At a private fund-raiser Tuesday night at a waterfront Hamptons estate, Hillary Clinton danced alongside Jimmy Buffett, Jon Bon Jovi and Paul McCartney, and joined in a singalong finale to “Hey Jude.???
“I stand between you and the apocalypse,??? a confident Mrs. Clinton declared to laughs, exhibiting a flash of self-awareness and humor to a crowd that included Calvin Klein and Harvey Weinstein and for whom the prospect of a Donald J. Trump presidency is dire …
But Mrs. Clinton has been more than accessible to those who reside in some of the country’s most moneyed enclaves and are willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to see her. In the last two weeks of August, Mrs. Clinton raked in roughly $50 million at 22 fund-raising events, averaging around $150,000 an hour …
It’s easy to declare Donald Trump an unacceptable choice as President. And it’s become far too easy to think very poorly of the Democratic Party’s selection. Many say there are still orders of magnitude difference in suitability for the job. I agree there’s a difference — but not to the power of 100 or even 10.
HRC is custom-made for leadership in the Culture of Lickspittle. It’s not a virture.
For the past couple of years I’ve posted on the corporate dictatotship’s great tradition — publishing anti-labor opinion oieces as good cheer on Labor Day. Despite inequality so high it menaces social cohesion nationwide and has brought on an election featuring the two most unpopular candidates in my lifetime, there’s never a shortage of white male douchebags from the right or some worthless corporate-cheerleading business institute pushing opinion pieces insisting the working man and labor has it too good on Labor Day. And the great thing about them is they’re all passed off as well-wishing or defenses of the rights of the commoner.
You could hang a few of America’s CEO’s from lampposts and set them on fire with napalm and white phosphorus, viewable by streaming on the web, and these guys would still be at it, railing about socialism, the necessity for more right-to-work legislation, the need for increased tax incentives/bribes for businesses (so they’ll allegedy hire more — which somehow never happens) and the holy sacraments of America’s free market and entrepreneurialism.
So roll this year’s selection…
Here’s Idaho’s governor insisting that firing local government workers during the Great Recession was virtuous.
Even in 2009-2010, when the private sector was taking it on the chin to the tune of an actual 1.1-percent decline in Idaho jobs, our State government reduced its employment by 5.3 percent. — the governor of Idaho, C. L. Butch Otter
Here, a simple and straightforward pack of lies from Paphlygonia on Shit Creek in Arkansas.
Labor Day signals need for labor reform … the labor movement is now turning its back on employees. — The Mountain Mail of Upper Arkansas
From someplace in New York pretty much like the middle of Pennsylvania.
I championed cutting taxes on small businesses and manufacturers so they can have the capital they need to expand and to create good jobs … I will continue fighting to create and keep good jobs in Central New York. — Madison Cunty Courier, New York
Can’t or won’t find anything nice to say about people? Pimp for mega-corporate beer owned by foreign interest.
The Budweiser Labor Day USA Survey touts itself as “a new national study that dares to ask the toughest questions about America’s most flag-waving, beer-drinking and charcoal-grilling end-of-summer holiday. — Watertown Public Opinion
With private sector membership in labor unions at its lowest in my lifetime, thats still too much. Competitive enterprise, my foot.
With Labor Day around the corner, a traditional holiday honoring American workers, it’s an apt time to take a hard look at the value of labor unions. — Newsday, opinion contributed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute
While workers here in Michigan can now refuse to pay dues, even while working under the terms of a negotiated contract, thanks to the signing of the Right to Work law in 2012, most feel intimidated and are afraid to exercise that right to resign from the union due to implied repercussions from union bosses and union loyalist coworkers. — Two page letter to the editor by a Right-to-Work anti-labor rep in Macomb County, Michigan
Then there’s the middle-aged white guy who imitates your grandfather at Sunday dinner get together to keep himself in good stead with the local chamber of commerce or whatever.
In fact, my father worked there during the 1950s and ’60s for a whopping $1.50 per hour (around $9 in today’s money), and that was some 30 cents higher than the minimum wage at the time … In my opinion, hard work is something to which a lot of modern Americans today seem to be allergic, for lack of a better description … I come from a long line of hard workers. There was no privilege in any branch of my family ... A corporate businessman we-ate-shoe-leather-and-we-liked-it type, G. L. Deer in the Point Pleasant Register of Ohio
And the cranky old white guy from way way out in flyover country who quotes from someone you’ve never heard of from 80 years ago because America is a socialist colony of quislings sucking the lifeblood of liberty and money-making.
Clark’s talk often referenced the roots of socialism that were planted by Roosevelt, the roots that have grown in size and today threaten to replace the Founder’s “Tree of Liberty,??? the tree the Founders planted in 1776 … When Americans think of treason, betraying one’s county, they often think of Benedict Arnold. Today, America has its Benedict Arnolds. They are in the unions, in management, and in government … — old man named Conkey in the Cherokee Tribune Ledger News of Georgia
Right wing business cheerleader think tank most people have never heard of, even in Michigan.
The state took a brave step forward by passing a right-to-work law in 2012. That reform did wonders for economic growth … More of this, please. The more we can root out many of the entrenched problems associated with compulsory unionism, the better. While much has been done in private sector unions, it’s important to move serious union reforms further in the public sector. — opinion in the Detroit News, contributed by employees of the right wing anti-labor Mackinac Center for Public Policy
This one is great because it’s an uncomplicated fuck you, I’ve got mine. Shut up, get a job, because life’s hard and then you die.
Let’s stop telling young people to find their passion and start telling them to find a job … The work you do in the world is not supposed to make a fulfilled individual; it’s supposed to make you an employed individual. — “Get a job!” type in the TCPalm of Stuart, Florida
I include the next one precisely because IT IS NOT like the others. Here’s one honest man.
Can we stop with the platitudes about celebrating the workers and face the reality of America?
For starters, let’s do something about the name of this three-day weekend. Instead of Labor Day, let’s call it Plutocrat Day or maybe Oligarch Day. — Bob Franken, The Sun Prairie Star, Wisconsin
And the very last, from the Wall Street Journal, deserving of very special notice. Because IT’S ME and 10 plus or minus a couple million more!
What do unworking men do with their free time? Sadly, not much that’s constructive. About a tenth are students trying to improve their circumstances. But the overwhelming majority are what the British call NEET: “neither employed nor in education or training.??? Time-use surveys suggest they are almost entirely idle—helping out around the house less than unemployed men; caring for others less than employed women; volunteering and engaging in religious activities less than working men and women or unemployed men. For the NEETs, “socializing, relaxing and leisure??? is a full-time occupation, accounting for 3,000 hours a year, much of this time in front of television or computer screens.
Clearly big changes in the U.S. economy, including the decline of manufacturing and the Big Slowdown since the start of the century, have played a role. But something else is at work, too …
he Clinton campaign has now spent months trying to convince relatively obscure former Republican officials to endorse her campaign while also adopting many Republican slogans and arguments in her quest for the presidency …
Clinton gave a speech in Ohio on Wednesday with yet another former Bush official, James Clad. The speech was billed as touting “American exceptionalism???, one of the more repellent nationalistic concepts that Republicans have used to shame progressives in the past. She spoke mostly about foreign policy, a subject in which Clinton – with her penchant for supporting foreign wars and beefed up US military presence everywhere – seemingly has more in common with mainstream Republicans than the Obama administration.
To paraphrase Julian Assange: Cholera or gonorrhea?
Assange has always been quixotic, sometimes erratic, but no one manipulates him. Animosity on his part toward the US government is understandable. It’s always been my impression he was and is inimically opposed to the American empire.
Assange wound up seemingly forever stuck in the Ecuador embassy in London when HRC was Sec’y of State after it was her department that was hashed by Chelsea Manning’s Wikileaks Cablegate release. By definition, Clinton’s position at the virtual apex of our empire has made her a natural target for Wikileks spills. Why this would be considered shocking or unusual is a mystery to me.
Paradoxically, at one time the NYT and others were all too happy to work with Julian Assange. In truth, his relationship with the domestic and western press has always been fraught.
A long long time ago and before Wikileaks, Assange was a hacker and he subscribed to my old electronic newsletter.
“This is not an East-West fight …[though] it is being presented as such by people with an agenda.”
The Clinton campaign is behind a great part of the effort to paint Assange as a tool of Russia. Not really a surprise, considering how Wikileaks has fed into the perpetual aggravation of Hillary Clinton and her private server e-mails. However, thinking that Assange and Wikileaks might tilt the election with an “October surprise” of some kind is a bridge way too far.
“You help raise the next generation of American patriots. I want to give a special shout out to Boys Nation, which meant so much to my husband when he was growing up.”
And it was a small part in a longer pep talk about American exceptionalism and an extended pandering to military service (which the Clintons like the vast majority of Americans including myself had and hve no part of) and patriotism. This goes hand and hand with the America never stopped being great meme. which from the vantage point of the Clinton class, the wealthy and their still employed enablers, is all true. You see, America is always great, never stops being so, shame on you for thinking it, you must want American Hitler to be President.
“[When] Vladimir Putin, of all people, criticized American exceptionalism, my opponent agreed with him, saying, and I quote, ‘if you’re in Russia, you don’t want to hear that America is exceptional’,??? Clinton continued. “Well maybe you don’t want to hear it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.”
I’m not from Russia. But the exceptionalism shtick is drivel. But it is surely tailor-made for HRC’s kind of audience.
I was dragooned into attending the American Legion’s Boys State/Boys Nation thing when I was in high school. I did not care for it. But it was a great thing for budding fascists, bullies and bootlicks, though, so it makes sense to me that the Clintons would think highly of it. It was probably perfect for them, being real American “meritocracy” stuff.
You’ll surely get a kick out of my tribute to it, too, so here’s a reprint/dredge-up from about a decade ago.
JUNE 2007 — [Summer camps] must be about pain and embarrassment. It’s also important they be totally useless. It’s a bonus if they’re scarring, too.
Boy Scouts of America summer retreat in Pine Grove, Pennsylvania, was good for all three decades ago. You went, more accurately — were sent — to be physically purged and have a week gouged from your summer.
It reliably meted out punishment to those who had committed no crime.
If you slipped up in even the pettiest way — made the biscuits wrong — you had to do push-ups in front of the troop leader, a thirty-something man with an icky fondness for watching his charges do physical training with their shirts off.
On a par with Boy Scouts of America summer retreat was Keystone Boys State.
Keystone Boys State was a one-shot, eligible to you only when you were between junior and senior year in high school.
This year’s Keystone Boys State is at Shippensburg College (Shippensburg State Teachers, originally), running between June 24-30. (That was for 2007. -ed) Perhaps Keystone Boys State campers will Google this essay and be persuaded to threaten their parents with reprisals should they be forced to fulfill their commitment later this month.
Kids, don’t go!
DD is giving it to you straight. Keystone Boys State is not the Army but you’ll get a little dose of it later this month. Except you won’t be able to drink heavily, shoot guns or patrol foreign boulevards for prostitutes. You won’t be made Army Strong.
Naturally, DD did not volunteer for Keystone Boys State. I was drafted by irresponsible vainglorious parents and members of the local American Legion who thought of me as a utensil, an honors student at Pine Grove Area High School, something to be offered to the state Legion leadership. In a small town like Pine Grove, kids didn’t have the luxury of snubbing their noses at “gifts” from the local American Legion-VFW. Parents wouldn’t have it.
My Keystone Boys State was held at State College. It is a tribute to Penn State University that the American Legion sponsored operation wasn’t capable of bringing out a loathing in me for all things Nittany Lions. I remain a fan of the college football team and Joe Paterno.
Indeed, it’s astonishing that Penn State University would have allowed the use of its facilities to an organization and operation which determinedly obstructed any efforts by campers to enjoy Penn State, or even get to know about the school.
You see, attendance at Keystone Boys State didn’t give camp-goers much of a glimpse of the university.
When I attended, Boys Staters were restricted to two dormitories, a nearby cafeteria and attached playing fields.
How Keystone Boys State managed this in the Seventies was nasty business.
Upon arrival in State College, campers were separated into platoons, with each platoon being assigned a nominal city, named after some Pennsylvania government functionary.
DD was assigned to “Bethman City.” Each city resided on one floor of a dorm. Each city’s adult minders were from the active ranks of the US military. Bethman City’s minder was a USMC man from Parris Island. I’ll call him Gunny, although that was not his real name.
Gunny was a power drunk with a talent for cussing, neither of which DD thinks could be any liability in the Marines, although it was momentarily surprising to see him lay it out so plainly within 60 seconds of arrival.
The first thing Gunny told us about was screening at Parris Island. He was specific in his description of a Marine Corps recruit found with a rubber dildo in his rectum. Why this was important to tell a bunch of high school boys, other than it being an X-rated shaggy dog story, was not immediately obvious.
More pressing, Gunny said, was that we campers recognize we were to stay within the bounds of Keystone Boys State. Under no circumstances were we to take walks to downtown State College, described as a potentially dangerous place.
At this point, DD’s high school eyes rolled, having already been to State College a number of times to see Saturday football. Since I was in the back, Gunny did not see the contempt in which I held him and his developing tale. If he had, perhaps I would have been ordered to do some push-ups without my shirt on.
Gunny explained that there were women who were pros in downtown State College and they were eager to take advantage of us. It was such an outrageously stupid story, a few of us assumed he’d been told to tell it by someone old and weird and higher-up from within the American Legion.
The current website for Keystone Boys State advertises it as “non-military.”
Whether this is true now I don’t know, but in the Seventies the claim was utter horsecrap.
The camp was functionally administered by US military men. Every morning there was inspection — the kind in which a military man examined your bed and opened the drawers of your empty desk to see if there was any dust in them. If there was dust in an empty drawer, it was scooped up and put on your bed or on the top of some of your property to teach you a lesson. Whatever miscellaneous lint or dirt was found during inspection was always deposited on your belongings or personal space. This kept up until our military counselors realized we’d stopped giving a shit about what they thought and did, around mid-week.
How well a Boys Stater’s city did in inspection determined in which order you would eat lunch during the day. Bethman City always did poorly and, as a result, we always ate lunch last or near to last.
In late afternoon, after some worthless class on state government and a round of compulsory softball in the sweltering heat, the camp retired to the drill field to practice calisthenics, marching in formation and pass-in-review. During the exercises, each city was judged on its form and ability to follow orders snappily. That determined in which order you ate dinner.
Bethman City, you guessed it, often finished last.
By mid-week, Gunny had reported in for Keystone Boys State duty drunk or with savage hangover too many times. He was dismissed and the slack taken up by an USAF man.
At that point, the boys of Bethman City made the decision to stop paying attention to cleaning up bathrooms, sweeping rooms atomically clean and making beds quarter-bounce-worthy for inspection. Then we always finished last.
Being snappy on the drill field went out, too. On the last day of camp, when all the thugs from high-school football teams and their assorted camp lackeys had been “elected” leaders of Keystone Boys State and allowed to go into the reviewing stand as the elite who watched the rest of the lumpen pass-in-review, we dropped our pants while trudging past the bleechers. We ate last.
The people who ran my Keystone Boys State liked nothing better than to order around teenagers, mostly for what appeared to be the sheer sake of it.
“A week at Keystone Boys State condenses what might take several months in real life to less than 168 hours,” informs the official KBS website. “This compressed simulation helps people learn lessons about the actions and consequences of leadership in a very realistic way.”
Yes, one thinks learning to suck up, march in formation and follow pointless orders does teach something about life but one ought not to ask teenage kids to give up a week of summer to learn it. The current website seems to indicate Keystone Boys State is big with those junior ROTC operations which haven’t yet been run off public high school properties.
“The effort to get everyone involved at [KBS] manifests itself by having every ‘citizen’ elected, selected, assigned or appointed to leadership positions throughout the week. Each citizen also is provided with text materials based on organizational science and personal development exercises. Much of what we do is a spin-off of the Stephen Covey text, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective [People],” the boys camp proclaims.
“All citizens should become familiar with parliamentary procedures, ‘Robert’s Rules of Order’ and Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – NOW ! ! !”
“The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” wasn’t required reading when DD attended Keystone Boys State, probably because it hadn’t yet been written.
It is another in a long line of publications from the self-help industry, filled with the kinds of slogans and advice people used to following orders and doing pointless institutional or corporate busy work for work’s sake think will help them improve their attitude so they can earn a quick million dollars, get promoted and exit the logjam of daily life.
Some of its tenets: Think Win/Win! Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood! Synergize!
Adoption of such a thing indicates the Keystone Boys State experience is, more than likely, an even more annoying and brainwashing experience in 2007 than it was in the Seventies.
It was true that every “citizen” of Keystone Boys State had to hold a “political” position by the end of the week.
This meant that as the inner core of apple-polishers was exhausted during the awarding of positions of “leadership” within the quasi-state camp apparatus, other positions were handed out on the basis of an ad hoc cronyism until, by the end of the week, everyone had one. It was mandated that everyone hold a public office.
I was made Bethman City dog catcher on the last day of formal camp operation. It didn’t require a vote.
For kids stumbling into this, if you must go to Keystone Boys State (and you SHOULD NOT if possible), I recommend you take a musical instrument, even if you aren’t in the high school band. Campers with instruments got to be in the Keystone Boys State community band. Perks were associated with it, like getting out of marching-in-formation and being allowed to eat ahead of everyone else, regardless of how badly your city did during inspection.
In the weeks following Keystone Boys State, I was able to make productive use of the camp one time and only once.
Everyone from Pine Grove High School who attended KBS was required to attend an American Legion dinner at the local Veterans of Foreign Wars banquet hall. After dinner, the campers would be asked to speak about their experience at Keystone Boys State.
I had no interest in attending and told my parents that if they forced the issue, like they’d forced KBS, I would tell the Legion dinner audience exactly what KBS was like. I would start with Gunny and his stories about a Marine recruit with a dildo up his ass and hookers patrolling the streets of State College looking for fresh-faced young boys.
That was all it took, really. When Mom and Dad asked what they should tell the organizers of the dinner, I told them to say I was at … another camp for the week.
Now that it one hell of a story, isn’t it? Real gonzo journalism. There ain’t nothing the Clintons could put down on paper to top it.
Anyway, moving on, about halfway through her speech today, Clinton gave a little spiel on computer security for the 1 percent. Computer security for the 1 percent is the years old story of China stealing all the intellectual property of America’s wealthiest companies, particularly it’s arms manufacturers
More recently, Russian hackers have taken their place. Worse, from the meritocratic and all-knowing point-of-view of the Democratic Party, Russia is attacking the DNC in cyberspace and possibly setting up to jigger the vote so as to throw the election to Trmp.
HRC is on the case:
We’ll invest in the next frontier of military engagement, protecting U.S. interests in outer space and cyberspace. You’ve seen reports. Russia’s hacked into a lot of things. China’s hacked into a lot of things. Russia even hacked into the Democratic National Committee, maybe even some state election systems. So, we’ve got to step up our game. Make sure we are well defended and able to take the fight to those who go after us.
As President, I will make it clear, that the United States will treat cyber attacks just like any other attack. We will be ready with serious political, economic and military responses. And we’re going to invest in protecting our governmental networks and our national infrastructure. I want us to lead the world in setting the rules of cyberspace.
If America doesn’t, others will. So in short, we have to be ready to win today’s fights and tomorrow’s.
Economist N. Greg Mankiw of Harvard in the NYT this week on the unfortunate turn of events in which voters now don’t believe it when experts say trade is good:
“You see it in Donald Trump’s railing against immigrants and trade agreements. It may well be part of Hillary Clinton’s shift, under pressure from Bernie Sanders, against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which she once embraced as ‘the gold standard in trade agreements to open free, transparent, fair trade.’
“You certainly see it in the British decision to exit the European Union, which has become known as Brexit. That vote flummoxed most political forecasters, and it makes one wonder whether Americans might also produce a surprise in November …”
The answer, according to Mankiw, is simple: more education. Although not stated baldly, those now opposed to “corporate America-style” (my words) global trade are the stupid — the less educated.
Mankiw: “In the long run … there is reason for optimism. As society slowly becomes more educated from generation to generation, the general public’s attitudes toward globalization should move toward the experts.’” Who are all for it.
N. Greg Mankiw was economic advisor to Mitt Romney. He is also opposed to raising the minimum wage. I would normally post the link to the NYT but globalism and all that hasn’t been good for me. I’m sore about it, even though I’m educated.
Also from the “Oh, That’s Rich!” channel, an explanation, now among the thousands, as to Why “The Tom Friedman Blues” needs to be on your gadget and reviewing stand.
“Thomas Friedman moves beyond his Flat World to divide the world into ‘Web People,’ who he likes, and ‘Wall People’ who he holds in contempt. Donald Trump is naturally the lodestar of the Wall People …
“Okay, so let’s work through some logic here. If you want to see a freer flow of ideas and technology, by replacing patent and copyright monopolies with more modern ways of promoting innovation and creative work, then you are a Wall Person. After all, Friedman’s Web People wouldn’t know how to get by in the world without these relics from the feudal guild system.
“If this means that life-saving drugs, which would be cheap in a free market, are priced beyond the reach of the people who need them, well get used to Thomas Friedman’s world. If it means that we have to turn the whole world into copyright cops to ensure that Disney can collect its royalties on Mickey Mouse, that’s a small price to pay to keep the Web People wealthy…”
I’d like to add that Hollywood got the FBI to confiscate the kickass torrents website and arrest its owner last week so that the Motion Picture Association of American and Marvel Studios would not be deprived of any of their due profits on Captain America: Civil War by the grasping BitTorrent clients of the leeching poors. And, of course, they have momentarily stymied me in my downloading of pirated eBooks on the inequalities and failures of the US system.
Of course, I will inform you as soon as an adequate replacement is put in place. Currently, the Pirate Bay and EasyTorrents don’t cut the mustard.
“People want more power over their own lives. They want to feel some connection to society. Most particularly, they don’t want to be dictated to by distant bureaucrats who don’t seem to care what they’re going through, and think they know what’s best for everyone …
“These are legitimate concerns. Unfortunately, they came out in this past year in the campaign of Donald Trump, who’d exposed a tiny flaw in the system.
“[Self-congratulating] cognoscenti could have looked at the events of the last year and wondered why people were so angry with them, and what they could do to make government work better for the population.
Instead, their first instinct is to dismiss voter concerns as baseless, neurotic bigotry and to assume that the solution is to give Washington bureaucrats even more leeway to blow off the public. In the absurdist comedy that is American political life, this is the ultimate anti-solution to the unrest of the last year, the mathematically perfect wrong ending.
“Trump is going to lose this election, then live on as the reason for an emboldened, even less-responsive oligarchy.”
In related matters, this sneering and very successful video from Comedy Central:
Thought experiment from the Listen, Snob desk: Do you think someone engaged in pulling the wings off flies for purposes of entertainment is teaching a lesson in civics at the same time? Or just someone who pulls the wings off flies for money? (Shooting fish in a barrel also cost effective as analysis.)
If you think watching cable comedians picking gobbets of flesh off the bodies of selected volunteers from the American polity to studio laughter in 2016 is brilliant work, we’re on different sides of the fence.
Hillary Clinton is the choice. It’s over and that’s it.
However, from the primary season’s Dale Carnegie course, How to Make Friends and Influence People, I learned much about myself.
I learned from Nick Kristof at the Times that if you supported Sanders and plan to vote Trump in protest you “have bipolar disorder.”
Earlier in the week, Paul Krugman categorized Sanders supporters. A few of the names: Naderites, refuseniks, Clinton Derangement Syndrome sufferers, and angry white guys, somewhat like the army of angry white guys now admiring Trump.
Add to that: morons (or equivalent, a couple 100 times), misogynists, cranks, magical thinkers, and Bernie Bros — or people who troll women on the internet.
And, courtesy of the NYT: guys who are going through psychological “reactance,” which is to say guys — white — who act defiantly and do the opposite when told to do something by a perceived authority figure, their mother, a woman, a teacher etc. Which equates to a fancy way of saying misogynist angry white guys and stupid ones, too.
“On one hand, Trump has a base of intense, even fanatical, support in much of rural and small town Pennsylvania …” writes Edsall.
There is a paradox. Pennsylvania was enthusiastically for Bill Clinton. That enthusiasm has not worn off. However, Hillary Clinton is a different story. While she has the overwhelming support of Pennsy women, she’s shunned by men.
This book perfectly captures the mind-set of Sanders voters. Is it also a harbinger of their unwillingness to suck it up and vote for the wife of the main villain of the piece? Let’s hope Frank is willing to set aside his bile long enough to use his credibility on the left to face the hard realities of politics and help protect us from a cruel fate this fall.
Another extended insult and a recommendation to suck it up.
“Mistakes happen, says William Banks, a professor at Syracuse University’s Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism” on the drone strike that killed two humanitarian aid workers, one American and one Italian, in Pakistan.
That’s a quote from the BBC, courtesy of one of many scholars flacks for the forever wars devoted to dropping bombs on the poor people of the world. “Even if you’re up close and personal, it can be difficult,” Banks adds. It’s difficult to tell the “bad guys from the good guys.”
This is what passes for pithy comment, scholarship and critical thinking from the American academy on our many wars in 2015. That’s because the American system virtually wiped out everyone who wasn’t attached to the payroll of the Department of Defense or the national security infrastructure after 9/11. Experts on the matter, you see, are only necessary as fonts of simple-minded justifications, suitable for public consumption, for whatever it is the war machine is doing around the world.
What does Syracuse know about national security and terrorism? Nothing. Its “institute” didn’t exist until 2003.
A visit to its homepage (laugh at it’s unintentionally hilarious acronym) shows it to be almost all middle-aged and older white guys. Like most of these things, funded and fertilized by national security money, it’s a dumping ground for lawyers, military men from the wars still wearing their uniforms for their bio pictures, and lower and middle tier officials from the Pentagon. Plus, they can’t even hire someone to keep their web links working correctly.
“At times mistakes occur because of poor judgment,” continues the BBC. (No link, I won’t do it.)
Then the Beeb White House reporter digs up still another lawyer from the University of Houston to furnish yet one more upper class servant-of-the-military to white-mansplain how it is the war on terror is fought. For the one times ten to the sixth power time.
“There was ‘faulty intelligence,’ says Jordan Paust, an international law professor at University of Houston.” But the target site appeared to be “lawful … despite the unintended deaths,” he tells the Beeb.
“Someone’s got to make a choice …. That’s not necessarily a war crime.”
Faulty intelligence. Hard time telling the “bad guys from the good guys.” Even if you’re up close and personal it’s difficult.
A sack of potatoes could have thought this stuff up.
Do the war flacks passed off as scholars know how bad they sound? Certainly some of them do. But that’s why they’re paid. We need people to convincingly pretend they’re serious and thoughtful so that the news doesn’t veer dangerously into discussions of systematic callousness, inequities, blood and long-term consequences.
And there’s nothing that can be done about it. Except write something supercilious on a blog, something no one will like or share because … why, exactly?
Well, what to like? There’s no appropriate social media reaction widget.
The Obama administration has helped the Saudis with intelligence and tactical advice and by deploying warships off the Yemeni coast. Now it is wisely urging them to end the bombing. The White House seems to have realized that the Saudis appear to have no credible strategy for achieving their political goals, or even managing their intervention.
Seems baldly disingenuous, does it not? There are smart people at the New York Times. When they say “the Saudis appear to have no credible strategy” they certainly know it’s a strategy cooked up and targeted by the US Africa Command after it was surprised by the eruption of revolution. (Google US Africa Command and “stability operations” for a bleak laugh.)
“The deployment of the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier and other warships to the Arabian Sea this week was intended [to help the war effort], writes the Times. “American officials said they were prepared to intercept a nine-ship Iranian convoy headed for Yemen and believed to be carrying weapons for the rebels. Fortunately, the Iranian vessels turned around, avoiding a possible confrontation.”
Yes, an entire nuclear carrier surface action group is needed off one of the poorest countries in the world, just in case.
Perhaps the President or the Times ought to concede that letting Special Operations Command and the East Africa Air Pirates drone crew give Yemen the business for a few years hasn’t done the world any humanitarian favors.
Yemen has almost always teetered close to being a failed state. In 2013, the country’s electrical production was 850 megawatts, down by almost half of what it was the year before.
By contrast, the cities of Burbank, Glendale and Pasadena consumed 962 gigawatt hours of electricity in 2012 for residential use alone. Pasadena, by itself, it’s probably safe to say, has indescribably more electrical production capacity at its disposal than the entire country of Yemen.
Yemen, then, is patently one of the worst off places in the world, it’s deteriorating electrical production capacity only one measure of its very weak and fragile structure.
The US government, or its military, surely cannot say with any straight face (although they may try), that unleashing a vigorous anti-terror campaign upon the country did not significantly contribute to its current terrible condition.
“Core Al Qaeda is a rump of its former self,??? said an American counterterrorism official, in an assessment echoed by several European and Pakistani officials.
The Pakistanis estimate that Al Qaeda has lost 40 loyalists, of all ranks, to American drone strikes in the past six months – a higher toll than other sources have tracked but indicative of a broader trend. Now, they say, Qaeda commanders are moving back to the relative safety, and isolation, of locations they once fled, like the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, and Sudan.
Yet militancy experts caution that it is too early to sound the death knell for Al Qaeda’s leaders, for whom patience and adaptability are hallmarks, and who, despite the adversity, remain the principal jihadist militants focused on attacking the West.
“People always want to know when the job will be finished,??? said Michael Semple, a militancy expert at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland. “I don’t think we can talk about that. They’re on the back foot, rather than being eliminated.???
The job will not be finished. That would mean the need for so many facile “militancy experts” might come into question.
Militancy experts. Say it again. Sounds delicate, like something for which you have to have brains.
Is there a metric, a “militancy quotient,” used to measure countries we’re working over because terrorists? What’s the quotient of Yemen? Pakistan? Iraq-Syria-Libya?
The newspaper does sort of glumly concede al Qaeda men are has-beens next to ISIS, though.
“A Nobel Peace Prize laureate’s [Barack Obama’s] embrace of drones, partly on humanitarian grounds, is sure to increase their legitimacy as instruments of war in the future,” reads the New Yorker. “But how can Obama’s choice be squared with the accumulating record of mistakes?”
In 2014, Camp Lemmonair in Djibouti (or US Africa Command’s home) was the launching pad for 16 drone sorties a day, most of them into Yemen.
Nothing bad ever goes away for good here. Like turds, these things just float back up to the top of the great public punch bowl of life, again and again.