Category Archives: soap box

Integrity — exercise in imagination

“You mean to tell me this American citizen has been locked up, without charges, in solitary confinement, for almost a year over there?” asks the president sharply.

“Yes, sir,” says a high ranking advisor, “at our request, sir.  He’s articulate, and pissed off and self-righteous.  He preaches in perfcct English and in native Arabic.  He has a worldwide following of young jihadi types.  He could be lethal winning hearts and minds for al Que’da.”

“Can’t we charge him with anything?  He’s an American citizen, are we now detaining American citizens without charges, without habeas corpus, without any sort of judicial process? Has the Constitution been suspended for citizens who are too critical of our policies and I’m just the last to find out?”

“We really don’t have grounds to charge him with anything, sir, other than abusing the First Amendment.  We need to hold him, though.  He’s dangerous, charismatic, his internet sermons are inspiring fanatical youth around the world.”

“Can’t we shut down his website?”

“We did.  The sermons circulate on DVD.  It’s best to keep him locked up, sir.”

“Under the secret detention black site policies Dick Cheney and David Addington put into place when this country went to the dark side?”

Sometimes no answer is the best answer, the advisors hold their peace.  

“Charge this guy and have him extradited or tell Yemen to cut him loose,” orders the president, turning to the next name on the list.  

A year or so later, still not charged with any crime, the American cleric was released from prison.  

A couple of years later his name appears on a kill list given to the president.  The president is known for his  eidetic memory.

“Isn’t this the guy who Yemen had in solitary without charges, the American citizen we finally told them to cut loose?”

“Yes, Mr. President.  He’s still giving sermons, and his rhetoric is on fire.  We need to silence him.”

“I ask you again, general, can we charge this motherfucker with a crime before we kill him?  Any crime?  At one time extra-judicial executions were frowned upon.  We Americans always frowned upon them, publicly at least.  Are we now killing even American citizens without feeling the need to even charge them with a crime?   Doesn’t his father have a lawsuit in our courts to keep him off the kill list?”

“The law suit will be moot, sir, if we shoot.”

Moment of decision, where one would like to imagine a man of integrity drawing a principled line he will not cross.  An American citizen cannot be killed without judicial review.   Even if he is charged and tried in absentia, there is some legal process, some requirement to prove guilt of a crime serious enough to punish with execution, before we sentence one of our citizens to death.  It’s just wrong, putting a name on a secret list and designating him for death, especially one of our own citizens and it sets a very dangerous precedent.

“Mr. President, he’s been eluding us for many months, for over a year.  He’s becoming a hero in that wild tribal area in Yemen and a symbol of defiance.  We know where he is tonight, we have a small window to act.  We need to kill him now, sir.”  

A long pause.  “Fine,” the signature scrawled left-handed next to the American’s name, marked for death.  “Just don’t come to me in a couple of weeks and tell me you also killed his teenaged son with the dreadlocks, or the kid’s friends listening to hiphop somewhere.”

“Will do, Mr. President, absolutely.  Thank you, sir.”

 

 

Here we go, the ACA, in a nutshell

Haven’t discovered how to enforce my right not to receive apparently fraudulent bills from health care providers (so far I’ve had a few hundred dollars for duplicative demands for payment dismissed, after calls to billers).  But part of the difficulty with the law is put in context by the following:

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), codified as amended at scattered sections of the Internal Revenue Code and in 42 U.S.C. commonly called the Affordable Care Act (ACA) or “ObamaCare“, is a United Statesfederal statute signed into law by President Barack Obama on March 23, 2010.  (Wikipedia)

When I wrote the other day that it was written by the health insurance and pharmaceutical industry to benefit those industries, I was lacking the name of the author of the ACA.  A friend found it for me in remarkably short order.   Her name is Elizabeth Fowler and she worked closely with former Senator Max Baucus between three separate stints in the industry.

Here’s a good article about Elizabeth Fowler, health industry insider and primary author of the PPACA, now back working for Johnson & Johnson — with a very worthwhile five minute video editorial by Bill Moyers at the end of the article.

(Thanks to JDS for sending link to article on Liz Fowler and her stinking ilk)

If you prefer an article in the New York Times, read this.

A bit more about Ms. Fowler and her former boss, Mr. Baucus:

Fowler’s career in Washington stretches back more than a decade, when she first left a private sector hospital group in Minnesota in 2000 to join the Health Care Financing Administration, a federal agency now known as the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).

By the following year, Fowler had landed at the powerful Senate Finance Committee, working on health care issues for Montana Democrat Max Baucus. Lobbying records show that Fowler stayed until 2006, when she departed for a two-year stint at health insurance company WellPoint, only to return to the Senate in 2008, again working on health policy for Baucus.

When it comes to health care, and health lobbyists, Baucus isn’t just any senator. Since 1998, he has collected more than $5.1 million in campaign contributions from the insurance, pharmaceutical and nursing industries, making him one of the health care sector’s most heavily backed lawmakers.

 (the rest of the article is here —->)  yawn, yawn 

The Difficulty of Even Researching the ACA

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is one of those taunting, ironic names government sometimes gives to things.   That patients are not protected from billing practices that violate the law, that the rights that must be protected are not discoverable without massive effort (my own efforts continue, I’ll let you know when this lawyer discovers the section of the massive and complicated law that outlines these inviolable rights)  that there is no place to have a clear adjudication of the many violations of protected rights, and that the health care is not necessarily affordable add to this citizen’s sense of being taunted.

My frustration reminds me of how angry I felt, the day after millions gathered across the globe, and I was one of hundreds of thousands in New York City out protesting on an arctic day, threatened by NYPD on horseback and kept blocks from the U.N., when then President Bush announced that we would invade Iraq in a war based on endlessly repeated lies and the profit calculations of a few powerful corporations.

“Those stupid, cynical, Nazi motherfuckers!”  I remember thinking as Operation Shock and Awe began in my name.  That was just my frustration speaking.   The architects of that illegal war were not stupid– they made a ton of money whacking that hornet’s nest and destabilizing an already volatile part of the global warming puzzle. Nobody whose actions lead to amassing a fortune can be called stupid, not here.   Cynical?  Perhaps, you could make a good argument there, but there is no law against being a cynic.  

Nazis?  Well, to put things into perspective, the Nazis started a war that killed tens of millions while deliberately exterminating many millions in specially designed death camps.  The Bush Administration killed only about 500,000 Iraqis, many of them, undoubtedly people who hated America.  Moreover, not one of these Iraqis was killed in a death camp, there simply were no death camps.  Perhaps 1% of that number of Americans were killed liberating Iraq from a monster, so already comparisons with the Nazis seem a bit strained, don’t they?  

The Bush Administration, as President Obama finally admitted “tortured some folks”, but even a quick comparison makes one realize how unfair it is to call them Nazis.  They really believed they were doing the right thing!

Maybe Max Baucus, whose committee wrote the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act so reviled and attacked by the President’s legions of bitter enemies believed the same thing.  The health insurance industry, and the pharmaceutical industry, two huge supporters of the long-time senator, would be badly hurt by a single payer system that would allow a few hundred million Americans to bargain for health services that could be fairly regulated by the federal government.  Where is the freedom in that?  Stinks of Socialism and restraint of the free market, don’t it?

Don’t believe me, here’s what Wikipedia says about Mr. Baucus  and the practical conflict of conscience * he endured while overseeing creation of the immensely dense Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  In a five year period prior to beginning his work on Obamacare he took in almost $5,000,000 in campaign contributions from the industries the new law would either make much more profitable or rob of a good share of its profitability.  Doesn’t take a genius to put the sad facts together.

What I’m looking for, and haven’t found yet, in addition to a clear cut answer on whether I should pay bills for hundreds of dollars for a covered preventive service, on top of my $471 monthly premium, is the name of the woman, one of the primary authors of the grotesquely tangled ACA,  who went through the revolving door President Obama announced would be closed, and returned to work for the health insurance industry at an annual salary in the millions.   Can you say “job well done”?   Good thing Mr. Obama closed that revolving door, as important as his closing of Gitmo.   Ask the prisoners there who are being force fed with tubes down their throats how that closing of Gitmo thing worked out for them.

Sarah Palin winks atcha.

 

 

* Baucus has been criticized for his ties to the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries, and was one of the largest beneficiaries in the Senate of campaign contributions from these industries.[40] From 2003-08, Baucus received $3,973,485 from the health sector, including $852,813 from pharmaceutical companies, $851,141 from health professionals, $784,185 from the insurance industry and $465,750 from HMOs/health services, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.[49][50] A 2006 study by Public Citizen found that between 1999 and 2005 Baucus, along with former Senate majority leader Bill Frist, took in the most special-interest money of any senator.[51]

Only three senators have more former staffers working as lobbyists on K Street, at least two dozen in Baucus’ case.[51] Several of Baucus’s ex-staffers, including former chief of staff David Castagnetti, are now working for the pharmaceutical and health insurance industries.[52]Castagnetti co-founded the lobbying firm of Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti, which representsAmerica’s Health Insurance Plans Inc, the national trade group of health insurance companies, the Medicare Cost Contractors Alliance, as well as Amgen, AstraZeneca PLC and Merck & Co.Another former chief of staff, Jeff Forbes, opened his own lobbying shop and to represent thePharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America and the Advanced Medical Technology Association, among other groups.[citation needed]

A statistical analysis of the impact of political contributions on individual senators’ support for the public insurance option conducted by Nate Silver has suggested that Baucus was an unlikely supporter of the public option in the first place. Based on Baucus’s political ideology and the per capita health care spending in Montana, Silver’s model projects that there would be only a 30.6% probability of Baucus supporting a public insurance option even if he had received no relevant campaign contributions. Silver calculates that the impact on Baucus of the significant campaign contributions that he has received from the health care industry further reduces the probability of his supporting a public insurance option from 30.6% to 0.6%.[53]

In response to the questions raised by the large amount of funding he took from the health care industry, Baucus declared a moratorium as of July 1, 2009 on taking more special interest money from health care political action committees.[54] Baucus, however, refused to return as part of his moratorium any of the millions of dollars he has received from health care industry interests before July 1, 2009, or to rule out a resumption of taking the same or greater health care industry contributions in the future.[54] His policy on not taking health care industry money reportedly still allowed him to accept money from lobbyists or corporate executives, who, according to The Washington Post, continued to make donations after July 1, 2009.[54] A watchdog group found that in July 2009 Baucus accepted additional money from the health care industry in violation of his own self-defined moratorium terms, reportedly leading Baucus to return those monies.[55]

source

Obamacare 101

If you receive health insurance under the Affordable Care Act (“ACA”), Obamacare, you already know that it has all of the elements of a corporate scam.  If not, the jury would seem to still be out.   I’m here to tell you that the verdict is in.

I have a politically progressive friend who reads the Wall Street Journal every day.  He argues that the ACA has been a great step forward.  It covers millions more uninsured Americans than ever before and is beginning to rein in runaway medical costs.   As a participant in the ACA, and no fan of the Wall Street Journal, I can tell you from direct experience how closely Obamacare resembles an insurance industry scam.  

On the plus side first, it can’t be denied that eliminating the loophole of “pre-existing conditions”, the term that enabled American health insurance companies to deny insurance if you were ever sick with a particular disease, was welcome, and long-overdue.   There are other good features, no doubt. The perfect should never become the enemy of the good, as the president has said, but for the most part the ACA, that great free market compromise with comprehensive health care reform written primarily by and for the insurance industry, profits mainly that industry.   Like many other boons applauded by the Wall Street Journal, it involves large profits for the canny few at the expense of the clueless many.  

The opacity of the 900 page ACA is one of its most notable features.  If your rights and remedies are hard to discover, most people pay the bills they are sent and kiss their rights and remedies goodbye.

New York State set up a Health Care Marketplace at the earliest possible date.   We were all in for Obamacare.  Visit the New York State of Health website and you will marvel at the opacity of the consumer-friendly system.  From the difficulty of signing in (that’s called Get Started, by the way, no matter how many times you’ve already gotten started), to the lack of easily navigable plan details, to the absence of a clear statement of what the ACA is, or what it guarantees, to the almost completely useless help number (“we are experiencing more than the usual volume of callers, your business is very important to us”) you will see enough to discourage the casual seeker of health insurance from persisting there.  Also, enough to deter anyone looking for the rights guaranteed by the law in clear, unequivocal language.

“Preventative services are 100% covered,” the helpful woman at the NYS of Health assures me, after only 35 minutes on hold.  I ask her where I can see a list of these covered services, since I’ve already paid $150 in co-pays towards my recent colonoscopy and am being dunned, and threatened with collection letters, for an additional $281 connected with this preventative service.   She isn’t sure where I can find that language, the NYS of Health Marketplace only sells the plans, they don’t actually administer them or oversee the individual insurance companies.  

This particular woman is great, sympathetic, smart.  I kick myself that I did not get her name.  We look together for language that says I’m entitled to have my colonoscopy paid for 100% under the ACA, for my $471 monthly premium.  I find, several screens later, in only 4 or 5 clicks, this page, under Resources, and on the pull-down menu there’s a link for Using Your Plan, that eventually takes me to this, at the bottom of that page:    

Sep 26, 2013

Covered Benefits and Out-of-Pocket Costs for 2014 Standard Health Plans

And I read, under What Are Essential Health Benefits, number 9, the closest I will find to any kind of confirmation of this seemingly simple yes or no fact that preventive services are not subject to any deductible, to wit:  

Prevention & wellness services and long-lasting disease management

“You are entitled to be repaid that $150 you already paid for a covered service.  If your insurance company is making you pay any fee in connection with a colonoscopy they are not in compliance with the ACA and you should hold their feet to the fire,” this bright woman, a former health insurance industry appeals expert, tells me firmly.  

She informs me, in answer to my question, that the Department of Financial Services (“DFS”) is the state agency that holds insurance companies accountable for compliance issues.  She gives me their 800 number (800-842-3736  M-F 8:30-4:30).   I ask why there is no information about that on the NYS of Health webpage. They are discouraging frivolous complaints, she explains, since so many people are having problems with the ACA.  Not publishing the complaint number reduces the amount of angry callers making unfounded complaints before they have followed up with their individual insurance plans to make sure the insurers are out of compliance before calling DFS to lodge a complaint.

Makes me think of President Obama’s laudable campaign promises about transparency in government, protection of whistle blowers, and robust protections for consumers. Clear knowledge of one’s rights, after all, is a precondition to exercising them.   Few things are more important to the proper functioning of a just and accountable democratic republic than government transparency.   Few things are more useful to exploiters, despots and profiteers than the secret concealment of devilish details that might galvanize righteous opposition.

I recall the president’s campaign rhetoric and think of the Obama administration, the most opaque in our history, whatever else one might say about it, and my jaws clench. And I have to say, between Obama and Bush, dealing with the latter is much less soul crushing to an idealistic citizen than listening to the glib eloquence of the Equivocator in Chief, great lover of justice and defender of the common citizen that he is.

 

 

Rationales versus Reasons

Now, admittedly, I am a foolish idealist.  I don’t say this to be cute, only to underscore that living in a world with concrete, monetizable values that override fairness, and what was once quaintly thought of as common decency, it seems foolish to me, over and over, to keep dreaming of a more merciful and equitable society.  It would be different, perhaps, if I had great wealth to hire a talented team to help me market my fond ideals, but that’s a pointless thought.

In the decade before the Civil War, an unprecedented carnage not eclipsed for more than fifty years, when machine guns, aerial assault and poison gas were added to the atrocities of trench warfare, our countrymen were poised to kill each other.   We are again now.    Violence is the default setting in our violent nation and when one people holds another under their dirty boot long enough the only answer becomes murder.  Justifiable homicide, each injured party believes righteously.   

We now have a culture where each side feels, once again, as though it has been held under the other’s dirty boot for long enough.  This feeling is amplified by the mass media, which does whatever it can to get people to tune in.   Billions of dollars hang in the balance and truth, a slippery thing in any case, is reconciled only in the corporate bottom line.

So instead of serious discussions, and an honest search for the real reasons for our problems and possible solutions, we get rationales and overheated partisan rhetoric.  Talented talking head pundits make millions of dollars to pontificate, deliver talking points and push a party line, their demographic choir lustily nodding their agreement, shuddering in disgust, pumping their fists.  My foolish idealism believes, like Anne Frank, before the Nazis killed her, that all people are basically good.  If they had the facts, and a bit of honesty, just a little….

Right, Dave.

I offer just two rationales, instead of reasons, that merely state a good enough excuse to do something truly inexcusable.  In fairness, let me qualify that.   The displacement of millions of people, the violent deaths of tens or hundreds of thousands– not necessarily inexcusable, fair enough.  But to be fair, and in the context of an unprovoked attack on a country ruled by a tyrant and massive destruction in the name of freeing them, it seems a bit hard to excuse.

Rationale for the war in Iraq: 

Why Iraq?  Because we and many others (Democrats too) thought he had WMD’s and because we could use a strong country in the Middle East that was sympathetic to us for their liberation.

This rationale leaves out the oft trumpeted connection between Saddam and al Qaeda, which turned out to be as false as the WMD rationale.   That the CIA and many foreign intelligence sources knew the reports of this connection and the WMDs were false was not seen as an impediment to the invasion of a country that would be sympathetic to us even if we inadvertently destroyed its infrastructure, displaced millions, killed many thousands, subjected it to more than a decade of mayhem, explosions, assassinations and so on, in the name of freedom and democracy… well, such are the costs of war, the price of freedom, one might rationalize.

And I am tortured by torture, as I keep saying.   It makes my skin crawl that so many Americans are so nonchalant about what our government has been doing in our names.  I was proud of John McCain for this speech.  Here is a rationale for torture, you will notice how different it is from a good reason to torture, something that, outside of doing it to inflict maximum pain on someone you hate, I have never heard:

I don’t justify torture…water boarding isn’t torture…it’s used in the training of our troops.  And we only water-boarded three people.  And the times then called for enhanced interrogation methods so that 9/11 could never happen again.

A person saying this, you might think, well, you, Sir, have set up a straw man to try to prove your point.   This is an actual answer to the question “how do you justify Americans torturing people?”.  It seems unfair to suggest that if we grabbed this woman, shoved a bag over her head, rushed her, shackled and diapered, to a dark, coffin-sized cell and locked her in there for a few weeks she would say the same thing at the end of her little adventure.  Even if we did not strip her naked, kept her cell at a comfortable temperature, left her in silence and never put a gag in her mouth, tilted her upside down on a board and poured water into the gag until the doctor monitoring the procedure told us we were about to accidentally kill her.

As for me, I just wish I had something productive to keep me busy enough not to think of these things.   I sometimes envy people I know who are running at high speed all day, far too busy to ponder, more than momentarily, things so sickening, and so futile and depressing to ponder.

Yemeni girl004

photograph from Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars: The World is A Battlefield.

 

A Thought on Frederick Douglass and Justice

If you read the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, you will have no doubt you are in the presence of a towering refutation of the racist lies of American slavery.   You will understand, within a few paragraphs, why teaching a slave to read was considered such a serious offense.  To compare a man to a barnyard animal when that man can speak and write as eloquently and powerfully as Douglass does, shoves the smug comparison back down the ignorant comparer’s throat.

I received an email yesterday comparing our Founding Fathers to the Jewish warriors, the Maccabees, who drove the forces of Antiochus out of ancient Israel, a rebellion celebrated in the rare nationalistic holiday of Chanukah. The speaker gave the pertinent details:

 “The 167 BCE Jewish rebellion led by the Hasmonean (Maccabee) family against the Seleucid/Greek Emperor Antiochus (IV) Epiphanies, who was determined to ruthlessly uproot Judaism and replace it with Hellenic values.”

The Founding Fathers and the Maccabees, he said, were determined, idealistic, brave, visionaries who prevailed for freedom against powerful enemies in spite of the massive odds against them.   Their truth goes marching on, the email intimated, as does the connection between American democracy, a light unto the world, and modern day Israel which embodies the ancient code the Jews gave to the world.

As I read the email I thought of the same speech being delivered by any number of true believers.   Every true believer believes their cause is uniquely just, that their greatest leaders are determined, idealistic, brave visionaries fighting often impossible odds against evil enemies intent on their destruction.  One woman’s freedom fighter is another woman’s terrorist and so on.  I replied that I wondered how someone like Frederick Douglass, who gave a famous speech on July 4th, 1852, years after his own escape from an American slavery still heartily underway, might feel about this discussion of American Freedom and the Light unto the Nations bit.

My friend wrote back that she meant to read a bit more about Douglass, but that it was her impression that he was a “‘Jeffersonian-type’ thinker,’ always able to see the whole picture and understand the context of the times.”

I wrote back suggesting she read more from the pen of Douglass and then ventured, in my opinionated way:

For him to have been a Jeffersonian-type during slavery would have been like a guy in Auschwitz taking a nuanced view of Hitler.  I think even Jefferson’s most privileged house slaves probably were not enlightened enough to see the “big picture” and be consoled by the idea that in just a couple of hundred years there would be a black president.  

Here is the heart of the speech Frederick Douglass delivered on Independence Day 1852:

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

The whole speech is here.

I Mash Yer Fez– rewrite

There is irony that flies and irony too heavy to leave the ground.  Sometimes you can tweak the flightless variety a bit, sometimes not.  I tried and failed in my first attempt at this one a couple of days back, to the horror of more than one reader.  I will give it a more straightforward shake, lose some of the italics, try to say directly what I meant to say the first time.

I endorse gentleness and mildness, and strive to maintain these qualities above all, although it is not easy work.   Our society is violent, competitive and challenging, for one thing.   Most humans are prone to anger when mistreated or frustrated.   It is an almost irresistibly good feeling to be right, to feel justified, to prevail.  This reflex to prevail is a common cause of friction and leads to righteous anger when we feel wronged or victimized in our zero sum society.   Wars are fought, faces punched, prisons filled, lives destroyed, out of righteous anger.    

Our society’s laws, not always designed to ensure fairness, can be seen as the organized expression of this rage to be right.   Follow me here: laws are made by those with the power to institutionalize their unfair advantage, no matter how grotesque, and to enforce it by deadly state action, if necessary.  The penalty for looting after a natural disaster and making off with a bag of groceries — prison, if you’re not shot first.  The penalty for participating in, and profiting handsomely from, billion dollar financial fraud — it’s complicated.

Our land of the free and the home of the brave, the worlds’ first modern republican democracy, was for a century a land of slavery.  This history is considered ancient and is rarely discussed at any depth.   The arguments against slavery are many, well-known, have in recent times won the day. It seems beyond dispute now that slavery is evil, morally repugnant and illegal.  The single compelling argument for a century of American slavery was this:  we need them to make ourselves wealthier by having a slave economy, fuck you, stay out of our way of life.  

The bitter, bloody struggle that resulted in the abolition of American slavery was over for less than a decade before a legally sanctioned new version of The Peculiar Institution was set in place for a century by Supreme Court skullduggery and racist codes of strict segregation violently maintained by terrorism winked at under the laws of the former slave states.   The struggle for freedom for the descendants of slaves during that century cost many brave lives.  

Today many Americans feel satisfied that slavery is deep in our past, some consider us a “post racial society”, since we now have a half-black man in the White House.  Can anyone really say with a straight face that our ongoing history of racism at law and in practice has ever been seriously addressed in this country?

Slavery and racism are considered by many as elements of ancient history, and they are hot subjects that raise hackles on both sides.  Fine, then, let’s grant that American racism is all in the past, for the sake of moving on and take a look at more recent outrages at law.  

We have been, since the devastating, coordinated terrorist attacks of 9/11/01, engaged in a permanent war against terrorism, The War on Terror, a war that is used to justify many excesses including the murder of many blameless civilians in a number of countries, right now.  

Soon after the 9/11 attacks Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld  fired chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Hugh Shelton, a commander reluctant to abandon legal safeguards designed to minimize the deaths of innocent people and ensure a solid intelligence foundation before employing elite, secret black ops squads to kill suspected terrorists.   Rumsfeld replaced him with a new general who agreed with the sleek, muscular, infinitely flexible new black ops policy the Bush administration had in mind to go after al Qaeda and similar groups.

They sincerely believed that preventing the killing of innocent civilians was a meaningless consideration in an all out existential world-wide War On Terror.  Collateral damage, Rumsfeld and the Bush administration believed, is inevitable and, if kept secret, not something many Americans would get excited about.  They were correct in that calculation.  What you don’t know, you don’t want to know, even if you thought you might have needed to know it, if you know what I’m saying.

Before circumventing the letter, spirit and intent of national security and anti-torture laws and treaties, the administration hired a team of lawyers to write preemptive justifications detailing why they are legally allowed, even obliged, to not follow the laws they were willfully violating.

What makes all this intolerable for an idealist who believes, Anne Frank-like, in spite of it all, in democracy, is that these legal justifications are classified, state secrets kept from the citizens of the world’s greatest democracy.   And once these secret policies are given a fig leaf of legality and put into motion, it is almost impossible to stop them.  Our current president has stepped up the secret killings and prosecuted journalists under a 1917 anti-espionage statute carrying the death penalty to prevent the release of truths about our policies that might embolden our many enemies.

Righteous rage can be intoxicating to a maniac.  While intoxicated with what feels to him like righteous rage, spraying machine gun fire at inhuman enemies seems like a reasonable thing to do.  After that, though, the let down often comes quickly.  After a moment’s reflection the maniac is as likely to turn the gun on himself as to do anything else.  

Personally, no matter how provoked or worked up, I would err on the side of pausing to take a few breaths before capitulating to rage and smashing someone’s fez.  

Unless under direct physical threat, being gentle, calm and soft-spoken is usually much more productive than being righteously enraged, agitated, loud, and ready for justifiable violence.  

Of course, I know where I live and I fully realize how idiotic what I’m saying sounds.  Even if I’m totally right.

 

On the other hand — I smash yer fez

[warning:  this post contains violent, heavy handed irony which does not always work in written form.  In fact, it didn’t fare much better in an out loud reading, where it caused a tearful plea to please stop reading it (right before the too late redeeming ending, too).  Abhorring slavery, assassination, lynching, maniacal use of firearms, it uses violent language to try to show the amount of righteous rage violence unleashes, but it is a dangerous game not to be played lightly, as I have attempted to play it here.   I regret any upset this post may cause, even as I leave it here, for whatever redeeming social value it might have.  A less visceral, more humane version is here if you prefer your points made less brutally.]

 

And, with accursed French nuance, I confusingly add that, naturally, it also feels almost irresistibly good to be righteously outraged, you fucking fuck!  

What are the laws, after all, but the organized expression of this rage to be right?   They are made by those with the power to institutionalize their unfair advantage, no matter how grotesque, and to enforce it by deadly state action, if necessary.  Slaves?  We need them to make ourselves wealthier, fuck you.  Free the slaves?  Fuck you, get a rope, we’ll show you how we deal with fucks like you.  Oh, go ahead and call the damn sheriff, he can hold the end of the damn rope we hang you from, Mr. All Men Are Created Equal Pantload, sir. 

Or even better, and a more recent example– Rumsfeld, after 9/11, facing a reluctant chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Shelton so concerned with legal safeguards for protecting the innocent and due process when using elite, secret black ops squads to kill foreign nationals suspected of involvement in terrorism.  “You’re fired, general,” said the jaunty Secretary of Defense, hiring a new guy who agreed that all terrorists and potential terrorists, everywhere on earth, must be hunted down and killed and the more secretively, the better. Any collateral damage?  Also secret.  State secret.  Classified.  Need to know. Don’t ask, we kill you.

The funny thing, if it is funny, is that even those circumventing the letter, spirit and intent of even the most high minded laws, or especially those, will hire the best lawyers in the world to write a preemptive justification for why they are legally allowed, even obliged, to not follow the law that they are willfully violating.

Where can we find these legal justifications, we citizen members of the general public of the world’s greatest democracy?  Top secret, bitches.  We have a 1917 anti-espionage statute carrying the death penalty, you want to be charged and prosecuted under that deadly law, journalist bitches?   I don’t think so!  You want to act like the truth doesn’t embolden our enemies?  Get the rope!

Righteous rage feels good for a second, while you are spraying machine gun fire and screaming at the top of your lungs at inhuman enemies, real or imagined.  After that, though, if you reflect for a moment, you’re as likely to turn the gun on yourself as to do anything else.  I would err on the side of pausing to take a few breaths before capitulating to rage and smashing your fucking fez.  

I would argue, if I was an arguing fellow, that, when not under direct physical threat, being gentle, calm and soft-spoken is usually much more productive than being righteously enraged, agitated, loud, and ready for justifiable violence.

Of course, that’s just me, fucking Ahimsa-Boy.  What the hell do I know?

 

Facts: 0, Emotions: 1 (F) (Politics clipped from an e-mail)

It horrifies me that brilliant and courageous journalists like Jeremy Scahill, Jane Mayer and a few others, can make such airtight cases for their important and just causes, shine a clear light into unspeakably cruel darkness, and…. it changes nothing.  The detailed and coherent telling of the actual facts, even if they stir the emotions terribly, do not have any effect on organized human action (politics) next to the raw emotions alone, stirred violently with a buzzword or two and chanted over and over on the mass media.
 
Jane Mayer, in The Dark Side, lays out the many horrifyingly criminal illegalities involved in the torture program, with dates, names, details, memos, who authorized and ordered what, how the laws were violated, the exact techniques routinely used, the destroyed tapes of torture interrogations, etc.  A few years later President Obama, either in an unfortunate ad lib or reading a dick fingered teleprompt, admits that “unfortunately… we tortured some folks.”  Tortured some folks.   Harry Shearer does a good Obama imitation and that week on Le Show he did a musical number (at 42:00) with the hook, in unison with the Obama sound bite, a nonchalantly harmonized “we tortured some folks.” 
 
Scahill, as he details in his book Dirty Wars (a NY Times best seller it seems the NY Times never reviewed), travels to a village near Gardez, outside the Green Zone in Afgahnistan, to investigate a rumored massacre of civilians. There had been a party in a village called Khataba early into the morning of February 10, 2010 to celebrate the birth of a child.  The locals all have videos of the party on their phones, smiling faces, men dancing.  Suddenly a  helicopter lands, guys in heavy boots jump out, walk on the roof.  
 
One of the men who had been dancing at the party goes out to see what’s up and gets pumped full of lead by American commandos.  Likewise the two pregnant women who run to him screaming, likewise a teenage girl and another man, also shot to death.  Only a couple die immediately, the cop and one of the women linger, groaning, for five hours after the Americans dig their bullets out of the bleeding bodies with their tactical knives.  It would have been embarrassing and incriminating if local authorities, or NATO investigators, found American bullets in the bodies of the deceased, after all.  The commandos stop the others from taking the two mortally wounded family members to the nearby hospital.  They handcuff the remaining men, march them to the helicopter and drop them somewhere miles from home to have a nice day.   
 
Scahill sees the videos and still photos of the victims, talks to the eye witnesses.  The brother of one of the murdered men, whose pregnant wife was also killed, tells Scahill that when he finally got back from where the Americans dropped him he was ready to put on a suicide vest and go kill Americans but his father wouldn’t let him.
 
Scahill follows other similar stories in various countries and eventually learns that these killings are all the work of JSOC (Joint Strategic Operations Command), the highly secretive, elite Special Forces killing units that work directly for the president.  “Do what you’ve got to do, boys,” says the president, presumably, and they eventually track down and kill Osama bin Laden, to the cheers of American hockey and football crowds.  Scahill, who had been slowly and painstakingly unearthing details about the secretive JSOC, was amazed to hear JSOC, a name that is rarely spoken and never seen in print, suddenly lauded on CNN, Fox and everywhere, embodied in heroic Seal Team Six.  
 
Scahill discovers that the kill list, once a few dozen names, now includes thousands of names.  The lists of those killed, and the civilians killed along with them are highly classified, naturally, although Scahill puts together a rough list of confirmed raids, drone strikes and confirmed kills that shows these happen multiple times daily, mostly by drone now, in literally 40 something countries the US is not at war with.  Every dead male of military age is considered a dead terrorist, like in the old body counts in Viet Nam where every dead civilian was counted as neutralized Viet Cong. It is unknown how many of the undisclosed numbers of killed children, older men and females of all ages are also terrorists, though it is also, probably, if we are justified in killing them, a substantial number, eh?  
 
Scahill, a guest on Bill Maher’s show, lays out some of the hellish details for the audience.   Fellow guest Jay Leno asks Scahill  “why haven’t they killed you yet?” and Scahill just gives him a grim look, says nothing. 
 
Fair question.  So much easier just to kill a troublesome motherfucker like that, you know?  Not that he offers any real threat to the tireless killing machine, the only thing the American people have endless funds for… but still, there is a principle here, one would think.

Living in an Immature Nation

Each time I find my blood boiling these days I’m surprised.   I feel that my blood should have learned how not to boil by now.  It has been several years now,  trying to make myself a mild man, with modest success.   The surge of anger some things stir, often things on the radio news, still takes me by surprise.   Like doomed children in NYC I’ve never met, and am trying in vain to work with, the anger often flares over a seeming abstraction– like the senseless death of another doomed kid. My abstraction-inspired anger seems weak compared to the concrete things most citizens of an immature nation become enraged about.

A fanatic takes a large sharp knife, forces one of ours to make a speech to a video camera, then brutally cuts the man’s head off.  Unspeakable savagery abhorrent to any decent person.   We can be dismayed that our Saudi Arabian allies publicly behead people for a variety of crimes, but at least that is a sovereign government rather than some random vicious asshole with a sharp knife and an internet hook-up.

Murderous fanatics launched an ingenious and horrific attack on America thirteen years ago that succeeded in changing many things in the nation they hated.  They killed thousands of random citizens.  They caused unimaginable emotional and economic devastation– the immediate economic costs of the attack alone were literally billions of dollars (some sickening graphs are here).  

America changed overnight from a nation coming to terms with the necessity for international law to one that justified torture and any practice that could inflict damage on this inhuman international enemy.   The 9/11 attacks provoked two decade long wars, one a “pre-emptive” war entirely unprovoked, shoddily planned and disastrous, that cost over a trillion dollars, stalemated America, left the Middle East shattered, angry and violent and thousands more Americans dead, maimed, disabled for life.  Not to mention Iraqis, Afghanis, Syrians, Lybians, Egyptians, Yemenis, Pakistanis– countless millions displaced, orphaned, torn apart.

Recent polls showed that Americans are finally sick of endless war, even if it is far away and fought only by those who sign up and an army of highly paid mercenaries.   Even if American military dead can no longer by shown on TV, Americans are sick of the wars.  They accomplish nothing, cost zillions, make the opposite of friends for the U.S.A., are pointless, less than pointless.  Some argue they play directly into the hands of terrorists bent on destroying the West.

Even if there are no American “boots on the ground”, most Americans seemingly have come to realize that bombing raids over impossibly complicated conflict zones seem like a stupid idea for solving knotty, centuries-old problems. Particularly when this American murder from the air often makes things worse in unforeseen ways. Particularly when those knotty, centuries-old conflicts are being played out thousands of miles away, across an ocean and another continent.

While Americans were telling pollsters they are not anxious for the next war, the president was lambasted by his many enemies as a weak, vacillating, nuance-pondering  sissy for hesitating to authorize a “muscular response” to the latest provocation, for not immediately ordering the slaughter of guilty and innocent alike each time a new horror happens somewhere in that oil rich region.  Recent polls showed that most Americans have come to support this hesitation to use state violence as the first option.  It’s almost as if we have finally tallied up the results of our bold, muscular war policy of recent years and realize perhaps a bit more reflection, and less reflexive muscular activity, might have led to a better result than rushing in boldly to blow things up and declaring ourselves victors before the battle was won.

What had my blood boiling the other day?  The newest polls found that a majority of Americans are now behind the president who finally stopped wringing his hands and did what good red-blooded patriots have wanted him to do since those horrible videos of the beheadings came out.   Recent polls show Americans love the bombing of these monsters, these ISIS savages.  ISIS, crucifiers, beheaders, rapists of children, using an explosive public relations campaign, did what American advertisers strive to do all the time — dramatically sold a brand and inflamed imaginations to change hearts and minds.  The president’s friends and enemies alike applauded when he finally announced that America would kick ISIS’s fucking asses.

I think of this endless cycle of blood-crazed lynch mobs, the vicious haters proving their point over and over.  I can provoke you and make you kill, make you step over your mother and even kick her in the face, to rush out to murder and, in turn, justify my revenge killings.  Nyah, nyah, nyah nyaaaaaa-yah!   I put my smirking picture on the internet cutting one of your people’s heads off and you’ll kill more civilians than I ever slaughtered (and I crucified, disemboweled, burned to death, shot, stabbed, hacked more faceless chumps than you can count).  “YOU SUCK, AMERICA!!!!” I taunt on viral video.    Then I sit back and wait for American bombers to help me do my important work.   You fools are my greatest recruiters!

Here’s the wild part about living in an immature nation– we have little sense of anything outside of our own immediate concerns.   We’ve been raised and trained this way.  We think of ourselves as exceptional, different and better than those born in slums without sewer systems or even outhouses.  It is truly not in our nature to equate every other human life with our own.  We will, of course, knit our brows in true sorrow when we see footage of a dozen little children’s bodies, blown up in some remote village where we also blew up many adult men we had good reason to believe were mostly terrorists.  Sure collateral damage happens, but way over there, you know, it happens to “f-ing sand n-words”, if we picture them at all, badly drawn faceless creatures randomly scurrying on a computer screen.  You can blow them up for extra points while fighting the haters of our freedom.   Just don’t accidentally kill one of our own!  LOL!