Imprisoned Refugee Moms Start Hunger Strike

Two dozen female inmates of the grotesquely named Berks County Family Residential Center in Pennsylvania have begun a hunger strike to protest their imprisonment by the Obama administration. Although the Department of Homeland Security claims that refugee families awaiting legal disposition of their cases are held in captivity for no longer than 20 days, the "Madres de Berks" state in an open letter to Director Jeh Johnson that most of them have been prisoners for as long as one full year.

To make matters even worse, the detention center had been ordered shut down months ago by the state of Pennsylvania because of its substandard conditions. The federal government responded by filing for and getting an immediate stay of the order, effectively rescinding it despite the horrific third world environment described by both the prisoners and the various human rights and legal groups trying to help them.

Human rights activists and psychologists agree that the open-ended detention of young children is hazardous to their health, regardless of the concern-trolling "national security" propaganda that the Obama administration seeks to impart to the public.

The Berks County facility, formerly a nursing home, was later re-purposed as a juvenile delinquent detention facility before finally being modified by the non-Trumpian tender-hearted Homelanders to incarcerate both children and their mothers.

According to a brief filed by Human Rights First, the mothers first filed formal written complaints to the government about the lack of proper health care for their children last December.

One mother said that her son's skin condition had worsened since Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) imprisoned them at Berks four months previously. Instead of immediately addressing her concerns, an ICE worker advised her to make another medical appointment while icily reminding her that if she didn't like the bureaucratic brush-off, “You may accept your removal order and arrangements can be made for your removal from the United States. At this time, your custody status remains unchanged." 

A mother of a five-year-old girl wrote this letter to ICE:

My daughter has been having diarrhea for about three weeks now and we went to see a doctor but they did not give us any medication, not even serum. (Pedialyte). With every passing day her behavior is getting worse and the psychologist just tells me to be patient. I need you to give me adequate medication and that you give me the opportunity to take my case out of her. I am not a criminal. You gave the opportunity to other persons who have been deported to leave, why not give it to me. It has been more than four months that I have been detained.

She and other mothers daring to complain all received the same boilerplate response: make an appointment. And if you and your kids don't like waiting for one, then just get on the bus and go back to the violence-torn Honduras, Guatemala, or El Salvador that you fled in fear for your very lives.

Stop abusing the hospitality of the Exceptional USA.

  After the state of Pennsylvania futilely ordered the Bates Berks Motel for Immigrants shut down on the basis of its substandard conditions, a Federal court last month ordered the mothers and children released immediately because the government has also failed to comply with a previous ruling called Flores v. Lynch. The Department of Homeland Security chose to appeal that decision as well, once again falsely claiming that migrant families are being held for less than a month before their cases are adjudicated.

Out of desperation, two dozen of the incarcerated mothers began a hunger strike on August 8th.

Out of an abundance of cynical iciness, Homeland Security flacks are choosing to further denigrate and threaten the strikers rather than listen to their concerns. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer,

Advocates for the women say some staff at the center threatened the hunger strikers, saying if they did not resume eating they could grow so weak that their children would have to be taken from them.
A spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said the 75 residents at the facility have access to meals served three times a day in the cafeteria and free snacks.
According to ICE protocol, hunger strikers are to be referred for medical supervision and evaluation only after not eating for more than 72 hours or missing nine meals.
For that reason, said the ICE official, "currently no residents at the facility are considered to be on hunger strike."

Lindsay Harris of Immigration Impact wrote about a guided tour she took of the unlicensed but still open prison for families this year:

Being detained at the Berks detention center has brought no end to the trauma these children endure. Every night, detention center staff wake the children and their parents every fifteen minutes, shining flashlights in their eyes, conducting sleep checks that they claim are mandated under state childcare regulations. Under the same state regulations, children, even toddlers, are not allowed to sleep in the same bed as their parents. One father, recently released from detention, told us that he begged the staff to allow his two-year-old to at least fall asleep in his arms, and then move him to his own bed, but “for safety reasons,” the staff refused.

 Children we interviewed expressed concern about the medical care they received at the center. Two children explained that they had untreated tooth pain and had been waiting weeks to see a dentist to have fillings replaced. This is nothing new and complaints about inadequate care in family detention centers have been filed in July and October last year.

It is the height of irony that Homeland Security even outsources its official inspections of Berks and its other migrant and federal prisons to a for-profit corporation called the Nakamoto Group, whose wealthy founder has actually received humanitarian awards for being such an immigration success story himself. Gary Nakamoto likes to sell himself as a philanthropist as he vacuums up all those lucrative government contracts for inspecting and reporting on gulags for migrants.

While the unaccountable profiteers bask in their own self-serving and self-righteous xenophobic glow, here's is the full text of the scathing letter to Jeh Johnson from Madres de Berks: 

Dear Jeh Johnson,

As the Secretary of Homeland Security, you said last week that you have helped ensure that “the average length of stay at [family detention] facilities is 20 days or less.” We are 22 mothers who have been imprisoned at the Berks County Residential Center, in Leesport, Pa., for 270 to 365 days. We have relatives and friends who would be responsible for us and who wait for us with open arms, but your Department of Homeland Security has denied our release.

The reason for this letter is to inform you that on Monday, August 8, we began a hunger strike to protest our indefinite detention, and to request that you end this practice of detaining mothers and children and allow our immediate release.

Our children, who range in age from 2 to 16, have been deprived of a normal life. We are already traumatized from our countries of origin. We risked our own lives and those of our children so we could arrive on safe ground. While here, our children have told us they sometimes consider suicide, made desperate from confinement. The teenagers say that being here, life makes no sense. One of our children said he wanted to break the window to jump out and end this nightmare.

On many occasions, our children ask us if we have the courage to escape. They grab the chords that hold their ID cards and tighten them around their necks, saying they want to die if they don’t get out. The smallest children, who are only two-years-old, cry during the night because they cannot express what they feel. For some time, our children have not eaten well, and they have lost weight.

We left our homes in Central America to escape corruption, threats, and violence. We thought this country would help us, but now we are locked up with our children in a place where we feel threatened, including by some of the medical personnel, leaving us with no one to trust.

On Monday, we decided to begin this hunger strike, hoping that our voices will be heard and that we will obtain the liberty from detention that we need so much.

We are desperate, and we have decided that we will get out of here dead or alive.

Signed,

Mother with 12-year-old son with 365 days in detention.

Mother with 12 and 16-year-old daughters with 365 days in detention.

Mother with 6-year-old daughter with 365 days in detention.

Mother with 6-year-old son with 365 days in detention.

Mother with 7-year-old son with 340 days in detention.

Mother with 6-year-old son with 335 days in detention.

Mother with 15-year-old son with 305 days in detention.

Mother with 4-year-old daughter with 304 days in detention.

Mother with 9-year-old son with 300 days in detention.

Mother with 2-year-old son with 300 days in detention.

Mother with 4-year-old daughter with 277 days in detention.

Mother with 14-year-old daughter with 276 days in detention.

Mother with 7-year-old son with 276 days in detention.

Mother with 7-year-old daughter with 271 days in detention.

Mother with 2, 8 and 9-year-old children with 270 days in detention.

Mother with 3-year-old son with 270 days in detention.

Mother with 6-year-old son with 269 days in detention.

Mother with 4-year-old son with 240 days in detention.

Mother with 9-year-old daughter with 180 days in detention.

Mother with 7-year-old daughter with 120 days in detention.

Mother with 14-year-old daughter with 80 days in detention.

Mother with 7-year-old son with 60 days in detention.

Goldwater Girl Redux

Now that Hillary has gotten her jingoistic corporate convention out of the way, and Trump is sinking in the polls, and Bernie Sanders is admonishing the Bros that the Clinton Restoration is as revolutionary as Wonder Bread, we're just about at that point where we can finally take the waiting right out of the Empress-in-Waiting moniker.

Why wait until she's formally elected to ditch progressives and show her true conservative, war-hawkish colors? In the space of just a few weeks, she's sought and gained the support of such odious Republican billionaires as Michael Bloomberg and Alice Walton, along with a whole Who's Who of Deep State war criminals. Although she's still angling for Henry Kissinger, and Dick Cheney is playing hard to get, and George Bush is waffling on the prom invite, there are plenty of sloppy Neocon seconds lined up, fetid bouquets and résumés in their slimy grasping hands.

"Why is Clinton using Trump to promote Republicans?" hypothetically muses Carl Beijer:

 Donald Trump is, by far, one of the weakest nominees for president in modern history. His unfavorable rating is now hovering around 63%, well above that of even the most unpopular nominees over the last several decades. Clinton is presently unlikely to lose any state that Obama won in 2012, and is in a position to add several more - including Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina. At present, her lead over Trump doubles the largest lead Obama ever built over Mitt Romney four years ago.

Strategically, this advantage should create an extraordinary opportunity for the American liberal-left. As the standard-bearer for the Democratic party, Clinton is in a position to press this advantage against her political opposition and make them pay as high a price as possible for nominating such an unpopular candidate. Broadly, this would mean, among other things, winning as many legislative seats as possible in order to advance the Democratic agenda.

Instead, we are seeing the exact opposite. From the recent email leaks, DNC Communications Director Luis Miranda:

[T]he Clinton rapid response operation we deal with...[doesn't] want us to tie Trump to other Republicans...That's a problem....we can't give down ballot Republicans such an easy out. We can force them to own Trump and damage them more by pointing out that they're just as bad on specific policies...We would basically have to throw out our entire frame that the GOP made Trump through years of divisive and ugly politics. We would have to say that Republicans are reasonable and that the good ones will shun Trump...It might be a good strategy ONLY for Clinton...

 The strategy that Miranda is criticizing here is precisely the strategy that we have seen play out over the past few weeks, as the Clinton campaign hypes statement after statement from "reasonable" Republicans who have become embarrassed by Trump. Liberals and Clinton media surrogates have fallen in line accordingly, and are now openly praising Republicans who everyone understood yesterday to be some of the most radical reactionaries on the planet.

Miranda, one of the DNC operatives forced to resign after the email leaks, also questioned Clinton's hording/hiding of campaign cash in a veritable pay-to-pay slush fund -- a sordid truth which was first exposed in April by Margot Kidder in CounterPunch.

As Maureen Dowd writes in her latest column, the money and the influence-peddling among reactionaries effectively make Hillary "The Perfect G.O.P. Nominee":

Hillary is a reliable creature of Wall Street. Her tax return showed the Clintons made $10.6 million last year, and like other superrich families, they incorporated with the Clinton Executive Services Corporation (which was billed for the infamous server). Trump has started holding up goofy charts at rallies showing Hillary has gotten $48,500,000 in contributions from hedge funders, compared to his $19,000.

Unlike Trump, she hasn’t been trashing leading Republicans. You know that her pals John McCain and Lindsey Graham are secretly rooting for her. There is a cascade of prominent Republicans endorsing Hillary, donating to Hillary, appearing in Hillary ads, talking up Hillary’s charms.

Robert Kagan, a former Reagan State Department aide, adviser to the McCain and Mitt Romney campaigns and Iraq war booster, headlined a Hillary fund-raiser this summer. Another neocon, James Kirchick, keened in The Daily Beast, “Hillary Clinton is the one person standing between America and the abyss.”

All so sadly, or as Donnie might say, "bigly" true. My published Times comment:

 HRC couldn't have asked for a better opponent if she'd constructed him out of a six-foot pile of mildewed straw. By running against Trump, the whole Trump and nothing but the Trump, and openly courting neocon war criminals and "establishment" Republicans, she's outrageously giving CPR to what should have been a rotting corpse of a political party by now.

By giving new life to the pathocrats who made Trump possible, Clinton is only making her own party weaker and more right-wing, only making it easier for down-ticket Republicans to slither their way back into power.... the better to triangulate with during the Clinton restoration. Grand Bargain, here we come. TPP, (just waiting for that fig leaf of meager aid for displaced American workers) here we come. Bombs away.

With three months to go before this grotesque circus ends, Trump is giving every indication that he wants out, getting more reckless by the day. And that's a good thing, because with her rise in the polls, Hillary will now have to do more on the stump than inform us she is not Trump. She'll have to ditch the fear factor. She'll have to start sending emails and Tweets with something other than "OMG! Did you hear what Trump just said?!?" on them to convince voters.

She'll have to stop hoarding her campaign cash and share it with the down-ticket Democrats running against the same well-heeled GOPers she is now courting with such naked abandon.

The Empress needs some new clothes to hide that inner Goldwater Girl.

Under ordinary circumstances, pre-Citizens United, Democrats probably wouldn't countenance such a right-wing nominee. But the party of the working stiff is now officially the party of the plutocracy. If liberals are uncomfortable about this state of affairs, they're putting on the stiff upper lip during the Donald Blitz. The Democratic Establishment is bound and determined to ignore the trials and tribulations of the worsening every-day lives of their erstwhile base, but they are least inviting you to visit their big tent. While you can't exactly rub elbows with the generals and the godzillionaires, you can gain parity with them in your mutual hatred and fear of Donald Trump. As Hillary's mantra goes, we're all Better Together.

Clinton is banking on the primordial tribalism which has always been an essential part of being human, surpassing even the Golden Rule when times get hard and fraught. Where would humanity be without someone to hate and fight against and demonize?

Bertrand Russell could have been talking about the American electoral process, based as it is mainly upon hatred and fear and insecurity, in a lecture broadcast over the BBC some 70 years ago. Even war-mongering Hillary can easily and hypocritically proclaim that "Love Trumps Hate" because

We are taught to believe in worldwide cooperation, but the old instincts that have come down to us from our tribal ancestors rise up in indignation, feeling that life would lose its savor if there were no one to hate, that anyone who loved such a scoundrel as So-and-So would be a worm, that struggle is the law of life, and that in a world where we all love each other, there would be nothing to live for.

Liberals who have no qualms about a Democratic administration's drone assassination policy and undeclared wars and legalized bribery and the cruel imprisonment/deportations of mothers and children fleeing the Central American violence birthed by CIA-led coups can pour out all their outrage at moldy old Donald Trump and his stupid Wall.  Loyalty to party trumps everything.

It may be the economy, stupid, but tribalism helps you to temporarily forget your misery. Even tainted food tastes good and fills you right up as long as it's loaded with just the right amount of propaganda sugar.

At Play in the Fields of Obama

How apt and how cynical that the Obama administration would choose the first day of the Olympics to release its "playbook" on the drone assassination program.

Assuming that anybody is paying attention and will tear themselves away from NBC's packaged games spectacular long enough to read the White House's redacted report on its lethal drones, the framing of state-sponsored murder as a book of arcane gaming rules almost seems designed to normalize this vicious program in the minds of the sports-addicted public.

We're so wrapped up in the hyper-nationalism of the Olympics that we'll be lulled into cheering for the high-tech precision of Predator and Reaper drones as lustily as we cheered America's first gold medal -- for precision rifle-shooting, as it turns out.

The redacted version of the top-secret drone playbook, produced in response to a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union, is nearly as convoluted as the rules and scoring for Olympic gymnastics. The Obama administration contorts itself into a pretzel as it purports to explain its rules for killing people by remote technology.

"Any direct action must be conducted lawfully and taken against lawful targets; wherever possible such action will be done pursuant to a blah blah blah blah. r " helpfully explains one of the first sentences in the Playbook.

We really don't learn much of anything new in this kill list sports guide, following on the heels of the administration's estimate last month that it has mistakenly killed around a hundred innocent civilians in its drone campaign. That figure was in marked contrast to reports by other organizations, which put the "collateral damage" number at closer to 800 human beings, including many women and children.

Obama's Playbook reveals only the bureaucratic procedures for marking a person or group of people for death, and fails utterly to discuss its reasons for doing so. I suspect the core reason that they kill people is simply because they can. They have given themselves that right, and that is all the American public needs to know.

In order to absolve the president or any one particular department or official of personal responsibility, the Playbook requires that each "operational agency" (including the CIA and the Pentagon among several redacted entities) prepare a report recommending "direct action," whether it be a drone strike or a capture. Those plans are then reviewed by lawyers from the various agencies before reaching the desk of the chief attorney of the National Security Council. From there, the plans go to the Semifinal Death Squad, euphemized as the "Principals' and Principals' Deputies." These are made up of the heads or deputy heads of the Departments of State, Defense, Justice, and Homeland Security, as well as the CIA, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the National Counterterrorism Center.

If all these various people in suits and uniforms unanimously sign off on an assassination, then their recommendation need not go to President Obama for final approval. But, if there is disagreement or dissent, then it's up to him to personally approve or abort a strike.

 And should the "Principals" recommend the assassination of an American citizen, then the Attorney General must also render an opinion before the hit is allowed by the president to proceed.

The bureaucratic guidelines for drone assassinations do not apply in active war zones, of course, where the need for rules varies from general to general, and any atrocities (mistakes) and civilian deaths can easily be blamed on "the fog of war."

According to the Playbook, only the President has the power to order someone obliterated outside of a combat area, which has previously been loosely defined as anywhere and everywhere. The phrase "American soil" was either redacted or omitted from the Playbook.

Like any sports team worth their salt, they've covered all the bases. And through what they (probably CIA Director John Brennan) grotesquely call their "Nomination Package" of potential targets, they also think they've covered all their asses. As Obama made perfectly clear in his preliminary drone report, victims have no right to sue him or anyone else in the US Government, should their relatives die or themselves become injured by one of his Predator or Reaper drones.

It's no coincidence that Obama went especially heavy on the jingoism to praise the American athletes of the Olympics at nearly the exact same moment he released his redacted report on the White House Kill List. War and sports have always been inextricably mingled in national psyches.

In Rio, one thousand American armed personnel and spies have been drafted to guard the sporting venues. According to a top secret intelligence report conveniently "leaked" to NBC, the same corporate media outlet broadcasting the games:

The operation... encompasses all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies, including those of the armed services, and involves human intelligence, spy satellites, electronic eavesdropping, and cyber and social media monitoring.
Areas of cooperation include vetting 10,000-plus athletes and 35,000-plus security and police personnel and others; monitoring terrorists' social media accounts; and offering U.S. help in securing computer networks, the review shows.

George Orwell noted the links among state-sponsored violence, politics and the modern Olympics more than 60 years ago:  

Instead of blah-blahing about the clean, healthy rivalry of the football field and the great part played by the Olympic Games in bringing the nations together, it is more useful to inquire how and why this modern cult of sport arose. Most of the games we now play are of ancient origin, but sport does not seem to have been taken very seriously between Roman times and the nineteenth century. Even in the English public schools the games cult did not start till the later part of the last century. Dr Arnold, generally regarded as the founder of the modern public school, looked on games as simply a waste of time. Then, chiefly in England and the United States, games were built up into a heavily-financed activity, capable of attracting vast crowds and rousing savage passions, and the infection spread from country to country. It is the most violently combative sports, football and boxing, that have spread the widest. There cannot be much doubt that the whole thing is bound up with the rise of nationalism — that is, with the lunatic modern habit of identifying oneself with large power units and seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige. Also, organised games are more likely to flourish in urban communities where the average human being lives a sedentary or at least a confined life, and does not get much opportunity for creative labour. In a rustic community a boy or young man works off a good deal of his surplus energy by walking, swimming, snowballing, climbing trees, riding horses, and by various sports involving cruelty to animals, such as fishing, cock-fighting and ferreting for rats. In a big town one must indulge in group activities if one wants an outlet for one's physical strength or for one's sadistic impulses. Games are taken seriously in London and New York, and they were taken seriously in Rome and Byzantium: in the Middle Ages they were played, and probably played with much physical brutality, but they were not mixed up with politics nor a cause of group hatreds.

If you wanted to add to the vast fund of ill-will existing in the world at this moment, you could hardly do it better than by a series of football matches between Jews and Arabs, Germans and Czechs, Indians and British, Russians and Poles, and Italians and Jugoslavs, each match to be watched by a mixed audience of 100,000 spectators. I do not, of course, suggest that sport is one of the main causes of international rivalry; big-scale sport is itself, I think, merely another effect of the causes that have produced nationalism. Still, you do make things worse by sending forth a team of eleven men, labelled as national champions, to do battle against some rival team, and allowing it to be felt on all sides that whichever nation is defeated will “lose face”.
I hope, therefore, that we shan't follow up the visit of the Dynamos by sending a British team to the USSR. If we must do so, then let us send a second-rate team which is sure to be beaten and cannot be claimed to represent Britain as a whole. There are quite enough real causes of trouble already, and we need not add to them by encouraging young men to kick each other on the shins amid the roars of infuriated spectators.

So don't cry for Obama's drone victims, America. There's no need to mourn people with no names, no faces, no countries and no stories. Besides, Obama already paid lip service to the tiny, token Olympic "Team Refugee" during his Cult of Sport weekend address to the nation. There's no need to either humanize or grieve for Those Other People. Revel instead in the glory of the games. Support both the troops and the athletes. Both are symbols and servants in the same community of predatory capitalism, after all.

In literal Orwellian fashion, Obama uses the language of capitalism and war in his weekly address praising the Olympic athletes. He strives to normalize both brutal militarism and class and wealth disparities. Just like a drug pusher, he sells spectator sports as the modern opiate of the masses. And since it's an election year, and all that the Democratic Party has to offer to struggling people is identity politics, he sells "diversity" right along with the violence. He even renders harmless the poverty and lead-poisoned water in Flint, Michigan:

   Our team boasts the most women who have ever competed for any nation at any Olympic Games.  It includes active-duty members of our military and our veterans.... Our roster includes a gymnast from Texas who’s so trailblazing, they named a flip after her.  A young woman who persevered through a tough childhood in Flint, Michigan, to become the first American woman to win gold in the boxing ring.  And a fencing champion from suburban Jersey who’ll become the first American Olympian to wear a hijab while competing.  And on our Paralympic team, we’re honored to be represented by a Navy veteran who lost his sight while serving in Afghanistan and continues to show us what courage looks like every time he jumps in the pool....

 That idea – that you can succeed no matter where you’re from – is especially true this year.  We’ll cheer on athletes on the first-ever Olympic Refugee Team: Ten competitors from the Congo, Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Syria who personify endurance.

And with that script from the Playbook of Propaganda out of the way, as the bombings in Syria and Libya and Yemen and Afghanistan and Sudan and Pakistan and Iraq continue unabated, President Obama took off for his annual vacation to Martha's Vineyard to watch the Olympics from the security of a $12.5 million luxury compound.

He may choose to ignore the links among war and politics and sports, but that doesn't mean he won't be hitting the links. Because all war and no play would make Barack a very dull president indeed.

August Is Trump Mental Health Month

If you tuned in to CNN or scanned the homepage of any major media outlet in the past few days, you'll have learned that the people running the asylum are whispering about staging an "intervention" for Donald Trump. 

Reactionaries Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani, for example, have turned into mental health concern trolls practically overnight. They echo the fear running throughout the Establishment that Trump is endangering American military might and exceptionalism by questioning wars and even by verbally jousting with the Gold Star Khan family. 

You might have noticed that these bereaved parents are oddly being described by major media outlets as "Muslim-Americans" rather than as American citizens who emigrated from Pakistan. So many politicians and journalists seem to think that Islam is a country rather than a religion. Did you ever hear anyone described as a Catholic-American, or a Baptist-American, or an Atheist-American? I thought not. Members of the media-political complex themselves need an intervention for their own Orientalism. 

And they also need to be confronted and called out for their own unhealthy greed. After recklessly giving Trump a year and a billion dollars' worth of free campaign advertising, letting him spout his misogyny, racism and xenophobia with reckless abandon, the moral arbiters of America are finally getting serious about Stopping Trump. The corporate media aren't even trying to pretend at anything close to objectivity. First, they red-bait Trump, accusing him without a shred of evidence of being a Russian tool. Now he's a mental case with a hankering to blow up the world, his short fingers just itching to press the red button the minute he enters the White House.

One congress critter has even started a Change. Org online petition, demanding that Trump be professionally screened for a psychiatric disorder. With its graphic depiction of him looking like a character straight out of Dante's Inferno, #Diagnose Trump also serves the dual purpose of demonizing the mentally ill.

In Your Guts You Know He's Nuts

Rep. Karen Ross (D-CA) writes:

Donald Trump is dangerous for our country. His impulsiveness and lack of control over his own emotions are of concern. It is our patriotic duty to raise the question of his mental stability to be the commander in chief and leader of the free world. Mr. Trump appears to exhibit all the symptoms of the mental disorder Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). Mental health professionals need to come forward and urge the Republican party to insist that their nominee has an evaluation to determine his mental fitness for the job. It is entirely possible that some individuals with NPD can successfully function in many careers, but not the Presidency of the United States. We deserve to have the greatest understanding of Mr. Trump's mental health status before we head to the polls on November 8th, 2016. #DiagnoseTrump

You don't need to be a mental health professional to sign Ross's petition. You merely have to be afraid of Trump. As of this writing, more than 10,000 concerned citizens had signed on. Or at least, there are 10,000 signatures. Some could be duplicates signed by sufferers of obsessive-compulsive disorder, or even paid Democratic Party operatives. Maybe Putin or Wikileaks can hack into the Change.Org data base and give us some names.

Here's my take on this latest bout of electoral hysteria. If you force one candidate or politician to undergo a mental health evaluation, then you should require all of them to. Just think about how differently things might have turned out if Ronald Reagan had been screened for early stage Alzheimer's or George W. Bush's brain had been PET-scanned for evidence of alcohol-induced damage.  And then there's Bill Clinton's known sex addiction and Hillary's documented bouts of clinical depression.

As far as Narcissistic Personality Disorder is concerned, I doubt that anybody aspiring to become leader of the "free" world can be entirely immune from it. I'm sure you've seen the checklist:

1. Grandiosity with expectations of superior treatment from others
2. Fixated on fantasies of power, success, intelligence, attractiveness, etc.
3. Self-perception of being unique, superior and associated with high-status people and institutions
4. Needing constant admiration from others
5. Sense of entitlement to special treatment and to obedience from others
6. Exploitative of others to achieve personal gain
7. Unwilling to empathize with others' feelings, wishes, or needs
8. Intensely jealous of others and the belief that others are equally jealous of them
9. Pompous or arrogant demeanor.

Out of curiosity, I Googled "mental health screening," and was gifted with a whole slew of online tests. I decided to take the one sponsored by Psychology Today magazine. Based upon some recent weight gain, an occasional sleepless night, and once in awhile pondering my own mortality, I got a preliminary diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder. I was advised to seek an appointment with a mental health professional in my area (who'd paid to have his or her name included at the end of the magazine test.)

I immediately became anxious and worried (another scary symptom!) until I realized that Psychology Today couldn't stay in business without selling ads to drug companies with a vested interest in selling megatons of anti-depressive and other psychotropic medications to American citizens, many of whom are probably worried sick about the prospect of President Trump. (Trumpophobia, or Trump Derangement Disorder.)

Ironically, there was a recent  article in Psychology Today warning of the mental health dangers of watching too many drug ads on television:

 The average American TV viewer can expect to watch up to 30 hours of prescription drug advertising each year, the editors of Scientific American noted recently, with drug makers spending $5.2 billion on such ads in 2015. That’s a 60 percent increase on the total spent four years earlier, with no signs of slowing down.

Ironically, the article was accompanied by an ad for mental health screening and (drug) treatment.

Even more ironically, another article in Psychology Today describes how hard, if not impossible, it is to define exactly what mental health even is. 

I'm so confused (one more troubling symptom probably requiring an emergency prescription.)

Does worrying about Trump give you a dry mouth, insomnia or palpitations?

A mental health professional is standing by, prescription pad at the ready. Ka-ching!

If that doesn't appeal to you, listen to any recent speech by President Obama for some nice New-Age therapy. According to him, American life has never been better. All you need are some bootstraps and a dream and a ladder of opportunity to reach the promised land of NotTrump.

I Got Hacked

Note to readers: if any of you received an email from me containing a weird link, don't open it. It wasn't from me. My account was hacked.

If you did click on the link, please change your email password right away. 

My account is now secure - I changed my own password.

Hillary Or Die

 Is this show ever going to end?

If my math is correct, today's the day that we can finally start singing 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall and apply it to the election.

You take one media episode down, you pass it around, then 98 days till America Votes.

The various plot twists and back stories and cliffhangers necessary to hold the viewing audience's attention are getting more convoluted and outlandish by the minute. And so they must, if Kardashian Nation is not to cut the cord and stay tuned long enough to vote for the Smarter of Two Evils come November 8th.

And so the "horse-race" is looking more and more like a cheap remake of Homeland, in which Hillary plays the flawed but intrepid agent fighting Trump the Terrorist Traitor.

As Carl Bernstein wrote in A Woman In Charge, his biography of the Empress-in-Waiting, Hillary has acted the dual (and dueling) roles of fighting Joan of Arc and victimized Jane Eyre for her entire public life. She essentially sets herself up to be her own straw-woman, then sits back to await the attacks from both right and left, some of which are justified and some of which veer (by design) off into hyperbolic overkill. The formulaic plot then has Hillary donning her shining armor to fight the enemies which she herself has had a large part in creating. And fudging of facts - flying in the face of all fact - has long been a Clintonian weapon of choice.

The latest example of this tactic came a couple of days ago in her interview with Fox News, in which she doubled down on her untruthiness about her private email server. She lied about her lying, thus earning the maximum Four Pinocchios rating from the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler, who wrote:

 As we have seen repeatedly in Clinton’s explanations of the email controversy, she relies on excessively technical and legalistic answers to explain her actions. While Comey did say there was no evidence she lied to the FBI, that is not the same as saying she told the truth to the American public — which was the point of Wallace’s question. Comey has repeatedly not taken a stand on her public statements.

Liberals hate Fox with absolute justification, which is probably why Hillary chose it over MSDNC  to set herself up, to victimize herself anew and importune her fans to fight back anew against all the "haters."

And thanks to Donald Trump, she has a boorish billionaire-in-the-flesh to deflect voter attention from her own crimes and misdemeanors. It's almost as though he himself was actually a straw man of the Clintons' own creation: a true Clintchurian candidate rather than the "Siberian candidate" that Paul Krugman, among others in the corporate media, has presented for scare-mongering purposes. That's how perfect a two-dimensional enemy Trump is for her tired brand of paranoid identity politics. Because of widespread, media-driven and justified Trumpophobia, Hillary is getting a miraculous second wind and a comparative free pass on the "lesser evil" of her own serial mendacity.

And with traitorous misogynistic Donnie around, she and her new BFF Barack Obama can even get the American public to overcome their annoying "sickly inhibitions" against never-ending wars, get people to either ignore or to cheer on their aerial murders of hundreds of innocent civilians in Syria  as well as a whole new unauthorized and undebated round of bomb attacks on Libya. Their use of a dead Muslim soldier's Gold Star parents to attack Trump at last week's convention was a real stroke of genius on their part. It not only elicited the desired xenophobic reaction from him, it helped to squelch any incipient popular anti-war sentiment.

Hardly any Americans are outraged about the fact that over the last seven and a half years, the Obama administration has ordered a drone strike against Muslims on an average of once every four days. They're mad that Trump wears his own Islamophobia on his sleeve and even insults the grief-stricken parents of a fallen soldier.

If you're with Barack and Hillary and the unabashedly militaristic Democrats, then your motto might as well be We're All Neocons Now.

Obama stood in the East Room of the White House today with one of his TPP partners, the prime minister of tax-haven Singapore, to urge Republican leaders to denounce Trump in the name of patriotism. More and more GOP officials are already announcing they'll be voting for the Clinton restoration. This might effectively set the stage for one-party totalitarian rule in the United States, should the top Republican leadership actually heed Obama's call for unity in the service of plutocracy and withdraw their endorsements of Donald Trump -- leading to loss of funding and defeat at the polls.
 
Meanwhile, Democrats are able to gloss over the Wikileaks revelations of the deep corruption within their own party by actually red-baiting Trump (and by extension, voters) as they point to his alleged friendships and murky financial dealings with Russian oligarchs and Vladimir Putin, whom they accuse of hacking into their emails and databases and trying to mess with an American election.

As I wrote in a Sunday New York Times comment: (in response to a column by Frank Bruni that bemoaned stubborn Hillary's inability to connect with American angst)

 There are still 100 days, troves of Wikileaks goodies, media propaganda, natural and man-made disasters to go before this whole interminable spectacle ends (only to start up again in January 2017, if not before.)

I consider myself a political junkie, yet I am beginning to tune out. Every hour there's a new scare-mongering headline. Today it's Trumputin leading us to Trumpistan. Tomorrow it'll be the latest terror plot or hack. If a week goes by without one mass shooting, CNN won't know what to do with itself.

I really hesitate to criticize Hillary too harshly, because as we all know, if you diss her, you're either a secret Trump supporter or a whiny Bernie Bro "purist" -- which is the same thing as being a tool of Putin, which of course means that you're totally Un-American.

 And that is pretty much how they want you to feel. If you didn't wave the flag, and bop balloons with Bill Clinton, and weep at all the platitudinous speeches, and rejoice that LGBTs and Muslims and Black and Brown people all have equal rights to fight and die in endless wars in the pursuit of corporate dominance, then there has to be something seriously wrong with you.

I wish that Hillary had mentioned "poverty" more than once in her speech, wherein she promised to be the president of the "struggling, the striving and the successful". It made me think she'll be equally attuned to the rights of billionaires and meritocrats sweating their Ivy League applications.

I need some air.

Great Expectorations

Judging from all the electronically amplified throat-clearing that marred an otherwise boring acceptance speech, Hillary Clinton seemed to be choking on her own platitudes.

I couldn't help envisioning a scene from the great new Netflix series, Stranger Things, which I've been binge-watching all week as an antidote to the real horror of the Democratic National Convention. Right before tuning in to the robotic Chelsea introducing the robotic Hillary on Thursday night, I'd nearly gagged at the sight of a young boy coughing out a slimy eel-like creature into his bathroom sink. And so, at the sound of her first throat spasm, I braced myself in anticipation that Hillary, too, would be expectorating something even nastier than her hoarse-throated ode to great American exceptionalism.

 I almost felt sorry for her early on, when she as much as admitted that she'd been an abused child. Dorothy Rodham, her wonderful late saint of a mother, had once heartlessly kicked her out the door to confront a group of neighborhood bullies all by her little pre-school self. I wonder why Hillary didn't also mention the anecdote in Carl Bernstein's biography, which had her alcoholic father throwing the toothpaste out the window if somebody left the cap off, and then making the kids go out to hunt for it in the dark. Daddy went ballistic on the frequent occasions when his wife and kids failed to live up to his impossibly great expectations.

But as with everything else in the radical centrism of Clinton World, I suppose there has to be balance in the bathos. Hillary had nothing but glowing words for her dear old bootstrapping John Bircher of a dad on Thursday night.

And there has to be balance, as the late Christopher Hitchens wrote, in manipulating populism in the service of elitism. Thus did Hillary give a condescending verbal pat on the snow-white head of Bernie Sanders, looking  bored and grumpy in his seat as his wife Jane gave him frequent therapeutic pats on the back.

Clearing her throat ironically and ostentatiously, Hillary crooned out to her erstwhile nemesis:

Our country needs your ideas, energy, and passion. That’s the only way we can turn our progressive platform into real change for America.

Populism, meet the Neoliberal Project. Calling humanity-crushing corporate coups like the Trans-Pacific Partnership  (ostentatiously allowed to survive in the party platform) "progressive" is a feeble but common way to fool people into thinking that job offshoring and subsequent wage suppression throughout the world is actually good for them.

And then the gunk really flowed forth. It was a multi-colored, multi-textured oratorical mess that must have been festering all her political life:

We will work with all Americans and our allies to fight terrorism.

There’s a lot of work to do.

Too many people haven’t had a pay raise since the crash.

There’s too much inequality.

Too little social mobility.

Too much paralysis in Washington.

Too many threats at home and abroad.

But just look at the strengths we bring to meet these challenges.

This is highly unskilled obfuscation. Does Hillary's ghostwriter really think that by verbally juxtaposing domestic social problems with military might, people will then all join together in one big patriotic blob? Fight terrorism with hard work while acknowledging desperation and inequality and too many threats, be afraid, and then blame it all on the "paralysis in Washington" so beloved by the extreme centrists and the same multinational lobbyists who recycled a very small portion of their own corporate welfare to fund the spectacularly orchestrated Clinton Coronation.

It was no big surprise that after many of us gagged on Hillary's expectorations, she herself reportedly went on to party late into the night at a private shindig hosted by Lady Gaga, the rock star queen of the identity politics which barely holds the morally bankrupt Democratic Party together.

Before serenading Clinton, Gaga had given another exclusive concert in neighboring Camden, New Jersey, one of the poorest cities in America. It benefited not the poor, but one of Hillary's Superpacs.

But back to the speech. Hillary's noxious juxtaposing continues, as she counters Donald Trump with her own inclusive neoliberal army of caring professionals solidly aligned with both the victims and the perpetrators of state-sanctioned economic and physical violence:

Troops on the front lines.

Police officers and fire fighters who run toward danger.

Doctors and nurses who care for us.

Teachers who change lives.

Entrepreneurs who see possibilities in every problem.

Mothers who lost children to violence and are building a movement to keep other kids safe.

"Entrepreneurs who see possibilities in every problem" is neoliberal code for Never Let a Serious Crisis Go To Waste. (See: New Orleans/charter school takeover, Haiti/post-earthquake wage suppression, and just about any place where mostly man-made disaster strikes.)

But wait. Her acceptance speech may have started out as a few dry throat clearings, but Hillary's hacking is getting juicier by the minute: 

Remember: Our Founders fought a revolution and wrote a Constitution so America would never be a nation where one person had all the power.

Two hundred and forty years later, we still put our faith in each other.

Look at what happened in Dallas after the assassinations of five brave police officers.

Chief David Brown asked the community to support his force, maybe even join them.

And you know how the community responded?

Nearly 500 people applied in just 12 days.

Her speechwriter here skillfully combines democratic ideals with police state oppression. Of course no one person has all the power in America. It's a team effort of revolving door professionals from what's called the "establishment" or the "ruling class" or the "Washington Consensus" -- or what political theorist Perry Anderson calls the consilium of the Security Elite: 

"It extends across the bureaucracy and the academy to foundations, think tanks, and the media. In this milieu, with its emplacements in the Council on Foreign Relations, the Kennedy School of Harvard, the Woodrow Wilson Center at Princeton, the Nitze School at Johns Hopkins, the Naval War College, Georgetown, Brookings, the Carnegie Foundation, the Departments of State and Defense, the National Security Agency and the CIA, positions are interchangeable, individuals moving seamlessly back and forth between university chairs or think tanks and government offices, in general regardless of the party in control of the administration."

And the militarized police forces protect this elite team effort both at home and abroad. Only witness the snipers on the rooftops at Hillary's convention, protecting her and her whole consilium cohort against the proletarian rabble as the rich partied in and around the Wells Fargo arena this past week.

But back to the regal phlegm. Hillary now pivots to the "personal" in order to re-introduce herself to a public which has gifted her a sad approval rating of barely 30 percent.

I’ve been your first lady. Served 8 years as a Senator from the great sate of New York.

I ran for President and lost.

Then I represented all of you as secretary of State.

But my job titles only tell you what I’ve done.

They don’t tell you why.

The truth is, through all these years of public service, the “service” part has always come easier to me than the “public” part.

I get it that some people just don’t know what to make of me.

As CounterPunch's Jeffrey St. Clair quips in his brutally hilarious series on the convention: "HRC says the 'service part' always came more naturally to her than the “public part”. Well, that explains the private email server…"

Hillary went on to reprise her promise to "be president for the struggling, the striving and the successful," which is code for caring just as much about billionaires as she does for meritocrats sweating their Ivy League applications and elbowing their fellows in the ribs for a chance at a promotion or a corner office. She barely paid lip service to the crushingly impoverished. The P word - poverty - did in fact make the final cut in Hillary's coronation speech, with just one little mention. Overdoing it might have harshed the mellow of the USA! USA! USA! fight song echoing from the nosebleed seats, might even have burst a couple of those oversized balloons that a doddering and slack-jawed Bill Clinton just couldn't get enough of tossing around.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The Hillarian hucksterism isn't quite done yet:

I believe America thrives when the middle class thrives.

I believe that our economy isn’t working the way it should because our democracy isn’t working the way it should.

That’s why we need to appoint Supreme Court justices who will get money out of politics and expand voting rights, not restrict them. And we’ll pass a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United!

That's why, as the New York Times reports, Clinton's wealthy donors were literally coming out of their well-appointed, room-sized closets this week, descending en masse upon Philly's tonier spots. Former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist was quoted as gushing at the Ritz-Carlton: "This is a good place to be — for a lot of reasons.We must have set up five fund-raisers today. This is the bank.”

Hillary was certainly right as she ironically a-hemmed that "our democracy isn't working the way it should."

But never mind all that. It's always sunny in Philadelphia as long as the proles have a hopeful sunny outlook:

I refuse to believe we can’t find common ground here.

We have to heal the divides in our country.

Not just on guns. But on race. Immigration. And more.

That starts with listening to each other. Hearing each other. Trying, as best we can, to walk in each other’s shoes.

So let’s put ourselves in the shoes of young black and Latino men and women who face the effects of systemic racism, and are made to feel like their lives are disposable.

There she goes, echoing President Obama's platitude that dark-skinned people "feel like" their lives are disposable - thus putting the onus on the victims of state-sanctioned racist violence themselves. Anything rather than utter the active words of reality: on average, US law enforcement personnel actually kill one person every 24 hours. That picked-on feeling? It's too often the pain of a last dying breath.

Now here comes that centrist, balanced approach again, putting even more of the onus on the working class and reducing lethal institutionalized social problems down to "rebuilding trust" between cops and communities. Meet the truncheons halfway - extend a helping head. Lift those hands a little higher behind your back to make it easier for them to cuff you:

Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of police officers, kissing their kids and spouses goodbye every day and heading off to do a dangerous and necessary job.

We will reform our criminal justice system from end-to-end, and rebuild trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve.

We will defend all our rights — civil rights, human rights and voting rights … women’s rights and workers’ rights … LGBT rights and the rights of people with disabilities!

And we will stand up against mean and divisive rhetoric wherever it comes from.

Reduce social injustice to identity politics. And stand against the meanness and divisiveness of Donald Trump, every time you see him getting a billion dollars' worth of free campaign advertising from the same media conglomerate which has colluded in the coronation of Hillary herself.

 Thank you and may God bless the United States of America!

(Thank god, it finally ended.)

and

         the

                  goat-footed

balloonMan          whistles

far

and

wee

-- e.e. cummings