Category Archives: soap box

Reprieve for Thanksgiving

I heard the bit on the radio yesterday about the president pardoning a turkey.   They do this every year, I’ve heard it many, many times over the years.   I heard it before I was a vegetarian (or pescatarian, as a friend corrects)  and every year for the seven or so since I stopped eating terrestrial meat.  Though the bit annoys me every year, it was not until I heard about Mr. Obama’s scripted bit of mischievous mercy at the White House the day before Thanksgiving that the obvious bludgeoned me.

The two pardoned turkeys, Abe and his understudy Honest, were presumably picked out of a group of condemned birds.  The rest of you butterball bitches, over to the slaughterhouse.  Have a nice ride, boys! The good news was announced on the radio, coast to coast, Abe and Honest would be spared from having their heads cut off and would live out the rest of their lives on a nature farm.  Children could smile at the heartwarming thought of these two lucky birds escaping the hatchet.  

Something I’d never thought of before, in my general disgust at this lightheartedly sadistic ritual of symbolic mercy: if these birds got a presidential pardon, what capital crime were they on Death Row for?   They’d been condemned at birth, true, but what was their actual crime?  Then it hit me.  They’d been found guilty of the crime of being meat.  Not one had been on trial for so much as a second, outside of Abe and Honest in 2015, they’d been condemned by the millions before they were born.

There was no denying their guilt, even if they could have been given due process of some kind.  There’s no defense, even if a genius turkey emerged and somehow made it through Harvard Law School. Guilty as charged:  when cooked skillfully we are delicious.   We can’t really do anything about it, my eloquence and accomplishments notwithstanding, we, as a species, are way too stupid.  Even pigs, who are much smarter than dogs and cats, can do nothing against their executioners.  No pig is ever pardoned, or if she is, we don’t hear about it on the radio between ads for great savings on Black Friday.

I’d heard a guy on the radio several years ago talking about how depressed pigs are when they are shoved into tiny pens too small for them to move around in and force fed.   They understand quickly that they are in Auschwitz, that any plans they might have had regarding their life are now over.  No more wallowing in mud, nuzzling the piglets, no farm kid’s affectionate hand on their bristly side.   Just a horrible life in an industrialized killing plant until they are fattened up enough and then a frightening and brutal death, carried out by underpaid workers who have one of the world’s most gruesome jobs.  

Nice that Abe and Honest got pardoned.  It was the right thing to do, Mr. President.  Kids need this kind of good news in a world where kids are slaughtered every minute of every hour.  On the other hand, sir, what the fuck?  I mean, seriously, what the fuck?

A guy like your predecessor, a likable idiot with some misguided and repugnant views about the world, well, he can get away with it.  I suppose I have to let you off the hook, as a matter of basic fairness.   I try not to ride a high horse just because my cat looked at me with great sensitivity as I was hearing about how depressed pigs get in their mechanized death camps.  

He looked at me like “this surprises you?   That humans are brutal, ruthless creatures who obtain their meat in the most despicable and highly profitable way?   You look surprised.  Pathetic.  How about a treat, you guilt-ridden prick?”  

Could not eat bacon after that, or cow, or even chicken or Abe or Honest’s relatives.   Gives me no right to pontificate about it, I just lost the ability to disconnect the soul of the animal raised for the slaughter from the delicious once-living tissue on my plate.

“Don’t even think about that moral high horse, man.  I got two words for you:  Adolf Hitler, motherfucker.”

Yeah, I know.  The psychopath who set the benchmark for evil was a vegetarian for the last twenty years or so of his hideous life.  A flatulent one, if the accounts of people who didn’t like him can be believed.  Supposedly did it in penance for the murder or suicide of the niece he was obsessed with, probably tried to have sex with.  Too bad his penance wasn’t a bullet through the temple.  Only tragedy about his death was that it didn’t happen twenty years earlier.

“OK, don’t change the subject.  What about the souls of the sentient sea creatures you have no hesitation to eat?  Less sentient than the ones who live on land?  Too alien as a life form to relate to, as you can in your sentimental attachment to cute mammals, anthropomorphized birds?”

Well, I’m just happy as hell that Abe and Honest will be living out their full, bird-brained lives at some game farm somewhere.  God bless this great nation, whose exceptionalness is more exceptional than the exceptionalness of any other people.

Happy Thanksgiving.

 

 

 

Collateral Damage, yawn

This will no doubt seem a peevish time, an ill-timed time, to bring this up, days after the hideous terrorist carnage in Paris, and Beirut.  There is never a good time to bring things like this up.  Why is it that I cannot help but bring things like this up?  It’s just a government policy, after all, mostly secret, designed to kill those who hate us, why the necessity to fuss over it like a bone caught crosswise in the craw?

When someone who is objectively evil, driven to do evil things, like Dick Cheney, or his bully lawyer David Addington, or generously rewarded torture justifiers tenured law professor John Yoo and Federal Judge Jay Bybee, authors of the secret Torture Memos; when someone sees the world in simplistic terms and is seemingly gullible, like George W. Bush, well– it is understandable that to them a bit of “enhanced interrogation” or “collateral damage” would mean little in the general scheme of things.

Who but a pussy, after all, would worry about the rights of people who are quite likely guilty of the most unthinkable crimes?   Or even if not guilty, nothing like a little brutality and a decade or so of detention to weed out the true haters from the ugly fuckers who just look like true haters.

In the case of evil people, or true believers, insisting that their actions are decent and morally justified, all you can really do is clench your jaw, in all but the rarest case you can’t stop them.

But what is one to do when the person ordering daily murders by remote control, from a kill list, and referring to murdered children as “collateral damage” is an excellent salesman who has made of himself the most likable product, an articulate and winning expression of our highest democratic ideals?    The quick-witted, cool exemplar of human decency?

This is, of course, a purely rhetorical question.   Candidates lie.  Presidents spin, conceal their worst acts.  Some give stirring speeches about government transparency that make lovers of participatory democracy tingle and then have a worse record on state secrecy and the concealment of government crimes than Mr. Cheney.   If Israel is condemned for “extra-judicial” killing of its enemies, so be it.  If it then becomes our national policy, secret kill lists, body counts, any dead, dismembered male over 18 presumed to be the enemy, who the hell are you to get all self-righteous about it?  

An excellent question, sir.  You are nobody to get all fucking self-righteous about it.   Better a thousand innocents die over there than one of us be murdered by them over here.  End of story.  

Any other questions, jerk-off?

 

 

 

 

 

A Small Piece of What Hobbles Me

Among the things that have me by the toe, the waning of democracy and the ever steeper upward tilt of the so-called level playing field.

“Are you fucking crazy?  You are held by the toe by a myth that was, at best, an exercise for keeping order and property, designed by the wealthy and maintained, whenever necessary, by their goon squads?”

Democracy was more than that.

“If you say so, my idealistic friend.”

Take the example of public education, a once truly democratic institution.  Not that long ago the children of immigrants, educated in New York City Public Schools, could attend the City College, for affordable tuition they could earn by working as they studied, get an excellent education, graduate debt-free with a degree that was worth as much as degrees now costing $160,000, and find work in their chosen field that allowed them to move out of the tenements where they grew up. 

“OK, nice example of democracy in action, and meritocracy, but times change.  Systems evolve.”

Ya, mon.  This is what has me by the toe, in the New Gilded Age, working with an outmoded belief in something good that is now under constant, coordinated attack by a well-funded army of profiteers.   I designed a program for public elementary school students, to work as a group, guided by their own ideas, supported by adult facilitators.  My idea was to show public school kids, in poor neighborhoods, at their best– give them a showcase to demonstrate what they could do if they weren’t being actively trained to be factory workers in factories that no longer operate in the US, or, failing that, failing, dropping out and becoming prisoners in a privatized for-profit prison system.

“You are pissing into the wind and ignoring the fact that, sad as it may seem to you, you are one of the few people you know who is even passingly following this sickening debate about public education.   Only people with bleeding hearts give more than a passing thought to the fate of the kids you want to work with.  The children of the disenfranchised are an abstraction.   ‘Disenfranchised’ — without the right to meaningfully participate in decisions about their own governance.    But let’s not get lost in emotionality.”

“Look at the numbers, it makes everything easier to understand when you view it with a calculator in hand.   Simply multiply the number of students entitled to a free public education in the U.S. by the sum each state and school district allocates per student.  That number is hundreds of billions of dollars a year, left on the table for substandard education.”

Hundreds of billions of dollars a year. No need to pull a number out of our asses, when we can pluck one from the internets:  $621 billion a year, as of a couple of years ago.

“No small sum, my friend.   Private entrepreneurs who have already shown they know how to make billions are the best stewards of that kind of dough, not people with interesting theories about how children learn, or a quaint belief that cooperation yields more social benefit than competition.   You can’t expect public school administrators, teachers, educational theorists and the like to know as well as Bill Gates, Michael Milken, Michael Bloomberg, giants in making mountains of profit, some of the richest and most enterprising men in the world, how to maximize the profit of that enormous investment in such an important human resource.”  

You make my case for me, friend.   Milken served his time in prison, ten year sentence generously discounted by 80%, seemingly got to keep most of his ill-gotten money and is now called a philanthropist on his Wikipedia page.  We learn at a glance:  

Michael Robert Milken (born July 4, 1946) is an American former financier and philanthropist. He is noted for his role in the development of the market for high-yield bonds (“junk bonds”),[1] for his conviction following a guilty plea on felony charges for violating U.S. securities laws, and for his charitable giving.  

Forbes currently lists his net worth at $2.5 billion.   

Read on and learn how you do it.  This is how you do it:

Milken and his brother Lowell founded Knowledge Universe in 1996, as well as Knowledge Learning Corporation (KLC), the parent company of KinderCare Learning Centers, the largest for-profit child care provider in the country. He is currently chairman of the company.[18] Milken also established K12 Inc., a publicly traded education management organization (EMO) that provides online schooling, including to charter school students for whom services are paid by tax dollars,[19] which is the largest EMO in terms of enrollment.[20]

“This is really the best use of your time right now?  Showing how a convicted billionaire felon/philanthropist is profiting by redirecting public school dollars to his own for-profit enterprises?   This is really the best use of the time that is slipping like sands through the hourglass?”

Not at all, friend, not at all.  Just a small piece of what hobbles me.

Life’s Work

The pursuit of excellence for its own sake is regarded as idiocy in a society that values only the creation of value– that is, the creation of the dough re mi — money you can buy things with.  Things are given value according to how much they’re worth — in dollars and cents. Nothing could be more basic and immutable than this first law of the marketplace, no?   Why bother to write clearly, if not to hone your craft for money?   Why be meticulous about playing in tune, and in time, if nobody is paying — if, in fact, nobody is listening?   I am listening.    

I was checking out a guitar yesterday, a 3/4 size Martin that felt good in my hands, sounded good.   I’d been thinking about it, realizing I’d probably have to buy it, even though it’s not really made of wood. “How does it sound amplified?” I asked the kid with very long hair.   He handed me a cable and led me to a room with padded stools and amps.  

“It sounds good,” he said.  He was right.  Damn, it sounded very good. I began to play, now with a pick, now using fingertips to pluck the chords of One Note Samba; I strummed with my thumb, with the pick.  A nice rich, round tone.  The pleasure of playing this little guitar was considerable, my hands relaxed, playing things they’d played enough to play smoothly, improvising, checking out the harmonics.

Somebody came into the room after a few minutes and began to play another guitar.  At first I was annoyed at the intrusion, but when I realized the guy was playing a straightforward thing in E,  I played in E, some fills, a couple of chords.   It was OK, I could continue to check out the guitar.   My back was to the guy, he’d sat behind me.   He soon got very ornate, playing a fast, elaborate finger-picking piece that was tricky to follow.  He turned up his amp.  

It was quickly obvious that this was the common exhibitionist wanker in a guitar store, there are dozens of them, wailing away, fancying themselves gunslingers, striving for supremacy, the spotlight, the admiration of their flailing peers.   If you walk through the main room of any guitar store there are many of them, bashing away at guitars, in every key, in no key, with varying degrees of skill, playing over each other, all of them way too loud.   The cacophony is unbearable.   They get into cars, if they have them, tailgate, ride the horn, pass on the shoulder cursing as they go, spin out of control, ultimately wind up totaling their cars into a divider.  On a good day.

I never turned to look at him, unplugged the guitar and brought it back to the salesman.  I’ll buy it tomorrow, I decided, when I’ll be in the neighborhood next.

In the subway on the way home I am fleshing out an idea that struck me while walking across 18th Street.  I’d paused to write: reading is magic, think about it.  Marks on paper tell you what I’m thinking.

Picture that animated.   That’s what I was doing on the subway.  I drew a pen, took a brush and painted a shadow under it.  The train swayed, jerked, but I have always written and drawn on trains, am an experienced surfer that way.  It is a very rare stroke that goes wrong for me on a train.   I soon had a 3-D looking calligraphy pen drawn on the page.  I made a note to animate the drawing and then cut the pen out.  I’d take the cut out pen, dip it in a drawing of an ink bottle, the cruder the better, and write the words, in stop-motion, as though they were flowing from the moving pen:

Reading is magic, think about it.  Marks on paper tell me what you’re thinking.  

True.  A simple but powerful illustration of the amazing human invention of writing and reading — communicating anything you can think of to express using combinations of 26 symbols.  Also a powerful evocation of the potential of animation to get kids interested in literacy.   I drew in my book for about ten stops, was pleased and shut my eyes.  It felt wonderful to shut my eyes on that air-conditioned train.  

write ani

Inevitably I had the second thought, which caused my eyes to open and which I began to note on another page — in black and white.  

reading animation

We do not, as a society, give a fuck if you can read, have a rich mental life, consider ideas and solutions to problems you might not have imagined.  We do not, as a society, give a rat’s ass if you can write, beyond clicking a box assuming liability for any and all debts incurred in the course of your dealings with our corporation.  

Our society does not have work, or any productive use, for a good chunk of its people, tens of millions of them.  The young versions of these unneeded people are sent to schools to prepare them for a life where they are not needed.  The lesson many of them learn clearly is: fuck you, asshole, bend over and spread your cheeks.  Lift up the nutsack. Cough.  

Life’s work:  knowing this, all of it, and living calmly and productively, doing everything your talents allow to inspire, give hope, make a small ripple of change.  Death is waiting for you anyway, why be aggravated by the many aggravations this life dispenses so generously for free?

But… besides that, Mrs. Lincoln, this is still the greatest country in the world

Those in our great and wealthy nation who are cruelly fucked need to understand it is usually nothing personal.  Truly.  Nobody gives a shit about you as an individual, that is what the cruel part of cruel fucking is all about.  You as a person are erased, but it’s nothing personal.   The mistreatment was not meted out to you as an individual, so don’t get so individually indignant, man.   Let us look at the case of American blacks, for example.  Let’s take a short historical look at this cruel fucking, see if we can put it in perspective.

We should all be able to agree that the deliberate murder of perhaps ten million African ancestors during the mass kidnapping of slave laborers to the New World was an inhuman atrocity.   As bad as the Holocaust with a capital H was, and as many millions murdered, the sickening carnage of the “Middle Passage” makes any decent person want to vomit as much as the black and white film of rubbery skeletal cadavers being dumped down chutes in the death camps does, or Henry Morgenthau’s contemporary accounts of the nauseating brutality of the genocide Turks inflicted on the Armenians during WW I, or any modern-day version, for that matter.   There is no comparing mass murders, they are all the same.   Done with that argument, OK?

We can agree, one would hope, that slavery was an unmitigated evil that caused irreparable harm, while creating and concentrating vast wealth, and led eventually to a cataclysmic outburst of mass psychosis in which three quarters of a million, mostly poor, Americans lost their lives in combat, (more than the total of American dead in all other wars combined)  another quarter million dead civilians, not to mention the countless maimed, amputated, brain damaged.  The war was fought, as most are, to preserve the privilege of the wealthy who stood to lose a fortune, and their genteel way of life, if slavery was abolished.  There was talk, for a time, about 40 acres and a mule for every freed slave, to minimally compensate them for their centuries of unpaid labors and to put them on their feet as free families.   Nothing was ever done about that, there were soon much more pressing problems for America to deal with.   After the war the nation went into the worst economic depression in its hundred year history, at the end of which the robber barons made untold monopoly fortunes.  For the masses of all colors — mostly misery.  

The only good thing about the Civil War– the end of slavery.  The 13th Amendment made slavery illegal under the U.S. Constitution, except that the Supreme Court quickly put the 14th Amendment, enacted to protect the rights of freed slaves, into a judicially crafted ninety year deep sleep.  While the 14th Amendment slumbered the Ku Klux Klan put on the kind of horror show that hate-filled sore losers with weapons are apt to put on, if not restrained by the law.   A century of terrorism, protected by state laws upheld by the Supreme Court’s perverse 1873 14th Amendment ruling (the resurrected 14th has been in place now for fifty years and tens of thousands of cases brought under it), which gave the former rebel states, who had taken up arms against the nation they seceded from, the last word on the treatment of its citizens, including former slaves.

It is not surprising that the lot of former slaves was hard in the former Confederacy.  

A mass migration northward towards decent paying industrial jobs resulted in a large gathering of the descendants of slaves in the ghettos of major cities.  The decent paying industrial jobs eventually were sent places where the corporations could pay the workers less and therefore keep more of the profits.  Ghettos traditionally have the worst city services, worst schools, highest crime, highest unemployment rates, most repressive policing, and currently– a school to prison pipeline.  And as prisons are increasingly privatized, finally a profitable use for the bulk of these disaffected, often angry, sometimes violent, sons and daughters of the ghettos.  

So while some of us felt proud recently that America had its great post-racial photo-op, a very accomplished and unique half-black man is currently president, it is good to keep things in perspective.   It’s not post-racial in ghettos and housing projects, or in prisons, or on Ivy League campuses or in corporate board rooms.  This country is as divided in many ways, including matters of basic civil rights and race, as it was immediately prior to the Civil War.  Millions of Americans, of all races and every national origin, are simply, how to put this tastefully?… fucked.  

People who are the recipients of sex they did not consent to are often deeply disturbed by the experience.   That said, if it is done on an institutional level, and you live in a democracy where, unless your point of view has billions to spend selling itself via free speech, you have almost no voice as an individual and you must not take it personally.  You really must not take it personally, man.

Really, I mean… you know what I’m saying? 

Don’t Take It Personally, Man

You may be correct to feel that not being told the price of a medical service until after you’ve bought it is like going into a store and not being told, until after you make the purchase, the nonrefundable price, which you are 100% responsible to pay.   Or, like a restaurant where the bill is secret until after you’ve eaten, a policemen waiting to take you in if you refuse to pay whatever the restaurant demands.  Seems unreasonable, un-American, but according to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the practice is neither of these when it comes to medical services. 

Critics will be critics, and some critics ignore the facts in their zeal to score points, but a few things about the flawed step forward that is Obamacare (The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act– PPACA) are beyond dispute. Systemically, it is an improvement over what existed before.   The elimination of the grotesque loophole of “pre-existing condition” exclusion from coverage alone was worth the fight.  Giving the medical industry financial incentives to prevent disease rather than continuing to profit off billions in late in the game testing and end of life treatment is another long overdue step in the right direction.  It can’t be denied that millions more Americans have health insurance under the PPACA and access to preventive care, many for free.

 Those things said, huge problems remain with this compromise, authored by a health insurance industry insider,  that keeps the private health insurance and pharmaceutical industries firmly in charge of seeing their profits undisturbed.    Millions are still uninsured under the PPACA and tens of thousands of Americans will continue to die preventable deaths every year from treatable diseases discovered only in their fatal stages at ERs across the country.  

 Individuals may find also find themselves among a few million in an income category a little too high for free service, and too low to qualify for and afford the premium service members of Congress receive.  Such persons will, unfortunately, be a bit screwed by the details of the PPACA.  

The high deductibles, outsize charges for routine services, billing irregularities and other unappealable indignities may cause these patients to feel unprotected and that the mandated health care they pay for each month is sometimes obscenely unaffordable.   These Americans must take solace from the fact that it is truly nothing personal.

 Yes, it’s your individual problem, true, since the bills will be enforced by lawyers sent to collect all charges, but take courage in knowing that you are not alone in being partially unprotected by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, an otherwise wonderful program.  It’s nothing truly personal, surely you can see this.  It affects millions, so stop your belly-aching!

 If you consult for twenty minutes with a physician’s assistant, for example, who has never heard of the symptom you report, repeats your google research while you sit there, and who orders a blood test to rule out certain things, you may have a little sticker shock when you get the bill for $507.   This sticker shock comes about because there is apparently no provision in the law that the patient be informed of cost prior to receiving a service.  Call your insurance company and they will tell you the doctor must first bill them for the service and then the price is determined, according to negotiated rates, and sent back to the doctor, who will in turn bill the patient the deductible amount.  

It’s all right there on the bill:  consult with physician’s assistant:  patient’s responsibility– $180.   Subsequently reduced, without explanation, on a follow-up bill thirty days later, to $110.   Blood test:  $641.  Patient’s responsibility:  $327.   Insurance, oddly, paid the corporation representing the doctor $314 for the blood test.   $437 for a visit to a physician’s assistant?   Call to ask about these charges and you will be told the charges are all correct, sir, all the proper codes were entered, these are the legal rates your insurance company agreed you would pay.   You can take it up with the attorneys who are handling the collection matter for the doctor’s office.  

 Have a nice day and, please, keep in mind that this is strictly legal, enforceable and absolutely NOTHING PERSONAL!   Only a baby would take it personally, though plenty of folks, apparently, are squawking like babies about their treatment under this inarguably great step forward. 

 To be fair, though, would you rather be treated unfairly with the right to be hospitalized (at no expense beyond your premiums and deductibles) when you finally have a stroke or without that right?  You’d have to be a fool not to see that this is a no brainer.   

 

America, America

I must find something to occupy me more productively during the long working day. Come home after work too tired to think, with a feeling of accomplishment or even just relief to be done, get a paycheck.   This unpaid uphill life I’m living is too challenging.  

Having a simple, self-evident and overdue idea: that kids in trouble need to be listened to, need to be allowed to play, make creative and editorial decisions in relation to their learning — testing it a hundred times, watching it succeed everywhere — what the hell is that balanced against its failure to thrive, against the vast landscape of intolerable annoyances that can only truly be surmounted by unqualified success, or, in the meantime, a dedicated spiritual practice or an all-consuming job?  That it might well help every child it touches?  Succeed against the odds or shut the fuck up, loser.  

Why for example get worked up about the details of the new trade bill President Obama is trying to fast track through Congress?   Up or down vote, you don’t need to debate the details, it’s bipartisan.  

Personally, I have other things to worry about, like the $507 bill for last month’s twenty minute session with the Nurse Practitioner ($180) and a blood test ($327).  I have to take a walk and arrange a meeting with an ombudsman or patient advocate at Columbia Doctors, see how far I can negotiate it down to a reasonable number.

“Sir, $327 for a blood test IS a reasonable number, approved by Empire Blue Cross under the terms of the PPACA, as is $180 for a consultation with a medical professional who, arguably, should not have been on Google perplexedly searching for ‘pink mucas’ for the bulk of your short meeting, shouldn’t have offered to do a rectal exam she knew — when asked– would tell her nothing, and who should probably have asked about your recent diet, stress, changes in life, exercise, sleep and so forth instead of just making a referral to a specialist– particularly since the questions she didn’t ask turned out to be keys to solving your bowel problems, as you did on your own. But your bill has been negotiated on your behalf and approved by the insurance company and is legal, mandatory and collectible under the PPACA.  If you have a problem with it, talk to your congressman.  You owe us $507 and since you have insurance your argument about being treated as uninsured, and allowed the discount we often give to such patients, is flatly absurd.  Unless you’d like the bill turned over to our debt collector, like many before it, pay it now.  How would you like to pay, cash, check or credit card?”

I don’t know, for the life of me, why I’m not making a call now to make arrangements to have that fun discussion instead of tapping here.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement is no doubt a massive and complicated bill.   The president gets hot when he’s accused of keeping it secret.  It is not secret, he insists, any member of Congress can make an appointment to go read it.  They simply may not bring staffers with them, may not photocopy any part of it or remove it from the restricted reading room, may not make notes or discuss its terms with anybody with clearance who hasn’t seen it.  That’s what fast-track means, up or down vote — “yes” or “no”– there’s no need for debate.  Plenty of Republicans are already on board to vote “yes”.  What the hell is the problem with the liberal wing of the president’s own party?

Maybe it’s the lack of public debate?  I don’t know.  Secrecy, and even semi-secrecy, has a bad smell in a democracy where an informed electorate is supposed to be involved in the decisions made on its behalf.  We all know this is a bit of a myth, but still, secrecy is a slap in the voters’ faces, and it smells bad.  

When Vice President Cheney and President Bush could not stall the 9/11 Commission beyond November 2002, they set conditions for speaking to the commission. They would go before the commission together, not be sworn to tell the truth, nor would they testify, no notes, no recordings, everybody on the commission was sworn to keep whatever they said secret.   Struck me as a deal a couple of mafia dons would make, if they owned the court system and the police force.  Sunlight is the best disinfectant for abuses of democracy, as well as hateful free speech, except, apparently, when it shines into the dark side where it doesn’t belong.  Some things are best kept secret from a skittish electorate that can’t handle the truth, is the theory.

Think of the stink that would have engulfed us if the enhanced interrogation program had not been kept secret, except for those members of a Congressional committee who got restricted access to secret memos, after agreeing, under the penalties for treason, not to disclose their classified contents. The memos, it turns out, justified everything by arguing that each enumerated torture technique was not torture if a doctor was present to make sure death did not result from it.  Imagine the outrage if the public had been let in on the details of that program!

We’re just finding out now about guys hung by chains naked, submerged in ice water, kept in cages half the size of a coffin, kept awake for days on end, in cold, and heat, and menaced by snarling dogs, and look how pissed off some of us feel.  Imagine if we’d known while it was being systematically done to hundreds, or possibly thousands, of suspected bad men held without charges in secret prisons scattered around the globe?  Imagine if we’d known that $81,000,000 in taxpayer dollars had been paid to two rogue psychologists to oversee this controversial, failed experiment in counter-terrorism?

The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement  has at least one provision that some people will get upset about, rightly or wrongly.   I don’t know how we know about this provision, since the contents of the trade agreement have never been made public, but nobody seems to be denying that this is one of its provisions.  Ah, I see some traitor has apparently leaked a section of it, to Wikileaks, natch.

Corporations whose profit expectations have been diminished or damaged by laws or regulations of member states will be able to sue those state, local or federal governments, in special Investor-State Dispute Settlement tribunals.  The judges in these tribunals will be lawyers who have experience in the area the corporation works in, be familiar with the nuances of their profit expectations.   Many will have, without a doubt, worked for, or even still work for, these corporations.

“But it’s the same with the Security and Exchange Commission,” you will argue, correctly.  “The government lawyers there charged with catching financial shenanigans are the minor leaguers, the best of whom will get to work for the corporations they regulate for many times their government salary.  That’s the world, why be a weak little whiny bitch about it?  Make some money, you’ll feel better.”

The conspiracy theorists among us imagine the worst.  Alarmists and weaklings, one and all.  After all, NAFTA turned out fine.  And the draft provision for the Investor-State Dispute Settlement tribunals (see linked Washington Post article) includes, ironically, clear transparency rules, requiring that all cases brought under the TPP must be public.

The enhanced interrogation program, or torture program, if you’re being a pain-in-the-ass stickler for accuracy, even though it was far more extensive than admitted, even though evidence of some of the more medieval abuses was deliberately destroyed, even though it must be admitted that little or no actionable intelligence resulted from this widespread, systematic trampling on decades of evolving human rights law and the anti-torture treaties we championed, well, no harm no foul.  You can understand the need to keep that kind of shit top secret, just look at the harm the after-the-fact revelations have been doing.

Barack Obama is a good man, a brilliant and witty man.  He’s a funny, cool guy with everyone’s best interests at heart.  If he says this bill needs to be fast-tracked, who is a nation of obstructionist ignoramuses to say no?   Finally he has a truly bipartisan bill he’s trying to sign into law and stubborn members of the president’s own party are standing in his way.  Many Americans hate him simply because his father was African and, under the time-honored American code of racism, he is considered a black man.   I rest my case.  Fast track this shit.  Father knows best.

“Get a job, you bum!” a witty fan yells at the ump.

Why would it bother me?

My father never bought products made in Germany.  It was because of German industry’s involvement with the death camps.  IG Farben paid the SS $1 a day for slave laborers from Auschwitz, they were marched from the death camp to the nearby factory until they couldn’t be profitably used anymore, then they went into a gas chamber.  Mercedes-Benz, according to my father, a student of history who read the NY Times every day, built some kind of killing machine (I forget exactly what he told me), possibly the gas chambers or ovens for The Final Solution.  I may have them confused with BMW, who also used slave laborers from the death camps.  The drivers of both brands, to this day, tend to be unyielding at crosswalks, I’ve noticed.

“Is it right to hate the children and grandchildren of people who made money working for Hitler?” I asked, a bit rhetorically, when I was in high school.  

“It’s justified,” said my dad, “and I hate them.”   

“Would Viet Namese people be justified, 50 years from now, in hating us and boycotting American made products because of what the government of the USA did to their parents, grandparents, their countryside?” I asked him.  

“Yep,” said my dad.   I think he was right, too.  Particularly if you live in a democracy– the government speaks for the electorate.   In spite of literally millions turning out to protest Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Bush’s march toward war against Iraq, our government visited hell on that nation.  Do Iraqis have a right to hate America?   You bet your ass they do.

One of my problems is that I never get over certain things.  I find myself thinking of the calculated and bogus case that was made for raining death and destruction on the population of Iraq.  I think of how President Obama generously turned the page on recently committed American war crimes, while justifying his own highly classified murderous practices.  

The final “evidence” of the connection between Saddam and 9/11 that was trumpeted by the Bush Administration was from an al-Queda prisoner we’d secretly shipped to Egypt to be tortured.  In order to get the torture to stop al-Libi said Saddam was training al-Queda in the use of poison gas and other chemical WMD.   When he was released by the Egyptians he immediately recanted, admitted he told them that to make the torture, the super-super enhanced interrogation, stop.  Yet his information, extracted under torture, was the lynchpin of the entire falsified case for invading Iraq.

Then you have the war, the debates, the traitors, the people who hate our freedom, freedom on the march, torture redefined as necessary to use against people who hate our freedom, we call it “enhanced interrogation” now and we only did it a few times, destroyed videotapes of the worst of it, pretended (as Cheney continues to) it had extracted “actionable intelligence”, though it’s highly unlikely it ever did, classified memos relating to its use, blah blah, economic disaster in 2008 orchestrated by powerful elites who profited handsomely from systematic fraud and were never punished for any of it …. so really, who today can be expected to get excited about this paragraph?

 There is a sad postscript to the story. Al-Libi is the only “high-value” detainee who was not sent to Gitmo for eventual trial before a military tribunal. Instead, he was quietly turned over to Moammar Gadhafi’s henchmen in Libya, and just days after being visited by Human Rights Watch, was found hanging from his neck inside a Libyan prison. His family believes he was murdered to cover up the true story of what happened to him. We’ll never know the answer to that, but we do know with certainty that an American president used bogus intelligence from a tortured detainee to make a false claim to the American public and to the world.

source

Ho hum.  Maybe some day I’ll grow up, I can only hope.