People Before Profit blog

Flawed intelligence bill advances Bush agenda

Fri, 17 Dec 2004 05:11:00 +0000

News Analysis

The Bush administration has been pushing an agenda of restricting constitutional rights and increasing the power of the executive branch to suppress dissent. Step by step, starting with the USA Patriot Act, Bush has gotten Congress to marginalize judicial oversight of executive branch spying on and repressing people it dislikes.

From the outset, Bush has used public fear of terrorist violence as leverage to pass repressive legislation. The intelligence bill just passed is an example of this strategy. It will do little to protect us from terrorism, but much to advance the right’s power agenda. Media discussion centered on the new position of a “national intelligence director” organizationally above the director of the Central Intelligence Agency and other spy agency heads. This served to distract public attention from the dangers to civil liberties contained in the bill.

Efforts by the Republicans to include language from the CLEAR Act that would have authorized state and local police to stop and question anybody they thought might be an “illegal” did not make final version, causing some far-rightists to vote against it. The bill as passed by the House and Senate also included some new “safeguards” for civil liberties, but these turn out to be pitifully weak. Here are some of the problems with the bill:

• It makes mere membership in an organization classified by the government as “terrorist” a felony. Remember that the government can so designate any organization it likes, without restraint either by the judiciary or Congress.

• It allows the government to use Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court warrants, which are secret, to place under surveillance noncitizens who have no known connection to any foreign government or terrorist organization, if the government says they may be “lone wolf” terrorists.

• It creates automatic pretrial jailing of people indicted for terrorism-related crimes by a grand jury, even if there is no indication the individual is dangerous or a flight risk. The accused must prove that he or she does not represent a risk. The ACLU, in a letter to Congress just before the bill was passed, pointed out that the current administration “has a record of making accusations of involvement in terrorism in pretrial hearings without evidence to support those accusations,” creating a real danger that innocent people will languish in jail for months or years.

• Under the pretext of facilitating coordination among intelligence and law enforcement agencies, the bill greatly expands the ability of the government to snoop on information in public and private databases, without adequate safeguards for people’s right to privacy.

• Though some of the worst anti-immigrant language of the bill was removed, the requirement of a national standard for the issuance of driver’s licenses can open the door to unnecessary restrictions on the issuance of licenses, or even a national ID.

• Grand jury information in “terrorism” cases will now be more easily shared with state and local governments and, even more worrisome, with foreign governments, who might use it to go after the families of individuals being investigated in the United States.

• It requires that the names of crews of ships docking in U.S. ports be checked against secret terrorism watch lists, similar to the lists that have been used to stop “dangerous” people (like Sen. Ted Kennedy) from getting on airplanes. This brings back memories of one of the worst abuses of McCarthyism, when sailors were blacklisted from U.S. ships because their names were on “subversive” lists. Thousands lost their livelihoods.

The bill creates a Civil Liberties Oversight Board that is supposed to prevent abuses. But this is a joke, as the president will appoint board members, they will work out of his executive office, and will serve at his pleasure. Yes, indeed, the fox will diligently guard the hen house.

The bill finally passed with only two nay votes in the Senate and 75 nays in the House. Both Republican and Democratic politicians are congratulating themselves for creating a moderate and workable document, but in the process they have opened the door to future attacks on civil liberties.

Bush raid on Social Security stirs growing alarm

Fri, 17 Dec 2004 04:41:00 +0000

PITTSBURGH — Alarms are going off in union halls, churches and senior citizen residences across the country as the Bush administration kicks into gear its campaign to privatize Social Security.

On Dec. 15, President Bush convened an economic summit, at which the first speaker was Richard Parsons, co-chairman of Social Security commission and chief executive of Time Warner. The commission, established in 2001, is calling for the privatization of Social Security under the cover of “private retirement accounts.”

At an Economic Policy Institute (EPI) press conference Dec. 14, Aaron Henry, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and chairman of the National Academy of Social Insurance Board of Directors, damned the proposals before the summit.

“At a time when [the U.S. is] borrowing $100 million an hour from abroad, the $5 trillion deficit is accelerating, medical costs hammer wages and profits … and the income inequity is skyrocketing, for an economic summit to discuss diverting revenue from Social Security is the most perverse agenda this administration has come up with to date.”

Kenneth Apfel of the Lyndon Johnson School of Public Affairs and a former Social Security commissioner, said the debate has been solely around right-wing privatization schemes, benefit reductions, a retirement age increase and a change in the way benefits are calculated.

All this comes at a time when Social Security revenues are in good shape. According to the numbers used by everyone, including the President’s commission, Social Security can pay all promised benefits for the next 38 years without any changes at all. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) just upped that estimate to 48 years, the Institute for Public Accuracy said Dec. 14.

“By either measure, the ‘long-term problem’ faced by Social Security over the whole next 75 years is actually less than it faced in each of the decades of the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s,” the IPA said.

Social Security is more financially sound than it has been throughout most of its 69-year history. Even with CBO projections that the Social Security Trust Fund will run out in 2052, it still will not be “bankrupt”; revenues will cover 81 percent of promised benefits.

“To extend the trust fund into the 22nd century with no change in benefits,” Paul Krugman wrote in the Dec. 7 New York Times, “would require additional revenues equal to only 0.54 percent of the gross domestic product” — roughly the portion of Bush’s tax cuts going to people with annual incomes over $500,000.

As of December 2001, 45.9 million people, one in every six Americans, depended on their monthly Social Security check to pay their bills. About 3 million of those receiving Social Security checks are under 18, surviving family members of deceased workers. It also provides income to disabled workers.

Recently a young worker, upon getting his first paycheck, asked, “Who is FICA?” FICA taxes are Social Security taxes. Workers pay 6.2 percent on income capped at $84,900, and the employer pays 6.2 percent.

Since 1983, Social Security has generated more revenue than it has paid out in benefits. That surplus is kept in the trust fund, earning 6.6 percent in interest per year. In 2001, the trust fund took in $72.9 billion in interest. Social Security is a defined-benefit insurance program independent of the ups and downs of the stock market, with built-in safeguards to protect workers’ investment.

The Bush administration’s proposed reforms, charged Apfel, would manufacture an immediate crisis in Social Security because it would take money out and cost at least $2 trillion to implement.

EPI economists believe that job creation, raising the $84,900 cap, rescinding the tax cuts for millionaires, establishing incentives to increase personal savings and controlling health care costs would address the expected Social Security shortfall in 2044.

Henry Aaron, who has tracked the Bush administration over the past four years, is convinced that the attempt to privatize Social Security will be rammed through Congress in the first six months of 2005. The softening up campaign has already begun with press reports of a $20 billion fraud in Medicare, and attempts to manufacture a Social Security crisis are in place.

“Social Security is a government program that works, a demonstration that a modest amount of taxing and spending can make people’s lives better and more secure,” Krugman wrote. “And that’s why the right wants to destroy it.”

The Alliance of Retired Americans (ARA), a union-based senior organization with 3 million members, and the 35-million-member American Association of Retired Persons are calling for lobbying over the holidays to save Social Security.

Leaders of the AFL-CIO, NAACP, National Organization for Women (NOW), and others scheduled a Washington press conference Dec. 16 to announce “an aggressive campaign to stop President Bush’s plan to dismantle Social Security.” Speakers were to include AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, NAACP Chairman Julian Bond, NOW President Kim Gandy, Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, ARA President George Kourpias, and Marty Ford of the Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities.

The author can be reached at dwinebr696@aol.com.

Ohio vote tally still being questioned

Fri, 10 Dec 2004 05:48:00 +0000

CLEVELAND — Upset by the certification of Ohio’s presidential election results by Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, several Ohio groups are demanding a recount of the vote. Almost no one expects that the outcome of the election in Ohio — and hence the decision about who won the presidency — would be overturned in such a recount. The groups’ concern is that the democratic process be protected, and that voting irregularities that occurred in Ohio never happen again.

Groups and individuals involved in the request for a recount include the Libertarian Party, the Green Party, the Ohio Democratic Party, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the Ohio Kerry campaign, Citizens Alliance for Secure Elections (CASE), Common Cause, the Alliance for Democracy, Election Protection (backed by the national People for the American Way), the League of Pissed Off Voters and others.

An automatic recount is triggered if the margin of victory is within a small percentage point. The almost 119,000-vote margin for George Bush was smaller than the unofficial 136,000-vote margin projected on election night. Yet the results were not close enough to trigger an automatic recount, so the parties requesting the recount have to pay for it. They have already raised enough money to do this.

One Ohio county, Delaware County, attempted unsuccessfully to block the recount. A federal judge ruled that the recount should go forward, despite Delaware County’s protest.

Meanwhile, Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) convened hearings Dec. 8 in Washington to hear and investigate complaints that voters in Ohio and other states were effectively disenfranchised.

The list of complaints about voters being disenfranchised includes:

• Long lines at the polling places that caused many discouraged voters to leave the polls without voting.

• Voters who had voted for years at a particular polling place being told their names were not on the rolls.

• Mass confusion among poll workers, including failing to inform would-be voters that they could vote a provisional ballot if their names were not on the rolls.

• Poll workers discouraging voters from voting a provisional ballot, saying that the voter’s vote wouldn’t count anyway, so “why waste your time?”

• Poll workers failing to inform voters of their correct polling place if they were in the “wrong” precinct.

• Last-minute rulings by the secretary of state’s office regarding which provisional ballots would be counted and whether or not challengers would be allowed in polling places.

• Voters who applied for absentee ballots never receiving them and, therefore, being unable to vote at all.

• Observers at the vote-counting process at boards of elections having to sit 6 feet behind the vote-counters and unable to see how they were counting the votes.

• Miscounts of voting tallies by computer voting machines.

• Machines tabulating votes for the wrong candidate.

• Boards failing to notify voters about problems with their voter registration cards in time for the voters to correct the problem, voters registration, information being incorrectly entered on boards of elections rolls, or not entered at all.

Hence, hundreds of voters arrived at the polls, waited hours in the rain, fully expecting to vote, only to be told that there was a problem and they could only vote a provisional ballot.

About one-third of all provisional ballots in Cuyahoga County, one of Ohio’s largest counties, were rejected. By contrast, about 76 percent of all Ohio provisional ballots were accepted. The rate of rejection of provisional ballots in Cuyahoga County was significantly higher in largely African American wards and precincts.

All of this has angered many voting rights groups, who vow never to let these problems happen again. Coalitions are forming across the state to continue work on election reform, regardless of the outcome of this particular race for the presidency.

Why is govt spying on us?

Fri, 10 Dec 2004 05:16:00 +0000

Peace, religious groups protest infiltration

PORTLAND, Ore. — Peace and justice leaders across the nation hailed an American Civil Liberties Union project, announced Dec. 2, to spotlight FBI spying and infiltration of grassroots organizations that oppose the Iraq war and other right-wing policies of George W. Bush.

The ACLU has filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with the FBI in 10 states and the District of Columbia asking for release of files of illegal FBI surveillance of law-abiding organizations over the past four years. Attorney General John Ashcroft seized on the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to ram through the USA Patriot Act, and FBI spying and infiltration was drastically escalated.

“We have evidence that the FBI and local police — working through so-called Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF) — are spying on environmental, political, and faith-based groups,” the ACLU said in a statement. “We think the public deserves to know more about who is being investigated and why.”

Benjamin Stone, executive director of the Iowa Civil Liberties Union, told the World in a phone interview from his Des Moines office, “Making government accountable is one of the ACLU’s highest priorities. We want to help the citizens of this nation understand the kind of tactics the FBI is using in the name of ‘war on terrorism.’”

He recalled the subpoenas obtained by the FBI task force in Des Moines last February targeting a peace group at Drake University as well as the Iowa Peace Network and Catholic Peace Ministries. The sub-poenas ordered Drake University to turn over any records, including surveillance by campus security, about a Nov. 11, 2003, campus meeting titled “Stop the Occupation! Bring the Iowa Guard Home.” The following day, 12 people were arrested on “trespassing” charges while peacefully protesting the Iraq war at a nearby National Guard base. The nationwide outcry against the subpoenas was so loud that the subpoenas were withdrawn.

“Surveillance of innocent people is unacceptable and should not be tolerated,” Stone said. “We still live in a representative democracy. People need to remember that because if we forget, it’s going to be hard to hold on to it.”

The Rev. Calvin Morris, executive director of the Community Renewal Society, is one of dozens of Chicago-based leaders who joined in the FOIA request filed by the Illinois Civil Liberties Union. “People are treated as suspects because their views are contrary to those of the administration,” Morris told the World. “The administration proclaims a ‘state of emergency.’ But we are not in that situation at all and we should challenge that assumption. Freedom is not served when we become a police state, when we become like those we are struggling against.”

Kareem Irfan, chair of the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago, charged that Ashcroft and the FBI put the Arab and Muslim communities “under siege” with massive religious and racial profiling in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. Thousands have been detained and interrogated solely based on their religion or national origin. “While all of us, as Americans, desire a safe and secure homeland, we simply cannot tolerate members of our community being singled out for FBI spying and investigation on the basis of racial or ethnic background or simply for practicing our faith or speaking out on matters of public concern,” he said.

Here in Portland, the City Council is scheduled to debate Dec. 22 whether to renew cooperation by the Portland Police Department with the FBI’s JTTF. Oregon ACLU Executive Director David Findanque said 17 peace and justice groups in Portland are demanding that the FBI lay bare its spying and infiltration against Oregon’s Muslim community and peace movement.

Among the victims is Lumumba Ford, whose parents are respected leaders of Portland’s African American community. Ford has a master’s degree from The John Hopkins University Center in Nanjing, China, and is fluent in Chinese. He is married and the father of a child. He converted to Islam several years ago. FBI stoolpigeons testified in the “Portland Seven” trial that he was a member of Al Qaeda.

Ford is now serving an 18-year sentence at Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas. His “crime” was being arrested in China on his way to Afghanistan. “They never accused my son of a single act of terrorism,” said Sandra Ford. “But they said he is a ‘member of Al Qaeda.’ They know it is a lie. The government has decided that anyone who is a Muslim is a terrorist. It’s another case of railroading you if you are poor and Black.”

The U.S. Attorney in Portland had agreed to a plea bargain, setting the sentence for Ford at seven years. “But the Justice Department intervened. They wanted to make an example of him. We are now in the process of setting up a defense committee,” Sandra Ford said.

Last spring, the city was rocked by the FBI’s arrest of Portland attorney Brandon Mayfield, a Muslim convert falsely accused of involvement in the Madrid train bombing. He was jailed for weeks without legal representation. He was released and the FBI apologized for falsely accusing him of terrorism.

The author can be reached at greenerpastures21212@yahoo.comclick here for Spanish text

Ohio voters cry fraud, demand recount

Fri, 03 Dec 2004 04:59:00 +0000

The crowd packing an African American church in Columbus, Ohio, Nov. 28 cheered as Rev. Jesse Jackson urged the Ohio Supreme Court to set aside George W. Bush’s narrow win in this battleground state.

Jackson charged a “pattern of intentionality” in suppressing the Black vote in Ohio, which Bush claims to have won by 136,000 votes. “We can live with losing an election,” Jackson said. “We cannot live with fraud and stealing.”

His speech was a dramatic highpoint of the surging demand to investigate voter suppression in Ohio, remove Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell and recount all ballots.

Demanding the removal of Blackwell, who chaired Ohio’s 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign, Jackson said, “The owner of the team can’t also be the referee. We need federal supervision of federal elections. Right now we have 50 separate but unequal ways to vote. There can be no safe harbor for a flawed process that leaves people disenfranchised.”

He added, “You can’t have public elections on privately-owned machines, especially where one of the owners has vowed to deliver the state for George Bush.” Jackson was referring to Walter O’Dell, CEO of Ohio-based Diebold, the largest manufacturer of voting machines, who promised last spring to deliver Ohio for Bush.

“You can hack these machines,” Jackson said. “The playing field is uneven. These numbers will not go away. We as Americans should not go begging a secretary of state for a fair vote count. We cannot be the home of the thief and the land of the slave.”

The issue, he said, is not John Kerry versus George Bush. “This is about Medgar Evers and Fannie Lou Hamer and Viola Liuzzo. About Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner, and 27 years in prison for Nelson Mandela.”

A Nov. 13 hearing in Columbus by the Ohio Election Protection Coalition (OEPC) heard about widespread irregularities in sworn testimony by 32 Ohio voters, precinct judges, poll workers and legal observers.

“There is no way Bush’s margin in Ohio will hold up in a recount; there are just too many discrepancies,” OEPC statewide coordinator Jocelyn Travis told the World in a telephone interview. “The bottom line is there were too many problems that add up to suppressing the vote especially in Black and Latino precincts.”

A shortage of voting machines forced voters to wait as long as 12 hours in a cold driving rain, and some had to leave for work without voting, she said.

Travis said the number of provisional ballots raises the issue of whether all new registrants were entered correctly in the system.

“We support a recount,” she added. “I truly believe that every vote must be counted. Otherwise people are going to lose confidence in the integrity of the system.”

During the hearing, witnesses told of a Franklin County precinct that awarded Bush 4,258 votes even though only 628 people voted there. Franklin County voters waited hours to vote, yet 68 stored voting machines were never used on Election Day.

Youngstown pastor Rev. Werner Lange estimated 8,000 votes were lost from the African American community just in Youngstown because of “woefully insufficient” voting machines, and said that “would translate to some 7,000 votes lost for Kerry.”

Matthew Segal of Gambier, Ohio, told the hearing Kenyon College students and Gambier residents “had to stand in line up to 10 to 12 hours in the rain,” and many left without voting. By contrast, Republican-majority precincts had ample machines.

“We support a recount in Ohio due to the widespread irregularities,” Tim Rusch of the New York-based National Voting Rights Institute (NVRI) told the World. A joint statement by NVRI, People for the American Way, Common Cause, and the Fannie Lou Hamer Project said, “We believe it is imperative that, in a democracy, every citizen’s vote be counted.”

The statement adds, “Approximately 93,000 ballots (in Ohio) have not been counted on the grounds that voters either voted for more than one presidential candidate or did not cast a vote in the presidential race. Ohio election officials … may be improperly disqualifying thousands of the 155,000 provisional ballots that have been cast.”

Leaders of the Green and Libertarian parties have filed a lawsuit requesting a recount in Ohio and are raising the required $113,600 or $10 per precinct payment. Blackwell said state election rules allow him to limit a recount to only a few days. He said he will certify the Ohio vote by Dec. 6 and a recount must be completed by Dec. 13 when Ohio electors are scheduled to meet.

At the request of a bipartisan group in Congress including Reps. John Conyers (D-Mich.), Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), Gregory Meeks (D-Fla.), Louise Slaughter (R-N.Y.) and others, the Government Accountability Office will investigate 57,000 complaints of election irregularities delivered to the House Judiciary Committee during and after the 2004 elections.

The author can be reached at greenerpastures21212@yahoo.com.click here for Spanish text