We Are NSA (Not So Adept) At Noticing the Mentally Ill

You'd think that with a multi-billion dollar surveillance state monitoring our every move, somebody would have been alerted to the fact that Aaron Alexis, a guy with security clearance to work in a military installation, had been complaining about hearing voices in his head and thinking that stalkers were sending microwave signals to his body. Classic symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia.

From Reuters:

Alexis told police he believed people were following him and "sending vibrations into his body," according to a Newport police report.

He told police that he had twice moved hotels to avoid the noise he heard coming through the floor and the ceiling of his rooms, and that the people following him were using "some sort of microwave machine" to prevent him from sleeping.

"Based on the naval base implications and the claim that the involved subject, one (Aaron Alexis) was 'hearing voices,' I made contact with the on-duty Naval Station police," a Newport police officer wrote, adding that he faxed his report of the incident to Navy police.

The Newport police report said Navy police had promised to check if Alexis was in fact a naval base contractor.

 Maybe it's because the military-industrial-surveillance complex has nothing to do with keeping us safe, and everything to do with profits, control, and power for a group of doddering old fools with shiny medals for their chests and Star Trek captain chairs for their padded rumps. Maybe it's because the alleged shooter was not a Facebook fan, and didn't Tweet, or send emails to act as magnets for the NSA dragnet. He just didn't fit the mold of the mythical tribal militant internet chatterer or Occupy subversive anarchist.

He wasn't political enough for the spooks to notice. He didn't threaten the power structure. He wasn't a whistleblower. He didn't worship at a Mosque.

He was just sick. According to several published reports, he had sought help from the Veterans Administration. Whether he was rebuffed, or put on terminal hold, or just got lost in the shuffle like so many sufferers of mental illness remains to be seen.

When I read about Aaron Alexis, I was reminded of an incident in the 70s when I'd just started my first reporting job, and was assigned to the police beat.

Early each morning on my way to the newsroom, I'd stop in at the municipal cop shop in Newburgh, N.Y. to inspect the blotter for the previous night's arrests. One day as I was sitting in the lobby, scribbling my notes, a middle-aged man walked in and approached the desk sergeant.

"You gotta help me," he pleaded. "They're out to kill me."

After failing to elicit any cogent details from the complainant, the cop sent him on his way. As the man shambled out, the officer glanced in my direction, rolled his eyes and shook his head, muttering something about a full moon.

Fast forward a couple of days, and all hell had broken loose in police headquarters. There'd been a hostage situation overnight. A man had barricaded himself with his victims in an upstairs apartment. Shots were exchanged with police, and one hostage died of a bullet wound to the heart.*

Later that afternoon, as the suspect was led into court for arraignment, I recognized him as the same man who'd pleaded for help at the police station. And it turned out he'd also sought help in the local hospital emergency room, and from a Catholic church. He was rebuffed at those sanctuaries, too.

There are thousands of people with severe mental illness in this country, getting rebuffed, every single day. We rarely notice them until (and let me emphasize that this is the exception to the rule) they become violent.

Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, a psychiatrist, appeared on the PBS News Hour last night to speculate on what could have been tormenting Alexis:

Somewhere, something went wrong with his brain in his 20s, and now you're looking at symptoms of the disease, one of which is acting out, in this case killing people. And in his mind, he was doing it based on delusions.

My guess is that he was terminated by the Navy, more or less, discharged on. He probably thinks the Navy were doing all of these things that he's experiencing in his mind, and he was going to get back at them. And so this episode makes no sense to us, but to him it made perfect sense.

And, as to how he could have escaped notice both during the vetting process and on the job: 

First of all, it's important to emphasize, Judy, that most people with schizophrenia don't become violent. It's only a small been who are not being treated who become violent. In terms of -- we put everything together now, and you say this guy was potentially dangerous. He had a brain disease. He had alcohol abuse. Apparently, he had episodes of violence.

 Nobody had that information to put together, and so that -- also people with paranoid schizophrenia actually can look pretty good in an interview. And so it's difficult. This is a man who didn't know he was sick. He had what we call anosognosia, where he has no awareness of his illness. He would have been hard to treat.

It's estimated that about half of all people suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and severe bipolar disorder are going untreated at any given time. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, that amounts to about 3.5 million people.

Since it appears that even the most innocuous gun control laws don't stand a chance in this country, maybe it's time for us to just concentrate on the humanitarian crisis of neglected mental illness.

After all, although the most vulnerable among us don't have a lobby, at least there is no NRA-like anti-mental health lobby skulking around Capitol Hill, threatening congress critters with primaries if they speak up for healthy minds.

Of course, I am being naïve.

* I tracked down a Google archive of my article. To read it, you have to use the "drag" technique.

Dog Whistling to Wall Street: Anniversary Edition

Barack Obama might have lost the battle to appoint one of Wall Street's own to control the Fed and run the world, but the Class War of the rich versus the rest shall continue. For, cynically hidden within his self-serving, platitude-ridden retrospective of the collapse, in which he ascribed virtually no blame to the criminal financial cartel which continues to terrorize and prey upon us, was yet another presidential dog whistle of reassurance to the Malefactors of Great Wealth.

The occasion for this week's presidential speechifying (besides another un-shocking mass shooting rampage) was the fifth anniversary of the result of yet another deregulation-caused rampage: the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers, and the ensuing loss of trillions of dollars in household wealth. And since the traditional fifth anniversary gift is a product made of wood, Obama decided to bonk us all over the head with another oratorical baseball bat.

 As is usual for him, Obama surrounded himself during Monday's speech with living statues of stone-faced fanboys and girls, to serve as hoi polloi props. Although forced to acknowledge that glaring income inequality has risen to historic proportions in the five years of his tenure, he persisted in portraying himself as part innocent bystander, part hero of the continuing debacle. As is usual for him, he blamed a generic "Congress" instead of the rising plutocracy of which he and they are simultaneously facilitators and members.

Since the entire speech was nothing but a great Big Lie from beginning to end, I will only parse about half of its repetitive mendacity in order to make my points about his weasely subtext. Italics are Obama's actual bloviations.

I want to be clear, though, that even as we’ve dealt with the situation in Syria, we’ve continued to focus on my number-one priority since the day I took office — making sure we recover from the worst economic crisis of our lifetimes and rebuilding our economy so it works for everybody who is willing to work hard; so that everybody who is willing to take responsibility for their lives has a chance to get ahead.

(Dog Whistle # 1: Right off the bat, Obama reveals his cruel inner core of judgmental Calvinism. It is standard Republican dogma that only mythical Horatio Algers willing and able to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps are deserving of a chance. This opening paragraph  echoes the infamous "47 Percent" statement of his faux-nemesis, Mitt Romney, who sank his own presidential chances at that ill-fated secretly taped Boca Raton fundraiser: "My job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”)

In fact, most Americans who’ve known economic hardship these past several years, they don’t think about the collapse of Lehman Brothers when they think about the recession.  Instead, they recall the day they got the gut punch of a pink slip.  Or the day a bank took away their home.  The day they got sick but didn’t have health insurance.  Or the day they had to sit their daughter or son down and tell him or her that they couldn’t afford to send their child back to college the next semester. 
And so those are the stories that guided everything we've done.  It’s what in those earliest days of the crisis caused us to act so quickly through the Recovery Act to arrest the downward spiral and put a floor under the fall.  We put people to work repairing roads and bridges, to keep teachers in our classrooms, our first responders on the streets.  We helped responsible homeowners modify their mortgages so that more of them could keep their homes.  We helped jumpstart the flow of credit to help more small businesses keep their doors open.  We saved the American auto industry. 
And as we worked to stabilize the economy and get it growing and creating jobs again, we also started pushing back against the trends that have been battering the middle class for decades.  So we took on a broken health care system.  We invested in new American technologies to end our addiction to foreign oil.  We put in place tough new rules on big banks — rules that we need to finalize before the end of the year, by the way, to make sure that the job is done — and we put in new protections that cracked down on the worst practices of mortgage lenders and credit card companies.  We also changed a tax code that was too skewed in favor of the wealthiest Americans.  We locked in tax cuts for 98 percent of Americans.  We asked those at the top to pay a little bit more.

(Dog Whistle #2-a,b,c,d etc: And this little piggy went We We We all the way home, right past the five-year statute of limitations! Sssh..... don't worry, Financial Overlords of the Universe. Larry and Barry got you covered. We nibbled around the edges so that the American people paying no attention think that we're doing stuff for them. And that bit about modifying mortgages was full of chutzpah, even for me. All that TARP money that was supposed to help people keep their homes? It went to you guys instead. No questions asked! You're still making more than 300 times the salary of the average schmuck! You gotta love me for being willing to stand up here and lie like this.)

So if you add it all up, over the last three and a half years, our businesses have added 7.5 million new jobs.  The unemployment rate has come down.  Our housing market is healing. Our financial system is safer.  We sell more goods made in America to the rest of the world than ever before.  We generate more renewable energy than ever before.  We produce more natural gas than anybody. 

(Dog Whistle #3: The unemployment rate is down because people have given up in despair. The chronically jobless are no longer counted. Notice how suddenly it's "our" businesses? Obama easily pivots in this paragraph from the suffering masses right over to the corporations. He lamely tries to include the rest of us in his "healing economy" meme.... our housing market.... our financial system.... we sell.... we generate.... we produce more natural gas. It has nothing to do with "us", of course. He is talking to multinational corporations in this paragraph, and couching his love and admiration for their greed as patriotism, a sentiment we are being invited to feel. The last sentence, by the way, should have been delivered in the first person singular. He is beginning to sound like President Buzz Windrip, the "con man/Rotarian" slimeball in It Can't Happen Here. It can, and it has.) 


Health care costs are growing at the slowest rate in 50 years — and just two weeks from now, millions of Americans who’ve been locked out of buying health insurance just because they had a preexisting condition, just because they had been sick or they couldn't afford it, they're finally going to have a chance to buy quality, affordable health care on the private marketplace.

(Dog Whistle #4: The profits of the private insurance industry will remain safe, bloated, and protected under Obama's watch. Health care costs are slowing because people can't afford to seek medical attention. But in anticipation of ObamaCare, premiums and co-pays continue to skyrocket in many markets. And if they aren't, then the insurance grifters can always take their business elsewhere. Obama signals that there is no danger -- I repeat, no danger -- of a single payer program ever coming to pass. People will have the "right" to buy insurance from a predator. They will not have the right to actual care. There is a difference.)

And what all this means is we've cleared away the rubble from the financial crisis and we've begun to lay a new foundation for economic growth and prosperity. 
And in our personal lives, I think a lot of us understand that people have tightened their belts, shed debt, refocused on the things that really matter.  All of this happened because ultimately of the resilience and the grit of the American people. And we should be proud of that.  And on this five-year anniversary we should take note of how far we've come from where we were five years ago.

(Dog-Whistle #5: Who writes this crap? Notice the clumsy grammar - "because ultimately of" in the bolded sentence above. In any event, this is where Obama begins the pivot into Deficit Cult Derangment Syndrome territory. The Simpson-Bowles Catfood Commission is alive and well in Obamaville. He uses the gratuitous austerity already inflicted on the suffering masses to praise them for their totally involuntary Grit and Resilience, which along with No Boots on the Ground, ranks as one of the most annoying and overused phrases in the presidential lexicon. And in a nod to Wall Street, he gushes about how far we have come in the last five years. Do 90 percent of all the gains since the Crash to the top One Percent ring a bell?)

But that's not the end of the story.  As any middle-class family will tell you, or anybody who’s striving to get into the middle class, we are not yet where we need to be.  And that’s what we’ve got to focus on — all the remaining work that needs to be done to strengthen this economy. 
We need to grow faster.  We need more good-paying jobs.  We need more broad-based prosperity.  We need more ladders of opportunity for people who are currently poor but want to get into the middle class.  Because even though our businesses are creating new jobs and have broken record profits, the top 1 percent of Americans took home 20 percent of the nation’s income last year, while the average worker isn’t seeing a raise at all. In fact, that understates the problem.  Most of the gains have gone to the top one-tenth of 1 percent. 

(Dog Whistle #6: Knowing just what we were thinking when we were thinking it, he pivots right back to the suffering masses again. Always keep them confused as to whose side you're on. Maybe you're on their side! Remember the simmering sentiments of Occupy. So acknowledge their pain, even if you not quite as adept at pretending to feel it like Bill Clinton was.) 

So, in many ways, the trends that have taken hold over the past few decades — of a winner-take-all economy where a few do better and better and better while everybody else just treads water or loses ground — those trends have been made worse by the recession. 
That’s what we should be focused on.  That’s what I’m focused on.  That’s what I know the Americans standing beside me as well as all of you out there are focused on.  And as Congress begins another budget debate, that’s what Congress should be focused on.  How do we grow the economy faster; how do we create better jobs; how do we increase wages and incomes; how do we increase opportunity for those who have been locked out of opportunity; how do we create better retirement security — that’s what we should be focused on, because the stakes for our middle class and everybody who’s fighting to get into the middle class could not be higher. 
In today’s hypercompetitive world, we have to make the investments necessary to attract good jobs that pay good wages and offer high standards of living.  And although ultimately our success will depend on all the innovation and hard work of our private sector, all that grit and resilience of the American people, government is going to have a critical role in making sure we have an education system that prepares our children and our workers for a global economy.... 

The problem is at the moment, Republicans in Congress don’t seem to be focused on how to grow the economy and build the middle class.  I say “at the moment” because I’m still hoping that a light bulb goes off here.  (Laughter.)
So far, their budget ideas revolve primarily around even deeper cuts to education, even deeper cuts that would gut America's scientific research and development, even deeper cuts to America’s infrastructure investment — our roads, our bridges, our schools, our energy grid.  These aren’t the policies that would grow the economy faster.  They're not the policies that would help grow the middle class.  In fact, they’d do the opposite.

(Dog Whistle # 7: Yeah, blame it all on those pesky "trends" rather than deliberate policies. Those "trends" are simply the spawn of the living breathing Free Market Bitch Goddess who rules all of us, dontcha know. In this paragraph, Obama whimsically asks a whole shitload of open-ended questions with all the righteous moral urgency a tepid machine politician can muster. And then don't offer any solutions. Blame it all on Congressional gridlock, as if your own policies or lack thereof have not contributed to this epidemic political and financial criminal malpractice. Go for the cheap laugh, and fire up the dwindling base by blaming Republican recalcitrance and attention deficit disorder instead of the complicity of the two corrupt sides of one Money Party.)

Up until now, Republicans have argued that these cuts are necessary in the name of fiscal responsibility.  But our deficits are now falling at the fastest rate since the end of World War II.  I want to repeat that.  Our deficits are going down faster than any time since before I was born.  (Applause.)  By the end of this year, we will have cut our deficits by more than half since I took office.
That doesn't mean that we don't still have some long-term fiscal challenges — primarily because the population is getting older and they're using more health care services.  And so we've still got some changes that we've got to make and there's not a government agency or program out there that still can't be streamlined, become more customer-friendly, more efficient.  So I do believe we should cut out programs that we don’t need.  We need to fix ones that aren't working the way they're supposed to or have outlived their initial mission.  We've got to make government faster and more efficient. 

(OK, I probably shouldn't even call this paragraph Dog Whistle #8, because it's more like a direct bull-horn blast to Wall Street and the predators of Pete Peterson's Third Way Fix the Debt cabal. Despite the shrinking deficit and slow growth, he still wants to cut Medicare and Social Security. He still pretends to believe that less money in people's pockets will be good. As is usual for him, he euphemizes such cruelty as "fiscal challenges." Half of the population may be teetering on the brink of poverty, but hey, let's make them suffer even more. Especially those old geezers who are sucking up all the health care and selfishly want to retire with dignity. Screw 'em. Obama cares about his customers, understand. Wink, nod, chuckle.)

But that's not what is being proposed by the Republican budgets.  Instead of making necessary changes with a scalpel, so far at least, Republicans have chosen to leave in place the so-called sequester cuts that have cost jobs, harmed growth, are hurting our military readiness.  And top independent economists say this has been a big drag on our recovery this year.  Our economy is not growing as fast as it should and we're not creating as many jobs as we should, because the sequester is in place.  That's not my opinion.  That's the opinion of independent economists. 

(Dog Whistle # 9: Repeal the Military Sequester. War, war, war, bombs, drones, not pinpricks. war. Forget Head Start closings, or Meals on Wheels deliveries cut off to old geezers sucking up all that medical care.)

The sequester makes it harder to do what’s required to boost wages for American workers, because the economy is still slack.  So if Republicans want the economy to grow faster, create more jobs faster, they should want to get rid of it.  It’s irresponsible to keep it in place.
And if Congress is serious about wanting to grow the economy faster and creating jobs faster, the first order of business must be to pass a sensible budget that replaces the sequester with a balanced plan that is both fiscally sound and funds the investments like education and basic research and infrastructure that we need to grow.  This is not asking too much.

(Dog Whistle #10: He still wants the Grand Bargain. His idea of a balanced plan is to inflict even more austerity on suffering people in exchange for asking the obscenely rich to chip in a few more pennies to call it even. Bring back Head Start in exchange for agreeing to permanent immiseration through Chained CPI. Heads, Wall Street wins, and Tails, we lose. Blame the other party, not the hoarding corporate welfare hordes, for stagnant wages.)

Congress’s most fundamental job is passing a budget.  And Congress needs to get it done without triggering another crisis, without shutting down our government, or worse — threatening not to pay this country’s bills.  After all the progress that we’ve made over these last four and a half years, the idea of reversing that progress because of an unwillingness to compromise or because of some ideological agenda is the height of irresponsibility.  It’s not what the American people need right now. 
These folks standing behind me, these are people who are small business owners, people who almost lost their home, young people trying to get a college education, and all of them went through some real tough times during the recession.  And in part because of the steps we took, and primarily because of their courage and determination and hard work, they’re in a better place now. 

( Dog Whistle # 11: The president will never surround himself with members of the permanent underclass, angry people, obviously sick people, people dressed in rags. Here, he reassures Wall Street that he will keep the peasants, or "folks", in line. Grit and resilience, determination and hard work will be tolerated by the ruling class. Marching in the streets, walking off McJobs, sit-down strikes? Not so much.) 

But the last thing they’re looking for is for us to go back to the same kind of crisis situations that we’ve had in the past. And the single most important thing we can do to prevent that is for Congress to pass a budget, without drama, that puts us on a sound path for growth, jobs, better wages, better incomes.
Now, look, it’s never been easy to get 535 people here in Washington to agree on anything.  And budget battles and debates, those are as old as the Republic.  It’s even harder when you have divided government.  And right now you’ve got Republicans controlling the House of Representatives, Democrats controlling the Senate, Democrat in the White House.  So this is always going to be tough.
Having said that, I cannot remember a time when one faction of one party promises economic chaos if it can’t get 100 percent of what it wants.  That’s never happened before.  But that’s what’s happening right now. 
You have some Republicans in the House of Representatives who are promising to shut down the government at the end of this month if they can’t shut down the Affordable Care Act.  And if that scheme doesn’t work, some have suggested they won’t pay the very bills that Congress has already run up, which would cause America to default on its debt for the first time in our history and would create massive economic turmoil.  Interest rates on ordinary people would shoot up.  Those kinds of actions are the kinds of actions that we don’t need. 
The last time the same crew threatened this course of action back in 2011 even the mere suggestion of default slowed our economic growth.  Everybody here remembers that.  It wasn’t that long ago. 
Now, keep in mind, initially, the whole argument was we’re going to do this because we want to reduce our debt.  That doesn’t seem to be the focus now.  Now the focus is on Obamacare. So let’s put this in perspective.  The Affordable Care Act has been the law for three and a half years now.  It passed both houses of Congress.  The Supreme Court ruled it constitutional.  It was an issue in last year’s election and the candidate who called for repeal lost.  (Applause.)  Republicans in the House have tried to repeal or sabotage it about 40 times.  They’ve failed every time.
Meanwhile, the law has already helped millions of Americans — young people who were able to stay on their parents’ plan up until the age of 26; seniors who are getting additional discounts on their prescription drugs; ordinary families and small businesses that are getting rebates from insurance companies because now insurance companies have to actually spend money on people's care instead of on administrative costs and CEO bonuses.

(Dog Whistle #12: He conveniently fails to mention that as president and defender of the Constitution, he retains the power and the duty to pay the nation's debts. He can mint a trillion-dollar coin with the stroke of his pen. But gridlock sells. Lobbyists must prosper. And most important, Wall Street does not like the trillion dollar coin idea. They cannot be impeded from extracting their rents, cheap labor, and blood.)
 
They said that they wanted entitlement reform — but their leaders haven’t put forward serious ideas that wouldn’t devastate Medicare or Social Security.  And I've put forward ideas for sensible reforms to Medicare and Social Security and haven’t gotten a lot of feedback yet. 
They said that they wanted tax reform.  Remember?  This was just a few months ago — they said, well, this is going to be one of our top priorities, tax reform.  Six weeks ago, I put forward a plan that serious people in both parties should be able to support — a deal that lowers the corporate tax rate for businesses and manufacturers, simplifies it for small business owners, as long as we use some of the money that we save to invest in the infrastructure our businesses need, and to create more good jobs and with good wages for the middle-class folks who work at those businesses.  My position is, if folks in this town want a “grand bargain,” how about a grand bargain for middle-class jobs?  So I put forward ideas for tax reform — haven’t heard back from them yet.
Congress has a couple of weeks to get this done.  If they’re focused on what the American people care about — faster growth, more jobs, better future for our kids — then I’m confident it will happen.  And once we’re done with the budget, let’s focus on the other things that we know can make a difference for middle-class families — lowering the cost of college; finishing the job of immigration reform; taking up the work of tax reform to make the system fairer and promoting more investment in the United States.

(Dog Whistle # 13: He will whine in public, but won't take the time to arm-twist for the "middle class" like he arm-twisted and whisper-campaigned for Larry Summers and bombing Syria. This speech is just part of the resume-padding strategy for what promises to be a very lucrative post-presidential career. Membership on the boards of Citigroup and Third Way beckon, as do speaking gigs and vacation homes. Besides the "challenges" euphemism to justify cut and slash, another favorite of the centrist cult to which Obama belongs is "sensible." If you don't agree that reducing benefits for orphans, widows, wounded vets and retirees is "sensible", then you must be bonkers, just as bad as those nasty Goopers.)
 
If we follow the strategy I’m laying out for our entire economy — and if Washington will just act with the same urgency and common purpose that we felt five years ago — our economy will be stronger a year from now, five years from now, a decade from now. 
That's my priority.  All these folks standing behind me, and everybody out there who’s listening — that's my priority.  I've run my last election.  My only interest at this point is making sure that the economy is moving the way it needs to so that we've got the kind of broad-based growth that has always been the hallmark of this country. 
And as long as I’ve got the privilege of serving as your President, I will spend every moment of every day I have left fighting to restore security and opportunity for the middle class, and to give everyone who works hard a chance to get ahead.  
Thank you, everybody.  God bless you.  God bless America.  (Applause.)

(Dog Whistle #14: "The economy" is defined as the continued unfettered grift and repugnance of the transglobal financial cartel. Mammon blesses it through High Priest Barack.)

I left out the redundant paragraphs in the speech, mainly about Obamacare, so if you feel cheated in any way, you can watch The One in his entirety in the link above.

An equal-time response from a representative of the grit and resilience of the American people can be viewed here.  

The Fall of Summers

I think President Obama might have been all set to announce his nomination of the new Fed chief today, to coincide with his glowing report about how great the economy is doing in the throes of the Long Depression, and how he and Larry saved us from utter destruction back in those dark days of Aught-Nine.

Then, in the midst of crafting their trumpeting celebration of The Recovery as orchestrated by Larry Himself, somebody in the White House noticed the cover of National Journal, the subtlety of which perfectly matches that of Summers Himself, and belatedly decided to pick up the phone and do a whip count. Even the Blue Dog Dems were starting to balk. Oops. 

So Larry Summers bowed out (probably not graciously, given his track record of surliness), and that is that. Or is it? Could Obama prevail, and get his first choice,  Timmy "The Foamer" Geithner, to change his mind about taking the job after all? Will Obama turn out to be a complete bitch and pass over Janet Yellen just out of pure spite? Will he nastily rub our noses in it and appoint somebody even worse than Summers? The terrible possibilities are endless. Just look at the roster of unprosecuted banksters and pro-austerians who still walk this earth on the 5th Anniversary of that other Great Fall (Lehman Brothers.)

That report on the "recovering" economy released by the White House last night certainly seems to have been written with Summers in mind. With him at the helm in those early, hairy days, we were bold! We made the tough choices! Half the population may be in poverty, but as Obama says for the umpteenth time,the grit and resilience of the American people will make everything hunky-dory (with the usual weasely caveat that there is still work to do, such as raising the minimum wage a whole dollar.) I'll have more on the gory details (and vague platitudes) later, after I have been thoroughly caffeinated. Actually, I should probably just tranquilize myself. Or, as Michelle says, Drink Up!™

Before his crash and burn (but no worries, Citigroup will always be there), Summers was also doing some revisionist history in an attempt to recast himself as a Man of the People. According to this report planted in Reuters as part of his populist resume-padding campaign for the Fed, he claims that he personally met with the banksters right after the Crash of Aught-Eight to inform them that they were not liked by the people for whom he the Man. Oh, and by the way, Larry thinks that thanks to him, Wall Street has totally changed. They now care what we think about them. (which is not much). They care about their "image."

The silver lining on this dreary end-of-summer Monday (raining here) is that there are a few principled Democratic senators left willing to thwart The One's wishes. What with Syria (which the corporate media is inexplicably pegging an Obamian blunder of epidemic proportions) he is losing political capital very early in his final term.  I suspect the NSA spying revelations, and the fact that most of the 99% are still suffering, is what's really putting the dent on his credibility.

As the world turns, so goes the worm.

Diverting the Bewildered Herd

Let's see....

Income inequality in America has officially reached its highest level since the Great Depression. Conservative estimates now have a third of us living at or below the poverty line, but in real life, fully 50% of the population is teetering on the brink of financial catastrophe. Compared to the rest of the civilized world, only the recent dictator- devastated Romania ranks lower than we do on the child poverty scale. These stats are a feature -- not a bug -- of what happens when plutocrats take charge, and government for the commonweal falls down the memory hole.

And adding insult to the injury of a financial oligarchy run amok, it turns out that a parallel criminal surveillance state has been operating in plain sight for years, both within and without our "borders" -- and it's getting bigger and nastier and more intrusive and less accountable all the time.

The natives have been getting restless. McWorkers are starting to walk off their jobs, clamoring for a living wage. The vast majority of Americans have reported themselves to be upset about government spying, and Edward Snowden is reaping higher approval ratings than Barack Obama. Erstwhile complicit Congress Critters were even threatening to hold hearings in order to hold the burglars of the NSA to account.

So, dutiful placeholders of neo-feudalism and neo-fascism that they are, the revolving-door leadership of the Military-Industrial-Media-Spy Complex has sprung into action. They've deflected attention away from their own dastardly deeds and created a brand new villain for our outraged pleasure.

Quickly advancing from merely being the Butcher of Damascus to exploding on the scene as the Hitler of the 21st Century,  Syrian President Anwar al-Assad, mass exterminator of children, is the perfect villain. Add to the mix Vlad the Bad, suppressor of LGBT rights in Russia, and you've got yourself the perfect scenario for what Noam Chomsky has called "diverting the bewildered herd."

Every so often, in our long slog to the bottom, our leaders have to create a new monster to deflect attention away from their own monstrosity. Communism filled that role from the Fabulous Fifties, as the destruction of the New Deal and unions began, right up to the Fall of the Wall. Then, conveniently enough, came 9/11 and the open-ended, treasure and life-depleting Middle Eastern wars, security state-bloating war on terror, the whole globe becoming one big  battlefield and corporate-friendly free trade zone. Next, thanks to financial deregulation, the economy crashed and burned.  And for a couple of years, the marketing campaign miracle known as Barack Obama kept the restive herd temporarily penned in, chewing the cud of his delicious words.

Then along came Occupy (for the moment, anyway, suppressed.) Then along came Snowden, and polls began to show that people are refusing, any longer, to be terrorized. So, the Powers That Be started beating the war drums once again. Only this time, the people (and the whole world) were refusing to be tamed. They were saying No To War. So the president saved face by pretending to democratically punt over to Congress, which in turn, suddenly forgot all about the rogues of the NSA, in their haste to go on TV to posture For War, Against War, or Not Sure.

 The consumers of America are riveted. The blogosphere (myself included) ignores Snowden, the endless depression, the political graft, and the fact that not one banker is in jail as the five year statute of limitation on financial fraud of epic proportions draws to its convenient close.

Meanwhile, we the protesters of America are cheering because our People Power stopped the war in its tracks. We are celebrating Putin for Peace, and his ad agency-written New York Times op-ed. But wait. Right in plain sight, war is very much being waged, conducted in the usual manner: secretly, and proxified. That "no boots on the ground" mantra? It is absolutely meaningless when you consider that the true prosecutors, their own tender feet probably cleverly ensconced in thousand-dollar CJ Cleverley Bespokes, were only talking about GI grunt-brand boots. American weapons and personnel are absolutely on the ground, on Syrian soil, in the form of a secretly and grossly overfunded CIA, SEALs, Special Ops, and who knows who and what else. Of course, as official White House plumbers have leaked in their announcements to the corporate media, the American secret forces and associated clients only entered Syria after the Sarin attacks. Uh-huh.

Congressional approval for war is just a nicety to keep the herd diverted and believing that, despite what President Jimmy Carter recently said, we still have a functioning democracy. MoveOn, that mass herder of progressive veal, has suddenly stopped its email blasts begging for money in the name of anti-war. Critics, accused of being Nazi collaborators for speaking out against Syrian airstrikes to kill more children to avenge dead children, are being muted. We are nobly giving peace a chance at the same time we are languishing in our own domestic misery. We are back to rooting for Democrats vs Republicans, Barack vs Vlad, instead of noticing or caring that the Class War continues apace, and that we are on the losing end.

Meanwhile, to make us feel empowered™ in this, our time of mass joblessness and hunger, First Lady Michelle Obama has gone on her own offensive. Nancy Reagan once pompously advised us to Just Say No to Drugs, but Michelle is urging us to Just Drink Water (carefully not touting either the dubious health benefits or even the dangers of drinking too much of it.)

 Long forgotten are the days of the last Great Depression, when Eleanor Roosevelt actually visited poor people where they lived, listened to them verbalize their own needs. The poor have always been more than capable of knowing what they need: food, shelter, a decent income, medicine, child care, jobs. Where are the jobs, and where are the leaders who care?

But this is now, the times of the New Normal and government by technocrat and ad campaign. To make her latest initiative every bit as effective as partnering with national wage-slavemaster Walmart to shill for fresh food, our current FLOTUS is partnering™ with the lucrative bottled water industry to encourage us to buy our water as well as drink it. Evian and Poland Spring and the rest of the privatized water cartel will start carrying  Michelle's "Let's Drink Up!" logo on their products, the better to entice you in the grocery store aisles, your meager SNAP benefit card in hand. Because, as we all know, keeping the kids' bellies bloated with water temporarily staves off hunger. We have been taught by TV commercials that bottled water that you purchase is "better" and more upwardly mobile than free water from your kitchen tap. (Even though there is absolutely no difference in taste or quality, and the still-unbanned BPA in plastic bottles is actually quite harmful to your health) By purchasing water, you are good patriotic citizens helping to support a handful of low paying non-union jobs in bottling plants. You will also be boosting the tax-exempt Petroleum Industry, whose raw materials make up the plastic bottles. So drink for yourself, drink for America, and drink for Exxon-Mobil.

A water-logged herd is so much easier to divert. Away from the flood, and right over the cliff.

TANKA, Not Tanks

by Nan Socolow

The following are six comments I submitted to the New York Times yesterday morning.  I wrote all of these comments in TANKA, Japanese form of poetry  using 5 lines of 5,7,5,7,7 syllables each. 

Threaten to Threaten, Tom Friedman:

 

Arab Gulf leaders

 

Support Obama's effort.

 

Syria's amok.

 

We're not the Global Police

 

No need to aid Jihadists.

 

 

Who do you Trust?  Maureen Dowd:

 

 

Pooty-Poot's given

 

Obama and John Kerry

 

The red-line exit.

 

Joe Six-Pack is anti-war

 

He was Bush's base.

 

 

 

Homeland Confusion, Tom Kean, Lee Hamilton:

 

 

Homeland not secure.

 

Congress needs to scrutinize

 

Gaps in oversight.

 

Today Anniversary

 

Of World Trade Towers attack.

 

 

 

The Government and Inequality, Tom Edsall:

 

 

Inequality

 

America's Sin Qua Non

 

The rich are richer

 

The poor struggling for money.

 

Our Middle Class has vanish'd

 

 

 

09/11, My 2 Cents, Mark Bittman:

 

 

We use drones to kill.

 

Isn't gassing people worse?

 

Who will bell Assad?

 

Limited action?  No way.

 

Faint heart never kiss'd the cook.

 

 

The President Speaks on Syria, Ross Douthat:

 

 

I watch'd Obama. 

 

You're alone, wrong pundit!

 

O, insulting?  Not!

 

Ross, your lifetime has been short.

 

Study Putin and Assad.

 

 

Nan Socolow

Cayman Brac

British West Indies

Wargasms on the Potomac: U.S. Weapons Good, Syrian Weapons Bad

By Fred Drumlevitch

cross-posted from freddrumlevitch.blogspot.com (Progressive Food for Thought)

The sound of war drums rose over the Potomac. As did also certain other items. The tumescent political “leadership” and their rent boys of the mainstream media alternated between stroking each other to the point of wargasm and oh-so-seriously rationalizing to the public why they must let loose their dogs of war. Fortunately, many ordinary Americans have begun to realize just how tired they themselves are of getting screwed by the imperial overreach of what is supposed to be their government. Ostensibly elected by public vote, supposedly beholden to the people and meant to serve them, “our” government has over the past 30+ years transformed into one dedicated to delivering benefits to the rich, the banks, the corporations, and the military-industrial-surveillance-security complex — and that perpetuates its malfeasance through lies, manipulation, the marginalization and repression of protest, and the distraction of never-ending war.

Never-ending war? Well, nearly so. And this refers to far more than the duration of our most recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or our ongoing assassinations via drones in several sovereign foreign nations including Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen. Time dulls the memory, especially for those who weren’t active participants, but a recent Associated Press story summarized major U.S. military actions over the past three decades: Beirut (1982-83), Grenada (1983), Libya (1986), Panama (1989), Iraq (1991), Somalia (1992), Iraq (1993), Somalia (1993), Haiti (1994), Bosnia (1994-96), Iraq (1996), Sudan and Afghanistan (1998), Iraq (1998), Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Libya (2011), and Osama bin Laden (2011). 

It doesn’t end there. The United States probably maintains at least 500 military bases in at least 100 foreign countries, and it is likely that actual numbers are considerably higher. (The exact numbers are hard to know for a variety of reasons including deliberate obfuscation by the U.S. government. See here, here, here, here, and here). We spend more on our military than the next highest-spending fifteen to twenty nations combined. Is our country destined to forever undertake foreign military actions with the compulsion of a salmon swimming upstream to spawn? What will our unending pursuit of worldwide military domination beget?

And I haven’t even yet referenced our covert operations, which, since WWII, have been instrumental in the overthrow of several legitimate foreign governments (and significantly subverted many more). The overthrows of Mohammed Mossadegh (Iran, 1953), Jacobo Árbenz (Guatemala, 1954), Patrice Lumumba (Congo, 1961), and Salvador Allende (Chile, 1973), stand as but the most prominent examples in a long and sordid history of covert U.S. actions.

The covert operations and smaller military interventions may seem (by our imperial-capitalist metrics) to be fabulously successful, but are in fact profoundly dangerous, for they set the stage for later blowback, plus overreach elsewhere and spectacular failures. Our frequent foreign interventions, whether large or small, overtly military or instead covert, are part of a highly-dangerous feedback system of U.S. action and arrogance, a runaway self-righteousness that puts our entire foundational national purpose at profound risk. Do we exist to be the world’s policeman? The preamble to the United States Constitution does state that it was established "to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity", but these refer to this nation. Nowhere in our founding national documents do I recall any mention of world policeman.

As important as are the issues of imperial overreach, media failure, and perversion of the purposes of a democratic republic, they and their psychological underpinnings have been thoroughly examined countless times, and I will not further pursue them here (beyond including these links to recent posts by Andrew Bacevich, Ira Chernus, and George Lakoff). Instead, my focus in what follows will be on something else: a brief look at U.S. governmental hypocrisy in its current characterization of chemical weapons as so abhorrent as to necessitate U.S. military action in Syria.

To understand the scope of this hypocrisy, we might examine any of a wide variety of weapon systems that have been deployed, used, and, in many cases, provided to others by the United States: napalm and other incendiaries, Agent Orange, cluster munitions, land mines, thermobaric bombs, and nuclear weapons. President Obama, Secretary Kerry, Senator McCain, and all others so eager to militarily strike Syria — surely you are aware of the massive death and suffering these American weapons have inflicted on civilian populations. Please spare us your outraged denunciations of Bashar al-Assad and your insistence that we must act — unless you are also willing to denounce and adequately hold accountable American soldiers (and allies) who have caused the deaths of foreign civilians using the aforementioned weapons. Ah… I thought not.

(The United States is not even willing to properly hold accountable those soldiers who have murdered with more conventional weapons; while Major Nidal Malik Hasan was quite deservedly sentenced to death for his murder of thirteen U.S. soldiers at Fort Hood, Army staff sergeant Robert Bales was allowed to plead guilty and thereby escape the death penalty for his brutal murder of sixteen Afghan civilians. And most American war criminals are never properly punished. For example, in 2012 a U.S. military court would release with absolutely no prison time the leader of a U.S. Marine squad that in 2005 massacred 24 civilian men, women, and children in Haditha, Iraq — a war crime within the even broader war crime of a war of choice by the U.S. against a country that posed no threat to us.)

Let’s consider napalm and other incendiary weapons. (Open in front of me is the book Napalm: An American Biography, by Robert M. Neer, published in 2013 by Harvard University Press. Extensive in scope and supporting references, it should be required reading for those wishing to learn how weapons come to be developed, used — and misused. It and Wikipedia are my main sources for what follows).

British RAF bombers using magnesium weapons incinerated eight square miles of Hamburg in July 1943; the death toll from the Hamburg attack was an estimated 44,600 persons. A German doctor wrote “Bodies were frequently found lying in a thick, greasy black mass, which was without doubt melted fat tissue… All were shrunken so that clothes appeared to be too large.” (Neer, p.62-63). The RAF aided by the United States Army Air Forces incinerated fifteen square miles of Dresden in four raids in mid-February 1945, with a death toll estimated at around 25,000 (Wikipedia).

These attacks would be dwarfed by the aggregate of later U.S. incendiary attacks on Japanese cities. The night of March 9-10, 1945, U.S. Air Force general Curtis LeMay dispatched over 300 B-29s to wage an incendiary attack on Tokyo using napalm, magnesium, and white phosphorus, creating a firestorm, incinerating 16 square miles of the city, and producing approximately 100,000 deaths and tens of thousands of injured. But that was just the beginning. “After Tokyo, American bombers attacked Japan’s largest cities with napalm for ten days, […] until supplies ran out on March 19, 1945. After a three week pause to restock, incendiary bombardments started again on April 13, and continued again until the end of the war. […] During the five months until the end of the war over 33 million pounds of napalm in about 13 million M-69 bombs, along with napalm in other bombshells, explosives, and other incendiaries, laid waste to 106 square miles in Japan’s six largest cities, and destroyed or damaged 169 square miles in sixty of its largest metropolises” (Neer, p.83-84).

Of course, the above statistics do not convey any of the specifics of the human suffering experienced. “‘In the dense smoke, where the wind was so hot it seared the lungs, people struggled, then burst into flames where they stood’. … Jammed bridges became funeral pyres. Civil guard commander Kinosuke Wakabayashi and his daughter, shielded by a concrete warehouse, saw thousands ‘streaming towards the Sumida River bridges, and leaping into the river, clothes and even their bodies aflame. Soon both banks of the river were clogged with bodies. The bridges were so hot that anyone who touched a bit of iron or steel was seared like bacon on a grill.’ On the Kototoi Bridge, another recalled, ‘The steel grew white-hot and people who touched the metal were seared like steaks on a barbeque’. ‘[I]n some of the smaller canals the water was actually boiling from the intense heat’ recounted a U.S. government after-action report. Pools and ponds vaporized.” (Neer, p.79). “‘The updrafts brought with them a sickening odor, an odor that I will never be able to get completely out of my nostrils — the smell of roasting human flesh. I later learned that some pilots and crewmen gagged and vomited in reaction to this stench, and that a few had passed out,’ [ace pilot Robert] Morgan wrote.” (Neer, p.81). … “Dr. Shigenori Kubota […] described his travels in freezing temperatures through the devastated area just before dawn on March 10: ‘There was no one to rescue. If you touched one of the roasted bodies, the flesh would crumble in your hand. Humanity was reduced to its chemical properties, turned into carbon.’” (Neer, p.82).

 

"Charred remains of Japanese civilians after the firebombing of Tokyo on the night of 9–10 March 1945" (Wikipedia/Wikimedia)

photographer: Kōyō Ishikawa 1904-1989

Charred bodies of woman and child, firebombing of Tokyo
photo taken March 10, 1945 (Wikipedia/Wikimedia)
photographer: Kōyō Ishikawa 1904-1989

Such barbarism was not unique to World War II. I could continue with similar details from U.S. use of incendiary weapons and strategic bombing in Korea and Vietnam. I could describe the birth defect and cancer effects on the Vietnamese (and on U.S. veterans) produced by Agent Orange, the contamination of which during manufacture by a[n at that time unidentified] toxic substance was known to the U.S. government as early as 1952, long prior to U.S. involvement in Vietnam. I could document the continuing deaths and maimings (including of children) produced by anti-personnel land mines — an international treaty on which the U.S. has refused to sign. But I believe that I have made my point. War is indeed hell, and any attempt to characterize chemical weapons as somehow worse than other weapons that have been widely used by the United States is not just disingenuous, it is a bald-faced lie, and cannot be used to justify military strikes. It is in fact just one of many bald-faced lies that have come to dominate the U.S. political stage and been used to manipulate us during the past several decades. Those lies must end. The manipulations must end.

We, the people of the United States, do hereby declare that we will no longer offer blood and treasure to the gods of war. We will not replenish the coffers of the military-industrial complex. We will not sacrifice our own lives — nor will we take the lives of others — for the delusions of small men in high places. We ourselves hold no delusions about our ability to dominate the world, and we have no desire to do so. We will not be bamboozled into believing that our security is dependent on us acting militarily every two or three years in some far-off land. We will not accept being spied upon by our government, nor will we tolerate governmental repression of our dissent. We are reclaiming our country, and rededicating it to the purposes envisioned by its founding fathers. We will fight, but it will be domestically, for our Constitutional rights, opportunity for all, and social and economic justice. To the current politicians of this land we say: Understand that, accommodate yourselves to that, or vacate your offices, for you will be irrelevant to the future.

Text Copyright: Fred Drumlevitch

Fred Drumlevitch blogs irregularly at www.FredDrumlevitch.blogspot.com
He can be reached at FredDrumlevitch12345(at)gmail.com

Farewell to Arms?

Now that he has apparently been given a huge out by Uncle Vlad after getting all mucked in his own red line, President Obama's appearance before the nation tonight might as well consist of just two words:

After all the high drama that has distracted us from such important crap as the debt ceiling and where Hillary ate lunch, Herr Assad Hitler is, according to reports, giving up his CW stash in exchange for not getting blown to bits (not that the presidential palace or the royal presidential person itself was ever on Obama's hit list, or anything untoward like that.)

So, there is reason to be optimistic today that through no fault of our own dear leaders, there will be Not-War for the time being.

 By the way, my suspicion is that Obama had again desperately tried to engage Putin over staging a CW intervention and sending Assad to Sarin rehab at last week's G-20, and Putin probably just played him like a cat toys with a mouse. Then, after enjoying the American political spectacle for several more days, Putin finally pounced on Kerry's "off-the-cuff" offer, and put them all out of their misery.

It looks like Barack Obama is joining Edward Snowden in that new club called Russian Asylum.

Oh, and Michelle is against war on Syria. After all, she does send her kids to a Quaker school. No wonder Obama looked so testy in St. Petersburg and so downright ebullient in his TV interviews last night. He'd just made both a political and domestic escape from his surgical, tiny, pinprick of a Tomahawk missile bunker ball buster of a war. 

Unless, of course, bombing Syria was never about chemical weapons and children and human misery at all, and they're now scrambling to find another excuse/locale for their Mideast power/land grab.

Oh well. It's always something. But, as he is likely droning in the ear of his National Security Blanket Advisor Susan Rice, "We'll always have our Terror Tuesdays."
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