Right now, as I write these lines, MSNBC is probably in its fourth hour of coverage on the death of Michael Jackson, with many more to come. So much for “The Place for Politics”. I will admit to be a frequent viewer of Olbermann and Maddow – often enjoy watching them, in fact – but 
that network operates on a definition of politics that is nearly indistinguishable from that of personality and celebrity. So much of the discussion is about individuals, about style, about posture more than policy. Incidents like Jackson’s death put it in harsh relief. They’ll be on this for days, turning it like a roast on a rotisserie… and they won’t be alone in that. It’s just the type of narrative our pop culture loves best: the mega-star, staggeringly popular yet strangely isolated, follows a long downward trajectory into a very public disintegration, then dies under somewhat mysterious circumstances. Elvis all over again. That and the myth of the young crash-and-burn star (e.g. Curt Cobain) are particular favorites. I’m sorry Jackson’s dead, but honestly… is he the only one today?
We have two pointless wars going on, mind you. People are still dying by the score in Iraq, though each incident is treated like an aberration. I think the mainstream media is too focused on the bogus success story of the surge to dwell on the fact that the temporary truce appears to be falling apart. And while the spotlight is directed elsewhere, our antiwar congress has approved a massive supplemental spending bill for Iraq and Afghanistan (with funds tucked in to support the IMF) and sent it to our antiwar president to sign. This is the power of branding, my friends. As long as you sell these political actors as something different, they can do the same thing as the last group and barely raise a note of protest. Let the wise ones and the compassionate ones drive the killing/wrecking machine for a while. Surely they will wreak havoc more wisely than their predecessors.
While cable news cameras followed the ambulance block-by-block from Jacko’s 
mansion to the hospital, one wonders how many Iraqis met their end as a result of the violence we ignited; how many Afghans were shaken down by a kleptocratic state run by warlords and fueled by international aid dollars; how many nameless detainees were beaten, starved, electrocuted, waterboarded, or worse in some third-world dungeon on the orders of a faceless bureaucrat. And those are only the fires we started; there are also those we merely profit from, like the continuing blood-letting in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, and elsewhere. (And yes, before you email, we did have something to do with putting the Congo in the state it’s in today, funding and directing a terrorist army in the sixties that secured the deranged Mobutu’s grip on power.) In short, there’s no such thing as a slow news day… and no day when it becomes any less important to talk about injustice the world over.
They’re playing “Thriller” again. Ah, well. That’s all I’ve got.
luv u,
jp
around the fringes in our system, when the margins are relatively tight. Iran has much more serious, systemic problems. Even so, the people there obviously know what to do when things go badly wrong – get out in the street. These are the people we want to bomb so badly. I hope Americans are taking a close look at those folks out in the street, putting their necks on the line. This is the enemy, folks – the “axis of evil”. Whatever Bush used to say about having no quarrel with the Iranian people, it is they who would suffer in the event of any confrontation between our countries, just as they have suffered in the past, when we overthrew Mossadeq in 1953, through the decades of rule by our ally the Shah, and under massive assault from our other ally Saddam Hussein during the 1980s. Just take a real close look.
Does this Iran election controversy have a familiar ring to it? If so, perhaps it’s because something very similar happened in Mexico in 2006, when Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador ran against Filipe Calderon and most likely won the election, but was chiseled out of the presidency by Calderon (with the full support of the Bush administration, of course). To look at news coverage of Mexico today and its relationship with the United States, you would never know that there was any question surrounding Calderon’s election. Massive street protests yielded no change, no re-run of the election, no nothing. Could be that Iran’s current uprising will end the same way, despite the hopes of many. That would be sad for the many in Iran who wanted things to change, but with respect to U.S. policy, it is we who must change, whoever the president may be. We’ve invaded and occupied countries on both sides of Iran, we regularly threaten them with massive destruction, and yet we speak of them as the outlaw state. Hypocrisy, anyone?
keeping things from getting out of hand. I’ve talked about the foreign policy establishment in the Obama administration not being all that different from the late Bush II administration (or that of Bush’s father, for that matter). On the domestic policy front, we see more of the same. All of the major economic decisions are being shaped by Wall Street types, focusing on the health of companies rather than the well-being of workers. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the auto company bailouts. Obama’s automotive task force is made up largely of financial types, and their solutions reflect that experience. What the hell – we could have gotten THAT from McCain. 
some major financial institutions? The fact is, some of them wouldn’t even exist anymore if it wasn’t for our massive infusions of cash. Maybe we should, I don’t know, direct them to provide some capital to expand industrial production in the United States, focused on useful stuff (rather than superfluous weapons systems). Yes, I know… that sounds an awful lot like central planning and socialism, but what the fuck – if we leave this up to the corporate boards and the financial mavens, what’s left of our industrial capacity will have vanished in a few short years, along with our infrastructure for research and development. Nothing will be made here, nothing will be invented here… and the majority of us will be living in Hoovervilles. (Too many of us are right now, frankly.)
a kind of cultural crossroads and an international experience previously unknown in the White House – to see him make reference to historic wrongs so seldom acknowledged by Americans really puts the lie to that old “only Nixon could go to China” conventional wisdom. Sure, the rhetoric was, well, just rhetoric, and even as such carefully balanced and qualified, but just the same… what an odd impression it must have made on an Arab world so accustomed to the condescending ignorance and arrogance of Obama’s predecessor. I’ve got to think they think we’re goddamned weird, veering our little electoral pinewood racer from one side of the track to the other (and, doubtless, back again before long). Not hard to see why we’re hard to trust.
mandate Palestine that represents the only hope for a viable Palestinian state. And calling Iran out for threatening its neighbors is simply laughable – they are literally surrounded by the burned out ruins of our imperial overreach. It is this, more than a lack of openness, that breeds contempt towards us. That is much of what is being said by people in the Arab countries – good words, now let’s see some action. This doesn’t sit well with the likes of David Brooks, who describes the Arabs as ready to “sit back” and watch America force concessions out of Israel. But it is the people in Muslim countries in the middle east who have been bearing the brunt of these struggles for the past sixty years. They don’t expect anything to come easy. They just want us to stop actively working against them.
I have to admit to being a bit gob-smacked by their laser-like focus on Nancy Pelosi and the question of whether or not she has prevaricated over C.I.A. briefings about the use of torture in interrogations. They seem to be taking their lead not only from Republicans in Congress, but from retired G.O.P. leadership, like Newt Gingrich (a.k.a. the embodiment of all that is good and right). What the fuck, friends – this is like speculating over who listened in on the police scanner the night some arsonist burned an apartment house to the ground. Sure, even Pelosi’s explanation makes her seem hypocritical, but that’s a pretty minor matter next to the implementation of a broad policy of torture and prisoner abuse, in service to even more serious crimes.
the same fraudulent claims before the American Enterprise Institute. At least he’s keeping this heinous piece of history fresh in our minds… though why we should need any kind of mnemonic device is a bit beyond me. The war they started is, after all, still going on, still killing scores at a time. That is why waging an unprovoked war of aggression is considered the most egregious of crimes – because so many evils are contained within it. Cheney and his administration, the broad swath of congressional supporters, and ultimately every citizen of our nation bears responsibility for everything that proceeded from that fateful decision back in March of 2003. We are not a dictatorship; we are a democracy, and that is part of the price of democracy – taking ownership of your nation’s misdeeds.
a number of kind of shaky (though no less comforting) assumptions. One was that Obama might somehow prove to be an exception to the usual political rule, inasmuch as he was an insurgent pitted against a strong establishment candidate, and was not expected to win the nomination. He is also a compelling speaker, a likeable media personality, and so on. So for that two months between Election Day and Inauguration Day, it was possible to suspend disbelief and enjoy a brief vacation from that somewhat oppressive national political reality we’ve lived with all of our lives. That, of course, is over, and I suppose it’s all to the good. Hey, it was the holiday season, right? What better time to feel all festive and delusionary. Now the work begins.
week’s changing of the guard in Afghanistan illustrates. Over at Treasury we’ve got Larry Summers and Tim Geithner. I would term these two as “minders,” as well. After Dubya crashed the economy (with help from friends in both parties), reform is politically inevitable, and these two are well-placed to keep said reform from taking on too populist a character. Just this week, Obama’s proposal for the regulation of derivatives has the mark of Summers/Geithner on it, in the form of a loophole you could sail a supertanker full of public money through. While it establishes a central clearing house for derivatives and seeks to standardize them, it does not restrict the creation of more customized (non-standardized) financial instruments, nor does it appear to regulate them. So it offers a kind of voluntary regulation…. easy to evade. On the other side of the street, Obama appears to have his mind changed for him on releasing detainee abuse photos. Again – doing so does not advance the interests of the empire, any more than would democratizing the financial system.
might… be one or two of you out there who think I go a little easy on the Obama administration. Yes, I know – I seemed a bit more eager to take a few swings at his predecessor’s administration (alongside millions of others), and most of them were richly deserved. And yes, I did vote for Obama and not (repeat, NOT) for George W. Bush. But hell, we’re just getting started here in Obama-time, and I’ve got more than a few bones to pick with what’s been happening thus far. Let’s start with the b’s….
Afghani-Pakistan. Okay, this worries me. After months of hearing both administrations complain that the Pakistanis were not doing enough to take the fight to the Taliban, they appear to be doing what “we” asked them to do… and killing lots of civilians in the process, as well as creating a massive outflow of refugees. Though rare as hen’s teeth, I did hear a good segment on NPR’s Morning Edition the other day – an interview with two Pakistani fiction writers, who pointed out that Pakistan’s larger cities are being choked with homeless young people displaced by the fighting. These young Pakistanis are often sought out by religious zealots, who provide them with some base comforts and – perhaps – build on their resentment against the government (and its U.S. paymasters) who rendered them homeless in the first place. Like the Iraqi refugee populations in Jordan and Syria, no good will come of this.
Pennsylvania Avenue. And if there were any justice in this world, they wouldn’t have a peg leg to stand on. So short of any proper court proceeding, lets look at who wins the Jolly Roger award this week.
for a moment that the Bush Administration wasn’t trying to elicit false confessions out of people? Am I the only one who remembers the fact that Cheney was constantly running over to CIA headquarters in the run-up to the Iraq war, pressing them to come up with that “smoking gun”? A New York Times reporter I heard on the radio this week dismissed the notion that they were trying to drum up incriminating – if false – evidence about Saddam Hussein’s government; his point was, in essence, why wouldn’t they just make it up themselves? Answer – it doesn’t matter. They obviously felt they needed some evidence to ratchet up the fear factor and build support for the war. That’s why they relied on a drunk like “Curve Ball” and a shyster like Chalabi. That’s the central principle of terrorism, as the name suggests – scare the be-jeebus out of them so that they’ll do what you say.
the effectiveness of waterboarding. The writer – whose anonymous user name suggests he/she is a veteran – makes the claim that waterboarding produced the intelligence that foiled the plot to fly a jetliner into the library tower in Los Angeles. Of course, the claim falls apart on the most superficial level. The Bush administration took credit for foiling the plot in February of 2002; the torture (“enhanced interrogation”) program went into effect in August of that year. I can understand the writer’s confusion, though. There has been so much garbled noise around this issue in the past few weeks, much of it stirred up by that bloated ex-Vice President of ours, whom Gore Vidal once likened to “300 pounds of condemned veal in a gray suit.” Yes, Dick Cheney, evident war criminal, wants more memos released – the ones that show how effective his war crimes truly were in producing actionable intelligence. I say, tell it to the jury.
become so used to the idea, both through the actions of their government and via television shows like “24,” that they consider the “smoking gun” scenarios constantly referred to in the media as plausible. This is a bit like the phenomenon of judges – actual trial judges – deciding cases partly on the basis of science used in shows like “CSI”. It’s as if NASA started basing everything they do on the scientific principles embodied by “Lost in Space.” That’s kind of scary… almost as scary as the torture itself. If we’re getting that detached from reality when we set policy or even just consider its effects, we are in “deep doo-doo,” as Bush’s father used to say. Just the fact that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded more than 180 times over the course of a single month should indicate that, as a “smoking gun” remedy, this does not work.
triumphalist rhetoric about some military action against a “worthy” opponent. But the U.S. Navy vs. some teenage pirates… that’s about as lopsided a contest as I can imagine. Sure, they needed to get that ship captain out alive. Perhaps there was no other way to resolve the standoff – I can’t say, really. But this is nothing to crow about, and certainly not some enormous success that strikes a blow against tyranny. These pirates are desperate young men driven to a bandit’s life by circumstances we can barely comprehend. The very life’s blood of international commerce flows right past their shores in the form of these enormous freighters and tankers, and they see this as a meager opportunity to scrape some wealth out of a global system that passes them by. Not surprising that they grasp this nettle, even at risk of life and limb.
control their coastal waters, they have been unable to compete with unregulated fishing vessels from elsewhere in the region as well as Europe. Groups of Somalis have attempted to interdict illegal fishing, and these efforts have been conflated with piracy. There has also been a history of illegal dumping of toxic materials in Somali waters – something