Category: Uncategorized

 
Those that respect the law and love sausage should watch neither being made.
– Mark Twain
 
In the spirit of Twain’s famous metaphor, Joe Biden is a mighty gifted sausage maker. The vice president is the man of the hour, the Obama administration’s legislative deal-maker on the fiscal cliff and leader of forging gun-control legislation following the Newtown massacre. Biden is the LBJ of the Obama White House when it comes to dealing with Congress as that institution sinks ever deeper into an historic nadir of national trust.

Ever since he showed his political pugilistic skills with Paul Ryan in the VP debate following President Obama’s dull performance in the first presidential debate, Biden has moved to a position reminiscent of Cheney’s with George Bush.

“Joe” is always billed as an ordinary working class guy. On the campaign trail, the youthful 70-year-old flirtatiously nuzzles motorcycle mamas at lunch cafes. Last week, he amused the pundits by spouting corny jokes or wisecracks with everybody at a photo-shoot for new congress members being sworn in. As Maureen Dowd points out, the VP is comfortable in the halls of Congress and he is not afraid of letting his sub-conscious free-associate and have a little fun. He’s the politician you’d like to have a beer with. Michael Smerconish on MSNBC gushed, “Praise Biden for showing how it’s done, how to be a pol.”

VP Joe Biden in the limelight December 31st

On the other hand, this would-be working-man-of-the-people was re-elected US senator from the Moneybags Corporate State of Delaware for over 36 years, a period known for the inexorable slow demise of labor unions. Ponder that for a while and you realize what a brilliant and accommodating man Biden must be.

Joe Biden has been making sausage for over a third of a century. Among his list of successes is the current Drug War and the current Counter-Terrorism War, both of which are now interlocking to become one long, bi-partisan war without end. While Biden may scrap with Republicans, he is a classic Cold War Liberal in the Hubert Humphrey mode, pushing moderately progressive legislation while reinforcing the pillars of imperial militarism and the burgeoning police-state that is post-9/11 America.

I was asked earlier this week by an reporter for PressTV, the state television network in Iran, if I could explain why the US political system seemed to be so dysfunctional, with Congress and the President having created an artificial budget crisis 17 months ago, not “solving” it until the last hour before a Congressional deadline would have created financial chaos, and even then not solving the problem and instead just pushing it off for two months until the next crisis moment.

I thought for a moment, trying to come up with a simple way to explain the peculiar politics of a fake democracy where two equally pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist parties vie with genuine bitterness for patronage spoils and legal bribes, all the while ignoring the real wishes and needs of the public, and then it hit me: it is really all about US militarism and the unwillingness of the either of the two political parties to admit honestly to to American people how much they are being gouged to allow the US government and its corporate owners to continue in their attempt to control the world.

It really is that simple.

The US currently spends almost as much on its military and on paying for current and past wars in terms of interest on war debt and care for wounded and aging soldiers as the entire rest of the world spends on arms and war. Approximately $1.3 trillion gets spent each year in taxpayer’s dollars and in more borrowed funds (50 cents of every federal tax dollar goes to pay for the US military, the intelligence apparatus, veterans’ benefits and other related military costs). It is simply ludicrous, given this situation, to imagine that the US can significantly reduce its budget deficit either by raising taxes or by cutting social spending.

Think of it this way. The US is currently running a $1.3 trillion deficit (that is federal spending less tax revenue). That deficit, significantly one must note, almost exactly matches the amount that is being spent annually on the US military, and on military/intelligence-related activities.

The US spends $1.3 trillion a year on a military it does not need. Politicians won't talk about cutting it down to size.

This is the first part of a two-part series on Led Zep in DC. Click here for Part II
 

It was a few days before Christmas, 1970, and Elvis Presley was suddenly obsessed with a strange notion. Not another late-night private shopping spree for Lisa Marie, or a cross-country hamburger run this time. No, what Presley had in mind was far more important: the trumpet of destiny was once again beckoning him to her siren call. It had been decided somehow in his drug-addled mind that the King of Rock and Roll should meet the President of the United States. Not next week; not next year, or in the next decade: this had to happen right now.

Within hours, and without telling anyone in his Memphis Mafia entourage, Elvis was on a red-eye flight to Washington, D.C. – alone. Before Vernon Presley could say, “Has anybody seen Elvis?” (thus setting off a full-scale panic back at Graceland), Presley had arrived at the White House gates uninvited, asking to see the president.

Elvis explained to an astonished security guard that he knew the president was very busy, but that he would just like to say hello and give him a gift (a commemorative World War II .45 caliber pistol). He also bore in his hand a six-page handwritten note requesting – incredulously enough – to be appointed a “Federal Agent-at-Large” in the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.

Once it had been determined that the letter was genuine and that this heavily armed, velvet-and-suede-clad man at the gate really was the Elvis Presley, phones began ringing frantically all over the White House. “What the hell do we do with this guy?” was the question of the day. Elvis waited patiently in his three-room suite back at the Hotel Washington while the president’s men scrambled to accommodate his bizarre request.

In a staff memo fired off quickly to Nixon’s Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, the president’s Special Assistant Dwight Chapin suggested that “If the president wants to meet with some bright young people outside of the government, Presley might be a perfect one to start with.”

Haldeman scribbled in the margins of the memo, “You must be kidding.”

Nevertheless, he approved the visit, and Presley was finally allowed entry into an inner sanctum that no rock-and-roller before him had ever penetrated: the Oval Office.

L to R: Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin, Natalia Makarova, David Letterman, Dustin Hoffman, Buddy Guy and President Barack Obama at the White House

New documents obtained from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security by the Partnership for Civil Justice and released this past week show that the FBI and other intelligence and law enforcement agencies began a campaign of monitoring, spying and disrupting the Occupy Movement at least two months before the first occupation actions began in late September 2011.

As early as August, while acknowledging that the incipient Occupy Movement was “peaceful” in nature, federal, state and local officials from the FBI, the DHS and the many Fusion Centers and Joint Terrorism Task Force centers around the country were meeting with local financial institutions and their private security organizations to plot out a strategy for countering the Occupy Movement’s campaign.

Interestingly, one document obtained by PCJ from the Houston FBI office refers to what appears to have been a plan by some group, the name of which is blacked out in the released document, to determine who the leaders were of the Occupy Movement in Houston, and then to assassinate them with “suppressed” sniper rifles, meaning sniper rifles equipped with silencers.

The chilling document in question reads as follows:
 

“One identified BLANK as of October planned to engage in sniper attacks against protesters in Houston, Texas if deemed necessary. An identified BLANK had received intelligence that indicated the protesters in New York and Seattle planned similar protests in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin, Texas. BLANK 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.”
 

The wording does not sound like it’s some crank Tea Party faction they’re talking about — especially the words “deemed necessary” and the reference to “gathering intelligence against the leaders of the protest group.” Fortunately, in any case, no such assassination campaign materialized in Houston or anywhere else during the wave of Occupy actions across the country, but at the same time, there were never any arrests of whatever organization or individuals that the FBI clearly knew to be planning such a terrorist action against the Occupy activists.

NYPD cops became Wall Street's private army during the Occupy Wall Street campaign, even getting paid by the banks on the side

A 21st century psychotherapist steps into a time machine and comes out in Atlanta in 1855. Having no other marketable skills, he hangs out a shingle and promises new remedies for mental illness. A well-dressed gentleman knocks on the door and inquires if the psychotherapist might come to his plantation to examine the slaves.

“Most of them are well satisfied with their position and work hard within their natural limitations,” says the gentleman. “But a few appear to suffer most severely with drapetomania, dipsomania and dyaesthesia aethiopica. Even after whippings, they continue to defy my rules, either by subterfuge or outright defiance. I do not understand their affliction, which is cause for much suffering among them and financial losses for myself.”

After looking up drapetomania (compulsive running away), dipsomania (compulsive drinking) and dyaesthesia aethiopica (compulsive avoidance of work) in the latest journals of negro behavior, the psychotherapist goes to the plantation and convinces the psychotic slaves to talk with him for 50 minutes each week.

“I think I know what the problem is,” says the psychotherapist after a few months of research. “Your slaves had unhappy childhoods because they come from dysfunctional families. Their parents were often absent and even when they were around, they didn’t appreciate their children for their true selves. In some sense, your slaves are living in the past, acting out childhood fear and anger that is deeply buried in the unconscious.”

“And what do you recommend as a remedy?” says the gentleman.

“The best psychology has to offer right now is continued brutalization, on the theory that their race is incapable of deeper insight,” says the psychotherapist. “I think the evidence  indicates that re-traumatizing the already traumatized is ineffective for a small number of stubborn cases, as you have discovered. For the stubborn cases, I would suggest another form of therapy…”

If the 21st century psychotherapist was Freudian, he might now recommend years of talk therapy for the slaves until they had a clear understanding of their parents and siblings.

If the psychotherapist was Jungian, he might recommend dream journals and more creative outlets for the slaves so they could get insight from active imagination.

 
The tendency to identify manhood with a capacity
for physical violence has a long history in America.
– Marshall Fishwick

Violence is as American as cherry pie.
– H. Rap Brown
 
Watching President Barack Obama wipe away a tear as he spoke to the nation on the day a 20-year-old Adam Lanza dressed himself up like a Navy SEAL and took out 20 little kids and six of their teachers, it was clear the President was a good man and a deeply-committed father of young children.

The same day, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg noted the President’s touching emotions but quickly stressed it was time to strike hard and fast on gun control legislation. The problem of violence in America had gone unaddressed for decades and weapons were becoming more accessible and more lethal.

Meanwhile, Dan Rather told Rachel Maddow he felt President Obama returned to his first term M.O. and caved in to the right on the Susan Rice nomination for Secretary of State. Rather felt the President didn’t like to initiate fights and that when they came or were on the horizon, his first move, before the fight even began, was to concede and seek a centrist compromise.

.

But watching the President’s authentic sadness you had to wonder whether some of his troubled spirit might have been because he knew what this extraordinary killing spree in a Norman Rockwell Connecticut town meant for him as a second-term president. Following on the Virginia Tech, Gabrielle Gifford and Batman movie theater massacres, this instance of the systematic gunning down of six- and seven-year-olds was so incredibly efficient that it seemed even beyond the pale for the United States.

He faced three conflicting challenges:

Dear friends:
I dreamed that the DOE
Wanted to allow radioactive waste
From nuclear weapons facilities
To be recycled by siphoning it into
The single-stream Mississippi of the junk
That gets turned back into the stuff we buy.
 

How elegant is that!
 

But wait a second. . .
That wasn’t a dream.
They really want to do that!
But most of all
They want us to join them
In their psychosis.
If this wasn’t so real
I would seriously consider
Moving to an even safer oasis
Than rural Vermont
To enjoy the kind of world
I want to live in
And let the madness play out. . .
Let our descendents pick up the pieces.
Unfortunately when they are done
There won’t be any pieces,
Unless you call radioactive blobs
That used to be zippers
Fused to blobs of plastic and metal
That used to be assault weapons
Excavated from mounds that used to be cities,
Pieces.

 

Listening to NRA chief Wayne LaPierre lash out at any notion of gun control during that staunch gun advocate’s first public appearance in the wake of the horrific Connecticut school shooting triggered flashbacks to defiance I once heard from 1960s-era segregationist George Wallace.

Wallace rode a racist declaration from his 1963 governorship inauguration in Alabama to campaigns for the U.S. presidency years later: “Segregation now…Segregation tomorrow. Segregation forever!”

LaPierre’s refusal to embrace any reform of America’s gun laws exhibits defiance similar to arch-segregationist George Wallace — interestingly a man forced from the public political arena in 1972 by a gunman whose unsuccessful assassination attempt left Wallace paralyzed from the waist-down.

The bluster and bullshit of both LaPierre and the late Gov. Wallace are/were astounding in the extreme, each evidencing a pathological inability to accept the fact that their respective defenses of the indefensible were and are not acceptable.

George Wallace waged war against extending full civil rights to blacks while NRA head Wayne LaPierre continues to wage war against any gun control regardless of how moderate the proposed control measures are.

NRA whackjob Wayne LaPierre calls for guns in schools to combat gun violence in schools

On a recent Saturday morning people streamed into a church building in south Camden, NJ, all carrying similar items–some items bundled in blankets, some wrapped in rugs with others in cases and plastic bags.
Those items were not toys for tots or assistance for the destitute.

These items were guns – handguns, rifles and shotguns – some working, many inoperable, most old – all brought to that church center for bundles of cash ranging from $50 to $250 during a vaunted gun ‘Buy-Back’ program.

This government sponsored Buy-Back program did net a record number of firearms: 1,137.

The record-setting figure easily exceeded the previous New Jersey high mark of 700 guns which was set in 2009 during a similar buy-back program in the Newark area.

The Camden buy-back netted five fully automatic weapons, which is a plus.

But judging from photographs of that record return of guns featured in media coverage those five full auto weapons were not the dreaded AK/AR-style assault rifles rightfully feared by police for their ability to rapidly fire bullets that, unlike pistols, can shred bullet-proof vests.

And irrespective of that record number of guns turned in for cash, this program – like so many other buy-back programs around the nation – missed its real target.

Weapons turned in at last weekend's "guns for cash" event in Camden, NJ

If President Obama had been the commander of Allied forces during the invasion of Normandy 1944, he would have cut a deal with the Nazis when they launched the counter-offensive called the Battle of the Bulge, and WWII would have ended in Europe with a divided France and a still-extant Third Reich into the 1950s. If he had been president in 1965, we wouldn’t have Medicare today. If he had been Rosa Parks, black people might still be riding at the back of the bus.

The current president of the United States, the most powerful man in the world, commander in chief of the most awesome military the world has ever known, is the most pathetic negotiator in the history of modern politics. Either that or he wants to lose.

During his first term, we watched him inexplicably water down his health reform program before it even got started, removing the option of a Canadian-style state-run insurance program known as “single-payer” from consideration, and then cutting deals with the insurance industry, the hospital industry and the pharmaceutical industry, before going to Congress with a plan that ended up being a gift to all three.

We watched him cave early on in negotiations over a crisis economic stimulus plan in 2009, giving Republicans a $425-billion tax cut that did nothing to boost jobs in return for getting a measly $425-billion in stimulus funding approved. He caved quickly too on the plan to appoint Elizabeth Warren to head the newly created Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection. The list of Obama premature cave-ins is long and ugly.

Now, when he is almost by accident in an unassailable position to have the hugely unfair and damaging Bush tax cuts for the rich finally expire on December 31, leaving Republicans stuck in January with having to pass Democratic legislation restoring tax cuts for just the middle class, he is giving it away, offering gratis an undermining of Social Security benefits for all Americans by way of a subtle change in the way inflation adjustments are made in future benefits.

Separated at birth? Game throwers Barack Obama and "Chick" Gardil