This Can't Be Happening!

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 Pakistani girl and one of Obama's first drone victims, murdered in a US drone attack in South Waziristan, Pakistan on Feb. 14, 2009.

Jonathan Schell‘s probing review of Nick Turse’s new book Kill Anything That Moves originated on Tom Dispatch and migrated to Salon, where it appeared under the head “Vietnam was even more horrific than we thought.”

Really? While Jonathan Schell is not responsible for a Salon editor’s headline, he nonetheless seems convinced that Nick Turse’s recently published book justifies such hyperbole. Schell, of course, produced some of the finest reporting to come out of the Vietnam War, and one is inclined to take seriously his views on this subject. Yet Schell immediately undermines the authority conferred by his masterly reporting during the war’s earlier stages with the disclaimer that, “like so many reporters in Vietnam, I saw mainly one aspect of one corner of the war… not enough to serve as a basis for generalization about the conduct of the war as a whole.”

This retroactive blind spot on Schell’s part, I’d wager, did not prevent his many readers from doing precisely what he says he shied from, extrapolating from his gripping accounts the strong suspicion that the air war he witnessed so intimately in Quang Ngai Province was a template for the use of American air power and massive bombing throughout South Vietnam. It’s a tangential point, but it does set up the clouded historical perspective Schell applies throughout this review.

Nick Turse and his Vietnam book

I cannot comment here directly on Turse’s book for the simple reason that I won’t see the copy I ordered for another week. But as I sit here midwinter in a small village on the coast of Maine, with only limited reference materials at hand, I must take issue with some of the claims Jonathan Schell makes for this book that are independent of any future evaluations on my part concerning its quality, timeliness, and scholarly contribution.

It seems that only now with the publication of Nick Turse’s book has the narrow window through which Schell says he once observed the war expanded to reveal a source that “has for the first time put together a comprehensive picture…. of what American forces actually were doing in Vietnam.” What Schell had “once considered isolated atrocities were in fact the norm.”

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…

I am coming –
Made of stardust
And the dust that escapes from vacuum-cleaner bags.
I am blowing.
I am rushed and roaring
Like a waterfall
Coming straight at you,
Pushing ghosts out of my way. . .
 
Illustration by Evan James Lindorff-Ellery

America’s corporate news media love highlighting David-besting-Goliath stories…except apparently, when the fallen Goliath is major media mogul Rupert Murdoch – the billionaire owner of America’s caustic FOX News and other entities.

Arguably the biggest Goliath slaying story in the world during the past two years involved the unraveling of Murdoch’s news empire in England, where he exerted extraordinary influence over top British governmental officials from police to Parliament and even into that nation’s Prime Minister’s Office.

But disturbing documentation of wrongdoing by Murdoch minions, such as illegal hacking into telephones, arrests of top Murdoch executives and a scathing report from Parliament, elicited little sustained interest from America’s mainstream media into what is known variously as the ‘Murdoch Scandal’ and ‘England’s Watergate.”

This lack of ‘news’ coverage interest existed despite the fact that Murdoch’s News Corp is also a huge enterprise in the US where Murdoch’s FOX News routinely injects its highly partisan self in politics and public policy.

Even when one of the journalists who exposed America’s 1970s-era Watergate Scandal – Bob Woodward – broke a story in early December 2012 about a scheme by Murdoch to insert himself into the US presidency, America’s news media continued focusing on celebrity fluff and the looming ‘Fiscal Cliff.’

The face that launches a thousand news programs and misleads and manipulates millions of minds

What is wrong with America?

Big question.

Simple answer.

We Americans have completely lost any sense of why a country, a society, and a government exist.

Politicians, lobbyists and corporate media talking heads, and far too many ordinary people, have accepted and are promoting as gospel the circular notion that it’s important to encourage business to grow so that people will be hired and the economy can grow. This specious argument is used to justify the weakening labor unions, the raising of taxes on workers while they are cut for companies and the rich, the cutting of earned benefit programs like Social Security and Medicare, the gutting worker safety and environmental safety regulations, and the elimination of regulation of activities like banking, corporate mergers and takeovers, pharmaceutical companies etc. In fact every government action that results in making life harder or more dangerous for ordinary working people or for the poor is defended on the basis that it is necessary so that business can make more profit and help the economy to grow.

Growing the economy, however, is not, or certainly should not, be the reason we have government, the reason we are a country, or the reason we are a society.

The Declaration of Independence had it right when, in its inspiring preamble, it aroused a nation of rebels by espousing the inalienable rights of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Period.

And growth today poses a direct threat to all three of those stated goals.

Growth in all its aspects — economic growth, growth in profits, growth in sales, growth of population, growth in income – is a threat to life. It has become clear that the imperative of ever more growth, the ethos and driving force of modern corporate capitalism, is leading to the destruction of the very biosphere that sustains life on this planet. It is a threat to liberty, too, because one country’s growth — America’s — requires the constant assault on those weaker countries that threaten us. The globe is a finite place, and at this point, with seven billion people crowded upon it, for one group — that is to say 313 million Americans — to prosper and grow, requires that 6.7 billion others give up something. In other words, for America to grow, it must be in a constant state of imperial domination and war, which also means a state of war at home, with all the concomitant restrictions on freedom, not to mention expropriation of revenue from the public (53 cents out of every tax dollar), that such a state inevitably entails.

 
Since gun control is such a hot topic, the elite think tank the Project For a New American Decade (PNAD) has come up with a modest proposal to add to the national conversation. We think it’s worth a try.

First, we do the obvious, most sensible things: we establish universal background checks and dignified mental health services for those who exhibit a need for it. The third leg of the current gun control imbroglio — banning AR-15s — is a bit trickier.

When our beloved founding fathers walked this land, a lunatic with a gun had to dick around for five minutes to re-load his musket in order to shoot more than one six-year-old. Something like an AR-15 with a 30-round magazine would have been science fiction to them. So, I propose we make AR-15 assault rifles and extended ammo magazines illegal and set up an obligatory buy-back of the weapons with certain incentives to sweeten the deal.

As the first incentive, everyone who obeys the law and turns in an AR-15 gets an ounce baggie of the finest, most mellow marijuana known to man and a weekend get-away at selected resorts around the nation. There will be great gourmet food, hands-on sex therapists of one’s gender preference, a little Sandbox 101 emphasizing the need for social cooperation, and continuous showings of the The Big Lebowski. (In order to facilitate this incentive the federal government will have to quit trampling on State’s Rights and allow free private enterprise to work in the marijuana market.)

'Nam vet Walter Sobchak having a PTSD moment and his pal The Dude mellowing out

Of course there will be recalcitrants. This is America and we’re a nation founded on recalcitrance. So for those determined to disobey the new law and not participate in the buy-back, an Option B will be offered. Instead of the soothing ganja, the outlaws get a free bottle of the finest tequila, and instead of a resort get-away, the activities will be brought right to their residences. Instead of The Big Lebowski, they get noise, lots of it.

(Continued from Pt. I of Lori Spencer’s report from the nation‘s capitol.)

When Led Zeppelin attended a reception at the White House in advance of the Kennedy Center Honors, they were just as shocked to find themselves there as most everybody else was. Being personally roasted by the President of the United States — along with fellow Kennedy Center Honorees Dustin Hoffman, David Letterman, Natalia Makarova, and Buddy Guy — was an experience Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page could later only describe as “surreal.”

Led Zep was in the House

Page, Plant, and John Paul Jones also enjoyed getting the royal treatment during a weekend of festivities in Washington, D.C., including a State Department dinner on December 1 hosted by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and former president Bill Clinton.

Secretary Clinton described the honorees as “a group of legends and icons as diverse as they are talented. We have in our group of honorees tonight a broad cross section of talent and energy from comedian to chameleon, ballerina to bluesman, and three men so synonymous with rock and roll they need no more description than Page, Plant, Jones,” Clinton said.

“Now, in my line of work, we often talk about the art of diplomacy,” she added. “I really like saying that because so many of the building blocks for art and diplomacy are the same. We have to be willing to try new things, occasionally take big risks. … So the arts and diplomacy actually do go hand in hand. They play out on world stages and reflect our common need to build bonds of understanding with others.”

(Now, if only Secretary Clinton would listen to more Led Zeppelin, perhaps she could manage to tone down the warmongering and actually live up to her words about building bonds of understanding with others. But I digress…)

This interview of TCBH! founder and collective member Dave Lindorff was published in the Tehran Times on Jan. 9, 2013
 
 
Q: In one of your recent articles, you criticized Washington for imposing unilateral sanctions on Iran that deprive millions of Iranian patients of medicines. How does the U.S. government really justify these sanctions? What’s the general attitude of the American public toward the sanctions?
 
A: The U.S. does not justify this kind of thing. It simply doesn’t acknowledge it. The admission by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright that U.S. sanctions caused the untimely deaths of some 500,000 children in Iraq was an exception, caused by her being asked the question by a reporter on a live program (mostly the US media just ignore these kinds of horror stories). As for the American people, they mostly don’t know what is happening in their name, and for many who learn of this, while perhaps it upsets them a little, it is seen as “necessary” because Iran is portrayed rather absurdly as a “dangerous” enemy of the U.S.

Israel, which is threating to bomb Iran because it might be working on a nuclear bomb, has made hundreds of bombs at this Dimona plutonium-producing reactor plant. What really frightens Israel is not Iran attacking, but Israel losing its nuclear terror monopoly in the Middle East. Unlike Iran, Israel has never signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, does not allow nuclear inspectors, and doesn’t even admit it has nuclear weapons.

Here come the Pelicans,
Eight in a row
Following their leader,
Steering with their heads.
I stand at attention and salute.
Such primitive birds!
It feels right to honor
Their military instincts.
I’ll miss them.