Month: June 2015

by William Skink

Stupid Skink, you allowed a glimmer of hope from Democrats to blind you to how DC functions. You thought enough Dems on Capitol Hill would continue to oppose fast-track authority, but you were wrong. Fucking Democrats. How could you forget that there are Rich People’s Rules when it comes to the desires of the corporate class? I guess you need Dean Baker to remind you:

Congress gave the American people and the world something to celebrate last Friday. The House of Representatives refused to pass the package of bills that would have given President Obama fast-track authority for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). This was a huge victory for a campaign led by labor unions, environmentalists, consumer groups and other activists against the country’s biggest corporations.

A victory by the masses, or “everyday people,” over big money and big media is always grounds for celebration. But it is important to remember the game is far from over. This is one of those bills, like the TARP, where we are playing by rich people’s rules.

That means that the other guys get to have do overs until they get the outcome they want. Some folks may remember the vote on the TARP, the Wall Street bailout package. The Washington establishment was shocked when liberal Democrats and populist Republicans combined to defeat the original bill in the House. But that was not the end, after all the life of the Wall Street banks was at stake.

We know how that temporary stand against the TARP bailout turned, don’t we? And now the same thing with fast-tracking America into tighter corporate control. Here are your worthless Democrats, as reported by Mother Jones:

Well, it looks like the Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty is in business. The standalone fast-track bill just passed the Senate by a hair, 60-37. Several Republicans defected and voted no even though they had voted yes the first time around, but only one Democrat defected. So now it goes to President Obama’s desk, where he’ll sign it.

I wish Democrats experienced consequences for these constant betrayals, but they don’t. At Salon they think Hillary is going to lose to Bernie because of her deftly vacuous rhetoric around issues like trade. Sure, Salon, and I’ll have some of what you’re smoking please:

Clinton spoke on Roosevelt Island the day after the House TTP vote. She said the word ‘trade’ once, when breathlessly observing that she could see the new World Trade Center over her shoulder. In a year she has made just one statement on the issue. Months ago, when asked a question by NBC’s Andrea Mitchell she said, “Any trade deal has to produce jobs and raise wages and increase prosperity and protect our security. And we have to do our part in making sure we have the…. skills to be competitive.”

The morning after Announcement II, John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, appeared on “Meet the Press.” When asked her position on the TPP he managed to sound indignant: “She actually has been very clear about where she stands on trade…. First, does it grow jobs, grow wages and protect American workers and second, does it protect our national security…”

Podesta said Clinton would “render her final judgment” after the deal was done. That was it. Her non-answer would be her final answer until such time as it no longer mattered what she thought. Podesta’s performance may have tripped an alarm even in the tone-deaf Clinton camp. Later that day in Iowa, she talked for the first time on the record about the TPP. In a story headlined Trade Deal Comments Put Hillary Clinton at Odds With Her Former Boss, the Times told how she “bluntly suggested that the president should ‘listen to and work with’ Democrats to improve the deal and ensure better protections for American workers. If that cannot be done Mrs. Clinton said, ‘there should be no deal.’”

This may have been the story my liberal friends read. It reads as if Clinton came out swinging, but read it again and it’s clear she said even less there than she said to Andrea Mitchell. If Obama can’t work with Democratic House leaders who both support the TPP, there shouldn’t be a deal. But why wouldn’t he? Her verbal feint was sublimely subtle. Without changing her position, without even taking one, she repositioned herself on an issue roiling her party and nation. As message politics goes, it was state of the art. Too bad for Clinton it isn’t working.

Hillary puffs on the hopium and her followers breathe it in deeply. Through the haze the husk of her words are filled by the hopes of her supporters. It’s a choreographed dance of deceit with just enough suspended belief to make it palatable.

John Halle, over at Counterpunch, puts the treasonous support of free trade in juxtaposition to the racist execution of 9 church goers in Charleston. He calls it Obama’s Neoliberal Endgame:

It is a testament to the optimism of the left that some of us were able to find a silver lining even in the most toxic of black clouds which was the Charleston massacre. One of these was Maurice Mitchell of the Movement for Black Lives who was quoted as taking comfort in “the organizing and the heart and resilience we are seeing on the ground”. Mitchell was “hopeful that it will continue—that we might be able to precipitate a meaningful, transformative political and cultural shift in this country.”

Unfortunately, Mitchell’s optimism was probably misplaced for reasons Naomi Klein provides in The Shock Doctrine: crises, even those which might seem to galvanize the left, are routinely used as a smokescreen under which the right pursues their most regressive policies.

Last Thursday was no exception.

Indeed, while the bodies were being counted, the U.S. Congress approved HR 1314, a major step to achieving Trade Promotion Authority, or TPA, which will result in far more devastation in African American communities than white supremacists’ bullets. The difference lies in the violence being effected by fountain pen wielding men in suits resulting in unseen destruction–of jobs, environmental protections and organizing rights all of which adding up to mass unemployment, misery, and hopelessness and, ultimately, thousands of premature deaths.

There’s no connecting of the dots, no examination of the Big Picture. So what if Walmart stops selling Confederate flag merchandise? The corporate class is preparing their “free trade” shackles for us plebes while we discuss Obama’s use of the word nigger. Symbolic wins can’t replace policy losses. Electing Obama is the perfect example. While Democrats celebrated this symbolic victory, Obama served the corporate class more effectively these past 7 years than a McCain or a Romney could have.

And with Hillary we will get the same thing: a symbolic victory while the corporate class continues its incremental enslavement of the useless eaters they despise (but still marginally need for their profits).

And so it goes…

by William Skink

How did America become entangled with one of the worst state-sponsors of terrorism, Saudi Arabia, a nation that just carried out its 100th beheading? According to the report last Monday, one of the dangerous criminals who met this gruesome fate was a foreign national arrested for a non-violent drug crime:

Saudi Arabia has reportedly taken its number of executions for the year to 100, far exceeding last year’s tally and putting it on course for a new record.

According to a statement from the Saudi Press Agency, two more convicted criminals were killed by the government on Monday – including a foreign national guilty only of a non-violent drug smuggling offence.

While all that beheading is taking place half a world away, in the states–specifically, Montana–Saudi nationals have fled to the relative safety of their homeland after allegedly sexually assaulting female students and, just reported today, after being caught cheating. From the link:

CAIRO – A group of Saudi students caught in a cheating scandal at a Montana college were offered flights home by their kingdom’s diplomats to avoid the possibility of deportation or arrest, according to a cache of Saudi Embassy memos recently published by WikiLeaks and a senior official at the school involved.

The students were in a ring of roughly 30 alleged cheaters at Montana Tech accused of having systematically forged grades by giving presents to a college employee.

The cheating was discovered – and the staffer was fired – following an investigation made public in early 2012, but the memos reveal for the first time that the students were almost all Saudis and that their government booked them flights home following a meeting between college administrators and Saudi diplomats in Washington just before the scandal broke.

This story comes courtesy of the cache of memos recently released by Wikileaks, and it will certainly generate lots of interest for those interested in America’s perverse relationship with this barbaric nation.

There is a lot to learn from this release, especially when it comes to media manipulation. Binoy Kampmark at Counterpunch takes a look at that angle, as does Moon of Alabama. Remember that ridiculous plot featuring a used car salesman who was trying to pay assassins to kill a Saudi diplomat in DC? It was supposedly a scheme cooked up by those wily Iranians. Here is the wikipedia entry about the plot.

At the time, b, the German blogger at Moon of Alabama, called the plot nonsense. He was right and the New York Times was more than wrong–it was suckered into promoting a false propaganda narrative that benefited both the Saudi regime and the Obama regime.

To really understand this relationship America has with Saudi Arabia, one must go back to the year 1945. Luckily we have some help from documentary film maker, Adam Curtis. His relatively new film, Bitter Lake, examines the madness that has flowed from the meeting between President Roosevelt and King Abdulaziz:

In 1945 President Roosevelt met King Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia (whose son Abdullah died last week, to be replaced by yet another son, Salman) on board a warship on the Great Bitter Lake. It was a meeting that would have extraordinary, far-reaching and unintended consequences, for the west, for the world.

Curtis’s story unfurls from there, taking in America, Saudi Arabia, Britain, the Soviet Union. And Afghanistan, which found itself not just at the centre of the world, but the centre of a snowballing – and ongoing – international scandal. It’s a story that includes the spread of Wahhabism (no wasabi jokes, thank you); the oversimplification of the world, by Reagan and Bush (Sr) and Bush (Jr) and Blair, into a kind of fairytale of good v evil; the banks, inevitably; Bin Laden and 9/11 too, also inevitably; and now Islamic State, who want pretty much exactly what the Wahhabists wanted over half a century ago.

It’s a story full of violence, bloodshed, and bitter ironies, mainly about how the west, through misunderstanding and oversimplification, repeatedly achieved pretty much the opposite of what it was trying to achieve. America protected Wahhabism through its thirst for Saudi oil, and in doing so helped sow the seeds of radical Islam today. In Afghanistan they built dams to irrigate the Helmand valley, making it perfect to sow actual seeds, opium poppy seeds. The past is strewn with patterns, and warnings, if only anyone had bothered looking and tried to understand. But history is a bit too complicated for today’s politicians.

If we don’t try to understand what this fateful partnership with Saudi Arabia has wrought, then we will continue to operate under the fevered delusions fueling our post-9/11 insanity in the Middle East.

by William Skink

soaked in bleach
breach his eyes
place the shotgun
Hole’s disguise

Love is hard
when love is hooked
the goose is gold
the goose is cooked

–for K.C., who barely got to be a father before his wife had him killed

by William Skink

The false narrative about the dire situation in Ukraine took a very strange turn today, as reported by Sputnik news. For some reason, the direct beneficiary of the 2014 coup, Poroshenko, is asking Ukraine’s Constitutional Court to declare the ousting of Yanukovych as unconstitutional. From the link:

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko appealed to the country’s constitutional court, asking the court to recognize the ousting of former President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 as illegitimate.

“I ask the court to acknowledge that the law ‘on the removal of the presidential title from Viktor Yanukovych’ as unconstitutional,” Poroshenko said in a court statement published on the website of the Ukrainian constitutional court.

The current Ukrainian president said the law violates the constitution, according to which the President of Ukraine is protected by law and his title remains with him forever. He also added that by enacting the law in February of 2014, the parliament of Ukraine undermined the constitution.

Curious. Perhaps Porky isn’t feeling the kind of job security he was hoping for, post-coup. Even if that were the case, this move still doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. What’s going on here?

That’s a question the American populace isn’t well equipped to answer, considering most think the situation in Ukraine is a Russian-instigated conflagration. And they think that because news sources like the New York Times are seen as always credible, while a source like RT is seen as pure propaganda. In an interview about the rush to a new cold war, Robert Parry touches on the danger of these perceptions about media sources:

The American propaganda barrage has not at all swayed the Russian people and government. Of course, the U.S. says they are all being propagandized by Russia Today and other Russian networks. Frankly, one can argue with some ways some things have been reported by RT or other Russian sources, but they have been doing a more accurate, on-the-ground job than the U.S. press corps has been.

You can point to a number of egregious major mistakes made by the major US news organizations. The New York Times went along with a bogus photograph from spring 2014 supposedly showing Russian troops in Ukraine. It turned out that some of the photographs were misrepresented and did not show what they were supposed to show. They [the Times writers] were forced to retract that.

You can point to factual errors on both sides, but it’s not something where the U.S., as the New York Times tries to present it, is perfect and hasn’t presented anything improperly, while the Russian media are all lies and propaganda. It’s not true. But it’s getting to the point where you cannot be a reasonable person, or look at things objectively, because you are pushed into taking sides.

That’s where journalism is a very dangerous thing – especially here. There was a lot of dangerous reporting during the cold war that in some cases pushed the two sides into dangerous confrontations. That can happen again. We were lucky to escape the 60’s without a nuclear war. Now we are rushing ourselves back into something that William Polk, a writer and former diplomat of the Kennedy administration, has called a possible Cuban missile crisis in reverse. This time we’re the ones pushing our military forces onto the Russian border, rather than the Russians putting missiles onto a place like Cuba. We know how Americans reacted to that. Now the Russians are facing something very similar.

To highlight this, here is the New York Times reporting that the U.S. is poised to put heavy weaponry in East Europe:

RIGA, Latvia — In a significant move to deter possible Russian aggression in Europe, the Pentagon is poised to store battle tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and other heavy weapons for as many as 5,000 American troops in several Baltic and Eastern European countries, American and allied officials say.

The proposal, if approved, would represent the first time since the end of the Cold War that the United States has stationed heavy military equipment in the newer NATO member nations in Eastern Europe that had once been part of the Soviet sphere of influence. Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine have caused alarm and prompted new military planning in NATO capitals.

It would be the most prominent of a series of moves the United States and NATO have taken to bolster forces in the region and send a clear message of resolve to allies and to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, that the United States would defend the alliance’s members closest to the Russian frontier.

This is insane. As the summer heats up, let’s hope the new Cold War doesn’t go hot as well.

by William Skink

Another terrible tragedy. Another round of hand-wringing over guns. What motivated this killer? Why won’t the media call it terrorism? What is wrong with this country?

President Obama had some words worth considering:

“I’ve had to make statements like this too many times. Communities like this have had to endure tragedies like this too many times. We do not have all the facts, but we do know, once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun,” the president said, bringing up the seeming proliferation of armed violence in the country. “Now is time for mourning and for healing. But let’s be clear: At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency, and it is in our power to do something about it.”

These tragedies become political Rorschach tests. Guns, race, mental illness, the Confederate flag. These aspects will be endlessly discussed for a few days, maybe a few weeks, and then we’ll move on. What won’t be discussed is the fact America uses violence across the globe to achieve its political goals.

Innocent life is casually extinguished all the time via US-sanctioned drone terrorism. The American war in Iraq killed over a million people. America uses violence to get what it wants, spreading death and misery wherever “our interests” intersect with the lives of foreign people in foreign lands. We, as Americans, so easily degrade the lives of people in far-flung countries, collectively shrugging our shoulders at the casualties, it really shouldn’t be all that shocking when our violent culture produces a mass-killer like Dylann Roof.

But we won’t talk about that. We won’t acknowledge the reality that American foreign policy encompasses some of the worst methods of terrorism in existence today.

While we discuss this domestic tragedy, our Saudi pals continue to pummel Yemen. Saudi Arabia’s “war” only exacerbates the hell America has wrought in Yemen. Last April, Rolling Stone took a look at how Obama’s terrorist drone program is causing PTSD:

Symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, trauma and anxiety are becoming rampant in the different corners of the country where drones are active. “Drones hover over an area for hours, sometimes days and weeks,” said Rooj Alwazir, a Yemeni-American anti-drone activist and cofounder of Support Yemen, a media collective raising awareness about issues afflicting the country. Yemenis widely describe suffering from constant sleeplessness, anxiety, short-tempers, an inability to concentrate and, unsurprisingly, paranoia.

Alwazir recalled a Yemeni villager telling her that the drones “are looking inside our homes and even at our women.'” She says that, “this feeling of infringement of privacy, combined with civilian casualties and constant fear and anxiety has a profound long time psychological effect on those living under drones.”

Last year, London-based forensic psychologist Peter Schaapveld presented research he’d conducted on the psychological impact of drone strikes in Yemen to a British parliamentary sub-committee. He reported that 92 percent of the population sample he examined was found to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder – with children being the demographic most significantly affected. Women, he found, claimed to be miscarrying from their fear of drones. “This is a population that by any figure is hugely suffering,” Schaapveld said. The fear of drones, he added, “is traumatizing an entire generation.”

Call Dylann Roof a terrorist if it makes you feel better. Write opinion pieces about fatal gaps in Montana’s background check laws if you want to score some political points. Pass laws banning the Confederate flag if you think that will make any difference.

Personally, I don’t think it will. America came to be through the violence of manifest destiny. We built this nation on slavery and genocide. To get at the root of what America is in 2015 will require accounting for the entirety of our violent history.