Assembly Required

In my next incarnation, if I don’t return as a cricket or a gopher, I will be a carpenter or mechanical engineer, the kind of guy who can build a fence on a Saturday afternoon or dismantle an engine and put it back together. Hand and power tools will consider me a kindred soul rather than a dangerous imposter.

The other day we bought a new desk chair from World Market. It’s called a “Konrad” chair, made in Thailand from teak wood. Assembly required, of course. As I unpack the carton on the living room rug, I consider the long journey this chair has made from where it was produced to where it will be used. Trucked from a factory somewhere in Thailand, (what kind of factory, what kind of working conditions and wages?) packed into a sea container and loaded on a ship for the voyage across the ocean, perhaps stopping in other ports along the way to collect more cargo. World trade is a web of faceless factory workers, middlemen, transportation conglomerates, freight brokers and wholesalers, and a product moves through many hands before it lands on the floor of a store like World Market.

When I embark on a home improvement project anything can happen, and when all is said and done it’s more likely than not that there will be parts leftover. It’s also certain that at some point I will unleash a torrent of curse words and become cross with my wife and kids. (They have learned to give me plenty of space). The written directions and assembly diagrams for the Konrad chair make my head swim. Nuts and bolts, washers and screws; attach part A to B and B to C, tighten with Allen wrench. Sounds simple enough, in theory, but I am mechanically challenged and the damn Allen wrench keeps slipping from my fingers.

I’ve long thought that two people who are considering marriage should first attempt to build a piece of furniture that contains many pieces and parts. How they go about it is sure to be revelatory. Many years ago, my wife and I assembled a large computer hutch, and by the time we finished we despised one another. Every negative aspect in our respective personalities was on display that day.

Thankfully, I succeeded in assembling the Konrad chair without my usual histrionics, and when I sat on it for the first time it didn’t collapse beneath me. The pride I felt was disproportionate to the difficulty of the task, but given my mechanical incompetence, I still felt a sense of accomplishment.  

FOOTPRINT

It’s Sunday and we wake up to discover that we have no coffee in the house. We hop in a rented Chevrolet Cruze – my beloved 1998 Honda Civic is in the body shop for repair, the result of it being backed into by a delivery truck – and drive across town to Ralphs on Carrillo. The streets are quiet, a few people walking their dogs. The plaza in front of the public library is deserted, but in a few hours the homeless will begin congregating, some to sleep on the grass in the shade of a tree, others to hold court.

Inside Ralphs workers are restocking the shelves and arranging fruit and produce; others sweep the floors and rotate jugs of milk, containers of cottage cheese. I like this store because of its downtown location, and because here I see people I don’t see in Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods or Tri-County Produce – the elderly who live nearby, students, Mexican families, drifters and homeless. Each day a tide of human beings move through this store.

We locate our brand of coffee and a package of doughnuts for our son, and move through the self-service checkout, scanning our purchases and placing them in a reusable bag. No human interaction required, efficient yet impersonal; I swipe my debit card, enter my PIN, a receipt is automatically printed and the machine reminds me to take it.

Back outside I notice the grime on the red bricks and concrete, blobs of chewing gum, sticky stains from soda and juice spills, a single shoe imprint captured in this accumulated muck. NIKE, I think, though I could be wrong. This single imprint will last longer than a footprint on wet sand at the beach. 

NSA: Our Hero in a White Hat

Big news, breaking news. The NSA has intercepted or overheard Al-Qaeda terrorists “chattering” about an imminent major strike on American or European targets. High alert is ordered, and as many as nineteen embassies or American outposts in the Mideast or North Africa are shut down as a precaution. Among other claims, the major news media says the threats are specific enough for caution, yet still somewhat vague and nebulous. Hmmm, that’s crack reporting – specific yet vague. 

A new, younger generation of Al-Qaeda terrorists are said to be even more diabolical and fanatical than their forebears, going so far as to surgically implant explosives in the bodies of suicide bombers.

(This new generation may have a chip on its shoulder because the U.S. has killed or murdered so many of its fathers, uncles, brothers, cousins, mothers, sisters, and so on. You kill us, we kill you, forever and ever, amen.)

Yemen is the epicenter of this Al-Qaeda upsurge. The U.S. has a long history of intervention in Yemen, with clandestine boots on the ground, CIA agents skulking around the capitol, and drones soaring through the sky. We’ve killed so-called militants in Yemen, as well as a fair number of innocents, plus one very well known American named Anwar al-Awlaki and his teenage son. Boom, dead: father and son. The Americans went to great lengths to make it appear as if the kid was a budding terrorist, though as Jeremy Scahill reported in his recent book, Dirty Wars, the younger al-Awlaki wasn’t a terrorist at all – he was just a teenaged boy who wanted to spend time with his father.

Is it my growing paranoia or is the timing of this heightened security threat unbearably convenient? The political class and the public have responded to whistleblower Edward Snowden’s disclosures with anger directed against the Obama Administration and the national security state.

Suddenly, people are talking about the NSA’s domestic spying program, the agency’s insatiable appetite for trivial information, and how government officials have been forced to admit – grudgingly, of course -- that they have been lying to the American people. The U.S. government is pissed off, and making threats against countries from China to Bolivia, and the spying program is under intense scrutiny. The NSA is in dire need of some positive press – and what do you know -- just like that the NSA has used its awesome technological powers to foil a devious plot by the evil terrorists.

You don’t think, nah, no way, that the heightened alert is a pile of steaming horseshit cooked up by our best and brightest in the corridors of power…our government wouldn’t lie to us, would it? They wouldn’t use their powers to concoct some phony-baloney terrorist threat and make the NSA look like a cowboy in a white hat, riding in to protect us from the bad guys, would they? Our honorable government wouldn’t exaggerate the threat from a ragtag force that the Obama Administration has repeatedly told us has been decimated by JSOC raids, assassinations, and “surgical” drone strikes, right? 

Right?

What’s that fishy smell hanging over Washington D.C?

The New Normal is Creepy

A lot of creepy people want to get into politics or return to politics, even if this means airing the dirtiest, smelliest laundry from the dank recesses of their closets.

Anthony Weiner. What to say? The media probe the connection between Weiner’s suffering spouse, Huma Abedin, and Hillary Clinton, breathlessly wonder if Hillary is giving Huma advice and counsel. Hillary knows a thing or two about philanderers. Her Bill was the undisputed champion of the game – no skulking around cheap motels for Bill, oh no, he got himself sucked off by an intern right in the Oval Office.

Bob Filner, mayor of San Diego, is a seasoned groper of women. But not to worry, San Diego! Filner is going to change his wicked ways in only two intensive weeks of therapy; he promises to rise from the therapist’s couch a new, improved man.

Meanwhile, President Obama has woken from his dream of a bipartisan orgy and re-discovered the Economy and the middle-class. In a speech the other day, Obama said that since 2009 the richest Americans have sucked up 40% of income gains. This can’t continue, Obama said, because it’s tearing America’s social fabric. Tearing? Mr. President, dude, the Levi’s of the American body politic are in tatters, and your administration bears culpability – not as much culpability as John Boehner’s jihadist GOP – but, man, your hands are covered in the blood of the expiring middle class.

Of course the elites are partying hard, and why shouldn’t they? Everything is pretty much as it was when the economy tanked in 2008. CEO’s are raking in huge salaries and bonuses, the stock market is ticking along, private sector honchos move effortlessly between boardrooms and the hallways of regulatory agencies, corporations are still considered “people” for purposes of campaign donations, and Big Media still reports the Talking Points of the powerful like gospel truth. What’s changed?

Jobs and wages? Too boring for prime time. Help the poor? That’s socialism, and in America we only do socialism for the wealthy; for the poor and needy it’s tough love, self-reliance, moral hazard. Besides, we need a permanent underclass to provide clients for our for-profit prison-industrial complex. Gotta’ feed the money machine what it needs.

The hour is too late for Obama to find his long lost inner populist or to score a major legislative victory. The U.S. Congress is gerrymandered and captive; Obama may honestly wish to move forward, but the GOP is determined to move back to the 18^th century, no matter how citizens suffer. Power matters, people don’t. In case you haven’t noticed, this is government of the elite, by the elite and for the elite. Before we know it, Larry Summers will likely be the Fed chairman. Welcome back to one of the primary architects of our one-sided economy. The gilded revolving door keeps turning.

Maybe this explains why twisted personalities like Anthony Weiner and Bob Filner subject themselves to the media rack; for a place at the golden trough, they will sacrifice everyone around them and endure any indignity.

Sick, twisted, and creepy. Welcome to the new normal.  

Black Detroit, White Wall Street

I listened to President Obama talk about the Trayvon Martin trial. As usual, Obama said all the right things, sounded the right notes, but at the end of the day it’s unlikely that his administration can or will do a thing to change the dynamics that put Trayvon Martin in the ground long before his time.

Obama said we must give young African-American men options, pathways to opportunities to improve themselves. Ironically, a few days before the president’s speech, the city of Detroit declared bankruptcy. Detroit is the poster child for urban deindustrialization, job flight, corruption, poverty, mismanagement, and crime, and the face of contemporary Detroit is black.

How many Trayvon Martin’s are trying to survive in Detroit?

The Detroit that lives in the American imagination perished a long time ago, destroyed by monetary, tax, and trade policies pushed by every administration from Reagan to Obama. Obama has continued the new American tradition of slavish fealty to finance at the expense of working people.

For African-American men to have opportunities, they must first have a shot at decent jobs at living wages -- the sort of jobs that existed in the old Detroit – otherwise they will never set foot on a path that leads out and up.

Flipping hamburgers and dunking French fries in grease for minimum wage won’t do the trick, and it’s ridiculous to expect large numbers of African-American men to become entrepreneurs, though some certainly could, given a helping hand. Obama said not a single word about manufacturing jobs or union wages, though it is manufacturing jobs that are needed, and not only in the African-American community.

We honor finance, the buying, selling and trading of pieces of paper with the same fervor that we dishonor our inner cities. If there is an urban policy in place in the Obama administration I have no idea what it is. Perhaps, like almost everything else, we’ve left urban policy to the whims of the invisible hand of the market god.  

Working people have felt the back of that hand for three decades, but for African-American men it has been more like blows from the back of a fist. Detroit is but the most glaring example of the downward spiral: jobs flee, companies close, non-whites decamp to the suburbs, the tax base erodes, infrastructure decays and public services decline; the big money boys swoop in like vultures over carrion, and turn whatever public assets are left into commodities. 

I don’t think this country cares much for people like Trayvon Martin. Fear the Trayvon’s? Yes. Stop and frisk the Trayvon’s? Yes.  Criminalize the Trayvon’s and lock them away at rate disproportionate to the rest of the population? Yes.

But if we cared about people like Trayvon Martin, the president and the Congress would be doing for black Detroit what they did for white Wall Street. 

GULAG

One can only imagine the backchannel maneuvering going on in Washington D.C. and the corridors of the NSA and FBI and CIA and State Department over Edward Snowden. It must be frantic, a race against time to determine what information Snowden has beyond what he has already disclosed.

“I want to know everything this motherfucker Snowden has ever done in his miserable life! I want to know how many times he has jerked off! I want to know what kind of porn he looks at! I want to know about his mother, his father, his siblings and his fucking cat. I want information, and I want it now.”

Yeah, I imagine it’s hyper damage control mode driven by intense pressure from the White House. I imagine daily progress briefings held in secure conference rooms. Diplomatic conference calls with Russia full of pleas that Snowden be turned over to the US, and veiled threats of serious consequences if Russia refuses to comply. Quid pro quo deals are proposed.

Any nation that may be thinking of granting Snowden political asylum is put on notice; go ahead, Ecuador, but you’ll never see another nickel of US economic and military aid. No trade favors for you, Bolivia.

Comply with Uncle Sam or be crushed by our naked power.

The world’s foremost bully uses all its juice to isolate Edward Snowden, choke off his escape routes and reduce his options to zero.

The bully is unnerved by the young man living temporarily in the transit lounge of a Moscow airport, afraid of the data on his laptops and thumb drives, what he may have stored in the cloud or transmitted to others. Countless operatives are working around the clock on the Snowden affair, staring at computer screens until their vision turns fuzzy. Meanwhile, the bully uses all his power to discredit Snowden in the media, to call into question his motives, to claim that Snowden is a delusional narcissist bent on damaging the vital interests of the US.

One vital interest is that the US, and only the US, has the ability to eavesdrop with impunity on its citizens, allies and enemies. What we would not tolerate from others (except Israel, of course) we demand as our divine right. 

From every available pulpit the bully claims that Snowden was involved in espionage against his own country, land of the incarcerated and home of the Big Mac.

For his part, Edward Snowden has good reason to fear being extradited to the US; the example of another whistleblower, Bradley Manning, must never be far from his thoughts. Manning has been in the military wing of the American gulag for several years, facing multiple charges for leaking information to WikiLeaks. Manning acted out of conscience, too, and his one-way ticket to life in a cage got punched. If the US gets its bloody hands on Snowden, he’ll spend months or years in solitary confinement.  

Along with spectacle, incarceration is now an American specialty.

Easy Money

I feel the pain in my forehead again, the result of reading too much news and listening to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now. Did the abysmal US Congress – that pathetic body of whores – actually allow federal student loan rates to double to 6.8%?

Big banks borrow money from the government at 0.75%.

6.8% for students, 0.75% for banks.

If this travesty is not emblematic of everything wrong with the United States of America in 2013, I don’t know what is.

Do you need any more evidence that this nation is ruled by the finance industry? We may as well anoint Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase King of America and jam a fork in our democracy, once and for all. Fuck this corporate takeover of every facet of American life by dibs and dabs, just kill us quick and get it over with.

The pain is growing more intense, as if the jaws of a vice are closing; my eardrums feel as if they will burst.

Even Democrats have the austerity virus and tell us the nation simply can’t afford to help our students. We can, however, afford fighter jets and Hellfire missiles and drones and cruise missiles; we can afford to piss away billions of dollars chasing evil terrorists in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia; we can afford to transform the US-Mexican border into one of the most militarized in the entire world, rivaling that of North and South Korea; we can afford to give resource extractors like Exxon-Mobil millions of dollars in subsidies…

And the list goes on and the pain in my head worsens, and the greedy motherfuckers who rule this nation don’t even go through the motions of pretending they give a rat’s ass about the great unwashed masses. They know they have nothing to fear from Americans – this isn’t Egypt or Brazil or Tunisia, places where people get pissed off and flood the streets to demand redress of their grievances. Americans watch TV and stuff their faces with potato chips, and go right on believing in the red, white and blue, go right on electing pinheads, pederasts, and pissants to public office, where they rape us over and over. 

Maybe we deserve to be turned into paupers or serfs, since, after all, we vote for the gangsters who rob us blind, take what was public and make it private, for profit, for those who can pay; nothing is sacred, everything can be reduced to a commodity, valued in the marketplace, traded, bought, sold: education, health care, drinking water, crude oil, soybeans, corn, houses, manufacturing jobs, condoms, cow shit, horse shit and pig shit.

Remember how free trade and free markets were going to set us all free, make us rich? Remember Ronnie Reagan when he intoned that government was the problem? You still believe that bullshit?

0.75% for banks, 6.8% for students.

Nothing but easy money for the rich and this searing pain in the center of my working class forehead.

Astonishing & Perverse

San Francisco is experiencing a building boom driven by the desire of Silicon Valley types for high-priced condos and luxury apartments. Rent controlled buildings are being sold to developers and the tenants evicted; it’s unlikely that many of these tenants will be able to afford places in the new or refurbished buildings.

The power of capital.

On the front page of the New York Times I read an article about executive compensation, a hot topic a few years back, when the economy tanked and the financial industry got bailed-out by sucker taxpayers. Even though many CEO’s had made irresponsible bets on exotic financial instruments that cost their companies billions, they were not held accountable, either by forfeiting compensation or by being indicted. The Times article basically said that nothing can be done to slow the pace of CEO compensation; the median increase at the 200 or so largest firms stands at a hefty 16%.

The power of neoliberal policies: the wealthy get ever wealthier.

Not long after I read the Times article I saw a CNN Money report that claimed that 76% of American households exist paycheck-to-paycheck with no funds set aside for misfortune.

Why isn’t this story on the front page of every major newspaper in the country or being seriously debated in the corridors of Congress? This is the real economic story of our time – the chronic financial insecurity of the majority of American families. It’s obvious and it’s everywhere, and the corporate media could care less. Watching CEO pay skyrocket out of proportion to what one individual is worth to a firm is much sexier.

Working people in America Incorporated are an afterthought, as disposable as a used tampon. Our corporate fathers crushed the unions, exported our jobs, and devalued work. The United States Chamber of Commerce and hundreds of think tanks helped by providing the philosophic underpinnings: wealth is moral, greed is normal, and exploitation is the natural order of the universe. Unfettered by regulation and law, the best will rise to the top, where they naturally belong. The poor have no one to blame but themselves. Lack of industry, moral fiber, self-control and initiative, that’s the problem of the poor.

Everyone can be rich in America!

Nobody ever mentions that the game is rigged, not the New York Times or CNN or ABC. State lotteries are the wealth plan of most Americans. Win the big Powerball and you too can own six homes, a private jet, and a fleet of luxury cars, diamonds, stocks and bonds.

But that’s what separates most of us from the elite few – we hope for a big score against impossibly long odds while the elite cements a guaranteed return by rigging the table. They call it tax “relief” or other quaint euphemisms like “no-bid” contract; they stow their money in offshore accounts invisible to the prying eye of the IRS. It’s a game and they have mastered its rules.

Here’s the bottom line: socialize risk, privatize reward.

Jobs and wages are the real economy, where the majority of us live and breathe – and struggle. We don’t need an economist to tell us that when wages stay flat for more than thirty years, while the cost of health care and education and housing rises, a working person has little chance of doing anything but live paycheck-to-paycheck. He or she can do that dead-end dance, or work two or three jobs and relinquish any hope of achieving a quality of life.  

What the powerful have done to the American Dream is as astonishing as it is perverse. 

Dark Corners

As far as I can tell, Edward Snowden didn’t sell classified information to a foreign power or group, nor was he working for a foreign power. Snowden blew the whistle on what he considered illegal actions committed against American citizens by the NSA for reasons of his own.

Although Snowden didn’t commit an act of espionage, the Obama administration has charged him under the Espionage Act of 1917.

Obama likes the Espionage Act and has used it more than any other modern president.

It’s interesting to watch the ruling class – government officials and media -- close ranks over Edward Snowden. You have the president claiming that the NSA spying program is transparent because its activities have been reviewed and approved by the FISA court – a secret court. You hear Dianne Feinstein spouting gibberish about national security like a newly minted fascist.

But my favorite has to be Mike Rogers, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, who said Edward Snowden stole information that belongs to the American people. Yeah, Rogers trotted that BS line out. If the information belongs to us, why didn’t we know it existed until Edward Snowden leaked information about it to Glenn Greenwald?

Like a number of other high level government officials, Mike Rogers also spewed some hogwash about how the “bad guys” around the world have already changed their tactics in response to Snowden’s revelations. This is ludicrous. Terrorists around the world knew the NSA and the CIA and the DIA and the FBI and a bevy of private contractors were spying on them; what the terrorists didn’t know is the same thing the American people didn’t know -- that these entities were also spying on Americans.

The American government got its fat hand stuck in the cookie jar, and now it is frantically trying to pull it out, say it never happened, claim that what we see and hear is wrong. How can we believe a young, narcissist like Edward Snowden over assertions made by Dianne Feinstein and key officials of the national security apparatus?

I for one don’t trust my government to walk the thin line that divides necessary intelligence collection from invasive and indiscriminate collection, the line that separates the need for secrecy from the public’s right to know what is being done in our name, and, most important of all, the line that recognizes that dissent, debate and vigorous protest are necessary elements in a functioning democracy. 

Our political system is sclerotic and our media hopelessly corrupt, and I have no confidence that our leaders can protect us from terrorists without resorting to domestic oppression, or without demonizing whistle-blowers like Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning and Julian Assange, or having corporate media blowhards like David Gregory of NBC question the motives of a journalist like Glenn Greenwald. Gregory is a corporate and government lapdog, an access junkie who will never do anything to put that access at risk; Gregory and any number like him don’t report stories, they parrot the talking points handed to them.

The Obama administration talks endlessly about how transparent and open it is, but in reality this administration is hazardous to the health of investigative journalists.

Real journalists challenge the carefully constructed lies peddled by the powerful. Robert Scheer, Amy Goodman, Bill Moyers, Jeremy Scahill, Robert Fisk and Chris Hedges have the courage to question the prevailing wisdom, the facile government line, and the outright lies that flow from Washington D.C. and corporate boardrooms like raw sewage.

In an age of hyper-secrecy, we need investigative journalists brave enough to shine a torch into the darkest corners of the American Empire.

A Commercial Opportunity

I don’t remember when the Summer Solstice parade in Santa Barbara morphed from a largely organic, hippie celebration of the sun and the beginning of summer, to a commercialized “event.” I remember attending the parade when it was young, unique, different, weird, sometimes outrageous, and seeing more recent versions that have been sterilized for out-of-towners.

Yes, there is still plenty of bare flesh to be seen, wild costumes, painted faces, body art, head pieces, but where the parade ends at Alameda Park, there is a sign announcing an ATM machine, and booths selling handicrafts, hats, jewelry, posters, and t-shirts; there is Area 51, a local band, playing on a professional stage with a mixing board; and, though the organizers call it a “garden,” it’s really an aluminum pen where overpriced beer is sold. Lines for beer and food – ranging from gyros to Jamaican jerked chicken to Chinese to Mexican – are long and slow moving. In fact, before one can buy a burrito one must stand in line to buy tickets – ten tickets for $10. One quickly has the sense that this celebration of the sun is really a barely disguised commercial opportunity. But we’re all used to that now, right? It’s the same reason the Christmas season starts on Halloween’s heels.

Judging by gray hair, worry lines, knee braces and faded tattoos, many have come to Solstice to relive the 1960’s, when the young were in their ascendancy and almost anything seemed possible, including significant changes to the American capitalist order. In addition to questioning why the United States was bombing the shit out of Vietnamese peasants, young folks questioned our economic and social arrangements, why almost every facet of American life had to be organized around the dollar and cutthroat competition.

Others in attendance, considerably younger and in the full flower of Youth & Beauty might be here to get a taste of what those heady years were like. Although it’s sunny and warm, many young women are wearing knee high leather boots or ungodly ugly UGG boots with short-shorts or short skirts. Packs of shirtless young bucks are on the prowl, flexing their muscles and six-pack abs, impervious to dangerous UV rays. Area 51 is jamming some funk, the beer is flowing in the pen, and plenty of tickets are being converted into tacos and sandwiches and ice cream.

The ATM sign bothers me and I can’t stop thinking about it -- symbolic, to me anyway, of everything that has gone awry in Santa Barbara and the rest of the nation. Perhaps I’m just bitter, pining for a hometown that never was. Boom or bust my working class circumstances haven’t changed. I was born too late to catch the apex of the 60’s, some of the hope and optimism that died with the Kennedy’s and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and the election of Richard Nixon. I missed the high water mark described by Hunter S. Thompson in Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. I didn’t see the great wave crash, but I did watch it recede. 

Addicted

No surprise that the United States is charging Edward Snowden under the old Espionage Act. Figured that was coming. Now my government will pressure the authorities in Hong Kong to arrest Snowden and turn him over for the full American legal treatment. Snowden is ruined. The heavy book of punishment is sailing at his head.

The annual budget of the NSA is classified, of course, but I read somewhere that it must be in the cul de sac of eight or ten billion dollars. Here’s the ironic thing about that: the American taxpayers pay the NSA to spy on them. We pay the tab for the NSA’s toys, personnel, private contractors, everything. Jesus.

Spying is very useful for the government and corporations; the government gets tons of information it uses to track people it thinks might pose a threat to the republic, like rabid environmentalists and political dissenters, and the corporations make pots of money.

Some of the NSA’s budget is justified – it is a dangerous world populated with numerous crazies – even a die-hard liberal like me can see that, but a lot of the budget is clearly overkill and overreach. Would those excess billions be used for education and healthcare and infrastructure projects in our cities, for investment in people and creating a real economy of work and wages! Too bad it won’t happen. Proponents of a real economy cannot afford high-priced lobbyists, and they don’t typically have the jack to make huge campaign contributions; in other words, they can’t play the Washington game of give and get, pay and play.

I wonder, sitting here in the California sunshine on a June day, if what is now happening in Brazil will eventually happen here. The poor and middle class in Brazil have signaled, by pouring into the streets by the thousands, that they are sick and tired of being treated like chumps by the elite. Brazil is that interesting unequal society where a wood and aluminum slum sits next to a luxury high-rise protected by private security forces. The poor depend on public services, but find those services meager, and the fact that the government and the elite are spending billions to host the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics pisses them off.

The rich do what they want, the poor suck it up until they can’t take anymore of the rigged game.

As Hunter S. Thompson used to say, Selah. The rich and powerful never learn the value of moderation; power is the most addictive drug of all, and once you taste it and get hooked, there’s no going back to coach class.

Trust Us

“America holds auctions, not elections.” William O’Connor

So, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden confirmed what most semi-awake people already knew – the NSA is sweeping up gobs of information about American citizens.

The government has egg all over its face because of past assurances that the NSA wasn’t spying on Americans.

The din over Snowden is loud and confused; some call him a traitor and demand his head on a platter; others say he is a hero who acted on his conscience to expose a threat to democracy itself; and of course the smear campaign against him is well underway with some talking heads and pundits branding him as a narcissist and self-aggrandizer.

It’s difficult for an ordinary citizen to sort this one out. The Obama administration claims nothing is amiss with the NSA’s spying program, that in addition to being perfectly legal (as opposed to being morally right), it has been invaluable in foiling various terrorist plots. As with most claims by Obama’s spin masters, little evidence is offered to back up the assertion. We’re urged to believe that our government – and the many unaccountable corporations who are part and parcel of the global security state – would never misuse their access to the information of ordinary citizens.

In other words, the public should trust the NSA in the same way we should trust Goldman Sachs and Citigroup and Bank of America and BP and Exxon Mobil and Chevron, because none of these powerful behemoths has ever plunged a knife in our back.

In the aftermath of 9/11, when collective insanity reigned and moderate voices were drowned out by hysteria, and bloodthirsty Muslim extremists were hiding in every shadow, Congress misplaced its spine and cowered before Dick Cheney and relinquished too much power to the executive branch. Under the guise of security, most Americans were more than willing to trade basic civil liberties; and now we can’t stuff the genie back in the bottle. The surveillance state is too large, vast, interconnected, and profitable to be scaled back.

Too much power, of any sort, in too few hands is a tried and true recipe for tyranny.

Riding the Down Escalator

My last post, Dibs and Dabs, was pure shit, an embarrassment. I apologize to the six people who read it. What a cluster. Not sure what I was thinking.

But that’s the hazard of being an obsessive, self-indulgent blogger. A lot of the time all I do is litter the electronic stage with drivel and crap. I’ve been writing this blog for almost ten years and I think the time has come to demolish the balcony and sell the metal for scrap. I’m running out of things to bitch, moan and whine about; maybe I’m content. How did this happen?

Yes, the government of the United States, a purported Democracy, spies on its citizens; the Hydra-headed security state monitors our telephone calls and studies our e-mail messages and Facebook and Twitter posts.

Yes, our economic arrangements are absurd and inhuman, deliberately rigged in favor of the haves at the expense of the have-nots. I accept that this is a nation separate and unequal, and that the American Dream of upward mobility is dead for all but the wealthy and well connected; the rest of us are riding the down escalator, wondering how low it will take us.

Yes, the United States is the most feared nation on the planet. We have cruise missiles and drones and a massive intelligence apparatus, and numerous ways to project military power into places where we have no business operating. We trample the sovereignty of other nations with impunity; we swagger as only a true hypocrite can, and congratulate ourselves for being the baddest bully on the block.

And, so what?

The sun rises and sets, the neighbors get up in the morning and go to work or school or wherever, and my family does the same. My sixteen-year-old son is morose and brooding, temperamental and surly; my eleven-year-old daughter must be pushed or pulled out the door with her backpack and lunch bag dragging on the ground, her hair tangled and her Converse untied. My kids tie me in knots -- I love them, of course, the trouble is I just don’t understand them. Who are these opinionated and demanding little people? Why are they so dissatisfied with their young lives, their schools, and their friends? I tell myself that I was different at their age, but I was probably even more pig-headed, obstinate, stubborn, rude, and obnoxious. I was a shit, pure and simple. Guilty as charged. I pulled plenty of stupid stunts. One of these days I’ll reach back in my memory and write about some of my dim-witted pranks and pratfalls.

In the meantime, I hold on here on the American Riviera, on the north end of Milpas street. My luck is running pretty good. Life could be much worse.

Dibs & Dabs

Sting is playing the County Bowl tonight and the crowd is filing in. The marine layer was heavy all day, but the sky is clear now and it looks like a pleasant evening for a concert. Music beneath the stars in Santa Barbara. The crowd is mostly white, affluent looking, and orderly. These people don’t shout and whistle like the lower classes do for other acts, and the police haven’t seen fit to roll out additional units to maintain the peace. Sting is safe, mellow, not a menace to public safety. Our local gangbangers don’t care about Sting.

My government is going to prosecute Bradley Manning to the hilt and lock the young man away for life. So long, whistleblower, we’ll show you what becomes of people who spill state secrets. Straight into the American Gulag, never to be heard from again. Once we’re done with you, we’ll figure out a way to get your mate, Assange. He can’t hide in the Ecuadorean embassy forever; sooner or later he’ll slip up, and when he does, we’ll have him snatched and extradited, and he’ll get the full Cheney treatment. He won’t act so cocky when we ram a cattle prod up his rectum. Teach him to fuck with the U S of A.

It’s a wonderful world. The sky is blue, cloudless, and Sting is playing the Bowl. High heels echo off the sidewalk. Date night at the Bowl, overpriced chardonnay in clear plastic glasses. What could be better? Early summer on the American Riviera.

Sting has begun his show with a familiar tune but I couldn’t name it if my life depended on it.

People come, people go. Death on the installment plan, death in dibs and dabs, death in aging pop stars and memories of days gone by the boards. Sting on MTV, long ago and far away. Do they even show music videos on MTV now? What would Madonna have been without MTV? The illusion of reality is the greatest illusion of all. I’m sure I’ve been here before, in another life, another body. I bought this ticket, and I’ll take the ride to the end of the line. Maybe it will end in a small village high on a mountain, with a stream in the valley below where a man can fish for trout. Smell of pine and wood smoke. The locals keep to themselves. The train clatters down the mountain, disappears beneath the trees. Or maybe the train runs out of track on a wide, flat desert, plows into the sand, stops dead. The end of nowhere; cactus and buzzards and the malevolent sun.

Sting plays on. I can’t even hear the crowd. Darkness is falling, slowly, like a dream. 

Beneath a Tattered Flag

“For the tragedy of our world is precisely that nothing any longer is capable of rousing it from its lethargy.” Anais Nin

Another Memorial Day to honor our war dead.

We remain at war – preemptive war, continuous war, perpetual war, and shadow war. Pious words will be uttered today by the president and others -- they will talk about heroes and sacrifice and bravery and freedom. We are still killing Afghans and Pakistanis and Yemenis, and inside our own borders another kind of war is being waged, equally continuous and perpetual – the war against the poor, against workers, against students, against the elderly and the sick, against the environment. 

We continue to operate our own version of the Gulag Archipelago – the prison at Guantanamo, where most of the inmates are on a hunger strike to protest years of detention without charges or trial. President Obama says he wants to close Guantanamo but that Congress won’t let him. This doesn’t wash. It’s politics, again. If Obama were to release those inmates who the Department of Defense has determined are not a threat, and one or more of them were to become involved in a plot or actual attack on American interests, the political fallout would be severe. Obama has the authority; he just lacks the guts to issue the order.

American flags will fly today, flutter in the breeze, and Air Force or Navy fighter jets will scream over baseball stadiums, and Major League Baseball will trot out some of our wounded veterans for the obligatory standing ovation, and everyone can feel proud and patriotic while CIA drones swoop low over the frontier in Pakistan, and another car bomb explodes in Baghdad.

Everyone can feel proud and patriotic while income inequality grows and democracy shrivels on the vine, and more people are excluded from college or priced out of gentrified neighborhoods. America the Beautiful. Life is grand up on the hill, surrounded by wrought-iron fences and stone walls, at the end of a private road patrolled by private security forces; the nearest school is private, too, and free of brown or black faces. All the segregation money can buy. Life is grand on Wall Street too, and in the executive suite, and at the country club.

The wealthy send the poor to fight and die in places like Iraq and Afghanistan; the wealthy say that war is moral but helping the needy at home immoral because it makes the needy dependent on the fruits of the producers. This is said without irony.

The flag is flying, red, white and blue, but the country in its shadow isn’t the same. We invade other countries, we kidnap people we suspect, we detain and torture, we kill without due process, and we mock the rule of law. I suppose we have always committed these sorts of crimes and transgressions, but now it’s simply more blatant.

For twelve years the most powerful military force on the planet has chased the Taliban and al-Qaeda across and around Afghanistan. Where has this got us? What has been gained? Twelve Memorial Days have come and gone, and we are still “training” the Afghans to police and protect themselves. How many years of training does it take before we can lower the stars and stripes and close up shop?

War All the Time

I keep thinking my country has hit the nadir and must begin to rebound, but almost every day more evidence pops up to prove the empire is on the down slope and flailing like an elephant on roller skates.

The Senate held a hearing the other day about the Authorization for Use of Military Force or AUMF as it’s known, passed with bipartisan congressional support and patriotic fervor immediately after the 9/11 attacks. The AUMF gave then President George W. Bush and his henchman, Vice President Dick Cheney, unprecedented latitude to take the War on Terror to terrorists, wherever in the world they happened to operate. The president could prosecute the War on Terror any way he deemed fit without consulting much with Congress.

We’re thirteen years from 9/11 and still fighting the War on Terror in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia and other locales in Africa, and the AUMF is alive and well, and if some of the senators and generals who spoke at the hearing are to be believed, may continue another twenty years. 

In his second inaugural address, Obama claimed the era of perpetual war was over, but that was just a line in a speech designed to appease the base, not meant to be taken literally.

Perpetual war is still US policy.

The Obama Administration also uses the AUMF as legal cover for its targeted killing program. Every Tuesday, according to investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill, a list of names is presented to President Obama, and the leader of the free world decides who dies and who lives. Terror Tuesday is what the national security and intelligence apparatus calls it. Without due process of any kind, the president hands down a death sentence to be carried out by drone strike or by one of America’s proxies. Quite often innocent people are killed either with the suspected terrorist or instead of the terrorist, but we don’t lose any sleep over our mistakes. 

The U.S. also carries out pre-emptive “signature strikes,” guilt-by-association strikes, aimed at creating terror in a group of people of a certain age and with certain habits of movement and congregation. The military and its allies in the mainstream propaganda industry tell the American public that these strikes are clinical, surgical, precise, carefully designed to limit civilian casualties; they spin other fables for us as well.

When it comes to bending the Constitution, Obama is no better than Bush was and in many ways worse. His depredations against the Constitution, the sovereign territory of other nations, and basic human rights are many.

Basically, the U.S. has adopted Israeli operating procedures when it comes to protecting the homeland from terrorists: we assert the right to kill anyone, anywhere, at any time; we shoot first and mop up the mess later; we kidnap, render, and torture. It’s incomprehensible to me that this country maintains kill lists, and that the Executive branch has usurped so much war making power from the Legislative branch. When we finally and fatally become a fascist nation – and there are many disquieting indications that that day is approaching – we will look back at the AUMF and rue the day it became law.

How many more terrorists will we birth during another twenty years of extrajudicial killings and signature strikes and shadow warfare? One thing is for sure, because of the secrecy surrounding these operations, and the viciousness with which the current administration prosecutes whistleblowers and honest journalists, it will be a long time before we understand the full extent of the crimes committed in the name of freedom and security.

History shows that empires cannot sustain perpetual wars. U.S. policy makers will not outsmart or outrun history. The day when our proverbial birds come home to roost will be very dark and very cold.