Paranoia, Inc.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. There is danger lurking in every corner of every home in every neighborhood in every town in every one of the 50 states.

But take heart, patriots. Besides life, liberty, and the Second Amendment, each and every one of us has a unique biological weapon with which to protect ourselves and our loved ones. And that is our follicles. Whenever those little hairs stand at attention on the back of our necks, we can rest assured that terrorists cannot be far away.

To hammer that message home, FBI Director James Comey traveled to the great freedom state of Mississippi in order to deputize every man, woman, and child in Real America:

Mississippi is a great state, but like all 50 states it has troubled souls that might look to find meaning in this sick, misguided way. The challenge that we face in law enforcement is that they may be getting exposed to that poison and that training in their basement," Comey said. "They're sitting there consuming and may emerge from the basement to kill people of any sort, which is the call of ISIL, just kill somebody."

So let's just outlaw basements. They're hotbeds of intrigue, blogging, Cheeto-eating and porn-watching. No terrorist worth his salt would ever devise an evil plot on the front porch or, God forbid, while sitting on the crapper in an upstairs bathroom. 

So he stressed that the threat is very real, not just for military or law enforcement or the media, all of whom have been warned by the FBI that ISIS could be gunning for them, but for ordinary citizens as well.

"If you can video tape it all the better, if it's law enforcement all the better, if you can cut somebody's head off and get it on tape, what a wonderful thing in their view of the world," he continued. "That's the challenge we face everywhere."

And while crazy people are rampaging throughout the countryside, sabers and axes in hand, the Homeland Police State is being thwarted in its noble efforts to unconstitutionally gather information on every man, woman and child in America:

Comey expressed particular fear that restrictions on information gathering could give terrorists more leeway because they are harder to track.

"I'm very worried about where we're drifting as a country in respect to law enforcement's ability to, with lawful process, intercept communications. I'm not talking about sneaky stuff. I'm talking about situations where we have probable cause to believe that somebody is communicating with a terrorist group," he said. "... We're drifting into a place where there are going to be large swaths of this country beyond the reach of the law."

Somebody is in a basement right now, installing encryption software on a computer in order to prevent Big Brother from watching them. Somebody in a dark, spider-infested basement has deliberately taken himself off the grid in a craven attempt to subvert surveillance. In every neighborhood in every town in every state, there are evil Swath People lurking just beyond our sight.

Because of that, Comey said, citizens need to be constantly on the watch. The current climate of the world does not make it acceptable to see something and not report it.

"Ordinary folks should listen to the hair on the back of their neck," he said. "We've gone back through every homegrown violent extremist case in the United States and studied it. In every single case, someone saw something online, at a religious institution, in a family setting, at a school, that was weird, that was out of place, this person was acting in a way that didn't make sense."

I know exactly what Comey is talking about. Because just yesterday afternoon, in what I'd thought was the safe haven of my living room, I switched on my TV. And what jumped out at me,  what I saw and heard, not only caused the neck hairs  to practically jump out of their follicles, it made my stomach lurch with a sense of impending doom. Some crazy men had taken over the public airwaves to demand billions of dollars and carte blanche to kill people, whenever and wherever they please, with no end in sight to their rampage of terror:

Bully! Neocon Rough Riders to the Rescue

 I saw something, so I'm going to say something:

The cynical campaign of the troubled soulless souls posing as our leaders to grind us into a state of abject fear and submission is hazardous to our social, economic, physical and mental health. 

We are simultaneously being cast as the hunters and the hunted. We are asked to become vigilantes on behalf of the very police state that considers all of us incipient criminals lurking in basements. We live not in the land of the free, but in the United States of Stasiland.

Comey is only the latest designated spokesman of what Alan Feldman has called securocratic warfare: free-floating, open-ended borderless conflicts. Battlefields are replaced with battle spaces. There is a permanent state of emergency, necessitating the suspension of basic human rights. The enemy exists not only over there, but over here. In parks, in schools, in shopping malls, in churches, in airports, in basements... even in an apartment complex in the same scenic North Carolina college town that hosted the last Democratic Party convention.

To be acceptable to the populace, capitalistic wars for profit must be waged in the name of human safety rather than for crass territorial or monetary conquest. These wars can never end, because capitalism and growth must never end.

"The figure of the terrorist looms large here," writes Stephen Graham in Cities Under Siege, "because terrorists are seen to breed improper circulation of bodies, money and drugs. State discourses ensure the vague fusion of these malign presences and mobilities, and political opportunism ensures that counterterror legislation is applied to all manner of putative threats. At the same time, the global logistics, the tourism, the migration, the continual flow of commodities and currencies that sustain neoliberal capitalism are rendered invisible, normal."

So while Obama pushes for fast-track congressional authority to ram through the invisible corporate coup called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, he tries to distract us (and Congress) by cynically pretending to ask for permission to fast-track blasting unknown and unknowable enemies into oblivion. 

As Bruce Ackerman writes in a New York Times op-ed published today, Obama's putative request for war authority is vague enough to ensure that regardless of what Congress does, he and all future presidents will continue to call the shots.

Nevertheless, both the Bush and Obama administrations have used the wiggle word “associated” to transform the (War Powers) resolution’s limited grant into the wide-ranging war-making authority that Congress explicitly denied the president in 2001. White House lawyers have accomplished this power grab by claiming that a host of groups are somehow “associated” with Al Qaeda by virtue of increasingly distant connections to the surviving remnants of Osama bin Laden’s organization.

Despite this unhappy history, Mr. Obama’s current proposal explicitly endorses this power-grabbing formula. Not only does his proposal fail to limit the battlefield to Iraq and Syria, but it also authorizes him to take the fight beyond the Islamic State to battle any “associated persons or forces,” including “any closely related successor entity.”

Look over there at ISIS. Look over here, peer in your neighbor's basement window to detect those lurking, closely related successor entities and their associates. Look anywhere, as long as you don't look at the real terrorists: Citigroup and HSBC and Goldman Sachs and Exxon-Mobil and Northrup Grummon and G.E. and General Dynamics and Booz Allen and Stratfor.

Think with your hair follicles and your limbic systems, and for the sake of the plutonomy, please give those cerebral cortices a rest. It's the patriotic thing to do.

It's the Plutonomy, Stupid

I've been reading with great interest the richly detailed Times series about the claque of international high rollers creating a luxury real estate bubble in New York City. I am shocked, shocked that corruption is going on here.

This scam is one more manifestation of the global plutonomy -- an economy controlled by and benefiting only the extremely rich. Nations and their laws are being rendered moot faster than you can say TPP, IMF, WTO, NATO, the banking mafia, and the Obama Justice Department.  Rather than enforcing the laws on the books, the DoJ is doing nothing, zilch, nada about tax-evading oligarchs. The job of Eric Holder, the keeper at the plutocratic gates, is to give the malefactors a slap on the wrist at irregular intervals in order to placate a seething public.

 The most recent case, outlined in today's Times, has Holder cajoling the TBTFs (too big to fails) to enter into a felony plea agreement for the crime against humanity of international currency manipulation. At most, some low-level traders might be sent to jail. But if recent history is any indication, the Wall Street mafia's stock prices will actually go up with news of the pending deal, the DoJ's implicit message being that the crime spree may continue unabated. Crime literally does pay when you're a corporation or a billionaire headquartered in the One Indispensable Nation.

In the latest known case of fraud and larceny, leaked emails exposed Wall Street currency traders actually mocking their clients for being too stupid to realize they were being scammed.  When they were caught doing the mega-banks' bidding, they blamed the usual technical glitches. Mistakes were made.

Actually, the ruling class racketeers are laughing their heads off at the prospect of paying another huge fine, because they can claw every penny back in the form of tax rebates for their "losses" and still collect bonuses as their reward for stealing other people's money. And the stock market will soar.

Citigroup, one of the banks being charged with felony currency manipulation even as its executives remain embedded deep within the Obama administration, actually invented the concept of the Plutonomy. As deregulation and globalization were beginning to widen the wealth gap into a diseased maw of corruption and greed,  they were already laughing their heads off a decade ago too. They joked in private reports that "a rising tide will lift all yachts" as they smacked their lips in anticipation of an epic spending and hoarding binge by the uber-wealthy few.

When the memos first leaked in all their unfiltered greed, Citigroup executives were hugely successful in getting them suppressed by the corporate media. That's because they make the latest leaked emails from the latest crop of crooked currency traders look banal. You can watch forensic economist Bill Black dishing the dirt on the plutonomy porn here.

In pre-meltdown "Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances," published in 2005, and its 2006 sequel, "Revisiting Plutonomy: The Rich Getting Richer", bank analysts concluded that it was ultra-high net worth driving the economy.  "We think the plutonomy is here, is going to get stronger, its memberships welling from globalized enclaves in the emerging world, we think a ‘plutonomy basket’ of stocks should continue to do well … Binge on Bling … These toys for the wealthy have pricing power, and staying power.They are … more desirable and demanded the more expensive they are."

The markets might have collapsed, but the banksters were certainly right about the rich only growing stronger as a result of losses being socialized and all the gains being privatized into fewer and fewer hands.

The bankers writing those internal memos to their wealthy clients shrugged their shoulders and sighed that gross wealth inequality is just a matter of mathematics, not morality. (Shit happens.) They wouldn't know morality if it bit them in their sociopathic asses. But they're not stupid. Their Achilles heel remains fear of the great unwashed masses:

Plutonomy, we suspect is elastic. Concentration of wealth and spending in the hands of a few, probably has its limits. What might cause the elastic to snap back? We can see a number of potential challenges to plutonomy.

The first, and probably most potent, is through a labor backlash. Outsourcing, offshoring or insourcing of cheap labor is done to undercut current labor costs. Those being undercut are losers in the short term. While there is evidence that this is positive for the average worker (for example Ottaviano and Peri) it is also clear that high-cost substitutable labor loses.

Low-end developed market labor might not have much economic power, but it does have equal voting power with the rich. We see plenty of examples of the outsourcing or offshoring of labor being attacked as “unpatriotic” or plain unfair. This tends to lead to calls for protectionism to save the low-skilled domestic jobs being lost. This is a cause championed, generally, by left-wing politicians. At the other extreme, insourcing, or allowing mass immigration, which might price domestic workers out of jobs, leads to calls for anti-immigration policies, at worst championed by those on the far right.

Mind you, these centrist Democrat-oriented (pro-cheap immigrant labor and secret trade deals) Citigroup memos were written in the pre-Citizens United era, before money was declared speech and the ultra-wealthy were invited to openly and legally bribe and buy their politicians. The poor and working class were effectively silenced. And that silencing was subsequently and scientifically proven by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page.

  But even though we no longer have a functioning democracy, the proles must be stroked to avoid a repeat of 1789... or a new New Deal. Ten years ago, the Citigroup analysts stressed the necessity of politicians being skilled enough to fool us into continuing to think that our votes really do count. If we aspire to greed, we can then succeed:

Perhaps one reason that societies allow plutonomy, is because enough of the electorate believe they have a chance of becoming a Pluto-participant. Why kill it off, if you can join it? In a sense this is the embodiment of the “American dream”. But if voters feel they cannot participate, they are more likely to divide up the wealth pie, rather than aspire to being truly rich.

Could the plutonomies die because the dream is dead, because enough of society does not believe they can participate? The answer is of course yes. But we suspect this is a threat more clearly felt during recessions, and periods of falling wealth, than when average citizens feel that they are better off. There are signs around the world that society is unhappy with plutonomy - judging by how tight electoral races are.

You Too Can Be a Pluto-Participant (All You Need Is a Bootstrap and a Dream)

And this brings us to poor, rich Hillary Clinton. It turns out that her biggest challenge is how on earth she'll be able to wage a populist campaign while still doing the bidding of Citigroup and Goldman Sachs and without offending the donor-folks, both foreign and domestic, owning property in luxury towers. Her own daughter bought a $10.5 million apartment in a New York City luxury tower and received a nearly $1 million LLC tax break, for crying out loud. (not covered in the Times series.) Since it is very doubtful that Hillary can accomplish her tightrope walk of subterfuge with as much grace and finesse as the facile Mr. Obama, it's not a matter of if she'll crash and burn on her own gaffitude. It's when. So don't count Bernie Sanders or other backbenchers out just yet. And the Green Party is coming out hibernation, too.

 Now, back to the Times series on the money-laundering, tax-evading scam dressed up as investment in high end real estate. Lest the wealthy be unduly offended by the revelations of greed in their midst, the newspaper is also running a helpful companion piece on how the merely rich can cash in, too. (That's right: class envy has reached the point where multimillionaires are jealous of billionaires. Manhattan millionaires consider themselves middle class because of out of control housing costs. The whole definition of middle class should be changed, or maybe we should stop using the term entirely. In pricey Manhattan, for example, a family of four with an income of around $65,000 is considered poor enough to qualify for social services assistance, while such a salary in the rural heartland would probably make for a comfortable existence. "Middle class" is turning into more of a verbal ploy used by politicians in search of voters to groom and inspire to aspire, just as the Citigroup analysts have insisted they need to do in order to get elected.

The way for the One Percent to get richer is by betting on the .001 Percent. You mere mortal millionaires out there can get a sliver of the pie simply by investing in billionaires. You won't get to actually live in even one square foot of their luxury digs, but you can still belong to an LLC in-crowd or hedge fund. Even the family of Louise Storey, one of the writers of the Times series, owns real estate under LLC (limited liability corporation) tax-evasive and lawsuit-immunity  protection. (h/t Meredith-NYC). 

Good luck finding the humans behind the LLCs to sue in small claims court when you get bitten by your merely rich neighbor's dog. Nobody need ever own up to ownership. Magnify this scam a thousandfold when a Saudi prince's diamond-studded poodle bites you, and you get my drift. The tycoons in their towers are judgment-proof. And you can pay your own emergency room bill.

It's the plutonomy, stupid. 

Oh, and wouldn't you know it: the very last foreign godzillionaire to be exposed in the Times series is a Russian oligarch. How very nicely this ties in with the recent anti-Putin propaganda being broadcast in order to soften us up for a new war in Ukraine. We have a "responsibility to protect" those starving, freezing Russians, dontcha know. So they gin up the xenophobia, and call it a fight for world freedom. Making Putin a proxy for the despised Walton Family in the bitter hearts and jaded minds of the American precariat is just what the plutonomy ordered to keep itself whole.

Good (less evil) oligarchs vs bad (devil incarnate) oligarchs: that just about sums it all up.

And if the luxury real estate scheme crashes and burns, the criminals hiding behind their LLCs will get sanctuary in an undisclosed bank vault location or on a floating yacht-country somewhere, while you-know-who will left holding the bag. 

Oh, what a revolting state of affairs that will turn out to be. Because it's not if the next toxic greed-bubble will burst. It's when. You can bet on it.

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.