Paine v. Establishment Pains-In-Asses

"These principles had not their origin in him, but in the original establishment, many centuries back; and they were become too deeply rooted to be removed, and the augean stable of parasites and plunderers too abominably filthy to be cleansed, by anything, short of a complete and universal revolution."

Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine could just as well have been writing about why the liberal hand-wringing "resistance" to Donald Trump is so ineffectual. What is really needed is not just a so-called Blue Wave in the congressional midterms, but a global revolution against the whole rotten global tyranny of finance capitalism. No matter that Paine was talking about the revolution against Louis XVI of France, who actually was more a weakling than true corrupt despot in the mold of his Trump-like ancestor, Louis XIV.

The "revolution" and freedom we're supposedly celebrating today was actually one group of rich men - the "Founders" - disentangling themselves from another group of rich men in Great Britain. Their aversion to taxes and their embrace of the institution of slavery, which was already well on the way to abolition in the British Empire, was at the heart of the Declaration of Independence. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness would not be granted to enslaved people in America for nearly a century. And it was only granted on paper, and only for a little while, until the Jim Crow laws superseded both the "aspirational" Declaration and Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.

The pursuit of happiness for the owners of capital has always been contingent upon their freedom to oppress, enslave and even kill those they consider disposable. America has been at war, at one place or another, for a grand grotesque total of 223 years since the Declaration was signed in 1776. So Paine was right when he wrote:

"To establish any mode to abolish war, however advantageous it might be to nations, would be to take from such government the most lucrative of its branches."

and

"Each government accuses the other of perfidy, intrigue, and ambition, as a means of heating the imagination of their respective nations, and incensing them to hostilities. Man is not the enemy of man, but through the medium of a false system of government."

All courts and courtiers are alike. They form a common policy (or "narrative") which is separate and detached from the rights of people and nations. It's commonly known in the US as the Duopoly, or the good cop/bad cop two party system, or perhaps even more accurately, the Duplicity.

 Paine wrote, 

 "And while they agree to quarrel, they agree to plunder. Nothing can be more terrible to a Court or a Courtier than the Revolution....They tremble at the approach of principles, and dread the precedent that threatens their overthrow."

While we don't have the hereditary succession of a monarchy, we do have an aristocracy. We do have both political and media dynasties, which have more and more consolidated power unto themselves. 

And it's no accident that this American aristocracy, besides its orgy of violent wars both at home and abroad,  has waged a virtual war on public education in recent years. And that is because, as Paine wrote: "The more ignorant the country, the better it is fitted for this species of Government" (of hereditary succession, or what's today euphemized as the "meritocracy" of the elites).

As we celebrate 241 years of freedom, The Duopoly is currently in a virtual storm of overreaction to the "shock" primary election of 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who unseated one of the most powerful congressional Democrats in the country. But unlike the establishment's open disdain for Bernie Sanders during his own primary battle against Hillary Clinton in 2016, they're treating Ocasio-Cortez like a comparative rock star. She's young, she's charismatic, she's attractive, and she's Latina. So the pundits are sadly unable to fall back on attacking her as too old, too white, too crabby and too sexist as they did Bernie, despite the fact that her platform is nearly identical to his. They therefore will try to celebritize her into watered-down ineffectiveness. Her "story" will outweigh the policy proposals they find so dangerous to their self-interest.

They're obviously trying to co-opt and monetize her for their own ends, inviting her on all the political talk shows and plastering her picture all over the front pages. It seems to me that they're trying to make the best of a bad (for them) situation, in hopes that her popularity will spur more disaffected young people to pull the lever for Democrats across the board in the November midterms. Once she arrives in Washington, they'll try to relegate her to the sidelines. They will definitely order her, as they do with all her fellow reps, to immediately hit the phones and fund-raise for the Party for at least half of every working day.

A prime example of this attempted co-option is a Tweet sent out Tuesday by one of Barack Obama's closest and most trusted advisers, tamping down the notion that Ocasio-Cortez is even a lefty:

  Valerie Jarrett‏Verified account @ValerieJarrett

Valerie Jarrett Retweeted Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Love seeing @Ocasio2018 define herself rather than letting others do it for her. Seems like the right North Star to me

Valerie Jarrett added,

Alexandria Ocasio-CortezVerified account @Ocasio2018

I’m not running “from the left.” I’m running from the bottom. I’m running in fierce advocacy of working class Americans.…

8:58 AM - 3 Jul 2018

1,527 Retweets
14,030 Likes

 If you need more proof of the game that is afoot, the corporate media's chief liberal Bernie Bro-basher, Paul Krugman, posted a column on Tuesday very tepidly reversing his negative position on Medicare For All and limply applauding Ocasio-Cortez, insofar that it's unfair to compare her to a Tea Partier as some of those other centrist pundits are so unfairly doing. She is a "reasonable Democratic radical" as opposed to an insanely independent radical like Bernie. In other words, Krugman is falling in Obama/Clinton/Party line, and patting her on the head. He helpfully links to her campaign website, which to his passive-aggressive satisfaction entirely omits any wonkish details of her platform. And then he sneakily equates Medicare for All with the bait-and-switch "public option" being proffered by centrist Democrats posing as progressives for purposes of re-election.

So, about Ocasio-Cortez’s positions: Medicare for all is a deliberately ambiguous phrase, but in practice probably wouldn’t mean pushing everyone into a single-payer system. Instead, it would mean allowing individuals and employers to buy into Medicare – basically a big public option. That’s really not radical at all.

Krugman is disingenuous, if not downright duplicitous. My published response:

 Well, this piece from Paul Krugman is certainly an improvement over his nay-saying re Medicare For All around the time that Bernie Sanders was giving Hillary Clinton such a run for her Wall Street money.

Even so, there's still that lingering "but where are the details?" little dribble of cold water implicit in his defense of this good and sane and non-radical proposal. So I would suggest that anyone interested in the details visit the Physicians for a National Health Plan website for links to both Medicare For All bills now in Congress, as well as a wealth of other helpful info:

http://www.pnhp.org/facts/single-payer-resources

For those who still insist we must retain the austerian "pay-go" method of financing things that will help make people's lives better, Modern Monetary Theory is finally entering the mainstream. More here:

https://www.thenation.com/article/the-rock-star-appeal-of-modern-monetar...

The politicians who have no qualms about mindlessly appropriating more than a trillion dollars to our endless war machine and surveillance state should absolutely be called out on their hypocrisy every time they insist that there is just no money for Single Payer or a federal jobs guarantee, or that we have to rob from the poor to pay for the poor. The politicians who spout such nonsense are in thrall to the big money interests running this show. It's high time that the tycoons of unfettered capitalism get booed off their self-serving propaganda stage.

The United States of Child Abuse

At this point it doesn't matter what might be the self-interested motives of the politicians who staged Father's Day protests at the immigration prison in New Jersey and at the pediatric gulags in Texas. They're shining the national spotlight on the latest example of state-sanctioned cruelty.

As much as we might like to turn away, we cannot. When even Laura Bush, wife of war criminal Dubya, is compelled to speak out against the Trump policy of forcibly removing an estimated 2,000 children from their asylum-seeking parents, the teflon coating of the president who once boasted he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and get away with it is starting to lose its nonstick sheen, even among some of his erstwhile tacit supporters in the Grand Guignol Party.

Whether Donald Trump diverts from type and bows to public pressure for one of the few times in his life remains to be seen. But ominously, his base of supporters which agrees with everything he does is growing, and  emboldened by the rhetoric of their leader. Trump's approval rating has now reached the 40 percent danger zone.

So just because the lead human rights official at the United Nations is condemning Trump's actions in no uncertain terms as state-sanctioned child abuse doesn't mean he will have any influence on the regime's draconian policy. After all, Congress refused only a couple of years ago, and not for the first time, to ratify the International Rights of the Child treaty.  The United States is the only country which has officially given the giant middle finger to children, now that even the autocratic regimes of South Sudan and Somalia have become signatories to the treaty.

Trump is no outlier. He is only the latest and the loudest manifestation of the right wing core of Exceptional America.

Children as young as five or six years old were already getting hauled out of their American classrooms in handcuffs long before Trump decided that jailing the "illegal" ones should be the next logical step in the march of cruelty. As the American Civil Liberties Union reports, children are treated as adults in the criminal courts of 14 states. 

 The United States remains the only country in the world to sentence children to life in prison without the possibility of parole, a severe punishment that is categorically prohibited under the Convention on the Rights of the Child. While in recent years the U.S. Supreme Court has limited the application of this life and death sentence to children, around 2,500 people are currently serving this sentence for crimes they were involved in years ago as children.

So that the corporate media are now focused, en masse, on the abuses and deadly antics of the aptly named ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is really quite remarkable after years of relative avoidance of the issue during the Bush and Obama administrations. Trump, for his part, is no doubt cynically using the child arrests to pressure Congress into allocating him the funds for his precious Wall. And given that this is a midterms election year, he might well succeed in forcing the wishy-washy congress critters to finally pass an immigration reform package, including making permanent the Dream Act.

Meanwhile, here's my New York Times comment to Charles Blow's column
about the individual human beings who are being tragically swept up by the Icemen of Trumpistan: 

Only a few weeks elapsed between Trump calling them "animals" and treating them like animals, yanking kids from parents and jailing them. He literally views refugees as less than human.

His flacks' pleading that they're only following the law hearkens back to the fascist regimes of the last century.

That excuse didn't fly at the Nuremberg trials and it shouldn't fly here, either... although the US has carefully exempted itself from international human rights statutes.

US leaders have never held the family in highest regard. While the entire nation is rightly aghast at what's happening in our own back yard, should we really be shocked?

The Trump regime is also now assisting Saudi Arabia in a genocide in Yemen, attacking and isolating the only port of entry for food shipments.

Here at home, one in three black American males is imprisoned at some point in his life, a de facto policy which also serves to rip families apart. We have more prisons and lock up more people than any country on earth.

We have more guns than any other place on earth.
The students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas have certainly learned the hard way that US leaders don't care a whit about families - unless they're dynasties and billionaires.
It's the all-American norm of state-sanctioned violence with cynical thoughts and prayers, blame and excuses, whenever cruel policies have "shocking" consequences.
So little time, so much to protest against. Let's all wake up, and stay awake this time.

Ain't Nothing But a Hypocritical Hound Dog

Although Trumpism and human rights are obviously mutually contradictory, it still came as a huge shock in official circles when Secretary of State Rex Tillerson broke precedent and coldly refused to trumpet his agency's annual report on global human rights abuses. And to add insult to injury, he's even reportedly planning to close down State's War Crimes division.

How very oily of him. 

Not that the United States has ever actually looked in the mirror and condemned its own abuses and war crimes, which include but aren't limited to capital punishment, solitary confinement and the shackling of pregnant women in domestic prisons; aggressively invading other countries; torture by the CIA in black sites; bombings of hospitals; and extrajudicial assassinations by drone.

 It's that the Trump administration refuses to abide by the norms and traditions of its virtue-signalling predecessors. The serial giant middle fingers of Trumpian contempt make our exceptional country look bad to the rest of the world. His regime deprives us of our righteous opportunities to lecture the rest of the world. 

A further indication of the domestic erosion of human rights is the fact that the State Department official who did comment to the press on the annual human rights report did so anonymously, out of fear of retaliation from the Trump administration.

The government's annual report calling attention to global crimes against humanity has ever had any legal clout, mind you. As a matter of fact, the State Department has always functioned as a major arms broker to the same vicious regimes, such as Saudi Arabia, which it presumes to occasionally criticize. Still, as PRI reported in March, Tillerson's lack of engagement and flouting of tradition sends a chilling message to rights organizations as well as a tacit message of encouragement to autocrats in places like Turkey and the Philippines. The shallow hypocritical American rhetoric which has historically waved its feeble pompoms for human rights efforts around the world is completely evaporating:

The international watchdog Human Rights Watch linked Tillerson's no-show to what it fears is a broader decision by Trump's administration to downplay America's leadership role on the issue. 

"Trump's anti-Muslim refugee policy and hinted cuts to foreign aid have heightened concerns that the US won't be a vocal player on human rights issues abroad," HRW Washington director Sarah Margon said. 

 Tillerson's absence, she added "reinforces the message to governments, rights activists and at-risk minorities that the State Department might also be silent on repression, abuse and exploitation."

To complement that episode of passive-aggressive silence, Tillerson also aims to do away with State's Office of Global Criminal Justice, whose business is vocally "deploring" or "condemning" the war crimes of others while ignoring American atrocities - and while supplying the Deplorables with billions of dollars' worth of weapons every single year. The former Exxon CEO has already reassigned Stephen Rapp and his entire war crimes staff to other duties.

From the New York Times article about Tillerson's "reorganization" plans:

The war crimes office has modest resources. It has a staff of about a dozen and an annual budget of about $3 million, and it has generally been run by an envoy appointed by the president.

Mr. Rapp came to the office with considerable experience: He served on an international tribunal on the atrocities in Rwanda and prosecuted war crimes in Sierra Leone before President Barack Obama appointed him to lead the office in 2009, making him the ambassador at large for war crimes.

Mr. Rapp also played a major role in arranging for one of Syria’s most important defectors to provide thousands of photographs to the F.B.I. of detainees who had perished in President Bashar al-Assad’s prisons.

In the two decades that it has existed, the office has played an important role in bringing perpetrators to justice. Mr. Rapp worked behind the scenes to press Kosovo to accept its new human rights tribunal. The office also pushed Senegal to try Hissène Habré, the former dictator of Chad.

The key phrase here is "behind the scenes." The United States not only refused during the Clinton administration to become part of the International Court of Justice, it aggressively worked behind the scenes to weaken it, before it eventually denounced it, during a five-week conference in Rome.

As international human rights barrister and activist Geoffrey Robertson recounts in his excellent history, Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle For Global Justice,

Although the Clinton administration had previously advocated a world criminal court and Clinton himself called for it in his 1998 visit to Rwanda, his personal authority was eroded at the crucial time by the domestic fallout from his affair with Monica Lewinsky. After her blue dress was taken by the FBI for DNA analysis, he capitulated to the Pentagon, which had for some months been briefing the military attaches of its allies that the Court was a danger to soldiers of the Western alliance. Jesse Helms, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, announced that the Rome Treaty would be 'dead on arrival' in Congress if there was any prospect of the indictment of a single American soldier....

The US delegation rejected the principle of universal jurisdiction over war crimes and crimes against humanity (other than genocide) so vehemently that the US Defense Secretary William Cohen threatened Germany and South Korea with a US troop pull-out if they persisted in their support for the Statute.

Trump is really not much of an anomaly after all, is he?

So, rather than hound his administration for the ongoing horrendous war crime of 40,000 Iraqis crushed to death in their homes by American bombs or shot to death in the streets of Mosul by American-made guns, the media-political complex is instead hounding him for canoodling with a slimy bunch of Russian oligarchs. These are some of the same characters who were originally aided and abetted in the plunder of their nation by the "Harvard Boys" of the Clinton era.

Since these things are too horrific to report, and since such journalism would be against the best interests of the global ruling class, it behooves them to change the narrative and divert the attention. They've concluded that it's better to hound Trump for RussiaGate and for his slaughter of the English language than it is to howl in outrage about his administration's slaughter of human beings.

Jimmy Carter Strikes Back

Don't miss this op-ed by former President Jimmy Carter, running in Monday's New York Times.

At long last, a Democratic elder statesman is taking aim at the horrendous human rights violations being perpetrated in our name by an American president and Congress. It's about time somebody of Carter's stature struck back, joining the dwindling chorus of protests from the left in this election year. Because the USA has seen fit to chuck human rights in the garbage, we no longer have any right to pretend to be a human rights champion of the world. Writes Carter:

In addition to American citizens’ being targeted for assassination or indefinite detention, recent laws have canceled the restraints in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to allow unprecedented violations of our rights to privacy through warrantless wiretapping and government mining of our electronic communications. Popular state laws permit detaining individuals because of their appearance, where they worship or with whom they associate.

Despite an arbitrary rule that any man killed by drones is declared an enemy terrorist, the death of nearby innocent women and children is accepted as inevitable. After more than 30 airstrikes on civilian homes this year in Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai has demanded that such attacks end, but the practice continues in areas of Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen that are not in any war zone. We don’t know how many hundreds of innocent civilians have been killed in these attacks, each one approved by the highest authorities in Washington. This would have been unthinkable in previous times.

These policies clearly affect American foreign policy. Top intelligence and military officials, as well as rights defenders in targeted areas, affirm that the great escalation in drone attacks has turned aggrieved families toward terrorist organizations, aroused civilian populations against us and permitted repressive governments to cite such actions to justify their own despotic behavior.

Hats off to Jimmy Carter, who speaks truth to power in a frightening period of our history in which almost two-thirds of Americans find it acceptable for a politician to unilaterally decide who lives and who dies in lands far, far away from their own blinkered little existences. The chickens came home to roost on 9/11 and they'll be coming home again sooner or later unless more of us stand up and say "Enough."