Bernie Schools Hillary On What It Means To Be Progressive

Bernie Sanders makes a forceful point to shatter Hillary's progressive delusions.

"For the Democratic Party is not a collection of diverse interests brought together only to win elections. We are united instead by a common history and heritage--by a respect for the deeds of the past and a recognition of the needs of the future."   -- John F. Kennedy

Last night's MSNBC debate (moderated by Chuck Todd and Rachel Maddow)  between Sen. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton probably had more fireworks than earlier ones-  as it should - since intensity must increase the more Hillary tries to blur distinctions by painting herself as a progressive. She isn't. She's a "moderate"  or in common political parlance, a Neoliberal right centrist Dem. For those who haven't been around the last 60 years or so - and that is roughly 80 percent of Americans - the Democratic Party has steadily mutated from its New Deal origins and basis into something most of us (Kennedy liberals) no longer recognize. Sen. Bernie Sanders is trying to bring the Party back to its roots, while Hillary wants to take it further to the Right.

In essence, that is what this whole debate was about, irrespective of the particular topic: health care, Wall Street's influence, immigration, corporate campaign contributions, climate change or national security. There IS a correct Progressive or Liberal position on all of these, and anyone who attempts to blur over the differences is an obscurantist pure and simple. So let's not mince words.

In this blog entry I am not going to pick over every issue or segment of the debate, but provide an overarching framework of what it means to be a progressive and readers can DVR wind back the Dem debates - or any parts thereof- and see which candidate's claims and arguments meet the criteria.  

The true progressive or liberal then, will embrace each of the following and do so consistently, not ditch any when it becomes politically convenient:

   1) Taxes are of BENEFIT to Society and Increased Taxes are GOOD not BAD!

Instead, too many progressives flee from the T-word out of political expedience or chicanery, despite the fact it is higher taxes that can support the domestic programs (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid)  they are supposed to back, as well as allow for mega-projects we need like major infrastructure repair. (The Flint lead -in -the- water incident is just the 'canary in the coal mine' of what lies in wait if we don't act.)

The must-read article ‘The Next Tax Revolt’ (American Prospect, June, 2009, p. 37) held progressives’ feet to the fire by making them partly responsible for playing into the Reepos ‘no new taxes’ bandwagon.  Part of this is the natural desire to try to protect the lower income quintiles from higher taxes, which leads to gamesmanship – in using the tax code for political leverage. Thus, the author notes:

“a platform of no tax increases for the bottom 95 percent can win elections but it reinforces rather than debunks the Right’s fundamental view of the tax question: that public services aren’t worth paying for- and merely suggests getting someone else to pay for them.”

Many of us saw this at the time, which is why we vociferously pleaded for the Bush Tax cuts NOT to be extended, period, for ANYONE- both the high fliers, and the lower, middle class tier. The reason is that we knew from several analyses that only getting the wealthy to forego them would not cut the mustard. We needed everyone to sacrifice, since the necessary revenue can’t be found merely by soaking the rich (which also gives the Reepos ammo that the Left always attacks the wealthy)..

But sadly, progressives sabotaged their own cause by arguing for tax hikes only on the richest. Their moral center had thereby been obliterated on the issue because they played right into the Reeps’ mitts. In the most recent manifestation of this tendency we beheld Pelosi denying any increase in taxes would be part of the D-platform this year (thereby undermining Bernie's agenda) and also Hillary vowing she'd never raise taxes on the middle class. But when it comes to cuts to Social Security, you can be your sweet bippy she and Pelosi will be first in line to enable it!

2)     Environmental Threats Must Be Confronted – Not Dodged!

Thus, to forge a coherent moral center and abiding progressive position there can be no divergence of interest regarding environmental threats.  This leads to a series of elementary actions that can’t be disputed - at least not by genuine progressives (as distinct from the situational or 'cafeteria' variety):

-        The Keystone XL pipeline must be permanently mothballed never to arise again

-        Fracking must be cut back given its deleterious effects on  the water supply (especially given how water intensive it is, and 55% is done in the most drought –ravaged states).

-        Carbon taxes, either via front end (e.g. tax on production) or back end (tax on gasoline at the pump) must be implemented to prevent our hitting the 551 gT limit of carbon deposition, which would lead to going over the critical 2 deg C threshold.

-        Deep sea drilling must also be scaled back and much more rigorous regulations must be put into place to prevent a repeat of the BP oil disaster from ever occurring again.

The danger to the progressive moral center will come-  as it usually does – from unions -   objecting to “loss of  jobs”. But they have to be made to see that these jobs are worthless if people later pay a higher cost in untreatable cancers, or disasters that can affect large swaths of population.

3)     Wars Must Never Be Launched Unless the Nation is Truly At Risk

The obvious standard here is World War II and the threat from the Axis Powers. In other words, if there is no threat comparable to that threatening our immediate security, we do not ramp up the war machinery nor do we launch or instigate invasions, occupations or even cruise missile attacks- because we understand the consequences of those actions can only lead to more violence. Nor does a real progressive vote on war and invasion as Hillary did back in 2002.

This is also why none other than Chalmers Johnson noted it was our aggressive policy decisions, including keeping militarized bases in Saudi Arabia, that provoked the “blow back” of 9/11.  In other words, neither Afghanistan or Iraq ought to have been entered into – the first was misplaced, since it was 19 Saudis that were responsible for 9/11, the second was entirely contrived based on flawed WMD information from an Iraqi defector named “curve ball”.
 

In the judicious application of a coherent liberal-progresive ethics no war would be casually conducted by a random presidential edict, or pseudo-doctrine (i.e. 'Bush doctrine'). Instead, we’d have an actual declaration of war by congress. This would give congress the opportunity to exercise its constitutional duty, while imparting moral and ethical authority in rendering a war truly just. In this light, we'd have no more Vietnams, Iraqs, Afghanistans or other adventures of choice, finagled outside the parameters of congressional authority. For too long wars have been waged through the back door  at great financial and moral cost to the U.S.  The Iraq invasion, for example, never would have been allowed had an actual declaration of war been demanded by congress, as opposed to it meekly rolling over for the executive branch.

 

4)     The National Security state as it is presently configured is inimical to constitutional rights
 

This is  based on the Snowden- released files, hence we need to scale back the intrusiveness because no truly progressive person can defend or justify a mammoth dragnet sweep program that essentially renders everyone guilty. This disrespects the cornerstone of our republic – the 4^th amendment of the Bill of Rights.

Thus, no true progressive ought to have been in support of the NSA PRISM, Xkeyscore, Muscular or other programs. If you're a  right wing militarist, pro-security state fetishist, it's understandable you'd hump for security over liberty, but not as a progressive. And bear in mind any of those rights lost today will not be recovered later.

5)     Multinationals Must be Checked – Starting with GMO Foods.

Author and academic George Lakoff was quite correct  a year or so ago when he wrote that GMO foods are “horrible” so why is this even an issue for some progressives? You mean because they’ve bought the codswallop that GMOs will “help feed the world”. They need to do more research, and grasp how a tiny bump in larger crops – but which later lead to a range of cancers- is no gain. Not at all.  You’re exchanging 50 million hungry people for 500 million with terrible cancers in 30-40 years. How does that help the overall picture? Oh wait, yes! Immediate gain trumps the future pain! The mantra of Neoliberal capitalism!

6)    Wall Street Influence in Political Campaigns and 'Dark Money' Must Be Checked

Bernie has been all about this in every town hall meeting and in the D- debates. He invokes it because it is critical. So long as Wall Street money infects the political process it will be corrupted: the endless cycle will continue whereby citizens vote and instigate the latest money power coup for putative "leaders" (benefiting from the campaign largesse) and then those allied powerful interests redirect the government to their own ends as opposed to the citizens'.

Douglas Rushkoff, in his superb book, Life Inc. - How Corporations Conquered the World and How We Can Take It Back, has a special chapter on money (Chapter 6, 'To Whom Credit Is Due') and ought to be required reading for every citizen. As he points out: "Money is not a neutral medium - it favors some types of behavior while discouraging others."    In the case of the influx of money from Wall Street  the dynamic favors behaviors such as: weakening of banking laws (making it more likely citizens will again bail out banks, credit agencies, insurers etc.), greater advantage to select traders at the expense of ordinary investors, and lower corporate and other taxes accompanied by less regulation - making us more supporters of corporate welfare than the general welfare mentioned in the Preamble of the Constitution.  

 NO progressive worth his or her salt should therefore be taking money from Wall Street - whether for speaking fees or direct campaign donations via Super Pacs.

One wonders if indeed Americans, even most who claim to be progressive Democrats, really have the moxie and courage to follow that path to the hilt: the one Bernie Sanders advocates. Sometimes I wonder when I hear so many yapping about "pragmatism" or "Sanders can never get it done". If we adopt that mindset we never will, but then we can't bellyache about the deplorable condition of the country we're left with if we can't summon the will for real - as opposed to cosmetic - change!

See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/thom-hartmann/65852/if-you-want-to-win-go-progressive

And:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/gary-leupp/65854/is-a-socialist-really-unelectable-the-potential-significance-of-the-sanders-campaign

Is There A War On Reason?

This question was brought up in a recent TIME essay ('American Students and Politicians Need To Stop Waging A War On Reason', Oct. 5, p. 30) and the answer delivered was foursquare in the positive: Yes, there is a war being waged on reason. It doesn't even take a large degree of perspicuity to see that - merely paying attention to the ongoing public discourse of politicians, their assorted hearings and shenanigans (like the 5 hour grilling Planned Parenthood's Cecile Richards 2 days ago).

In that case Richards was suddenly presented with a graph from Repub congressman Jacob Chaffetz. The graph made it appear that abortions provided by Planned Parenthood grew to a much greater number from 2008 to 2013 than the number of cancer screenings and breast exam referrals.

The graph (above)  showed a ridiculously rising (high gradient) red line for abortions vs. a 'diving' graph for breast exams. Chaffetz claimed the graph was put together from PP's own data.

But keen observers soon smelled a 'rat' on observing the numbers associated with the abortion graph were far smaller than those for the breast exams. It later become clear it was done by 'Americans United for Life'. Adjusting for the difference, Chris Hayes showed the correct graphs on his Monday night 'UP' show with abortions just trailing at the bottom and with essentially zero slope, and breast exams with at least a sold 50-60 deg slope on the rise. (Adjusted for all screening categories the slope is negative but still far different with more positive outcomes than Chaffetz')

This is one example, but shows how reason can be undermined by faulty numbers, or misused data. The failure of reason is predicated on the fact the data was not decent nor were the facts, to begin with. (As also in the case of the claimed "global warming pause" embraced by deniers.)

Then there is Warren Commission groupie Michael O'Dell, who - in a paper on a known disinfo web site (of John McAdams) -tried to disprove D.B. Thomas Echo correlation analysis of the acoustic data published  in the British journal Science and Justice in 2001.  In his paper, O'Dell made much ado over a "60 Hz hum tone" that had already been repeatedly explained by others as evidence of copying. O'Dell then performs a linear regression analysis which he claims takes this into account. (See top diagram of Fig. 1). The problem is that O'Dell doesn't even present the graph in its proper scaled perspective, choosing truncated scales that make his regression line appear to have more gradient than it really does (see my correction of his line below)

Again, reason is sacrificed because the data are not correctly presented - in each of the foregoing cases with the wrong gradients or slopes.

As the author of the TIME essay puts it:

"The attack on education isn't on training our youth for whatever careers they choose; it's on teaching them to think logically in order to form opinions based on facts rather than familial and social influences. "

As I've also shown, quantitative reasoning can play a huge role in separating wheat from chaff.

Then there is the case of outright denial of empirical and visual facts  even when staring the percipient in the face.  I already noted this example in an April 11 post when in an encounter with John McAdams in 1997, on the Usenet newsgroup alt.conspiracy.jfk, he challenged a FAQ I'd written for the group. McAdams complained about my reference to Jackie “climbing over the limo trunk” in an effort to retrieve part of JFK’s blown out skull fragment (later inferred to be the Harper bone fragment retrieved by William Harper). He insisted "she wasn't climbing over anything" to which I then replied, "Ok, let's say she's moving across it to the rear - which shows a frontal shot".  He tried to "debunk"  this as well but a picture is worth a thousand words. And in the one below (from the Zapruder film - frames 313-14) readers can see the FACT of Jackie's trunk motion for themselves:

Now really, if a guy can't even admit reality when it's staring him in the bleeping face, why would one wish to trust him on anything?  No serious person should because a man who'd deny reality would deny anything . And yet thousands hang on McAdams' every word as if it's gospel. Again, a case of mammoth failure of reason and McAdams' assorted ad hominem jeremiads against "conspiracy buffs" even denote a war against reason - as does the indiscriminate attack on conspiracy thinking by the media in general, see e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/11/hyper-skepticism-of-conspiracy-phobics.html

Then there is the resistance among some college students to broadening their perspectives on the genesis of 9/11, every bit as misplaced as the elite national, corporate media's resistance to the notion of political conspiracy. The  TIME author (ibid.) cites a student at University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill who wrote m article criticizing a 'Literature of 9/11' course for requiring students to "sympathize with terrorists". He wrote this gibberish despite the fact he hadn't taken the class or read the actual works but relied on his "personal research". This dumbass kid would have benefited from reading Chalmers Johnson's ‘Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire’,  2000) later said to “have seen the September 11 catastrophe coming”.  Johnson’s 2000 book argued that U.S. interventionist foreign policy and military overextension, especially in the Middle East,  would lead to unintended and unpredictable consequences. Reading works such as Johnson's would have informed the punk about U.S. foreign policy decisions made in our name but to which we are not privy to consenting or voting on.

Then there is the woeful war on reason in connection with human induced global warming. In particular, two tactics of the denier must be noted:

1) Distorting and framing Uncertainty:

This is perhaps the biggest tactic in use and has to do with what has been called 'agnotology'.  This term,  derived from the Greek 'agnosis' - the study of culturally constructed ignorance- is achieved primarily by sowing the teeniest nugget of doubt in whatever claim is made (and as we know NO scientific theory is free of uncertainty).  Stanford historian of science Robert Proctor has correctly tied it to the trend of skeptic science sown deliberately and for political or economic ends .

The agnotologist and his ilk succeed once the following trope is emitted and embraced by the power structure:

‘There is still so much uncertainty, we shouldn’t invest money to solve the climate problem,’

But this is egregious on so many levels that it boggles the rational mind. First, any modern scientific pursuit must include uncertainty. Uncertainty is acknowledged every time I perform a measurement - say of the solar diameter- and express it with plus or minus kilometer values. It signifies that final measurement cannot be presumed free of measuring error which is inherent in all our physics, astronomy etc.

The matter of "too much uncertainty" is also the wrong way to look at the issue for any scientific model or measurement, because they can as easily UNDER-estimate a potential threat or occurrence as over estimate it. Let's take the case of city -busting asteroids which were the topic for discussion today on the CBS Early Show,  with physicist Michio Kaku.  Kaku reported that in fact we have had to readjust our estimates of asteroid impacts based on new observations. Where we once expected a city-buster (say one that could take out a city like New York) every 150 years, we now have to expect it such a killer every 30 years!

In a similar vein, the uncertainty attached to climate models could also be in the direction of under-reporting or under-estimating the full impacts. Thus, the uncertainty could well be such that the runaway greenhouse effect could erupt fifty to one hundred years earlier than previously thought. Or the rising of the sea level owing to melting Arctic (and Greenland) ice sheets could incept a 10m rise as opposed to a 3 m one. This is why uncertainties are expressed as plus and minus values at the end of the measurement.

My point is that the trope expressed above doesn't take into account that the uncertainty implies that the problem is more likely to be worse than expected in the absence of that uncertainty.

2) Misrepresenting Consensus on Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW):

This tactic has worked because too many Americans are not aware of the real consensus among real climate scientists that anthropogenic global warming is a FACT that must be acted upon. Perhaps the first researcher to scientifically and statistically establish this was science historian Naomi Oreskes - who first published an initial survey of global warming literature, entitled  “Beyond The Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change.”

Oreskes analyzed “928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords ‘climate change.’” She found that 75 percent of papers accepted the consensus view “either explicitly or implicitly,” while “25 percent dealt with methods or paleoclimate,” and took no position on AGW.  Remarkably, she found that none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.  

Later studies have found a small sliver of dissenting views, but the more the consensus has been studied, the sturdier it appears, while the dissenting literature is dogged with repeated problems. For example, in Eos Transactions, Vol. 90, No. 3, p. 22 , P. T. Doran and M. Kendall-Zimmerman found that (p. 24)

“the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely non-existent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes.”

In their analytic survey for which 3146 climate and Earth scientists responded, a full 96.2% of specialists concurred temperatures have steadily risen and there is no evidence for cooling. Meanwhile, 97.4% concur there is a definite role of humans in global climate change.

A 2010 paper, Expert credibility in climate change, reconfirmed the 97 percent consensus figure, and found that “the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC [or AGW] are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.” A 2013 paper, Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature, examined “11,944 climate abstracts from 1991–2011” and found that “97.1 percent endorsed the consensus position,” while a parallel self-rating survey found that “97.2 percent endorsed the consensus.”

Despite that, another Mensan (what's with these characters?) Marty Nemko, in a prominent Mensa Bulletin piece in 2010, actually posed these questions:

- Why does the media imply that the IPCC report reflects the consensus of thousands of scientists, when – as reported by CNN – there are dissenting scientists, like Richard Lindzen of MIT?

- If there’s consensus, why on Dec. 20, 2007, did the U.S.  Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Policy issue a report that 400 scientists now believe the evidence doesn’t support that “consensus"?

Nemko interprets “consensus” in these questions to mean 100% agreement, but this isn’t the case at all.  A consensus in the accepted English definition means the concurrence of an overwhelming majority. We have always known a certain minority hard core of scientists (the contrarians – who probably want more attention than being lumped in with others) have existed. People like S. Fred Singer of the University of Virginia and Richard Lindzen of MIT.  These outlier oddballs will always exist because it's in their interest to object, since either they are part- funded by the fossil fuel industry (Singer) or they are able to carve out a contrarian niche in a field otherwise dominated by concurrence (Lindzen).

But by confusing the meaning of "consensus" they seek to try to make the public believe the issue isn't settled when it is.  It would be analogous to a fundie claiming there's no consensus that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old because a few oddball naysayers, like Jason Lisle and D. Russell Humphreys, choose to differ. This despite the fact that we can actually use radioactive decay to obtain an excellent estimate that puts the Earth's age at 4 1/2 billion years.

As for Nemko's second question, the answer ought to be obvious: it's because the Senate is largely comprised of people who lack any credentials in climate science – and hence are not informed or educated enough to offer a professional scientific opinion – only a political one. Thus, they would not have been able to recognize that most of the 400 scientists "who don't believe the evidence supports a consensus" were not climate scientists.

Of course, we now know all this doubt, this agnotology, has been driven by elite interests in the fossil fuel industry as has been vividly exposed, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2015/08/union-of-concerned-scientists-exposes.html

The inability to think critically occurs even at the mundane or prosaic political level.  The TIME author, as an example, cites a 2014 poll by Alex Theodoridis of the University of California, Merced, in which 54 percent of Republicans polled believe Obama is a Muslim. When you also press many of them for evidence, they offer up a Youtube video where Obama seemingly admits it, despite the fact the video has been shown to be an edited fake (just like the one done on Planned Parenthood), see e.g.

http://www.factcheck.org/2009/12/truth-on-the-cutting-room-floor/

As the TIME author notes(ibid.)

"Obama has always been affiliated with Christianity and there is not one fact to indicate he's a Muslim"

The author is correct that "embracing reason is an uphill battle for humans" - particularly when one's beliefs and predispositions conflict with others' strong reasoning and actual facts. This also includes facts that can antagonize and make a person uneasy, especially students.

The final words of the TIME author in this context are spot on:

"If you don't want to read the books and develop the skills , don't take the class, don't attend the college. Spend the rest of your life huddled among those who agree with you.  But know that is not thinking - but sleeping. "

Or in other words, remain a "brain- eating zombie" the rest of your days, to use the author's parlance. Because those who attack and wage war on reason and those who use it really are "brain eaters" (at least of functional brains) and as we know that is the M.O. of the zombie.

"We Caved In to the Terr'ists!" - No - Common Sense Prevailed!

"Bwaaahahahaaa! We surrendered to dem North Korean terrorists! We need to remove 'the land of the free and home of the brave'  from the national anthem!  Boohoooo...Bwahahahaaa!"

Gimme a  break!  A major movie studio makes a damned turd of a movie about killing the leader of another nation  - then has the nerve to call it a comedy. Then  its phony "free speech" supporters (e.g. Judd Apatow, Rob Lowe etc.) whine like brats when theaters correctly pull it, unwilling to risk attacks- even from lone American psychos looking for any excuse to kill. And all this  transpiring pretty close to the same time polls have found most Americans (59%) believe torture is necessary in some or most situations.  Sorry, neither the film studio or the ones clamoring for it to still show the film (The Interview)  have any moral compass by which to set standards for anyone!

As I examined numerous online news sites yesterday evening I was appalled and amazed at some of the stupid comments, which have convinced me that most of the assholes who spout free speech blather (and demand to see this abomination of a flick)  are the same degenerates that support torture. Yes, it's entirely logical, as per this comment I read on one website, after the original commenter mentioned needing to acknowledge 'The Interview' was "terrible" and "objectionable for portraying the slaughter of a world leader as comedy".  The hare-brained response?

"It's good we have drones to eliminate those people with opinions like yours!"

This same jingoistic nitwit replied to a comment by me along similar lines, asking me how I could support using the threat of mass slaughter to halt a comedy. I informed the punk, asking him what planet he came from (Uranus?),  that no one supported either the hacking or the threats of a 9/11 slaughter but merely noted that when actions are taken which include making a film depicting slaughter of another nation's leader then there are bound to be consequences. We use the term "blowback" coined by Chalmers Johnson from his book by the same name.  This is why Sony never should have greenlighted this  $44 m mess of a film. It is NOT a matter of "free speech" but of common sense and sound judgment. A sane film studio, then, has the sense not to release a movie about assassinating a living leader - especially after it receives a heads up from thee Department of Homeland Security to the effect that "the film could provoke retaliation."

I also want to know where these self-proclaimed  "free speech"  people were when Ward Churchill of Univ. of Colorado- Boulder lost his job over an essay he wrote after 9/11, entitled "On Roosting Chickens". The obscure essay, dug up by a college sophomore with too much time on his hands, asserted that those working in the Twin Towers were "little Eichmanns" and conformed to the amoral ethics defined by philosopher Hannah Arendt in terms of the "banality of evil".  No matter how despicable you believe the essay to be, if you truly defend the "right to free speech" - you were (are) obligated to defend his right to write it without repercussions that impacted his life station. But no one with any power or in the media stood up for Churchill.It was as if a lynch mob punished him - and let's bear in mind he wrote an essay, concerning ideas - opinions - he didn't produce a film showing the murder of a real person.

Let us accept as a proposition that a nation - like a person- can go insane, either all at once or incrementally if the right conditions are evident and the right (wrong?) stimuli administered. In the process of going insane, the country's populace loses its bearings, its judgment and even common sense. Because it absorbs PR and propaganda it elects fools to office who actually plan to undermine its very security - even as it applauds torture, and making a movie showing the slaughter of another nation's leader. It can in no way ascend to a larger perspective to allow it to see its actions from the POV of other nations. It claims "exceptionalism" but is really not exceptional at all - it tortures like other nations, and lets the torturers walk free like other nations with dictators.  In the ultimate form, the insanity manifests as mass slaughter and even genocide.

Examples from history come to mind, including Rwanda in 1994 after years of talk radio led the resident Hutus to go on a genocidal rampage leaving more than 800,000 Tutsis slaughtered. Then there was Nazi Germany, where nonstop propaganda from the likes of Leni Reifenstahl slowly gutted the Germans' minds and sensibilities - leading them to accept actions, national decisions they otherwise would reject.  My good fortune has been that on two occasions - one in August of 1978, the other in May of 1985 -  I was able to meet and talk to actual flesh and blood Germans from the WWII era. One  (Kurt Braun) who had been a member of the Hitler Youth, forced to join at the point of a gun to his mother's head.

Kurt Braun, ca. Aug. 1978,  shows Nazi era films and how Germans were brain-fucked.

He showed me a sequence of vintage films - starting with Kristallnacht- that clearly depicted how the Germans' were gradually mind-fucked - to the extent that by the end  of the war they expressed shock that concentration camps even existed.  They had to be frog-marched by U.S. troops into places like Buchenwald and Dachau to see the spoils of what their Fuhrer had wrought.

I submit that the loony outcry from the pseudo-patriots and free speech phonies in the wake of this vile film being pulled -  with few people offering opposite opinions, shows how loopy and unhinged from reason we've become. We're more or less on the same track as the Germans ca. 1932, when one third embraced Hitlerian fascism.. It only remains to be seen what sort of fool we elect in 2016 that might take us all the way. Say some bombastic asshole like Chris Christie, with Ted Cruz as Obersturmfuhrer,.....errrrr.....VP..

As for 'The Interview'  being pulled by the theater chains, most dumbass critics don't seem to process that it was left to the chains themselves to deal with the threats . Other than allowing them out of their exhibition contracts, Sony provided nada nor any guidance.. Hell, it isn't even a matter of some actual terrorist  carrying out the threats. Given the U.S. population is riddled with nuts, many of whom own high -powered weapons, it would only take one lone wolf massacre - such as occurred in Aurora, CO in July, 2012-when James Eagen Holmes opened fire in a Cinemark Theater with his AR-15  and killed 12 and wounded 59. Then all the chains would reap the whirlwind, and all the twits now bawling about "the terrorists won" would be screaming "why didn't anyone see this coming and pull that film?"

Flash now to Hacktivist Hector Monsegur - now a security researcher - interviewed on CBS this morning, who disputes that the culprit was North Korea, as the U.S. is trying to claim. He noted first that "something like this to happen, it had to happen over a long period of time, You cannot just exfiltrate one terabyte or a hundred terabytes of data in a matter of weeks. It would have taken months maybe even years to exfiltrate one hundred terabytes of data without anyone noticing."

Which to me, suggests above all a disgruntled Sony employee who - given the content of the film - found it convenient to even leave North Korean 'tracks' (malware written in Korean) to mislead those trying to get to the source. Even Monsegur agreed the North Korean alleged language links don't tell him much as he's seen "Russian hackers pretending to be Indian, and Ukrainian hackers pretending to be Peruvian" - in other words leaving malware tracks to mislead. So we had better be careful before making wild accusations, or taking precipitous actions without 100 percent proof.

When pressed about the North Koreans as the hackers, Monsegur observed:

"In my personal opinion it's not. I mean look at the bandwidth in North Korea. I mean the pipes going in - they only have like one major ISP to handle all the data for the whole nation. That kind of information flow would have shut down the North Korean information flow completely.They don't have the infrastructure, they don't have the technical capability ...they do have state-sponsored hackers, very similar to Russia, to China and the good old USA."

Monsegur also suspects, like me, a former Sony employee (along the lines of Edward Snowden) downloaded all the info off Sony servers and sold it to someone else. Good luck on finding that lone wolf!

In the meantime, this country - now found guilty of the most abject and depraved tortures  (with a majority of its deluded people supporting them) - needs to back off and stop  its moral  posturing including yahoos squallering about the pulling of this disgusting flick out of theaters. And if you,  like the pundits,  make a really big deal out of protecting  "free speech" - be sure next time you support the speech of those like Ward Churchill too. Otherwise, don't waste your breath. Your 1st amendment eruptions don't mean diddly.

See also:

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-sony-japan-ceo-interview-20141220-story.html

And:

http://www.salon.com/2014/12/18/everyone_caved_how_much_of_the_interview_fiasco_is_actually_hollywoods_fault/


Excerpt:

"emails suggest Sony execs remained nervous about the film’s content, especially the ending. On July 9, Lynton wrote to Pascal, “we cannot be cute here,” saying they could work with “no melting face and actually not seeing [Kim Jong-un] die. A look of horror as the fire approaches is probably what we need.” Rogen, while willing to play ball, appears reluctant to completely scuttle the visuals in this Sept. 25 email to Pascal: “There are currently four burn marks on his face. We will take out three of them, leaving only one. We reduce the flaming hair by 50% … The head explosion can’t be more obscured than it is because we honestly feel that if it’s any more obscured you won’t be able to tell its exploding and the joke won’t work.”

Lynton and Pascal ultimately allowed the film’s ending despite their misgivings and despite the industry’s general reluctance (see Sacha Baron Cohen’s “The Dictator,” a Gadhafi-style fictional tyrant leading a made-up country) to directly provoke volatile dictators in the first place. They had a lot of money wrapped up in the project, after all, and Sony’s job is to make entertainments that make money. 

Feinstein Now Gets What 4th Amendment 'Extremists' Were All About - Will She Act?

"I don’t understand this being bamboozled into thinking that you have to do this to find bad guys. That’s false. There’s very simple principles you can use to find out who is the bad guy and who isn’t and you can do this without violating anybody’s privacy”. -   Bill Binney, former NSA code breaker on CBS Early Show, June 19, 2013

Senator Dianne Feinstein is now learning it's real easy to chirp and posture about the national security state  having "to protect the country" by mass surveillance,  especially when your own 4th amendment 'ox' isn't being gored. It was convenient for her, way back in November,  when she was hell bent to disembowel all fourth amendment protections for Americans by pushing on congress a "FISA Improvements Act" which would, in fact,  have gutted all remaining protections of privacy and basic rights for Americans - by legalizing a loophole known as the "backdoor search provision". I already went into some of this in previous blogs and the reasons why it's a terrible idea. One can  start with the statement of the 4th amendment itself - which evidently Feinstein has no clue about:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

What we conclude then is the NSA, government mass surveillance, mass warrants that Ed Snowden revealed, disclosed a rejection not only of citizens’ fundamental right to privacy but any right to be secure in one’s person, papers, effects. So, screw the citizen, the gov’t has arrogated to itself the right to seize anything deemed personal or private once it’s within its purview – whether a phone record, an internet communication, email or whatever. The powers -that- be may really argue they’re doing this for our own good, but in reality they are acting the part of a fascist dictatorship in denying any right of privacy or recognition of individuality at all.

According to Michelle Richardson, the surveillance lobbyist for the ACLU:

"For the first time, the statute would explicitly allow the government to proactively search through the NSA data troves of information without a warrant.   It may also expand current practices by allowing law enforcement to directly access US person information that was nominally collected for foreign intelligence purposes. This fourth amendment back door needs to be closed, not written into stone.”

Section 6 of Feinstein’s bill blesses what her committee colleague Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat and civil libertarian, has called the “backdoor search provision, which the Guardian revealed thanks to a leak by Edward Snowden, has revealed.  Feinstein’s bill passed the committee on an 11 to 4 vote on 31 October. An expanded report on its provisions was released by the committee the last week of November, and  added details about the ability of both intelligence and law enforcement to sift through all foreign communications databases that it accumulates under section 702 of the Fisa Amendments Act of 2008. (This is the specious law that legalized ex post facto Bush's warrantless wiretaps. Rather than hauling the Bushies over the coals, our traitors in congress found it easier to legalize the misdeeds).

All this is backstory to what's now unfolding on Capitol Hill. That is, The CIA  (according to Feinstein,  in a forty minute tirade two days ago),  breaking into the Senate Intelligence Committee computers and eliminating the key files of the Panetta Report. In this report, the Senate  Intelligence Committee  had the goods on just how vile the CIA torture and rendition program really was.   What we do know now, in retrospect,  is that it was in early December when the Central Intelligence Agency began to suspect it had suffered what it regarded as an embarrassing "computer breach."

Investigators for the Senate Intelligence Committee, working in the basement of a C.I.A. facility in Northern Virginia, had obtained an internal agency review summarizing thousands of documents related to the agency’s detention and interrogation program. Parts of the C.I.A. report cast a particularly harsh light on the program, the same program the agency was in the midst of defending in a prolonged dispute with the intelligence committee. In other words, exposure of the secret internal report would have exposed the spooks as being duplicitous and excessive (and likely unlawful) in their methods of extracting information (well depicted in the film Zero Dark Thirty, btw, which saw the spooks blowing a gasket when it came out, asserting things never went down like that. Now we know they likely did!)


Enraged that their 'cover' was blown, Agency officials began scouring the digital logs of the computer network used by the Senate staff members to try to learn how and where they got the report. Their search not only raised constitutional questions about the propriety of an intelligence agency investigating its congressional overseers, but has also resulted in two parallel inquiries by the Justice Department — one into the C.I.A. and one into the committee.

Feinstein, for her part, has maintained the documents were given to the Committee, not pilfered from computer networks, which I am inclined to accept.  And while Obama officially ended the program  — which began in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks and expanded into a network of secret prisons in Thailand, Romania, Lithuania and elsewhere — he never followed up by prosecuting the ones that did it.  It was left to Leon Panetta to drive an internal review of exactly how far the spooks stepped over the line.

Feinstein, therefore,  ought to be vigorously defending  and demanding the full disclosure of this report - which ALL Americans have a right to know about-  given representatives of their nation did it. But sadly, she appears more indignant at the  violation of the sacred propriety of her Committee. In other words, as NY Times columnist Maureen Dowd observed yesterday, she's more aggrieved at having her 4th amendment rights trashed (and those of her Committee) than protecting the same rights of fellow Americans.


And what of the Obama White House?  According to a New York Times report:

"there was little appetite inside the White House to accede to the committee’s request for all classified C.I.A. cables related to it."

But never mind 'little appetite', the separation of powers is supposed to ensure that the Committee's demands are met.   Hence, the Times quotation of  "a former senior American official" that this  release would "cross a fairly significant threshold" is irrelevant. Separation of powers, also evident during the Nixon Watergate era, meant that threshold should have been complied with.  Anyway the Times goes on:


A deal was struck between Leon E. Panetta, the director of the C.I.A., and Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the intelligence committee’s Democratic chairwoman, to make millions of documents available to the committee at a C.I.A. facility near the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Va. The documents covered roughly five years: from the inception of the program until September 2006, when all of the C.I.A.’s prisoners were transferred to the American military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

At the same time, Mr. Panetta ordered the C.I.A. to conduct its own review of the documents, a move designed to help the agency better understand the volumes of the material it had agreed to hand over to its congressional overseers.  This review, a series of memos that in recent days has come to be called the “Panetta Review,” is the internal study now at the center of the dispute between the C.I.A. and Congress.

(snip)

Some people who have read the review memos said that parts of them were particularly scorching in their analysis of extreme interrogation methods like waterboarding, which the memos described as providing little intelligence of any value.
------------------------------

Meanwhile, Sen. Mark  Udall (CO) has said it was his understanding that the internal review “is consistent with the intelligence committee’s report” and “conflicts with the official C.I.A. response to the committee’s report.” He said the existence of the report “raises fundamental questions about why a review the C.I.A. conducted internally years ago — and never provided to the committee — is so different from the C.I.A.’s formal response to the committee study.”

What is clear to the deep politics educated person is that the C.I.A. - as it was inclined to do with its internal report on the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion (which put the entire onus and responsibility on the Agency) - doesn't want these new conflicts (between what they really did in torturing and said they did) revealed to the public. Hence, the aggressive response to Feinstein's Senate Committee.

But, as in the case of the JFK assassination, the American people deserve to know the truth and not have it concealed from them. To an extent, as Chalmers Johnson ('Blowback') has noted, we are responsible (as voting citizens) for our leaders' policies. If these policies are contrary to our Constitution or International law  (as the CIA torture program most certainly was) then we have a right to know about them. In the end, we will be held as accountable as our leaders.

Hopefully, Dianne Feinstein will bear this in mind when she next endorses another NSA enabling law that takes 4th amendment rights from ordinary citizens.

See also:  http://www.denverpost.com/editorials/ci_25330216/public-deserves-see-cia-torture-report?source=nav

And:

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-parry/54745/how-looking-forward-tripped-up-obama

    And:

http://www.salon.com/2014/03/13/the_true_politics_of_the_cia_senate_spat/

Progressives Need A Moral Center AND Core Principles

Michael Tomasky,  in his 2002 article 'Dems Fightin' Words' in The American Prospect- zeroed in on why Dems have consistently lost the ability to parry, thrust, fight and RESPOND to the Right wing! And as a result keep losing major policy battles.

Tomasky declared it's because they are too focused on "temperate" or "reasoned" policy discussions!

Tomasky observes that the Dems eschewed political point-making and "hard nosed", no-holds barred political partisanship sometime in the early 70s. They replaced it with discussing fact-based policy points, which appeal to "reason" and "temperance" but do little or nothing for core partisans. The very people Dems need to get out to the polls each mid-term election.

Tomasky reinforced this by noting the Reeps are "unified around a central idea which can be expressed in both positive and negative language: that they are the conservators of liberty and morality, and that liberals are sending the country to hell in overdrive. Whatever Republicans do or don't believe they believe in those two hypotheses. This unity gives them their passion."

In effect, the Repubs KNOW what they are fighting for, the Democrats do not. The Dems, by contrast, are scattered with positions all over the board ….and in between.

Hence, they lack any coherent unified moral position, and their leaders often split – reflecting the same chaos.

Now, George Lakoff has come to pretty much the same conclusion. According to Lakoff, from a January 31 article in the UK Guardian by Zoe Williams:

“The progressive mindset is screwing up the world. The progressive mindset is guaranteeing no progress on global warming. The progressive mindset is saying, 'Yes, fracking is fine.' The progressive mindset is saying, 'Yes, genetically modified organisms are OK', when, in fact, they're horrible, and the progressive mindset doesn't know how to describe how horrible they are. There's a difference between progressive morality, which is great, and the progressive mindset, which is half OK and half awful."

 

What does he mean by this?  In Communicating Our American Values and Vision, he gives this summary: "Framing is not primarily about politics or political messaging or communication. It is far more fundamental than that: frames are the mental structures that allow human beings to understand reality – and sometimes to create what we take to be reality. But frames do have an enormous bearing on politics … they structure our ideas and concepts, they shape the way we reason … For the most part, our use of frames is unconscious and automatic."

So, basically, in saying the “progressive mindset is half OK and half awful” he’s asserting that progressives have not forged a coherent, unified mental structure from which to advance their narratives or arguments. Nowhere is this more obvious than the following areas, which also discloses why Dems (supposedly the embodiment of progressive ideals) are so often thrashed on the policy stage, and why they so easily capitulate – as in the horrific December budget deal which gave Reepos almost all they wanted, while taking $23b off the table for our side, essentially leaving the long term unemployed to twist in the wind.

 

1)     Taxes are of BENEFIT to Society and Increased Taxes are GOOD not BAD!

Instead, too many progressives flee from the T-word, despite the fact it is higher taxes that can support the domestic programs (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid)  they are supposed to back, as well as allow for mega-projects we need like infrastructure repair.

The must-read article ‘The Next Tax Revolt’ (American Prospect, June, 2009, p. 37) held progressives’ feet to the fire by making them partly responsible for playing into the Reepos ‘no new taxes’ bandwagon.  Part of this is the natural desire to try to protect the lower income quintiles from higher taxes, which leads to gamesmanship – in using the tax code for political leverage. Thus, the author notes:

“a platform of no tax increases for the bottom 95 percent can win elections but it reinforces rather than debunks the Right’s fundamental view of the tax question: that public services aren’t worth paying for- and merely suggests getting someone else to pay for them.”

Many of us saw this at the time, which is why we vociferously pleaded for the Bush Tax cuts NOT to be extended, period, for ANYONE- both the high fliers, and the lower tier. The reason is that we knew from several analyses that only getting the wealthy to forego them would not cut the mustard. We needed everyone to sacrifice, since the necessary revenue can’t be found merely by soaking the rich (which also gives the Reepos ammo that the Left always attacks the wealthy)..

But sadly, progressives sabotaged their own cause by arguing for tax hikes only on the richest. Their moral center had thereby been obliterated on the issue because they played right into the Reeps’ mitts.

2)     Environmental Threats Must Be Confronted – Not Dodged!

Thus, to forge a coherent moral center and position there can be no divergence of interest regarding environmental threats.  This leads to a series of elementary actions that can’t be disputed:

 

-        The Keystone XL pipeline must be mothballed never to arise again

-        Fracking must be cut back given its deleterious effects on  the water supply (especially given how water intensive it is, and 55% is done in the most drought –ravaged states).

-        Carbon taxes, either via front end (e.g. tax on production) or back end (tax on gasoline at the pump) must be implemented to prevent our hitting the 551 gT limit of carbon deposition, which would lead to going over the critical 2C threshold.

-        Deep sea drilling must also be scaled back and much more rigorous regulations must be put into place to prevent a repeat of the BP oil disaster from ever occurring again.

 

The danger to the moral center here will come-  as it usually does – from unions, objecting to “loss of  jobs”. But they have to be made to see that these jobs are worthless if people later pay a higher cost in untreatable cancers, or disasters that can affect large swaths of population.

3)     Wars Must Never Be Launched Unless the Nation is Truly At Risk

The obvious standard here, is World War II and the threat from the Axis Powers. In other words, if there is no threat comparable to that, we do not ramp up the war machinery nor do we launch or instigate invasions, occupations or even cruise missile attacks- because we understand the consequences of those actions can only lead to more violence.

This is also why none other than Chalmers Johnson noted it was our aggressive policy decisions, including keeping militarized bases in Saudi Arabia, that provoked the “blow back” of 9/11.  In other words, neither Afghanistan or Iraq ought to have been entered into – the first was misplaced, since it was 19 Saudis that were responsible for 9/11, the second was entirely contrived based on flawed WMD information from an Iraqi defector named “curve ball”.

 

In the judicious application of a coherent liberal ethics no war would be casually conducted by a random presidential edict, or pseudo-doctrine (i.e. 'Bush doctrine'). Instead, we’d have an actual declaration of war by congress. This would give congress the opportunity to exercise its constitutional duty, while imparting moral and ethical authority in rendering a war truly just. In this light, we'd have no more Vietnams, Iraqs, Afghanistans or other adventures of choice, finagled outside the parameters of congressional authority. For too long wars have been waged through the back door  at great financial and moral cost to the U.S.  The Iraq invasion, for example, never would have been allowed had an actual declaration of war been demanded by congress, as opposed to it meekly rolling over for the executive branch.

 

4)     The National Security state as it is presently configured is inimical to constitutional rights

Thus, based on the Snowden- released files, we need to scale back the intrusiveness because no truly progressive person can defend or justify a mammoth dragnet sweep program that essentially renders everyone guilty. This disrespects the cornerstone of our republic – the 4^th amendment of the Bill of Rights.

 

Thus, no true progressive ought to have been in support of the NSA PRISM, Xkeyscore, Muscular or other programs. If you're a  right wing militarist, pro-security state fetishist, it's understandable you'd hump for security over liberty, but not as a progressive.

5)     Multinationals Must be Checked – Starting with GMO Foods.

Lakoff was quite correct that GMO foods are “horrible” so why is this even an issue for some progressives? You mean because they’ve bought the codswallop that GMOs will “help feed the world”. They need to do more research, and grasp how a tiny bump in larger crops – but which later lead to a range of cancers- is no gain. Not at all.  You’re exchanging 50 million hungry people for 500 million with terrible cancers in 30-40 years. How does that help the overall picture? Oh wait, yes! Immediate gain trumps the future pain! The mantra of Neoliberal capitalism!

 

In all these cases, Lakoff and others find progressives fracture and divide.  The trope that trying to get them to cohere toward one objective is like "herding cats" is too weak an analogy. This is because progressives inevitably lose their moral voice and center by the incessant divisions. Their mindset becomes “half ok and half awful”.  So why are liberals-progressive losing the political argument. Lakoff again:

 

Every year, liberalism cedes more ground to the right, under the mistaken impression that this will bring everything closer to the centre. In fact, there is no centre: the more progressives capitulate, the more boldly the conservatives express their vision, and the further to the right the mainstream moves. The reason is that conservatives speak from an authentic moral position, and appeal to voters' values. Liberals try to argue against them using evidence; they are embarrassed by emotionality.

 

In other words, the (current)  vision of progressive politics is compromised and weak. Lakoff, according to Williams,  predicted all this in Moral Politics, first published in 1996. In it, he warned that "if liberals do not concern themselves very seriously and very quickly with the unity of their own philosophy and with morality and the family, they will not merely continue to lose elections but will as well bear responsibility for the success of conservatives in turning back the clock of progress in America.”

The problem again is: What exactly constitutes a liberal moral philosophy? I have provided some clues in this post, based on how I see a number of significant and challenging policy issues. My stance is that these ought to be criteria or markers around which a genuine and coherent liberal moral philosophy can be forged. Also with the implication that families themselves can’t exist and sustain themselves if their food and water is poisoned, or  the sources of cancer, or if the climate becomes so chaotic,  violent and unendurable that no human individual can survive – far less a family or larger community.

To quote Zoe Williams at the end of her piece:

 

This is what he believes it would take to refashion the progressive mindset: the abandonment of argument by evidence in favor of argument by moral cause; the unswerving and unembarrassed articulation of what those morals are; the acceptance that there is no "middle" or third way, no such thing as a moderate.

 

I welcome any input from interested readers on this!