The traveling salesman

The United States is the world's biggest arms dealer -- guns and bombs are the only thing America really makes anymore -- and Barack Obama is the national-salesman-in-chief, jetting across the globe to sell foreign governments on how, with no down payment and low APR financing, they can be the proud owners of a U.S.-made weapon of mass murder. He'll even throw in a free undercoating.

While those who fetishize political power and the cult of the presidency would like us all to believe the American head of state meets with his counterparts abroad to engage in weighty, high-minded discussions about John Rawls and the burden of maintaining the social contract, the reality is Obama -- like Bush, like Clinton, like Reagan -- is little more than a well-dressed shill for the military-industrial complex. But don't take my word for it.

"President Barack Obama made a strong pitch for the Boeing F-18 jet fighter in a meeting with Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff," the White House announced on Sunday, according to Reuters.

Not willing to let a U.S. Manufacturer of Death lose out to some limp-wristed French company, "President Obama underscored that the F-18 is the best plane on offer," Dan Restrepo, the Leader of the Free World's top adviser on Latin America, told reporters. And boy, would you listen to that baby purr?

This is the reality, folks -- *cough* liberals. When you cried over this empty suit's election, so did Lockheed Martin's board of directors, which finally had an eloquent new spokesmodel to replace that tired, twangy one. And since taking office, Obama has served them well, waxing eloquently one day about the virtues of democracy, bringing tears to the eyes of the liberal faithful at home and in Norway, and the next selling $60 billion in fighter jets to the dictatorship in Saudi Arabia.

But that the U.S. president is a shill for Corporate America isn't exactly breaking news; it's part of the job description. Still, Obama's sales trip to Brazil does highlight something else: what separates a moderate Latin American reformer from a thuggish Latin American tyrant. As the article from Reuters notes, Brazilian President Rousseff's decision earlier this year to restart the bidding process for the purchase of American fighter jets was seen as "one of the earliest signs of the pro-U.S. shift under her administration"; it wasn't her commitment to freedom, liberty and apple pie -- it was her willingness to buy flying war machines that say "Made in America."

Hugo, Evo, Rafael, Danny -- take note: If you want that imperial power to the North off your back and to be seen as "pro-U.S." in the eyes of the Washington foreign policy establishment, just purchase some war-tested, Obama-approved American weapons. After all, it's better to buy them now than to have them delivered whether you like it or not.

Looking back at a crime against humanity

With the U.S. and its allies inching closer to a war to "liberate" Libya from the man they just six months ago were arming with the finest weapons stolen oil money can buy, it's worth looking back at that war crime of yesteryear -- the 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequent occupation, which celebrates its eighth anniversary on Saturday -- and how that previous war of liberation (or rather, imperial aggression) worked out.

And oh, hey, it looks like Medea Benjamin and I did just that in our latest piece, "From 'Liberation' to Occupation," which you can read over at Counterpunch.

Whistleblowers and neocons

My latest piece for Inter Press Service on the problems whistleblowers at the World Bank and other multilateral lending institutions (say that 10 times fast) is now up.

The Institute for Policy Studies' "Right Web" project has also published a lengthy piece of mine on neoconservatives' views on Latin America and U.S. policy toward the region.

Coming Soon: How this bastard almost killed me.

'Under Obama, Better to Commit a War Crime Than Expose One'

My latest column with Medea Benjamin regarding the torture of Bradley Manning is now up at Michael Moore's site. Check it out.

'Cut Aid for Poor People, Not Israel'

Check out my joint Op-Ed with Code Pink's Medea Benjamin over at Common Dreams, "Republicans and Democrats Agree: Cut Aid for Poor People, Not Israel".

A curious argument

Writing in The Washington Times, Israel's deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon argues that recently leaked cables from the U.S. State Department disprove the notion of "linkage": the idea that putting an end to Israeli apartheid and the Jewish state's not-so-occasional massacring of the Palestinian people will help promote peace in the region:

The WikiLeaks revelations proved that among Arab decision makers and policy-shapers, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was fairly low on the list of urgent priorities in the region. These private conversations reveal that Arab leaders are preoccupied with the looming threat of Iran and only make perfunctory statements on the "Palestinian question" . . . .

Because if there's anything the last few weeks have shown, it's that the views of a handful of "Arab decision makers" in the region are representative of the millions of people forced to live under their rule.

(Photo Credit: Al Jazeera English, "Protests in Bahrain")

1,000 words

Against my better judgment -- my what? -- I'm posting this picture sent in by a loyal reader (*cough* my Dad) as a follow up to my piece on Ronald Reagan and his stupid face.

Embarrassingly enough, I am in this picture both 1) trying to look cool and 2) hating life with every ounce of my being. Of historical note: immediately after it was taken I decided I would dedicate the tattered remnants of what was left of my life to destroying America and the capitalist system.

Unemployed

Yup, like the title says -- just got the "it's not you, it's us" talk. See my résumé here and circulate it far and wide. Also: Send money. And beer.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

The American way

The Obama administration insists that Raymond Davis, a 36-year-old special forces veteran accused of killing two Pakistani men, is a U.S. consulate official -- and thus legally entitled to murder with impunity (oh, the perks of gang membership!). The Guardian, however, is reporting that he is "beyond a shadow of a doubt" a member of the CIA, in the words of a Pakistani intelligence officer, and thus fair game for a prosecution.

And while Davis -- no relation -- claims he was acting in strict self-defense, Pakistani officials dispute that, saying one of the men was apparently shot in the back as he tried to flee the scene, his body found 30 feet away from his motorbike.

"It went way beyond what we define as self-defence. It was not commensurate with the threat," a senior police official involved in the case told the Guardian.

Hmm. "Way beyond what we define as self-defense." "Not commensurate with the threat." I'm confused: is the dude talking about Raymond Davis or the war on terror?

(via Steve Hynd)

Anticipation

Earlier this week Inter Press Service published a piece of mine on the situation at California's Kern Valley State Prison, where inmates are being forced to drink water that officials know contains twice the level of arsenic that's considered "safe" by the EPA and World Health Organization.

Now Scott Kernan, the undersecretary of operations for California's Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (i.e., the Department of Mass Incarceration), has issued a statement that pledges action! to address the problem. The money line:

"We anticipate fully resolving this problem by August 2012."

For a chuckle, here's what a spokesman for the California Department of Public Health told me less than two weeks ago about the plans to build an arsenic treatment facility at the prison:

“Construction should start within 6 months and take 1 year for completion."

That means, at the latest, the treatment facility should have been completed by February 2012. Now for some giggles, here's what the warden of the prison, a Mr. M.D. Biter, said in a memo issued last month:

"We anticipate resolving the problem by October 2012."

And now for some belly laughs, here's what the previous warden, Anthony Hedgpeth, said in a memo issued back in 2008:

"We anticipate resolving the problem by June 2009."

I anticipate having to write about this for . . . awhile.

Prisoners forced to drink arsenic-laced water

I have a piece up today for Inter Press Service about a California prison where more than 5,000 incarcerated men are being forced to drink water known to contain twice the legal limit of arsenic, a known carcinogen. Prison officials have known about the problem for more than five years but have done nothing more than publish a handful of memos wherein they claim to "anticipate" resolving the problem . . . someday.

Those two years of my life I spent as an environmental journalist in DC? Not wasted!

Photo Credit: woodley wonderworks

If you're not embarrassed...

... then you're not paying attention.

From Barack Obama's speech today on the revolution in Egypt:

I'm also confident that the same ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit that the young people of Egypt have shown in recent days can be harnessed to create new opportunity, jobs and businesses that allow the extraordinary potential of this generation to take flight.

Really, dude? The people of Egypt just overthrew their repressive, authoritarian dictator of three decades -- the dictator who you and your predecessors all supported, by the way -- and you deliver the same address you'd give to a bunch of business major jack-offs at the Wharton School?

Are you fucking kidding me?

(via Jack Crow)

What Ronald Reagan's stupid face taught me about capitalism

It was the summer after 10th grade when I learned everything I would ever need to know about corporate capitalism.

Chalk it up to boredom, a wish to spend some time away from my parents and asshole friends, or a simple base desire to ineptly hit on and not hook up with a new crop of young teenage girls -- the more things change... -- I chose, voluntarily, to spend a week of my life on the campus of a nondescript Pennsylvania college learning about the power and glory of America's Free Market System.

And what a load of horseshit that was.

Founded in 1979, Pennsylvania Free Enterprise Week was started by a group of educators and businessmen interested in addressing “the compelling and urgent issue of workforce preparedness.” Born in 1984, I was founded as the result of a condom breaking in the back of a Chevette. Yet while coming from dramatically different backgrounds, the mysteries of fate decided that the paths of I and this seven day course in corporate capitalist brainwashing would cross that magical summer of 2000.

I'm getting teary just thinking about it.

In between what I was later told were motivational speeches from the likes of former Pennsylvania Governor and color-coded chart aficionado Tom Ridge and Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert – truly, I was a privileged youth – the program consisted of this: creating groups of about a dozen other pimply-faced youth who, in something of a corporate Lord of the Flies, selected a CEO, a CFO, a COO, a CDO, a CPO, etc. etc. ad infinitum, to Lead Us. We then proceeded to sell undefined “widgets” in various made-up markets based on the numbers a computer would spit out. Basically we, the corporate elite, would guess at what a computer algorithm wanted by writing down on a piece of paper how many widgets we desired to sell in a given place on a given day. We would then submit said piece of paper to the mercy of the electronic gods.

This was meant to teach us something about supply and demand. Or so I was told (According to the program's website, I apparently learned to “appreciate our free enterprise system” by witnessing from “a practitioner's perspective what it takes to be successful in an increasingly competitive global marketplace.” I believe the website was also written by a computer algorithm.)

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My interview with Medea Benjamin

My interview with Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin is up at Change.org, "Barack Obama: No Friend of Civil Liberties."

What evil looks like

Henry Kissinger and his wife, Nancy, arrive at the White House to dine on aborted Cambodian fetuses.

(via Mariscat)

Photo Credit: Reuters

Liberal blogger denounces violent rhetoric, hints at murdering Fred Phelps

As a sensible, mainstream liberal Democrat, "progressive blogger/activist" Howie Klein must of course view every tragedy through a strictly partisan lens. So, naturally, he knows, damn it, that Sarah Palin is directly responsible for the massacre in Arizona carried out by the crazed Jared Loughner. Indeed, like other good partisans, he knew it before the bodies in Tuscon were even cold (just as he knew Loughner must be a Ron Paul devotee -- you know, that crazy Texan who opposes all those humanitarian wars carried out by our liberal, Nobel Peace Prize-winning president).

This being the glorious age of social media, Klein, like other painfully plugged-in progressives sickened by violent political rhetoric -- but not so much by violent acts embraced by their favorite politicians -- took to Twitter to snarkily pronounce his verdict, with a series of 140 character insights like this one:

And this one:

So, one must wonder, how completely unaware, how absolutely devoid of self-consciousness, must one be to write things like the above -- accusing one's political foes of inciting their followers to commit murder through the power of hyperbolic rhetoric -- while seeing nothing unseemly about posting something like this?

It's a rhetorical question.

Incitement

Why won't the media hold Barack Obama responsible for inciting his followers to commit grave acts of violence?

Photo Credit: Minnesota Public Radio

Seriously, fuck that dude

A few months back, I took Center for American Progress blogger Matt Yglesias to task for arguing that, because the U.S. economy was in recession, it was better to spend money blowing up poor Afghan civilians than not -- you know, Keynesianism and the multiplier effect and all that economic jazz. After he surprisingly responded to be on Twitter, I apologized for calling him a "truly awful human being."

I was much too kind.

In a post this morning, my favorite liberal foil provides definitive proof that he is either 1) an idiot, or 2) evil -- though I suspect he may be both.

Take it away, asshole:

[W]ars undertaken for perfectly good reasons of collective self-defense can swiftly turn into situations that require post-conflict stabilization. North Korea might attack South Korea in a way that demands response, and the response could well lead to the collapse of the DPRK state requiring the victorious allies to administer former DPRK territory. So it’s not smart to just say “COIN is bad, so let’s make sure we can’t do it and then hope for the best.”

What we need, I think, is some form of American gendarmerie—a quasi-military federal organization specialized in police/security functions rather than finding and killing bad guys per se. Such a force would, unlike today’s military, have a valuable peacetime domestic role to play as a flexible auxiliary police force that could assist high-crime jurisdictions with the kind of temporary infusion of extra personnel that can help push crime rates down to a lower equilibrium.** A “surge” if you will. But it would also be prepared to deploy abroad in the case of contingencies. The regular military would be big enough to beat an adversary (i.e., a lot smaller than the regular one) but it would need to call on the gendarmes (who naturally would need a less French name) to conduct an occupation. This means we wouldn’t be caught lacking capacity in a real emergency, but since the gendarmes would be performing a useful peacetime domestic service politicians would (appropriately) feel that initiating situations that require their mobilization is high cost situation that ought to be avoided if possible.

I could go on at length at what is wrong with this suggestion -- first, allow me to speculate that Mr. Matt, as a pasty white employee at an establishment liberal think tank (full disclosure: I'm pasty white too), hasn't had much interaction with the quasi-military forces that already occupy American cities -- but seriously, do I really need to? If you're reading this blog, you probably don't need a remedial class on progressive dumbfuckery.

Anyway, I think IOZ would (and, fingers crossed, will) do a better job.

(via Thoreau)

In the Navy

I did not know this:

Other former Navy officers acknowledged that ribald humor, similar in nature to the sexual innuendo in Honors's videos, is a storied part of Navy tradition. For decades ships have held elaborate "Shellback" ceremonies for sailors making their first trip across the equator. These rituals typically have involved young sailors in drag and licking grape jelly from the belly button of a fat sailor who is dressed in an oversized diaper.