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The US stock market jumped up today on word that the number of new unemployment applications fell to the lowest level in four years.

Sounds good, right? It’s meant to sound good, but if you look at the number, and if you think about what it really means, it’s not good news at all.

What the US Labor Department reported was that new unemployment claims filed for the week ended Feb. 24 totaled 351,000, which was slightly lower than the 353,000 new claims filed the prior week. “Slightly” indeed! A better term for this 0.57% decline is “statistically insignificant!

The idea that such a “drop” in new claims would spark a jump in the Dow or the S&P shows how completely divorced from reality investors–and the reporters in the corporate media who trumpet these kinds of things–really are.

But it is worse than that. The number, remember, is new unemployment claims. That is to say, over a third of a million more Americans, all of them previously working, were laid off last week. Anyone who sees that as some kind of good news is really stretching to find a silver lining on a pretty dark cloud.

Happy talk on the economy is just talk when nearly 30 million are jobless and most others are struggling.

If a bunch of street toughs decided to gang up and beat the crap out of some guy in the neighborhood because they feared he might be planning to buy a gun to protect his family, I think we’d all agree that the police would be right to bust that crew and charge them with conspiracy to commit the crime of assault and battery. If they went forward with their plan and actually did attack the guy, injuring or killing him in the process, we’d also all agree they should all be charged with assault and battery, attempted murder, or even first-degree murder if he died.

In international relations and international law, the same applies. Under the Nuremberg Principles, later incorporated into the United Nations Charter, to which the United States is a signatory, the planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, which is defined as a war started against another nation that does not pose an imminent threat of attack on the aggressor nation or nations, is the highest of war crimes, for which the perpetrators are liable for the death penalty. Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of those above acts is an equally serious capital crime.

How then to explain the casual way that civilian and military leaders of the US and Israel are talking openly about plans and threats to attack Iran?

The supposed casus belli or justification for such an attack is that Iran, which has a uranium enrichment program underway which it claims is to produce nuclear fuel for its new nuclear reactor (a completely legal activity for any nation under international law), secretly plans to further enrich uranium to make an atomic bomb. Yet that is a process which, even if it were to be implemented, would not lead to an actual bomb suitable for testing for at least a year, and which would not give Iran a functioning, useable weapon for even longer. (US intelligence sources say that Iran at this point is not even trying to make a bomb!).

The very table at which US leaders, including President Obama, would make the criminal decision to attack Iran
 

 
(Illustration by Evan James Lindorff-Ellery)
 

Yearning for this or that impossible thing,
I started to become indifferent,
Which was for the best. . .
But,
Stubborn as I was proud,
I still wanted them to stop
What they were doing in my name.
I wanted them to listen to my stewing.
All I got was bad dreams.
So I gave my conscience an ultimatum:

I just received an object lesson into how easily we Americans are able to compartmentalize our principles and our sense of basic human decency.

My father, David Lindorff Sr., who is 89 (and an occasional contributor to ThisCantBeHappening!), recently took a bad fall, hitting the back of his head on the bedpost and suffering a concussion that has temporarily left him with some periods of confusion. In the rehab facility where he was recovering, he would sometimes, when he was tired and half-asleep, get confused about his location, and would try to climb out of the hospital bed he was in, putting him at risk of another serious fall.

I asked the nurse in charge of the floor, and later also asked the head of the facility, if he could perhaps have a safety strap placed over him so that he would not be able to inadvertently hurt himself, and in both cases received a shocked reply: “We do not restrain our patients here. That would be a kind of torture! We are a restraint-free institution.”

The revulsion in the director’s voice at the notion of even gently restraining a patient like dad in a bed for his own protection was so evident I was struck by its basic sincerity.

And yet, this is in a country where most of the citizenry is cheering the ongoing torture of captives in the government’s trumped-up “war” on terror. A country that also routinely–and again with the enthusiastic endorsement of the public–tortures many of the millions of human beings it incarcerates every year.

Hospital bed or torture rack? If you're an American, it may depend on who's occupying it.

The United States is finding the occupation of other nations more and more challenging. Witness the clueless US soldiers or contractors who burned a dozen Korans at the Bagram Air Force Base trash dump in Afghanistan. The uproar in response has only begun.

Then there were the ace troopers who filmed themselves urinating on corpses. And let’s not forget the perplexing US assault that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers. Plus a host of other disasters. We’re failing at Occupation 101. Economic challenges at home only add to the difficulty.

Meanwhile, as the US tries to control an occupation AND be the nice guy, dictators like Bashar Assad in Syria and Omar Bashir in Sudan employ classic scorched earth counter-insurgency tactics and hold onto power. In such a frustrating quandary, what is a poor superpower to do? Washington and Pentagon leaders have decided to fall back on what they feel the US does best: Secret killing.

In Part One of this story, I suggested there were similarities between the new US military doctrine of Special Ops hunter-killer teams and Dexter, the popular novel and TV character who is an upstanding police forensic expert by day and a gruesome psychopathic killer by night. Dexter calls his killer persona his “dark passenger,” a killer “dressed in red, white and blue 100 percent synthetic virtue” who kills only people who deserve to die.

In Part Two, we go to Hollywood.

Scenes from the feature film Act Of Valor

The US government wants its war machine to look good when the budget crunch is on. So with our ten-year Iraq occupation going south and Afghanistan headed in that direction, it’s understandable the Pentagon might want to shill its new, shiny War Doctrine in the marketplace of popular culture.

After two controversial wars, we’re now watching a situation in which Israel could attack Iran, but do it so ineffectually that it would pull the US into what could snowball into a Third World War. This is happening in the context of the Arab Spring upheavals that suggest people around the world are rising up and demanding the removal of the repressive yokes around their necks. China and India and Brazil are on the way to being competitive peers in the capitalist rat race. This dynamic is already driving gasoline prices higher and higher. The future is getting very troublesome and foreboding to contemplate for the average American.

 
I could have been a vicious raving monster who killed and killed and left towers of rotting flesh in my wake. Instead, here I was on the side of truth, justice and the American way. Still a monster, of course, but I cleaned up nicely afterward, and I was OUR monster, dressed in red, white and blue 100 percent synthetic virtue.
 
-Jeff Lindsay
Dearly Devoted Dexter

 
I teach creative writing in a maximum security prison in Philadelphia. During the week I scour two thrift shops for 35-cent paperbacks that I haul in to stock a small lending library I created for inmates. Amazingly, the prison had no library.

In the process of collecting used books, I’ve surveyed the crime, mystery and noir genre of popular fiction. I collect some books for myself and have read many in part or end to end. The range of quality in such a genre runs from garbage to genius.

I’m a Vietnam veteran and a veteran anti-war activist who follows the US war news closely. The psychological and mythic forces of Eros and Thanatos (Death) interest me and how they play out in popular culture. Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents writes about “the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction.” Eros is the force that brings humans together and Thanatos is the force that drives us apart. “This struggle is what all life essentially consists of,” Freud writes. Chris Hedges also writes of this split in his great book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.

The other day I picked up Jeff Lindsay’s second book in the Dexter series — Dearly Devoted Dexter — about a Miami police department forensic expert by day and psychopathic killer by night. Lindsay’s Dexter novels have spun off into a popular Showtime TV series. The Miami Herald called the book about a lovable serial killer “A macabre work of art.”

Personally, I wouldn’t pay the full cover price for this book. Still, Lindsay is a fine prose writer whose characters are well drawn and set within a fast-paced plot that ping-pongs from the sweet, personal and mundane to the truly horrific blood feast. Dexter as first-person narrator speaks in a tone of light, ironic gallows humor with the reader assumed as a friendly confidant. His day job is as a blood-spatter expert with the Miami-Dade Police Homicide Department.

Dexter author Jeff Lindsay, actor Michael C. Hall and a John Hoagland shot of a body dump in El Salvador circa 1985

In this book, Dexter has a relationship with a woman named Rita who has two kids, a boy and a girl, Cody and Astor. All three are wounded from abuse by her ex-husband. Interestingly, Dexter makes it clear he doesn’t care so much about Rita and is not interested in sex. At one point, this disciple of Thanatos is drinking beer and finds himself in bed snuggling with Rita and succumbing to the Erotic. “She was just so nice and smelled so good and felt so warm and comfortable that — Well. Beer really is amazing stuff, isn’t it?”

The attacks and attempted attacks this week on Israeli embassy personnel in Georgia, India and Thailand should serve as a serious warning to the people of both Israel and the US that there will be an increasingly heavy price to pay for the kind of government-sponsored terror that both countries have long practiced, and that too many Americans and Israelis have mindlessly cheered on.

The technology of terror has become so wide-spread, and the materials needed to construct magnetically-attached car bombs, cell-phone detonators, armor-piercing IEDs, diesel/fertilizer bombs and the like, are so accessable at consumer shops, hardware stores and local junkyards, that any government, and even any relatively savvy non-government group, can assemble and employ them.

What this means is that when a country like Israel decides to mount a covert campaign of assassination of scientists in a country like Iran, either by using its own agents, or by buying the help of an in-country terror organization like the MEK, it has to expect that the target country will turn around and do the same kind of thing back. There’s no stopping such a tit-for-tat campaign of slaughter, and in fact, it’s more likely that such covert actions will escalate than that they will subside. It is almost laughable to hear Israeli officials and Iran-War hawks in the US government and media decrying what they say are these allegedly Iranian-backed attacks on Israelis when it is well established at this point that the Israelis have been long doing the same thing in Iran!

The US had better quickly realize that the same thing problem of blowback retaliation in kind applies to America’s actions. There is an attitude currently in Congress, the White House, the Pentagon and the US intelligence services, that the US can act with impunity when it engages in “secret” wars, and even that such secret wars in support of its imperial agenda are a cheap alternative to the massive wars like those against Iraq and Afghanistan (which have not gone well for the US, truth be told).

These days, pretty much anyone, not just Mossad, can attach a drive-by bomb to a car, as Israel is learning

Lahore — Pakistan parliamentarians should promptly table a resolution calling for efforts to carve the state of New Mexico away from the United States and to either make it independent, or restore it to its status prior to the Mexican-American War (1846-48), when it was a part of Mexico.

With New Mexico’s population boasting the highest percentage of Latinos (estimated 46% in 2010) in the US, including descendants of Spanish Colonialists and recent immigrants from Latin America, and the highest percentage of Indigenous Americans (9.4%), US rule by the white-majority government in Washington over New Mexico may rightly be deemed as an alien, neocolonial occupation. The majority of Latinos, 83% of whom were born in New Mexico, share a Spanish and Native American ancestry, while the indigenous population is mostly Navajo, and trace their ancestry in the region back thousands of years to the pre-colonial era.

Of course, this proposal for the secession of New Mexico will be out rightly rejected by the US as an outrageous interference in American affairs and a threat to US sovereignty. The US, after all, has never believed in the motto ,”What’s sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander.” Rather, the US acts like the proverbial elephant in a China Shop, causing horrific destruction in the name of democracy, human rights and other similar big sounding slogans. Except that this destruction has been completely selective! Not when it effects America’s own interest. Or those of her “friends”.

Two candidates for internationally-backed independence movements?

Newfane–Entergy Nuclear of Louisiana, which operates the Vermont Yankee (VY) nuclear reactor in Vernon Vermont has launched an attack on the state of Vermont with the help of the federal courts.

Vermont state law gives the state the power to decide whether to allow further operation of the reactor past March 21, 2012 (the expiration date for VY). When Entergy bought VY, they agreed to this law and swore that they would not try to abrogate it. This was an outright lie on Entergy’s part, and they sued the state as soon as it was decided that further operation of this crumbling, leaking and led-by-liars reactor would NOT be in the interests of the state and they were not given permission to continue operation past March 21.

Federal Judge J. Garvan Murtha, a Bill Clinton appointee to the federal bench in 1995, gave Entergy all that they wanted and denied Vermont the right to legislate on this matter. The judge misconstrued testimony and completely ignored the case presented by the state to show that the Vermont legislature acted within the purview allowed by federal law. In his decision he cites quotes referring to safety that are either unattributed or taken out of context, having been expressed outside of the actual process of crafting the legislation. Some quotes cited even fail to distinguish between legislators and advocates who were speaking in committee hearings.

This ruling goes hand in glove with current Federal policies that enrich the 1% and keep power firmly in the hands of America’s largest corporations. It affirms that corporate profits trump the interests of the citizenry. And it’s based on the laughable notion that only the Federal government can be trusted to keep us safe from radiological accidents caused by corporate malfeasance and profit-driven lax practices.

Entergy's aging Vermont Yankee nuke plant has been plagued with accidents including this 2005 fire and a cooling tower collapse

Ask journalists across America what is the seminal U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding the First Amendment’s press freedom right and most with even a minimal knowledge of First Amendment history will quickly answer New York Times vs. Sullivan.

However, few journalists are aware that the Supreme Court decision significantly reinforcing their press freedom protections arose from the Civil Rights Movement, and in an action involving iconic activist Dr. Martin Luther King.

The 1964 New York Times vs. Sullivan decision is one of a number of U.S. Supreme Court rulings in the Twentieth Century where struggles by African-Americans to obtain long-denied constitutional rights succeeded in expanding constitutional protections for all Americans.

For example, the ability of all Americans to obtain employment free from suspiciously discriminatory job criteria and civil service tests received a big boost by the 1971 Supreme Court decision in the Griggs vs. Duke Power Co. job discrimination case.

There is a conservative campaign to erase black history, though most Civil Rights battles have helped whites too