Sunday, August 7, 2016

At Play in the Fields of Obama

How apt and how cynical that the Obama administration would choose the first day of the Olympics to release its "playbook" on the drone assassination program.

Assuming that anybody is paying attention and will tear themselves away from NBC's packaged games spectacular long enough to read the White House's redacted report on its lethal drones, the framing of state-sponsored murder as a book of arcane gaming rules almost seems designed to normalize this vicious program in the minds of the sports-addicted public.

We're so wrapped up in the hyper-nationalism of the Olympics that we'll be lulled into cheering for the high-tech precision of Predator and Reaper drones as lustily as we cheered America's first gold medal -- for precision rifle-shooting, as it turns out.

The redacted version of the top-secret drone playbook, produced in response to a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union, is nearly as convoluted as the rules and scoring for Olympic gymnastics. The Obama administration contorts itself into a pretzel as it purports to explain its rules for killing people by remote technology.

"Any direct action must be conducted lawfully and taken against lawful targets; wherever possible such action will be done pursuant to a blah blah blah blah. r " helpfully explains one of the first sentences in the Playbook.

We really don't learn much of anything new in this kill list sports guide, following on the heels of the administration's estimate last month that it has mistakenly killed around a hundred innocent civilians in its drone campaign. That figure was in marked contrast to reports by other organizations, which put the "collateral damage" number at closer to 800 human beings, including many women and children.


Obama's Playbook reveals only the bureaucratic procedures for marking a person or group of people for death, and fails utterly to discuss its reasons for doing so. I suspect the core reason that they kill people is simply because they can. They have given themselves that right, and that is all the American public needs to know.

In order to absolve the president or any one particular department or official of personal responsibility, the Playbook requires that each "operational agency" (including the CIA and the Pentagon among several redacted entities) prepare a report recommending "direct action," whether it be a drone strike or a capture. Those plans are then reviewed by lawyers from the various agencies before reaching the desk of the chief attorney of the National Security Council. From there, the plans go to the Semifinal Death Squad, euphemized as the "Principals' and Principals' Deputies." These are made up of the heads or deputy heads of the Departments of State, Defense, Justice, and Homeland Security, as well as the CIA, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the National Counterterrorism Center.

If all these various people in suits and uniforms unanimously sign off on an assassination, then their recommendation need not go to President Obama for final approval. But, if there is disagreement or dissent, then it's up to him to personally approve or abort a strike.

 And should the "Principals" recommend the assassination of an American citizen, then the Attorney General must also render an opinion before the hit is allowed by the president to proceed.

The bureaucratic guidelines for drone assassinations do not apply in active war zones, of course, where the need for rules varies from general to general, and any atrocities (mistakes) and civilian deaths can easily be blamed on "the fog of war."


According to the Playbook, only the President has the power to order someone obliterated outside of a combat area, which has previously been loosely defined as anywhere and everywhere. The phrase "American soil" was either redacted or omitted from the Playbook.

Like any sports team worth their salt, they've covered all the bases. And through what they (probably CIA Director John Brennan) grotesquely call their "Nomination Package" of potential targets, they also think they've covered all their asses. As Obama made perfectly clear in his preliminary drone report, victims have no right to sue him or anyone else in the US Government, should their relatives die or themselves become injured by one of his Predator or Reaper drones.

It's no coincidence that Obama went especially heavy on the jingoism to praise the American athletes of the Olympics at nearly the exact same moment he released his redacted report on the White House Kill List. War and sports have always been inextricably mingled in national psyches.

In Rio, one thousand American armed personnel and spies have been drafted to guard the sporting venues. According to a top secret intelligence report conveniently "leaked" to NBC, the same corporate media outlet broadcasting the games:
The operation... encompasses all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies, including those of the armed services, and involves human intelligence, spy satellites, electronic eavesdropping, and cyber and social media monitoring.
Areas of cooperation include vetting 10,000-plus athletes and 35,000-plus security and police personnel and others; monitoring terrorists' social media accounts; and offering U.S. help in securing computer networks, the review shows.
George Orwell noted the links among state-sponsored violence, politics and the modern Olympics more than 60 years ago:  
Instead of blah-blahing about the clean, healthy rivalry of the football field and the great part played by the Olympic Games in bringing the nations together, it is more useful to inquire how and why this modern cult of sport arose. Most of the games we now play are of ancient origin, but sport does not seem to have been taken very seriously between Roman times and the nineteenth century. Even in the English public schools the games cult did not start till the later part of the last century. Dr Arnold, generally regarded as the founder of the modern public school, looked on games as simply a waste of time. Then, chiefly in England and the United States, games were built up into a heavily-financed activity, capable of attracting vast crowds and rousing savage passions, and the infection spread from country to country. It is the most violently combative sports, football and boxing, that have spread the widest. There cannot be much doubt that the whole thing is bound up with the rise of nationalism — that is, with the lunatic modern habit of identifying oneself with large power units and seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige. Also, organised games are more likely to flourish in urban communities where the average human being lives a sedentary or at least a confined life, and does not get much opportunity for creative labour. In a rustic community a boy or young man works off a good deal of his surplus energy by walking, swimming, snowballing, climbing trees, riding horses, and by various sports involving cruelty to animals, such as fishing, cock-fighting and ferreting for rats. In a big town one must indulge in group activities if one wants an outlet for one's physical strength or for one's sadistic impulses. Games are taken seriously in London and New York, and they were taken seriously in Rome and Byzantium: in the Middle Ages they were played, and probably played with much physical brutality, but they were not mixed up with politics nor a cause of group hatreds.
If you wanted to add to the vast fund of ill-will existing in the world at this moment, you could hardly do it better than by a series of football matches between Jews and Arabs, Germans and Czechs, Indians and British, Russians and Poles, and Italians and Jugoslavs, each match to be watched by a mixed audience of 100,000 spectators. I do not, of course, suggest that sport is one of the main causes of international rivalry; big-scale sport is itself, I think, merely another effect of the causes that have produced nationalism. Still, you do make things worse by sending forth a team of eleven men, labelled as national champions, to do battle against some rival team, and allowing it to be felt on all sides that whichever nation is defeated will “lose face”.
I hope, therefore, that we shan't follow up the visit of the Dynamos by sending a British team to the USSR. If we must do so, then let us send a second-rate team which is sure to be beaten and cannot be claimed to represent Britain as a whole. There are quite enough real causes of trouble already, and we need not add to them by encouraging young men to kick each other on the shins amid the roars of infuriated spectators.
So don't cry for Obama's drone victims, America. There's no need to mourn people with no names, no faces, no countries and no stories. Besides, Obama already paid lip service to the tiny, token Olympic "Team Refugee" during his Cult of Sport weekend address to the nation. There's no need to either humanize or grieve for Those Other People. Revel instead in the glory of the games. Support both the troops and the athletes. Both are symbols and servants in the same community of predatory capitalism, after all.

In literal Orwellian fashion, Obama uses the language of capitalism and war in his weekly address praising the Olympic athletes. He strives to normalize both brutal militarism and class and wealth disparities. Just like a drug pusher, he sells spectator sports as the modern opiate of the masses. And since it's an election year, and all that the Democratic Party has to offer to struggling people is identity politics, he sells "diversity" right along with the violence. He even renders harmless the poverty and lead-poisoned water in Flint, Michigan:
   Our team boasts the most women who have ever competed for any nation at any Olympic Games.  It includes active-duty members of our military and our veterans.... Our roster includes a gymnast from Texas who’s so trailblazing, they named a flip after her.  A young woman who persevered through a tough childhood in Flint, Michigan, to become the first American woman to win gold in the boxing ring.  And a fencing champion from suburban Jersey who’ll become the first American Olympian to wear a hijab while competing.  And on our Paralympic team, we’re honored to be represented by a Navy veteran who lost his sight while serving in Afghanistan and continues to show us what courage looks like every time he jumps in the pool....
 That idea – that you can succeed no matter where you’re from – is especially true this year.  We’ll cheer on athletes on the first-ever Olympic Refugee Team: Ten competitors from the Congo, Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Syria who personify endurance.
And with that script from the Playbook of Propaganda out of the way, as the bombings in Syria and Libya and Yemen and Afghanistan and Sudan and Pakistan and Iraq continue unabated, President Obama took off for his annual vacation to Martha's Vineyard to watch the Olympics from the security of a $12.5 million luxury compound.

He may choose to ignore the links among war and politics and sports, but that doesn't mean he won't be hitting the links. Because all war and no play would make Barack a very dull president indeed.




Thursday, August 4, 2016

August Is Trump Mental Health Month

If you tuned in to CNN or scanned the homepage of any major media outlet in the past few days, you'll have learned that the people running the asylum are whispering about staging an "intervention" for Donald Trump. 

Reactionaries
Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani, for example, have turned into mental health concern trolls practically overnight. They echo the fear running throughout the Establishment that Trump is endangering American military might and exceptionalism by questioning wars and even by verbally jousting with the Gold Star Khan family. 

You might have noticed that these bereaved parents are oddly being described by major media outlets as "Muslim-Americans" rather than as American citizens who emigrated from Pakistan. So many politicians and journalists seem to think that Islam is a country rather than a religion. Did you ever hear anyone described as a Catholic-American, or a Baptist-American, or an Atheist-American? I thought not. Members of the media-political complex themselves need an intervention for their own Orientalism. 

And they also need to be confronted and called out for their own unhealthy greed. After recklessly giving Trump a year and a billion dollars' worth of free campaign advertising, letting him spout his misogyny, racism and xenophobia with reckless abandon, the moral arbiters of America are finally getting serious about Stopping Trump. The corporate media aren't even trying to pretend at anything close to objectivity. First, they red-bait Trump, accusing him without a shred of evidence of being a Russian tool. Now he's a mental case with a hankering to blow up the world, his short fingers just itching to press the red button the minute he enters the White House.

One congress critter has even started a Change. Org online petition, demanding that Trump be professionally screened for a psychiatric disorder. With its graphic depiction of him looking like a character straight out of Dante's Inferno, #Diagnose Trump also serves the dual purpose of demonizing the mentally ill.


In Your Guts You Know He's Nuts


Rep. Karen Ross (D-CA) writes:
Donald Trump is dangerous for our country. His impulsiveness and lack of control over his own emotions are of concern. It is our patriotic duty to raise the question of his mental stability to be the commander in chief and leader of the free world. Mr. Trump appears to exhibit all the symptoms of the mental disorder Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). Mental health professionals need to come forward and urge the Republican party to insist that their nominee has an evaluation to determine his mental fitness for the job. It is entirely possible that some individuals with NPD can successfully function in many careers, but not the Presidency of the United States. We deserve to have the greatest understanding of Mr. Trump's mental health status before we head to the polls on November 8th, 2016. #DiagnoseTrump
You don't need to be a mental health professional to sign Ross's petition. You merely have to be afraid of Trump. As of this writing, more than 10,000 concerned citizens had signed on. Or at least, there are 10,000 signatures. Some could be duplicates signed by sufferers of obsessive-compulsive disorder, or even paid Democratic Party operatives. Maybe Putin or Wikileaks can hack into the Change.Org data base and give us some names.

Here's my take on this latest bout of electoral hysteria. If you force one candidate or politician to undergo a mental health evaluation, then you should require all of them to. Just think about how differently things might have turned out if Ronald Reagan had been screened for early stage Alzheimer's or George W. Bush's brain had been PET-scanned for evidence of alcohol-induced damage.  And then there's Bill Clinton's known sex addiction and Hillary's documented bouts of clinical depression.

As far as Narcissistic Personality Disorder is concerned, I doubt that anybody aspiring to become leader of the "free" world can be entirely immune from it. I'm sure you've seen the checklist:
  1. Grandiosity with expectations of superior treatment from others
  2. Fixated on fantasies of power, success, intelligence, attractiveness, etc.
  3. Self-perception of being unique, superior and associated with high-status people and institutions
  4. Needing constant admiration from others
  5. Sense of entitlement to special treatment and to obedience from others
  6. Exploitative of others to achieve personal gain
  7. Unwilling to empathize with others' feelings, wishes, or needs
  8. Intensely jealous of others and the belief that others are equally jealous of them
  9. Pompous or arrogant demeanor.
Out of curiosity, I Googled "mental health screening," and was gifted with a whole slew of online tests. I decided to take the one sponsored by Psychology Today magazine. Based upon some recent weight gain, an occasional sleepless night, and once in awhile pondering my own mortality, I got a preliminary diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder. I was advised to seek an appointment with a mental health professional in my area (who'd paid to have his or her name included at the end of the magazine test.)

I immediately became anxious and worried (another scary symptom!) until I realized that Psychology Today couldn't stay in business without selling ads to drug companies with a vested interest in selling megatons of anti-depressive and other psychotropic medications to American citizens, many of whom are probably worried sick about the prospect of President Trump. (Trumpophobia, or Trump Derangement Disorder.)

Ironically, there was a recent  article in Psychology Today warning of the mental health dangers of watching too many drug ads on television:
 The average American TV viewer can expect to watch up to 30 hours of prescription drug advertising each year, the editors of Scientific American noted recently, with drug makers spending $5.2 billion on such ads in 2015. That’s a 60 percent increase on the total spent four years earlier, with no signs of slowing down.
Ironically, the article was accompanied by an ad for mental health screening and (drug) treatment.

Even more ironically, another article in Psychology Today describes how hard, if not impossible, it is to define exactly what mental health even is. 

I'm so confused (one more troubling symptom probably requiring an emergency prescription.)

Does worrying about Trump give you a dry mouth, insomnia or palpitations?

A mental health professional is standing by, prescription pad at the ready. Ka-ching!

If that doesn't appeal to you, listen to any recent speech by President Obama for some nice New-Age therapy. According to him, American life has never been better. All you need are some bootstraps and a dream and a ladder of opportunity to reach the promised land of NotTrump.

Wednesday, August 3, 2016

I Got Hacked

Note to readers: if any of you received an email from me containing a weird link, don't open it. It wasn't from me. My account was hacked.

If you did click on the link, please change your email password right away. 

My account is now secure - I changed my own password.



Tuesday, August 2, 2016

Hillary Or Die

 Is this show ever going to end?

If my math is correct, today's the day that we can finally start singing 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall and apply it to the election.

You take one media episode down, you pass it around, then 98 days till America Votes.

The various plot twists and back stories and cliffhangers necessary to hold the viewing audience's attention are getting more convoluted and outlandish by the minute. And so they must, if Kardashian Nation is not to cut the cord and stay tuned long enough to vote for the Smarter of Two Evils come November 8th.

And so the "horse-race" is looking more and more like a cheap remake of Homeland, in which Hillary plays the flawed but intrepid agent fighting Trump the Terrorist Traitor.

As Carl Bernstein wrote in A Woman In Charge, his biography of the Empress-in-Waiting, Hillary has acted the dual (and dueling) roles of fighting Joan of Arc and victimized Jane Eyre for her entire public life. She essentially sets herself up to be her own straw-woman, then sits back to await the attacks from both right and left, some of which are justified and some of which veer (by design) off into hyperbolic overkill. The formulaic plot then has Hillary donning her shining armor to fight the enemies which she herself has had a large part in creating. And fudging of facts - flying in the face of all fact - has long been a Clintonian weapon of choice.

The latest example of this tactic came a couple of days ago in her interview with Fox News, in which she doubled down on her untruthiness about her private email server. She lied about her lying, thus earning the maximum Four Pinocchios rating from the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler, who wrote:
 As we have seen repeatedly in Clinton’s explanations of the email controversy, she relies on excessively technical and legalistic answers to explain her actions. While Comey did say there was no evidence she lied to the FBI, that is not the same as saying she told the truth to the American public — which was the point of Wallace’s question. Comey has repeatedly not taken a stand on her public statements.
Liberals hate Fox with absolute justification, which is probably why Hillary chose it over MSDNC  to set herself up, to victimize herself anew and importune her fans to fight back anew against all the "haters."

And thanks to Donald Trump, she has a boorish billionaire-in-the-flesh to deflect voter attention from her own crimes and misdemeanors. It's almost as though he himself was actually a straw man of the Clintons' own creation: a true Clintchurian candidate rather than the "Siberian candidate" that Paul Krugman, among others in the corporate media, has presented for scare-mongering purposes. That's how perfect a two-dimensional enemy Trump is for her tired brand of paranoid identity politics. Because of widespread, media-driven and justified Trumpophobia, Hillary is getting a miraculous second wind and a comparative free pass on the "lesser evil" of her own serial mendacity.

And with traitorous misogynistic Donnie around, she and her new BFF Barack Obama can even get the American public to overcome their annoying "sickly inhibitions" against never-ending wars, get people to either ignore or to cheer on their aerial murders of hundreds of innocent civilians in Syria  as well as a whole new unauthorized and undebated round of bomb attacks on Libya. Their use of a dead Muslim soldier's Gold Star parents to attack Trump at last week's convention was a real stroke of genius on their part. It not only elicited the desired xenophobic reaction from him, it helped to squelch any incipient popular anti-war sentiment.

Hardly any Americans are outraged about the fact that over the last seven and a half years, the Obama administration has ordered a drone strike against Muslims on an average of once every four days. They're mad that Trump wears his own Islamophobia on his sleeve and even insults the grief-stricken parents of a fallen soldier.

If you're with Barack and Hillary and the unabashedly militaristic Democrats, then your motto might as well be We're All Neocons Now.

Obama stood in the East Room of the White House today with one of his TPP partners, the prime minister of tax-haven Singapore, to urge Republican leaders to denounce Trump in the name of patriotism. More and more GOP officials are already announcing they'll be voting for the Clinton restoration. This might effectively set the stage for one-party totalitarian rule in the United States, should the top Republican leadership actually heed Obama's call for unity in the service of plutocracy and withdraw their endorsements of Donald Trump -- leading to loss of funding and defeat at the polls.
 
Meanwhile, Democrats are able to gloss over the Wikileaks revelations of the deep corruption within their own party by actually red-baiting Trump (and by extension, voters) as they point to his alleged friendships and murky financial dealings with Russian oligarchs and Vladimir Putin, whom they accuse of hacking into their emails and databases and trying to mess with an American election.

As I wrote in a Sunday New York Times comment: (in response to a column by Frank Bruni that bemoaned stubborn Hillary's inability to connect with American angst)
 There are still 100 days, troves of Wikileaks goodies, media propaganda, natural and man-made disasters to go before this whole interminable spectacle ends (only to start up again in January 2017, if not before.)

I consider myself a political junkie, yet I am beginning to tune out. Every hour there's a new scare-mongering headline. Today it's Trumputin leading us to Trumpistan. Tomorrow it'll be the latest terror plot or hack. If a week goes by without one mass shooting, CNN won't know what to do with itself.

I really hesitate to criticize Hillary too harshly, because as we all know, if you diss her, you're either a secret Trump supporter or a whiny Bernie Bro "purist" -- which is the same thing as being a tool of Putin, which of course means that you're totally Un-American.

 And that is pretty much how they want you to feel. If you didn't wave the flag, and bop balloons with Bill Clinton, and weep at all the platitudinous speeches, and rejoice that LGBTs and Muslims and Black and Brown people all have equal rights to fight and die in endless wars in the pursuit of corporate dominance, then there has to be something seriously wrong with you.

I wish that Hillary had mentioned "poverty" more than once in her speech, wherein she promised to be the president of the "struggling, the striving and the successful". It made me think she'll be equally attuned to the rights of billionaires and meritocrats sweating their Ivy League applications.

I need some air.

Friday, July 29, 2016

Great Expectorations

Judging from all the electronically amplified throat-clearing that marred an otherwise boring acceptance speech, Hillary Clinton seemed to be choking on her own platitudes.

I couldn't help envisioning a scene from the great new Netflix series, Stranger Things, which I've been binge-watching all week as an antidote to the real horror of the Democratic National Convention. Right before tuning in to the robotic Chelsea introducing the robotic Hillary on Thursday night, I'd nearly gagged at the sight of a young boy coughing out a slimy eel-like creature into his bathroom sink. And so, at the sound of her first throat spasm, I braced myself in anticipation that Hillary, too, would be expectorating something even nastier than her hoarse-throated ode to great American exceptionalism.

 I almost felt sorry for her early on, when she as much as admitted that she'd been an abused child. Dorothy Rodham, her wonderful late saint of a mother, had once heartlessly kicked her out the door to confront a group of neighborhood bullies all by her little pre-school self. I wonder why Hillary didn't also mention the anecdote in Carl Bernstein's biography, which had her alcoholic father throwing the toothpaste out the window if somebody left the cap off, and then making the kids go out to hunt for it in the dark. Daddy went ballistic on the frequent occasions when his wife and kids failed to live up to his impossibly great expectations.

But as with everything else in the radical centrism of Clinton World, I suppose there has to be balance in the bathos. Hillary had nothing but glowing words for her dear old bootstrapping John Bircher of a dad on Thursday night.

And there has to be balance, as the late Christopher Hitchens wrote, in manipulating populism in the service of elitism. Thus did Hillary give a condescending verbal pat on the snow-white head of Bernie Sanders, looking  bored and grumpy in his seat as his wife Jane gave him frequent therapeutic pats on the back.

Clearing her throat ironically and ostentatiously, Hillary crooned out to her erstwhile nemesis:
Our country needs your ideas, energy, and passion. That’s the only way we can turn our progressive platform into real change for America.
Populism, meet the Neoliberal Project. Calling humanity-crushing corporate coups like the Trans-Pacific Partnership  (ostentatiously allowed to survive in the party platform) "progressive" is a feeble but common way to fool people into thinking that job offshoring and subsequent wage suppression throughout the world is actually good for them.

And then the gunk really flowed forth. It was a multi-colored, multi-textured oratorical mess that must have been festering all her political life:
We will work with all Americans and our allies to fight terrorism.
There’s a lot of work to do.
Too many people haven’t had a pay raise since the crash.
There’s too much inequality.
Too little social mobility.
Too much paralysis in Washington.
Too many threats at home and abroad.
But just look at the strengths we bring to meet these challenges.
This is highly unskilled obfuscation. Does Hillary's ghostwriter really think that by verbally juxtaposing domestic social problems with military might, people will then all join together in one big patriotic blob? Fight terrorism with hard work while acknowledging desperation and inequality and too many threats, be afraid, and then blame it all on the "paralysis in Washington" so beloved by the extreme centrists and the same multinational lobbyists who recycled a very small portion of their own corporate welfare to fund the spectacularly orchestrated Clinton Coronation.

It was no big surprise that after many of us gagged on Hillary's expectorations, she herself reportedly went on to party late into the night at a private shindig hosted by Lady Gaga, the rock star queen of the identity politics which barely holds the morally bankrupt Democratic Party together.

Before serenading Clinton, Gaga had given another exclusive concert in neighboring Camden, New Jersey, one of the poorest cities in America. It benefited not the poor, but one of Hillary's Superpacs.

But back to the speech. Hillary's noxious juxtaposing continues, as she counters Donald Trump with her own inclusive neoliberal army of caring professionals solidly aligned with both the victims and the perpetrators of state-sanctioned economic and physical violence:
Troops on the front lines.
Police officers and fire fighters who run toward danger.
Doctors and nurses who care for us.
Teachers who change lives.
Entrepreneurs who see possibilities in every problem.
Mothers who lost children to violence and are building a movement to keep other kids safe.
"Entrepreneurs who see possibilities in every problem" is neoliberal code for Never Let a Serious Crisis Go To Waste. (See: New Orleans/charter school takeover, Haiti/post-earthquake wage suppression, and just about any place where mostly man-made disaster strikes.)

But wait. Her acceptance speech may have started out as a few dry throat clearings, but Hillary's hacking is getting juicier by the minute: 
Remember: Our Founders fought a revolution and wrote a Constitution so America would never be a nation where one person had all the power.
Two hundred and forty years later, we still put our faith in each other.
Look at what happened in Dallas after the assassinations of five brave police officers.
Chief David Brown asked the community to support his force, maybe even join them.
And you know how the community responded?
Nearly 500 people applied in just 12 days.
Her speechwriter here skillfully combines democratic ideals with police state oppression. Of course no one person has all the power in America. It's a team effort of revolving door professionals from what's called the "establishment" or the "ruling class" or the "Washington Consensus" -- or what political theorist Perry Anderson calls the consilium of the Security Elite: 
"It extends across the bureaucracy and the academy to foundations, think tanks, and the media. In this milieu, with its emplacements in the Council on Foreign Relations, the Kennedy School of Harvard, the Woodrow Wilson Center at Princeton, the Nitze School at Johns Hopkins, the Naval War College, Georgetown, Brookings, the Carnegie Foundation, the Departments of State and Defense, the National Security Agency and the CIA, positions are interchangeable, individuals moving seamlessly back and forth between university chairs or think tanks and government offices, in general regardless of the party in control of the administration."
And the militarized police forces protect this elite team effort both at home and abroad. Only witness the snipers on the rooftops at Hillary's convention, protecting her and her whole consilium cohort against the proletarian rabble as the rich partied in and around the Wells Fargo arena this past week.

But back to the regal phlegm. Hillary now pivots to the "personal" in order to re-introduce herself to a public which has gifted her a sad approval rating of barely 30 percent.
I’ve been your first lady. Served 8 years as a Senator from the great sate of New York.
I ran for President and lost.
Then I represented all of you as secretary of State.
But my job titles only tell you what I’ve done.
They don’t tell you why.
The truth is, through all these years of public service, the “service” part has always come easier to me than the “public” part.
I get it that some people just don’t know what to make of me.
As CounterPunch's Jeffrey St. Clair quips in his brutally hilarious series on the convention: "HRC says the 'service part' always came more naturally to her than the “public part”. Well, that explains the private email server…"

Hillary went on to reprise her promise to "be president for the struggling, the striving and the successful," which is code for caring just as much about billionaires as she does for meritocrats sweating their Ivy League applications and elbowing their fellows in the ribs for a chance at a promotion or a corner office. She barely paid lip service to the crushingly impoverished. The P word - poverty - did in fact make the final cut in Hillary's coronation speech, with just one little mention. Overdoing it might have harshed the mellow of the USA! USA! USA! fight song echoing from the nosebleed seats, might even have burst a couple of those oversized balloons that a doddering and slack-jawed Bill Clinton just couldn't get enough of tossing around.




But I'm getting ahead of myself. The Hillarian hucksterism isn't quite done yet:
I believe America thrives when the middle class thrives.
I believe that our economy isn’t working the way it should because our democracy isn’t working the way it should.
That’s why we need to appoint Supreme Court justices who will get money out of politics and expand voting rights, not restrict them. And we’ll pass a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United!
That's why, as the New York Times reports, Clinton's wealthy donors were literally coming out of their well-appointed, room-sized closets this week, descending en masse upon Philly's tonier spots. Former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist was quoted as gushing at the Ritz-Carlton: "This is a good place to be — for a lot of reasons.We must have set up five fund-raisers today. This is the bank.”

Hillary was certainly right as she ironically a-hemmed that "our democracy isn't working the way it should."

But never mind all that. It's always sunny in Philadelphia as long as the proles have a hopeful sunny outlook:
I refuse to believe we can’t find common ground here.
We have to heal the divides in our country.
Not just on guns. But on race. Immigration. And more.
That starts with listening to each other. Hearing each other. Trying, as best we can, to walk in each other’s shoes.
So let’s put ourselves in the shoes of young black and Latino men and women who face the effects of systemic racism, and are made to feel like their lives are disposable.
There she goes, echoing President Obama's platitude that dark-skinned people "feel like" their lives are disposable - thus putting the onus on the victims of state-sanctioned racist violence themselves. Anything rather than utter the active words of reality: on average, US law enforcement personnel actually kill one person every 24 hours. That picked-on feeling? It's too often the pain of a last dying breath.

Now here comes that centrist, balanced approach again, putting even more of the onus on the working class and reducing lethal institutionalized social problems down to "rebuilding trust" between cops and communities. Meet the truncheons halfway - extend a helping head. Lift those hands a little higher behind your back to make it easier for them to cuff you:
Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of police officers, kissing their kids and spouses goodbye every day and heading off to do a dangerous and necessary job.
We will reform our criminal justice system from end-to-end, and rebuild trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve.
We will defend all our rights — civil rights, human rights and voting rights … women’s rights and workers’ rights … LGBT rights and the rights of people with disabilities!
And we will stand up against mean and divisive rhetoric wherever it comes from.
Reduce social injustice to identity politics. And stand against the meanness and divisiveness of Donald Trump, every time you see him getting a billion dollars' worth of free campaign advertising from the same media conglomerate which has colluded in the coronation of Hillary herself.
 Thank you and may God bless the United States of America!
(Thank god, it finally ended.)

and

         the

                  goat-footed

balloonMan          whistles
far
and
wee

-- e.e. cummings 



Thursday, July 28, 2016

The Party Dies, But Democracy Lives On

By Natalie Higley

(reprinted with permission of the author)

Just in case you missed it, after Bernie stood for the Vermont delegation, suspended the rules and forced the entire convention to do a voice vote (which we have fought against DEEPLY for months now) almost the entire Bernie delegation stood up and left the convention, together we all marched down the halls, chanting "this is what democracy looks like", and out into the media tent where we sat in silent protest with tape over our mouths. Written on the tape was, "no voice", "dnc stole my voice", "silenced by the dnc" and so on. We sat in solidarity holding hands. The media was unable to ignore us and that is why the media tent was the chosen destination.

 Cops then lined the doors and locked us in. Snipers were visible on the roof tops "monitoring" the media tent and the protest, police poured in from every direction, far more than I could count. We were hearing that we would all be arrested and removed if we didn't leave and yet they did not allow us to leave. Many of us, myself included, were very scared. We stood at the large glass walls at the front of the media building. I was crying and deeply upset, hundreds of Bernie delegates were locked outside the media building and standing in solidarity with us. I didn't know what to do, my phone was dead, i knew that my friends and family had been watching our live stream and that when my battery died I'm sure that they were panicking.

 I knew that if I got arrested so many things in my life would fall apart, and I started bawling uncontrollably, we were at the human limit of stress and exhaustion and emotionally overwhelmed after the slew of hardships and up and downs of this week. Being so overwhelmed I put my hands flat on the glass walls and just stared out the window crying, not knowing what to do. Within seconds, I had dozens of Bernie delegates outside, rushing the window and placing their hands over mine. Mouthing to me that we would be ok, that it will never be over, that we will continue, that they loved me, that they saw me, that we were together, that they would help me, that there was no need to be afraid because they were fighting to get us out, and they stood with me for an hour while the protestors outside were negotiating with officers for our release.

 I don't know what they said and I don't know what they negotiated, but after an hour and a half (felt like an eternity but in protesting world that's very fast) the doors were allowed to open. No one left me, and everyone wanted the opportunity to come "talk" to me. They stood with me and refused to leave until we were released. Once they opened the doors we had a flood of people coming to hug us and tell us how much they loved us and how proud they were to stand with us. It was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen in my life, and most likely nothing will ever top that.

 Afterwards, we spoke to a million and one press members. I interviewed with everyone from the young Turks to BBC. Then there was a march led by Nina Turner and the black lives matter movement, out of the convention center. If the dnc has not yet recognized how large the exodus from this party is becoming, they are even more self absorbed and tone deaf than I ever could have imagined.


 Yesterday began the death of the Democratic Party. They have brought this on themselves and deserve everything they get. Hillary loses to trump by double digits in the polls and the numbers are only getting worse. To ignore that is to ignore fact and truth, they are ushering in the age of trump with open arms and i won't take the blame come November. I've done everything possible to attempt to ensure a win for Bernie, the only candidate who consistently beats trump in the polls, and has for months. I can leave this Friday knowing that I've done my absolute best, along with the hundreds of delegates I've met this week. I am proud of every step we have taken here and of those to come in the next two days. I will never forget a single one of them, and I have never met a more amazing group of people.‪#‎TheRevolutionContinues‬ ‪#‎JillNotHill‬ ‪#‎DontBlameMeIVotedForBernie‬‪#‎DemExit‬ ‪#‎DncDeathBySuicide‬ ‪#‎DemConvention‬ ‪#‎NeverHillary‬‪#‎NeverTrump‬ ‪#‎ThisISWhatDemocracyLooksLike‬ ‪#‎TheDayThePartyDied‬‪#‎July26th‬
***************************
Natalie Higley, 23, is a Bernie Sanders delegate from Lakeport, California.  

Here she is, posing with Sanders at a campaign rally in Stockton held in May.



And here's full video of Tuesday's walkout, largely uncovered by the corporate media:


Dave Lindorff has more details and commentary here.

One More Miserable Night

There are already plenty of blow-by-blow accounts of the Democratic Convention, so I won't be adding to the shallow pollution in any substantial way. Life is too short, and besides, I find I can only take this mind-numbing spectacle in extremely small doses.  Even abandoning the hopped-up heads on MSDNC and CryptoNationalismNetwork for noncommercial C-Span didn't help. Because what is this convention anyway, but one long freaking commercial for the Neoliberal Project and Permawar?

It's as though the Home Shopping Network had a mind-meld with all the grotesque military recruiting videos ever made and then gave birth to an Academy Awards show that goes 72 hours over schedule. Every speech runs the pea-sized gamut from platitudinal to fear-mongering (fear Trump, not the weaponized capitalism that created him!). Every speaker focuses on identity and biography rather than on issues, every actor proclaims that America is the greatest country on earth.

 I keep waiting for the warning music from the orchestra to cut these people off.

I wait in vain. The music only enables them, as it attempts to create being from nothingness.

Take last night. A bunch of Broadway stars sang "What the World Needs Now Is Love, Sweet Love" which hideously segued into Master of War Leon Panetta bragging that Hillary will be able to bomb people to death more responsibly than traitorous Putin fanboy Donald Trump. The cognitive dissonance was relieved only by a group of brave Sanders delegates chanting "No more war, no more drones," while Clinton operatives scrambled to hand out fascistic "America Stronger" signs to the other delegates to drown out the unsanctioned love. (Since the DNC is still refusing to divulge the corporate sponsors of the glitzy convention, I can't wait to find out which defense contractor footed the bill for this particular bit of "muscular" propaganda. Maybe Trump can ask Putin to find out for us.)

I could have sworn I was still in Kleveland.... or Nuremberg.

I finally had to shut off the TV when the Gold Star mother was introducing Obama. The message was that as long as she can get a triple hug from The One, losing a son in a war for oil and treasure is almost bearable. Life gets better. Especially since it was Obama who inspired her to overcome her grief by getting into local politics, just by virtue of his magical hug.

So I am sorry to say that I unpatriotically skipped the president's ode to Hillary and to his own legacy. Maybe I'll parse it at a later date. But probably not. Like I said, life is short, the sun is shining and the birds are tweeting louder than the Tweets canonizing his speech as the greatest speech ever by the Greatest President in the history of time, space and propaganda.

If it's a more scathingly detailed synopsis you crave, then Jeffrey St. Clair over at CounterPunch is your guy. His daily blow-by-blow blow-ups of the botulistic canned festivities are actually very funny reads. And that is quite an amazing accomplishment, given the ingrained torture of the entire grotesque spectacle.

Party on.