A Colossal Wreck (73 page)

Not many people here really think the US government will shut down on August 3. The fight over the deficit is one of those American ceremonies, as embalmed in ritual speech and gesture as an English coronation.

August 4

Of course he blew it. Whether by artful design or by sheer timidity is immaterial. He blew it. Two days before the United States was officially set to default on its debts on August 2, Barack Obama had the Republicans where he wanted them: All he had to do was announce that he’d trudged the last half mile towards a deal but that there’s no pleasing fanatics who reject all possibility of compromise, who are ready and eager to shut down the government, to see seniors starve and veterans denied their benefits. So, Obama could proclaim, he was invoking the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution that states that the “validity of the public debt of the United States … shall not be questioned.”

Obama could have done that, but he didn’t. At the eleventh hour and the fifty-fifth minute he threw in the towel, and allowed the Republicans to exult that they’d got 95 percent of what they wanted: cuts in social programs, a bipartisan congressional panel to shred at its leisure what remains of the social safety net, no tax hikes for the rich, no serious slice in the military budget.

August 10

What’s a riot without looting? We want it, they’ve got it! You’d think from the press that looting was alien to British tradition, imported by immigrants more recent than the Normans. Not so. Gavin Mortimer, author of
The Blitz
, had an amusing piece in the
First Post
about the conduct of Britons at the time of Their Finest Hour:

It didn’t take long for a hardcore of opportunists to realise there were rich pickings available in the immediate aftermath of a raid—and the looting wasn’t limited to civilians.

The looting was often carried out by gangs of children organized by a Fagin figure; he would send them into bombed-out houses the morning after a raid with orders to target coins from gas meters and display cases containing World War I medals. In April 1941 Lambeth juvenile court dealt with 42 children in one day, from teenage girls caught stripping clothes from dead bodies to a seven-year-old boy who had stolen five shillings from the gas meter of a damaged house. In total, juvenile crime accounted for 48 percent of all arrests in the nine months between September 1940 and May 1941 and there were 4,584 cases of looting.

Perhaps the most shameful episode of the whole Blitz occurred on the evening of March 8, 1941 when the Café de Paris in Piccadilly was hit by a German bomb. The cafe was one of the most glamorous night spots in London, the venue for off-duty officers to bring their wives and girlfriends, and within minutes of its destruction the looters moved in.

“Some of the looters in the Café de Paris cut off the people’s fingers to get the rings,” recalled Ballard Berkeley, a policeman during the Blitz who later found fame as the “Major” in
Fawlty Towers
. Even the wounded in the Café de Paris were robbed of their jewellery amid the confusion and carnage.

The riots in London last week started in Tottenham, an area with the highest unemployment in London, in response to the police shooting a young black man, in a country where black people are twenty-six times more likely to stopped and searched by the cops than whites. As the
Daily Mash
puts it: “Many of these kids are less than two miles away from people who get multi-million pound bonuses for catastrophic failure and live in a culture where the material excess of people who are famous for nothing is rammed relentlessly into their faces by middle-brow tabloid newspapers. And of course later today the looters will be condemned in Parliament by a bunch of people who stole money by accident.”

September 7

The protesters outside the White House have furled their banners and headed home. Now the Obama administration will decide whether to issue a presidential permit for the 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline extension—a $7 billion project to bring heavy, “sour” crude oil
extracted from tar sands in Alberta, Canada, down through Montana and the Plains states to refineries on the Gulf Coast, notably in Port Arthur, Texas.

Even as the protesters savaged the scheme as a fearsome environmental disaster, the State Department issued its final environmental impact statement on August 26. Not surprisingly, it was favorable to the project, furnishing such nuggets of encouragement as “analysis of previous large pipeline oil spills suggests that the depth and distance that the oil would migrate would likely be limited unless it reaches an active river, stream, a steeply sloped area, or another migration pathway such as a drainage ditch.”

There’s no national need for the Keystone XL extension. But money talks, of course. Obama received $884,000 from the oil and gas industry during the 2008 campaign, more than any other lawmaker except John McCain.

September 8

America’s problems are huge: fourteen million Americans officially looking for jobs—about four job seekers for every job vacancy; 8.8 million part-time workers since the recession began; roughly 2.6 million people too discouraged even to look for a job: total—about twenty-five million people needing work or more work and an economy that is creating no new jobs.

As the economists Randall Wrey and Stephanie Kelton point out, “Business will not hire more workers until it has more sales. Consumers will not spend more until they’ve got more jobs.”

You can find America’s future in blueprints minted in business-funded think-tanks thirty to forty years ago at the dawn of the neoliberal age: destruction of organized labor; attrition of the social safety net; attrition of government regulation; a war on the poor, fought without mercy at every level. Last year the New York police stopped and questioned 601,055 people, predominantly blacks and Hispanics, and the numbers were up 13 percent for the first six months of this year.

September 22

First, a simple rule for killers: If you are going to murder someone in the United States, don’t try to get the job done in Texas. Keep your captive alive in the car till New Mexico, which recently banned the death penalty, or press on to California, which retains the death penalty but makes available very large sums of state money—potentially, hundreds of thousands of dollars—for a capable death penalty defense.

Business is correspondingly brisk in the lethal injection chamber in Huntsville, Texas. There are currently 413 on death row, and at the time of writing, 475 have been executed since 1976, 235 of them during Rick Perry’s decade-long stint as governor.

It turned out Thursday we won’t have to adjust the numbers yet. On September 15, the scheduled execution day for Duane Edward Buck, the US Supreme Court granted a stay of execution for Buck (who on September 12 had his clemency request turned down by the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles) while it reviews the case.

No one claims that Buck, forty-eight, didn’t shoot to death his former girlfriend and her male companion and wound a third in Houston in 1995. He himself admits his crimes. At issue is what an expert witness told the court during the sentencing hearing, where the jury decides whether the convicted murderer should go to prison for a life term or get lodgings on death row. To get Buck lined up for the lethal needle, his prosecutors needed to prove “future dangerousness.” How might Buck behave in the event he ever got out of prison?

Dr. Walter Quijano, a psychologist practicing in Conroe, a town just south of Huntsville, had actually been called by the defense, who hoped he would testify that Buck’s killing spree was an act of rage unlikely to be repeated. Under cross-examination, however, the prosecutors asked Quijano: “The race factor, black, increases the future dangerousness for various complicated reasons; is that correct?”

“Yes,” Quijano answered, probably out of sheer force of habit, because usually he was the prosecution’s expert, and he had testified in similar fashion for the prosecution in six other cases, racially profiling the defendants into the Huntsville death house. His “yes” was enough for the jury, which cut smartly through all uncertainty
about Buck’s future decisions by saying he should die, thus rendering speculation unnecessary.

In 2000, then-Texas Attorney General John Cornyn (now a Republican US Senator), recognizing the constitutional abuse for what it was, called for Buck and the other six to receive a retrial. Buck is the only condemned man who hasn’t gotten one. On September 13, Linda Geffin, one of Buck’s prosecutors in 1995, joined the chorus of voices calling on Gov. Perry to stay his execution.

Of course, it doesn’t help anyone on death row, headed for the injection chamber and amid last-ditch appeals, that we’re in campaign mode and right after Perry issued a fervent endorsement of the death penalty, earning him hearty cheers in the auditorium of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, when he stressed that imposing it has never lost him a moment’s sleep.

October 12

Even by the forgiving standards of American credulity, the supposed Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the US is spectacularly ludicrous. Why would Iran want to kill the Saudi envoy—the mild-mannered functionary, Adel al-Jubeir? I could understand an inclination to dispose of the irksome Prince Bandar who held the job for twenty-two years, from 1983 to 2005—simply in the spirit of “change.” But to kill any ambassador—particularly a Saudi ambassador—is to invite lethal retaliation, even war. Iran doesn’t want war with the US.

Suppose the CIA leaks a secret national security review concluding that the moon is actually made of cheese, and the Chinese are planning to send up a pair of gigantic bio-engineered rats to breed in numbers sufficient to eat the cheese and thus sabotage US plans for Missile Defense radar deployment on the moon’s dark side.

The headlines will initially proclaim “Doubts on Chinese Rat Threat Widespread. Many scoff.” The lead paragraphs in news stories in the
New York Times, Washington Post
and
Wall Street Journal
will quote the scoffers, but then “balance” will mandate respectful quotation from “intelligence sources,” faculty professors, think-tank
“experts” and the like, all eager to dance to the government’s tune: “Many say rat scenario ‘plausible,’ ” etc., etc.

Lo and behold, by the end of a couple of days of such news stories, the Chinese rat plot is firmly ensconced as a credible proposition. News reports then turn to respectful discussion of the US government’s options in confronting and routing the Chinese rat threat: “Vice President says ‘all options are on the table,’ ” etc.

October 28

Denied post-mortem imagery of Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki, the world now has at its disposal photographs of Muammar Gaddafi, dispatched with a bullet to the head after being wounded by NATO’s ground troops outside Sirte. Did the terminal command, Finish Him Off, come via cell phone from the US State Department, whose Secretary, Hillary Clinton, had earlier called for his death, or by dint of local initiative? At all events, since Gaddafi was a prisoner at the time of his execution, it was a war crime, and I trust that in the years of her retirement Mrs. Clinton will be detained amid some foreign vacation and handed a subpoena.

My friend and neighbor in Petrolia, Joe Paff, wrote a response to a dreadful story about Gaddafi’s killing on Yahoo’s site, commenting “This kind of gloating is bound to come back and bite your butt. Imagine how many people in the world would like to see Netanyahu or Obama dragged from their hiding holes and tortured. It will take about six months for everyone to regret the ‘new’ Libyan ‘democrats.’ ”

Yahoo’s initial electronic response was to write to Joe, “Oops! Try again.” So he checked “post” a second time. Yahoo then rewrote his comment, complete with misspellings, stripped of any mention of Netanyahu or Obama, and “posted” it as: “This is the kind of gloating that comes back and bites you on the butt. Just imagine how many peopel in the world would like to see Americans dragged through the streets and tortured to death.” As Joe wrote me, “Just another small episode in artificial intelligence and the present taboos.”

October 29

Remember Tilikum, kidnapped by whale-slavers off Iceland at the age of two in 1983? Deliberately starved as part of his “training” in a Sealand tank in Victoria, Canada, Tilikum has spent the past nineteen years at the SeaWorld marine park in Orlando, Florida. The whale has been involved in three lethal onslaughts on his captors, the most recent being an attack on Dawn Brancheau, a trainer he dragged into his tank and drowned in February 2010.

Why was Tilikum spared? Big whale, big money.

There’s a lot riding on the slave orcas toiling away, giving as many as eight performances per day, 365 days a year, as the star attractions in these marine parks. Tilikum’s asset value is enhanced by his duties as a sperm donor. He’s a breeding “stud” often kept in solitary, away from the other orcas, and has fathered thirteen killer whales.

Earlier this week, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) filed a lawsuit against SeaWorld for “enslaving” five orcas. Tilikum is one of the plaintiffs. PETA’s suit invokes the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing and prohibiting slavery, and demands the orcas’ release under the Amendment’s terms. “All five of these orcas were violently seized from the ocean and taken from their families as babies,” says PETA’s President Ingrid Newkirk, echoed by PETA’s lawyer, Jeff Kerr, who told AP: “By any definition, these orcas are slaves—kidnapped from their homes, kept confined, denied everything that’s natural to them and forced to perform tricks for SeaWorld’s profit.”

Will the orcas get legal standing?

Animals currently have no rights recognized in US law, but many groups of lawyers are working to strengthen laws that protect animals and many individuals have successfully brought lawsuits to protect the welfare of animals. Animal rights, or animal liberation, are one of the oldest forms of Animal Law.