On Serving Bush--a la carte

As is becoming painfully clear, Monica Goodling, erstwhile wonder child of Regents Univeristy (A.K.A., God U.) had a set of insightful questions for would be attorneys who wanted to work at the Department of Justice under GW Bush's disastrous reign.

One question is impossible to read without smiling:

What Is It About GWB That Makes You Want to Serve Him?

Outside the fact that such blatant political bias is in violation of the Hatch act (and Monica's bias successfully kept our so called 'anti-terrorism' team at the DOJ packed with inexperienced dilettantes--see post below), I could not help but noting the odd wording of the question 'serve him'...Rather lordly that, with all kinds of perverse feudal, not to mention, sexual overtones. But the favorite connotation, drawn out by a wit over at Talkingpoints memo, has to be the reference to Rod Serling's brilliant Twilight Zone episode:

A race of aliens known as the Kanamits land on Earth and promise to be nothing but helpful to the cause of humanity. Initially wary of the intentions of such a highly advanced race, even the most skeptical humans are convinced when their code-breakers begin to translate one of the Kanamit's books, with the seemingly innocuous title, "To Serve Man."

Sharing their advanced technology, the aliens quickly solve all of Earth's greatest woes, eradicating hunger, disease, and the need for warfare. Soon, humans are volunteering for trips to the Kanamits' home planet, which is supposedly a paradise.

All is not well, however, when a code-breaker discovers the Kanamits’ true intentions: Their book, "To Serve Man", is a cookbook, and all their gifts were simply to make humanity complacent, much like fattening pigs or cows before they are slaughtered.

Truly, let us serve Bush up, with sugared yams.

In answer to the question, the potential employee could have offered that he wanted to 'serve Bush' because of his excellent ratio of fat to meat. Or perhaps he might have opined that he wanted to serve Bush before he got to old and stringy, like his pa?

Why Republican Party Rule Sucks -- Part 10,000

From ThinkProgress

In today’s Justice Department report on Monica Goodling’s and other DOJ officials’ politicization of the department, the investigators reveal that Goodling’s political considerations were “particularly damaging to the Department because it resulted in high-quality candidates for important details being rejected in favor of less-qualified candidates.”

In one disgraceful example, Goodling refused to hire “one of the leading terrorism prosecutors in the country” because his wife was a Democrat:

He was an experienced terrorism prosecutor and had successfully prosecuted a high-profile terrorism case for which he received the Attorney General’s Award for Exceptional Service. … The candidate’s wife was a prominent local Democrat elected official and vice-chairman of a local Democratic Party. […]

[Executive Office for United States Attorneys (EOUSA) Michael] Battle, [EOUSA Deputy Director and Cheif of Staff] Kelly, and EOUSA Deputy Director Nowacki all told us that Goodling refused to allow the candidate to be detailed to EOUSA solely on the basis of his wife’s political party affiliation. Battle said he was very upset that Goodling opposed the detail because of political reasons.

Goodling’s “damaging” refusal, the report notes, forced the EOUSA to “select a much more junior attorney who lacked any experience in counterterrorism issues” and was grossly unqualified for the position:

Because EOUSA had been unable to fill the counterterrorism detail after Goodling vetoed this candidate, a current EOUSA detailee was asked to assume EOUSA’s counterterrorism portfolio. … He had no counterterrorism experience and had less than the minimum of 5 years of federal criminal prosecution experience required by the EOUSA job announcement. Battle, Nowacki, Kelly, and Voris all said they thought that he was not qualified for the position, since he had no counterterrorism experience.

Another section of the report verified early claims that Goodling had forced out a career attorney “because Goodling had problems with the AUSA’s alleged sexual orientation.”

On Altruism

Reading Lewis Thomas's The Medusa and the Snail and he provides some wonderfully quirky symbiotic relationships to consider when thinking about how we, as a society, tend to think in terms of 'social darwinistic' perspectives, honoring 'individuality' and, naturally, disdaining 'socialism'--or worse, as Ayn Rand might opine, 'altruism'.

Everyone says, stay away from ants. They have no lessons for us, they are crazy little instruments, inhuman, incapable of controlling themselves, lacking manners, lacking souls....Sometimes people argue this point of view seriously and with deep thought. Be individuals, solitary and selfish, is the message. Altruism, a jargon word for what used to be called love, is worse than weakness, it is sin, a violation of nature. Be separate. Do not be a social animal. But this is a hard argument to make convincingly when you have to depend on language to make it.

As Thomas notes, language is the supreme social endeavour. We use it as ants use touch and smell. We are bound by the commonality of language and its very use predicates against separation and isolation. To suggest, via the mechanisms of language ,that we somehow not depend on each other, that we remain solitary, is, as Lewis notes, something that really can't be done with a straight face.

Libertarians take note. We are-- by nature-- related, symbiotic and, further, altruistic. In fact, as Thomas suggests, maybe altruism is our most basic instinct? Maybe it was that cutting against the grain of selfishness that led to human civilization as we know it. And maybe, the flipside is also true. When we jettison 'love' or 'altruism', in favor of isolation and meager 'personal' responsibility, we begin that slow devolving step back down toward the lonely ameoba and the insanely isolated land once ruled by thimble brained dinosaurs.

My suspicion is that most of biology--and all of the ants--laugh at the libertarian's serious contenance set so earnestly in trying to convince everyone else that only the invdividual's responsibility to himself matters. If so, why bother to say anything? Why, indeed, even bother to communicate if it gains you nothing in an immediate fashion? And why use that most socialistic and socially dependent instrument imaginable--language--to communicate it?

War's Suicide pact

From AP

More than 22,000 veterans have sought help from a special suicide hot line in its first year, and 1,221 suicides have been averted, the government says.

According to a recent RAND Corp. study, roughly one in five soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan displays symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, putting them at a higher risk for suicide. Researchers at Portland State University found that male veterans are twice as likely to commit suicide than men who are not veterans.

At some point I hope someone notices that "serving" your country by killing little brown people in foreign lands does a disservice to both the little brown people, whom we murder, as well as the poor individuals we've decided to make do the murdering. Why? Because when you murder folks, you lose that sense of common humanity, your conscience--if you have one--bothers you--that's what war does. Some people are okay with this. We call them animals. They usually grow up to be successful Generals. Others aren't okay with it. Sometimes they are so not okay, they kill themselves out of searing regret.

That's why--not to put too harsh a point on this-- wars of convenience are extraordinarily bad ideas. And people who suggest that wars are somehow appropriate or effective reactions ought to be forced to wear dirty underwear on their heads and chained to a bunk somewhere very hot without air condition and laughed at for the remainder of their pathetically limited cro-magnon lives.

The Latest on the Military Industrial Complex and the Privatization of Intelligence from Chalmers Johnson

The wholesale transfer of military and intelligence functions to private, often anonymous, operatives took off under Ronald Reagan's presidency, and accelerated greatly after 9/11 under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Often not well understood, however, is this: The biggest private expansion into intelligence and other areas of government occurred under the presidency of Bill Clinton. He seems not to have had the same anti-governmental and neoconservative motives as the privatizers of both the Reagan and Bush II eras. His policies typically involved an indifference to -- perhaps even an ignorance of -- what was actually being done to democratic, accountable government in the name of cost-cutting and allegedly greater efficiency. It is one of the strengths of Shorrock's study that he goes into detail on Clinton's contributions to the wholesale privatization of our government, and of the intelligence agencies in particular.

Reagan launched his campaign to shrink the size of government and offer a large share of public expenditures to the private sector with the creation in 1982 of the "Private Sector Survey on Cost Control." In charge of the survey, which became known as the "Grace Commission," he named the conservative businessman, J. Peter Grace, Jr., chairman of the W.R. Grace Corporation, one of the world's largest chemical companies -- notorious for its production of asbestos and its involvement in numerous anti-pollution suits. The Grace Company also had a long history of investment in Latin America, and Peter Grace was deeply committed to undercutting what he saw as leftist unions, particularly because they often favored state-led economic development.

The Grace Commission's actual achievements were modest. Its biggest was undoubtedly the 1987 privatization of Conrail, the freight railroad for the northeastern states. Nothing much else happened on this front during the first Bush's administration, but Bill Clinton returned to privatization with a vengeance.
According to Shorrock:

"Bill Clinton… picked up the cudgel where the conservative Ronald Reagan left off and… took it deep into services once considered inherently governmental, including high-risk military operations and intelligence functions once reserved only for government agencies. By the end of [Clinton's first] term, more than 100,000 Pentagon jobs had been transferred to companies in the private sector -- among them thousands of jobs in intelligence… By the end of [his second] term in 2001, the administration had cut 360,000 jobs from the federal payroll and the government was spending 44 percent more on contractors than it had in 1993." (pp. 73, 86)

These activities were greatly abetted by the fact that the Republicans had gained control of the House of Representatives in 1994 for the first time in 43 years. One liberal journalist described "outsourcing as a virtual joint venture between [House Majority Leader Newt] Gingrich and Clinton." The right-wing Heritage Foundation aptly labeled Clinton's 1996 budget as the "boldest privatization agenda put forth by any president to date." (p. 87)

After 2001, Bush and Cheney added an ideological rationale to the process Clinton had already launched so efficiently. They were enthusiastic supporters of "a neoconservative drive to siphon U.S. spending on defense, national security, and social programs to large corporations friendly to the Bush administration." (pp. 72-3)

The end result is what we see today: a government hollowed out in terms of military and intelligence functions. The KBR Corporation, for example, supplies food, laundry, and other personal services to our troops in Iraq based on extremely lucrative no-bid contracts, while Blackwater Worldwide supplies security and analytical services to the CIA and the State Department in Baghdad. (Among other things, its armed mercenaries opened fire on, and killed, 17 unarmed civilians in Nisour Square, Baghdad, on September 16, 2007, without any provocation, according to U.S. military reports.) The costs -- both financial and personal -- of privatization in the armed services and the intelligence community far exceed any alleged savings, and some of the consequences for democratic governance may prove irreparable.
[snip]

...the current situation represents the worst of all possible worlds. Successive administrations and Congresses have made no effort to alter the CIA's role as the president's private army, even as we have increased its incompetence by turning over many of its functions to the private sector. We have thereby heightened the risks of war by accident, or by presidential whim, as well as of surprise attack because our government is no longer capable of accurately assessing what is going on in the world and because its intelligence agencies are so open to pressure, penetration, and manipulation of every kind.

You can read his full article here

Meditations on some books and my backyard

I used my Barnes and Noble birthday gift card today. Two picks:

Stephen Dunn's Everything Else in the World and Paul Hawken's Blessed Unrest.

I figured they'd balance themselves out. Stephen sold me with his beginning poem (A Small Part) in which this fitting line appeared:

but I was so young I believed
Ayn Rand had a handle on truth.

Heh.

The other book was Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawkens.

Paul Hawkens estimates there are well over a million organizations and probably more across the globe fighting for environmental sanity and social justice. I belong to one of the more visible, but there are hundreds of thousands of others and it will ultimately be up to every single one of these organizations to pressure the politicians and the corporations to change the whole concept of business and the way things are done.

I think we can start by cutting military spending by 3/4s; killing agricultural subsidies and pouring those funds into locally owned agri-businesses and the development of alternative energy infrastructure (Wind/Solar). I just finished reading a wonderful piece about a company that came on line--thanks to the foresight of the German government--whose 'business' model is taking methane producing bovine waste (manure) and capturing it for use in the energy grid.

Why aren't we doing something like that? I've got enough dog doo doo in my backyard to power a small house. I've also got Chinese squash, tomatoes, beans, basil and enough cucumbers to satisfy the entire Hotel New Hampshire. Next year, I'm planting peach trees in place of the standard Dogwoods in these parts. And my cedar 'separators' are going to make room for plum and grape. I might even get a goat, methinks.


Here's a little more from Stephen Dunn:

Clouds with periods of sun, says our weatherman.
Unlike some of us, he never intends to lie.
Many here who look no further than their yards
believe God has a design.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Bush's God has no design, so til your garden.

Bob Lutz in Hell

Oh, Oh.

From the perspective of Bob Lutz, cigar chumping, gas guzzling H2 cheer leader for the environmentally challenged, this bit of news must come as something of a downer.

Auto executives just can't catch a break. Add to slumping sales and lofty gasoline prices a ticking time bomb in their auto leasing operations. During the past several years automakers from General Motors (GM) to Nissan Motor (NSANY) to BMW leased millions of cars and trucks. As those leases end, the companies have to take back the vehicles—many of them the gas-guzzling SUVs, pickups, and luxury models people don't want anymore. You know what that means: more pain as the automakers offload those vehicles at a loss. Art Spinella, president of CNW Marketing Research, estimates that this year alone the industry will lose $4.7 billion on sales of previously leased SUVs. "This caught everyone by surprise," he says. And it's a problem that will keep on giving because many automakers only recently started to write fewer leases. So there are plenty of newly leased gas-guzzlers out there, some with terms as long as 39 months. Spinella sees $10 billion more in lost value as thousands more SUVs come off lease in 2009 and 2010.

Of course, for the rest of the sane world--who thought--rightfully--that SUVs were the latest snake and oil quick profit scheme for the ethical zero zone of the US Auto industry, their suffering is, frankly, good news. Our enviroment can only improve with fewer gas guzzling SUVs on the road. It also makes it much safer to ride environmentally conscious vehicles, like, you know, bicycles. Yeah, I know, no profit in bicycles, though. Ask me if I care.

Suck it up, Lutz. You live by the quick profit, you die by the quick profit. Only this time, you took down the dumber half of the US Auto industry with you.

Good riddance.