Enemies, many enemies

In one of my fondest memories intersect empire, literature, media, solitude, nature, asphalt, and urban and mountain landscapes. It was the mid-70's and I was listening riveted to one of Chicago's then three classical radio stations driving up Lake Shore while returning to my apartment on the North side in a spring down pour very late one Friday night. That evening's feature was a reading from Rudyard Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King. The movie starring Michael Caine and Sean Connery would be released that summer. I saw the film for the first time with three dear friends at a large theater in the city. We gentlemen wore sport coats and ties. The ladies wore fancy dresses. The times were different then, and too the cultural sensibilities.

I've viewed the film often since, enjoying it most when I watched it with my boys; my son Adam, his cousins Nathan and Scott, and Nathan's half-brother Graham. It made an impact on Nathan at least, because he would later ask me to play and sing The Minstrel Boy on the piano.

One of my favorite scenes occurs after the two fortune seekers, Peachy and Danny, have endured a grueling mountain climb through blinding snow and emerge to a pastoral setting and meet Billy Fish, a Ghurka soldier trained by the British in India, who speaks both English and the native tongue. Billy Fish, acting as interpreter puts for their proposition: to help the local leader fight and conquer his enemies.

"Ask him if he has enemies Billie."

"Enemies. Yes. Many enemies," comes the reply.

Thoughts of that exchange occurred while reading this AFP article in which enumerations of the numerous enemies the U.S. is fighting in its support of its puppet Karzai government. Included amongst the enemies in Afghanistan are:

1. Taliban Fighters
2. The Taliban (also Taliban)
3. Low and Mid-level Extremists
4. Insurgents
5. Islamist Insurgent Groups
6. Militants
7. Taliban Movement
8. Taliban Foot Soldiers
9. Hardline Taliban Supporters
10. Taliban Leadership
11. The Militia
12. Hizb-e-Islami Afgahnistan
13. Radical Insurgent Groups
14. Senior Most Taliban Leaders

The important people named in this article include

Hamid Karzai: Afghanistan President
Robert Gates: U.S. Secretary of Defense
Zabihulla Muhjahid: spokesman for "The Militia" (see above)
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar: leader of Hizb-e-Islami Afghanistan (see above)
Zubair Sediqi: spokesman for Gulbuddin Hekmatyar
Hillary Clinton: U.S. Secretary of State
Barak Obama - U.S. President


From the article, we are told that the Afghanistan President announced an "ambitious" plan to offer money and jobs to "tempt" (bribe) the Taliban fighters to "lay down their arms," in other words to surrender. The money to pay the bribes will not come from the Afghanistan coffers, but will be "Western-funded." Reading between the lines, the U.S. will be doling out cash. Karzai seems willing to spend unlimited amounts of American money to buy the peace as he later states "we must have peace at any cost."

The hopes are that this plan will "quell" the "crippling insurgency."

The use of "quell" here is interesting. The Miriam Webster online dictionary gives two meanings:

1. To thoroughly overwhelm and reduce to passivity
2. quiet, pacify

Since the insurgency is crippling, and "an increasingly deadly rebellion" has been waged since the U.S. outed the Taliban government in 2001, we can conclude that the second sense of quell is intended. Therefore, the long-term potential for success of this program of bribery would seem to rest upon whether or not the insurgency is fueled because of money issues.

We are later learn that "the Taliban will not sell themselves for cash" nor will they negotiate with "this government" (i.e., they do not recognize the Karzai government to be legitimate) and that the militia's goals include enforcing an Islamic government and the withdrawal of foreign troops.

The requirements of one of the "other radical Islamist group(s)" to come to negotiations is similar: unconditional exit of all foreign forces, new administration in charge for a year, permanent cease-fire, freeing of political prisoners.

U.S. Def Sec Gates calls the Taliban part of the "political fabric" of Afghanistan but demands that their future role contingent on a present surrender (laying down of weapons) in order to prove that they want a "role in Afghanistan's future." Clearly this segment of the Afghanistan political fabric is playing a very serious part in Afghanistan's present.

We are also told of U.S. Sec State Clinton has a long-term non-military strategy for stabilizing Afghanistan and Pakistan which "complements" President Obama's troop escalation strategy and apparently also complements Karzai's announced non-military bribe strategy (which will certainly enhance the coffers of the corrupt Karzai regime.)

The picture presented is of a group of committed fighters who are causing serious damage. Their goal is to boot out the U.S. and NATO troops and removing the present Afghanistan political administration.

The bribery strategy sounds like the Petraeus plan implemented in Iraq to make the troop escalation there look like a "success" on the basis of the ex-post facto basis of reduced violence.

Nowhere do we see mention of the 100,000 plus mercenaries (contractors) already in Afghanistan, nor any mention of the CIA paramilitary. Nor do we see the amount of money to be used as bribes, nor the period over which the bribery plan is scheduled to be in effect.

Nor do we see any estimates of the size:

The Taliban
The Taliban Movement
Taliban Fighters
Taliban Foot Soldiers
Taliban Leadership
Hardline Taliban Supporters
Senior Most Taliban Leaders

Nor are we told of the number in Afghanistan of

Radical Insurgent Groups
Islamist Insurgent Groups

Nowhere do we find the size of Hizb-e-Islami Afgahnistan.

There is no quantification for the numbers of

Low and mid-level extremists
Insurgents
Militants
The Militia

What we are left to conclude, however, is that we have enemies; many enemies. Enemies, thy names are legion.

Larger than the continental United States

Common Dreams featured this piece by John Gibbons Time to pull the plug on the bottle water swindle from the Irish Times

Plastic is one of the world’s most chronic pollutants. A colossal floating mass of waste trapped in the north Pacific gyre between Hawaii and Japan is estimated to contain more than 100 million tonnes of a floating soup of plastic, some of it there since the 1950s. The contaminated area of ocean is larger than the continental United States.

Nor is this problem specific to the Pacific. The UN Environment Programme calculates that every square mile of the world’s oceans contains an average of 46,000 pieces of floating plastic. More than one million sea birds a year die from ingesting plastic. This toxic cocktail makes its journey full circle to humanity via contamination of the marine produce we in turn eat.

Almost too painful to think about.

Somebody was always invading somebody in our God-forsaken world

I was in seventh grade for the school year 1963-64. In November, art class was interrupted by the announcement that President Kennedy had been shot. In the spring Mr. Saint John, the English teacher, gave us an in-class creative writing assignment with a choice among four or five topics. I chose to write about the soldiers in a war somewhere with the hero of my story jumping on a grenade to save the lives of his fellow soldiers. This sounds like a movie I probably saw. The culture had obviously prepared me to consider such sacrifice as worthy. To question at that time just why it was the who it was that we would have been fighting never would have entered my mind.

Slightly more than six years later in the summer of 1970 my friend King and I watched the lottery drawing that determined who would be drafted into the military. The accident of our births sheltered us. To question at that time just why it was the who it was that we would have been fighting never would have entered my mind, despite my Uncle Jim having been killed in combat in Viet Nam.

Flash forward to August of 2002, and it was clear to me that the United States would invade the sovereign nation of Iraq. Based on what I had absorbed in the intervening years about such undertakings, my gut told me that a much larger military force than the US then possessed would be required. In November of 2002, my son would turn 18. And then, and only then, did I ask just why it was that we would be waging war upon the Iraqi people.

By any traditional measure, I had received a very fine American education. But the system had failed to provide me with the tools to ask this basic question: what purposes and whose interests are served by the waging of such wars?

An American educational system designed to teach critical thinking skills in the arena of life and death would have them reading material such as the following, which I read in Retrieving Bones: Stories and Poems of the Korean War, an anthology edited by W. D. Erhart and Philip K. Jason. The passage below is excerpted from the book The Secret: An Oratorical Novel, written by James Drought who served in the military from 1952-1954.

The unfortunate thing that I discovered next, in the years of the Fifties, working like a slob for the finance company, not much different from the slobs I was trying to pump some money out of―was that the fat-cats are not content to exploit us, bleed us, work us for the rest of our lives at their benefit, but they want us to win them some glory, too. This is why every once in a while they start a war for us to fight in. Like everybody else, I suppose I read about the North Koreans invading the South Koreans, and just like everybody else―including the South Koreans it turned out later―I just didn't give a shit. Somebody was always invading somebody in our God-forsaken world and I couldn't keep up an interest in who was taking over who. And I can tell you this: I sure as hell didn't think this invasion was a threat to me, my family,my country, or even the whole goddamn world. But Harry Truman did. He decided that Americans―under the age of twenty-five of course, which left out him and the Congress and the businessmen and doctors and teachers and scientists and ministers―that we were going to defend South Korea. “We'll teach those bloody Communists!” Harry said, waving goodbye to the troop-ships, and Congress agreed and began appropriating all kinds of money to pay the businessmen for weapons and war materials―plus a profit, of course. It's a funny thing, but a lot of the experts saw we were surely headed for a Depression if it hadn't been for the Korean War; and the shot in the arm that this war gave to production to business and even to religion―since right away everybody returned to church to pray for their brave sons overseas―was something that the fat-cats had to have or they might have gone under and suddenly become poor folks like the rest of us―a situation they were quite ready to try anything to avoid. So suddenly we were at war, although the term applied was a little more subtle―”a police action,” Harry called it; but still it was the same old thing, the flag-waving in the newspapers and on the movie-screens, the speeded up draft, the processing centers, the crazy uniforms, the guns, the firing ranges, the squad-training, the troopship―and then war, death, murder for all under twenty-five, while Congress resounded with virulent speeches, much chest-thumping, and the artists began to “soul search,” and the businessmen pocketed the profits, as did the elderly war workers, the housewives, the physically unfit, the “professional patriots,” and the grey-haired ministers who gleefully led their flocks again in something worthy praying about. Again the fine and free Americans were being inflated with death. Oh, there was much band-playing and march-tingling and “we'll-kill-them” shouting, and everyone including General MacArthur predicted the war would be over in a few weeks. The military journals explained “Korea will be a useful testing ground for our young field commanders,” and everyone expected to gain something―except, that is, those under twenty-five. And even for these younger souls, slipping into their uniforms provided them at a tidy profit, there were voices like old Ernie Hemingway's which told them that war gave them a once in a million chance, a way to test their manhood, their courage, and all that was in them. You can tell how great you are, the young were informed, by how willing you are to give up your life, to charge the blazing guns for your for your buddies and for your country, and when it is over you will never be afraid again, because you will have discovered yourself. Nobody mentioned what those would discover who lay ripped open after the battle, bleeding, dying, dead from monstrous wounds.

An eloquent maker of promises

Howard Zinn on Obama's Nobel Peace Prize:

People should be given a peace prize not on the basis of promises they have made – as with Obama, an eloquent maker of promises – but on the basis of actual accomplishments towards ending war, and Obama has continued deadly, inhuman military action in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Reminded me of an evaluation of Timothy Geitner from Capitalism: A Love Story (paraphrased)

He's failed at every job he's ever held.

So why does he hold this important position?

Because he tells people what they want to hear.

A teller of pleasing tales.

Would you want to wager your life's savings?

At Counterpunch, William Blum asks an excellent question:

As to the US leaving [Iraq] ... utterly meaningless propaganda until it happens. Ask the people of South Korea — 56 years of American occupation and still counting; ask the people of Japan — 64 years. And Iraq? Would you want to wager your life's savings on which decade it will be that the last American soldier and military contractor leaves?

Toxic brew of regressive policies, sold through hate driven marketing techniques, all backed by the engine of kleptocratic thievery

At The Smoking Chimp, Hofstra University Professor Dr. David Michael Green pulls no punches in this scalding critique of the present-day GOP:

The GOP's problem is its ideology, plain and simple. Their toxic brew of regressive policies, sold through hate-driven marketing techniques, all backed by the engine of kleptocratic thievery, just isn't getting traction anymore. Just as it was inevitable that Bristol Palin and her nineteen year-old boyfriend, Levi Johnston, won't be getting married after all (golly, didn't see that one coming at all!) - Republican family values notwithstanding! - so was it clear that the GOP would end up being its own worst enemy. Americans show an amazing capacity for stupidity, to be sure, but just the same they will usually figure out in the end that what's bad for them is bad for them.

Understanding that political pendulums swing, and that absolute power corrupts not just Repulicans, Dr. Green fixes a realistic gave into medium future.

But one could imagine, much as with Labour and the Tories in the UK, that a decade or two from now the Democrats will get lazy and corrupt and stupid enough to lose to a deradicalized Republican Party that runs on a non-ideological appeal purely focused on competence, as an alternative to the messed-up incumbents.

Again, it's the policy that's the problem.

When the best you can offer to a frightened and submerged American public is some cheap and disingenuous rap about earmarks, along with a government that would do nothing to help, your party is going to go the same way as Herbert Hoover.

Because you are Herbert Hoover.

A few years ago while visiting some Iowa relatives, my folks and I stopped at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Musuem in West Branch, Iowa.

The library's web page notes that the library opened on 10 August, 1962, and has subsequently undergone "a massive expansion and renovation project" and "has grown from 32,000 to 44,500 square feet."

Massive expansion and renovation projects didn't come all that cheap even in 1992, when the museum was rededicated by Ronald Reagan. The web site notes:

The $8-million facelift was very much a public-private partnership, with Washington supplying $5 million for bricks and mortar, supplementing some $3 million raised by the Hoover Presidential Library Association for new exhibits and educational programming.

In other words, the facelift was a FIVE MILLION DOLLAR EARMARK which went to preserve the legacy of Herbert Hoover.

At least that's one way of looking at it, as for example a recent Chicago Tribune article headline noted about some recent Massachusettes earmarks.

Preserving the Kennedy heritage

March 12, 2009

More than $1 out of every $5 of the $126 million Massachusetts is receiving in earmarks is going to help preserve the legacy of the Kennedys. The spending package includes $5.8 million for planning and design of a building to house a new Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the Senate. The measure also includes $22 million to expand facilities at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum and $5 million for a new gateway to the Boston Harbor Islands on the Rose Kennedy Greenway.

—Associated Press

Or maybe it's just Democratic-sponsored earmarks that are evil incarnate?

Dancing in the streets - for the sake of your health

"Nothing so reshuffles the hierarchy of values of a politician - North or South - or gives his dormant conscience a wee breath of life, as a mass demonstration in the streets."

Howard Zinn: The Southern Mystique

Today on Democracy Now! Amy Goodman interviewed Russell Mokhiber who has formed a new group, Single Payer Action (singlepayeraction.org) in order to "have a direct confrontation with the health insurance industry and their lackeys in Congress."

Mokhiber notes that 60% of the American people plus majorities of doctors, nurses, and health economists support a single payer/Medicare model. Fierce resistance exists to even let the idea enter the national discussion. Mokhiber says "it's the usual situation where the will of the American people is being stopped by the powerful players in Washington" (health insurance industry and lobbyists).

In order to grab the attention of our local congress critters, Mokhiber advocates this strategy:

Now, there is an answer. The answer is not email campaigns. Congress is becoming immune to email campaigns. The answer is not letter writing. The answer is direct, face-to-face confrontation with the insurance industry and with Congress, with your members of Congress in your district. So we’re calling on Americans to sign up at singlepayeraction.org and to organize protests in front—get to know your district—your member of Congress district office. Probably less than five percent of Americans know where the district office of their member of Congress. Get to know it. Camp out there. Call the local media. The local media is going to love it. And let’s get this thing done. Let’s push through single payer for the American people, like the rest of the civilized world has.

District Office of U.S. Representative Melissa Bean
1701 E. Woodfield Road, Suite 200,
Schaumburg, IL 60173

Accustomed to singling out the poor, the minority, the ill and the invisible

At the Narco News Bulletin, Al Giordano reflects upon the potential paradigm shift if the war on "the poor, the minority, the ill and the invisible" targets an American sports icon.

Not since the olden days in Nottingham has a sheriff been on the verge of sparking an incident that would have such mega-consequences for a population. Can you imagine, kind reader, the firestorm if the drug war – so accustomed to singling out the poor, the minority, the ill and the invisible – suddenly targets America’s Darling and makes Michael Phelps the most recognizable face of peaceful illegal drug use on the planet? It would be akin to throwing a lit match into the basement full of gasoline that underlies current prohibitionist drug policies. Phelps is healthy, soft-spoken, polite, of good humor, skilled on television (as his hosting of Saturday Night Live revealed)… Grandmothers everywhere, when they see his face, don’t want to send him to prison: They want to pinch his cheek.

The media circus that would ensue would bring the hypocrisy of the drug war into every living room and stir a nationwide debate around every kitchen table over how thoroughly senseless the US war on drugs has become. In the context of the step-by-step and incremental policy changes underway, the making of Michael Phelps into martyr and poster boy would serve, much like that first hammer in Berlin, to inspire a thousand more blows against the Drug War Wall, turning its evident cracks into gaping holes and its cement to rubble.

Estimates suggest that half of the U.S. population has at one time or another experimented with marijuana. Two of our last three presidents have admitted as much. The one in between hinted as much.

At Counterpunch, Dale Gieringer provides some historical context on drug prohibition.

On February 9, 1909, Congress passed the Opium Exclusion Act, barring the importation of opium for smoking as of April 1. Thus began a hundred-year crusade that has unleashed unprecedented crime, violence and corruption around the world —- a war with no victory in sight.

Long accustomed to federal drug control, most Americans are unaware that there was once a time when people were free to buy any drug, including opium, cocaine, and cannabis, at the pharmacy. In that bygone era, drug-related crime and violence were largely unknown, and drug use was not a major public concern.

Gieringer tells us that the U.S. motivation for passing the Opium Exclusion was political; to curry the favor of the Chinese government.

Congress was moved to Act in 1909 not by any drug abuse crisis, but by foreign policy concerns. Per capita opium use had begun to decline by 1900, and only one in a thousand Americans indulged in smoking opium. Nonetheless, the State Department determined that an initiative against opium smoking would be useful in opening the door to China, which had long chafed under British compulsion to allow the opium trade. At the invitation of Theodore Roosevelt's administration, an international commission was convened in Shanghai in December 1908 to sign a treaty ending the trade –- the first step in what would become a far-reaching international system of drug control. As a gesture of good faith, the State Department called on Congress to pass legislation that would ban the importation of smoking opium, thereby creating the first illegal drug.

The so-called "War on Drugs" has greatly expanded the prison population:

Early 20th-century Americans would be astounded to see what a problem drugs have become since the establishment of drug prohibition. Every year, two million Americans are arrested and 400,000 imprisoned for drug offenses that did not exist in their time. Drug laws are now the number-one source of crime in the U.S., with one-half of the entire adult population having violated them.

But isn't that the point, after all? As long as those imprisoned are confined to the ranks of "the poor, the minority, the ill and the invisible," the war on drugs doesn't much enter into the conscience of middle class white America. Much like the war on terror doesn't much enter into that conscience. Handy mantras, marketing gimmicks, slogans to move the faithful on a gut level, to keep them from peering too deeply into the abyss.

How to cut your mortgage costs in half

This NYT article contains an incredible story. Set in Nevada (but likely to be played out all over the country), we learn of the Terrible Herbst chain of gas stations / convenience stores featuring slots, candy and beer. A combination that would seem to be a winner in bad times. The recently failed First National Bank of Nevada held the mortgage on the Terrible Herbst chain. The FDIC comes riding, like the U.S. cavalry to the rescue.

When regulators took over the First National Bank of Nevada last year, they faced a showdown with the Terrible Herbst, the mustachioed cowboy who boasts of being the “best bad man in the West.”

This was no real gunslinger, but the name and logo of a chain of gas stations and convenience stores in Nevada that feature slot machines next to candy and beer.

The family-owned Herbst chain, auditors at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation concluded, did not generate enough sales at its Reno-area gas stations to support the repayment of a loan, leaving auditors with three bad choices: Move to take over those stations and put the government in the gambling business. Cut off any flow of additional loan money. Or sell the loan at a steep loss.

What to do, what to do, what to do with Terrible Herbst? Well, ya got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, know when to run. Consider the options:

In the case of Terrible Herbst and its Reno-area gas stations, officials at the F.D.I.C. considered taking the highly unusual step of applying for a temporary casino license, allowing the agency to operate the gas stations and the electronic games after perhaps foreclosing on the nearly $10 million loan, one official involved in the effort said.

Another option, simply cutting off additional advances of cash from the loan, was ruled out because the business might close, making it nearly impossible to collect any of the outstanding principal.

What to do, what to do, what to do. Okay. Here's the plan:

The resolution of the case turned out to be a windfall for Terrible Herbst. The government put the loan on sale, and who should buy it directly from the government but the Herbst family, at a discount of more than 50 percent.

The government ate the loss, but at least it collected on some of the bad debt, the F.D.I.C. official involved in the deal said.

Executives at Terrible Herbst, who said they never formally refused to pay off the loan in full, were hardly disappointed.

“It worked out just fine,” said Sean Higgins, the company’s general counsel. “At least for Terrible Herbst.”

I think I understand.

Herbst owes $10 million on the properties, but can't generate enough income to pay them off.

FDIC doesn't want to takeover and run the properties, doesn't want to loan any more money. So, FDIC will let the government take a loss. Sell the properties at a "MORE than 50% discount." Just how much more, we are not told. I wonder why?

Suppose it's a 60% discount. Somebody was smart enough to find a dumb buyer for these toxic assets. Cool. Rather than having a toxic asset on its books, the government now has a cool $4 mill.

Some sucker owns the properties. Who dat sucker? Why, dat sucker is none other than Terrible Herbst. They just saved (something on the order of) $6,000,000.

Can anyone say potential moral hazard here? Any reason NOT to give say a 5% "fee" to a player with enough ambition to put get this deal done. How about if the player is maybe the brother-in-law of the FDIC regulator?

It's the great American way.

3 for 2007; 25 for 2008; 13 so far for 2009

This New York Times article indicates the scope of bank failures in 2007 and 2008. Hold on to your hats. Looks like 2009 will be an even steeper ride.

The F.D.I.C. inherited the collection of loans and property after the failure of 25 banks in 2008, compared to just three in 2007. Thirteen more have failed this year, including four on Friday night, and no one doubts that more are on the way. The F.D.I.C., which insures bank deposits and ultimately has responsibility for liquidating failed banks, is selling hundreds of millions of dollars worth of loans through eBay-like auction sites.

"Through eBay-like auction sites?" Does this mean "on-line." Talk about virtual reality. More like virtual unreality.

A surprisingly low profile in the new administration's stated plans

At the invaluable Tom Dispatch web site, Steve Fraser examines the public response to the wall street "titans" in 1929 and again in 2009 (my emphasis added).

This was then:

After 1929, when the old order went down in flames, when it commanded no more credibility and legitimacy than a confidence game, there was an urgent cry to regulate both the malefactors and their rogue system. Indeed, new financial regulation was at the top of, and made up a hefty part of, Roosevelt's New Deal agenda during its first year. That included the Bank Holiday, the creation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the passing of the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial from investment banking (their prior cohabitation had been a prime incubator of financial hanky-panky during the Jazz Age of the previous decade), and the first Securities Act to monitor the stock exchange.

This is now:

One might have anticipated an even more robust response today, given the damage done not only to our domestic economy, but to the global one upon which any American economic recovery will rely to a very considerable degree. At the moment, however, financial regulation or re-regulation -- given the last 30 years of Washington's fiercely deregulatory policies -- seems to have a surprisingly low profile in the new administration's stated plans. Capping bonuses, pay scales, and stock options for the financial upper crust is all well and good and should happen promptly, but serious regulation and reform of the financial system must strike much deeper than that.

And for some reason (bipartisanship?), the Obama administration is "staying the course" on the corporate "bail-out." Never forget, Obama is joined at the hip to Bush on this. Obama spent political capital to help get the TARP plan approved. Who the hell is advising him? And just how much money did his campaign rake in from Wall Street?

Instead, the new administration is evidently locked into the bail-out state invented by its predecessors, the latest version of which, the creation of a government "bad bank" (whether called that or not) to buy up toxic securities from the private sector, commands increasing attention. A "bad bank" seems a strikingly lose-lose proposition: either we, the tax-paying public, buy or guarantee these securities at something approaching their grossly inflated, largely fictitious value, in which case we will be supporting this second gilded age's financial malfeasance for who knows how long, or the government's "bad bank" buys these shoddy assets at something close to their real value in which case major banks will remain in lock-down mode, if they survive at all. Worse yet, the administration's latest "bad bank" plan does not even compel rescued institutions to begin lending to anybody, which presumably is the whole point of this new financial welfare system.

And just how much of the stimulus bill is in the oh so productive voodoo trickle down economics of tax cuts?

Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

The three front war

From this Al-Jazeera report, the U.S. appears to have another war criminal president. No surprise to any serious student of American history.

The US has launched more than 30 missile attacks on Pakistani soil in recent months, ostensibly against al-Qaeda and Taliban-linked fighters.

More than 220 people were killed in the attacks, according to a tally of reports from Pakistani intelligence agents, district government officials and residents.

Pakistan has been angered by the raids, saying that innocent civilians have been killed and that Pakistani sovereignty has been infringed.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Trying to undo the recovery from the First Great Republican Depression

At the Sideshow, Avedon Carol notes that:

You have to understand that the conservatives aren't just trying to "undo the New Deal" - though of course they are - but ultimately to undo the recovery from the First Great Republican Depression by first preventing a recovery from their new one.

They seem to be getting plenty of help from the democratic congress and the democratic President of the United States too.

More than 10 years behind the times

In the fall of 1998, FAIR published an article by Janine Jackson entitled The Myth of the 'Crack Baby'. Recently the New York Times featured an article by Susan Okie entitled The Epidemic That Wasn't.

From Janine Jackson's 1998 article we are offered insights into how typical MSM reporting would cover the narrative:

Already obsessed with the use of the cocaine derivative crack among the urban poor, mainstream media used ... limited, qualified findings as grounds for an astonishing spree of sloppy, alarmist reporting and racial and economic scapegoating that still echoes today

...


"Crack baby" stories typically had an anecdotal focus and a veneer of sympathy for the "tiny victims," ... More urgency was reserved, though, for the unimaginable dangers these babies were supposedly destined to wreak on the world: The Washington Post (9/17/89) warned of "A Time Bomb in Cocaine Babies," while the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (9/18/90) declared flatly, "Disaster In Making: Crack Babies Start to Grow Up."

...

The emphasis may have varied, from pity for the children ("Crack Babies Born to Life of Suffering," USA Today, 6/8/89) to disgust for the mothers ("For Pregnant Addict, Crack Comes First," Washington Post, 12/18/89) to the unfathomable amount "their" problems might wind up costing "us" ("Crack's Tiniest, Costliest Victims," New York Times, 8/7/89). But overall, commercial media found the premise - a coming onslaught of affectless genetic deviants - utterly persuasive.

Compelling stories cast within the mold of a morality tale. Jackson notes (my emphasis added)

The premise, however, was false. The inadvisability of using cocaine during pregnancy is not disputed. But subsequent research on cocaine-exposed children found that many of the dangers mentioned in initial studies are simply not borne out.

... Health-care providers working with infants exposed to cocaine in utero found them indistinguishable from other children. Much medical research pointed to other factors - such as the lack of good prenatal care, use of alcohol and tobacco, and, simply enough, poverty - as more primary factors in poor fetal development among pregnant cocaine users than cocaine itself.

Proponents of a revised view included Dr. Ira Chasnoff, whose initial 1985 study launched much of the media juggernaut. By 1992, Chasnoff was saying, "poverty is the worst thing that can happen to a child," and expressing dismay at the press' misuse of medical research. "It's sexy," he suggested of the "crack baby" story (AP, 12/6/92). "It's interesting, it sells newspapers and it perpetuates the us-vs.-them idea."

Just who is the us in the "us-vs.-them idea" mentioned by Dr. Chasnoff?

From the 2009 New York Times story, we learn that

When the use of crack cocaine became a nationwide epidemic in the 1980s and ’90s, there were widespread fears that prenatal exposure to the drug would produce a generation of severely damaged children.

...[S]cientists say, the long-term effects of such exposure on children’s brain development and behavior appear relatively small.

...
Cocaine is undoubtedly bad for the fetus. But experts say its effects are less severe than those of alcohol and are comparable to those of tobacco — two legal substances that are used much more often by pregnant women, despite health warnings.

In the first half of NYT article, we are told that the morality of cocaine use is the issue

cocaine use in pregnancy has been treated as a moral issue rather than a health problem ... Pregnant women who use illegal drugs commonly lose custody of their children, and during the 1990s many were prosecuted and jailed

But later in the article the racial issues loom large:

Possession of crack cocaine, the form of the drug that was widely sold in inner-city, predominantly black neighborhoods, has long been punished with tougher sentences than possession of powdered cocaine, although both forms are identically metabolized by the body and have the same pharmacological effects.

... If [cocaine-exposed children] develop physical symptoms or behavioral problems, doctors or teachers are sometimes too quick to blame the drug exposure and miss the real cause, like illness or abuse.

“Society’s expectations of the children,” she said, “and reaction to the mothers are completely guided not by the toxicity, but by the social meaning” of the drug.

What exactly does the "social meaning" of the crack cocaine mean? My best guess is that it means white elites jump upon any and all opportunities to further marginalize, stigmatize, and demoralize poor blacks.

Teasing out the effects of cocaine exposure is complicated ... [because] ... almost all of the women in the studies who used cocaine while pregnant were also using other substances.

Moreover, most of the children in the studies are poor, and many have other risk factors known to affect cognitive development and behavior — inadequate health care, substandard schools, unstable family situations and exposure to high levels of lead.

Back in 1998, FAIR painted a much clearer picture of the inherent racism and how 60 minutes legitimatized

Such a sustained media assault was not without real world effects, of course. Years of accusatory coverage contributed to a shift to more punitively focused public policy, which was, in turn, welcomed by the press. In 1994, 60 Minutes aired a show (11/20/94) celebrating one such policy: a South Carolina law under which women who used cocaine while pregnant were arrested and jailed under child abuse statutes. "Cracking Down," the segment was called.

Fast forward to 1998: Despite an amicus curiae letter signed by 15 leading medical and social service organizations condemning the policy, the Supreme Court declines to hear an appeal in the convictions of two South Carolina women. Cornelia Whitner and Malissa Crawley, both mothers of healthy children, are serving prison terms for prenatally "abusing" them by using cocaine. And 60 Minutes announces plans to re-air its 1994 segment on the policy that sent them to jail.

... [O]f 23 prosecutions, 22 were of African-American women, and the one white woman was married to a black man.

In America, the perpetuation of racial divide (us-vs.-them) serves to deflect from class issues. As the lawyer who represented Whitner and Crawley notes:

"Many of the people who are actually working with the women and children were saying, 'These are poverty babies, and nobody wants to address that. So we call them crack babies.'"

In addition

[L]eading medical groups like the American Medical Association, the American Nurses Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the March of Dimes [join] in saying, "If you want to help children, don't arrest their mothers."

In an entirely different morality play, Chicago Tribune sports writer Bob Verdi writes some unmentionable truths:

Like lemmings, members of the broadcast and print media have piled on ...

We in the media are not here to make you think; we are here to tell you what to think.

Funding and arming an international terrorist organization

Could it reasonably be said that a nation which spends $28.5 billion to support an international terrorist organization and furthermore provides 95% of the armaments used by said international terrorist aids and abets the terrorism?

This is not a theoretical question.

The more we fight the so-called "War on Drugs", the more the drugs seem to be winning. Which is difficult to reconcile when you stop and consider that "the drugs" don't shoot back.