Georgia, South Carolina And Tennessee vs Argentina

Yesterday afternoon, three gubernatorial fools-- gubers for short-- announced that they're prematurely opening their states up for the pandemic-- although none of their states were very closed down to begin with. The 3 imbeciles are Brian Kemp (R-GA), Bill Lee (R-TN) and Henry McMaster (R-SC). Let's start by looking at some numbers-- total cases and cases per million.

• Georgia- 18,947 (1,840 per million)
• Tennessee- 7,238 (1,088 per million)
• South Carolina- 4,377 (883 per million)

Remember those numbers, because by Memorial Day weekend they're all going to be much higher. On Good Morning America yesterday, Dr. Fauci made it clear that this is a big mistake that will steepen the curve and cause the nation's efforts to banish the pandemic to slow down. He said that "this is something that is hurting from the standpoint of economics, from the standpoint of things that have nothing to do with the virus... unless we get the virus under control, the real recovery economically is not gonna happen. So what you do if you jump the gun and go into a situation where you have a big spike, you’re gonna set yourself back... it’s gonna backfire. That’s the problem."




Wire Train was a band on my indie label, 415 Records. The original drummer, was Federico Gil-Sola, a kid from Argentina, who has since moved back there. Last night he suggested I read a piece in The Nation by Jacob Sugarman about how Argentina is handling the pandemic, Argentina Is Showing the World What a Humane Covid-19 Response Looks Like. "In December of 2019," wrote Sugarman, "the Peronist-progressive coalition party Frente de Todos (Everyone’s Front) swept into power after four years of neoliberal mismanagement. Now that it had begun enacting a social democratic agenda, against the backdrop of an unprecedented public health crisis, the forces of reaction were making their voices heard. Indeed, their demonstration began shortly after Minister of Labor Claudio Moroni ordered the country’s largest steel manufacturer, Techint, to pause the firing of 1,450 temporary workers. (President Alberto Fernández has since issued an emergency decree banning layoffs for a period of two months.) “Muchachos, les tocó la hora de ganar menos,” Fernández told the country’s business leaders at the time. “Boys, it’s time for you to earn less.”

Herein lies the challenge not just for Argentina but also for countless other liberal democracies across the West. While the outlines of our global crisis are only beginning to emerge, it is clear that Covid-19 demands that these nations reimagine the role of the state after decades of free-market hegemony. New possibilities have presented themselves that seemed unimaginable as recently as February. Even the editorial board of the Financial Times recently conceded that more radical reforms like a wealth tax and a universal basic income will have to be put on the table. Fernández, whose conservative predecessor, Mauricio Macri, reduced the Minister of Health to a non-cabinet position, understands this intuitively, implementing a pandemic response that, if not offering an exemplar for the Americas, stands in stark contrast to the region’s more overtly authoritarian regimes.

“I was concerned that the Argentine state apparatus wouldn’t be up to the task, but the response [has been] good,” says Marcelo Leiras, a political scientist and adviser to Argentina’s minister of the interior, Eduardo “Wado” de Pedro. “The Minister of Health [Ginés González García], at the beginning, thought that this epidemic would not strongly effect Argentina. For good reasons, I think. We didn’t know how contagious this thing was. The president was wise enough to widen his circle of advisers and heed the most prudent, conservative advice. He was [also] bold in choosing a strong quarantine policy, which in economic terms was incredibly risky.”

“We have to keep in mind how inarticulate the international response has been to the [coronavirus],” he adds. “It’s reflective of the political disarray of the West in domestic and international terms. I think the president sensed that and reacted very quickly and consistently.”

Whereas U.S. President Donald Trump and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro have abdicated responsibility for their nations’ pandemic responses, with each openly flouting epidemiologists and sniping at the governors of their respective states and provinces, Fernández issued a nationwide shelter-in-place order on March 20. At the time, Argentina had only 128 official cases nationwide, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. As with the Argentinian president’s prior decisions to close the country’s borders and place visitors from global hot spots in a two-week quarantine, the aim was simple: to flatten the curve before a swell in cases could overwhelm the country’s latticework of trade union clinics, public hospitals, and private health care providers. It is far too early to call the measures a success, but early returns suggest that they are working. Infections have come in well below initial projections, and as of April 12, Argentina’s death rate stood at two per 1 million habitants. Chile’s, by contrast, was four, and Brazil’s was five. The United States’ was 62.

“Argentina has acted very quickly in comparison with other countries,” says Rodrigo Quiroga, a bioinformatician at Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council. “[That includes] the rapid closure of the border, the mandatory isolation of those who came from countries with high rates of infections and the closing of schools. These measures, along with the quarantine, have reduced the number of cases in this first stage of the pandemic.”

Fernández’s economic actions have been no less audacious, especially when considering that his administration inherited a $311 billion debt that includes a record $57 billion loan in 2018 from the International Monetary Fund-- the institution that imposed punishing austerity measures after the country’s crash in 2002. Argentina has invested as much as 2 percent of its gross domestic product in an economic and social relief package-- among the highest within the G20-- while an executive order issued last month has ensured that no essential services be cut for retirees, social welfare recipients and households earning less than a combined 33,750 pesos (about $520) due to a lack of payment. These services include electricity, gas, water, mobile, and fixed landlines, as well as Internet and cable television. The Fernández administration has also suspended evictions and frozen all rent hikes through September, in addition to absolving “monotributistas,” the country’s bottom tax bracket, of penalties for failing to make their March tax payments.

More significantly, the president has created via executive order a 10,000-peso (about $150) Ingreso Familiar de Emergencia (Emergency Family Income) for domestic workers and other low-income earners, giving first priority to those who qualify for Asignación Universal por Hijo (Universal Child Allowance) and Asignación para Embarazadas (Allowance for Pregnant Women). Nearly 8 million Argentines will receive subsidies beginning April 21. The administration has further made every employer, regardless of trade and size, eligible for a Programa de Asistencia de Emergencia al Trabajao y la Producción (Emergency Assistance Program for Work and Production), postponing or reducing the tax commitments of small businesses by up to 95 percent and paying out between 50 and 100 percent of a monthly minimum wage salary for each of their employees. Meanwhile, the federal government has compelled banks to extend hundreds of millions of dollars in loans at a reduced interest rate in an effort to keep the economy afloat.

Although Argentina has declined to nationalize its private hospitals as Spain has done, it has secured their cooperation during the crisis so that its health care system doesn’t face a shortage of hospital beds. Fernández has likewise activated the armed services to build a number of triage centers in the event of a surge in cases. Taken together, these actions amount to a mass mobilization of the Argentinian state.

...Fernández has investigated relaxing quarantine restrictions in order to stimulate the economy, but the challenges will be immense. While the government maintains that its testing of Covid-19 is proportionate to the country’s low rate of infection (2,142 official cases as of April 12), it had administered just 19,758 tests-- 437 per million habitants-- two weeks before quarantine was tentatively set to end April 26. As the country attempts to ramp up the numbers of ventilators and test kits after years of funding cuts to the Administración Nacional de Laboratorios e Institutos de Salud “Dr. Carlos Malbrán” (the Malbrán Institute), and amid supply chain disruptions that have hampered much of Latin America, it may be all but impossible to control the virus’s spread in the more impoverished suburbs of Buenos Aires, where population density is high, access to quality health care is limited, and few enjoy the luxury to self-isolate. At the same time, a 2019 poll from Argentina’s Catholic University finds that nearly half of the country’s labor force (49.3 percent) works off the books, with 81.7 percent of that segment in low-quality jobs.

“The response has ultimately been reflective of the strengths and weaknesses of the Argentinian state,” says Leiras. “The Argentinian state is strong in dialogue and politics but bad in terms of infrastructure, in its ability to go to places and do things, to reach people with health services [for example]. In that respect, it’s like an octopus with very short tentacles.”

Yet, despite its deficiencies, Argentina has thus far managed to avoid the kinds of catastrophes emerging in countries like Ecuador, where bodies have piled up in the streets of Guayaquil, and Brazil, whose president now faces impeachment calls for his homicidal denialism. More recently, Fernández has encouraged the congress to pass a tax on the country’s biggest fortunes-- a response to his political opposition’s calls for government officials to reduce their salaries by 30 percent. The tax, which targets, among others, those who were granted immunity by the prior administration for hiding their wealth overseas, signals the president’s desire to fundamentally reorder Argentinian society as much as it aims to ameliorate the worst economic effects of the crisis. Fernandez grasps what many of his counterparts on the world stage have not: that our fates are intrinsically bound together, and that the historical epoch we’ve been thrust into demands a new social contract.

“For many years, Argentinians have been led to believe that politicians and union leaders were the source of all their problems,” the president mused in late March. “The real problem is those who believe that there are too many people, that this [isn’t] a country where we all have a place…. After the pandemic, everything will be different. We’ll live in another world. I believe that ours is a time of reflection, in which we can recover something that postmodernity has robbed of us.”

“Postmodernity has led us to believe that individualism was the secret and that success meant earning money,” he continued. “[We’ve seen] a microscopic bug lay waste to vast fortunes and destroy accumulated wealth. Microscopic. This same bug can kill [the rich] as easily as it can kill any one of us. What was the purpose then of accumulating so much?”

Billionaire Vulture Paul Singer Has Been Bribing Rubio To Help His Corrupt Business For Quite Some Time

Sunday started off with an explanation of the connection between Marco Rubio and vulture investor Paul Singer, who is now trying-- along with several other slimy billionaires-- to buy Rubio the white House. (Don't worry... Ted Cruz has his own equally horrid billionaires trying to buy the presidency for him.) Everyone more or less assumed that Singer was willing to invest heavily in Rubio because of their shared virulent Zionism and because of Rubio's consistent pledges to drastically lower taxes on billionaires, coupled with his perceived electability. But then Jonathan Marshall, writing for ConsortiumNews reported a key element most reporters have missed, not that the Singer's embrace signals an establishment shift away from Jeb, but that "Rubio earned that affection by advancing Singer’s high-stakes financial fight with Argentina."

Marshall points out Rubio's "political support for Singer’s efforts to drain more than $1.5 billion dollars from Argentina in payments on old bonds that lost most of their value after the country defaulted in 2001." In the Sunday discussion of Singer's corruption, we mentioned how he bribed GOP congressman Michael "Mikey Suits" Grimm with $38,000 to get him to use his congressional office to extort Argentina. Grimm is in prison for other (unrelated) corrupt practices but he isn't the only Republican who helped Singer with his disgraceful vulture operation against Argentina.

...Bloomberg noted, “Singer has repeatedly been labeled a ‘vulture investor’ by the emerging-market countries whose bonds he has bought and by development organizations such as Oxfam International that back forgiveness of poor countries’ debt.” The Guardian described the debt vulture model this way: “Vulture funds operate by buying up a country’s debt when it is in a state of chaos. When the country has stabilized, vulture funds return to demand millions of dollars in interest repayments and fees on the original debt. … It has been 16 years since most of the world began writing off the debts of the world’s poorest countries, but the vulture funds, a club of between 26 and 35 speculators, have ignored the debt concerts by pop stars such as Bono and pleas from the likes of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to give the countries a break and a chance to get back on their feet.”

It now looks like Singer is repaying Rubio for his willingness to fight his anti-Argentine battles and drag the U.S. Senate into it despite warnings from the State Department not to.

Singer’s Elliott Management bought that debt several years ago for less than $50 million, and then successfully sued in U.S. court to demand full recovery of the face amount-- in the face of opposition from the Obama administration, most other bondholders, and, above all, Argentina’s government, led by President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner.

Singer, who is famous for his bare-knuckles tactics against foreign governments, has gone after Kirchner’s government on all fronts. Most strategically, he supported the highly questionable claims by an Argentine prosecutor that the Kirchner government tried to cover up the involvement of the Iranian government in the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 people.

The issue was perfect for a smear campaign: targeting alleged Iranian terrorism and government anti-Semitism, Singer could undercut the legitimacy of the one entity standing between him and huge profits on his speculative bond purchases.

Singer’s Elliot Management is a major backer of American Task Force Argentina, which advocates for full repayment of the Argentine bonds and has spent millions of dollars lobbying Congress. It also spends big bucks to blacken Argentina’s reputation.

As Huffington Post reported in 2013, the group “has launched a broad attack on Argentina in its PR campaign. … Politico ad, paid for by ATFA, slammed the country as a safe haven for narcotics traffickers. Another ATFA ad accuses Argentine President Cristina Kirchner of making a ‘pact with the Devil,’ pointing to a legal memo between her country and Iran involving Argentina’s effort to prosecute Iranian defendants in a terrorism case.”

As one of its lobbyists told Huffington Post, “We do whatever we can to get our government and media’s attention focused on what a bad actor Argentina is.”

An investigation by Charles Davis for Inter Press Service showed that employees of Singer’s Elliott Management contributed more than $95,000 to Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Illinois, who wrote a letter denouncing President Kirchner’s agreement with Iran to investigate the 1994 bombing.

Rep. Michael Grimm, R-NY, who received $38,000 from Elliott Management employees, co-sponsored legislation demanding that Argentina’s bondholders receive full compensation, and called for an investigation of Argentina’s ties with Iran. Other recipients of Singer’s largesse-- including AIPAC, The Israel Project and the American Enterprise Institute-- also hammered the Kirchner government, virtually accusing it of anti-Semitism.

Last year, another member of Congress got in on the act: Sen. Marco Rubio. While grilling President Obama’s nominee as U.S. ambassador to Argentina, Rubio complained that Buenos Aires “doesn’t pay bondholders, doesn’t work with our security operations. . . .  These aren’t the actions of an ally.”

Adding a dig at President Kirchner, he added, “We have this trend in Latin America of people who get elected but then don’t govern democratically. Argentina is an example of this.” His speech triggered an angry response from Kirchner’s Foreign Minister Hector Timerman-- an Argentine Jew-- calling Rubio an “extremist.”

This May, Rubio introduced a resolution in the Senate suggesting that Kirchner conspired to “cover up Iranian involvement in the 1994 terrorist bombing.” Rubio declared that the issues in the case “extend well beyond Argentina and involve the international community, and more importantly, U.S. national security.”

As Eli Clifton noted, “It turns out that Singer’s hedge fund, Elliott Management, was Rubio’s second largest source of campaign contributions between 2009 and 2014, providing the presidential hopeful with $122,620, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.” Let's not forget that Singer gave Rubio $117,000 the same day Congress passed Dodd-Frank-- which Rubio voted to repeal 4 times.

When Kirchner herself had the temerity this spring to link Singer to various neoconservative attacks on her policies, citing a “global modus operandi” to coerce foreign states, the reliably neoconservative editorial page of the Washington Post published an editorial reply titled, “Argentina’s President Resorts to Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theories.”

To which Jim Lobe and Charles Davis, citing a long list of Singer connections to Kirchner’s critics, replied, “follow the money.” That advice, made famous in the movie version of Watergate’s Deep Throat, remains the best guide to understanding billionaire funding of candidates in the 2016 election.

And believe me, this isn't going to be a topic brought up by any moderators in the next Republican debate... nor the one after that.

Let's face it, the Catholic Faithful really don't want to know what their new leader did during the Dirty War

"Beyond the details, the main thing is that it's clear that he was not -- by a long shot -- at the level needed in the dramatic circumstances," Gabriel Pasquini, an Argentine playwright and author of the online current-affairs magazine El Puercoespín, told me. There were other clergymen -- "Catholic and from other religions" -- who "did whatever they could to save lives," Pasquini added. "For someone who aspires to be a bastion of moral values, it doesn't seem like a great precedent. Never, in the years he headed the Catholic Church in Argentina, did he acknowledge its complicity in the dictatorship, much less ask for forgiveness. Will he do so now, from the Vatican?"

Whatever the truth, Francis the Humble, it would seem, has much to clear up about what he thought, how he behaved, and what he did during his country's Dirty War. As with the role of the Church he has long served, it remains a mystery.

-- The New Yorker's Jon Lee Anderson, in a "Daily
Comment" post, "Pope Francis and the Dirty War"

by Ken

When you know that someone occupied a position of prominence and authority in Argentina during a period that included the years 1976-83, how is it possible not to insist on answers to the Big Question: What did you do during the war? The Dirty War, that is -- the reign of terror visited upon the Argentine people by one of the more ruthless and bloody regimes of recent times.

The New Yorker's outstanding foreign correspondent Jon Lee Anderson explains:

The new Pope, Francis the Humble, as he perhaps would like to be known, is an Argentine with a cloudy past. This in itself is not an offense but, rather, is in keeping with a religious institution that has long been marked by secrecy. From the smoke signals with which the papal conclave makes the fact, if not the process, of its decision known to the world to the wide-ranging coverups of sexual abuse involving priests and bishops, the Catholic Church is too often associated in the popular imagination with the darkest kind of institutional opacity.

Some of the cloudiness in Francis's past has to do with his relative obscurity during the years when he was still known as Jorge Mario Bergoglio, and with the way that the Church operates in even the calmest times. But much of it also has to do with questions about his real role during the country's anti-Communist terror three decades ago. Officially called the Process of National Reorganization by the military junta that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983, the Dirty War, as it is more commonly known, was a comprehensive campaign aimed at the elimination of Communists and others seen as "subversives." The purge claimed the lives of at least nine thousand people and as many as thirty thousand people, many of them killed in the most gruesome circumstances imaginable. Pregnant women were often held until they gave birth, whereupon they were secretly killed, their babies handed over to childless military families and others close to the regime for adoption. Hundreds of "children of the disappeared" are living today, young people in their early thirties, some of them still unaware that their parents are, in effect, their biological parents' killers. (Francisco Goldman has written about these children for The New Yorker.)

Many of the victims were held for months in official institutions, where they were repeatedly tortured before being killed, their bodies "disappeared." Justifying the purge, which was spoken about euphemistically but carried out in secrecy, the Argentine military espoused a brand of anti-Communist ferocity that echoed Franco's Fascist witch hunt, which had previously devastated Republican Spain -- a brand of ferocity that also shared his deeply entrenched ultra-Catholic and anti-Semitic views.

Through the years of the Argentine terror, Anderson writes, "the role of the Argentine Catholic Church in the junta's anti-Communist campaign was queasily intimate."

In official discourses, one of Bergoglio's predecessors, Archbishop Juan Carlos Aramburu, openly sided with the military's stated need for a purge, in which freethinking priests and nuns were also killed. For the most part, the Church remained mute in public about what was going on. But some priests were actually directly involved in the repression, by all accounts, with military chaplains going so far as to bless the drugged bodies of suspected guerrillas marked for execution as they were loaded onto military planes, from which they were then hurled to their deaths, unconscious, over the Rio de la Plata.

There have been past accusations, including testimony from a handful of priests and bishops, that the man who is now Pope Francis was complicit, too, if in a more subtle way. He was, in the early years of the Dirty War, the provincial, or superior, of the Society of Jesus in Argentina, at a time when the Jesuits produced some of the more freethinking and socially liberal clerics in Latin America -- a number of whom were targeted by military leaders during the era's repression -- and later led a seminary. The key allegation against him is that he pointed out left-leaning priests to the military as dissidents, leaving them exposed, and that he did not defend two kidnapped clerics or ask for their release. He has denied this, and says instead that he protected priests and others -- just quietly, in secret.

There is the predictable right-wing nattering in the comments -- e.g., defending upstanding Catholics like Spain's Generalissimo Franco (how dare you call him anti-Semitic!) and Pope Pius XII (why, he was the scourge of Hitler, just very secretly!). But the comment that grabbed my attention was this one, from CECIL9:

No doubt about it, this is a hit piece. Any historian would immediately note the lack of scruples this article presents. No factual data, just someone's slanted perspective of some possible wrong-doing by the new pope. New Yorker, dig a bit deeper and put some substance in your "comments."

It sounds at least somewhat reasonable -- until you give it a split second's thought. Is this clown suggesting that there are no facts about the Dirty War? Then he's just an out-and-out wacko or liar. More likely, he means that there are no documented facts about Bergoglio's role therein, in which case he is merely skating around the central reality that the Church, in common with so many other authoritarian, and especially right-wing authoritarian institutions, has a pathological, no-holds-barred commitment to maintaining its secrets -- almost as fanatically so as the Argentine junta itself.

I'm not saying that secrecy and cover-up are the first impulse of the jackbooted-thug mentality. It's first impulse, rather obviously, is to jackbooted thuggery, sometimes for its own sake (there are people whose minds just run that way), more likely in the "cause" of imposing their particular authoritarian values on everyone and everything in their path. But secrecy and cover-up are a close-second impulse, for obvious reasons. Despite the authoritarians' protestations of virtue, necessity, and the blessing of free-from-fact "higher powers," people of this persuasion are clearly aware of the mortal peril of disclosure -- aware that what they do is so unacceptable that any breach of secrecy can spell their doom.

Of course CECIL9 doesn't have the slightest interest in truth or history or facts. His one and only interest is in hearing what he wants to hear. And so he lies even about the piece he claims to be commenting about: "No doubt about it, this is a hit piece." Let's recall that the Anderson piece concludes:

Whatever the truth, Francis the Humble, it would seem, has much to clear up about what he thought, how he behaved, and what he did during his country's Dirty War. As with the role of the Church he has long served, it remains a mystery.

CECIL9 doesn't want to know the truth. He isn't interested in answers to inconvenient questions. For all his professed respect for "history," he has no idea what it actually is -- as applied, for example, to that sinister period of Argentine history. If your basic impulse is to lie about anything that makes you uncomfortable, then there are no mysteries there. Nothing to look at, folks, pass on by.

Let's not even get into the silliness of a Catholics-can-do-no-wrong screamer demanding accountability to facts. By that standard, of course, the entire Catholic enterprise would be padlocked by morning.

The whine of Catholic paranoia is one of the most persistent refrains of our time, even as the fantasies and lies spread across the globe. The one thing you can say about Catholicism is that it has perfected the seamless fusion of ignorance and lies, so that where one leaves off, the other kicks in. The Catholic message to the outside world is: We are a cult of liars and slavemasters. And F*^K YOU, ASSWIPES!

Let me be clear: I have worlds of admiration for principled Catholics, who fight the good fight inspired by their faith. Like the nuns who became whipping posts for that wacko monster Pope Cardinal Ratguts. The Catholics whose voices always seem to scream to the top are the savage apostles of lies and ignorance.

Pope Francis has had a lot of time to fill in the blanks about his activities during the period in question. Then again, he knows he belongs to an organization -- in fact is now the head of an organization -- that doesn't want to know. Very badly doesn't want to know, it appears.

#

Is There Such A Thing As An Austerity Riot That Isn't "Political"... Anywhere?

While Matt Taibbi, on this side of the Atlantic, asks the question we all know the answer to-- Is the SEC covering up Wall Street crimes?-- and an increasingly uncomfortable English public on the other side of the Atlantic wants to understand what happened to the independence of their judiciary, Naomi Klein bridges the vast expanse of ocean by explaining just how "political" Austerity Riots are. Let's start with the massive looting in post-invasion Baghdad.

Back then the people on cable news thought looting was highly political. They said this is what happens when a regime has no legitimacy in the eyes of the people. After watching for so long as Saddam and his sons helped themselves to whatever and whomever they wanted, many regular Iraqis felt they had earned the right to take a few things for themselves. But London isn’t Baghdad, and British Prime Minister David Cameron is hardly Saddam, so surely there is nothing to learn there.

How about a democratic example then? Argentina, circa 2001. The economy was in freefall and thousands of people living in rough neighborhoods (which had been thriving manufacturing zones before the neoliberal era) stormed foreign-owned superstores. They came out pushing shopping carts overflowing with the goods they could no longer afford-- clothes, electronics, meat. The government called a “state of siege” to restore order; the people didn’t like that and overthrew the government.

Argentina’s mass looting was called El Saqueo-- the sacking. That was politically significant because it was the very same word used to describe what that country’s elites had done by selling off the country’s national assets in flagrantly corrupt privatization deals, hiding their money offshore, then passing on the bill to the people with a brutal austerity package. Argentines understood that the saqueo of the shopping centers would not have happened without the bigger saqueo of the country, and that the real gangsters were the ones in charge.

But England is not Latin America, and its riots are not political, or so we keep hearing. They are just about lawless kids taking advantage of a situation to take what isn’t theirs. And British society, Cameron tells us, abhors that kind of behavior.

This is said in all seriousness. As if the massive bank bailouts never happened, followed by the defiant record bonuses. Followed by the emergency G-8 and G-20 meetings, when the leaders decided, collectively, not to do anything to punish the bankers for any of this, nor to do anything serious to prevent a similar crisis from happening again. Instead they would all go home to their respective countries and force sacrifices on the most vulnerable. They would do this by firing public sector workers, scapegoating teachers, closing libraries, upping tuitions, rolling back union contracts, creating rush privatizations of public assets and decreasing pensions-- mix the cocktail for where you live. And who is on television lecturing about the need to give up these “entitlements”? The bankers and hedge-fund managers, of course.

This is the global Saqueo, a time of great taking. Fueled by a pathological sense of entitlement, this looting has all been done with the lights left on, as if there was nothing at all to hide. There are some nagging fears, however. In early July, the Wall Street Journal, citing a new poll, reported that 94 percent of millionaires were afraid of "violence in the streets.” This, it turns out, was a reasonable fear.

Of course London’s riots weren’t a political protest. But the people committing nighttime robbery sure as hell know that their elites have been committing daytime robbery. Saqueos are contagious.

The Tories are right when they say the rioting is not about the cuts. But it has a great deal to do with what those cuts represent: being cut off. Locked away in a ballooning underclass with the few escape routes previously offered-- a union job, a good affordable education-- being rapidly sealed off. The cuts are a message. They are saying to whole sectors of society: you are stuck where you are, much like the migrants and refugees we turn away at our increasingly fortressed borders.

David Cameron’s response to the riots is to make this locking-out literal: evictions from public housing, threats to cut off communication tools and outrageous jail terms (five months to a woman for receiving a stolen pair of shorts). The message is once again being sent: disappear, and do it quietly.

At last year’s G-20 “austerity summit” in Toronto, the protests turned into riots and multiple cop cars burned. It was nothing by London 2011 standards, but it was still shocking to us Canadians. The big controversy then was that the government had spent $675 million on summit “security” (yet they still couldn’t seem to put out those fires). At the time, many of us pointed out that the pricey new arsenal that the police had acquired-- water cannons, sound cannons, tear gas and rubber bullets-- wasn’t just meant for the protesters in the streets. Its long-term use would be to discipline the poor, who in the new era of austerity would have dangerously little to lose.

This is what David Cameron got wrong: you can't cut police budgets at the same time as you cut everything else. Because when you rob people of what little they have, in order to protect the interests of those who have more than anyone deserves, you should expect resistance-- whether organized protests or spontaneous looting.

And that’s not politics. It’s physics.

Extra credit if you put together Taibbi's hypothesis with Naomi's:
For the past two decades, according to a whistle-blower at the SEC who recently came forward to Congress, the agency has been systematically destroying records of its preliminary investigations once they are closed. By whitewashing the files of some of the nation's worst financial criminals, the SEC has kept an entire generation of federal investigators in the dark about past inquiries into insider trading, fraud and market manipulation against companies like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and AIG. With a few strokes of the keyboard, the evidence gathered during thousands of investigations-- "18,000 ... including Madoff," as one high-ranking SEC official put it during a panicked meeting about the destruction-- has apparently disappeared forever into the wormhole of history.

...Many of the destroyed files involved companies and individuals who would later play prominent roles in the economic meltdown of 2008. Two MUIs involving con artist Bernie Madoff vanished. So did a 2002 inquiry into financial fraud at Lehman Brothers, as well as a 2005 case of insider trading at the same soon-to-be-bankrupt bank. A 2009 preliminary investigation of insider trading by Goldman Sachs was deleted, along with records for at least three cases involving the infamous hedge fund SAC Capital.

Even Chuck Grassley (R-IA) seems to have noticed that "it looks as if the SEC might have sanctioned some level of case-related document destruction... "It doesn't make sense that an agency responsible for investigations would want to get rid of potential evidence. If these charges are true, the agency needs to explain why it destroyed documents, how many documents it destroyed over what time frame and to what extent its actions were consistent with the law."

No rioters or looters will have this in mind when they're rioting and looting, but no understanding of the cause will be complete without it. And Joel Kotkin over at Forbes seems as pessimistic as I am about anything ameliorating the roots causes of what looks like will be some pretty bad upheavals worldwide.

The riots that hit London and other English cities last week have the potential to spread beyond the British Isles. Class rage isn’t unique to England; in fact, it represents part of a growing global class chasm that threatens to undermine capitalism itself.

The hardening of class divisions has been building for a generation, first in the West but increasingly in fast-developing countries such as China. The growing chasm between the classes has its roots in globalization, which has taken jobs from blue-collar and now even white-collar employees; technology, which has allowed the fleetest and richest companies and individuals to shift operations at rapid speed to any locale; and the secularization of society, which has undermined the traditional values about work and family that have underpinned grassroots capitalism from its very origins.

All these factors can be seen in the British riots. Race and police relations played a role, but the rioters included far more than minorities or gangsters. As British historian James Heartfield has suggested, the rioters reflected a broader breakdown in “the British social system,” particularly in “the system of work and reward.”

In the earlier decades of the 20th century working class youths could look forward to jobs in Britain’s vibrant industrial economy and, later, in the growing public sector largely financed by both the earnings of the City of London and credit. Today the industrial sector has shrunk beyond recognition. The global financial crisis has undermined credit and the government’s ability to pay for the welfare state.

With meaningful and worthwhile work harder to come by-- particularly in the private sector-- the prospects for success among Britain working classes have been reduced to largely fantastical careers in entertainment, sport or all too often crime. Meanwhile, Prime Minister David Cameron’s supporters in the City of London may have benefited from financial bailouts arranged by the Bank of England, but opportunities for even modest social uplift for most other people have faded.

The great British notion of idea of working hard and succeeding through sheer pluck-- an idea also embedded in the U.K.’s former colonies, such as the U.S.-- has been largely devalued. Dick Hobbs, a scholar at the London School of Economics, says this demoralization has particularly affected white Londoners. Many immigrants have thrived doing engineering and construction work as well as in trades providing service to the capital’s affluent elites.

A native of east London himself, Hobbs maintains that the industrial ethos, despite its failings, had great advantages. It centered first on production and rewarded both the accumulation of skills. In contrast, by some estimates, the pub and club industry has been post-industrial London’s largest source of private-sector employment growth, a phenomena even more marked in less prosperous regions. “There are parts of London where the pubs are the only economy,” he notes.

What’s the lesson to be drawn? The ideologues don’t seem to have the answers. A crackdown on criminals-- the favored response of the British right-- is necessary but does not address the fundamental problems of joblessness and devalued work. Similarly the left’s favorite panacea, a revival of the welfare state, fails to address the central problem of shrinking opportunities for social advancement. There are now at least 1 million unemployed young people in the U.K., more than at any time in a generation, while child poverty in inner London, even during the regime of former Mayor “red Ken” Livingstone last decade, stood at 50% and may well be worse now.

Hobbs claims that the current “pub and club,” with its “violent potential and instrumental physicality,” simply celebrates consumption often to the point of excess. Perhaps it’s no surprise that looting drove the unrest.

This fundamental class issue is not only present in Britain. There have been numerous outbreaks of street violence across Europe, including in France and Greece. One can expect more in countries like Italy, Spain and Portugal, which will now have to impose the same sort of austerity measures applied by the Cameron government in London.

And how about the United States? Many of the same forces are at play here. Teen unemployment currently exceeds 20%; in the nation’s capital it stands at over 50%. Particularly vulnerable are expensive cities such as Los Angeles and New York, which have become increasingly bifurcated between rich and poor. Cutbacks in social programs, however necessary, could make things worse, both for the middle class minorities who run such efforts as well as their poor charges.

A possible harbinger of this dislocation, observes author Walter Russell Mead, may be the recent rise of random criminality, often racially tinged, taking place in American cities such as Chicago, Milwaukee and Philadelphia.

Still, with over 14 million unemployed nationwide, prospects are not necessarily great for white working- and middle-class Americans. This pain is broadly felt, particularly by younger workers. According to a Pew Research survey, almost 2 in 5 Americans aged 18 to 19 are unemployed or out the workforce, the highest percentage in three decades.

Diminished prospects-- what many pundits praise as the “new normal”-- now confront a vast proportion of the population. One indication: The expectation of earning more money next year has fallen to the lowest level in 25 years. Wages have been falling not only for non-college graduates but for those with four-year degree as well. Over 43% of non-college-educated whites complain they are downwardly mobile.

Given this, it’s hard to see how class resentment in this country can do anything but grow in the years. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke claimed as early as 2007 that he was worried about growing inequality in this country, but his Wall Street and corporate-friendly policies have failed to improve the grassroots economy.

The prospects for a widening class conflict are clear even in China, where social inequality is now among the world’s worse . Not surprisingly, one survey conducted the Zhejiang Academy of Social Sciences found that 96% of respondents “resent the rich.” While Tea Partiers and leftists in the U.S. decry the colluding capitalism of the Bush-Obama-Bernanke regime, Chinese working and middle classes confront a hegemonic ruling class consisting of public officials and wealthy capitalists. That this takes place under the aegis of a supposedly “Marxist-Leninist regime” is both ironic and obscene.

This expanding class war creates more intense political conflicts. On the right the Tea Party-- as well as rising grassroots European protest parties in such unlikely locales as Finland, Sweden and the Netherlands-- grows in large part out of the conviction that the power structure, corporate and government, work together to screw the broad middle class. Left-wing militancy also has a class twist, with progressives increasingly alienated by the gentry politics of the Obama Administration.

Many conservatives here, as well as abroad, reject the huge role of class. To them, wealth and poverty still reflect levels of virtue-- and societal barriers to upward mobility, just a mild inhibitor. But modern society cannot run according to the individualist credo of Ayn Rand; economic systems, to be credible and socially sustainable, must deliver results to the vast majority of citizens. If capitalism cannot do that expect more outbreaks of violence and greater levels of political alienation — not only in Britain but across most of the world’s leading countries, including the U.S.

Scary to think of the mediocre individuals offering themselves up for leadership at this time-- Obama and Romney-- or the much less than mediocre-- a Michele Bachmann or Rick Perry. Why not the very best for a change, someone with real vision and real political courage... a Bernie Sanders?

NO CATHOLIC PRIEST HAS EVER VIOLATED THE SACRAMENTS-- NOT IN 2,000 YEARS

Last year at this time I was getting ready for a trip to Argentina. I documented that trip at my travel blog, the Around the World Blog, including my meetings with a beautiful and brilliant woman who has worked to oppose the military junta. Her short jail term makes her luckier than as many as 30,000 Argentines who... disappeared. This week a distinctly Nazi-oriented Roman Catholic priest, Father Christian von Wernich, was convicted of genocide, murder and torture in Argentina for his role in the "dirty war" against leftists.

Nearly 70 now. Von Wernich was the Buenos Aires police chaplain when the vicious military dictatorship was in power (1976-83).

Von Wernich was repeatedly accused by witnesses of using his position as a priest to assist interrogators in extracting information from the detained. Hector Ballent, who testified on the first day of Von Wernich's trial, said Von Wernich approached him within the clandestine center where he had been tortured under "La Maquina"-- stripped naked, soaked and shocked with electricity. Von Wernich urged him: "Why don't you confess, so that you won't be punished anymore?" Ruben Fernando Schell described an exchange with Von Wernich where the priest told him, "You've been planting bombs, doing bad things so that, when you leave-- if you leave-- God will reject you." He described Von Wernich's pressure as "the worst torture, a moral torture."

The Argentine Catholic Church refused to investigate or to get involved and still hasn't excommunicated the priest-- having transferred him in cognito to a small parish in Chile at one time to keep him out of the hands of the authorities after civilian government and democracy were restored. "Tuesday the church released a tepid statement, claiming his role was individual and not supported by the church, indicating that the Argentine Church's refusal to investigate is likely to remain."

Von Wernich had earlier accused witnesses of lying to the tribunal, in detached religious tone. "False witness is the devil, because it is filled with malice. In 2,000 years of history, no priest of the Roman Catholic Apostolic Church has violated the sacraments."

No doubt for Von Wernich the Spanish Inquisition were the glory days of The Faith. But yesterday the BBC reported a story from Italy of another Roman Catholic priest-- this one way higher up in the ecclesiastic hierarchy than Von Wernich-- who has followed a more prosaic priestly path to damnation. Monsignor Tommaso Stenico, however, was just suspended for his duties at the Vatican after telling an interviewer "that he did not regard himself as being in a state of sin because of his homosexual activities but was forced to keep them secret because of the church's teaching on the subject." He later realized he probably shouldn't have admitted he was gay and tried retracting it using a novel approach: "I said I was homosexual in order to unmask those who really are."

Perhaps Stenico and Von Wernich will wind up in the same circle many years from now. It will be a very crowded one, full of all the priests and shamen insisting that "In 2,000 years of history, no priest of the Roman Catholic Apostolic Church has violated the sacraments."




UPDATE: LET'S BE FAIR...

It isn't only sick, right-wing religionist nuts who claim to be "not gay" and then molest young boys; it's also sick, right-wing political figures who do that. And no, I'm not going to rehash a bunch of charges against Mark Foley, Mitch McConnell, Larry Craig, David Dreier, Jim McCrery, Bob Bauman, and... well you know the list. Cliff at Brave New Films alerted me to the story of yet another depraved Republican sex-maniac this morning.

The chairman of the Republican Party in Brown County faces criminal charges for allegedly fondling a 16-year-old Ethan House runaway and providing the boy with beer and marijuana late last year.

Donald Fleischman, 37, of Allouez, was charged last month with two counts of child enticement, two counts of contributing to the delinquency of a child and a single charge of exposing himself to a child.

What is wrong with these right-wingers? Are they all just horribly depraved? After Bob Bauman (R-MD) was caught with a young boy and lost his re-election bid and after he had stopped the denials and self-denials, and after he had come to terms with himself as a gay person, he wrote an autobiography, The Gentleman From Maryland-- The Conscience of a Gay Conservative. In it he admits that "in a desperate effort to create my illusion of self esteem I adopted conservative politics with a fervor amounting to neurotic escape. It would be my refuge form the unacceptable inner reality." OK... but they should do it with each other and leave minors alone.