grayson harper CHENEY

Cheney comes on the talk shows
and talks about the good old days
when he and his buds were the big
kahunas who ran the show
and told everyone to kiss their ass.
Sometimes they'd drop
firecrackers in a cocktail glass

and watch the wait staff lose their wits.
And they were always hiding the gardener's tools;
they'd make him climb the roof
to retrieve a shovel or a rake.
The maid opened her thermos one morning
and found a snake.

Warm nights
they threw off their clothes
and ran naked through the sprinklers.
George pounced on a frog
as it hopped through the grass.
Cheney pinned it to a wall and called it fate.
They sat around throwing darts
while it twitched and scraped.

Now and then a cat would appear
in the library or the Lincoln bedroom.
Someone—he can't remember who—
tied an orange tabby to a curtain rod
then poured water down its throat
just to see what it would do.

They dumped a keg of gin in the goldfish pond one time.
They blindfolded a goose, then hung it from a clothesline.

Cheney says they had a thing for dogs.
Someone would bring them over in a van
and drop them off at night,
dogs of every shape and color:
poodles, retrievers, borzois, beagles,
foxhounds, otter hounds, red-bone
coonhounds, border collies, beaucerons,
old english sheepdogs,
welsh corgis, tibetan spaniels,
pekingese, chihuahuas, great danes,
dobermans and pugs.

They hung them from a pipe
and beat them with clubs.

Cheney's voice is quiet and bland
like a clerk or a sexton.
The reporters nod and smile
and ask him gentle questions.

When he's finished with the scene
he's carried off in a limousine.

WE HAVE SEEN THE DARK PATH AHEAD

Artwork: The Sower, oil paint on wood by anna missed

BLIND POWER

Our President in Africa: "No country is going to create wealth if its leaders exploit the economy to enrich themselves, or if police can be bought off by drug traffickers."

Really? Is he talking about their country? Or ours? Isn't he describing what happened on Wall Street? Where's the investigation for all that? Why are bankers being rewarded for thievery instead of punished? Why are the folks who were in on the fix now entrusted with the repair work? And we certainly know that our entire government, from the President on down are bought by the corporations, the banks, the health industry, the whole works.

Obama: "No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20 percent off the top. . . No person wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery."

And even as he utters these words, Mr. Obama's Justice Department has sought to throw out Habeas Corpus at Bagram Air Base, and is arguing for the right to detain individuals without the benefit of lawyers or trials--even if they have been acquitted of all crimes! And, despite what this president may say, torture continues.

Yet, without even a hint of irony, Mr. Obama winds up saying, "That is not democracy, that is tyranny, even if occasionally you sprinkle an election in there. Now is the time for that style of governance to end."

Oh, Really? So I can't help but wonder: is hypocracy now simply a part of the equipment of being President of the United States? How is it possible for us to be parading around the globe telling everyone else how to live, how to make a "democracy" when the mote in our own eye is as big as a battleship?

What makes us think that we're not laughing stocks when we do that?

The world is watching us. The world is watching Mr. Obama. I hope he doesn't blow it.

BULLWINKLE R.I.P. (ALASKA GOV. PALIN TO RESIGN OFFICE)

Gov. Sarah Palin, channeling Gen. Douglas MacArthur, spun her fabulous fable in front of cameras, for her true believers. Resigning from the office of governor, with the blood of the world's most beloved moose on her hands, she behaved as if nothing had happened. Alaska would take care of itself; and in her view the sky was the limit, and she could free up her schedule to pursue the most powerful access to killing machines that presently exists, in Washington DC.

The bootheels of our civilizing force and the stamp of America on everything, is what Sarah is about; and the rest of the world is just a fresh kill, dressed out like poor Bullwinkle. Palin is worse than Boris Badenov and his sidekick Natasha, put together. Palin is the ammo queen, the absurd pinup for our shoot 'em up, militarized culture: a demon-banishing, burn-them-at-the-stake alternative; if President Obama should prove inadequate in his increasingly deceptive and secretive mission of "change you can believe in".

A dishonest leader will be exposed in good time. Before long the witnesses will strip him of his mask. Look at the struggle in Iran, where Iranians find themselves transfixed by the martyrs' blood; it's obvious that the spellbinding effect of their solidarity remains with us, as we are moved deeply; and these images stay with us long after the screen has gone dark. To witness the bravery of protesters in the streets, recalls the indignation that brings such strong resolve to the young. And when Iranians of all ages march in profound silence in their millions--even without words--they inspire us to understand something deeper in their history.

Bush, our former president, continually waged low level, covert war against that country; and his legacy builds on past interference in Iran's history, continuing the hope some have, of sowing social discord there. In America, those who take to the streets have been neatly blacked-out in the mass media; the parent corporations and their boards of directors, and their masters, control television and have drawn down a curtain, effectively screening off dissident behavior. We are so saturated as a nation with disinformation and propaganda, so dulled by a deadened, phony political life, that the minute we see something halfway real, it's not surprising that we feel somewhat more alive, as we watch these events unfold.

As a child, it was fun to watch The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. At the end of their comic escapades the two friends managed to frustrate the cranked-up scheming of the fumbling and somehow funny villains, Boris and Natasha. Usually at the end of the show the friends ("moose and squirrel") would reflect on what had happened, and sometimes would come up with an unexpectedly touching lesson, or moral of the story. So we're on our own. It just gets harder to explain the moral now that Bullwinkle is dead, so to speak. If you know what I mean.

I've been searching for what to say to Iranians for whom I feel great respect. I suspect there was foul play in Iran's election; others contest that I am naive. But repression is a language unto itself, and the exaggeration of violence, which is then added to the wearing down, the erosion of what sovereignty the people have, is expressed in the people's sense of loss and injustice. This is an indictment of any government that takes advantage of its people. Along with the issue of fraud is the politics of a cosmetic democracy.

The moral of the story is not just that a veneer of respectability covers some religious people, and a few of them are not worthy of that respect. Palin in our country represents people whose religious and ideological convictions confer rights to do the meanest things to those who are not like them, for as long as the believers can feel no remorse. This has been going on since the beginning of our country. They believe God blesses them when they look down on others, when they take without asking. The underlings are reduced to slavery and the slavemasters feel entitled to the forced labor.

No, my Iranian friends, the real moral is that we are fighting for the same things, under the eyes of those leaders who scowl at us, in our cosmetic democracies.


Happy 4th of July! I wish there were more ways to make Sarah Palin look funny.

AFFAIRS OF STATE

Maybe some day this country will grow up and realize that sex is a fairly routine activity, and what people choose to do in private behind closed doors, whether inside or outside their marriage, should have no bearing on one's ability to govern. At that point, maybe we will be able to get over it and laugh it off when the Bill Clintons and Governor Mark Sanfords of the world go out and screw around. Big f'n deal. Who the hell cares? And maybe, just maybe, we can skip the charade of the philanderer making these overtly tearful public displays of mea culpas; here it is going on, what?--two weeks?--and Sanford is still blathering on about it, while insisting that God wants him to stay on as governor of South Carolina. (It truly becomes a gut-ache when the God card is played.) Wisely (for once) Sanford's wife has chosen to stay in the background rather than expose herself to the usual public disgrace and humiliation of the "good" wife doing the "we-will-weather-this-together-I-will-stand-by-this-schmuck-no-matter-what" routine. John Edwards' wife has written a book about his affair, for Godsake, and is now making the talk-show circuit! The whole thing is so ridiculous and absurd and sickening, and it's long past time that we threw it overboard as a cultural event, as we have mostly already done with public hangings and lynchings. I keep waiting for the one guy among all these idiots who will actually stand up to the press for once and say the very thing that may put an end to this childishness once and for all. I would have thought Clinton was smart enough to say it, but no, he fell in the same trap as all the others, and tried to lie his way out of it. At which point, everyone on the planet who wasn't born yesterday knew what the sonofabitch was up to. So what should the answer be when asked that deadly question by the press?, i.e., "What were you doing with that girl?"

Simple. "It's none of your damn business." Now, what's so difficult about that?

copeland morris THE HERON

The heron stands where the lily was.
He makes himself visible with a slight
Movement, where his feathers were drawn
On undisturbed water, pond and marsh by
Shadow, canals connecting rows of houses.
Unreal before he was real; it was as if
Vertical lines could cast no shadow.

Just as harvest is the moon's omen
And the sun whispers when it's time to die;
The art of magic expresses something else.
Even ones and zeros can break the handcuffs
Of sheriffs. The heron places his stillness
In each of us; and he in his beauty is greater
In tall grass and still water where he disappears.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF TORTURE

Back in the days of the Spanish Inquisition, the infamous Torquemada didn't have to bother producing the "metrics" or data that would prove the productiveness of torture. This is because the confessions of so-called heretics had no intrinsic significance. Nearly everyone confesses under torture, regardless of whether they have anything important to confess. Torture, after all, is an instrument of terror. Former Vice-President Cheney was an advocate of torturing prisoners in US military custody. He still crows about it; he is still quoted on cable news, saying that we need more waterboarding, more criminal mistreatment of our prisoners, more and more of the inhumanity--and only then will we be safe as a nation.

Whatever it is that makes civilization so civilized went missing during the Bush and Cheney administration. Admittedly, there have been crimes tucked away from sight by this National Security State, since the Vietnam War ended; but the vulgarisms and the crimes committed wantonly by the past administration have represented such a break with traditions and law, as to leave most of us dumbfounded or in a state of shock. With torture policy released through the chain of command, these leaders severed all ties with decency, soiling themselves and their country.

It was frankly disconcerting to see how wildly the staff at Langley, CIA Headquarters, cheered President Obama, when he paid them a visit recently, and gave assurance that none of their interrogators would be brought up on charges for "following orders". On the other hand, our new president, to his credit, has signaled his willingness to let justice take its course, if evidence points toward the architects, major figures in the former administration. Those who manipulated and subverted the law, and the decision makers who threw in their lot with the torturers, will need lawyers if they hope to make a defense in court.

The Bush White House was at war with law, against both US law and international legal norms, which were the law of the land under treaty obligations the US government had supported and signed.

Sam Stark's 2007 February essay in Harper's, Flaming Bitumen, Romancing the Algerian War, builds upon Alistair Horne's historical account of the Algerian war of independence in the 1950s.

[Historian Alistair Horne] shows the psychological trauma [torture] imposes on those ordered to commit it, as well as the corrosion of military discipline and morale that spreads as exceptions to the laws of war become the norm. Donald Rumsfeld, it is reassuring to know, received a personal copy of A Savage War of Peace, alerting him to such relevant passages as the chilling words of Paul Teitgen, a former hero of the Resistance, who, as secretary-general of Algiers, recognized in Algerian prisoners "profound traces of the cruelties and tortures that I personally suffered fourteen years ago in the Gestapo cellars." "Once you get into the torture business,' Teitgen told Horne in an interview, "you're lost...All our so-called civilization is covered with a varnish. Scratch it, and underneath you find fear." " (my bold)

Fear, wearing a mask of bravado and daring, could be seen on the faces of those French colons who were proud to have their pictures taken for the bloody news stories, standing in front of heaps of Arab corpses, men whom they had tortured and executed. French men and women reading the stories, absorbed in the photos, were horrified at the cost of "victory" in Algiers. How could they live in a world with their Arab brothers, those who presumably belonged to the same culture, the same language, after such crimes had been committed? The conclusion, the consensus in metropolitan France, was that such a victory could never be worth the cost.

Americans still have to live in the same world with populations its military is regularly mutilating and killing. This is a war in which no end is predicted. A war that has included torture of captives: waterboarding, beatings, extreme sensory deprivation for men in solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, stress positions, terrorizing with dogs, sexual humiliation, anal rape with broomsticks and other objects;...and the list goes on.

America's leaders have yet to explain how a war waged at such a cost, a war that is never contained, but always expanding, can either be won, or end.

PIRATE IMBROGLIOS AND MEDIA SALIVATIONS

CNN simplifies it for you: civilized nations si, pirates no. The human interest story of an American merchant captain tossed into the lifeboat and his voyage through dread in the hands of three Somalian pirates, in waters off the Horn of Africa, is one of those stirring soap operas you won't forget until a few days have passed. Watching CNN and Fox News, it becomes more and more evident that the public is being constantly doped up on yellow journalism, fear, and sentimentality. And news anchor, Wolf Blitzer, is titillated by the suggestion that news broadcasts are not so much about informing the viewers, as in making sure they take a timely delivery on all the things they would be pleased to learn. For instance, the saga of the Portugese Waterdog that the Obama children have named, Bo.

The orchestra sat on its hands; there was no crescendo of Victory at Sea when three pirates were shot dead, in a combined operation of Navy Seals and the US ships and aircraft that supported the operation. One is breathless, nonetheless. And who isn't impressed at such a daunting rescue? And all snark and sarcasm aside, who is unmoved by a beaming, bearded American sea captain, who is relieved that his ordeal is over?-- not to mention the sight of his wife in tears, in the grips of laryngitis, barely able to speak, to stammer out her thankfulness to the heroes who saved her husband?-- and flanked by older children, a daughter and a son, with stunned expressions on their faces? And then the mood of grandeur, the pièce de resistance: to make it an affair of state, to ennoble it, the report cuts to the president of the USA, Barack Obama.

But what have we not been told? What is the backstory? What events preceded this week's episode of Heroes? Well it's only been a short while since the Bush administration basically hired the Ethiopian army to invade Somalia, and topple its Islamic government. The Ethiopians have withdrawn, leaving the nation prostrate and in the grip of political anarchy. Then there is the consideration of what so-called civilized nations have been doing in the waters off the coast of Somalia.

London Independent Columnist, Johann Hari, writes in Huffington Post that European nations have abused the fishing grounds off the coast of Somalia; and since an earlier collapse of government in that nation, have polluted its sea lanes and coast.

In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa - collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish-stocks by over-exploitation - and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea-life is being stolen every year by vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia's unprotected seas. The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods, and they are starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."

This is the context in which the men we are calling "pirates" have emerged.

To summarize this little pocket of history, it seems that at the very moment that the Islamic Courts government had brought some stability to Somalia, in the belly of the beast that was Bush/Cheney, was brought forth the cunning plan to push the people of that country back into chaos, using a little Ethiopian muscle. Most Americans are sadly unaware of the chain of events; and cable news and the big network establishments are nothing if not scrupulous at keeping them dumbed down and barefoot, as they stare vacantly at the latest action thriller, while Wolf Blitzer holds the simple script for simple minds. The power and majesty of the United States of America.

copeland morris DRAWING WATER

A belief in words is like water captured,
What you drew from the well, whatever
The sketch became under your hand. It was
Dressed up like a raincloud. It lay in the swells
Of the ocean. It had as many moods
As the seasons reveal, shifting as I longed
To be near you. There is a rhythm in what
I would say; though when I heard your voice
My own words were paralyzed. Years become
Reservoirs into which thoughts have pooled.
There is a Hausa saying--"It is with the body's
Water that one draws water from the well."

CHOMSKY THINKS GEITHNER BANK PLAN IS MUCH LIKE BUSH/PAULSON POLICY

ONE DAY THE BOTTOM WILL FALL OUT

This week the doomsaying over the world financial crisis became hard to ignore. In a Reuters report, Paul Volcher was quoted as saying, "I don't remember any time, maybe even in the Great Depression, when things went down quite so fast, quite so uniformly around the world". George Soros likened the current tailspin to the financial collapse of the Soviet Union, a turbulence more severe than the Great Depression. (Pedro Nicolaci da Casta/Juan Logoria reporting)

According to Soros, the financial system worldwide has "effectively disintegrated".

Topping the list of radical measures to meet this crisis, we have the idea of nationalizing the banks, and the less discussed notion of abolishing the Federal Reserve altogether, and printing "greenback" dollars, as Lincoln did during the Civil War. This was money not borrowed nor beholden to interest payments, but created from whole cloth, so to speak, on the full faith and credit of the USA.

The world today has stepped into a hole, and no one yet knows how deep it is. The terrible danger is in not being able to put a reliable number on the numerous debts and defaults that the banks are holding.

The best argument for nationalization of the banks is that it would make all the "toxic" papers visible. This would act like a formal bankruptcy proceeding; by audit and evaluation of all holdings, examiners could be able to advise as to invalidating the credit swaps or making the necessary markdown of assets. Some debt would be written off in this process.

Without such examination and consolidation, it seems futile to try piecemeal bailouts for banks, on the order of a $trillion or a $trillion-and-a-half, against an occult debt, that may run to the tens of trillions of dollars. But this is the avowed policy of the new administration, plus a supplement of around $800 billion to stimulate the economy.

Abraham Lincoln believed a government had the power to issue its own currency, and was not bound or obligated to borrow it from private sector sources. The Federal Reserve is a collection of powerful banking interests, which have insinuated their way into the status of a "semi-governmental agency", by the power of compound interest. We might want to change that at some point.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton travelled to China this week, with hat in hand, it has been said. And under the circumstances, the Chinese are not altogether happy with the posturing of certain American politicians, who accuse China of manipulating its currency, the yuan. And the Obama administration includes some of those trying to scapegoat China; but the light has not yet gone on in American heads to acknowledge that US lifestyles are to some degree negotiable, contrary to longstanding belief, since all other nations are beset by this calamity. There is undoubtedly a lot Americans can learn from the collapse of the late Soviet Union. Dmitry Orlov recently gave a speech to a small audience in San Francisco, where he outlined what he calls Social Collapse Best Practices, a concise guide to coping with the kind of meltdown the Russians experienced; and he describes how they were able to survive that ordeal. Orlov has long predicted that the US was headed for the kind of breakdown that befell the Soviets.

Thanks is owed to blogger, badger, for catching a translation of this excellent report by Frederico Rampini, from Italy's La Reppublica:

The palpable tension on the upper floors of China's leadership structure is proportionate to the wealth that Beijing has entrusted to its great overseas debtor. Fang Shangpu, the head of China's foreign exchange bureau, makes this very clear: "America must protect the interests of foreign investors. Its currency is China's number one foreign investment". With 2,000 billion dollars in official foreign currency reserves, Beijing's central bank is the richest on the planet. But that war-chest is subject to de facto sterilization. Its destination is obligatory: US Treasury Bonds, yet again, as always. In 2008 China bought a further 700 billion of them. Every US treasuries auction would fail if the Chinese central bankers did not turn up to play the role of kind-hearted creditor. And this situation continues despite the exchange-rate losses they have already suffered : since China's renminbi abandoned its fixed parity to the dollar (in July 2005) it has risen by 21%, thereby decreasing the value of China's dollar investments to an equal extent.

Meanwhile, the social costs of the US locomotive's crash are extremely severe. In the third quarter of 2008, as a result of the fall in exports, China's growth rate was brutally halved: 6.8% in GDP growth as compared to 13% in 2007. Following the mass layoffs in the textile, toys and electronics industries, the unemployed workers forced back into the rural economy now officially number around 27 million. Over a million and a half young college graduates too are unemployed: an even more politically explosive army of discontents. Now that Beijing needs to mobilize all available resource to relaunch its domestic growth, it is frustrating to remember those 2,000 billion dollars "frozen" to finance America.

The straw that has broken the camel's back is the revival of protectionism in Washington. First Treasury secretary Tim Geithner accused Beijing of "manipulating" its currency. Then came the Buy American clause in the 787 billion dollar public expenditure package launched by Congress, with Chinese steel as its number-one target. Xi Jinping, China's vice president and designated heir to the supreme leadership position, is furious. He too briefly abandons the language of diplomacy: "Even in this crisis", says Xi, "certain westerners seem to have nothing better to do than pick on us. I would like to remind them of some of our merits. Firstly, China does not export revolutions or hostile ideologies. Secondly, we do not export poverty or hunger. Thirdly, we do not export armed conflicts".

The seething resentment in these words does not yet mark the end of Chimerica. With Mrs Clinton the regime's leaders will rehearse the continuation of a constructive dialogue, convinced as they are that aggravating the global recession would benefit no-one. But in the light of mainstreet America's increasing hostility towards them, the leadership of the People's Republic is studying a "Plan B". Its most audacious moves include using the country's massive currency reserves for new purposes: to finance buy-ups of deposits of raw materials in other countries, ranging from Australia to Africa to Latin America. A reconversion that would have heavy consequences: a blow to the stability of the dollar, a worrying shortfall in treasury funding for Washington. However, the decision to step over this fatal threshold has not yet been reached: "We hate you but we can't do without you" is still the key sentiment in the present phase. But even Confucian patience has its limits.

What should we make of the power relationship between China and the US? One is the ascendant power, the other a power in decline. The world's manufactured goods are being made by the lender, while the borrower is the world's most strung out consumer and debt addict. Grab those dollars till they scream, for one day the bottom will fall out.