Confession of a Condor ...

MICMAC blitzkrieg prompts remedial retaliation

By Judge Mark J.Plawecki

On New Year’s Eve, Condor received an unexpected letter from an erstwhile friend who supposedly once wrote a treatise on philosophy while sitting in prison. I reprint in full:

Dear Condor,

I have long grieved silently but can no longer so do. This month, within a span of five days, our foes from MICMAC (that’s Military Industrial Congressional Media Academic Complex lest you’ve forgotten) have hastened to effectively terminate the remnants of our beloved Republic. Between December 9 and 13, the following six-gun assault occurred, perhaps, as Sparty(cus) would imagine, to correspond with the New Year’s Elite Six Bowl Games.

1. On December 9, the Senate Torture Report was released, or at least 525 of its 6,000 otherwise classified pages. The report officially documents in brutal detail what readers of Jane Mayer in “The New Yorker” and Mark Danner in “The New York Review of Books” have known for many years—high U.S. government officials authorized torture of terrorist suspects, then lied about it to Congress. At Nuremberg, the leading Nazi war criminals were hanged. In America, Dick “Take the gloves off” Cheney goes defiantly on “Meet the Press.” The fact that the Obama Administration plans on prosecuting precisely none of these scalawags leaves little doubt that its position is certain MICMACers are above U.S. law and international norms of civilized conduct.

On December 10, the House passed and three days later so did the Senate, the $1.1 trillion spending bill to keep the U.S. government “functioning.” Included were the following gems:

2. Israel was awarded its annual, no-questions asked $3 billion-plus allotment to continue to oppress its illegally occupied Palestinian inhabitants. This occurred less than two months after Israel’s own president stated, “It’s time to honestly admit that Israeli society is sick,” and asked if its Jewish citizens “have forgotten how to be decent human beings.” While making headlines in Israeli newspapers, said comments naturally went unmentioned in MICMAC media. Israeli aid from the U.S. since 1948 now exceeds $130 billion, more than the combined total given to sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Caribbean nations who represent more than one billion people. Israel’s population is 8.2 million.

3. Political donations by the “1% of the 1%,” the approximately 31,000 Americans who heretofore gift 80 percent of the contributions received by both major political parties are obviously insufficient for this group to properly influence matters of concern. Thus, in one stroke, donations were increased tenfold, so that instead of the paltry $32,400 you were thinking of donating to your preferred wing of the One Party System, you may henceforth bequeath a more reasonable $324,000 per election cycle of your hard-earned savings to purchase the politicians of current choice. A natural outgrowth, one might surmise, of the still reverberating money-is-speech ruling by the U.S. Supremes in its Citizens United decision.

4. The de facto Surveillance State long decried by constitutionalists was finally tidied up in law by Congress passing HR 4681 which codifies, for the first time, the government’s ability to collect any citizen’s private communications for any reason (or no reason at all). Congressman Justin Amash, who rallied 99 of his fellow 424 participating representatives to vote nay to this blatant nullification of the 4th Amendment, stated, there is, finally, “statutory authority for the acquisition, retention, and dissemination of U.S. persons’ private communications obtained w/o court order or subpoena.” (Yes, “but there are a record thirty-eight bowl games to watch,” replied Sparty, “and that’s not including the championship game.”)

5. A rule was repealed to allow New York’s real Five Families—J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley—to feed even more frenziedly at the public trough. Previously, banksters (who make up 95 percent of the total derivatives market) had to house some of their derivatives outside of subsidiaries, which are considered less risky and have higher credit ratings by agencies like Moody’s. Now, by stashing the derivatives in the subsidiaries, there is implicit government support, and billions more can be made on higher capital charges. If you enjoyed the financial meltdown of 2008-2009, just wait ‘til the Wall Street Casino brings us the next one.

6. Perhaps most ominously, on December 11, in the span of one (official) second, the House introduced and “unanimously” passed (with three members present) HR 5859, blasting Russia with another round of onerous sanctions, and helping privatize Ukraine’s infrastructure and utilities. This occurred on the same day that the Ukrainian parliament declared itself “a military state.” As former Rep. Dennis Kucinich opines—the Cold War has officially been reignited. Let’s call it Cold War II. To go with our never ending War on Terror, this two-tiered global conflict will continue to provide enormous subsidies for war profiteers, at the expense of the rest of us, for the foreseeable future.

That’s quite a half-week’s work for any cabal, let alone one whose propaganda arm has no intention of drawing attention to its deeds. In response, I propose we start a think tank to counter those in Washington—or better yet an anti-think tank—one that will keep your enlightened readership informed, remembering at all times that “one Marked missile is worth a month of MICMAC misinformation.”

I await your answer.

Anticipatorily,
Boethius (Bo)
–In hiding but nowhere near Snowden
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Mark J. Plawecki is a district court judge in Dearborn Heights. He is president and CEO of the newly formed Ransom Stoddard Institute, an Anti-Think Tank Missile (ATM) dedicated to the proposition that “Nothing’s too good for the man who shot Liberty Valance.”