Like me and Roldo Bartimole, Derf has been a long-suffering advocate for eliminating the racist Chief Wahoo image and the Cleveland Indians name from our city.
So, just stop for a moment and consider how you would react to a baseball hat with any of these logos on the front.
Not all offended? Who about this image? Or, maybe this?
Feck, just scroll through the vile mass of ignorance and stupidity.
[Roldo sent me this piece at 1215 on Saturday, 22 March, after I went “Thinking.”]
The major issue of the vote for a 20-year extended tax on Cuyahoga County resident is the problem of rigged leases between Cuyahoga County and Cleveland and three major league sports teams.
How did political leaders lend themselves to sign leases that force inevitable payments, seemingly in perpetuity, to anyone with enough money to buy a major league sports team in Cleveland?
This is the prime issue for voters. It is a significant issue for Americans in all big cities.
It is a significant issue for the Cleveland news media. Newspapers, television and radio journalists buried their head in the sand in the 1990s. Journalistic integrity simply was absent. Cheerleading dominated.
And media remains AWOL.
Matters that add up to hundreds of millions of public dollars – if not a billion or more – to subsidize businesses owned by billionaires and multi-millionaires Continue Reading »
This post is pinned to the top as a greeting to those who might have missed me while I went thinking. You’ll find new posts every hour, on the hour, this morning. Enjoy.
My typing stand built with the help of Buster (lower right) and Max (roll over).
While the feckin’ snow kept me from getting a lot of work outside done during my 10-day, Spring Break retreat, I did accomplish a considerable number of tasks, one of which was to build a typing stand for my IBM Correcting Selectric II typewriter (an amazing Christmas present from Mary Jo).
I assembled the stand from seven lengths of 3/4-inch black pipe (courtesy of Pete at Ace Hardware in North Royalton) and six Galvanized Iron Slip-On Rail Fittings Tees with Through Hole from McMaster-Carr in Aurora (suggested by Pete) and delivered to my door the next day. The typing surface is a repurposed cast-iron floor grate from an old house. The stand is rock solid and I had the legs cut so that the typewriter would be at the perfect typing height (I can’t tell you what a huge difference that makes).
The typing stand got a great work out. I typed 130 pages, nearly 40,000 words, working on two short stories that are bookends to the novel I’m currently working on. The exercise was helpful in that I was able to explore the roots of my main character’s psychology and to also explore a bit of how the end of the story and the epilogue (yes, I know, I’m always going on about how much I hate prologues and epilogues, but this one is necessary, damn it).
Today I go back to my regular routine for April and May.
For the next 10 days, Friday, 21 March through Monday, 31 March, I am on Spring Break and will be taking an Electronic Fast. I’ll be reachable by phone and I’ll check emails once a day for emergencies, but don’t expect any new posts here until April. Enjoy.
[Update, 0038, 21 March–Yes, the tech companies are colluding with the NSA, but they’re doing their own spying as well.]
I’m always suspicious of those whose noses get all out of joint because the America flag is ill-treated in a political protest protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, but don’t break a sweat when our Constitution itself is treated like a nose rag.
This 2010 protest in Phoenix was in reaction to Arizona SB 1070, an anti-illegal immigration law that was later gutted by the United States Supreme Court in Arizona v. United States in June, 2012.
The controversial “show me your papers” provision upheld by the Supreme Court has been blocked by lower courts in Arizona and the five copycat until now. As a result of the Supreme Court’s ruling, law enforcement in Arizona can now pull someone over and demand their “papers” if they suspect them of being here unlawfully. Discriminatory laws like SB 1070 invite racial profiling of Latinos and others who may look or sound “foreign,” including many U.S. citizens who have lived in America their entire lives.
As an 11-year veteran of our armed services, I am much more concerned about protecting our constitution than I am our flag. There is a reason that original copies of our Constitution are guarded in secure vaults in our nation’s capital while copies of the flag are commonly printed on underwear, do-rags and bathing suits.
From the Associated Press:
Texas has obtained a new batch of the drugs it uses to execute death row inmates, allowing the state to continue carrying out death sentences once its existing supply expires at the end of the month.
But correction officials will not say where they bought the drugs, arguing that information must be kept secret to protect the safety of its new supplier. In interviews with the Associated Press, officials with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice also refused to say whether providing anonymity to its new supplier of the sedative pentobarbital was a condition of its purchase.
The decision to keep details about the drugs and their source secret puts the agency at odds with past rulings of the state attorney general’s office, which has said the state’s open records law requires the agency to disclose specifics about the drugs it uses to carry out lethal injections.
I wish she were running for Senator or Governor, but I’ll take what I can get. We need a lot more people like Jennifer Brunner in public office.
Spencer Ackerman, for The Guardian, writes:
The senior lawyer for the National Security Agency stated unequivocally on Wednesday that US technology companies were fully aware of the surveillance agency’s widespread collection of data, contradicting months of angry denials from the firms.
Rajesh De, the NSA general counsel, said all communications content and associated metadata harvested by the NSA under a 2008 surveillance law occurred with the knowledge of the companies – both for the internet collection program known as Prism and for the so-called “upstream” collection of communications moving across the internet.
Asked during a Wednesday hearing of the US government’s institutional privacy watchdog if collection under the law, known as Section 702 or the Fisa Amendments Act, occurred with the “full knowledge and assistance of any company from which information is obtained,” De replied: “Yes.”
So, are Yahoo, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and AOL (to just name a few) lying through their teeth or is the NSA delivering pay-back? I suspect both to be true.
Just last evening I was discussing Cosmos with one of my students and remarked that I was not all that happy that the show was controlled by Rupert Murdoch and his Fox Broadcasting company. We were discussing the segment focusing on Giordano Bruno’s story. I remember Carl Sagan discussing Copernicus and Tycho Brahe in the original Cosmos, but Bruno was nowhere to be found.
It didn’t take long for the Fox ethos to intrude on Science. A Fox station in Okalahoma interrupted the segment discussing human evolution with a news promo. How convenient.
From The Los Angeles Times:
On Sunday night, the premiere of the science documentary series “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey” on the Oklahoma City Fox affiliate KOKH was briefly interrupted by a local news promo. These things happen all the time on TV. Big deal, right?
Well, it just so happens that host Neil deGrasse Tyson was referring to the theory of evolution just as the accidental preemption occurred. As first reported by the left-leaning website Raw Story, in the omitted portion, Tyson explained how “three and a half million years ago” humans “stood up and parted ways” from our biological “ancestors.” (You can see the uninterrupted version here.)
In the version that aired on KOKH, posted below, Tyson’s 20-second discussion of evolution is elided almost entirely, thanks to a misplaced spot plugging an upcoming local news broadcast.
The series, which executive producer Seth MacFarlane sees as a corrective to anti-science views, has drawn criticism from religious fundamentalists. Because of Oklahoma’s culturally conservative reputation and the almost too perfect timing of the misplaced promo, some have suggested (or even assumed) the cut was made deliberately.
Anyone want to be that Fox cancels the series because of low viewership?
(And just as aside, Derf’s reference in the final panel is to the work of Derek Chatwood.
What’s the problem with a nationwide license plate tracking database, anyway? [Kade Crockford, director of the Technology for Liberty program at the ACLU of Massachusetts] recently asked and answered that question in her blog:
If you aren’t the subject of a criminal investigation, the government shouldn’t be keeping tabs on when you go to the grocery store, your friend’s house, the abortion clinic, the antiwar protest, or the mosque. In a democratic society, we should know almost everything about what the government’s doing, and it should know very little to nothing about us, unless it has a good reason to believe we’re up to no good and shows that evidence to a judge. Unfortunately, that basic framework for an open, democracy society has been turned on its head. Now the government routinely collects vast troves of data about hundreds of millions of innocent people, casting everyone as a potential suspect until proven innocent. That’s unacceptable.
In this case, rather than building such a database from scratch, the federal government just sat back and let private industry satisfy what has turned out to be a lucrative market. The industry has also developed an effective business model. Vigilant Solutions, for instance, gives credentialed users initial access at no cost. “It’s free for a taste, with a fee that kicks in once they’re hooked,” Crockford explained.
The biggest problem facing the US may not be its repressive institutions, modes of governance and the militarization of everyday life, but the interiority of neoliberal nihilism, the hatred of democratic relations and the embrace of a culture of cruelty.
Huh?
1991 is not that long ago. I watched the hearings. You can watch the hearings and see for yourself how we put one of the most reactionary, anti-poor, anti-civil rights, anti-women right wing judges on the Supreme Court.
From the New York Times:
[Anita Hill] published a memoir in 1997; the following year, she joined Brandeis, teaching courses and pursuing research on gender and racial inequality. Years passed; her notoriety receded. Today, many of her students have no idea who Anita Hill is.
“I had to Google it,” said one, Megan Madison, who considers Ms. Hill a mentor. “I knew it was a name I should know, but I didn’t know the story.”
Ms. Hill wants young people to know. She had previously resisted entreaties from filmmakers, she said. But in 2010, with the 20th anniversary of the hearings approaching, she decided it was time “to revisit this, and for people to understand who I am.”
I confess that I am gobsmacked by the realization that a young black woman, who thinks of Professor Hill as a mentor, could only say that she knew Anita Hill “was a name, but… didn’t know the story.” I would be ashamed that a young white man born of privilege was ignorant of the events in the United States Senate in 1991, but Ms. Madison’s words floor me. How quickly we forget. How quickly we pass over and bury that which should shake us and awaken us.
There’s question whether P.T. said that there was a sucker born every minute and someone to take him.
But there’s truth in the saying. And we’ll all be put to the test soon.
The campaign to sell the sin tax will be slick but will avoid the promising lies it told before. They’ve been out-ed.
They’ll be playing on Clevelander’s heart strings. Aren’t we doing great! Of course, they’ll ignore joblessness, poverty, uneducated, unfed and uncared for children, police shootings, decrepit housing, pot holed streets and empty lots where once homes and businesses stood.
This is going to be the lie campaign by omission.
It follows the 1990 lies distributed via hundreds of thousands of dollars by team owners and business interests.
I’ve been over the lies about what Gateway would do. But there was one more, aimed at the African-American community.
One of the bigger lies told by the campaign for the original tax was run in the Call & Post. Full page ad.
It said: “Listen to Your Congressman.” Above this is the line introducing the fabricator: “Mayor White Says,” it told readers.
It used a quote by then Congressman Lou Stokes of the 21st District Caucus that suggested he was in favor of the tax when he was actually Continue Reading »
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!
Essay: Anatomy of the Deep State, written by Mike Lofgren, a former congressional staff member who served on both the House and Senate budget committees, and published by Bill Moyers & Company on 21 February of this year, is a longish piece at nearly 6,000 words and I’ve excerpted Lofgren extensively below, but I strongly encourage readers to stick with the whole piece so as to better grasp the breadth of his message.
The Deep State is the big story of our time. It is the red thread that runs through the war on terrorism, the financialization and deindustrialization of the American economy, the rise of a plutocratic social structure and political dysfunction. Washington is the headquarters of the Deep State, and its time in the sun as a rival to Rome, Constantinople or London may be term-limited by its overweening sense of self-importance and its habit, as Winwood Reade said of Rome, to “live upon its principal till ruin stared it in the face.” “Living upon its principal,” in this case, means that the Deep State has been extracting value from the American people in vampire-like fashion.
Just where does the power of this vampire-like red thread run?
Despite [his] apparent impotence, President Obama can liquidate American citizens without due processes, detain prisoners indefinitely without charge, conduct dragnet surveillance on the American people without judicial warrant and engage in unprecedented — at least since the McCarthy era — witch hunts against federal employees (the so-called “Insider Threat Program”). Within the United States, this power is characterized by massive displays of intimidating force by militarized federal, state and local law enforcement. Abroad, President Obama can start wars at will and engage in virtually any other activity whatsoever without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress, such as arranging the forced landing of a plane carrying a sovereign head of state over foreign territory. Despite the habitual cant of congressional Republicans about executive overreach by Obama, the would-be dictator, we have until recently heard very little from them about these actions — with the minor exception of comments from gadfly Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Democrats, save a few mavericks such as Ron Wyden of Oregon, are not unduly troubled, either — even to the extent of permitting seemingly perjured congressional testimony under oath by executive branch officials on the subject of illegal surveillance.
These are not isolated instances of a contradiction; they have been so pervasive that they tend to be disregarded as background noise. During the time in 2011 when political warfare over the debt ceiling was beginning to paralyze the business of governance in Washington, the United States government somehow summoned the resources to overthrow Muammar Ghaddafi’s regime in Libya, and, when the instability created by that coup spilled over into Mali, provide overt and covert assistance to French intervention there. At a time when there was heated debate about continuing meat inspections and civilian air traffic control because of the budget crisis, our government was somehow able to commit $115 million to keeping a civil war going in Syria and to pay at least £100m to the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters to buy influence over and access to that country’s intelligence. Since 2007, two bridges carrying interstate highways have collapsed due to inadequate maintenance of infrastructure, one killing 13 people. During that same period of time, the government spent $1.7 billion constructing a building in Utah that is the size of 17 football fields. This mammoth structure is intended to allow the National Security Agency to store a yottabyte of information, the largest numerical designator computer scientists have coined. A yottabyte is equal to 500 quintillion pages of text. They need that much storage to archive every single trace of your electronic life.
Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose. My analysis of this phenomenon is not an exposé of a secret, conspiratorial cabal; the state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day. Nor can this other government be accurately termed an “establishment.” All complex societies have an establishment, a social network committed to its own enrichment and perpetuation. In terms of its scope, financial resources and sheer global reach, the American hybrid state, the Deep State, is in a class by itself.
So, just who makes up, works for, understands The Deep State:
The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street. All these agencies are coordinated by the Executive Office of the President via the National Security Council. Certain key areas of the judiciary belong to the Deep State, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose actions are mysterious even to most members of Congress. Also included are a handful of vital federal trial courts, such as the Eastern District of Virginia and the Southern District of Manhattan, where sensitive proceedings in national security cases are conducted. The final government component (and possibly last in precedence among the formal branches of government established by the Constitution) is a kind of rump Congress consisting of the congressional leadership and some (but not all) of the members of the defense and intelligence committees. The rest of Congress, normally so fractious and partisan, is mostly only intermittently aware of the Deep State and when required usually submits to a few well-chosen words from the State’s emissaries.
Then, there is the matter of private enterprise:
As the indemnification vote showed, the Deep State does not consist only of government agencies. What is euphemistically called “private enterprise” is an integral part of its operations. In a special series in The Washington Post called “Top Secret America,” Dana Priest and William K. Arkin described the scope of the privatized Deep State and the degree to which it has metastasized after the September 11 attacks. There are now 854,000 contract personnel with top-secret clearances — a number greater than that of top-secret-cleared civilian employees of the government. While they work throughout the country and the world, their heavy concentration in and around the Washington suburbs is unmistakable: Since 9/11, 33 facilities for top-secret intelligence have been built or are under construction. Combined, they occupy the floor space of almost three Pentagons — about 17 million square feet. Seventy percent of the intelligence community’s budget goes to paying contracts. And the membrane between government and industry is highly permeable: The Director of National Intelligence, James R. Clapper, is a former executive of Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the government’s largest intelligence contractors. His predecessor as director, Admiral Mike McConnell, is the current vice chairman of the same company; Booz Allen is 99 percent dependent on government business. These contractors now set the political and social tone of Washington, just as they are increasingly setting the direction of the country, but they are doing it quietly, their doings unrecorded in the Congressional Record or the Federal Register, and are rarely subject to congressional hearings.
And, of course, the vital importance of always following the money:
It is not too much to say that Wall Street may be the ultimate owner of the Deep State and its strategies, if for no other reason than that it has the money to reward government operatives with a second career that is lucrative beyond the dreams of avarice — certainly beyond the dreams of a salaried government employee.
Fascinatingly enough, at least to me, Lofgren posits a positive influence to the Tea Party:
The Deep State thrives when there is tolerable functionality in the day-to-day operations of the federal government. As long as appropriations bills get passed on time, promotion lists get confirmed, black (i.e., secret) budgets get rubber-stamped, special tax subsidies for certain corporations are approved without controversy, as long as too many awkward questions are not asked, the gears of the hybrid state will mesh noiselessly. But when one house of Congress is taken over by tea party Wahhabites, life for the ruling class becomes more trying.
If there is anything the Deep State requires it is silent, uninterrupted cash flow and the confidence that things will go on as they have in the past. It is even willing to tolerate a degree of gridlock: Partisan mud wrestling over cultural issues may be a useful distraction from its agenda. But recent congressional antics involving sequestration, the government shutdown and the threat of default over the debt ceiling extension have been disrupting that equilibrium.
Who knew Rand Paul was doing good? Lofgren concludes:
As the United States confronts its future after experiencing two failed wars, a precarious economy and $17 trillion in accumulated debt, the national punditry has split into two camps. The first, the declinists, sees a broken, dysfunctional political system incapable of reform and an economy soon to be overtaken by China. The second, the reformers, offers a profusion of nostrums to turn the nation around: public financing of elections to sever the artery of money between the corporate components of the Deep State and financially dependent elected officials, government “insourcing” to reverse the tide of outsourcing of government functions and the conflicts of interest that it creates, a tax policy that values human labor over financial manipulation and a trade policy that favors exporting manufactured goods over exporting investment capital.
All of that is necessary, but not sufficient. The Snowden revelations (the impact of which have been surprisingly strong), the derailed drive for military intervention in Syria and a fractious Congress, whose dysfunction has begun to be a serious inconvenience to the Deep State, show that there is now a deep but as yet inchoate hunger for change. What America lacks is a figure with the serene self-confidence to tell us that the twin idols of national security and corporate power are outworn dogmas that have nothing more to offer us. Thus disenthralled, the people themselves will unravel the Deep State with surprising speed.
Moyers included the following reactions to Lofgren’s piece (from left): Andrew Bacevich on Washington’s Tacit Consensus, Danielle Brian on Legalized Corruption, Heidi Boghosian on Mass Surveillance, Henry Giroux on Resisting the Neoliberal Revolution, Tim Wu on Silicon Valley and Juan Cole on the Vulnerability of the Network.
Via Mano Singham…
[The unidentified Signal Intelligence official] gives two examples: “For instance, since the election of a pro-American president, one European partner has been much more open to providing information on their own capabilities and techniques, in hope of raising our intelligence collaboration to a higher level. Conversely, another of our partnerships has stalled, due largely to that country’s regional objectives not being in synch with those of the U.S.” In general, however, many of these “relationships have, indeed, spanned several decades” and are unaffected by changes due to elections, in large part because the mere existence of these activities is kept from the political class.
The implications for democratic accountability are clear. In an October Guardian op-ed, Huhne, the British former cabinet minister, noted that “when it comes to the secret world of GCHQ and the [NSA], the depth of my ‘privileged information’ has been dwarfed by the information provided by Edward Snowden to the Guardian.” Detailing what appears to be the systematic attempt to keep political officials in the dark, he wrote: ”The Snowden revelations put a giant question mark into the middle of our surveillance state. It is time our elected representatives insisted on some answers before destroying the values we should protect.”
The dangers posed by a rogue national security state, operating in secret and without the knowledge of democratically elected officials, have long been understood. After serving two terms as president, Dwight D. Eisenhower famously worried in his 1961 Farewell Address about the accumulated power of the “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry,” warning of what he called the “grave implications” of “the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” He urged citizens: “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.”
Just whom does the NSA work for anyway?
Leases are made to be broken.
Ask Gateway and the team owners that use its facilities.
Sometimes it’s even laughable how lease can be broken or corrupted.
I’ll call it the 57,500 square foot heist or lease alteration.
In 1993, I wrote this question: “How would you like to get 57,500 square feet of brand new office space – free? Oh, we’ll toss in furniture, some of it custom-made, too, at no extra cost. Interested?”
Who wouldn’t be? Real estate tycoon Dick Jacobs, then owner of the Cleveland Indians, wouldn’t be the kind to reject this offer.
It was a building Gateway constructed for the offices of the Cleveland Indians.
The lease (you know how sacrosanct they are) specified that lessee Jacobs would be housed “within the baseball facility, as designated in the final plans.” Not a separate building.
What was constructed was an office building. No property taxes to be paid, thank you. And fully furnished (we’ll get to that).
When I asked Gateway executive director Tom Chema at the time why the team got this building, not specified in the lease, he said, “for aesthetic Continue Reading »
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