Getting to Know Elena Kagan

by Ralph Nader

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/05/15-6

Given the Niagara of commentary on the nomination of Elena Kagan to become an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, we know very little about the nominee. For friend and critic alike, the predominant view of Ms. Kagan is that she has publically uttered or written remarkably little of her own views on any subject that directly or remotely relates to her forthcoming position.

As a law school graduate, brief stint as a practitioner, special assistant on domestic policy to President Clinton, professor of Law and Dean of Harvard Law School, Elena Kagan has been unusually circumspect, despite her lively tenure as editor of the Daily Princetonian while an undergraduate in Tigertown.

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Chomsky: How the Tea Partiers Are Getting Screwed by Their Own Ideology

By Noam Chomsky, In These Times
Posted on May 13, 2010, Printed on May 14, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/146852/

On Feb. 18, Joe Stack, a 53-year-old computer engineer, crashed his small plane into a building in Austin, Texas, hitting an IRS office, committing suicide, killing one other person and injuring others.

Stack left an anti-government manifesto explaining his actions. The story begins when he was a teenager living on a pittance in Harrisburg, Pa., near the heart of what was once a great industrial center.

His neighbor, in her ’80s and surviving on cat food, was the “widowed wife of a retired steel worker. Her husband had worked all his life in the steel mills of central Pennsylvania with promises from big business and the union that, for his 30 years of service, he would have a pension and medical care to look forward to in his retirement.

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The Truth About the Big Banks' Unprecedented Lobbying Avalanche

By Kevin Connor, AlterNet
Posted on May 13, 2010, Printed on May 14, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/146856/

Over the course of the financial reform process, the six biggest banks and their murky trade associations have waged an historic assault on democracy, hiring hundreds of revolving door lobbyists and spending hundreds of millions of dollars to push their legislative agenda. I've detailed this all in a comprehensive report for Campaign for America's Future and SEIU, which you ought read because it shows the extent to which these too-big-to-fail bank behemoths own Congress.

The report details how the Big Six banks hired 243 lobbyists who once worked in the federal government, including 202 who used to work in Congress, as well as others who worked at the Treasury, the White House, or a relevant federal agency like the SEC. This is at best a conflict of interest, and at worst, a takeover of all checks-and-balances on the financial industry.

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Blowback: Why They Try to Bomb Us

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/blowback_why_they_try_to_bomb_us_20100513/

Posted on May 14, 2010

By David Sirota

Imagine, if you can, an alternate universe.

Imagine that in this alternate universe, a foreign military power begins flying remote-controlled warplanes over your town, using onboard missiles to kill hundreds of your innocent neighbors.

Now imagine that when you read the newspaper about this ongoing bloodbath, you learn that the foreign nation’s top general is nonchalantly telling reporters that his troops are also killing “an amazing number” of your cultural brethren in an adjacent country. Imagine further learning that this foreign power is expanding the drone attacks on your community despite the attacks’ well-known record of killing innocents. And finally, imagine that when you turn on your television, you see the perpetrator nation’s tuxedo-clad leader cracking stand-up comedy jokes about drone strikes—jokes that prompt guffaws from an audience of that nation’s elite.

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Shadow Elite: Think BP's The Bad Guy? Think Bigger, Way Bigger

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/linda-keenan/emshadow-eliteem-think-bp_b_574606.html

By Linda Keenan and Janine R. Wedel

Coast Guard Captain leading hearings Wednesday: "It's my understanding that [a blowout preventer is] designed to industry standard ... manufactured by the industry, installed by the industry, with no government witnessing or oversight of the construction or installation. Is that correct?"

Regional supervisor, federal regulator MMS: "That is correct..."

That staggering statement of regulatory impotence was characterized this way by Sen. Bill Nelson in the Wall Street Journal: "If MMS wasn't asleep at the wheel, it sure was letting Big Oil do most of the driving." It is tempting to hope that Big Oil's days in the driver's seat are over, now that the Obama administration has ordered that the Minerals Management Service, which oversees offshore drilling, be split up, after critics said the agency was too close to the industry and had an inherent conflict of interest. Realists are highly skeptical. And in our view, it is shortsighted to focus public ire on one business and one massive, deadly disaster, even as HuffPost yesterday spoke to another whistle-blower alleging egregious practices.

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Outing the Fed

William Greider |The Nation   May 10, 2010

Update, May 11, 2010: The Senate adopted the Sanders amendment, 96-0, which does not indicate its meaningless. In these weird times, senators don't want to stand for the Fed if they can avoid it.

The weirdness of this political system is reflected in the fact that it takes a Socialist senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, and a libertarian Republican from Texas, Rep. Ron Paul, to beat the banking lobby. The Democrats are making a show of "Wall Street reform" but choking on the tough issues. Republicans are in the tank, as expected, though nervous about the public fury.

Sanders and Paul, however, found an opening with their bill to force a GAO audit of the sacrosanct Federal Reserve. This is a big deal, much bigger than most imagine. Congress has sputtered for years about the Fed’s imperious secrecy but never found the nerve to do anything. The Sanders-Paul audit bill, if it passes, will only be a first breach in the wall, but it promises to keep alive popular demands for more fundamental reforms.

Rep. Alan Grayson, the first-term Florida Democrat who partnered with Paul to pass the House version, has a distinctive way of explaining things with brutal clarity. "Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke doesn’t want an audit because Ben Bernanke doesn’t want to be audited," Grayson said. "Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, the former head of the New York Fed, doesn’t want an audit because Tim Geithner doesn’t want to be audited."

Forget all the official blabber about "Fed independence." The central bank has never been inde

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Lessons from the Gulf

by Stephen Lendman

Host of Progressive Radio News Hour Thursdays at 11 am, weekends at 1 pm

On April 22, AP reported the news - an initial April 20 explosion, then a larger one igniting Deepwater Horizon's oil drilling platform that burned for more than a day before sinking and releasing thousands of barrels of oil daily into surrounding waters, enough potentially to cause the greatest ever environmental disaster if not sealed in time to prevent.

Transocean Ltd. owned and operated the Deepwater Horizon platform under contract to BP Exploration and Production Inc., a division of BP - 4th on Fortune Global 500 with $239 billion in 2009 operating revenue and $14 billion in profits. It ranked fourth behind Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil and Wal-Mart. Of the world's 10 largest companies, six are oil giants. Transocean, an offshore drilling contractor, owns operates about 140 drilling rigs. More on its culpability below.

On April 29, the Institute for Southern Studies published "Facts and Figures" about the Gulf explosion and emerging disaster saying:

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Kagan in Context: Shafting Progressive Values

by Norman Solomon l Host of Political Analysis, Tuesday at 6 pm

If President Obama has his way, Elena Kagan will replace John Paul Stevens -- and the Supreme Court will move rightward. The nomination is very disturbing, especially because it's part of a pattern.

The White House is in the grip of conventional centrist wisdom. Grim results stretch from Afghanistan to the Gulf of Mexico to communities across the USA.

"It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don't cause spills," President Obama said in support of offshore oil drilling, less than three weeks before the April 20 blowout in the Gulf. "They are technologically very advanced."

On numerous policy fronts, such conformity to a centrist baseline has smothered hopes for moving this country in a progressive direction. Now, the president has taken a step that jeopardizes civil liberties and other basic constitutional principles.

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Myths and falsehoods about Elena Kagan's Supreme Court nomination

Media Matters for America has compiled and debunked myths and falsehoods about Solicitor General Elena Kagan's Supreme Court nomination.

http://mediamatters.org/research/201005100001

Myth: Kagan's policies on military recruiters make her "an anti-military zealot" and an extremist on social issues

CLAIM: Kagan's policies regarding military recruiters at Harvard indicate that she is an "anti-military" "radical" who "defied" the law . Phyllis Schlafly claimed in her March 31 syndicated column that Kagan "defied the Solomon Amendment" -- a statute requiring schools to provide the same access to military recruiters that they provide to other potential employers or lose federal funding. Liz Cheney called Kagan's actions "radical," and other conservatives have also distorted Kagan's position regarding military recruiters on Harvard Law School's campus. And The Washington Times published a 2009 op-ed referring to Kagan as "an anti-military zealot."

REALITY: Kagan consistently followed the law, and Harvard students had access to military recruiters during her entire tenure as dean. Throughout Kagan's tenure as dean, Harvard law students had access to military recruiters -- either through Harvard's Office of Career Services or through the Harvard Law School Veterans Association. Moreover, Kagan consistently followed existing law regarding access to military recruiters. Kagan briefly restricted (but did not eliminate) access to recruiters only after the U.S Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit ruled that law schools could do so. As The New York Times explained in a May 6 article:

[Kagan's] management of the recruiting dispute shows her to have been, above all, a pragmatist, asserting her principles but all the while following the law, so that Harvard never lost its financing.

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Obama's Supreme Court Nominee Elena Kagan Will Move the Court to the Right

AlterNet / By Marjorie Cohn

President Barack Obama has chosen Elena Kagan to fill the vacancy left by Justice John Paul Stevens' retirement. Sadly, Kagan cannot fill Justice Stevens' mighty shoes.

As the Rehnquist court continued to eviscerate the right of the people to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, Associate Justice John Paul Stevens filed principled and courageous dissents. For example, the majority held in the 1991 case of California v. Acevedo that although the police cannot search a closed container without a warrant, they can wait until a person puts the container into a car and then do a warrantless search because the container is now mobile. In a ringing dissent that exemplified his revulsion at executive overreaching, Justice Stevens wrote that “decisions like the one the Court makes today will support the conclusion that this Court has become a loyal foot soldier in the Executive's fight against crime.”

The founders wrote checks and balances into the Constitution so that no one branch would become too powerful. But during his “war on terror,” President George W. Bush claimed nearly unbridled executive power to hold non-citizens indefinitely without an opportunity to challenge their detention and to deny them due process. Three times, a closely divided Supreme Court put on the brakes. Justice Stevens played a critical role in each of those decisions. He wrote the opinions in Rasul v. Bush and Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and his fingerprints were all over Boumediene v. Bush.

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Look Out, Obama Seems to Be Planning for a Lot More War

Asia Times / By Jack A Smith

The Barack Obama administration's pronouncements and actions in recent months point to even greater war-making across the planet.

There's more war in America's future -- a great deal more, judging by the Barack Obama administration's reports, pronouncements and actions in recent months.

These documents and deeds include the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), the Ballistic Missile Defense Report, the nuclear security summit in New York and the May 3-28 United Nations nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference, as well as the continuing wars in the Middle East and Central Asia, and the 2011 Pentagon war budget request.

The United States government presides as a military colossus of unrivaled dimension, but the QDR, which was published in February, suggests Washington views America as being constantly under the threat of attack from a multitude of fearsome forces bent on its destruction. As such, trillions more dollars must be invested in present and future wars -- ostensibly to protect the besieged homeland.

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U.S. Pressure Helps Militants Overseas Focus Efforts

By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON — When President Obama decided last year to narrow the scope of the nine-year war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, he and his aides settled on a formulation that sounded simple: Eviscerate Al Qaeda, but just “degrade” the Taliban, reversing that movement’s momentum.

Now, after the bungled car-bombing attempt in Times Square with suspected links to the Pakistani Taliban, a new, and disturbing, question is being raised in Washington: Have the stepped-up attacks in Pakistan — notably the Predator drone strikes — actually made Americans less safe? Have they had the perverse consequence of driving lesser insurgencies to think of targeting Times Square and American airliners, not just Kabul and Islamabad? In short, are they inspiring more attacks on America than they prevent?

It is a hard question.

At the time of Mr. Obama’s strategy review, the logic seemed straightforward. Only Al Qaeda had the ambitions and reach to leap the ocean and take the war to America’s skies and streets. In contrast, most of the Taliban and other militant groups were regarded as fragmented, regional insurgencies whose goals stuck close to the territory their tribal ancestors have fought over for centuries.

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The case against Elena Kagan

By Glenn Greenwald

(updated below - Update II [responses from Dellinger and others] - Update III [response to Lessig])

It is far from clear who Obama will chose to replace John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court, but Elena Kagan, his current Solicitor General and former Dean of Harvard Law School, is on every list of the most likely replacements.  Tom Goldstein of SCOTUSblog has declared her "the prohibitive front-runner" and predicts:  "On October 4, 2010, Elena Kagan Will Ask Her First Question As A Supreme Court Justice."  The New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin made the same prediction. 

The prospect that Stevens will be replaced by Elena Kagan has led to the growing perception that Barack Obama will actually take a Supreme Court dominated by Justices Scalia (Reagan), Thomas (Bush 41), Roberts (Bush 43), Alito (Bush 43) and Kennedy (Reagan) and move it further to the Right.  Joe Lieberman went on Fox News this weekend to celebrate the prospect that "President Obama may nominate someone in fact who makes the Court slightly less liberal," while The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus predicted:  "The court that convenes on the first Monday in October is apt to be more conservative than the one we have now."  Last Friday, I made the same argument:   that replacing Stevens with Kagan risks moving the Court to the Right, perhaps substantially to the Right (by "the Right," I mean:  closer to the Bush/Cheney vision of Government and the Thomas/Scalia approach to executive power and law).

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Shadow Elite: Neocons, The Holocaust & Emergency Powers

By Janine R. Wedel

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/janine-r-wedel/emshadow-eliteem-neocons_b_565654.html?view=print

After a break last week, the Shadow Elite column resumes its look at the rise of executive power, and the cost to democracy. Today, how the Holocaust shaped neoconservative belief in the need for constant vigilance. The aftermath of 9/11 offered a small group I call in my book the "Neocon core" a politically receptive climate to wage war against the threat of terrorism and to link it with the perceived threat of Saddam Hussein, a threat they had long been warning about. In doing so, they abetted the increase in executive power.

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

"For us, terrorism remains the great evil of our time, and the war against this evil, our generation's great cause. . . . There is no middle way for Americans: it is victory or holocaust." -Richard Perle, co-author, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, 2004

Note the small "h" on the word "holocaust" from the book co-authored by Bush White House advisor Richard Perle, one of the most influential instigators of the war in Iraq. It suggests that to Perle and his ideological allies, the Holocaust was not a singular event, but rather the first of other potential holocausts that must be prevented.

As I detail in Shadow Elite, Perle is the linchpin of the Neocon core, an informal group of a dozen or so members of the far bigger and more diverse neoconservative movement, who've worked with each other in various incarnations for some thirty years to realize their goals for American foreign policy through the assertion of military power.

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New York Car Bomb Incident: Another False Flag?

by Stephen Lendman l Host of Progressive Radio News Hour

Thursdays at 11 am, Weekends at 1 pm

On May 1, New York Times writers Al Baker and William Rashbaum headlined, "Police Find Car Bomb in Times Square," saying:

"A crude car bomb of propane, gasoline and fireworks was discovered in a 'smoking' Nissan Pathfinder in the heart of Times Square on Saturday evening, prompting the evacuation of thousands of tourists and theatergoers on a warm and busy night."

Mayor Michael Bloomberg claimed "We were very lucky. We avoided what could have been a very deadly event."

For much of the evening, Midtown New York, from 43rd - 48th streets, was closed, heightening fear reported for hours on cable news shows, including statements by Bloomberg, Governor David Paterson, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne, saying the bomb "appeared (to be) in the process of detonating, but it malfunctioned."

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A Presidency in Peril: Warnings from Robert Kuttner

by Dean Baker

Like most progressives, Robert Kuttner had great hopes following President Obama's election in 2008. However, Kuttner also has been around long enough to realize the risk that President Obama might not live up to his potential in bringing about progressive change. His new book, A Presidency in Peril [1], documents how the Obama administration has been falling short.

The basic story is both straightforward and depressing. President Obama surrounded himself with advisers that were close to Wall Street and business in general. This undoubtedly reflected his disposition; he had always been a political moderate. However, it was also partly determined by his political backers. Wall Street's generosity with campaign contributions was an essential part of his rise to the top of the Democratic field in the presidential primaries. This guaranteed that Obama would pursue a cautious business-friendly path.

Much of the book focuses on the response to the economic crisis, in particular the bank bailouts and the stimulus. In both cases Obama took a centrist path that that largely protected the interests of the wealthy. This is most clear in the case of the bank bailout. In the closing weeks of the presidential campaign Obama took time out to push for the TARP, a huge wad of money for the banks that came largely without strings. After TARP, the bailouts continued, with Citigroup and Bank of America nursed back to life thanks to the generosity of the taxpayers.

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Celente Predicted Pakistani Terror as a Top Trend for 2010: More Terror to Come

KINGSTON, NY, 4 May 2010 — Months prior to the release of the Trends Journal’s “Top Trends for 2010” – on radio, TV, in Trend Alerts^® and press releases – Gerald Celente forecast a new wave terror strikes against the United States.  He predicted the time, the place, the who and the how.

The “time” would be 2010.  The “place” would be public and symbolic.  The “who” would, in all probability, be a lone wolf of Pakistani origin or heritage.  The “how” would be low-tech or high – whatever the method or means, the rationale would be would be the same: revenge.

Celente asked, “Who among the 200,000 Pakistanis living in America will decide to exact revenge for murdered relatives or drone-bombed villages back home?”  (See “Terror 2010,” Trends Journal^®, Winter 2010)

And the connections Celente spelled out long ago between the Obama administration’s $7.5 billion “Af-Pak Strategy” and its terror consequences, have not yet been made or acknowledged by Washington or by the American media.

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"Hey Dad, Why Does This Country Protect Billionaires, and Not Teachers?"

By Les Leopold, AlterNet
Posted on May 5, 2010, Printed on May 5, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/146738/

Last week, thousands of New Jersey public school students walked out of class to protest draconian school budget cuts. “Save my teacher,” their signs read. In a state that is home to a bevy of high finance billionaires, with the highest per capita income in the nation, teachers are being sacked left and right. In our town half the student body protested outside the high school. Perhaps the protesters should turn their eyes towards the twenty-five top hedge fund honchos who took in $25 billion in 2009. Their “earnings” alone could fund 658,000 entry level teachers.

It’s ironic that the battlefield in this war over resources is public education. Because the public remains entirely uneducated about the connection between those billionaires and school budget cuts. We are clueless about what the Wall Street billionaires do to earn their riches and whether it’s of any value. We might be able to understand “weapons of mass destruction,” but financial weapons of mass destruction are way beyond us.

The new earning reports are good, we read. The giant financial institutions are back to making billions through “trading.” So are these bankers grown-up versions of kids trading baseball cards–or are they robber barons? Are they enriching our society or siphoning off its wealth? Maybe the marching students of New Jersey could ask Governor Christie to explain.

Here’s what we do know for sure. Our modern financial honchos are very different from the robber barons of old. Everybody knew that Rockefeller meant oil, Ford meant cars and Carnegie meant steel.

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Hightower: Washington Overrun by 11,000 Corporate Lobbyists and $500 Million in Corrupting Donations

By Jim Hightower, Hightower Lowdown
Posted on April 29, 2010, Printed on April 29, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/146643/

Change. That's what Americans want. We the People--a.k.a. the body politic, the majority, the great unwashed, the hoi polloi, "us"--have made it clear that we want real, substantive change in the way Washington works, and for whom it works. We're sick of a "jobless recovery," rampant banksterism, collapsing bridges, corporate-owned elections, tinkle-down economics, oil dependency, made-in-China everything, mountaintop "removal," corporate welfare, falling wages, skyrocketing tuition, the demise of the middle class, and on and on. Enough! Ya basta! Stop it--change, dammit, CHANGE!

But where's the change? It's in subcommittees, in negotiations, in limbo, in transition, in purgatory, in trouble, in Never Never Land, in the trash can.

Why? Right-wing pundits and corporate-funded tea-party groups want you to blame Washington. Well, yes, Obama seems to lack convictions, much less courage; Senate Democrats tend to be five-watt bulbs sitting in 100-watt sockets; and congressional Republicans are...well, contemptible and pathetic. But these characters are the public face of the problem, not the source. Progressives need to focus on those shadowy players who're pulling the strings from behind the scenes to kill the will of the people and impose their special interest over America's public interest.

Who are they? Let's start by running some numbers on them:

• 11,195. That's the number of corporate lobbyists who are presently plying their nefarious trade day and night in Washington's hallways and back rooms.
• $2.95 billion. That's the amount that corporations spent on lobbyists last year alone (a sum more than six times greater than the total spent by all consumer,environmental, worker, and other non-corporate groups combined).
• $473 million. That's the sum of money that corporate executives and lobbyists have slipped into Washington's many political pockets--so far--for the 2010 election cycle, including donations to candidates, leadership PACS, and party committees. We are still seven months from the 2010 elections, and already corporate spending has reached the record-breaking total of $475 million shelled out for the entire 2008 cycle.

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Chomsky: Obama's No Human Rights Crusader -- Just Look at How He Aids Israel's Atrocities

By Noam Chomsky, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on April 27, 2010, Printed on April 28, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/146641/

[To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.]

The fact that the Israel-Palestine conflict grinds on without resolution might appear to be rather strange.  For many of the world’s conflicts, it is difficult even to conjure up a feasible settlement.  In this case, it is not only possible, but there is near universal agreement on its basic contours: a two-state settlement along the internationally recognized (pre-June 1967) borders -- with “minor and mutual modifications,” to adopt official U.S. terminology before Washington departed from the international community in the mid-1970s. 

The basic principles have been accepted by virtually the entire world, including the Arab states (who go on to call for full normalization of relations), the Organization of Islamic States (including Iran), and relevant non-state actors (including Hamas).  A settlement along these lines was first proposed at the U.N. Security Council in January 1976 by the major Arab states.  Israel refused to attend the session.  The U.S. vetoed the resolution, and did so again in 1980.  The record at the General Assembly since is similar.

There was one important and revealing break in U.S.-Israeli rejectionism.  After the failed Camp David agreements in 2000, President Clinton recognized that the terms he and Israel had proposed were unacceptable to any Palestinians.  That December, he proposed his “parameters”: imprecise, but more forthcoming.  He then stated that both sides had accepted the parameters, while expressing reservations. 

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