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May 21, 2013

Benghazi, IRS, AP stories: A shameful double standard

Filed under: Uncategorized — Greg in cheeseland @ 8:57 pm

Author’s note:
This article was originally published on the Madison Independent Examiner. Links to all of my sources (and more interesting reading) is available there. I encourage readers here to check them out. More of my articles are available for reading on my home page.

Full text (no hyperlinks):

The White House is on the defensive as three stories are inundating political news: The Benghazi hearings, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) targeting conservative groups and the Department of Justice (DOJ) seizing two months of Associated Press (AP) reporters’ phone records.

On Sunday, the president and chief executive officer of the AP, Gary Pruitt, called the phone records seizure “unconstitutional” and said the news cooperative has not ruled out legal action against the DOJ. Senate Republican minority leader Mitch McConnell said the same day that the IRS controversy amounts to a “culture of intimidation.”

In a House Judiciary Committee hearing last Friday, Attorney General Eric Holder referred to Rep. Darrell Issa’s (R-CA) behavior as “shameful.” The day before, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pointed out that there was no outrage “when groups on the other side of the political spectrum were under attack.”

Pruitt, McConnell, Holder and Reid may have good points. Republicans, Democrats and Independents should be outraged if Americans abroad are not given adequate security, the IRS is being used to target political enemies and the DOJ is being used to stifle freedom of the press. It is only fair, however, that both parties are treated equally by lawmakers, government officials and the media – and that has not been the case.

The shameful behavior of lawmakers, government officials and the media in the recent “scandals” work both ways. Both lawmakers and the corporate media fail to acknowledge is that there is a double standard at work. The Obama administration is being chastised for the same things that were overlooked during the Bush administration yet refuses to take higher ethical ground by continuing to violate constitutional rights and continuing a disastrous foreign policy.

Benghazi

The events at Benghazi were horrific, but so were the events at the 13 diplomatic compounds that were attacked during the Bush administration. Here is a list of those:

• January 22, 2002. Calcutta, India. Gunmen associated with Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami attack the US Consulate. Five people are killed.
• June 14, 2002. Karachi, Pakistan. Suicide bomber connected with al-Qaida attacks the US Consulate, killing 12 and injuring 51.
• October 12, 2002. Denpasar, Indonesia. US diplomatic offices bombed as part of a string of “Bali Bombings.” No fatalities.
• February 28, 2003. Islamabad, Pakistan. Several gunmen fire upon the US Embassy. Two people are killed.
• May 12, 2003. Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Armed al-Qaida terrorists storm the diplomatic compound killing 36 people including nine Americans. The assailants committed suicide by detonating a truck bomb.
• July 30, 2004. Tashkent, Uzbekistan. A suicide bomber from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan attacks the US Embassy, killing two people.
• December 6, 2004. Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Al-Qaida terrorists storm the US Consulate and occupy the perimeter wall. Nine people are killed.
• March 2, 2006. Karachi, Pakistan (again). Suicide bomber attacks the US Consulate killing four people, including US diplomat David Foy who was directly targeted by the attackers. (I wonder if Lindsey Graham or Fox News would even recognize the name “David Foy.” This is the third Karachi terrorist attack in four years on what’s considered American soil.)
• September 12, 2006. Damascus, Syria. Four armed gunmen shouting “Allahu akbar” storm the US Embassy using grenades, automatic weapons, a car bomb and a truck bomb. Four people are killed, 13 are wounded.
• January 12, 2007. Athens, Greece. Members of a Greek terrorist group called the Revolutionary Struggle fire a rocket-propelled grenade at the US Embassy. No fatalities.
• March 18, 2008. Sana’a, Yemen. Members of the al-Qaida-linked Islamic Jihad of Yemen fire a mortar at the US Embassy. The shot misses the embassy, but hits a nearby school, killing two.
• July 9, 2008. Istanbul, Turkey. Four armed terrorists attack the US Consulate. Six people are killed.
• September 17, 2008. Sana’a, Yemen (again). Terrorists dressed as military officials attack the US Embassy with an arsenal of weapons including RPGs and detonate two car bombs. Sixteen people are killed, including an American student and her husband, whom had been married for three weeks when the attack occurred.

Total killed: 60. Number of outraged Republicans: 0. Two of the attacks in Pakistan and Yemen were repeat attacks on the same facilities, yet there were no publicized demands for increased security and little or no improvements in security at either location.

The hypocrisy of lawmakers regarding Benghazi goes even further. While both the State Department and Pentagon budgets have increased yearly, in every year since 2010, Democrats requested more for embassy security, construction and maintenance than House Republicans approved. Some of the notable Republicans that voted against increased funding are the same ones that are blaming the Obama administration and the State department for the lack of security in Benghazi: Rep. Darrell Issa and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT).

Meanwhile former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who is allegedly accountable for the failure of security in Benghazi, warned on Feb. 14, 2011:

I was very clear with the Speaker about the deep concerns we have with the FY11 spending bill moving through the House floor this week. The scope of the proposed House cuts is massive. The truth is that cuts of that level will be detrimental to America’s national security. …Otherwise we will pay a higher price later in crises that are allowed to simmer and boil over into conflicts.

Many argue that Benghazi is scandalous not only because of the lack of adequate security, but also because rescue teams could have reached the embassy in time but were ordered to stand down, because the American people were not immediately told that it was a pre-planned attack and because of a perceived administration effort to hide its mistakes.

Some have even gone as far as to theorize, based on an editorial penned by Admiral James A. Lyons in the Washington Times, that the Benghazi attack was a staged kidnapping gone awry, intended to be an “October surprise” by the Obama administration with hostages taken and then being freed. Lyons asserts that there were plenty of military assets available to stop the attack before the loss of American lives, which is odd considering that he was not asked to testify in either hearing.

There are four points to consider that have surfaced in the hearings on Benghazi.

Firstly, Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other top Pentagon officials testified that the four-man special operations team referred to in the hearings, or any other ground forces, could not have made it to Benghazi in time to prevent the last two of the four deaths. Furthermore, the team had to be airlifted on a Libyan C-130 transport plane and the US government did not have immediate clearance from the Libyan government for that.

Secondly, the initial press releases that the attack was the result of a spontaneous demonstration rather than a pre-planned attack were based on the intelligence reports available at the time. Even though there were protests occurring at the time in several countries over a trailer for an anti-Muslim film, it was obvious to many at the time that the attack in Benghazi was not about a movie.

Thirdly, it is unclear why references to a terrorist attack were not subsequently made and the White House has yet to explain the ambiguity in their press releases, but that does not prove that the attack was preventable and the administration failed to do so. It also does not help the GOP’s case in proving that the Obama administration covered up terrorism when it was revealed that the emails were altered before being released to the press.

Lastly, but not least, the real issue that may be scandalous is being overlooked by both parties and the media. When US personnel were airlifted from Benghazi the night of the attack, there were seven Foreign Service and State Department officers and 23 CIA officers onboard. This fact alone indicates that the consulate was primarily diplomatic cover for an intelligence operation that was known to Libyan militia groups.

Among the questions that have not been probed is why the Benghazi mission, with its large CIA contingent, remained open when other Western countries, most notably Great Britain, had pulled out of Benghazi in the weeks preceding the attacks because of security concerns.

The use of US consulates by the CIA as operational bases without adequate security is practice common to both Republican and Democrat administrations. So is the pursuit of a foreign policy that led to the overthrow of the previous Libyan government that angered the militants and put US diplomats in a precarious position there. Perhaps lawmakers and the media should be questioning that.

IRS Targeting Conservative Groups

Within days after the latest round of Benghazi hearings, another “scandal” erupted when it was revealed that the IRS gave extra scrutiny to conservative groups claiming tax exempt status under 501(c)(4) of the IRS code and that some of their applications were delayed.

Organizations are allowed 501(c)(4) tax-exempt status if they can demonstrate to the IRS that they are primarily engaged in “social welfare” and not politics. That is, the group has to be “primarily engaged in promoting in some way the common good and general welfare of the community,” but they should not be primarily engaged in partisan politics or electioneering.

The difficult part for the IRS is how to make that distinction, especially considering that since the Citizens United ruling the number of applications for 501(c)(4) status doubled. Neither Congress nor the IRS has defined 501(c)(4)′s sufficiently, leaving the door open for IRS auditors to make up their own, discriminatory rules

IRS employees are given little or no guidance as to how to do that. The use of keywords in identifying individuals or groups for whatever reason is standard practice in all government agencies. Republican leaders, furthermore, admitted today that there is no evidence that the White House had anything to do with the targeting of conservative groups.

It is more likely that IRS employees chose to ask additional questions of groups that use the words “tea party,” “patriot” or “9/12” in their names not because of some political vendetta, but because they knew no other way to do so. Even considering, however, that many of the groups that were given extra scrutiny by the IRS are blatantly engaged in political activism, it is a form of profiling that should be frowned upon by all Americans.

The larger context of this “scandal,” however, goes beyond the specifics of keyword targeting, further questioning and delayed applications. Once again, lawmakers and media have turned the IRS “scandal” into a partisan issue when it is not. The IRS commissioner who resigned today was appointed under the Bush administration and the IRS engaged in the same practices targeting liberal groups such the NAACP, Greenpeace and even a liberal church before Obama was elected.

In 2004, the IRS went after the NAACP, auditing the nation’s oldest civil rights group after its then-chairman, Julian Bond, criticized President Bush for being the first sitting president since Herbert Hoover not to address the organization. “They [the IRS] are saying if you criticize the president we are going to take your tax exemption away from you,” Bond later remarked.

In 2006, a group funded by ExxonMobil called Public Interest Watch pressured the I.R.S. to audit the environmental advocacy group, Greenpeace, because it labeled Exxon-Mobil “the No. 1 climate criminal.” While the investigation was eventually closed, the IRS acknowledged it acted as a result of Public Interest Watch’s complaint.

The author of the Wall Street Journal article, Steve Stecklow, who reported that the IRS targeted Greenpeace on behalf of ExxonMobil, said in an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now:

This comes against a backdrop where a number of conservative groups have been attacking nonprofits and NGOs over their tax-exempt status. There have been hearings on Capitol Hill. Public Interest Watch was founded by a guy named Michael Hardiman who I interviewed, and he’s a Washington-based lobbyist. He’s a Republican….The records show he started to get a lot of money [in 2003], almost all of it from ExxonMobil.

Shortly before the 2004 election, the IRS audited a Pasadena, C.A. church called All Saints Episcopal and threatened to revoke its tax-exempt status because rector George Regas said from the dias, “Jesus [would say], ‘Mr. President, your doctrine of preemptive war is a failed doctrine.’”

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) said on MSNBC last Monday:

I wish there was more GOP interest when I raised the same issue during the Bush administration, where they audited a progressive church in my district in what look liked a very selective way,…I’m glad now that the GOP has found interest in this issue and it ought to be a bipartisan concern.

Meanwhile, conservative churches across the country such as the World Harvest Church in Ohio, were mobilizing Republican voters with little or no scrutiny, even going as far as flying Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican gubernatorial candidate, to three political events on its plane.

In 2006, pastor Mac Hammond of the Living World Christian Center in Minnesota said before welcoming her to the church: “You know we can’t publicly endorse as a church and would not for any candidate, but I can tell you personally that I’m going to vote for Michele Bachmann.” While the IRS did open an audit of that church, it went nowhere due to a “technicality.”

Many of the aforementioned cases occurred before the Citizens United ruling and that tax codes were much more well-defined under the 501(c)(3) rules at the time. There was little ambiguity in terms of enforcement under the C-3 rules, yet organizations were pursued nonetheless.

David Sirota, a columnist and best-selling author, points out in an article on Salon.com that the targeting of political enemies during the Bush administration went much further than IRS paperwork and audits: “We learned that along with the IRS, Secret Service and FBI, the Bush administration may have also been using the Central Intelligence Agency against its political enemies.”

While no organization on either side of the political spectrum should be unfairly scrutinized by the IRS, the outrage in congress and the media now, after the IRS was targeting liberal groups during the Bush administration, further suggests a double standard.

A few democratic lawmakers and news outlets took note of it publicly at the time, but it has in no way reached the level of intensity that it has last week. Many of the same lawmakers and media pundits that are screaming bloody murder about the IRS now were curiously silent when it was done ten years ago, which suggests that they are only outraged when government resources are aimed at their friends, but will look the other way when those resources are aimed at political enemies.

Has congress and the media reached a new heightened level of awareness, or do they just not care about the principles of equal protection under the law, impartial governance, and a nonpartisan approach of government agencies? A closer look at the AP phone-tapping scandal may reveal more.

DOJ Phone-tapping AP Reporters

The AP phone-tapping is also an example of a policy enacted under the Bush administration that has been continued under the Obama administration, yet was met with little or no outrage or opposition as it was being put into place – another double standard at work.

The DOJ informed the AP that it had secretly obtained telephone records for more than 20 separate phone numbers assigned to AP journalists and offices, both cell and home lines, including the AP’s main switchboard. While no explanation was given, it is likely that this was a result of the AP breaking stories last May about a foiled terror plot coming out of Yemen, involving plans to blow up an airliner bound for the United States.

Regardless of the rationale for the actions of the DOJ and US intelligence agencies, they are a clear violation of the freedom of the press rights guaranteed by the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Once again, however, these actions are not unprecedented and are part of a larger pattern. Similar phone-tapping and other surveillance by government agencies was largely ignored by politicians and the press before the Obama administration.

Over a decade ago, journalist Jesselyn Radack leaked e-mails to Newsweek regarding a cover-up by the DOJ of an ethics violation in its interrogation of “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh. The DOJ went after the journalist who published the e-mails, Michael Isikoff, obtaining phone records of the conversations without either of them knowing how.

Radack writes in the Daily KOS:

The latest revelation about the government infringement on AP confirms what too many whistleblowers…and journalists…already know about the national security state: when you speak truth to power, the government will use every weapon in its arsenal to silence you. I’ve been saying [that] for years – shouting into the wilderness…If the American media and public want to keep what’s left of their First Amendment rights, we need to wake up and see this latest attack on free speech for what it is: the government is using the criminal justice system to silence dissenters – a policy completely antithetical to a constitutional democracy that enshrines the freedoms of speech and the press.

Radack’s experience is not unique. In 2004 FBI agents obtained the phone records of Washington Post staff writer Ellen Nakashima, “who was based in Jakarta, Indonesia, at the time,” the Post reported in 2008, after FBI director Robert Mueller apologized. The FBI also obtained telephone records of an Indonesian researcher in the paper’s Jakarta bureau, Natasha Tampubolon. According to the Post, “records of New York Times reporters Raymond Bonner and Jane Perlez, who worked in Jakarta in 2004, also were compromised.”

In 2006, after ABC reporters Brian Ross and Richard Esposito broke a story about the CIA’s secret prisons in Romania and Poland, a senior federal law enforcement official told them that the government is tracking their phone numbers in an effort to root out confidential sources. “It’s time for you to get some new cell phones, quick,” the source told them in an in-person conversation.

In another leak case, New York Times reporter James Risen has been fighting a subpoena from Obama’s Justice Department for years. The Obama DOJ was after his sources for a chapter in his book about the Bush administration, State of War.

The Obama administration inherited the case from the Bush administration, and despite the fact that the district court judge sided with Risen during both the grand jury and trial, DOJ has continued to appeal the case. Last May, the DOJ argued before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals that reporters’ privilege does not exist at all for national security reporters.

While reporters and news agencies are the focus of the AP scandal, they are by no means the only ones that are being targeted by federal agencies with surveillance tactics akin to those used by fascist and totalitarian regimes. The expansion of government surveillance power began in earnest with the USA Patriot Act and has been expanded ever since.

In 2005, the New York Times revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) was conducting a secret and illegal wiretapping program in search of terrorists. Instead of reprimanding the government, Congress passed the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which made the practice legal.

After an AT&T whistleblower revealed in 2006 that a staggering number of emails and phone calls were being surveilled under FISA, another amendment to FISA was passed In June 2008 to further expand the scope of the government’s authority. A secret ex parte FISA court now exists solely to grant FISA warrants, which, as a lower court acknowledged, almost never denies a request.

Of course now, with the breaking news of the AP scandal, politicians and news agencies are expressing their shock and outrage at an unprecedented noise level. Yet years ago, when the measures that enabled the abuses were being put into place and codified under new laws, little if anything was heard in the press and there were no congressional hearings. Perhaps if something had been done before and not after the fact, Americans would not be at a point where many of their constitutional rights have disappeared.

Why the double standard?

There are many theories why Benghazi, the IRS and AP stories are getting so much attention in congress and the media when similar misconduct was largely ignored in the past. The partisan behavior of both parties suggests that few politicians care about a foreign policy that treats all nations in an unbiased manner, keeps Americans abroad out of harm’s way, and provides equal protection under the law with impartial government agencies and services.

Many on the left claim that is simply because a non-white democrat is in the White House and the right is in attack mode, worrying about upcoming elections with nothing meritorious to run with. Many on the right claim it is because these “scandals” are worse than similar ones that occurred under the Bush administration.

While there may be some truth in both perceptions, politicians and the media fail to put the double standard of politicized government based on ideological bias into a larger context. Radack touched upon an overriding theme it when she wrote of “speaking truth to power” and one can expound on that concept in the context of the recent “scandals.”

That context is better described as an ideological bias in Washington and the corporate media which tilts to the right in favor of the moneyed establishment over anyone or any group that challenges the status quo. Liberal groups who pursue causes such as the anti-war movement are not treated the same as conservative groups who pursue things such as the anti-tax movement because liberal causes tend to be at odds with the corporate oligarchs, while conservative causes tend to be aligned with the interests of the ultra-rich.

David Sirota, writing for Salon.com, sums it up very well:

…When conservative groups happen to be treated like liberal groups, the Washington Outrage Machine turns the noise up to 11 – even though when liberal groups were targeted, that Outrage Machine remained dormant. And with today’s national press corps reoriented around amplifying – rather than challenging – power, this double standard is then predictably reflected in a corresponding discrepancy in coverage.

The same concept applies when Democratic administrations are perceived to be challenging the status quo of moneyed elite, even though the policies and actions of the Obama administration have continued to benefit large corporations, Wall Street banks and the military-industrial complex.

Politicized administration of law and public policy is never acceptable, no matter which party is in power or who or what is being targeted. The recent Benghazi, IRS and AP “scandals” should be frowned upon by every American. But Americans also need to take a stand against all destructive foreign policy decisions and constitutional infringements no matter which party is in power.

That should have been done when the policies and practices that led to these abuses were being put into place over ten years ago. Overlooking trends in law and government because a favored political party is in power will catch people sleeping while their constitutional rights are being trampled. Selective outrage, double standards and hypocrisy will never move the country in the right direction.

What you can do

Call AG Eric Holder and tell him exactly what you think of the trampling of constitutional rights: 202-353-1555. You can also call your members of Congress and demand immediate, strong oversight. Ask them stand up to the national security apparatus that has been complicit in creating and empowering government agencies that are undermining the constitution. Tell them to act like representatives of the people and the co-equal branch of government that Americans elected them to be.
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Sources:

ABC News

NBC News

NBC News

Salon

Refreshing News

CNN

The Hill

Washington Post

Think Progress

The Hill

Washington Times

Wired / Danger Room

Madison Independent Examiner – Embassy attack…

Nation of Change

Consortium News

McClatchy

IRS.gov (PDF)

Washington Post

NBC News

Salon

Wall Street Journal

Democracy Now

Baltimore Sun

LA Times

New York Times

Houston Business and Tax Journal (PDF)

Chicago Tribune

Salon

Salon

Firedoglake

Washington Post

Daily KOS

ABC News

Press Freedom Foundation

New York Times

Huffington Post

Madison Independent Examiner – 14 defining characteristics of fascism…

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Wired

Policymic

Salon

USA.gov

May 20, 2013

Getting used to the future: Why I’m going camping this weekend

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , — Jane Stillwater @ 11:54 am

Consider this message in your inbox to be like a vacation e-mail response. “I’m going camping this weekend — roughing it, so to speak. No electricity. No automobiles. No computers! No heating and cooling units, no public library, no TV and no Berkeley Bowl Marketplace for food.”

Just me and a tent and the great outdoors, up on the Tuolumne River.

Will I survive? Given my low-level camping skills, the answer to that question might actually be “no”.

But going camping occasionally is always a good idea. It makes us more grateful for the soft life we now live down in the cities. And it should also make us appropriately angry that our greedy, stupid and immoral leaders have systematically squandered the incredible wealth of our national cornucopia on unnecessary, stupid, immoral and endless wars.

Happy Memorial Day — although it looks like no one in America seems to remember what our thousands and thousands of heroic dead soldiers should have been fighting for but were not — the right for ALL Americans to have a future that doesn’t involve living in tents.

May 17, 2013

The case of the missing photographs

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , — Bob Patterson @ 12:30 pm

Just because a photo is ubiquitous on the internet, that doesn’t mean that a columnist has permission to use that particular picture.  A columnist can either do a lot of clerk work to get permission to use a particular image or he can start carrying a camera and take pictures that he will give himself permission to run and then start to learn html coding.

When a photo librarian for the Associated Press got a request, in 1966, from LIFE magazine for a copy of the picture of Lee Harvey Oswald being shot by Jack Ruby, things got complicated when the future World’s Laziest Journalist noticed a copyright notice on the photo.  According to the ground rules the lowly photo librarian had to say “no” to one of the biggest and most prestigious members of the news coop organization.  It was the weekend and it was quite likely that there were no managers around to consult.  Then the beleaguered photo librarian ran into the AP’s Chief Executive Officer in the hall.  We quickly explained the dilemma.  He asked “What would you do if I weren’t here?”  We told him the ground rules required me to say “no.”  He hesitated a beat and then said:  “Pretend you didn’t see me.”

A column containing that vignette would be so much more eye appealing, if we could run the image of the murder happening but since it seems unlikely that even if the columnist started on Sunday morning to track down the copyright owner and get permission to use it online, the self imposed deadline of doing all that in time to post the column on Friday May 17, 2013 renders the question moot.  It will be easier to relate the incident and then challenge readers to do a Google Image search for the famous photo.

Since images enhance the drawing power of online postings, it is tempting to toss any old image on the top of the column and hope for the best, but a rudimentary acquaintance with photography indicates that the image needs more eye appeal than, for example, a snapshot of the columnist at a recent college commencement program.

If a columnist has talked shop with more Pulitzer Prize winning photographers (three) than reporters (one), then perhaps it might be realistic to assume such a fellow can make a valid claim to a better than a beginners knowledge of photojournalism and therefore should have a legitimate claim to having some photo editing competence.  If such a person wants to run photos he took, he knows there will be no hassles about permission to use any of those images with his column.  The unauthorized use of a copyrighted photograph could cause a remarkable increase in the amount of non productive clerk work and the best way for the World’s Laziest Journalist to avoid that unnecessary drudgery is to only use photos taken with his personal Coolpix.

It helps, of course, if the selected image has something to do with the contents in the column, but if the columnist has established his niche in the “three dot journalism” style of running multiple short items that cover a wide swath of subject matter just about any photo of anything could be deemed germane and useable as long as it was a good image.

In the past we have recounted getting a photo lesson in the AP lunch room from Eddie Adams and that name will impress folks who know the history of photojournalism, but folks who don’t recognize the name might like to know he is the guy who took the famous picture of the Police Chief in Saigon blowing out the brains of a suspect.  Tracking down permission to run that image is more clerk work than time permits so, again, we refer to curious to the wonders of the Google Image search site.

Do we need to get permission to post a photo we took?  Some time back, while working as a columnist for Just Above Sunset online magazine, we got the chance to take a ride on a B-17-G and write the story about the experience.  At one point, we borrowed the camera being used by Alan Pavlik, the photographer and the web site’s editor and publisher.  We flopped down flat on the ground and took one photo.  Now, it seems prudent that we secure his permission to use that photo (which was published with a large selection of the photos he took) with this column.  Once we got that permission (10-Q message sent) it should be a piece of cake.

It didn’t work so click on this link:

http://www.justabovesunset.com/imagelib/sitebuilder/misc/show_image.html?linkedwidth=actual&linkpath=http://www.justabovesunset.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/b17_fullside.jpg&target=tlx_new

(Readers may have to copy that URL and paste it into their browser.)

Our flight on the B-17-G was something that had been on our bucket list since high school, but in the tradition of fair and balanced journalism and in the tradition of the Ford vs. Chevrolet debate, we may still have some more work to do.  An assortment of WWII aircraft from the Wings of Freedom Tour (see more info at http://www.collingsfoundation.org/menu.htm) is coming to the SF Bay area and if we get a chance to get a ride on the B-24 that is coming to Moffett Federal Air Field next week, we could then do the judicious thing and cast our vote in the B-17 vs. the B-24 controversy.

We will probably go out to Moffett and take some photos of the WWII aircraft and mention the expedition in a future column because that will give us a convenient excuse to run (at least) one of those photos.

Speaking of missing photos and B-17’s, about a half century ago (how can that be if we are only 28 years old?  [Haven’t researchers proved that everyone online is 28 years old?]), we were reading up on the Liberation of Paris in WWII and we came across an account of a wild cowboy American pilot who flew a B-17 between the legs of the Eiffel Tower to fly under it.  It outraged the French people because of the reckless disregard for their national icon.  We saw one photo of the stunt back when we read about it but we have never seen a copy of that image online.

The editors at LIFE magazine knew the allure of a stand alone shot because of the popularity of their “Parting Shot” feature, which drew numerous submissions each week.  We have, in previous columns, suggested that the editors of LIFE and some commercial entity, such as Nikon and/or Eastman Kodak, should collaborate on an online version of that popular feature.  (Hellfire, if they need an editor to select one photo a day to be featured as the best, we know of a fellow in Berkeley who might volunteer his services.)  If they adapted a policy where every submission appeared online and each day one was selected as Best of the Day, they would probably get some fairly impressive hit numbers and submissions.

What makes an image jump off the computer screen?  There are plenty of hot rods with flame paint jobs and there are a great many Rolls Royce automobiles in the world but when we did a Google Image search for a Rolls Royce with a flames paint job we found only two valid suggestions.  One of them was a shot we took in Berkeley CA and posted on our photoblog.

Recently, in our attempt to do a survey of the contemporary pop culture scene, we came across the concept of “soap opera news,” and getting a chance to take a photo to illustrate a column on that topic, would be challenging.

This week, Norman Goldman, tipped his listeners to a US Supreme Court Case decision in the case of Robert Pelkey’s towed car that could serve as an example of soap opera news.

The World’s Laziest Journalist has been quite critical of the journalism industry.  We recently lambasted CBS Evening News for relying too much on footage of an interviewee crying.  Aren’t those weeping people interviews Exhibit A in the case to prove the existence of Soap Opera News?  We are not too sure about the legality of taking a photo of the TV screen showing an example of the soap opera news crying phenomenon and so we only mentioned it.  We note with interest the fact that last weekend Scott Pelley shook up the Journalism world by seconding our idea that America’s free press has become a parody of itself.  Come to think of it, some of the blustery anchors do remind us of that sly old fox, Marshal Rooster Cogburn (John Wayne) in the film “True Grit.”

Doing some digging to find some interesting tidbits of information and going places (such as Moffett Field) to see some interesting things and to watch some events happen helps the World’s Laziest Journalist cope with the challenge of breaking the boredom barrier in Berkeley.  It helps if we come up with some material that is new and unique.  Such as?  Isn’t it about time for an announcement be made and AP to run some photos of the location for where the Obama Presidential Library will be built?  Have your other sources for political punditry hipped you to the latest pop culture phenomenon named Paris Jackson?

While Fox reports on the latest Obama scandals, aren’t the treehuggers who are disappointed in the XL pipeline, the potheads who are miffed about the crackdowns on medical marijuana dispensaries, and the peaceniks who disapprove of all drone strikes (not just the ones Dubya authorized) supposed to rally to Obama’s defense?  Lotsa luck on that.

Charles Batman, the managing editor of the Santa Monica Independent Journal Newspapaers once said:  “I have seen the future of Rock and Roll and it is . . . litigation.”

Now the disk jockey will play our highly subjective list of the best one hit wonder (that qualification eliminates Les Paul and Duane Eddy from consideration) guitar recordings.  He will play Link Wray’s “Rumble,” Jorgan Ingman’s “Apache,” and Jody Reynold’s “Endless Sleep.”  We have to go charge the batteries for our Nikon Coolpix camera.  Have a “keep ‘em flying” type week.

May 15, 2013

America: The place where Israeli neo-cons get their Big Ideas!

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , — Jane Stillwater @ 12:49 pm

Some people are always unjustly accusing Israeli neo-cons of learning their rather barbaric occupation strategies (of torturing, killing, harassing, stealing from and jailing Palestinians) from the Nazis — but that’s just not true! Israeli neo-cons actually stole their barbaric, inhumane and uncivilized methods and ideas from America! And I have the maps to prove it too.

You know that map series that shows the changing demographics of land distribution between Israel and Palestine, from 1947 to present times? With the Israeli lands all illustrated in white and the shrinking native lands illustrated in green? http://en.avaaz.org/1108/palestine-gaza-statehood-bid-un

Well, I’ve been working on creating a demographic map of America between 1492 and present times too — illustrating land distribution between Native Americans and Euro-Americans in 1492, 1700, 1850 and now. And will it look familiar? Oh yeah. So stop trying to blame the current Israeli neo-con foreign and domestic policies http://www.roitov.com/articles/inventions.htm on the Nazis — when we already gots a winner right here in the good old U.S.A.

PS: Here is my version of the above-described demographic map of America, that I’ve drawn so far — except that I got the green bits and the white bits mixed up. Mercator would probably be rolling over in his grave right now but, hey, it’s the best I could do. http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com/2013/05/america-place-where-israeli-neo-cons.html

And now perhaps it’s time to start working on a new map — of what America’s very own “Project for a New American Century” neo-cons have in mind for Israel next. And this one is gonna be big, even bigger than my map of the U.S. And it’s gonna use up a hecka lot of green ink too — stretching all the way from Algeria and Libya, through Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran, all the way to Uzbekistan by 2050. Will get back to you on that one.

PPS: A mainstream Israeli newspaper has just reported that an ex-Bush official believes that the current chemical weapons charges against Syria are all false flags, planted by Israeli neo-cons. And if Bush’s guy is right, the Israeli neo-cons probably also copied that idea from all those American false-flag reports that Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons as well http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/west-of-eden/former-bush-administration-official-israel-may-be-behind-use-of-chemical-arms-in-syria.premium-1.519172

And now those copy-cat Israeli neo-cons have just dropped bombs on the Damascus airport.

Since 1997, Syria http://www.freepalestinemovement.org/home.html, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iran, Pakistan, etc. have all suffered violent military and economic attacks by American neo-cons. And this roll-call of preemptive aggression on the Middle East reads just like a page out of the PNAC playbook http://morallowground.com/2011/06/03/on-this-day-1997-project-for-the-new-american-century-founded/.

And now even East Jerusalem is under attack by Israeli neo-cons http://www.roitov.com/articles/jerusalemroads.htm

When we all voted for Obama in 2010 and again in 2012, we naively assumed that we had finally put an end to all that PNAC craziness. But no, no, no and no. The PNAC plan is obviously stronger than ever right now. So much for hope. Obama is clearly a PNAC type of guy.

And apparently America’s current upper escalations of power are also Al Qaeda types of guys too. According to Global Research, “[T]he recent Israeli strikes prove outright that Israel, acting on behalf of the US, is fighting on the same side as Al Qaeda in Syria. Western efforts to bolster supposed ‘moderate rebels’ have clearly only bolstered what has always been the main demographic of the militant ‘opposition’: Salafi/Jihaddi inspired and fomented militias, that do not espouse anything close to democracy.” http://www.globalresearch.ca/war-and-moral-expediancy-us-and-israel-support-salafist-jihadist-terrorists-in-syria/5334315

As Dorothy Parker used to say, “What new hell is this!” It’s a Hell that is costing American taxpayers their very life-blood, that’s what.

PPPS: Here’s a recent report from Gaza by an American doctor visiting there:

“…The refugee camps we visit seem even more soiled and overcrowded than before, and there is trash everywhere. The UN is running out of money to maintain its food assistance program and people are revolting…. Gaza is a pressure cooker. The UN predicts that Gaza may become inhabitable after 2020. But we will keep coming back as long as we can. Our conscience demands this of us http://palestinechronicle.com/gaza-we-will-keep-coming-back/#.UYQsxsqcHBY

Sounds like a Native American reservation to me — as best described here by Johnny Cash: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdNV9JX-Xi8 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCAf_Ajh_KQ and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0zbD84Q1U4.

PPPPS: Sanctions on Iran? Screw that. Somebody needs to put sanctions on those sleazy, war-mongering Israeli and American neo-cons http://vimeo.com/64853585. And what if Russia, Iran, China and India started a boycott of America and Israel too? What then? Here’s what: All of the shelves in all of the WalMarts in America and Israel would stand empty quick as a wink.

May 6, 2013

Stuck in history: Mother’s Day, Niles, Bikers & Charlie Chapman

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , — Jane Stillwater @ 12:38 pm

“Would you like to play Charlie Chaplin’s mother in my new movie?” a film student at UC Berkeley asked me recently. Of course I would. Yeah. Sure!

Did you know that Charlie Chaplin’s mother suffered from and finally died of tertiary syphilis, which she contracted while being forced into prostitution in the gold fields of South Africa by her greedy and unscrupulous husband? And that Charlie then grew up in a Dickensian-style orphanage in the slums of London? It’s true.

And did you also know that Chaplin made a whole bunch of his movies in Niles, California — back before Hollywood was Hollywood and Niles was Hollywood first? And that Niles is just 30 miles south of Berkeley? And that Niles is now one of the antique-store (and biker-bar) capitals of the world?

Just for a moment, let’s take a break from all the lies and propaganda http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/item/17948-forget-cocaine-the-bigger-danger-to-america-is-snorting-crack-koch we are all currently being bombarded with on our flat-screen TVs (propaganda that tells us Syria has WMDs just like Iraq did; that Iran, not the CIA, is the world’s baddest Bad Guy; that only Wall Street needs and deserves a bailout; and that John Kerry has the absolute right and cajones to contest honest elections in Venezuela but did diddly-squat to contest dishonest elections in Ohio http://filmmakermagazine.com/69630-slurping-docs-at-tribeca/). Instead, let’s return to those simple days of yesteryear when everything was uncomplicated and nice and the Little Tramp was king of comedy.

That’s what happens when you visit Niles, CA.

Niles is a sweet little all-American town with a main street and steam trains and an old-fashioned tearoom that is offering Mothers Day high tea.

I remember my own mother with very mixed feelings. She’s dead now (death is the ultimate career change, BTW), so it’s obviously too late to be working out all that emotional spaghetti with her in person — so on Mothers Day these days I just have to say goodbye to all that ambiguity and just let it all go.

But apparently Charlie Chaplin couldn’t — and didn’t. He always thought that he was the one who drove his mother nutzo and never even knew that she had syphilis.

Did I drive my own mother around the bend also? Did Barbara Bush drive young GWB nuts? And what was Anton Scalia’s mother like? We should ask Sandra Day O’Connor about that one.

Happy Mothers Day.

According to Mary Catherine Bateson, her mother (Margaret Mead) completely changed the way that babies were brought into the world and how children were treated here in America. At a time when American children were regimented rigidly with regard to feeding times and that babies were tortured with weird-looking instruments immediately after their birth, Mead let the world know that, in Samoa it was okay to hug one’s child and even actually breast-feed it when it was hungry instead of just letting it cry for three hours and then feeding it only from a bottle.

My mother herself wrote in my baby book that the hospital staff where I was born didn’t hardly allow my mom to see me during the first whole ten days of my life — and then they had the chutzpah to tell her that she couldn’t breast-feed because her milk had all dried up. No wonder so many American guys have such fixations with breasts! And American women seem to be fixated on them too. Just ask your nearest local plastic surgeon.

So. Perhaps the simple days of yesteryear weren’t so simple after all. Charlie Chaplin’s mother was bonkers from syphilis. We had the great 1929 stock market crash. And World War I was basically a slaughterhouse driven by propaganda and lies — so much so that the main difference between then and now appears to be that, back in the day, no one had flat-screen TVs.

But Niles’ silent-movie museum, antique stores, biker bar and tea room are still nice places to go on Mothers Day, and to dream about a simple and peaceful time long ago — one that never really existed.

PS: I also got to play another mother in a recent Academy of Art student film as well. Here’s the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6frzpjGhHEM

PPS: Chicago’s probate court system seems to have developed a rather unique way of celebrating Mothers Day. First, court attorneys who act as guardians for elders (at $250 an hour!) actively seek out home-owning old people; send in a phony doctor who declares them to be incompetent; get them tossed into a warehousing-type old people’s home; sell off the helpless elders’ homes; and then pocket the profits http://marygsykes.com/2013/05/03/a-system-set-up-to-dump-people-in-nursing-homes-let-the-attorneys-hold-a-bake-sale-for-funding/#comment-2050

How can people like this sleep at night? And how can they ever even look their own mothers in the eye after doing these grossly egregious things to other people’s mothers?

April 30, 2013

The Boston Marathon bombing: Failure of the police state

Filed under: Uncategorized — Greg in cheeseland @ 1:59 pm

Author’s note: Despite all of the confusion, questions, contradictory news reports and conspiracy theories regarding the Boston bombings, one thing is clear. The police state created under Bush and continued under Obama utterly failed the people of Boston on April 15, 2013.

Full text:

“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759

Since 9/11, Americans have willingly sacrificed constitutional rights, personal freedom, billions of taxpayer dollars and lives in order to feel safer from terrorist acts. The horrific bombing in Boston is an ugly reminder that such sacrifices are not keeping Americans safer.

Even though the suspects were found within days after the bombing, the surveillance and police state that Americans have allowed to be created utterly failed on April 15th, 2013. Indeed, over 250 years later, the words of Benjamin Franklin ring true.

Some are questioning the official narrative of the Boston Marathon bombing and the ensuring events in the five days that followed. That is to be expected when the official story seems so improbable in light of all the anti-terrorism measures that have been enacted over the past 12 years. If one believes that story, however, it should become clear that all of the rights that Americans have sacrificed, all of the tax dollars spent, and all of the lives lost in the “war on terror” have done nothing to keep Americans safer from terrorist attacks.

The American people are told that they need Echelon, the CIA, the NSA, the DHS, the TSA, fusion centers, tracking devices, RFID chips, drones, spy satellites, militarized police armed like Marines, and a defense budget that accounts for over 41% of world military spending – more than the next 10 highest spending nations combined.

Americans are told that they need indefinite illegal detention, illegal torture prisons that provide no reliable intelligence that can be acted upon, gun control, pre-crime arrest, a stifling of freedom of speech and expression, a means to bypass Miranda rights, control of every channel of communication, censorship of the media, complete control of the internet, etc. – all in order to prevent terrorist attacks and keep them safe.

Americans are told they need to make sacrifices in taxes, Social Security, Medicare, health care, education, jobs, infrastructure, and even lost lives in the military in order to keep them safe from “terrorists.” As a cowed and misinformed population willingly makes these sacrifices, the constitutional rights of common Americans are being shredded, their freedoms disappear and the nation is spent into bankruptcy as an all-powerful police state is expanded in an Orwellian fashion.

Despite all the sacrifices, two seemingly ordinary young men, ages 26 and 19, acting independently, were able to elude hundreds of police, federal agents, bomb-sniffing dogs, surveillance cameras, internet surveillance and even their own family and friends in order to set off two makeshift bombs and that killed three people and wounded over 200, evading capture for almost five days in a city of 650,000 people.

Before the suspects were caught, it took a plea to the public from the F.B.I. to identify them from a grainy department store surveillance camera still shot, a manhunt during which hundreds of rounds of gunfire were unleashed in a crowded city, a virtual martial law lockdown of thousands of Americans, house-to-house searches (see video below) and a cost of an estimated $333 million in expenditures and lost income in Boston.

Many details have been reported and later contradicted about the events between April 15th and April 19th, the background of the suspects and the manner in which authorities handled the situation. The full truth may never be known.

One thing certain, however, is that at least one of the suspects was on the F.B.I.’s radar before the bombings. The F.B.I. originally denied first meeting with one of the bombing suspects, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, two years ago, but finally admitted that after CBS published the information. There have been several allegations that the F.B.I. interviewed the elder bomber multiple times.

At the very least, that would mean that the F.B.I. would have run a background check on him and run his name and photos through all the available surveillance databases that federal agencies have created with taxpayer funding. Reuters reports that was done and that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was put on a terrorist watch list. Yet the public was asked for assistance in identifying him, which raises some questions.

There are only two possible conclusions based on those facts: Either the F.B.I. was utterly incompetent in preventing a terrorist attack by someone they monitored, or they are covering up that they were instigating and handling the bombing plot, like they have done with many others in the past, and this one got out of hand. Perhaps even a combination of both.

Another certainty is that a lot of security was in place at the bombing site before the bombs went off. Three of the security measures that have been documented to have been used at the finish line are bomb-sniffing dogs, a bomb drill and extra security provided by the National Guard, including the Weapons of Mass Destruction – Civil Support Team (CST).

So much security, in fact, that many “conspiracy theories” that the bombings were staged can be found on the internet. Along with the many unanswered questions, that is not surprising. The only way to prove that the official story is fabricated, however, would be through a serious investigation entailing filing state records act requests, Freedom of Information Act requests at the federal level, as well as obtaining the search warrants, affidavits and a whole lot more. Since authorities are obviously unwilling to release such information at this time, it is best to simply stick with the facts that are available.

The available “facts” are that despite a plethora of security, foreknowledge of the potential of one of the bombers to have a propensity for terrorism, billions of dollars of spending on homeland security, a 26-year-old and a 19-year-old were able to succeed in committing a terrorist act that killed and maimed innocent Americans. Then they managed to cause a large city to be transformed into a virtual martial law war zone after one was killed and before the other one was captured.

That can only be described as a failure of the surveillance, police state that Americans have made so many sacrifices for.

The real questions to ask may be: Where is this going to take America from here? Is the nation going deeper into the abyss of defense spending, more surveillance and further loss of constitutional liberties? Is homeland security designed to protect Americans under constitutional law or is it designed to protect the establishment’s power over the Constitution? Will over 200 years of laws and legal precedents be scrapped whenever a suitable event occurs or an excuse can be contrived? Who benefits from that, defense contractors, security firms, weapons and surveillance technology manufacturers, the elitists who run police states, or common Americans?

Obviously, the victims in Boston did not benefit from that. If the police state was designed to protect average Americans, then it has failed.

Get links, a slideshow and a video here: Madison Independent Examiner – The Boston Marathon Bombing: Failure of the police state

April 26, 2013

Bombs, Bullets, and Books

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , — Bob Patterson @ 12:35 pm

CA stands tall with Boston

“The Third Bullet” (Simon & Schuster New York © 2013) by Stephen Hunter is a fictional account of an investigation by a former U. S. Marine Corps sniper named Bob Lee Swagger into the murder of President John F. Kennedy.  Since this is the year of all gun chat all the time on talk radio and since this year will be the fiftieth anniversary of the tragedy in Dallas Texas on November 22, we were pleasantly surprised to learn of the existence of this new installment in a series of mystery-adventure novels about a fellow who is loosely based on the legendary Marine sniper Carlos Hathcock because it seemed that none of the trolls who dominate the national discussion on guns has mentioned this new book.  We have read several of the preceding installments in the series and were aware that the book would contain some very detailed technical information about guns and bullets.  Suffice it to say that this new book blends accurate details of known American history with some speculation in a manor that is both entertaining and thought provoking.

Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Agent,” which describes the anarchy caused by bomb throwing Bolsheviks and was published in 1907, is based on a true life incident that occurred in London in 1894 but it still has that “ripped from today’s headlines” aura of relevancy to it.  We wonder if teachers will urge their students to read this example of American Literature.  Conrad’s novel “Under Western Eyes,” is an almost century old look at the world of political fanatics in Russia.  What’s old is new and these two old books may start selling again.

“Twilight at the World of Tomorrow,” (Ballantine Books New York © 2010) by James Mauro tells the story of the use of a bomb by terrorists at the Great Britain Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair on July 4, 1940.  There had been other bomb incidents at that time in the New York City which were caused by a union dispute.   This bit of New York City terrorism remains an unsolved mystery.

“Live Fast, Die Young (The Wild Ride of Making ‘Rebel without a Cause’)” by Lawrence Frascella and Al Weisel (Touchstone © 2005) just happened to be the next book on our recreational “in” pile as pundits around the world faced the task of doing a weekend wrap-up for the week that included the Boston Marathon Bombing.  In that book, we learned (on page 79) that on the G. E. Theater episode titled “The Dark, Dark Hour,” James Dean worked with Ronald Reagan.

In a world where folks can see hundreds of cops standing around (on OT?) doing nothing, while the air traffic controllers are taught the pragmatic reasoning behind the move that destroyed their union, some cynics think that it may just be the latest installment in the long history of the anarchy caused by bomb throwers.

Did the folks on all Gun Chat radio all the time notice that while the police searched for the bombers, Sen. Harry Reid was saying “gun control legislation is dead for this year.”

Will the capitalist business owners in Boston charge employees who missed work on the day of the lockdown with a vacation day or will they cry “sequester cuts!” and declare that it was a one day sequester event and they need not pay for it?  How many will be magnanimous and pay regular salary for the missed work day?

Boston dominated the news but KPFA reported that something bad may have happened at Guantanamo the Saturday before Patriots’ Day.  Naturally the mainstream media ignored that and other important stories.

A fellow who was arrested for sending poison to politicians was released and can resume his career as the most famous Elvis impersonator alive.

If the Butthead and Bevis duo used cell phone technology to detonate the backpacks, did they also learn how to do that from material they found on the Internets?  If not who mentored them?  If the two brothers were enrolled in Terrorism 101, will President Obama pull a Dubya and invade the campus and destroy the school?  If the American military is spread too thin, then does it not follow that the investigation must conclude that the older brother, Lee Harvey Tsarnaev duped his younger brother into being part of the gang of two and that they acted alone?

Now that the story is out that Syria has used poison gas after President Obama warned them not to do that, he seems to be caught in a classic binary choice familiar to barroom brawlers:  “Throw a punch or shut up and go away.”  Will President Obama and the Syrian leader now do a political version of the “chickie run” sequence in “Rebel without a Cause”?

If Obama sends American troops to get involved in that country’s Civil War, will Kim Jung Un get bolder thinking that Obama has run out of troops to send abroad?

Will Obama back up former President Bush’s threat to deal severely with any country that provided a training ground for any terrorists who would subsequently attack the USA or will he find out that the military is stretch too thin to back up that old warning with the promised action?

After seeing the spectacle of Boston being brought to a complete halt for a day by two young bomb throwers, cynics are asking:  “Will their quick apprehension serve as an effective deterrent or will it act as a catalyst inspiring copycats to make many more well publicized political statements with bombs?”  Will historians say that the boys from Chechnya opened the flood gates for a hoard of Mongol copy cats?

Has one other news item, the slipped past most of the mainstream media?  According to the Los Angeles Times, more charges have been filed against the County Assessor.

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/apr/23/local/la-me-assessor-20130424

Since Dubya was notorious for not putting anything on paper we have always wondered what will be displayed at the Bush Presidential Library.  Apparently all the e-mails from fans will be one of the major attractions.

In the recently published book, “Ayn Rand Explained,” (Open Court Chicago © 3013) readers are informed (on page 17):  “Ideas, values, and behavior which we would reasonably think were wrong because they lead to the destruction of life are considered as acceptable as any others.”  What will conservatives do if it turns out that Tamerlin Tsarnaev was an avid Ayn Rand fan?  Could it be that he wore a WWJGD (What Would John Gault Do?) bracelet?

The guy, A. J. Clemente, who dropped the “F-bomb” on his debut as a news anchor in Bismarck, North Dakota, got invited onto the Letterman and Today TV shows, but our attempts to just find the name of his co-host, who remained composed and continued doing her job, were inconclusive.  Did A. J. read “Atlas Shrugged”?  Have American kids learned yet that “Incompetence Rules!” and that the old philosophy “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” would make a better motto for use on the money use by the USA.

Did the debate over “Miranda Rights” precipitate a situation where the prosecution’s case in the trial of the Boston Bomber is compromised before the opening statements are made?

Is an online pundit, who lives in Berkeley CA, being facetious and critical of the Democrat in the White House when he sports a 1940 Wendell Wilkie political button that proclaims:  “No Third Term”?

[Note from the photo editor:  While covering Occupy Oakland, we noticed an odd bit of graphics, from something called Soxstickers.com, which combined the outline of the state of California with the logo for Boston’s major league baseball team but we didn’t think it was relevant back then, but now that all the USA is expressing a desire to stand tall with Boston, we thought this photo might be an appropriate visual way to say that CA stands with Boston.]

Speaking of the New Deal, we are working on getting more details about an effort to establish a New Deal Museum.  With our luck the assignment editor for the features desk at the New York Times will read this column, scoop us, and save us a bunch of work.

According to “Live Fast, Die Young,” in early 1955, after being inured in a car wreck, actress Natalie Wood summoned movie director Nicolas Ray to her hospital room.  A Hollywood legend was born (page 40) when she (allegedly) whispered in his ear:  “They called me a goddamn juvenile delinquent.  Now do I get the part?”

Now the disk jockey will play the new Boston anthem, Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline,” a memorial playing of Ritchie Havens’ “Freedom,” and a memorial playing of George Jones’ “He stopped loving her today.”  We have to go find a good Walpurgis Night Party to crash.  Have a “Why do we do this, Buzz” type week.

April 24, 2013

The U.S. Supreme Court, tax laws & insanity: What I learned at three rubber-chicken lunches recently

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , — Jane Stillwater @ 9:59 am

The Berkeley-Albany Bar Association has been on a huge roll this year. First we had a local expert on the U.S. Supreme Court speak at our January monthly luncheon, giving us the complete 411 regarding what the court had been up to this past year. Not a pretty picture. It’s really hard to eat rubber chicken and contemplate Anton Scalia at the same time. But I took lots of notes. But then I lost them in the process of getting my apartment renovated.

Then, two months ago, we had a tax-law expert tell us all about Congress’s latest new IRS laws. It was also totally informative and I also took a whole bunch of notes. But then they got lost too.

However, regarding taxes, it doesn’t really matter what kinds of laws that Congress does or does not pass when it comes to you and me — not while rich people are being allowed to hide approximately 32 trillion dollars in offshore tax loopholes; money that, unlike your and my money, will never ever be touched by the IRS.

According to the Los Angeles Times, “[32 trillion dollars is] roughly the size of the American and Japanese economies combined, according to the report from James Henry, a former chief economist at McKinsey & Co. And the figure only includes financial wealth, not real estate, yachts or other assets held abroad.” http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jul/23/business/la-fi-mo-tax-havens-20120723.

The rich really are different from the rest of us — especially when it comes to cheating on taxes. We go to jail. They don’t.

In 1950, corporations paid 40% of America’s taxes. And now they pay almost zip.

This month’s speaker at the BABA luncheon was a psychiatrist and he spoke to us about how to prevent substance abuse and mental illness. Fascinating. “It’s mostly genetic,” he said.

Apparently if one of your parents or grandparents was nutzo or addicted, there is a 25% chance that you will be too.

“Most substance abuse and/or mental illness shows up in adolescence,” the speaker continued. Great. Now all we gotta do is keep our teenagers from being teenagers. Problem solved.

If only I myself had been able to somehow jump over those crucial hazardous teenage years.

Then the psychiatrist gave us six main signs to look for as flags for future mental illness. I think I had at least five of them — but then I already know that I’m crazy because I keep hopelessly believing that Mankind is basically good, that world peace is possible, that we will someday give up letting Wall Street and War Street be our gods, that the internal combustion engine causes climate change and that too much television is bad for you.

PS: Here are the six main flags for mental illness. Enjoy. But once you realize that you too (and almost everyone else in America) are also officially crazy, then you can just sit back, relax and enjoy the ride.

1. Feeling that “something’s not quite right”
2. Jumbled thoughts and confusion
3. Being fearful for no good reason
4. Hearing sounds/voices that are not there
5. Declining interest in people, activities and self-care
6. Trouble speaking clearly.

PPS: I just scored an actual solar-powered Lucky Kitty over in San Francisco Chinatown the other day. How crazy-good is that!

April 18, 2013

Living & dying on the streets: Being homeless is HARD WORK!

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , — Jane Stillwater @ 12:36 pm

While my apartment was busy being renovated, re-habbed and fixed up for most of last month and a good chunk of this one, I had been forced to find “alternative housing” — staying with relatives, living in cheap motels, house-sitting for strangers, sleeping on various couches and futons, renting rooms-by-the-night in other peoples’ homes, staying in hostels, whatever. But yesterday I finally got to move back home!

Sure, all my stuff was still in boxes when I got back and the heater didn’t work and there was no hot water, but it’s like Virginia Woolf used to say, “All one really needs is a bed and a computer of one’s own.”

Everything else is just icing on the cake.

This past month has been a grand adventure, obviously, and a whole lot of fun in many ways. But the bottom line is that, for most of this time, I was disoriented and grouchy and unsure and unorganized and even afraid. And for much of this time I was basically living out of the back seat of my car — and in laundromats and diners and parks and libraries. Even now, my head hurts just thinking about it.

And even though I myself was never in any real danger of being actually homeless during this time and didn’t have to go without any meals and always found a roof to put over my head, nevertheless, I was constantly stressed out during this entire month. Mucho stressed out. Stressed out a lot!

So just imagine if someone was forced to do this uber-stressful homelessness gig 24/7; for months and even years at a time — with no resources, no backup and no future hope that someday soon they would be going back home again. I can’t even imagine doing all that and still keeping sane.

In just the past month, my complete respect for the homeless has grown by leaps and bounds. It’s a wonder to me that they can handle all this stress day after day and still remain sane. It’s even a wonder to me that they can even still stay alive.

According to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, “[T]he number of homeless people on a single night in January 2012 was 633,782.” http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/12/20/us-usa-economy-hunger-idUSBRE8BJ14I20121220 And I bet there were a lot more than that.

Here’s to you, homeless Americans everywhere. Having been almost one of you for only one month, I salute you with all of my heart.

PS: My all-time favorite bumper sticker reads, “Imagine a world where EVERY child is wanted, nurtured, protected and loved: World Peace in one generation!” And I sincerely believed this was true until I met a young woman from China recently — and now have to re-think that idea completely.

“What are they like — those adults in China who have grown up under its single-child system, the fortunately-nurtured ones whose needs have all been met? Are they happy, secure, hopeful, compassionate?”

“No, hardly! They’re egocentric, self-centered and spoiled. They think only of themselves and their own wants and needs. Having been raised without siblings and with so many doting parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, all they can pretty much do now as adults is to whine a lot when they don’t get their own way — and expect to be waited on.”

And this same sort of thing seems to be true here at my housing co-op as well. When we all moved in here back in 1979, a lot of us had some pretty grim stories to tell — having endured poverty, homelessness, spousal abuse, single-parent loneliness, unemployment, overcrowding, victimization, addiction, etc; before finding these wonderful homes. I myself had previously been living in an attic without running water and then in a small apartment with no privacy.

And then our sweet little housing co-op offered all of us bruised members of society an idealistic new chance to be wanted, nurtured, protected and loved. My co-op’s motto became “Caring and Sharing”.

And so what happened next? How did these new residents handle this wonderful new chance? Humph. Instead of creating “neighborhood peace in one generation” like we had hoped, they soon became a re-creation of the worst of today’s modern American society, almost exactly. We soon developed an almost Darwinian example of survival of the fittest.

Within ten years, my sweet little housing co-op had already developed its very own Boss Tweeds and its very own 1%.

However, something good did come of all this. Timid little me actually began to develop the necessary cajones to go up against this new 1% all by myself. And even after surviving attempts to beat me up, illegally raise my rent, stage frequent sudden illegal “inspections” of my apartment, actually try to pass an ordinance that I was not allowed to knit in board meetings, hold five (5) kangaroo courts to try to convict me of wrong-doing, attempt to evict me illegally and even to throw me in jail, I did finally win the battle to get my housing co-op not only financially stable for the first time in years but actually renovated and restored to its original pristine condition.

And then, even more important, when George W. Bush stole the 2000 election, I realized that if I could single-handedly defeat the greedy Boss Tweeds who ran my housing co-op, then taking on GWB should be a walk in the park! And that’s how I became a blogger. So, actually, I do owe those former powers-that-be in my co-op a huge debt of gratitude after all.

They proved to me that if someone, even the weakest and meekest of us all, can work long enough and hard enough to achieve justice, then it can be obtained.

And so Wall Street and War Street had better watch out! I am still coming after them. And I’m now locked and loaded — with a computer and a bed!

PPS: A well-known local psychiatrist recently gave a speech to members of the Berkeley-Albany Bar Association, and he said that children raised in child-centered households were far LESS likely to become substance abusers than children raised in adult-centered households.

This probably means that the egotistic children of China at least won’t be at risk for getting all addicted to alcohol and drugs — plus it certainly explains why GWB was a drunk and coke addict for so many years.

April 12, 2013

Burglars. Books, and political games

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , — Bob Patterson @ 12:32 pm

 

Did Karl Rove suggest that to get some dirt out on a potential opponent without giving the impression that they were trying to launch a smear campaign, some top Republicans could supply a “clandestinely recorded” tape to a member of the liberal media and then accuse the Democrats of stealing the material . . . or . . . did the Democrats hire some crafty old burglars (are any of the old JM Wave team still alive?) to come out of retirement and pull off a new version of the Watergate caper?  Will a full, complete, and impartial investigation of this “outrage” be any more successful than the attempts to look into the short sales of airline stock before 9-11, the anthrax attacks via the Post Office, or possible vulnerability of the unhackable electronic voting machines?  Such a cover story for delivering a tape full of smears, jeers, and leers could not only avert attention from the source of the news story, but would also help divert attention away from the mean spirit of the Republicans.  For a big payoff what would prevent the McConnell team from making the recording themselves and engineering a stealth handoff of the item that was sure to stir up news coverage of the potential opponents mental health history?

A columnist with a cynical attitude might just as well do the keystrokes for a totally innocuous effort as try to make sensible points about the contemporary political atmosphere in a country that is mired in a stalemated debate and so we will take the path of least resistance (and effort) this week.

How old is disappointment in America’s free press?  Upton Sinclair’s attack on the newspaper industry, titled “Brass Check,” was first printed in 1920.  Over the past weekend, the reference library at the Amalgamated Conspiracy Theory Factory obtained a copy of George Seldes’ “Lords of the Press,” which was copyrighted in 1938.

A month ago, we had never seen the word “privishing,” but since then we obtained a copy of “History as Mystery,” by Berkeley based writer Michael Parenti, and “Into the Buzzsaw,” edited by Kristina Borjesson, which both explained that the word can be used to refer to a book that is published but then essentially quashed or left to languish unpublicized by book companies that want to extend some “interline courtesy” to some capitalist entities that would prefer folks don’t learn what those books have to say.

Did you know that up until Harry Truman ran for re-election the Depression was called “the Republican Depression,” but that in 1948, the conservative spin masters decided that the phrase “Great Depression,” sounded less partisan?

We had never heard the expression “hobo nickel,” until we ran across a young troubadour in a local Laundromat recently who hipped us to the topic of that collectable item.  We did a Google image search and were astounded to see what a fascinating item we had missed.  The young musician also was carrying an example of moldovite and was showing what makes it collectable.  It is a semi-transparent rock.

In the last week we also got a news tip that fans of Jim Lehrer might like to know that he has contributed a blurb to help Roy Zimmer draw attention to his political humor available on Youtube.  (What ever happened to Vaughn Meter?)

Recently we were delighted to stumble upon the book, “Hell above Earth,” by Stephen Frater, which tells the story of Herman Goering’s nephew, who became a B-17 pilot flying bombing missions over Germany in WWII.

The challenge of including unique bits of political commentary has become much easier than it used to be since America’s “Free Press” has become Fox-ified.  (See the “The Fox, the Hounds, and the Sacred Cows” chapter starting on page 37 in the book “Into the Buzzsaw.”)

For example, has any pundit pointed out the chilling potential for the hypothetical possibility that if North Korea makes an aggressive move against South Korea, a response by the United States might be a strategic time for hackers in China or Iran to cripple the American Military’s computer network.  If (subjunctive mood) that were to happen, would that, in turn, have a deleterious effect on America’s assertion that “all options are on the table” regarding a move to cripple or delay Iran’s efforts to build a nuclear device?

Most of the American based commentary we have encountered regarding Kim Jung Un is rather immature name calling and not at all like a calm evaluation of the possible repercussions of a new military adventure in Asia.  If Americans can handle very convoluted and intricate speculation about the rules and game strategy used in football, why do networks tend to resort to little or no expert analysis regarding International Politics?  Could that be an example of Fox-ified thinking at the headquarters of CBS and/or NBC?

Spending time and money inspecting bookstores to purchase obscure items such as Thomas Byrne and Tom Cassidy’s 2009 book titled “The Electric Toilet Virgin Death Lottery . . . and other outrageous Logic problems” may seem a tad foolish to most folks, but to someone who gets to feel like they “belong” when April 18 rolls around and National Columnists’ Day is celebrated, it makes sense.

Getting up early and turning on the computer, at 0600, to write about finding Stephen Clarke’s book, “ A Year in the Merde,” can be a bit of an ego-boost for someone who is aware that Hemingway urged wannabes to “write at first light.”

Would anyone else except a columnist enjoy learning (on page 161 of the book Time Capsule 1941 [A history of the year condensed from the pages of Time]) that Hitler’s Irish born sister-in-law, Bridget Elizabeth Hitler, was, before Pearl Harbor was bombed, working in New York City for British War Relief?

Only a columnist could use the fact that the Rolling Stones are about to start their new tour of “the colonies” in Oakland and that Willie Neslson is going to celebrate his 80th birthday later this month, to urge the two singers (who are both known for a vast array of duet recordings) to join together for a new example of their dueting abilities.  What song should they sing?  How about Bob Marley’s “Legalize it!”?  As the Stones tour begins, who wouldn’t want to hear Mick help Willie sing “On the Road Again!”?  Could those two rascals get away with a bawdy version of the WWII hit “Love them all”?  Would this be an appropriate time and place to plug John Costello’s book “Love, Sex, and War 1939 – 1945”

Tim Osman got a warm welcome to the USA by the CIA.  Who was he, really?  Look that information up on Google.

Will the anchor desks at the network news programs finally notice the story about the Los Angeles County assessor when he appears in court later this month?

With all the references of Mitch McConnell’s bugging being similar to Watergate, will the news media still cling to the old saw about “the burglars didn’t find anything of value” or will they start to hint that what they got was the dirt on the Vice Presidential candidate Thomas Eagleton and they used that to throw the Democrats off balance at the start of the 1972 Presidential Election campaign and parley that into Tricky Dick getting elected for a second time on a promise to end the War in Vietnam. This Sunday night is the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic encounter with an iceberg.

Just for yucks, pull up Hunter S. Thompson’s interview with Keith Richard on Youtube and see how many words you can understand as they talk to each other (ostensibly in English) and have no trouble understanding what’s being said.

If “they” have hacked into the Yahoo and Google sites and if the electronic voting machines are truly “unhackable,” why don’t Yahoo and Google hire the folks who delivered the unbeatable security to the “unhackabble” voting machines?  Were the people who designed the “unhackable” voting machines (by any chance?) veterans of “the Blond Ghost’s” old posse?

Baseball fans in San Francisco are getting their hopes up that they will soon see Carl Hubblell’s 1936 record for the Giants of winning 24 consecutive games be broken.

In his autobiography, Lenny Bruce started chapter five with this sentence:  “Standing on the deck of a warship in battle, you get a good look at the competitive aspect of life, carried to its extreme.”

Now the disk jockey will give Annette’s “Pineapple Princess,” a memorial tribute play and then spin ACDC’s “Dirty Deeds,”  Jackie DeShanon’s “Salinas,” and Bobby Daren’s “Jailer bring me water.”  We have to go check into some “false flag” rumors about the sinking of the SS Athena for the research department at the Amalgamated Conspiracy Theory Factory.  Have an “electro shock therapy” type week.

April 10, 2013

America: Always searching for new and better ways to kill people

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , — Jane Stillwater @ 3:27 pm

It’s not at all hard to believe that our most popular national priority right now is to see how many more new and effective weapons of death we can supply our troops with, supply foreign dictators with, supply our cities’ paramilitary police with, supply every rabid gun-nut and gangsta in the country with and/or also supply ourselves? Geez Louise!

And can you also believe that we just spent over 300 billion dollars on developing a F-35 bomber which, despite its crappy design, construction and performance, is still an ultra-deadly weapon of mass destruction on a post-Godzillian scale? http://www.warisboring.com/2010/11/01/kill-the-f-35/

What ever happened to knives, shivs, nunchuks, baseball bats or even fists? If you really want to kill someone that badly, shouldn’t you be required to do it with just your bare hands?

Over in this pile on my left we have all kinds of stuff we could be spending our money on that would make us healthy, happy and safe. And over in that pile to my right we have all kinds of stuff to kill people with. If you were to compare these two piles right now, one pile would about the size of a wedding cake — maybe. And the other pile would easily dwarf the Empire State Building or even the Twin Towers — the one that all the gazillion weapons we own couldn’t save. How misguided (or even sick) is that!

We Americans need to get a hold of ourselves. We need to put our blood-lust in check.

On the one side we have drones, robo-cops, tasers, lasers, assault weapons, white phosphorus, torture chambers, chemical weapons, biological weapons, gun shows, Blackhawks, Bradleys, hummers and atomic bombs.

And on the other side we have ballet. The symphony. Arts and crafts and music in the schools. Yawn. To most Americans, this side is a joke. “All that sissy stuff won’t protect us from The Enemy,” you cry. But guess what? With almost all our wealth and experience and knowledge and intentions going toward developing even newer and better ways of killing people, the enemy is already within our own walls. We ourselves are the ones who are slowly but surely destroying America — physically, financially and morally.

And we ourselves have now become all those scary nightmares in the closet, angels of death, schoolyard bullies, serial killers, relentless attackers and masters of our own doom that we fear so much.

That’s beyond sad. That’s psychotic.

Imagine if we had spent seven or eight trillion dollars on stuff like healthcare, jobs, schools, food and parks — instead of on constantly inventing new and better ways to turn human beings into fetid and rotting corpses and cadavers? Sure, we might all have been murdered in our sleep by the Bad Guys. But at least we would all die happy. And there wouldn’t have been all that many bad guys to begin with either. Or we could have just bought them all off.

Not only that, but having all these nasty cold-blooded weapons instead of having adequate healthcare, decent housing, infrastructure improvement, etc. is already killing us on a gargantuan scale. More Americans die of hunger, homelessness, untreated diseases, unregulated firearms, domestic violence, child abuse, corporate greed, agribusiness pesticides and GMO epidemics, Wall Street shadiness, prescription drug “side effects,” over-the-top industrial pollution, improper nuclear waste disposal, prison-industry callousness, heartless pension cuts, bankster housing scams, etc. than have ever died as a result of any “enemy” action.

And according to journalist Mark Karlin, the NRA is currently trying to sponsor legislation that supports selling guns to terrorists on our watch list, violent abusers of women, and the legally blind! How many Americans would that kill in a year? Osama bin Ladin woulda been so proud. http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/item/17893-gun-guys-support-selling-guns-to-terrorists-on-watch-list-violent-abusers-of-women-and-the-legally-blind-carrying-handguns

Despite all our good intentions, bravery, wisdom and even common sense, America’s largest and most popular industry right now is still designing, manufacturing and selling weapons that kill men, women and children.

America today is not a country I can be proud of.

PS: I am currently reading Peter Barus’s new book, “Matters of Life and Death” — all about Japanese sword-fighting and the honorable philosophy and art of “engagement” with an opponent http://www.amazon.com/Matters-Life-Death-Essays-Budo/dp/1481204432. But guess what? No one is ever “engaged” by a nuclear weapon. No one is ever “engaged” by a drone. There are no heroics involved in wholesale murder and slaughter. Just ask the surviving victims of Hiroshima and Auschwitz.

PPS: And speaking of Auschwitz, my very favorite holocaust museum ever is located in Terre Haute, Indiana. Founded by Eva Kor, a survivor of the Mengele twins project, this museum is based on Kor’s heart-felt philosophy, “Forgive your worst enemy. It will heal your soul and set you free”.

We have seen again and again in places like Bosnia, Congo, Kosovo, Israel, Afghanistan and Rwanda, how victims of brutality then turn around and become victimizers themselves — how quickly prey learns to become predator. So let’s try something new and end this vicious cycle. “Let there be,” as Kor herself says, “no more wars, no more experiments without informed consent, no more gas chambers, no more bombs, no more hatred, no more killing, no more Auschwitzes.” http://www.candlesholocaustmuseum.org/index.php?sid=44

Someday I hope to visit this inspiring museum myself.

PPPS: I’m still taking my month-long involuntary tour of cheap places to stay in Berkeley while my apartment is still getting re-habbed — although a friend of mine just commented that I should say “renovated” instead because re-hab sounds too much like someone has just sent me off to the drunk tank.

But the house-sitting/dog-walking gig ended yesterday and now I’m renting a SRO up on Parker Street for three nights. Hopefully I’ll be moving back home on Monday, although who knows? They just discovered black mold in the apartment above me and that might take some more time because they gotta call out the haz-mat guys in white suits. But that’s okay. I’m sort of actually starting to enjoy being pseudo-homeless and constantly “On the Road” — just like that other Berkeley resident, Jack Kerouac.

April 4, 2013

Closing corporate tax havens: The solution to the sequester (and world poverty)

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , — Greg in cheeseland @ 1:58 pm

Author’s note: This article was originally published on the Madison Independent Examiner. There is a slideshow and video for viewing there. You may recognize some of the images from this site. The video is very informative and I encourage you to check it out. It is about time Americans demand that mega-corporations and the super-rich pay their fair share of the tax burden.

It has been widely reported since at least 2010 that U.S. corporations and the wealthiest Americans have taken advantage of tax loopholes by hiding their assets in offshore subsidiaries (a.k.a. tax havens) in order to avoid paying U.S. income taxes. The amount of money hidden in these tax havens and what the lost revenue means to the American people has not been so widely reported.

According to several sources, including the BBC, the non-partisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) and James Henry, former Chief Economist at McKinsey & Company, the top 1% of wealthiest Americans and corporations have deposited between $21 and $32 trillion in tax havens in order to evade U.S. taxes. The top seven U.S. banks, furthermore, account for over $10 trillion in assets in more than 10,000 overseas subsidiaries.

Assuming these figures are correct, if all of these assets were taxable, then the U.S. could collect billions, perhaps trillions in additional revenue each year.

Data from the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and several governments are used in that assessment. (See video at source). CRS’s report focuses on five small countries generally considered to be tax havens (the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Ireland, Bermuda and Switzerland) and compares them to five of the top “traditional” foreign countries where American companies actually do business (Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, Australia and Mexico).

While any knowledgeable person knows that U.S. multinational corporations engage in tax avoidance by shifting their profits into tax havens, not many know exactly how that is done. The waters are further muddied by CEOs and corporate lobbyists who either deny that outright or use the standard industry mantra: “Our company pays all applicable taxes in every jurisdiction where we operate.”

The practice of using tax havens is somewhat simple and is legal under current tax codes, but that does not make the practice morally right or even ethical. Corporations and banks simply need to shift their profits by conducting transactions in countries with little or no corporate taxes. U.S. tax codes allow a “deferral” on paying taxes in the U.S. until the funds are actually brought back to the U.S. and in most cases, they never are.

A classic example of tax haven abuse is the common practice of registering subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands. With more than 85,000 companies registered there, it is one of the few territories in the world that has more organizations than inhabitants.

Mitt Romney’s Caymen Island accounts garnered some scrutiny during last year’s Presidential election. Facebook sheltered $700 million in the Cayman Islands in 2012, while posting over $1 billion in profits and paying no taxes in the US. In fact, 26 of the 30 largest U.S. corporations that utilize subsidiaries paid no income tax between 2008 and 2011, including GE, Boeing, Verizon, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs. The banks on the list, ironically, were bailed out by U.S. taxpayer money.

It can be correctly argued that the U.S. has the highest corporate tax rate in the world at 39.2% when both federal, state and local taxes are included. That, however, means very little in terms of actual taxes paid when corporations and the top 1% hide most of their profits and assets in offshore tax havens. Smaller corporations, small businesses and the bottom 99% of individuals are generating more than their fair share of revenue than are large corporations and the top 1%.

Conservative estimates of lost federal revenue due to offshore tax havens are about $150 billion per year, but that does not take into account what the states lose. A U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) report estimated that states lost nearly $39.8 billion in revenues in 2011, bringing the total to about $190 billion annually. Of that total, corporations were responsible for about 65% in lost revenues to tax havens, while wealthy individuals were responsible for the rest.

To put that in perspective, $39.8 billion would cover education costs for more than 3.7 million children for one year. This sum is also roughly equivalent to total state and local expenditures on firefighters ($39.7 billion) or on parks and recreation ($40.6 billion) in 2008. The U.S. national debt is closing in on $17 trillion and the sequester cuts total about $22 billion. $150 billion in additional federal revenue would make sequester a moot point and remove austerity from the national political vocabulary. The government could then move on to addressing the real problem in the economy – lack of well-paying jobs.

In his book, The End of Poverty, Jeffrey Sachs estimated that in order to end extreme world poverty it would cost $175 billion per year for the next 20 years, a total of $3.5 trillion. In other words, the wealthiest corporations and individuals have enough in offshore tax havens that they could do that now and still retain most of their assets. Taxing 65% of between $21 and $32 trillion in profits and assets at a rate of 39.2% could also provide more than enough to do that.

Dropping food instead of bombs on impoverished nations, true humanitarian projects such as helping to provide clean drinking water and electricity, instead of facilitating regime change in third world countries, may help to repair the U.S. image in the world and reduce terrorism. A better world image may even reduce the need to spend more on defense than the next 13 nations combined. As things stand now, unfortunately, the U.S. does not have enough revenue to help its own people.

The same businesses that avoid paying taxes are also the ones that benefit from educated American workers, an infrastructure that aids in the transportation of goods, services and transactions, and the security that the publicly-funded police and military provide on both a local and global level.

Yet corporations, banks and wealthy individuals have no problem with avoiding paying their fair share of taxes, thereby dumping the tax burden on the working poor, middle class and small businesses. Meanwhile Americans are looking at cuts in social services such as Medicare and Social Security, a crumbling infrastructure, an underfunded educational system, a higher deficit and higher taxes.

It is about time for Americans to demand that lawmakers put the brakes on the free ride that huge corporations and the top 1% have been getting for the past few decades.

Get links, sources, a slideshow and video here: Madison Independent Examiner – Closing corporate tax havens: The solution to the sequester (and world poverty)

April 1, 2013

Purple Haze: Putting the ghosts of Savo Island to rest

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , — Jane Stillwater @ 4:27 pm

Did you know that one of the first American naval battles fought in the South Pacific against the Japanese imperial fleet during World War II took place in the Solomon Sea, off the shore of some god-forsaken volcanic outcropping called Savo Island — and right next to another god-forsaken rocky island called Guadalcanal? And that the American navy lost that battle — bigtime? And that 1033 American sailors and Marines died from wounds received at Savo Island? And that four Allied heavy cruisers were sunk? http://historywarsweapons.com/battle-of-savo-island/

According to naval historian Lt. Col. David E. Quantock, “The Battle of Savo Island occurred early in the morning on 9 August 1942, when the Japanese 8th fleet surprised the Allied Task Force shortly after the landing at Guadalcanal. In approximately 37 minutes, the Japanese Navy destroyed four Allied heavy cruisers and killed more than 1000 American and Australian sailors, handing the U.S. Navy the worst defeat in its history. There were many strategic, operational, and tactical reasons for this debacle; however, the one common thread through the entire disaster was the poorly framed command and control relationships.” http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USN/rep/Savo/Quantock/index.html

Soon after this tragic event, a new housing project for naval personnel was constructed in Berkeley, CA, and named after that sad and humiliating battle. According to the January 3, 1945 Berkeley Gazette, “Located across the street from the WACs barracks, [Savo Island] will consist of 192 units [where] some combat personnel returning to shore jobs may rent a single-bedroom unit for as low as $11 a month.” http://tinyurl.com/cqx8exr

And one of the children raised in this new housing project was Jimi Hendrix. And we all now what happened to him.

And then Vietnam came and went. And Nick Terse’s excellent new book, “Kill Everything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam,” tells us the most accurate story to date about what really happened in Vietnam. As one reviewer put it, “‘Kill Anything That Moves’ is a hard book to read. You want to look away but finally turn the pages and read of mass killings and targeted assassinations of Vietnamese civilians, rape committed casually and coldly in sight of officers, sport killings and road rage incidents.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-van-buren/nick-turse-kill-anything-that-moves_b_2897858.html

And the ghosts from Savo Island, Vietnam and all the other bloody and unnecessary “wars” perpetrated by greedy corporatists and/or their “poorly framed command and control” have just kept on piling up since then. The 9-11 blunder, Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq — and now Syria, Iran and North Korea are also in the mix http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175669/tomgram%3A_ira_chernus%2C_obama%27s_risky_middle_east_fantasy/.

And these ghosts of more and more dead people from more and more unjust American wars seem to keep showing up at Savo Island. Why? Because “someone had blundered” on War Street (again) — or because someone else on Wall Street had gotten greedy (again). http://www.truthdig.com/dig/item/the_last_letter_20130318/
In 1974, the old Savo Island housing project in Berkeley was torn down and then Jimmy Carter (my hero, he built housing like this in every single city and town in America in 1979) gave orders to build a new, renovated Savo Island right on the same site — but as a housing cooperative. However, somehow I think that the ghosts of the old Savo Island still remain. There have been murders here. And suicides. And cancer victims. And hoarders. And addicts. And all-too-many cases of people going bat-shite crazy — perhaps even me!

The current Savo Island housing project is supposed to be an idealistic neighborhood cooperative, a perfect example of neighbors “caring and sharing” — yet now the only thing that we neighbors seem to do together is to bicker and quarrel night and day about every single little thing.

And now that our extensive new re-hab in progress and I’ve been forced to move out of my sweet little home for a month, I’ve also come to notice that every time I even set foot back on the property even for few minutes, I start to get this irrational feeling that it’s time to either fight or flee, almost like I was back on Guadalcanal myself!

Perhaps all the ghosts of all the dead from all those unnecessary American wars are still coming back to haunt us.

Can anyone recommend a good exorcist?

PS: And during the period that I have been out of my apartment during this re-hab, I’ve also been taking quite an extensive tour of Berkeley — renting rooms in people’s houses and apartments, sleeping on people’s floors, staying in cheap motels and house-sitting people’s dogs. It’s been quite a wild ride. But the squabbling at Savo Island has still remained a constant in my life. For instance, some of my neighbors at Savo have just accused me of staying up at the luxurious Claremont resort and spa in high style — at our co-op’s expense! Don’t I wish. Up there in the hot tub. Just me and a million or so ghosts.

PPS: I was watching a documentary on the Holocaust in Germany during World War II the other day — such inhuman brutality. In Nazi Germany, corporatists treated living and breathing men, women and children as mere instruments of profit, and all compassion was gone. This cold and brutal objectification of human life serves us as an obvious example of cwhat happens when orporate profit-driven motivation is taken to its extreme.

And so here is a warning: What German corporations did to the Jews — worked them to death, callously starved them and even stole their gold teeth — all in the name of making a profit? Then American multinational corporations may be about to do this to you and me too.

When profit alone is allowed to be king, hatred is then thrown into the mix and all compassion is dead, then no one is safe.

March 25, 2013

Kristallnacht in slow motion: Palestinians as the new Jews

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , — Jane Stillwater @ 11:16 am

Every time I write something unflattering about Israeli neo-cons, I always get a burst of anonymous phone calls for a few days. But this never happens when I write about American neo-cons. What’s with that?

Perhaps it’s because almost every progressive on the internet today writes unflattering things about American neo-cons and it would take forever to bully us all.

A FaceBook friend of mine living in Israel-Palestine just sent me a photo of a group of ordinary Jewish-Israeli citizens — beating up on a terrified Arab-Israeli woman in the street http://rabbibrant.com/2013/03/04/jewish-violence-on-purim-time-for-a-religious-reckoning/. And this photo reminded me of how, back in the 1930s, “Good Germans” used to beat up ordinary Jews on the streets too.

And the next thing you knew, along came Germany’s infamous Kristallnacht.

But the difference between “Good Germans” back then and “Good Israelis” now is this: Back in Nazi Germany, racism based on religious hatred all culminated in one horrible Kristallnacht orgy of killing, looting, oppression and genocide — whereas the new Zionist oppression and genocide in Israel-Palestine seems to be happening now in slo-mo. One day at a time, one house at a time, one street at a time, one Palestinian at a time http://www.roitov.com/articles/eastjerusalem.htm.

But the results are the same.

And now, in 2013, the average individual “Good Israeli”, just like the average individual “Good German” back in the 1930s (and the average individual “Good American” today) needs to finally wake up and finally realize that what neo-cons and pseudo-religious crazies can do (and have done) unto others, they can also do unto us as well.

PS: According to journalist Roi Tov, formerly a captain in the IDF, “On March 1, 2013, the Israeli Ministry of Transport inaugurated two lines of buses to be used exclusively by Palestinians and created the opportunity for a Palestinian Rosa Parks to spark the struggle for Human Rights in the Holy Land.” http://www.roitov.com/articles/bus.htm How come when “neo-cons” in Alabama segregated the buses, we all thought this action was abominable — but when Israeli neo-cons do the exact same thing, we give them a pass?

Tov calls this slow-motion attack on Palestinians “A war of the turtles” — except that the Israeli neo-cons’ turtle is a million times bigger, stronger, better armed and more powerful than the Palestinian turtle. Duh.

PPS: And does all this new slow-motion holocaust in Palestine mean that, 30 or 40 years from now, the UN will also allow Palestinians to establish a new homeland in Germany — as a salve for our guilt because the world knowingly stood by, did nothing and watched silently as six million Palestinians were sent off to concentration camps and/or gassed?

PPPS: And it appears that you and I are the ones also paying for this new “Kristallnacht in slow motion” racket as well. According to a recent Congressional report, America even bought Israeli neo-cons a whole shite-load of F-35s (those stealth bombers that don’t even work) in order to reign down even more slo-mo hell onto Palestinians!

And according to Joe Biden at a recent AIPAC conference, President Obama “has directed close coordination, strategically and operationally, between our government and our Israeli partners, including our political, military and intelligence leadership.” So apparently we are also guiding Israeli neo-con “strategic and operational” policies behind the slo-mo massacre of all those women and children in Palestine too. Good to know. http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/03/08/vice-president-biden-aipac-policy-conference-2013

****
Here’s a really good instruction manual to use if you’re an Israeli neo-con trying to steal homes from Palestinians in East Jerusalem. It’s even better than the manual used by American neo-cons and banksters to steal working-class Americans’ homes! http://www.roitov.com/articles/eastjerusalem.htm

March 17, 2013

Mexico: America’s on-the-job construction apprenticeship training program

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , — Jane Stillwater @ 11:45 pm

Been anywhere near an active construction site lately? I have. And the first thing that you will probably notice on almost any construction site in America these days is that almost everyone there is both skilled and hard-working. And the second thing that you might notice at each construction site in America is that almost everyone there is speaking Spanish.

“Where did those guys learn all those amazing and intricate construction skills?” you might ask after watching almost any construction crew in action.

“They learned them in Mexico.”

You want to receive excellent on-the-job training? Want to sign on to an excellent apprenticeship program in carpentry, woodworking, plumbing, roofing, whatever? Want to go to an outstanding trade school or attend a five-star-rated “technical institute” (as they used to be called in America back in the day)? Then just swim the Rio Grande backwards. Become a wetback in reverse.

No one here in America seems to be learning these skills any more. Plus, in many schools in America now, they don’t even teach woodshop in high school any more. So if you wanna learn construction skills, go south of the border. Or if you want to hire a good already-trained journeyman carpenter, Mexico is your go-to source for qualified craftsmen.

Just like there used to be a brain-drain of highly-skilled doctors and computer geeks coming to America from other countries, now we also have a brain-drain of highly skilled carpenters, steel-workers, stone-masons and bridge-builders coming to America from Mexico.

And that’s just sad; that strategically-important construction skills are no longer either the birthright or the passion of Americans born here these days — because almost no one is teaching them here now. And, more important, almost no one born here in America is even interested in learning these skills.

Mexico has become our new source of future skilled labor.

PS: Like it says on that famous T-shirt, “Illegal immigration began in 1492″. But instead of hating undocumented Americans, we should be grateful to them for helping to build America.

PPS: All those strong young American men and women who used to go into the building and manufacturing trades? They are now mostly specializing in becoming trained killers — heartless killers being sent to foreign lands where they don’t belong and instructed to murder children.

“The US war on Iraq has cost $1.7 trillion with an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans. But the cost could grow to more than $6 trillion over the next four decades when interest payments are included, according to study released on Thursday” according to AntiWar News http://news.antiwar.com/2013/03/14/iraq-war-could-cost-6-trillion/

And according to journalist Robert Parry, even the pope approves of this kind of carnage http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/16515-focus-pope-francis-cia-and-death-squads

And as for the rest of us? It’s like Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle just wrote, “37% of [Americans] are completely lost” http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2013/03/12/37-percent-of-people-completely-lost/

March 15, 2013

Citizen Journalism for fun, fame, and fortune

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , — Bob Patterson @ 12:34 pm

The St. Patrick’s Day weekend of 2013 is the perfect time for a pundit with Irish heritage to score a scoop from the grounds of the Amalgamated Conspiracy Theory Factory.  After spotting some white smoke coming from the chimney for the ACTF conference center, we learned that they have determined that JEB Bush is the front runner for becoming the 2016 Republican Party’s Presidential nominee.

Folks who believe that the Bush Dynasty brand had been irrevocably damaged by the Dubya term in the White House haven’t been paying attention to the fact that President Obama has retroactively approved George W. Bush’s war crimes, profligate spending, torture and executions without a trail and therefore has granted Dubya and the Republican Party full unconditional absolution which, in turn, provides a level playing field for JEB to make an unfettered run for his party’s nomination.

The stealth magnanimous gesture by President Obama has rendered the 2016 election to the tabla rosa level as far as the list of issues is concerned and that will give the Republicans the option (which they always covet greatly) of framing the debate by virtue of the fact that the lame duck incumbent will be ignored by the media as far as picking the election issues is concerned.

If the media fawn over the Republican frontrunner for the next three and a half years, and he also happens to be a member of the Bush family, there should not be any residual bad karma attached to the name by the time the unhackable electronic voting machines produce the new President via unverifiable results.  (Does using the phrases “Bush family” and “unhackable electronic voting machines” and the words karma and unverifiable in the same sentence offend conservatives?  Happy St. Patrick’s Day!)

Isn’t it so convenient that the election of the new Pope is diverting attention away from the rapidly approaching debt ceiling deadline?  Next week, won’t March Madness be the next diversion?

America’s voters are being conditioned to rely on one Democrat’s quote balanced by a Republican’s sound byte as qualifying as a legitimate example of the fulfillment of the free press’ mission of providing the facts that the voters will need to make an informed choice at the polls.

The skeptics who think that citizen journalists will get access to the inner workings of a particular politician’s strategic planning may not be aware of the possibility of the existence in the mainstream media of some good old fashioned horse trading in the guise of providing scoops and “exclusive” interviews as payment for unquestioningly participating in a bucket brigade style propaganda machine.

If (subjunctive mood) media stars are obliged to provide glowing reports on a politicians work in return for some puny scoops, how can a citizen journalist possibly get access to the politicians?

Are any of he media stars confronting Republicans and asking if they are participating in a de facto sit down strike?

Are any of Britain’s top star journalists asking questions about the Queen’s health?  Are they hacking her e-mails?

Will any media star ask Pope Frank about his program for handling the priests caught with their hand in the cookie jar (so to speak as it were).

Will interviews with starving families that end in crying provide anything other than propaganda value?

If the XL Pipeline is a ticking toxic time bomb, will the media play their cheerleader role if polls show that voters don’t believe the hogwash propaganda about jobs and energy independence?

If the voters of California are indifferent, at best, to the need for a bullet train, why are politicians, coping with austerity budgets, continuing to authorize funds for this boondoggle?  Didn’t St. Ronald Reagan explain that forty years ago when the governor with White House aspirations said:  “If you’ve seen one redwood tree; you’ve seen them all.”

Will any of journalism’s super stars have the chutzpah to ask question about the fact that tax payers’ money will have to be used to cover the shortfall of funds necessary for the rich boys to hold the boating races on San Francisco Bay later this year?

Do any journalists ask any of the members of the Supreme Court of the United States to elaborate on their partisan decisions?  Do any of the media stars covering SCOTUS do anything but rewrite news releases from the Courts’ spokesman?

What happened when Bradley Manning went to the New York Times and the Washington Post and offered them evidence that the USA was cutting corners with regard to being “the good guys” team in both the Invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan?

If media stars believe that “ya got to go along to get along,” and live that lifestyle, how will citizen journalists manage to outmaneuver the pros who have immediate access to all the news makers?

The possibility of fun, fame, and fortune are given as the motivating factors for inspiring altruistic efforts for providing a viable alternative to the work of media stars.  The Internets stars are the people who have a gigantic amount of publicity thanks to their association with major media companies.  Newcomers who “don’t play ball” will be trashed as conspiracy theory lunatics if they dare to offer some new points of view.  So scratch fame off the list.  The media that get unquestioned obedience from their stars aren’t going to hire a rookie and hope that they aren’t “high maintenance employees,” so scratch that off the list.  That leaves only fun.

Anyone who is not of Irish heritage will never understand how or why a columnist would get any fun out of naming JEB Bush the Republican frontrunner in March of 2013.  Media stars won’t “second the motion” because they are expected to build suspense and expectations for the contest that will be decided by the unverifiable results produced by “unhackable” electronic voting machines.

If, for example, if some ads on some buses in San Francisco spawn a lively debate about freedom of speech over the meaning of the word “jihad,” and if a columnist is the first to bring that dispute to his audience’s attention, then the Managing Editor (ME) might be disposed to be tolerant of other more frivolous items.

In an era when the staffs at various media have been reduced greatly because of austerity budgets, a citizen columnist might (just might mind you) manage to be the first to bring this to the attention of readers outside the Bay Area.

If the San Francisco street car company starts in March to use a trolly car from Brighton England that has a top that folds away like a convertible car’s top does, at a time when the rest of the USA is struggling with an excess of snow, that might catch the attention of readers who are tired of shoveling the snow off their sidewalks, and it just might catch the attention of the assignment editors for other websites (such as Jalopnik or the Huffington Post?), but the bottom line is that at best it will provide a columnist with an example of a unique attraction in a city that is rife with items to amuse and entertain tourists.

If the CBS Evening News staff wants to drop a subtle hint that Global Warming might be a valid concept, they could run some video of the tourists on that street car enjoying summer weather in March but if Fox doesn’t want to acknowledge that the “scientists” are on to something, they will just ignore the feature story potential for the vehicle that Brits might call a drophead trolley car.

Radio talk show host Randi Rhodes thought that Pope Frank looks like a dead ringer for her mentor Neil Rogers.  We concur.  On Thursday March 14, 2013, she played a bleep filled explanation by George Carlin of the current political stalemate.

Is there an audience for unique insights?  Why did two conservative Bay Area talk show hosts find the preemptive prison sentence for a thought crime by the cannibal cop caused them some horripulation (goose bumps) but the Invasion of Iraq has not yet caused them any retroactive regrets?  Is Double think regarding crimethink, an example of an oxymoron?

Conservative media stars can’t admit that Dubya’s belligerent foreign policy was questionable and the liberal talk show folks can’t criticize the cannibal cop’s conviction because they don’t want to sound like they are sympathetic to the efforts of a Hannibal Lector wannabe.  So neither group will be permitted to see any basis for a comparison and it will be up to a rogue columnist to point out the similarities.  Dubya did not commit crimethink; the cop did.

The Invasion of Iraq was OK because Dubya thought they had WMD’s, but the cannibal cop gets convicted of a crime he obviously intended to commit and that wasn’t OK.  Did any pundit call the cannibal cop’s offense an example of “crimethink”?

George Orwell, in “1984,” wrote:  “Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.”

Now the disk jockey will play John Wayne singing “Wild Colonial Boy” (from the “Quiet Man”), Mick Jagger singing “Wild Colonial Boy” (from “Ned Kelley”), the Pogue’s (what do they have to do with St. Patrick’s Day?) album “Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash,” and memorial playings of the first “Yes” album featuring Peter Banks on guitar and Iron Maiden’s album “The Number of the Beast” featuring Clive Burr on drums.  We have to go buy some more Girl Scout cookies.  Have a “Pogue Mahone” type week.

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