{ texts for nothing }

When you live in downtown Vancouver, you can’t help noticing what’s on the cover of the Georgia Straight, one of the city’s weekly alternative newspapers. This week’s cover shows Barack Obama and Michael Ignatieff standing close together and grinning at the camera. They look a little bit like old friends at a high school reunion.

It’s a fitting resemblance. After all, as the headline suggests, they’re both “Harvard men.” Obama graduated from Harvard Law School; Ignatieff got his PhD at Harvard and directed the university’s human rights centre for several years before entering Canadian politics (he’s now the Leader of the Opposition).

The Harvard connection is a minor point, but a telling one. Obama and Ignatieff both have ties to Harvard not by some strange coincidence, but because they are both members and representatives of  North America’s political and economic elite. It’s no surprise, then, that there are other, more substantial similarities between the two men on the cover of the Georgia Straight. Politically, they’re both centrists; economically, they’re neoliberals. They’re hawks on Afghanistan, supporters of the War on Terror, and proponents of Western imperialism in general, in the form of what Ignatieff calls empire lite. Neither Ignatieff nor Obama has any intention of questioning the fundamental assumptions of mainstream North American politics.

And we know what happens when you turn those assumptions into state policy. The worst economic crisis in over 60 years. Growing income inequality in both Canada and the United States. The ongoing erosion of civil liberties. Imminent environmental catastrophe. A series of pointless, unwinnable wars in the Middle East and Central Asia, with thousands of dead foreigners as collateral damage (the UN counted 2,118 civilian deaths in Afghanistan alone in 2008; anywhere from 100,000 to well over a million civilians have been killed in Iraq since the invasion). Those are the consequences of the kind of thinking that got Obama and Ignatieff where they are today.

It’s become almost boring to see the same old faces in the news all the time, shilling minor variations on the same old policies on behalf of the same old interests. Obama claimed that he stood for change, but he’s already shown that what he really stands for is a ruling class we can believe in. Ignatieff doesn’t even pretend to represent a break with the past. But a break with the past is precisely what we need. I’d say it’s past time for some real change — the kind of change that doesn’t come from men in suits grinning on the front pages of newspapers.

Remember when the Bush administration conveniently “lost” 5 million emails? Two public interest groups responded by suing the administration for its “knowing failure to recover, restore and preserve millions of electronic communications created and/or received within the White House.” Bush’s people, of course, spent the remainder of their time in office trying to get the lawsuit dismissed.

And now that Obama’s people are in charge, they’re doing the same thing:

The Obama administration, siding with former President George W. Bush, is trying to kill a lawsuit that seeks to recover what could be millions of missing White House e-mails.

Two advocacy groups suing the Executive Office of the President say that large amounts of White House e-mail documenting Bush’s eight years in office may still be missing, and that the government must undertake an extensive recovery effort. They expressed disappointment that Obama’s Justice Department is continuing the Bush administration’s bid to get the lawsuits dismissed. [...]

Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, noted that President Barack Obama on his first full day in office called for greater transparency in government.

The Justice Department ”apparently never got the message” from Obama, Blanton said.

Because, you know, transparency in government is for the other guys.

In 2007, five victims of Bush’s extraordinary rendition program filed a suit against Jeppesen, the Boeing subsidiary that helped the CIA send them overseas to be tortured. The Bush administration tried to block the suit by claiming the case would reveal state secrets and thus endanger national security — a blatant attempt to use executive privilege to cover up the crimes of the American state.

The case was still going when Obama took office. Within days of his inauguration, Obama signed orders shutting down secret prisons and banning torture. Surely, his supporters said, this showed that he was serious about ending the US government’s disregard for basic freedoms.

Sadly, no. In the Jeppesen case, Obama has explicitly and deliberately upheld Bush’s abuse of the state secrets privilege — much to the dismay of the ACLU:

It isn’t merely that the Obama DOJ is invoking the privilege for this particular case, which contains allegations of torture that are as brutal and severe as any. That’s bad enough. But worse is that they’re invoking the most abusive parts of the Bush theory: namely, that the privilege can be used to block the adjudication of entire cases (rather than, say, justify the concealment of specific classified documents or other pieces of evidence), and, worse still, can be used to prevent judicial scrutiny even when the alleged government conduct is blatantly illegal and, as here, a war crime of the greatest seriousness.

They’re embracing a theory that literally places government officials beyond the rule of law. No minimally honest person who criticized the Bush administration for relying on this instrument can defend the Obama administration for doing so here.

It gets worse. Not only is Obama upholding Bush’s drastic expansion of executive power, he’s continuing the rendition program:

Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States. [...]

The decision underscores the fact that the battle with Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups is far from over and that even if the United States is shutting down the prisons, it is not done taking prisoners.

“Obviously you need to preserve some tools — you still have to go after the bad guys,” said an Obama administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity when discussing the legal reasoning. “The legal advisors working on this looked at rendition. It is controversial in some circles and kicked up a big storm in Europe. But if done within certain parameters, it is an acceptable practice.”

How’s that for change we can believe in?

Marc Lee peers into the future and sees Steven Harper’s Economic Advisory Council calling for tax cuts:

OK, there has been no such call. Yet. But mark my words, this panel will call for tax cuts as the federal government’s fiscal stimulus, and the government will deliver.

The Economic Advisory Council is not exactly a representative group. No labour representation, no Aboriginal reps, no one from the social or non-profit sector whatsoever. Thus, the groups most likely to be affected by the recession have no voice on this panel.

Here’s a list of the council members. With two exceptions, they’re all big business bigwigs — and the exceptions are Gordon Campbell’s former Finance Minister and an ex-head of the CD Howe Institute. Marc Lee points out that four of them are multi-billionaires. I mean, Jim freaking Pattison is a member.

People like them created the current economic crisis. People like them aren’t going to be hurt by it. So why is the government that “represents” us listening to people like them, instead of people like us — people who are going to be hurt by the recession?

Whose interests are being represented here?

I don’t usually blog about the hideous farce that is American politics, but this is too good to pass up:

When Cheney was told during the ABC News interview that public opinion polls show an overwhelming opposition to the war in Iraq, Cheney’s response was: “So?”

And when the interviewer pressed him asking, “So — you don’t care what the American people think?” he responded, “No,” and explained, “I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls.”

Americans also roundly reject the position put forward by White House spokeswoman Dana Perino in an effort to explain Cheney’s comments. Asked whether the public should have “input,” she replied, “You had your input. The American people have input every four years, and that’s the way our system is set up.”

I guess those right-wingers really mean it when they say, “The US is a republic, not a democracy.”