BridgeGate

It's hard to feel sympathy for a bully who's been shown up to be one. When the New Yorker does a cover with little boy Chris Christie in the foreground, playing with a ball across lanes on backed up GW Bridge, you know something's up.

Chris Christie has high ambitions--to be the great white hope, a "centrist" Republican who wins the Presidency. With his landslide re-election, he seemed well placed: he could appeal to independents and Democrats, too.

But, like Nixon's Watergate, his miss-step was born of hubris: he wanted to "run up the numbers," i.e. win by the largest margin possible. He was doing it by bribing (legally, of course) and threatening, in order to gain endorsements of regionally prominent Democrats, or to discourage the kind of insubordination exhibited by Democratic legislators. While the target of the Fort Lee bridge pile up, most media claim was Fort Lee's mayor, there was also the tangled issue of re-nominating State Supreme Court Justices, in which the majority leader of the NJ Senate, a Democrat from Fort Lee, was at loggerheads with the Governor; Christie publicly referred to the Democratic Senate majority as "animals."

Either Governor Christie knew nothing about the Fort Lee operation to mete out vengeance, meaning he was an inattentive chief executive, who should never have been governor in the first place, or he inspired it (more likely) by a nod and a wink, and attempts to maintain what the CIA calls "deniability."

In either case, crimes were committed, as in Watergate; in this case they involve using public facilities for private purposes, and causing ancillary damage while doing so. It's entirely possible that prosecution will follow.

Even if Christie had no inkling of the plan at Fort Lee, his top-level administrators, and appointees like David "the-same-answer" take-the-Fifth Wildstein, thought that such massive dirty tricks were legitimate. His administration was, at very least, inspired by Christie to retaliate against his perceived enemies by wielding government to harass and frustrate. Perhaps it's his bully-boy persona that inspired his close aides to stage Bridgegate. Is this what a national Christie administration could look like? He could be worse than Nixon, complete with an enemies list and a yen to "get" his opponents. Christie already had a rep for retaliating against people who blocked him. BridgeGate could confirm it.

Christie was the most plausible candidate of the .01%, our contemporary Roman Senators, so he may still be a viable candidate: he could raise enough money to try to wash the Bridgegate stain away, but maybe that's not possible--unless our authoritarian elites remain willing to back him.

Why would they? So far, the only alternatives to surface are right-wing nuts: Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, neither of whom would be trusted by Wall Street. Look for other Republican "moderates" to test the waters. Somebody has to represent the corporate elite, and Democrats are at best unreliable.

Orange is the New Black

Orange is the New Black, the women's prison series, started out with promise: a good story, a well-acted cast of fascinating people. By the last episode in the first season, everyone was a murderer, a psychopath, a lesbian, or all three.

According to Elizabeth Cunningham, Piper Kerman's memoir (same title) is very different, more like both our experiences of people in prison. We volunteered and I taught at several maximum-security New York prisons. I learned to respect and like a good number of inmates. One of the things about Orange… that rang true in the earlier episodes--was the range of attractive characters of every color: from flamboyant to wooden and from highly rational to incoherent.

Why did Netflix squander such a promising series to the point where the main character becomes a violent maniac, and everyone else, including administrators, is corrupt, a murderer, violent, deranged, or a sexual predator?

The last episodes went downhill quickly; they brought to life all the prison stereotypes--of vicious, lying, lusty lesbians. But their actions leading to the horrifying last scene make no sense in terms of the characters as they were initially portrayed. Elizabeth suggested the writers opted for sex and violence; maybe, Netflix pressured them to make it more sensational, i.e. commercial.

What's lost here is any real exploration of a major American problem: the exploding prison population and the growing proportion of incarcerated minorities and immigrants. We imprison more of our people per capita than the worst dictatorships, except for China. Even nations like Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia imprison fewer than we do.

Prisoners, like the characters in the earlier scenes of Orange …, are real people with real quirks, stories and heartaches. Some are bad, most aren't. I encountered one man, famous for a terrible murder, who clearly belonged in prison. I was glad to have a prison guard right outside the partially open door. But he was the exception.

I learned from my 13 year experience teaching college courses there, that a lot of the people in prison were "inside" because of one bad choice in lives that offered many, and that most of them were as decent human beings as the people I encountered "outside." Many, perhaps most, would not have been in prison if they had been white, and living outside of ghettos. And most of my students were handicapped by terrible schools--not the faults of teachers, but of being crammed into classrooms and neighborhoods with too many kids with too many problems. While their command of written English was often spotty, most were bright, interested and motivated.

The waste of a promising venue for prison reform in Orange… parallels the human waste our criminal system imposes on American society: all the energy and talents of real people thrown into the garbage. Their loss reflects our increasingly unequal society, in which our "Roman Senators" accumulate increasing wealth and power at everyone else's expense.

Edward Snowden

Edward Snowden has done a tremendous service to the American people and to the world. He has not profited from his action to steal and divulge millions of government documents. He did so because it was the Government that was lying and committing the greater crimes of violating almost everyone's privacy. He deserves full amnesty, as do Chelsea Manning and others, for revealing CRIMES our government has committed, supposedly in our name. Proven liars like NSA's Clapper should be tried for perjury.



The New York Times wrote an editorial, of which the above is a brief synopsis. Essentially what they and the Progressive community want is to roll back the surveillance state.



Perhaps it's possible, although surveillance corporations will probably circumvent any government limits, and the technology for surveillance has become so powerful that entities with power will use it.



We are all like insects, under giant microscopes.



The last Roman Emperors probably dreamed they'd be able to do stuff like this, but could hardly keep track of the intrigue at court. They resorted, instead, to burning 'miscreants' alive on lamp-posts.

Now our "democracy" threatens Snowden with life in prison and hell, to begin with, just as they visited on Chelsea Manning--for revealing something most dangerous of all: the truth about Government lies.

Hell, Ed Snowden should get not only Amnesty, but the NObel Peace Prize, for revealing the absurdity of our international war culture and embarrassing the bully on the block, the USA.

Maybe peace and stability are still possible.