Month: July 2016

by William Skink

With the noise of the Democrat convention receding into the background I would have to say Margot Kidder’s half-ashamed, half-disgusted (she’s American/Canadian) response came closest to the reaction I had as I listened to spectacle on the radio. Read the whole piece for the full effect, but if you can’t be bothered to follow a link, then this will do:

I am half Canadian, I was brought up there, with very different values than you Americans hold, and tonight — after the endless spit ups and boasts and rants about the greatness of American militarism, and praise for American military strength, and boasts about wiping out ISIS, and America being the strongest country on earth, and an utterly inane story from a woman whose son died in Obama’s war, about how she got to cry in gratitude on Obama’s shoulder — tonight I feel deeply Canadian. Every subtle lesson I was ever subliminally given about the bullies across the border and their rudeness and their lack of education and their self-given right to bomb whoever they wanted in the world for no reason other than that they wanted something the people in the other country had, and their greed, came oozing to the surface of my psyche.

I just got back from a rather fierce walk beside the Yellowstone River here in Montana, trying to let the mountains in the distance reconnect me to some place of goodness in my soul, but I couldn’t find it. The scenery was as exquisite as ever, but it just couldn’t touch the rage in my heart. The visions of all the dead children in Syria that Hillary Clinton helped to kill; the children bombed to bits in Afghanistan and Pakistan from Obama’s drones, the grisly chaos of Libya, the utter wasteland of Iraq, the death and destruction everywhere caused by American military intervention. The Ukraine, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile, you name it — your country has bombed it or destroyed its civilian life in some basic way.

Well said, Margot. #Imwithyou.

Hillary has sent clear signals that, if elected, ratcheting up the death machine in Syria is going to be a top priority:

Hillary Clinton plans to order a full review of the United States’ strategy in Syria as one of her first priorities if elected President.

One of her foreign policy advisers, Jeremy Bash, said she would seek to end Bashar al-Assad’s “murderous” regime despite waning political will to oust the autocratic Syrian President.

He said dealing with Syria would be Ms Clinton’s “first key task” if elected and she would work to get President Assad “out of there”.

It just amazes me that Democrats will line up to vote for a belligerent warmonger because she has a vagina and her last name isn’t Trump. I guess they’re the kind of people who hear the word “Libya” and think of a partisan witch hunt instead of a nation that was destroyed by Hillary’s deranged neocon adventurism in pursuit of total US hegemony.

Here is how one reluctant Bernie supporter rationalizes voting for Hillary:

Finally, I will listen to Bernie and vote for Hillary, unenthusiastically, in November. This is not just a vote for the lesser of two evils — this is a vote against a soulless narcissist bully and for a moderate Democrat who is being pushed left, due in large part to Bernie and his movement.

Good job, Sheepdog Bernie, you adeptly delivered your movement to the doorstep of the war party, then abandoned them, running back to being an independent. How nice that you get to keep your job and taxpayer-funded health insurance while the woman who cheated and lied her way to the top of the ticket prepares for the terminal phase of American imperialism.

While that author leaves readers with some gutless Huffington post article lecturing Bernie supporters about how to continue their failed revolution, I will let Margot have the final word:

I am not an American tonight. I reject my Puritan ancestors who landed in this country in 1648. I reject the words I voiced at my citizenship ceremony. I reject every moment of thrilling discovery I ever had in this country.

You people have no idea what it is like for people from other countries to hear you boast and cheer for your guns and your bombs and your soldiers and your murderous military leaders and your war criminals and your murdering and conscienceless Commander in Chief. All those soaring words are received by the rest of us, by us non-Americans, by all the cells in our body, as absolutely repugnant and obscene.

And there you all are tonight, glued to your TVs and your computers, your hearts swelled with pride because you belong to the strongest country on Earth, cheering on your Murderer President. Ignorant of the entire world’s repulsion. You kill and you kill and you kill, and still you remain proud.

We are fools.

by William Skink

Last night I toasted the departure of one of the many selfless people who work at Missoula’s homeless shelter. During the night’s revelry, I made sure to show them the uphill battle we face to educate ignorant people who say ignorant things, like this:

People aren’t coming from all over the West because our downtown businesses sell booze, they’re coming because the Pov gives free food and beds for up to 60 days. Going downtown during the day after chore time and getting drunk is what many are doing, I have no doubt.

How many are responsible homeless and/or working poor, and how many are bums, true bums in every sense of the word? You worked there, how many? And how does this benefit Missoula? Currently it’s not, and that’s why we have the need for more police and the Florence Building in an uproar.

The Pov contributes to that problem.

Homeless people exist in Missoula because a shelter provides temporary housing and food. Get rid of the services, and the homeless people will magically go away, the thinking goes.

For those invested in this narrative, no amount of evidence to the contrary will change their mind. They think homeless people are like bears, so deprive them of a food source and they won’t pester us.

Most of the ignorance on display in my last post is easily disprovable. For example, this incredibly stupid comment put forth regarding transient issues being somehow unique to Missoula:

I feel the main problem is our homeless shelter’s policies which draw them in. We built it, and they come. Strangely, many other Montana cities with homeless shelters – such as in Helena, the numbers of which I put up last night – are not having these problems.

Why is it just Missoula?

Spending a few seconds googling “Billings transient problem” quickly dispels the erroneous assertion that Missoula is the only town in Montana dealing with these issues. Going further with my exhaustive research, I spent a few more minutes to see if a similar locale had similar issues, and sure enough I found this:

“Tourists have started posting on social media sites that they will not come back to Ashland due to their experiences downtown,” explains Seffinger, listing off grievances from public urination to snapping dogs. “It is important to have this image of Ashland corrected. Our tax base is an important part of being able to provide the services that make our town special and able to give to all our citizens.”

At the same time, Seffinger decidedly recognizes that the City has both a responsibility and an ability to help solve the problem—which does not just mean sweeping away homeless.

Several years ago, camping bans and sit-lie ordinances were presented by elected official as popular solutions; in Ashland, though, those practices pushed up against a more general feeling that there are more considerate and sustainable solutions. In 2010, after police used the camping ban to chase homeless men and women out of Lithia Park, protestors filled downtown for a week with signs reading “It’s not a crime to sleep” and “homeless but human.” As routinely, those ordinances brush up against constitutional limitations and are wiped off the books. Cities like Portland and San Francisco have abandoned those ordinances as a means to managing homeless populations, and in recent years have been searching more for long-term and considerate solutions.

Sound familiar?

I’ll leave it there, for now. I’m sure more ignorance will be on display in the comments, so stay tuned…

by William Skink

For years now the tireless refrain from chronic self-promoter, Greg Strandberg, has been to loudly bash anyone/anything that doesn’t make his own life better. Framing every issue in this manner is incredibly selfish and borderline narcissistic. But because he’s been obsessively persistent in commenting everywhere in the blogosphere comments are allowed, he is starting to get traction. Even Martin Kidston has lent his new media platform, Missoula Current, so Greg can offer a conservative counterpoint of fiscal restraint to liberal Missoula.

While I agree with some of his positions, and read his blog primarily because Greg now traffics in salacious political operative gossip to further the GOP agenda in Montana, his letter to the editor bashing the homeless shelter for the presence of gutter-punk street kids every summer is one of the laziest, ignorant statements I’ve read lately on homelessness, and downtown Missoula’s half-assed efforts to curb unwanted behavior EVERYONE agrees must be addressed (it’s just the matter of how, like how much, and who pays, where things get thorny).

Here is the statement ignorantly reducing the need for increasing law enforcement to busting transients:

We know the four police officers will cost $374,000 a year and we know that we need them now.

Why do we need them? It’s simple – to deal with the monumental transient problem we have downtown.

We created that problem by building the newfangled homeless shelter, prominently placed on Broadway. My how it draws in the young transients that choose a rag-tag existence of handouts as opposed to hard work!

Police need new officers to deal with this problem, and that’s obvious when the Florence Building is thinking of closing its lobby because the transients loitering out front are so bad.

So I hope the city will get its head out of the development clouds and start focusing on problems at the street level.

Greg, if you really believe “we” created “that” problem of street kids downtown by building a dignified shelter to more safely shelter people experiencing homelessness, not to mention the veteran program that helps vets beyond the impotent bitching of armchair assholes like yourself, then you are ignorant in addition to being an obnoxious self-promoter trying to monetize your online presence with two failed runs at being a politician.

Now, allow me to really answer the question of why gutter-punk train-hoppers and various other sub-strata of drainbow takers proliferate in Missoula around this time of year: it’s because Missoula is a beautiful, vibrant mountain town with a river running through it and a keep-it-weird alcohol/drug fueled nightlife scene that proves to be quite lucrative and entertaining for people on the streets.

Put simply, there are a lot of well-meaning suckers and enablers in this town.

Seven years of experience and lots of anecdotal stories is how I have arrived at this conclusion. Let me share a few.

I talked to plenty of EMTs over the years, and their frustrations are often palpable. One guy told me that on the umpteenth call for one of downtown’s most chronic alcoholics, they arrived to see a drunk college-aged girl literally stuffing money in this guy’s pocket as was sprawled on the sidewalk, unconscious. The EMT confessed to saying less than charitable things to this young woman about the timing and method of her charitable donation.

Another story I got from a bartender where my co-workers would have after-shifters now and then. We were talking about enabling, and she sheepishly described one Christmas when several patrons put on Santa caps and handed out pints of vodka to street people. Ho, ho, ho, gulp, gulp, gulp I guess.

The story I share most with people to persuade them to stop throwing money at people on the street is my own, and it helped me understand the dynamics at play, which is why I use it every chance I get.

It starts on a typical night downtown. I’m biking and it’s past the magical hour that delineates when someone can sleep on a sidewalk, and when they can’t. As I’m biking I see someone on the sidewalk and two police officers walking toward him, on foot patrol. I stop my bike and ask the officer I recognize (who also recognizes me from my work with people on the streets) if they would mind if I woke him up and sat him up so he could then be in compliance with our city’s enlightened ordinances.

Clearly not wanting to the be the uniformed officers required to do the unpleasant job of rousing a homeless man, they consent and let me be the one to do it, which is great because not having a uniform and knowing this guy pretty well makes the job much easier and less threatening, for him.

I end up sitting with this homeless man–who is old (though not as old as you would think)–for about an hour, and in that hour I watched, listened and learned.

I learned that in that brief span of time one kind person brought him a plate of nachos, not leftovers, but purchased just for him. A drunk guy who looked very bro-ish surprisingly didn’t verbally accost him, but instead gave him $20 bucks. A few minutes later, a woman, also intoxicated, gave him $4 dollars. Then another woman, even more intoxicated, gleefully exposed her breasts.

Food, money, entertainment. What’s not to like?

At this point in the story, whatever audience I was trying to persuade would generally be amused, and probably not deterred from enacting similar gestures of kindness to the less fortunate. Then I would explain what they didn’t see about this scenario that I discovered that night.

I first acknowledge that this guy slowly drinking himself to death is of course a sad case that stirs feelings of guilt and compassion, but what they don’t know is that street culture is very communal, so when they throw money at this broken-down alcoholic to buy alcohol, what they don’t see is the other people their charity enables, like the young Native guy who stops by later and pounds a few gulps from the vodka bottle–a kid I was almost positive had been part of a group of violent young men “rolling” other homeless people that particular summer downtown and along the river trail.

And they don’t see the next morning, before legal alcohol peddlers can start legally selling alcohol (8am), as this aging alcoholic is scrambling to find a place to take a shit, then hoping someone comes by to give him a pull before the shakes get too bad and he has a seizure.

I don’t expect people in this town to understand what’s happening on the streets, because they don’t have the experiences first responders and hospital staff and social workers have on the front lines. I do expect a blowhard like Greg Strandberg to better educate himself on an issue like this before ignorantly scapegoating a homeless shelter for problems our entire Missoula community is responsible for.

Ironically I do agree and will advocate for more law enforcement in Missoula, but not because a seasonal influx of obnoxious street kids blow through town every summer. We need more law enforcement because Missoula has grown significantly in the last 15 years and the ability of police to respond to the 300-400 calls coming in every day to 911 dispatch hasn’t kept pace in terms of personnel.

The problem, though, is the hope from downtown businesses that increasing the presence of police will solve the problem they have been complaining about year after year. This is one of those problems that is unrealistic to fix from purely a law enforcement perspective, especially with the jail always full and our gap-ridden mental health system and over-burdened criminal justice system the way it is.

So I’ll say it again, until the underlying problems are addressed, this issue won’t be policed away or hidden with better tailored ordinances.

by William Skink

Democrats are such suckers for a good speech. Give them pretty words from a competent performer, and they go gaga. Apparently Michelle Obama gave one of those kind of speeches last night, and my Facebook is packed with people tripping over themselves in awe and wonder.

I to am in awe and wonder, at how easily substance can be glossed over with passionately delivered political propaganda.

I don’t expect history to be kind to the Obama regime. Michelle Obama’s husband has been an absolute disaster, and the evidence is where we are at today.

Non-starry-eyed realists know this. They know Obama has waged a paranoid war against whistle-blowers, has deported more illegal immigrants than Bush, has bumblefucked across the Middle East and pushed a belligerent NATO to the doorstep of Russia, bringing us closer to nuclear armageddon than we have been in half a century. They understand the economic recovery is a joke and the upward sucking of wealth, exacerbating economic disparity, continues unabated. Obama protected Wall Street, allowing the same conditions of fraud and corruption to return the global economy to the edge of collapse, again. This is Obama’s legacy.

But Michelle did her duty and slathered lipstick on the criminally deceitful sociopath pig that is Hillary Clinton. And Democrats ate it up as media outlets like the Atlantic called it a ‘speech for the ages’ because she said shit like this:

So look. So, don’t let anyone ever tell you that this country isn’t great—that somehow we need to make it great again—because this right now is the greatest country on earth. And as my daughters prepare to set out into the world, I want a leader who is worthy of that truth.

How many millions have died across the globe from our great Nation’s wars of choice against country’s that didn’t directly threaten us, like Iraq? How many have been tortured? If our Nation is so great, why do we give weapons to terrorists who then behead a 10 year old boy?

Yep, you probably didn’t hear about that one, but some of those moderate Syrian rebels Michelle Obama’s husband has been arming to eliminate Assad videotaped a gruesome beheading of an emaciated boy in Syria. From the link:

The five “individuals” who killed the child are members of the Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki, a group supported by the CIA as well as with Saudi money and weapons. The group issued a statement on the case. It called it “an act of an individual” and blamed the “international community” for its problems. While only one person does the cutting the video shows that the five “individuals” are clearly acting as a group, cheering Takbeer and Allahu Akbar during and after the beheading.

Despite the publicly available video and the statement by the Zinki group leaders admitting the case, the U.S. State Department had only a very subdued response to it.

So how does this great nation respond to evidence of its moderate rebels beheading a 10 year old boy?

QUESTION: Is this the kind of thing that would affect assistance, U.S. assistance to this specific group but also just in general to the FSA?
MR TONER: Well, I think we’d take a – if, as you said, if we can prove that this was indeed what happened and this group was involved in it, I think it would certainly give us pause.
QUESTION: It would give you pause?
MR TONER: Well, give us pause about any assistance or, frankly, any further involvement with this group.
QUESTION: So, in other words, so it will draw – there will be some kind of consequence if you’re satisfied that this actually happened?
MR TONER: I can’t – again, I can’t say what that consequence will be, but it will certainly give us, as I said, serious pause and we’ll look at, frankly, any affiliation or cooperation with this group we may have going forward, if these allegations are proven true.

What a great response, am I right? If this reality is too depressing, let’s hear more from Michelle:

“In this election, and every election, it is about who will have the power to shape our children for the next four to eight years of their lives, and I am here tonight because in this election there is only one person I trust with that responsibility, only one person who I believe is truly qualified to be president of the United States, and that is our friend Hillary Clinton”

I don’t want any goddamn politician to have the power to shape my children, especially someone like Hillary Clinton. You see, I am trying to instill simple values in my kids, like don’t lie and don’t hurt people. So why would I want a pathological liar who literally celebrates death to have any influence in shaping their lives.

I am so fucking sick of hearing these warped platitudes from the beneficiaries of destruction like Michelle Obama. Her family will get armed protection for the rest of their lives, and the way this country is going, they will need it.

America is not the greatest country on earth. The harsh reality too many can’t acknowledge is that America is actually the biggest threat to world peace on earth, and outside our bubble, that’s what the rest of the world sees, according to a poll conducted two years ago:

US President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize four years ago. Today, the country he leads is seen — according to a new poll — as the biggest threat to world peace.

The global survey, conducted by WIN/Gallup International, polled residents in 68 countries on everything from the global economy to politics and living conditions.

According to the poll, 24 percent of the surveyed countries ranked the United States as the greatest threat to world peace today, followed by Pakistan at 8 percent, China at 6 percent and four countries (Afghanistan, Iran, Israel and North Korea) tied at 5 percent.

I guess Democrats have to delude themselves as best they can, considering they are preparing to elect a neoliberal warmonger who used her position as Secretary of State to enrich herself and restart the Cold War with Russia.

by William Skink

Over the weekend what many believed to be true was proven conclusively, thanks to Wikileaks: the DNC colluded with the Clinton campaign and select media to squash the Sanders insurgency. Coming out the weekend before the convention in Philadelphia, Democrats could appear more divided than Republicans after last week’s incoherent hodgepodge of mixed messages and fear mongering.

While Clinton has smeared critics of her reckless criminality and corruption as conspiracy theorists, the deflection strategy ahead of the convention is to insinuate a conspiracy that Russia was behind the DNC hack, and that Trump is literally a Manchurian candidate controlled by Putin.

What has the establishment so terrified is Trump’s twin assaults on free trade and imperialism. My favorite economist, Michael Hudson, puts it into context with this interview. Here’s a taste:

Until his speech, the whole Republican Convention, every speaker had avoided dealing with economic policy issues. No one referred to the party platform, which isn’t very good. And it was mostly an attack on Hillary. Chants of “lock her up.” And Trump children, aimed to try to humanize him and make him look like a loving man.

But finally came Trump’s speech, and this was for the first time, policy was there. And he’s making a left run around Hillary. He appealed twice to Bernie Sanders supporters, and the two major policies that he outlined in the speech broke radically from the Republican traditional right-wing stance. And that is called destroying the party by the right wing, and Trump said he’s not destroying the party, he’s building it up and appealing to labor, and appealing to the rational interest that otherwise had been backing Bernie Sanders.

So in terms of national security, he wanted to roll back NATO spending. And he made it clear, roll back military spending. We can spend it on infrastructure, we can spend it on employing American labor. And in the speech, he said, look, we don’t need foreign military bases and foreign spending to defend our allies. We can defend them from the United States, because in today’s world, the only kind of war we’re going to have is atomic war. Nobody’s going to invade another country. We’re not going to send American troops to invade Russia, if it were to attack. So nobody’s even talking about that. So let’s be realistic.

Well, being realistic has driven other people crazy. Not only did Krugman say that Trump would, quote, actually follow a pro-Putin foreign policy at the expense of America’s allies, and he’s referring to the Ukraine, basically, and it’s at–he’s become a lobbyist for the military-industrial complex. But also, at the Washington Post you had Anne Applebaum call him explicitly the Manchurian candidate, referring to the 1962 movie, and rejecting the neocon craziness. This has just driven them nutty because they’re worried of losing the Republican Party under Trump.

In economic policy, Trump also opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the TTIP trade and corporate power grab [inaud.] with Europe to block public regulation. And this was also a major plank of Bernie Sanders’ campaign against Hillary, which Trump knows. The corporatist wings of both the Republican and the Democratic Parties fear that Trump’s opposition to NAFTA and TPP will lead the Republicans not to push through in the lame duck session after November. The whole plan has been that once the election’s over, Obama will then get all the Republicans together and will pass the Republican platform that he’s been pushing for the last eight years. The Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement with Europe, and the other neoliberal policies.

On trade, Hillary Clinton doubled down with her VP pick, Tim Kaine, the Virginia Governor/Senator who voted to fast-track TPP and ignored abortion rights activists. The message from the Clinton campaign is pretty clear. Progressives: fuck off. Women: fuck off. You have no where else to go. What are you going to do, vote for the orange-haired Putin robot?

Tim Kaine is just the Clinton campaign being practical, the apologists will say. Virginia is a swing state. Tim Kaine is a safe choice. blah, blah, blah. And did you know Putin has implanted a chip in Trump’s brain and literally controls his every movement? It’s true, because Paul Krugmen said it in the New York Times.

Ok, he didn’t exactly put forth the microchip theory, but he did pen a column a few days ago calling Trump the “Siberian Candidate“. From the link:

If elected, would Donald Trump be Vladimir Putin’s man in the White House? This should be a ludicrous, outrageous question. After all, he must be a patriot — he even wears hats promising to make America great again.

But we’re talking about a ludicrous, outrageous candidate. And the Trump campaign’s recent behavior has quite a few foreign policy experts wondering just what kind of hold Mr. Putin has over the Republican nominee, and whether that influence will continue if he wins.

I’m not talking about merely admiring Mr. Putin’s performance — being impressed by the de facto dictator’s “strength,” and wanting to emulate his actions. I am, instead, talking about indications that Mr. Trump would, in office, actually follow a pro-Putin foreign policy, at the expense of America’s allies and her own self-interest.

I’m sure Democrats will eat this up. A hydra-headed Trumputian monster threatening everything the west holds dear. Be afraid, Democrats, be very afraid.

While our domestic charade continues piling on absurdities, across the pond Germany is gearing up to declare Russia its enemy. This information, like the confirmation of anti-democratic DNC corruption, is coming via a leak:

According to a report issued on June 6th in German Economic News (Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten, or DWN), the German government is preparing to go to war against Russia, and has in draft-form a Bundeswehr report declaring Russia to be an enemy nation. DWN says: “The Russian secret services have apparently thoroughly studied the paper. In advance of the paper’s publication, a harsh note of protest has been sent to Berlin: The head of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Russian State Duma, Alexei Puschkow, has posted the Twitter message: ‘The decision of the German government declaring Russia to be an enemy shows Merkel’s subservience to the Obama administration.’”

This may seem insane, but considering Germany, the engine of Europe, has a bank drowning in derivative debt amidst a European Union in slow motion collapse, reviving the Russian menace might be one of the only plays left for a desperate Merkel to play. And if you want to know how bad the situation with Deutsche Bank is, just read this:

On June 9th 2015, Deutsche Banks holdings were downrated to BBB+, even lower than Lehman immediately prior to their collapse.

And what makes all this so scary? Deutsche Bank’s derivatives holdings are the largest in the history of the planet. Even larger than JP Morgan’s by $5 trillion. We are talking $75 trillion, that is 20 times more than the entire GDP of Germany.

In other words, any major loss of confidence in the global stock market to which DB is exposed could result in an even larger recession than 2008. Given the fact that the % of GDp made up by this kind of financial speculation is even higher than pre-2008 in most western countries, it could result in global economic collapse.

Insolvent western banking behemoths like Deutsche Bank lurk in the background of this escalating path toward war. Merging the demonizing of Russia with the establishment’s demonizing of Trump makes a disturbing kind of sense when the scope of systemic insolvency is understood.

When it comes to money and supporting the Kremlin, what’s implied with Donald is actually explicit with Hillary. I’ve been trying to drive this point home with my Pops, who is adamant about voting for Hillary despite my delightful rants and chants of ‘blood on your hands’ when the spirit moves me. With regard to Billary doing the bidding of the Kremlin, here are two words I wish we were hearing right now: Uranium One. From the link:

As the Russians gradually assumed control of Uranium One in three separate transactions from 2009 to 2013, Canadian records show, a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton Foundation. Uranium One’s chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling $2.35 million. Those contributions were not publicly disclosed by the Clintons, despite an agreement Mrs. Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors. Other people with ties to the company made donations as well.

And shortly after the Russians announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in Uranium One, Mr. Clinton received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock.

I wonder if Paul Krugman remembers this piece, published by the same grey lady that provides his platform to push the conspiratorial insinuation that Trump is a Putin puppet. Is he angling for Secretary of Treasury?

The answer to that question is not important, just like most of what we will hear this week will be equally not important. And while Democrats do damage control as the convention kicks off, one has to wonder how a huckster like Trump, with virtually no ground game in swing states or substantive ad-buys, can be polling neck-in-neck with the anointed one.