Month: June 2018

by William Skink

What started with Bush after 9/11 continued under Obama and is metastasizing fast under Trump. Yet, thanks to partisan binary thinking, any claim of continuity between these three presidents creates immediate cognitive dissonance.

One of the arguments–actually, more like a warning–made during the Obama years was that failing to reign in executive power meant allowing that power to pass on to the next war criminal destined to give international law a fat, American middle finger.

I hoped this argument would be more persuasive, since Democrats at the time didn’t seem too worried about Obama doing things like executing an American teenager with a drone strike and deposing Gaddafi with the business end of a bayonet.

Since Democrats are now flipping their shit over how the Trump regime is punishing children for the actions of their adult family members, let’s quickly revisit the justification Robert Gibbs gave for Team Obama killing an American teenager:

ADAMSON: …It’s an American citizen that is being targeted without due process, without trial. And, he’s underage. He’s a minor.

GIBBS: I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well being of their children. I don’t think becoming an al Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business.

I’m sure Robert Gibbs can eat wherever the hell he wants in DC. Why? Because the power of partisan binary thinking disappears any threatening info that could trigger cognitive dissonance. It’s both impressive and demoralizing to witness.

Our lovely corporate media helps Americans avoid cognitive dissonance as best they can. For example, did you hear that the Trump regime killed that 16 year old teenager’s 8 year old sister? Yep, it happened, and barely anyone gave a fuck that it happened:

In a hideous symbol of the bipartisan continuity of U.S. barbarism, Nasser al-Awlaki just lost another one of his young grandchildren to U.S. violence. On Sunday, the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, using armed Reaper drones for cover, carried out a commando raid on what it said was a compound harboring officials of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. A statement issued by President Trump lamented the death of an American service member and several others who were wounded, but made no mention of any civilian deaths. U.S. military officials initially denied any civilian deaths, and (therefore) the CNN report on the raid said nothing about any civilians being killed.

But reports from Yemen quickly surfaced that 30 people were killed, including 10 women and children. Among the dead: the 8-year-old granddaughter of Nasser al-Awlaki, Nawar, who was also the daughter of Anwar Awlaki.

Killing civilians–be it women, children or men (jk, men are never considered civilians) is simply how US imperialism rolls. Why do anything to actually inform the American public about what is done, daily, in their name? That could revive the anti-war movement and hurt profits for Boeing and Raytheon, and we can’t have that.

But the information is out there for those who want to look. For example, Ben Rhodes recently admitted that Obama armed jihadists in Syria–you know, those bad people that are so bad it’s apparently ok to kill their children.

This is from a ZH piece zeroing in on one particular illuminating exchange:

In a wide ranging interview titled “Confronting the Consequences of Obama’s Foreign Policy” The Intercept’s Mehdi Hasan put the question to Ben Rhodes, who served as longtime deputy national security adviser at the White House under Obama and is now promoting his newly published book, The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House.

Rhodes has been described as being so trusted and close to Obama that he was “in the room” for almost every foreign policy decision of significance that Obama made during his eight years in office. While the Intercept interview is worth listening to in full, it’s the segment on Syria that caught our attention.

In spite of Rhodes trying to dance around the issue, he sheepishly answers in the affirmative when Mehdi Hasan asks the following question about supporting jihadists in Syria:

Did you intervene too much in Syria? Because the CIA spent hundreds of millions of dollars funding and arming anti-Assad rebels, a lot of those arms, as you know, ended up in the hands of jihadist groups, some even in the hands of ISIS.

Your critics would say you exacerbated that proxy war in Syria; you prolonged the conflict in Syria; you ended up bolstering jihadists.

Rhodes initially rambles about his book and “second guessing” Syria policy in avoidance of the question. But Hasan pulls him back with the following: “Oh, come on, but you were coordinating a lot of their arms.”

The two spar over Hasan’s charge of “bolstering jihadists” in the following key section of the interview, at the end of which Rhodes reluctantly answers “yeah…” — but while trying to pass ultimate blame onto US allies Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia (similar to what Vice President Biden did in a 2014 speech):

MH: Oh, come on, but you were coordinating a lot of their arms. You know, the U.S. was heavily involved in that war with the Saudis and the Qataris and the Turks.

BR: Well, I was going to say: Turkey, Qatar, Saudi.

MH: You were in there as well.

BR: Yeah, but, the fact of the matter is that once it kind of devolved into kind of a sectarian-based civil war with different sides fighting for their perceived survival, I think we, the ability to bring that type of situation to close, and part of what I wrestled with in the book is the limits of our ability to pull a lever and make killing like that stop once it’s underway.

To our knowledge this is the only time a major media organization has directly asked a high ranking foreign policy adviser from the Obama administration to own up to the years long White House support to jihadists in Syria.

I assume Ben Rhodes won’t be accosted in public for his role in arming jihadists who separate kids from their families by separating heads from bodies. and Obama? He scored a nice Netflix deal while also scamming Chicago to build the Obama Presidential Center.

But this is all in the past. The clear and present danger is Trump. Forget those distant Obama years, and the even more distant memories of Team Bush. Don’t think critically about how we got here. Just focus on Trump. And his minions. And whatever new outrage corporate media is telling you to be outraged about.

by William Skink

Another request to hit up the taxpayer piggybank is coming from the city of Missoula, this time for the never-ending desire to acquire and maintain more “open space”. If you want to read the cheerleading for this bond, you can read this Missoulian article.

If you read the article you may notice that at no point is affordable housing referenced, which is weird, because this bond will increase the cost of housing in multiple ways.

The first hit is the bond itself, which increases property taxes. These tax increases are almost always quickly passed down-stream to renters, who have been tremendously squeezed year after year as the cost of housing has sky-rocketed. If you are a renter voting for this bond will be voting to increase your rent.

Do you think your service sector job will also increase what they are paying you?

The second hit comes from what the bond is designed to accomplish: acquire more land to keep it safe from development. While that sounds good—and probably many would-be supporters of this bond and its designed intentions don’t connect that to the cost of housing—the law of supply and demand means that less available supply to develop will make land that can be developed more valuable, making the cost of development go up, which makes housing more expensive.

One might think developers would be opposed to this, but one would be wrong. Just look at who is being tapped to lead the campaign to convince Missoulians to support increasing the cost of housing in Missoula:

Ginny Merriam, the public information and communications director for the city, said there is not yet a campaign to advocate for the ballot measure. However, the plan is for it to be co-chaired by Rick Wishcamper of the Rocky Mountain Development Group and Tracy Stone-Manning of the National Wildlife Federation.

“The initiative is community-led rather than by local government, same as the last bond,” Merriam said. 

Sure, I guess a wealthy developer and former head of Montana’s DEQ are technically a part of Missoula’s community, but to consider them representative of the people who don’t benefit from their rent going up every year is disingenuous, almost like a bait and switch to take some of the heat off local government if this thing passes and the predictable increase in the cost of housing occurs.

Will local media cover the affordable housing angle of this open space bond? I hope they do. The Mayor claims he’s serious about addressing affordable housing, going so far as creating an entire housing office, yet he keeps supporting things that have the opposite impact on housing affordability.

Personally I think the entire premise of why an open space bond is “needed” should be given a long, hard look. Does Missoula really have problems attracting business, tourists and/or new residents? No, Missoula doesn’t have that problem, but that won’t stop Engen from making the following argument for why the taxpayer piggy bank should keep shaking out millions of dollars:

Engen said that having well-maintained open spaces for recreation provides an economic boost to the area.

“We had an Innovate UM symposium a month and a half ago, and we had executives from tech companies describing Missoula as a mountain headquarters,” he said. “All of this goes to quality of life. People want to live in nice places and want to do business in nice places. Open space helps attract and retain help in nice places where people can thrive and businesses can do well.”

Engen said he feels both the 1995 and 2006 bonds provided a valuable return on investment for city and county taxpayers.

What, exactly, is the return on investment? More people from the coasts moving to Missoula, driving up the cost of housing? More congestion on our roads? More tourists on our rivers? Larger property tax bills? More open space for homeless camps?

I wish the Mayor would be more specific about these returns on investment Missoulians supposedly get for financially enabling the purchase and maintenance of open spaces, and if those returns are worth the cost of making housing in Missoula less affordable.

Is it worth making more people on fixed income choose between things like groceries or medications? Is it worth putting a starter home for a young family further out of reach? Is it worth adding to the cost burden so many are already experiencing, leaving less discretionary money to do gratuitous things, like eating out once in a while or going to a movie?

Missoula has already passed tens of millions of dollars in bonds for schools and parks. But it’s never enough. There seems to always be more maintenance that is needed (and not budgeted for in the initial asks), or some new parcel to purchase, or some easement to obtain.

All of this contributes to the affordability crisis we are STILL EXPERIENCING in Missoula. If the Mayor wants people to believe he is serious about addressing this problem, he needs to stop advocating for the very things that have contributed to the affordability crisis in the first place.

by William Skink

Is outrage peaking over the Trump regime’s enforcement of immigration policies? I don’t know, but Facebook is cluttered with pic-click activism as indignant Americans find another reason to detest President Trump. But don’t try to provide context to how pre-Trump administrations are complicit in all this because they don’t want to hear it.

An executive director of a Missoula non-profit had this to say on Facebook: “I am really tired of hearing that this is a policy put forth by Dems. That is a complete lie. The “zero tolerance” policy was put forth this spring by the Trump Administration.”

It is not actually a complete lie to say the policy infrastructure existed before Trump to do what Trump’s border gestapo is now doing. Yes, previous administrations did not impose a zero tolerance policy, so the scale of what is happening now was not happening under previous regimes, but that is not to say it wasn’t happening at all.

The key distinction is between people entering the United States illegally and those appealing for asylum. What Trump’s gestapo is now doing is criminally prosecuting even asylum seekers, and that is why they are able to separate children from their families.

This Vox piece does a pretty good job describing what is happening. To answer the question “Is the policy of separating families new?” the article states the following:

Yes. But it’s building on an existing system, and attention to family separation has brought more awareness to problems with that system that have been going on for some time.

For the past several years, a growing number of people coming into the US without papers have been Central Americans — often families, and often seeking asylum. Asylum seekers and families are both accorded particular protections in US and international law, which make it impossible for the government to simply send them back. Those protections also put strict limits on the length of time, and conditions, in which children can be kept in immigration detention.

When the Obama administration attempted to respond to the “crisis” of families and unaccompanied children crossing the border in summer 2014, it put hundreds of families in immigration detention — a practice that had basically ended several years before. But federal courts stopped the administration from holding families for months without justifying the decision to keep them in detention. So most families ended up getting released while their cases were pending — which immigration hawks have derided as “catch and release.” In some cases, they disappeared into the US rather than showing up for their court dates.

The Trump administration has stepped up detention of asylum seekers (and immigrants, period). But because there are such strict limits on keeping children in immigration detention, it’s had to release most of the families it’s caught.

The government’s solution has been to prosecute larger numbers of immigrants for illegal entry — including, in a break from previous administrations, large numbers of asylum seekers. That allows the Trump administration to ship children off to ORR, rather than keeping them in immigration detention.

 

I am not looking into the context of this to try and provide any kind of cover for what Trump is doing because it’s despicable and cruel to terrorize children for any reason, and that is ultimately the consequence of this policy to separate kids from their adult family members seeking asylum.

But, I also don’t think it’s all that helpful to reflexively blame Trump without at least trying to understand how we got to this point, because if people don’t understand they will assume the opposite of TRUMP DO BAD is that DEMOCRATS DO GOOD (if only they can get your vote and ride that blue wave come November).

On Democracy Now Renee Feltz, a DN correspondent and producer, asked some important questions about what happens after the cycle of outrage runs its course:

We just heard from Michael, who is a young man who’s saying he’s fleeing, essentially, gang violence. And we’ve seen Attorney General Jeff Sessions say that that’s no longer going to be accepted as a reason to come here seeking asylum, as well as women who suffer domestic violence. Now, what are we going to say when we look at what happens after Democrats and Republicans are done being outraged about the separation of young children from their parents? What about slightly older children, such as Michael, who’s 17? What about children as young as 10 or 11? Many of them might go on to be characterized as potential recruits for MS-13, who we’ve seen President Trump speak out against widely.

Now, will the Democrats compromise and say we can agree to deport these type of kids or to put them into these juvenile detention centers, essentially, or will they claim that these young children should also be kept with their parents, in terms of keeping families together? And so, when we talk about following the money, some people are asking: If Democrats regain control of the House later this year, will they consider things like abolish ICE? If they’re so unhappy with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, will they cut off the funds? And if not, why?

Because what is happening at the border right now is so heart-wrenching there is mounting pressure to do something, and in these situations doing something is usually seen as preferable to doing nothing. What will that something be to stop this inhumane treatment of human beings? Billions for a stupid wall? Money to fight gang recruitment? Forced manual labor at a Trump Hotel?

For Democrats nervously thinking about November, there are additional questions to be asking, like how to leverage outrage into donations and/or votes. What they won’t be asking is how to change American foreign policy so countries like Honduras don’t become violent hell-holes people feel compelled to flee in order to survive. They won’t ask because their party has been complicit in destabilizing the very places now being referenced by asylum seekers as their reason for trying to come to the US in the first place.

I can’t imagine having my children taken from me, it’s almost too horrible to think about. And I can’t imagine the impossible choices involved in calculating if it’s worth the risk to stay and face narco-gangs and corrupt governments in the south, or make the trip north to the heart of the capitalist cartel’s most successful experiment in wealth accumulation.

The only hope is that by unleashing the border Gestapo Trump has provided the catalyst to legislative action. If Democrats win in large enough numbers, and they have massive public support behind actual reform, maybe something will come of it.

At the end of the day a government that condones putting children in cages is a government that should not be allowed to exist.

by William Skink

While most people who heard the recent suicide statistics were probably alarmed and disturbed, for feminists and other social justice warriors who understand that the real problem in the world is men and the patriarchy we represent, there was some good news: men are killing themselves in significantly higher numbers than women.

If you have a problem with men killing themselves, just think of them all as misogynist douche bags who just want to die because they no longer can rape women at will. Even if they’re young men, don’t worry, because their deaths are even better—just think of all the raping that didn’t happen because they’re dead.

Some women are courageous enough to go even further and properly identify male members of our species as young as toddlers as just being rapists in the making. I don’t know why Julian Vigo thinks Feminism may have a misandry problem, it’s only natural to identify threats when so much historical trauma has been experienced. From the link:

This story of Cronus is what came to mind this past week when I found myself set upon by dozens of so-called “radical feminists.” I am obliged to put this term in quotation marks to refer to these women since this brand of radical feminism seems to have been hijacked by individuals who are very much out of touch with what feminism is about (eg. women), much less anything related to the tenets of radical feminism. By all accounts from what I have witnessed this past week, what these women believe to be feminism is merely a vindictive table-turning of history, dare I say a buffet of those women who are in any way tainted by their proximity to the male body—especially those women who have not spawned Satan’s seed: the male child.

What kicked this shit storm off was when a post I made last week on my timeline regarding a feminist event this summer which I might have been interested in attending. As a mother to two small children, my participation in such events is entirely related to my ability to bring my children with me, especially when an event is not a local one-day affair. So as with all logistical communications, I wrote and asked if I could bring my children aged two and five. This is the exchange I posted on my Facebook wall:
I just received this as an email for a “feminist” event:

“It is a female-only space so we do not allow male children.”

My response: “You have just written the most fucked up email I have ever received in my life. Happy not to attend. Wow!!!”

From this post I received comments like, “Why is that fucked up?” where I was expected to explain to an adult female who considers herself a feminist why barring a two-year old because he is male might present a moral problem for any group which not only calls itself “feminist” but which seeks to liberate all females from sex-based oppression whereby the mothers of these children are necessarily excluded. The irony in posing such a question made my head reel, but no sooner could I realize the incongruence of this assertion did another woman write, “I actually don’t understand, either. I’m not being snarky. I really don’t see why it’s wrong to have female-only spaces.” I had to underscore many times in these conversations that my objection had to do with being asked not to bring a two-year-old male to a feminist event, not the fact that, as per many social events, children in general were not welcome. My disagreement had nothing to do with “female-only spaces,” but dealt with the more serious matter of excluding small male bodies because of some deeply prejudiced views of males from birth.

I then reminded these women of the Facebook groups I have had to leave in recent years where some feminists had actually advocated for the abortion of male fetuses to counter the historical injustices of femicide and misogyny. I had left those groups upon reading this eugenical proposition and reminded these women last week that the disdain for and the planned elimination of male bodies from the site of the social is nothing other than eugenics. It was upon this basis that I protested the demonization of male bodies as a political strategy. I even, somewhat ironically, invoked the term “feminazi” demonstrating how a word so often misused by men’s rights activists, actually makes sense in this specific context of willing and orchestrating away males as a class, all under the guise of “safe spaces.” Certainly, “female-only spaces” is the lie these “feminists” tell themselves to commit to a essentialism of male guilt through birth.

Vigo wrote this piece last March, so she didn’t have the benefit of reading this Washington Post op-ed, written by Suzanna Danuta Walters, a professor of sociology and director of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Northeastern University. The op-ed is titled Why Can’t We Hate Men? It ends with this:

The world has little place for feminist anger. Women are supposed to support, not condemn, offer succor not dismissal. We’re supposed to feel more empathy for your fear of being called a harasser than we are for the women harassed. We are told he’s with us and #NotHim. But, truly, if he were with us, wouldn’t this all have ended a long time ago? If he really were with us, wouldn’t he reckon that one good way to change structural violence and inequity would be to refuse the power that comes with it?

So men, if you really are #WithUs and would like us to not hate you for all the millennia of woe you have produced and benefited from, start with this: Lean out so we can actually just stand up without being beaten down. Pledge to vote for feminist women only. Don’t run for office. Don’t be in charge of anything. Step away from the power. We got this. And please know that your crocodile tears won’t be wiped away by us anymore. We have every right to hate you. You have done us wrong. #BecausePatriarchy. It is long past time to play hard for Team Feminism. And win.

So what can we do locally? One thing we can do is change our perspective on things that may seem upsetting—like this old white man in Butte losing his housing voucher. Instead of being upset, let’s celebrate! Hopefully he will be homeless by the time the cold comes, then winter will kill him off! By that standard Missoula isn’t failing homeless men when we allow them to freeze to death on the streets of our gentrified utopia, we are simply allowing natural forces to balance the historical inequities forced on women throughout history.

And don’t mourn Dancing Guy, Missoula. The dancing woman who almost always accompanied him to live music events is clearly better off without him. Under that interpretive dance veneer of hand exploding fireworks in the sky and reeling in imaginary fish was surely a controlling member of the patriarchy who probably forced his female partner to join him in producing their weird spectacle seemingly adored by Missoulians.

Going through just today’s Missoulian front page there are even more opportunities to celebrate, like those four dead male hunters starting to wash up down-stream and a missing 3 year old boy. Whoopee!

Even the Indy is getting in on the action with this week’s street talk, following up the question about who your favorite pop-culture father figure is with an inquiry about what you are doing to dismantle the Patriarchy. Young white man David Schacht knows how to answer. His favorite father figure is Caitlyn Jenner, and to describe his efforts to dismantle the patriarchy, he says: “I assistant-teach about climate change in Brooklyn. We have climate experts come in every week. We only have women experts of color.”

Yes, that is the kind of attitude we need from today’s young white men. We need them to actively exclude other men from even discussing the existential threat of climate change, because even Nobel-winning scientists like Steve Running are obviously just doing their work to satisfy the ego of their toxic masculinity.

So, if you come across something about Steve Running, like this from his Wikipedia page:

“A recognized expert in global ecosystem monitoring, Running was invited to serve on the board of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In 2007, the IPCC was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”. Running made the following statement about winning the prize: “We’ve got to get past all the petty bickering and get to work. This is about a big transition for society over the next 50 years. The path we are on is unsustainable. What the Nobel committee is saying is that we’ve got to wake up. We’ve got to change the course of the whole world.”

Please remember, fuck that guy. Regardless of his accomplishments, he was born with the privileged cock of patriarchy in his pants and should therefore stop trying to influence the world around him. Right?

Which leads me to the cultural expectation that we should be celebrating Father’s Day this weekend. Why? What’s to celebrate? Masculinity is toxic. Phallic edifices of the patriarchy besmirch the earth. Also, Trump is a father, and anything Trump does is bad (like meeting with an evil dictator to deescalate nuclear tensions) so if someone like Trump can be a father, then clearly the entire role of fatherhood should be jettisoned to protect our children from toxic masculinity.

Or, to drop the sarcasm for a moment, how about we see the social wedges being imposed on men and women for what they are: part of a larger divide/conquer strategy to create and expand social divisions to fracture any sense of solidarity among the vast majority of the population not benefitting from rapacious, late-stage capitalism.

Happy Father’s Day!

by William Skink

The obsessive need of the anti-Trump resistance to oppose anything Trump does has created a disturbing space for Democrats to assert their hawkishness. This article in Counterpunch today explains why that is so dangerous:

If more proof was needed to persuade anyone that the Democrats are indeed a war party, it was provided when Senator Chuck Schumer and other Democrat leaders in the Senate engaged in a cynical stunt to stake out a position to the right of John Bolton on the summit between Trump and Kim Jong Un.

The Democrats asserted that the planned summit could only be judged successful if the North Koreans agreed to dismantle and remove all their nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, end all production and enrichment of uranium, dismantle its nuclear weapons infrastructure, and suspend ballistic missile tests.

Those demands would constitute an unconditional surrender on the part of the North Korean leadership and will not happen, and the Democrats know it.

But as problematic as those demands are, here is the real problem that again demonstrates the bi-partisan commitment to war that has been at the center of U.S. imperial policies: If these are the outcomes that must be achieved for the meeting to be judged a success, not only does it raise the bar beyond the level any serious person believes possible, it gives the Trump administration the ideological cover to move toward war. The inevitable failure to force the North Koreans to surrender essentially forecloses all other options other than military conflict. 

From NPR to my liberal friends on Facebook, these talks have been largely criticized as legitimizing a dictator who starves his own people. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that starving people to force political change is SOP (standard operating procedure) for US imperialists. It’s called sanctions, people, and the goal is to create enough misery to trigger a popular revolt.

Over half a million Iraqis died because of sanctions and Madeline Albright infamously said she thought the human price was worth it. In Yemen, with US support, Saudi Arabia is positioned to exacerbate the starving of millions of people as the last port falls to Saudi forces. Millions could die as a direct result of this barbarous war against one of the poorest Middle East nations.

But we’ll just gloss over all that because Trump. Trump is the clear and present danger, right? Even if he is making progress with a nuclear armed North Korea, the resistance must find a way to find fault. It has become pathological.

Don’t get me wrong, there is no altruism coming from Trumpland. I just don’t understand why taking a few steps back from nuclear brinkmanship can’t be applauded.