Gore Endorses Obama and Tells Us "Elections Matter"

"Take it from me, elections matter," Gore said.

"If you think the next appointments to our Supreme Court are important, you know that elections matter. If you live in the city of New Orleans, you know that elections matter. If you or a member of your family are serving in the active military, the National Guard or Reserves, you know that elections matter.

"If you are a wounded veteran, you know that elections matter. If you've lost your job; if you're struggling with a mortgage, you know that elections matter."

To which I would add:

If elections matter and they decide public policy, then why didn't you, Al Gore, fight harder in 2000 when the election which you won was stolen? Why didn't you call upon your supporters to march on the Supreme Court and demand that the vote count be continued and that all the votes be counted?

If elections matter, then how come John Kerry didn't fight harder in 2004 to make sure that the votes were counted, and why did he give up even though he actually won the election?

If elections matter and you want your vote to count, how come the Democrat-controlled Congress in 2007 decided that it wasn't going to do anything about the hackable electronic voting machines and other disenfranchishment issues until at least 2010?

If elections matter, then why hasn't the 2006 mid-term election that gave the Democrats back the majority in Congress produced any of the changes that people thought they were voting for when they voted for Democrats?

If elections matter, then how come the Democratic party won't listen to majority sentiment that demands impeachment and an end to the war?

If elections matter, how come Sen. Barack Obama, elected to serve the people and the Constitution, doesn't understand what "high crimes and misdemeanors" are, and won't do anything NOW about a president and vice-president who are flagrantly and repeatedly violating the law, carrying out invasions based on lies, threatening to do it again any week now, and who have admitted torturing people?

If elections matter, then how come we always hear it said: "Vote. It doesn't matter who you vote for. Vote." How come it doesn't matter who we vote for?

Oil-buying craze tops excess of dot-coms

And the speculator bubble is due to burst, analysts say

[The silver lining in high oil prices is that those damn SUVs are becoming increasingly undesirable to people and they're trying to trade them in for Hondas. I hear from Honda dealers that they're offering SUV trade-ins of $2k and the sellers can't believe it - DL]

By MICHAEL PATTERSON AND ELIZABETH STANTON
BLOOMBERG NEWS

The rally that recently drove oil to a record $139.12 a barrel has surpassed the gains in Internet stocks that preceded the dot-com crash in 2000.

Crude has risen 697 percent since trading at $17.45 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange in November 2001 and reached 28 record highs this year. The last time a similar pattern was seen in equities was eight years ago, when Internet-related stocks sent the Nasdaq Composite Index up 640 percent to its highest level ever, according to data compiled by Bloomberg and Bespoke Investment Group LLC.

The Nasdaq has tumbled 78 percent from its March 2000 peak, erasing about $6 trillion of market value, as investors concluded that prices weren't supported by profits at companies such as Broadcom Corp. and Amazon.com Inc.

But billionaire investor George Soros and Stephen Schork, president of Schork Group Inc., say oil is ready to tumble because prices aren't justified by supply and demand.

"There's nothing different between this mania, the dot-com mania, the real estate mania, the Dow Jones mania of the 1920s, the South Sea bubble and the Dutch tulip-bulb mania," said Schork, whose Villanova, Pa.-based firm advises the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, Wall Street firms and oil companies on the outlook for energy prices. "History repeats itself over and over and over again."

Oil has climbed on growing demand from China and India, whose economies have expanded the past seven years at an average annual pace of 10.2 percent and 7.3 percent, respectively. Supply disruptions in Nigeria and Iraq and declining production in Russia also have boosted prices. Investors have added about $250 billion to commodity index trading strategies since 2003, according to Mike Masters, president and founder of Masters Capital Management, a St. Croix-based hedge fund.

Money is flowing into oil as the global economy slows. The worst U.S. housing slump since the 1930s and more than $390 billion of write-downs and credit losses at banks will slow global growth to 2.7 percent this year from 3.7 percent in 2007, according to the World Bank.

The U.S. economy's expansion may slow to 1.3 percent this year from 2.2 percent in 2007, dragging down oil demand by 240,000 barrels a day, according to economists surveyed by Bloomberg and Energy Department data. In China, the second-biggest fuel consumer after the U.S., economic growth may fall to 10.1 percent from 11.9 percent, the Bloomberg survey shows.

"I don't know if you can classify it as a bubble or not," said Masters. "But there is no question that investor demand is having an effect on price. Very little of it has to do with physical supply and demand of crude oil."

Gains in oil are the result of a "bubble" caused by speculation from index funds and a tight balance between supply and demand, Soros said in testimony before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation on June 3. "The bubble is superimposed on an upward trend in oil prices that has a strong foundation in reality," he said.

Commodity index traders account for about 40 percent of the open interest, or outstanding contracts, in the 12 agricultural commodities for which the Commodity Futures Trading Commission reports data, according to Chicago-based Bianco Research LLC.

Crude futures more than doubled in the past year and surged $10.75 a barrel on June 6, the biggest rise on record and the largest in percentage terms since June 1996. Robert Aliber, a professor of economics emeritus at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, says the risk of a "correction" has increased because prices climbed so fast.

"You've got speculation in a lot of commodities and that seems to be driving up the price," Aliber, co-author of "Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises," said in an interview from Hanover, N.H.. "Movements are dominated by momentum players who predict price changes from Wednesday to Friday on the basis of the price change from Monday to Wednesday."

Burton Malkiel, a Princeton University economics professor and author of "A Random Walk Down Wall Street," said the rise in oil may be justified because supplies are limited and demand in developing economies is increasing. That distinguishes oil from the market for technology stocks in the 1990s, where supply "could be expanded infinitely" and new stock issues helped push down prices, he said.

"The picture is fundamentally different than the Internet picture," Malkiel said in an interview from Princeton, N.J. "I'm not saying we're running out of oil, but we're clearly supply-constrained. Five and 10 years from now, the price is going to be higher than $134."

"You can look at the chart and say oil's taking on the characteristics of a bubble," said James Bianco, the president of Bianco Research. Still, "it may have a long way to go before it eventually peaks," he said.

Congress on Verge of Giving Telecoms Get Out of Jail Free Card

Thomas Ferraro of Reuters, reporting today:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - White House and congressional negotiators have reached a tentative agreement on an anti-terror spy bill that would permit court dismissal of potentially billions of dollars in lawsuits against phone companies, sources familiar with the talks said on Friday.

Under the possible accord, a federal court could immunize a company by ruling it had been given written assurances that its participation in the U.S. government's warrantless domestic spying program was legal and authorized by President George W. Bush, one source said.

For the rest of the article, go here.

When Bush was caught red-handed "persuading" the major telecoms such as AT&T, Bell South and ("Can you hear me now?") Verizon into engaging in massive, illegal, warrantless surveillance of Americans' phone calls and Internet activity beginning - get this - in February 2001, seven months before 9/11, he first lied about it and claimed that it was only a small number of international phone calls and that it involved known or suspected terrorists.

Then when more revelations came out, revealing his first cover story to be utterly false, he changed his tune and said that all of this surveillance was necessary in the war on terror and that FISA's rules couldn't be abided by against such an implacable enemy. Those rules, for those who don't know, included retroactive permission for government spies to do their surveillance. The FISA court meets in secret and provides a means for the government to carry out national security surveillance, but also provides a means by which the government, if it's engaging in surveillance of its political rivals (such as what Nixon got caught doing against the Democrats and against the anti-war movement and civil rights movement), will be curbed.

The whole notion propagated by people like Bush, Cheney and former A.G. "Torture Boy" Alberto Gonzalez that FISA interferes with their holy war on terror is, in other words, transparently ridiculous and obviously false.

Yet the mass media for the most part has been unable and/or unwilling to make this simple point clear.

This telecom amnesty bill gives the companies who went along with this felonious behavior - the one company that refused, QWest, was punished by the White House and its CEO has been prosecuted in revenge - a free pass for their knowingly violating the law. The cowards and the criminals get rewarded and the one company with courage to stand up for the law and against unconstitutional invasions of our privacy gets punished. This is the world under Bush and Cheney, the Congress and both major political parties.

This is how far things have come.

The felons in charge of our country get caught, they lie about it, then they get caught with their hands even deeper in the cookie jar than was previously known, and unable to lie anymore, scream "national security," and the people charged with supervising the executive branch, decide to make what was previously illegal, legal. "You want cookies from the cookie jar?" Congress says, "Here, have more cookies. In fact, we'll give you the cookie jar and the cookie company FOR FREE. Anytime who're feeling the need for cookies, feel free. In fact, here's my daughter. You're feeling horny, take her. Rape her all you like. You need a place to sleep? Take my bed. Take my wife. Beat her and rape her too, as you please. Take my house. Take anything you want. It is, after all, a free country. And we're living proof of that fact."

Of Whales and Worms: the 2008 Election

Many people regard Obama’s upcoming nomination for president as a sign that change is underway and that the nightmare of Bush and Cheney will be over beginning in late January 2009. New York Times columnist Frank Rich, for example, sees Obama’s emergence as a changing of the guard. Others have cited Obama’s campaign as indicative of millennials beginning to take the political stage. Millions are pleased that finally an African-American is going to be nominated by one of the two major parties and see this as in and of itself a step forward.

For the well-meaning people who are feeling this way, I have this question: How can the same Democratic Party, and the same specific individuals, who have co-operated in, permitted and/or legalized the Bush regime’s atrocities – including torture and war crimes – now tell us that the candidate that they endorse is the solution to the horrid things that this system and these individuals have themselves facilitated and colluded in?

This is like the offspring of the Alien mother in the movie Alien coming out not hellishly grotesque looking and drenched in saliva but instead a fuzzy Beagle puppy.

This is like George W. Bush delivering a poetic and surpassingly beautiful two-hour speech extemporaneously.

This is like a worm giving birth to a full-grown whale.

See the rest of my essay at Counterpunch.

Rage Against the Machine in the Netherlands

RATM came on stage in solidarity with the prisoners being tortured by the US government, wearing black hoods and orange jumpsuits.

David Stern's Feeling the Heat

Yesterday, during half-time of the NBA finals (the outcome of the game I'd rather not even talk about, thank you very much!), Commissioner David Stern announced that he would go back and re-interview the NBA officials so that he could then come back and tell us all again - as he declared, remarkably - that no, no, no, there hasn't been any cheating and fixing of games.

(I'm not making this up or embellishing upon it. Stern said this. I have now found the relevant transcript excerpt:

"I ... didn't think it was fair for them [NBA officials] to have to respond ... against the allegations by an admitted felon that somehow all or a large swath of NBA officials had engaged in illegal conduct. But I would just say ... we will go back and prospectively ask the questions of officials in effect again with respect of specific acts, even though they've all been interviewed, so that I could sit here in front of you, really on behalf of our officials, who don't engage with you on a regular basis, to say no, no, a thousand times no...")

So nice to know that the outcome of those interviews - unlike, of course, the games themselves - is predetermined!

(In looking at articles about Stern's press conference, I have not yet found anyone commenting on this remarkable statement by Stern. It's possible that someone's written about it, but I haven't seen it yet.)

Tortured Logic

Yesterday, by the narrowest of margins (5-4), the US Supreme Court found the Bush regime's indefinite holding of detainees at Guantanamo to be unconstitutional, ruling that the detainees had a right to the Great Writ of Habeas Corpus to challenge their detentions in US civilian courts.

This is, of course, a very good thing since the opposite finding would have been devastating.

I have two observations to make about this.

First, there shouldn't have even been a debate about this. The decision should have been unanimous. The fact that it wasn't is very ominous and revealing.

Scalia, writing for the minority, stated that this decision meant that more Americans would be killed by the terrorists. See his further comments here:

“If the understood scope of the writ of habeas corpus was ‘designed to restrain’ (as the Court says) the actions of the Executive, the understood limits upon that scope were (as the Court seems not to grasp) just as much ‘designed to restrain’ the incursions of the Third Branch [i.e. the Judiciary].

“‘Manipulation’ of the territorial reach of the writ by the Judiciary poses just as much a threat to the proper separation of powers as ‘manipulation’ by the Executive,” Scalia continued. “The understood limits upon the writ deny our jurisdiction over the habeas petitions brought by these enemy aliens, and entrust the President with the crucial wartime determinations about their status and continued confinement.”

Two things stand out about (In)justice Scalia's remarks here.

One, he concludes and asserts as a settled question that the detainees are enemies. As Michael Rapkin has pointed out, by the government's own admission, 70% of the GITMO detainees are innocent. Many of them have been there for six years, tortured by the US military the entire time.

The government won't charge most of these detainees.

Why is that?

Because they haven't got anything on them.

Contrary to most Americans' perception, based on the lies purveyed by Bush et al, these detainees haven't all been picked up on a battlefield. Most of them have been turned in for bounties by neighbors or rivals.

This is an extraordinary gaff from a judge to render judgment from the bench without a trial and without charges being even filed that these detainees are all guilty of terrorism. Except that it's not a gaff.

Two, Scalia, as he characteristically will do, bends his reading of the law and the Constitution to suit his politics. He has previously publicly mused that "so-called torture" isn't cruel and unusual punishment because - you're going to love this - it isn't carried out within the framework of crime and punishment and since the "cruel and unusual punishment" prohibition refers only to that, presto, "so-called torture" isn't by definition cruel and unusual.

In the instant case, Scalia is claiming that the Judiciary is overreaching by upholding the Great Writ (as it is described in the Declaration of Independence) against the Executive branch's negation of habeas corpus.

The Court, in other words, according to Scalia, should not restrain a President who is "entrust[ed]" with "crucial wartime determinations." The American colonists who broke with King George over his abolition of habeas corpus were, therefore, wrong to do so because they were restraining an executive who should rightly make these decisions by himself. What would Scalia say about Alexander Hamilton's remarks that “the practice of arbitrary imprisonments has been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instrument of tyranny"? (THE FEDERALIST NO. 84, at 533 (Alexander Hamilton) (Benjamin Fletcher Wright ed., 1961).

The second observation I would make here is by way of addressing those who say that this razor's edge decision means that we have to make sure that McCain doesn't get a chance to appoint more judges like Scalia, Roberts, Thomas, and Alito. That is, make sure Obama gets elected.

We need to understand how the Court got packed the way that it has. Of course, the President gets to appoint them. But the Judiciary acts within the parameters of not principally what the President - and to a lesser degree because of "advise and consent," the Congress - wants but the political atmosphere in the country.

What would be more meaningful: an Obama presidency who is a little to the left of McCain on certain matters, or a mass movement spearheading a majority sentiment in the country that demands that habeas corpus be sustained and that demands that illegal and indefinite detentions, extraordinary rendition, torture as policy, and the phony war on terror (a justification for wars of conquest such as Afghanistan, Iraq, soon Iran and not long after that probably Pakistan) be ended?

Obama has, as readers know, signed onto the foreign policy of Bush and Cheney with regards to Iran. He has said that he admires the foreign policy of George's father.

If the "war on terror" that Bush and Cheney have used to justify all of their unjust wars and rumors of (another) war is also Obama's credo, and that forms the rationale and backdrop to the conservative majority in the Supreme Court, then how perilous is the fate of habeas corpus and the rest of the Bill of Rights (save the 2nd Amendment which the right wing will NEVER abrogate)?

Even if Obama were a liberal, which he is not, and wanted to save habeas corpus and move the Supreme Court away from the radical right, could he do so in a country in which the mobilized forces are the right wing and the demobilized forces of the left and the majority sentiment are absent except as voters?

The radical right has been mobilizing its forces and creating public opinion via their right wing media empire and their various "think tanks" et al for two plus decades.

They recognize correctly that who is in office and what their party affiliation is matters much less than what the parameters of public discourse are. They have been dominating that public discourse such that even those individual Democratic officials who differ with them feel it necessary to endorse and legitimate the parameters of debate set by the radical right.

This will continue to be the case even if Obama were elected absent a mass movement coming from the left. In fact, it would continue to be the case even if Ron Paul or Ralph Nader were elected. Look at how unambiguously Obama stated his support for Israel at AIPAC. Look at how Hillary Clinton declared her enthusiasm for the Bush doctrine by declaring that if she were president she'd "obliterate" Iran.

One of the more disturbing aspects of the views of many of those who support Obama today is their stance of "give him the benefit of the doubt," sure what he says is "worrisome, but he has to say some of these things to get elected."

This is an extraordinarily thin reed of hope in the face of the storms coming from the right. If your candidate can't even say the right things before he becomes president, what will he do when he becomes the next Chief Executive of the Biggest Empire in History?