In the imperial halls of the Senate, there is some incredibly stiff competition in corruption and incompetence. Lieberman, Dodd, Durbin, Stevens, and McCain immediately come to mind, but when a Senator uses a deadly attack on American soldiers in Afghanistan to score political points, we might have a winner. Which is exactly what San Francisco’s own Dianne Feinstein did when discussing the Afghan War with George Stephanopoulos.

I don’t know how you put somebody in who was as crackerjack as General McChrystal, who gives the president very solid recommendations, and not take those recommendations if you’re not going to pull out.

If you don’t want to take the recommendations, then you — you — you put your people in such jeopardy, just like the base in Nuristan. We lost eight of our men. We didn’t have the ability to defend them, and now the base is closing, and effectively we’re — we’re retreating away from it. And so I think the decision has to be made sooner, rather than later.

Those eight men we lost were killed in an attack on Camp Keating, a military base troops calls “Ambush Alley.” Plopped in a low valley in the ourskirts of northern Afghanistan, it is used to secure the roads between Nuristan and Kabul. Even the military admits that it’s been an extremely vulnerable base since it opened in 2006, and then whoops, 8 more families with an empty chair at dinner.

It makes sense, however, that Feinstein would demand that 40,000 more boys be sent to lose their minds and limbs in the mountains of Afghanistan; there’s a lot of money in it for her. Feinstein’s multimillionaire husband, Richard Blum, oversees two large defense contractors. Given that as ranking member of the Senate’s Military Construction Appropriations subcommittee, Feinstein supervised the allocation of billions of dollars a year, who do you think got the contracts? URS Corp., a San Francisco-based defense contractor partially owned by Blum, received nearly $3.5 billion from the Army. Perini, one of Blum’s biggest investments, also makes nearly $2 billion a year helping the US occupy Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s no wonder Feinstein is pushing for more war.

The Pentagon refers to its bloody military-industrial-congressional-complex web as the innocent sounding “defense contracting,” but in a saner time, we called individuals and industries who profited from piles of corpses “merchants of death.”

Keep in mind that this is our tax money being sent to Feinstein’s husband, socializing his risks and privatizing his profits. Meanwhile, the Feinstein-financed war machine is hunting down the Taliban who also happen to be getting rich off of American taxpayers. Local contractors in Afghanistan who deliver supplies and equipment to NATO bases are charging the US “protection money” to pay off the Taliban, and combined with extortion and drug trafficking, they are now better financed than Al Qaeda.

The war in Afghanistan won’t end because the war and its accompanying contracts are the ends, and any excuse will do: democracy, liberation, WMDs, safe havens, etc. At least we know Feinstein’s excuse for perpetuating the killing fields in Afghanistan: profit.

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For more of Robert’s work, please visit his Libertarian Examiner blog.

It’s only fitting that the 8th anniversary of the US’s Afghan blitzkrieg would fall around the same time as San Francisco’s annual “Fleet Week.” For six days, the US Navy’s “Blue Angels” buzz over San Francisco, subjecting the entire city to ear-piercing sonic booms as they fly in perfect formation, entirely way too close to the ground. Whether we want them to or not, the Navy’s killing machines will howl and screech along the coast this entire weekend.

To my surprise, there are actually a lot of people who enjoy this show, and thousands of tourists stop by the bay to watch the event. I just don’t get the appeal of watching military planes, paid for by coercion (taxation), siege the city. It reminds me of the Soviet’s annual “May Day” parades, where Red Square would glitter with tanks, jets, and soldiers marching like mindless ants. The goal of these Soviet parades was to remind the people of the disproportionate power that the state has over them. Should you show any disobedience, this is what officials have at their disposal to keep you in line.

But this is America, land of the free, home of the brave. The military exists to protect us, not stifle dissent, right? Just don’t tell that to the G20 protesters in Pittsburgh last week, where they met the state’s newest and most popular asset: cops dressed in military fatigues. Why a civilian cop in Pittsburgh needs to have a camouflaged uniform on is unclear, but the symbolism sure is. In one widely-circulate video from the protest, four fatigue-covered policemen emerge from an unmarked car, stuff a back-packed protester inside, and drive off. The incident was reminiscent of those old Soviet “disappearances.”

The goal of the Pittsburgh fascistas and the Blue Angels is ultimately the same: submission and the fear-inspiring aspects of warfare. The Blue Angels that dazzle us from above are the same type of planes that unleashed “shock-and-awe” on Baghdad, a strategy with the intended purpose of terrorizing local populations.

While we won’t experience the death and horror visited upon Iraqis, Serbs, or the countless other countries US planes have pummeled, we will be subjected to the terrorizing influences war machines provide. The bigger and more powerful the state’s guns get, the less likely it is that there will be dissent or complaints. Despite the fact the US law forbids the use of the military being used as police, American history is filled with instances of domestic military deployment, and there are thousands of troops ready to do the president’s bidding in case of an emergency (how long will it be until one of those is declared?).

While I will be spending the weekend covering my ear-drums, I can’t help but think of George Orwell, who argued that the government depends on the manipulation of the language for its existence and power. Calling flying war machines “angels” is statist entertainment and abuse of language at its finest, violence cloaked in civility. Though nobody will likely be killed this weekend, our resistance is slowly sent to the graveyard.

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For more of Robert’s work, please visit his Libertarian Examiner blog.

Of all the places one would not expect to find this video filmed, skaters in San Francisco filmed this exchange between a young skater and SFPD Officer Schwab, 2099.  Thanks to Mission Mission for the find.

The exchange is pure skater harassment, the kind anyone who has picked up a deck knows. Some kids are skating and fucking with a city fence while trying to record a video. Neighbor calls the cops, cop show up and busts up the show. It isn’t long before the officer takes a poke, which a punk is always happy to reciprocate.

Moments later, Schwab delivers this Emmy-winning performance instead of his Miranda rights:

Resist again and I’m going to break your arm like a twig. And then you can treat me like the asshole you think I am.

Undoubtedly many of you have taken that trip to the back of the squad car, where the officer slaps the cuffs on and makes a big show about a night in the clink only to relent a few blocks away from the alpha male from the pack and turn him loose.   Having possessed in my whole life maybe a quarter of the restraint of tongue the arrested skater demonstrated in the short exchange that got him apprehended, I have a special affinity for his situation.  Having made that trip a time or three myself, I learned something each time.

The first time I thought the guy was giving me a break.  That what I had done really did merit incarceration and that the officer was bending the rules to let me out of something that might haunt me for the rest of my life.  The second time I started to get wise to the ruse.  I’d seen people get arrested for real; they were read rights with plenty witnesses on hand in front of cameras.  The third time I got handcuffed but escaped arrest, I recognized it for what it was: a douchebag with a hurt ego making himself feel tough in front of a bunch of kids.

The way they turn your shoulder to tear your ligament just a little, the pull on the cuffs to bruise your wrists for a wee, the way they slam the door onto your other shoulder to give you a lasting knot – it is not law enforcement.  It is purile bullying.

When kids are shooting each other in the gut at public pizza joints in broad daylight, we need less Officer Schwabs.  Police officers need to be serious men and women of even tempers, passionately committed to helping their communities.  It is a hard and unpopular job, made all the more insufferable by dicks like me.  But they chose their life, and in so choosing agree to suffer our ire as we agree to suffer their abuse.

Only now, these criminals called skateboarders can share their everyday with the rest of the world.  And people are learning just how ridiculous these public servants can be.