This Can't Be Happening!

There were two times Republicans broke into fervent applause during this lame duck president’s seventh State of the Union speech: the first was when he called for passage of “fast track” authority to negotiate and send to the Senate a Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade pact — basically a NAAFTA for the Pacific region; the second was when he noted that he “won’t be running for president again.”

The applause came because those were the two most significant things that the president said in what was otherwise a pathetic and dreary exercise in posing as a liberal progressive reformer now that there isn’t a chance in hell that any of his supposedly pro-middle-class proposals for reform will become law.

The cheering for the TPP on the Republican side of the House Chamber came because Republicans, unabashedly the party of capitalism, are all about reducing tariffs, freeing corporations to move to the cheapest labor countries in search of bigger profits, and the hell with American jobs being lost. They are happy to give the president and his not-so-brazenly, and yet still equally pro-capitalist Democratic minority in Congress, their support in passing the wholly pro-corporate TPP.

Obama alluded in his talk to the reality that NAAFTA, CAAFTA and other treacherous trade deals “haven’t always done as promised to protect jobs and the environment,” but he promised to do better this time. If that’s the case though, why would he want “fast track” authority, which means negotiating with other countries like China and Indonesia in secret, and then presenting Congress with a final treaty that must be voted on up or down with no amendments or changes? It’s all a giant scam that will end up eroding US jobs further. The president claimed that “export-oriented” jobs pay more than other jobs, which might be correct, but he failed to note that trade deals cut two ways: they do promote exports, but they also by definition promote imports by reducing tariffs on imported goods and services, and those imports are job killers. Worse yet, trade deals enable US companies to pull up stakes and move manufacturing work abroad because they can then produce the goods cheaper and ship them back to the US market thanks to new lower tariffs on imports.

As for his line about no longer running for president, that is precisely what made such a joke about all his proposals for taxing the rich more, making community college free to all, and “doing more to make it easier for workers to form unions,” etc. None of those proposals will ever become law because he and the Democratic Party, thanks to six years of selling out progressive voters who elected them when they had two, and later still at least one house of Congress in their control, has now lost control of both houses. And Republicans don’t have to listen to what the president wants, since he’s on the way out. No wonder they all cheered that admission by the president that his sell-by date was approaching.
Why are all these Republicans standing and clapping for President Obama during his State of the Union speech?
 

 
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
                                    -George Orwell
 
Back in 1979, reviewers liked to point out that Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam epic Apocalypse Now was so plagued with difficulty and confusion (the star suffered a heart attack during shooting and a devastating typhoon destroyed all the sets) that the making of the film paralleled the reality of the Vietnam War itself.

A similar observation might be made of Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper about Iraq. Like the Iraq War itself, Eastwood’s movie begins by exploiting a historically inaccurate delusion and, then, sustains itself for two hours on the mission to protect US soldiers against the insurgency that arose in opposition to the US invasion and occupation based on the initial delusion.

The film opens with a black screen and a muezzin chanting the Islamic adham, or call to prayer, from a minaret. The words “Allahu Akbar” are very distinguishable in the chant. Islam is very much in the news, especially after the Charlie Hebdo killings, and the phrase “Allahu Akbar” is by now familiar with popular US audiences. Such a subliminal opening felt ideologically heavy-handed to me, intimating an unseen evil lurking in the dark. The narrative quickly sketches in Chris Kyle’s introduction to hunting animals, his recruitment and training as a Navy SEAL and how he met his future wife, Taya, at a bar. This leads to an emotional scene of the two lovers watching on TV as the twin towers are knocked down. Then — wham! — we’re in Iraq and sniper Kyle is confronted with the dilemma of having to shoot a mother and son to protect an advancing Marine platoon.

Bradley Cooper as Chris Kyle doing his job in Iraq

Any honest skeptic equipped with even a cursory understanding of the antecedents to the Iraq War will see what’s going on here. It’s not a debatable issue: We know now for sure that Iraq had absolutely nothing — nada, zilch — to do with the downing of the twin towers in New York. Dick Cheney’s persistent claims to the contrary, the secular Muslim Saddam Hussein, once our ally, was a bitter enemy of al Qaeda. But in 2014, the film’s producer, writer and director decided on a clean and efficient plot line that hinges on the highly emotional image of the towers falling. The real Chris Kyle may have absolutely believed in this fictional connection, but a protagonist’s delusion is not a defense for emotionally perpetuating such a costly fiction (many call it a “lie”) in a narrative film about the war. But, then, that’s what “popular” filmmaking is all about, and Eastwood is, if nothing else, a maestro of popular American storytelling. Whether or not one respects such a corrupt decision, the fact is American Sniper is an extremely well-made movie.

Something about how life or God or who ever is behind the curtain of
all things pulling all our strings,
the strings that jerk us up out of the void and into the light and
heat and cold and make us put on
our boots and start walking and talking and eating cornflakes for
breakfast and slaps us around and
dumps us in the middle of deep dark holes of despair and desperation
where monsters come out of the night
and gobble up our happiness when we aren’t looking and then throws us
in the ocean of self doubt and confusion that dries up the
next minute and leaves us spread out like dead butterflies on the
specimen table of alienation…
Only to have the phone ring and someone tell us that the person we
love most in the world just died
and now we have to look at the sunrise and wonder what we ever thought
was beautiful about it and if it will
ever look beautiful again. . .
And how wonderful it is that after all that happens Life or God or
who ever it is that is behind the curtain of all things pulling
our strings now Jerks up out of the void the most incredible being
that says, “Look at me! I’m going to start it all over again.
And I’m so beautiful none of what has come before me matters a flea’s
butt because I bring with me the promise that
life can be different and nobody can deny that who looks at my tiny
fingers or by big bright eyes and the way I wiggle my toes
at the cosmos because I’m alive and that’s all that matters and if
there’s anything
at all close to pure being it’s me!”
 
 
  — Frank Asch
 
 
This poem was offered to ThisCantBeHappening! by Frank Asch, the noted children’s book author/illustrator. He lives in Hawaii. (It is copyrighted may not be reprinted without permission of the author.)

If you’re planning to commit an act of terror in the US and want to be left alone by the FBI, make sure your target is something, or someone, that the US government doesn’t like or care about.

Consider these two terrorist plots.

Just last week, on Jan. 14, the FBI announced that it had arrested Christopher Lee Cornell, a guy in Ohio the bureau alleges had plans to attack Congress with pipe bombs and guns. Apparently acting alone, Cornell is alleged by the FBI to have “researched how to make pipe bombs” (there’s no indication that he actually made or tested any actual bombs), and to have purchased a pair of M-15 semi-automatic rifles and ammunition. How Cornell, who is described as a self-styled “jihadist,” but one with no real connection with foreign Islamic militants, planned to get past the metal detectors and tight security at the Capitol Building in Washington, was not explained, and probably was not known to Cornell himself. It also appears that the FBI was watching Cornell all along, and no doubt encouraging him too, as it was working with a snitch — a man facing prosecution who was in communication with Cornell and may well have been a provocateur, given the Bureau’s prior history of luring vulnerable people into planning terror acts which it then busts.

Compare this case with one we reported on earlier here, which was in the works in the fall of 2011. I’m referring to a terrorism plot in Houston, TX, which the FBI never did report publicly, but which was instead disclosed only thanks to some documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act in 2012 by the Washington, DC-based public interest law firm Partnership for Civil Justice, and which involved an apparently well-developed plan to assassinate leaders of the Houston Occupy Movement. Those documents — internal memos sent out by FBI offices in Houston and Gainesville, FL — refer to “one identified [deleted]” that “planned to engage in sniper attacks against protesters in Houston, Texas if deemed necessary.”

The initial memo, sent to FBI headquarters in Washington from the Houston FBI office, went on to say that the “identified” plotters “had received intelligence that indicated the protesters in New York and Seattle planned similar protests in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin, Texas,” and that they “planned to gather intelligence against the leaders of the protest group and obtain photographs, then formulate a plan to kill the leadership by suppressed sniper rifles.”

When it learned some group planned to use sniper rifles to murder Occupy leaders, the FBI did nothing
 

The Democrats are showing their true colors now that they have lost control of both houses of Congress.

Suddenly, with the assurance that they don’t have to worry about being taken seriously, the “party of the people” has come forward with a proposal to levy a 0.1% tax on short-term stock trades, particularly on high speed trading.

Don’t get me wrong. A stock-trade tax is a great, and long-overdue idea. In fact, such a tax, which could raise some $800 billion in revenue over a decade, should probably be bigger than just 0.1%, and targeted more directly at high speed trading. (Most experts agree high-speed trading has been undermining any semblance of a fair market for stocks and bonds by handing an outsized advantage to companies that have access to huge computers that can make enormous trades, front-running other investors by getting into and out of the market in microseconds, so why not levy a graduated trading tax that is progressively higher the shorter the time period an investment is held?)

The point is that this trading tax is something that progressives have been calling for now for years, if not longer, but while they were in a position to actually make it happen, Democrats in Congress were silent about it.

Now though, with Republicans, who are dead-set against a tax on stock trading, in control of Congress so that there is no chance of passage, the Democrats as a party are calling for it, with Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) planning to introduce the measure this week as part of an ironically named “action plan” to combat income inequality which would also include a measure to cut $2000 in income taxes for families earning less than $200,000 a year, and to more nearly triple the child care credit.

If the Democrats had passed such measures back when they had the White House and both Houses of Congress, back in 2009 or 2010, they wouldn’t be looking at a Republican Congress today. If they’d proposed such measures last year, when they still at least controlled the Senate, they wouldn’t have lost the Senate last November.

But of course, if they had made these proposals when there was a chance of them becoming law, the Democrats in Congress would have lost all the fat campaign donations and other legal bribes that they receive from Wall Street banks, brokerages and hedgefunds.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) warns union workers at an AFL-CIO conference that not all Democrats are on their side

        By all means let’s mourn together; but let’s not be stupid together.
                          -Susan Sontag
 

The costly debacle known as the Iraq War put the US government in a tough spot that’s now exacerbated by the rise of the Islamic State in Anbar Province and western Syria.

A recent New York Times story referred to the Islamic State (also ISIS or ISIL) as a “conundrum” — “a hybrid terrorist organization and a conventional army.” The focus of the story was Major General Michael Nagata, who heads something within the Pentagon known as the Strategic Multilayer Assessment. The Times called it an “unofficial brain trust outside the traditional realms of expertise within the Pentagon, State Department and intelligence agencies, in search of fresh ideas and inspiration.” Besides this theoretical effort to delve into the psychology of the Islamic State, General Nagata has been assigned by President Obama the practical battlefield task of training local Syrian and Iraqi forces to fight the Islamic State.

Major General Michael Nagata, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi at Camp Bucca and the Islamic State leader today

“We do not understand the movement,” General Nagata said of the Islamic State. “And until we do, we are not going to defeat it. We have not defeated the idea. We do not even understand the idea.” The Islamic State’s efforts to reach into places like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya and even Afghanistan “is a huge area of concern,” said Lisa Monaco, Obama’s counterterrorism adviser. CIA Director John Brennan said, “We have to find a way to address some of these factors and conditions that are abetting and allowing these movements to grow.”

General Nagata’s concern is this: “There is a magnetic attraction to I.S. that is bringing in resources, talent, weapons, etc, to thicken, harden, embolden I.S. in ways that are very alarming.” In other words, the Pentagon and the US government are seriously scared of the Islamic State and what it means in the Middle East, North Africa and Southwest Asia. General Nagata, we’re told, wants to introduce complexity into the conundrum. Some might say it’s a bit late in the game for that. To his credit, the general seems to realize that the Islamic State is playing the US like a fiddle. “They want us to become emotional. They revel in being called murderers when the words are coming from an apostate. They are happy to see us outraged,” he says. This suggests that, so far, US belligerence has played right into the hands of the Islamic State, and General Nagata knows it.

A huge number of entitled, mostly white cops in New York City, who have apparently been engaging in a two-week job action to protest their boss’s (that’s Mayor Bill deBlasio’s) support for protesters against the police killing of Eric Garner, a black man busted for selling “loosie” cigarettes on the street on Staten Island, may be unintentionally offering the public a demonstration of their own irrelevance.

For two weeks now, the largest police force in the nation has essentially stopped making arrests. According to a lead story in the New York Times today, ticket issuance by police in this city of 8.4 million is down by 90 percent. The paper reports that:
 

Most precincts’ weekly tallies for criminal infractions — typically about 4,000 a week citywide — were close to zero.
 

And yet, New York continues to function normally, with people going about their business, secure on sidewalk, street, public transit and in their homes.

Could it be that the city has been wasting much of the nearly $5 billion it spends annually on its over 34,000 uniformed cops (15% of the city’s budget)? Could it be that having all those cops cruising around neighborhoods harassing people — mostly, statistics show, people of color and poor people — by stopping them and frisking them, by busting them for “crimes” like public urination, smoking a joint, drinking a beer outside, selliing trinkets or “lossie” cigs, or just “looking suspicious” — has been doing nothing to reduce major crimes and violence after all?

If this job action keeps up, and the city doesn’t descend into a spasm of crime and mayhem, maybe Mayor deBlasio should live up to his early billing as a former radical activist and start sacking the protesting cops. He could start by retasking the NYPD intelligence staff (which has been wasting its time playing CIA and infiltrating mosques and Islamic centers). He should have them instead look over the photos of the officers, nearly all of them white, who publicly dissed him by turning their backs on his eulogies for the two cops who were murdered by a nut-job from Baltimore who decided to kill New York cops to avenge Garner’s and Ferguson teen Michael Brown’s slayings by police, and summarily fire them.

White NYPD officers turn their backs on New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio's eulogy for a slain cop.
 

When I was starting out as a reporter back in 1972, working for a little family-owned daily, the Middletown Press in central Connecticut, I had editors and a publisher who demanded the best from us. If I was covering a story — whether it was a police blotter report, a town meeting, or a controversial decision by a local zoning board — and I failed to ask an important question, I inevitably got a call from the editor telling me to get it answered and inserted into my article.

These days, leaving important questions unasked is not just commonplace, it has become the norm. This is particularly true when it comes to not questioning the assertions of government authorities.

A few days ago, I wrote about how the New York Times has been simply parroting, unquestioned, the official Washington line concerning Russia and President Vladimir Putin in its reports on the crisis in Ukraine, where a US-backed coup last year ousted the elected government and installed a bunch of fascists and corrupt oligarchs.

Now we have the once-celebrated Philadelphia Inquirer, which in the wake of a spate of police murders of unarmed blacks in Los Angeles, Ferguson, MO, Staten Island, NY and Cleveland, OH, shamelessly pimped for the brutal and murderous Philadelphia Police Department and its complicit Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey.

In a Saturday banner headline over a pair of articles, the Inquirer declared “HOMICIDES DOWN,” over an article that was sub-headed “Changes in police approaches are seen as key to a safer city.”

For starters, the headline was misleading. Homicides in Philadelphia were not actually down in 2014 from the prior year. We learn in the article itself that in 2013 there were 247 people killed in the city, while last year, the number killed was 248 — an increase of one. Both years do represent a 7% decline from 2012, but that decline is old news, hardly meriting an all-caps banner headline this year, particularly as close to 250 murders in a city of 1.5 million represents a lot of killings (New York, with 8 million people, had 328 murders in 2014, and considered that total horrific). The number of non-fatal shootings in Philly, to be sure, was down to 1047 this year, compared to 1128 in 2013. But again, that is hardly a number to boast about in a city of 1.5 million. In any case, it probably has more to do with the marksmanship or lack thereof, of the shooters, and the luck of the victims in getting to a hospital quickly, than with the quality of policing or changes in policing policies.

Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, protesters over a police killing, and 2014's last police victim, Brandon Tate-Brown
 

My ax is grinding
All by itself!
I can hear it giving itself to the grinding wheel
Every day when I wake up,
Most nights when I go to bed.
 
I am just grinding it.
 
What would I use it for?
To cut down my enemies to size?
To swing against the foundations of the NSA?
To destroy the diabolical machinery
That is excavating the tarsands in Alberta?
To obliterate all the missiles and missile silos
In the US and Russia and China?
To chop through all the walls that Israel has built
Over the years of its morally bankrupt occupation?
To use the butt-end to smash through
The prejudice and thickening armor
That our politicians weld
Around their hearts and minds?
To slice through the artery
That sluices our tax dollars into the military machine?
To sever my connection with all of the dysfunction
Of my paranoid, backwards nation?
Or just to chop through the gate
That keeps the pony of my spirit
Pastured where the grass has long since died?
 
 
   — Gary Lindorff

As shameful a propagandist for Washington’s war machine as the New York Times has been over the years, sometimes I still cannot believe the brazenness of its abandonment of even a pretext of dispassionate journalistic standards. One of those moments came today, when I read the left-column page-one article by Jim Yardley and Jo Becker headlined “How Putin Forged a Pipeline Deal that Derailed.”

In this Putin hit piece, the two journalists write that the pipeline in question, the so-called South Stream, which was intended to deliver Russian natural gas to southern Europe via a route through Bulgaria, was “Mr. Putin’s most important European project, a tool of economic and geopolitical power critical to twin goals: keeping Europe hooked on Russian gas, and further entrenching Russian influence in fragile former Soviet satellite states as part of a broader effort to undermine European unity.”

Wow.

No suggestion here that laying a pipeline from Russia’s gas fields to directly supply (and sell) natural gas to nations like Italy, Austria, booming southern Germany, the Czech Republic, Rumania, Hungary and the Balkan states might make good business sense!

The Times has written a lot of verbiage about the controversial Keystone XL pipeline designed to bring filthy and massively polluting tar-sands bitumen through the continental US to refineries in Louisiana, Texas and Oklahoma. It’s a dicey business proposition, given that the extracting this sludge from the sands of northern Alberta requires massive expenditure of natural gas and water resources, and costs approximately $100 per barrel of “oil” produced, yet nowhere have we read that the pipeline is “Washington’s most important Canadian project, a tool of economic and geopolitical power critical to twin goals: keeping Canada hooked on US refineries for its crude oil resource, and further entrenching US influence in the growing Canadian economy as part of a broader effort to keep Canada as a US satellite.”

No. The Keystone XL pipeline is always written about as an economic story and/or an environmental story.

But it gets worse.

South Stream pipeline for Russian gas to Europe, Canada's Alberta Tar Sands, and the Keystone XL pipeline under construction.