the mendacity of the state

the brave american soldier, bradley manning, rots in solitary confinement under a regime of torture designed to break his will to resist -- as well as dissuade anyone from following in his footsteps as a leaker of repressed facts about what the government does in our name.

the obama administration has shown its true colors in its treatment of manning, with hillary clinton, who was once taken seriously as a progressive voice in US politics, giving voice to the neo-con creed of maximum repression for minimum accountability:

the san francisco chronicle, in a report on wikileaks revelations in the european press, quotes clinton from a november press conference, where "she called the release of confidential department materials "an attack on the international community... There is nothing brave about sabotaging the peaceful relations between nations on which our common security depends," Clinton said.

what she should have said is that expediency trumps everything, especially when it comes to the mendacity of the US government pursuing its agenda -- which is identical to the agenda of its corporate overlords and the national security state apparatus.

the article in the chronicle details several instances where the US government pressured the germans and spaniards to drop charges against american agents who participated in the rendition and torture of citizens of those nations -- citizens who were later released without charge (usually because they were apprehended in the first place based on erroneous information).

the US did so to protect sources and methods -- the old national security canard -- but primarily to avoid accountability for its high-handed and illegal exploits, carried out without regard to civilized norms. the knock against wikileaks, and persecution of manning, follows the same predictable, loathsome rationale: no one should publicize what we do, lest we be put in a position to answer for our crimes.

the oligarchy in the US has for all intents and purposes declared that it is above the law, and shall never be held accountable for its actions -- no matter how heinous, or how many lives are lost in the pursuit of profits.

pfc bradley manning had a basic security clearance that allowed him to access a military internet called SIPRNet, and this is where he allegedly retrieved the documents that later were released by wikileaks.

as commendable as this is, for a young person who's conscience compelled him to make known his government's complicity in evil, in retrospect who can honestly believe that the contents of SIPRNet -- which is limited to secret or confidential communications -- are not known to potential adversaries without wikileaks? the chinese, for example, have a very sophisticated cyberwar command that would enable them to access such documents with relative ease. can anyone honestly say they lack the resources to do this?

it is also acknowledged, and one can easily research it on wikipedia, that our allies are privy to the SIPRNet as well. you can easily find the US-compliant governments that have such access listed in the wikipedia footnoted articles on SIPRNet. so what, again, is the crime of pfc manning?

his mistake was to make the secrets of the US oligarchy public to a world that is supposed to be content to remain under the thumb of military and corporate rulers, who prefer to keep their publics blinded from the truth by propaganda and manipulation. this is the only way the illusions that maintain the popular consensus can continue to function. once the truth of lawlessness and cynicism in the pursuit of profits is made part of the consciousness of the working classes, cynicism and distrust of government can become an overwhelming force against the ruling powers.

as goes gasoline, so goes the nation

let us pause to remember $20-a-barrel oil prices.

the last time gas prices went ballistic on the poor sheep of the USA, if you recall, was back in 2008, a bit before the great economic collapse that is known as the great recession -- which is only a marketing ploy to disguise the true nature of the catastrophe.

when people in the US see video of street scenes in europe, the gasoline prices they see advertised are in liters instead of gallons, so many of my poor, clueless fellow citizens think there's a rough parity in prices. or, if they realized that other people around the globe pay much more to run their far-less-numerous automobiles, it's with the same disdain they feel for anything foreign: "poor dumb bastards."

the fact is, gasoline prices in the US are heavily subsidized in order to drive the economic suicide machines that is carrying the nation off a scenic cliff during a stunningly photogenic sunset.

this is the truly exceptional nation that was built around the notion of cheap and plentiful natural resources, chief among them petroleum. the nation has secured the resources that allow for sprawling exurban lifestyles at a high price in terms of human suffering around the globe, in exchange for cheap gas here in the homeland.

now that the US global hegemony is being threatened by the unraveling of friendly regimes in the middle east and north africa, the markets are reacting with anxiety bordering on panic. the reasons for this are multiple, but at their heart the powers who suck the marrow out of the international economy have no room to talk: this is the invisible hand at work, and the magic of the marketplace extolled by ronald reagan showing the true nature of its exuberance.

in short, the bets that the banks through their instrument the FED have made vis a vis inflation and interest rates are now going monstrously bad, and instead of only shaking down the little people through their bailout regime and interest-free money, they have to contend with forces that will seriously test their ability to control a world that is rapidly becoming adversarial rather than complicit in this dirty game.

i just paid $3.50 a gallon for my weekly 9-gallon fill-up. i drive a 20-year-old car on a 50-mile-per-day commute. while gasoline prices continue their record march upward, people like me have been living on stagnant wages for several years now. when news reports of rising income come across this desk, i can only wonder which workers in which cities and industries are actually seeing upward movement in compensation.

instead, while the papers assure us that "core inflation" is holding steady and well within the bernanke FED's "target," there is no such steadiness at the grocery checkout. any item in your cart could be fifty cents higher this week than last -- indeed, a great many of them are. ditto with any other goods and services: the prices of things we need and buy every day continue to rise. when gasoline, the true lifeblood of the american way of life, reaches $4 and $5 a gallon -- which seems to be inevitable now -- watch the anger and anxiety in the already agitated public to reach the breaking point.

indeed, if there's any one thing that assures that the oligarchs can keep the lid on popular discontent, it's that gasoline that fuels the 50-mile-a-day commutes that many of us rely on. i'm one of the lucky ones, in that i'm not involved in a love affair with my automobile, and drive a clunker -- the exact type of car the government tried to take off the road in the corporate giveaway (aka "stimulus") called "cash for clunkers." (it was incredible to me that the law mandated that any vehicle cashed in under the program must be destroyed, and not resold. i couldn't believe how wasteful and opportunistic this was, as it took affordable used cars off the market and deprived the lower classes the opportunity to own a reasonably priced vehicle.)

when the last "gas crisis" was fresh in the collective memory, the government mandated certain fuel-economy regulations be applied to the automakers' fleets. while at the time the concern was with supply rather than the environmental consequences of all the carbon emissions, things like fuel economy standards and lowered speed limits suggested to the public that there were limits to our collective profligacy.

enter ronald reagan, and exit anything but a collective frenzy of consumption with a distinctive "me-me-me" flavoring. along with the solar panels from the white house roof, among the casualties of the renewed belligerency and consumption fever were the fuel economy standards. as with most of the stratagems of the free-marketeers, the movement was incremental rather than directly storming the citadel of common sense.

the automakers in this case exploited a loophole in the fuel-economy standards that existed for a class of vehicles called "light trucks." these were intended to apply to vehicles used by small business to carry people and equipment to job sites and customers, but instead the highways and byways of american were overrun with SUVs and minivans of all sizes and configurations. for most of us, this is typified by the suburban housewife in a land yacht, with several kids in the back seats, each watching a small video screen, while mom gabs away animatedly on her smartphone -- and every other driver lives in fear of being crushed by this lumbering behemoth.

this trend ultimately crested with the hummer H2, and as with all wretched excess finally doomed the very industry that spawned it -- taking the big detroit automakers down for the count (only to be resurrected by pure taxpayer cash infusions, no interest and no liability).

everyone know that after the gas-price frenzy, the great collapse of 2008 seemed to come out of nowhere and suddenly everyone was caught shit-faced at the prospect of all these giant wall street investment banks on the brink of insolvency -- and needed billions of dollars of mainline cash infusions to be brought back from the brink of destruction.

we all should know this part of the story, since its still practically as fresh as today's headlines. governments have loaded down their balance sheets with all the fraudulent investments these criminal enterprises that own the politicians made. the government, in its utter subservience to powerful and wealthy interests, is being crushed by the weight of the debts it incurs to finance the military establishment that ensures cash flow to multinational energy corporations, and industrial and weapons manufacturers on the one hand; on the other, it staggers under the weight of all the worthless paper taken on from the bankster conglomerates.

after all this very public larceny and malfeasance, which is perfectly well-known and understood, you might expect some remorse and penance from the malefactors, but you're barking up the wrong tree on that, buster!

no one is guilty, no one is punished. instead, the taxpayers are left holding the bag for all the bad investments they neither made nor profited from. in fact, many lost homes or their retirement savings, but are now expected to bear the brunt of this new artifice from the ruling elites called austerity in order to repair the wreckage of the system.

had the status quo prevailed in the mid-east and north africa, and not put too much stress on other clever schemes contrived to siphon the remaining wealth of the working classes of society, the elites might just have pulled their grand scheme off. the 15 percent of our wages we've been paying for the entirety of our working lives might have been forfeited to the banker class to satisfy their need for more and more wealth before dumping the US for more lucrative markets.

now i'm not so sure. when you start to muck with their gas supply, this is something that can cause serious dislocations in the political calculus that drives the debate in america. you cannot blame gas prices on mexicans or gay marriage. no one will give two shits about where the president was born, and they sure as hell won't want to hear a bunch of contrived nonsense about how he's channeling his late father's anti-imperialist tendencies.

there's nothing good or noble about the american people. they are about and selfish and barbaric as any nation you can name in any era of history. they are quick to name scapegoats, and will lash out at convenient villains at the drop of a hat. most of all, they'll be out for blood, and it'll be crazed and irrational demagogues they'll seek and follow, as they begin a crusade of folly to restore past greatness.

and it just ain't happenin', dude. there is no going back. this is a country that has collapsed in on itself, a grandiose cluster-fuck of self-indulgence and self-righteous entitlement. that's the whole story of american exceptionalism, delusion on a grand scale about stealing everything in sight to have it all for oneself without really deserving it. that's the name of the game, and that'll be the epitaph.

U.S. Decline, globalizing the gold mine...

from fareed zakaria in time mag:

"But this misses the broader point. The Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, who has just written a book, Civilization: The West and the Rest, puts things in historical context: 'For 500 years the West patented six killer applications that set it apart. The first to download them was Japan. Over the last century, one Asian country after another has downloaded these killer apps — competition, modern science, the rule of law and private property rights, modern medicine, the consumer society and the work ethic. Those six things are the secret sauce of Western civilization." U.S. Decline in Global Arena: Is America No Longer No. 1? - TIME

i have to laugh -- it's a repressed laugh -- at how the US fares in the secret sauce categories enumerated by this writer.

it's the great lie about modern crony capitalism that there's competition and consumer choice. the fact is closer to the opposite. only a few giant players in any industry, with ever-increasing consolidation, provide the choices we labor over. and what differentiates one item from the next is quality and price. those who can afford goods of value will have the best, while the rest settle for cheap, cheaply made crap. ever shopped for, say, a computer monitor? the truly good ones aren't sold at best buy. instead, the choices are for which bargain brand will do you for a couple of years, only to end up in the landfill as worthless junk.

modern science, on the other hand, is the basis for rising levels of productivity, as machines obsolete the human worker. this makes those with lots of capital to invest wealthy, while driving wages ever lower for "working" people -- if they can find meaningful work. in the US, we no longer make things, of course, with the notable exception of killing and state-security implements. we are somehow, as a consumer-driven economy, expected to generate 70 percent of the nation's GDP on a mcdonald's salary. this will not work long term, not to mention there's not much dignity for an adult in his/her prime working as career counter help.

the flip on the science thing is peoples' increasing dependence on the palliative of religion for sustenance in this period of economic and social upheaval. it's inevitable, i guess, that folks will turn to god and guns, as one politician quipped, when nothing else is going for them. the irony is that while the elites use technology to obsolete the working class, the working class abandons science for superstition, as if a hand will descend from a cloud to bestow goodies upon the elect. add to this the generalized irrational appeals to emotion these people are bombarded with from FOX news to explain their dire straits, and you see a general abandonment of enlightenment ideals, in favor of incitements to lash out against pointy-headed intellectuals who might have some understanding of their predicament and what policies might be beneficial.

rule of law and property rights should be split apart, since one is thriving while the other has ceased to function where it really counts.

we tend to think of the law applying to street-variety criminals, the guy with a handgun who holds up a liquor store. that aspect of the law still functions, though thoroughly sold out to the legal-judicial-prison industrial complex. the real criminals, on the other hand, the ones who are trying to crucify bradley manning and julian assange, are allowed to go about business as usual. whether it be war crimes and crimes against humanity, or the fraudulent, worldwide ponzi-scheme of the banking system, the people who ruin lives and poison the planet for personal gain have no fear of being called to account for their actions. they will without hesitation claim they're doing "god's work," which, were there a god, they'd be struck down for their impudence. read matt taibbi's work for rolling stone on how the banksters avoid accountability for their perfidy for a window into the law-less world they inhabit.

property rights, on the other hand, as sacrosanct. ditto contract law which enforces property rights. you may perceive property as your car or your house, but to the worldwide swindlers who've got real money in the game, the ability to go into a developing country, ravage the local economy and then exit with the spoils is a necessity in the racket we call the global economy. it is also the underlying cause of the worldwide insurrection we're now seeing being played out. in the US you see how bankers get bailouts, while they prepared for the collapse of the housing bubble when they rewrote the bankruptcy law in 2006, and congress obligingly passed it -- no questions asked.

consumer society and the work ethic are seen as the final pieces of the formula that brought about western domination of the world. this is an affront to people all over the world who work much harder than the bulk of lazy and corpulent americans to feed their families. the US has no great work ethic -- that was simply hungry foreigners, like my grandfather, who left the old country looking for a better deal. if he, and his mexican counterparts today, worked their asses off, they had a chance to rise above poverty, and could eventually achieve a relatively comfortable, middle-class existence. nowadays, the ass-busting immigrant is seen as an affront to the less-driven american worker who buys the exceptionalism propaganda they see on FOX news, that assures them they deserve a cushy lifestyle by maxing out the credit card and voting republican.

you see where this is going to end, right? the lazy american, given the once-over twice or cubed, gets left with crumbs while all the action shifts to asia -- where there's more to steal at the moment, and people haven't been raked over yet by the capitalists. thanks for the memories, fareed!

the corporate security state and PFC bradley manning

the pentagon has sent its pitchman out to lie to the subservient scriveners of corporate journalism about the barbaric conditions under which alleged wikileaks source PFC bradley manning is being imprisoned.

we have a report from AFP quoting the military's "press secretary" geoff morrell as saying of manning's detention, "He's not being treated differently than any other maximum security detainee and not differently really that much from the medium security detainees."


manning is not being "held in a hole," the government insists. he's being held under maximum security because, according to the pentagon, his escape would pose a risk to national security.


morrell, after visiting the brig at quantico, va., was so impressed by the accommodations that one almost expected him to say he wouldn't mind staying there himself. instead, he "came away impressed about how professionally the brig is run."


that's hardly the point, of course. manning has been held in maximum security, confined to his cell for 23 hours a day, since last summer. his only respite is that other one hour a day, when he must walk in an "indoor gym," which is equipped with walls, a ceiling and the floor. he is required to pace the floor during his recreational period, otherwise he is returned to his cell. this may conform to the letter of the military's regulations, but it mocks any humane standard of treatment for prisoners -- especially for someone whose "crimes" are having caused embarrassment to high government officials.


make no mistake about it: bradley manning is not a criminal. george w. bush and dick cheney are criminals; the heads of the too-big-to-fail banks on wall street who were responsible for the great crash of 2008 are criminals. bradley manning is a guy who wanted to serve his country, only to find that his country was involved in monumental wrongdoing.


and worse, no one in his chain of command cared.


from what we know from the guy who ratted him out --  himself a convicted felon who wants to join the lucrative racket of being a government informant -- manning tried to take his concerns to his superior officers before being unceremoniously blown off, and told to shut up.


if the allegations are to be believed -- and let's assume that at least the outlines are accurate -- manning passed along classified documents not to subvert the government, but to bring its questionable practices out of the shadows and into the light of day. manning is alleged to have done what any government whistleblower does -- not for personal profit, or to embolden enemies, but to allow the public to hold its leaders to account.


this bit about manning's potential escape endangering national security is yet another outrageous abuse of that tired canard by a government that is so out of control that it seriously believes that it actions are above the law, not subject to scrutiny, beyond questioning. had any of the documents in question been highly classified, and liable to endanger national security, then it stands to reason that they would not be accessible to over a million people within the national security state apparatus; presumably a private in the army would not be privy to highly sensitive documents -- which these are definitely NOT.


again, this is embarrassing stuff for our leaders, and not harmful to national security. the secretary of defense testified to congress that no significant or lasting harm was done. bradley manning never had access to any truly damning documents -- he only could see things that are not meant for public consumption. you and i, who pay for our leaders' exploits on behalf of mega banks and corporations, are the only ones who must not be allowed to glimpse the truth. what our masters want us to know, they feed us through the new york times and FOX news, and that's the extent of our knowledge. this has been part and parcel of government propaganda operations since world war I.


bradley manning has nothing else to give, but the government will try to use manning to give something to the rest of us: a lesson.


the lesson is, shut up and don't ask questions about what the government is doing. don't ask questions especially if you're working for the government. finally, if you cross the line and take your doubts about what the government is doing in our names to the public, be prepared to suffer a fate similar to medieval heretics.


the government is so desperate to punish bradley manning, and through him to get at and inflict similar punishment upon julian assange, that it is prepared to go to extraordinary lengths in order to do so. assange's persecution by the swedish government is nothing but a CIA smear operation, designed to get him within the US' reach -- something which they will doubtless achieve.


it looks grim, my friends. this is supposed to be a cautionary tale, a warning to those of us who might be inspired to stand up to the oligarchy that tells one story for public consumption, and an entirely different one to its inside operatives. i fully expect this to be a hard-fought battle, but the truth will eventually come out and people like manning will get the thanks he deserves. he has served his country well, barack obama and the other minions of corporate power be damned.


with this in mind, a vigil is planned at quantico on march 19 to show public support for bradley manning. i hope many, many people will show up to give the man support as the government tries to break his spirit. please plan to be there with us!

The Slog | Evidence-based bollocks deconstruction

for continuing coverage of the nausea-inducing antics of rupert murdoch's evil empire, i heartily endorse....

The Slog | Evidence-based bollocks deconstruction:

In an expected but nevertheless brazen decision to turn two blind eyes to growing evidence of serious and endemic Newscorp illegality, Media & Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt today confirmed his approval of the takeover plans of the Murdoch dynasty for BSkyB television.

Having inexplicably given the Murdoch-owned Newscorp bidders ‘more time’ to come up with a feeble accountancy scam, they have duly obliged and – via a deckchair-rearranging bit of legal bollocks – been given the green light to milk the BSkyB cash-cow without serious MMC referral.

Now is not the time to go into endlessly repeated evidential details. The Slog will take its time to absorb the detail of the deal, and then regroup. Suffice to say that on this, Day 50 of the emergence of solid cover-up evidence against the Met Police and Newscorp’s News of the World title, the Cameron Coalition has plumbed a new low in grubby favouritism.

Bankers can do what they want. Brussels can do what it wants. And now media baron paymasters can do what they want.

The fight continues. And remember this well: I was in the US when, despite endless evidence of Republican illegality presented to the American public by the Washington Post, Nixon won almost every State in his 1972 Re-election campaign. But in the end, the trail of lies, spin, excuses, surreal defences and constitutional corruption led back to the Oval Office.

The same will happen here.

AS ALWAYS WHEN I MAKE SUCH RARE APPEALS, I AM NOT AFTER ANY ACCREDITATION WHEN I ASK YOU TO LINK, TWEET, TEXT, CALL, EMAIL AND OTHERWISE GIVE LIFE TO OUR DEFIANCE BY GETTING THIS POST ONTO THE SCREENS OF AS MANY REAL LOVERS OF PLURALITY AS POSSIBLE.

JUSTICE WILL PREVAIL.

wanky bernanke

big up to the bernanke, who went up to the US senate and talked big scary scenarios about things for which the FED cannot be blamed. as our friends at bloomberg have written it:

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said the growing U.S. budget deficit could push borrowing costs higher and curb economic growth.
“The long-term unsustainability of our debt is a significant problem because it threatens higher interest rates, less confidence, and it could have impact on the current recovery,” Bernanke said in response to a question from the Senate Banking Committee.
“I have been urging Congress to address these problems not just in the current fiscal year, but looking over a longer time frame, because it is in fact over the next 10 or 20 years that these problems are going to be extraordinarily pressing,” Bernanke said.
When asked if the debt is a top priority for lawmakers, Bernanke said, “over the long term, certainly. It certainly must be addressed to get us back on a sustainable path.”

the big, bad deficit will strip the bark off the old money tree, he seems to be saying. that will kill the tree where dollar bills come from.

oh please, great wank bernanke, tell us it ain't so! tell us that what's really hurting confidence and the recovery.

number one, it's all that money you guys are printing to prop up the insolvent TBTF banks, that were the instruments of financial mass destruction through their massive and as-yet-unpunished deception. that is, in a word, their FRAUD.

check out today's washington's blog, for the complete rundown on how malignant the giant ponzi scheme is that has the economy to its knees -- and seems poised to finally put it out of its misery.

Billions in Bloat Uncovered in Beltway - WSJ.com

what a fascinating coincidence: the journal and their cousins at FOX news are both covering this story with zest. once again, the big, bad federal beast is wasting poor joe taxpayer's hard-earned money on frivolity like food-safety laws, economic development and the homeless. and it goes like this:

"The U.S. government has 15 different agencies overseeing food-safety laws, more than 20 separate programs to help the homeless and 80 programs for economic development.

These are a few of the findings in a massive study of overlapping and duplicative programs that cost taxpayers billions of dollars each year, according to the Government Accountability Office." Billions in Bloat Uncovered in Beltway - WSJ.com

of course, this is red meat for the people who have theirs (or think they do), and don't give a rip about what happens to anybody else. they are like ayn rand, who railed against the government until she got sick, and then she, too, had her hand out. who's there when you're at your most desperate?

these estimates of how much the government could save if some of these unspecified programs were consolidated doesn't take into account who put them into the budget to begin with. with all the bellyaching and gnashing of teeth among the tea partiers about government spending, they're just getting their share of government pork -- those earmarks that joe congressman inserts into spending bills to keep the folks back home returning him to office.

not to mention, even with the billions being bandied about, you know FOX and the WSJ won't be bringing up the small matter of subsidies to business interests that consume many more billions of the government budget than this so-called bloat. and don't even bring up the pentagon, where the real numbers we spend on "defense" in all its various manifestations tops a trillion dollars a year -- and we still don't feel safe!