Theologians: U.S. campaign finance system is unjust

[HT: NPR]  Just in case any of my Judeo-Christian conservative friends actually care what their Judeo-Christian theologians think...

... They agree that America's pay-to-play political system with unlimited political contributions is unjust. Here's the report's conclusion [emphasis mine]:

How can religious teachings help us shape a more just role for money in the American political system? What kind of theological principles should be applied to the problem? The ten theologians introduced in this volume offer many compelling candidates: Heed the voice of the poorest Americans. Develop a theology of corporations. Remember that justice requires a multiplicity of voices and fair economic outcomes – not just fair procedures. 

With $6 billion running through our election cycles and many more dollars spent on lobbying, it is time for people of faith and moral commitment to get more involved in reforming the role of money in American politics. We are called to apply the teachings and wisdom of our religious traditions. We are called to raise our voices and offer constructive action for a more just political system.

I've said it before: if we could fix campaign finance, most of America's intractable political problems would take care of themselves, because the majority usually knows what's best -- the One Percent just doesn't let them get their way most times.

Lo$ing Faith In Our Democracy

June 2014

Auburn Theological Seminary

URL: http://www.auburnseminary.org/sites/default/files/faith-money-in-politics-report-original.pdf

The true life of a 'welfare queen'

My dear conservative friends love personal anecdotes over cold statistics -- which we lib'ruls just fake anyway.

So here's a real "welfare queen's" experience of what it takes to qualify for, and keep, welfare assistance [emphasis mine]:

The first step in the food-stamp application process was turning in every imaginable document regarding my identity, housing, assets and personal finances. I was photographed and fingerprinted, which made me feel like everyone thought I was a criminal. After winding my way through the byzantine bureaucracy, including several hours-long appointments during which I obviously couldn't be looking for work, I was finally approved; the monthly allotment worked out to about $5 per day.

To keep receiving food stamp benefits, I had to spend every "work day" at a Human Resources Administration work-search office – my presence there was mandatory from Monday through Friday and from 9am to 5pm. The office was more than an hour from my apartment (that is, when public transportation – which I had to pay for myself – was functioning properly), but arriving even five minutes late earned a strike against my record for "non-compliance".

Two strikes, and I would have been out: the US system automatically revokes all benefits for rule-breakers, who then have to start the application process all over again. It's not a pleasant thing to discover when you're attempting to pay for groceries and your EBT card suddenly no longer works. The only excusable absences are job interviews – which required asking the interviewer for a mortifying letter of verification – or for illness with a doctor's note.

I asked about what would happen if I'd had a cold but couldn't afford to go to a doctor just for a note about it. My caseworker shrugged and said I'd have to go to the ER.

As I've told my conservative friends, and Gray emphasizes, "No one wants to be on welfare":

No one wants to worry about being judged as "wasteful" by pundits and policymakers and the people behind you in line for using your Electronic Benefits Transfer card at the grocery store to buy your prepackaged food, because you're too exhausted from 12 hours on your feet at a retail job and you don't have the time or the energy to cook.

No one wants to fear buying cake mix for a child's birthday celebration, only to receive scornful glares from other shoppers because they aren't buying rice and beans.

No one wants to explain for the fiftieth time that, Yes, my EBT card only works at grocery stores, and only for food – and, no, it can't be used for paper towels or beer.

Welfare-to-work, even if well-intended, has become overly bureaucratic and outdated:

The reality of meeting workfare requirements, however, is different from the idealized bargain of "will work for food". The bureaucracy today is mind-numbingly difficult to navigate and ultimately serves to block welfare recipients from access to better jobs and educational opportunities. [...]

Annie Hollis, a Baltimore-based social worker who has worked in urban settings for over 10 years, explained why the Clinton-era reforms were flawed and discriminatory from the start. "The problem with workfare is that in the wake of globalization, most of the jobs available to people without postsecondary education are increasingly part-time and minimum wage," she told me.

Policy hasn't caught up to that reality because recipients are only permitted to receive vocational training for a maximum of 12 months. Based on my personal experience working with single mothers leaving domestic violence situations, most jobs that pay a living wage require much more than one year of post-secondary education.

If federal workfare requirements weren't already stringent enough, states such as Florida, Georgia and Maine have pushed to expand the hoops that applicants must jump through to avoid sanctions – including eliminating waivers for job training absences due to illness to forcing recipients to pay for their own unconstitutional drug testing. 

I got my Master's, couldn't find a job and lived on food stamps. Now stop calling me a 'welfare queen'

By Stefanie Gray

June 15, 2014 | Guardian

URL: http://gu.com/p/3q2kk

Bergen: Iraq is Dubya's legacy, not Obama's

It's not just "blaming Bush" in order to let Obama off the hook; it's acknowledging the reality that U.S. actions have consequences -- and sometimes those consequences are irreversible.

Having learned nothing, neoconservatives like McCain are saying the U.S. should send troops back into Iraq.  "We had it won in Iraq," McCain just told MSNBC. Had it won! 

Not only is Iran actively involved in Iraq, as before, but now al Qaeda in Syria. Yet McCain says a U.S. residual force would not be under any threat -- "ground combat troops would not be on the ground"!  So what the heck would U.S. troops do there to make a difference?!

McCain's answer, basically, is to do regime change yet again -- "[Maliki] has to be changed; it is an unacceptable situation" -- and bring back the Iraq surge "brain trust" (including old neocons like Robert and Frederick Kagan) to think up a genius solution.  That is, one of our most experienced Senators in foreign policy and military strategy has nothing to suggest except "rinse and repeat" in Iraq, minus the ground troops for which McCain's beloved "surge" were the hallmark.

Pardon my French, but this is a brainless and dickless stance that can never be enacted; it's meant only to make Obama look bad. But kudos, I guess, to Sen. McCain for giving us even this many specifics, since most Republicans won't.

Bush's toxic legacy in Iraq

By Peter Bergen

June 13, 2014 | CNN

ISIS, the brutal insurgent/terrorist group formerly known as al Qaeda in Iraq, has seized much of western and northern Iraq and even threatens towns not far from Baghdad.

From where did ISIS spring? One of George W. Bush's most toxic legacies is the introduction of al Qaeda into Iraq, which is the ISIS mother ship.

If this wasn't so tragic it would be supremely ironic, because before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, top Bush officials were insisting that there was an al Qaeda-Iraq axis of evil. Their claims that Saddam Hussein's men were training members of al Qaeda how to make weapons of mass destruction seemed to be one of the most compelling rationales for the impending war.

After the fall of Hussein's regime, no documents were unearthed in Iraq proving the Hussein-al Qaeda axis despite the fact that, like other totalitarian regimes, Hussein's government kept massive and meticulous records.

The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency had by 2006 translated 34 million pages of documents from Hussein's Iraq and found there was nothing to substantiate a "partnership" between Hussein and al Qaeda.

Two years later the Pentagon's own internal think tank, the Institute for Defense Analyses, concluded after examining 600,000 Hussein-era documents and several thousand hours of his regime's audio- and videotapes that there was no "smoking gun (i.e. direct connection between Hussein's Iraq and al Qaeda.)"

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded in 2008, as every other investigation had before, that there was no "cooperative relationship" between Hussein and al Qaeda. The committee also found that "most of the contacts cited between Iraq and al Qaeda before the war by the intelligence community and policy makers have been determined not to have occurred."

Instead of interrupting a budding relationship between Hussein and al Qaeda, the Iraq War precipitated the arrival of al Qaeda into Iraq. Although the Bush administration tended to gloss over the fact, al Qaeda only formally established itself in Iraq a year and a half after the U.S. invasion.

On October 17, 2004, its brutal leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi issued an online statement pledging allegiance to Osama bin Laden. Zarqawi's pledge was fulsome: "By God, O sheikh of the Mujahideen, if you bid us plunge into the ocean, we would follow you. If you ordered it so, we would obey."

Zarqawi's special demonic genius was to launch Iraq down the road to civil war. In early 2004, the U.S. military intercepted a letter from Zarqawi to bin Laden in which he proposed provoking a civil war between Sunnis and Shia.

Zarqawi's strategy was to hit the Shia so they would in turn strike the Sunnis, so precipitating a vicious circle of violence in which al Qaeda would be cast as the protector of the Sunnis against the wrath of the Shia. It was a strategy that worked all too well, provoking first sectarian conflict in Iraq and later civil war.

Al Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI, regularly attacked Shia religious processions, shrines and clerics. The tipping point in the slide toward full-blown civil war was al Qaeda's February 2006 attack on the Golden Mosque in Samarra, which is arguably the most important Shia shrine in the world.

Three years into the Iraq War, AQI seemed all but unstoppable. A classified Marine intelligence assessment dated August 17, 2006, found that AQI had become the de facto government of the western Iraqi province of Anbar, which is strategically important because it borders Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia and makes up about a third of the landmass of Iraq.

In addition, AQI controlled a good chunk of the exurban belts around Baghdad, the "Triangle of Death" to the south of the capital and many of the towns north of it, up the Tigris River to the Syrian border.

Thus AQI controlled territory larger than New England and maintained an iron grip on much of the Sunni population.

In other words, the Bush administration had presided over the rise of precisely what it had said was one of the key goals of the Iraq War to destroy: a safe haven for al Qaeda in the heart of the Arab world.

By 2007, al Qaeda's untrammeled violence and imposition of Taliban ideology on the Sunni population provoked a countrywide Sunni backlash against AQI that took the form of Sunni "Awakening" militias. Many of those militias were put on Uncle Sam's payroll in a program known as the "Sons of Iraq".

The combination of the Sunni militias' on-the-ground intelligence about their onetime AQI allies and American firepower proved devastating to al Qaeda's Iraqi franchise. And so, between 2006 and 2008, AQI shrank from an insurgent organization that controlled territory larger than the size of New England to a rump terrorist group.

But AQI did not disappear. It simply bided its time. The Syrian civil war provided a staging point over the past three years for its resurrection and transformation into the "Islamic State of Iraq and Syria," or ISIS. And now ISIS has marched back into western and northern Iraq. Only this time there is no U.S. military to stop it.

NYT: Russia sent tanks and missiles to separatists in Ukraine

This is the best (and worst) bit from this New York Times story:

A rebel leader, Denis Pushilin, told Russian state television on Friday that the separatists had tanks but that it was “improper to ask” where they had gotten them.

Nope, you never narc on your supplier, that's the first rule of separatist warfare.

To add absurdity to farce, earlier on June 6, the Kremlin propaganda machine "Voice of Russia" said that the Ukrainian army's use of tanks on its own territory against armed and murderous separatists violated the Geneva Conventions.  So... what does Russia call a foreign power sending tanks and artillery into another country, unannounced, to be used by unlawful combatants, and hitting civilian targets?  

The U.S. State Department said, "We are confident that these tanks came from Russia." But that's not all:  "We also have information that Russia has accumulated multiple rocket launchers at this same deployment site in southwest Russia, and these rocket launchers also recently departed."  

Seriously though, what's the U.S., NATO and Europe going to do about this?  The West has Russia dead to rights.  So now what??

"A failure by Russia to de-escalate this situation will lead to additional costs," said a State Department spokeswoman. 

Additional costs?  Oh no, anything but that!  I'm sure Russian President Vladimir Putin is checking his mega-sized wallet right now to see if he can cover the bill.... 

The NYT says "the convoy was too small to serve a military purpose." I think this was a trial balloon. Putin is waiting to see how the West reacts. If they wimp out, Putin will send more tanks and heavy weapons, it's that simple.

(Putin is also doing it, coincidentally or not, just when Iraq's army is imploding; so maybe he figures the U.S. will be too distracted by events there -- and the stupid conservative blamesmanship going on -- to react adequately to events in Ukraine.)

Time to sack up!  Freedom isn't free.  This tinpot dictator must be put in his place, for the sake of liberty and security in Europe and international law.

Russia Sent Tanks to Ukrainian Separatists, U.S. Says

By Andrew E. Kramer and Michael R. Gordon

June 13, 2014 | New York Times

The State Department said Friday that Russia had sent tanks and other heavy weapons to separatists in Ukraine, supporting accusations Thursday by the Ukrainian government.

A convoy of three T-64 tanks, several BM-21 multiple rocket launchers and other military vehicles crossed the border near the Ukrainian town of Snizhne, State Department officials said. The Ukrainian Army reported Friday that it had destroyed two of the three tanks and several other vehicles in the convoy.

“This is unacceptable,” said Marie Harf, the deputy State Department spokeswoman. “A failure by Russia to de-escalate this situation will lead to additional costs.”

A Western official said that intelligence about the movement of the tanks and other weapons into Ukraine was shared on Friday with NATO allies. Secretary of State John Kerry complained this week about the flow of Russian arms to separatists in Ukraine in a phone call to Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister.

The spokesman for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Dmitry S. Peskov, said Friday that a Ukrainian armored personnel carrier had crossed into Russia for unclear reasons and was abandoned there. The Russian state news agency reported that the Russian border service said the occupants had then fled back to Ukraine

At the meeting of the Group of 7 industrial powers last week, President Obama warned Mr. Putin that the West would impose “additional costs” on Russia if its provocations were to continue.

The T-64 is an obsolescent tank no longer in active use by Russian forces, but still stored in southwest Russia.

“Russia will claim these tanks were taken from Ukrainian forces, but no Ukrainian tank units have been operating in that area,” the State Department said Friday afternoon. “We are confident that these tanks came from Russia.”

“We also have information that Russia has accumulated multiple rocket launchers at this same deployment site in southwest Russia, and these rocket launchers also recently departed,” the State Department added. “Internet video has shown what we believe to be these same rocket launchers traveling through Luhansk.”

Even before the State Department’s statement, Ukraine was having one of its better days Friday in eastern Ukraine, with government forces winning control of the port of Mariupol, the second-largest city in the separatist region of Donetsk.

The Ukrainian assault in Mariupol left five pro-Russian militants dead and four Ukrainian soldiers wounded, and ended with the hoisting of a Ukrainian flag at City Hall as the military routed the last separatists from the city’s administration buildings.

In Friday’s confrontation, videos posted online showed Ukrainian soldiers standing over captives who were lying face down with hands clenched behind their heads. The videos also showed soldiers displaying trophies of the battle — captured orange-and-black ribbons and shoulder patches of a pro-Russian group, the Russian Orthodox Army — and speaking with prisoners freed from the occupied buildings.

In that pro-Ukrainian forces — volunteer patrols of factory workers, a Ukrainian nationalist battalion called Azov and the Ukrainian military — had controlled most of Mariupol for weeks, the action was as much a propaganda victory as a military one.

In fighting near the besieged town of Slovyansk, a Grad ground-to-ground rocket of the sort said to be in the weapons convoy from Russia killed one person and wounded several others. Residents said the rocket went off course and hit a vegetable market in the village of Dobroyepole.

Over the long term, Ukraine, with its far larger though badly equipped and poorly trained army, has more forces, and it is unclear how long the separatists can hold out without more support from Russia. That is something Moscow cannot offer openly without risking more severe Western sanctions.

The result is misdirection and sleight of hand, and a conflict of endless puzzles and mind games.

The daytime journey of the three tanks through eastern Ukraine, which was filmed in multiple videos and witnessed by Western reporters, could not have been more obvious, and yet the convoy was too small to serve a military purpose. Was it a warning?

A rebel leader, Denis Pushilin, told Russian state television on Friday that the separatists had tanks but that it was “improper to ask” where they had gotten them.

Russia ratcheted up the economic pressure on Ukraine on Friday in their dispute over natural gas supplies and prices. Gazprom’s chief executive, Aleksei B. Miller, said that the company, a state-controlled energy giant, would not negotiate further with Ukraine over gas prices until Kiev paid its debts for past deliveries, and would adhere to a Monday deadline demanding prepayment for future supplies.

Yakov Smirnoff: Putin bringing back bad old Soviet days

No, Yakov Smirnoff is not dead, he's still doing comedy. And thanks to neo-Soviet autocrat Vladimir Putin, Smirnoff is making a comeback:

It's funny but the truth. It is an old, proven formula that dictators use: divide and conquer. It gets rid of all the things that might influence people. Then you're the sole source of information, and that's the key part of the plan. Putin is like a chess player. He understands that there are strategic moves he has to make and certain elements he needs to be able to control to have ultimate power, and the media is one of them. That's how the old Russian regimes -- Lenin, Stalin and all those guys with a unibrow -- were functioning at the time. 

I see the same thing that I grew up with starting to happen again in Russia. 

What a country!

How Putin's Russia Reminds Me of When I Was Censored by the Department of Jokes

By Yakov Smirnoff

June 10, 2014 | Huffington Post

URL: http://huff.to/1kiojA3