The Republican primary race is getting truly bizarre. Under normal circumstances, someone with Mitt Romney’s money, credentials, and establishment support should have by now been able to take a solid lead in the race, given the absence of any other major establishment challenger. And yet his levels of support have stayed at a mediocre 25% while successive opponents have been pecking at his heels, sometimes even overtaking him in the polls for short periods. It is clear that while the party establishment has gone one way, the party faithful is not happy with their choice.
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The infamous Haditha massacre that occurred on Nov. 19, 2005, have faded from people’s memories.

That morning, a military convoy of four vehicles was heading to an outpost in Haditha when one of the vehicles was hit by a roadside bomb.

Several Marines got out to attend to the wounded, including one who eventually died, while others looked for insurgents who might have set off the bomb. Within a few hours 24 Iraqis — including a 76-year-old man and children between the ages of 3 and 15 — were killed, many inside their homes.

As the reporter says, “Haditha became a defining moment of the war, helping cement an enduring Iraqi distrust of the United States and a resentment that not one Marine has been convicted.”

When reports of this got out, it was regarded as a horrifying atrocity and, as usual, was quietly buried. But two weeks ago, purely by chance, a reporter came across in a junkyard files of interviews of the people responsible for the massacre. What the interviews reveal is just how routine was the killing of civilians on this scale.

Chief Warrant Officer K. R. Norwood, who received reports from the field on the day of the killings and briefed commanders on them, testified that 20 dead civilians was not unusual.
…
General Johnson, the commander of American forces in Anbar Province, said he did not feel compelled to go back and examine the events because they were part of a continuing pattern of civilian deaths.

“It happened all the time, not necessarily in MNF-West all the time, but throughout the whole country,” General Johnson testified, using a military abbreviation for allied forces in western Iraq.

One can only imagine the bitterness and hatred engendered in the relatives of those massacred in this way.

The oligarchy, so long accustomed to do their looting in peace, has been surprised by the sudden turn in the tide against their rapaciousness and the successful adoption of the Occupy movement’s “We are the 99%” slogan now being used against them. You would have thought that they would be smart enough to lay low and hope that the storm passes.

But no, some of them are whining about how their feelings are hurt and contemptuously dismissing their critics as being ‘imbeciles’ and that those who are so poor that they pay little or no taxes have no right to complain because they have ‘no skin in the game’.

Matt Taibbi points out that the reverse is true, that it is the oligarchy that has no skin in the game because are not rooted in any place and thus have no sense of obligation to a geographical community that ordinary people have.

Most of us 99-percenters couldn’t even let our dogs leave a dump on the sidewalk without feeling ashamed before our neighbors. It’s called having a conscience: even though there are plenty of things most of us could get away with doing, we just don’t do them, because, well, we live here. Most of us wouldn’t take a million dollars to swindle the local school system, or put our next door neighbors out on the street with a robosigned foreclosure, or steal the life’s savings of some old pensioner down the block by selling him a bunch of worthless securities.

But our Too-Big-To-Fail banks unhesitatingly take billions in bailout money and then turn right around and finance the export of jobs to new locations in China and India. They defraud the pension funds of state workers into buying billions of their crap mortgage assets. They take zero-interest loans from the state and then lend that same money back to us at interest. Or, like Chase, they bribe the politicians serving countries and states and cities and even school boards to take on crippling debt deals.

Nobody with real skin in the game, who had any kind of stake in our collective future, would do any of those things. Or, if a person did do those things, you’d at least expect him to have enough shame not to whine to a Bloomberg reporter when the rest of us complained about it.

The oligarchy’s open display of the depth of their contempt for those not in their class is quite astonishing. I actually think this is a good thing and should be encouraged. The more this Marie Antoinette attitude is put on full public display, the more likely they are to get their comeuppance. As Taibbi ends his piece, “Unbelievable. Merry Christmas, bankers. And good luck getting that message out.”

At a recent campaign stop at a coffee house in New Hampshire, Mitt Romney spotted a man wearing a veteran’s cap. Since candidates love to pander to veterans, Romney glommed on to him but it was not quite what he expected. Listen to what the Vietnam veteran says after Romney leaves.

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Bradley Manning, alleged Wikileaks leaker, is finally getting his day in court, even if it is just a military court that does not allow for the full exercise of rights that civilian courts have.

One overlooked aspect of the WikiLeaks releases is what it says about US subservience to Israel’s interests. For example, recall the failure of the talks last year between Israel and the Palestinian leadership. M. J. Rosenberg describes how the US government, both the White House and the Congress, is controlled by the Israel lobby led by AIPAC, and says that “here is only one reason that Israeli-Palestinian negotiations collapsed. It is the power of the “pro-Israel lobby” (led by AIPAC) which prevents the United States from saying publicly what it says privately: that resolution of a conflict which is so damaging to US interests is consistently being blocked by the intransigence of the Netanyahu government and its determination to maintain the occupation.”

Israel has shown that it can extort what it wants from the US. Last year, the US requested that there be a moratorium on settlement building in the occupied territories. Israel refused, even rejecting the US offer of a bribe of three billion dollars in return for which Israel would simply have a moratorium on settlement for just 90 days. And despite being publicly humiliated time and again, the US government continues to be servile to Israel.

Apart from being one of the major enablers for these Israeli policies and lavishing the country with huge amounts of aid that enable Israelis to have a high standard of living, the US also provides it with diplomatic cover in the international arena. The US even vetoes UN resolutions on the settlements even when the resolutions are exactly in line with publicly stated US policy. WikiLeaks revealed that the US had secret deal with Israel to expand settlements even as they publicly decry it.

Is there any more glaring indication of the fecklessness of US political leaders and their subservience to Israel? But one notable feature is how few of the leaked WikiLeaks cables deal with Israel. Israel Shamir suggests that this is part of the western government-media subservience to the Israel lobby, which we also saw demonstrated with how they downplayed reports that the US, French, and German leaders view the Israeli prime minister as an incorrigible liar.

The Guardian and the New York Times, Le Monde and Spiegel are quite unable to publish a story unacceptable to Israel. They may pen a moderately embarrassing piece of fluff, or a slightly critical technical analysis in order to convince discerning readers of their objectivity. They may even let an opponent air his or her views every once in a blue moon. But they could never publish a story really damaging to Israel. This is true for all mainstream media.

Furthermore, no American ambassador would ever send a cable really unacceptable to Israel – unless he intended to retire the next month. Yet even supposing this kamikaze ambassador would send the cable, the newspapers would overlook it.

Even with thousands of secret cables about Israel in their hands, the mainstream media delays and prevaricates. They don’t want anyone to yell at them. That is why they have postponed publishing the articles. Once forced by circumstance or competition to publish the contents of the cables, you can bet they’ll twist the revelations into toady headlines and bury the truth in the final paragraph.

Robert Fisk comments on one aspect of Middle East politics gleaned from the few WikiLeaks releases:

It’s not that US diplomats don’t understand the Middle East; it’s just that they’ve lost all sight of injustice. Vast amounts of diplomatic literature prove that the mainstay of Washington’s Middle East policy is alignment with Israel, that its principal aim is to encourage the Arabs to join the American-Israeli alliance against Iran, that the compass point of US policy over years and years is the need to tame/bully/crush/oppress/ ultimately destroy the power of Iran.

There is virtually no talk (so far, at least) of illegal Jewish colonial settlements on the West Bank, of Israeli “outposts”, of extremist Israeli “settlers” whose homes now smallpox the occupied Palestinian West Bank – of the vast illegal system of land theft which lies at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian war. And incredibly, all kinds of worthy US diplomats grovel and kneel before Israel’s demands – many of them apparently fervent supporters of Israel – as Mossad bosses and Israel military intelligence agents read their wish-list to their benefactors.

As long as the US continues to be subservient to Israeli interests and impervious to justice, there will be no resolution of the Middle East conflict.

The corrupting influence of money on politics in the US is pervasive and entrenched. I had never found any proposed solution that satisfied me. The catch with federally funded campaigns, which is favored by many reformists, is that while it might reduce the influence of lobbyists and big campaign donors, it also tends to favor the two established parties. Until those two parties face a revolt or otherwise genuine threat to their entrenched dominance, there is little incentive for them to not be corrupt.

So I was pleasantly surprised to hear Lawrence Lessig on The Daily Show suggest a reform that might actually work. I have not read his book Republic, Lost: How money corrupts Congress – and a plan to stop it but his idea is that the government would refund the first $50 of people’s taxes to them in the form of a voucher that they could donate to any political campaign. In addition, each person would be allowed to donate up to $100 of their own money.

The catch is that this would require a constitutional amendment since the Supreme Court has ruled that money is a form of speech and steadily removed restrictions on campaign contributions.

The interview is well worth watching. In the first part, Lessig describes how the current system corrupts politics and in the second, he discusses his solution, as well as some other options that modern technology allows.

Part 1:

Part 2:

(This clip appeared on December 13, 2011. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post.)

Once again, The Guardian‘s Richard Adams spares me from having to watch last night’s Republican debate by providing an amusing live blog.

Donald Berwick is a highly respected expert on health care who was president Obama’s nominee to head the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. So of course he was opposed by the Republicans who are determined to block anything that might benefit people under the act. He was forced to serve for just a limited time by means of a recess appointment and has now stepped down from that post.

Chris Hayes had an interview with him that I highly recommended watching, especially his explanation about the important aspects of the Affordable Care Act. That begins at the 9:00 minute mark.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

In a comment to an earlier post on the increasing paramilitarization of the police, reader Steve raised the question of the connection between the rise of such policing in the US and the work of the ominously named Department of Homeland Security that was formed in the wake of the events of 9/11.

He is of course absolutely right. At the time that the Orwellian USA PATRIOT Act was rushed through in October 2001 with almost unanimous support in Congress (357 to 66 in the House and 98 to 1 in the Senate, with Russ Feingold being the lone holdout), many of us warned that this was a Trojan horse that would be used to undermine the rule of law and the constitutional protections that had, with a few exceptions, been followed for much of its history. What exceptions had been made were at times of great stress (the Civil War and World War II) and were seen as temporary measures.

The USA PATRIOT Act institutionalized these abuses and made them part of the new normal. Under the guise of fighting the ‘war on terror’, a threat that is increasingly being revealed as bogus, the DHS was created under the act and has, along with the National Security Agency and the CIA and FBI, been the vehicles that have been used to create a Big Brother state that now routinely violates the rights of Americans in the permanent war on terror.

Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi both look at the roots of the increased use of pepper-spraying as standard procedure, even as concerns are being raised about whether they are as non-lethal as claimed.

One consequence has been that the spread of so-called non-lethal weapons, such as the various gases, tasers, rubber bullets, concussion grenades, water cannons, ear-splitting sound emitters, etc., have had the effect of actually increasing the violence used by police, since the innocuous term ‘non-lethal’ for weapons that can still cause serious harm actually encourages their indiscriminate use against people. We seem to have reached the stage where we think that as long as people are not killed or dismembered, then whatever is done to them in the name of law and order is acceptable. This is the same kind of mentality that enables people to condone torture.

Two factors are leading to a proliferation of new anti-civilian weapons. One is that massive funding for the so-called ‘war on terror’ has enabled the DHS to shower military-style equipment on even small police forces that transform them into paramilitary units. While the equipment has been given away freely to local units, the heavy expense of maintaining them is the responsibility of local agencies and is draining police resources away from traditional police work. The other factor at play in driving this is that the huge amounts of money now available for ‘anti-terrorism’ has created an incentive for companies to come up with new ways of disabling and dispersing crowds. As a result, pepper spray may soon become one of the milder forms of brutality.

James Wolcott describes how ear-splitting sound devices known as LRADs (Long Range Acoustic Devices), more popularly known as ‘sound cannons’ and used on the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, can cause severe damage on the human body. He quotes an ACLU report that describes what happened to Karen Piper who was present at the scene of G-20 protests in 2009.

On September 24, 2009, Piper, then a visiting professor at Carnegie Mellon University, decided to observe G-20 protests in Pittsburgh’s Lawrenceville neighborhood as research for her book on globalization issues and the responses of bodies like the G-20 to protest activity. She arrived at Arsenal Park around 10 a.m. and saw protestors calmly and peacefully milling around the area. After the protest began, Piper walked on the sidewalk a short distance from the marching protesters, in the company of other curiosity seekers and journalists. When Piper became concerned about rapidly increasing police activity, she tried to leave the area. As she was walking away, police officers activated, suddenly and without warning, an LRAD a short distance away from her. It emitted a continuous piercing sound lasting several minutes.

Piper immediately suffered intense pain as mucus discharged from her ear. She became nauseous and dizzy and developed a severe headache. Since then, Piper has suffered from tinnitus (ringing of the ears), barotrauma, left ear pain and fluid drainage, dizziness, and nausea. She still suffers from permanent nerve damage.

“The intensity of being hit at close range by a high-pitched sound blast designed to deter pirate boats and terrorists at least a quarter mile away is indescribable. The sound vibrates through you and causes pain throughout your body, not only in the ears. I thought I might die,” said Piper, now an English professor at the University of Missouri. “It is shocking that the LRAD device is being promoted for use on American citizens and the general public.”

Now come reports of the development of lasers that ‘temporarily’ blind people being tested as riot control weapons in England. Rest assured that they will come here soon, to be followed by ‘accidents’ in which people end up being permanently blinded because of equipment malfunction or improper use.

We also have the first reports of the predator drones that are being used around the world to spy on and kill people now being deployed in the US.

I remember how, when I first came to the US in 1975, I was unnerved to see police walking around with real guns. Sri Lanka at that time had a civilian unarmed police force, with weapons used only in the most extreme cases. Now it has a highly militarized police with powerful guns, armored vehicles, and checkpoints becoming routine sights. The militarization of the police in the US is now also well underway and soon it will seem normal to see police in riot gear armed to the teeth stationed with armored vehicles at various places in cities.

We should never forget that the prime role of a country’s military nowadays is almost always to protect government leaders and the oligarchy from its own people, not from external threats. The external threat is an excuse to intimidate and cow its own people into acquiescence.

As usual, I did not watch last Saturday’s Republican debate, preferring to learn about it from Richard Adams’ always entertaining live blog for The Guardian. One exchange that caught my eye was when Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich fell over themselves trying to show who was more devoted to Israel, repeatedly referring to the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as their friend ‘Bibi’.

Romney: Of course you [Gingrich] stand firm and stand for the truth, but you don’t speak for Israel.
Gingrich: I didn’t.
Romney: If Bibi Netanyahu wants to say what you said, let him say it. But our ally, the people of Israel should be able to take their own positions and not have us negotiate for them.
Gingrich: Can I just say one last thing? Because I didn’t speak for the people of Israel. I spoke as a historian who has looked at the world stage for a very long time. I’ve known Bibi [Netanyahu] since 1984. I feel quite confident an amazing number of Israelis found it nice to have an American tell the truth about the war they are in the middle of and the casualties they’re taking and the people who surround them who say, you do not have the right to exist and we want to destroy you.
Romney: I’ve also known Bibi Netanyahu for a long time. We worked together at Boston Consulting Group. And the last thing Bibi Netanyahu needs to have is not just a person who’s a historian, but someone who is also running for president of the United States stand up and say things that create extraordinary tumult in his neighborhood. And if I’m president of the United States, I will exercise sobriety, care, stability and make sure that I don’t say anything like this.

Anything I say that can affect a place with rockets going in, with people dying. I don’t do anything that would harm that process. And, therefore, before I made a statement of that nature, I’d get on the phone to my friend, Bibi Netanyahu and say, would it help if I say this? What would you like me to do? Let’s work together because we’re partners.

I find it extraordinary that people running for the leadership of one country would so proudly proclaim their undying loyalty to another country, to the extent that they would not say anything without first getting it approved by the head of that country, even though that head is despised by world leaders as a liar.

I would like moderators at these debates to ask the candidates if there is any issue on which the interests of the US and Israel diverge. Except for Ron Paul, I expect them all to answer ‘no’, even though such an answer is patently absurd.