Dismantling Education, Dismantling Democracy

Dear Mr. President,

Received your July 2 letter yesterday. It’s brief—less than a page—and the crux of it is this: “Despite our differences, most of us share common hopes for America’s future—opportunity for our children, security for our seniors, and the broad-based prosperity that stems from a rising, thriving middle class. While we may disagree on how to get there, I remain committed to forging reasonable compromise where we can. Together we can strengthen our Union, safeguard our liberties, and restore the basic bargain at the heart of the American dream—the idea that if you work hard and meet your responsibilities, you can get ahead.” We may share common hopes for our future but I don’t see you leading us there. The middle class is still shrinking, wages falling and unemployment 7.6%. State and local governments are hard-pressed, cutting services and safety nets while the war machine—the Pentagon and security agencies and their contractors—sucks the economy dry. For example, a college education, which used to be affordable, now means a lifetime of indentured servitude to pay off loans that fatten banker bonuses. Here in San Francisco, 85,000 students attend Community College which will have its accreditation revoked next July, not by the Board of Education but by a quasi-private commission whose motives are suspect. The school has suffered poor administrative leadership and weak governance but academic quality is excellent and their benefit to the community is huge. Without accreditation the school is ineligible for public funding and will have to close, driving many of the 85,000 students into for-profit learning centers like Phoenix. Not for lack of funding or poor academic outcomes, but for administrative incompetence, something easily fixed. Shutting down a major public institution that provides affordable education lessens opportunity for our young and CCSF is only one casualty in the wave of the privatization of education sweeping the country. Chicago is closing 49 elementary schools, Pittsburgh closed 7 in 2012, Cleveland closed 16 in 2010 and 7 in 2011, and New York City closed 164 over the past decade. For-profit charter schools are replacing public K-12 schools, for-profit colleges and universities are replacing community and state-funded institutions, a process your Department of Education champions. I see it not as promoting “common hopes for America’s future,” but the dismantling of democracy in America. Part of your legacy, Mr. President.

The Humpty-Dumpty NSA Surveillance Program

Dear Mr. President,

It’s like Chinese water torture—the steady drip drip drip of revelations from the Snowden documents. First the phone logs, then PRISM, then the surveillance of China and Hong Kong, the bugs and wiretaps of EU offices and our European allies, the hacking of Germany’s phone and internet systems—and now Brazil’s—with more coming and the knowledge that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t put the Humpty-Dumpty NSA program back together again. You call it espionage and treason; I call it a heroic attempt to save democracy. And there’s more. The McClatchy report exposed your Insider Threat Program that not only encourages but requires government employees to snitch on “high-risk persons or behaviors,” i.e., potential whistle-blowers (http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/06/20/194513/obamas-crackdown-views-leaks-as.html#.UdwuFaz-tw1) and in today’s NY Times (“Judge Urges President To Address Prisoner Strike,” p. A12) Judge Gladys Kessler of the Federal District Court of the District of Columbia ruled that “It is perfectly clear that force-feeding is a painful, humiliating and degrading process” but Congress has prevented her from intervening. You, however, have the authority to address the issue, she wrote. Even the Times editors found the backbone to denounce the secrecy of the FISA court and urged Congress to pass Sen. Merkley’s legislation that would require declassification of the court’s activities so we can see what they’re doing. And the Bradley Manning trial? Not going well for the government. Today Colonel Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo, testified that the Guantanamo files released by Manning contained no useful information for an enemy and, in fact, most of it had already been made public by the Pentagon, a documentary, a book, and in news articles. The prosecution has produced zero evidence so far that Manning knowingly aided the enemy but no matter, the fix is in; the government wants a conviction to deter future whistle-blowers. But it’s too late: the Europeans are angry, the Central and South Americans are furious, and maybe the Americans are coming out of their somnolent trance. Thanks to Manning, Snowden, et al, America’s Secret Security State has been exposed and seen for what it is—the abuse of power that is leading us to a world of perpetual war with neither security nor freedom. It shows us as dangerous, a threat to world peace and that’s the first step, the recognition of abuse, to stopping it.

FISA Court Über Alles

Dear Mr. President,

“In Secret, Court Vastly Broadens Powers of N.S.A.” (today’s NY Times, p.A1) reveals that the FISA court has made secret laws, built a secret body of legal precedents, secretly exempted the NSA from most 4^th Amendment restrictions and has given the NSA powers the original Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act never intended. The court’s so secret that even where they meet in the Federal Courthouse in Washington is not revealed. The article calls the FISA court “almost a parallel Supreme Court” but the FISA court is not a real court, for they hear only one side—the government’s—which violates a fundamental tenet of American jurisprudence—adversarial arguments—and every decision, every finding, every interpretation of law is secret. This is the court you declared “transparent” on the Charlie Rose Show a few Mondays ago. Transparent to you maybe but not to us. This has become public because a number of current and former officials leaked it to the press and since everything about the court is classified, will these people be tracked down and charged with espionage? Hounded and punished like Assange, Manning Drake, Kiriakou and Snowden? The Times calls them “sources” not “leakers” but leakers they are, spilling the beans on this secret court whose operations are opaque and cloaked in the name of national security. It’s for the public’s protection, we’re told, that these secrets can’t be revealed but from out here on the hustings, it looks like it’s for your protection, Mr. President, and the protection of the appartchiks who just follow orders: your illegal wars and illegal surveillance on the rest of us. From out here, it looks more criminal than legal, more like tyranny than democracy. The FISA court, ironically, was created in 1978 to stop the abuse of illegal wiretapping but has morphed into a rubber stamp legal cover for illegal surveillance activity by the NSA. Only a handful of cases have ever been taken to the Court of Review and none have gone to the Supreme Court. Of the 1,800 requests submitted to the court last year, none were rejected and only 13 denials in 35 years. This is not justice or the rule of law or transparent government, Mr. President, this is an assault on democracy, the Constitution and We the People by the bright, thoughtful boy from Hawaii who became a smooth-talking presidential candidate from Illinois filled with false Hope and empty promises, whose true agenda was the greatest secret of all—the lust for power.

Obama's Brave New World

Dear Mr. President,

The American Propaganda Machine is in full throttle forward. Snowden is a “defector,” a “traitor,” an “aider and abettor of the enemy”—called that and worse by blowhards in Congress and liars in your administration. You even got UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon to denounce Snowden, saying he “misused data” —no mention of the misuse of data by the NSA or the rest of the American Security apparatus. Feinstein, faithful spearchucker that she is, without a shred of evidence claims Russian intelligence went through all Snowden’s computers and sucked up everything on his hard drives. Snowden denies it, Russia denies it, and given a choice between Snowden and Feinstein, my money’s on Snowden. Today’s NY Times had another hit piece on him, calling him, among other things, a hacker, a high school dropout, and a lone wolf; not one mention of the illegality of what he exposed or the lies told Congress and the American public. What bothers me most, however, is that Americans are not out in the streets protesting the Big Brother state of the nation. The news that the USPS photographs the front and back of every piece of mail sent—100 billion pieces a year—that law enforcement, federal, state and local government agencies are given copies without a court order or any oversight, barely made a ripple. The notion of privacy has become a quaint anachronism. Welcome to George Orwell’s 1984 and George Lucas’s THX-1138, worlds where the government knows everything about everybody—every movement, every conversation, every thought—and controls and programs its citizens through propaganda and punishment that teaches them not to question authority, not to dissent and not to rebel. It’s a dystopian vision of the future that seems to have arrived while we weren’t looking, that snuck up on us when we thought we were shucking the bad old regime of Bush and his neocons for the new enlightened Obama democracy of Hope, Change, Freedom, Equality and Justice. Instead, we got a smoother, slicker, more polished and far more effective version of Bush, a president who orders assassinations without qualm, who detains indefinitely and calls it national security and who won’t allow illegally imprisoned men in Guantanamo to either be released or die with dignity. Welcome to the Brave New World of Obama’s Amerika, where truth and transparency is the enemy, where We the People are guilty till proven innocent, and where whistleblower are called traitors. How did we let this happen?

More News Not Fit To Print

Dear Mr. President,

It didn’t take long for an obedient press to parrot your “Everybody’s doing it!” line about NSA’s spying, bugging and wiretapping. The lead editorial in today’s NYT agrees—no big deal, they say, “European reaction is overblown.” Besides, it’s not illegal for us to do it in foreign countries, just our own country. No mention that American phone calls, emails and internet activity is also being sucked up illegally. Nor is there any mention that the government rested its case in the Bradley Manning trial yesterday—now in its 5^th week—or that the prosecution has presented conflicting testimony and a lack of concrete evidence showing harm done to the U.S. (beyond embarrassment and evidence of war crimes and cover-ups), and no mention of yesterday’s admission that the Army lost the ‘contract’ Manning signed stipulating his terms of access to classified information upon deployment to Iraq. But none of that matters; the outcome is already in the bag—guilty as charged—by this Kangaroo Court. No mention either of the latest study on drone strikes done for the military by Larry Lewis, a researcher at the Center for Naval Analysis, which found that civilian casualties in Afghanistan resulting from drone strikes between mid-2010 and mid-2011 were an order of magnitude higher—10 times higher—than civilian casualties resulting from manned air strikes (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/02/us-drone-strikes-afghan-civilians/print). Not fit to print by the NYT, I guess, since it directly contradicts Brennan, Feinstein and others, including you: “conventional airpower or missiles are far less precise than drones, and likely to cause more civilian casualties and local outrage.” You said that in a speech you gave in May. No mention either of the 4 Guantanamo hunger strikers who filed suit in federal court Sunday to stop force-feeding or that your Department of InJustice claimed today that it was a perfectly humane way to keep them alive and not a form of punishment or intended to inflict pain, and besides, all 4 are “in good health.” http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/world/responds+forcefeeding+challenge+filed+hungerstriking/8612007/story.html). The Propaganda Wars are in full swing, the winner, the one who controls the definitions and the press. It’s something you understand, Mr. President, the power of words and their ability to move people. But in your case, you’re using it to move them in the wrong direction and that will be your enduring legacy.

Snowden Cornered, Obama On the Defensive

Dear Mr. President,

You may have Snowden cornered, stripped of his passport, declared a traitor, stateless, unable to move out of his room in the Moscow airport, but he’s got you on the defense too, trying to explain away the NSA and all those bugs and wiretaps, assuring our friends and allies they have nothing to fear from us—“Everybody does it,” you say. Yeah, right. But not on this scale, they don’t. Your words ring hollow like everything you say nowadays, like that statement that neither you nor anyone in your administration is going to “wheel and deal over a 29-year-old hacker” and even as you said it, your Vice, Uncle Joe Biden, is calling Correa in Ecuador, twisting his arm, and you’re warning other countries that granting asylum to Snowden would have “consequences,” and behind the scenes pressure mounts on country after country that might grant Snowden asylum. Maybe you don’t call it “wheeling and dealing” but it sure looks like it from out here in the hustings. And what about the deal with France and Portugal today, the pressure to deny the Bolivian president’s plane permission to pass through their air space because your security apparatchiks thought Snowden might be on board? The mask is slipping and people are finally discovering your M.O.—say one thing and do the opposite. Like calling on other nations to abide by the rule of law while we ignore laws and treaties alike. I’m rooting for Snowden, a true American hero and patriot who values democracy and hasn’t lost his moral compass. For me, personally, it’s sad to see the country I was brought up to believe was the beacon of freedom and justice become another evil empire like the one we were warned about back in the 50s and 60s (“We have met the enemy and he is us!” Pogo said back then), to watch our government lie and hide the truth, bend and ignore the law, human rights and justice, and regard its own citizens as the enemy, feared and suppressed, silenced and brutalized for speaking the truth. You’re just another two-bit politician in a town full of them, Mr. President, caring not a fig for the common good, corrupted by power or greed or revenge or whatever it is that drives you. You could have been one of the greats but you aren’t and you never will be ‘cause you’re in way too deep now, caught in a web of lies, deceit, secrecy and the seduction of power, so deep you probably believe it’s all necessary and just. But it isn’t and you’re on the wrong side of history, way past the tipping point.

A Poet's Warning and Obama's First Speech

Dear Mr. President,

Chapter 5 of your memoir, Dreams from My Father, recounts your discover of the power of words and your ability to move people by them. Your very first speech at Occidental College during a rally for divestment from South African is short, barely a minute, just a few lines, but spoken from the heart as your friend Regina says, and captures your emotions, knowing your words “had them, that the connection had been made” between you and those gathered on the quad. Here’s what you said: “There's a struggle going on,’ …My voice barely carried beyond the first few rows. A few people looked up, and I waited for the crowd to quiet. ‘I say, there's a struggle going on!’ The Frisbee players stopped. ‘It's happening an ocean away. But it's a struggle that touches each and every one of us. Whether we know it or not. Whether we want it or not. A struggle that demands we choose sides. Not between black and white. Not between rich and poor. No—it's a harder choice than that. It's a choice between dignity and servitude. Between fairness and injustice… A choice between right and wrong…” As I read this, I wondered where that young man’s passion for right went, for dignity and fairness and justice. The same man who uttered those words 3 decades ago now presides over the greatest surveillance state in history, orders extrajudicial assassinations, ignores the Constitution he has sworn to defend, calls truth a threat to national security, and prosecutes whistle-blowers while rewarding liars and murderers. What so twisted you to use your gifts not for justice and the common good but for secrecy and suppression, the tools of tyrants and dictators? Earlier in the same chapter, just before you leave Hawaii for Occidental, you recount a conversation with Frank, the old black poet who warns you that college isn’t going to educate you but train you. “They’ll train you to manipulate words so they don’t mean anything…They’ll train you to forget what it is that you already know. They’ll train you so good, you’ll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit. They’ll give you a corner office and invite to fancy dinners, and tell you you're a credit to your race. Until you want to actually start running things, and then they'll yank on your chain and let you know that you may be a well-trained, well-paid nigger, but you're a nigger just the same.” My god, Mr. President, is that what happened? Is that the price of power?