Now We Are Four

When I started Sardonicky four years ago, I was still on fairly friendly terms with Democrats. This blog, in the beginning, was only a slightly more leftist version of the Daily Kos. I was part of the crowd that largely bought into the myth that GOP bad, Lesser Evilism at least slightly good part of the time. I did my fair share of lazy-blogger Republican bashing and preaching to the liberal choir because it was fun and easy. I got tons of comments agreeing with me. My very first blog post was on -- who else? -- the snark magnet named Sarah Palin. In honor of Sardonicky's birthday, I am reprinting it below.

I actually cringed today when I reread one my earliest posts in which I defended neoliberal shill Debbie Wasserman Schultz. I called her "a breath of fresh air."  And as a result, I got lots of "you go, girl!" type of comments. But if the old saying "you live, you learn" is a truism, then "you blog, you get an education whether you want one or not" is a close relative.

I have become radicalized over the last four years, thanks to this blog and the hard thinking that it has forced me to do. It took me awhile, but eventually I realized that the two-party system is a sham and the neoliberalism it represents is a clear and present danger to all of us. Quite a few of my earlier readers abandoned this site in disgust, particularly during the 2012 presidential campaign.

Blogging requires lots of research and lots of facing of inconvenient truths, lots of reading beyond the New York Times, lots of closer reading of the New York Times to discover just how the language of propaganda actually works. It was that original scholar of propaganda, Edward Bernays, who wrote, way back in 1928, that at least half of all front page Times stories consist of government and corporate propaganda. Key words: at least.

Cutting through the crap and parsing the language of deceit and examining how words are used as tools of economic, social and political control has become my main area of interest.

***

My first post here, titled "Out, Out Damned Spot" was written in the wake of the mass shooting that wounded Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, and for which Sarah Palin attracted much outrage because of her infamous electoral "crosshairs"  website graphic, leading her to release a web video accusing her detractors of "blood libel."

Blaming Sarah Palin for the Tucson Massacre is just as unfair as blaming Lady Macbeth for the mayhem at Inverness Castle.  All these two maligned ladies did was lay out the weapons: Sarah, her cross-hair graphics and Lady M, a few carelessly placed daggers.  Subtle hints do not a murderess make.

Along with their histrionics and lust for power, both women have a fixation with blood. Palin, subdued from her usual frenzied harangues, looked like a robot on tranquillizers  as she Youtubed herself into the queen of the martyrs and the victim of “blood libel” of the biased liberal lamestream punditocracy.  To give her credit, I doubt she knows the anti-Semitic origin of the phrase, but the blood part likely was what appealed to her.  And Lady Mac was  totally obsessed with blood, even to the point of sleepwalking and being unable to wash the imaginary stains from her hands. Sarah, of course, also had difficulty scrubbing her website clean of the infamous Cross-Hairs map.  It had already gone viral all over cyberspace. “Out, out damned cache!” could be heard echoing through the valley, according to Wasilla lore.

The Lady Sarah really doth protest too much, methinks, and all the sanguineous references in the world can’t mask the fact that this anti-mother/mama grizzly has ice water running through her veins and a stony heart totally lacking in the warmth of human kindness.

On a somewhat related note to this little retrospective, I'll also include my comment to today's column by David Brooks, who somewhat uncharacteristically showcases famed leftist writer Ursula Le Guin's cautionary tale Those Who Walk Away From Omelas. It recounts a Utopia predicated on people enjoying life due to the imprisonment of a scapegoat; a child in a basement. The story is along the same lines of Shirley Jackson's The Lottery.(I've included a link to a recent speech by Le Guin; it's a must-watch). As is usual for Brooks, though, he writes a book report or presents a fictional scenario, and then fails utterly to condemn its real-life parallels. So I did:

Rousseau's social contract inspiring Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité has tragically devolved into the Gospel According to Ayn Rand. It's every rich man for himself. 

Every plutocrat alive thrives not on the suffering of one child in the basement, but on the suffering of the whole planet. In today's neoliberal world, only the Market is free, while everywhere human beings are in social, economic and political chains.

In the USA, one child in four lives in poverty. One in thirty is homeless. And according to polls, the majority of us are also fine with torture and even sanguine about the drone strikes that kill innocent children. 

Ursula Le Guin gave a wonderful speech last month at the National Book Awards, and challenged her fellow writers to "remember freedom." If the Enlightenment spelled doom to the divine right of kings, she said, then we can achieve a modern Enlightenment spelling doom to the hellish right of capitalists. Or, as Theodore Roosevelt dubbed them, "the malefactors of great wealth."

Fear is the enemy of literary freedom. The PEN human rights organization reports that more writers are actually self-censoring because of the chilling effect of government surveillance. We, whose Bill of Rights prides itself on freedom of speech, now rank a low 46th in press freedoms. 

We can either enlighten ourselves, start thinking outside of ourselves, start treating this planet with respect and dignity, or we might as well forget about existing at all.

Plus Ca Change: Photo-Ops Edition

Paris, January 11, 2015:

Washington, D.C.: September 11, 2011:

The first photo above shows 40 world leaders leading their publicity and security details on a solidarity march through Paris. Only if you were a bird or an aerial drone, however, would you have seen that the entire boulevard was actually closed to the millions of hoi polloi supposedly cheering them on. This ensured that the elite hides would be protected during their photo op in solidarity with the global military industrial complex. Here's what you were allowed to see in the news:

 

 You can just imagine the throngs of adoring fans following in their wake, can't you? It's the magic of corporate media propaganda. I guess nobody could ever have predicted that a flying renegade sans culotte with a camera was apparently able to avoid the snipers on the roofs to allow a tiny ray of reality to get through.

Here's how the New York Times flat-out lied about the leaders' participation in the rally:

 The world leaders — including President François Hollande of France, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority and Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain — joined the march in a solemn line. They moved slowly, clasping arms to show solidarity with the victims. The crowd roared in approval.

What crowd? What roar? The Times should be sued for journalistic malpractice.

The Independent has more on the phony theatrics here. Ironically and appropriately enough, political cartoonists have been among the first to notice the hypocrisy.

Of course, political hypocrisy and co-optation of tragedy for personal and political and military gain is nothing new. The second staged photo from the top shows the entire US Congress jostling for camera position in order to bray God Bless America in solidarity with the plutocracy and the surveillance state. This was actually a made-for-TV tenth anniversary reprise honoring the mass murder than spawned a trillion-dollar war and surveillance state. It was restaged so that all of them could participate. As you might remember, Congress and the air were both in lock-down mode in the days and weeks following the actual attacks, and political photo-ops and political travel were both severely restricted. Between then and now, however, the Patriot Act saved our freedoms and made billions of dollars for corporations. The Homeland Security agency was created along with a spy apparatus so vast that no one official knows every moving part. None of the moving parts was able to stop the Paris massacre.

Meanwhile, some people are making a huge deal out of the fact that President Obama didn't travel to Paris to insert his own mug into the most recent photo-op. It brought a whole new meaning to "American Exceptionalism." And that is patently unfair, because he did send Neocon maven/Ukraine coup provocatesse Victoria Nuland in his place, along with his wealthy Ambassador/Campaign Bundler Jane Hartley. Secretary of State John Kerry, who is currently in India acting as Obama's advance man for another neoliberal marketing junket, bristled at criticism of Obama's failure to show up for the group Class Picture:

  Mr. Kerry asserted that the charge was misplaced.

“The United States has been deeply engaged with France from the moment this horrific event took place,” Mr. Kerry said. “And I really think, you know, this is sort of quibbling a little bit.”

He noted that Victoria Nuland, the senior State Department official for Europe, joined the American ambassador to France in the march, along with other embassy officials.

“The president and our administration have been coordinating very, very closely with the French on F.B.I. matters, intel, law enforcement, across the board,” he said. “For the United States, that relationship is a constant, and it is ongoing.”

Got that? Obama (choke) doesn't (hysterical laughter) do fake publicity schmaltz. He's the grownup in the global room, having spent his weekend coordinating with the spy and police state agencies to figure out, among other pressing matters, just how could all those drone strikes have failed to take out the terrorists of Paris while they were allegedly jihad-training in Yemen. Plus, he was probably busy coordinating with his CIA buddy John Brennan on the cover-up of the CIA's at least peripheral involvement in recruiting and/or training and/or arming the terrorists. Plus, even Obama probably realized that the presence of his imperial Drone King person would have been a provocation too far for the large population of poor, disaffected, jobless Muslim youth living in the de facto ghettos on the outskirts of Paris. 

We have to spin the terrorism over here so we don't have to spin the terrorism over there.

Plus, thanks to its "coordination" with the American security apparatus, France is perfectly capable of taking care of itself and has wasted no time going into its own full-bore Post 9/11 mode:

 Seeking to reassure a jittery and unsettled population after last week’s terrorist attacks, the French authorities said on Monday that thousands of police officers and soldiers would be deployed to protect Jewish schools and other “sensitive sites,” in one of the country’s biggest peacetime security operations.

The defense minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, said that 10,000 soldiers would be deployed by Tuesday evening, in what he called “the first mobilization on this scale on our territory.”

I wonder if they'll also deploy Predator and Reaper drones, which have been nicknamed "flying guillotines."  I can almost hear Robespierre's head cackling in his grave.

I can all too easily envision Cheney holdover Victoria Nuland, dressed as Madame DeFarge, substituting bags of petits fours for knitting needles as she needles the masses into making a sharp right turn.

Madame in Ukraine

Madame in Paris

Non, Nous Ne Sommes Pas Charlie Hebdo

(*Updated below)

 There are very few media outlets in the United States comparable to Charlie Hebdo. In the magazine category, only The Onion and Cracked come remotely close. There's much more "satire" to be found on TV -- and I don't mean bland examples like Jon Stewart and Saturday Night Live. What's closest in mean-spirited spirit to Charlie is probably South Park, because it, too, was an equal opportunity offender, skewering religion, politics and popular culture, all with gleeful, provocative and tasteless abandon. Its creators, too, were targets of threats from fundamentalists of all stripes. The American response was to censor the lowbrow offensiveness.

We don't really "do" satire in this country. Nous ne sommes pas Charlie Hebdo (we are not Charlie Hebdo.)  Political cartoonists are a dying breed. As cartoonist/author Ted Rall noted in the L.A. Times, "more full-time staff political cartoonists were killed in Paris on Wednesday than may be employed at newspapers in the states of California, Texas and New York combined. More full-time staff cartoonists were killed in Paris on  Wednesday than work at all American magazines and websites combined. (There’s only one full-time staff political cartoonist at a website: Matt Bors. None at a magazine.)"

As a group, American publications have been particularly wary of publishing satirical cartoons of President Obama, lest they be accused of racism. The New Yorker came under such criticism during his first campaign in 2008, when its cover illustration simply skewered racial stereotypes of the Obamas as Kenyan Muslim Black Panther terrorist radicals. The offended audience missed the entire point.  

Granted, most right-wing artistic portrayals of the president have been racist, but Ted Rall -- who writes from the pretty far left -- suddenly had his own work rejected by many corporate newspaper pages and websites with the election of the first black president. He was most recently banned from Daily Kos because of what was construed to be an "ape-like" interpretation of Obama.

No, we don't do satire here. We are too easily offended. We're too busy manufacturing outrage and identifying with one side or the other of an oligarchic duopoly who'd just as soon kill us as look at us.

It's actually pretty hilarious that our repressive politicians and their staid propagandists of the corporate press are condemning the killing of French cartoonists as an assault on "freedom of the press." As I wrote about just the other day, the United States itself is abysmally low on the press freedom totem poll --  not because of "Islamic terrorism," but because of the terrorism of the hyper-capitalist police and surveillance state.

And despite all their pro-liberty editorializing, most major media outlets are refusing to publish the "blasphemous" cartoons that sparked Wednesday's massacre. They will give lip service to the right to be provocative, but heaven forfend that they be provocative themselves (unless, of course, it's propaganda provoking whatever negative sentiment the government wants them to project, as in recent anti-North Korean and anti-Putin sentiment, and obligingly characterizing all Muslim victims of American drone strikes as "militants.")

American writers, unlike the French cartoonists, are for the most part not willing to risk their lives and livelihoods for their beliefs and freedom of thought and expression. They're self-censoring, and their fear is spreading to the rest of the world.

The proud French tradition of afflicting the comfortable extends back to Rabelais, Moliere, Voltaire, those heady pre-Revolutionary days when street pamphleteers freely distributed insulting tracts and cartoons depicting the clergy and the Bourbons in most unflattering (and often scatological) lights. Francophile Andrew Hussey has an excellent piece today in the Times on the history of Parisian wit and also offers a rare nuanced look at the current strife between the French and Arab immigrants, who are confined to de facto ghettoes (banlieues) in the suburbs of the City of Light:

What is seen in the center of Paris as tweaking the nose of authority — religious or political — is seen out in the banlieues as the arrogance of those in power who can mock what they like, including deeply held religious beliefs, perhaps the only part of personal identity that has not been crushed or assimilated into mainstream French society.

What was gunned down on Wednesday in Paris was a generation that believed foremost in the freedom to say what you like to whomever you like. Parisians pride themselves on what they call “gouaille,” a kind of cheeky wit, based on free thinking and a love of provocation, that always stands in opposition to authority.

(Gustave Dore, illustration from Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel)

Non, nous ne sommes pas Charlie Hebdo. When the PEN American Center for human rights and literary expression put out its 2013 report on self-censorship and the war on freedom of the press, Lewis Lapham of Lapham's Quarterly wrote that the coexistence of our Second Gilded Age and the rise of the police state is no coincidence. Rising income inequality and the class war have put a huge damper on satire. Where, he asked, are the Mark Twains of the 21st Century when the times are so ripe for a resurgence?

“There are,” said Twain, “certain sweet-smelling, sugarcoated lies current in the world which all politic men have apparently tacitly conspired together to support and perpetuate… We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going and then go with the drove. We have two opinions: one private, which we are afraid to express, and another one -- the one we use -- which we force ourselves to wear to please Mrs. Grundy.

 ”It is the Mrs. Grundy of the opinion polls from whom President Barack Obama begs the favor of a sunny smile, to whom the poets who write the nation’s advertising copy sing their songs of love, for whom the Aspen Institute sponsors summer and winter festivals of think-tank discussion to reawaken the American spirit and redecorate the front parlor of the American soul.

The exchanges of platitude at the higher altitudes of moral and social pretension Twain celebrated as festive occasions on which “taffy is being pulled.” Some of the best of it gets pulled at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York when it is being explained to a quorum of the monied elite (contented bankers, corporate lawyers, arms manufacturers) that American foreign policy, rightly understood, is a work of Christian charity and an expression of man’s goodwill to man.

Contemporary American humor, writes Lapham, serves the purpose of amusing the sheep rather than shooting the elephants in the room. 

The grotesque American response to the murders of a dozen French satirists has been to gin up the xenophobia, ramp up the terrorist fear, to pit Fox News against MSNBC, and for all manner of religious fundamentalists and atheist ideologues to come out of their unhumorous cubicles to fan the distinctly  unnuanced flames. The mass murder of a dozen people will, unfortunately, present the perfect justification for the neo-cons to continue waging their own war of terror. Ask yourself what came first: Islamic extremism, or American provocation of it?

No, we Homelandians are definitely not Mark Twain or Rabelais or Voltaire or even Charlie Hedbo. And more's the pity. 

The French managed to eventually escape their own post-Revolutionary Reign of Terror. Will we?

"Love Is Stronger Than Hate"

* Update, 1/9: David North of the World Socialist Website has written an important piece that not only knocks down the hypocrisy of the West's reaction to the Parisian massacres, but criticizes the conventional wisdom that Charlie Hebdo is even part of the grand tradition of the European Enlightenment, when the satirists and cartoonists directed their scorn at the rich and powerful.

 In its relentlessly degrading portrayals of Muslims, Charlie Hebdo has mocked the poor and the powerless.

To speak bluntly and honestly about the sordid, cynical and degraded character of Charlie Hebdo is not to condone the killing of its personnel. But when the slogan “I am Charlie” is adopted and heavily promoted by the media as the slogan of protest demonstrations, those who have not been overwhelmed by state and media propaganda are obligated to reply: “We oppose the violent assault on the magazine, but we are not—and have nothing in common with—‘Charlie.’”

(snip)

The cynically provocative anti-Muslim caricatures that have appeared on so many covers of Charlie Hebdo have pandered to and facilitated the growth of right-wing chauvinist movements in France. It is absurd to claim, by way of defense of Charlie Hebdo, that its cartoons are all “in good fun” and have no political consequences. Aside from the fact that the French government is desperate to rally support for its growing military agenda in Africa and the Middle East, France is a country where the influence of the neo-fascist National Front is growing rapidly. In this political context, Charlie Hebdo has facilitated the growth of a form of politicized anti-Muslim sentiment that bears a disturbing resemblance to the politicized anti-Semitism that emerged as a mass movement in France in the 1890s.

In its use of crude and vulgar caricatures that purvey a sinister and stereotyped image of Muslims, Charlie Hebdo recalls the cheap racist publications that played a significant role in fostering the anti-Semitic agitation that swept France during the famous Dreyfus Affair, which erupted in 1894 after a Jewish officer was accused and falsely convicted of espionage on behalf of Germany. In whipping up popular hatred of Jews, La Libre Parole [“Free Speech”], published by the infamous Edoard Adolfe Drumont, made highly effective use of cartoons that employed the familiar anti-Semitic devices. The caricatures served to inflame public opinion, inciting mobs against Dreyfus and his defenders, such as Emile Zola, the great novelist and author of J’Accuse.

North is right. Look at the cartoon posted above. The generic Arab man has the stereotypical hooked nose, while the journalist he's French-kissing (a slur against alleged Muslim homophobia) is rendered as a relative milquetoast, pencil behind the ear and all. I haven't looked at past issues of the magazine, but I should. It's  now guaranteed to increase its circulation to numbers unimaginable only a couple of days ago. I think we're in for a huge surge of fascism, a new Reign of Terror in France and beyond, and I think it's going to get mighty ugly, mighty fast.

Let's hope that NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio stands his ground and doesn't restore the Bloomberg-era police profiling of Muslims, a practice that he abolished soon after taking office. 

As religion scholar Karen Armstrong writes in her excellent book, Fields of Blood, "every one of the (extreme fundamentalist) movements I have studied has been rooted in fear – in the conviction that modern society is out to destroy not only their faith but also themselves and their entire way of life," adding that "whenever a fundamentalist movement is attacked, either with violence or in a media campaign, it almost invariably becomes more extreme." 

She compares fundamentalist Islam with fundamentalist American-style right-wing Christianity, both of which actually thrive whenever they're attacked. Such attacks prove to them that their fears are well-grounded, that the elite secular forces really are out to get them.

And meanwhile, militant atheist Bill Maher, that witty epitome of a creepy new breed of intolerant liberalism, is already back on his soapbox to accuse "hundreds of millions of Muslims" of tacitly approving the murders in France. He's a one-man flame-throwing media army unto himself. What constitutes the American liberal class doesn't dare criticize his so-cool and enlightened vitriol lest they give ammunition to his sometime-paramour and co-bigot Ann Coulter.

That's how simplistic our Homelandian group-think has become. Pick your  side, and then don't ever think outside their pre-approved corporate lockbox.

The Return of Chompy

This is how the moribund chained consumer price index (CPI) method of cutting Social Security gets reanimated:

As one of its first orders of business upon convening Tuesday, the Republican House of Representatives approved a rule that will seriously undermine efforts to keep all of Social Security solvent.

The rule hampers an otherwise routine reallocation of Social Security payroll tax income from the old-age program to the disability program. Such a reallocation, in either direction, has taken place 11 times since 1968, according to Kathy Ruffing of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. 

But it's especially urgent now, because the disability program's trust fund is expected to run dry as early as next year. At that point, disability benefits for 11 million beneficiaries would have to be cut 20%. Reallocating the income, however, would keep both the old-age and disability programs solvent until at least 2033, giving Congress plenty of time to assess the programs' needs and work out a long-term fix.

The procedural rule enacted by the House Republican caucus prohibits the reallocation unless it's accompanied by "benefit cuts or tax increases that improve the solvency of the combined trust funds," as paraphrased by the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare.

As Michael Hiltzik of the L.A. Times lays out, this all-out war on the disabled, the sick, and the old has been planned for quite some time now. With a Republican majority in both houses of Congress, President Obama and the Wall Street branch of the Democratic party finally have the opening they've been craving to "reform" the social safety net.

 The GOP's job is to present a plan so cruel, so odious and so extreme that any eventual cuts in benefits agreed to by the Lesser Evil Party will have us breathing a sigh of relief that they're only sickening us and shortening our lives rather than immediately murdering us in our beds. The Republicans kill swiftly and with gusto; the Democrats prefer the gentler "boiling frog" approach.

It's how Good Cop/Bad Cop oligarchic theater works. It will be sold to the public as the sick and disabled being part of an organized crime ring, stealing from both current retirees and those mythical "future generations." It's just another variation on the tired old "divide and conquer" method used by rulers throughout history to maintain their choke-hold on power.

It's how politics in the age of Citizen United works. Even though large majorities of Americans want Social Security and Medicare expanded, the rich donor class does not. As we all know, the rich get what they want. And what they want is the profits from social insurance programs we've paid into all our working lives. What they want, frankly, is for the most vulnerable among us to simply disappear.

Such neoliberal media megaliths as CBS and NPR have already gotten the propaganda ball rolling with their recent "exposés" on disability scammers. According to the Beltway consensus, any malingerer with a pen and a stamp and a shyster lawyer and crooked doctor can collect lifelong disability simply on demand. In reality, however, only a small percentage of applicants are ever approved for benefits -- if anything, the system is unnecessarily cruel and time-consuming enough without Congress decreasing already meager benefits. It often takes years for a severely sick or disabled person to even get scheduled for an appeal hearing before an administrative court.

Embracing the Suck: The Sequel

Once the Democrats and Republicans grab that grotesque cudgel to hammer out their less-horrible plan (increased hunger for the vulnerable rather than outright starvation) Obama will most likely hail himself as the hero who saved the New Deal by bravely compromising. He was thwarted in his goal to reward the Wall Street grifters with our earned benefits early in his administration, but his time may finally have come. As Eric Zuesse of Washington's Blog reminded us shortly before the latest mid-term "shellacking,"

To Obama, his plan to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, so as to fund the Wall Street bailout, was an act of political courage. (In his interview with the Washington Post, he “pledged to expend political capital on the issue.”) It was his long-term plan, even though the polls showed widespread opposition to it by the public. This was a matter not of expediency, but of conscience, for him: he needed to find some way to fund both the ongoing Wall Street bailouts, and the massive federal debt that would be caused by the 2008 Wall Street crash and its resulting plunge in federal tax-collections; and this “balanced approach,” of tax hikes and spending cuts, would be his solution to both problems.

Here's then-Senator Obama's 2006 political audition before the directors of the oligarchy at the Brookings Institution, where the self-described "free trader" and market ideologue specifically promises to modernize (neoliberal-speak for slash) Social Security. He actually warns the filthy rich that their counterrevolution will not be a "bloodless process." (too bad that this smoking gun of a clip was not posted for public viewing until after the 2008 election.) The "Bob" he addresses is mega-banker Robert Rubin, former Clinton treasury secretary and architect of the Glass-Steagall repeal:

Before Thomas Piketty became a best-selling author and wealth inequality became part of the political lexicon, Obama used the smarmy mantra "sharing the sacrifice" to ram through his federal wage freezes, cuts in home heating assistance, slashing training programs like Job Corps, and other austerity policies. A variation on this theme, mouthed by House Minority Maven Nancy Pelosi upon agreeing in 2013 to cut unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless in exchange for keeping the government open, is "embracing the suck."

 It was only the recalcitrance of the Tea Party that doomed Obama's initial efforts to enact chained CPI and raise the Medicare eligibility age to 67. Now that austerity and deficit reduction have been totally discredited as means to "grow the economy," it should be interesting, to say the least, to see how he plans to justify sticking it to us this time.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe he'll veto the Republicans' efforts to slash Social Security. But I'm not hopeful. This man is a dyed in the wool conservative who is not about to change into a progressive two years before he's due to cash in big-time in private life.

So stock up on your popcorn now while you can still afford it.

Baby It's Cold Outside

 There's a big chill, and it has nothing to do with the new Polar Vortex (named Gorgon, because of its many tentacles) now writhing its way through the lower 48.

Americans who write for a living (or for free, for that matter) are still afraid to jot down every thought that comes into their heads, lest the all-seeing icy eye of the government Gorgon be watching them. It's the reptilian chill felt round the world, but the head, or epicenter, of this particular monster is smack dab in Washington, DC -- or more aptly, within the Surveillance State snake-pit located in and around our nation's capitol.

In the latest survey conducted by the PEN American Center, a literary and human rights association, more than half the participating 800 American writers reported that they self-censor. Government surveillance is the culprit, they say, and has "significantly damaged U.S. credibility as a global champion of free expression for the long term."

The polar vortex of this internalized censorship is churning all over the writing world, with other less-free countries all shook up because  the United States has been revealed to be not quite the bastion of democracy and free speech its leaders still insist it is. Turns out that the Land of the Free subpoenas reporters, jails reporters' sources, and generally bends over backward to suppress information, like torture reports.

 The United States is the all-seeing, crawling eye with global surveillance capabilities. As the One Indispensable Nation, it resides on a high peak of frozen unaccountability.

  The PEN survey expands on its findings from last year by not only questioning American writers on the horror they feel, but by comparing the writing habits of Americans with their foreign counterparts.

It found that American writers are just as afraid of creepy-crawly government surveillance as writers in such authoritarian countries as China. Writers in democratic and undemocratic countries are equally worried. And that leads one to believe that the concept of democracy itself needs to be redefined in this Age of Abnormal. All the world's an oligarchy, and all the men and women merely serfs, maybe? From the report:

Vast majorities of writers around the world said they were “very” or “some-what” worried about levels of government surveillance in their countries, including 75% in countries classified as “Free”by Freedom House, 84% in countries classified as “Partly Free”, and 80% in“Not Free” countries.

These  levels are consistent with the findings of PEN’s October 2013 survey of U.S. writers, which showed that 85% of American writers were very or somewhat worried about current levels of government surveillance. The high level of concern among U.S. writers mirrors that of writers living in the other four countries that make up the “Five Eyes” surveillance alliance (Australia,Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom), 84% of whom are very or somewhat worried about government surveillance. Writers are not outliers when it comes to their level of concern about government surveillance. Eighty percent of Americans surveyed in a Pew Research Center poll released on Nov.12, 2014, agree that Americans should be worried about the government’s monitoring of phone calls and internet communication.

Writers are so spooked that some of them were even afraid to respond to the PEN survey itself, lest the government take extra steps to monitor the fearful scribes. One writer complained that surveillance has cast a "ghostly and intimidating cloak" over his or her communications. Another woman describing herself as the daughter of Holocaust survivors said that compared to the NSA, the East German Stasi was amateur hour.

Writers in both free and not-free countries report avoiding speaking and writing about certain topics in public, as well as in their email and phone conversations, and have either refrained, or considered refraining, from conducting Internet searches on topics which might be considered fraught.

If for no other reason that it damages the US's reputation around the world, PEN is urging that the dragnet surveillance conducted by the NSA and other intelligence agencies cease -- or at the very least, that the government offer more transparency about whom it monitors and why.

I guess they haven't yet swallowed the government propaganda that were it not for Edward Snowden, writers would still be feeling free to write about whatever they want. What we didn't know couldn't possibly hurt us, right?  Until it comes out that the government is monitoring reporters, and that somebody like James Risen can get subpoenaed and threatened with prison unless he tells Big Brother what its monitoring of him could never reveal: his inner thoughts and the identity of a whistleblowing source.

It's a coincidence that Risen is in court, refusing to help the government prosecute a CIA whistleblower, the same week that the PEN survey came out. It's a coincidence that the Obama administration is shielding CIA torturers but vindictively prosecuting an agency employee (Jeffrey Sterling) who apparently had the courage to disclose the CIA's messed-up plot to mess with Iran's nuclear program.

Attorney General Eric Holder, while sanctimoniously promising he will not send Risen to jail for failure to comply, is nevertheless vindictively keeping this reporter twisting in the wind anyway, holding him up as an example of how uncomfortable and expensive the US can make life for writers should they write down thoughts and facts not conducive to the oligarchic national security. It's not-so-subtle mind control.

Risen is entering the eighth year of his battle with the Justice Department over a book he wrote that embarrassed the Bush administration. He is only the latest high profile example of Obama's war on whistleblowers. If a famous writer like Risen, protected by the most powerful newspaper on earth, can be persecuted this way, where does that leave others without the financial and legal resources to defend their civil rights?

The Obama administration is sending a definite message to all of us, and to government employees at every level: don't even think about talking trash about us. If you see something, don't say something. As Risen himself put it, Obama is "the greatest threat to press freedom in a generation".

So it's no surprise that the US has fallen a record 13 slots, to 46th place, in Reporters Without Borders' annual report on global press freedoms.

Countries that pride themselves on being democracies and respecting the rule of law have not set an example, far from it. Freedom of information is too often sacrificed to an overly broad and abusive interpretation of national security needs, marking a disturbing retreat from democratic practices. Investigative journalism often suffers as a result.

This has been the case in the United States (46th), which fell 13 places, one of the most significant declines, amid increased efforts to track down whistleblowers and the sources of leaks. The trial and conviction of Private Bradley Manning and the pursuit of NSA analyst Edward Snowden were warnings to all those thinking of assisting in the disclosure of sensitive information that would clearly be in the public interest.

US journalists were stunned by the Department of Justice’s seizure of Associated Press phone records without warning in order to identify the source of a CIA leak. It served as a reminder of the urgent need for a “shield law” to protect the confidentiality of journalists’ sources at the federal level. The revival of the legislative process is little consolation for James Risen of The New York Times, who is subject to a court order to testify against a former CIA employee accused of leaking classified information. And less still for Barrett Brown, a young freelance journalist facing 105 years in prison in connection with the posting of information that hackers obtained from Statfor, a private intelligence company with close ties to the federal government.

The UK fell a less drastic three spaces, to 33rd place, due to its smashing of Guardian computers in the wake of the Snowden revelations.  The UK doesn't even enjoy the same constitutional rights, including a shield law, as Americans supposedly do.

Still, we're not the worst of the worst. In other countries, organized crime and non-state violence severely curtail the freedom of the press. Four Guatemalan journalists were murdered last year, and Egypt has imprisoned Al Jazeera reporters for doing their job. Kuwait fell 13 places because a new law was passed which fines writers $1 million for criticizing the Emir, and sentences them to 10 years in prison for insulting Allah, Mohammed, the prophets and even the prophets' wives. In Greece and Hungary, journalists are at risk for physical attacks by the fast-growing fascist movements being spawned by neoliberal austerity measures.

So whether or not prison and violence against reporters are real or whether they're threatened, writers all over the world are feeling similar levels of fear, and they self-censor accordingly.

It's the globalization of state-sponsored terror and the war against independent thought. Hard, soft, in-between; physical or psychological: terror is still terror.

Meanwhile, there's always propaganda to calm our nerves. This recently-released official White House photo, for example, purports to show some staffers doubled over with hilarity at something mouthed by the Jokester-in-Chief. But the subliminal message -- be sycophantic or be sorry -- comes through loud and clear.

All Is Calm, All Is Blight

Americans certainly are a short attention-spanned bunch, not to mention stuck like glue to whatever the top-trending story is on any given day. Our anxieties are fleeting and fickle. One month, all we cared about was the Ebola outbreak. By the next month, when nobody we knew personally had actually caught or died of the disease, it was on to the next big thing. Namely, Kim Kardashian's butt.

I have to say that I'm really fond of the actual next big thing on the Things We Hate List. Because politicians are now even more feared than the crappy Economy they helped to create!  Granted, only 18% of those polled by Gallup actually consider our elected leaders to be problematic, but that is huge compared to the mere two percent who still list terrorism as the top thing to be terrorized about. And that should really scare the despised politicians, who rely on fear fomentation to keep the proles in line.

Here are the complete results:

As you can see, there is virtually no agreement on what should concern us the most. I suspect, though, that most people would agree that being called by pollsters during the dinner hour can be considered universally problematic, especially since most "polls" are simply marketing ploys in disguise. I noticed that Gallup asked no questions about the total failure of the FTC's Do Not Call program.

And how about that section titled "War/Wars (non-specific)"?  People apparently were not permitted to be nuanced about, say, their approval of the 30 Years War as opposed to the current Forever Wars. As a matter of fact, the Gallup pollsters seem to assume that just because President Obama "responsibly" ended the Afghanistan War by leaving only thousands of soldiers behind, and is only dribbling back troops to Iraq in mission-creep piecemeal fashion, we are basking in some sort of Orwellian Pax Americana.

Since we can't agree on what to loathe, the pollsters glibly conclude that everything is calm amidst the blight. The sum of all fears effectively cancels each one out.

With unemployment and gas prices falling, the U.S. not being involved in any major wars and scaling back operations in Afghanistan, and no acts of domestic terrorism occurring, the factors that have caused Americans to converge on a single pressing concern in the past simply weren't present in 2014. Rather, as mentions of the economy and unemployment have dwindled since 2012, mentions of healthcare and government leadership have grown to join them, forming a set of comparably sized, moderate-level concerns that now define the public's view of what ails the nation.

Not only was this the average picture in 2014, but it remained the state of affairs in the last quarter, suggesting 2015 is starting on a similarly calm note. That is underscored by the significant improvement in the Gallup Economic Confidence Index in late December, reaching positive territory for the first time since before 2008.

So that last bit about consumer confidence should make the despised politicians a little happier. The Dems' Hooveresque propaganda campaign about prosperity being just around the corner seems to be working.

But how will the muddled poll results affect the messaging of the detested politicians? How, most importantly, will they affect "the narrative" of Jeb and Hillary's Neoliberal Death Match?

The dispersion of public concern seen in 2014 may also have implications for the 2016 presidential election. Should it persist, the lack of a single defining public issue could make candidates' task of honing a message for the election more complex.

I guess, like the population they aim to fool, they'll "hone" their message on whatever topic is trending on any given day. They'll talk about whatever the corporate media stenographers tell us to care about, cancelling themselves and us out in the process.

As long as we're on the subject of meaningless polls, I'll add to the current listicle frenzy by pointing you to the most despised words of 2014, as compiled in the frozen north by Lake Superior State University. Here's a synopsis of what should be banned:

BAE ("before anyone else"): I have to admit that I'd never even heard of this one.

Polar Vortex: the top-trending euphemism for Winter, making Jack Frost and Old Man jealous. I don't understand why it wasn't included in the Gallup Poll. They never even mentioned what we really should be afraid of -- and that is Climate Change.

Hack: the gripe is with the misuse of this word, as in "life hack." I still plan to use it liberally when describing loathed politicians and sycophantic journalists.

Skill Set: banned for redundancy. You have a skill or skills, period. Similar in annoyance to "mindset."

Swag: banned for its catch-all quality. It's a lazy verbal tic similar to "um" and "American exceptionalism."

Foodie: what took them so long to ban this one?

Curate/Curated: it used to mean something to do with a museum. Now, everything is curated. The NSA doesn't collect your emails and phone conversations, it merely curates them as valuable works of art. The word is also used to justify copying and pasting entire articles on one's blog. If you "curate" someone else's work, you cannot possibly be accused of theft or plagiarism. You just dug it up somewhere to put in your own vanity museum.

Friend-Raising: typifies the mass marketization and dehumanization of life itself.

Cra-Cra: that is just craaaazy, dude!

Enhanced Interrogation: here's looking at you, New York Times.

Takeaway: not food for foodies, but a trendy word for "conclusion." As in, "what's your takeaway on the stupid Gallup poll?"

-Nation: another long-overdue one, in which loathed and insufferable people add "nation" after themselves or their organization. As in HillaryNation or FoxNation or ObamaNation. It's a real abomination.

Terror in the Big Apple

When two New York City police officers were shot to death this month, they were parked in front of a public housing project during an anti-terrorism training exercise. That just about says it all.

Cop union boss Patrick Lynch is actually correct about there being a war in the Big Apple. But it's not only a war of the cops against a liberal Democratic mayor and against the people protesting police brutality. It's the war of neoliberalism against the poor and working classes, and it's been going on for decades. The cops function to ease the gentrification process, and to contain the disposable populations. It's the rich whom they serve and protect. And thus it was no anomaly that the US vice president, the governor of New York, and all manner of dignitaries ostentatiously attended the funeral of one lowly murdered cop last weekend. The dead man is a symbol of their own endangered law, their own endangered order. Not for concern for the hoi polloi, either, is the New York Times wringing its hands over an alleged work slow-down by some selfish counterrevolutionary cops.

If the whole world is a battlefield, then the inner cities abutting the enclaves of the obscene rich are the theaters of modern  guerrilla warfare. Poor neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, where the cop shooting took place, might as well be another Mogadishu or Fallujah as far as the elites are concerned.

The wealth gap in New York City is the most extreme in the United States, with the city simultaneously housing a record number of billionaires and a record number of poor people. Homelessness is at a record high, and half the population is living in or near poverty.  From Bloomberg:

The most commonly used measure of inequality is the Gini index, which ranges between 0, which would be complete equality (everyone in a community has the same income), and 1, which is complete inequality (one person has all the income, all others none).  Manhattan’s Gini index stood at 0.596 in 2012, higher than that of South Africa before the Apartheid-ending 1994 election. (The U.S. average is 0.471.) If Manhattan were a country, it would rank sixth highest in income inequality in the world out of more than 130 for which the World Bank reports data. In 2009 New York’s wealthiest one percent earned a third of the entire municipality’s personal income — almost twice the proportion for the rest of the country.

The same patterns can be seen, albeit to a lesser extent, in other major cities. A 2006 analysis by the Brookings Institution showed the percentage of middle income families declined precipitously in the 100 largest metro areas from 1970 to 2000.

Meanwhile, based on the number of actual boots on the ground, the NYPD  is now the seventh largest army on the entire planet.

The collapse of the financial system in 2008 only accentuated the plight of the already marginalized living in poor urban neighborhoods. Even low-level employment opportunities collapsed, and brutal austerity measures under both a billionaire mayor (Michael Bloomberg) and the deficit hawks in both national political parties oversaw food stamp cuts and unemployment insurance and other drastic reductions in the social safety net.  Foreclosures on subprime mortgage disproportionately hit black and Latino populations, while the financial fraudsters of Wall Street have not only gone unpunished, but have succeeded in extracting even more wealth as a reward for their own malfeasance.

And the week before Christmas, two cops sat in their squad car, parked outside of a building which houses the poor and downtrodden. In the war on terror, the poor and downtrodden are considered terrorists until proven otherwise. The "disposition matrix" constructed by President Obama and his CIA consigliere John Brennan has come home to the Homeland. And HQ Central of the Homeland is in the Big Apple. Goldman Sachs even shares office space with the cops in its taxpayer-subsidized office tower. (If nothing else, the city police are suffering from one hell of a post-Bloomberg hangover. No more Muslim-stalking. No more stop-and-frisk. It must be hard to have a new mayor trying to at least somewhat reverse a fascist coup.)

The two murdered police officers were victims not only of the crazed shooter -- they were collateral damage of the tenuous oligarchic system that employed them. They were working overtime, probably to earn some extra money for Christmas. Cops, as members of the middle class Precariat, are tasked with keeping the real underclass in line. The plutocracy draws its domestic armed forces not from within its own class,  but from the ranks of the working poor, integrating them into its program of economic and political oppression. Police forces are the low-intensity (usually) military ops for the elites. No wonder the rulers get all shaken up when a few of their domestic troops get killed. If you actually think they personally give a shit about the murdered cops, though, think again. They are mourning symbols of their own power, not the disposable bullet-ridden human bodies.

Two cops were sitting in their squad car in front of a public housing project, learning how to detect the terror camouflaged in every neighborhood resident. They were there to learn how to track and target people moving about within the cluttered infrastructure, there to detect threats in the mundane activities and spaces of everyday life.

It was probably no accident that another recent police shooting took place within another Brooklyn public housing project, neglected by the same austerity policies which have destroyed the hope and dignity of so many people. A cop shot and killed a resident for the offense of simply moving and existing within his own pitch-black stairwell. The officer apparently panicked, but he'd also been effectively trained to automatically criminalize the tenants of projects.

And while cops patrol the domiciles of the demonized poor, the free-marketers of both political parties have ramped up selling out public housing to vulture capitalists. In a little-noticed section of this month's corporate giveaway known as the Cromnibus Bill, the number of public housing units being "privatized" by the Obama administration has tripled, from 60,000 to 180,000 units.

Of course, the neoliberals of HUD are euphemising this corruption by calling the program "Rental Assistance Demonstration" (RAD). It's rad, all right -- in a scary Paul Ryan/Ayn Rand kind of way. Not only did  RAD go from an unproven pilot program to full-scale evisceration of public housing in the space of only a few months, it puts the lives of the poor -- mainly elderly and women -- into the clutches of the same predators who destroyed the housing market through subprime fraud in the first place. The Obama administration has once again chosen the rentiers over the renters. And it set the stage for this privatization of the units by deliberately underfunding public housing in every proposed White House budget since 2010.

The developers who take over public housing (a major safety net for the poor) will be able to set their own rents and, as usual, will be immune from all government oversight and accountability should the dwellings fall into even further disrepair. The renters themselves will receive government rent vouchers instead of protective leases. Foreclosures and evictions are distinct possibilities and are all part and parcel of the "creative destruction" of poor neighborhoods.

Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA) complained to Obama about the selling-out of public housing in her own Watts district, but to no avail. (After all, he got his start in Chicago politics thanks to the FIRE gentrification crowd). Waters said, “Put simply, if the price of accessing private capital is to put public housing ownership at risk, then that price is too high. A more appropriate and sustainable approach would be for the federal government to provide adequate funding directly to the public housing program.”

And as tenants rights advocate Lynda Carson writes,

In addition to RAD destroying thousands of good union public housing jobs across the nation, RAD pits low-income renters in the Section 8 program against public housing tenants needing Section 8 vouchers. Because RAD results in displacing tenants from their public housing units, the tenants are pressured to accept Section 8 vouchers to find another place to reside. Vouchers that may not be worth much as the on-going massive sequestration budget cuts destroy the Section 8 voucher program.

According to a November 2014 report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), massive sequestration budget cuts that are still in effect have resulted in the loss of 100,000 Section 8 vouchers (Housing Choice Vouchers) during 2013. Unless the sequestration budget cuts are ended which is unlikely once Republicans take total control of Congress on January 1, 2015, public housing tenants pressured to accept Section 8 vouchers because of the RAD program are being placed at risk of homelessness.

And isn't that the whole plan? More open green spaces, less housing for the marginalized and criminalized poor to hide from the paranoid and predatory rich.

 Neighborhoods on the elite chopping block have been transformed into military Human Terrain Systems.  CCTV at every intersection allows real instances of urban violence to supplement the fictional fare that Hollywood produces to frighten us into submission. If citizens can envision urban areas and housing projects as hotbeds of savagery, then citizens can also accept more police and more jails. It's an endless propaganda feedback loop, in which both the cognitively superior "liberal" elites and the fundamentalist right-wingers are manipulated into joining forces in their hatred of the "Other". One side calls them IQ-deficient gun-loving losers in need of a hand up rather than a handout. The other side calls them godless moochers and takers lolling about on their hammocks of dependency.

Two cops, sitting in their patrol car, guarding against terror in front of the place where the poor people live.

America: where life itself has been a war for a long, long time.

You can watch the Ball drop tonight in Times Square.