Barry Grey

In the latest scandal involving the criminal activities of major banks, the US Justice Department on Tuesday announced a $1.9 billion settlement with British-based HSBC on charges of money laundering on a massive scale for Mexican and Colombian drug cartels.

The deal was specifically designed to avert criminal prosecution of either the bank, the largest in Europe and third largest in the world, or any of its top executives. Even though the bank admitted to laundering billions of dollars for drug lords, as well as violating US financial sanctions against Iran, Libya, Burma and Cuba, the Obama administration avoided an indictment by means of a “deferred prosecution agreement.”

The agreement was in keeping with the policy of the US government of shielding top bankers from any accountability for illegal activities that led to the collapse of the financial system in 2008 and ushered in the global recession. Not a single leading executive of a major bank has been prosecuted, led alone jailed, for fraudulent activities that triggered the present crisis, leading to the destruction of millions of jobs and the decimation of working-class living standards in the US and around the world.

Under the protection of the state, the frenzied speculation and swindling continue unabated, underpinning record profits for the banks and bigger-than-ever seven-figure compensation packages for top bankers.

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Barry Grey

Trade union leaders met Tuesday with President Barack Obama to give their support to his plans for massive cuts in social programs upon which tens of millions of workers depend.

The hour-long, closed-door meeting at the White House was the first act in a carefully orchestrated campaign to convince the public that unprecedented cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps and other welfare programs are the only alternative to economic disaster in the form of the so-called “fiscal cliff.”

The task assigned to the union chiefs is to counter broad popular opposition to the cuts by promoting the White House claim that it is pursuing a “balanced” approach to deficit-reduction, combining spending cuts with increased taxes on the rich.

Also on Tuesday, the post-election “lame-duck” Congress, which continues to sit until the newly elected Congress takes office January 1, reconvened. Previous deals between the White House and congressional Democrats and Republicans insured that the lame-duck session would be conducted in an atmosphere of crisis over hundreds of billions of dollars in tax hikes and automatic spending cuts slated to begin January 1.

No sooner was the election out of the way than the ruling class launched a mind-numbing, saturation media campaign over the need to enact a bipartisan deficit-reduction plan before the new-year. Both the Democrats, who control the White House and the Senate, and the Republicans, who control the House of Representatives, agree that such a plan must include sweeping cuts in social entitlements and a comprehensive “reform” of the tax system.

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Barry Grey

A Progressive Surge - The “rising American electorate”
carried Obama and a strong slate of Democrats to victory.
(According to "The Editors" at The Nation magazine)

The Nation’s promotion of such political filth is of a piece with its support for a right-wing government, a party and political system dominated by a financial oligarchy, and the criminal policies they carry out against working people both within the United States and internationally.

The response of the Nation magazine to the reelection of Barack Obama underscores the deeply reactionary role of the “left” liberals for whom the publication speaks, and the politically diseased character of their obsession with racial and identity politics.

The tone was set in the magazine’s postelection editorial, posted on its web site November 7, entitled “A Progressive Surge.” The editorial makes the preposterous argument that the narrow election victory for Obama, whose right-wing policies resulted in a net loss of more than 7 million votes from his total in 2008, represented a triumph of progressive forces over the forces of reaction.

Of an election in which popular disillusionment with the political system and both major parties resulted in a net drop of nearly 10 million votes for president, with voter turnout declining in every state, the editors write: “This right-wing coalition was defeated at the polls by a ‘rising American electorate,’ a coalition of women, African-Americans, Latinos, the young and unionized blue-collar workers in Midwestern battleground states.”

The article gushes over the victory of “several stalwart progressives” in Senate races, including Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, and Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, “who will become the first gay or lesbian to serve in the Senate, where she will join the ranks of a record number of women senators.” “The new Democratic majority in the Senate,” the editorial asserts, is “decidedly more progressive than the one it will replace.”

The editors are, inconveniently, obliged to note that the “progressive” president and his party are about to enact “devastating cuts to social programs” and are proposing a “grand bargain” on the deficit that “will end up dealing out the most pain to the people Romney disparaged as the ‘47 percent.’”

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Barry Grey

Within American ruling circles, it is well known that plans for war against Iran are far advanced, but there is a conspiracy of silence by both political parties and the media to keep this reality out of the presidential election. The intent is to drag the American people into yet another bloody war in the Middle East on the basis of false pretexts and lies, despite broad popular opposition to an attack on Iran.

Nothing reveals the anti-democratic and fraudulent character of the elections more clearly than the refusal to explain to the American people the military carnage that is being prepared in their name and allow them to express their democratic will.

Over the past week, a number of commentaries in the American and European press have warned of an attack by either Israel or the US, or both, against Iran in the near future, and a bipartisan group of former foreign policy officials, retired generals and former legislators has issued a report outlining the potentially catastrophic consequences of an unprovoked attack on the Persian Gulf country.

Some of the recent articles have the character of a pre-emptive political strike by ruling class figures wary of a war against Iran, while others suggest that such a war is necessary and inevitable. The confluence of such commentaries is itself an indication that detailed planning for war is underway.

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Barry Grey

The role of the government in shielding the financial mafia shatters all claims that the financial system can be reformed.

On August 9, the US Justice Department announced it was ending a criminal investigation into allegations that Goldman Sachs committed securities fraud in its underwriting and marketing of mortgage-backed securities in the months leading up to the Wall Street crash of September 2008. The department said it would not file charges against the bank or any of its employees.

As a special favor to Goldman, the Obama administration’s Justice Department took the unusual step of making a public announcement that it had cleared the bank of wrongdoing.

The allegations stemmed from a detailed, 640-page report on the financial crisis issued in April of 2011 by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The report, based on a two-year investigation and 56 million pages of evidence, documented rampant fraud and criminality by major banks and the complicity of credit rating firms and federal bank regulators. In releasing the report, the chairman of the committee, Senator Carl Levin, said the panel’s two-year probe had uncovered “a snake pit rife with greed, conflicts of interest and wrongdoing.”

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Barry Grey

The US Supreme Court ruled Monday that prison authorities can routinely subject people detained even on minor misdemeanor charges to invasive strip searches, whether or not there is reason to believe they are dangerous or are concealing contraband.

From The State Torture of Hope Steffey by Schuyler Ebbets

The 5-4 decision, authored by the so-called “swing” member of the court, Justice Anthony Kennedy, and joined by the four-member right-wing bloc, is the latest in a series of reactionary rulings broadening the police powers of the state and trampling on the Bill of Rights.

The ruling makes a mockery of the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, which bars unreasonable searches and seizures. It is but the latest in a host of court rulings, particularly in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks and the launching of the so-called “war on terrorism,” that seek to accustom the American people to intrusive state violations of their privacy rights and the heavy-handed presence of the police in all aspects of life.

While the four-member liberal bloc on the court lined up behind the dissent written by Justice Stephen Breyer, the Obama administration sided with the prison authorities and the right wing on the court. It filed an amicus brief in support of blanket strip searches of newly detained individuals and against the case brought by plaintiff Albert Florence, a New Jersey car dealership finance director who was wrongfully arrested in 2005 on a misdemeanor charge and subjected to two strip searches in six days before he able to see a judge and prove his innocence.

The administration’s intervention in this case to support police state-type measures is not an aberration. It has intervened repeatedly in the federal courts in defense of unconstitutional procedures, including “rendition” of alleged terrorists to be interrogated and tortured in foreign countries and warrantless domestic spying. Over the past several months, Obama has signed a law authorizing the indefinite detention without trial of anyone targeted by the president as a “terrorist,” and his attorney general has defended the “right” of the president to order the assassination of any person, including a US citizen, anywhere in the world.

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Tom Eley & Barry Grey

Screen captures from “Collateral Murder”: Top left, Reuters reporters and other Iraqi civilians, talking. Top right, the group comes under fire from Apache gunship. Bottom left, men fleeing. Bottom right, men all dead. From now on this could happen anywhere. To anyone. Legally.

In a speech delivered Monday at Northwestern University Law School in Chicago, US Attorney General Eric Holder asserted the “right” of the president to secretly order the assassination of US citizens. Laying out a brief for virtually unchecked executive power to carry out military aggression abroad and repression at home, the speech was a sweeping attack on fundamental democratic and constitutional principles.

Holder’s remarks were cast within the framework of the so-called “war on terror.” In words intended to instill fear and panic, he declared early in his remarks that America had reached an “hour of danger.” He continued: “We are a nation at war… there are people currently plotting to murder Americans, who reside in distant countries as well as within our own borders.”

The attorney general’s remarks come five months after President Obama ordered the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen, in a drone attack in Yemen. Another US citizen, Samir Khan, was killed in the same attack. Two weeks later, Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, was killed in subsequent US drone strike.

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Joseph Kishore & Barry Grey
WSWS

Mother and daughter raped & murdered by Obama's ‘rebels’
in Misurata

Obama [has] proclaimed the right to launch military action against any country whenever US “interests and values” are at stake.

As the American military expands its campaign against civilian population centers, killing at least 19 people in a single incident on Monday, Senators John Kerry (Democrat of Massachusetts) and John McCain (Republican of Arizona) have introduced legislation that would retroactively authorize the Obama administration’s war.

More than 90 days into the war, the administration is now in open violation of the War Powers Act, which requires congressional authorization for military action within 60 days, and, failing that, the withdrawal of US forces within the next 30 days. Obama has flouted even this minimal requirement for oversight of executive war-making.

Amidst suggestions from some members of House of Representatives, primarily Republicans, that they might move to cut off funding for the war, Kerry and McCain are spearheading a drive to obtain a vote by the Democratic-controlled Senate sanctioning the military aggression. A vote is expected some time this week or next. According to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the Kerry-McCain resolution has broad support from Democrats as well as many Republicans.

The resolution provides a legal fig leaf for the bombing of Libya to continue for up to one year. Of particular significance is its language, which asserts the broadest possible basis for US military operations.

It expressly authorizes the use of the US armed forces “in support of United States national security policy interests” in Libya. The aim is to set a precedent for expanding the basis for US military interventions even beyond the preemptive war doctrine laid down by the administration of George W. Bush.

That doctrine repudiated the post-World War II framework of international law, which incorporated the principles affirmed in the Nuremburg trials of Nazi leaders, outlawing war as an instrument of policy and permitting it only when required for self-defense.

The Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, which formed the basis for the Nuremberg trials, expressly prohibits war as “an instrument of national policy” (and therefore also “national security policy interests”) except in matters of self-defense. This pact remains a binding treaty under international law, and therefore is incorporated in US law as well.

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Joachim Guilliard

Um Demokratie nach Libyen und Afrika zu bringen...

Seit dem 19. März bombardiert eine neue „Koalition der Willigen“ Tag für Tag libysche Städte und Armeeeinheiten. Alle Vermittlungsvorschläge werden ignoriert. Die Kriegsallianz werde ihre Luftschläge wohl noch viele Wochen fortsetzen, tönte es vom Außenministertreffen der NATO in Berlin. Das Bündnis müsse Libyen weiter angreifen, bis der Revolutionsführer Muammar al-Gaddafi verjagt sei, verkündeten am Tag darauf die drei Kriegsherren, US-Präsident Barack Obama, der britische Premier David Cameron und Frankreichs Staatschef Nicolas Sarkozy, in einem gemeinsamen Kriegsappell, den sie via Washington Post, Times und Le Figaro in die Welt schleuderten.

Der neue Krieg der NATO wird von einer großen Mehrheit der Staaten in der Welt abgelehnt. Die meisten glauben, dass er nicht zum Schutz der Zivilbevölkerung geführt werde, sondern für den unmittelbaren Zugriff auf die libyschen Öl- und Gasvorräte. Die gleichzeitige französische Intervention in der Elfenbeinküste und die forcierte Ausweitung der militärischen Präsenz der USA in Afrika deuten zudem auf Ziele hin, die darüber hinausgehen: die Sicherung und Ausweitung westlicher Dominanz auf dem gesamten afrikanischen Kontinent, um dessen Rohstoff-Ressourcen ein erbitter Wettkampf stattfindet.

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Barry Grey
WSWS

Migrants who successfully made the boat trip to the tiny island
of Lampedusa, Italy from the unrest in north Africa receive as-
sistance. Photograph: Francesco Malavolta/AP

The attempt to justify the imperialist war by casting it as a humanitarian intervention to protect Libyan civilians against the regime of Muammar Gaddafi exposed as fraud

The British Guardian newspaper published an investigative report Monday documenting the case of African refugees who were left to die in the early days of the war against Libya by NATO and European authorities who spotted their vessel drifting in the Mediterranean but made no effort to rescue them.

The newspaper, citing the account of survivors and an Eritrean priest in Rome who was one of the last people to communicate with the stranded boat, said the passengers were left to drift in open waters for 16 days, even though the Italian coastguard had been alerted and the vessel had been seen by a military helicopter and an aircraft carrier.

Only nine of the 72 people who boarded the boat in Tripoli on March 25 in a desperate attempt to reach the Italian island port of Lampedusa 180 miles northwest of the Libyan capital survived the ordeal. The others, including 20 women and two babies, died from thirst and starvation while on the boat or after beaching near Misrata on April 10.

The Guardian exposé coincided with an announcement Monday by the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR that a refugee boat with as many as 600 people on board sank Friday off the coast of Tripoli. There are no reports of survivors.

UNHCR spokeswoman Laura Boldrini said that, besides the disaster on Friday, at least three other boats with a combined total of several hundred passengers left Tripoli in late March and disappeared.

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