Friday, December 18, 2015

Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire

 ** 12/20: Readers, please feel free to join the discussion on last night's debate in the comments section below.

  *12/19: Updated below

'Twas the week before Christmas and all through Times Square, they finally stopped joking 'bout Bernie's wild hair.

And much to my wondering eyes did appear a headline, above the New York Times homepage fold, containing the name of Bernie Sanders!

But wait. The article didn't mention Bernie's record two million donors, or his two major union endorsements until the very end, as a kind of afterthought. Rather, it gleefully spread the news that one of his campaign's workers* had "breached" a voter database belonging to President-designate Hillary Clinton. The only thing shocking about this news is that Hillary Clinton is actually allowed to own a bunch of our names. Our personal information has been collected and collated, possibly without our knowledge. Politicians are cyberstalking us, and then they have the nerve to get upset when a rival inadvertently uncovers their strategy and methods. Don't we have a say in all of this?

Very conveniently, a firewall set up by the Democratic National Committee was allowed to collapse just as the Sanders worker went on his computer. The DNC immediately pounced, barring the Sanders campaign from accessing any further voter information from its site.

This should tell us three things. First, that the DNC website is as much a bungled mess as Healthcare. gov. Second, that Hillary Clinton and DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz are taking the Sanders campaign very seriously. They see the same polls and numbers that we do. If they weren't scared, they wouldn't give a shit about what some low-level Sanders staffer was doing with Hillary's precious information.

The third possibility is that the Sanders campaign was simply set up.

But for now, they are "disciplining" Bernie for the data breach, even while admitting that it was a software error of their own subcontractor's making that enabled the Sanders staffer to see what he couldn't later unsee. The poor peeper was summarily fired for peeking at Hillary's data.

From the Times piece by Maggie Haberman and Nick Corasanti: 
The Democratic National Committee has told the campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont that it was suspending its access to its voter database after a software error enabled at least one of his staff members to review Hillary Clinton’s private campaign data.
The decision by the party committee is a major blow to Mr. Sanders’s campaign. The database includes information from voters across the nation and is used by campaigns to set strategy, especially in the early voting states.
The breach occurred after a software problem at the technology company NGP VAN, which gives campaigns access to the voter data. The problem inadvertently made proprietary voter data of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign visible to others, according to party committee officials.
The Sanders campaign said that it had fired a staff member who breached Mrs. Clinton’s data. But according to three people with direct knowledge of the breach, there were four user accounts associated with the Sanders campaign that ran searches while the security of Mrs. Clinton’s data was compromised.
The timing of this news is exquisite, coming as it does on the very eve of the third primary debate among Clinton, Sanders, and Martin O'Malley. While Hillary might choose to not bring it up during the festivities, the publicity is at the very least designed to rattle Sanders' nerves as it implicitly impugns his heretofore spotless integrity.

Ironically, it was the Sanders campaign that has been warning the DNC about lax security on its digital databases.

Meanwhile, the Times is finally taking note that the Democratic debates are few and far between, compared to the nonstop GOP series of circus acts. Columnist Frank Bruni, for one, disingenuously wonders why he is just now hearing about this kick in the teeth to democracy. Maybe it's because he's been holding his fingers over his ears when he is not opening them wide to hear every blast of every Trump, Cruz, and Carly?  

My published response to the former restaurant critic/current horse-race style maven:
It's a little late for Frank Bruni to grouse over the Undemocratic Party specifically, and the demise of democracy generally.

By my count, since last June, he has written 6 columns devoted exclusively to Donald Trump, 3 on Ted Cruz, one on Carly Fiorina, one on Ben Carson, one on Scott Walker, and one on each of the four GOP debates. He's written 3 on Hillary, one of which inordinately praised her performance at the first and only weeknight Democratic debate.

He has written zero columns about Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley.

But Bruni is only part of the group-think pack which seems to have made a pact to either ignore Bernie, or to gently castigate him. ("he's unelectable, proles, because we say so!") This is regardless of the inconvenient truth that Bernie is more popular than Trump, and that a recent Quinnipiac poll has him beating Trump by a wider margin than Hillary.

Media Matters reveals that ABC is the worst, having devoted 81 minutes to coverage of Trump, to Sanders' 8 seconds.

Over the past month there have been 22 Sanders headlines in the NYT and 64 in the Post, while Trump got 145 headline mentions in the NYT and 535 64 in the Post:

https://theintercept.com/2015/12/17/wheres-bernie-media-ignores-sanders-...

Here's a challenge to Frank Bruni. Break away from the Group-think Pack and devote an entire column (serious and issues-centered, not snarky) to Bernie. Your readers will thank you.
(In retrospect, I should probably have been more careful what I wished for. More rapid than eagles, let the prancing and the pawing begin. Stay tuned for some very serious commentary about the Great Bernie Breach, or How Hillary Got Hacked.) 

* The worker was not a low level naif, as I'd originally surmised. He was, in fact, Josh Uretsky, Bernie's national digital data director. Uretsky told MSNBC that his breach of Hillary's info was an intentional way of alerting the DNC about how effed up their security is, comparing it to leaving a friendly note in the hallway of a homeowner who'd stupidly left his door open. That is a pretty poor analogy, in my opinion. He should have compared it to staying on the premises till Hillary and her security detail returned (probably from breaking into a different house or database down the street), and then pleasantly surprising them with a welcome home party, complete with cocktails and snacks. Leaving a note, then cutting and running is just so lower class. You have to stick around and schmooze a little.  Amazon gift cards for the Clinton volunteers would have been a nice gesture, too.

Meanwhile, the Sanders campaign took the DNC to federal court, suing the party apparatus for breach of contract over its rude slamming of Bernie's own door on his own house of data. A temporary truce has been declared, though the lawsuit is continuing. Maybe Hillary and Bernie can have a beer summit like the one Obama conducted with professor Skip Gates and the cop who arrested him for attempting to breach his own home while black. I hope not, though. Hillary is she who cannot be placated, so Bernie shouldn't even try. It is looking more and more likely that he was/is being set up... and in a most inept fashion, given the blowback against the DNC and the Clinton machine.

I'll write more either tonight or tomorrow, post-debate. 

Meanwhile, if there is a Dump Debbie (Wasserman Schultz) petition circulating out there, please let me know. The sooner we see the back of that ham-handed autocrat, the better off we'll be.

  

Thursday, December 17, 2015

Can We Talk?

The establishment doesn't hate Donald Trump because he's a bigoted narcissist. They hate him because of truths like this that occasionally escape his uncensored maw:
We have spent $4 trillion trying to topple various people that frankly if they were there and if we could have spent that $4 trillion in the United States to fix our roads, our bridges and all of the other problems, our airports and all the other problems we have we would have been a lot better off I can tell you that right now. We have done a tremendous disservice not only to the Middle East but to humanity, the people that have been killed, the people that have been wiped away and for what? It's not like we had victory. It's a mess. The Middle East is totally destabilized, a total and complete mess. I wish we had the $4 trillion or $5 trillion.
I didn't watch the CNN war-mongering infomercial during which Trump uttered those words, because as I noted last month, I am boycotting CNN as a form of silent anti-war protest. Judging from the snippets of it that I have seen and read, though, I did myself a y-u-u-ge favor. What was quaintly advertised as a debate was nothing less than a mental waterboarding of the entire viewing audience. Donald Trump at least provided a little comic relief as he played Good Cop to a group of blathering sadists and an immoderate moderator appropriately named Wolf Blitzer.

Speaking of comedy, it finally dawned on me who Trump reminds me of. He is the male version of his late lamented friend and fellow vulgarian, Joan Rivers. Or maybe the ghost of Joan Rivers has possessed his brain.

  In a stand-up routine Wednesday broadcast live on several channels from Sheriff Joe Arpaio's Arizona by way of the mouldering Catskills Borsht Belt, Trump was in full "Can we tawk? Can we tawk?" mode. He perfectly aped Joan Rivers' vocal pattern of never completing a word or a sentence, as a way of expressing and sharing mass exasperation with All Things Stupid. For example, instead of saying "A hundred and fifty" Iranians in a prisoner exchange, he sputtered "A hundred and fi---." You can almost imagine him resting his waving demagogic finger just long enough to pretend-gag himself, Joan Rivers-style. Awwwk!

" And Hillary Clinton?" he ranted. "She leaves and goes back to sleep for a week. It's incre--!" (incredible.)

"Am I wrong? Am I wrong?"  Double-sentencing is a Trump-Rivers standard.

"They are the worst, the worst!" is another of their trademark vocal tics. Also, "It's horrible. Horrible!" And, "It's just---. It's just....!" and its variant, "It's just the worst!"

 




 
And don't even get me started on the mocking of the disabled, a Rivers-Trump staple. So is the fine art of heckling the hecklers:





(OK, so she admitted afterwards that there are two things going on whenever you do comedy: your mouth, and your head. The same can be said of Trump and his improvisational political stand-up routines.)

And last but not least, hate speech against Muslims and Latinos is an entertainment must when your audience consists largely of white refugees from the middle class, feeling more maligned and ignored by the day. The masses must have their scapegoats.



 



Joan Rivers is dead, Donald Trump is alive, and he may become the next president of the Feudal States of America. But take heart, plebs!  Democracy is not really moribund. It has simply morphed into a laugh riot of a reality show. We the people are the paying spectators. We'll have the freedom to chortle till we die.

Amirite, or am I wrong... am I wrong that this is just... this is just the worst, the worst?

It's horrible.

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

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.

Saturday, December 12, 2015

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.

Friday, December 11, 2015

The Varieties of Pride

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.

Wednesday, December 9, 2015

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 Ø´ÛŒ وختونه خو یادونه به یی ÙˆÛŒ                                    
                                                                                    جور به Ø´ÛŒ زخمونه خو داغونه به یی ÙˆÛŒ

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.