Immunity, Impunity, Plutocracy

(optional soundtrack)

The very rich and the very incorporated have long been able to rob, plunder and despoil with de facto impunity. Now, however, the billionaire Koch Brothers and their Republican puppets want to ensure that their flouting of the law will get the rubber stamp of de jure impunity.

The Kochs and their think tank, the Heritage Foundation, are being unfairly praised for spearheading bipartisan criminal justice reform legislation. The decriminalization of low level drug use among the poor and minorities is just the fig leaf they need. Their real aim is to ensure that white collar crime at the very highest levels  may be committed with impunity from now until the cows come home... or more likely, until they are barbecued alive on the polluted killing fields of Koch-sponsored climate change.

That the corruption allowing for the de facto impunity of the rich is well nigh complete is evidenced by the revelation that Obama administration officials have been secretly negotiating the criminal justice reform bill --  not with Congress, but directly with Koch Industries. From The Washington Post: 

Koch Industries general counsel Mark Holden huddled Thursday with White House counsel Neil Eggleston and the president's senior adviser Valerie Jarrett to discuss the prospects for criminal justice legislation, which has made recent advances but may run aground because of an impasse over a proposal that would change the burden of proof for some corporate crimes.
One measure that passed the House Judiciary Committee with bipartisan support— the Criminal Code Improvement Act — would require prosecutors in cases as wide-ranging as food tainting and corporate pollution to prove that defendants “knew, or had reason to believe, the conduct was unlawful,” otherwise known as “mens rea.” President Obama and several congressional Democrats have warned the change could derail legislation that otherwise enjoys significant support from both parties.

In other words, ignorance of the law and of the consequences of criminal behavior would be an excuse.... but only for the very rich and the very incorporated. Not that any BP officials are actually going to prison for the lethal Deepwater Horizon disaster, not that any Wall Street CEOs are actually being prosecuted for the worst financial disaster in modern history, not that any General Motors bigwigs have been indicted for dozens of defective ignition switch deaths. These people simply want the guarantee of immunity and impunity to be ironclad, engraved into law.  All they'd have to do for a get out of jail free card is to plead stupidity.

Because they've grown a little fatter, they've grown a little meaner, and they need that Christmas angel of impunity on their shoulders.

For you and me, ignorance of the law would still be no excuse. An unpaid traffic ticket could still land us in debtors' prison.

The rich want unequal protection under the law. They want to change the Constitution, not just bribe politicians and judges to ignore the Constitution.

And all that Obama and "several" Democrats can do is warn that this death blow to what is left of democracy "could" derail the reform package? I mean, the phony Christmas deadline these officials use every year as an excuse to ram through legislation that hurts citizens and rewards the rich is one thing. That the legalization of plutocratic crime and dismantling of the Bill of Rights is even being contemplated is a whole new kettle of very rotten fish.

Jarrett admits to a very cozy relationship with the Kochs' lawyer, exchanging several emails a week with him to secretly discuss the legislation. (Can't wait for those emails to made public decades from now, when the statute of limitations has safely run out. Or until Wikileaks provides them.)  Right now, the official cover story is that Jarrett is prevailing, getting the Kochs to change their minds about granting premature immunity to rich people and polluters like them as a prerequisite to getting the justice reform bill passed. After all, the chances of them ever being punished for their misdeeds are already near zero. If anything, they are rewarded for their misdeeds, in the form of waivers, tax breaks, and admission to the inner sanctum of the White House itself.

Meanwhile, it is a given that the Koch lawyers are also secretly huddling with Republican congress critters, making them an offer they can't refuse even as they give themselves and the White House cover. Will the White Plutocrats' Impunity Bill squeak through at the 11th hour, just in the time for their holiday vacations to Aspen and Hawaii? Or, do we call up our congress critters and say "Hell, NO!"

 As Karen Faulk wrote in In the Wake of Neoliberalism, a chronicle of the social justice movement that sprang up in the 1990s after Argentina's Dirty Wars, "corruption in the public sphere and the impunity that guarantees it are part and parcel of the neoliberal state."

Argentinians took to the streets to protest the cover-ups of psychological and physical violence, directly relating them to the ensuing economic and social violence made manifest by the rampant criminality of the oligarchs and the impunity granted them by corrupt public officials. Citizens not only didn't accept the official story that "we tortured some folks," they rightly and directly correlated the whitewashes of the Dirty Wars with the injustices later wreaked upon the populace by free market neoliberalism.

Something similar is now going on with the Black Lives Matter movement protests. These young activists understand that the impunity of the rich is tantamount to the denial of human rights for the poor. They are reacting to the myriad ravages of neoliberalism: physical and psychological, economic and judicial.

The United States version of the Argentinian "disappeared" have names like Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray and Laquan McDonald. Elsewhere on the planet, they are largely nameless, and they number in the millions. They are the detritus of war and colonialism. They are the collateral damage of the Neoliberal Project.

And meanwhile, the White House secretly and cynically negotiates with the abhorrent Koch Brothers as our cold, lean lives hang in the balance.

Plutocratic impunity has got to go. We need a little justice, right this very minute.

Cruz Missiles and Obombers

"We will carpet-bomb them into oblivion." -- Senator and presidential hopeful Ted Cruz, speaking this week to his high-rolling donors and war profiteers.

"Meanwhile, our men and women in uniform are stepping up our campaign to destroy ISIL.  Our airstrikes are hitting ISIL harder than ever, in Iraq and Syria.  We’re taking out more of their fighters and leaders, their weapons, their oil tankers. Our Special Operations Forces are on the ground—because we’re going to hunt down these terrorists wherever they try to hide.  In recent weeks, our strikes have taken out the ISIL finance chief, a terrorist leader in Somalia and the ISIL leader in Libya.  Our message to these killers is simple—we will find you, and justice will be done." --  President and plutocratic hopeful Barack Obama, speaking today to his high-rolling foundation donors and war profiteers under the guise of his weekly address to "the nation."

So, which man's gruesome bellicosity do you think the New York Times is wringing its hands over today?

Let the newspaper's editorial board explain its own convoluted thought processes:   

Mr. Cruz is a lawyer and a foreign-policy neophyte. Anyone with any understanding of military strategy knows that “carpet-bombing” is a term used by amateurs trying to sound tough. Indiscriminate bombing has never been a military strategy, and it would be senseless in an age of “smart” weaponry and precise targeting.

In Syria and Iraq, mass bombing would kill hundreds of innocent civilians and fuel radicalization. That’s why military leaders utter the term “carpet-bomb” only while laughing at Mr. Cruz.

Ted Cruz apparently has the same semantic problem as Donald Trump. He isn't discreet enough about his desired rampages. Unlike Barack Obama, he apparently wouldn't quietly meditate over St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas before checking his Kill List and therapeutically bombing people into oblivion. Unlike the mature and placid Barack Obama, he is using divisive fire and brimstone Biblical language to justify death and destruction.

Obama, on the other hand, uses Biblical mythology to unite everybody in the love of death and destruction. 

 He even crams the miracle of Christmas into his accelerated bombing campaign. The co-option of religion for purposes of Permawar is, as a matter of fact, the true centerpiece of today's address:

Faith communities have come together in fellowship and prayer.  Families lined the streets for the annual children’s Christmas parade—because we can’t let terrorists change how we live our lives....Churches and synagogues are reaching out to local mosques—reminding us that we are all God’s children....   Back in San Bernardino, people from across the community have joined in prayer vigils—Christians, Jews, Muslims and others.  They’ve sent a powerful message—we’re all in this together.  That’s the spirit we have to uphold.  That’s what we can do—as Americans—united in defense of the country that we love.

I guess his propaganda shop wrote his speech before the arson attack on a mosque near San Bernardino.

Meanwhile, everybody is piling on the odious Ted Cruz, for the sole reason that his verbiage on killing innocent civilians is distasteful and crass, while Obama is not only smarmily discreet, he keeps the details of his massacres as close to the vest and as hidden from the public  as possible. The thousands of people killed by his drone strikes, for example, are part of a sanitary "Disposition Matrix" in which Muslim men of military age are considered enemy combatants until never proven otherwise. When women and children are killed, their names are not revealed either. Mistakes get unfortunately made. Obama's targets not carpet-bombed, of course. They simply get turned into pretty pink mist by predator missiles, or decapitated by cluster bombs.

And Obama does continue to use sadistic cluster bombs, refusing to sign a near-universal treaty banning their use. This year alone, the United States and/or its puppets have cluster-bombed five separate countries: Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, Sudan and Libya. Cluster bombs are essentially horse-sized hollow point bullets. When they hit, they divide themselves into hundreds of smaller bombs, the better to wreak more death and injury for miles around.

When Obama dropped a cluster bomb on Yemen in 2009, killing 35 women and children, he tried to keep the atrocity quiet by arranging for the two-year imprisonment of the journalist -- Abdulelah Shaye Haider -- who exposed this war crime to the world. Since the regime change in Yemen, Saudi Arabia has taken over the sadism, purchasing an additional $640 million worth of cluster bombs from the United States.

As Glenn Greenwald reported in The Intercept, the modus operandi of the Obama administration has been to condemn the use of cluster bombs by other countries while continuing to stockpile, sell and use them itself. Just as the New York Times tacitly exonerated the Democratic president in today's editorial blasting Cruz over his carpet bomb rhetoric, so too did they exonerate him earlier this year by insisting that Obama was voluntarily abiding by the provisions of the treaty he refuses to sign.

When Obama's defense secretary, Ashton Carter, appeared this week before a Senate committee (that Ted Cruz "irresponsibly" missed) in order to demand billions more dollars for weapons and the building of several more military bases from which to launch murderous attacks, he and his minions even scoffed at the Texas senator in absentia. The Times editorial noted:

At the hearing on United States military  strategy against ISIS that Mr. Cruz missed on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Paul Selva, assessed Mr. Cruz’s prescription.

The wanton bombing Mr. Cruz repeatedly refers to, General Selva said, is categorically “not the way that we apply force in combat. It isn’t now, nor will it ever be.”

Ted Cruz, a man who thinks he’s qualified to be commander in chief, decries terrorists’ taking of innocent lives while agitating for bombing that would kill thousands of noncombatants and radicalize thousands more. What he’s saying shows an utter lack of fitness to command America’s armed forces.

When they kill under Obama's direction, they do so with steely Zen-like resolve rather than with salivating Cruzian idiocy. Better to have a president professing love for the people on his hit list than one screaming about how much he hates their guts. Screaming while killing and maiming your victims might make them despise America or something.

As Obama himself soothed, Bush-like, today,

This week, we’ll move forward on all fronts.  On Monday, I’ll go to the Pentagon.  And there, I’ll review our military campaign and how we can continue to accelerate our efforts.  Later in the week, I’ll go to the National Counterterrorism Center.  There, I’ll review our efforts—across our entire government—to prevent attacks and protect our homeland.  And this week, the Department of Homeland Security will update its alert system to ensure Americans get more information, including steps that you and your communities can take to be vigilant and to stay safe.

He's even bringing back those bizarre color-coded terror threats to help keep your minds off the fact that you don't have as much money for Christmas presents for the kids this year. When you're visiting family and friends during the holiday season, make sure you monitor them for suspicious language and activities. If you see that Uncle Joe's eyes are glittering maniacally as he carves the turkey, say something.

Who is the idiot here? Obama seems to believe that killing more people will magically prevent their friends and relatives from becoming "radicalized" and killing us. Who is the radical here?

God bless us, everyone. 

"We worship an awesome God...." -- Barack Obama, from the 2004 keynote address that lit the fuse under his own presidential campaign.

The Varieties of Pride

By Jay - Ottawa

"WASHINGTON — One key indicator of the health of the US aerospace and defense sector, foreign military sales rose to a record high of $46.6 billion for fiscal 2015, but US officials are warning of a dip in sales next year."

http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/2015/10/18/pentagon-agency-handled-record-foreign-arms-sales-2015/74003606/

Aw gee, a dip in sales next year.  Despite the predicted dip in weapons production and the export thereof nobody is likely to beat the USA in this business any time soon.

"Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) director Vice Adm. Joseph Rixey said that 2015 was the agency’s biggest year yet….  'It’s just been volume, there’s not been one big sale,' said Rixey…. 'We’ve had to double down contracting officers just to keep up the pace….' "  

Way to go, admiral.  From another respected source we learn that "US exports of major weapons increased by 23 per cent between 2005–2009 and 2010–14 [and] the Middle East received 32 per cent."

http://books.sipri.org/files/FS/SIPRIFS1503.pdf

Dollars and contracting officers may be standard measures on the progress charts, but there are other indicators that the business of war is booming.  The arms export business is a fillip to sectors found on the fringes of war, many of them nonprofits, like Doctors Without Borders (MSF) or the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR).  They also complain about not keeping up the pace.

Nothing changes.  All year round planes loaded with small arms and ammo lift off from the States and head east to the most lucrative trouble spots.  Ships loaded with the heavier stuff  cast off and head east with tanks, howitzers and drones, batteries included, some assembly necessary upon arrival.  All in time for Christmas if you order now.  Some of us wonder whether these exports will ever end.  Bon voyage, exports, down to the last round for whomever you're aiming to take out tomorrow.

Yesterday, something new was added to the import-export business of North America.  From Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey there began the export of a special cargo, this time moving from east to west.  Syrian refugees are heading for Canada.  The first plane in the new trade flew over my Ottawa around 3PM on its way to Pearl's Toronto by around 4PM. Then four hours of paperwork until the first shipment of 150 Syrians could leave the airport to explore their new home.  All this I know from the headlines; it was top story all day on radio and TV.

http://globalnews.ca/news/2394286/live-blog-toronto-set-to-welcome-feds-first-syrian-refugees-to-canada/

Nature spread out an unusually mild and sunny December 10 for Canadians and for the incoming Syrians.  Today it's much the same, unusually mild.  "10,000 Syrians by Christmas," says the new Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, straining to keep the pace of his campaign promise.

Most people back him in this business but let's be honest; some Canadians object.  We commoners welcome you Syrians with a bit of hesitation.  But you do look so tired.  And we do have room here.  Shades of the first Christmas story.  So eat, rest.

Did I mention the weather is so fine for this time of year?  What a day.  Mild weather predicted again for tomorrow when the next flight lands in Montreal.  (Up here we have to do everything first in English, then French, or vice versa––very inefficient––just to make sure nobody feels left out.)  After Montreal's day in the sun a flood of charter flights will head west from the Middle East with much less hoopla.  Another 25,000 by March 1, says Trudeau. 

O Canada!

Goodbye, Middle Class. Hello, Fear

In 1971, two-thirds of Americans lived in middle class households. Today, only half do. And their numbers keep dwindling.

Until very recently the vast majority of US citizens, no matter how unemployed, underemployed, and struggling they were, still considered themselves a part of the middle class. That fantasy is rapidly losing the magic perpetuated by political propaganda. Cold, hard reality is finally beginning to set in. More and more of us are willing to admit that not only are we dirt-poor, we are getting nowhere fast. 

In the same week that the Pew Research Center issued its stunning report chronicling the death of the middle class comes a new New York Times/CBS poll revealing that those refugees from the middle class are scared to death...of another terrorist attack. It is so much easier to be fearful of the Enemy Outside than of the Enemy Within, especially when the telephoning pollsters limit the questions to ISIS terrorism, and ignore economic terrorism. It is so much easier to turn to billionaire success story Donald Trump after watching nonstop doomsday terror coverage on CNN than it is to vainly scour the mainstream news for information on the sane, liberal solutions of Bernie Sanders. It's so much easier to blame "those Muslims" and "those illegals" for our woes than it is to blame the predatory plutocrats hiding in their boardrooms and their gated communities.

The poll also shows that attitudes toward gun control are shifting. "Only 44 percent of Americans favor a ban on assault weapons, 19 percentage points lower than after the mass shooting in Tucson in 2011," reports the Times. "And while 51 percent favor stricter gun control in general, that is down from 58 percent in October."

The harder and faster we fall from the middle class, the more weaponized we seem to get.

****

In his "Empowering the Ugliness" column today, Paul Krugman explores the similarities and differences between the rise of right-wing extremism in Europe (LePen) and the United States (Trump and the GOP). The European elites, he writes, have tried to freeze out the Right, while here in the U.S. the Right is embraced by the elites. He traces the American roots of extremism to Nixon's Southern Strategy, which is correct insofar as it goes.

 But then Krugman goes on to timidly tiptoe around the neoliberal mantra of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, avoiding how their project spawned decades of unfettered capitalism, and how it morphed into Clintonism, Bushism, and Obamaism. Austerity dictated by financialized capitalism has intensified, if not created, Western xenophobia. Maybe it's because neoliberalism has always been a bipartisan (deregulation, corporate coups known as "free trade") thing in this country, and Krugman must limit himself to searching across the pond and shooting GOP fish in a barrel during election season. He writes, "Even admirers and supporters of the European project (like me) have to admit that it has never had deep popular support or a lot of democratic legitimacy. It is, instead, an elite project sold largely on the claim that there is no alternative, (my bold) that it is the path of wisdom."

(Well, at least he smarmily admits that he admires neoliberal elitism.)

My published response: 

"There is no alternative" (TINA) was actually said by Margaret Thatcher as she and Reagan launched their global Neoliberal Project in the 80s. This project is governance of, by, and for high finance. When turbo-charged capital driven by a small group of plutocrats is allowed to speed across borders without any brakes, humanity and public institutions are left crushed and gasping in its wake.

Clinton and Blair added the sweetness of "social responsibility" to the free trade gas. Bush's wars of aggression and tax cuts for the rich were the toxic additives.

Trump, consummate entertainer and manipulator that he is, is TINA's end-product. Forsaking the dog whistle, he belches out the xenophobia that's been churning in the American gut for decades, if not centuries The only shocking thing about the Donald Trump Experience is that the elites of the media/political/military complex are shocked by it at all. After all, they created this monster.

Besides the Trump ugliness, there's the ugliness of what the Pope aptly calls a piecemeal World War III. There's the whitewash of the US bombing of a Doctors Without Borders hospital, and the cover-ups of racist police murders in Chicago and elsewhere. There's paranoid spying on citizens, mass incarceration, and an epidemic of gun violence. Wealth inequality spawned by TINA has reached such grotesque proportions that the middle class is no longer the majority.

It's ugly and it's cold and it's cruel out here. So let's Feel the Bern.

Protesting American Terrorism

From the point of view of the generals, the bombing of a Kunduz, Afghanistan charity hospital in October was a tragedy and the result of a series of unfortunate events and botched communications. Mistakes were made, leaves of absence were ordered. No outside investigation was deemed necessary, and no criminal charges are pending.

From the point of view of the people victimized by that attack, the destruction of the Médecins Sans Frontières hospital was an act of pure terror and aggression. 

Not satisfied with the attempted whitewashing by the Obama administration and Pentagon of the murders of at least 30 people, representatives of MSF (Doctors Without Borders) planned to demonstrate in front of the White House today before delivering a petition, signed by more than half a million people, demanding accountability for the atrocity. Protesters gathering in Lafayette Park were to be given white lab coats to display solidarity with the medical personnel killed and maimed in the military attack, an apparent clear-cut violation of the Geneva Convention ban on targeting hospitals in war zones.

While the mainstream media are busy fomenting the domestic fear over ISIS, and The Donald Trump Experience is sucking up all the oxygen in the echo chamber, and people are scrambling to Tweet out their condemnations of "his" Islamophobia, the Muslims killed in the hospital terror attack have been all but ignored. Since there was no photo gallery of the victims of that particular massacre gracing the front pages of American newspapers or profiles of them aired by cable outlets, MSF has provided its own, honoring the 14 doctors and nurses and support staff who lost their lives:

  Zabiullah, 29 years old and married (bottom row) was a poet as well as a security guard at the hospital.  At the time of his horrific death, he'd been working on Pashto language translations of several books. He was also writing a book about the famous Khan Abdul Ghafar Khan. "While he started working with MSF less than a year ago", says MSF, "he had already made lots of friends due to his friendly and kind manner". Here is one of his poems:

                                     تیر به شی وختونه خو یادونه به یی وی                                    
                                                                                    جور به شی زخمونه خو داغونه به یی وی

Time will fly, but its memory will remain,
Wounds will heal, but its stain will remain.

You can read the other bios by clicking the link above. And here's a tribute by MSF President Dr. Joanne Liu:

According to MSF's own internal report of what was essentially a terroristic attack by the US Military, patients were burned alive in their beds and fleeing medical personnel were decapitated or lost limbs after being deliberately targeted by the American gunship pilots. Besides the medics, 10 patients and seven other victims burned beyond recognition are among the dead.

President Obama apologized. President Obama sent his thoughts and prayers. President Obama ordered the military to investigate itself. President Obama is probably ever so grateful that despised fascist clown Donald Trump is obligingly deflecting all the media attention and cameras away from today's demonstration. You'd think that Trump and his aggrieved supporters were the only ones scapegoating Muslims all of a sudden. He is simply boiling up the xenophobia that's been simmering for decades, or really ever since the Pilgrims landed and started their own extermination crusade against "The Other". Trump is like the Creature from the Black Lagoon, only the latest monstrous byproduct of a radioactive swamp. He's a media sensation, thrilling horror fans everywhere, enabling the Lesser Evilists to wag their fingers at the scapegoated scapegoater with all the supercilious sanctimony they can muster.

Candidates are sending out nonstop email blasts urging us to show solidarity with Muslims by sending them (the candidates, not Muslims) our money. Hillary "We Came, We Saw, He Died" Clinton, who voted for the Iraq war that killed hundreds of thousands of Muslims and was later responsible for the bombing of Libya that helped create the horrific Muslim refugee crisis, is no exception:

Gimme

 

  Meanwhile, a monstrously vague synopsis of the military's perverted self-probing exercise, released on Thanksgiving Eve to little fanfare, was about what you'd expect: a box office dud with horrible acting and an inane script. From the New York Times:

Calling the airstrike a “tragic mistake,” General (John) Campbell read a statement announcing the findings of the investigation, which he said concluded that “avoidable human error” was to blame, compounded by technical, mechanical and procedural failures. He said another contributing factor was that the Special Forces members in Kunduz had been fighting continuously for days and were fatigued.
 General Campbell and his staff did not say how many people were being disciplined, or how. But a senior United States military official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said one of those punished was the Army Special Forces commander on the ground in Kunduz during the fighting. The official would not identify the commander by name but said the officer, a captain, was relieved of his command in Afghanistan on Wednesday morning.

(snip)

The general confirmed that Médecins Sans Frontières, the French name of Doctors Without Borders, had succeeded in reaching the Special Forces commander to inform him of the attack about 12 minutes into the airstrike, at 2:20 a.m. But he said the strike was not called off until 2:37 a.m. — after the aircrew had already stopped firing. But that timeline does not agree with accounts by the aid group and other witnesses, who said the strike went on for more than an hour.

The aid group, which has called for an independent, nonmilitary international inquiry into the airstrike, was sharply critical of General Campbell’s remarks. “The U.S. version of events presented today leaves M.S.F. with more questions than answers,” said Christopher Stokes, the organization’s general director. “The frightening catalog of errors outlined today illustrates gross negligence on the part of U.S. forces and violations of the rules of war.”

 (snip)

In his account of the investigation report, which is said to be 3,000 pages long but has not been publicly released, General Campbell said that the targeting system on the AC-130 gunship that carried out the airstrike pointed to what proved to be an empty field. Realizing that was not correct, the crew on the gunship decided to target the Doctors Without Borders hospital as the building nearest to the coordinates that matched the description of the intended target.

“The investigation found that the actions of the aircrew and the Special Operations commander were not appropriate to the threats that they faced,” General (Wilson) Shoffner said. “We did not intentionally strike the hospital, and we’re absolutely heartbroken over what happened.”

Heartbroken, but not morally or criminally accountable. The folks were tired or confused when they deliberately shot at medical personnel in white coats,  and obliterated a building readily identifiable by its logo and a red cross on its roof.

 I guess that's what they mean when they tout American Exceptionalism.

Hillary Youth

Since Hillary Clinton is so invested (that hideous market-based word she uses to express her love) in children, who better to shill for her identity brand of politics than a group of little girls, laboriously reading letters to her that they supposedly wrote all by themselves.

Since when does a child barely able to pronounce the words on "her" letter commiserate with a multimillionaire over how hard it is to juggle grandma duties with commander in chief duties? As the kids say, I can't even.

  American fascism is finally fully out of the closet thanks to Donald Trump, and Hillary is seizing her own cult of personality moment. Her campaign TV spot features one little girl dubbed "Scout," American flag emblazoned on her shoulder, giving the military salute to her heroine. The final voice-over has another girl saying she's "available" to work for Hillary for candy in lieu of salary.

So much for gender pay parity and feminism in the Age of Hillary. "Scout" had better watch her back, because the Empress in Waiting is so invested in war and Wall Street finance that little girls, if they're not members of daughter Chelsea's social class, will be faced with two options. Be cannon fodder, or be collateral economic damage from crushing student debt coupled with low/no wages. Hillary may be a slick lawyer, but she is no Atticus Finch. She doesn't appear in the ad herself, promising to still be there when Scout wakes up in the morning.

Watch the spot, and decide for yourself if this ad doesn't exude a distinctly totalitarian odor.

All Is Calm, All Is Fright

President Obama is a master of the mixed message, and last night's address to the nation was no exception.

First, there were the skewed optics. Although staged in the small setting of the Oval Office, Obama forsook his desk and chair, choosing rather to stand at a podium before two completely unnecessary, auditorium-strength microphones. Instead of exuding fireside chat intimacy, Obama's purported reassurances were those of an avuncular armchair general rallying the anxious troops. It actually sounded more like a karaoke practice session conducted in the privacy of his bathroom.

Oh Pentagon, Oh Pentagon, How Beautiful Thy Branches

Then there were the words themselves. Although lauded by the New York Times  as being "tough, but calming," Obama did in fact try to placate his right-wing critics by resurrecting the alarming and once-abandoned "war on terrorism" jingoistic rhetoric of George W. Bush. Never once did he directly call out the fascist demagoguery of the Republican Party in general, nor the verbally dangerous Donald Trump and Ted Cruz in particular. From the Times editorial praising the speech:

The speech signaled how worried the White House has become about the trajectory the war against the Islamic State, or ISIS, could take if a sense of widespread panic, turbocharged by election year politics, started shaping domestic and foreign policy. While he didn’t unveil new initiatives, Mr. Obama called on Americans to reject the impulse to take actions based on fear.

“Even in this political season, even as we properly debate what steps I and future presidents must take to keep our country safe, let’s make sure we never forget what makes us exceptional,” he said. “Let’s not forget that freedom is more powerful than fear.”

Obama would have done better to urge the citizenry to shut off CNN and Fox and other corporate media outlets that have a vested financial interest in keeping the fear alive and the wars continuing.

He also ceded unnecessary xenophobic ground to Republicans and some Democrats who've demanded a stricter vetting process than the already draconian procedure for admitting refugees from Syria and other regions. He even falsely implied that the female shooter had entered the United States without a visa. She did, in fact, possess a fiancee visa. (The official transcript of the speech now bears that correction.)

The president did not profess any interest in peace. He just cited the need for more political cover to intensify the bellicosity. Those secret piecemeal surges by Special Ops and CIA troops under cover of darkness must really be getting him down.

Mr. Obama also issued a strong and timely challenge to Congress to approve a new legal authorization for the military campaign that was launched in August 2014. It’s time, he said, “for Congress to demonstrate that the American people are united and committed in this fight.”

He needs Congress to effectuate the pretense that 320 million US citizens are "united and committed in this fight." He needs to spread the blame to voters who elect the members of Congress who then give him carte blanche for war, for whatever blowback and mayhem might ensue from the further adventures of the profiteers of the Military Industrial Complex. He needs us to overcome our "sickly inhibitions" against war and bloodshed, lest we all die at an office Christmas party someday. He's about as calm-inducing as angel dust.

Oh, and by the way, Congress should do something about domestic gun control while they're also so eagerly doing Obama's bidding in appropriating billions of dollars every year for uncontrolled international arms sales and the frenetic domestic manufacture of assault rifles, grenades, tear gas, drones and nukes.

And while he urged us not to demonize Muslims, he said nothing about the thousands of innocent Muslim lives snuffed out by his predator drones. He said nothing about the letter he recently received from four former service members, warning him that his assassination crusade is creating more terrorists than it kills. As Ed Pilkington and Ewen MacAskill wrote in the Guardian last month:

The group of servicemen have issued an impassioned plea to the Obama administration, calling for a rethink of a military tactic that they say has “fueled the feelings of hatred that ignited terrorism and groups like Isis, while also serving as a fundamental recruitment tool similar to Guantánamo Bay”.

 In particular, they argue, the killing of innocent civilians in drone airstrikes has acted as one of the most “devastating driving forces for terrorism and destabilization around the world”.

“We cannot sit silently by and witness tragedies like the attacks in Paris, knowing the devastating effects the drone program has overseas and at home,” they wrote.

 The joint statement – from the group who have experience of operating drones over Afghanistan, Iraq and other conflict zones – represents a public outcry from what is understood to be the largest collection of drone whistleblowers in the history of the program. Three of the letter writers were sensor operators who controlled the powerful visual equipment on US Predator drones that guide Hellfire missiles to their targets.

 Needless to say, the Times and other major media outlets have ignored that open letter as well as the document, leaked to The Intercept by another whistleblower, revealing that about 90% of the Muslims killed by American drones have been innocent civilians, including women and children.

Instead, the Times grotesquely lauds Obama's war against terrorism in language couched in the civil rights movement. "Obama Says of Terrorist Threat: 'We Will Overcome It'," blared another headline from the Paper of Record. That article informed me that I am "jittery" about the people whom the president finally broke down and called "Islamic extremists," in a further cowardly attempt to placate the cacophonous media-political complex's demands for tougher talk. But you will be happy to know that the Times found his demeanor "serious, but not grim or angry."

Actually, I found his words utterly revolting and phony. His demeanor looked tired, gray and defeated amidst all the push me-pull you efforts to boost him up or keep him down, depending upon the corporate party persuasion of his official elite critics.

No doubt we'll miss him when he's gone, what with the looming possibility that either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump will be glaring and blaring out at us from our TV screens to announce the latest bombing campaign, with or without the official approval of a corrupt Congress.

******

Since the New York Times ignored Bernie Sanders in all the war-is-peace hoopla I gave him a boost in both my published comments on this Pearl Harbor Day. The op-eds by Hillary Clinton and Paul Krugman were so eerily similar, they might as well have been written in tandem.

First, Hillary went for comedy as she (or probably one of her economists-for-hire) hilariously feigned "reining in Wall Street."

My comment:

It's not just the outrageous speaking fees that Wall Street bankers paid to Mrs. Clinton, helping make her a multimillionaire. Her refusal to consider restoration of Glass-Steagall is the major tip-off that she will continue to be a loyal servant of the oligarchs.

Granted, its repeal wasn't the sole cause of the financial crisis. But her assertion that Glass-Steagall wouldn't have prevented the collapse of A.I.G. and Lehman is disingenuous at best.

Former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich calls it out as pure "baloney." Where do you think the funding and the lines of credit and the toxic mortgage products for these non-banks came from? From the too-big-to-fail monsters, of course. With Glass-Steagall in place, Lehman and Bear Stearns would probably still be around today, and people wouldn't have lost the good-paying jobs that have never come back.

 Without another Glass-Steagall in place, it's not a matter of if the banks will fail again. It's when.

There is no expansion of Social Security in Mrs. Clinton's economic plan. It's not enough to simply "protect" our great national retirement program from Wall Street's clutches. We must make the trust fund solvent into perpetuity by scrapping the cap on FICA contributions, as well as raising the monthly benefits above the poverty level where they now stand.

Wall Street needs reins, all right. But Mrs. Clinton's plan is tying it up with a pretty little ribbon and asking us to believe it's a lasso.

Feel the Bern.

Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs Cowers in Fear Before Hillary

****

Next, Paul Krugman (named-dropped approvingly by Hillary during the last debate, for agreeing with her on Glass-Steagall) wonders why, since the economy is "not so bad," the Fed is going to raise interest rates. As usual, he glosses right over the Democrats' willing complicity in implementing austerity.

My response:

This Panglossian refrain of "well, it could always have been worse" is getting tiresome. It's a slap in the face to the vast majority of people trying to survive in a nation with stagnating wages, record wealth inequality, and a political system where corruption has become normalized.

If we took just a tiny fraction out of the trillions we're wasting on endless war and surveillance and put it into a national jobs program and expansion of Social Security and true universal health care, the economy would recover from "not so bad" to soaring and healthy and vibrant. But there is no elite will to change things. Money rules politics, and the oligarchs have all the money.

Yes, the Republicans are pathocrats. But the purpose of the Democrats, erstwhile party of the working class and the poor, has devolved into fending off the right wing -- that is, when they're not accomodating them. It was President Obama, after all, who had the bright idea to seat the so-called Catfood Commission for "fiscal responsibility." That worked out so well that Democrats failed to go to the polls in 2010, and austerity got underway with a vengeance.

Yes, Europe didn't do stimulus and the employment situation stinks. But its countries still provide free health care and education to citizens. Their young people may not have jobs, but at least they're not drowning in student debt. Europe also don't imprison its citizens in record numbers.

We can do better. We can fill that glass. We can elect Bernie. 

****

The main terrorism we have to fear is the economic and ecological terrorism unleashed against the entire globe by the Neoliberal Project: governance by elected officials and unelected plutocrats with just the right ass-covering smidgen of "social responsibility." 

A Plutocrat (Bill Gates) and His Puppets