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This Bill of Tyranny also repeals the Posse Comitatus Act, which has been US statutory law since 1878 and which prevents the use of the military in law enforcement against US citizens.

The executive office of the President and heads of the various security agencies wrote to Congress opposing the military detention amendment not on constitutional grounds but on the grounds that the amendment codifies in law the powers that the executive branch has achieved by assertion and with the complicity of Congress and the federal courts. The executive branch did not want its new asserted powers codified in law, because codification would reduce its flexibility and make the executive branch accountable to the law.

The executive branch said that military detention would interfere with its ability to have detainees held by the CIA in prisons that were not military prisons. Also, the Obama regime was disturbed that the implication of military detention is that detainees are prisoners of war. One of the main sponsors of the military detention amendment, Senator Carl Levin, indicated that one of the purposes of the military detention amendment was to provide some protection to detainees. Senator Levin asked and answered this question: Should somebody determined “to be a member of an enemy force who has come to this nation or is in this nation to attack us as a member of a foreign enemy, should that person be treated according to the laws of war? The answer is yes.”

Detainees treated according to the laws of war have the protections of the Geneva Conventions. They cannot be tortured. The Obama regime opposed the military detention amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, because detainees would have some rights. These rights would interfere with the regime’s ability to send detainees to CIA torture prisons overseas. This is what the Obama regime means when it said that the requirement of military detention denies the regime “flexibility.”

The Bush/Cheney and Obama regimes evaded the Geneva Conventions by declaring that detainees are not POWs. By classifying its prisoners as something else, the sordid government in Washington could avoid accountability for its mistreatment of detainees.

The November 17, 2011, letter to the US Senate from the Executive Office of the President says that the Obama regime does not want the authority it has under the Authorization for Use of Military Force, Public Law 107-40, to be further codified. Codification is risky says the regime: “After a decade of settled jurisprudence on detention authority, Congress must be careful not to open a whole new series of legal questions that will distract from our efforts to protect the country.”
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/legislative/sap/112/saps1867s_20111117.pdf

In other words, the Obama regime opposed military detention not for any good reason but for a bad reason. The executive branch had achieved total discretion as to who it detains and how it treats detainees. Moreover, the lack of accountability to any law meant that no one could find out what the executive branch was doing to detainees.

Codification introduces accountability to law, and whether or not this was Congress’ intention, the executive branch does not want accountability.

Obama got rid of the accountability in the amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act with signing statements, themselves unconstitutional exercises. In a word, the United States is now a lawless state. The executive branch, as long as the president declares that the country is at war, has the power of a Caesar. Congress, the alleged representatives of the people, no longer has the right to declare war or even the right to be informed when Caesar decides to take the country to war.

The Bush regime declared that the president as commander-in-chief in the “war on terror” has the prerogative to deprive US citizens of their liberty and property without due process of law. During the Obama regime, Congress attempted to codify this power in order to block the executive branch’s self-transformation into a Caesar, but failed. The Obama regime added to the power of the executive the right to deprive US citizens of their lives without due process of law. Today the President of the United States sits in the Oval Office in the White House and draws up lists of people to be murdered.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/05/the-presidents-kill-list.html

The degeneration of American democracy into a police state is subject matter for another book. I have provided a brief account here in order to dispel naive expectations that democracy will restore the economic prospects of citizens.

To turn to economic dispossession, I have documented for a decade that jobs offshoring has moved to China and India and other low wage countries not merely American jobs, but also the consumer income, tax base, GDP, supply chains, and life careers associated with the jobs. (See, for example,
the collection of my columns in
How The Economy Was Lost
.)
I have pointed out that the result is a US unemployment rate of between one-fifth and one-fourth of the work force, a high rate that is hidden by the deceptions used in the official statistics. (See John Williams,
s
h
adowstats.com
)

Until recently economists have refused to acknowledge the facts. In a subsequent section of Part Two, I examine studies of American economists, who purport to find that jobs offshoring benefits the US economy. This conclusion is so problematic that it makes me wonder if economists have been influenced by research grants, speaking fees, consultancies, and corporate board memberships. The beneficiaries of jobs offshoring are shareholders, who receive capital gains, and executives, who achieve managerial performance bonuses from the reduction in labor costs and higher profits achieved by offshoring labor.

As I have made clear in my writings over the past decade, official US statistics prove that the US has been unable for years to produce any jobs in the tradable category, whether manufacturing or professional services.  In March 2011, Nobel economist Michael Spence came to the same conclusion in a paper for the Council on Foreign Relations. Spence’s conclusions will be reported in subsequent sections of Part Two. Spence’s analysis of the official US jobs data supports my own. The US economy has only been able to create jobs in non-tradable domestic services such as waitresses and bartenders, ambulatory health care, and retail trade.  Before the real estate bubble burst, house construction was a source of jobs.

When I was Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury for Economic Policy in the Reagan administration, oil imports were the only concern in the balance of payments, and this deficit was covered by the excess of US foreign earnings abroad over payments to foreigners on their investments in the US.

In more recent times, there have been years in which the US trade deficit in manufactured goods, including high-technology goods, exceeded the oil imports. Americans no longer produce their own clothes and shoes. A significant proportion of military components is produced in foreign lands.

The high rate of US unemployment has so far proved to be immune to the stimulus of the largest federal deficits and the most aggressive monetary policy in US history. The current unemployment is unlike the post-World War II unemployment. During the second half of the 20th century, the Federal Reserve would raise interest rates and put the economy into recession in order to cool down the rate of inflation. As inflation dropped and unemployment mounted, the Federal Reserve would reverse course, cut interest rates and supply the economy with renewed growth in the money supply. Stimulative policy worked in those days, because the jobs still existed to which workers could be called back as consumer demand rose.

Today, the jobs have been moved abroad. US economic stimulus benefits China and India, but does little for US employment.

In economic theory, the rationale for the profit motive in capitalism has always been that profits indicate areas for investment and expansion, and losses indicate activities and companies that fail and go out of business. This rule is no longer observed in the US. Financial sector corporations are now “too big to fail.” Consequently, bankrupt financial institutions are bailed out by taxpayer subsidies and debt monetization by the Federal Reserve. Today in America, the bigger the corporation, the less likely it will be permitted to fail regardless of the magnitude of its losses.

This procedure of rescuing failures at the expense of the population is now also the rule in the European Union. With the mega-rich subsidized by the mega-poor, is present day capitalism worse than imagined by Karl Marx?

It has not been possible for US corporations to move all manufacturing and professional service jobs, such as software engineering, offshore. Nevertheless, corporations have found another way to reduce their labor costs. The corporations tell Congress that there is a shortage of labor and that they require more foreign laborers to fill the “skill gap.” The skilled workers brought in on H-1B work visas have no bargaining rights and are paid one-third less than US wages.
The difference goes into corporate and shareholder profits. Modern day capitalists are loyal only to money, not to country.

Socially, America has become a third world country with a small minority of “haves” and a large majority of “have-nots.” In recent years more than half of university graduates, many burdened with large student loans, are unable to find employment and have had to return to live in their childhood rooms in their parents’ homes. Even many of those who found employment have to live with their parents as their salaries are insufficient to cover the rent on a residence of their own.

Millions of Americans have lost their homes and millions more are unable to make mortgage payments and are awaiting foreclosure. Americans are living in their cars and in tent cities.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/08/11/economic-woes-lead-to-proliferation-tent-cities-nationwide/
Engineers have jobs as Wal-Mart clerks and sales clerks in department stores. Their incomes and living standards have collapsed.

Statistician John Williams (
shadowstats.com
) reports that real as opposed to nominal incomes continue to fall. Deflating median US income with the Consumer Price Index for urban consumers (CPI-U), Williams finds that after a decade US income levels in 2010 have not recovered their pre-2001 recession highs. Moreover, Williams reports, adjusting incomes with the traditional CPI-U measure “shows that the level of 2010 median household income is below where it was in 1969.”

Studies have concluded that the richest 20 per cent of Americans control 84% of the country’s wealth and that the total wealth of America’s richest 400 families equals the total wealth of the bottom half of the US population, roughly 150 million people. ( See, for example, this report: 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/sep/13/american-middle-class-poverty
  ) The distribution of income in the US is so heavily biased in favor of the extremely rich that the United States now has the worst distribution of income in the developed world. The US income distribution is actually worse than that of many Third World countries, falling between Uruguay and Cameroon. According to the Central Intelligence Agency (see
http://start.csail.mit.edu/mirror/cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2172rank.html
), the US has a worse income distribution than Iran, Nigeria, Nicaragua, Cambodia, Thailand, Kenya, Russia, China, Senegal, Turkmenistan and Jordan.

I am often asked how the American economy differs today from the  years of the Reagan administration when I was a high Treasury official in charge of US economic policy. Those were pre-offshoring and pre-deregulation times, and the differences are immense. A far higher percentage of Americans were employed. The dollar was strong, not weak. Home ownership was expanding, not contracting. Commercial banks were separate from investment banks, and debt leverage was restricted. In other words, the financial system was not a casino, and corporate profits were not obtained by replacing American labor with foreign labor.

The assault on common sense rules, which governed American capitalism and made it humane, resulted from the hubris created by the triumph of capitalism over Soviet communism.  The neoconservative “end of history” nonsense proclaimed the United States to be the only viable political-socio-economic system. (See, for example
,
Francis Fukuyama,
The End of History
.)

This hubris caused America to over-reach and led to America’s demise as a prosperous and free country. The beacon of light during the Cold War has been put out.

For decades the Democratic Party seemed to have a monopoly on class war with demagogy of "the rich." In the 21st century, the rich instigated class war with attacks on labor unions and middle class jobs. The ladders of upward mobility are being dismantled. America, once the land of opportunity, is now polarized between rich and poor.

The lives and careers that are being lost to the carnage of America’s gratuitous wars are paralleled by the economic destruction of careers, families and communities in the U.S. Since the days of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s, the U.S. government has sought to protect employment of its citizens. Presidents George H. W. Bush, William J. Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama have turned their backs on this responsibility.