Biped Twilight

A-G Schneiderman: Hero or Sell-Out?

2012-01-27T02:29:00.000-08:00

The leftish blogosphere has been alight this week with heady hosannas of triumph over the appointment of New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to head a new federal Unit on Mortgage Origination and Securitization Abuses to investigate the nefarious doings of the big banks. Schneiderman was state senator for my district for 20 years and should be ascended directly into heaven for his work in dismantling the horrible Rockefeller drug laws in our state. I always liked him and actually contributed money to his tough campaign for A-G, in which he was not the darling of the party establishment.

He also has taken a strong lead in pushing for real investigations of bankster misdeeds in the housing arena and has kept admirably distant from the scandalously phony ’50-state’ A-G settlement led by bankster front man Tom Miller of Iowa. Schneiderman, Biden of Delaware, Masto of Nevada, Harris of California and several others have bolted from this charade designed to give the guilty banks legal cover while Obama and Geithner have lent Miller substantial political support. So did Obama suddenly see the light? Or did the Occupy movement’s impact on the national debate require a better PR response?

I hope Schneiderman succeeds in carrying out investigations of the banks and holding their criminal feet to the fires of hell. But there are plenty of reasons to suspect that this appointment is a head-fake and that its ultimate aim is the opposite of what Obama trumpeted in the SOTU speech. If so, Schneiderman is a turncoat.

First of all, we need to ask why this federal unit needs to be created at all. It sounds good and has obviously persuaded many people that Obama is finally going to go after banking crimes, which have been detailed on the finance blogs in excruciating and appalling detail. But there are plenty of federal agencies, including the Department of Justice itself, with the subpoena power and resources to undertake this sort of investigation, none of which have been encouraged to do so by one Barack Obama. If the president has had a major change of heart, why not get his current employees to do their jobs instead of creating another level of bureaucracy?

A parallel question is why not encourage or strengthen current and ongoing state A-G efforts to pursue their local investigations and bring solid civil and criminal cases against the originators, servicers and other white-collar gangsters who continue to undermine the mortgage market? The hold-outs named above have been doing exactly that with the scant resources at their disposal. Or why not at least redirect Miller to stop negotiating a Get Out of Jail Free Card for the banks while the investigations that we supposedly need—and Miller steadfastly has refused to carry out—are undertaken?

One possible answer is that Obama doesn’t really want tough investigations and prosecutions at all but realized he needed to neutralize the independent state A-Gs who can bring charges and do serious damage to the banks. New York is the key state in all this given that many of the legalized theft vehicles a.k.a. securitization trusts, that were formed to package the lousy mortgages that blew up our economy, were headquartered in our state and are thus subject to its laws. Therefore, Schneiderman held very powerful cards, which he may now be handing over to the White House.

It’s pretty clear what the White House is getting out of this: Obama looks like he’s finally getting it vis-à-vis the banks just as campaign season gets underway. He re-convinces his disgruntled followers that he is out for the little guy after all. But what does Schneiderman get, other than national exposure and a shot at the eternal gratitude of the Wall Street-dependent Democratic Party?

There are many more unanswered questions in this surprise appointment: did Schneiderman’s fellow A-G holdouts know that he was going to take this gig? Did they agree to it? Were there negotiations among them to sketch the terms of the new entity and guarantee Schneiderman’s independence from the sorts of bureaucratic obstacles thrown by the White House at Elizabeth Warren, whom Obama famously tossed under the corporate bus to the delight of the big banks? A-G Biden of Delaware (son of the Veep) sounded a little sour about the deal, which suggests that he was blindsided by it.

In short, the whole thing pretty much stinks, and while one should not attribute motive nor presume in advance that it will fail, the chances that this is a sincere attempt to serve the public interest and prosecute bank fraud are slim. Obama is in the middle of a political campaign and needs the deep pockets of exactly the people who would be facing perp walks and huge, costly settlements if the new federal unit’s investigations actually succeed. How likely is it that this is Obama’s true intention?

Perhaps I will turn out to be wrong, but this gambit does not pass the whiff test: it is more likely to be a masterful political stroke by a president who is extraordinarily clever at looking like the reasonable, empathetic guy on the side of the downtrodden while doing the bidding of the powerful. And the ongoing clown show on the GOP side gives him precisely the cover he needs to make populist noises while doing nothing.

Scary is as scary does

2012-01-25T02:46:00.000-08:00

The cynicism of Obama standing before Congress as the defender of the little guy is breathtaking even if one acknowledges the golden opportunity presented by the bizarre circular firing squad over in the Republican camp. But from an unscientific reading of my Facebook feed, it’s going to work: Obama is going to look like the noble defender of Fairness against mean, rich, white people.

Others are going to parse the weakness of the announced measures, especially the dastardly turning of our state A-G, Eric Schneiderman, who was poised to do some real harm to the mortgage-industrial complex and now looks like a sellout. But I prefer to take note of other developments this week, such as the simultaneous endorsement of war crimes and indictment of whistle-blowing, all occurring on the watch of Mr Fair Guy.

As the people of Iraq are painfully aware, Frank Wuterich, the sole remaining defendant in the notorious Haditha massacre of 2005 has just gotten off with a slap on the wrist and no jail time. This despite ample evidence that he led his squad in slaughtering two dozen civilians in a revenge attack after a U.S. soldier died.

Not that the incident was particularly unusual, just harder to cover up, as reporters later discovered. In 2011 the New York Times found secret transcripts of military interviews from the investigation into the Haditha massacre in which Marines described killing civilians on a regular basis, including shooting children in vehicles that failed to stop at military checkpoints.

Amazingly, no one at the Times was indicted for aiding the enemy during wartime for these reports on the whacking of civilians.

Meanwhile, on the home front, John Kiriakou, a CIA employee who dared dissent from the torture regime is now facing espionage charges. Kiriakou made news in 2007 when revealed that accused terrorist Abu Zubaydah had been waterboarded. Now that’s where the investigative and prosecutorial machinery really gears up under President Fair: when the secrets start to leak out of how our government agents kidnap people, fly them around the world to be tortured and then lock them up without charges.

So spare me the horror stories about nasty Newt and Million-Dollar Mitt. Okay, they’re repulsive snakes and in a normal world would be required to take medication under supervision. But they’re so obvious as to be somewhat less dangerous. It’s the smooth-talking enablers of corruption and war crimes that have me worried.

Save us

2012-01-21T12:23:00.000-08:00

The mystery of South Carolina deepens even while the decision to renew the attack on Fort Sumter attracts a broad consensus among its white citizenry.

Federal government taken over by socialist Muslims—check.

Welfare queens still getting a free ride on taxpayers’ back—check.

Military strength undermined by Arab-loving anti-Semitic forces disloyal to Israel—check.

Belief in God under assault by secular baby-killers and homos—check.

Federal government to take honest workers’ pay to pay for socialized medicine—check.

National budget on verge of collapse due to tax-and-spend Democrats—check.

Economy run into the ground by enemies of free enterprise—check.

So with all these facts so clear, why is it that the Republicans have put on such a remarkably fickle display? Why do their love affairs with candidates explode faster than a Kardashian matrimony?

And why, oh Knower of All Mysteries, can Newt Gingrich still exist at all, much less be poised to win today’s primary (according to Nate Silver, who should know)?

Bachmann, Perry, Cain, Gingrich, Santorum, Gingrich redux—why can none of these figures, all spouting roughly equal amounts of bizarre and meaningless rhetoric, win the hearts of the inflamed GOP masses? Smarter people than I have tried to provide an answer and failed.

However, Gingrich the Undead provides one possible hint: he arises like Prince Vlad to feed on anything human. The zombie party needs BRAINS just as the Vampire Lestadt requires a pint of AB-positive. Gingrich’s facile blathering softens up the enemy’s tissue and prepares it for quick consumption.

In addition, his permanent posture of aggrieved nastiness fits the culture of a society that has lost its moral compass, celebrating aggressive war for conquest and institutionalized torture in exchange for the will-o’-the-wisp of Safety.

Like an addict whose life is falling apart, the punch-drunk whites of South Carolina cast about wildly to find scapegoats upon whom to place the blame for the daily and accelerating chaos, instead of examining the three decades of Reaganite illusion that generated it. If they manage to lose in November, an election that was theirs for the asking had they exercised a minimum of self-control, a new enemy will need to be invented.

By then, after being browbeaten relentlessly with televised bile, mass disgust with what passes for ‘politics’ will be at the boiling point.

I’d rather not think about what they will clamor for next.

"Oh, Carry Me Back. . . "

2012-01-19T02:52:00.000-08:00

Rick Perry went for the Confederate vote in the run-up to Saturday’s South Carolina primary by saying that the state was ‘at war’ with the federal government. Perry probably should have been born a couple of centuries back when that was literally true, but nostalgia aside, the message was pretty unmistakable: it’s time to revisit the idea of secession.

No accident, either, that Perry’s remark came after a question from the lone black guy, Juan Williams, about suppression of minority voting rights.

If Perry is playing General Beauregard firing on Fort Sumter, Obama has not yet shed his imitation of President Buchanan, the antebellum incompetent who did everything he could to appease the seditious southerners, to no avail. In the face of a nationwide campaign to subvert democracy by keeping unwanted voters away from the polls with photo-ID laws and the like, Obama and his fully complicit Democratic Party can’t bring themselves to name and shame it.

There has been a raft of book reviews and academic debates lately chronicling Abraham Lincoln’s evolving feelings about slavery and emancipation, and it’s disturbing to remember how the guy was dragged kicking and screaming to the historic Proclamation that ended the national shame only in the rebellious states (the slave-holding border states were exempt). It was only after the Civil War that the constitutional amendments codified minimum equality for all citizens, and nearly 200 years later the fight still isn’t over.

Today’s latest—Newt Gingrich’s announcement that he would ditch the annoying Constitution and ignore Supreme court rulings—is further confirmation that our nation is heading toward a new confrontation in which a rewrite of the verdict of the War between the States is on the table. The rebel states were forced to accept federal domination and recognize the human rights of former slaves until Reconstruction was abandoned under President Hayes and Jim Crow segregation began. Newt is saying we should repeat that happy history.

This is the real culture war of today—when the Republicans denounce the errors of the ‘60s, turns out they’re not referring to Woodstock. They mean the 1860s.

Liberal New York’s underbelly of greed

2012-01-15T06:10:00.000-08:00

Carolyn Maloney represents the tony ‘silk-stocking’ district of Manhattan’s Upper East Side and toils for a host of worthy goals such as women’s health, relief for the 9/11 victims and anti-corruption oversight in federal contracts. She was touted as a possible successor for Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat and from all appearances seems to be a nice lady, too.

But money talks in the same language in liberal Manhattan as in the cracker backwoods of Georgia. Maloney has now been exposed as a cheap date after joining with former car thief and congressional thug Darrell Issa to author and introduce the scandalous Research Works Act (H.R. 3699) of 2011 to reverse public access to federally funded science to the benefit of academic publishers like Elsevier, which (surprise, surprise!) turns out to have donated cash to her campaign.

Academic publishing is one of the great, misunderstood scams of modern life. The owners of ‘peer reviewed’ journals, which researchers rely on to get their work out, are monopoly institutions that exploit unpaid labor to roll up huge profits. They get scientists to submit articles, then farm out the drafts to reviewers who spend hours pouring over each detail to spot errors and weaknesses, return the whole mess to the authors for rewrites, do little or no copy-editing and then sit back smugly as the ‘owners’ of the final product, for which they sometimes charge tens of thousands of dollars annually for subscriptions. So research originally funded by public monies ends up for sale in private hands after 99% of the work has been done for free.

But Maloney has some of these publishing companies in her district and was so susceptible to the blandishments of their PR people that she didn’t even bother to rework the lobbyists’ talking points before using them in her replies to unhappy constituents. A little campaign cash apparently didn’t hurt either, not that Maloney needs any—she crushed her last Republican opponent by 60 percentage points.

There has been some progress in recent years in breaking the monopoly over academic publishing and liberating federally-funded scientific knowledge for public use instead of permitting corporate behemoths like the Dutch octopus Elsevier from slurping up torrents of cash for virtually nothing. That’s where congressional whoring comes in handy, to turn back anything that might smack of the public interest. We expect it from creeps like Issa, and it’s a bracing dose of reality to see the same service to corporate overlords coming from smiley moms like Maloney wearing excellent suits.

The PR of war

2012-01-10T07:36:00.000-08:00

If we are in a run-up to war with Iran, it would make sense for the preparations to proceed along parallel tracks, one being the demonization of the enemy-to-be as monstrous and bellicose. The Iranian mullahs offer plentiful opportunity for that and have ever since the unlovely eyebrows of Ruhollah Khomeini were contrasted with our nice-guy ally, the Shah. [U.S. Navy photo via AP]

But equally important is the contrasting image of oneself as an innocent lamb just trying to get along peaceably in a complex world. That’s where the rescue of Iranian fishermen from Somali pirates came in very handy, and while the act may have genuinely been a lucky accident, its utility to stoke to flames of war is a cynical triumph. How can the Iranians be so unreasonable, we might ask ourselves, when our friendly sailors are being so neighborly?

It might help by way of context to recall that the U.S. has not always behaved quite so gently towards the Iranian populace. For example, does anyone recall that in 1988 the U.S. Navy shot down an Iranian airliner in the contested Straits of Hormuz, killing 290 civilian passengers, an act for which money, but no apology, was ever offered? Our guys said the whole thing was an unfortunate accident--would that have persuaded us had the roles and nationalities of attacker and victim been reversed?

And how many of today’s New Hampshire primary voters might recall the American support for Saddam Hussein for doing us the favor of waging war against Iran for eight years, including the use of his arsenal of chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers? Yes, that Saddam Hussein and those weapons of mass destruction, which propagandists like Rice and Rumsfeld would later use to justify an unnecessary war of conquest.

So it’s nice that the fishermen were saved from kidnapping, and no, it doesn’t mean U.S. intentions are benign.

Adult intervention, please

2012-01-07T02:24:00.000-08:00

Bipeds are a sorry race, but theistic bipeds are more trouble than a bag of cats. Put GOP Bible-thumpers on one side and Iranian mullahs on the other, and—no, better yet, don’t put them anywhere near each other.

With the chattering classes all agog about the Republican nutbag de jour, we are in serious danger of being blindsided by a new war that few really want but that nobody is capable of stopping.

Belligerent rhetoric about Iran and its nuclear capabilities has ratcheted up in recent weeks and is now reaching dangerous levels, boosted by the irresponsible threats from the candidates and the crazy excess influence of the Israeli lobby on our political machinery.

It’s clear Israel wants to pull the United States into an attack on Iran, and that’s an understandable short-term goal, albeit suicidal in the long run. But what is truly astonishing is that after the somewhat less than glorious chapter of the Iraq war—also heavily boosted by Israel— is scarcely concluded, the politico-military establishment can think another war in Asia is a good idea for our country.

The Iranians, not known for prudent moderation, have been pumping up the counter-threats and have succeeded in driving up the price of oil through generating nervousness about what might happen if their country is attacked. Although we can read optimistic accounts
of how well the West is prepared to deal with an interruption of crude from the Gulf, our creaky economic recovery is in no condition to sustain a sudden spike in the price of gas.

An outbreak of hostilities in Iran would almost certainly drive up prices at the pump at least temporarily, slamming consumer pocketbooks just as the presidential election fight begins in earnest. That alone might make Obama cautious about green-lighting Israeli adventurism, but our current president has not distinguished himself by his resistance to the escalating demands of the Israeli ‘ally’.

The trouble with beating the war drums is that the situation can suddenly escape the control even of those in charge. The biped masses can be stirred up, but they can’t always be calmed down quite so easily.

There is a fascinating tale, by way of example, from the Falklands/Malvinas war where the Argentine generals suddenly realized that they could not retreat in their confrontation with the British colonists and had backed themselves into a corner requiring the ill-fated invasion of the islands. This was a vicious military dictatorship that casually picked up dissidents and tossed them out of helicopters, but even they were powerless in the face of the aroused populace baying for blood.

This time, Obama has a moral duty to exercise statesmanship and refuse to let his country be dragged into a war that is counter to its long-term interests. He may be making electoral calculations and looking for a way to keep everyone happy, but war is not something upon which it is possible to split the difference. There is no middle ground between war and not-war; you either do it, or you don’t.

The Christian spirit, Iowa-style

2012-01-04T09:25:00.001-08:00

In the spirit of modern Christianity as practiced by the Iowan evangelicals, I celebrate herewith the personal suffering of the losers in yesterday’s caucuses.

To Michele Bachmann: HA HA HA, your religious nutcake friends don’t want to be led by a woman because they’re patriarchal assholes. You didn’t realize that? Go read the Bible again while standing in a corner with your head covered.

To (Williard) ‘Mitt’ Romney: HA HA HA, even putting a hippish, informal-sounding name on your ballot line instead of the creaky, doofus handle your parents gave you didn’t help. You’re a big phony and so transparently insincere that even these Iowa rubes want to puke on your face. You’ll eventually become the nominee and wish you hadn’t.

To Rick Perry: HA HA HA, Texas bullshit doesn’t export very well. It’s okay to be a big dumb fuck down in that windswept prairie and let the barbecue sauce run down your string tie, but on the national stage you have to know where to find China on a map. Maybe Sarah Palin will invite you onto her reality show to joke-hump an ibex. (Because we know a little something about your personal life, don’t we? but now it’s safe because you’re a nobody again.)

To Rick Santorum: HA HA HA, enjoy it while it lasts because your timing was accidentally brilliant, and no one knows what a dope you are. Yet. Soon they will, and you will join the ranks of the Great GOP Losers’ Circus toot sweet.

To Ron Paul: HA HA HA, you sounded almost like a Czech dissident standing next to that collection of retards, but attracting attention now means you have to explain the neo-nazis doing your canvassing. But hey, legalizing drugs and abolishing the central bank is a winning strategy for the Christian Plutocrat Party, go for it!

To John Huntsman: HA HA HA, 1% in Iowa, even Sarah Palin did better than that while making millions of dollars not campaigning for anything. You didn’t get the memo about sanity being grounds for disqualification? Oh well, it’s in the mail.

To: Newt Gingrich: HA HA HA, you came in fourth because big, nasty Mitt’s secret PACs threw a shit-silo at you anonymously, awww, poor widdle booboo. Your policy of dismantling public campaign financing ended up exposing your pyramids of pseudo-intellectual pud-slapping, dat is so mean!

To Herman Cain: HA HA HA, that’s me laughing at you because you are a laughingstock and a pompous fool. You didn’t even last long enough to be on the ballot! You are a historic failure, 999%! Go put your hand up a hooker’s panties—but now you’ll have to pay her.

This year will be hell, but at least all of you except one gets to lose. That is some slight consolation.

Not listed

2012-01-03T12:58:00.000-08:00

The Iowa caucuses’ results will be in shortly, and a lot of useless jaw and tongue exercise will ensue. Hairdos will be analyzed; comely wives (and one limp-wristed husband) will be displayed; band music will be heard from sea to shining sea. Journalists earning more than half the city of Dubuque will stand in front of cameras pretending that this is some earth-shaking event in the annals of Democracy.

Lost in this cacophony of pointlessness is the sad fact that no American can vote, now or later in 2012, to preserve the constitutional protections against search and seizure, for the right to be stand accused before a judge, for the sanctity of private life from the intrusive nose of the State.

No one in America can vote to hold the criminal war-mongerers of 2003 responsible for their violation of the core Nuremberg principle: aggressive war. No one can cast a ballot against the drumbeats of an attack on Iran, a country on the other side of the world that cannot threaten our security even in the fevered imaginations of a whole pod of Beltway think tanks. (Although of course, Iran might create problems for Israel, the foreign nation that directs our foreign policy.)

No one can vote to dismantle the Guantánamo dungeons or to cease the systematic destruction of human personalities that has been made into official United States of America policy, endorsed by two presidents.

No one can exercise their suffrage to demand the investigation of the white-collar crimes that led to the financial panic that destroyed millions of workers’ lifetime assets. No one can vote to put a stop to the banksters’ ongoing looting and pillaging of the country’s pension funds, productive industry, municipalities and states. No one can opt to vote for the 99% instead of choosing a representative of one of the two wings beholden to the elite 1%.

No one can vote to rationalize the demented medical care system that gobbles up nearly a fifth of our gross domestic product. No one can vote to dig in the nation’s heels and resist the attempts to wreck Social Security, the solidarity program that saved our parents and grandparents from the shameful poverty of the aged that was the fate of their own ancestors.

No one can vote to restrain the militarization of our policing functions or to stop the melding of local enforcers with the vast intelligence and spying apparatus.

No, none of us can vote for any of these things because they are not on offer in the voting booth here in the Greatest Nation on Earth. The terms of our democratic exercise for 2012 are already set, and they do not include any of these pressing and, some might even say, crucial issues. They are not on any ballot anywhere because the Democratic Party, led by President Barack Obama, has eliminated substantive debate on these issues by adopting by Republican position on them.

And so while the Ringling Bros. spectacle continues among the Republican contenders, we do not notice that they have already won the election without a single vote being cast.

Who will protect the little girls of Beit Shemesh?

2011-12-28T04:35:00.000-08:00

It’s a shame that any 8-year-old girl has to put up with abuse, but the hazing of Naama Margolese by fellow Orthodox Jews—albeit of a different sect—is the best civics lesson we’ve had from the Middle East since the fall of Mubarak. [Photo: Oded Balilty/AP]

When hundreds of religious fanatics can line up on a sidewalk to threaten and intimidate little girls, maybe something is wrong with the Zionist vision that the land of Israel is for Jews and only Jews. As in any exclusionary ideology, disputes inevitably must arise as to who is more racially/ religiously/ ideologically/ whatever-ly pure.

The Haredim spitting at Naama for dressing like a slut (apparently her 8-year-old arms were showing) have decided that they, only they, are righteous enough to know what ‘God’ has dictated to be proper biped behavior. This is the exact parallel of the southern Baptists who seethed with murderous rage at the sight of black girls going to Little Rock High in 1961.

Neither is the incident unusual, according to published reports. ‘I think the whole country needs to wake up, that it’s not just a corner in Beit Shemesh, it’s happening everywhere’, a local told The Christian Science Monitor.

It’s too bad that it took abuse of an innocent Jewish child to wake up people to what has been happening in that part of the world for the better part of a century. Can anyone seriously doubt that Arab schoolchildren have been putting up with stunts like this while no one pays any attention? Any objections would immediately be dubbed Hamas propaganda.

The sight of Orthodox Jewish children being called ‘whores’ by religious zealots does illuminate, however, the absurdity of insisting that Hamas recognize the ‘legitimacy’ of the state of Israel—as if the South African problem could have been solved if Nelson Mandela had just endorsed white supremacy.

When Israeli prime ministers get more respect from Congress than a sitting president, we can’t expect an even-handed Middle East policy from Washington. But it will be amusing to watch all the evangelical Christians eager to hitch their wagons to the Zionist train flounder when Israelis themselves can’t decide who is a ‘real’ Jew.

Israeli political leaders, with other, bigger fish to fry, are apparently concerned about the loose cannons on the ultra-Orthodox right. But then again, they’ve empowered these black-hatted fanatics to harass the Palestinian enemy, and their state is based on giving preference and privilege to persons born to a certain ethnic and religious group. Hard to backtrack now.

In addition, the settlement enterprise has made the most extreme elements into heroes and given them military cover for exactly the kinds of nasty behavior on display this week. Too bad when it turns around and bites you on the improperly draped ass.

Bradley Manning & the above-ground railroad

2011-12-23T09:43:00.000-08:00

The Manning ballet now being performed in a military court with a pre-determined outcome is not a legal case but a political one. It is a public spectacle demonstrating for all to see which people in our two-tiered country are to be subjected to punishment and which are to get off scot-free.

Manning is accused of spilling government secrets just as Daniel Ellsberg was once long ago. Ellsberg and Manning acted against the United States government’s pursuit of aggressive war unjustified by any conceivable notion of self-defense.

This is the crime for which the accused at the Nuremberg trials were condemned to death or lengthy prison terms. The prosecutor, U.S. Attorney General Robert Jackson, said that aggressive war was the fundamental cause of all the other crimes against humanity that occurred in the 1940s—including the Holocaust.

So did Ellsberg and Manning violent a statute in releasing classified documents? Maybe, but that’s not why they were put on trial. Let’s look no further than Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby’s outing of an active-duty CIA agent who refused to go along with their plans for war in Iraq. They’re off the hook while Manning faces life in prison.

His real crime is whistle-blowing.

Did W’s lawyers violate treaties and our own laws by providing cover for torture? Who cares? Did Donald Rumsfeld and W himself openly admit to authorizing these heinous practices, condemned by civilized nations for decades? No problem. Under the Obama Doctrine, powerful members of the insider club are not to be bothered with legal action or even investigations of their deeds. Only defenseless 20-year-olds who can first be tortured for months in solitary to soften them up must face trial. And given the powers contained in Obama’s recent defense spending bill, he can keep them there indefinitely if he so chooses, without judicial review.

It’s ironic but entirely appropriate that Manning should be facing this kangaroo court just as the U.S. attempt to conquer and occupy Iraq (‘Operation Iraq Freedom’) has ended in failure. While the appalling costs are totted up--$1 trillion of treasure, tens of thousands of deaths, a society ripped to shreds, ongoing death squad actions and terrorist bombing campaigns so relentless and terrifying (such as yesterday’s) that many yearn for the order and relative safety of Saddam Hussein’s era—American military and civilian officials dare to praise this criminal debacle as a ‘liberation’.

And not only are these statements accepted at face value by a society that has utterly lost its moral compass, new war-mongering campaigns are pushed forward at full throttle—a direct result of Obama’s refusal to hold his predecessors legally and politically responsible for their actions.

Here is a Foreign Affairs trial balloon insisting that yet another country (Iran) has really skeery Weapons of Mass Destruction or soon will and that we therefore must get ready to drop bombs on them. Condi Rice’s ‘mushroom cloud’ was effective propaganda, which turned out to be a lie. Rice never paid a price for her perfidy, so we get another round from another unconcerned advocate of unprovoked war. Now, we are asked to swallow more falsehoods and prepare another bellicose enterprise against a country whose annual military budget is one-seventieth ($10 billion) of ours.

Stephen Walt says:

And let's be crystal clear about what [the warmonger du jour] is advocating here. He is openly calling for preventive war against Iran, even though the United States has no authorization from the U.N. Security Council, it is not clear that Iran is actively developing nuclear weapons, and Iran has not attacked us or any of our allies—ever. He is therefore openly calling for his country to violate international law. He is calmly advocating a course of action that will inevitably kill a significant number of people, including civilians.

But so what? Israel’s increasingly demented leadership is very eager for this attack to take place, which is what really matters. The Israeli tail is wagging the dog in Washington more successfully than ever, so much so that even mainstream mouthpieces like Thomas L. Friedman have become alarmed. It’s ironic that the very country that emerged from the Holocaust is now frantically pushing the United States to violate the core principle of the Nuremberg verdict. And it is a testament to the gullibility, ignorance and moral obtuseness of the American people that a huge sector will go along with it a mere eight years after they were bamboozled into the Iraq disaster in exactly the same way.

Are we bored yet?

2011-12-21T08:54:00.000-08:00

How long can we bear these elaborate set pieces over minor details and pretend that they equal a political debate? When will it be fair to wonder if the issue of who ends up in charge of our affairs matters? The latest round of posturing by the intransigent Republicans and the pathologically masochistic Obama White House boils down to how much austerity should be shoveled into the latest package of temporary relief for the masses of unemployed and bruised middle classes. But their debate is not over fundamentals: they only dissent over how much wealth should be pushed into the upper income brackets while the social democratic legacy of FDR is slowly dismantled.

Obama’s tying of a tax break to the Social Security Fund is an appalling scandal that, I anticipate, will ring the death knell for the most successful social insurance program in our history, one that even Bush II could not touch. Once the lowered payroll deductions are well established, it will be impossible to return them to previous levels, and the long-standing falsehood about the Fund’s insolvency will molt into fact. There was no need to boost demand in this way as Dean Baker notes in The Guardian:

‘The only reason to tie the tax cut to Social Security is if the intention is to raise issues about the Social Security tax at some future point.The response of the Obama people to this complaint is that this is the only tax cut that the Republican Congress will approve and that we badly need the stimulus. . . . But if that is the case, it only speaks to the incredible failure of this administration to define the agenda and speak honestly about the economy. It's not surprising that they don't have the political support for more effective stimulus when they abandoned the effort to make the case almost two years ago’.

Yves Smith writing in Naked Capitalism a few weeks ago was more emphatic in agreement that Obama’s early error on the economy trapped him in a downward spiral:

‘The widespread, vocal opposition to the TARP [bank bailout] was evidence that a once complacent populace had been roused. Reform, if proposed with energy and confidence, wasn’t a risk; not only was it badly needed, it was just what voters wanted.

‘But incoming president Obama failed to act. Whether he failed to see the opportunity, didn’t understand it, or was simply not interested is moot. Rather than bring vested banking interests to heel, the Obama Administration instead chose to reconstitute, as much as possible, the very same industry whose reckless pursuit of profit had thrown the world economy off the cliff. . . . Obama’s repudiation of his campaign promise of change, by turning his back on meaningful reform of the financial services industry, in turn locked his Administration into a course of action. The new administration would have no choice other than working fist-in-glove with the banksters, supporting and amplifying their own, well established, propaganda efforts.’

I agree with these assessments with one exception: that Obama somehow goofed. I give the man credit for his famous smarts and therefore conclude that he is doing exactly what he wanted to do all along, which is save the threatened behinds of the financier class and consolidate their rule. If Obama is using the Republican wacko brigades to enable him to impose a viciously conservative program of wealth redistribution upward while pretending to be the last-populist-standing, his actions make perfect sense as discussed in indignant detail here by Glen Ford.

There is every indication that the coming election season will confirm that the strategy is working brilliantly and that attention will be diverted to the bad, nasty Tea Party brigades while the 99% are well and finely skewered by the Republi-crat duopoly.

R.I.P. State of Laws

2011-12-15T19:21:00.000-08:00

Nadezhda Mandelstam, writing about the Stalinist terror and its aftermath, said, ‘It is a lucky society in which despicable behavior at least has to be disguised’.

Our luck just ran out.

With constitutional lawyer Barack Obama’s signature and the support of all but 7 U.S. senators, the ancient right to be accused of a crime before a judge and defend oneself from the accusation—enshrined in our founding documents by Franklin, Madison, Jefferson and Washington—will soon be history. The inevitable outcry against this casual, almost light-hearted endorsement of the chewing up of lives in the name of state security, will come too late.

Our society, ten full years after the traumatic events of 9/11, has endorsed the concept that the safety of the majority may be used to eliminate any remaining squeamish hesitations about trashing the rights of individuals. And we can be sure that our ruling lords have registered this very welcome message. Their power is now entrenched, and opposition will slowly be mowed down like spring grass.

It is unfashionable here in America to dawdle over the personal stories of victims of our unleashed police state—ironically, perhaps, in the land of Individualism. In honor of the funeral of the key constitutional protection known as habeas corpus, I share below part of the story of Mohammed El Gorani, an ambitious Chadian teenager who sought education in Pakistan and was picked up at a mosque in the post-9/11 sweeps of anyone who looked suspicious. His story will soon be our own:

I was born in 1986 in Saudi Arabia, in Medina, the Prophet’s city. My parents came from North Chad – I don’t know exactly where. They left Chad for Saudi because they believe that if you live in a holy place, it’s easier to go to paradise. They were nomads, from the Goran tribe. When they arrived in Medina, they took the tribe’s name as our family name, so I’m called Mohammed el-Gorani, ‘the Goran’. My parents were camel herders and always had to keep moving to find grass. But when they arrived in Medina, my father did a lot of different jobs: washing cars, working in a shop belonging to a Saudi – you can’t have a shop if you’re not Saudi. There’s a lot of stupid rules about foreigners in Saudi Arabia. When my parents tried to send me to school, they said: ‘Is he Saudi?’

‘No, Chadian.’

‘There are no places left. Come back next month …’

When I was eight, I went to a school run by a man from Chad. He taught anyone who couldn’t go to a Saudi school. I was there four years until my father got ill. Then my brother and I, we had to start working. We washed cars and sold in the street cold water, prayer mats and beads – you can make good money during the Pilgrimage and the Ramadan. I went every month to Mecca with kids from Sudan and Pakistan to sell to the pilgrims. If the police came, we ran away. We had to be careful. If they capture you, they take your money and your stuff. Sometimes they take you to prison and your father had to come and sign a paper. Thus we paid for hiring our house, for the electricity. We changed house seven or eight times, but we always had electricity and tap water. Not like here in Chad.

He became friends with a Pakistani boy who lived near him. We called him Ali.

When I got 14, Ali asked me: ‘How long are you going to keep washing cars?’ He knew I wanted to be a dentist. All my friends had teeth problems, but there wasn’t a good dentist for non-Saudis – they just pull your teeth out. Also foreigners have no way to study after high school. Ali had taught me some Urdu, his mother tongue: numbers, words you need for selling, anything that’s useful with Pakistani pilgrims. Ali told me: ‘You’re good at languages. If you could speak English, you could work in a hotel in Mecca.’ His brother spoke English and had a good job in a hotel. Ali told me about English and computer lessons in Pakistan. ‘Go to Karachi. My uncles and cousins will welcome you, you just need to pay the lessons.’ I told my parents, they refused. My uncles said, ‘You’re crazy!’ but they knew if I decided something I would do it. My goal when I went to Pakistan was to help my family – life was getting difficult.

Without telling anyone, I went to Jeddah to ask for a passport at the Chadian Consulate. The consulate guy told me: ‘You need to change your name and lie on your age.’ I needed to be 18 and I was only 14 or 15. ‘And you need to pay me baksheesh.’ I had enough money. Every day I gave a part of my earnings to my family and saved the rest in a powdered milk tin that I buried in front of the house. On my last day in Medina, I went to see my Uncle Abderahman. I couldn’t say goodbye openly, but in my heart it was goodbye. It was 1 a.m., not a normal time to visit, as I was planning to leave the same night. I took his hands in mine and kissed his head, like we do in our tradition. In the morning, he told my mum I must have left.

‘Maybe he went to Jeddah, like he does usually,’ she said.

‘No, this time he’ll go far away.’

I took a plane to Karachi. Even Ali was surprised. I called his cousins and they came to the airport. Ali’s uncle taught in his house: the lessons lasted six months, three months of English lessons, and three months of English and computer lessons. I planned to go home after those six months. But two months after my arrival, there was 9/11. I didn’t pay attention – I was very busy with my lessons. Every day, I woke up, went to school, ate lunch, played football with the neighbourhood kids, studied, prayed. Every Friday, I went to pray in a big mosque not far from the house. Most of the people praying there were Arabs, because the imam was Saudi and spoke a good Arabic. One Friday, at the beginning of the sermon, we saw a lot of soldiers surrounding the mosque. After the prayers, they started questioning the people. They were looking for Arabs. They asked me: ‘Saudi?’

‘No, Chadian.’

‘Don’t lie, you’re Saudi!’ It must have been because of my accent. They put me on a truck and covered my head with a plastic bag. They took me to a prison, and they started questioning me about al-Qaida and the Talibans. I had never heard those words.

‘What are you talking about?’ I said.

‘Listen, Americans are going to interrogate you. Just say you’re from al-Qaida, you went with al-Qaida in Afghanistan, and they’ll send you home with some money.’

‘Why would I lie?’

They hung me by my arms and beat me. Two white Americans, in their forties, arrived. They were wearing normal clothes. They asked: ‘Where is Osama bin Laden?’

‘Who’s that?’

‘You’re fucking with us? You’re al-Qaida, yes!’ They kept using the F-word.

I didn’t understand this word but I knew they were getting angry. A Pakistani was in the room, behind the Americans. When they asked if I was from al-Qaida, he nodded, to tell me to say yes. I wasn’t doing it, so he got mad. The Americans said: ‘Take him back!’ The Pakistani was furious: ‘They’re looking for al-Qaida, you have to say you’re al-Qaida!’ Then they put the electrodes on my toes. For ten days I had them on my feet. Every day there was torture. Some of them tortured me with electricity, others just signed a paper saying they had done it. One Pakistani officer was a good guy. He said: ‘The Pakistani government just want to sell you to the Americans.’ Some of us panicked, but I was kind of happy. I loved to watch old cowboy movies and believed that Americans were good people, like in the movies, it would be better with them than with the Pakistanis, we’d have lawyers. Maybe they’d allow me to study in the US, then send me back to my parents.

They started taking detainees away every night, by groups of twenty. We didn’t know where they were going to, but we thought the US. One day, it was my group’s turn. The Pakistanis took away our chains and gave us handcuffs ‘made in the USA’. I told the other detainees: ‘Look, we’re going to the US!’ I thought the Americans would understand that the Pakistanis had cheated them, and send me back to Saudi.

So my hands were tied in the back and a guard held me by a chain. We were twenty, with maybe fifteen guards. They covered our eyes and ears, so I couldn’t see much. When they took off our masks, we were at an airport, with big helicopters. Then the movie started. Americans shouted: ‘You’re under arrest, UNDER CUSTODY OF THE US ARMY! DON’T TALK, DON’T MOVE OR WE’LL SHOOT YOU!’ An interpreter was translating into Arabic. Then they started beating us – I couldn’t see with what but something hard. People were bleeding and crying. We had almost passed out when they put us in a helicopter.

We landed at another airstrip. It was night. Americans shouted: ‘Terrorists, criminals, we’re going to kill you!’ Two soldiers took me by my arms and started running. My legs were dragging on the ground. They were laughing, telling me: ‘Fucking nigger!’ I didn’t know what that meant, I learned it later. They took off my mask and I saw many tents on the airstrip. They put me inside one. There was an Egyptian (I recognised his Arabic) wearing a US uniform. He started by asking me: ‘When was the last time you saw Osama bin Laden?’ ‘Who?’ He took me by my shirt collar and they beat me again. During all my time at Kandahar, I was beaten. Once it was like a movie – they came inside the tent with guns, shouting: WE CAUGHT THE TERRORISTS! And they put us in handcuffs. ‘Here are their guns!’ And they threw some Kalashnikovs onto the ground. ‘We’ve been fighting them, they killed a lot of people!’ All that was for cameras, which were held by men in uniforms. I was lying on the ground with the other prisoners. They brought dogs to scare us.

Mohammed el-Gorani was 14 years of age when he was arrested and sent to Guantánamo. Read the rest here:

Britain’s version of the "paranoid style"

2011-12-15T12:56:00.001-08:00

Amid the to-ing and fro-ing of the unwieldy European Union over its uncommon currency, the Brits have managed to distinguish themselves for clumsiness and may pay a steep price. Tory PM David Cameron reacted to the latest save-the-euro scheme by picking up his marbles and withdrawing across the channel, saying that the UK would veto any change in the operative EU treaties rather than subject its financial sector to new rules that might cost it cash.

While this dramatic huffing and puffing was cheered by the tabloids and the permanently aggrieved nationalists (the ‘Euroskeptics’), the Brits soon found themselves in a certain unenviable solitude as the other 26 EU member nations more or less went along with the tentative plans, which in any case are far from a done deal and may flop spectacularly just as all prior magic bullets deployed to date. Nevertheless, in diplomacy and especially EU diplomacy, splendid isolation is the one thing a country wishes to avoid. But in the short run, it’s popular.

We see the same here in the Greatest Country Ever as the America-Firsters insist on special treatment and special rules and subject anyone daft enough to question them to Foxocide. This was the attitude deployed against, for example, the International Criminal Court designed to bring war criminals and genocidists to trial—and which the U.S. is not above utilizing despite refusing to join the treaty as it would subject U.S. personnel to its rules.

Another demented manifestation is Obama’s follow-up to the spy drone falling out of the skies over Iran by asking for it back. Um, right. This would totally work if farmers outside of Pittsburgh suddenly came upon an enemy spyplane, they’d just package it up nice and call UPS.

It’s the same mentality at work when W and then Obama insisted that U.S. soldiers and mercenaries in Iraq not be subjected to local laws (failed); when they undermined the Kyoto global warming treaty so that we can continue to churn out greenhouse gases (succeeded); and when they built protectionist measures into the ‘free-trade’ pacts that are all the rage so that our professional classes and intellectual property-holders are safe from competition while our workers must go toe-to-toe with Chinese wage slaves and malnourished Cambodian seamstresses (succeeded wildly).

What these measures have in common is that they play well to nationalists and xenophobes and always will. Bipeds are pretty much convinced that their particular affinity group is special and should be recognized as such while fairness and as sense of a worldwide commonweal mean nothing. It will come as a nasty shock, however, when other countries eventually acquire the power to apply the same principles to themselves. One day, Chinese and Indian leaders will stick their tongues at us while the rising oceans lap at the shores of Miami and Manhattan. We have every right to burn more coal, they will say, under the rules you have set.

Will Iowa 2008 be repeated as farce?

2011-12-11T07:12:00.000-08:00

Those who witnessed the Iowa caucuses four years ago reported two phenomena: the impressively well oiled Obama operation on the ground and the surge of grassroots support for him that very few had anticipated. In retrospect, it seems easier to understand the unattractiveness of Hillary Clinton as the inevitable candidate who would usher in a marginal flip back to the Democratic version of business-as-usual. She represented amorphous centrism, for some (complicity, for others) rather than a clean break with the disastrous W years, most starkly symbolized by her endorsement of the Iraq aggression and conquest. Obama captured the yearning for a new approach.

Well, we know how that turned out, but the yearning hasn’t gone away, and if anything is stronger than ever on both sides of the red-blue divide. That, I believe, contributes to the Republican base’s inability to lose its virginity to the Mitt: they know he’ll be a good provider, but there’s no passion. He’s predictable, pragmatic and exudes perfect-hair more-of-the-sameness.

I suspect this year’s surprise is going to be Ron Paul, the marginalized, ignored, and mocked candidate treated as mostly a joke. He’s blunt, uncompromising, lively, and consistently radical, yet he doesn’t sound nasty or mean-spirited like the others. His campaign ads display a youthful, hip aesthetic, and his libertarian views set him apart from the Washington establishment, which constantly does him the favor of pretending he doesn’t exist or shouldn’t—a reaction not lost on voters.

Alone among the GOP contenders, he thinks wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere are a bad idea, and he dares to suggest decriminalizing drugs along with dismantling whole government departments and smashing the Federal Reserve. For a confused teen with an anti-government worldview, this odd combination can make a lot of sense.

Paul’s poll numbers are already substantial in Iowa, and the caucuses are a month away. The Grinch is riding high, but the recent spotlight should burn off a good deal of his sudden luster. Romney remains Romney, alas, and the others have speed-dated themselves into the back corners of the dance hall. In an electoral season with more volatility than the Dow Jones industrials, a Paul surge makes perverse sense.

Not that his winning in Iowa would necessarily mean much. But it would throw the masters of the universe into a whole new panic, and that would almost make the agonizing prospect of a whole year of this foolishness bearable.

Two signs of shifting winds

2011-12-08T13:12:00.000-08:00

Obama made a populist-sounding speech this week in Kansas, just down the way from the John Brown memorial. If Americans still studied history, this would not be the first figure one would expect a politician to be associating with, given that if the man were alive today, he’d be sitting in a 4 x 4 cell in Guantánamo.

But I digress. Obama had a lot to say about the unfairness of our current tax and income structure and even summoned the ghost of Teddy Roosevelt (not the conqueror, the trust-buster). He praised the ‘largest middle class’ the world had ever known, foreshadowing his prompt acknowledgment that the ‘basic bargain’ generated by the Depression and the war to create said middle class has ‘eroded’. So far, no earth-shaking novelties. His critique is red meat for the Democratic base: the benefits of growth have flowed to the top while ‘everybody else’ is struggling. OMG, the man is about to ‘mic check’ and carry his sleeping bag down to Zucotti Park.

It gets better: ‘breathtaking greed’, ‘hard work stopped paying off’, ‘those at the very top grow wealthier than ever before’. Obama’s rhetoric is back to 2008—would he perhaps be running for office?

The creepy part of Obama’s speech, however, is how mismatched his lofty words are from his own actions. This is the guy who held perhaps the most powerful cards since the 1930s to break the power of the financier class that he now criticizes when the banksters crawled to Washington pleading for a lifeline to save their institutions. Instead of extracting real concessions and curbing their power, what did he do? He permitted Geithner and Bernancke to pour cash into the largest banks virtually in secret (the details are coming out only now with Bernancke feverishly resisting); perpetrators like Goldman Sachs suffered no haircuts on AIG exposures; banker bonuses a year after the crisis were as obscenely huge as ever; no investigation has been conducted into the sneaky mortgage practices that Obama now dares to criticize, and the few serious attempts to do so (Schneiderman in new York, Coakley in Massachusetts, Masto in Nevada) face concerted Administration attempts to undermine them; no Justice Department prosecutions have been brought against any major players; Elizabeth Warren, the consumers’ advocate, was boxed into a corner and marginalized; mortgage relief for homeowners has been a fraud via easily-gamed programs like HAMP; and on and on.

Obama talks a good game, especially when he wants votes. Maybe he even believes that stuff, which some people will care about. (I don’t.) But in wielding vast executive powers at a time when the entire country would have supported actions to alleviate the gross unfairness embedded in our system, Obama buckled. He folded while holding a straight flush and now wants us to take his rhetorical flights at face value.

Meanwhile, here in New York State our governor has just shifted gears as well. After weeks of insisting that tax breaks for the state’s millionaires’ were sacrosanct, Andrew Cuomo announced yesterday that Albany’s huge budget deficit requires that the super-rich pay some, too. It’s not a great deal, but Cuomo saw the need to use the word ‘fair’ or ‘fairness’ three times in his 60-second sound bite.

This shows the impact of the Occupy movement and the growing consensus that the system is stacked against the 99%. But it’s far too early to crow victory. This is a tactical retreat by the Democratic accomplices of big money, not a change of heart. There is no rediscovery of the core value of a progressive tax system that provides social services, and public transport, education, environmental protection and infrastructure will continue to absorb the costs of the financial crisis and the radically resliced pie that is now becoming a permanent feature of our class society.

Meanwhile, the GOP circus makes it pathetically easy for ambitious Dems to don the heroic robes of people’s champion while doing very little. With a cariacature like Newt Gradgrind—er, I mean Gingrich leading the opposition and calling for the return of child labor, it’s pretty simple to look humane by contrast. But no one should expect praise for endorsing the Emancipation Proclamation or the abolition of foot-binding.

President of Ubeki-beki-beki-stan-stan mourns departure of Herman Cain from presidential race

2011-12-05T16:54:00.000-08:00

My fellow Ubeki-beki-beki-stan-stanians:

It is with deep sadness and disappointment that I must announce to you that our much ignored and almost unperceived country has lost its greatest champion in its history: Herman Cain’s candidacy is no more. [gasps, weeping, lamentations, boos, cries of ‘No!’]

I know all of you thrilled with anticipation at the prospect of our tiny, forgotten, indeed pre-forgotten, entity being at long last recognized as a respected partner in the community of nations, despite our barely perceptible national territory on the sides of the world’s steepest mountains. While this accident of topography makes us invulnerable to attack, as almost-president Cain has astutely noted, it also makes it extremely hard to find us without a map. Even with a map. In fact, Ubeki-beki-beki-stan-stanians are notoriously hard to pin down about anything, including our own geography. This could have changed, but alas, our defender has bowed to the ruthless pressures of great power politics, and we have been shoved aside once again by other claimants on the world’s attentions, such as Sikkim, Nairu and the Solomon Islands [female ululations, chants of “9-9-9”]. Thank you, I completely understand your feelings.

While it is a bitter burden that we must bear, having come so close to our long-sought yearning to appear in Webster’s Gazeteer of the World, this meteoric but dazzling moment in the eyes—or at least the imaginations—of the entire world must inspire us to greater efforts in the pursuit of recognition. Or even perception. We must never waver in our determination, nor abandon our dream. Our dream of existing and being recognized as such, by trudging ever forward on the trail that Cain, our champion, has blazed. May the flag of Ubeki-beki-beki-stan-stan, once we invent it, flutter proudly over these virtually horizontal toeholds that we call home and may our descendents take up the challenge advanced so courageously by Herman Cain, to make our reality at long last, real.

Liberal new York, ah yes

2011-12-05T09:24:00.000-08:00

We sail upon a sea of blue here in the Empire State, but underneath that satisfied self-image of diversity, tolerance and sophistication is a rather brutal class society and often a painfully corrupt one. Our new governor, Andrew Cuomo, reflects this paradox neatly in his highly ambitious person (2016 is only four years away, wink wink).

Cuomo pulled together diverse forces on the same-sex marriage fight and helped persuade some Republican state senators to break ranks and support it, a remarkable feat and a highly lucrative one as his campaign war-chest balloons with all that grateful gay cash. He was rightly lionized at the PRIDE events in June, but his achievement only demonstrates that rich people can be both open-minded and stingy.

The recession has clobbered the state’s accounts, and while Cuomo slashes spending on all fronts, he has refused so far to even contemplate extending the so-called ‘millionaires tax’ that would provide the state a sorely needed additional $5 billion, or just about enough to cover two years’ deficits. Cuomo trots out the lame excuse that higher taxes will cause the comfy to flee to neighboring Connecticut and New Jersey, which is just silly.

One area that is getting slammed, as usual, is public transport. The city’s subway system receives about half of its operating and capital budget from Albany, without which a ticket would be $5 instead of the current $2.50. After the collapse of the system during the bankruptcy of the 1970s, New York bounced back and made the trains safe and pleasant to ride again. It was a key element in the city’s renaissance, so often attributed solely to the get-tough policing associated with Giuliani.

My very hip bicycling/urban policy group, Transportation Alternatives, reports in this month’s magazine that Cuomo has barely spoken to transit authorities and seems wedded to the Clintonian-centrist idea that viable Democratic candidates for national office have to act like Republicans. That means refuse to tax rich people and to starve public services. This approach has made Obama so popular among his natural base that a worldwide Occupy movement sprang up comprised of indignant youth. But the blind faith in this failed strategy persists.

Across the Hudson, Governor Christie (the fat one) stirred up major poo by canceling the planned tunnel under the river that would have alleviated commuting for his residents. Some people hated it, some people loved it; but at least New Jersey residents now have a clear choice.

We should be so lucky. Now we have a cost-cutting, millionaire-coddling ‘liberal’ governor who will be opposed by cost-cutting, billionaire-coddling ‘conservatives’. The subway system and in the long run the city itself will suffer, but don’t expect these short-sighted pols to offer us a real alternative. Austerity is the new religion, and all must bow down before its mighty banker-popes.

Banks safe, millions to die

2011-11-30T11:22:00.001-08:00

Economists and sometimes foreign policy wonks talk about ‘opportunity costs’, meaning the things one can’t do because of the decision to do something else. Crudely speaking, it refers to the fact that one can’t buy a product with cash already spent on other things. Nor can a state send its national guardsmen to put out a forest fire if they’re fighting a war halfway around the world. One can only buy a pencil or a gumdrop with the same nickel.

As World AIDS Day approaches (Dec. 1), the stark opportunity costs of a decade of war and the prioritization of banker profits can be observed with depressing clarity as the highly successful effort to slow down the epidemic is being systematically drained of support. The Global Fund to Combat AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis just announced that its Round 11 of grant funding to the hardest-hit countries must be canceled as donor governments fail to honor their replenishment pledges. The big European development agencies, funded largely by their respective states, cannot commit the promised money as everyone is scrambling to backstop the shaky euro.

As Fund official Stephen Lewis remarked in a ringing denunciation of the donor governments’ collective failure, political leaders have made sure that Wells Fargo could make $4.1 billion this quarter, Bank of America $6.2 billion and JPMorganChase $4.6 billion despite having blown up the world economy. And why stop at banks? Oil companies like BP, Exxon and Shell, hustling us to doom with fossil fuels made $5.1 billion, $10.3 billion and $7 billion respectively. But the measly $1.2 billion needed by the Global Fund cannot be found anywhere, and these same corporate behemoths haven’t contributed a penny either while simultaneously joining the political assault on all governments so as to starve them of cash.

Among those governments reneging on their pledges of support to the Global Fund is good old Obama’s, which can find $1.9 billion per day to fund military activities, but not the promised $1.33 billion per year he promised to fight the three scourge diseases. It’s a rather excellent summary of how the economic system has become our master, indifferent to the fates of peoples, replacing the savage pharaohs and insular monarchies of prior eras.

Lewis acidly quotes all the pious phrases mouthed by Blair, Obama, Bush and many others when making these fine promises to much praise and fanfare (and headlines). But when it comes time to pony up, they’re nowhere to be seen. Keep that in mind when the flood of cynical b.s. comes raining down from on high tomorrow.

Has Obama's next war already begun?

2011-11-28T12:17:00.000-08:00

The story around the ‘accidental’ attack on a Pakistani border post emits a foul smell not just because two dozen theoretically allied troops were killed, possibly in their sleep but because it has the markings of a deliberate massacre.

The NATO command’s quick promise to launch a ‘thorough investigation’ is reminiscent of Kissinger’s similar vow once he ‘learned’ of the secret and illegal bombing of Cambodia, which in fact he and Nixon had ordered. While mistakes certainly can and do happen in war, the timing of this one immediately prompts a question, Is the U.S. at war in Pakistan or at war with Pakistan? Is all the breathless wanking about Iran just saber-rattling while the next front has already been opened?

The tone of comments from Washington about the state of affairs in that country has been increasingly belligerent. In September a top U.S. general said the so-called Haqqani network, responsible for many deadly attacks in Afghanistan, ‘acts as a veritable arm’ of the Pakistani intelligence service, and Obama’s spokesman didn’t contradict him. Hillary Clinton said during her October visit to Pakistan that the country had to shut down the ‘safe havens’ being used by this group in the border region, using language described as ‘unusually harsh’.

The usual anonymous State Department sources added that Clinton also had threatened that the U.S. would ‘act unilaterally’ against elements like the Haqqani network on the Afghan-Pakistan border. Did anyone assume such unilateral action included firing on the supposed allies’ own soldiers?

Clinton’s ringing statement of principles should win a prize for modernist irony with phrases like, ‘No one who targets innocent civilians of any nationality should be tolerated or protected’. The dozens of Afghan children wiped out in drone attacks should be grateful that they were not officially ‘targeted’ by the videogame drone runners at CIA headquarters. But lookout kids, Hillary’s patience has worn thin, said the commentariat, no doubt after the U.S. Embassy was besieged by the Taliban forces in downtown Kabul for nearly 24 hours. That would be annoying if you’d spent ten years and a trillion or so dollars ‘pacifying’ the place. But ignominious failure has not generated any enthusiasm for a wind-down of this endless and, with bin Laden dead, pointless war.

All these martial phrases recall the notorious threat reportedly issued by Bush-era official Richard Armitage just after 9/11, that the U.S. would gladly ‘bomb [Pakistan] back to the Stone Age’ if cooperation in the hunt for bin Laden were not immediately forthcoming. He denies it, but that’s less important than the constant citing of the apocryphal quote, which has the same intimidating effect. In any case, the message was pretty clear: do our bidding vis-à-vis Haqqani or else. Was two dozen soldiers bombed in their barracks the ‘or else’ part?

All this is nothing new. Obama distinguished himself during the 2008 campaign by taking a more warlike stance toward Pakistan even than hawkish Hillary, and his administration was barely a week in office when the drone attacks started up on Pakistani territory, an early sign of the Bush-Obama continuity on war.

Obama’s people always say that the Pakistani objections to the drone attacks are pro forma and understood by both sides as not to be taken seriously. That’s a convenient explanation. Another one is that Pakistan is too weak to do anything about it. India is more and more the U.S. favorite in the region—Obama visited Delhi in 2010 and snubbed Islamabad by not stopping by for tea—and the Chinese, Pakistan’s historical ally, don’t want trouble. Pakistan gets a billion and half dollars of aid annually from the U.S. and nowhere else to go for it.

Jeremy Scahill, who writes on military issues, says this about how Obama is ‘radically expanding’ the U.S. war in Afghanistan deeply into Pakistan’.

‘Whether it is through US military trainers (that’s what they were called in Vietnam too), drone attacks or commando raids inside the country, the U.S. is militarily entrenched in Pakistan. It makes Obama’s comment that “[W]e have no intention of sending U.S. troops into Pakistan” simply unbelievable’.

‘For a sense of how significant U.S. operations are and will continue to be for years and years to come, just look at the U.S. plan to build an almost $1 billion massive U.S. “embassy” in Islamabad, which is reportedly modeled after the imperial city they call a U.S. embassy in Baghdad. As we know very clearly from Iraq, such a complex will result in an immediate surge in the deployment of U.S. soldiers, mercenaries and other contractors’.

But there’s a big problem with this relentless expansion of the Afghan war into a country of 175 million increasingly hostile people. Although the U.S. can inflict a lot of pain, the long-term goals enunciated by Obama and Clinton may be impossible although we shouldn’t count on their uniformed advisors ever to admit it. In an era of non-stop budget slashing, we’ve already spent the farm on pacifying Afghanistan and succeeded in antagonizing 20 million people while propping up a corrupt nutcase president and his heroin-trafficking brother. Al-Qaeda and other like entities can be crushed, but new ones can also emerge. Does Obama plan for an even larger—and vastly more expensive—permanent occupation of Pakistan? Is that why our Social Security checks have to be slashed?

The limits of shamelessness

2011-11-26T11:11:00.000-08:00

I saw Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism on the PBS News Hour Thursday, an unusual showcase for someone so defiantly critical of both Democratic and Republican postures on economic topics. (Outfits like PBS usually permit ‘debate’ only when strictly bounded by the two major parties such that their differences, while often real, just as often mask deeper agreement on core issues. It is probably not an accident that Smith was invited onto a show sponsored by Bank of America on perhaps the least-viewed day of the year. But I digress.)

The subject was the lack of criminal prosecutions for fraud emerging from the financial crisis of 2008, whose aftereffects remain with us. Four experts were invited to comment, limiting them to two substantial comments each in the ten-minute segment. Three of the four trotted out lame excuses: the cases are SO complicated; the regulatory agencies have SO few staff; the requirement to prove intent is SO high a bar. Smith demolished those arguments to the extent possible in three minutes (the evidence of fraud is massive, the Nevada attorney general is prosecuting with a tiny operation, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act requires CEOs to sign off on the company’s books and attest to their accuracy).

But more significant, to my mind, was what was left unsaid. No one argued that the accusations of fraud are false, that the bank execs should be left alone, that they’re ‘doing God’s work’, as the inimitable Blankfein said, that the prosecutions are a partisan Democratic attack, that free markets should be left alone to function according to their inherent perfection, that attacking banks is an expression of foolish, Luddite anarchy. One of the four was a former Republican congressional aide and certainly would have gladly poured on those arguments had he dared. But he didn’t.

Contrast that silence with the active defense of torture, indefinite detention, military tribunals, and the wholesale stripping of our Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Amendments. While many objections to these abuses continued to be voiced, whole presidential campaigns are being mounted to actively defend such worthy acts as waterboarding and all the rest of it. My conclusion is that the banker class is extremely isolated, and this should have interesting consequences if another financial panic ensues, as appears more than likely given the ill winds blowing in from Europe.

P.S. One comment on Yves’ blog referred to the ‘Petroleum Broadcasting Network’, which given the steady stream of insufferable bullshit from Chevron featured there, strikes me as very fair.

The MFs at MF Global

2011-11-22T15:37:00.001-08:00

MF Global Investments is the name of a rather fly-by-night hedge fund operation established on Wall Street fairly recently. It collapsed a few days ago and has been tentatively found to have lost between $600 million and $1.2 billion of its clients’ money in the course of throwing good money after bad. It did so, the investigators now swarming around its chaotic bookkeeping now believe, by illegally shifting the cash from client accounts into its casino trading operation. In short, it is alleged to have committed the same kind of crimes as the so-called ‘rogue traders’ that cost Barings, UBS and SocGen vast sums.

One notable difference is that the guy in charge of this no-longer-shocking rip-off was until recently the Democratic governor of New Jersey, Jon Corzine [above]. Will he do time? After all, a billion bucks is rather more serious, you would think, than the three-dollar bottle of water looted by a guy in Britain during their recent riots—for which said thief received a six-month prison term. We need to resuscitate Victor Hugo and have him rework Les Misérables.

MF Global is another chapter in the ongoing destruction of the rule of law, but the bright side on this occasion is that certain powerful constituencies were ripped off. You know something is up when a leathery old dinosaur like Chuck Grassley is stirring his horny tail shingles over the latest debacle.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission should ‘do everything possible’ to get to the bottom of this, said Grassley, a Republican senator from Iowa. Oh, you mean the Commission that you and your GOP buddies have done everything in your considerable power to intimidate, dismantle, starve, browbeat and harass into irrelevance since government cannot solve any problems, but rather is the problem? Good luck getting that entity moving on restoring the cash to your Iowa farmers who used MF Global to hedge future crop and livestock prices.

‘Unlike the big banks, the average farmer who lost money in this fiasco can’t afford to hire an attorney and attend proceedings in a Manhattan courtroom’, said Grassley in an insouciant display of cynicism.

Grassley’s Iowa is where a group of sell-out state attorneys-general periodically gather to find a way to give the TBTF banks a free pass over their looting and wrecking of the economy through mortgage chicanery. His state’s AG, Tom Miller, is at the heart of this scheme whereby the banks would pay a paltry fine in exchange for immunity from things like the robo-signing scandal, fraudulent foreclosures, document counterfeiting, and the mass crushing of homeowners now slipping into poverty. Obama and team are fully behind this plan to further entrench the 1% and reward criminality—the current White House version of ‘bipartisanship’.

Luckily, a few AGs are resisting, like our own Eric Schneiderman, whose election I am happy to have supported monetarily. Schneiderman and prosecutors from Delaware and Nevada are investigating and should be presenting some interesting civil and perhaps criminal cases in coming months. (Hilariously, Miller kicked Schneiderman off the negotiating team for objecting to the sell-out.)

Obama wants to bury all this fraud and ‘turn the page’ as he did with the torture scandal of the Bush era. Republicans are naturally silent because they’re fully complicit. But loyal capitalists, wherever they may be hiding, ought to be demanding a real clean-up with real consequences because, as the MF Global fiasco illustrates, the entire financial edifice requires trust. When clients cannot even be certain their cash deposits are protected from the Wall Streets gamblers, then the game is very close to up. I am already reading advice in the financial blogs that people should hoover up any assets they have and put them promptly into explicitly government-backed and -guaranteed securities because nothing is sacred, and nothing is safe.

Shame

2011-11-20T10:38:00.000-08:00

This remarkable video of the Occupy Davis incident—in which a line of armed cops responds to students sitting on the ground and refusing to leave by pepper spraying them as if they were insects—reveals the growing moral force of the popular movement and why the ruling elites are increasingly alarmed.

You can almost read the mind of this poor mook cop, guns and equipment dangling off him at every angle: uppity civilians are refusing to obey my order; therefore, I will assert my authority in the easiest, most effective possible way. No doubt he’s been at a dozen training courses sponsored by Homeland Security or the anti-terrorist network and long ago lost any sense of what policing is supposed to be about or how democratic societies are theoretically different from thug dictatorships.

The students, however, were not so easily intimidated and promptly performed what could become a defining moment of Occupy history. They began to chant, ‘Shame on you!’ and faced the cops down, even pushing them back. This was a brilliant, intuitive discovery of the moral force of righteousness, and Occupiers should replay it on the sides of buildings from coast to coast. The cops suddenly lose their bearings entirely: one moment they think they’re the revered guardians of public order; the next they’re exposed as bullies. Their faces tell it all: they don’t know if maybe the kids aren’t right.

I am reminded of a similar although much more vicious incident during my years reporting from Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship. Shortly after the notorious degollados murders (the word means, ‘those whose throats were cut’), there was a memorial ceremony in the main Santiago cemetery for the three victims. These were high-ranking Communist Party leaders who were snatched off the streets—in one case as the man was leaving his children at school—and later found dead in a field near the airport.

Memorials such as these were always swarming with heavily armed cops desperately trying to provoke any sort of incident so that they could start cracking heads and hauling people in. (The corrupt press would then blame the victims for starting ‘violence.’) Family members in attendance often had lost relatives to the torture dungeons of the regime or had them disappear never to be seen again. So the rage and resentment was right on the surface, and the attendees had to exercise enormous self-control to avoid giving the goons an excuse.

One of the dead men came from a well-known artist family, and his father, Roberto Parada, began to read a poem, which was entitled, ‘Ode to a Vile Bastard’ while his mother, the stage actress María Maluenda, and the widow, Estela Ortiz, looked on. The cops confidently circulated through the crowd, jostling the mourners and ready to pounce. But Parada just kept reading his screed against the regime and by extension those of its enforcers present, despite the vast imbalance of weaponry and ostensible power. It was an inspiring moment. Then Estela Ortiz then took the stage and let loose a volley of defiant denunciation that I only wish I had had the presence of mind to record. She was utterly fearless and directed her words right into the faces of the cops, cursing them as animals and cowardly thugs of a corrupt regime.

Little by little, the cops began to fall back. The looks on their faces were exactly what we see in the Davis video: surprise, then guilty shock. They suddenly saw themselves for what they were: armed goons harassing the mourning families of the civilian victims of the state that paid them.

Occupy’s radicalism is, in my opinion, precisely there: it is turning the tables on the smug exploiters and making it no longer cool for them to sit atop the pyramid flashing their filthy fortunes. Bankers are no longer the smartest, the hippest, the cleverest, the guys to meet, the A list with the hot babes—they are quickly becoming pariahs, and this, more than anything, will undermine their cozy get-rich-quick schemes.

Occupy = Vote (Not)

2011-11-17T03:36:00.000-08:00

Our Mayor One-Percent’s crackdown on Zucotti Park may boomerang as soon as today. The Occupy movement could never thrive as an experiment in Utopian community while mobilizing against the greedy, ruling elite, and now there is a chance its attention will sharpen on the latter while issues of sleeping arrangements and where to find a potty become secondary. No doubt there was a certain creative spirit generated by maintaining a headquarters in the tiny plaza, but it was always temporary. I’ll be curious to see what ideas percolate up next about how to proceed, such as the suggestion that people in the neighborhood start to take in Occupiers so that they can sleep offsite and still stick around. Today’s demonstration should also give us an idea of the strength of the forces sympathetic to OWS and what they/we all have in mind.

A lot is being written about the nationwide coordination of the evictions and the role of Homeland Security, the FBI and probably the Obama Administration. None of this should come as a surprise to anyone not in a coma. The Occupy movement is a gigantic headache for the entire political class, and occasional pious bleatings of sympathy aside, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are eager to see it grow and coalesce further.

It’s a bit surprising to see even sophisticated observers like Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker miss the point in this regard as they gently urge OWSers to get back into the ‘political’ game and grasp—poor, innocent lambs that they are—that sooner or later it’s all about who wins elections. The Tea Party, these commentators point out, had a major success by channeling its energies into the 2010 elections and thereby imposing the current crew of lunatics on the entire country, despite their relatively low numbers. Or as Hertzberg wrote on Nov. 7, ‘Ultimately, inevitably, the route to real change has to run through politics—the politics of America’s broken, god-awful, immutably two-party electoral system, the only one we have.’

But OWS and its larger constituency have better instincts than that. They know that the electoral game is rigged and that the promises made in November are easily shredded by Christmas. What better demonstration of that fact than the ongoing disgrace of the Obama Administration itself, which systematically marginalized the popular forces that got it into office and folded the uprising against the Bush-era crimes into an electoral machine that it promptly dismantled once the job was done. The right wing, especially the Christian conservative movement, refused to play along with the GOP in that way and kept its potency.

No, OWS is much more a cousin to the rebellions of the 60s and 70s, which is why its propaganda doesn’t even address who’s running for what nor declare itself either for or against any of those guys as candidates per se. Its denizens don’t denounce Obama; they just ignore him. Obvious enemies of the 99% like Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker get mic-checked and harassed, but that doesn’t reduce Occupy Chicago to a voter canvassing operation for his Democratic counterpart. The core of Occupy is direct action, disruption, denunciation, confrontation, and the like, not letter-writing campaigns nor patient tolerance of proxies, even the well-meaning ones, in city councils or state legislatures. That hasn’t worked, and there’s even less reason to believe in it now that corporations can buy that entire system out of their petty cash boxes. As for the ‘route to real change,’ we’ll see about that. I don’t think the civil rights, antiwar, or women’s movements suffered from Hertzberg’s poverty of vision.

Yes, Hendrik, people haven’t forgotten that electoral democracy is better than dictatorship, and no doubt many millions will head out to vote in primaries next year. But as elected European leaders are sidelined in one country after another in favor of ‘technocrats’ willing to do the bidding of the French and German bankers, why should anyone delude himself that the worthy custom of suffrage will save us from subversion at the top?

"Occupy" the mind

2011-11-15T02:16:00.000-08:00

I told someone just last night that the physical occupation part of the Occupy movement was not sustainable in the long run, but that if the authorities tried to smash it by force, they might well regret their decision. The movement can easily assume new forms that the 1% will find even harder to control, and now that Zucotti Park is being dismantled in the usual heavy-handed fashion—with an attempted news blackout to boot—the tactical skirmish is only going to get more interesting.

My neighborhood’s city councilman, Ydanis Rodríguez, is reportedly under arrest with a bleeding head wound. No doubt the cops decided he looked suspiciously Hispanic.

The stupidity of the 1%-defending powers has consistently stimulated the growth of the Occupy movement, and I don’t doubt this will be a further contribution.

Plumbing the depths of moral bankruptcy

2011-11-14T04:07:00.000-08:00

Americans still capable of focusing on human decency rather than their own comfort should shudder with revulsion at the cheerleading for torture that occurred in the latest Republican presidential debate. These displays of willful ignorance and bloody-mindedness are farcical, but we scoff at our peril—history has too many examples of the vast damage that can be inflicted by buffoons.

For those who missed the spectacle, Bachmann openly welcomed torturing detainees in dungeons because it has worked so well to date. (Members of the audience stopped pulling the wings off butterflies and cheered wildly.) Cain said torture was bad but waterboarding doesn’t count as torture because he heard a general say so. Only Huntsman and Paul came out against drowning people repeatedly to make them talk—note their rank in the opinion polls.

This repugnant display will generate more ammunition for those voices obsessively convinced that we must save our republic by lining up behind Barack Obama. But Obama is the one individual who did most to enable Saturday’s celebration of viciousness. It was Obama who tried to close Guantánamo, met resistance and then dropped the subject. It was Obama who declared three months into his term that we must ‘look to the future’ and not even consider criminal investigations of ‘our’ torturers.

It was Obama who arranged for a new super-max facility to be built (in his home state of Illinois, no less) to house never-convicted detainees in inhuman conditions of isolation, even though they have been convicted of no crimes in any court.

The justification for this shredding of our 500-year-old system of legal protections for the accused, which dates from the resistance to the arbitrary power of the monarch, is that these particular accused are terrorist bad guys. How do we know? Someone in authority, preferably wearing a uniform, said so. Obama has done nothing to resist this mentality, and the argument that he was powerless in the face of right-wing fury is simply an excuse. We have no idea what would have happened if Obama had taken a firm stand against torture and lawlessness because he never did. And despite compromising away his principles, the attacks rain down upon him as a Muslim symp and a weakling anyway.

We have the worst of all worlds, and the torture regime is now an established part of our legal and political landscape with impunity for the perpetrators. The implications are chilling.

Glug, glug . . . [redux]

2011-11-08T02:17:00.000-08:00

So Herman Cain, the implausible, yet real black cracker from Georgia, now passes into the dustbin of history hoist on his own excessively favored petard. The GOP seems cursed forever to relive in ever new ways its morbid fascination with the wanderings of the Clintonian phallus; it flails ineffectually at Obama, wishing that it could focus its hate through discovering a sexual offense in someone who seems contentedly married to a comely wife.

The disagreeably TMI details of Cain’s forays up the skirts of job-seekers (recalling Joan Rivers’ career-making joke on Carson: ‘Are men threatened by smart women? What guy ever reached up a woman’s dress looking for a library card?’) are unseemly, but no Fox commentator can condemn them as inappropriate. Kenneth Starr’s Monica-gate performance, his careful parsing of the trail of semen stains up a certain blue garment, remains within living memory. Our biped politics have always been driven by the exigencies of the male organ, but the modern politicization of the bedroom, stirred to life by the ‘60s and exaggerated beyond farce by the Christian ‘80s, now places it in our, um, faces far more immediately. There is no escape from its heavy-veined demands.

The end of Cain’s brief aurora borealis was yawningly predictable, but his success at Republican speed-dating, while it lasted, reflected some of that coven’s loony core values: contempt for the vulnerable, faux populism in grating tones, ignorance as virtue, the whole mythology of personal superiority reflected in access to ample supplies of cash. Even Cain’s groping was financed by siphoning expense money from a corrupt lobbying system in which luxury suites and high-end snatch were coin of the realm. Cain must be dumbfounded to suddenly realize that his participation in this business as usual is now the cause of his downfall.

The real tragedy for Cain, as outlined by a New York magazine commentator this week, is that his goal of becoming a Sarah Palin-like celebrity and cash in massively on the inspirational lecture circuit is now endangered. He has become a laughingstock while also exposed as a sleaze, probably a fatal combination. But his intuition was faultless: politics as spectacle, the New Hampshire primary as reality television. Maybe he can court Kim Kardashian, and put his hand up her dress live for the cameras.

How dare these Greeks vote? [Updated]

2011-11-06T08:30:00.000-08:00

The EU endgame is illustrating that we now live under not democracy nor even oligarchy but simple bankocracy. If we resuscitated Aristotle, he’d have to rewrite Politics entirely as rule-by-the-global-moneylenders surely never occurred to him as a possibility. No doubt he’d curse us for awakening him from a pleasant 2,500-year sleep for such vulgarity and refuse to enable the (ever more) Dismal Science as dignifying superstition and wizardry.

[cartoon by Martin Sutovec @Jack’s Political Cartoons]

It is remarkable how completely and utterly the core neoliberal presumptions have collapsed in the face of the European debacle: that democratic capitalism signaled the End of History, that this glorious final stage of human development would usher in a permanent state of blissful well-being based on the popular will, the primacy of markets and peace among (roughly similar) nations. But things haven’t quite worked out according to that plan.

As usual, it was biped hubris that monkeyed up the works. Had Merkel and Sarkozy been able to force their banker overlords to absorb the losses of an early Greek default a year or two ago, the rolling EU train wreck probably could have been avoided or at least postponed to more prosperous times (if those ever return again). But this is demanding passion fruits from a sycamore tree. The autistic brains who rule the financier universe, as wonderfully portrayed in the new film Margin Call, are incapable of the long view and want only more, more, more, preferably today but in any case no later than next week.

Geithner and Obama are now demanding of the European ‘allies’ that no peripheral Mediterranean upstarts be permitted to stiff Citibank and JP Morgan as U.S. banks are just as exposed to the new blood-letting as their European counterparts. No doubt Obama’s Democratic team concurs with Merkozy that any hint of putting the Greeks’ fate to a vote by themselves is anathema—another fine Greek word.

Uncertainty and instability have reigned for a good year now, and I read no convincing predictions of what will come next. But this shlumping along cannot go on forever, and I suspect some resolution is approaching, some defining event that, while not conclusive, emphatically points our fragile world in one direction or another. Outright Greek default, of course, is one possibility, an increasingly likely one given the disarray at the top in Greece and the danger that the replacement for the current mortally wounded government will be no government at all. That would cascade through the EU’s and the world’s banks with nasty consequences although it would probably focus the minds of our fractious leadership a good bit.

Another is some form of authoritarianism to get the unruly Greeks (and anyone else getting ideas) back in line. Francis Fukuyama notwithstanding, History has not in fact ended, and the fall-back position of ruling elites has been muscle from the times of australopithecus. One would have to be very innocent to suppose that that option is off the table. Meanwhile, silly assertions of popular sovereignty, like Papandreou’s plebiscite on the debt peonage deal, will not be tolerated.

[Update] I see the economics editor of The Guardian, Larry Elliott, agrees with me. The money quote:

‘The latest phase of Europe's sovereign debt crisis has exposed the quite flagrant contempt for voters, the people who are going to bear the full weight of the austerity programmes being cooked up by the political elites. . . . To the extent that governments had any power, it has been removed and placed in the hands of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF. What matters to this group is what the financial markets think, not what voters might want. It is as if the democratic clock has been turned back to the days when France was ruled by the Bourbons.’

Elliott adds that this would be disturbing even if the austerity medicine being administered were working. It is not.

Who will police the police?

2011-11-03T04:07:00.000-07:00

Police rallied outside a Bronx courthouse a few days ago to denounce the prosecutors who dared to indict their fellow officers for the ‘professional courtesy’ of fixing parking tickets. Gang leader Patrick Lynch, president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, shouted and stamped his feet over the dastardly arrests since, as he insisted, ‘taking care of your family’ is not a crime.

This headline and story followed two days later: [bold highlights added]

‘Brooklyn Detective Convicted of Planting Drugs on Innocent People’

By TIM STELLOH, New York Daily News

The New York Police Department, already saddled with corruption scandals, saw its image further tainted on Tuesday with the conviction of a police detective for planting drugs on a woman and her boyfriend.

Before announcing the verdict, Justice Reichbach scolded the Police Department for what he described as a widespread culture of corruption endemic in its drug units.

“I thought I was not naïve,” he said.

“But even this court was shocked, not only by the seeming pervasive scope of misconduct but even more distressingly by the seeming casualness by which such conduct is employed.”

The case was rooted in a far larger tale of corruption in Police Department drug units: Several narcotics officers in Brooklyn have been caught mishandling drugs they seized as evidence, and hundreds of potentially tainted drug cases have been dismissed. The city has made payments to settle civil suits over wrongful incarcerations.

During the trial, prosecutors described the corruption within the Police Department drug units that Detective Jason Arbeeny worked for. One former detective, Stephen Anderson, who did not know the defendant, testified that officers in those units often planted drugs on innocent people.

The detective’s lawyer, Michael Elbaz, tried to discredit the most important prosecution witnesses, Yvelisse DeLeon and her boyfriend, Juan Figueroa. Ms. DeLeon had testified that the couple drove up to their apartment building in Coney Island and were approached by two plainclothes police officers. She said she then saw Detective Arbeeny remove a bag of powder from his pocket and place it in the vehicle.

“He brought out his pocket,” Ms. DeLeon told the court. “He said, ‘Look what I find.’ It looked like little powder in a little bag.”

In the department’s Brooklyn South narcotics unit, for instance, drugs seized as evidence are not counted or sealed until they reach the precinct and can be handled by multiple officers along the way, Justice Reichbach said, adding that such unacceptable practices “pale in significance” to the “cowboy culture” of the drug units.

“Anything goes in the never-ending war on drugs, and a refusal to go along with questionable practices raise the specter of blacklisting and isolation,” he said.

The accused, 14-year veteran detective Jason Arbeeny, faces only four years in prison for ruining people’s lives with phony accusations, ironically far fewer than the terms he saddled his victims with.

But ‘anything goes’ in the war on drugs and, needless to say, its capitalized first cousin, the War on Terror, and that simple phrase illustrates how Dick Cheney, Barack Obama and all their little friends are playing not just with fire but a warehouse full of Roman candles in setting whole categories of their enforcers above the law. Police states don’t just appear overnight—they require careful preparation, indoctrination and coaching, and a populace complicit with its crimes. Ours is eager to the point of embarrassment.

Note the similarities between Detective Arbeeny’s tactics and those loved by our Homeland Security teams: you find a guilty party and then figure out how to create evidence around them. So far, the terrorist-hunters haven’t been accused of total fabrications, but what’s stopping them? The day they face NYPD-style quotas to keep their funding intact cannot be far off.

Incidentally, there is a direct line between these abuses of policing power and the criminal behavior of the still-untouched Wall Streeters and their collaborators, the money-churning mortgage packagers and servicers. The nearly dead mortgage market may, in fact, turn out to be the one place where impunity’s consequences most quickly become obvious for the indifferent masses as they see the value of their principal asset—home equity—go up in smoke. This already has happened to millions, but many, many more could suffer a similar fate unless the ongoing legal shenanigans are investigated, exposed, prosecuted and thereby stopped. The Obama/Geithner team’s insistence that all will be well if we just let the banks get away with all their crimes is going to end badly—how is the housing market ever going to recover if people cannot trust even the deeds to their own properties?

Policing OWS [Updated]

2011-10-28T13:00:00.000-07:00

The New York Police Department has been getting some bad PR lately, all of it richly deserved. Here’s a roundup:

[from the NY Times]: ‘Eight current and former New York police officers were arrested on Tuesday and charged in federal court with accepting thousands of dollars in cash to drive a caravan of firearms into the state’. The laddies in blue were also accusedof organized cigarette smuggling, and from the sound of the wiretap quotes, pretty much anything else they could rip off and resell. These free-lance capitalist stalwarts in uniform have ties to a notorious neighborhood in Brooklyn that, um, tends to have a low incidence of street crime, wink wink.

In another case, a former police officer recently testified in court that he and his colleagues planted drugs on innocent (black) men to meet their arrest quotas and—believe it nor not—earn overtime. (One can imagine the camaraderie in the canteen: ‘Hey, Tony, let’s go frame a few [deleted] and charge the extra hours so we can make our boat payments.’) Hundreds of drug cases were then thrown out as the evidence was, quite reasonably, judged to be tainted and unreliable. The false-arrest lawsuits are just beginning.

The entire issue of arrest quotas was roundly denied by NYPD higher-ups when it first surfaced; then the Village Voice published a four-part series based on secret tape recordings of precinct meetings in which cops were ordered to meet their (non-existent) quotas. Oops!

Then there’s sexual assault, which is getting a lot of media attention here due to the serial gropers and rapists preying on women. Turns out one of them might be a cop—an active-duty officer got caught exactly one block from my Inwood apartment building using his service weapon to threaten and rape a schoolteacher, and detectives are trying to decide whether he was responsible for other assaults around town.

There’s more! Indictments were just handed down today in a gigantic ticket-fixing case in the Bronx where cops routinely made sure that friends and relatives never had to pay like other poor slobs without family connections to corrupt bureaucrats and their enforcers. Anyone who has to face the permanent agony of parking in this city will be dancing a jig in glee at the sudden appearance of Lady Justice.

Ironically, the big gun-running bust may have originated from a ticket-fixing investigation when the anti-corruption squad started listening in on cops to see who was involved and got an earful of their other activities. But the connection is less accidental than it may seem at first glance, and the discovery hardly serendipitous.

When the ticket-fixing scandal broke a while back, a disturbing number of commentators tended to brush it off as no big deal, Aw well, just a guy doing someone a favor. Patrick Lynch, the loathsome head of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association (who cheered the death of unarmed Sean Bell in a hail of police bullets—50 of them, to be exact—a few years ago) immediately criticized the investigation and insisted that ‘this thing’ should and could have been handled differently, i.e., in secret and with kid gloves, the way the cops are used to being treated.

But allowing cops to fiddle with parking tickets is extremely dangerous, and the city should be applauded for not tolerating it—finally. If the police force is allowed to evolve into a Mameluke-type caste of professional muscle beholden only to itself, it’s only a matter of time until a few rogue elements decide to take the next logical step and become a criminal syndicate. Why not? Who’s going to stop you if you’re the one who decides who gets arrested?

Only the naïve will believe that the ambitious gun-smuggling cop gang is the sole dubious operation inside the NYPD, despite all the stern finger-wagging from top officials. Aside from the overtly criminal scams, there is a much larger secret-handshake pact in force in the city, one that includes the real criminal masterminds: the thieves on Wall Street and the fancy cast of socialites who thrive on their loot.

OWS has astutely understood, in its amorphous, non-hierarchical way, that the NYPD’s constant stop-and-frisk practices are part and parcel of this control system. New York cops stopped 700,000 people last year, almost all of them black or Hispanic males. Willie Hazzard [right] has been harassed in this way 17 times while walking down the street, often with his two children. His Brownsville neighborhood in Brooklyn has recorded 14,000 cop stops—equivalent to one per resident. Ninety-nine percent of the time, there’s no arrest. The department insists there’s no racial profiling involved, an assertion some children under age 4 are thought to believe.

All this comes from the famous “Broken Window” crime-prevention theory associated with the Giuliani era, but the result is huge numbers of black and Latino kids busted for pot even though white youths smoke it more. Those arrested are then saddled with a criminal record for the rest of their lives, just the thing to keep them out of the ever-shrinking labor pool. Since we already have the largest prison population per capita in the developed world, the real unemployment rates are really much higher to start with.

Wall Street benefits from the huge pool, created by its system of organized looting, of nobodies deprived of a decent living, and the city’s cops cooperate by harassing minority youth squeezed into the economic margins with no prospects. So let us not be surprised as the city power structure finds new ways to besiege and repress OWS at the bidding of its banker friends. Today’s announcement that the fire department will inspect the encampment’s generators is a good example: pointless attention to formal rules in the service of the guys who wipe their asses with the law each morning before breakfast.

[Update]: I see that Lynch led a group of several hundred NYPD officers to the arraignment of the ticket-fixing colleagues and insisted that they should be let off because ‘taking care of your family’ and of people who ‘support police’ was NOT A CRIME.

So here are a few questions for Mr Lynch:

If it is okay to alter official police department documents to protect family members from parking violations, would it also be proper to do the same to protect them from, say, a breaking-and-entering charge? A rape charge? A hit-and-run charge?
If not, what are the criteria to determine the difference between what is NOT A CRIME (despite being listed as one in our statutes) and what should, in fact, be considered an actual crime?

Who should make that decision? You? Any NYPD officer? The precinct captain? Charlie Rose?

Those citizens of New York who are not related to police officials do not have their instant get-out-of-jail-free card available. You did mention similar benefits for those who ‘support police’? How does one go about obtaining that designation? Is there a membership card? How much are the dues? To whom should they be paid? Can I use a credit card, or do you prefer cash?

Vote with your feet

2011-10-25T03:02:00.001-07:00

The disconnect between the electoral spectacle that embodies our formal democracy and life back on earth is becoming more stark by the day. Tunisia has shown us an excellent example of how to run a workable parliamentary system by shortening the campaign season to a few weeks, rather than than the 18 months of relentless abuse we are now subjected to, every bit as exasperating as subway harangues from wheedling beggars and screeching religious nutbags. (Tunisian turnout was an impressive 90 percent.)

But the most annoying part of the Chinese water torture known as election year hasn’t yet begun: the nonstop whining we are about to experience from appendages of the Democratic Party telling us what we ‘must’ do to stave off the greater GOP evil by dutifully lining up with the current team. One of the recurrent themes we will be hearing is that of the crucial importance of controlling nominations to the Supreme Court, which will fall to the K Street lobbyists if Obama does not return.

It’s true Obama’s nominations have been a rare bright spot, and Sotomayor and Kagan are holding the line admirably though without much effect so far. And therein lies the nub: the Supreme Court, being a political institution, is influenced by the currents and overall zeitgeist of the society in which it resides. To date, the radical ideologues put there by the Repubs have had clear sailing to do their will because opposition to their designs on our democracy are so toothless—starting with the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania.

FDR had a notoriously recalcitrant Supreme Court that kaboshed his New Deal innovations one after another. But he had the winds behind him, and eventually (despite or perhaps because of the dust-up over his 1937 court packing scheme) the Court buckled and stopped standing in the way of his reforms.

By contrast, the New York Times Magazine noted in August that Obama hasn’t even bothered to push his appointments to the federal bench, from which Supreme Court appointments usually emerge. Bush placed 13 of his guys on federal appellate courts during his two terms; Obama so far—zero. In fact, Obama has failed to insist on 80 vacancies to federal district and appeals courts, choosing instead to shy away from confirmation fights. Instead of fighting, he waits for his sworn enemies to make nice, and meanwhile we get awful decisions like Citizens United (that made corporations into persons with First Amendment bribery, er, advertising rights legal).

Occupy Wall Street is much more likely to influence the shape of future judicial decision-making than this or that Demo pol boosted into office with obscene sums of Wall Street and K Street cash. We can stand around debating whether people must vote for these jamokes or refuse to do so, and there will be consequences either way. But the actions we need today are not in the polling booth; they’re in the parks, the meeting halls and yes, the police precincts.

P.S. Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism demolishes the latest Obama mortgage relief scheme. She calls the plan ‘yet more proof that this Administration is not about to inconvenience banks to help homeowners and communities. It has tools in its power that would change the incentives for banks and make them far more willing to do what the overwhelming majority of mortgage investors would prefer, which is to provide deep principal mods for viable borrowers, [force] banks to write down seconds, and tak[e] an aggressive stance on foreclosure fraud. . . . But just as the banks and their captured governments in Europe seem intent on grinding down entire economies to extract their pound of flesh, so are banks in the U.S. continuing to operate a doomsday machine that grinds up housing with no regard for the economic and social costs’.

Does anyone seriously think the pushback on this ongoing scandal will come from Washington, rather than the streets?

Some perspective is in order

2011-10-21T12:27:00.000-07:00

It’s too bad Khaddafy wasn’t captured alive and put on trial, both to educate Libyans and the entire world about exactly what took place under his rule as well as to start off the new regime with a display of respect for human rights as a universal norm and value. However, that’s probably asking a lot of people who have been terrorized for four decades and barely have a functioning military hierarchy among the rebel forces. So it’s a pity, but hardly surprising. And incidentally, it’s their revolution. Maybe they decided to follow the Obama example: when you find your enemy, you blast his effing head off (in the absence of a handy drone missile).

Nonetheless, it’s legitimate to express dismay at the execution-style killing of the dictator. Less acceptable is the constant undercurrent of doubt, pessimism and sniping at how the Libyans have handled their uprising from the start. Today’s Guardian wasted no time with this headline mere hours after the assassination: ‘Libya’s revolution has triumphed, but will democracy?’ A fair question, one that was never asked of, say, Czechoslovakia or Russia in the early 1990s. I wish I had assembled the more glaring examples in recent months, but a media historian ought to. They give off a faint whiff of racism from the Wise Ones of western punditry who apparently cannot fathom that an oppressed people not led by somebody who looks like them can pull off a revolution and then successfully and adequately organize their society for the well-being of its inhabitants. And just wait, we will soon hear about the skeery, dangerous Islamic politicians who may get a foothold now—not that anyone worried much about how the overthrow of communism empowered reactionary Polish Catholics or Hungarians nostalgic for Admiral Horthy.

Finally, why is it so hard to accept that NATO played a positive role in the outcome? The world is not comprised of the innocent and the evil locked in eternal combat, but of highly problematic bipeds whose motives are rarely free of ambiguity. NATO and Obama could have let Khaddafy’s tanks roll into Benghazi and his minions massacre tens of thousands, Bashir Assad-style. In that case certain knee-jerk elements would be accusing the U.S. of complicity in genocide and denouncing BP’s oil deals. You can never please some people. There are now 100 million Arabs living in three revolutionary regimes across North Africa. This is a good thing.

Against bipartisan looting

2011-10-19T02:56:00.000-07:00

I can’t imagine who exactly watches things like the Republican presidential debate that seeped onto television last night from Las Vegas, but it’s curious that while that bizarre celebration of adolescent arrested development was happening, the Occupy Wall Street folks were hooting and catcalling—at a Democratic governor.

Naomi Wolf’s arrest outside snatched the headlines away from Andrew Cuomo’s award ceremony—sponsored by the Huffington Post, no less—and shifted the focus to the New York governor’s refusal to extend the extra income tax on millionaires that the state desperately needs. Cuomo ranks as a pretty good governor in the sorry crop of 50, but Huffpost badly misread the zeitgeist to focus on his admirable role in legalizing same-sex marriage and miss the fact that he’s asking for sacrifices from everyone but the 1%.

The state of New York is in trouble financially, surprise, surprise. State workers are being pressured for concessions with the sword of 3,500 job cuts hanging over their heads if they refuse. State university tuition is getting bumped up every year and will cross the $5000-mark soon. And on and on—nearly every state in the country is frantically looking for revenue, but the one with the largest crop of filthy rich, led by a ‘liberal’ Democrat, refuses not to impose a new tax but merely to extend an existing one.

Not only that but Cuomo had the bad taste to compare his stance with dad Mario’s Catholic-based opposition to the death penalty because in both cases polls showed people disagreed with the governor’s position.

So pandering to millionaires is now a point of quasi-religious dogma? Please, don’t answer that because I fear the reply. But it does tell us how far the remote and clueless Democratic establishment is from co-opting the OWS movement. Obama, Cuomo & gang seem to think OWS is a mere Democratic parallel to the Tea Party movement that helped Republicans in 2010, a wave they can ride in a similar fashion. The only parallel here is the universe they’re living in.

That ‘new person smell’ indeed.

Would you rather be murdered with a shovel or thrown off a tall building?

2011-10-15T12:07:00.000-07:00

Two events occurred in the U.S. Congress this week that together speak volumes about the continued bankruptcy of our entire political class and also demonstrate, incidentally, that our deservedly maligned national legislature is not dysfunctional at all when it comes to producing yet more favors for the 1%.

First, Obama won passage of his trade pacts with South Korea, Colombia and Panama that will provide new profit opportunities for the few and additional job losses for the many. These treaties are mistakenly called ‘free trade’ pacts in an act of ideological branding that further serves the ruling business elite when in fact they actually increase trade barriers in the form of patent and copyright protections for U.S. pharmaceutical other companies. They are also called ‘pacts’ rather than ‘treaties’, which is what they are for all intents and purposes. But treaties require a 2/3 vote of Congress, and our leading pols, as always when facing a problematic legal speed bump preventing juicy new benefits for the rich, promptly dismantled it.

The NY Times carried a minor story, read by few and ignored by all who matter, about the next round of job losses that this ‘free-trade’ pact will generate, this time among the tiny remnant of textile workers still producing specialty fabrics in a South Carolina factory. As anyone knows who wears clothes today, textile work long ago shifted to the sweatshops of China, Vietnam and Honduras thanks to many other ‘free-trade’ pacts that brought us cheap T-shirts and mass-produced ‘designer’ goods.

There is a particular irony in this development for me as I recall, as a reporter covering Capitol Hill in the early 1980s, an angry exchange in a Senate committee hearing between the old liberal warhorse from Ohio, Howard Metzenbaum, and an arrogant neo-Dixiecrat named Fritz Hollings of South Carolina. The two seemed to dislike each other heartily, and Hollings was ragging Metz by bragging about how his state had ‘pulled all those textile factories from up north’ down to his, not mentioning that the lack of labor unions was a principal motive. Metzenbaum sputtered and turned red in the face, but he was helpless in the face of the economic forces turning his (and my) home state into the Rust Belt. Industry had free rein to play off the states against one another and extort the best, tax-freest deal to be had, and so it went—the factories left the industrial north and headed to the Reaganite South and West.

But alas for Fritz Hollings and his happy non-union Carolinian workforce, that wasn’t good enough. If South Carolina workers were docile and cheap, wouldn’t a billion Communist Chinese be even cheaper, and needless to say, yet more docile by far? ‘Free-trade’ pacts globalized the whole process and returned the impoverished Palmettos to their previous de-industrialized state.

But I digress. Meanwhile, also in the U.S. Congress the Obama ‘Jobs Bill’ went down to ignominious defeat as could have been predicted by anyone paying attention. The silver lining is that Obama’s nefarious plan to undermine Social Security by removing its tax base is also postponed—though no doubt it will be back soon as part of the next legislative consensus between the two parties determined to impoverish us all.

With the two parties in joyful cahoots in this way, the 99% are left to own our, party-free devices. Today, the Occupy Wall Street movement adjourns to Times Square, and it will be interesting to watch the reactions of the assembled Nebraskans and other puzzled visitors at the idea of resistance to corporate looting.

Victory in Zucotti Park

2011-10-14T05:08:00.000-07:00

Bloomberg tried and failed to sweep the popular protest against Wall Street out of Lower Manhattan this morning. When I arrived around 6.30 a.m., the crowd was just announcing (using their clever human-relay communications system) that the maintenance company would postpone their request to police to clear the Occupy Wall Street site for ‘cleaning’ after all. The sudden need for a clean park precisely at Zucotti was probably a ploy to clear the area and then ring-fence it to put an end to the permanent Tahrir Square-style occupation. The park is very ably maintained now by the protest movement and is tidier than most despite its air of a homeless encampment.

The city’s back-down was another example of people-power. Had there not been hundreds of supportive bystanders and a huge media presence, the occupiers might have been successfully bullied. As it was, the heavy-handed police tactics of the early days merely backfired, and there was a good chance any muscle applied to enforce ‘maintenance’ would have, too. As the police bosses constantly tell those of us uncomfortable with the ubiquitous surveillance cameras snooping at our lives, If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. Now that everyone carries a videocamera in his pocket, that applies to the cops, too

War-making as farce

2011-10-13T17:22:00.000-07:00

Okay, so if this Iranian plot to blow up a Washington restaurant ‘reads like the pages of a Hollywood script,’ as stated by FBI Director Robert Mueller, under the walk-like-a-duck-sound-like-a-duck principle, it in fact is from the pages of a Hollywood script. Except that in Hollywood they sometimes write more believable screenplays.

Turns out that the main suspect, Mansour Arbabsiar, may have suffered brain damage in a near-fatal knife attack, was ‘comically absent-minded’ and generally incompetent in all his personal and commercial endeavors. This Washington Post background article quotes locals in Corpus Christi describing him as ‘goofy’, notes that he had a recent narcotics arrest and was nicknamed ‘Jack’ because he liked Jack Daniels bourbon a lot. He had failed at the restaurant business, a finance company and used car sales, and his second wife recently dumped him.

In short, Arbabsiar is a complete screw-up, and the idea that a sophisticated intelligence agency planning an audacious assassination in the middle of Washington, DC, would hire this bozo is side-splittingly unbelievable.

The guy who helped Arbabsiar cook up the plot is described as a Mexican drug dealer who was let off in exchange for cooperation. Well, he brought them the goods, so now he’s probably free to go rejoin the Zetas and hang journalists from highway overpasses with their guts hanging out. Nice partners Obama has teamed up with for this operation.

Obama and Hillary C obviously needed something to goose their campaign against Iran a little, but they should be ashamed of themselves for settling on this pathetic charade, which is already falling apart. With a few more details of this farce, the entire U.S. foreign policy establishment is going to become a laughing-stock.

But even more disturbing is the possibility that credibility is not a high priority for the Obama pranksters. They may simply be trying to whip up nationalistic spirit to boost their unsuccessful campaign to get the Iranians into doing their bidding. Careful, though: irrational fervor can quickly slip out of control of the happy demagogue who launches it. Obama wouldn’t be the first head of state to get himself boxed into a war he didn’t mean to launch but found himself powerless to stop.

A most timely conspiracy

2011-10-12T04:11:00.001-07:00

Here’s an excellent reason not to believe everything we’re being told about the Great Iranian Plot to Blow Up Washington:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration plans to leverage charges that Iran plotted to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States into a new global campaign to isolate the Islamic republic.

The fit is too neat. Maybe there was such a plot to kill the Saudi ambassador and slaughter a few random diners, and maybe somebody from Iran was involved. But, I’m sorry, the government that brought us the weapons-of-mass-destruction-that-never-were and caused a horrific war with that package of lies shoulders a very, very heavy burden of proof. We don’t believe what they say just because they say it.

Early commentators point out the gross amateurishness of the affair, starting with the use of an alert-triggering $100,000 bank transfer when spy agencies know to use cash instead. There will be more details today, and they should be interesting. But let us also note that the U.S. security services are now heavily engaged, as a matter of policy, in targeting supposed national enemies and generating plots to ensnare them.

A fascinating piece in a recent New York magazine [searching for link, stay tuned] outlined how it’s done: you infiltrate a mosque or a social club of the target ethnicity, talk about how much you hate U.S. policy in Israel or Afghanistan and then encourage whomever takes the bait to start planning a terrorist attack. Once you have a taker, you nurse the plot along, provide arms or money, record and videotape everything, and then bust the sap. The article cites law enforcement sources arguing that this procedure is necessary to pro-actively prevent terrorism even though the plots might never have come to fruition without the role of the security agency charged with frustrating them.

The wisdom and prudence of this policy is open to debate, but it seems entirely relevant when plots appear such as the Iranian Restaurant Caper that seamlessly dovetail with the long-term aims of U.S. foreign policy, especially with presidential election season approaching. Just two weeks ago we learned that the Obama Administration had provided Israel with several dozen 5,000-pound ‘bunker buster’ bombs that could be used to strike Iranian nuclear facilities. The transfer occurred in 2009, but the leak is recent—could we be seeing the beginning of a propaganda campaign to justify a new act of war? If so, the assassination plot is a godsend—or perhaps Zeus is a CIA asset.

Globalized oligopoly and its discontents

2011-10-11T19:07:00.000-07:00

I stopped by Occupy Wall Street for a brief second look this evening and enjoyed the scene greatly. I would place a bet that there are more political and philosophical discussions taking place per square yard in Zucotti Park than in most Princeton seminar rooms. A few people are mugging for the cameras, but the fact that there are cameras recording the scene in the first place reflects the resilience of the occupation and the inability of city poo-bahs first, to ignore it, then to uproot it with heavy-handed police tactics. These kids are voicing the vast indignation of most of our society, the decent portion anyway, and despite Mayor Bloomberg’s annoyance, they’re going to continue to denounce his plutocrat friends for a good while. I’m just sorry I missed the march [above] past the grotesquely opulent East Side apartments of Messrs Dimon, Koch and Murdoch this afternoon where the monopolists and money-changers gather to congratulate each other after a long day at the office looting our productive economy.

On the way back, I chanced to read through an old copy of a Chilean weekly magazine (The Clinic) that reached me months late, and I was struck by the similarities between our version of bitter frustration and theirs, our shared sense of exclusion from what are ostensibly democracies. Editor Patricio Fernández, writing in April, commented on the country’s popular movements and the dissatisfaction they reflect 20 years after the departure of Pinochet from power. Specifically, Fernández described a nasty police overreaction to demonstrations against a highly unpopular hydroelectric plant recently imposed on the country that will ruin vast tracts of pristine forests in the far south. But his comments go deeper, to the malaise of a society that is producing economic growth and even creating plenty of miserable jobs (we should be so lucky), but remains in the hands of a select few:

‘There is a vacuum of leadership. Whole generations have detached themselves from public debates. Interpersonal networks have replaced political parties, unions, parishes, student associations. All the most successful mass actions arise out of nowhere, headless. The Transitional Government [read here, by way of parallel, Obama] has accepted, taken on and legitimized the exaggerated glorification of the market, economic growth as the supreme value, individual initiative as unquestionable, the State ashamed of itself’.

One article after another paints a vision of a society encrusted with obscure and corrupted power centers unresponsive to popular wishes, a ruling elite dating back centuries that continues to monopolize position, influence, status and, of course, wealth. This issue of The Clinic came out just before the student-led uprising that continues to paralyze Chile over demands to end Pinochet’s legacy of privatized education—which our friends Bloomberg, Obama, Gates and of course the entire right wing want to imitate here. That movement, 30 years in the making, was an explosion; a good part of the school year has been wrecked by strikes, and the sitting conservative government’s approval ratings are in the toilet.

Ill fares the land, as Tony Judt would and in fact did say: people are deeply disturbed, uneasy, outraged, fed up, in many cases desperate. I would add on the positive side, healthily skeptical, demanding answers and willing to hear new ideas. And sick to death of the chattering classes and their patronizing, dismissive bullshit. (Anything that gets David Brooks’ hair on fire is hitting its target.) Zucotti Park is the mere seed of a rebellion, but it has promise. I’ll be watching closely to see whether the attempts by the Democratic Party establishment to herd its energies into the 2012 elections enjoy any success—if they do not, we’re on our way.

The real danger from Mexico

2011-10-09T06:41:00.000-07:00

It’s hard to keep up with the myriad ways in which our leadership is determined to help us shoot off our feet, but one of the most disturbing and potentially dangerous ones is the complete insanity dominating current immigration policy. In fact, ‘policy’ is an overly generous choice of words—what we have is vengeful Mexican-bashing parading as a novel idea.

The topic is close to my heart as I myself was an immigrant for over 20 years and understand something of the difficulties of adjusting to a foreign culture even when one has access to all the legal niceties and can earn more money than the average local resident, as was my case. First, let’s dispatch the b.s. about the lawfulness or lack of same that colors this whole discussion, e.g., the placards held by red-faced nativists at anti-Mexican rallies with phrases like, ‘What are part of illegal don’t you understand?’

What could be more reasonable than asking people to conform to the laws? Well, nothing much if it weren’t so glaringly selective. This complaint would hold a tad more weight if there were any comparable interest among these red-faced nativists in adherence to the rule of the rest of the laws in our increasingly arbitrary society. Instead, the masses, led by the celebrated gumballs in Don’t Tread on Me costumes, have distinguished themselves by virtually begging the state to abuse its powers and ignore legality. We permit it to snoop into every corner of our lives, read our library records, attach tracking devices to our cars, build databases on dissidents, encourage members of suspect groups to commit crimes so that they can be targeted, and generally conspire against anyone who dares to make trouble—all in the sacred name of Keeping Us Safe. (Not to mention, of course, torturing detainees.) When the hispano-baiters start objecting to the dismantling of the First, Fourth and Eighth Amendments, I’ll be interested in their opinions about immigration law.
Which is not to say that our borders should be thrown open willy-nilly or that laws governing who should come live here should not exist. Sensible management of immigrant flows is required and advisable—exactly what will not be occurring. Instead, we have punishment of the most vulnerable as in the latest ignoble act by the state of Alabama in denying schooling to Mexican children whose papers are not in order. No longer able to condemn black kids to permanent illiteracy, the noble fathers of Dixie can now exercise their eclipsed white supremacy with brown ones. This sign shown at the top of this post says it all. When Alabama needed cheap construction and chicken-farm workers, the holy statutes meant nothing; now that they’re expendable, the message is: We will make your lives hell.

While the local demagogues drive Hispanic residents further into the economic and social underground, no one seems to be paying much attention to the rise on our extensive southern border of a terrifying class of professional death-worshipers whose activities will soon spill over into the 50 states and no doubt already have. The activities and twisted beliefs of Mexican drug gangs are surely among the most frightening phenomena of our age. They play by no known rules and seem to delight in cruelty as a pastime. What can we say about an outfit that rolls the heads of its victims up to the front doors of elementary schools?

When I worked in the southern states for a Hispanic organization, I had the opportunity to speak to police officials and even a chief or two about the pressures on them to combine police work with the pursuit of immigration violators by doing things like demanding residency papers on traffic stops. These cops generally hated it, and the more astute ones openly opposed the mixing of duties because it converted them into the immigrant communities’ enemy.

A democratic society requires a sympathetic populace ready to lend a hand, cooperate and provide useful information—which raises the question of how much we are committed to maintaining one. Just wait until the drug gangs dig in deeply enough to be obvious, and the alarmed residents desperately want their local precincts to gather solid intelligence on their activities. Who among the badgered and terrified Mexicans, many of whose children are U.S. citizens, will volunteer for that?

I may cry

2011-10-07T10:22:00.000-07:00

I feel terrible that the Yankees were ousted from the playoffs. No more games at the cool ‘home-run-friendly’ stadium we built for the richest sports franchise in the world with our helpful tax concessions. No more standing at attention in the 7th inning to salute the ‘brave men and women fighting for freedom in Iraq’. No more fawning news about ballplayers who could pay off the national debt. I am lost, heartbroken.

"Sold out"

2011-10-05T18:55:00.000-07:00

I hurried down to Occupy Wall Street after work today to observe and eventually join the march. It was organized and the permit granted rather quickly. I suspect that after the PR debacle of the heavy-handed police tactics at the Brooklyn Bridge march, the city poobahs decided on prudence. The tough stuff backfired in any case, and the new crowd was huge.

I was inspired by the crowd, which is far from automatic for a jaded old-timer like the undersigned. My Ohio friend and I stood along lower Broadway just south of City Hall Park and watched the steady stream of people file down to the encampment past a fairly relaxed phalanx of cops standing by their metal grates. What struck me the most was the large number of hand-lettered signs hurriedly drawn onto bits of cardboard. It said to me that this is an authentically spontaneous movement fueled by exasperation and outrage. Here are a few of the slogans:

“Lost My Job, Found an Occupation”
“Rutgers Faculty against Kleptocracy”
“Enough Greed”
“Class Warfare? You Betcha!”
“Danger: High Crimes Area”
“I’ll Believe Corporations Are People When Georgia Executes One”
“Money Talks Way Too Much”
“Democracy Not Plutocracy”
“I Never Met a Person Whose Name Ends in Inc.”
“Stop Rewarding Failure: Golden Showers Not Golden Parachutes”

There was a big labor presence and the usual left-wing sects, but mostly a lot of independents of all ages. The crowd wasn’t huge—one could actually circulate fairly easily, which meant no 50 thousand, but it was ten times bigger than the last one, and it took a good hour for the entire march to leave the staging area. Many signs sported the figure 99% meaning those getting the shaft to enrich the other 1%. The most popular chant was, ‘Banks got bailed out, we got sold out!’

I take that as a bad sign for both parties responsible for the current mess but particularly for Obama and his Democrats. This crowd’s ire at the filthy rich is quite bipartisan, and the widespread idea of a sellout implies that a deal was struck somewhere and later betrayed. That would be the election of 2008 even if no one said it openly. Nobody cares.

What a disconnect between the non-stop, breathless pud-stroking on our TV channels over the presidential horse race and the underlying indifference to the whole show among the people on the streets today. Whatever these folks may have in mind by way of a solution to the nation’s ills, it most certainly doesn’t have much to do with rearranging the backsides of whoever is occupying large chairs in Washington office buildings. That alone makes it encouraging.

Glug, glug. . . [updated]

2011-10-04T01:59:00.001-07:00

When a bank’s stock drops by 10 percent in a single day, something is up. And this isn’t just Smoky Corners Savings & Loan, we’re talking the big guys, Bank of America, Citi, some Europeans, and so on. As some astute observers (whose views never seem to make it into the mainstream) have been saying for months, we are galloping toward a new banking crisis.

Wall Streeters have decided that they hate Obama’s guts, which is pretty ironic given that he saved them from being hung from lampposts by theirs in 2008 and may soon have to do so again. O has been the big banksters best friend since the day he took office—now he gets another chance to prove he’s got their back as the bloated vacuum cleaners of national wealth totter and again threaten collapse.

If BofA or some other ill-managed wreck does go belly up, Obama will have yet another opportunity to force the management out, tell stockholders they get bupkis (hey, that’s capitalism, you made a bad investment) and reorganize the whole sorry mess with the inevitable infusion of government, i.e. our, cash. But of course he won’t.

Far more likely, far more sad, and far more dangerous is this scenario: the Geithner-led Treasury will insist on throwing new trillions at these zombies while browbeating everyone that the economy will sink otherwise, and befuddled Democrats will go along with it while kissing their re-elections good-bye. Worse yet, the wacko brigade in Congress could easily block any action at all and fulfill their dreams of apocalypse, at which point Jesus of Nazareth will surely ride in on a fiery chariot to inaugurate the Last Days. Can’t wait.

[Update}: Watching the careening stock markets these days is such a vertigo-producing experience one should only attempt it after dosing with dramamine. A comment from some Important Person gooses the equities up; reality in the form of statistics on economic performance jerks them back down again as the Europeans try to keep their 17-nation currency zone afloat.

Some commentators are drawing a parallel between Europe’s tribulations today and those of the 13 newly independent American colonies when Alexander Hamilton struggled mightily to insist that the nascent republic had to absorb all revolutionary war debts, no matter who had issued them. Hamilton won and thus established the ‘full faith and credit’ concept by which the new U.S.A. stood behind these outstanding borrowings. However, Nouriel Roubini (‘Dr Doom’)—who turns out to be quite a wag—said that would work if Europe ‘were a country rather than a cacophony’. Har har, good one. Every time a message emerges from one end of that continent, someone contradicts it from the other end.

One important element of the current uncertainty is, well, the uncertainty. Banks on both sides of the Atlantic are getting slammed in part because no one has a good idea what is really on their books. This is one of the many ways by which the super-rich have managed to bite themselves in the ass—these mega-banks fought and whined and kicked and screamed so successfully against having to reveal their true net worth (shedding the ‘mark-to-market’ accounting of assets after the 2008 meltdown and winning permission from Obama/Geithner to get by on bluff) that now no one believes anything they say. Citibank, BofA, Morgan Stanley and no doubt others we haven’t heard of it are tanking badly, and they have no one to blame but themselves as investors dump their shares for safer havens.

“Bad Bishop Brown” and the missing ideas

2011-10-02T09:05:00.000-07:00

What could have softened the globalized blows to my sad old home village, the once thriving city of Galion, Ohio? [see post of 9/27 below, ‘Requiem for a Town’]. It has a charming physical landscape of gentle hills surrounded by solid-gold, Corn Belt farm lands, and it once was home to well-educated, industrious and civic-minded inhabitants, many of German Catholic or Calvinist origins, entirely disposed to remain there. But it was sent to the economic slaughterhouse by its own business elite, who built it up when times were good and shook its dust off their Gucci boots when it was time to jettison the place and seek profit elsewhere.

The local unions did grumble in the early stages of this dismantling, but there was no cultural or ideological foundation for unionism or social democratic/socialist politics upon which to construct real resistance. The Cold War was still in full force, and anything vaguely leftish was dangerously taboo—even everyday liberals were whispered about as suspect ‘pinkos’ during our ‘50s childhoods. The lasting symbol of this heretical radicalism was the abandoned downtown mansion of ‘Bad Bishop Brown’, the late Episcopal bishop who was drummed out the church and defrocked as a communist—which he was. In 1925 Brown had the distinction of being the first churchman tried for heresy since the Reformation, which he promptly turned into a book entitled, naturally, ‘My Heresy’.

We went to school next to this rambling, brick structure with an enclosed walkway to the old carriage house where a faint, eerie light always burned. For us kids the place was obviously haunted, and the idea that the last resident was a creepy old commie red meant that for sure he would snatch us from beyond the grave and do horrible things to us if we dared to get too close. I don’t remember anyone even making the suggestion that we try to get inside and roam the abandoned rooms. Our teachers said that since he had left his estate to the CP, the place was tied up in court, and so matters stood for decades.

Galion managed to acquire the Brown mansion, and the local historical society now runs a lovely museum there with fascinating material. Brown turns out to have been quite a character. He was such a charismatic preacher that the Episcopal hierarchy, impressed with the new converts he drew, made him a bishop and then sent him to Arkansas in 1899 for seven years—more on that later. But Brown had had a difficult and abusive childhood and cared about the downtrodden as his Christian faith instructed. He immediately sympathized with the Russian Revolution when it occurred, which of course meant trouble.

We had a tour of the place during the weekend of our class reunion, and the town seems to have made its peace with BBB’s ruby-red past, no doubt made easier by the demise of the Soviets he championed. The young lady curators can speak of ‘the Bishop’ respectfully and remind visitors, while viewing the hammer and sickle engraved on the floor tiles, that he handed out meal vouchers to hobos during the depression and was friends with Helen Keller and Eugene V. Debs. We even learned that our famed and acclaimed drama coach, the late Miriam Sayre, had read to the Bishop as a young girl when his eyesight failed, and we saw the study where this occurred, festooned with portraits of Marx, Lenin and Stalin. Since Brown paid for Miss Sayre’s education at Ohio State, we also were beneficiaries of his largesse without knowing it.

Aside from the curiosities [such as the priceless item at right that the bishop authored], however, the museum exhibition doesn’t really answer the question of what turned a small-town Christian pastor into a sophisticated champion of socialist thought? I don’t know enough of the story, but I suspect the break occurred during his sojourn in the Jim Crow South as bishop of Arkansas. Eventually, he was politely invited to leave the state as his thinking did not square with that of the locals, and we can imagine that the experience of official racism lovingly embraced by his Christian institution must have rattled his cage profoundly. Brown wrote a pamphlet on ‘The crucial race question’ dated 1907, just after his return.

From there it might well have been a fairly easy leap to question the entire structure upon which his life previously had been built. Continuous reading, as evidenced by his book-lined studies, must have introduced him to the ferment of iconoclastic ideas circulating in the early decades of the century, and then the Bolshevik upheaval put the icing on the cake. It’s easy to see the folly of enthusiasm for old Joe Stalin from our post hoc perspective, but a strong-willed intellect seeking to understand his world—and change it—could have found a lot of answers in the radical currents of the times.

I linger on this history in part because I relived it in my own way, five decades later. We were hatched in the overheated crucible of the Cold War and believed what we were told, embraced the dazzling history delivered to us about America’s glorious triumph over Naziism and the ongoing battle against the next evil foe. Then came the disturbing challenges to segregation, the scenes of brutality from Birmingham and Hattiesburg, and finally the carnage of Vietnam, in which we were expected to participate ourselves. Suddenly, the narrative did not hang together quite so seamlessly.

In the reactive search for a more convincing explanation of this disorienting new information about our world, I too careened into naïve and overly simplistic visions. Much of it has left me healthily skeptical, but I also thank my lucky stars and my innate caution that I did not swallow whole any of the more extreme versions circulating in the wild and woolly ‘60s and ‘70s. Eventually, journalism gave me the discipline to look more closely and more deeply at a variety of situations and enabled me to realize that the truth is radical enough and usually needs little ideological embellishment.

And yet a structured framework for understanding is also essential to confront the whirlwinds of change, to make sense of phenomena and sort it into patterns. Bad Bishop Brown’s discovery of Karl M & Associates would have helped him see that the local captains of industry were not entirely free agents but just as buffeted by forces beyond their individual control as the workers laboring in the factories lining the Erie-Lackawanna tracks that I played along (despite strict prohibitions).

But Brown was dismissed as a dangerous nut, and his ideas suppressed. Galion is so much the worse—and yet now, with the town in ruins, the questions posed by the bad bishop about the nature of our economic system have never been more relevant. As one local lady said to me, ‘Maybe the bishop was just ahead of his time’.

Hooray for debit card fees

2011-10-01T07:10:00.001-07:00

Bank of America, in perhaps one of its dying acts, has announced that debit card users will be hit with a five-dollar monthly fee. Despite the gross excess of the charge, this is a good thing. Instead of banks silently and almost secretly extracting value from retailers through their monopoly control of plastic, those customers utilizing the convenience now must see—and feel—its cost.

The ostensible source of the change is a new government limit to the banks’ gouge-per-swipe fees. As usual, the banksters are determined to howl with outrage over this feeble attempt to interfere with their looting of the productive economy. Its apologists are quick off the mark to blame Dodd-Frank, the new financial regulatory framework, for forcing them to assault their customers in this new way. They don’t want us to know that at 21 cents a swipe, they’re still reaching deep into the consumer pocket, just not quite as deeply as pre-Dodd-Frank when they collected on average 44 cents per debit.

The credit card industry is one of the most grotesque scams perpetrated on American consumers since the sale of snake oil for rheumatism. They were first offered as a convenience for travelers or large purchases to avoid the risks of carrying cash, but then we were seduced and encouraged to use them to buy toothpaste. Interest rates were supposed to reflect the minor costs of floating us the purchase price of our items for 30 days or for allowing us to pay off the merchandise in quotas, which also enabled stores to extend credit without the headache of pursuing deadbeats.

But then the hyper-inflationary 1970s gave banks permission to match the country’s sky-high overall interest rates as they climbed into the upper teens, and naturally once those fell back to earth, the credit card owners continued to charge at the peak while obtaining funds for a fraction. That turned the business into a gold mine as anyone who slipped behind on payments could easily be trapped in lucrative debt peonage. Not content to simply offer financial services, banks had found that they could insert a needle directly into the budgetary veins of working Americans and permanently siphon off their blood. Now that BOFA et al. have acquired the habit, the withdrawal symptoms are undoubtedly agonizing.

According to a consumer advocate interviewed on The News Hour Friday night, the cost of processing a debit card swipe is about 4 cents, so banks are still going to make a killing. That won’t stop them from screaming bloody murder and trying to shift customer outrage to government regulators who dared to moderate their pursuit of all the money, all the time. Count on the biggest banks to bump up their fees in tandem so that few mortals can escape the new regime by shifting their accounts to the competition.

A real innovation would be to allow retailers to offer discounts for cash payment, something the credit card monopoly furiously resists as they know that buyers would then realize that the ability to get instant credit has a cost. Under the current system banks get showers of gold while store owners and merchants, i.e., the real economy, are stuck with the golden showers, forced to fork over a hefty percentage of credit card sales for the privilege of offering plastic transactions.

This fight is far from over, and we cannot rely on the political establishment to hold the line against further bankster intimidation. Meanwhile, a shift back to broader use of cash for everyday payments looks like a healthy resistance tactic for consumers suddenly aware of this hidden cost benefiting no one but Uncle Scrooge.

And justice for all . . .

2011-09-30T19:06:00.000-07:00

Amanda Knox may be guilty, or she may not, but at least she has had the opportunity to defend herself in an Italian court of law. The nonstop coverage of her case must reflect considerable interest among viewers in her fate, and tonight’s wrap-up made reference to the ‘judgment’ the Italian system of justice is facing along with Ms Knox given the criticism of its investigative and procedural performance in the case.

Curious, then, that a similar perspective on the U.S. counterpart continues to shine by its absence. There’s a new documentary film here in New York on the case of Omar Khadr, the 15-year-old Canadian picked up in Afghanistan in 2001 and accused of killing a soldier. Aside from the obvious detail that Afghanistan was a theatre of war in which killing is known to occur, we have since learned that this child was tortured by U.S. troops until he confessed and then shipped to the dungeons of Guantánamo where a stream of inquisitors tried to get him to reiterate his confession on videotape—without success.

The film, entitled ‘You Don’t Like the Truth’, is comprised mostly of excerpts from this chilling exercise in police interrogation techniques of a defenseless (and of course lawyerless) minor. Despite New York’s huge film scene where premières with directors present for Q&A are well attended, the crowd at Film Forum was measly. Indeed, the movie is not easy to watch, but then again it must have been a good deal more difficult to live through for Khadr, now in his 20s and still in prison although he’s due to be shipped to Canada for more years of incarceration next month.

What strikes me in observing these two very different legal proceedings with two completely different audiences is the facile racism of the double standards applied: Amanda, the white American girl, should be given a fair shot; Omar, the Muslim kid on a prayer mat, can rot in the Cuban sun because—as the Canadian interrogator says explicitly—an American soldier is dead. It’s pretty clear by the end of the picture that Omar couldn’t have tossed the deadly grenade because pictures from the scene, released to his lawyers years later, show him to be half-dead at the time, face down in a pile of rubble. But the point is not the guilt or innocence of a given prisoner, which does not really concern the jailers, nor their collaborators, nor I do not hesitate to add, us. It’s far simpler than that: the whole exercise is about revenge. Americans got killed on 9/11; Americans got killed in the Afghan firefight; someone has to pay. You’ll do.

A wonderful musical played on Broadway last year about the notorious 1930s Scottsboro Boys case, in which black men riding a freight train were accused of rape by a white woman, which of course in Alabama meant they were guilty or might as well be. Their obviously rigged trials dragged on for years, creating a cause celèbre and a nationwide solidarity movement that kept winning appeals and new trials, which were then rigged again. Eventually, the accused were offered their freedom, but only if they confessed. One refused and died in jail. Even seven decades later the case remains so sensitive that the spectacular production didn’t really catch fire even in liberal New York, and when the cast appeared on the Emmy awards show, they were reduced to performing a jolly-Negro number from Act I completely devoid of any of the play’s discomfiting content.

I think the Emmys producers knew intuitively that Americans today suffer from a gnawing discomfort about the operations of our legal apparatus, even if we remain only vaguely conscious of our anxiety. When political concerns trump the rule of law, the guilt or innocence of individual citizens fades into insignificance. This is a universal phenomenon that no legal system probably ever entirely escapes, but it’s unsettling to realize that the laws we think exist to protect us from unfair treatment, and often do, cannot withstand popular fury or even certain mundane bureaucratic pressures. Take the demented child-molestation-in-nursery-schools witchhunts of the ‘70s and ‘80s when suddenly fundamentalist Christians and liberal feminists alike were discovering anal sex orgies in daycare centers where they in fact had never occurred. Popular passions were assuaged, and many innocent lives were destroyed.

And yet the law is a wonderful thing. Americans, despite our weakness and complicity with the steady deterioration of our citizenship, also intuitively believe in suspects being read their Miranda rights and getting a chance to defend themselves in court. After all, we’ve grown up watching Law & Order, NCIS, CSI and before that The Defenders, Perry Mason and another dozen shows I can’t think of. We love courtroom drama, and we sense that the laborious procedures in place there set a minimum bar for the police and prosecutorial powers that could easily run roughshod over the rest of us as occurs in many countries around the world. It’s taken us at least 500 years to split the roles of judge, jury and executioner so that the high and mighty and their police agents couldn’t peremptorily subject us to the terror of impunity. Now, they say that ‘terror’ is the reason they should get all those roles back.

There is much more to say about the erosion of our precious judicial guarantees that Obama has now endorsed and aggravated. But today’s development merits a quick notice: it is now officially permitted for the president to determine that a U.S. citizen is an enemy of the state and can be targeted for liquidation with a remote-controlled drone. The White House insists Anwar al-Awlaki was guilty of terrorist acts but saw no need to charge him with any before carrying out extra-judicial murder in a foreign country. How long will it be before we discover that it can also be performed right here at home?

Requiem for a town

2011-09-27T00:26:00.000-07:00

This is the front door of the house in Galion, Ohio, where I grew up. The papers on the front door are foreclosure notices and other legal information from Freddie Mac, apparently the owner of the mortgage note (no doubt collateralized and resold for quick profit to take advantage of the government guarantee). I was told by an old classmate at the reunion that I probably could pick up the property for less than my parents paid for it when we moved there in 1955.

Galion was once a booming industrial town made prosperous originally by its location at the intersection of the old Pennsylvania and Erie-Lackawanna railroad lines. High school graduates from my era could go get a job at the Perfection Auto Body plant, North Electric, Galion Iron Works, Fisher Body in nearby Crestline, Pittsburgh Plate Glass, two overcoat factories and a couple of steel grave vault makers. If you didn’t like that job, you quit and got another one. Now those factories are ruins, and the working class neighborhoods that surround them are wrecks. A local website says 700 houses in the town sit empty.

My only surprise was hearing that crystal meth labs are still rare. However, my old classmates say heroin is big.

So this is what a few decades of deregulation and ‘free trade’ have done to the industrial heartland, thanks to the joint efforts of Democratic and Republican regimes alike. In my early adult years the jobs in Galion started to move south to the anti-union ‘right to work’ states. North Electric, for example, shipped its production to Tennessee.

Not content with moving operations around the U.S. to de-unionize their workforces and save on wages and benefits, the companies soon discovered the marvelous advantages to be found in corrupt, repressive regimes overseas that could provide limitless streams of docile, powerless workers, China being the classic example. How ironic after our McCarthyite 1950s childhoods to find it wasn’t reds under beds that threatened our country but the business elites who would sell out the country to communism.

As many observers more knowledgeable than I have pointed out, despite all the quacking and howling about getting the nasty state out of economic affairs, the United States does have an industrial policy. That policy for decades has been to dismantle domestic manufacturing and globalize it so that the large corporations can shift a greater percentage of earnings to profits and pay out less to workers. Reagan, Bush, Clinton and the rest are in full agreement on this point.

If we had had a worker- or union-based political party with a radical bent, perhaps the industrial transformation, were it really necessary, would have been resisted so that the masters of our universe were forced to do it in a less brutal way. Perhaps transitional planning could have occurred in which communities such as Galion could have acquired the tools to adapt and grow in new directions to take up the slack created by the waning of its industrial golden age.

Instead, its inhabitants were thrown willy-nilly into their own future to sink or swim as they might. Many thousands moved on.

Instructions issued for U.S. Middle East policy

2011-09-21T09:21:00.001-07:00

Smoke and Mirrors

2011-09-21T03:07:00.000-07:00

We can now see the outlines of the dish we will be served for the next 14 months of the Great Distraction known as presidential elections: Obama will be accused, by the people he did everything to please, of doing everything he should have done but didn’t.

Take the accusation from the neo-Marlboro Man, Rick Perry, that Obama is guilty of ‘appeasement’ and hostility to Israel. (The ‘appeasement’ line is a direct reference to Britain’s disastrous handling of Adolf Hitler in the run-up to World War 2—always a popular meme with Zionist absolutists.) The criticism is bizarre given Obama and Hillary C’s acquiescence to continued settlement building and three years of enabling of Israeli intransigence and refusal to offer anything on Palestine. But Obama dared to suggest the 1967 borders as the basis for a permanent settlement, and he’s now cast as Neville Chamberlain handing over Czechoslovakia to the Nazis.

Meanwhile on the domestic front, Obama has rolled out his election-year populism by calling for a ‘millionaires tax’, which has zero chance of becoming law but may sound plausible to some of his Democratic base. That makes him guilty of ‘class war’ to Madame Bachmann and the party of the rich when in fact he has done a far better job than they could have dreamed of protecting the fabulously, obscenely and criminally wealthy financial sector.

All of which augurs a huge national yawn as we prepare for a full year of even more deeply debased political non-debate. But what else could we expect of embarrassing television spectacles like the CNN ‘Dancing with the Pols’ show last week purporting to be a serious discussion of our future? Why don’t we just ask Alec Tribec to stand the candidates behind the little Jeopardy boxes with smiley-face name tags (‘Newt!’, ‘Ron!’, ‘Mitch!’) and award the presidency to whomever can provide the best question for the answer, ‘Mental state characterized by lack of empathy and an inflated sense of self-importance’?

Legalized prostitution at CBS

2011-09-19T19:26:00.000-07:00

CBS Evening News just ran a story about the explosion in prescriptions of the morphine-like painkiller Oxycontin—something like 3 billion doses per year (could that possibly be?)—much of it diverted to illicit use. The curious aspect of the report, which featured a Michael Moore-ish confrontation with a suspect pharmacist in Florida, was that there was not ONE mention of the company that produces this drug now being siphoned off in vast quantities to the contraband market.

We’re particularly aware of pharmaceutical opiates here in New York after the gruesome and terrifying pharmacy massacre that occurred on Long Island this past June in which a crazed addict mowed down two druggists and two unlucky bystanders during a robbery. The bizarrely casual mayhem gave us a clue to the dangers of this new mass addiction, one that hasn’t fully penetrated pop culture just yet.

A fellow I met a while back who works in drug counseling in an upstate New York city told me that addiction to pharmaceutical painkillers is the number one problem they see today. Once the addicted run out of pharmacy options, they then turn to street heroin buys—quite a reversal from the classic drug scenes of yesteryear.

For the record Oxycontin is produced Purdue Pharma of Stamford, Connecticut. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about Purdue’s Olympic-level figure skating along the edges of legality:

In May 2007 Purdue Pharma agreed to pay $19.5 million in fines relating to aggressive off-label marketing practices of OxyContin in 26 states and the District of Columbia. In specific, the company encouraged dosing more frequent than the recommended interval of 12 hours and did not fully disclose the risk of hazardous or harmful use.

Later in May 2007 Purdue Pharma and three of its top executives pleaded guilty in a Virginia federal court to charges that they misbranded OxyContin by representing it to have ‘less euphoric effect and less abuse potential’ than it actually has and by claiming that people taking the drug at low doses could stop taking it suddenly without symptoms of withdrawal. The FDA had not approved these claims. The company and the executives were to pay $634 million in fines for felony and misdemeanor misbranding.

In October 2007 officials in Kentucky filed a lawsuit against Purdue Pharma for misleading health care providers and consumers ‘regarding the appropriate uses, risks and safety of OxyContin’; as of mid-2008, however, the case had been ‘consolidated with other lawsuits into a single multi-litigation suit’ in a federal court in New York.

A lone pharmacist in a pathetic strip mall with a dubious prescribing history is an easy target for big, bad TV guys. But given the relevance of the producer company’s aggressive promotion of its drug and the increasing social cost of this vast web of over-prescription, wouldn’t it have been appropriate for the CBS ‘reporter’ to have unleashed his cameras on the top executives of Purdue also? Could the huge amount of televised drug-pushing, er, advertising, which earns large sums of money for CBS’s owners, have anything to do with this glaring omission?

Teeter-totter

2011-09-14T04:26:00.000-07:00

Bipeds ruling nations are not, generally speaking, a healthy set of specimens, but in some periods of history the loonies have to dissemble. That doesn’t seem to be the case any more, and it makes the world is a more dangerous place than usual. All the talk this week is about banking crises and chronic unemployment. Let’s not forget war.

The teetering French banks, just downgraded this morning by one of the corrupt rating agencies, have been labeled ‘Credit-Anstalt 2.0’ by some wags. That was the name of the Austrian bank whose collapse marked the real start of the Great Depression, foreshadowed but not really caused by the 1929 stock crash. A Euro functionary sounded quite desperate when sounding alarms this morning about the dangers to the whole EU project.

Meanwhile, tectonic shifts are occurring in the Middle East as Turkish PM Erdogan is visiting revolutionary Egypt to openly forge an anti-Israel bloc. A Guardian correspondent wrote:

Erdogan arrived in the country accompanied by an army of 200 Turkish businessmen and has announced plans to increase investment and establish a formal strategic co-operation council between the two nations. With Egypt’s military junta on the back foot over recent pro-change protests and the breaching of the Israeli embassy during a protest in Cairo last week, this trip has come at a particularly sensitive time.

The report also called Erdogan a ‘media star’ as thousands of Egyptians cheered his arrival at the Cairo airport. ‘With his strong rhetoric on Turkish-Arab unity, high-profile satellite TV chatshow appearances and photogenic walkabouts in the capital—including an impromptu and warm meeting with street protesters campaigning for regime change in Syria and Yemen—Erdogan did little to hide his intention of positioning Turkey into a leadership role at the heart of the Arab spring’.

In case no one has noticed, Israeli leaders are not characterized by sober moderation. They operate from a permanent siege mentality even when on a winning streak; now, by alienating everyone, they’ve managed to give themselves real motive for concern.

How hard would it have been for the Israelis to apologize for killing civilians aboard the Turkish aid ship? For that matter, why not welcome Palestinian statehood at the UN and be done with it? Instead, the nutcase and openly racist Israeli foreign minister indulges in cheap, sophomoric insults with the result that the long-term alliance with Turkey is perhaps mortally wounded.

But apologies from the die-hards in Tel Aviv are as likely as polite debate at Fox News. These reactionary elements have been so empowered for so long and have intimidated and browbeaten their adversaries into such cowed defensiveness that they are no longer capable of behaving in their own best interests. This, IMHO, is a feature of our age, and an ominous one—we cannot expect our leaders to pursue even their own goals in a rational fashion.

The Israelis must be particularly edgy given that their only real ally in the world—us—is overstretched and weakened by domestic strife, including an economy that refuses to jump-start. So as things deteriorate on a variety of fronts simultaneously, the threat of sudden, game-changing reactions rises sharply.

On that note I observe that the inimitable Dick Cheney, instead of having to spend his time working with his lawyers to defend himself from the charges of crimes against humanity that he merits, is once again stirring the pot for the attack on Iran that he couldn’t convince W to authorize when they were in office.

Cheney phrases this war-mongering as a mere belief that Israel ‘would’ bomb Iran if the former felt threatened but then quickly adds that Iran is in fact ‘an existential threat’. Case closed.

It goes without saying that a little pre-electoral war-making never did any politician any harm—especially if it can be dressed up as victory. Is there any evidence that Obama would hesitate to go this route? I see none.

Insomniac early warning

2011-09-12T01:12:00.000-07:00

Up at 3 a.m. reading the European papers online. Will the next banking crisis start today? Greek bailout deal collapsing. . . French banks to get a downgrade. . . Eurozone leaders have no strategy. . . markets signaling another big thumping. . . world economies in the toilet. . . .

More nasty in the 9th district

2011-09-11T10:03:00.000-07:00

A special election to fill the vacated House seat of Anthony (‘All-in’) Weiner is expected to provide yet another snapshot of parochial selfishness in Wonderfully Liberal New York. David Weprin [above, left] was tapped for the thankless chore of running by the local Democratic machine because nobody more ambitious wanted to bother with a district that is slated to disappear in the next reapportionment. He was expected to dutifully show up and vote with the Democratic minority in a legislative chamber reduced to meaninglessness by the extortionists of the Tea Party.

But then former mayor and perennial asshole Ed Koch showed up to endorse his Republican opponent and Tea Party favorite, Bob Turner [right], for the completely bizarre reason that Obama needed a good mid-term slap for being so tough on Israel. Huh? I guess not authorizing Tel Aviv to launch drone missiles at Iran means you’re unreliable as a Zion-booster.

Weprin, as an orthodox Jew representing a state assembly district full of bloc-voting Hasidim, could hardly be taken as weak on the topic of Israel. But Koch said the heavily Democratic Brooklyn-Queens district should ‘send a message’ on Israel to Obama by electing a Republican.

But there’s another side to this race: Weprin is also vulnerable because he supported same-sex marriage in the recent vote in Albany, and that’s an issue that gets a lot of sidelocks on fire. It’s ironic that Koch, a lifelong bachelor who suffered from anti-gay innuendo during his political career, should help gang up on one of the guys who made this courageous vote. Same-sex marriage probably moved another orthodox Jewish Brooklyn Assemblyman, Dov Hikind, to endorse Weprin’s Roman Catholic opponent.

Koch is retired and didn’t have to wait to be dead to get his name on a bridge (the former Queensboro). So it’s hard to parse out what exactly motivated him to get involved in this peculiar way. Maybe he just misses being a player. But Koch has had a troubled relationship with gay issues—in the recent PBS documentary on the origins of gay emancipation, he makes a rather shocking admission that he backed the notorious raids on the Stonewall Inn because the street kids and riffraff that patronized it were annoying the neighbors. Who knows, maybe he resents the way things have evolved and how young people can live.

The latest poll has the Teabagger up by six points, pretty amazing in a heavily Dem district. In any case the national buzz we’ll hear if the Dems lose this by-election won’t have much to do with gay marriage or Israel, however. It will be interpreted as yet another repudiation of the Obama team’s management of the economy and its political irrelevancy. Meanwhile, Koch will have helped put an end to the career of an orthodox Jew who dared to buck his peers’ oppressive posture on sex.

Head fake?

2011-09-09T01:14:00.001-07:00

Obama’s speech showed that he in fact does know how to package a case, present it forcefully and mobilize the power of his office to create political facts. So he isn’t clueless after all, he just hasn’t wanted to use these tools up to now.

So what does the New, Improved Obama propose? To respond to the jobs crisis he (finally!) acknowledges by raiding the Social Security piggy-bank. Cutting in half the payroll tax—which has kept Social Security solvent for 80 years despite the full-throated campaign to declare it bankrupt—means that to restart the economy’s sputtering engine, the national retirement system should be further undermined.

There is also some spending in the emergency proposal, to which we can fully expect the Republican Furies to object. But if they are smart, they will go along with it to nail down the huge prize Obama is handing them by offering to turn their dire prophecies about Social Security insolvency into a reality.

I’ll have to read the fine print, but my first impression is that this progressive-sounding proposal is the worst thing to emerge from the Obama White House yet. Does the president secretly belong to the Tea Party?

GOP pre-coronation ceremony

2011-09-08T03:55:00.001-07:00

I don’t get the gloating and laughing over the increasingly surreal crop of Republican presidential candidates unless it’s a meant as open-bar-at-the-apocalypse fatalism. But the idea that these people are so far off the sanity scale that their display serves the other camp is delusional. [photo: AP/Chris Carlson]

The political Pollyannas are going to spend so much ink on the distraction of presidential electioneering that it may keep GDP positive for the next few quarters. But I see no indication that the Republicans’ choice of a nominee will make much difference given that to have any sort of contest, be it in war or baseball, there must be two opposing sides. What side does Barack Obama represent?

For example, we’ll hear a lot today about Rick Perry calling Social Security a Ponzi scheme. Obama doesn’t use that term, but he falsely pretends that the 80-year-old national pension guarantee program requires immediate first aid. For whom do I vote if I think the program should be defended vigorously and not raided in the name of bogus ‘deficit reduction’? Why do we think people concerned about that will rush out to support someone who openly promises to trash it?

Poor, clueless John Huntsman endorsed science, immediately showing the futility of his campaign. He thereby skates dangerously close to outflanking Obama from the left. The president’s buckling to the polluters on clean air shows that Democrats don’t let science stand in the way of political expendiency/cowardice either. Where do people concerned about green issues put the X? What makes us think they will bother?

And why should nasty bloodymindedness such as that displayed by Perry on the death penalty will disturb or mobilize significant numbers of people? The every-sperm-is-sacred Christian crowd has never shied away from cheering for death when it involves people they dislike, be they Afghans, Iraqis or prisoners in Texas. Given Obama’s silent indifference to civilian casualties, official use of drone-delivered assassination as a foreign policy tool and complicity with torture, where are people with a concept of human rights supposed to collect?

For the Republican juggernaut—soon to be strengthened with limitless oceans of cash—to be slowed down in the least, there would have to be an opposing force. I see no signs of one whatsoever. I therefore conclude that the big build-up over the presidential nomination nod is already an anti-climax. Obama was useful to the ruling elite in giving the appearance that something fundamental was going to change. He promptly protected the war criminals and the ran interference for the financier thieves. That done, he’s not needed any more. The new team is already in charge, and the specific assignments that will be distributed—including commander-in-chief—are a mere detail.

British MI6 use of Qaddafy

2011-09-05T07:37:00.000-07:00

The cover-up of British-Qaddafy secret service links, including rendition and torture of detainees, is unraveling.

Tripoli was overrun by the rebels so quickly that Qaddafy’s over-confident minions did not manage to destroy all incriminating documents, an outcome that the NATO allies must be quite unhappy about. But the truth is quite rapidly—‘trickle’ may not, in fact, be the right term.

Human Rights Watch has apparently discovered a letter from Mark Allen, the head of MI6’s counter-terrorism unit, to Qaddafy’s chief henchman: ‘I was grateful to you for helping the officer we sent out last week. I am so glad’. Allen also refers to ‘the remarkable relationship we have built over recent years’.

The background is that Qaddafy’s years as a notorious bad-boy and terrorist enabler came to an end when Tony Blair and George W Bush realized that he could come in quite handy as a ruthless sonofabitch on the U.S./U.K. team rather than a ruthless, freelance sonofabith. They then incorporated his corrupt regime into their web of torture stations to which anyone suspected of al-Qaeda ties could be easily disappeared.

The discovery by Human Rights Watch also included the unsurprising news that British intelligence was cooperating with the Chinese Communists to spy on Muslims in western China and that the Chinese state arms agency was trying to sell weapons to Qaddafy in the weeks before his overthrow. (The Chinese denials on that one are quite hilarious given that they pretend that this entity was acting on its own without orders from the top.)

How marvelous it would be if someone, somewhere could start drumming it into people’s heads that the supposed architect of the Lockerbie airplane bombing, the one that sent American citizens’ bodies exploding over Scotland, was then made a partner in an ultra-secret CIA-MI6 ‘security’ operation. This is the price we are asked to pay for being ‘safe’.

Jack Straw, Blair’s foreign secretary at the time of the invasion of Iraq to seize its ‘weapons of mass destruction’ AND during the time of the now-discovered joint spy venture with Qaddafy, issued the following non-denial denial about the cache of secret papers. Note the weasel words employed:

The position of the British government—successive British governments, not least when I was British foreign secretary—was very clear. And that was that we were opposed to unlawful rendition, we were opposed to any use of torture or any other similar methods and not only did we not agree with it, we were not complicit in it, nor did we turn a blind eye to it . . . . No foreign secretary can know all the details of what its intelligence agencies are doing.

Anyone versed in the reading of these legalistic contortionist acts can see immediately that the last line cancels out all the preceding b.s. A fair translation would read: ‘The position of the government—not what actually happened but the position we hid behind—was obviously to behave, i.e., to not do A, to not do B and to not do C. But then we went ahead and did the opposite, and if we get caught, some poor shit way down the food chain is going to get it in the neck, not me’.

A human rights group named Liberty, whose representatives just recently walked out of a phony ‘investigation’ into British renditions last week, demanded a new procedure to get to the bottom of the constant tissue of lies.

Director Shami Chakrabarti said, ‘The latest scandalous revelations of intimate trading of “detainee debriefings” with the Gaddafi regime render the [previous] process completely inadequate. . . . We urge the government to understand the gravity of what happened under the last administration and to think again whilst there is still time to rescue Britain’s reputation in the world’.

That implies that Britain cares about its reputation, which is not an idle question. Torture is still the nail upon which the ‘West’ insists upon hanging its last shred of credibility as a haven of human rights and the rule of law. We will see if the British ruling elite, awash in scandal and incapable of exercising leadership while the world economy heads into the toilet, stubbornly clings to its criminal practices.

The DNC discovers bad manners

2011-09-03T13:40:00.000-07:00

Let’s do a recollection experiment: when the Tea Party burst onto the scene to denounce Obama’s health insurance reform in 2009, how many times did we hear their Republican enablers chide or attack them as impolite, rude, obnoxious, rowdy, threatening, counter-productive, screamers, or media-hounds—all of which terms could reasonably have fit on a number of occasions?

Someone could do an Internet search of the coverage, but I’m pretty confident we would find that the GOP pols benefiting from tea-bagger rage to undermine Obama stayed mum about their bad behavior. Now check out this report from Iowa about how local Democratic Party stalwarts promptly trashed the only people out raising hell about the threats to Social Security by attending a Chuck Grassley town hall meeting and getting in his face.

‘It’s unfortunate that they continue to mistake screaming for persuasion and embarrass themselves in this manner’, party Chairwoman Sue Dvorsky said in a statement released Wednesday.

‘They need to focus on getting results and not on getting on TV’, Sam Roecker, communications director for the state Democratic Party, told The Huffington Post.

Aside from the obvious retort that ‘getting on TV’ is fully equivalent to ‘getting results’ in this TV-driven political day and age, it’s curious that the state Dem poobahs in Iowa seem so much more exercised by displays of populist rage than by Republican attacks on our well-being. But then again, that makes perfect sense given that their boss, Barack Obama, is part and parcel of the assault.

As the campaign season moves into higher gear later this year, the chattering classes will focus on the mud flying in the battle for the GOP nomination. But this more significant story will occupy only the sidebars if it gets told at all: the ferocious campaign by the Democratic machine to squelch effective dissent against the multifaceted Obama sellout—even when said dissent is not even directed at him.

Natural disasters--another way to crush the weak

2011-09-01T18:16:00.000-07:00

The Great Hurricane of 2011 has come and gone, and the city managed quite well though the suburbs are still a mess nearly a week later with very serious damage. Here in town, there was some carping and moaning about evacuations and transit shut-downs given that nothing much happened, but the mayor’s team—never fully recovered from their poor showing at last winter’s blizzards—were not going to be caught erring on the side of excessive confidence. [Photo: Natalia Jimenez, Newark Star-Ledger]

My neighborhood had a few downed trees and a lot of water. If no one had told us it was a hurricane, we wouldn’t have noticed anything unusual. The streets were quiet and deserted all weekend, which is a sight to behold in New York and rather pleasant in a slightly unsettling way. The enforced indoor weekend wasn’t terrible even though the television channels were seized by narcissistic TV ‘personalities’ who jammed their vapid commentaries down our throats just like the subway panhandlers who say they are ‘sorry to disturb you’ and then torture everyone mercilessly until they’re paid off.

Wheedling and cadging are the recourse of the trapped poor (and the dysfunctional, but I’m not referring to them), and it is very annoying but understandable if there are no alternatives. A sensible and well-ordered society would suppress it ruthlessly in public spaces (like subway cars) and offer people services instead, rather forcibly, thus: Hungry? You can get a meal through an established procedure; if you don’t want it, stay out of people’s faces. Of course, if the hungry routine is bullshit, then piss off up a rope.

This digression has a point, please bear with me. The laughable Republican reaction—insisting on a pound of flesh, er budget cuts, before hurricane relief is forthcoming—made me recall my first-hand observations of disaster aid in the area around Valparaíso in Chile during the earthquake of 1985, a far milder one than the gigantic 2010 follow-up. Although horrible Eric Cantor backed down, it’s a good moment to think about how relief efforts reflect a society and what it tells us about our country to see the attitudes and practices on display when Mother N strikes.

An acquaintance told me that in a prior hurricane some 15 years ago, FEMA came through the flooded Jersey suburbs and essentially handed out $1,000 checks to anyone in the affected area based on the reasonable assumption that people with property in a flood zone would need to fix things or buy things, which would cost them money. Therefore, the government could give them some without making too much fuss about it. If someone with a Maserati in the driveway also picked up a payment, or a sharpie scammed the Red Cross for a free blanket, nobody’s hair caught on fire.

By contrast, the Pinochet regime immediately treated Chileans made destitute and/or homeless by the earthquake as suspect chiselers. I interviewed one general in charge of relief efforts who waxed on a great length about how people always wanted stuff for free, how disasters enabled dishonest people to take advantage, and on and on. Meanwhile, a stream of trucks full of donated clothing passed through the nearby military base at Tejas Verdes, and the local people immediately started hearing tales of how the guys in uniform were selecting all the best stuff for themselves.

On the ground, people weren’t getting much help aside from grim meals in the temporary shelters. Instead of effective aid, the military state responded with—surveys. Those who could still live in their damaged homes received regular visits from a series of government reps whose job was to provide no assistance to people in need but to gather statistics on them. I remember one distraught woman sinking into furious despair after her seventh or eighth visit from a bureaucrat with a clipboard asking the same questions she’d already answered but who could give her no information about when this precious data might be channeled into some useful purpose.

People caught in this trap laid by a cynical, corrupt system concerned solely with producing some pointless statistics to make itself look good on TV promptly will recur to begging, hustling and petty thievery. They will prey upon the unwary, including each other, and make life annoying as hell for anyone they think they can browbeat into shedding some spare change. Equally cynical charities will spring up to turn their suffering into melodrama with the proper narrative arc to make donors feel good and neutralize criticism. What will not happen is systematic, long-term solutions to the victims’ problems, which were worsened by the natural disaster but in very few cases actually created by it. (A rare exception is the sort of slow, steady work by true local development experts like my old friends at EPES.)

Similarly, here at home we should anticipate further deterioration in our treatment by the state in the direction of this familiar, sorry dynamic. Blame-the-poor and favor-the-rich attitudes and measures have become ever more deeply embedded as automatic responses to any such occurrence. A parallel can already be seen clearly in the mortgage mess where the same philosophy is operating, i.e., it’s not that the banks are crooked, it’s greedy homeowners who thought they could afford a big mansion and then crapped out on their payments. Expect more of the same.

Lawlessness from Guantánamo to Mobile

2011-08-26T12:01:00.000-07:00

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism tells the story of two home-owners cheated out of their lives by Chase, a.k.a., JPMorganChase whose CEO, Jamie Dimon, is high up on the Obama White House invite list. When getting a feel for just how ruthlessly corrupt this institution is, try to keep in mind that this is the outfit feted and celebrated by the Democratic Party stalwarts, not the usual suspects regularly fellated by bad old GOP figures like Romney, Bachmann and Perry. I introduce the harrowing tales this way to underline that we are experiencing a slow coup d’état by the financier/rentier class that has completely seized control of both major parties and is proceeding to beggar us in exactly the bipartisan fashion that Obama is so enamored of.

Here’s one of the stories: April Barnett bought a house in Oxford, Alabama in 2007. Her fiancé and later husband Jason helped with the down payment.

In 2010 the house burned down. It was fully insured. The insurance company paid Chase the full amount of the balance due on two mortgage notes.

Chase cashed the checks. Voilà. But not so fast.

Shortly thereafter, April, now pregnant, checked the online record of the mortgage balance. It was listed as unpaid. No one at Chase could tell her why.

April and her husband now started getting repeated harassing telephone calls demanding further payment. They could never get anyone at this ‘bank’ to check their own records to find that the full value of the mortgage was sitting in Chase’s accounts and had been for months.

Chase then began foreclosure proceedings—despite having received the full amount of the mortgage balance from the insurance company.

Eventually, the bank ‘discovered’ that it had received the money but somehow did not know what it was for, despite having clear instructions from the insurance company that had issued payment. But Chase then demanded an additional $8,000 to ‘bring the loan current’. [Hint: was this the real reason the payment was ‘misapplied’?]

Eventually, Chase was forced to admit that it had been paid in full and released the lien. However, when April and Jason later sought a mortgage for a new house, they discovered to their horror (but not surprise) that Chase had reported them to a credit bureau for the (unfair, illicit, negligent, whatever) foreclosure. Their new mortgage loan, which was going to be at 4.1%, suddenly shot up to 6.8%, a penalty of over $100,000 over the life of the 30-year note.

While preparing to sue the ass off Chase, the now destitute couple tried to buy a washing machine at a home supply store. Their application for a store credit card was denied because Chase still refused to take the phony foreclosure off their credit report.

Now, there has been a lot of talk about banks making ‘mistakes’. What happened to the Barnetts were not mistakes—they reflect a pattern of misapplication of monies engineered to cause phony arrears or defaults, which then enable the mortgage servicers to charge extra fees and browbeat, intimidate and torture defenseless consumers into paying off the extortion. It is absolutely in no way different from having to give Paulie and Christopher 500 bucks out of the till of your corner deli to avoid a broken kneecap.

Smith has a second, eerily similar story, which those with strong stomachs and not in a homicidal frame of mind already can read here that illustrates once again that these drive-by assaults on customers are not accidents, errors, mishaps, goofs, screw-ups or the result of a low-level clerk’s hangover. THEY ARE STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE FOR CRIMINAL INSTITUTIONS KNOWN AS BANKS.

That’s why the Wall Street-Geithner-Obama posture of not pressing ‘technical’ issues against mortgage abuses (like New York AG Schneiderman is trying to do pretty much solito and getting all kinds of heat for) that could ‘undermine the banking system’ is so much repugnant bullshit. Schneiderman wants to unearth and prosecute and eventually put a stop to concerted criminal behavior that, if left unchecked, can and will undermine the rule of law in business. If our present Masters of the Universe think the housing market is weak now, just wait until the great mass of citizens from Nevada to North Dakota gets the idea that having a bank loan means risking your face being ripped off.

For example: in the comments column of Smith’s post today, I read this from Caitlin O: ‘We’ll be looking for a retirement home in another decade or so and are saving for it now with the intention of paying cash. We also intend to have a full forensic title audit done before we close. Sadly, this seems to be the route a prudent person has to take today’.

Caitlin is answered by Alice who writes: ‘You are hardly the crazy one here. You are the smart one, and this is coming from someone who made a career in the mortgage business. The “biggest investment in your life” is what we told our loan applicants. I would never advise anyone to buy a home today. I have read the docs they are having people sign at closing, and the only thing the pretender lenders have left out are the requirement that you turn your first-born over to them’. [emphasis added]

I further believe that this sea of corruption is exactly and precisely reflected in that other festival of lawlessness known as the Bush Administration and specifically its successful introduction of torture into the accepted, standard practice of the government of the United States, along with suspension of habeas corpus rights, massive invasion of privacy and all the rest of it, now being celebrated and justified by Cheney on his book tour.

Both of these phenomena—the great bank rip-off and the torture regime—have been endorsed and strengthened by President Barack Let’s-Look-Forward-Not-Backward Obama, ie, the one now in office and towards whom any meaningful resistance must now be directed.

Is it 1910?

2011-08-26T04:05:00.000-07:00

When we read about the Robber Barons like Carnegie and Rockefeller in high school, the tone was one of amazement and marvel at the crude old days when individuals amassed such wealth that a single man’s morning attack of bursitis could shift the tectonic plates of the U.S. economy. Well, guess what, them times are back, whoopee. Warren Buffett has now come to the single-handed rescue of Bank of America, an entity whose managers swore just 24 hours before that it did not need any such help. Shades of 2007! Recall how often you heard, ‘Everything is/will be just fine’ back then, right before the business-political complex had a massive panic attack.

Buffett bought $5 billion worth of preferred shares in the ‘perfectly solvent’ second-largest bank of the land and got a lucrative deal on another piece of business called warrants, which he can cash in later. But whether or not he makes money on paper is pretty irrelevant, even to a guy who sits atop a pile of gold that Scrooge McDuck couldn’t even fantasize about. If BOFA goes down, Buffett knows that the U.S. government will ride to his rescue a la TARP, which saved Buffett’s investment in Goldman Sachs. So let’s not fall into the wise-old-Warren camp and rush down to buy a few shares.

Meanwhile, will Buffett’s billions save us from the next banking crisis? Nobody, and I mean nobody knows.

Pundit narcissism

2011-08-22T18:15:00.000-07:00

Watching a people rise up and throw off the yoke of an oppressive, murderous regime despite vast risks to life, limb and loved ones ought to occasion a moment of joyous congratulations. We certainly would be cheering if it were we ourselves who had done it.

All the subtle sniping at the Libyans’ heroic achievement is a mean-spirited outrage. Instead of marveling that a populace not blessed with iPhones and the Christian religion could actually gamble with their lives to escape tyranny, instead of applauding people who go beyond putting ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ on their license plates and wearing funny hats to their garden parties but who actually place their bodies in the way of the assassins’ bullets, the punditocracy has wasted less than a full day to tell us the many ways Libya’s revolution could go astray.

A Guardian sage stroked his beard and immediately warned that ‘there will be little time for euphoria’. Oh no, no celebrating down there in the street. Now, says this Brit expert, is the time to ‘unite factions’, overcome ‘tribalism and Islamists’ and recover from the ‘ruins of four decades of totalitarian control’ where state institutions remain ‘feeble and insecure’. (P.S.-I’m so relieved that we don’t suffer from ‘tribalism’ here in the United States and are carefully safeguarding our adherence to non-totalitarian practices through our non-feeble and secure institutions.)

Surely the most grotesque display of clueless insensitivity was today’s Daily Beast headline: ‘Libya War’s Unsung Heroes’. DB refers not, mind you, to actual Libyans but the ‘small crew of military specialists’ hunched over computer screens as they safely cruise above the Mediterranean and who this article says are ‘as responsible as anyone for Qaddafy’s defeat’. I wonder how the family members of those fighters who fell into the hands of Qaddafy’s torturers would react to the idea that NATO technicians are the true heroes of their revolution.

But even the knowledgeable and sympathetic, such as Patrick Cockburn at The Independent, got right onto wondering, now that Qaddafy has lost, who exactly has won? It seems that those even paying attention spend as much time lambasting each other for being right or wrong as noticing what the Libyan people might have been doing the last few months.

Glenn Greenwald, whom I normally admire greatly, couldn’t shift his sour gaze from the fact (true enough) that Obama wiped his backside with the War Powers Act by refusing to seek congressional endorsement for the intervention.

‘And now, in the wake of the apparent demise of the Gadaffi regime, we see all sorts of efforts, mostly from Democratic partisans, to exploit the emotions from Gadaffi’s fall to shame those who questioned the war’. . .

Greenwald is right, but his relentless trashing of his critics today reveals a barren, windswept heart. He could have taken a day off to celebrate human freedom instead of pounding away at his own virtue. I’m disappointed in him.

Another arena of unseemly display is the comparison of Libya with Iraq as if the people who actually inhabit these two countries are a sidebar to our discussion of outsiders’ roles in their affairs. To draw parallels between the Libyan civil uprising and Bush’s unprovoked attack is morally distasteful, to say the least. The two are not comparable; one is a revolution; the other, an aggressive war of conquest condemned and prohibited under the Nuremburg precedent. Or should revolutionaries refuse outside help? Let’s ask the ghost of George Washington.

I’m not sure what to make of this peculiar reaction to what should be a moment of worldwide inspiration. Is it merely Orientalism again rearing its racialist head? Are the smug western polities, including their most astute newswriters and best-informed observers, permanently incapable of taking Arabs seriously?

All these sourpusses may be right. But just as there’s a time for war and a time for peace, there’s a time for saying, Well done. There’s a time for honoring the sacrifice of people who laid down their lives for their country. I repeat, if it were us, we’d insist on it.

Ill fares the land

2011-08-21T05:22:00.000-07:00

I hasten to acknowledge theft of this title from the incomparable historian, the late Tony Judt, because he was, as usual, remarkably prescient about where we are headed, both here in the U.S. where Judt ended his teaching career at NYU and in Europe from whence he sprung. (A pity he didn’t manage to hang on for a few more months—what an essay he would have penned over the recent upheavals back home in England.) This was the title of his last major lecture, delivered without notes from his wheelchair before ‘Lou Gehrig’s disease’ incapacitated him completely.

The immediately evident illness afflicting our sister continents is the economic one, and I side with those pessimist commentators who think we are on the verge of something very big and very nasty. Despite the bleating reassurances from the permanent shill brigades, the evidence of my inexpert eyes tells me that the banking crisis of 2007-08 is soon to be back because, behind the smoke, the mirrors and the unfathomable trillions, it was never really solved. As Judt wrote, ‘The little crash of 2008 was a reminder that unregulated capitalism is its own worst enemy: sooner or later it must fall prey to its own excesses and turn again to the state for rescue. But if we do no more than pick up the pieces and carry on as before, we can look forward to greater upheavals in years to come’. Judt would probably have been surprised to find his warning justified so soon.

The TBTF behemoth banks may or may not be solvent; but if they aren’t, we won’t know until it is too late as the lame state continues to permit them to obfuscate and hide their books (as well as cook them). Meanwhile, European banks are most certainly skating on very thin ice, and while they could be saved by a vigorous dose of supra-national, pan-European intervention—precisely the antidote not to be found in the Sarkozy-Merkel medicine cabinet—they won’t be. God only knows how this will play out, but recent market gyrations suggest that some big players are heading for the hills, cash in hand.

That Anders Breivik, the Norwegian nazi, should have appeared just at this moment to murder liberal teens is no accident, not in any direct cause-and-effect sort of way but because he reflects so aptly the racist and reactionary mood of that continent and, I think, our own. What the euro mess has exposed is that the monetary union was ill thought out for a variety of technical reasons with which I’m only minimally conversant. But the next step, deeper integration and merging of international destinies in one, big, happy, Euro eco-political project, is now both required and impossible. While the Europeans’ economic futures are intertwined in actual fact, in moments of stress it’s much easier for people to revert to exclusive solidarity with clan, tribe, race and nation. This, I believe, is in store.

‘We work while they eat souvlaki and drink ouzo’, sneered the extreme right-wing Dutch pol, Geert Wilders, whose anti-immigrant party has steadily gained electoral strength. Wilders was speaking of the supposedly profligate Greeks, but his tone is immediately recognizable: lazy bums on welfare. Nativist parties all over Europe are vetoing any attempt by their political leadership to save the euro through massive, central bank intervention despite the harrowing consequences that may result for the Fatherland, much as the Tea Party blithely weakened our own prospects with its sophomoric antics. The reactionaries set the terms, and the supposedly sane are impotent—or complicit.

Wilders would be at home in the Republican Party of Arizona or perhaps Alabama. Hard-working [fill in nationality here]’s are being victimized by [insert hints of race/ethnicity here]’s who just want to suck the teat of our tax-and-spend nanny state. Sadly, this is extremely appealing to bipeds and in fact has been the main tune on the GOP playlist since the Nixon era and probably before I was born. Given the glacially slow and painful victories of the civil rights movement, overt racism is bad form—but the wink-wink version is making a comeback, capitalizing on the presence of a black president.

Oklahoma senator Tom Coburn was asked whether Obama wants to ‘destroy America’. Coburn pretended to defend the president but then promptly said that, as an ‘African-American male’, he had benefited from government programs (affirmative action, wink-wink) and so ‘his intent is to create dependency because it worked so well for him’. Translation: uppity Negroes can’t make it on their own, so they like giveaways that take away from hard-working white people.

Then there is Texas governor Perry, the lastest nutbag on the scene, who distinguished himself with a crack about a ‘dark cloud’ over America, exactly the phrase my racist neighbors used to use when a black family would make a rare appearance in our Ohio town. Expect more of the same as the campaign heats up, and further expect Obama to pretend he’s not hearing what the dog-whistlers are communicating.

In Judt’s long essay, which was excerpted in the New York Review of Books, he draws a parallel with the run-up to 1914, in which few Europeans had any idea that their entire world was about to go smash in an orgy of destruction. The comparison is not reassuring. Judt did not, however, linger on one of the more depressing aspects of that debacle, the collapse of working-class internationalism in the jingoist flames of war. I anticipate a similar process of retreat away from the superficial pluralism of our times to a bold, resurgent racism, couched of course in permanent denial.

I’ve also foolishly predicted that our current president will be lucky to finish out his (single) term and that, despite the confident shaking of liberal heads over the wacko brigade presented by the GOP, one of these clowns is going to haunt our nightly news starting in 2013. But that is a detail about which I could easily be wrong. Whatever or whoever comes to rule in Washington, the financial elite is going to continue to hijack the ship of state into its privatized waters and pump the gold out of the hull until there is nothing left.

Joe Nocera illustrates by example in Saturday’s New York Times how it will work: we taxpayers are building a huge white elephant at the Ground Zero site, supposedly in honor of the hallowed victims. But what is really occurring is that in exchange for our hard-earned wealth, developers will make a killing, Condé-Nast will get subsidized office space to produce their elitist magazines, and payment will come out of bridge and tunnel tolls for decades to come. That’s because the Port Authority (which, bizarrely, owns and manages the twin tower site) must find some way to pay for its pathetically inefficient use of public assets for private gain.

Such is the panorama in store for us in the 21st century: obscene wealth accompanied by mass impoverishment and, eventually, social breakdown. No wonder Obama is busily trying to turn the Internet into a tool of the Surveillance State.

Crime & Punishment

2011-08-17T11:49:00.000-07:00

Here’s what the underage texters jailed for four years in Britain for promoting riots on Facebook SHOULD have been texting:

‘Blimey, I woke up pitching a tent this morning, I need a million pounds quick. Let’s go defraud some pathetic Paki out of his life savings’.

‘Nang, bro! I’m in. Any penny stocks to flog to a dumb-ass pensioner? I’ve nicked the seniors list from the town council, there’s a shed load of old geezers around so senile, they’re ripe as shagbags for a poke’.

‘Dog’s bollocks! We’ll peddle lots of P.O.S. to them, then arb a half-million moves by lunchtime!’

‘Piece of piss! My new algorhythms are mega’.

‘You’re pulling my damn plonker! How’d ya nab off with it?’

‘I’ve got a bloke at Barclays, kabish?’

‘Nosh on me nadgers, that fuckwit’s thick as shit in the neck of a bottle, wouldn’t trust him to float an air biscuit’.

‘FOAD, unbeliever. I’ll make a dozen monkeys without any feeble wankers muckin in then. Hang with Rosie Palm and her five daughters if y’d ruther’.

‘Don’t get jarred up, mate, keep your hair on. I’ll be down at the sausage fest, save me a place, I’m still in my scuds’.

‘Clean the shit from your rocking horse, and get over here, you knuckle shuffler’.

‘Hey, I know my onions when it comes to selling knocking shops to nuns, how do you think I aced all my accounting finals?’

Had they merely engaged in this sort of harmless banter over their plans to defraud the downtrodden, the spotty lads would not be facing jail time at all. In fact, they’d probably be hailed as promising potential Masters of the Universe and pulled in offers from Bank of America and AIG. Instead, this is what happened, according to The Guardian:

Sutcliffe-Keenan, 22, used his Facebook account in the early hours of 9 August to design a web page titled The Warrington Riots. The court was told it caused a wave of panic in the town. When he woke up the next morning with a hangover, he removed the page and apologised, saying it had been a joke. His message was distributed to 400 Facebook contacts, but no rioting broke out as a result.

No, rioting did not break out over the joke. I suppose it would be too much to hope that this sentence results in some.

Excuse me, but Obama is toast

2011-08-14T11:42:00.001-07:00

Which is far from the most worrisome aspect of our future. To review:

The Republican line-up [cartoon: Rolling Stone] on display last week may be laughable, but anyone amused had best prepare for a lengthy stretch of stand-up as the lumbering wreck of the GOP claws its way back into the White House next year. Although predictions are perilous, it doesn’t take a crystal ball to see that the fragile, collective faith that alighted on Obama the newcomer as a vehicle for doing things differently has evaporated and will not return. All those hoping for a ‘real loony’ like Bachmann or Perry to become the nominee so that Sensible People will stick with Obama had better be careful what they wish for. I will happily place money on the likelihood that the Democratic wipe-out of 2012 will rival that of Walter Mondale in 1984.

Under normal circumstances, such a prospect would be discouraging but not necessarily grim. We’ve survived religious nut-cases in the Oval Office before. But needless to say, normal times these are not. The social break-down evidenced in the British riots are a foretaste of what the seizure of our polity by the super-rich holds for our own future. Two eager economists even reported they dug into the historical record and found that, Behold! austerity leads to unrest.

But more disturbing than witnessing the social costs of wrong-headed social and economic policy is the realization that the entire system is incapable of righting itself. I am persuaded by those commentators who have concluded that this—not the silly S&P downgrade—is the true motive for the stock market implosion. At a time when households cannot goose economic activity for lack of purchasing power, Washington is now completely trapped in the demented worship of fiscal pruning, cutting back government stimulus at exactly the time when it is only thing that could save our collective ass.

Thus the mega-rich have managed both to achieve their immediate goals—crippling government and avoiding punishment for their looting—and to undermine the system that makes them super-rich in the first place. They are like drug addicts who know that using is wrecking their lives and nonetheless head out every night to score.

This is the real crime of the Obama presidency and the reason it must end as soon as possible. If he were fighting for a traditional Democratic, Keynesian strategy, insisting that long-term deficits must only be addressed later when the economy is not in danger of capsizing, that instead government must step up and direct income to the poorest and most destitute as the only means of restarting its engine, it would be worth sticking with him even in a losing battle. That way, once the current strategy fails, as it will, there would be some remaining chance for a humane and sensible alternative.

Instead, we have happy talk and paralysis while the hateful and spiteful claim— correctly—that the current occupant of the White House is out of his depth, has botched the recovery and has no plan B. It will be ironic indeed if the first act of the incoming 2013 Bachmann or Perry administration is to call for emergency deficit spending to put people back to work, for example, on war industries in preparation for an attack on Iran.

And it’s not hard to anticipate the reaction that will greet any manifestations of British-style urban chaos that may erupt in the meantime. In fact, we lived through it once in the 1960s when ‘law and order’ became the Nixonian watchword during the construction of the Southern strategy that turned all of Dixieland into red states. Covert racism is always the fall-back position in our country in times of social stress, so expect more Confederate flags to fly at the Rick Perry rallies as the Civil War gets refought, possibly with an entirely different outcome.

Let’s not forget how dangerous real economic collapse can be—the last one ended with 50 million dead. It was war that got the wheels of German industry moving again as well as our own, and the world remains populated, last time I looked, by the same fragile bipeds desperate for answers in troubled times.

Follow the money [Updated]

2011-08-09T02:01:00.000-07:00

It makes no difference whether the riots spreading across urban Britain are comprised of mindless crowds delighting in destruction and focused on carrying off large-screen TVs. This is not a political movement that will be damaged by the ugly aspects of the chaos, the targeting of random passers-by, the Clockwork Orange violence and the cruel mockery of shop-owners losing their livelihoods in an evening’s burst of Molotov cocktails. It is an explosion.

But why should we expect the marginalized lumpen at the extreme bottom of Britain’s underclass to behave any differently from the bankers at the extreme top? When the ruling elite burns down the economy and giggles over its ongoing looting of the nation’s accounts, why shouldn’t idle youth who will never have a real job torch a furniture store and laugh while it turns to ashes? Why should they care about anything except the money they might illicitly obtain or feel any responsibility toward ‘society’, which as Margaret Thatcher reminded them decades ago, doesn’t exist?

For over a generation the unemployed and unneeded have been told by Thatcher and New Labour (and her counterparts here, the neolibs, the Reaganites, the Clintonian triangulators and now the Teabagger faction) that nothing counts except making it, that you’re a winner or a loser, and losers can go piss off up a rope because the winners owe you nothing and will make sure the state is powerless to do anything about it. Winners will tool about on yachts and shop at Louis Vuitton; the rest of you can sell drugs and spend your down time in for-profit prisons.

It’s no accident that the trigger for the riots was yet another shooting of a non-white citizen by the disgraced Metropolitan police force and that the family learned about his death from the telly. The top cops, too busy earning cash from the Murdoch tabloid empire to focus on actual police work, still haven’t cleaned up their racist act after decades of commissions, inquiries and scandals. Anyone surprised at the result should get out more. And for New Yorkers, the references in the British press to the smoldering resentment of black teens over the constant police practice of stopping and frisking them for ‘suspicion’ rings ominously familiar.

As our own Masters of the Universe continue to insist that banks must be made whole while people may crumble into dust, the British riots provide useful information about where the country’s current idiocy is taking us. With one fifth of the working-age population struggling, the cloud-cuckoo Congress wants to slash unemployment benefits and cut taxes on the rich. Time to refill the fire extinguishers!

[Update] I see the Financial Times agrees with me. Albert Edwards writes, ‘While I hear the UK politicians denounce the looters as common criminals (which of course they are), I can’t help but think that Louis XVI in 1789 and Tsar Nicolas II in 1917 might have said the same thing’.

The long downward grade

2011-08-06T19:09:00.000-07:00

In the midst of the market panic last week, the Bank of New York Mellon began to charge large clients a fee for parking cash. That is, a bank, which in a normal world pays for the privilege of acquiring deposits, is now charging the depositor for the privilege of keeping his cash safe because there is so much wealth sloshing around the system with no reliable harbor.

What better metaphor for the latest example of free-market capitalism’s failure at what it claims to do best—efficiently allocate resources? The unbridled worship of free markets, which was supposed to distribute capital efficiently if the Titans of Industry could just be unshackled from the interference of gummint, has now resulted in the accumulation of vast stores of money that have no use while equally vast sectors of actual people have no money. Next, we’ll have a replay of those Depression-era tales of farmers dumping their oranges into the ocean while soup kitchens were running out of food. Meanwhile, the Tea Bagger faction will be begging the hedge-fund manager Creosotes to have just a bit more tax-free dessert on us—just a tiny slice, ‘It’s wafer-thin’.

Blame for the current debacle can be apportioned widely and in a most fair and balanced way. As the Cassandra of finance, Yves Smith, says at her essential blog, Naked Capitalism, the roots of the recurring financial roller coaster go back to the failed strategy of the incoming Obama team:

‘All the authorities did was patch up a predatory banking system with duct tape and bailing wire and hoped enough cheerleading would restore confidence. And after the banks got their bailout money, the mood seemed to be, “We spent so much on them, we don’t have anything left for anyone else”. The alarming rise in government deficits, which was primarily the result of the crisis and not discretionary spending, has led to a deadly combination of austerian policies . . ., dysfunctional government responses, faltering recoveries and deliberate shredding of social contracts. It’s like watching a house burn and then having people throw Molotov cocktails at it’.

Yes, yes, of course the bad old Republicans were guilty of setting the stage for this, and the Teabagger faction is a dangerous passel of bug-eyed millenarians eager for Jaisus to ride in on a heavenly chariot. But Obama is going to take the bulk of the blame for getting us here, and he bears it. It was Mr O who brought in the Clinton-era architects of deregulation to make sure the mega-banks and their corrupt owners felt no pain; Obama who refused to heed the dissidents who said his stimulus package was too small and weak to jump-start the economy; Obama who included no direct job-creating measures in his first 100 days despite enjoying a giant congressional majority.

Maybe he would have been blocked. Maybe the Blue Dogs and the GOP would have stymied every attempt to take these radical steps. We’ll never know since Obama never made the attempt. Instead, he begged for consensus, empowered the saboteurs and cheapened his office instead of using it to do battle. He played footsie with Fox, brushed off the racist South Carolina congressman who shouted him down, refused any hardball and mocked the people who worked to elect him. His inconsistent and occasional rhetorical jabs at Wall Street’s stingy billionaires merely incensed them since they took him for a paper tiger that wouldn’t dream of showing them any real teeth.

And for all Obama’s pandering to the interests of the ruling elite, his reward is further disdain. Standard & Poor’s downgrade of U.S. debt is the finance sector’s collective act of flicking him off their shoulder like a bothersome gnat. This rating agency, the same one that so distinguished itself during the housing bubble by declaring worthless mortgage bonds to be triple-A quality because it was paid off by its clients to do so, now openly defies the executive authority on explicitly political terms and pretends to dictate policy from its unelected perch in lower Manhattan. The same rating groups that refused to notice the Bush tax cuts and their devastating impact on the nation’s accounts now dare to declare us unable to maintain the safety net that they and their friends sytematically shredded.

These financiers are like the ancient ruling families of a Latin American dictatorship who react with apoplectic rage when upstart newcomers throw a fancy party and dare to invite them. But they are only being who they are—a truly wise man would know that to win their favor requires causing them pain in the time-honored S&M tradition of the decadent aristocracy. Obama tries to coax them into partnership and instead only reaps their contempt.

Our democratic system missed a world-historic opportunity in 2008-09 when the zombie banks tottered on the edge. We only required a bold leader to use his (or her) enormous but temporary power to push out the corrupt leadership, declare the bank shares worthless, give bondholders new equity stakes with the infusion of system-saving government cash that had to come anyway and say, Welcome to a new era of finance re-subordinated to the needs of the productive economy. What a world we would be living in if those Goldman Sachs and BOFA execs suddenly found their life savings had gone up in smoke like those of the millions of people whose lives they ruined? How cautious hedge fund managers and bank presidents would be today, willing and even eager for careful federal regulations to keep their industry from experiencing such a traumatic episode ever again?

The future is not bright. But the reconstruction of popular resistance to the reign of this new finance mafia can only begin when the illusions that have brought us to this pass are ripped apart. For my part, I am eager to see an end to the facile demonization of the reactionary forces while the complicity of the Democratic Party and its principal figure is ignored. The coming recession, if such there be, is Obama’s very own, to have and to hold. He is the architect of this debacle, and it’s time to stop making excuses for him.

‘We have an agreement’

2011-08-02T12:12:00.001-07:00

Has there been a bleaker moment in our adult lives where the forces of decency have looked so rudderless, so bereft of leadership? The Grand Bargain arranged by Obama seals the teabagger triumph as we officially declare government to be the enemy of virtue and worthy of being smothered at the altar of capitalist anarchy. Any and all attempts to ease the suffering of the powerless is to be considered suspect; wealth is to be worshiped unblinkingly; and even our increasingly futile exercises of democracy are now to be subordinated to a select ‘super Congress’, which will decide on the contents of our pocketbooks and, ultimately, the contours of our collective fate.

If gridlock, i.e., resistance from those affected, gums up the works, the cuts go through automatically. This from a Congress and a White House that can’t address Senate filibusters or permit appointments to the federal judiciary to occur automatically if a single member chooses to hold them up.

Needless to say, this complete collapse of opposition to the rule of the obscenely rich could only have occurred under a Democratic presidency. No McCain or Romney would have been able to deliver the national turkey trussed and ready for carving with the thoroughly cynical aplomb displayed by Mr Hope’n’Change. Under a GOP regime, those eager to fight would have had a rallying center of sorts instead of being immediately cast as petulant teens unwilling to accede to the reasonable demands of our increasingly goofy Ward Cleaver-in-chief.

The Voices of Reason are telling us not to worry so much, or ‘talking us back from the ledge’, as one Serious Person put it Monday. Fear not, the cuts this year are minor, the details aren’t yet worked out, concessions have been made that can be recouped later. Ha ha ha. Does anyone seriously think Bush’s ‘temporary’ tax cuts won’t be extended indefinitely when they are next due to expire? Are there still people gullible enough to think Obama truly, secretly opposes them?

We whistle along foolishly, however, if we think for a minute that this ignominious collapse and unconditional surrender to the neo-Confederates will satisfy them. Empowered by their successful threats to suicide-bomb the nation’s accounts into smithereens, al-Qaeda on the Potomac will now set its lustful sights on new targets.

It’s impossible to predict what those might be, but let us not forget that the election of our first black president was never accepted as legitimate by the race reactionaries empowered by the opportunistic GOP leadership and enabled by the cost-free rewards Obama continues to grant them. Obama dreams if he thinks pandering to their selfish desires will rehabilitate him in their eyes. Beneath the surface of the phony war over whether or not to further bipartisanly impoverish the defenseless is a quite real drumbeat of reaction based on clan, color and narrow nationalism. Norway provides a recent example.

Lest we slip into the now mainstream view that Mr Breivik is a lone nut representing no social tendencies, note that blogmeister Pam Geller, the main force behind the Ground Zero Mosque smear (who likes to call Obama ‘President Jihad’), thinks Breivik’s victims would have grown up to become ‘future leaders of the party responsible for flooding Norway with Muslims who refuse to assimilate, who commit major violence against Norwegian natives including violent gang rapes, with impunity, and who live on the dole’.

[caption from Geller’s blog to photo at right: ‘Note the faces which are more Middle Eastern or mixed than pure Norwegian’].

Geller didn’t exactly say the slaughtered teens got what they deserved, but her website briefly featured this photo helpfully pointing out that many of the dead had suspect racial characteristics. The Norwegian Labor Party was not holding a ‘summer camp’ on the island of death, she insisted, but an ‘anti-Israel indoctrination training center’. (Perhaps if it had been a drone attack, she could cheer openly.) Geller is not another marginal wackjob—the extreme right has absorbed those margins and largely erased them.

The examples proliferate: Colorado Tea Bagger Congressman Doug Lamborn compared Obama to a ‘tar baby’ yesterday, another blatantly racist trope that has become mainstream in Republican discourse.

No, we are not headed for a national socialist putsch, and we do not live in a fascist state. But by further crushing the struggling middle and lower classes through the disastrous debt deal, Obama piles fuel onto the already vigorous fires of irrationality and scapegoating fanned enthusiastically by Geller, O’Reilly, Buchanan & Co. with unpredictable consequences. Obama’s immigration policies are punitive and draconian, his security apparatus eagerly hounding Arabs with police-state tools at their command, and his all-out war on whistle-blowers weakening internal dissent. All that is missing from the mix is a relapse into recession and the end of any possibility of gainful employment for the one-sixth of the working-age population that is desperately awaiting the jobs recovery that no one on Capitol Hill seems any longer to care about.

We've been screwed

2011-07-30T13:13:00.001-07:00

What a pity that the dramatic budget showdown between Obama and the loony-tunes right is a fraud. We could have used a real fight over real visions of the role of state finances in the midst of recession and over government in general, whether it should aid the needy or merely clear a path for rich and privileged.

Unfortunately, the fight was over before it began because Obama’s position is so close to the Tea Party’s own that it can’t find anything substantial with which to oppose him. Want to put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block? Done. Want to rewrite history and claim that government spending is the cause of our economic ills? Published. Want assurances that the federal government cannot come to the aid of states as they suffocate under the bankster-created crisis? Signed in blood-red ink. Want the head of Elizabeth Warren on a platter? With parsley or cilantro?

Since Obama has essentially carried out the teabagger program without much prodding, the Republican freshmen do look quite demented, and with such a tail wagging the legislative dog, anything can happen. Not content with Obama’s $4 trillion slash that will leave the poor and middle classes poorer while the top 0.1 percent scoop up what’s left of our lunch, the unleashed wild dogs of Washington roam Capitol Hill looking for something more to scavenge. Given their backgrounds in millenarian Christian cults, they scoff at warnings that they will set off an apocalypse since they fully expect one in any case and, for many, the sooner it comes the better.

More likely, however, is that calmer heads will prevail and realize that the Republican program has been shoe-horned into being by the nation’s first black president. Why, it’s better than Clarence Thomas outlawing affirmative action. And while the liberal troops still in the thrall of the Democratic turncoats wax indignant over right-wing antics, they barely notice that behind their backs the New Deal has been undone.

A truly progressive or even a modestly centrist Democratic president would have taken on the financial elite that drove the world economy off a cliff, taken advantage of the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to shrink the bloated financial sector and strengthen production, fought for a stimulus package large enough to fill the gap in demand cause by the bankers’ wreckage and insisted that the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy end to restore government fiscal health. He would have railed against any plan to balance the books on Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid as a huge majority of the country wishes he would. Now that would have been a fight worth buying a ticket for.

Instead, Obama has run interference for the banks, shoveled cash at them furiously, allowed the paltry reforms to be undermined, adopted Republican rhetoric on entitlements and budget horrors, given away the store on taxes and still scrambles to find more red meat to satisfy the howling hyenas of the right.

I get a slew of urgent e-mails daily from all sorts of progressive groups urging me to sign onto this or that petition to complain about Republican skullduggery. But I’m still waiting for one of them to rise up in glory to blurt out that the grand hope-and-change candidate we all went out to elect has become an emperor not only standing there stark naked but waving his business at us worse than Anthony Weiner ever did.

Behind the phony fight over the silly debt ceiling stands a two-headed political class that has joined forces—despite appearances to the contrary—to impoverish us. Its principal agent is Barack Obama.

Permitted thoughts

2011-07-26T03:48:00.000-07:00

What a contrast in the tone of reactions to the Norwegian slaughter once the suspect turned out to be not an Ay-rab but an Ar-yan and a specimen out of a Warner Bros war movie to boot. Remarkably, some news organs promptly decided that ‘terrorism’ was therefore not involved since apparently only officially-designated enemies can engage in such acts. Merely executing dozens of teenagers out of ideological zeal does not qualify.

The New York Times didn’t even bother to apologize for rushing to trumpet that an al-Qaeda-like entity had committed the massacre, saying ‘initial reports’ from ‘some analysts’ had steered them wrong. ‘There was ample reason for concern that terrorists might be responsible’, whined the Times in its own defense. That’s extraordinary. If Arabs did it, it’s terrorism; if a white guy goes nuts with guns, it’s not.

Terrorism is therefore not what you do; it’s who you are.

Note also the howls of indignant outrage from immigrant-bashers that anyone could dare to suggest their steady demonization of dark people could possibly have ANYTHING to do with the lone-wacko-gone-crazy. Why, it’s ‘blood libel’ to suggest anything of the sort, as Sarah Palin would say, and Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips, quoted approvingly by the assassin in his mega-screed, actually referred to the rising ‘blood lust’ against her in the blogosphere. Eighty kids get lined up and shot, and right-wing pundits promptly declare themselves to be the suffering victims.

The Jerusalem Post editorialized that, while the tactics employed are heinous, terrible, etc., etc., Mr Breivik’s overall position on the topic is, well, more or less correct. It added that ‘discontent with multiculturalism’s failure must not be delegitimized’ especially since other right-wing murderers might be waiting in the wings. So the liberal zionist position is something like this: Breivik’s tactics are somewhat inappropriate, but given how crazy people are out there, we should do what he says and keep out Arabs.

Contrast these reactions with the thought control exercised after 9/11 in which we were told exactly what to think and exactly what to feel for weeks afterward and furthermore were warned that to dissent in the slightest way was essentially treasonous. We were then forced to line up behind the demented conquest of Iraq as a result, based on the ‘mushroom cloud’ scaremongering of Condi Rice et al. Instead, today we are not even permitted to wonder out loud if perhaps-maybe-possibly all the immigrant-bashing rhetoric from raving bigots might have played a role in the deaths of Norway’s children given that the guy who did it quotes them at length.

It took Glenn Beck about ten minutes to decide that the dead were, in fact, like Nazis because they liked to gather in the woods and think political thoughts. Good for Juan Cole for campaigning for the man to be refused air space for all eternity—even though it won’t happen. (I’ll happily join Cole’s call for a boycott and plan to send hand-written notes to all Beck’s advertisers one by one, a far more meaningful act, may I add, than cyber-signing the half-dozen online petitions I’m sent daily.)

Breivik’s act does indeed remind us of Europe’s fascist demons and occurs, not incidentally, exactly as the European unity project is wobbling dangerously and threatening to spin out of control. The Greek debt crisis has been politically unmanageable precisely because nationalist sentiments, not least in Germany, have trumped the European spirit. Fiscal union and a single European treasury has never seemed more far-fetched, and dismemberment of the Eurozone remains a plausible outcome.

Norway's mass response to this heinous crime has been inspiring--sober, dignified and resolute. But storm-clouds are gathering on humanity’s horizon.

Heading Out [Updated]

2011-07-19T21:06:00.000-07:00

Will try to check in en route. Wednesday's stop: Ossining and Connecticut.

Back in one piece Sunday 7/24, had to abandon ship, er bike, in Fall River (no Lizzie jokes!) when temp hit 101. More on lessons learned along the way later today and this week.

MURDOCHALYPSE!

2011-07-16T11:24:00.000-07:00

I wish that were my own coinage, but alas, it is not. However, it does convey the dimensions of the U.K. scandal gobbling up the poisonous Murdochian squid at the heart of British journalism if indeed that term still applies in this case.

We’ve been unaware of the rumblings across the pond about this scandal for the last several years, and it’s easy to see why we didn’t grasp its implications. After all, chasing after celebrities and engaging in all sorts of skullduggery to get a photo of Sarah Ferguson sucking the toes of her boyfriend while inconveniently married to a Windsor prince was considered fair game, rather nasty and all that, but the price of fame and fortune to those basking in them. We were more dismayed at the viciously partisan tactics employed by Murdoch’s American arm, Fox News.

But the thing crystallized when word leaked out that the Murdoch tabloids had hacked into the phone messages of a disappeared teenaged girl who eventually turned up dead, not merely violating her privacy but even—by erasing messages to make room for more headline-generating data—giving her grieving parents false hopes.

Murdoch had to personally beg the dead girl’s parents’ forgiveness—but it was too late. It was now clear, as one wag put that, that Murdoch’s form of yellow journalism hadn’t just crossed the line but erased it.

Now we’re hearing about the incestuous coziness between Murdoch’s chief lieutenants and the entire British political class, something akin to the Fox-Rove-GOP axis here at home. (All that’s left to round that out would be former one-term president Barack Obama then hiring on as the network’s ‘liberal’ commentator in 2013 in exchange for several millions a year—don’t scoff.)

But this scandal has plenty of staying power. We still don’t know all the facts, and they can only get grubbier. The FBI is trying to see whether Fox/Murdoch minions tried to hack 9/11 victims’ telephones, and the financial regulators should be asking some pointed questions as well, such as, Kindly detail how your company’s accountants posted payments from News International to British police officers, payments often known as ‘bribes’ or ‘payoffs’. Please take your time and answer fully given that false statements are punishable under federal statutes.

Like all Masters of the Universe, Murdoch badly misread the scope of this debacle and thought he could use his usual combination of threats and succulent emoluments to get his way. Instead, his bid for a U.K. satellite company not only collapsed after a unanimous vote in Parliament, he’s undoubtedly going to have to give up his remaining minority stake. His son James went from heir-apparent to next up on the guillotine. Murdoch himself may be lucky to escape an orange jumpsuit. In any case I expect to see the entire NI operation under brand-new management, or ownership, soon.

Snoops brought low

2011-07-15T04:22:00.000-07:00

Like Watergate, the accelerating implosion of the Murdoch empire was provoked by breaches of privacy. Richard Nixon, as part of his successful game plan to crush the pointy-headed McGovernite liberals and the ‘nattering nabobs of negativism’ who opposed his continued slaughter in Vietnam, authorized spying on them and other dirty tricks, then tried to cover up the wiretapping, snooping and manipulations through payoffs and dissembling. Eventually and ironically, he was brought down by his own tapes of his own conversations, hoist on the petard of eavesdropping as a way of life.

The Murdoch octopus, comprised of British tabloids, The Times of London, the Wall Street Journal, Fox and until recently a major British cable company, may face a similar fate and through similar means. After making life hell for anyone who stood in their way by snooping on them, tracking their movements almost before they made them, hacking their cellphones, intimidating them and possibly blackmailing them, in the spirit of J. Edgar Hoover, with dossiers on their secrets—in short, by using the cover of journalism to campaign relentlessly in favor of the empire’s pecuniary interests, Murdoch’s minions now face the blinding spotlight that they have made a facet of British life. No one will pity their discomfort, and if god is indeed great, it will be severe.

Is it not curious that abuses of the sanctity of private life can generate such political earthquakes? Murder victim Milly Dowler’s family was consumed with grief over the loss of their teenage daughter to a sexual psychopath, but Murdoch’s media machine could not see past the succulent headlines to be gathered from the victim’s phone messages. A public indifferent to the annoyances of movie stars pursued by photographers was appalled. Similarly, Nixon’s ‘plumbers’ thought his enemy’s psychiatrists could have useful data to marshal against the boss’s critics and so burglarized a shrink’s offices in an attempt to humiliate Daniel Ellsberg. No one was safe, no private space immune.

While illicit spying has triggered these political avalanches, popular revulsion is not over the snooping per se but the hubris generated by snoopers’ vast powers. People react to the implications of placing such capacity in the hands of the mighty. If the president himself can wiretap his enemies and send out the IRS to harass them over taxes, who can stop him? If Murdoch’s tabloids can buy your medical records and bribe chief investigators at Scotland Yard, how is that so different from dictatorship?

The Cold War presented the contrast between a lively, open society with citizens unafraid of their governments and the frightening Big Brothers of the eastern bloc where secret police overheard everything and threatened the dissident with Siberia or simply the social annihilation easily accomplished by an authoritarian state. Yet once the Soviet Union disappeared, it is we who are fair game for the insatiable maw of the security apparatus, fed by the threat of terrorism and perversely eager to keep it alive to justify further intrusions into our e-mails, our library borrowings and our private telephone conversations.

Carl Bernstein is quoted in The Guardian today saying that this is ‘the beginning, not the end’ of the seismic event. With Murdoch’s protected favorite, Rebekah Brooks, now having resigned, it is evident that the man behind the curtain is frantically pulling at the levers but producing no smoke. We’ll see how much he enjoys being the story instead of controlling it.

But in the long run the Bush-Obama spying/snooping extravaganza will have to face scrutiny, too, for example, over this shameful episode. Our bought-and-paid-for members of Congress lose no sleep over the gross abuses contained in the Patriot Act and barely debated its renewal after the current administration requested it. This does not mean the citizens they purportedly represent will forever share their indifference.

Oh Bliss, Oh Ecstasy

2011-07-09T19:26:00.000-07:00

Get ready for some real fun: Britain’s Watergate is here and promises to provide months of joyous entertainment and much deserved suffering of the truly and appallingly awful.

The British version of Fox News has taken a huge hit after one of Murdoch’s slime-soaked operations, News of the World, was found out hacking into the voicemails of crime victims and relatives of those of died in the subway terrorist bombings. Incredible as it seems, their reporters interfered with an ongoing police investigation and even deleted messages to a missing woman [above]. She was later found dead.

Needless to say, the Brits are not amused.

Here in the U.S., we are accursed with the steady rotting of political discourse caused by Fox, Limbaugh and other purveyors of hysteria, but it’s nothing compared to the role played by the Murdoch media empire in the Old Country, something much closer to the soft coup achieved by Berlusconi in Italy. In both cases media deregulation and consolidation allowed vast powers to be accumulated in the hands of a single billionaire, thereby subverting the democratic process as illuminated here.

In the Italian case Berlusconi used his businesses to take power directly; Murdoch preferred to exercise it from the wings. But in Britain the game may be up as many further chapters of the scandal are anticipated.

For now, the closing of News of the World, one of Murdoch’s favorite vehicle for recycled sewage, has generated some hilarious about-faces among its soon-to-be-unemployed staff, who all see themselves as victims of a terrible injustice. The Guardian quotes one:

‘The phones on the news desk have been ringing all week with people shouting the nastiest, most vile abuse’. Sort of like what happens when Fox News gets you between their cross-hairs, isn’t it?

The accused top execs are being followed by a media scrum of the sort they usually generated for others. We can only hope that god does in fact exist and that these painful harassments last for months or years.

The coverage of the sudden shift in the fortunes of the Murdoch family [below right] in Britain is massive and particularly focused on whether their current bid to further consolidate the empire with another television channel, known there as BSkyB, may be sidetracked. But a long analysis in The Guardian provided a sharp reminder of what is at stake in this long stare in the foully stinking heart of British politics.

The jointly-signed piece recalls how dependent former Prime Minister Tony Blair was upon Murdoch’s support and in the end how comfortable with the improperly symbiotic relationship. Just before pledging full support to W’s disastrous invasion and conquest of Iraq, Blair was on the phone to Uncle Rupert nearly a dozen times, no doubt getting assurances of the tabloid publisher’s support.

So while millions of people in the U.S. and the U.K. poured into the streets to denounce the unnecessary and criminal war, the voice of the people meant nothing. Blair backed the slaughter of hundreds of thousands on a vote of 1 to 0.

That is the perverse and dangerous system that Hacking-gate threatens at long last.

Scary Movie 2012

2011-07-05T18:33:00.000-07:00

Frank Rich’s profile on Obama entitled ‘Something Rotten’ appeared in New York magazine this week, Rich’s first major essay since leaving the Times. It’s a fair, devastating take-down, all the more so because Rich is sympathetic and had high hopes for the Obama presidency. But it breaks very little new ground. It catalogs Obama’s serious weaknesses and states the obvious: that his re-election is in big, big trouble. In a sane world against a remotely credible opponent, Obama would be a huge underdog.

Of course, we haven’t inhabited a sane world for some time, which is troublesome not just because some complete wacko may soon be in charge, but because a presidential election year brings out the worst in those benighted creatures on two legs and their weak leaders. I also fear what could come next, not just next November but the whole tedious stretch leading up to it. We really have no idea how Obama would react upon facing defeat, and he has not been the least bit shy about wielding and adding to the vast powers his predecessors bequeathed him.

There are two arenas in which I find Obama’s instincts particularly worthy of anxiety if not alarm: the New Deal legacy and the international sphere, specifically the Iranian bugbear.

As to the former: Rich argues that Obama’s biggest mistake was not slapping down the finance industry when it was on the ropes. By throwing it a taxpayer-funded lifeline without extracting anything important in return (the lame reforms in Dodd-Frank are a mild and scarcely relevant exception), Obama mortgaged his administration to the idea that returning quickly to the failed, old ways would restore economic health. He thereby re-energized the rapacious banking sector, whose natural allies are his mortal enemies in the GOP.

Obama now has no real constituency left in economic policy: the Tea Baggers think he’s the anti-Christ; many of his erstwhile boosters see him as a sell-out; and Mary & Joe Main Street are unemployed or underwater and cannot trust him. Only the tiny minority of die-hard Democrats will follow Obama into the Valley of Death even if a large additional slice eventually sickens at the thought of Bachmann and Romney on the evening news and throws him their votes. But I do not anticipate long lines at the polling stations as in 2008.

So where does Obama go from here, having tossed his chance for an appealing populist, neo-Rooseveltian stance? All signs point to further pandering to the rhetoric and demands of the greedy, swallowing the GOP deficit mania whole hog and desperately seeking BFF status with people who would like to see him in livery welcoming their guests at the front gate. We can anticipate the usual pattern of Obama giving up the farm before negotiations begin, then throwing in Mom’s retirement cottage when the opposition digs in its heels.

But why stop there? The scenario could get much worse: why merely lose in the budget talks when you can give away even bigger prizes?

For example: Obamacare is a big, fat target for the incoming Republicans should they come back to haunt us next year. But what if a new Grand Compromise were made attractive to them? Why couldn’t Obamacare be a model for dismantling the single-payer government-funded healthcare monoliths that Republicans have been aiming at for decades? Force seniors and the poor to buy Obamacare-style insurance instead of guaranteeing them free medical services, and voila, the budget is freed up for more tax reductions.

Democrats are cynical enough to sell this to their base, and who would stop them? The party machinery would immediately go to work to convince us that it’s the ‘best deal we can hope for’ and will ‘preserve’ these programs for future generations, etc., etc., blah blah.

That’s a cynical view, to be sure, but here’s one to top it: why shouldn’t Obama greenlight an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities next year? Because he got the Nobel for peacemaking once upon a time? Pardon my chortle. The Israelis are itching to do it; the neocons would cheer; the Democratic establishment would grumble and go along. Many liberal Jews would be ecstatic. A few wise dissidents would warn of dire consequences, but three quarters of Congress would stand on their chairs to support it.

Rich has little to say about what drives Obama; perhaps he finds our president too opaque to read. Or maybe Rich doesn’t really care—I don’t. He says Obama ‘falls hard’ for Ivy League white guys like Rubin, Summers and Geithner and doesn’t try to explain it further. He concentrates on what he thinks Obama has to do to turn his unsteady ship around and win re-election. That’s exactly what I’m afraid of, too.

DSK took the IRT down to Main Street, USA

2011-07-04T05:37:00.000-07:00

Did the former head of the IMF try to rape a hotel maid, and if not, what the f*** was going on last month?

Dominique Strauss-Kahn was all set to become president of France and instead ended up wearing an ankle bracelet and doing the perp walk through lower Manhattan. The French are justifiably skeptical when not appalled at the way the accused are guilty until proven innocent under the American justice/media roasting system. Did political considerations play a role in the unfolding debacle?

First, as we know now, the sterling credibility of the main witness against DSK is now tarnished beyond repair as she was found to be lying about the gang rape she said she had suffered back home, lying about what she did after the DSK incident and hiding the huge cash deposits she had received into a series of bank accounts. She’s also tight buddies with a dubious sort sitting in an Arizona jail for drugs trafficking. Some shortcomings in yer police work there, as Frances McDormand’s sheriff in Fargo would say.

It must be cause for considerable chortling among the many people swept up in the NYPD nets and charged with serious crimes based on equally flimsy evidence and who do not have the resources to meet a $6 million bail as DSK did. For example, the fellow arrested for the wild shooting spree on the Coney Island boardwalk a few weeks ago that resulted in the death of a young girl swore to reporters that he didn’t do it—what are the chances he will be railroaded by a system eager to ‘solve’ this case and put someone away for it?

However, incompetence does not equal conspiracy. Manhattan D.A. Cyrus Vance, Jr., is getting smacked around a lot for the high-profile sloppiness with which the case was handled, and he deserves the hot-seat after climbing into the office on the old-boy network rather than merit. But by all accounts he’s not a scumbag, and it was his own office that revealed the DSK accuser’s unreliability.

A much more curious element is the role of police commissioner Ray Kelly, outlined in a fascinating piece by NYPD gadfly Leonard Levitt on May 30. Turns out Kelly is some sort of BFF of French president Nicolas Sarkozy who stood to benefit mightily from the downfall of his principal rival. Kelly is known to be particularly harsh on leakers, but his reaction to the full airing of the anti-DSK case in the early days drew only a pro forma rebuke. No doubt the French press will make considerable hay of the Kelly-Sarkozy friendship now that the whole case is wobbling.

While DSK may soon be off to France to pick up the shards of his mighty career, the fallout here in New York may continue for quite some time. The maid is now facing a grilling about her asylum application, among other things, and it would be interesting to know if she was living in a special residential facility based on faked medical records, the fake daughter that she apparently used to lower her tax liabilities or some other modification of the facts. An immigrant hotel maid with $100,000 in cash in a bank account that she forgot to mention certainly does have some explaining to do.

Of course, women who are not model citizens can also be raped, but now seems like a good time to await more facts and not rush forward to accuse or defend anyone until they are clarified. Nevertheless, while remaining in the hypothetical realm, let’s keep in mind that lying to obtain asylum is not a victimless crime given that plenty of people who really are persecuted and threatened face skeptical bureaucracies and are turned away precisely because people have learned to game the system so cleverly.

The case illustrates how media glare can be both violent and salutary, can shred reputations fairly or unfairly while also providing a window of opportunity to get to the bottom of things. It would be nice if reporters were equally assiduous in delving into facts when less glorious beings than DSK are among the accused.

A lot of people in this world are queer

2011-06-28T15:01:00.001-07:00

One cannot stand on a corner for five hours at a Gay Pride march and street party, as I did Sunday, without seeing that the drive for homosexual emancipation has tapped into something enormously human and, until recently in historical terms, very much hidden: that our biped species occupies a spectrum of being that only vast amounts of social pressure can squeeze and cram into the usual categories of race, gender and desire. I conclude that the effort exhausts both wielder and object because its official suspension Sunday was extremely energizing.

The endless stream of individuals who seized the streets of Manhattan produced in this observer an intoxicating sensory overload and undermined any attempts to define ‘male’ and ‘female’ with precision, much less ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ (and forget ‘black’ and ‘white’ or even ‘brown’). Genital equipment aside, there were as many expressions of butchiness and femminess as a city of 8 million + suburbanites + tourists can display. Full of beans and attitude, the hordes of mostly youthful celebrants demonstrated with their insouciant day-long promenade that we have learned and long maintained a far too narrow view of what makes us who we are.

For this reason I believe that the establishment of full marriage equality for same-sex couples in New York State, passed into law last Friday, signals a game-changing moment, a moment in which the genie has escaped the lamp, probably for good. While opponents’ worries that granting rights to gay partners will somehow damage traditional marriage is pretty silly, in another sense I believe they are onto something: regular old hetero marriage will never be the same. Die-hard segregationists also feared that the provision of full civil rights for ‘Negroes’ would change the meaning of being white, and they were right. It did.

I was sent photos of the recent gay-lesbian-whatever rights march in Santiago [right], where I personally witnessed the early shoots of a similar movement for emancipation in the late 1980s and ‘90s. These are scenes repeated all over the world (despite considerable ongoing repression), and they communicate to my eye a powerful human desire to burst the constricting bounds of a false conformity. Neo-nazis in Russia and evangelical Christians in Uganda may campaign against the impulse for this freedom, but they would do as well to ask rivers to change course or plants to stop seeking the sunlight.
[left: San Salvador/Denver Post]

Nonetheless, these reactionary creeps can do a lot of damage, and the African variety isn’t getting anywhere near the negative attention that they deserve. The incipient visibility of gay and lesbian people and organizations in Senegal, Ghana, Uganda, Cameroun, Zimbabwe and Malawi has been accompanied by a ferocious reaction. The tales are quite horrific.

A Ghanaian legislator told gays to leave the country or face ‘lynching’. A court in Malawi sentenced a male couple to 14 years in prison for holding a ‘marriage’ ceremony. Camerounian gays are abanoned upon arrest and cannot even get a lawyer as none dare to defend them. Tabloids print pictures of ‘known homos’ on their front pages, in one notorious case, leading to the murder of Ugandan activist David Kato [pictured].

The Arizona-based Family Watch International (FWI) run by professional harpie Sharon Slater is hard at work trying to get Africans to adopt their wacko version of Christianity and urging an anti-gay Kristallnacht to drive their point home. For example, one of the worst cases is Uganda where local hate-mongers allied with FWI decided to whip up a homosexual death penalty bill, only halted by a worldwide firestorm of revulsion. FWI is led by homo-rehab nutcakes like Slater who promise their dazzled African partners ‘scientific information’ on how gays can be made to mend their evil ways.

But lest we attribute this madness only to the sun-addled Arizonans, recall that Obama BFF and inaugural preacher, Rick Warren, has also had a hand in this repugnant activity, all of which was stimulated by the foreign aid cash that was shoveled into Africa along with unhealthy dollops of Christian proselytizing through Bush II’s AIDS program called PePFAR.

Ironically, the African pols most eagerly lapping up these holy horse-droppings whine incessantly about protecting ‘African culture’ from the human rights groups, completely oblivious to the fact that they are being spoon-fed a grossly colonialist ideology from their fairy godmothers of the Christian right.

Another irony of the anti-gay crusade in Africa is the role gay men played in bringing to light the African AIDS crisis in the first place and in lobbying for the billions in aid and medicines that have flowed to the continent since. It must be a bitter experience for long-time gay activists and AIDS industry officials in Geneva and in the aid-donating capitals of Europe to see the beneficiaries of their solidarity sink into crazed demonizing of tiny gay advocacy groups.

Some of the demagogy around homosexuality even blames the bedroom behavior of local gays for a country’s economic and social problems, a sort of homophobia as the new century’s version of classic European anti-Semitism. Michelle Goldberg writing in The American Prospect two years ago noted that ‘the rhetoric of homophobia recapitulates the tropes of classical Jew hatred. . . . a subversive internal enemy with dangerous international connections. . . . having an almost occult power [and who] represent modernism and cosmopolitanism’.

The African homophobic campaigns are great fun for the evangelicals because they can witness and cheer from the sidelines at shit they would never get away with at home—stale accusations about the recruitment of children, yellow press outing campaigns, etc. Though one can’t dismiss the damage these godly missionaries can inflict, after Sunday’s celebration I can’t help thinking that in the long run they’re fighting a losing battle. I don’t see Africans as different from New Yorkers in any meaningful way, and I trust that there are many thousands of people in Durban, Lilongwe and Dar-es-Salaam eager to be who they are, given half a chance.

While the Bible-thumpers, facing defeat at home, eagerly push a more vulnerable African continent toward their version of medieval bliss, biped humanity in all its disastrous glory pulls in the opposite direction.

Victory

2011-06-25T05:31:00.000-07:00

New York State has reversed the tide of sexophobic reaction and passed marriage equality for same-sex couples. The triumph was a tribute to the sharp political skills of our new governor (Cuomo) and his enthusiastic support—not just lip service and weasel-words—of the equality issue. It also showed the impact of steady lobbying and persuading work by the gay advocacy groups, which managed to overcome their fractious conflicts of two years ago when the same-sex marriage bill suffered a thumping defeat. A lot of conflicted legislators came around on the issue after hearing stories and anecdotes from articulate spokespeople, many of them directly affected by the legal limbo gay partners face. Mayor Bloomberg’s billions didn’t hurt either.

I also sense that our society has absorbed something about the basic unfairness of treating couples differently and the insidious impact of such discrimination on youth. My own state senator, Dominican-born Adriano Espaillat, explained his Yes vote with reference to the suicide of Tyler Clementi in his district and just a few blocks from where I live, the lad who jumped off the George Washington Bridge after his date with a guy was streamed live over the Internet.

Espaillat also noted that his office received over 600 messages of support for the bill and fewer than 100 against it.

Commentators are already declaring the New York action a game-changer because it came about through a legislative act, not a court decision. Although Vermont and New Hampshire were admirably ahead of their time, New York is just a much bigger and more influential state. I can already see the city caterers gearing up to throw Adam and Steve a high-society wedding worthy of being splashed across the gossip magazines.

The emergence of a solid bloc of same-sex marriage states is also a good reminder of what a disaster the Clinton presidency was on the issue. We have good old Bill to thank for signing into law the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) that permits individual states not to recognize same-sex marriages performed in others. Clinton ushered into being a permanent dual track of legality in which partners have to consider whether to take a job in Texas or Wisconsin and abandon the protections they enjoy in Boston or D.C.

Clinton could have vetoed that bill and fought against it, but he was more concerned about his political future. Then we all witnessed the presidential election of 2008 in which Joe Biden and Sarah Palin peaceably agreed that marriage should not be extended to same-sex couples.

Obama continues this tradition of catch-up, intoning nice-sounding phrases about non-discrimination while allowing himself to ‘evolve’ on the marriage issue. Luckily for gay and lesbian couples, their organizations did not wait for the passage of geologic time so that Democratic pols could evolve into something more useful. They went about their work and scored impressively.

Thirty years after the New Right turned the horrors of homosexual emancipation into a rallying cry to mobilize Reagan voters and build a Christian base for Republicans, the utility of that enemy is fading away. It’s no accident that abortion and taxes are occupying a more prominent role in the Tea Party universe—even the Bible thumpers aren’t all that convinced that the world will end because a couple of elderly ladies can visit each other in the hospital and gay lovers can stamp on the champagne glass at Fire Island.

Follow the money

2011-06-22T19:29:00.001-07:00

Cigarettes are going to look pretty gross soon as the tobacco control movement gathers momentum. Packs will now be required to include disgusting pictures of the products’ effects, which probably will contribute more to reducing health costs than a half-dozen Obamacares. One expert on a tobacco control e-mail list that I read opined that the icky pictures, replacing those cool, green Kool packages and flashy Marlboros, would generate distaste and shunning from the store clerks forced to sell these products, further de-normalizing this centuries-old practice of legalized mass drug addiction for private profit.

But another commentator raises a creepy side note: the government’s endorsement of nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) as the best, if not the ONLY, way to go if you want to quit, thus boosting a huge potential market for the pharmaceutical companies who market these products.

The fact of the endorsement is beyond debate: all the packs will be required to list the government’s 1-800-QUIT-NOW line, at which callers will be browbeaten with the official line that NRT will enable them to quit, and only silly, stubborn, foolish people will try to do it on their own. This discourse rather echoes the ubiquitous line from makers of statins that you ‘can't kid yourself’ into thinking that cholesterol can be lowered through diet alone.

The official web site, www.smokefree.gov—which carries the logos of HHS, NIH and the National Cancer Institute at the bottom—says that ‘NRT can double a smoker’s chances of quitting smoking’.

This ‘fact’ has been duly ‘demonstrated’ by the gold standard of ‘science’ today: the randomized, blinded, placebo-controlled trial. All pharmaceutical products have to go through this lengthy testing process to earn the almighty (and lucrative) government seal of approval. In such trials research participants are randomly assigned to study arms and observed over a period of time to see who responds more favorably. NRT does okay in these tests.

But as one indignant cessation campaigner points out, this suggests a serious abuse of scientific method: smokers going into the trial will immediately recognize whether they are getting a dose of their drug or a useless sugar pill. It’s like a study pitting a heroin substitute against nothing and ‘discovering’, lo and behold! that the people getting their artificial dopamine stimulation don’t head out every night to score.

The real test of effectiveness is whether NRT users do better over an extended period than people quitting cold turkey, and there apparently is considerable evidence that they do not. I don’t pretend sufficient familiarity with that scientific literature to judge, but it wouldn’t surprise any person with a working brain that powerful economic interests might be quite happy suppressing such knowledge so that they could better sell their products to millions of smokers anxious to quit.

You’d think that a crucial debate of this sort would have attracted some attention to the policymakers involved and a critical eye from reporters as to whether or not they are appropriately neutral arbiters of the evidence. A 2007 Wall Street Journal article [Kevin Helliker, Feb 8, 2007, ‘Nicotine Fix: Behind Antismoking Policy, Influence of Drug Industry’] headlined the unsurprising fact that the head of the federal panel in charge of setting government policy runs an academic research center funded in part by NRT producer companies.

But four years later, nothing in the news coverage of the recent announcement of the nine new pictorial warnings suggested any controversy at all. John Polito, the cold-turkey advocate, writes on his site:

We cannot blame a profit-driven industry for designing clinical trials so as to vastly inflate the worth of worthless quitting products. What should deeply trouble all of us is that our government, whose own real-world findings are contrary to industry marketing, refuses to expose obvious industry shell games.

Polito then wonders ‘how hard the pharmaceutical industry pushed to get the 1-800-QUIT-NOW message on all cigarette packs and the full extent of its financial influence in designing [the] telephone counseling scripts’.

[NB: The Health Canada Web site referenced in the graphic image at the top does not push NRT as essential for quitting the way the U.S. government version does. Curiouser and curiouser.]

Battle for not just Brooklyn

2011-06-17T13:00:00.001-07:00

Battle for Brooklyn is a documentary about a real estate development project (Atlantic Yards) in the heart of that borough that involved the usual combination of venality, procedural tricks, phony promises of jobs and housing, truly appalling race baiting and all-around steamrolling of any participation by local residents in the reshaping of their city. The result, years later, is that downtown Brooklyn will have a basketball arena and some tacky chain stores and that’s about it, all at the cost of huge tax subsidies from us to a bunch of already filthy rich people.

The film is a fascinating look at how the big boys do things, and it leaves one even more cynical about the elections that purport to give us an opportunity to make our voices heard. Ha ha ha. When they want something, they don’t shilly-shally around listening to poor schmucks like us.

The doc doesn’t pretend to anything resembling neutrality, and it’s weakened by the filmmakers apparent disinterest in probing the motives and psychology of people who were bought off by the developers in one way or another and who joined the chorus of racially-tinged boos aimed at the activists who spearheaded the opposition, including many whites but also heroic local black leaders like City Councilwoman Letitia James. That would have been useful for people trying to apply the lessons learned to future battles, which are a constant of modern life pretty much anywhere on our urbanized planet.

That said, the movie is a devastating reminder of complicity at the top when the dollar sign is mightily involved and how little labels like ‘Republican’ and ‘Democrat’ matter in that ionospheric realm. It shows perhaps a precursor of battles to come as this supposed dichotomy between the ‘right’ and ‘left’ parties in advanced democracies shrinks further as is occurring today all over Europe.

Consider, for example, this indignant manifesto from one of the occupiers of Madrid’s main square, the Puerta del Sol, to a TV reporter who told those protesting ‘not to question democracy’. It is entitled, ‘Yes, We Question This Democracy’.

Yes, we question this democracy. We question this democracy because it fails to support popular sovereignty: the markets impose decisions for their own benefit and the parties in Parliament are not standing up to this global fact. Neither in our country nor in the European Parliament are they fighting to put an end to financial speculation, whether in currency or in sovereign debt.

We question this democracy because the parties in power do not look out for the collective good, but for the good of the rich. Because they understand growth as the growth of businessmen’s profits, not the growth of social justice, redistribution, public services, access to housing and other necessities. Because the parties in power are concerned only for their own continuation in office, making deals to stay in power and leaving their electoral programme unfulfilled. Because no politician
has to live with what they legislate for their ‘subjects’: insecurity, mortgage debt and uncertainty.

We question this democracy because it colludes in corruption, allowing politicians to hold a private post at the same time as public office, to profit from privileged information, to step into jobs as business advisors after leaving office, making it very profitable to be a politician. . . .

We question this democracy because it is absurd that the only way to ‘punish’ a party is to vote for another one with which one does not agree. We question this democracy because the parties in power do not even comply with the social provisions of the Constitution: justice is not applied equally, there are no decent jobs nor housing for all, foreign-born workers are not treated as citizens.

Excuses are not good enough for us. We do not want to choose between really existing democracy and the dictatorships of the past. We want a different life. Real democracy now!

Dare thee not!

2011-06-16T18:48:00.000-07:00

So the Weiner is toasted, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn is wearing an ankle bracelet. Isn’t it odd that you can torture people, start wars, rob the entire known universe of its cash, all with relative impunity and that the only acts that are REALLY, REALLY unforgivable involve your dick?

Go Greeks!

2011-06-15T17:50:00.000-07:00

With the utter failure of democracy to (1) rein in financial markets worldwide thus generating an ongoing economic catastrophe or to (2) force the perpetrators of these financial shenaningans to share in the burdens of repairing the damage, only direct action is left. Bravo to the people of Greece for pouring into the streets Egyptian-style and refusing to allow their country to be swallowed up by the banker squids.

It has been evident even to a casual outside observer such as myself without the benefit of a PhD in economics that the Greek economy could never escape from the country’s insane debt. This crushing burden, roughly similar to the permanent debt peonage forced on black sharecroppers in the post-bellum South, was built up through a combination of local fecklessness and international collusion by French, German and British banks aided, need we add, by the scam-artistry of Goldman Sachs.

In his annals of Alexander the Great’s conquests around the Mediterranean and beyond, Arrian relates how the invading Macedonian hordes would lay siege to a resisting city, slaughter its defenders and carry off its treasures. That’s pretty much what the European Central Bank has in mind for Greece today—its latest ‘solution’ to the debt trap is for virtually any Greek public asset of value to be sold off to privateers, all while no bondholder forfeits a single centime. If that doesn’t pay the bills, perhaps the ECB could arrange for surviving Greeks to be sold into slavery.

We have seen this all before. Latin America was forced into a similar process of wealth transfer through debt, which only ended when the endless extraction became untenable and destabilizing. The process included lengthy and complex negotiations in which all parties, including creditors, had to agree to give up something. But the European Union, whose 27 members cannot decide what size table to sit around, shows no signs of finding its way toward a solution of this sort.

The banksters raise a great hue and cry about the horrors of default—that Greece simply declare itself incapable of paying out on its sovereign bonds—but this outcome seems to me highly desirable to inject a bracing dose of reality into the conversation, even or especially if it collapses a French bank or two. There is much talk of a Lehman Brothers-style crisis, a meltdown and all the rest, and in a highly leveraged, unregulated financial system run by devious gangsters, severe instability is always a possibility.

But the alternative is to allow the obscenely wealthy to keep shifting the burden of their incompetence onto the state (i.e. taxpayers) indefinitely while any gains accrue only to them. Elections, which result in a back-and-forth between members of the political class all in thrall to these banker gangs, are irrelevant. It’s time for the pitchforks, come what may.

Decline

2011-06-14T07:05:00.000-07:00

Goody, goody, we’re now set for 18 months of mindless posturing pretending to be a political debate. The Republican challengers launched the festivities with their pre-New Hampshire reality series complete with ‘this or that’ questions like, [Do you prefer] Elvis Presley or Johnny Cash? Not one presidential contender drove a truck through the huge opportunity to briefly impersonate an adult and say, ‘That question is silly and beneath the dignity of the office to which I aspire’.

Not that one of these bozo bipeds couldn’t end up in the Oval Office. The excessive confidence of the Obamaoids is fading in inverse proportion to the stickily high unemployment figures and Obama’s caving to the banksters in March of 2009 is now proving deadly just as dissidents warned at the time. Instead of taking the historic opportunity to pull the financier-rentier class back in line and subordinate it to the working economy, Obama and his A-team of enablers (Geithner, Summers and the rest) handed them the store in exchange for promises to bring back productive employment. That hasn’t worked out.

So now we have the prime-time spectacle of demented goofballs like Herman Cain and Michelle Bachmann actually saying true things, like broken clocks that are correct twice a day. When Obama makes happy-talk by calling employment problems a mere ‘bump in the road’, Mitt (the Hair) Romney can score easy points with his ad of depressed workers taking issue with that rather heartless statement. By refusing to place blame on the perpetrators of economic catastrophe with his disastrous let’s-hold-hands-and-sing bipartisan fantasy, Obama now has to shoulder sole responsibility for the current state of affairs.

A large portion of the finance/economy blogosphere, which I enjoy reading as a curious consumer, has been on Obama’s ass for his entire term for excessive optimism, dissembling and delight in the cozy confines of the banksters’ back pockets. As Yves Smith lays out today in a full airing in her blog Naked Capitalism,

‘Obama’s repudiation of his campaign promise of change, by turning his back on meaningful reform of the financial services industry, in turn locked his Administration into . . . working fist in glove with the banksters, supporting and amplifying their own, well established propaganda efforts.

‘Thus Obama’s incentives are to come up with “solutions” that paper over problems, avoid meaningful conflict with the industry, minimize complaints, and restore the old practice of using leverage and investment gains to cover up stagnation in worker incomes. Potemkin reforms dovetail with the financial service industry’s goal of forestalling any measures that would interfere with its looting. So the only problem with this picture was how to fool the now-impoverished public into thinking a program of Mussolini-style corporatism represented progress’.

The depressing part of the story is that Smith is quoting herself, having written that in March of 2010, and the takeover of our productive economy by the cash-extraction industry has only gotten worse in the year since. Despite the wall of liquidity being thrown at the TBTF banks, lending is sluggish, small businesses (the ones that create most employment) are squeezed and the underlying balance sheets remain dangerously shaky.

If a major new upheaval occurs, which is likely with the Europeans’ problems and the still-untapped sewer of legal fraud lying beneath the nation’s foreclosure industry, the bank behemoths will be back at the government warehouse demanding more.

Based on past performance, Obama would respond to a new Wall Street crisis by giving the banks everything they ask and then politely inquiring if they feel better now, thereby providing a new opportunity for corporate shills like Romney, Bachmann and Pawlenty to charge forward as defenders of the little guy.

These are the unsavory choices provided by our creaky democracy today.

Live by the soundbite. . .

2011-06-13T11:45:00.000-07:00

There is a story about Anthony Weiner’s role in the legislation providing medical assistance for 9/11 first responders, the so-called Zadroga bill, that provides a neat counterpoint to the circus he’s now starring in. Weiner is famous for going ballistic and blasting the Republicans from the well of the House when they cynically blocked the measure as needless gummint spending.

Weiner cleverly channeled the frustration many of us felt at the time at the gigantic targets the forces of reaction were providing but at which no Democrats, including especially one B. Obama, would take aim. He directly shamed and smacked the GOP in a way only the Limbaugh-driven Republicans dare to do in our sado-masochistic political culture.

One can opine on whether or not this take-no-prisoners tactic was correct or wise—I personally thought it long overdue. But the incident shows how Weiner’s combative posture as a free-lance hot dog (sorry, couldn’t resist) worked, how his willingness to elbow his way into the scoring zone made him a love/hate object. He reportedly didn’t contribute much to the collegial process involved in constructing the Zadroga bill and left what New York colleague Jerold Nadler called ‘thousands of hours’ of negotiations to others. But when the opportunity arose for a devastating soundbite, Weiner had the killer instinct to snatch it. So it was Weiner on the morning news shows battling the Republican dragon, not Carolyn Maloney, Nadler or other NY pols you’ve never heard of.

It’s an effective way to get ahead, and Weiner distinguished himself among the crowd by his full-frontal attacks. Given Democratic spinelessness and their eagerness to please the very right-wingers who disdain them, he provided welcome relief. But when you alienate friends and enemies alike by shoving everyone aside en route to the cameras, it’s got to be pretty lonely when the cameras are not showcasing your opinions but rather your pants down around your ankles.

Law for all

2011-06-12T09:55:00.000-07:00

Whole cities in Mexico can’t hire a police chief because he (or she in a few cases) will be promptly sliced and quartered by the drug traffickers and the pieces placed on the town battlements for all to see. That is, unless he is willing to accept a huge bribe to look the other way and help keep out the competition. Hm, that’s a tough one: would you like 20 thousand dollars or to have your nuts doused in alcohol and set on fire?

We may shudder at these stories of awful things occurring far away, but the protection of what we enjoy as a modicum of rule of law closer to home is also under sustained assault, albeit on a far lesser scale. General indifference to lawful/lawlessness is a deeply-held biped trait, as far as I can tell, unless and until said injustice touches one personally as the torture debate has re-proven. But there are a few faint signs of resistance that are encouraging.

Here in New York we are regularly witness to all sorts of police misconduct, which just as regularly results in no punishment for the official perps. However, the latest scandal involving ticket-fixing threatens to do the boys in blue some serious damage, not because any one is particularly surprised or even incensed at the practice, but because it finally undermines a precious enforcement commodity—trust.

A Bronx jury recently acquitted a guy [above] charged with drunk driving after learning that the charging officers regularly fixed traffic tickets for their friends. So much for the ticket-fixing = ‘professional courtesy’ theory bruited about by defenders of the practice—a jury quite reasonably concluded that if police can make a legitimate charge go away with a wave of the wand, they could also drum up an illegitimate one for someone they don’t like quite as well.

Some of the juror comments were devastating: ‘completely corrupt’; ‘They have no integrity’. ‘They don’t even deserve a badge’. This development must be sending chills up and down prosecutorial spines all over town. How easy it will be for defense lawyers to discover that the testifying cop has engaged in this routine practice and blow virtually any case out of the water?

The Daily News says the Bronx DA’s office is frantically offering plea deals to keep ticket-fixing cops off the stand. At least one murder case has been lost over the suddenly un-credible cops problem.

It is also no accident that surprising love-bomb from a jury occurred in the Bronx, a majority black and Hispanic district. That’s where the youngsters bear the brunt of the city’s 600 thousand annual ‘stop and frisk’ actions in which cops since Giuliani have been permitted to harass minority men relentlessly as part of the over-played ‘broken windows’ theory of crime prevention. One result is that the city has racked up vast numbers of marihuana arrests, which saddle minority youth with a criminal record for life.

One lesson, if anyone at NYPD is in the mood for higher ed, seems to be that official impunity, two-tiered justice and effective policing don’t really mix.

You da Man

2011-06-07T12:12:00.000-07:00

I do not care about Anthony Weiner, his career or his dick. But there is something breathtakingly insane and yet utterly predictable about all three.

There is a certain kind of alpha male attracted to the modern political game—neurotically ambitious, chronically sleep-deprived and disagreeably fixated on winning, whatever that might mean at a given moment. They’re the kind of guys who are comfortable on the cable news scream-shows and also fanatically dedicated to the gym, which they shoehorn into their 20-hour days.

Weiner is a good exemplar of this class of weirdos who now run our lives. They also appear very frequently in the Obama White House, and no doubt in the prior version as well. They are usually dangerously pumped up (note how Weiner accented his firm man-titties for the camera), overworked and either constantly on the verge of hysteria (Rahm Emanuel) or so eerily self-controlled you suspect they are part Vulcan (Geithner). These are the guys capable of designing an education advocacy program with the perverse, twisted title, ‘Race to the Top’, suggesting that they think the main reason to learn things is to show off to everyone how superior you are. The Weiner debacle illustrates something not often acknowledged among us: THERE IS SOMETHING WRONG WITH THEM.

It’s easy to suppose how the disease progresses among these types: they have early successes, are smart and aggressive, learn ruthlessness and are attracted to others like themselves, which reinforces their worst tendencies. They achieve a measure of status and suddenly are surrounded by people sucking up to them (sometimes literally), thereby convincing them that their original intuition—that they are extremely special—is correct. From there it’s a quick slide down the psychological precipice to sensations of invincibility, hubris and catastrophe.

Despite the finger-pointing at Weiner for not knowing how to reel it in, our culture reinforces this profile and constantly rewards those who fit it. We pretend to think we find them appalling when for the most part we can’t imagine being dominated by anyone else.

DoJ pursues Edwards, forgives Yoo

2011-06-04T18:04:00.001-07:00

Which is worse? Funneling campaign money to your secret floozy to keep the news of your love-child out of the news? Or torturing people?

The Obama Justice Department has shown itself quite zealous in putting the screws to a political nobody who came dangerously close to making Sarah Palin vice president. (Imagine if his sexual peccadilloes had emerged after he had become the nominee.) He is a thoughtless, irresponsible, narcissistic human being as fully outlined and described in excruciating detail by his former top aide, Andrew Young, in The Politician.

That said, I find it morally loathsome that the Justice Department should dash after this guy with a felony indictment when it is itself criminally eager, on the express order of President Obama, to ‘put the past behind us’ on the systematic torture regime created by the Bush-era criminals. It says something, had we need of further proof, about who the real enemies of this White House are: liberal Democrats who stray out of line.

Torturers and their ilk are okay.

Employment sucks

2011-06-03T10:37:00.000-07:00

The country’s latest jobless figures are out confirming the uneasy buzz in the econ/finance pages that the supposed ‘recovery’ that has made bankers (but few others) so happy may be sputtering out. Job creation totaled a pathetic 54,000, not nearly enough to absorb the new workers entering the force. Obama’s re-election mantra for disaffected supporters like me will be all about how ‘change’ takes time, so don’t be so whiny. But what if change is indeed happening but in the wrong direction?

Obama refused to countenance a New Deal-style public works or job-creation program when he was freshly in office and could have jammed something through over the howls of outrage from rich white guys. Our prez consistently has caved to the deficit panic people who hate his guts and allowed well over a million jobs (1.3 million according to this guy) to disappear in the government sector as state after state hits the fiscal wall. Sharp spending cutbacks at a time of diminishing demand used to be considered dumb policy, something that fatally discredited Herbert Hoover and aggravated the 1930s Depression. But oddly, it’s back.

Meanwhile, Europe is also in the grips of the new financial oligarchy, now doctoring periphery countries like Ireland, Greece and Portugal with the same poison that was once forced down the collective throat of people in Uruguay, Indonesia and Zambia: slash government spending, privatize everything, drive the powerless into abject poverty and declare the economy ‘healthy’. It’s working about pretty much as well now as it did in the 1970s. Britain’s recovery from the recession is now in doubt, and the debt-peonage being shoehorned into the defenseless Greek islands is a scandal. The new measures will guarantee that holders of German and French bank bonds will cream off any surplus produced by workers there for the foreseeable future.

I don’t read anything in the economics pages that suggests the people in charge really think any of this will work to restore economic health. But I gather that that is not really the goal—rather, the IMF-OECD-Treasury-Goldman fino-political bankopoly is determined to keep the cash flowing into its bottomless pockets at whatever cost necessary. We are witnessing a class war waged by experts with Barack O as Confuser-in-Chief.

Keep us safe!

2011-05-30T07:00:00.000-07:00

Two former New York cops were acquitted of rape last week in yet another highlight of the culture of impunity that surrounds the men in blue. [photo: NY Daily News]

Ironically, the two would never have been indicted at all had it not been for the ubiquitous security cameras taping our every movement. The street cameras caught the men returning to the apartment of a woman whom they had been called upon to assist because she was dangerously drunk.

Prosecutors charged that they assisted themselves right into her bedroom and raped her. They were seen returning to her flat three times that night for no apparent reason and were later caught falsifying their records and arranging a phony 911 call to cover it up.

One cop even admitted he crawled into her bad to ‘console’ her. However, the jury hesitated at the lack of DNA evidence and the woman’s faulty recollections and declared them ‘not guilty’.

That is not the same as declaring them ‘innocent’. The whole thing smelled so completely fishy that anyone not a cop would be looking at 25 years. The two were found guilty only of ‘misconduct’ and fired--I guess the city was not eager for them to respond to future damsel-in-distress calls.

But we shouldn’t be surprised at the abuse of the powers that, as a society, we continue to pile onto the security forces that multiply around us. Who dares to suggest that the feds should not snoop into our mails and our library records, that the accused should be put on trial instead of held indefinitely on suspicion? The renewal of the ‘Patriot’ Act (at which Orwell would smile) sailed through Congress last week with hardly a peep of protest over the systematic dismantling of our civil protections. Give the police more power and shut up, seems to be our guiding philosophy.

Cops and their friends have long been permitted to operate outside certain laws as long as they didn’t overdo it. We’re just now getting a glimpse into the huge ticket-fixing industry in New York that defense lawyers already are defending as ‘normal professional courtesies’. That means, if you have the right friends, of course you should be excused from law-breaking. Fahgettaboutit. The scandal only broke open because cops went too far and caused some DUI citations to disappear, upon which the drunken cop-friendly drivers promptly went out and did it again.

Non-white people, however, usually do not have such friends and therefore are subject to the short end of the security stick. They are the ones who will not be surprised or particularly concerned if the U.S. becomes an overt police state because things won’t feel all that different to them.

On the other hand, for those used to more privilege, seeing that guys in uniform can do pretty much anything to you is going to be increasingly startling. The accuser in the rape case (not named in news accounts) was a fashion executive of some sort—if you can snuggle in bed uninvited with someone like that and get off, why worry?

[cartoon: Truthdig]