TPP-Negotiating Process: Who’s "Us" And Who’s "Them?"

-by emorej a Hong Kong

“China” is everybody’s ultimate answer to most questions about the TPP. Obama’s closing argument is:

“the rulebook is up for grabs. And if we don’t pass this agreement-- if America doesn’t write those rules-- then countries like China will.”

But what does “China... write... rules” really mean? And what does it obscure?

Intended meaning of Obama and others who reference “China”:

• A clear meaning is that: China is welcome to join a previously-established TPP, just not welcome to participate directly in negotiating its initial details.

• A clearly intended implication is that: The main opposing interests relevant to the TPP are American interests (which are being advanced the most by the negotiating path being taken) vs. Chinese interests (which would be advanced more by the alternative negotiating path not being taken).

Much is obscured by the above rhetoric, including the following:


 Background Structures


• Each of America’s elite and China’s elite now faces the question of how to best preserve its economic and political dominance achieved in a separately evolved system which now has become inter-dependent with the other, and is fast merging with the other.


• Inter-dependency is demonstrated by the share of American wealth that depends on production and/or sales in China, and the share of Chinese wealth that depends on investment and/or sales in America.


• Merging of previously separate systems is demonstrated by a feedback loop of globalizing communications, transport and transactions, as the same global prices and resource constraints guide the perspective and actions of every economic actor, from American soybean farmers, to Chinese smartphone assemblers, to aspiring software app developers of any nationality or location.


• Merging of elites is even more advanced, as demonstrated by the tendency of China elite family-members to hold American real estate, university degrees, passports, spouses and/or positions in elite American organizations (especially in America-headquartered global investment banks).


• Merging of elites is both a consequence and a further catalyst of the systems’ inter-dependency and merger, serving: 


(a) to improve each elite’s mix of opportunities and risks,

(b) to increase the influence that each elite increasingly shares with the other, and

(c) to increase their shared incentives to accelerate and deepen the systems’ merger.

Background Perspectives

• The above structural changes and trends help us appreciate that “the rulebook” is mainly to govern the transition to full systems’ merger, and to continuation of domination by merged elites, rather than to govern the (increasingly imaginary) competition between countries.


• Regardless, most Americans are instinctively sympathetic to an argument that any rulebook is best not written by China. Before acting on this instinct, however, it is useful to look more closely at the perspective of most Chinese.

• China’s most recent century-long transitions through civil war, Mao-inspired chaos, effective martial law, and finally crony-capitalism verging on kleptocracy, have created a very cynical populace. Although China’s elites produce much ideological propaganda, most people in China recognize this as fictitious window dressing of a domestic system maintained mainly through carrots of economic rewards, and sticks of threatened (and sporadically implemented) police and military repression. Americans tend to focus on these Chinese government-to-populace sticks, but the carrots are also very important, and the need to deliver the carrots is a major constraint on the Chinese government’s freedom of action.


• Cynicism does not prevent the Chinese populace from responding emotionally to appeals to national pride. It should be easy to understand why Chinese have a somewhat sensitive national pride, in light of China having only in recent decades recovered much national power and prestige after a long period of decline and suffering from foreigners’ incursions.


• Provoking anti-foreign nationalism is the main tool available when Chinese elites need to distract the populace whenever the government needs breathing space in order to conform its mix of carrots and sticks with changing popular demands. (In comparison with America, China does not have a domestic “other,” on the scale of the African-American or Latino-American populations, available to be targeted for the purposes of this kind of distraction).


• Each upsurge, of China’s anti-foreign nationalism, tends to militate against international collaboration, although there is also a countervailing desire, for national prestige through ‘club membership,’ as an after-effect of the multi-decade insult of the “China” seat in the United Nations having been denied through American support for the Taiwan holed-up “Chinese” Nationalist government that had lost the civil war on China’s mainland.

Consequences


 • China’s elites do not have enough other sources of popular legitimacy to voluntarily give up easy access to the tool of provoking anti-foreign nationalism.


• The easiest way for China’s elites to sell TPP entry to their populace will be to later frame it as a “prestigious and profitable club from which China is being disrespectfully excluded.”

• At present, China’s elites do not have strong enough sticks to persuade the cynical Chinese populace to passively accept ‘carrots-later’ deferred gratification through arguments like the following:

• A general law of economics is that ‘a rising tide will raise all boats’ if we stimulate economic efficiency through global free competition;
• Our country’s government is willing and able to evaluate complicated details, and to negotiate for them to yield the greatest benefits, and lowest attainable risks, for the greatest number of our compatriots;
• If any of our compatriots loses jobs or profits to this global competition, then our government will be willing and able to redress this through later-decided and later-funded adjustment assistance;
• In order to squeeze the most concessions out of other countries’ negotiators, our government must agree in advance to a quick and clean up-or-down vote (without normal opportunities for filibustering, adding riders, etc.).

• The only question is: 
can any other big country's populace be persuaded to accept these arguments? 
Unfortunately, the answer in the country with the biggest economy and global influence (I’ll give you one guess which one) is probably: 
“yes,” especially if that populace can be mollified by further arguments (express or implied) like the following:

• No citizens have been entirely excluded from the decision-making process (because each citizen’s voice is taken into account in each election).
• Sell-outs by politicians are constrained by fear of voter revenge (because what politician wouldn’t prefer to stay in public office rather than retire to a well-paid networking position?).
• Our pride says we can out-compete foreigners (or at least prevents us from admitting our fear that we cannot).
• Any politician who needs to distract us from economic sticks and carrots does not need to provoke us against foreigners, because it works even better to provoke us against domestic racial minorities and immigrants.


CONCLUSION:


• The main opposing interests relevant to the TPP are not “American vs. Chinese,” but rather are:


(i) those of both the American and Chinese 1%, vs.

(ii) those of the American and Chinese 99%.


• The sequence of 


(i) first America to negotiate and approve; and

(ii) then China to join



 is the path of least resistance to institutionalizing 


(i) benefits for both the American 1% and Chinese 1%, and

(ii) detriments to both the American 99% and Chinese 99%.

• If Americans can pressure Congress into rejecting the current TPP, then the eventual result is likely to be:


(i) not (as threatened) a Chinese-written TPP detrimenting all Americans; but

(ii) rather (in reality) a more 99%-respectful trade, investment and employment regime both in the USA and globally.

UPDATE: TPP As An Election Issue
by Howie

Yesterday Jimmy Panetta, breaking with retiring incumbent Sam Farr and his own dad, former Congressman Leon Panetta, declared that he is opposed to the TPP.

The one potential 20th CD candidate who could give Panetta a serious run for his money-- Democratic state Senate Majority Leader Bill Monning-- is a strong ally of the labor movement, which is implacably opposed to the TPP; Monning’s own fervent opposition might have helped to rally troops and raise money in a potential congressional race.

On Tuesday in front of the bayside Custom House in Monterey, Panetta the Younger deftly throttled the issue. "Based on my initial understanding and what I have read, it appears that right now I’m against it, I’m leaning towards against it."

Does Endless War Define All Our Elite Political Groupings Regardless Of Party?

I wish I could say that Leon Panetta’s book, Worthy Fights, will be the capstone of his wretched political career. But with Hillary likely to be the next president, I suspect Panetta’s repulsive attacks on Obama will only guarantee him position and influence to come. Everyone knows the 76 year old Panetta was Bill Clinton’s OMB Director and then Chief of Staff and then Obama’s Director of the CIA and then Secretary of Defense. Fe people know that earlier Panetta, a conservative by nature, was a Republican who worked for California Republican Senator Tom Kuchel and then for President Nixon. Always the opportunist, he switched parties in 1971, claiming the GOP had turned too extreme, ands was soon elected to Congress, where he was the typical New Dem/Blue Dog type DLC hack. He was another personnel mistake Obama blundered into. I’m sure he’s sorry now.

Panetta confides that he thought Obama was wrong on some key decisions, just as Gates and Clinton did in their memoirs. Which makes this reader ask: Why did these officials continue to serve a president with whose policies they often seemed to disagree? Retrospective candor is fine, but wouldn’t it have been better to speak out at the time and perhaps even resign on principle? The country would have been poorer without their service, but we need officials who will tell the truth publicly, in real time, before they make the book deal.

…What has already made news is Panetta’s criticism of Obama. It clearly troubled Panetta, who loved his time in Congress, that Obama “was believed not to have found his time as a senator very rewarding and to be disdainful of Congress generally.” He writes that Obama’s “decision-making apparatus was centralized in the White House” far more than that of any other administration he had seen, reducing the importance of Cabinet posts.

The comments on Iraq and Syria are blistering. As Panetta saw it, the White House was “so eager to rid itself of Iraq that it was willing to withdraw [in 2011] rather than lock in arrangements that would preserve our influence and interests.” Obama’s departure left Iraq to its sectarian misleaders and prefigured the disastrous explosion this year of the Islamic State.

As for Syria, Panetta says that Obama “vacillated” on his “red line” pledge to take military action against chemical weapons in 2013. He writes, “The result, I felt, was a blow to American credibility.”

So he and Hillary— both vile corporate Dems of the worst kind— are on record “warning” Obama. I’m sure Team Clinton is delighted and, as Glenn Greenwald wrote in a post for The Intercept this week, the glorification of endless war as the official policy of America— will be front and center again, just as soon as they get rid of the conflicted interloper and an appropriately warmongery Clinton is back in the White House.

Leon Panetta… said this week of Obama’s new bombing campaign: “I think we’re looking at kind of a 30-year war.” Only in America are new 30-year wars spoken of so casually, the way other countries speak of weather changes. He added that the war “will have to extend beyond Islamic State to include emerging threats in Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere.” And elsewhere: not just a new decades-long war with no temporal limits, but no geographic ones either. He criticized Obama— who has bombed 7 predominantly Muslim countries plus the Muslim minority in the Phillipines (almost double the number of countries Bush bombed)— for being insufficiently militaristic, despite the fact that Obama officials themselves have already instructed the public to think of The New War “in terms of years.”

Then we have Hillary Clinton (whom Panetta gushed would make a “great” president). At an event in Ottawa yesterday, she proclaimed that the fight against these “militants” will “be a long-term struggle” that should entail an “information war” as “well as an air war.” The new war, she said, is “essential” and the U.S. shies away from fighting it “at our peril.” Like Panetta (and most establishment Republicans), Clinton made clear in her book that virtually all of her disagreements with Obama’s foreign policy were the by-product of her view of Obama as insufficiently hawkish, militaristic and confrontational.

At this point, it is literally inconceivable to imagine the U.S. not at war. It would be shocking if that happened in our lifetime. U.S. officials are now all but openly saying this. “Endless War” is not dramatic rhetorical license but a precise description of America’s foreign policy.

It’s not hard to see why. A state of endless war justifies ever-increasing state power and secrecy and a further erosion of rights. It also entails a massive transfer of public wealth to the “homeland security” and weapons industry (which the US media deceptively calls the “defense sector”).

Just yesterday, Bloomberg reported: “Led by Lockheed Martin Group (LTM), the biggest U.S. defense companies are trading at record prices as shareholders reap rewards from escalating military conflicts around the world.” Particularly exciting is that “investors see rising sales for makers of missiles, drones and other weapons as the U.S. hits Islamic State fighters in Syria and Iraq”; moreover, “the U.S. also is the biggest foreign military supplier to Israel, which waged a 50-day offensive against the Hamas Islamic movement in the Gaza Strip.” ISIS is using U.S.-made ammunition and weapons, which means U.S. weapons companies get to supply all sides of The New Endless War; can you blame investors for being so giddy?

This war— in all its ever-changing permutations— thus enables an endless supply of power and profit to flow to those political and economic factions that control the government regardless of election outcomes… The last thing the Washington political class and the economic elites who control it want is for this war to end. Anyone who doubts that should just look at the express statements from these leading Democrats, who wasted no time at all seizing on the latest Bad Guys to justify literally decades more of this profiteering and war-making.

I’m going to finish up my thoughts on this first thing tomorrow morning. This one was going way too long already.

Awww! An ex-CIA director is captured for history in the company of his faithful companion

Leon Panetta (CIA director, 2009-11) and Bravo in their official CIA portrait, by Steven Polson, unveiled last week in the agency’s Directors’ Gallery.

"I brought him to work with me in the director's office, and he sat in on a lot of the briefings on the bin Laden raid and never leaked a word about what was going on."

-- Leon Panetta, to the Washington Post's "In the Loop"
team (which adds, "Well, that's what Panetta thinks")

by Ken

What's more, "In the Loop" reports, "Folks at the agency, probably thinking Bravo had clearance, would pet him as he wandered about during meetings in the office." The former CIA director told "In the Loop" that Bravo was with him during "a lot of crises," and "he kept me grounded." He added, "One of the greatest dangers of jobs in Washington is you lose your humanity, and people need to remember that."

So it was only natural, when it came time to commission an official portrait for the CIA's Directors' Gallery, ex-Director Panetta wanted to have Bravo the golden retriever included. He got his unconventional wish, and the result was unveiled last week.

The portrait was done by Steven Polson, who the "Loop"-ers note "has done a couple dozen or more of Cabinet-level folks -- including three former secretaries of state." Our relentless investigators did worm out of him, however, that "this is the first one with a dog." You have to figure that going forth, once word spread has spread, a groundswell of public officials entitled to having an official portrait done will clamor to have a treasured pets included.

It's certainly not the first time that the ex-CIA director and ex-defense secretary has been picture in the company of Bravo, as witness the photo below from his Pentagon days, when he thanked the Maine Golden Retriever Club for making him its first honorary member.

Then-Defense Sec'y Panetta and Bravo at their desk in 2012, when the secretary was made the first honorary member of the Maine Golden Retriever Club.

SPEAKING OF THE EX-DIRECTOR AND EX-DEFENSE SEC'Y --

"In the Loop" goes on to report:

Meanwhile, Panetta’s got a memoir coming out next month. Worthy Fights covers his whole D.C. career, from Richard Nixon’s administration (Nixon fired him) to the Obama White House.

Will it be a tell-all? Panetta demurred: “Hopefully people will learn some lessons about how to run the government. I’ve seen Washington at its best and at its worst, and there are some lessons to be learned. First and foremost, we have to elect leaders who want to govern.”

#

Did Kerry And His Clique Plot An End Run Around Obama On Syria?

Susan Rice is as much a hawk and a creature of the Military-Industrial Complex as John Kerry ever was. But McCain and Lindsey Graham, America's two most preeminent warmongers, sandbagged and sabotaged Rice and demanded that Obama appoint Kerry Secretary of State. Policy-wise there is no difference between Rice and Kerry and today she serves as National Security Advisor and he serves, thanks to McCain and Graham, as Secretary of State. The difference is that her loyalty is unquestionably to Obama. Kerry doesn't give a crap about Obama.

In fact, impeccable Beltway sources have told me that Kerry sees himself as the "President of Foreign Policy." He tried-- and failed-- to pull off a virtual coup in Washington over the Syria crisis. A very dominant, transpartisan and self-serving National Security clique in Washington was determined to railroad Obama, who's concerns are more about domestic affairs than foreign affairs to begin with, into a war with Syria and-- in their fondest dreams-- Iran. John Stewart looked at it with a sense of humor the other night on The Daily Show, outing Lindsey Graham for the whole nation.



Gene Lyons made many of the same points-- without pointing out Lindsey Graham's bizarre sexual dysfunctions-- at the National Memo yesterday. He starts with a quote from a Graham hero, Winston Churchill: "To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war."

Before you make the mistake of taking President Obama’s most strident critics regarding the Syrian deal too seriously, ponder this: With few exceptions, those calling the Russian-American agreement to eliminate Bashar al-Assad’s nerve gas arsenal a capitulation, a sellout, and a shameful retreat also think bombing Damascus wouldn’t have been nearly enough.

Nothing short of a boots-on American invasion of Syria would have satisfied these jokers. Prominent among them is Senator John McCain (R-AZ), who views the diplomatic breakthrough as “an act of provocative weakness on America’s part.”

McCain, who has vigorously supported all nine of the nation’s last three wars on about 316 TV talk shows, is never happy unless the U.S. is attacking somebody. Only violent solutions strike him as realistic. That’s probably the single biggest reason he never became president.

Then there’s Eliot A. Cohen, founding father of the Project for a New American Century, a now-defunct Washington pressure group whose messianic schemes for a U.S. empire stretching from the Mediterranean to Afghanistan inspired the Iraq War. Featuring such luminaries as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, to these geniuses, overthrowing Saddam Hussein was only the beginning. Next on their agenda was Iran, in case you wonder why the mad ayatollahs have been tinkering with nukes.

So anyway, just as President Obama was getting ready to ask Congress to endorse a punitive strike against Syrian chemical weapon sites, Cohen published a Washington Post column scolding Americans for their cowardice. The families of the war dead, he allowed, were entitled to their sorrow.

“But for the great mass of the American public,” he wrote “for their leaders and the elites who shape public opinion, ‘war-weariness’ is unearned cant, unworthy of a serious nation and dangerous in a violent world…Americans can change the channel if they find the images too disturbing.”

Got that citizens? Shut up, pay your taxes and avert your eyes.

Next the Obama administration pulled a large Russian rabbit out of its hat, leaving the neocons feeling foolish. For all the hugger-mugger about “red lines” and the White House’s odd decision to position a naval task force within striking range of Damascus before deciding to ask congressional permission, the end result was nevertheless remarkable.

Clumsy? Definitely. But it’s not a Bruce Willis movie; it’s a foreign policy.

“By hook or by crook,” Kevin Drum writes “Obama (a) raised the issue of Assad’s chemical weapons to an international level, (b) got Vladimir Putin (!) to take a lead role in reining them in, (c) got Assad to join the chemical weapons ban and agree to give up his stockpiles, and (d) [did] it all while keeping military pressure as an active option, but without ever firing a shot.”

In other words, for all the nonsensical talk of “appeasement,” the very crafty President Putin and the Syrian dictator now own this deal. Meanwhile, U.S. military options remain unchanged. President Obama has bought himself considerable freedom of action.

Mike Tomasky has it right: “If Assad is mad enough to use [chemical weapons] again, Obama won’t mess with Congress or even Russia. He’ll be credited by most observers…for having shown restraint the first time, and more people will agree at that point that Assad must be punished.”

Then there’s Charles Krauthammer, the Post columnist who accuses Obama of “epic incompetence,” complaining that the Russians prefer to keep Bashar al-Assad in power. He worries that “Assad is the key link in the anti-Western Shiite crescent stretching from Tehran through Damascus and Beirut to the Mediterranean.”

Hmm… Isn’t something missing here? Let’s go to the maps. It’s roughly 900 miles from Tehran to Damascus via, oh yeah… Baghdad. See, it’s precisely the U.S. invasion of Iraq championed by Krauthammer and his chums that created this supposedly scary alliance. Sectarian strife among Sunni and Shiite Muslims has erupted there at irregular intervals for almost 1,400 years. Shouldn’t these brilliant thinkers have thought of that before now?

So what do the Russians want? In a word, stability. Unlike the U.S., Russia has a large Muslim minority. Roughly 1 in 6 Russians is Muslim. Like the Tsarnaev bothers of Boston, MA, nearly all are Sunni. What Putin definitely doesn’t want is Chechen separatists getting their hands on nerve gas. Driving overland, Syria’s roughly as close to Chechnya as to Iran.

Can Putin be trusted? To do what’s good for Russia, yes. As President Obama explained to George Stephanopoulos, the Cold War is over. “I don’t think that Mr. Putin has the same values that we do,” he said. “But what I’ve also said to him directly is that we both have an interest in preventing chaos, we both have an interest in preventing terrorism. The situation in Syria right now is untenable.”

And he also quoted Ronald Reagan: “Trust, but verify.”

And when I mentioned a "transpartisan and self-serving National Security clique," it wasn't by chance. The War Party isn't just McCain, Eliot Cohen, Lindsey and Krauthammer. Many of us watched with dismay as Bronx New Dem Eliot Engel, the congressional spokesperson for AIPAC and Israel's Likud Party, cheer-led for war for the last month. House Dems have him slated to become Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee if they ever take back control of Congress. And then there's Obama's last Defense Secretary, Republican-turned-Democrat ex-congressman and neo-liberal shithead Leon Panetta. Like most of the War Party, he was furious that Obama went to Congress. Panetta sounds like McCain is writing his lines for him: "When the president of the United States draws a red line, the credibility of this country is dependent on him backing up his word."

Panetta's a clown and Obama's first Defense Secretary, Republican Robert Gates, was happy to point out why.

Gates said a strike would be like "throwing gasoline on an extremely complex fire in the Middle East." He brought up past interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya as examples of how American military action can lead to unintended consequences.

He also dismissed attacking Syria to enforce a red line.

"I believe to blow a bunch of stuff up over a couple of days to underscore or validate a point or principle is not a strategy," he said.

...Gates, who was appointed secretary of defense by former President George W. Bush and retained by Obama, said he thought America's most recent presidents "have become too quick to reach for a gun to solve an international problem."

Tiny Tim Geithner Isn't Obama's Only Cabinet Member Who Should Go-- Meet Leon Panetta

Does it sound horrible and indefensible that Obama is about to make David Petraeus head of the CIA? It should-- but it shouldn't sound surprising that Petraeus will be heading the world's most hated governmental agency, nor should it really sound any worse that Petraeus is replacing ex-Clinton chief of staff Leon Panetta, the new Secretary of Defense. The Military Industrial Complex is a world unto itself-- a consumer of more of the nation's wealth than any other sector and the source of more corruption than even Wall Street. So it certainly shouldn't have shocked anyone that the former Democratic congressman from California turned Military Industrial Complex honcho would call for cut backs in Social Security and Medicare to keep the machine rolling along-- the machine Eisenhower once warned the country about in no uncertain terms (see video above).

Panetta started his career as a Republican working for Senator Tom Kuchel (R-CA) and then for the Nixon Administration. He jumped the fence in 1971 because his centrist vision was no longer at home in a Republican Party moving sharply right. That centrist vision helped hold back a progressive agenda for nearly two decades while he served in Congress, particularly when he was a powerful member (and then chairman) of the House Budget Committee, the Paul Ryan of his time.

"We're already taking our share of the discretionary cuts as part of this debt-ceiling agreement, and those are going to be tough enough," Panetta told reporters at the Pentagon Thursday. "I think anything beyond that would damage our national defense."

He said savings need to come from entitlement programs and from higher taxes-- not further defense cuts. In effect, that puts the six Democrats who will soon be appointed to the committee on notice: don't screw around with this.

Democrats are now demanding clarity from the White House: does President Obama think Medicare and Social Security can be cut by $500 billion over 10 years, but the bloated defense budget can not?
Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) put the question to Obama in a Friday letter.

"I urge you to make clear that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta did not speak for the Administration when he stated yesterday that additional spending cuts, beyond those in the recent debt-ceiling agreement, should come from non-discretionary spending such as Social Security and Medicare while the military budget is spared," Frank wrote.

The key to all of this, of course, remains the GOP's steadfast commitment to never raising a single new dime of revenue. While Panetta made clear that the consequence of GOP intransigence on this score will have a deleterious effect on U.S. security, he also made it harder for Dems to stand firm and let penalties kick in if Republicans don't bend.

Cecil Bothwell is the progressive Asheville City Councilman running for the Democratic nomination against reactionary Blue Dog Heath Shuler. Yesterday he shared his ideas with us in regard to the horrible Boehner-Obama deficit deal that led to the S&P downgrade. This morning you can see how consistent those ideas are with his vision for a more realistic Pentagon. "There is no excuse for our so-called 'defense' spending," he told me. "The fact that our military budget exceeds those of the rest of the world's countries combined reeks of empire. Yes, we need to defend our borders. No, we do not need to be the world's policeman. Panetta has drunk the Pentagon Kool-Aid, and ought to be replaced."

Generally-speaking this is where most progressives stand in terms of Panetta's reactionary position. Two of the Blue America-backed candidates are campaigning on a very different vision. Nick Ruiz (D-FL): "When half of U.S. tax revenue is consumed by the military industrial complex, we need only look at defense budget order takers like Leon Panetta to understand why it is so. And he wants zero realistic cuts to defense!? The real question Americans should ask themselves is why did the 'Democratic' President of 'hope and 'change' nominate Panetta for the directorship of the CIA-- and then nominate him for Secretary of Defense? Doesn't sound progressive or Democratic to me-- sounds downright hawkish and imperialistic."

Across the country, Norman Solomon (D-CA) was making a similar point:

This goes to the truism that you choose your advisers and you choose your advice. Populating the cabinet with Tim Geithner or Leon Panetta makes it very likely that the advice will skew toward the interests of Wall Street and the military-industrial complex, especially given that those secretaries of Treasury and Defense are functioning in tandem with current administration priorities that skew toward the historic rightward edge of the Democratic Party. On its merits, Panetta's statement is a collapse of core moral values under the pressure of an insatiable drive for military prowess and corporate profits, very much in sync with what Martin Luther King Jr. called "the madness of militarism." If we must have a warfare state while the young and the old, the poor and the nearly poor, suffer needlessly and endlessly, then Panetta is ably fulfilling his duty. But, in the name of basic human decency, we must not have such a state.

Watch Barney Frank with Rachel last night talking about how excesses in the military budget hurt America:

Two items from the daily hatred and fear blotter

Know your church: Priests at Our Lady of the Rosary Church in San Diego have saved the Catholic Church from the abomination of allowing mass to be said for a dead homo. (The online world being what it is, I guess I better quickly add that the foregoing is written in total mocking derision of the Church's inhumane bigotry and hatred.)

by Ken

I know we've had our fair share of LGBT- or just-plain-gay-themed stories lately, and clearly these are of heightened interest to Howie and me, but I like to think they're of interest to anyone concerned with basic rights. More particularly, it seems to me that the attempt on the Right to hold the line or even push back on these fronts should be of serious concern to all lovers of freedom. I can think of two reasons:

(1) Wouldn't it be fair to say that when repression is in the air, it's targeted first at the most vulnerable groups? It would be wise not to imagine that the Unholy Warriors of the Right will only be going after the LGBT contingent. This is an "orthodoxy issue," and the Upholders of the Right have their sights set on all deviants from the One True Path.

Call this the Canary in the Mine Factor.

(2) Because hatred of all things LGBT is perhaps the most emotional of all the organized-religious hatreds, the current jihad is being waged with a backs-against-the-wall ferocity, with a sense of the Forces of Darkness closing in on the Righteous. What I'm suggesting is that we're seeing with better than usual clarity the special viciousness and dehumanization that lies at the core of the Defense of Orthodoxy when the defenders feel they're under siege.

It may seem paradoxical, but the very same ferocity can be triggered when the Defenders score victories, as they have, for example, in all the public referenda on same-sex marriage laws. It may not seem reasonable that they react almost identically in victory and defeat, but I think the common thread is raw hatred and fear, which when you get down to it seems really what the most fire-breathingly orthodox of orthodox religionists are all about.

Call this the Hatred and Fear Factor.

FROM TODAY'S HATRED AND FEAR BLOTTER --

I. DADT isn't going quietly

We know now that Don't Ask, Don't Tell (DADT) is not going to be consigned to the dustbin of lousy public policy during the Pentagon stewardship of Robert Gates on Thursday. Opinion is divided as to whether the advent of Leon Panetta as defense secretary is going to provide, intentionally or otherwise, an excuse for further delay in the secretary's certification of military readiness for repeal. Most obviously, a new secretary taking the reins of a department as vast and complex as the DoD, especially with approximately two and a half wars in progress, is going to have his hands full and could easily justify setting other priorities. Beyond that, if the new secretary feels that on this particular matter he must do his own due diligence, well . . .

Further delay would be regrettable from a theoretical standpoint, of course. DADT is not only demeaning to the people it targets, it also undermines our national security by depriving the military of the services (and special skills) of a lot of people who want nothing more than to serve honorably. But further delay continues to take a serious toll on servicemen and servicewomen. Remember, the Obama Pentagon has never stopped enforcing DADT.

Consider this report from Advocate.com:

Pentagon Confirms New DADT Discharges

By Andrew Harmon
Posted on Advocate.com June 27, 2011 03:30:00 PM ET

The Pentagon confirmed Monday that more service members have been discharged under “don’t ask, don’t tell” pending certification of the policy’s repeal, with one individual’s discharge approved as recently as Thursday.

A total of four airmen have been discharged under the policy in the last several weeks, Pentagon spokeswoman Eileen Lainez confirmed Monday.

One of those individuals is Airman First Class Albert Pisani, who spoke to The Advocate earlier this month of his voluntary separation under “don’t ask, don’t tell,” which defense officials approved on April 29.

Air Force spokesman Maj. Joel Harper told The Advocate that the discharges of three additional service members — two female staff sergeants and one male second lieutenant— have been approved since an April 29 discharge. Harper declined to say whether Pisani was the April 29 discharge, citing confidentiality reasons.

When The Advocate story ran, Defense officials had said that the separation approved April 29 was the only such discharge under DADT since late October, when the Defense Department limited authority for discharges to just five senior officials.

But in a statement, Harper confirmed the additional discharges since. “On May 31st, 2011, the Secretary of the Air Force approved discharges of two Airmen under the provisions of 10 USC 654 [the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy],“ Harper said. “On June 23, 2011, the Secretary of the Air Force accepted the resignation of an Airman who asked to be separated under the provisions of [DADT].”

Harper said that all four individuals discharged had made voluntary statements regarding their sexual orientation and had asked to be “separated expeditiously.” . . .

II. The Church hounds a victim beyond the grave

This item seems to me just plain nauseating. Without further preamble:

Catholic Church denies funeral mass to San Diego gay businessman

Posted by San Diego LGBT Weekly, Monday, June 27th, 2011

In a decision reminiscent of the Catholic Church’s refusal to hold a funeral mass in 2005 for openly gay businessman John McCusker, Our Lady of the Rosary Church in Little Italy has canceled a funeral mass scheduled this Thursday morning for openly gay businessman John Sanfilippo, owner of the SRO Lounge, a popular gay cocktail bar.

Sanfilippo died on Friday, June 24.

City Commissioner Nicole Murray Ramirez, a friend of the Sanfilippo family, talked to his partner of 30 years, Brian Galvin. “The Sanfilippo family and Brian are, of course, devastated and are trying to get the mass in another church,” Murray Ramirez said.

When the parish priests found out about the gay relationship of Sanfilippo and Galvin, the priests said they were uncomfortable with Sanfilippo and Galvin’s relationship, according to Murray Ramirez, adding the church notified the family on Sunday that the Thursday funeral mass was canceled. . . .

I hate to be judgmental (chuckle), but this strikes me as beyond the pale even for the Church of Bigotry, Hatred, and Fear. The San Diego LGBT Weekly story notes that City Commissioner Ramirez has contacted the San Diego Diocese "for a clarification of its policy of funeral masses for LGBT Catholics and is planning to press for a policy statement from Bishop [Robert] Brom." It should be interesting to see how the bishop responds (or doesn't).

#

Perelman Tonight er, Panetta Today: Beware of the coming cyber-Pearl Harbor

Warning: This is not a drill, or an outing of "Perelman Tonight."

by Ken

from Huffpost-slash-AOL News:

CIA Chief Leon Panetta: Cyberattack Could Be 'Next Pearl Harbor'

Appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee for a confirmation hearing for his appointment as the secretary of defense, Leon Panetta warned that the U.S. could face cyberwarfare in battles to come.

“The next Pearl Harbor we confront could very well be a cyber attack that cripples our power systems, our grid, our security systems, our financial systems, our governmental systems,” Panetta said.

Though he talked on subjects ranging from Libya to withdrawing troops from Afghanistan to the war on terrorism, Panetta highlighted his concerns regarding the U.S.'s preparedness for cyberattacks.

“This is a real possibility in today’s world,” he said. “As a result, I think we have to aggressively be able to counter that. It is going to take both defensive measures as well as aggressive measures to deal with it.”

The Obama administration recently unveiled its proposal for global cybersecurity. Statements from the Pentagon have also indicated that the government will consider cyberattacks originating from foreign countries to be equivalent to acts of war meriting military response.

This sounds pretty serious, chief, and I'll bet it would help if we all went out today and took some "aggressive measures" -- like maybe abridging some civil cyberliberties? Wasn't it Justice Brandeis who said, "Better safe than sorry"? (Possibly not. I always have trouble keeping track of those justices and all they say. They're regular Chatty Cathies.)

Anyway, here's the thing, chief. It's hard not to at least crack a smile from dire warnings issued by someone who looks like, well --


This is all I'm saying. You can get back to whatever you were doing now, chief. Preparing for that move to the Pentagon, isn't it? Probably there'll be lots of stuff to warn us about from there, and aggressive measures to be taken. Just remember, well, you know.

#

Why Emanuel Nixed The Release Of The Torture Photos

-by Doug Kahn

Appointing John Durham as prosecutor, no matter how broad his scope of investigation, will have only one near-term result: he'll immediately go into court to make sure the military photos of detainee abuse won't be released anytime soon. And he'll win.

According to the Washington Post: "Durham's mandate, the sources added, will be relatively narrow: to look at whether there is enough evidence to launch a full-scale criminal investigation of current and former CIA personnel who may have broken the law in their dealings with detainees." There is absolutely no public support, and no moral justification, for prosecuting the 'foot soldiers' (CIA employees and the Blackwater contractors we hired as professional torturers back in 2002 and 2003) while leaving Dick Cheney and his line of command alone. So this appointment is for some other purpose.

Here's the timeline. In September 2008, the appeals court decided in favor of the ACLU and its FOIA request for the photos, filed in 2003. This May, the White House announced President Obama had decided not to appeal to the Supreme Court. On May 28, the administration changed its tune and asked the appeals court to "recall its mandate" to release the photos in prospect of a Supreme Court appeal. The appeals court agreed on June 10. Since then, Obama has asked for, and received, two extensions on its deadlines for filing at the Supreme Court. On August 7, they petitioned the Supreme Court to hear an appeal.

It's all about the torture photos, and the conniption fit CIA chief Leon Panetta threw at the White House last month. Panetta had a heated argument with a "senior White House official," a formulation the Washington Post uses when it means Rahm Emanuel. Obama's chief of staff versus Clinton's chief of staff. It makes sense to me that Rahm and company concluded early this year to proceed with domestic accomplishments like health care reform and the energy bill, and that prosecuting anyone in the Bush administration would make bipartisan support from Republicans in Congress impossible. Releasing the photos (reportedly displaying horrific abuse at non-military, CIA prisons) would create a firestorm of criticism that would force Obama to act against Cheney and crew, not just the CIA guys. So the photos have to be withheld for as long as possible. You have to figure Panetta objected to having CIA employees taking the heat for boss Cheney.

The courts have already soundly rejected arguments that letting the public see the photos would harm the detainees; they'd be redacted to hide the identities of the victims. There were claims that anger over the photos would harm US troops, by inciting more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, also rejected. Rahm needs some specific people to be harmed in order to prevail, and naming a prosecutor gives him those people: a few CIA employees and contractors. They'll just tell the court that the photos are certain to prejudice people who would end up being on the jury in any trial, and the pool of prospective jurors is every adult American.

Any ethical, moral Attorney General would reject prosecuting only the little guys. So Holder appoints a prosecutor to start to get ready to begin to prepare to commence looking for evidence to use in asking a grand jury (which might be convened) for an indictment against possible suspects who might have violated the (as yet undetermined) legal instructions from unnamed Bush administration lawyers vis a vis how to grill 'illegal enemy combatants' (definition currently in legal limbo) in an 'enhanced' manner. As opposed to torturing them fair and square, as it were.

We shouldn't hold our breath.