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Entering the Intelligence Labyrinth |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6396"><span class="small">Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch</span></a>
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Wednesday, 01 October 2014 12:50 |
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Engelhardt writes: "Never have so many had access to so much information about our world and yet been so unprepared for whatever happens in it."
(photo: The Daily Dot)
Entering the Intelligence Labyrinth
By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
01 October 14
 hat are the odds? You put about $68 billion annually into a maze of 17 major intelligence outfits. You build them glorious headquarters. You create a global surveillance state for the ages. You listen in on your citizenry and gather their communications in staggering quantities. Your employees even morph into avatars and enter video-game landscapes, lest any Americans betray a penchant for evil deeds while in entertainment mode. You collect information on visits to porn sites just in case, one day, blackmail might be useful. You pass around naked photos of them just for... well, the salacious hell of it. Your employees even use aspects of the system you’ve created to stalk former lovers and, within your arcane world, that act of "spycraft" gains its own name: LOVEINT.
You listen in on foreign leaders and politicians across the planet. You bring on board hundreds of thousands of crony corporate employees, creating the sinews of an intelligence-corporate complex of the first order. You break into the “backdoors” of the data centers of major Internet outfits to collect user accounts. You create new outfits within outfits, including an ever-expanding secret military and intelligence crew embedded inside the military itself (and not counted among those 17 agencies). Your leaders lie to Congress and the American people without, as far as we can tell, a flicker of self-doubt. Your acts are subject to secret courts, which only hear your versions of events and regularly rubberstamp them -- and whose judgments and substantial body of lawmaking are far too secret for Americans to know about.
You have put extraordinary effort into ensuring that information about your world and the millions of documents you produce doesn’t make it into our world. You even have the legal ability to gag American organizations and citizens who might speak out on subjects that would displease you (and they can’t say that their mouths have been shut). You undoubtedly spy on Congress. You hack into congressional computer systems. And if whistleblowers inside your world try to tell the American public anything unauthorized about what you’re doing, you prosecute them under the Espionage Act, as if they were spies for a foreign power (which, in a sense, they are, since you treat the American people as if they were a foreign population). You do everything to wreck their lives and -- should one escape your grasp -- you hunt him implacably to the ends of the Earth.
As for your top officials, when their moment is past, the revolving door is theirs to spin through into a lucrative mirror life in the intelligence-corporate complex.
What They Didn’t Know
Think of the world of the “U.S. Intelligence Community,” or IC, as a near-perfect closed system and rare success story in twenty-first-century Washington. In a capital riven by fierce political disagreements, just about everyone agrees on the absolute, total, and ultimate importance of that "community" and whatever its top officials might decide in order to keep this country safe and secure.
Yes, everything you’ve done has been in the name of national security and the safety of Americans. And as we’ve discovered, there is never enough security, not at least when it comes to one thing: the fiendish ability of “terrorists” to threaten this country. Admittedly, terrorist attacks would rank above shark attacks, but not much else on a list of post-9/11 American dangers. And for this, you take profuse credit -- for, that is, the fact that there has never been a “second 9/11.” In addition, you take credit for breaking up all sorts of terror plans and plots aimed at this country, including an amazing 54 of them reportedly foiled using the phone and email “metadata” of Americans gathered by the NSA. As it happens, a distinguished panel appointed by President Obama, with security clearances that allowed them to examine these spectacular claims in detail, found that not a single one had merit.
Whatever the case, while taxpayer dollars flowed into your coffers, no one considered it a problem that the country lacked 17 overlapping outfits bent on preventing approximately 400,000 deaths by firearms in the same years; nor 17 interlocked agencies dedicated to safety on our roads, where more than 450,000 Americans have died since 9/11. (An American, it has been calculated, is 1,904 times more likely to die in a car accident than in a terrorist attack.) Almost all the money and effort have instead been focused on the microscopic number of terrorist plots -- some spurred on by FBI plants -- that have occurred on American soil in that period. On the conviction that Americans must be shielded from them above all else and on the fear that 9/11 bred in this country, you’ve built an intelligence structure unlike any other on the planet when it comes to size, reach, and labyrinthine complexity.
It’s quite an achievement, especially when you consider its one downside: it has a terrible record of getting anything right in a timely way. Never have so many had access to so much information about our world and yet been so unprepared for whatever happens in it.
When it comes to getting ahead of the latest developments on the planet, the ones that might really mean something to the government it theoretically serves, the IC is -- as best we can tell from the record it largely prefers to hide -- almost always behind the 8-ball. It seems to have been caught off guard regularly enough to defy any imaginable odds.
Think about it, and think hard. Since 9/11 (which might be considered the intelligence equivalent of original sin when it comes to missing the mark), what exactly are the triumphs of a system the likes of which the world has never seen before? One and only one event is sure to come immediately to mind: the tracking down and killing of Osama bin Laden. (Hey, Hollywood promptly made a movie out of it!) Though he was by then essentially a toothless figurehead, an icon of jihadism and little else, the raid that killed him is the single obvious triumph of these years.
Otherwise, globally from the Egyptian spring and the Syrian disaster to the crisis in Ukraine, American intelligence has, as far as we can tell, regularly been one step late and one assessment short, when not simply blindsided by events. As a result, the Obama administration often seems in a state of eternal surprise at developments across the globe. Leaving aside the issue of intelligence failures in the death of an American ambassador in Benghazi, for instance, is there any indication that the IC offered President Obama a warning on Libya before he decided to intervene and topple that country’s autocrat, Muammar Gaddafi, in 2011? What we know is that he was told, incorrectly it seems, that there would be a “bloodbath,” possibly amounting to a genocidal act, if Gaddafi's troops reached the city of Benghazi.
Might an agency briefer have suggested what any reading of the results of America's twenty-first century military actions across the Greater Middle East would have taught an observant analyst with no access to inside information: that the fragmentation of Libyan society, the growth of Islamic militancy (as elsewhere in the region), and chaos would likely follow? We have to assume not, though today the catastrophe of Libya and the destabilization of a far wider region of Africa is obvious.
Let’s focus for a moment, however, on a case where more is known. I’m thinking of the development that only recently riveted the Obama administration and sent it tumbling into America’s third Iraq war, causing literal hysteria in Washington. Since June, the most successful terror group in history has emerged full blown in Syria and Iraq, amid a surge in jihadi recruitment across the Greater Middle East and Africa. The Islamic State (IS), an offshoot of al-Qaeda in Iraq, which sprang to life during the U.S. occupation of that country, has set up a mini-state, a “caliphate,” in the heart of the Middle East. Part of the territory it captured was, of course, in the very country the U.S. garrisoned and occupied for eight years, in which it had assumedly developed countless sources of information and recruited agents of all sorts. And yet, by all accounts, when IS’s militants suddenly swept across northern Iraq, the CIA in particular found itself high and dry.
The IC seems not to have predicted the group’s rapid growth or spread; nor, though there was at least some prior knowledge of the decline of the Iraqi army, did anyone imagine that such an American created, trained, and armed force would so summarily collapse. Unforeseen was the way its officers would desert their troops who would, in turn, shed their uniforms and flee Iraq’s major northern cities, abandoning all their American equipment to Islamic State militants.
Nor could the intelligence community even settle on a basic figure for how many of those militants there were. In fact, in part because IS assiduously uses couriers for its messaging instead of cell phones and emails, until a chance arrest of a key militant in June, the CIA and the rest of the IC evidently knew next to nothing about the group or its leadership, had no serious assessment of its strength and goals, nor any expectation that it would sweep through and take most of Sunni Iraq. And that should be passing strange. After all, it now turns out that much of the future leadership of IS had spent time together in the U.S. military’s Camp Bucca prison just years earlier.
All you have to do is follow the surprised comments of various top administration officials, including the president, as ISIS made its mark and declared its caliphate, to grasp just how ill-prepared 17 agencies and $68 billion can leave you when your world turns upside down.
Producing Subprime Intelligence as a Way of Life
In some way, the remarkable NSA revelations of Edward Snowden may have skewed our view of American intelligence. The question, after all, isn’t simply: Who did they listen in on or surveil or gather communications from? It’s also: What did they find out? What did they draw from the mountains of information, the billions of bits of intelligence data that they were collecting from individual countries monthly (Iran, 14 billion; Pakistan, 13.5 billion; Jordan, 12.7 billion, etc.)? What was their “intelligence”? And the answer seems to be that, thanks to the mind-boggling number of outfits doing America’s intelligence work and the yottabytes of data they sweep up, the IC is a morass of information overload, data flooding, and collective blindness as to how our world works.
You might say that the American intelligence services encourage the idea that the world is only knowable in an atmosphere of big data and a penumbra of secrecy. As it happens, an open and open-minded assessment of the planet and its dangers would undoubtedly tell any government so much more. In that sense, the system bolstered and elaborated since 9/11 seems as close to worthless in terms of bang for the buck as any you could imagine. Which means, in turn, that we outsiders should view with a jaundiced eye the latest fear-filled estimates and overblown "predictions" from the IC that, as now with the tiny (possibly fictional) terror group Khorasan, regularly fill our media with nightmarish images of American destruction.
If the IC’s post-9/11 effectiveness were being assessed on a corporate model, it’s hard not to believe that at least 15 of the agencies and outfits in its “community” would simply be axed and the other two downsized. (If the Republicans in Congress came across this kind of institutional tangle and record of failure in domestic civilian agencies, they would go after it with a meat cleaver.) I suspect that the government could learn far more about this planet by anteing up some modest sum to hire a group of savvy observers using only open-source information. For an absolute pittance, they would undoubtedly get a distinctly more actionable vision of how our world functions and its possible dangers to Americans. But of course we’ll never know. Instead, whatever clever analysts, spooks, and operatives exist in the maze of America’s spy and surveillance networks will surely remain buried there, while the overall system produces vast reams of subprime intelligence.
Clearly, having a labyrinth of 17 overlapping, paramilitarized, deeply secretive agencies doing versions of the same thing is the definition of counterproductive madness. Not surprisingly, the one thing the U.S. intelligence community has resembled in these years is the U.S. military, which since 9/11 has failed to win a war or accomplish more or less anything it set out to do.
On the other hand, all of the above assumes that the purpose of the IC is primarily to produce successful “intelligence” that leaves the White House a step ahead of the rest of the world. What if, however, it's actually a system organized on the basis of failure? What if any work-product disaster is for the IC another kind of win.
Perhaps it's worth thinking of those overlapping agencies as a fiendishly clever Rube Goldberg-style machine organized around the principle that failure is the greatest success of all. After all, in the system as it presently exists, every failure of intelligence is just another indication that more security, more secrecy, more surveillance, more spies, more drones are needed; only when you fail, that is, do you get more money for further expansion.
Keep in mind that the twenty-first-century version of intelligence began amid a catastrophic failure: much crucial information about the 9/11 hijackers and hijackings was ignored or simply lost in the labyrinth. That failure, of course, led to one of the great intelligence expansions, or even explosions, in history. (And mind you, no figure in authority in the national security world was axed, demoted, or penalized in any way for 9/11 and a number of them were later given awards and promoted.) However they may fail, when it comes to their budgets, their power, their reach, their secrecy, their careers, and their staying power, they have succeeded impressively.
You could, of course, say that the world is simply a hard place to know and the future, with its eternal surprises, is one territory that no country, no military, no set of intelligence agencies can occupy, no matter how much they invest in doing so. An inability to predict the lay of tomorrow's land may, in a way, be par for the course. If so, however, remind me: Why exactly are we supporting 17 versions of intelligence gathering to the tune of at least $68 billion a year?
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NM Officer Spoke of Shooting Before Killing Homeless Man |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=13446"><span class="small">Jonathan Turley, Jonathan Turley's Blog</span></a>
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Wednesday, 01 October 2014 12:45 |
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Turley writes: "The Albuquerque police have long been criticized for a high rate of shootings and the increasing militarization of their operations. This month, many have joined in that criticism after the release of a videotape of police shooting a homeless camper, James Boyd, in the foothills outside of the city."
Screenshot from the videotape of the police shooting of homeless camper, James Boyd, in New Mexico. (photo: KRQE)
NM Officer Spoke of Shooting Before Killing Homeless Man
By Jonathan Turley, Jonathan Turley's Blog
01 October 14
 Editor’s Note: This April article by Jonathan Turley is to provide context for the more recent developments depicted in the more recent video. SMG/RSN
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxn_hVJXhvY
 he Albuquerque police have long been criticized for a high rate of shootings and the increasing militarization of their operations. This month, many have joined in that criticism after the release of a videotape of police shooting a homeless camper, James Boyd, in the foothills outside of the city.
Boyd, 38, has a history of mental illness with episodes of violence. Three officers approached him on March 16th about camping in an unauthorized area. After they woke him, they had a three-hour standoff and Boyd is heard saying that he was “going to walk” with them. However, he then gathers his things and one officer is heard yelling “Do it”. A flash-bang device then exploded at his feet, causing Boyd to drop his bags. The police released a German Shepard and Boyd appears to take something out of this pocket that might be a knife. However, he seems to be looking straight at the dog and he may have been trying to protect himself from the dog. Then he turns away from the officers. He is then shot repeatedly in the back by two different officers. A dog is then released again to be sure that he is not moving. He was later pronounced dead.
I have watched the video below and I fail to see the need for lethal force, though the department cleared all of the officers as justified in the shooting. The release of the dog seems to me the cause for his reaction. Moreover, he was a good distance away when they shoot him with a dog in between them and the suspect. Yet, Police Chief Gorden Eden has insisted that the helmet video below shows that his officers were in danger and had to fire on a “direct threat.” In this message to the public on the police website, Eden proclaims “We are proud of the way in which we interact with the community in our continuing collaborative problem solving efforts.” This is not a particularly good example of problem solving for most of us who watch the video.
Since 2010, the Albuquerque Police Department has been involved in 37 shootings — resulting in 23 deaths. Critics has said that the city police have shot more people than the NYPD during the same period did in New York despite the fact that New York is 16 times larger than Albuquerque.
I think if it commendable that police waited so long in speaking with Boyd who does have a violent history. It is that patience that makes the ultimate throwing of the flash grenade and the shooting so odd. There seems to be a rapid escalation of force by the police that is not explained by what we are seeing on the videotape. After all, this is a case of someone sleeping in a non-camping area — not the execution of an arrest warrant for a violent offender or some other high-risk operation. Clearly, there is always a risk in approaching a homeless person with both mental illness and prior violence. However, I do not see how the shooting is justified based on this videotape alone.
What do you think?
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The Florida Farce: Rick Scott Vs. Charlie Crist |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=32445"><span class="small">Jeb Lund, Rolling Stone</span></a>
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Wednesday, 01 October 2014 12:34 |
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Lund writes: "If you want a picture of America two terms from now, ignore the national stage and gaze instead at the states, where failure is confirmed before it's applied to the rest of the country. Look to a Ponzi state running eternally on the next out-of-town sucker, administered by a gerrymandered GOP hammerlock and overseen by a man who the president of Public Policy Polling once said could be trounced by 'a ham sandwich.'"
Governor Rick Scott of Florida and Charlie Crist, the former governor of Florida.(photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images and Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The Florida Farce: Rick Scott Vs. Charlie Crist
By Jeb Lund, Rolling Stone
01 October 14
Come on down to the Sunshine State and see everything that is wrong with American democracy
 f you want to forecast the fate of the nation, it's tempting to play the Hillary and Mystery Date 2016 guessing game. But that's like determining wedding cake ingredients by the plastic bride and groom on top. If you want a picture of America two terms from now, ignore the national stage and gaze instead at the states, where failure is confirmed before it's applied to the rest of the country.
Look to a Ponzi state running eternally on the next out-of-town sucker, administered by a gerrymandered GOP hammerlock and overseen by a man who the president of Public Policy Polling once said could be trounced by "a ham sandwich." That man is Florida Governor Rick Scott, who bought one election and feels like having another, who — depending on your point of view — makes the Sunshine State either more of a national punchline than it already is, or a paradise where every political malignancy can sizzle and bloat before coming home to fuck up wherever it is you live. Meanwhile, the man sent as an alternative to the theory that government's job is to die quietly is Charlie Crist, a Republican conveniently converted to Democrat, for whom even long-time friends say pursuing policy takes a distant second place to holding office as an end in itself.
That Rick Scott is a Republican is no surprise. He has a classic up-from-his-bootstraps story that doesn't involve a coal-mining immigrant granddad but actually features himself. And like so many conservative biographies, it's ideologically impure — estranged from an abusive father, raised at points in public housing, getting a government job, starting a business in part via GI benefits, eventually becoming CEO of Columbia/HCA, the nation's largest private healthcare company, which grew by undercutting non-profit hospital fatcats with cutthroat private bottom-line policies.
Why he ever wanted to become a Republican candidate remains bit of a mystery, because while CEO of Columbia/HCA, the company was assessed the largest penalty for Medicare and Medicaid fraud in history. In yet another instance of the GOP Cult of the Leader at work, Scott presented the ideal candidate because of the success of his business, which was owed to his vision; the fact that it ultimately paid nearly $1.7 billion in penalties for a criminal enterprise was someone else's fuckup. Scott himself admitted to exercising his Fifth Amendment privileges in a civil deposition 75 times when it might relate to the federal investigation of Columbia/HCA — not to use his right to avoid self-incrimination but because he didn't want to indulge a "fishing expedition." That's not a legitimate application of the Fifth Amendment. Your chief executive at work: a man for whom the rules of the justice system are just, like, this hassle.
His 2010 candidacy felt spectacularly surreal because, to paraphrase something I wrote then, he was a proud, self-celebratory embodiment of unpunished white collar crime. It was like seeing the executives of Merrill, AIG, Lehman Brothers and Countrywide simultaneously going through Senate confirmations to the Federal Reserve while drawing fingers across their necks at the committee chairperson and mouthing the words, "YOU'RE NEXT." Scott could run on his record only in the most oblique and vacuous manner, since floating away via golden parachute after bumping your revenues by defrauding the federal government is not a viable state economic model.
Instead, Scott snorted the Tea Party miasma and duly acted as if his gubernatorial opponent were Barack Obama and health insurance. If elected, Scott would move the State Capitol from Washington, D.C. back to Tallahassee. To sell this vision, he insulated himself from campaign accountability in almost every respect. He sent his own mother to a news conference as a substitute, refused to subject himself to interviews from newspaper editorial boards and ducked debates. Reporters were ignored with an almost princely disdain and fed bland focus-group-tested answers to unrelated questions. He instead largely campaigned on television, pouring over $73 million of his own money into saturating the state with ads whose studio magic made him look like an approximation of a human being. It didn't work. Florida residents and critics nationwide simply call him Voldemort.
Once in office, the limitations of running on his record and as not-Obama immediately showed. Despite going on to set the record for one-term executions since 1970, he admitted he hadn't considered the responsibility of signing death warrants before he decided to run for office. In fact, the Tallahassee rumor mill suggested he wasn't even aware that he physically had to sign each order. His office maintained the same level of lockout contempt for the press corps and expressed dismay and outrage at the "partisan" criticism of the office. Such micromanaged disdain for access and devotion to imaging doubtless increased focus on the revelation that Scott made a show on the trail of adopting a rescue dog, then ditched it once it had served its purpose. The secretive nature of the Scott administration continues to this day, with revelations that Scott and aides used private emails and private phones to circumvent the state's Sunshine Laws.
Meanwhile, despite claiming on the stump that he would create 700,000 new jobs in seven years, on top of the projected job growth of 1,000,000, for a rate of roughly 242,857 jobs per year, Scott almost immediately ratcheted his pledge down by 1,000,000, claiming he merely needed to create 700,000 jobs total. This is akin to pledging 2 billion years ago to build a grand hotel and canyon on the site of the Colorado River, then showing up 2 billion years later to take credit for the Grand Canyon and hope everyone forgot about the hotel. And, as the Tampa Bay Times reports, he still comes up short according to his own office, reporting growth of 620,300 jobs in four years, far short of the 971,428 he should be on track for. Worse, even his own office's numbers are fudged, because they don't count public sector job losses — despite the fact that they are jobs — because, well, fuck 'em. Factor in jobs lost to Scott's budget slashing and elimination of regulatory oversight — 15,000 in just the first eight months alone — and he's only at 594,900.
In fact, Scott's crowning moment of Non-Obamaness came early in his term, when he rejected $2.4 billion in free stimulus money to nix a high-speed rail system between Tampa and Orlando, which is currently served by the nightmare of I-4 and daily intercity commute and vacationer traffic. Two independent firms concluded that the rail line would have run at a "$28.6 million surplus in its tenth year" and create 49,900 "job years" through 2014, with 1,100 permanent jobs thereafter. Instead, Scott trusted the negative estimates of the Libertarian Reason Foundation. Which is a cool place.
As of 2014, he's still listening to them. Rather than accept the burden of $2.4 billion in no-strings attached federal funds for rail in one of the state's busiest corridors, Scott has added a minimum $3 billion (and potentially up to $6 billion) debt to Floridians for 169 miles of "toll lanes" in Jacksonville, Miami, Orlando and Tampa. As the Tampa Bay Times reports, the idea of "first class" and "coach" driving lanes comes from Bob Poole and the Reason Foundation, which receives funds from companies that benefit from more cars and more road construction, including a company based in Florida that already manages two Florida toll roads. Moreover, Scott's Secretary of Transportation joined the administration from "HNTB, the Kansas City-based construction company that specializes in infrastructure projects including toll lanes."
Which is fine; more cars on the road belching exhaust means nothing to a giant peninsular state whose highest point is a grand 345 feet above sea level and whose premiere city is essentially doomed to drown. Scott has repeatedly defended his refusal to create "job killing" regulation on climate change (despite the fact that — again! — regulation is a job) because he's "not a scientist." When plenty of people who are scientists offered to meet with him, he gave them 30 minutes and emerged totally unaffected by the persistent and accredited intrusion of objective reality. Which is par for the course in GOP epistemology.
Despite not being a scientist, Scott had no trouble fighting federal clean water standards, limiting Big Sugar's liabilities for cleaning up the shit they pump into the Everglades or slashing $700 million from state water management districts while offering Department of Environmental Protection employees bonuses for speeding up "permitting" for private companies.
Despite not being an educator, he knows charter schools are the answer and that it's important that Florida school districts can't consider whether current charter applicants have had previous charter schools fail. He knows how to trumpet adding $1 billion to the education budget and omit previously cutting $1.3 billion from it.
Despite not being a jurist, Scott has stuffed 26 judicial nominating commissions with flunkies, rejected Florida Bar recommendations to the commission 19 times and produced a reliable majority of white, male conservative justices.
Despite not being an economist or politician, he's pledged a $1 billion tax cut that is politically totally infeasible and economically makes no sense.
Despite not being a child care specialist, he knows how to celebrate a token increase of $31 million to the child welfare budget after the deaths of 40 children in state care ruined the optics of his call to cut $179 million from those programs.
Despite his expertise in the health care industry, he can reject the essentially free Medicaid dollars from Obamacare, reverse course and say he would accept the money — knowing full-well the overwhelmingly GOP legislature would never let him — then waffle until his stance is unclear.
It's all a pattern that fits with the selective competence of Republican Leadership. He's not a doctor, but he can throw red meat to conservatives by likening medical marijuana to alcoholism and addiction, then punt responsibility to the ballot initiative process. He's not gay, so it's not his place to criticize Attorney General Pam Bondi's appealing a judicial overturning of the state's gay marriage ban. He's not a social worker, but he can mandate that state employees and all citizens on welfare get a mandatory drug test—and wind up spending more on the tests and defending them in the courts than was saved by kicking people off the welfare rolls. (But, hey, the kind of tests required were just like ones offered by the Solantic Corporation, whose shares he moved into a completely independent trust in his wife's name!) Lastly, while he's not a politician, he can be governor. While he's not an economist, let him fuck around with tens of billions of dollars. He's absolutely in charge up until the point someone siphons, say, potential votes or enough Medicare money to get slapped with $1.7 billion in federal fines.
And he's going to win again, because he's raking in out-of-state money, PAC money and prepared to spend up to $100 million — to say nothing of his personal fortune — on ads and is already dwarfing Democratic opponent (and former Republican governor) Charlie Crist's budget. He can avoid the press, pretend the occupant of the White House is his current opponent and hammer viewers with ads running misleading Obamacare numbers and concluding: "Charlie Crist, what he's selling is Obama."
He can even distract from his record at Columbia/HCA by trying to paint Charlie Crist as a crook, fuck it up and still get away with it. Two weeks ago, the Scott team started blasting Florida with an ad called "Swindled." It features Florida investor Dean Kretschmar claiming to have been swindled by Charlie Crist and a Ponzi schemer named Scott Rothstein. Not only did Kretschmar not make this accusation against Crist in his lawsuit against Rothstein, he got most of his money back. Further, the accusation of impropriety made against Crist (which investigators deemed unfounded) is that he sold judgeships to Rothstein by putting him on a judicial nominating commission in exchange for donations. The twist, as the Miami Herald reports, is that Kretschmar's attorney is "a Scott donor and GOP operative" named William R. Scherer and that "Scott appointed Scherer to a JNC post in 2011. The next year, Scott appointed Scherer’s daughter, Elizabeth Ann Scherer, to a circuit court bench." No one watching the ad would have any idea that the accusations made against Crist are flimsy at best and better directed at Scott himself, and in any event, there will be a dozen new ads by the end of October, because any problem is a small problem when you can paper over it with hundreds.
It might be worth getting angry if Charlie had much of a chance to win or to govern or was even that much of an alternative.
To win, Crist needs to motivate Democrats in an off-year election, which lean heavily toward Republican turnout. To do that, he's running on and off his record as a former Republican career politician, which infuriates Republicans and forces Democrats to cherry-pick the parts of Crist's record they want to believe are constant and true and not just the products of his whimsy and glib eagerness to please. The latter is probably an exercise in self-delusion.
What made Crist dynamic as a Republican, beyond his effortless ability to connect with voters one-on-one, was a vaguely populist nose-thumbing at Republican orthodoxy. But radicalism within the tent is small beer outside it. The air of populism he cultivated in going after government mismanagement as chairman of the State Senate Commission on Executive Business, Ethics and Elections made ideological sense as a member of the party that considers government a problem. Even his populist moves, like suing energy companies over rate hikes, were sold as much as small-business initiatives as anything else. And his unpopular lefty stances on the environment could go right out the window when his political needs aligned with big industry — like being willing to reconsider Florida's offshore drilling ban the moment John McCain came sniffing about a potential place on the 2008 presidential ticket. His conduct as governor — swanning into office just before noon and out the door by three, delegating policy downward and cramming complex issues into bullet points, playing hooky to glad-hand with swells — likewise only serves you as a citizen if your politics dictate that government's job is to exist as little as possible. Apply those standards to a Democratic candidate, and you've created a feckless political operative immediately abandoning the purpose for which he seeks election, substituting a party designation and electoral opportunism for actual governmental change. Aside from his official party registration, Charlie Crist is a Democrat only if you are a Republican.
That's not to say he isn't trying. Despite formerly murmuring properly about life, he says the right hands-off Rockefeller Republican things about women's bodies and privacy, hoping to motivate young women voters and those on the fence. And he's reaching out to the African-American community, highlighting his history of extending early voting and of addressing the civil rights impacts of a racist criminal justice system by restoration of voting rights to felons (something Scott has done the opposite of, including vigorously disenfranchising legal voters).
This last is important, because Crist needs to approach Obama's turnout levels among African-Americans in the Fort Lauderdale-Miami Dade areas and in the rest of the state. Currently, he faces pushback from that community, because he's supported the solidly Democratic teacher's union's lawsuit against charter schools — schools which many African-Americans enjoy as a means of escape from underfunded public schools in depressed neighborhoods. Poor Charlie's still too much of a Republican and too worried about scaring Panhandle crackers from the land of the "Christian School Established about 24 Hours After Brown v. Board of Education" to campaign on the only reasonable solution — which even The Onion gets—that maybe it's a racist, classist nightmare to keep funding schools on the basis of neighborhood tax revenue as opposed to a fixed amount per child, period. Sure, that's a fantasia, but so is a Florida Democratic mandate and Charlie Crist being a liberal. The most forceful thing he's said on that account is a reverse formation of Ronald Reagan's explanation for going from New Deal Democrat to movement conservative: "I didn't leave the party; the party left me."
Even if Crist wins, he loses. The State of Florida is still gerrymandered all to fuck, meaning that something like half of all Republicans in Tallahassee would have to be caught with dead hookers or live boys to make the legislature competitive. And it's still absurdly corrupt — before he pleaded guilty, the Jim Greer trial threatened to rope in numerous elected officials and operatives, including Crist, while sitting senator and darling of Tea Party fiscal responsibility Marco Rubio paid no price for misuse of State GOP credit cards and close ties to a man accused of bribery. Even when it's not overtly unlawful, Crist would have to work with a legislature that, for instance, gave career hack Jimmy Patronis (a man with no industry experience) a position on the Public Service Commission in order to remove a potential competitor for the seat of outgoing Senate President Don Gaetz, for which his son Rep. Matt Gaetz is running, despite his DUI arrest that was preposterously dismissed. (Full disclosure: Matt Gaetz was on the debate team of a high school drama/debate program for which I provided drama coaching and judging, though I do not believe we ever spoke.) It's not like the Public Service Commission matters, though; it only settled for hanging $3.2 billion on Florida taxpayers for one broken power plant and one never-built. Meanwhile, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie — a man getting probed more than an alien abductee in This Ain't The XXX-Files: A Porn Parody — can stand outside Jimmy Patronis's restaurant and say of Rick Scott, "Do not let this good, honest man get away from this job," and nobody in the crowd thinks to set fire to everything in sight until the ground is razed and left bare to grow something more useful, like kudzu.
The fact is that Crist at best has the chance to impotently pursue an inert centrist policy amid an American Legislative Exchange Council paradise, where guns are plentiful, ground may be stood but government intervention goes all the way up the fallopians, more cars are welcome, the Everglades are bulldozed, the fight is still being taken to the gays, public transport is nonexistent, schools are profitable and results optional, prison is worth investing in, voting is discouraged, income tax is nil, and revenues outside a tiny corporate flat tax and property taxes rely on regressive service taxes, sales taxes, bed taxes and transactional fees. Meanwhile, even if the company you were responsible for committed a historic act of fraud, you can sink $73 million of your own dollars into running as an outside entrepreneur and buy yourself a governorship despite all the charm and human relatability of a dripping sack of bleached tumors.
And maybe, to change all that, you get Charlie Crist, ex-Republican, who will run the state like a business, or maybe not bother to run it much at all, while nodding more telegenically at the Everglades, women, gay people and minorities. This is the kind of grand political spectrum Florida and the nation offers its citizens, and this is your future. You can have a Republican, or you can have someone who is basically a Republican with varying degrees of empathy. Or, in more brutal terms, the difference between Charlie Crist and Rick Scott is the difference between a Republican and a Republican who is overtly evil or insane.
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Congress Cuts $8.7 Billion in Food Stamps, But Finds $22 Billion to Fight ISIS |
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Wednesday, 01 October 2014 11:50 |
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Cole writes: "The GOP Congress's assault on the American working class has been waged with the pretext that the Federal government has no money (what with being in debt and all). This despite the money being owed to the American people on the whole, and despite the long tradition of deficits in government budgets, which have seldom in history been balanced."
Juan Cole. (photo: PBS)
Congress Cuts $8.7 Billion in Food Stamps, But Finds $22 Billion to Fight ISIS
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
01 October 14
t was all the way back in February, so the memory of this headline has faded:
” Congress passes $8.7 billion food stamp cut
By Ned Resnikoff
It’s official: 850,000 households across the country are set to lose an average of $90 per month in food stamp benefits.
The Senate on Tuesday voted 68-32 to send the 2014 Farm Bill – which includes an $8.7 billion cut to food stamps – to President Obama’s desk. Nine Democrats opposed the bill, and 46 members of the Democratic caucus voted for it, joining 22 Republicans.”
The GOP Congress’s assault on the American working class has been waged with the pretext that the Federal government has no money (what with being in debt and all). This despite the money being owed to the American people on the whole, and despite the long tradition of deficits in government budgets, which have seldom in history been balanced. But note that when there was a Republican president in the zeroes, the same voices did not demand austerity, but ran up the deficit with obvious glee.
In contrast, Congress has no problem with the war on ISIL in Iraq and Syria, which could cost from $18 bn to $22 bn a year. Admittedly, in military terms this expense is relatively small. The point is that the same people who have trouble justifying a safety net for the working poor and find it urgent to cut billions from the programs that keep us a civilized society rather than a predatory jungle– the same people have no difficulty authorizing billions for vague bombing campaigns that are unlikely to be successful on any genuine metric.
The failure of an air campaign in Syria where there is no effective fighting force on the ground allied with the US, which could take advantage of the bombings, is becoming evident at Kobane. Despite US and other aerial bombings, ISIL fighters have moved to only a couple of miles from the besieged Kurdish city.
In contrast, in Iraq the Kurdish Peshmerga have taken a few villages and a border crossing with Syria back from ISIL in the past couple of days, and may have benefited in this push from close air support from the US and other governments. Even there, while intervention to stop the Kurdish capital of Erbil from falling to ISIL might be justifiable, helping the Kurdish Peshmerga capture Sunni Arab towns is a more delicate proposition.
In any case, all of a sudden I guess cost is no object for the Tea Party and its fellow travelers.
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oes Senator Pat Roberts, the Republican from Kansas, live in Kansas? That's the issue that's tripped him up as he runs for reelection. But I have known for a decade where he really lives. Like Dorothy, he is no longer in Kansas anymore. Like Oz, he is a charlatan. He lives in a land of lies and deception of his own making.
