Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Reveling in the Pain of Others: Moral Degeneracy and Violence in the "Kill Team" Photos

Monday 20 June 2011
by: Henry A. Giroux, Truthout | News Analysis

The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent people.... The coldness of the societal monad, the isolated competitor, was the precondition, as indifference to the fate of others.... Regressive tendencies, that is, people with repressed sadistic traits, are produced everywhere today by the global evolution of society.... Everywhere where it is mutilated, consciousness is reflected back upon the body and the sphere of the corporeal in an unfree form that tends toward violence. -Theodor Adorno

War, violence and death have become the organizing principle of governance and culture in the United States as we move into the second decade of the 21st century. Lacking a language for the social good, the very concept of the social as a space in which justice, equality, social protections and a responsibility to the other mediate everyday life is being refigured through a spectacle of violence and cruelty. Under such circumstances, ethical considerations and social costs are removed from market-driven policies and values just as images of human suffering are increasingly abstracted from not only their social and political contexts, but also the conditions that make such suffering possible. Moreover, as public issues collapse into privatized considerations, matters of agency, responsibility and ethics are now framed within the discourse of extreme individualism. Unexpected violence, aggression and the "'masculine' virtues of toughness, strength, decisiveness and determination ... are accentuated," along with the claims of vengeance, militarization and violence.(1) The collapse of the social and the formative culture that make human bonds possible is now outmatched by the rise of a Darwinian ethic of greed and self-interest in which violence, aggressiveness and sadism have become the primary metric for living and dying. As the social contract is replaced by social collapse, a culture of depravity has emerged in American society. The spectacle of violence permeates every aspect of the machinery of cultural production and screen culture - extending from television news and reality TV to the latest Hollywood fare. Of course, this is not new. What is new is that more and more people desire spectacles of high-intensity violence and images of death, mutilation and suffering and their desires should no longer be attributed to an individual aberration, but instead suggest an increasingly widespread social pathology.

Death and violence have become the mediating link between US domestic policy - the state's treatment of its own citizens - and foreign policy, between the tedium of ever expanding workdays and the thrill of sadistic release. Disposable bodies now waste away in American prisons, schools and shelters just as they litter the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. America has become a permanent warfare state, with a deep investment in a cultural politics and the corollary cultural apparatuses that legitimate and sanctify its machinery of death. The American public's fascination with violence and death is evident in the recent popular obsession with high-octane action films, along with the ever-expanding volume of vampire and zombie films, TV shows and books. We also see death-dealing and violent acts accrue popularity with Hollywood films such as the 2010 academy-award winning "The Hurt Locker," in which the American bomb disposal expert, William James (Jeremy Renner), repeatedly puts himself at risk in the face of defusing various bomb threats - thus to highlight the filmmaker's concern with a growing "addiction" to war. As Mark Featherstone points out, there is more represented here than the reckless behavior of immature and hyper-masculine soldiers. He writes, "James takes unnecessary risks and lives for the limit experience.... [H]e feels most alive when he is closest to death ... When James ... throws the bomb suit away and stands before the bomb with no protection, he puts himself at the mercy of the bomb, the embodiment of the death drive."(2)

"The Hurt Locker" is only one of a number of serious films that address, if not mirror, a psychological state in which the production of a virulent masculinity now augurs both a pathological relationship with the body, pain and violence and a disdain for compassion, human rights and social justice. The death drive in American society has become one of its fundamental characteristics and, undoubtedly, its most disabling pathology. More than a trace of this mode of aggression and moral indifference now dominates contemporary American life. Marked by a virulent notion of hardness and aggressive masculinity, a culture of depravity has become commonplace in a society in which pain, humiliation and abuse are condensed into digestible spectacles of violence endlessly circulated through extreme sports, reality TV, video games, YouTube postings and proliferating forms of the new and old media. But the ideology of hardness and the economy of pleasure it justifies are also present in the material relations of power that have intensified since the Reagan presidency, when a shift in government policies first took place and set the stage for the emergence of an unchecked regime of torture and state violence under the Bush-Cheney regime. Conservative and liberal politicians alike now spend millions waging wars around the globe, funding the largest military state in the world, providing huge tax benefits to the ultra-rich and major corporations, and all the while draining public coffers, increasing the scale of human poverty and misery and eliminating all viable public spheres - whether they be the social state, public schools, public transportation, or any other aspect of a formative culture that addresses the needs of the common good.

Mainstream politicians now call for cutbacks in public funding in order to address the pressing problems of the very deficit they not only created, but gladly embrace, since it provides an excuse either to drastically reduce funding for vital entitlements such as Medicare and early childhood education or to privatize public education, transportation, and other public services, while putting more money into the hands of the rich and powerful. The real deficit here is one of truth and morality. The politics of austerity has now become a discourse for eviscerating the social state and forcing upon cities, families and individuals previously unimaginable levels of precarity, suffering and insecurity. As Rania Khalek points out, conservatives want to "exploit the budget crisis in order to starve government…. The truth is that the economic crisis, sparked by decades of deregulation and greedy financial forms, caused high levels of unemployment that dramatically reduced state and local tax revenues. Add to that years of tax cuts for the wealthy and decades of corporate tax-dodging and you've got yourself a budget crisis."(3) The discourse of "deficit porn" now justifies the shift in public policy and state funding further away from providing social protections and safeguarding civil liberties toward the establishment of legislative programs intent on promoting shared fears and increasing disciplinary modes of governance that rely on the criminalization of social problems.(4)

The broader cultural turn toward the death drive and the strange economy of desire it produces is also evident in the emergence of a culture of depravity in which the American public appears more and more amenable to deriving pleasure from images that portray gratuitous violence and calamity. As mentioned above, exaggerated violence now rules screen culture. The public pedagogy of entertainment includes extreme images of violence, human suffering and torture splashed across giant movie screens, some in 3D, offering viewers every imaginable portrayal of violent acts, each more shocking and brutal than the last. The growing taste for sadism can be seen in the recent fascination on the part of the media with Peter Moskos' book "In Defense of Flogging," in which the author seriously proposes that prisoners be given a choice between a standard sentence and a number of lashes administered in public.(5) In the name of reform, Moskos argues, without any irony, that public flogging is more honest and a sure-fire way of reducing the prison population. Not only is this book being given massive air time in the mainstream media, but its advocacy of corporal punishment and flogging is treated as if it is a legitimate proposal for reform. Mind-crushing punishment is presented as the only choice left for prisoners outside of serving their sentences. Moreover, this medieval type of punishment inflicts pain on the body as part of a public spectacle. Moskos seems to miss how the legacy of slavery informs his proposal, given that flogging was one of the preferred punishments handed out to slaves and that 70 percent of all current prisoners in the United States are people of color. Surely, the next step will be a reality TV franchise in which millions tune in to watch public floggings. This is not merely barbarism parading as reform - it is also a blatant indicator of the degree to which sadism and the infatuation with violence have become normalized in a society that seems to take delight in dehumanizing itself.

As the social is devalued along with rationality, ethics and any vestige of democracy, spectacles of violence and brutality now merge into forms of collective pleasure that constitute what I believe is an important and new symbiosis among visual pleasure, violence and suffering. As I have suggested, taking pleasure in violence can no longer be reduced to a matter of individual pathology, but registers a larger economy of pleasure across the broader culture and social landscape. The consumption of images of human pain as a matter of personal pleasure and taste has given way to representations of human suffering, humiliation and death that circulate across the culture as part of the collective indulgence in gross spectacles that persist in being called entertainment, news and knowledge sharing. What is more, privatized pleasures and violence translate increasingly into forms of structural violence that are mobilized by the death drive and use the spectacles of violence to generate a source of gratification and intense socially experienced pleasure. Amplified sadism and voyeurism are now characteristic of a contemporary society that has narrowed the range of social expression and values to the receipt of instant gratification and the pursuit of pleasure as one of its sole imperatives. As images of degradation and human suffering become more palatable and pleasurable, the body no longer becomes the privileged space of agency, but "the location of violence, crime and social pathology."(6) Americans now find themselves in the midst of a brutal authoritarianism in which freedom is reduced to the narrow realm of individual needs, narcissistic pleasures and the removal of all forms of social responsibility, particularly those imposed by the government. Sovereignty and governance, under the guise of "personal choice," are instead produced and defined by the market and the power of large corporations and financial institutions. As decadence and despair are normalized in the wider culture, people are increasingly exploited for their pleasure quotient, while any viable notion of the social is subordinated to the violence of a deregulated market economy and its ongoing production of a culture of cruelty.(7) For all intents and purposes, politics as a matter of public governance is dead in the United States.

How else to explain the insistent demand by many conservative and liberal pundits and the American public at large that the government release the grisly images of Osama bin Laden's corpse, even though the fact of his assassination was never in doubt? How might we understand the growing support among the American populace for state-sanctioned torture and the rising indifference to images which reveal its horrible injustices? Just as torture is sanctioned by the state and becomes normalized for many Americans, the spectacle of violence spreads through the culture with ever-greater intensity. Whatever bleeds - now gratuitously and luxuriously - brings in box office profits and dominates media headlines, despite being often presented without any viable context for making sense of the imagery, or any critical commentary that might undercut or rupture the pleasure viewers are invited to derive from such images. Representations of violence and human tragedy now merge seamlessly with neoliberalism's culture of depravity in which risk and mayhem reinforce shared fears rather than shared responsibilities and a Hobbesian war of all against all becomes the organizing principle for structuring a vast array of institutions and social relations.

As corporate capitalism translates into corporate fascism, prominent politicians such as Sarah Palin, radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and media monopoly moguls such as those who deliver Fox News repeatedly deploy the vocabulary of violence to attack the social state, labor unions, immigrants, young people, teachers and public-service employees. At the same time, the depravity of aesthetics gains popular currency in organs of the dominant media that reproduce an endless stream of denigrating images and narratives of people constrained by the forces of poverty, racism and disability. Their pain and suffering now become a source of delight for late-night comics, radio talk show hosts and TV programs that provide ample narratives and images of poor families, individuals and communities who become fodder for the "poverty porn" industry.(8) Programs such as the reality TV series "Jersey Shore," the syndicated tabloid TV talk show series "The Jerry Springer Show" (and its endless imitators) and "The Biggest Loser" all exemplify what Gerry Mooney and Lynn Hancock claim is a massive "assault on people experiencing poverty [seizing] on any example of 'dysfunctionality' in poor working class communities ... [exhibiting] expressions of middle-class fears and distrust, [while] also [displaying] a fascination with poverty and the supposedly deviant lifestyles of those affected - where viewers of moral outrage are encouraged to find the worst and weakest moments of people's lives also funny and entertaining."(9) Disconnected from any moral criteria, the search for ever more intense levels of sensation and excitation become the pedagogical and performative force par excellence in shaping the world of entertainment. Within this context, the pleasure of humiliation and violence is maximized and cruelty is elevated to a structuring principle of society.

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What has led to this immunity and insensitivity to cruelty and prurient images of violence? Part of this process is due to the fact that the American public is bombarded by an unprecedented "huge volume of exposure to ... images of human suffering."(10) As Zygmunt Bauman argues, there are social costs that come with this immersion of the culture in staged violence. One consequence is that "the sheer numbers and monotony of images may have a 'wearing off' impact [and] to stave off the 'viewing fatigue,' they must be increasingly gory, shocking and otherwise 'inventive' to arouse any sentiments at all or indeed draw attention. The level of 'familiar' violence, below which the cruelty of cruel acts escapes attention, is constantly rising."(11) Hyper-violence and spectacular representations of cruelty disrupt and block our ability to respond politically and ethically to the violence as it's actually happening on the ground. In this instance, unfamiliar violence such as extreme images of torture and death becomes banally familiar, while familiar violence that occurs daily is barely recognized, becoming, if not boring, then relegated to the realm of the unnoticeable and unnoticed. An increasing volume of violence is pumped into the culture as yesterday's spine-chilling and nerve-wrenching violence loses its shock value. As the need for more intense images of violence accumulates, the moral indifference and desensitization to violence grow, while matters of cruelty and suffering are offered up as fodder for sports, entertainment, news media, and other outlets for seeking pleasure.

Under the regime of neoliberal policies, relations and values, profit-making becomes the only legitimate mode of exchange; private interests replace public concerns; and unbridled individualism infects a society in which the vocabulary of fear, competition, war and punishment governs existing relationships. Within an economy of pleasure and commodification, freedom is subsumed by a calculated deficit that reduces agency to a regressive infantilism and degraded forms of gratification. What Leo Lowenthal called "the atomization of the individual" bespeaks a figure now terrorized by other human beings and reduced to living "in a state of stupor, in a moral coma."(12) This type of depoliticized inward thinking - with its repudiation of the obligations of shared sociality, disengagement from moral responsibility and outright disdain for those who are disadvantaged by virtue of being poor, young or elderly - does more than fuel the harsh, militarized and ultra-masculine logic of the news and entertainment sector. This "atomization of the individual" also elevates death over life, selfishness over compassion and economics over politics. The spectrum of disdain and vulnerability has been extended at the current historical moment to contempt for life itself. Life reduced to "bare life" and the vulnerability it produces elicits imperviousness at best and a new kind of pleasure at worst. Precarity, uncertainty and misfortune no longer evoke compassion but disdain, while simultaneously opening up a space in which vulnerability offers a pretext for forms of pleasure that reinforce a culture of cruelty.(13) But even more so, it produces a kind of dysfunctional silence in American society in the face of widespread hardship and suffering - virtually wiping out society's collective memories of moral decency and mutuality.

The merging of violence and pleasure has been on full display throughout American history, though images of such depravities have often been hidden. Exceptions can be found in the history of racism and the startling and disturbing images of the public lynching of African-Americans, the brutal murder of Emmett Till and the mass killings at My Lai depicted in photographs of American soldiers relaxing and smiling after the carnage. More recently, a number of photographs have once again surfaced which display grotesque acts of violence and murder by a select group of American soldiers stationed in Afghanistan. The images released by Rolling Stone magazine in the United States focused on the murderous actions of 12 US soldiers, who decided to kill Afghan civilians allegedly for sport. They used the moniker "The Kill Team" to refer to themselves, aptly registering both the group's motivation and its monstrous actions. In the five months during which these soldiers went on a murderous rampage in Kandahar Province, writes one reporter, "they engaged in routine substance abuse and brutality toward Afghan locals that led to four premeditated murders of innocent civilians, the ritual mutilation of corpses (some of the soldiers reportedly severed fingers from their victims to keep as trophies) and the snapping of celebratory photographs alongside the deceased as if they were bagged deer."(14) The soldiers' actions exhibited their immersion in a death-driven culture that differs only in degree from the one I have been documenting throughout this article. Their actions were neither isolated nor individualized, but reflect their evident belief that killing for sport in such a culture could take place with impunity. Proudly bearing the title "Kill Team" registers "the pure depravity of the alleged crimes."(15) In one particularly disturbing photo celebrating a kill, one of the soldiers, Jeremy Morlock, is shown posing with the body of Gul Mudin, a 15-year-old Afghan boy. With a grin on his face and a thumbs-up sign, Morlock is kneeling on the ground next to Mudin's bloody and half-naked corpse, grabbing a handful of hair to lift up his bloodied face.

The platoon's squad leader, Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, was so pleased with the kill that he desecrated the young boy's dead body by severing one of his fingers. Mark Boal quotes one soldier's account of the incident: "'It was like another day at the office for him'.... Gibbs started 'messing around with the kid, moving his arms and mouth and acting like the kid was talking.'" Boal adds, "Then, using a pair of razor-sharp medic's shears, [Gibbs] reportedly sliced off the dead boy's pinky finger and gave it to [the soldier], as a trophy for killing his first Afghan."(16) Gibbs' instinct for barbarism appears utterly ruthless and lacking in any sense of ethical consideration or self-reflection - to say nothing of the political and social costs incurred by the US-led mission. The staff sergeant was so intent on killing Afghan civilians that he actually boasted about it, telling one soldier, "Come down to the line and we'll find someone to kill."(17) Revealing the depth of his inhumanity, Gibbs reportedly told his soldiers that all Afghans were savages, and talked to his squad about how they might be inventive in killing civilians. In one almost unbelievable scenario, the soldiers considered throwing "candy out of a Stryker vehicle as they drove through a village and shoot[ing] the children who came running to pick up the sweets. According to one soldier, they also talked about a second scenario in which they 'would throw candy out in front and in the rear of the Stryker; the Stryker would then run the children over.'"(18)

Unlike the Abu Ghraib prison photos that were designed to humiliate detainees, the "Kill Team" photos suggest a deeper depravity, an intense pleasure in acts of violence that are preplanned and carried out with no impending threat, culminating in the sadistic collection of body parts of the slain victims as trophies. The "Kill Team" was after more than humiliation and the objectification of the other; it harbored a deep desire to feel intense excitement through pathological acts of murder and then captured the savagery in photos that served as mementos, so they could revisit and experience once again the delight that comes with descending into the sordid pornographic hell that connects violence, pleasure and death. The smiles on the faces of the young soldiers as they posed among their trophy killings are not the snapshots of privatized violence, but images of sadism that are symptoms of a social pathology in which shared pleasure in violence is now commonplace. As my colleague David L. Clark points out, the smiles on the faces of these soldiers suggest something perverse and alarming. He writes, "This isn't Hannibal Lecter, after all, but G.I. Joe [and these photos appear as] symptomatic evidence of a certain public enjoyment of violence for the sake of violence, i.e., not the smile of shared pleasures between intimates (one form of the everyday), but a smile that marks a broader acceptance and affirmation of cruelty, killing for sport. Those smiles register a knowing pleasure in that violence and say that it is okay to kill and okay to take pleasure in that killing."(19)

The "Kill Team" photographs are important because they signify a new register of what can be called a failed sociality. In this instance, the social does not disappear as much as it is overwritten by a sociality of shared violence - a sociality marked not by the injurious violence of the lone sociopath, but instead by a growing army of sociopaths. The "Kill Team" photographs offer a glimpse into a larger set of social conditions in a winner-take-all society in which it becomes difficult to imagine pleasure in any other terms except through the spectacle of violence buttressed by a market-driven culture and dominated by a survivalist ethic. What is it about these photos that reveals the smear of the pornographic, a titillation grounded in maximizing the pleasure of violence? What are the political, economic and social forces bearing down on American society that so easily undercut its potential to raise critical questions about war, violence, morality and human suffering? What forms of responsibility and what pedagogical strategies does one invoke in the face of a society that feeds off spectacles of violence and cruelty? What forms of witnessing and education might be called into play in which the feelings of pleasure mobilized by images of human suffering can be used as "a catalyst for critical inquiry and deep thought?"(20) Rather than being reduced to a mechanism for the cathartic release of pleasure, a society saturated in the claims of violence, war, aggression and poisonous modes of masculinity must serve as an indictment, a source of memory and evidence of the need to imagine otherwise.

In contrast to the "Kill Team" photos, we have seen images from Libya, Syria and Iran where the murder of young students and other protesters by state militia thugs have been captured on video and circulated the world over. Such images become a pedagogical tool, a critical mode of public pedagogy capable of forms of witnessing that allow people to imagine the unimaginable. What is emancipatory about these images, as Georges Didi-Huberman points out in a different context, is that they work to refuse what he calls the "disimagination machine"; that is, these are images that are "images in spite of all" - bearing witness to a different and critical sense of remembering, agency, ethics and collective resistance.(21) These images have ignited massive collective protests against repressive governments. Such images did not feed the basest of collective desires and pleasurable fantasies detached from any real consequences. To the contrary, such images of abuse and suffering have inflamed a society in which a formative culture exists that enables people to connect emotional investments and desires to a politics in which unthinkable acts of violence are confronted as part of a larger "commitment to political accountability, community and the importance of positive affect for both belonging and change."(22)

America has lost the formative culture that would allow us to contest, challenge and transform the prevailing culture of unbridled individualism, consumerism, militarism and desire for instant pleasure. Both major political parties now impose harsh penalties on the poor, young people, the elderly, immigrants, and other groups considered disposable. We are on the brink of an authoritarianism in which war and violence not only cause unbearable hardship and suffering for the vast majority of the American people, but also produce a larger social pathology in which the actions of the "Kill Team" soldiers who sought out pleasure in the most vile and grotesque acts of violence are symptomatic of something that is becoming normalized and commonplace in American society. This is a violence being waged against democracy and the public good, one that feeds on mobilization of desires and collective pleasures in the face of the suffering of others.

Footnotes:

1. Richard J. Bernstein, The Abuse of Evil (London: Polity, 2005), p. 49.

2. Mark Featherstone, "The Hurt Locker: What is the Death Drive?" Sociology and Criminology at Keele University - Blogspot (February 25, 2010). Online here.

3. Rania Khalek, "Death by Budget Cut: Why Conservatives and Some Dems Have Blood on their Hands," AlterNet (June 13, 2011). Online here.

4. See, for instance, Loic Wacquant, "Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity," (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).

5. Peter Moskos, "In Defense of Flogging," (New York: Basic Books, 2011).

6. Paul Gilroy, "'After the Love Has Gone': Bio-Politics and Ethepoetics in the Black Public Sphere," Public Culture 7:1 (1994), p. 58.

7. I take up in great detail the notion of a culture of cruelty in Henry A. Giroux, "Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism," (New York: Peter Lang, 2011).

8. I have taken the term "poverty porn" from Gerry Mooney and Lynn Hancock, "Poverty Porn and the Broken Society," Variant 39/40 (Winter 2010). Online here.

9. Ibid.

10. Zygmunt Bauman, "Life in Fragments," (Malden: Blackwell, 1995), p. 149.

11. Zygmunt Bauman, "Life in Fragments," (Malden: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 149-150.

12. Leo Lowenthal, "Atomization of Man," False Prophets: Studies in Authoritarianism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1987), p. 182.

13. Judith Butler touches on this issue in Judith Butler, "Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence," (London: Verso Press, 2004).

14. Jim Frederick, "Anatomy of a War Crime: Behind the Enabling of the 'Kill Team,'" Time (March 29, 2011). Online here.

15. Ibid.

16. Mark Boal, "The Kill Team," Rolling Stone, (March 27, 2011). Online here.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

19. David L. Clark, personal correspondence, May 15, 2011.

20. Mieke Bal, "The Pain Of Images," in "Beautiful Suffering," ed. Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards and Erina Duganne (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 111.

21. Georges Didi-Huberman, "Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz," trans. Shane B. Lillis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), pp. 1-2.

22. Clare Hemmings, "Invoking Affect: Cultural Theory and the Ontological Turn," Cultural Studies 19:5 (September 2005), pp. 557-558.

http://truth-out.org/reveling-pain-others-moral-degeneracy-and-violence-kill-team-photos/1308333080

US soldier admits killing unarmed Afghans for sport

Jeremy Morlock, 23, tells US military court he was part of a 'kill team' that faked combat situations to murder Afghan civilians

* Paul Harris in New York
* guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 23 March 2011 23.17 GMT



An American soldier has pleaded guilty to being part of a "kill team" who deliberately murdered Afghan civilians for sport last year.

Army Specialist Jeremy Morlock, 23, told a military court he had helped to kill three unarmed Afghans. "The plan was to kill people, sir," he told an army judge in Fort Lea, near Seattle, after his plea.

The case has caused outraged headlines around the world. In a series of videotaped confessions to investigators, some of which have been broadcast on American television, Morlock detailed how he and other members of his Stryker brigade set up and faked combat situations so that they could kill civilians who posed no threat to them. Four other soldiers are still to come to trial over the incidents.

The case is a PR disaster for America's military and has been compared to the notorious incidents of torture that emerged from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. This week the German magazine Der Spiegel published three pictures that showed American soldiers, including Morlock, posing with the corpse of a young Afghan boy as if it were a hunting trophy.

Some soldiers apparently kept body parts of their victims, including a skull, as souvenirs. In a statement issued in response to the publication of the photos the US army apologised to the families of the dead. "[The photos are] repugnant to us as human beings and contrary to the standards and values of the United States army," the statement said.

Morlock has told investigators that the murders took place between January and May last year and were instigated by an officer in his unit, Staff Sergeant Calvin Gibbs. He described how elaborate plans were made to pick out civilian targets, kill them and then make their deaths look like they were insurgents. In his confession Morlock described shooting a victim as Gibbs tossed a grenade at him. "We identify a guy. Gibbs makes a comment, like, you know, you guys wanna wax this guy or not," Morlock said in the confession.

Morlock now stands to be sentenced to at least 24 years in jail but with eligibility for parole after seven years. That has come about because Morlock struck a plea bargain that will see a lighter sentence in return for testifying against his fellow soldiers.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/23/us-soldier-admits-killing-afghans/print

Wisconsin, Inc.: New Republican Politics in the Age of the Recall

By Abe Sauer | June 16, 2011

James Smith said that, at first, he was worried about a backlash. "No one protested my house yet," he said. "I thought that was coming for sure this weekend."

A 25-year-old behemoth redhead, Smith works as a technician at Gundersen Lutheran Medical Center. His Facebook page says he's a fan of Rachel Maddow. His real Facebook page describes him very differently. He's a Republican who is running for office in Wisconsin. He's a would-be spoiler.

What Smith doesn't know is that he is being sacrificed, like so much else, by a rogue Wisconsin Republican Party determined to monetize as much of the state as possible before everyone gets recalled. Iron ore. Internet access. Human beings. It doesn't matter. Welcome to Wisconsin, Inc.

To get to La Crosse, you follow Interstate 90, going northwest out of Madison, and it's a good highway, and often new. On the banks of the Mississippi River, just across from the People's Republic of Minnesota, it's a wet University town that just decriminalized limited marijuana possession. It's hard to believe that inside such a leafy quaint place some of the dirtiest politics in the nation are brewing.

The outraged thousands who descended on Madison in March have fulfilled a promise, triggering recall elections for nearly a third of the state's senators.

With recalls certified for nine senators (six Republican; three Democratic), the impatient Republican majority has called a rare "extraordinary session" to punch through the collective bargaining prohibitions of the budget bill. But just as the session started, the state's highest court ruled, speedily, in favor of the bill's passage. The most surprising part of the court's ruling was the dissenting opinion, in which the Chief Justice, in no uncertain terms, accused the majority of disinformation: that the ruling "set forth their own version of facts without evidence."

That may sound tame by the screaming hyena standard of cable news political discourse, but in the legal world, it's a bona fide scandal and finally confirms that everything in Wisconsin, from the highest court in the land to the dirt, has become rabidly partisaned.

The promiscuous nature of the emergency session may also be used to pass as many bills as possible before recall elections potentially shift the power in the senate.

To stall the recall elections, the state Republican Party has openly admitted it will run "spoiler" candidates in the Republican recalls, in order to force a Democratic primary and postpone, for a month, the general elections. Those who made "consequences" a rallying cry after November 2010, are suddenly not so fond of the concept.

The spoiler candidate strategy is a move many Wisconsin voters find distasteful. And yet: the Wisconsin Democratic Party appears eager to bite. "We cannot and will not stoop to the Republicans' level by encouraging candidates to lie about their party affiliation, or recommending that people try to deceive voters," said Dem Chair, Mike Tate—and then announced that the party will run "placeholder" candidates to force primary elections in all six of the Democratic recalls.

Not only are the Democrats apparently so dense they think Wisconsin voters will punish the Republicans for the financial irresponsibility of "spoiler" candidates but not the Dems for "placeholders," but also, as state Republicans have rightly pointed out, it's pretty rich for the Dems to take the high road.

In the 2010 race for the 25th Assembly District representative, a candidate recruited by the AFSCME union got on the ballot as a Republican in an attempt to split the conservative vote against Rep. Bob Ziegelbauer. (The tactic didn't work.)

Meanwhile, as both sides complain about how best to fix the state budget shortfall, these placeholding spoilers will cost the respective counties about $45,000 per election, meaning the forced primaries will cost Wisconsin taxpayers more than $400,000 on top of the $400,000-plus for the general recall elections.

Especially for the "fiscally responsible" Republicans, this stunt seems indefensible.

Wisconsin Republican Party executive director Stephan Thompson has claimed that the "protest candidates" are being used because GOP incumbents are disadvantaged by the fact that Democratic challengers can campaign, while the recalled senators must continue working in Madison. But in La Crosse, for example, recalled GOP Senator Dan Kapanke's challenger is Rep. Jennifer Shilling, a current legislator. The same is true of Republican Senator Alberta Darling, who is being challenged by current Democratic Representative Sandra Pasch.

One election where a senator is, by Thomas' definition, "disadvantaged," is the recall election of Republican Senator Rob Cowles, who is being challenged by fake Democrat Otto Junkerman. Junkerman, who is 82 and a former Republican state representative, once described on the House floor how he had turned in his own son for using and selling drugs, after which, his wife left him.

Fake Democrat John Buckstaff hates Wisconsin so much he took out a $3,600 ad in the Wall Street Journal in 1986, complaining about the business climate and advocating people "escape" the state. That came a year after his business was sued by the Department of Natural Resources for air pollution.

The Republicans have also put up another octogenarian, Gladys Huber, formerly an Ozaukee County Republican Party board member, as a Democrat—forcing a primary and moving the general recall election of Alberta Darling to August. Other longtime Republicans who will run as Democrats include 65-year-old Rol Church and John Buckstaff. Both retirees, the former was a financial backer for "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" and the latter is a self-made business leader in that he made himself by selling the huge furniture corporation he inherited. Buckstaff hates Wisconsin so much he took out a $3,600 ad in the Wall Street Journal in 1986, complaining about the business climate and advocating people "escape" the state. That came a year after his business was sued by the Department of Natural Resources for air pollution.

What almost all of the recruited Republicans have in common is that they do not need to worry about living down their actions, even if they do have to worry about living through the campaign.

All but James Smith.

* * *

Born in 1985, it's not difficult to see how James Smith got himself into this mess. A Republican groupie, Smith is painfully willing to please the Republican party he fetishizes. Smith's real—as in, private—Facebook page features photo after photo of him standing alongside Paul Ryan, Wisconsin Lt. Governor Rebecca Kleefisch, Newt Gingrich, Senator Ron Johnson, Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen and Governor Scott Walker. And there he is next to Dan Kapanke, the recalled Republican Senator that Smith resigned his local GOP post to register as a Democrat to run against.

James Smith worked on Governor Scott Walker's election. He was a delegate to the Republican State Convention. It was a week ago that he resigned his position on the La Crosse County Republican Party Executive Committee and filed as a Democratic candidate for partisan state office. Smith admits that the candidacy was arranged by the state party. The fake Facebook page, Smith said, was done by himself, "for the fun of it."

The most generous possible way to describe him is naive. James Smith is what would happen if Lennie from Of Mice and Men somehow became involved in All the King's Men.

Smith told me that the state Republican office, with which he spoke before announcing his candidacy, helped him get signatures for his nomination papers. Needing only 400, he already had more than 600 on Sunday. He told me he's shooting for 800, though, because he expects many of them will be challenged. Smith received many of these signatures thanks to a letter circulated on his behalf by the 3rd District Republican Party Chair, Maripat Krueger. The letter asking for signatures, dated June 3 and signed by Krueger, also read "Paid for by Friends of James Smith, James Smith, Treasurer."

Yet, on June 14, Smith told me he had not raised any money. When I asked him where the money came from for "Friends of James Smith," Smith said, "I don't know." He is also unsure how he became treasurer.

Neither Krueger nor the 3rd District Republican Party responded to requests for comment.

By just getting on the ballot and forcing a primary, his candidacy is already successful, which means he is no longer necessary. Like the other dull patsies, Smith has been suckered into doing something the rest of the state's Republican leadership supports, but is too spineless and self-preservationist to volunteer for themselves.

Smith's future political career, whatever he imagined for himself, is ruined—and Smith's unmistakable physical stature makes it impossible for him to blend in anywhere.

A lifelong resident of La Crosse, James Smith's name is mud. The local newspaper has a steady stream of letters to the editor, such as June 10's "Smith should be ashamed of actions." At 25, he's a local villain in a town of 50,000, the kind of small place where people traditionally try and keep a low profile. A Willie Stark who never quite figures out what Tiny Duffy is up to, Smith's future political career, whatever he imagined for himself, is ruined—and Smith's unmistakable physical stature makes it impossible for him to blend in anywhere.

Smith plays a far larger role in the Republican strategy than he probably understands. Dan Kapanke, the senator for whom Smith is throwing himself on a grenade, will be removed by a grenade coming soon after. Kapanke is the most vulnerable of the recalled senators, and he knows it. During the height of the Madison protests, Kapanke claimed that protestors had smashed his windshield, despite police reports that noted the small chip was "consistent with a stone being picked up from another vehicle tire and launched into the air." More recently, Kapanke was recorded saying “We’ve got tons of government workers in my district. Tons.... We gotta hope that they, kind of, are sleeping on July 12th. Or whenever the date is.” As expected, Kapanke's continents didn't take kindly to their elected representatives pinning hopes on their sleeping habits.

In what was largely seen as a referendum on Governor Walker in April, La Crosse County went for unknown challenger Joanne Kloppenburg against sitting Supreme Court Judge David Prosser. Just after that, a special election to fill the seat of 16-year incumbent Republican Representative Mike Huebsch was won by a Democrat.

At a "chicken Q" fundraiser at the Concordia polka hall in La Crosse, I listened as Shilling, alongside new rock star, state Senator Jon Erpenbach, addressed hundreds and banged away on the Democrats' latest winning strategy: Paul Ryan's Medicare plan. Tying Kapanke to the Republican plan to gut the entitlement will play no worse in Wisconsin than it did in Buffalo. Even the Republicans know this—fellow Wisconsinite Paul Ryan was suddenly removed as a guest at a Kapanke recall fundraiser in May.

Three of the ten people I spoke with at the "chicken Q" admitted they had voted for Walker and Kapanke. La Crosse County—Democrat from the waist up, Republican from the waist down—went for Walker in the 2010 gubernatorial election. It won't do it again.

The most telling example of Kapnake's future is the yard signs. Throughout La Crosse, I saw Shilling for Senate signs everywhere. After several days in town, I had counted only four Kapanake yard signs. During my visit to the La Crosse Republican Party's office, I spied piles of Kapanke signs piled up in the back room, gathering dust. Meanwhile, a month before the July 12 election date, the Shilling campaign posted on its Facebook page that it was currently out of yard signs, its second batch, but that it was printing more.

For the current herd of Republican legislators, James Smith is just a resource. Dug from the ground, sucked from a river, recruited via a conference call, it's all just a natural resource that desperately wants to be capitalized. This new strain of Republican is not one Wisconsin, nor the United States, has ever seen. Gone is the Republican who, in genuinely wanting the best for Wisconsin, cut corners and chomped cigars with captains of industry, rolling the silk purse strings in his fingers in an attempt to balance the sort of corporate patronage that had ever been. The new Republicans are corporate wrecking crews, given a sledgehammer, a piece of legislation and a command to "make it fit."

They're making it fit. All of it.

* * *

Madison. Since election, Governor Walker is fond of saying the state is now "open for business." But Wisconsin isn't just opening up to business, it's becoming business, where human and natural resources are valued only immediately as commodities.

Late in the draft process, the University Omnibus legislation suddenly swelled with provisions that would force the University of Wisconsin system to cease support of WiscNet, a high-speed Internet network started in 1989 and now servicing schools, hospitals and municipal governments statewide. The provision forces the UW to return more than $37 million in federal funding to expand the service, including hundreds of miles of new fiber-optic cables. Republican legislators and the Wisconsin Telecommunications Association point out that the UW can use BadgerNet, a state-run network supplied by private providers such as AT&T. UW administrators estimate that the $2 million it would spend on WiscNet services by 2016 would amount to payments to BadgerNet over the same period of $27 million. That doesn't even count the schools.

Three-fourths of public schools and nearly every public library in the state accesses the Internet via WiscNet. The new language will require them to contract with private providers, multiplying schools' ISP costs just as Walker cuts their budgets and expands access, and state payments, to private charter schools.

As with every naked quest for profit, the collateral damage will be significant. For beginners, UW officials have pointed out that the provision will require the UW to resign from its partnership in federal research networks like Internet2 and BOREAS-net.

Another new proposal offered by the corporate-controlled legislature is a relaxing of the state's child labor laws, essentially allowing 16-year-olds to work the same schedules as adults. Michelle Kussow, the grocers association’s vice president of governmental affairs and communications, told The Cap Times that "the limited number of hours they could work" was "tough on teens." Those "limited" hours? 26 during school weeks, 32 during partial weeks, and 50 during vacations and summer break.

This new unrestricted work schedule dovetails perfectly with the administration's massive cuts to education. It doesn't take a formal understanding of geometry to understand how groceries best fit into a paper bag.

Proving that the Wisconsin Republicans are such in name only, the legislature has also raised the ire of conservatives, with a proposal limiting the rights of individual land owners. A proposal receiving unanimous Republican Budget Committee support makes it easier for the state government to appropriate private land to build highways and power lines. No surprise that there is a corporate power line contractor backing the rule: American Transmission Company. A testament to how unengaged with true conservative values the current legislature is, even blindly pro-Walker right wing radio host Vicki McKenna slammed the proposal as "Bad policy. Period."

This change to eminent domain policy comes just as ATC gets ready to buy up property for a $400-million power project linking Madison and La Crosse. Sounding a lot like a socialist, ATC's attorney recently said the policy is fair "because in the long run it benefits all of us."

The fair price ATC wants to pay land-owning Wisconsinites? Wisconsin's conservative Journal Sentinel, which endorsed Scott Walker, notes that ATC offered a Marathon County family $7,750 for a piece of land appraised at more than $40,000.

Then there is the "venture capital" bill which would create a Wisconsin Venture Capital Authority tasked with extending hundreds of millions to out-of-state insurance firms in exchange for slighly more than those hundreds of million in in-state investments. Known in the corporate world as a "CAPCO," the investment plan is better known in the real world as a "Ponzi Scheme." Literate Wisconsin conservatives should even know this, seeing as the Journal Sentinel reported on the disaster of Missouri's CAPCO program in December of 2003, noting that the majority of the initial funds had been immediately swallowed by the corporate partners, leaving only 34 percent for any actual business development. Republican Senator Glenn Grothman even described the plan's out-of-state organizers as "bunko artists."

Once discovered, Walker's CAPCO proposal stank of such cronyism that Walker himself backed off and asked for a rewrite. But the plan will go forward.

Meanwhile, impatient with even this progress, corporations have just started advertising their own legislation.

Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the state's most powerful corporate lobby, has begun airing a radio campaign supporting the "Jobs for Generations Act," even though no such bill has been introduced. The spot praises the legislation for creating 2000 $60,000-a-year jobs in an iron ore mine that would last 100 years. In her district, the ad even mentions recalled Republican Senator Alberta Darling, even though Darling admitted surprise at hearing her name attached to the bill. This is the real world equivalent of sending out invitations announcing the wedding of yourself and Angelina Jolie—and then expecting her to show up.

Defend Wisconsin has put togethera heartbreaking list of the legislature's other plans to return "fiscal sanity" to the state. Even if you assume that three-fourths of the very biased Defend Wisconsin's list is inflated, the remaining measures cannot be mistaken as anything short of an attempt to skin the state for as much immediate profit as possible, with no thought to its long term welfare.

Much like with its tear-down of public education, the Wisconsin legislature is not building business: it is finding ways to privatize existing public services so that they may become bullet points on the annual reports of private corporations.

* * *

But after Kapanke, the Democrats need only pick up two more of the five other recalled seats, defend their own three recalled seats—and they will have wrestled control of the state senate.

Unfortunately, it's clear that many of the newly politicized think that the recalls will pave the way to reverse the collective bargaining abolition. With the bill passed, and the most significant challenge struck down by the Supreme Court, a Democrat-controlled wing of the legislature will only be able to stop the bleeding. Even if the Senate passed a repeal of Walker's bill, it would never get through the House, and if it did, which it won't, Walker would veto it. Following the ruling, the state chapter of the AFL-CIO immediately filed a federal suit, claiming the bill violates the 1st and 14th amendment—but that's a long shot.

Collective bargaining in Wisconsin is dead.

The tent city that has surrounded the Madison capitol each night for the last week was called "Walkerville." It's an odd name but not as odd as the one the pro-Walker camp came up with when the right-wing, phony news organization The MacIver Institute ran a poll: "Entitledtown."

The second round of Madison protests have been angrier, more aggressive and more desperate. Some are unreasonable. A recent stunt where protesters dressed as zombies interrupted Walker's address to Special Olympics athletes was the PR equivalent of a shotgun in the mouth. The footage from that screw-up was broadcast, in outrage, around the state for days afterward.

Following the Supreme Court ruling on Tuesday, general strike signs were rumored to be circulated. By Wednesday afternoon though, the capitol grounds were largely empty of protesters. The Sentinel's All Politics Blog reported that "demonstrators and public in the Assembly gallery have thinned out." "Of course it's thinning out. They're out of munchies and pot..." wrote one commenter. Another: "Quitters."

After a month where hundreds of thousands occupied the capitol, not a single arrest was made, despite the protesters being slandered by Republicans as "thugs." Now, on Wednesday, three were arrested for disorderly conduct in the assembly gallery. Even the Democratic minority is fed up; Wednesday night on the Assembly floor, Democratic Representative Cory Mason blankly admonished the Republicans, "Don't piss down my back and tell me it's raining." On Thursday morning, after the budget was passed, a women in the assembly gallery locked her head to the railing.

In the coming days, several major events will take place. These were planned in advance of the ruling, and expected to confront the extraordinary session. With the bill passed though, they'll likely be ignored by the media. Just more Madison hippies acting like Madison hippies.

It's noteworthy that Russ Feingold, completely absent both in spirit and voice and presence during the massive March protests, has, after Senator Herb Kohl's announcement to not seek another term, suddenly become a very vocal presence at Walkerville. Feingold's statement at Walkerville? "We will not stop until we win." He was not more specific.

Governor Walker, for his part, appears to know that he has overstepped. Recent statements by the Governor have attempted to make peace with state workers, calling them reasonable and respectable, calling Wisconsin's teachers the nation's best—all while blaming the protests and strife on "out of state" forces and agitators. But most recent polling puts his approval rating at an all-time low of 43 percent, with 50 percent now favoring a recall. November is a long time away though, and Walker, and the Republicans, are hoping the already-recovering economy provides a credit-taking opportunity, after which everyone will judge results but not process.

Walker hopes Wisconsin will forget the labor when they see the baby.

But those in it for the long haul, like the Teaching Assistants' Association members who were some of the first capitol occupiers three months ago, hope that energy will shift to the recall elections, including the one that has been promised for Walker himself in November.

More months of this. More rhetoric. Exhausting rhetoric.

But then, that's also part of the plan: an exhausted electorate sweltering in the summer heat is unlikely to vote, let alone twice in a month.

Back in La Crosse, Dan Kapanke doesn't have to worry about exhaustion. He has no future. The corporations to which he now belongs have mined their stake, and will continue to wring him of his usefulness over the next two months until they cast him aside, just like James Smith, just like Wisconsin.

Update 6/16 pm: The link to James Smith's Facebook page is not incorrect. In the hours after publication, Smith deleted both his real and fake Facebook pages.



Abe Sauer can be reached at abesauer at gmail dot com.

Photo of Feingold via @DefendWisconsin

http://www.theawl.com/2011/06/wisconsin-inc-new-republican-politics-in-the-age-of-the-recall