Equinoxious

Happy first day of Spring, everybody! Let us rejoice in one of only two magical days in the astronomical year when, legend has it, Night and Day achieve parity. (equinox is Latin for "equal night")  Twelve hours of sunlight and twelve hours of darkness. Isn't equality grand? I imagine that Consensus Builder in Chief Obama is reveling in this rare, balanced approach. On the one hand, darkness has its soporific benefits, as in an entire population too exhausted and depressed to notice they are living under the most secretive, privacy-killing, income-disparate political system in American history. On the other hand, that new day is forever dawning when an entire population can be fooled into thinking there's a ladder of opportunity just waiting right outside their doors, each rung leading to a seat at the table at the end of the rainbow.  If they only work hard enough and play by the same rules, that is.

It's the season of rebirth and spring peepers, those tiny frogs that come out of the grass and shriek with joy all night long. No slow boiling in a somnolent pot for these little guys. They are not, of course, to be confused with regular run-of-the mill frogs who scream at the slightest provocation, much like the paranoid billionaires we're hearing so much about these days. Here are the sights and sounds of slimy plutocrats faced with the specter of a slight tax increase:

 

While you're digesting that, the AccuWeather folks have thoughtfully debunked some of those pesky Vernal Equinox myths. Did you know, for example, that you are no more able to balance a raw egg on the Most Balanced Day of the year than you are on any other day? What a disappointment. It also turns out that even the equality of the Vernal Equinox is vastly overrated. It's kind of a scam, actually, much like the equality of opportunity Beltway Consensus meme everybody is croaking about.

"No, that's really more astronomical than anything we get closer with the equal length of day and night based on the effects of daylight saving. The one place where you'd probably see the most equality between day and night is at the equator, somewhere like Quito, Ecuador," said (meteorologist Dan) Kottlowski.

Go figure. True natural equality exists in a socialist country not under the control of the American Empire. That extra sunlight we think we're seeing? In the grand scheme of things, it is only an illusion.

But on that note, let's hear it anyway for national Sunshine Week, begun by a group of newspaper editors way back in the day when news people still demanded accountability from our elected leaders.

Play MYSTIC For Me

"Nobody is listening to your phone calls."  -- Barack Obama, June 7. 2013.

"NSA program 'reaches into the past' to retrieve, replay phone calls." -- Washington Post, March 18, 2014.

Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani report on the latest Edward Snowden bombshell:

The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording “100 percent” of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place, according to people with direct knowledge of the effort and documents supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden.

A senior manager for the program compares it to a time machine — one that can replay the voices from any call without requiring that a person be identified in advance for surveillance.

You can't blame this operation -- code-named MYSTIC -- on Evil Overlord George W. Bush. It started in 2009, early in the Obama administration, at about the same time he was boasting so stridently about the Most Transparent Administration Ever that he eventually got a special transparency award behind closed doors.

Oops. This latest Snowden revelation should rank right up there with "if you like your health plan you can keep it" but it won't. Congress will not mess with the security state, despite the best theatrical efforts of Dianne Feinstein. And if anybody points at the prez and starts with the taunt "Liar liar, Mom Jeans on fire!" it won't be the Republicans. (well, maybe it'll be Rand Paul, but that's about it.)

The Post, unfortunately, partially acquiesced to Deep State demands by agreeing not to reveal the "target"country (ies) where the spooks are busily recording and collecting conversations. But, the article continues,  

In the initial deployment, collection systems are recording “every single” conversation nationwide, storing billions of them in a 30-day rolling buffer that clears the oldest calls as new ones arrive, according to a classified summary.

The call buffer opens a door “into the past,” the summary says, enabling users to “retrieve audio of interest that was not tasked at the time of the original call.” Analysts listen to only a fraction of 1 percent of the calls, but the absolute numbers are high. Each month, they send millions of voice clippings, or “cuts,” for processing and long-term storage.

They don't say where the actual audio recordings are being stored, but that behemoth of a secret building out in the Utah desert sounds about right. Because all those trillions of words and the billions of voices that use them have to be stashed someplace, I reckon. We can't just have them floating free up in the clouds, where they constitute a terrorist threat to the bulked-up bureaucracy! Dangling conversations are a threat to our Freedoms, after all.

And moreover, the spooks retort, the Post's reporting on their sociopathic voice collections is itself a threat to our freedoms. In an emailed statement, NSA factotum Vanee Vines complained that “continuous and selective reporting of specific techniques and tools used for legitimate U.S. foreign intelligence activities is highly detrimental to the national security of the United States and of our allies, and places at risk those we are sworn to protect.”

You can say that again, VeeVee. Journalism in the public interest does indeed place at risk the security and stalking capabilities of your bureaucracy, not to mention the untold billions of taxpayers dollars feeding its insatiable appetite. 

So I'll say it again. Either your elected reps pledge to defund the spy agencies and repeal the Patriot Act, or they can go pay somebody to hold their place in the unemployment line. (It is beneath the dignity of millionaires to use their own bodies to wait in any line.) Or more realistically, they can go to K Street or a corporate-funded university or think tank and work directly for the surveillance state as we naively vote in their corporate-funded replacements.

Fat Cats and Suck-Ups

The headline in the so-called Progressive Congressional Caucus's latest budget proposal tells the whole sordid, regressive story:

8.8 MILLION JOBS BY 2017
$4 TRILLION IN DEFICIT REDUCTION


Austerity is dead, and income inequality has been proclaimed as the defining challenge of our time. So long live.... Deficit Reduction?

Somebody hasn't been reading their Paul Krugman, who rightly observes that it's stupid to worry about deficit reduction during economic downturns. Somebody didn't get the message that the Fix the Debt cult of billionaire deficit hawks just turned diseased tail feathers and ran.  Somebody didn't notice that shrinking deficits are not economy boosters.

If the Democrats are wondering why their electoral chances in the mid-terms are looking so dismal, they should look no further than the progressive wing of their own increasingly right wing corporate party. Why do even the most liberal members of Congress seem to have a pathological need to tout deficit reduction in their "Better Off" budget? The headline of their document should be making the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. Because nobody cares about deficit reduction except obscenely rich people.

Robert Borosage of Campaign for America's Future valiantly parses the  doubletalk (by the way, I would love to see a think tank or lobby call itself something like Fight the Miserable Status Quo for Change Today, or People Against the Soul-Crushing Present) Whenever a group with "future" in the title sends me a fund-raising email, the hairs on the back of my neck remain at full attention. Because time's a-wastin'!). But, I quibble. Writes Borosage:

This is the most progressive budget that will be introduced in the Congress.  It contains bold reforms, but it also accepts a remarkably conservative fiscal framework.  

It devotes over $1 trillion more of the increased revenues from its tax reforms to deficit reduction than to investment over 10 years. It projects an annual deficit of 1.6 percent GDP in 2024, far below a sustainable level of from 2.5 to 3 percent. The CPC rightfully challenges the destructive austerity policies of the last years, calling for repeal of the sequester and the wrong-headed Budget Control Act. But it responds to the alarms of the deficit hawks. Wall Street will howl at the tax proposals, but bankers should be pleased at the tribute paid to deficit reduction.

Holy sacred cow, Batman! These pragmatic suck-ups are worse than that wimpy Oregon couple who called 911 because they were "trapped" in their bedroom by their tantrum-throwing fat cat. Aptly named "Lux."

On the one hand, the progressive budget "rightfully" challenges violently destructive, over-the-edge austerity policies. On the other hand, it politely "asks" the rich to pay just a tad more, as it tacitly gives credence to their mantra of fiscal responsibility. Much of the additional tax revenue in this budget would go toward paying down the debt instead of much-needed spending to stimulate the economy. Even if it passed, the CEOs would simply gnash their teeth in public, but purr in private, complacently licking their paws as they lose a corporate jet deduction here, a vacation home write-off there.

Because the fat cats are safe, we're still trapped, and there's certainly no law enforcement named Eric Holder's DOJ to answer our calls for help. Even Eric Holder's own DOJ watchdog admits that they're unwilling to herd fat cats.

With a few extra progressive-sounding meat by-products ( e.g.,"restoring" cuts to the previously too-meager food stamp budget and "reversing" the federal wage freeze ) this progressive budget is not too far from what the Bowles-Simpson Catfood Commission has been calling for this whole time! Tax credits that reward the "hard work" of regular people, closing of tax loopholes for corporations to make it all seem fair.

It obediently falls in party lock-step with the president's own paltry suggested minimum wage of $10.10 -- rather than the more generous $15 an hour being demanded by fast food workers.

And rather than call for true universal health care in the form of Medicare for All, the We Suck Less Budget suggests "building on the successes and efficiencies" of Obamacare through a public option, and graciously allowing individual states to pursue single payer plans.... in the future, of course. Not right now, with upwards of 40 million people uninsured right now and not having the power to put off getting sick until the future.

Not only is this Better Off campaign propaganda document disturbingly vague and disturbingly conservative, it's also disturbingly pro-war and surveillance state. They don't want to end NSA domestic spying (or better yet, cut off funding entirely for the NSA, the CIA and all the other acronyms of over-the-edge authoritarianism). The Progressive Caucus is merely calling for the usual veneer of more fake transparency. They want an annual accountability report from the president to ensure that we are being spied upon in a thrifty way. There's even an ominous bit about continued funding of diplomatic efforts to effect "stability" in governments other than our own. It's suspiciously pro-regime change-sounding, as in supporting undemocratic coups that put fascist puppets into power. See: Ukraine. Why domestic spying and continued meddling abroad would even remotely make us "better off" is not explained by the progressive caucus.

The usual suspects herded into the Democratic veal pen are screeching because this bold milquetoast budget is not getting the same attention by the corporate media as Obama's worse budget and Paul Ryan's terrible budget. Progressives really should be howling in embarrassment and fury that the words debt and deficit are in a progressive document at all. Austerity words have become acceptable parts of the liberal lexicon, and are being used as olive branches to placate wealthy campaign bundlers who donate equally to both parties. Because no matter which side wins at the polls, the plutocrats will remain the pampered show cat champions. Their money, after all, determines both the campaign themes and election outcomes. They will continue getting better, and better, and better off.

And meanwhile, keep paying attention to what our politicians actually do, rather than to what they say in speeches or write in their aspirational fund-raising budget manifestos. The usual bipartisan suspects of the Millionaire Senate, for example, have just come to a tentative agreement that would resume short-term benefits to the long-term unemployed, in exchange for allowing cheap-ass bosses to "delay" contributing to the pension plans of those lucky duckies fortunate enough to still have jobs. Extending jobless benefits to a few million people for a few more lousy months would also be paid for by a regressive user tax on airline travelers. It's the same old, same old: they rob from the struggling to pay for the barely surviving. The hoarding rich shall not be inconvenienced as they grow richer and more bloated by the day. But they assuredly will continue to howl in mock outrage, victims of their own psychotic persecution complex.

The fat cat plutocrats and the suck-up politicians they own are to democracy what malignant tumors are to an organism. They neither know nor care that the cancer always dies right along with the host.

Greed: Tales of the Tolls

Austerity for the many and prosperity for the few is taking its toll, big-time.

Ask not for whom this deafening dissonant clanger of a bell tolls, proles. It tolls for thee.

Thee who drive in cheaply made overpriced cars with stuck accelerators and faulty airbags. Thee who ride the rusty rails from upstate New York backwaters in a quest for stagnating wages in the Income Disparity Capital of the nation. Thee who work and live in crumbling buildings heated by gas coming from pipes constructed, as Charles Pierce points out, during the administration of Grover Cleveland.

Ironically, those iron pipes were laid right in the middle of the last Gilded Age. Back then, of course, the Age of Excess also included manufacturing jobs. The free labor market of slavery had only recently ended, forcing the robber barons of yesteryear to either hire people, or go without their roads, bridges, railroads, newspaper chains and mansions.

The robber barons of the 19th century still had way too much, and the workers and citizens far too few protections and rights. But despite semi-regular financial panics and widespread political corruption, the economy was booming. And as the economy boomed, the labor movement began to thrive. Rights -- like the eight-hour day --  were hard-fought, but they were eventually won, despite the best efforts of the plutocrats.

Fast forward to the 21st century, and the modern robber barons have amassed even more than way too much, having reaped more than 90% of the gains since the meltdown which they had an integral role in creating. The 21st century economy has been financialized, the jobs and the profits have gone offshore, and the politicians running the government at the behest of the obscenely wealthy have not put the maintenance of the commons at the top of their to-do list. Regulations, with the public safety as their quaint raison d'etre, are going the way of the dinosaur.

And so came a triple-whammy of a week of tragic news. The deadly explosion and collapse of two buildings on the poor part of Park Avenue was immediate and newsworthy. It bled, so it led.... in spite of its usually ignored locale, on the proverbial wrong side of the crumbling tracks. The irony is that the poorly maintained Metro-North line nearby had to be shut down because some debris from the blasts landed right on top of them. Decay, meet Decay.

Utterly preventable tragedies usually come at fairly wide intervals, thus making them easier for us forget and for complicit politicians to sigh "Nobody could ever have predicted that deregulated greedsters couldn't have policed themselves!" And to be sure, the two scathing reports on General Motors and Metro-North, though coming only a day apart, address a monoculture of greed whose tragic effects have been generations in the making, whose death and dismemberment tolls have been insidiously mounting in plain sight in front of blind eyes for many years.

  The reports' impact is as shocking as the cataclysm in Harlem. How much longer can we ignore the human toll that the big money-controlled Caligula Caucuses of our state and national legislatures have exacted and will continue to exact unless we radically change the Greed Culture itself? How long must we wait before we replace sadism with sanity?

If the damning report on Metro-North in the wake of December's derailment and quadruple fatality is any indication, it might be awhile. Because it turns out that the only meaning of time in the world of the railway executive -- and any profiteer worth his salt, for that matter -- is money. "Punctuality Beats Safety at Metro-North" reads the headline in the New York Times:

 The review, from the Federal Railroad Administration, found that the commuter railroad’s operations control center pressured workers “to rush when responding to signal failures,” and that workers struggled to secure the track time needed to perform essential repairs. Even policies as pedestrian as the use of cellphones have created dangers: Amid confusion about the rules, cellphone use is “commonplace and accepted” among track workers on the job.

The report is all the more stunning, says the Times, because Metro-North had been considered one of the safest railway systems in the nation. And now we find out that the workers don't attend even perfunctory safety meetings, that they work long, sleep-deprived hours, that the tracks are not maintained adequately, and that getting commuters to their stagnating-wage jobs on time trumps everything else. Everything. Remember: time is money.

It's bad enough that General Motors, whose millionaire executives were so richly rewarded with much taxpayer largesse at the expense of the auto union and its pensioners, had been deliberately hiding the effects of ignition problems in some models for over a decade. But now comes news that 303 people had died in crashes in the recalled models after air bags failed to deploy.

It gets worse. The watchdog group Center for Auto Safety has also accused the now ignorance-pleading National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) of ignoring complaints about the problems for years. "The only way NHTSA could not see a defect trend," said the Center's Clarence Ditlow, "was if it closed its eyes."

Oops. There go those willfully blind eyes peering at a plain-sight spectacle again.

But, as retired NHTSA researcher and crash victim advocate Lou Lombardo observes, there has long been "a strange indifference to highway carnage" by the leaders of this country. Part of it is the revolving door phenomenon, in which government regulators and the industries they supposedly monitor become, in effect one and the same entity. And both safety regulators and the auto industry have long fought implementation of a national electronic crash notification system to better track and stop possible mechanical defects in the vehicles involved in crashes. Such a system could save hundreds, if not thousands of lives, says Lombardo. Such a system also assumes that the people in charge of safety are humane, and that car manufacturers are not letting their need for greed get in the way of the safety of their customers. It also assumes they aren't stupid, since dead and maimed drivers don't go shopping for new cars.

As Lombardo and former Dept. of Transportation official Ben Kelley write on the FairWarning blog:

 ... Car companies still are racing to add infotainment features to new models – some of them featuring video display screens on their instrument consoles – that are bound to further divert drivers’ eyes and attention from the road. The mounting safety risk from infotainment systems seems to be widely viewed as inevitable and beyond society’s ability to control. Meanwhile, Texas has adopted an 85 mph speed limit for a soon-to-open toll road, a move likely to be copied by other states, but that would be off the table if safety was a prime concern.

 Are you detecting a pattern yet? The protection of life and limb may no longer be much of a basic human right as guaranteed by the United States government. But your leaders will protect to the death your right to possess your precious electronic gizmos. It's the American, multi-tasking, need for speed, profits-over-people way.

The tolls of greed, the tolls of privatized toll road death-traps, the tolls of political visual impairment, the tolls of the fingers on the electronic gizmos instead of on the steering wheels. Clunk, clang, crash, ka-ching.

The Spy Who Didn't Love Her

This is just pathetic.

When Sen. Dianne Feinstein discovered in 2010 that the CIA was illegally tinkering with evidence about its torture program, she apparently was not upset enough to either denounce the agency publicly or to demand a criminal investigation.

She demanded an apology instead. And she got one. Case closed.

But when she recently demanded a similar apology from the CIA for spying on her own staff, a mea culpa was not forthcoming. And so, in a fit of pique,  DiFi took to the Senate floor today to express her deepest disappointment that the CIA never learned any decent manners. If only they'd personally expressed their regret to their BFF Dianne, the cheating and the serial violations of the Constitution never would have had to come to this public airing of dirty laundry.

 DiFi, who has long enabled the antics of the spook agency rather than fulfilling her own duties as chaperone of the spook dance, is acting like a woman scorned. She is not taking being ill-used "lightly."

Her belated tirade comes in the wake of media revelations that the CIA had not only illegally spied on her oversight personnel looking into Bush-era waterboarding and other war crimes, it had also had the chutzpah to accuse her people of stealing incriminating documents about the agency's torture program. Therefore, her continued complicity within the shadow state has become a tad uncomfortable  for her. Caught as she is between a rock and a hard place, she's being forced to come out of the shadows and pick a side.

Of course, this is not defined as "our side." Spying on the hoi polloi is dandy, spying on DiFi's entourage, not so much. She has not, of course, gone so far as to threaten to cut off the cash flow for her CIA. She simply wants her side of the story to get out. This is what is known in political circles as Damage Control.

So, DiFi is regretfully choosing her own employees over the spies she thought had loved her. And it hurts her to be so indiscreet about the end of the affair. It really hurts. You can hear the pain in her voice. You can feel the pain in her tortured official written denunciation:

I rise today to set the record straight and to provide a full accounting of the facts and history.

Let me say up front that I come to the Senate Floor reluctantly. Since January 15, 2014, when I was informed of the CIA’s search of this committee’s network, I have been trying to resolve this dispute in a discreet and respectful way. I have not commented in response to media requests for additional information on this matter. However, the increasing amount of inaccurate information circulating now cannot be allowed to stand unanswered.

Huh? Her claim that she didn't know about  CIA malfeasance until early this year is shot down by subsequent paragraphs in her own statement:

In May of 2010, the committee staff noticed that [certain] documents that had been provided for the committee’s review were no longer accessible. Staff approached the CIA personnel at the offsite location, who initially denied that documents had been removed. CIA personnel then blamed information technology personnel, who were almost all contractors, for removing the documents themselves without direction or authority. And then the CIA stated that the removal of the documents was ordered by the White House. When the committee approached the White House, the White House denied giving the CIA any such order.

After a series of meetings, I learned that on two occasions, CIA personnel electronically removed committee access to CIA documents after providing them to the committee. This included roughly 870 documents or pages of documents that were removed in February 2010, and secondly roughly another 50 were removed in mid-May 2010.

This was done without the knowledge or approval of committee members or staff, and in violation of our written agreements. Further, this type of behavior would not have been possible had the CIA allowed the committee to conduct the review of documents here in the Senate. In short, this was the exact sort of CIA interference in our investigation that we sought to avoid at the outset.

So, she knew something was afoot for the past several years. But let's parse it: when she became aware of evidence-tampering by the CIA, possibly at the behest of the White House, she said nothing publicly. After all, they were all Democrats. It was an election year. But actually spying on her own Staff? By outside contractors, no less! And the press gets ahold of the story? Cue the outrage.

And about that evidence-tampering, or evidence theft. The White House counsel and the CIA got themselves off the hook by politely apologizing to Feinstein, promising they'd never tinker with evidence ever again. And so she thought everything was hunky dory:

I went up to the White House to raise this issue with the then-White House Counsel, in May 2010. He recognized the severity of the situation, and the grave implications of Executive Branch personnel interfering with an official congressional investigation. The matter was resolved with a renewed commitment from the White House Counsel, and the CIA, that there would be no further unauthorized access to the committee’s network or removal of access to CIA documents already provided to the committee.

On May 17, 2010, the CIA’s then-director of congressional affairs apologized on behalf of the CIA for removing the documents. And that, as far as I was concerned, put the incident aside.

This is pretty stunning stuff. A sitting Senator has evidence of a crime with a cover-up possibly originating in the White House, and she covers it up.

This, from the woman who had the chutzpah to suggest that Edward Snowden is a traitor. (For his own part, Snowden sees right through DiFi's maudlin performance art, likening her display of outrage to that displayed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel upon discovering she'd been the victim of American spy state eavesdropping.

And then there's her explanation of how her staff obtained a secret report by former CIA Director Leon Panetta.... the report that the CIA is now accusing them of "stealing." DiFi even has a sneaking suspicion that her people might have innocently gotten the forbidden documents in question as a result of them being deliberately planted by an Edward Snowden-type character!

We have no way to determine who made the Internal Panetta Review documents available to the committee. Further, we don’t know whether the documents were provided intentionally by the CIA, unintentionally by the CIA, or intentionally by a whistle-blower.

In fact, we know that over the years—on multiple occasions—the staff have asked the CIA about documents made available for our investigation. At times, the CIA has simply been unaware that these specific documents were provided to the committee. And while this is alarming, it is also important to note that more than 6.2 million pages of documents have been provided. This is simply a massive amount of records.

So if evidence of crimes came through, the only fault lies in the fact that evidence spans over 6.2 million pages. It's hard out there for a stonewaller, I guess. Who can possibly read all that incriminating material and make it safe for bureaucracy?

The tortured explanation goes on and on and on. What really shines through is her persistence in believing that if only current CIA Director John Brennan had  kept her in the elite loop instead of giving her the cold shoulder and ignoring her letters, she would never have gone into public accusatory mode. And that is perhaps the scariest aspect of this whole scandal.

Johnny & Di in Happier Times

It will be interesting to see anybody demands an investigation of the subterfuge, given how many people seem to be in it up to their eyeballs. I  tend to doubt it. Real scandals that affect real people have a way of never becoming official scandals in official Washington. 

Meanwhile, in denying that he ever spied on Di, John Brennan expressed supreme confidence in his own continuing job security.  "I will be the first one to say we need to get to the bottom of it," he told MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell. "And if I did something wrong, I will go to the president and I will explain to him exactly what I did and what the findings were. And he is the one who can ask me to stay or to go."

As of this posting, the president had not yet asked Brennan to stay or go. As a matter of fact, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney made it perfectly clear: "The president has great confidence in John Brennan, and confidence in our intelligence community and in our professionals at the CIA."

So if I had to predict Obama's non-answer in a press briefing (or, more likely, in one of his serial performance art performances on a daytime talk show or comedy webcast), it would go something like this: "I have the utmost regard for both Senator Feinstein and my CIA director.  These people are dedicated public servants. I call both of them friends. Therefore, I will be calling a meeting in the near future, in order that these minor differences and misunderstandings between two good people can be worked out to everyone's satisfaction."

And swept under the rug, right along with the tattered remains of the Bill of Rights.

Deadly Times Ahead

Welcome to Daylight Saving Time, a.k.a. Nighttime Stealing Time.

Since most of us don't need that fake extra hour of daylight to plow the fields and bring home the cows after supper, time theft is exactly what the annual abomination of Daylight Saving Time is. No benefits are accruing to those being ordered to save. To the contrary: the first Monday of DST has been scientifically proven to be the most dangerous day of the entire year. Chances are that you might not even live to see another night because of all that pretend extra sunshine being inflicted upon you. Heart attacks and fatal car accidents and workplace mishaps reach their annual peak Monday, the intensity decreasing slightly for the rest of the week. Night-owls suffer more than day-owls. Outbreaks of workplace cyber-loafing are not uncommon.

Calling something 'saving' is SOP to make you feel resigned to being abused without your permission. (see: Republicans' "health savings accounts" to replace Medicare, and Obama's MyRa "retirement savings accounts" to maybe someday replace Social Security.)

The Turn of the Screw Clocks is tantamount to mandated sleep deprivation in an already sleep-deprived society. Sleep deprivation has, after all, been deemed torture by the Geneva Convention. Hyperbolic to call Daylight Saving Time torture, you say? Well, not so much, when studies show that even occasional or "minor" sleep deprivation has a cumulative effect, permanently altering brain chemistry and damaging health. You cannot catch up on lost sleep. For some, that one mandated lost hour could be the difference between life and death.

Sleep deprivation has been blamed for the Chernobyl meltdown, the Exxon-Valdez oil spill, and the Challenger disaster.  Most recently, the engineer of the ill-fated Metro-North train that killed four people in New York reported "zoning out" as a result of his work schedule having recently shifted from late night to early morning.

Factor in our chronic lack of sleep with the exhaustion pinnacle that is Nighttime  Stealing Week, and you've got a recipe for a whole bunch of tragedies.

 The irony is that the whole time-altering scam started out as a joke by none other than Ben Franklin. He facetiously suggested that colonists could save money on candles if they advanced their clocks ahead by an hour in the warmer months. And the rest, like most of ironic American history, is history. The Gothamist has 21 more reasons why the Great Time Robbery sucks, as if you needed any more.

Meanwhile, if you are you feeling tired and cranky after being forced to set your clocks ahead, try not to smash stuff as the chipper TV news mannequins urge you to just put on your happy face and dress yourself in sunshine and indulge in that horrible, neoliberal-sounding Power Nap after your Power Lunch. Try some blood pressure-reducing Ohhhhhmms between the Yawwwwwns.  There might still be a foot of grimy gray snow on the ground where you live, but try to visualize all those hopped-up horny Easter Bunnies "springing ahead" wherever you look. Don't be a downer. Take an upper. If you're not into drugs, just raise up the curtains and greet the glorious dawn! It's empowering. Which is pretty stupid, since DST actually means it's still dark outside at 6 a.m.; Dawn is dawning a whole hour later now. So, scratch that. Stay up a whole hour later instead, and watch the romantic sunset.  Your body clock may be screaming in protest, but those diurnal rhythms are just so yesterday. We live in an artificially lit, techno-connected 24/7/365 brave new world of higher worker productivity and stagnating wages. Get used to it, plebes, because there's always another poor slob waiting to take your place, willing to get by on less sleep just for the chance to survive another day-lightful day.

So let's keep a lousy idea that was lousy when they dreamed it up in those mythical, simpler, agrarian times for no other reason that it exhausts us. Sleep, as a universal, equal opportunity, no-cost phenomenon, is profitable only for the sleepers. The global economy is not making any money while you're snoozing, folks! The world cannot be made safe from terror with a country full of lazy snorers strung out in their hammocks of dependency. And in a hyper-capitalistic world that commodifies everything from drinking water to health care, if it's not profitable, then we must get rid of it. The plutocracy's answer is not more sleep for better health, but less sleep for us translating into more money for them.

And what better place to study how to reduce sleep than the taxpayer-funded Eternal War Complex? From ABC News:

By devising superhuman ways of staying awake for up to seven straight days and nights, military officials hope to lend U.S. soldiers a strategic edge in future conflicts.

"Eliminating the need for sleep during an operation … will create a fundamental change in war fighting and force employment," says a recent statement by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

To strive toward creating the no-sleep soldier, DARPA has funded a multi-tiered program from tinkering with a soldier's brain using magnetic resonance to analyzing the neural circuits of birds that stay awake for days during migration. The hope is to stump the body's need for sleep — at least temporarily.

"This program is really out of the box," says John Carney, director of DARPA's Continuous Assisted Performance program. "We want to look at capabilities in nature and leverage it so we can apply it in ways that no one thought possible."

Just what we need: bird brains studying bird brains for fun and profit and death. No word if there are mass suicides among sleep-deprived birds to correlate with the suicide epidemic of returning "tinkered" troops. But whatever. Stop kvetching about your precious hour of lost sleep, civilians!  If our Troops can go without sleep to keep you safe, think of the endless possibilities for an army of round-the-clock worker bees here in the Homeland!

Actually, that is already happening. As journalist Nick Reding reveals in his excellent investigative book Methland, the way that the low-paid, multi-shift workers at an Iowa meatpacking plant stayed awake was massive quantities of .... well, meth. The feds and the corporations didn't care, because the cost of the labor stayed low, and the profits flowed in, and people are ultimately disposable anyway. One more reason the War on Drugs sucks, as if you needed another reason.

I've told the story before about how I got my own personal, albeit short-lived revenge  on Dimwit Saving Time. One of my first assignments as a cub reporter was to write a story on it. Silly me, I (mistakenly of course) advised readers to set their clock back an hour instead of forward. I awarded folks with two extra hours at no cost to them. When the story zoomed past the sleepy editor and got into print and I realized my mistake while reading the front page at home that Sunday, I felt sure that the next day at work would be my last. But much to my surprise and relief, the newsroom was erupting in laughter. Turns out the only readers who called to complain were ladies who'd missed church. And since my editor was both an atheist and a misogynist, it ironically worked out very well for me at that brief moment in Time.

And it turns out I am in very good company. Toronto Mayor Rob Ford used his Twitter account to advise 130,000 people to set their clocks back Saturday night. No word if he was smoking crack at the Time, or if he can't remember because he was plastered when he Tweeted. Like a sleep-deprived migrating magpie.

Maybe the Army can study him.

CIA = Caught in Act

So what's more horrendous -- that the CIA was caught spying on United States Senators, or that the CIA appears to be getting away with it, gleefully thumbing its nose at all of us because it enjoys the full faith and protection of elected officials past, present, and future?

Just who was caught, and who has already been captured? (Hint: every compromised elected official with a past, a cell phone, and a computer)

When even Rachel Maddow, who normally makes me cringe because she is normally such a shill for the Obama Administration and the Democrats, calls the spying scandal "the death of the Republic stuff," you know this is pretty serious stuff.

“The whole separation of powers thing almost pales in comparison to the seriousness of the allegation that a nation’s own spy services have been turned against its own government. Particularly, where that government is supposed to be overseeing the spy services," said MSNBC's Maddow this week.

The news that the CIA monitored members of the Senate Oversight Committee, who are supposedly overseeing the CIA, is rendered even more shocking with the further revelation that those doing the spying were outsourced independent contractors. Talk about the chicken of privatization coming home to roost!

But wait, it gets even worse. Kevin Gosztola reports, via Time, that Obama's Justice Department is now investigating the Senate staffers who had the nerve to look at CIA torture documents and possibly remove evidence of CIA crimes from the permitted premises! And here we are, fretting about the coup in Ukraine when there's a coup in the USA going on under our very noses.

McClatchey News Service, in breaking the original story, explained that the spying on the overseers revolves around the long-delayed release of a Senate report on torture and other abuses during the Bush Administration. Confirmation of John Brennan as CIA director last year was predicated upon his promise to release the report pending his agency's own perusal of it. That was a year ago. So either the spies are very slow readers, or they've got "stuff" they want to hide. Of course, Brennan's name is most likely in the report at frequent intervals, seeing how he'd also worked for Bush. He has long claimed to have known nothing about Bush era war crimes.

Brennan had originally been Obama's pick to direct the CIA in his first administration, but had to withdraw the nomination because the country was still reeling from Bush. Instead Obama appointed him his national security advisor, and together they devised the "Terror Tuesday" lists of pre-criminals to kill by drone. By the time the second term began, abuses by Obama had become acceptable to the polled majority of his "liberal supporters". Better to have a Killer Obama than a Killer Romney, doncha know. Rachel Maddow certainly never characterized Obama's various rampages against the Constitution as potential "death of the Republic stuff" in any case.

  From McClatchey:

The development marks an unprecedented breakdown in relations between the CIA and its congressional overseers amid an extraordinary closed-door battle over the 6,300-page report on the agency’s use of waterboarding and harsh interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists held in secret overseas prisons. The report is said to be a searing indictment of the program. The CIA has disputed some of the report's findings.

White House officials have closely tracked the bitter struggle, a McClatchy investigation has found. But they haven’t directly intervened, perhaps because they are embroiled in their own feud with the committee, resisting surrendering top-secret documents that the CIA asserted were covered by executive privilege and sent to the White House.

(snip)

In question now is whether any part of the committee’s report, which took some four years to compose and cost $40 million, will ever see the light of day.

The report details how the CIA misled the Bush administration and Congress about the use of interrogation techniques that many experts consider torture, according to public statements by committee members. It also shows, members have said, how the techniques didn’t provide the intelligence that led the CIA to the hideout in Pakistan where Osama bin Laden was killed in a 2011 raid by Navy SEALs.

The committee determined earlier this year that the CIA monitored computers – in possible violation of an agreement against doing so – that the agency had provided to intelligence committee staff in a secure room at CIA headquarters that the agency insisted they use to review millions of pages of top-secret reports, cables and other documents, according to people with knowledge.

As Dan Froomkin of The Intercept reports, senators are not so much demanding to know what the hell is going on, as they are reduced to issuing a plaintive cry for help:

In a letter to President Obama on Tuesday, Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) referred to what he called “unprecedented action against the Committee in relation to the internal CIA review,” and described it as “incredibly troubling for the Committee’s oversight responsibilities and for our democracy.”

The allegation comes on the heels of a fruitless quest by members of the House and Senate to get NSA officials to confirm or deny whether information on phone calls by members of Congress has been swept up in the agency’s metadata dragnet. (Since it’s so indiscriminate, presumably they have, but the NSA won’t say so.)

Luckily for Obama, he is so embroiled in Ukraine-o-Mania, itself probably spawned by a CIA coup, that his non-answer to Udall has not yet been called into question.

This "death of the Republic stuff" is so extreme that I think it's also fair to ask, again, exactly what the president's function in our country really is. We all knew that he was the factotum of Wall Street, but does he also pledge his primary allegiance to the CIA? It has been confirmed that upon graduating Columbia, Obama worked for a CIA front group and had previously spent time traveling through Pakistan on an extended tour, "visiting friends." Such extreme conspiracy theorists as Alex Jones have long accused the president of being a CIA plant. You have to wonder if there's the tiniest grain of truth in any of this, given the president's apparent disinclination to order that torture report released. Or is this just another example of egregiously misplaced loyalty? Maybe he's just trying to protect his pal John Brennan.

But more likely, he's probably protecting his own rear end against the day another report is written on his own tortuous tenure of forced Gitmo feedings, continued extraordinary renditions of "terrorists," drone killings, whistleblowing prosecutions and his paranoid Insider Threat program, bankster protections, and unprecedented secrecy. He gave Bush a pass, so he expects Hillary or Jeb to continue the fine old pardoning tradition handed down for generations, and give him a free pass, too.

Sounds like the first order of business is to repeal the Patriot Act, if we have even a prayer of wresting what's left of our "representative democracy" from the hands of the surveillance state. Sounds like just the re-election litmus test for our corrupt, complicit and compromised politicians. I am waiting for the first brave soul willing to fight back instead of helplessly whining, to risk exposure for some past crime or embarrassment in order to save the moribund Republic stuff from itself.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/03/04/220161/cia-monitoring-of-senate-computers.html#storylink=cpy