This Can't Be Happening!

Shopping at Walmart

Welcome to Walmart,
How may I help you?

You can start by reading my shirt.
On the front it says: Leave while you can.
On the back: Follow my ass.

Outside the day-sky is black.
There is a static energy crackling from
Every plant and rooftop.
Everything is charged.
There is an acidic tang to the air,
A volatile fried plastic smell.

I am homeless.
I will do anything for food.
Wash your car, clean your garage.
I am a middle-aged starving, fat American.
I see myself crucified on a solar panel.

I do not trust my governor,
My senator, or my president.
And least of all myself.
I tread lightly.
I’ve been trying to grow wings.

Where can I find reading glasses and socks?
I wander the aisles of Walmart
Trying to focus on my inner life.

Every-day-low-prices suckle my brain.

I have a real barcode on my butt.

When I get my glasses and my socks
I will stand in the parking lot.
I will squint at the sun
Which will be smiling
And pointing its bright middle finger
At my car
Which is on fire.

 
I’m a leftist, but I have a weakness for my brothers and sisters on the right. For some reason, I’m compelled to see what troglodytes like Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Megyn Kelly are thinking. They’re all quite entertaining as they do their best to un-man Barack Obama and advocate day-in, day-out for war with Islam. They are masters of malicious fog.

Then there’s a writer like New York Times columnist David Brooks, a man who must sit around observing current events until he figures out a safe, center-right position he can express in the most reasonable, muddled language possible. Reading David Brooks is like trying to get a grip on jello.

In this current political swamp there’s also writers like Cenk Uygur, a Turkish naturalized US citizen who left the Muslim religion behind to become an on-line journalist. He did a stint with MSNBC and now is the main man on The Young Turks show. Once a Republican, he’s moved left to the progressive side. His recent effort at clarity concerning the question whether “Islam is the motherlode of bad ideas” was brilliant. The topic was a TV exchange among Bill Maher, Sam Harris and Ben Affleck. Harris made the “motherlode” remark. Maher compared Islam to the Mafia. A pissed-off Affleck said they were both talking bigotry.

David Brooks and Lewis Mumford

Brooks’ October 3rd column was called “The Problem With Pragmatism.” Annoyed at “people who try to govern without philosophic or literary depth,” Brooks linked Liberalism with Pragmatism and, with some help from Lewis Mumford and an essay in the 1950s New Republic magazine, trashed pragmatism as not up to speed for our moment in history, a moment suddenly taken over by more military adventure in the Islam-saturated deserts of Iraq and Syria. Citing Mumford, Brooks writes of our national mission and how “only people with an aroused moral sense will be properly mobilized to stand up for humanity.”

Lewis Mumford seems an odd inspiration for Brooks’ soft, center-right paean to our current moral mission. Mumford wrote a lot about cities and architecture. He felt human communication, more than the use of tools, was the secret of human advancement. One imagines he would be appalled how secrecy now impedes so much human communication. Mumford was critical of advertising and marketing and of the growing use of credit — all now on steroids in the holy pursuit of corporate profit. He didn’t like things like built-in obsolescence and product changes based on superficial fashion; again, fundamentals of our dysfunctional national condition. Mumford advocated well-made products that would last and be re-used by succeeding generations. He advocated biodiversity. He is said to have influenced people like Jacques Ellul, Witold Rybczynski, E. F. Schumacher, Herbert Marcuse, Thomas Merton, and Marshall McLuhan. How such a writer could be critical of pragmatism I can’t fathom.

A number of progressive and left-leaning writers in the US have jumped on a report by Wikileaks that the neo-con dominated National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and various other US-government linked organizations with a history of subversion and sowing discord abroad are operating in Hong Kong and on that basis are making the leap of “logic” that the democracy protests in Hong Kong must therefore be a creation of US policy-makers.

As a progressive, Chinese-fluent journalist who has spent years working in China and especially Hong Kong, and who has spent decades exposing the secret workings of US agencies and their network of fake NGOs in support of US empire, as well as their anti-democratic activities here in the US, I can understand why people might be suspicious, but I want to explain that Hong Kong is not Ukraine or even Venezuela or Brazil.

Long a colony of Great Britain, Hong Kong has a more than century-long tradition of people fighting for their freedom and for the right to have a government elected by themselves, and not simply appointed to rule over them. Especially in the years of the 1960s–’90s, as the time drew ever closer when the British would have to leave and an increasingly powerful and assertive China would assume sovereignty over this British colony, they won freedom of speech, press, religion, assembly and a legal system that largely protected them from arbitrary arrest and detention without charge. They even won a small degree of democratic power, as the British agreed grudgingly to allow a minority of the seats in the city’s Legislative Council (Legco) to be elected by popular vote by district. Britain did not, right up to the handover of sovereignty to China in July 1997, allow Hong Kongers to elect the city’s “mayor,” known as Governor, who remained a crown appointee of the UK right to the lowering of the Union Jack.

But because of the militant demands of Hong Kong people, who regularly took to the streets en masse to demand that freedom and democracy both be not just protected but expanded after the handover, China was forced — by its need to reassure foreign investors and companies that political stability and rule of law would be continued in Hong Kong under Chinese rule — to grant those demands. Thus the Basic Law that governs the relationship between China and what is now called the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, assures the democratic election by popular vote of 40 of Legco’s 70 seats (the remainder are “elected” or chosen by various occupational sectors like law, banking, etc.). The Basic Law also guarantees the continuation of the key freedoms won by Hong Kong people: speech, press, religion, assembly, etc., including labor rights like the right to join unions and to strike. Significantly, nearly all of the elected seats in Legco have been won repeatedly by representatives of the various pro-democracy parties, which have the overwhelming support of Hong Kong residents.

I give this history to make it clear that there is a multigenerational history of struggling for and defending individual rights and of fighting for democratic rights in Hong Kong. Hong Kong people are not new to this stuff, and as an educated population with access to a world of information in their open media and wide open internet, they are not a population that is readily susceptible to the kind of manipulation and subversion practiced typically by the likes of the NED.

Certainly in a time like this, the NED, USAID (and the CIA), could be expected to try to gain some influence. Why not? But saying that they are active in Hong Kong and trying to have influence is a far cry from saying they are “behind” the protests or that they have “orchestrated” the protests. Those who make this leap are, I believe, exhibiting unintentionally an attitude of Western cultural superiority that assumes that “We Americans” are smart enough to see this kind of subversion, but Hong Kong people wouldn’t notice how they are being used.

The mass protests demanding democratic election of Hong Kong's chief executive are not the creation of US agencies

Police carp about college students’ selection of a prison inmate for their commencement speaker. It must have something to do with Mumia Abu-Jamal…the man that cops across America love to hate.

Chuck Canterbury, National President of the Fraternal Order of Police, issued a statement on October 1 that blasted Goddard College for its failure to block the commencement speech scheduled for Sunday (10/5) by Abu-Jamal, an alum of the small liberal arts institution in Vermont.

Canterbury castigated the fact that the group of 23 Goddard students who chose Abu-Jamal to address their boutique commencement ceremony “will be addressed by a remorseless killer who murdered Philadelphia Police Officer Danny Faulkner.”

Abu-Jamal’s controversial 1982 conviction for killing Officer Faulkner has been upheld by state and federal courts. However, that conviction is widely condemned by entities as diverse as Amnesty International, the European Parliament and the NAACP as fraught with misconduct by Philadelphia police and prosecutors that crippled Abu-Jamal’s fair trial rights.

Abu-Jamal briefly attended Goddard in the early 1970s. He obtained a B.A. degree from that institution 1996 through correspondence courses taken while on death row awaiting execution for Faulkner’s murder.

Mumia Abu-Jamal serving life without parole, his alma mater Goddard College, and an image from an FOP website showing a police riot squad
 

In a perverse way, maybe it’s progress that the US is now admitting that it doesn’t really care about how many civilians it kills in its efforts to “decapitate” a few suspected terrorist leaders.

Still, it’s disturbing in the extreme to see this admission reported without comment in the US corporate media, which treats the information like just another announcement about how the latest war is being fought — say what kind of ammunition is being fired by the Reaper drones being sent into Syria, or what kinds of bombs the F-16s are dropping.

Here was the White House announcement, as reported by Michael IsIkoff in Yahoo News:

The White House has acknowledged for the first time that strict standards President Obama imposed last year to prevent civilian deaths from U.S. drone strikes will not apply to U.S. military operations in Syria and Iraq.

A White House statement to Yahoo News confirming the looser policy came in response to questions about reports that as many as a dozen civilians, including women and young children, were killed when a Tomahawk missile struck the village of Kafr Daryan in Syria’s Idlib province on the morning of Sept. 23.

The article then goes on to state:

Caitlin Hayden, a spokesperson for the National Security Council, told Yahoo News…that a much-publicized White House policy that President Obama announced last year barring U.S. drone strikes unless there is a “near certainty” there will be no civilian casualties — “the highest standard we can meet,” he said at the time — does not cover the current U.S. airstrikes in Syria and Iraq.

The “near certainty” standard was intended to apply “only when we take direct action ‘outside areas of active hostilities,’ as we noted at the time,” Hayden said. “That description — outside areas of active hostilities — simply does not fit what we are seeing on the ground in Iraq and Syria right now.”

Isikoff goes on to write that “Hayden added that U.S. military operations against the Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL) in Syria, ‘like all U.S. military operations, are being conducted consistently with the laws of armed conflict, proportionality and distinction'”

Left unsaid is that those same laws of armed conflict — we are here really referring to the Geneva Conventions, treaties concerning the legal conduct of war that were negotiated by and signed into law by the United States and most other countries of the world — make invading another country that does not pose an imminent threat to the invader a war crime of the highest order.

What, American journalists should be asking, is the point of worrying about whether one tactic or another, whether it’s the use of depleted uranium weapons, the dropping of white phosphorus incindiary weapons, the torturing of captives, or the launching of drone-fired missiles at targets known to contain innocent civilian men, women and children?

US drone strikes are killing civilians as Obama lowers the standard for avoiding civilian casualties in attacks in Syria
 

 
Ain’t no time to wonder why.
Whoopee, we’re all gonna die.
– Country Joe McDonald
 

I like to call it The War of the Heads. ISIS beheads people one-on-one, up-close-and-personal on You Tube while the United States of America and its coalition of cautious or secret partners prefers “decapitation,” as in using powerful F16 bombs and drone rockets to whack off metaphoric heads.

It’s easy to work up a vengeful frenzy sitting on our couches watching the medieval slicing off of heads. Especially when it’s heads we recognize! It’s harder to get worked up about people we don’t know who die much more slow and horrible deaths buried in the buildings we obliterate in an instant. We are sometimes allowed to watch buildings go up in a fiery cloud on our TV screens. But not to worry, no one is doing You Tube videos of the man, woman or child buried in noxious dust and concrete, gasping for air as he or she slowly expires in agony. You have to be a local Arab or Muslim helping to drag the remains and pieces of humanity out of the building to feel the call to vengeance from these F16 and drone hits.

Drone pilots "decapitating," an ISIS fighter beheading and a corpse in a building blown up in Gaza

In a New York Times op-ed, Thomas Friedman goes deep and explains how President Obama’s challenge at this historic juncture is to make the Arab/Muslim world recognize it’s an abject failure as a culture. It must accept the need for a ruthless imperial killing campaign to destroy the psychopathic ISIS killers. Don’t pause and consider that ISIS was directly spawned as a vengeance reaction to this kind of thinking and killing in the first place. No, keep thinking it’s all because Arabs and Muslims are a backward civilization in need of cleansing. I imagine getting the Arab/Muslim world to go for Friedman’s line should be easy — about as easy as someone like me getting the Exceptionalist/Imperialist world to recognize its blunders and debacles.

Over at Fox, Bill O’Reilly was on a tear advocating the creation of a 25,000 member mercenary killing force to be led by US officers. An American Foreign Legion for the 21st Century. A well-paid, highly-trained, international killer-force immune to progressive US politics and capable of working around the Constitution. O’Reilly loves to defend the Constitution — except when it’s inconvenient. The point is to make killing bad guys easier. Then all you have to do is decide who the bad guys are, which is a simple matter as long as the secret meeting is limited to the right people.

A 25,000 member American Foreign Legion is a natural progression from Vietnam’s secret Phoenix Program to Iran-Contra’s “war-off-the-books” to Dick Cheney’s “dark-side” to a flat-out extra-Constitutional, rapid-reaction death-force. “It’s gonna happen,” O’Reilly says with his bully’s confidence. Eric Prince, the former Seal who founded Blackwater, agreed with him. So did Geraldo Rivera. No more pinhead discussion: It’s time for the ultimate vengeance deliverance system.

The US claims to be supporting democracy from Ukraine to Cuba, and from Somalia to Iraq, often by bombing the alleged opposition, or by supporting proxy wars and subversion. But one place where real democracy activists are battling against the forces of repression they are curiously getting no backing from the United States: Hong Kong.

There, student activists, a local occupy movement, and now the independent trade union movement and massive numbers of ordinary working class and middle class people are mobilizing to prevent China from going back on a pledge made in 1997 to allow Hong Kong people in 2017 to elect their city’s “mayor,” called the chief executive, by popular vote.

The government in China, which assumed sovereignty over Hong Kong from Britain in 1997, at the time established what was called a Basic Law governing Hong Kong, and granting the former British Colony self-rule. As part of that Basic Law, the partially-elected, partially-appointed legislative council (Legco) was dissolved, and new elections were held. The appointed British governor was replaced with a chief executive appointed by a panel of business leaders and other prominent figures selected by the central government in Beijing. But over the course of the next 20 years, the number of members of the Legislative Council who are directly elected by the citizens of Hong Kong was to be gradually increased (it is currently 40 out of 70, with the balance elected by so-called functional constituencies — basically the professions like law, banking, etc.), and in 2017, the chief executive was to be directly elected from a slate of candidates.

Now China says that this last crucial democratic reform will be curtailed. Instead of picking their own “mayor” democratically, China says Hong Kong residents will have to choose between candidates who will first be vetted by the government in Beijing, which will only allow to run for office those deemed to be suitably “patriotic” and to “love China.”

That backslide from popular suffrage has sparked a huge and growing protest in Hong Kong which began with students, who tried to occupy the grounds in front of the Legislative Council building. The students last week were joined by the large Hong Kong Occupy Central movement–the latter a local outgrowth of the 2011 global occupy movement. Earlier this week Hong Kong police, who have over the years generally have shown considerable restraint in dealing with public protests, acted more like today’s militarized American cops, firing rounds of teargas into the peaceful crowds, spraying pepper spray into the faces of sitting protesters, and making large-scale arrests.

To view a drone's-eye video of the dramatic democracy protest in the center of Hong Kong, click on the image
 

Talk Nation Radio host David Swanson, a noted labor and peace activist who has been doggedly promoting the idea that war itself is a crime — one that was outlawed by the Kellogg-Briand Pact, ratified by the Senate 85-1 and signed by President Calvin Coolidge — interviews TCBH! founder Dave Lindorff about the crisis in Ukraine, about the US push for war against ISIS, and ultimately Syria, and about the ongoing militarization of the police in the United States.

Listen to this half-hour edition of Swanson’s program “Let’s Try Democracy,” by clicking here

TCBH!'s Dave Lindorff (l) and David Swanson, host of Talk Nation Radio's "Let's Try Democracy" program (r)

Good riddance!

Eric Holder has announced that he is leaving his post of Attorney General, which he has sullied and degraded for six years.

A corporate lawyer with the A-list Washington and Wall Street law firm Covington & Burling, Holder will be remembered for his timid defense of civil rights, his overseeing. and even encouragement of the massive militarization of the nation’s police forces, his anti-First Amendment efforts to pursue not just whistleblowers but the journalists who use them, threatening both with jail and in fact jailing a number of them (particularly in the case of whistleblower extraordinaire Edward Snowden, and Wikileaks journalist Julian Assange, both of whom reportedly face US treason charges), and his weak enforcement of environmental protection laws.

But Holder, who came into his position as the nation’s top law enforcement officer in early 2009 at the start of the Obama administration and at the height of the financial crisis, will be best remembered for his overt announcement that there would be no attempt to prosecute the criminals at the top of the nation’s biggest so-called “too-big-to-fail” banks, whose brazen crimes of theft, deceit, fraud and perjury during the Bush/Cheney years and beyond sank not just the US but the global economy into a crisis which is still with us.

Holder not only did not make any effort to put Wall Street’s banking titans behind bars for their epic crimes; he did not even make them step down from their exalted and absurdly highly compensated executive positions when his office reached negotiated settlements with the banks in civil cases involving those crimes — civil cases that in almost all cases allowed the banks to settle without even having to admit their guilt. (His ludicrous excuse: punishing these criminal executive might jeopardize the banks’ stocks and hurt “innocent” shareholders!) Nor was this legal benevalence limited to purely financial crimes. Banks like Citicorp and HSBC, which were found to have knowingly laundered millions — even billions — of dollars in drug money for drug cartels, were also allowed by Holder to escape with petty fines, and no prosecution of a single bank executive.

As the US Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) notes in its response to word that Holder is leaving as AG, his Justice Department generally even allowed the Banks that were fined to deduct those fines from their taxes as a business expense — something that ordinary citizens are not allowed to do by the IRS, and which Holder could have barred the banks from doing.

No surprise there. Among the clients of Holder’s old law firm are both Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. The firm also has since 2010 had a lobbying services contract with Xe Services, the murderous mercenary firm formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide whose bloody abuses in Iraq were so monstrous the company had to change its name (but not its methods) in order to keep obtaining mercenary services contracts from the US government.

It is being suggested that Holder may opt to go back to his old post as a partner at Covington & Burling, which would be the final, though hardly surprising, insult to the American people, providing a particularly galling example of Washington’s revolving door between government regulators and enforcers and the industries that they were supposed to be regulating or keeping honest.

God, how far we have fallen from the days when Ramsey Clark was attorney general, and left to become a leading critic of Washington’s imperial government at home and abroad!

AG Holder going after the To-Big-To-Fail banks (NOT)
 

New York City — There were many extraordinary moments during both Sunday’s huge climate march through mid-Manhattan and Monday’s more militant protest in Lower Manhattan’s financial district, from the little boy marching with a tambourine that had “This Machine Kills Fascists” written around its edge (a bow to Woody Guthrie who painted that line on his guitar) to the bored policeman along the march route blowing a huge bubble from the gum he was chewing. But the most telling occurred in the early afternoon on Monday, when, as several thousand climate action protesters sat or milled around, penned into several blocks of Broadway by hundreds of linked-together metal police barricades, a young man astride a pair of telephone booths began an impromptu IWW rant.

(Update: The IWW reports that the young man in question is named Elliot Hughes, and is co-founder of the IWW’s Ecological Unionism Caucus.)

The day before, during the big march down Central Park West, Sixth Avenue and across 42nd Street, those phone booths had been favored vantage points for photographers, dancing young women and people just trying to get a better view of the march. Bored cops standing along the parade route would chat and joke with those perched above. But this time a young man, dressed in black and standing in sight of the big bronze Wall Street Bull sculpture, and just several blocks down Broadway from Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange building, was shouting out a call for workers to unite, rise up and overthrow the capitalist system. It was just too much for the police who were guarding the barricades to segregate people so those on the street couldn’t leave and so supporters on the sidewalk couldn’t join the protest.

A dozen of the cops came over to the nine-foot-tall phone booths, surrounding them, and demanded that the shouting young man come down. He ignored them, realizing that they couldn’t reach him, and went on to finish his speech, which was relayed phrase by phrase via the “human mic” technique perfected three years earlier by the Occupy Wall Street movement. When he was done, he paced around on his perch like a rooster, looking down at the surrounding cops, and then suddenly made his break.

Leaping over the cops and some of the surrounding protest supporters, he managed to land on his feet on the sidewalk and started running. Protesters closed ranks behind him, slowing down the cops who all began chasing after him.

At that point, all the police guarding the metal barriers took off after the young man too. Eventually this police horde caught up with the man, and leapt on him like a rugby scrum. I don’t know what happened to him in the end. He was probably arrested and charged tautologically with resisting arrest, but for what violation I don’t know since, as the events of the day before proved that just standing on a phone booth was not illegal or cause for arrest; apparently only making a leftist speech from one is a “crime.”

Young IWW speaker atop a phone booth later fled arrest and drew cops away, allowing protesters to liberate the street