This Can't Be Happening!

 
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer.
– D.H. Lawrence

The realist in murder writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations … where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket … where no man can walk down a dark street in safety because law and order are things we talk about but refrain from practicing.
– Raymond Chandler
 
 
American pop culture is certainly not unique in having a love affair with killers. Since the first cave man cracked his neighbor’s head open to control a water hole, eliminating others has been top on the list of problem-solving techniques.

Life today has evolved to the point the club has been improved and a young man can sit in an air-conditioned room sipping a Diet Pepsi as he whacks somebody 12,000 miles away. Or else an elite team of tricked-up killers with sophisticated air support can be dropped in at night to do the job.

That’s the state of the art of homicide 2012, America’s dirty little secret.

Retired General Stanley McChrystal and special ops soldiers; at right, a raid in Afghanistan.

Our military is now establishing secret bases all over the world from which to launch these types of homicide assaults specifically focused on leaders of movements we don’t like. The Navy has even developed a fast, twin-hulled catamaran called the littoral combat ship that will deliver these killer teams from the littoral or shallow waters off shore. In the spirit of historic gunboat diplomacy, it’s quite fearsome looking to intimidate the natives.

This kind of projected violence is now going on big time in Yemen, the very poor country on the southern edge of the Arabian peninsula, which is dominated by the super-rich Saudi royal clan, an oily collaboration with which US leaders have had a half-century relationship.

As Jeremy Scahill’s excellent reporting from Yemen makes clear, our drone attacks and support for Yemeni government troops are aggravating poor Yemenis like crazy, driving them into the arms of al Qaeda elements. And, as we should all know by now, once the magic word “al Qaeda” is mentioned all reason and compassion goes out the window and homicide becomes the acceptable problem-solving recourse.

The Senate is currently deadlocked on taking action to prevent the interest on new Stafford guaranteed student loans from rising on July 1 from 3.4% to 6.8%, with Democrats saying they want to “pay for” keeping the current “lower” 3.4% rate by closing a loophole that allows some wealthy people to avoid paying Social Security and Medicare taxes, while Republicans want to “pay for” keeping the lower rate by eliminating a fund for preventative health care in the 2010 health care reform law.

But what is all this nonsense about “paying for” a supposedly “lower” interest rate of 3.4%?

There are actually two kinds of Stafford loans: subsidized and unsubsidized. The unsubsidized loans, and Stafford loans taken out by graduate students, already carry a whopping — some might say usurious — 6.8% interest rate. It’s only the so-called “subsidized” loans that carry a 3.4% rate, and it’s only those loans that would see their rate rise if the two parties cannot come to an agreement to extend the “subsidy.”

But what subsidy are they talking about, anyhow?

Inflation, according to the government’s own statistics, is running at 2.7%. In other words, the government, which is the lender in the case of Stafford Loans, is already making 0.7% on its “subsidized” loans to undergraduates. And the inflation rate has been considerably lower in prior years, so the government has actually been making out like a bandit longer term. If it were to start earning 6.8% on these loans, like it’s already making on older loans, unsubsudized Stafford loans and Perkins Loans, the Treasury would be raking in huge profits on a loan program which is supposed to be helping make college affordable for lower income and middle-income students.

Some deal!

Remember, unless the government secretly suspects that the Occupy Student Loans movement is going to succeed in convincing millions of students to simply refuse to make payments on the $1 trillion in outstanding student loans, these loans are about the safest financial instruments known to man.

Students graduate owing tens of thousands of dollars they can't pay, while the government profits

In journalism and in life, it is best to admit it when you’re wrong, and I was wrong last week. In my haste to write something timely about the triumphant return of Occupy Wall Street to the front lines of protest on May 1, I assumed that Fox Five New York and the NYPD were uniquely stupid as they colluded on a story about the possibility of Arab terrorists secreting bombs in their “cavities,” as the reporter referred to certain familiar orifices that are usually unmentioned on television. Fox Five led their 10:00 pm newscast with the story and I, in my cynicism, thought that only the minions of Rupert Murdoch could lead the news with an imaginary explosion of fecal matter and viscera on a day when Occupy Wall Street had tied up traffic all over Manhattan.

Boy, was I naive.

ABC, CBS, CNN, BBC, MSNBC, NPR, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Guardian, Christian Science Monitor, Daily Mail, Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post and hordes of other corporate media also played up the imaginary explosions of fecal matter and viscera. My mistake was googling only “cavity bomb,” which was the intense focus of Fox Five. What I should have done was google “body bomb,” “implanted bomb,” “breast implant bomb” and “belly bomb.” Those kind of bombs were everywhere.

In a typical report on April 30, Diane Sawyer, solemn and furrowed, announced on ABC World News that as a nation we had reached the eve of the anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s assassination. “US authorities,” she said, were “studying a new terror threat tonight” and chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross would tell us of “heightened concern in the air and on the ground.”

Ross then reiterated that unnamed authorities were afraid of body bombs that would “target Americans.” The idea was “not far fetched” because “medical experts” said there was plenty of room in the gut for “surgically implanted explosives.”

“The surgeon would open the abdominal cavity and literally implant the explosive device in and amongst the internal organs,” said medical expert Dr. Mark Melrose, standing in front of a dark, ominous anatomical painting of the human gut.

“Right in there?” Ross asked incisively.

“Right in between the intestines, the liver, and the stomach,” said Melrose.
Crack ABC reporter Brian Ross questions 'medical expert' Dr. Mark Melrose about placement of a dreaded Arab ass bomb

“This is not a reflection of who we are or what we stand for.”
— Jeff Gearhart, Wall-Mart general counsel, on the firm’s Mexico bribery

[Torture] “is not the norm.”
— Mike Pannek, Abu Ghraib prison warden.

“This is not who we are.”
— Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the US massacre of 16 Afghan villagers.

“This is not who we are.”
— General John Allen, commander of forces in Afghanistan, on Koran burning

“This is not who we are.”
— Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta on troops posing with enemy body parts

“This is not who we are.”
— Secretary of State Clinton, also on troops posing with enemy body parts

Spying by the New York Police on Muslims in Newark, NJ, which the Newark Police Chief was alerted to, is “not who we are”
— Newark Mayor Cory Booker

“I can tell you something all of you know already – that using pepper spray on peaceful protesters runs counter to our values. It does not reflect well on this university and it absolutely is not who we are.”
— UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi, who ordered campus police to use force to clear peaceful student occupiers from the campus, leading to pepper spraying of students

Ripping families apart by deporting the undocumented parents of American-born children is “not who we are.”
— President Barack Obama

“This larger notion that the only thing we can do to restore prosperity is just dismantle government, refund everybody’s money, and let everyone write their own rules, and tell everyone they’re on their own — that’s not who we are.”
— President Barack Obama

“You can’t say, well, we developed trade and the economic relations first and the disregard of human rights. That’s not who we are. We are the United States of America.”
— Sasha Gong, director of the China branch of Voice of America
 

The latest PR catch phrase from business, administration, military, state and local officials after some atrocity or other is that whatever happened, it is certainly “not who we are,” a phrase appropriately initially uttered by the Vietnam War commander, Gen. William Westmoreland, with reference to the My Lai slaughter of 400 women, children and old men, all civilians, by a group of US soldiers.
American atrocities: Not who we are? Really?

There are two truths about the US that come clearly to the fore in the current diplomatic blow-up between the US and China over the case of people’s lawyer Chen Guangcheng, though neither is really getting stated in the corporate media coverage of the story.

The first is that the US does not, and has not really ever, cared about the issue of human rights abuses in China, and the second is that the Obama administration, including the supposedly “tough” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, doesn’t know squat about how to negotiate — not when it comes to dealing with Republicans in Congress, and certainly not when it comes to China.

In the case of human rights in China, it is certainly true that the US has helped certain brave democracy advocates in China, like the astrophysicist Fang Lizhi who was a mentor to many of the Tian An Men activists of 1989 and who was holed up in the US embassy for three weeks before a deal was cut to get him out of the country, or several of the Tian An Men activists who were spirited out of the country with the help of the CIA following the government’s bloody June 4, 1989 crackdown on the movement. But the motivation behind these actions of support at the time by the US government, which was headed by first Ronald Reagan and then George H. W. Bush — two men notoriously not noted for their concern about human rights in the Third World, as witness their support for the death-squads of El Salvador or the murderous Contras in Nicaragua–was not promoting or defending freedom in China. It was undermining the government of China — a far different thing.

Now we have something arguably worse: an administration so focussed on helping US corporations invest in and reap profits from China, where they are eager to ship millions of US jobs, that they are ready to sell out any brave Chinese activist who might try to turn to America for help under the mistaken belief that the U.S. actually takes its oft touted ideals of freedom and promoting democracy seriously.
Sold out and sell-out: Chinese people's lawyer Chen Guangcheng and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

As we slog towards another vapid, largely meaningless exercise in pretend democracy with the selection of a new president and Congress this November, it is time to make it clear that the current president, elected four years ago by so many people with such inflated expectations four years ago (myself included, as I had hoped, vainly it turned out, that those who elected him would then press him to act in progressive ways), is not only a betrayer of those hopes, but is a serial violator of his oath of office. He is, in truth, a war criminal easily the equal of his predecessor, George W. Bush, and perhaps even of Bush’s regent, former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Let me count the ways:

* For starters, in vowing to “preserve, protect and defend the US Constitution of the United States,” President Obama, upon taking office, had a sacred obligation to prosecute the people who had gravely wounded that document prior to his assuming office. It was clear, as I wrote in my book The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office (St. Martin’s Press, 2006), that Bush and Cheney had ordered and condoned and covered up torture of captives in their so-called “War” on Terror, as well as in the very real wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, committing grievous war crimes that are not only violations of international law, but of the US Criminal Code, given that the US is a leading author and signatory of the Geneva Accords). They also were war criminals of the first degree for orchestrating, through lies to both the UN Security Council and the US Congress and the American people, about the alleged threat and imminence of any threat by Iraq to the US or its allies. President Obama, under the UN Charter and under US law, as the president, commander in chief and top law officer in the nation, was bound to investigate and prosecute those crimes. Instead, he ordered that there would be no prosecutions.

* A federal court also ruled that President Bush had committed a felony in using the National Security Agency and several complicit telecommunications companies to spy on massive numbers of Americans with no warrants. Again, instead of prosecuting the president once he replaced him, President Obama said there would be no prosecution, and he went on to expand that spying program exponentially, effectively shredding beyond recognition the Fourth Amendment against unreasonable searches and seizures, which had been a leading rallying issue for the revolutionists of 1776.

* President Obama, on his own initiative, has moved beyond the illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, launching illegal wars against Libya, Yemen and Pakistan, largely through the use of American military aircraft, cruise missiles and especially pilotless drones.
Obama and Bush, two war criminals and committers of High Crimes and Misdemeanors against the Constitution

This article appears today in the Opinion Section of the Los Angeles Times
 

Students traditionally have a soft spot for their alma maters. But as growing numbers of students run up debt in the high five and even six figures to pay for college, that may change. Especially when they discover their old school is actively blocking them from getting a job or going on to a higher degree…

With transcripts blocked at government request, jobless indebted students face a dark future
 

For the rest of this article, please go to the Los Angeles Times

I got home at 10:00 pm on the nose, and the first thing I did was take off my shoes after 14 hours of May Day marching with 30-40,000 other conscientious objectors to capitalism. My feet hurt, okay? My second priority was turning on the local news, which happened to be Fox Five New York. According to my watch, it was 10:02. I didn’t see the first few seconds of the story, but it must have have been the lead. There was Ray Kelly, the chief of police, talking about…not Occupy Wall Street?…no, it was a video of him on some talk show, warning of the apparently imminent threat of Arab terrorists “implanting” bombs in their bodies and blowing up airplanes and buildings.

The reporter, whose name I didn’t catch, showed a mug shot of a sullen swarthy Arab terrorist who had confessed to “helping” his brother implant such a bomb. The reporter then interviewed a “security expert,” whose name I also didn’t catch. As I say, my feet hurt and I wasn’t paying full attention. The security expert speculated that the most you could fit into a man’s “cavity” would be a one pound bomb, and such a weapon probably couldn’t bring down an airplane. A woman, he said, could at most fit a one-pound bomb in one cavity and a two-pound bomb in her other cavity.

The reporter wanted to know what would happen if a large number of Arab terrorists implanted many such bombs on their bodies. The security expert said that many such bombs inside many such Arab terrorists, probably looking even more sullen and swarthy than usual, would increase the likelihood that our x-ray machines and first-rate Homeland Security personnel would detect them before they could blow up the airplane.

The next story was about some Republican heavyweight endorsing Romney. Maybe it was Giuliani, the great hero of 9/11. His name came up, I remember that. To reiterate: my feet were still hurting.

The third story started with the anchor saying something like, “In other security concerns today, Occupy Wall Street marchers paraded down Broadway…” The reporter asked several non-marching pedestrians, “Are you annoyed yet?” Some said yes, some said no, which was, I thought, very fair and balanced. More than 30 marchers were arrested, she reported. Ray Kelly, she further reported, estimated that the city had spent $30 million on Occupy Wall Street security since last fall.
The NYPD's new "biggest fear": The ass-bomb terrorist

India’s successful test of a ballistic missile with a range of more than 5,000 km, was
was uncriticised by the US.

Contrast this lack of concern with the America’s obsessive concern about a suspected or potential
nuclear programme by Iran, or to US threats over the failed rocket launch by North
Korea a few days earlier.

India has increased its military spending by 13% this fiscal year, to roughly US $38
billion, according to an April 20 article in The Independent (UK) titled, ”India’s nuclear
ambition must not be ignored”). Yet this has not raised US ire — or even US eyebrows!

India, the bully of the South Asia region, has happily announced its entry in an
exclusive club within the comity of nations, having now demonstrated the capability to
hit a target at 5,000 kilometers.

The Chinese newspaper, Global Times (Beijing), hit out at Western countries for
displaying double standards for not condemning the test firing of the Agni-V, writing:

“The West chooses to overlook India’s disregard of nuclear and missile control treaties,”
the editorial said. “The West remains silent on the fact that India’s military spending
increased by 17 percent.”

Double standards it is!

The US had no complaints when India test-launched a 5000-km nuclear-capable missile

A little over a month ago, back on March 19, at 3:00 in the morning, the Limerick Nuclear Power Station, which runs two aging GE nuclear reactors along the Schuylkill River west of Philadelphia, had an accident. As much as 15,000 gallons of reactor water contaminated with five times the official safe limit of radioactive Tritium as well as an unknown amount of other dangerous isotopes from the reactor’s fission process blew off a manhole cover and ran out of a large pipe, flowing into a streambed and on into the river from which Philadelphia and a number of smaller towns draw their municipal water supplies.

No public announcement of this spill was made at the time, so the public in those communities had no idea that it had occurred, and water system operators had no opportunity to shut down their intakes from the river. There was no report about the spill in Philadelphia’s two daily newspapers or on local news programs.

Only weeks later, after the regional office of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was finally sent an official report by Exelon, the owner of the plant, did a public notice get posted on the NRC’s website, after which some excellent reporting on the incident was done by Evan Brandt, a reporter for a local paper called The Pottstown Mercury.

ThisCantBeHappening! contacted the NRC regional office with oversight over Limerick and was told that Exelon had only reported the incident to state authorities — the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (PEMA). A call to the DEP elicited a response that the state agency, now in the hands of a Republican governor who has shown open distain for environmental concerns ranging from nuclear waste to regulation of natural gas fracking chemicals, that it did not feel it was necessary to issue any public report on the spill. “Exelon assured us that it was not an EPPI incident,” explained DEP regional office spokeswoman Deborah Fries.

“What’s an EPPI?” she was asked. “It’s an Event of Potential Public Interest,” Fries replied.

The Limerick nuclear reactors just outside Philadelphia are the same design as those at Fukushima, all built by GE