Where Eagles Dared

Sandy Socolow (CBS News)

You may never have heard of Sandy Socolow, especially if you weren't around during the 60s and 70s and beyond, when watching Walter Cronkite deliver the nightly news on CBS was a ritual in millions of American homes.
I confess that he wasn't exactly a household name to me, either, until I got to know his former wife, Nan, through New York Times commenting. (Nan has contributed several poems to Sardonicky, and a Watergate-era poem she wrote to him is reprinted with her permission at the end of this post.)

Sandy Socolow, longtime producer of Walter Cronkite's newscasts, died on January 31 at the age of 86. He was among the last of the so-called "Murrow Boys," former newspapermen who turned the new medium of television into a unique and popular information-delivery vehicle. This was before news, and entertainment and corporate sponsor interests merged, and TV news -- as evidenced most recently by the Brian Williams scandal -- has been exposed as something of a personality, money- and ratings-driven fraud.

Journalists, many of them with perfect hair and pretty faces, were both physically and psychologically embedded deep within George W. Bush's misbegotten adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, helping to glorify the war effort and probably helping to prolong it as well, through their largely non-critical coverage. (Remember the phony "Saving Private Jessica" story, and the staged toppling of Saddam's statue as preludes to the selling of war as a soap opera of infotainment?)

TV war coverage was, and is, a long way from Vietnam in more than time and distance. Back then, there was a Fairness Doctrine (broadcasting in the public interest). Back then, journalists tended to take their "afflict the comfortable" duties more seriously, as opposed to their banal goals today: getting access to the powerful and engaging in he said/she said debates instead of proactively digging for the truth. It was Sandy Socolow who produced the famous Morley Safer film segment that showed American troops setting fire to a Vietnam village, which sparked the previously lacking public outrage and hastened the end of the war. Walter Cronkite went to Vietnam himself, came back, urged a withdrawal of troops in the name of human decency, and caused LBJ to realize that since he'd lost Cronkite, he'd lost America.

Sandy Socolow (his last name is Russian for "eagle" or "falcon," says Nan) worked with Cronkite almost continuously from the time he arrived at CBS in the mid-50s until Cronkite's own retirement. As Bruce Weber chronicles in his excellent New York Times obituary, Socolow risked his job by producing Cronkite's succinct and damning overview of the then-obscure Watergate scandal:

Less than two weeks before the presidential election, the “Evening News” broadcast Cronkite’s two-part summation of the unfolding Watergate story, largely following the reporting in The Washington Post by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward.

The first installment, which detailed the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington and a dirty tricks campaign orchestrated by the committee to re-elect President Richard M. Nixon, appeared on Friday, Oct. 27, absorbing an extraordinary 14 minutes of the 22 minutes or so devoted to the news.

The Nixon White House put pressure on CBS corporate executives to cancel the second installment of the report, which was to focus on the financing of the illicit doings and on the ways figures involved in the Watergate scandal were connected to the president.

But Sandy Socolow chose to ignore the threatening directive, imparted through CBS chairman William S. Paley, to kill the second part of the story, opting instead to trim it down. The rest, as they say, is history:

The CBS report nonetheless had a significant impact, not least because it gave the Watergate story the imprimatur of the nation’s most authoritative newsman, Walter Cronkite. Less than two years after Nixon was resoundingly re-elected, the Watergate scandal forced his resignation.

Fast forward 40 years, and a shocking 64% of investigative journalists are convinced that their own government is spying on them. Fast forward 40 years, and the Fourth Estate is largely a glorified steno pool. As Maureen Dowd writes in her Sunday New York Times column on the Brian Williams debacle,    

Although there was much chatter about the “revered” anchor and the “moral authority” of the networks, does anyone really feel that way anymore? Frothy morning shows long ago became the more important anchoring real estate, garnering more revenue and subsidizing the news division. One anchor exerted moral authority once and that was Walter Cronkite, because he risked his career to go on TV and tell the truth about the fact that we were losing the Vietnam War.

But TV news now is rife with cat, dog and baby videos, weather stories and narcissism. And even that fare caused trouble for Williams when he reported on a video of a pig saving a baby goat, admitting “we have no way of knowing if it’s real,” and then later had to explain that it wasn’t. The nightly news anchors are not figures of authority. They’re part of the entertainment, branding and cross-promotion business.

So on top of Orwell's 1984, we've got the anesthetizing frosting of Huxley's Brave New World. Distractions and delusions are the order of the day. My response to Dowd:

CNN was actually pre-empting their usual terror and sabre-rattling coverage on Saturday because of LyinBrianGate. Poppy Harlow fumed that it was "too soon" for Maureen Dowd to have exposed Brian Williams as a phony. Poppy hopes he gets his job back, because they're all like family.

I'm glad Maureen mentioned Walter Cronkite, because the longtime producer of his news program died just last weekend. Sandy Socolow was a trailblazer for TV news. It was largely due to Socolow that the American people learned the awful truth about Vietnam. And thus was the war dealt a mortal blow by the power of independent journalism.

Brian Williams, on the other hand, bathed himself in jingoistic glory and glamor. The viewers were numbed and awed, and the horror show went on. Those, of course, were the years of the "embed" -- the sneaky way that the Bush cartel controlled reporters by giving them unprecedented access to the battlefield and all the military toys and garb at their disposal. Chelsea Manning, the truly courageous soldier who did expose the war crimes -- including film of helicopter snipers shooting Reuters reporters to death -- languishes in prison while infotainer Williams is raking in the millions for performing the joint function of actor and propagandist.

There is no anti-war movement because we're not being told the truth about any of the wars. But now that Williams has been exposed as a fraud, let the chips fall where they may, and let all our eyes and minds be opened.

Nan Socolow shares the poem she wrote to her husband to celebrate his courage under fire from what had been, until the past couple of administrations anyway, perhaps the worst assault on journalism by government in American history. It was originally published in the June 1975 New Republic.

RIDING INTO BATTLE,

MY HEART ON YOUR LANCE

You're my peach

you're my prince

pennoned

gonfaloned

tietacked

you joust

mosey along

astride your

falcon steed.

You're my bee

you're my berry

my cufflinked
Charlemagne

of traffic jams

and medieval nights

the modern day

vassal of

Medici me.

Nan Socolow

Three Generations of Socolows: Nan With Her Sons and Grandsons

Final Jeopardy Category: Distractions

I'll take "Media Scandals" for a buck, Alex.

A: This memory-impaired but suave multimillionaire stud muffin will keep his infotainment job because the American sponge-colonies love that he puts the hunkiness and happiness back into global atrocities and human misery and boring government propaganda.

Q: Who is #LyinBrian? 

Absolutely correct!  Everybody loves it when elites are temporarily scorned for their lies, but rise again when they 'umbly admit that "mistakes were made". Americans also love dynasties, as in elite pundit's daughter gets the starring role (Peter Pan) on the same network where Daddy reads from a teleprompter for half an hour every night and lobs incestuous softball questions at presidents and their kin and other ruling class racketeers. Plus, he is hot. Just ask Buzz Feed.

No Lie: Brian Actually Hired Chelsea Clinton, Whose Mom Also Lied About Sniper Fire

A: This dorky but dapper New York Times pundit falsely claimed psychological damage from chronic exposure to vituperative reader comments, but claims to love his bullies anyway.

Q: Who is David Brooks?

Brooks: I Do Unto Others

 Right again, contestant!  Our Mister Brooks is vying for MVP on Brian Williams' farm team (The League of Mendacious Self-Aggrandizing Overpaid Pundits) by  pleading service-related PTSD. You see, David Brooks admitted last summer that he hasn't really sullied his eyeballs with reader comments for years. Rather, he pays (or more likely doesn't pay) his minions to dredge through the bile and hand him a couple of fawning tributes to boost his inflated ego. But in today's column, a mistake was made and he forgetfully claimed his feelings are hurt when he reads all the comments. He used his hurt feelings to construct a pulpit from which to preach empathy and world peace. If David Brooks can rise above all the mean-girliness, then so should our elected warmongering leaders. To be fair, Brooks's hypocrisy and fibbing don't rise to the level of #LyinBrian, but it's still well within the psychopathic personality disorder spectrum. And even if #BrooksIsAJerk goes viral, the man himself needn't worry, because he doesn't have a Twitter account. "I don't have a lot of ideas, so I'm not going to waste them on Twitter," he told Katie Couric at the Aspen Ideas Festival last summer.

A: This overpaid CNN anchor is the favorite for this year's Overpaid Pundit Award for best exhibitionist performance by an ignoramus.

Q. This is a wild guess, Alex, but based on his idiocy in Ferguson and that bit with the toy airplane crashing in a make-believe ocean... is it Don Lemon?

 Three times a charm, gamer! In the wake of that other viral distraction and looming Jeopardy category called To Vax or Not to Vax, Don stripped down on Twitter to show off his "measles vaccination" scar on some pretty buff musculature.

 Unfortunately for Don, he misremembered that it was a Smallpox vaccination scar. Not to be undone by the ensuing Twitter blast, however, he doubled down and then claimed his scar was a combo Measles-Smallpox souvenir, or Smeasles. Smallpox vaccinations were never part of the MMR (Measles, Mumps, Rubella) regimen. They predated the MMR regimen. They don't do scars any more because Smallpox has been eradicated. (Notwithstanding those little incidents at the NIH and the CDC.)

Congratulations. You just won a buck (not three, because game show cash awards are cheap-ass, in solidarity with your wages) and a copy of our home game. Taxes are your responsibility. Waivers must be signed.

Q. But Alex. Won't Don Lemon and David Brooks and Brian Williams get fired or at least have a pox put on all their houses?

A. No, you silly little prole. The rich and famous are immunized from accountability. The public loves to gawk. They're hooked on click-bait. They imagine that pundits read their comments or otherwise care about them. People love to be distracted. Most people don't care about the truth, they only care about how entertaining the stories are at the end of their minimum wage double shifts. That is how, when the planet is alternately burning, flooding, and freezing, the Obama administration is able to start a new war every week, ram through secretive corporate coups and call them "trade deals," and otherwise sell out democracy.

They want you to fly your doomed little toy airplanes into Don Lemon's black hole of forgetfulness.

Ready for Hillary: The Bush-Saudi Connection

Now that President Obama and his retinue are safely back from groveling before the Saudi royal family, they can get back to politics as usual.. They can insist (indirectly, through the New York Times) that not only did the Bush retinue grovel worse, they were even complicit in 9/11. It's been an open secret for years that certain members of the royal family were whisked out of the country in the immediate aftermath of the attacks: the only people permitted to breach the no-fly zone.

Open government advocates have long demanded the declassification of a redacted portion of the 9/11 Commission Report, which allegedly names all the names and has the potential to deeply embarrass members of the Bush administration, if not directly implicate them in criminal behavior. In a sane world, it would also shock the American public.  But government officials with a long tradition of having each others' backs have long resisted calls for such transparency. Major corporate media outlets have largely ignored the story.

Until this week, that is. In a series of front-page blockbusters, the New York Times has outlined the deep financial and ideological ties between the Saudis and Al Qaeda, and between the Saudis and George W. Bush as exposed by a previously scorned Super Max prisoner named Zacarias Moussaoui. Today, the newspaper floated a trial balloon from the Obama administration which hinted that they are at least considering the release of 28 redacted pages of the 9/11 Commission report.

They seem to be getting ready for Hillary. They seem to be noticing that Jeb Bush represents the only serious threat to her ascension to the throne of American Empire. (The Times took care of Chris Christie earlier this week, pointing out that like every corrupt politician worth his salt, he likes to live large and enjoys many a pay-to-play perk.)

But back to the players known as the Bushes and the Saudis and the Obamas. The Times' Carl Hulse transmits the desired message:

“I think it is the right thing to do,” said Representative Stephen F. Lynch, Democrat of Massachusetts and an author of a bipartisan resolution encouraging President Obama to declassify the section. “Let’s put it out there.”

White House officials say the administration has undertaken a review on whether to release the pages but has no timetable for when they might be made public.

Maybe they're waiting for Jeb to announce that on second thought he needs to spend some more time with his family. So for now, they're being extremely nuanced and discreet.

Mr. Lynch and his allies have been joined by former Senator Bob Graham of Florida, who as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee was a leader of the inquiry. He has called for the release of the report’s Part 4, which dealt with Saudi Arabia, since President George W. Bush ordered it classified when the rest of the report was released in December 2002.

 Mr. Graham has repeatedly said it shows that Saudi Arabia was complicit in the Sept. 11 attacks. “The 28 pages primarily relate to who financed 9/11, and they point a very strong finger at Saudi Arabia as being the principal financier,” Mr. Graham said last month as he pressed for the pages to be made public.

This is purely conjecture on my part, but I smell Florida politics. Graham's daughter, newly elected to a seat in the House of Representatives, would like to run for the Senate seat now occupied by Marco Rubio. And if Marco Rubio runs for president, that  seat is potentially up for grabs. The problem is that Jeb is currently way ahead of Rubio in the polls. If Jeb goes away, so potentially does much of a state re-election campaign for  Rubio.

To be fair to Graham, though, he has always fought against the redaction of the pages of his commission's report which directly tie  the Saudi royal family to the attacks. He just got a little more polite about the non-transparency issue when Barack Obama took office, is all.

It helps that the 9/11 families are ramping up the pressure, especially those suing Saudi Arabia itself in federal court. They're losing patience with Obama's continued reassurances that the truth will out. Hulse of the Times:

“If we stop funding of terrorism and hold those people accountable, wouldn’t it make a dent in the financing of terrorism today?” asked William Doyle, whose son, Joseph, was killed in the World Trade Center. Mr. Doyle said that President Obama personally assured him after the death of Osama bin Laden that he would declassify that section of the report.

Now that Obama is in his proverbial last quarter and his administration is already transitioning over to Empress Hillary, that time may be nigh... or more specifically, as close to possible as Election 2016, to provide maximum impact and electoral advantage. An October surprise is not out of the question.

More likely, in my view, is that the Obama people are simply posturing. They waited until a hardcore hawk named Richard Burr (R-NC) took over the Senate Intelligence Committee chairmanship before sending out their nouveau-transparency signals and rattling Jeb Bush in the process. They had heretofore dutifully avoided releasing the redacted sections of the report when the Democrats held the Senate.

Burr has actually demanded that the recently released and heavily redacted Senate report outlining CIA torture be re-classified and placed back in his hands for the protection of the guilty.

All Hillary has to do in her upcoming campaign is hint that the Bushes orchestrated a 9/11 cover-up. She obviously can't release classified material herself, now that she's safely and temporarily out of government. She will be able to tell voters that they would be shocked, shocked if they only knew what she knows.

And she is not telling.

Groundhog Day

(credit: USA Today)

It's deja vu all over again. It's fascist coup all over again.

 In the past half century alone, the USA has invaded, bombed, and/or occupied Vietnam, Lebanon, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Panama, Gulf States, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, and Syria.  And even that is only a partial list. There are shadow wars being waged all the time from more than a thousand American military bases dotting our endangered planet.

Deja vu has popped up its rabid, fascist little head all over again. Because while you were distracted watching the Super Bowl last night, the Obama administration and its corporate partners brazenly tacked yet another gigantic hunk of real estate onto their plunder list. And that is Ukraine, and by extension, Russia.

Oh, we've known for awhile that the White House fomented the right-wing coup in Ukraine last year in order to wage a not-so-proxy war against Russia, and has used special ops and the CIA to help its puppets attack civilian populations -- conveniently demonized as "pro-Russian rebels" -- in the east.

 But now they're moving on to the next level: directly and openly arming their puppets, escalating the civil war, leading to the hoped-for toppling of Vladimir Putin and the opening of Russia to the Western flank of the global oligarchy. The ever-helpful New York Times slapped the announcement on its front page today, right next to all the gruesome football coverage.

As commenter Patricia M. points out, the timing of the latest roll-out was everything. American leaders waited until the sponge colonies of consumer-spectators were riveted on one jingoistic spectacle before debuting another one for our paranoid, patriotic pleasure. Stun the "bewildered herd" while they're still mindlessly wallowing in their alternate televised universe of blood, brawls, and babes. Strike while they're helplessly hung over by the annual spectacle of guts, glory, and greed that is the Super Bowl.

For as Noam Chomsky observed in Manufacturing Consent, "If you want to have a violent society that uses force around the world to achieve the ends of its own domestic elite, it's necessary to have a proper appreciation of the martial virtues and none of these sickly inhibitions about using violence."

So last night, we saw one football player suffer a compound arm fracture and another one dragged off the field with a concussion, interspersed with flying Thunderbirds, fireworks, and Katy Perry riding a giant metallic robot. We overcame any sickly inhibitions we might have otherwise felt about a new war. Our consent was being cynically engineered by the media-political complex.

Strike while the striking is good, and the news of yet another front in the forever war is almost guaranteed to be met with a group "Meh" by an exhausted viewing audience replete on beer and Doritos and a funny Superbowl commercial featuring drunk-driving Lindsay Lohan selling cheap car insurance. Strike, yet disguise the coming bloodshed in the blandest possible terms.

 Michael Gordon, the same Times reporter who helped Judith Miller plant the phony weapons of mass destruction bunk that enabled Bush's criminal invasion of Iraq, co-wrote this propaganda too:

With Russian-backed separatists pressing their attacks in Ukraine, NATO’s military commander, Gen. Philip M. Breedlove, now supports providing defensive weapons and equipment to Kiev’s beleaguered forces, and an array of administration and military officials appear to be edging toward that position, American officials said Sunday.

President Obama has made no decisions on providing such lethal assistance. But after a series of striking reversals that Ukraine’s forces have suffered in recent weeks, the Obama administration is taking a fresh look at the question of military aid.

Breedlove sounds like a character straight out of Catch-22, doesn't he?   Breedlove is the designated breeder of war fever. And since familiarity breeds contempt, Obama the Minderbinder is allowed to distance himself from the plot, pretending that he is just starting to agonize over whether to liberally intervene in a situation that he himself created.

The usual suspects have their carefully orchestrated roles down pat:

Secretary of State John Kerry, who plans to visit Kiev on Thursday, is open to new discussions about providing lethal assistance, as is Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, officials said. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who is leaving his post soon, backs sending defensive weapons to the Ukrainian forces.

In recent months, Susan E. Rice, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, has resisted proposals to provide lethal assistance, several officials said. But one official who is familiar with her views insisted that Ms. Rice was now prepared to reconsider the issue.

This is the obligatory creation of a crisis atmosphere. The architects of mayhem are portrayed as having to address circumstances that they had no hand in orchestrating. The masters of war and the fomenters of right-wing coups posture as victims who have to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into combat. Susan Rice, whose reputation for bloodthirsty bellicosity precedes her (Congo, Libya), is  miraculously recast as the woman of peace who is now forced to become a reluctant warrior.

Gordon and his cohort Eric Schmitt continue the charade:

 “Although our focus remains on pursuing a solution through diplomatic means, we are always evaluating other options that will help create space for a negotiated solution to the crisis,” said Bernadette Meehan, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council.

That is Newspeak worthy of Orwell. Bombs and guns and death and destruction have become the means to "create space for a negotiated solution to the crisis."

Obama himself created that space awhile ago. Of course, he euphemizes his coup by bragging that he "brokered a deal to transition power in Ukraine."  

And the Times dutifully marches on:

Fueling the broader debate over policy is an independent report to be issued Monday by eight former senior American officials, who urge the United States to send $3 billion in defensive arms and equipment to Ukraine, including anti-armor missiles, reconnaissance drones, armored Humvees and radars that can determine the location of enemy rocket and artillery fire.

Michèle A. Flournoy, a former senior Pentagon official who is a leading candidate to serve as defense secretary if Hillary Rodham Clinton is elected president, joined in preparing the report. Others include James G. Stavridis, a retired admiral who served as the top NATO military commander, and Ivo Daalder, the ambassador to NATO during Mr. Obama’s first term.

Translation: they want more war for endless profits. Flournoy is the founder of the weapons industry/Wall Street-funded Center for a New American Security, (CNAS) whose main purpose is to gin up "responsibility to protect" excuses for waging war and making billions of dollars for the military-industrial complex in the process. It was CNAS which orchestrated and still controls Michelle Obama's "Joining Forces" propaganda campaign, whose goal is to get the American public to support American imperialism through "supporting the troops." (who wouldn't support the troops?) Mrs. Obama's recent promotion of entertainment like American Sniper is a huge part of the corporate-funded Permawar effort. Moreover, she's seen to it that movies and TV shows portraying soldiers and veterans will now be subject to a military seal of propaganda approval.

But back to the New York Times propaganda:

The administration’s deliberations were described by a range of senior Pentagon, administration and Western officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were talking about internal discussions.

A spokesman for General Breedlove declined to comment on his view on providing defensive weapons, which was disclosed by United States officials privy to confidential discussions.

What a bunch of craven cowards, starting wars while hiding behind their cloaks of anonymity in their office towers. This is the territory of the controlled leak. It is not punishable, because leakers in high places never punish themselves. Only whistleblowers exposing war crimes and official incompetence ever get punished.

The entry of the United States into a new, semi-proxified war against Russia is all of a piece with the ongoing fascist coup destroying what's left of American democracy. Besides the Center for a New American Security, the other authors of the report calling for the launching of a thousand new missiles in Ukraine are the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the Atlantic Council and the Brookings Institution. The chairman of the Chicago Council is none other than Lester Crown, one of Barack Obama's original funders and a major stakeholder in General Dynamics, manufacturer of weaponized drones and other military hardware. The Atlantic Council is a bloated cornucopia of war-hungry multinationals:  Chevron, Airbus, Lockheed Martin, Bank of America, the Blackstone Group, Northrup Grumman, Coca-Cola, HSBC, US Chamber of Commerce, Microsoft... to name just a few.

If any member of the Forbes 400, or any the top 80 billionaires already owning half the world's wealth have been left out of the Ukraine War Manifesto, it has to have been an oversight. I am sure there's still time to score an invitation, though, and turn their money into speech, their speech into more blood-soaked money.

Obama's Fascist Dog Whistle

In what President Obama grotesquely calls the fourth quarter of his game, he is simultaneously acting as both head cheerleader and star player of the plutocracy's burgeoning corporate global coup. Under the guise of a campaign called the "middle class economy," he's performing an epic fake on the heads of the populace and executing end-runs around democracy itself. And he does all of this while Deflategate is sucking up all the media oxygen in the room.

You have to hand it to Obama. Against all odds, his approval rating has clawed its way back to the 50 yard line. Fully half  the thirsty sponges that pass for the minds of the American consumer-spectators in the stands apparently believe the hype. He deserves a Super Bowl ring for being one of the most valuable players ever employed by the International League of the Oligarchs.

He exemplifies the power that propaganda has over desperate people during desperate times.

The Republicans have their racial dog whistle to divide and conquer the colonies of sponges. Obama has his fascist dog whistle to Wall Street, thrumming just below the surface of the populist song he croons to unite and daze and conquer the colonies of sponges.

His latest weekly address to the nation is a textbook example of the technique perfected by Joseph Goebbels. The title alone should give you an immediate heads-up: "A Path Towards a Thriving Middle Class."

It's only a path, mind you  -- not an actual destination. The fun of travel is not the being there, but the journey itself, and the anticipation of being there. And since you will be flying on standby, you can get bumped at any time. You can especially get bumped if Obama gets fast track authority from Congress to ram through an epic job-killing trade deal. So fasten your seat belts and enjoy the scenery while it lasts. This is your Captain speaking:

Hi, everybody.  At a moment when our economy is growing, our businesses are creating jobs at the fastest pace since the 1990s, and wages are starting to rise again, we have to make some choices about the kind of country we want to be.

 Will we accept an economy where only a few of us do spectacularly well?  Or will we build an economy where everyone who works hard has a chance to get ahead?

 Pssst. Yo, Jamie and Lloyd and all you Too Big to Fails and billionaire donors. You are growing at warp speed, guys! You are creating crappy precarious low-wage jobs at the fastest hyper-capitalistic pace in decades. Your own wages are rising, at upwards of 300 times that of your average worker. That is the most extreme in the entire world. Obama might claim that wages for the proles are starting to inch up, but the reversal of fortunes of the working stiff is in negative territory. The grim reality is that paychecks are going down, down, down. David Cay Johnson has the lowdown and the charts over at Al-Jazeera. No worries, though, the Times  and the cable channels aren't covering this inconvenient truth. They're all on board with the president's new-found populism, treating his words as if they meant something. In the New Abnormal Economy, more tax breaks for child care expenses are considered "bold."

 Now that he's set the stage for the rosy recovery, Obama immediately pivots to that telltale diversionary question-begging. He even pretends  to channel socialist Senator Bernie Sanders by stealing the phrase that "only a few at the top are doing spectacularly well." (Despite his gift for mimicry, Obama doesn't dare try to imitate the spluttering enraged Brooklynese "spectaculuh-ly well") The dog-whistled answer to the plutocrats to his first question -- will only a few do well? -- is a very definite "Yes We Can!"

The second rhetorical question tacitly adheres to Mitt Romney's criticism of the takers and the moochers, declaring through omission that the sick, the disabled, the elderly, the marginalized, the chronically unemployed will not have the same chance as the hard workers to "get ahead."

We’ll help working families’ paychecks go farther by treating things like paid leave and child care like the economic priorities that they are.  We’ll offer Americans of every age the chance to upgrade their skills so they can earn higher wages, with plans like making two years of community college free for every responsible student.  And we’ll keep building the world’s most attractive economy for high-wage jobs, with new investments in research, infrastructure, manufacturing, and expanded access to faster internet and new markets.

So many Orwellian obfuscations in just that one tiny paragraph.

First and foremost, Obama's populist initiatives have absolutely no chance of passing. They are not only too late, they are too little. One lousy week of paid family leave and free community college for "responsible" non-moochers are pathetic compared to the more generous safety nets and subsidies in other civilized nations. European countries commonly grant workers months or even years of at least partially paid time off to care for children or other family members. Many, including Germany, offer free four-year university education to all. So why then, since even crumbs for the struggling have no chance, didn't the president go really big?

 Because even hopeless ideas always have an outside chance of sticking, and offer the merest possibility of being implemented in some future, more lefty administration. Obama is not about to take even a rhetorical chance.

He further dog-whistles to Wall Street by giving credence to the much-debunked "skills gap" excuse used by the right wingers and the ultra wealthy, tax-averse job creators for not hiring people at liveable wages. There is no skills gap -- there is only an empathy gap. But Obama buys into this blame-the-victim theme because it enables using public money to train workers for private profit. The community college funding idea is very much of a piece with the fascist policies now euphemised as "public-private partnerships." It's the privatization of profit and the socialization of risk and cost.

Obama really pulls a fast one by coupling "expanded access to faster internet and new markets." Everybody wants faster internet service, so why not tack on "new markets" as code for the job-killing, planet-polluting corporate coup of the Trans-Pacific Partnership? Be very vague while presenting it as good thing for regular people. It is such a grotesquely bad thing that even the glib Obama can't bring himself to say its name right out loud. It's such a bad thing that he refuses to divulge what's actually in it.

Of course, he couldn't afford to be so circumspect with Congressional Democrats this past week. He warned them to "keep their powder dry" on the TPP and not to read the Huffington Post. He apparently didn't realize that one of his propaganda hacks had just signed Obama's name to a Huffington Post editorial published only the day before. Hilarity ensued. Even Obama warns us not to believe Obama.

We can afford to make these investments.  Since I took office, we’ve cut our deficits by about two-thirds – the fastest sustained deficit reduction since just after the end of World War II.  We just have to be smarter about how we pay for our priorities, and that’s what my budget does.  It proposes getting rid of special interest loopholes in our tax code, and using those savings to cut taxes for middle-class families and reward businesses that invest in America.  It refuses to play politics with our homeland security, and funds our national security priorities at home and abroad.  And it undoes the arbitrary, across-the-board budget cuts known as “the sequester” for our domestic priorities, and matches those investments dollar-for-dollar in resources our troops need to get the job done.

Obama still pretends that austerity worked. He still brags about cutting programs and prolonging suffering. But now he is willing to ease the suffering somewhat, because he's got world wars to fund and defense contractors to enrich and citizens to spy upon. He's in his last quarter.He needs to get the job done.  And that job is total weaponized domination of the globe and permanent feudalism here at home.

Now, I know that there are Republicans in Congress who disagree with my approach.  And like I said in my State of the Union Address, if they have ideas that will help middle-class families feel some economic security, I’m all in to work with them.  But I will keep doing everything I can to help more working families make ends meet and get ahead.  Not just because we want everyone to share in America’s success – but because we want everyone to contribute to America’s success.

This is the part in virtually every Obama speech where he poses as The Adult in the Room. This is the part where he appeals to the tribalistic instincts of the sponge colonies and pretends that the bad GOP won't let him get stuff done. The truth is that Republicans very much agree with his approach. They're anxious to give him unitary executive fast track authorization to complete the trade deals for the oligarchs served so well by both political parties. They agree with his bloodthirsty foreign policy of total world domination, the only minor quibbles being with the timing and locations of the various invasions and bombings and plunder-fests. They have willingly relinquished their own advise and consent duties, letting Obama as well as Bush bomb at will. They agree with his shielding of Wall Street criminals and CIA torturers. They think it's fine that he has the power to drone people to death. They are totally down with his administration's record deportations and prosecutions of whistleblowers and his war on journalism. 

And they definitely agree with the penultimate graf in his weekly address: they sincerely want everyone to contribute to America's success -- be it by their minimum wage precarious labor, the use of their bodies as cannon fodder, their forced contributions to the predatory medical insurance industry, their occasional votes to pick among pre-approved corporate shills to pose as their representatives.

 That’s the way the middle class thrived in the last century – and that’s how it will thrive again.

The middle class thrived in the last century with a strong labor movement and a 90-plus percent tax rate on obscene wealth under the Eisenhower administration. The middle class thrived because a  president named Franklin Delano Roosevelt welcomed the hatred of the same breed of sociopath that Obama now fawns over.

From FDR's April 1938 Message to Congress:

The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.

The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living.Both lessons hit home.
Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing.

Are we tolerant immobile sponge-colonies? Or do we become activist citizens?

Our very survival depends on our answers to those questions.

Anti-Terror Task Force to Target Protesters

So much for the dawn of a new day for police-community relations in the wake of the Eric Garner chokehold death and other high profile homicides-by-cop:

Police Commissioner Bill Bratton announced Thursday that the NYPD is establishing a new anti-terror strike force.

The unit of 350 cops will be specially trained in high-tech weaponry to deal with protests, “lone wolf” attacks and evolving threats posed by terrorists, CBS2’s Marcia Kramer reported. The Strategic Response Group, Bratton said, will be dedicated to “disorder control and counterterrorism protection capabilities.”

This makes Sen. John McCain's (R-Senility) "Get out of here, you lowlife scum!" snarling directive to Code Pink protesters harassing Henry Kissinger (War Criminal-Senility) yesterday look positively beneficent.

 “It is designed for dealing with events like our recent protests, or incidents like Mumbai or what just happened in Paris,” the commissioner said.

Bratton compares the peaceful protesters of #BlackLivesMatter to the perpetrators of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. He actually thinks that the people staging die-ins at Macy's are just as dangerous as the terrorists who blew up a hotel in India. He thinks that anybody who speaks out against state-sponsored violence and economic oppression is not only low-life scum, but low-life scum deserving to be executed on the spot. With machine guns.

Funding for the new squad is expected to come from both the city and federal Homeland Security grants. “They’ll be equipped and trained in ways that our normal patrol officers are not,” Bratton said. “They’ll be equipped with all the extra heavy protective gear, with the long rifles and machine guns — unfortunately sometimes necessary in these instances.”

At least he admits that the anti-personnel squads will be abnormal. At least he admits that New York City will now have its own jackbooted Gestapo. Because those "Hands Up, Don't Shoot" signs present a clear and present danger to the powers that be. Bottom-up democracy rearing its ugly head is an imminent threat to fascism. People congregating in public spaces and raising their voices represent an unfortunate instance of independent thought and action that shall not be tolerated by the Homeland Security State. Also, since the weapons manufacturers need a constant stream of revenue, and the politicians require a constant stream of bribes from the high tech weapons industry to maintain their own tenuous holds on power, the new task force is a creative new excuse for the rich assholes of the military-industrial complex to make a whole bunch more money.

They are actually selling this brutal campaign against citizens as a plus for community policing. See, the anti-protest terror squad is designed to free up the regular cops from having to deal with demonstrators and terrorists, allowing them to canoodle more with the folks in the neighborhoods. The brass does not address the possibility that the folks in the neighborhoods are often the same people who join in the protests.

Is this another iteration of the Good Cop/Bad Cop divide-and-conquer method of controlling the serfs? It sure sounds that way.  This new strategy will absolutely separate the good cops from the bad cops, relieving the stress of never knowing precisely what their job description is supposed to be.

Roy Richter, president of the Captains Endowment Association, said he supports the move. “That’s a great idea,” he told Kramer. “To the extent that you relieve the drain on resources in the neighborhoods by assigning an officer to an anti-terror function … I think that’s a very positive thing.

“There’s been a dialogue that’s been happening, which is  positive. Any time you have a dialogue and develop a relationship and can see the people you’re speaking to, so this further assists that,” Richter added.

And let's not forget the subways. Somehow, I don't think Bratton's placement of cameras in every car is designed to catch those dreaded "manspreading" perps. I think the cameras will simply make people aware that Big Brother is always watching them, make them think twice about abusing public transportation in order to exercise their rights of free speech and assembly.

The commissioner said he will also ask Mayor Bill de Blasio for more funding to buy more Tasers as an alternative to the use of force. Bratton reportedly wants at least 450 cops — five or six at each of the city’s 77 precincts — to carry Tasers on them, not leave them in their cars, Kramer reported.

Tasers as an alternative to the use of force? People have been known to die from being tasered. Tasers have been known to be over-used by police officers. How about some lessons in street psychology and public relations instead?

Bratton admitted he had more work to do to bring up the morale of the department. A poll done by the NYPD found that a majority of cops fear getting sued or being disciplined by the department.

OK, they finally cut to the chase. This ever increasing, heavy duty weaponization of the police, this characterization of protesters as scary criminals, is just being done to assuage the hurt feelings of the cops. It's all a big fat sham, a bribe for the union rank and file to prevent any more turning-of-backs against the mayor at police funerals. Machine guns are a testosterone booster for the armed servants of the ruling class and a buffer between struggling oppressed people and the thugs of hypercapitalism.

It's not a coincidence that New York City has the highest wealth disparity in the country. It has the highest concentration of billionaires in the world juxtaposed with some of the most extreme poverty. And it wants to host the 2016 Democratic National Convention.

Them Drones Gonna Rise Again

Six years in office, countless hundreds of drone strikes, and thousands of casualties later, President Obama has finally called for stricter regulations on the flying robot industry.

It seems that a drone operated by an intoxicated geopolitical intelligence expert accidentally wandered into the Temp Emp's personal space and had a great fall. All the Secret Service tech geeks and all the Secret Service men had no way of either detecting it or stopping it. And obviously they couldn't put it together again, because it was a crappy piece of junk purchased in a Radio Shack.

But be afraid. Be very afraid. Barack surely is, though he hides it very well. Two years after telling the nation that he planned to rein in the drones, he finally means business. Well, sort of:

"You know that there are companies like Amazon that are talking about using small drones to deliver packages... There are incredibly useful functions that these drones can play in terms of farmers who are managing crops and conservationists who want to take stock of wildlife." Obama said. "But we don't really have any kind of regulatory structure at all for it....These technologies that we're developing have the capacity to empower individuals in ways that we couldn't even imagine 10-15 years ago," Obama said, pledging to work to create a framework that "ensures that we get the good and minimize the bad."

It's the balanced approach for which Obama is so famous. Ban oil and gas drilling in the Arctic, but approve it in the Atlantic. Ban drone use by drunks and idiots, but allow it for oligarchs and corporations and presidents and CIA dudes drunk on power. Differentiate between frivolous drone use and serious drone use. Suggest even the merest possibility of regulations, then sit back and smirkingly wait for the political donations and lobbying junkets to start flowing and flying in. If a drone bearing bribery cash crashes in the thicket of Congress, it's not that people might not hear it. It's that nobody actually gives a shit. Corruption is now perfectly legal.

Americans also don't care much about drone crashes that occur in other people's yards in other people's countries, or even about the maimed and dead human beings (militants) or victims (extremists) having the poor taste to live in a "tribal area" or who've made the poor choice of being born to the wrong parents.

Meanwhile, everybody in Amerika is either guffawing or freaking out about the Great White House Drone Incident. Gail Collins wrote her usual lighthearted column on the subject of drones in general, envisioning such hilarity as drone-borne pizza deliveries creating pie in the sky over Brooklyn. But seriously, folks:

The public conversation instantly turned to terrorism and whether a maniac could use a recreational drone to drop a bomb, or start a chemical attack. This is a terrible worry. But at least we have multitudes of dedicated, vigilant public servants, virtually all of them totally sober, working night and day to make sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen.

However, we’re not giving enough attention to the threat of normal American idiots. The kind of people who think it’s fun to sit in the backyard and point laser lights at the cockpits of incoming planes, or participate in a YouTube challenge that involves trying to snort a condom up one’s nose. The folks for whose benefit countless utility companies have written tips that include “don’t look for a gas leak with a candle or lighted match.”

OK, so now I get it. The problem is not with drones per se, but with the idiots who operate drones. We've come back full circle to the all-American dogma of Personal Responsibility. Here's my comment to Collins:

Could a maniac use a recreational drone to drop a bomb, or start a chemical attack?

NIMBY! Those drones are called Predators and Reapers, and they're way out of the price range of the average intelligence agency drunk. And forget those tribal people out in the middle of nowhere. They're pretty much permanently hunkered down, because the constant sound of drones over their heads makes the kids too afraid to leave the house and go to school, let alone go wild in a drone toy store.

To soberly operate a weaponized drone joystick, you always, always wait for the official Kill List. If the horror of what you actually do ever hits home and the PTSD hits, then you can hit the bottle -- because it's still a long wait to see a VA shrink.

See, there are times when mistakes are made and collateral damage happens, when even whole wedding parties get droned instead of "militants" (defined by responsible leaders as any male in the age range of pre-puberty through senility). There was that one stray Hellfire missile that only last week rendered an 11-year-old boy into "bugsplat" (how droners describe a direct hit on a dehumanized person). Of course, he'd exhibited bad judgment by living too near his dad in the Disposition Matrix.

And since the Senate passed a bill last year absolving the president from having to divulge names of drone victims, we can all rest easy and pretend that the only drones that matter are the irresponsible ones landing in the White House veggie garden.

Maybe the drunk drone operator mistook his drone for a salad shredder. But true American patriot that he is, he "self-reported" his little mishap (not to be confused with self-deported, needless to say, since there apparently will be no banishment to Kochistan or elsewhere in the prison-surveillance complex.)

The New York Times described the incident as a "drunken lark." That is just so Gray Lady-stuffy; I personally prefer "tipsy ode to a nightingale," given that it occurred around 3 in the a.m.

Hear the word of the lord. No drones for wacky immature revelers:

They need to grow up to become responsible drone operators, who love and respect their drones as much as the technocrats who govern them. Let the wholesome, benumbed, all-American, well-balanced bluebirds of happiness drone on... and on... and on.