Obscene, Threatening Comments Posted at Anti-TSA Website Traced to Homeland Security Servers

Jonathan Benson at Natural News, December 29, 2010:


Officials from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) seem to now be going on the offensive against those who oppose its new invasive and unconstitutional airport security protocols being carried out by agents of the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA). According to George Donnelly, owner of WeWontFly.com, government workers appear to be posting hateful messages on his anti-TSA blog under the guise of anonymity.

One such comment, which has since been deleted, said, “F**k you, f**k all you c**ksuckers, you wont change anything.” Another stated, “Ride the bus, TSA is here to stay there [sic] doing a great job keeping americia [sic] safe.”

[...]





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Welcome to the Collapse

As published on Dissident Voice, Common Dreams, Signs of the Time, CounterPunch and Online Journal, 12/29/10:





The spinmeisters are playing the same record over and over, recovery, recovery, scratch, scratch, recovery’s in da house! The Associated Press trumpeted, “After two years of recession, Christmas 2010 will go down as the moment when Americans rediscovered how much they like to shop.” On December 28th, Yahoo Finance reassured us at 9AM, “The recovery is on track,” but an hour later, it featured a new headline, “Consumer Confidence Unexpectedly Falls in December.”

With its attendant social chaos, crime and despair, the country is sinking into an economic quicksand, yet Americans are injected daily with a massive dose of tranquilizing nonsense. Today’s top stories, “Elton John Becomes a Dad,” “Air Force Mascot Goes Missing at Game,” “10 Best Celebrity Hair Moments” and “Synchronized Walking Routine.”

The cheeky and cheery are occasionally contradicted by grimmer admissions, however. Even Voice of America, that Cold War relic and official mouthpiece of Washington, has this exchange:

[VOA]: "How does it feel from the beginning of the Christmas season from your point of view?

[Cashier]: "It's not that good. It's like so-so, you know."

[VOA]: "So business isn't so great right now."

[Cashier]: "No I don't think so. Because people don't have the money to buy, there are lots of people who don't have jobs."

[VOA]: "Is your job in danger?"

[Cashier]: "Yeah."

Weird, such candor from the VOA. Maybe their CIA check bounced? In any case, let’s meet some denizens of Philadelphia’s the Gallery, my local shopping center. Mrs. Fischel runs a meat and cheese shop. Business has steadily declined over several years. To make matters worse, management has raised her rent, to make up for other merchants who have closed shops or who are behind in their payments. The third level of this mall is completely dead, and the second is barely hanging on. Just this week, Payless Shoes as well as G&G, Unica and Sunshine Blues, all clothing stores, have gone belly up.

Fischel’s son, a recent graduate of law school, has moved back home from Orange County. He has no job, only mushrooming debts from student loans and credit cards. He loved California and never expected to live in Philly again. It used to be that once you moved out, you stayed out. It was an American rite of passage. By 2006, however, two thirds of American college graduates were already returning to their parents. Now, the number is up to 85%.

Meet Mr. Ali, who runs a modest kiosk offering cheap purses, belts and watches made in China. He used to sell Gucci and Coach labels—not the bags, just the labels—which were tacked or sewn onto knockoffs by the customers themselves. Many of our poorest are infatuated with brand names. With a CK, say, slapped onto their person, they feel instantly higher class.

An immigrant from Pakistan, Ali’s first job was at a Seven Eleven, before he saved enough to buy a gas station. With his current business, it was no big deal to sell $1,500 daily. Now, he’s lucky to gross $500. Whenever this mall’s open, Ali’s in there. All he does is work. Even if there were 12 inches of snow on the ground, Ali would be there at 9AM, waiting for his first customer.

When he had saving, Ali made the fatal mistake of investing in Fannie Mae and Citigroup, among other supposedly blue chip stocks. Like millions of others worldwide, he lost his shirt. A hundred-and-forty-six thousand dollars gone. Ali sold his home and his new truck, hired a lawyer to consolidate his credit card debts. He now drives an unheated lemon. “In a couple of years, I’ll buy another house for my wife and children,” he insists even as his earning nosedives. He’s lost money the last two Christmases.

Meet Mr. Giuliani, who used to make $28 an hour as a computer repairman. He supplemented his day job by freelancing, charging $85 and up for each home visit. Replaced by technicians from India, Giuliani became a transit police officer. The goal of globalism has always been to outsource jobs and import labor. To maximize profits, bosses must minimize costs. At $15 an hour, Giuliani now patrols the Gallery to make sure teenagers don’t go berserk after they get off the trains.

Some of these kids like to pick fights with each other, shopkeepers or even security guards. With no jobs and little money, their idea of fun is to raise hell, inside this shopping mall or wherever. In March, a 73-year-old man and a 41-year-old woman were hospitalized after beatings by a gang of kids around 12-years-old. Playing a game called “catch and wreck,” they chanted “Fight! Fight!” and called Belinda Moore a “bald-headed bitch” as they pummeled her, knocked her to the ground, snatched her bag and stomped on her hat. Moore told the Philadelphia Daily News, "I don't know if these kids hate society or hate life itself but I cannot believe they could do that to someone. Where is all that hatred coming from when you're only 11 or 12?" Also in Philadelphia, an 18-year-old killed a 68-year-old woman with a frying pan, stole her truck, then blogged on MySpace two days later, “Bored as fuck! Meh and Mira bout 2 go touch city hall! put sum more money in mah mouth!”

Back to Giuliani: he inherited his house, so Giuliani doesn't have to worry about a mortgage, but thanks to the housing bubble, his property tax has ballooned. For sentimental reasons, Giuliani doesn’t want to sell his childhood home, but he may have to. With ten rooms, the heating bill is enormous, and there won’t be too many buyers lining up.

The Gallery is a hub for commuter and subway trains. This design brings in more customers, sure, but the labyrinthine concourses also provide a haven for many homeless people. Dazed, they wander among shoppers, to be shooed away by guys like Giuliani. Dozing in wheelchairs, collapsing in corners or picking through trash cans, these resilient men and women seem oddly unaware that the recovery is in full swing, and that even dogs, according our cynical media, got expensive toys this holidays.

The collapse will not be televised. Ignored and alone, each of us will experience it singly. As blemish and accusation, you will be photoshopped from the American Dream group portrait. The lower you slip, the more invisible you will be. The disconnect between what's real and what's broadcast will become even more obscene by the day.

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State Lawlessness on the Rampage

PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS in CounterPunch, 12/28/10:





The year 2011 will bring Americans a larger and more intrusive police state, more unemployment and home foreclosures, no economic recovery, more disregard by the US government of US law, international law, the Constitution, and truth, more suspicion and distrust from allies, more hostility from the rest of the world, and new heights of media sycophancy.

2011 is shaping up as a brutal year for American democracy. The Republican Party has degenerated into a party of Brownshirts, and voter frustrations with the worsening economic crisis and military occupations gone awry are likely to bring Republicans to power in 2012. With them would come their doctrines of executive primacy over Congress, the judiciary, law, and the Constitution and America’s rightful hegemony over the world.

If not already obvious, 2010 has made clear that the US government does not care a whit for the opinions of citizens. The TSA is unequivocal that it will reach no accommodation with Americans other than the violations of their persons that it imposes by its unaccountable power. As for public opposition to war, the Associated Press reported on December 16 that “Defense Secretary Robert Gates says the U.S. can’t let public opinion sway its commitment to Afghanistan.” Gates stated bluntly what has been known for some time: the idea is passe that government in a democracy serves the will of the people. If this quaint notion is still found in civics books, it will soon be edited out.

[...]





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2011: A Brave New Dystopia

True brilliance by Chris Hedges in Truthdig, 12/27/20:



The two greatest visions of a future dystopia were George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” The debate, between those who watched our descent towards corporate totalitarianism, was who was right. Would we be, as Orwell wrote, dominated by a repressive surveillance and security state that used crude and violent forms of control? Or would we be, as Huxley envisioned, entranced by entertainment and spectacle, captivated by technology and seduced by profligate consumption to embrace our own oppression? It turns out Orwell and Huxley were both right. Huxley saw the first stage of our enslavement. Orwell saw the second.

We have been gradually disempowered by a corporate state that, as Huxley foresaw, seduced and manipulated us through sensual gratification, cheap mass-produced goods, boundless credit, political theater and amusement. While we were entertained, the regulations that once kept predatory corporate power in check were dismantled, the laws that once protected us were rewritten and we were impoverished. Now that credit is drying up, good jobs for the working class are gone forever and mass-produced goods are unaffordable, we find ourselves transported from “Brave New World” to “1984.” The state, crippled by massive deficits, endless war and corporate malfeasance, is sliding toward bankruptcy. It is time for Big Brother to take over from Huxley’s feelies, the orgy-porgy and the centrifugal bumble-puppy. We are moving from a society where we are skillfully manipulated by lies and illusions to one where we are overtly controlled.

[...]




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'This Is All I Choose to Tell': review

Terry Hong in San Francisco Chronicle December 26, 2010:



This Is All I Choose to Tell
History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature
By Isabelle Thuy Pelaud
(Temple University Press; 208 pages; $21.95 paperback)

What's wrong with this scenario? Robert Olen Butler's "A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain" wins the Pulitzer Prize despite "his portrayal of sweet and off-beat Vietnamese American caricatures," as San Francisco State University Associate Professor Isabelle Thuy Pelaud diplomatically comments in "This Is All I Choose to Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature."

Meanwhile, multifaceted, defiant Vietnamese American writer Linh Dinh ("Fake House") is "denigrated and dismissed for addressing the ruthless reality of life on the margins, which includes caricatures of offbeat white characters," and best-selling author Monique Truong ("The Book of Salt") is asked by her first publisher "to simplify the language because they said a Vietnamese cook could not possibly have such sophisticated thoughts and the language was too poetic for an uneducated Asian character."

This is why Pelaud needed to write "the first book-length study of [Vietnamese American] literature." She deftly examines 35 years of Vietnamese American writing in two parts, providing historical and cultural context in "Inclusion," then offering close readings of diverse titles in "Interpretation." She argues that two markers - the Vietnam War and the arrival of most Vietnamese to America as refugees, not immigrants - clearly differentiate, but should not define or limit, Vietnamese American literature from other longer-established Asian American literatures.

Pelaud shows rare weakness when she gets entangled repeating other scholars' work - her chapter, "Hybridity," for example - rather than relying on her own sharp perceptions. Her shrewd insight gleams brightest in "Reception" when critiquing the critics. In spite of historical, cultural and commercial challenges facing Vietnamese American writers, Pelaud's closing prediction that soon, "more stories will be published" is certainly reason for hopeful anticipation.



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Pilot punished for YouTube video

ABC News, Sacramento, 12/22/10:



SACRAMENTO, CA - An airline pilot is being disciplined by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) for posting video on YouTube pointing out what he believes are serious flaws in airport security.

The 50-year-old pilot, who lives outside Sacramento, asked that neither he nor his airline be identified. He has worked for the airline for more than a decade and was deputized by the TSA to carry a gun in the cockpit.

He is also a helicopter test pilot in the Army Reserve and flew missions for the United Nations in Macedonia.

Three days after he posted a series of six video clips recorded with a cell phone camera at San Francisco International Airport, four federal air marshals and two sheriff's deputies arrived at his house to confiscate his federally-issued firearm. The pilot recorded that event as well and provided all the video to News10.

At the same time as the federal marshals took the pilot's gun, a deputy sheriff asked him to surrender his state-issued permit to carry a concealed weapon.

A follow-up letter from the sheriff's department said the CCW permit would be reevaluated following the outcome of the federal investigation.

The YouTube videos, posted Nov. 28, show what the pilot calls the irony of flight crews being forced to go through TSA screening while ground crew who service the aircraft are able to access secure areas simply by swiping a card.

"As you can see, airport security is kind of a farce. It's only smoke and mirrors so you people believe there is actually something going on here," the pilot narrates.

Video shot in the cockpit shows a medieval-looking rescue ax available on the flight deck after the pilots have gone through the metal detectors. "I would say a two-foot crash ax looks a lot more formidable than a box cutter," the pilot remarked.

[...]




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Is A Police State Worth Fighting For?

Simon Black in Daily Reckoning, 12/22/10:

In 43 BC, over 2,000 years ago, warring consuls Antony, Lepidus, and Octavian were duking it out with each other over control of Rome following Julius Caesar’s assassination the prior March.

Each had legions at his disposal, and Rome’s terrified Senate sat on its hands waiting for the outcome. Ultimately, the three men chose to unite their powers and rule Rome together in what became known as the Second Triumvirate. This body was established by a law named Lex Titia in 43 BC.

The foundation of the Second Triumvirate is of tremendous historical importance: As the group wielded dictatorial powers, it represented the final nail in the coffin in Rome’s transition from republic to malignant autocracy.

The Second Triumvirate expired after 10 years, upon which Octavian waged war on his partners once again, resulting in Mark Antony’s famed suicide with Cleopatra in 31 BC. Octavian was eventually rewarded with nearly supreme power, and he is generally regarded as Rome’s first emperor.

Things only got worse from there. Tiberius, Octavian’s successor, was a paranoid deviant with a lust for executions. He spent the last decade of his reign completely detached from Rome, living in Capri.

Following Tiberius was Caligula, infamous for his moral depravity and insanity. According to Roman historians Suetonius and Cassius Dio, Caligula would send his legions on pointless marches and turned his palace into a bordello of such repute that it inspired the 1979 porno film named for him.

Caligula was followed by Claudius, a stammering, slobbering, confused man as described by his contemporaries. Then there was Nero, who not only managed to burn down his city, but was also the first emperor to debase the value of Rome’s currency.

You know the rest of the story – Romans watched their leadership and country get worse and worse.

All along the way, there were two types of people: The first group was folks that figured, “This has GOT to be the bottom; it can only get better from here.” Their patriotism was rewarded with reduced civil liberties, higher taxes, insane despots, and a debased currency.

The other group consisted of people who looked at the warning signs and thought, “I have to get out of here.” They followed their instincts and moved on to other places where they could build their lives, survive, and prosper.

I’m raising this point because I’d like to open a debate. Some consider the latter idea of expatriating to be akin to ‘running away.’ I recall a rather impassioned comment from a reader who suggested, “leaving, i.e. running away, is certainly not the proper response.”

I find this logic to be flawed.

While the notion of staying and ‘fighting’ is a noble idea, bear in mind that there is no real enemy or force to fight. The government is a faceless bureaucracy that’s impossible attack. People who try to do so usually discredit their argument because they become marginalized as fringe lunatics. Violence is rarely the answer, and it often has the opposite effect as intended, frequently serving to bolster support for the government instead of raising awareness of its shortcomings.

Unless/until government paramilitaries start duking it out with citizen militia groups in the streets, this is an ideological battle…and it’s an uphill battle at best.

[...]

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Researcher Rick Nevin Links Lead Exposure, Criminal Activity

This is an older article, but in light of my recent focus on street crime, I want to post it here. Shankar Vedantam in the Washington Post, July 8, 2007:


[...]

"In Britain and most of Europe, they did not have meaningful constraints [on leaded gasoline] until the mid-1980s and even early 1990s," he said. "This is the reason you are seeing the crime rate soar in Mexico and Latin America, but [it] has fallen in the United States."

Lead levels plummeted in New York in the early 1970s, driven by federal policies to eliminate lead from gasoline and local policies to reduce lead emissions from municipal incinerators. Between 1970 and 1974, the number of New York children heavily poisoned by lead fell by more than 80 percent, according to data from the New York City Department of Health.

Lead levels in New York have continued to fall. One analysis in the late 1990s found that children in New York had lower lead exposure than children in many other big U.S. cities, possibly because of a 1960 policy to replace old windows. That policy, meant to reduce deaths from falls, had an unforeseen benefit -- old windows are a source of lead poisoning, said Dave Jacobs of the National Center for Healthy Housing, an advocacy group that is publicizing Nevin's work. Nevin's research was not funded by the group.

The later drop in violent crime was dramatic. In 1990, 31 New Yorkers out of every 100,000 were murdered. In 2004, the rate was 7 per 100,000 -- lower than in most big cities. The lead theory also may explain why crime fell broadly across the United States in the 1990s, not just in New York.

The centerpiece of Nevin's research is an analysis of crime rates and lead poisoning levels across a century. The United States has had two spikes of lead poisoning: one at the turn of the 20th century, linked to lead in household paint, and one after World War II, when the use of leaded gasoline increased sharply. Both times, the violent crime rate went up and down in concert, with the violent crime peaks coming two decades after the lead poisoning peaks.

Other evidence has accumulated in recent years that lead is a neurotoxin that causes impulsivity and aggression, but these studies have also drawn little attention. In 2001, sociologist Paul B. Stretesky and criminologist Michael Lynch showed that U.S. counties with high lead levels had four times the murder rate of counties with low lead levels, after controlling for multiple environmental and socioeconomic factors.

In 2002, Herbert Needleman, a psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh, compared lead levels of 194 adolescents arrested in Pittsburgh with lead levels of 146 high school adolescents: The arrested youths had lead levels that were four times higher.

"Impulsivity means you ignore the consequences of what you do," said Needleman, one of the country's foremost experts on lead poisoning, explaining why Nevin's theory is plausible. Lead decreases the ability to tell yourself, "If I do this, I will go to jail."

Nevin's work has been published mainly in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Research. Within the field of neurotoxicology, Nevin's findings are unsurprising, said Ellen Silbergeld, professor of environmental health sciences at Johns Hopkins University and the editor of Environmental Research.

"There is a strong literature on lead and sociopathic behavior among adolescents and young adults with a previous history of lead exposure," she said.

Two new studies by criminologists Richard Rosenfeld and Steven F. Messner have looked at Giuliani's policing policies. They found that the mayor's zero-tolerance approach to crime was responsible for 10 percent, maybe 20 percent, at most, of the decline in violent crime in New York City.

Nevin acknowledges that crime rates are rising in some parts of the United States after years of decline, but he points out that crime is falling in other places and is still low overall by historical measures. Also, the biggest reductions in lead poisoning took place by the mid-1980s, which may explain why reductions in crime might have tapered off by 2005. Lastly, he argues that older, recidivist offenders -- who were exposed to lead as toddlers three or four decades ago -- are increasingly accounting for much of the violent crime.

Nevin's finding may even account for phenomena he did not set out to address. His theory addresses why rates of violent crime among black adolescents from inner-city neighborhoods have declined faster than the overall crime rate -- lead amelioration programs had the biggest impact on the urban poor. Children in inner-city neighborhoods were the ones most likely to be poisoned by lead, because they were more likely to live in substandard housing that had lead paint and because public housing projects were often situated near highways.

Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes, for example, were built over the Dan Ryan Expressway, with 150,000 cars going by each day. Eighteen years after the project opened in 1962, one study found that its residents were 22 times more likely to be murderers than people living elsewhere in Chicago.

Nevin's finding implies a double tragedy for America's inner cities: Thousands of children in these neighborhoods were poisoned by lead in the first three quarters of the last century. Large numbers of them then became the targets, in the last quarter, of Giuliani-style law enforcement policies.




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Absolute power gets blamed absolutely

Spengler in Asia Times, from 1/21/09:




Inauguration day brings to mind the reason I don't read science fiction. It's never weird enough. Today, America will place more power than any peacetime president ever has wielded into the hands of a man nobody knows. He has convinced more incompatible constituencies that he takes their side than any politician in American history. And through no fault or merit of his own, he has stumbled into more power than the White House has had since World War II.

From the day Obama was elected to 9:30am Tokyo time on Monday morning, the S&P 500 index has lost 17% of its value, after absorbing Obama's proposed cabinet and hearing the gist of his economic stimulus plan. That can't be blamed on Bush. It counts as the "Obama crash". With the unprecedented power of his office, Obama inherits a commensurately high level of accountability. Unless he offers something radically different, the boomerang of expectations could flatten him faster and more thoroughly than the swift ascent of his star. People in power get blamed; people with absolute power get blamed absolutely. As the economy continues to deteriorate, there will be no one left standing to blame but Obama.

[...]

What will Obama do? He has more answers to urgent problems than the verses of Barnacle Bill the Sailor ("I'll tell Iran/that I'm the man"), but they are just as fanciful.

I have never met the man, but I have interviewed a fair sampling of his supporters, and conclude that Obama learned the power to cloud men's minds, like the Shadow on the old radio show. Apart from ambition, there is no "there" there. There are as many Obamas as there are interlocutors. He is a hollow man, I concluded, a Third World anthropologist studying us with engaged curiosity but complete emotional detachment. In this respect he is unpredictable.

I predict that he will do nothing much at all. The American economy is in trouble because Americans got too much cheap credit to buy houses, using their price appreciation to buy other consumer goods. Obama proposes to provide more cheap credit to homebuyers and incentives to buy consumer goods, which seems an odd response to the problem. Now that Americans are scared out of their wits and likely to save every available penny, it is hard to flush with enthusiasm over his program's prospects.

Obama's secretary of state, the redoubtable Hillary Clinton, will pursue the same tired formulas in the Middle East and South Asia into tighter and tighter little circles, until she quits in frustration. His Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, will do precisely what he has done in the past year in his capacity as head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which is to use the federal balance sheet to buy trillions of dollars of toxic assets. And Defense Secretary Robert Gates will continue to attempt to engage the Iranians, as he has done since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, when he took notes for president Jimmy Carter's national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski in meetings with the newly empowered mullahs.

He will make resonant speeches, hold frequent press conferences, consult friend and foe alike, and tread water while America's economy and strategic position continue to deteriorate. His entourage of one-trick wizards, as I called them in a recent commentary, will pick over the broken American economy for trophies to put into private equity funds. (See Obama's one-trick wizards, Asia Times Online, November 25, 2008). Without casting aspersions on anyone involved, the opportunity for self-dealing in a multi-trillion-dollar bailout-cum-recapitalization of the financial system exceeds the grandest dreams of Third World kleptocrats.

At a certain point he will have to take a decisive stand on something. And then we will learn who Obama is, and what he wants. Four years ago, I predicted of George W Bush, "Many will be the night during his second term that Bush will wish he were still in Texas, and still drunk." (see Careful what you Bush for, Asia Times Online, August 3, 2004). I predict that there will be nights when Obama will wish he were still in Springfield.



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Pentagon Papers Whistleblowers Call for a New 9/11 Investigation

Washington's Blog, December 9, 2010:




The main players in releasing the Pentagon Papers were Daniel Ellsberg and Senator Mike Gravel.

Ellsberg is, of course, the former military analyst and famed whistleblower who smuggled the Pentagon Papers out of the Rand Corporation.

Senator Gravel is the person who read the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record. This act made the papers public record, so that they could not be censored by the government.

Ellsberg and Gravel are receiving a lot of media attention right now for their support of Wikileaks.

But little attention has been paid to Ellsberg and Gravel's support for a new 9/11 investigation.

Ellsberg says that the case of a certain 9/11 whistleblower is "far more explosive than the Pentagon Papers". (Here's some of what that whistleblower says.)

He also said that the government is ordering the media to cover up her allegations about 9/11.

And he said that some of the claims concerning government involvement in 9/11 are credible, that "very serious questions have been raised about what they [U.S. government officials] knew beforehand and how much involvement there might have been", that engineering 9/11 would not be humanly or psychologically beyond the scope of those in office, and that there's enough evidence to justify a new, "hard-hitting" investigation into 9/11 with subpoenas and testimony taken under oath (see this and this).

Senator Gravel has long supported a new 9/11 investigation. Gravel told the Daily Caller this week:

Individuals in and out of government may certainly have participated with the obviously known perpetrators of this dastardly act. Suspicions abound over the analysis presented by government. Obviously an act that has triggered three wars, Afghan, Iraqi and the continuing War on Terror, should be extensively investigated which was not done and which the government avoids addressing.

Other high-level whistleblowers have alleged a cover-up as well.

For example, Air Force Colonel and key Pentagon official Karen Kwiatkowski - who blew the whistle on the Bush administration's efforts to concoct false intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction - wrote (page 26):

I have been told by reporters that they will not report their own insights or contrary evaluations of the official 9/11 story, because to question the government story about 9/11 is to question the very foundations of our entire modern belief system regarding our government, our country, and our way of life. To be charged with questioning these foundations is far more serious than being labeled a disgruntled conspiracy nut or anti-government traitor, or even being sidelined or marginalized within an academic, government service, or literary career. To question the official 9/11 story is simply and fundamentally revolutionary. In this way, of course, questioning the official story is also simply and fundamentally American.

Indeed, Ellsberg and Gravel join a long list of high-level former officials in the government and intelligence services - including many well-known whistleblowers - who have publicly demanded a new investigation.

And see this.




....................................................
["Collapsing America"]




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Mobile Guard Tower

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16 Shocking Facts About The Student Loan Debt Bubble And The Great College Education Scam

The American Dream, 12/21/10:



[...]

#1 Americans now owe more than $875 billion on student loans, which is more than the total amount that Americans owe on their credit cards.

#2 Since 1982, the cost of medical care in the United States has gone up over 200%, which is horrific, but that is nothing compared to the cost of college tuition which has gone up by more than 400%.

#3 The typical U.S. college student spends less than 30 hours a week on academics.

#4 The unemployment rate for college graduates under the age of 25 is over 9 percent.

#5 There are about two million recent college graduates that are currently unemployed.

#6 Approximately two-thirds of all college students graduate with student loans.

#7 In the United States today, 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees.

#8 The Project on Student Debt estimates that 206,000 Americans graduated from college with more than $40,000 in student loan debt during 2008.

#9 In the United States today, 24.5 percent of all retail salespersons have a college degree.

#10 Total student loan debt in the United States is now increasing at a rate of approximately $2,853.88 per second.

#11 There are 365,000 cashiers in the United States today that have college degrees.

#12 Starting salaries for college graduates across the United States are down in 2010.

#13 In 1992, there were 5.1 million "underemployed" college graduates in the United States. In 2008, there were 17 million "underemployed" college graduates in the United States.

#14 In the United States today, over 18,000 parking lot attendants have college degrees.

#15 Federal statistics reveal that only 36 percent of the full-time students who began college in 2001 received a bachelor's degree within four years.

#16 According to a recent survey by Twentysomething Inc., a staggering 85 percent of college seniors planned to move back home after graduation last May.

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Lawless Police State

As published on Dissident Voice, CounterPunch and Online Journal, 12/23/10:





As we police the world and become more of a police state each day, basic police functions are being neglected here at home. In Detroit, seven out of ten murders are unsolved. In Oakland, the police will no longer respond to a host of crimes, including burglary, theft, embezzlement and extortion. The problem is mostly manpower. Atlantic City has axed 60 cops this year, on top of 13 who retired without being replaced. Last year, Camden was rated as the second most dangerous city in America. Two years ago, the most deadly. Faced with this, Camden is about to lay off half of its cops. Flint, MI, has also fired nearly half of its police. Its murder rate is at record high. In Illinois, more than 300 policemen have been let go in 2010.

With unemployment getting higher and higher, there will be less tax revenues, meaning more cops will be laid off even as crime rises. In Newark, 167 cops have been let go. With more murders and carjackings, the National Guard has been proposed as a solution, yes, the same National Guard that occupied Newark’s streets with tanks during the 1967 riot, where 26 people were killed and 725 injured.

In Camden, Guardian Angels have shown up. In Oakland, there are private security guards patrolling downtown. Called “Ambassadors,” quaintly enough, they are unarmed, for now. Gun packing security guards are already all over America, however, though usually confined to private properties. Expect this to change. (In England, even bona fide cops are not armed as they patrol the streets!) After Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired 150 Blackwater mercenaries to roam New Orleans. Wielding assault weapons, many were fresh from the mayhem of Iraq.

Recently, I was in Newark’s Ironbound, a working class neighborhood of mostly Portuguese, Brazilian and Latin American immigrants. Wandering around, I paused in front of a cartoon rooster towing a Volkswagen. Was this some weird allegory of our power-down future? A diss against the car? Against Hitler? A 40-ish man, Jose, appeared to explain that pollo al carbon, grilled chicken, has become Karpollo, the name of his restaurant. Thus, a chicken pulling a car. Jose has been in that location three years. So how’s business, I asked. Not too bad, Jose said, though he had expected it to be much better. Many people in the Ironbound do construction work, so they’re seriously hurting. A few years ago, a man could easily make $900 a week. Now they’re losing homes and apartments. Many have moved out. With fewer jobs and cops, crime has gone up even here, for long one of the safer parts of Newark. “Just a week ago,” Jose pointed down the street, “a guy was carjacked with a gun, right at that corner!”

Jobless, you can always sign up for flag-waving genocide and foddership. Granted, the starting pay isn’t all that great, but it sure beats McDonald’s. Plus, you’ll get grub, fox holes and trauma care au gratis. Discharged in pieces, you’d be done, but if you could come back sorta whole, you may luck into a well-armed job to patrol the good old USA terrorizing all these home-bound slobs, whether muggers, pickpockets or protestors, desperate and often angry folks, you know, just like you.

If only we could stop maintaining hundreds of military bases overseas, we could save trillions and have money to fix problems back home, but Big Brother needs his corruption and his wars, so, in the meantime, America’s biggest export to China, our largest trading partner, is, guess what, soybeans! Our biggest imports from them are electrical machinery and computers. I should add that airplanes are our second largest export to the Chinese, so we’re not quite a banana republic, not yet, merely a tofu one.

In this gun and tofu economy, returning vets can also join gangs, or rejoin the ones they were already in. According to a 2007 report, “Gang-Related Activity in the US Armed Forces Increasing,” nearly all the major American street gangs are represented in our military. Gang members enlist to learn urban warfare tactics, steal weapons, sell drugs or recruit new members. After years of fighting two major wars, it’s hard to make recruiting quotas, I’m sure. Judges have also offered convicted gang members the option of joining the military instead of going to jail.

Enlist, gangbanger, and be part of the biggest gang of all! The Army of One recruiting slogan is obviously nonsense, except for Bradley Manning. A gay man, he's the lone warrior against the Pentagon. Here’s hoping he doesn’t crack. A civil rights victory, the don’t ask, don’t tell repeal will nevertheless provide more bodies for the U.S. killing machine. I’m reminded of Edward Bernays’ devious scheme to get more women to smoke. Posing as suffragettes, fashionably dressed, svelte young ladies were told to lift “torches of freedom” from under their dresses, then puff them for the cameras.

Everywhere you look, there are smoking guns. Whether in Kandahar, Fallujah or Salinas, California, all these well-trained, well-armed men shooting at each other from all directions are a ka-ching nirvana for our military industrial complex. The more mass murders, the happier the CEOs and investors. As for collateral damages, well, better luck next life, dudes! If we don’t starve the Pentagon, carnage will be our last growth industry.





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What really makes a killer?

Guardian, 12/19/10:




The reports of Ruby Thomas's conviction for manslaughter showed the media are still obsessed by class

On Thursday, Ruby Thomas and Joel Alexander were convicted of the manslaughter of Ian Baynham, who died after a drunken and vicious homophobic assault in Trafalgar Square in September last year. Thomas, who led the unprovoked attack, was clearly a deeply disturbed 17-year-old, and you didn't have to look too far into her background for some of the possible psychology behind her violent rage.

In 2003, her father had been convicted of manslaughter in the same Old Bailey courtroom after stabbing a taxi driver 28 times. She had, as one result, a history of depression and an addictive tendency toward binge-drinking, which had been exaggerated by a recent ectopic pregnancy. At the age of 15, she had assaulted a bus driver, kicking and punching him in the back of the head and had earned another conviction for possessing a knife.

The headline shorthand that all the reports of her latest, horrific crime chose to use about her, however, were "former public school girl Ruby Thomas", as if she were some sheltered and privileged St Trinian inexplicably gone bad; the rest of her biography was buried in the reports, or ignored, while we were asked to dwell on her £12,000-a-year school fees and her mother's £300,000 house.

Thomas had attended Sydenham High School while her father was in prison, before she was expelled "for unspecified reasons". It wouldn't be hard to argue that some of the other experiences of her young life might have outweighed any perceived educational opportunity that she had spurned in that time, but that didn't stop the profiles emphasising her schooling as her defining characteristic. Some chose to quote from the Sydenham prospectus: "We know our girls and they know us... their school is very proud of them" or suggested the ironies of claims about a "supportive and caring" environment.

There are many ways to begin to understand a crime. The narrative we still resort to, though, invariably involves loaded inferences about class, as if nothing else ever counted.

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And To All a Good Night

James Howard Kunstler, December 20, 2010:



At this time of year, who can fail to understand the wish to forget all the woes and fiascos of our time, and to retreat into the cozy firelit nooks of Christmas, where a pint or so of grog, or egg-nog, or even seven fingers of Williams 'Lectric Shave in an empty jam jar might avail to wash away the frightening specters of debts, and banks, and, trade imbalances, and countries with economies composed mostly of losses?

For now, America is a rug stretching from Maine to California, under which we've swept the filthy detritus of money matters and governance. It worked most of the year, though the rug has grown as lumpy as a landfill. Nothing is more important for the moment than provoking millions of people with no means for carrying their current obligations to ply the malls in search of Christmas merchandise, so the little ones will not be disappointed on the Great Day. Who could fail to understand this, too, since the sorrows of children only magnify the failures of the adults who love and fear for them.

President Obama's tax deal with the corn-and-pork-fed mental defectives of the Red States has been spun into an historic act of political ju-jitsu - a sharp trade to great advantage for the slick city operator against the avaricious rubes - but to me it was just another act of Santa Claus Theater. You have to love the conceit that all this fuss about money is finally settled. So we can settle back in the raptures of flat screen high-def 3-D TV and imagine that we're like the characters in Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful Life - which, by the way, in case you never noticed, is a story about a banker who gets into big trouble financing the first larval manifestations of suburban sprawl. If only Frank Capra had lived to see the Federal Reserve's Maiden Lane portfolio, a sack of shit so monumental it would make the fabled swag-bag of Kris Kringle himself look like the descending colon of a pygmy marmoset.

[...]





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Bitter Memories of War on the Way to Jail

Chris Hedges in Truthdig, 12/20/10:




[...]

What can I tell you about war?

War perverts and destroys you. It pushes you closer and closer to your own annihilation—spiritual, emotional and, finally, physical. It destroys the continuity of life, tearing apart all systems, economic, social, environmental and political, that sustain us as human beings. War is necrophilia. The essence of war is death. War is a state of almost pure sin with its goals of hatred and destruction. It is organized sadism. War fosters alienation and leads inevitably to nihilism. It is a turning away from the sanctity of life.

And yet the mythic narratives about war perpetuate the allure of power and violence. They perpetuate the seductiveness of the godlike force that comes with the license to kill with impunity. All images and narratives about war disseminated by the state, the press, religious institutions, schools and the entertainment industry are gross and distorted lies. The clash between the fabricated myth about war and the truth about war leaves those of us who return from war alienated, angry and often unable to communicate. We can’t find the words to describe war’s reality. It is as if the wider culture sucked the words out from us and left us to sputter incoherencies. How can you speak meaningfully about organized murder? Anything you say is gibberish.

The sophisticated forms of industrial killing, coupled with the amoral decisions of politicians and military leaders who direct and fund war, hide war’s reality from public view. But those who have been in combat see death up close. Only their story tells the moral truth about war. The power of the Washington march was that we all knew this story. We had no need to use stale and hackneyed clichés about war. We grieved together.

War, once it begins, fuels new and bizarre perversities, innovative forms of death to ward off the boredom of routine death. This is why we would drive into towns in Bosnia and find bodies crucified on the sides of barns or decapitated, burned and mutilated. That is why those slain in combat are treated as trophies by their killers, turned into grotesque pieces of performance art. I met soldiers who carried in their wallets the identity cards of men they killed. They showed them to me with the imploring look of a lost child.

We swiftly deform ourselves, our essence, in war. We give up individual conscience—maybe even consciousness—for the contagion of the crowd and the intoxication of violence. You survive war because you repress emotions. You do what you have to do. And this means killing. To make a moral choice, to defy war’s enticement, is often self-destructive. But once the survivors return home, once the danger, adrenaline highs and the pressure of the crowd are removed, the repressed emotions surface with a vengeance. Fear, rage, grief and guilt leap up like snake heads to consume lives and turn nights into long, sleepless bouts with terror. You drink to forget.

[...]






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[Story]


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Bloody Trophies

As published on Signs of the Time, Dissident Voice, Common Dreams, Uruknet, CounterPunch and Online Journal, 12/17/10:






We have an unprecedented capacity to absorb scandals. Wikileaks or no, Americans wake up each day to a new set of outrages, yet nothing changes. With hundreds of channels at our fingertip and a billion songs sloshing in our skulls, no crime against country, man or earth can linger long enough in any brain cell to matter. All synapses are currently busy with bullshit, yet again, thank you.

There have always been enough incriminating evidences to fill several Pentagons and CIA headquarters. It takes no dick or hacker to know that the U.S. government is duplicitous and sadistic. It lies and kills compulsively. Though hardly alone, America’s unique in her reach and influence. As an empire, our sick tendencies become everybody else’s problems. Without our “leadership,” would Poles and Ukrainians kill and be killed in Iraq? Would Germans patrol Afghanistan? Would Georgia pick a fight with Russia, only to have its ass kicked? We don’t just commit evils, we train many others to do it. We graduated thousands of torturers from The School of the Americas. After some bad press, it was niftily re-christened as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. (Similarly, Blackwater is now Xe.) Our tactics haven’t changed, and waterboarding, openly admitted to by our cynically sinister capos, is the very least of it. No criminal confesses to everything. “Ah, I only do some shoplifting on the side, Your Honor. No beating or rape or nothing.”

Our elected leaders, our bald, shiny faces to the rest of the world, are shameless hypocrites. During the Georgia-Russia conflict, George Bush was indignant that Russia had "invaded a sovereign neighboring state,” while John McCain declared, "In the 21st century nations don't invade other nations."

Was March 20th, 2003 in the 21st century? I’m not talking about March Madness, of course, but the start of our invasion of Iraq. Sated with college hoops, Americans could switch channel for some cool, live snuff action. Soon after, George W. Bush announced at the Boeing F-18 Production Facility in St. Louis, “Two weeks ago, the Iraqi regime operated a gulag for dissidents, and incredibly enough, a prison for young children. Now the gates to that prison have been thrown wide open, and we are putting the dictators, political prisons, and torture chambers out of business.” (Applause.) A mere year later, the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, revealing America to be in charge of Saddam’s torture chambers.

Not so incredibly, we also imprisoned children in Abu Ghraib. Its commander, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, spoke of visiting the youngest inmates, including a boy who "looked like he was 8-years-old." Maybe this kid was just undersized from all those years of economic sanctions? Maybe he was actually 11 or 12? By 2008, the Pentagon would admit to jailing 600 Iraqi juveniles. From a supposedly feel-good story in Stars and Stripes: “The U.S. military in Iraq is holding some 600 juvenile detainees—ranging in age from 11 to 17—and is building educational programs to address their special needs.”

In any case, no evidence could be more damning than what happened at Abu Ghraib, yet there were no consequences, really. We went on with our occupation, which has continued to this day, and only one officer was ever court-martialed. The conviction of Lieutenant Colonel Steven L. Jordan was even overturned, resulting in merely an “administrative reprimand” on his record. Torture, American style, is an administrative procedure.

The photos themselves often show our troops casually moving about in the background. It was business as usual to punch, slap and kick prisoners; to jump on their naked feet; to videotape and photograph naked male and female prisoners; to forcibly arrange prisoners in various sexually explicit positions for photographing; to force prisoners to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time; to force naked male prisoners to wear women's underwear; to force groups of male prisoners to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped; to arrange naked male prisoners in a pile and then jumping on them; to position a naked prisoner on a box, with a sandbag on his head, and attach wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture.

On and on the various means for inflicting pain and humiliation on helpless human beings. Oh, the casual or gleeful sadism, often sexual, of our conquering heroes! These all-American men and women will go home, marry, raise children and become realtors, policemen, accountants and teachers. We freak out when a sexual predator moves into the neighborhood, but how many honorably discharged and decorated torturers and mass murderers are chummying up among us?

“Dad, what did you do in the Iraq?”

“Oh, nothing much, I broke chemical lights and poured the phosphoric liquid on prisoners; beat prisoners with a broom handle and a chair; threatened male prisoners with rape; sodomized a prisoner with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick. Now, what would you like for Christmas, Son?”

General Antonio M. Taguba’s list of Abu Ghraib abuses, summarized above, was leaked to the press by an unknown source. Though not a whistleblower per se, Taguba did not flinch from accusing his own comrades, and he didn’t scapegoat but pointed his finger at the very top. In 2008, Taguba wrote: "After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the [Bush] administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

For showing courage and integrity, Taguba was forced into retirement, but Bradley Manning, a mere private, is already paying a much heavier price for exposing yet more crimes by the U.S. Army. Kept in solitary confinement for seven months now, Manning faces up to 52 years in prison, with many, including Congressman Mike Rogers, calling for his execution.

Manning’s physical and psychological conditions are deteriorating rapidly. He turns 23 today. Friends who have visited Manning in prison are being intimidated by our government from speaking out, according to the Guardian. People are being stalked, computers seized without warrants. A staple of Fascism, extra-judicial harassment should never be tolerated in any genuinely free society.

So after decades of appalling disclosures by human rights organizations, the media and even the government itself, nothing has changed. We have enough evidence to convict just about everybody and everything inside that Beltway, save a potted plant or two, perhaps, so what’s missing is not more information, but an ability to deduce and to synthesize, that is, to think, and, even more importantly, some semblance of moral clarity.

The same scene that outrages one person will titillate another. To a Nazi, photos of Dachau and Bruchenwald are a turn on. Atrocity and torture images also confirm the status quo, since they illustrate most vividly who has the power, who can do what to whom, who can be stripped naked, bloodied and blown to bits.

Susan Sontag rightly considered the Abu Ghraib images as trophies. Proud of our bloody trophies, and not just photos but ears, fingers and whatnot, many Americans still subscribe to our full spectrum domination, ass-kicking aspirations, so protests or no, Wikileaks or no, the American Empire will not be shamed or persuaded into changing its ways. It will not reform itself. Cornered, it’s likely to become even more vicious. Evil will bare its fangs most nakedly.

Obey orders and torture and the worst that can happen to you is an administrative reprimand, whatever that means, but if you follow your conscience, be prepared to be locked up, tortured or even killed. It’s already in the book.







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Violent clashes erupt in Italy after Berlusconi survives no-confidence vote

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The Role of the Corporate Media in Wikileaks

From Michel Chossudovsky's "Who is Behind Wikileaks," 12/13/10:




[...]

The Central Role of the New York Times

Wikileaks is not a typical alternative media initiative. The New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel are directly involved in the editing and selection of leaked documents. The London Economist has also played an important role.

While the project and its editor Julian Assange reveal a commitment and concern for truth in media, the recent Wikileaks releases of embassy cables have been carefully "redacted" by the mainstream media in liaison with the US government. (See Interview with David E. Sanger, Fresh Air, PBS, December 8, 2010)

This collaboration between Wikileaks and selected mainstream media is not fortuitous; it was part of an agreement between several major US and European newspapers and Wikileaks' editor Julian Assange.

The important question is who controls and oversees the selection, distribution and editing of released documents to the broader public?

What US foreign policy objectives are being served through this redacting process?

Is Wikileaks part of an awakening of public opinion, of a battle against the lies and fabrications which appear daily in the print media and on network TV?

If so, how can this battle against media disinformation be waged with the participation and collaboration of the corporate architects of media disinformation?

Wikileaks has enlisted the architects of media disinformation to fight media disinformation: An incongruous and self-defeating procedure.

America's corporate media and more specifically The New York Times are an integral part of the economic establishment, with links to Wall Street, the Washington think tanks and the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

Moreover, the US corporate media has developed a longstanding relationship to the US intelligence apparatus, going back to "Operation Mocking Bird", an initiative of the CIA's Office of Special Projects (OSP), established in the early 1950s.

Even before the Wikileaks project got off the ground, the mainstream media was implicated. A role was defined and agreed upon for the corporate media not only in the release, but also in the selection and editing of the leaks. In a bitter irony, the "professional media", to use Julian Assange's words in an interview with The Economist, have been partners in the Wikileaks project from the outset.

Moreover, key journalists with links to the US foreign policy-national security intelligence establishment have worked closely with Wikileaks, in the distribution and dissemination of the leaked documents.

In a bitter irony, Wikileaks partner The New York Times, which has consistently promoted media disinformation is now being accused of conspiracy. For what? For revealing the truth? Or for manipulating the truth? [...]





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Julian Assange as Prose Poet

From his blog:







Nataliya

Did I ever tell you about the time Nataliya took me out to go get a drink with her? We go off looking for a bar and we can't find one. Finally Nataliya takes me to a vacant lot and says, 'Here we are.' We sat there for a year and a half, until sure enough, someone constructs a bar around us. Well, the day they opened we ordered a shot, drank it, and then burned the place to the ground. Nataliya yelled over the roar of the flames, 'Always leave things the way you found 'em!'

(with apologies)






Do electric sheep dream of f16's?

In the morning, the call to prayer rises from mosque to citadel, the sun lights the haze into a furnace, glowing and aglow, casting long golden shadows into dusty streets, where swallows swoop on blinking gendarmes, while above them young girls water roof top sheep and pigeon boys climb their hutches to wave great checkered flags at distant points in the sky.





The Australian lagoon

Australia is a lagoon in a sea of english which, having no translation tarrif, washes over us, sweeps our new thoughts away and blends into those that remain, until we no longer know whose thoughts we are.

Industries can dump pig iron to crush foreign production and they can also dump words. Billions of these ideas, already produced for another english market and having no translation tarrifs or transport costs slither into the country unheeded, stricken local journalists and set their burrows in our brains.

We're part of the big english world; this is our reality -- so when we fight, we must fight like kings. When we write about the sea we must write to the sea.





Krill to the baleen of the feminine

I've always found women caught in a thunderstorm appealing. Perhaps it is a male universal, for without advertising this proclivity a lovely girl I knew, but not well, on discovering within herself lascivious thoughts about me and noticing raindrops outside her windows, stood for a moment fully clothed in her shower before letting the wind and rain buffet her body as she made her tremulous approach to my door and of course I could not turn her away.

But then, just when one might suspect that men are krill to the baleen of female romantic manipulation, I found myself loving a girl who was a coffee addict. I would make a watery paste of finely ground coffee and surreptitiously smear this around my neck and shoulders before seducing her so she would associate my body with her dopaminergic cravings. But every association relates two objects both ways. She started drinking more and more coffee. Sometimes I looked at her cups of liquid arabicia with envious eyes for if there were four cups then somehow, I was one of them, or a quarter of everyone one of them...






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“Livid” Ambassador to United States vowed never to return to America after being confined to a glass cage and groped

Prison Planet, December 10, 2010:


A humiliating TSA pat down that left Indian Ambassador to the United States livid and insistent that she would never return to America has prompted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to promise a review of TSA policies in the aftermath of a nationwide revolt against invasive airport security measures.

At the height of the TSA backlash last month, Clinton herself told CBS News that the pat down procedures were so invasive that she would personally want to avoid them.

Now she has been forced to promise an inquiry into measures that led to Indian diplomat Meera Shankar being confined to a glass cage before being invasively groped by TSA staff in full public view, after Indian authorities demanded an apology for her treatment.

“We obviously are concerned about it,” Clinton told reporters in Washington.

[...]





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Pakistan elites turn blind eye to war

Fatima Bhutto in Asia Times, 12/11/10:



With governments like Pakistan's current regime, who needs the strong arm of the US Central Intelligence Agency? According to Bob Woodward's latest bestseller, Obama's Wars, when Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari, an obsequiously dangerous man, was notified that the CIA would be launching missile strikes from drones over his country's sovereign territory, he replied, "Kill the seniors. Collateral damage worries you Americans. It doesn't worry me."

Why would he worry? When his wife, Benazir Bhutto, returned to Pakistan in 2007 to run for prime minister after years of self-imposed exile, she was already pledged to a campaign of pro-American engagement. She promised to hand over nuclear scientist and international bogeyman Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, the "father" of the Pakistani atomic bomb, to the International Atomic Energy Agency. She also made clear that, once back in power, she would allow the Americans to bomb Pakistan proper, so that George W Bush's global "war on terror" might triumph. The Americans had been involved in covert strikes and other activities in Pakistan since at least 2001, but we didn't know that then.

This has been the promise that has kept Zardari, too, in power.

According to the recent cache of US State Department cables released by WikiLeaks, his position and those of his colleagues in government haven't wavered. In 2008, for example, Prime Minister Yousef Raza Gilani enthusiastically told American ambassador Anne Paterson that he "didn't care" if drone strikes were launched against his country as long as the "right people" were targeted. (They weren't.) "We'll protest in the National Assembly," Gilani added cynically, "and then ignore it."

In fact, protests by the National Assembly have been few and far between and yet, by the end of November, Pakistani territory had been targeted by American unmanned Predator and Reaper missile strikes more than 100 times this year alone. CIA drone strikes have, in fact, been a feature of the American war in Pakistan since 2004. In 2008, after Barack Obama won the presidency in the US and Zardari ascended to Pakistan's highest office, the strikes escalated and soon began occurring almost weekly, later nearly daily, and so became a permanent feature of life for those living in the tribal borderlands of northern Pakistan.

Obama ordered his first drone strike against Pakistan just 72 hours after being sworn in as president. It seems a suitably macabre fact that, according to a United Nations report on "targeted killings" (that is, assassinations) published in 2010, Bush employed drone strikes 45 times in his eight years as president. In Obama's first year in office, the drones were sent in 53 times. In the six years that drone strikes have been used in the fight against Pakistan, researchers at the New America Foundation estimate that between 1,283 and 1,971 people have been killed.

While the dead are regularly identified as "militants" or "suspected militants" in newspaper stories and on the TV news, they almost never have names, nor are their identities confirmed or faces shown. Their histories are always vague. The Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC) took a careful look at nine drone strikes from the last two years and concluded that they had resulted in the deaths of 30 civilians, including 14 women and children. (Perhaps superior American military intelligence classified them as "militants in training".) Based on this study, an average rate of error can be calculated: 3.33 civilians mistakenly killed in each drone attack. The dead, Pakistanis will assure you, are largely unnamed, faceless, unindicted and unconvicted civilians.

Pakistanis are considered irrelevant, however, and collateral damage, as it turns out, doesn't seem to worry anyone in the governing elite.

[...]





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Bank of America to pay $137 million in state fraud cases

A glint off the iceberg. Washington Post, December 7, 2010:



Bank of America will pay $137.3 million to settle allegations that it defrauded schools, hospitals and dozens of other state and local government organizations, federal officials said Tuesday. The settlement stems from a long-running investigation into misconduct in the municipal bond business that raises money for localities to pay for public services.

[...]





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Mikhail

New York, December 7th, 2010:




Educational attainment is overrated. The rules of competitive advantage in a globalized economy dictate that American youth should stay focused on honing their core competencies: strengthening their schoolyard- and cyber-bullying aptitude, sharpening their Muslim-baiting skills and finding creative excuses to keep their war-fighting machine in continuous operation for another 70 years.

Americans have nothing to worry about - they can simply continue to import cheap migrant labor (or outsource) to handle all their menial tasks. Need to build more creationist theme parks? Why not import more Mexican day-laborers. Need an IT workforce? Keep hiring Indians to operate your data centers. Numbers not adding up? Why not outsource the accounting to Sri Lanka. Not enough doctors? Keep importing them from Africa.

The main thing is that Americans should never lose sight of the fact they're exceptional and entitled to be waited on and served by the rest of the world.

After all, it would be impossible to conceive of a world where the homeland itself became colonized by its erstwhile empire and the Americans turned into smelly cabdrivers, right?




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Reading this Wednesday

Linh Dinh & Steve Healey
December 8, 2010--8:00 pm
The Poetry Project
at St. Marks Church
131 E. 10th Street
New York, NY 10003
212-674-0910

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WikiLeaks and espionage -- Israeli style

Jeff Gates in Online Journal, Dec 6, 2010:



The U.S. is under attack by an enemy within. Skilled at game theory warfare, this foe targets the most sensitive realm of U.S. national security: its relations with other nations.

The online publication of a quarter-million documents chronicling diplomatic exchanges is notable both for what’s omitted and what’s included. To determine whether this latest release was a form of espionage, analysts need only examine how this treasure trove of trivia was peppered with documents certain to damage U.S. relations.

To identify its origins, analysts must answer a key question: Cui Bono? To whose benefit?

One clue: the release of degrading and insulting language about Turkish leaders soon after they insisted in late October that the U.S. no longer share Turkish intelligence with Tel Aviv.

That request from a valued ally marks a critical step in isolating Israel by requiring that the U.S. shut down Israeli operations inside its 16 intelligence agencies, the White House and the Intelligence Committees in both the House and Senate. Tel Aviv was not pleased.

Turks remain outraged at the lack of accountability for the execution-style killing by Israel Defense Forces of nine Turkish citizens aboard a humanitarian ship that was boarded in international waters while sailing to Gaza with provisions to relieve an Israeli siege.

Was this release a tit-for-tat, Tel Aviv style? Is WikiLeaks the visible face of an Israeli disinformation campaign? Whose interests were served by disrupting U.S.-Turkish relations?

Intent is determinative

A leak on this scale is only a leak if it is a random data dump. If items were purposely included or excluded based on their intended effect, it’s an intelligence operation. Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski points out how this release is “seeded” with information that is “surprisingly pointed.”

[...]





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Submarine Dive Finds Oil, Dead Sea Life at Bottom of Gulf of Mexico

ABC, Dec. 3, 2010:


A mile below the surface in the Gulf of Mexico, there is little sign of life.

"It looks like everything's dead," University of Georgia professor Samantha Joye said.

In an exclusive trip aboard the U.S. Navy's deep-ocean research submersible Alvin, ABC News was given the chance to observe the impact of this summer's massive oil spill that most will never see.

The ocean floor appears to be littered with twigs, but Joye points out that they are actually dead worms and that Alvin is sitting on top of what is considered an 80-square mile kill zone.

[...]



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Helpless

As published on Signs of the Times, Dissident Voice, CounterPunch, Common Dreams and Online Journal, 12/3/10:

“A man, without force, is without the essential dignity of humanity. Human nature is so constituted, that it cannot honor a helpless man, although it can pity him; and even this it cannot do long, if the signs of power do not arise.”--Frederick Douglass

The strong act. The weak react. Protest is a tool of the weak. The main aim of any protest is to draw attention to an injustice. It appeals, broadcasts and seeks to impress you with its number. So many of us are feeling this way. You are few, we are many, etc. After each mass protest, there is always a disagreement over the size of the crowd, with the estimate of the organizers usually doubling that of the authority, i.e., the target of the protest.

Even without number, even when the protest is made up of a few quixotic weirdos, or just one, it can still have meaning. The sight of a lonely protester on a city street, ignored by the crowd, is basically pathetic, if not comic, but if he happens to make some sense, then his very isolation can become an indictment of this crowd. Concepcion Picciotto, born 1945, has been encamped across the White House for twenty-nine years, since 1981. She lives in a tent, surrounded by signs denouncing U.S. militarism and its support for Israel. When Picciotto began, Carter was the President who had gotten us involved in Afghanistan. In 2010, Obama is fighting the same mujahideen armed by Carter. As long as the guns sell, it’s all good. A lonely protester is not unlike Jonah ranting away in Nineveh, except Jonah got results. Folks actually heard him and changed their ways.

Recently, I ran into a young man named Turk in Philadelphia. He wore a grinning mask while displaying two signs: “END THE FED” and “Paper is poverty. It is only the ghost of money, & not money itself--T. Jefferson.” The Fed is a private banking cartel that controls interest rates and the amount of money in circulation, i.e., how much inflation we’ll have to suffer. Inflation is basically white collar thievery. Like Concepcion, Turk made too much sense, so of course most passersby only saw him as a freak. After staring without comprehension, a man challenged Turk incoherently, threw up his hands and walked away. Turk’s protest wasn’t entirely futile, however, if just a single person became interested enough to investigate further. With success so incremental, however, Philadelphia will likely burn down many times over before the Fed is ever abolished. The good news is that there are many more Turks out there. The bad news, there aren’t nearly enough. Most Americans are too busy watching Bristol Palin cha-chaing and tangoing to care about why their cash is losing value, why poverty awaits them. Like the citizens of Nineveh, Americans can’t tell their right hand from their left hand. (Most of us don’t know we have two right hands.) Those who control the cash flow control everything. Playing God, the Fed will continue to bankrupt this country, Turks be damned!

A step up from the protest is the strike. Like most protests, strikes are generally peaceful, especially in recent decades, but there is one crucial difference: a strike is always disruptive. An archaic definition of "to strike" is to lower a sail, since disgruntled sailors formerly struck sails to disable a ship. Thus, to remove from production any tool, including one's own body, is to go on strike. To change business as usual, one must start by disrupting business as usual. Gandhi did not rely on sign waving protests but strikes and boycotts, and these disruptive actions, supported by the masses, crippled the ruling apparatus. Threatened, it often reacted with violence.

The more widespread a strike or boycott, the more business it’s willing to disrupt, the more likely it is to achieve its goals. Rosa Park’s refusal to give up her seat would have yielded nothing if it wasn’t followed by the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which lasted over a year. By withholding their money, black riders brought the city to its knees. Of course, this also entailed a sacrifice on their part, but every struggle has a price, with inconvenience the very least of it. Carpools were formed, black taxi drivers drove black patrons around at a steep discount, charging only a dime, the equivalence of a bus fare at the time.

If too few people joined in a boycott or strike, it would be punchless, so unity is essential. In Montgomery or British-ruled India, people could readily unite because the wrongs they suffered were easily identifiable, as were the agents of these wrongs. It was, literally, black and white. In today’s America, we have no consensus on what or who are responsible for our dismal state of the union. With a constant lullaby about “recovery,” many Americans are even denying that we’re up the septic creek at all. Everywhere you look, muddy thinking abounds. Tea Partiers rail against big government and corruption, yet support the Pentagon, that bottomless cesspool of corruption. On the left, there are still those who are invested in Obama and the Democratic Party. Ignoring all evidences, they refuse to see that our Democratic politicians support endless war, endless corruption and endless, Israel-style apartheid no less than their Republican colleagues. Both parties are shills for the military industrial complex. Our troubles are not political, then, but systemic.

Our common enemy is the military industrial complex. The United States has, by far, the largest military budget in the world. It is also the world’s biggest arms dealer. Year in and year out, death is what we purvey, it’s what we’re really good at, but most Americans don’t object, because they think that selling guns, jets, tanks and bombs puts bacon on the table. (Many of us also like the idea of kicking ass, frankly.) Moral qualms aside, not every American can have a job assembling Hellfire missiles, yet we must all pay for a bunch of them, as many as the Pentagon cares to order. The economics don’t add up, but let’s not fuss over numbers.

Our common enemy is the military industrial complex. Visiting India for the first time last month, Obama went to Gandhi’s home, then promptly celebrated the signing of a mega arms deal. Accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, our prez even had the chutzpah to declare, “I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there is nothing weak--nothing passive--nothing naïve--in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.” What he meant was, “You stay non-violent, while I kill. You stay non-violent, or I will kill you.”







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