God the Insufferable Jerk

Tuesday, September 18, 2012 by The San Francisco Chronicle

by Mark Morford

 

I am delighted to report God still appears to be a bit of an unbearable twit.Not at all pleased with your appreciation of pornography, yoga, or Barack Obama.

Petulant. Uptight. Whiny as a third-grader with recurring lice. How do we know? Because, against all deeper understanding and without a single care that He’s not the slightest bit real in the literal sense, the Almighty still insists on keeping score, observing your every move, measuring your capacity to hate others who do not agree with your narrow view of life, or love, or America.

It’s true. If all reports for the past week – and the past handful of incoherent centuries – are to be believed, God does nothing but laze about the couch with a golden iPad, tracking how many times He’s mentioned on television, who won the Packers game, how often you watch porn or say something nice to a gay person, and who commits more acts of guilt-addled fear in his glorious name.

Oh, and love. There’s love in there somewhere. Maybe. Unless you’re a liberal. Or Muslim. Or gay. Then you’re on your own.

Recent proof? Easy. Did you happen to notice how Fox News was simply bursting at the fanatical seams to tell everyone that, during our recent pair of national political conventions, the Republican party mentioned God twelve times in their platform? Twelve times! They must really love God. They must love God, despite how their candidate believes God’s message appeared on magic golden plates to a huckster polygamist in the woods in the 1820s, and called it a religion. Never mind that now.

God was reportedly sort of pleased at being name-dropped a dozen times on national television (God is wildly vain that way), despite how the lesser-known Shotguns & Slim Jims Party mentioned Him a whopping 147 times during their convention, all while blasting mailboxes from the bed of a speeding Ford F-150 in rural Idaho. But of course, their convention was only broadcast on YouTube, so God was all, “meh.”

And what of the Democrats? They only mentioned God once during their convention, maybe, in passing, sort of under their breath, and apparently completely forgot the part about Jerusalem being the capital of Godlandia. Can you believe it? If there’s one thing God cares about most in the eternal flux of the vast and impenetrable universe, it’s regional cartography. And college football.

The Republicans, as you might expect, had a conniption fit at the Dems’ omission, to the point where Mitt Romney actually suggested that the president secretly wants to remove “God” from our national identity, our currency, our scared and angry America, and replace him with… I’m not sure who. Kobe Bryant or something. Horror!

God, of course, does not like any of this one little bit. The Almighty, as envisioned by the majority of spiritually malnourished Americans, is a bizarre, baffling, curmudgeonly creation, prone to raging outbursts, impossible to please but insanely easy to offend, wielding his moral compass like a hammer made of shame and fear and only trace amounts of the aforementioned love. But only if you really earn it. And of course, no one really does.

You disagree? You dare to deny this definition of God? You perhaps think the divine is some hippie-dippy notion of, say, pure light energy, divine anima, infusing and radiating from all things at all times everywhere including Muslims and Mormons, genomes and genders, dogs and donuts, babies and bison?

You maybe think God is actually something wider and far more beautiful? An all-pervasive sense of divine consciousness, perhaps, fully present and available to every single being at all times in an instant, requiring no church, no priest, no bloody cross, no cash outlay, no whiny political party to validate and empower? What are you, some sort of book-reading communist? Pipe down and go do some yoga, hippie. Scared people are running the world.
 
It is, of course, painfully easy to mock. It is terrific but sort of lazy (I admit) fun to jab at the tragicomic American definition of God as irritable grandpa-child who cares far too much about what happens at nauseating political conventions, gun shows, children’s beauty pageants, ad nauseam.

It requires a bit more compassion to understand that most Americans, like most of the world, are simply desperate for any sort of meaning, any sort of simple understanding amidst all the madness, war, and the lack of education. And therefore even just the mention of “God” on the dollar, in the national credo, in another insipid political platform, this somehow gives a hint of stability, a shared mythology, to an otherwise impossible and terrifying world.

It’s a little tricky to unpack, but sometimes it must be acknowledged: There exists in the American mythos this fragile, long-abused idea that when you buy a gun, or a beer, or a Chinese-made pair of Levi’s using a piece of tattered green paper with the word “God” on it, that it actually means something, that underneath it all there’s this tiny, microscopic hint of divine glue holding it all together, somehow.

It’s sort of charming. It’s sort of wonderful, this delicate notion of spiritual connectedness that’s been mauled to death by capitalism and politics and buried beneath a million layers of churlish ignorance and fear of Other so rampant and sad, many Americans are terrified to leave their hometowns, much less visit another country and see how the rest of the world rocks the divine wow.

Nevertheless, it’s there. Behind the Fox News witlessness, underneath the insulting political platitudes, despite organized religion’s furious attempts to kill it with dogma and sneering patriarchy, lies a certain sweetness, a cultural naiveté borne of a deep and inescapable desire to know, to understand our place in the cosmos, even just a little, even if it means sacrificing the radically self-realized spirit to some bland and politicized whole.

Or maybe not. Maybe it’s not all that sweet after all. Maybe it’s one of the sadder, more debilitating aspects of the modern American condition, given how it’s no secret that organized religion, conservative politicians, marketers and megacorps alike love nothing more than to prey upon the poor and the less educated, anyone desperate for structure and divine meaning, but not quite willing or able to figure it out for themselves.

This is why the Republican cause is so frantic to invoke God as much as possible. “God” implies there’s some sort of explanation, impossible though it may be for pathetic and sinful humankind to understand. Invoking a bitter, judgmental God you can never really access (much less fully embody yourself) brings wobbly balm to those who live in fear of a complex and impossible world, those who feel everything is out of their control.

Hey, at least Angry Republican Grandpa in the sky has it all figured out, right? At least I don’t have to think too much, look too deeply in the mirror, or listen to that nagging, deep-down voice telling me nothing’s really as it seems, right? I mean, whew.

Profiles in Decadent Cowardliness

September 13, 2012
Two Conventions
by RALPH NADER

The Republican and Democratic Conventions are mercifully over but their corrosive impacts on our democracy persist.

First, did you know that taxpayers helped fund these conventions at a level of $100 million for logistics and police sequestrations of demonstrators in Tampa and Charlotte and an additional $18.2 million each for general convention expenses?

The two party duopoly obviously controls the honey pot in Congress. That corporate welfare is what they enacted in spite of the fact that the party’s convention committees are private corporations that should pay for their own big political party and their many smaller social parties with plentiful food and drink. No third party – Green, Libertarian or others – received any taxpayer money for their conventions this year.

Second, the Republican and Democratic Conventions have jettisoned their original purposes which were to resolve the contest for the presidential nomination and work up a platform. Both functions are now decided beforehand, setting the stage for a choreographed theatrical event of political pomposity and braggadocio. On the periphery are the omnipresent corporate lobbyists and their parties of free food and drink.

Did they ask you the taxpayers to foot so much of this bill? Silly question for an oligarchy greased by a plutocracy.

Taking these conventions at face value, one is shocked by how they are scripted right down to every line of every speech vetted by the politicos. Clint Eastwood’s spontaneity that so angered the GOP operatives was the exception.

The Republicans put three themes in just about every speech. Tell your personal story, recount your humble beginnings, and describe how you pulled yourself up by your own bootstraps. Show the people you’re human or at least humanoid, not corporatist. Keep heralding small business so you don’t have to talk about Big Business which has bad vibrations these days around the country. Also, praise, praise, praise Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan as family men with family values. Imagine Republicans telling the press that the convention was to “humanize” Romney and give the voters a warm, fuzzy feeling about their candidate so as to forget that his campaign is a clenched-teeth mouthpiece for Big Business.

The Democratic Convention evokes pity. They too had similar scripts at the podium – narrate your humble, hardworking family lines, talk incessantly about jobs so you won’t have to talk about wages. Especially muzzled was the willing Richard Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO, who, since 2009, has been given the back of Obama’s hand on “card check organizing rights” and on an inflation-adjusted minimum wage. His staged remarks even withheld any mention of a $10 minimum wage (See H.R. 5901 bill “Catching up with 1968”) and the raiding of worker pensions by corporate raptors.

The repetitive over-wrought praise of “el Presidente” in every speech became mawkish, reminding one of the “politics of personalism,” present in many countries with underdeveloped political institutions. Michelle Obama found no time for mentioning the Obama family and America’s mission to grow and consume nutritious food and keep fit to avoid the ravages of obesity. She was too occupied gushing over her aggressive drone commander’s touching nightly reading of letters from Americans about their problems.

The mass obeisance ended when the commander-in-chief himself sprung onto the stage to speak the language of hope, meanwhile avoiding addressing the number of undesirable conditions that need his attention at this singular opportunity.

Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks, trying to be sympathetic, was looking for some significant specificity:

“What I was mostly looking for were big proposals, big as health care was four years ago. I had spent the three previous days watching more than 80 convention speeches without hearing a single major policy proposal in any of them. I asked governors, mayors and legislators to name a significant law that they’d like to see Obama pass in a second term. Not one could. At its base, this is a party with a protective agenda, not a change agenda…”

Fortifying Brooks’ observation was Obama’s recounting of the differences between the Democrats and Republicans. They are almost all defensive in nature. Defend social security, Medicare, and abortion from the Republican offensive. The Democrats are not on the offensive – getting tough on: corporate crime, consumer gouging, bank abuses, corporate tax avoidance and evasions. They are not on the offensive fighting for worker’s safety and labor rights or minimum wage increases or helping the poor earn more and pay less.

Even when Obama mentioned climate change – a recent no-no in the Democrat’s lexicon – his words were defensive, namely “climate change is not a hoax” he did not elaborate.

This defensive attitude against the cruelest, most ignorant corporate-indentured, anti-worker, war mongering Republican Party in history is also seen in the debates and programs of Democratic Congressional and state candidates.

Being on the offense with an agenda standing for and with the people who economically are being driven, along with their country, into the ground by unpatriotic global corporations and their political minions, should be easy. Unless, that is, the Democrats want to continue dialing for the same corporate campaign dollars.

Playing defense explains why veteran Democrat members of the House of Representatives tell me that the party is going to lose the House again to the likes of John Boehner and Eric Cantor. The Democrats cannot even defend the country from Republicans who think Ronald Reagan was too moderate and unelectable today.

Corporate Power on Full Display at Dem and GOP Conventions

Thursday, September 6, 2012 by Common Dreams

by Laura Bonham

 

In the past week, we have been witness to the spectacle of the Republican and Democratic national conventions, events where both parties leave no stone unturned in their attempts to gain the confidence of voting Americans. Perhaps the biggest and best opportunity during presidential campaigns for the parties to differentiate themselves from each other, but the similarities between the two conventions cannot be overlooked.

Beyond the highly orchestrated ceremony, canned speeches, and attempts to show off their commitments to the grassroots and diversity, both parties have clearly spent huge sums to convince Americans that a vote for the other party’s candidates is a vote for the full-blown destruction of our American culture.

Long ago both parties abandoned their grassroots and the attendant disruptions that made conventions exciting and interesting to watch. Today’s national delegates, comprised of elected officials and the Party faithful, are tasked with formalizing the selection of nominees for president and vice president, which is already well-decided long before the conventions take place.  Non-committed delegates are pressured to vote the “right” way for the sake of party unity, and the Party’s platform, which is largely ignored by its elected officials and candidates, is finalized. There is no spontaneity; both are equally boring.

Dissident voices are squelched.  Ron Paul and his Libertarian Republican supporters were dissed at their convention where an unscripted moment of actual rebellion (and good TV) broke out on the floor. While many may disagree with their positions, not only do Libertarian Republicans remain true to their political principles, they have remained supporters of the Party. It is easy to understand their reaction at the convention, and the potential for them to abandon Romney for Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson. 

While there is little controversy within the Democratic Party this year, the party is on the same trajectory with their progressive wing, as demonstrated at their 2004 convention in Boston where party bosses subjected Kucinich delegates to vigorous verbal arm-twisting in an attempt to show unanimous solidarity for Kerry.

By virtue of their wealth, titans of industry have always had more voice in our elections than the average individual.

Unable to secure a presence through the regular Machiavellian channels of party participation, Progressive Democrats of America has sponsored a shadow convention for the past two national conventions, after their organizing convention in Boston during the Democratic convention in 2004. One can only wonder how many progressive Democratic voters will abandon Obama for Green Party candidate Jill Stein or the newly forming Justice Party candidate Rocky Anderson.

But, the most disturbing similarity between the two is direct corporate sponsorship, and the more obscure soft corporate funding through their respective host committees. While the GOP Convention website proudly boasts their corporate sponsors on their homepage, the Democrats have also accepted corporate funding while trying to maintain the sheen of grassroots funding. Corporate funders for the GOP include Google, Microsoft, Wellcare, Walmart, Chevron and an assortment of energy companies among others. Democratic sponsors include AT&T, Bank of America, Duke Energy, Time Warner Cable, UnitedHealth Group, Piedmont Natural Gas, and US Airways. Coca Cola and Wells Fargo have covered their bets by sponsoring both conventions.

Corporate tentacles are more entwined in our political process than simply making the massive ad buys paid for by undisclosed sources sanctioned by the Citizens United ruling. Corporate sponsorship of the Republican and Democratic conventions has long been policy, despite attempts to curb the practice due to the clear conflict of interest. This year’s sponsors come from the healthcare, communications, oil, gas and energy, banking, automotive and housing industries – all of which have benefited from recent legislation under both Democratic and Republican administrations and are likely in line to receive additional benefits in the next administration, whichever party comes to power.

We cannot ignore the connections that wealthy patrons and their corporations have on our political process and who gets elected in this country. By virtue of their wealth, titans of industry have always had more voice in our elections than the average individual. Their influence has led to the election of politicians who support their corporate worldview and appoint judges.

Over time, the doctrine of corporate personhood became a reality as corporations – artificial entities created by government – gained inherent human rights through legislation and the courts. Because the Supreme Court decided in Buckley v. Valeo that money is speech and in prior cases that a corporation is a person, every attempt made by government to control money in politics has resulted in loopholes through which obscene amounts of money pours.

For over a decade, proponents of small “d” democracy have been working to limit the power of corporations. Immediately following the Citizens United decision, they came together to form the Move to Amend Coalition. Recognizing that corporations can and have benefited society in many ways, have an important role in a vibrant economy, and are entitled to privileges to protect themselves, Move to Amend is calling for a Constitutional amendment which clearly states that corporations are not people, are not entitled to unalienable human rights, that money is not speech and can be regulated in campaigns. 

Hostility Toward the Health of the People

The Economic Mess

by ELLIOT SPERBER

Bill Clinton raised a good deal of applause the other night in his speech at the Democratic National Convention, pointing out that the Republicans made a huge mess out of the economy. And while what Clinton said was to some degree the case, it was only the case insofar as it omits a great deal of what we see in the world around us from consideration. To be sure, he neglected to mention the far larger issue that it is not only the Republicans’ economic plan, but that of the Democrats as well that makes not only a mess, but an extremely toxic, and – it should be stressed – completely unnecessary “mess” out of the entire biosphere.

It is telling that when it comes time to discuss the subject of cleaning up the big mess of the economy, no mention is made at all about the deep, structural mess that includes, among other things, a prison population in this country that is at present in excess of 2,200,000 people – a figure, by the way, that excludes minors. Indeed, the long-term economic policy in this country has involved incarceration, in one way or another, for over a century. Since the end of the Civil War – especially, but not exclusively, in the south – a sizable amount of economic growth has been attributable to prison labor. Let us not forget, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which outlaws slavery, has a prison labor exception. And, as soon as Reconstruction was prematurely terminated, the state, together with industry, lost little time in taking advantage of this exception. Through such programs as the convict lease system, newly freed slaves were put back to work in a manner that gives new meaning to the term free laborers.

As the US continues to trudge through this period of post-industrial permanent unemployment – one in which outsourcing and automation have bludgeoned the working class’s jobs along with their bargaining power – we are seeing permanently unemployed sectors of the population being permanently housed in corrections facilities. This model of social control, developed in the Jim Crow South, has for decades been applied to the entire country.

Not only do prisoners these days produce such consumer items as Victoria’s Secrets underwear, but the prisons themselves are an important sector of the economy, employing countless guards, cooks, contractors, sub-contractors, construction workers, etc. This outstanding social problem has, among other things, led to the situation where, although the US has only 5% of the world’s total population, it houses 25% of the world’s total prison population – a number unprecedented in both absolute as well as relative numbers. Moreover, through discriminatory policing, discriminatory convictions, and discriminatory sentencing – that is, by design – it is only increasing.

Clinton, and then Obama on the following night, spoke in grandiloquent terms of a new era of economic growth in sight for the United States. But even if, for the sake of argument, such growth could deflate the astronomically large prison population, it would still have no effect – at least not any salutary effect – when it comes to cleaning up the actual, concrete messes this economy systematically produces and reproduces.The ceaseless production of largely unnecessary junk food, junk clothes, junk medicine, junk toys, and their packaging, among other things, creates a literal mess, polluting our world, and spreading a cancer epidemic, not to mention climate change.

It is illustrative that in one sentence Obama mourns his mother’s death from cancer, raising the issue of health care (which his Affordable Care Act will do literally little to affordably provide to most people) and in the next he touts his salvaging of the automobile industry – an industry that leads the way not only in the production of cars, but in the production of carcinogens. Not only does pollution from automobile exhaust contribute to soaring rates of asthma, heart disease, and cancer, among other illnesses; in addition to polluting the air it pollutes the water and soil as well.

Beyond automobiles and junk, one of our most fundamental needs, the production of food, is subordinated not to the requirements of nutrition and health, but to profit. It is a well-documented fact that industrial agriculture employs fertilizers and pesticides that, in adddition to contributing to health problems through direct consumption, create monumental health problems from pollution. Vast deadzones now sprawl throughout our oceans and waterways. And where people are not harmed by these practices, they are often harmed by the intended product of these practices: food that contributes less to health than to obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. From the harms caused by nuclear waste, oil production, natural gas and coal extraction, to those caused by weapons manufacturing, and their attendant wars, this economy is not just a mess, but a tremendous source and cause of disease.

And even if, contrary to not only experience but its very own logic of metastatic growth, the  capitalistic economy could continue to develop without its highly toxic shadow, for most people work itself is an occupational disease. Obama and Biden’s assertion that a job is more than a paycheck is correct. However, for most people work is less a source of satisfaction and purpose than it is a necessary evil – one that doesn’t even pay the bills these days. There is just too much work. As countless studies demonstrate, there have been huge increases in worker productivity over the years accompanied by widening disparities in pay between entry-level workers and corporate executives. Virtually all of the profit from all of this work is going to the few owners. People are not only aware of this, but are literally sick of it.

Instead of demanding decreases in taxes, people should be demanding decreases in work. Indeed, a century ago, when machines were relatively new and were hailed as labor-saving technologies, there was an expectation that the workweek would be diminished to two or three days. As we all know, no such diminution occurred. For the sake of our health, however, it should. For the sake of our health the above-mentioned economic practices that are not only not improving at all but are instead diminishing our quality of life should be eliminated. And when people speak of the mess of our economy, we should not neglect to consider the entirety of this mess. A just political-economic system would not only not reproduce these injuries, it would supply those things that people actually need. And it is a just political-economic system that we should be striving toward, not – to use present-day political parlance – more of the same. For centuries the legal maxim salus populi suprema lex esto has affirmed that ‘the health of the people is the supreme law.’ Beyond other things, this maxim subtends the emancipatory ideals of the Declaration of Independence. While it has been used to pursue harmful practices as well, for centuries it has also been used to nullify laws and practices that in one way or another trespass on the health of the people, however problematically this notion may be defined.

Perhaps the time has come to not only critically reinterpret this maxim, but in the face of a world that is becoming more and more hostile to the health of the people of the planet, to apply it to the exigencies we all today together confront.

Americans Are Disposable - That IsThe Message From Both Parties

September 7, 2012~ Paul Craig Roberts

If political conventions are ranked on a one to ten scale for intelligence, I give the Republican Convention zero and the Democrats one.

How can the United States be a superpower when both political parties are unaware of everything that is happening at home and abroad?

The Republicans are relying for victory on four years of anti-Obama propaganda and their proprietary programed electronic voting machines. For nearly four years Republican operatives have flooded the Internet with portraits of Obama as a non-US citizen, as a Muslim (even while Obama was murdering Muslims in seven countries), and as a Marxist (put in power by the Israel Lobby, Wall Street, and the military/security complex).

Most Republican voters will vote against Obama based on these charges despite the curious fact that no committee in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives held a hearing to determine if Obama is a citizen. If Obama were not a citizen, why would the very aggressive House Republicans not capitalize on it. It would be easy for a Congressional committee to determine if Obama were a citizen. Despite the propaganda, the Republicans in office have shown no interest in the propaganda charges spread by Republican operatives over the Internet.

Either Republicans have no confidence in the charges and do not want to end up proving with Congressional hearings that Obama is a citizen, or the Republicans, having destroyed every other aspect of the US Constitution, reducing it to “a scrap of paper,” feel that making an issue of the last remaining Constitutional provision other than the Second Amendment would be the height of hypocrisy and don’t want to risk opening the constitutional issues that Republicans have run roughshod over.

If the Republicans can destroy habeas corpus, due process, violate both US statutory and international law, ignore the separation of powers, and create a Caesar, why can’t the Democrats run a non-citizen?

Why didn’t the Republican convention raise the issue about the Obama regime’s claim that the executive branch has the power to assassinate US citizens without due process of law? No such power exists in the US Constitution or in US statutory law. This gestapo police state claim exists only as an assertion. Republicans ignored this most important of all issues, because they support it.

Why didn’t the Democrat convention raise the issue that the Republicans took us to wars based on 9/11 assertions without ever conducting an investigation of 9/11? No qualified high-rise architect, structural engineer, physicist, chemist, or national security expert believes a word of the US government’s 9/11 story. Neither do the first responders who were on the scene and witnessed and experienced the event.

Many experts keep their opinions to themselves, because otherwise the federal grants to their universities are over and done with or their architectural and engineering businesses are boycotted by patriotic former clients.

Regardless of these risks, there are 1,700 architects and engineers who have sent a petition to Congress that they do not believe one word of the official explanation and who demand a real investigation.

Why did not either party raise the question of how can the US economy recover when corporations have offshored millions of US middle class jobs, both manufacturing jobs and professional service jobs. For at least a decade, the US economy has been able to create only lowly paid domestic non-tradable (not exportable) service jobs, such as waitresses, bartenders, and hospital orderlies.

Both parties talk total nonsense about jobs. The Republicans say they can create jobs by not taxing the rich. The Democrats say they can create jobs by financing jobs programs. The Republicans say that the Democrats’ jobs programs simply take money from business investments and give it to those who patronize bars and the drug trade. The Democrats say that the low taxes of the Republicans just subsidize yachts, exotic cars, private aircraft, and $800,000 wrist watches for the one percent, most of which is produced abroad.

Neither political party will admit that when US corporations offshore their production for US markets, Americans are removed from the incomes associated with the production of the goods and services that they consume.

Offshoring is defended by both moronic political parties as “free trade.” In fact, offshoring is the gift of what was US GDP to China, India, and the other countries to which US corporations locate their production that they sell to Americans. US GDP goes down, the GDP of the countries who make the American goods sold to Americans goes up. The idiot free market economists call the de-industrializing of America “free trade.”

As an intelligent economist–an oxymoron– would know, destroying consumer incomes by moving their jobs to other countries, leaves consumers without incomes to purchase the imported offshored goods. 

Neither American political party recognizes this disconnect. Neither party can afford to recognize it, as both parties are dependent on corporate campaign financing, and offshoring boosts executive bonuses and share prices. A political party that opposes offshoring of US jobs simply does not get financed.

So, the great “superpower,” the “indispensable nation,” the world hegemon, is going into an election, and no one knows what are the stakes.

Why did not either political party ask: if Washington has demonized Iran, why did the 120 countries that comprise the non-aligned movement convene in Iran last week?

Is Washington’s propaganda failing? Can Washington no longer convince the world that the countries that Washington wants to destroy are evil and must be destroyed?

If Washington’s propaganda is failing, the world rule of the hegemonic power will not succeed. As world rule is Washington’s goal in keeping with the neoconservative ideology, then Washington is failing and is not the superpower it pretends to be.

Most credible foreign policy experts, none of which either political party has, believe that Washington has thrown away US “soft power” by its obvious lies and unjustified military attacks on seven Muslim countries, its encirclement of Russia with missile bases, and its encirclement of China with air, naval, and troop bases.

In other words, Washington’s moral force no longer exists. All that exists is financial and military force, and both will fail as they are insufficient.

Neither party asked why the US is at wars with Muslims for Israel. Why should Americans be losing lives and limbs for Israel while going broke and running up enormous war debts for our children and grandchildren? The answer from both parties is to blame the country’s bankruptcy on what Washington does for its own economically disenfranchised citizens. America’s financial problems are all the fault of Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, housing subsidies, Pell grants–any and every thing that gives a leg up to the non-one percent.

In short, the attitude of both parties is: if you are not the one percent, you are disposable.

Both Obamacare and the alternative Republican voucher program dispose of ill Americans who confront potentially terminable diseases. The American people and the ill no longer count; only the budget counts. Letting the elderly die sooner is cheaper. We can therefore afford more wars for hegemony and more tax cuts for the one percent.

Have any peoples in human history ever been less represented by their government and political parties than Americans?

The US government represents Israel and the one to ten percent. Everyone else is disposable.

Regardless of the political party whose lever is pulled in November, every American who votes will be voting for Israel and for their own demise.

America's Police State on Steroids At the Conventions--When Did Dissent Become a Crime?

Protests in Tampa and Charlotte have been swarmed by police and enveloped in surveillance.
September 6, 2012  |  

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- In cities hosting large gatherings such as the national political conventions or international summits, we’ve come to expect a massive militarized police presence, even as the ranks of protesters thin. But what happens to all of the new high-tech cop toys and newly passed ordinances once conventioneers leave town? They stay.

I was at the alternative journalist flophouse in Charlotte on Sept. 4, the first day of the Democratic National Convention, when I received word of kettled protesters a few blocks away. I had just met FireDogLake reporter Kevin Gosztola, and after forming a mutual admiration society, we raced outside.

We hoofed past siren-flashing police cars blocking side streets, hiking alongside an empty roadway. Walls of blue loomed ahead. Our hands went to our sides and drew cameras. As we neared a broad intersection, protesters appeared behind a double line of police using bicycles as barricades. The entire intersection was encircled by hundreds of ground troops, motorcycle cops, commanders, surveillance units and vehicles. Media flitted along the perimeter and uncertainty coursed through observers. Why had hundreds of police barricaded the protesters, were they going to sweep them up, would violence break out?

In turned out the protesters were conducting an impromptu street blockade, preventing delegate buses from proceeding on their appointed route. The police moved to funnel the protesters into an isolated grass field lined with metal fencing, the “free-speech prison.” It was devoid of life, save for CODEPINK’s Medea Benjamin on a loudspeaker demanding: “Free Bradley Manning,” and “We don’t want a war with Iran.” A dozen anarchists approached the cage and broke into the “Hokey Pokey,” sticking their left arms in and singing, “You do the hokey-pokey and kiss your rights goodbye, that’s what it’s all about.”

It was a replay of the final night in Tampa, Fla., at the Republican National Convention. There, perhaps 150 protesters also blocked an intersection, delaying delegates exiting the convention after Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech. Nearly 400 police penned in the protest, and at every intersection visible, up to two blocks away, squads of police waited in reserve. A crew of seven Guardian Angels had deputized themselves as back-ups in case the police were overwhelmed, their tee shirts and bodies having seen better days.

Police-to-Protester Radio Incalculably Wide

Protests in Tampa and Charlotte have been surrounded by media, swarmed by police and enveloped in surveillance. Perhaps because of the military-like mobilization, arrests have been rare and police in both cities have not prevented unpermitted marches, though they have been tightly managed. There were only two reported arrests [3] in Tampa, and activists who dropped banners and locked down at a coal-fired power plant were not arrested.

On Tuesday, Sept. 4, ten undocumented immigrants were hauled off after staging a nonviolent civil disobedience action. Police also nabbed three protesters, including one for wearing a mask and another for allegedly crossing a police line [4] – something I did multiple times without incident. Of course, I was wearing a suit, and the protesters were a bit scruffier, lending weight to activists’ contention that police single them out based on their appearance.

I moved on to a Planned Parenthood rally taking place nearby. I talked my way through the first layer of Secret Service despite lacking credentials. The crowd was a pink haze of tee shirts bearing the slogan, “2012 Yes We Plan,” with the zero replaced by a circular package of birth-control pills. With the branded tees, pink signs declaring “Women are watching and we’re voting Obama,” and canned speeches for Obama, it had all the spontaneity of a corporate rock concert, as soothing to the Democratic Party machine as a river of pink Pepto-Bismol. Unlike the feral anarchists outside, the pro-choice troops inside the Democratic fold were free of a suffocating police presence.

Drones, “less-lethal” weapons and anti-dissent laws

The feds gave $50 million each to Tampa and Charlotte for security for the conventions, and it showed in the police mobilization and shiny new equipment ranging from bicycles and “less lethal weapons” to communications gear and medieval-style armor for cops and horses. Given the fact that protesters amounted only to a few hundred, it’s suspicious that thousands of police needed to be deployed -- more than were in evidence for massive protests in Washington, D.C. against the Iraq War a decade ago.

The biggest impact of militarized policing is not at the conventions themselves, but in the long term. The two political conventions coincide with the Summer Olympics. The international games proved to be a handy way to push out the poor from city centers by constructing stadiums and Olympic villages that are repurposed for tourism, consumption and high-end housing. Similarly, conventions and summits like NATO, G8, the RNC and DNC are part of the trend of intensifying the policing of poor and dissidents.

In some cases the convention policing leads to a more aggressive posture. In Denver, which hosted the 2008 DNC, 200 police in riot gear [5] used their toys on Occupy Denver last October, attacking [6] them with rubber pellets, mace, batons and pepper spray. In Chicago [7], new laws passed to stifle dissent at NATO protests there in May were made permanent, as were laws passed in Charlotte [8] for the DNC. (The Tampa laws had a sunset clause.)

The covert side of policing summits and conventions is more disturbing. Tactics like infiltration, spying and provocateurs sometimes come to light when raids of activist spaces, pre-emptive arrests and contrived terrorist plots are sprung and the victims snared. Other elements remain covert.

Speculation was rife if drones would be employed during the RNC. A Tampa police spokeswoman denied [9] that any of the “60 local, state or federal agencies involved in the security operation of the Republican National Convention will utilize air or ground drones.” But a private company, United Drones, was adamant that it would be flying drones for an unnamed private party during the convention. The morning after the RNC ended, as I drove into Tampa across the Howard Frankland Bridge with a legal observer, we spotted a low-flying aircraft. It looked like a large model aircraft with no obvious cockpit to hold a pilot, but was moving much faster than highway traffic.

Militarized and pre-emptive policing

Alex S. Vitale, associate professor in sociology at Brooklyn College and author of City of Disorder [10] and numerous reports on protest policing [7], told AlterNet that he pinpoints the “intense changes” in policing to the 1999 World Trade Organization Ministerial in Seattle that was disrupted by nonviolent protests. (The much-reported window-breaking by self-described anarchists took place after and away from the much larger nonviolent actions.) But there is no across-the-board standard, he cautions. “Policing is more militarized or pre-emptive in depending on the department,” he says.

“[P]olicing in the U.S. is very decentralized,” Vitale explains, and “the handling of protests is left to the local police.” At the 2000 RNC in Philadelphia, says Vitale, there was a “heavy police response, pre-emptive arrests, mass arrests, holding people on exorbitant bail.”

In New York at the 2004 RNC, the police response was “pre-emptive,” as Vitale describes it, complete with “mass arrests, infiltration and surveillance.” In 2000 at the DNC in Los Angeles, the ACLU lambasted the LAPD for creating “an orchestrated police riot [11]” after shooting tear gas and rubber bullets into a crowd at a rally for which organizers held a permit. Vitale says there was a “more militarized response” at the 2008 RNC in St. Paul.

Thus, the decision to give protests some breathing room in Tampa and Charlotte is notable because of past convention experiences, as well as the police attacks on Occupy camps in the last year. That may explain the absence of outright police aggression. Given the highly scripted nature of the conventions, 16,000 journalists looking for a story, and the prominence of Occupy Wall Street, chaos on the streets could have bumped the canned convention speeches from the top headline.

Vitale says: “Local officials want to minimize the level of dissent because to them, it’s all a very high-risk endeavor. They don’t want to get caught with the protests interrupting the events in any way.”

The danger of speaking out: 'Jesus, it's a war zone.'

I mention to Vitale that the Occupy Movement succeeded in part because it was theater: People acted out a new society in public. The flip side was the theater of the police response -- from the military-style assault on Occupy Oakland to the stormtrooper gear of Portland’s police to the cinematic staging of thousands of New York police sealing the financial district the night of May Day.

Vitale agrees there is an element of spectacle. He says the militarization of policing “communicates a symbolic message to participants and public that speaking out is dangerous and must be treated as a violent threat. The use of body armor and vehicles is almost never warranted. It communicates a message of fear and violence.”

That spectacle was on full display in Tampa and Charlotte. The day after Hurricane Isaac swiped Tampa, I wandered through the security zone, perhaps a quarter mile around the convention’s outer security perimeter. Stopping at a Salvation Army truck for some cold water, the only other civilian was a sun-crisped local. Appearing dazed, he gestured to the empty streets, speaking to no one in particular, “It’s a military zone. Jesus. It’s a war zone.”

Squads of camouflage-clad cops marched by; pelotons of bicycle police cruised streets; posses of horse-mounted police stood at the ready; heavy-duty golf carts crammed with law-enforcement personnel zipped by; platoons of riot police shadowed protesters; two-man teams on overpasses scanned areas below with binoculars, Secret Service in bulletproof vests secured checkpoints; assault boats plied the water; choppers circled above.

While there is federal involvement in policing conventions says Vitale, “I’ve always resisted the notion that we can explain the intensification of policing as a result of federal intervention. The military, fed law enforcement and local law enforcement have all become less tolerant of dissent. They are all experimenting with new techniques and technologies to aggressively contain the dissent. They are all learning from each other.”

Keeping away all but militants and fanatics: "making money off orange jumpsuits"

In the security state, democracy has withered. In Tampa during the Republican National Convention, what was known as the “free speech zone” was a portable stage on a crumbling road slicing through barren brownfields. The Westboro Baptist Church [12] – the “God hates fags” gang that pickets the funerals of dead U.S. soldiers based on the logic that they were killed as divine retribution for believing “it’s OK to be gay” – entered the zone one afternoon. As a handful toted flamboyant posters of hate, more than 100 police took up position.

A minute after I chanced upon them, a hundred or so anarchists marched on the scene chanting, “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re anarchists, we’re going to fuck you up!” Dozens of reporters and cameraman stalked the edges like lions hunting antelopes. As the protesters encircled the Westboro crew, mixing insults with pleas for tolerance, 100 riot police pounded the street as they rounded the corner. More police poured in from every direction and a helicopter swooped in.

Despite the tension, no violence occurred. Vermin Supreme [13], the performance activist who sports an upside-down boot affixed to his head, gently dissuaded the police from breaking heads by pointing out over a bullhorn that there was no need for aggression against peaceful protests. The anarchists had made their point and went on their way. But the city of Tampa had also made its point. In the militarized convention space, the only groups exercising the right to dissent are left-wing militants and right-wing fanatics.

There is a strategy to this. Vitale says, “We are producing urban spaces in many cities that are hostile to dissent. The summits accentuate that by adding in a layer of barricades and intensive policing.” The purpose of the intensive policing, he argues, is to insulate the rich and powerful who attend the conventions “from the rabble.” He adds: “Dictators have been doing this sort of thing for generations.”

I asked Vitale if these conventions are pop-up police states. He countered, “I’ve been to police states, and you get shot if you demonstrate, not spend a night in jail.”

That’s true -- for most Americans. But at a rally against voter suppression in Tampa, Life Malcolm, a member of the Black People’s Advancement and Defense Organization, described his hometown.

“Tampa is a police state," Malcolm said. "Twenty four hours a day, seven days a week we are under constant surveillance. We see the police on every street corner, in their cars, on their bicycles, or on foot patrol in our communities. All night long their helicopters are whirling overhead when we are trying to read with our children, put them bed or be romantic with our mates. The police beat us up, scare us, lock us up, harass us. You can’t even walk down the street being black, drive down the street being black.”

As a consequence, said Malcolm, “In our neighborhoods nobody comes outside. Everybody is boarded up in the house because they are afraid to come outside the house and be caught by the police like some kind of animal. In the state of Florida, they used to make their money off oranges, now they make their money off people in orange jumpsuits.”

Long after the media and politicians are gone, dozens of local and state police agencies will be back at work, showered with new weapons, technology and laws to contain troublemakers and undesirables. No matter who wins in November, the march toward a police state will continue unabated.