Psyche, Science, and Society

Bernie Sanders on class war

Sen Bernie Sanders calls attention to the massive class warfare being waged by the few ultra-rich against the rest of us. Take home line:

While it is true that the billionaires and their supporters are “fired up and ready to go,” there is another more important truth. And that is that there are a lot more of us than there are of them. Now is the time for us to stand together, educate and organize. Now is the time to roll back this orgy of greed.

There certainly are vastly more of us than them. We must fight or lose what we have. This fight can’t rely on the Democrats, or any politicians. For the Democrats, like the Republicans, essentially represent the the few, not the many. The many must organize to demand, not to ask.

Full article:

The Billionaires Want More, More, More

By Sen. Bernie Sanders

The billionaires are on the warpath. They want more, more, more.

In 2007, the top 1 percent of all income earners in the United States made 23.5 percent of all income — more than the bottom 50 percent. Not enough! The percentage of income going to the top 1 percent nearly tripled since the mid-1970s. Not enough! Eighty percent of all new income earned from 1980 to 2005 has gone to the top 1 percent. Not enough! The top 1 percent now owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. Not enough! The Wall Street executives with their obscene compensation packages now earn more than they did before we bailed them out. Not enough! With the middle class collapsing and the rich getting much richer, the United States now has, by far, the most unequal distribution of income and wealth of any major country on earth. Not enough!

The very rich want more, more and more and they are prepared to dismantle the existing political and social order to get it. During the last campaign, as a result of the (Republican) Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, billionaires were able to pour hundreds of millions of dollars of secret money into the campaign — helping to elect dozens of members of Congress. Now, having made their investment, they want their congressional employees to produce.

Republicans in Congress, needless to say, are all on board. The key question is whether a Democratic president and a Democratic Senate go along to get along, or whether they draw a clear line at protecting the interests of the middle class and vulnerable populations of our country while tackling our economic and budgetary problems in earnest.

In the next month, despite all their loud rhetoric about the “deficit crisis,” the Republicans want to add $700 billion to the national debt over the next 10 years by extending Bush’s tax breaks for the top 2 percent. Families who earn $1 million a year or more would receive, on average, a tax break of $100,000 a year. The Republicans also want to eliminate or significantly reduce the estate tax, which has existed since 1916. Its elimination would add, over 10 years, about $1 trillion to our national debt and all of the benefits would go to the top 0.3 percent. Over 99.7 percent of American families would not gain a nickel. The Walton family of WalMart would receive an estimated tax break of more than $30 billion by repealing the estate tax.

That’s just the start.

The billionaires and their supporters in Congress are hell-bent on taking us back to the 1920s, and eliminating all traces of social legislation designed to protect working families, the elderly, children and the disabled. No “social contract” for them. They want it all.

They want to privatize or dismantle Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and let the elderly, the sick and the poor fend for themselves.

They want to expand our disastrous trade policies so that corporations can continue throwing American workers out on the street as they outsource jobs to China and other low-wage countries. Some also want to eliminate the minimum wage so that American workers can have the “freedom” to work for $3.00 an hour.

They want to eliminate or cut severely the U.S. Department of Education, making it harder for working class kids to get a decent education, childcare or the help they need to go to college.
They want to rescind the very modest financial reform bill passed last year so that the crooks on Wall Street can continue to engage in all of the reckless behavior that has been so devastating to our economy.

They want to curtail the powers of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy so that Exxon-Mobil can remain the most profitable corporation in world history, while oil and coal companies continue to pollute our air and water.

They want to make sure that billionaire hedge fund managers pay a lower federal tax rate than middle-class teachers, nurses, firefighters, and police officers by maintaining a loophole in the tax code known as “carried interest”.

We know what the billionaires and their Republicans supporters want. They’ve been upfront about that. But what about the Democrats? Will President Obama continue to reach out and “compromise” with people who have made it abundantly clear that the only agreement they want is unconditional surrender? Or, will he utilize the powerful skills that we saw during his 2008 campaign for the White House and bring working families, young people, the elderly and the poor together to fight against these savage attacks on their well-being? Will the Democrats in the Senate continue to pass tepid legislation, or will they use their majority status to protect the interests of ordinary Americans and, for a change, put the Republicans on the defensive?

The time is late. The stakes are extraordinary. While it is true that the billionaires and their supporters are “fired up and ready to go,” there is another more important truth. And that is that there are a lot more of us than there are of them. Now is the time for us to stand together, educate and organize. Now is the time to roll back this orgy of greed.

November 20th, 2010

New article on American Psychological Association Practice Organization “mandatory” assessment

Thomas Gaudio has written an article — Fraud Suits Expose Rift in Major Psychology Group — on the controversy regarding the “mandatory” voluntary assessment that  was collecting for the American Psychological Association Practice Organization (APAPO):

Clinical practitioners were misled for nearly a decade about an extra charge called the practice assessment fee they paid when applying for or renewing annual APA memberships, claim the suits, both filed in the United

States District Court for the District of Columbia within the last month. APA, a not-for-profit corporation and trade group based in Washington D.C., failed to disclose that the fee was voluntary and solely for membership in the APA Practice Organization, according to the suits.

Full article.

November 20th, 2010

Transport Canada on new airport US screening procedures

November 19th, 2010

London Lord Mayor tells Bush to stay away or face arrest

Unlike the US, where “real men” brag about supporting torture, and their “critics” look the other way, to the “future,” Britain seems to be reaching a consensus that torture is wrong, always wrong, vile and wrong. The Tory Lord Mayor of London advises George W. Bush not to visit as he may face arrest for torture:

George W. Bush Can’t Fight for Freedom and Authorise Torture
If the West’s aim is to spread the rule of law, it cannot be achieved by vile means, argues Boris Johnson.

By Boris Johnson

It is not yet clear whether George W Bush is planning to cross the Atlantic to flog us his memoirs, but if I were his PR people I would urge caution. As book tours go, this one would be an absolute corker. It is not just that every European capital would be brought to a standstill, as book-signings turned into anti-war riots. The real trouble — from the Bush point of view — is that he might never see Texas again.

One moment he might be holding forth to a great perspiring tent at Hay-on-Wye. The next moment, click, some embarrassed member of the Welsh constabulary could walk on stage, place some handcuffs on the former leader of the Free World, and take him away to be charged. Of course, we are told this scenario is unlikely. Dubya is the former leader of a friendly power, with whom this country is determined to have good relations. But that is what torture-authorising Augusto Pinochet thought. And unlike Pinochet, Mr Bush is making no bones about what he has done.

Unless the 43rd president of the United States has been grievously misrepresented, he has admitted to authorising and sponsoring the use of torture. Asked whether he approved of “waterboarding” in three specific cases, he told his interviewer that “damn right” he did, and that this practice had saved lives in America and Britain. It is hard to overstate the enormity of this admission.

“Waterboarding” is a disgusting practice by which the victim is deliberately made to think that he is drowning. It is not some cunning new psych-ops technique conceived by the CIA. It has been used in the dungeons of dictators for centuries. It is not compatible either with the US constitution or the UN convention against torture. It is deemed to be torture in this country, and above all there is no evidence whatever that it has ever succeeded in doing what Mr Bush claimed. It does not work.

It does not produce much valuable information — and therefore it does not save lives. Of course we are all tempted, from time to time, by the utilitarian argument. We might become reluctant supporters of “extreme interrogation techniques” if we could really persuade ourselves that half an hour of waterboarding could really save a hundred lives — or indeed a single life. In reality, no such calculus is possible. When people are tortured, they will generally say anything to bring the agony to an end — which is why any such evidence is inadmissible in court.

In the case of the three men waterboarded on Bush’s orders, British ministers are not aware of any valuable information they gave about plots against Heathrow, Canary Wharf or anywhere else. All the policy has achieved is to degrade America in the eyes of the world, and to allow America’s enemies to utter great whoops of vindication. It is not good enough for Dubya now to claim that what he did was OK, because “the lawyers said it was legal”. The lawyers in question were Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee and his deputy, John Yoo, and after a good deal of political cattle-prodding from Rumsfeld et al, they produced a totally barmy attempt to redefine torture so as to allow waterboarding.

Pain was only torture, they determined, when it was “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily functions, or even death”. If that is right, it would seem that most of the techniques of the Spanish Inquisition would be acceptable to the American government. You could beat the soles of someone’s feet; you could pour molten candle wax on their extremities; you could even pull their finger nails out without infringing those conditions.

How is some tired and frightened American officer supposed to make head or tail of this sophistry, late at night in some bleak Iraqi jail? How is he supposed to calibrate the pain that comes from an organ failure or death? It is no wonder, with orders like that coming from the top, that the troopers misbehaved so tragically in Abu Ghraib. They failed to see any moral difference between waterboarding their suspects and putting hoods over their heads. They failed to see any moral difference between waterboarding them and terrifying them with alsatian dogs or attaching electrodes to their genitals. They failed to see any moral difference, that is, because there isn’t any moral difference.

That is the real disaster of the waterboarding policy — that we are left with the impression that the entire US military are skidding their heels on the slippery slope towards barbarism. And that is emphatically not the case. Yesterday at the Cenotaph we remembered the sacrifice of men and women not just in two world wars, but also in Iraq and Afghanistan. The purpose of these conflicts is not so much to defeat “the enemy”, but to defend things we believe to be inalienable goods — freedom, democracy and, above all, the rule of law.

I believe that, of all nations, America still best upholds and guarantees those things. It would be ludicrous to suggest that the waterboarding disaster, or the evils of Abu Ghraib, have set up some kind of moral equivalence between America and – say – the murderous Taliban regime, let alone Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. If you want to appreciate the difference, remember that the perpetrators of Abu Ghraib were court-martialled, and we know about US interrogation techniques because of rules on freedom of information. But if your end is the spread of freedom and the rule of law, you cannot hope to achieve that end by means that are patently vile and illegal.

How could America complain to the Burmese generals about the house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi, when a president authorised torture? How can we talk about human rights in Beijing, when our number one ally and friend seems to be defending this kind of behaviour? I can’t think of any other American president, in my lifetime, who would have spoken in this way. Mr Bush should have remembered the words of the great Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, who said in 1863 that “military necessity does not admit of cruelty”. Damn right.

November 18th, 2010

CIA ordered to release cold war human research documents

guinea pigsguinea pigsIt is well known that the CIA conducted horrific experiments on many people, including US troops, during the cold war. A group of veterans is suing the government for using troops as human guinea pigs in studies of chemical, biological, and psychological weapons in the MKULTRA, Artichoke, Bluebeard and other CIA programs. The plaintiffs have just won a major victory as the judge has ruled that the CIA must release a broad range of documents on these experiments that they are still trying to hide.

The judge came near to accussing the CIA of lying in order to withhold the documents:

The CIA insisted discovery was unwarranted in its case, because it never funded or conducted drug research on military personnel.
Larson wasn’t convinced.
“[T]his court rejects the conclusion that the CIA necessarily lacks a nexus to Plaintiffs’ claims, and orders the CIA to respond in earnest” to the veterans’ requests, “particularly because defendants have presented evidence that would appear to cast doubt on that conclusion,” he wrote.

Now we need some brave judge to order the CIA to release documents on recent CIA research on detainees.

November 17th, 2010

Taiwan animators on TSA body scan scam

Fiction today, fact tomorrow.

November 17th, 2010

Schakowsky proposes progressive deficit reduction plan

Rep. Jan Schakowsky, a member of the Deficit Commission, has issued a plan [pdf] that poses a progressive alternative to that the the Commission Co-chairs. In a press release, she summarizes the central elements:

1) Increased economic stimulus to spur growth in the immediate term

· Provide $200 billion to invest over the next two years in measures to create jobs and spur economic growth, including passing the Local Jobs for America Act; and funding for education and law enforcement; Unemployment Insurance, Federal Medical Assistance Percentages (FMAP) and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program extensions; and infrastructure. 

· Adopt the President’s proposals to eliminate overseas tax havens and incentives for outsourcing

2) Smart, targeted spending cuts

· Non-Defense Discretionary – $8.55 billion in savings through increased efficiency and cuts to programs that benefit large corporations that don’t need assistance.

· Defense Discretionary – $110.7 billion in cuts from the 2015 defense budget, including efficiency savings, reducing our troop levels, cutting weapons systems we don’t need, and scaling back the wartime increases in the size of the military.

3) Mandatory spending cuts

• Health Care – at least $17.2 billion in savings by implementing measures to bring down the cost of health care to the federal government and lower health care inflation overall.
• Other – $7.5 billion in savings by cutting agriculture subsidies in half, and redistributing federal support to offer greater benefits to small family farms reduce subsidies to large corporate agribusiness.

4) Reductions in tax expenditures

• Raise $132.2 billion by closing tax subsidies for companies that ship American jobs overseas.

5) Increases in revenues

• Raise $144.6 billion in revenue through progressive reforms to the estate tax, treating capital gains and dividends as regular income, and enacting a cap and trade proposal that includes protections for lower-income people.
• Enact President Obama’s budget proposal to let the Bush tax cuts for the top 2 brackets expire and return to 2009 estate tax levels.
• Non-tax revenue – raise $7 billion by addressing places where the private sector is currently under-paying.

Schakowsky also denounces the idea of cuts in social security for the bait-and-switch that it is:

“There is a better way than the Simpson-Bowles proposal – which relies heavily on benefit cuts instead of revenue increases.

“Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit. Addressing the Social Security issue as part of the deficit question is like attacking Iraq to retaliate for the 9/11 attacks – there is simply no relationship between the two and attempting to conflate them does a grave disservice to America’s seniors.

“Taking money from Social Security retirees whose average total income is $18,000 per year and average benefit is $14,000 ($12,000 for women) is simply wrong. It places them at fiscal risk and hurts the economy because they will be unable to purchase the goods they need.  Americans in poll after poll have indicated their opposition to benefit cuts – particularly at a time when Wall Street bankers are making record bonuses.

The Schakowsky alternative does not contain any cuts to Social Security.

• It ensures long-term solvency to Social Security by eliminating the wage cap on the employer side and raising it to 90% on the employee side, applying FICA to all wage income below the cap, and establishing a modest legacy tax on wealthier Americans.
• Surplus funding that can be used to improve the extremely-modest benefits that are now provided.

This plan seems like a sensible place to begin a discussion. That isn’t likely to happen on the Commission, as Schakowsky’s plan doesn’t gouge the poor and middle class to enrich the wealthy. Of course, Obama will likely ignore or undercut it as he seeks his holy grail of “bipartisanship,” aka, caving.

November 16th, 2010

TSA training people for police state?

digby discusses the new whole body scanners from the TSA, and the man, John Tyner, who refused a scan, was ordered to leave the secure area, was escorted out by TSA thugs, and is now under investigation for “leaving a secure area!” digby believes that this nonsense is part of a strategy to create a police state and get citizens used to unquestioningly follow ridiculous orders:

When I wrote about it over the week-end, I pointed out that this was the latest in a series of steps leading to a police state — the building of a police bureaucracy and the intimidation and the incoherence of security theatre designed to confuse citizens and indoctrinate them to the idea that they should unquestioningly submit to absurd directives from authorities. It’s how you control a populace.

She goes on to point out the total irrationality of the TSA’s policies:

For instance, the body scanners are designed to see things that the metal detectors cannot see, including things hidden inside the body. But you are allowed to opt out of that to get a pat down — which doesn’t include a cavity search (yet.) This makes no sense unless you think that terrorists are so stupid that they can’t figure out where their bodily orifices are. In other words, the only way this could be construed as rational is if they required everyone to go through the scanner or get a full strip and cavity search.

One people routinely allow government officials to view or fondle their genitals in a sexual assault, what else is left? Is there a limit to what people will put up with in order to pretend to be “safe?’

UPDATE: Firedoglake has initiated a petition to stop the TSA’s “Porn or Grope” policy:

The TSA’s “porno scanners” are a gross invasion of privacy. After the House voted down invasive porno scanners, the TSA ignored the will of Congress and bought the machines anyway, wasting $25 million in stimulus funds to create just a single job.

The TSA’s new aggressive “pat downs” are clearly designed to punish people like John Tyner who refuse to go through the porno scanners. Neither the scanners nor the aggressive pat-downs make us any safer. Now the TSA is further abusing its power, threatening a citizen’s most basic rights to intimidate the rest of us.

It’s clear that the TSA is out of control. Congress should investigate the TSA’s abuse of power, and then pull the plug on the invasion of our privacy.

Sign it here.

November 16th, 2010

Britain to compensate torture victims

Britain is light years ahead of the US in coming to terms with its government’s involvement in torture. In the latest development, the British government has agreed to pay millions of pounds compensation to 12 men, a number of whom were Guantanamo prisoners, who claim British government collusion in their torture. The BBC reports:

Government to compensate ex-Guantanamo Bay detainees

Around a dozen men who accused British security forces of colluding in their torture overseas are to get millions in compensation from the UK government.

Some of the men, who are all British citizens or residents, were detained at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba.

At least six of them alleged UK forces were complicit in their torture before they arrived at Guantanamo.

The Commons will debate the payout when Justice Secretary Ken Clarke makes a statement on Tuesday afternoon.

A written ministerial statement on the out-of-court settlement, which had been expected to be released on Tuesday morning, was withdrawn by the Ministry of Justice.

BBC chief political correspondent Laura Kuenssberg explained there was some concern whether a written statement was sufficient for an issue that was causing so much concern.

Lengthy negotiations

It is believed the government wanted to avoid a lengthy and costly court case which would also have put the British secret intelligence services under the spotlight.

Bisher al-Rawi, Jamil el Banna, Richard Belmar, Omar Deghayes, Binyam Mohamed and Martin Mubanga were among those who had begun High Court cases against the government.

They had claimed that UK intelligence agencies and three government departments were complicit in their torture and should have prevented it.

In May, the Court of Appeal ruled that the government was unable to rely on “secret evidence” to defend itself against the six cases.

Then, in July, the High Court ordered the release of some of the 500,000 documents relating to the case.

At least 60 government lawyers and officials have been working through the documents.

The settlement was believed to have been agreed after lengthy negotiations.

BBC political correspondent Ross Hawkins said the Intelligence and Security Committee and the National Audit Office would be briefed about the payments.

He said the government would now be able to move forward with plans for an inquiry, led by Sir Peter Gibson, into claims that UK security services were complicit in the torture of terror suspects.

Mr Mohamed’s solicitor, Sapna Malik, refused to comment on reports that her client will receive more than £1m in compenstation

She told the BBC: “I can’t confirm any details about the settlement package. All I can say is that the claims have been settled and the terms are confidential.”

She added: “Our client was horrendously treated over a period of almost seven years, with a significant degree of collusion from the security services in the UK.”

Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said of the payments: “It’s not very palatable but there is a price to be paid for lawlessness and torture in freedom’s name. There are torture victims who were entitled to expect protection from their country.

“The government now accepts that torture is never justified and we were all let down – let’s learn all the lessons and move on.”

Severely tortured

The Cabinet Office said: “The prime minister set out clearly in his statement to the House (of Commons) on July 6 that we need to deal with the totally unsatisfactory situation where for ‘the past few years, the reputation of our security services has been overshadowed by allegations about their involvement in the treatment of detainees held by other countries’.”

The UK security services have always denied any claims that they have used or condoned the use of torture.

Last month, the head of MI6, Sir John Sawers described torture as “illegal and abhorrent” and defended the service’s need for secrecy.

Mr Mohamed, from west London, was held in Pakistan in 2002 before US agencies moved him to Morocco, where he was severely tortured, before he was sent on to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

It later emerged that a British intelligence officer visited him in detention in Pakistan and that the CIA had told London what mistreatment he had suffered.

Mr Mohamed, 32, had alleged that his torturers in Morocco had asked questions supplied by MI5.

He was released in 2009, when allegations of British involvement in torture returned to prominence.

November 16th, 2010

Scots gang emulate CIA, waterboard rival

As President Bush brags about authorizing waterboarding torture and gets away with it, the torture tactic is spreading in the popular culture. The Daily Record brings news that a Scots drug gang waterboarded a rival. They apparently were inspired by US government torturers:

Waterboarding was virtually unheard of until the US declared its global war on terror following the September 11 attacks.

Carried out in secret by mysterious CIA operatives, it is widely regarded as torture and was banned last year by president Barack Obama.

The gang heard of it in the media and decided it was just the thing they needed:

“This mob are not to be messed with. They’ve obviously seen all the stuff on the news about waterboarding terrorists and thought it would work for drug dealers.”

Like most torturers, they claim it worked:

“They locked him in a flat in Whitevale Street last Wednesday and tried out this waterboarding torture.

“Apparently he was pinned down, they put some cloth or something over his face and poured the water over him.

“The flat was empty and the only thing lying about was a scaffolding board so he was tied on to that and tilted back before the water was poured .

“It sounds pretty horrendous – he told pals he collapsed after it and nearly drowned.

“But he handed back 750 pills. He wasn’t taking anymore of that torture. From their point of view it worked.”

Who’s next?

Heck of a job, Bushie.

November 16th, 2010