The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) was originally passed in 1946, then modified in 1966 to prevent its misuse to hide information rather than doing its originally intended function of making knowledge of government activities available to the public. It was further amended a number of times, notably in the post-Watergate period of 1974; in 1982 when Reagan limited its application in the interests of national security; in1995-99 when Clinton opened up much information on what the government had been doing during the Cold War and most things of historic interest from at least twenty-five years earlier. In 2009 and 2010 Obama permitted retroactive classification of documents requested under FOIA, and briefly exempted the SEC from some disclosure in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2007. Despite these modifications, the law and the departments organized to handle information requests under FOIA have remained as established in 1974. It has been a useful tool for those few remaining journalists who keep trying to expose the truth about government activities which the government would prefer that the public not be aware of.
Monday, May 26, 2025
Designated Delays
Monday, October 7, 2024
Post Convention Punditalia '24 Political Outlook
In my post of July 8th I described how things looked for the upcoming elections, as of early July, and what the choice between Democrats and Republicans entailed. I have described what has transpired since then in a two-part illustrated piece called Satanic Summer which will appear on my Substack as soon as I can resolve, or work around, the technical difficulties related to my printer/scanner failure.
The political conventions went on as scheduled and the Democratic Convention in Chicago avoided violence by keeping demonstrators several miles away by use of extensive barricades. Bibi Netanyahu got to make his speech to Congress with all the record number of standing ovations he was promised, I had predicted, to anyone who asked me, that the party which managed to replace its candidate before the election, i.e. Trump or Biden, would win the election. At first that seemed to favor the Republicans when Trump was convicted on all thirty-four felony charges in New York, and later when there were two attempts to assassinate him. There was some talk of a conspiracy to kill him, with no evidence to support it. However, the constant hysteria about the threat to democracy that Trump represented and how he must be stopped at all costs, and such talk by Democratic pundits and politicians including the Vice President, certainly fostered an atmosphere to bring emotional gun nuts out of the woodwork. Those failed assassination attempts may have offset any election bump in the polls for the Democrats that derived from the Trump felony convictions.
Meanwhile the principle change in the election outlook was the withdrawal of the candidacy of President Biden after his very shaky performance in the first scheduled debate with Trump in the campaign. Joe didn't really want to go, as he had convinced himself that he was the best man for the job, but he failed to convince very many of his fellow Democrats, as well as the major donors to the party and the campaign. His withdrawal came quickly after the debate performance but after most of the Democratic primaries had been held, with virtually no other candidates being allowed on the ballots, so the Democratic Party leadership got together and decided that V.P. Kamala Harris was their candidate. That decision was announced before the convention, where she would be officially anointed along with her choice for vice president.
By late spring it looked fairly certain that Donald Trump would once again be elected. While that is no longer a given, the result looks slightly more likely to be the opposite, although Democrats are very good at losing elections. Trump seemed confident of defeating his visibly aging opponent and ridiculing him. To his dismay, he is now facing a candidate capable of turning the tables on him, by simply reminding people that Trump is almost as old as Biden and nearly as incoherent. Indeed, should Trump win the election, by the end of his term he will be the oldest US president in history.
Despite the long duration of US electoral campaigns, there is very little discussion of issues by the public, the main stream media, or the candidates. There is no lack of issues worthy of debate and in earlier election years I have made my own views on most of them clear. This year, most of those issues fade into insignificance due to the two issues which are virtually absent from discussion in this campaign. We are closer than ever to nuclear war which could escalate into a nuclear holocaust making all these discussions irrelevant. Should we escape that through some rational thinking, which seems to be in short supply right now, we will have to face the devastating consequences of climate change. This has been discussed a good deal in the past decade or so but in this election year, it has vanished from the agenda. While we've seen pledges to reduce carbon emissions and to make heating and lighting ever more efficient, the constant push to war and increased military expenditures by the US Empire has more than offset all the efforts made thus far to combat climate change.
I've mentioned the imminent threat of nuclear war and the effects of climate change as the two issues that make all the others insignificant, but I haven't forgotten the other important elephant in the room. The new axis of genocide, formed by the US and Israel with the UK and the EU as junior members, shows no signs of going away, at least not due to any US elections. The US "leadership" declared its intentions three decades ago to take control of the world through its economic power, backed up by its military might. The US has roughly 800 military bases spread over three quarters of the countries of the world so it is close to effective control of the planet by now. Ironically, the US government, and I include all three branches, is now controlled by Israel, a small dependency of the United States and the largest recipient of US foreign aid.
Donald Trump won the election of 2016 in large measure by outpandering Hillary Clinton in her attempt to be Israel's strongest supporter. We may see a repeat performance. Genocide has bi-partisan support and US efforts at world hegemony may run into opposition as its alliance with a pariah nation destroys the trust, the good will and good reputation the United States has built over the past eight decades.
We've seen who Donald Trump is and the damage he can wreak. The only conceivable positive trait we've seen in him is that he may be less enthusiastic than the current regime about promoting unending war. We know little about Kamala Harris and how she might handle the decision making in the White House. She was a candidate for the Democratic candidacy in 2016 and she was a terrible candidate who dropped out early. So far she's given no indication that she would deviate from the policies of the Biden Administration. Both candidates fully back the genocide that we're participating in. At the Democratic Convention, Harris announced a new politics of joy. A little joy may be needed in these dismal times, but at a moment when our country is participating in the most visible genocide in eighty years and we're spending precious resources on the promoting, inciting and escalating of war all over the globe, speaking of the politics of joy appears tone deaf. Hillary Clinton was tone deaf about all the "deplorables" and she lost an election regarded as one she couldn't possibly lose.
We've seen some bizarre reversals of positions in recent years, especially this year. Whereas the Democratic Party has traditionally been seen as the party of the rights of minorities and of civil rights in general, and the GOP as the party of business interests and of the wealthy, that been reversed to some degree. The GOP has always tended to have an authoritarian element, and abortion enthusiasts will correctly point to its promotion of restrictions on abortion as evidence of that, but recently, the authoritarian push to limit free speech, promote censorship and illegal surveillance has come from what used to be thought of as the Left, but in reality is the ever more right-wing Democratic Party. The oligarchs can claim to be Democrats or Republicans but they are much the same in promoting their own interests by investing in both.
Other radical reversals of associations have been popping up all over. Robert Kennedy Jr., who has deep family ties to the Democratic Party, after being kept off the ballot in Democratic primaries, and then being kept off state ballots when trying to run as an independent candidate, all by lawfare brought by the Democratic Party, has now joined the Trump campaign where he hopes to have a say in Trump Administration policy. Similarly, Tulsi Gabbard who was a Democratic Representative from Hawaii, as well as being a member of the Democratic National Committee until she resigned from that ruling body in 2016 in protest of its corrupt and undemocratic procedures, has joined the Trump campaign, just a year or two after resigning from the Democratic Party. She has been, and remains, among the most vocal critics of Kamala Harris.
Not to be outdone, the Democratic Party has been seeking Republican turncoats who oppose Trump, and there are plenty of them. That they have abandoned Trump is reasonable but it would be more honorable if they just stayed out of sight and prayed forgiveness for backing him the the first place. That some popular person who seeks public service in a red state might go along with the local party is understandable, and the same could be said in Democratic states. However, the recent headliners are Liz Cheney and her father Dick, the Acting President for much of the Little George Bush Administration. While I may obsess about when he and Bush will be brought up on War Crimes charges in an international tribunal, he doesn't usually occupy much of my thoughts.
However, in recent weeks Liz Cheney has been out campaigning with Kamala Harris and Dick Cheney has announced his support. Politics can make strange bedfellows and unlikely coalitions are not a new thing but is there anyone whose support Kamala Harris would reject? I, for one, would not vote for anyone who accepted the support of Dick Cheney.
Usually I am free with my voting suggestions, which too often involve picking the least awful candidate. This time is different. Both major party candidates are totally totally unacceptable. Most people will vote with the party they identify with. I usually do that myself. However, I will not vote for a pro-genocide candidate for president or senator or representative. After one or two anti-war and peace candidates have been eliminated through bureaucratic maneuvering, there is only one presidential candidate on my ballot who opposes genocide. Thus, Jill Stein will get my vote again. Her chances of winning are about the same as my chance of winning a big lottery. She is running ahead of Kamala Harris in recent polls in a few places in the country where our involvement in genocide is regarded as an issue. The results of this election will change little or nothing but we can just send a tiny message that the status quo is unacceptable.
Things sometimes change quickly but in June of 2021 I posted a cartoon that commented on the US Empire and its relationship with Israel. You can see it here.
Tuesday, August 13, 2024
Lewis Lapham and Other Heroes
In the midst of this summer from Hell, sandwiched between the withdrawal from the presidential race of Joe Biden and the speech by Bibi Netanyahu to the assembled Houses of Congress in the Nation’s Capitol, came the news that Lewis Lapham had died.
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foto by Nicole Bengivino for the New York Times |
Lewis H. Lapham was one of my heroes and will remain so as long as I am able to read and write. Do we need heroes? Should we have them? Blind devotion to to imperfect people can lead to irrational and dangerous cults. We saw that a few decades ago with the Jonestown Massacre and more recently politics have come to be dominated by personality cults in place of policy discussions. However, most of us do look to people we respect and who can serve as models for how we hope to conduct our lives and achieve the goals we set for ourselves.
Monday, July 8, 2024
PUNDITALIA '24 Political Outlook
Saturday, April 13, 2024
Shame
The most forceful public assertion of shame that I can recall was when Special Counsel Joseph Welch turned to Senator Joseph McCarthy on June 9th, 1954, and said “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last”? The unspoken answer was clearly “no” and that marked the beginning of the end of McCarthy’s vicious career of destroying other people’s lives through lies, slander and innuendo. Shortly after this, he was investigated, censured by the Senate, and left to die in disgrace. It also marked the last time that shame played a major role in American public life. Full immunity to shame has been developed over the subsequent seven decades and has opened the way to breathtakingly new behavioral extremes by the two entrenched contenders for the presidency in 2024, both cheered on by young acolytes who, as members of the Enron generation, have no need to develop an immunity to shame, a concept to which they’ve never been introduced.
Sunday, February 25, 2024
A Solution for Gaza
Friday, December 8, 2023
Emergency Media Reset
“The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.” George Orwell
Virtually all the media, even those moderately sympathetic to the cause of the Palestinians, refer to the events of 7 October and its aftermath as the war between Israel and Hamas. I tend to cling to the outmoded concept of wars being a way of nations resorting to conflict resolution through military means when diplomatic means have failed, or have never been tried. Sometimes it’s a matter of big just rolling over small, but usually it involves two countries, nations or states. There have been any number of warring factions within larger political entities. From 1948 Israel has existed as a nation, given that recognition by the UN with remarkable international unanimity, although the measure also accorded a Palestinian state, a solution which has never been implemented and one which the current Israeli Government will stop at nothing to prevent.
Gaza is an occupied territory. Since 2006 it has been condoned off and fully controlled by Israel. No ships could arrive; nobody could enter or leave without Israeli approval. Food entering the territory was calculated to not exceed the cumulative minimum caloric levels to avoid starvation of the population. Perhaps the Israelis hoped that the Palestinians would just become depressed and die off. They’ve spared no effort to that end but have not succeeded so they appear to have moved on to the final solution, which meets all the international criteria for genocide.
Our media talk about genocide often, but such talk is usually limited to the big one in Europe in the 1940’s while those in Africa don’t get much mention, just as the slaughter of the Armenians was largely forgotten by the world for a century. This one is there for all to see, although the Israelis did shut down the internet for a while to stop live reports from getting out. More journalists have already been killed in this two month old conflict than in all other recent US wars.
In recent weeks, some hostages on both sides have been released. Each has his or her own story but some Israeli women, upon release, have even expressed gratitude to their captors for their considerate treatment. You might have missed that if your news comes from the major media, just as you may have missed the stories of Israeli troops simply blowing up buildings where Hamas was thought to be holding hostages, killing everyone inside, captors, hostages alike, in order to avoid negotiations with the enemy. Illegal settlers in the occupied West Bank have continued murdering Palestinians with impunity.
In October Josh Paul, Director of the State Department’s Bureau of Military Affairs, resigned saying the Biden Administration’s “blind support for one side “ was leading to policy decisions that were “short-sighted, destructive, unjust and contradictory to the very values that we publicly espouse”.
Israel has been getting a lot of bad press, despite all its MSM and Congressional support, so a propaganda counteroffensive was due.
On December 6th the New York Times published a story containing the following:
“ President Biden condemned the “unimaginable cruelty” of Hamas attackers who raped and mutilated women in Israel on Oct. 7, and he blamed the terrorist group’s refusal to release its remaining female hostages for the breakdown in cease-fire talks. Hamas has rejected the allegations. …
“Survivors and witnesses of the attacks have shared the horrific accounts of unimaginable cruelty,” Biden said. “Reports of women raped — repeatedly raped — and their bodies being mutilated while still alive — of women corpses being desecrated, Hamas terrorists inflicting as much pain and suffering on women and girls as possible and then murdering them.”
“Matt Miller, a State Department spokesman, said that “a number of people believe” that Hamas did not want to release female hostages because of the stories they would tell about how they were treated. But he said he was “not able to speak with a definitive assessment that that is the case.”
This came two months after the Hamas insurrection and as far as I know that brutal attack lasted a day or two, catching the Israelis, always known for their intelligence sophistication and expertise, unprepared. A forty page report has emerged showing that an attack by Hamas was known a year before the attack happened, much as the 9-11 attacks in the US were known and reported by US intelligence services but ignored by President Bush. Was Bibi following the same script? Bush was hoping to have a war on Iraq. He got his excuse, even if it was based on knowing lies. Was this the Netanyahu’s chance to launch the final solution?
I have no way to know whether or not Biden’s allegations hold any truth. Perhaps, but we have heard lurid stories put out by the government of babies being beheaded for which there was no evidence. There is no way to conduct a rage-driven massacre of 1500 people in a gentle humane way, any more than there is a way to humanely bomb a crowded concentration camp holding more than two million people into oblivion.
Meanwhile, the people in northern Gaza were ordered to evacuate to the southern part within 48 hours so that their homes, schools, hospitals and mosques could be destroyed and then, after many arrived, the bombing and artillery attacks started in the south. A cease fire to exchange hostages was arranged for four days then the assault continued, despite Biden’s urging the Israelis to adhere to international law while getting on with their self-defense activities (i.e. slaughter of the Gazans). Saturday Night Live couldn’t make this stuff up. Well, they could, but it would never be aired.
The last time I checked, Biden’s approval rating was 27% and falling. Economists, even some intelligent-seeming ones, are amazed by this, since while inflation has been way up, it is easing and the stock market is making a nice recovery. Unemployment is down as more people are taking second jobs to help with rising costs. None of the experts even consider that the the levels of distrust and disgust with the government are harder to quantify in their charts. As an American who has spent very few of the past fifty years in my native country, it is hard for me to accept that the Americans I knew, who were were mostly decent people regardless of their political affiliation, have nearly all died or mutated into monsters supporting any means to world domination, even genocide if that’s what it takes, but if I look at our political representatives of both major parties, that’s more or less the way it appears. There are occasional signs of hope such as this letter by White House staffers protesting administration policy. May their numbers increase.
***
Thursday, November 2, 2023
Dream Scenarios
1. 1. Neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden
are candidates for President in 2024. As
I write, this does appear to be a dream, but it is one shared by the majority
of voters, 77% at last count, in the USA.
I’ve done a cartoon suggesting such an outcome. There are various ways
this could come to pass. One or two of
the dozens of indictments of Trump might stick and Biden’s on-going imitation
of Dr. Strangelove may tank his polling numbers so badly that nominally
Democratic oligarchs will feel the need to pull the plug. That would be the cue for Congressional
Democrats to jump ship in a desperate effort to save their jobs.
2. 2. Palestinians take control of
Libya. It is still too early to tell how
the genocide in Gaza will work out. It
has been going on for a long time but in early October the people in the world’s
largest concentration camp finally put together a major revolt. Was the huge Israeli intelligence failure a
sign of incompetence or were Bibi and company hoping for something bad enough
to be an excuse for ridding themselves of the Palestinians for good? Earlier
instances of Israeli military assaults on Gaza at three- or four-year intervals
were flippantly referred to as “mowing the lawn”. Sometimes even lawn care
specialists can get fed up and opt to nuke the whole yard with Roundup. It is apparent that Bibi and his Defense
Minister Yoev Gallant want the Gazans all dead.
They say as much, except when talking to Joe Biden or Antony Blinken,
who both repeat that the Israelis are only out to get the Hamas terrorists. It has been reported that 1500 Israelis were
killed in the rebellion. The number of Palestinians killed in retaliation is by
now three or four times that but given that the European role models for the
genocide used a ratio of ten to one in killing people deemed collaborators in
the killing of any Nazi soldier, we probably won’t see the slaughter slow down
until the Palestinian death toll reaches 15,000. There were 2,200,000 people living in Gaza. Withholding food, water, medicines and fuel,
as announced by the Minister of Defense, could kill all of them but there might
be some grim regional repercussions which are hard to predict. Suggestions come from both Israeli and
American sources that the Palestinians could be relocated elsewhere, usually
meaning somewhere in Egypt. The
Egyptians want no part of that. I have a
better idea. Since NATO bombed it into
the Stone Age in 2011, Libya has been a failed state, a haven for human traffickers,
slave traders and warring gangs. Palestinians are a clever bunch. If they can build in Gaza under severe
sanctions, they can thrive anywhere, so the UN could relocate those of them who
want to go to Libya. It may not be their
ancestral home but it does have a small population living over a sea of oil.
They could probably restore the country to a functioning state and after
generations of resisting Israeli attacks, they should have no trouble fighting
off the French and English coming to steal the oil.
3. 3. Donald Trump elected Speaker of the
House. This outcome may have already
been derailed by the election of little-known Louisiana congressman Mike Johnson
to the post after four or five previous candidates failed to garner the needed
votes. Will Johnson last? We shall see.
He is seditious enough to gather the full support of the GOP, but such
tendencies will assure a compact Democratic opposition when legislation needs
to be passed. The Speaker does not have to be a member of congress if I recall
correctly. Trump has a long history of
getting people to do things which are good for him while being against their own
interests. That’s practically the job description of a Speaker of the
House. His respect for law, as a
concept, may be even lower than that of Mitch McConnell, his respect for truth is
in the range of ex-Speaker Paul Ryan, and his personal depravity no worse than
that of another former speaker, Dennis Hastert. On a combination of the three
traits mentioned above, Trump’s performance would seem better than those of
Newt Gingrich. While Trump is despised
by a slim majority of Americans, and both feared and ridiculed by people all
over the world, his political instincts have been undervalued. He did, after all, perform two political
miracles. First, he managed to outdo Hillary Clinton in her obsequious
pandering to Israel, a feat unmatched in the annals of fairy tales. He followed
that by winning an unwinnable election against the same Hillary Clinton, former
first lady, Senator and Secretary of State, who had the support of legions of
women thrilled at the prospect of seeing a woman president. Trump could
probably control Republican congressmen enough to get them to vote to pass
legislation, no matter how repugnant, but in troubled times it might not be
worse than having no functioning legislature at all, relying on a corrupt and
senile President and a Supreme Court, still unencumbered by any Code of Ethical
Standards, to keep the wheels of government turning. There are some worrisome aspects
to a Speaker of the House Trump, beyond the mundane political considerations of
a radical GOP platform getting a boost. The Speaker of the House is third in
line to the Presidency so if both the president and the Vice President were to
die in office, the Speaker would become President. Only a few years ago Trump
boasted that he could shoot a person in the middle of Fifth Avenue in broad
daylight and his supporters would still support him. Biden already has other vulnerabilities,
and the Secret Service agents may have lost their fervor to protect him after
his dogs haven bitten eleven of them.
Kamala Harris would be well advised to stay away from Fifth Avenue for
the next twelve months. Trump’s felony
indictments may keep him off the ballot in enough states to prevent him from
being re-elected but he could have another path to the presidency.
Sweet dreams!