Comical Plutocrat Blows Smoke At Greenwald

When it comes to the latest conspiracy theories, I usually back away out of pure rational instinct. But the smear campaign currently in full swing against Glenn Greenwald simply reeks of a conspiracy between the government and the corporate press.

The smears against Edward Snowden started predictably and immediately. But the campaign against the messenger of the messenger took awhile, mainly because Snowden is off the radar at the moment and Glenn Greenwald's public profile has been rising by the day. David Gregory got the ball rolling last Sunday, and landed in the gutter. (see this excellent Frank Rich smackdown.) Today, New York Daily News reporter Dareh Gregorian pitched a 90 mph spitball aimed straight at Greenwald's head. But rather than beaning Greenwald, he missed the mark by a mile. He has not yet learned the first lesson of the journalistic smear: always use subtle language and weasel words to make your nasty points. Judging from the outraged reader comments on the News site, Gregorian's ham-handed salvo has boomeranged big-time and come back to hit him in his own smirking face.

I won't bother to repeat what Gregorian wrote, which Greenwald has already discounted in a much calmer manner than I ever could, simply expressing bemusement that the Daily News and the New York Times both seemed to have mysteriously come up with his tax records at exactly the same time.

All you have to do is Google Dareh Gregorian and the dots start connecting all by themselves. He is the son of Vartan Gregorian, one of New York City's leading plutocrats. Daddy is president of the Carnegie Corporation, coming from a long line of previous stints in the academic-industrial complex.  He has served in, or been honored by, every recent presidential administration, beginning with George H.W. Bush. Since President Obama appointed Vartan to the White House Commission on Fellowships, did he also commission Junior to be just the fellow to smear Greenwald? Inquiring conspiracist minds want to know.

How Junior ended up on the staff of a New York City tabloid instead of on the august pages of the New York Times would be anybody's guess, until you actually read his drivel. And judging from a snarky piece in the New York Observer about his 2003 engagement (to the daughter of a New York Times socialite columnist) the younger Gregorian gives a whole new depth to elite shallowness:

 “I’m attracted to talented people, and she’s incredibly talented-crackerjack and on the ball,” Mr. Gregorian said. “Very enthusiastic, very dogged. She had a natural ability that came out very quickly.” And her big brown eyes didn’t hurt, either. “I spent a lot of time watching what he did, because he was really good,” Ms. Haberman said.

She told her father about the strapping coworker, and he praised Gregorian senior, whom he’d met on the Manhattan dinner-party circuit throughout the years (Ms. Haberman had never heard of him). Then, one night, it occurred to her that when it came to her feelings for her comely co-worker-well, as her Dad might’ve put it, she’d buried the lead. “I was just seized with the wind to call him,” she said. “I told him that I adored him.” Fortunately, young Mr. Gregorian reciprocated her feelings. “I knew I wanted to marry her even before we started going out,” he said.

They’re planning the wedding, at an as-yet-to-be-determined downtown location, from their east midtown one-bedroom, where his comic-book collection- Captain America is his favorite-takes up half the closet. When Ms. Haberman left the Post last fall, she brought with her a Wonder Woman desk figurine that Mr. Gregorian had given her. “It’s funny now, because she’ll come home and say: ‘This thing happened today! But I can’t tell you about it till tomorrow,’” he said. “We have a little Hepburn-Tracy thing going on.”

Indeed, they’re both still puffin’ away on cancer sticks as if it were the 1940′s. “The Mayor has given me repeated crap about it,” Ms. Haberman said with a sigh. “I smoke Marlboro Ultra Lights; he smokes Camel Ultra Lights. It’s so cute. We’ll die together.”

You really can't make this stuff up. A middle-aged hack with a comic book collection and a stinky smoking habit is handpicked by the Powers That Be to take a pile of thin dirt on a columnist who broke an embarrassing story about them and hurl it into the wind. You can almost smell the desperation. It reeks like a pack of unfiltered Camels.

When I last checked, there was still no New York Times story on how the dastardly Mr. Greenwald once reneged on a student loan and still owes the IRS money. Gregorian, of course, never needed to take out a student loan in his life. And scion of the American Aristocracy that he is, he enjoys tax breaks the rest of us can only dream about.

This is just the latest indication that L'Affaire Snowden is, to the top .001%, simply an icky manifestation of the Class War of the proles against them, rather than the epic outing of the neo-fascist corporate spy state that is keeping them all in power.

Some Climates Never Change

The graphics couldn't have been better -- or worse, depending on your point of view. There was the normally unflappable, cool president sweating like a pig. When I first saw the photo below, I actually thought he was weeping in remorse over his fateful choice to preside over a spy state, with the resulting loss of all his international friends. No such luck. In the midst of the current climate of authoritarianism and racism and xenophobia, he was simply and belatedly waxing rhapsodic about the actual climate. Suffice it to say that he added volumes to the hot air surrounding him. For what he said and didn't say (in other words, an analysis of his gifted doubletalk), here's a good piece from Common Dreams.

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So much is going on this week that even the national media can't fall into their usual stenographic lockstep; they were running all over the place playing Musical Leads. CNN's Neocon maven Erin Burnett was still stuck on desperado fugitive (as opposed to heroic whistleblower) Edward Snowden -- adding nothing about why his own government is hunting him down like an animal. MSNBC pivoted to the Supreme Court's trashing of the Voting Rights Act, with only snippets of Trayvon Martin trial coverage. My local CBS affiliate highlighted the impending funeral of James Gandolfini, combined with a rogue tsunami that hit the Jersey shore.

Meanwhile, the impending security state tsunami known as Immigration Reform was pretty much buried beneath the detritus. Whenever you hear the word Reform, just remember that it is a synonym for creative destruction. So in case you were thinking that immigration reform was going to be some sort of humanitarian outpouring of good will to the tired, the poor, the huddled masses, you'd better think again. The actual title of the impending Senate bill should be "How Do We Hate Hispanics? Let Us Count the Ways."

We will likely be spending billions of our taxpayer dollars to construct a full-fledged militarized zone at the southern border, complete with a 700-mile long double fence, a fleet of drones, and one border patrol agent stationed every thousand yards. The drones and the cops will probably outnumber the population. And to further attract the rabid Tea Party xenophobes of the House, the  vast majority of senators also agreed that workers awaiting membership in the Exceptional American Citizens Club will have their FICA and Medicare contributions confiscated for at least a decade, and that everybody will now be subject to random search and seizure as far as 100 miles north of the border. Immigrants not fluent in English will be excluded from the long slog to citizenship. (An excellent piece by Chris Hayes provides the little-noticed grim details.) 

Erick Garcia (no relation) an undocumented immigrant active in the Presente.Org movement, sent me an email this week to voice his disgust at the punitive nature of the proposed immigration legislation:

Every time a cop car passes by me in Arizona, my heart races. I've seen too many of my friends and family living in fear, not knowing for certain if they'll come home to the people they love each day or face deportation. Nobody knows we need to fix our immigration system more than me. 

But as a DREAMer, I'm terrified about what's happening in Congress....  This is what would need to happen before immigrants are given any hope of legalization: we'd need far more agents at the border than troops in Afghanistan, we'd spend billions of dollars on radar surveillance similar to what's used in Iraq, and we'd double the cost of unnecessary border enforcement to $30 billion. This, even though border crossings are at or below zero and experts say our border is more secure than ever.

 So with bipartisan friends like the Senate, who needs racist enemies like the Ku Klux Kourt? (credit, Greg Palast) Remember, the Senate immigration vote is only an opening salvo. The rabid House no doubt will make it even more sadistically sweet. Private prisons that charge rent to the undocumented is probably on their agenda, if they do go so far as to allow a vote. The only question remaining is why anybody in their right mind would even want to sneak over into the Land of the Drones and the Home of the Craven. You can work, but you'll get no benefit from the taxes you pay. And thanks to the Supreme Beings in their depressing black robes, you may not be allowed to vote even when you do finally get certified as a genu-wine side of prime American beef.

The White House pronounces itself perfectly okay with the latest draconian immigration amendments. And why wouldn't it? Militarization creep has been creeping everywhere you look. New York City stops and frisks minority people so many times that the number of stops has actually outnumbered the entire minority male population of the Big Apple. Muslims, too, are currently suing the city in federal court over the NYPD surveillance program.

Most of us, for the time being, are "merely" having our phone records and internet searches swept up and stored. But how much longer before it gets physical and we, too, become too cowed to even walk on the streets? Of course, if you frequent airports, you already know all about the TSA grope and the body rape-scan. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-Wall Street), of the Seven or Eight Immigration Gangstas, did once suggest similar pat-downs at all subway stations, but his proposal went nowhere. Maybe next year.

 The only people not creeped out by the chipping away of our civil rights are the politicians and the pundits and the secrecy industrial complex which stands to get very, very rich in order to keep us "safe." And quiet. And afraid.

The planet is warming up, yet the hearts and minds of the political leadership couldn't possibly get any colder.

Obama's Enemies List

Richard Nixon was a paranoiac with a scowl and a stash of expletive-laden revenge porn audio tapes.

Barack Obama is a paranoiac with a charm-offensive grin and more whistleblower prosecutions under his belt than in all other previous administrations combined. Even a self-defensive meeting with civil libertarians on Friday afternoon about the recent uproar over the government spying upon its own citizens was held under an unnecessary veil of secrecy.

And, as McClatchy Newspapers reveals, there is now even an Obamian version of Nixon's Enemies List, called the Insider Threat Program:

Even before a former U.S. intelligence contractor exposed the secret collection of Americans’ phone records, the Obama administration was pressing a government-wide crackdown on security threats that requires federal employees to keep closer tabs on their co-workers and exhorts managers to punish those who fail to report their suspicions.

This goes for all federal employees, not just those in the spy agencies. In the Social Security Administration. In the Department of Agriculture. In the Education Department. Each agency of the government is turning into its own little Stasi. I am trying to imagine what kind of spying might be going on in my local Social Security office, for example. Is one worker falling under suspicion for being too sympathetic to applicants, or maybe once forgot to demand that last unit of identification as proof of existence? Or, is Obama's Insider Threat manifesto just institutionalizing the usual petty backstabbing office politics?

Actually, it's a lot worse. Because if one of your co-workers with an ax to grind snitches on you, you can theoretically be prosecuted under the Espionage Act. It looks as though J. Edgar Obama wants to raise his record of whistleblowing prosecutions far, far above the current measly seven (counting Edward Snowden.):

Government documents reviewed by McClatchy illustrate how some agencies are using that latitude to pursue unauthorized disclosures of any information, not just classified material. They also show how millions of federal employees and contractors must watch for “high-risk persons or behaviors” among co-workers and could face penalties, including criminal charges, for failing to report them. Leaks to the media are equated with espionage.   

“Hammer this fact home . . . leaking is tantamount to aiding the enemies of the United States,” says a June 1, 2012, Defense Department strategy for the program that was obtained by McClatchy.

And that's the gist of it, folks. Our government considers all of us enemies of the state for even daring to ask what they're doing in all our names.

I can only imagine what it must be like to work for the federal government in the Age of Obama. If you snitch on a friend, do you get a bounty in the way of a raise and promotion, or will the cheapskates just toss you some comp time off and an extra half hour for lunch? If you fail to snitch on a friend and the boss later finds you knew all about something without reporting it, is that grounds for your dismissal or even prosecution? 

Working under conditions like this not only adversely affects the workers, it affects the whole working of government. Who can possibly function under such a system? Somebody will always be looking over your shoulder. Clerical mistakes, lost paperwork,  nervous breakdowns will no doubt skyrocket. Morale will plummet to zero. But maybe that's the whole plan.

And it's not only blatant stuff like talking to the media that the employees are being asked to report. Workers must also alert their bosses to the personal problems -- such as marital woes -- of their colleagues -- because such issues might lead to a troubled person spilling secrets for foreign governments, or worse! They're even supposed to keep tabs on one another's reading material. One red flag, according to the government, is if someone reads the Onion and Salon. I think the latter entry in the List of Forbidden Websites must be outdated, though. It was on the Government List because Glenn Greenwald used to work there.

So  I imagine that sneaking a peek at The Guardian during lunch hour at the Patent Office might land you in the slammer before quitting time.

The Obama Administration must be having conniption fits now that Hong Kong failed to cave to threats from the World's Policeman and allowed Edward Snowden to leave the country. I wonder if White House hacks are reporting on each other's mental health as they all collapse to the floor and start chewing on the rugs.

The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves

 

Irish Politician: Obama Is A War Criminal

Imagine if one of our American elected representatives stood up in the corporate-pandering 10%-approval-rating Congress and spoke truth to power like Irish T.D. (Teachta Dala) member Clare Daly did before her colleagues and her country.

She'd probably be shouted down and arrested by the Capitol Police as a heckler before she even got the first paragraph out.

This is what the real Left looks like, people. This is also how "transparent" political debate is supposed to work. In public, uncensored. Democracy is alive and well somewhere in the West.

Meanwhile, the Belfast Telegraph captured the reaction* of J. Edgar Obama's family:

*To a swarm of wonderful Irish midges and a boring tour guide. Lunch with Bono couldn't come soon enough. Now they're all safe and sound back in the Homeland, keeping us all safe as they listen to our sounds.

Anything You Don't Say Can Be Used Against You

You no longer have the absolute right to remain silent in Police State USA.

That is the unbelievable gist of a Supreme Court decision issued on Monday. If the cops don't Mirandize you prior to conducting an informal, friendly chat, and you clam up at some point in the voluntary interview, your very silence may now be legally construed as a prima facie indicator of your guilt. You must verbally self-invoke your right against self-incrimination, because passive-aggressive sullenness won't cut it. Even nervous tics can be used as evidence against you.

So as the chip, chip, chipping away at the Bill of Rights continues apace, we can now add the Fifth Amendment to the First and Fourth as optional suggestions no longer engraved in stone. It's all part of the brave new world of checks and balances of the Terror Triad formerly known as the three separate branches of government. The spy state not only has the right to vacuum up all your data, it has given itself the right to use your refusal to speak to them about it as a weapon against you. This, my friends, also applies to the "US Persons" whom the president insists are not spied upon by their own government.

Monday's decision stems from a Texas (where else?) case in which a man named Genevevo Salinas appealed his murder conviction based on claims that his refusal to talk to police during informal questioning were later used against him at trial. Lyle Denniston of SCOTUSblog lays it out:

He (Salinas) had voluntarily gone to a police station with officers to talk about the murder of two brothers in 1992.  He was not under arrest, and was not in custody, so he had no right to “Miranda warnings” telling him that he had a right to silence.

He answered almost all of the officers’ questions, but simply sat silent when the officers asked him if shotgun casings found at the scene would match his gun.  He acted very nervous in response, but said nothing.  Prosecutors used the fact that he said nothing to help convince the jury that he was guilty.  He was convicted and is serving a twenty-year sentence.

The Court rejected the argument by Salinas’s attorney that, since he was not in custody at the time and had not been given warnings about his rights, that he did not have to explicitly claim the protection of the Fifth Amendment when he did not want to answer the police questions about the shotgun casings.   The Court had previously said, in a number of other contexts, that one had to invoke the right for it to take effect, but it had never done so in the setting of a voluntary encounter of an individual with officers at a police station.

The conservative majority of the Court ruled that if you voluntarily talk to police, the Miranda Rule does not apply. They only have to inform you of your right to remain silent if they're holding you against your will.

He answered most of the officers’ questions, but simply remained silent when they asked him whether shotgun casings found at the scene of the murders would match his gun.   He shifted his feet, and others acted nervously, but did not say anything.   Later, at his trial, prosecutors told jurors that his silence in the face of that question showed that he was guilty, that he knew that the shotgun used to kill the victims was his. 

 His lawyer wanted the Supreme Court to rule that the simple fact of silence during police questioning, when an individual was not under arrest, could not be used against that person at a criminal trial.   The Court did not rule on that issue.  Instead, it said that Salinas had no complaint about the use of his silence, because in order to claim the Fifth Amendment right to say nothing that might be damaging, he had to explicitly say something that showed his silence was a claim of that right.  Since he did not do so, the Amendment did not protect him, according to the decision.

As Slate's Brandon L. Garrett points out, this "terrible decision" will make false confessions a lot more likely:

 Salinas may very well have been guilty of the two murders. But in many cases, as in this one, there are no eyewitnesses and not much other evidence of guilt: That is why the police may desperately need a confession. And that makes it crucial for them to handle interrogations and confessions with the utmost care. The court appreciated none of the pressures police face, and how they can squeeze an innocent suspect. Alito and the other conservatives were not troubled that there was no video to confirm that Salinas was in fact uncomfortable as well as silent. If Salinas had answered the question by exclaiming that he was innocent, could police have reported that he sounded desperate and like a liar? The court’s new ruling puts the “defendant in an impossible predicament. He must either answer the question or remain silent,” Justice Stephen Breyer said in dissent (joined by the other three liberal-moderates). “If he answers the question, he may well reveal, for example, prejudicial facts, disreputable associates, or suspicious circumstances—even if he is innocent.” But if he doesn’t answer, at trial, police and prosecutors can now take advantage of his silence, or perhaps even of just pausing or fidgeting.

 We're sure to see an epidemic of those friendly, exhausting, totally voluntary all-night chats conducted by seasoned interrogators. Youthful suspects not well-versed in Constitutional law, along with immigrants not well-versed in the English language ,will be prime targets for the new Silence is Not Golden ruling. Belching, nodding off to sleep, grimaces, yawns.... all can be used against you now. The private prison profiteers must be salivating. The school-to-prison pipeline just widened by a mile. 

We already have the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world, and this new decision making criminal convictions as easy as pie can only make it grow. One in a hundred "US Persons" is behind bars not because our crime rate is so high, but because we punish poor people for non-violent offenses, such as drug use. Incarcerated people tend to lack a high school diploma. People lacking a high school diploma tend to not be able to tell you the meaning of the Fifth Amendment.

Slam, bam.

Don't Like Corporatized News? Get Wasted!

With any luck, the million or so denizens of the Spy State who enjoy top secret security clearance will take full advantage of this special offer from the Washington Post:

Anything to loosen up the spooks and make them spill as they swill. After all, according to the email come-on that just landed in my In-Box, Washington Post connoisseurs have vacuumed up elite wines from all over the world in order to placate the palate, numb the senses, and loosen the tongue:

The experts at The Washington Post Wine Club swirl, sip and sniff thousands of wines from around the globe to curate special collections for Wine Club members. In addition to delivering incredible national and international wines, they are also excited to introduce the best from bourgeoning Washington-area wine regions for a one-of-a-kind Wine Club experience.

Oh golly. And here I thought the Washington area was a burgeoning whine region composed of millionaires grousing about how their security has been compromised by upstarts who don't know their place in Secret Society.

 I believe I'll wait for the New York Times to send me a special offer on their Marijuana of the Month Club. We can inhale elite pot at the same time we inhale their pricy propaganda. Thomas Friedman will be much easier to take if accompanied by a Maui Wauwie brownie. David Brooks, the human Skunk Weed, will go down smooth as silk with frequent tokes of Purple Haze. And you definitely want to light up some God's Bud as you partake of Ross Douthat. Maureen Dowd is just the ticket for Strawberry Queen (or, for when she Chronically offends the Obamabots, Urban Poison.)

If it's only a cheap glue-sniffing effect you're after, just log on to Politico. There's no pay-wall, so the inside-the-Beltway toxicity is totally free and gratuitous.

Cheers!

Checks & Balances

Back in the primordial era, American schools used to teach that our three branches of government provide a system of checks and balances to ensure that no one entity can ever ride roughshod over the system. The courts can strike down unconstitutional laws, the legislature makes sure that the president doesn't glom onto too much power, and the president has the power of the veto pen. Round and round Democracy goes, like a happy little amusement park ride.

That was then. Today we have a unified Triad of Terror operating in a funhouse of smoke and mirrors, grotesque simulacra of what the beloved founders ever could have envisioned in their wildest plutocratic dreams.

The current carnival barker in our neo-fascist theme park is President Obama. I finally watched the clip of his pre-G8 interview with Checkpoint Charlie Rose, portions of which I posted in my previous entry. Flying in the face of all fact, he pretended that checks and balances still exist within the soft totalitarian state known as USA. In true Orwellian fashion, he insisted that the secret rubber-stamp Fisa court is transparent, that Congress has been fully briefed and is therefore compliantly looking after the interests of the people, and that he himself is just a trustworthy caring fellow, so just trust him. Because, Charlie, if you could be in the Situation Room and see what I see, you would understand. Now shut up. Or, as he dismissively said when confronted over his own hypocrisy at a Berlin press conference today, "People (me) don't also don't always do what you want. It's shocking."

Checks and balances actually are very much alive. The checks comprise billions of dollars flowing in a torrent from the national treasury straight into the coffers of Booz Allen Hamilton and the rest of what columnist David Rohde is calling the Secrecy-Industrial complex. The balances are the precarious high wire stunts of  the rising stars of Security Circus (Feinstein, Clapper, Alexander) sending propagandistic chills and thrills into America's living rooms. Can they keep us safe from terror and still protect our basic freedoms? It's a nail-biter.

Can they continue to juggle their own self-contradicting claims, saying that the outing of state secrets is both an egregious, egregious assault on national security and an opportunity to have a feel-good National Conversation on Civil Liberties? 'Tis an earthquake of cognitive dissonance.

Will they ever explain why they now assert that massive surveillance sweeps of billions of phone records helped avert a terror attack on the New York Stock Exchange, but somehow forgot to hold one of their self-serving press conferences where they brag about arrests which later are proved to be FBI agent provocateur plots? The Magic 8 Ball says: Don't Count on It. (This article in Wired tells you why: the alleged plotters themselves called it off.)

Meanwhile, I'd be remiss in my duties if I didn't point to a controversial new theory being proffered by columnist Naomi Wolf.  According to her, the very effortless articulate ease (so admired by me) with which Edward Snowden has explained NSA spying may indicate he is not who he says he is -- that he may, in fact, still be working for an intelligence agency which is using him to instill some cowed obedience into the populace. He could, paradoxically, be a manufactured distraction.

“But do consider that in Eastern Germany, for instance," writes Wolf, "it was the fear of a machine of surveillance that people believed watched them at all times—rather than the machine itself—that drove compliance and passivity. From the standpoint of the police state and its interests—why have a giant Big Brother apparatus spying on us at all times—unless we know about it?”

While my first impulse is to scoff at Wolf, as does Dave Lindorff, there is a tiny part of me that can't totally discount her theory out of hand. (Blame it on devouring John Le Carre's plot-twisting novels since adolescence). Wolf is in a whole different league from the growing new coalition of Obamabots and Right Wingers, with all their silly shoot-the-messenger treachery and narcissistic personality disorder hysterics. But even if she's right, and Edward Snowden is a government plant being used to distract us and cow us, it's a stupid gambit. It will probably boomerang right back on them anyway. (It already is -- a local criminal court is now demanding NSA records as evidence in an armed robbery case. Yay!) Also, I think Glenn Greenwald is way too savvy to be taken in by a double agent.

And the Germans, meanwhile, are not naïve enough to be taken in by the charmingly offensive Barack Obama as he visits Berlin and speechifies to an invitation-only crowd of thousands at the Brandenburg Gate. According to Der Spiegel, ticket-holders were bailing out (officially because of an 85-degree "heat wave") and officials were scrambling at the last minute to fill all the empty seats. Protesters, kept far away from the latest circus stunt, were massed at the Berlin Wall, bearing signs containing the motto now going viral in Deutschland:

Stasi.2.... All Your Data Is Belong to Us