News From A Parallel World

The state of Alabama has discovered a sneaky way to outlaw abortion, even though Roe v. Wade is the law and will certainly remain so regardless of whether that idiot Romney ousts that liar Obama in November. The abortion argument, on the federal level, is long over with.

But Alabama has passed a law requiring any doctor who wishes to perform an abortion to be admitted to practice at one of the state’s hospitals. And it turns out that none of the four doctors in the state who do perform abortions have such hospital status.

A fellow internet columnist, Dr. Lenny, wrote to me this morning concerning one of my recent scrawls and referenced the presently mythical State of Jefferson. For those who have not yet heard of it, Jefferson is the name taken by northwest denizens who dream of the great day when they can detach from the rest of Oregon and California, forming their own entity.

In 1941, there was a real movement to do this. Several Oregon and California counties voted to secede from their respective states and join together. The mayor of Port Orford, Oregon, one Gilbert Gable, proposed that Curry, Josephine, Klamath and Jackson should join with California’s Del Norte, Siskiyou, and Modoc counties, given that the residents of this area weren’t getting decent representation in the halls of government in their respective states.

Many people saw it as a ridiculous notion, not because it was a bad idea but because it would legally require the agreement of the legislatures of both states as well as ratification of the federal Congress. None of those bodies would ever consent. For one thing, the idea that two more Senators would be elected was seen as diluting the power of the ones already stuffing themselves on the public’s dough in Washington.

But some folks took it seriously. Meetings were held. A state flag was designed. The name ‘Jefferson’ was adopted after broad consideration of others, including Bonanza and Discontent. In California, Trinity County endorsed the new state, joining with the other four. Shasta and Lassen gave it serious consideration. In Oregon, on November 27, 1941, a group of residents carrying hunting rifles stopped traffic on Highway 99 south of Yreka, passed out copies of a Proclamation of Independence, and declared that Jefferson was in “patriotic rebellion” against Oregon and California.

It’s hard to say where the movement might have gone, but events overtook it. Mayor Gable died on December 2, and several days later the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

There remains today a sensibility which dreams of Jefferson. Residual traces of the original movement are commemorated by highway markers, scenic overlooks, and a public radio station. People such as Dr. Lenny still believe in it. I’ve dreamed worse dreams and so have you.

I realize that the Alabama example is an odd one. After all, finding a way to evade the federal law on abortion does not exactly recommend Alabama as a leader in any fight for regaining freedom in America. If those guys could figure out a way to reinstate slavery, they’d be interested. Face it, intelligence is not widely available in some parts of the country.

But in a way, I am encouraged by those boneheads.

Like you, I am aware of the undeniable fact that the banks run the bleeding world. All that is required to understand this simple reality is that one pays attention to events outside one’s front door. Even Senator Durbin’s rather amazing admission that “the banks run this town (Washington, D.C.)” is unneeded in view of the news.

For example, this morning’s paper alerted us to the agreement in Brussels reached “(a)fter an all-night bargaining” among “European leaders” to “use the continent’s bailout fund to funnel money directly to struggling banks...”

Why is this so familiar? Why are we not even shocked?

During the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama got himself into trouble by remarking, in an aside at what he thought was a private fund-raising event, that some Americans took comfort in clinging to their ‘guns and religion.’ Seems to me that in 2012 there are quite a few Americans taking some comfort in clinging to a fantasy that Barack Obama is ‘progressive’ or even a decent man whose determination to do the ‘right thing’ is thwarted at every turn by the evil Republicans.

We cling to fantasies because life is hard and we’ve got to cling to something. If we’re carrying anything more advanced than the brain of a reptile inside our craniums –– or is it ‘crania’? –– we know that the banks and other corporate empires run the world, which includes the United States. We know that the Congress is corrupt and probably can’t be redeemed because only millionaires need apply. We know that regulatory bodies have been so badly compromised they can’t perform their jobs. We know that the wealthy are getting wealthier, thanks to tax deals, offshore bank accounts, and various money laundering schemes we barely comprehend. We know that Obama, like his predecessors, at least since 1980, is merely a broker for the military-industrial complex.

The federal system has utterly failed but we have no idea what to do about it.

And so we cling to the Obama fantasy if we’re ‘liberals’ and to the ‘tea party’ (or Ayn Rand) fantasy if we’re conservative. The only alternative seems to be pitching ourselves off the bridge.

But maybe not.

Have you noticed: everywhere you turn in America, more and more, local, regional, and state governments are getting pissed off at the feds. Just the other day, the Supreme Court told Montana that its rules against corporations buying its legislators are unconstitutional. California passed a humane medical marijuana law but, despite promises, Obama and his cops have gone after dispensaries and closed many down. From sea to shining sea, local ideas about government have been trampled by a federalism that nobody can stop.

According to most online sources, the State of Jefferson is being revived these days, apparently spurred by right-wing disenchantment with perceived government control by ‘liberals’. But the problem is with structure and not ideology. When the government is spying on people and peering into bedroom windows, the right wing in general has no problem with it; when it’s forcing people to buy insurance they can’t afford, the left thinks it’s a great advance for universal health care.

In the 1960s, the left liked a powerful federal government because it could enforce integration and promote racial equality. In the 1980s –– despite protestations to the contrary –– the right liked federal power because Reagan was at the helm and he could wipe out local attempts at environmental protection and workplace safety, flatten unions and screw the air traffic controllers.

There was a time in America when the use of federal power was a reasonable mechanism assisting in the evolution of a fair and just society. But as in all societies, there were and are people interested in manipulating the levers for their own purposes, and in the U.S. these people have infiltrated and compromised the entire federal power structure.

Today, the FCC doesn’t protect the airwaves for the people. It protects them from the people. The FDA doesn’t regulate food safety, it guarantees that those who adulterate food are safe from troublesome regulation.

Some people can’t believe I’m still optimistic about the planet, even America. I agree it’s not a short-term deal. The human race, pretty embarrassing. My old friend Martin Shepard in New York thinks humans have made no progress at all in thousands of years; we dress a little better and know how to clean utensils. We have dentists and people who can repair Chevrolets. But he thinks we’re just as savage, just as creepy and unredeemable. Of course, Marty was a shrink years ago.

Friend of my daughter, Kenneth Johnson, just published a book about life, mostly his, and the travel from a life of guns, robberies, life as a pimp. He sees things pretty deeply now and his book, The Last Hustle, is a wonder of intelligence and grace. He’s changed over the years, no question.

I’ve changed, too, and I think for the better. I’ve learned a little, maybe not much but something. I’m slow, sort of like the human race. I fuck up, no way around it. But I’m better.

What that tells me, my daughter’s friend and my experience and what I’ve seen in others I’ve known, change and redemption, is that there’s hope for the human race. We’ve got a chance. So maybe we can learn a way around this monster we’ve created, this American system which grinds people under its feet, which commits crimes against its own people. Not by fighting it with its own weapons, not by trying to take that system on its own terms, but by slipping past it, sliding around it, changing it despite itself.

The State of Jefferson exists because it lives in our minds. So, too, did Woodstock Nation once, real and shining and possible, just around the next corner. We can create a better world if we dream it hard enough and find whatever inspiration we can from the small, sweet blows against the empire struck from the towns and cities and communities, left or right, doesn’t matter.

So, thank you, Dr. Lenny, for the reminder, and Jessica for your friend’s astonishing book, and the rest of you out there who have moved through time and space to be here right now.

We’ve got a lot of work to do, so get to it. Saddle up.

“These contempt charges aren’t about politics,” said Republican congressman Rich Nugent of Florida, offering further proof, if any is needed, that Florida is electing a brand of demagogue extreme even for the American South.

“What Republicans are doing with this motion today is contemptible,” said Nancy Pelosi, House minority leader, apparently forgetting that her own party had authored a few contempt charges against Bush officials under similar circumstances. “Even for them it’s contemptible.”

Contempt, yes, indeed, plenty of that going around these days. Lies, too, by the bucketful. God, makes you want to go into politics, doesn’t it?

The issue currently at hand in all of this contempt business is the interest Republicans have stirred up over a Justice Department/ATF program known as ‘Fast & Furious.’ Where these idiotic names come from I don’t know. They’ve got these whackos inside the Pentagon who dream up shit such as ‘Operation Pagan Thunder’ but this seems to have been a ATF op all the way.

The basic story of ‘Fast & Furious’ seems to be that the geniuses running our country decided to let large arms shipments go through in order to track them to bigger sources. It’s a pretty common approach to crime investigation, actually, and police from Bangor to Walla Walla use it all the time, especially in drug trafficking.

The problem inherent in this scheme is that government agencies are notorious for using such operations to fatten their own wallets. The CIA, for example, tracked a lot of heroin in Southeast Asia during the war against Viet Nam and in so doing made plenty of off-the-books cash. Urban cops sometimes have a hard time resisting the easy money they can make in befriending drug dealers. Sometimes, it appears that the CIA and other government agencies purposely assist the importation of drugs into urban areas such as South Central L.A. in order to keep the population strung out.

It’s not at all evident whether the ATF was interested in interdicting or promoting arms smuggling into Mexico.

In any case, it seems that at least one U.S. border patrol agent was killed by someone using one of the guns the ATF let slip through, and the congressional Republicans are simply outraged at the fact.

The self-righteous outrage of congressional Republicans is, of course, beyond disgusting when you consider that they routinely ratify far worse actions and behavior, and ignore many more tragedies, when it suits their partisan purpose. Pelosi is right, of course, but when it comes to hypocrisy there is plenty to go around.

These politicians, the lot of them, ought to be held in contempt by the American people. I omit a few, of course, such as Bernie Sanders, but basically we’re dealing with a kind of mutation which has thoroughly inflected both major parties.

The Republicans were uninterested when Reagan and his crowd fomented mass murder in Central America and abetted it by making an end run around the Boland Amendment. The Democrats ignored Clinton’s war crimes in Iraq and elsewhere, not to mention his playing footsie with cocaine smugglers. Both Bushes have been world class criminals, and under their administrations legitimate congressional requests for documents have been ignored.

Now Obama uses the fiction of ‘executive privilege’ to deprive Congress of documents pertaining to the ‘Fast & Furious’ debacle and everybody’s outraged. Oh, please. On February 15, 2008, House Republicans walked out on a vote to hold Harriet Miers and Joshua Bolten in contempt for refusal, under cloak of ‘Executive Privilege’, to testify about the Bush attempt at firing all U.S. Attorneys.

Any outside observer who has not surrendered his/her sanity in these matters would have to conclude that both parties are full of phonies and hypocrites. If it’s our secrets, you can’t have them; if it’s your secrets, hand ‘em over. Executive privilege, contempt citations, got any extra tickets to the Nationals’ game this Sunday?

This is a game, people. I just another in a long line of e-mails, stretching back years, actually, from an old friend who blames everything on Ralph Nader. The Gore giveaway in 2000, Hurricane Katrina, the economic collapse, Tim Lincecum’s string of losses, all Nader’s fault. How convenient.

Reminds me of ‘Deep Throat’ telling Woodward in another fake history, ‘All The President’s Men’, “you think all this was the work of little Donald Segretti?”

The system is rigged. What we are seeing is a charade on the big stage, high school politics writ large. Good guys and bad guys. My friend with the Nader fixation is perpetually pissed off about Americans’ distractions with sports and television. What he doesn’t get is that the political circus is part of the same distraction, a show for the masses.

Today the Supremes, on a 5-4 vote, bought most of Obama’s health care legislation. That won’t end the challenges, of course, and that, too, is a charade. Will some folks get care who otherwise would’ve been forced to shown up at emergency rooms? Yes. Will the costs go down? No. Will the care get better? No. The insurance companies will get richer, and that’s the point.

Until Americans figure out that the political reality here is exactly the way George Carlin –– and Bill Hicks –– described it, we will continue to buy into the colored lights and flashing signs. Got a candidate for you, step right this way. Sure there are a few ‘differences’, just enough to get everybody whipped up. But if you write down the entire list of major policies under Obama and compare them to the promised or likely policies under Romney, it’s pretty much the same guy, and that’s depressing as all hell.

Want to try that experiment for yourself? Take the following positions and close your eyes. Pretend they’re the policies of a white Republican and see where that turns out on the contempt meter:

Spying on American citizens, surveillance, warrantless wiretaps. Rounding up people and sending them to foreign lands to be tortured. Compiling lists of people to be killed by special operations soldiers. Bombing wedding parties, funeral processions, and emergency responders. Keeping people in prison without charges for ten years. Appointing bankers to oversee the banks. Appointing Monsanto lobbyists to oversee ‘food safety’ and federal regulations. Seeking to extradite Julian Assange while paying no attention to the Pakistanis who funded the alleged 9-11 hijackers. Backing new laws which criminalize free speech in areas where public officials are speaking. Backing new laws which enable the army to seize Americans and lock them up without charges, trial, or lawyers, indefinitely. Busting pot dispensaries and making it hard for sick people to get medicine. Militarizing urban police forces with sophisticated army weaponry. Paying Halliburton hundreds of millions to build ‘detainment centers’ in the U.S. for unspecified purposes. Appointing the CEO of General Electric, which paid no federal taxes on profits in the billions, and which outsources thousands of jobs, to head the ‘Jobs’ council. Sending special ops troops to overthrow governments around the world.

Personally, I’ve got plenty of contempt to go around. The parties exclude anyone seriously interested in democratizing the economic system or bringing sanity to the country’s foreign policy. The media, of course, which lives on political bribery, joins the happy little agreement to evade real issues.

We face some critical problems in America in 2012, problems of wealth and poverty, problems of a twisted economy which is NOT improving despite Wall Street shuffles, problems of stupid wars, drug empires, crumbling educational institutions. And what are we offered? A couple of candidates whose ostensible ‘differences’ are over gay marriage and –– sort of –– abortion rights, neither of which will be seriously impacted by the outcome regardless of who wins (the reasons are complex but, simply put, come down to this: it is impossible to put Roe v. Wade back in the bottle, and gay marriage is accepted among the young; both of those fights are over).

What the system guarantees is that we will not have any real choices, only pretend choices. We are a free people if by freedom you mean the opportunity to choose among crappy television shows, brands of cola, and fast food emporia.

Contempt. Yes, that lying swine from Florida who proclaims that it’s not about politics but about that federal agent gunned down by a weapon the ATF allowed to slip through a porous border. It’s ALL politics, every bit of it. First one party gets outraged, then the other. Then they head out for dinner and the theater.

The Obama White House has the hots for Julian Assange. The President and his people have had a federal grand jury meeting for more than a year in Virginia –– as close to the center of military and secret police power as any community in the country –– looking for ways to charge Assange with grave crimes, even though he hasn’t committed any.

Right now, the U.S. is threatening Ecuador, through media whores like the editorial board of the Washington Post and via Hillary Clinton’s diplomatic avenues, to dissuade Ecuador from granting him political asylum. Obama wants Assange sent to Sweden to face phony charges in order to expedite his extradition to the U.S.

We’d like to kill him but the publicity would be pretty bad and plane crash accidents have been so overused.

What struck me as interesting was the fact that in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center, September 11, 2001, which have been used to justify killing off the Bill of Rights and moving the country toward fascism, America came across information that one of those said to be involved in the attacks, Mohammed Atta, had received $100,000.00 from Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who himself had been acting on behalf of General Mahmoud Ahmed, then chief of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, that country’s equivalent of the CIA.

When the Wall Street Journal exposed this payment, Ahmed was ‘forced to resign,’ but the U.S. has never asked that he be extradited or charged. No claim has ever been filed against him in an international tribunal. He has never been questioned about it.

One man releasing ‘secret’ and embarrassing files to public scrutiny, we want to put him on trial and throw him in prison. Another man spending a huge sum in support of a man said to have been the lead hijacker on 9-11; him, he don’t care about. No questions, no legalities. Forget about it.

Stinks to high heaven, this does.

Seemed reasonable enough. Senator Bernie Sanders authored an amendment to the farm bill which would give states the power to require that genetically modified foods be labeled.

Seventy-three Senators voted against it, including 28 Democrats.

On the web sites this morning, shock at the news, and one writer wondering whether Obama knew about the most recent scientific evidence of the poisoning of cattle who’d sucked up GMO feed.

I wonder whether the writer knew that Obama has appointed Monsanto’s chief lobbyist and a corporate Vice President to serve as the ‘food safety czar’ of the Food and Drug Administration.

You can keep the change this time, Barack.

Sanders introduced his amendment after his own state’s legislature backed down from requiring GMO labeling after a threat of a lawsuit by Monsanto.

Surveys repeatedly show overwhelming public support for GMO labeling. Maybe people really want to know what they’re eating. Monsanto (and Dow Chemical and a few others) doesn’t want you to know. You might get confused.

The threat of lawsuits is very real. Huge corporations use these threats to force local governments to back down anytime they try to enact policies the criminals oppose. Vermont didn’t want to incur the enormous expense of defending itself against a company with Monsanto’s spectacular financial resources.

I once served on a county commission whose job included reducing or ending county contracts with nuclear weapons contractors. The Nuclear Free Zone in Marin was one of several which explored the idea that grassroots work for peace could counter the arms industry’s ownership of national policy.

We recommended that Marin County cease doing business with Motorola for that reason. Lawyers for Motorola made it clear they’d sue us if we upheld the law. Against the 4-1 vote of the Commission, the county’s Board of Supervisors cracked. That’s how it works.

I’ve written about Monsanto before, February 17, 2012: http://lookingglass.blog.co.uk/2012/02/17/the-face-of-evil-12807395/ Probably will write about it again. If you’re looking for corporate evil in its most malevolent form it’s hard to beat Monsanto. The Senate vote is really no surprise. The surprise, I guess, is that more than 20 Senators had the stones to stand against it. Probably gonna cost ‘em.

America is no longer a democratic country. This is not really news to most people. There are some who would say that’s been true for nearly fifty years and I won’t argue. But lately it’s in our faces every day and that’s hard to ignore. Saw a video earlier on fracking called ‘Sky Is Pink,’ which featured former Democratic Governor Ed Rendell (D-PA) who is now pimping for an oil and gas company, paid a lot of money to lie about the dangers of this stupid practice. Meanwhile, the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, whose dad was an honorable man, is apparently backing the fracking of his state, despite the demonstrable fact that this will poison the water and probably kill a lot of people –– there are statistical spikes in breast cancer wherever fracking is concentrated.

These guys are Democrats. They’re the guys we’re supposed to support with our time and money and votes because they’re the last line of defense against the swinish Republicans who would do terrible things if we let them.

My own state has a GMO labeling initiative on the November ballot. It will pass because despite the big money propaganda campaign –– including the wholesale purchasing of mass media and television ‘commentators’ –– most people know liars when it’s this bloody obvious.

The real question is, will California cave in to Monsanto when the lawyers come around with their threats? Because somebody sure as hell had better refuse to.

Little while ago, I stumbled upon a terrific video series, the lone television season of ‘Ellery Queen’ starring Jim Hutton. Twenty-plus episodes based on the character created by a couple of ne'er-do-well cousins, Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, and produced in 1975.

Nothing especially political about either the characters or the plot lines, although Hutton’s Queen, son of the NYC’s homicide chief, does exhibit a remarkably humane and even innocent view of his fellow beings.

I never saw any of the shows, since by 1975 I was not much interested in television and the general run of garbage to be found there. Man, I had no idea how bad it was going to get by the turn of the century.

The Ellery Queen shows are basically pure fun, with all sorts of guest stars from the era, and a good-natured approach to the subject matter, which was of course murder.

Was watching an episode the other evening in which a couple of suspects are Russian diplomats, not very convincingly played by Robert Loggia and Nina Van Pallandt. Van Pallandt, incidentally, is much better in Robert Altman’s version of the Raymond Chandler novel ‘The Long Goodbye.’

The episode has a political subtext, the rash of attempts by Soviet sailors to gain asylum in the United States by jumping ship while docked along the eastern seaboard. About that time, the ‘seventies’, people were fleeing dictatorships and desperately trying to find safety in America.

In one scene, as Ellery and his father ask questions of the Russians, Loggia wonders aloud whether their conversation might not be being secretly recorded. A shocked David Wayne replies, ‘This is the United States of America!’ Ah, the good old days.

Of course, I’m interested in this episode, titled ‘The Adventure of Colonel Nivin’s Memoirs’, in view of the very public drama being played out today involving the nations of Ecuador and England and the United States, and a world patriot named Julian Assange, who hopes for safety and asylum in Ecuador.

Forty years ago, those seeking asylum found ways to reach America. They were fleeing the Soviet bloc countries, or Cuba, or a variety of others where freedom was something reserved for the very few and freedom of speech was a term with meaning only in its absence. We welcomed them.

Now, it's other nations in the world who may offer safe harbor while America wants to imprison and even murder them. If someone today asked whether a conversation is being recorded, there is no proud and defiant answer.

Assange is presently in England, having been initially taken into custody on clearly faked claims of sexual assault in Sweden, and has sought refuge inside the Ecuadoran embassy. He has petitioned Rafael Correa, President of Ecuador, for political asylum.

Much of the world –– that part whose political news doesn’t come from the whores at the American networks –– knows that Sweden wants Assange in order to extradite him to the U.S., where a federal grand jury has been meeting in secret for more than a year, drumming up a nasty catalogue of charges, and where the government of Barack Obama is determined to shut him up for good.

Assange is fighting for his life.

Ecuador would almost certainly grant him asylum. There’s no serious doubt that he is a political prisoner, that America wants to get him because he is the center of the publication by WikiLeaks of tens of thousands of supposedly secret documents, many of them deeply embarrassing to the people who run this country and others.

As for that fraud Obama, he has locked up a reputed source of many of these documents, Bradley Manning, for almost two years, much of the time in solitary confinement and under conditions the U.N., Amnesty International, and established international law defines as torture.

The first batch of ‘secret’ files exposed a videotape of a U.S. helicopter crew exulting in the murder by machine guns of several civilians, including rescue workers. Rather than prosecuting or at least disciplining the guilty troops, members of a military Obama takes pains to praise as “exceptional in character,” the U.S. went after the messenger.

There are two serious difficulties facing Assange and Correa. The first is that the Ecuadoran embassy in London is now ringed with British soldiers and, while Assange can’t be touched while inside that building, he can be prevented from leaving. Second, Ecuador exports a lot of products to the U.S. and America can impose sanctions against it if Correa grants Assange asylum. Such a heavy-handed threat is already issuing from such corporate mouthpieces as the Washington Post, whose gutless editors printed this warning today:

“There is one potential check on Mr. Correa’s ambitions. The U.S. “empire” he professes to despise happens to grant Ecuador (which uses the dollar as its currency) special trade preferences that allow it to export many goods duty-free. A full third of Ecuadoran foreign sales ($10 billion in 2011) go to the United States, supporting some 400,000 jobs in a country of 14 million people. Those preferences come up for renewal by Congress early next year. If Mr. Correa seeks to appoint himself America’s chief Latin American enemy and Julian Assange’s protector between now and then, it’s not hard to imagine the outcome.”

The Post editorial is so riddled with lies you’d think it came from the desk of Rupert Murdoch. Assange is not being sought by the U.S., the editors say; such a claim is a ‘fantasy’. And Ecuador is no haven for freedom of speech; Correa, repeatedly labeled as ‘left wing’, is an ingrate, “wallow(ing) in anti-American slanders and paranoia.” Presumably, he should be thrilled that America is not bombing his country –– yet.

There is some support rising for Assange and Ecuador among U.S. writers, but politicians in America are uniformly silent thus far. Even those who have timidly criticized U.S. policies in the middle east and elsewhere are saying nothing. Cowardice is not confined to the Post’s editorials but runs like a cancer through the American body politic.

It is not other nasty regimes which persecute, torture, and murder people now, conditions which once caused people the world over to yearn to reach America. It is our shores which frighten them, our government which threatens them, our military power which exterminates them.

In America, the sick propaganda which fuels national policy and drives the public semiconsciousness is virtually unchallenged among those with any power. The President, a black Democrat who promised transparency, support for whistle blowers, an end to torture, is leading us in the other direction, proclaiming at every turn his love for all things military and his contempt for those who fail to join the chorus.

My voice is small. Yours is probably small, too. We do not own newspapers or television networks. We don’t even own any congressmen. But together our voices can still become large enough to matter. Once there was a time when people of conscience could be heard in America. That time may come again if we care enough for freedom and for the real principles of this once-great country to stand up.

Jamie Dimon is a crook. This isn’t news.

The JPMorgan Chase CEO, appearing before the Senate Banking Committee as a part of his world tour, was showered with accolades by members from both parties evidently undeterred by the plain fact that Chase ripped off many billions of dollars, including more than two billion in hedge fund ‘losses’ while the American economy sank. Dimon and boys simply stole it.

It’s all roses for Jamie. As Cory Currier in Pro Publica details, the relationship between the bank and the Senate is so cozy you could toss your breakfast. I can’t toss mine because I haven’t eaten it yet but I have big plans for later. Not only have 16 of the 22 committee members received direct bribes from Chase –– including a fat check for chairman Tim Johnson, a Democrat –– an impressive roster of former committee staffers, including Johnson’s top aide, has found a second home after leaving the capitol. They have become lobbyists for Chase, a dignified term for pimps, which is of course what they are.

You probably already know that Chase was the largest single contributor to the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain in 2008. Just guessing but that might have something to do with the fact that Dimon has been spending his time at the country club and not inside a federal prison. It also accounts for his imperious manner. Nobody’s going to touch him and he knows it.

Lobbying is perfectly legal, of course. Every staffer in Washington knows that he or she can leave his or her job at any time and hook up with a big corporation at an obscene salary. Influence peddling. It’s the American way.

The result of this institutional corruption is so horrible that when it emerges in its naked glory most people of ordinary sensibilities have to avert their eyes. In a brilliant essay for Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi describes the Senators –– with the lone exception of Oregon’s Jeff Merkley –– as behaving “like love-struck schoolgirls or hotel bellhops.”

What impressed Taibbi most forcefully was the stunning ignorance displayed by committee members. These are U.S. Senators, the highest legislative officers in America, and they obviously don’t understand the first thing about banking, even though that’s the committee they’re serving on.

Thing is, they don’t need to understand anything about banking. They need only obey orders. Their former staffers will instruct them on how to vote. The legislation they adopt will have been written for them by the bankers’ lawyers. It’s an easy gig.

I don’t want to sound completely naive here. Corruption has always been a part of politics. It’s just that somewhere between 1950 and 2012, the U.S. has become the most blatantly corrupt political system in the world. And the saddest part of all is that these high-ranking pols, these blow-dried Senators, have been bought for a pittance. They’re not only whores, they’re cheap whores.

What will it take? How much more obvious does it have to get? How many Americans with pitchforks and ropes will be enough to overwhelm the security guards and hang these guys in the public square?

Good God, it gets ever crazier. I recall vividly the words of Hunter Thompson who claimed it ‘never got weird enough for me’ and wonder what he’d say now. Because if you need weirder than this you are taking the wrong drugs.

The legislature of the State of Michigan, whose Republican governor has formerly taken over local governments by fiat, abrogating democracy, elections, and popular rule, has now banned one of its members, Democrat Lisa Brown, from speaking.

Brown has been silenced –– thus disenfranchising her constituents –– because she referred to her vagina during a debate on the latest anti-abortion junk being peddled by the idiots of the right wing. Maybe it was the clarity of her commentary. She concluded her argument by saying, “I’m flattered that you’re so interested in my vagina, but ‘no’ means no.”

You and I know what that means. Women do not get to say no to men. Women who say no are cunts, uh, I mean, vaginas.

I am so sick of how disgusting men are. I’m sorry, I know, not all men. And women, after all, Sarah Palin and that nitwit from Minnesota, it’s not unanimous, but sweet Jesus, there’s obviously a difference. Men such as the Michigan majority leader, Jim Stamas. I’ve never met a woman this fucked up and I’ve been around.

Freud, of course, had it wrong. It’s men, not women, who have penis envy. Plus, men feel vulnerable. My bet is that the penis, uh, wanger, uh, red rooster, being outside the body, gives its owner a sense of vulnerability. Women, they hide their love away; men, they are forced to let it all hang out.

In the ‘sixties, it was cool to let it all hang out, but not anymore. Not for a fellow such as Stamas. Can you imagine the horror, the shock, the sense of disbelief? This Lisa Brown referring to her vagina? Men never use words like that.

I realize that America’s political and cultural sickness is shared by the genders. I no longer embrace the wonderful fantasy that as women gained electoral power we would become a more peaceful country. We tend to elevate the women who exhibit the worst of the masculine traits, e.g. Hillary Clinton actually cackling over the death of Moammar Qaddafi, but still... it’s men who combine puritanical fear of sex with a meanness of spirit and a palpable thrill at mayhem.

Old news, I know. The cliché of the football assassin who worships his ‘saint-like’ mother. The celebration of violence in a mass media which forbids using words such as ‘fuck’ or showing a woman’s nipple. There are plenty of places where it’s safer to punch someone than to breast-feed your child.

Can’t say ‘vagina’ in the state legislature. God, I hope the Michigan young are not this bonehead stupid, and I hope they hurry up and take power. We seem closer than I’d thought to pitching right off the cliff.

It’s 1:30 in the morning and I’m waiting for a phone call from a Comcast technician. You may think that’s peculiar and you’re entitled to your opinion. I’m just trying to read my damned mail.

I do realize that Comcast is probably no worse than the other ‘services’ out there. They hook you up and sell you shit and then fail all the time. We value you as a customer. Please stay on the line. Is there anything else we can help you with?

The reason I can’t access my mail is that I am periodically denied the privilege by Comcast because it does not recognize my password. My password is incorrect, it turns out, although my password is identical to the password these clowns issued me in the first place. Here’s your password: just kidding.

Previously, I’ve just shut down my computer, closed internet connection, and then reopened. Usually that works. Sometimes it works the next day but at least it works. But tonight I finally just blew a gasket. Wrong password? Fuck you! How’s that for a password? Got your password right here, suckers.

I went to the Comcast online ‘chat’ help where allegedly live ‘analysts’ fix your problem. The first person ran me through the usual stuff, user name, mother’s favorite ice cream, who plays shortstop for the Phillies, and then agreed to assist me in selecting a new password.

I asked, may I select my own this time? Sure. Okay, here it is. Nope, we’ve selected one for you. The one they picked was the presumably typical combination of four letter words. The person on the other end, if it was a person, said he or she –– the name was ‘Surender’, which should have been a clue –– said I could now use the new one and he/she would remain on the line while I tried it out. Guess what? The next message was that he/she would exit the room –– that’s how they talk –– shortly, so hurry up.

The new password didn’t work and ‘Surender’ was gone. I wrote a note to Comcast telling them my opinion of their service, their corporation, and their parentage. I filled in the questionnaire by checking the blanks which rated them as disgusting. Then I tried again.

This time I didn’t get ‘Surender’, which was momentarily reassuring. I got someone with a human name. Elisa. Of course, she may have been connecting from Tierra del Fuego, but at least she was conversant in English. I explained. We are so sorry, Elisa said. We’ll fix it right away. Can you tell me your father’s maiden name and the birthdate of Lyndon Johnson’s Springer spaniel?

Then I couldn’t find my Comcast account number. I made the mistake of paying my bill earlier in the month and haven’t been hit with the new one. I don’t keep the bills because I haven’t figured out how to deduct this rip-off from my taxes. Elisa said, can I call you?

I thought this was a little forward, but under the circumstances, hell yes. Then she reported that it might be a while because “we are having an issue now and can’t view the account details. I do apologize for the inconvenience but no worries, we now have our technician who are (uh oh) working to have the system up and running.” She assured me that as soon as the system was working she would telephone me. Would that be okay?

Well, what exactly were my options? As near as I can tell, the earlier helpful ‘analyst’ had voided my old password and failed to make the new one operational. I had no choice. In the meantime, Elisa wrote, Comcast also offers great FAQ and Help forums.

Elisa then exited the room. She has not returned. She has not called. That was half an hour ago. Comcast’s army of technician are now working like little beavers to fix the system and she will telephone me the instant it’s available, even if it’s four in the morning, even if she has left work and has started a long weekend. Even if she’s gone on vacation with a boyfriend from Bangladesh.

In my little note to Comcast, I promised to write a column about all this and here it is. If you have a palatable alternative to Comcast, I urge you to use it. If I knew what I was doing, I’d figure out how to change to some less horseshit cable company, if there is one, but I sort of doubt it.

Your call is very important to us. Please blow me and I’ll get to you as soon as you have given up all hope.

Grandson Jacob graduated from San Andreas High School yesterday, a cool ceremony on the campus in Larkspur and right up against the property of the larger, more academically-ambitious Redwood, known among the students as ‘Deadwood’ or ‘San Quentin West.’

San Andreas is an elite school but not everyone wants to get into it. That’s because it’s an ‘alternative’ school, you know, the sort dreamed up in the 1960s and consigned to the corner as soon as was practicable. It’s an elite school because it really is a school, a place where teachers are generally free to teach and students are challenged to learn.

It’s not a testing factory for future cogs in the grand corporate machine.

Around 50 graduates. Jake looked pretty good in his red cap and gown. I of course remember him as a cute 6-year-old wearing a viking hat. There were the usual cheers for the grads, and the speeches. And there was recognition for three retiring teachers, including one I’ve known for many years. When his name was announced the gathering appeared to levitate. I’ve heard cheers before but few as full-throated and wild as this one.

See, Jim’s a teacher.

I know he’s got some time off coming, I’m not begrudging him anything. Next year might be my brother’s last as a teacher, too. When they go, it’s a loss that’s incalculable. They’re not replaceable.

When I was in school, I was sensationally lucky. We had so many great teachers at San Rafael in the early ‘sixties that I thought it was normal. It wasn’t. These days what we had at San Rafael is actually impossible. It was a fluke. I figured that out when I later went to U.C. Berkeley and Boalt Hall and never had such good teachers, not even close.

We make it pretty hard to teach now. America seems to have decided that real teachers are a luxury. It’s easier to hire functionaries who will administer standardized tests, ‘teach’ what’s in the texts, and do as they’re told. Real teachers are problems, always wanting to do something different, take risks, challenge students to think. The people who run the country found out in the ‘sixties what happens when you teach an entire generation to think: trouble. They weren’t going to let that happen again.

People like my brother and like Jim are rare now. They have to be able to manage a hostile system and still deliver the goods. Since nobody but the kids wants them to deliver the goods, this is hard.

We’ve all seen the polls which indicate that most people don’t know anything about democracy, America, the Bill of Rights, and the constitution. They are unaware of their rights and thus ripe for losing them. I’m a little cynical about this. I think there are forces in the country who want this. A docile, ignorant population is easier to control.

I’ve seen the difference real teachers make in people’s lives. Students lucky enough to get Jim or Chuck in a class or two never forget them. When I hang around with old friends, people who went to San Rafael High when I did, we sometimes talk about our teachers. We know how truly fortunate we were. Charlie Fesler, Allen Barahal, Carroll Leach, Prosper Boutet, Jack Curtin, Lew Levinson, a dozen more. What we got was one of the all-time breaks going to that school at that time.

Maybe if we didn’t make it so hard to do the job, we’d be able to grow more teachers like these. Pay ‘em a real salary. Treat ‘em like the extraordinary resources they are, value their gifts. Hire teachers and get out of their way. Quit making them scapegoats for the problems of government or society.

Jake’s leaving San Andreas at the right time. Without Jim, the place isn’t going to be the same. Maybe there’ll be another one, it’s possible, someone with heart and soul, someone who loves kids and they can bloody well tell, you know. Hope so. Kids need people like that.

“I will concede you know more about JFK’s assassination than 99% of literate America. Your theory could very possibly be the best one. I concede. You win.
 
“However, your claims about RFK’s shooting are far less plausible...”

That’s part of a letter I got the other day from a guy I know on the east coast. Maybe it’s the weather.

For years I’ve been finding his comments in my e-mail in basket every time I wrote about one or more of the political assassinations which radically changed the course of American history. They have not been complimentary.

He thinks he’s my friend. Now, I really don’t mind people disagreeing with me. I’ve lived long enough to have been wrong many, many times about a wide range of things, and one of the great benefits of having real friends is that they’ll let you know when they think you’re screwing up.

This guy, though, it’s not that sort of commentary. For one thing, his is not a friendly disagreement. It's closer to a relentless barrage of intellectually-pretentious claptrap. For another, his ignorance of the subject matter is absolutely breathtaking.

The above few lines: on the one hand, after calling me a variety of unpleasant names with respect to my work on the John Kennedy murder, which for a long time he has insisted was done by the government’s chosen patsy, he now backs off. No explanation, no indication that he’s done any research on his own –– other than reading the preposterous Stephen King book –– and there’s the odd “you win” turn of phrase.

I win? What the devil does that mean? It means, apparently, that he thought we were engaged in a contest. It would be cheap to recite the expression concerning the war of wits with an unarmed man, but I’m a cheap sort and this guy, when it comes to knowledge of subject, truly is unarmed.

But he can’t let it go, can he? No. My ‘claims about RFK’s shooting are far less plausible...’ Is that right? And he would arrive at that conclusion based on, uh, what?

Today is the 44th anniversary of Robert Kennedy’s primary victory in 1968. Shortly after midnight, walking with a small entourage through the narrow passageway leading to the kitchen in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, he was shot in the head.

With his death, the country was lost. The war in Viet Nam continued for many years, and another 30,000 Americans and a million Vietnamese died while Brown & Root, the precursor to Halliburton, made a fortune. The United States has been on a downward trajectory since then. That is not coincidental.

I’m going to post this brief note and get to bed. It’s late and I’ve got work to do tomorrow. Sometime in the next day or two, I’ll write about Robert Kennedy’s murder. I’ll recite facts and engage in some speculation. Then you can decide whether my ‘claims are...plausible.’