This is you, and this is me, and we suck.

I watched the video embedded below, and a nasty, discouraging thought occurred to me.

This is me.  This is you.  I’m not referring to the people on the ground being mercilessly and gleefully beaten and stomped.  I’m referring to those administering the wanton abuse.  Sure, they are part of an organization that has received billions of dollars of U.S. ‘aid’ over the years.  Sure, while we were toppling a government that provided its citizens with one of the highest standards of living in the Eastern world, and the most freedom to its female population, we were letting the violent tyranny represented in the video go unchecked.

That is all true, and we as U.S. citizens are partly responsible for that behavior, but the nasty, discouraging thought had little to do with events so far removed.  Behavior such as this has been meted out to dissenters right here in the U.S.  Much of it has been hidden from the masses by the complicity of our corporate media, but enough has gotten through the wall of silence and obfuscation that most of us should understand what’s been done in our name (but on behalf of a very slender segment of the population).

Even the violence and oppression handed out to the Occupy movement isn’t precisely what I’m referring to.  After all, it isn’t anything new.  The ‘Miami Model‘ has been in effect for roughly a decade now, at least.  In fact, the nasty thought piqued by the video above refers to an application of the Miami Model which is now being arranged for my own city next spring.

On a recent day at work, I heard talk of generous amounts of overtime to be offered to a number of fire and police personnel.  There will be federal and probably some military deployments as well, to be sure, as the G20/G8 Summit and the NATO Summit will be held a week apart in Chicago in May.  I’m sure much of the city center will be turned in a police-state fortress, all so that undemocratic organizations can shield themselves from the nonviolent anger and dissatisfaction of representatives of the majorities they refuse to represent.

Our city’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel, is a dear friend of the elite financial interests represented by the G20/G8 contingents, and a close ally and fellow traveler of the neoimperial interests represented by NATO.  So Emanuel will have no trouble securing the many millions of dollars needed to pay for the temporary fortress (even though there’s no money available anywhere to pay our unionized public school teachers).  Even that nastiness isn’t what I find discouraging.

What I find discouraging is that all this money will be spent, all the intimidation and, if possible, violence, will be handed out, and the local and national corporate media will sell it as necessary business as usual.  And you and I will sit there and buy it.  Some of you are my colleagues, some of you are my allies on the street (police officers); you will be the worst, because some of you will put on your uniforms and whatever riot gear and collect the overtime and go out intimidating the protesters and cracking their skulls, and for what?  To defend the interests of some wealthy assholes who are just waiting for the right time to fuck you out of your pensions and benefits?  But you won’t be alone.  The rest of us will sit there, while the kind of brutality in the video above is either implied or acted out before our eyes, and we won’t do shit about it.  In fact, most of us will probably line up a few months later to elect some of the same assholes who have brought us to this point.

We suck, and we deserve what’s happening to our country.  I would like to be able to say that the human race deserves better, but I seriously doubt that.  We may think we can get away with ignoring the brutality being meted out to our fellow human beings, but Planet Earth is warming up to give us what we deserve, even as we shop and entertain ourselves and pretend there’s no price to pay for our catastrophic irresponsibility.

Idiotic totems and cognitive dissonance

First I’ll recommend the following post by Amanda Marcotte, who is on fire this week:

Gingrich was taking your Harley out for a weekend, nothing more

These rubbers are, as you can imagine, largely Republican. They are definitely the sort of people who find the Tea Party compelling; I’m guessing that many motorcycles since I’ve moved have been updated with “Don’t Tread on Me” logos, as well as more Confederate flags, as a talisman to keep the reality that we elected a black President from penetrating their consciousness.

Amanda’s focus on reactionary Harley riders called to mind something I saw during the summer, when I was working at the firehouse near Wrigley Field.  One of my colleagues parked his shiny Harley against the firehouse, and on his vehicle at least two of those black POW/MIA decals were prominently displayed.  If I recall correctly, he was wearing some article of clothing that also bore the logo.  This is a topic I like to revisit periodically, because it is a stark reminder of the amount of vile bullshit that gets elevated to sacred, totemic status in our society.

In Chicago, and I’m guessing in the entire U.S., you are unlikely to pass two or three government buildings (of any level of government)– be they firehouses, post office branches, libraries, or others– without finding at least one flying the POW/MIA flag.  Given the satanically odious motives behind the original POW/MIA campaign, and the epic dishonesty that the campaign and its symbols represent, there are few items more symbolic of our terminal national political illness.

Vietnam & Other American Fantasies

review by Christian Parenti

Reading between the lines

Sometimes dishonesty isn’t as simple as directly saying something false.

For example, there’s this.

Then there’s the following, from a Chicago Reader report (by our always excellent local journalism gems, Mick Dumke and Ben Joravsky) about local political reluctance to decriminalize marijuana:

The mayor said he was considering policy changes but had concerns about decriminalization. “Other cities that have done this have then had to go back and do corrections because it’s created its own set of problems,” Emanuel said.

A reporter asked him what sort of problems he was talking about. The mayor declined to detail them.

“I’m not going to get into hypotheticals,” he said.

(Emphasis mine.)  Note his first statement, wherein he offers a direct, unambiguously defined reason for his “concerns” (‘concerns,’ a word used by the reporters, here connotes reluctance).  Emanuel mentions “cities,” and he mentions “problems” that required “corrections”; these are common nouns that denote more specific, detailed definitions.  When asked to add such details to his clearly defined construction, the mayor characterizes such specifics as “hypotheticals.”

Now, if you’ve read more than one or two posts of this humble blog, and you’re reasonably fluent in English, and you’ve never been married to me, then chances are you’re going to accept that I’m not completely stupid.  I’m going to give you, dear reader, that same benefit of the doubt.  I’m also going to accept that Rahm Emanuel is not so ignorant of the English language that he can’t tell the difference between hypothesizing and providing specifics to a clearly defined evidential construction. 

If you ask me if I think the sun will rise tomorrow, based on my observation of the sun’s behavior on previous days, then you’re asking for a hypothesis.  If I tell you I know of some days in the past where the sun rose but it was obscured by cloud cover, and you tell me provide a list of such days, you are requesting specifics to a clearly defined evidential construction.  See the difference?

Mayor Emanuel signals his reluctance and offers a clear reason, one that is lacking in specific details.  He declines to give those details, citing a wish to avoid “hypotheticals.”  So that leaves us with three possibilities here: 1) a smart, educated man and skillful politician displayed ignorance or laziness with his use of a very specific noun; 2) he’s skipping a rhetorical step, assuming that listing the problems he’s vaguely cited would lead to a ‘hypothetical’ discussion which he would rather avoid; and 3) he’s being evasive.  I’m leaning toward 3 while recognizing that it’s not mutually exclusive of 2.

Is the mayor’s veracity important here?  If you read the rest of the article, and keep in mind that Emanuel is a highly skilled and seasoned politician who’s worked directly with two of our nation’s most beloved presidential dissemblers, maybe you’ll agree that it is.  Why would Emanuel trouble himself to make a public statement about an important political issue if he weren’t going to actually do anything substantial?

Why, indeed.

Globalization and Coercive Violence

America is today the leader of a world-wide antirevolutionary movement in the defence of vested interests.  She now stands for what Rome stood for.  Rome consistently supported the rich against the poor in all foreign communities that fell under her sway; and, since the poor, so far, have always and everywhere been far more numerous than the rich, Rome’s policy made for inequality, injustice, and for the least happiness of the greatest number.

Arnold Toynbee, 1961[1]

There are only two ways to govern: with consent or with fear.

Naomi Klein[2]

Coercive violence is a fundamental element of globalization.  Failure to adequately address the phenomenon of coercive violence could result in a reification of globalization’s worst conceivable outcomes.

In order to analyze the integral nature of coercive violence to globalization, it is necessary to place the phenomenon of globalization in its proper historical context.

The analysis will begin with a brief overview of the regional and imperial histories of globalization, and discuss the transition from the last self-identified imperial power—Great Britain—into the Anglo-American/Western European aggregation of nation-states that currently dominates much of the political and economic sphere.  The analysis will proceed to the present, where the U.S. and its Western allies have brought coercive global violence into a new phase.

‘Thou shalt fuck over thy neighbor…’

Okay, that isn’t part of the Decalogue, but as moral imperatives go it’s a hell of a lot closer to our national ethos than any of the Ten Commandments.  Put that in front of your courthouse, jerky!

I’ll let Morris Berman say the smart words at which I’m only hinting:

As Jerry Seinfeld’s lawyer in the final episode of the series tells him: “You don’t have to help anybody; that’s what this country’s all about!” The problem is that if you live by the dollar, you die by the dollar. That’s what’s going on today. In fact, perhaps the really interesting question is not why we are finally coming apart, which strikes me as being more or less obvious, but how we managed to stay together for this long. Competition cannot be the glue of a society, because by definition it’s an anti-glue. Thus David Ehrenfeld, Professor of Biology at Rutgers University, recently wrote: “A society driven mainly by selfish individualism has all the potential for sustainability of a collection of angry scorpions in a bottle.”

Read the whole thing; it’s priceless.

Anyway, in my Facebook meanderings I found this article:

Private Prisons Spend Millions on Lobbying to Put More People in Jail

JPI claims the private industry hasn’t merely responded to the nation’s incarceration woes, it has actively sought to create the market conditions (ie. more prisoners) necessary to expand its business.

According to JPI, the private prison industry uses three strategies to influence public policy: lobbying, direct campaign contributions, and networking. The three main companies have contributed $835,514 to federal candidates and over $6 million to state politicians. They have also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on direct lobbying efforts. CCA has spent over $900,000 on federal lobbying and GEO spent anywhere from $120,000 to $199,992 in Florida alone during a short three-month span this year. Meanwhile, “the relationship between government officials and private prison companies has been part of the fabric of the industry from the start,” notes the report. The cofounder of CCA himself used to be the chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party.

This is really bad, and it reminded me of this:

“Nigger, nigger, nigger.”

I read the previous post after not thinking about it for a while, and at first blush it seems a little harsh and a bit too focused.  I intended it more as a thought experiment than a cogent analysis, though, so I wasn’t overly concerned about it’s intellectual accuracy.  However, this morning I saw this:

Is the Manufactured Crisis at the Post Office a Push Toward Privatization?

I’ve mentioned this before somewhere in the past, but I believe it more relevant now: I once heard a joke, told to my face, by a white colleague at a former job.  It goes as follows:

Q: What do Florsheim Shoes and the U.S. Postal Service have in common?

A: 20,000 pairs of black loafers

So if you’re wondering now if I am fixated on race, if I’m imputing racial motivations to an issue that is more generically political and economic, allow me to clarify.  I’m not suggesting that the move to destroy the unionized, lower-middle-class labor force of the USPS is entirely racially motivated.  I’m suggesting the saboteurs understand that racial politics make the destruction an easier sell.

While we must never forget that racism is a core element of conservative politics, I don’t believe this dynamic excludes putative liberals.  They may not use the word ‘nigger,’ not even in their thoughts, but when they see this USPS story in corporate media, what do you think will stand out in their minds?  The letter carrier they rarely if ever see, who delivers their mail day in and day out, faithfully upholding the United States Postal Service creed?  The workers they’ll never see, tirelessly sorting mountains of mail for hours on end (or something like that)?  Or will they envision the sassy black bitch who didn’t smile at them after they waited twenty-five minutes in line trying to mail a package in late December?

My money’s on the latter.  While the efforts of the Wall Street protesters are vital and admirable, I believe that the majority of putative liberals are Oprah-liberals and hedge fund Democrats.  This doesn’t mean most of them are wealthy, but it does mean they’ve bought into the same ‘free market’ nonsense as have the right-wingers.  As reflected in their voting choices, they are unwilling to seriously challenge the neoliberal bipartisan oligarchy that runs our country.  A few are deeply invested in it, yes, but the rest are just hanging on for the diminishing consumerist ‘benefits.’  So when they don’t see massive, nationwide prosecutions of mortgage fraud or securities fraud or the like, they don’t even shrug.  Conversely, when they see thousands of hard-working public employees being scammed out of their livelihoods by a craven Congress beholden to reactionary antilabor interests, they don’t blink.  Serves those ‘black loafers’ right, I guess.

The antirevolutionary effects of racism

Could world social unrest hit America’s streets?

"Don't cry, sis. At least we're not niggers."

Americans turn on themselves first, and then on each other.  What we have is worse than learned helplessness.  It’s learned self-loathing.  To put it crudely, we are taught to hate not just the nigger over there, but also the nigger within.  Ironically, and almost paradoxically, it is this largely racially motivated self-hatred– ‘you’re okay as long as you’re better than a nigger’– that precipitates the paralysis or the badly misdirected activism (e.g. teabagging)*: the fear and loathing of all things black, including the internalized states of mind and being that have morphed out of the concept of the despised and feared African descendant, creates a cognitive dissonance that prevents people from rising up against their true systemic antagonists.  The term ‘class warfare,’ so bluntly wielded by right-wing mouthpieces, is an example of the exploitation of this dynamic.  To suggest that the majority of working people (i.e. non-wealthy whites) should organize against their betters (i.e. predominantly white rich people) is to suggest that those working people must also identify with others who have been put upon (i.e. non-wealthy brown and black people).  In other words, to fight against the traditionally white power structure, they must become niggers.  For at least a healthy plurality of working white people, that is a sin worse than remaining enslaved to a worsening status quo that is manipulated against them by the traditionally white power structure.
Keep in mind that most people (especially those most involved in its perpetuation) would probably not articulate this phenomenon in such stark terms as I’m using here, and I’m not suggesting that the phenomenon is purely racial in structure and character.  I’m just trying to cut to the core in as few words as possible.  You know how difficult that is for me.

*It’s also part of what drove countless thousands of poor, put-upon Southern laborers to take up arms to protect the profits and bloated lifestyles of their aristocratic Confederate countrymen, instead of uniting with their black fellow laborers to overthrow the plantation economy and culture.

This migration is not due to global climate change

I’m not exactly fed up with Blogger, but the limitations of its features vex me.  So I’m experimenting with this move to WordPress.  We’ll see how it goes.

Meanwhile, have a look-see at the shitstorm that’s building up around the titular issue.  Soon enough it will no longer be easy to pretend that global climate change is a liberal hoax designed to deprive white men of their ManMobiles.

Record Arctic Ice Melt Threatens Global Security

Ah, it seems like just yesterday that we last visited
CHICKENSHIT NATION

Airplane bathroom sex blamed for terror alert

I like the unvarnished description:

The local ABC affiliate in Detroit, WXYZ, was a bit more explicit in its language, noting that “the ABC News National Security team is telling Action News that their sources say the flight was disrupted by two people having intimate relations in one of the bathrooms.”

Now consider the FBI version:

An FBI statement on the incident, however, mentions neither “making out” nor “intimate relations.” It says simply, “Out of an abundance of caution, NORAD scrambled F-16 jets to shadow the flight until it landed safely at DTW at approximately 3:30 PM EDT. Law enforcement met the flight, which was brought to a remote area of the airport. The plane was swept with negative findings and cleared at 5:15 PM ET.”

Rule Number 1 of the police state: you must continuously justify the existence of the police state.

SHODDY JOURNALISM, OR A THINLY DISGUISED AGENDA?
YOU DECIDE…

Read the following story:

City councilman killed after finding pot field

Note that nowhere in the story is the shooting placed at the scene of the “illegal marijuana operation.”  Also, note that the suspect is identified as a “transient.”  Had the ‘transient’ recently settled down and purchased a plot of land, upon which he began to grow pot?  Was the suspect growing pot on someone else’s land?  Was the shooting in defense of the marijuana operation?  Did the shooting have any connection to the pot?

We are told in the story how valuable the victim was, and how he will be missed.  What we are not told is why he was killed.  What the victim was doing when he was killed– investigating a possible illegal operation– is relevant.  However, given that the report contains no direct connection between the victim’s intent and his murder, why put that front and center, in the headline and the lede?  Based on the details given, we don’t know if the suspect is the killer, nor do we know if the killing was related to the victim’s intent.  (There are certainly enough details given about the suspect’s past to suggest other possible motives for the shooting.)

This is either a case of shoddy journalism, or it is a case of putting out a story with political agenda.  It certainly looks like both.

I highly recommend that everyone get their e-tails over to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.  They do a splendid job of ferreting out just this sort of thing.  Unfortunately, this sort of thing is the rule rather than the exception, so their challenge is more handling the sheer volume than searching out transgressions.