Guess Who Hates Our Freedom

It was James, a thickset American interrogator nicknamed “the Elephant,” who first told Lakhdar Boumediene that investigators were certain of his innocence, that two years of questioning had shown he was no terrorist, but that it did not matter, Mr. Boumediene says.

The interrogations would continue through what ended up being seven years, three months, three weeks and four days at the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. . . .

He was beaten on arrival, he said. Refusing food for the final 28 months of his detention, he was force-fed through a tube inserted up a nostril and down his throat, he said. There was a hole in the seat of the chair to which he was chained, sometimes clothed, sometimes not; as the liquid streamed into his stomach, his bowels often released.

He emerged gaunt, with wrists scarred from seven years of handcuffs, almost unable to walk without the shackles to which he had grown accustomed, he said. Crowds terrified him, as did rooms with closed doors, said Nathalie Berger, a doctor who worked with Mr. Boumediene shortly after his release. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/26/world/europe/lakhdar-boumediene-starts-anew-in-france-after-years-at-guantanamo.html?pagewanted=all

So, what is the point of torture? Let's connect the dots. The Republicrats are engaged not only in supporting murder of US citizens, not only in supporting the renting out of prisons and their populations to vicious corporations, and not only in stripping rights of free speech while increasing rights to own, carry, and hide weapons in public. They are also engaged in what the Democans label a "war on women." Nice distraction. Naomi Wolf in the UK Guardian advances an interesting theory about the “war on women.” She argues it’s not primarily, as usually claimed, a war on feminism or progressivism.

I would say [the surge of punitive anti-choice legislation] is all part of the larger crackdown we see on privacy, private space, freedom and personal choice.

It is on the same spectrum of control: the will to gag Bradley Manning or Julian Assange also seek[s] to gag a medical provider in South Dakota. The same impulse to peer into personal emails and listen to private phone calls that has led the NSA to pour billions into surveillance stations in Utah, is the same impulse of panopticon state control that wants to get between the sheets of men and women in consensual sexual decision-making, and monitor or restrict their access to condoms and contraception. And it is the same Big Brother impulse for control that maintains that what a woman does with her own care-provider is a function of state management. . . .

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/may/24/what-lies-behind-war-on-women-naomi-wolf

Let me be clear: While the Dems make better noises, in the past several years they have done little to advance the interests of anyone, female or male, who isn't rich. As mentioned here before, Bill Clinton did what the Repubs failed to accomplish: He dismantled the safety net for poor women. Barack Obama promised to close Guantanamo but, not only kept it open, one year ago he re-launched Guantanamo's notorious "military tribunals," claiming military  commissions "ensure that our security and our values are strengthened." http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-12671777 This would be hilarious, except it isn't. It's tragic.

Before a fascist state can move against real enemies, it must create internal “others.” Women, gays, and immigrants serve that purpose. For a disgusting list, for example, of newly aired “anti-PC” descriptions of women as animals by men (and even women) in power, see this: http://www.alternet.org/story/155362/6_absurdly_demeaning_conservative_attacks_on_women?page=entire

In pre-World War II Germany, Jews, gypsies, and Communists provided the fodder on which hate could feed. Like the sidewalk busker distracting the mark from his sleight of hand, the current government sets up targets for a naïve public, leveraging anger against those who have destroyed a way of life for hundreds of thousands of Americans. That real anger, tethered by a sense of impotence, too often gets released against women, people of color, gays, and immigrants, in short, against any “other,” just as hungry Germans vented their rage at the expense of German Jews.

As I've been saying, we see less and less of the freedoms we took for granted as Americans. The NY Times of May 29 reveals Obama's bloodlust as he reviews and selects from a hit list that includes "several Americans." Since the launch of Occupy Wall Street, more than 75 journalists have been arrested. Freedom of the press has reached an all-time low, salvaged only by the wide-open spaces of the Internet. Unfortunately, those spaces are endangered by ongoing attempts to colonize the net in order to keep the riffraff from posting. As Naomi Wolf notes,

. . . bills have been proposed in Albany, New York to criminalize anonymous postings online – to "protect business people and government officials" from criticism.  And the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act has language legalizing the directing of propaganda at United States citizens. And so on. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/may/24/what-lies-behind-war-on-women-naomi-wolf

Even scarier, Google ensures the absolute lack of anonymity of those who post online. We’ve all noted our gmail running ads that reflect content of personal emails. A friend and I emailed back and forth about nothing but “trucks.” It didn’t take the robo-spies at Google long to pick up on that "private" content and start pushing various truck sellers to us. But the commercialism of privacy is merely one wing of a conspiracy that broadens, it seems, minute by minute:

In 2010 it was revealed that Google partnered with the CIA in a venture called “Recorded Future.” Google’s vast data archive can be harnessed to meet “security” needs. This is especially troubling in light of a controversial bill being pushed through Congress, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). The act would allow sharing of data between companies like Google and the National Security Agency (NSA) to combat alleged cyber-security threats.

This gets scarier in light of a recent DC Court of Appeals ruling upholding a lower court’s decision blocking a Freedom of Information request from the Electronic Privacy Information Center. EPIC sought to determine the nature of the collaboration between the NSA and Google over Chinese hacking of the company’s site. The claims of national security are increasingly trumping a citizen’s right to know and his/her notion of privacy.

http://www.alternet.org/story/155479/the_terrifying_ways_google_is_destroying_your_privacy?page=entire

Returning to the dilemma of Lakhdar Boumediene--like Kafka’s “prisoner,” he still has no idea why he spent seven years of his life in hell, five years after being told his captors knew of his innocence. Psychology 101 teaches us we most despise in others what we cannot overcome in ourselves. Ranting against terrorist acts while committing them qualifies. The CIA is a terrorist organization, the United States a terrorist state, feared by too many people across the globe. The purpose of torture is not to elicit information. Level-headed intelligence personnel, past and present, point out that interrogation works best when the person conducting the interview (1) knows the subject’s language well; (2) understands the subject’s culture; and (3) goes after the information indirectly, through befriending and disarming the subject. These techniques worked beautifully on German prisoners of war in WWII.

But the purpose of the torture in which the US is engaging is not to garner information. The purpose is to terrify--and not only to terrify the subject of the interrogation, but additionally to terrify those of us who understand, there but for the grace of the government go I.

Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Robots

John Edwards cannot keep it in his pants. Stop the presses! Powerful men tend to have uncontrolled sexual appetites, with plentiful "stocks" of willing partners to tempt any who require tempting---albeit not always "willing". The Kennedys are a prime example. Joseph, JFK's dad, was accused by a teenaged friend of one Kennedy daughter of climbing into her bed in the middle of the night. JFK's appetites were legendary, inspiring awe for his pain tolerance because he had a bad back. To be fair, I don't know if subsequent generations of Kennedys outgrew the family's entrenched misogyny. I rather hope they did, if only for the safety of female visitors to their houses.

But the lesson embedded in the Edwards' saga is not the need to outfit male politicians with chastity pants, nor even the lack of priorities exhibited by voters who scream for the heads of morally wayward office seekers while tolerating far more egregious behavior, behavior that is corrupt in ways having nothing to do with sex.

Consider the May 21 NY Times account of various testimony on the case against the Senator. Advised by knowledgeable consultants that the affair with Rielle Hunter would destroy his career, Edwards placed the incompetent woman in a well-paid position, producing so-called webisodes for his candidacy. The productions, so amateurish they couldn't be aired, raised suspicion. Yet the arrogant Mr. Edwards flew this lowly employee on his private campaign plane, toting her luggage himself even though he couldn't deign to pick up a newspaper on his own. He requests health insurance for her and, when told she's a mere consultant and they don't give benefits to contract employees, he barks something along the lines of "Do it," responding to "Why?" by snorting, "Figure it out." This man clearly has a death wish.

Meanwhile, the Senator represents himself as a friend to the poor, uniting "the two Americas." I guess Rielle was sort of poor before he united with her.

But the real lesson lies in the exposure of the private man behind the candidate. Edwards, the putative man of and for the people, turns out to be someone who psychologically tortured his wife in the final months of her life, a man with a snarky attitude toward those who questioned, unfortunately, NOT his ethics but his wisdom, and one who cavalierly used campaign funds to keep his proclivities under wraps, even as he impregnated his mistress. The dissociation between the public Edward and the private parallels the burgeoning dissociation we see in, for example, Barack Obama, who can be broken down into President Obama, Candidate Obama, and private Obama. Campaign Obama is the puppet of PACs and paid hacks with very expensive wet fingers waggling in the wind. President Obama is the puppet of the .01%. And if you think you have a clue who the private Obama is and what he truly believes, you must have psychic powers.

The front page of the same NY Times contemplates some of the damage inflicted by Citizens United.

. . . for a growing number of strategists and operatives in both parties, the very nature  of what it means to work in politics has shifted. Once wedded to the careers and aims of individual candidates, they are now driven by the agendas of the big donors who finance outside spending. . . ."I think at the end of the day it has to do with money," said Matt Mackowiack, a Republican consultant who works with Let Freedom Ring, a group set to spend $20 million on political advertising this year.

Consider Abraham Lincoln on the train, scribbling the Gettysburg Address on an envelope. A Dubya couldn't have made it past the first public speech. Whatever you think of Mr. Lincoln, and I have many reservations about his well-doctored image, he said what he thought and believed in what he said. With campaigns the product of opinion polls and slanted news programs and influential lying TV ads, the public has become nothing but a pawn in an ugly game. We vote for robo-candidates, telling us anything we want to hear and dissociating themselves from, for instance, racist ads because, after all, they cannot control what those super PACs are doing.

So here's what our democracy has devolved into: Cardboard men and women equipped with recordings pasted together by people to whom "in the end, it's all about money," and rhetoric aimed not at what's shredding our country and its economy, but at what will shred our intellects by firing up our prejudices. We too will become robots in the thrall of men for whom everything on earth is all about money.

I don't believe in God but I fervently wish somebody could help us.

Don't Send Your Brains to the Celebration

Barack Obama finally placed his imprimatur on gay marriage. Those who have longed for his endorsement of their right to their rights are shouting hallelujah! His action, of course, contributes to the good fight, but don't mistake it for anything approaching the "evolution" of his conscience he and his campaign lay claim to. When supporters praise his courage because, in their estimation, this will cost him the black vote, they are fooling themselves. This morning's NY Times notes that within hours of his announcement, he had a conference call with "eight or so black ministers" and that, while all expressed opposition to gay marriage, "most" said they would urge their congregations to vote for the President.

In 1960, John Fitzgerald Kennedy and his campaign staff debated a telephone call to Coretta Scott King to express concern over the arrest of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Would it help or hurt JFK's bid for the White House? His advisers concluded he could not win without the African-American vote and he made the call. Good decision. Black voters put him over the top and into the Oval Office.

Memoirs yet to be written will detail a similar pow-wow preceding Obama's declaration. As for black voters deserting Mr. Obama in November--well, that imagined scenario reminds me of a cartoon featured on the cover of the New Yorker long ago, when AT&T owned every telephone in the country. The cartoon showed a businessman in his office high above New York City. A string runs from a Dixie cup in the man's hand out the open window. (This hasn't been done by children in years--not since parents began bestowing iPhones on their ten-year-olds, but this was a common toy devised for short-distance communication among playmates in the 1950s.) The man is saying, "So I told them, if you won't give me better service, I'm going to a competitor."

Why not get misty-eyed over Obama coming to his senses? In the first place, as many have noted, the reason rights are called "rights" is that they are not, or at least should not be, subject to popular vote, and it might have been nice for our President to have perceived and even mentioned this when he "evolved". Moreover, there's a great deal at stake when citizens are so easily swayed by these blatant PR maneuvers. Faith in the humanity of politicians will only net us more debacles like California's Proposition 8. The time for Obama's conscience to kick in has long passed and we can do ourselves a favor by not engaging in fuzzy-headed thinking about what motivated him. (Let's not forget, in our enthusiasm, that this remains a corrupt and un-constitutional Administration--which, incidentally, doesn't distinguish it from its predecessors, but there's the rub--an administration that, for example, practices George W. Bush-style public censorship, recently perp-walking a reporter from a gooey schmooze of a press conference, a reporter who questioned the purported accuracy and the drooled-over justice of killer drones.

Someone asked me recently, "What happened to all the firebrands of the 1960s?" I said, "We got old." Just as our President calculates his every word from the perspective of advancing his standing, we have shelved our ideals in favor of financial and emotional security. A nightmare I had frequently in the mid-1960s involved my going to prison and losing out on all of my daughter's childhood. But that was the totality of the nightmare because, besides time, I had very little to lose.

Even so, I am dismayed by the relative lack of passion among today's younger people. Ironically, in the '60s. we married young and had children young, but remained politically active for some years beyond "settling down." Nowadays people put off marriage and even child-bearing for quite a while--it's not unusual anymore to see women of 35 having their first baby. When I was 29 and having my second baby, the obstetrician told me bluntly, "You're not a spring chicken anymore. If you're going to have more babies, you shouldn't wait."

These late-marrying folks, however, have invested in their careers, careers that, in the case of women, often have been made possible by the now curmudgeonly firebrands of the 1960s. The current attack on women has not deeply upset enough young women. The farther we get from, for example, the era in which American women went to Mexico for butcher-shop abortions, the less anxious the current generation feels about losing those rights.

Just as we can't see fascism gripping our country, we can't see rights taken away, even as they disappear, one by one.

Why THEY Are Winning the Class War

Every time progressives backing Obama succeed in guilt-tripping me for not supporting the President (think of the Supreme Court!), I take a deep breath and grit my teeth and say okay, I'll vote for him--yet one more stench of corruption fills my nostrils.

Okay. Jon Corzine's banditry is not new. Trouble is, for the majority of Americans (me definitely included), this is abstruse stuff. "Financial instruments"? "Collateralized debt obligations"? "Credit default swaps"? Quants? (The latter, it turns out, are the math whizzes conscripted for cash by financial titans, and as such these ethically challenged individuals are responsible for the conversion of our economy into a lot of monetary hot air.)

In a moment I'll get back to Corzine and Obama, but first a birdbrain-eye's view of the gutting of US-economic-stability-for-profit. Here's a sweet summary:

'Having likened the 1973 invention of the Black-Scholes formula for calculating derivative risk as finance’s modernist moment, Lanchester, the most artful writer-qua-writer here, sees the 2008 derivatives crisis as its postmodernist moment, in which value recedes from our comprehension like meaning in Derrida, with the crash its Derridean “aporia.” In this he was anticipated by the genius who was wrong about everything, the Ayn Rand-schooled, postobjectivist Fed czar Alan Greenspan. As Taibbi reminds us, that supreme oracle once crowed about the “ever increasing conceptualization of our Gross Domestic Product — the substitution, in effect, of ideas for physical value.' http://www.salon.com/2012/01/08/reading_the_financial_crisis/ 

In other words, lying wizards figured out how to "leverage" optical illusions while stripping our nation of value based on physical objects, i.e., manufacturing. These geniuses saw that money could be made by losing as well as by winning and by gutting instead of building companies (a la Mitt Romney and Bain Capital). We ordinary folk never dreamed such nefarious scams existed. Force-fed worship of the "free market," most of us bought all the canards about it, most importantly that it had anything to do with the reality in which we work, save, and spend.

What a shock to discover, then, that we'd been shriveled from a great nation into one link in a multinational corporate chain. Because we didn't heed Adam Smith, who warned us of the true role of the State, i.e., to protect the wealthy, we were unprepared for the indifference of state apparatus to crimes of breathtaking enormity.

Take Jon Corzine, whose MF Global Corporation topped the rabbit out of the hat by deep-sixing 1.2 billion dollars. Gently asked by Congress where that money went, Corzine shrugged off the question with "I don't know. Sloppy bookkeeping, I guess."

The money was fraudulently removed from, supposedly "segregated" but actually absorbed, customer accounts and presumably placed in more congenial offshore locations. So far, Corzine's insouciance has not netted him a single indictment. Too bad he didn't slip up and steal $25 from a 7-11. He could be doing life.

Don't believe the government protects those who steal big from those who steal small?

Farmers' money (along with other customers' money) was impermissibly transferred from MF Global. Senator Stabenow is the Senate Agriculture Committee Chairwoman who lobbed soft-ball questions at Corzine during hearings. If you don't look for fraud, you don't find it. She kept asking "where is the money?" but that is what the investigation is supposed to uncover. Corzine claimed he didn't know. If Senator Stabenow wanted to ask a sensible question to pin down Corzine and get to the bottom of matters, it would have gone something like this: "To the best of your recollection, to which financial institutions was money of any kind transferred from MF Global the week before the bankruptcy? Can't remember? Then please name one."
For example, it later came out that Corzine knew of a $175 million transfer to JPMorgan and still later it was revealed that the source of funds was "segregated" customer accounts. This gives the appearance that the Agricultural Committee hearing was cheesy theater instead of a genuine attempt to hold Corzine accountable under Sarbanes-Oxley rules and the rules of the entities that regulated MF Global.

(And this)

Terrence Duffy, executive chairman of the CME Group, testified to Congress on December 13, 2011 that a draft report showing a more than $900 million shortfall in required segregation was withheld from regulators. MF Global employees later claimed this was due to an "accounting error," but auditors found no such so-called accounting error. Later, MF Global admitted the shortfall was real and that so-called segregated customer funds had been impermissibly transferred. Lawyers notified Duffy by phone and email that a senior MF Global employee indicated Corzine was aware of "loans" of money from segregated account to MF Global's European affiliate and that at all times the people doing the transfers were under the authority of MF Global management. Duffy's testimony on these matters begins at 17:24 on this C-Span clip:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/janet-tavakoli/jon-corzine_b_1466744.html

So how close is our "liberal" President to a man of such sterling character? Corzine is a top fund raiser for Obama, a man Joe Biden consults, and a personal friend who hosts Mr. and Mrs. Obama, presumably spending on them some of his ill-gotten gains.

Corzine has bundled over half a million dollars for the Obama campaign. In April he held a $38,500 per person fund raiser for the President at the lavish apartment in NYC that he shares with his wife, Sharon. A former Goldman Sachs exec, Corzine will exit his post at MF Global, aloft on a golden parachute of $12,000,000. (Too bad about the investors who got shafted but oh well.)

Obama's campaign handlers claimed in January that Corzine's money of THIS year (but not of previous years) had been returned. Correct me if I'm mistaken, but doesn't April FOLLOW January?

Corzine is one of the two dozen Wall Street bandits to whom the President opened the White House not long ago in an effort to quell the peculiar rumor that he is hostile to their interests. At one point, the former New Jersey governor and senator was considered a shoo-in for the Cabinet as Secretary of the Treasury.

Once, in my casual youth, my husband and I shared a living room floor overnight with a disgusting racist friend of our hosts. I couldn't sleep for the stink--an actual physical sensation that made me long to stop up my nose. Were I to step into a room with Jon Corzine, I suspect a similar sensation would overtake me.

Yet I am asked to pull the lever for a president whose administration so far has refused to pursue justice--not against the former president and vice president who lied thousands of people--American, Iraqi, and Afghan--to their deaths (oh, ha-ha, is Bin Laden hiding under the dais?), not for corporate thieves who destroyed the economy for the poor and middle class, not against banks that robosigned foreclosure orders on property to which they could not show title, and not against a man who oversaw the theft of more than a billion dollars.

I'm not a law and order fanatic, but it seems to me we should've had our fill of criminals asking for our endorsement for political positions enabling them to damage us further. And, no, I confess I don't see a viable alternative to this rotten President in the absence of a coherent (instead of a do-your-own-thing woo-woo) Occupy Movement that sailed past any opportunity to coalesce into a formidable third party--almost as if they were Obama sailing past promise after promise after promise, floating on phantasmagorical good intentions.

Double sigh. Oh well.