Stockpiling inmates

I was unaware that Sarah Palin was still a meme, but the Democratic Party is apparently still using her to raise money and build their email lists. Apparently, because who cares enough to look it up, the former Alaska governor said the US government is "stockpiling bullets" to use against the public. And so a petition has been launched by the Democratic Governors Association to demand an apology because that is important:

Accusing our government of actively stockpiling weapons to use against its own people is not only offensive and wrong -- it's downright dangerous. For Sarah Palin to insinuate that the United States is similar to the tyrannical governments in Syria and Iran who do carry out those types of atrocities is completely reprehensible.

Good on the governors for looping Iran into the mix, rather than a Bahrain or Saudi Arabia. President Hillary may have to bomb them someday, so it's important to lay the groundwork now. Sarah Palin and Iran: Bad. Got it.

Of course, the unfortunate thing is that the US government is "actively stockpiling weapons to use against its own people" (no one cares about it using them against other people). You don't end up with 2.3 million Americans in prison cells by asking them nicely. You force them in at the point of a gun. The FBI alone gets over $8 billion a year to do this. Federal prisons get over $8 billion to keep them there.

Is that the same as the sort of political repression that goes on in Syria or Iran? No, it's different. The people getting shot in the streets by security forces are usually Black or Latino. And no one has anywhere near the size prison population that America does.

(via @FireTomFriedman)

'Corporations are people,' says every American politician

Out stumping on the campaign trail this week, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney committed the following "gaffe" when confronted by some liberal hecklers:

"Corporations are people, my friend. . . . Of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people."

Like the spectacle of a moderately liberal New England governor campaigning as a true, red-blooded social conservative, Romney's remark is ludicrous and liberal pundits have rightly had a field day with it. Corporations, of course, most certainly are not people; they can't be imprisoned, for one. So yes, let's all enjoy a good chuckle at ol' Mitt's expense and hope he provides many more belly laughs in the coming months -- I have my fingers crossed for more impromptu mingling with minorities.

But here's the thing, and the reason I have "gaffe" in scare quotes: Does any national politician -- does any leading Democrat -- actually disagree with what Romney said? Not the rhetoric, which I think most would be wise enough to avoid, but the substance of what he was defending: corporate personhood.

Some would no doubt point to President Obama's denunciation at last year's State of the Union Address of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, which held that corporations enjoy the same free speech rights as any other person. However, that response is something of a non-sequitur, as Obama's criticism was not of the root problem behind the decision about which I asked, corporate personhood, but of a narrow ruling that merely extended said legal status. And on strictly legal grounds -- which, full disclosure, I don't much care about -- it's hard to disagree with the court's ruling, which is merely the bizarre consequence of the even more bizarre and longstanding practice of the state bestowing the legal status of a person on an inanimate financial venture.

This isn't nitpicking. Conflating criticism of the Citizens United ruling with criticism of corporate personhood itself is like conflating criticism of a politician with sedition and treason. I mean, what's the fear, exactly: that, thanks to the Supreme Court, corporations are now going to corrupt Our Democracy by buying and selling politicians? I'll admit such an outcome is scary, but if we're going to be in the business of constructing doomsday scenarios, we ought to be sure they differ from the status quo.

The truth is, Romney's "gaffe" is much like Sarah Palin's remark in 2008 that, why yes, the U.S. would be legally obliged to attack Russia if it went to war with a member of NATO. Back then, every pundit and politician with a blog or a microphone went to town ridiculing Palin's ill-considered and risible remark, arguing it proved her unfitness for office, all the while obscuring a key fact: that what she said was indisputably true. Then as now, the real controversy ought not to have been the clumsy way something was stated, but the truth of what was said.

Criticize Romney and the Supreme Court all you want, the more troubling issue is that, legally speaking, corporations are people -- and that no one in establishment political circles sees a problem with that. This bipartisan embrace of the corporate state consequently causes problems for the 99.9 percent of us not likely to sit on any corporate boards for, while real-live people do indeed reap the benefit of corporate profits, corporate personhood and its attendant "limited liability" ensure they face almost none of the consequences of their bad, and often criminal, decisions.

For instance, while mere mortal, flesh-and-blood people would face serious prison time for paying right-wing death squads to execute labor activists, corporate executives who personally approved those very payments were able to conceal their identities and get away with a mere fine from the Justice Department, the cost of which was no doubt passed along to costumers and shareholders as a whole, rather than the actual perpetrators. Legally, the executives weren't responsible, some prick named "Chiquita" was.

Because blame for wrongdoing can be passed off on to another person -- another person who, again, can't go to jail -- corporate executives can get away with reckless behavior as a matter of course. The profit when such recklessness pays off is huge and, of course, theirs to keep. When it doesn't, as in the case of Goldman Sachs and the housing bubble and with BP and its destruction of the Gulf, the worst that happens is someone like Tony Hayward has to delay remodeling the kitchen in their 14th house by a few weeks while, in true American socialistic fashion, the rest of us chip in to pay for their mistakes. And every politician from Mitt Romney to Nancy Pelosi is fine with that, even if they disagree on how best to rationalize it to an angry public.

If you're laughing at Mitt Romney because, well, he's Mitt Romney: Fine. By all means. But if you're laughing at his remark under the impression his stance on corporations is fundamentally at odds with, say, Barack Obama, the laugh's on you.

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.

The bipartisan attachment to flag lapel pins

Christian fundamentalist support for the modern nation-state of Israel is kinda funny: on the one hand, fundamentalists are some of the most fervent defenders of Israel's "right to exist" (and right to occasionally bomb and invade its neighbors), while on the other, most of them believe all of Israel's inhabitants will ultimately need to die or convert to Christianity before the righteous few can experience the glorious second coming of Jesus Christ, our lord and savior, hallelujah, amen. There's a bit of a tension there.

Be that as it may, that religiously derived support carries merrily on today, with Sarah Palin -- whose name I promise to do my best never to type again -- opportunistically proclaiming her devotion to Israel in her remarks at the Tea Party convention. Commenting on her speech, Salon's Glenn Greenwald notes that despite appearing at a hyper-nationalist right-wing event, there has been no conservative outcry over Palin donning a flag lapel pin of another country, Israel, during her speech. As Greenwald writes:

Is there any other nation in the world where a leading politician can appear in public -- without controversy -- wearing the flag of a foreign country? It was a huge scandal on the Right when immigration reform marchers waved Mexican (along with American) flags in order to display cultural solidarity with Mexican immigrants who were being demonized and living in wretched conditions, as non-persons, in the U.S.; isn't it obviously more significant when someone who recently wanted to be Vice President and is now the leader of this Fox-News-sponsored political movement appears at events in the U.S. wearing an Israeli flag melded to an American flag, as though the two nations are joined as one entity? Why should an American political leader be wearing an Israeli flag?

Sarah Palin of course isn't the first U.S. politician to proudly boast of her support for Israel by way of tacky patriotic accessories. Nevada Democrat Shelley Berkley wore an Israeli/US flag lapel pin just off the floor of the House of Representatives during a 2007 interview with me regarding, coincidentally, the role of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in defeating a measure that would have declared Congress' opposition to a war with Iran:

At the time, AIPAC lobbied heavily against one provision initially included in the Democratic war funding bill that would have barred the president from launching an attack on Iran without the explicit consent of Congress. Asked why the measure was removed, Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) told one of my colleagues at the time that "our friends at AIPAC" had bombarded members of Congress with phone calls expressing opposition to measure. That opposition was due to the belief, as Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-NV) told the Associated Press, that the measure "would take away perhaps the most important negotiating tool that the U.S. has when it comes to Iran."

Interestingly, when I interviewed Berkley about the measure a few days later, she downplayed AIPAC's role in getting it removed, claiming to me that the group only instructed its members to lobby against the provision after the Democratic leadership had already removed it. Sensing that the move was generally unpopular with the Democratic base, she repeatedly tried to shift the conversation to the failures of the Bush administration, rather than her support for an aggressive stance toward Iran. Of course, her claim that AIPAC played no role in getting the Iran provision removed was cast in doubt not only by Cuellar's comments (an accout others, such as Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA), confirmed to me), but by the fact that Berkley was wearing an Israeli/U.S. flag lapel pin at the time of the interview (she will also be "making the case for Israel" at this week's AIPAC convention).

Stephen Walt sure is looking crazier every day, isn't he?

'Homicide bombers' and Sarah Palin

In her big speech at the media-saturated convention that purportedly represents the "Tea Party" movement, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin riffed on the meaning of words and the political manipulation of language, ridiculing the Obama administration for reportedly favoring the term "overseas contingency operation" to describe U.S. imperial adventures in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, over the more viscerally appealing "war".

"We can't spin our way out of this threat," she told the cheering crowd in Nashville, Tennessee. This being Sarah Palin, though, the observation that politicians manipulate language was of course immediately followed by spin and a garbled manipulation of the English language. "It's one thing to call a pay raise a job created or saved, it's quite another to call it a devastation that a homicide bomber can inflict a man-made disaster."

Putting aside the silly attack on a straw man, a "homicide bomber", for those not familiar with Fox News' reporting on the Mid-East, is the term favored by neoconservatives and popularized by the Bush administration for what the rest of us know as "suicide bombers" -- the latter a term the armchair marines at places like Commentary and The New Republic believe is far too forgiving, "bomber" not being sufficient enough to signal that they are the baddie, and "suicide" perhaps prompting too much empathy toward the terrorist as a misunderstood loner. But while useful for propagandists, "homicide bomber" actually conveys less information than the term its intended to replace; a news report that declares "Homicide bomber kills 10", for instance, would not impart the all-important information of whether the bomber died too.

But if we're trying to best express impotent but righteous moral and patriotic certitude in our stories and bravely worded blog posts, why even keep the word "bomber"? To say someone has bombed something is a value-neutral statement, after all -- it could be referring to a good bombing, like Hiroshima or Nagasaki, just as much as a bad one, like that Nigerian underwear guy -- leaving some news consumers confused as to where their sympathies should lie. That being the case, I, for one, propose that we call all those who blow themselves on the behalf of some group other than the U.S. military homicide murderers, just to emphasize that in this instance we mean to say killing is bad. "Breaking: Homicide Murderer Strikes Baghdad Market" leaves little doubt we're talking about some faceless foreigner perpetrating a heinous crime, not one of our boys or girls.

Moving along, the "Palin plan" for winning the war on terror:

"And when it comes to national security, as I ratchet down the message on national security, it's easy to just kind of sum it up by repeating Ronald Reagan when he talked about the Cold War. And we can apply this now to our war on terrorism. You know, bottom line, we win, they lose. We do all that we can to win."

To recap: the secret to winning the war on terror is doing all that we can to win. Now you know. Go out there and be a winner!

That which must not be said

Democratic blogs are erupting with righteous fury over a statement made by John McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin, suggesting the United States may need to go to war with Russia if it attacks would-be NATO members Georgia or Ukraine.  But before I get to the hypocrisy of the partisan reaction, let's go to the tape:

When asked if the United States would have to go to war with Russia should Georgia join NATO and Russia invade the country, [Palin] said, "Perhaps so."

"I mean, that is the agreement when you are a NATO ally, is if another country is attacked, you're going to be expected to be called upon and help.

Unfortunately, though the prospect of war with the nuclear-armed Russia may seem horrific, that is nonetheless the widespread -- though unstated -- view of much of the bipartisan Washington foreign policy establishment. 

Consider that Barack Obama, who once fashioned himself as something of an "anti-war" candidate, in response to the recent Georgia-Russia conflict called for "deepening relations between Georgia and transatlantic institutions, including a Membership Action Plan for NATO". Translation: if Georgia becomes a NATO member under an Obama administration, the United States would be obligated to militarily aid Georgia should it ever be attacked by Russia.

As the blogger IOZ points out, article 5 of the NATO treaty says just as much:

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

Of course, the problem liberal bloggers have with Palin's statement is not that she agrees with the Obama-Biden position, but that she frankly states what that position actually entails. As Ilan Goldenberg writes at the Huffington Post:

Technically, if Georgia and Ukraine were to become part of NATO under Article Five, we would be obligated to protect them and even Obama-Biden support bringing them into NATO. But here's the thing...

No sane American or European leader would ever ever ever give an answer like that . . . . Barack Obama would never give that answer. Joe Biden would never give that answer. They would say that we don't discuss those types of hypotheticals. That might sound like a cop out, but think of the Palin alternative and what kind of alarm bells that sets off in Moscow. Prescisely the type of alarm bells that could one day lead to mushroom clouds.

You see? Everyone agrees that Georgia should be allowed into a mutual security agreement that could conceivably lead to a hot war between the United States and Russia -- but gosh darn it, you're not supposed to be so honest!