Saturday, October 31, 2015

Not Debatable?  (Scariest Stock Market Ever?)  Ryan Rules, Riots & Reduces Social Security/Medicare/Disability  (Not Holding GWB Accountable)  Afghanistan Smoke Burns USA USA USA  (The Demobilization of the US People and the Spectacle of Election 2016) Happy Halloween!



Lots of scary stuff going on now.

And you just thought it was the Halloween madness.

Obama Keeps Pentagon Spigot Open
A Military-Backed Comedian Will Be Guatemala’s Next President & Activists Aren’t Laughing

Reminder:  The Bubonic Plague Is Alive and Well

Reliable Rebel
Jeremy Corbyn and the Revival of the Radical Left

The disciples of New Labour lost spectacularly to Jeremy Corbyn, an easy-going leftist. His strategy was simple: he talked in plain terms about the moral wrongness of a Tory agenda to which Labour had ceased to offer clear opposition—and about what Labour could do to create a more just and equal country. The party once closely identified with the cautious, compromised politics of the Third Way is now, against all expectations, led by a socialist.

Corbyn is a mainstay of the British left. For years, he has demonstrated alongside trade unionists, left-wing students, and assorted other radicals.
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The Scariest Halloween Stock Market Chart

The stock market's advance is immortal - isn't it?
What would Halloween be without a scary chart of "The Stock Market That Cannot Die?"   We know the stock market cannot die because we're constantly told it's immortal:


(Click on photo to enlarge)

You know the drill:  the Federal Reserve will never let the market fall, never, never, never: it will continue to loft higher for all time, in immortal glory.

Like a blood-sucking vampire, the market is parasitically feeding off the real economy. As the host weakens, the parasite increases its control. Now the market is telling the real economy:  if I die, you die, too.
The entire Status Quo is now utterly dependent on a rising stock market:  not just for the illusion of the wealth effect, but for tax revenues, pension fund stability, and the fantasy that a rising market is a substitute for a healthy economy.
It's terribly frightening to be in thrall to a parasite that will bleed its host dry to maintain itself. But that's not the scariest possibility.
The scariest possibility is that the stock market will fall despite all the promises that its advance is immortal.
If this were to happen, all those "safe" index funds would implode along with the broad market.
One of my pumpkins whose entire 401K retirement account is in "safe" S&P 500 index funds looked at the chart above and completely lost it. The possibility that the market is not only not immortal but might be poised for a staggering decline can drive even the most trusting investor to drink.


Posted by Charles Hugh Smith
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A calm, definitive take about a very scary situation from my buddy at The Green Eagle:

Working the Refs
Well, now that the dust has cleared from the most recent Republican excuse for a debate, it is becoming more clear what they accomplished.  Here's a short list:

1.  Managing to define the totally business-controlled CNBC as a dastardly part of the "liberal press," out to do them harm by asking any question they don't find it convenient to answer.

2.  Finally make it totally legitimate to deal with any question that challenges them in any way, by ignoring it and simply going off on a tirade against the press, accompanied by thunderous applause from their hand-picked audience of ignorant savages.

This method of dealing with things was, of course, raised from an occasional dodge to SOP by Sarah Palin. This is one of the legacies that she left us:  utterly misplaced anger is now a substitute to answering a question.

3.  By canceling the upcoming debate that was to have been run by NBC, they have established that they do not need to have even the pretense that this is a real effort to examine the candidates' beliefs.  They are now free to run these debates as nothing but a cynical political sideshow; a self-awarded freedom they will certainly take advantage of.

4. Surrendering to the candidates the right to determine what sort of questions get asked.  Given the cynical bunch of grifters they have assembled, you can imagine how that will work out.

There has been a decade long (at least) trend among Republican candidates to insist that they not be forced to answer any questions they don't want to, or submit to anything even resembling an impartial interview.

They have turned the right of the public to know who the candidates are, into the right of the candidates to have nothing known about them except their packaged publicity. This is ideal for Republicans, of course, because their real agenda - stripping the country of its wealth, to give to their rich backers - is hardly likely to have widespread appeal.

In order to win elections, it is vital to them that they prevent any real information about themselves from seeing the light of day.  This newest manipulation of the debate process is one more step toward an election process that is as forthright as a Volkswagen pollution control system. 

And from my buddy at The Field Negro:

I am still trying to figure out why the RNC is still whining about the debates Wednesday night.

They actually cut ties with NBC because of the perceived bias against the poor republicans by that network.

I honestly don't get it. Obviously Ben Carson and company does not understand the meaning of the word debate. In a debate you are supposed to get tough questions and answer them to the satisfaction of the person asking them.

"'We were betrayed,” he (Rance Priebus) said, “and I think the candidates were betrayed by CNBC.”'

Huh? "Betrayed"? These men (and woman) are trying to lead the most powerful country on earth and they can't handle a couple of questions from CNBC moderators? That's not a good look. Hillary hung in for 11 hours while facing down Trey Howdy Gowdy and his faux Benghazi (drink,drink, gulp) hearings. They are lucky Black folks don't care about them, because, like Hillary, they would have had to deal with the Black Lives Matter kids as well.

“It’s not about me and gotcha questions, it’s abut the American people and whether they have the right to actually hear what we think,” Carson insisted.

Ben, we hear what you think,  we just can't believe that you are serious.

As a very dangerous (and highly media-touted) politician has been being called a wonk by "reporters" for many years (although how a real wonk could be so ignorant about so many academic/scientific subjects is a topic for another essay), it may be more enlightening to call him what he really is.

An economics-incompetent ideologue who demands obedience to his secretive decisions about what should be funded (and should not be funded) with U.S. taxpayer money.

Paul Ryan Wants to Shut Down the Government, Permanently 

Everyone has seen the news stories about how Representative Paul Ryan, the leading candidate to be the next Speaker of the House, is a budget wonk. That should make everyone feel good, since we would all like to think a person in this position understands the ins and outs of the federal budget. But instead of telling us about how much Ryan knows about the budget (an issue on which reporters actually don't have insight), how about telling us what Ryan says about the budget?

It is possible to say things about what Ryan says, since he has said a lot on this topic and some of it is very clear. In addition to wanting to privatize both Social Security and Medicare, Ryan has indicated that he essentially wants to shut down the federal government in the sense of taking away all of the money for the non-military portion of the budget. This fact is one that is easy to find if a reporter is willing to do five minutes of research.

Ryan directed the Congressional Budget Office to score his budget plans back in 2012. The score of his plan showed the non-Social Security, non-Medicare portion of the federal budget shrinking to 3.5 percent of GDP by 2050 (page 16). This number is roughly equal to current spending on the military.

Ryan has indicated that he does not want to see the military budget cut to any substantial degree. . Following Ryan's plan, in 35 years we would have nothing left over after paying for the military.

Just to be clear, this was not some offhanded gaffe where Ryan might have misspoke. He supervised the CBO analysis. CBO doesn't write-down numbers in a dark corner and then throw them up on their website to embarrass powerful members of Congress. As the document makes clear, they consulted with Ryan in writing the analysis to make sure that they were accurately capturing his program.

So what percent of people in this country know that the next Speaker of the House would like to permanently shut down most of the government? What percent even of elite educated policy types even know this fact? My guess is almost no one, we just know he is a policy wonk.

And our peace prize president ushers us back into Afghanistan for decades to come?

Wouldn't you have liked to be a fly on the wall in the meetings urging that?

Some taxpayer input, at least, should have been a part of the decision-making process, shouldn't it?

US Tax Dollars up in Smoke Over Afghanistan
Citizens Earn it, Government Burns it, Creating a Haze

Want to meet a government official who tells the truth — in spades? Then you will definitely want to set aside time to hear of the stunning findings of the top US investigator for spending in Afghanistan.
The biggest problem is not theft, but waste, he says. For example, the $500 million spent on airplanes that no one could fly, and that ultimately had to be scrapped, a process that cost yet more thousands of dollars. Or the gift of soybeans, which the Afghans will not eat and will not grow. Or how about the creation of a navy for Afghanistan — a country that is landlocked?

The biggest source of the problem is the lack of accountability, he says. But that is changing.

“God bless whistleblowers,” says Sopko. “If we didn’t have them, things would be a hundred times worse.” And some of his sources of information would surprise you.

Not all of the money was wasted in Afghanistan, he says. You cannot believe where all the money (from corruption in Afghanistan) has ended up — but a lot of it is here in the United States.”

If anyone can find it, it’s probably John Sopko.


Click HERE to Download Mp3
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More Halloween scares needed?

Not really.

'Truth' Recalls a Lost Opportunity to Hold George Bush Accountable

By Charles Pierce, Esquire
30 October 15
On the story of Dan Rather and Mary Mapes' pursuit of the 43rd president's National Guard records, and a parallel — and more successful — effort at the "Boston Globe."
indly Doc Maddow had Dan Rather on her show on Thursday to talk about the new movie, Truth, which depicts the events surrounding the 60 Minutes II investigation into George W. Bush's still-largely-vaporous service in the Texas Air National Guard.

According to people I know who have seen it, the movie portrays both Rather and producer Mary Mapes (played by Cate Blanchett) as people who got the story right, but got the details just wrong enough to leave the door open for attacks on their credibility from Republican ratfckers. The attacks were so virulent that CBS caved completely, Mapes and Rather wound up losing their jobs, and the story fairly well disappeared from the news, even though there is a wealth of other detail to suggest that C-Plus Augustus ducked out of his sworn duty—including Garry Trudeau's bounty of 10K to anyone who can prove C+A made it to Alabama, which, as far as I know, remains uncollected.
As kindly Doc Maddow pointed out, CBS was far from the only news organization to question Bush's devotion to duty. In September of 2004, The Boston Globe ran a story in which the newspaper proved fairly convincingly that, at least twice, Bush clearly shirked his obligations. One of these episodes should have gotten him a round-trip ticket to Tan Son Nhut Airbase as punishment but, curiously, it did not.

The story was written by Walter Robinson, and reported out by the Globe's crack Spotlight team. I mention all of this because the two stories are about to collide at a multiplex near you. At about the same time that Truth opens, a movie called Spotlight also will be released, and it depicts the battle that the Globe undertook to bring the scandal of clerical sex-abuse in the Boston Archdiocese to light. A lot of the same people, including Robinson, Sasha Pfeiffer, Steve Kurkjian, and my old pal Mike Rezendes, who are portrayed in Spotlight, shared a by-line on the Bush story 11 years ago. These were great reporters then, and they were great reporters when they cracked the Church story, and they are still great reporters today. And C-Plus Augustus dodged a 50-caliber shell when the attack on CBS killed this story for good.
Comments:
# Philothustra 2015-10-30

Exactly. I was in Texas in 1968-74 and knew some of Dubya's playboy pals-- big cokeheads, not that I care. Dubya himself was a bighat playboy personified, riding on the coattails of papa daddy's stolen fortune and the Prescott Bush Nazi legacy.
Dubya stole every office he was given, but Cheney never let him near the reins of power. That's why he was kept in Texas at the Crawford Ranch for three months in the early days of the "Bush" presidency. He was never supposed to be in DC when 9/11 came down-- they knew he was too scatterbrained to trust to give live press conferences.
The probability of a terrorist attack= 100%
The source? New Pearl Harbor Team, Dick Cheney, conspirator in chief.
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The Demobilization of the US People and the Spectacle of Election 2016

Thursday, 29 October 2015
Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
You may not know it, but you're living in a futuristic science fiction novel. And that's a fact. If you were to read about our American world in such a novel, you would be amazed by its strangeness. Since you exist right smack in the middle of it, it seems like normal life (Donald Trump and Ben Carson aside). But make no bones about it, so far this has been a bizarre American century.
Let me start with one of the odder moments we've lived through and give it the attention it's always deserved. If you follow my train of thought and the history it leads us into, I guarantee you that you'll end up back exactly where we are - in the midst of the strangest presidential campaign in our history.
To get a full frontal sense of what that means, however, let's return to late September 2001. I'm sure you remember that moment, just over two weeks after those World Trade Center towers came down and part of the Pentagon was destroyed, leaving a jangled secretary of defense instructing his aides, "Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not."
I couldn't resist sticking in that classic Donald Rumsfeld line, but I leave it to others to deal with Saddam Hussein, those fictional weapons of mass destruction, the invasion of Iraq, and everything that's happened since, including the establishment of a terror "caliphate" by a crew of Islamic extremists brought together in American military prison camps - all of which you wouldn't believe if it were part of a sci-fi novel. The damn thing would make Planet of the Apeslook like outright realism.
Instead, try to recall the screaming headlines that labeled the 9/11 attacks "the Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century" or "a new Day of Infamy," and the attackers "the kamikazes of the twenty-first century." Remember the moment when President George W. Bush, bullhorn in hand, stepped onto the rubble at "Ground Zero" in New York, draped his arm around a fireman, and swore payback in the name of the American people, as members of an impromptu crowd shouted out things like "Go get 'em, George!"
"I can hear you! I can hear you!" he responded. "The rest of the world hears you! And the people - and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!"
"USA! USA! USA!" chanted the crowd.
Then, on September 20th, addressing Congress, Bush added, "Americans have known wars, but for the past 136 years they have been wars on foreign soil, except for one Sunday in 1941." By then, he was already talking about "our war on terror."
Now, hop ahead to that long-forgotten moment when he would finally reveal just how a twenty-first-century American president should rally and mobilize the American people in the name of the ultimate in collective danger. As CNN put it at the time, "President Bush... urged Americans to travel, spend, and enjoy life." His actual words were:
"And one of the great goals of this nation's war is to restore public confidence in the airline industry and to tell the traveling public, get on board, do your business around the country, fly and enjoy America's great destination spots. Go down to Disney World in Florida, take your families and enjoy life the way we want it to be enjoyed."
So we went to war in Afghanistan and later Iraq to rebuild faith in flying. Though that got little attention at the time, tell me it isn't a detail out of some sci-fi novel. Or put another way, as far as the Bush administration was then concerned, Rosie the Riveter was moldering in her grave and the model American for mobilizing a democratic nation in time of war was Rosie the Frequent Flyer. It turned out not to be winter in Valley Forge, but eternal summer in Orlando. From then on, as the Bush administration planned its version of revenge-cum-global-domination, the message it sent to the citizenry was:  go about your business and leave the dirty work to us.
Disney World opened in 1971, but for a moment imagine that it had been in existence in 1863 and that, more than seven score years ago, facing a country in the midst of a terrible civil war, Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg had said this:
"It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us - that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain - that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom at Disney World - and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish for lack of vacations in Florida."
Or imagine that, in response to that "day of infamy," the Pearl Harbor of the twentieth century, Franklin Roosevelt had gone before Congress and, in an address to the nation, had said:
"Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger. With confidence in our airlines, with the unbounding determination of our people to visit Disney World, we will gain the inevitable triumph - so help us God."
If those are absurdities, then so is twenty-first-century America. By late September 2001, though no one would have put it that way, the demobilization of the American people had become a crucial aspect of Washington's way of life. The thought that Americans might be called upon to sacrifice in any way in a time of peril had gone with the wind. Any newly minted version of the classic "don't tread on me" flag of the revolutionary war era would have had to read: "don't bother them."
The Spectacle of War
The desire to take the American public out of the "of the people, by the people, for the people" business can minimally be traced back to the Vietnam War, to the moment when a citizen's army began voting with its feet and antiwar sentiment grew to startling proportions not just on the home front, but inside a military in the field. It was then that the high command began to fear the actual disintegration of the US Army.
Not surprisingly, there was a deep desire never to repeat such an experience. (No more Vietnams! No more antiwar movements!) As a result, on January 27, 1973, with a stroke of the pen, President Richard Nixon abolished the draft, and so the citizen's army. With it went the sense that Americans had an obligation to serve their country in time of war (and peace).
From that moment on, the urge to demobilize the American people and send them to Disney World would only grow. First, they were to be removed from all imaginable aspects of war making. Later, the same principle would be applied to the processes of government and to democracy itself. In this context, for instance, you could write a history of the monstrous growth of secrecy and surveillance as twin deities of the American state: the urge to keep ever more information from the citizenry and to see ever more of what those citizens were doing in their own private time. Both should be considered demobilizing trends.
This twin process certainly has a long history in the US, as any biography of former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover would indicate. Still, the expansion of secrecy and surveillance in this century has been a stunning development, as ever-larger parts of the national security state and the military (especially its 70,000-strong Special Operations forces) fell into the shadows. In these years, American "safety" and "security" were redefined in terms of a citizen's need not to know. Only bathed in ignorance, were we safest from the danger that mattered most (Islamic terrorism - a threat of microscopic proportions in the continental United States).
As the American people were demobilized from war and left, in the post-9/11 era, with the single duty of eternally thanking and praising our "warriors" (or our "wounded warriors"), war itself was being transformed into a new kind of American entertainment spectacle. In the 1980s, in response to the Vietnam experience, the Pentagon began to take responsibility not just for making war but for producing it. Initially, in the invasions of Grenada and Panama, this largely meant sidelining the media, which many US commanders still blamed for defeat in Vietnam.
By the First Gulf War of 1991, however, the Pentagon was prepared to produce a weeks-long televised extravaganza, which would enter the living rooms of increasingly demobilized Americans as a riveting show. It would have its own snazzy graphics, logos, background music, and special effects (including nose-cone shots of targets obliterated). In addition, retired military men were brought in to do Monday Night Football-style play-by-play and color commentary on the fighting in progress. In this new version of war, there were to be no rebellious troops, no body bags, no body counts, no rogue reporters, and above all no antiwar movement. In other words, the Gulf War was to be the anti-Vietnam. And it seemed to work... briefly.
Unfortunately for the first Bush administration, Saddam Hussein remained in power in Baghdad, the carefully staged post-war "victory" parades faded fast, the major networks lost ad money on the Pentagon's show, and the ratings for war as entertainment sank. More than a decade later, the second Bush administration, again eager not to repeat Vietnam and intent on sidelining the American public while it invaded and occupied Iraq, did it all over again.
This time, the Pentagon sent reporters to "boot camp," "embedded" them with advancing units, built a quarter-million-dollar movie-style set for planned briefings in Doha, Qatar, and launched its invasion with "decapitation strikes" over Baghdad that lit the televised skies of the Iraqi capital an eerie green on TVs across America. This spectacle of war, American-style, turned out to have a distinctly Disney-esque aura to it. (Typically, however, those strikes produced scores of dead Iraqis, but managed to "decapitate" not a single targeted Iraqi leader from Saddam Hussein on down.) That spectacle, replete with the usual music, logos, special effects, and those retired generals-cum-commentators - this time even more tightly organized by the Pentagon - turned out again to have a remarkably brief half-life.
The Spectacle of Democracy
War as the first demobilizing spectacle of our era is now largely forgotten because, as entertainment, it was reliant on ratings, and in the end, it lost the battle for viewers. As a result, America's wars became ever more an activity to be conducted in the shadows beyond the view of most Americans.
If war was the first experimental subject for the demobilizing spectacle, democracy and elections turned out to be remarkably ripe for the plucking as well. As a result, we now have the never-ending presidential campaign season. In the past, elections did not necessarily lack either drama or spectacle.
In the nineteenth century, for instance, there were campaign torchlight parades, but those were always spectacles of mobilization. No longer. Our new 1% elections call for something different.
It's no secret that our presidential campaigns have morphed into a "billionaire's playground," even as the right to vote has become more constrained. These days, it could be said that the only group of citizens that automatically mobilizes for such events is "the billionaire class" (as Bernie Sanders calls it). Increasingly, many of the rest of us catch the now year-round spectacle demobilized in our living rooms, watching journalists play... gasp!... journalists on TV and give American democracy that good old Gotcha!
In 2001, George W. Bush wanted to send us all to Disney World (on our own dollar, of course). In 2015, Disney World is increasingly coming directly to us.
After all, at the center of election 2016 is Donald Trump. For a historical equivalent, you would have to imagine P.T. Barnum, who could sell any "curiosity" to the American public, running for president. (In fact, he did serve two terms in the Connecticut legislature and was, improbably enough, the mayor of Bridgeport.) Meanwhile, the TV "debates" that Trump and the rest of the candidates are now taking part in months before the first primary have left the League of Women Voters and the Commission on Presidential Debates in the dust. These are the ratings-driven equivalent of food fights encased in ads, with the "questions" clearly based on what will glue eyeballs.
Here, for instance, was CNN host Jake Tapper's first question of the second Republican debate:
"Mrs. Fiorina, I want to start with you. Fellow Republican candidate, and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, has suggested that your party's frontrunner, Mr. Donald Trump, would be dangerous as president. He said he wouldn't want, quote, 'such a hot head with his finger on the nuclear codes.' You, as well, have raised concerns about Mr. Trump's temperament. You've dismissed him as an entertainer. Would you feel comfortable with Donald Trump's finger on the nuclear codes?"
And the event only went downhill from there as responses ranged from non-answers to (no kidding!) a discussion of the looks of the candidates and yet the event proved such a ratings smash that its 23 million viewers were compared favorably to viewership of National Football League games.
In sum, a citizen's duty, whether in time of war or elections, is now, at best, to watch the show, or at worst, to see nothing at all.
This reality has been highlighted by the whistleblowers of this generation, including Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and John Kiriakou. Whenever they have revealed something of what our government is doing beyond our sight, they have been prosecuted with a fierceness unique in our history and for a simple enough reason.
Those who watch us believe themselves exempt from being watched by us. That's their definition of "democracy." When "spies" appear in their midst, even if those whistleblowers are "spies" for us, they are horrified at a visceral level and promptly haul out the World War I-era Espionage Act. They now expect a demobilized response to whatever they do and when anything else is forthcoming, they strike back in outrage.
A Largely Demobilized Land
A report on a demobilized America shouldn't end without some mention of at least one counter-impulse. All systems assumedly have their opposites lurking somewhere inside them, which brings us to Bernie Sanders. He's the figure who doesn't seem to compute in this story so far.
All you had to do was watch the first Democratic debate to sense what an anomaly he is, or you could have noted that, until almost the moment he went on stage that night, few involved in the election 2016 media spectacle had the time of day for him. And stranger yet, that lack of attention in the mainstream proved no impediment to the expansion of his campaign and his supporters, who, via social media and in person in the form of gigantic crowds, seem to exist in some parallel universe.
In this election cycle, Sanders alone uses the words "mobilize" and "mobilization" regularly, while calling for a "political revolution." ("We need to mobilize tens of millions of people to begin to stand up and fight back and to reclaim the government, which is now owned by big money.") And there is no question that he has indeed mobilized significant numbers of young people, many of whom are undoubtedly unplugged from the TV set, even if glued to other screens, and so may hardly be noticing the mainstream spectacle at all.
Whether the Sanders phenomenon represents our past or our future, his age or the age of his followers, is impossible to know. We do, of course, have one recent example of a mobilization in an election season. In the 2008 election, the charismatic Barack Obama created a youthful, grassroots movement, a kind of cult of personality that helped sweep him to victory, only to demobilize it as soon as he entered the Oval Office. Sanders himself puts little emphasis on personality or a cult of the same and undoubtedly represents something different, though what exactly remains open to question.
In the meantime, the national security state's power is largely uncontested; the airlines still fly; Disney World continues to be a destination of choice; and the United States remains a largely demobilized land.
Comments:
DHFabian • 4 hours ago
As many rural people know, sometimes an old bull will "go bad." He'll become increasingly irrational, unpredictable, and dangerous, and such bulls have been known to kill the farmers, or to kill themselves by charging into trees or the side of a barn. America appears to be like an bull "gone bad."
The problem isn't just the Republicans. In no other nation could you find a political "left" whose motto is: "Stand in Solidarity -- to protect the status quo of the bourgeoisie!" Meanwhile, Democrats have quietly worked to dismantle nearly a century of progressive politics and policies. The "masses" have no idea of what to do, or how to go about doing it. Because there is no "left" to push back against the right, we have no choice but to accept the increasingly fascist nature of this country.
Jethro_T • 9 hours ago
From the article:
"Those who watch us believe themselves exempt from being watched by us. That's their definition of "democracy." When "spies" appear in their midst, even if those whistleblowers are "spies" for us, they are horrified at a visceral level and promptly haul out the World War I-era Espionage Act. They now expect a demobilized response to whatever they do and when anything else is forthcoming, they strike back in outrage."
That's a pretty concise history of US domestic policy since 1947, and even more so since Watergate; "striking back in outrage" is a pretty concise description of officaldom's response to the Occupy movement, in addition to describing the fates of Manning and Snowden, and Ellsberg before them.
Any mobilization of the 99%, to be successful, will have to take the form of a massive withdrawal of our consent from illegitimate and unaccountable power. Whistle-blowing is just one of many ways to manifest that withdrawal.
drrichard • 11 hours ago
It is bread and circuses without the bread. You can link this trend to other things, such as the decline in newspaper readership, the end of preeminent radio and television journalists who people actually listened to (Murrow, Cronkite, etc.), the end of the Fairness Doctrine, and the major networks ignoring international stories. In other words, the consolidation of media and its increasing emphasis on subjects that aren't controversial to the big corporations. Throw in the decline in high school standards and you have an increasingly ill-informed public that doesn't know how to ask the right questions. If it's not immediately profitable to someone then intellectualism is disparaged in this country.
Maybe overall it's a lack of a common national effort - both the Civil War and World War 2 (and to some extent WW 1) touched everybody in America, and huge numbers of people were directly or indirectly involved in the conflict. But modern warfare doesn't need large bodies of soldiers and sailors, so most citizens (including those who would have served) can go about their lives with the story taking place "out there." Cheer the troops when they come home, toss a few bucks to the "wounded warriors," fly the Jolly Roger (er, POW/MIA) flag, see the world like a John Wayne movie, and don't ask why the country is fighting or your rights are slipping away.

Tom Engelhardt

Tom Engelhardt, cofounder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, coauthored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet:  The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.

Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch:

Four Responses to Military Failure in Washington
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How to Be Eternally "Caught Off Guard" in the Greater Middle East

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