Laura Flanders

Pelosi or Cheney? Who's the Torturer in Chief?

Laura Flanders on May 19, 2009 - 9:26 AM ET

Beltway journalists seem finally to have a found a torture story they like. Mind you, not the one about the Bush/Cheney White House possibly okaying drowning to extract "information" to justify an Iraq attack -- not that story. The story the Beltway bulldogs have decided to get stuck into is a story about Democrats.

Let's recap. Prosecutions of members of the Bush/Cheney administration became a real possibility last month. As part of an ongoing court case, the Department of Justice released memos detailing techniques approved for use on terror suspects. CIA interrogators were given legal authorization to use water torture, to slam an alleged "high-value" detainee's head against a wall, to place insects inside a "confinement box" to induce fear, and force a detainee to remain awake for 11 consecutive days. All that, according to a memo signed by the former head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), Jay Bybee, now a federal judge.

Subsequent reports including commentary by an FBI interrogator who interrogated one of the same suspects by traditional -- non-torture -- means, suggests that even knowing (as most interrogators did) that torture produces untrustworthy evidence (because torture victims make things up to make the torture stop), officials at the highest level in the Bush/Cheney administration okayed torture tactics.

Did they order abuse specifically to extract an Al Qaeda/ Saddam Hussein link? Maybe. But we'll never know, because instead of even asking the question, the headline story in the media has become: "Nancy Pelosi is a hypocrite."

"Pelosi a hypocrite" vs. "Cheney okayed torture for political reasons:" It seems easy to pick the hotter scoop. Yet David Gregory (of Meet the Press) was all over Pelosi, as were the rest of the Sunday squawkers this weekend. On Fox News they talk about almost nothing else. Why didn't the House speaker push back harder? When did she actually know what? Was she right to hold a press conference blaming the CIA? They're not bad questions. They're important questions. But when it comes to torture, is Pelosi the thorn or the point?

"This is not where the White House wants the public discussion to be," Gregory said on Morning Joe. Too right. But it's bigger than that. On this question of torture-for-war or Pelosi political mis-step, it's not just the White House that wants a different conversation. It's America. We need accountability for torture -- and prosecutions -- if we don't want heinous practices to continue. And we need a press that grasps, not avoids, the serious questions. Scrutinize Pelosi all you like -- but right after Cheney's shut up and Bybee's off the bench.

Laura Flanders is the host of GRITtv which broadcasts weekdays on Free Speech TV (Dish Network Ch. 9415) on cable (8 pm ET on Channel 67 in Manhattan and other cities) and online daily at GRITtv.org and TheNation.com.

Robbing Us and Paying Out

Laura Flanders on May 12, 2009 - 9:44 AM ET

The results of the Treasury Department's touted "stress tests" are out – and so far the result is a call for massive new capital for banks. It adds up to a needed $100 billion for Wells Fargo, Bank of America and the rest. Sooner or later we'll be looking at TARP Three, I bet.

It's hard not to feel bilked. Even when they were running short of cash, the banks looked after their own. According to a recent academic study they paid out a staggering $400 billion to investors in 2007 and 2008 even as the worst banking crisis since the Great Depression broke. With the value of their portfolios shrinking and common equity drying up, Lehman Brothers dividends went up 13% in January 2008. TARP recipients JPMorgan and Wells Fargo cut dividends only in February and March 2009, and as of late last month, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley had yet to do so, despite urging from the Fed.

Watching their own backs is what these banks do best. Now they're doing it by lobbying to beat back bankruptcy reform.(See a pretty furious discussion on GRITtv this week.) At the banks, public money goes in the front and out the back.

Meanwhile, while the government's doing somersaults to keep owners and top bank managers in place and in the black, many Americans are choosing between food and home and gas.

It's not only unfair, it's not smart.

There is no fair rationale for allocating trillions of US dollars to protect bankers' hedge funds and well-paid execs while tens of millions of working Americans go belly up.

Societies dominated by finance (as ours has been,) have always collapsed. The only way the US gets back on track is with good paying jobs in solid communities that work. In New York, Wall Street's cheering up – but libraries are going broke. Just imagine if you took the trillions and kept teachers on the job, built roads, gave people grants to re-do homes, issue fair mortgages, and provide quality childcare.

Let's not kid ourselves: filtering trillions through banks and investment houses won't do the job -- they built their billions by cutting labor and keeping down pay – and rewarding companies that did the same -- especially their execs. If we do not rebuild the US workforce there's no way this country's going back up. Are we "all in this together?" -- Hardly. You just have to look at Main Street to know that.

Killer Economics

Laura Flanders on April 27, 2009 - 4:12 PM ET

We don't need a 100-day reckoning to know the score: war, recession, violence in Pakistan and now a global epidemic.

The landscape before us is a pretty tense: more than thirteen million unemployed, falling prospects, rising gun sales, not to mention the foreclosure of probably an additional ten million homes. Many are fearing a long hot summer, the implications of which will be felt across the land. And now there's Swine Flu.

It's funny that when it comes to Swine flu, we get it. When we're talking about the human body, we seem to understand that vulnerable parts put the whole body politic at risk.

In the face of a virus it makes perfect sense: germs don't discriminate. Poisons spread. Switch to the topic of poverty and predatory lending, and we have a problem grasping the basics. Yet exploitation and corruption jump fences too. The epidemic of predatory lending, for example, began by targeting Black, Latino (especially female) borrowers, but predatory practices didn't stay in the 'hood.

On Sunday, as 20 cases of swine flu were confirmed, American health officials declared a public health emergency. After scares from SARS and bird flu a few years ago, international protocols were put in place to deal with global pandemics. At a news conference in DC, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano called the flu emergency declaration "standard operating procedure."

Imagine if we'd declared an Economic Health Emergency after Enron, and the Asian financial crisis of 1997 and the collapse and devaluation of the Russian ruble?

What we need are some standard operating procedures to deal with a plague of killer economics. Reading today's New York Times about the Treasury Secretary's cosy professional and personal relationship with the very industry he was supposed to regulate, it's clear that quarantine would have served us well.

In the case of epidemics, we investigate the causes and isolate the carriers. On the economic front, so far, we've forged forward without virtually no diagnosis -- and promoted the virus-carriers to high office.

So what, now? Well, we'll need more than a face mask to protect us from Geithneritis. And no amount of Theraflu will do.

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The Answer to Obama=Hitler

Laura Flanders on April 17, 2009 - 9:01 AM ET

The presidential campaign had more than a smattering of it. The economic crisis is breeding lots more. Crazy talk comparing Barack Obama to Hitler went mainstream April 15th. It's nasty and it could get worse, but there is something Barack Obama could do about it if he wanted to.

This week on GRITtv, the Indypendent's Arun Gupta talked about the Right's April 15th "tea parties." They tapped into real resentments, he said, but manipulated them in a racist way. Just as some mortgage-holders have become the scapegoats for all our economic woes and along the way the borrowers themselves have become "subprime" -- so too, president Obama's is talked about as not really American, a closet Muslim, a "sub-prime" president. "There is racial code wording going on," said Arun.

It was all over the signs at the April 15 rallies: "Obamanation." "Hang Em High!" "Show us your real birth certificate." The creepiest declared: "The American Tax Payers are the the Jews for Obama's ovens."

None of this is new. The Obama=Hitler comparison's been out there since early in the presidential campaign. Rev James David Manning from Harlem sermonized on the topic back in June 2008 (there's a clip on YouTube,) but Manning's spew never received the Jeremiah Wright treatment; it got him invited onto right-wing radio instead. Indeed, some right-wing shock-jocks used their mikes to deliver almost daily diatribes questioning Obama's religion and his citizenship. Now with Limbaugh in the limelight again, right-wing talkers are enjoying a bump and from fringe to middle is how this stuff moves -- with the help of powerful media.

There's nothing like economic chaos to feed fear and anger. We know that much. And race-panic has always been an easy sell in the USA. Historically, those who want to divide and conquer unrest have always succeeded by dressing up racism and xenophobia as working-class solidarity.

There is an antidote. President Obama could put 5 million Americans on the federal payroll as FDR would have done; stop foreclosures on people's homes. Stop federal and state job layoffs, and stop -- please stop -- those screw-us again schemes for unscrupulous bankers.

It's clearly not his nature, but it better become Obama's strategy. The best answer to fake working-class solidarity is the real kind.

Laura Flanders is the host of GRITtv which broadcasts weekdays on Free Speech TV (Dish Network Ch. 9415) on cable (8 pm ET on Channel 67 in Manhattan and other cities) and online daily at GRITtv.org and TheNation.com.

New Way Forward?

Laura Flanders on April 13, 2009 - 5:33 AM ET

Chris is keen on A New Way Forward and Zephyr wrote about the group here. I had a chance to talk with Kyle Krahel-Frolan a New Way Forward organizer when he was on a GRITtv panel discussing What Next? (after the bank bonus brouhaha.) The conversation's rich -- and looking around the table here, I was struck with the smarts of the crew. Protest can be knee-jerk, (and sometimes that's just right) but these organizers have their heads' screwed on.

Lesson from Vermont: Don't Cower, Push.

Laura Flanders on April 9, 2009 - 9:06 AM ET

They did it. On Tuesday the Vermont legislature formally recognized that civil unions are not the same as marriage. Forgive me for saying it, but I think the Vermonters have a thing or two to teach the Congress.

Mustering one more vote than the two thirds majority needed to override their Governor's veto, they passed a bill that grants same sex couples the freedom to marry, and became the first state in the nation to achieve marriage equality through legislation rather than the court.

What's it got to do with Congress? Merely this: there is such a thing as the courage of conviction. How many times have we heard that progress comes through conciliation? It's the ubiquitous refrain of political "framing" and "spin-meisters."

"Go to where the middle is." How many anti-war activists, anti-poverty, pro-single-payer advocates have been told that progress comes from hugging the middle, not pushing the edge? You hear it now in Washington, around healthcare --- or the budget.

Civil Unions, passed in 2000 in Vermont, didn't satisfy fair-minded Vermonters. They'd pushed from the edge to Civil Unions, still wanted marriage equality, and they weren't going away, and they continued to work and to push. A veto threat from Vermont's governor didn't discourage the backers of same sex marriage. Among the people egging them on was former Democratic National Committee chair and former Vermont governor Howard Dean. "Vote your conscience, not your district," he encouraged legislators at a pre-vote party fundraiser.

"Stand up for doing the right thing; for being a human being," Dean was quoted as saying in the Burlington Free Press. "Put human rights above politics -- because if you don't, you'll regret it for the rest of your political career."

He was right. Coming less than a week after a ruling by the Iowa Supreme Court that extended same sex marriage in that state, and with bills to follow suit under consideration in several other states, the arc of history feels as if it's tilting toward equal protection after all.

And watching LGBT equality advance you've got to chalk up one more victory to a small but determined minority clinging to what they believe is right. If culture warriors always trod softly-softly and adhered to conventional guff, we'd never have marriage equality. Or inter-racial marriage. Or votes for women, or civil rights.

The A in NATO is not for Afghanistan

Laura Flanders on April 4, 2009 - 10:21 AM ET

It's a strange idea, that the future of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization lies in the mountains of Afghanistan. But that's just the case that President Barack Obama and British Defense Secretary John Hutton are making at NATO's 60th anniversary summit this weekend in Strasbourg.

Hutton, like Obama, is trying convince his counterparts in NATO that they should commit more troops to Afghanistan. In fact, he told the BBC on the eve of the summit that the Afghan war is the defining conflict for NATO in this part of the 21st century.

It's the same message carried by Obama.

Will it fly? I guess that depends on how much history makes its way into the celebration. When it was founded 60 years ago, no one would ever have imagined that, more than half a century later, NATO's defining conflict could possibly be in central Asia.

NATO was created in 1949 to defend western democracies from scary Stalinist Russia.

A recent guest on our program, Andrew Bacevich, said in a commentary in the LA Times this week that the best gift any American President could give NATO right now would be "a valedictory address, announcing his intention to withdraw the United States from the alliance."

"The U.S. has done its job. It's time for Europe to assume full responsibility for its own security," wrote Bacevich.

He argues that "the US has done European nations no favors urging the alliance to expand its reach, abandoning its defensive posture to become an instrument of intervention."

On the matter of defense, NATO sat out the only really significant fight on its continent last year (the one between Russia and Georgia,) and so far it's achieved more backlash than lash in Afghanistan.

Peace activists who gathered en masse outside the Strausberg meeting demand more than the exit of the US from the alliance. They want the end of NATO altogether. The biggest threats to Europe, they argue, are economic and environmental; the military build up is just a mission-creepy money-sucker.

Whether you think it should go, or only that the US should, NATO in Asia doesn't make much sense. The A stands for Atlantic. Not Afghanistan.

Silence on Afghanistan: If Only it Were a Joke

Laura Flanders on April 2, 2009 - 9:30 AM ET

It's April Fool's day week and my inbox is full.

My favorite prank posting so far comes from the London- based Guardian newspaper which announced (via Twitter): "The Guardian scraps print version for all-Twitter format"

The newly Twittered 140-character-only archive was said to include the following articles: "OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see [link]," and "JFK assassin8d@Dallas, def. heard second gunshot... WTF?"

What I wish was a joke was some of the rest of what's been coming in...

Like all the mail from supposedly anti-war groups who worked hard to elect Barack Obama on an anti-Iraq war platform, but now, when it comes to escalation in Afghanistan, are lining up in support.

After the president announced the deployment of 4,000 more troops (on top of the extra 17,000 he's already sent) Jon Soltz, an anti-Iraq war organizer with VoteVets wrote in the Huffington Post: "With today's announcement President Obama has shown that he 'gets it.' That's why we at VoteVets.org are supporting the plan." They even have a rah-rah petition going.

Americans United for Change ran hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of anti-Iraq war ads in 2007, but they refused to answer a Washington Post blogger's question about Afghanistan. Anti-war organizers - and plenty of generals -- agreed that there was no military solution possible in Iraq. But many of those who got their head round that idea then, seem to believe the opposite is true in Afghanistan, even though Obama's own advisers say the struggle there can't be won on the battlefield.

On the website of the liberal Center for America Progress there are no fewer than five articles supporting the president's policy, including one headlined "Seven Reasons Why We need to Engage in Afghanistan."

On the Afghanistan deployment, as the Center for Media and Democracy's John Stauber has pointed out, MoveOn has thus far been silent on Afghanistan.

The Post's Greg Sargent says that when MoveOn's members were recently polled on their priorities for 2009, the subject didn't apparently make the cut.

I wish I could say APRIL FOOLS. But sadly no. Looking at the history of Afghanistan, I'd have to say, the joke, such as it is, is on us.

Laura Flanders is the host of GRITtv which broadcasts weekdays on Free Speech TV (Dish Network Ch. 9415) on cable (8 pm ET on Channel 67 in Manhattan) and online daily at GRITtv.org and TheNation.com.

Geithner's Plan: Like an Oil Spill

Laura Flanders on March 24, 2009 - 9:28 AM ET

Twenty years ago this week, the Exxon Valdez ran aground, spilling ten millions gallons of filthy oil over 10,000 square miles of Prince William Sound. The Exxon corporation spent the next two decades fighting paying punitive damages to the victims. Announced, by coincidence, on the anniversary of that disaster, the Obama administration bank rescue plan is about as comforting as Exxon's clean up.

The economy's drowning in bad assets; trillions of dollars worth. The Treasury proposes renaming that bad stuff "legacy assets" and hopes to drive up the price by paying private investors to buy them. Go ahead and buy -- the Treasury says -- the taxpayer will take the hit if those toxic assets turn out to be, well, toxic.

Like Exxon, which has gone in for a major publicity make-over, pushing renewable energy in advertising even as it funds global warming denial, Geithner's hoping to persuade investors to engage in a whole new round of protected gambling, the very phenomenon that got us into this mess in the first place. Those "complex derivatives" aren't bad, just undervalued, he claims, victims of public panic. Treasury's willing to push a few cheap hits in the hope that a little free dope will get the hedge funders addicted again.

There's just one catch: those derivatives are bad: bad bets upon bad bets, based on cost-free betting. Traders gambled, reaped the profits in transaction fees and walked away. Kind of like Exxon: profiteering off the good days and reaping the private gain from public resources, and throwing the cost of environmental clean up back onto the taxpaying public.

The problem is with the commanders, many of those who drove us aground, are still sitting pretty. As Frank Rich and others have reported, Larry Summers can't admit fault: he helped torpedo the regulation of derivatives while he was in the Clinton administration.

Learn from Alaska. Years after the Exxon Valdez belched guck all over the coast, ruining a fishing industry and bankcrupting a people, the financial industry's flooded our economy with garbage and we're letting the ship's captains control the clean up.

Ask the Alaskans how well that worked. Not so bad for Exxon; less well for the people and the planet.

What to Do With 1,200 Pounds of Bull

Laura Flanders on March 5, 2009 - 10:18 AM ET

You can learn a lot from obituaries -- and recently there have been some great ones.

In February, it was Conchita Cintrón, a celebrated female bullfighter.

Cintrón, who retired from bullfighting after having killed as many as 750 bulls in the ring, died in Lisbon last month at the age of 86.

At eighteen, according to the obituaries, she was known as la Diosa Rubia, the Blond Goddess.

A headline about her in the New York Sun in 1940 read, "She's a Timid Blue Eyed Girl But -- She Kills Bulls Without Qualms."

"I have never had any qualms about it," she said. "A qualm or a cringe before 1,200 pounds of enraged bull would be sure death."

Lesson One in these political days: Don't cringe when there are 1200 pounds of bull coming towards you...

My favorite obituary from this month so far is of Molly Kool, sea captain.

Kool qualified as a captain at age 23, the first woman in North America to be a licensed ship's captain. She died last week at her home in Bangor, Maine, two days after her 93rd birthday.

One contemporary news account described Kool this way: "Her eyebrows are shaped and arched, her lips lightly rouged, her blonde hair up in feminine curls. That's Miss Molly Kool ashore ... but in her barge ... she knows no fear ..."

She was nothing if not pragmatic.

The New York Times notes one widely reported occasion when Kool's ship, the Jean K collided with another in a dense fog and sent her hurtling overboard, where she risked being sucked under by the ship's propeller. A piece of timber floated by and she grabbed it as the ship's passengers hurled life preservers down at her.

"I'm already floating," Ms. Kool hollered up at her shipmates from the brink. "Stop throwing useless stuff at me and send a boat!"

Ahem! Anyone else hear an absolutely perfect message for these economic hard times?

When you're already floating you don't need more help to float. "Stop throwing useless stuff -- and send a boat!"

Exactly. And to think, some say that feminist history's over-rated. Happy Women's History Month.