Spaced Odyssey

Desert Storm and Enduring Freedom were bad enough.  But who the hell came up with the moniker "Operation Odyssey Dawn" for what could either be the beginning of World War III or just a quickie multinational air raid lasting a few short days and costing the many millions of dollars we apparently have although we're broke?

Hmmm....What to Call a Temporary Humanitarian War?

Somebody from the Department of the Navy came up with it, apparently, but nobody is taking credit. Or has yet been fired. According to MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell, it was chosen by a convoluted process of alphabetizing or the Dewey Decimal System or something.  It was something like a Mad-Libs game in which the words that tell the ultimate story are chosen at random, make no sense, and have a bunch of drunken partiers collapsing in laughter.  Only, there's nothing really funny about war.  Anyway, O'Donnell is running a contest to find another name, any name, to replace Operation Odyssey Dawn.  Something that doesn't sound like psychedelic dish detergent or the name a stoned New Ager would pick for a first-born daughter.

Among the  early votes are Obama's Dud, Obama's Downfall, Oddly Disingenuous, Offal Dense (check out O'Donnell's blog, The Last Word, for the full list and details on how to enter). Meantime, my suggestion is just shortening the damn thing to Operation O.D.  As in, I am overdosing on the wars, the CNN coverage of the wars, the CNN doomsday soundtrack of the wars, the CNN bursting bomb graphics of the wars, the sight of Richard Engel at the wars (who by the looks of him hasn't slept for two months), and President Obama flying down to Rio as the curtain rises on the(undeclared) wars. Hey, but something good has come out of it.  For the first time, House Speaker John Boehner has uttered the word "humanitarian." I guess when it comes to cutting funding for WIC and NPR, that's not being inhumane - it's just being fiscally responsible. But when it comes to raining down bombs and firing missiles into North Africa?  Wow!  It just doesn't get any more humane than that!

One more thing - can somebody please decide how to spell that dictator's name before he is killed, leaves, or lives to see the new dawn of another massacring day? I have read Qaddafi, Khaddafy, Gaddafi, and ad infinitum.  How about just plain K-Daffy - or Godawful? 

A Virtual Gated Community

If you are a New York Times subscriber, registered user or commenter, the richest man on the planet owns a piece of you. And if you plan on forking over between $185 and $300 a year in order to scale the digital edition's upcoming paywall, you’ll be contributing even more to the vast fortune of one Carlos Slim.

The Richest Man in the Universe

The well-fed Slim is not a country singer. He is a Mexican businessman who not only has retained his number one spot on the Forbes list of billionaires, he widened the gap considerably last year, accumulating an additional $20.5 billion to bring his total fortune to $74 billion.  He has far surpassed both Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in accumulated wealth. But unlike these two richest Americans, he has not given away huge chunks of his fortune. According to Forbes, his monopolistic ownership of Latin America’s biggest wireless company accounts for two-thirds of his wealth.

Slim is the single largest shareholder of the Times after the controlling Sulzberger family.  When the paper suffered near-catastrophic advertising losses after the financial meltdown of 2009, Slim came to the rescue with a $250 million loan at a near-usurious interest rate of 14 percent.

The Times announced last year that it planned to get out from under the burdensome debt three years early by paying Slim back in 2012… soon after it starts implementing its controversial new paywall. 

At the time of the loan, the NY Post had a field day. “Robber Baron Saves the Times!” the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid gloated. “He has expanded his riches in a poor country, where the minimum wage is 50 cents an hour, by charging excessively high telephone rates at his near-monopoly.”

Slate said the Slim /Times venture has transformed him from robber baron into robber patron. The billionaire, who has been accused of being the main cause of so many illegal immigrants crossing into the United States to escape his iron monopolistic fist, has repeatedly denied wanting to buy The Times outright.

His current stake in the newspaper, including his initial investment, stock options and loan interest, is estimated at about 17 percent. Tellingly, and curiously, he has no voting rights on the board or input into editorial content (or so we are told).

The Times currently earns an estimated $3 million annually in digital ad revenue from its online edition. So, combined with the compound interest on his loan, Slim’s share of that pie alone is probably close to half a million.... Chump change for somebody like Slim.

The comments sections of Times articles also contain digital advertising.  Since those of us who write frequently on these boards contribute to the paper’s bottom line by generating user clicks in the tens of thousands, it is reasonable to assume that we, individually, contribute our own small share to the bank account of Senor Slim.  Hmm… how could I be making his life more pleasant?  It’s fun to imagine that I paid for a spoonful of caviar at his latest yacht party, or maybe donated an hour’s wages for one of the army of private security guards he employs to keep his imposing hide safe in his lawless, impoverished country. And it’ll get even better once we start paying at least $15 a month to continue the privilege of writing for free in the comments sections.  It’s a double dipping win-win for Carlos, and we’ll be helping to get the Sulzbergers out of hock early too.  The least they could do is thank us. (Don’t hold your breath).

Maintaining Him in the Lifestyle to Which He is Accustomed

Details of the paywall and the pricing rationale remain confusing.  Theoretically, we will get 20 free articles a month before we are asked to pony up. However, readers can sidestep the paywall by linking to Times articles from any number of other sites. And how the Times will track its frequent  users is also a subject of debate.  It is fairly easy to bypass paywalls by clearing your internet browser of cookies every so often, so the sites have no record of your visits. But since The Times requires user registration to recommend articles and post comments, it is unknown if the newspaper will track users through log-in information.

My biggest gripe is not about the subscription plan itself (newspaper reporters and editors have to eat too), but about the amount being charged.  Fifteen bucks is a lot if you’re on a fixed income or low income or no income. Several readers and commenters have written to say they will not be able to afford the rates. I agree with others who suggest that a fee of $5 a month would not only be more affordable to readers, but would probably also generate many more subscribers and more profits for the Times… and Senor Robber Baron-Patron. 

 Perhaps most important to me is that the  pricey new paywall will effectively stifle valuable input from the increasing numbers of indigent people in our country. Reader comments will increasingly reflect the views of the more affluent or at least the financially solvent among us. And how about readers from overseas who may have even fewer assets? (I am thinking of the many readers from Egypt who contributed during the recent revolution).  Personally, I would like to continue hearing from real people who are actually going through a foreclosure, have been out of work for two years and counting, and who lie awake at night wondering how they’re going to pay their next electric bill or forestall bankruptcy because of illness. The Commentariat, as my friend Marie Burns the Constant Weader calls it, is a valuable part of journalism and should be represented by people from all walks of life.  The paywall will be an effective Wall of Silence, a closed, gated community to shut out people who are already shut out enough as it is.

Homeland Security Sec. Janet Napolitano recently announced plans to tear down the border fence between Mexico and the USA. We have enough barriers, enough walls. We don’t need another one. Me oyos, Senor Slim?

Fences Don't Always Make Good Neighbors

Duck and Cover

The Suburban Landscape

Back in the days before Google maps and TomTom, people were taken aback by my verbal directions when visiting me for the first time. “Come all the way to the top of the hill and make a right where you see the big nuclear warning siren,” I’d say blithely.  After about a decade, I’d gotten used to looking at the towering eyesore built just a few hundred yards from my house.  But I never did get used to the ear-splitting, seemingly endless four-minute-long wail that would literally rattle the windows and send my cats into kniption fits about once every few months or so.

Each of the 172 sirens in four New York counties is supposed to warn of impending nuclear disaster within a 50 mile radius of the Indian Point Power Plant – which the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has just named the most dangerous facility in the country, due to its long history of unplanned radioactive gaseous burps and leakage problems and a transformer explosion and proximity to a fault line. It’s not so much the earthquake risk – it’s the fact that the aging facility was built with no protections against earthquakes of any magnitude.  What a shock.

The siren’s sole message is to tell us to turn on our TVs and radios for further instructions and evacuation routes.  Basically, the only evacuation instruction is to get in the car and head north. Quick.  Fallout shelters are few and far between.  Town hall basements, that sort of thing.  Nice thought, except that along with Indian Point, even the warning sirens have had a history of malfunctioning more often than not.

Indian Point’s license is due to expire in the next few years, and the plant operator. Entergy, is seeking a 20-year extension of its operating permit. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, long an opponent of the plant, is using the NRC report and Japan crisis to renew his call for shutting it down for good. The only trouble is, the state has no plan on how to replace the electricity that Indian Point now generates to an estimated 25 percent of New York City and its immediate environs.

 “Gov. Cuomo’s post-closure plans are laid out in one sentence: ‘We must find and implement alternative sources of energy generation and transmission to replace the electricity currently supplied by the Indian Point facility’ he wrote in his 170-page Cleaner Greener New York report.” (Rockland Journal News, 3/16/11).

Without replacing the energy provided by Indian Point, experts warn, the existing grids will become overloaded, and we can expect roving blackouts to prevent a full system crash.  And even with that precaution, we may experience a full system crash.

What I don’t hear being talked about during this latest nuclear power plant debate is the danger of transporting nuclear waste on our crumbling highway and bridge system.  The NRC and NTSB have strict standards, of course, for the transport of hazardous materials. Here is part of a lesson plan they provide to schools about how they keep us safe: "The spent fuel must be shipped in heavy casks, weighing from 20 to 100 tons, depending on the mode of transportation (truck, barge, or train) but all must pass a series of severe tests, such as: A collision with an immovable object, like being dropped thirty feet onto reinforced concrete; being dropped 40 inches onto a steel spike; being burned in a hot fire for 30 minutes; submersion in water for eight hours."

I'm no scientist, but what would happen if a tractor trailer carrying spent fuel ended up hundreds of feet below water for more than eight hours?  Given the abysmal state of our infrastructure, I think we should worry more about collapsing bridges than short-range impalations on spikes.

I'll never forget an interview I did with the director of my county’s Civil Defense Department in 1979 after the Three Mile Island disaster. The population was in near-panic mode, and my main assignment was to find out where to go, the location of fallout shelters in the area, symptoms of radiation poisoning, and so on.  Besides scoring the scoop that my county building had a previously unpublicized luxurious underground bunker designed to house and feed bigwig officials in the event of a nuclear disaster (complete with decontamination showers and a cafeteria with wall-length murals of peaceful outdoor scenes to stave off claustrophobia), the director told me about unregulated nuclear waste being transported over the Hudson River bridges by sleep-deprived truckers. We should be more worried about the nukes on our roadways than in our power plants, he warned.

Here is the official NRC map of where the nukes travel, by road and by rail. Nowadays, by law, the big rigs have to display warning logos prominently on their vehicles.  No doubt, seeing these graphics will keep us all safe as we careen down the interstates at a legal 65 mph.



See America First



Honk if You Like My Driving!







Mr. Atom, Cuddly Mascot of the NRC

 Meanwhile, the Republican Congress wants to deciminate the Environmental Protection Agency and its ability to monitor our air quality, and President Obama takes a quick few seconds  to tell us to help Japan as he fills out his March Madness basketball picks.  But at least we no longer have a president who talks about “nukular” crap. That would be just too much to bear.

Obama Convicts Loughner Before Trial

Somebody didn't vet President Obama's milquetoast Arizona Daily Star op-ed on gun control last weekend:

"But one clear and terrible fact remains. A man our Army rejected as unfit for service; a man one of our colleges deemed too unstable for studies; a man apparently bent on violence, was able to walk into a store and buy a gun.

He used it to murder six people and wound 13 others. And if not for the heroism of bystanders and a brilliant surgical team, it would have been far worse." -- Barack Obama, Arizona Star, March 13, 2011.

Hmm.... one of the first things I was taught in Journalism 101 is that you never, ever categorically state that someone committed a crime.  You write something to the effect of "Joe Blow was arrested on charges of public lewdness"  or "Barry allegedly passed on the right, causing the accident."

Obama just succeeded in tainting any jury pool called to consider the fate of Loughner.  This could be a gift to his defense lawyer.  How could anyone get a fair trial once the President of the United States has already declared him a murderer?

I give props to MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell for pointing out the op-ed's glaring faux pas on his show last night. I am really surprised it hasn't been picked up by any other media outlets -- at least I haven't seen it reported anywhere else in all my internet news travels.

This all leads me to believe that Obama didn't even write this plodding, talking-pointy, bullet-pointy op-ed. He may not have even read it.  As a graduate of Harvard Law, he should have caught the mistake. 

Sounds like a few heads need to roll besides that of a State Department spokesman who speaks out against the inhumane treatment of Bradley Manning.

Chasing the Devil Out of Chase

A group of ministers stormed JP MorganChase on Park Avenue in New York on Friday to both perform an exorcism and close their accounts.  Although they waved their crucifixes with aplomb, and sprinkled holy water in an attempt to cast out the devil of greed, the banking behemoth was still standing as of Monday. No credible reports of CEO Jamie Dimon suffering attacks of pea-soup projectile vomiting or head-spinning have yet been received.



Jamie Demon Dimon

Chase, the nation’s third largest mortgage servicer, has modified the loans of only six percent of the New Yorkers requesting such relief in the past year. Out of more than a thousand city homeowners seeking help from Chase under the federal government’s Home Affordability Modification Program, more than 80 percent of the applicants never even got a reply from Chase.  Lloyd Blankfein. of that other mega-bank, Goldman Sachs, once infamously said that his Wall Street house was doing the "Lord’s work." But now the people who are really doing the Lord’s work are as mad as hell, and they aren’t taking it anymore.

It’s common wisdom that not only has HAMP been a bust , but the big banks are still acting like Mafia shakedown artists in foreclosing illegally and utterly thumbing their noses at the struggling homeowners the program was designed to help. Documents released today by the hacking group “Anonymous” reveal that Bank of America has been running a scam which forces its own expensive insurance on mortgagees without their knowledge.  Emails provided by a BofA whistleblower seem to indicate an effort to cover up the scam from the prying eyes of auditors.  A nonpartisan, populist activism group called Ampedstatus.com has recently morphed into a social networking site to organize anti-Wall Street demonstrations and nonviolent resistance against the oligarchy.  Protest events at several branches of the Federal Reserve are being planned for later this month.

Our government is not watching out for our interests, so somebody has to. President Obama is not about to come out on the side of the people when his White House is stuffed to the rafters with Wall Street insiders. His new chief of staff, Bill Daley, is fresh from a stint as one of the head honchos of JPMorgan Chase. So what if he temporarily divested himself of his bank stock?  That revolving door from government to the Military Industrial Complex and K Street is spinning apace, and the boundaries between private and public have become so blurred as to be nonexistent.

The small group of church people and their followers sang “We Shall Overcome” and quoted Martin Luther King before they peacefully performed their symbolic exorcism, entered the bank and closed out their accounts.  Rev. Allen Ramirez of the Brookville Reformed Church passionately shouted, “We are here to sprinkle holy water on the Evil Empire!"

The Hell That Fraud Has Created (Dore engraving from Dante's Inferno)

That there is a special place in hell reserved for banksters is not a new idea. Dante assigned the penultimate recess of his fiery pit – the Eighth Circle – to the greedy and the fraudulent. One of its denizens is Geryon, the demon of avarice. He has a smiling human face, so we don’t immediately notice his grasping claws and stinging scorpion tail. Dante knew his banking industry, all right.  It hasn’t changed in the 700 years since he lived and without regulation, it never will. This is Medievalism Redux.

The only cure for avarice is outside intervention. Exorcism, of course, has some pithy symbolic value. It’s a nice theatrical segue to the mass demonstrations, recalls, elections, public exposure and relentless drumbeat of discontent that grows ever louder with each passing day.

We. Have. Had. Enough.

A Garden of NeoCon Horrors*

You’d think Paul Wolfowitz would have the good sense to keep quiet, but as Maureen Dowd wrote in her column on Sunday, he has no shame. Neo-Cons, like all fanatics and preachers of moral rectitude, do not know silence, nor do they have the remorse chromosome in their genetic codes. They are not known for the qualities of soul-searching and self-examination. If they ever admitted they were wrong about Iraq, their heads might explode.

And, as long as complicent cable news outlets and newspapers are willing to give Wolfowitz and his cohort free airtime and space, they will never be silenced. They may have left public office, but they still wield inexplicable power in the court of public opinion. Like their cousins in radical conservatism, the Tea Partiers, the Neo-Cons thrive on fear-mongering and outright lies. They make millions of dollars on their ghostwritten fictional memoirs, and rise to the top of bestseller lists. Somebody out there is buying what they sell.

For example, Wolfowitz told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria last Sunday that the families of the Pan-Am bombing victims had demanded money during the Bush Administration's negotiations with Libya over its removal from the official terrorism list. Wolfowitz admitted he had no proof to back up his claim, but he said it anyway. (The Pan-Am families, of course, have vehemently denied his allegations). But no matter – Wolfowitz and other relics of the Bush era seem to have a peculiar talent for staying front and center. Do you suppose it’s because we are all so in awe that none of them has ever been prosecuted for war crimes, and we are irresistibly drawn by the sheer chutzpah of career criminals who get away with it?. Or, does the mainstream media still remain convinced now, as they were then., that Iraq was a grand adventure and a rousing success despite a few “setbacks?”

Now. Wolfowitz is calling for aggressive military intervention in Libya, and was given valuable Wall Street Journal op-ed space to make his case.  Several months ago, he and Bush torture enabler John Yoo lambasted the decision to try terrorists on our soil, or to close Gitmo, in a high-profile New York Times op-ed piece.   Somebody obviously listened to them. Attorney General Holder long ago walked back on plans for New York City trials as perfect symbolic venues for 9/11 terrorism payback. Gitmo is still very much there. All trials will now be by military tribunal, not in civilian courts.

 Maureen Dowd suggested in her column that Wolfowitz should just go away and take up horticulture. Any NeoCon Garden would surely include the toxic herb Wolfbane, which is an apt name and has the unpleasant side-effect of causing too much nervous excitement ( I think W. might have been given an infusion of that particular herb to psych him up for invading Iraq).

 And Wolfowitz has always cultivated bleeding hearts, which look lovely, but their pretty name belies the fact that every part of them is poisonous. The Bush crowd sold the nation on its bleeding heart doctrine in the run-up to invasion - by ginning up a lie about WMDs and then spreading vaunted, unwanted and nonexistent Democracy where it smelled money to be made for the Military Industrial complex.

Of course, there's always been a fair amount of the noxious Dumbcane in the NeoCon botanica. That's another toxic weed that is the devil to get rid of once it takes hold. Just when you think you it's gone, it keeps popping up, year after year.  It  thrives especially well in the moist unhealthy air and swampy soil around Washington, D.C. 

 * This post was originally submitted as a "comment" to the NY Times. It was rejected, probably because it was deemed too abusive.  How can you be too abusive to Paul Wolfowitz?  Other posts openly called for his demise.  Wow, life is so unfair.  

Bullies and Pulpits



"Commander in Cute" - This is Getting Scary




Lately, Barack Obama has been acting more like the president of the PTA than the president of the United States.  Instead of leader of the free world  he’s been in Daddy in Chief mode, frenetically hopping from one school to the next to push for public/private partnership in his “Race to the Top” initiative.  Instead of leading the battle of the budget, he’s talking about dealing with playground bullies.  Instead of condemning the Republican assault on unions and the McCarthyesque hearings against Muslims, he's sent out an email called “Commander in Cute.” The official White House photo Thursday was of Barack hoisting an adorable four-month-old in the air. It was a parody of a campaign photo. This guy has never stopped running. On average, he spent every other day on Air Force One last year, crisscrossing the country for town halls and backyard schmoozes.



And we thought George Bush was not up for the job with all his brush-clearing jaunts to the Crawford ranch.  Where the hell is Obama?  This week, he’s played a game of football in the Oval Office with the Australian prime minister. Today he’s hosting a White House Conference on Bullying with Michelle. Don’t get me wrong, I hate bullying.  One of my children was a bullying victim 15 years ago, when it was still considered just a normal part of growing up, and my complaints were not taken seriously by school administrators. Now that cyberbullying has started causing kids to actually kill themselves, we are finally addressing it on a national level. But is it necessary for the President to devote what seems like an entire day to it? 



He Likes to be the Only Adult in the Room



I am beginning to think of the President as a figurehead or a public relations front guy. He is kind of like Prince William or Prince Charles, appearing at one charity event, one factory, one school, one photo-op after the other.  He is a Royal who poses, but does not truly govern. He does not lead. His own Party is beginning to complain about his total failure to deal what appears to be an imminent government shutdown.

“President Obama is the only person in the country with the clout to reframe the debate on public sector unions in a more sensible manner, and he seems to have wrapped himself in a radio silence,” writes Sasha Abramsky today in Salon.com. “….he’s not only the president, he’s also a first rate orator with an almost preternatural ability to get people to see things his way when he really wants them to.”

When he wants them to…. There’s the rub. I don’t think Obama really wants people to see anything any particular way, unless it has to do with him or the corporations which he serves.  Remember his groundbreaking speech on race during the 2008 campaign, after the Rev. Jeremiah Wright kerfuffle?  That wasn’t really about his concern over racial inequality. That was Barack, soaring rhapsodic, to save his own candidacy. We have not heard one thing about race from his lips since he became president. Not one word about poverty, even though a quarter of all children are officially poor. Not one word about gun control since the Tucson Massacre two months ago. Not one word about the illegal vote in Wisconsin destroying collective bargaining. Not one word since Feb. 17  when he made a non-committal remark that Governor Walker appeared to be assaulting the unions. I rejoiced when I heard that the Organizing for America wing of the Democratic National Committee had gotten involved in the Madison protests. I despaired when I heard that Obama caved when House Speaker Boehner demanded that he back off, and he obliged by angrily ordering his renegade organizers away from the scene.

So, when Abramsky writes: “Mr. President – Use the Damn Bully Pulpit!” I can only reply that Obama will never do any such thing. Theodore Roosevelt coined that phrase when he was president, and he was referring to the use of the White House as a platform from which to advocate policies and agendas. A century ago, “bully” had a different meaning than it does today. Far from being a perjorative term for an abusive person, it used to mean “great” or “superb.”



The Original Bull Moose



Obama fits neither definition of the word.  He is not an in-your-face bully in the vein of Teddy, or Chris Christie, or LBJ. Nor is he superb.  He's an empty suit in front of twin teleprompters, uttering so much canned pablum that even infants in photo-ops and his staunchest supporters are beginning to tire of it.