Watch Your Wallet!

Much Ado about Nothing in Budget Debate

All the sturm and drang in Washington over the March 1 deadline for a budget deal is an act. Two acts really.

The Republicans are pretending that if we don’t have budget cuts this year, the whole US economy will collapse because of the nation’s enormous indebtedness.

The Democrats are pretending that if no deal is reached, and automatic across-the-board cuts of 8% for the Pentagon and 5% for other programs will not only put the nation’s defense at risk and cause widespread suffering, but that it will derail the nation’s fragile economic “recovery.”

Both claims are, to put it gently, bullshit.

To put it in perspective, remember we’re talking about $86 billion dollars in spending for this current year.

That’s in a federal budget of $3.5 trillion, and a national economy of $16 trillion. A little math is in order. One trillion dollars is $1000 billion dollars. So $86 billion dollars represents just 2.46% of the federal budget. And it represents just 0.5% of GDP.

Even it it ever does make it to operational status, at $166 million a pop and rising, the F-35 boondoggle will be to-expensive-tEven it it ever does make it to operational status, at $166 million a pop and rising, the F-35 boondoggle will be too-expensive-to-risk in actual combat. Cutting the program would save $400 billion overnight (just the planes shown here together cost us taxpayers over $1 billion!).

Talkin' 'bout My Generation:

In Defense of Baby Boomers

I’m fed up with the trashing of the Baby Boom generation.

Sure you can find plenty of scoundrels, freeloaders, charlatans and thugs who were born between 1946 and 1964, but you can find bad and lazy people in every generation. In fact, the so called “Greatest Generation” who preceded the Boomers abounds in them. That doesn’t prove anything.

What has me ticked, as someone who was born in 1949, is that the right wing has for decades been attacking my generation in particular, and has succeeded, pretty much, in portraying us Baby Boomers as self-centered, spoiled and entitled. The right has then cleverly used that deceptive image to go on and attack important programs like Social Security, Medicare, college loans, etc., by trying to divide the generations against each other, claiming that we Baby Boomers are intent on abusing, even bankrupting, those programs.

The truth is something else entirely.

The generation born after World War II in fact has been admirable and almost unique in its altruism. While our parents were either overt racists and sexists or turned a blind eye to those twin evils, and for the most part uncritically accepted the imperialist policies of the post-war US government, our generation challenged the idea of imperial war, supported the struggle of African-Americans to win voting rights and to end legal segregation and, after a struggle in our own ranks, fought for equal rights for women — with many of the men of our age cohort joining in that struggle.

My generation did more in our personal lives and lifestyles, beginning in the 1960s and continuing on through the decades, to break down walls of religious and racial bigotry, than any before us, and we have raised children who have continued that legacy.

As for Social Security, it was our generation that has had to pay more into the system to anticipate our greater longevity and our greater numbers, paying vastly higher Social Security payroll taxes than our parents ever did. We also strongly supported the creation of Medicare in 1965, at a time when we were still more than 40 years from being able to make use of it.

Antiwar demonstrators at the Pentagon during the Mobilization action in October 1967. Several hundred were arrested and jailedAntiwar demonstrators at the Pentagon during the Mobilization action in October 1967. Several hundred (the author among them, visible in the lower right, back turned) were arrested, beaten by US Marshals and jailed at the federal prison in Occoquan, VA.

The LAPD Got their Man How They Wanted Him: Dead

“Burn that fuckin’ house down…Fucking burn this motherfucker!!”

–Voices overheard on police radio at the scene of the cabin where Chris Dorner was trapped and burned to death
 

It was clear from the outset when fired LAPD cop Chris Dorner began wreaking his campaign of vengeance and terror against his former employer that the California law enforcement establishment, led by the LAPD itself, had no interest in Dorner surviving to face trial, where he could continue to rat out the racist and corrupt underbelly of the one of the country’s biggest police departments.

Dorner, as I wrote earlier, claimed he had been fired for speaking up during his three years on the force, through channels and to superior officers, about incidents he had witnessed of police brutality and of the rampant racism that permeates the department — not just white on black, but black on Asian, Asian on Latino and Latino on white. His response to being sacked — threatening to kill senior officers he blamed for this law enforcement distopia as well as some of their family members — was criminally insane, but his complaints, made in a 6000-word post on Facebook, had and continue to have the ring of truth.

The LAPD response to his threats was to mobilize the whole 10,000-member department in a manhunt, complete with $1-million reward. Cops exchanged their black uniforms for military fatigues and armed up with semi-automatic weapons. Two Latino women delivering papers in Torrance were attacked from the rear of their pick-up by seven LAPD cops who, with no warning, peppered their truck with bullets, targeting the back of the driver’s head, firing at least 70 rounds and destroying the vehicle (amazingly, neither woman was killed, though one was hospitalized in serious condition). That attack, which looked like the kind of thing US soldiers and Marines routinely did to suspect vehicles in Iraq with such deadly impact, made it clear that the LAPD wanted Dorner badly, but only dead, not alive and talking.

The Big Bear cabin where Chris Dorner made his last stand, burning after SWAT team tear-gas grenates ignited itThe Big Bear cabin where Chris Dorner made his last stand, burning after SWAT team tear-gas grenates ignited it

Rogue Cop on the Lam Becomes Folk Hero to Some: LAPD Appears to Want Dorner Dead, not Captured and Talking

Let’s not be too quick to dismiss the “ranting” of renegade LAPD officer Chris Dorner, who is fast becoming something of a folk hero in his one-man challenge to the LAPD, one of the nation’s biggest and baddest police departments.

Dorner, a three-year police veteran and former Lieutenant in the US Navy who went rogue after being fired by the LAPD, has accused Los Angeles Police of systematically using excessive force, of corruption, of being racist, and of firing him for raising those issues through official channels.

By all media accounts, Dorner “snapped” after his firing, and has vowed to kill police in retaliation. He allegedly has already done so, with several people, including police officers and family members of police already shot dead or wounded.

Now there’s a record huge “manhunt” involving police departments across California, focussing on the mountains around Big Bear, featuring cops dressed in full military gear and armed with semi-automatic weapons. (Some 40-50 senior LAPD officers specifically threatened by Dorner are also being heavily guarded by LAPD cops.) Dorner has so far skilfully eluded his pursuers, despite a $1-million bounty on his head and thousands of people in the posse hunting for him. He has meanwhile developed a large and growing following of people who are actually rooting for him, with some comparing him to the Batman of “Dark Knight,” striking terror into, and wreaking vengeance on a corrupt police culture.

Few would argue that randomly killing police officers and their family members or friends is justified, but I think that there is good reason to suspect that the things that Dorner claims set him off, such as being fired for reporting police brutality, and then going through a rigged hearing, deserve serious consideration and investigation.

The LAPD has a long history of abuse of minorities (actually the majority in Los Angeles, where whites are now a minority). It has long been a kind of paramilitary force — one which pioneered the military-style Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) approach to “policing.”

If you wanted a good example to prove that nothing has changed over the years, just look at the outrageous incident involving LAPD cops tasked with capturing Dorner, who instead shot up two innocent women who were delivering newspapers in a residential area of Los Angeles. The women, Margie Carranza, 47, and her mother, Emma Hernandez, 71 (now in serious condition in the hospital), were not issued any warning. Police just opened fire from behind them, destroying their truck with heavy semi-automatic fire to the point that it will have to be scrapped and replaced. The two women are lucky to be alive (check out the pattern of bullet holes in the rear window behind the driver’s position in the accompanying photo). What they experienced was the tactics used by US troops on patrol in Iraq or Afghanistan, not the tactics that one expects of police. Their truck wasn’t even the right make or color, but LAPD’s “finest” decided it was better to be safe than sorry, so instead of acting like cops, they followed Pentagon “rules of engagement”: They attempted to waste the target.

LAPD officers fired on this car with clear intent to kill (check out the bullet holes behind the driver-seat position)LAPD officers fired on this car with clear intent to kill (check out the bullet holes behind the driver-seat position). Trouble was, it was the wrong make and wrong color, and instead of Dorner, it was two Latino women, one of whom is now in serious condition from her wounds. No warning was given before the barrage.

Keeping Americans Safe: Freedom of Information Takes Another Hit in the United States

The US government doesn’t like Iran. I get that. It claims, on pretty dubious grounds, that Iran might be planning, at some point down the road, to take some of the uranium it is processing into nuclear fuel to a higher level of purity and make it into an atomic bomb.

Because of that possibility, which Iran denies, and for which there is no hard evidence, the US has been tightening an embargo against Iran, blocking countries from buying Iranian oil, blocking banks from doing business with Iran, blocking Iranian banks from doing business with the US, and blocking certain products from being exported to Iran.

Many of these actions are, in and of themselves, hostile acts that could, under international law, be considered acts of war given that there is no UN authorization. In fact, some of them are exactly the type of thing that drove militarists in Japan, fearful of their country being cut off from access to iron ore and to oil, neither of which are available in Japan, to go to war against the US back in 1941.

But for all that, the US is not at war with Iran. Got that? There is no state of war between Iran and the USA. You can travel there as a tourist if you like–actually more easily than you can go to Cuba. Iranians can visit the US too, though they probably will get a pretty serious going over by the ICE crew at their port of entry.

Now, however, the US has taken a really stupid step. It has blocked the carrying of Iran’s state-owned English-language PressTV television broadcast on the Galaxy 19 satellite that was allowing the 24-hour newscast to be viewed, at least by some people, in the US. Galaxy 19 is operated by Intelsat, which is domiciled in Luxembourg for tax purposes but is actually a US-run firm, founded here in 1964, and run currently by a crew of US executives who hail from such firms as Dish TV, Sprint, GTE and the powerful NY and Washington law firm of Paul, Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison.

Full disclosure: For several years, I have been frequently interviewed by Iranian Press TV reporters for commentary on such matters as the US election campaign, the US economy, various issues before the Congress, the state of civil liberties in the US, police repression of the Occupy movement, and also international issues such as the US drone warfare campaign and the war in Afghanistan. For six months, I was also paid to write a weekly column for the Press TV website, until that arrangement was ended for financial reasons on Jan. 3 of this year.

 Intelsat's satellite has cut the signal for Iran's PressTV broadcasts to North AmericaKeeping Americans safe (and in the dark): Intelsat's satellite has cut the signal for Iran's PressTV broadcasts to North America

Who’s going to step up? President Obama Must be Impeached

If the Constitution is to have any relevance, and if America is to remain a free society, then there is really no alternative: there must be a bill of impeachment drawn up and submitted in the House, and there must at least be a hearing on that bill in the House Judiciary Committee.

The disclosure, by NBC, of a so-called “white paper” by the White House offering the legal justification for the executing of American citizens solely on the authority of the executive branch and the president exposes a White House so blatantly in violation of the Constitution that it simply demands such a hearing.

As Juan Cole explains clearly in an essay in Informed Comment, there are five ways that the white paper authorizing executive execution of Americans violates the Constitution. These, he explains, are:

* There has to be an actual crime for there to be a punishment, and this paper authorizes execution without any crime.

* If, as the letter suggests, the president’s authority to order executions without trial derives from the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed by the Congress, that would constitute a so-called bill of attainder, which he explains is a declaration that a certain person or class of people (i.e. terrorists in this case) are prima facie guilty of a crime. But as he notes, the Constitution specifically outlaws bills of attainder, saying in Article 1, Section 9, “No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law will be passed…”

* The letter violates the separation of powers, according the president the powers of executive, legislature and judiciary.

Drone killing machines, coming soon to a country near you...Killer drones, coming soon to a country near you…

In Defense of 'Killer' Cats

Years ago, when I was briefly an adjunct faulty member in the Communications Department at Cornell University, I remember attending a faculty meeting where a full-time tenure-track colleague was giving an advance presentation of a paper he was soon to deliver. He had conducted an experiment to see whether negative political advertising was effective or not, and concluded, after a couple of controlled tests, that it was not. I asked him who his test subjects were, and he said they were volunteer students from Cornell. I asked how representative such a test could be, if the students were from an Ivy League school, and were probably among the smartest, most intellectual young people in the country. He couldn’t really answer. Clearly, his results were meaningless at best, but hey, he would soon be delivering a paper at a prestigious conference.

I’m reminded of that flawed study by the current cat fight over a new study claiming that feral cats are the primary cause of a rapid decline in the US bird population. The authors of the study, according to a heavy-breathing report in the New York Times’ Science section today, “scaled up local and pilot studies to national dimensions,” to conclude that wild and domestic cats kill an annual 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion small mammals a year in the US. If true, this would, they say, make the cat “one of the single greatest human-linked threats to wildlife in the nation.”

I love the decimal points applied to an amalgamation of small geographic studies that all, as the Times notes, “admittedly come with wide ranges and uncertainties.” Decimal points are great tools for implying mathematical rigor when there clearly was none.

Feral cats certainly kill birds and small mammals, but they are replacing native predators that are gone.Feral cats certainly kill birds and small mammals, but remember: they are doing the work of native predators that are gone, thanks to hunters and encroaching civilization.

Links? We Don’t Do No Stinkin’ Links: Cognitive Dissonance at the New York Times

For a masterpiece in cognitive dissonance, just look to the foreign editors and the managing editor of the New York Times, who managed to run two closely related stories making opposite points in Saturday’s paper without referencing each other at all.

The first, Algeria Sowed Seeds of Hostage Crisis as It Nurtured Warlord, by Adam Nossiter and Neil MacFarquhar, reports on how the Algerian government essentially enabled and encouraged the crisis in neighboring Mali by backing — even hosting in Algiers — an Islamic militant leader and local warlord, Iyad Ag Ghali, who then tried to take over Mali by force, including taking Algerians and other foreigners hostage at an oil drilling site, leading to a deadly Algerian battle and now a war in Mali that has drawn in the old colonial powers. The article talked at length about the risks of working with such militants. The risks for Algeria, that is; not the risks in general of such a practice.

On the same day, the paper ran a second article, this one by C.J. Chivers, titled A Rebel Commander in Syria Holds the Reins of War. This piece is a glowing paen to Abdulkader al-Saleh, aka Hajji Marea, a rebel leader in the Syrian civil war. The article paints the man whose nom de guerre is comfortingly (and incorrectly) translated as meaning “the respectable man from Marea” (it actually means “the man from Marea who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca), is clearly aligned with a radical Muslim group, the Al Nusra Front, which the article notes, is “blacklisted” by the US as a terrorist organization.

Abdulkader al-Saleh, America's 'Man in Syria'...for now at least.Abdulkader al-Saleh, America's 'Man in Syria'…for now at least.

Hey, Hey, Barack! What Do You Say? How Many Kids Have You Killed Today?

I personally found the president’s inaugural speech not just insipid, but disgusting. It reached its gut-churning nadir near the end where he said:
 

“We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war…We will show the courage to try and resolve our differences with other nations peacefully – not because we are naïve about the dangers we face, but because engagement can more durably lift suspicion and fear…And we must be a source of hope to the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the victims of prejudice – not out of mere charity, but because peace in our time requires the constant advance of those principles that our common creed describes:  tolerance and opportunity; human dignity and justice.”
 

As he spoke these uplifting phrases, US factories were cranking out, under the terms of billion-dollar Pentagon contracts (in a small part of the staggering annual $1.6 trillion the US actually spends under Obama on its military), fleets of drone aircraft that daily are raining explosives down on innocent men, women and children in countries that the US is not even at war with. Most of those drone attacks are personally approved by our Nobel Peace Laureate president, who has claimed the right — unchallenged by either Congress or the Judiciary — to order the liquidation of anyone he deems to be a terrorist (including American citizens), as well as those, even children, who happen to be in the vicinity of such a person. Of the 362 drone strikes in Pakistan to date, 310 were launched during the period Obama has been commander in chief.

The result of this policy of state terrorism has been a wretched, criminal slaughter of children — a slaughter that has been hidden from view, and denied wholesale by the Pentagon and the president. Over 3000 people have been killed, the vast majority of them non-combatant “collateral damage” deaths. Over 172 of these have reportedly been children.

Noor Syed, 8-year-old girl, one of Obama's first drone victims, killed in Pakistan drone attack on Feb. 14, 2009.Noor Syed, 8-year-old Pakistani girl and one of Obama's first drone victims, murdered in a US drone attack in South Waziristan, Pakistan on Feb. 14, 2009.

Obama’s Second Inauguration: Big Money but No Big Lines

There were no memorable lines in President Obama’s second inaugural address. Certainly nothing like Franklin Roosevelt’s “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” which was in his first inaugural, or like John F. Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”

But there was plenty he said that was troubling.

The problem mostly wasn’t what he said. It was how he said it, and what he left unsaid.

Take climate change.

The president acknowledged the problem, saying: “We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.”

So far so good, but then he didn’t talk about any serious steps to do that, such as shutting down coal-fired generating plants and putting a stop to plans to import dirty, massively polluting and inefficient oil from Canadian and US tar-sands deposits. Instead he focussed on economic opportunities to be had if the US would start investing seriously in new energy technology. He did not take this unique opportunity to tell Americans honestly what the risks of inaction are: The extinction of half the species on the earth, including primary food sources that keep billions of us alive, and the risk of runaway warming that could raise the oceans by 16 to 60 feet. Instead he focussed parochially on storms and droughts and forest fires getting worse. This was a wasted leadership moment if there ever was one.

When JFK made his one inaugural address, the Cold War was at its height. He didn’t fudge the moment, and instead let Americans and the world know the gravity of the threat of mutual global nuclear annihilation by describing the situation thusly as “both sides overburdened by the cost of modern weapons, both rightly alarmed by the steady spread of the deadly atom, yet both racing to alter that uncertain balance of terror that stays the hand of mankind’s final war.”

Three inaugurals, two memorable, one not so much...Three inaugurals, two memorable, one not so much…