Public Enemy Number One: The American Public

Ferguson, Missouri sector, Homeland Security States of America:

(Reuters)

(New York Times)

(YouTube)

As so many others have observed, these are the photos of a war zone. The explosion of events in a predominately black midwestern community is the direct result of 1) endemic racism and the paranoid "us against them" mentality of many police departments; and 2) putting the surplus high tech weaponry of war into the hands of poorly trained (mostly) men, who then act out of macho fantasy, abject fear, and mindlessness nurtured by stunted lifetimes' worth of consumption of violence-as-entertainment.

One young black man tried to take a detour from the school to prison pipeline that our cruel society had so callously mapped out for him, and he paid for his goal with his life.

Ferguson, Missouri may be the epicenter of a national tipping point, when the people finally had enough and began reacting to state violence against their peaceful protests with some civic violence of their own. From Reuters:

Police in Ferguson, Missouri, fired tear gas, stun grenades and smoke bombs to disperse some 350 protesters late Wednesday, the fourth night of racially charged demonstrations after police shot to death an unarmed black teen.

Some demonstrators hurled rocks at police as others scattered, while smoke engulfed the area. A Reuters reporter saw two young men preparing what looked like petrol bombs in a bus-stop shelter, their faces covered by bandanas. Police said protesters had thrown petrol bombs at officers.

Protesters have gathered every night since Saturday when 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot to death in the mostly black suburb of St. Louis, during what authorities said was a struggle over a gun in a police car. Some witnesses say he was outside the car with his hands up.

Police have deployed camouflage-clad officers in body armor, including one manning a rifle on a tripod atop an armored car, to Ferguson.

"I've had enough of being pushed around because of the color of my skin. I'm sick of this police brutality," said one protester, who gave only his first name, Terrell, 18. "I'm going to keep coming back here night after night until we get justice."

Political bigwigs have called for calm, of course. President Obama, esconced on his island playground with other members of his social class, is "heartbroken." And do I have to tell you that they're already insisting that "this is not who 'we' (exceptional Americans) are?"

 “The worsening situation in Ferguson is deeply troubling, and does not represent who we are as Missourians or as Americans,” Mr. (Missouri governor) Nixon said in a statement. “While we all respect the solemn responsibility of our law enforcement officers to protect the public, we must also safeguard the rights of Missourians to peaceably assemble and the rights of the press to report on matters of public concern.”

 Yes, actually, Ferguson is who we are. The only surprise is that there is not even more of a national uproar. Like in Detroit, where they actually cut off life-sustaining water to poor people who couldn't pay their bills. Like in New York City, where another black man was choked to death by police for the crime of selling untaxed cigarettes on the street. The state violence against ordinary people may not be as flashy and camera-ready as it is in Ferguson, Missouri, but it goes on every single minute of every single day, in every neighborhood in every town in every state in this country.

It's the violence of committing ten times as many mentally ill people to prison as are being treated in psychiatric facilities. It's the violence of a bipartisan Congress cutting billions of dollars from the food stamp program while giving corporate welfare to the elite class that is sucking the life out of poor people. It's the violence of a Texas governor using game wardens to hunt down human beings at a national border.

Meanwhile, since it bleeds, it leads in the corporate media. Blood and gore in the Homeland are vying for attention with the blood and gore in Iraq and other far- flung locales that are not in our back yard. When even reporters from respected national news outlets get roughed up and arrested without charge by the cops in a hometown low-wage McDonalds, that is news. 

When police brutality starts happening to nice, white, middle-class people who vote -- maybe then the bigwigs will pause in their toasts to one other and worry that they'll be toast in November and beyond.

As Matt Apuzzo of the New York Times recounts in a truly chilling article on police militarization,

The Pentagon program does not push equipment onto local departments. The pace of transfers depends on how much unneeded equipment the military has, and how much the police request. Equipment that goes unclaimed typically is destroyed. So police chiefs say their choice is often easy: Ask for free equipment that would otherwise be scrapped, or look for money in their budgets to prepare for an unlikely scenario. Most people understand, police officers say.

"When you explain that you’re preparing for something that may never happen, they get it,” said Capt. Tiger Parsons of the Buchanan County Sheriff’s Office in northwest Missouri, which recently received a mine-resistant truck.

Obama and his war-mongering cronies should have known that when you give toys to boys, they will play with them at every opportunity. Why go to a domestic argument in a squad car when you can roll through someone's living room in a tank? Why let all those surplus grenades go to waste when you can raid the wrong house and toss them into the crib of an innocent baby? Why let schools keep a trouble-maker after class to do homework when you can taser him and point a submachine gun at him before throwing him into a private prison? 

So, if Obama is as heartbroken as he claims to be by the events in Missouri, he should take his pen and his phone and issue one of those mandatory orders of his. All police departments must give up, forthwith, their billions of dollars' worth of  tanks, planes, attack helicopters, submachine guns, water cannon blasters, and grenade launchers.  A safe, unpopulated spot out in the desert somewhere can be found where the weapons of war can be neutralized.... perhaps by digging a hole a mile deep and a thousand miles wide and pouring a billion tons of concrete over the whole mess. Then the president can take his pen and cancel all the contracts with the Offense Industry. Let them make war with the weapons they already have. When those wear out, stop the wars and come home.

 The surplus money can go to schools, universal health care, forgiveness of college loans, a guaranteed national income or living wage, and enhanced Social Security for dignified old ages.   

I hate violence. But I applaud anyone who refuses to be dehumanized for one more outrageous minute.

Update: President Obama has evolved beyond the heartbreak phase, and has entered the next theatrical phase, where he urges calm from all involved, thus lumping the proles and the police into the convenient melting pot of free-floating violence. The cops should exercise more restraint, and at the same time it's on the victims to not react the way a normal human being is supposed to.

For the next suppressive phase, Obama pointedly moved from the previous outdoorsy backdrop of his vacation spread to a more officious indoor venue, complete with military flag backdrop. 

It was a tacit message that Security State America shall prevail.

 “Now’s the time for healing,” Mr. Obama said. “Now’s the time for peace and calm on the streets of Ferguson.”

This is called rushing the public to get over it already, and achieve that instant closure that he so desperately needs, even before the latest victim is decently buried.  He also made the obligatory and utterly meaningless call for "transparency."

 In Obaman newspeak, transparency is defined as opacity. Transparency is the way he absolved himself from revealing details about his drone killings, the way the NSA is absolved from perjury and criminal trespass charges, among other myriad felonies, and the way the CIA is absolved of torture and crimes against humanity of which we know naught, because Obama censored the Senate report.

Not one word from the president about disarming and demilitarizing the local police departments as a sensible way to effectuate the calm he pretends to crave.

 It does seem, however, that the Powers That Be will make an attempt to "tone it (police brutality) down" until the people get over it and until the mainstream media get around to moving on to the next bloody thing.

Robin Williams

News of Robin Williams' death has been a sucker-punch to the gut of a nation. At the same time, the reality that this genius is no longer of the earth is a concept that still hasn't quite sunk in.

I always liked his improvisational stand-up better than his TV sitcom or his later commercial blockbuster movies. (Exception: Awakenings.) When I first saw this anarchist in action, hyped up on his own natural amphetamines, I remember wondering how he ever managed to wind down enough to fall asleep at night. Later, when he revealed his substance abuse issues, I was not surprised that he'd taken the self-medication route, both to calm down and to ease some enormous hidden emotional pain. It's a testament to his own fortitude that he lasted as long as he did, into his seventh decade. Geniuses of his caliber who battle mental illness and addiction usually don't survive middle age.

His death is also a reminder that, as in so many of its other assbackwardnesses, America the Exceptional is still in the Dark Ages regarding mental illness. How many times in the past day have we heard media personalities pontificate about Williams "battling his demons?"  Because, despite the advances in knowledge that depression is an organic disease, it's  still equated with being possessed by the devil, or regarded as a moral or even criminal failing.

In fact, there are ten times more mentally ill people incarcerated in American jails than are being treated in psychiatric settings. These prisons are 21st Century Bedlams, in which sick people are so neglected and abused that by the time they are released, their illnesses have only gotten worse.

According to a study released in April by the Treatment Advocacy Center, in 2012, there were an estimated 356,268 inmates with severe mental illnesses in U.S. prisons and jails. There were only 35,000 mentally ill individuals in state psychiatric hospitals. Its findings show that the deliberate "transinstitutionalization" of mentally ill patients from hospitals to prisons is well nigh complete.

"We characterize seriously mentally ill individuals as having a thinking disorder," the report trenchantly concludes. "But surely it's no worse than our own."

On that note, let us remember the refreshing  and hilarious sanity of the truly great Robin Williams. Let the current epidemic of barbarism take a back seat to the humanity of one brilliant soul for at least one more day.

Made in the USA

This is refreshingly journalistic, at least more nuanced compared to the deja-vu American chest thumping for freedumb being spewed in the news these days:

BAGHDAD — When American forces raided a home near Falluja during the turbulent 2004 offensive against the Iraqi Sunni insurgency, they got the hard-core militants they had been looking for. They also picked up an apparent hanger-on, an Iraqi man in his early 30s whom they knew nothing about.

The Americans duly registered his name as they processed him and the others at the Camp Bucca detention center: Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badry.

That once-peripheral figure has become known to the world now as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-appointed caliph of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and the architect of its violent campaign to redraw the map of the Middle East.(snip)

At every turn, Mr. Baghdadi’s rise has been shaped by the United States’ involvement in Iraq — most of the political changes that fueled his fight, or led to his promotion, were born directly from some American action. And now he has forced a new chapter of that intervention, after ISIS’ military successes and brutal massacres of minorities in its advance prompted President Obama to order airstrikes in Iraq.

 So at least the New York Times admits that the current fiasco is the direct result of American intervention rather than the standard propaganda, that a new group of terrorists just sprang up, fully-formed, for the sole reason that they just "hate us for our freedoms."

But then the piece veers off into "it was just a failure of intelligence" territory rather than it was a gross failure of intellect and human decency at the very highest levels story. It's quite telling that it was the private spy agency known as Stratfor -- not the CIA --  which apparently first raised the red flag on the ISIS precursors, and quite telling that it was Wikileaks that revealed how clueless and cavalier the US government was about all the blowback the US government was creating.

Baghdadi is portrayed as a cross between John Gotti (he gave street parties and built schools in between extortion raids on the Iraq citizenry) and a Che Guevara-like character "warmed over for jihadists." A Pentagon official even expresses grudging admiration for him, given his slick propaganda skills and racketeering campaign worthy of any billionaire Wall Street banker.

He sounds like a neoliberal folk hero in the making. Created of free-marketers, by free-marketers, for free-marketers.

And then the story veers off into the standard Obama vs. Hillary personality piece shallowness. The Beltway is all abuzz over a simmering feud now boiling over into potboiler territory.

According to The Atlantic, Hillary is making fun of Barry's snooty "Don't Do Stupid Shit" foreign policy. That is patently unfair, since his shitbombs are actually quite well-aimed and open-ended. Hillary blames his failure to arm Syrian rebels for the current crisis, forgetting that the arms dealers of America have already provided all the firepower necessary for the current crisis. And even worse, she's all "hepped up" about war. And it appears that she will run unopposed for the presidency. The Republicans are absolutely crazy about her.

So bombs away.... in the name of humanity, religion, Mom, apple pie and oligarchy.

Meanwhile, New York Times columnist Charles Blow hilariously blames disengaged American people instead of the misinforming media for an epidemic of public ignorance about ISIS and the wars: 

More Americans need to be more engaged, because these conflicts are complicated. There are no easy answers. Sometimes there will be no clear choices between good guys and bad guys but only choices among lesser demons. Sometimes conflicts are a swirl of history, ambition, grievance, vengeance and egos. Sometimes actors can only see righteousness in their wrong. Sometimes nobility and savagery coexist.

But if America, as the world’s last remaining superpower, is to faithfully play a role — if we must play that role — as a check against tyranny and terror in the world, its citizenry must be up to the task of discernment.

Huh?

 My published response: 

 If Americans aren't the most engaged people on world issues, then neither are our elected leaders the most transparent. Far from it.

Jill Abramson, former NYT executive editor, called the current White House the most secretive she's encountered in all her years in journalism.

More whistleblowers have been prosecuted under Obama than in any prior administration. CIA analyst John Kiriakou, who blew the whistle on torture, is rotting in prison, while the actual torturers (aka "patriots) are protected. A long-awaited Senate report on CIA torture is now on indefinite hold, because White House censorship has been so intense as to render it practically meaningless.

Reporters Without Borders has ranked the US a dismal 46th in its most recent annual press freedoms survey, representing a 14-point plummet in just one year. Another survey, by PEN, reveals that most American journalists now self-censor out of fear that the government is reading their emails and listening to their phone calls.

So not only do we have to be more engaged, we have to be more vigilant. This, of course, is easier said than done, especially when people are more worried about which Peter they'll have to rob to pay which Paul every month than what ISIS is.

And this ignorance naturally suits the bellicose gatekeepers and their propaganda merchants just fine.

To my busy friends, I recommend Polk winner Robert Parry's Consortium News for some of the best, clearest investigative journalism on the wars.

  

Everywhere Is War: World Edition

 America is one hell of a schizophrenic bastion of phony democracy.

Depending upon geography, the ethnicity of the target populations, and the politicians being bribed, America the Exceptional either drops proxy bombs on people (Gaza), direct-drones people ("tribal" areas), or drops packages of food, water and medicine on a carefully vetted few (a remote mountaintop in Iraq) as P.R. cover for a bombing campaign that benefits multinational oil companies ("American interests.")

To be fair, if ISIS was attacking the Gaza Strip instead of Northern Iraq, I think President Obama would also be falling all over himself condemning the genocide and defending the right of Palestinian children to live and breathe.... based purely on their physical proximity to Israel. When it's Netanyahu's terror state doing the attacking, there are of course no American planeloads of sustenance arriving to help those embargoed, starved, bombed-out victims.

To the contrary. Since the U.S. Senate has, in fact, just unanimously allocated more money to Israel for its incremental extermination of the petroleum-poor inmates of the world's largest outdoor prison, I think it's obvious to anyone paying attention that the leaky wreck of state known as the USS Hypocrisy sailed a long time ago. And all the expensive propaganda pumps in the world can't keep up with the bilge.

Obama picks and chooses his lucky humanitarian recipients based solely upon their profit potential. The world is taking notice.

 Yet, in what is increasingly looking like World War Three, Obama is portrayed by the stenographic corporate media as either a hopeless wimp (right wing/neocon/Fox/CNN) or as a reluctant warrior bound by his noble moral impulses (right of center/neoliberal/r2p/ {"responsibility to protect"}New York Times/MSNBC).

Here's how the Times' White House insider Peter Baker spins it,  

In sending warplanes back into the skies over Iraq, President Obama on Thursday night found himself exactly where he did not want to be. Hoping to end the war in Iraq, Mr. Obama became the fourth president in a row to order military action in that graveyard of American ambition.

The mandate he gave to the armed forces was more limited than that of his predecessors, focused mainly on dropping food and water. But he also authorized targeted airstrikes “if necessary” against Islamic radicals advancing on the Kurdish capital of Erbil and others threatening to wipe out thousands of non-Muslims stranded on a remote mountaintop.

Notice the immediate emphasis on the rescued being non-Muslims, lest the Islamophobes fret.

As he explained himself to a national television audience, Mr. Obama made a point of reassuring a war-weary public that the president who pulled American forces out of Iraq at the end of 2011 had no intention of fighting another full-scale war there. Yet his presence in the State Dining Room testified to the bleak reality that the tide of events in that ancient land have defied his predictions and aspirations before.

The road to hell is paved with good fake intentions. Baker forgets to mention that Obama very much wanted to keep boots on the ground in Iraq before ostensibly pulling out in 2011. But the Iraqis refused to sign a Status of Forces agreement, which would have given American contractors and troops immunity from prosecution for their imperialistic crimes, misdemeanors and those unfortunate atrocities that crop in every war where testosterone runs wild. And what does Obama's telegenic presence in the State Dining Room (instead of the intimate Oval Office) signify? Baker doesn't explain. Does it mean that Obama is hungrily awaiting his dinner? Somebody please tell me!

Baker continues quoting Obama's televised speech:

“I know that many of you are rightly concerned about any American military action in Iraq, even limited strikes like these,” he said. “I understand that. I ran for this office in part to end our war in Iraq and welcome our troops home, and that’s what we’ve done. As commander in chief, I will not allow the United States to be dragged into fighting another war in Iraq.”

Many of us are rightly concerned about military actions all over the planet. Ukraine. Libya. Yemen. Afghanistan. Pakistan. Africa. Central and South America. The thousand known military bases throughout the globe and the unknown number of CIA/Special ops black sites and outposts. A Pentagon/Surveillance State budget in the stratosphere.

 Sorry, Obama: the United States is the dragon, not the drag-ee.... and the rest of the world is its state dinner flambé.

But let the Times continue spinning its rusty wheels:

Mr. Obama has spent months resisting just that. Even after the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, seized Falluja and other territory in the western part of the country at the beginning of the year and marched through Mosul and toward Baghdad by summer, the president expressed no enthusiasm for American military action.

... in that particular locale, seeing how it evokes so many memories of the "folks" who tortured other folks and lied their way into war and essentially left Iraq in ruins. Obama is more enthusiastic about starting a new cold war against Russia, with his fascist Ukrainian neocon-installed puppets, and waging his myriad secret wars to keep up the pretense that he actually deserved his Nobel Peace Prize. He single-handedly ruined Libya, of course, and was ultimately prevented at the last minute from bombing the hell out of Syria based on what turned out to be trumped-up evidence of sarin attacks by the government.

In June, he sent in 300 special forces troops not to fight but to assess the situation, an assessment that has yet to be completed, and he increased surveillance passes over Iraq. But Mr. Obama rebuffed calls, including those from within his administration, to quickly send in air power to hit ISIS forces.

Aides said his hand was not forced until ISIS won a series of swift and stunning victories last weekend and Wednesday night against the Kurds in the north, who have been a loyal and reliable American ally, especially compared to the Baghdad government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. ISIS threats to wipe out Yazidis and other religious minorities trapped on Mount Sinjar, they said, added to the urgency.

He crept the mission and waited for the necessary crisis. Despite the best efforts of the NSA and the CIA, they never even saw ISIS (their own Frankenstein monster) coming. CNN and the Washington Post are among the bloodthirsty outlets manically reporting that this failure of intelligence is all Edward Snowden's fault. The smell of official desperation is everywhere.

“You don’t have to have a ton of insight to know he feels reluctant,” said Douglas Ollivant, a former Iraq adviser in the White House under Mr. Obama and President George W. Bush. “He wants the Iraq problem not to exist. And that’s exactly what the American people sent him to the White House to do.” But “all these factors may kind of drag him kicking and screaming into some kind of decision.”

Like I said.... the smell of official desperation is everywhere. Poor Barry just wants to go golfing, and reality will not let him. Can it get any more maudlin? I think we can count on it. Read the rest of the article, but be warned: there are gobs of viscous verbal treacle ahead. It's a veritable follow-the-money guide to the seamless transition between the brutal Bush and Obama administrations and how the various players have profited. Ollivant, for example, is a paid war-mongering network shill and venture capitalist whose tentacles extend throughout the media-military-industrial complex.

Meanwhile, ceasefire ended, the Israel-Gaza war has resumed, with another child killed in Gaza by the Netanyahu terror machine as he played near a mosque. With more than one Palestinian faction negotiating, the hellish nightmare seems bound to continue for the foreseeable future.

The fighting in Ukraine rages on.

And closer to Home Sweet Homeland, drug-addled Texas Governor Rick Perry is deploying 1,000 National Guard troops to the Mexican border to battle the "alien invasion." In what sounds uncomfortably close to a genocide precursor, he is even using game wardens to hunt down migrants. Animalization is tantamount to dehumanization.

And now for some perspective.

In other news, a respected climate scientist was so rattled by the recent discovery of vast plumes of methane streaming up from the Arctic sea floor that he sent out this S.O.S. tweet to the whole warring world:

“We’re on a trajectory to an unmanageable heating scenario, and we need to get off it,” he (Jason Box) said. “We’re fucked at a certain point, right? It just becomes unmanageable. The climate dragon is being poked, and eventually the dragon becomes pissed off enough to trash the place.”

America Is Bummed

Not that we really needed an NBC-Wall Street Journal poll to tell us this stuff:

More people than ever before in the history of the greatest exceptional g-d-blessed nation that the world has never known now think that their children will be worse off than they are. The magic number is three-quarters, or 76% (as an aide-memoire for the pop quiz, just remember the magical year that the Declaration of Independence was signed, 1776).

  Also for the first time, most Americans now believe that record wealth disparity is a driver of the lousy economy. And for one more time in a whole series of many times, most Americans blame their elected officials for the perpetuation of the chronic lousiness. But in a deviation, more people are now including their own particular pork-barrel pols in the despised category.

Despite the vaunted recovery (of the One Percent) two-thirds of us still feel mired in a recession. Forty per cent of us report that at least one member of our family has lost a job in the past five years. Most of us feel that the country is in decline.

So, while Americans are bummed, their disaffection does have a healthy basis in reality. It's what they call an exogenous depression. It's a malady caused by outside forces. Therefore, these polls are actually a faint sign of hope: the majority of people at least are correct about the root causes.

The people win when the people refuse to blame themselves, despite the best efforts of the propagandists of Bootstrapville. 

It even sounds like the "folks" are morphing from depression into anger and actually directing their rage at all the right culprits.

Whether the people can resist the usual "divide and conquer" tactics commonly used by our leaders whenever the national mood turns sour and their power is threatened remains to be seen.

 Do we turn against each other when politicians manipulate such hot button issues as immigration, or do we embrace solidarity and finally turn against our common plutocratic enemy?

Never say never. Strange things happen.

When the Depraved Get Depressed

Just when you thought the filthy rich couldn't get any more depraved, they get so mind-numbingly depraved that they don't even care what the deprived might think of them. From the New York Post:

A Manhattan corporate attorney is leading a group of wealthy Hamptonites who want to tear down a Water Mill road sign honoring a nun killed in a 2012 hit-and-run — because, he whines, he’s tired of repeating her depressing tale to guests.

“Every time someone visits, I am forced to recount this tragedy because they ask who Sister Jackie was,” John Carley, a former counsel to rental-car giant Avis, said in a January letter to Southampton Town officials.

“While I have no doubt Sister Jackie was a wonderful person and deserves to be remembered by those who knew her, her tragic death while visiting us is not an event residents wish to recall.”

Town highways boss Alex Gregor had installed a blue sign that reads “Sister Jackie’s Way” above the normal green street marker last summer to memorialize Sister Jacqueline Walsh, 59, who was killed walking near the Sisters of Mercy convent on Rose Hill Road in July 2012.

Sister Jackie

Since the majority of rich denizens of the road have now officially voted to remove the sign, town officials will comply with the request in order to lift all those heavy, unspiritual spirits.

Among those demanding that the memorial to the nun be torn down is Pia Lindstrom, who is married to Carley. A former NBC reporter, she is a daughter of late actress Ingrid Bergman, who famously starred as kindly Sister Mary Benedict opposite Bing Crosby in The Bells of St. Mary's. 

The Anti-Nun Nonentities

 
You might think that Lindstrom, the anti-nun, would be auditioning for the role of La Belle Dame Sans Merci. But she's really just a critic, and not only of street signs that interfere with the shallow chitchat at her garden parties. Here's one of her blurbs for New York Magazine's annoying "The Best of Everything" feature:

If you walk along Flying Point Beach in Water Mill, there's a warm inlet of water where children can play because it's shallow. Also, there's never anybody at all on Wyandanch beach in Southampton.

It's as quiet as a nun without a street sign memorial to spoil the ambience.

Right next to Lindstrom's beach blurb is an entry from one Lizzie Grubman, who raved, "Everybody goes to Gibson in Sagaponack, a sceney beach that feels public, even though it's private."

 You may remember Lizzie as the socialite who created quite a sceney scene when she mowed down 16 people with her Mercedes SUV at a Hamptons bar way back in 2001 and served all of a month in jail on multiple felony counts, including drunk driving, reckless endangerment and assault. (To be fair, she had nothing to do with the hit and run of the nun.) Lately, she has become notorious in the Hamptons for stiffing her servants out of their wages and bouncing checks. It must be like there is never anybody at all in the world except Lizzie Grubman and Pia Lindstrom.

One Too Many Days On A Shallow Beach: La Lizzie

Gregor, the Sister Jackie highwayman memorialist, is sanguine about the latest brouhaha:

“I guess rich people, especially around here, get annoyed pretty easily,” he said.

Easily annoyed.... and, it turns out, very easily depressed. Hoi polloi, both dead and alive, are causing the phone lines of Hamptons psychotherapists to light up  this summer. The New York Times, keen chronicler of  the crowd that "summers," is on the tragedy:

The East End of Long Island has long been one of the most sought-after summertime escapes, one generally out of reach for the average vacationer as fishing villages and farms have become playgrounds for the rich. But the democratizing power of the Internet has turned more Hamptonites into prospering landlords, given visitors many more options and brokers many fewer, and left local officials busy trying to keep a cork on all the new activity.

Websites like Airbnb, HomeAway, VRBO and even Craigslist are vastly reshaping the seasonal market, letting renters and owners transact for as little as $75 a night in an area where six figures for one month is not extraordinary. But as in New York City, where some sites, notably Airbnb, have come under scrutiny, in the town of East Hampton, which includes the villages of Sag Harbor, Amagansett, Springs and Montauk, many listings blatantly violate local laws severely restricting short-term rentals.

Street signs honoring merciful nuns. And now Craigslist? Oh, the humanity. Somebody, call Pia Lindstrom's husband, pronto! Alert Lizzie to get the Merc out of the 10-car garage!

“If you’re staying for a month or two, you probably want to behave yourself and be a good neighbor, but if it’s just for a weekend, it’s probably just to party,” Fran Donovan, a local mental health therapist, said on Thursday while enjoying an iced tea at the Golden Pear Cafe on Newtown Lane. Ms. Donovan said one of her patients’ top anxieties these days was the explosion of short-term rentals.

A house down the block from hers has already been rented out online to large parties twice this season. “Does my business benefit from people coming out? Of course,” she said, referring to her seasonal clients. “But it seems like everyone’s trying to ride the gravy train, and if they’re not careful, it’s going to crash.”

 Somebody call Doctor Freud, before their pampered dispirited heads explode.

On second thought, somebody call a Hamptons yoga instructor named Erika Halweil, who infuriated New York Times readers when the "Vows" section ran a story last year recounting the "spiritual awakening" she herself experienced when she accidentally struck and killed a child with her car, resulting in a better life for Erika Halweil, who was changed for the better by the sight of the victim's spirit leaving the body. So don't get mad, rich people. It is absolutely possible to get even more self-fulfillment at an Ayn Rand Yoga Center in a tony neighborhood near you. 

On third thought, somebody call Doctor Piketty and have him give a lecture to these rich assholes. They need to be reminded that all this record wealth inequality is hazardous to their health, too. There's Affluenza, there's an epidemic of narcissism, but there's also TB and MERS and Ebola. So if they're not careful about reining in their greed, and sharing a little wealth with the teeming masses, they're liable to go crashing down just like Sister Jackie's sign.

And they will be shown no mercy. And nobody will ever dream of naming a street after them.

Not Intimidated by Depravity: Alex Gregor (photo, N.Y. Post)

Depraved Diplomacy

Just when you thought the official depravity couldn't get any worse, it gets mind-numbingly worse:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- An Obama administration program secretly dispatched young Latin Americans to Cuba using the cover of health and civic programs to provoke political change, a clandestine operation that put those foreigners in danger even after a U.S. contractor was hauled away to a Cuban jail.

Beginning as early as October 2009, a project overseen by the U.S. Agency for International Development sent Venezuelan, Costa Rican and Peruvian young people to Cuba in hopes of ginning up rebellion.

In one case, the workers formed an HIV-prevention workshop that memos called "the perfect excuse" for the program's political goals - a gambit that could undermine America's efforts to improve health globally.

It's bad enough that the CIA used a hepatitis screening program in Pakistan as a ruse to gather DNA evidence in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, resulting in an actual outbreak of polio in that country when the fraudulence was exposed and citizens refused to avail themselves of legitimate vaccination programs.

 But this operation in Cuba is even worse, because the Obama administration has exploited unqualified students for use as agitators and undercover agents for purposes of regime change. Not to nab a terrorist, but to foment the overthrow of a legitimate leftist government in order to make that part of the world safe for ravenous capitalism.

 And now that the White House's cynical ploy has been exposed, it might even have succeeded in making Cuban youths think twice about getting tested for HIV.

And to add insult to unthinkable injury, the administration paid its democracy mules sub-minimum wage. It even made their relatives unwitting couriers of American cash.

Then again, these adolescent agents are not exceptional Americans. They will not be allowed anywhere near Obama's vaunted "opportunity ladders" even if they work hard and play by the rules. They got little to no job training.They are from some of the same poor drug and gang-infested, CIA-destabilized regions from which tens of thousands of other youths are fleeing for their very lives. They are, therefore, highly expendable and exploitable. Obama used them the same way unscrupulous con artists advertise summer jobs in which naive kids end up getting dumped into cities far from their homes to sell magazines door to door.

In all, nearly a dozen Latin Americans served in the program in Cuba, for pay as low as $5.41 an hour.

The AP found USAID and its contractor, Creative Associates International, continued the program even as U.S. officials privately told their government contractors to consider suspending travel to Cuba after the arrest of contractor Alan Gross, who remains imprisoned after smuggling in sensitive technology.

The Cuban operation is part of a shadowy foreign policy which allows the government to partner with so-called "aid" agencies as cover for its coups and other mischief. It works the same way as the outsourced torture contracts. It allows for arms-length immoral transactions and plausible deniability when things go awry.

The use of callow youths as spies and their placement into dangerous situations is a new low, even for this White House. And it was only a couple of days ago that, with Obama's bland admission that "we tortured some folks" and that he had only outlawed "some" of the torture techniques, I thought I'd seen it all.

I was wrong. Now he can add labor rights abuse (and depending on the spies' ages, even child abuse) and a potential new AIDS epidemic to his list of accomplishments. Why do I keep thinking of Orson Welles as Harry Lime in "The Third Man?" Oh yeah... the polio vaccine scam and the memorable scene of the exploited kids in the hospital beds.

Creative Associates (a name more than creepy enough for a Graham Greene spy thriller) does blandly admit, right on its web-page, that its alleged mission of global HIV eradication has plenty of ulterior, free-market motives (Tell-tale Orwellian weasel words are in my bold):

For over a decade, Creative has served as an implementing partner for HIV and health interventions worldwide. Creative works with local communities as primary platforms for development interventions in health, HIV prevention, literacy, national stabilization, elections, life skills, and capacity building often leveraging schools and their unique reach into those societies. Throughout its efforts, Creative remains committed to the “whole child.” We bring capacity in each area relevant for a child’s development and growth and throughout the life cycle: literacy and cognitive development; health and well-being; economic security; and a safe and secure environment. This holistic approach fundamentally recognizes the community’s role and impact on children’s development.

In his World AIDS Day 2012 address, President Barack Obama declared that “we stand at a tipping point in the fight against HIV/AIDS, and working together, we can realize our historic opportunity to bring that fight to an end.” Creative is committed to contributing to the reality of an AIDS-free generation through its work -- promoting HIV prevention in communities and schools, supporting access to care and treatment services, and improving economic livelihoods through partnerships and linkages.

Creative’s keen sensitivity to local culture gives us intimate insight we apply to develop and integrate customized technical solutions to build country capacity, scale evidence-based technical strategies, promote gender equality, and ensure program sustainability. Creative incorporates monitoring and evaluation metrics into programs from inception to measure accurate outcomes, foster transparency, and increase sustainability. Our sustained commitment to health and HIV interventions has grown from the meaningful opportunity to save mothers and children, foster an AIDS-free generation, and ultimately support people around the world to better their lives.

That last paragraph, by its very banality, is the most cynically telling of all. It jibes so conveniently with the neoliberal "empowerment of women" movement which gives cover to so much of the American meddling abroad. How using the young as spies promotes "gender equality" is anybody's guess. But it's worth noting that Hillary "It Takes a Village" Clinton was secretary of state when this whole regime change fraudulent HIV initiative was dreamed up shortly after Obama took office and promised a better relationship with Cuba.

 Creative Associates itself was founded by a female "venture philanthropist."  M. Charito Kruvant was recently named among Washington's "100 Most Powerful Women." 

Go figure.

Her agency was also behind the fake Cuban Twitter scam revealed by the AP earlier this year. A longer version of the article linked above can be found here. (One young Costa Rican operative tracked down by AP reporters is not talking, having signed a "nondisclosure" agreement with the US Government on the illegal operation.)

As Moon of Alabama observes, "This only shows again why every nation on this world must distrust ANY word that comes out of official Washington. The leaders from African countries who are just now visiting Washington should keep the Cuban example in mind when Obama tries to charm them into U.S. dependency. None of his words can be trusted or be accepted as having any real meaning."


When there's money to be made, particularly at the expense of the desperate and the marginalized, there is no limit to the depravity, newly euphemized as "venture philanthropy" to disguise its innate ugliness.  Money begets power begets more money begets more power. Too much is never quite enough when expansion is the only goal.

And as Hannah Arendt noted in her seminal work on the subject, the unhealthy mixture of superfluous (excess) capital and superfluous human beings is always a recipe for totalitarian disaster.