The conservatarians applaud the buyout of the government by the wealthy elite, but cry the loudest at miniscule government “handouts” towards the welfare state. Apparently selling your country to the top bidder is acceptable, but providing people with less than enough money to live on is unfathomable.

Obama is a whore to Wall Street and big money, the 100% exact opposite of a socialist, yet that’s what he’s called over and over again.

Even stranger is the attitude of quasi-fascists on the right who applaud Obama’s most tyrannical behavior (so long as it vindicates Republicans who have done the same thing):

The White House detainee policy volte-face vindicates the policies of President George W. Bush. At the very least, Mr. Obama should apologize to his predecessor for smearing his reputation so thoroughly during the 2008 campaign. Our novice commander in chief has learned the valuable lesson that talking about being president, at which Mr. Obama was so adept, is a far cry from actually being president, at which he clearly is not.

This makes even less sense than I initially realized: if Obama learned a “lesson” by continuing Bush’s policies, then hasn’t he proven he IS an “adept” President? Even when he does EXACTLY what the Right wants, even if it’s as EVIL as they want, it will STILL never, ever, ever be good enough for them.

This is precisely why lamenting Obama’s constant capitulation is pointless: he is not, nor has he ever been, a Marxist, a communist, a socialist, a leftwinger, a liberal, or even a moderate. He is a right-wing authoritarian asshole, and yes he is an unindicted war criminal, just like George W. Guantanimo is for people like THEM–except that I’m in favor of giving even bloodthirsty warmongers fair and speedy trials, not out of bleeding-heartedness, but out of spite and contempt for their sick, demented perversions of “justice”.

It’s funny\sad how the Tea Party nuts who call Obama “Hitler” tolerate him ONLY when he actually behaves like a dictator.

“He swore an oath on the Bible to become president that he would uphold the Constitution and enforce the laws of the United States. He is not a one-person Supreme Court. The idea that we now have the rule of Obama instead of the rule of law should frighten everybody. The fact that the left likes the policy is allowing them to ignore the fact that this is a very unconstitutional act,” Gingrich said.

There is no doubt that Obama HAS done exactly that, albeit regarding rather different matters. Obama may have violated the Constitution in regards to the War on (some) Terror, but the gay marriage issue he’s been, well, less than consistent, lousy but less than tyrannical. It’s just so frustrating to want to be able to address Obama’s extra-Constitutional reach without giving credence to Gingrich’s nonsense.

Visa can’t find anything to get WikiLeaks charged with in Iceland despite a private investigation and commitment to continue blocking their customers from donating to WikiLeaks. Security firm HBGary has had their asses handed to them by hacktivist group Anonymous after company head Aaron Barr bragged that he had infiltrated Anon through Facebook. The response was for Anonymous to hack HBGary’s files through Barr’s email, which led to the discovery of staggeringly cutthroat plans to attack journalists¹ (where else have we heard that recently?)

Over and over again, people from Egypt, Australia, and Facebook (which isn’t exactly a country, but is certainly large enough to BE a country) are daring to speak truth to power find that power responding swiftly and harshly, whether it’s trying to get you arrested, plotting to attack your credibility, or just killing you. All of which, in the long run, shows just how right the whistleblowers are.

***

Meanwhile, cannabis prohibition in America is certainly being challeneged, but the government’s response is less reactionay violence than cynical chicanery.

The DEA is trying to make a loophole for government-grown pot (there’s one place at the University of Mississippi that does this) to be sold legally under the current federal law which bans THC in all forms. Here’s how the Daily Caller explains it:

[DEA spokesperson:] “THC, natural or synthetic, remains a schedule I controlled substance. Under the proposed rule, in those instances in the future where FDA might approve a generic version of Marinol, that version of the drug will be in the same schedule as the brand name version of the drug, regardless of whether the THC used in the generic version was synthesized by man or derived from the cannabis plant.”

In other words, THC in plant form or as an extract, will still be illegal. What won’t be illegal is if a pharmaceutical company buys THC from a government-licensed provider, puts it in a pill, receives the DEA’s stamp of approval, and sells it a price that will likely be far higher than the price of marijuana.

Daily Caller doesn’t mention that the only “government-licensed provider” is UofM, which NORML’s blog does. This smells like cronyism to me: they have all this weed lying around, the rules are a little looser for what you can do with weed these days, and there’s a screaming market. Did UofM ask the DEA to make an exception in their favor, which they won’t do for dying people, in order to make money off of dying people at an inflated rate?

Hillary Clinton recently said the reason drugs can’t be legalized is “there’s too much money in it,” which I at first dismissed as just being laughably stupid, if taken literally(you can read the entire interview transcript here²). But prohibition has benefited The Powers That Be (and oh how they be) in myriad ways, from destabilizing countries to justify pro-corporate military intervention, to funding juntas in third-world countries to install pro-American, pro-business regimes (similar themes have have popped up recently as well).

The DEA tricking out the government’s homegrown, while Hillary runs cover for the drug war. You have to wonder how deep this goes…

WikiLeaks, Anonymous — you’re up.

(Much love to @dailyhempbuzz on Twitter for retweeting Part 1!)

¹See page 4 for list of journalists. Also, take a look at pages 6 and 8, with photos and descriptions of Bahnhof AB, a web server host in a former “Cold War bomb shelter” [thier emphasis] nestled in Pionen White Mountains in Sweden, which hold much of WikiLeaks. You really begin to get a feel for the mentality info-security groups have.

²Thanks to Scott Morgan for the link

The protests in response to this are credited with fomenting what the Twitter hashtag calls “#jan25″. The Egyptian government’s internet shutdown, which proceeded over the next few hours, is believed to have largely been an effort to attack internet social networks, like “We Are All Khaled Said” Facebook page.

I’ll have more to say later…

What these arguments missed was the hunger for the cables in countries that didn’t have fully functioning democracies or the sort of free expression enjoyed in London, Paris or New York. Within hours of the first cables being posted the Guardian started receiving a steady stream of pleading requests from editors and journalists around the world wanting to know what the cables revealed about their own countries and rulers. It was easier to call the revelations unstartling, dull even, if one lived in western Europe, rather than in Belarus, Tunisia, or in any other oppressive regime. [Emphasis added]

People LIKE it when you free information about their government. This is real fuel for ground-up democratic movements. You can convince people that the system needs to be overthrown when even the regime’s partner in weapons trade, the US, complains about them behind the curtain.

Paradoxically the leaked comments by the US ambassador in Tunis, widely read across the region, played a major role in boosting Washington’s image on the Arab street. Ordinary Tunisians liked the way in which the Americans – unlike the French – had so frankly highlighted corruption.

They now wanted the US to support their ongoing jasmine revolution. They asked Washington to exert pressure on neighbouring Arab leaders, and prevent them from interfering.

And how does Washington respond to their newly-earned respectability?

The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, had previously denounced the leak of the cables, because it had “undermined our efforts to work with other countries to solve shared problems”.

This is the “bad America” that the PFB-described “left” might be looking for: the US has the means to provide oppressed people with free information as a basic tool towards their own liberation, but Washington feels this “undermines [their] efforts” because their “efforts” have nothing to with supporting democracy in the Middle East. Their goals are primarily business and political arrangements that work in the US’s favor, which are not necessarily conducive to Egyptian self-determination. “Problems” sometimes include popular democratic movements, or at the very least anti-business-as-usual movements (witness East Timor as a particualrly unpleasant example: 1, 2, 3, pages 9-10)

The anti-government Egyptians see America as a potential ally, since we have all this dirt on Mubarak. But the US has been, and continues to be, a supporter of the regime. Hillary Clinton and the administration (Biden won’t call Mubarak a dictator) don’t want America to actually use its powers for good, like we always go around saying we do. We’d rather let the Middle East have a low, cynical opinion of us than an optimistic one because a cynical view keeps the people’s expectations lower. Fewer moral obligations, a broader amount of screw-up room (if we handle things badly, they’ll just say “Oh, it’s the US, they can’t do anything right, look at Iraq, etc.”). It’s a nasty, somewhat self-loathing attitude for the US to have: we’re ashamed when we are too pro-democracy. Or, as Chris Matthews explained:

They[dictators] want their oldest kid to replace them. And what was the plan for transition for our friend? Did we ever talk to him about it? Did we talk about it, encourage him? That’s my view. Character and planning. And I don’t see–I feel shame about this. I feel ashamed as an American, the way we’re doing this. I know he has to change. I know we’re for democracy, but the way we’ve handled it is not the way a friend handles a matter. We’re not handling as Americans should handle a matter like this. I don’t feel right about it. And Barack Obama, as much I support him in many ways, there is a transitional quality to the guy that is chilling. [Emphasis added]

Yes, Matthews believes that Mubarak, a Dubya ranch hand, is all Obama’s fault because Obama didn’t help our wayward “friend” enough to see the error of his ways. Maybe sending him more teargas would’ve improved his self-esteem enough to not be so much of a bad ol’ dictator anymore. (But if his heart grows 3 sizes bigger, what will he do will all the teargas?)

I believe in relationships. I think we all do. Relationship politics is what we were brought up with in this country. You treat your friends a certain way. You’re loyal to them. And when they’re wrong, you try to be with them. You try and stick with them.

If we give the tyrants BIGGER HUGS, they’ll turn nice! Why didn’t I realize that before??

*****

To contrast the power of information loosened, witness the tragedy of information denied:

Chinese students completely confused by what we think of as an iconic and universal image[, the man standing defiantly in front of tanks in Tainanmen Square]. There are, of course, dissidents in China today who continued to try to keep the truth alive about what actually happened in Tiananmen Square.

But the government there has really effectively maintained the 20-yearlong lie about Tiananmen—a 20-yearlong lie that Tiananmen was no big deal. There certainly wasn‘t anything heroic about it except maybe on the government side. From the government‘s perspective, they say they were criminals and thugs causing chaos and anti-Chinese uprising. The government just had to restore order, that‘s all. They had to.

Transcript here.

(Note: my quotations over PFB’s use of “left” is because I find it increasingly difficult to figure out what people actually mean when they label someone else’s politics as “left” or “right”. For example, the “left” stereotypically hates the US government over foreign policy, but loves it under domestic policy, or at least that tends to be the “right” wing’s way of framing the debate, so presumably they can love the US abroad but hate it at home… See how weird it gets?)

]]> http://positromagnetics.wordpress.com/2011/02/09/wikileaks-makes-us-look-good-and-the-us-government-hates-it/feed/ 0 zenquagga http://positromagnetics.wordpress.com/2010/12/28/quick-round-up/ http://positromagnetics.wordpress.com/2010/12/28/quick-round-up/#comments Tue, 28 Dec 2010 19:40:00 +0000 zenquagga http://positromagnetics.wordpress.com/?p=122 ]]> Grabbed a bunch of headlines off RawStory…

Portugal’s tough drug decrim policy is profiled and compared to changing US policies and attitudes. Factual error regarding California’s medical legalization start date; Proposition 215 (Cal HS 11362.5)
was passed in November of 1996, not 2006. It would be amazing if 14 other states had passed medical marijuana in a span of four years, but that is not what actually happened. (Source: here and here.)

Snarky editorial by Roger Simon abouty TSA body scanners, their ineffectiveness at stopping The Bady Guys, and excellence with enabling privacy violation and costing taxpayers lots and lots of money. Napolitano says it’s worth the expense even if they don’t work because they serve as a deterrence. Which makes no sense–YOU ARE ON AN INTERVIEW ON TELEVISION ADMITTING THEY DON’T WORK. Where, exactly, will the deterrrence come from? Fortunately, Mr. Simon provides us with a better alternative.

Activists use Facebook, Twitter, Internet. You don’t say!

The US cannot account for billions of dollars spent in Afghanistan. You don’t say! I wonder what they’re doing with it…

What I found dismaying (and a moral reason why I’m not so keen to shop at Target anymore) is a warning during the process about drug screenings that are a requisite for employment. The warning included a statement that even if a prospective employee had a legal prescription for marijuana signed by a doctor in a state where medical marijuana was legal, the person would be ineligible for employment at Target.¹ Never mind how cruel this is, to persecute someone by barring them from employment because of the medicine they use. Never mind how STUPID it is, since the patients have paperwork to separate themselves from recreational users (not that I think rec users should be denied employment either). It really underlines a lie that the pro-pot minarcho-capitalists who inaccurately call themselves ‘libertarians’ have been screaming for years: that the War On Drugs is all the government’s fault.

My hero Glenn Greenwald tweeted about this revolting policy many businesses have back in August, with a link to a NYT article about people being fired for these non-offenses.

I’m sure there are ‘libertarians’ upset by these policies, but can they explain them? After all, for years they have claimed that it is the Big, Bad Government that robs us of freedom wherever we go. We are told by ‘libertarians’ that government regulation, especially of the economy, is a harbinger of doom to personal rights.

Well, legalizing something is also regulation. Regulation doesn’t always mean restriction; it can also mean permission. In fact, while I haven’t looked at the specific wording of all the various states’ policies (they are all a bit different from one another), it would not suprise me in the least if the legalizing law restricted the state. Many laws, including much of the U.S. Constitution (which minarchists salivate over) is written this way. Pennsylvania’s HB1393, the not-yet-passed bill that would legalize medical marijuana in that state, is in fact written in precisely that way:

Section 5. Medical use of marijuana permitted.

(a) Freedom from arrest, prosecution or penalty.–

(1) A qualifying patient shall not be subject to arrest, prosecution or penalty in any manner, or denied any right or privilege, including, but not limited to, civil penalty or disciplinary action by a professional licensing board, for the medical use of marijuana, provided that the patient possesses a registry identification card and no more than six marijuana plants and one ounce of usable marijuana.

(2) There shall exist a rebuttable presumption that a qualifying patient is engaged in the medical use of marijuana if he possesses a registry identification card and no more than six marijuana plants and one ounce of usable marijuana. The presumption may be rebutted by evidence that conduct related to marijuana was not for the purpose of alleviating the symptoms or effects of a patient’s debilitating medical condition.

(3) A qualifying patient may assert the medical use of marijuana as an affirmative defense to any prosecution involving marijuana unless the patient was in violation of this section when the events giving rise to the prosecution occurred.

(Note: Formatting altered to make the text more readable; emphasis added by me)

The fallacy of minarchists and other capitalists is the totally false presumption that the workplace is “free” from tyranny and that public space is savagely “controlled” by the government. I hate government authoritarianism, but the fact remains that workplaces are authority-driven environments. A boss, or corporate body, is an authority figure. There are no “libertarian” authorities. Some may be more liberal than others, and that’s great. Not every business drug tests, for example.² But the naive belief that the market or competition or “laissez-faire” or any other minarcho-capitalist shibboleths magically protect employees (i.e., the working class) from the whims of their boss(es) is absurd. Management is going to be inclined to be socially and economically conservatives virtually all of the time because the purpose of a profit-driven business is to PROFIT, not move forward on social change. I can’t even be that hard on bosses who at least feel pressured to drug test their employees because they are afraid of losing business to socially backwards clients.

But if the law says they’re legal, and drug testing is an added expense, then every “law” of the Magical Self-Correcting Market says drop the testing policy. But they don’t. Why, it’s almost as if businesses are motivated to control their workers exactly the same way governments are motivated to control their citizens, even at added cost. It would appear that governments and businesses, both authority-driven institutions, have the same compulsion to control people, regardless of what science, medicine, or basic concepts of individual rights would otherwise dictate. And regardless of how ‘libertarians’ think the world works.

¹I looked online for a copy of Target’s policy regarding drug testing but couldn’t find one. If I come by one later I’ll add it as an update.
²I also looked for a list of businesses that don’t drug test. I could have sworn there was one kicking around the webtubez years ago. Until I can find it or another one like it, here are some helpful links:
http://www.lectlaw.com/files/emp02.htm from ‘Lectric Law
companies that DO test

The “Courthouse News Service” (whatever that is) published a report about how Churchill lost his appeal to get his job back. Here’s some excerpts from the article:

Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies, made headlines in 2005 for his essay “On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” in which he called some people who worked in the World Trade Centers “little Eichmanns.” The essay likened Eichmann’s work organizing trains to send Jews to concentration camps to “ongoing genocidal American imperialism.”
[...]

Reaction to the essay sparked a university investigation, which found Churchill guilty of academic misconduct, including plagiarism and falsifying data. He was fired in 2007.
[...]

“Churchill’s academic freedom did not include the right to commit research misconduct that was specifically proscribed by the University’s policies and enforced through a system of shared governance between the administration and the faculty,” Judge Graham wrote.

Note how there is no actual mention in the article of any details of the alleged “plagiarism”. Instead, it focuses on his naughty, naughty ‘little Eichmann’ comparison, which supposedly was not the reason he was fired. It also goes into details about Eichmann’s role in the Holocaust, which Churchill did not mention in his essay. The .PDF attached to the end of the article has a copy of the court’s decision, which also provides no details about the “misconduct” or “plagiarism”. Keep in mind I am not a legal expert; I do not know if it is customary or not for official legal decisions to carry much detail of the charges, but I certainly expected to see details in the NEWS article. I mean, it’s the “Courthouse News”. Why WOULDN’T they at least write about the details of the findings if they were significant enough for Churchill to lose his appeal?

After reading one side of the story, I decided to read the other. Churchill’s website carries a FAQ-style rebuttal to the charges. Here’s part of it [emphasis theirs]:

Didn’t the investigating committee find misconduct?

After combing through more than 4,000 pages and 12,000 footnotes of Ward Churchill’s publications, CU found only a handful of minor points to dispute. CU called them “fraud” and “plagiarism” but they were really questions of historical interpretation and claimed deviation from unspecified “standards.”

Many people have been fooled by the heft of the Investigative Committee’s 124-page Report. In fact, most of the allegations were dropped. The charges boiled down to:

◦4 questions of interpretation of sources concerning smallpox epidemics or
“blood quantum” laws.

◦3 charges of ghostwriting and attribution of authorship, under “standards” the
Committee never could identify. The author whose work was supposedly
plagiarized never accused Ward Churchill of doing so.

(Although there is a link at the bottom of this part of the rebuttal that says “. . . click here for more details”, it simply goes back to the top of the page.) It seems suspicious indeed that such trivial quibbles would be grounds for termination, and I tend to believe Mr. Churchill was right in claiming his firing was due to political pressure and not misconduct on his part.

The reason that I focused on the claims of plagiarism is that that’s a pretty serious thing for an author to do, and if that claim could be substantiated, then Ward Churchill’s arguement would be much harder to take seriously. But if the author (whose name is not mentioned either in the court decision or Churchill’s page) never made an accusation of plagiarism, then I would have to conclude that Churchill was fired unfairly. I suppose I could read through the court’s other documents to find the author’s name, but “Courthouse News” should have put it in their article.

This is yet another news story where the headline completely misleads the reader from reality. And the article’s author probably has nothing against (or for) Mr. Churchill. It just seems like another example of lazy tabloid reporting, where the SCANDAL is more important than the facts.