By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
TPP
Clinton’s words on TPP don’t differ all that much from Republicans, including Obama’s [The Intercept].
“President Bill Clinton needed Republican votes to pass NAFTA, and, likewise, Obama will need to lean on Congress’s top Republicans—Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner—to get the TPP passed” [Newsweek].
Zephyr Teachout: ““The TPP, if it gets passed, will be known as Congress’s Citizens United, because it is giving corporations greater power, foreign corporations, multinational corporations, greater power than citizens” [New York Observer].
Obama shifts his pitch: “Instead, in a 4,000-word address to Organizing for Action (OFA), Obama sought to place his trade pact alongside his signature domestic initiatives, including his health-care law, the auto industry bailout, student-loan consolidation and Wall Street reform” [WaPo]. Wow! I’m sold! (OFA, the last game refuge of the Obots is, of course, pre-sold.)
2016
Senators Elizabeth Warren and Claire McCaskill asked the GAO to study the impact of garnishment on borrowers in their 60s and older on concerns about retirement security [Bloomberg]. Hillary?
“The people behind Run Warren Run aren’t deaf. They think they can change her mind” [Politico]. No Sherman statement from Warren, in that (AFAIK) she has never said she’d reject a draft.
“Clinton’s advisers are respectful of Warren, but they privately argue that Clinton has a more sophisticated understanding of the economy” [The New Yorker]. “Sophisticated.” Heaven help us.
The S.S. Clinton
The Big Dog slinks off from “honorary” chair position at for-profit Laureate “University” as KKR prepares IPO, and so he should, ka-ching ka-ching [Bloomberg]. What happened to the brilliant young man who made it all the way from Hope, Arkansas to Oxford, where students have been taught since 1096 A.D., a non-profit, and therefore, like anything public, in the gunsights of sleazy private equity investment banksters everywhere? Where is that young man, Bill? Is he inside you anywhere, now?
The advantages of Hillary’s “H” logo [The Altantic]. “W”,”O”, and “H” spell “how” ass-backwards. Coincidence? You be the judge!
Schweitzer/uranium, Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson: “Republicans need to be careful not to overstate the case. There’s no evidence of quid pro quo” [Bloomberg]. Never happen. Republicans always over-reach. Not that it hasn’t worked out well for them.
Schweitzer/uranium: “Are the Clintons correct in saying that there is an attack machine geared up to go after them? Of course. But why have they made it so easy?” [The New Yorker].
Iowa “Faith and Freedom” summit didn’t narrow the Republican field [National Review].
Republican Establishment
Michigan Republican Governor Rick Snyder thinking of throwing Detroit into the ring [Guardian].
Jebbie signs leading evangelical attorney Jordan Sekulow as senior advisor [Salon]. Known associates include Robert Mugabe and the Slavic Center for Law and Justice.
Republican Principled Insurgents
Scott Walker: “My relationship with God drives every major decision in my life” [New York Times]. Walker: “What sustained us all along the way is we had people who said, ‘We prayed for you.'” “Imprecatory prayer”; Google it!
Rubio: “I’m running for office with much more experience and qualifications than Barack Obama had” [Bloomberg]. Setting the baseline pretty low there, eh, Marco?
Republican Clown Car
Cruz: “Today’s Democratic Party has decided there is no room for Christians. There is a liberal fascism that is going after Christian believers” [The Hill]. Wowsers.
Gingrich: “Instead of buying a new yacht, I’m going to spend $70 million on a candidate” [WaPo]. And Newtie should know.
Shorter George Packer: “I’m b-o-o-o-r-e-d” [Corey Robin, Salon]. Nice evisceration of one of the leading lights of our famously free press; and I’m not the only one who thinks that gridlock is just fine, given the alternatives.
Campaign 2016 to focus on the “woes of the middle class,” even though the recession has hit the poor harder [Wall Street Journal, “For 2016, Middle-Class Woes Overshadow America’s Poor”]. Which you can hear in the rhetoric all the candidates, of both parties. In other words, the top 20%.
Conclusion of Internet voting study in Brazil: “Technology appears more likely to engage people who are younger, male, of higher income and educational attainment, and more frequent social media users” [SSRN]. Film at 11.
The Hill
Strange bedfellows allliance between conservatives and teachers on Common Core [New York Times].
Corruption
The Tory and Lib-Dem MPs who will profit from selling off the NHS [Daily Mirror].
“A secret recording caught [senior Tory Cabinet minister] Francis Maude praising outsourcing firm Sodexo [ka-ching] – and promising a ‘flood’ of similar privatisations if the Tories win a second term” [Daily Mirror].
Rahmerdämmerung
Chicago Public Education Fund, whose board is a who’s-who of Chicago power brokers and Rahm backers, being investigated by the Feds over no bid contract to cronies [Chicago Magazine]. It’s important to watch Chicago; it’s probably next in line after New Orleans and Detroit, which is why Rahm was deployed there.
Illinois economic development agency could be privatized [Chicago Tribune]. Like Ohio and Wisconsin; seems to be an agenda item for the local elites out there in Kochistan.
Black Injustice Tipping Point
Baltimore Bloods and Crips call ceasefire for #BlackLivesMatter [Daily Beast]. More interesting than it seems if you consider a gang as a proto-state (and, for that matter, the state as a proto-gang, as we see in countless ways daily).
Interestingly, after a “remarkably peaceful” day, the Baltmore violence seems to have started outside Camden Yards baseball park, “at three bars with sidewalk cafes” in a clash between fans and protesters [WaPo]. So, alchohol. And St Louis fan behavior was a portent for this; it would be a shame if the violence became the narrative, but “if it bleeds, it leads.”
Amazingly, or not, CNN never did a split screen between the White House Correspondents Dinner and the Baltimore protests — or Nepal [The Great Will Bunch, Philadelphia Inquirer].
The violent killing of 25-year-old Freddie Gray, whose spine was snapped in the custody of Baltimore police who’d stopped him for no obvious reason, is an American tragedy, driving thousands of people into the streets on Saturday. Most were peaceful, but some young people on the fringes shattered windows, looted convenience stores, and stomped on police cruisers. Some 40,000 baseball fans at Camden Yards were abruptly told by city officials that it wasn’t safe to leave.
Think about that for a moment, in relation to TV news. CNN and their rival networks have been known to cut away from regular programming to show planes with stuck landing gear circling a runway, or random police chases of random suspects in a random city. But now a city telling 40,000 people not to leave a baseball game because of social unrest, albeit briefly, wasn’t news? Are you kidding me? More important was the broader stakes, that the citizens of a great American city, stripped of its factories and caught between high crime and appalling levels of police brutality, were trying to make a statement, that their lives mattered. But to the Beltway revelers…they just didn’t.
I was watching CNN, and you could feel the awkward, nervous tension. Even the host Poppy Harlow and the guests acknowledged that people in the CNN newsroom were watching Twitter and other social media, and they knew that the Freddie Gray protests in Baltimore were all that folks wanted to talk about. But they just couldn’t break away from the their inane prattling about looming White House humor.
The 45-minute mystery of Freddie Brown’s death (with handy timeline) [Baltimore Sun].
Imperial Collapse Watch
“The Obama administration considers the real alternatives to drone strikes to be the unpalatable options of grueling ground wars or passive acceptance of terrorism. Then it congratulates itself for picking the wise, ethical and responsible choice of killing people without knowing who they are” [Spencer Ackerman, Guardian].
Class Warfare
Clickbait headline: “The history of American inequality, in 1 fascinating chart” [WaPo]. However: “Between 1830 and 1970s, only the bottom 90% saw their incomes rise. After 1980, only the top 1% saw their incomes rise.” Thank you, neo-liberals, for facilitating this transition.
News of the Wired
- Throw away your weed whacker and pick up your scythe [Digg]. Or sheet mulch everything, and live with the few weeds that remain (module xeriscaping).
- Nuts are good for you [New York Times]. Make up your own jokes!
- “New Hugo Award categories for puppies” [Boing Boing].
- Louis CK’s surreal short films [Open Culture].
- Non-violent civil resistance survey from Erica Chenoweth [University of Denver].
- Interviews with three women who helped spark Occupy Hong Kong [South China Morning Post]. Very interesting.
- “The Barrett Brown Review of Arts and Letters and Jail: A Sign of Things to Come” [Front Burner]. Very funny, amazingly.
Readers, feel free to contact me with (a) links, and even better (b) sources I should curate regularly, and (c) to find out how to send me images of plants. Vegetables are fine! Fungi are deemed to be honorary plants! See the previous Water Cooler (with plant) here. And here’s today’s plant, the first of “Spring is here!” week one. Via Chuck, who writes:
I took some pictures of daffodils that my wife planted in our garden 25 years ago when she was pregnant with our daughter. My wife worked hard in the garden all day. We think all that hard work is why she went into labor the following day.
Please send me plantings and garden projects!
If you enjoy Water Cooler, please consider tipping and click the hat. It’s the heating season!
Talk amongst yourselves!
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If the TPP passes, wouldn’t the tobacco companies then be able to take the US and state governments into the tribunals to force them to revoke their anti-smoking laws and ordinances?
I may have it wrong, but I think it would need to be a foreign company complaining about our national/local laws inhibiting their profits. Not that it wouldn’t be done, just that it wouldn’t be Phillip Morris – directly.
So they would need a straw. Easy-peasy. I’m sure that one of the “judges,” when acting in their non-judge-y, lawyerly capacity, would be happy to set up the necessary arrangements, shell companies, pay-offs, etc.
* * *
I’m happy with “judge-y,” or the idea of it. It’s like truthy. The TPP tribunals are court-y, the judges are judge-y, etc. What fun!
if only the tpp were fun-y.
ISDNs in action (I live in Australia): We the people of this land, through our highest court, decided that Phillip Morris could not sue us for “lost profits” just because we passed strict tobacco plain packaging laws. No problem, said PM, we will just sue the “sovereign” country of Australia via ISDN from another jurisdiction (Hong Kong). So now a $400M payment from the taxpayers of Australia to the coffers of Phillip Morris looms.
Make no mistake folks, this is corporo-fascism at its very worst. We all need to understand just how toxic and fascist Obomba is for promoting this anti-citizen, anti-worker, anti-freedom secret deal as his signature “accomplishment”.
It went through? $400M? That’s a lot of money, even today.
Just-y. Wasn’t that an Isuzu vehicle model? “Trust us!”
Subaru Justy.
If the TPP passes, won’t all US-based mega-corps offshore their headquarters for just this reason?
The TPP is treason!
I may have it wrong but I thought Phillip Morris International was a Swiss company or that they were suing based on a Swiss – Urguarian treaty.
A lot of former ‘American’ companies aren’t really ‘American’ companies anymore and I suspect those are the ones who would have the power and resources to sue.
I don’t think it’s revoke as such. It’s that the tribunals could make even the threat of “compensation” for “expropriated” “lost profits” so large that the governments affected would change their laws, “voluntarily.”
I also don’t know how grandfathering works (although clearly one aspect of the so-called “courts” will be to obfuscate the real power relations with hairballs of seeming legality).
Philip Morris Asia is suing Australia over intellectual property through the WTO:
Gaius Publius has good rundown of the current TPP situation regarding progressive dems vs the Obots:
http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2015/04/warren-tells-obama-to-put-up-or-shut-up.html
Yes, that’s an awesome takedown. I’d love to see Brown and Warren (and Bernie?) go to the mattresses — a real old-fashioned filibuster where they talk for days, and not a mere procedural move.
Thanks
….and even MSNBC Dem spear-carrier Joan Walsh can see that ” the president lamentably shades the truth” on TPP (most people call it lying).
http://www.salon.com/2015/04/27/democrats%E2%80%99_free_trade_war_is_getting_ugly_and_obama_is_bending_the_truth/
I love “lamentably shades the truth.” That’s a keeper.
Hillary’s “H” has a red arrow pointing toward the right. That’s truth-in-advertising.
To be fair, that’s a reasonably graphic treatment. Imagine an arrow that pointed off the page on some stationery, for example. But yeah.
An arrow angled up at 45 degrees would be like the Volvo logo, perhaps coincidental?
It’d look too much like the Mars symbol. Think of all the sweet Gramma Empress messaging that would dilute.
I think it shows inattention to detail which is a hallmark of Clinton. People have lost their jobs over mixing up the union bug mailer and the non union bug mailer, at least one. There were other issues with that individual, but Democratic voters told us the union bug was missing and didn’t want to hear an apology from a kid at UVA. It’s a campaign reality. These people are just lazy.
The arrow should be pointing up. Way more predictive for the failed Clinton ll administration. BOHICA.
Regarding garnishing of Social Security benefits to repay student loans: Warren and McCaskill don’t mention that the IRS does it, and with no lower limit.
(Garnishment to repay student loans only applies to Social Security payments in excess of $750 per month because, you know, it’s not reasonable for TPTB to expect anyone to live on less than that!)
The Barret Brown piece is excellent. I’m going to print that last sign up and hang it in my apartment building.
Since I haven’t beaten the co-op economics drum in a little while:
Introducing the Worker Coop Academy Class of 2014
if only the birds could testify:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/features/green/blog/bal-light-street-falcons-20150422-photogallery.html
Via @kgosztola
“This makes inconvenience at a ballgame irrelevant…” Baltimore Orioles COO on #FreddieGray protests
Just when you thought all in sports ownership/management were unrepentant so and sos along comes the exception. Good for him.
Orioles manager Buck Showalter but pretty eloquent as well. Something along the lines of, “Reminds you that certain things are a lot more important than a game.”
Thanks, got a link on that? Baseball has its own history, here, of course, so it’s nice to see both Angelos and Showalter reacting in a humane fashion.
That is a terrific link; I’ll run it tomorrow. If you run across anything more Baltimore-centric like that, please feel free to send it to me.
I’m dumbfounded. That’s a remarkable statement.
Thank you Mr. Angelos.
Imprecatory prayer? No one did it as well as the Romans:
http://www.livescience.com/20483-black-magic-ancient-curses.html
Praying with verve, ad urbe condita. Scott Walker is lukewarm pulmentum in comparison.
I’d like to see 1 Congressperson like Sen Warren, Sanders, etc, introduce a bill that ANY laid off or fired USian worker, is entitled to their salary, + CPI, + 1% over CPI to account for increased projected productivity & promotions, until age 67, and this age 67 is subject to higher revision if any Future Grand Ripoff crapifies the Medicare &/or Soc Security age above 67. After all, these Corporate Employers are HARMING FUTURE PROFITS.
If nothing else, it would show the ridiculousness of the Harming Future Profits nonsensical notion of the TPP.
“Come kill a website with me today. Then we can wander the wastelands together.” -Fredrik de Boer, “The Supervillain’s Guide to Saving the Internet“, on winnowing Ben Smith’s money and destroying clickfarms.
(Present forum excluded, of course.)
Very well done. I really wish some of these people — the Clintons, Obama — would stop for a moment and consider what they are doing. Bill and Hillary must have had sparks of idealism at one time. If they look inside maybe they can recognize some faint glimmer of light. Obama I’m not so sure about.
Nope to late and somewhere there is one of young big dog with gwb at their summer home
https://twitter.com/beschlossdc/status/275941914182828033
Thank you. Do feel free to propagate. More in sorrow than in anger, of course!
According to Christopher Hitchens (who I briefly loved before realizing what a stupid, drunken buffoon he was), Clinton spent most of his time at Oxford getting laid. So perhaps he never had any idealism at all, and was just very motivated to succeed.
Surely the set of all idealists and the set of all hedonists do not completely overlap? That before we get to ol’ Hitch, who I’d trust on this topic as far as I could throw a concert grand piano.
Yeah, he did have a strange, hateful obsession with the Clinton’s. But I can’t really say a majority of his hate wasn’t justified…
Well, to the extent that hate is ever justified. Especially strategic hate management. The spectacle of the Obots in 2008 taking up the right wing talking points of 1992 should really have given more people pause than it did.
The more learn about the Clinton’s, the less I like them. Especially Hillary. I’m not sure how I can be expected to feel less than hatred for a woman who proudly boasts about, effectively, smashing an entire country into tiny pieces.
“We came, we saw, he died. HAHAHAHAHA!”
My intuitive feeling is that Hitchen’s hatred was based on social class snobbery and Hitchens’s sense of aesthetic offendedness that a genuinely poor-background white trash descended person like Bill Clinton would soil the marble halls of Oxbridge ( or whatever it’s called). And he found bad things about Clinton to hang the hatred on. But it wasn’t the bad things that made Hitchens hate Clinton. It was Clinton’s really low lower class background. In my intuitive view.
I’ve never understood the “Bill grew up poor” theme. Politically I understand its use, particularly when he was running against the upper-class Bush, but the facts don’t really bear it out.
His mom was a nurse, and yes, I understand that a nurse in the late 40s in small town Arkansas wasn’t paid well, but his grandparents owned a grocery store and helped out financially, and in 1950 his mom married Bill’s stepfather who owned a local car dealership. You can call them middle class or working class, but I wouldn’t call them poor.
Of course, by Hitchens’ standards I’m sure Bill wasn’t good enough for Oxford.
Useful clarificatiion and reminder that Bill did not grow up in destitution.
But even when I made the comment I was at least half-way thinking in terms of “social class-status pecking order” position. Clinton was NOT descended from local social-elite gentry people, whether rich ones or poor ones. I suspect he was considered to be “grubby white trash” to many avatars of “shiny white cash”, even if those avatars were descended from the “impecunious black-sheep” branches of their fine families. I have long suspected Hitchens to be one of the Fine FamilyOriented Elitists who was offended at this “poor white trash person” at his snooty class-reserved Oxfordbridge ( or whatever it’s called).
Great observations.
What I have come to realize about people like the Clintons is that it does no good at all to project onto them the outlooks and values that “normal” people have. I think that’s what perhaps you are doing when you look for some glimmer of idealism from their past that you hope might somehow resurface and give them some self-reflection or second thoughts.
Imho, no one who sets out early on in life to a career of political power has much in common with the “normal”. Just think–who in their right mind would be willing to run the gauntlet of campaign nastiness to be elected to much of anything?
Hmm. It’s not a very great hope. But if it doesn’t sting him, it might open a few other eyes. It really isn’t necessary to shout through a megaphone at all times, you know.
I remember reading that Bill and Hillary were campaign volunteers on the McGovern Campaign. I read that they were broken-hearted when McGovern lost, especially with so many unionized thing-making working-class Democrats voting for Nixon.
I have a hypothesis. The Clintons vowed revenge against the American working classes for breaking their hearts by voting for Nixon in 1972. They took that revenge ( Bill especially) when they (he especially) was in a position to get NAFTA, WTO Membership for America, and MFN for China passed. Part of his motivation I believe was to destroy workers’s lives in revenge for their having destroyed his hopes for McGovern. Just a theory . . .
Is your hypothesis based on any evidence?
No. I would have to look for evidence to test the hypothesis. I would have to see how soon he began pursuing anti-workeritic and anti-unionitic policies after he first got elected to office. If he had anything to say on the subject before getting into office, that would be evidence too. Also, historians and biographers would have to interview people who knew the Clintons in the months before and after the McGovern loss to see what they said about it to fellow politically-minded people. It is something that perhaps David Maraniss could look into if he chose. Or maybe that person from Arkansas who admired Clinton so much and talked about a birdhouse he gave the Clintons or something when Clinton was President would have memories of Clinton’s 1972 thoughts on the matter.
It is just a very strong feeling that I have. Nothing more, at this point. But that’s what I deeply suspect as a possible motive other than getting rich after office.
This is more fun with small print that’s done with invisible ink.
Posted in comments at Washington blog by Southernfink
https://www.popularresistance.org/pro-israel-clause-added-to-trade-debate-unanimously/
An epic rant from the COO of the Baltimore Orioles on Twitter, curated by USAToday.
Gandhi had Nehru who had 4 million men under arms. King worked during a period of relative prosperity in many African American communities. I should point King warned that no change would lead to violence. He met Malcolm X. King didn’t cast him out.
malcolm x never committed any act of violence….
malcolm little sorta…the angry young street punk whose mother was institutionalized cause she sorta kinda got upset when her husband, a garveyite was pushed in front of a street car for not bowing often enough to the not so black foke…
same reason Rube Foster was institutionalized. Kenashaw Landis, one of the most evil people to walk the planet earth, suspended babe ruth for six weeks for daring to play baseball with black foke…
this myth that malcolm committed violence.
He stated that he could not see how violence could be stopped if people were going to be treated like dogs in the modern world…
The advantages of Hillary’s “H” logo [The Altantic]. “W”,”O”, and “H” spell “how” ass-backwards. Coincidence? You be the judge!
WHO in no particular order??
I started to read Wo-He-Lo, but I blame that on the Camp Fire alumnus I dated for many years.
Bush, Obama, Clinton, in that order.
Pro-Israel clause added to Trade deal unanimously: CommonDreams
“We find these laws invalid and will not comply.” -the nine words that ought to scare the crap out of any government but are not uttered frequently enough, defiantly enough or often enough to matter.
Cardin must be pro-Fast Track and pro-ObamaTrade to put an Apple of Discord like that before people who might otherwise unite against Fast Track.
Unanimous, eh? Well, maybe it will work out to the detriment of TPP getting ratified by enough countries to take effect (if there is a trigger threshhold). I should think that the Malaysia government would not join a TPP with that condition. Maybe the Indonesia government wouldn’t either. And maybe the Pacific Coast South American governments would reject a TPP with a law like that in it on general principles.
What do other commenters think of this being an inadvertent poison pill in the TPP for some foreign governments? Any chance of it?
Australia’s foreign minister, Julie Bishop, is a rabid, pro-likudnik who called the BDS movement “anti-semitic” so no objection from Oz..
Australia FM: Don’t call settlements illegal under international law
UPDATE on Baltimore. From various sources I read:
1) Very heavy police presence today, including county police in addition to Baltimore’s. (This is often a very bad sign, since poor coordination between different forces leads to violence, certainly during Occupy Oakland.)
2) Incident where high schoolers pepper-sprayed on leaving school.
3) Clash between police and protesters after Freddie Gray funeral.
4) Hotels in Baltimore area being booked (implication: Those who can getting out/and or influx of protesters).
5) Family members tweeting advice on how to get out.
Unfortunately, I don’t have time to follow this story as I should; I’d welcome any information from readers in Baltimore.
It would be nice if I had no reason to worry, but we might remember that Baltimore is a good deal closer to “our nation’s capital” than St Louis is, and the forces that can be deployed would be correspondingly more powerful, and more ruthless.
Incidentally, none of this makes what Angelos said above less true. More true, if anything.
UPDATE
6) Tactical vehicles said to have been spotted.
UPDATE
7) Maryland governor declares state of emergency. This might not end well. Will be interesting to find out what people see from the windows of the Acela — which passes through Baltimore — tomorrow.
At this posting time this Baltimore TV station had a live video feed of protests:
http://baltimore.cbslocal.com/show/cbs-baltimore-live-video/
Democrats will miss the glory days of Occupy.
Makes you wonder what would have happened if Occupy and #BlackLivesMatter were simultaneous, instead of in sequence.
Trying to be as disconnected as possible, I think Occupy was a cutting off point for many of the participants from the system.
“Black lives…” was still too associated with existing black “leaders” to work. Yes, the athletes wearing hoodies was neat, but there wasn’t an Ali out there. The basic issue Al Sharpton and his ilk can’t coexist with Occupy.
Going back to the Civil Rights movement, King oozed contempt for the black church in America. He didn’t say it explicitly, but he pointed out many community leaders didn’t want to rock the boat. “Black lives” attracted too much of the wrong element, basically the Congressional black caucus to really be an inclusive structure.
I have read that Occupy-affiliated students concerned about loans laughed at, sneered at, and rejected older people who wanted Occupy to extend its “loan-burden” concerns to mortgage-holders. Did I read something true or false when I read that?
I’d certainly like a link for it; I don’t remember any such thing, and I do remember Occupy Atlanta and IIRC an Occupy in Michigan defended people about to be evicted. Granted, a law of life is that “there’s always an asshole,” and Occupy was decentralized, and so somebody might have said what you remember. But again, I don’t remember it.
i sure hope this summer’s gonna be another cool one.
boots on the ground..
Well, so do I, actually. I’m not a “worse is better” guy.
i’ve never thought anything of the sort. otherwise, you’d have “buy gold” ads or something on the site.
the daffodils are awesome, by the way. at point pelee national park in southern ontario there are daffodils growing in the middle of the forest, remnants of long-lost homesteads.
Good. The people who like to sharpen the contradictions rarely get cut.
“let’s go to christie, she on the scene, she’s been pepper sprayed.
“twice!”
“hahaha”
•••
listening to the play-by-play (god lord!) is like reading a kilgore trout story.
american intifada..
Not a good precedent.
How many of the rioters might be secret police agents tasked to draw police response?
far too many, i fear..
Demonstrations should have organized squads of peacekeepers trained and tasked to beat down anyone and everyone seen picking up “that first stone”. Beat them into unconsciousness so fast they don’t have time to draw their hidden police gun if they happen to have one.
A version of that approach was written about somewhere in The Grapes Of Wrath.
Obviously the same treatment should be meted out to black blockers who pick up “that first rock”. Some of them could be undercover police, and since it is impossible to know which ones are, they should all be treated as being undercover policemen.
Sovereignty, BG style: “[BG defense minister Nenchev] revealed that the Defence Ministry was discussing an option of cooperating with NATO for joint defence of Bulgarian air space. The minister stated he was studying the experience of the three Baltic states, which paid EUR 5 M for defence of their air space annually. Nenchev did not rule out the possibility of requesting from the USA to leave the F-15 jets, which are stationed in Bulgaria for a longer period of time, but this required a bilateral agreement.”
From “the Prussians of the Balkans” (per the NYT of 1918) to a colony in the span of 100 years. Well done. Now all we need is to get the Parliament to approve the proposed purchase of 3rd hand, 1970’s vintage F-16s from Portugal to replace the far newer and more capable MiG-29s and the plunder and national humiliation will be complete. Makes one wonder why hundreds of thousands had to die fighting Ottoman rule and in two Balkan and two world wars only to get back to square one…
Five million Euros isn’t very much, is it? I would think a reasonably well-financed mercenary outfit could afford that…
Except there is the matter of several $ billion the president today proposed to spend on US arms, including the aforementioned extremely old and used F-16s, a maintenance nightmare many times more expensive than the extremely reasonable Russian offer. That money will be flowing to Lockheed. That, while the pension funds have been looted and healthcare and education are an utter mess. Straight out of the neocolonial textbook, ain’t it? Then there is the steep decline of capabilities from Mig-29s to Block 10 F-16s. Finally, there is that pesky matters of sovereignty and extreme public opposition to giving it up, and the 70% of the population self-identifying as rusophiles. This is basically a powder keg that the compradors are trying to set on fire.
The Ukrainians are lucky. We could be selling them F-35s!
In one of the early episodes of the great Hill Street Blues*, the President (who is never named) is planning a visit to the “Hill”, the poor, mostly minority neighborhood where the precinct is located. The precinct captain calls a gang summit where some White House stooge prattles on about the President’s visit only to be interrupted by one of the up and coming gang leaders (Jesus Martinez, for those familiar with the show), who tells him essentially that if there’s going to be any payouts made in his neighborhood the President can just send it to him because “up here, I’m the government”. That was 1981.
*It’s hard to believe I can drown in replays of so many terrible shows, but there are only 3 seasons of Hill Street Blues available. Every so-called great modern drama on television owes a debt to that show. If you haven’t seen it or it’s been awhile, I strongly recommend it. The technology may be dated – and after AIDS, it’s uncomfortable to see an officer with a reputation for biting – but it’s still a damned good show and very relevant, IMO, today, especially it’s focus on trying to both police and retain one’s humanity (the show makes clear not everyone does and there’s a very high price to pay, usually by those being policed, for that).
i imagine the fusion centers are in “code 3 orange stratecom 7 mode” right now.
http://wkrn.com/2015/04/27/baltimore-police-warn-officers-across-u-s-about-gang-threat/
I saw Baltimore Mayor’s news conference.
How is this different from Marshal Law?
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Under martial law authority goes to the highest ranking military commander in the AO, and is accompanied by the imposition of military law. So, Baltimore’s situation is de facto martial law, except no one will say it or declare it formally less the myth of American freedum and democracy and equality comes crashing down even amongst the rubes.
The sad thnig is the schmucks who were responsible for Freddie Gray have been suspended so those police hurt weren’t even the ones responsible for the incident.
I would start to think at some point the police might consider more care before deploying deadly force since these protests seem to be looming larger and larger. It’s only a matter of time before the term police “injured” becomes police killed as a result of protests.
That’s real smart, closing the schools just when the weather gets warm. Why, anybody would think they were asking for trouble? (Closing the schools means school lunches get closed too, so I’m seeing a scenario where a cop whacks a kid for boosting a Hostess Twinkie, or some other food-like substance, from the corner store.
And, ya know, 30 (thirty) arrests? That’s really not a very large number. We are seeing the same disprortionate response we saw both in Ferguson and Occupy generally. Elephants panicking at the sight of a mouse, trumpeting and stamping.
Thanks for the update. Please keep us informed!
The authorities seem to be really, really pissed that the community blew off some steam – despite the fact that is was probably expected and unavoidable.
If I am reading this time-line from US News & World Report correctly, Obama pledged “the federal government’s help to respond to riots” and the Maryland Governor announced that “the National Guard is on alert and may deploy to help police” well before the Mayor decided to ask for the National Guard. Was the decision forced on her (I believe she is new)?
The Mayor’s news conference also seemed staged. Each of the five officials that spoke began in much the same way: that they loved Baltimore / were long-time residents and did not want to see “thugs” destroying property. One of them said that they deplored the destruction of property because there was still damage from the riots in 1968!!!!!! (OMG, that says it all – so little investment in the area that they still have damage from back then.) No attempt to understand or reach out to the protesters. Reporter’s questions (the first one’s) focused on lack of preparation and lack of early action to counter protesters.
>>> Lambert, it might be worthwhile to get a transcript just to pull out that quote for the NC readership.
RT reported that the whereabouts of the mayor had been unknown all day up until the press conference. It is pretty safe to conclude that she was getting instructions from “higher”. I doubt she is in charge of anything at this point, that would be the AG’s office and the National Guard. Of course it would be unseemly in this great land of ours to declare martial law, so this is stage managed to appear that local elected officials are in charge while the federal government runs things behind the scenes. America is one big stage act…
The Black Agenda Report on this should make for interesting reading.
All of the five officials at the news conference were African-American. Obama is half African-American and his new attorney general is African-American. There is talk of Al Sharpton going to Baltimore. The Governor of Maryland is a Republican white guy (whose wife is Korean).
PS The Mayor is not new. And ‘martial’ not ‘marshal’ (duh!)
Lieutenant governor of Maryland and head of Maryland National Guard are also African-American.
Heard a report on the Pete Sentilli (radio?) show (ht ZH) by a guy named James McArthur (who Pete seemed to know well and trust), that raised suspicions that the police were deliberately allowing the situation to escalate. At one point, James said that the police response seemed “orchestrated” (to intimidate and cause escalation).
PS I don’t know who Pete Sentilli is and never listened to his show before this.
Dem party elites scheme to make use of Warren’s popularity—all for Hil’s benefit, of course.
http://observer.com/2015/04/aggressive-effort-underway-by-democratic-leaders-to-recruit-elizabeth-warren/
Baltimore Bloods and Crips call ceasefire for #BlackLivesMatter –
And then they attacked the police (13 injuries last count.) that’s an insurrection, and it’s been inevitable for some time.
Tomorrow should be very interesting – except the main action might be tonight.
as someone who lives in Baltimore, there is nothing interesting about what tomorrow will look like.
I expect to be sick to my stomach when the sun comes up.
Lambert, the riots started 2 blocks from where I work. You are way off.
I wonder if satirical poster-makers could make posters of Obama with captions like: Would you buy a used car from this man?
Or one saying : ObamaTrade. “If you like your zoning ordinances, you can keep your zoning ordinances.”
“If you like your environmental regulations, you can keep your environmental
regulations.”