Franklin's Focus 7/30/10

More Evidence Obama's of Authoritarian Personality

The appended piece, which first appeared at Edward Wasserman's
website, was published in abbreviated form in the op/ed sections of
several city newspapers across the country. I am enclosing the entire
article. I read both versions and preferred the longer, more scholarly
version.

A ton of evidence has appeared that incriminate Obama as possessing an
authoritarian personality. It's hard to say which action of his is
most indicative of this personality trait. Forgive me for repeating
myself, but as you know, I have argued that the appointment of Arne
Duncan as Secretary of Education is blatant evidence of Obama's
authoritarianism. Duncan ran the Chicago school system when Obama was
living in Chicago and mixing socially and business wise with the
Chicago crime family.

Duncan absolutely believes in a militarization of all public schools
from first grade to high school graduation. He instituted corporal
punishment in the Chicago schools. Teachers used a heavy duty leather
strap to beat recalcitrant or impudent students. Duncan hoped to
strictly militarize all the Chicago schools. The first Chicago school
he did this with forced students to wear military uniforms,
participate in marching drills, salute teachers, and so on.

It has always been a dream of Duncan (and Obama?) to see all public
schools in Amerika militarized and all education to adopt a
pedagogical form of medieval scholasticism, a system that stresses
memorization of facts, and deemphasizes all forms of critical
thinking. At least one southern school has already been completely
militarized by Secretary Duncan. I've been unable to find out how many
others have suffered this fate.

My point is that Duncan and Obama are longtime close personal friends
who share similar world views. The appointment of Duncan to preside
over education in Amerika is tempting evidence that Obama may have an
authoritarian personality.

Today's selection of a piece by Edward Wasserman underscores more
evidence that Obama may have an authoritarian personality.
Authoritarians hate our fourth estate with a passion. They do not like
to have their authoritarianism exposed. When Obama okayed the
establishment of hidden torture prisons abroad by the CIA, it was done
secretly. Alas, reporters in those countries where the torture prisons
were located unearthed the truth, which soon leaked to the Net media
in Amerika. For unknown reasons, only the Net folks discussed this to
any degree. Even that degree of publicity infuriated the White House.

As I recall, the White House promised us that 'indefinite detention'
would be ended, but this turned out to be just one more lie. Obama
obviously is unwilling to surrender this blatantly dictatorial power.
Only dictators have the power to point a finger at any citizen, order
his or her detention, and keep that person imprisoned for life with no
trial, no habeas corpus, and no information as to where that prisoner
is located. Worse yet, is rumored that some persons thusly detained
have been sent to one of the hidden torture camps of the CIA. This is
the ultimate in authoritarian power. My guess is that Obama's
authoritarian impulses will never allow him to forsake the so called
power of 'indefinite detention'. Every dictator prizes that kind of
power.

The appended article by Wasserman examines Obama's passion for secrecy
and his willingness to hide just about anything he does that might not
be exactly kosher. This tendency to conceal is clearly not acceptable
in a true democracy.

Right now it is questionable as to whether or not a true democracy
exists in this country IMHO.

Today's Quotation

'But in the forefront of military training... the boy must be
transformed into a man; in this school he must not only learn to obey,
but must thereby acquire a basis for commanding later. He must learn
to be silent not only when he is justly blamed but also must learn,
when necessary, to bear injustice in silence.'

Adolph Hitler, 'Mein Kampf'', 1925-27

Warmest regards,
Richard

=====================================================

7/20/10 Edward Wasserman's Blog www.edwardwasserman.com

Obama media strategy offers more of the same

In at least one area of political life the spirit of bipartisanship is
strong, and the Obama administration has picked up pretty much where
the Bush team left off. That’s in the realm of information control:
treating the news media like a pestilence, using secrecy rules to stem
inconvenient disclosures, ducking informed scrutiny in favor of staged
encounters, punishing unauthorized leaks vigorously, and generally
regarding publicly significant information as something officials are
entitled to handle as a political resource of their very own.

The media have been slow to face up to this side of the
administration. That’s partly, I think, because Obama himself is such
a lucid and engaging voice and partly because his campaign was so
thoroughly media-enabled that it seemed saturated with the religion of
accessibility and transparency. Plus, it’s because after the arrogant
jawboning of Rumsfeld and Cheney, their extravagant secrecy claims,
and their boss’ own inarticulateness, the Bush era seemed an easy act
to follow.

But? The Obama record is unsettling on a number of counts. First, high-
level press relations. “Is Obama’s White House tighter than Bush’s?”
So asks the current Columbia Journalism Review, which catalogues the
vanishing press conferences—none between July 2009 and May 2010—
stricter rules on background briefings, reliance on new media where
officials fully control their message, even elbowing press
photographers aside so that the media must run handouts.

Then there’s official secrecy. The Associated Press reported recently
that for the year that ended in October 2009, the government responded
to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by invoking exemptions
to the law 49 percent more often than in the year before. (Obama was
in office nine of the 12 months covered, I should note.)

Plainly, this administration likes its ship tight and its lips zipped.
After the embarrassment over Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s grousing in
Rolling Stone magazine about his bosses and the Afghan war he was
heading, the Pentagon ordered its top commanders worldwide to get
advance approval for all interviews “or any other means of media and
public engagement with possible national or international
implications”—or, as a blogger in Stars and Stripes, the military
newspaper, put it, “damn near everything.”

Is that a good idea? Is the public really ill-served when senior
commanders let it be known that they have misgivings about the
strategic efforts they’re leading?

For that matter, is national security really at stake in the
prosecution of a former senior National Security Agency official named
Thomas Drake? He was indicted in April for leaking classified
information to a Baltimore Sun reporter about several big NSA programs
that, as The New York Times reported, “were plagued with technical
flaws and cost overruns.”

Surely secrecy laws aren’t being applied to save face, are they?

A similar question could be asked about Bradley Manning, the 22-year-
old Army specialist who gave Wikileaks, the whistleblower website,
harrowing video taken from a helicopter gunship during a 2007 attack
on a group of men in a Baghdad street in which at least a dozen people
died, including two employees of Reuters, the international news
service. Manning is in detention in Kuwait, and to be fair, he
allegedly boasted of offering the website far more extensive
information, some of which may be justly classified.

But this footage wasn’t. The ferocity of the attack, and the
impossibility of telling from the air just how serious a threat the
Iraqis actually posed before they were shot to pieces, testify to the
nature of the war our country brought to theirs. No less than the
torture pictures from Abu Ghraib, or in its time, than the photos from
the 1968 My Lai massacre, these are images that no state has a right
to keep from its people.

But suppression is so tempting. Take the case of Hollman Morris, a TV
news producer from Colombia specializing in human rights coverage.
Morris was awarded a Nieman Fellowship to study at Harvard for the
year, but the administration has denied him a visa, the first time in
the 60-year history of the country’s premier mid-career program for
journalists that a fellow was barred. Morris has apparently angered
influential people in his homeland–including its president, a U.S.
ally–for his reporting on insurgents and death squads, and it appears
the U.S. is trying to keep its friends happy there by stopping him
from studying here.

So the governmental overreaching continues. The temptation among those
in power is to view themselves as the owners of public information
when they are, in fact, only its custodians, and their job is to
ensure its free flow. Obama pledged to roll back some of the harsher
strictures of the Bush years, and it’s a promise he has yet to deliver
on.

End