Morning in Ameristan

As the urban blight in Cleveland is temporarily masked this week by a paranoid buildup of militarized police forces and high tech weaponry for purposes of protecting the wealthy against the rabble during a glittering week of corporate excess and political theater, the Philosopher King once more was forced to emerge from his cave to tell Americans to just get along. 

It had been a bloody Sunday in Baton Rouge, scene of the second lethal attack on police officers in the United States in less than two weeks.

"My fellow Americans," intoned Commander in Chief Barack Obama, "Only we can prove, through words and through deeds, that we will not be divided.  And we’re going to have to keep on doing it 'again and again and again.'  That’s how this country gets united.  That’s how we bring people of good will together.  Only we can prove that we have the grace and the character and the common humanity to end this kind of senseless violence, to reduce fear and mistrust within the American family, to set an example for our children."

To set an example for the children, Maryland and Maine police arrested 80 citizens protesting state-sponsored violence over the weekend. Since July 7th, 24 more people have been killed by police officers.

Now, about those words and deeds and example-setting: Obama recently returned from a trip to Europe, where he'd effusively praised the lethal weaponry of the United States Navy, announced another permanent military presence in Eastern Europe, bragged about a trillion-dollar upgrade in the American nuclear arsenal, and redeployed nearly 600 more troops to Iraq. Just prior to his trip to boost American military might abroad, he'd announced that the 15-year-old war in Afghanistan, the longest in US history, will continue to be an open-ended one. As soon as he returned to the White House, he admitted that his drones have killed about 100 innocent civilians - out of the many hundreds or even thousands who have been killed in actual fact. Those kinds of killings have been deemed "legal" by his team of lawyers. They're in the "all in the American family" category, because few family members have so much as whispered about staging an intervention to stop them.

Obama made no mention of the fact that the Baton Rouge shooter was an honorably discharged member of the United States Marines Corps, and that one of his victims was also a former Marine. Nor did he mention that one of the Dallas shooter's victims was a fellow Iraq War vet and another a former Marine who'd then gone on to train unaccountable private security forces. He did not mention that both skilled police assassins received all their highly advanced firing and tactical ambush training from the Pentagon.

The wars have come home to roost. The two most recent attacks on police officers appear to have been motivated by self-destructive impulses as well as by racial hatred. They were as much suicides-by-cop as they were murders of cops.

 Veterans, who take their own lives at the rate of almost one every single hour, are also given precedence on civil service recruiting lists. In 2012, while he was running for re-election and anxious to reinforce his toughness cred, Obama began awarding more than $100 million in grants to municipalities still reeling from the financial collapse. The federal government funded the police department salaries and benefits of returning vets who'd served in the post-9/11 military for at least 180 days. Precedence was given to cities and towns with "high crime rates."

Vice President Joe Biden even admitted, in the official White House press release, that the jobs of soldier and cop are essentially the same: "Since we got into office, the President and I have been committed to helping our returning heroes find jobs and transition back into civilian life. A lot of them want to keep serving now that they’re back, and these COPS Grants help give them that chance."

And then-Attorney Gen. Eric Holder, who also authored the secret legal opinion authorizing presidents to assassinate far-away people with Predator and Reaper drones, enthusiastically chimed in:  “Today, we step up our support for recent veterans by offering them the chance to pursue meaningful careers in law enforcement. At a time of budget shortfalls, these grants will provide opportunities for much-needed, highly-trained professionals – with a proven commitment to service - to continue their careers in communities all across the country.”

In the wake of the spate of police shootings and in the interests of Democratic Party identity politics, departments seeking renewal of their federal COPS grants are this year being asked to provide proof of such "community policing initiatives" as the polite questioning of LGBT defendants in custody.

At the same time, despite some new limitations imposed last year (no more bayonets and hand grenades!) the administration is still providing these police departments with surplus military gear - including MRAPs (mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles), sound blasters, water cannons, and even weaponized robots of the type used to blow up the Dallas shooter. As the L.A. Times reported after Obama's cosmetic "reforms,"

One analyst called the president’s order a half-measure that does little to change the perception that the police are a military organization working against the people they’ve sworn to protect.
“The symbolic aspect is really important,” said Pete Kraska, chairman of the graduate program in justice studies at Eastern Kentucky University, who writes about and studies the militarization of police. “They wanted to change the ethos from a warrior mentality to a public servant mentality. But allowing the discards of war to still be transferred, albeit with some new restrictions, to our local police sends them the message that they’re engaged in this warlike endeavor where they need warlike machinery.”

Meanwhile, sales of automatic military rifles to the general public have also increased, skyrocketing with every new mass shooting. The closed feedback loop of violence grows and festers exponentially. In Cleveland, site of the GOP convention, everybody who wants to open-carry their personal weapons will be allowed to do so despite the increased political "tensions."  It's the law. It's the American way.

Hot in Cleveland (New York Times)

"And that is why it is so important that everyone -- regardless of race or political party or profession, regardless of what organizations you are a part of -- everyone right now focus on words and actions that can unite this country rather than divide it further," Obama lectured on Sunday evening.  "We don’t need inflammatory rhetoric.  We don’t need careless accusations thrown around to score political points or to advance an agenda.  We need to temper our words and open our hearts -- all of us. 

"That’s who we are, and that’s who we always have the capacity to be," Obama ironically vowed. And that’s the best way for us to honor the sacrifice of the brave police officers who were taken from us this morning." 

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, meanwhile, will hold his own Law and Order convention in Cleveland. Ignoring the reality that the Baton Rouge shooter was a Marine, he chose again to blame "radical Islam" for the latest carnage. "We are trying to fight ISIS, and now our own people are killing our police.Our country is divided and out of control. The world is watching," he blustered.

Hillary Clinton, who never met a war she didn't like, and who was caught on camera gleefully gloating over the gruesome murder of Libya's Qadaffi ("We came, we saw, he died"), also waxed indignant over the latest green-on-blue murders in the Homeland: "Today’s devastating assault on police officers in Baton Rouge is an assault on all of us," she exclaimed from the safety of her heavily guarded compound. "There is no justification for violence, for hate, for attacks on men and women who put their lives on the line every day in service of our families and communities."

At her own party confab in Philadelphia next week, Clinton will even set aside one special night to employ the mothers of several African-American police state casualties as political human shields. As Amy Chozick of the New York Times reported, she's been flying them in, courting them, collating them, and using them for joint campaign appearances since last spring:

The Clinton campaign named this sisterhood forged in the shared loss of a child the “Mothers of the Movement,” and they have become an unlikely linchpin of Mrs. Clinton’s success in the Democratic primary. At campaign stops, Mrs. Clinton introduces them as “a group of mothers who belong to a club no one ever wants to join.” The mothers will arrive in New York this week to help Mrs. Clinton compete in the primary on Tuesday.”

Having these women by her side has provided Mrs. Clinton with powerful and deeply sympathetic character witnesses as she makes her case to African-American voters.

The perks of being in Hillary's Bereaved Moms Club don't quite extend to holding the men who killed their children criminally liable for their actions, however. Instead, "we must do more to have national guidelines about the use of force by police, especially deadly force,” Clinton told CNN. “We need to do more to look into implicit bias, and we need to do more to respect and protect our police. Look at what happened in Dallas. Those police officers were protecting a peaceful protest.”

Campaign 2016: Blame ISIS for homegrown American violence, drop more bombs, scapegoat and deport more refugees, hire more military vets with PTSD to be domestic cops, voice shallow support for endlessly deployed troops, ramp up the jingoism, support your local sheriff, and then make vague, simpering promises to "look into" talking about racism at the same time that they effect and defend de facto racist policies, both at home and abroad.

Joyeux Quatorze Juillet

That's French for Happy Bastille Day.

July 14th marks the day in 1789 when angry crowds stormed the Bastille prison in Paris, sparking the French Revolution.

Wall Street obviously does not celebrate Bastille Day. However, if you're in the vicinity, the New York Times suggests that rather than storming The Tombs or Rikers Island, you ponder the statue of Joan of Arc in Riverside Park and then float by the Statue of Liberty, which was donated by the French people. As much as Donald Trump would love to replace it with a Wall, and as much as Barack Obama continues to deport Latin American migrants and refugees in record numbers, it remains a potent symbol of the time when we accepted -- actually, when our forebears were -- the tired, the poor, the huddled masses.

The contemporary masses are also urged to eat out during French Restaurant Week. The Times helpfully links you to some of the participating eateries -- where, for this one week only, you can score lunch at the amazing prix fixe of $17.89. Since this price represents approximately one half of the weekly food stamp allowance for the average struggling peasant or Walmart worker, don't forget to ask for a doggie bag on the way out. And as ever, the city's homeless are advised to use caution when dumpster-diving for any of the culinary leftovers.

But marchons, citoyens, because it turns out that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are now in a dead heat in the plutocratic presidential sweepstakes. More than two-thirds of respondents in a new Times/CBS News poll say that in the wake of her email scandal, Clinton is simply not to be trusted. Nonetheless, the mistrusters think that she is still very qualified to be president. In other words, we prefer our corrupt politicians to be competently careless rather than just carelessly careless.
 
Trump is mistrusted only very slightly less than Clinton. This is partly because loathing of him has been holding fairly steady, while the Hillary hatred might simply be a temporary crater in the killing fields of competence.

I rather suspect that we won't be hearing any Happy Bastille Day Tweets from either member of this Dynastic Duo.

***

I never thought I'd hear myself write this, but President Obama actually nailed it the other day with this statement about police violence:

“As a society, we choose to underinvest in decent schools. We allow poverty to fester so that entire neighborhoods offer no prospect for gainful employment. We refuse to fund drug treatment and mental health programs. We flood communities with so many guns that it is easier for a teenager to buy a Glock than get his hands on a computer or even a book. And then we tell the police, ‘You’re a social worker; you’re the parent; you’re the teacher; you’re the drug counselor.’ We tell them to keep those neighborhoods in check at all costs and do so without causing any political blowback or inconvenience; don’t make a mistake that might disturb our own peace of mind. And then we feign surprise when periodically the tensions boil over.”

If only he espoused policies to counteract those true words -- if only he fought for policies and took executive actions that would tamp down the awful reality -- what a halfway decent country and world this might be.

Times columnist Charles Blow also finally addresses the class war aspect of aggressive policing policies in today's op-ed:

We choose to be blind to the policy choices our politicians have made — and that many have benefited from, while others suffered — while simultaneously holding firmly to the belief that all of our own successes and comforts are simply the result of our and our families’ drive, ambition and resourcefulness. Other people lack physical comforts because they lack our character strength.

It is from this bed of lies that our policing policies spring. When the president says, “We tell them to keep those neighborhoods in check at all costs,” who is the “we”?

It’s not the blue-collar civil servants in law enforcement or the working-class and poor communities, which are aggressively patrolled. No. The “we” is the middle and moneyed classes.

My published comment:

 The president's statement about the impossible roles we expect of police officers in this increasingly dystopian country of ours was one of the truest things he's ever said.

This is about classism as well as racism. Very much the product of capitalism, racism only got worse after the abolishment of slavery, since the subhuman wages paid to freed blacks also served to drive down the pay of whites. Dividing and conquering working people has always been the battle cry of plutocratic freedom.

The rich are still too big to jail, and there are now more black people in prison than there were slaves during the mid-19th century. Prisons for profit are just one of the many ways that the rich exploit the poor.

 And cops are stuck in the buffer zone. They ARE the buffer zone.

Wall Street is looting their pension funds, too. Their pay stinks, too. Working in swing shifts, they're sleep-deprived. When they get subpoenaed to testify in court during the day, they still have to go to work at night. When they arrest somebody on illegal weapons charges, too many politically appointed or elected right-wing judges promptly let the culprit go on low or no bail.

Cops are human too. Every time one of them overreacts, they endanger their co-workers.

Besides protesting police violence, we should direct our wrath at the sadistic (mainly GOP) policy-makers who created the Gestapo security state in the first place. Confront them right where they work. And fire them on Election Day.

Feeling the Heartbern

 *Updated below.

Hope you had your gallon jug of Mylanta handy for the capitulation:

To be fair, Bernie Sanders has succeeded in getting the Democratic machine to at least give lip service (for purposes of convention unity P.R.) to such initiatives as free public college tuition for working and middle class families, an increase in the minimum wage to $15, and reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act. He failed abysmally at getting them to recognize that Palestinians are human beings possessing basic human rights. He failed to convince them to turn against Party Leader Obama and oppose ratification of the brutal corporate coup euphemized as the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

And the endless wars, of course, will continue. Bernie didn't even try at anything close to pacifism. War is the essential glue holding all the bipartisans together.

So.... about that "revolution."

  According to Bernie Sanders, no world event will be more important than electing Hillary Clinton president in November 2016. There will be as few as possible disruptions at the party convention in Philadelphia later this month, because the hope balloon has already been popped. That promise of "taking this fight all the way to the convention?" Gone the way of the rotary phone and the used car salesman.

Hillary was her usual grimly gracious self at today's rally in New Hampshire. She allowed that Bernie's "passionate advocacy hasn’t always made him the most popular person in Washington. But you know what? That’s generally a sign you’re doing something right.”

Not that Hillary and her minions in the press ever thought Bernie was actually doing anything right by espousing Medicare for All and other "happy dreams." Until he capitulated, he and the "Berniebros" were smeared with a whole paintbox  full of slimy colors, ranging from racism to sexism to delusion to radical extremism to utopianism. Now that's all in the past, and Hillary, too, is embracing rainbows and puppies and unicorns. She's even honoring you with her generous willingness to accept your paltry $27 donations to supplement the billion or so she's raked in and will continue to amass from Wall Street and the polluters of mass destruction.

Applause, applause. (although a few Bernie Sanders fans did walk out in protest.)

To paraphrase the Empress-in-Waiting, we have to build those bonds of mutual respect between the police state and the oppressed masses.  Hillary used the smarmy passive tone in describing the epidemic of shootings by cops: “the tragedy, the tragedy of black men, and women and children killed in police incidents.”

Murder becomes a "police incident" in which innocents simply "get killed." 

(The neoliberal status quo is starting to squeeze my gut in a vise. Taking my first slug of Mylanta.)

 And, she went on, we must take back "our democracy" from the wealthy special interests of which, for purposes of manipulating populism in the service of elitism,  the Clintons are currently to pretending not to be a part.  Last time, the pandering was directed against vulture capitalist Mitt Romney. This time, it's Trump, who to Hillary's benefit, is Romney on crack and steroids with a side of racism and narcissism topped off by the froth of a dull-normal IQ.

To be fair to Hillary, she did speak one sentence of great universal truth today: "Talk is cheap."

And Bernie's body language said it all. As Hillary began speaking, he immediately began wiping his brow (or was it his eyes?) with the white handkerchief of surrender. There was no heat wave in New Hampshire today.

Congeal the Bernary!

Sorry to cut this post so short, but I'm starting to feel the churn. For lunch today I'm having another double shot of Mylanta with an Alka Seltzer chaser.

* I thought I had agita, but it's nothing compared to the indigestion suffered by New York Times columnist Andrew Rosenthal. While regular people (or should I say independent voters of all ages and millennials) are upset about Bernie's endorsement of Hillary, Rosenthal is miffed that it wasn't "inspiring" enough.

It didn't quite reach the over-the-top levels of Barack's own soaring oratory last week, but neither was it unenthusiastic to the ears of most (regular) people who heard it.

Rosenthal bitched just a few weeks ago about Bernie not getting off the pot, and now that the Vermont senator has finally dumped his concession, Rosenthal is complaining about the quality of the offal. He whines:

Bernie Sanders went off for a month to contemplate life after the revolution, and this was the best he could come up with? “Secretary Clinton has won the Democratic nominating process, and I congratulate her for that.”

So said Sanders at a rally in New Hampshire on Tuesday, where he appeared on stage with Hillary Clinton as an ally for the first time. As big events go, it felt pretty small, with Sanders waving his arms around and offering up his usual list of shouted slogans.

His real concern is that Sanders doesn't have the magical power to force his fans to vote for a deeply loathed candidate. Bernie fans aren't proper little lemmings, it seems.

So still very much stuck in my digestive disorder metaphor mode, I published this reply to Rosenthal:

The New York Times's heartbern just won't go away, will it?

Long after the "flailing arms" and the "shouted slogans" and the rallies are naught but wispy white-haired memory clouds floating high above the Green Mountain State, the elite pundits will still be reaching for their Mylanta, thinking of all the democratic horror that might have been... had they treated Bernie with any respect to begin with.

The outrage of Medicare for All, the nightmare of free college tuition, the threat that there would be no Trans-Pacific Partnership to enrich the corporations even more than they already are, still linger like bad acid reflux, judging from all the "sore winnerdom" displayed by the pundits lately.

Bernie-bashing seems a bit moot at this point, wouldn't you say? Or will you still be demanding "What does Bernie want?!?" a decade from now?

 Actually, I thought Sanders was almost too enthusiastic in his endorsement of Hillary Clinton. He shouted so much that he was forced to wipe the sweat (or was it tears?) from his face with a symbolic white hanky the moment she finally got her turn to faux-enthusiastically praise her faux-nemesis.

I would have preferred that he keep his promise of "taking this fight all the way to the convention"- if only to make the confab seem a little more exciting. The suspense is gone, the uncorked wine drunk (and upchucked) before its time.

Hillary's greatest, most truthful line in her grimly gracious speech: "Talk is cheap."

The Violence of the Elites

While the ruling establishment cries that its beloved country is falling apart, what with police officers shooting citizens, an Army veteran shooting police officers, and people taking to the streets in protest across the nation, the leader of the free world still has his own capitalistic priorities very much in order.

Dallas or no Dallas, police brutality or no police brutality, crisis or no crisis, there was no way in hell that President Obama was going to cut his war-mongering trip to Europe one day shorter than he already had to.

Belying the New York Times' headline that he is "brooding over the interminable wars of his presidency," a very ebullient Obama boarded a state-of-the-art naval destroyer in the sunny Mediterranean to inspect the troops and gloat over American exceptionalism. No matter that people were being tragically and graphically gunned down stateside on live TV. As Mark Landler drily reports:

“That’s pretty impressive,” Mr. Obama said to Petty Officer Second Class Garrett Nelson, after the sailor told his commander-in-chief about the accuracy of a five-inch, 54-caliber gun mounted on the ship’s foredeck. “That’s better than I do at skeet shooting.”

Mr. Obama’s advisers fought to keep this stop on his five-day trip to Spain and Poland, even after he decided to cut the trip by a day and return home on Sunday to deal with the deadly shootings in Dallas. Sightseeing in Seville, as the president had planned to do, was easy to skip; surveying the military hardware in Rota was not.

You see, there is state-sanctioned violence for profit, and then there is the unsanctioned violence that doesn't make nearly enough money for the very rich and the very powerful. (OK, except for the gun manufacturers and their NRA lobbyists.) Before returning home to "deal with" Dallas, Obama had to complete some very important deal-making in Europe on behalf of military contractors and manufacturers. A thousand more permanent troops in Poland, the retention of more than 8,000 troops in Afghanistan, and the addition of 500 more pairs of "boots on the ground" in Iraq are just the parts they're bothering to tell us about.The fact that an Afghanistan war vet shot an Iraq war vet in Dallas - bringing the war back home - seemingly didn't even enter into their thought processes.

Henry Giroux describes the pathological idiocy perfectly:

In the increasingly violent landscape of anti-politics, mediation disappears, dissent is squelched, repression operates with impunity, the ethical imagination withers, and the power of representation is on the side of spectacularized state violence. Violence both at the level of the state and in the hands of everyday citizens has become a substitute for genuine forms of agency, citizenship, and mutually informed dialogue and community interaction.

(snip)

 What we are observing is not simply the overt face of a militarized police culture, the lack of community policing, deeply entrenched anti-democratic tendencies, or the toxic consequences of a culture of violence that saturates every day life. We are in a new historical era, one that is marked a culture of lawlessness, extreme violence, and disposability, fueled, in part, by a culture of fear, a war on terror, and a deeply overt racist culture that is unapologetic in its disciplinary and exclusionary practices. This deep seated racism is reinforced by a culture of cruelty that is the modus operandi of neoliberal capitalism–a cage culture, a culture of combat, a hyper masculine culture that views killing those most vulnerable as sport, entertainment, and policy.

Landler of the Times, meanwhile, provides us with the near-parodic preferred narrative that the elites do want disseminated:

 Throughout this trip, Mr. Obama has confronted the reality that the United States is engaged in military operations around the world. At a NATO summit meeting in Warsaw, he announced that American troops would lead a battalion stationed in Poland to deter an aggressive Russia. The destroyer in Rota is a pillar of a missile-defense program that Mr. Obama has stuck with despite the tensions it raises with Moscow.

This illustrates the typical unaccountability of the "deciders." Obama traipses over to Europe and is shockingly confronted by the military bases and high tech weaponry that suddenly sprang up all by themselves without any elite intervention whatsoever. And of course, the aggression is conveniently couched in terms of "defense," despite the fact that Russia is not currently making any moves to take over the world. But it might want to, someday, so Obama has accordingly and provocatively announced a trillion-dollar upgrade of the American nuclear weapons arsenal. But there will be no government jobs program for the chronically unemployed, no government single payer health care system, and no new taxes on the coddled rich.  

And alleged US enemies, including Russia and Iran, are taking notice that the land of the free doesn't exactly practice what it preaches. There are hysterical untrained traffic cops ordered to fill their cities' coffers from ticketing poor motorists driving decades-old vehicles with broken taillights, and then there are the militarized shock troops playing with all the leftover and surplus gear that the Pentagon always throws away in favor of newer, prettier, more lethal toys.

This is the already legendary picture being seen round the world today, confirming the race and class-oppressive oligarchical system that still insists upon calling itself American democracy:

(Jonathan Bachman, Reuters)

But golly gee, says Obama, isn't it just terrible that too many people in the Homeland "feel like" they're getting picked on by trigger-happy, under-trained cops. Isn't it awful that guns are getting into the hands of the mentally ill, for whom no government-subsidized treatment is forthcoming. But he'll make room in the busy schedule to head on down to open-carry Texas to lecture the Black Lives Matter movement some more. 

Then he'll go directly to Congress and demand an immediate multibillion-dollar aid package for cash-strapped cities, including funds for psychological police recruit vetting, hiring and intensive training.Then he'll put the kibosh on those private equity vultures getting their claws on public pension funds and otherwise exploiting and injuring American municipalities. (Only kidding: he will do no such thing.)

As Conor Friedersdorf observed in The Atlantic, Obama actually hews pretty closely to the conservative rhetoric of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas whenever he talks about racism. And Obama is rarely criticized by liberals when he frequently espouses "political correctness" and compromise with one's oppressors as a substitute for direct social action.

But back to Landler of the Times, ironically forging ahead with the government-manufactured "news analysis" presented as straight reporting:

Small wonder, then, that Mr. Obama was in a reflective mood on Saturday when a reporter asked him at a NATO news conference about the nature of war in the 21st century — and, specifically, how he felt about the likelihood that he would be the first two-term president to have presided over a nation at war for every day of his presidency.

Speaking with striking candor for a public setting, Mr. Obama said: “As commander-in-chief of the most powerful military in the world, I spend a lot of time brooding over these issues. And I’m not satisfied that we’ve got it perfect yet.” But he added, “I can say, honestly, it’s better than it was when I came into office.”

This is Obama in his contrived media role as pensive philosopher king. Let us celebrate the fact that he was so strikingly candid in front of a group of sycophantic reporters and a small personal army of security guards. He ever so 'umbly admitted that he is not perfect, although he is a lot more perfect than any of his predecessors. Especially George W. Bush, who continues to live in the lap of luxury in the same city that saw so much violence last week. Obama, of course, had refused to prosecute him and his neocon pals for invading Iraq on false pretenses and killing millions of people and torturing who knows how many. Nonetheless, he will never hesitate to lecture both the cops on the street and the protesters on how to get along together for the sake of American exceptionalism. When he vowed that "justice will be done" in Dallas, he unfortunately was not referring to the former president.

On the contrary: Bush will join Obama as an honored guest at Tuesday's interfaith service honoring the slain police officers. 

Landler again:

 Mr. Obama characterized his approach to war as a hybrid: committing limited numbers of American troops to conflict-ridden countries, but working with those countries to develop their own armies and police. He drew attention to an announcement at the Warsaw meeting that NATO would begin training Iraqi troops inside the country. (The alliance had already been training them in neighboring Jordan.)

As evidenced by the large number of "green on blue" attacks in Afghanistan, this community policing approach has worked out about as well over there as it has over here. As evidenced by the quagmire of Vietnam, helping other countries by sending in "advisers" is only one of the first steps of mission-creep and open-ended war. And ka-ching goes the beat of late-stage capitalism's malignant heart.

 “What I’ve been trying to do is to create an architecture, a structure — and it’s not there yet,” the president said. The difficulties of working with unreliable partners is “probably going to be something that we have to continue to grapple with for years to come.”

Ah, the semantics of war and death. Call it a building project, perhaps worthy of the Pritzker Prize. But also warn that the constant building is going to cause inevitable collapses and collateral human damage. Those non-union construction workers and corrupt inspectors make a plutocrat's life a living hell. But there's still enormous profit to be made with all that endless "grappling" with the consequences of your own shoddy policies and standards.

 Mr. Obama said chronic, low-level counterterrorism campaigns could have a debilitating effect on society. “This different kind of low-grade threat, one that’s not an existential threat but can do real damage and real harm to our societies, and creates the kind of fear that can cause division and political reactions — we have to do that better,” he said.

This is the same guy who recently accused Donald Trump of being an irresponsible fear-monger. Of course, Obama is as much as admitting that his own "limited" drone assassination program causes fear, division and political reactions. He has to do better in order to get people to accept their own dooms.

For Mr. Obama, who was a lawyer, the shadowy legal status of this hybrid form of warfare is another heavy burden. That, he said, helped explain why the White House issued a report two weeks ago disclosing estimates of the civilian casualties from drone strikes.

“What I’m trying to do there is to institutionalize a system where we begin to hold ourselves accountable for this different kind of national security threat and these different kinds of operations,” he said.

It only took him seven years to begin to pretend to hold himself accountable for Murder, Inc. Therefore, he is hastening to "institutionalize" his renegade killing policy for the sole craven purpose of absolving himself from any personal responsibility.

Landler hilariously concludes, 

Mr. Obama also looked on the bright side. There are fewer wars today between states, he said, and no wars between great powers. That is a testament to institutions like NATO, he said, and a reason that Russia’s revanchism was such a big concern at the summit meeting.

As Mr. Obama enters the final six months of his presidency, his approach to war clearly remains a work in progress. But he insisted that — whether it was drone strikes, the surveillance programs of the National Security Agency, the long effort to close the military prison at Guantánamo Bay or the training of soldiers of other countries — he had tried to bring 21st-century warfare out of the shadows.

Stay on the sunny side, always on the sunny side, stay on the sunny side of life... and death.

Now, it's on to Dallas to lecture those pesky Black Lives Matter folks. 

 

***

The New York Times ran a rather smarmy editorial on Sunday, politely requesting that Obama be a tad more accountable about his drones of death. Compared to  more than 1300 reader responses to Maureen Dowd's Sunday column on how Hillary Clinton has "contaminated" Obama and his minions with her email scandal, the drone editorial only gathered 111 comments. Faraway death and destruction just aren't as riveting as political intrigue and the fortunes of the elites, I suppose.

Here are my published comments to the drone editorial (the second one is actually a reply to a reply):

For all that Americans care that politicians and bureaucrats have given themselves the hideous right to summarily execute people, it's not likely that the administration is sweating this one out.

Polls show that a majority of us are fine with the assassination program. In one A.P. poll, only 13% of respondents declared themselves strongly opposed. Nearly half said it's O.K. to unleash Hellfire missiles from the aptly named Predator and Reaper drones even when there's a chance that innocents will also die in the process.

Let's face it: what we Americans don't know, (and what we aren't allowed by our government to see in all its bloodiness) definitely will hurt us. Those unnamed and unknown drone victims have family and friends. They leave behind orphans who might understandably become radicalized enough to join ISIS and other groups which never would have existed in the first place without American aggression.

We must acknowledge that our own government is a terrorist state in the eyes of those "other people" who are afraid to even send their kids to school, what with the drones constantly buzzing above their heads. We must acknowledge that our government is not "keeping us safe" by killing hundreds (or thousands) of people for no other reason than that they can.

State-sanctioned murder is state-sanctioned murder, whether it's accomplished by trigger-happy untrained cops on our own streets, or by remote-control unaccountable technocrats in remote "tribal areas."

And the follow-up to a reader asserting that I am well-meaning but naive about the realities of war:

 Richard,

1. Despite the fact that Bush invaded Iraq on false pretenses, as evidenced most recently by that exhaustive British report, you automatically assume that Americans are the "good guys."

2. The drone strikes in question are being conducted in countries with whom the US is not at war. The whole definition of war has become so loose as to become meaningless. The world is now a battlefield, and all the people in it are potential targets based upon some magic formula. I believe that the term that CIA Director John Brennan used is the "disposition matrix." The "casualties of war," are dehumanized through an Orwellian sci-fi term dreamed up by an unelected bureaucrat.

3. The White House report, written by NSA Director James ("we don't collect your emails") Clapper, is suspect on its face. The numbers don't match with the body counts of other independent (and reputable) organizations. His glib explanation for the lack of details is that it would be just too hard for the USA to helicopter down and pretend to be forensic pathologists. They don't know, and they don't want to know. And they get away with it, because most American citizens don't much care either. It's telling, for example, that the big brouhaha over Hillary's emails rarely mentions that she herself signed off on a few drone strikes using her unsecured system. It's the medium that concerns people, not the lethal message.

And finally, I fully realize that I am in a distinct pacifistic minority.

Deliberate Indifference

By Elizabeth O'Meara Adams

The brief legal definition of deliberate indifference is "the conscious or reckless disregard of the consequences of one's acts or omissions. (lectlaw.com)

An internet search on “deliberate indifference” will bring up many links, most of which are related to jail populations, but also some in relation to school and work environments.

But based on the definition above, I see deliberate indifference as the core issue within our government and powers that be. From this deeply ingrained attitude does the bulk of government action (and inaction) take place. The current election cycle has brought this to the forefront, seen most recently in the Democratic Party’s platform, which refused to lift the cap on Social Security and supports the TPP. The Democratic Party used to be called the party of the people, but it can only be that if the definition of “people” is the Supreme Court definition, which conflates corporations with living, breathing, suffering human beings.

Deliberate indifference is so deeply ingrained in the United States, inequality in all aspects of U. S. life just gets worse and worse. And the absolute worst outcome of this inequality has finally been brought to the open for all to see. It is a deliberate indifference that is more obvious and much more lethal. It is that of the criminal “justice” apparatus: the apparatus that incentivizes arrests to fill jail cells, keep the coffers full, and otherize human beings who have non-white skin.

The videos we have seen, thanks to unimaginably brave witnesses, are showing anyone not afflicted with cognitive dissonance how utterly fucked up our nation is. And these crimes against our citizens did not just start taking place since the advent of social media.

The deliberate indifference starts with the initial contact over a minor infraction, which wouldn’t have taken place had the person been Caucasian. It continues to the next level with the use of lethal force. And then the second shot. And the third. And the fourth.

And it continues even further with the startling lack of medical attention. If shooting another human being to hell doesn’t say someone doesn’t value another life, leaving them to certain death does. Disregarded at the beginning of the encounter, discarded like a piece of trash at the end, these people are paying the ultimate price for society’s failure to give a damn.

• Forcing a woman out of her car, threatening to taser her, and slamming her head on the ground during a stop for failing to signal a lane change. #SandraBrown #DeliberateIndifference
  
  
• Taking the time to handcuff a cooperative unarmed woman while her boyfriend bleeds out during a stop for a broken taillight. #PhilandoCastile #DeliberateIndifference #CPR #EMS
  
  
• Shooting an unarmed man in broad daylight, as he runs away from you, and not calling EMS or attempting CPR while he bleeds out. #MichaelBrown #DeliberateIndifference
  
  
• Worrying more about getting in trouble than providing life-saving help to an innocent man whom you just shot. #PhilandoCastile #DeliberateIndifference
• Using deadly force on a man selling CDs and not initiating life-saving measures. #AntonSterling #DeliberateIndifference
  
  
• Americans should be “troubled” by the videotaped murders by police, but we are “horrified” by the “senseless” murders of police officers. #DeliberateIndifference #TargetedDronesKillInnocentBrownPeople
  
  
• When you are harming someone who is not harming you, you are judge and jury. When you do nothing to save his/her life, you are executioner. #DeliberateIndifference #BlackLivesMatter

***

Elizabeth O'Meara Adams is a nurse-practitioner residing in Northern California. She volunteered as a Nevada caucus leader for Bernie Sanders and wrote about her experiences here and here.

A Whole New Level of Bearing Witness

The live-streamed video of the aftermath of yet another police shooting is disturbing on so many levels. It also displays a remarkable act of human courage under literal fire.

Recordings of deaths-by-cop by concerned bystanders are becoming ubiquitous. Memorialization of state-sanctioned violence against mainly black and brown people is a valuable public service, prodding our moribund "justice" agencies, politicians and news organizations to start counting the dead and demanding accountability.

But Wednesday's live Facebook stream of a motorist dying in Minnesota after being shot in a routine traffic stop brings citizen journalism and bearing witness to a whole new level. Watch it here:

Diamond Reynolds, the victim's girlfriend, dispassionately recounts to her viewing audience the events leading up to all the blood. Rather than attending to her loved one, identified as 32-year-old Philando Castile, she directs her full facial attention toward her camera as the man lies bleeding to death next to her. 

The medium has temporarily displaced the terrible reality. Only the cop, pointing his gun at her through the open car window, acts emotionally distraught. Reynolds, the passenger, is the one who behaves calmly and respectfully, obeying the hysterical cop's orders to keep still, her hands on the wheel. Perhaps she realized that if she attempted to give aid to the bleeding man, it would have been construed as reaching for a gun herself and resulted in her own execution. She was likely acting out of pure self-preservation. She'd obviously taken "The Talk" on how to behave around cops while black to heart. Nonetheless, she persists in her triple role as a mate, a citizen-journalist, and a social justice advocate.

“Please, officer, don’t tell me that you just did this to him,” she said. “You shot four bullets into him, sir. He was just getting his license and registration, sir.”

It's only after she's removed from the car, her cell phone camera pointing grotesquely up at the clear blue sky, does the personal reality seem to hit her, does she begin to break down and wail, and cry, and mourn.

Once she is placed in the police car, she resumes her calm journalistic narrative to the outside world. Shock, denial and adrenaline combine to enable another surge in her powerful self-possession. Perhaps not yet realizing the gravity of the victim's condition, she is remarkably lucid about the details, recording for posterity the physical characteristics of the shooting officer, the number of shots fired, her physical location, her need for a ride home. Her cell phone simultaneously acts as a cold conduit and as a powerful extension of her own human body.

It's as though she can't allow herself to fully and safely confront what just went down without the aid of that extra electronic eye, that extra electronic larynx.

The cell phone and social media are now a black person's lifeline. The film doesn't lie. History can no longer be revised.

Declarations of Codependency

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby. 

If there's one positive thing you can say about the ruling class, it's that they usually err on the side of taking care of their own. As much as some of their peers smash things up, there's always a ready supply of Elite Miracle Glue to put them together again.

Political appointee James Comey of the FBI performed his own mess-cleaning role on Tuesday by issuing an ass-covering non-indictment indictment of Hillary Clinton. He accused her of "carelessness" in the handling of her correspondence as she acted out her own politically-appointed part as Secretary of State. But because she is a duly recognized member of the Class, there will be no charges, trial or jail time. That kind of justice is reserved for the little people and for government whistle-blowers like Chelsea Manning. Comey admitted that the scope of the FBI probe was kept as artificially narrow and piecemeal as her corporate-sponsored presidential platform itself.

He as much as admitted that the FBI "investigation" was political window dressing:

The lawyers doing the sorting for Secretary Clinton in 2014 did not individually read the content of all of her e-mails, as we did for those available to us; instead, they relied on header information and used search terms to try to find all work-related e-mails among the reportedly more than 60,000 total e-mails remaining on Secretary Clinton’s personal system in 2014. It is highly likely their search terms missed some work-related e-mails, and that we later found them, for example, in the mailboxes of other officials or in the slack space of a server.
It is also likely that there are other work-related e-mails that they did not produce to State and that we did not find elsewhere, and that are now gone because they deleted all e-mails they did not return to State, and the lawyers cleaned their devices in such a way as to preclude complete forensic recovery.

So despite obstruction of justice on the part of Clinton and her minions, no charges of obstruction of justice will be forthcoming. As commenter Scott W observed in a New York Times comment, Richard Nixon must be writhing with jealousy in his grave.

Comey continued,

 We have conducted interviews and done technical examination to attempt to understand how that sorting was done by her attorneys. Although we do not have complete visibility because we are not able to fully reconstruct the electronic record of that sorting, we believe our investigation has been sufficient to give us reasonable confidence there was no intentional misconduct in connection with that sorting effort.

All-righty then. As long as you don't actually intend to kill somebody during your drunk-driving adventure, no charges will be leveled if you're rich enough and powerful enough. Paris Hilton must also be writhing with jealousy, after having had to spend a couple of days in jail for her DUI in which absolutely nobody was ever harmed.

Hillary's only "crime," if we read between Comey's lines, is that she may have endangered the security of other members of the Establishment. Bad actors like Vlad Putin could have gotten hold of some embarrassing stuff, due to Hillary's irresponsible penchant for privacy and paranoia throughout her global travels. Important people may still end up looking bad. But that is certainly no felony if you are a rich and powerful person yourself.

 And like the feckless Daisy Buchanan before her, Hillary was immediately whisked away from her own hit-and-run to both political glory and legal safety.  High above the clouds and then high before the crowds, she had Barack Obama to give her some much-needed cover. (Bill Clinton, the ever-unreliable antihero of this saga, has been temporarily banished from the stage in the wake of his purely social private airplane tryst with Comey's boss, the politically-appointed Justice Doyenne Loretta Lynch.)

Despite (or because of) what should have been the embarrassment of a nationally televised FBI tongue-lashing, Clinton and Obama put up a brave orchestrated front, staying together for the sake of the never-ending Party. To deflect any potential audience disgust at the Clintonian antics, Obama strove mightily to aim the popular wrath toward the most loathsome strawman-in-the flesh rich guy ever to be dreamed up by the Ruling Class:  Donald Trump.

Dredging up that booming, stammering, down-home, G-droppin' style we haven't heard since he last played the populist against private equity vulture Mitt Romney, Obama (who is now reportedly plotting his own career in venture capitalism) was in full lesser-evil mode. As New York Times columnist Frank Bruni  put it, he didn't just ask that we vote for Hillary. He commanded us to vote for Hillary in "a testimonial that was both gushing and epic."

 You see, the media wants you to know that it's Obama's ruling class legacy - not the survival of the working class and the underclass - that's actually on the line here:

Then you look up toward the end of your second term to behold a Republican presidential nominee who is cynically exploiting racism and xenophobia to put the White House within his own reach. He’s not merely your adversary; he’s your antithesis. And his victory would do more than endanger your policies. It would question the very moral of your journey, the very bend of the arc you frequently invoke.

That’s what Barack Obama confronts right now, and that’s why he hit the campaign trail on Tuesday, appearing onstage with Hillary Clinton in North Carolina and proclaiming without reservation that “there has never been any man or woman more qualified for this office” than she. That’s why he’ll say words like those again and again, with the same fire, in the months ahead.

For the nation’s first black president, Clinton isn’t just the better candidate. She’s the better America. She wins and he holds on to his rosiest convictions about what he and his presidency symbolize.

As I responded to an unsigned Times editorial politely requesting more "clarity" from Clinton regarding her carelessness:

 The televised spectacle of the Clinton campaign rally in the immediate aftermath of James Comey's scathing assessment of her competency was downright surreal.

The North Carolina crowds chanting "I'm with her! I'm with her!" and President Obama proclaiming Hillary to be the most qualified and "tested" presidential candidate who ever lived was like something out of a Fellini film.

It's only the continuing atrocity of the Trump candidacy and his Nuremberg rallies that's making Hillary look even remotely morally acceptable to many voters. Because who would ever have thought that a major candidate being lambasted by the head of the FBI for serial venality and recklessness could be tempered and even subsumed in the news cycle by that other major candidate - who, it is obvious, has yet to reach his own outer limits of sociopathy?

It's a sad time in the USA, when the two nominees are competing mainly to see who can win or deflect the most negative media attention. Comey rips Hillary to shreds on character and judgment, while the Speaker of the House rips Trump another new one for yet another sick outburst of racism.

The Clinton-Trump death match could well be the kiss of death to the corrupt, money-driven duopoly. Now might be the optimal time for those third and fourth parties to fill the vacuum.

The only spoilers in the mix are Trump and Clinton themselves.

Forget about whether America is great, greater or greatest. We want our democracy back.