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The Obama administration’s secret seizure of the phone records of Associated Press reporters is the latest attack on core democratic rights in the United States.

Last week, the Justice Department acknowledged that it had obtained a subpoena in February of this year to require telecommunications companies to turn over two months of phone records on some 20 lines used by the AP. The subpoena was part of an investigation into an alleged leak of classified information that had occurred the year before.

It is likely that many more media outlets have been similarly targeted, and the administration has refused to respond to requests that it reveal what other records were seized. Anyone who speaks to the media about any matter has to assume that their phone numbers and contact information have been or could be made available to the government by secret court order.

There could hardly be a clearer violation of the First Amendment guarantee of the freedom of the press.

The controversy over last year’s Al Qaeda assault on US diplomatic and CIA facilities in Benghazi, Libya has been revived amid a deepening political crisis of the Obama administration.

Even as the debate between the Obama White House and its Republican opponents becomes more heated, however, the real issues underlying the September 11, 2012 attack, which claimed the lives of the US ambassador, Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans, remain hidden.

Some Republicans have gone so far as to suggest that administration’s handling of the Benghazi affair could become grounds for impeachment of the Democratic president. There is a sense that Obama, also embroiled in controversies over state spying on the media and IRS harassment of groups politically opposed to the administration, is in serious trouble as a result of anti-democratic and militarist policies pursued behind the backs of the American people.

As always, the presentation of these developments by the American media is dishonest and deliberately misleading.

With the release of his Financial and Operating Plan on Monday, Detroit’s emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, has thrown down the gauntlet to the working class. Employing the threat of bankruptcy as leverage, Orr is calling for a savage attack on a population already plagued by unemployment, declining wages and poverty.

Detroit is on the front lines of a national and international strategy of the corporate and financial elite, in which increasingly dictatorial methods are being employed to force through deeply unpopular measures.

Behind the anodyne phrases about “streamlining the city’s operations” and “restructuring the city’s long-term liabilities” lies a slash and burn policy. Health insurance for 28,500 active and retired city workers will be cut or eliminated outright. Further cuts in wages will be unilaterally imposed. Any profitable city assets or services are to be sold off.

In a series of prosecutions, precedents are being established for the criminalization of political dissent in America.

Last week, Massachusetts high school student Cameron D’Ambrosio was arrested and charged under “terrorism” laws merely for posting lyrics on Facebook that make reference to the Boston Marathon bombings. He faces 20 years in prison. A string of similar “terror” prosecutions around the country take aim at the First Amendment protection of free speech and political expression.

The authorities have already branded select participants in Occupy Wall Street and anti-NATO protests as “terrorists.” Last year, heavily-armed “domestic terrorism” commandos raided Occupy Wall Street protesters’ homes in Washington and Oregon, using battering rams and stun grenades. The commandos were authorized to seize all “anti-government or anarchist literature or material.”