THE RICH REALLY ARE DIFFERENT FROM YOU AND ME

I'm working lines tonight, so no real commentary from me, but a fellow I don't know contacted me via email yesterday to push for my blog a graphic he put together about the rich in a sort of 99% Occupy Wall Street context. I've gotten these pitches from people before, and always dismissed them. Primarily because it usually is only marginally related to my own blogging, but also because, even though I do indeed write a blog, nobody really reads it, and consequently I have absolutely no sway or influence, and certainly cannot provide any real exposure, except to maybe the five or ten people who actually check out Real Art with any regularity. But, surprise surprise, this guy's graphic is pretty good.

So check it out:



Nice, huh? Of course, it is ironic and amusing that the graphic directs people to some sort of online accountant training scheme. It's like, "Okay, so the rich suck, but wouldn't you like to work directly for them, crunching their numbers, finding ways for them to avoid paying the relatively few taxes they're paying now?" Personally, if you're interested in accounting, I advise you to attend your local community college for a few courses to see if you like it. Then go to an accredited university to finish your course work, rather than this fly-by-night operation which may or may not be of any real value.

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Customers or Citizens?

From CounterPunch:

At the root of the long-standing distinction between businesses and customers on one hand, and governments and citizens on the other, is that the experience of being a customer and being a citizen are (or at least traditionally have been) framed by fundamentally different imperatives.

When I go into a store to buy something, my actions are generally guided by a concern to which all other considerations are decidedly subsidiary: getting the “most” –be it measured in quantity or quality–product for my money.

Though I may also go to a government agency to “get” something, that effort to obtain a good or service is necessarily mediated by concerns for the commonwealth. Indeed, that is one of the prime purposes of government: to establish mechanisms that that give voice to collective goals of one type or another, transcendant aims that necessarily ask us curb or tame all that we might desire in the privacy of our customarily covetous hearts.

Hence, when we allow the language of consumerism to be injected into the realm of the commons, we are effectively permitting the miseducation of the populace in regard to the relationship they can and should expect to have with the government.

More here.

Right. And this miseducation simply plays into the hands of psychotic right-wing forces that want to destroy the government, or at least, as anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist once put it, "shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." Same difference. The point here, however, is the longstanding conservative meme that government ought to not only favor business by never touching it at all, but that it should also be run like a business. Of course, I'm not really sure what that means exactly because government and commerce are two separate and distinct concepts, very often with conflicting or mutually exclusive motivations and goals. But here we have Romney and others once again pushing that now tired concept that what the US really needs is a businessman to get all our affairs in order.

And that's a really bad idea.

Business' sole purpose is to create profit; government, however, and by that I mean our government, exists to...well...it's always worth it to revisit our foundational documents:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The preamble to the Constitution tells us why we have government, and none of it says a damned thing about making a profit. Further, business is autocratic; government is democratic. Businessmen are woefully unprepared for the coalition forging, deal brokering, and hard nosed politicking needed in order to effectively run our democracy. I really have no idea why any American at all thinks we need a businessman in the Oval Office. It really is apples and oranges. Nonetheless, the notion persists, I assume, because of decades of American commerce worship. That is, our nation has to a great extent fetishized the businessman as the greatest possible position to hold in our culture, while making commerce our sole concern. In short, people believe this bullshit because of mythology.

Yeah, creationism isn't the only thing we have to fear.

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NRA dreams come true

From Digby over at Hullabaloo:

So it would seem that the teen-ager was the one who was afraid. And rightly so as it turns out.

He didn't run, and for good reason. If he had, he would have been considered a "fleeing suspect" and could have gotten shot. Of course, under Florida's lunatic gun laws, if he stood his ground, he could still get shot. Indeed, under these laws, the only person who has any rights is the one with the gun. And that person is evidently entitled to stalk, chase and shoot unarmed strangers and call it self defense.

I was talking about this this morning and someone said that "they" were going to have to change these laws. And I realized once again how sick our society has become --- those are NRA laws and thus inviolable. I honestly cannot picture how it's even possible for them to be changed short of a massive uprising by tens of millions of middle class working Americans. The NRA is holding the government hostage and its now completely ineffectual at dealing with gun violence.

More here.

Digby's talking about Florida's psychotic "stand your ground" law essentially extending the so-called "castle doctrine," which allows you to kill home intruders, out into public space. That's the legal issue behind this awful killing down in Florida everybody's talking about; that's why local police aren't charging the killer with a crime. And yeah, I have no doubt that Digby's right when she asserts that this is something the NRA pushed on Florida's state legislature. I mean, of course the NRA is behind a law that allows you to shoot somebody on the street and call it self-defense even though your target is unarmed and eighty pounds lighter than you and trying to get away. Fucked up shit.

Back in the 90s, liberals seemingly gave up on the gun control issue. Sure, lots of liberals still support the idea, but nobody really beats their breast about it anymore. Democratic candidates don't talk about it on the stump. Around the same time, I kind of gave up on it, too. Michael Moore's documentary Bowling for Columbine made the flabbergasting observation that gun ownership rates in Canada are approximately equal to the US, but their homicide rate is a lot lower: maybe the wing-nuts have a point when they say that people kill people, not guns. At any rate, I got tired of having the argument with people who are scared shitless that black thugs are going to kill them.

But now there's this situation in Florida with a white man killing an unarmed black teenager out in the street for no other reason than fear and racial paranoia. And it's all apparently completely legal. I don't even know if this is actually a gun control issue, but I'm certain that it's totally utterly irredeemably fucked up. How can this possibly be just? How can you just kill someone because you're afraid of him?

So we Americans love our guns. Gun ownership is apparently deeply embedded in our culture. We've got to have our guns, got to carry them around like the old West. Is this kid's death just the price we have to pay in order to be a gun-loving society? This stinks. I'm fucking sick of this macho bullshit.

Apparently, killing black kids out in the street is the white man's right. Down South, anyway.

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Jimmy Carter Says It’s “Fine For Gay People To Be Married”

From the New Civil Rights Movement, courtesy of a gay marriage advocacy group on facebook:

Former Democratic President Jimmy Carter says it’s “fine for gay people to be married in civil ceremonies,” and adds that Jesus never once said anything about homosexuality. The 39th president seems to have evolved, and talks about his new book, “NIV Lessons from Life Bible: Personal Reflections with Jimmy Carter,” in an exclusive interview with The Huffington Post:

"Homosexuality was well known in the ancient world, well before Christ was born and Jesus never said a word about homosexuality. In all of his teachings about multiple things -– he never said that gay people should be condemned. I personally think it is very fine for gay people to be married in civil ceremonies.

I draw the line, maybe arbitrarily, in requiring by law that churches must marry people. I’m a Baptist, and I believe that each congregation is autonomous and can govern its own affairs. So if a local Baptist church wants to accept gay members on an equal basis, which my church does by the way, then that is fine. If a church decides not to, then government laws shouldn’t require them to."

More here.

Indeed, Jesus never said anything at all about homosexuality. And this is something of a key point conspicuously unaddressed by today's fundamentalist Christians: Jesus existed in the Hellenistic world, that is, the geographic region around the Eastern Mediterranean that was conquered by Alexander the Great, and, culturally speaking, this region was very Greek in its outlook. So it isn't simply that homosexuality was known to Jesus; rather, it's that homosexuality was practiced all around Jesus. It was culturally normal, and Jesus apparently had absolutely no problem with it, or he would have said something about it, like he did with the Pharisees or the Romans or the Samaritans or the poor or tax collectors and on and on.

Sure, you can quote Leviticus all day long, but if you're serious about the "New Covenant," you're going to be taking your cues from Jesus much more than from the Old Testament, which his ministry superseded.

And Carter's right about legally requiring churches to marry people, too. And he's not "arbitrarily" drawing this line, either: the first amendment clearly states that Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion. You simply cannot compel a religious body to do anything in terms of how it worships. Churches don't have to marry gay people if they don't want to do so, and that is a protected and foundational civil right. On the other hand, and by the same token, churches that do want to solemnify gay matrimony have just as much of a right to do so as churches that don't.

I swear, Carter is far better in his role as elder statesman than he ever was as President of the USA. But then, I'm certainly not the first to have made such an observation.

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NAACP to call on UN to investigate voter disfranchisement in US

From the UK Guardian courtesy of BuzzFlash:

The leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP, will travel to Geneva next week to tell the UN human rights council that a co-ordinated legislative attempt is being made by states across America to disfranchise millions of black and Latino voters in November's presidential election.

The delegation, headed by the NAACP's president, Benjamin Jealous, will address the council on Wednesday and call on the UN body to launch a formal investigation into the spread of restrictive electoral laws, particularly in southern states. The NAACP intends to invite a UN team to travel across America to see for itself the impact of the new laws, which it argues are consciously designed to suppress minority voting.

The UN has no power to intervene in the workings of individual American states. But Jealous told the Guardian that the UN had a powerful weapon in its armoury: shame.

"Shame alone is effective. The US, and individual states within the US that have introduced these laws, have a vested interest in maintaining the opinion that we are the world's leading democracy. That means something," Jealous said.

More here.

Yeah, shame is right because that's what this is, a fucking shame.

The notion of the NAACP having to go to the United Nations, hat in hand, like a despised and oppressed minority in some fucked up third world dictatorship is the shame of the United States. All these Republican voter ID laws are just sickening. I mean, their ostensible purpose is to fight "voter fraud," and I have no doubt that many of the rank-and-file believe exactly that. Of course, what these Republicans don't realize is that there is no problem with voter fraud, at least, not the kind these laws are aimed, ostensibly, at combating. I mean, sure, there are some screw-ups here and there, a few assholes who just like fucking with the system, but nothing, nothing at all, in the way of fraud that would actually change an election--there's just no evidence of this anywhere.

So it really is about suppressing minority votes. It may not even be directly racist in terms of whites just not wanting people of color to vote simply because they're not white; it may be that the GOP doesn't want minorities to vote because they usually vote for Democrats. But whatever the motivation, the outcome is racist, pure and simple, the kind of thing we haven't seen since Jim Crow. And there is seemingly no help on the horizon here at home. So the NAACP is off to the UN, and every American should hang his head in shame.

Of course, even though there is no problem with voter fraud, there is a problem with election fraud, the kind of thing where the GOP works around the electoral edges, tweaking and adjusting, sometimes legally, sometimes illegally, as with electronic voting machine tampering, or placing shoddy ballot equipment in Democratic precincts when Republicans control the electoral process, that sort of thing.

This is probably the grossest example, and it has affected malevolently the course and trajectory of US and even world history. Scum bag Republicans.

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SWAT Team Raids Occupy Miami Safehouse

From Crooks and Liars:

Mahmoud and other Occupy Miami members were preparing to travel downtown to protest the birthday of Chase Bank CEO Jaime Dimon when at least half a dozen police vehicles screeched to a halt in front of the building on NW Seventh Street.

A cop in a dress shirt and bullet-proof vest jumped out of an unmarked car, aimed his gun at them, and shouted, "Everyone on the ground," according to Occupy Miami members.

"I thought it was either a joke or he was robbing us," says an occupier who gave his name only as Cobra. "Then an ice-cream truck full of SWAT officers pulled up."

"They said that they had gotten a tip that we had "long guns" and were going to use them at our protest," Occupy member Thomas Parisi told Miami New Times.

More here, with video.

My older brother, a staunch, but reasonable, conservative, made this observation when I compared unfavorably the government's treatment of the Tea Party rallies to the heavy-handedness used against the Occupy groups: Tea Party groups show up, protest a few hours, and go home; OWS stays for weeks. Okay, that was a fair observation. Whatever your interpretation of the first amendment versus private property or public disruption laws, the Occupy groups do, indeed, create a much bigger social hassle for public authorities than their conservative Tea Party counterparts. I mean, I still think it's harassment, but the conservatives have an argument, at least.

So I wonder how my brother, or any other conservatives who make the same assertion, would explain this one? This Occupy group in Miami was on their own private property. Sure, they were about to go to a demonstration, but they hadn't even left yet. And the cops didn't simply show up and bust them: they used the paramilitary assault force commonly known as a SWAT team to come in and fucking take over. On a "tip" that the Occupiers were bringing guns. And never mind the fact that there are numerous documented instances of Tea Party protesters who actually brought guns to their rallies and were not detained or arrested by police.

Can somebody please explain to me how this is not police harassment?

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Frankie



Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging pics!

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The Bible Belt's Love Affair With (Gay and Straight) Porn

From AlterNet:

Actually, Obama has never said anything in favor of adult entertainment. Very few Democratic politicians will openly embrace the adult entertainment industry in any way. And the more one examines the data, the more evident it becomes that Republican-dominated states with a heavy concentration of far-right culture warriors are also states where erotic entertainment is very much in demand. Adult industry advocate Bill Margold, who was one of the top adult film stars of the 1970s, has often described the United States as a place where people hypocritically condemn adult entertainment with one hand while pleasuring themselves to it with the other hand; recent data bears that out.

In 2009, Benjamin G. Edelman of the Harvard Business School published the results of a state-by-state study on the number of people who were subscribing to adult membership Web sites; Edelman found that eight of the 10 states that had the highest per capita consumption of online porn were states that Republican John McCain won in 2008’s presidential election. Utah topped the list, and other red states in Edelman’s top 10 included Oklahoma, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alaska, North Dakota and West Virginia. The only states in Edelman’s top 10 that Obama won in 2008 were Florida and Hawaii.

More recently, in December 2011, Rutgers University researcher/blogger Omar Haq published the results of his study on Google searches for gay porn. Haq found that between 2004-2011, the top 10 states that had the most Google searches for gay porn included five states that McCain won in 2008 (Texas, Mississippi, Kentucky, Louisiana, West Virginia) and five states that Obama won (New York, Ohio, New Mexico, Nevada and Florida). “People subscribe to a lot of porn in the southern Bible Belt states,” Haq noted. “I really believe it is suppression. Freud himself said that the more you suppress people, the more they are going to want to do something. It might be due to conservatism; I think that definitely plays a role."

More here.

So, of course, I have my own issues with the porn industry, from a leftist perspective, but it's about how the industry is structured, how it depicts and treats women, not at all, however, with the notion of visual depictions of people having sex in and of itself. That is, I'm all for porn; let's just keep in mind that the actors, or models, whatever you want to call them, are workers just like all other workers, and must be treated by their employers with decency and respect. Let's also keep in mind that, with the shoddy state of sex education being what it is, teenagers see this stuff and take it seriously as a guide for how men and women ought to treat each other in the bedroom. Porn ought to be responsible.

Indeed, a lot of it is responsible, and I have no quarrel with it.

But that's all beside the point for this post: no, we're talking about conservatives who, on the one hand, support politicians who are blatantly anti-sex, anti-woman, and anti-porn, but, on the other hand consume pornography at similar or higher rates than voters in more liberal states. Needless to say, there is more than a wee bit of hypocrisy going on here. And that's pretty easy to figure out.

We have been living for the last few decades in a culture where sexuality is omnipresent. Yes, this has something to do with the rise of Freud as a pop icon, and the invention of the birth control pill, but what's most powerful on this cultural front has been advertising. Yeah, that's right, advertising. From the moment advertisers figured out that sex sells all kinds of products, when television producers and film makers discovered that sexual imagery increases audience numbers, America crossed a threshold from which there could be no return. The sexual revolution became serious economics, and now sexual imagery and capitalism walk hand in hand.

So there's no going back. Not unless you want to regulate the sex right out of the market, and that's just not going to happen.

So these anti-sex politicians are appealing to a point of view that only excites a very small minority, even though many voters give lip service to this nostalgia driven Puritanism. Call it bizarre tribalism, or hypocrisy, whatever, but the fact is that these conservatives who vote for anti-porn politicians live every day within our culture. And that culture is a sexual culture. It is no surprise at all that people in red states like porn as much as, or more, than people in blue states. They are, after all, twenty first century Americans.

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7 Scientific Reasons You'll Turn Out Just Like Your Parents

From Cracked, courtesy of a buddy on facebook:

Old people are cranky, slow and boring. Kids are noisy, restless and irritating. For most of us, life is about making sure we stay as awesome as we are right now -- we'll always love our video games, and music, and eating burritos at two in the morning after the bars closed. Isn't that what all the commercials tell us, that you're only as old as you feel?

Well, science has some bad news for you. The behaviors of the elderly that you write off as old-person lameness, and your behavior that the elderly credit to dickish rebellion, are all based in biology. And no, you can't stop it.

Click here to read 'em.

So I, and probably most Americans, have been operating on a somewhat dubious principle in our dealings with the rest of the human race: people's behaviors and attitudes are mostly governed by conscious thought. I mean, people's behaviors and attitudes are governed mostly by conscious thought, but I, for one, have wildly underestimated biology, hormones, and genetically hardwired routines in human interaction for most of my life. Actually, I probably continue to do so, but I'm trying to catch up.

For me, this all began a few years ago when I started reading George Lakoff essays about conservative versus liberal attitudes. In a particular interview with him, he asserted that logic, within the human mind, is inextricably intertwined with emotion. That is, there can be no such thing as a purely logical decision; logic is always associated with emotion, whether you like it or not. It is an easy conclusion to make, and further reading on my part has supported this, that humans aren't really logical. We are, first and foremost, biological creatures, subject to our own physicality, which includes the brain, an important and complex organ, but an organ nonetheless. That is, logic, while valuable, is simply an intellectual construction of the human brain, rather than our natural way of understanding the universe. In short, we must make an effort to be reasonable.

Don't get me wrong: human beings do have a great deal of conscious control over their own thoughts and behaviors, but looking back on that great literary theme we all study in high school, reason versus passion, I find myself reevaluating the impact of passion, or rather biology, in the overall equation. Passion apparently counts for a whole lot more than I could have possibly imagined a decade ago.

I have no idea where this notion will eventually take me.

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The War is Over, the War is Lost, Bring Them Home

From CounterPunch:

This latest GI mental explosion by the staff sergeant was preceded by increasing acts of American troop indiscipline – Marines pissing on Afghan bodies, the Koran-burning fiasco, units loudly cheering indiscriminate Hellfire drone attacks on a village, etc. – that an increasingly demoralized junior and midgrade officer corps has neither the ability nor will to stop.

The troops are protesting “by any other means” their entrapment in a no-win landscape where Washington politicians and career-crazy senior officers keep a war going beyond the limit of sanity.

It’s no stretch to suggest that GI suicides, domestic violence by returning soldiers and their self-harm by narcotics are a depoliticized form of protest against the same despair that was felt by General Westmoreland’s cannon fodder at Hue or World War One poilu at the Chemin des Dames allied massacre when they refused to fight any more.

The Afghani war is over. Yet the President, his cheerfully on-message advisors, and most of the stenographic media refuse to call it a night when the situation on the ground, with its secret night raids and fucked up soldiers, can only get much worse. Mitt Romney, who never served and has five military-age sons likewise, wants to stay there presumably forever and fight it out. Rick Santorum wants to hang in until “mission accomplished” whatever that is.

More here.

We've been there a fucking decade. Bin Laden's been dead for nearly a year. I don't know what we're even ostensibly fighting for these days, let alone what we might be really fighting for. Apparently, we're fighting in order to win, but nobody seems to know what winning means or what it's supposed to look like.

I opposed the Afghanistan war from almost the beginning, based on the reasoning that outraging Muslim populations can only make the disaffected fundamentalist jihadi movement gain sympathy and grow. That's still a very good reason to get the fuck out, but there are now numerous other good reasons to end the war, as well. Monetary cost, among them. Collateral damage, another.

But right now, after this bizarre shooting spree performed by a man who was cleared to continue serving in spite of his traumatic brain injury, I think that fucking up permanently our soldiers' minds and emotions by inflicting endless war on them stands as one of the most compelling. We can't wait for 2014. It's time to get out right now.

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The Go Nowhere Generation

From the New York Times op-ed section courtesy of Eschaton:

But sometime in the past 30 years, someone has hit the brakes and Americans — particularly young Americans — have become risk-averse and sedentary. The timing is terrible. With an 8.3 percent unemployment rate and a foreclosure rate that would grab the attention of the Joads, young Americans are less inclined to pack up and move to sunnier economic climes.

The likelihood of 20-somethings moving to another state has dropped well over 40 percent since the 1980s, according to calculations based on Census Bureau data. The stuck-at-home mentality hits college-educated Americans as well as those without high school degrees. According to the Pew Research Center, the proportion of young adults living at home nearly doubled between 1980 and 2008, before the Great Recession hit. Even bicycle sales are lower now than they were in 2000. Today’s generation is literally going nowhere. This is the Occupy movement we should really be worried about.

And

Perhaps young people are too happy at home checking Facebook. In a study of 15 countries, Michael Sivak, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute (who also contributed to the D.M.V. research), found that when young people spent more time on the Internet, they delayed getting their driver’s licenses. “More time on Facebook probably means less time on the road,” he said. That may mean safer roads, but it also means a bumpier, less vibrant economy.

All this turns American history on its head. We are a nation of movers and shakers. Pilgrims leapt onto leaky boats to get here. The Lost Generation chased Hemingway and Gertrude Stein to Paris. The Greatest Generation signed up to ship out to fight Nazis in Germany or the Japanese imperial forces in the Pacific. The ’60s kids joined the Peace Corps.

But Generation Y has become Generation Why Bother. The Great Recession and the still weak economy make the trend toward risk aversion worse. Children raised during recessions ultimately take fewer risks with their investments and their jobs.

More here.

Oh god.

When I was a kid I used to think that if you wrote for the New York Times that you must be pretty smart. Increasingly, I'm thinking the opposite. Or maybe the state of corporate journalism has gotten so bad that intelligent writers have to work in code or some such.

That is, the essay has the answers it seeks weaving in and out of its assertions and observations: young Americans aren't leaving home these days because there is nothing compelling them to do so. Indeed, the rise of the corporate state, the consumerization of everything, the continuing disaffection of voters from our now fictional democracy, the destruction of civil society, and, of course, the bleak jobs picture, all make staying at home and doing nothing with your life a whole lot more enticing than jumping into our cesspool of a society in order to - what? - participate in life-long endeavors that may or may not provide a living, but will almost certainly produce anxiety, depression, and a sense of meaninglessness.

Doing chores for your parents and fucking around on the internet are far more meaningful and fulfilling activities than handing your life over to a soul-sucking corporation, or teaching in an educational system that is consciously designed to not educate, or entering our corrupt political system, or working in the shitty service sector, or any other number of bankrupt "career opportunities" offered today by our pathetic excuse for a civilization. American life is pointless in the long run, and the kids appear to realize that. Nonetheless, even though the above linked essay has the truth encrypted between the lines, the writer makes the obligatory finger-wagging admonitions about facebook and video games. As if American youth suddenly collectively said, "Hey, fuck doing something with my life; I'm playing video games!"

If there is any truth to this article's central point, that twenty somethings aren't getting out there on their own, the reason is that there is nothing out there worth doing. Because our leaders have rendered American existence pointless.

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Scooter Libby v. Bradley Manning

From CounterPunch:

Libby and fellow war plotters Karl Rove and Richard Armitage, not satisfied by their success in making war, wanted to punish their Washington enemies. They leaked Plame’s name to the mischievous columnist Robert Novak — to punish her husband, Wilson. Novak’s story ended her CIA career, and exposed her agents and contacts.

A jury later convicted Libby of obstruction of justice and perjury around the case. A judge sentenced him to 30 months in prison, and fined him $250,000. Bush, months later, commuted his term. But no one got charged with plotting to distribute false information to lure the public to war. The New York Times had even helped the campaign by publishing the lies as news stories on its front page.

And

These documents exposed not secrets vital to our enemy, but lies, corruption and crimes by US officials and those of other countries. Manning’s defense team stresses that what Wikileaks published wasn’t or shouldn’t have been secret.

Manning did however embarrass US officials by exposing their illegal, stupid, selfish and downright inane activities. If he illegally distributed those documents, why doesn’t the Justice Department charge the New York Times and other newspapers that gleefully distributed this supposedly classified (mortifying) material?

More here.

As the essay observes, Manning is now facing life in prison for treason, and has already spent months behind bars in solitary confinement, often in forced nudity, ostensibly to keep him from committing suicide--of course, nudity isn't really part of traditional jailhouse suicide watches, so, you know, it's obviously bullshit, and really designed just to punish and humiliate him. And do keep in mind that this is the Obama administration doing all this. Some "change."

So. Let's look at how the federal government, spanning two administrations, one from each party, deals with people who leak classified information. Libby leaks info that blows a CIA agent's cover, wasting, no doubt, millions of dollars in terms of training and the immediate end to ongoing intelligence operations run by said agent, not to mention the destruction of her personal career, all for the purpose of punishing a political enemy who had done nothing more than tell the American public the truth about how the Bush administration was lying in order to justify the illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq. Libby is essentially slapped on the wrist and then pardoned. Manning, on the other hand, leaks information about US massacres and other American war crimes and is essentially thrown into a hole for months, naked, and is now up on charges that will probably result in him spending the rest of his life in prison. There will be no pardon because the Obama administration is leading the charge on this.

Obviously, there is no justice here, in both cases. I'd be outraged, but I long ago gave up hope for there being any justice at all concerning our endeavors in Iraq. That is, US national security is now, and probably has been for a very long time, a criminal enterprise, not subject to the rule of law, totally managed by the whims of the Commander-in-Chief. At this point, it's pretty easy to argue that, in this realm, war and defense, Obama is as much of a criminal as his predecessor.

Of course, neither will ever be made to pay for their crimes.

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10 Hilarious Right-Wing Freak-Outs Over Children's Cartoons

From AlterNet:

The right wing is hyper-paranoid that liberals have some secret power-cabal to shift the cultural politics of America (er, they confuse themselves for themselves), and therefore can find a bogeyman in anything. We’ve seen this plenty on the GOP campaign trail, with their attacks on, and fear of (broadly) women, gays and people of color. Sometimes they attack directly, but other times they find a strawman to mask their hate—contraception or marriage equality. But what happens when conservatives’ abject terror gets so ridiculous, paranoid and out-of-whack that the basic culture wars don’t do it for them anymore?

That’s when they start going after kids' shows.

More here.

Of course, this is to a great extent about conservative paranoia. I mean, paranoia is one of the main features of conservatism. Why do you think they're so into their guns? Why do you think the conservative version of God is all about wrath and anger instead of peace and love? Why do you think conservatives are united against things instead of for them? Conservatives are a terrified people who believe that enemies are in the woodwork just waiting to slit their fat throats. It is no wonder that they see malevolence in children's cartoons. They see malevolence everywhere.

But, more broadly, I also see this as evidence of the continuing conservative journey into fantasy and non-reality. Remember, these are people who now have open hostility toward science and rational inquiry. Conservatives don't believe in global warming, even though it is, at this point, a well established scientific fact. Nor do conservatives believe in evolution, which is an even more established scientific fact than global warming. Conservatives, many of them, at least, believe we found WMD in Iraq, that President Obama wasn't born in the United States, that cutting tax rates creates more tax revenue, and on and on and on.

And in order to maintain these impossible beliefs, conservatives have constructed complex and wild fantasy narratives and conspiracy theories explaining why they're right even though they're wrong. For instance, many conservatives actually believe that the reason the vast, vast majority of climate scientists assert that global warming is a fact is that they are part of a worldwide plot to bring more government money into their research institutions. That's right. It's not simply that conservatives believe the scientists are wrong; it's that they believe these tens of thousands of scientists are lying in order to bilk the government of tax dollars. And, for some reason, none of this veritable host of weathermen has gone on the record to talk about the conspiracy. Really, it's as good as aliens or Bigfoot. Impossible. But they believe it.

So, if conservatives are willing to go that far into fantasy land, to assert that football stadiums full of people are all in on a plot to defraud the planet so they can do more and better research, and that none of them, none at all, are talking about it, how can it be so weird that conservatives believe children's cartoon producers are in on a conspiracy to indoctrinate kids into homosexuality and communism? Okay sure, it's all weird. I'm just saying that, given the overall context, it's not at all surprising.

Disturbing, but not surprising.

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Sammy



Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging pics!

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Ignorance Is Strength

From the New York Times, some new Paul Krugman:

So why are Republicans so eager to trash higher education?

It’s not hard to see what’s driving Mr. Santorum’s wing of the party. His specific claim that college attendance undermines faith is, it turns out, false. But he’s right to feel that our higher education system isn’t friendly ground for current conservative ideology. And it’s not just liberal-arts professors: among scientists, self-identified Democrats outnumber self-identified Republicans nine to one.

I guess Mr. Santorum would see this as evidence of a liberal conspiracy. Others might suggest that scientists find it hard to support a party in which denial of climate change has become a political litmus test, and denial of the theory of evolution is well on its way to similar status.

More here.

It's not easy being college educated these days, especially if you have a degree in the humanities. No, I'm not talking about how stupid I was to study theater and the mass media, and how I'm not making the big bucks because of it; I'm talking about how such studies trained me well as a critical thinker, how I'm able to see the Great Oz behind the curtain working his arcane contraptions that create the illusion of his magnificence, how I can see that repeating "hope and change" endlessly does not actually create hope and change, how I can see that cutting tax rates does not, in fact, create more tax revenue. And on and on and on. That is, once you've learned how to decode what passes for conventional wisdom these days, how to see through what everybody else "knows" is real, depression is a very real possibility.

Of course, I wouldn't have it any other way. It is far better to be sad but enlightened than to be happy but deeply ignorant. And it's not as bad as I'm making it sound, either. Ideally, if you can get together a certain density of educated people who understand just how fucked things are these days, you can change things for the better. But we're nowhere near that, which is how both parties appear to want it to be. After all, the political establishment doesn't want anybody to see how foolish the Great Oz actually looks, or they'd have a rebellion on their hands: ignorance is the policy of the establishment.

Needless to say, the Republicans are way ahead of the curve on this--the Democrats, at least, continue to give lip service to college education, but usually mean job training rather than actual intellectual development. But, as Krugman observes, how on earth can you get people to buy that global warming isn't happening or that evolution doesn't exist if they're well educated? You can't. Now that the Republicans are pushing pure fantasy as fact, they have to trash university education. Interestingly enough, trashing education fits in very nicely with lots of other GOP notions, such as phantom WMD in Iraq, or "drill, baby, drill."

Anti-intellectualism is as American as apple pie, but now the fast-fading Republicans absolutely depend on it. Otherwise, there wouldn't be enough of a party left to even hold a primary.

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Invisible Children responds to criticism about ‘Stop Kony’ campaign

From the Washington Post:

A new campaign spreading across the Internet says it has one goal in mind: Make Joseph Kony, the Ugandan leader of the violent Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) “famous” so he can be brought to justice.

The viral film was created by Invisible Children, a charity that seeks to end the conflict in Uganda and raises awareness about the use of child soldiers and other human rights abuses by Kony and the LRA.

And

But in November, a Foreign Affairs article pointedly challenged the tactics used by Invisible Children and other nonprofits working in the region to raise awareness. “Such organizations have manipulated facts for strategic purposes, exaggerating the scale of LRA abductions and murders and emphasizing the LRA’s use of innocent children as soldiers, and portraying Kony — a brutal man, to be sure — as uniquely awful, a Kurtz-like embodiment of evil,” the magazine wrote.

More here.

If you've got a few bleeding heart friends on facebook, and, being a bleeding heart myself, I have many, then you've probably been pounded by this campaign on the social network and elsewhere for the last forty eight hours or so. While on the one hand I'm pleased to see yet another left-of-center public awareness project fire up so quickly, on the other hand I have to admit that I don't really know much about the Ugandan situation, and I'm certain that I probably know more about it than most of my fb friends hitting me hard with anti-Kony posting. That is, the political problems of Africa, devastated as it still is by over a century of brutal European imperialism, from which it can hardly be called "recovered," are complex and opaque. Choosing sides is a dicey proposition at best, one that should not be undertaken lightly or easily.

So this Invisible Children thing seems a bit pat to me.

But my overall sense of the campaign came together tonight after I got home from work when I suddenly realized, vis a vis the Ugandan situation, the we have our own war criminals right here in the US, people who play golf, pontificate on television, and even sit in the best chair in the Oval Office. Here's my latest fb status update:

According to the principles established at the Nuremberg war crimes trials after WWII, the worst war crime of all is waging aggressive war, that is, choosing to go to war rather than having it forced on you, because all other war crimes take place under that umbrella of war-by-choice. And, of course, that's exactly what the US did in Iraq starting nearly a decade ago. Why, then, are so many concerned fb people all hot and bothered by this Kony guy in Africa, when Americans can't even get it together enough to prosecute OUR OWN WAR CRIMINALS?!?!? I'll start worrying about other nations' war criminals when we start worrying about our own.

This was, of course, quickly followed by a comment from one of my bleeding hearted friends:

But taking a stand for peace in any capacity or anywhere is nothing to bemoan, right? Or just make an inspiring video, rallying the masses re: our country's war criminals.

And I can never keep my mouth shut:

Okay, good point, but we've been here before, again and again. American liberals are really good at seeing the proverbial speck in the other country's eye, but not seeing the spike in their own. That is, liberals have been achingly silent about the crimes against humanity committed by the Bush administration, and now the Obama administration. For years. I'm sure this Kony guy is as evil as they say, but we have absolutely no moral license to berate him when we refuse to do anything about our own guilt. We have to do that first, or it's just a big joke, morally speaking.

Then a conservative friend popped his head up and started arguing UN resolutions, but I'll save that for another day. I mean, really, this whole thing is being driven by liberals, and that's who I'm talking to here: conservatives don't give a shit if we commit war crimes; no point in arguing with them on this.

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Burning the Quran; Urinating On Dead Bodies

From CounterPunch:

The burning of the Quran at Bagram Air Base, once a Soviet airfield when the Communist superpower occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s, was described by a BBC correspondent as NATO’s tipping point in the country. The situation had been in the making almost from the beginning since the October 2001 invasion. The American military never understood that, in a country as impoverished but as rich in history and culture as Afghanistan, individual and national honor is the greatest asset. The failure to recognize this is particularly unfortunate for the United States, where so many politicians and those associated with the military-industrial complex would not stop talking about their honor and religious beliefs.

Is this failure down to the blindness of hubris? Or a disturbing level of prejudice against Muslims and Islam permeating certain sections of society and military? Is this the reckless instinct of a boyish mentality? Or a desperate method of finding a moment of laughter and entertainment in a highly stressful environment. Is it because of lack of training? Or no training is enough when irrationality rules human minds.

Acts such as the recent desecration of dead Afghan bodies by American marines urinating on them, and filming the episode, raise these awful but unavoidable questions.

More here.

When Alexander the Great conquered a nation, he took great pains to validate the local culture of the people he had just absorbed into his empire. He would make sure that his new subjects saw him dressed in their style of clothing. He would worship the local gods in their temples, eat local foods, participate in local cultural customs. The whole point was to win the hearts and minds of his new empire, and it worked pretty well--his empire didn't fall apart until after his death, when his sons divided it up as inheritance.

Apparently, Americans don't do that. Indeed, despite various officers and generals here and there who know how fucking stupid it is literally to piss on the culture of a conquered nation, and have done their damnedest to keep it all from happening, there just doesn't seem to be enough institutional will in our armed forces to do what needs to be done to win the hearts and minds of our new subjects. I mean, it doesn't have to be like this. We could easily educate our troops about local customs and establish standing orders that such customs must be respected; we could attach culture officers to every regiment to oversee it all. And maybe we've been doing that the whole time. I don't know. But it doesn't appear to be paying off in terms of American troops respecting the cultures of the nations we occupy.

In short, America is, at this point in history, ill suited to be an empire. I mean, of course we're ill suited because we're a republic, and empire tends to destroy republican rule. But I don't think Americans, as a people, have the cultural intelligence to really pull it all off. That is, we're a bunch of big fucking rednecks.

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THE STAR TREK CALENDAR PICTURE OF THE MONTH IS...



...Number One and Captain Pike!

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QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES
Means "Who Polices the Police?"

From the Houston Chronicle:

Two Harris deputies arrested, one fired

Eleazar Gongora, Jr., was charged with continuous sexual abuse of a child, a felony. He was taken into custody by sheriff's deputies, the Gulf Coast Violent Offenders and Fugitive Task Force.

And

Also on Friday, another deputy was arrested after internal affairs investigators accused him of falsifying records of his whereabouts while at work.

Jimmy W. George, 38, was later charged with felony tampering with a government record.

More here.

I haven't done one of these police corruption posts in a while. To be honest, I've gotten bored with them. On the other hand, that's kind of terrifying. That is, you find stories like this everyday, everywhere. I could devote an entire blog, with a daily output, to this stuff. It's so totally widespread that it's common. And that's why I'm bored with it. Why that's terrifying is because it represents, to me, anyway, the normalizing of police corruption and brutality as something with which we are comfortable. I mean, after all, it does happen all the time.

But the above linked story caught my eye because it's about two separate cases of police misbehavior in the same police department in the same freaking week. Full disclosure: the Harris County Sheriff's Department once illegally entered my apartment years ago with their guns drawn in search of a car thief who they had lost some five or six hours earlier--indeed, they illegally entered every apartment on the property for the same reason. That's professionalism. And by "professionalism," I mean "amateur hour."

My older brother, a conservative, has dismissed my assertions that we have a massive policing problem in this country by quickly noting that we have a lot of police, and that policemen are human beings, and human beings often do bad things--that is, this is to be expected and nothing can be done about it because being bad is human nature.

But shouldn't we hold the guardians of the law to a higher standard? Especially when so many cops appear to be breaking the law everyday, all the time? Frankly, I've come to believe that there is something embedded in the very culture of American policing itself that stinks to high heaven. And if we just shrug it off as human nature, without exerting any effort to see if something might be causing people who ought to be America's finest to be much less than that, then we're accepting police corruption and brutality as something normal and natural.

And I refuse to do that.

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Breitbart Takes A Dirt Nap

From Cynical Times courtesy of somebody or some organization I'm friends with on facebook:

Propagandist Andrew Breitbart collapsed and died Thursday while walking near his home in Los Angeles, leaving behind a string of wrecked individuals and organizations devoted to the less fortunate.

As a conservative media hatchetman and journalist of convenience, Breitbart has been at the forefront of the race to the bottom in both national news and politics for more than a decade. The 43-year-old melded political activism with propaganda to bring woe to liberal causes and individuals who often seemed incapable of defending themselves against his virulent attacks. He was facing the legal consequences for that aggressive partisan behavior at the time of his death.

Breitbart, who was raised in Los Angeles' upscale Brentwood community, and his youthful sidekick, James O'Keefe, who was raised in the affluent New Jersey community of Westwood, formed a kind of dynamic duo for those seeking to mislead the faltering middle class on behalf of predatory elites. They used partially staged and heavily edited videotapes to exaggerate the sins of their political opponents and spread them so rapidly via conservative websites that the mainstream news media was forced to match many of their alleged "scoops" without thoroughly vetting them.

The result was an echo chamber where conservative lies quickly took on the appearance of truth. The debris created by those misrepresentations left many political and news insiders in puzzlement Thursday as they struggled to praise the life of a damaging and divisive figure at the time of his passing.

"It’s difficult for me to assess Breitbart’s impact upon American media and American politics as anything other than poisonous," conservative David Frum said of Breitbart. "When one of the leading media figures of the day achieves his success by his giddy disdain for truth and fairness—when one of our leading political figures offers to his admirers a politics inflamed by rage and devoid of ideas—how to withhold a profoundly negative judgment on his life and career?"

More here.

I was in grad school when right-wing religious scum bag Jerry Falwell kicked the bucket. In addition to teaching an undergraduate acting class, part of my assistantship responsibilities was working in the university's professional theater office, which is where I was when the news broke on the internet. Needless to say, virtually everyone in the theater business is pretty liberal; I thought nothing about dancing a jig while I made the announcement to my co-workers, who immediately joined in the festivities. Of course, the phrase "virtually everyone" doesn't mean "everyone." One fellow, a conservative, actually a fair-minded guy who I liked a lot, quickly scolded us, lecturing, "A man has died; how can you be celebrating?"

I backed down out of respect for my conservative friend, but I did defend myself: "This is the guy who blamed 9/11 on feminists, gays, and abortionists. He blamed Katrina on gays. And that's just a tiny little bit of the bile and venom he spewed for decades, always cloaked in a pathetic veneer of religious respectability."

I feel essentially the same way about Andrew Breitbart, except that I think he was worse. Indeed, Falwell was always simply riffing on his psychotic far right kooky Biblical interpretations--that is, despite his evil, there was always, at least, a sense of authenticity about him, a sense that he believed what he was saying. Breitbart, in stark contrast, went to great pains to construct elaborate lies about the people he considered to be political enemies. And many of those people, including the 300 ACORN workers who lost their jobs because of his smear campaign against the organization, weren't even public figures; they were just ordinary people rendered into collateral damage in the conservative blogger's solo crusade to destroy all things liberal.

I mean, think about it: debate is one thing; lying and smearing, just because you think it's justified by your ideology, is quite another. Breitbart was human trash. Total scum. A major manifestation of everything that's wrong with this country today. And I'm supposed to mourn him? Just because "a man has died"? No fucking way. The world is a better place now that piece of shit is dead.

Fuck you Andrew Breitbart. You were the absolute worst my generation has to offer. Fuck off and die.

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Reine



Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging pics!

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FACEBOOK DEBATES
COMMUNISM AS PSYCH-OUT

Here's what I posted to start the fun:

From the last page of David Harvey's 2010 book The Enigma of Capital:

"Communists, Marx and Engels averred in their original conception laid out in The Communist Manifesto, have no political party. They simply constitute themselves at all times and in all places as those who understand the limits, failings, and destructive tendencies of the capitalist order, as well as the innumerable ideological masks and false legitimations that capitalists and their apologists (particularly in the media) produce in order to perpetuate their singular class power. Communists are all those who work incessantly to produce a different future to that which capitalism portends. This is an interesting definition. While traditional institutionalised communism is as good as dead and buried, there are by this definition millions of defacto communists active among us, willing to act upon their understandings, ready to creatively pursue anti-capitalist imperatives. If, as the alternative globalisation movement of the late 1990s declared 'another world is possible', then why not also say 'another communism is possible'? The current circumstances of capitalist development demand something of this sort, if fundamental change is to be achieved."

I started the comment thread myself, but others soon came out to play--it is important to note that my buddy Alden is an actual socialist, and my buddy Stephen is a self-identified Tea party conservative.

Ronald Personally, I think the left should dust off the old school term "communist" because it really gets pro-establishment types nervous and off their game. I mean, it's one thing to argue with a liberal or progressive, quite another to argue with a freaking COMMUNIST!!!! Power to the people, comrades.

Michael That might be fun.

Stephen But Ron, one doesn't even have to argue with a communist. The dead, numbered well into nine figures, have already done so, and further argument is superfluous. The communist legacy is misery, and though misery loves company, company loathes misery.

Alden well, you've already contradicted yourself, stephen. or perhaps exaggerated just how superfluous such an argument might be.

Stephen Well, aren't you clever. No, there's a huge difference between hearing a case and dismissing it.

Alden you haven't made much of a case, and unless you're willing to count capitalism's dead using the same rubric, there isn't much point in continuing. (but then, i think that's generally the case for Facebook debates.)

Stephen Again, you have misunderstood. I don't have to make a case: communism is already universally discredited.

Alden and yet you persist in this thread. i guess we're both just, what? procrastinating?

Stephen Ha! Touché. (Though technically, I'm not arguing against communism. I don't have to: that ship has sailed. I'm arguing against rehashing the argument.)

Ronald Alden, Stephen, thank you for illustrating my point perfectly!

Stephen What was your point, Ron? If it was that communism isn't really the Nehru jacket of ideologies, then all I can do is shake my head. Well, no, I can do more than that, but that's what I'll do first.

Victoria Ron, it was highly amusing to find this thread at the very late end of my day today...just finished a marathon homework session with my kids, one of whom is writing a literary analysis of Catcher in the Rye...and I talked her through the process of analyzing it using Marxist theories...pulled a copy of the Communist Manifesto off the shelf to assist with concepts and quotes...It's been a lot of fun to find all of the threads and connections between the two pieces.

Ronald The point, Stephen, is that there is an entire body of literature out there, going on one hundred fifty years worth of contributions, that is so persuasive that, at one point, nearly half of humanity subscribed to those ideas in various ways. And even the people who didn't like Marx in the original had to deal with those ideas, even grudgingly implementing them from time to time, and, really, we're still dealing with them today, whether we realize it or not. Unfortunately, after a century of anti-communist propaganda, most Americans are woefully unaware of the Marxist discourse, and don't know how to effectively argue against it. When I throw a little Marx into a serious discussion about economics, I usually encounter sputtering and dismissal, without any real response--you know, "Well, communism just doesn't work!" or "Communism kills people!". Americans, most of them anyway, really don't know what to say to the elementary truism that the rich exploit the poor. That's because Americans just don't KNOW Marx, even though they're certain they do.

Stephen ‎"...so persuasive that, at one point, nearly half of humanity subscribed to those ideas..." -- at gunpoint. Those who disagreed were sent to the most noteworthy of communism's contributions to our vocabulary -- gulag, laogai, re-education camps -- or just outright killed, more than one hundred million of them. There is no benefit derived from communism to any portion of mankind to which you can point that can justify that. And only the morally bereft even try. Got that? Morally bereft.

Ronald Right, Stephen. You just continue to illustrate my point. I'm not talking about the people under regimes which described themselves as "communist." I'm talking about labor unions, social democracies, academics, rank-and-file workers in democracies, and regular ordinary people like me who have actually read some Marx and writers influenced by him. Indeed, Marx is one of, if not the, most quoted source in all printed literature after the Bible. We see his influence in Social Security, in the Wagner Act, in the American Civil Rights Movement, and on and on and on.

Being a student of anti-communist propaganda, rather than a student of Marx, you're not taking any of this into account. Instead you just jump into pre-programmed "communism bad" statements, taking the absolute worst examples of regimes that got a lot of mileage out of calling themselves "communist" but without bearing any resemblance to what Marx actually wrote: I'm sure you realize that thousands of Marxists declared the Russian revolution over when it was clear that the Bolsheviks were taking control.

Ronald MORE: I also hope you understand that Marx's writings were twofold. That is, a great deal of his writing, and the writing of others who have followed in the tradition he established, is a massive critique of capitalism--the other stuff is about establishing a fair and just economic system. I'm not going to in any way defend his economic prescriptions; I'll leave that to comrade Alden, but I will defend to the death his critique of capitalism, which is just about as accurate today as it was in the mid nineteenth century. I'm assuming you're unfamiliar with Marx's good stuff, but I'm pretty certain that criticism never killed anybody at all.

Not much more to say after that, although I can't wait to hear how Stephen replies, and I'm sure he will because he never backs down from a political argument. But I do think he performed here exactly the way I figured he would. I mean, it's totally fair, of course, desirable even, to criticize the violent regimes that have self-identified as "communist" over the decades, but Marxism is just as much of an academic discourse as it is an ideology or style of government or economics. Most Americans, particularly conservative Americans, are just unable to engage in that discourse, believing, in accordance with decades of relentless anti-communist propaganda, that anything even remotely related to Marx is tantamount to evil. In that way, they're kind of like fundamentalist Christians.

You know, that last sentence kind of sums it all up: resistance to even a fair discussion about Marxist ideas is tantamount to fundamentalism. 'Nuff said.

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Homeland Security Kept Tabs on Occupy Wall Street

From Rolling Stone:

The five-page report – contained in 5 million newly leaked documents examined by Rolling Stone in an investigative partnership with WikiLeaks – goes on to sum up the history of Occupy Wall Street and assess its "impact" on everything from financial services to government facilities.

And

It’s never a good thing to see a government agency talk in secret about the need to “control protestors” – especially when that agency is charged with protecting the homeland against terrorists, not nonviolent demonstrators exercising their First Amendment rights to peaceable dissent. From the notorious Cointelpro operations of the 1960s to the NYPD’s recent surveillance of Muslim Americans, the government has a long and disturbing history of justifying the curtailing of civil liberties under the cover of perceived, and often manufactured, threats ("the potential security risk to critical infrastructure). What’s more, there have been reports that Homeland Security played an active role in coordinating the nationwide crackdown on the Occupy movement last November – putting the federal government in the position of targeting its own citizens in the name of national security. There is not much of a bureaucratic leap, if history is any guide, between a seemingly benign call for "continuous situational awareness" and the onset of a covert and illegal campaign of domestic surveillance.

More here.

I'd say I'm outraged, which I am, but it just seems so pointless.

The government, no matter which party is in control, is always necessarily right-wing. I mean, the government is hopelessly intertwined with capitalism. The government has the legal monopoly on violence. The government is about control and order. These are all right-wing values. And that's why, even though they say they hate the government, you'll never see this kind of harassment against the Tea Party or its ilk. Ultimately, the right wing loves the government; they just want it to be more true to itself, more capitalist, more violent, more controlling. So the government loves the right, and the right loves the government. Government harassment of this variety, for the most part, is aimed only at the left.

Indeed, there is a very long history of US governmental subversion against groups and individuals who oppose capitalism, violence, or governmental control. Union busting, the blacklisting of anybody in the entertainment business who liked Karl Marx, FBI surveillance of Martin Luther King, the extrajudicial killing, murder really, of Black Panther Fred Hampton while he slept in his home. It goes on and on. Just click the Cointelpro link above for more on this. The government hates the left and wants to destroy it. Always.

That's why raging against this DHS move against OWS, and its possible coordinating with local governments to take the movement down, strikes me as pointless. This is how it works. Right wingers can protest and demonstrate all they want, without impediment, because, in reality, they support the government. Left wingers already have two strikes against them just for being leftists. Actually trying to change the power structure by appealing to popular sentiment is the third strike, which is when the gloves come off.

I'd call it anti-American, which in many ways it is, but then when has America really been true to its own principles?

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