Radical SAHM

They can protest all they want as long as they pay their taxes

2012-01-21T18:12:00.001-05:00

I am always trying to think of ways to make the idea of Vermont independence palatable to the uninitiated person. By uninitiated I mean someone who hasn't spent a few years in the uncomfortable headspace that rejects the assumption that Vermont, or any state, is required to remain in a posture of political and financial subservience to the presumptive higher wisdom of a federal government; an entity that is chronically and systemically unresponsive to the needs of the people, having chosen to assign the well-being of the rich and their corporations as flimsy proxy for the well being of the citizenry. In Vermont we rally against our geriatric nuclear plant's hopes of perpetual NRC coronation in hopes of avoiding any more irradiation and we show the fuck up to protest the NDAA and PIPA, Bradley Manning and Tim DeChristopher's incarceration and the plunder of our collective wealth represented by the waste and fraud of programs like the F-35. We call for our National Guard troops to come me from Iraq and Afghanistan and we vote to impeach sitting presidents. We lobby for our small farmers like it was going out of style and we hold our town meetings like they matter. We are filled with the spirit, there is no doubt.

I come to believe more and more, however, that the only protest that will matter is the one where people stop paying their federal taxes. Indulge me for a moment and imagine if a large group of individuals were to set up a joint holding account for these retained funds. Initially one could reasonably frame this as a simple tax protest and quite a legitimate one at that given that most Americans (not just Vermonters) want to curtail our militarism, decrease the influence of corporations and require the rich to pay their fair share of taxes. The federal government has not only been unresponsive to these sentiments, it has moved in exactly the opposite direction with the invasion of Libya, Citizens United and it's failure to impose any additional burden on the rich during this terrible recession despite the fact that their tax rates are historically low. Imagine how thought provoking and potentially paradigm expanding it would be for state legislators and other citizens to see all that money in one place and ponder the possibilities.

How would Vermonters feel about the social security and healthcare debates going on at the federal level if we could suddenly fund all our entitlement liabilities ourselves and structure them how we pleased i.e. without having to find a happy medium with South Carolina? How would the balance of power change if the federal government had to ask us for contributions to the wars for global hegemony each year? If instead of having to simply re-up with the thoroughly corrupted federal legislature by expending minimal effort throwing around phrases like "unpatriotic apologist" and "our boys deserve the best", they had to sell the idea to 50 individual states ever single year? What if the federal government had to explicitly ask for money to support corporations that are outsourcing jobs while giving huge salaries and bonus' to CEOs who hoard profits overseas to avoid taxes while smugly awaiting the next profit repatriation holiday? How many Vermonters would agree to funding oil and ethanol subsidies if they could say no? Could Vermont do a better job repairing its crumbling infrastructure if it didn't have to go begging and submit a forest worth of paperwork to the government to get a bit of its own money back? If it didn't have to keep a Leahy on staff to pander and pimp and drag some money back out of the Sarlac Pit of the Military Industrial Complex to bring jobs to the people? (We could make it fun, have an annual ceremony where we'd give his (former) salary to a small business person and blow out a riff on a trumpet or some such.) Imagine if the cynicism and fatalism of paying your taxes were replaced with purposefulness and empowerment?

I can hear you out there worrying about what Mississippi will do to itself if what some perceive to be the federal choke chain of simple decency and "reasonableness" is removed. Let me carefully suggest that said federal choke chain allowed the despoiling of the Gulf of Mexico by an oil industry responsible for creating, on our own soil, one of the greatest examples of The Resource Curse. Allow me to curb your enthusiasm by mentioning that the drug war, so unequally waged against black people, also occurs under its beneficent auspices. And let's not forget that the attempts by those in the lower latitudes to assert themselves against the power of corporations intent on either fracking or mountaintop removing large sections of this country into inhabitability are just as readily squelched by the power of these United States.

In short, you don't have to reject the entire notion of a United States in order to embrace the notion of federal accountability through greater state level financial leverage. Anyone can see that it is hopeless to try and affect change while sustaining the status quo with every paycheck.

Good Times

2012-01-10T14:28:00.004-05:00

From December 17, 2011
Josh and Jesse are both sick and we had just about 1 tsp of Nyquil in the house which clearly isn't going to cut it. Now, its Saturday and it's almost 6pm so I've had a few at this point and Josh can't go because he's prostrate on the couch having attended a 6 year old's water slide birthday party this afternoon with Elias who can't swim for shit and that kind of extreme parental vigilance is exhausting. And he's a man with a cold. Enough said. So, toasted lightly brown, I'm looking at this pittance of nighttime relief clinging to the bottom of the bottle and I'm looking at my huge truck which I am just learning to control and I'm like: can't do it, I'm walking to the drugstore. So I announce to everyone that I am, in fact, "WALKING TO THE DRUGSTORE" because I've had a few beers and it isn't OK for me to drive (Teaching. Fucking. Moment. Y'all.) I grab my purse and my flashlight and head out into the 15 degree night. I get to the store and what's the first thing I see (after cracking myself up reading aisle signs. Why?) but this amazing beast cast in the finest Chinese resin. I instantly realize that my intoxication has led me to a date with $5 yellow demon-eyed destiny: "Whooooa! My NAME is Buck!" So, 1 package of spiderman bandaids, a Whitmans' sampler and one off-gassing 8 point buck later (oh and the Nyquil, I got that too.), I am walking home having had the most fun for $20 that I can remember. If you haven't gone shopping at a drugstore after a few beverages in a while (and who has, we all drive everywhere right?) I highly recommend it. I put the buck on Josh's nightstand. I hope he likes it.

Live simply so that these kids can die anyway because your Christmas shopping isn't what's killing them

2011-12-13T14:12:00.003-05:00

A wonderful sentiment that rings hollow after only cursory consideration. Let's take this from the top.

What message is this visual device trying to send?

1. Those kids do not have enough food. Those chubby women have too much food.

2. Those women should give $ to those children instead of buying so many toys for their kids.

3. We should all be grateful we aren't starving African children and bitch a little less about stuff.

Seems to make sense, right? But African children with painfully swollen bellies and brain damage are not caused by overweight, slightly crazed looking mothers buying toys.

What would be more appropriate here is a strong condemnation of deforestation, slash and burn cattle farming and poor agricultural practices like improper grazing and mono-culture that deplete fertility and/or cause desertification. We could see a picture of Wall Street commodity traders inflating the prices of grain in order to make very rich people richer. Or we could see western governments supporting brutal and corrupt African regimes in order to curtail China's resource ambitions. Unlike the poorly coiffed, LL bean big shirt consumer brigade pictured above, these factors all tip quite precipitously towards direct causation.

These women could send their annual toy budget to an aid organization but these children aren't starving for lack of $, they are starving because of bad weather, bad soil, commodity price inflation and war, factors pretty much beyond the reach of the average female Toys R Us shopper. Juxtaposing a picture of some spiritually challenged wonk from the IMF or World Bank or some ConAgra douchebag whose policies actually cause this kind of shit might be harder to understand but it would be far more accurate.

I can't help but get a slight wagging finger feeling from this too, like I'm being directed to not feel bad about the American middle/working class' plight. Though the average American has access to plenty of calories they are only one paycheck, one job loss, or one illness away from being homeless. And that cart has maybe $150 worth of stuff in it (it's all box) which is no great shakes when you're spending $2K a month just between your mortgage and your health insurance. So, in addition to being a bad example of cause and effect, this visual unfairly gives the impression of vast squandered resources, engenders a self-hate that is unearned and makes snooty face at anyone fussing about wage stagnation and unemployment.

Arguing for systemic fairness goes much further towards helping these children than sending money to Unicef and certainly effects positive change more than feeling bad about Christmas shopping*. You don't have to be starving and walking around in dirty underwear to be morally entitled to advocate loudly for systemic fairness. Honestly, once you're at that point you wouldn't be very good at it, anyway.

*the waffle riot people are excluded from this implicit pardon.

Massey Murder

2011-12-07T13:20:00.004-05:00

Roy Blankenship is back in the coal business. He is free as a bird and back in the coal business after his company paid a measly $200 million fine (the fact that this is a record breaking fine just makes this more depressing) for knowingly endangering the lives of his workers in order to make more money. The government's investigation found that:

"managers at…Massey put profits ahead of workers' safety, and that an ingrained corporate culture of greed and recklessness ultimately led to a catastrophe that should have been prevented…federal investigators found that a preventable methane ignition triggered the explosion, which was then fueled by an accumulation of coal dust…"The results of the investigation lead to the conclusion that PCC/Massey promoted and enforced a workplace culture that valued production over safety, and broke the law as they endangered the lives of their miners." Management showed a "systematic" and "intentional" pattern of covering up safety hazards at the mine, such as the inadequate ventilation and poor roof supports that contributed to the disaster, according to investigators. The mine also had an "established" practice of tipping off managers when federal and state safety inspectors were on the way…The company went so far as to maintain two sets of safety books -- one that included known dangers, and another watered-down version that miners and inspectors could see…Workers who tried to bring forth safety concerns were routinely bullied by their superiors and feared losing their jobs making them unlikely to seek out inspectors. "

Now if Massey were a real person rather than a corporate "person" this would be 29 counts of manslaughter at the very least, more likely reckless homicide. The fact that no one is going to go to jail for killing 29 people, even when it has been demonstrated that systematic and deliberate behaviors mandated by Massey Energy caused this explosion, is as clear an example of our inculcated and compromised justice system as you'll find.

Our justice system has been contorted and leveraged to serve the interests of capital to such as extent that it is impossible within the law to hold the responsible parties to account when their misbehavior causes calamity and death. Our elites; be they energy executives, barons of finance or members of the legislature; have completely insulated themselves from just retribution for their crimes by contorting the law to either make their criminal activity legal or by making their crimes not subject to incarceration. Sure they pay fines, fines that seem like a lot of money to regular people, but these aren't regular people. Blankenship got a $12 million severance when he left Massey AFTER The Big Branch explosion! Massey was sold for $7 Billion AFTER the accident happened!

If justice were to be served, every person who ever ordered a subordinate to implement one of these profit generating, life endangering policies would be going to jail and every lackey who intimidated a whistleblower would be going to jail. But as right now, just one guy might be going to jail for obstruction of justice for actions related to the investigation, not the accident.

When people kill other people out of passion; be it hatred, love or anger; our justice system holds them to account. But when incorporated people kill other people out of greed, it goes unpunished. Personal responsibility dissolves into the soft focus capital C corporate, designed to absolve these entities of the responsibilities of personhood while preserving the rights of personhood.

I think people might believe that there is some higher logic than greed at work here. There isn't. I think people might believe that our laws are held to some ultimate standard of fairness. They aren't.

In a society where justice had any value, our awareness of the pretty well established effect of bureaucracy on perception of personal responsibility ("I was just doing my job loading those cattle cars! It wasn't my decision!") and the difficulty of assigning guilt to groups of people who come together for the sole purpose of making money, should have lead us by now to a simplified and effective method for punishing these transgressions. That the reality is just the opposite speaks to the utter corruption, dysfunction and illegitimacy of the system.

Image by Cat and Girl "The Incredible Lightness of Being Dead"

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Waffle Riots

2011-11-30T20:41:00.004-05:00

A guy in the comments of an article I just read took the author to task for applauding the "successful" uprisings in Egypt saying "has the author read the news lately, that place is a mess!"

Part of me says "right on Credulous Man, Arab Spring was a US plot all along and the new boss is probably going to be worse, high fuckin' five!". But another part of me says "Oh Soft American, so drunk on consumerism that you are thoroughly convinced all transitions should be painless upgrades that require no sacrifice or downtime, this must be stressful for you."

I think a big part of why Americans can't seem to pull their asses out of the couch crevasse to demand a better system of governance (hell, to demand a system that won’t eat it self alive in the next 45 minutes) is because they have the expectation that beneficial change can occur in the same sanitized way that old boring white appliances get replaced with shiny new front loading red ones.

Since half the point of consumerism is to turn people into infantile hedonists too preoccupied with developing their "style" with the cheap shiny fruits of globalization to spend more than 5 minutes a day worrying about what their government might be up to, I think my theory is awesome. (this only holds up as long as the cash and credit flows, of course, interrupt this atmosphere too egregiously and well, watch this crowd go after the $2 #blackfriday waffle makers at Walmart. Fucking terrifying, no? Imagine if these people were actually hungry or cold or something.)

This thought flows through the same vein I posted in the other day about how people are resistant to leaving their big evil bank for a small, ethical credit union because the process is sort of a pain in the ass, takes a bit of time and doesn't make them have more money or stuff when it's over. We are very much accustomed to having our cake and eating it too i.e. getting something for nothing. Joining a credit union is damn near the easiest and most direct way to subvert the criminal banking cabal yet this somehow gets lost in all the flustered, confused, vaguely sweaty 'having to do actually something' shtick.

Fundamental social/political change has always been a convulsive, destructive, highly inconvenient process. Elites very much enjoy being Elites and with institutional inertia working in their favor, depriving them of the favorable climate through which they extract their glorious tribute like a hyena pulling the guts out of a still hot wildebeest will definitely precipitate one of those 'out of my cold dead hand' type situations.

So maybe Mr. Commenter is keen to Paul Wolfowitz's plan to suck up all those former Soviet Client States before China gets too big to make a fuss. Maybe he's tuned in to The Rand Corporation's devious covert regime change machinations. Or maybe he's just wondering when a better political system will be ready for pre-order on Amazon.

Tar Sands = Energy Independence = Bullshit

2011-11-17T12:08:00.003-05:00

So this tar sands ad comes on while I was waiting to watch a CNN video. Nice looking black man starts telling me how US energy independence is one of America's biggest challenges right now and that tar sands oil is the answer. Now I know that because they are "people" corporations are pretty much allowed to lie under the guise of exercising free speech but this claim really pushes even that permissive standard.

Boys and girls, today we are going to learn a new word: EXPORT. EXPORT is what happens when American energy companies can get a higher price for their products by selling them to other countries! Was I in the bathroom when Obama made his "all domestically produced energy must be sold domestically" speech? Did I pick the wrong moment to go get another beer and miss the announcement of the nationalization of all domestic energy resources? WTF is "innocuous but capable looking black man" talking about?

I understand by and large people are really, really clueless and on the whole disinterested in the issues surrounding fossil fuel dependence and the imminent rack and ruin of Petroleum Man (Hat tip, Gaelan Brown) but they aren't the people watching the CNN video that featured this advertisement, hence my perplexity.

First and foremost, it is hard imagine how anyone can watch an ad from a fossil fuel company and not disbelieve anything and everything they say simply because they are a fossil fuel company. Everything about this industry is malevolent and dysfunctional; from the government subsides that obliterate the proper functioning of energy markets by squelching competition to the externalization of the costs of the pollution it produces, to the highly inequitable pay structures to the unavoidable realization that it is dead end industry; even a credulous but somewhat well informed person (the typical CNN viewer, no?) has to balk at the get go, right?

Having their "innocuous but capable looking black man" spokeswhore talk absolute nonsense about energy security is just the icing on the cake. For fuck's sake, not only are we not entitled to the use of the energy that is produced domestically, we don’t even get a cut of $$$ these companies make unless we live in Alaska! We just get to pay to clean up after them, buy our kids a lifetime of asthma medication before shipping them off the fight in the latest resource war and wait for the PR campaign featuring an innocuous by capable looking Hispanic woman telling us "drinking water security is one of America's biggest challenges right now and privatizing weather is the answer"

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Middle Class or First World Subsistence?

2011-11-15T19:52:00.001-05:00

I must take issue with the assertion made in this article that a couple with 3 children making 50K combined is "solidly" anything, never mind middle class.

Let's run down the list of assumptions required to argue that 50K leaves a family of 5 with enough disposable income to be considered middle class vs. living a first world subsistence existence. This couple owns their home (or lives rent free), they have no debt in the form of student loans, car payments, credit cards etc., they have good employer subsidized health insurance and are all healthy and since both parents are working we have to assume that grandma is the work-day caregiver and she gets paid in love.

Even with these fairly outrageous assumptions, that 50K is more like 41K once you take out taxes. That's less than 185% of poverty level income for this family. They would easily qualify for reduced school lunches, subsidized housing and food stamps. That's middle class???

Let's look at this a different way, where we assume they have most of the liabilities most families have. They pay $1,200 a month for Housing (if they are lucky, in Chittenden County this would be very hard to do for a family of 5.), they pay $500 a month for 2 student loans, they pay $300 for health insurance, they have a car payment of $250, they pay car insurance of $100, and they pay $500 a month to have one kid in full time daycare. From the post taxes residual of 41,000 we get around $3400 a month. After just the above expenses (by no means a comprehensive list), this family has around $550 left to pay for everything else; food, utilities, car repairs, all the crap costs like parking tickets and broken teeth that come up and all the discretionary consumption that supposedly defines what middle class is.

Drop one of the student loans or the car loan and it's still insane to call their income situation anything but precarious and stressful. Even though they are both educated white collar professionals, it is Orwellian nonsense to call these people middle class.

YES WE CAN! (give our kids milk in a cup!)

2011-11-15T19:35:00.007-05:00

In this fine article, Tom Philpott regales us with the sordid tale of wanton whore bags from the industrial food lobby successfully preserving regulations that allow the lilliputian smear of tomato paste on a frozen pizza to count as a vegetable when calculating the nutritional merits of school lunches. This inspired me to spend part of the morning peppering Governor Shumlin's twitter feed with perky pellets of 140 character cleverness asking why the fuck Vermont feeds our wee ones the bleached, irradiated, emulsified, amalgamated and most likely contaminated swill from outfits like Cargill, Tyson and Hood when we have such stark raving mad unrealized but nonetheless chomping at the bit capacity to meet the needs of our school lunch program with food made here.

Oh Governor, I said, what better way to strengthen our economy and the well being of our children than to commit to sourcing our public school lunch programs locally? Would it not be easier to shrug off the entire federally subsidized school lunch program, a program that offers a mere $1 per meal subsidy to our schools, than to hope (in the Derrick Jensen sense of hope: a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency) that the USDA will one day free itself from the clutches of the agribusiness interests which currently bend policy in the direction of their hungry gaping maw somehow not sated by the steady stream of agriculture subsidies already flowing thereto.

The thing about the corporate capture of regulatory agencies is that, well, they are somewhat restrained by the fact that they are captured. It is hard to imagine arguing that our energy would be better spent reforming the entire regulatory and electoral system of the United States than it would be developing a way for Vermont to feed this one small part of our population that already shows up in semi orderly fashion at the same place everyday. How difficult, within the wider scheme of difficult things, would it be to put ovens and stoves back in our school kitchens and to have people there that can use them to prepare 2 simple meals for children?

Can we really, in good conscience and without hanging our heads in shame say "the federal system only allows us to buy commodity beef and the local milk doesn't come in a box" and leave it at that? We are admitting defeat in a much more expansive way than we intend if we throw up our hands and resign ourselves to supporting industrial milk because industrial milk comes in a box and local milk doesn’t come in a box so we can't serve public school kids local milk.

That is "take us out behind the shed and make it as quick and painless as possible" type talk, folks.

Those boxes suck anyway, they are god damn near impossible to open.

sorry for your service? Ugh.

2011-11-11T13:50:00.003-05:00

Veteran's Day is a tough day for me to navigate.

How do you thank someone for risking or giving their lives for a lie, for a mistake, for an oil company, for an empire that has long since abandoned the work of serving its people? How do you say that you would never be willing to unquestioningly put yourself in harm's way for such corrupt, poorly planned and deceptively articulated causes? How do you say 'thank you' when you’d give up your citizenship and leave the country before you'd give your life or offer your child's life to sustain U.S. global hegemony?

Can gratitude cohabitate with the knowledge that regardless of the "threats" at hand, you know that in a less demagogic, less corrupt, less greedy and more incredulous world, we'd have far fewer people to thank for their sacrifices on Veteran's day. It is common sense that military men and women would be far better served by not being sent into harm's way than by any amount of cheap grace we can heap upon them having sent them to war needlessly, out of intellectual lethargy more than conviction, having had no tangible costs imposed on us, taking the knee-jerk patriotic easy way out. When we are asked to honor the service of our military men and women are we not also being asked to honor militarism? How can we hate war and love war at the same time?

Isn't it inherently condescending and disingenuous to say thank you to someone for doing something you are unwilling to do, something you know is folly, something you know is perpetuated by the skillful parlaying of the manipulative power of anachronistic mythology?

In the end I feel like I should just be saying 'Sorry'. I'm sorry our nation can't think of anything better to do with your lives than send you to far away lands to kill and subdue people who will hate you for it. I'm sorry we'll pay you so poorly to do it. I'm sorry we'll often fail to care for you when you come back broken. I'm sorry we'll misplace your body or lose it entirely. I'm sorry we'll lie about how you died to cover up our mistakes. I'm sorry because I believe in my heart of hearts that your act of service, an act that will no doubt color the rest of your life, was a terrible waste of life, of money and of opportunity.

So, like I said, it's a tough day for me to navigate.

*although arguments could be made about WWI and WWII having been wholly being avoidable massive wastes of human life, I can't make them so I limit my comments to the militarism of my lifetime.

Baklava!

2011-11-04T15:38:00.001-04:00

So I'm on Twitter, watching the twitards tweeting this Greek debt crisis up, down and sideways. Some wondering how a "disorganized" Greek default and exit from the Euro will affect US unemployment (the going bet is +1.5%, btw) and with some sagely saying "if someone offered to cut my debt load in half I'd take it, haw haw haw" and still others just saying "duhhhhhhh" or "Baclava!".

I'll leave it to the really fine article What passes for smart on the Greek Debt Crisis to 'splain how and where even what is considered progressive media has fallen quite short in evaluating the Greek situation but, let me say this: we the people aren't getting the full story on the implications of Greek default because the full story would undermine the underpinnings of the whole fetid ball of wax under whose stingy patronage we labor. We cannot confront the paucities of the oligarchic capitalist system using its language and its assumptions for both have been purged of any notion which doesn't serve the host.

"This is the Facebook rule: if you don’t pay the freight, you aren’t the customer, you are the product. Politicians compete for the money and favors of the rich, and what they sell is the ability to wrangle you: to pass the austerity bills, to cut the benefits, to privatize the jewels of the public system, to force through the multi-trillion dollar bailouts…They control the media, right down to the bottom, to make sure that what is discussed is what they want discussed, in the terms they want it discussed. That default isn’t that bad: forbidden.That currency controls mitigate damage in these circumstances: forbidden. That lenders will lend to defaulting countries almost immediately: forbidden."

Please forgive me for lapsing into clichés but it's hard to improve upon "you cannot solve a problem with the same consciousness that created it".

And as for the Greek people themselves, though perhaps less so the most urban among them: a culture that is almost as deeply suspicious of government as they are deeply attached to afternoon naps, that happily relinquishes 3 hours each evening to eat dinner and talk, in this humble writers opinion, will be just fine no matter the outcome of this particular pixel based debacle.

Having said that and though having just recently eaten a truly revelatory bagel and liverwurst delight, thinking about greece makes me hungry so I am off to prowl the pantry.

Starving the Beast

2011-11-04T11:19:00.002-04:00

There is a bit of legislation in the rusty crusty works of congress that would require banks to make it easier for people to close accounts, one would assume in order to move their money to smaller institutions that don’t regularly abuse them and/or hold the national economy hostage when their bets go bad.

How ever well intentioned this legislation may be, and I have my doubts about this, it is also a prime example of the kind of top down fuckitude that has paralyzed individual action in our fine nation. Just as the credit union bug starts catching, here comes big daddy fed with a can of Lysol, putting the kibbutz on individual initiative to make the change by stating outright that making the switch is toooooo haaaaaard and implying that people should wait for the government to make it easier/safer/more convenient before they do it.

Now there's a banner idea. Let's wait for Congress to write a new law that makes it easier to walk into a bank and close an account: this should only take 3-5 years and cost about 3 million dollars to accomplish and in the end the banks will have inserted enough caustic bullshit into the legislation to make the move harder and probably have a significant fee attached to it.

I closed an account with Bank of America and opened an account with Vermont Federal Credit Union without any help and with no difficulty. If you hate what the Too Big To Fail banks are doing to this country and you want to help starve them out of existence in the most direct and effective way available to you, do not wait for the government to make it "easier".

Don't make me start waxing poetic about "at what cost liberty" because that would embarrass us both.

Here is a video with Jimmy Stewart in it to get you all hopped up on righteous indignation before you head out to do the deed:

Dear Taxpayer

2011-11-04T11:13:00.001-04:00

This video is painful to watch but, 3 brutal years in to this crisis, I think it is worth revisiting what a bunch of slimy, self-important, conniving, lying douche bags all these CEO's are. I'll probably spend the rest of my life wondering how they escaped with their lives.

Repigs be Good: Rick Perry Edition

2011-10-28T14:51:00.005-04:00

Rick Perry on why he might skip some debates:

“These debates are set up for nothing more than to tear down the candidates. It pretty hard to be able to sit and lay out your ideas and your concepts with a one minute response. So, you know, if there was a mistake made, it was probably ever doing one of the campaigns [debates] when all they’re interested in is stirring up between the candidates instead of really talking about the issues that are important to the American people.”

First off, I am sorry I made you read that quote. Sentence structure like that is never easy to experience. But more to the point, it appears Rick Perry is trying to make the case for not having candidate debates. (I stifle a "Yay!" I live tweet these things. All of them.) This makes sense since he sucks so bad a thinking/talking and, honestly what candidate wouldn't rather just share their carefully crafted, buffed and polished image of themselves with the public? What candidate wouldn't want to be able to present their hyperbolic dysentery without fear of factual repudiation or troublesome discussion? David Frum made a very good point the other day about Perry: Perry isn't speaking to the pundit/policy wonk class when he throws down garbage like The Sort of 20% Flat Tax Plan *Now With The Magiks™*, a the plan that will:

-Eliminate SS taxes without eliminating SS payments by protecting the SS Trust Fund that is already empty!
-Simply the tax code by preserving the entire existing tax code and adding a rasher of optional flat tax gobbled-d-gook to it!
-Promise to keep energy prices low and energy plentiful in the US of A while assuming in all predictive economic models that energy prices will double by 2018 and allowing all our domestically produced energy to be exported!
-Reduce Government spending and government revenue without cuts to entitlement or military spending or addressing healthcare costs at all! Not even a little bit! Not one word!

Perry is actually talking to the Cognitive Dissonance Class of repigs; people who want to think they are good people who don’t want poor children and old people to starve, who don’t relish having the blood of a million innocents on their hands and who want winners not cheaters to get the spoils of the great American white uny-corn 24 hour buffet. They want to be good whilst still being repigs and voting for assholes like Perry. If you spend several hours a day worrying about the devil bungholing your soul for all eternity, you want to be good bad enough to believe almost anything. As much of a stretch as it it, they might even believe that debates leave a brain trust like Perry in the grips of The Frustrations: the limited time allotted for answering queries is just too dang short for him to fully convey his deep knowledge of the issues of the day. Also, he can fly and poops blueberry muffins.

Imbecile Institutions Case Study: Law Enforcement

2011-10-28T11:55:00.001-04:00

Our law enforcement institutions have been showing a keen determination to keep shitty people on the job lately. I'll leave it to Glenn Greenwald to brilliantly opine about how the 2 tiered justice system makes it easy for member of elites classes such as law enforcement to evade judicial justice. I just want to discuss a few recent examples of people who screwed the pooch at work and kept their jobs. Tosten Veblen had a snappy way of describing institutions that drift into the realm of dysfunction by relying on outmoded ways of thinking; in this case some combination of the embrace of the sunk costs fallacy and the supremely loathsome "we take care of own" mentality seems to characterize these FAILS: Veblen called them "Imbecile Institutions". Here are a few examples:

The Sean Bell incident: You can read here, here and here for the background on this case but for my purposes we need only discuss that after having proven to be either too jumpy, too disorganized, too eager or all 3, the cops who killed this unarmed man in a arain of 50 bullets on the eve of his marriage to the mother of his 2 children, still get to be cops. As Ta-Nehisi Coates put it so well this morning "an officer who's made this sort of catastrophicmistake should not continue in his chosen line of work… Being a cop is a reallyhard job. Not everyone is up to it."

Fast and Furious: You can read here, here and here for the details of this massive fuck up but for my purposes we need only discuss how the supervisors of this operation: "Fast and Furious…was ascheme that allowed the sale of weapons to known gunrunners…it all went wrongand ATF lost track of 80 percent of the guns, which have been used in numerous crimesin Mexico and have been involved in the deaths of US border agent Brian Terryand immigration officer Jaime Zapata" not only didn't get fired but got promoted.

Detroit crime lab abandoned whilst still full of unprocessed evidence and police gear: Again, you can go here, here and here for details but here's the basics:

"The Detroit Free Press found last week that the lab, housed in a former elementary school, still contained criminal evidence and files. Televisions, cameras,microscopes, files, old blood samples, and even live ammunition...the building had been open, with a fence down and windows busted open, for at least a week."

Whoa, the person in charge of this will surely lose his job! Ralph Godbee Jr., who was Assistant Police Chief at the time, was told to clean out the lab before it was left to wilds. Not only didn't he do that, he didn't even make sure it locked when the staff and security left. Godbee wasn't fired or even demoted. He is now Chief of Police in Detroit.

Shouldn't we be trying to get smart, capable people in these jobs? Aren't there lots of smart capable people looking for work? Man o Manischewitz, we totally suck at meritocracy.

On NPR on Occupy Oakland

2011-10-28T11:39:00.001-04:00

NPR's reporting of the protester smack-down in Oakland has been infuriating. NPR chose to describe the brutally disproportionate reaction of the OPD to peaceful protesters as a "clash between protesters and police". The use of this phrase is a blatant attempt to repackage reality as to absolve the OPD of their unwarranted aggression by creating a sense of equanimity of violent intent between both parties. And it gets worse from there.

Here we have a situation where a group of people LEGALLY exercising their constitutional right to free speech and assembly, responds to police attempts to unjustly and forcibly remove them by (stupidly, admittedly) throwing water bottles, paint and a few rocks and being met by hundreds of police dispensing teargas, beanbag projectiles, flash grenades and rubber bullets from within the protection of riot gear. This wasn't a "clash" this was an attack by a state ARMY against a group of unarmed civilians. To try to frame it as anything short of that is dishonest at best and dishonest for the purpose of misinformation and manipulation of public sentiment to advance the ends of NPR's corporate sponsors at worst, to say nothing of the irony of assaulting the public to maintain pubic safety. Or are protesters no longer considered 'the public' due police protection in the same way that US citizens deemed 'terrorists' are no longer due their rights as citizens?

"There is no threat to the public when the public uses a public space. To suggest otherwise is authoritarian absurdity. Rather, the purpose of the police attack was to break the will of the protesters by causing them physical harm…Tear gas and nightstick blows disperse a crowd, but they also leave a memory of violence that deters future assembly"

It is worth mentioning that the pretext for this attack was trumped up sanitation and public safety concerns that could have easily been addressed by communication with the group's leadership. Although the professed lack of leadership within Occupy Oakland competent enough to resolve the alleged issues was used as a justification for the attack, these leaders magically materialized the moment Mayor P.O.S. decided she wanted to keep the peace/her job.

A later NPR segment featured this gem: "If Occupy Wall Street had an agenda, it might be able to bring grass-roots energy to the Democrats the way the Tea Party did for the GOP." To the first point: has NPR had its head up its ass for the past 6 weeks? How else could the #OWS agenda have evaded their notice? To the second: I just answered my own question, yes it does, because anyone who looks at #OWS and says "oh my, the democraptastic sell-out "thanks for inviting us, we just so happy to still be here" half of our oligarchic political duopoly will surely be able to benefit from this movement that TOTALLY rejects everything said craptastic party truly stands for." Later in the same segment, from Matt Bennett of the group Third Way: "Bennett wants to avoid having Democrats tied to the excesses of the fringe of the Occupy Wall Street protests the way the party was tied for decades to the excesses of the anti-war movement." We were all told just last week, when Obama pretended to end the war in Iraq, that the Iraq war has cost us all $3-5 trillion dollars, all of it debt. In this time of austerity hysteria where everyone and their grandma is pledging to root out waste, fraud, inefficiency, gremlins and couch change to stave off the default of the entire US economy, where we are spending $300 million A DAY in Afghanistan and just blew a another billion (and counting) to liberate Libya from The Man Who Knew Too Much, here is a self labeled liberal saying that candidates should shy away from the anti-war movement with NPR dutifully reporting this utter nonsense.

NPR: This is propaganda not journalism. Drop your sugar daddies Walmart and ADM, raid that sweet endowment of yours and do your freakin' job.

DEATHMATCH: 3rd parties vs. duapolistic political paralysis

2011-10-12T16:46:00.000-04:00

There was quite a good discussion of #OWS on 'On Point' today but one of the guests and a few of the callers expressed genuine concern regarding the movement's advocacy for a third party. I am getting pretty tired of hearing people freak out at the thought of a 3rd party challenger to the Democraptastic Party. Why do people assume that the next repig president will end the world or, equally stupidly, that the next democratic president will save it? This is simply not a scenario that is born out by history. People clutch their pearls and invoke the specter of Nadar like the world ended because Gore lost. Bad things definitely happened under Dubya but they happened while a Congress full of Democrats and all of us good hearted civvies were watching, for crap's sake. It seems to me, the only really deserving villains in that election were the folks that rigged it. But I digress.

May I suggest that we may have to lose a few battles in order to win the war? Instead of issuing empty threats to vote for lack luster, hopeless democratic candidates with sour expressions on our faces and hearts devoid of sparkling gladness ("we will vote w/out enthusiasm, we mean it!"), we should just not vote for them. We should just not vote for them even if it helps a republican in the short term. We have to show politicians that we are really fucking serious about this shit in order for them to listen. I have 2 little kids and I can threaten them with all sorts of terrible things; giving all their toys to good children who clean their playroom when their Mom asks them to and being made to sleep in the yard with the rabbits if they won't Go The Fuck To Sleep for example; and they don’t give a flying monkey unless it actually happens. I'd bet a my personal fortune of about $200 and one fine pair of Dansko clogs that it wouldn't take even 2 full election cycles for a few real progressives to break from The Party of Sad Clown Corporate Shills and to start taking action to reverse the curse of the Friedman Plague under whose influence we suffer. You have to ask yourself why any rational lefty person would run against a democrat in the current climate of fear. He or she can reasonably assume that they'll be wasting their time because all the pee pee pants fauxgressive liberals quake at the thought of wasting their vote. The intellectually easy knee-jerk "oh my gawd not a republican" attitude adopted by this group is so epically self-defeating and politically flaccid only a liberal could embrace it.

In closing, let me offer this: nothing on gia's green earth will motivate people to get the fuck over themselves and abandon duapolistic political paralysis faster than living in a Koch-Cain Rombot America for a few years. Think about it, maybe that should be our god damn PLAN.

US politics is rich people talking to rich people

2011-10-07T19:20:00.003-04:00

‎"Globally speaking, I am rich. Chances are everyone reading this is rich. US politics is rich people talking to rich people. Remember that."

Statements like this kind of piss me off. I say kind of because it is an obviously true statement. It pisses me off because the implication is that, because we don't live in a favela scraping a subsistence living out of a garbage dump, we should shut the hell up about how RELATIVELY poorly most people are fairing under corporate fascism in America.

Yes, we do infinitely better here than in the 3rd world. Only a douchebag or a Water Carrier would say otherwise. Howfuckingever, this is not a reason to placidly accept that 1% of our population controls the vast majority of our national wealth and just about all of our government. This is especially true because one of the Oligarchy's favorite dance routines is the perpetual war paradigm that threatens not only the combatants but the ability of our planet to sustain human life in dignified form. What level of violence would we be delivering to the door of the truly poor of the world if we shut up about this and just wrote in our gratefulness journals instead?

I wonder if people who say things like this are just trying to be mindful of their unearned blessings or if they are elitist assholes who just want the serfs to pipe the fuck down and gratefully accept whatever noblesse oblige gets tossed their way.

#OWS

2011-10-07T14:11:00.004-04:00

The MMM is hard at work taking the #OWS protesters to task for not having a thoroughly vetted solution mapped out to solve the problem of oligarchic capitalism within the context of a dysfunctioning democracy after just 2 weeks of unamplified dialogue and sleeping under tarps. Oh what a silly movement! And some of them don't even thoroughly understand the banking system! How can we take the dirty hippies seriously if they don’t have a Romney-esque 150 point plan to save America by tweeking the extreme periphery of our FUBAR system? Truth is, the majority of folks involved in social movements that have successfully fought for libertas and a fair shake in this country have not grasped the full panoply of the policy implications of their advocacy. Hi-dee-ho! That's not what social movements do, asscracks.

Did civil war combatants take to the killing fields because they felt passionately about the disagreements between the northern mercantilists and the land barons of the agricultural south regarding taxation? Were the mine workers in the 1890's (who successfully rallied around the simple idea of "they shouldn't be allowed to kill us if we strike for something better than starvation wages and imminently life imperiling conditions") self-conscious about not demonstrating a through understanding of the minutea of industrialists concerns related to coal production? Nope. What the MMM is asking #occupywallstreet to do in order to become "legitimate" is to abandon their wide open mesa of concern regarding the income and justice inequality effects of the corporate capture of government and instead to dive into a technocratic wonk-fest that will both bore us to tears and alienate ¾ of their field i.e., to be taken seriously by the Serious Class aka the groveling minions of the going concern, #OWS must cease to be a social movement and adopt the tao of divisive micro-concerns that has all but paralyzed modern advocacy.

By not taking a standardized and iron clad position and meekly offering ameliorative recommendations to and through the staus quo, #OWS is making 2 pretty radical statements: 1. the current system cannot supply solutions and 2. solidarity will be maintained among all worthy causes. #OWS is offering UNITY against the relatively scant number of dickheads steering us towards oblivion in the interest of more OF the same FOR the same by insisting, thus far, on continuing to exist loosely under the big tent of THE TRUTH: the vast majority of Americans are being poorly served by corporate fascism.

You can't run a society on something this simple but you sure as shit can build a movement around it.

Excerpts from Cameron’s speech, with competing narrative and snark added.

2011-09-05T16:21:00.005-04:00

(The bold is me.)

With permission, Mr Speaker, I would like to make a Statement on Libya.

When we met here on that Friday in March, Qadhafi’s tanks bore down on Benghazi. His air force had already begun strikes against his people there. And his army had smashed through Zawiyah with grave loss of life. (60 people were killed in Zawiyah. For perspective, Assad has murdered about 2,500 people in Syria and 29,000 children have starved to death in Somalia over the same time period)

Qadhafi had vowed to hunt down his people like rats, using the full might of his armed forces, backed up by mercenaries (Such an icky word for “guys the government paid to fight”. We pay Blackwater to do bad things but we call them private contractors. This is especially tasteless given how, as we speak, The Libyan Opposition is now imprisoning/beating/murdering all the dark skinned people it can find under the guise of fighting mercenaries.)

Britain could not stand by as Qadhafi slaughtered his people. (Inexplicably happy to stand by while Assad does it though) Nor could we allow a failed pariah state festering on Europe’s southern border, with the potential to threaten our own security. (Pakistan is all “fuck you, bitch!”)

The Libyan Opposition (a lose affiliation of folks with unknown allegiances most assuredly simmering with latent ethnic and tribal conflicts) and the Arab League (the guys that financed 9/11) both called for NATO to protect the civilian population. So together with the US and France, we secured agreement for UN Security Council Resolutions 1970 and 1973. And with this clear legal mandate, this House voted by a majority of 544 in favour of military action. (Resolution 1973 demanded a ceasefire and authorized the international community to establish a no-fly zone and to use all means necessary short of foreign occupation to protect civilians. Resolution 1970 condemned the use of lethal force by Gaddafi against protesters and imposed a series of international sanctions. That’s it. Everything that happened/happens after that is outside this legal mandate)

Today the Libyan people have taken their country back. (with the help of US and British logisticians, security advisers, forward air controllers, intelligence operatives, damage assessment and information from the CIA and other U.S. intelligence gleaned from their previous work with the Qadhafi government on counter terrorism *cough-rendition and torture-cough*. But other than that, it was all them.)

…This has been (the Libyan People’s) revolution and none of it would have happened without them (They did indeed provide a lovely pretext for an action we’ve been wanting to take for the longest time) Ordinary Libyans from all walks of life came together and rose up against Qadhafi. From the villages of the Nafusa mountains to the tower blocks of Misurata, the alleyways of Zawiyah and the streets of Benghazi, the Libyan people fought with incredible courage. (I just threw up in my mouth)

Many paid with their lives. Others have been seriously injured. And the struggle is not over. (There are black African “mercenaries” to hunt down, loyalists to ferret out and kill, old ethnic and tribal conflicts need to be played out to say nothing of sipping sweet crude oil out of Qadhafi’s yellow hat)

They still face forces loyal to a dictator who last week threatened to turn Libya “into a Hell.” (Though we told you 2 weeks ago that he was a gonner, toast, outta there, he can still do this…somehow...I guess.)

And the long work of building a new Libya is just beginning. But what is clear is that the future of Libya belongs to its people (well, it belongs to our business interests first, then by proxy to the people). The task of the international community now is to support them as they build that future (as we decide what shape we want Libya to take and they, hopefully, act grateful long enough for the public to lose interest) That means helping to finish the job – ensuring security, helping to address the immediate humanitarian needs (we blew up a lot of their stuff!) and supporting the Libyan people as they lead the longer-term process of reconstruction and political transition. Let me address each in turn.

First, finishing the job. (Yes! First, do everything, then move on to #2)

Britain has been at the forefront of the military operation to protect the Libyan people. (and seriously, we looked at Q and said, we can do better than this) Our planes and attack helicopters have made 2,400 sorties across Libya carrying out one fifth of all NATO airstrikes, against some 900 targets in Qadhafi’s war machine. (Ha! “War Machine” This includes the electrical grid, FYI. Aka the “Civilization Machine”)

…The National Transitional Council has been working to negotiate a peaceful outcome. But their leaders have explicitly requested that NATO continues its operations to protect civilians until that is achieved. (They don’t have any guns, planes or expertise of their own after all)

Over the weekend RAF Tornados struck eight military command and control installations South-West of Waddan and nine weapons and ammunition stores near Sirte. For as long as Qadhafi remains at large, the safety and security of the Libyan people remains under threat. (Hell-Fucking-Lo, those are Libyan people too, Mr. Cameron!)

So let me be clear. (Oh dear god, not you, too with the ‘let me be clear’ shit.)

We are ready to extend the NATO mandate for as long as is necessary. Second, we will support the Libyan people in bringing Qadhafi to justice. Mr Speaker, this is a man whose crimes are becoming ever more apparent every day (just like Dick Cheney!) and who is wanted by the International Criminal Court.

There must be no bolt-hole; no pampered hiding place from justice. (Yeah, Saddam got a fucking sweet bolt hole, let’s not let that happen again. Literally, we found him in a hole, ‘member?) He must face the consequences of his actions, under international and Libyan law. (This is Cameron trying not to have a ‘burial at sea’ problem. Cue the scathing side eye from President Obama)

… The police are returning to the streets. And the Council leaders have been clear and consistent in cautioning against disorder and against reprisals. (Oh no! Not “consistent cautioning” What’s next? The “comfortable chair”?)

Mr Speaker, Libya is a country of 6.5 million people. It’s one of the richest in Africa. Its proven oil reserves are the ninth largest in the world and in relation to their GDP, bigger than Saudi Arabia. (Cameron takes a break to fap a bit here)

Libya is fully capable of paying for its own reconstruction. Of course there is a role for foreign advice, help and support but we don’t want to see an army of foreign consultants driving around in four by fours giving the impression this is something being done to the Libyans, rather than done by them. (No, giving that IMPRESSION would be bad)

What the Libyans need above all is their frozen assets back. (so they can pay you to rebuild their stuff and invest in your projects)

… And for their part, we expect the new Libyan authorities to meet their pledge of ensuring transparent and accountable financial systems. (Hahahahahahahahaha! Weeeeeeeeeeeee!)

Next, political transition. Some people warned – as Qadhafi himself did – that the Libyan people could not be trusted with freedom; that without Qadhafi there would be chaos. (he was probably right about that)

What is emerging now, despite years of repression, and the trauma of recent months, is immensely impressive. Enormous difficulties lie ahead but the Libyan people are showing the world their resilience and spirit. (It’s been 2 weeks and they are still fighting so lets’ hold off with the freeze frame thumbs up CHiPs moment, k?)
In a far-reaching Roadmap and Constitutional Declaration the new authorities have set out a clear vision and process for a new democratic Libya. (We wrote this)

This is not being imposed from above; it is being shaped by the Libyan people. (No it isn’t)

And Libya’s new leaders are clear about the sort of Libya they want. (No they aren’t)

At the Paris Summit, Chairman Abdul- Jalil spoke of his determination to build a society of tolerance and forgiveness, with respect for the rule of law. (Biblical law, buzinga!)

A national conference will bring together all the tribes, civil society, men and women, from east and west, united to shape the political transition. (and they will get in arguments and go home to plan how to kill each other)
And they are planning for a new constitution and elections within 20 months. (not 19, not 21. I had no idea nation building was such a precise science.)

LEGACY (again, 2 weeks, Dude. Here you are sitting on your horse and the cart is like 2 towns over already)

Our relationship with the new Libya must of course deal with a series of problems from the past…It was because of accusations (also mountains of documentation) of complicity by the British Security Services in the mistreatment of detainees overseas, including rendition, that I took steps last July to sort this whole problem out...My concern throughout has been to deal with these accusations of malpractice (I guess you could call contracting out torture and murder malpractice) as to enable the Security Services to get on with the vital work they do. And because they can not speak for themselves, let me put on record once against our enormous gratitude for all they do to keep our country safe.

…On Syria, Britain will continue to lead the argument for a UN resolution to build on the EU’s oil embargo which is now in place. The message to President Assad must be clear: he has lost all legitimacy and can no longer claim to lead Syria. The violence must end. And he must step aside for the good of his country and his people. (at some point this needs to happen, maybe in 20 months when Libya is “Finished” or when Syria finds more oil, eh?)

Mr Speaker, it is the Libyan people who have liberated Libya. (This is a blatant misrepresentation of the facts)

There was no foreign occupying army. (You know they have an extremely narrow legal definition of this that they keep under their pillow at night)

This has been a Libyan-led process, assisted by the international community (a Libyan pretext was provided and we then took it over).

Libyans never wanted to have foreign troops on the ground (the ones that wanted Qadhafi out certainly did)

This was our view too, along with the Arab League and the rest of the international community. It was absolutely right. Many cynics proclaimed stalemate and asserted that Qadhafi would never be defeated. The Libyan people proved them wrong. (No one ever said that a NATO coalition led by the US and UK could not defeat Qadhafi. No one. Ever.)

It was a unique set of circumstances and not something that we can or wish to repeat all over the world. But I have never accepted the argument that because you can't do everything, you shouldn’t do anything. Mr Speaker, removing Qadhafi from power was a major achievement. (Didn’t you just say that wasn’t the point? Regime change was just a happy accident? Yes. And I am very, very tall)

Although the work is not yet done (Qadhafi is still out there after all, rooting around for a bolt hole), the Libyan people can be proud of what they have achieved and we can be proud of what we have done to help them (…do something they never would have been able to do on their own without a prolonged and painful period of civil war that might have ended with a non-friendly government in place somewhere that has oil that we need).

"After all, I earned it"

2011-08-29T13:17:00.003-04:00

Dear Generalized CEO of a major corporation/bank that is tired of being a "Water Carrier",

No one “earns” the kind of compensation assholes like you get. Your compensation is determined by a dysfunctional corporate culture that is suicidally short sighted and so gluttonous it can’t see its own dick. You make what you make because you’ve bought the system and contorted it to allow you to extract ignoble volumes of value. Your ridiculous compensation is determined by a business model that belittles when it doesn’t flat out ignore 50% of the production equation >> LABOR. Where would you and your Übermensch business savvy be without labor? Where would your great big, strong smart guy ideas go to die without the labor to bring them to fruition? Keep giving yourself all the profits, keep depriving labor of their fair share, let wages slide further and create a libertarian dystopia where no one can afford to buy any of the stuff you make and where the cogs in the great wheel of your omniscient machina get so dumb they can’t work the buttons on the machines they can’t assemble, never mind design or build. Now I know you don’t give a shit because you’ll just move your business to a country that educates its workforce and sell your wares somewhere that pays its citizens decent wages. That’s what unapologetic parasites do, after-all, suck off the benefits of the investments of others until your Friedman Plague kills the new host as well, all while using your media myth machine to perpetuate the idea that you actually DO anything, that you actually PRODUCE anything, that you are not societal dead weight. Sorry to tell you, you self-inflated, completely replaceable, immoral piece of shit, but you just aren’t 343 times more productive than your workers. Sure you can go to right clubs and the right galas, wank the right people and effectively circle your glittering wagons around the ill got gains of the past 30 years. You’ve got that going for you but that isn’t real, your highness. You and all your cronies are a bunch of delusional, truly useless people whom, once set outside the Faberge egg of your coddled existence and legislated privilege would curse the divine for the unfairness of it all and probably piss yourself. I hope your secretary; you know the one pays a higher marginal tax rate than you do; poisons your coffee.

Best,

RadicalSAHM

Bank of America wets its beak

2011-08-23T16:10:00.003-04:00

A friend just told me that Bank of America is charging a 3% transaction fee on donations to the UN World Food Program from Somalia famine relief. Here is the ESL meets legalese bullshit they sent to him when he inquired:

“Thank you for your inquiry dated August 22, 2011 regarding the foreign transaction fee assessed on your Upromise World MasterCard. We are happy to assist you. We definitely understand your concern regarding the $1.20 foreign transaction fee assessed on your account on August 12, 2011 for the transaction processed through UNWORLDFOODPROGRAM, Great Britain. Allow us to inform you that the international transaction fee is the 3% of the transaction. This fee is initiated by transactions made in a foreign currency and any transactions made in U.S. dollars if the transaction is made or processed outside of the United States.”

I wonder how much in total thus far these shitheads have managed to cream off the top of funds that are destined for starving people. There is a notification at the very bottom of the donation page at UNWFP that states: “Please note that donations to WFP may be subject to cross border fees, as our gifts are processed by a UK-based bank. These fees may be implemented by your credit card company or bank and are not charged by WFP.” But this language is not part of the reading required to make the donation as it is at the very bottom of the page as the last item in a 5 item list that appears UNDER/AFTER the submit button.

Regardless of whether this is legally legit, it is morally repugnant that an American Bank is wetting its beak vis a vis transactions meant for desperately hungry people. How about donating that 3% fee to the cause, jackasses. Just add this to the list of reasons to join a local credit union, folks.

Sweet

2011-08-23T09:52:00.002-04:00

Here’s the thing about Libya, why we so desperately needed to get in there and shower the Qaddafi regime with our humanitarian intervention, why the President unilaterally declared war without the consent of congress and why congress let him and why every jerk-off mouthpiece in MMM bought in…Sweet crude oil.

Now, before you roll your eyes and say word fucking one about supporting the freedom seeking peoples of Libya, I have one word for you: Syria. The government of Syria has been mowing down its peaceful protesters for months and the President just got around to formally officially quasi-asking Assad to step down yesterday. Syria haz oil?

Not only does Libya have oil, but they have a grade of sweet crude oil that is so low in sulfur that you only have to pass through a cheese cloth and then put it straight into a delivery truck. It doesn’t take a very big brain to see that though they supposedly do not have a lot of oil (and those oil reserve figures are all random hopeful moments anyway, like Saudi is going to admit “duuuuude, keg is killed”) the oil is incredibly valuable. In D.C. right now, there is a major protest happening regarding Canadian tar sands oil. Tar sands oil. Desperate motherfuckers in Canada are plowing up carbon sequestering boreal forest to expose the sticky sand underneath so that they can boil it to extract the bitumen that is so sour and shitty that I you can’t even call it comparable to conventional oil until after a, like, 400 stage refining process. This stuff is twice as polluting as conventional oil and its production alone is set to dump an amount of greenhouse gases equivalent to the total GHG output of the entire nation of Denmark by 2015. These are the lengths to which supposedly sane people are going to produce liquid fuels to pour into the gaping, howling maw of global demand. Yet we are supposed to be reticent to suspect that our government didn’t clap its little girly hands with jump with glee the moment 4 guys in a bar in Libya (3 of which work for the CIA) decided to start making trouble for K-Daffy. Consider how long it took to go from the first protests in Libya to NATO fireworks: One month. This was a plan waiting for a suitable pretext almost as obvious as when GWB pulled the completed Patriot Act out of his magic cowboy hat 2 weeks after 9/11.

Can we all please pull our heads out of our arses and start rationally assessing geopolitical machinations within the context of peak oil? Our economic growth has been predicated upon cheap fossil fuels and these fuels are running low, running sour and running in places we can’t reach without making the whole endeavor blatantly uneconomic. We aren’t going to run this show on goddamn algae; this is why we are balls deep in the Middle East. Frizz head’s ouster (should it turn out that he has in fact been ousted) may well pan out to be a victory for democracy in Libya and this is just super and we can warm our toes by this ancillary effect but it does not alter the fundamental objective or nature of the mission one iota. We committed ourselves to an illegal war and spent a billion dollars opportunistically engaging in pile-on regime change in a sovereign nation in the hopes of securing access to its oil resources. (And it appears a butt-load of gold, too.)

Who you calling a Terrorist?

2011-08-18T17:00:00.001-04:00

To be published in the September 2011 issue of Vermont Commons, a print journal and online forum for exploring the idea of Vermont independence – political, economic, social, and spiritual. http://www.vtcommons.org/

Listening to National Propaganda Radio in the early hours after the Oslo attacks, I was less than shocked to hear that 3 out of the 3 explanations offered for the attacks were Islamic Terrorism™. I posted to FB: “Maybe it wasn't the Ay-rabs in Oslo, y’all? This goes beyond not keeping it in your pants. You folks just left the house with no pants this morning.” Turns out, all it took to get the “All Al Qaeda, All the time” meme circulating was a single claim by a single man that a hitherto unknown member of a hitherto unknown Jihadist group had claimed responsibility for the attack. That was sufficiently proof-like for every major American news agency to report that this was an act of Islamic terror.

That the media mistook their responsibility to wait for facts rather than yelping “first!” and vomiting groundless supposition all over the interwebs in a mad rush to pantless morning meeting isn’t really surprising or interesting. What is truly fascinating is watching them all attempt to walk back their premature, heh hem, issuances and desperately attempt to rebrand this story as ‘THE NOT TERRORISMS” now that the bad guy is a “white, Christian, conservative, gun-owning, patriotic small businessman opposed to socialism, immigration policy and Muslims”. Man ‘o Manischewitz, it IS hard out there for pimp when what you are pimpin’ is the deeply cynical and purposeful idea that acts of terrorism can only be committed by Muslims. Mark my words (go ahead, mark em, I’ll wait); Anders Behring Breivik will be called an extremist and dismissed as an aberration because if we call a right wing extremist a Terrorist, a dozen popular bloggers, another dozen mainstream political organizations and half of the Republican candidates for president will have to be either put under surveillance or arrested. The MMM can’t call all acts of violence motivated by ideology with the intention to intimidate and cajole Terrorism when the heart and soul of half our political duopoly thinks these tactics are not just fine and dandy but positively righteous; watering the tree of Liberty and all that Jeffersonian high-and-mighty-just-don’t-tell-me-I-can’t-own-people crap. Yeah, only Muslims can be Terrorists and we aren’t at war in Libya because we don’t have “boots on the ground” and we aren’t at war in Pakistan or Yemen or Somalia because we only kill people there with drones. Speaking of Somalia, it’s worth noting the conspicuous lack of calls for “humanitarian intervention” in Somalia beyond sending processed vegetable protein rations. I guess this makes sense because, let’s be honest, those people are used to dying of starvation and being left to shrivel in the sun. It’s like, part of their culture. ‘Sides, having the surviving population being permanently brain damaged by malnutrition will make our eventual takeover of African resources as easy as, well, knocking over a retard and taking their stuff. All in all, the level of semantic “management” taking place in government and the MMM these days must be making George Orwell do the Electric Slide, the Hustle and the Macarena in his grave.

Let’s suspend our “Sandy Browns Only” policy for the term Terrorist for a moment and consider this: how would the government and the media react if it were revealed that a nationwide group of extremely religious people had embarked upon a well documented and publicized campaign to seize control of all American institutions and impose a strict theocracy. What if this organization had infiltrated the highest levels of government and civil society? What if they started calling their churches “armories” and their followers “warriors”? What if they were called the New Apostolic Reformation and Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin were all followers? Man, it’s getting so crazy up in here that even the looks like a duck and sounds like a duck test aint’ no good anymore.

The take away here is that they must maintain the fiction of the ever threatening murderous “other”--and this other must not be white or Christian, that would be confusing-- and then attempt to tuck it into all the spaces that evil can fill—despite the fact that most terrorism is nationalistic and not Islamic. They must do this to position the Middle East as a fetid snake pit of hatred for small town parades, Nascar and booty shorts and Islam as a religion predominantly concerned with destroying Christianity (Christianity just did a “whatchu talkin’ about Willis” on that one. Eradicating all other faiths is their long game, after all. Gotta give ‘em props for having a long game). This serves the desired end of shaping the people that live on top of the oil as infinitely killable.

To mistake the objective of our ever expanding occupation of the Middle East as an effort to protect Americans from terrorism is, well, a big fucking mistake. We created the majority of the animosity in the Middle East by occupying their countries, killing civilians, leaving the breathers without water and power and police and courts and all the shit we are supposed to think they didn’t have under their former government and then herding whoever’s too scared to stay where they’re at into refugee camps. If I’ve said it once I’ve said it 100 times, put yourself in their shoes and tell me you wouldn’t be rightfully murderously angry, too. When they fight back we use this as rationale to hit them even harder. It’s perfectly pathological and it’s working.

We are occupying the Middle East to secure corporate access to the scarce and sour resources that lay under that hot dusty place; resources the whole world –but mostly China—needs to hold together every single link in the chain. Our political process is owned by corporate behemoths that are stultified and uncreative and completely vested in the perpetuation of the status quo and the corporate charter quarter to quarter short term thinking that actively prohibits any rational pragmatic planning for our long and bumpy ride down the supply curve. Our legislators are too in love with their business cards and most of our people are too blinded by cognitive dissonance and the belief that the ability to buy cheap crap = freedom to right the ship of state. If you can stomach it (I’m out) you can listen to politicians from both sides of the aisle blow smoke up your butt talking about incentivizing renewable energy (but only after incentivizing the living crap out of fossil fuels) and increasing fuel standards (by 2035! We’ll all be eating Haitian style dirt cookies by then! Hahaha!). Dick Cheney may be “more machine than man now, twisted and evil” but he isn’t stupid. The architects of our Middle East policy know what’s up; it’s too damn late for orderly transitions and anything they say to the contrary is pabulum intended to forestall the coming shit storm long enough for the cement to cool on their bunkers.

I am always happy to live in VT but never more so than when I contemplate the level of anger and social breakdown that will accompany the mass recognition of the end of the age of oil and what resources and opportunities we knowingly squandered during its death throes. I am convinced that there is more awareness per capita here in VT (along with artisan bakeries and breweries!) than anywhere else in our swollen, broken union and this awareness is going to serve us well. We won’t be wasting precious energy on the first few stages of grief and most of those stuck at stages 1 and 2 will never make it over the Green Mountains.

Deather

2011-05-31T08:32:00.006-04:00

To be published in the July issue of Vermont Commons, a print journal and online forum for exploring the idea of Vermont independence – political, economic, social, and spiritual. http://www.vtcommons.org/

You know how you watch CSI and you point and laugh and roll your eyes at the rank silliness of all the 72” LCD touch screens, rotating holograms, state of the art sample libraries and instant DNA analysis? Well, it appears lots of people think that shit is, like, totally real.

“I know DNA…and you cannot, repeat CANNOT take a tissue sample from a shot-in-the-noggin-dead-guy in a north central Pakistan special forces op, extract the DNA, prepare the DNA for assay, test the DNA, curate the raw DNA sequence data, assemble the reads or QC the genotype, compare the tested DNA to a reference, and make a positive identity determination…all in 12 hours…So, maybe they did get Osama. But there is no fucking way they had any genetic proof of it by the time they dumped the body over the side.”-some guy that knows DNA

I’m not saying he isn't dead but I am saying that the government is, like, totally lying about how he died and in so doing revealing a fundamental contempt for the justice system. The government’s behavior also confirms that the US Empire is currently running on very rich fuel mix of 3^rd grade level storytelling and cognitive dissonance on steroids.

The corporate media meme is that Bin Laden was executed without trial and his corpse “buried at sea” (no doubt this phrase is 2011’s “hiking the Appalachian trail”) because the U.S. would have been paralyzed by the media firestorm and controversy that a Bin Laden trial would have caused. Bull to the shit. There are only 2 reasons to execute a guy and then dump the body rather than bringing him to trial: either it isn’t him or your evidence is insufficient for a trial. Any other explanation constitutes a resounding condemnation of the capacity of the justice system to…well…adjudicate stuff. That we didn’t even forge ahead with the pretence of a trial under whose auspices we could have emerged at the very least united in the presumption that the executive branch does not have the right to unilaterally decide who is guilty and what constitutes justice. We could have maintained that this is for society as whole to decide and that that is what a fucking judiciary is FOR. That we didn’t jump in with both feet for even a sham trial speaks unfortunate volumes.

After WWII, the international community managed to have trials for high ranking Nazi's who outright murdered 6 million Jews (and gypsies, homosexuals, mentally ill and retarded people, basically anyone that would ruin the holiday picture) and were in large part responsible for a war that killed 60 million people in a dozen different countries. As we speak, Ratko Mladic is on his way to Hague for trial having been accused of almost unfathomable war crimes. Falling back on the non-reasoning of Bin Laden being some special strain of evil so pure and so virulent that his treatment defies adherence to the rule of law while at the same time somewhat eagerly assuming ourselves incapable of riding the tumultuous waves of a trial is not only an admission that we are a less viable nation with less viable institutions than we were 65 years ago but that Serbia is currently eating our law and order lunch. Since we are on the subject of Nazi’s, if I hear one more spokeswhore prattle on about how Bin laden was “the Hitler of our generation” I am going to hurl. Oh, how we love to fellate ourselves with the idea that BL and his dusty band of not so merry men actually constituted an existential threat to the United States. That a bunch of guys with box cutters and IED’s could topple America Fuck Yeah!™ is both insane and pathetic. More informative is how the American people can swallow the following logic: Bin Laden’s death is a glorious victory over the threat of Al Qaeda and proof of American supremacy AND Bin Laden’s death does not diminish the threat of Al Qaeda one schmear and actually ratchets up the stakes of the war on terror to the extent that congress (which has its thumb securely up its ass in respect to the patently illegal war we are waging in Libya) used concern over retribution as a rationale to extend the vile and injurious Patriot Act for four more years without fact finding or debate. We simply can’t be the greatest nation on earth if we shiver in the shade thrown by a few hundred very angry extremists yet this is exactly the contradictory rhetoric being delivered and accepted.

When it’s suggested that the government offer some “proof” of their purported exploits, they are quick to contend that the longer this stays in the news, the more inflamed Bin Laden’s acolytes could become. (And then they call you a “deather” and tell you to go share a padded cell with Orly Taitz.) Call me crazy, but methinks the carnival images of red faced chest thumping puerile glee sent round the world half a dozen times is going set aflame whatever righteous tinder is out there all on its own. This is an excuse to not present evidence which might reveal either a 10 year old time stamp on the video or unflattering details of his execution which do not fit the asinine semper fidelis narrative in play. The other reason we can’t be allowed to see these images or images like them is because doing so may disavow us of the notion that war isn’t a horrible, indiscriminate, brutal, wasteful, soul killing venture and that seeing the dead body of a mythical creature construct like Bin Laden might trigger the realization that he was just a man and not the potentially world ending cataclysm that the self-serving conflict industry has very deliberately made him out to be. This kind of Oprah brand light bulb moment would put a serious cramp in Lockheed Martin and Co.’s style as well as that of the resplendent epauletted birds of prey roosting in the overburdened upper branches of the military. I’m not a fan of reductionism but in this case, it is pretty simple: those who profit from war want war to continue, even if they have to tell you that you are both wet and dry at the same time to sell it. The War on Terror is just a means to an end; a deeply militarized surveillance state capable of global resource domination in the interest of the Corporatocracy.

Now, to the amateur hour storytelling. Bin Laden’s death was initially breathlessly described using the following details: He was living in a luxury million dollar mansion (bad Muslim!), he was both armed and actively engaged in a firefight with US forces when he was killed (suicide by SEAL!) and he used his wife as a human shield during the battle (pussy!). Amazingly, not only have ALL of these seemingly intentionally inflammatory details proved to be false but they also appear to have been gleaned from a 1990’s Steven Segal screen play. Seriously, the only missing detail was them bursting into the room just as BL was about sodomize the senator’s corn fed daughter and then having him beg piteously for his life while admitting to being a McDonalds loving, Laverne and Shirley watching hypocritical fraud. The pathology of this narrative cannot be overstated especially given that most people wouldn’t have cared if they had just marched up and shot him in the back. Or in his sleep. Or in a coma. The posturing artifice and myth of the war on terror is so delicate and the American people’s acceptance of even the most fatuous rationale is so complete that the truth is both not an option and unnecessary. For instance, only in a state of suspended disbelief powerful enough to watch Tron 2 can one simultaneously believe that the invasion of Afghanistan was worth the blood and treasure and that, in light of recent events, an invasion of Pakistan is not. For the love of Pete, they harbored him after the fact!

Lots of ink has been spilled celebrating the efficiency of Bin Laden’s assassination. We found the right house, only broke one helicopter and only killed the one guy we were aiming it. No dead villagers to dig the bullets out of this time! A nice neat job, booya! Well…if you ignore the fact that we have been at war in the region for more than 10 years, killed around a million people, created 10’s of millions of refugees, spent trillions of dollars leant by China (and thus put ourselves into a supplicant political position) and inflamed the hatred of untold numbers of people who rightly object to being murdered and occupied, it was neat. If you ignore the fact that we were the first big investor in Al Qaeda, that we financed, armed and trained the Mujahedeen back when they were being good little terrorists fighting the Soviets, it was neat. In short, if you ignore the fact that we created the terrorist threat and a blow back flavored petri agar to grow it in, then today is a proud day and you should run out and buy a t-shirt. Bonus points if it has an eagle on it.

Even if you wholeheartedly accept that Bin Laden was responsible for coordinating the 9-11 attack and that there had to be a non-proportional response i.e. “He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue” in Afghanistan, a study published in The Lancet, the only peer reviewed study of the Iraqi death count, found that as of 2006, more than 655,000 Iraqi deaths had been caused by the U.S. occupation of Iraq. An invasion and occupation of a country that did not attack us or even harbor those that did, that waited years for a suitable pretext and, in the end, was rationalized by intelligence we damn well knew to be false, has--as of 5 years ago mind you--killed 2.5% of Iraq’s population. Let’s dispel with some dubious logic: engaging in an activity with the end game being death and destruction (what “they” do) is morally indistinguishable from engaging in an activity where death and destruction are just profitable by-products (what “we” do). Take a moment to imagine how you would feel if a foreign army invaded our country, killed 7 million people and forced our President to hide in a hole before being hung. Riddle me this: if we feel entitled to kill more than a million people to ostensibly avenge 2,751 deaths, what are the families of those million innocent dead entitled to do to us? Unlike the conjured menace of one Middle Eastern boogey man, that is a thought that should keep you up at night.

Reflections on the Royal Wedding

2011-04-29T09:38:00.002-04:00

There is a part of me that accepts that to live is to suffer; that the nature of our human existence is inevitably colored by exploitation, random tragedy and farce precisely because it is a HUMAN existence. Human nature being what it is, a precariously balanced and bickering duality of avarice and generosity, tribalism and universalism and petty short term thinking and the ability to project forward beyond middling conflicts to the event horizon of the long term greater good, it is foolish to think our experience could be otherwise. Yet, it is impossible to look at human development and not see that we are, overall, better off than we once were both materially, politically and socially. There is less hunger in the world even though many are still hungry. There is less oppression in the world although many are still oppressed. And although our advanced democracies have abdicated their representative entitlements by choosing a path of dogmatic cognitive dissonance in servitude to their baser drives, the world is still more vulnerable to will of the people than it ever has been. So as I watch William and Kate play their part in the extended dance mix of The Sun Never Sets, though I am perfectly cognizant of the opportunity costs on display, I can’t help but feel that this kind of crap is exactly what people need. Tradition, process, the celebration of common experience and the expectation of a certain mode of adult comportment freshens the air of what often feels like a long slog through how-low-can-you-go. Noting that the British monarchy, versus the American monarchy, lives a life of service to and exposure to the people they draw their income from. From here forward, these folks will be sharing every birth, burp and fart with their people in a pretty transparent way. We, on the other hand, get the slithering Gollum-esgue Lloyd Blankfein, counting his gold in the dark reaches of Gringotts while playing the Ministry of Magic like a fucking flute. It feels like an opposite’s day version of “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” where one person gets to live in splendor for the greater good except that the greater good part got left out. Anyhoot, it’s a beautiful spring day for a pretty dress and lots of flowers and we’d certainly be better off with a parliamentary system so I shant eschew the fanfare but rather appreciate the role that tradition plays in keeping us from just clubbing our neighbor and taking his string trimmer.

Red Herrings

2011-03-24T14:26:00.005-04:00

To be published in the spring Issue of Vermont Commons, a print journal and online forum for exploring the idea of Vermont independence – political, economic, social, and spiritual. http://www.vtcommons.org/

There are several red herrings flopping wetly in our midst. Boss Kiss is trying to sell a doozy with his admonition that “no one can be ruled out” as a partner in fighting climate change in Burlington. The Mayor insists we must pursue partnerships even with the likes of Lockheed Martin, a corporation that has done more to both create climate change through the carbon belching military and to perpetuate climate change inaction via their membership in the Chamber of Commerce than any other entity short of one specifically created to serve those purposes. To say nothing of the effects on homegrown green industry to inviting a politically highly favored financial behemoth like Lockheed to the party, to anyone serious about addressing climate change, this partnership is the anti-matter of sense. But wait, there’s more! Bob Kiss and the City of Burlington have another big plan in the works: they plan to expand Burlington International Airport, hoping to double the number of cars and planes that travel hither and yon each day. Given that air travel is one of the bestest ways to create climate change, methinks the mayor may be beating the oft mentioned plowshares over his own head. But this isn’t about climate change because, for reals, tiny Burlington VT can’t do squat about world-wide climate change. Even if every man woman and child in Burlington were to stop producing carbon emissions, there would be no effect on climate change. Frustrating as it is, only concerted action by whole nations can ameliorate the unstoppable effects of climate change. In light of this unfortunate reality, framing the Lockheed Partnership as a responsible answer to climate change is so nonsensical it suggests the purposeful obfuscation of the real agenda. We can only retire to the fainting couch to speculate (money!) what Bob Kiss hopes to get from Lockheed in exchange (money!) for the massive green-washing benefits LM would extract from the arrangement (there is a great sucking sound coming from the general direction of Burlington Telecom!). Yet this fish is but a wee smelt in the wider sea of tantalizingly simple piscine rhetoric.

Another red herring on the ice of our national consciousness is the idea that we are, like, totally broke and must therefore give up all which separates us from the beasts of the forest. The winger elite tell us that we simply don’t have the money to keep all the frilly pretties we once held dear: jobs that pay well enough to support a family, a spot at the polls that isn’t crowded out by some lard ass corporation and an educational system that is more than an 12 years of industrialized torture by test. Yeah, we’re making the tough choices alright, at least in terms of non-military discretionary spending that makes up only 12% of our overall costs. More to the point, what other choices have we made that might have had some role in emptying the national coffers?

We choose to indulge the Military Industrial Congressional Complex in their dogged prosecution of a perpetual war strategy to the tune of at least $1.2 trillion a year. In the midst of the current shrink-that government-baby-down-to-a-drownable-size hysteria, Boeing just got the green light for a $35 billion modified 767 tanker project, a plane designed for the midair refueling of nuclear-armed bombers intended for use in retaliation to a Soviet first strike. Like the trillion dollar F-35 program, this is a War Games era military program that has slogged its way through years of “meh” and one rather spectacular takedown in 2005 that sent Boeing’s chief executive officer to federal prison, to triumphantly re-emerge re-branded as jobs program for Boeing’s hometown of Everett, Washington. Not a single sound bite was used to argue that the plane is actually necessary. It bears repeating that the military sucks at job creation. One Congressional study estimated that moving money from the Pentagon to state and local governments would create two jobs for every job eliminated. Another recent example from the MICC is the $2.5 billion allocated to the purchase of additional C-17 cargo planes in 2010. Neither the White House nor the Pentagon wanted these planes but Congress ordered them anyway! Now the C-17 itself, at cost of $45 billion for the initial run, replaced 2 perfectly serviceable transport planes, the 121 C-5 and the 265 C-144, so the unnecessary procurement of more C-17’s adds insult to injury.

We chose to allow the banking class to expropriate $13 trillion in wealth during the financial crisis that their pathological greed created. The financial industry doesn’t create wealth, it just shuffles claims on existing wealth so the fact that they now claim $13 trillion dollars they would not have had but for the bailout represents a simple transfer of wealth from the people to bankers. Imagine for second what the State of Vermont could have done with just the $13 billion funneled to Goldman Sachs to cover their exposure to AIG, to say nothing of the $500 billion in low interest emergency loans they received? Maybe with that kind of money we wouldn’t have the worst railroads in the entire country and we wouldn’t be contemplating wishing our mentally ill citizens good bye and good luck managing that schizophrenia on your own.

We choose to allow corporations to hide billions of dollars in income through tax avoidance constructs like unrepatirated profits, retained earnings and undistributed profits. The tax value of these legally hidden assets is estimated between $37 and $100 billion per year. We chose to extend the Bush tax cuts for those making more than $250,000 per year, a deal costing $40 billion in revenue this year alone. We did this while persecuting 2 wars bought on credit to the tune of $200 billion a year. We did this during a brutal recession that has at least 16% of the work force either unemployed or underemployed and doesn’t take into account those that have exhausted their benefits. It is important to put this already terrible number into the context of a labor participation rate of only 65%. There are fewer people in the labor force today than at any time since 1984 and we can’t employ almost 20% of them.

We go forward with these indefensible uses of the people’s wealth while concurrently making a show of fiscal responsibility by proposing to cut $1 billion from Headstart; a program that has proven to be the most cost effective way to combat disparities in educational achievement by addressing the problem of poverty and cultural disenfranchisement. We depict public sector workers as lazy, greedy, as “the haves” to the private sector “have nots” and most ridiculously as the root cause of our spittle inducing, faux financial malaise. This argument is even less credible than Newt Gingrich’s recent exoneration of his wandering penis as a direct function of his boundless love for America. We choose to give the most destructive, least productive, least deserving and richest among us a king’s ransom at our moment of greatest vulnerability and task those least able to give a drop more with making up the difference. It makes even a wide and dewy- eyed optimist like me wonder: Do Republicans want the government to fail?

The final herring and choice: we choose war in the land of the tribalist isolationist, whacka doddle dapper dandy under the pretext of defusing a humanitarian crisis. Newsflash: Congo has been in the grips of a humanitarian crisis since 1996 and 5 million people have been killed there so if we are really feeling bad about all the deadness happening in Libya, why aren’t we discussing action in Congo, or Ivory Coast or Detroit or Baltimore? Of course this is a flimsy ruse that Tom Ashbrook thought up to pump our empathy glands. The powers that be couldn’t give a shit about dead Libyans and won’t even acknowledge the growing pile of dead Bahrainians and Yemenis. Hell, we can hardly get it up for dead Americans these days unless they happen to be rich people caught up in the mother of all Darwin Awards ceremonies off the coast of Somalia.

Our willingness to consider an entanglement in another Middle Eastern civil war reeks of desperation as does the suggestion that we drain the strategic reserve to combat gas prices that have yet to hit $4 a gallon, a price that would be welcomed like a cool breeze on hot day in Europe. This is a back handed admission of the current paradigm’s inability to react rationally or responsibly as the world tips into a pick your poison sampler of resource decline that our elites cannot acknowledge without assenting to their own extinction. Enter the red herring: a device to ensure that confusion reigns, that manufactured bitterness divides and that reckoning is delayed long enough for the necessary changes to be made and the scene set for feudalism v2.0.

Bedtime Stories

2011-03-02T13:36:00.000-05:00

Originally published in Vermont Commons, a print journal and online forum for exploring the idea of Vermont independence – political, economic, social, and spiritual. http://www.vtcommons.org/

The response to the Tucson shootings by the main stream media and President Obama are as glaring a demonstration of exploitation and mass delusion in the service of preserving the anachronistic myth of America as you’ll find.

In the same week it was announced that our illegal invasion of Iraq has resulted in over a million casualties, our nation has spent millions of words canonizing 6 murdered Americans. When 10 children die every day from gun violence in our country, we spent a week engaged in masturbatory suffering over the death of just one child. What bon chance for the media that the littlest victim was a white middle class Christian child given that the other 9 children that died that day were most likely black, poor and didn’t have professional portraiture at the ready. How equally fortuitous that the shooter is bonkers! Far be it from the main stream media to call an attempted political assassination “political”.

Katie Couric and Co. fell over themselves putting on their big boy empathy pants in a rush to rise above what they consider inconsequential items like the virtual hit Sarah Palin put out on Gifford, Glenn Beck’s call to “put a bullet in their head” and Rush Limbaugh’s idea to keep one liberal alive in a zoo just to prove they once existed. The pantheon of the winger elite has been begging for bloodshed but the media cries “No political story here!” Just a magical 9-11 little girl, imbued with lots of magical soft focus flag waving, puddle jumping 9-11ishness.

As the mother of 2 children, who bless every day of my life and smell like warm baby powder biscuits, let me posit this question: 30,000 people die in the U.S. every year from gun violence so why have we decided to notice this child? It is largely because she has none of the “thought baggage” attached to a dead child in the ghetto or a child killed in a drug raid; stories of indigestible tragedy, a miasma of unsexy grey without 2 syllable villains and victims. Better to use this child cipher whom they can impose their agenda upon, using her as a vehicle to sink their rhetorical shots. Yet she was nothing more or less than a little girl and her death no more or less tragic than that of all the Middle Eastern little girls we’ve killed. The MSM’s opportunistic exploitation of this child coupled with the public’s eager willingness to get dragged down into a warm, good feeling place of inculpable pure grief is enough embarrass the hell out of any adults in the room.

Enter Obama’s Panglossian stroke fest of a speech. “We should be willing to challenge old assumptions in order to lessen the prospects of violence in the future.” Either Obama is only referring to the narrow category of violence aimed at middle class white people, or the mounting body count in the Middle East, our increasingly injurious prosecution of the drug war and our murder and torture of those suspected of thought crimes against the U.S. Empire aren’t acts of violence but of “guidance” or “tough love”. The U.S. produces 2/3 of all the weapons on earth and we dole out a great many as “foreign aid” so for Obama to opine to anyone about violence warrants an all time high score on the To Kill a Mockingbird “unmitigated temerity” scale. “Let us be as good as she thought we were”, he said, undoubtedly double-timing it back to the White House to halt the practices of indefinite detention, extraordinary rendition, domestic warrantless spying and the persecution of whistle blowers. Next up, no more blowing up suspicious goat herders by Predator joystick!

When Obama said, “we are better than this” he was wrong. We are worse than this rather trifling example of disrespect for human life because we kill at much greater scale, with our sanity in hand and with massive impunity. We kill to secure economic advantage for corporations and to protect the position of elites for as long as extend and pretend will allow. When Obama crooned, “She saw all this through the eyes of a child…I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it”, what he really wants is for us to have an imaginary democracy and to accept, with childlike unquestioning faith, the legitimacy of the institutions which are going to pretend to uphold it.

Our President took the fertile occasion of a mass murder to tell America a bedtime story, effectively stifling the impulse to contemplate the real American trajectory. He told us that contrary to how fundamentally divided we are, we are still “first and foremost…Americans” and despite one side of the aisle having deserted reality entirely and the other side being spineless sell-outs fiercely coveting the other side’s schwag, and both sides being innately incapable of challenging the status quo, we are still able to solve the paradigm crushing conundrums we face as one nation. This magical thinking, in addition to being immensely comforting, is a bald faced lie. Obama’s appeal to the diaphanous myth of our innately superior American-ness is necessitated by the ethical and functional bankruptcy of the American reality.

As the current arrangement collapses, Liberty, Freedom, Unity and Independence will rush in with enough irony to choke a horse: Liberty from the rule of law and public services, Freedom from pensions and employment and Unity in hunger and chaos. We raise moist eyes in hope to a media spectacle intended to prevent us from engaging in a painful reckoning: that we are ill prepared for the real Independence that our corporatized, centralized, stultified government has made inevitable.

The world as it is

2011-02-09T19:43:00.007-05:00

The dominant sentiment I am left with after the Burlington City Council meeting regarding Mayor Bob Kiss' agreement with Lockheed Martin is that we are having entirely the wrong conversation. Even if everyman woman and child in Burlington were to stop producing carbon emissions, there would be no effect on climate change. Even if the entire United States stopped producing carbon emission entirely, there would be very little effect on climate change. In fact, NO reduction in carbon emissions by any one nation will have a significant impact on climate change.

Let us spend a few moments in the world as it is versus the world we’d like to have and embrace reality. Unless we are talking about the US, China and India cutting emissions 80% within the next 5 years, climate change is not something that we can reasonably discuss fighting. Given the world as it is, climate change is inevitable both from a biological tipping point POV and from a geopolitical POV. The preventing-climate-change ship sailed 30 years ago. Climate change is something that we can only reasonably discuss dealing with, not preventing. The climate change issue is thus a red herring.

The only thing that Burlingtonians and by extension all Vermonters can do in the face of climate change is to first acknowledge its imminence and then prepare for some freaky ass weather and a level of global chaos that will undoubtedly manifest as massively percussive conflicts over non-fossil fuel resources like water and grain (wars over fossil fuel resources are already old news). Facing reality costs nothing so we can afford it.

Chasing after Lockheed Martin to help fund large scale wind and other energy projects is exactly the wrong direction to in head in to tackle our solvable problems here in VT. What we need are highly decentralized city/neighborhood scale power production plants that can provide power for us, not the NE grid. Yes, the massive projects that make financiers get wood may make great returns. Big fucking deal. Since when has it proved true that the interests of finance and the interests of people are copacetic? Ask our South American friends how the huge public infrastructure projects they “partnered” with the IMF and Bechtel to build turned out. The projects were over built, over financed and ended up privately owned after a desperation sale that left countries at the political mercy of the financiers who held their debt. It’s funny how the Big Time debt peddlers don’t present this to potential “partners” as an example of their work.

We would be significantly better off with 25% of the power we have today than with 0% of the power we have today. This is a potent insight that we should all contemplate. At this achievable level we will not have a/c but we will have a freezer, we will not have a dryer but we’ll have a washer and our kitchens will not be lit up like a surgical suite but we’ll have a light to read by at night. The reality of the future of energy is that there will be much less of it and it will be more expensive. This is what happens when the most efficient fuel known to man goes into steep decline in a world that didn’t prepare. A techno-narcissistic miracle will not be delivered in time and anyone who says it will is just buying themselves time to loot what’s left of the treasury.

We can only reject reality for so long. Hard times and hard weather are ahead. We can meet these challenges with an evil personified monkey on our back (in the corporate sense of person-hood, of course) or we can meet it on our own terms. These are the real choices we can reasonably discuss.

Planet Pentagon

2011-01-08T19:06:00.010-05:00

Take it from un-credentialed housewife, even a cursory examination of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Program reveals the Pentagon ignoring its own by-laws and brushing aside its own stated values in pursuit of an unstated and inconsonant goal. The continuation of the F-35 program, a program that is unnecessary, egregiously underperforming, over budget and behind schedule but none the less replete with an embarrassing level of fawning congressional support, is an obvious “tell” of institutional failure, where the singular interests of global corporations can no longer be served within the rule of law. The Nunn-McCurdy Amendment, a measure adopted by Congress in 1982 to curtail cost growth in American weapons procurement programs, provides an excellent framework for revealing the disparity between the official mission of the F-35 and the actual cause being advanced. Both the DOD appropriation system and the congressional oversight of that system are fatally compromised in favor of non-stop hand jobs for military contractors to the direct operational detriment of the men and woman in the military and at the ever increasing burden of tax payers.

Nunn-McCurdy requires, among other things, the cancellation of any defense program whose total cost grew by more than 25% over the original estimate unless the United States Secretary of Defense submits a detailed explanation certifying that the program is:

1. Essential to the national security because there is no suitable alternative of lesser cost available
2. Affordable in so far as new estimates of total program costs are reasonable
3. Accountable in so far as the management structure is adequate to control costs

The F-35 program has violated Nunn McCurdy twice. In 2005, DOD was able to convince Congress that although the program was really big and really messed up, they could fix it. I imagine there was much rueful head shaking and some pro forma chagrin before congress recertified the program. In 2010, DOD argued that the program was now HUGE and incredibly fucked up, but they could fix it and Congress re-certified. The difference being, in 2010 it was impossible for DOD to factually defend a single one of the assurances they offered to prevent the program from being cancelled on the spot as federal law required.
First, the F-35 program is not essential to national security because there are suitable alternatives of lesser cost available. The DOD/congressional meme dictates that our operational capacity depends entirely on this program so it is throw up your hands, the show must go on, too big to fail. This is unmitigated horseshit. With no meaningful flight testing to speak of, all F-35 capability currently resides exclusively in PowerPoint and a few DOD wet dreams so not only are there many viable alternatives but ALL the alternatives are thoroughly proven and much less expensive. A combination of the new F-16 and F-18 fighter jets, the moth balled A-10, the Gripen, the Eurofighter, the Super Hornet and cruise missiles can cover all the bases the F-35 promises to cover in some far off and misty technophilaic’s tomorrow. No one can argue that this program is essential except in so far as cancelling it and being forced to call a spade a $70 billion dollar Lockheed Martin R+D subsidy would be exceptionally embarrassing.

Secondly, new cost estimates are not reasonable. Initially, the projected cost of the F-35 was $35 million each. Today the projected cost is $155 million each. On what planet can a 450% increase in price (with serious performance concessions mind you) be labeled “reasonable”? Only on Planet Pentagon, where they can’t tell you who their contractors are, what their contractors are doing or if they’ve been paid once, twice or three times a lady! The Pentagon has been given a hall pass in respect to the Chief Financial Officers Act. This act requires audit readiness from all federal agencies and departments. The Pentagon has failed to meet the standard for 27 years running. (Having read a good many of their reports, I can posit that the use of impenetrable acronyms could account for a good deal of the confusion.) And before you reach for the “it is the nature of groundbreaking technological advances to have unknown costs” rationalization, let’s be clear that the reason DOD offered to explain the cost increases was that the initial estimates didn’t include the costs of machine tooling, construction materials or labor, items reasonably within the purview of even the dullest project manager. The real reason the price has gone up so exponentially is that the DOD knew what the price needed to be to sell the program and they simply and cynically and illegally provided that price knowing full well that once it was in the pipeline and once the money was flowing, it would likely never be cancelled. You know why they spread defense contracts around to every state? So every congressman will have the incentive to let these monsters keep rolling no matter the ultimate cost.

The spiraling cost over-runs will only be exacerbated in the near future as foreign buyers renege on their purchase agreements due to increasing price and extended production timelines. The F-35 is engaged in an “acquisition death spiral”: as fewer planes are built to spread costs across, each plane becomes more expensive until it prices itself out of the market entirely. Back in the day, Pentagon propaganda ministers were pimp walking their epaulets around town saying they’d be building between 3,000 and 5,000 of these planes. Today the number stands at just 2,400 with Norway, Denmark, Canada, Japan, The UK and Australia delaying their purchases and reducing their orders. The only foreign buyer that isn’t balking at the F-35 purchase is Israel. That is because we are giving them billions of dollars in military aid to buy them with and Lockheed itself is giving them $4 billion in domestic manufacturing guarantees. Wait, you didn’t think American manufacturers were going to make all these planes did you? Oy vey!

Third, management structure is not adequate to control costs. Just 5 months after congress re-certified the F-35 program in 2010, the Pentagon turned around and de-certified Lockheed Martin’s aircraft cost and schedule tracking system, i.e. their management structure for controlling costs. According to a Pentagon procurement director, the cost and schedule tracking system had been significantly deficient for 3 years so the Pentagon was fully aware that management structure was not adequate long before the Ashton Carter stood in front of congress with his pants afire and testified that it was.

I wonder what DOD will do at the inevitable 3^rd violation hearing? Protest being forced the pay Lockheed in goats, the only remaining viable US currency? Or maybe they’ll do a Glee-style mash-up of Slave-4-U and Wrapped around Your Finger. This would be about as relevant and as serious as what they presented and Congress accepted at the 2010 hearing.

Beyond Nunn-McCurdy, the most non-partisan government agency out there, the Government Accountability Office, sent up the impartial government agency equivalent of exploding rainbow sparkle flares just 5 months after re-certification (it must be the DOD’s belief that the outer limit of Congress’ attention span is 5 months), with a report chock full of statements suggesting that the plane is going to be so late and so minimally functional that in the absence of a rescission of the second law of thermodynamics, military leaders are going to have to make like the Ministry of Truth and engage in a robust campaign of recidivist history and mass hallucination regarding U.S. military capability. The GAO is also voicing concern about the small issue of the F-35’s design/build concurrency. In a bid to forestall the acquisition death spiral by actually meeting a production deadline, Lockheed Martin is building planes while still designing their major systems. This guarantees a first run of $155 million “mistake jets” which will require crazy expensive retrofits or just be junked entirely and sent to the western desert to be used for target practice. Additionally, the GAO is fretting the estimated $1 trillion total lifetime cost of the program, worrying it may prove unaffordable given the austerity storm looming on the US budget horizon.

Now seems like a good time to remind folks that the raison d’être of the F-35 program was greatly enhanced affordability relative to our current fleet. Current estimates (which will be revised substantially upwards in about 5 months, I figure) of the operation and support costs for the F-35 will be 1.5 times the cost of the aircraft it will replace. The most fundamental tenet of the program is lying in a savagely violated heap on the floor but no one can acknowledge it any more than a baseball player can grab at the hurt place when he gets hit by pitch.

In the absence of reality based justifications, the F-35 can be seen for what it is, Bernie Sanders: an effort to transfer wealth from tax payers to weapons contractors by a military-congressional conspiracy of rank deceit cloaked in a deeply cynical patriotic fog. The desertion of the rule of law and fact based decision making renders any appeal through the democratic process both frustrating and ultimately useless. This elite game of pin the tail on the moving target is mirrored by many of our dominant institutions as they labor to sustain their legitimacy and their power. Like bank stress tests, healthcare reform and airport security, this is stagecraft aimed at upholding the illusion for as long as possible while the mechanisms of disaster capitalism bleed the public dry.

In the Palin Era, there will be no fact based reckoning allowed or, let’s get real, even suggested. But if our governing elites were to allow such a reckoning on the F-35 or any of the other shit end of the Ponzi scheme boondoggles that are in play, a terrifying truth would be revealed: Oligarchic capitalism and the debt economy, escorted by the four horsemen of peak oil, the murder of American manufacturing, the financialization of the economy, and the immaturity, nescience and apathy of the American people, have popped their last bottle of bubbly. Despite the U.S Empire’s grotesque efforts to resuscitate it, the centralized democratic infinite growth paradigm is dead and the new boss in town is unelected. It is the Pentagon, securely tethered on Lockheed Martin and Co.’s short leash and accountable to none other.

Boondoggle

2010-10-12T10:05:00.001-04:00

This is a bit I wrote for my local paper. I could have said much more but there is a 650 word limit.

The F-35 program has national security implications that reach far beyond local concerns.

As an issue of resource allocation, the hugely expensive F-35 program jeopardizes air defense capability as it absorbs more and more of DOD appropriations. Any rational person looking forward can anticipate those allocations shrinking while the costs of the F-35 will continue to rise. We currently have the smallest, oldest and yet most expensive military fleet since WWII. The further allocation of vast resources to a program that is experiencing massive failures in both the budgetary and testing realms at the real near term detriment of our air capability is suicidal.

The F-35 was initially priced at $50 million. The price now stands at $120 million with 10 years left in the development cycle. This enormous increase can be explained by the need to build significant variations on the basic platform for the different services that will be using the plane. This is ironic when you understand the F-35 was initially pitched as a cost saver due entirely to the assumption that the same plane could be used in all services with only minor alterations. The reality is the different services cannot be adequately served with a single fighter. Trying to strap on the functionality each service requires late in the development cycle not only produces a plane with mediocre functionality but that mediocre functionality comes at a much higher price.

The F-35 program has twice violated the Nunn-McCurdy Act that "calls for the termination of programs whose total cost grew by more than 25% over the original estimate, unless the United States Secretary of Defense submits a detailed explanation certifying that the program is essential to the national security, that no suitable alternative of lesser cost is available, that new estimates of total program costs are reasonable, and that the management structure is adequate to control costs." Although DOD officials profess the F-35 program meets the standard, none of this is true. Existing specialized planes with minor alterations can run all the ANG missions the USAF says it needs the F-35 for and other forces would do quite well with the other proven and less expensive fighters. Additionally, the pentagon recently withdrew certification of Lockheed Martin’s system of tracking aircraft costs and schedules because of “persistent deficiencies” that have stood uncorrected for three years. How this indicates their confidence in program costing estimates and management is mystifying.

The plane is currently in an unprecedented level of concurrency, with production and testing occurring at the same time. This concurrency guarantees the first planes off the will be duds. The implications for battle readiness are obvious. What isn’t obvious is the effect cost and performance uncertainty will have on the volume of international sales. The viability of the whole program rests upon selling a certain number of planes.

Due to climbing costs and technology problems, many foreign buyers (Israel, Norway, Denmark, Canada, Japan, and Australia) are delaying their decisions about purchasing the F-35. That they are not reneging on their agreement to buy has more to do with the lucrative F-35 production contracts only available to partner (buyer)nations than their enthusiasm for the F-35. Partner nation incentives outsource a large percentage of F-35 component manufacturing. This incentive program effectively neuters any praise worthy domestic job creation effects. Additionally, offset deals with nations like Israel effectively leave the US taxpayer buying the plane for the partner nation.

Not only is the “essential” nature of the F-35 program indefensible, its flagrant cost and development over-runs require it be condemned as an example of rewarding failure: heaping copious rewards upon entities which at best fail to produce what they’ve promised and at worst cynically exaggerate their claims of what can be done in order to secure funding and their place in the continuum of Too Big To Fail.

The greatest danger to our national security is our indebtedness, not our enemies. With two wars charged to our Chinese credit card and programs like the F-35 sucking the life out of our military capabilities, we continue to enable the political chess game of DOD decision making that is both feckless and reckless at our peril.

In our name

2010-10-12T10:03:00.002-04:00

I like Bill McKibben a lot. He’s earnest, honest and his prognostications are appropriately dire. He advocates for a voluntary paradigm shift in energy use, a shift with infinite implications to our way of life that is undeniably necessary if we are to avoid a cataclysmic both near and distant social and climate future. He’s right but I can’t help but feel like the guy is hopelessly naïve. I can’t help but feel that Bill McKibben is missing the most basic salient point: that the human institutions to whom we have delegated the management of our lives are inherently suicidal. Not only will these institutions fail to act to effect their own long term survival and ours by extension, but in full awareness, they will choose to barrel ahead and hasten their end with blatant and willful acts of self harm. They will do this to sustain what we believe to be our divinely given entitlement to a world that is materially impossible for all but a mere fraction of our population even if supported by the harshest totalitarian political system. More germanely, however, they will do this because it is the essential nature of large bureaucracies to be sclerotic, uncreative and vested in the maintenance of their dominance even as cascading events show their flaws to be fatal. The strongest example of institutional suicidal intent is in the area of energy.

Let me preface this discussion. We recently witnessed the biggest unintentional release of oil in world history; a decades- deep despoiling of an entire region of our country. An event that revealed a degree of regulatory capture, greed-on-speed and fundamental incompetence that contradicts everything we are taught to believe about the Übermensch of capitalism and industry. To no one’s great surprise, the liable corporation lied about the size of the spill, using toxic dispersants to sink and hide the oil. We must all be visual learners because deprived of the apparently requisite images of oil soaked beaches and birds, we seemed to lose our ability to appreciate that a very bad thing was in process. The government backed BP’s scam until the nearly hysterical cries of foul from the scientific community could no longer be stifled. However, by the time the truth of the matter was revealed, the corporate-government cabal had successfully exploited our short attention span by managing the flow of information to effectively dissipate outrage. Spill fatigue had set in (probably right next to war fatigue and financial crisis fatigue. Damn couch is getting crowded!) and we looked to authorities with moist eyes, just wanting to be told it was going to be ok. Being incapable of keeping it in their pants, the cabal happily obliged just a week after the deluge from the ruptured area was finally plugged. After 200,000,000 million gallons of oil and 2 million gallons of dispersant was dumped into the gulf, the government said “mother nature has done her job”, most of the oil was gone and we should go back to eating gulf seafood. They basically said “we haz the magiks!” and the president went swimming. Oh tra la la la la! Have some shrimp for fuck’s sake! It passes the smell test!

So where do we go from here? We can dial back our energy use and invest heavily in sustainable technology at the couldn’t be more direct expensive of the fossil fuel industry profits, jobs and the entire growth paradigm OR can we keep doin’ what we’re doin’ and go to any length, no matter how batshit insane, to get the oil we’ll need to make the attempt. It is worth noting that we cannot succeed in this endeavor. At best we have 10 years before there is so little oil left that we can afford to extract and use that its existence is not pragmatically important. The status quo is not an option. Let’s look at what we are doing and use this information to divine which way we are gonna go.

Japan is planning to begin extracting methane hydrate from frozen under sea beds where it exists in a slush-like life form due to a combination of low temperature and high pressure. Japan currently has to import almost all its energy so the energy autonomy that these resources may provide is very exciting for them. What isn’t so exciting to contemplate is that the sensitive area they are planning to mine with experimental technology could, in a bad case scenario, accidentally release enough methane to snuff out all life on earth. The probable case scenario is that enough methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, will be unintentionally released to get the global warming party started properly.

Next we have mountain top coal removal. Coal companies do away with the “overburden” on a mountain top buy pushing it into the surrounding valley and then they blow up the mountain, sift out the coal and wash it with fresh water mixed with toxic chemicals. They use the solid debris from the coal extraction to dam up the valley and they pour the coal slurry, now chock full of heavy metals, into the unlined area. One of Massey’s slurry lakes holds 9 billion gallons of the stuff. The coal and rock dust from the explosions pollute the air, the slurry pollutes the ground water, the bare mountain tops and the compact detritus in the valleys exacerbates flash flooding and sometimes the dams just flat out fail and the super toxic slurry buries homes and kills off all life in the streams and rivers it gets into.

In their quest to satisfy the global thirst for gold, cobalt, tellurium, nickel, copper and silver, the Chinese and the Canadians are heading to the sea floor to begin under sea mining. This is the underwater equivalent of mountain top coal removal. They blow up the hydrothermal vents where these metals are found, sift out the metals and then dump the detritus back into the ocean where it will smother out all life. They aren’t even disputing that this will be the effect of the activity. Wiping out all life on earth is much more efficiently done when you start at the bottom of the food chain, I’ll give ‘em that.

Here in the US, we are now actively using a technique called Hydraulic Fracturing to extract natural gas in 34 states. Fracking involves injecting millions of gallons of fresh water mixed with 596 chemicals including many known carcinogens 8,000 feet into the earth where it literally causes the earth to fracture, releasing pockets of natural gas. Part of the fracking fluid stays in the rock and inevitably migrates into the water table. The remaining fluid returns to the surface where it is now considered toxic waste. It is stored in open pits, often unlined open pits, and contains barium, cadmium, strontium, methane, ethane and propane gas. This too leaks back into the ground water. The people who live near these operations can often set their well water on fire. Due to a successful lobbying campaign by the nattie gas industry, the hydraulic fracking process is exempt from the protections of the clean water act so the EPA cannot play a role in establishing its safety. Gas companies are currently planning to mine extensively in the area of the NY and PA watershed which is the sole supply of drinking water to 15 million people.

Canada is currently hard at work refining tar sands. This process requires scraping away the top layers of the earth; that is all the trees, all the plants, and all the soil (more pesky “overburden”) in order to access the tar soaked sandy layers beneath. The tar sands are then mixed with fresh water (it takes 4 barrels of fresh water to produce one barrel of synthetic crude oil from bituminous sand) that is heated by natural gas as well as mixed with toxic solvents. The effluent of this process is a HAZMAT which is stored in, you guessed it, open pits. Canadian oil production produces more greenhouse gases than all Canadian transportation combined.

Machinations like this are how our institutions are responding to the energy crisis and the energy crisis underlies every other crisis we’ve got. We can hoist a hopeful torch for our virtue as a species but reality currently blindingly reflects the best of what you can expect when huge institutional bureaucracies are left in charge of the henhouse: short sighted self sustenance taking the path of least resistance.

Institutional inertia is contingent upon human complicity. We are complicit in the suicidal machinations of our institutions when we accept and defend a religofied growth economy paradigm. We are complicit when we expect energy to be so cheap that we can waste fully half of it. We are complicit by insisting we can be sustained in our foolish and spoiled behavior by relying on Adam Smith’s ghost to produce a ninth inning miracle. We are complicit in that we feel adequately clothed by the diaphanous myth of American exceptionalism even as acts of ecocide and homicide are done in the full light of day in our name.

Calling it

2010-10-03T19:34:00.001-04:00

I believe Sarah Palin will be the Republican nominee for president in 2012. I don’t (currently) think she’ll win, but her viability relative to the competition is undeniable and due to the confluence of other factors, specifically the altered state of the news media and the pragmatic radicalization of the Republican Party, the Killa from Wasilla is a shoe in. Should this occur, the notion of decentralized governance may quickly go from being dismissed as an at best impracticable and at worst treasonous idea to being rationally considered the only alternative to living in a nation of involuntary child birth, mandatory Christianity, hyper militarization and the egregious overuse of winking.

It would be foolish to cling to the idea that Media will somehow come to its senses and actually vet Ms. Palin should she throw her hat in the ring. If you examine Media over the past few years you will see that it has no interest in performing “the journalisms”. What we once called journalism is now called the news industry and true to form it aims to run cheap and be inoffensive enough to attract revenue. As a result, in the past 3 months we have had candidates who lie about finding beheaded corpses, who declare the color black to be evil, who circulate pictures of the president with a bone through his nose and who state that condom use actually causes AIDS being none the less heavily covered by Media. It is now standard practice for right wing candidates to simply refuse to answer questions about their political platform, instead issuing press releases and then making like a light dazzled cockroach. Generally, one expects this kind of behavior to create the impression of not being serious. I recall a man being dropped as a serious candidate just for hollering a fairly de rigueur “woohoo!” at a campaign rally. His campaign caught a scorching case of The Overs because of his minor break in decorum. Yet Sarah Palin, who endlessly alludes to a made-up golden age of the Christian white unicorn endless buffet, who can’t remember where her son Trig was born and who will come right out and say we should attack Iraq to shift this Rapture business into overdrive remains astride her vinyl appliquéd mobile carnival of delusion soaked prayer warriors and rolls right the heck on. By and large we still have the expectation that only important shit gets on the news and that only serious contenders get treated like serious contenders. We are mistaken and perception in politics, like possession in property, is more than half the battle.

Some will argue that Palin is too “out there” for mainstream Republicans to rally behind. I disagree. The Republicans have long been pursuing a strategy of prioritizing winning elections and maintaining their powerbase over governing to any particular ideological standard because you can’t drown that shrunken government baby without access to the bathtub. The Republicans recently drove a bus over the former golden Buddha of neo-conservatism Karl Rove for not goosesteeping with glee when the ‘bater hater won the Delaware primary. If they’ll render the considerable lard from his carcass, all bets are off. Having been left holding the bag when the bottom fell out of the successful joint Democratic-Republican campaign to financialize the economy, the Republicans are ready to gleefully lock arms with any group that can provide them with the shiny objects necessary to distract voters from Republican corruption and ineptitude. With a political base that has raised voting against their own interests to an art form, this is no herculean task.

To most thinking people, Sarah Palin is a joke. The scale of her masturbatory ignorance and her ethical narrowness set against her folksy/sexy soft shoe really is something to behold (or avoid like Gonorrhea). However, I would hazard a guess that the denizens of the Weimar Republic, the pinnacle of western civilization at the time, would have greeted warnings about the rise of Nazi movement with incredulous amusement as well. Would it have been difficult, even as late as 1932, to convince the average Deutschlander that they were about to embark upon a 12 year crusade to recreate a geographically expanded faux historical epoch of Aryan dominance devoid of Jews, The Polish, homosexuals, the mentally ill and the retarded? You betcha!

The historical record is unavoidable. Be it in Germany, Cambodia, Serbia, or Rwanda: when serendipity pairs up desperate people with a charismatic figure singing a happy tune, a new possibilities horizon is created. Sarah Palin may not be that that figure herself, but her candidacy could represent a rock rolling downhill in such a way that is unstoppable given the desperation imbued by the inexorably deteriorating straits of our economy, the willful ignorance and proud bigotry of a sufficient number of motivated Americans and the complete abdication of fealty to reality by half our governing elite.

The Empire will not stave off this menace. To do so would deny its essential nature: to support the status quo and existing elites at any cost to the wider world. Empire will accelerate the evolution of Tea Party Operation Hate-n-Fear. We wrap ourselves in a warm blanket of American exceptionalism and assure ourselves we are not witnessing the nascence of new fangled fascism at our peril.

2010-09-13T09:40:00.001-04:00

This Modern World

Steady States

2010-09-10T12:09:00.004-04:00

Recently, the concept of peak oil has quietly entered the main stream media lexicon with several large energy related organizations issuing reports confirming that we have indeed entered the period in which we begin to extract the last half of our petroleum reserves. This oil is harder to extract and is therefore more expensive to extract, it is of lower quality and therefore more expensive to refine and its supply will heretofore follow a gradual downward curve. Problem is, even in recession the world demand for oil follows a steepening upward curve.

Most economists will tell you when the supply of a good does not meet demand, the resulting increase in price will magically signal (no doubt with an invisible and very rational dog whistle) consumers (don’t call them people. ever.) to substitute other goods into their neat little commodity basket. Unfortunately for the autistic science and the frustrated wanna-be physicists that dwell there: there is no one substitute nor combination of substitutes for liquid petroleum fuel and real people get pissed and act extra irrationally when they can’t have the stuff they need. So even as the concept of peak oil enters the discussion, it does so through the filter of conventional thinking about commodities which is inapplicable to the discussion of a substance for which there is no substitute and upon which our transportation, agriculture, industrial and national identity as consumers are all (now precariously) based.

Inevitably, our bloated, unaccountable, insolvent and most importantly, intractable Empire will either collapse under the weight of its obligations and retract or suffer a deadly blow from some black swan event and disintegrate in a spectacular human scale demonstration of chaos theory. These are the stakes of peak oil. There will be no orderly transition designed and implemented from on high, they are far too busy up there trying to extort the last few dollars of our national wealth to be making plans for an orderly transition!

Therefore, our discussion of local agriculture and locally sustainable energy must assume that our very survival is going to depend upon having these systems in place when the centralized economy crumbles. Our discussion of financial sovereignty must acknowledge the reality that most large banks/financial institutions are currently insolvent and unaccountable to local account holders and businesses so we must build a local financial system loyal to local interests not because it’s cool but because we are going to need a financial system after the one we have falls apart. Our discussion of no longer funding the US war machine must assume that every dollar we send to the fed is being sent into a black hole that feeds no one but the entrenched interests of a military industrial complex whose only interest is more war, more depletion and more destruction, all of which is oppositional to the interests of people. Our discussion about the wisdom of sending our National Guard troops to fight overseas rather than protecting us here at home must assume that all their deaths are meaningless and all of their efforts are futile because all the fighting and dying in the world isn’t going to bring the oil back. Who here is willing to die to hold up the Empire for 5 more years?

The age of growth is over and the manufacturing jobs are gone and we have to figure out how to make a more austere, locally sustainable, steady state paradigm work. It is time to abandon not only the sentiment of the infinite growth economy, but also its assumptions and its language. Someone needs to start telling the truth around here and it might as well be us.

On the Mosque

2010-09-10T11:55:00.003-04:00

On the face of it, the anti- mosque people are clearly blaming an entire religion for the actions of a few radical people. This isn't entirely insane. I am an atheist with no love or respect for religion in general and one can reasonably argue some culpability within the Islamic religion for the actions of the 9-11 hijackers because any dogma that intuits “your wrong, I’m right, talk to the hand” is marginally complicit when that shit goes off the rails. However, I would argue this for Catholicism and Christianity, too, and if these hysterical low information anti- mosque people were to emerge from their dogmatic, irrational cave for 5 minutes they’d be forced to argue that both these religions should be wiped off the face of the earth. Catholicism can go down for the crusades, the inquisition, witch burning, and institutionalized child rape. Christianity can go down for being the religion of both the Klu Klux Klan and the Nazi Party. I think we can split the difference for the genocide of Native Americans, the demonization of homosexuality and the third class status of women.

It is also important to make note of what ISNT getting the common man whipped into an apoplectic frothing frenzy: they are building a fucking MALL under the ground where the WTC once stood. There is going to be a Gap and a Bath and Body Works cheek by jowl with the carbonized bone fragments of the dead. This shameless commercialism should score an 11 on anyone's disrespect-o-meter. And I’m sure you’ve heard mention of the nudie bars in the area. I guess the one thing all religions and political philosophies can get behind is a bare cooch.

The only way these people can avoid the huge and lumbering logical fallacies in their arguments both for and against religious freedom, both for and against the rights of property owners and both for and against the strength and superiority of the United States is by squeezing their eyes shut, stuffing wet tissue in their ears and walking in careful circles while repeating the mantra “it was better when we are all white, it was better when we were all white”.

Which brings us to the true heart of the issue: these people have been betrayed, demeaned and depleted by their ruling elites and that desperation is now being exploited by the right wing pundit minions of those elites who, in creating a new scapegoat class to serve as a locus for the anger and desperation they themselves created, aim to reenact the time tested ritual dance of race and cultural warfare to distract from the more ominous reality: that most Americans are being sucked dry by capitalism’s last pneumonic effort to extort what remains of our national wealth. Their willful ignorance and juvenile eagerness not withstanding, it is both incredibly sad and incredibly boring that this is all this kind of crap is EVER about.

Let if suffice to say that we respect religious freedom and private property in this country and that should be the end of the discussion. A holocaust survivor once said that the best way to answer an insult is to ignore it. We should rebuild the area and go on with our lives. Endlessly playing the victim is for pussies and douche bags who have something to gain from it. What we should really be afraid of is not the changing demographics of our country or the threat of someone imposing Sharia Law on us while we are napping, but the trend towards uncritical thinking, idolatry, corporate media capture and the congenital ineffectiveness of liberalism that are rendering us susceptible to the entrance of a charismatic dictator.

In 1928, the Nazi Party got 2.8% of the vote. By 1932, it was a done deal. We invest in cynical and non-sensical movements and ignore the similarities between then and now at our peril.

Oldy but goody

2010-09-05T11:08:00.002-04:00

This is almost 2 years old but it feels just as fresh as when I first wrote it. It made me laugh, anyway, so enjoy!
____________________________________________________________

Everyone Lies -Dr. Gregory House

"I find motherhood difficult… you won't be reading posts where I wax on about motherhood being the joy of my life. There are moments; many, many, moments; but not enough. Not enough for me to not wish I could go to work every day and leave them in the care of someone else. Perhaps then they would be happy to see me…I'm tired of blogging, tired of photos of baby bumps, hand crafts, children who actually are having fun… I wonder why my children can't be like all these beautiful, clean, happy children photographed on blogs."

I had a visceral response to this recent blog post. Aside from having felt all the same isolation, the not having fun, the wishing for just one moment the kids looked happy to see you and feeling like a rhymes-with-PAVE, I also think it encapsulates one of the most pernicious and fundamental ills of motherhood: competitiveness and its underlying dishonesty. I don’t know if it’s because so many SAHM’s today were formally career women or if it’s a defensive mechanism for women who’ve taken on a traditionally undervalued role or if it’s due to the fairly dogmatic Christian orientation of many of the crunchy simple SAHM bloggers, but something in the milk ain’t clean.

It’s not hard to fathom why someone would present an idealized self in a public forum but this is a slippery slope. If we enter the online “community” of SAHM’s but only present half the story, we are liars, liars, pants on fires. The majority of what I see in my daily stroll on the interwebs is airbrushed, edited and disinfected follow-the-party-line-I-am-so-blessed horse puckey. Some of these are, in truth, business blogs. They are selling something. Even if it’s just a little bit of advertising, they tailor their blog to get lots of traffic and light, positive, humorous content gets lots of traffic. If you were to miss this important detail and you were to take some of these bloggers at their word, you’d think you were Lucifer incarnate for not enjoying baking with your children, for not wanting to volunteer at preschool unless doing so involves a tuition waiver, or for just wanting the kids to pipe down and leave you alone for an hour because you just can’t tell your daughter which pony/princess/polka dot you think is the prettiest one more fucking time.

One woman’s blog professes her desire to create a completely selfless child centered existence as a SAHM of 4 who is homeschooling. Spell it with me: C-O-N-T-R-O-L- I-S-S-U-E-S? And now one for the kids: M-A-L-A-D-J-U-S-T-E-D? It’s the blog version of the commercial where the kid won’t eat the lovely balanced meal the mom cooked for him so the plain-Mom-like-person-wearing-slacks hands him a PediaSure milkshake and then proceeds to stare at him while he drinks his hydrogenated vegetable oil ambrosia. She is googley eyed, happy and relieved having achieved the prime directive. Whoa. If my kids won’t eat, my kids DON”T eat and I only look at them like that when they are asleep and I’m on my second beer.

Another blog that features felt crafts is about where “design and motherhood intersect”. Ooooooookay. This very talented woman is an art director/designer who has 5 children. So, we can assume: $$$, Childcare and Housekeeper. I have about as much in common with this woman as I do with a traditional working father. And while we’re at it, wealthy people aren’t like us. Period.

There are bloggers that suggest using the vegetable sculpture arts to entice the little folks to eat. They extol the virtues of the kids eating the vegetables (duh.) as well as the delight you will find in the process. Pause. Blink. Pause. There is some disease of affluence meets inertia of the overly entertained argument to made here but this activity is dancing so far over on the ridiculous side of the Insane Things Mother’s Ask of Themselves tracks that I can’t be bothered.

There are some blogs that are brutally honest about sometimes wanting to throttle their kids, drinking too much, having a gut and feeling like a cat in cage. A big fat fattie “thank you” for those.

When we light heartedly chuckle about our children’s unwillingness to go to bed when it’s actually got us out on the roof threatening to jump or we refuse to admit that we let the kids watch movies just because they enjoy it in all its passive, escapist glory (like we do) we play along in a malevolent charade. Motherhood isn’t a game or a popularity contest and isn’t even a job in the traditional sense. My god people, it NEVER ENDS. Have you ever heard of jobjob that NEVER ENDS? We all have different gifts and different challenges and we all have horrible days when we do horrible things we regret and great days when we do it all right. Displaying a life sponsored by Glitz Retouching Services cheapens the experience, makes it more about marketing than sharing and more about hubris than support. It’s transparent. It’s boring. It’s more than a little pathetic.

So, to the lovely lady whose post inspired this bit of sparkling prose: If it looks too good to be true, it probably is so don’t sweat it…and never ever, ever put your kid in pageant.

you do not need to see an egg-sucking dog in action to know what to expect

2010-08-23T12:25:00.001-04:00

Highlights from Joe Bageant's latest:

"This political class stands between all of us down here and the tiny minority in the ruling class waaaaaay up there, wherever the hell up there is. No use to squint. You can't see it from where we are. That comes in mighty handy in denying the existence of a ruling class.

On the other hand, you do not need to see an egg-sucking dog in action to know what to expect -- or not to expect. The track record of the political class is an open book. As the layer of millionaires buffering the elites who pay for their campaigns, they've done their jobs. They approved the Bush administration's massive tax cut for the rich. They dropped the per-child tax credit for families with incomes less than $20,000. They "reformed" prescription drugs right out of Medicare. They reformed health care into hundreds of billions of increased profits for the insurance industry.

However, the American political class' finest moment came in September 2008 when the financial greed machinery of American investment houses went tits up. The Republican and Democratic parties, major corporations, and manufacturers of US opinion came together in one of the greater bipartisan efforts in modern US history. There was nothing to do, they all agreed, but buy up $700 billion in "toxic asset" investments. "Otherwise," they prophesied, the world would end. Meaning that the ongoing national Ponzi scheme they have always sold to the American people as the US economy, would finally crash.
And in case there were any skeptics out there among the unwashed, the public was reminded just how much they stood to lose -- which was everything. Deep in the boiler room, the Goldman Sachs black bag crew had wired up the "economy" with enough explosive "financial instruments" to take out every working mook's home, or retirement savings, which the medical industry was already sucking up at an alarming rate. Something had to be done before the health care industry got it all, and repo the family ride.

Yessiree, it was gonna be a "systemic collapse," by god, and if you needed proof, just look at the way both George Bush and Barack Obama agreed that some American corporations were too big to let sink, therefore it was time for the public to start bailing out the boat. Meanwhile, the royal economists were unanimous in that this "rescue" was going to require another 10 trillion bucks somewhere down the pike -- a very short pike. So it must all be damned serious and we gotta do this thing. Right folks?

In an unusual display of common sense, the American public said "Bullshit," by margins of three or four to one, depending upon region. That did not bother political and economic elites much. What the fuck do the proles know anyway?"

"Still though, we have in common that none of us like the idea of a ruling class. We did not from the very beginning. Yet, we no longer take effective action, because it has become impossible to identify what we might do to change anything. Instead, we react to events. That is what the ruling class wants, because if we are reactive, then outcomes can be controlled by controlling the stimuli. Keep 'em dazzled with foot work. So the stimuli keep coming at us faster than we can think. And they are presented as fate, or the result of "fast changing world events," or a banking collapse no one could have predicted -- things to which we must respond immediately. Most of us just give up. Which again, is what the ruling class wants us to do..."

"Let’s call a spade a spade, it's fascism".

2010-08-23T11:35:00.001-04:00

The real problem we see queuing up here in terms of personal safety and access to basic rights, is a huge crisis of legitimacy. Once enough people don't accept the legitimacy of the government and void of leadership is created, the really scary shit starts.

From Automatic Earth:

"There are a number of things the present US government is doing spectacularly wrong. Perhaps first and foremost is the complete failure to make good on its promise of more transparency in politics. Just a few days ago, both Washington and BP declared that “most of the oil" in the Gulf of Mexico was gone. But that statement was always ridiculous, and is now proven to be so. What were they thinking? Does anyone still realize that there was never any impartial research done into the amount of oil that was spilled? That all the numbers that are available come from BP and the government, both of whom have excellent reasons to hide the truth?...

Another issue that Obama and his men fail miserably in is economic numbers. Unemployment is far higher than they let on, simply because they don't care for looking all that bad. Home prices are artificially kept high, through subsidies and the wavering of mark-to-market accounting rules for loans and securities, simply because neither the government nor the corporations would remain standing if housing prices were left to the free market to deal with.

And also: last week in Ohio, Obama stated in a meeting with the public that the US economy "is on track". Is it, though? GDP numbers have been revised downward multiple times already this year. The present "official estimate" is a 2.4% growth, and expectations are that next week, this will be lowered to 1.4%.

The Consumer Metrics Institute begs to differ. Its Growth Index 91-day (one quarter) trailing figure now stands at -5.06%!! Which is 7.46% lower than the present government number, derived from the Department of Commerce's Bureau of Economic Analysis."

Just cones, cones, and more cones, as baffling as crop circles

2010-08-23T11:24:00.002-04:00

Some highlights from the latest JHK:

"for some reason the New Hampshire government controls the sale of liquor. Puritan guilt? Creeping socialism? Who knows. Apparently some brilliant state wonk got the idea that they could maximize revenue by selling liquor to motorists. Now, granted, not everybody motoring up I-89 is an alcoholic, but surely some of them are. Maybe it's a scheme to kill off the Boston Irish..."

"We stopped for lunch in a clam bar, naturally. The dining room was populated by a new race of humanoid behemoths, great lumbering brutes the size (and shape) of giant sloths, only dressed in the raiment of clowns, downing heaps of battered fried things, purportedly of-the-sea -- except I honestly don't see how there can be anything alive left to catch out there with the industrial-strength trawlers scraping the ocean floor as if they were Zamboni machines grooming the rink at the Boston Garden..."

"There were more giant sloths wading curiously in the surf (still hungry perhaps?) as we crossed the border into Maine, where you really want to weep for your nation. Is there any way to fuck up a landscape that has not been tried there, short of all-out war (which might actually have the benefit of`clearing a lot of muck away)?

"Even there in the New England backwaters, the toxic superhero-thug culture of Hollywood rules and the idle grandsons of mill-workers glowered in death-metal regalia at passing strangers as if they were auditioning for parts in the next Road Warrior movie. Not a few of them seemed to have lopsided heads. Does crystal meth do that?..."

"The last weird display we encountered was the mystery of highway cones in Vermont. The orange rubber cones were deployed along the center line of I-91 for scores of miles, with absolutely no sign that any project -- shovel-ready or otherwise -- was underway, leading us to suspect that the project of cone deployment for its own sake was a kind of rogue stimulus program. Just cones, cones, and more cones, as baffling as crop circles. No heavy equipment, no men in hard hats. Just mile after mile of cones. Whatever it signified, it was at least equally unproductive as high frequency trading -- the other half of what's left of the US economy..."

Newsflash: factory farming sucks eggs

2010-08-23T11:00:00.002-04:00

When you have almost 500 million eggs coming from 2 farms what the fuck do you think is going to happen? This wasn't an aberration. Both the enormous scale and disgusting conditions of factory egg production guarantee not only outbreaks of common pathogens like salmonella, it also guarantees the development of super bird flu virus that can't be contained by massive egg recalls.
I don't know what is more disturbing: the outbreak itself, the pathetically feckless surprise of the public or the enormous waste of concentrated animal misery that the destruction of all these eggs represents.

Egg Recall Expands To More Than Half A Billion Nationwide

Welcome to 4th Reich?

2010-08-23T10:49:00.000-04:00

We are watching the creation of a scape-goat class to serve as a locus for the anger and desperation of a people who have been betrayed and left destitute by their governing elites. Sound familiar?

From GG:

"The animosity and hatred so visible here extends far beyond the location of mosques or even how we treat American Muslims. So many of our national abuses, crimes and other excesses of the last decade -- torture, invasions, bombings, illegal surveillance, assassinations, renditions, disappearances, etc. etc. -- are grounded in endless demonization of Muslims. A citizenry will submit to such policies only if they are vested with sufficient fear of an Enemy. There are, as always, a wide array of enemies capable of producing requisite fear (the Immigrants, the Gays, and, as that video reveals, the always-reliable racial minorities), but the leading Enemy over the last decade, in American political discourse, has been, and still is, the Muslim.
That's why the population is willing to justify virtually anything that's done to "them" without much resistance at all, and it's why very few people demand evidence from the Government before believing accusaitons that someone is a Terrorist: after all, if they're Muslim, that's reason enough to believe it. Hence, the repeated, mindless mantra that those in Guantanamo -- or those on the Government's "hit list" -- are Terrorists even in the absence of evidence and charges, and even in the presence of ample grounds for doubting the truth of those accusations.
And there's no end in sight: the current hysteria over Iran at its core relies -- just as the identical campaign against Iraq did -- on the demonization of a whole new host of Muslim villains. A population that is constantly bombarded with tales of Muslim Evil (they want to kill your children and explode a nuclear suitcase in your neighborhood) will be filled with fear and hatred -- sentiments always exacerbated during times of economic strife and uncertainty -- and very well-primed to lash out. That's the decade-long brew that has led to this purely irrational, hate-driven demand that they not be allowed to desecrate and infect the Sacred, Hallowed Space of Ground Zero (the religious terminology used to talk about 9/11 is both creepy and no accident). This "debate" over Park51 is many things. An inconsequential "distraction" from what Really Matters is not one of them."

Methinks Peak Oil is about make it's mainstream debut

2010-08-23T10:37:00.001-04:00

Sad that Matt Simmons died before he could be thoroughly and completely vindicated of industry assertions of quackery.

from The Guardian:

"But the (International Energy Association)...has come under increasing scrutiny from a growing group of critics who believe the IEA's optimism is misplaced. Last year the Guardian revealed that the IEA was also riven with dissent over the issue with senior staff members privately telling newspaper they thought the official numbers on future global oil supply were over-optimistic.

The IEA predicted in the 2009 World Energy Outlook published last November that oil demand would grow from 85m barrels a day today to 88m in 2015 and reach 105m in 2030. The organisation presumes the challenge of meeting that demand can equally be met by a mixture of higher Opec production and considerably more output from unconventional sources.

But an internal IEA source said: "Many inside the organisation believe that maintaining oil supplies at even 90m to 95m barrels a day would be impossible, but there are fears that panic could spread on the financial markets if the figures were brought down further. And the Americans fear the end of oil supremacy because it would threaten their power over access to oil resources."

The IEA has denied the claims of internal dissent and sticks by its figures. But Kjell Aleklett, a professor of physics at Uppsala University in Sweden and author of a report The Peak of the Oil Age, claims crude production is more likely to be 75m barrels a day by 2030 than the "unrealistic" 105m projected by the IEA."

Sharron Angle Campaigned Against Black Football Jerseys On Religious Grounds: Color is 'Thoroughly Evil'

2010-08-23T10:28:00.000-04:00

The headline is really sufficient but here is the article if you want to learn more. This is what passes for a serious senatorial candidate these days.
I hear the beaches in Lima, Peru are lovely.

Tony Robbins throws up his massive hands and walks away from the stock market

2010-08-23T10:22:00.003-04:00

You may love him or hate him but I think it is meaningful that he is coming out and telling people to get the fuck out of the stock market and get used to "winter". You don't get much more main stream than this guy.

"titillating in a schadenfreude sort of way"-Matt Taibbi

2010-08-23T10:15:00.005-04:00

David Stockman was Ronald Reagan's budget chief. When you consider how often the douchebags in the Republican Party invoke Regan's name, having this guy come out swinging like this is pretty freakin' awesome.
From Four Deformations of the Apocalypse via the NYT:

"The first of these started when the Nixon administration defaulted on American obligations under the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement to balance our accounts with the world...since chronic current-account deficits result from a nation spending more than it earns, stringent domestic belt-tightening is the only cure. When the dollar was tied to fixed exchange rates, politicians were willing to administer the needed castor oil, because the alternative was to make up for the trade shortfall by paying out reserves, and this would cause immediate economic pain — from high interest rates, for example. But now there is no discipline, only global monetary chaos as foreign central banks run their own printing presses at ever faster speeds to sop up the tidal wave of dollars coming from the Federal Reserve...

The second unhappy change in the American economy has been the extraordinary growth of our public debt...This debt explosion has resulted not from big spending by the Democrats, but instead the Republican Party’s embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don’t matter if they result from tax cuts.

The third ominous change in the American economy has been the vast, unproductive expansion of our financial sector. Here, Republicans have been oblivious to the grave danger of flooding financial markets with freely printed money and, at the same time, removing traditional restrictions on leverage and speculation...the trillion-dollar conglomerates that inhabit this new financial world are not free enterprises. They are rather wards of the state, extracting billions from the economy with a lot of pointless speculation in stocks, bonds, commodities and derivatives. They could never have survived, much less thrived, if their deposits had not been government-guaranteed and if they hadn’t been able to obtain virtually free money from the Fed’s discount window to cover their bad bets...

The fourth destructive change has been the hollowing out of the larger American economy. Having lived beyond our means for decades by borrowing heavily from abroad, we have steadily sent jobs and production offshore...The only reason we have not experienced a severe reduction in non-farm payrolls since 2000 is that there has been a gain in low-paying, often part-time positions in places like bars, hotels and nursing homes...

The day of national reckoning has arrived. We will not have a conventional business recovery now, but rather a long hangover of debt liquidation and downsizing...it’s a pity that the modern Republican Party offers the American people an irrelevant platform of recycled Keynesianism when the old approach — balanced budgets, sound money and financial discipline — is needed more than ever."

Bye bye friendly skies

2010-08-18T09:53:00.000-04:00

The International Energy Agency: ‘Cheap oil is over’

"The era of cheap oil is over. Each barrel oil that will come to market in the future will be much more difficult to produce and therefore more expensive. We all - governments, industry and consumers - should carefully choose the type of car we want to buy in the future and should be prepared for oil prices being much higher than several years ago."

That means more than $145 a barrel. Airlines start to sputter and cough at $100 a barrel so book your Disney flights now!

More Bad Idea Jeans

2010-08-18T09:45:00.001-04:00

Sounds like a great idea, I mean, what could go wrong? How hard is it to see that despite the real therapeutic benefit this may have on PTSD etc., it will not limit itself to those applications. Pretty soon we'll all be getting diagnosed with Generalized Stress Disorder and find ourselves complacently re-writing history at the Ministry of Truth.

Scientists Develop A Vaccine For Stress

"Is this a step on the path to a Brave New World? The head of a research team at Stanford says he is on the verge of producing a vaccine that would deactivate the brain’s stress-causing chemicals. For the first time, people could shut off the fight-or-flight mechanism that has determined our behavior (and helped ensure our survival) since the caveman era."

also:

Stressed out? Fear not, scientists are working on a vaccine

"After early setbacks, the Stanford team has adapted a herpes virus to carry engineered 'neuroprotective' genes deep into the brain to neutralise the rogue hormones before they can cause damage. The virus is now shown to work on rats. "To be honest, I'm still amazed that it works," Professor Sapolsky told Wired magazine recently."

Sucks to be you of the day

2010-08-18T09:39:00.004-04:00

Hoo-wee! It's a good thing the economy is in recovery. Otherwise, things could get ugly.

Crowds Chase Scarce Housing Vouchers

"Sixty people were taken to hospitals Wednesday in this Atlanta suburb after a lengthy wait and an angry mob scene in a sweltering shopping-center parking lot. Those treated for heat exposure and injuries from scuffles were among 30,000 people who had lined up for a waiting list for just 455 vouchers to cover part of their rent.

Some camped out for nearly three days in temperatures that neared 100 degrees, including pregnant women, elderly in wheelchairs and people who drove down from New York City and Philadelphia, hoping to get on the waiting list in East Point for Housing Choice, or Section 8, vouchers."

free lunch is a very good thing indeed, no matter who's eating it

2010-08-12T17:53:00.002-04:00

Another great one from Orlov:

"The Russian author Eduard Limonov wrote of his experiences with poverty in America. To his joy, he discovered that he could supplement his cash earnings with public assistance. But he also quickly discovered that he had to keep this joy well hidden when showing up to collect his free money. It is a curious fact that in America public assistance is only made available to the miserable and the downtrodden, not to those who are in need of some free money but are otherwise perfectly content. Although it is just as possible to be poor and happy in America as anywhere else, here one must make a choice: to avoid any number of unpleasant situations, one must be careful to hide either the fact that one is poor, or the fact that one is happy. If free public money is to be obtained, then only the latter choice remains.

It is another curious fact that vast numbers of Americans, both rich and poor, would regard Limonov's behavior as nothing short of despicable: a foreign author living in America on public assistance while also earning cash! It seems reasonable that the rich should feel that way; if the poor can't be made miserable, then what exactly is the point of being rich? But why should the poor particularly care? Another cultural peculiarity: what dismays them is not the misappropriation of public funds. Tell them about the billions wasted on useless military projects, and they will reply with a yawn that this is just business as usual. But tell them that somewhere some poor person is eating a free lunch, and they will instantly wax indignant. Amazingly, Americans are great believers in Lenin's revolutionary dictum: "He who does not work, does not eat!" One of the rudest questions you might hear from an American is "What do you do for a living?" The only proper response is "Excuse me?" followed by a self-satisfied smirk and a stony silence. Then they assume that you are independently wealthy and grovel shamefully.

Most shockingly, there are many poor Americans who are too proud to accept public assistance in spite of their obvious need for it. Most Russians would regard such a stance as absurd: which part of "free money" don't these poor idiots like—the fact that it's money, or the fact that it's free? Some Russians who are living in the US and, in trying to fit in to American society, have internalized a large dose of the local hypocrisy, might claim otherwise, but even they, in their less hypocritical moments, will concede that it is downright foolish to turn down free money. And rest assured, they will mop up every last penny of it. Mother Russia didn't raise any dummies.

But let us not blame the victim. What causes these poor souls to leave money on the table is just this: they have been brainwashed. The mass media, most notably television and advertising, are managed by the well-to-do, and incessantly hammer home the message that hard work and self-sufficiency are virtuous while demonizing the idle and the poor. The same people who have been shipping American jobs to China and to India in order to enhance their profits want it to be generally understood that the resulting misery is entirely the fault of the miserable. And while the role of the pecuniary motive may be significant, let us not neglect to mention the important fact that producing mass misery is a high-priority objective in and of itself."

Pushing on a string

2010-08-11T10:10:00.000-04:00

From a longer article at Automatic Earth further debunking the recovery mythology and forecasting harder times to come. Deflation, liquidity traps, the implications of the death of the debt economy, all the good stuff in this one.

"Williams also points out that the actions of the FED so far are not having an inflationary effect:
"The banks are not lending. The money the Fed put into the system in terms of buying mortgage-backed securities from the banks and trying to help bank liquidity ended up back with the Fed as excess reserves. We have well over $1 trillion there; had the banks loaned that money in the normal stream of commerce, it would have added more than $10 trillion to the broad money supply, which otherwise is up around $14 trillion. That certainly would have had some inflationary impact if not in terms of actual business activity. You can't always get the economy to grow by pushing money into it. Sometimes it's like pushing on a string.

It is indeed pushing on a string. Trying to stuff more credit into a system that is already choking on it will do nothing to increase the money supply in circulation. It cannot -even possibly- be inflationary. We are already in monetary contraction, as Williams has noted, and the contraction of credit makes the situation considerably worse than it appears from traditional money supply measures. Contraction is being aggravated by a fall in the velocity of money, as people, companies and banks hang on to what cash they have.

In a deflation, real interest rates are always higher than nominal rates. The real rate is the nominal rate minus inflation, and when inflation is negative, the numbers are added rather than subtracted. Even zero in nominal terms is not low enough to make the real rate sufficiently low to reignite borrowing and lending.

This is the liquidity trap, and governments are thoroughly caught in it already.

There is no chance that the money injected by the Fed will find its way into the real economy, and no chance that it will ignite a wage/price spiral in an era of credit contraction and rising unemployment. Employees will have no pricing power at all under such circumstances, which means that wages will fall rather than rise. Prices will also fall, as the withdrawal of credit will remove price support across the board. However, even as prices fall, affordability will be getting worse, because purchasing power will be falling faster than price.

People typically understand that inflation can make things less affordable over time, but deflation can do so much more quickly and much more comprehensively. The scenario that Williams describes is one of the effects of deflation, with real prices shooting up and everything becoming dramatically less affordable in a very short space of time.

We agree with Williams as to the prospects for the real economy in the near term:
"I expect an accelerating pace of downturn in the next couple of months. The numbers will turn sharply worse....

....By then we'll find the consensus pretty much in the camp that we're in a double-dip recession. The popular press will describe it as a double dip, but we never had a recovery. Actually, this is just a very protracted, very deep downturn that has had a pattern of falling off a cliff, bottoming out, having a little bit of bump due to stimulus and then turning down again. Sort of shaped like the path of a novice skier going down a jump for the first time. Speeding sharply down the hill, he goes up in the air and starts spinning wildly as he tries to figure out which end is up with his skis. Then he takes a pretty bad tumble. We're beginning to spin in the air."

We also agree with Williams as to the nature of the problem - credit expansion - and his observation that credit availability is decreasing:
"Most of the growth we'd seen in the last decade prior to this downturn was due to debt expansion. The debt structures have pretty much been put through the wringer and consumers are not expanding credit, generally because it's not available to them. Absent debt expansion and/or significant growth in income, no way can the consumer expand personal consumption."

Without the ability to expand consumption, there is no price support even at current levels, let alone a chance for prices to rise. Credit expansions are based on Ponzi dynamics - the creation of multiple and mutually exclusive claims to the same pieces of underlying real wealth pie, as opposed to cutting the pie into a larger number of smaller pieces as currency inflation would do. The Ponzi nature of credit expansion is the determining factor in the ultimate fate of all bubbles."

Smart stuff from a smart guy

2010-08-10T15:31:00.001-04:00

Greenwald on collapse:

"Does anyone doubt that once a society ceases to be able to afford schools, public transit, paved roads, libraries and street lights -- or once it chooses not to be able to afford those things in pursuit of imperial priorities and the maintenance of a vast Surveillance and National Security State -- that a very serious problem has arisen, that things have gone seriously awry, that imperial collapse, by definition, is an imminent inevitability?"

on the "professional left":

"You may think that the reason you're dissatisfied with the Obama administration is because of substantive objections to their policies: that they've done so little about crisis-level unemployment, foreclosures and widespread economic misery. Or because of the White House's apparently endless devotion to Wall Street. Or because the President has escalated a miserable, pointless and unwinnable war that is entering its ninth year. Or because he has claimed the power to imprison people for life with no charges and to assassinate American citizens without due process, intensified the secrecy weapons and immunity instruments abused by his predecessor, and found all new ways of denying habeas corpus. Or because he granted full-scale legal immunity to those who committed serious crimes in the last administration. Or because he's failed to fulfill -- or affirmatively broken -- promises ranging from transparency to gay rights.
But Robert Gibbs -- in one of the most petulant, self-pitying outbursts seen from a top political official in recent memory, half derived from a paranoid Richard Nixon rant and the other half from a Sean Hannity/Sarah Palin caricature of The Far Left -- is here to tell you that the real reason you're dissatisfied with the President is because you're a fringe, ideological, Leftist extremist ingrate who needs drug counseling...

Being a rational, engaged citizen means objecting when political leaders do things that you think are wrong or bad and praising them when they do things you think are good and constructive. That even includes President Obama. It's just that simple, and pointing to Scary John Boehner hovering in the corner in order to ratchet up fear levels isn't going to change that, nor should it. Barack Obama is President of the U.S. at least until January, 2013, and wields vast power. It's therefore vital that he, like any other political official, be held accountable for the bad actions he undertakes -- just as he himself always argued."

No caption needed

2010-08-09T19:21:00.003-04:00

Chris Hedges

2010-08-09T17:00:00.003-04:00

There is some seriously ironic shit going down in Israel/Gaza.

"And so tonight, a night when some seek to name names and others seek to hide names, let me do some naming. Let me call things by their proper names. Let me cut through the jargon, the euphemisms we use to mask human suffering and war crimes. “Closures” mean heavily armed soldiers who ring Palestinian ghettos, deny those trapped inside food or basic amenities—including toys, razors, chocolate, fishing rods and musical instruments—and carry out a brutal policy of collective punishment, which is a crime under international law. “Disputed land” means land stolen from the Palestinians. “Clashes” mean, almost always, the killing or wounding of unarmed Palestinians, including children. “Jewish neighborhoods in the West Bank” mean fortress-like compounds that serve as military outposts in the campaign of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. “Targeted assassinations” mean extrajudicial murder. “Air strikes on militant bomb-making posts” mean the dropping of huge iron fragmentation bombs from fighter jets on densely crowded neighborhoods that always leaves scores of dead and wounded, whose only contact with a bomb was the one manufactured in the United States and given to the Israeli Air Force as part of our complicity in the occupation. “The peace process” means the cynical, one-way route to the crushing of the Palestinians as a people....
Let me close tonight with one last name. Let me name those who send these tanks and fighter jets to bomb the concrete hovels in Gaza with families crouching, helpless, inside, let me name those who deny children the right to a childhood and the sick a right to care, those who torture, those who carry out assassinations in hotel rooms in Dubai and on the streets of Gaza City, those who deny the hungry food, the oppressed justice and foul the truth with official propaganda and state lies. Let me call them, not by their honorific titles and positions of power, but by the name they have earned for themselves by draining the blood of the innocent into the sands of Gaza. Let me name them for who they are: terrorists."

Speak of the devil

2010-08-09T16:53:00.000-04:00

From JHK's latest:

"The failure of leadership extends through government to the news media to business to the universities to the courts. All authorities are suspect. All are dishonest and cowardly. When the attempt to enforce some basic rules of decency in banking ends up in legislation that runs two-thousand pages, the rule of law is dishonored. Anyway, adding that much unneeded complexity to a system that is already too excessively complex to function anymore must be an obviously bad move. The Glass-Steagall act was under forty pages. Why not just correct the mistake we made eleven years ago and vote it back into existence? Somebody must know where it is - in some back filing cabinet of the Library of Congress.
In times like these politics gets very crazy. The public forgets how misled and confused it is and develops vicious certainties that do not necessarily jibe with reality. The public becomes a mob and democracy turns into a kangaroo court, which is to say: a mockery of the rule of law. I suspect we'll see a correlation of turbulence in politics and markets as the weeks pound forward toward Halloween. By election day, democracy itself will be in disrepute and the streets will run with mad dogs. When this sucker goes down (to paraphrase a past president) it's going to be like a fire in a circus tent. Don't expect much from the clowns' bucket brigade. We'll be lucky if they don't toss gasoline into the grandstands."

Meeting James Kunstler

2010-08-09T16:44:00.000-04:00

The guy couldn't have been nicer. I was terrified of course, he's been a huge influence on me and I was afraid that either he'd be a turd or that I would do something foolish like not be able to find the restaurant. Well, I found the restaurant and he was great. I'd love to see him speak at greater depth and with greater grit someday (it was a newby audience and the presentation and his manner was geared for it) but it was nothing short of an honor in any event.

: )

Krugman goes dark

2010-08-09T16:36:00.003-04:00

It's been interesting watching Krugman's tone change. His latest offers no reprieve from his failing optimism.

"The antigovernment campaign has always been phrased in terms of opposition to waste and fraud — to checks sent to welfare queens driving Cadillacs, to vast armies of bureaucrats uselessly pushing paper around. But those were myths, of course; there was never remotely as much waste and fraud as the right claimed. And now that the campaign has reached fruition, we’re seeing what was actually in the firing line: services that everyone except the very rich need, services that government must provide or nobody will, like lighted streets, drivable roads and decent schooling for the public as a whole.
So the end result of the long campaign against government is that we’ve taken a disastrously wrong turn. America is now on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere."

I think if more people understood that kind of contraction that is already taking place in the US such as in the automobile and steel ghost towns in Pennsylvania and the Midwest, Detroit's literal self destruction and abandonment being the best example, they'd pay more heed to these signs disintegration. I personally think going back to gravel is a great long term strategy. Too bad they are doing it out of brokeness rather than foresight.

Public Pensions

2010-08-09T16:28:00.001-04:00

My city just found out it is "missing" 9 million from it's pension fund. I don't know if it's theft or a bad hedge fund to blame to by hook or by crook, we are going to be talking about cutting public pensions. I think pensioners needs to take a hit despite recognizing that it sucks. It is equally unfair to have me pay for the shortfall between their expectations and realty.

From the NYT:

"There’s a class war coming to the world of government pensions.The haves are retirees who were once state or municipal workers. Their seemingly guaranteed and ever-escalating monthly pension benefits are breaking budgets nationwide.The have-nots are taxpayers who don’t have generous pensions. Their individual retirement accounts have taken a real beating in recent years and are not guaranteed. And soon, many of those people will be paying higher taxes or getting fewer state services as their states put more money aside to cover those pension checks.At stake is at least $1 trillion. That’s trillion, with a “t,” as in titanic and terrifying.The figure comes from a study by the Pew Center on the States that came out in February. Pew estimated a $1 trillion gap as of fiscal 2008 between what states had promised workers in the way of retiree pension, health care and other benefits and the money they currently had to pay for it all. And some economists say that Pew is too conservative and the problem is two or three times as large.So a question of extraordinary financial, political, legal and moral complexity emerges, something that every one of us will be taking into town meetings and voting booths for years to come: Given how wrong past pension projections were, who should pay to fill the 13-figure financing gap?"

TSA is looking at your naked ass and laughing

2010-08-04T17:59:00.008-04:00

Tips to Bob Cesca and Co. for this bit of news:

"Despite past statements by federal agencies that images from body scanners were not and could not be saved or recorded, a government agency has admitted to storing approximately 35,000 body scan images, CNET reports.

According to CNET, "U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse."
The resolution and detail of the body scan images varies depending on the technology used in the scanner (i.e. X-ray backscatter vs millimeter wave. See full-body millimeter wave images below, via TSA.gov).

Privacy advocates have denounced the machines for generating images so graphic they are tantamount to "virtual strip-searching," and, in the UK, minors were recently barred from passing through the controversial full body scanners over child pornography fears.

As CNET writes, the TSA recently noted that it requires all checkpoint scanners used at airports to have the ability to save and share images. The agency added that such features are only for "testing, training, and evaluation." CNET reported that these capabilities "are not normally activated when the devices are installed at airports," although TSA spokesperson Sari Koshetz later told the Huffington Post that the body scanners' image storage capabilities are "never activated when deployed in airports."
The TSA wrote in a blog,
While we have said this many times, it bears repeating, TSA will not keep, store or transmit images. Once deleted, they are gone forever. For additional privacy, the officer viewing the image is in a separate room and will never see the passenger and the officer attending to the passenger will never see the image. The officers have 2-way radios to communicate with other in case a threat object is identified.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center is currently suing to "suspend the deployment of body scanners at US airports."

UPDATE: TSA spokesperson Sari Koshetz noted that the images produced by millimeter wave scanners resemble "blurry negatives" with a "humanoid form" and compared the images produced by scanners using X-ray backscatter technology to "chalk etchings." No faces are shown and "very little detail" appears "unless a threat object is visualized." Additional information on privacy and body scanners is available from the TSA here."

Okay TSA, if the images are so shitty why the hell are you saving them??? All this shouldn't surprise one single living person with more than 2 working synapses.

The VT contingent of the Military Industrial Complex does the happy dance

2010-08-03T11:56:00.000-04:00

The embrace of Burlington as the choice for the basing of the F-35 flies in the face of common decency in 3 realms: concern for the health, welfare and property of everyone who lives near the airport, concern over rapacious and irresponsible government spending and the concern for the misery, death and hatred of the US that is engendered by our aggressive, imperialistic military policies.

Despite the vapid claims from the VTANG of being “good neighbors” there is no way to ameliorate the toxic level of noise and exhaust that will be emitted by these planes. It is unconscionable to put the needs of a few ANG employees over the well being of an entire community. The people of this city got fed a line about the EIS being pivotal to the basing decision. They asked us to withhold judgment until we had the data. They lied to our faces at that meeting.

The F-35 program is a $500 billion dollar albatross in the making. This multi-service plane will be extremely expensive and will be dwarfed in all areas of performance by specialized planes regardless of how many ridiculous pieces of “data” the USAF and the ANG make up to promote it. Leahy and Co. should be embarrassed to be prancing around promoting this enormous piece of low performing pork and they should be ashamed of further enmeshing VT in the immoral and economically untenable War Economy.

When you put aside the yellow flag bumper stickers and the easy talk about “our boys” when discussing the F-35 you are left with a killing machine that will ultimately carry nukes. Since the 1950’s, our policy of pre-emptive war has done nothing to promote peace and everything to promote the financial gluttony of the Military Industrial Complex. The F-35 program is part and parcel of this corrupt and greedy cabal which seeks and seeds unrest in order to keep our tax dollars flowing into its gaping maw. The ANG is using its service men as PR human shields against this reality.

Arguing that it’s high patriotism to keep shipping our men and women off to slaughter and be slaughtered in order to secure petroleum, gas and mineral extraction rights for multinational corporations is just plain sick. The most patriotic thing I can think of to do is to reject this mess of a plane, reject these brutal and interminable wars of choice and bring our people home.

Crap at my parents house

2010-08-02T13:51:00.000-04:00

some truly horrifying stuff here. Example:

Caption:
Do you know why this clown is smiling and rubbing his belly? Because he just ate a box of puppies. “Awww, Sad”, you might be thinking. Well, I’ll have you know, it was those puppies that ate his lower half. So, it’s not sad, it’s revenge.

all eyes are trained in moist hopefulness

2010-08-02T13:47:00.000-04:00

From Kunstler's latest:

"President Obama appears more and more Gorbachev-like to me, a well-intentioned functionary sailing his ship-of-state steadily into a maelstrom. The course is set and ain't nobody going to make a move to change it. Of course, Mr. Obama is no more to blame than Mr. Gorbachev was -- if anything one can't help but admire Gorby's steering of the creaky old Soviet ghost ship into drydock with nary a pint of blood spilled in the process -- but what's really striking in America today is the massive failure of leadership in the layers below Mr. Obama, and in all the other sectors of American culture where CEOs, chairpersons-of-the-boards, deans and provosts, doctors of this and that, generals and attorneys-general, even diverse clergy in all their arresting head-gear cannot collectively advocate for reality.
This failure of credentialed and elected authorities will surely unleash the crazies as we skid toward fall. Legitimacy hates a vacuum. The absence of a reality-based consensus for action will invite a consensus based on other things such as the lust for vengeance, the labeling of scapegoats, patriotic gore, and all the alternate trappings of a politics-gone-mad. Enjoy the heat and the clam rolls wherever you are in the meantime, and when you come home don't be surprised if you no longer recognize the country you're in."

I am having dinner with Mr. Kunstler on Thursday before he gives a talk In East Dover VT. This guy is the father of my doomsday perspective and I am really looking forward to meeting him.

Capitalism isn't a yellow brick road to eternal prosperity

2010-08-02T13:41:00.001-04:00

Krugman continues on his journey to the dark place:

"Two years from now unemployment will still be extremely high, quite possibly higher than it is now. But instead of taking responsibility for fixing the situation, politicians and Fed officials alike will declare that high unemployment is structural, beyond their control. And as I said, over time these excuses may turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the long-term unemployed lose their skills and their connections with the work force, and become unemployable."

I concur with this fella in comments:

"There are some problems in this world bigger than the United States government and Federal Reserve, Mr. Krugman. There are some problems in this world which are bigger than humankind and technological civilization.
The ideas that seemed to work so very well for so very long have ceased functioning. I suggest that this indicates that humankind has encountered a phase shift transition. The world that existed before doesn't exist any longer and cannot be resurrected.
Capitalism is dead. The greatest ponzi scheme in the history of humankind has run its course. Previous generations got extremely wealthy at the expense of this generation and all future generations.
Capitalism actually died a long time ago. The only reason why it has seemed to remain alive is because the government propped up fraudulent economic bubbles with money borrowed from China. The tech boom and the real estate boom both served to make Americans feel wealthy while they were actually becoming impoverished.
As it turns out, capitalism isn't a yellow brick road to eternal prosperity for Americans.
The loss of wealth is a tragedy but it is not the biggest tragedy humankind will experience in the 21st century. The death of capitalism is just a distraction on the way to the death of technological civilization."

And I would add that corporations are hoarding the profits they are reaping from the downsizing they did during the recession (as any profit minded entity would be expected to do) having learned just how few people they can employ and still get the job done. I would also suggest high level corporate/industrial collusion to deprive the Obama administration of an economic recovery. Either doomedshortsightedprofittakingway, the jobs will not be forthcoming.

Update:
More on this from Robert Reich:

"Second-quarter earnings reports are coming in, and they're making Wall Street smile. Corporate profits are up. And big American companies are sitting on a gigantic pile of money. The 500 largest non-financial firms held almost a trillion dollars in the second quarter, and that money pile is growing larger this quarter. Profits that plummeted in the recession have bounced back. Big businesses have recovered almost 90 percent of what they lost.
So with all this money and profit, they'll start hiring again, right? Wrong - for three reasons.
First, lots of their profits are coming from their overseas operations. So that's where they're investing and expanding production.
GM now sells more cars in China than it does in the US, but makes most of them there. The company now employs 32,000 hourly workers in China. But only 52,000 GM hourly workers remain in the United States - down from 468,000 in 1970.
GM isn't just hiring low-tech assembly workers in China. Last week the firm broke ground there on a $250 million advanced technology center to develop batteries and other alternative energy sources.
You and I and other American taxpayers still own over 60 percent of GM. We bought GM to save GM jobs, remember?
GM officials say no American taxpayer money is being used to expand in China. But money is fungible. Because of our generosity, GM can use the dollars it doesn't have to spend in the United States meeting its American payroll and repaying its creditors for new investments in China.
Second, big U.S. businesses are investing their cash in labor-saving technologies. This boosts their productivity, but not their payrolls.
Last Friday, for example, Ford reported a $2.6 billion second-quarter profit. The firm is already more than two-thirds the way to equaling its record 1999 profits. But due to labor-saving technologies, Ford now has half as many employees as it did a decade ago.
Wall Street analysts are happy with Ford's "commitment to keeping capacity in check," according to the Wall Street Journal. Ford shares rose 5.2 percent Friday. "Keeping capacity in check" is the Street's way of saying "no new hiring." In fact, the Street is advising investors to sell the stocks of companies that talk openly of expanding capacity.
Finally, corporations are using their pile of money to pay dividends to their shareholders and buy back their own stock - thereby pushing up share prices.
Last Friday, GE announced it would raise its dividend by 20 percent and reinstate its share-buyback plan. It's GE's first dividend increase since the company cut its dividend in early 2009. As a result, GE shares are up more than 5% in the past few days.
Bottom line: Higher corporate profits no longer lead to higher employment. We're witnessing a great decoupling of company profits from jobs.
The next supply-side economist who tells you companies need more incentive (i.e. lower taxes) before they'll hire is living on another planet.
The reality is this: Big American companies won't begin to think about hiring until they know American consumers will buy their products. The problem is, American consumers won't start buying again until they know they have reliable paychecks."

I must amend his last statement: they'll start hiring when they can't meet demand for their products but they don't give a damn if those consumers are American (and they'll invest in labor saving technology before they invest in labor, this why capitalism dies, it bankrupts its own buyers).

The 3rd largest airforce in the world...

2010-07-28T15:55:00.003-04:00

...is at The Bone Yard near Davis Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson , Arizona. All of these planes are capable of being returned to service. There are trillions of dollars represented here, invested over 40,50,60 years and the world is no more peaceful because of it, to say nothing of what that money could have been spent on instead.

The military tells us we need to spend nearly a trillion dollars for the F-35 because it will keep us safe. Not only does a cursory review of military history lay waste to this claim but it is safe to assume a society that invests in profligate aggression and destruction will reap just that.

The institutions of war are designed to support and encourage the practice of war, not to achieve of peace.

Required post

2010-07-19T16:14:00.000-04:00

I need to be on the record with this one.

From Matt Simmons:
"40,000 to 45,000 feet below the surface there is a giant lake of toxic oil that is expanding by 120,000 barrels per day...that must now be 400-500 feet deep...all the stuff we seeing on the surface is just the scum.."

The full interview is required listening at King World News

Kunstler comments and more video at MSNBC

Holy crap

2010-07-16T14:22:00.001-04:00

It is a slow starter but watch the whole thing. This is an animated depiction of all known detonations of actual nuclear devices since the 40's. Makes you look at cancer statistics in whole new light.

Catalog Living

2010-07-14T10:55:00.000-04:00

In the same vein as the previous site but just for catalogs. PB and their ilk provide me with many moments of entertainment with their silly, hyper-consumerist, OCD arrangements. Again, laugh out loud.

"Elaine wasn’t about to let some hot flashes get in the way of balancing the checkbook with the abacus."

Unhappy Hipsters

2010-07-14T10:44:00.002-04:00

This site makes me snort out loud. I like modern furniture and architecture a lot but the genre can get pretty self congratulatory, overly reductionist and frankly kinda ridiculous. One example:

Caption: "With her parents away at Burning Man, little Antoinette was left alone, seething with hollow rage."

It's good stuff. Check it out.

ok, maybe just cartoons until september

2010-07-13T14:01:00.002-04:00

from xkcd:

from Cat and Girl:

Hiatus

2010-07-13T11:39:00.000-04:00

I haven't blogged in about 2 weeks. I am tired of speaking into the void: both the internet void and the blinders securely fastened clueless community void and my kids are keeping me pretty busy. So consider Radical SAHM to be on hiatus until September.

Get the Fed out

2010-07-03T09:55:00.000-04:00

We are just finishing up season 4 of The Wire at my house so these posts about education really resonate.

From Borderland:

"It is really interesting to me that President Obama can let BP take the lead in cleaning up the disaster in the Gulf, and yet teachers have got hedge fund managers, mayors, think tank policy wonks, billionaire vulture capitalists, and no real education experts, calling the shots on public school “reform,” with Arne Duncan as department head, whose teaching experience comes from volunteering at his mom’s after school program (He actually says this, as if it means something!) mouthing a bunch of nonsense about educating our way to a better economy and making education the civil rights issue of our generation. Well, no. The economy tanked because of a monumental failure of government to regulate the financial industry, and manufacturing long ago moved out of the country. And before we can talk about civil rights, we need to straighten out some things with health care, endless war, mass incarceration, racism and immigration, and state-sponsored torture."

and from VTCommons:

"When BP chief executive Tony Hayward appeared before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Chairman Henry Waxman said the Committee reviewed 30,000 documents related to the oil disaster and found "no evidence that you (Hayward) paid any attention to the tremendous risks BP was taking." Likewise no one at the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, or the House and Senate education committees etc. is paying any attention to the tremendous risks the U. S. Department of Education is taking with its money bribes to the states.

Why does Vermont allow the Feds to dictate who should work in these ten Vermont schools (Johnson Elementary, Northfield Elementary, Integrated Arts Academy, formerly H. O. Wheeler Elementary, St Johnsbury School, Mount Abraham Union High School, Lamoille Union High School, Windsor High School, Winooski High School, Rutland High School,Fair Haven High School)?

The answer is a one-time $8.5 million Federal handout. We should remember that it's our money in the first place. We should not sell our children so cheaply.

Prediction: In the long run, the money fountain at the U. S. Department of Education will do more harm to our national well-being than the BP oil gusher. The Obama/Duncan ramping up of the discredited Reading First, their co-opting of state education policy through the bribery of Race to the Top and the other initiatives that travel under the name of reform will put a generation of children's public school lives in shambles as national standards and tests are delivered by the truckload from corporate America, and test prep takes over any pretense of curriculum."

Ode to The Automatic Earth

2010-06-27T18:07:00.000-04:00

I am a big fan of The Automatic Earth.

Cousinavi

2010-06-26T09:32:00.000-04:00

I really enjoy this guy:
On Sarah Palin:

"The very sound of Sarah Palin’s voice simply screams IMBECILE. And so, one experiences a profound degree of cognitive dissonance almost immediately. Why are those people listening to her? Why are they applauding? It just doesn’t make sense!

The crowd is easy to explain. If you’ve ever heard cats in heat screaming in the night, you know what an unpleasant sound it is. Nevertheless, it draws every fucking cat for miles right into the same alley. Sarah Palin’s voice is the clarion call for idiots. Repulsive to thinking people, but irresistible to horny morons who want to hump the stupid...

Just bury some speakers under Wal-Mart parking lots, play random Sarah Palin audio clips, and watch the fat fuckers in “I’m with Stupid —>” tee shirts come streaming out of the store, glinting in the sun as they mindlessly scratch their crotch and look for a magic marker with which to misspell something on a big piece of Bristol board."

On BP:

"We are doing everything we possibly can...(BP slogan)"

...to minimize our exposure in terms of damages, hide and obfuscate the depth and breadth of the harm caused by our negligence; mis-, non- and malfeasance, destroy evidence of the true impact of our brainless, greedy cock-up, retain control over as much of the oil as possible in order to sell it and use that money to line the pockets of our executives and stockholders, and to employ horrible deadly, largely untested chemicals in these efforts, which will permit us to later argue in court that there is insufficient scientific evidence linking exposure to those chemicals with the outbreak of clusters of extraordinarily rare forms of cancer and other devastating neurological wasting diseases and birth defects to possibly hold us responsible for the medical nightmare that will surely follow the environmental wasteland we are now busy covering up."

Like a pie in the face

2010-06-25T10:25:00.000-04:00

It doesn't get any clearer than this, folks. If you don't "get it" at this point then you truly deserve what you get...which is the shaft.

From Bob Cesca:

"Do you remember the dollar amount of the annual subsidy paid to Big Oil? $38 billion. That's right, the Republicans voted to continue paying corporate welfare to companies like BP, but they filibustered a bill of nearly equal dollar value paid to unemployed Americans. The Republicans. $38 billion to oil companies? YES! $33 billion to unemployed Americans? NO!"

more sand down the rabbit hole...

2010-06-24T20:06:00.001-04:00

Sustaining the unsustainable part 1,478. From TaxVox:

"For two years, the homebuyer credit has been in the running for Washington’s worst tax policy idea. Now, new evidence about this bit of legislative bilge suggests it may be time to retire the trophy.

The Commerce Department reports the new homes market collapsed in May after booming in March and April (chart). Why? Well, in early spring, in response to an intense marketing campaign by the real estate and mortgage industries, tens of thousands of buyers accelerated home purchases to take advantage of this sweet tax give-away (as much as $8,000 for some buyers) before the credit expired on April 30. Then, just as most sentient economists predicted, the market dried up. Actually, it didn’t just dry up. It became the Death Valley of housing.
Monthly new home sales (which are seasonally adjusted) had been running about 350,000 in early 2010. As buzz about the credit heated up, purchases spiked to about 390,000 in March and to 450,000 in April. Then, the credit disappeared and so did the buyers. Sales in Mayplunged to 300,000, the lowest level in four decades.

As the chart shows, this was--entirely unsurprisingly--exactly the same pattern we saw when the credit was first scheduled to expire at the end of 2009: A big run up in sales in October and November followed by a sharp decline thereafter.

Total amount of permanent job creation from this timing change: pretty close to zero. Cost to taxpayers: $12.6 billion just through last February—even before the latest buying frenzy. What a deal!

As my Tax Policy Center colleague Ted Gayer has been warning, at least 85 percent of those buyers would likely have purchased a home anyway. For them, the credit was a pure gift--courtesy of a government running a $1.4 trillion deficit.

But that’s not all. Yesterday, the Treasury Department’s inspector general issued its second report on homebuyer credit fraud. And the scams are worthy of a Carl Hiasson novel. Among the lowlights: 1,295 prisoners received $9.1 million in credits for houses they claimed to buy while incarcerated. Two hundred forty-one were serving life sentences at the time. Hiasson—the bard of two-bit Florida hustlers-- will be pleased to learn that almost two-thirds of these frauds occurred in his home state, where ripping off federal taxpayers appears to be about as common as shuffleboard.

And it wasn’t just cons running the hustle. Sixty-seven different people claimed the tax break for one house. More than 2,500 got almost $18 million for homes they bought before the credit was effective. In all, the IG unearthed 14,132 people who received erroneous credits of $17.6 million.

The hardest bit to swallow is not so much that the homebuyer tax credit is a boondoggle. It is that it was a totally predictable waste of money. Economists warned Congress in 2008 that the credit would do little more than shift timing decisions by a few months. But lawmakers ignored the advice again and again. Remarkably, the Senate may be about to give buyers still more time to close on homes they put contracts on before April 30. That way, they can squeeze the last few dollars out of a failed credit."

Capitalism isn't free markets

2010-06-24T19:12:00.003-04:00

We all seriously need to get some vocabulary under our belts.

From David Korten at Yes!:

"We were raised in America to believe that capitalism is synonymous with a market economy, democracy, and human liberty. Turns out it isn’t true. The term capitalism means rule by capital, which means rule by the owners of capital. It was a term originally coined to refer to an economy in which ownership of the means of production is monopolized by a small financial elite for its exclusive benefit to the exclusion of the interests of the rest of the society. That is the true meaning of capitalism. It is what we have and the consequences are clear.

As Wall Street so clearly demonstrates, capitalism seeks monopoly control of every aspect of daily life to avoid market discipline and uses its money and lobbyists to circumvent democracy and hold politicians hostage to Wall Street interests. Far from being the champion of markets and democracy, capitalism—rule by big money—is the mortal enemy of both.

We are constantly told that the only alternative to rule by Wall Street capitalists is to sacrifice our individual liberty to rule by Communist bureaucrats. We are not supposed to notice that in fact the obvious alternative to capitalism is what capitalism promises, but does not deliver: real democracy and a real market economy, which as described by Adam Smith looks a whole lot more like a local living economy than an economy ruled and centrally planned by Goldman Sachs, WalMart, and Monsanto."

Americans hate soccer

2010-06-24T18:06:00.000-04:00

Helicopter parenting

2010-06-21T16:30:00.004-04:00

I had a very interesting conversation at the playground the other day with a Mom who had just returned to VT after spending 6 months living in Belfast. I asked her if she was happy to be home and she looked at me sadly and said "nope". She said she had never been more relaxed and happy as a Mom then when she was in Ireland. She loved how the parents left the kids alone. Let them be kids and figure out how to be together on their own. She said if one more parent came to tell her that her son had bumped into their kid, pushed their kid, not played with their kid, she was going to drop the f-bomb on them. To say nothing of the schools that provided hot breakfast, all sports and field trips and activities at no cost and without requesting parental volunteers. I hear ya, sister!

From Free Range Kids:

Dear Free Range Kids: NJ Mom here. After reading the New York Times friendship article, I went on such a rant that Lenore asked me to pull myself together and write something up.

The article concerns the latest bizarre twist to the seemingly never-ending micromanaging of middle/upper middle class children. In a nutshell: You can’t have a best friend anymore, it might hurt someone’s feelings. Instead, to avoid exclusivity, cliques, and bullying, children should be friends with a bunch of kids, with no one person being more special than another.

OMG. Can’t we just leave these poor children alone, even for just a minute? Can’t we just let them be mean, or nice, or scared, or bored, or sad or angry or even not a “success” at school? Can’t we, as the adults, simply guide them on their journey to adulthood, instead of preventing them from feeling any pain–ever?
As my mother says, “I sure wouldn’t want to be a mother in this day and age.” She’s right. The pretty straightforward job of childrearing has become so, so…messy and convoluted. And it is just too damn much work.

All my children have to do is open their eyes in the morning, and they have more of everything than do millions and millions of other children, from potable water to two parents who love and enjoy them. We as parents, teachers, “childrearing experts,” and school administrators must let go of this delusion that we can fix everything for our children. They already have everything they need and can manage very well without us constantly messing with the minutia of their lives.

I do hope it’s obvious that I’m not advocating the absence of parenting. I’m simply saying that adults should guide and support the children in their care, not interfere to such a degree that real life passes them by."

Some similar sentiments here:

"Part of childhood and growing up is learning how to feel pain. Helicopter parenting is bad enough, but when that attitude gets institutionalized we’re in for some serious trouble. We already live in a highly litigious society. Now we have the expert class warning us that close friendships might be damaging to our poor, fragile children’s psyches. Next they’ll tell us that being too close to family could cause people without families psychological trauma, and the next thing you know you’re living in that creepy commune from The Giver."

Why our nobles betray us

2010-06-21T16:17:00.000-04:00

I'm not as optimistic as Mr.Uygur. There is no way in hell the system will change from within (as he is saying here) and there is no way American's will get off their asses and change it from outside. The system is going to fall apart and we are going to have to start over.

From Uygur:

"if we pay the campaign expenses of politicians instead of letting the lobbyists pay them, then the politicians might actually work for us. If we ban the politicians and their staff from working as lobbyists, they might not have as much incentive to sell us out.
I know the people inside DC think that last proposal is absolute heresy. How would they get rich if they can't work as lobbyists? And that's precisely what the problem is. They're getting rich at our expense. We're crazy to allow this system to continue.
The nobles will never change it. This is how they got to where they are. This is how they maintain their power and salaries. We have to make them change it. And as William Wallace found out, you can only do that from the outside and by not listening to the establishment that has different (and almost exact opposite) motivations as you do."

Mismanaging contraction

2010-06-21T16:08:00.000-04:00

Another nice, clear invocation of reality from Kunstler today:

"Reality is telling us to downscale and get different fast. Quit doing everything possible to prop up the drive-in false utopia and all its accessories. Get local. Tighten up. We have no intention of doing that. The idiocy that passes as informed opinion wants the US money managers to kick out the jambs handing out more money created out of thin air to promote a fantasy called "recovery." To what purpose? To keep the tailgate parties going down at the Nascar ovals? Over at The New York Times Monday morning, the fatuous Paul Krugman says that "stinting on spending now threatens the economic recovery." Earth to Krugman: we're mismanaging contraction. Further expansion is just not in the cards right now for the human race. We don't need more people on the planet and we don't have the means to accommodate them. There will be no 'recovery" to "growth" - especially by means of pumping more oil into the system. There is no techno-miracle alt-fuel panoply waiting in the wings to take over from oil. And there is no research-and-development program that will make it happen, no matter how many acronym-studded incantations we drone out.
I admit that contraction is a hard reality - but so is the recognition that we don't get to live forever, something every child begins to grapple with around age seven. The inability to face comprehensive contraction will only insure that its side effects are more debilitating."

No matter how you slice it

2010-06-21T10:07:00.001-04:00

A lot has been written recently about American's aversion to sacrifice. We want to keep our comfortable lives and we'll accept ever increasing costs in order to do so. We'll gladly accept being lied to and we'll gladly accept the moral complicity in mass murder and environmental destruction in a mad, grasping push to sustain the unsustainable just a little bit longer.

Moshe lays it out:

"The essential truth of our predicament, that no politician will utter, is that we are now transitioning into a future of scarce and expensive energy. Renewable sources currently provide only a tiny fraction of our energy, and even with a massive effort to increase that fraction, even at the expense of other expenditures that we currently hold dear (from medical procedures to the military), it will take decades before the scale of renewable energy will replace a major portion of the current nonrenewable sources. And although all the candidates promise it will be "affordable", renewable power will never be cheap and abundant enough to maintain our current economic model. "Economic growth" was just a temporary phase of reckless liquidation of nonrenewable resources. "Sustainable growth" is an oxymoron."

Republicans actually really love stimulus

2010-06-21T09:54:00.000-04:00

And they especially love really poorly performing stimulus.
From Ezra:

"It's worth recalling that Republicans didn't always mistrust stimulus. They didn't even mistrust deficit-financed stimulus (not that there are many other kinds). Back when they were selling the Bush tax cuts, the original argument was that the economy was great and the government was running a surplus and you should get your money back. But then the economy tanked when the tech bubble burst. No problem! “Because the economy is slowing down, I believe it is vital that Congress pass a pro-growth tax cut," said Dick Armey. We're all Keynesians when convenient.
Tax cuts tilted toward the rich do stimulate the economy, of course. But they don't do it very well. According to Mark Zandi's numbers, you get 32 cents of stimulus per dollar spent on the Bush tax cuts. That's because tax cuts that tilt towards the rich boost how much money they save, not how much they spend. Compare that with state and local aid, which give you a $1.41 of stimulus for each dollar spent."

Walking away

2010-06-21T09:51:00.002-04:00

Apparently the government might be looking to penalize homeowners for strategic mortgage default. That is, to penalize them beyond the total credit destruction they already get. Regardless of how you come at this issue from a moral standpoint, this makes absolutely no practical sense whatsoever. The heart of this is institutional reluctance to allow prices to correct/tank and this is to protect the holders of the mortgages: the banks and the Federal government. The illusion of home value cannot be maintained forever. It is only a question of how much taxpayer money goes down the deep dark hole in the meantime and how many ignoble affronts can be presented to homeowners in the process.
From Yglesias:

"There’s just always been a desperate need for an orderly legal process whereby the value of homes and the value of home loans can be systematically written down (”cramdowns” is the lingo) in response to the system-wide re-estimation of what real estate is worth. Failing to do this is, among other things, introducing a large amount of geographic rigidity into the labor market. We need some people to move away from the worst-afflicted areas and migrate to places where there are more opportunities. People who can’t afford to sell their houses are basically “stuck in place,” disproportionately in the very places where it’s hardest to find jobs."

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when the worst case scenario is also the realistic case scenario

2010-06-21T09:34:00.001-04:00

A major concern that is coming to light on the internet (you won't hear about it in the MSM, too scary) is the corrosive nature of all the effluent shooting through the wellhead. It's like having sandpaper working on a pipe 24 hours a day: eventually the pipe is going to fail and given that we have at least 3 months of ever increasing flow (it's increasing because the enclosure is failing)to contend with, this is a real possibility. As if having 4 million gallons of oil spewing into the gulf everyday weren't bad enough, if the wellhead fails entirely, we simply won't be able to stop the oil and we'll have to wait for all 100,000,000 barrels to empty out.

From the Atlantic:

"Right now, a disaster that keeps flowing until August is the worst anyone wants to imagine, but there are worse possibilities-- it could be the start of years of unchecked oil flowing into the Gulf...

There are legitimate concerns about the integrity of the casing. Yesterday, someone asked Admiral Allen about that. He said that concerns about the integrity of the well bore were part of the decision to stop the "Top Kill" a few weeks ago, indicating that there are significant concerns. On April 23, the Coast Guard was aware that the size of the leak could grow from 8000 barrels a day to 64,000 to 110,000 barrels a day if the well completely blew out. That's quite close to the current spill estimates. Does that mean that the well is nearing a full blow out?

The reason the casing's integrity matters is that if it's cracked, oil will push out through the cracks and into the surrounding ground, destabilizing the ground around the casing, and bubbling up from the ocean floor. Here's more, with Senator Bill Nelson's interview a week and a half ago saying just that. A seeping well, of course, will be hard to contain.

And finally, more alarming, and possibly a gross overstatement, there is the possibility that as the ground and the casing shift, the whole thing collapses inward, the giant Blow Out Preventer falls over, the drill pipe shoots out of the remains of the well, or any number of other scenarios that could make it very difficult or impossible to eventually stop the gusher even with the relief wells. (I do not know the author of this post, and cannot vouch for its accuracy. I do not share the author's fear that there is a conspiracy to hide this information. My sense is that it's unthinkable and so no one is asking the questions.) Thus the relief well are being drilled in a race with the integrity of the ground around the well and the casing.

If they don't make it, we're looking at a very very different kind of accident. (This is where the "decade" remark comes in.) And if so, Tony Hayward will look back upon yesterday as a relatively pleasant interlude before the *real* disaster struck. "

time to wake up and smell the coffee

2010-06-18T10:31:00.003-04:00

No we Can't:
"In brief:

● BP drills a hole down through many layers of rock, of different strength and consistency, to the oil.
● The oil will then come up through this bore hole at great pressure.
● You do NOT want that pressure forcing the oil sideways into upper levels of the drilled-through rock.
● So you line the bore hole with steel casing, and cement in the space between casing and bore hole wall. This is deep-drilling S.O.P.
● Evidence from the Top Kill failure suggests that this casing-cement system is now fatally compromised.
● So we have “down hole leaks” — oil under colossal pressure forcing its way sideways into below-sea-bed rock formations.
● If you had (which of course we don’t) some massive cork to jam into the top of the bore hole and stop the gusher, all that sideways-leaked oil would just come bursting out through fissures opening up in the sea floor.
● For miles around.
● And even though we don’t have such a cork, the bore hole might collapse in on itself, with the same effect.

As the writer says: “The very least damaging outcome as bad as it is, is that we are stuck with a wide open gusher blowing out 150,000 barrels a day of raw oil or more.”

In slightly different words: The best we can hope for is that the thing just goes on gushing through the bore hole indefinitely. (Or until we can drill enough relief wells to reduce the pressure. Don’t hold your breath.)

I’m as horrified as anyone by this — if the guy has got it right, and I’ve understood him correctly. At the same time, as a constitutional pessimist, I’ll own to a certain grim satisfaction. The infantile optimism of post-JFK America may have met its match down there in the Gulf. Nature is not mocked."

Americans are not addicted oil

2010-06-18T10:24:00.003-04:00

I got a case of the extra sads when Obama used the term "addicted to oil" the other night and not just because the village idiot used it first. You can't be addicted to something that forms the basis for civilization. Calling our dependence on oil an addiction suggests that we can just walk away from it which is 1. exactly what the government is hoping we won't do because it would absolutely crush the demand required for the infinite growth economy that NO ONE is talking about deserting and 2. it suggests that this "problem" we have is the result of individual personal failing and while it is to a certain extent it is overwhelmingly due to institutional resistance to change over which individuals have very little control. We do not have viable alternatives to oil in place. If we were to break our addiction there would be mass chaos, violence and starvation. What we have is profound institutional inertia that actively shapes individual psyches and enables the continuance of a deeply dysfunctional and hopeless dependence on oil. Probably too many 3 syllable words for a presidential address.

Awesome.

2010-06-17T11:06:00.003-04:00

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Guest font

2010-06-17T09:05:00.000-04:00

So very funny. Enjoy,

I'm Comic Sans, Asshole.

BY MIKE LACHER

- - - -

Listen up. I know the shit you've been saying behind my back. You think I'm stupid. You think I'm immature. You think I'm a malformed, pathetic excuse for a font. Well think again, nerdhole, because I'm Comic Sans, and I'm the best thing to happen to typography since Johannes fucking Gutenberg.
You don't like that your coworker used me on that note about stealing her yogurt from the break room fridge? You don't like that I'm all over your sister-in-law's blog? You don't like that I'm on the sign for that new Thai place? You think I'm pedestrian and tacky? Guess the fuck what, Picasso. We don't all have seventy-three weights of stick-up-my-ass Helvetica sitting on our seventeen-inch MacBook Pros. Sorry the entire world can't all be done in stark Eurotrash Swiss type. Sorry some people like to have fun. Sorry I'm standing in the way of your minimalist Bauhaus-esque fascist snoozefest. Maybe sometime you should take off your black turtleneck, stop compulsively adjusting your Tumblr theme, and lighten the fuck up for once.
People love me. Why? Because I'm fun. I'm the life of the party. I bring levity to any situation. Need to soften the blow of a harsh message about restroom etiquette? SLAM. There I am. Need to spice up the directions to your graduation party? WHAM. There again. Need to convey your fun-loving, approachable nature on your business' website? SMACK. Like daffodils in motherfucking spring.
When people need to kick back, have fun, and party, I will be there, unlike your pathetic fonts. While Gotham is at the science fair, I'm banging the prom queen behind the woodshop. While Avenir is practicing the clarinet, I'm shredding "Reign In Blood" on my double-necked Stratocaster. While Univers is refilling his allergy prescriptions, I'm racing my tricked-out, nitrous-laden Honda Civic against Tokyo gangsters who'll kill me if I don't cross the finish line first. I am a sans serif Superman and my only kryptonite is pretentious buzzkills like you.
It doesn't even matter what you think. You know why, jagoff? Cause I'm famous. I am on every major operating system since Microsoft fucking Bob. I'm in your signs. I'm in your browsers. I'm in your instant messengers. I'm not just a font. I am a force of motherfucking nature and I will not rest until every uptight armchair typographer cock-hat like you is surrounded by my lovable, comic-book inspired, sans-serif badassery.
Enough of this bullshit. I'm gonna go get hammered with Papyrus.

By the people for the people

2010-06-17T08:57:00.001-04:00

Holy cow! No conflict of interest here!

Congress members overseeing firms involved in gulf spill held oil, gas stock

"Nearly 30 members of the congressional committees overseeing oil and gas companies held personal assets in the industry totaling $9 million to $14.5 million late last year. That included at least $400,000 in the three companies at the heart of the Gulf of Mexico oil-drilling disaster, according to a Washington Post analysis of financial disclosure forms released Wednesday."

Republicans couldn't be less interested in small government

2010-06-17T08:48:00.000-04:00

Here is Orin Hatch calling for pee-pee tests of everyone getting unemployment and welfare. As Balko said the other day, Republicans don't really want small government. They "welcome government intervention as long as it’s in support of their agenda."

Orrin Hatch: Let’s Drug Test Unemployment Insurance Recipients

"This amendment is a way to help people get off of drugs to become productive and healthy members of society, while ensuring that valuable taxpayer dollars aren’t wasted,” he said after announcing his amendment. “Too many Americans are locked into a life of a dangerous dependency not only on drugs, but the federal assistance that serves to enable their addiction.”

Even if this asshole really wanted to help drug addicts, which he doesn't, or really wanted to intervene in the culture of welfare dependency, which he doesn't, a deep recession isn't the right time to tackle drug use and welfare dependency and urine tests that will toss people off the rolls without the social programs to back them up will do nothing but create desperately poor, hungry, drug using street people. It wouldn't take a master statistician to figure out that it is most likely cheaper to pay for peoples drugs via benefits than to police their activities or incarcerate them never mind the community value of not having abandoned housing surrounded by large crowds of vagrants. Hatch is pandering to his base of ignorant, ethnocentric persecution junkies and this kind of legislation, which feels right to these people but is actually just bad policy, is a great example of the triumph of ideology over practicality, empathy and reality.

Trapped in Egypt for no fucking reason except bullshit

2010-06-16T19:54:00.000-04:00

It may be hard being green but traveling when your brown aint so great either these days. Sucks to be this dude.

Mother Jones:

"For six weeks, Mr. Wehelie has been in limbo in [Cairo]. He and his parents say he has no radical views, despises Al Qaeda and merely wants to get home to complete his education and get a job. But after many hours of questioning by F.B.I. agents, he remains on the no-fly list. When he offered to fly home handcuffed and flanked by air marshals, Mr. Wehelie said, F.B.I. agents turned him down.
....“For many of these Americans, placement on the no-fly list effectively amounts to banishment from their country,” said Ben Wizner, a senior staff attorney with the A.C.L.U. He called such treatment “both unfair and unconstitutional.” An F.B.I. spokesman, Michael P. Kortan, said that as a matter of policy, the bureau did not comment on who was on a watch list. But he said the recent plots showed the need “to remain vigilant and thoroughly investigate every lead.”
“In conducting such investigations,” Mr. Kortan said, “the F.B.I. is always careful to protect the civil rights and privacy concerns of all Americans, including individuals in minority and ethnic communities.”
....The no-fly list gives the American authorities greater leverage in assessing travelers who are under suspicion, because to reverse the flying ban many are willing to undergo hours of questioning.
But sometimes the questioning concludes neither with criminal charges nor with permission to fly. The Transportation Security Administration has a procedure allowing people to challenge their watch list status in cases of mistaken identity or name mix-up, but Mr. Wehelie does not fit those categories."

Bernie bill to cut oil industry subsidies fails 35-61

2010-06-16T19:49:00.000-04:00

Further evidence of our inability to do even the simplest and most reasonable fucking thing. Learn to chop and stack wood. Learn to make soap. Buy a rifle.

Wonk Room:

"The executives’ claim that taking away the subsidies would result in job loss is pretty laughable, considering how lucrative an enterprise oil is on its own. Sima Gandhi has pointed to estimates from the Office of Economic Policy at the Department of Treasury, which found that removing subsidies for the oil industry would affect domestic production by less than one-half of 1 percent at most.

We would get far more bang-for-the-buck in terms of job creation if we used this money just about anywhere else. But instead, job creating legislation stalls on Capitol Hill, while subsidies to the most profitable of industries continue."

Telling the truth

2010-06-16T15:38:00.005-04:00

In listening to lots of pro-Obama speech reaction today, I have to conclude that people just don’t get it.

Even among his fans, no one is particularly thrilled with Obama’s oil spill speech. It wasn’t specific enough, he looked tired, he looked nervous, etc. Lots of these folks are examining the subtext of the speech and what his vague words might have been suggesting in terms of future policy announcements. Several people said things akin to “he’s so smart and kind and good, he must have underwhelmed us on purpose”. People are saying that if had actually said anything he’d have been panned so they understood why he didn’t say anything. And of course, the old stand-by that despite anything questionable that he does, thank goodness we have Obama and not McCain. Well, here’s my take on Obama’s speech.

Obama doesn’t want to change US energy policy, i.e. he doesn’t want to change how the US government treats the fossil fuel industry. Obama wants to be president for 8 years and do some good in the process but he does not want to change the status quo. He believes in its potential for redemption within the narrow confines of its current institutional framework and within the even narrower confines of its current crop of power elites. What Obama wants is not going to be sufficient to even slightly ameliorate our rough ride down the supply curve of fossil fuel with all its attendant misery. He isn’t a bad man and he is clearly a very, very smart man but he isn’t going to be effective because he isn’t willing to tell us the truth we need to hear. Obama needs to be actively facilitating the crafting of a way out, not vaguely advocating for some kind of reform down the line.

How are we are supposed to magically transition our entire country to alternative energy without having a leader willing to explain peak oil and map out our extreme and multi-platform dependence on this rapidly depleting resource? How can we all be brought to understand the depth of our problem without using terms like "resource war" and telling people that Dick Cheney and his NEPDG orchestrated the invasion of Iraq to secure oil? How can we encourage alternative energy without advocating for an immediate and substantial gas tax and ending government subsidies to fossil fuels? How about mentioning the FACT that for the first time in history official oil production forecasts are shrinking? How about having a fireside chat where he explains how fossil fuels are cheap due to tax payer subsidies and the free market's failure to capture the price of negative externalities? How about saying the word CONSERVATION? Obama isn't going to get an energy revolution started by carefully crafting subtext into a speech! As long as he limits himself to what is generally considered to be politically possible and doesn't take a stand and doesn't present and fight for a position (a position which must be radical to be effective) he is just kicking the can down the road.

This does not make him a fundamentally bad leader or even a bad man but it does make him unequal to the task at hand which is nothing short of handling the impacts of the at best partial collapse of the industrialized United States. When I say that people just don’t get, this is what I mean. What’s at stake isn’t the next election or the future of the Democratic Party, or even the fate of the Gulf of Mexico. The stakes are not if we fall but how hard and unfortunately for Obama, who might have been a great President in a calmer time, the realities of this task aren’t on his blotter or even worse, not on his radar.

It is completely sci-fi

2010-06-16T11:14:00.001-04:00

Comments on BP's policing of the spill area:

Naomi Klein:

"The whole Gulf Coast is a corporate oil state...It's like BP broke it, so now they own the entire Gulf Coast...We might accept the premise that BP is best positioned to know how to fix the blow up at 5,000 feet, but that also seems to mean they think they should control media access and the entire clean up of a massive national emergency. BP is in charge of everything. We were on the water in open seas the day before the Wackenhut incident and a boat pulls up next to us and asked if we worked for BP and we said, "No," and they said, 'You can't be here.'" It is completely sci-fi. It's a corporate state."

Yobie Benjamin:

"It is clear from this evidence that while the US Coast Guard and BP continues to claim that there is no media blackout and media restrictions, BP has hired security thugs to enforce a media blockade.
Even more disturbing is the guards trying to restrict the TV crew and reporter on a public beach. Note how the BP security people are explicitly warning workers not to talk to the TV reporter."

CBS:

"When CBS tried to film a beach with heavy oil on the shore in South Pass, Louisiana, a boat of BP contractors, and two Coast Guard officers, told them to turn around, or be arrested."

Mother Jones:

"I asked today's BP liaison/public-beach gatekeeper, Jason, who really seemed like a doll, if we could in the meantime talk to the cleanup workers. We can't, he said with an apologetic face, but not because BP forbids them from talking to the press. It's the subcontractors who've threatened to fire the workers for any media interaction. Indeed, when I ran into some packing up on the Grand Isle beach twenty minutes later, I asked them only if they were done working for the day, and they refused to tell me. One woman said, "I can't talk to you," and then another worker ran up to her and grabbed her arm and said, "Just ignore her, ignore her," and the whole interaction was unsettlingly rude and sort of sad. The workers who were staying next to me in my Grand Isle motel last week told me that when BP (not, in this case, and for the record, a subcontractor) had instructed them that they couldn't talk to the press, it'd involved a warning that media organizations would go so far as to dub audio propaganda over their videotaped commentary, putting unflattering words in their mouths. "

Debtors Prison

2010-06-16T09:28:00.000-04:00

From Automatic Earth:

"People too often assume that the consequences of debt will remain minimal, even to the point of deliberately maxing themselves out before a default they know is inevitable. This is a very dangerous practice. As the article points out, debts which are at risk of non-payment are often sold on to those lower down the financial foodchain, who reckon they have enough of a chance of collecting to justify the amount they pay to buy the debt from the original issuer.

If they have paid very little, they do not need to actually collect on many debts to make a profit overall. Debts can be sold on multiple times, to operators prepared to use harder and harder tactics, until the debt can end up in the hands of 'Vinny the Knee-Capper', or equivalent. Long before that people can suffer a multitude of lesser consequences, beginning with harassment and moving on to jail. It doesn't appear to matter that debt is not a criminal matter. Expect existing authority to be abused, left, right and centre. This is the way much of the world lives already, in fear of corrupt authority or authority exercised on behalf of powerful vested interests, even if it constitutes a clear violation of legal principles.

We are seeing the early stages of the return of debtors' prisons and other less palatable consequences. Debtors beware."

AE cites this article from The Star Tribune :

"As a sheriff's deputy dumped the contents of Joy Uhlmeyer's purse into a sealed bag, she begged to know why she had just been arrested while driving home to Richfield after an Easter visit with her elderly mother.
No one had an answer. Uhlmeyer spent a sleepless night in a frigid Anoka County holding cell, her hands tucked under her armpits for warmth. Then, handcuffed in a squad car, she was taken to downtown Minneapolis for booking. Finally, after 16 hours in limbo, jail officials fingerprinted Uhlmeyer and explained her offense -- missing a court hearing over an unpaid debt. "They have no right to do this to me," said the 57-year-old patient care advocate, her voice as soft as a whisper. "Not for a stupid credit card."
It's not a crime to owe money, and debtors' prisons were abolished in the United States in the 19th century. But people are routinely being thrown in jail for failing to pay debts. In Minnesota, which has some of the most creditor-friendly laws in the country, the use of arrest warrants against debtors has jumped 60 percent over the past four years, with 845 cases in 2009, a Star Tribune analysis of state court data has found."

This harkens directly back to something Derrick Jensen talks about. He asks whether we feel like we live in a violent society. Most people(men) would say no but Jensen posits that the moment we step outside of a narrow set of parameters, our society's violence reveals itself.

Reactions to Obama's speech

2010-06-16T09:14:00.000-04:00

Yglesias:

"I understand that the Senate isn’t going to pass a comprehensive climate/energy plan that puts a price on carbon. I get that. Nevertheless, the right thing to do is to pass such a bill. A discussion of energy policy should say so. A discussion of energy policy should mention climate change. There’s more to be said about the benefits of energy reform than its role in averting climate catastrophe. And there’s more to improved energy policy than carbon pricing. But climate change is really important. And putting a price on carbon is really key to getting a handle on it. If you’re talking about these issues, you should say that stuff. And Obama didn’t...If you’re not going to talk about this stuff, then why talk? There’s nothing wrong with settling for less than you wanted, but it’s downright weird to not even discuss what really needs to be done."

Ezra:

"The pessimistic take is that Obama shied away from clearly describing the problem, did not endorse specific legislation, did not set benchmarks, and chose poll-tested language rather than a sharper case that might persuade skeptics."

Scheer:

"What’s with the president’s war analogy on the oil spill? It’s as if some alien force, “The Invasion of the Slippery Sludge,” suddenly attacked us. “Abroad, our brave men and women in uniform are taking the fight to al-Qaida,” President Barack Obama said Tuesday in his White House speech, “and tonight, I’ve returned from a trip to the Gulf Coast to speak with you about the battle we’re waging against an oil spill that is assaulting our shores and our citizens.” What nonsense. The oil was minding its own business until some multinational corporations, enabled by a dysfunctional government regulatory regime, decided to wage war on the ecological balance of the oceans by employing technology that they were not prepared to control. Cleaning up the oil spill mess we made by raping the environment to satiate our consumer gluttony is not a glorious battle against evil but rather obligatory penance for the profound error of our ways."

Obama has officially lost Jon Stewart

2010-06-16T08:44:00.001-04:00

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Not rocket science after all

2010-06-15T21:35:00.003-04:00

According to this article from the NYT, Steve Wereley, who I posted about here, was right on the money...after looking at one video...almost a month ago. They needed to let the momentum die down before admitting how bad it is. They knew from the beginning. All of them. And Obama used this once in a lifetime historical chance to push for aggressive changes to our energy policy to push for...business as usual.

From NYT:

"A government panel on Tuesday released yet another estimate of the amount of oil flowing from a damaged well, declaring that as much as 60,000 barrels a day could be spewing into the Gulf of Mexico. That is roughly 2.5 million gallons of oil a day, and it means an amount equal to the Exxon Valdez spill could be gushing from the well about every four days."

Checkmate

2010-06-15T13:01:00.002-04:00

Orlov's latest. This is a wonderful fleshing out of what I was alluding to in A conversation about a reckoning earlier this week.

"When attempting to come to terms with the regularly observable demise of civilizations, and the forthcoming demise of this one, our failure to cope is complete: ancient pagan archetypes take over our thinking, our unconscious mind takes over, and we are transported to a realm of second-rate fantasy films. All reasonable people agree that the future is either Mad Max or Waterworld; take your pick, end of discussion...

People who fail repeatedly yet always try again are lauded for their persistence, never mind that they are serial failures. This isn't necessarily bad; people should and do safeguard each other. What's worse is that the higher in society one goes, the more dilute the consequences of failure tend to become, until we rise up to those exalted places whose existence is safeguarded by the magic incantation "too big to fail." This incantation is quite effective: many people are hypnotized by it. It prevents them from seeing something quite obvious: when serial failures are continually rescued, this allows them to bloat up until they are too large for the rescuers to deal with, at which point they become too big to not fail. When any one of them can no longer be rescued, the result is a cascaded failure that overwhelms the rest, and failure becomes crippling. Past that point, nobody gets to try much of anything ever again: society has checkmated itself.

What happens after that point bears a striking resemblance to what came before. After all, there were many insoluble problems before, and many degenerative cultural trends could be observed. It's just that there are more of them afterward, and they are more severe, but there may not be an obvious qualitative difference. It may not be immediately apparent that checkmate has arrived, and the specific point in time can become visible only in retrospect, if at all. Emergencies come and go, and people get used to the fact that the beaches are black and sometimes catch fire and burn for weeks, or that there is a ravine running through the center of town where the riverfront used to be, or that electricity is only on for a couple of hours a day. Dogs and children turn feral, but nobody remembers when that started happening, so everyone assumes that that's the way it's always been. Nor does anyone remember when it became fashionable to tattoo corporate logos on one's scalp, or to proudly display one's naked buttocks in public. An expatriate who leaves and later comes back might think that this now is a completely different country, but those who stay would be at pains to detect the difference because for them changes were too slow to rise above the threshold of perception...

A society takes a series of bad turns (which may not seem bad at the time). Once that happens, it's all over but for the waiting. The turns are irreversible, and attempting to make a society undo them is futile. In this situation, the only adaptive thing any of us can do is to learn to live as if these turns had never been made in the first place. "

Accountability

2010-06-15T10:20:00.001-04:00

From Glenn Greenwald:

"The Supreme Court today denied a petition of review from Maher Arar, the Canadian and Syrian citizen who was abducted by the U.S. Government at a stopover at JFK Airport when returning to Canada in 2002, held incommunicado for two weeks, and then rendered to Syria, where he spent the next 10 months being tortured, even though -- as everyone acknowledges -- he was guilty of absolutely nothing. Arar sued the U.S. Government for what was done to him, and last November, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal of his lawsuit on the ground that courts have no right to interfere in these decisions of the Executive Branch. That was the decision which the U.S. Supreme Court let stand today, ending Arar's attempt to be compensated for what was done to him...

Just compare how the American and Canadian Governments responded to what everyone agrees was this horrific injustice. The Canadians, who cooperated with the U.S. in Arar's abduction, conducted a sweeping investigation of what happened, and then publicly "issued a scathing report that faulted Canada and the United States for his deportation four years ago to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured," and made clear he had done absolutely nothing wrong. Then, Canada's Prime Minister personally and publicly apologized to Arar, and announced that Canada would compensate him with a payment of $ 8.5 million.

By stark contrast, the U.S. Government, which played a far more active role in his abduction and rendition to Syria, has never apologized to Arar (though individual members of Congress have). It has never clearly acknowledged wrongdoing (the only time it even hinted at this was when Condoleezza Rice called U.S. conduct in this case "imperfect" -- you think? -- and generously added: "We do not think this case was handled as it should have been"). In fact, it continuously did the opposite of providing accountability: in response to Arar's efforts to seek damages from the U.S. Government, the U.S. raised -- under two successive administrations -- a slew of technical arguments to persuade American courts not to hear his case at all, including the argument that what was done to Arar involved "state secrets" that prevented a judicial adjudication of his claims. The U.S. even continued to ban Arar from entering the U.S. long after it was acknowledged that he had done nothing wrong, thus preventing him for years from appearing before Congress or in the U.S. to talk about what was done to him. Indeed, after the Bush administration spent years arguing that courts were barred from hearing Arar's case on the ground of "state secrets," the Obama administration embraced those same arguments and then urged the Supreme Court not to hear his appeal.

So congratulations to the U.S. for winning the right to wrongfully abduct people and send them to their torture with total impunity. What a ringing statement about our country's willingness to right the wrongs it commits and to provide access to our courts to those whose lives we devastate with our behavior. Andrew Sullivan today referred to "the cult of the inerrant leader": the inability and refusal of our political class to acknowledge wrongdoing, apologize for it, and be held accountable. The Maher Arar case is a pathological illustration of that syndrome. "

There is simply no way the government/Obama can explain this. There is no justification. The guy was innocent. With Obama poised to make his big "we are going to hold them accountable" BP speech later today, we should all be nauseated by his arrogance and his hypocrisy and fearful of this latest extension of executive power.

Prohibition

2010-06-15T09:59:00.002-04:00

History doesn't repeat itself but it does rhyme - Mark Twain

This great article references the book Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, a book I look forward to reading. The drug war is clearly being persecuted in the interest of the industries that serve it and for no other reason and I agree with the writer's assertion that the need for tax dollars will be it's undoing, as it was for prohibition .

The Parable of Prohibition

"With the implementation of the 18^th Amendment in 1920, the dysfunctions of Prohibition began. When you ban a popular drug that millions of people want, it doesn't disappear. Instead, it is transferred from the legal economy into the hands of armed criminal gangs. Across America, gangsters rejoiced that they had just been handed one of the biggest markets in the country, and unleashed an armada of freighters, steamers, and even submarines to bring booze back. Nobody who wanted a drink went without. As the journalist Malcolm Bingay wrote, "It was absolutely impossible to get a drink, unless you walked at least ten feet and told the busy bartender in a voice loud enough for him to hear you above the uproar".

So if it didn't stop alcoholism, what did it achieve? The same as prohibition does today—a massive unleashing of criminality and violence. Gang wars broke out, with the members torturing and murdering one another first to gain control of and then to retain their patches. Thousands of ordinary citizens were caught in the crossfire...

One insight, more than any other, ripples down from Okrent's history to our own bout of prohibition. Armed criminal gangs don't fear prohibition: They love it. He has uncovered fascinating evidence that the criminal gangs sometimes financially supported dry politicians, precisely to keep it in place. They knew if it ended, most of organized crime in America would be bankrupted. So it's a nasty irony that prohibitionists try to present legalizers—then and now—as "the bootlegger's friend" or "the drug-dealer's ally." Precisely the opposite is the truth. Legalizers are the only people who can bankrupt and destroy the drug gangs, just as they destroyed Capone. Only the prohibitionists can keep them alive.

Once a product is controlled only by criminals, all safety controls vanish and the drug becomes far more deadly. After 1921, it became common to dilute and relabel poisonous industrial alcohol, which could still legally be bought, and sell it by the pint glass. This "rotgut" caused epidemics of paralysis and poisoning. For example, one single batch of bad booze permanently crippled 500 people in Wichita, Kan., in early 1927—a usual event. That year, 760 people were poisoned to death by bad booze in New York City alone. Wayne Wheeler persuaded the government not to remove fatal toxins from industrial alcohol, saying it was good to keep this "disincentive" in place...

Yet it happened. It happened suddenly and completely. Why? The answer is found in your wallet, with the hard cash. After the Great Crash, the government's revenues from income taxes collapsed by 60 percent in just three years, while the need for spending to stimulate the economy was skyrocketing. The U.S. government needed a new source of income, fast. The giant untaxed, unchecked alcohol industry suddenly looked like a giant pot of cash at the end of the prohibitionist rainbow. Could the same thing happen today, after our own Great Crash? The bankrupt state of California is about to hold a referendum to legalize and tax cannabis, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has pointed out that it could raise massive sums. Yes, history does rhyme.

Many people understandably worry that legalization would cause a huge rise in drug use, but the facts suggest this isn't the case. Portugal decriminalized the personal possession of all drugs in 2001, and—as a study by Glenn Greenwald for the Cato Institute found—it had almost no effect at all. Indeed, drug use fell a little among the young. Similarly, Okrent says the end of alcohol prohibition "made it harder, not easier, to get a drink. ... Now there were closing hours and age limits, as well as a collection of geographic proscriptions that kept bars or package stores distant from schools, churches and hospitals." People didn't drink much more. The only change was that they didn't have to turn to armed criminal gangs for it, and they didn't end up swigging poison.

Who now defends alcohol prohibition? Is there a single person left? This echoing silence should suggest something to us. Ending drug prohibition seems like a huge heave, just as ending alcohol prohibition did. But when it is gone, when the drug gangs are a bankrupted memory, when drug addicts are treated not as immoral criminals but as ill people needing health care, who will grieve? American history is pocked by utopian movements that prefer glib wishful thinking over a hard scrutiny of reality, but they inevitably crest and crash in the end. Okrent's dazzling history leaves us with one whiskey-sharp insight above all others: The War on Alcohol and the War on Drugs failed because they were, beneath all the blather, a war on human nature.