If I can make it there. . . .

After a blissful spell of quietude, New York State politics is back on the front burner, and as usual it is so depressing as to make us wonder precisely how we are superior to Arizona or Louisiana.

First, there’s Charlie ‘Four-Rent-Stabilized-Apartments in Harlem’ Rangel who doesn’t realize that he’s a laughingstock and clings to office instead of repairing to his Caribbean resort to sit irrelevantly on a beach. Not that many people in his safe district (in which I reside) are up in arms about how he blew four decades of seniority on vanity projects and corruption just when he could have brought whole hog farms of federal pork to the recession-blasted city.

On top of that, we have been forcefully reminded of our goofball Governor, David Paterson a.k.a. Alfred E. Newman—who successfully stonewalled the investigation into his own and others’ appalling conduct when his driver/bodyguard beat [below] up a girlfriend last October.

Paterson was already scraping the bottom of the approval-polls barrel, but when we learned that he had called up the victim in a blatant attempt to intimidate her out of her domestic violence complaint, he was forced to abandon his joke of a re-election campaign. But four months later he’s unapologetic and now says he regrets having dropped out.

The sorry details of the incident are here and here, but suffice it to say that Paterson is a Harlem/Democratic Party machine pol who grew up privileged and thinks he’s special. You’d think in a city where the black population faces such grave problems that there would emerge a class of black political leaders occasionally interested in solving them rather than cashing in on all the goodies that come with office. But you would be wrong.

Ground Zero Racism

I can’t improve on this hilarious take-down at Firedog Lake of the racism-enablers at the [LOL] Anti-Defamation League who pretend to criticize the anti-Muslim sentiment pouring forth over the building of a mosque at Ground Zero and then join Sarah Palin by calling for us to give in to it. First, Firedog quotes the ADL statement:

The bigotry some have expressed in attacking them is unfair, and wrong. But ultimately this is not a question of rights, but a question of what is right. In our judgment, building an Islamic Center in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause some victims more pain unnecessarily, and that is not right.

Then they take the piss out of them:

Amazing. It’s like the ADL is pro- and anti-defamation at the same time. It denounces the right-wing bigots while using birtheresque we’re-just-saying-there-are-questions-that-need-to-be-answered weasel-words to echo their talking points.

For an encore maybe the ADL can announce that it ‘categorically rejects’ homophobia but is mindful of the ‘legitimate questions’ about whether gays make suitable parents or undermine military unit cohesion and therefore recommends that they stop trying to get married or enlist in the armed forces because it upsets too many people.

Or maybe it can denounce anti-immigrant xenophobia while pointing out the ‘legitimate questions’ about whether Hispanics are dangerous disease-carrying criminals who will steal our jobs and social services and oh-so-gently suggest that maybe they should find another country to emigrate to.

Look, it’s very simple really: You don’t oppose bigotry by tut-tutting it and then siding with the bigots. You oppose bigotry by opposing bigotry.

This would be so contradictory as to be inexplicable if the ADL were really about opposing race- or religion-based bigotry. But it’s not. It’s an arm of the Israeli lobby, and it’s task is to accuse people of anti-Semitism if they get in the way of that foreign government’s interests and designs. So naturally it would be sympathetic to people furious about the mosque at Ground Zero.

Oink oink

The difference in treatment of the auto industry and the banks was put into stark relief this week as Obama sallied forth to defend the bailout of Detroit by saying the money was well-spent, saved jobs and all but $25 billion or so will be recovered.

Obama didn’t mention that the price of the bailout was the Grand Guignol-style rolling of heads down the corporate aisle. He hadn’t been president for two months when the White House pushed out the chairman of GM and forced Chrysler into a partnership with Fiat as the conditions for the federal life-line.

Meanwhile, yesterday the federal agency charged with vigilance over the equity markets barely rapped the knuckles of Citibank, beneficiary of either $20 billion or $300 billion in federal largesse (depending on how you calculate it) around the same time as GM and Chrysler were getting $85 billion. Two executives will have to pay back some tiny portion of their Ali Baba loot while the company was saddled with a laughable fine of $75 million for systematically cooking its books.

How many ways is this unfair? First of all, Citibank’s sins were of quite a different nature than GM’s—the latter was a lousy automobile company that lost oodles of money while at least trying to produce something. But Citibank was a casino run by a mob. It put out phony balance sheets to bamboozle bond and shareholders, and when the whole thing blew up, the government came to its rescue while regular folks got laid off and thrown onto the street.

So did the guys responsible for this debacle go the way of Rich Waggoner and the other GM schmos? Um, not exactly. Gary Crittenden, former chief financial officer of the bank, will have to folk over $100,000 for his lies. That would be a lot for a normal person, but Crittenden ‘earned’ $19.3 million in 2007 and another $12.2 million in 2008 from Citibank alone, not to mention the eight interlocking corporate boards he also sits on. The fine is barely an embarrassment.

Citibank did not bother to conceal its contempt for the federal overseers in its statement, noting that the other of the two ‘punished’ executives is a ‘highly valued employee’, rather than a crook who should be taken out and shot.

The grotesque surrender to finance capital performed by the Obama Administration (with the Republican ‘enemies’ expressing faux outrage and secretly cheering them on) gives us the worst of all possible worlds—the alleged party of the downtrodden carrying hod for the rich and powerful. At least when it was Bush and his sleazy crowd doing it, one could read their obvious indifference to anyone not as rich as they are. But the Democrats pretend to be concerned while doing nothing to stop the steady concentration of power in the hands of a financial oligopoly that has demonstrated to all and sundry that nothing can stand in its way.

The Afghan war is lost

Aside from the juicy tidbit here and there, not much in the latest Pentagon Papers constitutes much of a surprise.

We might not have known that the insurgents have heat-seeking missiles, the kind that the CIA once provided them to shoot at Soviet helicopters.

We might not have had precise information on how many of the drone strikes launched from a Virginia suburb were blowing up civilian bystanders or relatives of the targeted fighters.

We might not have exactly realized how many gazillions of dollars in health, education and security aid—the kinds of things Republicans wouldn’t vote to spend money on here at home even if guns were pointed at their heads—was being flushed down the toilet of corruption and mismanagement.

In short, we might not have had data on the trees, but we certainly could see the forest. It was clear that our decade of war in Afghanistan was a debacle long before Wikileaks gave us the gory details.

Now, President Obama will issue the expected harrumphs about the leaks’ damage to ‘national security’, and given his record to date he probably will persecute the leaker(s) as enthusiastically as the Bushites if not moreso.

We will hear much indignant bloviating about the violation of this or that ‘law’ on the disposition of confidential documents, under the assumption that we will be shocked, shocked, at the idea of illegality in our war-making apparatus. It would perhaps be prudent not to talk about this much by cellphone or in e-mails since we know the National Security Agency is gathering 1.2 billion of them daily—and now legally, thanks in part to Obama himself.

After Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, it took another four years for the Vietnam war to end. Applying that metric to Afghanistan would put us roughly in 2014 to close this sorry chapter--in the midst of the next presidential term. Does it really matter whose?

One of the saddest items in the Pentagon Papers was the revelation that Lyndon Johnson’s reasons for persisting in the Vietnam tragedy were:

70% - To avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat.
20% - To keep South Vietnam and the adjacent territory from Chinese hands.
10% - To permit the people of South Vietnam to enjoy a better, freer way of life.
ALSO - To emerge from the crisis without unacceptable taint from methods used.

Note the principal reason for continuing the lost cause and the attendant mayhem: to not lose.

Who can doubt that similar cynical reasoning dominates in the halls of decision-making today?

Maybe they can go to the 'Laura Bush' hospital

Here is a story not likely to see the light of day on our non-stop cable chatter channels: the huge spike in radiation-related cancers among the children of Fallujah, six years after the massive assault on the city by its American conquerors.

Fallujah was targeted in 2004 in Operation ‘Vigilant Resolve’ after insurgents there killed four civilian contractors working for the Blackwater security firm and publicly burned their bodies. The incident made a lot of people on the U.S. side very angry, and most of the population was evacuated in preparation for a major battle, which duly ensued and reduced the Sunni stronghold to rubble.

The British Independent reported on an epidemiological survey that was conducted there in response to anecdotal evidence that something pretty terrible was happening to the city’s newborns. The study, published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, found that cancers of all sorts had mushroomed after the city was turned into a free-fire zone.

Among the main findings of the study, entitled ‘Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005-2009’:

-infant mortality rose to 80 per 1,000 births compared to 19 in Egypt, 17 in Jordan and 10 in Kuwait.

-female breast cancer increased 1,000%

-the sex ratio between boy and girl babies dropped from 1,050/1,000, which is normal, to 850/1000, suggesting genetic damage affecting male fetuses more than females. A similar change was discovered in Hiroshima in the 1940s.

-rates of leukemia rose 3,800% (the increase at Hiroshima after the atom bomb was dropped on it was 1,700%)

The survey included nearly 5,000 people, and the statistical evidence that this is not a coincidental result is overwhelming. While epidemiologists usually celebrate significance if their numbers show no more than a 1 in 20 chance of randomness, the Fallujah cancer figures were in the range of 1 in 100 million.

The report does not shy away from the obvious conclusion: the pattern is ‘similar to that in the Hiroshima survivors who were exposed to ionizing radiation from the bomb and uranium in the fallout’.

The logical explanation is that American troops included depleted uranium (DP) weaponry in their assault on the town. Aside from the brief controversy over their use in tank battles involving troops, one can only imagine the cynicism that went into the decision to deploy them against civilians.

Stay tuned to hear a thorough airing of this pertinent outcome of Operation Iraqi Freedom on CNN, Good Morning America, Nightline and the PBS News Hour. Also, anticipate a chapter on this topic in Christopher Hitchins’ next book, sandwiched between praise for the courageous and talented neocons who engineered the invasion.

Shame [Updated]

What a revealing moment we have before us in the Shirley Sherrod incident, after the rapid climb-down by the yellow-bellies in the Obama Administration who buckled in the face of the Fox News onslaught without even checking their facts.

Sherrod is the former Agriculture Department employee who was subjected to a McCarthyite assault by the creeps at Fox based on a tendentiously edited video purporting to make her look like a racist. In fact, she was speaking frankly about race in ways that one Barack Obama once did to save his election campaign--and was considered an oratorical genius afterward.

But Sherrod is merely a minor cog with no powerful friends, so she could be sent a text and told to resign while driving herself home—based on nothing more than an attack by her boss’s sworn enemies. Her dignified but obviously pained comments reveal how hurtful it must have been for a lifelong civil servant to be dumped for political reasons without even being given a chance to state her case.

It’s no wonder Obama’s poll numbers are slipping if this is how he’s coaching his minions. Their behavior is more reminiscent of the Czechoslovak Communist Party after the post-Dubcek ‘normalization’ than a democratic government.

And no wonder those of us still in charge of our faculties are feeling so gloomy about the future if these gigantic opportunities to show some cojones and stand up to the bullies are turned again and again into displays of rank cowardice by the guys we put in charge.

However, I believe it is a mistake to read this pathetic cringing by the ruling Democrats as stupidity or cluelessness. I have a much more pessimistic interpretation: complicity.

The Democratic White House acts like the hapless child of an alcoholic, desperate for any sign of right-wing approval that is always withheld. They seem psychologically colonized by the permanent abuse; instead of turning their attention to their natural allies, they chase after those who spurn them with more eager compromises, which merely reinforces their tormentors’ contempt.

If Martin Luther King, Jr., were alive today, he’d undoubtedly be one of the ‘fucking retards’ denounced by Rahm Emanuel & friends for messing up their deal-making with the reactionaries and racists that we voted out. Obama’s White House, like the Democratic Party he heads, fears the Shirley Sherrods of the land much more than the Fox News demagogues and the Limbaugh-worshiping knuckleheads who openly seek their destruction.

Sherrod’s story is one worth revisiting. She and her husband tried to save black-owned farms in Georgia despite the relentless hostility of the openly racist governor Lester Maddox and lack of support from an unresponsive federal government. What a moment to remind Americans of how race really has worked in the last 50 years instead of scrambling to deliver the head of a hard-working lady to a cabal of howling, race-baiting, white guys who run a TV network.

[Update] CNN was scrambling this morning to track down the aide at USDA who frantically texted Sherrod to get her to quit when the Fox video trickery first broke. But Sherrod defended the aide in interviews and repeated her assertion that the pressure to fire her came from the White House. Please, God, let it be Rahm Emanuel who did it! And let the networks stay interested long enough to track down the truth.

Also: More reporting, please, on the fact that Sherrod’s own father was gunned down by a white farmer in a highly dubious incident, who then was not indicted by an all-white grand jury in the time-honored southern way of doing things. But Fox doesn’t confuse the race issue with tales of mere homicide when it can play gotcha with edited videotapes.

Quoth the Raven, "Forevermore".

Torture is forever.

Those, like our current president, who think it best to ‘look forward’ rather than scour out the filth from our recent past eventually will be frustrated when others discover the truth and assign the blame for the official practice of torturing defenseless detainees conducted by the United States of America.

As has often occurred, the British are far ahead of us, and it is surely an irony of our decade that it is the Conservative Party there taking the lead. Prime Minister Cameron launched an executive review to be led by a judge with the aim of ‘restoring British moral leadership in the world’.

That seems to be a low priority here in our country where the possession of massive stocks of weaponry acts as a substitute for silly old ‘moral leadership’. But Obama and the foreign policy establishment should not underestimate the slow, corrosive effect of having the truth of their brutalities come dribbling out.

Already the British papers are assembling evidence that British intelligence agents stood by while detainees were tortured in Pakistan, Egypt, the Emirates, Bangladesh and of course Afghanistan and Iraq. Even slippery Tony Blair is unlikely to escape given the paper trail already leading towards his unctuous and smarmy person.

Blair has fallen back on the lawyerly constructions about whether he condoned or authorized ‘torture’, allowing himself wiggle room to continue to dodge the precise, smoking-gun evidence of his collusion with crimes against humanity. Eventually, however, the Iraq and Afghan wars will wind down, and the public’s fascination with torturing news of the ‘ticking time-bomb’ out of hapless suspects will fade into embarrassment.

Curiously, it is the heart of the British establishment itself that is pushing for a housecleaning to remove the taint of the torture years. The steady revelations generated support for a special investigation not only from Cameron and his deputy P.M. Clegg but also a foreign secretary from the Thatcher years (Lord Howe) and a top army staff officer (Lord Guthrie). This suggests that the Brits see real damage done to their interests by the unleashing of Star Chamber tactics of yesteryear and want to put an end to the chapter promptly.

Meanwhile, back in the U.S. there are other signs of disquiet about the introduction of medieval practices prohibited under Anglo-American jurisprudence for 500 years. The American Psychological Association told a Texas licensing board earlier this month that Dr James Mitchell should be stripped of his license for aiding the CIA’s torture of a detainee.

Just the beginning! As the months and years grind on, those who sold their souls to the national security apparatus and forgot their professional ethics will face the harsh glare of publicity—while the higher-ups who utilized them like Blair and Rumsfeld enjoy their golf games. It will be so unfair!