Realistic vs fearful vs wishful

On a few occasions here I’ve ventured into the unspeakable – that the events of 9/11 are mysterious and unexplained by the official investigative body, the 9/11 Commission. I don ‘t know what the real explanations are, as it is all hidden from view, but do know that the cellular phone calls, the un-invterviewed witnesses, the highly unlikely coincidences … the very fact that everything went right for a guy in a cave 7,000 miles away while everything went wrong for the most powerful and sophisticated military in the world … that a passport with a hijacker’s name on it survives a towering inferno … c’mon. You guys know this too. You know something’s up.

And that is why I am writing this – not because I know the answers, as I do not. I am addressing the various reactions that people have when they come across the same anomalies. It’s understandable. I get it. I was there at one time.

Avoid H&R Block

Most people’s tax returns are ridiculously easy. If you have wages, interest or unemployment benefits, and perhaps have some Earned Income Credit coming, go to the IRS site that directs you to place where you can do your taxes for free. Don’t be scared – it’s routine, fail-safe, and accurate.

Whatever you do, avoid H&R Block.

If your taxes are more complicated, you are self-employed, itemize deductions, have doubts about whether or not you are entitled to exemptions, buy a tax program. TurboTax will get you through it. They will rip you off to piggy-back a state return, which is a big profit center for them, and maybe even charge to e-file, which costs them virtually nothing. But you are still better off than you would be visiting an expensive preparer.

Whatever you do, avoid H&R Block.

If you have tax issues beyond the norm – sale of assets or residences, passive investments, minimum IRA withdrawals, audits, rental units, LLC’s and S-Corps and K-1′s, then it would not hurt to visit either a CPA or an enrolled agent. Avoid the shingle-hangers, tax preparers who are neither of those, as they are usually strictly reliant on the software and often turn out shoddy work. CPA’s and enrolled agents must undergo rigorous training. It’s not easy to become either. Do ask your preparer how he/she bills, as many of them, like auto mechanics, work off a schedule and charge $X for this form, $X for that form, without regard to actual time. Those who charge by actual time are usually more reasonably priced.

If it ain’t a mess, it’ll do till the mess gets here

I am not here to cheer you up. The situation is about as serious and difficult as I’ve experienced in my career. We are facing an extremely difficult time, comparable in many ways to the 1930s, the Great Depression. We are facing now a general retrenchment in the developed world, which threatens to put us in a decade of more stagnation, or worse. The best-case scenario is a deflationary environment. The worst-case scenario is a collapse of the financial system.

Those are the words of George Soros, speaking to Newsweek recently, or so my link says. The billionaire financier who is so feared by the right wing, known to finance such subversive undertakings as Wikipedia and Adbusters. As perhaps the only billionaire who is engaged in proactive movement politics, he is naturally demonized, thought to sleep every day under the bed of Ingamar Johansen before venturing out on moonless nights to destroy capitalism, turn women into lesbians, and promote witchcraft.

“The collapse of the Soviet system was a pretty extraordinary event, and we are currently experiencing something similar in the developed world, without fully realizing what’s happening.

Except that so many people on the margins do realize what’s going on. We are re-inflating the bubble, overextending the military, encircling ourselves with enemies of our own making. Collapse is not only imminent, but for rest of the planet, perhaps welcome.

Freedom from ignorance

The things that informed me most were my experiences in fighting for freedom of the press, freedom to communicate knowledge – which, in the end, is freedom from ignorance. Secondly, [were] my experiences in understanding how the military-intelligence complex works at a practical level. I saw that publishing all over the world was deeply constrained by self-censorship, economics and political censorship, while the military-industrial complex was growing at a tremendous rate, and the amount of information that it was collecting about all of us vastly exceeded the public imagination.

I just got back from a trip, and in the mail was a Rolling Stone magazine. So typical, it is part pop culture, trying to stay in touch with young people and at the same time wanting to connect with older generations too. So on the cover is David Bowie (John Lennon has the week off), and inside is a full length interview with Julian Assange. Oh yeah – did I also say that Rolling Stone* is one of the few publications in the United States that does actual journalism?**

I set the magazine by my chair, but elected not to read the interview last night as I did not want to become agitated before sleepy time. I read it this morning. I’m not agitated. It’s more depressing than infuriating. The power of the United States National Security State (NSS) is so impressive that it cannot be well-described. It is felt via Assange and Bradley Manning as ominous, far-reaching and oppressive. We are not a free country. I knew that, but did not feel the weight of the oppression in totality until I read his words.

It’s one thing to see him destroyed – he knows that what he was told by a “Western intelligence source,” that he is “fucked,” is true. Whether he is nabbed by Karl Rove’s buddy Carl Bildt in Sweden, or whether the US brings him home via British extradition laws, he’ll likely never experience freedom again. Obama*** intends to fry him, and he has at his disposal the full weight of the military-industrial complex. Companies that have attempted to help him lose clients, individuals lose their jobs. The US media is assassinating his character – there are over twenty million links to him and “rape” now on the Google. MasterCard, Visa and PayPal have conspired against him and yet there are no legal proceedings against the companies in their conspiracy against him – not a good sign. There is complicity, top to bottom, among the corporate, military, media and government wings of the NSS.

Dog in a manger

“I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”

(Winston Churchill, 1937)

There’s a word for passing judgment on people who lived long before us based on current moral standards – presentism. But the British were (allegedly*) the first to use poison gas on Kurds of northern Iraq, so present standards have not changed much. A long view of history indicates that being Churchill’s dog in the manger is perhaps the most vulnerable position one can be in. To put it another way, he meant to have wealth without power to defend that wealth. That is where American Natives found themselves after the European migration, French aristocrats in the 1790′s, European Jews during the Nazi regime, and now Arabs and Persians of the Middle East who sit atop vast reserves of oil.

Blue Bayou

There is so little understanding within this country of our leadership, how truly vile and evil we have become since our ascendancy to the throne post-WWII. A friend tried to explain to me two days ago how Nietzsche predicted this, or at least described the phenomenon. I wasn’t so impressed with that laborious idea so much as the simple notions I carry: 1) Only people who want power rise to power, and 2) power corrupts. I do believe that the Trilogy of the Ring is more useful than Nietzsche here, or maybe just put in a way that I can understand.

Over at Intelligent Discontent, Polish Wolf and I had a go-round concerning Bradley Manning. He took the authoritarian stance that misdeeds must be punished, that Manning had committed espionage. I used the word “torture,” and he reminded me that mere solitary confinement is not torture. Now I realize that this is how his treatment is going down here in the Land of the Free. Nothing of his real abuse has filtered down even to well-informed people.

No surprises here

Jhwygirl writes about a political discussion hosted by the Policy Insitute last week. The event was not recorded so that the candidates could speak freely. Not kidding. That’s how we roll.

During the event Rep Kim Gillan of Billings is said to have remarked that last year’s oil spill on the Yellowstone River was a benefit. Her words, as cited by jhwygirl:

…there are people in Billings that think the oil spill was a good thing, that it was good for business. They are looking at their watches and asking can we do this again next year?”

It’s not clear from that brief remark whether she is being sarcastic. I doubt it. I ran for legislature in Billings in 1996 and Gillan was a fellow candidate, one of two or three successful ones. I was terribly unimpressed with her at the time, not sensing any progressive impulses in her. She struck me as a right wing Democrat. I would not fully comprehend until the year 2000 how much the Democratic Party leadership despises progressives**.

I am going on memory here now, but as I remember, Gillan, the wife on a physician, had gotten a later-life masters in economics. Most likely she studied neoclassical economics, and credulously sponged it up – I was not impressed by her intellectual firepower. But she learned duckspeak, and was thereby set to go into politics properly trained in right wing economics.

I believe in public education, and that our brains and grades should be the guide by which we advance, and not our bank accounts. I wonder if Gillan would survive in a merit-based system. The remark above, if cited correctly, is testimony to the Carolyn Kennedy* syndrome: too much education wasted on too little brain.
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*To avoid the tinge of sexism, this could also be called the “Steve Forbes Syndrome.” It is not gender-based, but rather a phenomenon of
privilege, where people like Gillan, Forbes, and George W. Bush have access to higher education without meriting it. They are taught the words, but never quite grasp the music. In Bush’s case, it made him a dangerous man. The others are just annoying.
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**I hasten to add that I brought about my own electoral defeat without assistance from anyone.

The Somambulant Party

A wimpy exit from office

[President Obama] is accelerating the advance of the military industrial complex, but is percevied in many quarters as doing the exact opposite. President Obama has increased the size, cost, prioritization, and global presence of the U.S. military. He has, with his War on Libya, established the prerogative to take the nation into war against the will of the United States Congress. He has created drone warfare on a significant scale. He has enlarged and formalized due-process-free imprisonment, and cemented in place warrantless spying and the power to abuse prisoners. He has expanded the use of assassination, including U.S. citizens. President Obama has radically expanded claims of state secrets to protect the crimes of his predecessor, and made greater use of the Espionage Act to punish whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined. Obama has formalized, legalized, systematized and normalized what was illicit under Bush. He has pursued base construction and expansion of missile “defense” systems to the detriment of U.S. relations with China, North Korea, Russia, Iran and Pakistan, among other nations. Like all presidents during this permanent war, Obama is a war president. Unlike all other Nobel Peace Prize recipients, Obama praised war in his acceptance speech. David Swanson, opening remarks at a conference commemorating the 50th anniversary of Eisenhower’s weak-kneed remarks concerning the Military Industrial Complex. (Emphasis added)

There was a reason why Ike made his famous MIC speech as he left office rather than during his eight-year term – he was afraid to speak up. Even then, only twelve years after passage of the National Security Act, the military had such a hold on government that even a president could not counter its power. So he yelled back a warning to us as we viewed his asshole and elbows.

They are always with us …

Glenn Greenwald cites Law Professor Jonathan Turley in listing the assaults on the Bill of Rights taking place in the post 9/11 environment, first brought on by the George W. Bush Administration and now intensified by Obama:

1. Assassination of U.S. citizens;
2. Indefinite detention;
3. Arbitrary justice;
4. Warrantless searches;
5. Secret evidence;
6. War crimes;
7. Secret court;
8. Immunity from judicial review;
9. Continual monitoring of citizens;
10. and Extraordinary renditions.

Any student of post-war America realizes that all of this went on from VJ day forward. The US was in a position of unparalleled power, and the people who ran the country were no less susceptible to absolute corruption than anyone before. It happened quickly, with passage of the National Security Act of 1948, changing the name of the War Department to “Defense,” and conversion of the wartime OSS into the peacetime CIA. Soon thereafter came McCarthyism and the attack on civil liberties in the name of anti-communism. Wars, major and minor, were routine.

Here we go again …

But, listen, let’s review the rules. Here’s how it works. The President makes decisions. He’s the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put ‘em through a spell check and go home. (Stephen Colbert, 2006 White House Correspondents’ Dinner)

It appears we’re about to start another war. The American media is beating the drums. It’s not spontaneous. It’s by design. They take orders. It’s easy for people in other countries, not under our propaganda umbrella, to see this, but to live here and be inundated with American “news” to the exclusion of all else makes it virtually impossible to get a real picture of the world.

The drums are beating. Scary stuff, as Iran has not disarmed itself as Iraq did. Russia is very sensitive about its flanks. Iran has done nothing to warrant an attack, but it is in a strategic position, is independent, and so interferes with American and Israeli (our Mini-Me) objectives in the region.

The US (and the ugly stepchild Israel) are indeed worried that Iran might get a nuclear bomb, but only for one reason: It makes attacking them costly for us, might even deter us. That’s all that’s about.