On the Banality of Evil: A Psychiatric examination of Hermann Goering

Scientific American Mind has an interesting article on the post-war psychiatric examination of Hermann Goering; Hitler's deputy and president of the (Nazi) Reichstag.

The article summarizes the work of American psychiatrist Dr. David Kelley, who spent extensive time interviewing and evaluating Hermann Goering and other high-ranking members of the defeated Nazi government.  His analysis ran contrary to the allies own propaganda, which stated that Nazi's were "madmen" and insane.

[Kelley] believed that Goering and his cohorts were commonplace people and that their personalities "could be duplicated in any country of the world today"... In other words, the Holocaust and the war's other heinous crimes were the products of healthy minds.

The implications are not trivial.  For example, many of the events that have occurred as a result of America's own war against global terrorism can also be explained, not as the act of mentally deranged "bad apples," but of people seduced by their own power and thus willing to erase the boundaries of accepted behavior and engage in barbarism.  The obscenities employed in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, at black-site torture centers across the world, and even in America's own domestic prisons, are examples where seemingly normal people can deviate from established rules of conduct and pursue grotesque and monstrous criminality in the name of the state and ideology.

Ritholtz on the rise of the Corporatocracy

Over the past 30-years both Republican and Democratic parties have drifted from their traditional positions towards extreme stances. Throughout this period pro-corporate policies that catered to the balance sheets of multinationals and those with enough cash to pay-to-play, have defined the legislative agendas of both federal and state politicians. Left-wing political activists, like Ralph Nader, have been calling Washington D.C. "corporate occupied territory" for the past two decades. Consider the following:

• The revolving door between corporate officers and government employees has become the norm.
• A study conducted in 2005 by Public Citizen found that from 1998, "43 percent of the 198 members of Congress who left government to join private life have registered to lobby."
• Politicians have become indentured servants to special interest groups and major lobbyists in the financial/insurance industries, the military-industrial complex, the energy/ chemicals sector, big-pharma, corporate agricultural, and the communications/ electronics industries.
• Legislation is often written directly by lobbyists and submitted to congressmen and state legislators for direct approval.  Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, told The Atlantic magazine, "The average American doesn't realize how much of the laws are written by lobbyists... It's shocking how the system actually works."
• "Corruption, in its institutional sense, denotes the degeneration of republican forms of government into despotism, and typically comes about when the private ends of a narrow faction of citizens succeed in capturing the engines of government." (Harper's, Speak, Money, Oct. 2010)
• The Brookings Institute calls "The 5-4 conservative majority decision in Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission that struck many decades of law and precedent [to] likely go down in history as one of the Supreme Court's most egregious exercises of judicial activism."  The Roberts court, "dismissed the legitimacy of laws... equated the free speech protections of individuals and corporations in spite of countless laws and precedents that insisted on meaningful differences."
• A USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll taken Dec. 16-18, 2005 found that 49% of American adults say they believe "most members of Congress are corrupt."
• The Republicans K-street project, was a project by now convicted former congressman Tom Delay to coerce lobbying firms to "hire Republicans in top positions, and to reward loyal GOP lobbyists with access to influential officials."
• Super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff, was sentenced in 2006 for conspiracy, fraud, and tax evasion related to his lobbying efforts

Barry Ritholtz, CEO of FusionIQ (an investment firm) and primary blogger at The Big Picture tells his readers that:

In 2009 and 2010, I learned that Corporate America took over the political process via their exhaustive lobbying efforts. What was once a Democracy is now a Corporatocracy... Politicians do the bidding not for the people, but for the corporate establishment. Those people who want to blame the barking, snarling government for all the woes of the world do not want you to look further up the leash to see who is giving the commands. These corporate apologists pretend to be philosophers, but in reality they are mere Fellatrix, bought and paid for by their lords and masters.

We've reached a turning point.  When growth was evident, jobs were available, and cheap accessible credit abounded, everyone was happy and willing to keep dancing to the same tune. Now that the bill is past due and we're looking at decade of low growth or worst, investors and everyday persons on both the right and the left are seeing the system for what it is.  Ritholtz acknowledges that we were warned by the founding fathers, Eisenhower on the military-industrial complex, and countless other critics about the perils of what philosopher Sheldon Wolin has described as inverted totalitarianism.

The corporate state does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader. It is defined by the anonymity and facelessness of the corporation.

The viciousness and lawlessness of the corporatocracy knows no bounds. Like Orwell's 1984, those in control have no interest in the betterment of mankind or pursuing nationalistic agendas, they are solely interested in power for power's sake. And in the polluted materialistic cesspool that is modern existence, that power is obtained through the collection and amassment of wealth and money.

A Government for, by, and of the Corporations

Bloomberg News has an end of the year article ("Out of Lehman's Ashes Wall Street Gets Most of What It Wants") and an interview with its lead author,  Christine Harper, on the subversion of  the financial industry reform and the underlying power of the banks over Washington DC's political class.

The past two years have seen the worst economic turn down in the American economy since the Great Depression.  The origins of this downturn emanate nearly exclusively from America's financial industry, which manipulated legislators in the 1990's to abandon historic safeguards and firewalls and then engineered novel methods to expand and grow their balance sheets.  The result was a global recession that destroyed trillions of dollars worth of capital, reduced nations like Iceland, Ireland, and Latvia into economic wastelands, and has crippled growth across the Western world. However, in that same period, the same institutions that caused so much damage and harm to the world have grown richer than ever.

The last two years have been the best ever for combined investment-banking and trading revenue at Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, 56, and his top deputies are in line to collect more than $100 million in delayed 2007 bonuses -- six months after paying $550 million to settle a fraud lawsuit related to the firm’s behavior that year. Citigroup, the bank that needed more taxpayer support than any other, has a balance sheet 14 percent bigger than it was four years ago.

The article elaborates on how the Obama administration, from its very inception, was uninterested in challenging the banks. The inclusion of former Clinton era deregulatory stalwarts, like Lawrence Summers, and persons directly responsible for the financial crisis, such as former president of the Federal Reserve bank of NY, Timothy Geithner, lead Simon Johnson, former chief economist at the IMF, to conclude “that the banks were going to get a free pass." Reformers were politely ignored and persons that significantly challenged the status quo "were dismissed as unrealistic, misinformed, advancing ulterior motives or damaging to U.S. competitiveness."

The too big to fail (TBTF) banks are now even bigger and the legislation crafted by congress is incapable of deterring these monopolies from engaging in even more disastrous swindles.  Meaningful changes, such as the re-introduction of Glass-Steagall or even what became known as the Volcker Rule, which would "ban proprietary trading at regulated banks and prohibit them from owning hedge funds and private equity funds" was water-downed, gutted, and then abandoned altogether.

Attempts to reign in the excessive salaries and bonus structures at the big banks were immediately defeated by representatives from both the corrupt Republican and Democratic parties. 

71 percent of Americans said big bonuses should be banned this year at Wall Street firms that took taxpayer bailouts, and 17 percent said bonuses above $400,000 should be subject to a one-time 50 percent tax. Only 7 percent of the respondents said they consider bonuses a reflection of Wall Street’s return to health and an appropriate incentive.

Even though a clear majority of citizens wanted the plutocrats pay to be cut for their egregious mishandling of the economy, congress in collusion with the robber-barons would have none of it.

To ensure that none of their paid whores in congress would go off message or engage in populist pandering, lobbying efforts during the 2010 election period were thrown into overdrive.

The biggest financial companies increased their spending on lobbying in the first nine months of 2010 as they sought to influence the legislative outcome, according to Senate records. JPMorgan’s advocacy spending grew 35 percent, to $5.8 million from $4.3 million, while Goldman Sachs’s jumped 71 percent to $3.6 million.

The Dodd-Frank Act for financial industry reform was eventually passed, but:

The law won’t prevent lenders with federally guaranteed deposits from gambling in the derivatives markets, though it will place restrictions on some types of contracts and require more transparent trading and central clearing. It does little to solve the danger posed by leveraged firms reliant on fickle markets for funding.

Two decades of legislative changes have given the banks and the financial industry everything they wanted; yet that was not enough.  Today every American citizen, through the generosity of their political representatives in Washington, is forced to subsidize the incompetence and greed of the bankers.  In return you, joe-public, are given a moribund economy, marginal economic growth, reduced benefits, no retirement, a society with high structural unemployment, and the comforting thought that all those rich motherfuckers on Wall St. are enjoying their vacations in the Hamptons on your dime.

Casino Jack Movie Trailer

BofA forecloses despite not a single payment missed!

The illegal and criminal machinations of the American banking industry continues to be exposed on a daily basis.  Consider this latest hor d'oeuvres that the media has overlooked.

[Bank of America] earlier this month notified Shock Baitch and his wife Lisa (Friedman) Baitch that foreclosure action will start today – Christmas eve – unless the couple agrees to put their home up for a forced sale. As of Thursday night Bank Of America has not backed down from its foreclosure threat.

Why?

Because another unit of Bank of America erroneously reported to credit agencies that the family was seeking a loan modification, ruining their credit rating and as the result putting their mortgage into default.

All this is happening even though the bank – after admitting it erred and sent a letter of apology in September – handed this case to a special unit at Bank of America that is charged with dealing with severe customer issues. It promised to notify the credit reporting agencies that the couple were not deadbeats, but were good credit risks.

This isn't some South Florida wasteland, where automated robosigners operating 24/7 are churning out bogus legal documents without any oversight.  The case in example is in Hartford, Connecticut, the historic international center of the insurance industry and thus a city and state steeped in the rigors of proper accounting and legal procedures.  As Barry Ritholtz of the "Big Picture" blog stated on this subject:

This is not about keeping deadbeats in their homes, as a few idiots and liars have asserted. The corporate sympathizers who are too busy fellating the bank to recognize what is going should be ignored. This is about fundamental property rights and the Rule of Law in the United States — nothing less.

Listen to what the homeowners in this particular case have to say about the useless bags of corrupt corporate shit that is Bank of America:

“Bank of America lied and submitted fraudulent information to the credit bureaus and now I am literally and financially paying for it,” Baitch said. “I looked into help with a consumer counseling service, but we can’t participate because our income is too low to meet the payment requirement. I looked into bankruptcy, but we have too much equity in the house. I cannot meet the minimum payments now on the credit cards and may have to default. I am in a situation that I should have never been in since [the bank] destroyed our credit and ability to refinance. All our debt should have been consolidated and I should have positive cash flow monthly not negative.”

Where is the great socialist Barack Obama on this matter? According to the press, the Obama administration is very, very mad at the perceived fraud undertaken by the banks, but on the other hand "the administration had yet to find anything fundamentally flawed in how large banks securitized home loans or how they foreclosed on them."

Well, Mr. Obama, I have for you a very real and obvious case of how the banks foreclosure process is fundamentally flawed and illegal. So while critics bloviate about the man's so-called socialist policies, he continues to carry water for the banks and refuses to hold his biggest corporate donors accountable for the their illegal behavior.

Chillout Session: Dogs of War

Quote of the Day: On the Rise of Statism

After the excesses of the Bush Administration, the failure to prosecute those within it who committed illegal acts, President Obama's claim that he is empowered to order the extra-judicial assasination of American citizens far from any battlefield, the treatment of Bradley Manning in custody, TSA's recent behavior, the growth of the DEA, the expansion of the surveillance state, and the bipartisan stamp of approval on indefinite detention – among other things! – the federal government has shown itself to be the most likely entity in American life to behave abusively toward American citizens.

- Conor Friedersdorf, "Who Is It That Shuts Down Dissent?"

NYT's Book Review of Matt Taibbi's "Griftopia"

The New York Times Sunday Book Review looks at Matt Taibbi's newest publication "Griftopia"

The reviewer summarizes the book with the following:

In “Griftopia,” a relentlessly disturbing, penetrating exploration of the root causes of the trauma that upended economic security in millions of American homes, Taibbi argues that what unfolded was far from accidental. Rather, the nation suffered the equivalent of a hostile takeover of key areas of its commercial life by investment banking houses, while regulators and members of Congress abdicated their responsibilities either because they were influenced by campaign cash or because they believed the fairy tale that unsupervised markets always work best. The result, Taibbi asserts, was a thieves’ paradise — Griftopia.

Taibbi takes on the zombie lie, pushed by right-wing hacks, that the banks were forced to sell subprime mortgages to poor people and that Fannie Mae and Fredie Mac were the root causes of the crisis.

Taibbi persuasively dismisses the argument that the financial crisis was caused by poor people with a taste for real estate, delineating how Wall Street eagerly handed out mortgages to anyone with a pulse, and then used the home loans as the material for a far more lucrative enterprise — the exotic investments known as derivatives. The derivatives market depended upon a steady supply of mortgages. But when too many of the bets went bad, Wall Street persuaded the Treasury to construct bailouts that Taibbi describes as a “labyrinthine financial sewage system designed to stick us all with the raw waste and pump clean water back to Wall Street.”

The book attacks the mindless Tea-Party movement, calls Alan Greenspan the biggest asshole in the universe, delves into America's bubble machine typified by the original vampire-squid, Goldman Sachs, and considers how Obama's health care initiative is nothing less than a boondoggle for the toxic-sludge dealers in big-Pharma and the nickle-and-dime kleptomaniacs in the so-called insurance business.  As emotionally cathartic as it is to find someone who will call the biggest thieves and crooks on the planet, what they truly are. It is Taibbi's constant attack on the enterprises of American capitalism, those revered and sacrosanct temples, in which he viciously and relentlessly dismantles and exposes as being little more than high-end criminal rings, that is most satisfying.

An excellent read.  I hope someone was generous enough to put it under your Christmas tree.

Obama, bagman for Bush's torture adventures

McClatchy Press has an excellent summary, through Wikileaks, of the Machiavellian maneuvers made by the Obama White House to undermine both international law and justice.

This blog has in the past described how the administration of Barack Obama over the past two years, has given "support and comfort" to the torturers and fiends of the Bush junta (here, here, and here). A number of prominent political and legal commentators have equally concluded that Obama, his AG, and members of his administration are now as culpable as their predecessors in concealing acts of torture, manipulating foreign governments to forsake investigations of American criminality, and failing to vigorously uphold constitutional prerogatives in prosecuting those who have violated domestic laws and international treaties, to which America is signature to.

In 2009, the Obama administration sent Republican Senator Mel Martinez to Spain to cajole the Spanish judiciary into abandoning investigations lead by Spanish magistrate, Baltasar Garzón into six Bush lawyers who laid, "the foundation for abuse of detainees in the months following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks." The Spanish investigations concerned Alberto Gonzales, who described parts of the Geneva conventions "quant" and "obsolete" after 9-11; Bush lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee; David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney's counsel; William "Jim" Haynes, Defense Department General Counsel; and Doug Feith, a Pentagon undersecretary who handled policy issues for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

The Spaniards were not swayed and told Martinez and the American ambassador to Spain, that "The independence of the judiciary and the process must be respected.''  Michael Ratner, a civil rights attorney affiliated with the Center for Constitutional Rights, states that "The U.S. prides itself on our own independent judiciary... But here you have the hypocrisy of the U.S. government trying to influence an independent judicial system to bend its laws and own rules.''

The timeline of the above diplomatic maneuvers coincides with Obama's attempt to marginalize Bush's crimes:

But by the time Spain's Association for the Dignity of Prisoners filed the torture complaint that U.S. diplomatic circles found so troubling, the Obama White House was resisting calls to set up a Truth Commission or assign a special prosecutor to examine the legal framework that set up Guantánamo and permitted "enhanced interrogation techniques'' that included waterboarding high-value detainees.

"Generally speaking, I'm more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards," Obama said on Feb. 9, 2009.

How Mr. Obama, a man who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, could become protector and defender of his predecessor's criminality, will be an issue that historians will grapple with for decades.  The emotional cheers of "change you can believe in" lie exposed as election based propaganda, told by the architects of Empire to confuse the guilible masses into believing that their opinion actually matters.

Americans Negotiating with Taliban Impostor!

Over and over, the impression given by our marginally elected politicians is that they and their well educated bureaucracy, if given enough time and effort are capable of implementing effective leadership and results across the globe.  The Afghan war is a typical example, in which we the citizens of the West have been promised that the country would be modernized and made safe from the Taliban.

Despite nearly a decade there, neither NATO nor America seems capable of winning a war against a fifth rate nation.  Why is that?  The reason might have something to do with the type of people who we have running the show over there.  Consider this and file it under "My God, they can't be this Fucking Stupid!"

According to international newspapers, both NATO and America have been negotiating with an impostor who claimed to be a high ranking Taliban commander.

NATO and Afghan officials said they held three meetings with the man, who traveled from in Pakistan, where Taliban leaders have taken refuge.

The fake Taliban leader even met with President Hamid Karzai, having been flown to Kabul on a NATO aircraft and ushered into the presidential palace, officials said.

The episode underscores the uncertain and even bizarre nature of the atmosphere in which Afghan and American leaders search for ways to bring the nine-year-old American-led war to an end. The leaders of the Taliban are believed to be hiding in Pakistan, possibly with the assistance of the Pakistani government, which receives billions of dollars in American aid.

That's right.  The US government, including  Gen. David Petreaus the US Senior military commander in the region, was commenting on the progress they were having in negotiating with... a fucking impostor!  The impostor who for months was taking their money and pretending to be interested in halting the Talban's offensives in Afghanistan against NATO troops.  According to others:

The man may have been a Taliban agent. “The Taliban are cleverer than the Americans and our own intelligence service,” said a senior Afghan official who is familiar with the case. “They are playing games.”

Brilliant!  At this point any statements made by anyone in any Western government can be considered useless.  We are fighting semi-literate tribesmen, who have no formal military training, no firm logistical support lines, no long term financing for their guerrilla campaigns, and no discernible resources; other than that provided by the duplicitous and corrupt Pakistani.  Yet we are being told that the war will last for another five years!  Send Biden, Obama, and every member of congress and their adult relatives to do a tour of duty in Afghanistan and this war will end tomorrow.

The continued ascent of the surveillance state

Recently Dana Priest and William Arkin of the Washington Post published another chapter into their ongoing investigation of America's secretive information gathering operations.  In the past series, they discussed the emerging nexus between corporate entities, clandestine information services, and the government.  A system so large that "Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications."  No single entity within the government is capable of understanding the totality or scope of the enterprise; not even the president's own top officials on the subject.

The most recent chapter to this story, involves the involvement of state and local police agencies.  Across the nation terrorism task forces have been created to capture information related to domestic threats that may arise in each jurisdiction in America.  The federal government has provided grants to this regional governments and police forces to purchase high-end military surveillance systems and communication networks to monitor and manage local populations.  In those cases where no terrorism related activities are identifiable, the new task forces are used to monitor criminal classes and/or any person or group the state deems of interest.

The most contentious aspect of the government surveillance lies in the collection of data on individuals who are completely innocent of any wrongdoing.  A Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, or SAR, has been established to collect data (personal, commercial, financial,...etc) upon any person the state determines suspicious.  Unlike the conventional system, where the state does not have the right to collect and horde every minuta of data about your life, the new terrorism laws and surveillance state network, casts a wide net.

As of December, there were 161,948 suspicious activity files in the classified Guardian database, mostly leads from FBI headquarters and state field offices. Two years ago, the bureau set up an unclassified section of the database so state and local agencies could send in suspicious incident reports and review those submitted by their counterparts in other states. Some 890 state and local agencies have sent in 7,197 reports so far.

The objective of the system is to amass as much information on each person within the United States as possible. The federal state has had a long and sordid history of monitoring, infiltrating, and undermining civilian populations engaged in nothing less than constitutionally sanctioned criticism of government practices. The following examples confirm the misuse of the current security state powers:

• In Virginia, the state's fusion center published a terrorism threat assessment in 2009 naming historically black colleges as potential hubs for terrorism.
• From 2005 to 2007, the Maryland State Police went even further, infiltrating and labeling as terrorists local groups devoted to human rights, antiwar causes and bike lanes.
• And in Pennsylvania this year, a local contractor hired to write intelligence bulletins filled them with information about lawful meetings as varied as Pennsylvania Tea Party Patriots Coalition gatherings, antiwar protests and an event at which environmental activists dressed up as Santa Claus and handed out coal-filled stockings

In America, the public has generally accepted the rise of the surveillance state. Trivialities such as civil liberties, the abuse of constitutional freedoms, the invasion of individual privacy, and the monitoring of lawful public assemblies, are glossed off by the mainstream media and the population as minor irritants that only affect those swarthy and obviously guilty dark-skinned persons with funny names. Glenn Greenwald expands on this asymmetric information relationship:

One of the hallmarks of an authoritarian government is its fixation on hiding everything it does behind a wall of secrecy while simultaneously monitoring, invading and collecting files on everything its citizenry does. Based on the Francis Bacon aphorism that "knowledge is power," this is the extreme imbalance that renders the ruling class omnipotent and citizens powerless.

The cabal of corporate fascists has extended its tentacles into every aspect and function of every person in the nation. Big brother is not just a metaphor, he is the state.

Airport Security: protecting the state's right to abuse you

According to news reports from ABC news' Austin, TX affiliate, a middle aged woman was assaulted by TSA employees, dragged out of Austin airport, and arrested by local police for refusing to allow the state to physically examine her breasts.  Unless I'm your physician or a law enforcement official who has probable cause to believe that you are engaged in a criminal act, groping a woman's breasts in public is considered sexual assault.  Under America's authoritarian regime, the state in the name of national security has the right to sexual assault any woman: your wife, mother, sister, or daughter, in the name of protecting the nation from overheated and dangerous tities.

Claire Hirschkind, fourth amendment rights proponent and the perpetrator of this heinous act of civil disobedience, stated to the press that the basis of her actions was that "she [was] a rape victim [sic] who has a pacemaker-type device implanted in her chest." The news report outlines the events:

Hirschkind was hoping to spend Christmas with friends in California, but she never made it past the security checkpoint.

"I can't go through because I have the equivalent of a pacemaker in me," she said.

Hirschkind said because of the device in her body, she was led to a female TSA employee and three Austin police officers. She says she was told she was going to be patted down.

"I turned to the police officer and said, 'I have given no due cause to give up my constitutional rights. You can wand me,'" and they said, 'No, you have to do this,'" she said.

Hirschkind agreed to the pat down, but on one condition.

"I told them, 'No, I'm not going to have my breasts felt,' and she said, 'Yes, you are,'" said Hirschkind.

When Hirschkind refused, she says that "the police actually pushed me to the floor, (and) handcuffed me. I was crying by then. They drug me 25 yards across the floor in front of the whole security."

I have been criticising the absolute uselessness of this entire "fear-mongering" and civil liberties denying exercise for sometime. In an earlier blog ("Will this scanner make my penis look bigger?"), I discussed the limited value to subjecting persons to invasive an qualitatively ineffective screening practices. Civil libertarians and consumer advocates have entered lawsuits and issued numerous complaints about the virtual strip-searching of innocent civilians (examples here, here, and here).  The ACLU has also been warning people, for much of the past year, as to the authoritarian over-reach of airport screening procedures:

what was formerly voluntary is now mandatory... this is the classic way that invasive technologies reach us: the authorities make them as palatable as possible to get the public to swallow them (they’ll say it’s "voluntary," or "applied only in certain cases," and tell you it’s chock-full of privacy protections). Then once they’re accepted, they become more and more intrusive in all the ways the ACLU always warns against.

Ralph Nader wrote to President Obama earlier in 2010, to ask him to consider the potential public health risks entailing the exposure of millions of citizens to ionizing radiation through the employment of not fully tested technology at the nation's airports.  He further elaborates on previous mistakes made by the government in pushing unsound technology:

It was wasteful enough for the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) to install the “puffer” security devices at U.S. airports and then withdraw them because they were found to be “unreliable” at a cost of $30 million to taxpayers. Now, a far larger amount of taxpayer money is being spent on these scanning devices by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which claims it is not obligated to observe the Administrative Procedures Act.

Prior to the American Thanksgiving holiday season, a national debate proceeded on the absurdity of the entire "junk-touching" process.  Even this limited outcropping of sensibility has been revealed to be little more than political posturing and an attempt by right-wing media to publicly embarrass the Obama administration.  Glenn Greenwald explains:

I have no doubt -- none -- that if there were a Republican President in office now, these very same people would not only be defending the TSA in the name of Staying Safe, but maligning critics as Privacy Fetishists, Civil Liberties Extremists, and Friends of The Terrorists... In the other corner, we have the Democrats, who -- in perfect unison -- would be screaming bloody murder about these methods and waving the Flag of Civil Liberties if George W. Bush were still President, as they would smell partisan advantage from doing so. But since it's Barack Obama who is President, they are -- with a few exceptions -- meekly raising concerns, though more often acquiescent to the TSA when they aren't outright supportive.

Of course, all this is to protect you the feeble minded and easily scared public.  In the original ABC article discussing Ms. Hirschkind, fellow passenger Emily Protine says it all, "It's unfortunate that that happened and she didn't get to fly home, but it makes me feel a little safer."  Safer from what?  Another ABC News story discusses the case of Houston businessman Farid Seif who accidentally brought a loaded gun in his carry on luggage and evaded detection.  Despite assurances that airport safety is better than ever, field research tells a completely different story.

Experts say every year since the September 11 attacks, federal agencies have conducted random, covert tests of airport security. A person briefed on the latest tests tells ABC News the failure rate approaches 70 percent at some major airports. Two weeks ago, TSA's new director said every test gun, bomb part or knife got past screeners at some airports.

How is that nearly ten years after Sept-11, people with firearms are walking aboard airplanes in their hand luggage?  Yet we are told that by radiating large segments of innocent people with ionizing radiation and subjecting people to invasive search practices will make us all safer.

Why WikiLeaks matters in this age of Chinese Democracy

In Spain, the WikiLeaks disclosures have dominated the news for three days now. The reporting has been led by the level-headed El País, with its nationwide competitor, Público, lagging only a bit behind. Attention has focused on three separate matters, each pending in the Spanish national security court, the Audiencia Nacional: the investigation into the 2003 death of a Spanish cameraman, José Cuoso, as a result of the mistaken shelling of Baghdad’s Palestine Hotel by a U.S. tank; an investigation into the torture of Spanish subjects held at Guantánamo; and a probe into the use of Spanish bases and airfields for extraordinary renditions flights, including the one which took Khaled El-Masri to Baghdad and then on to Afghanistan in 2003.

- Scott Horton, "The Madrid Cables"

Within the elite political classes and global mainstream media, there is a rising anger and palatable contempt of Wikileaks' periodic information dumps.  The information to date has not been on the scope of the Pentagon Papers. As Fareed Zakeria said in Time magazine, "The Pentagon papers revealed that the U.S. engaged in a systematic campaign to deceive the world and the American people and that its private actions were often the opposite of its stated public policy."  The information clearly has shown governments across the world, be that autocratic or supposedly democratic, to have engaged in deceit, deception, and propaganda to achieve their own statist objectives.  Many in the MSM yawn and say that everything posted has been known.  Perhaps, but the MSM certainly didn't do their job in actively verifying those known suppositions.  Others, like CNN's Wolf Blitzer are filled with rage that anyone would dare to willingly examine the state secrets of the American Empire without first getting the state's tacit approval; like how him and all the other "respectable" laggards of the MSM do.

One commentator has said, "The difference between WikiLeaks and other media organizations is that WikiLeaks is doing its job properly."  Statist leaning politicians and right-wing bloggers on the other hand, are issuing their typical belligerent and illogical fatwas on WikiLeaks.  Despite an obvious understanding of the role of freedom of the press and in the case of America, the first amendment of the US constitution, we have the following verbal flatulence.

• Newt Gingrich, former Republican speaker of the US House of Representatives stated that Juilan Assange of WikiLeaks, "deserves to be hunted and executed" and held as an "enemy combatant."
• Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told NBC's David Gregory Sunday that Assange is a terrorist.
• Caribou Barbie (aka Sarah Palin) suggested that Assange deserved the same treatment as terrorists and insurgents.
• Sen. Lieberman (I-CT) has asked American companies to not assist WikiLeaks disseminate the data.  To date, Amazon.com has pulled WikiLeaks from its servers, PayPal has stopped donations, and a Seattle based company Tableau Software removed data visualizations published by WikiLeaks to Tableau Public.
• Tom Flanagan, a professor at the University of Calgary and former advisor to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, half-jokingly called for Mr. Obama to assassinate Mr. Assange.
• National Review's Jonah Goldberg asked, "Why wasn't Assange garroted in his hotel room years ago?"
• The same politicians who demanded that America illegally invade Iraq and permanently occupy Afghanistan, now claim that that WikiLeaks will have blood on its hands.

When the White House, the Pentagon, or any other agent of the government willingly passes "state secrets" to the press, such as in the lead-up to the Iraq war through the NY Times' Judith Miller or in the outing of CIA WMD investigator Valerie Plame, the same voices are silent.  When official court stenographer for the Bush White House, Bob Woodward, distributes state secrets in his books, in the way that teenage girls spread gossip, the mainstream press is agog with effuse praise.
 
On another level, the entire WikiLeaks criticism is typical of the fundamental contempt that the political and media class has for democracy, transparency, and government accountability. Governments do not want anyone to understand how incompetent and criminal they are in their everyday blunders. The American government has shown an extreme and persistent proclivity to lie to its citizens, to disseminate false information to the press and public, and conceal their criminal actions to further its own statist objectives. They and their paid cultural managers want a population engaged in the trivial and the irrelevant. A public that is aware and actively demanding accountability is an unacceptable situation for those leading the American Empire Project.

We are living in an age of Chinese Democracy, where the our imperious leaders tell us we are free to do as we are ordered.  The government continues to classify more and more of its activities behind the shield of state secrets, while maximizing its surveillance of innocent people through both legal and illegal means. This is why WikiLeaks matters. The lies that lead to the invasion of Vietnam, the falsehoods that attempted to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the evasion of responsibility surrounding the regulatory framework that lead to the Great Recession, the concealment of war crimes committed by US soldiers and CIA functionaries, the erosion of civil liberties and freedom... etc. are all reasons why whistle-blowers like WikiLeaks matter to functioning democracies.

Dubya is Threatened with Arrest if He Visits London, UK!

From Scott Horton's blog over at Harper's comes this exquisite piece of news, from the city of London's conservative Mayor.  I usually do not repost entire posts of others, but this succinct and insightful post is too valuable to not be shared in its totality. Bold print has been added by me.

London’s Tory mayor, Boris Johnson, has some strong words of caution for former president George W. Bush: if you come to Europe to promote your book, pack heavily and be prepared for a long stay. In fact, you may “never see Texas again.” As he sees it, Bush’s book and statements he has made in efforts to market it constitute admissions of serious crimes.

Initial reports about Bush’s autobiography did not go over well in Europe, and Britain’s new Conservative government was particularly eager to push back against suggestions that their conservatism had any resemblance to the Bush variety. Bush insisted this his decision to use waterboarding and other torture techniques kept Britain safe. But British Conservatives are having none of it:

In the case of the three men waterboarded on Bush’s orders, British ministers are not aware of any valuable information they gave about plots against Heathrow, Canary Wharf or anywhere else. All the policy has achieved is to degrade America in the eyes of the world, and to allow America’s enemies to utter great whoops of vindication. It is not good enough for Dubya now to claim that what he did was OK, because “the lawyers said it was legal”.

As Johnson sees it, the torture debate is ultimately about America’s claim to leadership in the world and the Bush team’s sullying of the nation’s reputation:

How could America complain to the Burmese generals about the house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi, when a president authorised torture? How can we talk about human rights in Beijing, when our number one ally and friend seems to be defending this kind of behaviour? I can’t think of any other American president, in my lifetime, who would have spoken in this way. Mr Bush should have remembered the words of the great Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, who said in 1863 that “military necessity does not admit of cruelty”. Damn right.

***

I have been saying this for years.  In yesterday's blog on Republican corruption, I stated that it is only a matter of time before someone in the Bush junta is ensnared and eventually prosecuted for international legal problems arising from their years of legal misconduct.  Whilst America's media glosses over the fact that both Dick Cheney and George W. Bush have admitted to ordering torture, people around the world are looking carefully at the decider's words and movement and evaluating the possibility of bringing him or his henchmen in front of a magistrate to explain themselves in court.

What we have also seen is that Mr. Obama has made substantial efforts to collude with the former administration in shielding and protecting them from domestic and international prosecutions.  Andrew Sulivan states in his blog that the most recent WikiLeaks information dump, "reveal an extraordinary effort by the US embassy and the Bush and Obama administrations to cajole, pressure, redirect and try to rig legal cases that could reveal the war crimes of the previous administration."  Both administrations are bound by the pirate's ethic of evading responsibility and accountability for any action they or their Jolly-Roger-like counterparts may engage in.  The Obama administration is now culpable in the crimes of his predecessors, and needs to explain their actions, at the very least, to the voters who demanded change that they could believe in.

Sen. Sanders on the Greed of the Plutocrats

Republican Corruption Tales...

In the past two weeks, two particular incidents have occurred that crystallizes the level of corruption and nepotism within the ranks of America's conservative party and big business interests.

The first involves the man who came to represent Republican corruption across America during the 2006 election; former Texas congressman and majority house leader Tom Delay. In 2005, Delay known on the Hill as "the hammer" for his harsh lobbying and legislative practices, was indicated for money-laundering and evading Texas anti-corruption laws. Two weeks ago, a jury in Austin, Texas, after 19-hours of deliberations found him guilty.

The NY Times reports on the case:

The verdict ends the latest chapter in a long legal battle that forced Mr. DeLay to step down. The trial also opened a window on the world of campaign financing, as jurors heard testimony about large contributions flowing to Mr. DeLay from corporations seeking to influence him, and about junkets to luxury resorts where the congressman would rub shoulders with lobbyists in return for donations.

Delay was initially charged for violating Texas campaign finance laws, but prosecutors realizing it would be impossible to convict him under these terms decided to prosecute him under a 1903 law, in which Texas prohibited corporations from giving money to candidates directly or indirectly. The details surrounding Mr. Delay participating in a transfer of money from private donors to his PAC to Texas candidates have never been in question.  What the jury determined though is that Delay actively engaged in flouting state laws to subvert democracy and manipulate state elections in favor of Republican candidates.

***

The second case involves another No.2 man amongst the conservative machine.  Charges of international corruption have been made against the man most responsible for the invasion of Iraq, the institution of torture as American foreign policy, and extending a regulatory framework that led to the greatest economic collapse in American history since the Great Depression; former Vice President Richard "go fuck yourself" Cheney!

Prior to becoming Dubya's VP, Cheney was Chairman of the Texas based energy services company Haliburton.  According to reports in the press, Cheney will be "indicted in a Nigerian bribery case as part of an investigation into an alleged $180 million bribery scandal."  The charges stem from the systemic bribery amongst Nigerian custom officials on behalf of Royal Dutch Shell Plc., one of the world's largest oil and gas company's.  The charges have furthermore, lead Interpol to issue an arrest warrant for him.

The likelihood of Dick Cheney being extradited to Nigeria or a foreign court is zero.  However, the fact remains that the world of tomorrow will be a very different place than it currently is and all the imperial might will not protect all of the members of the Bush junta into perpetuity for the domestic and international crimes they have committed.  Just as Henry Kissinger is unable to visit numerous countries for his involvement in multiple cases of state terrorism and criminality, so will these people be forced to limit their visits to states who have an independent judiciary that does not take matters such as, crimes against humanity lightly.

GOP's memo to America's unemployed: Drop Dead!

Stephen Pearlstein, business columnist for the Washington Post, recently wrote an enormously useful post in which he takes apart the Republican stance on the economy, the Federal Reserve, and the current unemployment situation across America.

He first establishes the governing philosophy of the party of 'no' since the mid-term elections:

Only two weeks after the midterm election, it seems clear that the 2012 campaign has begun. For too many Republicans, the aim is to politicize policy, trash the institutions of government and intimidate anyone who might disagree with their radical ideology.

The Republican party's public mantra has long been low taxes, smaller government, and accountability.  If anyone can find a Republican that has pursued this trifecta consistently while in congress I'd like to know, because the reality is that they have pursued low taxes for corporations and the very rich, while irresponsibly failing to engage in concomitant spending cuts.  Conservative economist Milton Friedman said, "for the government to spend is for the government to tax."  So, despite their claims, what Republicans are actually doing is shifting the tax burden, "explicitly or implicitly to tax somebody, either in the present or the future, either directly or indirectly, to pay for that purchase." They counter that that is not true, because the tax-cuts magically pay for themselves.  Again, this supply side voodoo-economics, has been shown to yield either no or minimal value to the economy and therefore do not pay for themselves.  For example, analysis of George W. Bush's tax cuts indicate that it produced an insignificant level of economic growth during his presidency. Hence, this is just the attempt of one group of people to evade paying taxes and force another group to subsidize their excesses.

Pearlstein recognizing the fallacy of the Republican tax-cut and spend mantra, estimates the impact of not extending the Bush tax cuts to small cash flow-through businesses and people earning beyond $250,000.

The macro view, from the forecasting firm Macroeconomic Advisers of St. Louis, is that not extending tax cuts for high-income households would reduce gross domestic product growth by - drumroll here - two-tenths of one percent in each of the next two years. And the difference in the unemployment rate? A whopping one tenth of one percent!

The impact of letting the richest people in the country pay the same taxes on the top tier of their income, as what they were paying during the Clinton administration in regards to the overall economy, is virtually negligible.

Regardless of the context, the same failed policies are trotted out as a panacea to every economic situation. And here is where the standard argument becomes exceptionally ugly. Knowing that their policies have failed and have lead to the harshest economic downturn since the Great Depression, Republicans are demanding that not only that their rich-friends, who have been on a tax vacation for the past decade, not be further taxed, but that those who are unemployed "drop dead."  In their devious minds, they are now attacking the Federal Reserve for pursuing monetary policies that leads to full employment. Whereas these same miscreants didn't attack the Fed when it was bailing out their fat-cat friends on Wall Street and creating a firewall of secrecy that concealed the extent of the criminality between big business and the government when Republicans were in power. Their hypocrisy is endless.

Get sick; drop dead.
Need help in paying for a family member's health care; let them drop dead.
Need to upgrade your skills at college to get a job; drop dead.
Cannot find a job and you've used up your savings; drop dead.
Need help preventing foreclosure on your home; drop dead.

Obama's failure and the floundering of the American economy is their ultimate objective. In their minds the death of the American dream is their stepping stone back into power. Republicans are traitors to everything that the country is supposed to represent.

Charlie Rose interviews Charles Ferguson of the "Inside Job"

http://www.charlierose.com/view/content/11321

The above link is to a recent interview (29 November 2010) between Charlie Rose and Charles Ferguson who produced the well reviewed documentary on the origins of the financial collapse of 2008 and the subsequent global bailout of the financial industry by governments across the world.

He states specifically, "the film is about the systemic corruption of the United States by the financial industry and the consequences of that systemic corruption."

In the interview Ferguson makes it clear that the corruption of America and its legislative and regulatory processes are profound.  He makes the case that much of what happened would not have occurred if the businessmen behind these monolithic investment banks were not so incompetent and blinded by greed and the US government had not abdicated its role, as an agent for fairness, in properly regulating the whole industry.  The actions taken by the government was to save the banks and the elite bankers, while allowing the rest of the population to fend for itself.  The bankers, with the exception of Lehman Brothers, were not made to make any sacrifices.

Ferguson further contends that "massive criminal fraud" was undertaken. Despite the nauseating proclamations by the financial industry and their media stooges, it is clear that both government and the largest corporations in America engaged in what may stand as the largest criminal event of the past quarter century. The reality is that none of these people, given the political climate and entrenched corruption of government, will be held accountable for their actions in destroying trillions of dollars of wealth, eliminating millions of jobs, and pushing families off the cliff.  When ordinary people lose their health care, lose their homes, lose their life savings, and end up destitute, the same people who caused this mayhem will snicker and call the rest of the population parasites!

I've said it numerous times on this blog, that only when people recognize the true nature of corporations in their society and begin to combat the force of coruption through monied politics, will things change.

Flow Chart of human hookups, first-dates, and relationships

I'm not sure how accurate any of this data actually is, but it's interesting just to think about in the idle spaces of own existence.

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/.a/6a00d83451c45669e2013489aeda81970c-popup

(h/t to Andrew Sullivan's the Daily Dish)

Things I found interesting:

1. 5.4% of people die without ever getting married.
2. 56% of people claim to be unhappy with their sex lives (Forget viagra and other boner drugs!  I see an opening here for subscription based tantric sex lessons offered at the local Learning Annex!)
3. Largest reason for breakups is a loss of interest (that seems accurate based on my own experiences)
4. 22% of people worldwide have engaged in infidelity (again, based on hereditary disease profiles I've reviewed that seemed entirely correct)

Arizona's indulgence with the banality of evil

I have been for some years awed by the grotesque indecency and outright evil that presents itself as the norm in the low-tax geezer-vista that is the state of Arizona.  Many will recognize the ongoing battle between locals and illegal immigrants.  My disgust does not entail this well discussed legal tussle and the underlying racial animus prevalent across the state.  Instead, I'd like to draw attention to the mindset and legislative behavior of the state's Republicans, who with their tax-free and minimalist government ideology have created a perfect example of the banality of evil.

I came across this example in the NY Times of the lengths many of the well-heeled denizens of the state will go to, in order to protect their personal fortunes from the local taxman.  Consider the following:

“Arizona is seeing more of the traditional battle of the generations...between some retirees who want taxes — including school taxes — kept low, and most parents who want better support for the schools their kids attend.”

Patrick Flynn, the president of a homeowners group in Troon, AZ in 2007, states that he has no qualms about education, he "just does not like the idea of paying for it."  In this particular exhibition of generational greed and malice, the residents of the district created a bogus local school district with no schools, teachers, or students to prevent their property taxes from being raised.  Families with children must pay adjacent districts to have their children participate in schooling.  As a state senator explains, “The whole purpose of this was to avoid taxes on their million-dollar homes.”

In an earlier post titled "The young must die so Geezers can pay low taxes" I explained how the Governor of Arizona planned to eliminate health coverage for 47,000 low-income children.  In the name of fiscal austerity the legislators gladly abandoned their most vulnerable citizens so that these modern day Merchants of Venice wouldn't have to worry about wasting their well earned shekels on youthful vermin.  The fact that the elderly receive federally subsidized Medicare and have no worries about paying for health care costs is an irrelevance to these hypocrites.  Racial bigotry is used by the citizens of the state to claim that most of the children were the offspring of illegals, who shouldn't be receiving benefits regardless.

What has drawn my particular ire today though is another instance of greed masquerading as fiscal rectitude.  The NY Times has a horrible story of how Arizona legislators have stripped citizens belonging to the state Medicaid program from having life-saving transplants.  Persons who for whatever reason that were waiting for a liver, lung, or other tissue were told to drop dead by their own representatives.

When Alan Grayson, the former congressman for Florida, said in 2009 that the Republican plan for health care reform was, "Don't get sick. That's right, don't get sick."  The MSM and Republicans bemoaned his rhetoric and yet evidence is abundant that he was absolutely correct.  On the floor of the House of Representatives, Grayson offered this scathing critique of the Republican party's program for health care

According to this study, “Health Insurance and Mortality in U.S. Adults” which was published two weeks ago, 44,789 Americans die every year because they have no health insurance. That’s right, 44,789 Americans die every year, according to this Harvard study called “Health Insurance and Mortality in U.S. Adults.” You can see it by going to our website, grayson.house.gov. That is more than ten times the number of Americans who have died in the war in Iraq.

It’s more than ten times the number of Americans who died in 9/11. But that was just once: this is every single year. That’s right: every single year. Take a look at this. Read it and weep. And I mean that – read it and weep because of all these Americans who are dying because they don’t have health insurance.

The state of Arizona offered this pathetic rational for why the government was serving poor and sick citizens a death sentence:

State Medicaid officials said they recommended discontinuing some transplants only after assessing the success rates for previous patients. Among the discontinued procedures are lung transplants, liver transplants for hepatitis C patients and some bone marrow and pancreas transplants, which altogether would save the state about $4.5 million a year.

While many states in the union have reduced or eliminated aspects of health coverage during the Great Recession, Arizona once again goes the extra distance to condemn their citizens to the vagaries of market-based health care; i.e. pay or you fucking die!  The cruelty and lack of any resemblance of ethics of these people is mind-boggling.

The behavior of all levels of government in Arizona is one of maximizing short term financial gains for their most well off citizens, while brutally undermining the health, education, and well-being of large portions of their population.  How is it that the richest country in the world has a health care system that is on par with second-rate industrial nations?  The justifications of the proponents of this lot are always anchored to some bizarre notion of moral indignation that others are getting a free ride, while they -the greediest generation, who never sacrificed, never went to war in the name of democracy and freedom, and who had their entire lives subsidized from birth- continuously demand others do without, what they loudly proclaim is their deserved entitlement.

Brazil recognizes Palestine as an independent nation

Brazil is Latin America's superpower.  For the past decade it has been part of the BRIC group of emerging markets that has grown at an impressive rate compared to the nearly stagnant and tepid grown witnessed respectively in Europe and the USA during the same period.  Today, Brazil is the 8th largest economy in the world, with a GDP $1.57 Trillion (USD).  It has a large and diversified economy with agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and service sectors.

Today, according to the Washington Post (via the Associated Press), Brazil is formally recognizing Palestine as an independent and autonomous nation state based on 1967 borders.

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva... sent a letter to Abbas on Dec. 1, saying Brazil recognizes Palestine and hopes that the recognition will help lead to states of Israel and Palestine "that will coexist peacefully and in security."

With the so-called peace process continuously undermined by Israel's gimmickry and bad-faith negotiations on the part of the USA for much of the past decade, there is little reason to believe that there will ever be an independent Palestine under the current settings.  Brazil's recognition therefore is an interesting and potentially thorny issue for Israel.  The PLO formally declared Palestine as independent state in 1988 and at least 102 other nations also recognize it as such.  There are another 44 states, that have some form of informal recognition of the PLO or the PNA in governing the Israeli controlled occupied territories.

If the rest of the world realizes that Israel has no intention of ever surrendering the occupied territories over to an independent Palestinian government, then it is likely more Western countries will follow Brazil's stance.