Torture Watch

 (*Updated below)

So here's my question: will we have to wait for the release of the Senate's torture report until President Obama has finished his weekly vetting of new targets of drone strikes,  or does Kill List Tuesday not interfere with Torture Tuesday?

I bring this up only because Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties union, has also called upon Obama to devote some of his busy Tuesday to pardoning the Bush administration's war criminals. Theoretically, this would be a tacit admission that they are, in fact, war criminals, which is better than just ignoring them and inviting them back to the White House for special occasions.  Since Obama already announced there will be no prosecutions, the least he can do is grant his predecessors permanent amnesty instead of letting them twist in the wind for all eternity. As Romero writes in a New York Times op-ed:

 When the (Obama Justice) department did conduct an investigation, it appeared not to have interviewed any of the prisoners who were tortured. And it repeatedly abused the “state secrets” privilege to derail cases brought by prisoners — including Americans who were tortured as “enemy combatants.”

What is the difference between this — essentially granting tacit pardons for torture — and formally pardoning those who authorized torture? In both cases, those who tortured avoid accountability.

But with the tacit pardons, the president leaves open the very real possibility that officials will resurrect the torture policies in the future. Indeed, many former C.I.A. and other government officials continue to insist that waterboarding and other forms of torture were lawful. Were our military to capture a senior leader of the Islamic State who was believed to have valuable information, some members of Congress would no doubt demand that our interrogators use.

 (snip)

The spectacle of the president’s granting pardons to torturers still makes my stomach turn. But doing so may be the only way to ensure that the American government never tortures again. Pardons would make clear that crimes were committed; that the individuals who authorized and committed torture were indeed criminals; and that future architects and perpetrators of torture should beware. Prosecutions would be preferable, but pardons may be the only viable and lasting way to close the Pandora’s box of torture once and for all.

What Romero doesn't mention is that, besides committing war crimes of his own via the drone assassination program, Obama himself practices both direct and indirect torture. The UN and other human rights groups have deemed the force-feeding of detainees at Guantanamo Bay to be torture. Our government still outsources torture to other governments. The placement of thousands of American prisoners in long-term solitary confinement has been called torture.

If Obama pardons Bush, he will also have to pardon himself. And that will never do. He's got his legacy to worry about, as the New York Times never fails to remind us. On this particular Terror Tuesday, without a hint of irony, the paper is concern-trolling his civil rights and racial politics legacy.

While you're waiting for the report, Glenn Greenwald offers a succinct preview, and will be live-blogging the actual release. (I may be offline myself since a big Nor'easter is set to hit up here and the power company is already sending ass-covering outage alerts.)

*Update:  It's now been released. Suffice it to say, the CIA's brutality makes the sadistic kops now in the news look like choirboys. The sexual sadism (rectal force-feeding) is particularly gruesome. But as Obama says, we must look forward, not backward.

"It is important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that those folks (CIA) had.” -- Barack Obama, this year, grudgingly admitting that "we tortured some folks."

H'ostess With the Mo$test

For that special One Percent someone who has everything but still wants more, more, more: a complete set of gold-embossed cocktail napkins with a selection of original Hillary quotes (including one borrowed from Teddy Roosevelt). Only the best will do for the blotting of sensitive Dom Perignon-stained chops and the prevention of stains on antique mahogany coffee tables.

And if you order now, you will also receive a free Hillary magnet, reminding you not to forget to put on your movie star shades in the dead of night while texting before getting behind the wheel of your Mercedes.

 

If you choose to follow this link to the Ready for Hillary website, please be warned. They wouldn't let me in until I entered a name and zip (I picked "Hannah Bananah 90210") and an email address. (I used my real one.)  From there, I got sent to a donation page. I discovered that unless you fork over the cash, you can't go any further. You cannot be ready for Hillary unless you pay for Hillary. 

At that point, I quit in disgust. But, it turned out they were only kidding! Thank goodness I'd  supplied my correct email address, because a few hours later I got the official invite welcoming me to Ready for Hillary! or, more specifically, the Ready for Hillary Store! From this follow-up special offer, without even having to buy anything first, I got instant access to the entire site, complete with glowing blogs by Hillary fans, and even more Hillary stuff for sale.

The whole reason I wasted part of my Sunday on Hillary in the first place was yet another Frank Bruni column in the New York Times, obsessively and prematurely rhapsodizing over the ephemeral Hillary candidacy demanded by the elite punditocracy.  Bruni kindly provided a link to a now-viral country music video (he found it cringe-worthy only in its blue collar pandering) which extols her qualifications for the presidency, based solely upon the fact that she's a sexy-woman Granny. It is a must-miss, but like any highway wreck, it's a shady magnet for gawkers. And that, of course, includes most of us. Because admission is absolutely free!

Here's my published comment to Bruni:

Did you notice that the Hillary video contained a snippet of the trademark baseline bar from "We Will Rock You?" It's a song by Queen, in case you didn't get the subliminal message. It's a real disgrace, and Hillary should have egg all over her face. (The blood is on her hands, vis a vis her Iraq vote.)

At this point, the only reason I'm not in a deep depression is because throngs of people, the erstwhile Democratic "base," are taking democracy into their own hands and marching for social and economic justice. Whether Hillary gets this subliminal message remains to be seen. The day I see her mingling with the poor in Mississippi, or spending the night in a heatless, roach-infested slum dwelling in Bed-Stuy to show some solidarity with "the base" will be the day when my mind will possibly begin to change about her. And it can't be one of those one-off political stunts, either. She has to openly call for criminal indictments of banksters, and an end to wars and the surveillance state.

 Of course, I jest.

If it comes to a Hillary-Jeb contest, or even worse, a Hillary-Romney Neoliberal Death Match, don't be surprised by a mass de facto boycott of the polls come 2016. Watching a group of plutocrats at phony debates sponsored by Big Oil, General Dynamics, Boeing, and Goldman Sachs will make the Hillary video look like a Prix D'Or winner at Cannes. The "base," many of whom no longer can even afford cable because they have no jobs and no money, won't be watching anyway.

I got many replies to this comment from other readers, some of whom agreed with me and others that didn't. (It's that damned Clinton polarizing/triangulation effect!) The most popular commenter misinterpreted my forecast of a voter boycott as direct advocacy of a voter boycott. If the Republicans win, then I, fanciful questor after unicorns that I am, will personally be the direct cause of the destruction of America. The usual blaming and shaming stuff plagiarized from Obamaville, in other words.  Other commenters declared themselves also sick of the false choices offered to voters in our semi-pseudo-democracy.

 And, while I am used to being called an extremist nut by the usual suspects, today marked the very first time in my blogging career that a bona fide neuroscientist from the Cornell Weill Medical Center characterized my political criticism of Hillary as "psychoses" -- plural, no less, as in more than one disease. You can't get much more official than that, especially when you're conducting diagnoses-by-Internet. The good doctor was replying to a late follow-up comment, consisting entirely of a Hannah Arendt quote* on the "lesser evilism" meme historically used by totalitarian governments to control the residents of the Police State. (Remind me not to leave my brain to Cornell in my living will.)

Paradoxically, my neurophysicist respondent seemed to be buying into the "punitive psychiatry" method of stifling dissent common in the same totalitarian regimes that Arendt warned about half a century ago. Unfortunately, by the time I read my psych chart in the Times comment section, they'd closed the thread and I was unable to schedule a follow-up consultation. (I'd Googled his name, and was able to discern his profession through the magic of the Internet.)

 Maybe Dr. Moreau (not his real name) will get lucky and find some of those Hillary "H'ostess With the Mostest" cocktail napkins under the tree this year.  From morning to night, he can rev up his neurons over such pithy bon mots as:

I really do hope that we have a woman president in my lifetime.”
 
“Human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights.”

“Women are the largest untapped reservoir of talent in the world.”

“America’s democracy is not a birthright...It must be earned and preserved by every generation.”

“In a democracy, citizens cannot sit on the sidelines. They have to get into the arena, as Teddy Roosevelt said, and participate.”

And in the highly likely event that these quotes don't quite do it for you, and you still "need help in framing your Ready for Hillary conversations" with your marks family and friends, you can order a special Ready for Hillary toolkit.

 One set of tools can be used for a house party and another for "tabling" -- as in, I suppose, the tabling of any dissent via the Stalinesque "public psychiatric shaming" method.

* "If we look at the techniques of totalitarian government, it is obvious that the argument of ‘the lesser evil’… is one of the mechanisms built into the machinery of terror and criminality. Acceptance of lesser evils is consciously used in conditioning the government officials as well as the population at large to acceptance of evil as such…. Politically,the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.” – Hannah Arendt, 1964.

Rot in Cleveland

It sounds like the Kleveland Kops Klan (aka the police department) needs to take its talents elsewhere. The "heat" needs to be put in cold storage.  Gitmo-upon-Antarctic Shelf has a nice ring to it.... especially since there's a real possibility of it soon breaking off and becoming stranded on the seas for all eternity, like the Flying Dutchman.

The timing of the scathing Department of Justice Civil Rights Division report on the culture of violence in the Cleveland Division of Police (CDP)couldn't have come at a more exquisite time, what with people throughout the country finally having had enough of the police state and taking to the streets in protest. The report comes only a fortnight after the most egregious and publicized case, in which a mentally disturbed rookie cop summarily executed Tamir Rice, a 12-year old playing with a toy gun.

 Unfortunately, the tepid recommendations contained in the government report are tantamount to sentencing a serial rapist to do-it-yourself sensitivity training in a battered women's shelter.

Just as no bankster has been jailed for destroying the entire global economy,  psychopathic cops who are maiming and murdering citizens on the streets and in their own homes, are also largely immune from accountability. The thugs wearing uniforms instead of white sheets, who assault people for the crime of existing while black or poor, are simply being admonished to go back to the police academy for a refresher course, deck themselves out with cameras, and work harder to "restore the public trust." As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, the beatings will continue. The Obama administration would just prefer that the domestic torturers do it with a little more finesse, with a whole lot of public relations whitewashing thrown in for good measure.

The federal government's year-long investigation that began in March 2013 (based upon some good muckraking, government-shaming journalism by the Cleveland Plain Dealer) resulted in exposure of a whole series of civil liberties violations:

Our investigation concluded that there is reasonable cause to believe that CDP engages in a pattern or practice of using unreasonable force in violation of the Fourth Amendment.That pattern manifested in a range of ways, including:

The unnecessary and excessive use of deadly force, including shootings and head strikes with impact weapons;

The unnecessary, excessive or retaliatory use of less lethal force including tasers,chemical spray and fists;

Excessive force against persons who are mentally ill or in crisis, including in cases where the officers were called exclusively for a welfare check; and

The employment of poor and dangerous tactics that place officers in situations where avoidable force becomes inevitable and places officers and civilians at unnecessary risk.

It's the Keystone Kops without the comedy. This Ohio city is a veritable Wild West free-for-all, with officers bashing people over the head with their guns, pepper-spraying and tasering suspects already subdued and in handcuffs, passersby being shot by police bullets fired in a wild panic, and the physical assault of mentally challenged people unable to respond to commands.

 The physical force is also "applied as punishment for the person’s earlier verbal or physical resistance to an officer’s command, and is not based on a current threat posed by the person. This retaliatory use of force is not legally justified." the report noted. 

The use of standard de-escalation techniques to calm agitated persons or defuse fraught situations is not widely practiced in Cleveland, putting both civilians and officers at risk. Nor are extreme incidents ever internally reviewed by superiors, said the report.

In one case last year, police shot the actual victim of a crime they'd been called to investigate. A man named "Anthony" had been held hostage in a home by armed gunmen, and escaped. As he ran toward the officers for help, dressed only in his boxer shorts, they opened fire on him. Luckily, they missed. Others weren't so fortunate. One man was shot in the stomach on his own front porch, because he moved his arms slightly while he was being cuffed. A suicidal deaf man was tasered for using his hands to communicate with officers in sign language. Another man in the midst of a seizure was tasered while he was strapped to a gurney. A police officer choked a woman while she was handcuffed to a table. The list of abuses goes on and on. The Marquis De Sade has met the Gestapo.

Now, here's the kicker. The DOJ actually investigated the CDP for the same pattern of endemic violence and abuse ten years ago. At that time, it was recommended that the CDP clean up its act voluntarily, in-house -- and government investigators are now shocked, shocked that the cops didn't follow through. It seems that the DOJ forgot to appoint a Court probation officer or similar independent monitor to check up and make sure the cops were behaving themselves.

 It seems that the feds also need some remediation -- or better yet, resignations. It seems they should have learned their own accountability lesson.

Apparently, they partially have, because along with the in-house, voluntary self-improvement course and gratuitous premature praise for the Cleveland PD, an outside monitor will be appointed to keep tabs this time around.

In their simpering conclusion, Civil Rights Division Acting Assistant AG Vanita Gupta and Northern District of Ohio US Attorney Steven Dettelbach did indeed make sure to laud the cops for their difficult job, especially in light of the cruel budgetary austerity imposed upon Cleveland by brutal capitalistic forces outside their control (Okay, so I paraphrased that last part, but that is the subtext whether they admit it or not.) And like any police state apparatchiks worth their salt, they did not forget to also blame the victims, admonishing them that "healing the rift" is also on them. "All of the residents of the city of Cleveland should recognize... that many Cleveland officers have pursued their profession in order to effect positive changes within the City and they make great personal sacrifices to do dangerous work.... Respect and trust must go both ways."

Except, of course, that it's only the "civilians" who ever end up actually getting arrested, indicted, tried, and jailed. When cops commit crimes, they either walk with impunity -- or if they're caught on video, they get a special defense attorney (aka the prosecuting District Attorney) to sidestep due process by subverting the secret grand jury system into a tool of democracy-free exoneration.

In case you hadn't noticed, we now live in a police state. 

And just in case you hadn't, there are thousands of protesters on the streets right now forcing you to notice. Right now, we're being allowed to vent. Keywords: right now.

Grim Times in America

Protests erupted throughout New York City in the wake of a grand jury giving a pass to the white police officer derisively known as the "Choke Cop." Everywhere, that is, except Staten Island, the actual scene of Eric Garner's death last summer.

The exact spot of the homicide was empty last night, save for the presence of some wilted bouquets and a couple of reporters. Everyone was holding marches and die-ins on the West Side Highway and Times Square and Rockefeller Center.

Staten Island, that most outer of boroughs, is the base of New York City Republican politics. Dan Donovan, the elected district attorney who ensured that Choke Cop was not indicted, is a former operative in the local Republican machine long controlled by the Molinari family. The borough is more than 75% white and only 10% black. So entrenched are conservative politics that voters just re-elected Molinari-backed Michael Grimm to Congress despite the fact that he is under criminal indictment for corruption. Grimm, unsurprisingly enough, has run on a militaristic law and order, pro-Homeland Security, Islamophobic platform. He's the classy guy who threatened to hurl a reporter over the balcony after this year's State of the Union address.

Ex-New York City Mayor and multibillionaire Michael Bloomberg could never have won narrow re-election to a third term himself without Staten Islanders returning him to power with a whopping 76% of their own vote. Bloomberg was gung-ho on both Stop & Frisk and for fighting against "quality of life" annoyances that got in the way of his gentrification campaign to turn the city over to the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor and downtrodden. Eric Garner interfered with the quality of life of Staten Island, apparently. He'd long been a target of police state harassment for allegedly cheating the state out of its cigarette taxes. Garner had the effrontery to support his family through the sale of  "loosies" instead of supporting the plutocracy through his low-wage labor. Garner was an affront to capitalism.

He refused to accept his arrest graciously, and thus was his breathing permanently arrested.

Since the whole homicide was caught on tape, it will be exceedingly hard for the timid corporate lawyer/AG  Eric Holder not to bring charges against the police department and city. Any punishment will no doubt come in the usual Holder method of an out-of-court settlement, payable by the little people who pay the taxes, and not by such tax-exempt citizens as the Kochs, Alice Walton, and Wall Street banks.

Garner's death, while reminiscent of the Ferguson shooting of Michael Brown, is actually more of a piece with the deaths of two bi-racial Staten Island toddlers during Hurricane Sandy. As flood waters raged across the island, submerging Glenda Moore's SUV and sweeping her children away, her pleas for help from her neighbors went coldly rebuffed. Glenda Moore is black.

According to the sister, a dripping-wet Moore banged on doors looking for help in the middle of the hurricane, but couldn’t find anyone willing to help her.

"They answered the door and said, 'I don't know you. I'm not going to help you,’” said the sister. "My sister's like 5-foot-3, 130 pounds. She looks like a little girl. She's going to come to you and you're going to slam the door in her face and say, 'I don't know you, I can't help you'?'”

Moore spent the night huddled on a doorstep as the hurricane’s assault continued. At daybreak, her sister said, the desperate mother walked until she found a police car and related her heart-breaking story.

So much for the racist meme that the reason black people so often get killed is because they're big and scary and threatening, like Michael Brown and  Eric Garner.

The Moore Family of Staten Island

In the wake of Sandy, Staten Islanders - white, black and blue-collar -- were coldly rebuffed by both the city and FEMA. And when Occupy Sandy took up the slack and set up shelters and food tents, the odious Bloomberg sent in the cops to shut them down and evict the Good Samaritans. It was apparently another one of those "quality of life" issues that so offended his elite sensibilities. (He'd previously cracked down on people donating food to homeless shelters, and called for the fingerprinting of food stamp applicants.)

Bloomberg may be gone, but his legacy of demonizing and demeaning poor and minority people remains a festering sore. And Staten Island is still locking its doors, while the cops are still locking and loading.

Bill Bramhall, New York Daily News

The Beatings Will Continue

Barack Obama's answer to racial and economic injustice in America is not to withhold domestic weapons of mass destruction from local police departments. To the contrary -- the police simply need more intensive training in how to assault people with accuracy and professionalism. They must learn to lob tear gas canisters responsibly, and to use proper steering techniques when deploying tanks in mall parking lots.

As the Kill List president knows all too well, state violence is both an art and a science:

Obama plans to issue an executive order before the end of February 2015, directing federal agencies to improve the way in which local law enforcement agencies procure, audit and manage a giant stockpile loaned and purchased from the Pentagon. However, the White House said the programs would remain in place.

Obama is also separately calling for a $263m, three-year spending package to reform police departments across the country which, if approved by Congress, could lead to the purchase of an additional 50,000 lapel-mounted cameras to record police officers on the job.

Got that? Obama doesn't need any stinking Congress to OK the continuing evolution of impoverished American neighborhoods into billion-dollar militarized zones. But he pleads powerlessness about the body cameras, which would have to be included in a much cheaper spending package. This "reform" package, you see, will also act as a money magnet and pork barrel vehicle for individual districts. Armies of lobbyists from the tech and security industries will converge on Capitol Hill, campaign bribery cash in hand, to ensure that they're part of any legislation to keep them and the political ruling class safe and secure, and to keep poor people fearful and oppressed. 

And about those body cameras being hailed as a deterrent to violence? Like any gizmo, they can be lost, stolen, tampered with, accidentally dropped in the toilet. The film can be suppressed by friendly judges in secret evidence hearings (Abu Ghraib, Gitmo),  or even deliberately destroyed with impunity. (CIA torture tapes)

 The president is also creating a task force to advise the White House on additional ways in which public trust can be improved between law enforcement and minority communities. The panel, led by Philadelphia police commissioner Charles Ramsey and former assistant attorney general Laurie Robinson, will report back within the next 90 days.

The beatings will definitely continue. Obama essentially just dog-whistled the law and order message so beloved of his Republican friends. For, when Ramsey was police commissioner in Washington, DC, he instituted traffic checkpoints for the sole purpose of entering drivers' information into a deep-state data base. Under his watch, surveillance cameras were installed throughout the city. He also ordered the mass arrests in 2002 (without charge or even a warning to disperse) of 400 people spending the day in a park during meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Some were peaceful protestors; others were just families having a day of fun. Ramsey was later deemed personally liable for violating their Fourth Amendment rights, and the city was ordered to pay restitution totaling more than $1 million. But good enemy of the people that he was, he kept his job.

Most recently, Ramsey has come under fire for his Philadelphia department using excessive force against civilians using their cell phones to film police violence. The ACLU filed its latest lawsuit against the city this fall on behalf of a woman claiming she was physically assaulted and restrained while filming an arrest at an environmental protest in 2012.

And he keeps getting rewarded.

Obama's appointment of this man to yet another whitewashing task force is sure to fire up the people now mobilizing for racial and economic justice. But I doubt that it will inspire that ephemeral something that he cynically calls "public trust." Let's hope that the unnamed "young civil rights leaders" with whom the president also deigned to meet on Monday will not be bribed with offers of government jobs or other perks in exchange for getting with Obama's program. Let's hope that the protesters are more aligned with the bottom-up activism and  horizontalism of the Occupy movement than with the cloying, co-opting grasp of such entities as MoveOn.

Defending the decision to allow that flow of equipment from the military to police to continue, the White House said the bulk of what is transferred is “fairly routine”, a definition it said included “office furniture, computers and other technological equipment, personal protective equipment and basic firearms”.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest said the president had opted for an overhaul of the equipment procurement process – rather than an end to it – because some of the material transferred had proved useful. He pointed specifically to vehicles used in the hours after the 2013 Boston terrorist bombings. “What is needed, however, is much greater consistency in the oversight of these programs,” Earnest said.

Calling government disbursement of weapons of mass domestic destruction to local yokels in jackboots  "routine" sends a chill right up my spine. As does Earnest's cavalier description of police state overkill and the shutdown of a major American city in the wake of the Boston bombings as "useful." The beatings will continue  -- and so will Obama's Theater of Intimidation. As the Guardian noted, "the White House report detailed an enormous arsenal of almost half a million pieces of controlled property already loaned by the Pentagon to local police departments, including 92,442 small arms, 44,275 night vision devices, 5,235 humvees, 617 mine resistant ambush protected vehicles and 616 aircraft."

The president argued that “the law too often feels as if it is being applied in discriminatory fashion”, but qualified those remarks by saying racial bias was neither widespread nor “the norm”. Some have criticised the president for playing down the scale of racial bias in the criminal justice system.

Another dog-whistle to the right wing. Black and Brown folk have a perception problem, is all. Stop your whinin' and complainin', and Stand By Me, intones the first African-American president.

Explaining why Obama had not yet visited the St Louis suburb, Earnest said the president was conscious that reforms were needed to police forces across the country, not just in Missouri. He later added: “The underlying issues here are broader than just race. This goes to the foundational relationship between law enforcement agencies and the communities that they’re sworn to serve and to protect.”

Earth to Obama: this crisis is not a marital spat between equal partners (police and community.) This outbreak of state-sponsored violence is just the latest iteration of the historic racial oppression woven into the very fiber of American life. It's the direct result of plutocrats gone wild, politicians gone corrupt, and jobs just gone. It's the inevitable manifestation of the most extreme wealth gap of modern times. Making this an issue of police vs community is one more divide and conquer tactic. Keep the weapons flowing and the war contractors enriched. Pit the maligned and the marginalized against one another. And then cover your asses by appointing a commission to study it, then whitewash it and cram it, along with the other forgotten reports, under the rug on the next holiday weekend.

 May the Task Force be with them. Because it's all they've got left in their moldy bag of tricks.

And may the real Force be with us...  the force of our bodies, our voices, our solidarity. The beatings cannot continue if enough of us refuse to accept the punishment.

Say Goodbye to #TurkeyPardonGate

Let the national healing begin: the Good Christian Bitch who dissed the Obama daughters for dressing and acting like teenagers is gone, resigned, fired in order to spend more time with God, with whom she evidently has a close personal relationship:

Elizabeth Lauten, the communications director for Rep. Stephen Fincher (R-Tenn.), resigned Monday following a Facebook post that criticized Malia and Sasha Obama's appearance at the annual White House turkey pardon ceremony, according to NBC News.

According to screenshots posted by Gawker on Saturday, Lauten wrote to the first daughters, asking them to "try showing a little class":

Dear Sasha and Malia, I get you’re both in those awful teen years, but you’re a part of the First Family, try showing a little class. At least respect the part you play. Then again your mother and father don’t respect their positions very much, or the nation for that matter, so I’m guessing you’re coming up a little short in the ‘good role model’ department. Nevertheless, stretch yourself. Rise to the occasion. Act like being in the White House matters to you. Dress like you deserve respect, not a spot at a bar. And certainly don’t make faces during televised public events.

Lauten was evidently too stupid to celebrate the hilarious teenage face-making, given that the girls' obvious disdain for the presidential pomposity closely mirrors that of her very own cohort. I myself was cheering them on, and wishing that all of Obama's planted human backdrops were free to show such heartfelt disgust at his bromide-filled performance events.

It's just too bad that Lauten's turkey of a boss couldn't also follow her into ignominious oblivion. Stephen Fincher, who also happens to be the second largest corporate welfare recipient of farm subsidies in Congress, will unfortunately continue cackling his way through another term. He'll no doubt continue invoking Jesus as he spreads the gospel of starvation to the many,  many millions of children whose families depend on food stamps for their bare-bones survival in this endless, plutocrat-manufactured Great Recession.

You may remember Fincher as the hypocrite who led last year's crusade to kick two million kids off food stamps. Preening before the C-Span cameras, he righteously quoted from the Book of Thessalonians during an epic Biblical debate with his fellow critters: "The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat!" he thundered.

I wrote at the time that as a child, little Stevie probably identified more with the loathsome Farmer McGregor villain in The Tale of Peter Rabbit than with the adorable little hungry bunny. Assuming, that is, that his bedtime stories ever went beyond Old Testament fire and brimstone. Something must have made him the way he is. I imagine he picked Elizabeth Lauten as his assistant because she reminded him of Dear Old Mom.

Since it has now come to light that the newly departed Lauten actually did all the publicity for Fincher, you have to wonder if her duties included cherry-picking Bible passages for him to justify his cruelty. The message seems to have seared its way deep into her alleged soul, despite her close personal relationship with the Lord.

Anyway, as you also may remember, that congressional version of the Bible story ended with the usual bipartisan Amen, with a hefty dose of Social Darwinism thrown in for good measure. Democrats agreed to kick fewer kids off food stamps and reduce the monthly stipend, while sugar supports for all the political sugar daddies were left intact. And President Obama signed the whole thing, crowing that less food for all helps shrink the deficit. (too bad Malia and Sasha couldn't have been on hand to roll their eyes at that dollop of banality too.)

We Are All Pequots Now

It's that most exceptional time of the year, when we bow our heads in thanks, celebrating the birth of the great American hegemon. It's time to get all nostalgic about the myth of the beneficent and libertarian pilgrims, escaping as they did from the persecution of being regulated and taxed by the government.

 Admittedly, this whole Thanksgiving holiday bounty thing is kind of hard if you live in a place like bankrupt Detroit, and are experiencing your own forced colonization by the deregulated puritanical plunderers of Wall Street. Grim men in austere suits are seizing  all that distressed property for a song and then baiting inviting the distressed multitudes to partake of the orts. (Drinking water is extra, however. If you've been late paying your water bill, you'll just have to swallow your stuffing crumbs dry.)

But I digress. This is the day we must also remember that using religion and fear as the plunder-weapons of choice is a grand American tradition that survives to this very day. From Howard Zinn's "People's History of the United States":

When the Pilgrims came to New England they too were coming not to vacant land but to territory inhabited by tribes of Indians. The governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, created the excuse to take Indian land by declaring the area legally a "vacuum." The Indians, he said, had not "subdued" the land, and therefore had only a "natural" right to it, but not a "civil right." A "natural right" did not have legal standing.

 The Puritans also appealed to the Bible, Psalms 2:8: "Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession." And to justify their use of force to take the land, they cited Romans 13:2: "Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation."

 The Puritans lived in uneasy truce with the Pequot Indians, who occupied what is now southern Connecticut and Rhode Island. But they wanted them out of the way; they wanted their land. And they seemed to want also to establish their rule firmly over Connecticut settlers in that area. The murder of a white trader, Indian-kidnaper, and troublemaker became an excuse to make war on the Pequots in 1636.

 A punitive expedition left Boston to attack the Narraganset Indians on Block Island, who were lumped with the Pequots. As Governor Winthrop wrote: "They had commission to put to death the men of Block Island, but to spare the women and children, and to bring them away, and to take possession of the island; and from thence to go to the Pequods to demand the murderers of Captain Stone and other English, and one thousand fathom of wampum for damages, etc. and some of their children as hostages, which if they should refuse, they were to obtain it by force." 

The English landed and killed some Indians, but the rest hid in the thick forests of the island and the English went from one deserted village to the next, destroying crops. Then they sailed back to the mainland and raided Pequot villages along the coast, destroying crops again. One of the officers of that expedition, in his account, gives some insight into the Pequots they encountered: "The Indians spying of us came running in multitudes along the water side, crying, What cheer, Englishmen, what cheer, what do you come for? They not thinking we intended war, went on cheerfully... -"

And so it went. Pequot crops were slashed and burned, Pequot people died of European diseases if they didn't starve first, and their homes were razed to the ground just like in foreclosed Detroit and other select spots in the re-colonized States of the Homeland. The original assault against the native population was so intense and so thorough that in the end, perhaps a couple dozen inhabitants out of an original population of many thousands remained in any given locale. 

So let's contemplate how it felt, and how it still does feel for so many of us, to actually be on the receiving end of the imperialism that made this country so special.

But since I'm such a sucker for alternative history:

Wednesday (playing "Pocahontas")): Wait!

 Amanda: (a modern lady-who-lunches in the audience) What?

  Wednesday: We cannot break bread with you.

  Amanda: (playing Sarah, a pilgrim lady-who-lunches) Huh? Becky, what's going on?

  Becky: [whispered] Wednesday!

  Wednesday: You have taken the land which is rightfully ours. Years from now my people will be forced to live in mobile homes on reservations. Your people will wear cardigans, and drink highballs. We will sell our bracelets by the road sides, you will play golf, and enjoy hot hors d'oeuvres. My people will have pain and degradation. Your people will have stick shifts. The gods of my tribe have spoken. They have said, "Do not trust the Pilgrims, especially Sarah Miller."

  Amanda: Gary, she's changing the words.

  Wednesday: And for all these reasons I have decided to scalp you and burn your village to the ground. 

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Here's wishing Sardonicky readers a peaceful holiday weekend and a heartfelt thank you for your continuing interest and support.