Glenn Greenwald discusses how the doctrine that the president is unconstrained by either the Constitution or the Congress is being advanced even more vigorously, that “the Obama administration is arrogating unto the President the unilateral, unrestrained right to start wars in all circumstances, whether or not the U.S. is attacked.” And Obama’s defenders are using the same arguments they criticized when Bush’s defenders used them when he similarly ignored the constitution.

Greenwald adds:

Then there’s the notion that Presidents in the past have started similar wars without Congressional approval. That’s certainly true, but so what? The fact that an act is commonplace isn’t a defense or justification. That “defense” was also a common refrain of Bush followers to justify their leader’s chronic unconstitutional acts and other forms of law-breaking: Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and FDR interned Japanese-Americans, so why are you upset that Bush is acting outside the law? The pervasiveness of this form of thought underscores the dangers of learned acquiescence: once a government engages long enough or pervasively enough in a certain form of criminality or corruption, the citizenry is trained to accept it and collectively ceases to resist it, even learns to embrace it. What Obama is doing in Libya is either lawful or it isn’t on its own terms; whether other Presidents in the past have acted similarly (and they have) is irrelevant.
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One’s views on the desirability of the Libya war have absolutely nothing to do with whether Obama has acted legally and/or whether his theories of presidential power are valid. This, too, should have been decisively settled during the Bush years, when Bush followers invariably argued that Bush was justified in eavesdropping without warrants or torturing because of the good outcomes it produced (Keeping Us Safe) — as though Presidents have the power to violate laws or transgress Constitutional limits provided they can prove that doing so produces good results. The one and only safeguard against tyranny is that political leaders are subjected to the constraints of the Constitution and law (we’re a nation of laws or a nation of men, said Adams: you must choose). To argue that you’re supportive of or indifferent to lawless acts because of the good results they produce is simply another way of yearning for a benevolent tyrant (and is another way of replicating the mindset of the Bush follower).

Ayn Rand is a current favorite among the oligarchy and its serf-like tea party followers since she saw successful people as achieving things entirely on their own with no help from others or society, opposed all taxes as stealing by the government, called for the elimination of all government redistributive efforts, and attacked as weak those who need governments and others to help them in times of need. She called them ‘looters’ and ‘moochers’. The Randians are at the forefront of cutting government programs that do not benefit the oligarchy.

But a recent report reveals that Rand herself was a hypocrite. When she became ill with lung cancer late in life, she applied for and obtained social security and Medicare benefits under a different name name. It should not be surprising that she was a hypocrite and sought out government help when she needed it. They are all like that. Look at the way Wall Street rushed to the government for assistance when the financial system tanked. They only oppose government helping those who are not part of the oligarchy.

I have read only one of Rand’s books, The Fountainhead. I am aware that her magnum opus is Atlas Shrugged and it forms the basis for the Galtian fantasies of the oligarchy, but The Fountainhead was such an awful book that I have little stomach to read any other work by her, especially since they are so long. It was not only the politics of the book that I found objectionable but mainly her writing style which consists of characters who have no depth and are merely types, existing mainly to take positions and make speeches that advance her philosophy. Subtlety is not her strong suit.

We are witnessing the inevitable mission creep in Libya.

The original stated goal was to create a no-fly zone supposedly to prevent the Libyan government using their air power to attack innocent civilians. That quickly changed into destroying the Libyan air forces even while they were on the ground. Then the US-led NATO air attacks started targeting those Libyan forces that were fighting rebel forces and threatening to push them back. Then the air attacks started hitting those Libyan forces that were away from the fighting, even those in their barracks.

Now the air attacks are supposedly targeting munitions stores. We are also told that CIA operatives have been in Libya for several weeks already meeting with rebel forces and that Obama has authorized covert support for Libyan rebels, which likely means including supplying arms. This escalation in involvement has happened remarkably rapidly.

So what is going on? Obama says that Gaddafi must go but that regime change is not part of the mission. Taken at face value, what we seem to be seeing is the US acting as the de facto air force of the Libyan rebels, and slowly increasing its contribution to the war effort to balance ay success by Gaddafi’s forces. In other words, the goal seems to be to create either a stalemate or marginally tilt the balance in favor of the rebels.

What is the point of this? After all, a protracted civil war causes immense pain for ordinary people and results in the destruction of a country’s infrastructure, causing long term hardships.

And what if Gaddafi stays in power and his forces can withstand the current NATO campaign? The US is far too deep into the conflict now to allow that to happen. So expect to see the next stage of ratcheting up, with bombings of supposedly military targets in cities as a sign to the Libyan people who still support him that his government is incapable of protecting them and thus pressuring them into rising up against him and join the rebel forces. Then we will begin to receive the inevitable reports of a hospital or a school or a mosque or marketplace being hit, resulting in civilian casualties, which will of course be regretted as unfortunate ‘collateral damage’.

So we will end up with civilians killed, the very thing that the US action was supposed to prevent. No doubt the dead and their families will be pleased that they were killed by a ‘humanitarian’ military force rather than by their own government.

And that will set the stage for the final step, sending in US troops or surrogates from other countries or mercenaries.

Russian Television tallies the real cost of America’s many wars.

The Daily Show points out that even paying no taxes at all is not enough for the oligarchy.

Stephen Colbert reports on the attacks on working people by state governments. The state governments want to roll back all the benefits and protections that labor unions have given us, and allow employers to have unfettered power over their employees. Collective bargaining has been the way that individuals who have no economic or political clout could gain some bargaining power.

Michael Moore on The Colbert Report points out that just 400 people in America have more wealth than 150 million. And that is still not enough for them. They want to have as much as 250 million and are aided in their greed by the federal and state governments that they have bought, and the dupes amongst the tea party crowd who have no idea that they are being used as fodder for the further enrichment of the oligarchy and will be tossed aside as soon as they have served their purpose.

The country has long been engaged in a one-sided class war that has been waged by the oligarchy on the rest of us. Now people are beginning to fight back as the nakedness of the greed and power grab becomes apparent.

Paul Krugman is a politically savvy man so it surprises me that even he thinks that the reason that the Republicans and the oligarchy are getting their own way so easily on fiscal issues is because Obama is a lousy negotiator.

As I have said over and over again, the Democrats negotiating strategy is to betray the middle and working classes that support them and give the oligarchy as much as they can while acting as if they were forced into it or were outmaneuvered. Since even people like Krugman and other liberal commentators seem to have bought it, it means that they have succeeded.

The Democrats behavior is perfectly understandable if you bear this simple rule in mind: When it comes to any policy that the Democrats say they espouse but which hurts the interests of the oligarchy, the Democrats do not want a strategy that will win, they seek one that will lose.

Glenn Greenwald has another excellent piece on how the US oligarchs, as represented by the Koch brothers, are so greedy as to be delusional, seeing themselves as the oppressed ones, fighting against a President Obama who in their eyes is a ‘dedicated egalitarian’ who has ‘internalized Marxist models’ and is ‘the most radical president we’ve ever had as a nation’ because he has had ‘antibusiness, anti-free enterprise influences affecting him almost all his life’.

Greenewald contrasts this with the reality:

Since Obama was inaugurated, the Dow Jones has increased more than 50% — from 8,000 to more than 12,000; the wealthiest recieved a massive tax cut; the top marginal tax rate was three times less than during the Eisenhower years and substantially lower than during the Reagan years; income and wealth inequality are so vast and rising that it is easily at Third World levels; meanwhile, “the share of U.S. taxes paid by corporations has fallen from 30 percent of federal revenue in the 1950s to 6.6 percent in 2009.” During this same time period, the unemployment rate has increased from 7.7% to 8.9%; millions of Americans have had their homes foreclosed; and the number of Americans living below the poverty line increased by many millions, the largest number since the statistic has been recorded. Can you smell Obama’s radical egalitarianism and Marxist anti-business hatred yet?

Then there are those whom Obama has empowered. His first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, is a business-revering corporatist who made close to $20 million in 3 short years as an investment banker, while his second, Bill Daley, served for years as JP Morgan’s Midwest Chairman. His Treasury Secretary is undoubtedly the most loyal and dedicated servant Wall Street has ever had in that position, while Goldman Sachs officials occupy so many key positions in his administration that a former IMF and Salomon Brothers executive condemned what he called “Goldman Sachs’s seeming lock on high-level U.S. Treasury jobs.” Obama’s former OMB Director recently left to take a multi-million-dollar position with Citigroup. From the start, Obama’s economic policies were shaped by the Wall Street-revering neo-liberal Rubinites who did so much to serve corporate America during the Clinton years. Meanwhile, the President’s choice to head his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness — General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt — heads a corporation that “despite $14.2 billion in worldwide profits – including more than $5 billion from U.S. operations – [] did not owe taxes in 2010”: an appointment the White House still defends.

Yes, these are definitely the actions of a doctrinaire egalitarian determined to destroy the capitalist system in the US and usher in a Marxist dictatorship.

This scene from the 1987 film Wall Street captures perfectly the attitude of the oligarchy towards the rest of us. It is their insatiable greed that will be their downfall.

The way that teachers and unions were attacked in Wisconsin and Ohio was really a covert attack on public schools in particular and the public sector in particular. The war against public schools is now becoming more overt:

Texas Congressman Ron Paul told the crowd government wants “absolute control” of the “indoctrination” of children. Paul spoke along with Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and Georgia businessman Herman Cain.

“The public school system now is a propaganda machine,” Paul said, prompting applause from the crowd of hundreds of home schooling families. “They start with our kids even in kindergarten, teaching them about family values, sexual education, gun rights, environmentalism – and they condition them to believe in so much which is totally un-American.”

Really? Children in public schools are indoctrinated to be anti-American?

Steve Benen points out other examples, including Rick Santorum:

And campaigning in New Hampshire, Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum, who’s homeschooled his seven kids, wasn’t subtle about his disdain for the American institution.

…Santorum took a swipe at public schools. “Just call them what they are. Public schools? That’s a nice way of putting it. These are government-run schools,” he said.

Santorum added that the Head Start program is a Democratic conspiracy to bring “more children out of the household” in order to brainwash and “socialize” them.

As Benen notes, “By most modern standards, these are the kind of remarks that would bring a presidential campaign to a humiliating end, but by today’s GOP standards, it’s just Tuesday.”

As I have repeatedly said, the oligarchy seeks to destroy any sense of collective obligation and responsibility and make the US a land of individuals grabbing as much for themselves as they can. We are truly living in crazy times.

Here is a news report on the demonstration that took place last Sunday at Quantico base in Virginia to support Bradley Manning that ended in some arrests.

The current war on Libya was sanctioned by United Nations Security Council resolution #1973 that was passed on March 17 and authorized “all necessary measures … to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.” It should be noted that the resolution expressly excludes “a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory” which means that another resolution will be required if bombing alone does not result in the removal of Gadhafi from power and they want to send troops in.

The resolution passed with ten votes in favor and five abstentions. It is noteworthy that apart from Germany, the other four abstentions consisted of Brazil, Russia, India, and China, countries that constitute the newly formed so-called BRIC bloc, that is emerging as an economic counterweight to the US and Europe.

Immediately after the vote both Russia and China issued very critical statements on the bombing campaign. Since either of them could have vetoed the resolution, it seems highly hypocritical for them to complain now since they had to have known what was coming. (Even if they had vetoed it, the US, Britain, and France would have found some other pretext for bombing, but that is not the point at issue here.)

So why didn’t China and Russia veto the UN resolution? I wonder if they want to lure the US and its NATO allies into these wars so that they will simply bleed themselves dry by one misbegotten military adventure after another. Russia, in particular, learned this painful lesson first hand when the US lured them into a long, costly, tragic, and ultimately losing war in Afghanistan. Maybe this is their revenge.

Stephen Walt discusses how the neoconservatives and liberal interventionists in the US, supposedly on the opposite ends of the political spectrum, are actually very similar when it comes to taking the country to war.

The only important intellectual difference between neoconservatives and liberal interventionists is that the former have disdain for international institutions (which they see as constraints on U.S. power), and the latter see them as a useful way to legitimate American dominance… So if you’re baffled by how Mr. “Change You Can Believe In” morphed into Mr. “More of the Same,” you shouldn’t really be surprised. George Bush left in disgrace and Barack Obama took his place, but he brought with him a group of foreign policy advisors whose basic world views were not that different from the people they were replacing.

Libya is another example of how we really have just one pro-war/pro-business oligarchy that rules the country.

Walt also wonders if whether China may not be the ultimate beneficiary of the Libyan war, saying “And who’s the big winner here? Back in Beijing, China’s leaders must be smiling as they watch Washington walk open-eyed into another potential quagmire.”

It might seem to a naïve or conspiracy minded observer that there is some plan being implemented, aided by the political leadership, to deliberately drive America into the ditch. Look at all the efforts currently underway to defund the government and thus destroy public services so that libraries cut back, regulatory agencies are made toothless, public schools are undermined, workers are impoverished, retirement funds are looted, national parks are destroyed by development, logging and mining, roads and bridges fall apart, police and fire protections and other social services are reduced or eliminated, all the while waging more and more wars on other countries that not only cost a lot but breed anger and resentment against the US.

Of course, such an explicit plan is unlikely and is unneeded. All these things are happening as a logical consequence of an oligarchy run amok that seeks only to advance its immediate short-term interests by cutting taxes on the wealthy and eliminating any form of government oversight and restraint and doesn’t give a damn about anything else. When coupled with outside forces that seek to draw the US into expensive overseas military adventures and overblown internal security measures (these are, after all, the stated goals of al Qaeda), we are well on the path to the implosion of a once powerful country.