Challenging Obama on Manning

An Open Letter To President Obama

By Norman Solomon
Consortiumnews.com
August 22, 2013

Dear President Obama:

As commander in chief, you’ve been responsible for the treatment of
the most high-profile whistleblower in the history of the U.S. armed
forces.

Under your command, the United States military tried, and failed,
to crush the spirit of Bradley Manning.

Your failure became evident after the sentencing on Wednesday,
when a statement from Bradley Manning was read aloud to the
world.

The statement began:

“The decisions that I made in 2010 were made out of a concern for
my country and the world that we live in. Since the tragic events of
9/11, our country has been at war. We’ve been at war with an enemy
that chooses not to meet us on any traditional battlefield, and due
to this fact we’ve had to alter our methods of combating the risks
posed to us and our way of life. I initially agreed with these methods
and chose to volunteer to help defend my country.”

From the outset, your administration set out to destroy
Bradley Manning.

As his biographer Chase Madar wrote in The Nation:

“Upon his arrest in May 2010, he was locked up in punitive isolation
for two months in Iraq and Kuwait, then nine more months at the
Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Virginia. Prohibited from lying down
during the day or exercising, he was forced to respond every five of vhis waking minutes to a guard’s question: ‘Are you OK?’ In his final
weeks of isolation, Manning was deprived of all clothing beyond a
tear-proof smock and forced to stand at attention every night in the
nude.”

More than nine months after Manning’s arrest, at a news conference
you defended this treatment, which the State Department’s chief
spokesman, P.J. Crowley, had just lambasted as “ridiculous,
counterproductive and stupid.” (Crowley swiftly lost his job.)

Later, the UN special rapporteur on torture issued a report on
the treatment of Manning: “at a minimum cruel, inhuman and
degrading.”

At a fundraiser on April 21, 2011, when asked about Manning,
you flatly said: “He broke the law.” His trial would not begin
for two more years.

Bradley Manning’s statement after sentencing on Wednesday said:

“It was not until I was in Iraq and reading secret military reports on
a daily basis that I started to question the morality of what we were
doing. It was at this time I realized that (in) our efforts to meet the
risk posed to us by the enemy, we have forgotten our humanity.
We consciously elected to devalue human life both in Iraq and
Afghanistan. When we engaged those that we perceived were the
enemy, we sometimes killed innocent civilians. Whenever we killed
innocent civilians, instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct,
we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified
information in order to avoid any public accountability.”

Public accountability is essential to democracy.

We can’t have meaningful “consent of the governed” without
informed consent.

We can’t have moral responsibility without challenging official
hypocrisies and atrocities.

Bradley Manning clearly understood that.

He didn’t just follow orders or turn his head at the sight
of unconscionable policies of the U.S. government.

Finding himself in a situation where he could shatter the numbed
complacency that is the foundation of war, he cared, and he took
action as a whistleblower.

After being sentenced to many years in prison, Manning conveyed to
the American public an acute understanding of our present historic
moment:

“In our zeal to kill the enemy, we internally debated the definition
of torture. We held individuals at Guantanamo for years without
due process. We inexplicably turned a blind eye to torture and
executions by the Iraqi government. And we stomached countless
other acts in the name of our war on terror."

“Patriotism is often the cry extolled when morally questionable acts
are advocated by those in power. When these cries of patriotism
drown out any logically based dissension, it is usually the American
soldier that is given the order to carry out some ill-conceived
mission.”

Clearly, Mr. President, you have sought to make an example
of Bradley Manning with categorical condemnation and harsh
punishment.

You seem not to grasp that he has indeed become an example, an
inspiring example of stellar courage and idealism, which millions of
Americans now want to emulate.

From the White House, we continue to get puffed-up sugar-coated
versions of history, past and present.

In sharp contrast, Bradley Manning offers profound insights in his
post-sentencing statement:

“Our nation has had similar dark moments for the virtues
of democracy, the Trail of Tears, the Dred Scott decision,
McCarthyism, and the Japanese-American internment camps,
to mention a few. I am confident that many of the actions
since 9/11 will one day be viewed in a similar light. As
the late Howard Zinn once said, ‘There is not a flag large
enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.’”

Imagine. After more than three years in prison, undergoing
methodical abuse and then the ordeal of a long military trial
followed by the pronouncement of a 35-year prison sentence,
Bradley Manning has emerged with his solid humanistic voice
not only intact, but actually stronger than ever!

He acknowledged, “I understand that my actions violated the law;
I regret if my actions hurt anyone or harmed the United States. It
was never my intent to hurt anyone. I only wanted to help people.
When I chose to disclose classified information, I did so out of a
love for my country and a sense of duty to others.”

And then Bradley Manning concluded his statement by
addressing you directly as President of the United States:

“If you deny my request for a pardon, I will serve my time
knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to
live in a free society. I will gladly pay that price if it means
we could have a country that is truly conceived in liberty
and dedicated to the proposition that all women and men
are created equal.”

You failed to break the spirit of Bradley Manning.

And that spirit will continue to inspire.



Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding
director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.

http://consortiumnews.com/2013/08/22/challenging-obama-on-
manning

Military Madness: Has Our Species Become Insane?

Military Madness: Has Our Species Become Insane?

By Jim McCluskey
Global Research
August 20, 2013

Helen Caldicott is the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and a world
renowned campaigner against nuclear weapons.

She says that our species is ‘mentally sick…

"The whole society is sick. We are in the grip of a death wish."

She points out that 1 in 25 people are sociopaths with ‘no moral
conscience’ and these are the people who rise to the top; who
are in charge.

Is she right? Have we really become insane?

There is good reason to believe so.

By insane behavior I am referring to avoidable behavior which will
result in our own destruction and would be seen as such if we were
‘in our right minds’.

There are many reasons for the belief that much of our behavior
has become insane.

Here are some of them.

1. Nuclear Weapons on High Alert

2000 nuclear weapons are held ready for launch at the press of
a button.

This could happen by accident, misunderstanding or malicious
intent.

It came within hours of happening in 1962 during the Cuban Missile
Crisis.

It came within seconds of happening when the drunkard President
Yeltsin had his finger on the button after being told Russia was
under nuclear attack.

It could happen now at any time. Is this sane?

2. Nuclear Arsenals

There are seventeen thousand nuclear weapons in existence; enough
to incinerate everyone on the planet many times over as well as
destroying most of the other nine million species we share the planet
with.

Is this sane?

We are not told the destructive power of the weapons being deployed
but we do know, for example, that the 180 B61 American bombs
now in Europe, can be 30 times more destructive than the Hiroshima
bomb.

President Obama has recently put $537 million in his 2014 budget
proposal (total cost is expected to be $10 billion) to upgrade these
bombs and make them more accurate!

Each bomb can destroy a major city the size of London or New York.

Is this sane?

All this is totally unnecessary.

A perfectly sane alternative is available, an enforceable treaty
banning nuclear weapons.

The existence of a feasible sane option compounds the madness.

Harboring arsenals of nuclear weapons undermines our very
humanity.

As the Nobel Laureate in Literature, Kenzaburo Oe, declared, “The
most terrifying monster lurking in the darkness of Hiroshima is
precisely the possibility that man might become no longer human.”

3. Nuclear Power and Radiation

Contamination from a single failure at Chernobyl spread right
across Europe.

The struggle to keep the lethal emissions at bay is going on still,
27 years later.

At Fukushima three complete meltdowns of reactor cores have been
emitting radioactive material for over two years and nobody knows
how to stop it.

If the wind had been blowing the other way when the disaster
started Tokyo would have had to be evacuated and a large part of
Japan would have become uninhabitable for 300 hundred years.

If another earthquake occurs the cooling ponds of reactor 4 (loaded
with fuel rods) could lose their coolant releasing sufficient radiation
to pollute the entire northern hemisphere.

Two and half years after the triple meltdowns started the general
manager of TEPCO, the responsible corporation, announced,
referring to the discharge of radioactive cooling water into the sea,
“We understand that this discharge is beyond our control and we do
not think the current situation is good.”

Humanity is refusing to abandon a technology which can, through
a single accident, pollute countries and continents.

Is this sane?

4. The Arms Trade

The arms trade fuels the world’s wars. It is a major cause of
human suffering.

Each year, around $45-60 billion worth of arms sales are agreed.

The 5 permanent members of the UN Security Council (US, Russia,
France, United Kingdom and China), together with Germany and
Italy account for around 85% of the arms sold between 2004 and
2015.

Most arms sales (something like 75%) are to developing countries.

The leaders of selling countries are shameless.

Prime Minister Cameron recently led a bevy of arms dealers on a
selling spree to Saudi Arabia (the only likely use of weapons sold
to the Saudi government will be against their own citizens when
the Arab Spring finally arrives).

Senior UK Minister Dr Cable MP took another ‘defense delegation’
to India.

Dr Cable publicly justified the UK government’s behavior by saying
"If we didn’t do it, someone else would."

This does not earn a reprieve for other criminal activities like
robbing banks.

Another common justification is ‘The arms industry creates jobs’
– jobs for killing people.

Can any of this be considered rational behavior by mature human
beings?

5. Wars

Global military spending is over $1.7 trillion dollars; more than
two-fifths of this is by the US.

The western powers purport to be "peace-loving."

The only countries on the planet who currently routinely invade
other countries and kill their citizens are the UK and the US.

The western powers claim to be "law-abiding.

Yet the United Nations forbids armed attack on other states.

The 1970 UN Declaration on Principles of International Law declares:

‘Every State has the duty to refrain in its international relations from
the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political
independence of any State, or in any other manner inconsistent with
the purposes of the United Nations. Such a threat or use of force
constitutes a violation of international law and the Charter of the
United Nations and shall never be employed as a means if settling
international issues’.

Clear enough?

In order to stop terrorism we invade other countries where we think
there might be terrorists and slaughter their families.

Like dousing a fire by throwing petrol on it.

Despite thousands of years of experience to the contrary our leaders
still behave as though the best way of solving a dispute is to kill the
opposition.

Madness.

6. Global Warming

The planet is warming (up 0.8° F since start of 20th c).

Scientist are over 90% sure the primary cause is human activities
such as burning fossil fuels and deforestation.

Lowest estimate of rise is 1.1 to 2.9 °C (2 to 5.2 °F); highest
estimate 2.4 to 6.4 °C (4.3 to 11.5 °F).

Acceptable level of rise is generally considered to be 2.0 °C.

Our response is to continue with a system of fossil fuel dependency
for billions; a system which is expanding round the globe.

A 2012 report in the Guardian states ‘The first phase of Kyoto, the
only international binding treaty on emissions cuts, has failed to
slow global carbon emissions’.

A recent World Meteorological Organisation Report (WMO) gives
current actual trends based on measurements.

The report confirms the upward trend of temperatures.

The recent decades was the warmest ever recorded for
the northern and southern hemispheres.

This is true of both land and sea temperatures.

The rate of temperature rise in the past two decades has been
unprecedented and moreover the rate of sea level rising is
accelerating.

The extreme weather of recent years which has caused countless
deaths is believed, by most meteorologists and climate scientists
to be an indicator of what is to come from climate change.

The fact that climate change is happening and that pollution is a
contributing factor has overwhelming scientific support.

Yet our species is in a state of denial.

There is a lack of political will and denial is encouraged by powerful
economic interests.

Excessive increase in global temperature will result in famine, floods,
water shortages, large population movements, and land and resource
wars.

Surely a rational sane world would ensure that this does not happen
due to human pollutants by agreeing and imposing necessary limits
on polluting emissions.

7. Sociopathic and Psychopathic Leaders

The gratuitous wars started and waged by the US and UK
governments result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands
of people.

These governments support and/or turn a blind eye to kidnap,
torture, and terrorizing innocent villagers in Afghanistan and
Pakistan with drone attacks.

Both governments authorize the use of the nuclear agent depleted
uranium which deposits radiating materials injurious for thousands
of years and which condemn the unborn to a lifetime of suffering.

Since the war there has been a huge increase in cancers and
the number of deformed babies born in Iraq.

In Fallujah doctors have advised women not to have babies
because of the terrible risk.

Deeds which would be prosecuted as major crimes if performed
by citizens are routinely enacted by our leaders yet they take no
responsibility for these crimes and exhibit no remorse.

They act without conscience; they are sociopaths and, in some
cases, psychopaths (occupying the extreme end of the sociopathic
range).

Sociopaths and psychopaths are characterized by their lack of
empathy or ability to experience the feelings and emotions of
others.

Guilt and remorse are a foreign land.

They are both irresponsible and have an overblown sense of
entitlement.

Nothing is ever their fault.

All these are characteristic which we can readily recognize among
the power elites of our mad world; in politics, in banking, and in
the world of ‘defense’.

At one time psychopathology was called "Moral Insanity" an apt
term ripe for reinstatement.

As stated above 1 in 25 people are sociopaths and like oil in water,
they pollute the top layer of society; their ruthless drive facilitates
their access to power.

The renowned US writer and journalist William Blum declares, in
an article referring to ‘Washington’s endless bombings and endless
wars’ and Kerry’s hounding of whistleblowers, that we are witnessing
"Unlimited power in the hands of psychopaths" and He adds, "My own
country truly scares me."

Corporations which in some cases seem to be more powerful than
governments are also reported to suffer from the same malaise.

We are told that people like Thom Hartmann have suggested that to
be the head of a fortune 1000 corporation, one must be a sociopath.

A researcher on corporate psychopaths puts the numbers between three and 12 percent of managers.

The book "Snakes in Suits" by the psychologist Robert Hare, is about
psychopaths in the world of corporations.

The psychopathic behavior of our political and corporate leaders is
clear for all to see, but what about ourselves, the citizens.

There are very many more of us than there are of them.

Why do we tolerate their crimes?

Is our passivity not itself a form of madness?

http://www.globalresearch.ca/military-madness-has-our-species-
become-insane/5346201

The Politics of Cruelty

America’s Descent Into Madness

By Henry A. Giroux
Information Clearing House
Thursday, August 15, 2013

America is descending into madness.

The stories it now tells are filled with cruelty, deceit, lies,
and legitimate all manner of corruption and mayhem.

The mainstream media spins stories that are largely racist,
violent, and irresponsible, stories that celebrate power and
demonize victims, all the while camouflaging its pedagogical
influence under the cheap veneer of entertainment.

Unethical grammars of violence now offer the only currency with
any enduring value for mediating relationships, addressing
problems, and offering instant pleasure.

A predatory culture celebrates a narcissistic hyper-individualism
that radiates a near sociopathic lack of interest in or compassion
and responsibility for others.

Anti-public intellectuals dominate the screen and aural cultures
urging us to shop more, indulge more, and make a virtue out
of the pursuit of personal gain, all the while promoting a
depoliticizing culture of consumerism.

Undermining life-affirming social solidarities and any viable notion of the public good, right-wing politicians trade in forms of idiocy and
superstition that mesmerize the illiterate and render the thoughtful
cynical and disengaged.

Military forces armed with the latest weapons from Afghanistan
play out their hyper-militarized fantasies on the home front by
forming robo SWAT teams who willfully beat youthful protesters
and raid neighborhood poker games.

Congressional lobbyists for the big corporations and defense
contractors create conditions in which war zones abroad can
be recreated at home in order to provide endless consumer
products, such as high tech weapons and surveillance tools
for gated communities and for prisons alike.

The issue of who gets to define the future, own the nation’s
wealth, shape the reach of state resources, control of the
global flows of goods and humans, and invest in institutions
that educate an engaged and socially responsible citizens has
become largely invisible.

And yet these are precisely these issues that offer up new categories
for defining how matters of representations, education, economic
justice, and politics are to be defined and fought over.

The stories told by corporate liars and crooks do serious harm to the
body politic, and the damage they cause together with the idiocy they
reinforce are becoming more apparent as America descends into
authoritarianism, accompanied by the pervasive fear and paranoia
that sustains it.

The American public needs more than a show of outrage or endless
demonstrations.

It needs to develop a formative culture for producing a language of
critique, possibility, and broad-based political change.

Such a project is indispensable for developing an organized politics
that speaks to a future that can provide sustainable jobs, decent
health care, quality education, and communities of solidarity and
support for young people.

At stake here is a politics and vision that informs ongoing
educational and political struggles to awaken the inhabitants of
neoliberal societies to their current reality and what it means to
be educated not only to think outside of a savage market driven
commonsense but also to struggle for those values, hopes,
modes of solidarity, power relations, and institutions that infuse
democracy with a spirit of egalitarianism and economic and social
justice.

For this reason, any collective struggle that matters has to
embrace education as the center of politics and the source of
an embryonic vision of the good life outside of the imperatives
of predatory capitalism.

As I have argued elsewhere, too many progressives are stuck in the
apocalyptic discourse of foreclosure and disaster and need to develop
what Stuart Hall calls a “sense of politics being educative, of politics
changing the way people see things.”

This is a difficult task, but what we are seeing in cities that stretch
from Chicago to Athens, and other dead zones of capitalism
throughout the world is the beginning of a long struggle for the
institutions, values, and infrastructures that make critical education
and community the core of a robust, radical democracy.

This is a challenge for young people and all those invested in
the promise of a democracy that extends not only the meaning
of politics, but also a commitment to economic justice and
democratic social change.

The stories we tell about ourselves as Americans no longer speak
to the ideals of justice, equality, liberty, and democracy.

There are no towering figures such as Martin Luther King Jr.,
whose stories interweave moral outrage with courage and vision
and inspired us to imagine a society that was never just enough.

Stories that once inflamed our imagination now degrade it,
overwhelming a populace with nonstop advertisements that
reduce our sense of agency to the imperatives of shopping.

But these are not the only narratives that diminish our capacity to
imagine a better world.

We are also inundated with stories of cruelty and fear that undermine
communal bonds and tarnish any viable visions of the future.

Different stories, ones that provided a sense of history, social
responsibility, and respect for the public good, were once circulated
by our parents, churches, synagogues, schools, and community leaders.

Today, the stories that define who we are as individuals and as a
nation are told by right-wing and liberal media that broadcast the
conquests of celebrities, billionaires, and ethically frozen politicians
who preach the mutually related virtues of the free market and a
permanent war economy.

These neoliberal stories are all the more powerful because they
seem to undermine the public’s desire for rigorous accountability,
critical interrogation, and openness as they generate employment
and revenue for by right wing think tanks and policy makers who
rush to fill the content needs of corporate media and educational
institutions.

Concealing the conditions of their own making, these stories
enshrine both greed and indifference encouraging massive
disparities in wealth and income.

In addition, they also sanctify the workings of the market, forging
a new political theology that inscribes a sense of our collective
destiny to be governed ultimately and exclusively by market forces.

Such ideas surely signal a tribute to Ayn Rand’s dystopian society,
if not also a rebirth of Margaret Thatcher’s nonfiction version
that preached the neoliberal gospel of wealth: there is nothing
beyond individual gain and the values of the corporate order.

The stories that dominate the American landscape embody
what stands for commonsense among market and religious
fundamentalists in both mainstream political parties:

Shock-and-awe austerity measures; tax cuts that serve the rich
and powerful and destroy government programs that help the poor,
elderly, and sick; attacks on women’s reproductive rights; attempts
to suppress voter ID laws and rig electoral college votes; full-fledged
assaults on the environment; the militarization of everyday life;
the destruction of public education, if not critical thought itself; an
ongoing attack on unions, on social provisions, and on the expansion
of Medicaid and meaningful health care reform.

These stories are endless, repeated by the neoliberal and
neoconservative walking dead who roam the planet sucking
the blood and life out of everyone they touch, from the millions
killed in foreign wars, to the millions incarcerated in our nation’s
prisons.

All of these stories embody what Ernst Bloch has called “the
swindle of fulfillment.”

That is, instead of fostering a democracy rooted in the public
interest, they encourage a political and economic system controlled
by the rich, but carefully packaged in consumerist and militarist
fantasy.

Instead of promoting a society that embraces a robust and inclusive
social contract, they legitimate a social order that shreds social
protections, privileges the wealthy and powerful and inflicts a
maddening and devastating set of injuries upon workers, women,
poor minorities, immigrants, and low and middle-class young people.

Instead of striving for economic and political stability, they inflict on
Americans marginalized by class and race uncertainty and precarity,
a world turned upside-down in which ignorance becomes a virtue
and power and wealth are utilized for ruthlessness and privilege
rather than a resource for the public good.

Every once in a while we catch a brutal glimpse of what America has become in the narratives spun by politicians whose arrogance and
quests for authority exceed their interest to conceal the narrow-
mindedness, power hungry blunders, cruelty, and hardship embedded
in the policies they advocate.

The echoes of a culture of cruelty can be heard in politicians such as
Senator Tom Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma, who believes that
even assistance to those unemployed, homeless, and working poor
suffering the most in his home state should be cut in the name of
austerity measures.

We hear it in the words of Mike Reynolds, another politician from
Oklahoma who insists that government has no responsibility to
provide students with access to a college education through a state
program, “that provides post-secondary education scholarship to
qualified low-income students.”

We find evidence of a culture of cruelty in numerous policies that
make clear that those who occupy the bottom rungs of American
society, whether low-income families, poor minorities of color and
class, or young, unemployed, and failed consumers, are considered
disposable, utterly excluded in terms of ethical considerations and
the grammar of human suffering.

In the name of austerity, budget cuts are enacted that fall primarily
on those individuals and groups who are already disenfranchised, and
will thus seriously worsen the lives of those people now suffering the
most.

For instance, Texas has enacted legislation that refuses to expand its
Medicaid program, which provides healthcare for low-income people.

As a result, healthcare coverage will be denied to over
1.5 low-income residents as a result of Governor Perry’s
refusal to be part of the Obama administration’s Medicaid
expansion.

This is not merely partisan politics; it is an expression of a new form
of cruelty and barbarism now aimed at those considered disposable in
a neo-Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest society.

Not surprisingly, the right wing appeal to job killing and provision
slashing austerity, now functions as an updated form of medieval
torture, gutting myriad of programs that add up to massive human
suffering for the many, and benefits for only a predatory class of
neo-feudal bankers, hedge fund managers, and financiers that feed
off the lives of the disadvantaged.

The general response from progressives and liberals does not take
seriously the ways in which the extreme right-wing articulates its
increasingly pervasive and destructive view of American society.

For instance, the views of new extremists in Congress are often
treated, especially by liberals, as a cruel hoax that is out of touch
with reality or a foolhardy attempt to roll back the Obama agenda.

On the left, such views are often criticized as a domestic version
of the tactics employed by the Taliban, keeping people stupid,
oppressing women, living in a circle of certainty, and turning
all channels of education into a mass propaganda machine of
fundamentalist Americanism.

All of these positions touch on elements of a deeply authoritarian
agenda. But such commentaries do not go far enough.

Tea Party politics is about more than bad policy, policies that favor
the rich over the poor, or for that matter about modes of governance
and ideology that represent a blend of civic and moral turpitude.

The hidden order of neoliberal politics in this instance represents
the poison of neoliberalism and its ongoing attempt to destroy
those very institutions whose purpose is to enrich public memory,
prevent needless human suffering, protect the environment,
distribute social provisions, and safeguard the public good.

Within this rationality, markets are not merely freed from
progressive government regulation, they are removed from
any considerations of social costs.

And where government regulation does exits, it functions primarily
to bail out the rich and shore up collapsing financial institutions and
for what Noam Chomsky has termed America’s only political party,
“the business party.”

The stories that attempt to cover over America’s embrace
of historical and social amnesia at the same time justify
authoritarianism with a soft edge and weakens democracy
through a thousand cuts to the body politic.

How else to explain the Obama administration’s willingness to
assassinate American citizens allegedly allied with terrorists,
secretly monitor the email messages and text messages of its
citizens, use the NDAA to arrest and detain indefinitely American
citizens without charge or trial, subject alleged spies to an
unjust military tribunal system, use drones as part of a global
assassination campaign to arbitrarily kill innocent people, and
then dismiss such acts as collateral damage.

As Jonathan Turley points out, “An authoritarian nation is defined
not just by the use of authoritarian powers, but by the ability to
use them. If a president can take away your freedom or your life on
his own authority, all rights become little more than a discretionary
grant subject to executive will.”

At the heart of neoliberal narratives are ideologies, modes of
governance, and policies that embrace a pathological individualism,
a distorted notion of freedom, and a willingness both to employ
state violence to suppress dissent and abandon those suffering
from a collection of social problems ranging from dire poverty
and joblessness to homelessness.

In the end, these are stories about disposability in which growing
numbers of groups are considered dispensable and a drain on the
body politic, the economy, and the sensibilities of the rich and
powerful.

Rather than work for a more dignified life, most Americans now work simply to survive in a survival-of-the-fittest society in which getting
ahead and accumulating capital, especially for the ruling elite, is the
only game in town.

In the past, public values have been challenged and certain groups
have been targeted as superfluous or redundant.

But what is new about the politics of disposability that has become a
central feature of contemporary American politics is the way in which
such anti democratic practices have become normalized in the
existing neoliberal order.

A politics of inequality and ruthless power disparities is now matched
by a culture of cruelty soaked in blood, humiliation, and misery.

Private injuries not only are separated from public considerations
such narratives, but narratives of poverty and exclusion have become
objects of scorn.

Similarly, all noncommercial public spheres where such stories might
get heard are viewed with contempt, a perfect supplement to the
chilling indifference to the plight of the disadvantaged and
disenfranchised.

Any viable struggle against the authoritarian forces that dominate
the United States must make visible the indignity and injustice of
these narratives and the historical, political, economic, and cultural
conditions that produce them.

This suggests a critical analysis of how various educational forces
in American society are distracting and mis-educating the public.

Dominant political and cultural responses to current events, such as
the ongoing economic crisis, income inequality, health care reform,
Hurricane Sandy, the war on terror, the Boston Marathon bombing,
and the crisis of public schools in Chicago, Philadelphia, and other
cities, represent flashpoints that reveal a growing disregard for
people’s democratic rights, public accountability, and civic values.

As politics is disconnected from its ethical and material moorings, it
becomes easier to punish and imprison young people than to educate them.

From the inflated rhetoric of the political right to market-driven
media peddling spectacles of violence, the influence of these
criminogenc and death-saturated forces in everyday life is
undermining our collective security by justifying cutbacks to social
supports and restricting opportunities for democratic resistance.

Saturating mainstream discourses with anti-public narratives,
the neoliberal machinery of social death effectively weakens
public supports and prevents the emergence of much needed,
new ways of thinking and speaking about politics in the twenty-
first century.

But even more than neutralizing collective opposition to the growing
control and wealth of predatory financial elites, which now wield
power across all spheres of U.S. society, responses to social issues
are increasingly dominated by a malignant characterization of
marginalized groups as disposable populations.

All the while zones of abandonment accelerate the technologies
and mechanisms of disposability.

One consequence is the spread of a culture of cruelty in which human
suffering is not only tolerated, but viewed as part of the natural
order of things.

Before this dangerously authoritarian mindset has a chance to take
hold of our collective imagination and animate our social institutions,
it is crucial that all Americans think critically and ethically about the
coercive forces shaping U.S. culture, and focus our energy on what
can be done to change them.

It will not be enough only to expose the falseness of the stories
we are told.

We also need to create alternative narratives about what the
promise of democracy might be for our children and ourselves.

This demands a break from established political parties, the
creation of alternative public spheres in which to produce
democratic narratives and visions, and a notion of politics
that is educative, one that takes seriously how people interpret
and mediate the world, how they see themselves in relation to
others, and what it might mean to imagine otherwise in order
to act otherwise.

Why are millions not protesting in the streets over these barbaric
policies that deprive them of life, liberty, justice, equality, and
dignity?

What are the pedagogical technologies and practices at work that
create the conditions for people to act against their own sense of
dignity, agency, and collective possibilities?

Progressives and others need to make education central to any
viable sense of politics so as to make matters of remembrance
and consciousness central elements of what it means to be critical
and engaged citizens.

There is also a need for social movements that invoke stories as
a form of public memory, stories that have the potential to move
people to invest in their own sense of individual and collective
agency, stories that make knowledge meaningful in order to make
it critical and transformative.

If democracy is to once again inspire a populist politics, it is crucial
to develop a number of social movements in which the stories told
are never completed, but are always open to self and social
reflection, capable of pushing ever further the boundaries of our
collective imagination and struggles against injustice wherever they
might be.

Only then will the stories that now cripple our imaginations, politics,
and democracy be challenged and hopefully overcome.



Mr. Henry A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair
Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural
Studies Department and he is a Distinguished Visiting Professorship
at Ryerson University.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article35822.htm

The Moral Imperative of Activism

The Moral Imperative of Activism

By Ray McGovern
Common Dreams
August 13, 2013

That America is in deep moral and legal trouble was pretty much
obvious to everyone before Edward Snowden released official
documents showing the extent to which the U.S. government has
been playing fast and loose with the Fourth Amendment rights of
Americans to be protected against unreasonable searches and
seizures.

Snowden’s revelations, as explosive as they are, were, in one sense,
merely the latest challenge to those of us who took a solemn oath to
support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all
enemies foreign and domestic.

That has been a commitment tested repeatedly in recent years,
especially since the 9/11 attacks.

After all the many troubling disclosures, from torture, to
”extraordinary renditions” to aggressive war under false pretenses,
to warrantless wiretaps, to lethal drone strikes, to whistleblowers
prosecutions, to the expanded “surveillance state” it might be time
to take a moment for what the Germans call “eine Denkpause,” a
“thinking break.”

And it is high time to heed and honor the Noah Principle:

“No more awards for predicting rain; awards only for building arks.”

This is our summer of discontent. The question we need to ask
ourselves is whether that discontent will move us to action.

Never in my lifetime have there been such serious challenges to
whether the Republic established by the Founders will survive.

Immediately after the Constitutional Convention, Ben Franklin told
a questioner that the new structure created “a Republic, if you can
keep it.”

He was right, of course; it is up to us.

So let’s face it. The Obama White House and its co-conspirators
in Congress and the Judiciary have thrown the gauntlet down at
our feet.

It turned out that we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

As Annie Dillard, one of my favorite theologians, has put it,
“There is only us; there never has been any other.”

And as one of my favorite activists/prophets continued to insist,
“Do not say there are not enough of us. There ARE enough of us!”

Besides threats to basic constitutional rights and gross violations
of international law, there are other pressing issues for Americans,
especially the obscene, growing chasm between the very rich and
the jobless (and often homeless) poor.

There is widespread reluctance, even so, to ask the key questions?

Is it right to fire teachers, police and firefighters; to close libraries;
leave students in permanent debt; gut safety-net programs, all by
feigning lack of money?

Yet, simultaneously, is it moral to squander on the Pentagon and
military contractors half of the country’s discretionary income from
taxes, an outlay equivalent to what the whole rest of the world put
together spends for defense?

It seems we are guided far more by profits than by prophets.

And without prophetic vision, the people perish.

Profit Margin

America’s lucrative war-making industry operates within a
fiendishly, self-perpetuating business model:

U.S. military interventions around the world (including security
arrangements to prop up unpopular allies and thus to thwart
the will of large segments of national populations) guarantee
an inexhaustible supply of “militants, insurgents, terrorists or
simply ‘bad guys’ a list that sometimes comes to include American
citizens.

These troublemakers must be hunted down and vaporized by
our remote killing machines, which inflict enough destruction
and stir up enough outrage to generate even more “militants,
insurgents, terrorists or simply ‘bad guys.’

And, in turn, the blowback toward the United States, the
occasional terrorist attack creates enough fear at home to
“justify” the introduction of draconian Third Reich-style
“Enabling Act” legislation not very different from the
unconstitutional laws ushering in the abuses in Germany
80 years ago.

With only muted murmur from “progressive” supporters, the
Obama administration has continued much of the post-9/11
assault on constitutional rights begun by George W. Bush,
and in regard to Barack Obama’s aggressive prosecutorial
campaign against “leakers,” Obama has taken these
transgressions even further.

Are we to look on, like the proverbial “obedient Germans,”
as Establishment Washington validates the truth of James
Madison’s warning:

“If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in
the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.”

Yet, while countless billions of dollars are spent on “security” against
“terrorism,” little attention is devoted to the truly existential threat
from global warming.

Can we adults in good conscience continue to shun the dire
implications of climate change?

This question was again brought home to me personally on Aug. 6, as
our ninth grandchild pushed her way out into a world with challenges
undreamed of just decades ago.

When she is my age, will she rue joining us last Tuesday?

I can only hope she will forgive me and my generation for not having
the guts to face down those whose unconscionable greed, continues
to rape what seemed to be a rather pure and pleasant planet when I
made my appearance seven short decades ago.

Prophets On The Margin

And, then there is the worship of “free market” idolatry which has
savaged America’s Great Middle Class and expanded the ranks of
the desperate poor.

The late Rabbi Abraham Heschel had challenging words for us:

Decrying the agony of the “plundered poor,” Heschel insisted
that wherever injustice takes place, “few are guilty, but all are
responsible.”

He added that, “Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil
itself.”

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., warned:

“A time comes when silence is betrayal … We must speak with all
the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must
speak…. There is such a thing as being too late…. Life often leaves
us standing bare, naked, and dejected with lost opportunity…. Over
the bleached bones of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic
words: ‘Too late.’”

Amid these daunting challenges, endless war, encroachment on
liberties, environmental devastation, and economic disparity,
there is also the question:

Are our churches riding shotgun for the System.

As truly historic events unfold in our country and abroad, I often
think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor who founded the
Confessing Church as an alternative to the overwhelming number of
Catholics and Lutherans who gave priority to protecting themselves
by going along with Hitler.

How deeply disappointed Bonhoeffer was at the failure of the
institutional church in Germany to put itself “where the battle
rages.”

This is the phrase Martin Luther himself used centuries before:

“If, I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every
portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which
the world and the devil are at the moment attacking, I am not
confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing him. Where
the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved and to
be steady on all the battlefield, except there, is mere flight and
disgrace if one flinches at that point.”

No one has put it better than a precious new friend I met on a
“cruise” in June/July 2011 hoping to reach Gaza, author and
poet Alice Walker, who said:

“Activism is my rent for living on this planet.”

As some of you know, that attitude found her a passenger on
“The Audacity of Hope” the U.S. Boat to Gaza.

On July 1, 2011, we made an activist break for the open sea and
Gaza but were able to sail only nine nautical miles out of Athens
before the Greek government, under strong pressure from the
White House, ordered its Coast Guard to intercept us, bring us
back to port, and impound our boat.

Okay to be Angry?

Recalling the anger I felt at the time, I was reminded that, all
too often, people are conflicted about whether or not to allow
themselves to be angry at such injustice, whether it be in Gaza,
on the Aegean, or elsewhere.

I had been in that category of doubt, until I remembered learning
that none other than Thomas Aquinas had something very useful
to say about anger.

In the Thirteenth Century, Aquinas wrote a lot about virtue and
got quite angry when he realized there was no word in Latin for
just the right amount of anger, for the virtue of anger.

He had to go back to what Fourth-Century Doctor of the Church
John Chrysostom said on the subject:

“He or she who is not angry, when there is just cause for anger,
sins.”

Why?

Because as John Chrysostom put it, “Anger respicit bonum justitiae,
anger looks to the good of Justice, and if you can live amid injustice
without anger you are unjust.”

Aquinas added his own corollary; he railed against what he called
“unreasoned patience,” which, he said, “sows the seeds of vice,
nourishes negligence, and persuades not only evil people but good
people to do evil.”

Frankly, I have not thought of us activists being virtuous, but
maybe we are, at least in our willingness to channel our anger
into challenging and changing the many injustices here and around
the world.

There should be no room these days for “unreasoned patience.”

One saving grace peculiar not only to the ancient prophets and
theologians but to the Alice Walkers and Medea Benjamins of
today is that they did not get hung up on the all-too-familiar
drive for success.

That drive, I think, is a distinctly American trait.

We generally do not want to embark on some significant course of
action without there being a reasonable prospect of success, do we?

Who enjoys becoming the object of ridicule?

The felt imperative to be “successful” can be a real impediment
to acting for Justice.

One prophet/activist from whom I have drawn inspiration is Dan
Berrigan.

I’d like to share some of the wisdom that seeps through his autobiography, To Dwell in Peace.

Berrigan writes that after he, his brother Phil, and a small group of
others had used homemade napalm to burn draft cards in Catonsville,
Maryland, in May 1968 at the height of the Vietnam War, Dan mused
about why he took such a risk:

“I came upon a precious insight. … Something like this: presupposing
integrity and discipline, one is justified in entering upon a large risk;
not indeed because the outcome is assured, but because the integrity
and value of the act have spoken aloud. …

“Success or efficiency are placed where they belong: in the
background.

They are not irrelevant, but they are far from central. I was in need
of such reflections as we faced the public after our crime. … All sides
agreed, we were fools or renegades or plain crazy. …

“One had very little to go on; and one went ahead nonetheless. …
The act was let go, its truth and goodness were entrusted to the
four winds. Indeed, good consequences were of small matter to
me, compared with the integrity of the action, the need responded
to, the spirits lifted.”

The more recent prophets and activists I have known have generally
been able to do this, to release the truth of the act to the four winds.

And I am sure that helps them avoid taking themselves too seriously.

Anticipate The Jut-Jaw

Here’s how Dan Berrigan recounts the immediate aftermath of the
action at Catonsville:

“We sat in custody in the back room of the Catonsville Post Office,
weak with relief. … Three or four FBI honchos entered portentously.
Their leader, a jut-jawed paradigm, surveyed us from the doorway.
His eagle-eye lit on Philip. He roared out: ‘Him again! Good God,
I’m changing my religion!’

“I could think of no greater tribute to my brother.”

The Berrigans help affirm for me that this God of ours
is a God of laughter, and we are the entertainment.

And that’s just one reason a light touch seems to be required.
Will we be successful? Wrong question.

The right one is will we be faithful? Will we dare to go with the
Berrigans to where the battle rages.

I am very much looking forward to being able to refresh my spirit,
and also my sense of humor, with some later-day prophets at
the upcoming Conference on the Moral Imperative of Activism,
Aug. 16-17, at the National Kateri Tekakwitha Shrine in Fonda,
New York.

Let me close with a poem written by the German writer
Peter Gan, in 1935 during the Third Reich.

I think it summons us in a thoughtful way to contemplate
who we are and what we are called to do, today.

But first the most important thing:

“What are you doing in these great times?

“Great, I say, for times seem great to me, when each man
driven half to death by the era’s hate, and standing in the
place he’s given,

“Must willy-nilly contemplate no less a thing than his own BEING!
A little breath, a second’s wait May well suffice, you catch my meaning?”



Ray McGovern was an Army officer and a CIA analyst for 30 years,
and is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
(VIPS).

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/08/12-8

The Mass Awakening

Flood of Information Will Cause Mass Awakening When Media
Control Ends

By Golden Age of Gaia
Sunday, August 11, 2013

Control of the mainstream media appears to persist.

When control of the media is overcome, we can expect a flood
of information that will result in a great mass awakening.

Jesus through John Smallman tells us that the media remains
under the control of those whose interests lie in dominating
us.

“[The] media is owned and controlled by those who would control
you, and it is obviously not in their interests to inform you of what
is truly occurring."

Nevertheless, they no longer have a stranglehold on the
dissemination of information, and the truth is coming out
despite their best efforts to contain it.” (1)

SaLuSa tells us that “the media is aware of what is happening but
hold back for fear of the consequences.

That will change in short time, as we must have an informed public
before we can consider open contact.” (2)

The Pleiadian High Council through Wes Annac tell us that the
reasons for media suppression of the news are often invented
out of thin air.

“All those who know of revolutionary things are not allowed to
talk, for reasons made out of thin air when the real reasons
behind the suppression of so very many things are for control
and for a sustained feeding of the elite class and of a presumed
‘betterness’ on the part of your dark than the rest of humanity.” (3)

Matthew Ward sees the decline of media censorship as a good
indicator of the light’s progress:

“Because the dissemination of accurate information is crucial,
another good indicator of the light’s progress is that mainstream
media censorship clearly is on the decline.” (4)

Action is occurring but it isn’t being reported on, SaLuSa tells us.

“Action is taking place but as you have realized it still does not hit
the main Press outlets."

The news will become so important that a point will come when it
can no longer be hidden or ignored.

Governments like to be in control and have always tried to cover up
news about demonstrations or rebellions amongst the people.

However, once the media gets hold of the real truth behind what is
happening, they will take the side of the people.” (5)

The impact of the truth getting out via the alternative press is that
more and more people will wake up, Jesus says.

“As more and more information about how you have been lied
to and betrayed by those who have claimed to be working on
your behalf becomes generally known, so more of you will feel
that nudge to awaken, to change the insane reality in which
you apparently have to live your lives, and to join collectively
together to change the nightmare of your illusory reality into
a pleasant and harmonious dream from which awakening will
be easy, enticing, and entrancing.” (6)

Wanderer of the Skies says the truth revelation will cause the
greatest “Mass Awakening” to date.

“Prepare for great movements of information all over your globe
that will focus those who are not in tune with what you have been
accomplishing all this while."

This will be the next, and greatest to date, mass awakening of
individuals who have been asleep through the process thus far.

This information will come from many sources, including your media,
which has even now begun to unravel the Illuminati control about it.

“Truth is rolling over those that resist, and those who have always
wanted this information to ‘get out’ now see no impediment to their
actions to make it so."

This trickle will now become the floodgates of information that are
a precursor to disclosure.” (7)

SaLuSa describes the work of the Earth allies in getting information
out.

“There are a number of trusted allies that are in the forefront of
releasing information that makes clear what our intentions are."

"In short time we will also play our part in bringing out the facts
directly to the public. … Many atrocities have taken place that
you are unaware of, but the truth cannot be concealed.” (8)

He predicts a sudden wealth of information soon.

“Each project is underway and that will result in a sudden wealth
of information reaching you."

Events are such that the facts can no longer be kept hidden, and
with that there will be an explosion of people coming forward to
tell what they know.

It may take longer where the Vatican is concerned, as it is akin
to a secret society that has kept its dark secrets hidden well
away.

However, nothing will remain concealed for too long, as you are
entitled to know the truth and the extent to which you have been
deceived.” (9)

He describes how eventually the star nations will provide
news directly but for now they rely on the Internet, despite
the presence of some deliberate disinformation.

“Eventually we will provide our own services to ensure our
actions are not misrepresented, but meantime we welcome
and thank those of the Light who are in the forefront of
revelations through the Internet."

“Sometimes the reports are somewhat speculative, which
means that you must still be discerning in how you interpret
them."

By and large they will be reliable, but you must still watch out
for deliberate disinformation.” (10)

At that time it will be shown that the galactics are here at the
request of the councils that look after this planet’s development,
he says.

“You near the time when our actions and that of our allies will
be reported in the media.

With it will come explanations for what takes place, and it will
be made clear that our intervention has been authorized by the
High Councils that look after your evolution.

“Normally you would be left to determine your future, and that
is still true where your Ascension is concerned.

However, we talk of the greater picture, and our responsibility to
carry out the Divine Decree that you shall all have the opportunity
to ascend.” (11)

So we can expect the opening of the floodgates of information
as the media yields its censorship of the news.

When it happens, whistleblowers will come forward and the
galactics will provide their own services to get the news out.

The flood of information will cause the greatest mass awakening
to date as we move forward towards the date of Ascension.

http://goldenageofgaia.com/accountability/media-cover-ups/flood-
of-information-will-cause-mass-awakening-when-media-control-ends

An Open Letter to General Buchanan

Bradley Manning’s Judge

By Peter Hollings
Information Clearing House
Wednesday, August 7, 2013

General Buchanan,

You have it within your power to set the sentence for Bradley
Manning.

I am a former military officer having served two tours of duty
in Vietnam.

I recall my oath of office to uphold the Constitution.

It is not an oath to support any particular group of people, or a gang
of criminals exercising authority outside Constitutional boundaries.

What kind of country would we live in if political and military leaders
could do what they wished while suppressing public information and
without legal restraint?

Bradley Manning has, in my opinion, bravely risked his life
and freedom as a matter of conscience to help Americans
restore the rule of law in their society.

He has revealed crimes committed by our government that we,
the people, did not, and would not have authorized.

This is a matter that cries out for justice.

If we continue to pass legislation favoring certain financial elites
and punishing those who reveal the crimes of state in service of
those same elites we will have an unfair and unstable society.

The same is true in the application of what is called justice.

You have an opportunity to obey your oath of office and duty
to the Constitution to free Bradley Manning.

That might come at some professional cost in the short term,
but, believe me, the American people would remember and
forever respect your act of courage.

I believe that it should never be a crime to disclose a crime
committed by a public official and every public official should
be accountable for crimes committed in office.

The American people have not agreed to hire criminals to
conduct their affairs of state and would not do so if posed
with such a choice.

Please choose the right thing. We will remember this.

I will personally lobby our government to strip all who committed
or condoned crimes while in office of all government benefits,
including retirement.

We (the American people) will not reward people for committing
crimes.

Peter Hollings

Please note that General Buchanan can be contacted at:

jeffrey.s.buchanan@us.army.mil

If any reader of this message feels moved to also contact him,
this e-address is the venue to use.



Peter Hollings is a former military officer.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article35740.htm

Obama’s Downward Spiral

Obama’s Downward Spiral

By Jason Hirthler
Dissident Voice
August 4th, 2013

Four freedoms have always formed the bedrock of American liberty.

The freedom of speech, the freedom of assembly, the rights to
privacy and to a fair trial, largely covered in the first, fourth, and
sixth Amendments.

It is astonishing that a single president has so thoroughly undermined
all four.

With the conviction of Bradley Manning Tuesday on 20 criminal
charges carrying a potential sentence of 136 years in prison,
the verdict on the muckraking aspect of free speech is clear,
state crimes must be hidden, and those who expose them must
be destroyed.

That the Obama administration so vigorously pursued this
outcome raises once more the question of whether America
will finally see through the ruse of the modern Democratic
Party and its now thoroughly disgraced leader, or will it
continue, against all evidence to the contrary, to cling to
that party’s threadbare mandate, now reduced to the
shamefulness of being “the lesser evil.”

If by chance, the American majority recognizes our Machiavelli
for what he is, let this be an epitaph for the headstone of a
dead mythology.

Falling For Faust

From a supposedly stirring speech at the Democratic National
Convention into 2004 to the weepy confirmation in Chicago
four years on, millions fell for the mystique of Barack Obama.

Ignoring the realities of power, his vetting by corporate leadership,
his subservience to institutional wealth, his massive funding by
finance, insurance, and real estate conglomerates, they bought hook,
line, and sinker the empty promise of “Change We Can Believe In.”

This portmanteau served as an idealist’s suitcase into which
desiccated liberals packed all their disappearing dreams.

Once their man was elected, they were pacified with little more than
some high flown rhetoric and a few tawdry policy proposals destined
for the Congressional guillotine.

Then they could wash their hands of it and get back to the business
of making money, conscience intact.

Welcome to liberal politics in the 21st century.

Had anyone been following activist and author Paul Street, for
instance, they would have been quickly freed from their illusions.

Paul Street, however, was initially one of deluded supporters of
Obama; other progressives did regard Obama with extreme
skepticism prior to his becoming president, or at least exposed
to the truth about Obama.

As evolutionary psychologist Robert Trivers has laid out extensively
in his book "The Folly of Fools" people with a desire to believe a
particular story are often impervious to facts that contradict it.

There are strong evolutionary incentives for people to sustain false
historical narratives in their quest to achieve survival or reproductive
advantage.

You can see the ease with which these farcical story lines caused
millions to leap so credulously into the arms of a vitiated Democratic
Party.

It’s also a testament to our paucity of choice that millions of
marginally deflated liberals decided to vote again for Obama
in 2012, salving their consciences with the daft ‘lesser of
two evils’ analogy, by which they were able to dispense with
the harder questions about an electoral system that only
offered two evils.

No longer able to sustain their narrative of incremental change
and lesser evilism, they are now left with nowhere else to go, a
politically displaced people, the latest refugees of the franchise.

So here we are, five years in, and we find that our messiah-
scholar, is a Savonarola of apocalyptic proportions.

With a world for a stage, he capers from role to role.

As an imperialist, he wields power like a Borgia.

As a paranoiac, he resembles a police state Napoleon.

As a militant, he disregards borders like Teddy Roosevelt.

As a gunrunner and friend of stateless jihad, he mimics Reagan.

Our freedoms lie in spangled tatters at his feet.

Speaking Freely

As for the particular freedom of speech, Obama has taken steps
to drastically circumscribe the free exchange of ideas.

By grossly expanding the scope and reach of NSA surveillance and
seizing the private communications of mainstream media outlets,
he has sent a chill rippling through the country.

Programs like PRISM and Boundless Informant, or possibly the
broadest program of them all, XKeyscore, capture our private
thoughts and inscribe our digital ethnographies in clandestine
data silos.

No doubt we’ll all think twice next time we think to speak our
mind.

What about the freedom of assembly?

Well, the freedom to gather in peaceful protest of government
policy is dutifully enshrined in our constitution.

It may not be the anointed scripture that old school right-
wingers think it is, but it is the closest thing we have to
a ten commandments.

Obama is desecrating the tablets.

By literally cordoning off the commons, we have shuttled
protestors and petitioners into pens of expression that
more resemble the foreyards of an abattoir than a public
space.

Witness the diminished strike zones of Con Edison workers
last year and the truncated cobblestones of Wall Street during
the Occupy protests, the rebel-swept grounds of Zuccotti Park.

But police efforts to deny protest will soon be augmented
by a helpful partner.

In June, an expansion of military laws granted the military explicit
power to intervene in public spaces to “quell…civil disturbances.”

Naturally, as breaking news about sitcom stars dominated the
airwaves, this expansion of martial policy went unnoticed.

The Pentagon is developing a troop force to deal with “domestic
catastrophes.”

You can easily imagine that useless phrase being tossed aside
and substituted with “civil disturbances” caused by “domestic
extremists,” formerly known as peaceful protestors.

Entrapment is now a legitimate tool of police work.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is now prepared to
surveil your peaceable marches, infiltrate your gatherings, and
sow dissent among your ranks.

In so doing, the DHS can hopefully incite you to violence, at which
point you cross the threshold from deranged anti-corporatist, to
domestic extremist (the NSA’s foreground of terrorism) and can be
usefully detained and deposited in a tent prison on the periphery of
your crumbling metropolis.

Fair Enough?

Due process, you say?

Guantanamo prisoners, if they still had the strength to, would
laugh in the face of a patriot pronouncing this blessed creed.

Your indefinite imprisonment is authorized by the NDAA.

As is your trumped-up trial before a military tribunal, should a
show trial be necessary in your case.

And so is your liquidation should anonymous authorities deem
you not worth the trouble of detaining.

It’s no wonder Obama signed the NDAA under cover of darkness
on New Year’s Eve.

A satanic verse is best inscribed in Cimmerian conclave.

How arrogant is this administration?

It believes it has the right to reinterpret any judicial ruling, like the one by a brave judge prohibiting indefinite detention of Americans.

Or perhaps the point is cast in sharper relief by the fact that under
the President’s guiding hand, the CIA conducts “signature strikes” on
hapless villagers in countries across the Middle East, a population of
people with no rights.

Their crime: looking like trouble.

Perhaps youngish, male, disgruntled at a pandemic lack of work,
irritated by the perpetual droning in the sky, frightened by the
frequent explosions in nearby villages.

Hard to imagine anyone in such a climate of fear wouldn’t bear the
signature of a terrorist.

The ‘double-tap’ hits are equally cruel, as they obliterate first
responders to an attack (by first eliciting a tragedy to which
they are bound to respond).

Note how the CIA here imagines that the first to respond will be
nefarious terror suspects. They are not like us.

We are guilty by the falsest of associations; they by the most
intimate.

The enemies, in these strikes, are people defending their own
homes, moving to rescue mortally wounded relatives, otherwise
known as ‘insurgents’.

One in fifty killed are known militants.

The euphemisms of mayhem drone on.

How they reach a fever pitch before the shot is fired by
remote control from a benign bunker outside Sin City.

An Actor Unmasked

I’m afraid that our constitutional scholar and ethnically
mixed prodigy has proven himself a shapeshifter.

From friend of the downtrodden and community activist,
he became the conscience of a liberal nation, the
messianic voice of an oppressed minority, the hope
of a guilt-ridden bourgeois.

From there, amid the collapsing scenery of American society, he
swiftly turned his back on his people, his adopted communities
of color, and embraced the starched collars of global finance.

FIRE’s favorite lackey has handed trillions to his pals in
pinstripes.

His rhetorical palinodes were myriad and predictable.

You could do the pantomime yourself.

You need only learn the maxims of cool-headed centrism,
and the master the footwork of retreating promises.

For every war denounced and terminated, conjure a new
conflict.

For every faux terrorist entrapped, draw true jihadists
from the signature of a drone strike.

Match each miniscule jobs program with a momentous
trade agreement that offshores millions.

With every reference to American exceptionalism,
wiretap a citizen-suspect.

Instead of dragging America off to hydrocarbon detox,
launch a saturnalia of fracking.

Rather than champion the underclass, spy for the ruling
class.

That is the crux of it, class war.

As president, you know your true constituency, it’s Ed Herman’s
“unelected dictatorship of money.”

The job description doesn’t mince words: befriend the rich,
and defraud the poor.

Chastise the whining billionaire in public, and then cut a deal
behind closed doors.

Lay a soft palm on the shoulder of a prole for the press, and
then teach him to vote against his interests.

One market, self-regulating.

One people, self-censoring.

One empire, self-interested.

One enemy, psychopathic.

There you have it. A presidency in a nutshell.

Obama has not shied away from redefining the office, although
he is history’s progeny.

He has consolidated the excesses and failings of his most
famous predecessors.

From the grave, Nixon blushes at our unblushing surveillance
state.

From his imperial crypt, Reagan sees his strategic stamp on
arms back-channeled to Sunni contras.

Clinton sees all the hallmarks of a corporate sellout in his
public platitudes and private fundraisers.

Bush finds his signing statements appended to every legal
sheaf.

They croon with envy, our presidents emeritus.

The centrist for Obama’s ability to boycott conviction.

The neocon for the temerity of his overreach.

Chameleon, fascist, Iago, Faust.

Is there a term of betrayal that won’t suit this maestro of
appearances?

Apparently not.



Jason Hirthler is a writer, strategist, and 15-year veteran of
the communications industry. He has written for many political
communities. He lives and works in New York City.

http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/08/obamas-downward-spiral