Robert Gibbs speaks to the messaging approach of the White House
Aboard Air Force One en route to the New Hampshire town hall currently under way, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs conducted a quick press gaggle. At one point he fielded several questions about the Obama administration’s messaging on healthcare.
In my opinion, the problem with the administration’s messaging — and we’re seeing it right now in New Hampshire — is that it’s too problem-oriented. That is, they are strong on explaining the problems of the current healthcare system and complaining about the healthcare industry, but there’s less detail and simple explanation about how the reform actually works to solve or eliminate these problems.
In any case, here are relevant portions of that transcript, followed by a video from an interview Gibbs did earlier today on the ground in Washington:
Q: On what we’re going to get here in a little bit in New Hampshire, what are you expecting in terms of congressmen being burned in effigy, that kind of thing?
MR. GIBBS: Look, I’ve been to several hundred of these with Barack Obama. I doubt that I’ve ever been to one where everyone agreed with everything he said. I think he’s always believed and I think the New England tradition is that you have an exchange of ideas and hopefully all sides become better informed about the issues that are affecting them. I think that’s what the President has always looked at a town hall meeting to do. I don’t expect anything to be markedly different in that sense today.
Q: What about his message? Is it going to be different — is he tweaking it or –
MR. GIBBS: No, we’ll talk about what we’ve talked about for a while. We’ll talk about the importance of health insurance reform. The introducer today, which I think you guys have information on, is somebody who’s been denied coverage because of a preexisting condition. Twelve-and-a-half million Americans over the past three years have been denied coverage because of a preexisting condition. And I think most people recognize that it’s time for that to change. That kind of discrimination has to stop and it’s something the President will focus on in large measure today.
Q: Robert, is it safe to say that the level of opposition, especially conservative opposition that has hardened to the health care reform, that took the administration by surprise?
MR. GIBBS: Based on?
Q: Based on polls showing diminishing public support and also — among the conservative — the level of conservative animosity towards the reform. Has that taken the — did that take the administration by surprise? Is that –
MR. GIBBS: That conservatives oppose health care reform is about as surprising as the sun having come up today in the east.
Q: I mean the sort of virulence of it, the –
MR. GIBBS: Well, I don’t — just because somebody can yell at a health care town hall meeting I think is indicative only of one’s personal lung capacity.
Q: Is there any danger of diluting the message? There are so many different facets to this. You’re talking today, as you said, about preexisting conditions. Also you’ve talked about — the President has talked about health care in the context of economic reform. Going from sub-message to sub-message to sub-message, is there a danger that none of them are sticking?
MR. GIBBS: No, I — look, I think if you’re sitting at home, you’re concerned that your health care bill is going up because it’s gone up every year. It’s doubled in the past nine years. We’re in the midst of a tremendous economic downturn, which makes paying for the increasing cost of health care even harder. And if you lose your job or your employer has to cut your health care and you find yourself on a private market, as millions of people do every day, you might get discriminated against because somebody in an insurance company decides you have a preexisting condition.
I don’t think that’s confusing; I think that’s the way millions of Americans live every day. I think that’s what people are focused on in this debate. I don’t think that people are — no offense, but you guys cover a lot of process and you cover a lot of — you cover noise and heat and light, but I think what people in America want to know is how is this reform going to help them or how is it going to affect them. I think that’s what the President wants to do today, is discuss those particulars with the American people. I think that’s what they’re concerned about.
Q Can you have light without heat?
MR. GIBBS: Absolutely.
Q I guess my point being, as you said, people want to know how this is going to help them, but each time the President goes out that message is substantially different to some people, who listen sort of occasionally.
MR. GIBBS: I don’t think the message is — maybe I just — maybe I missed it. I don’t think the message is substantially different. I don’t — we’ve been talking about health care the same way for almost two-and-a-half years. We’ve been talking about the fact that it’s not just about increasing coverage, it’s cutting costs. It’s about making sure that insurance works for people. I don’t think we’ve changed messages at all.
…..
Q: Do you think the President is winning the message war? And if you feel like he is winning that war, how do you know?
MR. GIBBS: Look, I think we are continually trying to let people know what this means to them. There’s a lot of noise. I think about — take, for instance, the whole debate about supposed euthanasia. Did you see the interview that the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein did with Republican U.S. Senator Johnny Isakson? Look, this is somebody who helped to author on the Senate side a similar provision as is in the House side.
Is there a constant struggle because you guys would rather cover Sarah Palin saying something that Johnny Isakson says is nuts? Sure, there’s always a struggle in that. But for 40 years this has been tough going because there are a group of people — we hear them, we seem them now — that are for the same status quo; they’re for the special interests that are making billions and billions and trillions of dollars on a system that works well for them, but not for millions and millions of Americans — they want to keep that.
Our challenge each and every day is to go out and make sure people understand that doing nothing costs the American people more in health care — more in health care spending; it makes our budgetary problems worse; it causes people to lose their coverage and lose their doctor. And we can change all that.
In his television interivew with NBC’s Matt Lauer, Gibbs explained why the White House was sending the president out for a live town hall. Gibbs mentions many of the points he later reiterates on Air Force One. And he addressed the subject of the protesters.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Obama’s unprecedented war on whistleblowers
From Manning to Kiriakou, critics are aggressively targeted as the White House turns a blind eye to abuses
Former CIA officer John Kiriakou and Bradley Manning (Credit: AP)
On January 23rd, the Obama administration charged former CIA officer John Kiriakou under the Espionage Act for disclosing classified information to journalists about the waterboarding of al-Qaida suspects. His is just the latest prosecution in an unprecedented assault on government whistleblowers and leakers of every sort.
Kiriakou’s plight will clearly be but one more battle in a broader war to ensure that government actions and sunshine policies don’t go together. By now, there can be little doubt that government retaliation against whistleblowers is not an isolated event, nor even an agency-by-agency practice. The number of cases in play suggests an organized strategy to deprive Americans of knowledge of the more disreputable things that their government does. How it plays out in court and elsewhere will significantly affect our democracy.
Punish the Whistleblowers
The Obama administration has already charged more people — six — under the Espionage Act for alleged mishandling of classified information than all past presidencies combined. (Prior to Obama, there were only three such cases in American history.)
Kiriakou, in particular, is accused of giving information about the CIA’s torture programs to reporters two years ago. Like the other five whistleblowers, he has been charged under the draconian World War I-era Espionage Act.
That Act has a sordid history, having once been used against the government’s political opponents. Targets included labor leaders and radicals like Eugene V. Debs, Bill Haywood, Philip Randolph, Victor Berger, John Reed, Max Eastman and Emma Goldman. Debs, a union leader and socialist candidate for the presidency, was, in fact, sentenced to 10 years in jail for a speech attacking the Espionage Act itself. The Nixon administration infamously (and unsuccessfully) invoked the Act to bar the New York Times from continuing to publish the classified Pentagon Papers.
Yet, extreme as use of the Espionage Act against government insiders and whistleblowers may be, it’s only one part of the Obama administration’s attempt to sideline, if not always put away, those it wants to silence. Increasingly, federal agencies or departments intent on punishing a whistleblower are also resorting to extra-legal means. They are, for instance, manipulating personnel rules that cannot be easily challenged and do not require the production of evidence. And sometimes, they are moving beyond traditional notions of “punishment” and simply seeking to destroy the lives of those who dissent.
The well-reported case of Thomas Drake is an example. As an employee, Drake revealed to the press that the National Security Agency (NSA) spent $1.2 billion on a contract for a data collection program called Trailblazer when the work could have been done in-house for $3 million. The NSA’s response? Drake’s home was raided at gunpoint and the agency forced him out of his job.
“The government convinced themselves I was a bad guy, an enemy of the state, and went after me with everything they had seeking to destroy my life, my livelihood and my person — the politics of personal destruction, while also engaging in abject, cutthroat character assassination and complete fabrication and frame up,” Drake told Antiwar.com. “Marriages are strained, and spouses’ professional lives suffer as much as their personal lives. Too often, whistleblowers end up broken, blacklisted and bankrupted,” said the attorney who represents Drake.
In Kiriakou’s case, the CIA found an excuse to fire his wife, also employed by the Agency, while she was on maternity leave. Whistleblower Bradley Manning, accused of leaking Army and State Department documents to the website WikiLeaks, spent more than a year in the worst of punitive conditions in a U.S. Marine prison and was denied the chance even to appear in court to defend himself until almost two years after his arrest. Former chief military prosecutor at Guantanamo Morris Davis lost his career as a researcher at the Library of Congress for writing a critical op-ed for the Wall Street Journal and a letter to the editor at the Washington Post on double standards at the infamous prison, as did Robert MacClean for blowing the whistle on the Transportation Security Administration.
Four employees of the Air Force Mortuary in Dover, Delaware, attempted to address shortcomings at the facility, which handles the remains of all American service members who die overseas. Retaliation against them included firings, the placing of employees on indefinite administrative leave, and the imposition of five-day suspensions. The story repeats itself in the context of whistleblowers now suing the Food and Drug Administration for electronically spying on them when they tried to alert Congress about misconduct at the agency. We are waiting to see the Army’s reaction to whistleblower Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis, who documented publicly this week that senior leaders of the Department of Defense intentionally and consistently misled the American people and Congress on the conduct and progress of the Afghan War.
And this remains the most partial of lists, when it comes to recent examples of non-judicial government retaliation against whistleblowers.
Government bureaucrats know that this sort of slow-drip intimidation keeps people in line. It may, in the end, be less about disciplining a troublemaker than offering visible warning to other employees. They are meant to see what’s happening and say, “Not me, not my mortgage, not my family!” — and remain silent. Of course, creative, thoughtful people also see this and simply avoid government service.
In this way, such a system can become a self-fulfilling mechanism in which ever more of the “right kind” of people chose government service, while future “troublemakers” self-select out — a system in which the punishment of leakers becomes the pre-censorship of potential leakers. At the moment, in fact, the Obama administration might as well translate the famed aphorism “all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to remain silent” into Latin and carve it into the stone walls of the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, or NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, or the main office of the State Department at Foggy Bottom where I still fight to keep my job.
Silent State
I am told that, in its 223 years of existence, I am the only Foreign Service Officer ever to have written a critical book about the State Department while still employed there. “We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People“ exposed what State did not want people to know: that they had wasted enormous amounts of money in Iraq, mostly due to ignorance and a desire for short-term successes that could be trumpeted back home. For the crime of writing this book and maintaining a blog that occasionally embarrasses, State Department officials destroyed my career, even as they confirm my thesis, and their own failure, by reducing the Baghdad Embassy to half its size in the face of Iraq’s unraveling.
“The State Department was aware of Mr. Van Buren’s book long prior to its release,” explains attorney Jesslyn Radack, who now represents me. “Yet instead of addressing the ample evidence of fraud, waste and abuse in the book, State targeted the whistleblower. The State Department’s retaliatory actions are a transparent attempt to intimidate and silence an employee whose critique of fraudulent, wasteful and mismanaged U.S. reconstruction efforts in Iraq embarrassed the agency.”
Without allowing any rebuttal or defense, State suspended my security clearance, claiming my blogging was an example of “poor judgment,” transferred me from a substantive job into a meaningless telework position, threatened felony conviction over alleged disclosure of classified information, illegally banned me from entering the building where I supposedly work, and continues to try to harass and intimidate me.
My travel vouchers from as far back as the law allows have come under “routine” re-examination. My Internet activity is the subject of daily reports. My credit reports have been examined for who knows what. Department friends who email me on topical issues have been questioned by agents of Diplomatic Security, the State Department’s internal police. My Freedom of Information Act request for documents to help defend myself and force State to explain its actions has been buried.
Without a security clearance, and with my Diplomatic Passport impounded, I will never serve overseas again, the lifeblood of being a Foreign Service Officer (FSO). A career that typically would extend another 10 years will be cut short in retaliation for my attempt to tell the truth about how taxpayer money was squandered in Iraq.
All of this has taken place in such a way that I cannot challenge it (except by writing and speaking about it in public — at additional risk). The State Department has standard disciplinary procedures that it could have invoked against me, but those leave room for public challenges and, in some cases, would allow me to force documents into the open that State would rather not share with you.
Hall Walkers: Ghosts in the Machine
Before “telework” existed as an option that allowed undesirable employees to be sent home and into a kind of benign house arrest, people like me at State were called “hall walkers.” They were the ones whom the Department no longer wanted as employees, but who could not be fired due to lack of evidence. So they would have their security clearances suspended without recourse, be removed from their assignments, and yet told that, to get paid, they needed to be physically present in the main State building eight hours a day.
Since they were not assigned to an office, State was wholly unconcerned about how they occupied themselves during those long empty days. And though as a “teleworker” I am not one, the hall walkers are still with us.
The main State building is enormous, with literally miles and miles of corridors, and the hall walker might wander them, kill time at the library, have a long lunch, stop in to chat with former colleagues still willing to be seen in his or her company. Even in the first FSO training course called A-100, young diplomats are advised that the most ignominious end to a career is not failing at your job, but being thrown into the purgatory of hall walking — still on the payroll but no longer a member of the tribe. Disowned, shunned, exiled in the ancient Greek tradition.
Hall walking is a far cry from being dragged through a trial or spending two years in solitary, but it exists on the same continuum. No one at State will say how many employees still exist in the shadow world of hall walking, but at least dozens is a reasonable guess.
I am told as well that State Department officials are increasingly moving to suspend security clearances for acts wholly outside the realm of security, like blogging they find offensive. One State Department Human Resources employee confided to me that this has, in fact, become the go-to strategy for winnowing out unwanted employees in the too-hard-to-fire category, a sad evolution, given the sorry history of the State Department in the McCarthy era.
Fighting Back
For a government employee being punished extra-legally by an agency ignoring its own rules, there is still one recourse: the Office of the Special Counsel. Created in 1979, it was to be an ombudsman meant to keep an eye on governmental nastiness and ensure the implementation of the Whistleblower Protection Act. Empowered, among other things, to investigate and “make right” instances of federal retaliation against legitimate whistleblowers, the office was sidelined through several administrations.
Under George W. Bush, it was embroiled in scandal when its head, Special Counsel Scott Bloch, instead purged its staff of lawyers who disagreed with him and announced that he would not follow up on cases of discrimination based on sexual orientation. Last summer, Bloch pleaded guilty to deleting evidence from his computer while under investigation for retaliating against his own staff.
At a moment when government extra-legal retaliation against whistleblowers and leakers is on the rise, call it ironic, but the Office of the Special Counsel has seen a rebirth under its current head, Obama appointee Carolyn Lerner. As the Washington Post recently described her, Lerner has “gone to the mat and tried to expand the boundaries of the law’s protections for whistleblowers. She has lifted long-sagging morale at an agency that, instead of behaving as an independent watchdog, has treaded water for much of its existence.”
Specifically, Lerner reassignedstaff members to review a backlog of cases against whistleblowers facing reprisals, including “veterans’ hospital staff members reporting poor lab procedures [and] air traffic controllers claiming flight-pattern dangers.” She has enforced a 60-day limit on responses from federal agencies. The Office seems to have re-embraced its mission. “She’s a pit bull,” saysTom Devine, legal director of the Government Accountability Project, which defends whistleblowers.
There are other signs of resistance in Washington to the urge to cloak the government in silence. For example, Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) launchedan investigation into the Food and Drug Administration’s secret email monitoring of scientists warning that unsafe medical devices were being approved over their objections. Whistleblowers, said Grassley, often are treated “like skunks at a picnic.”
The Senator demanded that FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg disclose who authorized the monitoring, how many employees were targeted, and whether the agency obtained passwords to personal email accounts, allowing communications on private computers to be intercepted. He also wants to know whether the agency’s two-year surveillance campaign is still ongoing.
In another recent case, the Office of the Special Counsel formally asked the Air Force to take harsher disciplinary action against supervisors at the Dover mortuary who had tried to fire two whistleblowers who raised accusations about the mishandling of soldiers’ remains.
The Government Accountability Project has filed a complaint on my behalf with the Office of the Special Counsel demanding that the State Department cease its retaliatory personnel practices against me. The Department is particularly vulnerable, given its drumbeat of support for the rights of bloggers and other dissidents in the Middle East and China. State has already been forced to readmit me to the building and return my access badge. I remain an optimist, believing that my complaint will succeed and that, someday, I will return to work at a State Department where employees can talk openly about the bad as well as the good.
It Matters
Americans, who elect and pay for their government in Washington, deserve to know exactly what it does there — and elsewhere around the world — with their dollars. As in my case in Iraq, such information often is only available if some insider, shocked or disturbed by what he or she has seen, decides to speak out, either directly, in front of Congress, or through a journalist.
The Obama administration, which arrived in Washington promoting “sunshine” in government, turned out to be committed to silence and the censoring of less-than-positive news about its workings. While it has pursued no prosecutions against CIA torturers, senior leaders responsible for Abu Ghraib or other war crimes, or anyone connected with the illegal surveillance of American citizens, it has gone after whistleblowers and leakers with ever increasing fierceness, both in court and inside the halls of various government agencies.
There is a barely visible but still significant war raging between a government obsessed with secrecy and whistleblowers seeking to expose waste, fraud and wrongdoing. Right now, it is a largely one-sided struggle and the jobs of those of us who are experiencing retaliation are the least of what’s at stake.
Think of those victims of retaliatory personnel practices and imprisoned whistleblowers as the canaries in the deep mineshaft of federal Washington, clear evidence of a government that serves its people poorly and has no interest in being held accountable for that fact. This administration fears the noise of democracy, preferring the silence of compliance.
[Disclaimer: The views expressed here are solely those of the author in his private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense or any other entity of the U.S. government. The Department of State most certainly does not approve, endorse or authorize this article.]
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Obama’s winning hand on religion
Policies based on science and reason are the best way to protect free exercise of religious belief
A special deal for the churches? (Credit: AP/Charles Dharapak)
President Obama’s strategy of “reaching out to” or “appealing to” religious voters has proven to be ineffective electorally and counterproductive for policymaking. As much as Obama seems to understand the complexities of American religion, he listens too much to the voices of religious leaders who want the government to accommodate their edicts regardless of the impact on everyone else. The spoils go to the ones with access, to those who sit in the valued “seat at the table” in Washington.
After decisively issuing the contraception coverage rule last week, the administration took only a few news cycles, dominated by liberal Catholics like E.J. Dionne fretting about how Obama “botched” the issue, to dispatch surrogates to assuage the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
“There are conversations right now to arrange a meeting to talk with folks about how this policy can be nuanced,” pastor Joel Hunter, a conservative evangelical who is close to the president, told the Washington Post on Tuesday. “This is so fixable, and we just want to get into the conversation.” The bishops promptly signaled that they would reject the floated compromise out of hand.
Obama would do better to govern and to run for reelection as a frankly secular candidate: the president who will ensure that policy is made based on reason and science, not religion. And he should make clear that he comes to this position precisely because he cherishes the free exercise of religion (or not) of all Americans. While this might cause indignation among some of those with a seat at the Washington table and set off fainting spells on cable news, it would not cause Obama to lose critical swing constituencies such as white Catholics or moderate evangelicals.
Getting into the conversation hasn’t been a problem for conservative Catholics and evangelicals. Obama’s signature faith initiative — the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships — exists today largely in the form that these conservative religious leaders demanded. Back in 2008, candidate Obama nearly spelled the end of a carefully cultivated alliance with some religious leaders when he pledged in a speech to fix the constitutional inadequacies of George W. Bush’s Faith-Based Initiative. These livid religious leaders extracted a promise from the campaign: Don’t make a fuss about the speech now, and Obama will not make the changes he promised.
True to his word to the religionists, Obama has retained, among other things, a Bush-era rule, which permits faith-based organizations receiving federal aid to discriminate based on religion or religious belief in hiring employees. Because the rule remains in place, such taxpayer-funded, religious organizations can fire or refuse to hire applicants based on their religion, or even for being the sort of person their religion considers sinful, like a lesbian or a single mother.
Obama’s refusal to budge on this issue has infuriated advocates for church-state separation (many of whom represent religious organizations and/or are ordained clergy in the Coalition Against Religious Discrimination) for his entire White House tenure. But Obama knows that without the ability to discriminate in hiring, many of the biggest recipients of federal dollars (who euphemistically call this “co-religionist hiring”) will walk away from the faith-based project.
Good riddance, you might say, if they’re using your tax dollars to discriminate. But Obama the constitutional lawyer has been swallowed whole by the religionists on this issue.
Regardless of his stance on religion, the reaction from the fever swamps — the conspiracy theorists who insist he’s a Muslim or a secret agent of a special anti-American branch of Kenyan socialism, or Newt Gingrich, who claims he is a “secular socialist” — will not go away. Even after the supposedly respectable enclave of the National Prayer Breakfast, Obama was disparaged by conservatives for deigning to acknowledge the similarities between Christianity and other religions. He was abused for his suggestion that Jesus had ideas other than succeeding in business without really trying.
Never mind that Obama fondly recalled a visit with Billy Graham, or made note of which evangelical pastors he prayed with. There’s no winning the Christian exceptionalists. Mark Joseph, writing in the National Review, derided Obama for not realizing that the speaker who preceded him, Veggie Tales alumnus Eric Metaxas, would preemptively mock the president with his critique of “phony religiosity.” But for conservatives, Metaxas’ speech was even more damning than a dig at Obama’s supposedly less than rigorous Christianity.
“Metaxas’s most blistering attack,” Joseph wrote, “was his careful but dogged determination to link previous attitudes among churchgoers toward slavery and Nazism with those of some present day churchgoers toward abortion.”
The Obama administration — not unlike its predecessors of both parties — looks out with blinders at the religion landscape. The blinders extend no further than the religious groups with lobbyists (like the bishops) in Washington, who claim to represent their entire religion, even when, for example, 98 percent of Catholic women don’t seem to care that the bishops insist contraception is a sin. As a recent study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life showed, the money to lobby can buy you access to ensure your religious views — even if they contradict medicine, science or public health — shape policy. As Catholics for Choice has pointed out, though, Archbishop Timothy Dolan doesn’t represent all American Catholics, but rather the 271 American bishops.
I recently was talking with a friend, whose 84-year-old mother, a lifelong and devoted Catholic, recently stopped going to Mass. She was fed up, he said, with the “anti-Obama” lectures she heard at church. I would love to see Obama invite my friend’s mother — from a Midwestern swing state, by the way — to the White House for a meeting.
The religious outreach gurus will no doubt ask, How many people does she represent? Oh, I don’t know. Tens of millions?
Israel’s real target: Obama
Prime Minister Netanyahu's threats have more to do with challenging Washington than with actually attacking Iran
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Obama (Credit: AP)
After being elected in large part because he’d opposed a “dumb” war in Iraq, President Obama finds himself confronting an even dumber one in Iran. Exponentially dumber, actually.
Dumb because like the targeted assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists rarely cited by columnist commandoes, bombing raids alone can’t achieve the alleged goal: preventing the Ayatollahs from acquiring nuclear weapons.
Slow them down, probably. Stop them, no. Short of a full-scale invasion and occupation of a nation three times larger than neighboring Iraq in population and five times larger in land area, that can’t be done. Global disapproval didn’t stop North Korea, Pakistan or, for that matter, Israel.
Exponentially dumb because it could set the entire Middle East aflame.
You’d think the Israelis, of all people, would recognize that threatening a people with death and destruction hardens their resolve. Yet the New York Times reports that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “told visitors that he believes the Tehran government to be deeply unpopular, indeed despised, and that a careful attack on its nuclear facilities might even be welcomed by Iranian citizens.”
Yes, and Dick Cheney predicted that U.S. forces invading Iraq would be greeted with candy and flowers. “Most analysts [in Jerusalem] and abroad,” the Times noted cautiously, “take a different view.” Indeed, historical examples of civilian populations cheering on aerial bombardments are rare, if not nonexistent. Despite his and Cheney’s obvious affinities, one would expect Netanyahu to be made of saner stuff.
Assuming that the Israeli prime minister’s motives for threatening a unilateral Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear facilities are as reported. I suspect they are not. To put it bluntly, it’s not so much the regime in Tehran that Netanyahu is keen to destabilize as the one in Washington. The question now is how far he’s willing to take it.
Despite media chatter about “red lines” being crossed, it’s hard to point to anything the Iranians have done to provoke the current crisis. They’ve been trash-talking since 1979. Otherwise, no Iranian armies are massing. With its navy badly outgunned in the Persian Gulf, and a vestigial air force scarcely capable of defending against Israeli bombers, Iran sits surrounded by U.S. bases in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan — well, everywhere.
Iran’s last military action of any consequence was its catastrophic 1980s war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, during which it suffered more than a million dead. The Persians haven’t actually invaded anybody for more than 300 years. The Shiite regime’s expanded regional influence came about as an unintended consequence of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
For what it’s worth, the Ayatollahs deny any intention of attacking the “Zionist Entity”— despite frequently wishing that it would vanish from the earth. Even Iranian clients Hezbollah and Hamas have been mostly quiet. With Iran’s economy faltering under economic sanctions engineered by the Obama administration, and much of its population seething with resentment amid an acrimonious feud between President Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Khameni, the Tehran regime’s got all it can do to survive, much less to start a suicidal conflict with Israel — not to mention the United States.
But when articles invoking the Holocaust and urging “creative destruction” in Iran appear on the same day (Feb. 7) in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek and Bloomberg News, a skeptical observer might be forgiven for suspecting a well-coordinated propaganda campaign.
Writing in Beirut-based Al-Akhbar, American journalist Max Blumenthal dates its inception to a Jan. 3 article in Israel Hayom revealing that Israel’s National Security Council — basically Netanyahu’s closest political allies — had concluded that “U.S. President Barack Obama is ‘naive’” and fails to understand Israel’s precarious position. Deemed a Likud Party organ, the newspaper is owned by multibillionaire Las Vegas casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson, who bankrolls Netanyahu and serves as Newt Gingrich’s Sugar Daddy too.
Netanyahu appears to see an Obama second term as an impediment to further Israeli expansion into the West Bank — or “Judea” and “Samaria,” as Likudniks style it — and has cast his lot with the Republican right. He’s made public appearances with notables like Glenn Beck and “End Times” evangelist John Hagee. Adelson himself has pledged his vast resources to Obama’s defeat.
In his State of the Union speech, President Obama reiterated his determination to prevent Iran’s getting nuclear weapons. He said he was “taking no options off the table.” But he also expressed hope that international sanctions could lead to a peaceful resolution.
On cue, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen called this “startlingly naïve.” Only a fool or a Frenchman, the same pundit once opined, could doubt the existence of Saddam Hussein’s WMD. Bombs away!
President Obama also reportedly dispatched Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey to Israel to warn Netanyahu that if he tries to force the United States’ hand, he’s on his own.
But can he make it stick?
For his sake and everybody else’s, he’d better.
Obama’s high-tech labor lies
We have no shortage of skilled engineers. Corporations would just rather import foreign ones on lower wages
(Credit: AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
A few days after the New York Times’ (embarrassingly belated and deeply flawed) article on Apple’s Chinese production facilities reignited a national discussion about offshore outsourcing, President Obama was confronted during a Google+ “hang out” about why during a brutal unemployment crisis his administration continues to support expanding the H-1B visa program that allows tech companies to annually import thousands of low-wage engineers from abroad. In his stunning answer, the president first expresses bewilderment that any American high-tech engineer could be out of work, because he says that “what industry tells me is that they don’t have enough (domestic) highly skilled engineers” and that “the word that we’re getting is that somebody (a domestic engineer) in a high-tech field should be able to find something right away.” He then goes on to insist that the H-1B program is “reserved only for those companies who say they cannot find somebody in (a) particular field” and that it shouldn’t apply to industries where “there are a lot of highly skilled American workers” looking for a job because he says his administration is focused on “encourag(ing) more American engineers to be placed” in open positions.
For a single news cycle, the interchange made headlines focused on the president’s subsequent request that the questioner send her husband’s resume to the White House. But as heartwarming as that human interest angle was, it buried the real news in the interchange: namely, that Obama showed himself to be either wholly ignorant of the reality facing high-tech workers today, or simply willing to echo the self-serving lies of his high-tech CEO friends. Whichever it is, the president’s claims are clearly at odds with the basic facts of the high-tech labor market.
Though the unemployment rate for the high-tech industry is certainly lower than the overall unemployment rate, the sector is far from the full-employment status that tech CEOs claim. No matter what the industry is “telling” Obama, there remain thousands of highly skilled engineers in America who are either underemployed thanks to tech companies use of the controversial “permatemp” status, or completely out of work. That’s because, as I noted last week, despite the political rhetoric to the contrary, our universities are producing far more Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) workers than allegedly worker-starved tech companies are willing to employ. Indeed, a generation of jobless engineers exists not because, as tech CEOs insist, they don’t possess the skills to fill open jobs, but because those tech CEOs aren’t looking for domestic workers. On the contrary, they are looking for foreign workers who will simply accept lower wages and fewer workplace rights than Americans.
That brings us to the president’s comments about the H-1B program — an instrument so antithetical to the interests of American workers that India’s Commerce Minister officially christened if the “outsourcing visa” in 2007. As Rochester Institute of Technology professor Ron Hira has expertly documented in congressional testimony and detailed reports, this visa both allows American high-tech companies to replace their domestic workers with cheaper foreign workers, and also allows foreign outsourcing firms to move huge swaths of America’s existing high-tech industry offshore for the long haul.
In the first scenario, which I reported extensively on in my 2008 book “The Uprising,” a high-tech company will simply terminate an existing American worker — typically, a more senior worker whose longtime service at the company has resulted in higher wages. Then, the company will use an H-1B visa to import a foreign replacement for that worker — one who accepts far lower wages and benefits, both because the wages in their home country are lower that what they are being offered on the H-1B temporary visa, and because their H-1B visa status is wholly controlled by the employer. That means that most foreign H-1B workers wouldn’t dare ask for the same wages as their American counterparts because it would mean asking for equality from an employer who has the unilateral power to deport them.
The effects of this particular use of the H-1B visa are not surprising. As the Government Accountability Office noted, many high-tech “employers said that they hired H-1B workers in part because these workers would often accept lower salaries than similarly qualified U.S. workers.” That is borne out by wage statistics from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency, which the New York Times reports found that “the median salary for new H-1B holders in the information technology industry is actually about $50,000″ as compared to much higher wages for similarly skilled domestic workers. And in case you believe President Obama’s mind-boggling assertion that H-1B visas are “reserved only for those companies who say they cannot find somebody in (a) particular field,” remember that his own Department of Labor admits the opposite is true: The visa may be used and “H-1B workers may be hired even when a qualified U.S. worker wants the job, and a U.S. worker can be displaced from the job in favor of the foreign worker.”
As Hira reported in a study for the Economic Policy Institute, this straightforward use of the H-1B visa has easy to understand effects at some of America’s biggest tech firms:
In early 2009, Microsoft announced it would lay off 5,000 workers. After meeting that target by late 2009 it announced another round of 800 layoffs. Yet it continued to import H-1B workers, ranking fifth in FY08 and moving up to second in FY09 on the top H-1B employers list. It received 2,355 H-1Bs in those two years alone. Microsoft also extensively contracts with leading offshore outsourcing firms like Infosys and Satyam, which provide on-site personnel on guest worker visas. In addition, it recently signed a major three-year contract with Infosys to “handle all the technology services and support for Microsoft itself.” Given Infosys’ statements in its SEC filings, the vast majority of the workers servicing the Microsoft contract will almost surely be guest workers on H-1B and L-1 visas…
Hewlett-Packard announced layoffs of nearly 25,000 employees after its acquisition of EDS in 2008, yet H-P and EDS, and its offshore outsourcing subsidiary MPhasis, received 1,047 H-1Bs and L-1s in 2008 and 2009. Not all of those 25,000 jobs would be lost — approximately half of them were going to be offshored to workers in low-cost countries.
Of course, one of the most compelling arguments forwarded by proponents of the current H-1B program is that even though existing American employees are being put out of work by H-1B visa holders, at least these new arrivals to the United States might stay here, thus permanently adding their valuable high-tech skills to the overall American workforce. While that may be true for some of the H-1Bs who work directly for American firms, note the section in the above passage about foreign companies such as Infosys and Satyam, because it highlights that second, even more insidious way the H-1B program today operates — specifically, the way it works with non-American “consulting” firms.
Recall that such consulting firms whole business is helping American high-tech firms permanently move various IT services and operations overseas — not because workers in those countries are better skilled or educated, but because they will accept far lower wages and workplace standards. In this, we’re not talking about Microsoft or HP hiring a few lower-wage fill-ins — we’re talking about Microsoft or HP hiring an entire foreign firm like Infosys or Satyam to help them subcontract huge parts of their existing American business to foreign locales where wages are way lower, workplace regulations are lax, and unions do not exist. Once such contracts are in hand, these foreign subcontractors acquire thousands of H-1B visas from the U.S. government and dole them out to their own employees working on a contract basis inside major American high-tech firms inside the United States. Those employees are charged with helping those American firms permanently shift so-called “back office” services to low-wage locales like India. As the New York Times explained:
(Indian outsourcing consutancy firms) have used (the H-1B visa) to further their primary mission, which is to gain the expertise necessary to take on critical tasks performed by Western companies, and perform them in India at a fraction of the cost. Thousands of H-1B visas every year are being won by individuals acting as outsourcing ambassadors. Highly skilled and easily meeting the objective standards for excellence that the law requires, the employees interact with U.S. companies like Morgan Stanley and Boeing, gathering an outsourcing mandate and lubricating the flow of tasks to an Indian back office…
According to data compiled by ComputerWorld, this manipulation of the H-1B program is now one of the biggest ways the visa is used. As the trade magazine reported just three days before President Obama’s public defense of the H-1B program, foreign “offshore outsourcing companies” — read: companies that subcontract huge swaths of domestic work to low-wage locales offshore — now “make up the majority of the top 10 H-1B visa users in 2011.” This is why in a separate story, the Times went on to report that relatively few H-1B employees from offshore outsourcing firms seek permanent green cards. Far from the H-1B being used in the way its proponents assert — as a method of attracting new, high-skilled workers to become permanent residents and thus improving America’s overall high-tech workforce — the H-1B is now being used as a means of shipping America’s entire high-tech industry offshore.
To be sure, it’s impossible to know if President Obama is simply ignorant of these facts, or merely doesn’t want to acknowledge them, for fear of alienating his campaign donors in the high-tech industry. But don’t discount the power of those donors to turn an incumbent president into their own public advocate — especially during an election season when that incumbent president has a well-known history of relying on high-tech donors to underwrite his election campaigns. Obviously, those donors have a vested financial interest in answering Obama’s fundraising call if — and when — that president seems determined to preserve the status quo and oppose any proposed pro-worker reforms of a program like the H-1B visa. After all, no matter if they are replacing domestic American workers with imported H-1B workers, or using the H-1B program to shift huge parts of their businesses offshore, those high-tech executives have a very lucrative scam going, and clearly, they don’t care if American workers are the ultimate victims.
Whether the president cares remains an open question — but based on his comments about the H-1B program last week, his ultimate answer doesn’t look promising.
David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com. More David Sirota
Catholics need to preach what we practice
When 98 percent of Catholics use birth control, why is Obama in hot water for making sure insurance covers it?
President Obama bows his head in prayer prior to speaking at the University of Notre Dame during commencement ceremonies in 2009. (Credit: AP)
I first learned that Catholics don’t always practice what the church preaches about contraception when I was pretty young, no more than 12. My stay-at-home mom did the laundry, and it was my job to help her fold the clothes and put them in everyone’s drawers when I got home from school. One day putting my father’s socks away, I found a box of condoms at the back of his sock drawer. After a few awkward attempts at conversation, my devout Catholic parents came clean: They had only three kids, and almost all of our relatives had comparably small families, because most Catholics planned their families, too.
No one expected women’s lives to be an unbroken series of pregnancies and births anymore. It was better for women that way – but also for children. (Not to mention for husbands, who no longer had to confine sex to the times of the month when women weren’t ovulating if they wanted sexual pleasure without a special bonus nine months later.) The church was a wonderful institution, my parents said, but it was very old, and it sometimes took a while to catch up with the times. Kind of like the way Grandma still said “icebox” for “refrigerator.”
That was at least 40 years ago. Far from catching up with the times, the leadership of the Catholic Church is trying to drag the rest of us backward.
I was disappointed to see the progressive Catholic E.J. Dionne, whom I really admire, accuse President Obama of throwing his Catholic allies “under the bus” by insisting that federal health insurance regulations requiring contraceptive coverage apply to Catholic institutions, if they employ non-Catholics. Note that the administration is OK with church-run institutions that only employ Catholics prohibiting contraception coverage. It simply won’t let the church impose its teachings on non-Catholics. This shouldn’t be a controversial decision.
Let’s make a couple of things clear here. Obviously, the law won’t force Catholics to use contraception. And 98 percent of Catholics already practice birth control (and not the “natural family planning” kind), according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute. It’s not as though Catholics are an endangered minority of true believers being forced to transgress a fervently held and widely practiced church rule. This battle is over a Catholic Church teaching that even Catholics ignore almost unanimously.
The administration’s requirement comes from the Institute of Medicine within the National Academy of Sciences, which considers contraception access part of a total healthcare plan that brings down maternal and infant mortality rates. The government sets minimal basic standards for the benefits and safety conditions employers must provide to employees. What if Catholic hospitals and universities and public agencies objected to occupational safety rules for doctrinal reasons? Child labor laws? Would people argue they should be exempt from those regulations? Of course not.
Now Catholic bishops are urging priests and parishes to rise up against the Obama administration’s alleged violation of religious freedom. It’s bad enough that men with no credibility on the issue of sexuality get to tell their fellow Catholics what to do. They do not get to tell the American president what to do.
Paradoxically, Dionne chides Obama for his contraception decision given the great lengths the president went to in order to make sure that his healthcare reform legislation wouldn’t fund insurance that covered abortion in 2010. But as Dionne himself notes, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops continued to dissemble anyway and insist the bill still provided abortion funding, despite a very public compromise by the president that angered many pro-choice Democrats. As the president has learned the hard way on many fronts, the politics of placating extremists only leads to more extremism. Obama was absolutely correct to draw a line in the sand here.
I think it’s particularly important for Catholics – for all of us, actually — to take a stand on this, because of a related controversy in the news: The Susan G. Komen Foundation’s deplorable decision to cut the funds it gives Planned Parenthood to provide breast cancer screening. Foundation head Nancy Brinker worked for the Bush administration, and the organization’s pink-washing politics and business practices have come under fire before. But this latest decision is outrageously political, the result of an organized right-wing crusade against Planned Parenthood over the fact that a legally separate wing of the organization provides abortion services.
Of course, only 3 percent of Planned Parenthood’s activities have anything to do with abortion. In many communities, the agency is the sole health provider for poor and/or uninsured women, offering screening for breast and cervical cancer along with basic female health services. In the past five years, Planned Parenthood has provided 4 million breast exams and referrals for 70,000 mammograms. The Komen funds paid for 170,000 breast exams and 6,400 mammogram referrals over five years. Since this post started out personal, I should also note that in my Brooklyn-Long Island-Albany based family, my mother, my grandmother, three aunts and four cousins have been diagnosed with breast cancer; my mother and two of my cousins died, all between 45 and 52.
Unfortunately, Komen’s relatively new vice president for policy, Karen Handel, is a right-wing Republican endorsed by Sarah Palin (cover your ears before you click the video) in her unsuccessful bid to become Georgia’s governor. Handel describes herself on Twitter as a “lifelong conservative Republican, formerly Georgia Secretary of State.” She made opposition to Planned Parenthood part of her failed gubernatorial platform, and Komen knew exactly what it was getting when it hired her. It’s tragic the organization decided to get involved in the culture wars, particularly on the wrong side.
Right-wingers like Handel have tried to convince Americans that Planned Parenthood is about nothing but abortion, but increasingly it’s obvious that the real goal is to criminalize birth control as well. I’d note the irony of people who oppose abortion working so hard to cut off funding for contraception, except to the doctrinaire Christian right and Catholic base, there’s no irony. Sex is intended for reproduction. Rick Santorum has called contraception “a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.” None of the rest of us want to live in a country where such a narrow worldview is enforced. So let’s remember: Every time a prominent organization or politician compromises on these issues, it doesn’t mollify the forces of reaction, it emboldens them.
Planned Parenthood raised a stunning $400,000 in the day and a half after the Komen decision became public. You can donate here. It also got an additional $250,000 donation from the family foundation of Dallas philanthropist Lee Fikes and his wife, Amy. That is getting close to matching the almost $1 million Komen funds lost for this year, but they’re not there yet. Do what you can.
Catholics have a special responsibility to speak out and defend President Obama’s contraception decision. (And tell Komen to keep screening poor women for breast cancer, while you’re at it.) We need to preach what we practice: Catholics like sex as much as the rest of y’all, and 98 percent of us plan our families. The president shouldn’t be punished politically for doing the right thing. He should be praised.
Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large. More Joan Walsh
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