New Orleans 8/29/05: Never Forget

Health Scare #4: Profits Matter More Than People

Nothing could be more truthful than the fact that I don't want "government run health care." But I don't want for-profit health care either. So, as usual, I'm left with nothing. No options, no outlets. Trapped out in a world where Onion stories come true with remarkable ease and depressing regularity. Like this gem from last year:

WASHINGTON—After months of committee meetings and hundreds of hours of heated debate, the United States Congress remained deadlocked this week over the best possible way to deny Americans health care.

"Both parties understand that the current system is broken," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters Monday. "But what we can't seem to agree upon is how to best keep it broken, while still ensuring that no elected official takes any political risk whatsoever. It’s a very complicated issue."

"Ultimately, though, it's our responsibility as lawmakers to put these differences aside and focus on refusing Americans the health care they deserve," Pelosi added.

The legislative stalemate largely stems from competing ideologies deeply rooted along party lines. Democrats want to create a government-run system for not providing health care, while Republicans say coverage is best denied by allowing private insurers to make it unaffordable for as many citizens as possible.

"We have over 40 million people without insurance in this country today, and that is unacceptable," Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) said. "If we would just quit squabbling so much, we could get that number up to 50 or even 100 million. Why, there's no reason we can't work together to deny health care to everyone but the richest 1 percent of the population."

(Congress Deadlocked Over How To Not Provide Health Care, The Onion, August 19, 2009)

The bald-face, plain-as-day fact remains: people are dying, right now, from lack of health care. While Our Glorious Leader and his Randian hack "opponents" sit around a table and spar over bullshit talking points, people are dying. Yesterday, today, every day. It's gotten so bad even the New York Times finally noticed:

As members of the Obama administration and Congress met on Thursday to try to find common ground on health care, a new report warned that without comprehensive legislation, more than 275,000 adults nationwide will die over the next decade because of a lack of health insurance. Nearly 14,000 of those deaths would occur in New York State. [Emphasis mine.]

An earlier study by the Institute of Medicine estimated that 18,000 people died prematurely in 2000 because they lacked insurance; the Urban Institute updated that figure to 22,000 in 2006. The new study, by liberal advocacy group Families USA, applied the same methodology used in the previous reports to drill down and calculate, on both a national and state-by-state basis, the latest figures.

“This is only the tip of the iceberg, and the most severe consequence, which is death,” said Kathleen Stoll, director of health policy at Families USA. In addition, thousands of other citizens, perhaps millions, are experiencing a reduction in the quality of their lives and their health because they lack insurance, she said.

Unfortunately, the Time's reveals its real concerns by burying all of those horrible numbers in its websites Health section, safe from the prying eyes of everyone who isn't already and old fart, or an old-fuck-at-heart (like your humble narrator).

On the more-prominent U.S. page we find a more typical example of the media's Health Care "Reform" coverage under the headline Pelosi Struggles to Corral Votes for Health Care Bill:

The future of President Obama’s health care overhaul now rests largely with two blocs of swing Democrats in the House of Representatives — abortion opponents and fiscal conservatives — whose indecision signals the difficulties Speaker Nancy Pelosi faces in securing the votes necessary to pass the bill.

The article is a prime example of Horse Race Journalism, a genre that now dominates American political writing thanks to years of pressure from the mouth-breathing media whores on the Right and the more-intelligent but (apart from Michael Moore) ideologically hamstrung media whores of the "Left." That is, the politically empowered "Left," symbolized by Pelosi, Reid, and Our Glorious Leader, the president, who are little more than rich, privileged shills for the very power structure left-wing politics are supposed to oppose.

This creates the twin phenomenons of political "centrism" and policy "triangulation," rhetorical red herrings meant to mask what the economist John Williamson identified (way back in 1989) as the "Washington consensus."

Being an economist, Williamson saw nothing particularly seedy or evil in this term (at least, not at the time...he has since recanted his choice of words for all the usual, wrongheaded reasons). At the time he originally coined the phrase he was attempting to outline a complex of economic ideas that everyone in Washington could agree upon, regardless of their politics. These included deregulation, unfettered access to credit, trade liberalization, the privatization of state assets, the deification of private (which, in most cases, means "corporate") property, and the destruction of even the the shadow of a functioning "welfare state." All of this motivated by a free market fundamentalist belief that economics can do more for people than politics.

If you happen to be rich, then, yes, it can. If you're poor, well...fuck you running. It's your own fault for not playing the proper Horatio Alger game. You must be out of favor with the Invisible Hand of the Market, what Jello Biafra called "God Incorporated." Did you eat meat on Friday? Sacrifice the wrong goat? Whatever it was, it certainly can't be the fault of a system that threw you overboard before you were even born. In any case, the System couldn't care less. It's far too busy bribing Congress with one hand and slapping their pitiful excuses for "reform" back with the other:

Anthem Blue Cross, a unit of WellPoint, recently informed subscribers in California that premiums for individual insurance policies would rise an average of 25 percent, with some rates going up as much as 39 percent.

“Raising our premiums was not something we wanted to do,” [WellPoint CEO] Ms. [Angela] Braly said [in her testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee Wednesday]. “But we believe this was the most prudent choice, given the rising cost of care and the problems caused by many younger and healthier policyholders dropping or reducing their coverage during tough economic times. By law, premiums must be reasonable in relationship to benefits provided, which means they need to reflect the known and anticipated costs they will cover.”

Translation? It's not our fault we're so rich, or that we're legally bound to do everything we can to get richer. It's those damn doctors and their damn hospitals. It's the damn old people and their stupid needs for care. It's the damn young people jumping ship because they can't afford our base rates in the first place, only to slink back like beat dogs when something goes wrong.

According to Reuters, Ms. Braly pulled down over $9 million last year. Now that she's Chairman of the Board as well as President and CEO she can expect a raise this year, at the very least. The other witness quoted by the Times, Lauren Meister of West Hollywood, can expect to supply Braly with that raise now that WellPoint has pushed her premiums up by two hundred dollars:

“We saw what deregulation did to the cost of utilities in California,” Ms. Meister said. “We saw what the lack of regulation has done on a national level to our financial and banking system. Well, it’s doing the same thing to our health care system.”

Ms. Meister added: “The City of West Hollywood, where I live, regulates how much landlords can raise the rent each year to keep rents stabilized. Why can’t the federal government regulate how much health insurance companies can raise their rates per year, in order to stabilize premiums?”

Well, Lauren, it's got a lot to do with the insane amounts of money the health care industry has used to grease our government's wheels. Since 2005, that's been a $46.6 million investment, counting publicly-disclosed campaign contributions…who knows how much more cash changes hands away from the cameras? It's all a matter of profits over people, power of progress, and money over matters of life and death. So rejoice and be exceeding glad: they'll be no "government run" health care in this country. Not until the greedheads and glandhanders figure out how to run it straight into the pockets of their true constituents.

Health Scare #3: Limbaugh, Beck, Ingraham Laugh at Toothless Woman, Flash Everyone With Evil Underbelly of America

Thanks to David Brock's penance, Media Matters, even those us who consciously chose not to amerce ourselves in the Right-wing noise machine get to learn (as if we needed a refresher) just how evil a nation the United States really is.

During her turn at health care summit, Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-New York) talked about plenty of stuff. But because our media is full of sensationalist bullshiters, the only comment of her's with any legs turned out to be the story of a constituent so poor she "wore her dead sister's teeth."

The store grew gams thanks, in part, to the noise machine, a prime example of political symbiosis that keeps this country deadlocked into a uneven tug-of-war between centrist and rightwing crazies. A so-called "liberal" tells a horrible story in public. So-called "conservative" voices respond to it with ridicule, vitriol, and spite. And we can already here liberal voices rising in a chorus of indignation (MediaMatters holding the baton) at the Rightwing mouthpiece's callous indifference to the suffering of their fellow Americans. As if something like this:

LIMBAUGH: You know I'm getting so many people -- this Louise Slaughter comment on the dentures? I'm getting so many people -- this is big. I mean, that gets a one-time mention for a laugh, but there are people out there that think this is huge because it's so stupid. I mean, for example, well, what's wrong with using a dead person's teeth? Aren't the Democrats big into recycling? Save the planet? And so what? So if you don't have any teeth, so what? What's applesauce for? Isn't that why they make applesauce?

should come as a surprise. "Let them eat cake," Marie Antoinette shouted. Well, no, she didn't, but never mind. Evil people have shouted it ever since, whenever they wanted to display their complete contempt for the rest of the human race.

While discussing the probably results of privatizing Medicare (sick, old people tossed out of hospitals, into the streets, to join the legions of crazy people already tossed out in '80s), Rep. Slaughter declares, "We're better people than that." Well, I'm sorry, Congresswoman, but we're really not. Have you seen Glen Beck's ratings? I have. More people watch his rambling civics-lesson-tirades in one night than visited these pages last year. Surely all of them are sincere, red-blooded Americans, hoping to keep pace with the endless treadmill that is the News. And maybe they like their current events served up in silky, semi-sweet Beckness. Who am I to begrudge them?

Such was my thinking. Until I heard this:

On his February 26 radio show, Glenn Beck played an audio clip of Slaughter's account then said, "I am wearing George Washington's dentures right now. I'm wearing his teeth right now." He later added, "I just like wearing dead people's teeth. But in America -- I'm sorry, I didn't know that that was -- I've read the Constitution before. I didn't see that you had a right to teeth." Echoing Limbaugh's remarks the previous day, Beck stated, "The environmentalists should be all over Slaughter. 'How dare you say that?' My gosh, they're just recycling. They're just reusing."

You can hear Beck and his "sidekick" break out into frat-boy giggles when Rep. Slaughter says, "she wore her dead sister's teeth." Now I want to be clear, here: I respect Glenn Beck's right to laugh at the pain and suffering of Rep. Slaughter's constituents. All I ask in return is that he, and everyone else, respect my right to fantasize about his parent company's (owner's) destruction at the hands of an angry mob. That makes me giggle.

After all, Glenn Beck's program is taped at the News Corporation office studios, 1211 Avenue of the Americas (Sixth Avenue to the rest of us) New York, New York, right down the street from MSNBC's 30 Rockefeller Plaza.

So imagine, if you will, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow leading a torch-wielding procession of correspondents, line producers, key grips, camera operators, runners, ADs, journalists, bloggers, and talking-heads through the night streets of Manhattan, singing "All Hell Can't Stop Us," or "I Wanna Free Miss Liberty" or some other fine selection from the IWW's Little Red Songbook. They storm News Corps' offices, overwhelming security. Rent-a-cops shit themselves in fear as red-eyed, foam-mouthed, Brooks Brothers-outfitted lefties, fed up with years of taking conservative shit, break down the revolving doors and pour in. Shattered glass twinkles in their frosted, TV hairdos.

Enmass they rush raving up the narrow stairwells, pouring out like a latte-fueled wave into the live studios. Sound men battle with boom mikes for bo staffs. Camera men's faces are driven into teleprompters by rebellious runners. Studio and viewing audiences keep their seats, shocked into rigidity by the sight of liberals actually doing something for a change. Other than bitch on endlessly about how dirty, evil and mean are those ol' conservative media whores, dag nab them.

Bill O'Reily, dragged from behind his desk, exposes his rubber-ducky emblazoned, $2000 silk boxers to a stunned and horrified world. He declares the whole "fucking thing sucks" as he's carried out to the streets on the shoulders of Chris Matthews Show interns, who proceed to tar, feather, and set Bill marching south, down Sixth Avenue, with instructions not to stop until he reaches the Village.

Meanwhile, back upstairs, Maddow stomps Laura Ingraham into bloodied unconsciousness with a pair of Manolo Blahnik's alligator boots, while Beck looks on, enraptured. Not by the girl fight. No, our man is caught by the visionary's paralysis. Like the audience itself, he is enrapture by the sight of his own worst fears made flesh. In a last ditch moment of egoism sure to make his spiritual grandmother, Ayn, proud, Beck has just enough time to stand and declare, "See? I WAS RIGHT!" before an Ed Schultz boot-to-the-naughty-bits reduces him to a simpering ball of well-dressed muck...

Whew. Sorry. Blacked out there a minute. And now I've got old union songs stuck in my head. What was it we were talking about?

Oh, yeah. Right. Fantasy.

Health Scare #2: We've Already Lost. They've Won

In the lead-up to tomorrow's health care "summit" (i.e., pointless political show-pony piece), the quixotically-named Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington released a wonderful (pdf) list of just how much health care cash each of the participants has received. Ranked from highest to lowest, reading it is an exercise in "Oh...now I understand. That's why John Boehner, Harry Reid and Steny Hoyer have been acting like such god-almighty dicks this past...zombie Jesus, it's been almost a year already. Where does the time go?" Straight down the drain, along with any chance you ever had of affordable health care.

From CREW's website

According to CREW’s study, the five summit invitees who have received the most health care dollars since 2005 are:

• Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), who has received over $2.5 million in contributions, $777,113 from the pharmaceutical/health products sector alone;

• Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who has received over $2.2 million, $802,500 of which came from doctors, other medical professionals and their trade associations;

• Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), who has received nearly $2 million, $483,750 of which came from the insurance, HMO and health services industries;

• Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY), who has received almost $1.9 million, $572,237 of which was contributed by hospitals and nursing homes; and

• Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD), who has received over $1.8 million, and like Sen. McConnell, received a large portion of that -- $709,261 -- from health professionals

So. We see the bribery wheel continue its Grand Round. Where she stops, nobody knows, but odds are good it won't be anywhere you (you less-than-filthy rich, politically disconnected, more-or-less completely disenfranchised person, you) would want to go.

And lest any of the ten or so people who actually bother to read these notes (not that I have anything but love for all you wonderful lurkers who come to steal my screen shots from Godzilla the Series) think Our Glorious Leader is somehow, magically above all this, CREW reminds us all that, "Additionally, President Obama received over $18.6 million during his presidential campaign."

Since precious few of us will ever see any side of $18 million, I took a quick walk around the internet and found that such a chunk of change is:

• the total amount raised by Bono's Product Red campaign for The Global Fund, despite a year's worth of endorsements from every supposedly-conscientious celebrity from Stephen Spielberg to the Mad God, Oprah. (Called a "meager $18 million" by the industry shills at Ad Age...which just goes to show you what world they really live in. Big hint: it ain't ours.)
• the amount of stimulus money the AARP received last year for the Senior Community Service Employment Program ("Hello! Welcome to Wal-Mart! Been a nice winter, hasn't it?")
• the rumored sale price of the Fire Island Pines resort. And if you don't know what that is, congratulations: whatever doubts, masturbatory fantasies, or drunken, back-seat-of-a-car "experiments" you might've had in the past, I hereby declare you straight. Go forth and sin some more.
  
• (and) the amount of money allocated for a upgrade to one (that's one) government website. Which one? Recovery.gov, of course. Because its not really "irony" until you feel that knife twist a bit.
  

Happy political theater, everyone. How's that "Canadian system" looking?

John Yoo's "Bloodshed of the Two Torture Memos"

Two Decembers ago, former Vice President Dick Cheney said,

"we don't do torture."

And the authors of the two most-famous Bush-era "torture memos"--the ones advocating "enhanced interrogation techniques" including waterboarding and the forced consumption of Brittany Spear's albums--were just cleared of any and all misconduct by an internal Justice Department review. So we must not "do torture."

And yet, on February 14th, Cheney brazenly admitted "I was a big supporter of waterboarding."

So just so we're clear, here...

You're the Office of Legal Council to the President of the United States. The Vice President's office sends word down that we're fightin' a new type of war and all, and maybe that ol', moth-eaten Geneva Convention really don't apply to the people we catch up in this war. Maybe we just need to, oh, I don't know...start letting the CIA kidnap people, throw them in some hole in the ground somewhere...like Morocco...or Cuba...and start torturing them, ya know? The Vice President's representative asks you to whip up a way this might be accomplished. What do you do?

Do you:

(a) Politely thank the Vice President's representative (probably his lawyer, David Attington), show him out the door, immediately grab the phone, call the President, and inform him his Number Two is a raving mad asshole who wants to undermine that greatest of great myths of ours: the rule of law, warping the character of this great nation into a grinning, horrible, schizophrenic parody of itself. Or do you

(b) Inform the Vice President's man that you'll do everything in your power to see that such a policy conforms to the laws of the United States, as proscribed by the Constitution and determined by the courts, or

(c) Inform the Vice President's man you'll be sure to write a memo equally sure to abandon "fundamental practices of principled and balanced legal interpretation,” fail "to cite highly relevant precedent, regulations, and even constitutional provisions," and misuse "sources upon which it does rely," conveniently ignoring everything else in a hard-line, insane drive to vest the Executive Branch of this country with unrivaled power. After all, we're at war. No time to be liberal pantywaist and wring our hands over "the laws". It's time to go all Howard Roark on these Camel Jockey assholes. Tell you what, screw writing up a legal case. You've decided to join up with the U.S. Marines right now, because that'll be the shortest distance between you and you ventilating terrorist scumbags.

Or do you

(d) Call a meeting with other senior lawyers from the Attorney General’s office, the White House counsel’s office, the Departments of State and Defense, and the National Security Council regarding whether the Geneva Convention applied to members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Inform the Vice President's man that, at these meetings, you and your lawyer pals will do everything in your power to draft a memo sure to abandon "fundamental practices of principled and balanced legal interpretation,” fail "to cite highly relevant precedent, regulations, and even constitutional provisions," and misuse "sources upon which it does rely," conveniently ignoring everything in a hard-line, insane drive to vest the Executive Branch of this country with unrivaled power.

(These quotes come from a 2007 critique of John Yoo's torture memo written by Dawn Johnson, currently head of the OLC under Our (new) Glorious Leader, President Obama--so suck on it, Johnny.)

Said memos will be sure to justify the Vice President's stated wishes, producing documents the President, Vice President, SecDef and Attorney General will spend the next eight years (Yoo wrote the torture memos back in 2002) hiding behind. Remember when Bush and Dick used to go on and on, when they were all, like, "Nope, we good. It's all legal. We've got these memos from the OLC, and they say it's fine. Foggedaboutit, not problem. Stop trying to coddle the terrorists and grow your balls back, you liberal pantywaist." Weren't those great times?

And it'll be okay. Really. No one will ever hold you accountable for providing a legal cover to the Bush Administration's obviously-adamant wish to torture people. You can even write a book all about it and no one will even bat and eyelash.

Let's be clear: Dick Cheney's valentine this year? Waterboarding. Fuck Liz and the kids, right? Sick fetishist is all about strapping men down to tables, putting washcloths over their mouths, and dribbling two-gallon milk jugs full of water onto them until their gag reflex makes them puke, or pass out, or both. Former Vice President Dick is a self-described "fan" of this. A "big" one. Sweet bleeding Jesus.

But wait: it gets worse. Lawyers for a Tunisan Gitmo prisoner, Rafiq Alhami, have just filed a lawsuit alleging that CIA kidnapper-spooks were torturing people as far back as December, 2001

In his lawsuit, Alhami stated, as the Associated Press described it, that, from December 2001, he was held in three CIA “dark sites,” where “his presence and his existence were unknown to everyone except his United States detainers,” and where, at various times, he was “stripped naked, threatened with dogs, shackled in painful stress positions for hours, punched, kicked and exposed to extremes of heat and cold.” He also stated that his interrogators “sprayed pepper spray on his hemorroids, causing extreme pain.”

[...]

Moreover, although the OLC memos dealt specifically with a “high-value detainee” program that began with the capture of Abu Zubaydah on March 28, 2002, it’s also clear that the administration began working out how to deal with prisoners outside of existing legal frameworks within days of the 9/11 attacks. Most of this centered, at the time, on expanding the program of “extraordinary rendition” developed by the CIA under Bill Clinton in order to deliver “terror suspects” to third countries, where they could be interrogated by proxy torturers or even “disappeared.”

This in itself was enormously worrying, of course. The Clinton-era program occupied a horribly gray area, in which “terror suspects” — mostly Egyptians — were seized by the CIA and rendered to the custody of the Egyptian government, which was then free to kill them, torture them or imprison them after show trials, but it was at least a carefully controlled program, involving 13 prisoners between 1995 and 2000, according to research undertaken last year by Peter Bergen for Mother Jones, and a detailed paper trail that required the existence of a sentence by a court, even one handed down in absentia by a government with a disturbing human rights record.

After 9/11, however, all these restraints were abandoned. Within 12 days of the attacks on New York and Washington, a Yemeni named Jamal Mar’i, who worked for a Saudi charity in Pakistan, was kidnapped from his house in Karachi and rendered to Jordan, one of several countries with whom the Bush administration had swiftly established arrangements involving “extraordinary rendition” and torture. In the ten months that followed, before the OLC issued its indefensible opinions, at least 25 more prisoners were rendered to torture in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Syria, and we now know, from one of three more OLC memos released two weeks ago — written in May 2005 by Steven G. Bradbury, the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General, and revisiting the OLC’s August 2002 torture opinions — that, after the CIA brought torture in-house in August 2002, 94 prisoners in total were held in secret CIA custody.

The fact I can even cut and paste these words without my head exploding, gumming up the keyboard with fragments of skull and brain goo, just goes to show you how far down the moral-evolutionary ladder eight years of Dick Cheney has really pulled us. Congratulations to us as a nation and as a culture: we've re-branded torture and once again made it cool by embracing it in absentia, through our "elected leaders." Great job all around.

Maybe next we can bring poisoning wells with dead bodies back to good. Quick, someone think up a name for that that won't scare people when they hear it on the six o'clock news. Something boring and bland, like the rest of American politics..."enhanced...water treatment techniques"?

Obviously, the correct answer to the above is (d), since torture memo authors John Yoo and Jay Bybee were ruled "not guilty" of professional misconduct. The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility did what the government does best and issued a report about it on Friday. Remember when your kid told you about that flunked Math test on the trip home from Six Flags? Well, the DOJ just pulled one of those one us. With Congress out until Monday (thanks, President's Day) and nobody important watching TV Friday night, they knew they could get away with giving Johnny and Jay a cute little smack on the wrist. Bad, bad boys, you two; letting that mean-old Mr. Cheney talk you into writing things. That gets you in trub-ble!

This sends a clear and concise message to conscientious men and women within the American government, and, indeed, all free governments of the world: suck-up, brown-nose, and bend over backward to please your powerful superiors. Not only will this allow you to twist and mutilate the law, but if your superiors are evil enough, you'll even get to twist some human beings along with it.

Christ sake, these two won't even be disbarred. Bybee will go right back to his day job as a federal judge (of all things), while John Yoo gets right back to the business of molding young minds at...Berkeley...of all the goddamnedest places in the Universe. Yoo, at least, has out-and-proud admitted he fixed the law to justify his "client's" (the Administration's) wishes. In the middle of bitching about Obama's decision to close Guantanamo Bay (and, one year out, what the hell's going on with that anyway?) Yoo even let slip the fact "President" Bush himself personally authorized waterboarding "three times in the years after 9/11."

(Sidenote: you know the Spirit of the 60s is well and truly dead when the man who literally wrote the book [and, first, the memo] on American torture programs can remain in his job at UC Berkeley with, apparently, no loss of life, limb, or property. God, the political Left in this country really is a coalition of toothless, bourgeois hypocritical fucks. He's authorized waterboarding for goddsake. C'mon Berkeley radicals: the least you could do is trash the man's office.)

Obviously, at this point, no one in the Obama Administration is the least bit interested in investigating the crimes of their predecessors. Why should they be? President Clinton was equally obliged to let the previous Bush Administration get off scott-free. It's not as if moral, ethical, or even legal concerns are foremost in Our Glorious Leader's mind. You noticed all this "extraordinary rendition" bullshit (when FARC does it it's just called "kidnapping" but I guess American "doesn't do that" either) started under Bill Clinton, didn't you? Good ol' Slick Willy sure stabbed us in the back on that one. The point is, all this is bigger than one evil, little man...or one evil, god-all-mighty-stupid presidential administration.

Let's be clear: U.S. torture policies grow out of fundamental assumptions of U.S. foreign policy. Foremost is the assumption that we, as the U.S., have the power to do whatever we want, whenever we want to do it. And get away with it. Until we get over that little canard, there's not a damn thing voting for your favorite corporate puppet is going to do about all this.

Just FYI.
(Within the Empire is supported in part by a grant from Dick Cheney Foundation: doing what Dick Cheney says, before he shoots us in the face. And by the annual financial support of Dick Cheneys like you. Go fuck yourself, Mr. Cheney. Go fuck yourself right up the butt.)

"take my pound of flesh and sleep well"

Around nine o'clock this morning, central standard time, a man named Joseph Stack set his house on fire, stole a Piper Cherokee from a nearby Georgetown, Texas airfield, and crashed the plane into an Austin office building, the Echelon I.

Echelon I is home to both the FBI and IRS field offices. Two people are in hospital. One is currently missing. Joe Stack is, rather obviously, dead, and already he's been christened the new Grey Champion of his age. Or the new Osama bin Laden.

Whichever way you lean, copies of Stack's suicide note/exegesis are now available in a variety of places, for the informing of your opinion. Titled "Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let's try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well," it paints the portrait of man driven out of his mind by fifty-four years of good ol' American hypocrisy. Signed, "Joseph Stack 1956-2010. 2/18/10," it shows deliberation, for all its short comings of coherent rhetoric (which its author freely admits). At once autobiographical and firmly political, Stack's note is scathing indictment of American political culture, sure to be swept under the rug at the first convenient opportunity.

In his note, Stack narrates of a life of repeated failure, with IRS bureaucrats, repeatedly cheating him out of his retirement savings. He rails against government bailouts of big business (GM, the airlines, the drug and insurance companies who grow fatter by the day thanks to "the joke we call the American health system") and big business' corruption of government ("there has never been a politician cast a vote on any matter with the likes of me or my interests in mind. Nor, for that matter, are they the least bit interested in me or anything I have to say"), tacking right off the deep end of America's political spectrum with a new, violent populism, which is really as old as this continent. He justifies his heinous actions (which we at Within the Empire would never in any way condone, defend or advocate) by concluding

"I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are. Sadly, though I spent my entire life trying to believe it wasn’t so, violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer. The cruel joke is that the really big chunks of shit at the top have known this all along and have been laughing, at and using this awareness against, fools like me all along."

In other words, watch out, America. Your citizens are growing desperate, dangerous, and crazy. Not that we've ever been otherwise. But under certain strained circumstances, we have historically been moved to act on our national inclinations.

Personally, I'm putting everything I've got into canned food and shotguns.

Memo from the Climate Scientists: We're All Screwing Ourselves

Via Climate Progress, "a project of the Center For American Progress Action Fund," overseen by Dr. Joseph Romm (author of Hell and High Water) comes a chart n' graph-laden Illustrated Guide to the Latest Climate Science everyone interested in facts should at least glance at sideways before opening their mouths.

The gist? We're screwing ourselves as a nation, as a species, and doing it faster and more thoroughly than even the most pessimistic number crunchers ever though possible. But with all that snow on the ground, don't try to tell anyone about global warming. No. Obviously God Himself has answered those effete, elitist scientists with a triple handful of "treacherous," continent-ravaging storms. That's what we get for letting evil secularists study problems without their partisan blinders firmly stapled into place, and issue uncensored reports.

My dentist paused in the act of torturing my teeth to reveal his own ignorance. "Well," he said, glancing out the window at dead, Midwestern grass, "the climate's changing all the time."

Sure, Doc. But that's not the point. It's changing faster and more radically because of what we do. We, the collective entity known as "the human race" are senselessly murdering our biosphere thanks to a combination of ignorance, willful-stupidity, gross incompetence and greed. Blithely labeling this problem "Global Warming" or (as it was re-christened under Bush) "Global Climate Change," is itself a symptom of our wider, cultural myopia and unwillingness to confront the problems we create for ourselves.

Personally, I told my dentist, I like to cut through all the bullshit and lies and just call the problem what it is: the Apocalypse. Or, at the very least, an Apocalypse. As Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel spent years trying to teach us, there's always another Apocalypse around the corner. Only the concerted efforts of those fighting the "good" fight prevent them from destroying us hundreds of times over.

My problem with Dr. Romm? He (and thus, his organization) have fallen into a trap. By critiquing the Bush-era's Apocalyptic policies, decrying the "politicization" of a global crisis (as if global crisis' occur in the Ideal universe of Plato's Eternal Forms, far removed from politics) he, his organization, and the PAC that funds it, have all fallen into the very trap they hoped to set at Dubya's feet. They have politicized themselves by entering the arena of America politics. And bloodier, more unforgiving stage you will not find this side of Restoration-era England. They have ceded the high ground, because the American System (to use Henry Clay's term) as its currently constituted, requires them to get down in the mud, with paleolithic assholes, like the Republican Governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell. Who, in his White Presidential Power rally response to Our Glorious Leader's State of the Union Address, brazenly declared (in a nod to Dominionist voters across the Old Dominion and throughout the national TV audience):

We are blessed here in America with vast natural resources, and we must use them all.

Because obviously, if we don't, the terrorists will win.

This Apocalypse is not insolvable. The simple fact is, the vicious plutocrats who control the ruling institutions of American (and, to a large extent, global) society do not care. They don't give a high, holy fuck about you, me, the plant, or anything on it unless they can turn a profit by converting whatever-it-is (you, me, our homes, our fellow citizen's lives) into a market derivative. Forget the politicians, as Saint Carlin said,

"Politicians are put there to give you the illusion you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long-since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the State Houses, the City Halls, they've got the judges in their back pockets, and they own all the big media companies so they control all the news and information you hear. They got'cha by the balls. They spent billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well we know what they want: they want more for themselves and less for everybody else...They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking...You know what they want? They want obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it..."

So what are you doing reading this? Time to climb into your S-Fuck-UV, sit in traffic for an hour, making sure to kill your quota of polar bears, show up five minutes late to your designated cube and waste another ten minutes getting a multisyllabic reaming from your asshole boss, who's surely in the same sinking boat as you, as all of us, are. But may all the gods lend you aid in getting him to recognize that fact. After all, "The climate's changing all the time." Nothing wrong here. Go back to sleep.

In Honor of President's Day

we offer this critique of the Obama Administration by special guest columnist Friedrich Nietzsche:

Hope. Pandora brought the jar with the evils and opened it. It was the gods` gift to man, on the outside a beautiful, enticing gift, called the "lucky jar." Then all the evils, those lively, winged beings, flew out of it. Since that time, they roam around and do harm to men by day and night. One single evil had not yet slipped out of the jar. As Zeus had wished, Pandora slammed the top down and it remained inside. So now man has the lucky jar in his house forever and thinks the world of the treasure. It is at his service; he reaches for it when he fancies it. For he does not know that that jar which Pandora brought was the jar of evils, and he takes the remaining evil for the greatest worldly good--it is hope, for Zeus did not want man to throw his life away, no matter how much the other evils might torment him, but rather to go on letting himself be tormented anew. To that end, he gives man hope. In truth, it is the most evil of evils because it prolongs man`s torment.

--Human, All Too Human (1878) #71
(Photo by Photo by Pete Souza, whitehouse.gov)

The Empire's Collapse Continues Unabated (2009 In Review)

The Supreme Court finally came off the bench today (pun most certainly intended), firing yet another salvo in the all-but-officially-declared Class War the United States' corporate masters have spent decades waging against we mere mortals.

The decades-old system of rules that govern the financing of the nation's political campaigns was partially upended by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling issued just ahead of the pivotal 2010 midterm congressional election season.

Thursday's landmark decision, approved by a 5-4 margin, could unleash a torrent of corporate and union cash into the political realm and transform how campaigns for president and Congress are fought in the coming years.

[...]

The new ruling blurs the lines between corporate and individual contributions in political campaigns. It also strikes down part of the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance law that banned unions and corporations from paying for political ads in the waning days of campaigns.

Even before the court's decision, national political campaigns had been growing increasingly expensive. Watchdog groups worry that by removing limits on expenditures by corporations that are not coordinated with candidates' campaigns, the court will boost the role of special interests in politics.

That last sentence is the kind of “no shit, Sherlock” reporting you can only find on NPR, a paragon of mainstream media tedium. Nevertheless, the implications of this ruling are so blatantly obvious even Nina Totenberg felt compelled to admit, “[The ruling] will undoubtedly help Republican candidates since corporations have generally supported Republican candidates more.”

Occasional liberal hero Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) seems to be the only member of “our” Congress capable of seeing the implications of all this through the fog of lobbyist cash:

"If we do nothing then I think you can kiss your country goodbye," Grayson told Raw Story in an interview just hours after the decision was announced.

"You won't have any more senators from Kansas or Oregon, you'll have senators from Cheekies and Exxon. Maybe we'll have to wear corporate logos like Nascar drivers."

Grayson said the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling -- which removes decades of campaign spending limits on corporations -- "opens the floodgates for the purchases and sale of the law."

Nice words, and Grayson at least has the courage to do what his position allows: In the lead-up to this decision, he introduced five bills with wonderful names like the Business Should Mind its Own Business Act, intended to plug the new holes Justice John Robert's court seems intent on burning into our Constitution. Yet Grayson still appears blind to the essential problem of “our” democratic institutions. Within this little Empire of ours, there is no law that can't be overturned by the influx of cold, hard cash.

Add to this the fact that Our Glorious Leader has renominated Ben Bernanke to his apparently-sacrosanct position as head of the Federal Reserve. The merest hint of a delay in his reconfirmation sent the jackals, vultures and vampires of Wall Street into an uncontrolled, three-day orgy mass nappy-soiling, despite the soothing promises of Senate Banking Committee Chairman, former presidential candidate, and all-around toothless, corporate hack, Chris Dodd.

Add to this the fact that, over a month ago, on December 13, Our Glorious Leader's top financial-industry waterboy and former Laura Ingraham date, Larry Summers, won the unofficial Within the Empire Holy Shit Award when said, live, on CNN, that “everyone agrees that the recession is over,” a comment that certainly holds true for the billionaires he's helped enrich throughout his entire career. The rest of us are faced with one, undeniable message from America's ruling class: “Bend over, shut up, and take your medicine, you fuckin' crybabies. Don't act like you don't like it.”

Meanwhile, the lunatic asylum more commonly known as the U.S. Congress has shelved any further discussion of health care reform until former nude model Scott Brown takes Ted Kennedy's old seat in the Upper House, providing him a greater vantage point from which to join his fellow Republicans in their by-now-year-long campaign to demonize President Obama and piss on the non-billionaire citizens of this country. Their fear-mongering intransigence, along with the opportunism and stupidity of their Democratic “rivals,” has destroyed any chance at meaningful health care reform, ensuring that, whatever legislation eventually appears on the president's desk, it will include a massive give-away to the insurance industry.

From Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) comes conformation of my worst expectations, among them that,

at the highest levels of the Senate and the White House, there's still no plan, and he doubts whether President Obama will insert himself forcefully into the process.

Of course he won't. Our Glorious Leader has two foreign wars to fight, plus the domestic propaganda war against the paleo-conservatism. Hamstrung by his own post-ideology ideology, he seems incapable of realizing the scope of this last war, perhaps the most important one of his first term. With three years to go, the score is a rather obvious 0-1, and no amount of rousing speeches in Ohio or on television are going to change that, Mr. President.

Mr. Obama's appearance coincided with new state figures showing Ohio's jobless rate climbed last month to 10.9%, from 10.6% in November, nearly a full point higher than the national average. National figures released Thursday showed a jump in the number of Americans who applied for jobless benefits, with claims rising 36,000 to 482,000 last week, the third straight week claims increased. Analysts had expected new claims to slip to 440,000.

I offer these comments with no wonkish solutions to the crisis this country faces. Mass firings of those responsible for our current financial crisis would only a trigger another, for which Our Glorious Leader would, in true “liberal” fashion, fall all over himself to take the blame, even without an opposition ready, willing, and clearly able to foist it all upon him. Despite all the myths surrounding President Obama, he is and always has been a conciliator, a self-conscious shill for the status quo. That is the awful truth at the heart of his non-ideological ideology: a truth that, by its ability to please the robber barons that truly own this country, ensured his election in the first place.

How Obama won over the managers and money movers of this country remains the great untold story of the 2009 campaign. The results of this marriage between the centrist politics and the robber barons are visible on any street in the country not named “Wall.”

Outside the corridors of power, the status quo is quickly becoming unmanageable. Now, from the series of tubes comes word that Our Glorious Leader has agreed to cut his party's throat, announcing a freeze in discretionary spending...except for that which is sure to disappear down the military-industrial complex's black money hole across the Potomac River from his house, otherwise known as the Pentagon.

Memo from the Obit Desk

Gary Edward DeMoss passed on to the Gray Havens at 5:15 a.m. on January 6, 2010, one day shy of his sixty-third birthday. He is survived by his big sister, Jenni, big brother Jack, son David and beloved wife, Gene Kay. Per request, he is to be cremated and his ashes scattered where ever the fuck we want. There will be no funeral, but there will be a private party held in his honor as soon as the weather breaks, featuring plenty of margaritas. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations be sent to your nearest food bank and/or homeless shelter. Have a few margaritas yourself while your at it, in honor of my father, the hero.

Why We're Not Leaving Afghanistan

Our Glorious Leader destroyed the last shred of his already-dubious credibility last night, distorting history for his own already-decided purposes and failing utterly to assuage anyone of anything besides our own, most-cynical suspicions. At best, by dragging out his ninety-day “policy review” before more-or-less submitting to that stuck-up little poindexter of a general, Stanley McChrystal, President Obama has supplied his political opponents with distracting, rhetorical ammunition, endangering (perhaps purposefully) his halfhearted attempts to pass health care “reform” and proving, for all and sundry, that no matter how much he might him and haw, in the end Obama will bend to the prevailing winds of Washington.

Just like all the rest of 'em.

How long, oh Lord, how long? Forever, if at all possible. As the president told last night's class of West Point Cadets:

“If I did not think that the security of the United States and the safety of the American people were at stake in Afghanistan, I would gladly order every single one of our troops home tomorrow. So no, I do not make that decision lightly. I make this decision because I am convinced that our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

Notice that slick insert at the end. “Afghanistan and Pakistan.” And presumably any other 'stan that might harbor “terrorists” or “Taliban insurgents” or whomever the Bad Guys will be next. If history holds, once the Taliban are “defeated” (presuming they'll ever be), the U.S. will in all likelihood turn on the corrupt, slave-driving warlords who genuinely rule Afghanistan outside of “President” Karzai's Kabul Bubble, our current “allies” in our lop-sided, ghost war against “terrorism.”

It didn't take long for President Obama to lose me. After about two minutes of rhetorically flogging the memory of 9/11 (the defining knee-jerk reaction of every American politician in this blighted age) he reminds the cadets that Congress and NATO give him the cover to continue Bush's First War. “Under the banner of this domestic unity and international legitimacy, and only after the Taliban refused to turn over Osama bin Laden, we sent our troops into Afghanistan.”

Bullshit. If the Bush years have taught us anything, it's that the United States government requires neither domestic unity or international legitimacy. For anything. We do what we want, when we want, at times with all the subtitle tact of the Borg: We say “Comply!” and the nations of the world would do well not to hesitate, not even to ask, “How quickly?”

The fact remains, Afghanistan's Taliban-led government (which was as diverse and factious a group of power-mad assholes as you're like to find) offered to give us bin Laden repeatedly, before and after 9/11, if only we'd offered them some way to save face. The word in Pashtu is aabroh. We know the concept as "an out." Assume you've got a guest in your house. Your guest contracts nineteen guys from the surrounding neighborhood to go over to someone else's neighborhood and fuck some shit up. Representatives from that neighborhood demand you hand your guest over, but how can you do that in public and still save face with the rest of your neighbors?

As Bush's cadre of power-mad assholes rushed through the halls of NATO and the UN, State Department officials and (one can only assume) CIA back-channelers scrambled to arrange some kind of deal with the Taliban, presumably to head off the war. “We were not serious about the whole thing, not only [the Bush] administration but the previous one," Richard Hrair Dekmejian, an expert in Islamic fundamentalism and author at the University of Southern California, told the Washington Post in 2001. “We did not engage these people creatively. There were missed opportunities.”

President Obama conveniently forgot to mention that the sticking point, at the time, seems to have been the State Department's insistence that bin Laden face trail in U.S. courts, a novel idea that went by the wayside pretty damn fast once the bombs began to fall and the CIA Black Sites began to rise up. The seriousness of either side in these negotiations remains an open question, as it probably will far into the future. But there's a wonderful quote in that same WAPO article, straight from the first “war president's” mouth:

“We know he's guilty. Turn him over,” Bush said.

Let's stop right there a moment and invert things. Imagine if some crazed, fundamentalist Christian-American, or some radically Ayn Randian, freemarketeer decided to bomb...oh, I don't know...lets just say the Blue Mosque. Imagine if the Taliban demanded then-Glorious Leader George Bush hand over said “terrorist,” that he might face the “justice” of Afghanistan's Sharia-soaked court system. Now imagine if Mullah Omar (remember him?) went on television and answered our requests that Afghanistan provide evidence linking our hypothetical Randian to his alleged crime by declaring, “We know he's guilty. Turn him over.”

And what, gentle citizen of the Empire, do you think the United States would say to that?

Apparently, sometime in February, 1999

...Taliban security forces took bin Laden from his Kandahar compound and spirited him away to a remote site, according to media reports at the time. They also seized his satellite communications and barred him from contact with the media.

Publicly, the Taliban said they no longer knew where he was. [Former Assistant Secretary of State Karl E. ] Inderfurth now says the United States interpreted such statements “as an effort to evade their responsibility to turn him over.”

Others, however, say the cryptic statements should have been interpreted differently. [Former CIA station chief and footsoldier in the 1980's jihad against the Soviets, Milton] Bearden, for example, believes the Taliban more than once set up bin Laden for capture by the United States and communicated its intent by saying he was lost.

“Every time the Afghans said, 'He's lost again,' they are saying something. They are saying, 'He's no longer under our protection,'” Bearden said. “They thought they were signaling us subtly, and we don't do signals.”

We certainly don't do “subtle”.

The Thirty thousand more troops Our current-Glorious Leader plans to pour down the dank, awful hole that Afghanistan has become (on top of the forty thousand he committed back in March) are not a subtle tool. Neither is General McChrystal's plan to bribe the country's various factions into not shooting each other (as we've done in Iraq). It might work—so long as we continue paying the bribes. But what happens when we stop paying the bribes? Iran, 1979, anyone? In the meantime, this policy will leave us with a cadre of unreliable, insecure, drug-dealing warloards for allies.

And all of the above reminiscences might be immaterial anyway. Former Pakistani Foreign Minister Niaz Naik told the BBC in October, 2001, that “senior American officials” told him “in mid-July that military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October.”

Mr Naik was told that if the military action went ahead it would take place before the snows started falling in Afghanistan, by the middle of October at the latest.

He said that he was in no doubt that after the World Trade Center bombings this pre-existing US plan had been built upon and would be implemented within two or three weeks.

And he said it was doubtful that Washington would drop its plan even if Bin Laden were to be surrendered immediately by the Taleban [sic].

We have no real reason to believe Mr. Naik out of hand. After all, he's only accusing the Bush Administration of having a secret plan to start a war everyone now claims was foisted upon us by September Eleventh. Even Our (current) Glorious Leader repeated this last night.

“Now let me be clear:” President Obama said. “None of this will be easy.” Thus, on top of his Nobel Prize, Our Glorious Leader earns 2009's No Shit Awards Grand Prize for Speechifying. “The struggle against violent extremism will not be finished quickly and it extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan. It will be an enduring test of our free society and our leadership in the world.”

I agree with that last sentence completely. These are dangerous times, and they will expose the true, beating, bleeding heart of this country. There's no need to assume we'll find anything as prosaic as the president describes in there, once we crack the country's ribs. Examining such a rarefied organ will require time we may no longer have. Iran may get the bomb. Russia, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel already have it, and God knows who else is keeping it on the down low. Antarctica is melting, and nobody cares because no one can find out how to make money from the problem. Unemployment hits 10 percent and what new jobs program does our Commander in Chief roll out?

Say, do you like long hours, low pay, and freezing your ass off in the mountains of a country you couldn't even pronounce eight years ago? Discover a strength like no other, and a country so weird Alexander the Great took one look at it and said, “Fuck...”

“After 18 months,” President Obama continued, “our troops will begin to come home.” Ri-ight. “These are the resources that we need to cease the initiative while building the Afghan capacity that can allow for a responsible transition of our forces out of Afghanistan.” Until, that is, our publicly announced troop increase causes the ranks of foreign fighters crawling across the 'stans to swell like a cake-addict's boobs. Iraq, 2004? Anybody? How about Afghanistan in the 1980s, when the Soviets tried sinking a hundred thousand plus soldiers into that deeper well?

None of this enters into the calculation of our Empire's ruling class. We've known since October that leaving was “not an option” in Afghanistan. We had that right from the horse's mouth...and Robert Gibbs is no broke-down old mule: he's the Administration's designated show pony. As with health care, the real solution to the “problem” of Afghanistan was removed from consideration before we even began. This allowed President Obama to invite a bunch of people over to the White House and emerge three months later to claim what he considers his great “victory”: a “bipartisan” consensus.

The fact is, such a thing exists. In our president's mind, we can never really leave Afghanistan. As soon as we do, what stops the Russians or the Chinese from rolling right over all those poor little Pishtu tribes people? Genghis Kahn tried that too and it worked out great, let me tell ya. I say God's speed to the Russians and the Chinese if they want to waste blood and treasure in those mountains.

But nobody asked me. My opinion is not considered in the debate.

“I am painfully clear that this is politically unpopular,” Obama told a small group of columnists [including the assume-liberal David Ignatius, from who's column this comes] “Not only is this not popular, but it's least popular in my own party. But that's not how I make decisions.”

So congratulations, Teabaggers, for being right for all the wrong reasons. Our Glorious Leader has just admitted, in public, that we do not live in a democracy. Go forth a shop, plebs. Christmas is here. Rose Bowl's coming up, with the Super Bowl afterward, and really, and who really cares about Afghanistan anyway? As Denis Maloney, one of six pro-war protestors who gathered across the street from the two hundred fifty-strong anti-war candle light vigil, said,

“If you consider the fact that that area of the world produced people who killed 3,000 Americans in America, maybe it's about time we went over there and stomped them out.”

God, I love my country.

The Full Speech:

Fort Hood: Mr. Self-Destruct

Remember, remember, the Fifth of November
The Gunpowder Treason and plot
I know of no reason why the Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.

--Popular verse, seventeenth century England.

By now you've all know that poem, and you've all heard of Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who staged his own Gunpowder Treason yesterday at the Ft. Hood, Texas, Soldier Readiness Center, killing thirteen and wounding thirty, including the police office who eventually stopped him, Sgt. Kimberly Munley. All but two of the wounded are out of the hospital, according to USA Today. Major Hasan remains in the coma Sgt. Munley put him, attached to a ventilator at the Brook Medical Army Center in San Antonio, according to the Press Trust of India. (Nothing says the Brits once ruled our country like spelling “center” with that extra “e”).

It's difficult to write about one of these things as the reports come in. Our Glorious Leader has already warned us against jumping to conclusions. Mosques everywhere within the Empire are battening down the hatches, fearing reprisals from “mainstream” (no one dare call them “white”) Americans.

The New York Times reports:

When the shooting began, members of three units of Army reservists in the Combat Stress Control Detachments were inside a medical and services center at Fort Hood signing medical forms and getting last-minute vaccinations before they went overseas.

There is no evidence that Major Hasan singled out his fellow combat stress counselors, but an Army official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the continuing investigation, said Major Hasan had been scheduled to deploy with the three Reserve units.

Hasan, the son of Palestinian immigrants who owned a restaurant in Roanoke, VA, graduated with honors from Virginia Tech in 1995. He joined the service, got his commission, and received his medical degree from Uniformed Services University, Bethesda, in 2003, just in time to serve his residency at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He became a psychological counselor for wounded soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, and stayed on until July of this year, when he transferred to Ft. Hood, the largest military base in the world.

Sometime in August, Hasan legally purchased two FN Herstal Tactical Five-seveN pistols from Guns Galore, a self-evidently-named gunshop in Killeen, Texas, the town Ft. Hood supports. FN Herstal's website describes the Five-seveN (which comes “NATO Recommended”) as “Well balanced, with smooth contours and no protruding parts,” needlessly insisting that it “will instinctively be handled correctly and is extremely easy to use.”

All the classic hallmarks of a public murder rampage are present in the absolute deluge of press accounts (15000 in Google News alone). The initial rumors of four, five, six shooters (no doubt all part of a secret Muslim plot to allow President Obama to take away our guns). The (attempted) suicide by cop. The terse statements of local authority figures. The rush to exploit tragedy by national ones. The fetishistization of the victims. The shocked insistence by co-workers, neighbors, family members and community religious leaders that Hasan was a dedicated professional, a quite man who turned to religion for solace after his parent's deaths in 1998 and 2001, attended Friday prayers in uniform, and toured his apartment building days before his rampage giving away personal belongings.

The standard, disingenuous “Why?” is already under debate on comment boards and talking head shows across the media landscape. As NPR noted in their own, alright-but-not-great report, two narratives are emerging: Maj. Hasan-as-crazed-Muslim-extremist and Maj. Hasan-as-crazed-PTSD-psychologist. Lost in the babel is any stable picture of Maj. Hasan-the-dedicated-professional who was “performing quite well” according to Col. Kimberly Kesling, deputy commander of clinical services at Darnall Army Medical Center, Ft. Hood's hospital. At the bottom of a sudden media dogpile, Col. Kesling is already rushing to distance herself from Hasan. “You would hope you never know someone who would have such a demon.”

S. Ward Casscells, a former Assistant Secretary for Health Affairs, came close to asking an impertinent question of USA Today (they being too chicken to ask it themselves):

“You're entitled to ask, was he moved to Fort Hood because he wasn't doing well at Walter Reed and they thought the fresh start would help?' " he said.

“Talking to people who knew him," Casscells said, "no one thinks that this was (post traumatic stress), and they are skeptical that he was subject to religious harassment.”

“That is not tolerated in the military. The military will look at all this closely and decide if there is any mental or physical illness, whether this is just a lonely guy with a remote personality who got a bad officer evaluation report and lost the confidence of his peers, maybe withdrew into religion as solace. What could we have missed? How could we do better?”

Every one seems to be missing the fact that, less than three years ago, Walter Reed was synonymous with bureaucratic inefficiency, crumbling infrastructure, criminally-neglectful mistreatment of patients, and the complicity of top brass in concealing all of the above. Two and half years can seem like a lifetime in America, but thanks to the internet, yesterday becomes today. Or March 1, 2007, as the case may be. That was the day the Washington Post reported:

A procession of Pentagon and Walter Reed officials expressed surprise last week about the living conditions and bureaucratic nightmares faced by wounded soldiers staying at the D.C. medical facility. But as far back as 2003, the commander of Walter Reed, Lt. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley, who is now the Army's top medical officer, was told that soldiers who were wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan were languishing and lost on the grounds, according to interviews.

Lt. Gen. Kiley resigned from his position as Army Surgeon General eleven days after that story saw print. The day after, March 2, Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA's 30th) of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, sent a letter to Major General George Weightman, the man who replaced Kiley as Walter Reed's commander (and was himself temporarily replaced by Kiley after being relieved of command on March 1, 2007). In the letter, Waxman informed Gen. Weightman to prepare himself for questions regarding an internal Army memo that fell into the Committee's hands. Written by Walter Reed Garrison Commander Peter Garibaldi in September, 2006.

The memo (titled: “Challenges Concerning the Base Operations A-76 Study and resulting Reduction in Force (RIF) at Walter Reed Army Medical Center (WRAMC)”) details the sad story of life inside Walter Reed from its worker's perspective. “It appears that over the past six years,” Waxman wrote,

the Defense Department has been engaged in a systematic effort to replace federal workers at Walter Reed with private companies for a host of functions, including facilities management, patient care, and even guard post duty entrance. This effort occurred under the A-76 process, which is shorthand for OMB Circular A-76.

The A-76 process was an element of Vice President Gore's reinventing government initiative. The idea behind A-76 is to force federal employees to compete with the private sector for the jobs being performed by the federal employees.

Then Florida happened, and Our (former) Glorious Leader, George W. Bush, ramped A-76 up full blast under the newly-rebranded rubric of “competitive sourcing initiatives,” opening up federal jobs of all stripes to private contractors. Like IAP Worldwide Services.

IAP Worldwide Services is a private company owned by Cerberus Capital Management LP, an asset-management firm (a company that owns other companies) chaired by Bush-era Treasury Secretary John Snow. Former Kellogg Brown and Ruth operating officer Al Neffgen holds the chief executive post and ex-KBR VP Dave Swindle (couldn't make that name up if you tried) holds the company president's chair. IAP would go on to achieve infamy in 2005 for it's bungled, over-priced attempts to deliver ice to Hurricane Katrina victims.

But back to Waxman's story:

In September 2004, the Army determined that the in-house federal workforce at Walter Reed could perform support services at Walter Reed at a lower cost than the bid received from IAP Worldwide Services. IAP protested this determination. As a result of the protest, the Army Audit Agency was directed [by whom? Waxman doesn't say - D] to reevaluate the bid from the federal employees. It has been reported that the Army Audit Agency withdrew its certification of the employee bid and unilaterally raised the bid by $7 million, thereby making the employee bid higher than the contractor bid. The Army then reversed its determination and resolved the A-76 process in favor of IAP.

When the employees sought to appeal this ruling, they were not allowed to make their case. Alan King, the Deputy Garrison Commander at Walter Reed, filed a protest of the contract award with GAO, but under the A-76 rules in place at the time, federal employees had no standing to object to A-76 determinations. Consequently, there was no similar cost review of the IAP bid proposal.

By January, 2006, IAP received a five-year, $120 million contract from Walter Reed, with the transition from in-house to out-sourced scheduled to being in January of '07. That year must've seemed a year of absolute hell as skilled government employees, including “skilled maintenance personnel and workers with specific knowledge of Walter Reed's systems and infrastructure,” left Walter Reed in droves, rather than wait for the inevitable round of lay-offs and replacements. By January, 2007, a trickle of twos and threes – an early retirement here, a change in position there – had become a flood, leaving Walter Reed with one-sixth of its original support staff workforce – maybe 60 people, out of an original 300. IAP fired those sixty and replaced them with fifty of their own people on February 3 when it took over management of the facility, but that was a little more than a panacea. Not even too little, too late. These were Dark Times at Walter Reed, when already-stressed infrastructure crumbled under incompetent new management and someone began to shoot his or her mouth off to the Washington Post about the mold on walls, the roaches, and the injured soldiers pulling self-assigned “guard duty” shifts, chasing away the neighborhood drug dealers working nearby street corners.

And is that a brown-skinned, thirty-something Major in a smock we see, making his rounds through all this chaos? Visiting soldiers no longer physically capable of visiting his office (assuming he still has one): men and women with missing arms, legs and faces living in darkness their own filth because the people who fix the lights and change the bedsheets are AWOL this week. Or this month. Imagine you're a young doctor, hot out of med school, interning at a place with a famous name, and all you want is to help soldiers with minds and bodies ground up by the grist mill of war. It'd be like getting up and going to hell every morning. Reports that Hasan received a bad performance review at Walter Reed (if true) should come as no surprise at all. Could you spend years at Walter Reed listening to soldier's stories? Could you then pick up and move to Texas? How is Texas a “fresh” start?

As Mark Ames has already noted (in a much better article than this one) Ft. Hood is no Disneyland.

For one thing, it holds the record for most soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan — 685 so far — and though we don’t know the figures, it’s reasonable to assume that Fort Hood is responsible for a sizable percentage of the tens or hundreds of thousands killed in those countries since America invaded them. Over the same period, 75 soldiers have committed suicide at Fort Hood, ten in 2009 alone — the highest of any base. In just one weekend in 2005, two soldiers who’d returned from Iraq killed themselves in separate incidents. Last year, in something right out of Full Metal Jacket, Specialist Jody Michael Wirawan, 21, of the 1st Cavalry Division, shot and killed his lieutenant, then killed himself when police arrived. And life in Killeen isn’t much nicer: it has one of the nation’s lowest median incomes and highest crime rates. Earlier this year, a 20-year-old Fort Hood soldier was killed by a Killeen cop who claimed he killed the soldier after being dragged underneath his SUV; the dead soldier’s mother filed a lawsuit claiming that the cop was notoriously out-of-control and violent, and that he shot her son while the car was pulled over.

In 1991, George Hennard Jr. killed twenty-three people at a local diner after driving his pickup through the wall, the deadliest rampage in American history...until Seung-Hui Cho shot up Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007.

Our hearts go with the citizens of Killeen and the families of all the victims. We owe it to them to understand why these things happen, in the hope (infinitesimal as it may seem) of preventing them from ever happening again. Understanding will be impossible as long as we engage in the process of separating victim from villain with a hard, fast line, and tossing epithets like "crazy" and "terrorist" around...as if we all agreed on their meaning. There is a deep malaise eating at the heart of our country, our culture and (I would argue) our civilization itself. Maj. Hasan is neither the first nor the most violent mass murderer of our history. Not even in the year-to-date.

On March 10, Michael Kenneth McLendon, a former police officer (who, like Hasan, "didn't last"), killed his mother, set her house on fire, and cut a bloody swath of mayhem across two south Georgia counties, Coffee and Geneva. Mad Mike killing ten people before turning the gun on himself in the parking lot of Reliable Metal Products, a factory where he'd once worked.

March 24: Convicted felon, Lovelle Mixon kills four Oakland police officers: two with an SKS, two with an AK-47.

April 4: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania resident Richard Poplawski used a bullet-proof vest, a .22 rifle, a semiautomatic pistol and...an AK-47...to hold off the Pittsburgh police for four hours, killing three officers.

April 30: Jiverly Antares Wong (or Voong) killed thirteen people at a Binghamton, New York American Civic Association center before turning the gun on himself (beating out Hasan on the sociopathic scoreboard).

June 10: James Wenneker von Brunn walked into the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington and shoot a security guard.

August 4: George Sodini shoot three women at an LA Fitness in Collier Township, Pennsylvania, outside Pittsburgh, before turning the gun on himself.

And, as Kurt Vonnegut would say, so it goes.

What Anti-War Movement?

Via Democracy Now: "It has now been eight years since 9/11. The United States is still engaged in Iraq and is escalating its wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan with no end in site. Speaking at the Bluestockings Bookstore on the Lower East Side in New York, Arun Gupta, a founding Editor of The Indypendent, takes a critical look at the failures and future of the once massive anti-war movement."

Thanks To (and shamless plugs for) Joseph Lieberman

The author of School Shootings took the time to answer a few of questions today. Details to follow. In the meantime, I'd just like to say we met at SE Portland's premier hole-in-the-wall, wi-fi/coffee bar, The Funky Door. (Give them money.)

But sheer coincidence, August 1, 2009 is the 43rd anniversary of Charles Joseph Whitman's attack on the University of Texas, Austin...a fact (believe it or not) I didn't even realize until just this moment.

Things went off without a hitch thanks to the vast improvements in microphone technology the CIA's seen fit to show us (I kid the CIA--we're really very close, they and I. No, not really.) I tremble at the thought of what Macaulay Culkin might've accomplished back in 1990 with the aid of my little Sansa. In fact, the damn thing worked so well I can hear just about everything in the room. So the quest begins for a good freeware sound mixer. In the ultimate scenario, the mix will bring Joe's answers into the clear while completely eliminating any

Thankfully, my subject was a professional. So much so that most of his answers come complete with their own paragraph-breaks. Expect a transcript and new movie review this week...just don't quote me on that. The Dog Days are almost here, and it's only getting hotter.

Take care of each other.

Health Scare #1