Author: Tom Sullivan

The plaintive cry of the perpetually oppressed
by Tom Sullivan

A somewhat misanthropic friend once said if he ever wound up as an insider in some group he would have to create an outside just to feel like himself. Even as conservative Christians insist that they are America, inhabiting a country created by God himself just for them, and as sure as the prosperity gospel that he smiles upon and blesses them, they are most comfortable posturing as oppressed outsiders. So GOP presidential wannabes were on message yesterday in Iowa:

“The single greatest threat to all of our freedoms is the threat to your religious liberty,” Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, told the crowd in a speech that at times sounded like a church sermon. “Let me be clear tonight: I’m not backing off because what I’m saying is true. We are criminalizing Christianity in this country.”

That theme was predictably popular and reverberated throughout a five-hour-long summit hosted by the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition that attracted more than 1,200 Republicans and churchgoers. The event kicked off with a prayer calling on the Lord to “restore this country through godly leadership.”

“You know, in the past month we have seen religious liberty under assault at an unprecedented level,” said Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who announced his White House bid last month. He was also met with repeated bursts of applause.

You know the drill. If you won’t let us dominate you, then you’re oppressing us.

Louisiana’s Governor Bobby Jindal this week took to the New York Times to position himself as defender of the faith:

Our country was founded on the principle of religious liberty, enshrined in the Bill of Rights. Why shouldn’t an individual or business have the right to cite, in a court proceeding, religious liberty as a reason for not participating in a same-sex marriage ceremony that violates a sincerely held religious belief?

In an America in which over three-quarters identify as Christians, a GOP that controls both houses of Congress, 31 governorships, and nearly 70 percent of state legislatures is, according to Jindal, beset on all sides by “left-wing ideologues who oppose religious freedom” and “seek to tax and regulate businesses out of existence.”

As Heather Cox Richardson observed in Salon, Jindal laid bare Movement Conservatism’s Grand Bargain when he wrote that defending freedom “requires populist social conservatives to ally with the business community on economic matters and corporate titans to side with social conservatives on cultural matters.” And what’s really got Jindal and the religious right pissed is that after Walmart and NASCAR sided with marriage equality activists against recent “religious freedom” bills, the bargain is broken. Richardson writes:

Its end has been a long time coming. The toxic amalgam of economic and social reactionaries that Jindal identified began to mix after the Second World War. Americans in that era rallied behind the New Deal consensus. Reactionary businessmen loathed business regulation and taxation, but had no luck convincing voters to turn against the policies most saw as important safeguards against another Great Depression. Then, in 1951, a wealthy young writer suggested that social issues might be the way to break popular support for the New Deal. William F. Buckley, Jr. advanced the idea that unfettered capitalism and Christianity should be considered fundamental American values that could not be questioned. According to him, anyone who called for an active government or a secular society was an anti-American collectivist in league with international communism.

With communism a fading memory except among aging Cold Warriors, and with one-quarter of the world’s population Muslim, Movement Conservatives will have a hard time getting buy-in from multinational corporations in alienating an already huge and growing market. What the religious conservatives are waking up to post-Indiana is that their former partners no longer need them.

Perhaps capitalists should have betrayed them with a kiss?

Silenced for speaking her mind
by Tom Sullivan

We have become disturbingly accustomed in this country to police shootings of unarmed, black men. This is not another one of those:

Pakistan civil liberties activist and social worker Sabeen Mahmud was shot dead by unidentified gunmen in Karachi Friday night as she headed home from a talk on the troubled Balochistan province. She was 40.

According to the Dawn website, Sabeen left The Second Floor — she was the director of T2F which she called a community space for open dialogue — with her mother shortly after 9 pm and was on her way home when she was shot. She died on the way to hospital. Doctors said they retrieved five bullets from her body. Her mother was said to be in a critical condition.

“No one has claimed responsibility for her shooting, and police have not named any motive,” reports CNN, plus this background on Mahmud:

Her second floor cafe on a dusty industrial road was painted with dashes of psychedelic colors. And Sabeen Mahmud surrounded herself there with books, people, and discussions on technology, human rights and women’s entrepreneurship.

Introducing others to Jimi Hendrix, street art, and talking politics was not supposed to get her killed. But in Pakistan, free speech is dangerous, and Mahmud’s exuberant exercise of it made her stick out nationwide.

[snip]

In the province of Baluchistan, where separatists have fought a virulent insurgency for years, people have been disappearing regularly. There have been steady allegations of mass abduction. The Lahore University of Management Sciences planned to host the discussion on the topic, with human rights activist Mama Qadeer Baloch, but authorities shut it down.

Mahmud would not hear of it not going on.

“Despite the plurality of opinion, very little space seems to be given to the discussion in Pakistani mainstream media or academia; the debate seems to be shut down before it can even begin,” she posted on Facebook. “What is the reality? Has the media been silenced on Balochistan? What makes it dangerous for us to talk about Pakistan’s largest province at one of our most celebrated universities?”

So she hosted the talk herself. At Aljazeera, friends remember her:

“Sabeen was a voice of reason, pluralism and secularism: the kind of creed that endangers the insidious side of constructed Pakistani nationalism,” Raza Rumi, a rights activist who escaped an assassination attempt in March 2014 and now lives in the United States out of fear for his life, told Al Jazeera.

“In her work, she was neither a political partisan nor a power seeker but Pakistan’s state and non-state actors are averse to any form of dissent. This is why she had to be killed,” Rumi said.

“Her death has simply reopened my wounds. She gave me support when I escaped death and now I feel even more scared to return to Pakistan. Her death is a huge blow to Pakistan’s civil society and social change movements.”

Outside this morning, it’s raining.

Don’t fear the Reapers
by Tom Sullivan

General “Buck” Turgidson: Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks.

But who’s counting? As Digby pointed out last night, there is a lot less precision to these “precision” drone strikes than meets the monitors of drone pilots at Creech Air Force Base. The government can’t even keep count of how many Americans they’ve killed. The Guardian reports:

The targets of the deadly drone strikes that killed two hostages and two suspected American members of al-Qaida were “al-Qaida compounds” rather than specific terrorist suspects, the White House disclosed on Thursday.

The lack of specificity suggests that despite a much-publicized 2013 policy change by Barack Obama restricting drone killings by, among other things, requiring “near certainty that the terrorist target is present”, the US continues to launch lethal operations without the necessity of knowing who specifically it seeks to kill, a practice that has come to be known as a “signature strike”.

How certain is “near certainty”?

Human-rights observers see little indication, two years after Obama’s speech, that the US meets its own stated standards on preventing civilian casualties in counter-terrorism operations. Reprieve, looking at US drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan, concluded last year that the US killed nearly 1,150 people while targeting 41 individuals.

What’s infuriating about these stories is the boilerplate “fog of war” excuses given after the fact. As if, after the Reaper has lingered over a potential target for hours (or days) while the CIA cross-checks its sketchy intelligence, everything just happened so fast.

Can’t wait for these beasties to be lingering over your rooftops, can ya?

The selling of “Hillary fraud”
by Tom Sullivan

With Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race, you knew the “Clinton Rumors” would be back with a vengeance. Along with the chain emails from your dad. David Mikkelson has been collecting them at Snopes.com since the 1990s:

As he did in 2007, Mikkelson has seen a recent uptick in interest in Clinton rumors. The popular one recently was that Clinton was fired from the Watergate investigation. “It’s everything that people want to believe of her,” Mikkelson said — “she’s a liar, she’s corrupt, she’s unethical — all in one piece.” It is also important to note: This rumor is false.

Somebody once said they’ll keep doing this stuff as long as they think it works.

A few days ago we had a media blitz over Clinton Cash written by Peter Schweizer, a former Bush speechwriter and Breitbart.com contributor. The pattern is familiar:

Schweizer explains he cannot prove the allegations, leaving that up to investigative journalists and possibly law enforcement. “Short of someone involved coming forward to give sworn testimony, we don’t know what might or might not have been said in private conversations, the exact nature of the transition, or why people in power make the decision they do,” he writes. Later, he concludes, “We cannot ultimately know what goes on in their minds and ultimately provide the links between the money they took and the benefits that subsequently accrued to themselves, their friends, and their associates.”

So then, nothing. Yet again.

This morning at the New York Times we have “Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation as Russians Pressed for Control of Uranium Company” about Canadian mining financier Frank Giustra. You remember the Times. From the run-up to the Iraq invasion? Or maybe Judith Miller?

Bullshit sells. America buys. (“Oh, McFly, your shoe’s untied.”)

Just yesterday, Michael Tomasky blasted:

While I’m at it with the irony quotes, I might as well drape some around that adjective “investigative” too. The Times, it seems, has decided to debase itself by following the breadcrumbs dropped by this former adviser to Sarah Palin because Schweizer devotes a chapter to Giustra and Kazakhstan, which the Times reported on back in 2008, and the Times plans to follow up on that.

I remember reading that Times story at the time and going, “Wow, that does look bad.” But then I also remember reading this Forbes (yes, Forbes!) debunking of the Times story, which was headlined “Clinton Commits No Foul in Kazakhstan Uranium Deal.” By the time I finished reading that piece (and please, click through and read it so that you are forearmed for the coming Times hit job), I was marveling to myself: Golly, that Times piece looked so awful at the time. But it turns out they just left out some facts, obscured some others, and without being technically inaccurate, managed to convey or imply that something skuzzy happened where it in fact hadn’t. How can a great newspaper do such a thing?

How indeed? But throw enough smoke bombs into newsrooms and people will believe there must be a fire. Maybe, might be, and possibly are the stock-in-trade of rumor mongering. It works. Look how well it has worked for Hans von Spakovsky & Co. in convincing the people of River City that they’ve got trouble with a a capital “V” that stands for voter fraud, and that he’s just the guy to sell them a boys’ band photo ID laws to fix it.

By the way, it was former president Bill Clinton who explained how this stuff works to The Daily Show‘s Jon Stewart in August 2004:

STEWART: Is it – has it gotten to the point – do you believe that politics has gotten so dirty and so – that these kinds of tactics have become so prevalent – that this is the reason half the country doesn’t vote, or, this is the reason we don’t get, maybe, the officials that we deserve?

CLINTON: No, I think people do it because they think it works.

STEWART: That’s it. Simply a strategy?

CLINTON: Absolutely. And as soon as it doesn’t work, they’ll stop doing it. So I think Senator McCain, whom I admire very much, made a mistake not bashing the Bush campaign over the attacks on his service. They implied he betrayed the country when he was a POW and he made a huge mistake in not bashing them for that calling operation saying he’d adopted a black baby. It was blatantly racist. They’ll do this stuff as long as they think it works.

Judging by the headlines, it’s still working. “Oh, McFly, your shoe’s untied.”

Earth Day 2015 – Water
by Tom Sullivan

Today, Earth Day 2015, President Obama visits Everglades National Park to talk about climate change and the threat it poses to the water ecology of south Florida. On the first Earth Day in 1970, few Americans had even heard of ecology.

NPR’s Melissa Block spoke with Evelyn Gaiser, an ecologist with the Florida Coastal Everglades Long Term Ecological Research Program, about saltwater incursion into the Everglades. She’ll be reminding the president the Everglades is not just home to birds, snakes, and alligators:

BLOCK: And along with preserving biodiversity, preserving wild space and habitat, of course also you’re seeing a real threat to drinking water with what’s going on in the Everglades, right?

GAISER: That’s exactly right. So the people of Florida depend on that aquifer underneath the Everglades for their drinking water. And as we have insufficient freshwater moving into the Everglades, we see a depletion in the freshwater resources available to the growing population of South Florida.

On the Pacific coast, Californians struggle with an epic drought and reservoirs have all but dried up.

In Asia, Siberians have their own water problems. Lake Baikal, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the largest (by volume) body of fresh water on the planet, is at its lowest level in 60 years. Precipitation has been less than expected, and still the Irkutskenergo hydroelectric plant on the Angara river – the lake’s only outlet – keeps drawing down the level to generate power. Upstream, hydroelectric dams planned in Mongolia will further reduce the lake’s water level. Fishermen are finding fish stocks decreasing, and in villages on the shores of the lake, wells are drying up.

The World Economic Forum believes that “the global water crisis is now the largest risk and greatest impact to our lives and our planet.” Economically. But fear not. Where some see scarcity, others see opportunity. Take New Jersey’s water. Multinational corporations can’t wait to. Lucas Ropek writes at Americablog:

The Water Infrastructure Protection Act (WIPA), approved on February 5th, allows municipalities to sell their water facilities to private companies without public referendum. As part of Christie’s privatization task force agenda, WIPA aims to balance Jersey’s current budget crisis, while also fixing the state’s water facilities that ail from “emergent conditions,” or what the bill calls “serious risks to the integrity of drinking water and the environment.” The Protection Act has alarmed New Jersey communities and watchdog groups, however, who claim, as activist Jim Walsh has said, the bill allows “multinational corporations to profit off increased water rates with virtually no recourse for New Jersey residents.”

When it comes to ensuring water supplies for fracking or development, small-government conservatives suddenly start talking like command-economy planners. They advocate regionalization and interconnectivity of water systems with “unallocated capacity to expand.” All in the name of public health and protecting the environment, dontcha know.

And not just in New Jersey. Across the planet, the World Bank and multinational water companies such as American Water, Nestle, Suez, and Veolia are coming to rescue us from our profligate ways. Or are they?

Independent water advocates, from CAI to Anand’s group in India and others including the Focus on the Global South network, point to India today as evidence that privatized systems lead to underfunded infrastructure and unpredictable, often high prices. The IFC defends the private sector by claiming that these companies offer efficiency gains (PDF). But those gains come at the expense of lower-income households, advocates such as Naficy point out, as companies increase rates to subsidize their own profitability.

There’s a growing backlash against these projects. In 2000, headlines around the globe documented protests in Bolivia’s third-largest city in response to the privatization of the city’s municipal water supply and against the multinational water giant Bechtel, eventually pushing the company out of the country. The IFC’s own complaint mechanism reports that 40 percent of all global cases from last year were about water, even though water projects are only a small fraction of what the IFC funds. In 2013, CAI and 70 advocates from around the globe released an open letter (PDF) to the World Bank Group calling for “an end of all support for private water, beginning with IFC divestment from all equity positions in water corporations.”

But don’t they see? The only prescription is more cowbell. Those Siberian socialists wouldn’t be having these water supply problems if, as Veolia suggests, they just privatize the lake, monetize the water, exploit financial opportunities, externalize risks, optimize costs, enhance competitiveness, and price drinking water planetwide according to its “true cost,” ensuring long-term profitability.

Problem solved!

Rapturous Bachmann
by Tom Sullivan

Go ahead, Michele Bachmann. Break out your “THE END IS NEAR” sign. You know you want to. She came close in a radio interview:

Michele Bachmann says the rapture is coming, thanks to President Barack Obama’s policies on Iran’s nuclear program and marriage equality.

In a radio interview last week, Bachmann, the former Minnesota Republican congresswoman, told “End Times” host Jan Markell, “We need to realize how close this clock is getting to the midnight hour.”

“We in our lifetimes potentially could see Jesus Christ returning to earth and the rapture of the church,” Bachmann said. “We see the destruction, but this was a destruction that was foretold.”

Yes, she’s serious. In the westernmost mountains of North Carolina, for example, one of the most frequent questions congressional candidates will be asked is what version of the Bible they read.

Eschatology has been quite the rage among Bachmann-like believers pretty much forever. They take Revelation very seriously. Especially the “Rapture,” a word that appears nowhere in the New Testament. They’ll even argue over whether the Rapture comes before, during, or after the Great Tribulation that precedes the Second Coming and the Millennium. A preacher I knew was once asked whether he believed in a pre-Trib, mid-Trib, or post-Trib Rapture. He answered that he was a pan-Millennialist. He figured it would all pan out in the end.

I’m not sure Michele Bachmann would get the joke.

“Lord of the Shadows” — the Bush legacy
by Tom Sullivan

Following up this morning on the must-read Der Spiegel article on the origins of an Islamic State (IS) cooked up by former Saddam Hussein intelligence officers. A trove of documents Der Spiegel obtained late last year reveal the architect of the Islamic State to be a former Iraqi colonel, Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi, known to IS as Haji Bakr or else “Lord of the Shadows.” Bakr died in January 2014 after implementing his “blueprint for a takeover … not a manifesto of faith, but a technically precise plan for an ‘Islamic Intelligence State’ — a caliphate run by an organization that resembled East Germany’s notorious Stasi domestic intelligence agency.” Bakr and his agents would exploit others’ extremist faith to recruit an army. The Syrian civil war provided the chaos they needed to implement their plan.

Bakr survived quality time in U.S. custody at Camp Bucca and Abu Ghraib Prison to eventually form “a powerful underground organization.” He and a group of former Iraqi intelligence officers conceived a new Islamic State. They made Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi the figurehead. “They reasoned that Baghdadi, an educated cleric, would give the group a religious face” that would attract foot soldiers from abroad. They preferred foreigners rather than Syrian rebels. (Local recruits might be reluctant to commit the atrocities necessary to instill the fear needed for control.) Spies would infiltrate towns and pave the way for takeover:

The spies were told to note such details as whether someone was a criminal or a homosexual, or was involved in a secret affair, so as to have ammunition for blackmailing later. “We will appoint the smartest ones as Sharia sheiks,” Bakr had noted. “We will train them for a while and then dispatch them.” As a postscript, he had added that several “brothers” would be selected in each town to marry the daughters of the most influential families, in order to “ensure penetration of these families without their knowledge.”

The spies were to find out as much as possible about the target towns: Who lived there, who was in charge, which families were religious, which Islamic school of religious jurisprudence they belonged to, how many mosques there were, who the imam was, how many wives and children he had and how old they were. Other details included what the imam’s sermons were like, whether he was more open to the Sufi, or mystical variant of Islam, whether he sided with the opposition or the regime, and what his position was on jihad. Bakr also wanted answers to questions like: Does the imam earn a salary? If so, who pays it? Who appoints him? Finally: How many people in the village are champions of democracy?

Those who cooperated could be used. Potential leaders who might resist could be quickly disappeared. It had worked for Saddam Hussein. Using “ninja outfits, cheap tricks and espionage cells camouflaged as missionary offices,” Der Spiegel reports, Bakr’s shadowy team of Iraqi veterans created the Islamic State to reclaim the region they had lost to the American invaders and the leadership positions they had lost after Paul Bremer, George W. Bush’s head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, dissolved the Iraqi army by decree in May 2003.

I once read a manual ostensibly distributed by U.S. intelligence operatives to Central American rebels during the Reagan administration. Among other tactics, it taught insurgents how to spoof assassinations of respected village leaders to make it look as if the central government had murdered them. Villagers previously reluctant to join the rebels, angered by the “government” killing of local elders would be tricked into joining the people who actually killed them. Not so different from the IS false-flag operations Der Spiegel recounts.

In another odd parallel (no, they’re not equivalent), it appears what Haji Bakr and his team have done resembles a strategy U.S. politicos have used for decades: co-opting the religious right as foot soldiers for accomplishing secular goals. (Are they that gullible everywhere?) If Der Spiegel’s reporting is correct, the Islamic State’s jihadis have no idea they are being used by former Saddam intelligence operatives to help retake Iraq and the region for themselves and not for Islam at all. After Syrian rebels killed Haji Bakr, they scooped up “computers, passports, mobile phone SIM cards, a GPS device and, most importantly, papers. They didn’t find a Koran anywhere.” So it goes.

Seeing the Other as real
by Tom Sullivan

Confronting Hatred: 70 Years after the Holocaust played on the local NPR station recently. Narrated by Morgan Freeman, the program looks at “racism, antisemitism, and the ways in which hatred can grow.” I tuned in late and heard a German woman confronting Klansmen. It led me to this 2014 clip from the BBC:

Mo Asumang is a German filmmaker who confronts racism by speaking directly to those who want her excluded from their world. They don’t talk to or know their “so-called enemy,” Asumang says, “so what they do when they talk to me, they talk to reality, and that’s the first thing they have to survive.”

MORGAN FREEMAN:

Asumang concedes that her tactics for confronting hatred so directly are not for everyone. But she is inspired by the incredible change she witnessed in her own family, when her grandmother—a former Nazi party member, who worked for the SS—came face to face with a black grandchild.

MO ASUMANG:

My mother, she told me when she told my grandmother there’s a baby going to be born and the baby’s going to be black, that my grandmother said she wanted to jump in front of the tram and kill herself. But then when she saw me, even though she was at the SS, when she saw me, there was an emotional moment, and this emotional moment was human. There was a baby, and she was a woman. She felt like a mother. So she took care of me. So I think, through this in my personal history, I am really very, very sure that every person, even if the person has been to the SS, can change, but we have to bring it to a personal level.

It struck me how, as Asumang suggests, keeping the Other at a distance, maintaining the caricature, is essential to “keeping the faith,” as it were. Nazis, Klansman, antisemites, various brands of religious fundamentalists, have nice, neat, black-and-white categories for the world that insulate them from opposing ideas, contradictions, and people unlike themselves. Dealing with real people makes them very uneasy. It is “out of fear,” she suggests to a robed Klansman.

“No, it’s not out of fear,” he insists. Fear is for the weak.

In evangelical circles, mingling to temptation, to corruption. It’s threatening:

2 Corinthians 6:14 (KJV)

14 Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?

Because the devil is gonna steal your faith if you let him get too close. (Remember the God Warrior?)

Professor David Pilgrim of the Jim Crow Museum in Michigan explains his interest:

As corny and trite as it sounds, I think that antisemitism, racism, sexism, and homophobia…I think those things undermine democracy. I think they make of democracy a lie. I mean as long as we have these “us versus thems,” and as long as people are hurt in our society and others think that’s their problem, then we undermine this nation. So the trick is, is to figure out a way to get people that are not themselves directly hurt to believe that they are a part of the same “We.” And that for me has been the thrust of what it is I’ve spent my life trying to do; trying to make the “We” bigger.

The New York Times editorial board this morning examines renewed efforts to keep the wrong people from voting after the Supreme Court struck down the preclearance section of the Voting Rights Act — efforts disguised as something loftier and more star-spangled. As sure as Benghazi, in 2016 we are sure to see more allegations of widespread fraud and more efforts to block participation by nameless, faceless “those people.”

We have met the enemy and he is You
by Tom Sullivan

“How many isolated incidents equal a pattern?” radio host Tavis Smiley asked Bill O’Reilly this week as the two debated police misconduct and mass incarceration.

From mass surveillance to mass incarceration, it appears that government of the people, etc. is increasingly prone to viewing itself as government against the people. The Guardian reported Friday that the Missouri National Guard had to caution its people against referring to Ferguson protesters as “enemy forces“:

A briefing for commanders included details of the troops’ intelligence capabilities so that they could “deny adversaries the ability to identify Missouri national guard vulnerabilities”, which the “adversaries” might exploit, “causing embarrassment or harm” to the military force, according to documents obtained in a Freedom of Information Act request by CNN.

And in an ominous-sounding operations security briefing, the national guard warned: “Adversaries are most likely to possess human intelligence (HUMINT), open source intelligence (OSINT), signals intelligence (SIGINT), technical intelligence (TECHINT), and counterintelligence capabilities.”

National Guard spokesman Capt. Quinn told CNN later drafts of mission plans dialed back the language. Quinnn said, “‘enemy forces’ would be better understood as ‘potential threats.'” So that’s comforting.

In France, lawmakers debated an anti-terrorism bill that would expand the breadth of government surveillance:

The proposed law, introduced in Parliament on Monday, would allow the government to monitor emails and phone calls of suspected terrorists and their contacts, without seeking authorization from a judge. Telecommunications and internet companies would be forced to automatically filter vast amounts of metadata to flag suspicious patterns, and would have to make that data freely available to intelligence services. Agents would also be able to plant cameras and bugs in the homes of suspected terrorists, as well as keyloggers to track their online behavior.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls insisted, “… this is not a French Patriot Act.” We’re just going to Hoover your Internet and phone calls. (Pun intended.) Meanwhile, back in Washington, D.C., Congress is getting ready to extend the Patriot Act, including Section 215 that the NSA uses justify bulk data collection of personal data. But even without Section 215, there remain “a host of far-reaching surveillance authorities, including those of the Drug Enforcement Agency that are aimed at US citizens.”

Writing for Washington Monthly, Seth Stoughton a former police officer, now a law professor at the University of South Carolina, looks at the warrior mindset being inculcated by law enforcement training:

In this worldview, officers are warriors combatting unknown and unpredictable—but highly lethal—enemies. They learn to be afraid. Officers don’t use that word, of course. Vigilant, attentive, cautious, alert, or observant are the terms that appear most often in police publications. But officers learn to be vigilant, attentive, cautious, alert, and observant because they are afraid, and they afraid because they’re taught to be.

As a result, officers learn to treat every individual they interact with as an armed threat and every situation as a deadly force encounter in the making. Every individual, every situation — no exceptions. A popular police training text offers this advice: “As you approach any situation, you want to be in the habit of looking for cover[] so you can react automatically to reach it should trouble erupt.” A more recent article puts it even more bluntly: “Remain humble and compassionate; be professional and courteous — and have a plan to kill everyone you meet.”

Gosh, what about that would make young, black males apprehensive when encountering police officers?

Stoughton thinks this is exactly the wrong approach:

Counterintuitively, the warrior mentality also makes policing less safe for both officers and civilians. Officers learn to both verbally and physically control the space they operate in. They learn that it is essential to set the proper tone for an encounter, and the tone that best preserves officer safety is widely thought to be one of “unquestioned command.” Even acting friendly, officers are told, can make them a target. But like the use of physical force, the assertive manner in which officers set the tone of encounter can also set the stage for a negative response or a violent interaction—one that was, from the start, avoidable. From the warrior perspective, the solution is simple: the people with whom officers interact must accede, respecting officers’ authority by doing what they are told. The failure to comply is confirmation that the individual is an enemy for the warrior to vanquish, physically if necessary. And remember that officers are trained to expect threats. Our brains are wired so that we see what we expect to see; given their training, it’s no surprise that officers react to threats that don’t actually exist. The result is avoidable violence.

We are expected to treat police officers as public servants and heroes willing to lay down their lives to protect us. So it baffles me how, as Stoughton writes, “would-be officers are told that their primary objective is to go home at the end of every shift.” What is heroic about that? About sacrificing others before you would sacrifice yourself? What is heroic about shooting unarmed suspects in the back or choking them to death for selling loose cigarettes? Stoughton rightly blames the training, and offers suggestions on training Guardian Officers rather than Police Warriors. But beyond that, there is a culture growing within law enforcement, the military, and the intelligence community that, post-September 11, increasingly views the public they are meant to serve as “enemy forces” to be dealt with. Somewhere, Osama bin Laden must be smiling.

Regal-atory capture
by Tom Sullivan

Progressive groups are sure to be fuming over the agreement among congressional leaders on approving “fast track” authority:

In what is sure to be one of the toughest fights of Mr. Obama’s last 19 months in office, the “fast track” bill allowing the White House to pursue its planned Pacific trade deal also heralds a divisive fight within the Democratic Party, one that could spill into the 2016 presidential campaign.

With committee votes planned next week, liberal senators such as Sherrod Brown of Ohio are demanding to know Hillary Rodham Clinton’s position on the bill to give the president so-called trade promotion authority, or T.P.A.

“NAFTA on steroids” may have bipartisan support, but the secret trade agreement — congressional staff must have security clearances to view the draft trade pact text — also “enjoys” bipartisan opposition. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll in January showed Americans were in no hurry to expand trade: “59% said it could be delayed until next year and 16% said it shouldn’t be pursued at all.” Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, said in a press release yesterday, “Congress is being asked to delegate away its constitutional trade authority over the TPP, even after the administration ignored bicameral, bipartisan demands about the agreement’s terms, and then also grant blank-check authority to whomever may be the next president for any agreements he or she may pursue.”

Florida Democrat Rep. Alan Grayson said “we’ve had, I hate to say this, a sellout government.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat, wrote in the Washington Post that the “Investor-State Dispute Settlement,” or ISDS provisions, in TPP “would tilt the playing field in the United States further in favor of big multinational corporations. Worse, it would undermine U.S. sovereignty.” For that and other reasons, the T-party derisively calls the Trans-Pacific Partnership Obamatrade.

The agreement in Congress follows a 240-179 vote in the House to repeal the estate tax. The White House theatens a veto, and The Hill reports Republicans do not appear to have the votes needed to override.

Elizabeth Warren spoke Thursday with Esquire’s Charlie Pierce about the estate tax vote:

“I can’t believe it,” she said. “Well, yes, I can. This isn’t just a really bad idea. This is an attack on our values — getting rid of the estate tax in order to help a handful of really rich people, and telling our children that there’s no money for them to go to school, to help them with their student loans, to build the necessary infrastructure so that they can get to and from the jobs that will help them pay off those loans…well, that’s just…obscene.“

As Digby observed yesterday at Salon, even the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank agrees the estate tax, as it now stands, is not preventing the growth of “a permanent aristocracy” in this country, and “abolishing it entirely turns democracy into kleptocracy.” That is, repeal would codify what we have now. Perhaps we should call our present struggle a fight to ward off regal-atory capture.

Many of our flag-waving, fellow Americans, both rich and poor, are royalists by temperament, predisposed to government by hereditary royalty and landed nobility, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are not created equal. During the Revolution, they sided with the British. After the Treaty of Paris, most stayed here. Their progeny and others so disposed have made it their project, as Digby suggests, to restore control to those whom Republican Sen. Dan Quayle once called “the best people.” And to corporations. Because corporations are the best people too, my friend.