Charlie Rose interviews Guardian editors Alan Rusbridger & Janine Gibson

The methodology pursued by the mainstream American press on the matter of the NSA's global data mining operations has been to question the nature, psychology, and patriotism of  Edward Snowden, the leaker. Understandably, rather than discussing an abstract, unconstitutional and criminal operation that has Orwellian dynamics, those who manufacture consent would much rather the public consider irrelevant personal trivia. Similarly, reports in the American press about Julian Assange/WikiLeaks and Pvt. Bradley Manning typically have misidentified the actual topic at hand; that being deliberate government lies and state criminality conducted against their own citizens and foreigners.  So instead of zeroing in on the copious deceptions of the state, we are left with banal inquiries into the legitimacy of the data breaches.

The interview above with the Guardian's Alan Rusbridger and Janine Gibson is an example of this infuriating process.  While I think Charlie Rose has produced some wonderful and thoughtful interviews on many subjects, his line of inquiry into the motivation of Mr. Snowden belies deference to state propaganda.  The Guardian editors clearly articulate that there has been no evidence by either the US government or any other sources that these leaks have been harmful to anyone or the US government.

Is it really too much to have television journalists ask questions like:

• Why has this program been running, when the public clearly said it was unacceptable back in the middle of the decade of the zeroes?
• Why are members of the US Congress so woefully ignorant of the scope of these programs?
• What penalties shall be administered upon those members of the military and government, who have been lying to the public about these programs?
• Under what authority does the US government have in stealing all the private and personnel data of non-citizens not located within the United States? 
• Why does the US government continually prevent these programs from being adjudicated and subject to constitutional review, if they deem them truly legal?
• Why doesn't the press call those in government who lie to the public and engage in illegal behavior traitors?
• Why are private corporations used to such an extent in gathering and processing clandestine information?
• Why does the current US government engage in prosecuting and penalizing whistleblowers to the extent that they do?

As others have said on this matter, the only reason a universal monitoring program is in place is that the state believes its true enemy is its own citizens.

What she just said...

Occupy Wall Street protestor using something other than a manila colored pizza box to denounce the corrupt state of affairs that is now America's corporate plutocracy.

***

The topics inveighed by the left are vast and given the MSM's collusion in disseminating propaganda and controlling the public narrative on subjects of interest to the corporate state, usually very little coherent messaging makes it into the public consciousness.  However, people across the world, not just in authoritarian countries, are protesting en mass to the reckless and destructive practices of our authoritarian and/or corporate overlords.  Unlike the bullshit machine during the Iraq invasion where the venal and pliant press stenographed the Bush imperium's falsehoods on Iraqi mushroom clouds and fantastical weapons of mass destruction, the fruits of our economic discord are apparent for all to see.  The nations of the world are sliding into a new period of stagnation and decline.  Unemployment, social mobility, declining wages, and reduced prosperity are evident for all to see.  While society crumbles, multinational corporations are sitting on trillions of dollars of liquid capital, financial houses are given nearly unlimited protection by the state for their incompetence, and the wealthiest beneficiaries of the past 30-years of deregulation and financialization of western economies bemoan any increase in their tax rates.

The elite are firmly aware that for them to stay in power demands that the masses are fully unaware of how dire a situation they are in.  Institutional propagandists denounce the protestors as "dangerous" and predicated on mob rule.  Many are asking what the objectives of the movement are about (psst... its about greedy stupid bankers and their congressional whores, motherfucker!).  Daniel Indiviglio at The Atlantic is already calling the protests a waste of time, given that they are unfocused, the financial industry owns congress, and of course the big lie, that America really, really needs behemoth "to big to fail" monstrosities like Bank of America, Citibank, or Goldman Sachs, because as he states, the rest of the economy is just useless unproductive crap. To enforce the objectives of the corporate state, NY city police department was more than happy in assaulting, brutalizing, and arresting innocent civilians who exercised their first amendment rights.  This is nothing new for the NYPD, which has a long record (i.e. the 2004 Republican presidential election convention) of crushing pubic dissidence and violating the civil rights of protestors.

Many people realize the system is fundamentally rigged against them and the composition of the protestors and their supporters reflects this fact:

The crowd—while represented widely in the media as white, liberal college kids—is surprisingly diverse, including raging grannies, street kids, union workers, professors, ex-bankers, longtime activists, human rights lawyers, Native American band members and ex-military. Political views span the spectrum, from anarchist to right-wing libertarian—complicating efforts toward any kind of unifying objective or mantra.

Chris Hedges, Pulitzer prize winning journalist and author, had this to say about the occupation:

The real people who are scared are the power elite. Of course, they’re trying to make you scared and us scared. But I can tell you, having been a reporter for the New York Times, that on the inside they’re very, very frightened. They do not want movements like this to grow, and they understand on some level — whether it’s subconscious or, in other cases, even overt — that the criminal class in this country has seized power.

I am not optimistic that any particular resistance to the corporate state can succeed in changing the current trends.   If history is a guide, it is more likely that the people will turn on those protesting and disclosing the rampant corruption, rather than on their own imbecile leaders.  As long as people remain confused, uneducated, and ignorant to the current situation, the crypto-fascists, corporate fraud-mongers, and militarists driving policy will remain in the driver's seat.

Quote of the day: Tom Ricks on Fox News

I think Fox may be the most destructive force in American society nowadays, basically pouring poison into the stream of our political discourse.

- Tom Ricks, "Fox News Scoop!"

As this blog has been discussing for years, the function of the media is not to inform, but to deform reality for the benefit of the ruling class.  In this context, the nature of the news is by definition propaganda and its value, just as Pravda was during the years of the Soviet Union, is to leave the audience with a specific perspective that benefits the powerful.  In the USSR it was the communist party; in the USA it is the broad swath of business interests, including the military-industrial-surveillance complex, big-pharma, big-agri, the financial industry, the energy/chemicals sector, and Health care/insurance industry.  Fox News serves the interests of these people and is, as Ricks points out, a source of outright fraud that contaminates civil discourse with purposefully designed falsehoods and innuendo that plays into the biases and bigotry of their audience.

I found it interesting when Dick Cheney was vice-president, that he wanted the television in his hotel suites preset to Fox news.  Did that mean that he wanted to know what the minions were watching and thus assess the adequacy of his disinformation machine personally?  Or did it mean that Cheney was uninterested in hearing other perspectives of news, other than the one he and his cohorts had created?  Fox News represents the convoluted intersection of corporatism and government sponsored deceit.  This disinformation channel, because it wasn't interested in news but in pushing perspective, became a juggernaut in the decade of the zeroes. The conventional framework of left and right politics has broken down.  As a result, no longer is the prevalent conflict between liberals and conservatives.  Instead, the struggle for America has become a battle between an inverted form of totalitarianism, defined by corporatism, and the free flow of information espoused by those interested in democracy.

There are those who feel that if a person is given sufficient and credible information, they will invariably choose the most rational argument.  The fact that religion, debunked political ideologies, and failed economic models persist amongst the majority of Americans, suggests that this line of thinking is false.  Many people don't want to know the truth.  They want to be lied to and given ridiculous and fictitious narratives that make their lives tolerable.  The majority of the world want to exist under what Nietzsche described as a slave ethic.  A world where they are the constant victims, where forces external to themselves are always punishing them and depriving them of their just deserves.  In the minds of American conservatives, Fox News is their secular conduit to the outside world.  They can justify their ignorance and prejudices through presented falsehoods and manufactured realities, while all the time marching to the beat of their corporate masters.

The other Sarah Palin movie

Sarah Palin (aka Caribou Barbie) and her entourage of semi-literate Alaskan troglodytes are now the subject of another movie. Unlike the celebrated bizzaro-land movie called "The Undefeated" (apparently no one has told her that she lost 2008 election), there is a documentary at this year's Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) documenting the actions of everyone's favorite candidate/beauty contestant.  The documentary is called "You Betcha!" which sounds just about right.

It doesn't surprise me that the dismally educated people in middle-America still gravitate to her beauty pageant veneer and fixate on her "us against them" nostrums.  After all, these populist shibboleths have existed since popular uprising have existed (yes... what the Romans have done for us lately!) and have a constant fan base regardless of who is in office. The problem with this half-wit, is that she actually thought being a politician was just a little more than being a B-rated celebrity and all those fans of hers, weren't just buying a ticket to indulge in the latest Republican merry-go-round ride.  She has zero policy credentials on any subject of relevance, whether that be foreign policy, America's global hegemony, the financial industry, or cost structure and delivery of social services like Medicare.

As a candidate Palin was so dismally incompetent on a national level that within a few weeks of the public becoming aware of this hockey-mom with lipstick, the McCain-Palin ticket started to tank with independent voters, women, and moderate Republicans.

While she was a positive force leading up to the 2010 mid-term elections for the Tea Party crowd, the problem that arose was that Palin wasn't always willing to follow the Republican script and would too often improvise. An example of her idiocy was her over-the-top media retort that erupted subsequent to Congresswoman's Giffords' attempted murder earlier this year. Since that incident Palin's numbers have been in decline. 

My take on the great American grifter is that she would really love to run for president, but isn't too keen on all that policy stuff and book-learning; like most of her fans.  She clearly loves the attention and the not insignificant pocket change that her and first-dude Todd have managed to pull in since abandoning the Alaska people for a staring role in this week's TLC re-run.  However, the media has already moved on to observe the craziness of Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and almost as verbally irresponsible Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX).

So like any good huckster she now moves from state to state, trying to locally re-invent herself, while trying to boost her flailing popularity nationally.  I think she will self destruct at some point and hopefully she will take as many Republicans with her in the process.

Stephen Harper and the Abuse of Power

I'm loathe to affiliate myself with Mr. Ignatieff, who has in my opinion been one of the most incompetent leaders of Canada's Liberal party in years. Given how bad things have been since Jean Chretien was pushed out of office, that is not an insignificant matter.

However, I cannot stand Mr. Harper and all the faux-patriots and ignoramuses of the Canadian Conservative Party. Their deceit, incompetence, indifference to the truth and their slavish want for power and authority over the lives of Canadians, is unbearable. Why the opposition parties haven't been taking the boots to the crotches of these so-called conservatives is beyond my understanding. Everyone knows Harper is a thug. So why then engage in a strategy where they play the role of the village idiot who gets his ass kicked every morning by the town bully.

If these right-wing wannabe crypto-fascists want to go medieval on us, the people, then I have no problem with the opposition parties dragging Harper's bloated and corpulent carcass across the television screen.

Sarah Palin, accomplice in mass murder!

Is this a reasonable graphic?  Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who remains in an induced coma, didn't think so when asked about the above graphic issued by Palin, which implores Republican supporters to "reload" and keep pursuing their Democratic Party opponents.  In fact, the local Arizonan Republican candidate to oust Ms. Giffords did far more than Caribou Barbie.  He actually had a gun rally, where they said "Remove Gabrielle Giffords from office, shoot a fully automatic M-16." (ref. below)

Again, this type of inflammatory rhetoric isn't coming from fringe elements and outliers, this is coming from Party leaders, and no less than a former Vice-Presidential candidate of the USA herself.

If the above isn't sufficient to validate the depravity of these so-called Christians, consider what another Republican candidate and Tea party-backed congresswoman Michele Bachmann had to say on the subject:

Controversial Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) said this weekend that she wants residents of her state "armed and dangerous" over President Barack Obama's plan to reduce global warming "because we need to fight back."

Whether these politicians believe what they are saying or are merely ginning up the facile minded dunces of the gun-totting "kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out" crowd is irrelevant to me.  They are inciting political violence to achieve political aims.  That and that alone is what the last decade has been all about: the war and struggle against violent extremism and terrorism!

Neither their words nor actions have been misconstrued by anyone to be merely metaphorical.   They themselves clearly defend their stance as a violent defense against Washingtonian corruption and capitulation to liberalism.  The only question left, is when is the Department of Justice going to start applying the laws uniformly and start sending Republicans to enjoy the warm sunshine and if Dick Cheney can be believed, excellent health care, in Guantanamo, Cuba?

Americans Negotiating with Taliban Impostor!

Over and over, the impression given by our marginally elected politicians is that they and their well educated bureaucracy, if given enough time and effort are capable of implementing effective leadership and results across the globe.  The Afghan war is a typical example, in which we the citizens of the West have been promised that the country would be modernized and made safe from the Taliban.

Despite nearly a decade there, neither NATO nor America seems capable of winning a war against a fifth rate nation.  Why is that?  The reason might have something to do with the type of people who we have running the show over there.  Consider this and file it under "My God, they can't be this Fucking Stupid!"

According to international newspapers, both NATO and America have been negotiating with an impostor who claimed to be a high ranking Taliban commander.

NATO and Afghan officials said they held three meetings with the man, who traveled from in Pakistan, where Taliban leaders have taken refuge.

The fake Taliban leader even met with President Hamid Karzai, having been flown to Kabul on a NATO aircraft and ushered into the presidential palace, officials said.

The episode underscores the uncertain and even bizarre nature of the atmosphere in which Afghan and American leaders search for ways to bring the nine-year-old American-led war to an end. The leaders of the Taliban are believed to be hiding in Pakistan, possibly with the assistance of the Pakistani government, which receives billions of dollars in American aid.

That's right.  The US government, including  Gen. David Petreaus the US Senior military commander in the region, was commenting on the progress they were having in negotiating with... a fucking impostor!  The impostor who for months was taking their money and pretending to be interested in halting the Talban's offensives in Afghanistan against NATO troops.  According to others:

The man may have been a Taliban agent. “The Taliban are cleverer than the Americans and our own intelligence service,” said a senior Afghan official who is familiar with the case. “They are playing games.”

Brilliant!  At this point any statements made by anyone in any Western government can be considered useless.  We are fighting semi-literate tribesmen, who have no formal military training, no firm logistical support lines, no long term financing for their guerrilla campaigns, and no discernible resources; other than that provided by the duplicitous and corrupt Pakistani.  Yet we are being told that the war will last for another five years!  Send Biden, Obama, and every member of congress and their adult relatives to do a tour of duty in Afghanistan and this war will end tomorrow.

The continued ascent of the surveillance state

Recently Dana Priest and William Arkin of the Washington Post published another chapter into their ongoing investigation of America's secretive information gathering operations.  In the past series, they discussed the emerging nexus between corporate entities, clandestine information services, and the government.  A system so large that "Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications."  No single entity within the government is capable of understanding the totality or scope of the enterprise; not even the president's own top officials on the subject.

The most recent chapter to this story, involves the involvement of state and local police agencies.  Across the nation terrorism task forces have been created to capture information related to domestic threats that may arise in each jurisdiction in America.  The federal government has provided grants to this regional governments and police forces to purchase high-end military surveillance systems and communication networks to monitor and manage local populations.  In those cases where no terrorism related activities are identifiable, the new task forces are used to monitor criminal classes and/or any person or group the state deems of interest.

The most contentious aspect of the government surveillance lies in the collection of data on individuals who are completely innocent of any wrongdoing.  A Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, or SAR, has been established to collect data (personal, commercial, financial,...etc) upon any person the state determines suspicious.  Unlike the conventional system, where the state does not have the right to collect and horde every minuta of data about your life, the new terrorism laws and surveillance state network, casts a wide net.

As of December, there were 161,948 suspicious activity files in the classified Guardian database, mostly leads from FBI headquarters and state field offices. Two years ago, the bureau set up an unclassified section of the database so state and local agencies could send in suspicious incident reports and review those submitted by their counterparts in other states. Some 890 state and local agencies have sent in 7,197 reports so far.

The objective of the system is to amass as much information on each person within the United States as possible. The federal state has had a long and sordid history of monitoring, infiltrating, and undermining civilian populations engaged in nothing less than constitutionally sanctioned criticism of government practices. The following examples confirm the misuse of the current security state powers:

• In Virginia, the state's fusion center published a terrorism threat assessment in 2009 naming historically black colleges as potential hubs for terrorism.
• From 2005 to 2007, the Maryland State Police went even further, infiltrating and labeling as terrorists local groups devoted to human rights, antiwar causes and bike lanes.
• And in Pennsylvania this year, a local contractor hired to write intelligence bulletins filled them with information about lawful meetings as varied as Pennsylvania Tea Party Patriots Coalition gatherings, antiwar protests and an event at which environmental activists dressed up as Santa Claus and handed out coal-filled stockings

In America, the public has generally accepted the rise of the surveillance state. Trivialities such as civil liberties, the abuse of constitutional freedoms, the invasion of individual privacy, and the monitoring of lawful public assemblies, are glossed off by the mainstream media and the population as minor irritants that only affect those swarthy and obviously guilty dark-skinned persons with funny names. Glenn Greenwald expands on this asymmetric information relationship:

One of the hallmarks of an authoritarian government is its fixation on hiding everything it does behind a wall of secrecy while simultaneously monitoring, invading and collecting files on everything its citizenry does. Based on the Francis Bacon aphorism that "knowledge is power," this is the extreme imbalance that renders the ruling class omnipotent and citizens powerless.

The cabal of corporate fascists has extended its tentacles into every aspect and function of every person in the nation. Big brother is not just a metaphor, he is the state.

Why WikiLeaks matters in this age of Chinese Democracy

In Spain, the WikiLeaks disclosures have dominated the news for three days now. The reporting has been led by the level-headed El País, with its nationwide competitor, Público, lagging only a bit behind. Attention has focused on three separate matters, each pending in the Spanish national security court, the Audiencia Nacional: the investigation into the 2003 death of a Spanish cameraman, José Cuoso, as a result of the mistaken shelling of Baghdad’s Palestine Hotel by a U.S. tank; an investigation into the torture of Spanish subjects held at Guantánamo; and a probe into the use of Spanish bases and airfields for extraordinary renditions flights, including the one which took Khaled El-Masri to Baghdad and then on to Afghanistan in 2003.

- Scott Horton, "The Madrid Cables"

Within the elite political classes and global mainstream media, there is a rising anger and palatable contempt of Wikileaks' periodic information dumps.  The information to date has not been on the scope of the Pentagon Papers. As Fareed Zakeria said in Time magazine, "The Pentagon papers revealed that the U.S. engaged in a systematic campaign to deceive the world and the American people and that its private actions were often the opposite of its stated public policy."  The information clearly has shown governments across the world, be that autocratic or supposedly democratic, to have engaged in deceit, deception, and propaganda to achieve their own statist objectives.  Many in the MSM yawn and say that everything posted has been known.  Perhaps, but the MSM certainly didn't do their job in actively verifying those known suppositions.  Others, like CNN's Wolf Blitzer are filled with rage that anyone would dare to willingly examine the state secrets of the American Empire without first getting the state's tacit approval; like how him and all the other "respectable" laggards of the MSM do.

One commentator has said, "The difference between WikiLeaks and other media organizations is that WikiLeaks is doing its job properly."  Statist leaning politicians and right-wing bloggers on the other hand, are issuing their typical belligerent and illogical fatwas on WikiLeaks.  Despite an obvious understanding of the role of freedom of the press and in the case of America, the first amendment of the US constitution, we have the following verbal flatulence.

• Newt Gingrich, former Republican speaker of the US House of Representatives stated that Juilan Assange of WikiLeaks, "deserves to be hunted and executed" and held as an "enemy combatant."
• Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told NBC's David Gregory Sunday that Assange is a terrorist.
• Caribou Barbie (aka Sarah Palin) suggested that Assange deserved the same treatment as terrorists and insurgents.
• Sen. Lieberman (I-CT) has asked American companies to not assist WikiLeaks disseminate the data.  To date, Amazon.com has pulled WikiLeaks from its servers, PayPal has stopped donations, and a Seattle based company Tableau Software removed data visualizations published by WikiLeaks to Tableau Public.
• Tom Flanagan, a professor at the University of Calgary and former advisor to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, half-jokingly called for Mr. Obama to assassinate Mr. Assange.
• National Review's Jonah Goldberg asked, "Why wasn't Assange garroted in his hotel room years ago?"
• The same politicians who demanded that America illegally invade Iraq and permanently occupy Afghanistan, now claim that that WikiLeaks will have blood on its hands.

When the White House, the Pentagon, or any other agent of the government willingly passes "state secrets" to the press, such as in the lead-up to the Iraq war through the NY Times' Judith Miller or in the outing of CIA WMD investigator Valerie Plame, the same voices are silent.  When official court stenographer for the Bush White House, Bob Woodward, distributes state secrets in his books, in the way that teenage girls spread gossip, the mainstream press is agog with effuse praise.
 
On another level, the entire WikiLeaks criticism is typical of the fundamental contempt that the political and media class has for democracy, transparency, and government accountability. Governments do not want anyone to understand how incompetent and criminal they are in their everyday blunders. The American government has shown an extreme and persistent proclivity to lie to its citizens, to disseminate false information to the press and public, and conceal their criminal actions to further its own statist objectives. They and their paid cultural managers want a population engaged in the trivial and the irrelevant. A public that is aware and actively demanding accountability is an unacceptable situation for those leading the American Empire Project.

We are living in an age of Chinese Democracy, where the our imperious leaders tell us we are free to do as we are ordered.  The government continues to classify more and more of its activities behind the shield of state secrets, while maximizing its surveillance of innocent people through both legal and illegal means. This is why WikiLeaks matters. The lies that lead to the invasion of Vietnam, the falsehoods that attempted to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the evasion of responsibility surrounding the regulatory framework that lead to the Great Recession, the concealment of war crimes committed by US soldiers and CIA functionaries, the erosion of civil liberties and freedom... etc. are all reasons why whistle-blowers like WikiLeaks matter to functioning democracies.

Glenn Greenwald on why the Democrats lost

With that strategy, the Democratic Party now reaps what it has sown.  Its message and identity are profoundly muddled, incoherent, unclear, uninspiring, and self-negating.  Worse, its policies are mishmashes of inept half-measures that, with a handful of exceptions, produce little good for anyone (other than Wall Street, the Pentagon and other corporate interests).  They are perceived as -- and are -- beholden to Wall Street, special interests, and the corporations they vowed to confront.  They are without any ability to confront the massive unemployment crisis and financial decline the country faces.  And as a result of all of that, they lay in shambles.  Anyone who can survey all of that and cheer for the strategy which Democrats have been pursuing -- let's build our majorities by relying on GOP-replicating corporatist Blue Dogs -- or who thinks that this election loss happened because "Democrats are too liberal," resides in a world that has very little to do with reality.  And that's true no matter how many times they repeat the simplistic snippets of exit polls to which they've obsessively attached themselves.

Glenn Greenwald in a blog post at Salon.com, takes on MSNBC commentator Lawerence O'Donnell in his assertion that the Democrats lost because they are too "liberal" and the country simply prefers "conservative" candidates and governance.

Over the past decade, I too have excoriated those who babble about the fundamental divide between philosophical and political liberalism and conservatism in America.  The terms in themselves are inexhaustibly used incorrectly by both sides to impugn their opponents and distort the overall discussion.  Virtually no credible conservative government has existed at the federal level in the past forty years in America.  Ronald Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, and Dubya were pro-corporatist presidents who advanced statist agendas.  Government under each of these men was widely expanded; the national debt ballooned; war and the invasion of numerous countries in violation of international law was conducted; treaties were maligned and rejected at whim; established precedents in US constitutional law were regularly dismissed and abrogated with presidential approval; corporate take over of the executive and legislative branches was perfected under Republican rule over these decades.  At what point did the fanatics of conservative causes rally against these changes?

The pro-corporatist Democrats have always used the excuse that they could not execute a liberal agenda, that was and is favored by a majority, because of the stalking horse of conservatism amongst the population.  People now realize that because of gerrymandering, corporate donations and special interest meddling, and a two-party system that invalidates third party politics, that there is very little that they themselves can do to upend and change a system.  America has for the past decade not been a democracy, but  a plutocracy governed by people who are servants, not to the constitution or the people, but to multinational corporations: including bankers, insurance companies, the military-industrial complex, oil companies, and a bevy of special interests that are more than willing to bribe politicians into executing their agenda.

O'Donnell represents the liberal version of a cultural manager; a person who nonchalantly bemoans the tyranny of the left-wing of the Democratic party, but refuses to address the perennial failure and Pavlovian response of the Democratic party hierarchy in pursuing Republican-light policies once they are elected.  Clinton was elected to improve the economy, introduce health care, and end the brutal twelve years of Republican mismanagement.  Instead, he pursed a strategy of triangulation and capitulated to conservative policies of energy and financial deregulation, which has left the American economy broken and on unsound footing.  Obama in the face of aggressive citizen support has sought legislative capitulation to the banks, big oil, big-pharma, insurance companies, and the Military-Security state.  Obama's claims which he made during the 2008 election, of attacking special interests and the oligarchs appear little more than pleasant lies told to naive children.

Quote of the Day: On Pat Tillman's Death

The one thing that’s definitely true is there’s certainly a cover-up. I mean, I wouldn’t speak on whether they had some CIA operative waiting in a bush to shoot his ass … I think it’s criminal for sure.

- Richard Tillman, brother of killed soldier Pat Tillman, about his brother’s death. Real Time with Bill Maher

I too have written my opinion of Pat Tillman's death and of the documentary movie that came out last month in cinemas across North America. It should be the duty and moral obligation of every American to understand who Pat Tillman was and under what circumstances he died.  None should ignore his death or that of many other soldiers, during the Bush years, who enlisted to serve their nation, but were used as political pawns in the geo-political machinations of the neo-conservatives and American military-industrial complex.

The Dismal Science Redefined

Current economic theory is less a science than an ideology peculiar to a certain period of history, which may well be nearing an end...

[Economists are] the jilted lovers of the science world – the more rigidly they approach their subject, the more it mocks them with spurious and headstrong behaviour.

Since this blog started, I've been constantly commenting on the dearth of empirical evidence that lies behind many of the attributed economic theories of our time and the persistent irrationality, if not complete fraud, of proponents of modern economics.  Many noted persons who are economists, like Paul Krugman and J. Brad DeLong, have likewise stated how the field has become a self-serving entity, that is in many cases polluted beyond the point of usefulness.  The above quotes, culled from a Globe and Mail newspaper opinion piece by Brian Milner titled "Economists and their fairy tale world of prognostication," is another indictment of the dismal science's ability to actually be a science.  The central basis of any science is its ability to factually explain natural phenomenon, testability of theories, reproducibility of experiments, and its ability to predict future events.  Economics, or at least that set of dogma pedalled in the MSM, doesn't pass any of the above criteria. 

If economists want their profession be taken seriously, then they should start actually calling out those on their side who have perennially gotten it wrong and banish them.

The entire fable of sustainable capitalism is disintegrating all around us like the dreamscape in the movie Inception.  The communists of China, through their mercantile and corrupt practices, are acquiring natural resources across the globe and buying friends everywhere.  The new globalization that peaked in the last decade is slowly devolving.  The financial system that imploded in 2008, has only been patched together with band-aid remedies and awaits further paralysis in the near future.  China, Europe, and America are all betting against the odds, that growth will magically return and the masses will defer sharpening their pitchforks until another day.

All Means to Attract and Distract...

  

As Thomas Frank said in his book What's the matter with Kansas?

These voters are far more concerned with the frustrations and indignities of everyday life than with scholarly rigor or objective material interests, they suffer from old man’s disorder, their deafness to the insincerity of their leaders is a cultural marvel, it is a place where hatred trumps bread, and I have worse to say.

Yes, we know all that, but what will Tiger Woods think!  And more importantly, since Elin was married to the world's greatest sex-freak, will she ever be satisfied with anyone else between the sheets!  Again, what do the sheeple think?

Dean Baker: The Numbers Game

Dean Baker, economist and Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, has an opinion piece in the Huffington Post that is a clarion call about the economic "numbers game" that has been run by the architects of the new Gilded Age.

He asks the basic question:

If this disaster was preventable and we know how to get out of it, why didn't our leaders try to stop it before it happened? Why don't they take the steps necessary now to get the economy moving again?

The answer is obvious:

The answer to both these questions is simple; the politicians work for someone else. On Election Day, the politicians might need our votes, but they won't get to be serious contenders unless they've gotten the campaign contributions of the big money crew. And the moneyed elite has been using its control of the political process to ensure that an ever larger share of the economy's output is redistributed upward in their direction.

He goes on to explain that over the past 30-years, corporations and the wealthy, have bought politicians at the local, state, and federal levels who have crafted legislation that promotes inequality, reduces safety networks for middle class and poor citizens, and marginalizes the earning capacity of the middle class via globalization.

He explains:

For example, they wrote trade rules that were designed to put downward pressure on the wages of the bulk of the U.S. workforce by placing manufacturing workers in direct competition with low-paid workers in China and other developing countries. This had nothing to do with a belief in "free trade." They did not try to subject lawyers, doctors or other highly paid workers to the same sort of international competition. They only wanted international competition to put downward pressure on the wages of workers in the middle and bottom, not those at the top.

This elite has instituted a system of corporate governance that allows top executives to pilfer companies at the expense of their shareholders and its workers. Top executives are overseen only by a board of directors who owe their hugely overpaid sinecures to the executives they supervise. And of course the Wall Street barons themselves are given a license to gamble with the implicit promise that government picks up their tab when they lose.

As this blog has written (here, here, here, and here), neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are interested in providing a sustainable framework, where the majority of Americans can get a quality education, pursue meaningful life long employment, and engage in building a dream of a more equitable and fair world.  Instead, both parties pursue a scorched-earth policy against the majority of the country's citizens, by providing greater benefits to the top 1% of the population, while pushing the remaining middle-class into perpetual debt and eventual pauperdom.

Unfortunately, the propagandists keep the masses well agitated and entertained through truly mind-warping concepts like:

• Did Bill and Hillary kill Vince Foster?
• The OJ case.
• 9-11 was a conspiracy committed by the Bush junta!
• Was Barack Obama born in the USA?
• The rise of Barack's Socialist/Fascist/African dystopia!
• Obama is a Muslim terrorist sympathizer!
• Anything said by Sarah Palin
• Anna Nicole's drugged corpse
• Kate and Jon's idiotic children and their ridiculous lives.
• Octo-Mom
• Michael Jackson's court cases, pedophile accusations, and finally his drugged corpse

Only when the masses realize how they have been completely sold out by the politicans and their own citizens, will anything meaningful begin to occur.

The First Ground Zero Mosque - The Original World Trade Towers!

An article in Slate illustrates the profound conceptual disconnect most people have between what the actual World Trade Towers were and its relation to Bin Laden and the 9-11 attacks.  Given the ignominious and bigoted diatribe offered by both the right and left on the subject of the Cordoba House Project in New York City near ground zero (discussed here, here, and here), this is a welcome anodyne.

The original towers were designed by Minoru Yamasaki, a Japanese American, who gained popularity with the House of Saud (The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) in the early 1950's.  Many of his designs, including the entire World Trade Tower complex as constructed in the 1970's, used Islamic themes and architectural conceits.  The article outlines a few of these elements in the overall WTC design:

• At the base of the towers, Yamasaki used implied pointed arches—derived from the characteristically pointed arches of Islam—as a transition between the wide column spacing below and the dense structural mesh above.
• Yamasaki replicated the plan of Mecca's courtyard by creating a vast delineated square, isolated from the city's bustle by low colonnaded structures and capped by two enormous, perfectly square towers—minarets, really. Yamasaki's courtyard mimicked Mecca's assemblage of holy sites—the Qa'ba (a cube) containing the sacred stone, what some believe is the burial site of Hagar and Ishmael, and the holy spring—by including several sculptural features, including a fountain, and he anchored the composition in a radial circular pattern, similar to Mecca's.
• The dense filigree of complex geometries alludes to a higher spiritual reality in Islam, and the shimmering quality of Islamic patterning relates to the veil that wraps the Qa'ba at Mecca.

The author of the Slate article infers that the Bin Laden family's construction company were intimately associated with many of the projects that occurred in Saudi Arabia and Osama Bin Laden, himself, would have been well aware of Yamaski's utilization of Islamic themes.  She then postulates that one of the rationals, although not necessarily the primary reason, for Bin Laden to attack the WTC towers, was that the buildings represented an intermixing of the Islam, modernity, and international capitalism. 

To Bin Laden, the World Trade Center was probably not only an international landmark but also a false idol.

It should also be understood, that the attack on 9-11, contrary to the facile arguments posited by the MSM and the Bush Administration, were not merely an attack on America.  Michael Scheuer, former CIA counter-terrorism expert on Bin Laden, explained in his book Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, that the attacks were meant to provoke the US to expand their presence in the Middle East and engage in a clash of the civilizations battle with Islam that would destabilize apostate and pro-American regimes, eventually forcing the Americans and their lackeys into permanent retreat; like that of the Soviet Union during their Afghan conflict.  Bin Laden, in 2007, stated that if people wanted to understand the conflict, that they should, "read the book of Michael Scheuer in this regard."

I'm Pat 'Fucking' Tillman

That's my new salutation.

"How's your day Bub?"

"I'm Pat 'Fucking' Tillman!  Fuck You!" Will be my response.

"But you're not Pat, jackass.  You're a fucking nobody."

"That's why I'm Tillman, motherfucker. The dead don't get a sequel. So it's up to me; us regular Joe's, who are fucking nobodies, to run the ball down the field in the face of your accepted lies; through the blizzard of your propaganda; pivoting around the miserable hacks and sycophants, who you parade around on the playing field in their expensive wears and high-end jewellery, and telling us little people how much we need them in order for us to exist. It's up to me to soldier on, by channelling my contempt towards punishing you everyday, even when I'm losing yardage."

"I'm Pat 'Fucking' Tillman!"

I never watched Pat on television. Although I played the game in high school, I don't care for it.  I also played war too, and shot my share of cowboys, Indians, and assorted desperados. So maybe I'm just indoctrinated through youthful exuberance to find you and your whole crew ridiculous.

Maybe this is my Tyler Durden moment. Although, I've long thrown away my Ikea catalogues, I'm pretty sure that I'm not free. But that's how you like it.  After all, the world is made up of slaves and masters. It always has.  On the one hand, there are those who imprison themselves with their want of bullshit and need to prostitute themselves to the priests of high commerce or some other cult.  I don't know when it occurs for everyone, but at some point along the way these folks begin to believe that their abductors are actually interested in their well being and that these hostage takers, may be trying to elevate them though slavery. Happiness you know; happiness is through slavery.

On the other side are the pushers, the dealers, the pimp who beats you down every time you question his motives, that teacher that lied to you in school, and that bigot who never gave you a chance.  The truth of the matter, is I don't need your diseased spreading ass.  And that's where Pat comes in.

"I'm Pat 'Fucking' Tillman!"

Surprise, Republicans and Sarah Palin Lie Again!

Whereas all politicians and their paid hacks in the MSM constantly lie and ply the public with erroneous data, deliberately misleading statements, and more-often-than-not propaganda, few entities are as skilled in dissembling as the Republican Party.  Case in point is a recent flare up on the right-wing news cycle by Caribou-Barbie (aka Sarah "I'm an idiot" Palin), in which she accused the Obama administration of deliberately not waiving a 1920 law, called the Jones Act, which "requires all shipping between U.S. ports or in U.S. coastal waters to be carried in U.S.-flag ships that are owned and crewed by U.S. citizens." (Kevin Drum, MotherJones.com).

As McClatchy Press states:

From former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to Arizona Sen. John McCain to junior members of the House of Representatives, conservative Republicans have accused President Barack Obama of failing to do all he can to help clean up the Gulf of Mexico oil spill because he hasn't waived a U.S. maritime law called the Jones Act.

The Republican talking point is that the Obama administration is preventing much needed foreign vessels from engaging in clean-up efforts arising from the Deepwater Horizon rupture, which still remains uncapped to this day.

The central problem with this bit of hysterics is that "Maritime law experts, government officials and independent researchers say that the claim is false. The Jones Act isn't an impediment at all, they say, and it hasn't blocked anything."  Furthermore, Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said that no Jones Act waivers were necessary, since all the activities were occurring outside the 3-mile limit to which the act was applicable.

On Tuesday the State Department announced that new offers of aid would be accepted from 12 foreign countries and international organizations, but spokesman P.J. Crowley noted that booms donated by Mexico, Norway and Brazil had been in use since May 11,and that 24 foreign vessels from nine foreign countries already have been helping with the cleanup.

With the exception of McClatchy, most in the press did not find it odd that ex-Governor Palin (technically 1/2-term Governor and full time moron), who claimed to understand oil politics better than any past or present governor, doesn't understand the basic facts surrounding the maritime law she is quoting.  Senator John McCain, another lying dingbat, stated that the Jones Act was subverting the recovery and was costing Americans jobs!  Others were quick to realize that the preening of the Republicans had little to do with maritime conservation or assisting the Gulf coast community, but rather an attempt to push for the removal of a federal law that limited foreign interests from controlling maritime trade within US waters.

The perennial willingness of Republicans to sell out national interests to the first multinational corporation with a fist-full of dollars, is as close to treasonous as it gets.

American Idiots: Deep South Edition

One of the great paradoxes of America is that although more Americans have won Nobel prizes in the fields of science and medicine than any other nationality, and given the fact that the nation has the best universities and some of the greatest research and development centers in the world, Americans as a whole remain woefully ignorant, if not completely hostile, to basic scientific knowledge and rationality.

Over the past twenty years repeated surveys have found that as much as 95% of the American population is scientifically illiterate.  A recent study conducted by the California Academy of Sciences found that 47% of Americans did not know how long it takes Earth to revolve around the sun, and 41% believed that dinosaurs and early humans coexisted.  Another recent poll done by the Pew Research Foundation, found that only 52% of Americans understood the basis of stem cells in relation to normal differentiated cells and a mere 46% knew that atoms are larger than electrons.  As described in the Boston Globe, "On a highly contentious issue like global warming, meanwhile, the gap between scientists and the public was vast: 84 percent of scientists, but just 49 percent of Americans, think human emissions are causing global warming."

So it should come as no shock to discover that only a mere third of the population "believe" in the theory of biological evolution.  Worst, more than 50% of the population "believe" in literal creationism.  It is this latter group of simians that I wish to highlight.  In the state of Alabama, a state that is ranked as having the largest percentage of obese citizens and least educated persons in the country, the local Republicans managed to achieve a new intellectual low through a primary election campaign commercial.  According the online political news-blog TPM,

[An Alabama] state PAC recently went on the air with an ad attacking one of the Republican gubernatorial candidates for supporting the teaching of evolution in schools and for saying that parts of the Bible aren't true.

The candidate, Bradley Byrne, responded with a lengthy press release vehemently defending his belief in creationism and the infallible truth of the Bible.

The aggrieved Republican pol went on to further dismiss every piece of scientific analysis in the past 4,000 years -from the ancient Babylonians who studied astronomy to 19th C. scholars who developed theories of electromagnetism and nuclear chemistry to modern 21st C. molecular biologists- by making the ludicrous claim of "I believe the Bible is the Word of God and that every single word of it is true ..."

All these dunces and like-minded inbred yahoos south of the Mason-Dixon line are a burden to the rest of humanity.  They are idiots, who are morally debased, scientifically illiterate, and lacking in any common sense.  Just watch the following clip as evidence.

Jobs? What Stinkin' Jobs?

A week ago the US government published statistics, which state that the US economy added 162,000 jobs in March.  The conventional propagandists make the absurd claim that the recession is over and that the Gilded age can continue again without interruption.   A huge hurrah could be heard in the financial district of New York as the DJI passed the 12 thousand mark; a level it hasn't reached since June 2008.  Once again, the divide between reality and Dr. Greenspan's imaginarium of useless financial gimmickry grows even larger.  An emerging view that has now become nearly axiomatic amongst those of us in the reality-based sciences, is that the study of economics has become little more than an ideological handmaiden to political forces and is polluted to the point of uselessness.

Those economists, on the other hand, who have been constantly critical of both the Bush and Obama administrations economic dissembling and the "green-sprouts" argument, have noted their objections to the over-simplified and intellectually dishonest statements of their peers who claim that the US economy is on the mend and jobs will soon abound.

Robert Reich, Dean Baker, and Mark Thoma, to name a few, outline the situation:

• The positive news is that manufacturing has shown a brief but constant uptick in jobs over the past few months in the USA.  A total of 45,000 jobs since December 2009.  However, future growth is likely to be anemic.
• The US census bureau added at least 48,000 new jobs for the 2010 census in March.  As many as a million jobs will be added alone for this endeavor in the following months. These jobs are temporary and only provide a short-term solution to those who are chronically unemployed; however.
• Since the inception of the Great Recession, the US economy has lost 8.4 million jobs and failed to create an additional 2.7 million necessary as per population growth.  Thus, a total of at least 11 million jobs have either disappeared or failed to materialize.
• Many of the jobs that have been lost were in construction, mortgage banking, appraisal, financial and legal services associated with the bubble market, and manufacturing.  Most of these service oriented jobs will not return and in the case of manufacturing, are permanently lost as long as the Chinese retain their slave-labor policies and currency manipulation practices.
• State and local governments have shed 72,000 jobs since December, or 24,000 a month.  A trend that will accelerate as the federal stimulus program weans and state revenues continue to slump.
• The federal government's spending on last year’s domestic stimulus is still near its peak, and the Fed continues to hold down interest rates.  Without these two factors, there would be no job growth to report.
• Nominal wages fell in March for the sixth time since 1964. Dean Baker states that, "This is not a good sign for future income growth."
• Consumer debt remains high, with those who are employed saving and paying off existing debts rather than engaging in further purchases.  If there is a permanent change in consumer demand, no recovery to pre-recession levels of economic activity will occur in the near future.

The obvious question that remains is what has the US government or the Fed done to prevent the big banks, which are now bigger than they ever were and were at the center of this recession, from engaging in the same activities that led to this current economic collapse?  Nothing.

Suicides staged to cover up torture at Guantanamo

It will have blood; they say, blood will have blood
- Macbeth, Act 3, Sc4. 121.


Part I - Background

Research conducted by Human Rights Watch investigator John Sifton and the ACLU have determined that at least 100 persons have, "died during interrogations, some who were clearly tortured to death."  Retired US Army General Barry McCaffrey has said, "We probably murdered dozens of [detainees] during the course of that, both the armed forces and the C.I.A." 

The American public cannot claim ignorance about the festering myasis that has become normative behavior amongst intelligence gathering agencies and the US military this past decade.  Reports published as early as 2002 in both the NY Times and Washington Post, describe the beating deaths of Afghan detainees by US troops and CIA field contractors.  Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker magazine exposed the truculent grandstanding by Rumsfeld's all too willing "rotten apples," when orders for the gloves to come off at Abu Ghraib were made.  Extraordinary rendition, CIA black-site torture camps, civilian massacres by mercenary forces, Bush's torture memos authorizing -if necessary- genital mutilation, regular doses of water-boarding against Al Qaeda high-value operatives, and Guantanamo's Muslim concentration camp are all piece-and-parcel of the Bush junta's Global War on Terrorism that were on public display. 

A review of homicide cases, however, shows that few detainee deaths have been properly investigated. Many were not investigated at all. And no official investigation has looked into the connection between detainee deaths and the interrogation policies promulgated by the Bush administration.

Gen. Antonio Taguba, after investigating the Abu Ghraib abuses, said that "there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current 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."

In spite of the obvious facts, the false narrative offered by both the government and their accomplices, is that torture (otherwise stated as 'enhanced interrogation' in the MSM) is limited to those "ticking time-bomb" cases and even when used, is innocuous and not permanent and therefore justifiable.  The following case proves the complete opposite is true.

Part II - Cover Up of Guantanamo Homicides

Scott Horton at Harper's magazine has unfolded another horror story at Guantanamo, that includes the staged suicide of three detainees and the subsequent cover up by the military and Department of Justice officials under both Bush and Obama administrations.

According to the NCIS documents, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.

The article presents the accounts of military officers who were stationed at Guantanamo at the time, which indicate that each of the three detainees were subject to torture at a classified sub-site at 'Gitmo' referred to as Camp "No" (i.e. "no" it doesn't exist) and returned to their cells in the dead of night.  Horton claims that a concerted effort was subsequently made by military brass to paint the deaths as a publicity stunt coordinated by the inmates in order to tarnish American image.  Government investigators dismissed the purported suicides as nothing more than 'asymmetric warfare' by the enemy. 

Andrew Sullivan interjects that further investigation is warranted and that no one in government can be trusted to handle the truth:

This case deserves a thorough and complete and exhaustive inquiry and investigation. I no longer believe that any entity in the US government can be trusted with such a task. The investigation must be able to go right to the very top of the torture program and do so with no political influence whatsoever.