The Hidden Hammy Hand

According to a puff-piece by Peter Baker in yesterday's New York Times, President Obama's perceived weakness and helplessness at the dawn of his second term is only a mirage. Behind the scenes, the latest spin has it, Barack is strong-arming the critics and facing various crises using something called the "hidden hand" approach. This is apparently a pivot from the first term's Leading from Behind propaganda that excused drone strikes, and is not to be confused with Adam Smith's Invisible Hand of the Free Market -- although as a New Democrat, Barack is every inch the Wall Street-friendly neoliberal. According to Baker, Obama  is now channeling Dwight Eisenhower -- who during his time in office was perceived as being a hands-off, bland kind of guy, but whom history later revealed to have been full-bore dynamo! If we only knew about Obama what Obama knows about himself, then all would be well with the world. So shut up.

I guess the White House and Peter Baker don't realize that "The Hidden Hand" is also a theory beloved by Illuminati conspiracists, as well as a schlocky movie about aliens taking over the government. Given the recent NSA revelations, you'd think they could have come up with a better metaphor.

Of course, it's also just a coincidence that the White House fed Baker the Hidden Hand malarkey only a day after the George Zimmerman verdict had evoked only a tepid response from the president. It was translatable as "The jury has spoken. Everybody needs to get along."

 Even though it would be unseemly for a sitting president to weigh in strongly on a case under investigation by the DOJ, the Obama administration still felt the need to proffer a self-serving excuse to stifle criticism his chronic radio silence on race. It is a fraught issue, one that the president was letting his AG, Eric Holder, address instead.

Until yesterday, that is. In a nationally televised interview with Univision, Obama actually did dog-whistle on the subject of race by effusively praising that uncrowned king of racial profiling, New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. The president all but nominated the architect of the city's onerous Stop and Frisk campaign against minorities to head up Homeland Security. Via Emptywheel:

Univision: Mr. President, New York Commissioner Ray Kelly has been floated for the next DHS Secretary. What is your take on it?

 Obama: Well, Ray Kelly has obviously done an extraordinary job in New York and the federal government partners a lot with New York. Because obviously our concerns about terrorism oftentimes are focused on big city targets. And I think Ray Kelly is one of the best there is. So he’s been an outstanding leader in New York. We’ve had an outstanding leader in Janet Napolitano at the Department of Homeland Security. It’s a tough job. It’s one of the toughest jobs in Washington. She’s done an extraordinary job. We’re sorry to see her go. But you know, we’re going to have a bunch of strong candidates. Mr. Kelly might be very happy where he is. But if he’s not I’d want to know about it. ‘Cause you know, obviously he’d be very well qualified for the job.

 Coming as it did mere weeks after Kelly reportedly expressed outrage at AG Holder for filing a brief in the civil rights lawsuit against him, and only days after the George Zimmerman verdict has brought the scourge of racism to the forefront of the national conscience, Obama's "hidden hand" turned into a gigantic hunk of ham in a New York minute. For a guy whose handlers are paranoid about him raising the hackles of critics if he dares speak out on sensitive issues, Obama not only spoke out, he stuck his big foot in his big mouth. In effusively praising Kelly, he broadcast the awful truth that he tacitly supports the institutional abuse of black and brown people. There is simply no other explanation for his homage to the odious Ray Kelly. None.

Come to think of it, the schlocky Hidden Hand movie does mesh perfectly with the sci-fi specter of Ray Kelly leading Homeland Security. The man is a walking paranoid cartoon, as David Sirota cogently lays out in a piece for Salon.

Making the first black president's admiration of Kelly all the more stunning was the testimony of New York State Senator Eric Adams at the recently concluded civil trial:

“He (Kelly) stated that he targeted and focused on that group because he wanted to instill fear in them that every time that they left their homes they could be targeted by police,” Adams said under questioning by attorney Jonathan Moore, representing the plaintiffs in a class-action suit on the controversial practice.

“I told him that I believe it was illegal and that that was not what stop-and-frisk was supposed to be used for,” Adams said.

He said Kelly’s response was, “How else are we going to get rid of guns?”

How else is George Zimmerman going to get rid of Skittles?

So if Ray Kelly gets the Homeland Security job, will Stop and Frisk become the law of the land, debuting near the new militarized Southwestern border should immigration "reform" pass? Even if Shira Scheindlin, the presiding judge in the civil case, puts an end to the practice in the Big Apple, Obama and the Kelly Gang could always appeal to the FISA court to get one of those "special needs" secret rulings to keep on "Essing and Effing".

Stop and Frisk has everything to do with intimidation and very little to do with stopping crime (except that it makes it easier to jail minority youths for pot possession.) According to the American Civil Liberties Union, stops under the Michael Bloomberg/Ray Kelly regime have been rising sharply --  from 160,851 in 2003 to 685,724 in 2011. About half of the 2011 stops resulted in physical searches.

 NYPD records show that police conducted more stops of black males between the ages of 14 and 24 than the total number of young black males living in New York City. Less than two percent of the street arrests turned up concealed weapons.

If you want to know how severely and permanently Ray Kelly's abusive practices damage his targets, be sure to read an op-ed titled "Why Is the NYPD After Me?" by Nicholas Peart, one of the plaintiffs in the class action lawsuit. You can also watch Chris Hayes interviewing Peart here.

It's all about Security State control, keeping the downtrodden down, and the powerful protected. That's the real Hidden Hand. Reach, meet Grasp. Nothing exceeds like excess.

Yesterday, Eric Holder recounted a conversation he once had with his father about the safe and proper way for black men to interact with cops, and how he was forced to have the same conversation with his own son. I think maybe he should be having a conversation with his boss.  
 

A Thousand Points of Blight

At a time when one out of every four American children lives in a food-insecure household,  when one in three people is poor or near-poor because of unemployment and underemployment, when income disparity is at its most extreme level since the Gilded Age .... House Republicans have yanked food stamp funding from the Farm Bill, endangering the 50 million people relying on a program that is already woefully inadequate. The average monthly food stipend per person is only $136. Most recipients run out of grocery money by the third week. 

But adding insult to injury is what Republicans do. They're the psychopathic Bad Cops who, confident that President Obama and the Wall Street "New Democrat" Good Cops will never challenge them in any meaningful way, have become free to exhibit their cruelty right out there in the open. Thanks to gerrymandering and manufactured divide-and-conquer techniques that pit poor Fox News-viewing whites against a growing brown and black population, they get just enough votes to hold onto the House of Representatives. They thereby run the whole show through sheer dint of sadism, disguised as "libertarian populism." Paul Krugman wrote a scathing column on this phenomenon, spearheaded by Sen. Rand Paul, last week. My response:

Can't you just hear that lonesome Rand Paul dog whistle blow?

Paul is using Alex Jones-style conspiracy paranoia and racism to drum up poor white support for the Party of Destruction. He's betting that boiling the frogs over a low steady heat -- cutting food stamps here, unemployment benefits there -- will stop them noticing that they're being cooked right along with the black and brown people that they need to believe are stealing the food from their mouths and the jobs from their kin. The truth -- that chronic hard times are the direct result of unregulated capitalism and corrupt politics -- is not out there. Only six national media conglomerates supply 90% of everything they see and hear.

What Paul & Paul (Ryan) and the GOP don't seem to realize is that their "populism" won't do much good if their constituents can't earn a living wage. Those bills from the greedy cable monopolies just keep going up -- watching Fox News propaganda will be way out of the price range of poor white people. When jobless benefits are cut to the bone, there goes the electricity -- along with Rush Limbaugh. And once the food stamps are kaput and the Medicaid is denied, they'll be too hungry and sick to bother voting, let alone caring. The USA has now plummeted to #27 in life expectancy. 

The new GOP messaging is useless. They're are out of gas, lurching along on their own toxic fumes. Too bad they're poisoning the rest of us on their ride to the scrap heap for old clunkers.

So here's how the kinder, gentler free-market Libertarian known as Barack Obama will counter the looming forced starvation of 50 million people caused by the bipartisan compromised slashing of at least $20 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP): He's invited that original Mr. Compassionate Conservative, George H.W. Bush, over for lunch at the White House today to unveil (drumroll, please) a brand new PPP (public-private partnership) that will rely on community volunteerism to feed the hungry. It's very similar to the now-defunct White House Council on Jobs & Competitiveness, made up of CEOs who lobbied for tax breaks and deregulation and did not create one single job.

 To mark the latest milestone in his corporate race to the bottom, Obama will also award a "5000th Point of Light" medal to some philanthropists who feed millions of starving African children. The subliminal message?  To get Third World America ready and prepared for private charities to take over government safety net functions, thus wielding ever more malignant tax-evading philanthropic control over the masses: 

After joining Bush to present the award, Obama will announce the formation of a new task force made up of Cabinet agency officials to identify ways that public agencies and the private sector can partner in support of national service. 

The Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) and the White House Domestic Policy Council will oversee the effort, which is meant to build on Obama administration efforts to promote greater community service. 

The event isn’t the first collaboration between the two presidents. Bush served as one of 16 honorary co-chairs of Obama’s first Inauguration, at which he called for a national day of service to occur on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. (to make us forget who MLK really was: an anti-war, anti-imperialism, pro-labor, rabble-rousing radical who spent his life demanding government help for the poor.)

Oh, and Neil Bush, that privateering poster child for disaster capitalism, will also be in attendance. You may remember Black Sheep Neil as the crooked ex-banker/ entrepreneur (Obama loves entrepreneurs) who cashed in big-time in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Matriarch Barbara, who will also be wined and dined by the Obamas, had made a point of offering her own money to storm victims -- with the precondition that her charity went through Neil's educational software company. 

Of course, the Bushes and the Obamas look like the Beaming Lords and Ladies Bountiful when compared to Bible-thumping Rep. Stephen Fincher of Tennessee, who literally foams at the mouth demanding that food stamp recipients work for their meals, even as he himself personally cashes in on millions of dollars in subsidies for his own farm. It's hard to decide what fictional villain to compare him to. Simon Legree comes to mind, or any one of the long list of hyperbolic villains from the Dickens collection. If Fincher's mother read him The Tale of Peter Rabbit when he was a tyke, he probably identified more with evil Farmer McGregor than with the hungry little bunnies. Not only did that Beatrix Potter bad guy chase the kids away from the food, he even stole the clothes they lost during their escape. Starve 'em, scare 'em, skin 'em and freeze 'em. It's the capitalist way.

In his column today, Paul Krugman compares the War on Food Stamps to the dystopian Hunger Games, in which people are forced to fight each other to the death for the pleasure and entertainment of the plutocrats:

So House Republicans voted to maintain farm subsidies — at a higher level than either the Senate or the White House proposed — while completely eliminating food stamps from the bill.       

To fully appreciate what just went down, listen to the rhetoric conservatives often use to justify eliminating safety-net programs. It goes something like this: “You’re personally free to help the poor. But the government has no right to take people’s money” — frequently, at this point, they add the words “at the point of a gun” — “and force them to give it to the poor.”

It is, however, apparently perfectly O.K. to take people’s money at the point of a gun and force them to give it to agribusinesses and the wealthy.

Gail Collins also took on the SNAP crisis in her own excellent column on Saturday. (But just like Krugman, she can't quite acknowledge the complicity of the Democrats, although she comes close):

And while food stamps go to poor people, most of the farm aid goes to wealthy corporations.

So House Republicans passed the farm part and left food stamps hanging.

Say what?

Tea Party conservatives have an all-purpose disdain for anything that smacks of redistribution of wealth, and food stamps are a prime target. “The role of citizens, of Christians, of humanity, is to take care of each other. But not for Washington to steal money from those in the country and give to others in the country,” said Representative Stephen Fincher of Tennessee during a speech in Memphis.

So the food stamp program was the total opposite of a Tasty Bite to House Republicans. More like that Scottish thing with sheep stomach and oatmeal. But the agriculture part was billed as delicious restraint. They rallied behind the just-farm-stuff bill in a party line 216-to-208 vote.

 The larding of benefits to farmers didn’t come up during the House debate. It was all about food stamps, and Democrats asking to know why their colleagues wanted to cut aid to hungry children and old people. During an Agriculture Committee meeting on the bill, Representative Juan Vargas of California quoted Jesus’ lesson that “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

Got that?  Democrats do the Good Cop dance -- asking, cajoling, posturing on MSNBC, pleading and wondering. In the White House, they go full-bore Compassionate Conservativism.  Never do they condemn, lambast, make fun of, or deride. Maintaining the miserable status quo for the benefit of the rich is how this game is played. Here was my comment to Gail Collins:

The number of households on food stamps reached nearly 23 million this spring. This can be directly blamed on lack of jobs, stagnating wages, and the utter lack of political attention to the unemployment crisis and a wealth disparity that has sent the world's richest nation down to a dismal #27 in global per-capita income.

So, the GOP is using food stamps as one more stale variation on the Reagan welfare queen myth: blame the victims rather than the perpetrators.

Ironically, one of the biggest culprits in the financial meltdown -- too big to fail/jail JP Morgan Chase -- runs the SNAP e-card program in half the states. They just reported a 31% surge in profits! Not only do they command a bounty for each new food stamp case opened, they charge a fee every time a recipient makes a purchase or checks her balance. Where is the GOP outrage?

Nah. They love to claim that "lazy" food stamp moms (most of whom work) use their SNAP cards to buy cigs and booze and lobster tails while those moral folks have to toil for every off-brand box of cereal. Never mind that the real corporate welfare queens, like the Waltons of Walmartistan, rely on the government to supplement the income of their underpaid workers with SNAP and Medicaid cards. The Waltons own more wealth than 40% of the whole population.

One of these days, the GOP will go too far. People will finally SNAP and throw the bums out. They will land with a giant crackle and pop, before they soggily sink to the bottom of the bowl.

When you look at the grim statistics on child hunger and its consequences, the compassionate Obamas' "personal responsibility" approach appears all the more cynical. As far as Michelle Obama is concerned, kids just need to get off their butts and exercise. Struggling parents need to stop being lazy and prepare fresh fruits and veggies in between their minimum-wage double shifts.The latest Obama approach to childhood nutrition was to hold a recipe contest and a state dinner for a select group of well-fed kids. The media went wild when the president revealed that he loves broccoli. And how his "family"(read: peripatetic deceased mother and banker grandma) didn't cook his veggies up nearly as scrumptiously as his own personal chefs do today. I wish I was kidding. As much as this guy tries to cover up his authoritarian paternalism with schmoozy small-talk, it always falls as flat as a bowl of soggy potato chips.

Hey, Barack: Eat Me

Even a child who goes hungry just one time in her life is more than twice as likely to have health problems a decade after that one episode of malnutrition. Hungry children are more likely to be socially isolated, to have behavior problems and of course, they don't do well in school. They are understandably at greater risk for incarceration as teens and adults.

But maybe that's the whole plan. Well-fed children become cognitively healthy adults. Cognitively healthy adults tend to vote for their own economic interests and against corrupt politicians in service to the rich. Cognitively healthy adults refuse to play Hunger Games, where the only possible outcome is Heads They Win, Tails You Lose.  

Meet Farmer Fincher and Benevolent Barack. There's really only a pinprick of light between them.

 

Some Thoughts on the Zimmerman Trial

I was saddened, but not shocked, by the not guilty verdict for George Zimmerman in the point-blank killing of Trayvon Martin. There is a simple explanation for it: it happened in Florida. George Zimmerman had Florida law on his side. Without the relentless publicity and the pressure brought to bear by national political and media figures, there never would have been a trial in the first place.

This was in Florida, where holding such a trial would have been unthinkable even a generation ago. This was in Florida, home of the infamous Groveland Four case, in which a duly sworn sheriff and a posse with interchangeable costumes of police uniforms and KKK sheets serially tortured and  murdered a group of black men falsely accused of raping a white woman. Sheriff Willis McCall was not only never convicted, he kept getting re-elected to office. He died a free man.

George Zimmerman will die a free man too. But he will never be truly free. He will never be a neighborhood watch captain again. He'll be at least ten times as paranoid as he was the night he stalked and shot Trayvon, but maybe he'll think twice the next time he gets the urge to fire his weapon. Maybe all the other Zimmermaniacs roaming the earth will think twice about stalking and shooting every shadow they see lurking in the corners of their dull little minds.

This was in the United States of America, where even in one northern "liberal" city, a billionaire mayor and his police commissioner enforcer have legitimated racial profiling to a degree not seen since the pre-Civil Rights era in the south.

This was in the United States of America, the biggest arms dealer the world has ever known, where people still wonder why Congress couldn't even pass a modest background check law for gun purchases.

This was in the United States of America, where the Social Darwinism and financial austerity now implicit in public policy have made towns and cities so cash-strapped that they are resorting to using unpaid volunteers in their police departments. There are plenty of incipient  Zimmerman wannabes out there with guns and badges and assumptions and low intelligence and an utter lack of training and self-control. Depending on where you live, your next 9-1-1 call may bring a gung-ho intern cop to your door, only too eager to serve, protect and defend you -- for free.

Meanwhile, the human casualties and tragedies resulting from unregulated capitalism, too much money in too few hands, will continue to mount. This is a violent country, with a per-capital murder rate one of the world's highest and a per-capita incarceration rate bar none.

So, the fact that the Zimmerman trial was held at all, and that it was a fair trial, is testament that we can indeed make tiny incremental steps toward a more just system. Even in Florida -- which, despite its awful Stand Your Ground law, is one of the few states that allows cameras in its courtrooms. Every court in this country should be opened to TV cameras -- from the lowest municipal court, where judges are often unqualified, corrupt political flacks, all the way up to the Supreme Court, where just the sight of Samuel Alito rolling his eyes at Ruth Bader Ginsberg's impassioned dissent against the evisceration of the Voting Rights Act would have caused an instant national scandal.

But this is the United States of America, land of official secrets and shadows. So the fact that Trayvon Martin's name is now a household word, that the George Zimmerman trial was held and that it was covered without interruption on CNN, is thus rendered all the more amazing. Trayvon did not die in vain. And Zimmerman is not innocent.

The Temp Emp Has No Clothes

The people in charge of the USG (amerikun guvmint) are one exceedingly stupid and paranoid bunch.

If they were smart, they'd just leave Edward Snowden alone. President Obama lives and breathes public opinion polls and focus groups. So, now that more than half the population thinks Snowden is a whistleblowing hero and that the USG has gone overboard with this whole spying thing, does he let up? No, he does not. He may not be scrambling his fighter jets, but he's definitely scrambling to land on the front page of the New York Times and look like an idiot, planting a story about how he's strong-arming Latin American countries to deny asylum to Snowden. If thuggishness is how he wants to be remembered, he is succeeding mightily.

Meanwhile, Snowden is seizing the inept American moment and applying for asylum in Russia -- presumably to gain safe passage, eventually, to one of those South American countries. If the USG maintains its anal-retentive hold on the entire atmosphere, Snowden could just end up traveling overland with Vlad in a protected convoy up to the Arctic Circle, traverse it by dog-sled and ice-breaker, (assuming there's any ice left) and then head down the Pacific Coast to safe haven. (Sarah Palin can wave to them from her house as Putin rears his mighty head in her space.)

Obama may have pretended to end Bush-era torture, but he has simply finessed and expanded it. By effectively trapping Snowden, he is torturing him. In recent days, one federal judge ordered Obama's guards to stop feeling up the private parts of Gitmo detainees. And even fellow Democrats are warning him he's breaking the law by force-feeding them. And now, international human rights groups are in Russia, holding the president up to even more universal scorn for hounding the whistleblower who did nothing more than expose USG malfeasance and speak truth to power.

Maybe Congress doesn't have the cojones to impeach our temporary emperor (Temp Emp), but at long last, he and the corporate American Empire are being tried and convicted in the world court of public opinion. That has to count for something, no matter how hard the Powers That Be try to ignore it and change it and blame the messengers. The whole manufactured consent thing is falling apart at the seams. The only surprise is how long the cheap propaganda thread has held it all together.

Update: More coverage from The Guardian. And here, in its entirety, is Snowden's remarkable statement:

Hello. My name is Ed Snowden. A little over one month ago, I had family, a home in paradise, and I lived in great comfort. I also had the capability without any warrant to search for, seize, and read your communications. Anyone's communications at any time. That is the power to change people's fates.

It is also a serious violation of the law. The 4th and 5th Amendments to the Constitution of my country, Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and numerous statutes and treaties forbid such systems of massive, pervasive surveillance. While the US Constitution marks these programs as illegal, my government argues that secret court rulings, which the world is not permitted to see, somehow legitimize an illegal affair. These rulings simply corrupt the most basic notion of justice – that it must be seen to be done. The immoral cannot be made moral through the use of secret law.
I believe in the principle declared at Nuremberg in 1945: "Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience. Therefore individual citizens have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring."

Accordingly, I did what I believed right and began a campaign to correct this wrongdoing. I did not seek to enrich myself. I did not seek to sell US secrets. I did not partner with any foreign government to guarantee my safety. Instead, I took what I knew to the public, so what affects all of us can be discussed by all of us in the light of day, and I asked the world for justice.
That moral decision to tell the public about spying that affects all of us has been costly, but it was the right thing to do and I have no regrets.

Since that time, the government and intelligence services of the United States of America have attempted to make an example of me, a warning to all others who might speak out as I have. I have been made stateless and hounded for my act of political expression. The United States Government has placed me on no-fly lists. It demanded Hong Kong return me outside of the framework of its laws, in direct violation of the principle of non-refoulement – the Law of Nations. It has threatened with sanctions countries who would stand up for my human rights and the UN asylum system. It has even taken the unprecedented step of ordering military allies to ground a Latin American president's plane in search for a political refugee. These dangerous escalations represent a threat not just to the dignity of Latin America, but to the basic rights shared by every person, every nation, to live free from persecution, and to seek and enjoy asylum.

Yet even in the face of this historically disproportionate aggression, countries around the world have offered support and asylum. These nations, including Russia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Ecuador have my gratitude and respect for being the first to stand against human rights violations carried out by the powerful rather than the powerless. By refusing to compromise their principles in the face of intimidation, they have earned the respect of the world. It is my intention to travel to each of these countries to extend my personal thanks to their people and leaders.

I announce today my formal acceptance of all offers of support or asylum I have been extended and all others that may be offered in the future. With, for example, the grant of asylum provided by Venezuela's President Maduro, my asylee status is now formal, and no state has a basis by which to limit or interfere with my right to enjoy that asylum. As we have seen, however, some governments in Western European and North American states have demonstrated a willingness to act outside the law, and this behavior persists today. This unlawful threat makes it impossible for me to travel to Latin America and enjoy the asylum granted there in accordance with our shared rights.

This willingness by powerful states to act extra-legally represents a threat to all of us, and must not be allowed to succeed. Accordingly, I ask for your assistance in requesting guarantees of safe passage from the relevant nations in securing my travel to Latin America, as well as requesting asylum in Russia until such time as these states accede to law and my legal travel is permitted. I will be submitting my request to Russia today, and hope it will be accepted favorably.
If you have any questions, I will answer what I can.
Thank you.

The Lunatic Fringe Goes Mainstream

Did you hear about that new Congressional bill creating a national park on the surface of the moon? Are you automatically assuming that its sponsors hail from the GOP lunatic fringe?

Think again. In the growing movement that I'll call the "If You Can't Beat 'Em, Join 'Em" Caucus, two Democrats have introduced the legislation:

The bill from Reps. Donna Edwards (D-Md.) and Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) would create the Apollo Lunar Landing Sites National Historical Park. The park would be comprised of all artifacts left on the surface of the moon from the Apollo 11 through 17 missions.

The bill says these sites need to be protected because of the anticipated increase in commercial moon landings in the future.

Under the legislation, the park would be established no later than one year after the bill passes and would be run jointly by the Department of the Interior and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). 

The measure would allow the government to accept donations from companies and foreign governments to help manage the landing sites and "provide visitor services and administrative facilities within reasonable proximity to the Historical Park."

 After one year, Interior and NASA would have to reach an agreement on how to manage the site, including how to monitor it, managing access to the sites and cataloguing the items in the park. 

Where does one even begin? Since humor and satire don't rank among the talents of our 10 percent approval-rating Congress, I simply couldn't believe at first that passive-aggressive pranksterism is at the core of this bill. At first glance, it does appear to be just one more symptom of the decline of Democracy and death of governance for the common good. We apparently have no money for the social safety net, but the sky's the limit for a Lunar Visitors' Center for the mega-rich!  

I think it was pretty much a given that the so-called Progressive Caucus had already capitulated to the right wing forces of Neoliberalism and corporate interests. But to go the whole Bachmanesque crazoid route? What gives? Well, for starters, the bill is assuredly of the camera-ready variety. It's outlandish enough to have been awarded a 21 percent chance of getting out of Committee for a formal floor vote. (Unlike the CPC's People's Budget, whose launch failed about two inches above the blast-off point) Is this the only way the Democrats can get some free attention from the corporate media?

The bill is, on its face, a huge pander to the ruling elites, the only people who can even dream of going to the Moon in their private rocket-ships. Cost for a ticket is expected to be in the $1.5 billion range. Out of the Orbitz of the casual traveler, for sure. Can you envision William Shatner doing the Price Line pitch?

Instead of fighting for the repeal of the Sequester, which has taken a big chunk out of earth-bound National Parks accessible to their constituents, Democrats seem not only to have given up -- they are fully embracing corporatism, unbelievably suggesting we just develop a Space Park for the richest of the obscenely rich, funded with public-private money. And it seems like only yesterday (it was actually two months ago) that Progressive Caucus member Keith Ellison was railing against the cuts to the parks service:

 A new report released by Rep. (now Senator) Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), details the sequester impacts to 23 national parks around the country. According to the report, U.S. national parks supply the economic lifeblood for countless communities across the United States. They contribute more than $30 billion in economic activity, support more than 250,000 jobs and generate $9.34 billion in labor income. The National Park Service faces $110 million in budget cuts, which means reduced hours and services for the nation's 398 national parks, 561 refuges, and more than 258 other public land units.

So the moon national park bill has got to be a huge practical joke. Right? There is simply no other explanation. Maybe Johnson and Edwards -- also members of the Congressional Black Caucus --  are trying to embarrass President Obama, who finally deigned to meet with them yesterday, after having avoided them like the plague for more than two years. Maybe he gave them a reprise of the spiel at his last meeting, when he ordered them to get off their duffs and put on their marching shoes for his Greater Glory. Maybe this time he told them to put on their marching shoes to forcibly march all their suffering constituents to the predations of private insurance, for the greater glory of ObamaCare.

Adding insult to injury, Obama apparently kept the CBC waiting for more than an hour as he attended to more pressing business than that of the crisis of a black unemployment rate almost double that of whites. Of course, the delegates later reported that the closed meeting had been positive. Really. Out of this world, as a matter of fact. 

Why else would two of them put on their marching shoes and introduce a bill for the construction of an outer space park for the top One Percent of the One Percent? If that isn't making a Statement, I don't know what is.

And knowing the Republicans, they'll probably add an amendment slashing Medicare coverage of oxygen supplies in order that the rich can breathe freely as they carouse in their lunar theme park. And the Democrats will give in, doing their clumsy political version of the Michael Jackson moon walk. They'll appear to be moving forward and going backward at the same time. It's called Maintaining the Status Quo.

 

What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy? -- George Orwell, 1984.

 

Out of the Sleepy Shadows

Thanks to Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald, our Shadow Government is finally wincing from the glare of some long-overdue sunlight. The rays keep creeping in and creeping in, until finally, the vampire of the national security state has nowhere else to go but inside its own corrupt coffin. And as it lies exposed, perhaps what is left of our free press can finally hammer the stake of truth right through the data-engorged heart.

The New York Times has finally entered the NSA muckraking fray with a blockbuster front page piece on the existence of a secret Fisa court with powers so vast and overreaching that, according to reporter Eric Lichtblau, it might as well be declared our Parallel Supreme Court. Every time I thought it couldn't get any worse, it  turns out to be worse. And getting worser all the time, judging from the article: (the italicized parentheses are my own thoughts.) 

In more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation’s surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans while pursuing not only terrorism suspects, but also people possibly involved in nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks, officials say. (and that list of people will no doubt grow as "officials" become more and more afraid of their own shadows citizens.) 

 The rulings, some nearly 100 pages long, reveal that the court has taken on a much more expansive role by regularly assessing broad constitutional questions and establishing important judicial precedents, with almost no public scrutiny, according to current and former officials familiar with the court’s classified decisions. (Will these current and former officials be prosecuted for leaking? Not if the purpose of the article was to reassure people that everything is legal and hunky-dory.)

 The 11-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, was once mostly focused on approving case-by-case wiretapping orders. But since major changes in legislation and greater judicial oversight of intelligence operations were instituted six years ago, it has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court, serving as the ultimate arbiter on surveillance issues and delivering opinions that will most likely shape intelligence practices for years to come, the officials said. (the FISA Arm of the Supreme Court are the de facto Board of Regents of America.)

And then there is the law we never heard of, called the "Special Needs Doctrine" which effectively declares the Fourth Amendment null and void. But it's all good, all legal. The article continues,

Unlike the Supreme Court, the FISA court hears from only one side in the case — the government — and its findings are almost never made public. A Court of Review is empaneled to hear appeals, but that is known to have happened only a handful of times in the court’s history, and no case has ever been taken to the Supreme Court. In fact, it is not clear in all circumstances whether Internet and phone companies that are turning over the reams of data even have the right to appear before the FISA court. (This country no longer has the right to call itself a democracy.) 

Apparently, a few internet and cell phone providers have balked at having to turn over information on their customers without even being given the right of legal counsel to represent them. In those cases, the Shadow Court has had to "intervene." Here is where it starts getting murky. We don't know if the Secret Judges threaten to issue contempt citations for failure to honor their Special Needs and thus lock up would-be dissenters to secret prisons.

Although these revelations should be scaring the living daylights out of everyone enjoying their freedoms on this Weekend of Freedom-Wallowing, there are still quite a few commenters to the Times article asking what the big deal is. All governments spy, Obama just wants to keep us safe, there are Bad Guys out there. Here's the comment I sent in:

I can't wait to get the reactions of Congress critters to this news. How do they feel about having their power to make the laws usurped by an unelected body of people in black robes? Kind of gives a whole new meaning to the term "activist court", doesn't it?

And here I was, hoping that the Supreme Court would overturn the various NSA predations! They're in it up to their own eyeballs. John Roberts might as well be declared the Shadow President.

I think that we the people now have to demand that a vote to repeal the Patriot Act be the litmus test for our representatives' continued stay in Washington. Their failure to do so will be proof positive that they are fully in thrall to the corporations which are effectively in charge of things.

And if they still teach civics in the public schools, this article had better be the impetus for an immediate emergency revision of all the nation's textbooks. Checks and Balances? They belong in the dust bin of history.

Meanwhile, I continue to be amazed and grateful that every morning when I click on the Times home page, there are still little comment boxes open for us to "share our thoughts" even though our thoughts are being sucked up into the maw of the security state to molder and congeal until that inevitable day comes when our secret government will suddenly discover a secret algorithm that enables them declare independent thought a national security threat.

This is beyond Orwellian. It's Kafkaesque.

And here is my favorite, from "jb" of Oklahoma:

 A "parallel Supreme Court", but secret. A secret security apparatus, with secret spying for secret reasons, being overseen by secret briefings of gagged Congressmen. No limit on the secret contributions of moguls and corporations for the only visible bits of the secret government, the candidates we are to choose from, each and all of whom continue to increase the secret governance of our nation while we look around and wonder who's watching. And worry a bit that now we can be arrested, "interrogated", imprisoned, and killed without trials or seeing the evidence against us. As drones start to fill our skies as they now fill those of nations abroad. With secret fingers on the buttons, just waiting for the secret command to kill whoever they're told, and whoever happens to be nearby.

It's outlandish, it's unbelievable. And I would be afraid to write this comment if I weren't more afraid of what will happen when we are all afraid to write comments like this.

Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald is helping to gin up more outrage in the one section of the world that is still not beholden to the American imperium. (or as the Brazilians call it, Espionaram) He collaborated on an article for the Rio de Janeiro paper O Globo , explaining how the Obama government is collecting information on citizens the whole world over -- including in South America. Just because it can. There's also a Google translation of the original Portuguese language piece available, along with previous coverage of the NSA spying scandal.

A sentence from one article, Anglicized as "Glenn Greenwald: A Journalist in the Way of Obama"  was particularly pithy, and actually gained something in the translation:

Um conto que foi capaz de tirar o sono do presidente Barack Obama: A tale that was able to get the sleep of President Barack Obama

Is David Brooks a Racist?

That's the question being asked throughout the blogosphere (you can start here, here, here) today in the wake of the latest blather from David Brooks of the New York Times. (Google David Brooks + Racist and you get 1,660,000 hits.) What has people so riled up this time is that in his latest column, he shockingly calls into question the "mental capacity" of Egyptians to govern themselves.

I have sometimes wondered why more people haven't constantly and relentlessly called him out for all kinds of bigotry long before this latest effort. The simple answer is until fairly recently, Brooks had been a master of the conservative dog whistle, cleverly disguising the racist and classist message of his political clique within one turgid puddle of scholarly-sounding pablum after another. He is a master of the fine art of concern-trolling for the lesser people. But now, for whatever reason, Brooks seems to be losing his nuanced grip, along with his ability to fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time. 

It's finally even gotten to the point that the Times public editor was forced last week to publicly address the Brooks Problem in a blog-post. There were so many reader complaints about his column on immigration, titled "A Nation of Mutts", that Margaret Sullivan confronted him about it. She forwarded him one particularly scathing email from a mother of two bi-racial, bi-ethnic children, mightily offended that he had likened her offspring to mixed-breed dogs.

This confrontation is actually kind of a big deal. It is apparently a rule at the Times that a colleague never, ever publicly criticizes the work of another colleague -- particularly if the colleague in question is ensconced in the rarefied realm of the Times opinion pages.  Sullivan acknowledged as much herself.  But, since she has rapidly established herself as a public editor who thinks independently and is not afraid to take on the poobahs hiding beneath the Gray Lady's skirts, she challenged Brooks. And he responded, not only with utterly predictable disingenuity, but with such alacrity that he no doubt knew exactly what he'd been doing as he wrote his drivel, and had his self-serving defense all ready to copy and paste:

In that column, I was trying to embrace and celebrate a more ethnically intermingled America. I conclude with this sentence: “On the whole, this future is exciting.” To read this column as racist requires either a misreading or a strong desire to be offended, no matter what is on the page.

As for the use of the word “mutts,” history is filled with examples of groups who have taken derogatory terms and embraced them as sources of pride. To take the word “mutt” as a derogatory term, you have to believe that purebred things are superior to mixed-breed things, whether it is dogs or people. But if you don’t believe that, there is nothing to be ashamed of in the word mutt.

I seized on the headline after I was in a group of people talking about the future demography of the country and one participant said proudly, “We’re mutts.” That seemed to capture the message I was trying to convey, so I used it in the headline and the piece.

Translation: "I said mixed-breed folks are exciting, didn't I? So if you are offended, it's your own damned fault. Besides, if the marginalized can self-deprecate, where do they get off saying I can't deprecate them? And for your information, I got the whole idea for my terminology in an elite group of my own kind of people. Probably at one of the incestuous cocktail parties Washington is so famous for. So shut up."

To Margaret Sullivan's credit, she was having none of it. But she diplomatically wrote: "I believe Mr. Brooks when he says he didn’t mean to offend. But comparing people to animals is always tricky, and 'mutts' is a loaded term. There must have been a better way to say this, especially in the headline. I wish he had found it himself or that an editor had insisted on it."

That's the whole trouble. Brooks is his own editor and fact-checker. Look over any random sampling of his columns, and chances are good you will find factual corrections appended to some of them. His excuse? He was on deadline. His intern got confused. He is a Very Important Person.

Brooks should be fired. But he won't be. Like the equally odious Thomas Friedman, he is a brand, the public face of an establishment newspaper, widely read by the well-connected, a personality who appears on the corporate Sunday talk shows and hangs out at "ideas festivals" and rakes in the big, big bucks for his employer.

David Brooks has been denying racism in both himself and others for years. In David Brooks's world, racism simply doesn't exist. In his usual fake-amazed fashion, he once magically "came across" some black people getting along with some Tea Partiers:

I noticed that the mostly white tea party protesters were mingling in with the mostly black family reunion celebrants. The tea party people were buying lunch from the family reunion food stands. They had joined the audience of a rap concert.

Because sociology is more important than fitness, I stopped to watch the interaction. These two groups were from opposite ends of the political and cultural spectrum. They’d both been energized by eloquent speakers. Yet I couldn’t discern any tension between them. It was just different groups of people milling about like at any park or sports arena.

And yet we live in a nation in which some people see every conflict through the prism of race. So over the past few days, many people, from Jimmy Carter on down, have argued that the hostility to President Obama is driven by racism. Some have argued that tea party slogans like “I Want My Country Back” are code words for white supremacy. Others say incivility on Capitol Hill is magnified by Obama’s dark skin.

Then he blah-blah-blahs about the real problems in his insular little world: Jacksonianism vs. Jeffersonianism, Urban Vs. Rural, stagnation vs dynamism, data vs. ideology, blah-blah retch blah.

Is David Brooks a racist? The Magic 8 Ball says Concentrate and ask again.

Is David Brooks a giant dickweed? You may rely on it.