Dec 25th attempted bombing not a systemic failure but an institutional one

I woke Dec 26th to the startling news that a terrorist attack was launched against a commercial airline. Possible links to the all-ominous "al-Qaeda" were mentioned. Nigeria linked. A plane headed for Detroit, Michigan. Yemen


It seemed a long way from 9/11 and so many suspiciously failed attempts to commit terror on US soil again, and this particular young man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the son of a prominent Nigerian banker, reportedly had the noxious ingredients to do the deed. But once again, he was foiled by his own stupidity.


At any rate, fortune, not the highly funded, bloated US security services had it that the passengers and crew arrived safely for Christmas.



Pres Barack Obama offered a mea culpa, saying this goof was a systemic failure.


But he is as wrong as US Dept of Homeland Security policy, thankfully no longer a secret from the masses after another goof published its Standard Operating Procedures on the Internet.


Inasmuch as this story of the Nigerian would-be bomber is truth, inasmuch as this was an organized terrorist attack, what this represents is an institutional failure, not a systemic one. And the only thing our defense systems are doing is keeping the population in fear so as to continue the evil Bush doctrines of robbing us of our rights in secret trials, secret prisons, renditions, and police powers.

Eight CIA agents will never again celebrate a holiday with their friends and families, and this is sad. But that they were killed in the midst of the US occupation and assault on Afghanistan and the region should give us pause. These agents weren't there to plant crops or dig ditches to install plumbing for clean, running water to the poor villages.

Conventional wisdom out of Washington says they were there protecting the US. Well, they weren't protecting our freedoms, since those seem to continue to get carved away. Wiser more astute heads will recall the history or at least know the earth has no Chosen People, not even the exceptionalist US.

But all that secrecy and why a lone, Nigerian bomber, like Abdulmutallab, (or a small cabal of them) should want to cause destruction on such a holy day must not be answered with cries that they hate our freedoms.


The more unpopular, penetrating question is how are our purportedly noble institutions creating these villains and why should they want to attack our troops, our commercial airlines, and even eight CIA agents.


Could our occupations of huge swaths of the Mideast and Asia have anything to do with it? Might the US support of brutal dictatorships who suppress the people and keep them in a virtual Dark Age of religious superstition? How about those drones who continue to bomb soft targets - that is, neighborhoods, men, women, and children noncombatants? Do these things win hearts and minds, and does the US really care about their hearts or minds unless they are splashed against bullet-riddled masonry?


I cannot intentionally say much factual about this Abdulmutallab, so I do not want to demonize him or aggrandize him into a terrorist attacker. Scores of Black and Brown and Poor people are killed daily in the US, many by the police, but these are diminished in the back pages.

I am intrigued that Abdulmutallab is not the first educated person to be swayed to the supposed Dark Side. John Walker Lindh is serving a 20-year sentence for his role. Another educated American, Anwar al Awlaki, became a convert to Islam and left for Yemen where he embraced Jihad and reportedly met with said Nigerian.

These people aren't motivated by systemic failures and goofs but rather by Western institutions, and we need to face this.

The great purge of 2010

I will give no credit to George Bush, but that he kept his base in tow seems to adhere to a basic political rule. Our new president will celebrate a year in office next month, and in this time he has managed to follow a different course. He has disenchanted, disillusioned, and frankly shat on his base of optimistic supporters.

So the whisper in the streets is that the with this base unmotivated and the right-wing energized, the Republican wing of our ONE party state will resume control of the US Congress in 2010, at minimum. Progressive forces within marginal states could face the guillotine as well.

A purge may be on the horizon in 2010.

I give no credit to Bush because even his base is a coerced concoction. Things like culture wars are set up to divide "them" against "us", satiating their taste buds with the red meat of racist, homophobic attacks. These bases - left and right - are managed with varying skill levels, and in truth do not represent the majority of voting aged in the US: those became disenchanted long ago, as was the goal of the crisis managers of democracy. They were made disenchanted to keep growing, sophisticated populations from making actual demands of their governments.

The next best thing to Siberia is to get that 50% to simply drop out of the system and ease up on the pressure.

Obama. One pundit rightly asked, "where is the community organizer?" His decision last summer to back the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was surprising even to me, who opts for queer liberation and liberation generally vs. equality with the slave, settler state. But in backing DOMA, Obama outraged even the elites of the LBGTQ community, which doesn't show much political sophistication on his part.

Even the managed minorities need red meat, and Obama has not even done this. Iraq. Afghanistan. Guantanamo. LGBT rights. Yes, there are still liberals out in the prairies who continue to sing the praises of this Goldman-Sachs candidate, hope upon hope, and admonish the critics for not "trusting" what may come at the dawn.

I find these optimists, like I find many of our hardcore religious, rather medieval and mystical in their outlook. Imagine if someone were to have said this about George Bush, war criminal: to just wait, trust that these secret prisons will turn out alright.

But I suppose we fundamentally live in a mystical country which has replaced men in priestly robes for men in suits who have bought congressional districts.

If this is true, the coming purge will be shattering to the so-called Left in the US. The gullible masses will see the End of Worlds.

Yes, the pundits will continue to chatter. One more eloquent and glamorous one will ask for the responsible bureaucrat's head on a bed of lettuce. But the base, the voters, the minor activists, the community organizers will be traumatized as Obama's remaining single term (yes) will be driven by the right, and Obama will look less and less competent to do anything but plant a garden on a superfund site.

For my part, I hope this shift drives more than the usual trickle to our active and marginalized Other Parties, like the Peace & Freedom Party, Party for Socialism & Liberation, Socialist Party USA, even the Green Party. That is but one step.

The next is to reform our ballot access and our access to broadcast, official debates, where the public at large can know we have viable, leftist candidates who will not concede the successes of the capitalist coda.

Capitalism is bad for your health, bad for your community, bad for employment. Despite what Ayn Rand told us, there is nothing heroic about the class of people who rape and pillage, literally and metaphorically, to make money off the backs of enslaved poor people. We called those bullies when I was a school teacher. And we can do quite well without these heroes.

Up to the moment, any suggestion of this is met with a corporate press and alternative party inaccessibility. Horror stories about socialism are framed with the myth that we are free and rich.

More than a working class party, the United States is desperate for working class access to the reigns of power.