Comment on The Fictious War on Christmas

To paraphrase Charles Dickens, “Good morning all and to all a Good Morning.” That awful day of the year Christmas Day has rolled around once more. I am mindful of the self-proclaimed christians and christianist politicians among us who are bemoaning a mythical War on Christmas by people who have the temerity to wish people something different than the usual Merry Christmas in favor of a more diverse greeting reflective of the diversity in America that we all enjoy. Well perhaps all of us enjoy it except for the Lost in Leviticus christian crowd who believe that Happy Holidays is an act of war against the godhead. The greeting preferred by such people has always made me think of a a gaggle of old fat English gentlemen suffering the effects of gout on their blossoming bodies sitting around a bounteous table packed with fowl, roasts, rabbits, duck, and geese toasting themselves and their good fortune with glass after glass of English port and claret. In my view it has always seemed somewhat sacrilegious to honor a babe born in a shed meant to shelter animals against the cold of the night with such a gluttonous feast.

Recently I was in the local diner for breakfast and to visit with some of my friends and neighbors who favor the place for its breakfasts when I noticed one of the local Norbertine monks was present with a small group of his friends. I hailed the good father and he came over to where I was sitting and we began a short discussion about his confrères' plans to move their abbey from its present location in Trabuco to a more suitable location in Silverado. We began a polite discussion about their move and their efforts to build their new abbey on the grounds on an old turkey farm nearby. At some point he introduced himself simply as “Leo” and I introduced myself in the same fashion. I disclosed to him that I had once been a Claretian, an association of which I am still very proud decades after I left the company of those brave men. That prompted more discussion and we found we knew several people in common who were and are Claretians today.

He eventually withdrew from our conversation to rejoin his friends and shook my hand and wished me a Blessed Christmas. That blessing has been with me since as I think of Christmas and how it has been transformed from a shopkeepers' holiday into a corporate shopkeepers' holiday in modern America. Father Leo's simple greeting and blessing has really touched me and made me realize that I am indeed blessed to have the wonderful collection of friends who care for and love me. A Blessed Christmas to all who read this.

What Caused the Detroit Bankruptcy?

Something needs to be made clear about the Detroit bankruptcy:

The chapter 9 filing is not the fault of the city's pensioners nor is it the fault of the unions representing Detroit's worker bees.. Detroit has not fallen because 'greedy pensioners' are sucking up the money as America's wingnuts and their allies scream. IAccording to news reports the average pension in Detroit is some $19000 per year and the average social security benefit is about $14000 per year.

There are lots of people and institutions who are indeed responsible for the disaster that is Detroit but it is not the fault of the unions and it is not the fault of the pensioners. To say otherwise is simply not true and another example of lies being told in the GOP war against workers and poor people. These misstatements whether intentional or not are just examples of the class war being waged against people by other people working for vultures feathering their own nests.

The public employee unions represented the workers toiling for the City and its inhabitants negotiated labor contracts with the City. No one overpowered the City or otherwise took advantage of the City regarding pay, benefits and working conditions. These contracts were approved by both the workers and the City fathers through the City's legislative body elected by the citizens of the City. The result is there was created a contract binding both sides: the workers worked and the City paid a fair wage and agreed to pay money into the pension funds created by the contract. That should have been the end of the matter but it wasn't.

Several things coincided in time over the last decade or so to cause this bankruptcy:

The city fathers decided for whatever reason that they were not going to fund their portion of payments into the pension fund. These are called by the euphemistic term “unfunded pension liabilities”. In plain English the City government breached the labor contract.

The tax base of the City eroded because of a combination of things. Motor City was dependent upon the auto industry and the auto industry demanded and received special rights in the form of tax benefits which decreased significantly the funds available to the City to run the local government and to fund the pensions. The American auto industry began to falter due to competition from foreign auto industries in Europe and in Asia. The auto manufacturers and other industries dependent on the auto industry such as parts manufacturers left the City for other places where they could negotiate better deals for themselves and their equity holders and basically abandoned the City and abandoned their plants in situ to become Detroit's problem. As a result taxes were not being paid by the industry to the City. None of this of course happened overnight but these results accumulated over time. The net result was a decrease in the City's cash flow. Cash flow became a trickle.

The City needed to continue operating and to do that it had to borrow money and those loans were obtained on the strength of the tax value of the real property located in the City. The City borrowed this money from Wall Street banks and banking institutions generally referred to now as Banksters. The obligation to repay these loans were secured by tax levies and the consequent revenue stream now flowing very slowly. The value of real estate in Detroit plummeted and the tax receipts were no longer sufficient to support the City neither in its day to day operations, nor it obligation to maintain and repair or replace infrastructure nor its obligations to repay the Wall Street banks. The City's credit rating plummeted as well and for for the simple reason that the lenders were nervous and feared they would end up holding the bag. This started a ball rolling downhill and the City struggled to refinance its debt and meanwhile the City stopped making contributions to the pensions. Detroit made a habit of robbing Peter to pay Paul. The debt was refinanced and interest payments deferred to allow the City breathing room. The refinance documents tied the new obligations of the City to the City's credit rating as determined by the banking industry's allies in the credit rating industry. The banksters and the credit rating industry were and still are linked at the hip. Under the deal signed on to by Detroit and its bankster creditors if the City's credit rating decreased further which it did all bets were off and the deferred interest payments became due and payable not over a period twenty years but now. Due dates were accelerated just banks do with individual credit card users

The state of Michigan which had an obligation to pay to Detroit some forty seven million dollars annually for some mandated activities failed to make those payments and thereupon reduced the City's cash flow even more. Everyone it seemed had a straw in Detroit's revenue stream with an obvious result.

Michigan has a law that is pretty much unique to Michigan. It is called the Emergency Manager Law and is codified as Public Act 4 enacted and signed into law in its present form by GOP governor Rick Snyder. It allows the governor of the state to impose upon distressed \local governments and school districts a super bureaucrat called an Emergency Manager who after appointment runs all of the affairs of the city and converts the elected government into an a dictatorial government run by that manager. That manager reports to the governor and becomes in effect both the City's legislature and the City's executive. The elected government is magically turned into a group of political eunuchs with no legal authority to do the jobs that the citizenry elected them to do. It effectively overturns elections. The emergency manager is responsible only to the governor and are analogous to viceroys who were responsible only to the kings who appointed and anointed them. It was the Emergency Manager who initiated the bankruptcy that is now threatening the paltry pensions of Detroit's retired workers.

To say that the City's pensioners or the Union representing City workers are responsible for this bankruptcy is total unmitigated nonsense. The fault lies with Detroit's city council and other elected officials, the state legislature which defunded Detroit, the greed exhibited by Wall Street Banksters, the governor, the emergency manager and the credit reporting firms hired by the banksters. The destruction of the domestic automobile industry bears some responsibility. Currently it is the plan that Detroit's retirees are going to make up the shortfall by decreases in the payments the retired workers will receive. The banksters as is the usual case will get paid in full on he backs of poor and middle class people.

Remember that un-restrained capitalism is an upward wealth redistribution scheme in which the rich get richer and the poor become poorer and middle class destroyed. That my friends is what is going in Detroit. If there is a conspiracy it must be laid at the feet of the financial industry.

Ron Wyden Speaks on Secret Government

The following exchange took place between a Rolling Stone writer Janet Reitman and Sen Ron Wyden (D-OR) a member of the senate intelligence committee:


Reitman: “In March, you asked the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, whether the government knowingly collected data on millions of Americans, and he answered "not wittingly" – which we now know was, basically, a lie. Yet Clapper has described it as "the least untruthful" answer he could have given. What's the story behind that?”

Wyden: “After both the NSA Director and the Director of National Intelligence declined to clarify these remarks in writing, I decided it was necessary to ask the Director of National Intelligence about them at an open hearing. I sent the question over a day in advance so that he would be prepared to answer it. They didn't ask me not to ask the question – and when they've made requests like that for security reasons, I've always respected them. If they had asked me not to ask the question I would have not asked the question, though I would have kept trying to find a way to press them on it. When the Director gave an inaccurate answer to the question, I had my staff call his office later on a secure line and urge them to amend his response. They decided to let his inaccurate answer stand on the public record, until about a month after the Snowden disclosures. Even then, they started off trying to defend his answer, before finally admitting publicly that it had been inaccurate.” [Emphasis added]


What struck me hard between the eyes was the disclosure of the strength and power of the hold that executive agencies of the government have over members of the legislative branch of that government appearing in the emphasized portion of Mr. Wyden's response.
Our national government is supposed to be a limited government and our Constitution spells out the powers of that government and vests “all legislative power herein granted” to the Congress. Which simply means in plain English that the power to make government operate is with the Congress alone. No executive action is permitted without prior legislative action. What Wyden is saying is that “congress crested the agency and the agency controls how congress operates with respect to that agency” and that seems absolutely backwards. It seems that all any nameless government agent need do is pin a National Security label on any project, authorized or unauthorized, named or un-named and the project disappears from public view forever unless there's an Edward Snowden or a Bradley Manning lurking about. It is subject to only as much congressional oversight as the agency deems proper. This is nonsensical and really puts the cart before the horse. Now what do we do about this? Lift the carpet and sweep all this under the carpet until we forget about it – and let it continue?

Freeze Frame Terrorism

Today sixty-eight years ago. America set a new world's record. On this day in history America in a single act of terrorism killed one hundred and forty thousand innocents as they were going about their daily lives during a war they had no role in starting. They only fought it in the name of their emperor and died in it with the name of their emperor on their seared lips and skinless faces. Their screams of terror echo down the time line to the end of the universe where everything stops dead up against the wall.  Here we stand today more than ready, willing and able to do it again if herded again by politicians in service of their masters. Politics by other means is what historians call war. Mass murder is what it really is. God bless America.

The Last Post

This will be my last post for the foreseeable future. I would like to thank all the people who have read my rants over the time I have been writing this blog. I also would like to thank all the people who didn't bother to read it. I won't thank anyone who bullshitted me about reading it. You know who you are.  I am closing up the shop, taking down and folding the tent.

Civil Disobedience as Espionage

(c) 2010 Drawtosmile@gmail.com

I find the uproar over Snowden to be interesting. Snowden is not the traditional Civil Disobedient in the mold of Gandhi, MLK Jr, or Nelson Mandela or any of the other political prisoners including Bradley Manning. The practitioners of classical civil disobedience all realized that paying the penalty for their disobedience was part of what they had to endure and the educative function of civil disobedience was the fact that they went to jail for their beliefs and their refusal to bend to the demands of then current political morality. 

Snowden did not (although he may yet do so) go to jail. That causes me to believe that CD is an ongoing  political event. That being said it does not mean that Snowden is not a whistleblower.  We probably all suspected the existence of the NSA program if we actually thought about the technology available to the Government and the Government's secret contractors such as Bozz-Allen.. All he did to earn the enmity of the right wing noise machine and the various servants of government overreaching such as Feinstein, Schumer, Graham and McCain,Obama and Holder and the lesser lights or dimmer bulbs if you will like King, Gohmert et al was to disclose the actual existence of a tornadic covert program that sweeps up everything its path. He gave us concrete proof, direct evidence if you will  that we are being surveilled by our own Government.  This is not the same as saying that we are currently being listened to by agents of the government or agents of the privatized government such as Snowden's former employer. What he has established is  that all of what we say, hear, speak and write is being vacuumed up and stored for later use. Archived if you will. As someone said recently this is not a search and seizure. It's a  seizure and the search is yet to come. Snowden is going to be used by Chinese and Russian politicians. There is no doubt about that.  That does not make him a bad guy (at least as I understand the term) and much more importantly it does not mean that his disclosures are any the less important to us as citizens off the US. What we make of this is up to us.

Snowden's actions are certainly less criminal than the lies told by James Clapper under oath to congress this past spring nor less criminal than the disclosure of the identity of a CIA operative by Dick Cheney...something that deprived our nation of the services of Valerie Plame as a covert agent of our government.  That was certainly more of an espionage operation than Snowden's disclosures.

US Senate Skips Town for Fathers' Day Gfits

By law the Congress is charged as the lawgivers in our Nation with overseeing the operations of the the executive branch of government. This includes our national security infrastructure including the National Security Agency (NSA) that is busy turning our Nation into a textbook example of the national security state.

On Thursday last only days after Edward Snowden released documents showing the existence of the PRISM program at the NSA that indiscriminately vacuums up incredible amounts of what is called metadata from the phone calls, emails and Internet site visits of ordinary Americans the NSA held a classified briefing for the entire membership of the US Senate in a secure room in the basement of the US Capitol building. This was reported in The Hill which is a smallish circulation newspaper that reports mostly on goings on in the Government of the US.

What made this article unusual and worthy of note is that more than half of the membership of the Senate decided they would skip that briefing. That's right you read it correctly 53 members of the senate balanced their duty to oversee the structure of the national security state that has been created since the attack on the US by foreign nationals against their desires to get home early for the Fathers' Day weekend and the weekend won..

What really frosts my butt about this story is that the identities of the members who chose to get home early in order to be on time to receive their Fathers' Day gifts and accolades were secret and their names not disclosed to The Hill. Apparently the gift-receiving culture of our national politics was more important to them than doing the jobs they were elected or in some cases appointed to do. What gives here? Has the US Senate just blown us off big time?!