Obama getting exactly what he deserves on leaks

It’s just great to see the McCains and the Grassleys and the Lindsey Grahams slaughtering the Obama Administration over the constant leaks showing how tough and hands-on the prez is when it comes to disrupting the Iranian nuclear industry and assassinating undesirables. These are the juicy details pouring out of the government at the same time as the Obama team is seeking to put away Bradley Manning for life because he told on them.

As Glenn Greenwald has documented exhaustively, our current leaders have a grotesque double standard when it comes to unfriendly leakers and whistleblowers, whom they persecute mercilessly despite Obama’s lies campaign promises about transparency, and friendly ones, i.e. themselves spilling all kinds of confidential stuff about what a swinging dick the boss is. This was supposed to attract super-patriotic cheers, which it has from the Republican reactionaries like Peter King, who thinks it’s great that Obama ignores his base and further dismantles the rule of law.

Unfortunately, the security state doesn’t like Obama anyway, and they’re going to crush him. (The man just refuses to believe he isn’t invited to be part of their club.) The constant leaks from inside have provided a nice homerun ball to the Romney campaign and its surrogates, and I for will enjoy watching them hit it out of the park. Did he think he’s get a reward for letting the Bush-era criminals off the hook?

The announcement by Holder that there would be an internal investigation may not be enough to quiet the howling wolves. The whole story should percolate along right into the shank of the election season.

Finally, momentum against stop-and-frisk

An unusual coalition is building to confront Bloomberg’s awful stop-and-frisk law that lets the city cops criminalize all non-white males and treat them like shit. The latest and most positive development is that the city’s influential LGBT groups have weighed in definitively and endorsed a Father’s Day march against the disgusting and racist practice. It was heartwarming to see the gay leadership at a news conference in front of the Stonewall Inn this week with Sharpton and other black figures who usually have to denounce the cops’ excesses pretty much alone. Unions were represented, too, as well as the NAACP.

The NYPD is on track to record 800,000 street stops this year, a 20 percent annual increase. Black and Hispanic kids in certain neighborhoods can expect to be pulled over by cops and patted down weekly. There’s even a term for any kid who hasn’t had his turn yet: a ‘stop-and-frisk virgin’. The alleged idea is to take guns off the streets, which must be the last gun control measure permitted in the entire 50 states by now. But it’s directed at those you know, wink wink, other people, so it’s okay. Cops also love to use marijuana busts to get the kids fingerprinted and their data into the criminal system, where they can stay for life.

The gay and lesbian powers are a little hesitant about confronting Bloomberg on this or any other issue since he’s in their corner on marriage equality and other hot-button issues. Gay politics just comes backed with a lot more cash and privilege than the people usually objecting to black teenagers getting pushed around, which is what makes this so interesting.

But there’s an intersect that has awakened the LGBT crowd to stop-and-frisk abuse: harassment of underage gay kids, especially transgenders. The issue has been brewing for a number of years, and the TG contingent has become better organized and more vocal about the repeated incidents. It’s a small step from there to seeing the larger picture: that the kids aren’t getting stopped just because they’re young queens with no place to hang out, but because they’re young BLACK queens with no place to hang out.

Paul Schindler, editor of the excellent Gay City News, came out strongly against stop-and-frisk in an editorial and a front-page feature and noted the significant presence of our city council president, ambitious Chrstine Quinn, at the announcement. Quinn, who just married her female partner, is angling to be the next mayor, and though she is a shameless hack who has nested comfortably underneath Bloomberg’s undershirts for a decade, her flip against stop-and-frisk is a strong signal. That and the backing of the gay lobby are turning up the heat on the cops just a year from the race to succeed Mayor Mike, who continues to insist that stop-and-frisk is a great idea.

Here’s a chance to make a difference: join me at the Father’s Day event, June 17, 110th Street and Fifth Avenue, 12:00 noon.

Will Rangel be ousted after 42 years?

Because New York is a solid blue state, we will be spared the political garbage soon to spew onto the airwaves attempting to explain to us who should preside over the further impoverishment of the middle and working classes. We’ll just have to tune in to catch some of the crap being fed to our New Jersey neighbors where the race will be a bit tighter.

We do have some votes of interest, however, including the stubborn refusal to retire of Congressman Charlie Rangel, the Harlem boss whose 15th congressional district includes my modest domicile in the upper reaches of Manhattan. Redistricting has deleted a slice of the Upper West Side from Rangel’s 15th district and added a big chunk of heavily Latino Kingsbridge and Norwood in the Bronx all the way up to Fordham University. In fact, due to the loss of population in the state, Rangel’s 15th is now the 13th. Here’s a nifty interactive map that shows the old and new districts in helpful colors.

Because the new boundaries of the old Harlem-based district have pushed the Hispanic population from 45% to 55%, Rangel is being challenged by Adriano Espaillat, a one-term, Dominican-born state senator. Espaillat, who previously sat on the city council, is also my neighbor on Park Terrace West and a nice fellow by all appearances although I wish he wouldn’t set his SUV in the illegal space next to Isham Park. I guess public service does have its privileges.

I’ve started to get glossy mailings in anticipation of the Democratic primary later this month, which is the real election for this seat. (The whole area is not exactly Republican-friendly territory—Obama won 93% in the old Rangel district four years ago.) Rangel, going for his 23rd consecutive term, is refusing to run against Espaillat at all—his material exclusively talks about the nasty Republicans and their nefarious intentions. Few would disagree up here, and it’s probably a wise approach given Rangel’s recent bad news on ethics violations and the loss of his powerful committee chair two years ago.

Espaillat has steered clear of dragging that dirty laundry into the campaign although no one’s forgotten it. I wish there were clear policy differences between the two of them that one could identify, but there aren’t. Unfortunately but probably inevitably, it’s a race based on race: people are very likely to vote their ethnicity, and that gives Adriano a slight edge to be the first Dominican in Congress, for whatever that’s worth. He won’t be running for president though—he was born on an island that the U.S. never formally annexed.

Cuomo calls for halt to city's pot scam

There is movement, at long last, against the outrageous NYPD practice of stopping young black and Hispanic kids and busting them for pot through subterfuge and lies. Governor Cuomo set a fire under the city burgers’ comfy behinds by calling on the state to make pot arrests equivalent to a traffic fine rather than a criminal misdemeanor.

This decade-long and blatantly racist pot campaign is an excellent illustration of how neo-liberal management techniques dovetail neatly with more sinister social engineering. One need not be a tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorist to perceive the nefarious outcomes, which are the same whether or not a giant Evil Brain is behind the whole scheme.

New York’s crime statistics are a highly contested matter, the maker and breaker of political careers, most notoriously that of Rudy Giuliani whose triumph over Broken Windows is now the stuff of legend. Cop bosses and mayors just love to get their major crime stats down, and one ongoing scandal here is how they manipulate victims of serious offenses to get the incidents downgraded and make the top guys look good. At the same time, the management geniuses want to show ‘productivity’, which entails exactly the opposite—lots of arrests.

What’s the solution? Well, New York led the way back in 1977 in the trend to decriminalize marijuana as society came to realize that pot is a relatively benign substance and quite a nice one, too. But after several years in which the city ignored reefer, Bloomberg became mayor and promptly decided that he could extend the Broken Windows concept and at the same time criminalize virtually any minority male in town. The tool was a massive rediscovery of Reefer Madness.

While small amounts for personal consumption were not grounds for arrest under the 1980s reform, you couldn’t go around smoking weed in public. So cops suddenly began using their stop and frisk powers (800,000 stops expected this year alone) to cajole hundreds of thousands of black and brown kids into showing any Mary Jane they had on them with false promises that they’d then be let go. Once the kid brought out the stash, he was popped for having it in ‘public view’. After averaging no more than a thousand pot arrests a year in the 1980s, the city now busts 40,000 to 50,000 people annually. Last year saw an all-time high of 55,000. All these kids immediately get saddled with a record and are thus crippled in the increasingly rigged race for employment and survival. Gazillionaire Bloomberg’s term in office has meant criminal records for pot possession for 400,000 mostly young people, only 15% of whom are white.

Commissioner Ray Kelly supposedly told the NYPD officers to stop doing harassment pot busts last fall, but so far they’ve either ignored him or understood that he didn’t mean it. So enter Cuomo who has a good nose for popular issues that are ripe for harvest.

Bloomberg and even Kelly are supporting the change, which must mean that the old scam has outlived its usefulness. They are probably giving ground on pot so that they can split it off from the stop-and-frisk policy itself, which they eagerly want to preserve. New York magazine points out this week in its Approval Matrix that cops stopped and patted down 120,000 Latino and black adolescents last year—out of a total of only 170,000 in that age group citywide. A majority of the white minority in liberal old New York consistently tells pollsters that they think that policy is just fine.

Bloomberg the downsize [king]

Mayor Bloomberg is an authoritarian prick, and so sometimes it’s fun to watch him bulldoze the guys who normally get their way by buying up politicians not sitting on $20 billion in their bank accounts. His latest surprise attack is an order to ban large sugary drinks in the city, which promptly raised howls of indignant outrage from the outfits merrily peddling these liquid calorie bombs.

I was in the Bronx last week for my job and met with hospital officials who informed us that in some of their poorer neighborhoods, 50 percent of the patients at primary health facilities suffer from diabetes or pre-diabetic syndromes. So when we glimpse those lithe 30-somethings bounding like springboks along the footpaths in Central Park, it’s good to recall that pretty much half of the city’s poor are wrecking their health with carbohydrate overdoses.

The objections to the mayor’s ukase followed a familiar script: that the real starch problem was in the stiff collars of the nanny state, daring to dictate to Free Men what they could and could not do with their alimentary canals, i.e., an exact repeat of the fight over smoking in bars. Sure, it’s not the same issue, but one would expect something more inventive from the lobbyists who were all over the personal freedom implications but offer no alternative means for weaning the city’s bloated kids off their sugar highs.

I haven’t read all the arguments, but I begin by being massively unimpressed with Don’t Tread On Me-type objections from citizens who don’t give a crap about Obama’s kill lists or the 800,000 annual stop-and-frisks carried out by cops in this city. The pro-sugaroids can go mainline high-fructose corn syrup for all I care, which doesn’t mean Bloomberg is not an arrogant bully. He’s that too, and they deserve each other.

Scummish Scott has powerful allies; workers don't

Wisconsinites will probably keep Governor Walker in office tomorrow thanks to an obscene flood of cash from rich people, but the poster boy of union-busting already has suffered a crippling defeat. No first-term officeholder wants to spend most of his time fighting off a credible recall challenge even if it fails. All that out-of-state money that looks likely to give him the edge has exposed him as a stalking horse for the national campaign to unravel what’s left of the New Deal. Walker is a pathetic hack, and even if he wins, he loses.

Some commentators have expressed dismay at the notoriously lackadaisical reaction of the national Democrats to tomorrow’s obvious curtain-raiser on the November elections, especially noting the miserly sums provided to their Wisconsin counterparts to fight Walker. But these innocents presume, on the basis of no evidence, that union-busting is somehow disturbing to the Obama party. It isn’t. In fact, since the passage of right-to-work laws in the 1950s, the Democratic machinery has barely managed to fight a credible rearguard action against the steady erosion of union membership and clout, notwithstanding the Dems’ expectations, usually fulfilled, that the remnants of the blue-collar workforce will faithfully trudge along behind whatever ambitious, Clintonoid, business-friendly suit that emerges from the neo-liberal thicket.

Union backers will grumble and curse if Walker squeezes out a win and remains in office, but they shouldn’t be disheartened. The independent and largely spontaneous outpouring of opposition to Walker’s assault on their livelihoods and citizenship was its own victory and prepared the way for the next battle--in stark contrast to the usual channeling of citizen energies into electing Democrats who promptly abandon them. Replacing the scummish Walker with a generic Democrat, while it would be a delicious moment, isn’t half as important as way Wisconsinites have exposed the lines of battle for all to see. The lame support from Obama is part of this illumination, and if a Walker come-back presages defeat for the Democrats later in the year, they will have only themselves to blame.

Diplomacy and genocide, by Kofi Annan

Lord Unctious, the former UN Secretary General, is on stage again emitting pious bleating noises in the next armchair over from Bashir al-Assad, the world’s latest mass murderer. This week he called upon ‘everyone with a gun’ in Syria to put them down, thereby equating the regime’s roving death squads with the people trying to protect civilians being slaughtered. This is entirely consistent with the performance of a world-class do-nothing who stood by as UN chief during both the Rwandan genocide and the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia, yet still gets work. Diplomacy is a marvelous thing.

Annan was incapable of even sounding much of an alarm over Rwanda, and the fact that liberal heartthrob Bill Clinton didn’t want to be bothered by the fate of unimportant African peasants might have had something to do with it. Once it was too late, everyone said they were really, really sorry and agreed that they had certainly exercised bad judgment. So that fixes that.

Meanwhile, the mishandling of the Libyan affair a year ago has limited the UN’s usefulness in this case, and it is a pity that no one can do much while Assad proceeds to slaughter thousands of people. The original UN mandate in Libya was to prevent a similar round of mass murder by Khaddafy, who openly promised it when the eastern part of the country rose up against him. But then NATO took advantage of the green light to actively intervene and overthrow him, which the Russians and Chinese hadn’t signed on for and don’t want to see happen again, and who can blame them given the recent bellicosity directed at Iran.

No one has much moral high ground in this depressing scenario, and although the continuing horror must be weakening the Syrian regime’s support, experts don’t agree on what will happen next. One despairs of the biped race when mass insanity takes over--let it be over soon.