The Bipartisan War on Workers

There was a brutal double-whammy of an assault on American labor last week. And what with the torture report and Wall Street once again putting taxpayers on the hook for its greedy bets, hardly anyone noticed.

Whammy Number One: a bill allowing multi-employer pension funds to unilaterally cut the benefits of 1.5 million retirees was sneakily tucked into the Cromnibus Bill. This legislation, co-sponsored by a "liberal" Democrat and a Republican, paves the way for the immediate evisceration, at employer will, of the benefits of 1.5 million current retirees and tens of millions of future pensioners. These workers will not even be allowed to sue. It's a done deal.

Whammy Number Two: In a 9-0 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that Amazon warehouse temps don't deserve to be paid for the roughly half-hour per working day that they are forced to remain on the premises to undergo anti-theft body searches. The Obama administration fought hard for Scrooge, and Scrooge won. Besides being anti-labor, this odious ruling also falls neatly into the "pre-crime" rationale for the Surveillance State spying on American citizens. Not only are you presumed guilty for merely trying to live, but the highest court has effectively criminalized labor itself. The unanimous ruling has essentially paved the way for the workplace to become a jail, the boss to become the warden, and for the establishment to create a new tier of work: that of virtual enslavement. The ruling is mission-creep, plutocracy-style.

The pension plan-gutting (Whammy #1) is a double-whammy in and of itself, because the precarious worker-funded retirement plans now on the chopping block were made that way by the very Wall Street malfeasance which is again being handsomely rewarded and encouraged by the Obama White House and both parties in Congress.  As David Sirota writes in the International Business Times, this measure in the Cromnibus amounts to "the most consequential change to retirement policy in the United States since the passage of landmark pension legislation 40 years ago. Altering the 1974 Employee Retirement Income Security Act to permit benefit cuts could prompt a slew of efforts to chip away at formerly untouchable guarantees of income to millions of retirees."

Lawmakers pushing to allow benefit cuts are citing the example of the $18.7 billion Teamsters' Central States Fund, which has 410,000 members and is the nation’s second-largest multiemployer pension plan. There’s an estimated $22 billion gap between assets in the Central States Fund and promised benefits to the system’s current and future retirees -- a shortfall that legislators point to as a rationale to pass a new law permitting multiemployer plans to slash promised retirement benefits.

“We have to do something to allow these plans to make the corrections and adjustments they need to keep these plans viable,” said Democratic Rep. George Miller in pushing the plan.

But critics of the provisions say the plight of the Central States Fund is not a cautionary tale about unsustainable benefits but an example of Wall Street mismanagement. They note that Central States is the only major private pension fund where all the discretionary investment decisions are made by financial firms rather than by the fund’s board. Roughly a third of the pension system’s shortfalls -- or almost $9 billion -- can be traced to investment losses accrued during the financial industry’s 2008 collapse. Those losses were in addition to more than $250 million in fees paid by the plan to financial firms in just the last 5 years.

Many pension funds followed strategies that involved high fees for Wall Street companies while producing “financial returns that trailed plain vanilla investment strategies,” said Jay Youngdahl, a fellow with the Initiative for Responsible Investment at Harvard University. Central States appears to be a prime example, he said. “Before cutting benefits, we need to examine what exactly has happened.”

The pension funds controlled by Goldman Sachs alone lost more than a third of their value in the 2008 meltdown. Had this criminal banking cartel behaved itself and not gambled with union money, the funds would now be flush with cash and earning enough interest to keep the workers who paid into them in relatively comfortable retirements. Not only are the banks not being forced pay compensation to their victims, they continue to make obscene profits. CEO Lloyd Blankfein roams free, stuffing his own pockets as well as those of his political enablers in Congress and the White House.

Now we come to Whammy #2 -- the plight of the low-wage warehouse workers, who don't even have a pension fund that Wall Street can loot. Therefore, the masters of the universe are doing the next best thing: they're robbing employees of their time and their dignity.

The workers are not even employed directly by Amazon, but by the ironically-named Integrity Staffing Solutions. The case gives a whole new meaning to the word "Temp" and "workplace" (plantation). It also gives a whole new meaning to the argument that we have to elect a Democrat to save the Supreme Court from right-wing hacks. A Democratic administration actually urged its own black-robed appointees to screw the workers in this case.

And boy, did they ever oblige -- unanimously. The Court ruled that because the body searches have nothing to do with actual work, they are not compensable. Being held against one's will does not contribute to the bottom line of the employer, so all's fair in profit and oppression. From David Hensel's blog:

In an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, NV, workers for the temp agency Integrity Staffing Solutions have to go through a security screening at the end of each day for which workers are not paid. The process is meant to prevent theft by workers. Workers say waiting for the screening can take 25 minutes. Jesse Busk and Laurie Castro, two of these workers, sued the temp agency for the pay they were denied. The question asked is whether the security screening (and thus waiting for it) is an integral part of the principle activities for workers – should they be paid for the time spent in them?

 (snip)

The Court’s decision focused on what “integral and indispensable” work would be: it has to be absolutely central to why the workers were hired in the first place and a key part of completing that job.

"An activity is therefore integral and indispensable to the principal activities that an employee is employed to perform if it is an intrinsic element of those activities and one with which the employee cannot dispense if he is to perform his principal activities."

In her concurring opinion reversing a lower court ruling, "liberal" Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the forced security screenings were simply part of the exiting procedure, comparable to showering or waiting in line for a paycheck, and therefore not part of official work duties for which the plaintiffs were hired. Being criminalized by one's boss falls outside the category of labor and therefore can't be paid.

Wall Street crime pays.

Worker criminalization does not.

 In other words, Kafka has infiltrated the Supreme Court to allow a cheapskate version of Orwell's Big Brother to infiltrate the American workplace. 

(Illustrations courtesy of Kafka; Precariat courtesy of the American Plutocracy)

 The freedom to search and screen employees at no cost to the boss? You might call this latest New Abnormal in the age of unfettered hypercapitalism the "Enhanced Clocking-Out Technique".

The working class has been transformed into a post-2008 sub-underclass called the Precariat: officially defined as being only a meager paycheck or retirement benefit away from outright destitution. Even people lucky enough to have jobs are never allowed to forget that there are plenty more people waiting outside, willing to be searched, suspected, and oppressed for even lower wages and fewer benefits. It's how the plutocracy's Divide and Conquer agenda works.   

House Passes Torture Bill

(Update, 12/14: Make that the entire Congress. A link to the gory details is below.)

They come not to abolish pain, but to inflict even more of it.

Congress just held its annual holiday party for its high-rolling donors. This year's cutesy theme  was The Cromnibus That Stole Christmas. Yet again, they reprised their Scrooge role, robbing the poor and giving to the rich. And boy, were they ever sneaky about it this time around. As the whole world was reeling over revelations that Torture R Us, our leaders hastily wrapped up an Economy-sized giant rectal feeding tube in shiny paper, bestowed it upon a reeling public, and told us to "crom" it up our asses. They robbed pension funds, they defanged an already toothless Dodd-Frank, and they made political bribery even sleazier by increasing ten-fold the allowable individual donations to the Duopoly.

And then the "People's House" packed it in and started going home for Christmas to collect more spoils from their grateful political donors, who should be cheery that their outsized clout has once again put taxpayers on the hook for the risky bets guaranteed to cause another financial implosion sooner or later. The upper-crusty Senate is expected to rubber-stamp the deal shortly*, in order to continue the beatings and to beat the get-out-of-town rush.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who only a year ago was urging her Democratic caucus to "embrace the suck" by throwing millions of long-term unemployed under the bus so as to keep the government humming, pivoted back to full populist mode yesterday, trying to outdo Elizabeth Warren in the anti-bankster rhetoric department.

 Barack Obama, practicing for his upcoming star turn as post-Clinton triangulator, played the part of the Uncloseted Republican, going into full court press for Wall Street. He rallied his whole cabinet of Citigroup lobbyists to twist the same arms that had so lately fiercely acquiesced to Citigroup's dictating of the actual bill. Once you've put out for Wall Street, it gets increasingly hard to say No to Wall Street.

It was Good Cop-Bad Cop Kabuki theater at its most nauseating.

The mainstream media, though, are cheering because it was essentially a very good show, chock-full of suspense and identity politics. The New York Times has this glowing review:

The House narrowly passed a $1.1 trillion spending package on Thursday that would fund most government operations for the fiscal year after a rancorous debate that reflected the new power held by Republicans and the disarray among Democrats in the aftermath of the midterm elections.

 The accord was reached just hours before the midnight deadline, in a 219-206 vote, amid the last-minute brinkmanship and bickering that has come to mark one of Congress’s most polarized — and least productive — eras. The legislation now heads to the Senate, which is expected to pass it in the coming days.

 The split in the Democratic Party dramatically burst into view when Representative Nancy Pelosi, the minority leader and one of President Obama’s most loyal supporters, broke with the administration over a provision in the bill that would roll back regulation of the Dodd-Frank Act, which Ms. Pelosi said was a giveaway to big banks whose practices helped fuel the Great Recession. She spoke on the House floor in the early afternoon, expressing her strong opposition to the bill.

 As much as I believe that Pelosi's impassioned speech was cynically timed to provide some staged Shakespearean conflict with the paramour (Obama) who then publicly spurned her, for the Times to characterize the Democrats' new-found populism as "disarray" is a bit rich. The Gray Lady apparently likes her little marital spats to be decorous. The Gray Lady has reduced the shoving of a giant torture tube up America's butt to nothing but a little bickering among friends.

Mr. Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. were pressed to make a furious round of phone calls to try to persuade wavering Democrats, while House Speaker John A. Boehner worked to get more Republican votes.

The public support of the sweeping spending bill by the White House — which came just as Ms. Pelosi was making her speech on the House floor opposing it — was a rare public break with the minority leader and infuriated many of her loyalists.

Infuriated loyalists make the perfect targets for new rounds of Democratic fund-raising appeals. "Embracing the suck" cost them the mid-terms, so now it's back to the pretend-populism cycle again. I'm already getting emails urging me to show my solidarity with multimillionaire Nancy by throwing them some cash.

In a more than three-hour, closed-door meeting of House Democrats on Thursday night, many of the party’s more liberal members tried to rally support against the bill. The moment, they said, was one of conscience, and a chance for Democrats to demonstrate their allegiance with the middle class.

“We’ve got to stand up for principle at some point, or they’re going to kick us even more next year when they have a bigger majority,” said Representative Peter A. DeFazio, Democrat of Oregon. “They know we will stand our ground on principle in the future and not roll us so easily again.”

Standing their ground is a little late, but at least it was a "chance for Democrats" to pander to the base by pretending to be on their side. It was an "opportunity" for them to be seen as pro-middle class, even though it was only a year ago that they joined with the GOP to impoverish millions of jobless people and compromise over cuts to the food stamp program. Those were the days when they thought they could win the mid-terms by simply out-fundraising the Republicans. They won't be rolled so easily again. Because veering to the right and openly rolling the American people comes with a price.

In an emergency gathering, Democrats also expressed anger at Denis R. McDonough, the White House chief of staff, at what they saw as the president’s undercutting of Ms. Pelosi and other progressives by coming out in support of the deal so early in the day. But Ms. Pelosi ultimately gave her members the freedom to vote how they wanted. “I’m giving you the leverage to do what you have to do,” she said. “We have enough votes to show them never to do this again.”

She showed them, all right. Because it was a show. She dog-whistled as much when she told them to go ahead and vote for their Wall Street donors if that's what they needed to do. Moreover, the fix was already in, so a "nay" vote would look good on paper, if not in reality. Pelosi is like the abused wife who tells her beater that next time, she'll call the cops. So there.

The final vote was a blow to Ms. Pelosi, the liberal wing of the party and Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, who led the charge against the Dodd-Frank rollback. Mr. Boehner built a coalition of 162 Republicans and 57 Democrats, a rare achievement for a Congress that has often operated along strict party lines. Congress also passed a two-day funding measure to give the Senate time to pass the legislation.

This is the part where "the base" gets all riled up and their wallets get all opened up. And the bipartisan vote is anything but "rare." It is, in fact, quite common and well done to a crisp. When it comes to funding wars, the surveillance state, the banks and the corporate welfare queens, these clowns are always reaching across the aisle and slapping each other on the back while they slap the rest of us upside the head.

* The final vote tally is here

And here's my published comment to a piece by Gail Collins, suggesting that we discuss the Cromnibus at our weekend holiday dinner parties:  

We don't need a dinner party to discuss the Cromnibus from Hell. Who has the appetite? What this occasion demands is a national wake, because we're already spectators at our own funeral.

That Wall Street and billionaires own the government is a given. But our "reps" aren't even bothering to pretend any more. To me, the cruelest part of this plutocratic manifesto is that it allows multi-employer pension plans to slash the benefits of 1.5 million retirees. The irony is that many of these endangered pension plans were made that way by the same reckless Wall Street Casino behavior that Congress and the White House now want to restore and reward. Instead of another Glass-Steagall Act, the bad guys get richer and the workers get screwed.

The politicians we elect to represent us couldn't make their allegiance any plainer if they rubbed our noses in their effluent.

 What a week to be an American citizen. First we learn about the torture done in our names to people in other countries. Then we learn that even more economic torture will be foisted upon us.

We call it torture -- our leaders call it patriotism. We call it graft and corruption. They call it compromise and a victory for bipartisanship. We say we're mad as hell. They say we all have to have some skin in their rigged game, and to stop questing after unicorns.

They say change takes time and patience. We say that they'll continue in Gordon Gekko-Torquemada mode at their own peril.

 

Abolish the CIA

The Central Intelligence Agency, as far as I can tell, serves one major purpose. And that is of a taxpayer-funded criminal enterprise. Among the many hats it wears are: secret paramilitary wing of the White House, money launderer, drug and arms dealer (Iran-Contra) associate of the Mafia (Castro assassination plot) fomenter of coups, and overthrower of democratically elected governments. (Guatemala, Chile, Iran and the latest in Ukraine, with Cuba and Venezuela still very much in its sights) 

 Its ostensible, official function as a gatherer of actual intelligence has mostly been an abysmal failure for its entire 60-plus year life. It tends to make stuff up as it bumbles along. Which is why its warning on its own creation -- Al Qaeda --  fell mostly upon deaf Bushie ears.

The CIA failed to see the fall of Communism until the Wall came tumbling down. Though feebly warning of bin Laden's "determination to attack", it failed to stop 9/11. As a matter of fact, as the late Chalmers Johnson laid out in his series of books, the airplane attacks were "blowback" against CIA dirty tricks. Before he was a terrorist, Osama bin Laden was a paid (and later abandoned) CIA resource in America's proxy war against the Soviet Union.

And as Tim Weiner tells it in Legacy of Ashes, the CIA has been one long litany of failure ever since its misbegotten inception as a weapon against Communism in the days after World War II, when the first of a long line of unaccountable slush funds was known as the Marshall Plan.

Over the years, the agency threw around a lot of money and adopted a certain swagger. “We went all over the world and we did what we wanted,” said Al Ulmer, the C.I.A.’s Far East division chief in the 1950s. “God, we had fun.” But even their successes turned out to be failures. In 1963, the C.I.A. backed a coup to install the Baath Party in Iraq. “We came to power on a C.I.A. train,” said Ali Saleh Saadi, the Baath Party interior minister. One of the train’s passengers, Weiner notes, was a young assassin named Saddam Hussein. Weiner quotes Donald Gregg, a former C.I.A. station chief in South Korea, later the national security adviser to Vice President George H. W. Bush: “The record in Europe was bad. The record in Asia was bad. The agency had a terrible record in its early days — a great reputation and a terrible record.” And yet the myth of the C.I.A. as an all-knowing, all-powerful spy agency persisted for years, not just in the minds of America’s enemies but in the imagination of many American television-watchers and moviegoers. Among those fooled, at least initially, were most modern presidents of the United States. The promise of a secret intelligence organization that could not only spy on America’s enemies but also influence events abroad, by sleight of hand and at relatively low cost, was just too alluring.

The crimes exposed in the Senate Torture Report That Shook the World should come as no surprise to those who've been paying attention, or read such books as Jane Mayer's "The Dark Side" and Dana Priest's  "Top Secret America" or Weiner's exhaustive history of the CIA cited above.  We knew, through Mayer, about the Dr. Mengele-like psychologists who culled the literature to devise the methods to the madness. We knew, through Priest, about the black site prisons and the unlimited supply of cash thrown around with no accountability expected or even required by Congress. We knew about the murder-by-hypothermia of the detainee chained outside the Afghanistan gulag. We knew about the waterboarding (though the new report confirms there were more cases than previously realized.)

The difference is that the report released yesterday is getting a zillion times the attention the various excellent books, articles and other occasional exposes got when they were first published or aired. This, finally, is the US Government itself  airing its own dirty laundry for all the world to see. Thanks to the Bush Crime Family, the real meaning of the CIA is finally out there: Criminally Insane A-Holes.

 And the upshot is --- a screeching halt. A whimper, not a bang. No prosecutions. No firings. (At least in the Homeland.) To the contrary, the architects of torture are being amply rewarded and given air time to complain about how unfairly they're being portrayed. The "debate" is not whether torture is morally reprehensible and legally forbidden, but whether it worked.

President Obama, accessory-after-the-fact of the Bush administration's crimes, refuses to even talk much about the release of the report. From all indications, he fought tooth and nail, until the last minute, against even having the redacted form released. I suspect it was the threat of its leakage by someone he couldn't easily prosecute -- say, outgoing Senate Intelligence Committee member Udall -- that forced him to pretend to wave his pathetic white flag.

Ever the conciliator, the president is also a centrist when it comes to the effectiveness of  torture, which he is again euphemising as "enhanced interrogation techniques." Ever the coward, he lets one of his flacks do the post-game torturesplaining:

 That debate, after all, has left Mr. Obama facing an uncomfortable choice between two allies: the close adviser and former aide he installed as director of the C.I.A. versus his fellow Democrats who control the Senate committee and the liberal base that backs their findings. “We are not going to engage in this debate,” said a senior administration official close to Mr. Obama who briefed reporters under ground rules that did not allow him to be identified.

(Ever the willing CIA propaganda vessel, as most recently outlined in the Senate report itself, the Times still persists in granting  immunity and anonymity to the government bigwigs in order to spread the sympathy message of how uncomfortable Obama is feeling.)

The written statement Mr. Obama released in response to the report tried to straddle that divide. He opened by expressing appreciation to C.I.A. employees as “patriots” to whom “we owe a debt of gratitude” for trying to protect the country after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Then he judged that the methods they used in doing so “did significant damage to America’s standing in the world.”

(Give the Times credit where it's due. They perfectly encapsulated the Orwellian presidency in one paragraph. We should be thankful to the torturers because they tortured even though torture is wrong. And it's wrong because anything that damages exceptional America's reputation and power is wrong. You can hate the crime, but you sure gotta love those wascally criminals! They got the American flag in one hand, and a rectal feeding tube in the other.)

And finally, Mr. Obama asked the nation to stop fighting about what happened so many years ago before he took office. “Rather than another reason to refight old arguments,” he said, “I hope that today’s report can help us leave these techniques where they belong — in the past.”

(When crimes against humanity are downgraded to outmoded "techniques," and public outrage is denigrated to "old arguments," we can forget all about them and go on to the next big technique -- such as the Disposition Matrix, in which Muslims can be summarily executed by drone strike for the mere fact that they exist.)

Since Obama will not prosecute and will continue protecting the jobs of CIA employees who participated in torture, as well as the livelihoods of the torture contractors and the filthy rich Bush architects/retirees, how about Congress just abolish the CIA outright?  The agency not only serves no positive purpose, it has been amply proven to be a clear and present danger to everybody, everywhere.

Cut off their money. Cut them out of society. They had no sense of decency then, and they're not about to develop one now. And why should they? Obama has just declared them to be patriots.

We have seen the future. We are indeed, as Obama ordered, "looking ahead." The future is bleak. The war on terror has come home, and is now being waged against us by a cabal of Criminally Insane A-holes.... some elected, some self-appointed, and all of them very dangerous.

So we should be both angry, and scared to death.

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