News From A Parallel World

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.

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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.

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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.

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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/

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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.

Comments

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.

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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/

Comments

Boston

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 03:00:38 +0200

I don’t know who did it. Neither do you. It’s emblematic of our times and circumstances that it could be anybody. Religious extremists, right-wing Americans, the CIA or some other government agency, ex-GIs whose brains got turned to mush, anti-Americans, anti-Muslims, Middle East terrorists, Israeli provocateurs, or just a handful of sick fuckers with the ability ot make bombs.

It could be blowback, the predictable outcome of years of hammering other people with American weaponry. It could be false flag, yet another self-inflicted wounding designed to scare people and pave the way for further police state impositions.

It could be crazy people shaped by a culture which idolizes violence and its perpetrators, pushes a cold, vicious way of looking at the world, uses destruction to sell products to our children.

It could be the victims of the public school system which tries to turn people into robots, the victims of our psychological matrix which drugs people in an effort to make them docile, the victims of hate radio, hate preachers, hate-filled ideology.

I don’t know tonight and neither do you.

I avoid the junk on television but the web is overflowing with theories, charges, anger, expressions of sorrow, and finger-pointing. Already, with scant evidence in support, there are theories of conspiracy involving Muslims, gun nuts, and government agents. It is anyone who is not kissing the government’s ass and it’s the government itself.

In one especially sane column, by the Guardian writer Glenn Greenwald, it is offered that we as Americans might consider the carnage our own policies inflict on people around the world and expand our caring for those victims as well. The letters which landed on that site immediately contained vitriol so nasty I thought perhaps they’d been ghost-written by Ann Coulter.

It is not permissible on the web today to raise the issue of America’s own conduct. Anyone who asks pertinent forensic questions is automatically thrown into the conspiracy nut bin with Alex Jones. Anyone who questions what America is doing in other countries and to other people is savaged as a traitor.

I don’t know what happened and who did it, and you don’t either, but I do know this: it says quite a bit about who we are and what we’ve become that virtually any of the guesses imaginable could turn out to be true, and that whatever our government ends up claiming it is entirely possible that it will be a lie.

Comments

Everybody Knew Who It Was

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 08:29:01 +0200

Remember Steubenville, Ohio? Wasn’t long ago, couple of star football players got sentenced to a year in juvenile jail for raping a 16-year-old girl. Much of the subsequent media attention was directed at the defendants, one of whom broke down, crying “My life is over!”

As I wrote in my column of March 20th, "Apparently, coaches and parents attempted to cover-up the crime but were unsuccessful when other students, many of whom had witnessed the events of last August, used their cell phones to record the assault and posted photographs and videos online." http://lookingglass.blog.co.uk/2013/03/20/steubenville-15646308/

On September 2nd, last year, a 15-year-old girl from Saratoga, California, went to a party at the home of a friend whose parents were out of town. She drank until she passed out.

While she was unconscious, the girl was raped by three high school boys, who took photographs. Apparently, others took photos as well. The pictures would later turn up online.

The victim didn’t tell her parents about the rape, but she posted a Facebook note saying that what had happened, and the posting of the photographs made it “the worst day ever. They took pictures of me. My life is ruined.”

On September 10th, Audrie Potts, who at fifteen had a love for animals and music, who liked to ski and play soccer, hanged herself.

The rapists were arrested on April 11th, seven months later, although their identities have been known by students at Saratoga High since the rape. “Everyone already knew who it was,” said one student. “I wouldn’t have said they were nice guys, but I wouldn’t have expected them to do something like that.”

The rapists have been charged with sexual battery. They aren’t named in newspaper accounts because of their age, and authorities have not yet decided whether to prosecute them as adults.

The lawyers representing the punks issued a statement which read, in part: “most disturbing is the attempt to link her suicide to the specific actions of these three boys.” These guys have an interesting idea about what is 'most disturbing.'

Saratoga is what used to be called a bedroom community of 30,000, just south of San Francisco, and Saratoga High is a suburban school, where the student parking lot typically holds plenty of BMWs and Audis.

One student told a San Francisco Chronicle reporter, referring to the arrests, “I was hoping it would happen. You can’t do something like that and get away with it. When it didn’t happen right away, I was like ‘What’s going on?’” Another said, “It’s really frustrating that people could do that to someone...”

There are not only gang rapes in suburbia but suburban kids, in many cases white, privileged suburban kids who become passive spectators, sometimes electing to grab a few pictures of the blessed event. I went to such a high school in a bedroom community and the chance of a gang rape was not only close to zero, there is no chance whatever that had the student community known of such an assault we would have remained silent. The perps would've been lucky to be still in one piece when we handed them over to the law.

What’s going on here? What’s happened to our country that passersby enjoy the show and not stop it? Have we become so dead inside that we think of rape as just another school event, like homecoming?

How is it possible for a gang rape to occur, a girl hang herself because of it, and nothing happens for seven months, even though “everyone already knew who it was.”

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

Comments

Obama To Older Americans: Hurry Up And Die

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 11:32:02 +0200

Social Security has always been tied to the consumer price index. The thinking was that as the cost of things rose, so, too, should the monthly payments to those over retirement age, and at a rate which would leave the payees comparably paid. In other words, they shouldn’t be penalized by inflation.

Actually, pegging the yearly rise in calculated payments as a function of the CPI short-changes older people because older people spend a disproportionate amount of money on drugs and food, and these items typically escalate in costs faster than other sectors.

If America had a real President, even a real Democrat, even a decent human being at the top, the Social Security formula would be tied to an accurate calculation of real inflation for older people, but we don’t. Instead, we’ve got a President recommending that the yearly numbers reflect what is called a ‘chained CPI.’

It’s an accounting game, just like the kind the big corporations use when figuring out how to misrepresent their income or the Pentagon uses when explaining how billions of dollars mysteriously vanished. The chained CPI effectively lessens what people receive from Social Security every year, squeezing their often already barely sufficient income still further. It’s what we do here in America now to show what an admirable society we have. We screw those least able to resist.

Obama, having lied his way through one term and into a second, has no further need for the suckers on the left. He’s got from them what he wanted all along, one last vote. He could wiretap them, he could restrict their free speech, he could even murder people by remote-control, but after all it was the Republicans who made him do it, and anyway he was better than that doofus who forgot his own dog on the roof of his car.

Since Obama’s greatest skill is the ability to make one thing sound like something quite different, e.g. a death list is a ‘disposition matrix,’ he seems to think he can pull this off by denying he’s doing it. It’s only a “technical adjustment” and won’t harm older Americans. But he also says a chained CPI would save $122 billion in ten years, and that money is coming from Social Security recipients. It’s like chopping off someone’s index finger and saying, hey, you’ve still got nine left.

Obama’s proposal goes further than that. It changes the present rule which keeps Social Security payees within their current tax brackets, meaning that while even if you are not earning new income, you can be kicked into a higher bracket by adjustments that don’t even keep up with inflation. So you can get screwed twice.

Did I mention that while all this is going on, American-based corporations owe trillions in cash they’ve diverted to offshore accounts and get essentially a free ride. Or that capital gains loopholes alone cost the government $174 billion. Or that even capping the end of Bush’s tax cuts at $250,000.00 per year would bring in $183 billion.

There are other ways, lots of ways, to bring in additional revenue if that’s really the urgent national need Obama tells us it is. How about ending the restrictions on the government negotiating with drug companies for Medicare drugs? That’s $200 billion. And if it’s as serious as all that, maybe a financial transaction tax on the same people who ruined millions of lives along with the economy, at a gain of $1.8 trillion.

Instead, rather than take aim at a dozen of more revenue sources, some of them so obvious they’re hard to miss, the President is willing to kill a few old folks to try to lure the ‘opposition’ into a ‘grand bargain.’

The Republicans, naturally, like Obama’s interest in “saving Social Security and
Medicare” by tearing pieces out of them. House Majority leader Eric Cantor said he didn’t “understand why we just don’t see the White House come forward and do the things that we agree on” without additional tax increases, and Speaker John Boehner said “If the President believes these modest entitlement savings are needed to shore up these programs, there’s no reason they should be held hostage for more tax hikes.”

Ted Cruz, the flaming asshole from Texas and presidential aspirant, issued his own statesman-like remarks: “I’m encouraged by any steps that President Obama is taking to save and preserve Social Security. I think it should be a bipartisan priority to strengthen Social Security and Medicare to preserve the benefits for existing seniors.” God, I love demagogues, and there are so many out there.

Social Security, as you probably know, and as Obama, Boehner, and the rest of that criminal crew in Washington know full well, has nothing whatever to do with any budget deficit. To begin with, it is funded by direct contributions from workers out of their paychecks and was always intended to be distinct from any general budget issues. In other words, Roosevelt and the Congress which enacted it made it clear that this was to be a safe, reliable foundation for people to have a decent retirement in America.

Second, Social Security as it now stands, is completely solvent from its own funds for at least the next twenty years. There is no emergency and never will be. Should any shortfall emerge at a future date –– due to increased longevity or other factors –– it’s easy to fix: simply lift the cap on income subject to Social Security taxes, currently at $113,700.00.

What, then, is this “Change you can believe in” fraud really after? I know, he’s never been much of a populist and he has never shown much empathy for the poor. He’s never cared at all for the people struggling to find work or pay their bills. What he’s done to assist people cheated out of their homes by his banker friends –– Obama’s largest single 2004 campaign contributor was Goldman Sachs –– is miniscule and clearly begrudging.

But still, knocking the supports from beneath Medicare and Social Security is not only sabotage of two critically important programs, especially for the old and the poor, it is economically dangerous. Any economist not lying or deranged can tell us what these cuts are likely to mean. The proposed Obama cuts will make the economy worse because they will have the same effect in the United States that the so-called ‘austerity’ cuts have in Europe, and for the same reasons.

So what in the world is this guy doing?

I begin with this assumption: Obama’s a smart cookie. I think he’s got the morals of a cockroach but he’s smart. He understands what he’s doing, at least in the short term. This is a guy who attacked NAFTA while on the campaign trail, then backed it in the White House and now pushes the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which is worse than NAFTA by a factor so great nobody can estimate it. It guarantees a further erosion of the American middle class and a decimation of the country’s industrial base. He’s not doing this out of ignorance.

This is a guy who spoke of civil liberties and decried warrantless wiretaps during his presidential run, then sharply reduced such liberties and increased surveillance of ordinary citizens well beyond anything Bush imaged. Why?

Why the NDAA, which purports to give the President dictatorial power to grab Americans off the streets or out of their homes, take them to detention facilities, deprive them of any right to trial, to a jury, to a lawyer, to confront witnesses, even to be charged with a crime. It is the enabling act for a fascist state. He certainly knows that. He was a constitutional lawyer and he can read. Why did he do this? What was the danger to the nation so unprecedented, so enormous in scope, that it required the suspension of the liberty on which the nation itself is based? There is no such external enemy; he knows that. All of those people in Washington, even the paranoid right-wingers, know that.

Meanwhile, this whole ‘debate’ about the budget and the ‘deficit’ is a charade. Were the federal government not acting as the enforcement arm of the transnational corporations, were it not provoking wars all over the world and blowing up everything, there would be a surplus on the taxes extracted from the middle class. If the tax rate was restored to what it was under Eisenhower in the 1950s, with a Republican government, there would be no shortfall.

Instead, the Obama government and its congressional playmates are going after those most vulnerable, those least able to make it without help. It is going after Social Security, a fund created and entirely supported by the people it owes money to. In fact, it is the government which has systematically looted the Social Security funds for other expenditures over the years, a practice which is clearly against the law and which nobody seems to care about. Obama’s message to old people: Hurry up and die.

I think this is what’s going on:

Several decades ago, after consolidating the takeover of the nation accomplished by killing its best leaders and otherwise eliminating anyone else who might challenge them, the corporate barons looked into the future.

It was obvious that the entire world would be theirs for the taking. Profit, riches beyond anything they’d dreamed of, would be theirs provided they could take full advantage of the global market, but there would be certain problems to overcome. One would be nationalism. There were nations sitting on resources we wanted; we aimed to take them. Thus we turned loose what John Perkins has called economic hit men. We bribed those susceptible to bribery. We toppled or killed the others. This continues to today. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95MBlxjDsDU.

Two, the new owners needed leverage against fairly stable, otherwise democratic countries. Here, the takeovers would require more subtlety but the resistance would still exist. Accordingly, the IMF and World Bank cooked up economic studies proving that by accepting huge loans, these countries would improve their economies, not to mention fatten the portfolios of the special people. The payoff is what we’re seeing now in the ‘austerity’ policies being imposed on majorities in Italy, Greece, Spain, and elsewhere in Europe, where public resources are being ‘privatized,’ i.e. sold cheaply to corporate interests.

Interestingly, the ‘privatization’ dance was played out as the Soviet Empire fell, and while Russia hoped to emulate the democracies in Scandinavia, the price extracted by the West was the sale of the properties held by the state. As a result, there emerged the best manifestation of western capitalism, a Mafia, and everything was snatched at about ten percent of its value, guaranteeing the impoverishment of the Russian people.

Three, America’s rulers knew that eventually they could not succeed unless all barriers to ‘free trade’ were lifted. In other words, there could be no restrictions on importation of capital products. Thus was born NAFTA and across the border came cheap goods, as well as a flood of ‘illegals’ desperate for work after their own jobs were taken from them and they were forced into maquiladoras, factories near the northern border of Mexico.

You may not know this: there are over a million Mexican nationals employed at more than three thousand such export assembly plants. For the most part, these are people driven off their own land by corporations as a part of the NAFTA deal. What ignorant Americans don’t understand when they speak of ‘illegal aliens’ is that these people do not want to be in the United States. They would rather be home, with their families and their friends. They have been forced through desperation to take the hazardous journey to the U.S. out of sheer survival. That condition, just as the closure of rust belt factories in the American Middle West, is the result of NAFTA.

Most people have forgotten, but NAFTA was ushered into being with the full support of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and Bill Clinton. They knew it would cause severe problems for the working class in America. They knew it would devastate the unions. But that didn’t matter to the Democrats any more than it did to the Republicans, because while they natter about the middle class and ordinary people, they have nothing in common with us. They are having lunch with their friends, the CEOs and bankers. So is Obama.

Why is it legal for the President now to have you arrested, without evidence of any crime, and locked up permanently? That’s insane, but that’s the situation. Why was Halliburton handed just under a billion dollars to construct concentration camps inside the U.S.? For show? One of them captured on video, is just outside the Los Angeles airport; its chain-link fences are topped by barbed wire which runs in both directions.

Why have urban police forces been militarized? Why has the Department of Homeland Security run ‘exercises’ involving the army and local police in several big cities, including Houston and Los Angeles? For ‘training purposes’?

Why has the doctrine of posse comitatus, in place for a couple of hundred years and meant to prevent the use of the army against Americans, been suddenly revoked by the NDAA and the Procurement Act of 2012?

President Obama’s new choice for Secretary of the Treasury, Jacob Lew, formerly director of Obama’s Office of Management and Budget, is a big supporter of ‘austerity.’ Obama dispatched Lew to Europe to meet with the major players in imposing these grotesque measures on an already suffering population, claiming to be trying to mitigate some of the worst aspects of the policy.

This brought the headline “U.S. Anti-Austerity Push Gets Cool Reception in Europe” in the Wall Street Journal. This, of course, is a preposterous misstatement. The jaunt was better described in this fashion by William K. Black, lawyer and academic, former bank regulator and expert in white-collar crime and public finance, in Alternet:

“Lew was also one the group of Obama aides noted for their protection of Wall Street’s interests who led the effort to inflict austerity and begin to unravel the safety net through what they called the “Grand Bargain” (actually, the Great Betrayal).

“Obama’s decision to send Lew, the great proponent of self-destructive austerity, to Europe to urge them to end their self-destructive austerity exemplifies the incoherence of the administration’s financial policies. The fact that Obama is simultaneously proposing the Great Betrayal – its sixth form of austerity that Obama has agreed to inflict on our Nation since 2011 – produces a level of incoherence, incompetence, and hypocrisy so epic that it is likely to cause economists to act like manic depressives bouncing between wild-eyed gales of laughter and crying jags.”

Since Obama is obviously moving in the direction of austerity domestically, it is useful for us to better understand its machinery and its implications.

In Europe, the major mouthpiece for the policy is Germany’s Finance Minister, Wolfgang Shauble. He doesn’t call it ‘austerity,’ however. The word is already a curse there. Instead, he calls it ‘fiscal consolidation.’

Don’t you just love it? We now live in a world awash in fake language and euphemism for every loathsome policy and program which real language might expose to anger and worse in a population already beginning to sense something very wrong. ‘Fiscal consolidation.’ ‘Disposition matrix’ instead of death list. ‘Extraordinary rendition’ instead of kidnapping and torture.

The William K. Black piece is excellent, and I recommend it for a fuller view. For now, I’d like to cite a portion. It’ll give you the flavor:

“Schäuble’s claims about austerity repeat two of the great lies that are driving the über-Depression: (1) austerity in response to the Great Recession stimulates economic growth and (2) everyone agrees this is true. The third great lie is that “there is no alternative” to austerity. Economists have known for at least 75 years that austerity is likely to make economic contractions more severe. The eurozone’s infliction of austerity has produced precisely the self-inflicted damage that economists predicted. The European leaders who caused this wholly gratuitous economic disaster, unsurprisingly, will not admit or remedy their errors.

“But America has its own variant of this insanity and Lew is one of our most self-destructive austerians. Like Schäuble, Lew is a lawyer. As Obama’s OMB Director, Lew prepared a budget and a rationale for that budget that was an ode to austerity. I demonstrated this in detail in a prior column...”

“Putting two lawyers together to discuss macroeconomic policy also leads to discussions that cause economists’ jaws to drop in shock. If you understand economics you may wish to put on a neck brace before reading the next passage lest its incoherence cause whiplash.

“Standing next to Mr. Schäuble, Mr. Lew said pointedly that deficit reduction needed to be balanced with growth and investment policies. While growth targets may be different for different countries, he said, ‘I think it is fair to say that zero isn’t a good target for anybody and negative is very bad.’”

“Growth targets” are meaningless in this context. You cannot counteract austerity dragging your economy deeper into recession or depression by saying: “we are targeting a growth rate of four percent.” There is no magic incantation that can remove austerity’s destructive effect. A country cannot “balance” austerity with “growth and investment policies.” Austerity is an anti-growth policy. It frequently makes the debt-to-GDP ratio larger because it causes such a large fall in GDP. Krugman explained this in the same article I cited above.

“Meanwhile, austerity hasn’t even achieved the minimal goal of reducing debt burdens. Instead, countries pursuing harsh austerity have seen the ratio of debt to G.D.P. rise, because the shrinkage in their economies has outpaced any reduction in the rate of borrowing.”

http://www.alternet.org/economy/obamas-new-treasury-secretary-pushes-austerity-spreads-global-misery?akid=10312.113440.5poXga&rd=1&src=newsletter822794&t=5

If Black is correct, and Krugman and Robert Reich, Obama’s budget proposal is so wrong-headed it could easily plunge the United States back into a worse economic disaster, a full-fledged depression. Perhaps that’s why we’ve militarized the police.

The fact that crippling the safety net, forcing the sale of public resources, destroying unions leads to chaos, misery, and incipient revolt, has not stopped this course in Europe because the greed of the owners exceeds their concern for social equilibrium. That may be the case, too, in America.

Obama is doing their bidding. It no longer matters whether he’s a coward, agreeing to act as surrogate for the bankers and other racketeers, or is himself a miserable excuse for a human being. He has done some terrible things. This may prove to be the worst.

Comments

The Potential For Riot...

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 03:29:07 +0200

On March 23, the Laney Walker Supermarket in Augusta, Georgia, went out of business. The supermarket failed as a lot of family-owned and small business fail in Obama’s America, no bailouts for them, no federal spending to prime the pump, no Frankin Roosevelt.

There was plenty of food left inside, baby food, canned goods, noodles, and other non-perishables. The store owner prior to eviction had said that a local church would pick up the food for distribution to the poor, but by the 23rd, the church had failed to show, and the premises –– and everything inside –– became property of the bank.

I get asked sometimes why I can’t write columns less disturbing or at least less angry.

On the 23rd, hundreds of local residents in Augusta, poor people, came to the Supermarket carrying empty baskets and bags, hoping to get some of the food. The bank, SunTrust, would not make it available. Instead, the bank had the food loaded into dumpsters and driven to a landfill.

In Washington, the government brags that the unemployment rate has gone down, pretending it does not know that actual unemployment is about 20% and is not getting any better. They simply play games with definitions, no longer including those who have been out of work for as long as a year or have given up.

In Augusta, people who had lined up hoping for some help had to be restrained by police as they witnessed food being destroyed. Sheriff Richard Roundtree told reporters that “a potential for a riot was extremely high.”

From a savage article written by Sarah Carlson and published online by Global Research: “People got children out here that are hungry, thirsty,” local resident Robertstine Lambert told Fox54 in Augusta. “Why throw it away when you could be issuing it out?”

The SunTrust mouthpiece, Mike McCoy, said, “We are working with store suppliers as well as law enforcement to dispose of the remaining contents of the store and secure the building.” I suppose it’s some comfort to know that whatever the bank is paying McCoy is obviously being wasted.

According to Carlson, the area around the market is one of the poorest in Georgia, and there are about twenty evictions per day in Richmond County.

Some of the people who came to the market followed the trucks to the landfill and were turned away again.

In Washington, where two consecutive administrations handed trillions of dollars to the greediest pigs in America as a reward for having ruined lives and stolen the life savings of millions, where bankers who sucked up multi-million-dollar bonuses for acting as money laundering operators for organized crime have been adjudged by Attorney General Eric Holder to be too important to the economy to be prosecuted no matter what their deeds, Barack Obama presents a budget which by clever technicalities will cut the meager incomes of millions of the country’s most needy citizens.

Capitalism has no heart and no soul. It is a system designed by monsters to enrich monsters at the expense of those who do real work and to the detriment of those who desperately need the basic necessities of life. When the propaganda no longer works to fool the millions, what then?

As Carlson makes clear, the actions of SunTrust Bank do not differ from other examples we’ve had in recent years –– clothing being shredded before disposal to prevent needy people from getting it for free and thus lessening the ‘value’ of the clothing still to be sold. The bankers do not think as human beings but as money machines. Their jobs depend on not caring because caring might reduce the bottom line.

Our government will not help us. The Congress, more than half of whose members are multi-millionaires themselves, and the President, whose party once stood for something noble and which now stands for nothing, will not help us. They are in office to help the country’s real owners.

That’s why they can cut pieces out of the remaining pitiful safety net in this proudly rich country. They can take food out of the mouths of the hungry and not feel a damned thing.

I get asked sometimes why I can’t write columns less disturbing or at least less angry. I guess I could, but then I’d have to get drunk enough to pass out in the street.

Comments

How It Works

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 08:55:33 +0200

There was a guy once, went to high school with him and spent time hanging around him in the late ‘sixties and early ‘seventies as the country began to implode. Lou was a trust fund kid, beneficiary of a monthly stipend that would see him straight through life, plus his parents or grandmother bought him a pretty nice house along the canal in San Rafael.

After a brief flirtation with what we all thought of as the ‘revolution,’ Lou backtracked to his Whittier childhood and by the time of Reagan he was so lost that nobody’s efforts could salvage his mind or spirit. Lou had never had much of a clue about revolution, anyhow. His idea was a series of home robberies in the Berkeley and Oakland hills, and an arson at an Oakland restaurant, which he claimed to be ‘revolutionary acts.’

I asked him once how much money he needed. He had no answer. How about a million bucks? No, he was certain. The thing that got me wasn’t so much his answer as the fact that he had no hesitation at all. A million dollars wasn’t a serious proposition to him, and that was in the days when a million was pretty good capital.

Americans are about five percent of the world’s population. We consume twenty-five percent of its resources and create thirty percent of its pollution. Whether we cop to it or not, we want it to continue. We like having things. We like being collectively rich, even if nearly all of the wealth belongs to a very tiny percentage of people. We think that with a little luck or perseverance we, too, as John Lennon said, can live like the folks on the hill.

It’s the lottery mentality, and it’s been sold to us by some extremely powerful and very nasty people. Most Americans, after all, really like to think of the U.S. as a fairly egalitarian country, a place where people have a chance to ‘make something of themselves’ if only they work hard enough. We have a very high opinion of ourselves not borne out by the evidence, but we are good at ignoring evidence, after all. Dallas, for Christ’s sake.

We know that much of the rest of the world lives in relative squalor. We don’t know the numbers, of course, but we know people are dying of poverty. Actually, approximately 24,000 people die every single day of poverty or its effects. We don’t really want to know that, but if you force us to acknowledge it we’ll point to America’s great history of humanitarian relief and the international efforts we’re famous for. Have an earthquake and the U.S. is there.

We want to believe that great efforts are being made to rid the world of poverty. We point to great and powerful people and institutions, the use of GMO crops to feed the hungry in Africa, the Bill Gates initiative. U.S. foreign aid. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. If only poverty weren’t so stubborn we’d have it licked.

I think I’ve come to believe that we really don’t believe the propaganda, not deep down, but we try hard to because there’s a lot riding on it. We in the U.S. know that we are exploiting the resources of the rest of the planet, and we want to keep doing it.

We may be mostly decent folks, folks who are or try to be kind to one another, who really believe in principles such as democracy, who want the world to live in peace. But, in order for us not to march, en masse, on Washington, D.C. and New York City, and drag the pols and the bankers and the CEOs out from behind their mahogany desks and tie them to the bumpers of a fleet of ‘57 Chevys, we have to pretend that we don’t know how America’s wealth has been generated and how it is sustained today. And so we do.

I’ve got an old friend who is sure that if only the lazy and forgetful got themselves registered and then actually voted, we’d solve a lot of problems. This preposterous sentiment, touching though it is, describes a fantasy world which is nothing like the one we actually live in. The last presidential election which meant something was in 1960, and the nation’s owners put a stop to that sort of thing.

See, this is how it works.

America is an empire, not because its people are smarter or more ingenious than others but because we’ve got the guns and we’re not afraid to use them. Our owners have managed to convince a lot of us that we have a free society because we have access to hundreds of cable channels and the right to eat at the fast food emporium of our choice.

Sixty years ago, under a Republican President and in a fairly conservative era, the highest tax bracket in the U.S. was 91%. That is not a misprint. Ninety-one. That made it quite possible to fund all sorts of public projects, including highways and government services, without taxing the very poor at all. It also did not impede people getting rich.

Now, of course, we have a Democratic President proposing to cut money from the most critical programs the country has, Social Security and Medicare, in order to protect the tax breaks of his corporate friends, who in any case have lodged trillions of dollars in offshore accounts and refused to pay taxes on them.

Something sure stinks around here.

Thing is, the people who own America, like my old friend Lou, are not satisfied no matter how much money they have. It is just a game for them, albeit played to the death in many cases. Billionaires want more. And most Americans seem fine with that. After all, who knows, the next billionaire could be you! Those who raise any objection to this insane situation are attacked as trying to ‘wage class warfare.’

Domestically, the owners have been squeezing every dime they can get out of the rest of us, manipulating the stock market like a huge pump-and-dump operation, hyping the housing market, selling the bundled bad securities, trading enormous bonuses, moving vast sums offshore, taking wholesale bribes in the billions –– there were actually pallets of shrink-wrapped cash in Iraq, hundreds of millions, dispensed without paperwork to guys in suits, money Congress appropriated to help ‘reconstruction’ of the country we’d first destroyed, and nobody bothered to ask what happened.

One of the nation’s biggest banks has been run as a pass through for drug money and gun running, and as a laundry for the Mafia, and the highest law enforcement officer in the land, Eric Holder, says he will not prosecute these people because it would send shock waves through the economy. How it is possible that he is not being impeached and perhaps jailed for malfeasance and obstruction of justice is hard to fathom, but nobody seems too interested in making an issue of it.

In the rest of the world, the American empire is essentially moving to take over everything. Ultimately, of course, we will have a problem with the Chinese, who are not only more numerous than us but also solvent. In the meantime, we are using the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to force other countries into handing us the keys to their resources.

The banking scam is elegant in its simplicity. Representatives of major corporations or from the World Bank, let’s say, approach the leaders of a given country with a proposition: your people need infrastructure, they are told, perhaps port development, industrial parks, highways. We will arrange a loan.

The deal is necessarily based on a few understandings, as well, primarily that the corporations we select will be the ones doing the projects –– Bechtel and Halliburton are two favored sources but there are others –– and perhaps you will go along with us on that vote in the U.N. next month...

Countries which accept these loans soon discover that the economic ‘studies’ they were shown by the ‘consultants’ were actually cooked-up and not accurate, that the project was not going to work very well. And of course everyone already understood that none of these things would benefit the poor. Why would they? The poor have no power; they are not friends of the President.

When it comes time to pay off the loan, the recipient nation discovers that the terms were after all a little steep. It cannot pay. In some cases, the former crooked President absconded with half the cash and is living a good life in Switzerland. Don’t worry, says the World Bank or the IMF, we will extend a new loan, brand-new. For more than the first one. All you have to do is privatize your sanitation system, or your water system, or your schools, or your banks.

Naturally, some leaders of some countries, not being crooks and having seen this scenario many times already, decline the original offer. No thanks, we’ll just muddle along. As John Perkins, author of ‘Confessions of an Economic Hit Man,’ says, that’s when they send in ‘the jackals.’

The jackals are the special ops gang, the CIA people, whatever it takes. They either destabilize the country and force out the uncooperative leader or they simply assassinate him or her. That’s been done many times, too. In Panama, Ecuador, Iran, Chile, and so on. That’s one reason why popular leaders such as Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales have had to impose serious security and crack down on CIA front operations in their countries, because they didn’t feel like being ousted in a coup or shot dead.

The foreign policy of the United States is directed at extending its empire across the globe and in securing the world’s resources for the multinational corporations which own the U.S. government. That’s the entire point of it. So all the smokescreen nonsense about democracy and human rights and protecting civilians –– the latter is a very popular lie right now; we used it in Libya and are working it in Syria –– is just that, nonsense. We no more care about human rights than we care about the rights of the inmates at Guantañamo. Why do we think that years after the Haitian earthquake, with the millions donated by generous, ordinary Americans, the victims are still living in the mud while friends of the Clintons are building waterfront resorts?

As for the campaigns that at first sound honorable and even generous, such as “debt forgiveness,” they are actually clever schemes to take over a country’s natural resources. And Hollywood celebrities who don’t know shit are being exploited to push these sorts of things. The fine print: we will forgive your debt after you sign over the entirety of your country’s oil, gold, platinum, copper, or whatever else you’ve got, not to mention ownership of your tourist sites, land where we can build, and aren’t we nice people?

As I said before, I think we really do know these things, if not in detail at least in general terms. We might mouth the platitudes, we might even hope it’s true that our country means well, but we have to know we’ve built and sustained this palace on the bodies of millions.

Do we actually think there are ‘terrorists’ all over the world engaged in a massive conspiracy to attack America because they hate our freedom? Know how many people have been killed by ‘terrorists’ since 9-11? Half as many as have died from allergy to peanut butter.

Yet, we have built a security state and given it not only most of our money but control over our freedoms, as well. Chalmers Johnson always said that a country could choose either democracy or empire but not both. In America, we like the illusion of wealth –– since most of us don’t have a great deal of it –– better than we like freedom. That is a choice which will destroy our country if we don’t reverse it.

John Perkins describes it quite well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95MBlxjDsDU

Please watch it, educate yourself, then pass it to your friends. It’s up to us to change America. It’s up to us to change our world.

Comments

Drugging The Children

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 03:03:43 +0200

Man, I am so happy I wasn’t born fifteen years ago and to different parents. Had I been, there’s a decent chance I’d have been by now drugged to a faretheewell, thanks to general public ignorance, stupid or complicitous shrinks, and the greed and predations of the pharmaceutical industry.

In American society these days, far more than when I was a lad, there seems an almost pathological need for control.

I was a little active as a kid, always moving around, it seemed, and talkative as hell. My teachers could not easily shut me up. I recall spending a portion of second grade in the hall because Mrs. Campbell at Shorewood Hills couldn’t teach with me interrupting. In those days, fortunately, there was no clinical diagnosis of ADHD, a category dreamed up by fools to enable the mass drugging of a juvenile population. Had I been a child now, that’s how my behavior would have been described by many school personnel and psychiatrists. The wrong parents and zap, there goes another otherwise healthy brain.

I’ve written about the pharmaceutical industry before, most recently here: http://lookingglass.blog.co.uk/2012/12/25/ask-your-doctor-about-15353375/

I do not doubt that there are people who suffer from some form of what is termed ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, but I strongly doubt that more than ten percent of school-age children do. Yet that is the latest figure on the diagnosis for that group. And nearly one-in-five high school age boys have been given that clinical diagnosis –– and prescribed drugs to ‘control’ it.

According to the data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there has been a skyrocketing in the medicating of children over the past decade. An estimated 6.4 million kids between 4 and 17 have been diagnosed as suffering from ADHD at some point, a 16% increase since 2007 and a 53% increase since 2003. About two-thirds of these receive or have received prescriptions for stimulants such as Ritalin and Adderall, among whose effects are anxiety, addiction, and even psychosis.

Maybe I’m just dense, but what kind of society is it that freely dispenses pills which often cause a problem worse than the one they supposedly already have? What kind of society will promote drug addiction in children while continuing to put marijuana into the Class A category, ignoring its by now amply proven medical benefits?

The rise in prescriptions alarms some. Dr. William Graf, professor at the Yale School of Medicine, said, “Those are astronomical numbers. I’m floored. Mild symptoms are being diagnosed so readily, which goes well beyond the disorder and beyond the zone of ambiguity to pure enhancement of children who are otherwise healthy.”

It is about to get worse. That’s because the American Psychological Association expects to change the definition of ADHD to allow more people to receive the diagnosis and get the drugs.

Know what ADHD is? It’s commonly described as an abnormal chemical level in the brain that impairs a person’s impulse control and attention skills. But no doctor can show you the scientific studies where this chemical abnormality is shown to physically exist. There are no such studies. There is only the diagnosis, and of course the enormous profit.

Kids are sometimes considered “hyper,” especially in school. That’s usually because they are kids and because much of school is boring and pointless. How many ordinary children are being drugged to keep them quiet or bring them under ‘control’? Look again at the numbers: millions, that’s how many. How many young minds are being turned to mush by often well-meaning parents and criminal pharmaceutical companies? How many addicts are we creating? How many psychopaths?

The ‘news’ on television or radio or in the newspapers has managed to evade this rather interesting note: all of the people charged with mass killings in recent years in the United States have been taking psychoactive drugs. We don’t know if it’s a case of the drugs not working or of the drugs instigating the horrors, but given the science of it there is reason to worry.

Are there people with some form of ADHD? I don’t think it’s an entirely imaginary malady just because we can’t scientifically validate it. But I don’t believe 6.4 million kids have it. Do you?

If you still haven’t bought my book, what are you waiting for? Eleven reviews, all five-star. Check them out on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/News-From-A-Parallel-World/dp/1478194448/

Comments

The University

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 09:06:17 +0200

Back in the heady days of the 1960s, there were often wild clashes on college campuses. One of the more famous took place at Columbia University in New York City, where students angry about the University’s ties to the war as well as its plans to demolish a black children’s playground in order to build a gymnasium, touched off a mass occupation of five buildings, including Hamilton Hall, where black students were said to be armed.

After police swept the campus, beating up everyone they saw, including passersby, arresting over a thousand and sending more than a hundred students to the hospital, it was revealed that documents student occupiers had found in the President’s office showed the University doing business with the Pentagon. There was a public outcry, with many educators deploring the corrupt, secret use of an educational institution for political purposes.

Such were the innocent expectations of the old days. Today, we know that universities have pretty much all sold their souls to the government for a little cash, and if anything is left over it’s peddled to the corporations. Entire university departments have been sold to industries desperate for ‘studies’ making their toxic products look good, and there is no shortage of academic whores willing to write those papers and falsify the research.

It may have always been thus, and perhaps some of my readers will point that out to me, but it is now quite apparent that higher education is not the purpose of these institutions. They are in fact businesses, and their job is to make money and to promote products.

The issue arises these days in the context not of war, which nobody on campus seems to give a shit about, but of athletics. At Penn State, the assistant football coach was groping and apparently raping players in the showers and his superiors didn’t do anything about it.

At Rutgers, videotapes showing the basketball coach screaming invectives at players, striking them with a basketball and with his fists, many, many times, gave us the coach telling an interviewer that he was sorry now that he’d seen the tapes. His kids, he said, were ashamed of him. As my grandson Jake pointed out, the kids already knew what kind of person he is. The athletic director, who had been shown the tapes in December and done nothing about them, now says that he had hoped to encourage the man’s redemption. If you believe that, I have some unsecured shares in bundled derivatives to unload.

Now comes news that the national championship football team at Auburn was built around academically uninspired players, many of whose grades had been systematically altered to meet eligibility requirements, and it is plain as fucking day that they all knew, the coaches, the department, the people at the top. Players were also being paid, not very much, it’s true, but envelopes full of cash after practices as ‘encouragement.’ The suits are all denying it, of course.

College sports is a major source of revenue, often dwarfing any other source, and the people involved are quite aware of what television contracts and championships can mean to the bottom line. Athletics on this level are not amateur events. They are conducted as money machines. The only people being screwed are, not surprisingly, the players, who are not permitted to be paid, not even to accept the gifts of cars and so forth from ‘grateful alumni,’ although it obviously goes on. The NCAA piously insists that players be unsullied by money, all the while it promotes the corporate growth of the operation.

Tell the NCAA that athletes ought to be paid and you will be handed an exalted, self-righteous sermon on the greatness of amateur sport and the importance of keeping our students clean and untainted.

I am not surprised by the revelations out of Penn State, Rutgers, or Auburn, and neither are you. We know what the deal is. But what a shame that in addition to ripping off the players the system feeds their cynicism, and ours.

Comments

The Monster Cometh

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 04:17:28 +0200

Maybe it’s that I’ve got a really bad cold and a sore throat, which makes me crankier than usual. Maybe it was the sight of her face with that fake smile first thing in the morning as I inventory my malady to make sure my breathing’s good enough not to phone the doctor. Maybe it’s a lot of things.

There are plenty of evil creatures infesting the political landscape in the 21st century and my country has more than its fair share, and no doubt I could write ugly things about other personages, and have, but there’s something truly compelling about Hillary Clinton.

In the case of some people, it’s much too easy. For example, there was a cheery article in Salon.com this morning in which Alan Keyes, the Negro Republican who still no doubt thinks he’ll be nominated or elected to something for his many years of cleaning whitey’s shoes for him, is quoted describing gay marriage as “the archetype of all crimes against humanity,” the holocaust no doubt having slipped his mind.

But Hillary is a special case because she has managed to convince otherwise sentient millions, most of them self-defined as ‘liberal Democrats,’ that she is one of them.

I understand that there are psychological reasons for this. She attracted a lot of sympathy when tales of her husband’s numerous infidelities hit the atmosphere. She has managed to craft a public image of someone who cares about the things you care about. As a woman, her candidacy strikes a responsive chord among men who feel guilty and women who seek vindication.

However, as in retrospect might have been a good idea in the case of Barack Obama, we may be better served if we look beyond the race and gender of candidates and more deeply at their history and character.

Hillary has been around a while. We all carry around images of her. For me, the single most-enduring one is the video, her unguarded response when told of the murder by U.S. mercenaries disguised as Libyan ‘insurgents,’ of Moammar Qaddafi. The first time I saw this I felt a chill, a sick feeling, a sense of psychopathology. Check it out for yourself and see if it doesn’t make your blood run cold.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_x04Gn3-2g

There are moments with any public figure, scenes which render them bare-ass naked and without the makeup of public relations, the tailored clothing, literal and figurative, of the crafted image. Anyone can read a speech; some are very good at it. But it is far more telling when the words and actions are extemporaneous.

Thanks to YouTube, video pack rats, and advances in recording equipment, we’ve got many politicians and others dealing with the unexpected in ways which expose their real selves. John Kennedy typically reacted with humor, his brother with passion and empathy. Lyndon Johnson waved around his outsized ego. Nixon was a nasty, racist paranoid. Reagan was out to lunch.

With Clinton, there is a disturbing theme, again and again the expression of a willingness, even an eagerness, to kill people. The Qaddafi scene is one of the more vivid, but there are others. Asked what her response would be as President should Iran attack Israel, she used the word “obliterate.” That is the short form equivalent of mass murder.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LODIm-Utrgg

While it’s certainly true that candidates, even experienced candidates, can use the wrong word, these incidents have a brutal edge to them, a visceral pleasure in carnage. That ought to unsettle anyone, even those unschooled in Clinton’s history, which itself is no recommendation as a woman-of-the-people.

Probably you have heard or read of her long-time association as a lawyer for several of the creepiest corporations in the world, notably Monsanto. What you may not be familiar with is her association with a Washington prayer group which believes that it is on earth to rule the rest of us. Known as ‘the Fellowship,’ this group is a secretive congregation of D.C. right-wing power brokers which counts Sam Brownback and Rick Santorum among its members and whose spiritual leader is a crazy whack-job who uses Hitler and Mao as examples of the level of devotion leaders ought to inspire.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2007/09/hillarys-prayer-hillary-clintons-religion-and-politics

You may also be unfamiliar with some of her connections to antidemocratic political operatives. Two with whom she is especially close are Lanny Davis and Bennett Ratcliff, fixers who turned up at the press conference of the Honduran generals the day following their coup against the elected President of Honduras. I wrote about this at the time. http://lookingglass.blog.co.uk/2009/07/30/deep-politics-and-honduras-6615327/.

The leader of the coup in Honduras, General Romeo Vasquez, was a graduate of the then-named School of the Americas, the CIA’s training center for death squads.

But in recent years, especially as Secretary of State, Clinton’s principal roles have been as a broker for corporate opportunities and as a diplomatic blackmailer. In the former capacity, she hosted international business events and trade shows in the Middle East, pimping the suddenly favorable climate in the wake of America’s shock and awe. In the latter, she delivered threats; one Wikileaks series of cables show Clinton telling the French government that it could expect trouble unless that country reversed its negative policies toward Monsanto and GMO crops.

Another Wikileaks revelation concerned Clinton ordering U.S. diplomats at the United Nations to spy on their counterparts, including every member of the Security Council and the Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon, to collect DNA data –– iris scans and fingerprints –– and credit card numbers. I should not have to mention it, but these activities are illegal. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1333920/WikiLeaks-Hillary-Clinton-ordered-U-S-diplomats-spy-UN-leaders.html.

When the documents hit the media, Clinton’s response was to declare that Wikileaks’ disclosures were “an attack on the international community,” and vowed to hold Julian Assange “accountable,” which is a little like Richard Nixon vowing to hold accountable those who leaked information about his criminal activities. Her comments are worth reprinting in some detail. From a contemporaneous article in the Telegraph:

The US Secretary of State said she "deeply regrets" the release and attempted to reassure US allies around the world.
"I will not comment on or confirm what are alleged to be stolen State Department cables," Mrs Clinton said.
"But I can say that the United States deeply regrets the disclosure of any information that was intended to be confidential, including private discussions between counterparts or our diplomats' personal assessments and observations.
"I want to make clear that our official foreign policy is not set through these messages, but here in Washington," Mrs Clinton added. "Our policy is a matter of public record as reflected in our statements and our actions around the world.
"I would also add that to the American people and to our friends and partners, I want you to know that we are taking aggressive steps to hold responsible those who stole this information," she said.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/8169040/WikiLeaks-Hillary-Clinton-states-WikiLeaks-release-is-an-attack.html.

I guess we’re used to doubletalk from Washington pols, but note the spectacular, almost Olympic-level obfuscation here. Clinton does not regret the spying but the disclosure of it; she does not address the content of the various cables, which showed Washington’s contempt for other countries and their leaders, but claims with presumably a straight face that public pronouncements are actual policy and secret cables nothing of the sort. She wants everyone to know that the government will “take aggressive steps” to nail the leakers and, as Bradley Manning can attest, she was not kidding.

Anyone looking forward to a Clinton presidency as anything other than a reactionary nightmare ought to wake up now and not after it’s too late to stop her. Although she is pretending to weigh the situation it is evident that she has already done so, leaving the State Department so that she could separate herself to some degree from Obama’s policies while moving toward running without appearing to compromise her position.

She is comfortable working for corporate thugs, cozies up to fixers and the religious right, and will hammer anybody who divulges embarrassing facts about the government. Her political positions are always calculated, not the result of soul-searching or intellectual process –– take for example her quite recent support for gay marriage, something she avoided until the poll numbers began to tip decisively –– and her cabinet appointments would look a lot like Obama’s, or Bush’s.

In foreign policy, she colludes with dictators and expresses an especially vivid thirst for blood. Anyone who spontaneously cackles –– and if you’ve seen it, you know I am not being unfair using such a term –– “We came, we saw he died!” is a monster.

Comments

And Now For Some Really Bad News

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 04:28:33 +0200

Until today, I was under a misconception. I thought that any funds I might own and deposit in a bank were absolutely safe. They are, up to $250,000.00, guaranteed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the FDIC. If some guys roll into my local branch and stick guns into the faces of the bank manager and the tellers, my money is safe because it’s insured.

But I was wrong. I may be safe today, but that can be changed without notice, and it appears likely that it will be.

I don’t know what it is about banks, bankers, the money supply, and the rules which apply to these things, but for some reason the big boys are not anxious for the general public to understand what’s going on. For example, for much of my life I thought that the Federal Reserve was an arm of the government, a public institution subject to political control.

Until today, I thought my deposited amounts belonged to me and that I could access them whenever I wanted.

But the truth is that the minute you deposit funds into a bank in the U.S., the money belongs not to you but to the bank. It’s no longer yours. What’s yours is an obligation of the bank to pay it back. So, you may think, what’s the difference? I go down to Wells Fargo or Bank of America, or whichever criminal enterprise I’ve got an account with, and write a check and they hand me the cash.

And that’s how it works so far. But from internal documents pried loose and now made available by a few investigative journalists, the banks and the FDIC –– and the U.S. government –– have a plan to change all that.

Perhaps you’ve seen news items about what is going on in Cyprus. Apparently, due to yet another banking scheme which made a lot of cash disappear, there is a budgetary shortfall in that country. The crooks who run the banks in Europe are trying to impose ‘austerity’ programs in which, in exchange for loans which can’t be repaid, countries such as Cyprus agree to further compromise their independence and resources.

Across Europe and South America, the banks are moving to ‘privatize’ public assets and they’re getting away with it. Even where there is enormous public resistance, such as in Greece, the bankers, with the assistance of corrupt politicians and the military and police, manage to force-feed an amped-up system of control on the target countries.

We in the United States, asleep at the switch as we always are, are looking at the business end of a double-barreled shotgun and thinking it’s only a movie. What we do not realize is that there is a plan in the works to take our bank deposits and replace them with unsecured ‘equity’ in what’s left of the bank. I am not making this up.

The FDIC is an insurance company funded by the banks. Once our deposits are no longer subject to an IOU but are instead converted to an ‘equity share’ in the bank, whose value may be next to nothing, there is no insurance coverage. Quite literally, in the event of another banking emergency, your entire deposit, whatever you’ve got or think you’ve got in your bank, can instantly be converted to nothing better than a hazy ‘equity’ which has no value at all unless you can sell it to someone else. In effect, you will have been made a stockholder in a failing corporation without having any say in the matter.

You could think you had $100,000.00 in your savings account on Monday and wake up on Tuesday to discover that it was now five bucks and some ‘equity’ certificates. Again, I am not making this up.

Presumably, those detention centers the government had Halliburton construct with slightly less than a billion smackers and a no-bid contract, will turn out to have a use after all, because when fifty million Americans get fleeced like that they might finally tear their attention away from their televisions and video games and start looking for bankers and politicians to hang.

Still think I’m exaggerating, don’t you? Perhaps you recall that in the U.S., the multi-trillion-dollar bailout scheme (the numbers do go that high) nearly failed when the American people flooded the Congress with angry e-mails and phone calls. It took a unified effort by the criminals at the top of both parties, along with incoming President Barack Obama, to swing enough votes. Your memory may not be great on that scene but the bankers remember. They knew that it might be politically impossible to get another grand theft through Washington. So they prepared an alternative.

Much of the information in this column is from a piece by Ellen Brown, an attorney and chairman of the Public Banking Institute, which is hosting a conference in my home town in June. The column, along with citations, is available on line: http://www.resilience.org/print/2013-03-29/it-can-happen-here-the-confiscation-scheme-planned-for-us-and-uk-depositors

This, from a 15-page FDIC-BOE memorandum prepared in the wake of the last bailout:

“An efficient path for returning the sound operations of the G-SIFI (Global – Systemically Important Financial Institutions) to the private sector would be provided by exchanging or converting a sufficient amount of the unsecured debt from the original creditors of the failed company [meaning the depositors] into equity [or stock]. In the U.S., the new equity would become capital in one or more newly formed operating entities. In the U.K., the same approach could be used, or the equity could be used to recapitalize the failing financial company itself—thus, the highest layer of surviving bailed-in creditors would become the owners of the resolved firm. In either country, the new equity holders would take on the corresponding risk of being shareholders in a financial institution.”

This means what you think it means. There is no provision for a protective ceiling on deposits under $250,000.00. There is in fact no insurance at all. Remember the Lehman Brothers shareholders in 2008? That will be you and me when this plan is put into motion, wiped out.

From a recent article by Yves Smith, cited by Brown, entitled
When You Weren’t Looking, Democrat Bank Stooges Launch Bills to Permit Bailouts, Deregulate Derivatives:
“In the US, depositors have actually been put in a worse position than Cyprus deposit-holders, at least if they are at the big banks that play in the derivatives casino. The regulators have turned a blind eye as banks use their depositories to fund derivatives exposures. And as bad as that is, the depositors, unlike their Cypriot confreres, aren’t even senior creditors. Remember Lehman? When the investment bank failed, unsecured creditors (and remember, depositors are unsecured creditors) got eight cents on the dollar. One big reason was that derivatives counterparties require collateral for any exposures, meaning they are secured creditors. The 2005 bankruptcy reforms made derivatives counterparties senior to unsecured lenders.”

All that is necessary is the enabling legislation. And if you think Congress won’t pass it, you haven’t been paying attention. Banks own the nation. If bankers did not go to jail over what they just did, ruining the lives of millions and stealing their savings, they will never go to jail.

The next round of shortfalls, an inevitability since the banks operate on derivatives and continue to leverage something called ‘fractional reserves,’ by which they can loan ten times the money they receive in deposits, will not get a taxpayer bailout. The Congress would never pass another one of those. Instead, it will adopt the FDIC plan, and the FDIC will then steal everything it wants to.

As Brown makes clear, Section 716 of Dodd-Frank specifically prohibits public support for derivative speculations, which means that taxpayers can’t legally bail out the banks in the future for those losses. But once the FDIC plan is enacted, it will no longer be obligated to protect your money; it can simply take it.

Brown has a few ideas about what might still be done. It’s hard to be optimistic. All those dark predictions by George Carlin years back, I thought they were comic hyperbole. But they weren’t. It’s a mass robbery now, a looting of everything you and I have by the people who own the country and plan on owning the rest of the world. Our constitution’s in shreds thanks to Bush and Obama and a useless Congress, and our system’s being manipulated every minute of the day and night.

I read articles such as Brown’s (and others) and wonder if I’m living in some alternate world. Most of America seems completely unaware of what’s going on and grossly unprepared to assume the obligations of a free people under these circumstances. Other than passing information to each other, hoping enough people will awaken, hoping for critical mass, I don’t know what to do about all of this.

I’m a writer. Philip Roth said, the obligation of the writer is not to provide a solution. Good thing, since I don’t have any.

Meanwhile, buy my book, which is about something different and is a lot more fun to read. http://www.amazon.com/News-From-A-Parallel-World/dp/1478194448/

Comments

A Story For Easter

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 08:25:49 +0200

The Jesus thing fascinates me. In one sense, it’s a lot like what we do here in the west about the Kennedys and Dr. King: we name things after them but we aren’t really that interested in what they stood for or why they were sacrificed. I’m surprised there isn’t a Jesus Airport or Christ Boulevard. They could do that in Houston without much trouble.

I’m not a Christian and never have been but I’ve known a few who were the real thing and that is impressive, people trying to live by his precepts and teachings. Of course, in order to do that one has to ignore the ravings of the Jesus franchises, the professional money-raisers for Christ who bless wars and cut the ribbons at new shopping malls.

I don’t know much about him. I’ve heard things, though. I heard that he got pretty pissed off at the bankers of his time, the interest-chargers, and drove them out of the temple saying, ‘You’ve disgraced my father’s house.’ Nothing much has changed, as we can see.

He also said something such as, ‘What you do to the least among you, you do also to me.’ This is the sort of comment none of the Christians in politics seems able to recollect when it comes policy time. Screw the poor is practically the Republican mantra in the U.S., while the Democrats wring their hands and pretend they’d do more to help except there just isn’t enough cash lying around. Then they join the military cluster fuck and speculate on taking a piece or two out of Social Security to ‘spread the pain a little.’ Last time I looked, the pain had been spread all over the place except for those with money.

It was the ‘least of me’ statement which came to mind as I read the scathing piece in The Nation by Jeremy Scahill.

There is a fellow named Abdulelah Shaye. He is a journalist in prison in Yemen. The reason he is in prison is that Barack Obama insisted that he be held, despite the fact that following his arrest by security forces the government was about to release him.

Shaye, as it happens, is a real journalist. In that capacity, he sometimes traveled into territory controlled by al Qaeda groups and interviewed several of its leaders, including Anwar al-Awlaki, unaware that the radical cleric was on a CIA death list.

One of Shaye’s best friends is the political cartoonist Kamal Sharaf, who is related by marriage to radical Islamic cleric Abdul Majid al Zindani, founder of Iman University and a personage on a U.S. list of so-called ‘terrorists.’ Although Shaye used this connection to gain access to al Qaeda interviewees, he also wrote pieces quite critical of Zindani.

Independent journalists, however, are seen as serious threats to the U.S. and its allies. The President of the U.S., Barack Obama, had a big stick to hold over Ali Abdulah Saleh, President of Yemen until recently: most of the inmates at Guantanamo who have been adjudged innocent are Yemeni nationals, and Saleh did not want them back. Presumably, they’d cause trouble, especially after having been falsely incarcerated for more than ten years. So long as Obama kept them wrongly imprisoned, he had some special leverage with Saleh and, now, with his successor.

Shaye’s problems with Saleh and Obama apparently became critical in December, 2009. That is when the Yemeni government said that it had conducted strikes against an al Qaeda training camp in the town of al Majala, killing a number of ’terrorists.’ Shaye followed the story to al Majala and discovered something neither Saleh nor Obama wanted anyone to find.

First of all, the strike had been carried out not by Yemeni forces but by the United States. Tiresome as it is to keep writing these things, it ought to be pointed out that U.S. air strikes against nations with whom we are not technically at war violates a host of international laws.

In any event, Shaye found pieces of Tomahawk missiles, some bearing the imprint, ‘Made in the USA,’ and remnants of cluster bombs. He also found that the attack had killed not ‘militants’ but fourteen women and twenty-one children. Shaye took photographs, passing them to international news sources.

The Saleh government maintained that the bombings had been its own and that the U.S. had not been involved, however a subsequent Wikileaks disclosure of cables between the two countries proved Saleh and Obama were lying.

Then, in July of 2010, as Sharaf and Shaye were running errands, the former emerged from a supermarket to see his friend grabbed by armed men and hustled into a car. The men were Yemeni intelligence agents. They then put a hood over his head and took Shaye to an undisclosed site where he was threatened and told that if he continued to write about or speak of the Majala bombing, ‘we will destroy your life.’ He was then dumped onto the street in the middle of the night.

According to Shaye’s lawyer, the government threatened him many times, and beat him after his kidnapping. These things were done, he says, at the request of the United States.

Soon after the first kidnapping, Shaye’s friend Sharaf ran into trouble himself. His drawings of President Saleh and his criticism of the government’s campaign against a minority population attracted the malevolent attentions of the security police.

What happened next is described by Scahill:

“On August 6, 2010, Sharaf and his family had just broken the Ramadan fast when he heard shouting from outside his home: “Come out, the house is surrounded.” Sharaf walked outside. “I saw soldiers I had never seen before. They were tall and heavy—they reminded me of American Marines. Then, I knew that they were from the counter terrorism unit. They had modern laser guns. They were wearing American Marine–type uniforms,” he recalls. They told Sharaf he was coming with them. “What is the accusation?” he asked. “They said, ‘You’ll find out.’”

“As Sharaf was being arrested, Yemeni forces had surrounded Shaye’s home as well. “Abdulelah refused to come out, so they raided his house, took him by force, beat him and broke his tooth,” Sharaf says. “We were both taken blindfolded and handcuffed to the national security prison, which is supported by the Americans.” They were separated and thrown in dark, underground cells, says Sharaf. “We were kept for about thirty days during Ramadan in the national security prison where we were continuously interrogated.”

Eventually, Sharaf was released after pledging that he would draw no more cartoons for publication depicting Saleh. Shaye would not make a similar promise. He was placed into solitary confinement where even his family did not know what had happened to him at the hands of the state.

Shaye’s location was finally ascertained when a released prisoner said that he was being held in the Political Security prison. His lawyer saw him. Shaye had been beaten, heavily scarred, and psychologically tortured. He had been told that his family had abandoned him.

In September, Shaye was brought to court, but the prosecutor asked for more time to prepare, and he was returned to prison. In October, he finally had a hearing, put on display in the court inside a cage. He was accused of acting as a mouthpiece for al Qaeda, recruiting members, helping with selecting al Qaeda targets, joining al Qaeda, and urging that al Qaeda assassinate President Saleh and his son. Most of the charges carried the death penalty.

In January of 2011, Shaye was convicted of terrorism-related charges and sentenced to five years in prison and two more years of restricted movement and government surveillance. The trial, according to international observers cited by Scahill, was a farce. Evidence was manufactured. He was convicted because the United States wanted it, that’s all. He was guilty of exposing part of Obama’s secret war, and the deaths of ordinary people from American bombings.

It was after Shaye’s conviction and sentencing that many prominent Yemenis approached Saleh with petitions for his release. According to Shaye’s attorney, public support in Yemen moved Saleh to approve a pardon, and papers ordering his release had been prepared when news of the development reached Barack Obama.

On the day the news hit Yemeni papers, Obama telephoned Saleh to “express his concern” over the impending release. Saleh promptly changed his mind. That was two years ago.

If Obama has anything to say about it, and he does, a journalist whose only ‘crime’ was revealing the lies of the American President and his Yemeni counterpart, as well as the carnage these lies enable, is locked inside a prison and on a hunger strike. Western media don’t seem especially interested, but when pressed by international human rights observers, State Department spokeswoman Beth Gosselin recently referred questioners to the President’s statement of a year ago.

Scahill and The Nation got this response: “We remain concerned about Shaye’s potential release due to his association with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. We stand by the president’s comments.” When asked whether the US government should present evidence to support its claims about Shaye’s association with AQAP, Gosselin said, “That is all we have to say about this case.”

Nice, isn’t it? That’s all we have to say.

That’s not quite all I have to say. Abdulelah Shaye is not a spy or a ‘terrorist,’ but he is a real journalist, one whose enterprise and integrity led him to expose some secrets the U.S. doesn’t want its own people to know. Barack Obama is determined to prevent such journalists from interviewing those he considers enemies, yes, but also from disclosing what America’s bombs and missiles are doing to people who have done nothing to us. The American President "expresses concern" and a man is in prison in another country on charges notoriously false.

The real criminal is not in a Yemeni prison tonight.

Scahill’s great piece:
http://www.thenation.com/article/166757/why-president-obama-keeping-journalist-prison-yemen

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

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A Small Lesson In Justice

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 10:33:30 +0100

In March of 2008, Sharon Henry, a San Mateo County prosecutor, went down to the Noe Valley branch of Bank of America, figuring to deposit a healthy check for $27,500.00 from her partner, Kathleen Wilkinson, and pull out a grand in cash.

The bank manager, one Nancy Mendoza, confirmed that Wilkinson had a credit card account and that the money was within Wilkinson’s limit.

Shortly thereafter, Henry was arrested and handcuffed by San Francisco police, who prevented her from using her cell phone to call Wilkinson. At the station, Henry was shackled, cut off from using her phone or accessing her medicine –– she is diabetic.

How could such a bizarre thing happen? Glad you asked.

At the bank, Mendoza had taken the additional step of checking a database which included names of people with bank accounts but not those with credit cards. She found a listing for Kathleen Wilkinson with a notation that the latter was studying abroad.

Mendoza then phoned the number on the listed account and was told by the mother of that Wilkinson that the family didn’t know Henry. She called the cops.

As for the arresting officers, it is standard procedure for them to telephone the number printed on the check –– the phone number of the real Wilkinson. They did not do so.

Henry was finally released when her partner, frantic with worry, went to the bank to see whether she had been there.

Did I mention that Sharon Henry is black?

The position of Bank of America was that mistakes happen and Henry ought to be a good sport about it, a point of view so grotesque you’d think it was Wells Fargo. Henry lodged a claim for damages. The bank told her to, well, you know.

Then it got really interesting.

Henry filed suit claiming negligence and false arrest, torts which in this case certainly seem to have been established by the bank’s behavior and the actions of the police . After all, had Mendoza or any bank officer bothered to think, it would have been fairly clear that since the Wilkinson with the account did not have a credit card, and since Henry was protesting that they were calling the wrong person, it might turn out that there was more than one Kathleen Wilkinson in the world. Had the cops followed their own standard procedure, they’d have spoken with the real Wilkinson.

But nobody was interested in procedure, common sense, or in the protestations of the arrestee.

Did I mention that Sharon Henry is black?

Henry lost in U.S. District Court. Judge Richard Seeborg said that California law shields the bank from liability for any statements its employees make while investigating a possible crime, and that the arresting officers had probable cause because of what the bank manager said to them.

Roll that around in your head for a minute. Bank of America can make the sort of blunder that gets somebody taken away in handcuffs and it’s just one of those things. The cops probably should have phoned the number on the check before dragging her away, and maybe they should not have deprived her of her diabetes medicine but, these things happen.

Henry, who is a lawyer and thus has at least a basic understanding of legal reasoning, was appalled. She appealed. Two days ago, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, regarded as the most progressive of all federal circuit courts, issued a ruling upholding Seeborg’s decision –– and sanctioned Henry the sum of $50,000.00, which she is ordered to pay to Bank of America, for filing a “frivolous” lawsuit.

Equal justice for all, my ass. I give you the American legal system, and you can have it.

Did I mention that Sharon Henry is black?

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

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