A tent city rises in Ocean County, New Jersey:

More than 50 homeless people have joined the community within New Jersey's forests as the economic crisis has wrecked their American dream.
And as politicians in Washington trade blows over their country's £8.8 trillion debt, the prospect of more souls joining this rag tag group grows by the day.

Building their own tarpaulin tents, Native American teepees and makeshift balsa wood homes, every one of the Tent City residents has lost their job.

Ravaged by the loss of their jobs and their homes, the residents of Tent City struggle to get by without day-to-day luxuries that we take for granted such as food on the table and a roof over their heads.

Ex-minister Steve Brigham, 50, runs Tent City, which consists of a dirt road running through a two-acre encampment which has flowerpots laid out front of proud tents and homes.
Functioning as near to a normal town as possible, Tent City is governed by democratic rules agreed by all the residents.

They all must agree to no fighting, to clean the camp, to volunteer their time when they have it, and to most importantly keep the noise down after 10pm

Please click through to the full article and look at how Americans who used to be middle-class are living.

I think perhaps these people should take Joan McCarter's suggestion and send their resumes, along with photographs of how they are living, and send them to Eric Cantor, who had this to say yesterday:

Let him find them a job.

You want to say we liberals are full of hate? For guys like Eric Cantor, you bet we are. And that smug little prick deserves every bit of our hatred.

Labels: america R.I.P., homelessness, Teabag America, The Right Wing War on the Middle Class

Despite what the generations that follow the post-World War II baby boom think, most boomers in my circle have always had the fatalistic notion that Social Security would not be there for us. I've posted before about a Tom Toles cartoon from the 1980's called "The Reading of the Will" which is rife with boomer resentment at our parents' generation because of their defined benefit pensions and guaranteed Social Security payments and leisurely retirements. Somehow we always knew. Even when, in the 1980's, what is now called the "Social Security Trust Fund" was set up specifically for the purpose of beefing up the system for baby boomer retirement, we knew. We knew that whatever stores were built up were replaced with IOUs that we knew the government had no intention of paying.

Those of us who did not want children and have been lucky enough to have not been completely jettisoned from the job market are better off than many. We've been taking advantage of 401(k) match and putting away as much as we can afford. Whether we'll be OK remains to be seen, once Medicare is gutted (and it WILL happen, whether Barack Obama is re-elected next year or not, since he's shown himself to be at best a rubber stamp for Republican policies. But friends of mine who are trying to put kids through college and seeing them into adulthood are scared to death -- not just of their own futures, because who can put away money for retirement when a low-end college is $25,000 a year, but of that of their children, many of whom are unable to get a toehold in the job market. What good does it to do graduate with a degree in marketing when the only job you're going to be able to get is to be re-hired as a cart boy at the Stop & Shop?

Work longer, they tell us. People are healthier longer, so it doesn't make sense to retire at 65 the way it once did. That's all well and good, but is it healthy for a society that is hemorrhaging jobs for older people to clog up the workforce? And there's no sign that the job market is ever going to get any better. Anything done on a PC can be done more cheaply overseas. Anything requiring special skills can be done by hiring immigrants on work visas. I have a friend who's a production editor at a publishing company. She's fifty, she has two kids to put through college and who's going to be the one to tell her that her job may very well not even exist in five years?

I've spent all of my adult years in the Age of Corporatism. I graduated high school into the first Arab oil embargo and graduated college with a degree in sociology into the second one. I started out in a retail management training program that was the catch-all for liberal arts majors at the time. But at least I was graduating into a society that hadn't yet been completely taken over by greed. That happened later, after Ronald Reagan took office, and while I myself have done well, our society hasn't. Oh sure, we have gewgaws and toys and electronics and two flat-screen TVs and 200 channels of nothing you'd want to watch on TV. People have pulled their kids out of school for Caribbean vacations paid for on home equity loans and people in Section 8 housing have smart phones. All of this is cited as examples by Republicans of how well off we are. But are we? And what about tomorrow?

I work in an industry that is rapidly consolidating, with tens of thousands having been laid off in just the last two years. The web development I used to do is dead too, replaced by templates and do-it-yourselfers. When I was in high school and college there was always a "hot industry" that was hiring. If engineers weren't in demand, then marketers were. If there was a glut of marketers, the accounting field was begging for people. Now there is no "hot industry". There is no path to upward mobility for the poor, there is no path towards staying in the middle class for those who were born into it. Only those with inherited money are able to prosper.

Social Security was implemented in the depths of the Depression, and Republicans have been trying to get rid of it ever since. Whatever faults the Democrats may have had, what with Ted Kennedy's scandals and Tip O'Neil's tippling and Hubert Humphrey's often preposterous optimism, they could always be relied on to be the protectors of the middle class and the poor. Whether it was Social Security, Medicare, Pell grants, nutrition programs, or education, the Democrats were the party of the little guy.

Something happened along the way. I suppose you could say it started with Jimmy Carter, who was the first conservative Democrat to hold the White House. Carter, a Southern Baptist, paved the way for the relentless Christianism that has pervaded our political discourse in the years since then. Ronald Reagan started his presidency by busting the air traffic controllers' union and accelerated the path towards elimination of the middle class. Reagan recognized the religious fervor in the southern states and the midwest, and he recognized the residual racism in the south, and used it to pit the middle class against the poor while screwing over both. The patrician George H.W. Bush similar knew nothing about the struggles of middle class people as he marveled over a supermarket scanner. Bill Clinton used his charm to win over crowds of middle class and minority voters while implementing NAFTA and eliminating Glass-Steagall and insisting that he was one of them. The advent of the internet led to $100,000 programming jobs and new media and lots of opportunities for the middle class to start to afford the trappings of the wealthy, and Americans embraced them. They leased BMWs for the kind of payments you used to have to buy a Chevrolet. They took adjustable-rate mortgages that allowed them to make lower payments on bigger houses. They bought houses for 3% down. They took equity loans for akylit soaring-ceilinged great rooms and dream kitchens and summer-long cruises with their kids.

Then George W. Bush came along, and the first thing he did was look at the surplus that Bill Clinton and the internet boom had left him and said, "Let's cut taxes." But to paraphrase the man himself, the have-mores were his base, so they got most of the spoils. Then he ignored a Presidential Daily Briefing on August 6, 2001, and a month later almost 3000 people died in a terrorist attack that should have been thwarted had he been doing his job. And what did he tell people? Go shopping. He put us into two wars, one of them completely unnecessary, kept the tax cuts in place, and anyone who dared question him was called un-American and traitorous. A right-wing echo chamber that had been developed during the Clinton years to obsess over his sex life was now firmly in place, and Judith Miller canoodled with Scooter Libby, and weapons of mass destruction in Iraq became conventional wisdom, and if you questioned it, you could very well find your house firebombed by an increasingly frightened and angry population.

Fear was a potent weapon during the Bush years, with color-coded terror warnings and a convenient tape by Osama Bin Laden issued every time Bush's approval ratings dropped. People in flyover states sat up nights worrying about Scary Swarthy Men doing things to the local Wal-Mart, and all the while, while Bush's Washington was warning of terrorist plots and Americans were hiding under the bed clutching a roll of plastic sheeting in one hand and one of duct tape in the other, the guys at the top were rifling through the dresser drawers where Americans kept their spending cash and filled their pockets, then crept off and joined the Be Afraid Chorus.

This is really the point at which the Democratic Party became completely undone. Faced with a McCarthyite White House, and saddled with the baggage of Vietnam amti-war protests, Democrats fell silent as they gave George W. Bush blank check after blank check after blank check to cut taxes for his friends and to feed more and more American kids into a Middle East meatgrinder. This is where it became obvious that this was a party completely unable to frame an argument. A half-million ordinary citizens marched in New York City in early 2003 because we knew that the Iraq claims were bullshit, but the Democratic Party could not even be bothered to study the readily-available evidence out there. It was easier to just listen to the Washington pundits and go along.

Then in mid-2002, a virtually unknown governor from Vermont appeared on Meet the Press and miracle of miracles, was showing that he HAD read the evidence, and he KNEW what was going on. Here was a guy I could vote for.

Howard Dean became so much of a threat to the Washington narrative that not only did Democratic presidential rivals pool resources to tag-team him in Iowa, where it was starting to look like he just might be able to take his campaign of truth to the nomination, but the media got in on the pile-on, deliberately turning down the crowd noise at a rally for campaign workers following his defeat in Iowa so that his exhortations to the disappointed crowd sounded like the ravings of a madman. Later on, after Howard Dean was safely out of the way, ABC, the network that perpetrated this journalistic crime, admitted that they had turned down the crowd noise. Horse, barn door, etc.

So John Kerry, the party's anointed one, the guy who couldn't possibly be attacked because he was a war hero, became the nominee....and was promptly attacked as a war traitor. John Kerry made two fatal mistakes. The first was believing that the American people are too smart to believe demonstrable untruths, and the second was believing that he was working with good-faith operators. Yet despite the willingness of the public to believe the claims of the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (a group financed by a Bush and Tom DeLay campaign contributor), Kerry still came within Ohio's electoral votes of defeating George W. Bush in 2004. Kerry, displaying now-typical Democratic gutlessness, didn't even wait till all the Ohio votes were counted before taking his $14 million in campaign cash and going home, but it has since been well-demonstrated that Republican-initiated electronic voting shenanigans really DID tilt the scales for Bush.

So fast-forward to 2008. George W. Bush is acknowledged by all but about 20% of the population to be the miserable failure that those of us with gray matter in our crania knew all along. The financial crisis of 2008 has, depending on what you believe, put us within a hair's breadth of global economic collapse. The Democrats' presumed front-runner, Hillary Clinton, who in a room full of netroots activists at Yearly Kos 2007 said that "Lobbyists are Americans too", lost the nomination in the face of the charisma of Barack Obama, his transformative potential, and a desperate hunger in the population for someone as different from George W. Bush as possible.

I had supported John Edwards in the primaries. Of course we had no idea then what was going on in his private life, and we knew that people in his home state regarded him as somewhat of a phony, but at least he was SAYING the right things about how Americans were already suffering in a diminishing job market and a contracting economy. Edwards turned out to be as bad a messenger for "The Two Americas" as Ralph Nader is for "There Is No Difference", but at least on the stump he was the only guy paying any mind to what was happening. I took no end of shit from Obama supporters in those early days of the 2008 Democratic nominating process because I did not believe that he was the progressive dreamboat they did. I remember paraphrasing Walter Mondale's 1984 convention speech to a gay friend who was offended by John Edwards' "struggle" with accepting gay marriage. "You make John Edwards feel icky and you make Barack Obama feel icky. Obama won't tell you. Edwards just did."

And I was right.

But still -- what was an American in search of a president with a brain in his head, vote for a once-proud American Senator whose stock had fallen so far that he had to choose a bubble-headed beauty queen for his running mate, or a guy who could string together coherent sentences and show that he recognized we live in a complex world? McCain was so inept on the campaign trail that Obama hardly had to break a sweat. McCain seemed old, out-of-touch, and cantankerous. And even the priapic sexual fantasies of the pundit corps at the mere mention of Sarah Palin didn't change the fact that this dimwitted, theorcratic End Of Days-er was potentially one cancer survivor away from the nuclear football.

Even if you didn't support Obama all that much, there was a palpable aura of change in the air on January 20, 2009. It was an aura that diminshed quickly, as Obama filled his Cabinet with hacks, Clinton retreads, and corporatists. And now, thirty years after the I Got Mine And Fuck You doctrine took over the Republican Party, and one summer after the shrill ravings of barely 19% of the American people were treated as a massive new movement, here we are, with a Democratic Party capitulating to a gutting of the American social contract, and not even a request to ask billionaires to throw even one more nickel...one penny...into the pot.

I ask you: Who do these people, these Democrats represent? It isn't these people:




So who is it? And just whom do they think is going to keep them in office? Obama's political people think that "They Have No Place Else To Go" will keep the Democratic base in the fold. They think they're appealing to "a wide swath of voters":

Mr. Obama, seeking to appeal to the broad swath of independent voters, has adopted the Republicans’ language and in some cases their policies, while signaling a willingness to break with liberals on some issues.

That has some progressive members of Congress and liberal groups arguing that by not fighting for more stimulus spending, Mr. Obama could be left with an economy still producing so few jobs by Election Day that his re-election could be threatened. Besides turning off independents, Mr. Obama risks alienating Democratic voters already disappointed by his escalation of the war in Afghanistan and his failure to close the Guantánamo Bay prison, end the Bush-era tax cuts and enact a government-run health insurance system.

“The activist liberal base will support Obama because they’re terrified of the right wing,” said Robert L. Borosage, co-director of the liberal group Campaign for America’s Future.

But he said, “I believe that the voting base of the Democratic Party — young people, single women, African-Americans, Latinos — are going to be so discouraged by this economy and so dismayed unless the president starts to champion a jobs program and take on the Republican Congress that the ability of labor to turn out its vote, the ability of activists to mobilize that vote, is going to be dramatically reduced.”

Borosage is dead wrong. Maybe the dead-enders at Daily Kos, and the commenter here who insists that if you don't cheerlead for Obama it means you really want Mitt Romney to be president, will show up no matter what. But this particular voter is being tired of being told by a bunch of at best inept, lazy, spineless Democrats that no matter how many times they capitulate to the most insane Republicans we've ever seen, we have to vote for them because we have no place else to go. This particular voter is tired of being shown pictures of Michele Bachmann and being told, "ooh, SCARY!"

I am 56 years old. I can't say I want to be subject to torture because I'm not a Christian. I can't say I want to see a hastening of global thermonuclear war because some lunatic that a bunch of inbred ignorant hicks decided was a good person thinks it's his or her calling by God to accelerate the End of Days. I can't say I want a world in which my friends' kids are pushed down into poverty because the oligarchs find any semblance of the middle class frightening. I'd like to believe that I have 20 or 30 or, given the longevity of my family, even more good years ahead of me. I'd like to believe that I'll have time to do something other than just work, eat, and sleep before I die. But I'll tell you this much: If the rest of the middle class in country doesn't care that its government -- both parties -- hates them and is out to eliminate them at the beck and call of their oligarchic masters, then what the hell is the point? Let Michele Bachmann become president. Let's have a Supreme Court that always sides with corporations. Let's have creationism be taught in every school in the country. Let's head down this road towards a new dark ages. If Americans don't care enough to do something to stop this relentless decline into ignorance and hate and fear and loathing, why the hell should I, with my best years already behind me, bust my ass?

Labels: america R.I.P., despair, spinelessness, Teabag America, we ar, wussy-ass Democrats

Perhaps while Barack Obama and Harry Reid were congratulating themselves over their achievement of capitulation to Republican insanity striking a budget deal, they forgot that there's another battle coming:

Congressional Republicans are vowing that before they will agree to raise the current $14.25 trillion federal debt ceiling — a step that will become necessary in as little as five weeks — President Obama and Senate Democrats will have to agree to far deeper spending cuts for next year and beyond than those contained in the six-month budget deal agreed to late Friday night that cut $38 billion and averted a government shutdown.

Republicans have also signaled that they will again demand fundamental changes in policy on health care, the environment, abortion rights and more, as the price of their support for raising the debt ceiling.

Because ensuring that the poor and the elderly die off instead of costing billionaires a few more bucks a year in taxes, trying to prevent future generations from having to try to survive in an uninhabitable world, and most importantly of all, bitchslapping the sluts, are the only priorities right now for a Republican party that has turned into a pack of rabid dogs.

Of course Congressional Republicans are still pretending that the years 2001-2008 never existed; you know, those years when George W. Bush cut taxes and started two wars without paying for them. But hey, if you have Democrats who refuse to fight back, you can get away with saying shit like this:

“We want to see real structural, cultural-type changes tied to this debt ceiling. We’re not interested in a one-off kind of savings, or anything small,” said Representative Mick Mulvaney, a first-term Republican from South Carolina. “There has got to be game-changing kinds of changes to get us to vote for it.”

He dismissed warnings about default as “just posturing,” and said Democrats should bear the responsibility for passing any measure to increase the borrowing limit.

“It’s their debt,” he said. “Make them do it. That’s my attitude.”

It's a miracle that the New York Times actually responds to this with actual facts, given that in today's media, provable facts and utter horseshit are given equal credibility:

Of the nearly $14.2 trillion in debt, roughly $5 trillion is money the government has borrowed from other accounts, mostly from Social Security revenues, according to federal figures. Several major policies from the past decade when Republicans controlled the White House and Congress — tax cuts, a Medicare prescription-drug benefit and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — account for more than $3.2 trillion.

The recession cost more than $800 billion in lost revenues from businesses and individuals and in automatic spending for safety-net programs like unemployment compensation. Mr. Obama’s stimulus spending and tax cuts added about $600 billion through the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30.

Got that?

Bush administration contribution to the debt: $5 trillion.

Obama administration contribution to the debt: $600 billion.

And yet, you know as well as I do that if you ask your wingnut friends, they'll tell you that this is ALL OBAMA'S DEBT, that George Bush balanced the budget. Of course they have to wipe Bill Clinton out of existence in order to compress two decades like that, but then consensus reality never mattered to the right anyway.

So what does all this mean for thee and me?

Once the limit is reached, the Treasury Department would not be able to borrow as it does routinely to finance federal operations and roll over existing debt; ultimately it would be unable to pay off maturing debt, putting the United States government — the global standard-setter for creditworthiness — into default.

The repercussions in that event would be as much economic as political, rippling from the bond market into the lives of ordinary citizens through higher interest rates and financial uncertainty of the sort that the economy is only now overcoming, more than three years after the onset of the last recession.

But that's the whole point, isn't it? Put the economy back into recession, blame Barack Obama, and take over the Senate and the executive branch, so that it can become a Republican dream world of oligarchs living in gated mansions, stuffing themselves silly while the rest of us dumpster-dive?

Here's what the Republicans in Congress don't understand: The oligarchs; the Lloyd Blankfeins and the Jamie Dimons and the Koch brothers and the rest of their ilk don't regard the Republican legislators doing their bidding as their peers in the oligarchy either. Do you believe for one minute that when completely unfettered corporate power is the rule of law in this country, that these Captains of Industry are going to welcome the likes of John Boehner and Scott Walker and Paul Ryan to their groaning table? Hardly. They'll be out there dumpster diving with the rest of us.

Maybe we can turn them into Soylent Green.

Labels: America Gone Mad, america R.I.P., budget, debt, repub

For those who haven't already read it, you can see my account of my recent experience with Air Security Theatre at the Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood airport here.

A group of scientists NOT affiliated with either the government or the company that manufactures and distributes the backscatter scanners that are now being used in an increasing number of US airports, has sent a letter of concern to Dr. John P. Holdren, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology about the safety of these scanners.

Money quote:

The X-ray dose from these devices has often been compared in the media to the cosmic ray exposure inherent to airplane travel or that of a chest X-ray. However, this comparison is very misleading: both the air travel cosmic ray exposure and chest X-rays have much higher X-ray energies and the health consequences are appropriately understood in terms of the whole body volume dose. In contrast, these new airport scanners are largely depositing their energy into the skin and immediately adjacent tissue, and since this is such a small fraction of body weight/vol, possibly by one to two orders of magnitude, the real dose to the skin is now high.

In addition, it appears that real independent safety data do not exist. A search, ultimately finding top FDA radiation physics staff, suggests that the relevant radiation quantity, the Flux [photons per unit area and time (because this is a scanning device)] has not been characterized. Instead an indirect test (Air Kerma) was made that emphasized the whole body exposure value, and thus it appears that the danger is low when compared to cosmic rays during airplane travel and a chest X-ray dose.

Our colleagues at UCSF, dermatologists and cancer experts, raise specific important concerns:

• A) The large population of older travelers, >65 years of age, is particularly at risk from the mutagenic effects of the X-rays based on the known biology of melanocyte aging.
  
• B) A fraction of the female population is especially sensitive to utagenesis provoking radiation leading to breast cancer. Notably, because these women, who have defects in DNA repair mechanisms, are particularly prone to cancer, X-ray mammograms are not performed on them. The dose to breast tissue beneath the skin represents a similar risk.
  
• C) Blood (white blood cells) perfusing the skin is also at risk.
  
• D) The population of immunocompromised individuals--HIV and cancer patients (see above) is likely to be at risk for cancer induction by the high skin dose.
  
• E) The risk of radiation emission to children and adolescents does not appear to have been fully evaluated.
  
• F) The policy towards pregnant women needs to be defined once the theoretical risks to the fetus are determined.
  
• G) Because of the proximity of the testicles to skin, this tissue is at risk for sperm mutagenesis.
  
• H) Have the effects of the radiation on the cornea and thymus been determined?
  

Moreover, there are a number of ‘red flags’ related to the hardware itself. Because this device can scan a human in a few seconds, the X-ray beam is very intense. Any glitch in power at any point in the hardware (or more importantly in software) that stops the device could cause an intense radiation dose to a single spot on the skin. Who will oversee problems with overall dose after repair or software problems? The TSA is already complaining about resolution limitations; who will keep the manufacturers and/or TSA from just raising the dose, an easy way to improve signal-to-noise and get
higher resolution?

This is the technology that's supposed to be "keeping us safe."

The alternative is to be groped by TSA personnel. My experience at FLL, while not pleasant, was not as utterly humiliating as it could have been. Others' experience has differed:

We were flying from Nashville to Orlando to go to Disney for my son's birthday. My son is 9 years old. Nashville has installed the new backscatter scanners, aka "naked" scanners. Now I am not a modest person and for me myself I don't care. To be honest, I had not given it much thought. We were given no option to opt out of the scans that I could see, no signage or instructions. I later found out you can opt out and choose the pat down instead. Well, we all three went through the machine. Husband and I were fine. They scanned the kid and then informed us they had to pat him down. I asked why, they said he moved. So I am thinking run of the mill pat down, wand over his body and light touch. He is 9 years old for the love of Pete but that was not the case. Had anyone but a physician doing a necessary medical exam touched my child in the places the TSA agent put his hands, I would have filed charges. He groped the inside of his legs and touched his genitals. He put his hands around my son's neck in a choking position, felt all the way down his chest area and his buttocks. He placed his hands inside my son's pants waist band and felt around his waist. The agent was loud and intimidating even for me, a 36 year old women. He barked at him to "hold up your pants" and "spread your legs, shoulder width." All I could think was my son looked like he was being frisked and how humiliating this was for him to be stared at by everyone as they passed by us. Now, this whole scenario was out in the open, we were not given the option of privacy. My son was scared and humiliated. I am not a momma hen or a wacko and we fly regularly and have never minded the security measures needed but this was a shocking experience. Shocking enough for us to forgo air travel (which we have always loved) until these new security rules change and come closer to something akin to reason. (LINK)

Last week, one of my flying partners (Captain with Skywest) was going through security at DEN with his 18 year daughter. As his daughter approached the detector, the TSO working the NoS said on his headset, "heads up, got a cutie for you." He then confronted the TSA clerk with what he said and that neither of us are going through the NoS. The TSA clerk said you must have misunderstood me. (LINK)

Some lady came over and grabbed my arm and pulled me into another area and I pulled away from her and I said, “Woah, what’s going on here,” and she said, "If you opt out I have to give you a full patdown.”

They put me in this little area which is directly after the body scanner and the WTMD and so everyone who goes through that has to go around this area that I’m in. I’m just standing there and this lady is screaming at me about the procedures, and I said "Can I talk to your boss?”

And so I’m sitting there and she brings out her manager and the first thing she says to her manager is, "This girl has all kinds of opinions about how we’re doing our job wrong."

And that’s how she introduces the situation. I try to ask a question and I don’t get 30 seconds into talking with this woman and she runs away and she comes back with a dozen cops. I sat there and counted them. I asked at one point if I could grab my camera and they would not let me touch my stuff.

I’m just sitting there…and I’m trying to talk to the one officer and anytime I ask him a question that he did not have an answer to, he would get really upset and start yelling at me some more, and then they cuffed me in the chair. And then the original TSA lady who was going to give me the patdown just kind of quietly, so no one else can hear, she says, “I can tell you one thing,” and then she rips my boarding pass in half. (LINK)

Perhaps it's time to just stop flying until we are treated like human beings again. Wednesday, November 24 is opt-out day. If everyone who travels through an airport that day opts out of radiation exposure being administered by a government flack, and is instead treated like a prison inmate, it might wake us up to what we've lost in this pursuit of the illusion (not the reality) of "safety".

UPDATE:

Another account from someone who opted for "alternate screening":

After removing my shoes and making my way toward the metal detector, the person in front of me in line was pulled out to go through the backscatter machine. After asking what it was and being told, he opted out. This left the machine free, and before I could go through the metal detector, I was pulled out of line to go through the backscatter machine. When asked, I half-chuckled and said, "I don't think so." At this point, I was informed that I would be subject to a pat down, and I waited for another agent.

A male agent (it was a female who had directed me to the backscatter machine in the first place), came and waited for me to get my bags and then directed me over to the far corner of the area for screening. After setting my things on a table, he turned to me and began to explain that he was going to do a "standard" pat down. (I thought to myself, "great, not one of those gropings like I've been reading about".) After he described, the pat down, I realized that he intended to touch my groin. After he finished his description but before he started the pat down, I looked him straight in the eye and said, "if you touch my junk, I'll have you arrested." He, a bit taken aback, informed me that he would have to involve his supervisor because of my comment.

We both stood there for no more than probably two minutes before a female TSA agent (apparently, the supervisor) arrived. She described to me that because I had opted out of the backscatter screening, I would now be patted down, and that involved running hands up the inside of my legs until they felt my groin. I stated that I would not allow myself to be subject to a molestation as a condition of getting on my flight. The supervisor informed me that it was a standard administrative security check and that they were authorized to do it. I repeated that I felt what they were doing was a sexual assault, and that if they were anyone but the government, the act would be illegal. I believe that I was then informed that if I did not submit to the inspection, I would not be getting on my flight. I again stated that I thought the search was illegal. I told her that I would be willing to submit to a walk through the metal detector as over 80% of the rest of the people were doing, but I would not be groped. The supervisor, then offered to go get her supervisor.

I took a seat in a tiny metal chair next to the table with my belongings and waited. While waiting, I asked the original agent (who was supposed to do the pat down) if he had many people opt out to which he replied, none (or almost none, I don't remember exactly). He said that I gave up a lot of rights when I bought my ticket. I replied that the government took them away after September 11th. There was silence until the next supervisor arrived. A few minutes later, the female agent/supervisor arrived with a man in a suit (not a uniform). He gave me a business card identifying him as David Silva, Transportation Security Manager, San Diego International Airport. At this point, more TSA agents as well as what I assume was a local police officer arrived on the scene and surrounded the area where I was being detained. The female supervisor explained the situation to Mr. Silva. After some quick back and forth (that I didn't understand/hear), I could overhear Mr. Silva say something to the effect of, "then escort him from the airport." I again offered to submit to the metal detector, and my father-in-law, who was near by also tried to plead for some reasonableness on the TSA's part.

Read more here.

And just how do you think children make sense of the lessons they're told about not to let strangers touch them when if they travel with their parents they're put through this:

This is not about safety. I'm not sure what it is, but it isn't about safety. The chance of being a victim of in-flight terrorism is one in 10,408,947. As Ronald Bailey pointed out in Reason magazine in 2006:

Your lifetime odds of dying of a particular cause are calculated by dividing the one-year odds by the life expectancy of a person born in that year. For example, in 2003 about 45,000 Americans died in motor accidents out of population of 291,000,000. So, according to the National Safety Council this means your one-year odds of dying in a car accident is about one out of 6500. Therefore your lifetime probability (6500 ÷ 78 years life expectancy) of dying in a motor accident are about one in 83.

What about your chances of dying in an airplane crash? A one-year risk of one in 400,000 and one in 5,000 lifetime risk. What about walking across the street? A one-year risk of one in 48,500 and a lifetime risk of one in 625. Drowning? A one-year risk of one in 88,000 and a one in 1100 lifetime risk. In a fire? About the same risk as drowning. Murder? A one-year risk of one in 16,500 and a lifetime risk of one in 210. What about falling? Essentially the same as being murdered. And the proverbial being struck by lightning? A one-year risk of one in 6.2 million and a lifetime risk of one in 80,000. And what is the risk that you will die of a catastrophic asteroid strike? In 1994, astronomers calculated that the chance was one in 20,000. However, as they've gathered more data on the orbits of near earth objects, the lifetime risk has been reduced to one in 200,000 or more.

So how do these common risks compare to your risk of dying in a terrorist attack? To try to calculate those odds realistically, Michael Rothschild, a former business professor at the University of Wisconsin, worked out a couple of plausible scenarios. For example, he figured that if terrorists were to destroy entirely one of America's 40,000 shopping malls per week, your chances of being there at the wrong time would be about one in one million or more. Rothschild also estimated that if terrorists hijacked and crashed one of America's 18,000 commercial flights per week that your chance of being on the crashed plane would be one in 135,000.

Even if terrorists were able to pull off one attack per year on the scale of the 9/11 atrocity, that would mean your one-year risk would be one in 100,000 and your lifetime risk would be about one in 1300. (300,000,000 ÷ 3,000 = 100,000 ÷ 78 years = 1282) In other words, your risk of dying in a plausible terrorist attack is much lower than your risk of dying in a car accident, by walking across the street, by drowning, in a fire, by falling, or by being murdered.

So why are we going through this?

The Israelis have had tight security at that country's airports for decades. Mr. Brilliant used to work for an Israeli company and went there twice. He was asked why he was there, what he was doing, when he was leaving, everyone he was supposed to have contact with. They don't do virtual strip searches or grope women's breasts or men's scrotal sacs in the name of security. And Israeli security experts regard the scanners as a waste of money:

"I don't know why everybody is running to buy these expensive and useless machines. I can overcome the body scanners with enough explosives to bring down a Boeing 747," Rafi Sela told parliamentarians probing the state of aviation safety in Canada.

"That's why we haven't put them in our airport," Sela said, referring to Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion International Airport, which has some of the toughest security in the world.

Sela, former chief security officer of the Israel Airport Authority and a 30-year veteran in airport security and defence technology, helped design the security at Ben Gurion.

[snip]

Sela testified it makes more sense to create a "trusted traveller" system so pre-approved low-risk passengers can move through an expedited screening process. That would leave more resources in the screening areas, where automatic sniffing technology would detect any explosive residue on a person or their baggage.

Behavioural profiling also must be used instead of random checks, he said.

Scanners are expensive and dangerous. Groping is humiliating. Both turn every single traveler at an American airport into a suspected criminal. The professionalism of TSA employees varies even within the same airport. This is not security, this is performance art.

Again, I ask: Why are we putting ourselves through this?

Labels: america R.I.P., Department of Homeland Security, TSA

I'm actually somewhat surprised that we actually still celebrate Labor Day, given it's history of having been created by unions to celebrate union workers. Yet the very same people who have been excoriating unions for the last thirty years will be out at block parties and other holiday events extolling the working man while ignoring their own histories of outsourcing jobs (Carly Fiorina) or calling those who have lost their jobs due to downsizing "spoiled" (Sharron Angle) or railing against labor unions, even though unions have next to zero clout in labor negotiations these days.

Today is the day when many people have their last barbecue, their last swim, their last outing of the white pants before the fashion police come and beat them with sticks for wearing white after Labor Day. Here in New Jersey, it's yet another beautiful day, as it's been all weekend, with the kind of bright blue skies that set off the remaining oak trees -- a color that only exists when the humidity is low and the air is clean enough of pollutants. There's a certain forced gaiety about Labor Day weekend that doesn't exist on the other summer holidays. Memorial Day's meaning gets lost in its symbolism as an unofficial kickoff to summer. Independence Day shows us relaxed and still looking forward to another month of summer. But Labor Day is a winding down, a reminder that we still have to paint the wrought iron railing in yet another vain attempt to keep the rust away, that soon the heat will cut on at night, that we can actually sleep at night without an air conditioner or a fan in the window, and find ourselves staring at the ceiling because it's just too darn quiet.

What Labor Day isn't about anymore, is about working people. Last week The Hill ran a piece about the "blitz" that business groups plan against Democratic candidates today:

Business groups plan to go on offense against vulnerable Senate Democrats in their backyards to mark Monday's Labor Day holiday.

Local groups will target Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), Rep. Paul Hodes, the Democrat running for Senate in New Hampshire, and Kentucky Senate Democratic candidate Jack Conway in their states over their records on labor-related issues.

Local chapters of groups like the National Federation of Independent Business, state Associated Builders and Contractors and other commerce and retail groups will hold events on Monday targeting the incumbents and candidates, particularly on their stance on the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA, or "card-check").

Because nothing demonstrates the true spirit of Labor Day by big spending by greedy corporatists who are making record profits and keeping those profits in their pockets like using the terminology of war against candidates who might want to do something for those who have to work for a living.

Yesterday I read either a column or a letter to the editor -- I'm not sure which -- opining whether most of us would give up being able to dress casually for work and instead put on a suit and tie if it meant working from 9 to 5 and being home by six. Mad Men may be about people caught between a postwar world of conformity and the upheaval to come, but as usual with pop culture, the Mad Men phenomenon has been all about the style -- the clothes, the drinking, the constant cigarettes, the furniture. It's a stunningly-wrought set piece, to be sure. But lost amidst all the lamenting of the bygone days of Canadian Club and Parliaments are people like Christopher Hitchens, now dying from esophageal cancer, the primary risk factor of which is the combination of alcohol and nicotine. It's hard to argue that these days Don Draper is one iota happier because he gets to leave work at 5.

And yet, for those of us lucky enough to have jobs, but find ourselves leaving the house by 7 and getting home at 6:30 -- and that's during a slow time when we aren't working every weekend -- there's this constant feeling of having no life. We find ourselves in this never-ending cycle of feeling thankful that we still have a job even if it means we stumble home every night, eat a dinner of reheated Trader Joe's food, watch Countdown and maybe Rachel Maddow and then go to sleep to repeat the same thing tomorrow; then saying to ourselves, "Yeah, but that's what THEY want you to think!", and then looking around and seeing that we have a roof over our heads and being thankful again.

Why has it come to this? Why are employer and employee now enemies? Perhaps conformity is no longer the price we pay for being employed, but having to constantly prove our devotion to the company above all else in our life is. And yet we are the lucky ones, those of us who have jobs doing something meaningful, with supervisors who may be tough but are usually fair, with co-workers who are diverse, interesting, and intelligent people. What about those for whom the mind-numbing sameness is of getting out of bed every day with nowhere they have to go, nothing they have to do, other than scour the job boards for eight hours in the hope that something will show up for which they are completely qualified, and hoping that their resume comes over the fax first?

Is this what the two possible paths in America in the 21st century are -- having no life because you have no time or having no life because you have no job?

Sometimes I go with some colleagues to a local Fuddruckers for lunch. At the Fuddruckers, there is a woman who is clearly in her seventies. She works there. Her job is to bus tables. Every time I go there I leave a tip on the table and hope she's the one who gets it. Every time I go there seeing her simultaneously breaks my heart and frightens me to death. Because this is the future that Americans are going to vote for in November -- a future where you work into your seventies and eighties busing tables at Fuddruckers -- and that's if you're lucky.

A year ago, Alan Grayson took no end of shit from Republicans and the media for saying that the Republican answer for health care was "Don't get sick, and if you get sick, die quickly." Grayson was right, but he didn't tell the whole story. Today it's "Don't get old and don't lose your job, and if you do, die quickly."

Republicans demonize the unemployed because they think (rightly so, unfortunately) that if they can make the unemployed yet another hated "other" (like illegal immigrants or their latest favorite boogeyman, Muslims), they can distract the attention of the still-employed DOWN the economic ladder insted of realizing that the rich guys are stealing the few singles and fives they still have their wallets. Wages are flat, but more health care costs are being passed on to workers. Corporate profits are up, but hiring is down.

We live in a country where everyone was told from birth "If you work hard and play by the rules, you too can be a millionaire." If the hatefulness of their words didn't infuriate me so much, I would feel sorry for the unemployed truck driver, the out-of-work machinist, the guys bussed to the Glenn Beck rally by an organization funded by giant corporations and industrialists. These are people who believed the bullshit, the nonsense that everyone gets an even shake -- and now find themselves looking for someone to blame that it isn't true.

Today is Labor Day, and unions lie in wreckage around us. People who are out of work are getting ready to vote for the very people who would yank the very unemployment benefits that allow them to avoid homelessness. The Koch brothers aren't demonized by these people, but those with even less are. The reality that George Carlin spoke bitterly about in 2005 has come to fruition, making me think he died just so he wouldn't have to see multimillion dollar media "personalities" like Glenn Beck be greeted as practically the reincarnation of Christ by these people.

Labor Day always has a certain melancholy to it. This year it seems more melancholy than most.

Labels: america R.I.P., personal musings, rant

Remember when we marched in the streets of New York City in early 2003, over a half-million of us that no one called a movement, chanting "No blood for oil!"? They said we were wrong. They said it was about a constantly-changing stream of excuses to go to war in Iraq. Rachel Maddow, whose microphone was cut off right in the middle of it, had a devastating commentary on the wreckage of America's reputation as a result of the Bush/Cheney lies. I'll post the video in the morning if it's up. But it turns out we were right all along. I posted earlier this week about how Halliburton and Shell oil had been given the rights to develop the Iraq oil field. And now the parade truly begins:

But as the troops move out, the oil companies are moving in. According to a July report from the U.S. government’s Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, oil production in Iraq is currently about 2.4 million barrels per day. The goal, by 2017 is to produce 12 million barrels per day. That’s quite a leap, especially since average production levels have held steady for more than two years. It’s going to a take a lot of investment to expand production by 10 million barrels per day.

How much? That’s anybody’s guess. For example, in January, ExxonMobil signed an agreement to redevelop and expand an oil field in southern Iraq. A company spokeswoman says that “total field capital expenditure will depend on full project scope,” which is currently being examined.

There’s a pile of oil money pouring into Iraq right now. Since last year, the Iraqi government has awarded 11 development deals to various consortia. BP and China National Petroleum Corp. are developing the enormous Rumaila field, which has a total proven reserves of about 18 billion barrels. Other companies winning awards include Royal Dutch Shell (working with ExxonMobil on one project and Malaysia’s Petronas on another), France’s Total SpA, Angola’s Sonangol, Italy’s Eni SpA, Russia’s Lukoil and China National Offshore Oil Corp. The signature bonuses to be paid by the consortia are anywhere from $100 million to $500 million.

More investment is on the way. Iraq’s oil ministry is planning to build four new refineries that will nearly double the country’s refining capacity. Oil services firms like Weatherford International and Schlumberger are expanding their operations in the country. Earlier this month Halliburton won a deal to drill 15 wells in the Basra province in southern Iraq, though the financial terms have not been disclosed.

If development goes as planned, rebuilding Iraq’s oil sector could be a highly profitable investment for these companies over the long-term. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Iraq has the third largest proven oil reserves in the world (after Saudia Arabia and Canada). In 2008, oil exports accounted for nearly 90% of the country’s revenues.

Go take a look at "Faces of the Fallen" over at Washington Post. Go look at those faces of sons, brothers, lovers, husbands, fathers, wives, sisters, and friends whose blood was spilled because the Bush family not only regards the entire country as their own little fiefdom to be plundered for the benefit of themselves and their friends, they regard the entire WORLD as their own little fiefdom to be plundered for the benefit of themselves and their friends.

These young Americans died so that Dick Cheney can stuff more cash into his pocket in an attempt to fill the black hole that he has inside him where most of us have souls. These young Americans died so that George W. Bush could finally feel like a man. These young Americans died so that oil executives everywhere could buy a few more Maseratis, another mansion, more diamonds for their trophy wives.

We honor the service of these young Americans. We grieve their deaths, and we will carry the burden of our responsibility for them the rest of our lives. These young people trusted their country and they trusted their government. These young people loved their country. They believed in their country. And their country betrayed them. And no amount of revisionist history is ever, ever going to change that.

We should feel no joy tonight; no sense of relief that it's finally over. Because it will never be over. There are still 50,000 American soldiers in Iraq, and tens of thousands more in Afghanistan, trapped in an effort run by aging men who refuse to accept, even after the lessons of Vietnam, that some wars cannot be won and should not be fought. We do this over and over and over and over again. As long as there are small, mean little men who think that sending other people's children to fight somehow makes them bigger, as long as we give these mean little men the power to do so, we are going to be trapped right along with them.

Oh, and in case you want to know what the bottom line of it all is? Here you go.

Oh, and President Obama? Your party is still going to get its ass kicked in November anyway.

UPDATE: Rachel:

Rachel and Richard Engel:

Labels: america R.I.P., Bush family, Dick Cheney, FUBAR, Greedy Republican Bastards, Iraq War

Bob Herbert:

As a nation, we are becoming more and more accustomed to a sense of helplessness. We no longer rise to the great challenges before us. It’s not just that we can’t plug the oil leak, which is the perfect metaphor for what we’ve become. We can’t seem to do much of anything.

The city of Detroit is using federal money to destroy thousands upon thousands of empty homes, giving in to a sense of desperation that says there is no way to rebuild the city so let’s do the opposite: let’s destroy even more of it. Lots more of it.

There are plans aplenty for demolishing large parts of what’s left of Detroit, which in its heyday was the symbol of an America that was still a powerfully constructive force, a place that could produce things and improve the lives of its people and inspire the rest of the world.

Referring to an aspect of one of the plans, The Times’s Susan Saulny wrote in an article in Monday’s paper: “An urban homestead — one of the more popular parts of the plan — would be tantamount to country living in the city, the plan says, with homeowners enjoying an agricultural environment and lower taxes in exchange for disconnecting from some city services like water.”

The June 28 cover story of Time magazine is headlined, “The Broken States of America.” As I’ve mentioned here several times, the states are facing a catastrophic fiscal situation that is short-circuiting essential services, pushing even more people out of work, and undermining the feeble national economic recovery.

As Time reported: “Schools, health services, libraries — and the salaries that go with them — are all on the chopping block as states and cities face their worst cash squeeze since the Great Depression.”

We are submitting to this debacle with the same pathetic lack of creativity and helpless mind-set that now seems to be the default position of Americans in the 21st century. We have become a nation that is good at destroying things — with wars overseas and mind-bogglingly self-destructive policies here at home — but that has lost sight of how to build and maintain a flourishing society. We’re dismantling our public school system and, incredibly, attacking our spectacularly successful system of higher education, which is the finest in the world.

How is it possible that we would let this happen?

Here's why: Because American "greatness" was an illusion. It was an illusion because Americans, particularly all of us living in this country after WWII, got used to things being a certain way. We learned about heroes in school and then went home to television and suburban houses and cars the size of ocean liners (even the so-called "economy" cars) and new refrigerator models coming out this year, and a barrage of advertisements about how to achieve the good life through consumption. We made everyone who was in the military in WWII a hero, even those who remained stateside...and then we forgot the Korean war veterans. We gave a certain amount of credit to Martin Luther King, but forgot Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman and the kids who sat at that lunch counter. We heard about Abbie Hoffman a lot but never heard about Jeff Miller, Allison Krause, Sandy Scheuer, and William Schroeder. We never heard about doing without something --well-being, even lives -- for a greater good.

And we decided we were entitled to what we had.

In 1976, as the consequences of our profligacy started to become clear, Jimmy Carter gave us a stern talking to -- and was promptly defeated in 1980 by Ronald Reagan. Here was an ersatz image of the American West, telling Americans that they could have tax cuts AND lots more military spending, and still balance the budget. The president who railed against "welfare queens" told every OTHER American that they could have a free lunch. This mindset, which turned every American into one of those kids who attend schools where EVERYONE geta a gold star, reached its height after the 9/11 attacks, when George W. Bush told us that continuing to shop was patriotic and Dick Cheney told us that our lifestyle -- which included driving huge military vehicles that get 8 miles to the gallon, was "blessed."

Who wants to hear belt-tightening after that? After a decade in which families with two kids bought 10,000 square foot houses in which said kids never had to share a bathroom, let alone a bedroom, Americans are no longer even EQUIPPED to learn how to do without something, or defer gratification until later. Even now, as Barack Obama tries, however fecklessly, to deal with the many catastrophes that are the result of decades of Reaganism and DLC ersatz Reaganism, Republicans are still telling Americans that they can have a golden age again, if we just shovel enough money into the pockets of guys like Lloyd Blankfein and Tony Hayward.

As Pogo said, we have seen the enemy and he is us.

UPDATE 6/23/10: Proving my point:

Overwhelmingly, Americans think the nation needs a fundamental overhaul of its energy policies, and most expect alternative forms to replace oil as a major source within 25 years. Yet a majority are unwilling to pay higher gasoline prices to help develop new fuel sources.

Labels: america R.I.P., rant

I hope you all have had a chance to enjoy a tropical beach at least once in your life, because the days of sitting on pristine sands, looking at turquoise water and enjoying a dinner of fresh-caught fish are over, thanks to the oil-soaked greed of the Bush family and their cronies, the complete selling out of America to corporations, our own sense of petroleum-based entitlement, and Barack Obama's insistence on playing nice with greedy bastards:

A thick, 22-mile plume of oil discovered by researchers off the BP spill site was nearing an underwater canyon, where it could poison the foodchain for sealife in the waters off Florida.

The discovery by researchers on the University of South Florida College of Marine Science's Weatherbird II vessel is the second significant undersea plume reported since the Deepwater Horizon exploded on April 20. The plume is more than 6 miles wide and its presence was reported Thursday.

The cloud was nearing a large underwater canyon whose currents fuel the foodchain in Gulf waters off Florida and could potentially wash the tiny plants and animals that feed larger organisms in a stew of toxic chemicals, another researcher said Friday.

Larry McKinney, executive director of the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, said the DeSoto Canyon off the Florida Panhandle sends nutrient-rich water from the deep sea up to shallower waters.

McKinney said that in a best-case scenario, oil riding the current out of the canyon would rise close enough to the surface to be broken down by sunlight. But if the plume remains relatively intact, it could sweep down the west coast of Florida as a toxic soup as far as the Keys, through what he called some of the most productive parts of the Gulf.

Hollander said the oil they detected has dissolved into the water, and is no longer visible, leading to fears from researchers that the toxicity from the oil and dispersants could pose a big danger to fish larvae and creatures that filter the waters for food.

"There are two elements to it," Hollander said. "The plume reaching waters on the continental shelf could have a toxic effect on fish larvae, and we also may see a long term response as it cascades up the food web."

Dispersants contain surfactants, which are similar to dishwashing soap.

A Louisiana State University researcher who has studied their effects on marine life said that by breaking oil into small particles, surfactants make it easier for fish and other animals to soak up the oil's toxic chemicals. That can impair the animals' immune systems and cause reproductive problems.

Labels: 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, america R.I.P., corporatism, greed

Earlier this week, over 100 people lined up in Ridgewood, New Jersey to meet Captain Chesley Sullenberger, the pilot who successfully landed a US Air jet in the Hudson River last January. He was there for a signing of his book, Highest Duty: My Search for What Really Matters. One woman waiting on line said "He's everything that's good about America."

I wonder what she meant by that. Did she mean that what's good about America is that pilots like Sully and like Bryan Lawlor get demoted and have their pay cut in the middle class' race to the bottom? Or that the people who have our lives in their hands when we fly are moonlighting at Starbucks and collecting food stamps to make ends meet? I wonder if she thinks he's a good right-wing Republican because he wears a uniform, or if she knows that he appeared before Congress to testify in favor of better pay and working conditions for pilots. God knows the GOP doesn't know that Sully is a union guy; they recently tried to get him to run for Congress as a candidate in their I Got Mine And Fuck You Party.

Meanwhile, unemployment is up over 10 percent, even more Americans will lose their health insurance next year while members Congress dicker around about just how far up the rectums of insurance company executives they have to stick their noses in order to collect a nice paycheck for their next campaign, and the results of an economy which said that we don't have to make anything here and we don't even have to keep our knowledge work here are coming to fruition. The middle class is dying, but it's Party On Dude time on Wall Street:

Major U.S. banks and securities firms are on pace to pay their employees about $140 billion this year -- a record high that shows compensation is rebounding despite regulatory scrutiny of Wall Street's pay culture.

Workers at 23 top investment banks, hedge funds, asset managers and stock and commodities exchanges can expect to earn even more than they did the peak year of 2007, according to an analysis of securities filings for the first half of 2009 and revenue estimates through year-end by The Wall Street Journal.

Total compensation and benefits at the publicly traded firms analyzed by the Journal are on track to increase 20% from last year's $117 billion -- and to top 2007's $130 billion payout. This year, employees at the companies will earn an estimated $143,400 on average, up almost $2,000 from 2007 levels.

The growth in compensation reflects Wall Street firms' rapid return to precrisis revenue levels. Even as the economy is sluggish and unemployment approaches 10%, these firms have been boosted by a stronger stock market, thawing credit market, a resurgence in deal making and the continuing effects of various government aid programs.

The rebound also reflects growing confidence by some Wall Street firms that they can again pay top dollar for top talent, especially once they have repaid the taxpayer-funded capital infusions they received at the height of the crisis. So far, regulators and lawmakers have focused on making sure pay practices discourage excessive risk-taking, leaving to companies the question of how much is too much.

The Journal's analysis includes banking giants J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc.; securities firms such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley; asset managers BlackRock Inc. and Franklin Resources Inc.; online brokerage firms Charles Schwab Corp. and Ameritrade Holding Corp.; and exchange operators CME Group Inc. and NYSE Euronext Inc.

These are the same companies to which WE gave billions of dollars back in September 2007, when George W. Bush held us up at gunpoint and said "Gimme your dough or lose your house." And then millions lost their houses anyway. Does anyone still believe that this hasn't been some giant scam perpetrated on us? Does anyone still believe that our government represents us?

That's the tragedy of the "teabag" movement. The rage of the people standing on streetcorners with the signs showing Obama as Hitler are on to something, but even they aren't really aware of what it is. It's so much easier to buy into nonsense about Obama's birth certificate, or that he's a secret Muslim terrorist, or whatever crap gets thrown at them because it's not OK to use the "N" word than to realize that the very system that has been sold to them since Ronald Reagan talked about "a rising tide lifting all boats" is nothing but a massive transfer of wealth and standard of living away from them -- but not to the poor and the immigrants, but to those who already have more money than they could ever spend in 1000 lifetimes. How long have we heard blue-collar guys call into radio talk shows and defend massive tax cuts for the wealthy, saying "Rich people create jobs." During the Bush years, these "rich people" got billions in tax cuts, and where are the jobs? These people have been scammed the way Flounder got scammed by the Delta House guys in Animal House (and I'm not going to post that clip again even though I could post it every day and it would be appropriate). They fucked up. They trusted them.

When people who would gun everyone to the left of Ron Paul down if they thought they could get away with it start calling George W. Bush a war criminal at a Lindsey Graham meeting, you start realizing that left/right is not a continuum but a circle. And that if the "teabaggers" ever wake up and realize that the Scary Negro™ in the White House isn't the one making him poor, it's the system that has sold the current President, his staff, and every member of Congress except perhaps Bernie Sanders, Al Franken, and Alan Grayson, to the very corporations that have decided a middle class isn't in their best interest after all, the combination of the Angry Left and the Angry Right could be a potent force indeed. Because this isn't about red state/blue state, or liberal/conservative. It's about government of the people, by the people, for the people vs. a corporatocracy.

Labels: america R.I.P., bank bailout, rant

SC man died hungry, solo in tent, baffling friends

ANDERSON, S.C. — Friends of a 39-year-old South Carolina man are trying to figure out why he never reached out for help before dying broke and alone in a zipped-up tent on the banks of a lake.

Bright but reclusive Civil War buff David Condon lost his job at a local museum and fell behind on his rent.

Sometime in early July he disappeared. On Labor Day weekend, a group of college kids vacationing at a condo complex a few hundred yards from his tent peeked inside and found his body. The local coroner says he died of pneumonia, made worse by malnutrition. He was dehydrated and had lost 50 pounds in a few months.

His best friend, Craig Drennon, saw no sign Condon was having money problems or spiraling into despair when the two got together nearly every week to drink beers and play backgammon.

The people calling themselves Condon's "friends," he probably - & more accurately - considered "acquaintances." His disappearance alarmed no one enough to go looking for him. They ought to ask themselves exactly what they could have & would have done for the man. Passed the hat? Treated him to lunch at Burger King? Stored his possessions for him when he was evicted? Suggested he work part-time at Walmart so he could make his car payments & sleep in the backseat? Urged him to seek more help from government & nonprofit agencies? Condon knew he was up shit creek without a paddle, putting up a false front for as long as he could, then withdrawing into his humiliation & sparing others his personal misery. They ought to thank him for not interrupting their backgammon to beg for spare change.

What happened to Condon is about as authentically American an ending in 2009 as one can have, dying homeless, hungry, & mentally & physically wasted at the edge of a wealthy society that extolls self-reliance over all other personal qualities, advertises "a dollar & a dream," begrudges providing basic health care to all its citizens & won't even crack down on a financial industry that rewards failure with multi-million dollar bonuses.

I wouldn't be surprised if Condon had a useless Blackberry with no wireless service & a dead battery in his pocket.

Labels: america R.I.P., casualties of conservative "values", hopelessness, poverty, unemployment

I just didn't think it would happen this quickly:

Obama administration officials, fearing a battle with Congress that could stall plans to close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, are crafting language for an executive order that would reassert presidential authority to incarcerate terrorism suspects indefinitely, according to three senior government officials with knowledge of White House deliberations.

Such an order would embrace claims by former president George W. Bush that certain people can be detained without trial for long periods under the laws of war. Obama advisers are concerned that an order, which would bypass Congress, could place the president on weaker footing before the courts and anger key supporters, the officials said.

Look, I understand the dilemma. I understand that by utilizing torture, the Bush Administration created evidence against some of the people held at Guantanamo Bay that cannot be used under the system of justice we claim to utilize in the U.S. But does Barack Obama really believe that embracing the Bush Administration's power grab to incarcerate anyone, at any time, for any reason, under the cover of "war", is "change we can believe in" and that it's going to "keep us safe"?

Either we're better than the government of Iran or we aren't. And if we aren't, then let's throw this notion of "change" out the window and stop this crap about how America is so special and some kind of moral beacon for the rst of the world.

And by the way, in case Barack Obama doesn't know it yet, the very same wingnuts who ignored the destruction of habeas corpus under the Bush Administration are suddenly going to find it objectionable and a Threat to the Republic now that a Democrat has embraced it. So if he thinks this is a way to curry favor with Republicans, he'd better guess again. And if the new boss is going to be the same as the old boss, then we might as well sit on our hands in 2012 and let Sarah Palin become President. Because what the hell's the difference?

Labels: america R.I.P., fascism, habeas corpus, just another outrage, President Barack Obama

Every piece of information that comes out about the ginned-up case for war increases the horrible reality of how sick, depraved, and cynical the people we Americans allowed to lead this country for eight years were.

Last week, Rachel Maddow connected all the dots we have so far, and it's not a pretty picture:


I wonder if the same people who are willing to accept the legitimacy of torture in the nonexistent "ticking time bomb" scenario are as willing to accept it if the primary reason for torturing captives is to obtain not truthful, but FALSE information in order to gin up a false case for war?

Because if we as a people are willing to do so, even within the "context" of the climate here in the U.S. in 2002 (a climate whipped into a frenzy by the very same Bush Administration that resorted to the tactics of the worst tyrants in history in pursuit of a war they wanted so desperately), then there is in fact nothing in America that's worth saving. We are just another lost empire gasping its dying breaths in our lifetimes.

With Dick Cheney out on the hustings crowing about how torture kept us safe after the 9/11 attacks, one has to wonder why, with people like Richard Clarke trying to tell the Bush Administration what was coming, and with the now-infamous August 6 PDB screaming that Osama Bin Laden was "determined" to strike in the U.S., Dick Cheney was not "able" to "keep us safe" that day in 2001. I keep going back to this -- what some of us called LIHOP over the last seven years -- because every bit of information that comes out about how the Bush Administration used torture not to prevent another attack, but to gin up a case for war that George W. Bush had said he wanted even before being selected to the Presidency on December 12, 2001, points to my worst notions of a cost/benefit ratio being calculated in the Oval Office of what the potential negative fallout would be of allowing an attack to play out versus the potential gains in terms of support for the Iraq War.

This is why we now have the ridiculous spectacle of Newt Gingrich, who opposes any kind of investigation of the Bush Administration that ORDERED the use of torture techniques, running around demanding a Congressional investigation of Nancy Pelosi for claiming that the briefings she received about "harsh interrogation techniques" in 2002 and 2003 were incomplete and inaccurate. "Don't look here," he seems to be saying. "Look over there! Shiny object!"

Because the more information that comes out about why torture techniques were used by the Bush Administration -- to falsify a case for war -- the more it begins to look as if there really ARE no limits to which these people would have gone to go into Iraq. And if there are no limits, then you have to look at Dick Cheney in his underground bunker on 9/11/01, with George W. Bush conveniently out of town, ordering fighter jets to stand down while four planes are hijacked and head for the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Everything that came out of the Bush Administration from that day on can be traced directly back to that day -- a day which served them so well that suddenly the "inside job" people start sounding not quite so crazy. I'm not prepared to go that route, but if ginning up a fake case for an invasion of Iraq was that important, and since we know that Donald Rumsfeld ordered Richard Clarke immediately to find a link, is it really beyond the realm of possibility that allowing what they thought would be a 1993-style attack to play out would serve the needs of the Administration? Once you know just how depraved this bunch is, can you really draw a line and say "This is where they will not cross"?

I'm not going to go to the mat for Nancy Pelosi -- or any of the gutless Democrats who allowed George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to run amok for eight years -- a free pass on this. I know full well what the climate was in this country in 2002, but it is Congress' job to provide oversight -- and there was none. When I heard John Kerry's impassioned speech against a rush to war -- and then he voted for it anyway -- I knew that we could not rely on any kind of opposition to provide oversight. The Democrats allowed themselves to be cowed by bullies for eight years, and so were complicit in the ruination of this country.

And now we have the Obama Administration backtracking on all its promises in regard to cleaning up the worst offenses of the Bush Administration. So at this point I wonder: With what have they been threatened?



(h/t)

Labels: america R.I.P., Democratic sellouts, despair, Newt Gingrich, torture