Aspirational Preemption
The arrest of seven mentally disturbed Black men in Miami by Alberto Gonzales’ Justice Department, on the word of an informant who entrapped them, was charcterized by Gonzales as arrest for being “aspirational, not operational.” The only aspiration I am seeing here is the kind that happens when a drunk aspirates his own vomit… at least from the press. Any news organ that fails to note this as the latest act of media abjection in the face of rule by malevolent morons qualifies.
This arrest doesn’t call for cautious skepticism; it calls for howling ridicule.
I ‘ve been wondering for almost five years now, ever since September 11th, how they’d target Black folk with this terrorism shtik. I’ve been saying for over ten years now how Haitians (whose own elected governments get overthrown by the US) serve as poster children for white supremacy. Now I’m going to talk trash about Miami, because that’s how this gets put into perspective.
Miami is a giant eco-catastrophe that has turned the Everglades and the ocean into cesspools, a vast energy sink that serves as the doorway to selectively exploit and exclude all the people south of there whose lives have been ripped apart by the projection of US global power. It is politically embedded in a state run by one of the Bush brothers, and its local politics is run by the gusano Mafia — long used as both political and paramiltary mercenaries by the US intelligence underground. It is the enclave of the very worst of the US lumpen-bourgeoisie, that overlapping sphere where plain thug-venality maps directly onto financial power. It’s a shithole of conspicuous consumption alongside one of the most shameful homeless problems I have seen outside the third world, and a place where that gros-bourgeois flash is always right in the face of people who can barely keep the rent paid or put food on their tables. It breeds mental disturbances out of its combinaton of profound need and its creepy fashion-runway superficiality.
That’s why its no surprise that the FBI and the Bush Justice Department (that must be a joke) thought to use a police informant (quite often the absolute lowest form of primate life, or someone whose life has gone so far awry that cops can use them as virtual slaves) to entrap seven Miami men on charges that will likely make the Wen Ho Lee incident look like a prima facie case.
This administration has gotten so zany that even many of the most rock-ribbed of the Republican Party — now a freakish caricature of latter-day delusion — have begun to distance themselves from their cognitively-challenged, narcissistic commandante and his band of merry loon-lieutenants. While the rest of the country is pulling back from the abyss that this administration has careened alongside, these nimrods are advancing their design to impose fascism, the real thing, on the US. It starts with the reclamation of blood-and-soil, anti-intellectual machismo, moves into vigilantism, but then requires its scapegoats for when the pampered, endebted-to-their-eyeballs middle class finally inherits the inevitable results of running what Kenneth Boulding referred to as a madman economy.
There weren’t enough foreign-born Muslims in the US to constitute a respectable analog to pre-WWII European Jewry, so it was really only a matter of time before they found a way to paint the internal enemy Black. At least once they found out that scapegoating Hispano-Latinas would end in either mass deportations or a crippling pan-Latin@ strike… result the same, that film “A Day Without a Mexican” becomes reality.
Go for it all, Alberto Gonzales said, and Georgy-Porgy — encouraged no doubt by his honoorary-gusano sibling who presides over Florida — said let’s round up some Miami Negroes, and claim they wanted to blow up the Sears Building.
Anyone left who defends these viscious buffoons would defend them if Shrub molested a child on national television. Meanwhile, the legal ground is being sought to practice preemptive war at home.
Sks:
I am willing to bet 100 bucks that somewhere in DC when the Canada arrests of a real cell happened a Republican strategist said that a terrorism arrest was needed, and was needed fast.
From that conclusion, the orders flowed to Brother Jeb.
I dislike conspiranoia profusely (ie I believe 911 was made by fundamentalist jihadis, a plane DID fly into the Pentagon etc), but I am also the result of several generations of political prisioners and radicals:
this one stinks contintelpro all the way, and the setting, away from any hotspot of islamic activity, apparently homegrown, and broken up by low-rent informants rather than by the Canadian chillingly effective and careful police work, well it is just too perfect.
I mean, this is supposed to be the congressional election that decides if bush gets impeached or not… the stakes are just too high.
Watch it, this one is a watergate in the making…
Now, the connection between the immigrant scapegoatng and the Black scapegoating is lucid, but even more complex:
a) there is currently unusually low recuitment of Blacks into the armed forces, and unusually high recruitment of immigrants (putatively seeking citizenship, but there are ideological reasons too).
b) Black talk radio is full of anti-immigrant sentiment, to the point Mumia Abu Jamal has written about it, and this is being played too… in essence a Republican strategy to divide the Democratic base constituencies.
c) it follows on the heels of a brutal slaying on the part of some iraqi resistance cell of a tex-mex soldier from a gunho family. This is being currently played up in latino (should I say hispanic) talk radio to a much higher level than the anti-immigrant stuff is in Black radio: havent seen any polls yet but it looks liek there might be a huge spike in support for the war on terror on the part of latinos.
Divide and conquer. Delivered.â„¢
25 June 2006, 12:04 amlapetrov:
“the gusano Mafia” ==please, elaborate. Who, what, when –the where I got: Miami.
25 June 2006, 6:32 pmStan:
Gusanos (literally “worms”) is a name given to Miami-based anti-Castro Cubans, especialy those from the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), a violent, CIA-supported association that has beeninvolved in scads of illegal covert operations and terrorist actions.
The name was not a perjorative given them by Cuba, as many allege, but from a bunch of propaganda cartoons made by the CIA back in the day, as part of Operation Mongoose, to be broadcast into Cuba, featuring a worm as the narrator, the anticommunist Free Worm (Gusano Libre). Another bit of brilliance by the US intel estasblishment.
They now weild immense political power in Miami-Dade, and constitute a swing vote in Florida for presidential aspirants (haha), who all have to ritually denounce Fidel Castro every four years.
25 June 2006, 7:05 pmLinda Jansen:
Sks, how will this election decide if Bush ges impeached. The Dem leadership has already said they will not go for that. Even Conyers. “So, rather than seeking impeachment, I have chosen to propose comprehensive oversight of these alleged abuses.” May 18, 2006 Washington Post
Guess you’re thinking maverick repubs?
25 June 2006, 8:59 pmpeggy:
Stan, when you put it in words, the whole thing is so transparent. Who could not see? To me it was just a matter of same old same old, and I did not even bother to think about the fact that the arrest of these poor men, with their faces splashed all over everywhere, is a new low for the current administration. It’s like the different divisions of Bush & Co are in a competition with each other to see how low they can go. Hell’s the limit. Or maybe it’s not.
25 June 2006, 10:56 pmRobin Hering:
This case looks a lot like the Forest Gate Raid, where the police fabricated justifications.
Here’s a judge telling the Bush administration that they can’t arbitrarily declare someone an enemy combatant and deny them due process http://www.counterpunch.org/mariner07102003.html
In the Jose Padilla v. Donald Rumsfeld case, there are some messages in the Supreme Court ruling (both majority and dissenting opinions) telling the administration that their time is running out. http://news.findlaw.com/legalnews/us/terrorism/cases/index.html
Unfortunately, this latest group of victims and “examples†is in Florida, where there is usually not a fair trial over anything. (Where also Jeb and Marvin and a few others are scheming up privatized education, so our schools can be run “at low cost†and even more like prisons than they already are, and where tomorrow’s children can be better indoctrinated, more techie and more removed from the land, but that’s another conversation.)
There must be a segment of those in power watching what’s coming down, the creation of a global Palestine, and wondering about their personal safety. I mean, do they all plan to use only private airports, and at what college campus will their children be safe? There are 6.7 Bn souls on this planet, many, many unhappy and turning a wary eye toward Washington and Wall Street, so these people “with standing†make their own world more and more dangerous for themselves.
Lots of soldiers know they’ve been betrayed and even some metropolitan police forces are being denied worker benefits and have themselves been surveilled, don’t like it. People hear about these massive personal data “thefts.†Pensions gutted. Can’t make ends meet. Argentinafication/Iraqification. How much longer before folk add two plus two, learn to “spot the system†and connect the spots/dots, or at minimum register on a subconscious level and begin to detect, finally, the root cause and source of their anxiety, quit taking it out on each other?
CEOs, politicians/political staff and leaders “with standing†aside, there won’t be much sympathy any more for the upper middle class that works for them, or even the middle-middle class on cell phones in trade centers who keep voting for them time after time, and buying their stocks.
Just a guess, but there’ve got to be also a significant population of relatively decent people - analysts, say, who prepare dinner for their kids at night, help them with their homework - at the NSA, FBI, CIA, who smell something rotten by their individual standards.
I’d like to know if the folks running things know that there’s a fine line between general low-grade hate-fatigue tipping point and real desperation. Maybe all the chatter in the NYT about the gap between rich and poor expanding is elitist code for: better beware, we already know what happens when the proletariats get restless, and we still don’t have enough robocops and the space tasers aren’t up to performance, yet. (Or is it private security mercenaries from the Congo on my street corner? Is that why Rumsfeld wrecked the military, in order to privatize it?)
Yes, with regard for the plight of Mssrs Batiste, Phanor, Abraham, Herrera, Augustin, Lemorin, and Augustine - “First they came for the gypsies…â€
25 June 2006, 11:26 pmMaggie:
Great commentary, Stan, but it appears that the neocons are embarassed by their own awkward “con” job. The story has practically disappeared from the headlines. Perhaps it is already relegated to the dustbins of history, the person who wrote this stupid script relegated to sweeping the dustbin and Bush & Co. are back at the drawing board.
Maggie
26 June 2006, 8:28 pmRL Turner:
Stan: I found this guy’s stuff at http://JACKSONVILLE.COM/COMMUNITY/CC/BPVOXEXPRESS. It’s in the local online Times-Union. The guy had a great song and a very on the mark essay and satire about the Miami Terrorists. Check it out. I pasted a few of his items.
“Cheneyeuphemystic,†a new word, and the new HomeGrown Terrorism Song, and Midnight Machine Gun Madness!
SING ALONG with FEELING: HOMEGROWN ON THE RANGE, WHERE THE WANNABE TERR-ORRRR-ISTS PLAY…THEY DON’T LIKE THEIR HOME…THEY JUST WANNA ROAM…CLEAR UP TO THE SKY, PAST THE ELEPHANT’S EYYYYYYE…AND PLANT A FEW BOMBS IN THE SEARS TOWER DOME…OH, IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL MORNIN’…BEFORE IT TURNED INTO A BUMMER-FUL…DAAAAAY! WE ‘VE GOT A REAL SCARY FEELIN’, ‘CAUSE SOMEONE’S SURROUNDIN’ OUR WAY….OH, WHAT A SORROWFUL FEELIN’, NOTHIN’ IS GOIN’ OUR WAAAAAAAAAY! (End with a flourish of brass and drums!)
Gonzales and the White House have been battered for over two months about spying on Americans, for losing the personal data of thousands of U.S. military veterans and enlisted men and women, and for brutally exercising a no “checks and balances†dictatorial administration.
DIVERSIONARY TACTICS 101: So, when they found out the day before that the New York Times’ was going to publish, yet, another story about the government’s invasion of privacy, panic set in and the White House (mostly Dick Cheney) and Gonzales (in his elevated shoes) had to come up with something to take the onus off the privacy/spying issue.
And, what better diversion to create than rounding up so-called in-the-hood terrorists, who just happened to have been under surveillance for nearly ONE YEAR!
more…………
26 June 2006, 11:02 pmDiane:
I wonder how many other Americans find themselves constantly self-checking as I do. Like running a virus scan on the computer for fear of allowing one of the lies fed to us daily to compromise my soul. The hateful crime this government committed against the men in Miami ends whatever residual reservations I may have held regarding “the problem with illegal immigration.”
27 June 2006, 2:37 ampaul whalen:
as a So. Florida resident for over 25 years,let me compliment you on the mast accurate description of Miami ever written.It’s interesting to watch all the fascist comprador flotsam drift onto these shores over the past two decades.To listen to the rants as former plantation owners demand the hacienda back would highly amusing if they weren’t such dangerous scum.
27 June 2006, 11:31 amCharles Brown:
This is not exactly on point for this thread, but I had to share it. Murtha is getting to be another ex-military guy who is busting the system, like Stan.
CB
Murtha Says US Poses Top Threat to World Peace
The South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Sunday 25 June 2006
Miami - American presence in Iraq is more dangerous to world peace than nuclear threats from North Korea or Iran, Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., said to an audience of more than 200 in North Miami Saturday afternoon.
Murtha was the guest speaker at a town hall meeting organized by Rep. Kendrick B. Meek, D-Miami, at Florida International University’s Biscayne Bay Campus.
Meek’s mother, former Rep. Carrie Meek, D-Miami, was also on the panel.
War veterans, local mayors, university students and faculty were in the Mary Ann Wolfe Theatre to listen to the three panelists discuss the war in Iraq for an hour.
A former Marine and a prominent critic of the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq, Murtha reiterated his views that the war cannot be won militarily and needs political solutions. He said the more than 100,000 troops in Iraq should be pulled out immediately, and deployed to peripheral countries like Kuwait.
“We do not want permanent bases in Iraq,” Murtha told the audience. “We want as many Americans out of there as possible.”
Murtha also has publicly said that the shooting of 24 Iraqis in November at Haditha, a city in the Anbar province of western Iraq that has been plagued by insurgents, was wrongfully covered up.
The killings, which sparked an investigation into the deadly encounter and another into whether they were the subject of a cover-up, could undermine U.S. efforts in Iraq more than the prison abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib in 2004, Murtha said.
“(The United States) became the target when Abu Ghraib came along,” Murtha said.
27 June 2006, 2:15 pmDeAnander:
I am not so sure about the Toronto case… the RCMP don’t count as a Reliable Source in my book…
and
as to assassinating Harper, there are more Canadians making bitter jokes on that score than just a few angry young muslim males… particularly since he has adopted the BushCo playbook on secret no-media deliveries of dead Canadian troops from Afghanistan… not the most popular guy, outside the wingnut enclaves.
reasins for skepticism:
who needs conspiracy theories when you have racism and bent cops?
27 June 2006, 4:44 pmComandante Gringo:
The canadian pigs work hand in glove with vigilantes, private goonsquads and spoox, the CDN military and Canadian Legion, legions of informers from all areas of life (kinda like East Germany or the U.S.A. or the U.K. IMO), provocateurs and foreign secret police: to both spy on citizens and residents, and to infiltrate their organizations and to practice all manner of dirty trix. And worse. This is both on-the-record, and not-so-common knowledge. And Gawd knows what we don’t.
Fact is, the canadian secret police do exactly what the U.S. secret police and U.S. military want of them. Nothing they can’t do for Big Brother, eh? They also recruit many police fascists from other countries, most notably Britain and South Afrika and “Commonwealth” countries, but also further afield, apparently. And now, in this climate of insane fear that’s been stirred up in the world, they feel that they can interfere more than ever even in the politix of the country — to the extent that this rogue police apparatus has just had a hand in choosing this present neocon régime by sabotaging the election chances of the previous liberal one. To nary a peep from the media chattering class or professional politicos, I might add…
These goons really must be feeling that it’s now time for them to finally come into their own, indeed. And of course, most people are still having trouble grasping the true nature of the threat that’s posed to what little democracy we have, by these police goons. It probably seems too much like a blockbuster movie to the average suburbanite. Too surreal.
11 July 2006, 4:51 amBut that’s where we’re at.