First, they learned that financial markets are hyper-sensitive to steroids, lack of law enforcement, and time-tested shock doctrine principles, and that they can profit mightily from destroying capitalism.

Second, they learned that they “own the place,” “the place” meaning “the potemkin government,” “no longer applicable laws,” “the future wealth of all dispossessed generations of slaves, thralls, and hostages;” and “owning” meaning “complete mastery of all worldly possessions unto the end of the earth and beyond.”  Third, they learned that no lies are too big to tell.  Fourth, they now keenly understand that the religion of financial growth is the most powerful Kool-Aid invented, and now it’s just a matter of getting everyone on the plane to Jonestown.

pic Via Jesse.

Will we have to blow up a continent again before we stop Wall Street?

Surprise, surprise: Wall Street tactics akin to the ones that fostered subprime mortgages in America have worsened the financial crisis shaking Greece, Spain, Portugal, and undermined the euro by enabling European governments to hide their mounting debts.

What can government do?  Bankers own the place.

“The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government – a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation; recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform.” ~ The Atlantic Monthly, May 2009, by Simon Johnson

Eric Holder, Assistant to Attorney General Lindsey Graham, continues to puzzle over who, if anyone, should be brought to justice over mountains of evidence and allegations of torture.  The chief difficulty that continues to stymie Holder is the problem of credit assignment.  Who in the world can he possibly indict?  And where the heck in the complex and confusing chain of command would one begin?  If only some whistle-blower had the courage of his convictions to step forward and start naming names, to heck with the reprisals and damn the torpedoes, that would make Holder’s daunting problem that much easier.

Somewhere deep in the snowy Two-Way Mirror Mountains, beyond the Valley of the Mystical Contemplation of Worldly Demarcations, on the Peak of the Weltanshauung Breakdown at the top of the Conventional Wisdom Divide, where ululations of the wind are mistaken for human misery, and nothing moves, marks, or signifies in the Umwelt but the pomegranate eye of the blackbird…

At today’s White House press conference, Robert Gibbs told reporters that, “In addition to renewing the two national states of emergency executed by President Bush nearly a decade ago with respect to the 9/11 attacks and the war on terrorism, as well as the national state of emergency that has been in place since, oh, the early 50’s, or so, with respect to the existential threat posed by Iran to the United States…”  Gibbs paused, looking around the room of raised eyebrows, asking, “You knew that, right?” as everyone in the room, excepting the correspondents, gave grave sideward glances to each other.  

Gibbs continued, “Oh, and the national emergency due to swine flu, and uh…” Gibbs paused again to look at the laundry list of national states of emergency already in effect or being planned that were listed on the palm of his hand, before continuing, “Look, we’re up to our asses in alligators already, and things only look to get worse: Wall Street bankers gone wild, the mortgage crises, unemployment-fer chris’ sakes, have you seen U6?  Not “our” U6 but the real U6?– a federal deficit ballooning out of control, our inability to pass health care or even fill important cabinet positions, a dead-locked Senate majority, looming state, pension, and personal bankruptcies…the list of crises goes on, and they are multiplying like rabbits O.D.’d on Viagra!  

Enuhweh, rather than declaring national states of emergency individually for each and every crisis that unexpectedly erupts from the last, the President declared an all-subsuming national state of emergency due to the waning of hope and slim likelihood of desirable change amidst these established, persistent, and mounting national emergencies.  The President believes reducing the plethora of insoluble emergencies into a single state of emergency will raise consumer confidence sufficiently to pull us out of our spiraling nosedive into hopelessness and oblivion prior to November.”

Republican Minority Leader John Boehner accused the President of luring voters into a trap of false optimism.  “If Americans want to know the real truth, we Republicans will be glad to take them outside and show them things that will make them cry.”

Dr. Aafia Saddiqui, a Pakistani citizen who earned her Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience in the United States, was recently convicted on multiple counts of attempted murder of US soldiers.  She was alternately and rather hyperbolically demonized by the US media and government as “Lady al Qaeda,” “the Mata Hari of al Qaeda,” and “one of the top seven most wanted al Qaeda operatives,” whereas in the accounts of human rights activists she was known as the grey lady of Bagram and prisoner 650.  

It’s difficult to summarize this bizarre tale as told in often conflicting, incomplete, and often utterly unsubstantiated media accounts, though some parts of the storyline remain somewhat consistent.    The skeleton of the story looks like this: Siddiqui completed her Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience at Brandeis and MIT.  She moved to Pakistan with her husband three children.  After divorcing her husband, she and her children were again returning to the US in 2003, but they never made it to the airport, and were unaccounted for over the next five years.  There are allegations that she was captured in Pakstan and sent to Bagram prison.  At around this time, she was accused by US officials of being a terrorist suspect.  In 2008, she was detained by Afghan police, interrogated and shot by Americans, then subsequently convicted of attempted murder by US courts on flimsy and dubious grounds.

Here’s one fairly apt summary of her case by Paul Craig Roberts, in an article titled, It’s now official: The US is a police state.

Dr. Siddiqui, a scientist educated at MIT and Brandeis University, was seized in Pakistan for no known reason, sent to Afghanistan, and was held secretly for five years in the U.S. military’s notorious Bagram prison in Afghanistan. Her three young children were with her at the time she was abducted, one an eight-month old baby. She has no idea what has become of her two youngest children. Her oldest child, 7 years old, was also incarcerated in Bagram and subjected to similar abuse and horrors.

Siddiqui has never been charged with any terrorism-related offense. A British journalist, hearing her piercing screams as she was being tortured, disclosed her presence. An embarrassed U.S. government responded to the disclosure by sending Siddiqui to the U.S. for trial on the trumped-up charge that while a captive, she grabbed a U.S. soldier’s rifle and fired two shots attempting to shoot him. The charge apparently originated as a U.S. soldier’s excuse for shooting Dr. Siddiqui twice in the stomach resulting in her near death.

On February 4, Dr. Siddiqui was convicted by a New York jury for attempted murder. The only evidence presented against her was the charge itself and an unsubstantiated claim that she had once taken a pistol-firing course at an American firing range. No evidence was presented of her fingerprints on the rifle that this frail and broken 100-pound woman had allegedly seized from an American soldier. No evidence was presented that a weapon was fired, no bullets, no shell casings, no bullet holes. Just an accusation.

Wikipedia has this to say about the trial: “The trial took an unusual turn when an FBI official asserted that the fingerprints taken from the rifle, which was purportedly used by Aafia to shoot at the U.S. interrogators, did not match hers.”

An ignorant and bigoted American jury convicted her for being a Muslim. This is the kind of “justice” that always results when the state hypes fear and demonizes a group.

The people who should have been on trial are the people who abducted her, disappeared her young children, shipped her across international borders, violated her civil liberties, tortured her apparently for the fun of it, raped her, and attempted to murder her with two gunshots to her stomach. Instead, the victim was put on trial and convicted.

This is the unmistakable hallmark of a police state. And this victim is an American citizen.

I was just perusing the DK wingnut poll.

Republicans generally strongly (but hardly unanimously) dislike socialism, labor, immigrants, gays, abortion; and deeply love Christ and the death penalty (Ironic, love is).  On other issues, their uncertainty increases.  

Hardcore wingnuts are frequently the anus within the larger Republican ass, taking up around a third of the party.  While that is indeed large for an anus, what is it, about 15% of the country’s entire population?   Hardly representative of the country as a whole, and entirely over-represented in the media, but I guess we knew that also.

Men are slightly, but consistently wingnuttier than women; Southerners are significantly and consistently wingnuttier that non-Southerners; whites are significantly and consistently wingnuttier than non-whites; age-related differences in wingnuttiness do not stand out, except for some slightly, but consistently greater tolerance of sex and reproductive issues in younger groups (Both innovation and sex are typically more youthful phenomena).

Real Wingnuts:  whiter, Southerner, maler, somewhat older, and secessionister.  Old wounds, dawg.

***

Wingnut political mobilization is little more than a clamorous alarm call spread by contagion, a primitive but effective hue and cry common to many animal species.  The over-representation of wingnut memes in the media is a huge problem.  However, that alarm call potentially cries in all directions.  A lot of Republicans appear to be significantly less immoderate and more uncertain than their hardcore base on many issues.  If anyone could ever sit them down to explain, for example, what Medicare, Social Security and socialism are, and who is really trying to steal it or privatize it, that would be meaningful.

I hope a subsequent poll asks some specific questions about these safety net issues, plus some further things about their beliefs on capitalism, free markets, small businesses, monopolies, bank bailouts, government-controlled mortgage industries, etc.

Upon waking from his midday nap and taking a good long stretch, President Obama meandered into the kitchen. He stood there wondering to himself whether he was hungry, thirsty, or both, when his vegetative musings were side-tracked by the pronounced dripping of the faucet.  Goodness gracious!  Was that old thing still dripping?  He’d been meaning to get around to replacing that old washer for, oh, two, three year now, it must have been.  

Not a life-or-death situation, but all those little drops must add up over time, he thought.  It’s not the biggest job, either, but it’s not necessarily a simple job.  He’d have to crawl under the sink and shut off the water, find some wrenches, remove the stem valve…and frankly, he wasn’t sure if he had any spare washers he could scrounge around for that would fit.  He might have to take a trip down to the hardware store.  Even if he had some washers, there’s the problem of tightening them just so.  Too tight, and the handle won’t turn.  Too loose, it still drips.  But those were just technical issues.

The President drifted off into another room as these ideas were percolating through his thoughts, hemming and hawing over the Republican accusations of runaway government spending, and lingering mightily at the prospect of  what the water utility’s lobbyists might say.  He didn’t want to rush headlong into the job hastily getting everybody riled up, but neither did he want to fritter away another afternoon just lolling around or warming a chair.  That’s not what he came to Washington for.  The last thing he wanted was to be pulled up short in the middle of the job, ending up with a useless sink.  

He vacillated between considerations, ambled about, hesitated, then moved slowly on again, before finally deciding he wasn’t going to diddle daddle with this fiddle faddle any longer.  Not this time.  Fixing that faucet was the right thing to do.  Heck, he could probably stimulate the economy, save the taxpayer some money over the long haul, and claim environmental stewardship, while he’s at it.  He reckoned he should probably just mosey on down to the hardware store, and take a gander at their washers, first thing in the morning.