up with those values," he said.
Last week, Obama said the American people provided "extraordinary assistance" to the financial industry and "continue to face real hardship in this recession." Yet at the same time, Wall Street is expected to dole out a record $145 billion in bonuses to its employees this year.
"Instead of sending a phalanx of lobbyists to fight this proposal, or employing an army of lawyers and accountants to help evade the fee, I suggest you might want to consider simply meeting your responsibilities. And I'd urge you to cover the costs of the rescue not by sticking it to your shareholders or your customers or fellow citizens with the bill, but by rolling back bonuses for top earners and executives," Obama said.
Predictably resisting the kinds of changes Obama proposed, the banking industry warned of its opposition. But Obama evidently anticipated that reaction. He said he expected an “army of industry lobbyists” to fight his proposals. “If these folks want a fight, it’s a fight I’m ready to have,” he declared.
The president also pushed the establishment of a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, to regulate financial products including credit cards and mortgages.
Scott E. Talbott, the chief lobbyist for the Financial Services Roundtable, which speaks for most of the major lenders and insurance companies, said the Obama proposals would “reduce liquidity and increase risk.” He added, “That is the direct opposite of the goals we want to achieve.”
Bank lobbyists also attacked the proposed CFPA. "Maybe the administration will decide that they want to turn this into a partisan battle but, coming out of health care, I don't think the majority of senators want to have a partisan battle," said Edward L. Yingling, president of the American Bankers Association. "They want a bipartisan bill."
But Harvard law school professor Elizabeth Warren, chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel created to oversee the banking bailouts, has said that without the CFPA, "the tag on U.S. financial regulation reform may as well say 'Made on Wall Street'" and is "the best indicator of whether Congress will reform Wall Street or whether it will continue to give Wall Street whatever it wants."
And New York Times columnist Paul Krugman proposed “a simple solution” for passing CFPA and other financial reforms: Make Republicans (or Democrats) vote against it. "Expose the hollowness of their populist posing," Krugman wrote. "In short, take on the banks -- and force those who are covering for them into the open."
But many expert observers of the current recession feel that little will be achieved in the way of financial services regulation until lobbyists’ money is removed from the political landscape.
One such observer is Dr. Jack N. Behrman, emeritus professor at the University of North Carolina business school, who served as JFK’s Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Domestic and International Business. He told Truthout, “No Congressional campaign funds should be permitted to or through either party organization, and lobbying should be permitted only where no funds are involved -- merely persuasion. PLUS -- no Congressman would be allowed to become a lobbyist until four years after retirement.”
The already favorable lobbying environment for the financial sector may become even more favorable as a result of Thursday’s 5-4 Supreme Court decision. The five Conservatives on the court ruled that corporations, as persons, have free speech rights. And since money is considered speech, spending limitations cannot be placed on corporations. The decision means that significant parts of the McCain-Finegold law limiting campaign contributions by corporations are unconstitutional. Corporations – including businesses, labor unions and not-for-profits – will now be free to spend as much money as they wish in support of specific candidates in Federal elections.
Anticipating reduced profitability in the financial sector, bank stocks fell sharply on Wall Street. Investors read in The Wall Street Journal that Obama’s “goal would be to deter banks from becoming so large they put the broader economy at risk and to also prevent banks from becoming so large they distort normal competitive forces."
The article above originally appeared in Truthout.org
www.truthout.org
On the heels of a stinging defeat in the Massachusetts Senatorial race that dealt a major blow to passage of health care legislation, President Obama abruptly pivoted yesterday to change the subject to the state of the U.S. economy and to back sweeping regulatory reforms on “too big to fail” banks.
The president noted that it was those “too big to fail” banks that brought the U.S. financial system to the brink of total collapse a year ago by taking “reckless risks” to generate profits and bonuses.
Clearly struggling to channel the populist anger sweeping the country, he proposed legislation that would govern how big the big banks can become and what lines of business they would be permitted or forbidden to run.
Bank holding companies – which include the major commercial and investment banks – would be prohibited from engaging in the hedge fund or private equity fund fields.
The legislation Obama outlined would also seek to place limits on industry consolidation. It would achieve this by curbing the growth of the market share of liabilities at the biggest firms. The New York Times reported that an existing cap, put in place in 1994, put a limit of 10 percent on the share of insured deposits that can be held by any one bank. That cap would be expanded to include liabilities other than deposits.
Bank Holding Companies would also be barred from proprietary trading – using bank funds to invest on behalf of their own accounts, often resulting in banks taking investment positions against the interests of their shareholders.
Calling this “the Volcker Rule,” the president said commercial banks needed to get back to their core business -- taking customers’ deposits and lending money. Former Federal Reserve chairman Paul A. Volcker has long advocated this position.
Volker -- who reportedly fell out of favor with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and former Treasury secretary Larry Summers, now chairman of the president’s National Economic Council -- has long championed barring commercial banks from using deposits to finance trading in financial securities such as mortgage-backed securities. The losses sustained by commercial banks active in this kind of trading is generally thought to be a major cause of the 2008 crash and subsequent taxpayer bailout.
Most of the regulatory changes Obama proposed require legislation by Congress. This will not be easy, particularly since Republicans have already telegraphed their intention to oppose change – and since, as of Tuesday, the Democrats have lost their filibuster-proof 60-vote majority.
That loss came in the defeat of Democrat Martha Coakley in her quest to win the Senate seat occupied by the late Ted Kennedy for decades. Victory in the race went to Scott Brown, a conservative Republican, who bragged about being the Republicans’ 41st vote against the health care bill. He will be the 41st Republican in the senate, reducing the Democratic caucus to 59. Major legislation in the senate usually takes a super-majority of 60 votes to pass.
In a reliable poll, conducted the morning after the election, fifty-one percent of those Obama supporters backing Brown "said that Democratic policies were doing more to help Wall Street than Main Street."
In an interview with ABC News, Obama said Americans have a "feeling of remoteness and detachment" from Washington. "I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are and why we have to make sure those institutions are matching up with those values," he said.
Last week, Obama said the American people provided "extraordinary assistance" to the financial industry and "continue to face real hardship in this recession." Yet at the same time, Wall Street is expected to dole out a record $145 billion in bonuses to its employees this year.
"Instead of sending a phalanx of lobbyists to fight this proposal, or employing an army of lawyers and accountants to help evade the fee, I suggest you might want to consider simply meeting your responsibilities. And I'd urge you to cover the costs of the rescue not by sticking it to your shareholders or your customers or fellow citizens with the bill, but by rolling back bonuses for top earners and executives," Obama said.
Predictably resisting the kinds of changes Obama proposed, the banking industry warned of its opposition. But Obama evidently anticipated that reaction. He said he expected an “army of industry lobbyists” to fight his proposals. “If these folks want a fight, it’s a fight I’m ready to have,” he declared.
The president also pushed the establishment of a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, to regulate financial products including credit cards and mortgages.
Scott E. Talbott, the chief lobbyist for the Financial Services Roundtable, which speaks for most of the major lenders and insurance companies, said the Obama proposals would “reduce liquidity and increase risk.” He added, “That is the direct opposite of the goals we want to achieve.”
Bank lobbyists also attacked the proposed CFPA. "Maybe the administration will decide that they want to turn this into a partisan battle but, coming out of health care, I don't think the majority of senators want to have a partisan battle," said Edward L. Yingling, president of the American Bankers Association. "They want a bipartisan bill."
But Harvard law school professor Elizabeth Warren, chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel created to oversee the banking bailouts, has said that without the CFPA, "the tag on U.S. financial regulation reform may as well say 'Made on Wall Street'" and is "the best indicator of whether Congress will reform Wall Street or whether it will continue to give Wall Street whatever it wants."
And New York Times columnist Paul Krugman proposed “a simple solution” for passing CFPA and other financial reforms: Make Republicans (or Democrats) vote against it. "Expose the hollowness of their populist posing," Krugman wrote. "In short, take on the banks -- and force those who are covering for them into the open."
But many expert observers of the current recession feel that little will be achieved in the way of financial services regulation until lobbyists’ money is removed from the political landscape.
One such observer is Dr. Jack N. Behrman, emeritus professor at the University of North Carolina business school, who served as JFK’s Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Domestic and International Business. He told Truthout, “No Congressional campaign funds should be permitted to or through either party organization, and lobbying should be permitted only where no funds are involved -- merely persuasion. PLUS -- no Congressman would be allowed to become a lobbyist until four years after retirement.”
The already favorable lobbying environment for the financial sector may become even more favorable as a result of Thursday’s 5-4 Supreme Court decision. The five Conservatives on the court ruled that corporations, as persons, have free speech rights. And since money is considered speech, spending limitations cannot be placed on corporations. The decision means that significant parts of the McCain-Finegold law limiting campaign contributions by corporations are unconstitutional. Corporations – including businesses, labor unions and not-for-profits – will now be free to spend as much money as they wish in support of specific candidates in Federal elections.
Anticipating reduced profitability in the financial sector, bank stocks fell sharply on Wall Street. Investors read in The Wall Street Journal that Obama’s “goal would be to deter banks from becoming so large they put the broader economy at risk and to also prevent banks from becoming so large they distort normal competitive forces."
The article above originally appeared in Truthout.org
www.truthout.org
About Indefinite Detention…
By William Fisher
President Obama’s decision to detain 47 of the just-under 200 remaining prisoners at Guantánamo without trial indefinitely is drawing scorn from legal experts and human rights advocates, who charge that the government simply does not have enough evidence to convict the detainees it says can not be tried but are “too dangerous to release.”
Typical is this comment from David Frakt, a Lieutenant Colonel in the US Air Force Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps Reserve, Associate Professor and Director of the Criminal Law Practice Center at Western State University College of Law in Fullerton California. He is former lead counsel for the Office of Military Commissions Defense, who successfully represented Mohammed Jawad before the military commissions and won his release in habeas corpus litigation in 2009.
Frakt told IPS, “The administration's suggestion that they can't try 47 detainees, not because they don't have evidence of criminal wrongdoing, but because a criminal trial would necessarily involve disclosure of classified information, defies common sense.”
He gave three reasons.
“First, both under the Military Commissions Act of 2009 and under the Classified Information Protection Act (CIPA), in use in federal courts, there are elaborate mechanisms in place to protect classified information.”
“Second, given that the remaining detainees at Guantanamo have been held, on average, for over seven years, the likelihood that there is an ongoing need to protect classified sources and methods in such cases is remote.”
“Finally, it is hard to believe that there would be any greater risk of revealing important classified information than in the 9/11 trial, yet the administration is pressing forward with this and several other cases against high-value detainees who were kept in secret CIA ghost prisons and subjected to still classified methods of interrogation. The administration has acknowledged the right of all detainees to petition for habeas corpus in federal court. Why does the administration seem to believe classified information could be adequately protected in federal habeas litigation, but not in a criminal trial? It seems far more likely that there is simply inadequate admissible non-coerced evidence of criminality,” Frakt said.
Other legal scholars have weighed in with similar views. For example, Brian J. Foley, Visiting Associate Professor at the Boston University School of Law, told IPS, “ Many of the Executive's claims about danger and terrorism have been shown to be incorrect over the years. Last week's incident where an plane bound from New York to Kentucky was diverted for an emergency landing in Philadelphia because passengers freaked out when they saw a Jewish teenager engaging in an Orthodox prayer ritual, and the recent hours-long shutdown of Kennedy airport because a man from earthquake-ravaged Haiti mistakenly opened an emergency door in a terminal, show that our officials are over-reacting and cowardly.”
He said, “The Executive's claim that these people are 'too difficult to prosecute' really means that the Executive knows that the only evidence it has is weak or was obtained by coercion and is therefore very likely false.”
He added, “The Executive is afraid that the public will see what it has been up to, i.e., torture and fearful over-reaction. There are terms for this: cover-up and abuse of power come to mind. Shine the sunlight on these wretched, illegal, cowardly practices, and prosecute the people responsible for them - including members of the Obama Administration if they continue this cover-up and abuse of power.”
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), always a major player in the Guantanamo detention issue, called the Obama policy “un-American.”
Jonathan Hafetz, a senior ACLU lawyer, told IPS, "By committing to hold suspected criminals indefinitely without charge, the Obama has embraced one of the most lawless and un-American policies of the Bush administration, one that turns the most fundamental principles of the Constitution on their head. The notion that the government can simply hold those it believes "dangerous", without putting them on trial, will ultimately serve neither our liberty nor our security."
And Chip Pitts, president of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, asked, “How is this any better than Guantanamo itself and the spur such approaches give to al Qaeda?”
He told IPS, “No legal system worthy of the name can possibly imprison people indefinitely on the shameful argument that they are, in the absence of evidence and a fair trial, ‘too dangerous to release’.”
He called the move a “significant calcification of the lawless Bush approach of holding (often tortured) detainees indefinitely -- effectively, perhaps for life -- until the conclusion of some endless ‘war on terror’,” but said it is “actually undermining vital cooperation from European and Muslim allies, support for the rule of law itself and our country’s national standing and historical legacy.”
In a statement, Amnesty International USA, said, “Indefinite detention. There’s been talk about people who can’t be tried but who are too dangerous to release. This is absurd. People must either be charged with a crime and given a fair trial, or be released. End of story. That’s the way it works. Either there’s evidence against you or there isn’t.”
And Virginia Sloan, president of the widely respected Constitution Project, said, “Even if the Obama administration continues to work to close Guantánamo, by pursuing a policy of indefinite detention without charge, the damaging policies that embody the prison will continue, as will the negative effects to American values, the rule of law, and our nation’s reputation abroad.” She urged opposition to the use of military commissions.
The planned closing of the iconic prison facility on the island of Cuba has been, at the same time, one of the Obama Administration’s signature issues and most serious embarrassments. On his first day in office, the new president issued an executive order to close the prison by January 2010. That deadline has now been missed, as congress refuses to accept detainees even for trial in U.S. civilian courts and countries remain reluctant to accept them for resettlement.
For the past year, Justice Department lawyer Matthew G. Olsen has been leading a Task Force of national-security and law-enforcement officials who have been reviewing the files for each GITMO detainee. The review included an evaluation of any evidence against each man, how serious the threat would be if the detainee was released, and the government chances of prosecuting each prisoner successfully. The groups were then evaluated under the direction of Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.
But the process does not provide all the answers. For example, about 30 of the prisoners scheduled to be transferred to other countries are Yemenis. But transfers to Yemen have been halted following the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas day. It is believed that this plot was developed by a Yemeni affiliate of Al Qaeda.
Holder is also charged with deciding whether those to be prosecuted should face a civilian trial or a military commission. He has announced that five detainees would face a military commission and five others — including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — would be tried in civilian court. It is unclear what criteria the government uses to decide between military commissions and civilian courts.
President Obama’s decision to detain 47 of the just-under 200 remaining prisoners at Guantánamo without trial indefinitely is drawing scorn from legal experts and human rights advocates, who charge that the government simply does not have enough evidence to convict the detainees it says can not be tried but are “too dangerous to release.”
Typical is this comment from David Frakt, a Lieutenant Colonel in the US Air Force Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps Reserve, Associate Professor and Director of the Criminal Law Practice Center at Western State University College of Law in Fullerton California. He is former lead counsel for the Office of Military Commissions Defense, who successfully represented Mohammed Jawad before the military commissions and won his release in habeas corpus litigation in 2009.
Frakt told IPS, “The administration's suggestion that they can't try 47 detainees, not because they don't have evidence of criminal wrongdoing, but because a criminal trial would necessarily involve disclosure of classified information, defies common sense.”
He gave three reasons.
“First, both under the Military Commissions Act of 2009 and under the Classified Information Protection Act (CIPA), in use in federal courts, there are elaborate mechanisms in place to protect classified information.”
“Second, given that the remaining detainees at Guantanamo have been held, on average, for over seven years, the likelihood that there is an ongoing need to protect classified sources and methods in such cases is remote.”
“Finally, it is hard to believe that there would be any greater risk of revealing important classified information than in the 9/11 trial, yet the administration is pressing forward with this and several other cases against high-value detainees who were kept in secret CIA ghost prisons and subjected to still classified methods of interrogation. The administration has acknowledged the right of all detainees to petition for habeas corpus in federal court. Why does the administration seem to believe classified information could be adequately protected in federal habeas litigation, but not in a criminal trial? It seems far more likely that there is simply inadequate admissible non-coerced evidence of criminality,” Frakt said.
Other legal scholars have weighed in with similar views. For example, Brian J. Foley, Visiting Associate Professor at the Boston University School of Law, told IPS, “ Many of the Executive's claims about danger and terrorism have been shown to be incorrect over the years. Last week's incident where an plane bound from New York to Kentucky was diverted for an emergency landing in Philadelphia because passengers freaked out when they saw a Jewish teenager engaging in an Orthodox prayer ritual, and the recent hours-long shutdown of Kennedy airport because a man from earthquake-ravaged Haiti mistakenly opened an emergency door in a terminal, show that our officials are over-reacting and cowardly.”
He said, “The Executive's claim that these people are 'too difficult to prosecute' really means that the Executive knows that the only evidence it has is weak or was obtained by coercion and is therefore very likely false.”
He added, “The Executive is afraid that the public will see what it has been up to, i.e., torture and fearful over-reaction. There are terms for this: cover-up and abuse of power come to mind. Shine the sunlight on these wretched, illegal, cowardly practices, and prosecute the people responsible for them - including members of the Obama Administration if they continue this cover-up and abuse of power.”
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), always a major player in the Guantanamo detention issue, called the Obama policy “un-American.”
Jonathan Hafetz, a senior ACLU lawyer, told IPS, "By committing to hold suspected criminals indefinitely without charge, the Obama has embraced one of the most lawless and un-American policies of the Bush administration, one that turns the most fundamental principles of the Constitution on their head. The notion that the government can simply hold those it believes "dangerous", without putting them on trial, will ultimately serve neither our liberty nor our security."
And Chip Pitts, president of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, asked, “How is this any better than Guantanamo itself and the spur such approaches give to al Qaeda?”
He told IPS, “No legal system worthy of the name can possibly imprison people indefinitely on the shameful argument that they are, in the absence of evidence and a fair trial, ‘too dangerous to release’.”
He called the move a “significant calcification of the lawless Bush approach of holding (often tortured) detainees indefinitely -- effectively, perhaps for life -- until the conclusion of some endless ‘war on terror’,” but said it is “actually undermining vital cooperation from European and Muslim allies, support for the rule of law itself and our country’s national standing and historical legacy.”
In a statement, Amnesty International USA, said, “Indefinite detention. There’s been talk about people who can’t be tried but who are too dangerous to release. This is absurd. People must either be charged with a crime and given a fair trial, or be released. End of story. That’s the way it works. Either there’s evidence against you or there isn’t.”
And Virginia Sloan, president of the widely respected Constitution Project, said, “Even if the Obama administration continues to work to close Guantánamo, by pursuing a policy of indefinite detention without charge, the damaging policies that embody the prison will continue, as will the negative effects to American values, the rule of law, and our nation’s reputation abroad.” She urged opposition to the use of military commissions.
The planned closing of the iconic prison facility on the island of Cuba has been, at the same time, one of the Obama Administration’s signature issues and most serious embarrassments. On his first day in office, the new president issued an executive order to close the prison by January 2010. That deadline has now been missed, as congress refuses to accept detainees even for trial in U.S. civilian courts and countries remain reluctant to accept them for resettlement.
For the past year, Justice Department lawyer Matthew G. Olsen has been leading a Task Force of national-security and law-enforcement officials who have been reviewing the files for each GITMO detainee. The review included an evaluation of any evidence against each man, how serious the threat would be if the detainee was released, and the government chances of prosecuting each prisoner successfully. The groups were then evaluated under the direction of Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.
But the process does not provide all the answers. For example, about 30 of the prisoners scheduled to be transferred to other countries are Yemenis. But transfers to Yemen have been halted following the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas day. It is believed that this plot was developed by a Yemeni affiliate of Al Qaeda.
Holder is also charged with deciding whether those to be prosecuted should face a civilian trial or a military commission. He has announced that five detainees would face a military commission and five others — including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — would be tried in civilian court. It is unclear what criteria the government uses to decide between military commissions and civilian courts.
Well done, Mr. Kennedy!
By William Fisher
OK, if you really read Mr. Justice Kennedy's opinion for the Supreme Court's majority in the Citizens United case, you just have to agree with his reasoning.
No one wants to limit free speech. It would be unconstitutional! The First Amendment is one of our proudest achievements.
So of course, if corporations are just like individual persons, they ought to enjoy exactly the same free speech rights as the rest of us do. No more, no less.
Right! But wait just a minim here folks. How did corporations get to be persons?
It seems sort of counter-intuitive. After all, corporations don't serve in the armed forces defending our country. They don't show up for jury duty. They don't marry and have kids and mortgages. They don't vote. In fact, come to think of it, they don't do almost all the things people do.
So how did they ever get to be people?
So I read the Constitution. And I couldn't find a word about corporations being people.
As a non-lawyer, I then figured there must be a bunch of legal eagles somewhere in the picture. Maybe one of those pesky activist judges.
So I looked.
What I learned from Wikipedia was that back in 1886, there was a case that went to the Supreme Court called Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company. Before this case was argued, Supreme Court Justice Morrison Remick Waite simply pronounced, as follows:
The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.
Thus, Wikipedia tells me, "the doctrine of corporate personhood, which subsequently became a cornerstone of corporate law, was introduced into this 1886 decision without argument."
And then the court reporter duly entered into the summary record of the Court's findings that:
The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteen Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Thus it was that a two-sentence assertion by a single judge elevated corporations to the status of persons under the law, prepared the way for the rise of global corporate rule, and thereby changed the course of history.
Since then, the Feds and many State governments have passed laws limiting the rights of these corporate "people" to express themselves. Clearly unconstitutional.
Wait, there's more. Wikipedia gives me a bit of special insight into this momentous decision. Here it is: "The doctrine of corporate personhood creates an interesting legal contradiction. The corporation is owned by its shareholders and is therefore their property. If it is also a legal person, then it is a person owned by others and thus exists in a condition of slavery -- a status explicitly forbidden by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. So is a corporation a person illegally held in servitude by its shareholders? Or is it a person who enjoys the rights of personhood that take precedence over the presumed ownership rights of its shareholders? So far as I have been able to determine, this contradiction has not been directly addressed by the courts."
I was having trouble believing what I was learning, so I turned to my friend Peter Shane, a law professor at Ohio State and one of the country's most respected Constitutional scholars. Here's what he told me:
"The most amazing thing about corporate status under the Constitution is that this fundamental question was resolved by the Supreme Court without any real discussion whatever. Scalia is supposed to be an originalist? I doubt anyone in 1789 understood the First Amendment as a limitation on Congress's capacity to regulate corporations. As for corporations being 'persons' under the Fourteenth Amendment, was the purpose of the Civil War to free corporations from state control? This is historical nonsense."
He also reminded me of the Roberts confirmation hearing I watched. "Remember," he said, "how Chief Justice Roberts said he would just be an umpire on the Court, calling balls and strikes? The Citizens United decision just exposes once again how radically activist the Roberts Court is, inventing law as it goes along. Roberts makes Rehnquist look like Brennan. The American people should immediately demand that Congress propose a constitutional amendment to make the right to vote in all elections a federal right and to authorize Congress and the states to regulate corporate participation in electoral politics."
Well, good luck with that Amendment, Peter. That's a long and tortuous process.
Meanwhile, we'll all have to take a big breath and sit back and wait to see if an even greater torrent of corporate money starts pouring into the political process - though it's not easy to visualize anyone actually having any more money.
Like a zillion other people, I invest in a bunch of mutual funds and a few equities. And like the rest of us, I do that to earn money. That's as far as I want the companies I invest in to go in representing me. Making money.
That's it.
I don't want to hear them saying they represent me politically or in any other way. They don't speak for me. Who they actually speak for is arguable. You might say they speak for their shareholders, that it's the shareholders who own the company. If that's true, then us shareholders should get to have a vote before the first penny of political booty is dispensed.
Corporations aren't doing that now. With the Supremes behind them, why would they start giving me a voice? Besides, that would make me a slave-owner, and I can't afford the housekeeping help I have now.
Some pundits have been saying that the Citizens United decision was downright radical. Well, I guess you could say that. After all, it did reverse about a hundred years of jurisprudence.
But what keeps me confused is that if the guys in the black robes wanted to be truly radical they could overturn the 1886 Santa Clara County decision.
Then we wouldn't have to be running about worrying about what more mischief the corporations will do with their newly reaffirmed personhood.
OK, if you really read Mr. Justice Kennedy's opinion for the Supreme Court's majority in the Citizens United case, you just have to agree with his reasoning.
No one wants to limit free speech. It would be unconstitutional! The First Amendment is one of our proudest achievements.
So of course, if corporations are just like individual persons, they ought to enjoy exactly the same free speech rights as the rest of us do. No more, no less.
Right! But wait just a minim here folks. How did corporations get to be persons?
It seems sort of counter-intuitive. After all, corporations don't serve in the armed forces defending our country. They don't show up for jury duty. They don't marry and have kids and mortgages. They don't vote. In fact, come to think of it, they don't do almost all the things people do.
So how did they ever get to be people?
So I read the Constitution. And I couldn't find a word about corporations being people.
As a non-lawyer, I then figured there must be a bunch of legal eagles somewhere in the picture. Maybe one of those pesky activist judges.
So I looked.
What I learned from Wikipedia was that back in 1886, there was a case that went to the Supreme Court called Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company. Before this case was argued, Supreme Court Justice Morrison Remick Waite simply pronounced, as follows:
The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.
Thus, Wikipedia tells me, "the doctrine of corporate personhood, which subsequently became a cornerstone of corporate law, was introduced into this 1886 decision without argument."
And then the court reporter duly entered into the summary record of the Court's findings that:
The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteen Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Thus it was that a two-sentence assertion by a single judge elevated corporations to the status of persons under the law, prepared the way for the rise of global corporate rule, and thereby changed the course of history.
Since then, the Feds and many State governments have passed laws limiting the rights of these corporate "people" to express themselves. Clearly unconstitutional.
Wait, there's more. Wikipedia gives me a bit of special insight into this momentous decision. Here it is: "The doctrine of corporate personhood creates an interesting legal contradiction. The corporation is owned by its shareholders and is therefore their property. If it is also a legal person, then it is a person owned by others and thus exists in a condition of slavery -- a status explicitly forbidden by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. So is a corporation a person illegally held in servitude by its shareholders? Or is it a person who enjoys the rights of personhood that take precedence over the presumed ownership rights of its shareholders? So far as I have been able to determine, this contradiction has not been directly addressed by the courts."
I was having trouble believing what I was learning, so I turned to my friend Peter Shane, a law professor at Ohio State and one of the country's most respected Constitutional scholars. Here's what he told me:
"The most amazing thing about corporate status under the Constitution is that this fundamental question was resolved by the Supreme Court without any real discussion whatever. Scalia is supposed to be an originalist? I doubt anyone in 1789 understood the First Amendment as a limitation on Congress's capacity to regulate corporations. As for corporations being 'persons' under the Fourteenth Amendment, was the purpose of the Civil War to free corporations from state control? This is historical nonsense."
He also reminded me of the Roberts confirmation hearing I watched. "Remember," he said, "how Chief Justice Roberts said he would just be an umpire on the Court, calling balls and strikes? The Citizens United decision just exposes once again how radically activist the Roberts Court is, inventing law as it goes along. Roberts makes Rehnquist look like Brennan. The American people should immediately demand that Congress propose a constitutional amendment to make the right to vote in all elections a federal right and to authorize Congress and the states to regulate corporate participation in electoral politics."
Well, good luck with that Amendment, Peter. That's a long and tortuous process.
Meanwhile, we'll all have to take a big breath and sit back and wait to see if an even greater torrent of corporate money starts pouring into the political process - though it's not easy to visualize anyone actually having any more money.
Like a zillion other people, I invest in a bunch of mutual funds and a few equities. And like the rest of us, I do that to earn money. That's as far as I want the companies I invest in to go in representing me. Making money.
That's it.
I don't want to hear them saying they represent me politically or in any other way. They don't speak for me. Who they actually speak for is arguable. You might say they speak for their shareholders, that it's the shareholders who own the company. If that's true, then us shareholders should get to have a vote before the first penny of political booty is dispensed.
Corporations aren't doing that now. With the Supremes behind them, why would they start giving me a voice? Besides, that would make me a slave-owner, and I can't afford the housekeeping help I have now.
Some pundits have been saying that the Citizens United decision was downright radical. Well, I guess you could say that. After all, it did reverse about a hundred years of jurisprudence.
But what keeps me confused is that if the guys in the black robes wanted to be truly radical they could overturn the 1886 Santa Clara County decision.
Then we wouldn't have to be running about worrying about what more mischief the corporations will do with their newly reaffirmed personhood.
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