Franklin's Focus 9/19/10

Circle Jerks and Other Odd Phenomena According to Chris Floyd

I must thank Chris Floyd for resuscitating a term from my boyhood. I
love it when these antique phrases and words reappear and remind me of
the adventures of childhood. Of course, 'circle jerk' is not a term
that women are likely to be familiar with. It is the property of young
boys who at one point in puberty gathered together in a masturbatory
circle with a fine espirit de corps that little girls probably
expressed via their more civilized pajama parties.

For those female readers who are puzzled by the term 'circle jerk', it
refers to a group masturbation rite that young boys engage in. I admit
that I have puzzled over why young boys do this. I do however harbor a
suspicion that their first experiments with pleasuring themselves gave
rise to questions in their minds as to whether or not such a practice
was normal or not. Circle jerks are probably very reassuring to young
boys who might harbor some worries over the normalcy or perversity of
such an activity.

This, of course, is highly speculative, and I will gladly host a
discussion of this subject in Franklin's Focus, with both male and
female theories being welcomed. Such a debate would have the virtue of
being at least superior in value to the discussions occurring on the
The Hill.

Having voiced those thoughts, I must hasten to say that the original
meaning of the term 'circle jerk' is not what Chris Floyd is focused
on in an excellent blog. The theme he explores is definitely of
greater import.

Enjoy.

Warmest regards,
Richard

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9/17/10 http://www.chris-floyd.com/

Circle Jerks: Delaware Distraction Obscures Oval Office Atrocities

I.
The political-media-blogospherical establishment is currently working
itself into a lather over the elevation of a "nutty" Tea Party woman
to the Republican nomination for a Senate seat in Delaware. The
selection of Christine O'Donnell by a tiny sliver of voters in a
closed primary in a tiny state whose main claim to fame is its decades
of whorish service as a protective front for rapacious corporations
is, we are told, an event of world-shaking proportions fit for endless
analysis and scary headlines all over the world.

It's true that O'Donnell has taken the politically risky step of
denouncing America's national pastime -- masturbation -- and has, over
the years, supported any number of positions that put her on the far
side of common sense. But one struggles in vain to find that she has
advanced anything remotely as radical -- or lunatic -- as the idea
that the President of the United States is some kind of intergalactic
emperor who holds the power of life and death over every living being
on earth in his autocratic hands. Yet this is precisely the position
proclaimed -- openly, before Congress, God and everybody -- by the
highly educated, intellectually sophisticated, super-savvy Laureate of
Peace currently residing in the White House.

This same president has also fought tooth and nail -- often in open
court -- to shield torturers, escalate pointless wars of aggression,
relentlessly expand a liberty-stripping Stasi-style security
apparatus, give trillions of tax dollars to rapacious financiers,
health-care corporations, insurance companies and bloodstained war
profiteers, while launching cowardly drone missile attacks on the
sovereign territory of close ally, killing hundreds of civilians in
the process - and has just signed off on the biggest arms deal in
history with one of the most viciously repressive tyrannies on earth.

So I'm sorry, but I just don't see how a putzy, klutzy, wilfully
ignorant Tea Partier from perhaps the most corrupt state in the Union
is somehow more dangerous than the people we have in power now --
including a Vice-President who for decades was the senator (and
corporate bagman) from this very same most corrupt state in the Union,
and used his power to advance a "Bankruptcy Bill" that was one of the
most savage class-war attacks on working people -- and the poor, and
the sick, and the vulnerable -- that we have seen in many a year. Then
again, as far as I know, Joe "Bankruptcy Bill" Biden has never
publicly condemned the practice of masturbation.

Do I want to see Christine O'Donnell in the Senate? No, of course not.
Not only because in her freely chosen ignorance she has embraced the
most primitive, bleakly reductive understandings of religion,
politics, power, sexuality and human reality in general, but also --
and mainly -- because she will support all of the policies delineated
above: the imperial wars for loot and domination, the presidential
power to kill and incarcerate at will, the slavish support for Big
Money in all of its destructive manifestations, the perversion of
every single public program into an engine of private profit for the
elite, and so on down the line. But as her Democratic opponent will do
the same thing if he is elected, I don't see why we should be all het
up about O'Donnell's corporate-funded victory in the teeny-tiny
Republican primary in little bitty Delaware.

But hey, it's all good fun, right? The tribal partisans get to jerk
their knees in orgiastic spasms, drawing oceans of newsprint and TV
airtime, while the real business of empire -- slaughtering, torturing
and repressing human beings -- goes on unnoticed and unabated.

II.
But a hardy few out there are still trying to draw attention to the
actual crimes and moral atrocities being committed by the actual
holders of actual power. One of these is Andy Worthington, who is
beginning an eight-part series on the remaining prisoners still being
held in the still-unclosed American concentration camp at Guantanamo
Bay. As Worthington says, the series will

help explain how few of the remaining prisoners have any connection to
terrorism, how some are civilians, and how others were foot soldiers
for the Taliban, in an inter-Muslim civil war in Afghanistan that had
nothing to do with 9/11, and very little to do with al-Qaeda. I also
hope that it may contribute to the almost non-existent debate
regarding the Authorization for Use of Military Force, and the
administration's misplaced use of it to hold foot soldiers in
Guantanamo, as well as highlighting other aspects of the habeas
litigation, the military commissions, the moratorium on releasing
Yemenis, and the decision to hold 48 of the prisoners indefinitely
without charge or trial.

Hey, but you know what's more important than that, Andy? The fact that
someone who won the votes of a sliver of the electorate in a tiny
state doesn't think people should masturbate! Let's get our priorities
straight here.

Another campaign now underway is a major effort to free Bradley
Manning, the young soldier who committed the cardinal sin of trying to
unearth a few nuggets of truth about the murderous reality of the
American Terror War, now being prosecuted and expanded so assiduously
by the Continuer-in-Chief. On Thursday, filmmaker Michael Moore and
Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg launched "The Campaign
to Free Manning" in Oakland. The Guardian reports:

Demonstrations are planned in the US, Canada and Australia over the
next three days in support of Manning, an army intelligence analyst
who is being held at a military prison in Virginia ...Manning, 23, is
also accused of involvement in WikiLeaks' exposure of a video of a US
helicopter attack on apparently unarmed Iraqis in a Baghdad street.
Two Reuters employees were among those killed.

Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon papers to the New York Times that
laid bare the extent of US government duplicity in its claims to be
winning the Vietnam War, said Manning was defending the constitution
in revealing the truth about the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Soldiers' sworn oath is to defend and support the constitution.
Bradley Manning has been defending and supporting our constitution,"
he said.

Moore ... said the US military was being hypocritical in its attempts
to discredit Manning and accuse WikiLeaks by asserting that making the
secret documents public endangered the lives of Afghans collaborating
with coalition forces.

"To suggest that lives were put in danger by the release of the
WikiLeaks documents is the most cynical of statements," Moore said.
"Lives were put in danger the night we invaded the sovereign nation of
Iraq, an act that had nothing to do with what the Bradley Mannings of
this country signed up for: to defend our people from attack. It was a
war based on a complete lie and lives were not only put in danger,
hundreds of thousands of them were exterminated. For those who
organised this massacre to point a finger at Bradley Manning is the
ultimate example of Orwellian hypocrisy."

Below is a quick roundup of a few other recent stories that aren't
nearly as important as the selection by a minority party of a
candidate who doesn't approve of masturbation.

1. Seven Civilians Killed in US-Iraqi Raid
That was the original headline for the New York Times story about the
raid in Fallujah; within a few hours, however, the Pentagon PR units
had rolled into action, and the seven civilians killed at the site of
perhaps the most savage American campaign of the war had suddenly
morphed into figures of vague menace. The story did note that of the
dead, four were brothers "between the ages of 10 and 18." So America's
non-combat soldiers killed a 10-year-old boy in a non-combat raid in
the brave new era of non-combat service that has opened for the 50,000
U.S. troops still in Iraq.

But what is the life of that boy compared to the sliver of voters in a
tiny state who voted in a closed, partisan primary for some gushing
goober who doesn't like masturbation?

2. US Drone Strikes Kill 15 in N. Waziristan
Juan Cole reports:

The Associated Press does an important story about an intensive drone
strike campaign by the US military since September 2 in southern
Afghanistan and in Pakistan’s North Waziristan that has left 60
persons dead, among them innocent civilians.

On Tuesday alone, US drone attacks targeted suspected militants killed
some 15 persons in the village of Dargah Mandi village on the
outskirts of Miranshah, N. Waziristan’s main city.

The drone strikes have targeted fighters of the Haqqani network, one
of five or so major insurgent groups fighting against the US & NATO
presence in Afghanistan and against the Karzai government. Jalaluddin
Haqqani is one of Ronald Reagan’s “Freedom Fighters,” who battled the
Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan in the 1980s with American aid. He
could not accept the US invasion and occupation of his country,
either, and organized an insurgency now mainly led by his son Siraj.
The Haqqani group is not Taliban but rather Mujahidin and has only a
vague tactical alliance with Mulla Omar’s Taliban and similar groups.

Cole also notes that protests against these continuing deadly
incursions into Pakistan have been muted -- because the Pakistanis are
still dying in floodwaters, and in the water's pestiferous wake.
Millions are living in deadly deprivation. But look over there --
somebody's masturbating, or not masturbating, or something! Who cares
about the drowned and drone-bombed dead?

3. Obama's Thatcherite Gift to the Banks
OK, the Terror War goes on -- but at least Obama's finally waking up
to the need for more FDR-like stimulus for the economy -- and more FDR-
style war on the fat cats who are strangling us, right? What about
that big $50 billion infrastructure plan he announced on Labor Day?

Well, as Michael Hudson explains, the plan is yet another giveaway of
billions of tax dollars to rapacious financial interests:

The Obama transport plan is like a Fannie Mae for bankers, based on
the President’s guiding mantra: “Let’s help Wall Street put Americans
back to work.” The theory is that giving public guarantees and
bailouts will enable financial managers to use some of the money to
fund some projects that employ people – with newly created, non-
unionized companies, presumably.

Here’s the problem. Transportation projects will make real estate
speculators, the construction industry and their bankers very rich
unless the government recovers its public spending through windfall
site-value gains on property along the right-of-way ... But Obama’s
infrastructure plan is for Wall Street investors to get the windfall –
as property owners or as mortgage lenders making much larger loans
against the enhanced site value.

The plan would not add to the government deficit, Obama promised.
Unfortunately, in place of government taking more revenue, it will be
the finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sector that does the
taking. The banking system will now do what government was supposed to
do back in the Progressive Era: finance infrastructure. The difference
today is that instead of funding transportation out of tax proceeds
(levied progressively on the wealthy) or by the central bank
monetizing public debt, the Obama plan calls for borrowing $50 billion
at interest from banks.

The problem is that this will build in high interest charges, high
private management charges, underwriting fees – and government
guarantees. User fees will need to cover these financial and other
privatization costs “freed” from the government budget. This will
build about $2 billion a year into the cost of providing the transport
services.

This threatens to be the kind of tollbooth program that the World Bank
and IMF have been foisting on hapless Third World populations for the
past half-century. ... It looks like President Obama sat down with
Larry Summers, Tim Geithner and his other Rubinomics holdovers from
the Clinton/Goldman-Sachs Administration and asked what policies can
be funded without taxing the wealthy, but by borrowing via a separate
entity – with a government guarantee like the Fannie Mae and Freddie
Mac gravy train for Wall Street.

Well, yeah, but at least you don't hear him talking trash about
masturbation, do you? That's why we must support him. If we don't, a
bunch of kooks who just want serve corporate interests will get into
power! Then what will happen?

4. State Secrecy and Official Criminality
Scott Horton at Harper's tells us how Barack Obama -- whom we have
every reason to believe is a modern, rational man who has no problem
with masturbation -- is diligently, doggedly working to protect not
only the torturers of the Bush Administration (and his own) from the
legal process, but also any and every kind of state criminality.

Obama has just won a great court victory for state torturers, state
murderers, state terrorists -- and good old-fashioned grafters pigging
out in the public trough -- when an appeals court voted narrowly to
uphold Obama's contention that the government can shield any
criminality from justice by crying "state secrets."

Horton quotes the LA Times' description of just what Obama wanted to
cover up by killing a civil suit filed by an innocent victim of
America's gulag. The victim was suing the CIA agent who had "rendered"
him over to America's terror war allies, knowing he would be tortured:


The decision to short-circuit the trial process is more than a
misreading of the law; it’s an egregious miscarriage of justice.
That’s obvious from a perusal of the plaintiffs’ complaint. One said
that while he was imprisoned in Egypt, electrodes were attached to his
earlobes, nipples and genitals. A second, held in Morocco, said he was
beaten, denied food and threatened with sexual torture and castration.
A third claimed that his Moroccan captors broke his bones and cut him
with a scalpel all over his body, and poured hot, stinging liquid into
his open wounds.

There were no "state secrets," real or otherwise, involved in the
case. The details were already known, around the world, from legal
proceeding in the UK and elsewhere. But for Obama -- imperial
militarist to the core -- there was a matter of principle at stake;
i.e., the principle that the imperial court can shield the minions who
carry out its ordered atrocities behind the unpassable gates of "state
secrets."

Truth? No. Justice? Out. Compassion? Nix. Peace? Never. But
masturbation -- sure, why not? We're not kooks like that Christine
O'Donnell!

Now that's "progressivism."

End