Occupy Russia... And Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Greece, Holland, England, Poland...

Earlier today we witnessed the largest and most impassioned demonstrations in Russia since the breakup of the Soviet Union. Aside from the big one-- over 50,000 people-- in Moscow, there were over a dozen similar protests around the country. Hundreds of people protesting the rigged vote last week were arrested. Apparently they take rigged voting more seriously than people in Florida and Ohio. The Wall Street Journal, which usually sides with the forces of the status quo, was on the scene:

The huge display of popular anger raised the pressure on the Kremlin, which has so far dismissed the postelection discontent as instigated by the U.S. to undermine the Kremlin. But there was no sign that the authorities were willing to even consider opponents' demands for new elections or a full recount of the disputed Dec. 4 parliamentary vote.

Opposition leaders vowed to keep up the pressure with more demonstrations in a bid to disrupt Mr. Putin's chances in March presidential elections, when he was planning to secure a six-year term in office.

...In the Dec. 4 vote, the ruling United Russia party of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin saw its support drop sharply, but still retained a majority in parliament. But local and foreign observers reported widespread stuffing of ballot boxes and other abuses, many of which have been spread by reports and recordings on the Internet. U.S. and other Western governments have raised questions about what they say are suspicions of widespread fraud.

The Russian government hopes to appease the demonstrators by offering up the head of the Russian election commission, Vladimir Churkov, as a sacrificial lamb. But it's the lying and cheating and rigging-- not just of the election but of the whole system that has people so surly and ready to force change. And it isn't just in Russia. Friday we saw how the elites are cooking the books-- in Greece and on Wall Street-- to push their agenda down our throats. Everyday it feels more and more like what I imagine 1848 must have been like.

And I think it feels like that to the Pentagon as well. Americans may be complacent and easy to manipulate but the shit is starting to hit the fan across Europe. The Pentagon's top general in Europe seems to be reporting that we're lucky we didn't withdraw our troops from bases scattered all over the continent. Does he think they'll be needed to hold back pissed off angry Italians, Greeks and Germans?

The top military commander in the US has said that he believes the eurozone is at great risk and warned that any breakup of the bloc could have consequences for the Pentagon, even threatening its top weapons programme.

"The eurozone is at great risk," General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told an event hosted by the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank.

Dempsey suggested part of his concern was that the US military could be exposed to any unravelling of the eurozone.

"I mean [exposed] literally, through contracts and programmatics, but also because of the potential for civil unrest and the breakup of the union that has been forged over there," said the general.

The US military has more than 80,000 troops and 20,000 civilian workers in Europe, many based in Germany.

Dempsey pointed to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the Pentagon's costliest weapons programme, which the US is developing together with partners including Britain and Italy, which could also be at risk.

A crisis in Europe, if it were serious enough, could force allies to re-allocate spending which had been earmarked for the F-35, he said.

That, in turn, could drive up the cost of individual US aircraft at a time when US defence budgets are squeezed.

"It will clearly put them at risk if all the economic predictions about a potential collapse were to occur - inflation, devaluation," said Dempsey.

They wouldn't dare... would they? I guess if the worldwide showdown between the 1% and the 99% really does explode onto the streets, the billions spent on coersion will come into play. Here at home the "liberal" Democratic mayor of Boston-- liberal but-- had the police clear out his city's Occupy camp. And in NYC today, tens of thousands of Americans marched down Park Avenue to the UN to protest the one percent move in this country against basic democracy and their new GOP-passed laws against allowing citizens to vote. An awful lot of one percenters live on Park Avenue between 61st Street and 47th Street. I wonder if they shut drew their drapes. You didn't know about it? Here's the statement from Common Cause that the corporate media forgot to mention:

With voting rights in the U.S. facing the most aggressive attack in at least a century, Common Cause President Bob Edgar will join other civil rights and good government leaders at the head of a "Stand for Freedom" march and rally on Saturday in the heart of New York City.

"Americans like to think of our elections as a model for the rest of the world, but as we approach 2012, some of our leaders are behaving like dictators," Edgar said. "To advance their political careers and those of their allies, they're trying to exclude large groups of their fellow citizens from participating in our democracy. This march aims to call them out."

Beginning at the mid-Manhattan headquarters of Koch Industries, whose owners have helped finance a national campaign to impose needless restrictions on voter registration and voting, the march down East 61st Street, Park Avenue, and East 47th Street will conclude with a rally at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, in the shadow of the United Nations headquarters.

"Saturday is United Nations Human Rights Day, so it's particularly appropriate that we march to the UN, which stands for the promotion and preservation of democracy around the world, to defend democracy here in America," Edgar said.

Despite an absence of evidence that voter fraud is a significant problem in U.S. elections, the National Conference of State Legislators reports that lawmakers in 34 states introduced bills this year to impose or tighten requirements that prospective voters provide official documents proving their identity. It is estimated that millions of qualified voters, particularly senior citizens, college students, and people of color, lack the driver's licenses and other government-issued IDs these bills demand and so face the loss of their voting rights.

In re. Respect for the Law vs. Thomas and Scalia: Time for another round of our beloved game "If the Shoe Was on the Other Foot"

WANTED

ANTONIN "NINO THE LIP" SCALIA
and CLARENCE "COKE CAN" THOMAS

Caution: Do not attempt to apprehend these men yourself. They are armed with extreme crackpot ideology and considered extremely dangerous to the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law, and can count on the support of persons of limitless resources, contempt for the law, and ruthlessness. Especially watch out for that Mrs. Justice Thomas. She's hell on wheels.

by Ken

In a post earlier today Howie asked, "When Do Impeachment Proceedings Get Underway For Clarence Thomas?" The immediate issue is the awkward matter of a wee goof by Supreme Court Justice Thomas: He, um, well, lied on, for sure, five annual disclosure forms, and almost certainly a sixth -- and that's just what we know of.

For the years 2003-06, we know, thanks to Common Cause's dredging of IRS records, that Mrs. Justice Thomas was paid $686,589 by the conservative Heritage Foundation, and Common Cause believes that for 2009 Mrs. Justice T was paid a salary by Liberty Central, the far-right lobbying group she helped found. For each of those years Justice T listied his wife's income on his disclosure forms as "none." This is called breaking the law, six times over (again, that we know of), and it's hard to imagine a situation whereby this could be inadvertent or in any way innocent.

Since Mrs. Justice T is well-known as an extreme-right-wing activist, Justice T is hardly a stranger to questions about the propriety of her political activities, which include zealous partisanship on a whole range of issues that have been brought before her husband in his years on the High Court. His answer is always some variant of defending her free speech rights, but of course he's not that stupid, or he wouldn't have lied six times (that we know of) on those disclosure forms -- isn't it clear that he knows perfectly well what a clearcut conflict of interest there is?

And while we're on the subject of flagrant conflicts of interest, Common Cause is currently also asking:

"Did these two men, Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, have a shocking and undisclosed conflict of interest when they ruled on the Citizens United case -- which opened the floodgates to unlimited corporate political spending?"

They're inviting visitors to sign a petition "calling for a Justice Department investigation of whether Scalia and Thomas should have recused themselves from the Citizens United case because of their participation in secret political strategy meetings with Koch Industries."

We, the undersigned, call on the Department of Justice to investigate whether Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas should have recused themselves from ruling on the Citizens United case. We believe there are serious questions about their impartiality in this matter.

Justices Scalia and Thomas have been featured guests at secretive political strategy sessions sponsored by Koch Industries, a multi-billion dollar conglomerate that has invested millions of dollars in political campaigns and causes. Koch Industries was a major beneficiary of the Citizens United decision, which overturned long-established law to permit corporations to spend unlimited amounts on political advocacy.

Other guests at the private Koch meetings have included corporate leaders and conservative commentators. The involvement of Justices Scalia and Thomas creates a troubling appearance of bias, and should have led the Justices to disqualify or recuse themselves from participation in the Citizens United case. The Department of Justice has a duty to launch an immediate investigation.

About the only answer I can think of to the charges of conflict of interest against Justices Thomas and Scalia, the same one I hypothesized back when Justice Nino was taking the tiniest bit of heat for his flagrant conflict of interest in hanging out with then-Vice President "Big Dick" Cheney while he had every reason to believe he would be called on to rule on "Big Dick"'s suppression of the identities of the people he met with officially while developing his "energy policy," is that it doesn't matter how much time Justice Nino or Justice Clarence spends schmoozing right-wing potentates or even how much money said potentates pour into their family coffers, because the justices' votes were never affected in any way -- there was never any possibility that in a million years that would give even a microsecond's consideration to voting against the interests of their ideological bedfellows. That those bedfellows also made themselves their benefactors is just, well, gravy.

It's a time-honored cliché to say, with regard to conflict of interest, that what matters isn't actual conflict but the appearance of conflict of interest. Justices Nino and Clarence not only don't care about the appearance of conflict, they don't give a damn about the actual thing.

YES, IT'S TIME TO PLAY OUR FAVORITE GAME,
"IF THE SHOE WAS ON THE OTHER FOOT"!

By way of illustration, let's play, as I suggested in the post heading, another round of one of my favorite games, "If the Shoe Was on the Other Foot." This is where we imagine the roles switched: where accusations comparable to those against Justices Nino and Clarence were brought against one of the Supreme Court's moderate Justices -- Breyer, Ginsburg, Sotomayor, or Kagan.

TO BE CLEAR ABOUT SUPREME COURT LIBERALS

Let me say once again that there aren't any "liberal" justices on the High Court now, and there probably won't ever be again, the way the nomination and confirmation process has been reshaped. There's just the bloc of four ultra-extreme right-wing justices (the aforementioned Thomas and Scalia plus of course Chief Justice "Smirkin' John" Roberts and Justice "Sammy the Hammer" Alito), one more or less plain old right-wing justice ("Slow Anthony" Kennedy), plus the four moderates.

So just imagine Drudge or Hannity or Glenn Barf breathlessly "reporting" the ghost of a hint of a whisper of the slightest possibility of a financial irregularity anywhere in the same township with conflict of interest on the part of one of the moderate justices. In a matter of days the echo chamber of the Right-Wing Noise Machine would have the story thundering so crashingly from coast to coast that the justice's continued service would become a virtual impossibility. (At that, they're lucky that they're all sitting justices, so that their continued service would be only a virtual impossibility. If they were mere nominees caught in that ocean-to-ocean echo chamber, long before it reached that point they would have been cut loose by the president who appointed them, at least if it happened to be this president.)

There would be no ifs, ands, or buts about it. The drooling stooges who pass for "opinion leaders' now on the Right would be screaming for blood, and they would get it. (Think "Shirley Sherrod.")

CAN SOMEONE TELL THE INFOTAINMENT NOOZERS
THAT COMMON CAUSE IS NOT A "LIBERAL" ORG?

With regard to Common Cause, by the way, to whatever extent its reports on the financial and conflict-of-interest embarrassments of Justices Thomas and Scalia have gotten any notice in the infotainment noozemedia, in all the cases I've encountered it's always identified as a "liberal" group. It isn't. Never has been, and still isn't. It's a nonpartisan advocacy organization whose principal issues it lists as "money in government," "election reform," "ethics in government," "government accountability," "media and democracy," and "rule of law." "Right now," the "Our Issues" page on its website says,

we are working on several fronts to:

• Increase participation in the political process,

• Advance campaign finance reforms that make people and ideas more important than money,

• Make certain that government is open, ethical and accountable,

• Remove barriers to voting and ensure that our voting systems are accurate and accessible,

• Increase the diversity of voices and ownership in media, to make media more responsive to the needs of citizens in a democracy and to protect the editorial independence of public broadcasting, and to

• Make certain that public policy on health care, defense spending, climate change and other issues reflects the needs and priorities of our citizens, not special interests.

On the normal, rational ideological specturm, none of these is an "ideological" issue, just a good-government issue.

Is it really necessary to recall that Common Cause was the brainchild of a Republican, John Gardner? Actually, I would say that yes, apparently it is necessary.

I think I know where the confusion comes in. Common Cause says on the "About Us" page on its website," Common Cause "remains committed to honest, open and accountable government, as well as encouraging citizen participation in democracy." When we get down to specifics, it will be seen that while the group's goals are resolutely nonideological and nonpartisan, every single one is unequivocally and violently opposed by present-day right-wingers. Indeed, each is the object of lavishly funded to-the-death campaigns funded by those deep right-wing pockets.

Here's how those issues are framed in the website's "Our Vision" statement:

Common Cause is dedicated to restoring the core values of American democracy, reinventing an open, honest and accountable government that serves the public interest, and empowering ordinary people to make their voices heard in the political process.

In this spirit, Common Cause serves as an independent voice for change and a watchdog against corruption and abuse of power. Together with our sister organization, the Common Cause Education Fund, we employ a powerful combination of grassroots organizing, coalition building, research, policy development, public education, lobbying and litigation to win reform at all levels of government.

Founded with 4,000 core members in 1970 to serve as a people’s lobby, Common Cause has grown into a nationwide network of more than 400,000 members and supporters, with offices in 36 states and Washington, D.C. Today it works tirelessly to
• Strengthen public participation and faith in our institutions of self-government;

• Ensure that government and the political process serve the common good, rather than special interests;

• Curb the excessive influence of money on government decisions and elections and illuminate the connections between lobbying money coming in and government expenditures going out;

• Promote fair, honest and transparent elections;

• Hold government officials accountable for working within the rule of law and under high standards of ethical conduct;

• Fight for a vigorous, independent and diverse media; and

• Protect the civil rights and civil liberties of all Americans.

"Public participation and faith in our institutions of self-government"? Serving "the common good, rather than special interests"? "Excessive influence of money on government decisions and elections"? "Fair, honest and transparent elections"? Applying the rule of law and high ethical standards to government officials? "A vigorous, independent and diverse media"? "The civil rights and civil liberties of all Americans"?

I don't see how any of these goals could be branded as "ideological," but modern-day "conservatism" is diametrically and implacably opposed to each of them. To illustrate how far off the rational ideological specturm it is, the achievement of any one of these goals would mean an immediate, automatic, unappealable death sentence for the present-day movement. In fact, even partial achievement of as few as two of these goals would probably represent a crippling blow.

Which isn't likely to happen, of course. Slowly but surely over the last several decades the New Right has learned how to spend all those billions of dollars at its disposal to make sure that its voice is overwhelmingly the one most Americans hear, and overwhelmingly represented in the courts. Which brings us, as a random example, to the pair of federal judges who has so far ruled against part or all of the health care law. Which we'll take up tomorrow.

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"If we condone political theft . . . our civilization itself cannot endure" (Bill Moyers)

Great moments in Great Society history: the birth of Medicare. Sept. 1, 1965: HEW Secretary John W. Gardner (later the founder of Common Cause, second from left) and President Lyndon B. Johnson (far right, with Social Security Commissioner Robert M. Ball at left) formally accept the first Medicare Part B application received, from Tony Palcaorolla of Baltimore.

"The founder of Common Cause was a prophet in seeing money as the dagger directed at the heart of democracy. Like his fellow Republican Teddy Roosevelt, he opposed the ‘naked robbery’ of the public’s trust. A century ago, in one of the most powerful speeches in American political history, Roosevelt said: 'It is not a partisan issue; it is more than a political issue; it is a great moral issue. If we condone political theft, if we do not resent the kinds of wrong and injustice that injuriously affect the whole nation, not merely our democratic form of government but our civilization itself cannot endure.'”

-- Bill Moyers, in remarks on Common Cause founder John Gardner at the 40th-anniversary gala, Oct. 6

by Ken

Thanks to The Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel, not just for a spirited and incisive Washington Post column today, "Predator's ball," which we'll come back to, but for calling attention to this remarkable speech of Bill Moyers', which reviews some of the best and worst times in 20th-century American governance, taking off from one of the last books by one of my favorite writers, Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land.

Judt described a time when "the public" was no fiction and the word wasn’t even a term of opprobrium. Public schools, public libraries, public parks, public highways, public goods and services were the means of creating a fair society for people who weren’t rich. At its heart was an ethical compact without which society is a war of all against all and the free market for wolves becomes a slaughter for the lambs.

Guess where the historian Judt located the closest America came to that notion of social democracy? In Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Much of what was best in the legislation and social policy of the 20th century, he said, was social democracy in all but name.

As Moyers notes, from his view inside the Johnson White House, LBJ's Great Society -- in pursuit of which he appointed Republican John Gardner as secretary of health, education, and welfare -- was undone by his catastrophic Vietnam blunder. And by 1980, "the social democratic climate that Judt thought so promising," and had so quickly come "to seem plain common sense," "abruptly vanished from sight." And Moyers provides a masterful survey of the process by which corporate powers took off the gloves and established a stranglehold on our political system, with a final cheering-on from "the activist reactionary majority on the Supreme Court," which --

has opened the floodgates for oligarchs and plutocrats to secretly buy our elections and consolidate their hold on the corporate state. One of the greatest of our Supreme Court justices, Louis Brandeis, warned that "you can have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, or democracy, but you cannot have both." The pro-corporate Roberts majority looked at both options and declared, ‘OK. We’ll take the former.”

Vanden Heuvel, in her column today, covers some familiar post-Citizens United ground: the delusion of some Democratic Party money people that they could hold their own against right-wing cash, which by now, still in its early days, is coming to look even more overwhelming than our worst fears suggested when you factor in the unlimited cash pouring into those supposedly "independent expenditures."

"This flood of conservative money isn't an accident," vanden Heuvel notes, calling attention to Eric Lichtblau's recent NYT tracing ("Long Battle by Foes of Campaign Finance Rules Shifts Landscape") of the relentless and strategically masterful campaign pursued by conservatives going back to the late '90s to free corporate money from the shackles of government regulation.

And she comes to rest on the crucial point that all this money that's overwhelming our political process is being spent only partly on ideological grounds.

The money flooding into Republican coffers isn't for small government or balanced budgets. It's for retaining profitable subsidies, rolling back consumer or worker protections, sustaining anti-trust exemptions, reopening the financial casino, thwarting efforts to tax the wealthy. The respected economist Jamie Galbraith described this as the "predator state," where powerful corporate interests profit by creating and defending lavish government benefits. The Tea Party protest has been sparked in part by the widespread sense that government serves the powerful, not the middle class -- that it bailed out Wall Street, not Main Street. But the Republican campaign is bankrolled in no small measure by money from those intent on maintaining their government privileges and subsidies.

What I originally set out to write about will have to wait till tomorrow: a specific case of how this process of right-wing moguls spending huge quantities of money on ideology for profit works in practice, in the form of the billionaire Koch brothers' funding of a right-wing think tank, the Mercatus Institute, at a public university, Virginia's George Mason. I will be expressing the sincere hope that everyone connected with the once-reputable George Mason U be tarred with the brush of the Kochs' power-mongering corruption.


Bill Moyers addresses Common Cause's 40th-anniversary gala.

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