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This Memorial Day: Should We Arrest Cheney and Bush, Impeach Obama?

By Dr. Glen Barry, Ecological Internet
Earth Meanders come from Earth's Newsdesk

War and climate criminals will be brought to justiceIt has been awhile since I have written how U.S. militarism to prop up an unsustainable way of life is destroying both Earth and freedom. As Obama induced "hopenosis" starts wearing off, it is clear that on several key issues -- war, civil liberties and climate change --

we are getting "Bush Lite" policies from President Obama that differ little from his criminal predecessor. Military commissions to try those illegally held for years will occur after all, and some may be held forever without charges. We continue to be spied upon. Obama is escalating the unwinnable war in Afghanistan, and drawing out the criminal occupation of Iraq. Meanwhile the real Earth and society crushing crises of climate change and global ecosystem collapse remain woefully unaddressed. Heil Bush! Heil Obama!

After nearly a decade of criminal rule, America continues under new management to careen forward, wounded and flailing in vain attempts to return to a state of excessive democratic consumption. On the economy, the President has borrowed (stolen?) $trillions from our children to rescue a dying industrial and speculative
capitalistic shell game built upon usury, greed and unsustainability. And we are getting an inadequate climate change policy that cherry picks token measures to be seen as acting while coddling coal and tar sands which we know must end to survive. America's might makes right, damn the truth and consequences, mind set is destroying civilized society and our one shared Earth.

Democrats and Republicans are two faces of the same imperial American war machine, hell-bent to destroy Earth for one last fix of economic growth. Happiness and meaning is always having more stuff, damn the consequences for the Earth and poor. President Bush is a known war criminal that a truly just, law-abiding, democratic system would bring to justice. Torture, rigged elections, unprovoked illegal and imperial wars, spying on law-abiding citizens -- President or not, these are illegal behaviors. As are the current weak (and orders of magnitude insufficient) climate bill, subsidizing coal and its mountaintop removal mining, and continuing a state of unjustified perma-war when a great nation and its peoples are going bankrupt -- both financially and morally.

Charge War and Climate Criminals Starting with Cheney, Bush and Further Down the Chain of Command

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We are calling for withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan, ending the illegal bombing with US drones, including neighboring Pakistan, and the closing of the Bagram prison and ending indefinite detention and torture. We are calling for an end to these wars and occupations, including that of Iraq, so that our resources can be used for life-sustaining actions including the funding and the rebuilding of Afghanistans and Iraq's infrastructure and medical assistance to Afghans and Iraqis, in addition to poverty reduction programs in the United States and world wide. We are calling for accountability for those who have committed war crimes.

The Fight for the Public Option Hits Home Stretch -- Is Obama Hiding?

By Adele Stan, AlterNet
Posted on October 6, 2009, Printed on October 6, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143081/

For months, as Congress has debated health-care reform, President Barack Obama's tepid rhetoric about  the importance -- but not the necessity -- of a public health-care plan has caused anxiety among progressives. Indeed, even in his health-care speech last month before a joint session of Congress, Obama seemed less than committed to a fight-to-the-finish on behalf of the public option.

Then the left got serious.
Groups like Democracy for America and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee launched television ads targeting senators -- including Democrats -- who stand in the way of the public option. Progressives began raising campaign funds for pro-public option legislators, and the Accountability Now PAC promised primary challenges to those who fell out of step with progressive priorities like a public health insurance plan.

Lo and behold, the ground seemed to shift with this weekend's news that President Obama and members of his administration have been quietly talking with reluctant lawmakers, trying to cut a deal for a public option.

It's hard to say whether Obama is responding to pressure from the left, or was always inclined to step back publicly from the public option while quietly cutting a back-room deal for its survival. But it's safe to say that the pressure from the left hasn't hurt, even if one Democratic senator, a public-option advocate, contends it has. But the senator in question, Chuck Schumer of New York, almost has to say that: He's deeply involved in getting fence-sitting Democrats to come his way on the public plan when it's time for a vote.

This week, Senate leadership will begin the work of hammering out that body's final health-care bill, a combination of the legislation drafted by the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which contains a public option, and the one expected to be offered by the Finance Committee (the committee will vote on its bill today), which does not. If the final Senate bill does not include the public plan, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has signaled that he will carry the issue to the Senate floor in the form of an amendment. Failing that, the public plan could still survive via a budget maneuver when the House and Senate bills are reconciled in the conference committee.

Republicans, seeing that they may have to concede defeat on their attempt to derail the public option, are now looking to scuttle health-care reform with an attack on the mandate included in all the bills -- a requirement that all Americans buy health insurance (some with government help). In the mark-up session for the Finance Committee bill, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Tex., made his argument that the mandate equals a tax on people making less than $150,000 per year -- a violation, he says, of Obama's campaign promise not to increase taxes on working families.

http://healthcarecantwait.com/

And the assault on the mandate doesn't end with the Senate.  In more than a dozen states, efforts are currently under way to pass legislation that would declare the mandate unconstitutional under state law. Once the health-care reform bill is signed by the president, a state with a mandate ban in place will likely try to force a constitutional challenge to the insurance requirement. While leading constitutional scholars contend that federal law would trump state law in such a contest, the challenge could gum up the health-care works, possibly delaying the implementation of health-care reform in the state that posed the challenge. And with a heavy roster of right-wingers occupying the bench of today's Supreme Court, a surprise could be in order should a challenge to the mandate find its way to the high court.

So why not strip the
mandate out of the bill? Because the public option can't really work without it. The mandate is what keeps the public plan remotely affordable; it provides a pool that includes young, healthy people. Without them, you wind up with
a public plan populated by otherwise uninsurable people, most of them uninsurable because they are already quite sick. And health-insurance reform without a mandate will allow insurance companies to continue to cherry-pick the healthiest consumers for their rolls.

Back in Washington, support appears to be coalescing around the prospect of a health-care reform bill that contains a public option. In the House, Greg Sargent reports, there are 170 firm votes for a bill that contains a public option. That leaves 48 more to get, which insiders contend is do-able.

The Senate is a much tougher game. There it takes 60 vote to shut down a filibuster, one maneuver likely to be employed by opponents of reform. The Democratic caucus comprises exactly 60 senators, but not all are on board with a public option. That's why progressives have targeted television advertising on Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., and Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, both of whom seem to defy popular opinion in their states with their reluctance to embrace the public plan. (Coincidentally, both also receive a major portion of their campaign
funding from the health-care sector.) Other reluctant Dems include Senators Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Kent Conrad of North Dakota.

Still, Schumer contends that at least 54 Senate Democrats are ready to vote for a bill that contains a public insurance plan. That leaves six more to get, which Schumer says can be done.

If Obama is to get his public-option deal, however, he will likely need to win over heel-dragging lawmakers with some weakened version of the plan -- something either administered by the states, and perhaps not even launched until insurance companies fail to provide affordable insurance according to some benchmark built into the bill as a "trigger." (There's some belief that, if they go that route, Senate Democrats could win a single Republican -- that of Maine's Olympia Snowe.) However, many experts,  including former Secretary
of Labor Robert Reich, say that triggers don't work.

http://healthcarecantwait.com/

As the health-care reform bill wends its way through Congress, there's only one thing worth betting on: Some sort of health-care bill will pass into law. It looks like the bill will contain something called a public option. But whether it will represent true reform is anybody's guess.

Adele M. Stan is AlterNet's Washington bureau chief.

© 2009 Independent Media Institute.
All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/143081/

http://moretexastruth.blogspot.com/2009/04/calls-for-obamas-impearchment.html

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“Life is full of beauty. Notice
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Smell the rain, and feel the wind. Live your life to the fullest potential, and fight for your dreams.” Ashley Smith

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What
Recession? As the Economy Crashed Around Them, 400 Richest Americans Lined Their Pockets with $30 Billion$

By Les Leopold, AlterNet
Posted on October 1, 2009, Printed on October 6, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143028/

It's great to know that during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the wealth of the 400 richest
Americans, according to Forbes, actually increased by $30 billion. Well golly, that's only a 2 percent increase, much less than the double digit returns the wealthy had grown accustomed to. But a 2 percent increase is a whole lot more than losing 40 percent of your 401k. And $30 billion is enough to provide 500,000 school teacher jobs at $60k per year.

Collectively, those 400 have $1.57
trillion in wealth. It's hard to get your mind around a number like that. The way I do it is to imagine that we were still living during the great radical Eisenhower era of the 1950s when marginal income tax rates hit 91 percent. Taxes were high back in the 1950s because people understood that constraining wild extremes of wealth would make our country stronger and prevent another depression. (Well, what did those old fogies know?)

Had we kept those high progressive
taxes in place, instead of removing them, especially during the Reagan era, the Forbes 400 might each be worth "only" $100 million instead of $3.9 billion each. So let's imagine that the rest of their wealth, about $1.53
trillion, were available for the public good.

What does $1.53 trillion$ buy?

It's more than enough to insure the uninsured for the next twenty years or more.

It's more than enough to create a
Manhattan Project to solve global warming by developing renewable energy and a green, sustainable manufacturing sector.

And here's my favorite: It's more
than enough to endow every public college and university in the country so that all of our children could gain access to higher education for free, forever!

Instead, we embarked on a grand experiment
to see what would happen if we deregulated finance and changed the tax code so that millionaires could turn into billionaires. And even after that experiment failed in the most spectacular way, our system seems trapped into staying on the same deregulated path.

Instead of free higher education,
health care and a sustainable economy, we got a fantasy finance boom and bust on Wall Street which crashed the real economy. We have our 400 billionaires, and we have 29 million unemployed and underemployed Americans. We have an infrastructure in shambles. We have an environment in crisis. We have a health care system that would make Rube Goldberg proud. And we have the worst income distribution since 1929.

I hazard to guess that each and every
Forbes 400 member could get by with a net worth of $100 million. I don't think that would kill their entrepreneurial drive or harm our economy--in fact it would be a major boon to the economy to step back from the edge of such massive concentration of wealth. The real problem is getting there form here. A wealth tax that kicks in when you become worth more than $100 million would be a good start. The Eisenhower tax rate on adjustable gross income over $3 million a year would help as well.

And please let's not call it socialism,
now that we've placed the entire financial sector on welfare to the tune of over $13 trillion in subsidies and guarantees. (By the way, the yearly budget outlays for means tested programs for low income citizens is about $350 billion per year. So Wall Street's welfare is about 37 times as large as welfare for poor.)

So if narrowing the income/wealth
gap isn't socialism, what is it? It's the America that thrived in the 1950s and 1960s. It's the America that created a middle-class and vowed never to let the financial gamblers return us to another depression. It's an America that put its people to work and built an infrastructure that was the envy of the world.

Where's Dwight David Eisenhower when we need him?

Les Leopold is the executive director of the Labor Institute and Public Health Institute in New York, and author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance Destroyed Our Jobs, Pensions, and Prosperity—and What We Can Do About It (Chelsea Green, 2009).

© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/143028/

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