Marketing Death to a Sick America

Wherever there is pain and oppression, the lords of predatory capitalism will always find a way to profit from it. 

Are you a poor black kid who can't retrieve your wayward football from the unkempt yard containing Cujo's rabid litter-mate? In your kind of neighborhood, you obviously don't seek help from a responsible adult. You definitely don't want to call the cops. So you just close your eyes and fantasize that you're the super-hero designer of Northrup Grumman's stealth bomber. Your lost football will then magically float back to you just like an unmanned Predator drone. Because let's face it: you live in a Perma-War economy now, and the Trump administration is taking money away from poverty programs and giving it to the Pentagon. But please don't despair, all you poor and hungry children of America, because the Military-Industrial Complex is here to help. What a "turbulent world" needs is not more education and medical care and social programs. It needs more spying and destruction and maiming and killing. And so it's only natural that Northrup Grumman would take Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech and made it their very own.

Are you a working class refugee hopelessly hooked on opioids? Astra Zeneca is here to help - not by building rehab facilities, of course, but by pushing an anti-constipation drug designed specifically for junkies like you. Of course, the actor who plays the junkie on TV doesn't look like an actual junkie. In fact he is very hot. He is not only hale and hearty, he wears a hard hat and appears to be the boss on a major construction site. So the subliminal message here is that it's not the Oxy or the heroin that's holding you back. Those drugs are good for you, build up your muscles better than steroids. Your main problem, dude, is your embarrassing inability to have a bowel movement. So get "unplugged" and dream the dream of a full-time job.  Maybe you can even hallucinate piloting a stealth bomber while you're sitting on the toilet. Oh, and always indulge your addiction responsibly.

Are you a black or brown person who fears that you will one day get shot during a routine traffic stop or sentenced to solitary confinement for possessing a small amount of dope? No need to block highways or stage sit-down strikes or meet with politicians. Instead, always have an ice cold can of Pepsi at the ready as the weapon of choice to render your oppressor harmless. Or better yet, allow white super-model Kendall Jenner to do the honors for you, with a Bob Marley imitator crooning in the background for some added social justice ambience. And the world will live in perfect harmony forever as people slurp their sugary drinks and develop diabetes... which might sadly go untreated because there is no universal health care in America. Maybe Astra Zeneca can help. Or maybe you can join the military and bomb other oppressed people in turbulent countries far, far away from America the Beautiful.

Why bother with the messiness of Black Lives Matter, when #ResistanceInc is the cool way to go? We mustn't let the class war rear its ugly head. It might disturb the oligarchs, who only want to help through the magic of marketing more death to desperate people barely holding on in the end stage of Capitalism. 

The first rule of free market neoliberalism is to create a crisis. The second rule is never let it go to waste.

No Longer Feeling the Bern

Unless we all join together in a new anti-war movement and demand an end to global American aggression, there can be no political revolution and no real improvement in our lives here at home. 

In a televised town hall appearance last night on MSNBC, self-described Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders doubled down on both his support for President Obama's drone assassination program and for the U.S.'s  continued military escalations in the Middle East. Sanders called the presidential "kill list" perfectly legal, constitutional and necessary. He gave his stamp of approval to Obama's pivot from "no American boots on the ground" in Syria to ordering an additional 250 pairs of them to aid and abet Al Qaeda-linked "rebels" in the fight against ISIS.

Asked by Chris Hayes if he would continue Obama's drone strikes, which to date have killed thousands of innocent civilians ("collateral damage"), Sanders replied: "Look. Terrorism is a very serious issue. There are people out there who want to kill Americans, who want to attack this country, and I think we have a lot of right to defend ourselves."

 He added that as long as the extra-judicial executions ordered by politicians and bureaucrats are done in the current "legal, constitutional way" -- as defined by a couple of government lawyers-for-hire --he sees no problem with it.

Regarding this week's new deployment of hundreds more Special Ops troops to Syria, Sanders toed the company line to a fault. These human killing machines are merely acting as "advisers" to "Muslim troops," he insisted.

Sanders also supports the continued, open-ended deployment of 10,000 troops in Afghanistan. He was not asked about, nor did he address, the White House whitewash of the terroristic American bombing of a charity hospital last fall in Kunduz, resulting in the deaths of nearly 50 medical professionals and patients.

Nor did he speak out against the horrific new "rules of engagement" (secretly in effect since last fall) which allow for more civilian casualties in the air wars on Syria and Iraq and wherever else in the world a bomb falls. The Pentagon has quietly revised its standards for how many children can be ethically obliterated in the name of American exceptionalism.

USA Today reports that the generals have devised a handy little sliding scale with which to absolve themselves of any personal responsibility when they decide to bomb people to smithereens. Human beings in war zones are even ascribed a numerical value: "A strike with the potential to wound or  kill several civilians would be permitted if it prevented ISIL fighters from causing further harm."

The newspaper quotes one general celebrating the Obama administration's belated public pivot to hawkishness, likening it to Lyndon Johnson's no holds barred bombing offensives in Vietnam -- where those special advisers also initially only "helped" the South Vietnamese as the "best and the brightest" mission-crept their way into a bloodbath of epic proportions.

So, Bernie Sanders going on TV and spouting the same old platitudes in order to help us to overcome our "sickly inhibitions" about the latest unfettered war is the last straw for me. I am feeling something, all right. I feel like I've been burned. My feelings, of course, are nothing compared to what millions of people "over there" are experiencing as their homes and their bodies get burned to crisps by our leaders' bombs and drones.

As the great investigative journalist Seymour Hersh remarked the other day about the de facto American invasion of Syria, "Nobody ever seems to object too much when we put more people on the ground."

And sadly, that also appears to be the case with Bernie Sanders.  Now that he has virtually no chance of winning the Democratic nomination, he could have seized the moment last night to condemn war instead of embracing it. I'd been willing to pragmatically give him a bit of a pass on his historic lack of pacifism, in hopes that he might be elected and then pressured to ease out of the bellicose mindset. No more.

So enough with the hand-wringing over Hillary the Hawk and Ted Cruz's dastardly desire to carpet-bomb Syrians to death. President Peace Prize is already doing just fine in that department, and even the Empress-in-Waiting's Democratic primary challenger is effectively helping to grease the skids for her seamless transition to power. She'll just be the latest salesperson for Permawar. She'll just be a little more vocal than her smarmy male cohort in her unabashed enjoyment of it.

The invasion of Libya is probably just an election away. Obama, employing his usual lawyerly parsing, doesn't think such a move is necessary right at the moment, since it might send "the wrong signal" to that country's officials and citizens. He apparently doesn't believe that millions of refugees and hundreds of drowned children are not already enough of a signal.  

And as Trevor Timm writes in The Guardian, 

Libya is now engulfed in chaos and the number of Isis members is skyrocketing, largely thanks to the US and allies bombing the country and overthrowing Muammar Gaddafi five years ago. There are already drones flying over the country and special forces have already been in and out in the past year to conduct special forces missions. You can picture administration members soon arguing: we must invade the country to save it from the last time we bombed it."

Bernie Sanders will not be mounting any third party challenge, he says, because he doesn't want to end up like Ralph Nader. To me, there are worse things than ending up like Ralph Nader. What's worse is being complicit in mass killing.

And anyhow, Ralph Nader ending up like Ralph Nader continues to be a very good thing. He's spearheading (h/t "annenigma") what he calls an "historic civic mobilization" beginning with a four-day strategy session to be held next month at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. Participants will receive professional training in how to effect revolution from the ground up, in their own communities.

The third day (May 25) of the Breaking Through Power convention will be exclusively dedicated "to the enhancing of peace over the waging of war."

"Revitalizing the people to assert their sovereignty under our Constitution is critical to the kind of government, economy, environment and culture that will fulfill human potential and respect posterity," Nader says. "The participating citizens will be asked to support the creation of several new organizations. One will be a Secretariat to facilitate action to stop illegal wars and their quagmires (e.g. the wars on Iraq and Libya and their brutal aftermaths)" by some of the same retired military and diplomatic officials and other activists who so stridently protested during the Bush administration before dissent was quieted in the belief and hope that peace would finally be given a chance under the Obama administration. 

I'm feeling the Ralph.

Warrior Empress of Austeria

Before she became a progressive for purposes of collecting votes, Secretary Hillary Clinton traveled the globe for the purposes of collecting a record number of frequent flyer miles in the service of banks and multinationals.

Reading a blog-post by her staunch surrogate Paul Krugman the other day, about how those crazy Republicans try to sell such bogus products as "expansionary austerity" for the masses in order to jump-start economic growth, I was reminded of the time in 2011 when Hillary Clinton went to Greece and compared austerity to life-saving chemotherapy.

As if that rhetoric was not slimy enough, she also praised the failing, cash-strapped, indebted Greek government for devoting its scarce resources to helping her bomb the hell of Libya, and also for militarily preventing a humanitarian aid flotilla from leaving port to deliver lifesaving supplies to the blockaded Gaza Strip.

Even then, the Empress-in-Waiting wore three crowns: neoliberal scold and protector of Big Global Finance; staunch friend of the right-wing Israeli government and punisher of starving Palestinians; and hawk extraordinaire who never met a regime she didn't want to change or a war she didn't want to fight.

What was kind of unusual is that she would tout all three sadistic credentials in  just one short speech. In light of her and Bill's past domestic record now coming under some much-deserved scrutiny, I think it's worth taking another look at this episode in her international antics as well.

When the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and Goldman Sachs load corrupt governments up with debts that they can never repay, the result is always the same. The creditors, back up by the governments who serve them, impose draconian cuts in social programs for the citizens of said country, and then allow the predators to swoop in and seize everything from water to electricity to ports to real estate to oil to precious historical artifacts and monuments.

Hillary Clinton, in a sort of job interview/debut for all those post-State lucrative, boosteristic speeches she gave at Goldman Sachs and other companies, performed perfectly to all their specifications in July 2011:

The steps ahead will not, they cannot, be pain-free, but there is a path forward to resolve Greece’s economic stability and to restore Greece’s economic strength. I have faith in the resilience of the Greek people and I applaud the Greek Government on its willingness to take these difficult steps. Greece has inspired the world before, and I have every confidence that you are doing so again. And as you (addressing her Greek foreign minister counterpart) do what you must to bring your economy back to health, you will have the full support of the United States.....

 We believe that the recent legislation (another bailout for Eurozone banks and the global investor class predicated on austerity for working people) that was passed will make Greece more competitive, will make Greece more business-friendly. We think that is essential for the kind of growth and recovery that is expected in the 21st century when businesses can go anywhere in the world and capital can follow. We think that will provide a firm financial footing on which Greece will be able increasingly to attract businesses and create the jobs that Stavros said are absolutely important for the Greek people. Because businesses seek consistent, predictable regulatory and taxation regimes. Investors seek a level playing field. They expect transparency, streamlined procedures, protection of commercial and intellectual property rights, effective contract enforcement, all of which was part of your reform package.

 Therefore, I am not here to in any way downplay the immediate challenges, because they are real, but I am here to say that we believe strongly that this will give Greece a very strong economy going forward. There are lots of analogies – having to take the strong medicine that tastes terrible when it goes down and you wish you didn’t have to, or the chemotherapy to get rid of the cancer. There are all kinds of analogies. But the bottom line is this is the best approach and we strongly support it.

If this speech sounds familiar to readers of this blog, it's because I also wrote about it last summer. But in light of her current populist message, I think her pro-business message bears repeating. Once an austerian and friend of the banks, always an austerian and friend of the banks. As much as Krugman loves to rail against Paul Ryan and the scamming Republicans as the causes of all that ails us, the GOP could never survive without Democratic complicity. The Duopoly serves identical plutocratic masters.

Unfortunately for some private investors in Clinton World, however, the betting on Greece didn't pay off particularly well. A hedge fund owned by son-in-law Marc Meszvinsky, a Goldman Sachs alum, lost a ton of dough betting on Greek debt and beaten-down bank stock. Oh well... maybe there was a hedge fund betting against the hedge fund for all we know.

  Although Krugman's main thrust in yesterday's post was how wrong it is to criticize Donald Trump solely about his protectionism, I seized upon Krugman's parochial blaming of horrible austerity policies on just the GOP: (and got plenty of pushback for my efforts; read the replies from the usual suspects if you have any time to kill.) My published New York Times response:

The Democrats might boast of being a big tent for a coalition of liberal policy wonks, but let's not forget that they, too, got caught up in the "expansionary austerity" craze not too many years ago.

Before Hillary Clinton became a born-again populist, she, too, dictated pain as a cure. And I'm not just talking about the domestic welfare "reform" of the 90s which plummeted millions of women and children into permanent poverty, or her foisting of partial blame for the housing collapse on subprime mortgagors/evictees.

As Secretary of State, Clinton also assigned blame to the victims -- not the plutocratic perpetrators -- of the entire global financial meltdown. In Greece, in 2011, she grotesquely likened austerity to "chemotherapy" which not only kills unhealthy cells but is a magical elixir which will help the body economic to grow.

 When she started running for president, she quickly changed her tune and said oh dear, what a Greek tragedy, as though it were never orchestrated by the IMF, the oligarchs, the big banks and the wonks of the rentier class.

Yes, Republicans are scary dudes, especially Cruz. But let's not limit the critique to them. There's plenty of pathology to go around. All around the world, where 80 billionaires own as much wealth as the bottom half combined.

(When the Syriza Party was elected on its anti-austerity platform, Clinton wasted no time pivoting from her gushing support of the deposed Papandreou government to pretending to lecture the Troika on its responsibilities to suffering Greeks. It was all part of the co-optation of that particular populist uprising while waiting for even more austerity measures to be imposed. The power players always must be perceived as having "tried." That is their passive-aggressive modus operandi. And as State Department emails reveal, their concern was geared more toward geopolitical war strategy than toward the suffering of Greek citizens. They were worried about a possible Grexit and potential collapse of the Eurozone and exodus of their fig-leaf NATO allies --  for purely profit and power-driven reasons, of course.)

Meanwhile, back in 2011, Clinton was commending Prime Minister Papandreou for helping her help the Libyan people to "secure a better future" by way of NATO-bombing the country into an anarchic band of extremist factions. This was before she uttered her bone-chilling words on the gruesome death of Qaddafi: "We came, we saw, he died."

And she'd concern-trolled the Papandreou's blocking of the aid flotilla (including one ship called The Audacity of Hope!) bound for Gaza by saying: "We commend the Greek Government for seeking a constructive approach in consultation with the United Nations to addressing the humanitarian needs of the people of Gaza and working to avoid the risks that come with attempts to sail directly to Gaza."

Apparently those risks included about a million Palestinian families getting some desperately needed food and medicine. Too audacious for words. 

When I refer to Hillary Clinton as the Empress-in-Waiting, I am not kidding. 

When our rigged, super-delegated, brokered convention political system "elects" a president, the multinationals are indeed anointing the leader of their free world. 

Since the world is their oyster, no wonder they're clutching their pearls over an upstart named Bernie Sanders.

Drilling On Hold, But Torture May Proceed

Just because President Obama put a five-year kibosh on oil and gas drilling in the Atlantic doesn't mean that the ocean is now safe for whales and other marine life. Far from it.

Oil companies will still be free to blast away with underwater sonic cannons, prospecting for every last barrel of goo hiding beneath the ocean floor. They will be free to damage and destroy marine life in the process. They'll be free to hasten the extinctions already underway due to man-made climate change. 

Call it pre-emptive plunder. The thinking behind the White House giving approval to exploration without immediate extraction is that once the current global oil glut depletes itself,  and higher prices make it worth the market god's while, the multinationals will have their mother lodes all mapped out for them. They're simply being proactive. 

The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is currently considering eight separate applications for seismic blast testing for oil and gas in the Atlantic. To visualize what this "mapping" will do to wildlife, try to imagine undergoing a diagnostic ultrasound in the middle of a war zone. Imagine that submitting yourself to such a test would not only render you permanently deaf,  it would also very likely drive you insane. Imagine that the sound would be so loud that you would lose all sense of direction and not even be able to find your way home from the clinic. Imagine if you had your children with you, and the sonic blast had the effect of making you forget that you even had children.

That is what oil company sonic blasting will do to whales, sea turtles and other sentient beings. The sound can travel underwater for more than 2,000 miles to do its damage. According to marine conservation scientist Douglas Nowacek, the sound blasts can reach 260 decibels and continue for weeks or months on end.

 “Each survey would discharge its airguns approximately every 10 or 12 seconds, and would operate 24 hours per day," he told Congress last year.  "If these permits are granted, ocean animals located in that wide area of the Atlantic Ocean would be exposed to noise levels that are likely to cause impacts and to disrupt essential behavior patterns.”  

To suggest that the Obama administration's approval for this testing is tantamount to approving torture is actually quite an understatement.

As Oceana's Ingrid Biedron points out, “Since the Atlantic has been removed from drilling for the next five years, there’s no immediate need for companies to prospect for oil and gas in this way. We’d encourage them, and the government, to wait until there is safer technology available before going ahead with this.”

Asking predatory capitalists to wait for anything is asking way too much, of course. That their quest for more oil and more profits has already done irreparable damage to all the species inhabiting our precious planet is simply what neoliberal economists label an "externality," and what the masters of war label collateral damage.

And Obama's reasons for placing a five-year moratorium on Atlantic drilling actually have little to do with protecting the environment. His administration simultaneously approved ten new leasing sites in the Gulf of Mexico and another three off the Arctic coast. The decisions to halt drilling in the Arctic were made by the oil companies themselves -- the cost-benefit analyses simply did not work out in their favor.

And wasn't only environmentalists and tourism concerns that put pressure on the president to halt Atlantic drilling. It was the United States military brass. Underwater drilling by oil companies would damage the Pentagon's ability to play their war games on the Atlantic high seas and also interfere with the training exercises and other testing that they conduct on the Eastern coastline.

So when Big Oil is up against Big Forever War, the bigger, faster death obviously wins. But Big Oil dare not complain too much, seeing as how the Pentagon uses more of its polluting product than all other government agencies combined. As a matter of fact, the American military contributes more to global warming than any other institution on the planet. And miracle of miracles: the Pentagon enjoys blanket exemption from all international climate change agreements. So, as long as the wars continue, so will the current oil glut diminish, so will the oil companies' profits ooze back up in a giant blob of cash.

As Herbert Melville observed in his own anti-capitalist whale of a tale (Moby Dick): "The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvelous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!” 

Paris

More hundreds of innocent people were again caught in the crosshairs of Permawar last night, in what is being described in the Western media as a terrorist attack rather than as a counterattack against Western imperialism. 

Pope Francis is right in calling the night of carnage one more battle in a "piecemeal World War III."

From the Elysee Palace (Elysium, or abode of the gods), French President Francois Hollande proclaimed the attacks to be an act of war perpetrated and planned by the Islamic State, which is now seemingly getting its wish and being officially recognized as a nation unto itself:

“France, because it was foully, disgracefully and violently attacked, will be unforgiving with the barbarians from Daesh,” Mr. Hollande said on Saturday, adding that France would act within the law but with “all the necessary means, and on all terrains, inside and outside, in coordination with our allies, who are, themselves, targeted by this terrorist threat.”

France has already gotten a head start. Way back in 2012, Hollande armed the "good" Syrian rebels in a direct breach of a European embargo that then forbade weapons sales to that war-torn region. Maybe that is what President Obama meant last night when he bragged that France has always stood with the United States Empire in its own lawless, never-ending, obsessive compulsive quest to bring peace to the world through tanks, drones, guns, and various CIA coups and proxy wars. Except, of course, for the time post-9/11, when Francophobia became so intense within the elite American political class that Congress changed French fries into "freedom" fries on its menu in an inane act of solidarity to go along with its embrace of the paranoid Patriot Act and Bush's fraudulent invasion of Iraq.

They got over their food fetish quickly enough, but their war fetish lives on, and on, and on.

So does the jingoistic rhetoric. "They hate us for our freedoms" is enjoying a patriotic comeback from across the A to B political spectrum, clanging away throughout the land like a hollow cracked Liberty bell. The word "blowback" is nowhere to be seen or heard from within the parochial halls of the US media-political complex.

But the anodyne "values" are being belched out like projectile missiles. Obama himself managed to emit them a total of five times within a larger blast of boilerplate lasting less than two minutes:

"....this is an attack on all of humanity and the universal values that we share."

  "Paris itself represents the timeless values of human progress."

  "We are reminded in this time of tragedy that the bonds of liberté and égalité and fraternité are not only values that the French people care so deeply about, but they are values that we share."

 "And those values are going to endure far beyond any act of terrorism or the hateful vision of those who perpetrated the crimes this evening."

Meanwhile, Obama supplemented his mawkish Values with the hackneyed "thoughts and prayers" for the wounded and the dead, words that he recently professed to be so weary of while performing his official duty of mourning domestic gun violence victims. He did not offer monetary aid, help with funeral expenses, medical care, psychological counseling, or promises to end the bombings and give peace and refuge to some of the displaced, expelled people now barely surviving in makeshift refugee camps in Calais and elsewhere in Europe. 

He did promise more of the same "revenge is mine" Old Testament chest-thumping that we thought we'd seen the last of with the exit of the unindicted and richly rewarded George W. Bush. Obama offered more death.

 "We’re going to do whatever it takes to work with the French people and with nations around the world to bring these terrorists to justice, and to go after any terrorist networks that go after our people," Obama vowed to his TV audience.

Oh good. That must signify that he will also prosecute the American military terrorists who only last month obliterated the hospital run by the France-based Médecins Sans Frontières.

Or not. When the United States performs terroristic acts, they are done with therapeutic surgical strikes and bombs of democracy. They don't call them Patriot missiles for nothing. America's acts of aggression are hidden behind such grotesque monikers as Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Odyssey Dawn and Operation Inherent Resolve.

Total deaths in Paris attacks: between 100 and 150.

Total deaths in Iraq War(s): 224,000. And counting.

Some Victims Are More Equal Than Others

A Tale of Two Presidential Condolences.

In the coming days, we’ll learn about the victims -- young men and women who were studying and learning and working hard, their eyes set on the future, their dreams on what they could make of their lives.  And America will wrap everyone who’s grieving with our prayers and our love. But as I said just a few months ago, and I said a few months before that, and I said each time we see one of these mass shootings, our thoughts and prayers are not enough.  It’s not enough.  It does not capture the heartache and grief and anger that we should feel.  And it does nothing to prevent this carnage from being inflicted someplace else in America -- next week, or a couple of months from now.  -- Barack Obama, on the mass shooting that killed nine people in Oregon.

The Department of Defense has launched a full investigation, and we will await the results of that inquiry before making a definitive judgment as to the circumstances of this tragedy. ...Michelle and I offer our thoughts and prayers to all of the civilians affected by this incident, their families, and loved ones. We will continue to work closely with President Ghani, the Afghan government, and our international partners to support the Afghan National Defense and Security forces as they work to secure their country." -- Barack Obama, on the American bombing of a hospital that has killed at least 23 people in Afghanistan.

One condolence is eloquently maudlin and extended, the other is every bit as brief and clinical and detached as the series of "surgical strikes" that literally ripped apart an operating room, and incinerated critically ill people trapped in their beds.

If Obama is even dimly aware of his own cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy, he is doing his utmost to hide it. But as ever, when a mass shooting occurs on his turf, the sycophantic press makes him the center of the story. This time, as the New York Times mawkishly commiserated, he was "as visibly angry and frustrated as he has ever appeared in public during a brief televised statement from the White House."

And as George Orwell similarly commiserated in Animal Farm:

 “I trust that every animal here appreciates the sacrifice that Comrade Napoleon has made in taking this extra labour upon himself. Do not imagine, comrades, that leadership is a pleasure! On the contrary, it is a deep and heavy responsibility. No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?”

 I suppose that the people killed and injured in the Doctors Without Borders hospital made the wrong decision to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. As the deservedly despised Jeb Bush said about the Oregon shootings: "Stuff happens."

It must be hard out there for a Commander in Chief being expected to ask that Congress enact gun control laws, when he is simultaneously demanding that they allocate billions of dollars for guns, bombs and Predator Drones for his global adventures!  How hard it must be for him to castigate others for offering bland thoughts and prayers when he himself offers nothing but bland thoughts and prayers.

It seems that the only lives that count are American lives. Only American murder victims are looked upon as human beings who have been denied the chance to hope, dream, grow up, or grow old. When foreign people are killed, they are coldly downgraded to "the civilians affected by this incident." 

It could have been worse. Obama has at least bestowed upon them a bare minimum of humanity. His generals are still sticking to their own sanguine Collateral Damage depersonalization: Stuff happened.

Obama has long had a built-in auto-response to both types of murders. Domestic shooters are troubled young men who get hold of guns despite their mental health issues. Military shooters are patriots who often get accepted into the armed forces despite their mental health issues. And if they didn't have any mental health issues before they joined up, their chances of developing them skyrocket once the government issues them lethal weaponry and orders them to use it.

 A year before the Sandy Hook massacre that had Obama weeping on TV, an American soldier named Bobby Bales went on a shooting rampage in Afghanistan, young children among his 16 victims. Obama's response was boilerplate-similar to his reaction to the hospital bombing: “This incident is tragic and shocking, and does not represent the exceptional character of our military and the respect that the United States has for the people of Afghanistan."

 Many of the young male perpetrators of mass mayhem, both military and domestic, can't even remember a day when this country has not been at war. Obama himself has grotesquely dubbed them the "9/11 Generation."

He said last year,

America endures in the courage of the men and women who serve under our flag. Over more than a decade of war, this 9/11 Generation has answered our country’s call, and three months from now, our combat mission in Afghanistan will come to an end. Today, we honor all who have made the ultimate sacrifice these 13 years, more than 6,800 American patriots.  And we give thanks to those who serve in harm’s way to keep our country safe and meet the threats of our time.

I guess an American bomber killing children in a hospital yesterday was not part of any combat mission, seeing as how Obama announced that the war would be over by the end of 2014.

Safely Enduring

 
When a mass shooting occurs in America, Obama calls it carnage. When a mass shooting or bombing at the hands of Americans occurs elsewhere in the world, Obama calls it "an incident." Or, if the circumstances are especially egregious, as the attack on Doctors Without Borders surely was, he magnanimously upgrades it to a Tragedy. 

If Barack Obama worked as strenuously to arm-twist and bribe and threaten members of Congress over gun control as he arm-twisted, bribed and threatened them into giving him fast-track authority to negotiate the corporate coups known as free trade deals, then the domestic weapons reform he purports to crave might have a smidgen of a chance.

The truth is that Obama didn't make a peep about gun control until after the Sandy Hook shootings. And even those noises were tepid and belated. Instead of immediately sending a bill to Congress, he named a blue ribbon panel to leisurely discuss and debate gun violence. By the time lawmakers got around to voting on an actual bill, the NRA had attacked with its own threats and bribes, and the national grief and shock and outrage had been safely diluted.

The time to act is in the immediate aftermath of an atrocity.

But on the December 2012 day of the Sandy Hook shootings that killed 27 people, mostly children,  Press Secretary Jay Carney stopped the impetus right in its tracks. "This is not the day," he sanctimoniously told the nation, "to discuss gun laws."

And it's never a good day for them to discuss stopping their wars. International carnage is the only thing still inflating their puffed-up economy. Domestic carnage by way of more than 200 mass shootings this year alone is only a symptom of the larger American disease.

The real epidemic is suicide. One hundred Americans kill themselves every single day. But universal mental health care is not in our future, because the wealthy don't want to pay the taxes necessary to fund such preventive programs.

Economist John Komlos writes:

 This must be the moment to come to our senses and set entirely new priorities for our society in vigorously confronting the mass murder epidemic head on. We will never be able to lead decent lives unless we are capable of reigning in the terror at home, because we will continue to live with constant anxiety.

Instead of vacuous slogans of growing the economy and ineffective lamentations about the vicious murders, which will do absolutely nothing to lower the murder rate, we should set ourselves the explicit goal of reducing mass murders in the same way President John F. Kennedy declared the goal of reaching the moon within a decade. Ask the parents of the Sandy Hook Elementary School disaster if they’d agree with such a national mobilization at any price. We cannot do that on borrowed money. The only way to accomplish such a goal is by paying for it through additional taxes and a reduction in the conspicuous consumption of the super-rich. There is no getting around that.

Wealth inequality and the replacement of democracy with an oligarchy is hazardous to our health. The super-rich are a clear and present danger to all of us. 

 The lives of American citizens, Afghan citizens, all citizens, depend upon stopping the pathological rich. Eighty multi-billionaires now own half the wealth of the entire planet.

We can't afford them. It's time for a global wealth tax. It's the only way to cure them and their political operatives of their violent addiction to money and power and death.

Racist War Propaganda

At first I thought this was the trailer for another Star Wars sequel when I saw it on TV over the weekend. Guess again:

Notice all those boxes of "Aid"' on the assault vehicles? Do they contain blood money for the relatives of the collateral damage? Bribes for the puppet dictators? Wads of cash for private contractors? Snickers?

This recruiting film is obviously aimed directly at a whole generation of  desperate unemployed and underemployed people -- and judging from the leading man, specifically at  African-American teenagers, whose unemployment rate is a staggering 42%. It is just another example of institutionalized racism, what author Michelle Alexander calls The New Jim Crow. The main character in the commercial is shown racing toward oblivion, the better to escape the chaos of life on the streets  and  NRA-enabled gun murders at the hands of vigilantes or a long stint at a for-profit prison for a petty drug conviction. The voice-over booms over the Dolby soundtrack: "Where chaos looms, the few emerge. Marines move toward the sounds of tyranny, injustice and despair — with the courage and resolve to silence them. By ending conflict, instilling order and helping those who can’t help themselves, Marines face down the threats of our time.”

The solution that our corporate-run government offers is not to abolish racial profiling by police thugs and civilian watch commanders, but to expand it for even more profit for themselves. Escape injustice and despair here by embracing it over there! And we'll even give you your own gun. "Which way would you run?" asks the recruiting commercial.

Besides the blatant racism inherent in this film, it also presumes geographical ignorance on the part of its target audience. The defunding of public education does serve a purpose, after all. These movie Marines storm the Normandy beaches and magically, immediately arrive in Afghanistan to rampage across the desert in a crusade of aggressive humanitarianism. War is Peace.

Leave it to the military industrial complex to partner with Hollywood to produce this overblown piece of pricey propaganda, and then waste even more taxpayer money to run it on the cable TV shows we already pay to watch. They have no shame because they are psychopaths.