News From A Parallel World

Blackmail

Thu, 20 Jun 2013 09:54:19 +0200

The way Hoover used to work it: he’d make personal contact with the victim and say, Senator, I just want you to know that we came across this information out there about you, and we were able to keep it quiet so you don’t need to worry.

And the victim would know that Hoover knew and that Hoover was a power-mad, vindictive son of a bitch who would not hesitate to destroy anybody’s career, or life, if he was in the mood.

He tried pulling that shit with the Kennedys and it didn’t quite work. He called Robert, who was Attorney General, and said, you know, we’ve run across some information about your brother and this woman named Mary Meyer, and we think it might be an embarrassment if the public were to find out. The Kennedys told him to go fuck himself.

You know how that turned out. Mary Meyer was murdered, too.

With most people, though, Hoover could get what he wanted, which was often what his good friends in organized crime wanted. He actually denied there was such a thing as the Mafia, while sharing a box seat with gangsters at Del Mar Racetrack in California. He could redirect popular attention instead to a mythical ‘Communist conspiracy,’ and chase ‘Reds’ for forty years.

When Edward Snowden blew the whistle on massive spying by the National Security Agency, an operation of the U.S. military, what struck me immediately were the enormous blackmail possibilities inherent in it.

The NSA could and evidently has captured my email, web searches, phone calls, and the like, and yours, too, don’t kid yourself, but what were they going to find out? My views of the Giants’ chances this year? When the next card game’s going to be and where? My opinion of Barack Obama?

Presumably, they have been able to learn the identity of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people having affairs.

But what the Snowden revelations brought to mind was Hoover and what he might’ve been able to do with this level of sophisticated surveillance. Then, yesterday, came a statement from Russell Tice, another former NSA employee, who told several on line radio journalists about what he personally saw in 2004.

“I had my hand literally on the paperwork,” he told Peter B. Collins. “They went after members of Congress, the Senate and the House, especially on the intelligence and armed services committees and the judicial committee, but they went after other ones, too. They went after lawyers and law firms and they went after judges. They went after State Department officials… They went after U.S. international corporations, U.S. banking firms and financial firms. They went after NGOs (non-governmental organizations) like the Red Cross and people like that, that go overseas and do humanitarian work…

“Don’t tell me there’s no abuse because I had this stuff in my hands, I looked at it, and in some cases I was literally involved in the technology that was going after this stuff. When I said to (Keith) Olbermann, my thing is high tech, the other thing is the dragnet… the terrestrial dragnet. Well, my specialty is outer space, I deal with satellites, everything that goes in and out of space, I did my spying, that’s how I found out about this.”

Question: this creates the potential for massive blackmail…

“Absolutely. I was worried that the intelligence community now has sway over what is going on. I haven’t given you any names. This was in the summer of 2004. One of the papers I had in my hands was a bunch of numbers associated with a forty-something wanna-be Senator from Illinois, that’s who they went after…

“I can give you names of a bunch of different people they went after that I saw, the names and phone numbers of congress people and not only them, what looked like staff people, too, and not only their congressional offices, their home state offices. This thing is incredible what NSA’s done. They turned themselves into a rogue agency that has J. Edgar Hoover capabilities on a monstrous scale, on steroids.”

Tice had other names to offer besides Barack Obama, then a young candidate for U.S. Senate but already a rising star in the Democratic Party. The NSA, to Tice’s personal knowledge, was spying on Senators Diane Feinstein, Hillary Clinton, Orrin Hatch, and Dick Durbin. He says that the NSA is wiretapping everyone, that the captured material is stored in Utah, in the massive complex he says is already operational, contrary to what the government claims.

Maybe this was inevitable. After all, though the nation’s politicians breathed an enormous, collective sigh of relief when Hoover finally died, the power he was able to wield was available to anyone else with the ability to spy on America, and the growth of technology has made that a rather fantastic temptation to power-made sociopaths.

It may not have been strictly necessary to blackmail Congress into passage of the insane Patriot Act, as well as subsequent insults to the Constitution in the form of the NDAA and numerous other incursions against the protections of the Bill of Rights, but it probably helped.

For years, people everywhere have wondered what the hell is wrong with the President and with Congress. Why in the world would they chip away at the freedoms guaranteed under our laws in the name of ‘anti-terrorism,’ when anyone with even a modest intelligence can see that such acts do nothing to improve our security and everything to jeopardize it.

How did the bankers manage to get the government to pay them hundreds of billions even though they’d just finished –– well, maybe not finished –– swindling the country? How did the military get the civilian authority to wipe out the safeguards of posse comitatus, which had protected America from excesses by the army on our own land for more than a century? How in the world could a crazy, dangerous thing such as the NDAA, which purports to kill habeas corpus and the rights of the accused, get passed in the Senate by a vote of 93-7?

Oh, I know it’s hard to swallow. It’s hard to swallow. But it looks as though it’s true.

Comments

Trust Us, You Dumb Fucks

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 03:35:11 +0200

I saw the President’s statement, his latest, I think, defending the NSA program, Prism, and the government’s gathering of mass information on everyone in the country, stammering a bit and looking somewhat glassy-eyed but, then, he would, wouldn’t he, since we’re looking at the complete disaster now, the end of any real pretense.

Obama babbles about having a ‘conversation’ which according to him will involve ‘balancing’ two competing interests, one being your freedom, your birthright, your Constitution, and the other being your ‘security.’ We have to find that balance, Obama says, but he does not really mean ‘we.’ He means he and his friends, the army and the important people. The rest of us can go pound salt.

It is, like everything else in this man’s catastrophic presidency, a lie. Freedom and your rights under the 4th Amendment are not a counterweight to your security, where some mythical ‘balance’ need be found by the gang in charge, where you’ll have to give up some freedom, just a little bit, we’ll be really, really careful, in order to keep you safe.

Trust us, you dumb fucks.

Tonight, the President’s latest comic relief will appear on Charlie Rose, a perfect forum for pretentious claptrap. One of his mouthpieces, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, turned up on CBS’s Face The Nation yesterday, saying “I think that the American people can feel confident that we have those three branches looking,” in reference to the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, meaning that there’s plenty of ‘oversight’ by the ‘authorities.’

What McDonough was actually getting at was:

"The president is not saying, 'Trust me.' The president is saying, 'I want every member of Congress, on whose authority we are running this program, to be briefed on it, to come to the administration with questions and to also be accountable for it.'" So, what the President is saying is ‘Trust Diane Feinstein. and a secret court.’

In fact, as Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) has been trying desperately to warn people about for at least six months, the army and the FBI are spying on everyone and 'oversight' amounts to 'you folks go right ahead.' The intelligence committees of the House and Senate have received ‘briefings’ on programs which cannot be verified; the rest of the Congress has not been told anything of substance, not even that their own phones are certainly tapped.

Congress, says Obama, authorized these programs, even if they have no idea what they are, and they’re legal because a secret court you’ll never know about says they’re legal. Where did we get these secret judges and secret proceedings? From Joseph Stalin; he’s not using them anymore.

The purported ‘legality’ of the campaign of massive surveillance is another classic case of lies and misdirection. The Democrats’ minority whip in the House, Steny Hoyer, actually explained to the press six days ago that the same massive surveillance which was illegal when George Bush did it is now legal! That’s right, it’s legal because we say it is.

A secondary but critical strategy used by Obama and his hacks is to ignore the Prism operation and focus on a quite different spy program which seizes what is called ‘metadata,’ that information which may be gleaned from capturing every e-mail and telephone call without also picking up, or at least sorting through, content. The use of ‘metadata’ is claimed to be a lot less intrusive since in theory no one is listening to your calls or reading your mail. Obama and his defenders purposely conflate the two programs as a means of confusing the public. But even metadata collection is a very dangerous program because it allows the agency to create a three-dimensional profile of every person. Vice President Joe Biden understood this when he was asked about a similar attempt under Bush in 2006:

"I don't have to listen to your phone calls to know what you're doing. If I know every single phone call you made, I'm able to determine every single person you talked to. I can get a pattern about your life that is very, very intrusive. . . . If it's true that 200 million Americans' phone calls were monitored - in terms of not listening to what they said, but to whom they spoke and who spoke to them - I don't know, the Congress should investigative this. It doesn’t pass the Fourth Amendment test"

Obama himself, on Rose, from a PBS advance transcript:

"What I can say unequivocally is that if you are a U.S. person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls, and the NSA cannot target your e-mails … and have not."

Let’s see, how can I put this? He’s lying. Maybe I should use euphemism, that’s what Obama often does. Kidnapping and torture is ‘extraordinary rendition.’ A death list is a ‘disposition matrix.’ But, no, this column is not a presidential press release.

One revealing exchange:

Rose: So I hear you saying, I have no problem with what NSA has been doing.

Obama: Well, let me — let me finish, because I don’t. So, what happens is that the FBI — if, in fact, it now wants to get content; if, in fact, it wants to start tapping that phone — it’s got to go to the FISA court with probable cause and ask for a warrant.

Rose: But has FISA court turned down any request?

Obama: The — because — the — first of all, Charlie, the number of requests are surprisingly small… number one. Number two, folks don’t go with a query unless they’ve got a pretty good suspicion.

Rose: Should this be transparent in some way?

Obama: It is transparent. That’s why we set up the FISA court.

To give Rose his due, he appears at least to be trying, but how can you hold the President to account when he refuses to answer a straight question?

The answers Obama didn’t give, the truth, is this:

The FBI has to go to the FISA court to get a warrant, but of course that doesn’t respond to your question. First, NSA, not the FBI, is running Prism, and they’re not relying on warrants because we don’t think they need any. Second, the Prism operation captures everything, all the words and music, your e-mails, your web searches, your social site conversations, and stores them as data for later retrieval. Third, NSA employees, some of whom are private contractors, can listen to any conversation they want to and you’ll never know about it. Fourth, no, Charlie, FISA has never turned down a request. I didn’t want to tell you that because it sounds bad. Instead I danced away with that vague reference to “the number of requests are (sic) surprisingly small,” which of course tells you nothing. What’s ‘surprisingly’ mean? Five hundred? Five hundred million? You’ll never know. Fifth, remember the last time I got vague with numbers? I said the number of civilian casualties from my remote control drone attacks have been ‘surprisingly small.’ The actual number is about 30,000 dead innocents, but we think that’s surprisingly small under the circumstances. Sixth, we set up the FISA court to avoid transparency. If we had to take our requests for warrants to a real court, then people could find out about it. With FISA, even the targets never know unless they get lucky.

Later on in the interview, Obama claims that the massive surveillance program has “interrupted” terrorist plots inside the U.S., citing specifically the case of Najibullah Zazi, who was arrested four years ago and charged with planning to hit the New York subway system with bombs. Interesting that Obama would use this example as support for the proposition that American should surrender our most basic freedom, the guarantees of the 4th Amendment since, first, Zazi was captured not because of the spy operations of the NSA or FBI but as a result of ordinary, good police work, the kind that does not require destruction of the Constitution.

It’s also interesting that the Zazi case is the only one the government can cite, not very surprising since it’s been well-documented that 14 of the known 22 ‘terrorist’ plots which the government has managed to short-circuit since 2001 were actually instigated by the FBI itself.

Any competent reading of the 4th Amendment should make clear that the government has no possible legal authority for conducting massive surveillance of its citizens. Any such program is against the law and should result in prison terms for those engaging in it, those who created it, and those who went along with it. That is not hyperbole. It is simply a fair application of American law.

But thus far, nobody has had standing, according to the courts, to bring the matter to a hearing. Why? Because, said the courts, no one was permitted to use classified information to show that they, themselves, were among a class of people harmed by the practice. Even if the proof existed, it was classified secret and, as such, could not be used in court. So several lawsuits seeking relief from the massive spying we know was going on got tossed from this technical deficit. Now, however, the government cannot defend its felonies by saying people do not know because we do know, we know that we’re all being tapped, our mail is being captured and stored, and we know it thanks to the guts of a real patriot, one Edward Snowden.

My security as an American, my country’s security lies in its adherence to its fundamental laws, its Bill of Rights. My security is endangered, is damaged, only if those rights are compromised. And right now we have a President, a Congress, and a mass media falling all over one another in the race to do exactly that.

The greatest threat to American security is not some ‘terrorist,’ mythical or not. If someone blows up a public gathering, it is a crime, an ugly crime which requires real law enforcement and criminal penalties. If someone blows up the public’s rights under the Constitution, it is a crime much graver because the rights taken away will not be given back. The President apparently does not know this.

All across the internet now there are arguments, plenty of commentary, rumors, charges, false stories, planted stories, the bleating of fools. A single man stood against the espionage establishment, giving up a cushy life, maybe any life at all, to do the right thing, and he’s catching hell from all sides.

It’s a real question in my mind, watching this circus, reading these comments, noting the insane, pompous excretions from columnists such as Toobin in the New Yorker and Brooks and Thomas J. Friedman in the New York Times, and those creeps at CNN and the useless wankers Mitchell, Maddow, Matthews, and O’Donnell on MSNBC: are Americans too stupid and careless to deserve democracy?

Judging by the posted remarks on numerous web sites, plenty of Americans think it’s just ducky if the government spies on them since they’re ‘not doing anything wrong.’ It’s as though the entire history, the struggle for liberty, the sacrifices, the courage of real people have come to naught because the public cares more about its television shows and what they can buy at the mall than about liberty or the lies of their President.

Those who say that spying doesn’t bother them are fools, of course, but in some cases they simply have no idea what it means, and they are not going to learn about it on any of the television networks. It’s a classic conceit of the ‘liberals’ that MSNBC and its talking heads are ‘good guys’ and trustworthy, so much smarter than those blockheads at Fox. The truth, however, is that there is no more truth on MSNBC than on Fox, just a different, slightly more sophisticated variety of lie. Why do you think Obama is taking his road show to PBS tonight?

Trust us, you dumb fucks.

Joseph Goebbels noted that it was the ideal situation to have what are ostensibly differing news sources operating within a single closed system. That’s what we’ve got in America, and we don’t even know it. There are people out there who think Obama would be a much better President if only the Republicans wouldn’t keep blocking everything he’s trying to do. Seriously.

Edward Snowden is vilified by both major parties, mostly by Democrats since they are the assholes in power. Were Bush still in office, the sharpest arrows would no doubt be coming from the other guys.

It’s a real lesson in reality, for those with the guts to learn from it. From Obama to the Congressional leaders to the ‘liberals’ writing in the ‘liberal’ magazines and newspapers to the ‘liberals’ pontificating on ‘liberal’ radio and television networks, there is a near-unanimity: Snowden is a “traitor” (Diane Feinstein) who ought to be “prosecuted” (Al Franken), and hit with the full authority of the law. Never mind that he has exposed a most alarming, systemic violation of law, the utter destruction of the Constitution by the U.S. army, in conspiracy with a president and a handful of legislative ‘leaders,’ it is the whistle blower who must be found and punished.

That’s what the story is in the United States now. The person who exposes the crime is to be punished; the perps go free. Do you know about Thomas Drake? Like Snowden, he was an insider who saw massive violations of the law. Unlike Snowden, he brought these crimes to the attention of his superiors. They went after him. They charged him with breaking every law they could dream up. They ruined his life. They finally couldn’t jail him but that was only by fluke.

You may want to read Drake’s excellent recounting of his own experience and his observations on what Snowden is facing, in the Guardian UK, June 12 edition, online. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/12/snowden-surveillance-subverting-constitution

Drake came across something inside the NSA in 2001, called ‘Stellar Wind,” which was plainly illegal. He talked to some NSA legal people. They told him that since the NSA was doing it, it was therefore legal. Oddly, this is the same rationale used a week ago by Diane Feinstein, the senior Senator from California and Steny Hoyer, that pathetic joke from Maryland.

Stellar Wind was blanket electronic surveillance. The only legal difference between that and Prism is that the NSA now uses the fiction that a ‘warrant’ has been issued, albeit by a secret court, and albeit for the mail and other personal data on hundreds of millions of people.

Any sane reading of the 4th Amendment makes obvious the impossibility of a legal mass surveillance, since the army, nor Obama, nor any of the rest of those criminals in power can meet its terms. How can a seeker of any warrant ‘describe with particularity’ the persons to be searched and the things to be seized? Where is the probable cause? Does the government believe that there is probable cause to believe that hundreds of millions of Americans are engaged in criminal or ‘terrorist’ activity?

I’m watching this parade, the politicians and talking heads, and columnists, and I’m thinking the whole thing is over. We have allowed, through our sloth, our inattention, our cupidity, however and by whatever terms one wishes to use, the ascendancy of an evil class in America. The idea that a free society can exist when its military captures all the communications of its citizens is beyond rational exposition. And yet we have Harry Reid telling Americans to “calm down.”

The disinformation brigade is out in force, too, agents of the government or just plain crazy, to suggest that Snowden is a ‘disturbed’ person, or a government ‘agent’ whose work is designed to scare us more than we already are. Truth is a hard act these days. Maybe it’s always been so.

On YouTube you can find the videos contrasting what Obama said while campaigning and what he says now about government spying on its people. In 2008, he said, "This administration also puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide." I’ve never seen a civil libertarian turn so quickly into a mouthpiece for a police state. Makes me wonder who he really is, where he really comes from, what he really believed back when he was suckering me and millions like me into believing just one more time in this bankrupt system.

Trust us, you dumb fucks.

Not anymore.

http://www.amazon.com/News-From-A-Parallel-World/dp/1478194448

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Senator Franken Spits Up On Himself

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 01:53:07 +0200

"As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air — however slight — lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.”

from The Douglas Letters : Selections from the Private Papers of Justice William O. Douglas (1987), edited by Melvin I. Urofsky and Philip E. Urofsky, p. 162.

In an odd coincidence, I recently watched some of the original Saturday Night Live shows on video out of Netflix. One of the show’s writers and occasional performers was, as you probably know, the man who is now the junior Senator from Minnesota. He’s also available wearing an ape costume in an entertaining Eddie Murphy, Dan Aykroyd, Jamie Lee Curtis, movie called ‘Trading Places.’

Safe to say that in those days, Al Franken ingested an impressive range and quantity of illegal drugs. Also safe to say: had his telephone calls and personal communications been recorded for posterity, or for the enormous data center the government is presently constructing in Utah, there would now be available to anyone intent on blackmail or extortion a treasure trove of his seditious conversations and anti-government opinions.

It is a coincidence because today I read his comments on the disclosure –– although not to him; he says he’s known about it all along –– that the military’s spy apparatus, NSA, spies on everyone. He thinks it’s just peachy.

You know, Franken often played drooling loonies but I’d figured it was an act. It now looks as though he was just playing himself. Maybe all those years of drugs really did wax his brain.

The Senator’s statement ran like this:

“I can assure you this is not about spying on the American people. I have a high level of confidence that this is used to protect us and I know that it has been successful in preventing terrorism.”

A few years back, I floated a concept I called the Bonehead Baseline. My notion was that there existed a certain percentage of the population of the United States so utterly stupid it would vote to boil itself in oil if the mass media or the President suggested it. I pegged that percentage at about one-quarter.

I think now that I have overestimated the intelligence of Americans.

We all knew that there were creeps such as Mike Rogers (R-Mich) and Peter King (R-NY) who would sell the Constitution for a nickel and some good seats at the Super Bowl, but until Franken’s moronic statement I had not fully appreciated the level of stupid among ‘liberal Democrats.’ I mean, sure, Feinstein’s a jerk, and Harry Reid is a corrupt old bag of wind, but Al Franken?

What’s so troubling about Franken’s statement is not just that it’s bullshit. That’s what we get so much of anyhow these days, from every mass media outlet (MSNBC had Andrea Mitchell fawning over Feinstein) and the President and much of the Congress, but surely there were some intelligent people in the Senate, I mean apart from Ron Wyden (D-OR), had to be.

“I can assure you that this is not about spying on the American people.” So, what would you call it when secret agencies with undisclosed powers and budgets we can’t examine, have backdoor access to our entire field of communications such that our travel and behavior, our words and deeds, are in fact all tracked electronically and stored in a vast facility being built to house it? You call that “protecting me”?

“I know that it has been successful in preventing terrorism.” Excuse me, Senator, but you know no such thing, nor could you. You know only what you’ve been told by the secret police.

And what are the secret police telling Senator Franken? The general in charge of NSA –– you do know that the NSA is a military operation not under any civilian control, don’t you? –– Keith Alexander, told the Senate Appropriations Committee that the massive surveillance has ‘disrupted dozens of terrorist attacks.’

According to the unsigned Associated Press story, Alexander explicitly described... how the programs worked in collecting Americans’ phone records and tapping into their internet activity.

Vigorously defending the programs (he) said the public needs to know how the programs operate, amid growing concerns that government efforts to secure the nation are encroaching on Americans’ privacy and civil liberties.

“I want the American people to know that we’re trying to be transparent here, protect civil liberties and privacy, but also the security of the country. If we tell the terrorists every way that we’re going to track them, they will get through and Americans will die,” Alexander testified.

Since, for at least seven years that we know of, the military has been doing everything possible to conceal how the programs operate, in fact to conceal their very existence, it’s a little hard to buy the General’s ridiculous claims to ‘transparency.’ Of course, ‘transparency’ is one of the new buzz words used by politicians to conceal that they are doing precisely the opposite. Obama likes this word, too, as he prosecutes anyone who spills the beans about illegal activities and even war crimes, and classifies as ‘secret’ more documents than every U.S. President in history before him, combined.

“If we tell the terrorists every way that we’re going to track them...”

Let’s assume for the moment that there really are such creatures as “the terrorists.” It’s a fiction in real life, as you probably realize if you think it over. “The terrorists” amount to political and operational ‘enemies’ of the United States, largely confined to other regions of the world where they are fighting the attempts by the U.S. empire to control their countries and steal their resources. These are essentially nationalist wars.

There are also some people who would like to strike targets inside the U.S. Some of them are motivated by a desire to “get even” with America for its own terrorist actions in other places. Some are nasty types who think blowing up innocent people is justifiable –– I’m talking now about people not associated with Obama and his crew and the U.S. military.

It would be fair to say that there is general agreement among Americans of all political viewpoints that we would like to avert or prevent any such attacks in America. Regardless of someone’s rationale, we don’t want them setting off bombs in our country. If we can stop them from doing so, we ought to.

But what, exactly, are the threats of terrorism inside the United States? What forms of intelligence and police work is best able to stop these threats from becoming attacks?

What Alexander told the Senate sounds good until one applies a little logic to it, or until one insists on some details on how massive surveillance has protected Americans.

First, whatever actual ‘terrorists’ there may be who wish to cause death and destruction inside the U.S., have heard of the NSA, the FBI, the CIA, and the New York Times. They know about wiretapping and about GPS. They are not going to be sending other plotters e-mails or discussing their plans over the phone, know what I mean? Not unless they’re as fucking stupid as Al Franken.

So capturing and storing every communication of every American is probably not going to assist anyone is averting a ‘terrorist’ act.

The Associated Press story didn’t mention it for seven paragraphs, but finally got around to it. Alexander “did not give details on the terror plot he said had been disrupted.” They are all for 'transparency' but they're not going to tell you a thing. Trust us. Where have we heard that before?

Thus, Americans are supposed to take his word for it, NSA’s word for it, that its spy network, which directly destroys the Constitutional protections of the 4th Amendment under the guise of “protecting” us from “plots,” is just fine and we ought to, in the immortal advice of Harry Reid, “calm down.”

The lie that we have to surrender our freedom in order to be safe is the same lie dictators have told for centuries. It is never the truth but it depends for acceptance on the fear and cowardice of the people. Remember the ‘anthrax letters’ mailed to a handful of ‘left-oriented’ Senators in the wake of 9-11? Note the recent ‘ricin’ letters sent to Obama? Terrorists did not do these things. How do I know? Because terrorists know that Senators and the President do not open their own mail.

But Senators are easily frightened. They don’t mind surrendering your freedom in exchange for feeling a little bit more secure themselves behind the bullet-proof glass in their limousines.

So Al Franken cannot intelligently say to us that he “knows” that the Prism program has saved lives because he’s basing this only on claims made to him by the U.S. military, which in turn can’t tell him anything specific because it might jeopardize the secrecy necessary to protect his ass.

The “foiled plot” argument is being used by others, as well. Obama specifically mentioned two such plots, one of them being the 2009 subway bombing plot in New York. But as several investigative journalists have already noted, these were thwarted not by Prism or any other federal surveillance program but by ordinary, intelligent police work.

In fact, the Department of Homeland Security has secured nothing other than the largest budget of any domestic program and a bureaucratic future of unlimited expansion built on the fear of Americans.

We are at a dangerous crossing in the United States. Many of the people we have trusted to safeguard our democracy have fallen far short of their oaths. Some members of Congress, such as Peter King of New York, are clamoring for the prosecution of the journalist who broke the NSA spying story, Glenn Greenwald. Had anyone tried to prosecute the Washington Post for printing the Pentagon Papers, they’d have been laughed out of office. But times have changed.

Instead of being angered at the criminal acts exposed, our ‘leaders’ are angry that anyone exposed them. Today there are actually proposals to create yet another spy agency inside the NSA to guard against leaks. The government, which ought to be standing up for Americans rights under the Constitution, is instead searching for ways to prosecute those who exercise them too vigilantly.

And, meanwhile, the ‘debate’ is being framed as one of ‘balance’ between the right to privacy and the need for ‘security.’ Any time you hear this said, by anyone, in the newspaper or online or at a social gathering, you must flatten it. It is a false equation. Security is not increased or improved but endangered by incursions on privacy or other civil liberties. Wiretapping everyone does not make everyone more secure but less secure. Spying on the nation, ruining the constitution, wrecks America, it does not preserve it.

What the military has done is incredibly dangerous to a free society. The support it is getting from toads like Franken is alarming. Rights once surrendered can never be retrieved.

And there’s one more thing, one thing I don’t see mentioned anywhere but which may be the worst aspect of this entire affair.

When the military can spy on everyone, answerable only in theory to a small group which rubber-stamps what they do based only on assurances, the situation is inherently anti-democratic. There is nothing to stop the implementation of a dictatorship in whatever form the military wishes.

When the military can spy on everyone, it thereupon has access to everything said or written by everyone in public life, every member of the House and Senate, every person on a government regulatory body, every federal judge, every member of the cabinet. J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI for forty years as a big extortion and blackmail racket because he had wiretaps on some politicians and business leaders. What he did was nothing compared to the system already being implemented. And when the military can blackmail everybody in Congress and on the Supreme Court, just what kind of America do you think you’ll be living in, Senator Franken?

Comments

Edward Snowden And The Fight To Save America

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 09:09:30 +0200

California Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein called him a traitor today, referring to Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old contract employee who leaked the NSA’s power point presentation, used by the agency to orient personnel, to the Guardian UK and to the Washington Post. Pretty rich coming from Feinstein, whose negligence and complicity in undermining the most fundamental freedoms of Americans places her right at the top of the list if we’re going to talk about traitors.

Feinstein told the media that she, as chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and her colleagues, have known of the full-scale surveillance and interception of the e-mails, private documents, telephone records and calls, and web searches of the entire American population for seven years now, that this had been approved under Section 215 of the Patriot Act by the secret court authorized to give such blanket approval, and that it was all therefore legal.

Senator Harry Reid, another Democrat whose time on planet earth evidently expired long ago but he just hasn’t gotten the word yet, told critics of the spy network to “calm down,” as though we are little children having a tantrum over what the adults, in their wisdom, have done.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The Fourth Amendment’s roots in English common law can be traced back at least four hundred years, where it was first recognized that the ruler’s power to invade one’s home or person ought not to be unlimited but should required just cause. By the mid-18th century, just prior to the American colonial revolution, a writer named John Entick, whose pamphlets angered the king, had his home forcibly entered by the king’s messenger, Nathan Carrington, on a warrant issued by the 2nd Earl of Halifax, one George Montagu-Dunk. Carrington was authorized to look for and seize writings which had offended the monarch. In the ensuing legal case, Entick was freed by ruling of Charles Pratt, First Earl of Camden, who held that the warrant lacked probable cause.

Whether that nitwit Feinstein understands it or not, the Fourth Amendment specifically prohibits the sort of police state policies she and her Senate colleagues have so carelessly approved. Searches and seizures require warrants. No warrants shall issue except with a showing of probable cause which would describe with particularity the places, persons, and things. That’s slightly different from the secret court which told NSA and its other secret police friends, essentially, go ahead and grab whatever you want.

The various arguments being offered now by Barack Obama and his crew, by Feinstein, and by National Intelligence Director James Clapper, who said the leak would cause “irreversible harm,” are collectively the sort of rhetoric one expects from 9th graders on the losing end of a school debate.

As for Clapper, he ought to be arrested and charged with perjury, at least with lying to a congressional committee. As Jody Westby reminds us in her excellent column in Forbes, On March 13, 2013, Clapper was asked by Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon: “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Clapper said, “No, sir.” Westby skipped the second part of that exchange, which went like this:

“Wyden: It does not?

“Clapper: Not wittingly. There are cases where they could, inadvertently perhaps, collect –– but not wittingly.”

A few days ago, Clapper claimed that “the only type of information acquired under the Court’s order is telephony metadata, such as telephone numbers dialed and length of calls.” This, too, is a lie.

As to his testimony in March, Clapper was asked, by a fawning Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC, “Senator Wyden made quite a lot out of your exchange with him last March during the hearings. Can you explain what you meant when you said that there was not data collection on millions of Americans?

“Clapper: First –– as I said, I have great respect for Senator Wyden. I thought, though in retrospect, I was asked –– ‘when are you going to start, stop beating your wife’ kind of question, which is meaning not –– answerable necessary by a simple yes or no. So I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful manner by saying no.”

You get that? The ‘most truthful, least untruthful’ answer was a direct lie. A question about whether the government was spying on millions of America was on the order of a trick question. This is the man who runs the agency which is spying on everything you read and write, everything you say, and on your friends and neighbors.

Since without honest testimony from people inside the spy agency, especially its chief, Congress couldn’t do its oversight job even if it wanted to, Clapper’s lies are extremely important. The bastard ought to be in prison for this, alone. And, by the way, Clapper, my name is spelled R-A-Z-N-I-K-O-V, and you know where I live. You know where I live but I know what you are.

The real “harm’ these leaks cause are to the secrets the U.S. government wants to keep from its own people. Feinstein, appearing on television talk shows and in media interviews –– evidently, she’s been tapped to do this –– has claimed that the secret program has protected the nation by foiling ‘terrorist plots.’ Sadly, the two she referred to, including a 2009 plan to bomb the New York subway system, were actually broken by ordinary police work and had nothing to do with the police state mechanism she’s defending. There are other examples, she adds, lamely, but she can’t tell us about them because they’re secret.

Feinstein, Clapper, and Mike Rogers, House Intelligence Committee chairman, have made it a point to condemn news agencies and journalists who aided Snowden or others who disclose ‘secret’ information. Rogers, who once demanded the death penalty for Bradley Manning, said that journalist Glenn Greenwald, who helped break the story in the Guardian, “doesn’t have a clue how this thing works.”

Well, how does it work? Until Snowden, anyone protesting the massive spy operation as being illegal ran into a spectacular legal dead-end. Earlier this year, in the case of Amnesty International v. Clapper, the Supreme Court dismissed a suit against the mass collection of phone records on the grounds that the plaintiffs –– since the information was secret –– couldn’t prove what the program did or that they were personally subject to surveillance.

This madness in the legal thicket has been going on for some time now, with judges throwing out cases because those complaining about government malfeasance and even criminal behavior weren’t allowed to see or even produce documents proving it. In one case, where a plaintiff had actual proof, a federal court explained that he was not entitled to possess it and therefore it was inadmissible.

It is not just since 9-11 that this has been developing. The United States has been working its way toward a fair imitation of East Germany for quite a long time. For example, according to the new Atlantic Monthly piece by Bruce Schneier, ‘What We Don’t Know About Spying On Citizens: Scarier Than What We Know,’ the FBI has issued tens of thousands of what are called ‘National Security letters,’ which permit it to collect information on millions of people without a warrant, including from cloud-computer users, that it’s been intercepting cell phone data for 20 years, and that it can turn some powered-off cell phones into bugging devices. We know that the FBI initiated a program called Carnivore designed to capture everybody’s e-mail.

We also know that the NSA has a rather large inventory of domestic surveillance and data-mining programs with names such as Trailblazer, Stellar Wind, and Ragtime. We know NSA is building an enormous facility in Utah to store the data it’s collecting, a facility bigger than the Pentagon.

We know that when Congress made a half-assed attempt to rein-in the secret police by defunding the Total Information Awareness program in 2003, the TIA simply turned into several other operations under other names and kept right on going. We know that the Department of Homeland Security is collecting data on people and working with a newly-militarized urban police force to track dissidents. None of this has anything to do with national security or ‘terrorists,’ but it has everything to do with politics and controlling the people.

There have already been a number of documentary leaks showing that during the Occupy demonstrations, urban police forces took their orders from DHS, infiltrated dissenters with government agents, and collected names and information on anyone who participated. This is not what democracies do; this is what dictatorships do.

In the mid-1970s, when, unlike today, the Senate cared about things such as the Bill of Rights and asserting control over secret police operations, there was a committee which held hearings and demanded answers from people such as the CIA director. They got lied to, of course, but they exposed plenty of criminality, such as the COINTELPRO nightmare of the FBI, and they tried to prevent its continuation. They failed, of course, because in the end the secret police simply renamed things, hid things, and did the other things that thugs do and, after a while, the Congress was no longer comprised mainly of decent Senators, the media had been bought off, and the American people didn’t give a shit.

Now we’ve got the PRISM program, a data collection operation which has the capacity to pick up every e-mail you write, every web site you visit, every phone call you make. It is in short a total information gathering campaign run by NSA –– which is the military –– and which has managed to infiltrate or otherwise compromise civilian companies from Google to Microsoft to Facebook. The corporations thus far named, nine of them, have issued various phony denials, the kind of denial that doesn’t actually deny anything. Several companies proclaimed they had never heard of Prism, which fact doesn’t mean they didn’t hand over everything when asked; another favorite was the “no direct” assertion, which means only that a secondary source was inserted.

One example is Apple, which said it had never heard of Prism and “We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers and any agency requesting customer data must get a court order.” This, of course, doesn’t actually address the problem since, first, Prism has obtained a blanket order, evidently, which ‘legally authorizes wholesale access to records and, second, ‘direct’ can mean that the access is run through a secondary source. As Glenn Greenwald responded to it, “what this program allows is for them, either because the companies have given over access to their servers, as the NSA claims, or apparently the NSA has simply seized it, as the companies now claim –– the NSA is able to go in –– anyone at a monitor in an NSA facility can go in at any time and either read messages that are stored in Facebook or in real time surveil conversations and chats that take place on Skype and Gmail and all other forms of communication. It’s an incredibly invasive system of surveillance worldwide that has zero checks of any kind.”

The militarization of communications in the United States is extremely alarming, something which should deeply concern every citizen, yet we have idiots like Feinstein prattling on about how she’s known about it for years, a version of ‘trust me,’ and a President who insists that the amount of freedom we’ve had yanked from us without our consent really isn’t much considering how it keeps us ‘safe.’

Prism includes the content of communications, not just the metadata. Charitably, one may think that Feinstein and these other useless hacks are simply too stupid to understand the distinction, but it’s important. And the corporations are said by NSA to have jumped on board with nary a dissent. Microsoft, whose slogan is “your privacy is our priority,” was the first to sign up; then came Yahoo in 2008, Google, Facebook, and PalTalk in 2009, YouTube in 2010, Skype and AOL in 2011, and Apple, with Jobs dead, in 2012.

Despite the lies out of Google and that lot, Prism gives the U.S. military and other secret police agencies direct access to communications companies’ servers. In fact, the NSA document notes that it has the “assistance of communications providers in the US.”

Supporters of the Fisa Amendments Act, renewed in December, 2012, despite questions from the few Senators who continued to be troubled by it, argued that an important safeguard against abuse was that the NSA couldn’t obtain electronic communications without the consent of the telecom and internet companies that control the data. But Prism makes that unnecessary since it lets the agency directly and unilaterally seize such communications off the servers.

The document leaked to the Guardian made it clear that Prism hands over everything: e-mail, video, voice chat, file transfers, voice-over IP (Skype) chats, photos, and social networking details, and more. They also provide a scary glimpse into the mindset of the secret police. Prism, one document declared, was made necessary because FISA had shortcomings. Under Fisa, there had to be individual warrants. “Fisa was broken because it provided privacy protections to people who were not entitled to them... there were too many e-mail accounts to be practical to seek Fisas for all.”

Translated, this means, simply, we can’t adhere to the constitution anymore because it’s too hard to get warrants on everybody we want to spy on, there are just so many of them. Does that suggest anything to you? I’d say that if you want to spy on so many people that it overwhelms the warrant system, you may be spying on too many people.

Does the U.S. military think there are millions of prospective ‘terrorists’ in the U.S.? Does it think it has such an urgent need to spy on those millions that the time-honored and constitutionally required seeking of a court warrant is too slow?

Since 2001, twice as many people have been killed by an allergy to peanut butter than have died in ‘terrorist’ events. Of the 20 ‘terrorist’ plots foiled by the FBI and other agencies, as the New York Times recently revealed, 14 of them were actually instigated by the FBI itself.

Someone wants to turn America into a dictatorship, into a country where freedom is just another word which has no meaning, where people are brainwashed into thinking that they can’t be truly free because then ‘the terrorists’ would do bad things to them. Someone wants America to be Soviet Russia or Franco’s Spain, or Hitler’s Germany.

It doesn’t have to happen, but we’d better wake up fast. We’ve got the President and the major leaders of his party telling us that living in a police state is really not so bad, and we’ve got a large number of people, maybe even a majority, who think that if they, themselves, are ‘not doing anything wrong,’ we shouldn’t worry about any of this.

The framers knew better. Having lived through especially pernicious practices authorized by the crown, America’s colonists wanted nothing more to do with writes of assistance and general warrants. The Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776 expressly forbade the use of general warrants:

“That general warrants, whereby any officer or messenger may be commanded to search suspected places without evidence of a fact committed, or to seize any person or persons not named, or whose offense is not particularly described and supported by evidence, are grievous and oppressive and ought not to be granted.”

Article XIV of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, written by John Adams and enacted in 1780 as part of the Massachusetts Constitution, added the requirement that all searches must be “reasonable” and served as the basis for the language of the Fourth Amendment:

“Every subject has a right to be secure from all unreasonable searches and seizures of his person, his houses, his papers, and all his possessions. All warrants, therefore, are contrary to this right, if the cause or foundation of them be not previously supported by oath or affirmation; and if the order in the warrant to a civil officer, to make search in suspected places, or to arrest one or more suspected persons, or to seize their property, be not accompanied with a special designation of the persons or objects of search, arrest, or seizure; and no warrant ought to be issued but in cases, and with the formalities, prescribed by the laws.”

To the extent this is a democracy, it didn’t get that way by magic or because God made it happen due to our goodness, or because we’re mostly Caucasian and therefore better and more deserving. It got this way because the framers carefully constructed a Bill of Rights to protect us, to give us the tools to protect ourselves, from tyrants. If we don’t use them, we will lose them, and we will indeed find out what a dictatorship feels like.

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"When The American People Find Out..."

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 07:16:46 +0200

“A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. ” James Madison, June 29th. 1787, Debates in Federal Convention.

The founders warned us. Washington predicted that a standing army would kill democracy. Until the aftermath of World War Two, America did not have such a beast. Even then it was largely nascent, manifestly subservient to civilian authority.

Not anymore. There are lessons here as we watch the empire fall, but they will be forgotten by the next civilization which aspires to be free.

I think the founders were brilliant but they could not anticipate everything. It’s a popular viewpoint these days, a revisionist viewpoint, that all those guys, well, they owned slaves, they wouldn’t permit women to vote, nor those who didn’t own property. Yes, yes. It was not paradise. It never is.

But what the founders were serious about was the protection of a people from tyranny. They’d just fought out from under it themselves and they knew the kind of injustice a controlling government was capable of.

Over time, though, even with all the brilliance, the sacrifices, the campaigns and rallying toward freedom, even with a clever design, there was eventually the relentless ascendancy of tyrants, people who figured out how to manipulate the system designed to control them.

Money is a lot of it, and capitalism, but any economic theory runs aground on the shoals of human deficiencies. Communism works, if people are perfect. If people are perfect, anything works, even democracy.

The thing I like about democracy is that it takes human frailty and stupidity, greed and even violent proclivities into account. It knows people will do brutal things and tries to guard against that becoming the central fact of government.

In the United States, the standing army became the imbalance which tipped the scales, but I include in that the secret police, all the apparatus which gains its power from force. So long as the army and police are obedient to a benevolent civil authority, freedom is possible, may even flourish. When that is over it does not return.

There are many ways to talk about this. One way I like to do it is remind people that when violent acts are sustained, when the military and secret police can kill a president and other great leaders who are on the side of the people, when they can do that and get away with it, democracy is effectively dead.

We didn’t do anything about it when the criminals at the top in America murdered John Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy. They knew then that no one would stop them. You can’t let that happen and expect to be free.

The disclosures this week of spying so massive as to astonish, the fact of the FBI and NSA and, by obvious extension, the CIA and Homeland Security having backdoor access to every e-mail, every online search, every cell call, every tweet, have brought two responses. One, by civil libertarians or simply patriots, is outrage. The government has compromised your every thought. These documents, all of these elements of your communication, are captured electronically and stored for future use against you.

It is not as though people are sitting in little windowless rooms listening in on all your calls or reading your mail; they don’t need to. The police state simply stores it all and holds it until such time as your political dissent or involvement in anti-government organizing makes it useful to retrieve. This is fascism. It’s here.

The second response, from authoritarian minds like California Senator Diane Feinstein, is that this program is necessary to “keep us safe” from “terrorists.” Feinstein also managed to claim that since massive surveillance had been authorized by a secret court and in use for years that it is legal, the Constitution apparently having slipped her mind.

Also pretending that it means nothing is the President, Barack Obama, who is now officially the worst President in American history and maybe the last. One of his mouthpieces, Josh Earnest, and how perfect is that, said it was a “critical tool in protecting the nation,” evidently unaware that destroying the Bill of Rights removes the most critical tool for protecting what the nation claims to stand for.

Not every member of the Senate and House even knew of the existence of the operation, which was disclosed only to the intelligence committees of each house. One member of the Senate committee, Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, though unable to tell the people what was going on due to the secrecy agreements these members must abide by, stood on the floor of the Senate over a year ago and issued this warning:

"I have served on the Intelligence Committee for a decade, and I want to deliver a warning this afternoon: when the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry.”

That day is here but it remains to be seen just how angry people are. Already, Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian UK journalist who broke both the Verizon and the PRISM scandal stories, is being tweeted by stupid people who say, well, so long as you’re not doing anything wrong it shouldn’t matter if the government reads your mail and tracks your internet usage; Greenwald replies, fine, then send me your access codes.

The very first leaks, that a hundred Associated Press writers had their phone logs intercepted by the FBI brought outrage from some media, but subsequent stories, which are far worse, don’t seem to be generating much heat. The local press featured denials by a range of carriers, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, and AT&*T, however these denials are, as one writer noted, word games. The government does not need “direct” access so long as it has indirect access, and it does.

The claims by Microsoft and AT&T are especially galling considering new evidence surfacing today which shows that Microsoft built a backdoor key into its operating system for NSA as early as 1999, two full years before the attack on the Twin Towers and before the Patriot Act could be used to justify it. AT&T, meanwhile, was caught in 2004 when an employee in San Francisco leaked news of a special room used by the government to capture phone calls in the Bay Area.

The most important aspect of this situation, though, is not finding much traction in the media or even on the web, and it is beyond alarming.

For the NSA and FBI and the rest of them to be capturing every phone call, every e-mail, every web search of everyone means not only that they are able to see what you’re doing and store evidence against you but that they are able to do that with respect to every elected politician in America, every journalist, every television news broadcaster, every law enforcement person, every judge.

Thus, the secret police are amassing the kind of blackmail treasure trove even J. Edgar Hoover never dreamed of. And as a result, the mass media is now completely compromised, as is the Congress, as is the federal court system.

I have my doubts whether most Americans understand what is happening. Too many are like the nitwit who says she has ‘done nothing wrong’ and, thus, should not object to having her entire personal life known by total strangers.

It seems quite clear to me that only one thing can possibly turn this around: the Congress of the United States of America must act and act quickly. Rescind the Patriot Act and pass emergency legislation which outlaws these police state activities. America can be protected when the government needs a warrant in a real court before it paws through your life; if it can do that without a warrant, ‘terrorism’ won’t matter. We will have surrendered everything which makes this country worth defending.

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Assholes In Paradise

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 07:08:28 +0200

The photograph in the Chronicle shows a tuxedoed billionaire standing in front of a backdrop wall sporting the logos of Hilton and Mastercard. Beside him is his new bride.

Sean Parker, who is among those young, largely air headed assholes who scored big in Silicon Valley and display the arrogance and appetite of wild pigs at the trough. As has been said of others, he knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

Parker and his bride, one Alexandria Lenas, decided to get married in a really spectacular fashion, as befits America’s new royalty. They decided to celebrate their union by wrecking the fragile ecosystem of a portion of Big Sur.

What they did was not exactly legal, but money buys a lot in America these days. No doubt inspired by the criminals on Wall Street, Parker figured that he’d just have to pay a fee for it, some cash in the right pockets, and for a man sitting on billions of dollars he picked up pretty much accidentally cash is no problem at all.

Ordinary people, if they want to get married in nature, at the beach or among the redwoods, find a place which will accommodate them, take care not to cause damage, follow the rules, and honor both their environment and themselves. But Sean Parker and Alexandria Lenas are not ordinary people.

The couple chose a campground near the Ventana Inn & Spa, just south of Big Sur, on the California coastline. The coastline is protected under the California Coastal Commission; the Big Sur area consists of more than a dozen state parks and protected federal wilderness areas along the Santa Lucia Mountains. It is not permitted to roll into it with bulldozers, level the land, and construct whatever piece of shit monument to oneself some special prick thinks he might like for his wedding.

Yet, by the time the Coastal Commission staff learned what was going on, Parker’s hirelings were already a month into transforming a section of the Ventana property into his grotesque fantasy, constructing a stone bridge and fake castle walls, numerous rock stairways, fake ‘ruins’ of old cottages, a gateway and arch, various event ‘platforms,’ digging an artificial pond, and laying down an elevated dance floor.

The campground Parker trashed is adjacent to Post Creek, which is a spawning habitat for steelhead trout, a threatened species under the guidelines and protection of the federal government. According to the staff report to the Commission, “Steelhead populations require, among a variety of factors, the maintenance of low in-stream turbidity and water temperature, both of which are highly susceptible to degradation by (human) activities. Development resulting in erosion along waterways increases the sediment load in streams, which can smother eggs and occlude light necessary for aquatic flora photosynthesis and growth.”

The happy couple cut the original deal through Parker’s company, Neraida, and the private owners of the 170-acre campground, who are listed as a limited liability company. But use of the property is governed by the Coastal Act which created the Commission. And it turns out the owners of the campground were already in violation of their permit for never building a planned parking lot and for closing down the public campgrounds in 2007, which in combination effectively denies access to the general public, in express violation of the charter of the Coastal Commission.

If all of this sounds like the billionaire and his bride should have been stopped in their tracks by the law, you are not grasping how money works in America these days.

The Coastal Commission, advised of the blatant violations, allowed the nuptials to proceed at the ruined site on condition that the groom pony up $2.5 million bucks, small change for a man Forbes Magazine lists as a multi-billionaire. And the Commission, just to show there were no hard feelings, publicly thanked Parker for his cooperation.

There were other ‘conservationist’ interests to be bought off, too, although these were non-governmental. Though it refused comment on the Commission actions, one prominent group sent an e-mail which read, “Save the Redwoods League would like to congratulate the happy couple,” perhaps encouraged by the agreement that the happy couple would make a pitch for donations to the League to the wedding guests, a nice cross-section of filthy rich creeps and ‘progressive Democratic’ politicians, including Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom and the state’s highest law enforcement officer, Attorney General Kamala Harris, who trailed after the newlyweds like poodles, hoping for big money for future campaigns.

News of Harris’ attendance helps explain why she just hasn’t had the time to respond to all the e-mails asking her to investigate the murder of an unarmed man who was beaten to death by cops, including two CHP officers, in Kern County several weeks ago. She was probably too busy picking out a nice outfit. She refused to return the phone calls from the Chronicle writer, too.

Parker, who got rich off venture capital money and IPOs, had this to say about his deal with the Coastal Commission:

“We always dreamed of getting married in Big Sur, one of the most magical places on earth. In continuing my foundation’s mission, we are excited to support these important conservation-related projects for and with the local community.”

In other words, I’m paying off the Coastal Commission with the loose change in my pocket and nobody’s going to give me any grief because they all want cash in the future.

This is America, folks. This is what we’ve become.

Saw a brief excerpt someone posted on Facebook, this observation by Ralph Nader:

"We have the lowest minimum wage in the Western world. We have the greatest amount of consumer debt. We have the highest child poverty, the highest adult poverty, huge underemployment, a crumbling public works — but huge multi-billionaires and hugely profitable corporations.

“I say to the American people: What’s your breaking point? When are you going to stop making excuses for yourself?”

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Secrecy In The House Of Cards

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 09:21:56 +0200

One critical characteristic of the Electric Age is that there are no longer any secrets. That’s bad news for the rich and powerful because the rich and powerful are those who count on secrecy to hide their crimes, which are generally monstrous.

The reason there are no more secrets is that disclosure is so easy and irrevocable. In the good old days, people like Lyndon Baines Johnson could bury secrets by having his friend Malcolm Wallace murder whoever proved to be inconvenient. Governments could lock them up, restrict access, and deny the rumors.

When the Warren Commission realized that they were covering up what happened to President Kennedy, as they certainly did, they declared hundreds of documents to be held under seal for seventy-five years, probably figuring that by 2039 they and the conspirators would all be dead and beyond anybody’s jurisdiction.

In the ‘sixties and ‘seventies, the Pentagon could assume that its own record of the Viet Nam war would remain in the files. Even after its own historical study was photocopied by Daniel Ellsberg, one of its authors, the military and the Nixon government thought they could avert its publication. And it was almost true, since every major public figure Ellsberg tried to give a copy to, including J. William Fulbright and George McGovern, refused to take it, believing that to do so would be against the law.

Lyndon Johnson is dead and beyond any legal proceeding, even though his old friend and co-conspirator, Billie Sol Estes, swore a deposition which recited a lot of names of people whose deaths LBJ had arranged.

The Warren Commission finding on Kennedy;’s assassination has been completely discredited but nobody truly guilty of the crime ever saw the inside of a jail cell, except for Jack Ruby and a couple of CIA boys such as E. Howard Hunt, locked up on other matters.

Ellsberg got the Pentagon Papers published because the New York Times was then a decent, independent newspaper, willing to take its responsibilities seriously, and its top guys ordered their offices ringed with armed guards to keep the government from physically disrupting publication.

We are in a new era now and, even as the government and private corporations have managed to buy off, threaten, and otherwise control the mass media, the internet makes secrets a relic of a dead age. In our time, today’s Ellsberg just decided to package several hundred thousand files and pass them over to an internet publisher, Julian Assange, and the governments of the world went batshit crazy.

Secrecy is no longer a serious, practical condition. What Bradley Manning and Wikileaks did together was nullify the restrictions which nearly stopped Ellsberg and knock holes in the walls the powerful have erected to hide their miserable deeds.

Of course, the U.S. government, like most governments, retains considerable power to not only cover up its crimes but to brainwash the population into thinking that some information should be withheld from them for their own good.

We see that everywhere now that Bradley Manning, this generation’s Ellsberg, is finally brought to trial.

It is a military trial. Evidence is restricted. So is access to it, as well as to the proceedings themselves. The government has managed to hold the trial in a ‘courtroom’ so small that only fifty spectators and limited press may attend. You’d think it was a trial of a drugstore robbery in Pocatello.

Amazingly enough, the government has refused thusfar to permit news agencies and other interested parties to seat a stenographer and thus obtain a record of what is actually said. Virtually every mainstream media outfit is complaining, so perhaps that will be changed, but the entire environment in which the trial is to take place, the physical restrictions, the generally arbitrary rules on evidence, more closely resembles a show trial in Stalin’s Russia than it does a fair trial in America.

Manning has been in custody for three years, the better part of it under conditions which international observers have described as torture and as violative of covenants to which the United States is a signatory. He has been tortured, psychologically tortured by experts, in order to break him down, to weaken him and make him more susceptible to emotional collapse.

The U.S. government realizes full well that it can no longer control information, though it is trying to figure out ways to do so and there are plenty of useless pricks like Joe Lieberman who sponsor bills granting the government a ‘kill switch’ to shut the internet down. Therefore, this government, nearly any government, now knows that it can keep a grip on secrets only by scaring the hell out of anyone tempted to disclose them.

The Manning trial and its three year preliminary is designed to intimidate anyone else who might get the itch to reveal what the nation’s rulers are up to. Meanwhile, Julian Assange is imprisoned inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, unable to leave without facing arrest, extradition to America, or the shortcut of assassination.

Meanwhile, also, the brainwashing is holding up, which must bring good cheer to Obama and the other wankers in Washington. Even the corporate media, which has recently learned it is the target of massive illegal spying by the government, repeats the empty slogans of the police state. Tuesday’s editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle is a perfect example.

Titled ‘The big leak,’ it begins this way:

“Manning is no hero. While working as an intelligence analyst outside of Baghdad, he used classified access to gather hundreds of thousands of documents and sent them, willy-nilly, to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks. Was the public well-served by the release of that information? With some of the material, yes. But many of those releases were classified for a very good reason, and Manning and WikiLeaks endangered peoples’ lives by publishing it without thinking, without editing or otherwise showing restraint.

“So there is no question that Manning deserves punishment...”

Although the editorial also cites his treatment thusfar as "inhumane and excessive... The military has no excuse for subjecting Manning to this kind of treatment...” –– this is, remember, the Bay Area, where Manning and Assange have considerable popular support –– it does what virtually all of the mass media are doing in America, parroting the official story without seriously wondering if it’s true.

In fact, the truth is that Manning did not send the documents “willy-nilly” and WikiLeaks did not publish them “without thinking, without editing or otherwise showing restraint.” In fact, they exercised considerable thought and restraint, offering them to media giants such as the New York Times, which printed some of the documents, and inviting the Pentagon to assist in redacting them of any disclosures which might harm individuals.

The charge that the Manning material “endangered peoples’ lives” is a lie, and it’s central to the government’s censorship platform. The documents in fact revealed three significant things: that the United States was committing war crimes systematically; that the United States and other national governments were lying in their relations with one another; and that the United States was spying on diplomats at the United Nations and threatening various governments on behalf of corporate clients, e.g. Hillary Clinton trying to force France to accept Monsanto’s Frankenfoods or be punished as a consequence.

The first ‘document’ released via WikiLeaks was a short video of American troops in an Apache helicopter shooting a group of people walking along a street in Iraq and treating it like a sporting event. Survivors were butchered as they tried to crawl to safety. A passerby stopped his van and tried to assist the wounded; they shot him to death. Two of the dead were Reuters photographers.

That video triggered outrage in Washington, outrage at its disclosure and not at the crime depicted. Outrage at the man who had the integrity and the patriotism to risk everything in order to alert his country about what was being done in its name, not at the killers who are heard on the accompanying audio exulting at what they’d done.

The Chronicle editors are as wrong as they can be. Manning is a hero, a genuine hero. He put the well-being of his country ahead of his own security, health, and safety, even ahead of his own freedom. He is a hero. The Chronicle is not much of a newspaper.

The military will of course convict Manning in its kangaroo court. He has already pled guilty to a number of lesser charges, but they want him on a big one, that of “aiding the enemy,” which could lock him up for the rest of his life.

How is it that Bradley Manning “aided the enemy”? By exposing the lies of the American government and its diplomats? By exposing the murders committed routinely and with great joy by some of its soldiers? Other peoples and other countries already knew about these things. It is the American people who the American government wishes to keep in the dark.

Nobody’s lives were put at risk, the Chronicle’s idiotic claims to the contrary. What was put at risk was the grand charade of American foreign policy being sustained to fool the American people. It is that house of cards which Manning jeopardized, to the consternation and fury of its corrupted architects.

Maybe Americans are not ready to face these secrets. Maybe most Americans still cling to their fantasies about their country, the Land of the Free, where bluebirds sing on everyone’s window ledge and political leaders care about us. But maintaining the façade will get harder and harder. That’s the nature of the Electric Age. Eventually, when it becomes impossible to sustain, when the cognitive dissonance blows through public life like lawn furniture in a Florida hurricane, there will be hell to pay.

On that day, Bradley Manning will not only be a hero but be widely seen as one. On that day, there will be real criminals prosecuted and sent to prison for what they have done to their country.

[While waiting for that day, occupy your intellect with a book to which all eleven reviewers have awarded five stars: http://www.amazon.com/News-From-A-Parallel-World/dp/1478194448]

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The People Come To Taksim Square

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 09:55:20 +0200

Something is happening in this world, something difficult, bitter, glorious, dangerous, brilliant, ecstatic, frightening, and revolutionary.

Governments everywhere are desperate to kill it, crush this flower before it is fully-formed, flatten it before anyone gets ideas, before the things governments fear most, the freedom of people, the higher human qualities, love, tenderness, kindness, generosity, can gain traction, because if that happens those fuckers running the planet off the edge of creation will be running for their miserable lives.

Something is happening.

I’m seeing and reading the dispatches from Turkey now. With a few exceptions, I’d bet that America’s network news (sic) programs are either ignoring the whole thing or distorting it so badly viewers can’t figure out what’s going on.

This is revolution, you know, and there are two sides here, and people are being forced to choose, often times before they’ve thought it out, before they think they’re ready.

What little I’ve seen in the western media on Turkey tries to describe what’s happening there as a conflict over the cutting of trees or a fight about an office building which the government wants to construct in a park. That’s like describing the 18th century American revolution as a tiff over the tax on tea.

First there were photos. Although several on the web which posters claimed to be from Turkey have since been identified as actually coming from Egypt a couple of years ago, there are plenty which are clearly valid, including a mass of people, thousands of people, marching across the Bosphorus Bridge.

I am thankful for a letter posted yesterday by Tarihinde Yayimlandi, which begins: “I am writing to let you know what is going on in Istanbul for the last five days. I personally have to write this because most of the media sources are shut down by the government and word of mouth and the internet are the only ways left for us to explain ourselves and call for help and support.”

The scene in one way reminded me of another, forty years ago, when a small group of people, mostly students, tried to prevent the University of California from tearing up a small park. Before the ‘People’s Park’ movement was beaten, the governor brought in National Guard troops to occupy Berkeley, one man was shot to death on a rooftop and another blinded by police, and helicopters sprayed tear gas everywhere, including into the apartment I lived in on College Avenue where my infant daughter ‘s eyes burned her for a crime she had not committed.

But what is going on in Turkey is not People’s Park, and it will not end that way.

Five days ago, a group of people gathered in Istanbul’s Gezi Park to try to prevent the demolition of the park and tearing out of hundred-year-old trees to facilitate construction of a shopping mall. They brought their children, erected tents and spent the night under the trees. With the morning came the bulldozers, and the people stood in front of the machines.

Turkish police hit the people with water cannon and pepper spray, and the crowd dispersed. But when evening came, they returned, and their numbers had grown. The government then shut down the metro, canceled the ferries, blocked the roads. The media, newspapers, radio, television, did not carry this news. Yet despite the blackout, despite the blockades and closures, the people came. They heard about it and they came. They found ways around the impediments. They walked, some of them for miles, but they got there.

The crowds were nonviolent. Police drove tanks over them, killing at least two. The Turkish police, as did their counterparts in Oakland, fired tear gas canisters directly into the crowd, striking people in the head. Several people have been hospitalized in critical condition. Several have been blinded. Yayimlandi writes:

“These people are my friends. They are my students, my relatives. They have no ‘hidden agenda’ as the state likes to say. Their agenda is out there. It is very clear. The whole country is being sold to corporations by the government, for the construction of malls, luxury condominiums, freeways, dams and nuclear plants. The government is looking for (and creating when necessary) any excuse to attack Syria against its people’s will.”

“People who are marching to the center of Istanbul are demanding their right to live freely and receive justice, protection and respect from the State. They demand to be involved in the decision-making processes about the city they live in. What they have received instead is excessive force and enormous amounts of tear gas shot straight into their faces. Three people lost their eyes.

“Yet they still march. Hundreds of thousands join them. Couple of more thousand passed the Bosporus Bridge on foot to support the people of Taksim.”

“No newspaper or TV channel was there to report the events. They were busy broadcasting news about Miss Turkey and ‘the strangest cat of the world.’”

“Schools, hospitals and even 5 star hotels around Taksim Square opened their doors to the injured. Doctors filled the classrooms and hotel rooms to provide first aid. Some police officers refused to spray innocent people with tear gas and quit their jobs. Around the square they placed jammers to prevent internet connection and 3G networks were blocked. Residents and businesses in the area provided free wireless network for the people on the streets. Restaurants offered food and water for free.

“People in Ankara and Izmir gathered on the streets to support the resistance in Istanbul.

“I am writing this letter so that you know what is going on in Istanbul. Mass media will not tell you any of this. Not in my country at least. Please post as many articles as you see on the Internet and spread the word.

“As I was posting articles that explained what is happening in Istanbul on my Facebook page last night someone asked me the following question:

“‘What are you hoping to gain by complaining about our country to foreigners?’

“This blog is my answer to her.

“By so called ‘complaining’ about my country I am hoping to gain:

“Freedom of expression and speech,

“Respect for human rights.

“Control over the decisions I make concerning my own body.

“The right to legally congregate in any part of the city without being considered a terrorist.

“But most of all by spreading the word to you, my friends who live in other parts of the world, I am hoping to get your awareness, support and help!”

For further info and things you can do for help please see Amnesty International’s Call for Urgent Help

There followed on this site an astonishing flood of messages, nearly all supportive, from everywhere on the earth. Words of solidarity from Iceland, Mexico, Iran, the United States, Ireland, Germany, South Africa.

Several people offered their own internet access, including user names, passwords, and servers.

I realize that I don’t know anything about Turkey, it’s governance, traditions, history, religion(s) or culture. The Turkish people may well want a society different from my own or from one I would choose for myself.

I know this, though. From all over the world tonight, across the boundaries of borders and governments, media blackouts, internet interference, there are voices rising in support of the people in Taksim Square. We are in this together. And it’s possible, just barely possible, that in a world where the powerful have engineered closed, brutal systems of oppression there may still be, after all, a way to overcome.

I write this column tonight inspired by the bravery of the people of Turkey, and of the writer of the blog whose words I’ve reprinted. Have heart. The world is in trouble, we all know that, but the last acts have not yet been written. And my hope is not in the lies of politicians willing to sell out the most hurting among us on behalf of their rich friends but in the truths told by ordinary people standing together in the face of it.

Comments

The Underlying Premise

Sun, 02 Jun 2013 06:16:40 +0200

At some point in American politics, the owners turn you into their bitch. Either that or your small plane crashes, you go riding in a motorcade, you get maneuvered into a hotel kitchen in Los Angeles, take your pick. John Kerry’s alive, which speaks for itself.

The story goes like this. Election night, 2004. Everybody in politics knows that the presidential vote has just been hijacked. In fact, it’s so blatant even George Bush figured it out.

The way it was done, simple. The central vote tabulators in seven states have their tallies wired to a machine in Tennessee where a standard percentage is switched from Kerry to Bush. We know this for two reasons. First, some people have talked. Second, the exit polls gave it away.

The thing about exit polls is that they are sensationally accurate, so accurate that they universally used as protection against the very sort of theft that America experienced in 2004. When the methodology is sound, exit polls are always within one percent of the actual tally.

In 2004, the exit polls for 43 states was perfect. For the other seven, the announced results skewed between seven and eight percent from Kerry to Bush in each case. In six of those states it was enough to switch the electoral vote. In Pennsylvania, even a seven percent theft could not keep Kerry from taking it.

I knew it was a theft that night and I was not alone. Anyone familiar with politics on a practical level knew the outcome had been cooked because if you’re into politics you understand exit polls. It’s like a meteorologist knowing what a high pressure system means or a mathematician understanding Pi.

Anyway, the story is that Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards, had a contentious conversation, the gist of which was Kerry saying he was going to let it go and Edwards screaming at him.

Kerry was signaling to the country’s owners that he was prepared to play ball. Edwards was signaling that he was not very reliable. The latter found himself snared in a classic honey trap and even prosecuted; the former got to be Secretary of State.

The Edwards tale is for another time. Sufficient to observe that at the time of his downfall he was unlikely to be nominated –– that was always going to be a contest between the two ‘acceptable’ candidates, Clinton and Obama –– but he had the kind of backing which might force the issue on selection of Attorney General.

Can you imagine how the bankers would have liked Edwards at the Justice Department? Not exactly the ‘too big to prosecute,’ let’s have dinner at the White House this week situation they’ve got now.

Kerry’s capitulation was, of course, disgusting, but that’s how empires operate. If you want a job near the top, you have to enjoy, or at least not object to, fellating some of the most evil pricks in creation.

A month ago, Kerry made headlines by lecturing the Iraqis for being insufficiently grateful for everything America had been doing for them. I’m not inventing this, it really happened. ‘Grateful’ was his word.

Yesterday, he was making news again, this time on the issue of arms dispersal. The New York Times article ran in the Chronicle with this headline: Kerry criticizes Russia’s ongoing weapons sales.

The piece had Kerry “strongly criticiz(ing) Russia’s pledge to send advanced antiaircraft weapons to Syria, saying that its actions threatened to disrupt efforts to negotiate a political settlement of the Syrian conflict and posed an unacceptable risk to Israel.”

First of all, I’m getting sick and tired of Israel dictating American foreign policy, aren’t you? Enough, already. Some people feel strongly that Israel’s policies are an unacceptable risk to peace. Some people also feel strongly that whether Assad stays in power in Syria is not Israel’s business, nor America’s.

Second, anybody else remember the press release from the State Department a few months back crowing about how in 2012 the United States broke all previous records in sales of military equipment and armaments to the rest of the world? We were bragging about it. And now John Kerry is lecturing the Russians for maybe passing along some antiaircraft weapons?

Third, the United States is not interested in a ‘political settlement’ in Syria. We are interested in overthrowing the government, clearing a fat opening for the World Bank and the IMF, and Assad’s head on a stick, in any order you like. Assad himself has proposed as the only precondition of settlement that the Syria people vote for it; the United States has rejected that out of hand.

You know why Russia wants to send and Syria wants to receive antiaircraft weapons? Because when the U.S. and its NATO fig leaf wanted to get rid of Ghaddafi and wreck Libya, it first dropped mercenaries into the country as ‘rebels,’ then used airplanes to bomb the crap out of the government’s troops while pretending it was ‘protecting’ civilians. And it looks like America’s setting up to do it all again.

Kerry thinks, and the New York Times agrees with him, that “Russia’s announcement last week that it would go ahead with the sale of sophisticated S-300 missiles to Syria (has) added a dangerous new dimension to the civil war in Syria, even as Kerry and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, have worked together to hold an international conference in hopes of finding a way to end the fighting.”

The Times thinks it’s a ‘dangerous new dimension’ for the Syrian government to be able to protect itself from the rockets and bombers dispatched by the U.S., NATO, and Israel.

As for the ‘international conference,’ the rest of the world is by now aware of how the U.S. manages them. For example, we were able to delay peace talks over the Viet Nam war long enough for Kissinger and Nixon to bomb North Vietnamese hospitals on Christmas Eve. Apparently, Kerry’s task is to pretend to negotiate until we’ve killed Assad and ruined his country.

I really don’t think I’ve become that sophisticated. I think the U.S. government has become that obvious. These people don’t seem to care how completely hollow their posturing looks to the world. What matters to them is how much the American people know and, judging by public awareness of events concerning Iraq, Afghanistan, Mexico and all of Latin America, and Libya and the rest of Africa, the American people don’t know anything.

Obama moves his Tuesday death list over to the Pentagon and tells us its a big improvement. He says the drone attacks will also be moving to the military, and that we’ll be more discerning in the future. The public raves.

Yesterday came news that the Pakistani Taliban, in response to the latest drone attack, which reportedly killed Waliur Rehman and at least four other unlucky bystanders, has withdrawn their offer of peace talks. The Associated Press, pissed off that Obama stole the e-mail records of more than a hundred journalists, is still parroting the party line: the news release said the dead extras were all “militants.” With all due respect, how the fuck would you people know?

Rehman was targeted because the U.S. blamed him for a 2009 attack in Afghanistan which killed seven CIA ‘employees.’ That sounds almost clean, doesn’t it? We kill children with errant missiles, they must have been ‘militants.’ We send people to run torture centers at Bagram and elsewhere, they’re ‘employees.’

America runs the world, that’s what we think. That’s the underlying premise for all of this stuff, for raining death from the sky and writing off victims as ‘militants,’ even when they’re children or people attending a wedding or funeral. That’s the unspoken premise of everything Kerry does, from lecturing Iraqis to lecturing the Russians. We can destroy anything we want. The victim then ought to be grateful because we’re “helping” them “rebuild.” We can bomb a country at will, destabilize its government, assassinate its leaders, but if they try to obtain the means to defend themselves we say they’re “adding a dangerous dimension,” which they have no right to do.

John Kerry is just doing his job. Had he been sworn-in as President in January, 2005, it’s now abundantly clear he would have done as he was told anyhow.

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It Was Easier To Pretend

Sun, 26 May 2013 05:17:58 +0200

“He wasn’t a saint. He was just a normal person.” Alexander Schmorell was made a ‘saint’ by the Russian Orthodox church in 2012, but his old friend, Liselotte Furst-Ramdohr thinks that’s crazy.

Schmorell and Furst-Ramdohr, Christoph Probst, and Hans Scholl were central players in a resistance among German youth to the rising madness of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime. Among themselves, they organized the White Rose, German youth who risked their lives inside Germany.

At the beginning, they distributed anonymous leaflets, mailing them to randomly-selected names in the phone books; later, they passed them out door-to-door. On February 8th and 15th, 1943, they plastered walls in Munich with anti-Hitler graffiti.

Then, on the 18th, Hans Scholl and his sister, Sophie, tried something even more daring. They took copies of their sixth, and final, leaflet to Munich University and left piles of them outside classrooms and in the central stairwell. As they reached the top of the stairs, however, they had some remaining. Sophie Scholl threw them off a balcony so that they would float down on students below.

Sophie was seen by a caretaker, who called the Gestapo. Hans Scholl had in his pocket a draft for leaflet number 7; he tried unsuccessfully to swallow it as the Gestapo closed in.

The Nazis tried them for treason, along with their friend, Christoph Probst. The three were executed by guillotine on February 22, 1943. Hands Scholl’s last words were, “Long live freedom!”

Schmorell tried to flee. Furst-Ramdohr found some new clothes for him and a fake passport, but his attempt to reach Switzerland failed because of heavy snowfall. He returned to Munich. Shortly after, he was recognized by a former girlfriend when he entered a bomb shelter. He was arrested and later executed.

Furst-Ramdohr was also arrested but, perhaps because she was at 29 already a war widow –– her husband had died on the Russian front –– her life was spared. She herself points out that on her release, the Nazis had her followed for a long time, probably hoping that she’d lead them to other conspirators.

At 99, Furst-Ramsdohr is still alive. She gave dancing lessons until age 86. Now, she lives alone in a small town outside Munich, dismissive of the praise latterly heaped upon her and the other members of the White Rose conspiracy by Germans interested in feeling better about themselves.

“At the time,” she notes, “they’d have had us all executed.”

As it happened, the final White Rose leaflet was smuggled out of Germany in spring of 1943 and fell into the hands of the Allies. It was reprinted. A million copies were then dropped over the country by Allied aircraft in the autumn of that year.

Furst-Ramdohr says that she and her friends couldn’t understand how the German people had fallen for the Nazi propaganda. “They must have been able to tell how bad things were,” she says. But when the war was over, the rest of the world heard Germans claim that they hadn’t really known about the ovens. They’d been silent as the German legislature, spurred by the Reichstag fire and other crimes which, it turned out, had been done by the government and the Nazis themselves, took away their civil rights, amended their constitution, drafted policies which were used to suppress any opposition.

We didn’t know, they said, to a world which didn’t believe them. “They must have been able to tell,” but they hadn’t wanted to. It was easier to pretend.

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Tour de Farce

Fri, 24 May 2013 20:31:18 +0200

“Keep talking,” William Hurt says to Kathleen Turner in “Body Heat,” the brilliant film noir by Lawrence Kasden, “experience has shown that I can be convinced of anything.”

So, will it work, this long-delayed happy horse shit, this rhetorical tour de farce?

The nation, no doubt, pretended to watch. The media, evidently, pretended to parse it. The words and phrases are being examined for nuance, shading, emphasis.

It may even be that a large portion of the public, repeatedly lied to for five years now, will swallow once again the mellifluous cadence, the paternalistic patter, the slick packaging. Why not? Experience has shown that we can be convinced of anything.

For nearly four-and-a-half years, Barack Obama has been conducting the most bloodthirsty, belligerent, cold-hearted foreign policy in American history. You think I’m exaggerating, perhaps wildly exaggerating. After all, there’s Nixon to consider, and Lyndon Baines Johnson. If you want to go back in time, one might even make a case for Andrew Jackson, if you consider his genocidal war against Native Americans to be a foreign policy.

George Bush, the younger, was certainly bloodthirsty, belligerent, and cold-hearted, and if he ever faltered there were the creeps around him, Darth Vader and Wolfie, and little Elliot Abrams, the Prince of Darkness.

But Obama does his work with a dancer’s moves. He does not lurch around like Johnson, speeding through Texas in a Cadillac throwing beer cans out the window. He does not rant about the Jews, like Nixon, and throw in some Christmas bombing of hospitals just to prove his understanding of Jesus. He’s not showy, just ruthlessly efficient.

During his reign, America has hit more countries with missiles than at any other time in our history. We have also dispatched black ops characters, CIA killers and SEALS creeps, to murder local leaders in more territories and on every continent. We have done plenty of killing by remote control, obviating the need for risking the lives of Americans, which has kept the public sleeping and the press stupid, or maybe that should be the other way ‘round.

Obama is the first American President to personally write a death list, a list of human beings, none of whom he knows, to be assassinated on his orders. He probably doesn’t care for the term, though. ‘Death list’ sounds so much like Augusto Pinochet, doesn’t it? He calls it instead a ‘disposition matrix.’

There have been thousands of completely innocent people targeted and murdered by drones on his orders. We don’t have exact numbers because until today the United States has not even admitted we were doing it. And despite Obama’s speech, which one of his predecessors, Richard Nixon, would have called a limited, modified, hangout, we still don’t know.

The President told America that while he regretted having to kill people by remote control, the alternatives were morally worse. I’ve heard this argument from others, the claim that drones kill fewer people than, say a bombing run. “Neither conventional military action nor waiting for attacks to occur, offers moral safe harbor,” he said. I may be out of line here, but I’d say that anyone who blows the limbs off children by raining Hellfire missiles on their villages does not get to talk about morality. Not to me, not ever.

Then Obama explained that the wanton, psychopathic murder of thousands of innocents has been bothering him. He wants us to feel sorry for him. “For me, and for those in the chain of command, these deaths will haunt us as long as we live.” Yes, I’m sure they will. I’m sure that as he watches the NBA finals his enjoyment will be tarnished by images of death and destruction, of parents weeping over their dead children. Probably ruin the half-time show.

On Thursday, the administration released the names of four Americans Obama has killed, trying to soften the blow a little bit, get that out of the way first. One of these, the only one Obama admits to ordering murdered, was a man who spoke frequently about the need for a holy war against America. Under the new rules of Obama, the post-911 rules, the highly convenient new rules, we can kill people for talking if they say the wrong things.

Then we killed the man’s 16-year-old son, a strike Obama eerily claims was an accident. The odds of this being an accident are, well, equal to my odds of winning the U.S. Open this year.

Missing from Obama’s speech was any reference to the repeated use of what are called “double taps,” the targeting of not just a funeral procession or wedding, something numerous international reporters have documented as American practice, but hitting the first responders with another strike. This brutality, this particular use of calculated violence is against international law, which we claim to respect and follow, and is universally condemned.

The President got around to Guantanamo, too. Thing has become an embarrassment, all those inmates, maybe a hundred by now, on a hunger strike, and Obama’s decision to torture them further by force-feeding, jamming tubes down their throats. The process has been described in foreign media but not on MSNBC, where despite the occasional criticism the fake ‘left’ media is still kissing his ass.

It’s the fault of those damned Republicans, you know, who just wouldn’t let him close the place, except that he didn’t get into the details, how what he asked for was permission to bring them to a maximum security installation in Illinois. He promised to close the place on the campaign trail but evidently only to shift the prisoners to a different facility.

More than a hundred innocent men have been held for more than a decade, all of them tortured in violation of treaties to which the United States is a signatory, and Obama neglects to mention that these people have been adjudged innocent not only by the International Red Cross but by the Pentagon’s own investigation. The problem with releasing them is that he can’t figure out where to send them, and there are, according to an article in the Guardian UK, “classification concerns, security concerns, (and) the use of torture in interrogations.”

Recent public opinion surveys suggest that Obama can pull the tongues out of Guantanamo prisoners and a majority of Americans won’t give a damn. Nor are they interested in drones. So long as America’s wars are fought against people in other lands, Americans don’t much care. Right now, according to the Gallup Poll, only a third want to close Guantanamo and most never think about it.

A majority apparently buy Obama’s transparently false rationale that if we weren’t raining terror on people from the skies, we’d have to invade their countries or bomb them indiscriminately. Nowhere is anybody wondering whether we have the right to do any of this. Yemen has not attacked us, nor Somalia, nor Mali, nor Pakistan, nor Afghanistan.

Shifting the death lists from the CIA to the Pentagon is not exactly a reform, though we’re told that it is. Nor should we be becalmed by the soothing promises of transparency and no permanent war. We’ve heard these things before. They’re likely as true now as ever.

This President talks about terrorists but is himself responsible for more innocent deaths than any ‘terrorist’ leader whose name appears on his ‘disposition matrix.’ That is without serious dispute. Yet, as he more than once points to the flag and speaks of its meaning and enduring legacy, it never dawns on him, nor on the mass media, nor on the vast majority of people in America, that to anyone whose country, whose village or township, whose church or wedding reception or funeral procession, whose school is leveled by fire from the sky, it America which is the terrorist, America whom the rest of the world fears.

Obama is far too intelligent to believe what he’s preaching. He knows that America is not defending itself overseas, nor freedom, nor self-determination. He knows that we are sending troops to dozens of countries in Africa and the Middle East to secure oil reserves and natural gas pipelines, steal resources, establish military forward bases, and scare everybody into complying with our will. He knows this.

He made reference, briefly, to Mali. Mali is a country where there is a civil war. Much of that war is the product of an oppressive regime which ousted a democratic government and which is now fighting rebels who include people forced out of Libya by America’s bloody overthrow of Moammar Ghaddafi, which was itself done to get rid of a strong pan-African voice and a highly-successful economy in preparation for our own move into Africa. Obama knows this. Yet, he says that in Mali we are assisting the fight against al-Qaida, and not only do nearly all Americans listening to him believe it but nearly all journalists will report this uncritically.

One more thing. The President told us that “the future of terrorism” is homegrown, not elsewhere. Homegrown ‘extremists’ are the most dangerous threat we now face, he said, pointing to the Marathon bombing in Boston. This statement is the most alarming thing he said.

Placed in the context of all the other domestic changes Obama has overseen, from total electronic surveillance of the population to the construction of ‘detention centers,’ from the militarization of urban police forces to the inexplicably enormous purchases of bullets by Homeland Security, from the ‘new’ policy in which the military has authority inside the country in place of civilian authority to the NDAA and the assertion by Obama that the government may lock up without trial or even charges, indefinitely, any person deemed to be an ‘imminent threat,’ the definition of which is not only missing but possessed of a totalitarian vagueness, the 'future of terrorism' remark is chilling. He's bringing it all back home, folks.

We have heard for more than a year from crazy Senators such as Lindsey Graham saying that ‘the homeland is now part of the battlefield,’ which, when combined with the claims the government makes about what it has the right to do on any such ‘battlefield,’ ought to make any patriot’s blood run cold.

We are in trouble here, and Obama’s carefully prepared bullshit presentation scares me more than ever. And it ought to scare you, too.

Comments

Nothing To Fear At All

Thu, 23 May 2013 05:52:09 +0200

One of my favorite escape mechanisms, when I’m done with the day’s column and my head, often stuffed with political detritus, needs a little flushing out, is the very long series of novels and novellas written by Rex Stout over a forty year period ending in 1975, and featuring his mammoth, sedentary detective Nero Wolfe.

It’s not just another age and another era, it’s another reality in America, a time when people had rights. Seriously.

Mostly, the appeal of the books to me is the wit and humor. Narrated by Wolfe’s aide, Archie Goodman, we get the view of a couple of detectives who are always clashing with the cops, sometimes in a friendly way, sometimes at odds, always with the sardonic overlay which identifies them as smart-ass citizens entirely sure of their constitutional rights and happy to remind Inspector Cramer and his minions of them, regardless of threats to take their licenses or lock them up.

In virtually every story, Wolfe is called upon to remind Cramer and others carrying badges that he is not obligated to share his thoughts with them, that withholding evidence depends on whether something IS evidence and, in the event, it is subject to Wolfe’s better judgment, and that a police officer needs to justify it if he –– it’s nearly always a ‘he’ –– wishes to get answers to his questions.

Cramer will ring the bell and Archie will ask Wolfe whether he wants to see him. Wolfe, sometimes out of boredom, will admit the man who will then fire a question or two at him, such as ‘What did Bill Jones tell you yesterday,’ whereupon Wolfe will admonish him. “You know better, Mr. Cramer. Justify it.”

Cops, Rex Stout liked to remind his readers, had limits to what they could do and to what they could demand of citizens. For example, one could not stop you on the street and demand identification, not without a good reason. If one did, you were within your rights to refuse to provide it. On occasion, Archie would have to remind a cop that he was, depending on the year, not in Germany or Russia.

I’ve been reading the Nero Wolfe books for more than thirty years, ever since Beverly Galley turned me on to them. There are forty or fifty and I’ve read each at least four or five times. Reading them now, in the new century, in the new world created by decades of neglect by Americans of the governance of their own country, is bittersweet.

We don’t have those rights anymore, the ones Wolfe could and did recite to the cops, reminding them of their subservience to the people. The President has arbitrarily thrown out the Fourth Amendment, and the Sixth. The Congress has dispensed with the First and several others. The courts don’t defend them. The cops don’t honor them.

Until recent years, a motorist, stopped and cited for a driving infraction, could refuse to sign the ticket. Not signing might get you into more hot water, but you were certainly within your rights. Likewise, the plain fact that a cop ordered you to do something did not confer upon that cop the right to force you to obey. Cops were not regarded as God in the American system.

That has evidently changed. In my college city of Berkeley, as a matter of fact, where thousands of students rallied to protect their constitutional rights once upon a time, the cops can now beat you nearly to death if you don’t kiss their ass.

Two years ago, a truck driver named Oleg Kozacenko, who declined to sign a traffic ticket issued to him because he could not understand the writing on it, was beaten by two members of the California Highway Patrol on the side of the highway in Berkeley. They crushed his left orbital eye socket, broke his left arm and several ribs, smashed some bones in his face, and sent him to the hospital unconscious. Kozacenko apparently suffered brain damage, as well, since his injuries caused a deprivation of oxygen for a substantial time and he is no longer able to work.

Toxicology tests confirmed that Kozacenko had no alcohol in his system.

The cops who nearly killed him for the crime of not understanding the ticket they were telling him to sign, Andrew P. Murrill and Jim Sherman, one of them a trained fist-boxer, claimed the force they used against the victim was not excessive. They are still on the payroll.

Acting Chief Ken Hill said this: “The public if they get stopped and simply comply with what they are asked to do have nothing to fear, nothing to fear at all.”

Translation: do what we tell you or we will smash the bones in your face and send you to the hospital.

This was two years ago. Nothing was done to the cops who crushed this man’s eye socket and wrecked his life. The California Highway Patrol is a state agency and is under the jurisdiction of the State Attorney General, Kamala Harris.

Two weeks ago, a man was beaten to death by nine cops in Bakersfield, Kern County. Two of the cops were CHP members. This made it a state matter. Despite numerous letters to Harris demanding some action, nothing is being done. She has not had even the basic courtesy to respond to e-mails.

Maybe if this ambitious Attorney General had gotten off her ass two years ago and disciplined these psycho cops of hers, the word would have filtered down through the ranks and saved the life of David Silva in Kern County. Maybe if she did her job instead of spent her time preening for the camera and going to fund raisers for the President, it might avert the next murder by officers of the law. Maybe I’m expecting too much.

We used to have rights in this country. Now we just have the right to do as we’re told.

Comments

The Rich Have Lost Their Exuberance

Wed, 22 May 2013 08:34:02 +0200

This little column is about rich people. If you are a veteran reader here, you may recall other expositions in which I revealed a particular bias. For example, one I’m especially proud of of is ‘A Carnivore’s Tax Proposal,’ http://lookingglass.blog.co.uk/2010/08/01/a-carnivore-s-tax-proposal-9081071/.

I may have lost my sense of humor in the three years since I wrote ‘Carnivore,’ because this one isn’t going to be nearly as amusing. You want laughs, reread that one. I’m evidently angrier now than I was then.

We’ve had a couple of years of the Obama ‘recovery,’ and the White House is not shy about proclaiming it. More jobs all the time, a record high for the stock market, what could be the problem?

Growing up in Marin County in the early- and mid-’sixties, and being politically inclined, I made the acquaintance of some pretty rich people. Elizabeth Gatov was the Treasurer of the U.S. Roger Kent ran the Democratic Party in California. They lived on estates in Ross and Kent Woodlands, and yes, the latter was named after the family. I went to a few parties on those estates and enjoyed the ambiance.

The rich I knew had a kind of easy grace. Never, in any circumstances, did I get the impression that they thought themselves better than other people. Never.

I’m still in Marin but the old families are mostly gone. In their place are the new rich, scumbag executives and the spawn of such from eastern states and a few foreign addresses, driving around in Porsche SUVs, the reason for which cannot be lucidly explained, and other displays of wealth, enormous vehicles missing only the artillery mounts. Future models will need them.

Do you know that the rich have created categories of wealth which enable them to differentiate between the stuffed-pig variety and the lesser strains? Do you know what a ‘Henry’ is? Sounds not quite right, doesn’t it? A ‘Henry’ is a Higher Earner Not Rich Yet. Yet. These are people sucking in over a quarter of a million a year.

Henrys are in the top 20% but that is a cruel blight on their aspirations. I’ve met some of these people. They are young and have young children. They live in multi-million-dollar homes with views of Mt. Tamalpais or Angel Island but feel a little cramped. They have nannies for the kids because, well, who wants to spend all that valuable time with kids?

According to an article in the business section of Sunday’s Chronicle, the Henrys are having to make changes in their lifestyle choices, the economy being what it is.

“The rich have lost their exuberance,” says Pam Danziger, president of the luxury research firm, Unity Marketing. “They do not feel as wealthy. They increasingly feel that their wealth is threatened...”

The article, by Cotten Timberlake, a Bloomberg reporter, then informs us that “An increasing share of America’s ‘ultra-affluent’ consumers (now) view themselves as middle-class.”

The “2-percenters” have become wary due to “the recent recession,” and are “trading down” to less expensive products. Timberlake notes that one rich creep, a medical-equipment saleswoman from Minneapolis once “had no qualms about dropping $600 or more for Gucci purses” but now spends only $300 for Coach bags and is actually “filling in her Burberry wardrobe with pieces from J. Crew.” Oh, the ignominy. Oh, the disgrace.

What Timberlake refers to as the “bottom end” of the rich, those making a quarter of a million smackers or more each year, are retrenching. They are buying luxury items still, but perhaps fewer of them. Plus, with the housing market beginning to rebound, many of the “bottom end” who aspire to be even more stinking rich are investing in real estate. Why not? They’ll forego the latest Hermes handbag if it means greater luxury down the road.

Timberlake cites an attorney from Basking Ridge, New Jersey, in her 40s, who says she is no longer buying six new outfits every season. She says that she “continues to make purchases on an as-needed basis without being extravagant.”

Two days before the Chronicle article, the House of Representatives Agriculture Committee passed a farm bill for 2013 which cuts more than $20 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program over the next ten years. Of course, this House committee, as well as the lower chamber itself, is dominated by Republicans. It’ll never pass the Democratic Senate. Except...

The bill coming out of the Senate Agriculture Committee also cuts food stamps, just not quite as badly. The Democratic majority plans to snip a mere $4.1 billion. The differences will be ironed out in the conference committee before final approval in June.

In 2009, the Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act which, in part, temporarily increased benefits for food stamp recipients. Those benefits are about to expire. When the additional cuts, probably somewhere between four and twenty billion in a classic Republican-Democrat compromise, are added, food stamp recipients, the poorest people in the world’s richest country, will suffer real privation.

Even if the House capitulated to the Democrats’ version of the bill, estimates by field experts are that about 400,000 people will lose these benefits. In addition, more than 50,000 children will no longer be eligible for school lunches their families can’t afford to provide.

Any compromise version will send these numbers higher. It is likely that at least one million people, those last able to bear this burden, will suffer real loss. Obama will sign the bill.

As I’ve written recently, The President’s ‘chained CPI reform’ of the Social Security System will literally kill people, probably in large numbers. Millions of older Americans will be forced to choose between medicine and food. Now, the the imminent cuts to food stamps and school lunches will expand the misery to millions more.

Ironically, the stupid, punitive, cowardly goals of the Simpson-Bowles benchmarks have already been reached. Those, as you may know, were phony to begin with. But even if we accepted them, these further cuts to the programs most critical to help the poor are nothing short of wanton cruelty, enacted by millionaires without a thought to those deeply hurt.

I’m sorry the rich have lost their exuberance. I’d like to swing them by their tails, all of them, and throw them out the fucking windows. That might cause them substantial inconvenience but it would do my exuberance a world of good.

Comments

Looks Like Lieberman's Not The Only Monster In Connecticut

Mon, 20 May 2013 05:06:21 +0200

Okay, you’re going to think I’m inventing this story, really, you are. That’s because if it’s true, the education system in the State of Connecticut is being run by psychopaths, and we all know that professional educators are mature, wise, decent people.

Well, of course there are exceptions. For example, the governing system in my local high school district is controlled by cretins and liars, but this is Marin County and wealth often attracts such types. Don’t blame me; I grew up here and it wasn’t like that in the 1960s.

Anyhow, Connecticut.

I came across this material because I spend a lot of time poking around on the web. That’s where you have to be today if you want any news or reliable information. Sure ain’t gonna get it on MSNBC or Fixed News.

As a journalist, one of my many jobs is to pass along information people are otherwise unlikely to find because they have other jobs which don’t involve crawling all over the internet.

So, Connecticut.

The educational leaders in Connecticut have determined that the best way to educate children is to enforce a kind of ‘zero tolerance’ policy. School is serious and you’re not entitled to fool around. Only terrorists fool around, or their militant sympathizers, and we know where that leads.

Eight years ago, close to 500 kindergarten students in the state were suspended or expelled. We’re talking about six-year-olds. That seemed like a lot. I mean, what’s involved here? What does it take to kick a 6-year-old kid out of school? Bringing a firearm in a lunch box? Trying to stab a teacher? Setting off roadside bombs in the parking lot?

It’s not as though Connecticut is China. There are not millions of kids running around and posing a danger to themselves and others. But it gets better.

Over the intervening years, the number of suspended or expelled six-year-olds has increased nearly four hundred percent. Last year, 1,967 kids, six and under, were suspended or expelled. For those of you slow with math, that’s close to two thousand kids.

Most of them are nonwhite. Actually, that’s not clear enough. According to a report from the Connecticut Department of Education, and the follow-up in the Connecticut Mirror, “almost all of them black or Hispanic.”

I had to read that passage more than once. Almost all of the two thousand little kids suspended or expelled in Connecticut were black or Hispanic.

See, you learn something new every day. I’d always assumed that Connecticut was largely a white state, a bedroom state where rich people lived. I mean, this is the state which kept electing that miserable sack of shit Joe Lieberman to the Senate. You can’t get much whiter than that. But apparently the vast majority of kids in the schools are black or Hispanic.

Because if they’re not, if in fact the majority of school children are not black or Hispanic, then something really creepy is happening in Connecticut, even more so than usual.

In some schools, those booted out or otherwise disciplined made up almost half of the student population. One of these is a charter school much praised for its advanced curriculum.

The ‘experts’ consulted by the press did what experts often do: they passed around the blame. The kids were ‘acting out’ because they had been ‘traumatized at home,’ or because ‘something else’ was not being ‘attended to in their lives.’ Translated, it comes down to this: blacks and Hispanic families are failures in properly raising their kids.

This is how I translate it: the white power structure, like the power structure in education around the country, from Obama’s idiot Education Secretary Arne Duncan to the dipshits in the Tamalpais Union District in my county, is trying harder than ever to cram kids into the packages big business wants them in, and they're starting early.

George Carlin was, as usual, right. They don’t want critical thinkers. They want people just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough not to question the fact that they’re getting hosed every day of their lives. I’m paraphrasing.

Got news for the cretins in Connecticut: if you’re busting 2,000 kids and nearly all of them are nonwhite, you had better look in the mirror until you notice what the problem is.

Maybe six-year-olds are just trying to act their age. Maybe they’re not quite ready to don the official uniform of the American fool and waste their lives working for corporations. Run for it, kids.

Comments

The Confession

Sun, 19 May 2013 01:19:49 +0200

James Earl Ray didn’t shoot Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., yet he pled guilty. Most people don’t know it. Most people also have not had a direct experience with the criminal justice system in the United States.

An innocent person pleading guilty, how can that be?

Happens all the time. It’s also happened many times in a variety of ‘show trials,’ the sort of public spectacle that a government or political system feels called upon to produce for the masses, a trial which ‘explains’ things which would otherwise get pretty messy for those in power. It’s not some recent American invention but has been engaged in by all sorts of regimes for thousands of years. When I was a kid, I’d read about Stalin’s ‘show trials’ and wonder, how in the world did they get people to do that? In Russia, they’d execute these people, yet they still confessed.

It’s actually quite simple. Once the state gets hold of someone, let’s call him a patsy, which it wishes to fry for a particular crime, a variety of methods may be used to create no alternative to a guilty plea. In Ray’s case, it was explained to him that his claim of innocence would not go over well; the state had the rifle, which he had purchased, and a bundle of items he had supposedly dumped on the sidewalk in plain view. His innocence was beside the point. People wanted retribution. King was dead. If he appeared to be trying to weasel out of it, they’d execute him.

I don’t mean to get into that case here. That’s not what this column is about. No. It’s about how public perception can be created and reinforced concerning a major crime in which the accused may be entirely innocent yet appears obviously guilty. It’s been done before. It may be happening again in Boston.

The latest media story, released on CBS by former state FBI director John Miller, and based on unnamed sources, is that fugitive Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, bleeding from multiple wounds, hiding in total darkness beneath a tarp which covered a boat in someone’s back yard, and without a weapon to defend himself, managed to locate a Sharpie, or some other special pen which would work, and wrote a somewhat lengthy and ideologically-based confession on fiberglass.

Since the public disclosure of this belated discovery occurred a month after the fact, it does raise some interesting questions. For one thing, the ‘confession,’ as Miller describes it, perfectly mimics the ‘confession’ Tsarnaev is said to have made –– unable to speak due to bullet wounds in the throat, and without counsel –– to special interrogators flown to Boston from Guantanamo by the Obama government.

The boat ‘confession’ is a real break for the government, since the identical ‘confession’ the suspect is said to have made in the hospital would certainly be inadmissible at trial since he had not been advised of his right to remain silent.

I guess that since the younger brother had not been conveniently killed off like his older sibling, and Jack Ruby isn’t available anymore, it must’ve dawned on the authorities that this one might have to be put on trial.

What if he said he and his brother had been working for the government, told to go to the Boston Marathon, maybe even told to wear clothing which in photographs is eerily similar to that worn by a dozen ‘security’ personnel? What if they didn’t realize until later, when their photos were being thrown around on the web, when the cops told the American people to forget about all the other ‘suspects’ in the pictures –– including several carrying the same back packs –– and concentrate only on helping the police capture the brothers? This scenario is quite plausible given what we actually know, not what we’ve been told. What then?

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is 19 years old, shot multiple times and held in a hospital room with armed guards. For several days, he is allowed to see no one except the ‘special interrogation team’ from Guantanamo, which then produced, anonymously and by proxy, his supposed ‘confession.’ Because he’d been denied Miranda rights, on orders from Barack Obama and on a legal pretext so ludicrous that it alone raises substantial questions, this ‘confession’ could not be used in court. But it could be used to poison the public mind, which was perhaps its purpose..

One of the problems that crop up in the investigation of major crimes is that cops and other officials on the prosecution end of things often believe that the facts alone will not do the trick and that they have to dream up some fakery to strengthen the case. When that becomes obvious, as it sometimes does, anyone actually trying to figure out what happened now must sift out the lies and see what’s left. In this case, there are already so many lies that sorting through them has become a major impediment, at least for me. I’m not ready to write my ‘Boston’ column, but I’ll get to it.

In the meantime, the vast majority of Americans accept as given that this guy and his dead brother did the crime, not because there is any known, significant evidence, but because the government has cooked up a public relations story and gotten the mass media to swallow it.

You know the difference between the U.S. and New Zealand? Both countries have about three times as many sheep as people, only in the U.S. we let most of them vote.

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Eric Holder Bites The Big Banana

Fri, 17 May 2013 02:02:51 +0200

Chiquita Brands International is well known for its bananas and its friendly, lilting television ads. Safe to say that not too many people know anything about it. The Cincinnati corporation has been growing bananas in Colombia since 1899, which is before even I was born.

But Chiquita is not as benevolent as its cheerful, dancing banana image would wish you to believe. It has over the years acted as an arms conduit to Colombian death squads funded by drug traffickers and farmers organized as the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC). Court documents in a lawsuit against the company, brought under the Alien Torts Claim Act, show that a shipment of 3,000 AK-47 assault rifles and five million rounds of ammunition were routed to the death squads through Chiquita warehouses, then trucked to AUC by Chiquita vehicles.

Chiquita also demonstrated its loyalty to the AUC, which has been the sponsor of thousands of murders and numerous tortures of villagers, by giving it cash, more than a hundred payments over a course of seven years, totaling $1.7 million dollars. All of this occurred while AUC was designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. There is also considerable documentary evidence which shows that Chiquita was funding the death squads in part to rid themselves of troublesome indigenous organizers who were trying to attain better working conditions for pickers in the Uraba region.

The corporation got caught, as sometimes happens. But through negotiations with the government, it had to pay only $25 million in fines. Nobody went to prison. The major crimes got buried and the corporation was able to plead to lesser offenses. That’s some pretty fancy footwork by the corporation’s counsel, considering the numerous criminal acts committed, not to mention the tortures and deaths abetted, and he ought to get some credit for it. His name: Eric Holder.

Both the Justice Department and Eric Holder knew at the time, according to documents pried loose two years ago by the National Security Archive at George Washington University under the Freedom of Information Act (which the Obama administration is trying to ‘amend,’ which is to say weaken), that Chiquita’s cooperation with AUC led to 4,000 deaths and gave the death squads a ‘foothold throughout Colombia,’ according to the country’s Attorney General; Mario Iguaran. Didn’t stop Holder. What’s a few thousand deaths compared to corporate profits? Besides, while the U.S. was labeling AUC a ‘terrorist’ organization, it was simultaneously sending it millions in aid.

That’s right, the same man who has authored memos justifying Obama’s death lists had already proven his reliability in working for Chiquita.

This is the man who is telling the mass media, in the current dustup over getting caught stealing phone records from journalists at the Associated Press, that we ought to trust him. Incursions into freedom of speech and freedom of the press, not to mention the entire Fourth Amendment, should not trouble us unduly because he and the President would only do it when national security required it and, besides, the President knew nothing about it.

Well, that’s a relief. We can all go back to sleep now.

The ‘trust us’ theme is an alarming one, used to great effect so far in Obama’s murder of people on his death list, which he calls a ‘disposition matrix.’ First of all, anyone who uses doubletalk like ‘disposition matrix’ to describe a death list is obviously dangerous and untrustworthy. Second, when Holder was finally forced to offer a justification for what is manifestly a police state horror, he listed three elements: the target was someone who was connected to a terrorist organization or “allied” organization and the ‘threat’ was ‘imminent;’ the target could not be easily apprehended; and the President would only do this with respect for the rule of law and American legal tradition. In other words, trust us. He did not bother to answer questions about the purposeful killing of a 16-year-old American citizen, the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, who could not conceivably have represented an ‘imminent’ threat, even though Obama had ordered his father killed weeks earlier.

The Attorney General, in fact, does not work for the American people any more than the President does. Holder’s past work in helping a major corporation escape liability for aiding and abetting mass murder proved he could be counted on to do what his bosses wanted. That, far more than legal skill or hard work, is the primarily qualification for high government office, certainly under Obama but also under many other Presidents in the past.

In a January letter to Holder signed by Senators Charles Grassley and Sherrod Brown, he was asked to clarify the government’s policy with respect to prosecutions of financial institutions. Unsatisfied with Holder’s answer, which the Senators termed, “aggressively evasive,” they summoned him to testify before a Senate committee. “We want to know how and why the Justice Department has determined that certain financial institutions are ‘too big to jail’ and that prosecuting those institutions would damage the financial system."

On March 6, Holder testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that the size of financial institutions has made it too difficult to prosecute suspected crimes because such charges could threaten the existence of the bank and therefore damage the national or global economy. I guess he would know, having been counsel for one of the biggest crooks on the planet, the Swiss bank, UBS AG.

This is perhaps the single most bizarre –– and alarming –– statement ever made by the highest law enforcement officer in America. Consider: what sort of criminal acts would necessarily be involved in order to trigger prosecution and damages substantial enough to “threaten the existence of the bank and ... damage the national or global economy”? The kind that could get executives sent to prison for thirty years, that’s what kind. The kind that could result in penalties so severe that the very existence of the bank would be threatened, that’s what kind.

Which means that in Obama’s America, if you commit enormous crimes, you’re covered because you’re too important to the economy to risk prosecuting. If you sell some pot or stick up a gas station you are headed for prison.

Even more telling, Holder and Obama have gone after whistle blowers to the extent that this administration has prosecuted more than all previous Presidents combined. Consider that. They are willing to cripple journalism and free speech, but they will protect beyond any criminality the right of a corporation to steal the life savings of millions.

The last time an American President went after business executives on criminal charges was in the early ‘sixties, when Bob Kennedy’s Justice Department indicted executives from General Electric and Westinghouse for price fixing. These days, with General Electric paying zero taxes on profits in the billions, sheltering its cash in offshore accounts, its CEO has dinner at the White House and plays golf with Obama.

So when we hear and read statements from Eric Holder, it’s a good idea to remember what kind of man he really is, a fixer for criminals. And it’s growing apparent that that was the main thing which attracted Obama to him.

[Buy my book already, okay? http://www.amazon.com/News-From-A-Parallel-World/dp/1478194448/

Comments

I've Got Your Back, Mr. President

Tue, 14 May 2013 10:46:38 +0200

On the Alternet site, where I accessed a piece entitled ‘Talking Points Memo: Government Secretly Obtained Wide AP Phone Records IN Probe,’ a scandalous exposé of the Obama gang’s further dismissal of the Fourth Amendment, there suddenly appeared a pop-up invitation from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, inviting me to sign up to show my support for President Obama’s Agenda! The exclamation point is theirs. ‘Democrats need your support to help pass President Obama’s second term agenda,’ the ad says, exhorting me to ‘Show him you have his back!’

Since you are a culturally-aware person, you are now familiar to the point of projectile vomiting with the expression “have his back.” In the case of Obama, I would like to make it clear to the Democratic Party, its Senatorial Campaign Committee, and every bloody Democratic candidate and office holder with his or her hand out that I’ve got your backs to the degree you don’t stab me in mine.

Which means I ain’t helping you until Hell freezes over, pigs fly, and every member of the Federal Reserve is in prison for life.

The amazing thing is that this kind of appeal is still working. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have the balls to try it. It’s the political equivalent of a rapist asking his victim for spare change to call a getaway taxicab.

Yesterday’s disclosure courtesy of the Associated Press, which discovered that Eric Holder’s Justice Department had secretly obtained its phone records and decided not to bother mentioning it to the AP. The government claims it was legal for the usual reasons. According to Barack Obama, he needs the authority to lock up people without trial or an attorney, or even charges against them, in order to keep us safe. This insane rationale was ratified by 93 members of the Senate, including virtually all of the Democrats.

That reminds me, I ought to write a check to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to prove that I’ve got their back.

The President is implementing one of the worst budgetary operations in American history, which is saying something. I refer to the ‘sequestering’ of funds normally allocated for a range of governmental functions. The reason this is taking place is that Obama is a coward and a witling who ‘solved’ the budget crisis (sic) by joining with Republicans to appoint a committee to come up with a proposal. Remember? The committee’s proposal was that if the Congress didn’t fix the problem (sic) by a certain date, there would be automatic cuts made almost across the board.

To no one’s surprise, Congress didn’t do shit. The cuts were delivered. And guess what? When you cut five percent from multi-billion-dollar fat cats, they hardly notice; when you cut it from social services upon which the very poor and needy depend, you kill some of them.

The government immediately leapt into action to fix the problem: it restored funds for air traffic controllers because frequent fliers got inconvenienced by delays. Can’t have that. But the poor, well, tough luck. Some of you suckers probably voted for Obama so it’s practically your own fault.

While Obama entertains a large party of bankers at the White House, poor people are now in worse trouble thanks to his leadership. All across the nation, desperately important programs have been hit.

Meals on Wheels, a literal lifeline for the poorest among us, has been cut. So has Head Start, rent subsidies and vouchers, day care for farm workers, family services. A majority of members of Congress, both parties, are millionaires. Most of them don’t care if you die.

Think I’m exaggerating? Take the case of Sfia Smith. As a rare Chronicle story by Joe Garofoli detailed, Smith has had her senior housing costs rise by $50.00 each month. Unlike the assholes who didn’t do their jobs on Capitol Hill, not to mention that phony in the White House, Smith and others like her need that money to survive.

Smith lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Maybe she should abandon her home and friends for a cheaper locale, say Bangladesh. She receives less than $1,000.00 each month in Social Security –– you know, that “entitlement” Obama wants to cut to prove he can ‘cooperate’ with Republicans –– and a loss of fifty dollars is serious. In Garofoli’s words:

“After a lifetime of working a series of low-paying jobs –– maid, cannery worker, assembly line employee –– Smith doesn’t have a pension. Her daughter brings her lentils and fish most nights for dinner. She rarely goes out because she can barely spare money to see a movie.

“Smith’s housing options are limited in one of the nation;s hottest housing markets. She lives a few miles from where the San Francisco 49ers are building a $1.2 billion stadium and top Silicon Valley tech firms are rolling in money.

“Her daughter, Karima Holdman, is an unemployed former janitor and assembly line worker. Holdman’s long-time partner, Louie Campos, is a grocery checker, and they have little room to spare in their condo.

“’This puts me in a bad position,’ Smith said of the cuts. ‘I don’t understand why they have to do this to poor people.’”

Well, Sfia, let me explain it. See, the bankers stole lots of money, billions and billions. They needed that money so they could pay themselves billions of dollars in what they call ‘bonuses.’ It seems that these days in America, executives, top educators, sports stars, and media personalities all deserve very large ‘bonuses’ for doing pretty much nothing at all. Someone has to pay for that.

Likewise, every drone which fires a Hellfire missile into someone’s home in Yemen or Pakistan costs many millions of dollars. That money doesn’t grow on trees, so it has to come from somewhere. Certainly, you don’t expect executives or politicians to pay for that. The Kardashians aren’t going to pay for it. Tiger Woods can’t afford to pay for it. So, naturally, it’s got to be you.

Then, there’s the cost of the wars in general. These are expensive. You can’t destroy other countries and kill hundreds of thousands of people on the cheap. Then there’s the cost of rebuilding what we blow up. Someone has to pay for Halliburton’s and Bechtel’s profits.

And there are so many other important things which cost money. When Obama invited all of those CEOs and bankers to a feed at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, you know they didn’t have to buy their own dinners. You, Sfia Smith, your fifty dollars was needed for the dessert. I’m sure you can be very proud of that.

Yeah, President Obama, I’ve got your back all right. If it were up to me, you’d be out of office faster than you can tell another cracking good joke about drones or draw up today’s death list for your SEAL heroes.

By the way, dear reader, you do know, don’t you, that the entire ‘budget crisis’ is a fraud, right? Where does the national debt come from? It comes from borrowing. Who does the government borrow from? Why, the banks, of course! And the banks charge interest, well, why not? And so the taxpayers must pay more and more taxes to ‘service’ the debt. And of course the debt keeps growing, unless, as periodically happens, the government decides to cut your services, ignore a collapsing infrastructure, and stop spending money on trifles such as food stamps or medicine for the poor.

But none of that is necessary. In fact, there is no actual reason why the government could not itself issue money, whatever it needs to issue, to pay for whatever it wishes to spend money on. There would be no interest. In fact, the money spent, if it was not all pissed away on drunken Congressmen, would wind up working its way through the economy. But that’s another story for another time.

I am furious, as I often am. What kind of country allows this to happen, a bunch of politicians dreaming up a way to evade responsibility, institute ‘automatic’ cuts ‘across the board’ so that, as Obama likes to put it, we all share the pain? The rich are not suffering; they are not meant to suffer. Only the poor, those without jobs, those trying to scrape by, those deciding whether to spend their few dollars on medicine or food this week. Those are the ones who suffer.

Sfia said, “I don’t understand why they have to do this to poor people.”

Because the people who run this country are nasty, soulless bastards, that’s why. I am ashamed to be an American right now.

Buy my novel. It'll make you feel lots better than the daily news. http://www.amazon.com/News-From-A-Parallel-World/dp/1478194448/

Comments

A Father Of Four

Sat, 11 May 2013 10:30:07 +0200

Warning: I’m a little pissed-off tonight and this column uses extreme language. If that is likely to offend you, I’m sorry. Sometimes ordinary, diplomatic, polite language is not nearly enough, and this is one of those times. In my opinion, there are no words bad enough to tell this story, but I’m going to try.

There was a time when local ‘law enforcement’ officers who murdered unarmed citizens had reason to worry because there might be people coming after them. This was especially prevalent when white cops were shooting black men to death in the South in this land of the free and there were real lawyers in the Justice Department under Bob Kennedy or Nicholas Katzenbach.

But armed thugs with badges no longer have anything to fear in America. They can do anything. Eric Holder is too busy going after pot growers to worry about Gestapo activities and the criminal activities of ‘law enforcement.’

Early Thursday morning, a gang of armed killers wearing the uniforms of the California Highway Patrol and Kern County Sheriff’s Department beat a man to death with their night sticks, then confiscated the phone/cameras of witnesses, claiming they needed the video for an ‘investigation’ which might take years to complete.

Witnesses say that the victim, a 33-year-old father of four named David Silva, “begged for his life” as they beat him to death. One witness said that the was actually awakened from sleep by the sounds of the batons striking Silva’s head.

The murder took place on a street corner in Bakersfield. Two cops approached Silva to ask whether he was the person neighbors had complained about being intoxicated. They quickly decided that he was not being cooperative and began striking him in the head and upper body. As he fell to the ground, they called for backup, and several other cars arrived on the scene. What followed was an orgy of violence as as many as nine cops beat Silva to death.

Seven of the killers were Kern County Sheriff’s deputies; they have apparently been named. The CHP, meanwhile, refuses to disclose who participated in the murder wearing their badges, claiming that an ‘investigation’ was underway.

There are several such ‘investigations’ underway, including one by the Kern County Sheriff, a hack named Donny Youngblood, who asked for “patience” while he tried to figure out how to get rid of the evidence and whitewash the whole thing.

Kern County deputies immediately went after witnesses who had filmed the murder, confiscating cell phones and threatening people.

One, Sulina Quair, telephoned 911 as the attack proceeded. In a stunning audio made available to television station 23ABC, Quair pleaded with the dispatcher:

"There's a man laying on the floor and your police officers beat the shit out of him and killed him. I have it all on video camera. I am sitting here on the corner of Flower and Palm right now and you have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight Sheriffs. The guy was laying on the floor and eight Sheriff's ran up and started beating him up with sticks. The man is dead laying right here, right now."

http://www.turnto23.com/news/local-news/911-call-deputies-allegedly-beat-killed-david-silva

Evidently, what troubled the Sheriff’s Department was not the murder but the existence of a videotape which showed it.

In her 911 call, Quair warned that she would “send it to the news. These cops have no reason to do this to this man.” The dispatcher asked for her phone number “so the watch commander could call me,” but instead two deputies went after her, confiscating her camera when she demanded that they produce a warrant.

Quair had been on the scene because she and her family had been visiting relatives in the Kern Medical Center, across the way. Her sister Melissa Quair’s boyfriend, also present, got the murder on his own camera. In that video, Melissa later recounted, it is very clear that the deputies were beating Silva. At one point, she said, they hogtied him and lifted him and twice dropped him onto the street.

Melissa Quair and her boyfriend picked up some food at a nearby Taco Bell and were home eating it around 3:00 a.m. when two detectives arrived and demanded their phones. They entered her house without permission, she said, then kept them captive. Her boyfriend was prevented from leaving for work until he surrendered his phone.

Sulina Quair told the press that the deputies promised to return her phone to her right away, but Sheriff Youngblood now says that because it was seized under a warrant it cannot be given back without a court order.

Melissa Quair and her boyfriend can’t get their phones back, either. Neither can Sulina and Melissa’s mother, Maria Melendez, who also filmed the murder. When Maria went to visit Melissa later that morning, she was nabbed by the same two detectives and told she had to turn over her phone. These were seized by Youngblood’s goons without warrants, but he’s not releasing them, either.

“They lied to us,” Melissa said. “They said they would personally deliver the phones back to us the next day, but when we called they said they were keeping them until the investigation is over.”

Another witness, without a camera, described the scene she witnessed this way:

“When I got outside I saw two officers beating a man with batons, and they were hitting his head so every time they would swing, I could hear the blows to his head. His body was just lying on the street and before the ambulance arrived one of the officers performed CPR on him and another used a flashlight on his eyes but I’m sure he was already dead.”

The cops are not talking, saying there’s an ongoing investigation, presumably a cover-up, and they won’t let anybody see the cell phone videos taken by witnesses. Eventually, the cops promise, the public will get access to the films. I guess they’re bringing in experts to either manipulate the images or accidentally destroy them.

The dead man’s brother, Christopher, told reporters, “My brother spent the last eight minutes of his life pleading, begging for his life.”

David Silva was a human being. He had four children. In one photo accompanying a news story, he is shown with his three daughters, Makayla, 10, Katelyn, 4, and Chelsey, 8. He had a right to live. Nothing he did or is said to have done could justify what these criminals with badges did to him. We have a responsibility here. Cops are paid with public funds. They are supposed to serve us, not murder us. If we allow this to happen, we will deserve the police state horrors our negligence invites.

Having the Sheriff of Kern County ‘investigate’ his own men is a travesty.

Two of the killers wore the uniform of the Highway Patrol. That makes this a state crime. I want the Attorney General of California, Kamala Harris, to launch a criminal investigation and I want these mother fuckers in prison for life, all of them.

A man is beaten to death by people employed by the state. In a democracy, they are arrested and charged, and put on trial. If the evidence shows what witnesses say it does, they are sent to prison. In a police state, the ‘authorities’ ‘investigate’ the ‘incident’ until people forget about it, lose the ‘evidence,’ and maybe, if the heat makes them uncomfortable, a couple of the worst offenders get fined or put on paid leave. Which do you think is going to happen here?

Nothing’s going to return David Silva to his children, but maybe there are things we can still do to return this country to its people.

Yesterday, Sulina Quair said that Silva’s screams are still haunting her. She was an estimated twenty feet from the deputies as they beat the man to death.

“I’ve been crying a lot and his voice just plays over and over in my head. I sit there and I can still hear him choking in his own blood, trying to gasp for air.”

Comments

Cleveland's Reluctant Hero

Fri, 10 May 2013 09:10:51 +0200

The story has everything which appeals to Americans: drama, heroism, race, sexual perversion, psychopathology, money and commercial appeal.

Charles Ramsey is the hero, a man who has thusfar refused a reward for rescuing three women held captive by an evil fucker and his two brothers.

According to early press accounts, the kidnapper blames the victims, teenagers at the time of their abductions, for getting into his car in the first place. If that’s the precursor for an insanity plea, it’s a lulu.

As for Ramsey, he’s in a bind. Every time he tries to do the right thing he’s besieged with offers from people well-meaning or predatory. Already, McDonald’s corporation, hoping to suck up some reflected glory, is preparing to make him an offer of some kind. If I were Ramsey, I’d move and leave no forwarding address; it’s only going to get worse.

The women, Amanda Berry, Michele Knight, and Gina DeJesus, were rescued on May 6th when Ramsey heard Berry’s cry for help and kicked in a door, freeing her and her daughter. “There’re two more upstairs,” she told Ramsey. “Call 911.” Each captive had been kidnapped many years before by one of the brothers.

The 911 operator didn’t believe him. Ramsey said, “I’ve got Amanda Berry. The dispatcher told me ‘quite playing on the line, you ain’t got her.’ I said, send the police, you moron.”

When the cops came they found the other two women upstairs.

Ramsey, who lived next door, told interviewers he was amazed that the women were held in that house. “You got to have some big testicles to pull this off, bro, ‘cause I been here a year, we see this guy every day, we barbecue with the dude, we eatin’ ribs, listenin’ to salsa music... he just goes in the yard, plays with the dogs, tinkers with his cars and motorcycle... “

Ramsey himself inadvertently triggered the attention from McDonald’s. It seems Monday was his day off and he’d gone to the fast food emporium for a Big Mac and God knows what else and was home enjoying the repast when Berry’s screams got his attention. He ran next door still carrying the burger, a fact which was relayed to millions by way of videos all over the web. The corporation, naturally, hopped on board.

So far, Ramsey has waved off attempts to reward him. “I already have a job,” he said. “Give the reward money to them (the abductees).” This statement loosed the hounds of hell. One very large strain of opinion, evident by the thousands now on message boards and facebook, is that God will reward him for his selfless act. The other, a bit muted for obvious reasons, suggests that anyone who turns down reward money is a chump, or perhaps fishing for something better.

The rescuer does not see himself as a hero and appears embarrassed by such terms. “People saying I’m a hero, let me tell you something, I’m an American, I’m just like you, I work for a living...”

There are racial comments, many of them well-meaning. Ramsey is black, the kidnapped women white. One writer offered, “There Are Still Alot Of Decent BLACK Men Around. We Need More Ppl Like Him!!” This, of course, surprised me; I’d thought all the Decent BLACK Men had moved to Europe.

Others demanded to know what his race had to do with anything and said that Jesus would have approved. There is considerable talk of Jesus in these comments, a rash of them, actually, and talk of blessings and heaven and plenty of Amens. Maybe there’s a group of people sitting there, diligently composing these notes. Otherwise, where they come from is a mystery.

One writer demanded, “How do you know he is a Christian?” But this question was rolled under the wheels of the Good Lord’s express.

Ramsey himself is not oblivious to the race aspect of the whole thing., advising one flustered white newsman, “I knew somethin’ was wrong when a little pretty white girl run into a black man’s arms... somethin’ is wrong... dead giveaway, dead giveaway... either she’s homeless or she got robbed, that’s the only reason she run to a black man...”

These are strange times. I get the distinct feeling that for many people the Ramsey rescue is exactly the theater they’ve been waiting for. After all, nothing in politics is bringing us any joy, and there are crazy people running around with munitions, either self-directed or on a government leash. We could use a hero and Charles Ramsey may have to serve, like it or not.

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High Crimes And Misdemeanors

Thu, 09 May 2013 10:24:14 +0200

It’s one of those numbers you can’t believe when you first hear it. Did someone add a zero?

Twenty-six thousand. Incidents of rape and other sexual predations reported by women in the U.S. military, 2012, attacks on them by men in the U.S. military. 26,000. This is the number of assaults according to a research team which counted and credited what they were told, not the official number. The official number is lower. I don’t suppose I have to explain why that is.

The military brass are now on the hot seat before a Senate committee where female members are a little outraged not just by the numbers but by the official response they’re getting, a bunch of male generals with fruit salad on their chests patronizing the Senators, which is a bad idea.

The Secretary of the Army gave the predictable nod toward the gravity of the whole situation and then lectured the Senators about how women don’t report rape because, you know, they don’t want their families or boy friends to find out.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York was not amused, being a woman and not so easily tricked by brass hats as some of her male colleagues. Also not laughing, Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri. Elect a bunch of women to the Senate and there are going to be these problems.

Gillibrand wanted to know why rape charges shouldn’t be handled by civilian juries, a suggestion which no doubt sent chills down the Secretary’s back. She was taken by testimony from numerous women who explained how complaints of sexual abuse were not only ignored by the chain of command but usually resulted in the victims being ostracized or even punished. Perpetrators were routinely promoted.

In one notable instance, a military trial by jury, in which a defendant air ace was found guilty, was overturned by the officer who had herself appointed the jury panel. To this, the brass hats had no answer.

They also don’t seem capable of answering the overall question, which is this: what is going on in the United States military where there are more than seventy sexual assaults every single day? That’s a lot of rape any way you look at it.

Not being in the Senate and therefore not worried about re-election or getting any wealthy corporate sponsors pissed off at me, I wonder about the selectivity of Senators Gillibrand and McCaskill when it comes to affixing blame for criminality on the chain of command. See, the Senate has known for quite a few years now that the U.S. military has committed widespread torture as a matter of policy, kidnapping people and sending them via “black” flights to torture chambers all over the globe.

As a matter of fact, one day after the Boston Marathon bombings, as the country was transfixed by the drama of nine thousand heavily-armed troops occupying Boston in pursuit of a single, unarmed nineteen-year-old suspect, a 600-page report was issued by a nonpartisan commission on torture, American style.

The Constitution Project’s Report on the findings of the Task Force on Detainee Treatment was released at the Press Club in Washington, D.C., on April 16th. The product of two years of intense study and research, the bipartisan group, whose members included prominent Democratic and Republican members of past and current administrations, found that the United States has been guilty of conduct in violation of numerous international laws. In short, the Task Force found Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama guilty of war crimes.

Bet you didn’t see that on CNN.

Lest you suspect that the Task Force was comprised of some ideological misfits, let me disabuse you of that notion. Its co-chairs were Asa Hutchinson, former undersecretary, Department of Homeland Security and a Republican congressman, and James R. Jones, former ambassador to Mexico and a Democratic congressman.

Other members include Richard A. Epstein, a professor of law at NYU and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution; Brigadier General David Irvine, USA (Ret.), former strategic intelligence officer who taught military law for 18 years at the Sixth Army Intelligence School; Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering, former undersecretary of state for political affairs and former ambassador to the United Nations; Gerald E. Thomson, M.D., professor of medicine, emeritus, Columbia University and former president, American College of Physicians; and Judge William R. Sessions, former director of the FBI.

Get the picture?

The Constitution Project report found widespread use of hypothermia, water boarding, stress positions, abdominal beatings, genital torture, and other physical and psychological harm inflicted on prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan, at Guantånamo, and at “black sites” around the world. They also found that these practices, which the Obama regime pretends to have ended, are continuing at ‘friendly’ sites in other countries which promise not to use torture, a fiction everyone knows to be false.

The practice of ‘extraordinary rendition,’ which allows people to be kidnapped and flown to these ‘black sites’ began before 9-11, during the Clinton administration, and continues to this day under Obama.

The findings of this Task Force are thus extraordinarily shocking and important. The specific torture practices used and endorsed by the Bush administration and to some unspecified degree continued under Obama, are clearly in violation of international treaties and international laws. They are war crimes.

Several of the practices enumerated in the 600-page report were in fact used by the Nazis in World War II, called “Versharfte Vernehmung,”and SS officers who so engaged in them were summarily executed by Norwegians who captured them in 1948.

One Japanese General who water boarded captured American pilots during WWII was also executed.

The question is, of course, whether the United States is a democracy, governed by rule of law. If that is so, members of three administrations should be arrested and charged with capital offenses under international law which we, as Americans, have always claimed fealty to. We have always claimed adherence to the principles established at Nuremberg when they applied to others. Do they not apply to us?

Articles concerning the Constitution Project’s stunning report have appeared now in several newspapers, including the New York Times, L.A. Times, and Washington Post. They have also been noted by the American Bar Association Journal and by conservative publications.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/04/16/world/16torture-report.html?_r=0

http://www.lawfareblog.com/2013/04/constitution-project-report-on-enhanced-interrogation-concludes-u-s-engaged-in-torture/

http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/us_tortured_after_9_11_says_independent_constitution_project_panel_report/

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/a-necessary-reckoning-with-torture/

For those among my readers who suspect my political views to be to the left edge, or maybe over the edge, of the spectrum, let me cite at length the commentary from the The American Conservative:

“A new report by the Washington D.C.-based Constitution Project’s Task Force on Detainee Treatment appeared last week, and it should once and for all end the largely partisan debate about whether the United States engaged in torture as part of its counter terrorism effort. A rehashing of the pros and cons regarding the handling of terrorists might well have been considered old news but for the Task Force’s well documented unanimous judgment that in the aftermath of 9/11 the U.S. government had indeed carried out acts that were indisputably torture. A second finding maintains that the top officials in Bush administration bear full responsibility for enabling the practice, having entered into detailed discussions before committing what amount to war crimes.

“The report also notes how the corruption resulting from the White House decision to permit torture was so pervasive that CIA medical doctors routinely monitored the physical abuse that detainees endured and even made suggestions to “improve” the results.

“The report describes in detail how some prisoners were tortured to death or died under mysterious circumstances. Others were chained to walls or hung from ceilings. Some were restrained and placed in unchanged diapers for days at a time, forcing the prisoner to soil himself repeatedly for the duration of his interrogation. Placing suspects in stress positions for hours or days, the use of guard dogs to terrify, enforced nakedness, exposure to cold and heat, and sleep deprivation were routine.

“Of particular interest to those who believe that the CIA has been guilty of some dissimulation regarding the torture that it carried out—since it conveniently destroyed many of the records—the Constitution Project confirms that one or more Libyans were subjected to water boarding, a challenge to the Agency’s contention that the procedure was only used on three al-Qaeda detainees. And another interesting sidebar is the account of how the International Red Cross learned about the systematic torture at Guantanamo shortly after it began but decided it would be better and “more politically acceptable” not to go public and expose the abuses being authorized by the White House.

“Rendition of prisoners began under Bill Clinton and sometimes had nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism. Several dissident Libyans were turned over to strongman Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi as a favor. The Obama administration made clear that it had stopped all “enhanced interrogation” when it took office, but it continued to render suspects to friendly governments for questioning. The governments involved pledged not to use torture on the suspects, but an assurance of that nature is little more than a polite diplomatic fiction well understood by both Washington and the nation receiving the prisoners.

“Obama also failed to bring transparency and closure to the illegal activity by refusing in 2009 to go after those who ordered and carried out the torture, in spite of the fact that Washington is a signatory to the International Convention Against Torture, which requires prompt investigation of all such allegations. Obama claimed that he wanted to look forward rather than back and, to be sure, he would have faced intense Republican resistance if he had proceeded, but he has since stonewalled on any accountability by repeatedly citing the state secrets privilege to halt legal proceedings or attempts by victims of the torture to obtain redress. The White House also has reneged on pre-election pledges to close Guantanamo prison, where suspects continue to be held indefinitely and illegally without any charges and a large scale hunger strike currently underway is being dealt with through forced feeding, which the Task Force considers to be a form of torture. The report concludes that Obama’s refusal to address the treatment of detainees generally “cannot continue to be justified on the basis of national security.”

In his failure to pursue the documented crimes against humanity engaged in by his predecessor, President Obama is complicit in them. In continuing many of the barbaric practices himself, he bears similar legal blame. The author of the piece, Philip Giraldi, a former CIA case officer, concludes this way:

“Given the actual record on torture and renditions, trusting the government to do what is right is no longer an option, particularly when the White House can and will claim that its actions are based on national-security imperatives that cannot be revealed.”

When and if Congress gets around to facing its moral, legal, and ethical responsibilities for this grave and brutal history, it will need a truly independent special prosecutor and a courageous, patriotic grand jury to do what’s right.

Comments

Israel And The Liberals

Wed, 08 May 2013 09:34:11 +0200

When I was a kid, the New York Times represented the pinnacle of daily journalism. The best reporters, the most enlightened editorial perspective, the most trustworthy documentation. If the Times printed it, you could trust it.

Those days are gone. Now, the Times represents corrupted journalism. Now, when you see something in the Times it’s wise to discount it unless you find substantive support for it from more reliable sources, such as the Guardian UK, Truthdig, Firedoglake, Nation of Change, RT News, Al Jazeera, Greg Palast, American LiveWire, Rolling Stone, Common Dreams, or a random taxi driver in New York City.

The use of newspapers and other media to promote government or private agendas is well-established. Famously, William Randolph Hearst got his war against Spain by either setting up or capitalizing on the sinking of the Maine. The Times, although it abandoned Lyndon Johnson over Viet Nam, has rallied the citizenry for every international criminal enterprise since then, often fudging ‘facts’ to make the case. It has done this as a “liberal” publication, as a publication which endorses Democrats, including Obama. It, along with many other media temples, self-identifies as “liberal.” Not surprisingly, this reactionary “liberal” viewpoint is seized by crazies on the right who accuse the media in general of being “liberal.”

Liberal, though, has essentially disappeared in America. “Liberals” have become reactionary, pro-war, pro-austerity, pro-surveillance. “Liberals” write Op Ed pieces in rags like the Times arguing for reactionary positions on issues of war while couching them in terms of infinite reasonableness.

That is what is going on now, with the increasing noise about Syria and Iran. There is no decent reason for the United States to kill more people in order to save them, as it has done in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Mali, Yemen, Libya, and elsewhere. But lack of a good reason has never stopped us before.

Anyway, reasons don’t have to be real. They don’t even have to be sane. For many years now, the U.S. has been bombing the hell out of innocent people for humanitarian reasons. We’re itching to do it again in Syria. In fact, in the wake of last week’s air strikes against Syria by Israel, domestic U.S. support for American ‘intervention’ has escalated, according to New York Times columnist and former executive editor Bill Keller, who writes that Barack Obama should ”get over” any hesitation to do so.

Keller argues that just because we didn’t find any of the mythical weapons of mass destruction Bush and his regime (and the Times) said we’d find in Iraq, that shouldn’t stop us from attacking Syria.

“Our reluctance to arm the rebels or defend the civilians being slaughtered in their homes has convinced the Assad regime (and the world) that we are not serious.”

As Keller says, we are already arming the rebels via our proxies, the Saudis, and through Qatar, but our unwillingness to do it directly has caused many of our weapons to fall into the hands of extremists, including people associated with Al Qaida. Plus, we couldn’t make the situation any worse, he says.

Keller, in the fashion of today’s New York Times, is a ‘liberal.’ For real ass-sucking madness, another columnist, Thomas J. Friedman, pretentious asshole of the decade in my estimation, has a more straightforward prescription:

“I believe if you want to end the Syrian civil war and tilt Syria onto a democratic path, you need an international force to occupy the entire country, secure the borders, disarm all the militias and midwife a transition to democracy. It would be staggeringly costly and take a long time, with the outcome still not guaranteed. But without a homegrown Syrian leader who can be a healer, not a divider, for all its communities, my view is that anything short of an external force that rebuilds Syria from the bottom up will fail.”

Look, what is it with Americans that we think the world is our territory and we’ve just loaned it out to the people who live on it? What is it about us that we think we know what’s best for others and that, if necessary, we’ll impose it on them even if we have to kill them in the process?

Friedman wants to “tilt” Syria? Who the fuck gives him the right to do that? He wants to “occupy the entire country”? For what purpose and on whose behalf? He wants to “rebuild Syria from the bottom up”? In order to accomplish what end? The creation of a model state which better conforms to some mythical ideal we’re promoting, all the while our corporations are raping the nation and its people?

Friedman, Keller, and other American “liberals” are also looking to blow up Iran, although that’s not quite how they put it, at least not always. Hillary Clinton once threatened to “obliterate” the country and its people, an unusually candid moment from a classic war hawk who normally tries very hard to disguise her belligerent attitude toward other peoples. Syria, they may think, is a way to bring that about.

It’s been apparent for years now that the true aim of the United States in the Middle East is not peace or stability but a complete takeover of the region. We are an empire, pretending for the domestic audience that we’re for democracy and self-determination while the rest of the world is not fooled for one bloody minute. Any people being hit with American rockets are not under the false impression that we bring peace. Any government, especially those democratically-elected as in many Latin American nations, which sees the CIA and other spy apparatus being slipped into their lands for the purpose of killing or displacing their leaders knows exactly what’s going on, even if the American public is too anaesthetized by television and the government’s circuses to figure it out, or too morally bankrupt to care.

Nobody wants our “help,” because they know what it means.

I’m not sure what crime Assad committed to piss off America, but he clearly did something. We are not sending military equipment and, unofficially, special ops forces to ‘save lives,’ though that is what we say.

America’s record in the saving lives department is not especially good right now. It cost the Iraqis more than a million dead for us to save lives there. In Libya, the carnage was limited to but a few thousand directly, but our paid mercenaries from Qatar have butchered tens of thousands and probably many more than that, in the process of liberating them.

Meanwhile, America is being manipulated by Israel, nothing new, I grant you, but in increasingly alarming ways. The Israel air strikes against Syria last week were carried out ostensibly because Israel thinks that Syria is supplying arms and equipment to Hezbollah in Lebanon and believes it has the right to prevent it. What gives Israel the moral right to do what it’s doing in this and other respects is a mystery to many people, including me, however it clearly has a stranglehold on U.S. policies and U.S. public opinion.

President Obama, on the Israeli strikes:

“Israelis justifiably have to guard against the transfer of advanced weaponry to terrorist organizations like Hezbollah. We coordinate with the Israelis recognizing they are very close to Syria. They are very close to Lebanon. Hezbollah has repeatedly said they would be willing to attack as far as Tel Aviv. So, the Israelis have to be vigilant and concerned.”

Let’s step away from Fantasyland for a moment. Right now, Israel possesses nuclear weapons and the delivery system to hit any country in the Middle East. They developed these weapons after John Kennedy, who had hoped to halt their spread and convince the four countries which at that time had them to disarm, was killed. In size, they are the sixth largest nuclear power.

There are no Middle Eastern countries which pose a threat of any kind to Israel. Rhetoric aside, it would be suicide for anyone to attack Israel. Iran, among other things, has attacked no one for a thousand years, which is one reason for its survival.

Most Middle Eastern countries not named Israel have long been infiltrated by America’s CIA and other special operations forces. All have been threatened and several overthrown. Attempts at democracy unfavorable to America have resulted in assassinations and invasions. Iran itself was a democracy in 1953 but wanted to control its own oil; England and the U.S. destroyed the government and installed the Shah, one of the most brutal despots the world had ever known. Iranians remember this and are not grateful for it.

When Obama proclaims that Israel “justifiably” must “guard against transfer of advanced weaponry to terrorist organizations,” he presumably is suffering from a major cognitive lapse. In fact, most “advanced weaponry” now in the hands of groups America doesn’t like got there after initially being introduced into the world by the United States. Last year, Obama’s State Department bragged that the United States had sold more weapons to other nations in 2011 than at any time in its history. Even now, there is concern that much of the weaponry the CIA has provided to the ‘rebels’ in Syria is being held by people affiliated with Al Qaida.

It’s not hard to see that Obama and Israel are both moving into position for an attack on Iran. Indeed, there were major acts of sabotage connected with defense plants inside Iran within the past few days.

Where all this is leading is anyone’s guess, but an interesting commentary has begun to emerge in the Israeli press. This, by columnist Gideon Levy, in Haaretz:

“Israel is prodding U.S. President Barack Obama, catching him in his use of the words “red line,” challenging and provoking him to reach the real thing: bombing Iran. Israel wants to reveal the president’s nakedness on the Syrian matter in order to present him as naked on the Iranian issue. Perhaps he won’t bomb Syria, as Israel requested; The key thing is that he should bomb Iran. This policy of manipulating the American president, at the expense of Syrians’ blood, perhaps will pan out in the short run. But it will also make Israel even more loathed in Washington…”

It will also make the United States even more loathed throughout the Middle East. “The key thing is that he should bomb Iran.” The pure evil of this is evident to any sensate human being. These are people who live in Iran, ordinary people who have the same right to life as anyone in America, including members of Congress and the President’s own family. What did they do to earn such a despicable wish?

The argument that the United States has a right to attack, bomb, invade, or otherwise cause misery to any country in the world it wishes to destroy or merely push around is a dangerous one, a sick one. That it is promoted by so-called ‘liberals’ and about to be implemented by the government of a ‘Democratic’ President is grotesque.

Comments

Fifty Years Down The Rabbit Hole

Tue, 07 May 2013 09:44:46 +0200

The facebook item referenced a graduation speech at Ohio State by Barack Obama. In it, he told the graduates to reject dissent. Oh, he didn’t put it exactly in those terms but there is no mistaking the point.

He denounced it as ‘cynicism’ and ‘blaming government,’ meaning him, for “all of our problems.”

In between the introductory rote praise for soldiers, the hired killers who do his dirty work and make the world safe for corporations, and the ritualistic ‘God bless America’ exhortation at the end, Obama urged the next generation of adults to eschew making an issue of anything, to choose instead the “tranquil and steady dedication” over a lifetime. He likes the term ‘tranquil,’ bringing it back for an encore at the end. It’s an odd term, I think. Why would anyone use such a term when talking about the role of a citizen?

He talked about ‘American values’ and called the U.S. "the greatest country in the world,” which is ridiculous but predictable. It’s after all our ‘exceptionalism’ which gives us the royal right to bomb other countries with which we are ostensibly not at war, to kill strangers without any conscience whatsoever, and to loot other lands of their resources because, well, we’re special.

When he began discussing ‘service’ to the nation, he conflated it with the military. Like many shallow, reflexive, dangerous public pronouncements from fools these days, patriotism for Obama is about wearing uniforms and killing strangers on command. He wanted especially to praise the “50 ROTC cadets in your graduating class (who) will become commissioned officers in the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. 130 of your fellow graduates have already served – some in combat, some on multiple deployments. Of the 98 veterans earning bachelor’s degrees today, 20 are graduating with honors. And at least one kept serving his fellow veterans when he came home by starting up a campus organization called Vets4Vets. As your Commander-in-Chief, I could not be prouder of all of you.”

In fact, Obama’s emphasis at Ohio State was on conflict and war. He opened with this description of the times in which these graduates were entering adulthood:

“Class of 2013, your path to this moment has wound you through years of breathtaking change. You were born as freedom forced its way through a wall in Berlin, and tore down an Iron Curtain across Europe... And you came of age as terror touched our shores; an historic recession spread across the nation; and a new generation signed up to go to war.”

Without extensive analysis, it should in any case be noted that the Berlin wall did not come down because “freedom” forced it to. “Freedom” had nothing to do with the fall of the Soviet Empire. Greed, corruption, hypocrisy, and militarism killed the U.S.S.R., just as it’s doing to America now.

“...a new generation signed up to go to war.” Again, an odd construction. “...signed up” to go kill and be killed, mostly the former. Terror “touched our shores” and we are therefore going to rain it down on people in Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia and Mali and God Knows where else, and you wonderful new military recruits are going to do the raining.

To be fair, Obama did not limit the range of activities the young might engage in to contribute to a better world. They could join the Peace Corps, he said, or create a “startup” company.

“I suspect that those of you who pursue more education, or climb the corporate ladder, or enter the arts or sciences or journalism, will still choose a cause you care about in your life and fight like heck to make it happen.”

Even as you enter the arts or sciences or climb the corporate ladder, you’ll “choose a cause” and fight like heck to make it happen.

I kept reading the text of this speech and couldn’t shake a disturbing sense of atonality. The lines are just a little off, as though they were written by a fifteen-year-old intern or someone careful not to say anything meaningful.

The terminology itself, “choose a cause,” sounds creepy, as though it’s being said as a pro forma expression. It has the same resonance as someone advising a high school sophomore to “choose a club” to join, something to add to the resumé along with all the other useful adjuncts in “climbing the (corporate) ladder.”

What he was getting around to was what he called “citizenship.” He described it as something which seems to come out in crisis, when people rally around to help those harmed by the explosion of a plant in Texas or a bombing in Boston. Citizenship to Obama is a unifying thing, people forgetting their differences and “joining together” regardless of “petty divisions.”

It is a “united urge to help” which defines “citizenship” for Obama. We are “bound to one another... by a deep devotion to this country we love. That’s what citizenship is.”

No, it isn't. Citizenship is anything but a ‘devotion’ in which we are ‘bound to one another.’ It is a requirement of being informed and taking part, of challenging and standing up, sometimes alone, not as part of a crowd but as one who has taken on the risk of telling the truth. The founders of this country, whose work Obama is fond of homogenizing, risked their lives to stand against the policies of what was then their ‘mother country.’ They were in the minority and they had a decent chance of being hanged for it. They did not chant ‘USA! USA!’ as an exercise in the ‘unity’ of ‘citizenship.’

Maybe it’s the audience and Obama’s presumption that Ohio State students are not terribly intelligent. Maybe he doesn’t think they collectively possess much of a vocabulary. But there’s no question that in some passages he is talking down to them, talking to them as though they are slow-witted middle school students who might have trouble following anything very sophisticated. To wit:

“But if we’re being honest, as you’ve studied and worked and served to become good citizens, the institutions that give structure to our society have, at times, betrayed your trust.

“In the run-up to the financial crisis, too many on Wall Street forgot that their obligations don’t end with their shareholders. In entertainment and in the media, ratings and shock value often trumped news and storytelling. And in Washington, well, this is a joyous occasion, so let me put this charitably: I think it’s fair to say our democracy isn’t working as well as we know it can. It could do better. And those of us fortunate enough to serve in these institutions owe it to you to do better, every single day.

“I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we might keep this idea alive at a national level – not just on Election Day, or in times of tragedy, but on all the days in between. Of course, I spend most of my time these days in Washington, a place that sorely needs it.

Isn’t it painful to read this? “If we’re being honest...” and “as you’ve studied and worked and served to become good citizens...” “In the run-up to the financial crisis...”

He’s been “thinking a lot lately about how we might keep this idea alive at a national level –– not just on election day or in times of tragedy but on all the days in between.”

It’s like nails on a chalkboard, isn’t it? Bush spoke to us as though we were gullible. Obama speaks to us as though we’re children, not very bright children.

Missing from his speech was any reflection about how it might be that the bankers who “forgot... their obligations” wound up under him running the Treasury Department, much of the regulatory machinery, his White House staff, and the Department of Commerce, where Penny Pritzker, an old crony who introduced Obama to the golden coffers of Goldman Sachs, just got nominated for the top job, and there was no reference to the concession of Obama’s Attorney General that he wouldn’t prosecute any of these criminals –– maybe the worst felons in America –– because it would disrupt the economy, i.e. upset the bankers, to do so.

A month ago, Obama hosted a couple of dozen of these swine at a fancy dinner. He did not mention that, either.

Similarly, Obama urged the students to “vote, eagerly and often.” This may have been an attempt at humor, or perhaps he thought he was still in Cook County. And if those people you elect don’t do the job, he said, “if they put special interests above your own – you’ve got to let them know that’s not okay. And if they let you down, there’s a built-in day in November where you can really let them know that’s not okay.”

A built-in day in November!

Omitted from his mention of special interests was his own appointment of a roster of thieves, lobbyists, and whores to run virtually every federal department. Pritzker is only the latest in a long and distinguished line. If Obama, who promised on the campaign trail there would be no lobbyists in his administration, and then appointed more than a hundred of them, realized he was speaking of himself, well, this is a joyous occasion, so let me put this charitably: are you kidding?

But he isn’t kidding. In fact, he spoke of lobbyists as though they were the enemy rather than the talent pool from which he selects everybody in his government:

"As citizens, we understand that America is not about what can be done for us. It’s about what can be done by us, together, through the hard and frustrating but absolutely necessary work of self-government." (Ask not what your country can do for you...)

"The founders trusted us with this awesome authority. We should trust ourselves with it, too. Because when we don’t, when we turn away and get discouraged and abdicate that authority, we grant our silent consent to someone who’ll gladly claim it. That’s how we end up with lobbyists who set the agenda; policies detached from what middle-class families face every day; the well-connected who publicly demand that Washington stay out of their business – then whisper in its ear for special treatment that you don’t get."

But no, that is not “how we end up with lobbyists who set the agenda.” We end up with lobbyists who set the agenda because they buy the Congress and the President, including you, Barack Obama. While you were running your ‘grassroots’ 2008 race, you called on ordinary people to bankroll it; only later did it turn out that the big money –– more than three times what they gave to McCain –– came from Goldman Sachs and the other Wall Street crooks, and so you gave them the Treasury Department and control over national economic policy.

Of course, waiting until November of 2016 is not doing us much good right now. But we have to be patient. That’s another virtue of citizenship, according to Obama. Pick something, a “cause,” he says, and make it part of your life. While you’re climbing the corporate ladder, be sure to leave time for extra credit.

Meanwhile, don’t listen to those who want to scare you with stories about how dangerous the government is. Hell, the founders , Obama said, “left us the power to adapt to changing times. They left us the keys to a system of self-government – the tool to do big and important things together that we could not possibly do alone. To stretch railroads and electricity and a highway system across a sprawling continent. To commit mass murder of native peoples and herd the survivors into ghettos in which they are now able to run casinos. (Just kidding about the murder part; he skipped that, probably in the interest of saving time). To educate our people with a system of public schools and land grant colleges, including Ohio State. (Never mind that what was free public education now requires students to indebt themselves so that they are forced into jobs they may hate, or into the military). To care for the sick and the vulnerable, and provide a basic level of protection from falling into abject poverty in the wealthiest nation on Earth. (Although I’m going to take a piece out of Social Security and force some of our poorest citizens to choose between food and medicine, and our veterans we all pretend to honor have to wait years for help from the VA, and there are homeless veterans sleeping in our streets)....

“Still, you’ll hear voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s the root of all our problems, even as they do their best to gum up the works; or that tyranny always lurks just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave, creative, unique experiment in self-rule is just a sham with which we can’t be trusted.”

Well, that’s pretty cute. What I am suggesting is not that our “brave, creative, unique experiment... is a sham” but that it’s been hijacked by self-serving schmucks and by people like you, Mr. President, who have found “creative” ways to undermine the Bill of Rights, spy on every citizen, justify attacking other countries, and draw up death lists, none of which, if you’ll check the records, “the founders” had in mind.

While confining his advice on political participation to voting and to “choos(ing) a cause you care about” and ‘patiently’ pursuing it, Obama carefully excludes the more confrontational political exercises. If we don’t like what our ‘leaders’ are doing, we can always vote them out of office –– and elect a new batch of punks –– at the next ‘built-in day’ in November, 2016.

Friend of mine, on reading some criticism of Obama’s speech, objected that, while he is himself ‘disappointed’ in the President’s work, he thought the speech was okay. Maybe we read into it what we expect to find, he said. And maybe he’s right.

In my case, I’m a lot more than disappointed. Disappointed is what I am in the Giants loss to Philadelphia tonight at the yard. Disappointed is what I was last evening when the pasta I made turned out a lot less tasty than I’d hoped.

What I am about Obama is angry, really, really angry. Spitting angry. Throw-a-shoe-at-him angry. He has not disappointed me, he has betrayed me. He lied. About everything. Torture. War. Guantanamo. Civil liberties. Open government. Wiretapping. NAFTA. GMO labeling. Unions. Social Security. Freedom of speech. The banks. The Bush tax cuts for billionaires.

It is possible to give a speech to college students without treating them as though they were infants. I read the text of the speech and thought of other speeches I’d seen or read about. One speech I recalled clearly, a United States Senator at the Greek Theater at U.C. Berkeley. I was twenty years old, a college junior.

“It is not enough to allow dissent. We must demand it. For there is much to dissent from. We dissent from the fact that millions are trapped in poverty while the nation grows rich. We dissent from the conditions and hatreds which deny a full life to our fellow citizens because of the color of their skin. We dissent from the monstrous absurdity of a world where nations stand poised to destroy one another, and men must kill their fellow men...”

“You are a generation which is coming of age at one of the rarest moments in history - a time when all around us the old order of things is crumbling and a new world is struggling to take shape. If you shrink from this struggle...you will betray the trust which your own position forces upon you... You live in the most privileged nation on earth. You are the most privileged citizens of that privileged nation... By coming to this school you have been lifted onto a tiny, sunlit island while all around you lies an ocean of human misery, injustice, violence, and fear. You can use your enormous privilege and opportunity to seek purely private pleasure and gain, but history will judge you and, as the years pass, you will ultimately judge yourself, on the extent to which you have used your gifts to lighten and enrich the lives of your fellow man...”

That’s what it sounds like, a decent and genuine leader who does not counsel ‘patience’ but rebellion, who urges the young not to wait for the next election but to struggle against the inhumanity which infests our spirit and our politics.

No, Robert F. Kennedy didn’t mention climbing the corporate ladder, as though that were a necessary or admirable enterprise. He did not tiptoe around the misery in his country, mumbling platitudes about the ‘middle class,’ but stated it plainly, the truth, whether we were comfortable with that or not.

Obama barely mentioned the nightmare visited by American weaponry on other areas of the world, referring only to “our” troops, and then only in terms which invited his listeners to accept the inevitability of war. He skipped over every serious issue facing us as a nation, electing to refer to the economy in vague terms, picking up an easy plus with his global warming reference and neglecting to mention that we still refuse to sign on to international agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol.

It is insulting to speak to a nation in these terms and worse when the language he uses is simplified as though his audience is not capable to understanding anything more complex than “built-in day.”

He cited a very brief line from John Kennedy, taking it out of context from a speech Kennedy gave on disarmament, a graduation speech fifty years ago this June 10th, at American University, as a matter of fact, though Obama doesn’t say so, perhaps worried that some students might locate it on YouTube and see the difference between a real President and someone who is faking the whole thing.

Kennedy’s June 10, 1963, speech was, in fact, his greatest speech, one which broke dramatically with the military-industrial establishment his predecessor had warned of and which today, in a greatly advanced, cancerous form, owns Obama:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7IBSxVt9pw

Go ahead, watch it. Hell, just catch the first five minutes and then tell me you don’t see the unmistakable chasm, the tragic difference between these two Presidents. You will know why I am more than disappointed, why I feel with all my heart that for today’s President to take a short, unreflective line from the 1963 speech of a real President, distorting its context and ignoring its meaning, is a lie and a blasphemy.

Okay, enough vitriol for one column. If you like the style but want something a lot more fun, check out my novel, eleven five-star reviews, on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/News-From-A-Parallel-World/dp/1478194448/

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Four Dead In Ohio

Sun, 05 May 2013 02:19:19 +0200

“Tin soldiers and Nixon coming, we’re finally on our own. This summer I hear the drumming, four dead in Ohio...”

April 4, 1970. American troops crossed the border from Viet Nam into Cambodia, invading a sovereign nation which had done us no harm. The rationale, expressed by that murderous swine, Richard Nixon and his pal Henry Kissinger, was that North Vietnamese troops and Viet Cong guerrillas were using Cambodia as a sanctuary from which to launch attacks against the puppet regime in the South.

In the United States, college campuses were filled with angry students, demonstrating against America’s policy, seizing campus buildings, holding mass rallies, in some cases burning ROTC buildings to the ground.

At Jackson State in Mississippi, local police shot more than twenty black students who had gathered near a bowling alley to protest against continued segregation. Most of them were shot in the back.

At Kent State in Ohio, National Guard troops called out by Governor James Rhodes opened fire at unarmed, peaceful student demonstrators. Four were killed. More than seventy rounds were fired in just a few seconds of horror.

No one was prosecuted for the murders at Jackson or Kent.

Three decades later, American troops attacked the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, despite more than one million protesters across the world marching in a desperate attempt at pre-empting the wars begun by the Dick Cheney presidency.

Subsequent to these unprovoked mass slaughters, American Hellfire missiles were fired into Pakistan, a sovereign nation which had done us no harm. The rationale, expressed by George Bush, Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, was that al Qaida and Taliban guerrillas were using Pakistan as a sanctuary from which to launch attacks against the puppet regime in Afghanistan.

Under the successor presidency of Barack Obama, these strikes against largely civilian populations in Pakistan have been increased, and we now also routinely attack targets in Yemen, Somalia, and Mali. Mostly, the Obama White House refuses to talk about it, or even acknowledge that it’s going on. Congress does nothing.

In the United States, college campuses are filled with students trying to line up summer jobs, downloading the latest cool apps, and planning trips to the beach.

In the United States, every telephone call you make, every e-mail you send, is captured electronically by the FBI and stored for future use against you. In twelve years, an agency which did not even exist has burgeoned into a massive police state apparatus. Whistle blowers are imprisoned; criminals are considered too powerful to prosecute. These are facts, not guesses.

Neil Young asked it 43 years ago in another context, but it’s more true now than ever. How can you run when you know?

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Bad Moon Rising

Thu, 02 May 2013 20:35:41 +0200

The facebook photo is of a blue-uniformed cop standing proudly before a red sign which reads, ‘PUBLIC NOTICE: Pursuant to F.S. 715.21 John Goodman is a convicted Sexual Predator and lives at this location.’

The caption invites me to ‘LIKE if you LOVE the idea (and share).’ It has 442,079 ‘likes’ and has been ‘shared’ 86,589 times, but it’s only been on the web for a week. Ideas like these take time.

The signs are being posted in Bradford County, Florida. That’s the state where amateur storm troopers physically intervened to prevent ballots from being counted in 2000, thus creating the constitutional crisis in which a corrupt Supreme Court threw out the actual vote and appointed George W. Bush President. It’s also the state where it’s apparently okay to shoot someone to death if he’s black and wearing a hoodie, as Trayvon Martin discovered.

The cop in the picture looks pretty smug, and why shouldn’t he be? The signs are sure to give him more work, since inciting vigilante behavior has always proved profitable to law enforcement and posting such signs outside the residences of sex offenders will certainly give rise to rocks through windows, bullets through walls, and routine assaults by passing do-gooders.

Elsewhere in Florida, another cop has had another bright idea, this one also ratified and funded by the legislature. The Palm Beach County Sheriff has been given a million bucks to implement a neighborhood informer program. That’s right, kids! In Palm Beach County, you, too, can have law enforcement show up armed at the home of anyone you don’t like.

According to Sheriff Ric Bradshaw, the “prevention intervention” units will take phone calls on a 24-hour hotline from citizens informing on their friends and neighbors. “We want people to call us if the guy down the street says he hates the government, hates the mayor and he’s gonna shoot him,” Bradshaw said. “What does it hurt to have somebody knock on a door and ask, ‘Hey, is everything OK?’ ”

Bradshaw hopes this will become a model for the rest of the nation.

The goal, the Sheriff says, is preventing crime. In the case of the various tragedies we’ve witnessed in recent years, from Aurora, Colorado, to Newton, Connecticut, there’s always been someone who had an inkling ahead of time, someone who knew the perps were not quite right.

In Palm Beach County, they aim to ‘intervene’ before anything happens. In the local newspaper, the Palm Beach Post, the writers stress that there’s a debate “about the balance between civil liberties, privacy, and protecting the public.”

I’ve been hearing and reading a lot lately about a “balance” between civil liberties and a “need” to “protect” people. The requirement that we “balance” these things is being taken for granted among lawmakers, in Obama’s comments, at public meetings in places as disparate as Palm Beach and Oakland, California.

What Obama and these other cretins mean by ‘balance’ is that we will have to surrender some of the rights and freedoms guaranteed us by our foundational documents, by the Bill of Rights, in order to gain some additional ‘safety.’ The general public seems to be buying this. The mass media, of course, buys whatever they’re told. America is being militarized in our towns and villages and cities, in our communities and on our streets.

The people in Boston willingly handed over their rights under the Fourth Amendment because they were told that a single, 19-year-old ‘terrorist’ was loose among them. They submitted happily to an occupying army. Such is the life and times of America in the 21st century.

The Palm Beach Post story included this chilling line: “Bradshaw is...planning public service announcements to encourage local citizens to report their neighbors, friends, or family members if they fear they could harm themselves or others.” Sounds like East Germany, circa 1960.

The Sheriff explained that his intervention unit would help prevent violence and, “as a side benefit, law enforcement will have needed information to keep a close eye on things.” Bradshaw conceded that there was a possibility some would abuse the program, but is confident that “We know how to sort through frivolous complaints.” In other words, trust us.

Trust us is the premise, spoken or unspoken, for much of the extension of violent authority claimed by everyone from Barack Obama to the local cops. The President reassures us that although he pushed through a law which allows him to lock up without trial or charges, indefinitely, anyone he wants to, we shouldn’t worry because he would never abuse the power. Then he smiles and talks basketball and shows us his kids again.

Several people commenting on the Palm Beach story noted that in recent years, there has been a marked increase in police shooting to death unarmed people who had attracted calls from worried relatives or neighbors. Reminded me that in my own part of the country, the California coast, there have been such shootings almost weekly. Happen all the time in Vallejo, for example, and in Santa Rosa and other towns, someone phoning the cops because a spouse or son is “acting strange.”

Cops don’t subdue or otherwise disarm people anymore. They shoot them. Subsequent hearings are a farce because nobody is going to hold these wonderful law enforcement people liable for anything. Americans kiss the ass of cops and soldiers, regardless of what they do.

Programs where people are encouraged to inform on others always lead to horrors; they are the common signature of a dictatorship or police state. Nazi Germany made it a patriotic act to inform on one’s parents or children or siblings who, in the words of Sheriff Ric Bradshaw, hated the government.

Informers are also, not coincidentally, at the root of the ongoing shame of Guantanamo Prison. When the United States first invaded Afghanistan, we encouraged the locals to inform on one another; often, bounties were offered. The result was predictable: people informed on their personal enemies, anyone they wanted to get rid of. More than ten years later, after conducting experiments in psychological torture on them, the U.S. is afraid to let them go.

These are the signs of disaster and there are more of them all the time. Apparently, it doesn’t take much to scare Americans into pissing away the most critical rights they have, rights hard-won and hard-preserved over more than two centuries. It’s a line often attributed to Ben Franklin, sounds like something he’d say. Those who would exchange their freedoms for the promise of greater security will end up with neither.

Nor deserve them. Looks like we’re in for nasty weather...

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My Craziness, Explained

Wed, 01 May 2013 04:34:40 +0200

The last time I paid cash to a shrink was almost ten years ago. It didn’t take long to realize that she was lots crazier than I was.

I mean no disrespect to the therapists I know, a couple of whom are probably aces when it comes to helping people work through their problems, but I’m done with that stuff for life.

Part of the difficulty with shrinks is, of course, that they get into the field because they’re troubled and desperate to get fixed. That’s not a disqualifier. People get into what they get into for all sorts of weird or sensible reasons. But in my experience most of the shrinks I’ve seen were still working on their own shit, except that they were charging me money to do it.

Naturally, my unwillingness to trust any more credentialed whackos with my mental health has left a vacuum. I knew there was something wrong with me; I just didn’t know what.

Now, thanks to one Alex Seitz-Wald, a writer for Salon.com and occasionally the New York Times, I finally understand my problem.

I suffer from “motivated reasoning.” Unlike most normal people, who have no motives cluttering up their minds, I believe what I believe in order to make sense of my world.

One would never accuse Seitz-Wald of this. He was the writer who actually wrote a pre-election column in the Times proclaiming that Obama was a great President. Given that most ‘liberal’ observers were searching desperately for a rationale for voting again for the President, in some cases settling for the ‘Supreme Court’ argument, the Seitz-Wald approach was certainly novel.

Anyhow, according to Seitz-Wald, he has figured out why some people keep insisting on claiming that some major political events are the result of conspiracies. We are just trying to find a way to feel “in control.”

In support of his theory, Seitz-Wald enlists the help of professor Stephan Lewandowsky, a ‘cognitive scientist’ from the University of Western Australia, who last month published a paper which received “widespread praise for looking at the thinking behind conspiracy theories about science and climate change.”

Of course, you may mistakenly think that not all ‘conspiracy theories’ are the same, but Seitz-Wald and Lewandowky are here to straighten you out. Let’s take a look at the exchange, as published by Salon.com:

First of all, why do people believe conspiracy theories?
It gives people a sense of control. People hate randomness, they dread the sort of random occurrences that can destroy their lives, so as a mechanism against that dread, it turns out that it’s much easier to believe in a conspiracy. Then you have someone to blame, it’s not just randomness.

What are the psychological forces at play in conspiracy thinking?
People have a need or a motivation to believe in this theory, and it’s psychologically different from evidence-based thinking. A conspiracy theory is immune to evidence, and that can pretty well serve as the definition of one. If you reject evidence, or reinterpret the evidence to be confirmation of your theory, or you ignore mountains of evidence to focus on just one thing, you’re probably a conspiracy theorist. We call that a self-sealing nature of reasoning.
Another common trait is the need to constantly expand the conspiracy as new evidence comes to light. And that’s typical — instead of accepting the evidence, you actually turn it around and say that it’s actually evidence to support the conspiracy because it just means it’s even broader than it was originally thought to be.

Everyone is prone to some degree of bias and motivated reasoning — where do you draw the line, if there is one?
The crucial difference between having a preconceived notion — we all do that, of course — and conspiratorial thinking is when you get into that self-sealing reasoning and ignore every piece of evidence that is pointing the other way, when you’re starting to broaden the circle of conspirators, and when your skepticism gets to be nihilistic — when you believe absolutely nothing that the government or the media is saying — that’s when you’ve crossed the line.

I hear a lot of stories from people who email or from friends who have a brother, or cousin, or friend who they say is normal and smart, but then they’re horrified to find conspiratorial stuff on their Facebook page or whatnot. One was even a medical student at a very prestigious school. How do otherwise smart and reasonable people end up believing this stuff?
Well, there is no relationship to intelligence, in my experience. Many of these people are actually quite smart, though not all, so it’s not that. It’s the need to explain and control, as I said, but it can be other things also: A general sense of disgruntlement, feeling excluded from society.

How should we think of conspiracy theorists? They’re often dismissed as fringey nuts, but an awful lot of Americans believe in one conspiracy or another.
First of all, any extraordinary event will be followed by conspiracy theorizing. I can tell you that right now. Whatever happens tomorrow, there will be a conspiracy theory about it. Number two, I think it’s important that we understand that it satisfies a need. It isn’t that these people are necessarily disordered or marginal members of society. After all, not that long ago, half of Republican primary voters thought President Obama was born outside the U.S. So, if half of one segment of a population believes in a conspiracy theory then you can’t talk about marginal elements and you have to accept that it’s a real part of society and serves a need. And I think we have to understand that need and find ways for society to find other ways in which that need can be satisfied.

Whew! Impressive, isn’t it? A professor, too, with such deep analysis. And what a relief.

Here I thought the government had been lying to me about Viet Nam, the Gulf of Tonkin, WMDs in Iraq, al Qaida and its origin, NAFTA, Venezuela, the war on drugs, what the CIA and AID did in Latin America, the overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953, the murder of John F. Kennedy, and the attack on the World Trade Center. But I guess I “crossed the line,” lapsed into “self-sealing” from a deep need to control my environment.

Lewandowky can’t find a relationship between intelligence and conspiracy theories but I can. Anyone who still thinks President Kennedy was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald is dumb as a post.

Naturally, one might think that not all ‘conspiracy theories’ are identical. That is, a belief that 9-11 was carried out with at least substantial assistance from forces inside the U.S. government is not the same thing as believing that aliens are trying to scramble your brains using directed beams from atop the Empire State Building. But apparently I’m wrong. In the Seitz-Wald world, it’s all the same.

Seitz-Wald gets lots of mail from people “horrified” to find “conspiratorial” thinking on a friend or relative’s facebook page. These are “smart” people, and some of them seem “normal.” One was even a medical student at a prestigious school!

Look, we have a “need,” a “motive” for believing these things. We ignore evidence because we want to see the world this way. We are “self-sealing,” which sounds kind of strange. I don’t really think I’ve sealed myself, but maybe I just don’t know the whole story.

I’ve got an old friend who recently challenged me to give him “chapter and verse” on the physics of the World Trade Center buildings. He’d been told that the temperature from burning jet fuel, office furniture, and paper, had been sufficient to cause the forty-seven steel posts surrounding the interior to weaken to the point of total collapse. This, of course, is not the case, which explains why tall structures had never before fallen like this.

In fact, the burning jet fuel was almost entirely gone within moments of impact, and the presence of black smoke pouring out of each structure was graphic evidence that the fires were not very hot, not as fires go, and were oxygen-starved. And then there’s the molten metal flowing for more than a month underneath the rubble: how was that possible absent some additional factor?

The best ‘chapter and verse’ I know of is a 90-minute video produced by Architects and Engineers for 9-11 Truth, one of those vast conspiratorial organizations comprised of more than a thousand “self-sealing” professionals who appear “normal” but are in reality desperately seeking an explanation, however fanciful, for the tragic events of their time. I sent my friend the 58-minute edited version (it’s free, on line, You Tube) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ddz2mw2vaEg.

I haven’t heard back. Maybe he’s seen it, maybe not. Up to him. I’m responsible for my own mental processes, not anyone else’s. I do find it peculiar that some otherwise quite bright people continue to buy the bizarre theories of a lot of public tragedies propounded by the U.S. government, especially since we all know by now that, first, the government lies like a rug and, second, these theories are not supported by actual facts.

I can’t claim to be “normal,” and I’m not at a “prestigious medical school,” but my credentials don’t much matter if the facts are on my side. Some people use the term “conspiracy theorist” as a pejorative, meant to isolate and even condemn those who don’t buy the government’s lies about things. Citizens are supposed to be docile consumers of the information given us. Anybody asking questions is just looking for trouble.

In actual fact, a conspiracy is simply, by definition, an agreement among or between two or more people to commit a crime. To be a ‘conspiracy theorist,’ therefore, is hardly crazy. One would have to be barking mad to think such things do not happen, not just to stick up a local convenience store but to topple governments and manipulate policy. After all, there are trillions of dollars at stake.

The video I sent my friend includes a short piece at the end in which several psychologists are interviewed on the reasons some people are afraid to look honestly at evidence of conspiracy. Such people are in denial. The reasons are pretty obvious, but one of them is to remove our guilt. If presidents are killed or buildings brought down by solitary or uncontrollable forces, then it can’t be our fault. We don’t have to do anything about it. We can keep going as we are, sympathetic but ultimately unconcerned. Blame these things on Lee Harvey Oswald or Sirhan Sirhan, or on nineteen guys with box cutters, or maybe just on the random nature of the planet. Our sense of our own world, our own reality, our own truth, can remain the same.

The true ‘self-sealers’ are those who manage to ignore anything dissonant, anything which disturbs the storyline as given to them by their leaders, their father-figures, and broadcast by the corporate media. They are disturbed by inconvenient facts, take refuge in official government reports.

I, on the other hand, am a conspiracy theorist. I didn’t set out to be. I began to learn what was really going on in my world by letting my curiosity lead me to some books and articles forty-five years ago.

I don’t subscribe to every ‘theory’ being floated by people. I would rather think than subscribe. Consequently, I am not quick to believe that every tragedy is the work of a government agency. But I do by now know quite enough to know that my government does indeed commit monstrous acts and its secret police agencies have done murders. That’s not seriously disputable. And therefore, I look.

Unlike self-satisfied fools such as Alex Seitz-Wald, I haven’t handed my critical faculties over to the state. Don’t intend to, either.

Comments

Rachel, Rachel

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 00:26:22 +0200

There’s a point at which people begin to switch off their analytic capacities. It’s not a matter of intelligence, more like psychological aptitude. In the case of public figures such as news journalists or broadcasters or political people, it’s also a matter of trying to hang onto a socially-acceptable persona. There are unspoken, unwritten parameters.

I’ve seen this in several fairly well-known figures on the ‘left’ in the United States.

When Michael Moore, for example, endorsed Obama, then issued a glowing review of the propaganda film ‘Zero Dark Thirty,’ he obviously had disconnected his critical faculties in favor of something else. The ‘something else,’ I think, is the comfort of being invited to the right parties, being able to consort with other ‘important people.’

Once you start asking the questions which take you over the line, the invitations stop coming.

Plus, there are requirements for anyone who wants to be, you know, taken seriously.

One important item is this: the darker side of America is out of bounds, even for speculation or random inquiry. It’s okay to savage George Bush as a lying swine, now that he’s out of office. ‘Left’ journalists have no difficulty nailing the ex-President as a war criminal. Even Obama, after killing about three thousand random civilians by remote-control and wiping out habeas corpus, is beginning to attract criticism. But there are things you just can’t touch if you plan on hanging around or having a job.

As most readers of this column know, I spent many years digging into the details surrounding the killings of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. One benefit of this work was ostracism, criticism and, in some quarters, exorcism. People do not wish to be made uncomfortable and they resent those who instigate that.

In the case of the Kennedys, of course, the psychological foundation of denial was rock solid: if you can make these things appear to be random events in a sometimes random universe, then nobody has to take responsibility. If the CIA was directly involved in those murders, which it certainly was, then we might have to do something about it, and we don’t want to. Better to pretend it’s all just lone nuts, the vagaries of life.

Mostly, the American people have shown a distinct disinterest in getting beneath the surface on anything. For example, we hate the banks because they robbed us and ruined millions of lives, but we don’t want to find out about the Federal Reserve, what it is, who runs it, and why the U.S. government is subservient to it.

For most of us, some things are too much trouble, too difficult, too confusing, or simply over the line. And some things are too dark to handle, especially if you’re someone who values your place in society, or has a job in politics or the mainstream media.

Which brings me to Rachel Maddow. I’m afraid I’ve got to cut her loose.

Granted, she’s in a tough position. The target of much right-wing nastiness, in some ways the darling of the ‘left,’ her credibility is important to her –– and, of course, to her network. She’s smart, incisive, tough enough to kick John Boehner’s ass. And, like Michael Moore, she likes those party invitations.

For most of us, expressing political views outside the generally-acceptable ‘center’ risks very little. One fellow I know keeps being ‘de-friended’ on facebook because he won’t shut up about Boston. Some people stop getting invitations to dinner parties. Come to think of it, all of my invitations dried up years ago...

But for Rachel Maddow, it’s more than that. It’s her job, her image, her ability to keep cranking it out. She is, she’s been told, a pioneer in broadcasting, an ‘out’ lesbian who doesn’t have to play-act to earn respect or to satisfy some nervous males in the boardroom. She doesn’t want to blow it and it’s hard to blame her. But, still...

I just watched, for the second time (I had to pause it every ten seconds in order to transcribe it) a thirty minute Maddow news broadcast in which she blows up any credibility she ever had with me. I am way past annoyance. If I wasn’t such a blabbermouth, I’d be speechless with anger.

What spurred Maddow’s program was, evidently, the rash of ‘conspiracy theorist’ material coming out now, mostly in right-wing media, with respect to the Boston bombing. She is not content to explain why this perspective is incorrect. She must tie it into ‘conspiracy theories’ en toto, all ‘conspiracy theories,’ excluding of course those which are government-approved. The latter, says Maddow, those are the truth.

In the Maddow lexicon, there are no conspiracies, just bunny rabbits. And although we can all criticize the politicians and the government, we know that in the end they would never do the sort of ugly, crazy, sociopathic things that other people and other governments would do. She doesn’t have to say it directly but she’s thinking it: Americans don’t do things like that. Other races, other countries, especially other religions, well, sure. Jihad, remember? But not us.

She begins by holding up some books: the official 9-11 Report by the Commission which was charged with explaining what happened; a graphic comic-like book put out by the same Commission which is “much easier to read, it is full of pictures, laid out like a comic book, and although it contains the same information as this (the original Report), it’s made out in a way to be even more accessible to people who might not like the idea of digging through something like this... I highly recommend it.” And a third book, published by Popular Mechanics, in which “the geeks and engineers went through the inside job arguments and went through them piece by piece, as geeks, showing that those were not missiles attached to those planes, and the conspiracies about the so-called planned explosions (dripping sarcasm) that took down all those buildings...”

But, Maddow says, sadly, “of course, it didn’t work. The 9-11 conspiracies have not gone away (sic) because they are too ideologically and emotionally satisfying to the people who espouse them, they’re too satisfying to let the fact that they’ve been thoroughly refuted get in the way of continuing to enjoy the way that conspiracy makes you feel.”

This, of course, is where I begin to get the urge to knock her into next Tuesday. With all due respect, Maddow, how fucking dare you?

People who claim that critics of official fairytales find such criticism “emotionally satisfying” or that we insist that something is terribly wrong here because we “enjoy” the way that makes us feel, that is cruel, stupid, and arrogant.

It does not make anyone feel pleased to discover that the government is lying about murder. What kind of mind would think such a thing? In any event, since we’re getting into the psychology of it, I suggest that those who insist that events such as 9-11 couldn’t be ‘inside jobs’ are really just desperately denying the nightmarish fact that not everything in the universe is random and that they, themselves, might share responsibility for the crimes their own government commits.

This one early part of the show, the comic book section. This just astounds me that a rational person would say this: the 911 Report might be a little too hard to read, despite its friendly, narrative style (which elevates slick and eliminates details which the Commission could not explain), so you can read this comic book! Really, kids, it’s got the same stuff in it, only easier to understand, and with drawings, too!

That anyone who wants to be taken seriously would actually rave about a cartoon explanation for the staggeringly important attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, saying it’s easier to grasp... I watched this several times but there’s no other way to see it. Maddow thinks we’re all children. She does not want us worrying our little heads about inconvenient facts or worrisome problems in proof when it comes to 9-11. She wants us to read a ‘graphic novel’ with handy-dandy cartoons to make things easier for our tiny brains. Coming next: a pocket version of the bible.

Maddow, of course, doesn’t know much about 9-11, nor about the independent investigations conducted by a hell of a lot more “geeks and engineers” than those who faked the Popular Mechanics ‘study.’ That work, as it happens, has been thoroughly discredited by some very highly-credentialled professionals at Architects & Engineers for 9-11 Truth, as well as others.

As for the Commission itself, its own co-chairmen have publicly complained that facts were withheld from them, their Report doesn’t even mention Building 7, and the truncated ‘investigation’ –– which was allocated about 10% of the funds Congress spent on the attempted impeachment of Bill Clinton for lying about fellatio –– skipped over inconvenient details such as destruction of evidence, the presence of thermite in the debris, the hundred-plus reports by employees, fire and police officials of explosions inside the buildings, the bizarre pancaking of both struck buildings, the river of molten metal beneath the rubble, and even the remarkable traffic in airline put options just before the attack. And when it came to the question of who financed this, the Commission actually wrote that “in the end, it doesn’t matter,” although smarter than a hamster would likely think it sure as hell does matter.

Maddow is not familiar with these facts, of course. Those who make a show of going after ‘conspiracy theorists’ are generally unencumbered by such things. Science, too, such a bother. For example, regardless of how one twists the data, unless the government is prepared to revoke the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the buildings did not come down because they were hit by planes. But, hey, here’s a comic book if Popular Mechanics is too deep for you.

Doesn’t matter. To Maddow, it is all of a piece. If you think the government lied about 9-11 –– and, thus, the Patriot Act and the entire police state machinery which was rapidly put into place –– then you also believe that every other disaster, mass shooting, or bombing is the result of a government plot.

It’s the most raw form of hackery. Again and again, Maddow dumps the particulars into the cracker box and explains, well, ‘they’ think the government is doing this “because, well, so it can control us or something.” Snark, snark. Three times, she manages to explain that ‘conspiracy theorists’ believe that everything which has ever happened, including Aurora, Sandy Hook, and Boston, were done by the government “to, you know, enslave us, or something.” Or something...

Then, the capper. She introduces a woman whose son was a passenger on Flight 93, the one purported to have crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Alice Hoagland is the woman whose son is said to have phoned her from the flight, saying, “Hello, Mom, this is your son, Mark Bingham...” Some critics have wondered about that. How many kids phone a parent and announce themselves using their full name? Hoagland had gone to Shanksville, she said, and met some of the people who doubted the official theory. She explained to them that her son was a businessman who talked on the phone all the time and naturally just fell into the habit. She didn’t say he’d ever done it before.

Hello, Mom, this is your son, Mark Bingham, you remember, the one you gave birth to on August 12th thirty-two years ago in Bakersfield, the one with brown eyes and a cute goatee...

Hoagland lives in Central California. She describes attending a campus meeting put on by a group called 9-11 Truth, which she says is a “buzzword for loonies.” She raised her hand to object to something a speaker was saying. “Of course those buildings could be brought down by being hit by 767s (sic),” she said, although there is nothing ‘of course’ about it. It’s hard to find anyone of any professional standing who will explain how the temperature in the buildings could have reached the level needed to melt steel since jet fuel wasn’t even close and, in any case, had mostly burned off long before the structures came down. Never mind. Professional knowledge is not necessary for Hoagland, who says, “they reduced everything to a theory and I’ve come to the conclusion that you really can’t talk to those folks, you can’t reason with them because they are so invested in the crazy story that they’ve gotten hold of like a Rottweiler and chewed it until it became a really bloody big lie.”

“Just think of them as mental patients,” Hoagland told Maddow, “that’s what I do with conspiracy theorists.”

But Maddow is worried. “Some of the conservative media is (sic) starting to flirt with some of these folks, we maybe won’t be able to ignore it.”

Well, good gracious, maybe we won’t be able to ignore it. What if some of these crazy theories start to gain currency? Why, it might just undermine our faith in our institutions, just when we’d started to think that militarizing the police is a good thing.

Hoagland is also an expert on Boston, as it turns out. “Conspiracy theories work against us in so many ways... the two Chechen brothers, especially the older one, he radicalized himself and then he recruited his brothers and sisters (sic) to a ridiculously foul and violent form of Islam and he did that by visiting these various alternative news web sites...”

So it is in part the fault of these “alternative news web sites.”

I’ve said this before: I don’t know what happened in Boston. I read a lot of commentary and access sources, presumably alternative sources not officially approved by either the government or Rachel Maddow, and there are some questions which I think any serious person would ask.

There are problems with the Boston story as it appears to be given to us, problems with whether the brothers had only a single gun and what happened to it, with the bizarre ‘hold-up’ at a convenience store which served no apparent purpose (the fugitives had cash), the ‘arrest’ of the man who is seen naked in photos but who is either the older brother, unwounded, or a stranger thus far unidentified, whether the younger brother was already shot in the throat when found in the boat, whether there was an exchange of gunfire if he had no gun on his person. There are problems with the backpacks in the photos, the appearance of security personnel maybe from Craft International (look them up online and note their motto).

I don’t know what happened but it seems to me patriotic to ask questions instead of trying to bury them in a sarcastic diatribe. And, as to 9-11, Maddow has not seen any of the contrary evidence and makes no reference to anything specific because she can’t. She uses the term ‘conspiracy theory’ as a pejorative, as she is meant to, as we are all meant to, because that’s an easy way to dismiss critical thought. She is ignorant and parading it. But that’s far more acceptable than asking troublesome questions or opening your mind. Lucrative, too.

Comments

Sharing The Sacrifice

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 08:28:51 +0200

One of my favorite hypocrisies is the one where political ‘leaders’ such as the President, wringing their hands over the difficulties in budgeting for so many worthwhile wars and paranoid police state operations, explain to the nation that we all must “share the sacrifice.”

Since we are not all sharing the the obscene profits of the banks and corporations, not to mention arms manufacturers and media monopolists, it does seem a little bit disingenuous, but maybe I’m just in a bad mood, 72-hours post head injury.

The burden of these periodic ‘sacrifices’ is not fairly shared, of course. It is parceled out to those who have no power to prevent the government from robbing them, which means the poor get screwed every last time.

In four days, 400,000 of the neediest Californians will have their incomes sharply reduced because Barack Obama and the criminals and cowards in Congress worked out that stupefyingly corrupt ‘sequestration’ plan last summer. You remember, right? The deal was that since the country has no leader worth a damn, the so-called budget deficit would be addressed not by stopping imperial wars or corporate welfare, nor by closing tax loopholes which enable companies such as General Electric to pay nothing, nor by confiscating the trillions the banks stole, but by an automatic reduction in a lot of programs, including of course those most needed by the poor. This would kick in if the Congress and Obama couldn’t come to a deal to do otherwise.

You’ll notice none of these clowns is having his or her income savaged, and none of them is being forced to decide whether it’ll be medicine or food this week.

In four days, 400,000 Californians will have their unemployment benefits reduced by an estimated 17.7 percent. The State’s Employment Development Department announced a week ago that the cuts would not be applied until after state benefits ran out, which means that the people hit will be those whose inability to find a job has run past 26 weeks. Know who those people are? The ones in the worst trouble.

The cut will reduce the average weekly benefit from $296.00 to $244.00.

According to an article by the Chronicle’s excellent business reporter, Kathleen Pender, “The cuts were supposed to take effect at the end of March and reduce benefits by 10.7 percent. But many states, including California, had trouble programming the necessary changes by that deadline and, as a result, must reduce benefits by a larger amount.”

So the politicians, with help from the system’s functional disabilities, have piled injury on top of injury. And that’s not all. Pender writes that in addition to the cuts, other services will be hurt because sequestration “also will reduce funds the federal government gives states to administer unemployment programs. EDD said it urges customers to ‘use self help tools whenever possible.’”

I like that. Those among you with the least cash, the least skills, the least prospects, a the least resources, help yourself because we’re not going to be available.

Couple of weeks ago, there was a nice luncheon at the White House. President Obama’s guest list included Lloyd Blankfein, chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs; Jacques Brand, CEO of Deutsche Bank; Michael Corbat, CEO, Citigroup; Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of J.P. Morgan; Gerald Hassell, chairman and CEO of Bank of New York; Mellon Jay Hooley, chairman, President, and CEO, State Street Corporation; Sergio Ermotti, CEO of UBS; James Gorman, chairman and CEO, Morgan Stanley; Abby Johnson, President, Fidelity Financial Services; Steve Kandarian, chairman of the board, President and CEO, MetLife; Brian Moynihan, President and CEO of Bank of America; John Strangfeld, CEO, Prudential; John Stumpf, chairman, President, and CEO of Wells Fargo; Jim Weddle, managing partner, Edward Jones; Bob Benmosche, President and CEO, American International Group (AIG).

Must’ve been a festive occasion.

Comments

Staples To The Skull

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 08:16:37 +0200

I can tell you one thing: getting your head stapled is not as much fun as it sounds. The whole medical crew, on the other hand, was professional, kind, and nearly entertaining. Also subject to persuasion: I was able to talk the emergency room doctor out of feeding me via a needle; I have a thing about needles.

Before they stapled me, they jabbed my head with half a dozen shots of whatever it is they use to deaden the area. There is definitely a reason for this, see ‘staples,’ supra.

My neighbor who offered to drive me to the hospital until she saw the wound in my head called 911 and the gang rolled up my street fast as hell. That worried me a little since I couldn’t see how bad it was and had been trying to talk people into letting me stay home. I figured the bleeding would eventually stop, which I believe is technically true because after about five litres it’s all used up.

There’s something about these intimations of mortality that freak the shit out of me. It was Saroyan who said he always knew everyone had to die but he figured maybe God would make an exception in his case.

So long as the thing heals and avoids infection, I’m a seriously lucky fellow. This life thing, dangerous territory and so temporary.

One of my grandsons is itching to buy a motorcycle, a subject about which I had a nice conversation with his mom this evening. He’s seventeen and if you are older than seventeen you probably remember it well enough. At seventeen you can fly over the Grand Canyon on the wing of a paper airplane. I’m not trying to talk him about of it, although I’m aware that it’s hazardous. I’ve got friends with titanium pins courtesy of surprises on the road.

The surprises on this road can come at any time. I got one yesterday trying to get out of bed while still asleep. Still alive, still breathing, not at all done with this show.

Meteor shower today and this evening. Still time to catch a few.

Comments

Boston, Revisited

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 09:12:55 +0200

So the other brother’s been captured hiding under a tarp in the boat in someone’s back yard and Boston is no longer under lockdown.

I’ve got some things to say tonight and they’re not going to be terribly popular. That’s okay; my subscriber base has been getting much too big lately and probably needs some winnowing.

The web is overrun with crazy shit right now, even crazier than usual. My old friend Brad likes to argue that getting more people to vote will help matters but after reading what people are saying over the last couple of days I’m reassessing my support for democracy. Maybe the vote should be restricted to a small number of people who qualify only if they can explain what the Bill of Rights is and why it’s important.

In Boston, there were chants of ‘USA! USA!’ Some internet commentaries, on facebook and at various sites, are saying that the suspected bomber ought to just be shot, thus saving everyone the cost of a trial. The argument is also made –– by several Republican Senators who themselves couldn’t pass a literacy test, and evidently by Obama, who agrees –– that the accused’s rights under Miranda, the right to an attorney and the right to remain silent, should be withheld because, choose your rationale, he’s a terrorist, or maybe it’s an emergency, or he should be tortured to learn what he knows.

Meanwhile, I’m just surprised he’s still alive. How much more convenient for everybody if some patriotic night club owner slipped into the basement of the police station and shot him to death.

There are several sites and references, with photographic ‘proofs’, claiming that the Boston massacre was done by others, with some specific charges leveled, and that the brothers were just patsies. Indeed, the photos raise some uncomfortable questions. For one thing, what’s the story with all of those young guys, all dressed alike, all with backpacks, in the vicinity of the bombing? It’s not as though this was a sort of racing regalia. Same slacks, same jackets, often the same caps. There is the charge that some of these men were carrying backpacks with the unique skull insignia of a special branch of the Navy SEALS, and indeed the pictures show this. What does it mean?

Worse, one photograph apparently shows the brothers leaving the scene after the bombs went off and at least one of them may be still carrying his backpack. What we need, of course, is some independent, serious photographic analysis.

Then there are the boys parents. Of course, it’s not surprising if the parents of mad bombers report how nice their kids are. But the mother had something even more specific in mind. The older brother, she said, had been meeting with FBI agents for several years; she thinks they’ve been set up. http://www.filmsforaction.org/news/boston_marathon_bombing_suspects_mother_says_sons_setup/

The Boston lockdown is troubling for many reasons, not least of which is the precedent it sets. Here, a single suspect being hunted gives the authorities the right to effectively impose a shutdown of a major city. This has never happened before and although people were obviously terrified that may not have been enough to create conditions of a military occupation. After all, how often are criminal suspects being tracked by police? Do we lock down communities when this happens? And if we grant the government the power to do this, how do we prevent the power from being used whenever and for whatever purpose a government wants to use it?

We are already circumventing judicial review of incarcerations and even the use of government authority to kidnap and send people away to be tortured. The ‘war on terror’ has opened the floodgates on abuse of government authority and few seem to be trying to close them again.

I personally have no idea whether the cops got the right guys in Boston. It’s possible, either way. If they did it, they seem to be missing a motive which, though not essential for a conviction, is certainly something that ought to be there in the case of a political bombing. Despite the ham-handed attempts by the idiot media and demagogic politicians, the brothers appear not to have been political. People who knew them, at least the ones willing to talk, say that they were nice guys and not at all intense. One housemate of the surviving, younger brother, told the press that he saw him in the hallway on the day after the crime and that he appeared relaxed and normal.

I don’t put too much credence in the shootout which led the government to hone in on them the other night. I’d buy it except it’s hard to forget history, in this case the shooting of a Dallas police officer which led to the capture of a man who hadn’t shot him in November, 1963.

But who knows? I sure don’t. What I’d like is that the surviving brother be granted the rights of any criminal defendant, that he not be killed ‘while trying to escape,’ that he not ‘confess’ after being waterboarded a hundred times –– the only ‘proof’ the government ever got about Bin Laden and 9-11 was after such prolonged torture that no sane person would credit the evidence. I want to learn about motive. I want some answers that, so far, I’m not getting.

I would like to see my country exhibit the system of justice we claim to be proud of, affording this 19-year-old the right to a fair hearing on the evidence. I’d like to feel that the Boston horror was the work of two imbalanced kids with irrational motives. But if that’s not the case, we’d better figure out what really happened.

One way or another, the entirety brings to mind the brilliant explication of our current problem by one Chalmers Johnson, a university professor and one-time consultant to the CIA, who invented the term ‘blowback.’ There are several interviews on YouTube worth watching if you haven’t seen him before.

Johnson very calmly explains how it works. It is no longer out of reach for aggrieved people to strike back at America. The foreign policy we’ve engaged in for the past hundred and more years has gradually become more the more horrific, making enemies now with regularity and simultaneously shipping so much weaponry to the rest of the world that we have invited being attacked.

Do we really believe we can bomb civilians in countries around the planet and not incite the kind of hatred which would place our own country at risk? Our foreign policy has nothing to do with freedom and everything to do with geopolitics and the extension of empire. Are we as Americans willing to subject our country to these terrors, and to the consequent police state being already instituted without objection from a fearful, dangerously ignorant public, all for the sake of the enormous profits of corporations? That’s the larger choice we need to make as we ponder the questions of Boston.

Comments

Sex And The Single Girl

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 02:24:50 +0200

Pam Stenzel is a disturbed woman who travels around the country preaching sexual abstinence to high school students. Not that abstinence is immoral. Maybe crazy and self-destructive, but not immoral.

The problem with Stenzel and her programs is not that she has a retrograde opinion about kids and sex but that she hypes it with a sizable amount of, well, lies. For example, Stenzel tells kids that condoms aren’t safe, that any sort of sexual contact will inevitably lead to a sexually transmitted infection, and that taking birth control pills makes you ten times more likely to end up sterile or dead.

She also claims the ability to “look at any one of you in the eyes right now and tell if you’re going to be promiscuous.” Cool, huh? And, “No one has ever had more than one partner and not paid.” Guess it depends on what you mean by ‘paid.’ I’m a member of the ‘sixties generation. We had a few unplanned pregnancies. But all things considered, I think one would be justified in saying that there was considerable benefit to having more than one partner, for a variety of reasons we need not go into here.

Stenzel recently appeared by invitation to address the student body at George Washington High School in Charleston, West Virginia. Her speech was sponsored by an outfit called Believe in West Virginia. Promotional flyers promised “God’s plan for sexual purity.”

The student body vice president at George Washington, Katelyn Campbell, not only declined to attend the abstinence rally, she filed a complaint with the ACLU and began speaking out against it. Her school Principal, one George A. Aulenbacher, according to Campbell, thereupon threatened to telephone the college to which she had already been accepted, informing officials there that she has “bad character.”

This may prove to have been not one of Aulenbacher’s wisest administrative decisions. First, Campbell filed suit against him seeking an injunction she will certainly be granted. Second, the college which had admitted her is Wellesley, a rather famous institution about which Aulenbacher presumably had no clue.

Campbell has received this message from Wellesley: #Wellesley is excited to welcome you this fall.

In the Charleston district, a school board meeting is scheduled for this evening. There are indications that many of Campbell’s fellow students plan to attend and explain the facts of life to the board.

I’ve written recently about some issues I find troubling among young people, notably the seeming tolerance of bullying and even rape. Nice to know that there are students like Katelyn Campbell who refuse to be pushed around.

http://www.amazon.com/News-From-A-Parallel-World/dp/1478194448/

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