Roaming Charges: Nowhere Men

“Not a day goes by without a question imposing itself on the minimally sane mind: how can all this shit around us just go on?”

– Andreas Malm

+ I’ll never forget the irate call we got from an Obama senate staffer when we reported that Lieberman was Obama’s mentor in the Senate during his first year in office. “He didn’t have a fucking choice about it, man!!!!!!!” Sure.

+ When Joe Lieberman arrived in the US Senate in 1989, Strom Thurmond greeted him by saying, “I understand we think a lot alike in the way we do things.” “Yes, sir, I think we do,” admitted Lieberman. Strom probably learned about this reassuring profile of Lieberman’s center-right political beliefs from his weekly lunch date in the Senate cafeteria with Joe Biden who, like Lieberman, was one of the founding nowhere men of the Democratic Leadership Council, whose mission was to keep the Democratic Party from ever again straying to the Left of Michael Dukakis…

+ Al Gore’s Harvard mentor (and later political promoter at the New Republic) Martin Peretz convinced Gore to put Lieberman–the most obnoxious senator in a chamber full of them–on the ticket in 2000 for the express purpose of winning Florida by courting the Jewish and the Cuban exile vote in Miami-Dade, even they didn’t like him.

+ Political piety was Lieberman’s calling card and, like McCain, this pretense of recoiling from the dirty work of politics won him many friends in the mainstream press. In reality, Lieberman was a censor and a prude. He supported labeling hip-hop and heavy rock records and restricting the sale of video games to minors. He censured Bubba for having consensual sex and publicly denounced him for it. Gore’s pick of Lieberman meant that Bill Clinton, still enormously popular, couldn’t campaign for this ticket featuring two of the stiffest politicians in American history, likely costing the pair the election.

+ After the 2000 elections, Lieberman played an entirely malicious role in American politics. He spread lies about WMDs in Iraq, championed the wars on terror, condoned torture and campaigned against universal health care, successfully severing the public option from ObamaCare and gutting the planned extension of Medicare to people 55 or older.

+ Lieberman: “Every day Saddam Hussein remains in power with chemical weapons, biological weapons and the development of nuclear weapons is a day of danger for the United States.” September 4, 2002.

+ Petulant and vainglorious, Lieberman couldn’t handle being defeated by the progressive Ned Lamont in the CT primary, largely over his support for the Iraq War, and waged a nasty independent campaign backed by many in the GOP to narrowly win in the general elections. Then he endorsed McCain over Obama in 2008. He served as a model for figures such as Manchin and Sinema, who practiced a kind of political extortion against their own party. 

+ Lieberman was one of the chief architects of the post-911 police state in the US, working side-by-side with the Bush administration to construct the new Department of Homeland Security, lending it vast new powers not only to harass immigrants, especially those from Muslim countries, but to invade nearly every aspect of the lives of American citizens in the name of “security.”

+ No defender of civil liberties, Lieberman was no defender of civil liberties, Lieberman was a supporter of the Patriot Act and backed nearly every variety of government surveillance.  He authored the so-called Kill-Switch Bill, which would have given the President to assume complete control of the Net.

+ Lieberman was one of the first, if not the first, prominent politicians to advocate prosecuting Julian Assange under the Espionage Act, and introduced a bill in Congress to expand the law with that explicit purpose. Lieberman’s vendetta against Wikileaks included convincing (extorting?) Amazon, Visa, MasterCard and Pay Pal to stop servicing payments to the independent media organization.

+ Long an advocate of privatizing education, Lieberman testified before the Senate Education Committee in 2017 in favor of Betsy DeVos’ nomination to become Trump’s Education Secretary, telling the committee: “I know that some people are questioning her qualifications to be secretary of education, and too many of those questions seem to me to be based on the fact that she doesn’t come from within the education establishment. But honestly, I believe that today, that’s one of the most important qualifications you could have for this job. She has many others. She’s a mother and a grandmother. She cares about children more generally, and she has been involved in education, like so many parents and local citizen school board members across America for almost 30 years.”

+ Lieberman’s one benign contribution to the Republic was in helping to defang the federal government’s toxic posture toward homosexuals…but then so did Lynne and Dick Cheney. 

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+ We probably drove over the Francis Scott Key bridge 1000 times, mostly making big midnight circuits around Baltimore, which was often the only way our newborn daughter stop screaming infantile profanities at us and sleep for a few hours.

+ In the age of Clickbait Politics, it pays to offer an instant conspiracy theory to explain any major catastrophe. The wilder, the more profitable.

+ FoxNews’ Maria Bartriromo (people used to take financial advice from her) blamed it on “wide-open borders.”

+ Marjorie Taylor Green asked: “Is this an intentional attack or accidental?”

+ Andrew Tate, from whatever dungeon he’s hooking up from these days, warned: “This ship was cyberattacked…Black Swan event imminent.”

+ CPAC’s Matt Schlapp blamed the bridge collapse on…the COVID lockdowns.

+ Republican Senator Eric Schmitt pointed his finger, inexplicably, at the “weaponization of the Justice Department.”

+ And former 60 Minutes reporter, Lara Logan, says “intelligence sources” (Mike Flynn?) told her the bridge collapse was…wait for it… a cyberattack “just like the attack on 2020 on the voting machines that you cannot see.”

+ Others, naturally, blamed DEI, the far right’s latest euphemism for the N-word.

+ Personally, I blame the accident on surrealism. It was, after all, the Good Ship Dali, named after a fascist artist, whose captain was probably using hand-painted melting sea charts for the Chesapeake when the power went out…

+ As the Lever revealed, Maersk, the company that chartered the ship that destroyed the Key Bridge, was just sanctioned by regulators at the Labor Department for silencing whistleblowers who raise safety concerns.

+ Dali had been involved in at least one prior wreck. In 2016 the ship struck a stone loading pier while leaving port in Antwerp, Belgium, damaging the ship’s stern. An investigation cited navigational mistakes made by the ship’s master and pilot.

+ One theory is that Maersk may have been filling up its ships with “dirty fuel,” which can cause blackouts of a ship’s power generator. A Baltimore harbor pilot said that the ship had suffered from power shutdowns and loss of propulsion in the days before striking the Key Bridge. The pilot and his assistant reported the problems to the Coast Guard. “The vessel went dead, no steering power and no electronics,” said an officer aboard the ship. “One of the engines coughed and then stopped. The smell of burned fuel was everywhere in the engine room, and it was pitch black.”

+ Around 21% of the world’s containerships are more than 20 years old…

+ While FoxNews wasted little time blaming “open borders” for the Key Bridge collapse, immigrant workers were doing road repairs on the bridge when it was hit by the Maersk container ship and crumpled into the Patapsco River. The workers, mostly in their 30s and 40s, are from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico, and live in the Baltimore suburbs of Dundalk and Highlandtown. At least six of them died in the collapse.

Two days after the Key Bridge collapse, the southbound lane of I-5 in Portland was shut down during rush hour, after a bridge joint failed.

+ Toxic trains derailing, passenger airplane parts falling out of the sky, bridge joints failing, container ships demolishing one of the most traveled interstate bridges in the country. Heckuva job, Mayor Petebot!

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+ A study in Nature pinpoints the planet’s real contagion: Humans pass on more viruses to other vertebrates than they do to us…

+ In 2020, one in 25 cars sold worldwide was electric; by 2023, it was one in five.

+ UN emissions data is so out of date and incomplete that no one really knows how close most countries are to meeting their emissions targets.

+ People who live in France now produce 7% less carbon than the average person on Earth.

+ A study in Nature reports that fire suppression may be a more important factor in driving the intensity of wildfires than fuel accumulation.

+ This week ocean temperatures in the tropical Atlantic reached levels not normally found until June 3.

+ Hundreds of gray whales have starved to death off the Pacific Coast, owing to a sharp decline in food availability in their Arctic and sub-Arctic feeding grounds attributable to warming oceans…

+ Several of the largest new oil and gas field discoveries since 2021 have been made by companies with net-zero emissions pledges.

+ Agriculture accounts for 74% of the water diverted from the Colorado River, roughly three times as much as the amount of water consumed by cities. Nearly half (46%) of the Colorado River’s water is used to grow alfalfa and other hay crops for cattle.

+ Apparently, food politics remains immune from the war on wokeness. Two-thirds of people in the US say it’s the government’s job to make sure everyone has healthy food options…

+ Around 10 percent of the preterm births in the US during 2018, may have been caused by a class of chemicals commonly used in plastic food containers and cosmetic products. The social costs of the harm done by these chemicals may top $8 billion.

+ Landline phones only ever reached 20% of the world’s population. Now there are around 110 mobile phones for each person on Earth… and the waste piles and rare earth mines to prove it.

+ This Northern Harrier let me get pretty close to her yesterday on the marshy end of Redtail Lake in the Gorge. You can really make out her distinctive disc-shaped face. A few minutes later she alit, hovered, swooped and came up with a garter snake squirming in her talons. Spring in the Northwest…

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+ Ironically, Biden’s shameful backtracking on his campaign pledge to end the federal death penalty may save Julian Assange from being extradited to the US, since the Justice Dept. has refused to assure the UK it will not try to execute him under the terms of the Espionage Act.

The wife of James Ho, one of the circuit judges who banned mifepristone last year, took multiple payments from the group that brought it to court.

Federal judge Charles R. Breyer writing in his dismissal of Elon Musk’s suit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate, for documenting the rising swill of hate speech on Twitter since Musk took it over: “Sometimes it is unclear what is driving litigation, and only by reading between the lines of a complaint can one attempt to surmise a plaintiff’s true purpose. Other times, a complaint is so unabashedly and vociferously about one thing that there can be no mistaking the purpose. This case represents the latter circumstance. This case is about punishing the Defendants for their speech.”

Meanwhile, the Intercept’s Sam Biddle acquired documents through a FOIA request showing that Elon Musk’s Twitter/X was selling user data for government surveillance at the very same time it was allegedly fighting government surveillance in court.

The city of San Jose has put cameras on a municipal vehicle to train AI systems to detect homeless encampments. The city sends the footage to private computer vision companies who are using it to build homeless-encampments-detection algorithms.

+ Shortly after midnight on March 21, 17-year-old Karadius Smith was walking home with some friends in Leland, Mississippi, when a town cop began chasing him in a police cruiser and, according to Smith’s mother, ran him over from behind, leaving tire tracks on his back. The black teen died in the hospital later that day from his injuries. The cop who ran over Smith remains on the job and the police department has refused to let the family or their lawyer see the unedited footage of the chase and collision.

+ NYPD officials say they will deploy 800 more officers into the subway to “stop” fare evasion.

+ Earlier this week, 19-year-old Win Rozario, in the midst of a severe mental crisis, phoned 9/11 for help. When the NYPD arrived at his family’s apartment in Queens, they saw the 140-pound Rosario holding a pair of scissors and they tasered him. As he writhed on the floor, Rosario’s mother rushed to comfort him, dislodging the taser prongs. When Rosario reached for the scissors, the two cops shot him dead.

+ When MLK was bailed out of the Birmingham jail, he didn’t finance his own bond. The United Auto Workers, and others, raised tens of thousands of dollars to free him. Now the state of Georgia has passed a law banning bail funds from contributing to people’s bonds.

+ On his first day in his office, the new coroner in St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana called in a bomb threat that wasn’t a bomb [it was a box filled with body bags that had been in the office for 10 years], suggested his office had bugged by his predecessor and shut down a rape kit program because he’s “a businessman” and “it’s not a moneymaker.”

+ More than 60 percent of suspended driver’s licenses in the state of Ohio don’t originate from bad driving offenses, but because the driver owes an unpaid debt.

+++

+ Sam Knight: “According to one estimate, the average U.K. worker is now fourteen thousand pounds worse off per year than if earnings had continued to rise at pre-crisis rates—it is the worst period for wage growth since the Napoleonic Wars.”

+ A Justice Department investigation found immigrant children as young as 14 working among heavy equipment at Tuff Torq, a Tennessee firm that makes parts for lawnmowers sold by John Deere and others.

+ 44% of all single-family home purchases were by private investors in 2023, per Washington Times.

+ Eight of the 10 richest people in the world are Tech Lords…

Bernard Arnault – $230 billion
Jeff Bezos – $202 billion
Elon Musk – $187 billion
Mark Zuckerberg – $178 billion
Bill Gates – $153 billion
Steve Ballmer – $146 billion
Larry Ellison – $139 billion
Larry Page – $136 billion
Warren Buffett – $136 billion
Sergey Brin – $129 billion

+ Blackrock’s Larry Fink on the retirement crisis: “The real drawback of defined contribution was that it removed most of the retirement responsibility from employers and put it squarely on the shoulders of the employees themselves. With pensions, companies had a very clear obligation to their workers. Their retirement money was a financial liability on the corporate balance sheet. Companies knew they’d have to write a check every month to each one of their retirees. But defined contributions plans ended that, forcing retirees to trade a steady stream of income for an impossible math problem…The shift from defined benefit to defined contribution has been, for most people, a shift from financial certainty to financial uncertainty.”

+ Price of Ozempic per month:

USA: Nearly $1,000
Canada: $155
Germany: $59
Cost to Manufacture Ozempic: $5

+ Nearly 70% of registered voters in seven swing states support higher taxes on billionaires and higher income taxes on people who make more than $400,000 a year.

+ Colorado became the first state in the U.S. to pass privacy rights for brain (“neural”) data.

+++

+ Jets fans can breathe easier. RFK, Jr. passed over Aaron Rodgers to pick Nicole Shanahan as his running mate. Shanahan is a 38-year-old patent attorney whose affair with Elon Musk, reportedly ended her marriage to Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Shanahan met Brin at a yoga festival in Tahoe. She met her new partner, Jacob Strumwasser, an executive at a Bitcoin company, at Burning Man, naturally, and the couple were married in a Druidic “handfasting” love ceremony with included a “water blessing” to symbolize their mutual passion for surfing. Shanahan walked away with a reported billion dollars from her split with Brin. She reportedly used some of that to fund the syrupy Super Bowl ad for RFK, Jr., which enraged the Kennedy family.

+ Shanahan is a fierce critic of IVF treatments, saying it’s “one of the biggest lies we’re being told about women’s health.” Instead, she promotes “two hours of exposure to morning sunlight” as a cure for infertility. Wasn’t “sunlight” also one of Trump’s early remedies for COVID? Maybe she should have held out for a spot on his ticket.

+ Here’s Trump’s expert opinion on the RFK, Jr. ticket…

+ Speaking of IVF, Marilyn Lands, an Alabama Democrat, running to overturn the state’s restrictive abortion ban and the state Supreme Court’s ruling that frozen embryos are humans, just flipped a House seat in Huntsville by a huge margin. In 2022, Lands lost by nearly 7%., garnering 46.6% of the week. This week Lands won the seat by nearly 25%, with 62.4% of the vote. Trump won this district in 2020.

+ In the first six months after Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court, more than 26,000 Americans used pills to self-manage their own abortions, according to a new study published in JAMA. Pills are now used to perform 63% of all abortions in the US, more than double the amount just 10 years ago.

+ Popular support for abortion in the US has grown dramatically in the last 12 years. Public support in the US for the proposition: “Women should be able to get an abortion for any reason if she wants one” has climbed from 42% in 2012 to 57% in 2022.

+++

+ Can you wrap this up soon, Count? I feel dawn approaching and I’ve yet to feed…

+ Gilles Deleuze: “A leftist government doesn’t exist because being on the left has nothing to do with governments.”

+ After denouncing TikTokers, Arab-Americans, and anti-Zionist Jews, who will the Democrats blame next for their woes? Feminists! So much for making the campaign about reproductive rights.

+ Minnesota State Sen. Warren Limmer (R-Maple Grove) says safe gun storage laws will keep farmers from protecting their families against …. COWS:  “You even walk too close to a cow, and it’ll take you down and trample you into dust.”

+ According to Media Matters, Michele Morrow, the Republican nominee to lead North Carolina K-12 schools, who called for the televised execution of Barack Obama, trumpeted her work for a group that said school shootings are false flags, 9/11 was an inside job, and that Obama had a “Hitler bloodline.”

+ According to Page Six, the bankrupt and indicted Rudy Giuliani told anyone who’d listen at Mar-a-Lago that he’s caught in a “nightmare world” and “wakes up every day and can’t believe it’s real.”

+ The “illegal invaders” this Michigan State Senator is referring to were the Gonzaga and Creighton Men’s basketball teams arriving in Detroit for their Sweet 16 games…MAGA!

+ All politics is local: Benjamin Netanyahu once worked at the Boston Consulting Group, just down the hall from Mitt Romney.

+ A judge ruled this week that Brian Pritchard, a rightwing talk show host and the first vice chairman of Georgia’s Republican Party, who’d made public claims about systemic voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, voted illegally nine times.

+ Two weeks before NBCNews announced the hiring of Ronna McDaniel (then firing) as a political “commentator” for $300,000 a year, network executives illegally fired 13 union journalists. A complaint has been filed by the NBC Reporters Guild before the NLRB.

+ After Sheikh Sultan bin Jassim Al Thani, a member of the Qatari royal family invested $50 million in Newsmax, the company’s CEO, Chris Ruddy, reportedly instructed pundits and talking heads at the company not to criticize Qatar and sanctioned a newsreader who did so in 2018. “We were not allowed to criticize Qatar,” an employee told the Washington Post. “We were told very clearly from the top down, no touching this.” Ruddy and Newsmax have refuted those claims.

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+ The government of Colombia expelled Argentine embassy officials after President Javier Milei during a TV interview smeared Colombian President Gustavo Petro as “a terrorist, assassin and communist .”

+ Chuck D: “Guns in Haiti ain’t manufactured in Haiti. As in the USA, you kill guns you kill half of crime. Worldwide guns are attached to testosterone and in many cases dudes’ nutsacks….”

+ During a meeting with US business executives in Beijing, China’s President Xi Jinping made a few observations on US politicians: “Don’t take it the wrong way. You guys seem smart, but you keep funding utterly dumb and clownish politicians in your country. What’s up with that? In China, Tom Cotton wouldn’t even be a village chief.” Tom Cotton’s probably proud Xi knows his name…

+ Jair Bolsanaro was spotted rushing to the sanctuary of the Hungarian embassy last month, where he hid out as some of his allies and associates were arrested for plotting a coup against the newly elected government of Lula.

The latest Pew survey shows that most Americans think marijuana should be legal for medical and recreational use and only 11% think marijuana should be illegal for all uses.

+ AMLO’s proposal for addressing the migrant crisis:

+ The U.S. commits $20 billion a year to poor countries in Latin America and the Caribbean

+ Lift sanctions on Venezuela

+ End the Cuban embargo

+ Legalize law-abiding Mexicans living in the U.S.

+ According to the Alan Turing Institute: “The UK intelligence community (UKIC) is facing an existential challenge. It is being out-competed by providers of open-source intelligence and data companies, who can sell their insights to any customer…” Well, M-16 still has the coolest building…

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+ In 1972. the Nixon administration moved to deport John Lennon and Yoko Ono, on trumped-up charges that they’d overstayed the terms of their visa. The real motive was to silence Lennon during the elections because Nixon feared his influence on the youth vote, which was set to include 18 to 20-year-olds for the first time. The idea to target Lennon originated with Joe Biden’s old pal, Strom Thurmond, according to Lennon’s immigration lawyer, Leon Wildes. Thurmond was a member of the old McCarthy Committee, still going strong into the 1970s, which had held closed-door hearings on the subversive threat posed by John Sinclair and the White Panther Party, whom Lennon had supported when Sinclair was sentenced to a 10-year prison sentence for possession of two joints. After the hearings, Thurmond wrote a memo to Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, warning of Lennon’s association with Sinclair and other figures of the New Left, including Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman and Bobby Seale. Thurman wrote that “members of the Chicago 7 had devised a plan to hold rock concerts in various primary election states to recruit persons to come to San Diego for the Republican National Convention in 1972” and that “they intend to use John Lennon as the drawing card to promote their success. If Lennon’s visa is terminated it would be a strategic counter-measure.”

+ Amaia Odriozola writing in El Pais on what Lennon’s “disobedient glasses” signified: “Lennon was one of the first artists to understand his glasses not so much as a visual aid but as a style statement, such glasses were already associated with important people like Gandhi, James Joyce, Groucho Marx and Ernest Hemingway.”

+ Sean Ono Lennon: “How the hell is corn syrup the first ingredient in gummy vitamins? Like wtf? Are they trying to kill you even when you’re doing the right thing and trying to be healthy? What kind of evil shit is this?” Good to see he inherited his mom and dad’s sense of humor.

+ Rocky Raccoon went back to his room, only to find an invoice ($60) for Trump’s Bible…

+ Brandon Jones: “A political candidate who sells Bibles during Holy Week to pay lawyers who, among other things, are defending him in a hush-money case involving a porn star is a Flannery O’Connor story for our time.”

+ Cory Doctorow: “‘Enshittification’ isn’t just a way of describing the *symptoms* of platform decay: it’s also a theory of the *mechanism* of decay – the means by which platforms get shittier and shittier until they are a giant pile of shit.”

+ There’s that cliché–no less true for being one– that Americans only learn geography when we invade a country most of us had never heard of before. Otherwise, we learned alt-geography from MLB, where Cincy and ATL were in the West and STL and the Cubs in the East.

+ Ted Cruz’s father, Rafael Cruz says he became involved in right-wing politics after hearing Jimmy Carter speak in 1976: “The first time I heard Jimmy Carter campaign, I knew the man was a communist. He sounded just like Fidel Castro.” But what did he have against the man who tried repeatedly to kill Fidel, JFK?

+ The publisher and scholar of German culture Nicholas Jacobs died this week. Jacobs was one of the founding directors of New Left Books/Verso, along with Perry Anderson and Ronald Fraser, where he published English translations of major works by Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, among many others.

+ Lily Gladstone was presented with a rare Stand Up headdress by the Blackfeet Nation, a much greater honor than the Oscar she was robbed of, statuettes which for all we know are plated with gold mined from the Black Hills…

+ In an interview with the NYT, Pete Townshend said he doesn’t get much of a kick from performing live anymore and that The Who (or what remains of the band) would probably do one more global tour, then “crawl off and die.”

“AC/DC made 50 albums, but all their albums were the same,” Townshend said. “It wasn’t the way The Who worked. We were an ideas band. (…) I’ve got about 500 titles I might release online, mostly unfinished stuff. We’re not making Coca-Cola, where every can has to taste the same. And it’s turned out, surprise, surprise, that rock ’n’ roll is really good at dealing with the difficulties of aging. Watching Keith Richards onstage, trying to do what he used to do — it’s disturbing, heart-rending, but also delightful…The Who isn’t Daltrey and Townshend onstage at 80, pretending to be young. It’s the four of us in 1964, when we were 18 or 19. If you want to see The Who myth, wait for the avatar show. It would be good!” 

He’s as Blind as He Can Be, Just Sees What He Wants to See

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

Toxic Water, Toxic System: Environmental Racism and Michigan’s Water War
Michael Mascarenhas
(California)

All Mapped Out: How Maps Shape Us
Mike Duggan
(Reaktion)

Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis
Nick Bano
(Verso)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

The Carnegie Hall Concert
Alice Coltrane
(Impulse!/Verve)

La Vida Misma
Ivan Llanes
(VYDIA)

All My Friends
Aoife O’Donovan
(Yep Roc)

The Last Inner Freedom

“Dostoevski said once, “There is only one thing I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.” These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost. It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom—which cannot be taken away—that makes life meaningful and purposeful.” – Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

The post Roaming Charges: Nowhere Men appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey St. Clair.