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<p>Hurt not the earth, neither the sea nor the trees. The revelation of St. John the Divine</p>
<p>Once again the Bush administration has demonstrated creativity in dealing with problems caused by the environment. Trees are one problem and roads are a solution. Each has been addressed within the last two months. A part of the Healthy Forest initiative addresses the tree problem. The way it works is this.</p>
<p>Lumber companies cut down lots of old growth trees. Once they are gone there are fewer trees and the ones left are healthier. Pursuant to a new policy described on May 31, 2003, environmental studies before logging or burning trees will no longer be required. Consultations about the effects of those activities on endangered species will no longer be required if Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management biologists determine endangered species will probably not be harmed. Cutting and burning excess trees on up to 190 million acres of federal land can take place without environmental studies. Trees can be cut from up to 1,000 acres without environmental studies and controlled burns can be used on up to 4,500 acres.</p>
<p>Mark Rey, Agriculture Department Undersecretary in charge of the Forest Service and a lobbyist for the timber industry in a former life, explained the 1,000 acre rule: “It’s 1000 acres of forest that is unlikely to be consumed by catastrophic fire once we get it done.” Congressman Nick Rahall, of West Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the House Resources Committee sees it somewhat differently. He says: “Every so-called ‘common sense’ effort by the administration to restore forest health is really an effort to expedite logging on our public lands with little citizen oversight and no environmental analysis.”</p>
<p>In June the administration announced a proposal that will permit the building of more roads in formerly roadless areas. It proposes to open up large areas to recreation that were blocked by rules imposed by Bill Clinton in January 2001 which banned development on one third of all national forest land. The rules banned logging, construction of permanent roads and development on 58.5 million acres of national forest land. The proposed rule changes would exempt Alaska’s Tongass National Forest from the roadless area conservation rule opening up 300,000 acres to logging and the administration is seeking public comment on whether or not Alaska’s Chugach National Forest should be exempted from the rule thus opening up another 150,000 acres. The administration also plans to propose letting governors seek exemption within their states to the roadless rules.</p>
<p>For an explanation of this new approach we turn again to Mark Rey who explains: “What I would say is we are working out the path we will take in protecting the value of the roadless rule. We are going to construct a rule that has broad support.”</p>
<p>Some may wonder about the backgrounds of the people are who are giving birth to these new rules. The Secretary of the Interior, Gale Norton favored drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and prior to her appointment was quoted in an article in the L.A. Times saying: “We might even go so far as to recognize a homesteading right to pollute or make noise in an area.” As Colorado’s Attorney General, she implemented a ‘self-auditing’ procedure that allowed polluters to evade environmental fines. As Interior Secretary she had no trouble finding like-minded people to work with her.</p>
<p>Her deputy and second in command is J. Stephen Griles. His environmental sensitivity was developed under James Watt, Ronald Reagan’s Interior Secretary. As a lobbyist he represented Occidental Petroleum, National Mining Association and Shell Oil. On May 30, 2003, Bill Moyers examined the conflicts of interest that follow Mr. Griles around. Although he promised to recuse himself from any Interior Department business involving former clients, he has continued to meet with energy industry people who were once his clients.</p>
<p>James Cason, Associate Deputy Secretary is third in command. He was the nominee for Assistant Secretary of Agriculture for Natural Resources and Environment under George I. If confirmed, he would have been responsible for the National Forest Service and the Soil Conservation Service. He made history by what he didn’t do. Though approved in committee he failed to win confirmation in the full senate and asked to have his name withdrawn. That was reportedly the first time a nominee for Assistant Secretary got out of committee but didn’t get confirmed. The Chief of the U.S. Forest Service during the Reagan years, R. Max Peterson said: “Mr. Cason’s decisions at the Department of the Interior were uniformly bad when measured against any reasonable standard of public interest and fairness to the public which owns the public lands.”</p>
<p>Camden Toohey, Special Assistant for Alaska, is in charge of 270 million acres of Interior lands in that state. He is the former Executive Director of Arctic Power which lobbies on behalf of oil drilling in the Arctic Refuge. Bennett Raley is Assistant Secretary for Water and Science. He is in charge of allocating water to balance the needs of people and wildlife. He opposes the Clean Water Act. The list of appointees goes on but space does not.</p>
<p>On July 2, 2003, Earthjustice Legislative Director, Marty Hayden participated in a 21 chain saw salute to the Bush administration and corporate timber interests. He said that the Bush administration has adopted a policy of “Leave no tree behind.” That says a lot more about the administration policy than any of Mark Rey’s explanations.</p>
<p>CHRISTOPHER BRAUCHLI is a Boulder, Colorado lawyer. He can be reached at: <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a></p>
<p>&#160;</p> | true | 4 | hurt earth neither sea trees revelation st john divine bush administration demonstrated creativity dealing problems caused environment trees one problem roads solution addressed within last two months part healthy forest initiative addresses tree problem way works lumber companies cut lots old growth trees gone fewer trees ones left healthier pursuant new policy described may 31 2003 environmental studies logging burning trees longer required consultations effects activities endangered species longer required forest service bureau land management biologists determine endangered species probably harmed cutting burning excess trees 190 million acres federal land take place without environmental studies trees cut 1000 acres without environmental studies controlled burns used 4500 acres mark rey agriculture department undersecretary charge forest service lobbyist timber industry former life explained 1000 acre rule 1000 acres forest unlikely consumed catastrophic fire get done congressman nick rahall west virginia ranking democrat house resources committee sees somewhat differently says every socalled common sense effort administration restore forest health really effort expedite logging public lands little citizen oversight environmental analysis june administration announced proposal permit building roads formerly roadless areas proposes open large areas recreation blocked rules imposed bill clinton january 2001 banned development one third national forest land rules banned logging construction permanent roads development 585 million acres national forest land proposed rule changes would exempt alaskas tongass national forest roadless area conservation rule opening 300000 acres logging administration seeking public comment whether alaskas chugach national forest exempted rule thus opening another 150000 acres administration also plans propose letting governors seek exemption within states roadless rules explanation new approach turn mark rey explains would say working path take protecting value roadless rule going construct rule broad support may wonder backgrounds people giving birth new rules secretary interior gale norton favored drilling arctic national wildlife refuge prior appointment quoted article la times saying might even go far recognize homesteading right pollute make noise area colorados attorney general implemented selfauditing procedure allowed polluters evade environmental fines interior secretary trouble finding likeminded people work deputy second command j stephen griles environmental sensitivity developed james watt ronald reagans interior secretary lobbyist represented occidental petroleum national mining association shell oil may 30 2003 bill moyers examined conflicts interest follow mr griles around although promised recuse interior department business involving former clients continued meet energy industry people clients james cason associate deputy secretary third command nominee assistant secretary agriculture natural resources environment george confirmed would responsible national forest service soil conservation service made history didnt though approved committee failed win confirmation full senate asked name withdrawn reportedly first time nominee assistant secretary got committee didnt get confirmed chief us forest service reagan years r max peterson said mr casons decisions department interior uniformly bad measured reasonable standard public interest fairness public owns public lands camden toohey special assistant alaska charge 270 million acres interior lands state former executive director arctic power lobbies behalf oil drilling arctic refuge bennett raley assistant secretary water science charge allocating water balance needs people wildlife opposes clean water act list appointees goes space july 2 2003 earthjustice legislative director marty hayden participated 21 chain saw salute bush administration corporate timber interests said bush administration adopted policy leave tree behind says lot administration policy mark reys explanations christopher brauchli boulder colorado lawyer reached brauchli56postharvardedu 160 | 541 |
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<p>President Barack Obama applauds as GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt speaks following a tour of the General Electric Plant January 21, 2011 in Schenectady, New York. &#160; Photo: MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)</p>
<p>Next to Republican governors like Ohio’s John Kasich and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, it would be very easy for Democrats to look more sympathetic to union rights, the needs of working people and the ever-shrinking middle class.&#160;</p>
<p>The Democrats lost 63 House seats and six Senate seats in the 2010 mid-terms in the industrial midwest as key Democratic constituencies stayed home. Now would seem to be a great opportunity for the Democrats to rebuild their relationship with unions and their supporters in the insecure middle class.&#160;</p>
<p>The party could seize this opening by promoting an agenda stressing the creation of public jobs via desperately-needed infrastructure re-building and that the privileged top 2 percent of corporations ought to bear a fair share of the tax burden needed to maintain services and balance state budgets. The agenda's premise: The primary victims of the recession should not suffer more due to cuts in services they desperately need (e.g., education, healthcare).</p>
<p>But once again displaying their unique talent for alienating their base, Democratic governors in a host of states are moving in the opposite direction.</p>
<p>While loudly proclaiming their distance from the blatant arm-twisting methods of Walker, Kasich and company, these governors are busy resolving budget crises in terms that will not even slightly inconvenience the fortunes of the super-rich and corporations, both of which have emerged from the Great Recession with a bigger share of income and record profits.&#160;</p>
<p>Instead, numerous Democrats are trying to fill budget gaps by demanding extensive concessions from their public employees, along with higher fees and service cutbacks. Shamus Cook in Truthout has compiled a “short list” of states where Democratic governors are pressuring&#160;public unions to accept diminished legal rights and/or swallow massive contract concessions.</p>
<p>Forgetting the explosion in Wisconsin, these Democratic leaders doubtless imagine that they are following this road because they believe it to be "the line of least resistance” compared with what they would expect from taxing the rich and corporations. The list of governors pursuing this path include those of:</p>
<p>Massachusetts [discussed <a href="" type="internal">here</a>], Connecticut, Oregon, California, New York, Illinois, Washington, Hawaii, Minnesota, Maryland and New Hampshire.</p>
<p>By distancing themselves rhetorically from the heavy-handed tactics of Walker and Kasich, these Democratic governors may imagine they are showing how they are different from Republican attacks on the poor and middle class.</p>
<p>But the distinction is likely to be lost on Democratic constituencies in both the public and private sectors who have been suffering massive pay cuts and the loss of vital public services. As Cook observes:</p>
<p>The Democrats in the states listed above all hide their anti-union attacks behind a "deep respect for collective bargaining," a position akin to that of a thief who will steal your car but, out of respect, will not target your deceased grandmother's diamond earrings.</p>
<p>But by Election Day 2012, is the Democrats’ polite “pro-union” arm-twisting likely to look like a real alternative to the Republicans’ plan for making those at the bottom pay for the economic catastrophe caused by their reckless gambling on Wall Street and outsourcing of jobs?</p>
<p>CONNECTICUT YANKING: 'WITHOUT FIREWORKS OR ANGER'</p>
<p>In Connecticut, the situation is particularly egregious given the state’s wealth, low taxes on corporations and the wealthy, and the massive scale of the cuts demanded from public workers.</p>
<p>The position of Gov. Dannel Malloy is particularly self-delusional and distressing. Malloy has pressured state-employee unions for $1.6 billion in concessions to combat the state’s estimated $3.5 billion deficit, boasting that the tentative deal is "historic because of the way we achieved it - we respected the collective bargaining process and we respected each other, negotiating in good faith, without fireworks and without anger."</p>
<p>Not only is Malloy moving Connecticut forward “without fireworks and without anger,” but he is also doing so without any sign of disrespect to corporations and the investor class by raising their taxes.</p>
<p>Connecticut is well-known as one of the nation’s most affluent states. Less well-known is the profound inequality of its tax structure, which Malloy has chosen to essentially leave intact, as children’s advocate Joachim Hero <a href="http://articles.courant.com/2011-04-26/news/hc-op-hero-taxes-connecticut-0426-20110426_1_tax-freedom-day-income-tax-tax-.." type="external">notes</a>:&#160;</p>
<p>It is the lowest-income people for whom taxes cost more. If you make $121,000 a year or less — about 80 percent of us — on average 9.6 percent or more of that goes to taxes. But if you make more than $1.4 million a year,&#160;state and local taxes in Connecticut come to 4.9 percent of your yearly income, according to an analysis by the Instiute on Taxe and Economic Policy.</p>
<p>Malloy has <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/17/us-newjersey-revenue-idUSTRE74G64K20110517?feedType=RSS&amp;feedName=domesticN" type="external">raised</a> the top income rate slightly, “but it is still about two percentage points below the top rates of New York and New Jersey.”&#160;</p>
<p>TAX AVOIDER GE'S HOME BASE</p>
<p>Fairfield, Connecticut happens to be the home base of General Electric, which famously wound up <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/business/economy/25tax.html" type="external">paying</a> no federal income taxes on $14.2 billion in profits, and in fact walked away with $3.2 billion in tax credits. In a speech full of unintended irony, GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt <a href="http://www.itepnet.org/press/CT_ConnecticutPost_04262011.pdf" type="external">declared</a> in March that the U.S. tax system is:</p>
<p>old, complex and uncompetitive. The purpose of a tax code should be that everyone pays their fair share, including GE. But it should also promote jobs and competitiveness and does the opposite.</p>
<p>Yet Malloy and fellow Democrats have chosen not to isolate GE as the poster child for destroying American jobs even while it exploits our federal and state tax structures.</p>
<p>Instead, Democratic governors are pursuing—but respectfully, mind you— concessions from public employees who have been a crucial part of the Democratic base.</p>
<p>It’s hard to see how a strategy of punishing the Democrats’ staunchest allies and rewarding the leading destroyers of our economic base is a winning strategy to both heal the economy and win elections.</p> | true | 4 | email name recipients email comma separated message captcha president barack obama applauds ge ceo jeffrey immelt speaks following tour general electric plant january 21 2011 schenectady new york 160 photo mandel nganafpgetty images next republican governors like ohios john kasich wisconsins scott walker would easy democrats look sympathetic union rights needs working people evershrinking middle class160 democrats lost 63 house seats six senate seats 2010 midterms industrial midwest key democratic constituencies stayed home would seem great opportunity democrats rebuild relationship unions supporters insecure middle class160 party could seize opening promoting agenda stressing creation public jobs via desperatelyneeded infrastructure rebuilding privileged top 2 percent corporations ought bear fair share tax burden needed maintain services balance state budgets agendas premise primary victims recession suffer due cuts services desperately need eg education healthcare displaying unique talent alienating base democratic governors host states moving opposite direction loudly proclaiming distance blatant armtwisting methods walker kasich company governors busy resolving budget crises terms even slightly inconvenience fortunes superrich corporations emerged great recession bigger share income record profits160 instead numerous democrats trying fill budget gaps demanding extensive concessions public employees along higher fees service cutbacks shamus cook truthout compiled short list states democratic governors pressuring160public unions accept diminished legal rights andor swallow massive contract concessions forgetting explosion wisconsin democratic leaders doubtless imagine following road believe line least resistance compared would expect taxing rich corporations list governors pursuing path include massachusetts discussed connecticut oregon california new york illinois washington hawaii minnesota maryland new hampshire distancing rhetorically heavyhanded tactics walker kasich democratic governors may imagine showing different republican attacks poor middle class distinction likely lost democratic constituencies public private sectors suffering massive pay cuts loss vital public services cook observes democrats states listed hide antiunion attacks behind deep respect collective bargaining position akin thief steal car respect target deceased grandmothers diamond earrings election day 2012 democrats polite prounion armtwisting likely look like real alternative republicans plan making bottom pay economic catastrophe caused reckless gambling wall street outsourcing jobs connecticut yanking without fireworks anger connecticut situation particularly egregious given states wealth low taxes corporations wealthy massive scale cuts demanded public workers position gov dannel malloy particularly selfdelusional distressing malloy pressured stateemployee unions 16 billion concessions combat states estimated 35 billion deficit boasting tentative deal historic way achieved respected collective bargaining process respected negotiating good faith without fireworks without anger malloy moving connecticut forward without fireworks without anger also without sign disrespect corporations investor class raising taxes connecticut wellknown one nations affluent states less wellknown profound inequality tax structure malloy chosen essentially leave intact childrens advocate joachim hero notes160 lowestincome people taxes cost make 121000 year less 80 percent us average 96 percent goes taxes make 14 million year160state local taxes connecticut come 49 percent yearly income according analysis instiute taxe economic policy malloy raised top income rate slightly still two percentage points top rates new york new jersey160 tax avoider ges home base fairfield connecticut happens home base general electric famously wound paying federal income taxes 142 billion profits fact walked away 32 billion tax credits speech full unintended irony ge ceo jeffrey immelt declared march us tax system old complex uncompetitive purpose tax code everyone pays fair share including ge also promote jobs competitiveness opposite yet malloy fellow democrats chosen isolate ge poster child destroying american jobs even exploits federal state tax structures instead democratic governors pursuingbut respectfully mind concessions public employees crucial part democratic base hard see strategy punishing democrats staunchest allies rewarding leading destroyers economic base winning strategy heal economy win elections | 585 |
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<p>Whenever the question arises about the origin of AIDS, two positions are usually staked out. One is that AIDS was invented in a laboratory by a group of Western scientists in order to kill black people and gays. The other position is that it was an unexpected development, completely out of anyone’s control, not intended to harm any group in particular. In the February/March edition of POZ, an HIV/AIDS magazine published in the U.S., Lucile Scott wrote that Nobel Peace Prize winner and Kenyan ecologist Wangari Maathai said that “AIDS is a tool to control [Africans and black people] designed by some evil-minded scientists.” Because of the way her comment was presented, it was clear that POZ didn’t share her view. POZ asked five people prominent in the AIDS field to comment on what she said. POZ did not say what criterion was used to pick the five. Here are their comments.</p>
<p>1-Marie Saint Cyr, executive director, Iris House, a center for women living with HIV, NYC. “We may remain suspicious about HIV’s origins, but 48 million lives are infected. We have no time to focus on the mad-scientist theory.”</p>
<p>2-Cornelius Baker, executive director, Walker-Whitman Clinic, Washington, DC. “Maathai did not say anything that hasn’t been said in the South Bronx or South Florida. I hope her comments will redouble efforts to investigate the origins of HIV and prove her wrong.”</p>
<p>3-Nguru Karugu, international program manager, Balm in Gilead, an international black AIDS service organization, NYC. “Many black folks believe that AIDS was created in labs. The fact that Maathai is a Nobel Prize-winning scientist gives it credence. Unless [the belief of] this theory is acknowledged, African intervention will be unsuccessful.”</p>
<p>4-Edward Hooper, author of The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS. “Her comments are unhelpful–both for those who insist HIV crossed accidentally from chimpanzees to humans and for those (like me) who believe it began with careless scientific experimentation. Carelessness and genocide are very different.”</p>
<p>5-Beatrice Hahn, MD, professor of medicine, University of Alabama-Birmingham. “Since my lab evidence that HIV came from chimp SIV may not seem convincing, we need to go into the forest and prove, using noninvasive approaches, that wild chimps with SIV could pass it on to the people who hunt and butcher them. Then lab-made HIV would seem stupid.”</p>
<p>Even though I don’t believe that any scientist had the ability to create and direct a life form, this belief isn’t the main problem. The position that the virus developed without a plan in humans also sidesteps the key problem. The main problem is how the illness has been dealt with. This problem has to be confronted so that the origin of AIDS doesn’t keep on popping up and interfering with our ability to defeat this plague.</p>
<p>To confront this problem, the first thing we have to do is realize that the origin of AIDS question has two parts. The first part of the problem is ethical. The second part is financial. The ethical problem is, Is the developed world vicious enough to want tens of millions of people in Africa and other parts of the developing world dead in order to control resources and maintain profits? The answer is a deafening yes. All one has to do is examine briefly the history of the relationship between the developed world and Africa before AIDS. This history includes 250 years of African slavery by Europe and the U.S., killing of millions of Congolese by the Belgians, the colonization and looting of the African continent by the Europeans, the support of apartheid in South Africa by Europe and the U.S., the endless debt burden imposed on Africa and the ongoing death of hundreds of thousands of African women in childbirth and the death annually from preventable causes of millions of African children under age 5. The history of the difference in the death rate between blacks and whites in the U.S. provides more evidence. In the December 21, 2004 edition of The Washington Post, January W. Payne wrote an article entitled “Blacks dying for lack of health care: Disparities cost 886,000 lives in the U.S. in ’90s.” The article is based on studies reported in the December 2004 issue of the American Journal of Public Health that examined the disparities in health care between blacks and whites in the U.S.</p>
<p>The origin of AIDS issue will not go away because the former genocidal policies of the developed world have not been abandoned in favor of humanitarian activities to defeat the AIDS plague. On the contrary. In a report released Friday, March 25, 2005, the UN said that AIDS could kill 80 million Africans by the year 2025 if the present AIDS policies remain in force in the developed world. Despite the concern of the World Bank that the current policies could lead to regional economic collapse, existing programs that could stop the spread of AIDS and dramatically reduce the death toll in Africa and the rest of the developing world are not adopted. The Cuban anti-AIDS program is an excellent model to help implement a successful fight-back. But rather than support and help to promote that life-saving program, the U.S. is constantly threatening to destroy it and destroy Cuba. Instead, the U.S. pays for a failed program of abstinence only as the prevention tool.</p>
<p>Additional scientific advancements are not necessary to dramatically reduce the death toll and infection rate in Africa right now. In 1996 when the anti-retroviral drug therapy (anti-HIV “cocktails” usually made up of 3 or more drugs) came into widespread use in the U.S. and Europe, there was a dramatic reduction in the death rate of 40 to 80 percent. Now we know more about defeating HIV, so the death rate from AIDS continues to drop. The use of condoms, medical nutrition therapy (a diet specifically tailored to meet the nutritional needs of HIV+ people), new anti-retroviral drug therapy, other medications needed to treat opportunistic infections (illnesses caused by the weakening of the immune system), and education to reduce the stigma of being HIV+ can make a huge difference. Safe, clean water has to be made available so that HIV- babies born to HIV+ mothers can be fed formula rather than breastfed since breastfeeding can transmit the virus to uninfected infants. Infants fed formula made with bad water may die faster than if they were infected with HIV.</p>
<p>The second part of the origin of AIDS question is financial. In order to protect its profits, the pharmaceutical industry in the developed world is fighting an ongoing battle to prevent the production of low cost, generic anti-HIV medications. In the March 24, 2005 edition of The New York Times, Donald G. McNeil Jr. published an article entitled “India Alters Law on Drug Patents.” Although India was a primary source of inexpensive, generic AIDS drugs, the new law eliminated that source. India was forced to pass the law as a prerequisite for joining the World Trade Organization. Loon Gangte, an Indian living with AIDS who runs an AIDS program, said: “I am using generic AIDS drugs because I can afford the price. Since the bill has passed, when I need new drugs, I won’t be able to afford them. I could become one of the casualties.” Millions of other people also fear becoming casualties because India supplied drugs to about one half of the people with AIDS in the developing world.</p>
<p>Inexpensive medical nutrition therapy has not been adopted in the U.S. as an AIDS-fighting standard of care, so it’s unlikely that it will be promoted in Africa. We must always remind ourselves that no medication works without adequate amounts of the “big three”– air, water, and food. Without those three, life is over.</p>
<p>It’s not an evil scientist or even HIV/AIDS that’s killing off so many Africans. It’s the developed world’s dollar-based health care system that’s doing the job. Pathogens will come and go through the natural history of the world. HIV/AIDS is just one of them. It was welcomed as an unexpected ally by the developed world in the effort to re-colonize and exploit Africa. Unless the world’s progressive community intervenes to help defeat AIDS, those who want to exploit Africa’s vast wealth will make the most of this plague, whether HIV was produced in a laboratory by a psychopathic scientist or developed by accident.</p>
<p>EDWIN KRALES is an HIV/AIDS Nutritionist and Health Educator in New York City. He can be reached at: <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a></p>
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<p>&#160;</p> | true | 4 | new york city whenever question arises origin aids two positions usually staked one aids invented laboratory group western scientists order kill black people gays position unexpected development completely anyones control intended harm group particular februarymarch edition poz hivaids magazine published us lucile scott wrote nobel peace prize winner kenyan ecologist wangari maathai said aids tool control africans black people designed evilminded scientists way comment presented clear poz didnt share view poz asked five people prominent aids field comment said poz say criterion used pick five comments 1marie saint cyr executive director iris house center women living hiv nyc may remain suspicious hivs origins 48 million lives infected time focus madscientist theory 2cornelius baker executive director walkerwhitman clinic washington dc maathai say anything hasnt said south bronx south florida hope comments redouble efforts investigate origins hiv prove wrong 3nguru karugu international program manager balm gilead international black aids service organization nyc many black folks believe aids created labs fact maathai nobel prizewinning scientist gives credence unless belief theory acknowledged african intervention unsuccessful 4edward hooper author river journey source hiv aids comments unhelpfulboth insist hiv crossed accidentally chimpanzees humans like believe began careless scientific experimentation carelessness genocide different 5beatrice hahn md professor medicine university alabamabirmingham since lab evidence hiv came chimp siv may seem convincing need go forest prove using noninvasive approaches wild chimps siv could pass people hunt butcher labmade hiv would seem stupid even though dont believe scientist ability create direct life form belief isnt main problem position virus developed without plan humans also sidesteps key problem main problem illness dealt problem confronted origin aids doesnt keep popping interfering ability defeat plague confront problem first thing realize origin aids question two parts first part problem ethical second part financial ethical problem developed world vicious enough want tens millions people africa parts developing world dead order control resources maintain profits answer deafening yes one examine briefly history relationship developed world africa aids history includes 250 years african slavery europe us killing millions congolese belgians colonization looting african continent europeans support apartheid south africa europe us endless debt burden imposed africa ongoing death hundreds thousands african women childbirth death annually preventable causes millions african children age 5 history difference death rate blacks whites us provides evidence december 21 2004 edition washington post january w payne wrote article entitled blacks dying lack health care disparities cost 886000 lives us 90s article based studies reported december 2004 issue american journal public health examined disparities health care blacks whites us origin aids issue go away former genocidal policies developed world abandoned favor humanitarian activities defeat aids plague contrary report released friday march 25 2005 un said aids could kill 80 million africans year 2025 present aids policies remain force developed world despite concern world bank current policies could lead regional economic collapse existing programs could stop spread aids dramatically reduce death toll africa rest developing world adopted cuban antiaids program excellent model help implement successful fightback rather support help promote lifesaving program us constantly threatening destroy destroy cuba instead us pays failed program abstinence prevention tool additional scientific advancements necessary dramatically reduce death toll infection rate africa right 1996 antiretroviral drug therapy antihiv cocktails usually made 3 drugs came widespread use us europe dramatic reduction death rate 40 80 percent know defeating hiv death rate aids continues drop use condoms medical nutrition therapy diet specifically tailored meet nutritional needs hiv people new antiretroviral drug therapy medications needed treat opportunistic infections illnesses caused weakening immune system education reduce stigma hiv make huge difference safe clean water made available hiv babies born hiv mothers fed formula rather breastfed since breastfeeding transmit virus uninfected infants infants fed formula made bad water may die faster infected hiv second part origin aids question financial order protect profits pharmaceutical industry developed world fighting ongoing battle prevent production low cost generic antihiv medications march 24 2005 edition new york times donald g mcneil jr published article entitled india alters law drug patents although india primary source inexpensive generic aids drugs new law eliminated source india forced pass law prerequisite joining world trade organization loon gangte indian living aids runs aids program said using generic aids drugs afford price since bill passed need new drugs wont able afford could become one casualties millions people also fear becoming casualties india supplied drugs one half people aids developing world inexpensive medical nutrition therapy adopted us aidsfighting standard care unlikely promoted africa must always remind medication works without adequate amounts big three air water food without three life evil scientist even hivaids thats killing many africans developed worlds dollarbased health care system thats job pathogens come go natural history world hivaids one welcomed unexpected ally developed world effort recolonize exploit africa unless worlds progressive community intervenes help defeat aids want exploit africas vast wealth make plague whether hiv produced laboratory psychopathic scientist developed accident edwin krales hivaids nutritionist health educator new york city reached edwinkraleshotmailcom 160 160 160 160 160 160 160 160 | 827 |
<p>On a cold December morning, before sunrise in New York's Chinatown, about <a href="http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10100129886683125.2241019.28402847&amp;type=1" type="external">60 activists gathered</a> in front of Dunkin' Donuts along Canal Street. Gripping steamy styrofoam cups of joe, they stepped on to several chartered buses leaving for the port of Elizabeth, New Jersey. They had an appointment with a ship soon to arrive that, as they saw it, had blood on its cargo: apparel produced in Bangladesh, destined for the shelves of Walmart.</p>
<p>One hundred and twelve sweatshop workers in Dhaka, Bangladesh, burned to death on November 24 at the Tazreen Fashion Factory, laboring to ensure that the mega-retailer was fully stocked ahead of America's busiest shopping season. They were paid $37 dollars a month and gave their lives so that Walmart and other U.S. corporations can maintain a competitive edge in the global market place. Occupiers and labor activists who assembled that day aimed to block Walmart - symbolically and physically - from profiting off the deaths of the workers.</p>
<p>As the fleet of buses sped under the Holland Tunnel, an unmarked police car followed close behind. Detective Sergeant Bob Zukowski greeted the protesters when they arrived at the Jersey docks, asking activists what they planned to do on Port Authority property. Organizers made no secret of their plans. They came to the docks to establish a community picket so that workers with the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) would see it, honor it and walk off the job, refusing to unload the Maersk-Carolina.</p>
<p>The attempted blockade wasn't happening in a vacuum. That day, The New York Times detailed widespread instances of bribery by executives with Walmart Mexico who used millions of dollars to skirt labor and environmental protections. A month prior, on the busiest shopping day of the year, picket-lines encircled Walmarts across the U.S as workers and supporters demanded full-time hours and higher pay. So on that December morning in New Jersey, activists had reason to believe a community picket might encourage workers to join them -- a tactic that was applied successfully on the West Coast in the past.</p>
<p>But the East and West Coast dockworkers belong to two different unions, each with very distinct traditions. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) inherited a spirit of militant social justice unionism from its founder, the communist Harry Bridges.</p>
<p>Bridges' legacy could be seen alive and well when, at the height of Occupy fever in the fall of 2011, ILWU members walked off the docks of Oakland in solidarity with an Occupy picket as part of a call for a general strike on Nov. 2. The ILWU again refused to unload ships a little over a month later, responding to an Occupy call to shut down West Coast ports.</p>
<p>But the ILA has been riddled with mob intrigue, a legacy it has just begun to shake itself free of in recent years. The union has followed a national trend toward business unionism, which tends to see the relationship between bosses and workers as collaborative, not as that of competing class interests -- or in Occupy parlance, 1% versus the 99%.</p>
<p>I asked Sergeant Zukowski if it was normal for Port Authority police to trail demonstrators ahead of protests. Zukowski responded: “It's not very normal to have a demonstration here.”</p>
<p>Labor's New Front-Line</p>
<p>That could start to change. Backed against the wall in recent contract negotiations with the US Maritime Alliance (USMX), the ILA has threatened to strike. Picket lines could start popping up at ports from Maine to Texas on January 28. USMX has sought concessions from the union including reductions in hiring and healthcare payments, along with a slicing of the royalties workers receive on the cargo they handle.</p>
<p>The strike threat comes as unions across the country are being urged to swallow concessions. Meanwhile, wages for both organized and non-organized labor have stagnated since Wall Street financiers crashed the economy in 2008, intensifying a four-decade earnings decline.</p>
<p>The possible strike also arises at a moment of increased militancy among rank-and-file workers inspired by the Occupy movement, which shifted the national debate on to economic inequality.</p>
<p>“Labor has been very isolated, very under attack,” said Jackie DiSalvo, a member of the teachers union at the City University of New York. She has worked as a bridge between unions and the Occupy movement, and says that in all her years as an activist, “OWS is virtually the first mass movement to aggressively say that unions are a good thing.”</p>
<p>One of the first struggles Occupy put its energy behind was the battle for the Teamsters Local 814, who were locked out of Sotheby's, to win a contract. Over a 10-month period, Occupy staged actions that both disrupted business at Sotheby's and called attention to the art-handler employees' plight. Hundreds rallied in the workers' defense, as activists infiltrated and disrupted auctions and, in one instance, blockaded Sotheby's doors using bike locks.</p>
<p>The spectacle of men in tuxedos and women in fur coats confronted by militant trade unionists in Teamster jackets holding Occupy banners at the doors of Sotheby's highlighted the deep class divide that continues to be a central impetus behind the movement. After those 10 months of protest, the Teamsters Local 814 were back on the job – with a raise.</p>
<p>With its emphasis on direct democracy, spontaneity and flexibility of tactics – and unbounded by union hierarchies or legal impediments such as the Taft-Hartley Act – Occupy has infused the labor movement with a fresh dose of radicalism.</p>
<p>“If the workers at Sotheby's had gone into the auctions, their picket-line would have been declared illegal," said DiSalvo. Labor has tolerated and not been able to overturn tremendous legal restrictions on what they can do. We're not covered by those labor laws. People can get arrested. A union leader gets arrested, the union gets fined. We can be the front lines.”</p>
<p>Occupy has also leaned on labor at times. On Oct. 14, 2011, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Brookfield Properties – deed holders to the “privately-owned public space” where Occupy Wall Street pitched its tents – attempted to clean the Financial District of protest. The night before, AFL-CIO affiliates in New York City sent a mass mailing to their members, urging them to turn out and defend the encampment. Thousands mobilized in the early hours to help Occupy stave off eviction. The next day, media coverage of the movement started to take a different bent. “You can't say these are a bunch of wacko, slacker hippies if you've got the labor movement there,” said DiSalvo.</p>
<p>Back to the Basics</p>
<p>But organized labor and Occupy haven't always seen eye-to-eye.</p>
<p>In January of last year, a meeting meant to help forge a united front between Occupy and ILWU members in the Pacific Northwest ended in a brawl. In a statement that month, members of Occupy Seattle wrote that they stood in solidarity with the ILWU's locked-out Local 21, but seemed to exclude them from the movement. Citing the Dec. 12 shutdown of Oakland docks, the authors wrote that Occupy “has become a new type of movement of unemployed, low waged, and casualized workers both in the workplace and outside of it. We are the 89% of the U.S. working class that is not unionized.” The statement went on to call for moving “beyond the limits of traditional labor struggle.”</p>
<p>“Who shut down the docks in Oakland?” asked Occupy participant and longtime union activist Amy Muldoon. “I see it as the product of collaboration, whereas people who are more dismissive of the possibilities of organized labor right now think it was purely coming from the outside. They think they can gum up the works while not actually being part of the production, transportation, distribution or sales process.” To reorganize society based on “mass mutual aid,” Muldoon added, the change has to come from within the communities being affected.</p>
<p>Muldoon cautions against confusing the bureaucratic, top down labor structures of today with the ways things always were, or how they will be in the future. “The labor movement has itself been historically flexible and encompassed a number of things that the occupation of Zuccotti Park also encompassed. In the 1934 Teamster strike in Minneapolis, there was a commissary. There were medics. There was volunteer childcare. There were a number of things that sprang up out of the needs of self organization of collective struggle.”</p>
<p>And in this sense, she said, Occupy wasn't so much something new as it was a return to the basics. While expectations about the Occupy movement working successfully with organized labor may have been too high too early, OWS had a visible impact-- and will continue to be a part of the fabric of the labor movement going forward, she said.</p>
<p>Ironically, the precariat workforce alluded to by members of Occupy Seattle last year has undergone an upsurge of activity in New York City in recent months, with grocery workers, carwashers, airport security personnel and employees within the fast food industry all seeking to unionize. Sometimes they've worked in collusion with Occupy, while other times job actions have been sponsored by the Service Employees International Union and others.</p>
<p>“Those people within labor who wanted to be more militant have been able to express that,” added DiSalvo. “They had been trying for years to get people to talk about growing inequality with the 1% and they had gotten nowhere. The press ignored them. Then all of a sudden, Occupy made this breakthrough.”</p>
<p>The "Inherent Power" of the Global 99%</p>
<p>On the New Jersey docks in December, OWS labor activists were hoping for such a breakthrough with ILA members. But several dozen Port Authority police turned up to ensure that that didn't happen. The community picket was squeezed far away from the sight of dock workers.</p>
<p>Instead, activists mic-checked a letter sent from the Bangladeshi Center of Workers Solidarity, thanking them for helping to ensure that the workers who died at the Tazreen sweatshop were not forgotten. Disrupting the movement of goods, said their allies in Dhaka, “will further prove workers’ inherent power within the supply chain.” They added: “In acting in solidarity, you are showing the potential of this power to work across the world and confirming that we are all in this fight together.”</p>
<p>That potential power may further be unleashed if the ILA makes good on its threat to strike in the weeks ahead, putting a brake on the machinery moving global capital. We just had the year of Occupy. Now, it's time for the year of the blockade.</p> | true | 4 | cold december morning sunrise new yorks chinatown 60 activists gathered front dunkin donuts along canal street gripping steamy styrofoam cups joe stepped several chartered buses leaving port elizabeth new jersey appointment ship soon arrive saw blood cargo apparel produced bangladesh destined shelves walmart one hundred twelve sweatshop workers dhaka bangladesh burned death november 24 tazreen fashion factory laboring ensure megaretailer fully stocked ahead americas busiest shopping season paid 37 dollars month gave lives walmart us corporations maintain competitive edge global market place occupiers labor activists assembled day aimed block walmart symbolically physically profiting deaths workers fleet buses sped holland tunnel unmarked police car followed close behind detective sergeant bob zukowski greeted protesters arrived jersey docks asking activists planned port authority property organizers made secret plans came docks establish community picket workers international longshoremens association ila would see honor walk job refusing unload maerskcarolina attempted blockade wasnt happening vacuum day new york times detailed widespread instances bribery executives walmart mexico used millions dollars skirt labor environmental protections month prior busiest shopping day year picketlines encircled walmarts across us workers supporters demanded fulltime hours higher pay december morning new jersey activists reason believe community picket might encourage workers join tactic applied successfully west coast past east west coast dockworkers belong two different unions distinct traditions international longshore warehouse union ilwu inherited spirit militant social justice unionism founder communist harry bridges bridges legacy could seen alive well height occupy fever fall 2011 ilwu members walked docks oakland solidarity occupy picket part call general strike nov 2 ilwu refused unload ships little month later responding occupy call shut west coast ports ila riddled mob intrigue legacy begun shake free recent years union followed national trend toward business unionism tends see relationship bosses workers collaborative competing class interests occupy parlance 1 versus 99 asked sergeant zukowski normal port authority police trail demonstrators ahead protests zukowski responded normal demonstration labors new frontline could start change backed wall recent contract negotiations us maritime alliance usmx ila threatened strike picket lines could start popping ports maine texas january 28 usmx sought concessions union including reductions hiring healthcare payments along slicing royalties workers receive cargo handle strike threat comes unions across country urged swallow concessions meanwhile wages organized nonorganized labor stagnated since wall street financiers crashed economy 2008 intensifying fourdecade earnings decline possible strike also arises moment increased militancy among rankandfile workers inspired occupy movement shifted national debate economic inequality labor isolated attack said jackie disalvo member teachers union city university new york worked bridge unions occupy movement says years activist ows virtually first mass movement aggressively say unions good thing one first struggles occupy put energy behind battle teamsters local 814 locked sothebys win contract 10month period occupy staged actions disrupted business sothebys called attention arthandler employees plight hundreds rallied workers defense activists infiltrated disrupted auctions one instance blockaded sothebys doors using bike locks spectacle men tuxedos women fur coats confronted militant trade unionists teamster jackets holding occupy banners doors sothebys highlighted deep class divide continues central impetus behind movement 10 months protest teamsters local 814 back job raise emphasis direct democracy spontaneity flexibility tactics unbounded union hierarchies legal impediments tafthartley act occupy infused labor movement fresh dose radicalism workers sothebys gone auctions picketline would declared illegal said disalvo labor tolerated able overturn tremendous legal restrictions covered labor laws people get arrested union leader gets arrested union gets fined front lines occupy also leaned labor times oct 14 2011 mayor michael bloomberg brookfield properties deed holders privatelyowned public space occupy wall street pitched tents attempted clean financial district protest night aflcio affiliates new york city sent mass mailing members urging turn defend encampment thousands mobilized early hours help occupy stave eviction next day media coverage movement started take different bent cant say bunch wacko slacker hippies youve got labor movement said disalvo back basics organized labor occupy havent always seen eyetoeye january last year meeting meant help forge united front occupy ilwu members pacific northwest ended brawl statement month members occupy seattle wrote stood solidarity ilwus lockedout local 21 seemed exclude movement citing dec 12 shutdown oakland docks authors wrote occupy become new type movement unemployed low waged casualized workers workplace outside 89 us working class unionized statement went call moving beyond limits traditional labor struggle shut docks oakland asked occupy participant longtime union activist amy muldoon see product collaboration whereas people dismissive possibilities organized labor right think purely coming outside think gum works actually part production transportation distribution sales process reorganize society based mass mutual aid muldoon added change come within communities affected muldoon cautions confusing bureaucratic top labor structures today ways things always future labor movement historically flexible encompassed number things occupation zuccotti park also encompassed 1934 teamster strike minneapolis commissary medics volunteer childcare number things sprang needs self organization collective struggle sense said occupy wasnt much something new return basics expectations occupy movement working successfully organized labor may high early ows visible impact continue part fabric labor movement going forward said ironically precariat workforce alluded members occupy seattle last year undergone upsurge activity new york city recent months grocery workers carwashers airport security personnel employees within fast food industry seeking unionize sometimes theyve worked collusion occupy times job actions sponsored service employees international union others people within labor wanted militant able express added disalvo trying years get people talk growing inequality 1 gotten nowhere press ignored sudden occupy made breakthrough inherent power global 99 new jersey docks december ows labor activists hoping breakthrough ila members several dozen port authority police turned ensure didnt happen community picket squeezed far away sight dock workers instead activists micchecked letter sent bangladeshi center workers solidarity thanking helping ensure workers died tazreen sweatshop forgotten disrupting movement goods said allies dhaka prove workers inherent power within supply chain added acting solidarity showing potential power work across world confirming fight together potential power may unleashed ila makes good threat strike weeks ahead putting brake machinery moving global capital year occupy time year blockade | 991 |
<p>“Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.”</p>
<p>John Lennon</p>
<p>Just when it seemed unlikely that domestic and international events would unfold to test an already incompetent US government, along comes the acceleration of the movement to destroy Iran. That effort has been well documented over the past few years in scores of articles and position papers from the usual suspects in the media, think-tanks, and the Net. What’s missing in that coverage, though, is an understanding of the consequences of such an action, or consequence management in Pentagon parlance. More’s the pity in this discussion, comes the knowledge that the majority of Americans who are calling for military action-from all strata of society–do so as if they were casually ordering a pizza from Dominoes. Just pick-up the cellphone and, while salivating, order the Iranian War Special. Sit back and enjoy the pizza while watching the war coverage on television and gruesome videos on the Net. Oooo … Ahhh, look at that Specter Gunship at work! Whoa! Look at those body parts flying around. Pass me another piece of pizza!</p>
<p>That attitude is indicative of an intellectually bankrupt society. Does anyone in the USA think anymore? An attack on Iran would result in thousands of casualties for both US and Iranian military personnel, most of whom are youngsters. Civilian casualties would be in the many thousands. The ripple effect from such an action would cause a chain reaction of events that would spiral out of control. With no country, or group of countries, capable of de-escalating such a conflict–save for Russia and China–a world war could ensue. Certainly, the US government is no position to cope with the fallout, particularly if it deploys and uses tactical nuclear weapons. For some sane commentary on the matter, one has to rely on the lucid commentary of Martin Van Crevald over in Israel. His piece in Forward titled, Knowing Why Not to Bomb Iran is Half the Battle (forward.com) should be force-fed to supporters of an Iranian invasion. Hello United Free Kurdistan</p>
<p>According to a Reuters bulletin dated April 20th, Turkey has increased its troop presence in Kurdish dominated Southeastern Turkey by 40,000-bringing the total to 290,000. The Turkish government made that move because the American-backed Kurdish government in Northern Iraq/Kurdistan is likely to supply the Kurdistan Workers Party (PPK) with arms and intelligence on Turkish military movements in Hakkari, Van, Sirnak and other major cities in the country. It is likely that insurgents in Iraq have been training the PPK in the tactics that have been wildly successful against US forces in Iraq. Turkey has been ruthless in its oppression of the Kurds, as Saddam Hussein was, and that practice, according to the Kurdish National Congress (kncna.org), continues to this day with the Turkish Army’s secret police, Jitem, terrorizing the Kurdish population. Reliefweb.net, reports that the Kurdish language was not legalized until 1991 and the Turkish government had engaged in forced displacements as late as 2002 to break-up concentrations of the 20 million Kurds who reside in Turkey. Separatist statements by Kurds or talk of recognizing the Armenian Genocide results in doing some hard time in a Turkish jail.</p>
<p>The Turkish government has frequently complained about the duplicity of the US government as it plays its Kurdish cards. The US has largely stayed away from Turkey’s battle with its Kurds while actively supporting Kurdish groups in Iran and Syria with funds and arms. The creation of Kurdistan in Northern Iraq has infuriated Turkish leaders. When Condolezza Rice visits with Turkish officials in late April, these matters are sure to be topics of discussion.</p>
<p>Meanwhile in Iran, there are approximately four million Kurds who have suffered a similar fate as their Turkish compatriots. The Kurds in Iran are split on the type of revolt they want to run. One group formed in January 2006, the Kurdish United Front, wants to work within the Iranian system to gain equal rights. They likely receive funds from the US government via the KNC and other outlets. A Kurdish insurgent group known as Pejak–supported by the US government and working with US Special Forces and intelligence agencies on the ground–advocates the violent overthrow of the Islamic government in Iran.</p>
<p>Back in Turkey, the Kurds are not the only problem. There are accusations by opponents of Turkish President Recep Ergodan that Turkey is becoming a theocracy. Facing an election in 2007, the last thing Ergodan needs is to be perceived as an Islamic radical and incur the wrath of opponents supported by the Turkish military, which is to say the US military. The World Peace Herald, wpherald.com, carried a story titled, Turkish PM Tied to Islamic Forces. “In increasingly bitter verbal exchanges with President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, Mr. Erdogan rejected charges that he is leading Turkey away from its secular system toward Islamic fundamentalism. Mr. Sezer’s latest broadside was a statement to the War Academy that ‘religious fundamentalism has reached dramatic proportions. Islamic fundamentalism is trying to infiltrate politics, education and the state, it is systematically eroding values'”</p>
<p>So, as the bombs fly over Iran, the Kurds would be likely to seize the day and fight for the recognition of a Kurdish state that deletes portions of present-day Turkey, Iran, Syria and Iraq ( <a href="http://www.kncna.org/docs/map.asp" type="external">http://www.kncna.org/docs/map.asp</a>) from the map. This is no idle dream. The American based KNC openly advocates a United Free Kurdistan. One day, there will be a Kurdish state. That could be done in a non-violent fashion rather than as a consequence of a misguided military adventure against Iran. Finally, an invasion of that country would likely involve Turkish assets of some kind. As a member of NATO, Turkey houses tactical nuclear weapons and, as reported by Ramin Jahanbegloo in the Daily Star, “Participation by Turkey in a US/Israeli military operation is also a factor [concerning Iran], following an agreement reached between the Turks and Israelis.”</p>
<p>Central Asia and the Middle East would become a bloodbath one minute after an attack on Iran.</p>
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<p>Bye Bye Pakistan</p>
<p>In Pakistan, the US is having its cake and eating too. US weapons and technology are being used by the Pakistani dictatorship of President Musharraf to suppress a revolt for independence by the people of Balochistan ( <a href="http://www.bdd.sdnpk.org/" type="external">http://www.bdd.sdnpk.org</a>), also home to Pakistan nuclear tests in 1998 and a energy- rich province. The USA is also funding anti-Pakistani insurgent groups in Bolochistan in order to infiltrate drug operations, the black market for nuclear weaponry, Taliban remnants, and assorted Islamic resistance groups like Al Qa’da that have taken up residence in the hinterlands of Balochistan. The US State Department’s 2004 country report on Pakistan was effusive in its praise for Pakistan indicating that it was the key ally in the Long War on Terror and that Pakistan has its internal affairs under control. Yet the situation on the ground is quite different.</p>
<p>A February 2006 piece carried by sindhtoday.net/bs.htm has the following headline: Chemical Gas, Gunship Copters Used Against Baloch People. “Balochistan, the area’s largest and resource-rich province of Islamic Republic of Pakistan, has recently taken another blood bath where many innocent people have been killed in an [Pakistani] army action. [Pakistani] Interior Minister Aftab Sherpao has claimed that no children or woman have been killed in the recent operation but photographs released show that many innocent children were brutally killed in bombardment, as they can not be termed as terrorists.”</p>
<p>Pakistan is suppressing news on the seriousness of its fight against the Baloch. The number of killed-in action (KIA) its Army has incurred combating the Boloch revolt is well over 100 with thousands wounded. These troopers are portrayed by Musharraf as casualties in the fight against foreign terror when, in fact, its akin to a civil war: the Baloch are fighting for independence.</p>
<p>India Monitor reported in January 2006 that “Senator Sanaullah Baloch, a vocal and influential member of the Balochistan National Partysaid that if conditions continued to be as oppressive for the people of his home province, we will have no option but to exercise our national right for self-determination for a separate state…Today every Baloch knows that Pakistan is a viable state only because of Balochistan…Pointing to the natural resources and the strategic importance of the province in the region, he said that the information revolution had made the world very small and today the Baloch people could not be fooled, and wanted their rights.” (The dynamics of Kashmir, which threaten Pakistan’s stability, are beyond the scope of this piece).</p>
<p>As Iran is pummeled by US air strikes, and the Kurds make their move, What will the Baloch do? How will rebel groups like Al Qa’da respond? Will they rally to their Iranian comrades? Would the Pakistani military use a tactical nuke to wipe out all its problems in Balochistan? What about India’s reaction? What will Turkmenistan and the rest of the Stans do? Would Armenia side with the Turkish Kurds? How will the US troops in Iraq handle the fallout?</p>
<p>In another stellar example of incompetence, the USA-Indo nuclear deal struck by President Bush with Prime Minister Singh this past March was suppose to be a signal to Russia and China that the US is almighty. The USA seemingly gave no thought to what the deal with a country that refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty might create. Pakistan has vowed to increase its nuclear weapons capability. China has offered to build reactors for Pakistan and can tinker with America’s prosperity via currency manipulation. Russian nuclear forces are being upgraded. Saudi Arabia is alleged to have purchased tactical nukes and is starting its own commercial and military nuclear capability. In South America, Brazil has ramped up production of its nuclear capabilities and will not allow inspectors into certain nuke facilities. And there can be no question that Venezuela will develop a nuke program or, like Saudi Arabia, just buy the weapons outright on the black market. You Say You Want a Revolution</p>
<p>Domestic factors in the USA have to be added to this already volatile brew. The Red, White and Blue Revolt of retired US military generals such as Gregory Newbold and Anthony Zinni carried out in the US mainstream media is fascinating. Their call for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation is unprecedented in American wartime history and indicates that the only credible opposition to a civilian leadership gone mad is the military and big corporations. That other party called the Democrats are part of the problem and not the solution. As for President Bush; he dutifully does what he’s told by Cheney and Rumsfeld.</p>
<p>Take note that the generals are key players in investment companies like Globesecnine (Newbold is co-founder of globesecnine.com) and Anthony Zinni is a board member of Veritas Capital (along with a who’s who of former US military leaders). Wall Street helps fund these groups and they may have figured, finally, that Rumsfeld is bad for the military and business (read Jeffrey St. Clair of counterpunch.org for more on that relationship). US intelligence agencies like the CIA are always involved overtly or covertly in the investment/stock trading business, and likely have involvement in these investment firms. They are saying something too: revenge is sweet.</p>
<p>With rebellion in the military and corporate ranks, and the potential for more indictments of Bush Administration’s insiders (Karl Rove?) in the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson CIA case, one has to wonder how this group of people could possibly manage the day-after realities of an Iranian assault.</p>
<p>The USA is operating as if it really is an unchallenged superpower. What kind of superpower has increasing poverty, homelessness, unemployment and can’t even rebuild one of its premier cities-New Orleans–after a hurricane? What kind of superpower refuses to make concessions, to negotiate and treats other nations like China and Russia as inferior entities? What nation is the Paper Tiger now? It never had to be this way.</p>
<p>So what about Iran? The simple answer, in two parts, to all this madness is to turn the Iranian matter over the the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a NATO-like security coalition led by China and Russia. Iran is soon to become a member of that group anyway. Let the SCO monitor Iran as it builds its nuclear commercial and military capability. Iran wants to be a key energy player in a region it knows is dominated by Russia and China. The USA wants that black gold to come West and have geopolitical control over Central Asia. It’s never going to happen. It is inevitable that the Kurds and Baloch will have their independent states, the Iranians and Brazilians will have their nuclear power/weapons, the Chinese will have their ascendancy, the Russians will return to the world stage, and the Palestinians will get a fair shake one day.</p>
<p>Secondly, negotiate. More than ever, the USA needs to get back to the negotiating table. Maybe some grand brain out there should read NSC-68, Sec IX, authored in 1950 and designed to deal with the former Soviet Union. “The free countries must always, therefore, be prepared to negotiate and must be ready to take the initiative at times in seeking negotiation. They must develop a negotiating position which defines the issues and the terms on which they would be prepared–and at what stages–to accept agreements… The terms must be fair in the view of popular opinion… This means that they must be consistent with a positive program for peace–in harmony with the United Nations’ Charter and providing, at a minimum, for the effective control of all armaments by the United Nations or a successor organization.”</p>
<p>Talking? Negotiating? Why not the SCO?</p>
<p>What an insane thought.</p>
<p>JOHN STANTON is a Virginia-based writer specializing in political and national security matters. He is the author of America 2004: A Power But no Super, and co-author of <a href="" type="internal">America’s Nightmare: The Presidency of George Bush II</a>. Reach him at <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a></p>
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<p>&#160;</p> | true | 4 | society run insane people insane objectives think run maniacs maniacal ends think im liable put away insane expressing thats whats insane john lennon seemed unlikely domestic international events would unfold test already incompetent us government along comes acceleration movement destroy iran effort well documented past years scores articles position papers usual suspects media thinktanks net whats missing coverage though understanding consequences action consequence management pentagon parlance mores pity discussion comes knowledge majority americans calling military actionfrom strata societydo casually ordering pizza dominoes pickup cellphone salivating order iranian war special sit back enjoy pizza watching war coverage television gruesome videos net oooo ahhh look specter gunship work whoa look body parts flying around pass another piece pizza attitude indicative intellectually bankrupt society anyone usa think anymore attack iran would result thousands casualties us iranian military personnel youngsters civilian casualties would many thousands ripple effect action would cause chain reaction events would spiral control country group countries capable deescalating conflictsave russia chinaa world war could ensue certainly us government position cope fallout particularly deploys uses tactical nuclear weapons sane commentary matter one rely lucid commentary martin van crevald israel piece forward titled knowing bomb iran half battle forwardcom forcefed supporters iranian invasion hello united free kurdistan according reuters bulletin dated april 20th turkey increased troop presence kurdish dominated southeastern turkey 40000bringing total 290000 turkish government made move americanbacked kurdish government northern iraqkurdistan likely supply kurdistan workers party ppk arms intelligence turkish military movements hakkari van sirnak major cities country likely insurgents iraq training ppk tactics wildly successful us forces iraq turkey ruthless oppression kurds saddam hussein practice according kurdish national congress kncnaorg continues day turkish armys secret police jitem terrorizing kurdish population reliefwebnet reports kurdish language legalized 1991 turkish government engaged forced displacements late 2002 breakup concentrations 20 million kurds reside turkey separatist statements kurds talk recognizing armenian genocide results hard time turkish jail turkish government frequently complained duplicity us government plays kurdish cards us largely stayed away turkeys battle kurds actively supporting kurdish groups iran syria funds arms creation kurdistan northern iraq infuriated turkish leaders condolezza rice visits turkish officials late april matters sure topics discussion meanwhile iran approximately four million kurds suffered similar fate turkish compatriots kurds iran split type revolt want run one group formed january 2006 kurdish united front wants work within iranian system gain equal rights likely receive funds us government via knc outlets kurdish insurgent group known pejaksupported us government working us special forces intelligence agencies groundadvocates violent overthrow islamic government iran back turkey kurds problem accusations opponents turkish president recep ergodan turkey becoming theocracy facing election 2007 last thing ergodan needs perceived islamic radical incur wrath opponents supported turkish military say us military world peace herald wpheraldcom carried story titled turkish pm tied islamic forces increasingly bitter verbal exchanges president ahmet necdet sezer mr erdogan rejected charges leading turkey away secular system toward islamic fundamentalism mr sezers latest broadside statement war academy religious fundamentalism reached dramatic proportions islamic fundamentalism trying infiltrate politics education state systematically eroding values bombs fly iran kurds would likely seize day fight recognition kurdish state deletes portions presentday turkey iran syria iraq httpwwwkncnaorgdocsmapasp map idle dream american based knc openly advocates united free kurdistan one day kurdish state could done nonviolent fashion rather consequence misguided military adventure iran finally invasion country would likely involve turkish assets kind member nato turkey houses tactical nuclear weapons reported ramin jahanbegloo daily star participation turkey usisraeli military operation also factor concerning iran following agreement reached turks israelis central asia middle east would become bloodbath one minute attack iran 160 bye bye pakistan pakistan us cake eating us weapons technology used pakistani dictatorship president musharraf suppress revolt independence people balochistan httpwwwbddsdnpkorg also home pakistan nuclear tests 1998 energy rich province usa also funding antipakistani insurgent groups bolochistan order infiltrate drug operations black market nuclear weaponry taliban remnants assorted islamic resistance groups like al qada taken residence hinterlands balochistan us state departments 2004 country report pakistan effusive praise pakistan indicating key ally long war terror pakistan internal affairs control yet situation ground quite different february 2006 piece carried sindhtodaynetbshtm following headline chemical gas gunship copters used baloch people balochistan areas largest resourcerich province islamic republic pakistan recently taken another blood bath many innocent people killed pakistani army action pakistani interior minister aftab sherpao claimed children woman killed recent operation photographs released show many innocent children brutally killed bombardment termed terrorists pakistan suppressing news seriousness fight baloch number killedin action kia army incurred combating boloch revolt well 100 thousands wounded troopers portrayed musharraf casualties fight foreign terror fact akin civil war baloch fighting independence india monitor reported january 2006 senator sanaullah baloch vocal influential member balochistan national partysaid conditions continued oppressive people home province option exercise national right selfdetermination separate statetoday every baloch knows pakistan viable state balochistanpointing natural resources strategic importance province region said information revolution made world small today baloch people could fooled wanted rights dynamics kashmir threaten pakistans stability beyond scope piece iran pummeled us air strikes kurds make move baloch rebel groups like al qada respond rally iranian comrades would pakistani military use tactical nuke wipe problems balochistan indias reaction turkmenistan rest stans would armenia side turkish kurds us troops iraq handle fallout another stellar example incompetence usaindo nuclear deal struck president bush prime minister singh past march suppose signal russia china us almighty usa seemingly gave thought deal country refused sign nuclear nonproliferation treaty might create pakistan vowed increase nuclear weapons capability china offered build reactors pakistan tinker americas prosperity via currency manipulation russian nuclear forces upgraded saudi arabia alleged purchased tactical nukes starting commercial military nuclear capability south america brazil ramped production nuclear capabilities allow inspectors certain nuke facilities question venezuela develop nuke program like saudi arabia buy weapons outright black market say want revolution domestic factors usa added already volatile brew red white blue revolt retired us military generals gregory newbold anthony zinni carried us mainstream media fascinating call secretary defense donald rumsfelds resignation unprecedented american wartime history indicates credible opposition civilian leadership gone mad military big corporations party called democrats part problem solution president bush dutifully hes told cheney rumsfeld take note generals key players investment companies like globesecnine newbold cofounder globesecninecom anthony zinni board member veritas capital along whos former us military leaders wall street helps fund groups may figured finally rumsfeld bad military business read jeffrey st clair counterpunchorg relationship us intelligence agencies like cia always involved overtly covertly investmentstock trading business likely involvement investment firms saying something revenge sweet rebellion military corporate ranks potential indictments bush administrations insiders karl rove valerie plamejoe wilson cia case one wonder group people could possibly manage dayafter realities iranian assault usa operating really unchallenged superpower kind superpower increasing poverty homelessness unemployment cant even rebuild one premier citiesnew orleansafter hurricane kind superpower refuses make concessions negotiate treats nations like china russia inferior entities nation paper tiger never way iran simple answer two parts madness turn iranian matter shanghai cooperation organization sco natolike security coalition led china russia iran soon become member group anyway let sco monitor iran builds nuclear commercial military capability iran wants key energy player region knows dominated russia china usa wants black gold come west geopolitical control central asia never going happen inevitable kurds baloch independent states iranians brazilians nuclear powerweapons chinese ascendancy russians return world stage palestinians get fair shake one day secondly negotiate ever usa needs get back negotiating table maybe grand brain read nsc68 sec ix authored 1950 designed deal former soviet union free countries must always therefore prepared negotiate must ready take initiative times seeking negotiation must develop negotiating position defines issues terms would preparedand stagesto accept agreements terms must fair view popular opinion means must consistent positive program peacein harmony united nations charter providing minimum effective control armaments united nations successor organization talking negotiating sco insane thought john stanton virginiabased writer specializing political national security matters author america 2004 power super coauthor americas nightmare presidency george bush ii reach cioran123yahoocom 160 160 160 160 | 1,330 |
<p>Bruce Fein is the founder of the American Freedom Agenda. He served in the US Justice Department under President Reagan and has been an adjunct scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, a resident scholar at the Heritage Foundation, a lecturer at the Brookings Institute, and an adjunct professor at George Washington University. He was an advisor to Ron Paul. Bruce is also the author of the book "American Empire: Before the Fall."</p>
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<p /> PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Washington. And joining us again now to continue exploring libertarian political philosophy and views is Bruce Fein. Bruce was an associate deputy attorney general under President Reagan. He's author of the book American Empire: Before the Fall. He's now a co-counsel for the Turkish American Legal Defense Fund. And he's consulted with and worked with Ron Paul. Thanks for joining us.
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<p />BRUCE FEIN, LAWYER AND AUTHOR: Thank you.
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<p />JAY: So we've had a couple of conversations about foreign policy issues. Let's talk a little bit more about domestic issues. Let's start with the fight that took place over whether or not to extend the Bush tax cuts. What did you think of the tax cuts to begin with, and what do you make about extending them?
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<p />FEIN: Well, I don't have any general objection to tax cuts. I think the government is vastly bloated. We say--I think we can probably cut $900 billion out of the Defense Department. We shouldn't tax people for money that isn't needed. And I think also if you see the current furor over all these exorbitant pension, health costs that go to government employees, and lesser perhaps at the federal level but still there, that the public clearly, in my judgment, is supporting, it shows that we're spending much too much in government already. I do object to the fact, however, that it was indiscriminate. We still are taxing, like, capital gains, hedge funds, people who make vast sums of money as though they're not earning income like you and me, 'cause they get involved in trading certain kinds of financial instruments--all their profit is viewed as a capital gain. That seems to me almost obscene, given the profits they're making. But it's the nature of politics oftentimes that you get indiscriminate elements in a tax bill. But overall I don't see any need with the government to have more rather than less money, given the amount of bloat that's out there.
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<p />JAY: Now, what's talked about, pension funds and such, and I guess you're referring to state workers, now, I've seen several studies now that show that state workers compared to private workers at anything above the minimum level, where they're more or less the same, when you start getting to higher levels of education, state workers are making about 8 percent less than people in the private sector, and the higher, the more educated they are, the more senior their position, the less they're making--the gap between what you make in the public service and the private sector even widens. I mean, isn't there a kind of a mythology going on here,--
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<p />FEIN: Well, I don't know about that, Paul.
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<p />JAY: --especially when you compare it to what isn't getting taxed at the high end [inaudible]
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<p />FEIN: No--well, no, I don't necessarily believe so, because if you look at, you know, its--its health and pension benefits oftentimes are not included in the base salary.
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<p />JAY: No, [inaudible] talking about are.
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<p />FEIN: But moreover you have to ask--there's another element, the risk. You know, in private sector, you take risks. You get laid off. The risk of being laid off in the public sector is very, very tiny. And even more important, you ask--how much you're getting paid depends upon how much product you're contributing to social welfare and the public good. That's basically how we get compensated. My view is you can't--you ask, well, what are they doing in there that is contributing as much to social well-being and consumer satisfaction as the people who are in the private sector? And the reason--and that's--
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<p />JAY: Oh, come on. Come on. You've got to--.
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<p />FEIN: --in my judgment they're way overpaid. They're way overpaid.
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<p />JAY: Oh, come on. Someone picking up garbage or teaching kids has got to be contributing more to the private sector than a professional basketball player--I mean to the public social good; it's not the private sector.
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<p />FEIN: Yeah, but you can--you have--private contractors can collect garbage. You can contract that out. You don't need a government employee to collect garbage.
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<p />JAY: I'm not saying you need that. I'm just picking up your argument about remuneration should be based on social good. We don't have any of that in our society. The people running hedge funds are not doing social good.
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<p />FEIN: No, I know. But we define--the only way that we have any common standard of what social good is being done is by what people will voluntarily pay for if they have free-market transaction, even if they have market power. It's true. I mean, some people would pay, Paul, $100 million for a Monet painting, and I wouldn't pay a penny for it. Well, it's still worth $100 million to someone who's willing to pay for it.
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<p />JAY: But we vote in a system that says that we're going to pay a certain amount of taxes. It's as voluntary as going out and buying something.
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<p />FEIN: That's ridiculous. If you don't pay your taxes, you get sentenced to prison. If you don't buy a Monet, no one does anything to you.
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<p />JAY: No, but we vote for that system that says that. It's not coming from a king.
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<p />FEIN: Yeah, but--yeah, but it's--I know, but it's not a plebiscite. It's not like--no one is able to vote and say, I have to buy a Monet and I'll get punished if I don't. And, moreover, in the voting system, unlike the individual consumer choice, yeah, you have a right to vote, but you don't have a right to prevail. If you're outvoted by other people, you lose, and you accept that as part of the rules of the game. So you may end up with a system that you don't approve of, but you understand the overall due process requires you to accept law.
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<p />JAY: Which includes taxes.
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<p />FEIN: Which includes taxes. But that doesn't make taxes like going out in a free marketplace and deciding what to buy in it.
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<p />JAY: No, it probably makes it more participatory, because in the free marketplace is not very free these days.
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<p />FEIN: But anyway, you have--you get to choose--
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<p />JAY: You get to choose between--Coke and Pepsi is not a big choice here.
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<p />FEIN: --you get to choose whether you--you get to choose whether to surrender any money out of your pocket or not. You don't have that when it comes to taxes.
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<p />JAY: Okay. Let's move on to another thing.
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<p />FEIN: Okay.
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<p />JAY: One of the other taxes that more or less got eliminated, or certainly so reduced, was estate tax.
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<p />FEIN: Yes. Now, I'm--clearly believe that there ought to be estate taxes. I just think--.
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<p />JAY: You're for estate taxes.
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<p />FEIN: I'm for estate taxes. I think it corrupts a culture to develop a whole slew of people who inherit vast wealth from their parents. The true test of character and mettle and developing the strength you need in a citizenry is accomplishing it on your own, not just having it handed to you by somebody else, so that I--my judgment--you know, there's no greatness in saying, well, we shouldn't have any estate taxes so certain wealthy people can let their children grow up as doted-on--.
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<p />JAY: So isn't that a bigger issue than what's happening in the public service and the public sector? And I'll give you a very concrete example. In Wisconsin in 2008, at the very end of the federal estate tax--because in 2010 there actually wasn't one, and it begins--there's a new deal to have a lower one in 2011 and '12. But Wisconsin collected $158 million dollars in estate taxes in 2008; then in '09, next to nothing; and '10, zero. That's more, significantly more, than the kind of concessions they're trying to get out of the public sector workers, which is only going to net them about $30 million. Why aren't--?
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<p />FEIN: But I'm opposed to all of it. I mean, I agree. There's no reason--.
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<p />JAY: But why not put the emphasis there? Why not make the attack on the estate taxes? Why make the attack on public sector workers?
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<p />FEIN: I deplore both of them. You know, people have different choices. One doesn't exclude the other. You don't have to say, well, since one is $150 million and another $40 million, you should forget the $40 million. Forty million is too much to--I'm against waste in anything, even one penny.
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<p />JAY: Okay, but that isn't where most libertarians are putting their resources and time to talk about. If you take your cuts to the military budget and you put a real estate tax on it, even just get back to 2001 estate tax levels, which were traditionally there for 85 years, most of these cuts that are being talked about now in the House--. Everyone's for getting rid of waste, but I don't think you can call food programs and fuel subsidies for the poor a waste. So we wouldn't have to do any of that if--.
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<p />FEIN: No, we don't know how they're--we don't know how they're administered, Paul. You could say food given to North Korea's not waste. Well, what do you mean it's not waste? It ends up in the military. It's--there's a huge amount of waste that gets diversion into fraud.
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<p />JAY: We're not talking about--I'm not talking about food to North Korea. I'm talking about fuel subsidies for poor Americans.
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<p />FEIN: No, I understand. But I'm just saying that in the administration, in the administration of any program, there's vast amount of excess.
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<p />JAY: I'm talking about where do you--. Listen, there's going to be waste. Anything that's big, no matter who's running it, is going to have waste and inefficiencies in it. The question is: where do you put your focus? And most of the libertarians--and I don't include you or Ron Paul, but to some extent I do with Ron Paul--is they're putting their emphasis on these cuts on social programs, when the big elephants in the room is not only the military but the estate tax, and that there's so much money to be gotten there that it would easily balance the budget.
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<p />FEIN: Well, the military, I sure agree. But it's--I think you're being disingenuous to say, if you look at Medicaid, Medicare, and social security, those aren't huge sums. That's over $1 trillion a year. So that's obviously not a tiny amount. You're just talking about a very, very tiny slice, which is, alright, how much health and pension payments go to local and state employees. But that's not really where the huge spending is on the social programs.
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<p />JAY: No, the real spending is the cost of health care.
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<p />FEIN: Part of health care, but social security, too. Those two combined. Social security has pension elements in there.
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<p />JAY: Well, let's separate them, 'cause there's different questions with each one of them. Take health care. I mean, if you saw evidence that you could see a single-payer, government-administered health care plan was more efficient and cheaper overall than the current model or any--or a non-Obama health care [inaudible] go back to the status quo, would you agree--would you accept such a thing simply 'cause it was more efficient?
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<p />FEIN: I'm in favor of having government do things that cost less rather than more. Why would anyone want to spend more to accomplish the same thing than less? That's just nonsense.
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<p />JAY: So what did you think of the health care debate? 'Cause the single-payer people were agreeing with you that the Obama plan didn't really lower the cost of health care.
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<p />FEIN: But the single-payer people just had a model, too. Paul, you and I have been in Washington for long, long decades, and how many models--.
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<p />JAY: Well, you have. I haven't. You have.
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<p />FEIN: Anyway, I've been here 43 years, and I've seen hundreds of models that turned out the opposite of what they project, because we know the people behind the models have political agendas, so they always forecast something that's going to be different than what it actually turns out to be. And so I wouldn't believe any of those models farther than I could throw a stone. You know? We know that they're concocted up there for political reasons. I'm not going to put up a model, then say, well, if single-payer was so great [inaudible] everybody in the world who had an option at every state level, local level, internationally would have a single-payer option, 'cause it must be clearly the superior--. But that's not how all the programs operate in health care area, and that's why I wouldn't believe that. After all the nonsensical economic projections--.
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<p />JAY: Okay. Well, here's where you get to get my query, then, about the whole libertarian outlook, then. If the government's out of it, and you just let the free market decide, how do you prevent monopolization?
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<p />FEIN: Yeah, if you have the antitrust laws--it's not the government's totally out. You prevent price fixing, mergers that are too big. I'm, for example, in favor to prevent another TARP, having limits on the size of banks so they never can become too big to fail. So, clearly, government has a role in ensuring that you've got a properly competitive marketplace so monopolistic practices don't enter into the equation.
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<p />JAY: Do libertarians in the House agree with you on this?
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<p />FEIN: Certainly many--.
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<p />JAY: Like, would they go for a break up the banks, a--.
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<p />FEIN: I think there are libertarians who would go for putting size on bank limits, absolutely, 'cause they understand exactly what's going to happen: too-big-to-fail--Citibank, whatever; the whole economy will tremble; we've got to throw in money to prop it up.
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<p />JAY: And I don't hear this from libertarians, the need for more serious implementation of antitrust laws, which will be a critical element if you're going to have some measure of a free market.
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<p />FEIN: Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's--it's a fact that it hasn't been highest on the agenda, but I certainly would be in favor of it. But they may feel that there are other things that are more urgent and pressing.
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<p />JAY: Alright. So it gets back to an earlier conversation. There's some convergence of interest between what you say--and I'm not sure what you say is the same as what some of your Tea Party bretheren in the House say.
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<p />FEIN: I'm sure they don't. Look, listen, it's not an echo chamber. You've been around, Paul. There's going to be disagreements amongst--in any kind of group. It's a matter of degree and how willing there is to kind of get some compromise to bridge a difference. But, sure, what I'm saying is hardly going to be, oh, well, everyone gets up and sings like a Greek chorus exactly my same words [inaudible]
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<p />JAY: I understand that. But you know that. I'm trying to get a sense of--do you--do most libertarians share your opinion on antitrust laws?
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<p />FEIN: I think that most libertarians would understand the need to prevent price fixing and being too big to fail. Now, some would say, oh, you know, that's--maybe the Koch brothers or something, they want monopolies, but I think that's clearly a sharp minority. It goes back to Louis Brandeis. He was a Supreme Court justice, and before then he was someone who we might call a public advocate, arguing very strongly in the urgency of small business and a more atomistic, if you will, economy, precisely to encourage innovation and competition and prevent a company from becoming so large politically that no longer do free market forces work.
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<p />JAY: Okay. Let's go back to what's happening at the state level, quickly. Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, New Jersey, all of these states, with the exception of New Jersey, which actually has an inheritance and an estate tax, although it's relatively low, but in these other states, as far as I understand it, they don't have anything. They've been lowering the tax rates. Isn't there an issue of going after this vast accumulated wealth, at least before you start looking at public sector workers?
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<p />FEIN: I don't think you have priorities. You have to do it at the same time.
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<p />JAY: But they're making it a priority, 'cause--but they're not, but they're not going after this.
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<p />FEIN: I know they aren't, but that's the real issue. It's not, you know, is one more urgent than the other. I think estate tax--I think that the federal government is the one that really has the bite on the estate tax, not so much [inaudible]
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<p />JAY: And then share--do something to share with the states.
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<p />FEIN: And there's got to be a reevaluation of what we are as a nation. And we talk about, well, [inaudible] plummeting standards of living. The United States earmark is not standards of living; it's independence, freedom, that the default position in between government and individual liberty is individual liberty. And we all recognize that those values of the United States are what earmark us as a civilization, which is independent of GNP. Suppose that our standard of living, Paul, is no longer 2008 or 2007. Suppose it goes back to 1950. If we still retain our values and our devotion to due process and who we are as a people, and not wanting to dominate people abroad for its own sake, and don't go abroad in search of monsters to destroy, who cares? Who cares? When we write our epitaph, do we care, oh, well, he had x number of cars in his house or how many video games? No. That's not what we are as a civilization. The United States wasn't built on the idea the goal of the enterprise is make us as rich as can be. It didn't frown on that, no, the goal of the enterprise is to make us live by the better angels of our nature.
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<p />JAY: And there's a place for you guys in the Republican Party? Thanks for joining us. Oh, you can answer my question. I don't have to have the last word.
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<p />FEIN: The Republican Party evolves like any other party, and at some time and place, I hope it will be.
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<p />JAY: And not that the Democrats are that different on this score. Thanks very much for joining us. Thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.
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<p />End of Transcript
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<p />DISCLAIMER: Please note that transcripts for The Real News Network are typed from a recording of the program. TRNN cannot guarantee their complete accuracy. | true | 4 | bruce fein founder american freedom agenda served us justice department president reagan adjunct scholar american enterprise institute resident scholar heritage foundation lecturer brookings institute adjunct professor george washington university advisor ron paul bruce also author book american empire fall paul jay senior editor trnn welcome real news network im paul jay washington joining us continue exploring libertarian political philosophy views bruce fein bruce associate deputy attorney general president reagan hes author book american empire fall hes cocounsel turkish american legal defense fund hes consulted worked ron paul thanks joining us bruce fein lawyer author thank jay weve couple conversations foreign policy issues lets talk little bit domestic issues lets start fight took place whether extend bush tax cuts think tax cuts begin make extending fein well dont general objection tax cuts think government vastly bloated sayi think probably cut 900 billion defense department shouldnt tax people money isnt needed think also see current furor exorbitant pension health costs go government employees lesser perhaps federal level still public clearly judgment supporting shows spending much much government already object fact however indiscriminate still taxing like capital gains hedge funds people make vast sums money though theyre earning income like cause get involved trading certain kinds financial instrumentsall profit viewed capital gain seems almost obscene given profits theyre making nature politics oftentimes get indiscriminate elements tax bill overall dont see need government rather less money given amount bloat thats jay whats talked pension funds guess youre referring state workers ive seen several studies show state workers compared private workers anything minimum level theyre less start getting higher levels education state workers making 8 percent less people private sector higher educated senior position less theyre makingthe gap make public service private sector even widens mean isnt kind mythology going fein well dont know paul jay especially compare isnt getting taxed high end inaudible fein nowell dont necessarily believe look know itsits health pension benefits oftentimes included base salary jay inaudible talking fein moreover asktheres another element risk know private sector take risks get laid risk laid public sector tiny even important askhow much youre getting paid depends upon much product youre contributing social welfare public good thats basically get compensated view cantyou ask well contributing much social wellbeing consumer satisfaction people private sector reasonand thats jay oh come come youve got fein judgment theyre way overpaid theyre way overpaid jay oh come someone picking garbage teaching kids got contributing private sector professional basketball playeri mean public social good private sector fein yeah canyou haveprivate contractors collect garbage contract dont need government employee collect garbage jay im saying need im picking argument remuneration based social good dont society people running hedge funds social good fein know definethe way common standard social good done people voluntarily pay freemarket transaction even market power true mean people would pay paul 100 million monet painting wouldnt pay penny well still worth 100 million someone whos willing pay jay vote system says going pay certain amount taxes voluntary going buying something fein thats ridiculous dont pay taxes get sentenced prison dont buy monet one anything jay vote system says coming king fein yeah butyeah itsi know plebiscite likeno one able vote say buy monet ill get punished dont moreover voting system unlike individual consumer choice yeah right vote dont right prevail youre outvoted people lose accept part rules game may end system dont approve understand overall due process requires accept law jay includes taxes fein includes taxes doesnt make taxes like going free marketplace deciding buy jay probably makes participatory free marketplace free days fein anyway haveyou get choose jay get choose betweencoke pepsi big choice fein get choose whether youyou get choose whether surrender money pocket dont comes taxes jay okay lets move another thing fein okay jay one taxes less got eliminated certainly reduced estate tax fein yes imclearly believe ought estate taxes think jay youre estate taxes fein im estate taxes think corrupts culture develop whole slew people inherit vast wealth parents true test character mettle developing strength need citizenry accomplishing handed somebody else imy judgmentyou know theres greatness saying well shouldnt estate taxes certain wealthy people let children grow dotedon jay isnt bigger issue whats happening public service public sector ill give concrete example wisconsin 2008 end federal estate taxbecause 2010 actually wasnt one beginstheres new deal lower one 2011 12 wisconsin collected 158 million dollars estate taxes 2008 09 next nothing 10 zero thats significantly kind concessions theyre trying get public sector workers going net 30 million arent fein im opposed mean agree theres reason jay put emphasis make attack estate taxes make attack public sector workers fein deplore know people different choices one doesnt exclude dont say well since one 150 million another 40 million forget 40 million forty million much toim waste anything even one penny jay okay isnt libertarians putting resources time talk take cuts military budget put real estate tax even get back 2001 estate tax levels traditionally 85 years cuts talked house everyones getting rid waste dont think call food programs fuel subsidies poor waste wouldnt fein dont know theyrewe dont know theyre administered paul could say food given north koreas waste well mean waste ends military itstheres huge amount waste gets diversion fraud jay talking aboutim talking food north korea im talking fuel subsidies poor americans fein understand im saying administration administration program theres vast amount excess jay im talking listen theres going waste anything thats big matter whos running going waste inefficiencies question put focus libertariansand dont include ron paul extent ron paulis theyre putting emphasis cuts social programs big elephants room military estate tax theres much money gotten would easily balance budget fein well military sure agree itsi think youre disingenuous say look medicaid medicare social security arent huge sums thats 1 trillion year thats obviously tiny amount youre talking tiny slice alright much health pension payments go local state employees thats really huge spending social programs jay real spending cost health care fein part health care social security two combined social security pension elements jay well lets separate cause theres different questions one take health care mean saw evidence could see singlepayer governmentadministered health care plan efficient cheaper overall current model anyor nonobama health care inaudible go back status quo would agreewould accept thing simply cause efficient fein im favor government things cost less rather would anyone want spend accomplish thing less thats nonsense jay think health care debate cause singlepayer people agreeing obama plan didnt really lower cost health care fein singlepayer people model paul washington long long decades many models jay well havent fein anyway ive 43 years ive seen hundreds models turned opposite project know people behind models political agendas always forecast something thats going different actually turns wouldnt believe models farther could throw stone know know theyre concocted political reasons im going put model say well singlepayer great inaudible everybody world option every state level local level internationally would singlepayer option cause must clearly superior thats programs operate health care area thats wouldnt believe nonsensical economic projections jay okay well heres get get query whole libertarian outlook governments let free market decide prevent monopolization fein yeah antitrust lawsits governments totally prevent price fixing mergers big im example favor prevent another tarp limits size banks never become big fail clearly government role ensuring youve got properly competitive marketplace monopolistic practices dont enter equation jay libertarians house agree fein certainly many jay like would go break banks fein think libertarians would go putting size bank limits absolutely cause understand exactly whats going happen toobigtofailcitibank whatever whole economy tremble weve got throw money prop jay dont hear libertarians need serious implementation antitrust laws critical element youre going measure free market fein yeah yeah well thatsits fact hasnt highest agenda certainly would favor may feel things urgent pressing jay alright gets back earlier conversation theres convergence interest sayand im sure say tea party bretheren house say fein im sure dont look listen echo chamber youve around paul theres going disagreements amongstin kind group matter degree willing kind get compromise bridge difference sure im saying hardly going oh well everyone gets sings like greek chorus exactly words inaudible jay understand know im trying get sense ofdo youdo libertarians share opinion antitrust laws fein think libertarians would understand need prevent price fixing big fail would say oh know thatsmaybe koch brothers something want monopolies think thats clearly sharp minority goes back louis brandeis supreme court justice someone might call public advocate arguing strongly urgency small business atomistic economy precisely encourage innovation competition prevent company becoming large politically longer free market forces work jay okay lets go back whats happening state level quickly wisconsin indiana ohio new jersey states exception new jersey actually inheritance estate tax although relatively low states far understand dont anything theyve lowering tax rates isnt issue going vast accumulated wealth least start looking public sector workers fein dont think priorities time jay theyre making priority causebut theyre theyre going fein know arent thats real issue know one urgent think estate taxi think federal government one really bite estate tax much inaudible jay sharedo something share states fein theres got reevaluation nation talk well inaudible plummeting standards living united states earmark standards living independence freedom default position government individual liberty individual liberty recognize values united states earmark us civilization independent gnp suppose standard living paul longer 2008 2007 suppose goes back 1950 still retain values devotion due process people wanting dominate people abroad sake dont go abroad search monsters destroy cares cares write epitaph care oh well x number cars house many video games thats civilization united states wasnt built idea goal enterprise make us rich didnt frown goal enterprise make us live better angels nature jay theres place guys republican party thanks joining us oh answer question dont last word fein republican party evolves like party time place hope jay democrats different score thanks much joining us thank joining us real news network end transcript disclaimer please note transcripts real news network typed recording program trnn guarantee complete accuracy | 1,674 |
<p>For Vermonters who have seen Howard Dean up close and personal for the last eleven years as our governor, there’s something darkly comical about watching the national media refer to him as the “liberal” in the race for the Democratic nomination for president. With few exceptions in the 11-plus years he held the state’s top job, Dean was a conservative Democrat at best. And many in Vermont, particularly environmentalists, see Dean as just another Republican in Democrat’s clothing.</p>
<p>As the son of a wealthy Long Island family (his father was a prominent Wall Street insider), Dean’s used to having his golden path well greased. After dutifully attending Yale and then medical school, Dean looked for a state to launch both a private medical practice and a political career. He chose Vermont as much for its beauty as its lenient mood toward carpet bagging politicians, thus joining Brooklynite Bernie Sanders as a born again Vermonter.</p>
<p>Dean became Vermont’s accidental governor in 1991 after Governor Richard Snelling died of a heart attack while swimming in his pool. Dean, the lieutenant governor at the time, took the state’s political reins and immediately followed through with his promise not to offend the Snelling Republicans who occupied the executive branch. And Dean carried on with his right-leaning centrism for the next eleven, long years.</p>
<p>With his sights now set on the White House, the Dean team has been doing its best over the last year to polish up a mediocre gubernatorial record. They’re also trying to position Dean as “the liberal” in the Democratic field so as to grab the much-coveted early primary voters.</p>
<p>And nowhere are the tall tales of Dean’s liberalism more off the mark than when the Dean team begins to gush about his environmental record.</p>
<p>“EP under Governor Dean meant Expedite Permits, not Environmental Protection,” proclaims Annette Smith, the director of Vermonters for a Clean Environment.</p>
<p>Smith is no stranger to Dean’s environmental record, having tangled with the Dean administration on everything from the OMYA Corporation’s mining to pesticide usage on Vermont’s mega-farms. When Smith learned that Dean was holding a press conference at the Burlington Community Boathouse last week to celebrate his eco-legacy, she fired off emails to Vermont environmentalist calling for a protest of the event and wondering if they were “going to let Governor Dean ride out on his white horse of environmental leadership?”</p>
<p>It was Smith who stumbled onto Dean’s official gubernatorial web site a couple of years ago and found a bucolic photo of her home town of Danby being featured with this caption: “Time stands still hereyou might even forget when it’s time to go home.” Ironically, the location depicted in the photo was the same spot Dean was pushing to host a massive gas pipeline, a plan that would have required timber clear-cuts and other dramatic topographical changes. The Dean team removed the photo within a couple of weeks, but not before Smith made hay with his apparent hypocrisy.</p>
<p>“Dean’s attempts to run for president as an environmentalist is nothing but a fraud,” Smith told Wild Matters. “He’s destroyed the Agency of Natural Resources, he’s refused to meet with environmentalists while constantly meeting with the development community, and he’s made the permitting process one, big dysfunctional joke.”</p>
<p>Those are not the words you’d expect to hear from an environmentalist if all you relied on for your news was the mainstream press. The Burlington Free Press, for example, has spent considerable space putting one coat of varnish after another on Dean’s tenure, including a rather smarmy salute to his eco-record. The word from those quarters is that Dean is the environment’s friend and he’s done nothing but anger the business community by slowing development and stymieing growth.</p>
<p>Dean’s record, however, shows just the opposite. Remember, when Dean took office there were no Wal-Marts in Vermont; there was no Home Depots; Burlington’s downtown was dominated by local stores not the national chains that now rule the roost; there were 36% more small farmers in existence; there were no 100,000-hen mega-farms; and sprawl wasn’t a word on the tip of everyone’s tongue.</p>
<p>Interestingly, Dean told the Free Press last week that he wished the rest of “the country were more like Vermont.” But it certainly seems Dean has been doing his best to make Vermont more like the rest of the country.</p>
<p>Stephanie Kaplan, a leading environmental lawyer and the former executive officer of Vermont’s Environmental Board, has seen the regulatory process under Dean become so slanted against environmentalists and concerned citizens that she hardly thinks its worth putting up a fight anymore.</p>
<p>“Under Dean the Act 250 process (Vermont’s primary development review law) and the Agency of Natural Resources (ANR) have lost their way,” contends Kaplan. “Dean created the myth that environmental laws hurt the economy and set the tone to allow Act 250 and the ANR to simply be permit mills for developers.”</p>
<p>Kaplan points to the “Environmental Board purge” in the mid-90s that allowed Dean to set the pro-development tone. In 1993, the Board issued an Act 250 permit to C&amp;S Grocers in Brattleboro with conditions that restricted the diesel emissions from its heavy truck traffic. After C&amp;S execs cried foul and threatened to move to New Hampshire, Dean broke gubernatorial precedent by publicly criticizing the Environmental Board for issuing what he called a “non-permit.”</p>
<p>A year after receiving their public rebuke from Dean, four of the Environmental Board members - including the chair - were up for reappointment. With the not-so-subtle clues from Dean that he didn’t approve of the Board’s political direction, the Republican majority in the state senate shot down each and every one of their appointments, thus dramatically changing both the structure and climate of the Board.</p>
<p>“After the post-C&amp;S purge,” says Kaplan, “the burden of proof for Act 250 permits switched from being on the applicants — where it’s supposed to be — to being on the environmentalists. That’s why 98% of the permit requests are approved and only 20% ever have hearings.”</p>
<p>There is, however, one issue that Dean deserves credit for: his peripatetic efforts in land conservation. During his tenure, Dean has overseen the public preservation of over one million acres of Vermont land, most notably the former Champion Corporation lands in the Northeast Kingdom.</p>
<p>“But these special parcels seem to be the only land Dean cares about,” says Kaplan. “The rest has been fair game for over development.”</p>
<p>As Dean goes national he may be able to fool an Iowan or two with his eco-record, but Vermonters have seen enough to know that being green isn’t easy for Dean. And he’s far from being a liberal.</p>
<p>MICHAEL COLBY is the editor of the national monthly, <a href="http://www.wildmatters.org./" type="external">Wild Matters</a> He can be reached at <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a>.</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | true | 4 | vermonters seen howard dean close personal last eleven years governor theres something darkly comical watching national media refer liberal race democratic nomination president exceptions 11plus years held states top job dean conservative democrat best many vermont particularly environmentalists see dean another republican democrats clothing son wealthy long island family father prominent wall street insider deans used golden path well greased dutifully attending yale medical school dean looked state launch private medical practice political career chose vermont much beauty lenient mood toward carpet bagging politicians thus joining brooklynite bernie sanders born vermonter dean became vermonts accidental governor 1991 governor richard snelling died heart attack swimming pool dean lieutenant governor time took states political reins immediately followed promise offend snelling republicans occupied executive branch dean carried rightleaning centrism next eleven long years sights set white house dean team best last year polish mediocre gubernatorial record theyre also trying position dean liberal democratic field grab muchcoveted early primary voters nowhere tall tales deans liberalism mark dean team begins gush environmental record ep governor dean meant expedite permits environmental protection proclaims annette smith director vermonters clean environment smith stranger deans environmental record tangled dean administration everything omya corporations mining pesticide usage vermonts megafarms smith learned dean holding press conference burlington community boathouse last week celebrate ecolegacy fired emails vermont environmentalist calling protest event wondering going let governor dean ride white horse environmental leadership smith stumbled onto deans official gubernatorial web site couple years ago found bucolic photo home town danby featured caption time stands still hereyou might even forget time go home ironically location depicted photo spot dean pushing host massive gas pipeline plan would required timber clearcuts dramatic topographical changes dean team removed photo within couple weeks smith made hay apparent hypocrisy deans attempts run president environmentalist nothing fraud smith told wild matters hes destroyed agency natural resources hes refused meet environmentalists constantly meeting development community hes made permitting process one big dysfunctional joke words youd expect hear environmentalist relied news mainstream press burlington free press example spent considerable space putting one coat varnish another deans tenure including rather smarmy salute ecorecord word quarters dean environments friend hes done nothing anger business community slowing development stymieing growth deans record however shows opposite remember dean took office walmarts vermont home depots burlingtons downtown dominated local stores national chains rule roost 36 small farmers existence 100000hen megafarms sprawl wasnt word tip everyones tongue interestingly dean told free press last week wished rest country like vermont certainly seems dean best make vermont like rest country stephanie kaplan leading environmental lawyer former executive officer vermonts environmental board seen regulatory process dean become slanted environmentalists concerned citizens hardly thinks worth putting fight anymore dean act 250 process vermonts primary development review law agency natural resources anr lost way contends kaplan dean created myth environmental laws hurt economy set tone allow act 250 anr simply permit mills developers kaplan points environmental board purge mid90s allowed dean set prodevelopment tone 1993 board issued act 250 permit camps grocers brattleboro conditions restricted diesel emissions heavy truck traffic camps execs cried foul threatened move new hampshire dean broke gubernatorial precedent publicly criticizing environmental board issuing called nonpermit year receiving public rebuke dean four environmental board members including chair reappointment notsosubtle clues dean didnt approve boards political direction republican majority state senate shot every one appointments thus dramatically changing structure climate board postcamps purge says kaplan burden proof act 250 permits switched applicants supposed environmentalists thats 98 permit requests approved 20 ever hearings however one issue dean deserves credit peripatetic efforts land conservation tenure dean overseen public preservation one million acres vermont land notably former champion corporation lands northeast kingdom special parcels seem land dean cares says kaplan rest fair game development dean goes national may able fool iowan two ecorecord vermonters seen enough know green isnt easy dean hes far liberal michael colby editor national monthly wild matters reached mcolbywildmattersorg 160 | 649 |
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<p>On Tuesday, the 10-year German bund slipped into the bizarro-world of negative rates where lenders actually pay the government to borrow their money.&#160; Aside from turning capitalism on its head, negative rates illustrate the muddled thinking of central bankers who continue to believe they can spur growth by reducing the cost of cash. Regrettably, the evidence suggests otherwise. At present, there is more than $10 trillion of government sovereign debt with negative rates,&#160; but no sign of a credit expansion anywhere. Also, global GDP has slowed to a crawl indicating that negative rates are not having any meaningful impact on growth. So if negative rates are really as great as central bankers seem to think, it certainly doesn’t show up in the data.&#160; Here’s how the editors of the Wall Street Journal summed it up:</p>
<p>“Negative interest rates reflect a lack of confidence in options for private investment. They also discourage savings that can be invested in profitable ventures. A negative 10-year bond is less a sign of monetary wizardry than of economic policy failure.” (“ <a href="" type="internal">Money for Nothing</a>“, Wall Street Journal)</p>
<p>Bingo. Negative rates merely underscore the fact that policymakers are clueless when it comes to fixing the economy. They’re a sign of desperation.</p>
<p>In the last two weeks, long-term bond yields have been falling at a record pace. The looming prospect of a “Brexit” &#160;(that the UK will vote to leave the EU in an upcoming June 23&#160;referendum) has investors piling into risk-free government debt like mad. The downward pressure on&#160; yields has pushed the price of US Treasuries and German bund through the roof while signs of stress have lifted the “fear gauge” (VIX)&#160; back into the red zone. Here’s brief recap from Bloomberg:</p>
<p>“Today’s bond market is defying just about every comparison known to man.</p>
<p>Never before have traders paid so much to own trillions of dollars in debt and gotten so little in return. Jack Malvey, one of the most-respected figures in the bond market, went back as far as 1871 and couldn’t find a time when global yields were even close to today’s lows. Bill Gross went even further, tweeting that they’re now the lowest in “500 years of recorded history.”</p>
<p>Lackluster global growth, negative interest rates and extraordinary buying from central banks have all kept government debt in demand, even as yields on more than $8 trillion of the bonds dip below zero.”….</p>
<p>The odds of the U.S. entering a recession over the next year is now the highest since the current expansion began seven years ago, according to JPMorgan Chase &amp;amp; Co. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development also warned this month the global economy is slipping into a self-fulfilling “low-growth trap.” What’s more, Britain’s vote on whether to leave the European Union this month has been a major source of market jitters.” ( <a href="" type="internal">“Most Expensive Bond Market in History Has Come Unhinged. Or Not</a>“, Bloomberg)</p>
<p>There are a number of factors effecting bond yields: Fear, that a Brexit could lead to more market turbulence and perhaps another financial crisis. Pessimism, that the outlook for growth will stay dim for the foreseeable future keeping the demand for credit weak.. And lack of confidence, that policymakers will be able to reach their target inflation rate of 2 percent as long as wages and personal consumption remain flat. All of these have fueled the flight to safety that has put pressure on yields. But the primary cause of the droopy yields is central bank meddling,&#160; particularly QE, which has dramatically distorted prices by reducing the supply of USTs by more than $2.5 trillion in the US alone.&#160;&#160;&#160; David Stockman gives a good rundown of what’s really going on in an incendiary&#160;post titled “Bubble News From The Nosebleed Section”.&#160; Here’s a clip:</p>
<p>“…One of the enduring myths of Bubble Finance is that bond yields have plunged to the zero bound and below because of “lowflation” and&#160; slumping global growth. Supposedly, the market is “pricing-in” the specter of deflation. No it isn’t. Their insuperable arrogance to the contrary notwithstanding, the central banks have not abolished the law of supply and demand.</p>
<p>What they have done, instead, is jam their big fat thumbs on the market’s pricing equation, thereby adding massive girth to the demand side of the ledger by sheer dint of running their printing pressers white hot. Indeed, what got “priced-in” to the great global bond bubble is $19 trillion worth of central bank bond purchases since the mid-1990s that were funded with cash conjured from thin air.”</p>
<p>(“ <a href="http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/bubble-news-from-the-nosebleed-section/" type="external">Bubble News From The Nosebleed Section</a>“, David Stockman’s Contra Corner)</p>
<p>Central banks have never intervened in the operation of the markets to the extent they have in the last seven years. The amount of liquidity they’ve poured into the system has so thoroughly distorted prices that its no longer possible to make reasonable judgments based on past performance or outdated models. It’s a brave new world and even the Fed is uncertain of how to proceed. Take, for example, the Fed’s stated goal of “normalizing” rates. Think about what that means. It is a&#160; tacit admission that the that the Fed’s seven-year intervention has screwed things up so badly that it will take a monumental effort to restore the markets to their original condition. Needless to say, whenever Yellen mentions “normalization” stocks fall off a cliff as traders wisely figure the Fed is thinking about raising rates. Here’s Bloomberg again:</p>
<p>“Last year, inflation in developed economies slowed to 0.4 percent and is forecast to reach just 1 percent in 2016 — half the 2 percent rate most major central banks target, data compiled by Bloomberg show.”</p>
<p>So what Bloomberg and the other elitist media would like us to believe is that these highly-educated economists and financial gurus at the central banks still can’t figure out how to generate simple inflation. Is that what we’re supposed to believe?</p>
<p>Nonsense. If Obama rehired the 500,000 public sector employees who got their pink slips during the recession, then we’d have positive inflation in no-time-flat. But the bigwigs don’t want that. They don’t want&#160; full employment or higher wages or workers to a bigger share in the gains in production. What they want, is a permanently-hobbled economy that barley grows at 2 percent so they can continue to borrow cheaply in the bond market and use the proceeds to buy back their own shares or issue dividends with the money they just stole from Mom and Pop investors. That’s what they really want.&#160; And that’s why&#160; Krugman and Summers and the other Ivy League toadies concocted their wacko&#160; “secular stagnation” theory. Its an attempt to create an economic justification for continuing the same policies into perpetuity.</p>
<p>So what can be done? Is there a way to turn this train around and put the economy back on the road to recovery?</p>
<p>Sure. While the political issues are pretty thorny, the economic ones are fairly straightforward. What’s needed is more bigger deficits, more fiscal stimulus and more government spending. That’s the ticket. Here’s a clip from an article in VOX that sums it up perfectly:</p>
<p>“But if the exact cause of the bond boom is a little unclear, the right course of action is really pretty obvious: If the international financial community wants to lend money this cheaply, governments should borrow money and put it to good use. Ideally that would mean spending it on infrastructure projects that are large, expensive, and useful — the kind of thing that will pay dividends for decades to come but that under ordinary times you might shy away from taking on…..</p>
<p>The opportunity to borrow this cheaply (probably) won’t last forever, and countries that boost their deficits will (probably) have to reverse course, but while it lasts everyone could be enjoying a better life instead of pointless austerity.” (“ <a href="" type="internal">Financial markets are begging the US, Europe, and Japan to run bigger deficits</a>“, VOX)</p>
<p>That’s great advice, and there’s no reason not to follow up on it. The author is right, these rates aren’t going to last forever. We might as well put them to good use by putting people back to work, raising wages,&#160; shoring up the defunct welfare system, rebuilding dilapidated bridges and roads, expanding green energy programs, increasing funding for education,&#160; health care, retirement etc. These are all programs that get money circulating through the system fast. They boost growth, raise living standards, and build a better society.</p>
<p>Fixing the economy is the easy part. It’s the politics that are tough.</p> | true | 4 | tuesday 10year german bund slipped bizarroworld negative rates lenders actually pay government borrow money160 aside turning capitalism head negative rates illustrate muddled thinking central bankers continue believe spur growth reducing cost cash regrettably evidence suggests otherwise present 10 trillion government sovereign debt negative rates160 sign credit expansion anywhere also global gdp slowed crawl indicating negative rates meaningful impact growth negative rates really great central bankers seem think certainly doesnt show data160 heres editors wall street journal summed negative interest rates reflect lack confidence options private investment also discourage savings invested profitable ventures negative 10year bond less sign monetary wizardry economic policy failure money nothing wall street journal bingo negative rates merely underscore fact policymakers clueless comes fixing economy theyre sign desperation last two weeks longterm bond yields falling record pace looming prospect brexit 160that uk vote leave eu upcoming june 23160referendum investors piling riskfree government debt like mad downward pressure on160 yields pushed price us treasuries german bund roof signs stress lifted fear gauge vix160 back red zone heres brief recap bloomberg todays bond market defying every comparison known man never traders paid much trillions dollars debt gotten little return jack malvey one mostrespected figures bond market went back far 1871 couldnt find time global yields even close todays lows bill gross went even tweeting theyre lowest 500 years recorded history lackluster global growth negative interest rates extraordinary buying central banks kept government debt demand even yields 8 trillion bonds dip zero odds us entering recession next year highest since current expansion began seven years ago according jpmorgan chase ampamp co organisation economic cooperation development also warned month global economy slipping selffulfilling lowgrowth trap whats britains vote whether leave european union month major source market jitters expensive bond market history come unhinged bloomberg number factors effecting bond yields fear brexit could lead market turbulence perhaps another financial crisis pessimism outlook growth stay dim foreseeable future keeping demand credit weak lack confidence policymakers able reach target inflation rate 2 percent long wages personal consumption remain flat fueled flight safety put pressure yields primary cause droopy yields central bank meddling160 particularly qe dramatically distorted prices reducing supply usts 25 trillion us alone160160160 david stockman gives good rundown whats really going incendiary160post titled bubble news nosebleed section160 heres clip one enduring myths bubble finance bond yields plunged zero bound lowflation and160 slumping global growth supposedly market pricingin specter deflation isnt insuperable arrogance contrary notwithstanding central banks abolished law supply demand done instead jam big fat thumbs markets pricing equation thereby adding massive girth demand side ledger sheer dint running printing pressers white hot indeed got pricedin great global bond bubble 19 trillion worth central bank bond purchases since mid1990s funded cash conjured thin air bubble news nosebleed section david stockmans contra corner central banks never intervened operation markets extent last seven years amount liquidity theyve poured system thoroughly distorted prices longer possible make reasonable judgments based past performance outdated models brave new world even fed uncertain proceed take example feds stated goal normalizing rates think means a160 tacit admission feds sevenyear intervention screwed things badly take monumental effort restore markets original condition needless say whenever yellen mentions normalization stocks fall cliff traders wisely figure fed thinking raising rates heres bloomberg last year inflation developed economies slowed 04 percent forecast reach 1 percent 2016 half 2 percent rate major central banks target data compiled bloomberg show bloomberg elitist media would like us believe highlyeducated economists financial gurus central banks still cant figure generate simple inflation supposed believe nonsense obama rehired 500000 public sector employees got pink slips recession wed positive inflation notimeflat bigwigs dont want dont want160 full employment higher wages workers bigger share gains production want permanentlyhobbled economy barley grows 2 percent continue borrow cheaply bond market use proceeds buy back shares issue dividends money stole mom pop investors thats really want160 thats why160 krugman summers ivy league toadies concocted wacko160 secular stagnation theory attempt create economic justification continuing policies perpetuity done way turn train around put economy back road recovery sure political issues pretty thorny economic ones fairly straightforward whats needed bigger deficits fiscal stimulus government spending thats ticket heres clip article vox sums perfectly exact cause bond boom little unclear right course action really pretty obvious international financial community wants lend money cheaply governments borrow money put good use ideally would mean spending infrastructure projects large expensive useful kind thing pay dividends decades come ordinary times might shy away taking opportunity borrow cheaply probably wont last forever countries boost deficits probably reverse course lasts everyone could enjoying better life instead pointless austerity financial markets begging us europe japan run bigger deficits vox thats great advice theres reason follow author right rates arent going last forever might well put good use putting people back work raising wages160 shoring defunct welfare system rebuilding dilapidated bridges roads expanding green energy programs increasing funding education160 health care retirement etc programs get money circulating system fast boost growth raise living standards build better society fixing economy easy part politics tough | 834 |
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<p>The “masters of the universe” are shocked and displeased. Increasing numbers of voters are registering their anger, most recently by voting for Brexit in Great Britain. But many who voted for Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump during the recent US primary season were motivated by similar frustrations. And before that, there was Occupy Wall Street, los Indignados in Spain, Syriza in Greece, and other massive protests elsewhere in Europe as well. The reason is simple.</p>
<p>For over thirty years center right and center left political parties and establishment politicians have presided over massive changes in how the global economy functions which empower multinational corporations and a privileged minority at the expense of the vast majority, while creating unprecedented waves of refugees fleeing humanitarian disasters in the Mideast, Mexico, and Central America.</p>
<p>All while the mainstream media and establishment intellectuals pontificate about why these changes were both inevitable and for the good — when the truth is they are neither. More and more people are fed up, and tuning out establishment messengers, while new voices on both the right and left battle over leadership of a growing and disparate army of discontents. What can we say about the most recent manifestation in Great Britain?</p>
<p>There are two major forces driving discontent: Deteriorating economic prospects for <a href="" type="internal" />majorities, and challenges to traditional cultural hierarchies. The left plays on the former while the right plays on the latter. The right has a coherent program regarding the latter with broad appeal among older ethnic majorities: Re-segregation and restoration of white skin privileges. But the right has no coherent economic program besides blaming ethnic “others.”</p>
<p>The left has a coherent critique of neoliberal economics, and offers some useful alternatives: Stop catering to finance and subject it to competent regulation. Stop pointless fiscal austerity and provide needed fiscal stimulus. And stop dismantling, and rebuild the welfare state. Moreover, this program has broad appeal among the discontented.</p>
<p>But the left has not been able to compete successfully with the right regarding the second source of discontent. If progressive groups campaign for a principled defense of multiculturalism and protecting immigrant rights, they win support from ethnic minorities and some among the young, but they alienate older, majoritarian communities in economic distress. Moreover, the dilemma for the left is even worse. Because the truth is that until a left economic program is won and firmly in place, principled multiculturalism and defense of immigrant rights does further aggravate the economic distress of disadvantaged, majoritarian populations.</p>
<p>It is comical to watch the establishment on both sides of the Atlantic panic over short-run economic damage due to market “over reaction,” because any danger of this is due to their own negligence. Only because the establishment has hitched our economic destinies to the whims of financial markets is there any need to worry that Brexit might trigger yet another global meltdown. Only because the establishment failed to implement prudent, financial regulation in the seven years since the last financial crisis crashed the global economy is there any danger today. Only because the Cameron government and the European Commission responded to the Great Recession with counterproductive fiscal austerity is a return to deeper recession in Europe quite probable. But we can be sure of one thing: All negative economic trends will now be blamed on Brexit and the populist “mob” who brought it on, rather than on the establishment’s neoliberal policies which are actually responsible.</p>
<p>But I suspect the political ramifications of the Brexit vote will be far greater than any economic consequences. Brexit will put more wind into reactionary political sails in France, the Netherlands, and Eastern Europe. But let me comment on two potentially positive political ramifications.</p>
<p>(1) Scotland and Northern Ireland voted overwhelmingly to remain in the EU. I will not be surprised if we soon have a second vote on independence in Scotland which passes. Scotts clearly prefer the EU to the UK now that they must choose one or the other. Moreover, there are strong progressive forces in Scotland strongly allied with the independence movement there. Progressives in Scotland were disappointed that independence was narrowly defeated two years ago. I think they may now get their wish, and support for progressive economic reforms in Scotland will no longer be thwarted by Westminster. I will also not be surprised if Northern Ireland now moves to leave the UK and finally become part of the Republic of Ireland, and thereby become not only a member of the EU but the EZ as well. That is 1000 years of bloody history in the British Isles which may actually be resolved in a sensible, progressive, and remarkably peaceful way!</p>
<p>(2) Brexit is a blow to the leadership of the EZ, EC, and ECB resisting demands for a change in course. Just as it will be seized on by reactionary political parties, left forces will put it to good use. It may be too late for Syriza in Greece. But Podemos in Spain, Die Linke in Germany, and the coalition for change in the EU people like Yanis Varafoukis are trying to mobilize will cite the Brexit vote as a sign of what will eventually become of the EU if there is not a major change in course. This does not solve the dilemma progressive forces in EU member countries face: Should they stay and fight for meaningful reform within the EU? Or should they fight to leave because this EU will never become other than a neoliberal straightjacket? But in either case, Brexit is a blow to the powers that be in Brussels, and adds wind to the sails of progressive forces within the EU as well as reactionary forces, no matter what political strategy progressive forces opt for.</p>
<p>Robin Hahnel taught in the economics department at American University in Washington DC from 1976 to 2008, where he is now Professor Emeritus. He is best known as a radical economist and co-creator of a post-capitalist economic model known as “ <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_economics" type="external">participatory economics</a>.” In addition to a dozen book chapters and more than three dozen articles in academic journals, he has published ten books including&#160; <a href="http://books.zcommunications.org/books/quiet.htm" type="external">Quiet Revolution in Welfare Economics</a>&#160;and&#160; <a href="http://books.zcommunications.org/books/polpar.htm" type="external">The Political Economy of Participatory Economics</a>&#160;with Princeton University Press,&#160; <a href="" type="internal">Economic Justice and Democracy</a>&#160;with Routledge, and most recently&#160; <a href="http://www.zcommunications.org/green-economics-confronting-the-ecological-crisis-3-12-by-robin-hahnel" type="external">Green Economics: Confronting the Ecological Crisis</a>&#160;with M.E. Sharpe.</p> | true | 4 | masters universe shocked displeased increasing numbers voters registering anger recently voting brexit great britain many voted bernie sanders donald trump recent us primary season motivated similar frustrations occupy wall street los indignados spain syriza greece massive protests elsewhere europe well reason simple thirty years center right center left political parties establishment politicians presided massive changes global economy functions empower multinational corporations privileged minority expense vast majority creating unprecedented waves refugees fleeing humanitarian disasters mideast mexico central america mainstream media establishment intellectuals pontificate changes inevitable good truth neither people fed tuning establishment messengers new voices right left battle leadership growing disparate army discontents say recent manifestation great britain two major forces driving discontent deteriorating economic prospects majorities challenges traditional cultural hierarchies left plays former right plays latter right coherent program regarding latter broad appeal among older ethnic majorities resegregation restoration white skin privileges right coherent economic program besides blaming ethnic others left coherent critique neoliberal economics offers useful alternatives stop catering finance subject competent regulation stop pointless fiscal austerity provide needed fiscal stimulus stop dismantling rebuild welfare state moreover program broad appeal among discontented left able compete successfully right regarding second source discontent progressive groups campaign principled defense multiculturalism protecting immigrant rights win support ethnic minorities among young alienate older majoritarian communities economic distress moreover dilemma left even worse truth left economic program firmly place principled multiculturalism defense immigrant rights aggravate economic distress disadvantaged majoritarian populations comical watch establishment sides atlantic panic shortrun economic damage due market reaction danger due negligence establishment hitched economic destinies whims financial markets need worry brexit might trigger yet another global meltdown establishment failed implement prudent financial regulation seven years since last financial crisis crashed global economy danger today cameron government european commission responded great recession counterproductive fiscal austerity return deeper recession europe quite probable sure one thing negative economic trends blamed brexit populist mob brought rather establishments neoliberal policies actually responsible suspect political ramifications brexit vote far greater economic consequences brexit put wind reactionary political sails france netherlands eastern europe let comment two potentially positive political ramifications 1 scotland northern ireland voted overwhelmingly remain eu surprised soon second vote independence scotland passes scotts clearly prefer eu uk must choose one moreover strong progressive forces scotland strongly allied independence movement progressives scotland disappointed independence narrowly defeated two years ago think may get wish support progressive economic reforms scotland longer thwarted westminster also surprised northern ireland moves leave uk finally become part republic ireland thereby become member eu ez well 1000 years bloody history british isles may actually resolved sensible progressive remarkably peaceful way 2 brexit blow leadership ez ec ecb resisting demands change course seized reactionary political parties left forces put good use may late syriza greece podemos spain die linke germany coalition change eu people like yanis varafoukis trying mobilize cite brexit vote sign eventually become eu major change course solve dilemma progressive forces eu member countries face stay fight meaningful reform within eu fight leave eu never become neoliberal straightjacket either case brexit blow powers brussels adds wind sails progressive forces within eu well reactionary forces matter political strategy progressive forces opt robin hahnel taught economics department american university washington dc 1976 2008 professor emeritus best known radical economist cocreator postcapitalist economic model known participatory economics addition dozen book chapters three dozen articles academic journals published ten books including160 quiet revolution welfare economics160and160 political economy participatory economics160with princeton university press160 economic justice democracy160with routledge recently160 green economics confronting ecological crisis160with sharpe | 577 |
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<p>The Iraqi people fought and died for the sake of us all — martyrs in the Christian, no less than in the Muslim sense of the word. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest of the “chicken hawks” junta that seized the American administration illegally by rigging the 2000 presidential election are totally deranged, totally corrupt and totally cynical. Their blueprint for world domination (set out in black and white in a September 2000 document) is a Mein Kampf. Their corporate linkages are so blatantly venal as to be the envy of a Somoza, while their intricate web of lies and deception would make an amateur out of a Goebbels. Courtesy of another band of maniacal marauders — Bin Laden and co — they got their Reichstag fire.</p>
<p>Condoleezza Rice was quoted in The New Yorker last April admitting that soon after 9/11 she called together senior members of the National Security Council and asked them “to think about ‘how do you capitalise on these opportunities'”.</p>
<p>The martial madness has been unleashed. It must be stopped — no less than the survival of the human species is at stake.</p>
<p>Mr Blair has been harping on about Chamberlain and his appeasement. There is great irony in this, for the New Labourite premier is nothing like the imperialist and self-avowed racist Tories he so likes to emulate. His place in history will not be that of an intractable Winston Churchill, nor even that of a bungling Anthony Eden. He will have to look across the Channel for his historical antecedents: a certain Marshal Petin.</p>
<p>Faced with wholly unexpected resistance from the Iraqi people, the murderous thugs in Washington and London had by the end of week two of the war removed the last of their “Iraqi freedom” masks, showing the world the monstrous face of merciless war criminals. Baghdad and Basra were being systematically destroyed, thousands of “chicks” — women, children and men of all ages — were “in the way”, and they were being systematically and cold- bloodedly put to the slaughter.</p>
<p>Donny Rumsfeld, we are told, often quotes the legendary Mafia boss, Al Capone. And in proper Mafia style he began to eliminate witnesses; journalists, not “embedded in” (read: in bed with) the war criminals’ armed forces, were to be eliminated.</p>
<p>So early Tuesday, the offices of two Arab satellite channels, Al-Jazeera and Abu-Dhabi, were deliberately targeted. Later that same day, the Palestine Hotel, where most foreign reporters working out of Baghdad have been based, was shelled by tank fire. Three journalists, including Al-Jazeera’s Tarek Ayyoub, were killed.</p>
<p>John Pilger, writing in The Independent of 6 April noted, “Covering this [killing of civilians] in a shroud of respectability has not been easy for George Bush and Tony Blair. Millions now know too much; the crime is all too evident. Tam Dalyell, Father of the House of Commons, a Labour MP for 41 years, says the prime minister is a war criminal and should be sent to The Hague. He is serious, because the prima facie case against Blair and Bush is beyond doubt.”</p>
<p>The murderous brutality of the bombings of Baghdad and Basra, the images of killed and injured children (will we ever know the real figures for Iraq’s dead and maimed?), the unabashed cruelty of the scenes of hooded, cuffed and viciously manhandled civilian and military captives (so familiar from footage of Israeli soldiers rampaging in the West Bank and Gaza) — and this by the very soldiers whose government officials were screeching “Geneva Conventions” when a handful of American POWs were paraded before television cameras — none of it tells even half the horror story unfolding before our very eyes.</p>
<p>We now know, despite all the subterfuge and the criminal slavishness of the corporate media, that the invasion of Iraq was planned even before the chicken hawks and their paranoiac leader rigged their way into the White House. We know of the Project for a New American Century, among whose founders are none other than Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Dubya’s own maniacal ‘thinker’, Richard Perle and, who else, Jeb Bush, the Florida brother who gave George the presidency.</p>
<p>We know of the chicken hawks’ seminal report: “Rebuilding America’s Defences: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century”. We know that, far from being concerned about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein (which Bush said were giving him sleepless nights), the chicken hawks’ blueprint for global domination openly stated more than two years ago, “While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for the presence of a substantial American force in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”</p>
<p>We also know, thanks to Bob Woodward, that on the morning of 12 September 2001 (that is before anything at all was known about the culprits of the 9/11 atrocity), Rumsfeld told a cabinet meeting that Iraq should be “a principal target of the first round in the war against terrorism”. Secretary of State Colin Powell stayed his hand — for a while.</p>
<p>And now, after four weeks of death and destruction, Baghdad has fallen.</p>
<p>On the way to this once magnificent seat of Haroun Al-Rashid, The Guardian’s James Meek came across Marine Sgt Michael Sprague by a bridge outside the city of Nasseriya. “A few miles from the bridge to the south lie the ruins of the ancient city of Ur, founded 8,000 years ago, the birth place of Abraham and a flourishing metropolis at a time when the inhabitants of north-west Europe were still walking round in animal skins,” Meek observed. Sgt Sprague, from White Sulphur Springs in West Virginia, noted Meek, never knew it was there. Rather, he complained: “I’ve been all the way through this desert from Basra to here and I ain’t seen one shopping mall or fast food restaurant. These people got nothing. Even in a little town like ours of 2500 people you got a McDonald’s at one end and a Hardee’s at the other.”</p>
<p>Back in the White House, George W Bush, so mindful of the importance of the moment that, according to USA Today, he gave up on sweets just before the invasion, is no doubt communicating with God over how he, his chicken hawks and Sgt Sprague from West Virginia are going to be lording it over us all.</p>
<p>HANI SHUKRALLAH writes a weekly column for the Cairo-based <a href="http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/" type="external">al-Ahram</a> newspaper.</p> | true | 4 | 160 iraqi people fought died sake us martyrs christian less muslim sense word bush cheney rumsfeld rest chicken hawks junta seized american administration illegally rigging 2000 presidential election totally deranged totally corrupt totally cynical blueprint world domination set black white september 2000 document mein kampf corporate linkages blatantly venal envy somoza intricate web lies deception would make amateur goebbels courtesy another band maniacal marauders bin laden co got reichstag fire condoleezza rice quoted new yorker last april admitting soon 911 called together senior members national security council asked think capitalise opportunities martial madness unleashed must stopped less survival human species stake mr blair harping chamberlain appeasement great irony new labourite premier nothing like imperialist selfavowed racist tories likes emulate place history intractable winston churchill even bungling anthony eden look across channel historical antecedents certain marshal petin faced wholly unexpected resistance iraqi people murderous thugs washington london end week two war removed last iraqi freedom masks showing world monstrous face merciless war criminals baghdad basra systematically destroyed thousands chicks women children men ages way systematically cold bloodedly put slaughter donny rumsfeld told often quotes legendary mafia boss al capone proper mafia style began eliminate witnesses journalists embedded read bed war criminals armed forces eliminated early tuesday offices two arab satellite channels aljazeera abudhabi deliberately targeted later day palestine hotel foreign reporters working baghdad based shelled tank fire three journalists including aljazeeras tarek ayyoub killed john pilger writing independent 6 april noted covering killing civilians shroud respectability easy george bush tony blair millions know much crime evident tam dalyell father house commons labour mp 41 years says prime minister war criminal sent hague serious prima facie case blair bush beyond doubt murderous brutality bombings baghdad basra images killed injured children ever know real figures iraqs dead maimed unabashed cruelty scenes hooded cuffed viciously manhandled civilian military captives familiar footage israeli soldiers rampaging west bank gaza soldiers whose government officials screeching geneva conventions handful american pows paraded television cameras none tells even half horror story unfolding eyes know despite subterfuge criminal slavishness corporate media invasion iraq planned even chicken hawks paranoiac leader rigged way white house know project new american century among whose founders none cheney rumsfeld wolfowitz dubyas maniacal thinker richard perle else jeb bush florida brother gave george presidency know chicken hawks seminal report rebuilding americas defences strategy forces resources new century know far concerned iraqs weapons mass destruction hands saddam hussein bush said giving sleepless nights chicken hawks blueprint global domination openly stated two years ago unresolved conflict iraq provides immediate justification need presence substantial american force gulf transcends issue regime saddam hussein also know thanks bob woodward morning 12 september 2001 anything known culprits 911 atrocity rumsfeld told cabinet meeting iraq principal target first round war terrorism secretary state colin powell stayed hand four weeks death destruction baghdad fallen way magnificent seat haroun alrashid guardians james meek came across marine sgt michael sprague bridge outside city nasseriya miles bridge south lie ruins ancient city ur founded 8000 years ago birth place abraham flourishing metropolis time inhabitants northwest europe still walking round animal skins meek observed sgt sprague white sulphur springs west virginia noted meek never knew rather complained ive way desert basra aint seen one shopping mall fast food restaurant people got nothing even little town like 2500 people got mcdonalds one end hardees back white house george w bush mindful importance moment according usa today gave sweets invasion doubt communicating god chicken hawks sgt sprague west virginia going lording us hani shukrallah writes weekly column cairobased alahram newspaper | 590 |
<p>Wilfredo Lee/AP Photo</p>
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<p>As he courts conservatives skeptical of his right-wing bona fides, Jeb Bush, an all-but-announced GOP presidential candidate, has cited one of his most controversial moves as Florida’s governor to illustrate his record of standing firm on principle in the face of widespread opposition: his decision to unilaterally end affirmative action in Florida. “Trust me, there were a lot of people upset by this,” he boasted to activists at the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this year. But Bush’s effort to dismantle affirmative action in state college admissions and government contracting and hiring—which the Sun Sentinel dubbed the “most grievous blunder” of his tenure and a “prime example of Bush’s shoot-first, take-no-advice method of governing”—illustrates more than his executive style. At a time when racial tensions from Baltimore to Ferguson, Missouri, are a national issue, Bush’s fight against affirmative action, which led to a confrontation with the state’s black community, remains a significant episode in his political history.</p>
<p>In 1999, Bush’s first year as governor, Ward Connerly, the anti-affirmative-action crusader who had spearheaded successful ballot initiatives to eliminate racial preferences in California and Washington, descended on Florida to gather signatures for a similar measure that would appear on the November 2000 ballot. Bush was no fan of what he called Connerly’s “divisive” approach. (Republican support for Connerly’s amendment in California had pushed minority voters away from the GOP and helped Democrats take control of Sacramento.) But Bush also expressed skepticism about Florida’s affirmative-action policies, which he described in one private email as “stupid and destructive.” So Bush decided to preempt Connerly’s effort by ending affirmative action in Florida himself. He did so by signing <a href="http://www.dms.myflorida.com/content/download/705/3389/file/ExecutiveOrder99-281.pdf" type="external">Executive Order 99-281</a> on November 9, 1999.</p>
<p>Alongside his executive order, Bush proposed replacing affirmative action at Florida’s state-run universities and in government contracting with an initiative he called One Florida. Under the <a href="http://www.adversity.net/florida/jeb_bush_ends_quotas.htm" type="external">new plan</a>, students in the top 20 percent of each public high school class would be guaranteed admission to one of the state’s public universities. On the contracting side, Bush’s order wiped out set-asides and price preferences for minority-owned businesses. Instead, Bush sought to increase diversity in procurement by streamlining the certification process for minority vendors and encouraging purchasing officers to reach out to minority businesses.</p>
<p>From the outset, many observers suspected an ulterior motive lurked behind Bush’s executive order. With George W. Bush then the likely GOP nominee for president, Connerly’s contentious proposal could be expected to drive Democratic-leaning black voters to the polls in the 2000 election and potentially imperil his path to the White House. CNN’s Inside Politics dubbed Bush’s executive order the “political ‘Play of the Week.'” Bush denied that his brother’s presidential ambitions had influenced his decision, but the mere suggestion was damaging. For African Americans, “it was like their interests are being subordinated to the political interest of the Bush family,” says Florida State University political scientist Lance deHaven-Smith.</p>
<p>The public outrage triggered by One Florida largely focused on Bush’s decision to act unilaterally. “It was a very high-handed way to make a very controversial decision,” notes deHaven-Smith. Black legislators complained bitterly of being left out the process of crafting a policy that would have a significant impact on their community. “He never talked to me. He never talked to any African Americans that I knew about what he was doing,” recalls former state Sen. Les Miller, who served as the Democratic minority leader at the time. “It was a slap in the face.”</p>
<p>In the weeks after Bush unveiled his executive order, African American leaders rallied against One Florida. In late November 1999, black lawmakers held a protest in Orlando. In Washington, Rep. Corrine Brown (D-Fla.) called on federal agencies to determine whether One Florida squared with federal law and an existing desegregation agreement between the state and the federal government. She also encouraged African Americans to “deal with his brother”—then presidential contender George W. Bush—at the polls. State Sen. Daryl Jones, chair of the black legislative caucus, used One Florida as a rallying cry to register black voters ahead of the 2000 elections.</p>
<p>To fully implement One Florida, Bush needed the State University System Board of Regents to approve his ban on racial considerations in state college admissions. In a twist not lost on Bush’s critics, the regents vote was scheduled for Friday, January 21, the week of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. A few days prior to the vote, in a last-ditch effort to convince Bush to scrap his plan, a handful of black state lawmakers met with Lt. Gov. Frank Brogan at the state Capitol to make their case. During the meeting, Bush briefly popped in, telling the lawmakers that if they were waiting for him to rescind his executive order, “you might as well get some blankets,”&#160;according to the Orlando Sentinel. Democratic state Sen. Kendrick Meek (who would later serve in Congress) and state Rep. Tony Hill responded by staging a sit-in on the spot.</p>
<p>The protest was a public relations disaster for Bush, with newspapers likening it to the civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s. As Meek and Hill camped out in executive office suite into the evening—and a couple hundred protesters gathered outside the Capitol singing “We Shall Overcome”—Bush ordered his aides to “throw their asses out.” The remark that was caught on video in time for the nightly news.</p>
<p>The protest lasted into the next afternoon, ending only after Bush promised to delay the Board of Regents vote by a month. During that time, a panel of legislators held three public hearings on One Florida. The regents ultimately voted to implement Bush’s One Florida plan—but the protests continued.</p>
<p>On March 7, 2000, when Bush delivered his annual State of the State address, more than 10,000 people marched down Tallahassee’s Apalachee Parkway, the main artery leading to the Capitol. As Bush defended One Florida in his speech, demonstrators led by Rev. Jesse Jackson protested outside.</p>
<p>Bush ultimately got his way, but at the cost of his standing among black Floridians. After his first failed campaign for governor in 1994, when Bush was asked what he would do for African Americans and responded “probably nothing,” he had attempted to reach out to the black community. This effort included cofounding a charter school in inner city Miami. During his second gubernatorial bid in 1998, Bush vigorously campaigned in black neighborhoods and won endorsements from several prominent black leaders. He ended up winning about 14 percent of the black vote—a significant feat for a Republican. But One Florida helped diminish the good will Bush had built up, as did his administration’s flawed effort in 2000 to purge the state’s voter rolls of felons. When Bush ran for reelection in 2002, his support among black voters <a href="http://www.sptimes.com/2002/11/08/news_pf/State/Bush__McBride_didn_t_.shtml" type="external">dropped</a> by more than 50 percent.</p>
<p>After that, Bush “definitely tried” to mend relations with the African American community, notes deHaven-Smith, the FSU political scientist. Just a few months after the massive One Florida march in June 2000, Bush <a href="http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2000-06-14/news/0006140023_1_famu-law-fiu-s-law-law-school" type="external">signed off</a> on the creation of a law school at the historically black Florida A&amp;M University. Throughout his tenure, he made <a href="http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/stateroundup/florida-gov-rick-scott-seldom-appoints-black-judges/2197473" type="external">an effort</a> to appoint African Americans to judgeships. (He appointed 41 black judges—about 10 percent of his judicial appointments—in his eight years in office.) But One Florida and the voter purge turned African Americans against Bush early in his tenure. “They’re not going to change their minds about him for a century,” de-Haven-Smith predicts.</p>
<p>Bush’s One Florida move was indicative of his go-it-alone governing style. Bush seemed proud of this. Ten days after signing the executive order ending affirmative action, he wrote to a supporter, “I have always felt that big hairy audacious ideas need to be implemented rather than talked about.” Bush did become “more willing to respectfully disagree” in the ensuing years, says Matthew Corrigan, a professor at the University of North Florida and the author of Conservative Hurricane: How Jeb Bush Remade Florida. But when it came to making decisions without much consultation, Corrigan says, Bush didn’t change much: “He’s in charge and believes in executive power.” Former state Sen. Miller recalls, “I was there for most of his two terms in the Legislature, and I can tell you right now, it was a tough task dealing with Jeb Bush. As many people say, it was Jeb Bush’s way or no way at all.”</p>
<p>As Bush gears up for a likely White House bid, he has portrayed One Florida as a success. “We ended up having a system where there were more African American and Hispanic kids attending our university system than prior to the system that was discriminatory,” he declared at CPAC in February. But over the past 15 years, One Florida has produced mixed results, and <a href="http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2015/mar/11/jeb-bush/florida-has-more-black-and-hispanic-university-stu/" type="external">PolitiFact rated</a> Bush’s CPAC statement “mostly false.” (Bush’s spokeswoman did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)</p>
<p>Black freshmen enrollment at state universities has declined under One Florida, from about 18 percent in 2000 down to 13 percent in 2013. (The state’s black population has remained stable at around 20 percent.) The numbers are worse at Florida’s best public universities. From 2000 to 2009, black enrollment dropped by 15 percent at FSU—African Americans now account for only 7 percent of the incoming class, according to a Washington Post <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/after-bush-order-florida-universities-cope-with-shrinking-black-enrollment/2015/04/06/82d1e574-bcfe-11e4-bdfa-b8e8f594e6ee_story.html" type="external">investigation</a>. At the University of Florida in Gainesville, the state’s other flagship school, blacks make up 6 percent of freshmen, down from around 12 percent in 2000.</p>
<p>Latino enrollment numbers <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/minority-enrollment-in-the-florida-state-university-system/2015/04/06/34c212f4-dcb2-11e4-a500-1c5bb1d8ff6a_graphic.html" type="external">climbed</a>, however, at pace with the the state’s growing Latino population. In 2013, Latinos accounted for 27 percent of the state population and 28 percent of freshmen in the state university system. Before One Florida, Latinos were underrepresented; they comprised more than 20 percent of the population, but only 12 percent of enrolling freshmen.</p>
<p>Bush’s initiative fared better on the contracting side. According to the Miami Herald, contracts with minority- and women-run businesses jumped 232 percent in 2001 at the agencies covered by One Florida, where Bush made a concerted effort to immediately boost contracting with minority vendors. Yet under this policy it’s up to the governor to maintain an internal culture that prioritizes contracting with minority businesses.</p>
<p>Bush considers One Florida—and even the controversy he endured to implement it—as a campaign asset. It’s part of his <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2015/02/jeb-bush-cpac-2015-115577.html" type="external">sales pitch</a> to Republicans who think he’s too squishy on such issues as immigration or Common Core. But for African Americans in Florida, it’s a bitter reminder of a civil rights battle lost. “His affirmative-action position was his most direct perceived attack at the African American community during his tenure as governor,” recalls Florida Democratic strategist Ben Pollara. “I promise you that people remember what Jeb did.”</p>
<p /> | true | 4 | wilfredo leeap photo courts conservatives skeptical rightwing bona fides jeb bush allbutannounced gop presidential candidate cited one controversial moves floridas governor illustrate record standing firm principle face widespread opposition decision unilaterally end affirmative action florida trust lot people upset boasted activists conservative political action conference earlier year bushs effort dismantle affirmative action state college admissions government contracting hiringwhich sun sentinel dubbed grievous blunder tenure prime example bushs shootfirst takenoadvice method governingillustrates executive style time racial tensions baltimore ferguson missouri national issue bushs fight affirmative action led confrontation states black community remains significant episode political history 1999 bushs first year governor ward connerly antiaffirmativeaction crusader spearheaded successful ballot initiatives eliminate racial preferences california washington descended florida gather signatures similar measure would appear november 2000 ballot bush fan called connerlys divisive approach republican support connerlys amendment california pushed minority voters away gop helped democrats take control sacramento bush also expressed skepticism floridas affirmativeaction policies described one private email stupid destructive bush decided preempt connerlys effort ending affirmative action florida signing executive order 99281 november 9 1999 alongside executive order bush proposed replacing affirmative action floridas staterun universities government contracting initiative called one florida new plan students top 20 percent public high school class would guaranteed admission one states public universities contracting side bushs order wiped setasides price preferences minorityowned businesses instead bush sought increase diversity procurement streamlining certification process minority vendors encouraging purchasing officers reach minority businesses outset many observers suspected ulterior motive lurked behind bushs executive order george w bush likely gop nominee president connerlys contentious proposal could expected drive democraticleaning black voters polls 2000 election potentially imperil path white house cnns inside politics dubbed bushs executive order political play week bush denied brothers presidential ambitions influenced decision mere suggestion damaging african americans like interests subordinated political interest bush family says florida state university political scientist lance dehavensmith public outrage triggered one florida largely focused bushs decision act unilaterally highhanded way make controversial decision notes dehavensmith black legislators complained bitterly left process crafting policy would significant impact community never talked never talked african americans knew recalls former state sen les miller served democratic minority leader time slap face weeks bush unveiled executive order african american leaders rallied one florida late november 1999 black lawmakers held protest orlando washington rep corrine brown dfla called federal agencies determine whether one florida squared federal law existing desegregation agreement state federal government also encouraged african americans deal brotherthen presidential contender george w bushat polls state sen daryl jones chair black legislative caucus used one florida rallying cry register black voters ahead 2000 elections fully implement one florida bush needed state university system board regents approve ban racial considerations state college admissions twist lost bushs critics regents vote scheduled friday january 21 week martin luther king jr day days prior vote lastditch effort convince bush scrap plan handful black state lawmakers met lt gov frank brogan state capitol make case meeting bush briefly popped telling lawmakers waiting rescind executive order might well get blankets160according orlando sentinel democratic state sen kendrick meek would later serve congress state rep tony hill responded staging sitin spot protest public relations disaster bush newspapers likening civil rights demonstrations 1960s meek hill camped executive office suite eveningand couple hundred protesters gathered outside capitol singing shall overcomebush ordered aides throw asses remark caught video time nightly news protest lasted next afternoon ending bush promised delay board regents vote month time panel legislators held three public hearings one florida regents ultimately voted implement bushs one florida planbut protests continued march 7 2000 bush delivered annual state state address 10000 people marched tallahassees apalachee parkway main artery leading capitol bush defended one florida speech demonstrators led rev jesse jackson protested outside bush ultimately got way cost standing among black floridians first failed campaign governor 1994 bush asked would african americans responded probably nothing attempted reach black community effort included cofounding charter school inner city miami second gubernatorial bid 1998 bush vigorously campaigned black neighborhoods endorsements several prominent black leaders ended winning 14 percent black votea significant feat republican one florida helped diminish good bush built administrations flawed effort 2000 purge states voter rolls felons bush ran reelection 2002 support among black voters dropped 50 percent bush definitely tried mend relations african american community notes dehavensmith fsu political scientist months massive one florida march june 2000 bush signed creation law school historically black florida aampm university throughout tenure made effort appoint african americans judgeships appointed 41 black judgesabout 10 percent judicial appointmentsin eight years office one florida voter purge turned african americans bush early tenure theyre going change minds century dehavensmith predicts bushs one florida move indicative goitalone governing style bush seemed proud ten days signing executive order ending affirmative action wrote supporter always felt big hairy audacious ideas need implemented rather talked bush become willing respectfully disagree ensuing years says matthew corrigan professor university north florida author conservative hurricane jeb bush remade florida came making decisions without much consultation corrigan says bush didnt change much hes charge believes executive power former state sen miller recalls two terms legislature tell right tough task dealing jeb bush many people say jeb bushs way way bush gears likely white house bid portrayed one florida success ended system african american hispanic kids attending university system prior system discriminatory declared cpac february past 15 years one florida produced mixed results politifact rated bushs cpac statement mostly false bushs spokeswoman respond multiple requests comment black freshmen enrollment state universities declined one florida 18 percent 2000 13 percent 2013 states black population remained stable around 20 percent numbers worse floridas best public universities 2000 2009 black enrollment dropped 15 percent fsuafrican americans account 7 percent incoming class according washington post investigation university florida gainesville states flagship school blacks make 6 percent freshmen around 12 percent 2000 latino enrollment numbers climbed however pace states growing latino population 2013 latinos accounted 27 percent state population 28 percent freshmen state university system one florida latinos underrepresented comprised 20 percent population 12 percent enrolling freshmen bushs initiative fared better contracting side according miami herald contracts minority womenrun businesses jumped 232 percent 2001 agencies covered one florida bush made concerted effort immediately boost contracting minority vendors yet policy governor maintain internal culture prioritizes contracting minority businesses bush considers one floridaand even controversy endured implement itas campaign asset part sales pitch republicans think hes squishy issues immigration common core african americans florida bitter reminder civil rights battle lost affirmativeaction position direct perceived attack african american community tenure governor recalls florida democratic strategist ben pollara promise people remember jeb | 1,090 |
<p>A former inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has repudiated its major new claim that Iran built an explosives chamber to test components of a nuclear weapon and carry out a simulated nuclear explosion.</p>
<p>The IAEA claim that a foreign scientist – identified in news reports as Vyacheslav Danilenko – had been involved in building the alleged containment chamber has now been denied firmly by Danilenko himself in an&#160; <a href="http://www.rferl.org/content/russian_scientist_iran_nuclear_danilenko/24393322.html" type="external">interview</a>&#160;with Radio Free Europe published Friday.</p>
<p>The&#160; <a href="" type="internal">latest report</a>&#160;by the IAEA cited “information provided by Member States” that Iran had constructed “a large explosives containment vessel in which to conduct hydrodynamic experiments” – meaning simulated explosions of nuclear weapons – in its Parchin military complex in 2000.</p>
<p>The report said it had “confirmed” that a “large cylindrical object” housed at the same complex had been “designed to contain the detonation of up to 70 kilograms of high explosives”. That amount of explosives, it said, would be “appropriate” for testing a detonation system to trigger a nuclear weapon.</p>
<p>But former IAEA inspector Robert Kelley has denounced the agency’s claims about such a containment chamber as “highly misleading”.</p>
<p>Kelley, a nuclear engineer who was the IAEA’s chief weapons inspector in Iraq and is now a senior research fellow at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, pointed out in an interview&#160;with the Real News Network that a cylindrical chamber designed to contain 70 kg of explosives, as claimed by the IAEA, could not possibly have been used for hydrodynamic testing of a nuclear weapon design, contrary to the IAEA claim.</p>
<p>“There are far more explosives in that bomb than could be contained by this container,” Kelley said, referring to the simulated explosion of a nuclear weapon in a hydrodynamic experiment.</p>
<p>Kelley also observed that hydrodynamic testing would not have been done in a container inside a building in any case. “You have to be crazy to do hydrodynamic explosives in a container,” he said. “There’s no reason to do it. They’re done outdoors on firing tables.”</p>
<p>Kelley rejected the IAEA claim that the alleged cylindrical chamber was new evidence of an Iranian weapons program. “We’ve been led by the nose to believe that this container is important, when in fact it’s not important at all,” Kelley said.</p>
<p>The IAEA report and unnamed “diplomats” implied that a “former Soviet nuclear weapons scientist”, identified in the media as Danilenko, had helped build the alleged containment vessel at Parchin.</p>
<p>But their claims conflict with one another as well as with readily documented facts about Danilenko’s work in Iran.</p>
<p>The IAEA report does not deny that Danilenko – a Ukrainian who worked in a Soviet-era research institute that was identified mainly with nuclear weapons – was actually a specialist on nanodiamonds. The report nevertheless implies a link beween Danilenko and the purported explosives chamber at Parchin by citing a publication by Danilenko as a source for the dimensions of the alleged explosives chamber.</p>
<p>Associated Press reported Nov. 11 that unnamed diplomats suggested Volodymyr Padalko, a partner of Danilenko in a nanodiamond business who was described as Danilenko’s son-in-law, had contradicted Danilenko’s firm denial of involvement in building a containment vessel for weapons testing. The diplomats claimed Padalko had told IAEA investigators that Danilenko had helped build “a large steel chamber to contain the force of the blast set off by such explosives testing”.</p>
<p>But that claim appears to be an effort to confuse Danilenko’s well-established work on an explosives chamber for nanodiamond synthesis with a chamber for weapons testing, such as the IAEA now claims was built at Parchin.</p>
<p>One of the unnamed diplomats described the steel chamber at Parchin as “the size of a double decker bus” and thus “much too large” for nanodiamonds.</p>
<p>But the IAEA report itself made exactly the opposite argument, suggesting that the purported steel chamber at Parchin was based on the design in a published paper by Danilenko.</p>
<p>The report said the alleged explosives chamber was designed to contain “up to 70 kg of high explosives” which is claims would be “suitable” for testing what it calls a “multipoint initiation system” for a nuclear weapon.</p>
<p>But a 2008 slide show on systems for nanodiamond synthesis posted on the internet by the U.S.-based nanotechnology company NanoBlox shows that the last patented containment chamber built by Danilenko and patented in 1992, with a total volume of 100 cubic metres, was designed for the use of just 10 kg of explosives.</p>
<p>An unnamed member state had given the IAEA a purported Iranian document in 2008 describing a 2003 test of what the agency interpreted to be a possible “high explosive implosion system for a nuclear weapon”.</p>
<p>David Albright, director of a Washington, D.C. think tank who frequently passes on information from IAEA officials to the news media, told this writer in 2009 that the member state in question was “probably Israel”.</p>
<p>Although the process of making “detonation nanodiamonds” uses explosives in a containment chamber, the chamber would bear little resemblance to one used for testing a nuclear bomb’s initiation system.</p>
<p>The production of diamonds does not require the same high degree of precision in simultaneous explosions as the initiator for a nuclear device. And unlike the explosives used in a multipoint initiation system, the explosives used for making synthetic nanodiamonds must be under water in a closed pool, as Danilenko noted in a 2010 PowerPoint presentation.</p>
<p>Having endorsed the IAEA’s claims, Albright concedes in a Nov. 13 article that the IAEA report “did not provide [sic] Danilenko’s involvement, if any, in this chamber.”</p>
<p>In an interview with Radio Free Europe Friday, Danilenko denied that he has any expertise in nuclear weapons, saying, “I understand absolutely nothing in nuclear physics.” He also denied that he participated in “modeling warheads” at the research institute in Russia where he worked for three decades.</p>
<p>Danilenko further denied doing any work in Iran that did not relate to “dynamic detonation synthesis of diamonds” and said he has “strong doubts” that Iran had a nuclear weapons program during those years.</p>
<p>Albright and three co-authors&#160;published an account&#160;of Danilenko’s work in Iran this week seeking to give credibility to the IAEA suggestion that he worked on the containment chamber for a nuclear weapons programme.</p>
<p>The Albright article, published on the website of the Institute for Science and International Security, said that Danilenko approached the Iranian embassy in 1995 offering his expertise on detonation diamonds, and later signed a contract with Syed Abbas Shahmoradi who responded to Danilenko’s query.</p>
<p>Albright identifies Shahmoradi as the “head of Iran’s secret nuclear sector involved in the development of nuclear weapons”, merely because Shahmoradi later headed the Physics Research Center, which the IAEA argues has led Iran’s nuclear weapons research.</p>
<p>But in late 1995, Shahmoradi was at the Sharif University of Technology, which is a leading centre for nanodiamonds in Iran. Albright argues that this is evidence supporting his suspicion that nanodiamonds were a cover for his real work, because the main centre for nanodiamond research is at Malek Ashtar University of Technology rather than at Sharif University.</p>
<p>However, Sharif University had just established an Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology in 2005 that was intended to become the hub for nanotechnology research activities and strategy planning for Iran. So Sharif University and Shahmoradi would have been the logical choice to contract one of the world’s leading specialists on nanodiamonds.</p>
<p>GARETH PORTER&#160;is an investigative historian and journalist with Inter-Press Service specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “ <a href="" type="internal">Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam</a>“, was published in 2006.</p> | true | 4 | former inspector international atomic energy agency iaea repudiated major new claim iran built explosives chamber test components nuclear weapon carry simulated nuclear explosion iaea claim foreign scientist identified news reports vyacheslav danilenko involved building alleged containment chamber denied firmly danilenko an160 interview160with radio free europe published friday the160 latest report160by iaea cited information provided member states iran constructed large explosives containment vessel conduct hydrodynamic experiments meaning simulated explosions nuclear weapons parchin military complex 2000 report said confirmed large cylindrical object housed complex designed contain detonation 70 kilograms high explosives amount explosives said would appropriate testing detonation system trigger nuclear weapon former iaea inspector robert kelley denounced agencys claims containment chamber highly misleading kelley nuclear engineer iaeas chief weapons inspector iraq senior research fellow stockholm international peace research institute pointed interview160with real news network cylindrical chamber designed contain 70 kg explosives claimed iaea could possibly used hydrodynamic testing nuclear weapon design contrary iaea claim far explosives bomb could contained container kelley said referring simulated explosion nuclear weapon hydrodynamic experiment kelley also observed hydrodynamic testing would done container inside building case crazy hydrodynamic explosives container said theres reason theyre done outdoors firing tables kelley rejected iaea claim alleged cylindrical chamber new evidence iranian weapons program weve led nose believe container important fact important kelley said iaea report unnamed diplomats implied former soviet nuclear weapons scientist identified media danilenko helped build alleged containment vessel parchin claims conflict one another well readily documented facts danilenkos work iran iaea report deny danilenko ukrainian worked sovietera research institute identified mainly nuclear weapons actually specialist nanodiamonds report nevertheless implies link beween danilenko purported explosives chamber parchin citing publication danilenko source dimensions alleged explosives chamber associated press reported nov 11 unnamed diplomats suggested volodymyr padalko partner danilenko nanodiamond business described danilenkos soninlaw contradicted danilenkos firm denial involvement building containment vessel weapons testing diplomats claimed padalko told iaea investigators danilenko helped build large steel chamber contain force blast set explosives testing claim appears effort confuse danilenkos wellestablished work explosives chamber nanodiamond synthesis chamber weapons testing iaea claims built parchin one unnamed diplomats described steel chamber parchin size double decker bus thus much large nanodiamonds iaea report made exactly opposite argument suggesting purported steel chamber parchin based design published paper danilenko report said alleged explosives chamber designed contain 70 kg high explosives claims would suitable testing calls multipoint initiation system nuclear weapon 2008 slide show systems nanodiamond synthesis posted internet usbased nanotechnology company nanoblox shows last patented containment chamber built danilenko patented 1992 total volume 100 cubic metres designed use 10 kg explosives unnamed member state given iaea purported iranian document 2008 describing 2003 test agency interpreted possible high explosive implosion system nuclear weapon david albright director washington dc think tank frequently passes information iaea officials news media told writer 2009 member state question probably israel although process making detonation nanodiamonds uses explosives containment chamber chamber would bear little resemblance one used testing nuclear bombs initiation system production diamonds require high degree precision simultaneous explosions initiator nuclear device unlike explosives used multipoint initiation system explosives used making synthetic nanodiamonds must water closed pool danilenko noted 2010 powerpoint presentation endorsed iaeas claims albright concedes nov 13 article iaea report provide sic danilenkos involvement chamber interview radio free europe friday danilenko denied expertise nuclear weapons saying understand absolutely nothing nuclear physics also denied participated modeling warheads research institute russia worked three decades danilenko denied work iran relate dynamic detonation synthesis diamonds said strong doubts iran nuclear weapons program years albright three coauthors160published account160of danilenkos work iran week seeking give credibility iaea suggestion worked containment chamber nuclear weapons programme albright article published website institute science international security said danilenko approached iranian embassy 1995 offering expertise detonation diamonds later signed contract syed abbas shahmoradi responded danilenkos query albright identifies shahmoradi head irans secret nuclear sector involved development nuclear weapons merely shahmoradi later headed physics research center iaea argues led irans nuclear weapons research late 1995 shahmoradi sharif university technology leading centre nanodiamonds iran albright argues evidence supporting suspicion nanodiamonds cover real work main centre nanodiamond research malek ashtar university technology rather sharif university however sharif university established institute nanoscience nanotechnology 2005 intended become hub nanotechnology research activities strategy planning iran sharif university shahmoradi would logical choice contract one worlds leading specialists nanodiamonds gareth porter160is investigative historian journalist interpress service specialising us national security policy paperback edition latest book perils dominance imbalance power road war vietnam published 2006 | 733 |
<p>N. Mills: Ground Zero 7 Years Later</p>
<p>On the day after presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain stopped campaigning to place flowers at the World Trade Center site on the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I went there myself. Work has progressed since I visited Ground Zero a year ago, but when you look into the pit from which New York's new World Trade Center will rise, you don't get much of a sense of the future as you stare through the chain-link fence surrounding the construction.</p>
<p>Fights over design and money have made any progress difficult to come by. Foundation work dominates the activity at the 16-acre site these days. What you see primarily is workers moving dirt and mixing cement.</p>
<p>It is not until you look at the four-story-high artist's rendering of the future World Trade Center that hangs from developer Larry Silverstein's 7 World Trade Center on Vesey Street that a sense of where things are headed becomes clear. And therein lies the problem if you believe that the new World Trade Center ought primarily to be honoring the nearly three thousand who died there on 9/11.</p>
<p>What the artist's rendering, "World Trade Center 2012," captures are the silhouettes of the buildings that will dominate Ground Zero in the future. The memorial and underground museum that architect Daniel Libeskind created as the centerpieces of his master plan for the World Trade Center are nowhere to be found. Office spaces and shops have already won the day.</p>
<p>Along Church Street, which borders the east side of the World Trade Center, the Millennium Hotel, a Century 21 discount store, and a Brooks Brothers set the tone, and within the World Trade Center, its giant towers will do the same. On Liberty Street, which borders the south side of the World Trade Center, the absence of sentiment is even more apparent. The glassy Tribute WTC Visitor Center charges adults who want to walk through its tiny galleries $10 a head, and down the block, where a bronze bas-relief of the rescue effort dominates the exterior wall of Ladder Company 10 and Engine Company 10, the effort to honor those firemen who lost their lives in the 9/11 rescue effort comes off as a belated gesture.</p>
<p>Tourists occasionally stop to look at the bas-relief and its inscription, "Dedicated To Those Who Fell. And To Those Who Carry On. May We Never Forget." But most New Yorkers rush by. The one constant on my rainy afternoon visit was an old man with a gray beard and a red U.S.A. baseball hat who played "Amazing Grace" over and over on his flute, hoping that people would drop money into his flute case, in which he or passersby had already left a handful of dollars. The best spot for viewing World Trade Center, as the Japanese tourists with their endlessly clicking cameras have discovered, is the walkway that takes you across West Street to the World Financial Center that was built on Hudson River landfill next to the World Trade Center. But the unobstructed view from the walkway doesn't really change what you see from street level.</p>
<p>On my way back home, I stopped briefly at St. Paul's Chapel on Church Street. Completed in 1766 and modeled on London's St. Martin-in-the-Fields, St. Paul's is the oldest building in continuous use in New York. Its quiet graveyard, shaded by Sycamore trees, feels wonderfully out of place, and as the World Trade Center takes shape, St. Paul's will only become more of an oddity. But on the afternoon that I stopped at St. Paul's, it was comforting to think that the shadows from the future World Trade Center had not yet reached it. Back on Church Street, I gave a final glimpse at the building going on and noticed a handmade sign that had not caught my eye before. Taped to the upper windows of a building on Liberty Street were separate sheets of papers that in huge block letters declared, "Obama 4 Change."</p>
<p>The crude hand lettering seemed cheerful in its spontaneity, especially when I compared it to the impersonal, glowing lettering I saw earlier on avant-garde artist Jenny Holzer's animated text installation of prose and poetry that scrolls across the 65-foot wide, 14-foot high glass wall behind the reception desk at 7 World Trade Center, where Larry Silverstein, the developer of Towers 2, 3, and 4 has offices. By the time the World Trade Center is completed, there will be no room for handmade signs, but plenty of room for work like Holzer's that, in the name of innovation, sings the praises of the new World Trade Center over and over.</p>
<p>In August, Ada Louise Huxtable, who at the age of 87 is the dean of America's architecture critics, returned from a visit to the World Trade Center so angry that she could not even be ironic about her displeasure. "I would say that this has probably been the greatest planning fiasco in the history of the world," she wrote. Huxtable was kind enough to avoid saying exactly what was the World Trade Center's competition for awfulness, but it is hard to imagine that she erred by much in her final judgment.</p>
<p>Nicolaus Mills, a professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College, is author of Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America's Coming of Age as a Superpower. (Derek Jensen / Wikimedia Commons).</p> | true | 4 | n mills ground zero 7 years later day presidential candidates barack obama john mccain stopped campaigning place flowers world trade center site seventh anniversary 911 attacks went work progressed since visited ground zero year ago look pit new yorks new world trade center rise dont get much sense future stare chainlink fence surrounding construction fights design money made progress difficult come foundation work dominates activity 16acre site days see primarily workers moving dirt mixing cement look fourstoryhigh artists rendering future world trade center hangs developer larry silversteins 7 world trade center vesey street sense things headed becomes clear therein lies problem believe new world trade center ought primarily honoring nearly three thousand died 911 artists rendering world trade center 2012 captures silhouettes buildings dominate ground zero future memorial underground museum architect daniel libeskind created centerpieces master plan world trade center nowhere found office spaces shops already day along church street borders east side world trade center millennium hotel century 21 discount store brooks brothers set tone within world trade center giant towers liberty street borders south side world trade center absence sentiment even apparent glassy tribute wtc visitor center charges adults want walk tiny galleries 10 head block bronze basrelief rescue effort dominates exterior wall ladder company 10 engine company 10 effort honor firemen lost lives 911 rescue effort comes belated gesture tourists occasionally stop look basrelief inscription dedicated fell carry may never forget new yorkers rush one constant rainy afternoon visit old man gray beard red usa baseball hat played amazing grace flute hoping people would drop money flute case passersby already left handful dollars best spot viewing world trade center japanese tourists endlessly clicking cameras discovered walkway takes across west street world financial center built hudson river landfill next world trade center unobstructed view walkway doesnt really change see street level way back home stopped briefly st pauls chapel church street completed 1766 modeled londons st martininthefields st pauls oldest building continuous use new york quiet graveyard shaded sycamore trees feels wonderfully place world trade center takes shape st pauls become oddity afternoon stopped st pauls comforting think shadows future world trade center yet reached back church street gave final glimpse building going noticed handmade sign caught eye taped upper windows building liberty street separate sheets papers huge block letters declared obama 4 change crude hand lettering seemed cheerful spontaneity especially compared impersonal glowing lettering saw earlier avantgarde artist jenny holzers animated text installation prose poetry scrolls across 65foot wide 14foot high glass wall behind reception desk 7 world trade center larry silverstein developer towers 2 3 4 offices time world trade center completed room handmade signs plenty room work like holzers name innovation sings praises new world trade center august ada louise huxtable age 87 dean americas architecture critics returned visit world trade center angry could even ironic displeasure would say probably greatest planning fiasco history world wrote huxtable kind enough avoid saying exactly world trade centers competition awfulness hard imagine erred much final judgment nicolaus mills professor american studies sarah lawrence college author winning peace marshall plan americas coming age superpower derek jensen wikimedia commons | 519 |
<p>The Standing Rock tribe has filed a <a href="" type="internal">lawsuit</a> against the U.S Army Corps of Engineers for using the controversial Nationwide Permit 12 to fast-track authorization of the hotly contested Dakota Access&#160;pipeline.</p>
<p>Slated to carry oil obtained via <a href="http://www.desmogblog.com/fracking-the-future/" type="external">hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”)</a> from North Dakota’s <a href="http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/7174" type="external">Bakken Shale</a> basin to Patoka, Illinois, the plaintiffs say not only was the Army Corps’ permitting of the Energy Transfer Partners and Enbridge Corporation <a href="" type="internal">jointly&#160;owned pipeline</a> a violation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the Clean Water Act, but also a violation of the <a href="" type="internal">National Historic Preservation Act’s (NHPA) Section 106</a>.</p>
<p>A&#160;review of court documents for the case currently unfolding in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. has revealed that the <a href="" type="internal">tribal liaison</a> for Energy Transfer Partners tasked with abiding by Section 106&#160;passed through the revolving door and formerly worked for the Army Corps. The finding also raises key ethical questions in the field of&#160;archaeology.</p>
<p>That&#160;liaison — <a href="" type="internal">Michelle Dippel</a> — technically works for a Dakota Access LLC contractor named&#160;HDR, a company which <a href="http://www.hdrinc.com/markets/oil-gas/pipelines" type="external">helps pipeline companies</a> and <a href="http://www.hdrinc.com/markets/oil-gas" type="external">other</a> oil and gas industry infrastructure companies secure permits for their projects. Dippel, the South Central Region Environmental Services Lead for HDR, began her career as a project manager for the Army Corps’ Fort Worth District and also formerly worked for the natural gas pipeline company Spectra&#160;Energy.</p>
<p>An <a href="" type="internal">archaeologist by academic training</a> and a <a href="http://rpanet.org/members/?id=28576164&amp;hhSearchTerms=%22%22dippel%22%22" type="external">member</a> of the Register of Professional Archaeologists, a biographical sketch for Dippel tracked down on the Florida Department of Transportation’s website lists her job sub-title as “ <a href="" type="internal">Project Streamlining</a>” on behalf of the DOT.</p>
<p>Section&#160;106</p>
<p>Dippel lists&#160;Section 106 consultation as an area of expertise on her LinkedIn&#160;page.</p>
<p>Section 106, in turn, serves as a major part of the focus of the lawsuit, the recently completed <a href="" type="internal">occupation</a> of a Dakota Access Pipeline construction site in Cannon Ball, North Dakota, and the push by the Standing Rock Indian Reservation&#160;for a court-ordered <a href="" type="internal">injunction</a> to halt pipeline&#160;instruction.</p>
<p>“Although federal law requires the Corps of Engineers to consult with the tribe about its sovereign interests, permits for the project were approved and construction began without meaningful consultation,” reads an August 24 op-ed in <a href="" type="internal">&#160;The New York Times&#160;by Standing Rock chairman David Archambault II</a>.</p>
<p>“The Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior and the National Advisory Council on Historic Preservation supported more protection of the tribe’s cultural heritage, but the Corps of Engineers and Energy Transfer Partners turned a blind eye to our rights. The first draft of the company’s assessment of the planned route through our treaty and ancestral lands did not even mention our&#160;tribe.”</p>
<p>Indeed, the court documents demonstrate that&#160;Standing Rock officers’ <a href="" type="internal">letters to the Army Corps often went unanswered</a>.</p>
<p />
<p>Image Credit: <a href="" type="internal">U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia</a></p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p />
<p>An <a href="" type="internal">intervenor in the case</a>, the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, also&#160;testified in court documents about the sanctity of the land as it relates to tribal traditions and history. One of those <a href="" type="internal">testimonies</a> came from&#160;Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe member Joye Braun, an organizer for the <a href="http://www.ienearth.org/" type="external">Indigenous Environmental Network</a>.</p>
<p>The NHPA‘s Citizen Guide to&#160;Section 106 Review explains that Section 106&#160; <a href="http://www.achp.gov/docs/CitizenGuide.pdf" type="external">mandates</a> that government agencies, such as the Army Corps, “consider the effects of projects they carry out, approve, or fund on historic properties” though it also “does not mandate&#160;preservation” because “sometimes there is no way for a needed project to proceed without harming historic&#160;properties.”</p>
<p>At issue here in Standing Rock Sioux Tribe v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, then, is the alleged lack of thoroughness of the Section 106 review and not the absence of one altogether. Even the&#160; <a href="http://www.achp.gov/" type="external">Advisory Council on Historic Preservation</a> (ACHP) itself penned a&#160; <a href="" type="internal">letter</a> in May 2016 to the Corps expressing concern about the lack of rigor in&#160;its Section 106&#160;Review.</p>
<p>Like the <a href="" type="internal">southern leg</a> of TransCanada’s <a href="http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/5857" type="external">Keystone XL</a> pipeline and Enbridge’s <a href="" type="internal">Flanagan South</a> pipelines, the Army Corps and Dakota Access LLC by extension utilized Nationwide Permit 12 as an end-run around a more vigorous and NEPA-oriented environmental&#160;review.</p>
<p>Code of&#160;Conduct</p>
<p>The Register of Professional&#160;Archaeologists (RPA), of which Dippel is a member, <a href="http://rpanet.org/?page=About" type="external">describes itself</a> as a “listing of archaeologists who have agreed to abide by an explicit code of conduct and standards of research performance, who hold a graduate degree in archaeology, anthropology, art history, classics, history, or another germane discipline.” RPA also notes that “Registration is a voluntary act that recognizes an individual’s personal responsibility to be held accountable for his or her professional&#160;behavior.”</p>
<p>RPA also maintains a <a href="" type="internal">Code of Conduct</a>, calling for those in the profession to veer away from archaeology in service to the powerful and to the detriment of the&#160;vulnerable.</p>
<p>“An archaeologist shall&#160;actively support conservation of the archaeological resource base [and]&#160;be sensitive to, and respect the legitimate concerns of, groups whose culture histories are the subjects of archaeological investigations,” it reads. “An archaeologist shall not engage in any illegal or unethical conduct involving archaeological matters or knowingly permit the use of his/her name in support of any illegal or unethical activity involving archaeological&#160;matters.”</p>
<p>The Code, paying homage to&#160;ethics and the integrity of the profession, calls for archaeologists to disobey orders from their employers if they run contrary to the Code’s&#160;dictates.</p>
<p>“An archaeologist shall refuse to comply with any request or demand of an employer or client which conflicts with the Code and Standards,” it&#160;continues.</p>
<p>Dippel did not respond to a request for comment from&#160;DeSmog.</p>
<p>Terry Klein, President of RPA, said that the organization “only responds to a violation of our Code of Conduct or Standards of Research Performance when someone has <a href="http://rpanet.org/?GrievanceProcess" type="external">submitted a formal grievance</a> about the violation to the Register’s Grievance&#160;Coordinator.”</p>
<p>Though Dippel does not maintain a membership in the&#160;American Cultural Resources Association (ACRA), its <a href="http://acra-crm.org/code-of-ethics" type="external">Code of Ethics</a>also has fairly strict guidelines for work one could or should do on behalf of a&#160;client.</p>
<p>“While the definition of the public interest changes through ongoing debate, an ACRA member owes allegiance to a responsibly derived concept of the public interest,” it reads. “An ACRA member shall strive to respect the concerns of people whose histories and/or resources are the subject of cultural resources&#160;investigation.”</p>
<p>Archaeology as “Disaster&#160;Capitalism”</p>
<p>Critics of the modern-practiced academic discipline of archaeology, such as <a href="http://viu.academia.edu/RichHutchings" type="external">Richard Hutchings</a>&#160;— co-director of the <a href="https://criticalheritagetourism.com/about/" type="external">Institute for Critical Heritage and Tourism</a> and a Research Associate at Vancouver Island University — assail it as akin to what author&#160;Naomi Klein has referred to as “disaster capitalism.” Hutchings named it as such in a paper titled, “ <a href="http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/Archaeology_as_Disaster_Capitalism.pdf" type="external">Archaeology as Disaster Capitalism</a>,” co-authored with&#160;Vancouver Island University archaeologist and Professor <a href="https://viu.academia.edu/MarinaLaSalle" type="external">Mariana La Salle</a>.</p>
<p>The authors dub Dippel and those in similar positions in the orbit of commercial archaeology as&#160;“archaeobureaucrats,” or people who deploy&#160;their professional techniques in service to multinational corporations. Pipeline archaeology and clearing space for pipelines, in particular, has become a <a href="https://www.voiceamerica.com/episode/67438/the-growth-and-influence-of-the-oil-and-gas-industry-on-contemporary-archaeology" type="external">major player</a> in the <a href="https://www.mixcloud.com/indianajonesmythrealityand21st/in-the-pipeline-archaeology-and-the-oil-and-gas-industry/" type="external">private sector</a>.</p>
<p>“That most archaeologists are employed by and answer directly to transnational development corporations is only the tip of the iceberg,” Hutchings said via email. “More troubling is that while most archaeologists are white (like their employers and their employer’s stockholders), the majority of heritage sites archaeologists permit to be destroyed are Native American, raising the specter of not just environmental racism but a coordinated and systematic human rights&#160;violation.”</p>
<p>Thomas King*, the former&#160;Director of the Office of Cultural Resource Preservation for ACHP, has also critiqued cultural resources management work done by U.S. government agencies and corporations&#160;as a de facto whistleblower, calling the process a form of “whitewashing” in his 2009 book titled, <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Our-Unprotected-Heritage-Whitewashing-the-Destruction-of-our-Cultural/King/p/book/9781598743814" type="external">Our Unprotected Heritage: Whitewashing the Destruction of our Cultural and Natural Environment</a>.</p>
<p>U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg will <a href="" type="internal">issue a ruling</a> on the Standing Rock tribe’s request for an injunction on September 9, with a hearing on the issue set for the day before on September 8. Meanwhile, four miles north of Cannon Ball, an encampment of tribal protesters&#160;continues at the&#160; <a href="http://sacredstonecamp.org/" type="external">Sacred Stone Camp</a>.</p> | true | 4 | standing rock tribe filed lawsuit us army corps engineers using controversial nationwide permit 12 fasttrack authorization hotly contested dakota access160pipeline slated carry oil obtained via hydraulic fracturing fracking north dakotas bakken shale basin patoka illinois plaintiffs say army corps permitting energy transfer partners enbridge corporation jointly160owned pipeline violation national environmental policy act nepa clean water act also violation national historic preservation acts nhpa section 106 a160review court documents case currently unfolding us district court washington dc revealed tribal liaison energy transfer partners tasked abiding section 106160passed revolving door formerly worked army corps finding also raises key ethical questions field of160archaeology that160liaison michelle dippel technically works dakota access llc contractor named160hdr company helps pipeline companies oil gas industry infrastructure companies secure permits projects dippel south central region environmental services lead hdr began career project manager army corps fort worth district also formerly worked natural gas pipeline company spectra160energy archaeologist academic training member register professional archaeologists biographical sketch dippel tracked florida department transportations website lists job subtitle project streamlining behalf dot section160106 dippel lists160section 106 consultation area expertise linkedin160page section 106 turn serves major part focus lawsuit recently completed occupation dakota access pipeline construction site cannon ball north dakota push standing rock indian reservation160for courtordered injunction halt pipeline160instruction although federal law requires corps engineers consult tribe sovereign interests permits project approved construction began without meaningful consultation reads august 24 oped 160the new york times160by standing rock chairman david archambault ii environmental protection agency department interior national advisory council historic preservation supported protection tribes cultural heritage corps engineers energy transfer partners turned blind eye rights first draft companys assessment planned route treaty ancestral lands even mention our160tribe indeed court documents demonstrate that160standing rock officers letters army corps often went unanswered image credit us district court district columbia 160 intervenor case cheyenne river sioux tribe also160testified court documents sanctity land relates tribal traditions history one testimonies came from160cheyenne river sioux tribe member joye braun organizer indigenous environmental network nhpas citizen guide to160section 106 review explains section 106160 mandates government agencies army corps consider effects projects carry approve fund historic properties though also mandate160preservation sometimes way needed project proceed without harming historic160properties issue standing rock sioux tribe v us army corps engineers alleged lack thoroughness section 106 review absence one altogether even the160 advisory council historic preservation achp penned a160 letter may 2016 corps expressing concern lack rigor in160its section 106160review like southern leg transcanadas keystone xl pipeline enbridges flanagan south pipelines army corps dakota access llc extension utilized nationwide permit 12 endrun around vigorous nepaoriented environmental160review code of160conduct register professional160archaeologists rpa dippel member describes listing archaeologists agreed abide explicit code conduct standards research performance hold graduate degree archaeology anthropology art history classics history another germane discipline rpa also notes registration voluntary act recognizes individuals personal responsibility held accountable professional160behavior rpa also maintains code conduct calling profession veer away archaeology service powerful detriment the160vulnerable archaeologist shall160actively support conservation archaeological resource base and160be sensitive respect legitimate concerns groups whose culture histories subjects archaeological investigations reads archaeologist shall engage illegal unethical conduct involving archaeological matters knowingly permit use hisher name support illegal unethical activity involving archaeological160matters code paying homage to160ethics integrity profession calls archaeologists disobey orders employers run contrary codes160dictates archaeologist shall refuse comply request demand employer client conflicts code standards it160continues dippel respond request comment from160desmog terry klein president rpa said organization responds violation code conduct standards research performance someone submitted formal grievance violation registers grievance160coordinator though dippel maintain membership the160american cultural resources association acra code ethicsalso fairly strict guidelines work one could behalf a160client definition public interest changes ongoing debate acra member owes allegiance responsibly derived concept public interest reads acra member shall strive respect concerns people whose histories andor resources subject cultural resources160investigation archaeology disaster160capitalism critics modernpracticed academic discipline archaeology richard hutchings160 codirector institute critical heritage tourism research associate vancouver island university assail akin author160naomi klein referred disaster capitalism hutchings named paper titled archaeology disaster capitalism coauthored with160vancouver island university archaeologist professor mariana la salle authors dub dippel similar positions orbit commercial archaeology as160archaeobureaucrats people deploy160their professional techniques service multinational corporations pipeline archaeology clearing space pipelines particular become major player private sector archaeologists employed answer directly transnational development corporations tip iceberg hutchings said via email troubling archaeologists white like employers employers stockholders majority heritage sites archaeologists permit destroyed native american raising specter environmental racism coordinated systematic human rights160violation thomas king former160director office cultural resource preservation achp also critiqued cultural resources management work done us government agencies corporations160as de facto whistleblower calling process form whitewashing 2009 book titled unprotected heritage whitewashing destruction cultural natural environment us district court judge james boasberg issue ruling standing rock tribes request injunction september 9 hearing issue set day september 8 meanwhile four miles north cannon ball encampment tribal protesters160continues the160 sacred stone camp | 794 |
<p>Loren Elliott/Tampa Bay Times via ZUMA Wire</p>
<p />
<p>Donald Trump supporters got an unexpected welcome as they approached his Wednesday afternoon rally in Lakeland, Florida: Bob Welsh, a city commissioner from South Miami, had brought a set of speakers and was blaring the tape of Donald Trump <a href="" type="internal">bragging</a> about sexual assault in 2005. The footage, which was obtained and published Friday by the Washington Post, shook up the presidential race and prompted dozens of Republican elected officials to formally <a href="" type="internal">abandon</a> their party’s presidential nominee. Welsh was taunting Trump’s supporters, and had a sign for good measure:</p>
<p>These folks are playing the audio of the Trump tape over the speakers outside the Trump rally in Lakeland. <a href="https://t.co/OXTxxA4Tdl" type="external">pic.twitter.com/OXTxxA4Tdl</a></p>
<p>— DENALI (@timothypmurphy) <a href="https://twitter.com/timothypmurphy/status/786247355968450560" type="external">October 12, 2016</a></p>
<p />
<p>But the supporters who packed this rally hadn’t lost any sleep over the tape. They offered different theories as to where the video might have come from and what it really means, but they agreed on one thing: He’s still better than Crooked Hillary. As one middle-aged man put it, “He apologized for it, and Hillary doesn’t know how to apologize for anything.”</p>
<p>“I’m a guy, I’ve done worse,” said Henry Dupuis, who told me he was an immigrant from Canada. “Absolutely, me and my buddies? I’m serious about that.”</p>
<p>Worse than sexual assault, really?</p>
<p>“No, I’m just saying, well, call it…it’s just words,” Dupuis said. “It’s no action, compared to Bill Clinton. It’s just words.”</p>
<p>“What did I think of it?,” said Christine Lewis, from Lakeland. “Honestly, I thought that was the most ridiculous setup from the GOP. They set it up, they planned it, because it’s locker room banter—it’s all it was. Every guy in the United States of America has talked about doing a girl. In the bathroom. Or in the locker room, or wherever—on the bus. Let me tell you this: How come—this is what pisses me off—how come she can call a bunch of challenged kids at an Easter Egg hunt ‘retards’ and there’s no media coverage? That’s way worse than him talking about banging some girl.” (Jones was <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3635882/Hillary-Clinton-called-disabled-children-Easter-egg-hunt-f-ing-ree-tards-referred-Jews-stupid-k-s-Bill-called-Jesse-Jackson-damned-n-r-claims-Bill-s-former-lover.html" type="external">referring to a claim</a> made in a book written by a high school girlfriend of Bill Clinton, which posits that Hillary Clinton mocked disabled children as first lady of Arkansas.)</p>
<p>Lewis’ friend Steve Peters told me, “What guy doesn’t talk like that? If he didn’t talk like that I’d think there’s something wrong with him.”</p>
<p>Another Trump supporter, Diane (whose husband encouraged her not to give her last name) offered the entertainment industry defense: “There’s a lot of people in Hollywood, a lot of music people, rappers, that say a lot more dangerous and nasty language. And you know what? That language that Trump said in that was years ago, and it hasn’t killed anybody. And Hillary Clinton’s actions as secretary of state got people killed in Benghazi.”</p>
<p>“It doesn’t really affect me,” said Lew Gaskins of nearby Bartow. “He’s never been a politician. He’s always been a caricature, a TV star, so things like that are gonna be in his past. I think Billy Bush goaded him into it. He was just throwing out bravado, he wasn’t married at the time. I think they’re disgusting, every one of them.” (Trump was married to Melania at the time of the interview.)</p>
<p>David Jones, who wore a blue shirt with the word “Deplorable,” said the media should focus on something else: “What do they think about the tape that they’re just playing today about Obama showing his erection on his plane in 2008?” he asked me. The tape? “Yeah, it’s all over the internet now. It’s all over what’s his name, what’s the conservative guy’s name? Drudge.” (You can watch the video he’s talking about <a href="http://wonkette.com/607490/is-this-barack-obamas-giant-boner-sure-why-not" type="external">here</a>.) As for the groping comments: “Well, it’s not right, but he didn’t mean it for an open mic, and he didn’t act on it. And Hillary’s husband acted on it.”</p>
<p>Inside the event, Barb Main of Lakeland referred me to still another tape when I asked her about Trump’s comments. “I don’t really like it, but it was 11 years ago,” she said. “He wasn’t in politics. I think what Bill and Hillary have done is worse. I’ve heard the tapes of her laughing about the 12-year-old that was raped by the 35-year-old guy that got off. And that’s just sick. She was defending the guy that raped her—she knows he did it, and got him off with a minimal sentence and laughing about it. And the way she destroyed the women that were involved with Bill.” (Roy Reed, who was interviewing Clinton in the recording in question, has <a href="http://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2016/oct/12/reed-says-laughs-didn-t-target-girl-201/?news-arkansas" type="external">clarified</a> that Clinton was laughing at the “absurdity” of the Arkansas crime laboratory, and not the case itself.)</p>
<p>Sue Imbody, a real estate agent, told me she shrugged at the Trump tape because as a woman who had fought to break through in an industry dominated by men, she’d heard worse. “I’ve been in a lot of business transactions, and men are men,” she said. “And their discussions include some garbage that I would not use; sometimes it slips in my presence, but you know what, I understand that I’m not gonna change the world with my values, that if I want to participate and I want to know how it is in the real world, that I’m gonna have to get bigger than that, get beyond that, and understand the real crises we face.”</p>
<p>She continued, “They’re highfliers, high rollers. They talk their language; it’s a part of the good-old-boy system. I’m on the outside a lot of times, but they’re getting wiser, they’re getting more careful, and I’m all for women and so is Trump.”</p>
<p>A handful of people I spoke to did allow that Trump had done something undeniably wrong, but they emphasized forgiveness. “You know what, I’m a Christian woman and of course I do agree that that kind of talk is not something that is appropriate for the mainstream media,” Gwen Rollings told me. “However, he’s asked for forgiveness, and as Christians that’s what we’re supposed to do. I’m voting for his principles and his policies now.”</p>
<p>That same Christian charity was not available for the Republican politicians who had jumped ship over the weekend, though. “I would probably compare them to like Benedict Arnold,” Rollings said.</p>
<p /> | true | 4 | loren elliotttampa bay times via zuma wire donald trump supporters got unexpected welcome approached wednesday afternoon rally lakeland florida bob welsh city commissioner south miami brought set speakers blaring tape donald trump bragging sexual assault 2005 footage obtained published friday washington post shook presidential race prompted dozens republican elected officials formally abandon partys presidential nominee welsh taunting trumps supporters sign good measure folks playing audio trump tape speakers outside trump rally lakeland pictwittercomoxtxxa4tdl denali timothypmurphy october 12 2016 supporters packed rally hadnt lost sleep tape offered different theories video might come really means agreed one thing hes still better crooked hillary one middleaged man put apologized hillary doesnt know apologize anything im guy ive done worse said henry dupuis told immigrant canada absolutely buddies im serious worse sexual assault really im saying well call itits words dupuis said action compared bill clinton words think said christine lewis lakeland honestly thought ridiculous setup gop set planned locker room banterits every guy united states america talked girl bathroom locker room whereveron bus let tell comethis pisses offhow come call bunch challenged kids easter egg hunt retards theres media coverage thats way worse talking banging girl jones referring claim made book written high school girlfriend bill clinton posits hillary clinton mocked disabled children first lady arkansas lewis friend steve peters told guy doesnt talk like didnt talk like id think theres something wrong another trump supporter diane whose husband encouraged give last name offered entertainment industry defense theres lot people hollywood lot music people rappers say lot dangerous nasty language know language trump said years ago hasnt killed anybody hillary clintons actions secretary state got people killed benghazi doesnt really affect said lew gaskins nearby bartow hes never politician hes always caricature tv star things like gon na past think billy bush goaded throwing bravado wasnt married time think theyre disgusting every one trump married melania time interview david jones wore blue shirt word deplorable said media focus something else think tape theyre playing today obama showing erection plane 2008 asked tape yeah internet whats name whats conservative guys name drudge watch video hes talking groping comments well right didnt mean open mic didnt act hillarys husband acted inside event barb main lakeland referred still another tape asked trumps comments dont really like 11 years ago said wasnt politics think bill hillary done worse ive heard tapes laughing 12yearold raped 35yearold guy got thats sick defending guy raped hershe knows got minimal sentence laughing way destroyed women involved bill roy reed interviewing clinton recording question clarified clinton laughing absurdity arkansas crime laboratory case sue imbody real estate agent told shrugged trump tape woman fought break industry dominated men shed heard worse ive lot business transactions men men said discussions include garbage would use sometimes slips presence know understand im gon na change world values want participate want know real world im gon na get bigger get beyond understand real crises face continued theyre highfliers high rollers talk language part goodoldboy system im outside lot times theyre getting wiser theyre getting careful im women trump handful people spoke allow trump done something undeniably wrong emphasized forgiveness know im christian woman course agree kind talk something appropriate mainstream media gwen rollings told however hes asked forgiveness christians thats supposed im voting principles policies christian charity available republican politicians jumped ship weekend though would probably compare like benedict arnold rollings said | 565 |
<p><a href="" type="internal" />Andrew McKillop <a href="http://wp.me/p3bwni-5XW" type="external">21st Century Wire</a></p>
<p>It’s like we’re living in ancient pagan Greece or something.</p>
<p>Only yesterday, British Prime Minister David Cameron&#160; <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/jan/08/cameron-suspects-climate-change-abnormal-storms" type="external">insisted that the storms and floods causing havoc across his country</a> were because climate change. Yes, that old chestnut.</p>
<p>It’s one things for politicians to try and leverage public approval by flying the flimsy climate banner. You expect that. But no such leeway should be given to the media, as it is supposedly their job to inform the masses of facts, not mythologies.</p>
<p>Politically Correct Science</p>
<p>Let’s trace this tragic tale to the beginning. Seemingly decades ago, not 13 years, the UK Independent newspaper started the new century with the goal of becoming a world leader in government-approved, corporate-friendly global warming propaganda. Its chief warmist and green scribe, Charles Onians, fired the first climate salvo in a March 20, 2000, in this leading article:</p>
<p>“Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and the excitement of waking to find that the stuff has settled outside are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain’s culture”.</p>
<p>The Independent was soon followed by other UK papers, US papers, and European papers, and their broadcast media, in a permanent propaganda blitz to take “the warming thing” to the ultimate limits of childlike hysteria and stark distortion using the uncertain science of “the CO2 hypothesis”. The propaganda onslaught was stamped with the “warmist” hallmark of elite condescension and smug conviction that ordinary mortals are much too stupid to understand this “scientifically proven” crisis.</p>
<p>In what would become a typical example of “warmist” genre material, Charles Onians in 2000 cited David Viner, a researcher at the later-infamous climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia – the Home of the Hockey Stick – who told the unscientific masses that very soon “winter snowfall will become a very rare and exciting event”. And as for homeless sleeping in the gutter, not so many would die in the night – posing an existential crisis for English Middle Class Morality! By 2006, the UK Independent was regularly carrying junk science hysteria from ‘Gaia” author James Lovelock, a key example being his claim that “Billions of persons will die before the end of the century from global warming”. Since 2012, ‘Jim’ Lovelock has completely retracted and denied his warmist convictions, and tiptoed away from the train wreck of elite propaganda.</p>
<p>Always Go Further</p>
<p>Al Gore, chief promoter of the global warming scam with Rajendra Pachauri, always went further. Their propaganda onslaught mixed and mingled pure egoism with a frenetic drive to make millions for themselves and enrich their fellow conspirators, through an ultra-tenacious promotion of&#160; any “carbon-linked” cash-grubbing scheme. Showing what the business press calls “initiative and drive”, they promoted anything ranging from investment and trading scams, through government tax and corporate subsidy scams, to lurid books, films and TV documentaries.</p>
<p>THE CHURCH OF CLIMATE CHANGE: Gore and&#160;Pachauri guide the mass cult off their intellectual cliff.</p>
<p>Al Gore repeatedly said, in print, “the Arctic will be ice free by 2013”. Gore made this claim in print in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009.</p>
<p>And it didn’t happen. In fact the Arctic ice cap’s surface area increased by more than 25% in 2012-2013. The much-larger Antarctic ice cap also increased, by about 5% using NASA data. NASA, which is a fully warmist institution peddling the “CO2 hypothesis”, has been forced to admit the Antarctic ice sheet is now at its largest since it started regular satellite monitoring in 1979.</p>
<p>Media spending on the permanent propaganda campaign has been massive, and a fantastic misappropriation of public money where this concerns state-owned media. Obsessionally and expensively filmed summertime-only shots of polar ice melting – which the “climate correct” media has stuffed down our throats for a decade – are however now likely to be retreating to where they belong. To the trashcan of history and to empty film theaters, and late night TV doc boredom for the almost-asleep.</p>
<p>The warmists set up and tirelessly milked the global warming cash cow for all it could yield, but now it is Game Over time. Their great scientific scam may now be what it always scientifically was, a Cuckoo Theory which evicted all other possible theories of why the climate changes.</p>
<p>The Latecomers and Still Hopefuls</p>
<p>As plenty of writers including myself have explained plenty of times, the “CO2 theory” is scientific folk history and was junkscience from the moment it started – in about 1795 with Joseph Priestley and his lurid vision of Phlogiston Terror. To him worse than Al-Qaeda or mustard gas in the trenches of World War I, Priestley thought “phlogiston” could cause a mass dieoff of English industrial workers exposed to woodburning and coalburning fumes!&#160; But nobody had to believe it.</p>
<p>Today, only the most primitive minded and witless “warmists” soldier along, spouting idiocies in the hope the under-informed and the lazyminded will continue to buy their junkscience.</p>
<p>If all goes according to plan, Hollywood icon Leonardo DiCaprio will blast into space on the maiden voyage of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic “spaceship” this year. Incredibly enough, Messrs. Branson and DiCaprio style themselves as environmentalist celebrities with the elite mission of warning us there is a “coming ecological catastrophe” if we fail to address the carbon crisis.</p>
<p>Simply because they have garnered a large amount of money over the years, one way and another, their “commitment to fighting climate change” is called praiseworthy by brain-dead media, committed to “celeb worship” even as it backs off and away from the Global Warming scam. Richard Branson, despite all his attempts, is still far behind Al Gore in “warmist” cash-grubbing so he is active wherever that might turn a penny.</p>
<p>Branson claims he was “turned on” to Global Warming by ‘Jim’ Lovelock in person – the same Lovelock who has abandoned the scam. Branson is the founder and CEO of the “Carbon War Room”, an outfit advocating punitive-high energy taxes, which therefore has fawning support from Big Energy and Big Government, but his big hope is that “low carbon space travel” can become his new profit center. His one-liner to critics that space travel and carbon hysteria do not seem to mix, is that his brand of space travel is (very) Low Carbon. Cited by Wall Street Journal, 7 January, he has claimed: “We have reduced the [carbon emission] cost of somebody going into space from something like two weeks of New York’s electricity supply to less than the cost of an economy round-trip from Singapore to London”.</p>
<p>As we know, this concerns low-orbital short-period flight in the upper atmosphere, and nothing to do with real space travel, but coming from a “Global Warming ikon” we must accept there is always massive exaggeration and distortion. It is New Normal. On the other hand, we do not need to accept the plain, straight lying.</p>
<p>According to the US FAA-Federal Aviation Administration, also cited by Wall Street Journal, its own environmental assessment of the launch and re-entry of Virgin Galactic’s spacecraft says that one launch-land cycle will emit about 30 tons of carbon dioxide, or about five tons per passenger. That is around five times more than the carbon footprint of a round-trip flight from Singapore to London. When the support and infrastructure energy costs of the entire Virgin Galactic operation are added, including high-atmosphere flights by tracker and support aircraft, the total carbon emissions rise to about seven times more than an average round-trip flight from Singapore to London. The FAA says that for each passenger on a single trip using Virgin Galactic their total energy burn will be at least twice the energy an average American consumes in a year.</p>
<p>When or if Branson’s tacky low-orbital “space” flights backed by the United Arab Emirates and their “low carbon” petrodollars ever get their celebrity cargoes out of the Earth’s gravity field, a trip to Mars will be obligatory.&#160; Here, they will find an atmosphere that is about 96% carbon dioxide (or 960 000 parts per million), and they will be able to smugly gurgle, for the short time they can still breathe: “We told you so!”. Back on Earth however, a little modesty, or at least the prospect of lawsuits for open lying – which is cited by observers as one reason ‘Jim’ Lovelock and his namesake James Hansen have backed away from the Warming scam – call on them to give us a rest and to please pipe down.</p>
<p>Keeping The Baboons Warm</p>
<p>Keeping the warmist gravy train rolling – whatever happens in the real world – is rapidly reverting to whence it came.&#160; Big Government, the UN system, the nuclear power and alternate energy industry, and financial opportunists always looking for a new scam. To this motley crew, we have two major bit-part players – government-friendly media and Mr and Mrs Average Informed Citizen – so well-informed they are both easy prey for the lying propaganda from the Carbon Purists. But neither, in fact, can be counted on by the warmists, as they will soon find out.</p>
<p />
<p>Baboons in an English wildlfe park searching hot potatoes (Source/ Guardian)</p>
<p>Any kind of historical perspective on atmospheric science and the origins of the “CO2 hypothesis” was until recently deliberately kept out of the media. Any reference to “alternate theories” was trashed by the media as negative, anti-science, badly-intentioned and probably corrupt. Global Warming of the Al Gore variety was to&#160; the west what Lysenko was to the USSR of Stalin. Any mention of the relatively large, sometimes outright large changes of world average temperatures over the last 1500 years was derided by warmists&#160; – because there was warming in 1980-2000, by a few fractions of 1 degree celsius, we have a crisis. Only “carbon effluent” in the atmosphere could have caused this! What else?</p>
<p>The media, like public opinion is doing what it always does – it moves slowly but surely like a Titanic-crushing iceberg, breaking up as it goes. The media at this moment is packed with scientifically flaky, superficially plausible stories about how global warming causes record cold and massive snowstorms in New York, but also that until the magic date of 2065 global warming will be “net positive” for human beings, while Mr Obama has told us (although we don’t have to believe him) 97 percent of scientists still think crisis-style warming is a reality.</p>
<p>In a late 2013 report, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism said that most media coverage of climate change now emphasises uncertainty, and an increasing number (25%) focus on the “positive opportunities” global warming could or might bring.&#160; Global cooling, however, remains completely banned from mainstream media, except as&#160; freaky tidbit, despite it being at least as possible that we have cooling, as warming, in a time frame stretching to 2065.</p>
<p>Keeping The Baboons Stupid</p>
<p>Admitting that we don’t know what happens in the Earth’s atmosphere, therefore we can’t know how climate changes is affecting global temperature – is the ultimate blog-material. It is the no-no option and “just in case”, or “simply by precaution”, so we have to reject that possibility. Time is limited and Al Gore needs cash. Propaganda overkill arrived. Now Gore’s pews are empty, and we’re left with hit-and-run street preachers.</p>
<p>One key benefit of the comeuppance for global warming, losing its status of “unquestionable” except by misfits, psychotics and the badly-motivated, is that climate change will be able to emerge as the real subject of interest.</p>
<p>We are likely near the point, now, when the blindest and most faithful cult followers of global warming and the “CO2 hypothesis” will have to admit they’ve been sold a pup.&#160;The computer-modeled, science-correct, politically-correct theory of man-made CO2 causing global warming, or its second-best rebranded title of “climate change”, or its third-best of “extreme weather”, was a 10-year trip to oblivion along the well-trod path of Dumbing Down. Global Warming was Dumb with a capital D.</p>
<p>Gore-theory proved nothing at all. The sole benefit of the waltz down Propaganda Lane is that we know climate is changing but we don’t know why. Being able to admit that is difficult for high intellect baboons.</p>
<p>Baboons are in fact a lot more results-oriented, and have much less time to waste on trivial pursuits than human beings. For that reason they do not invent new enemies and they make do with ones they always have had and know well. Who are real. The Global Warming crisis movement – an example of mass hysteria – invented an all-new enemy for Mankind, called Mankind.</p>
<p>Also called misanthropy and being more than a little dated, the warmists pushed the misanthropy button so hard we were asked to think “we” are destroying our planet – unlike Al Gore with his personal Gulfstream 5 jet, his expanding waistline and penchant for fillet mignon and massage parlors with happy endings – and unlike Richard Branson and his Virgin jetliners, because average humans use far too much fossil energy, but Branson and his Hollywood playboy pal are apparently “saving the planet” for those of us who don’t own our own island in the Caribbean.</p>
<p>This mental constipation only has one logical readout – that human beings should operate a mass cull or ‘Die-Off’, to prevent us from killing the planet – which belongs to very nice persons like Gore and Branson.</p>
<p>Even low-IQ baboons would reject the embarked logic inside this mental masturbation. They would much prefer serious endeavors like looking for rapidly-cooling potatoes in the snow.</p>
<p>It’s officially an evolutionary crisis when the feral&#160;monkeys start looking smarter than our jet-setting monkeys in suits. Maybe it’s time to put the feral baboons in suits and ties, and let them realize their true Darwinian potential in Westminster, Brussels and Washington.</p>
<p>READ MORE CLIMATE CHANGE NEWS AT: <a href="" type="internal">21st Century Wire Climate Files</a></p> | true | 4 | andrew mckillop 21st century wire like living ancient pagan greece something yesterday british prime minister david cameron160 insisted storms floods causing havoc across country climate change yes old chestnut one things politicians try leverage public approval flying flimsy climate banner expect leeway given media supposedly job inform masses facts mythologies politically correct science lets trace tragic tale beginning seemingly decades ago 13 years uk independent newspaper started new century goal becoming world leader governmentapproved corporatefriendly global warming propaganda chief warmist green scribe charles onians fired first climate salvo march 20 2000 leading article sledges snowmen snowballs excitement waking find stuff settled outside rapidly diminishing part britains culture independent soon followed uk papers us papers european papers broadcast media permanent propaganda blitz take warming thing ultimate limits childlike hysteria stark distortion using uncertain science co2 hypothesis propaganda onslaught stamped warmist hallmark elite condescension smug conviction ordinary mortals much stupid understand scientifically proven crisis would become typical example warmist genre material charles onians 2000 cited david viner researcher laterinfamous climatic research unit cru university east anglia home hockey stick told unscientific masses soon winter snowfall become rare exciting event homeless sleeping gutter many would die night posing existential crisis english middle class morality 2006 uk independent regularly carrying junk science hysteria gaia author james lovelock key example claim billions persons die end century global warming since 2012 jim lovelock completely retracted denied warmist convictions tiptoed away train wreck elite propaganda always go al gore chief promoter global warming scam rajendra pachauri always went propaganda onslaught mixed mingled pure egoism frenetic drive make millions enrich fellow conspirators ultratenacious promotion of160 carbonlinked cashgrubbing scheme showing business press calls initiative drive promoted anything ranging investment trading scams government tax corporate subsidy scams lurid books films tv documentaries church climate change gore and160pachauri guide mass cult intellectual cliff al gore repeatedly said print arctic ice free 2013 gore made claim print 2006 2007 2008 2009 didnt happen fact arctic ice caps surface area increased 25 20122013 muchlarger antarctic ice cap also increased 5 using nasa data nasa fully warmist institution peddling co2 hypothesis forced admit antarctic ice sheet largest since started regular satellite monitoring 1979 media spending permanent propaganda campaign massive fantastic misappropriation public money concerns stateowned media obsessionally expensively filmed summertimeonly shots polar ice melting climate correct media stuffed throats decade however likely retreating belong trashcan history empty film theaters late night tv doc boredom almostasleep warmists set tirelessly milked global warming cash cow could yield game time great scientific scam may always scientifically cuckoo theory evicted possible theories climate changes latecomers still hopefuls plenty writers including explained plenty times co2 theory scientific folk history junkscience moment started 1795 joseph priestley lurid vision phlogiston terror worse alqaeda mustard gas trenches world war priestley thought phlogiston could cause mass dieoff english industrial workers exposed woodburning coalburning fumes160 nobody believe today primitive minded witless warmists soldier along spouting idiocies hope underinformed lazyminded continue buy junkscience goes according plan hollywood icon leonardo dicaprio blast space maiden voyage richard bransons virgin galactic spaceship year incredibly enough messrs branson dicaprio style environmentalist celebrities elite mission warning us coming ecological catastrophe fail address carbon crisis simply garnered large amount money years one way another commitment fighting climate change called praiseworthy braindead media committed celeb worship even backs away global warming scam richard branson despite attempts still far behind al gore warmist cashgrubbing active wherever might turn penny branson claims turned global warming jim lovelock person lovelock abandoned scam branson founder ceo carbon war room outfit advocating punitivehigh energy taxes therefore fawning support big energy big government big hope low carbon space travel become new profit center oneliner critics space travel carbon hysteria seem mix brand space travel low carbon cited wall street journal 7 january claimed reduced carbon emission cost somebody going space something like two weeks new yorks electricity supply less cost economy roundtrip singapore london know concerns loworbital shortperiod flight upper atmosphere nothing real space travel coming global warming ikon must accept always massive exaggeration distortion new normal hand need accept plain straight lying according us faafederal aviation administration also cited wall street journal environmental assessment launch reentry virgin galactics spacecraft says one launchland cycle emit 30 tons carbon dioxide five tons per passenger around five times carbon footprint roundtrip flight singapore london support infrastructure energy costs entire virgin galactic operation added including highatmosphere flights tracker support aircraft total carbon emissions rise seven times average roundtrip flight singapore london faa says passenger single trip using virgin galactic total energy burn least twice energy average american consumes year bransons tacky loworbital space flights backed united arab emirates low carbon petrodollars ever get celebrity cargoes earths gravity field trip mars obligatory160 find atmosphere 96 carbon dioxide 960 000 parts per million able smugly gurgle short time still breathe told back earth however little modesty least prospect lawsuits open lying cited observers one reason jim lovelock namesake james hansen backed away warming scam call give us rest please pipe keeping baboons warm keeping warmist gravy train rolling whatever happens real world rapidly reverting whence came160 big government un system nuclear power alternate energy industry financial opportunists always looking new scam motley crew two major bitpart players governmentfriendly media mr mrs average informed citizen wellinformed easy prey lying propaganda carbon purists neither fact counted warmists soon find baboons english wildlfe park searching hot potatoes source guardian kind historical perspective atmospheric science origins co2 hypothesis recently deliberately kept media reference alternate theories trashed media negative antiscience badlyintentioned probably corrupt global warming al gore variety to160 west lysenko ussr stalin mention relatively large sometimes outright large changes world average temperatures last 1500 years derided warmists160 warming 19802000 fractions 1 degree celsius crisis carbon effluent atmosphere could caused else media like public opinion always moves slowly surely like titaniccrushing iceberg breaking goes media moment packed scientifically flaky superficially plausible stories global warming causes record cold massive snowstorms new york also magic date 2065 global warming net positive human beings mr obama told us although dont believe 97 percent scientists still think crisisstyle warming reality late 2013 report reuters institute study journalism said media coverage climate change emphasises uncertainty increasing number 25 focus positive opportunities global warming could might bring160 global cooling however remains completely banned mainstream media except as160 freaky tidbit despite least possible cooling warming time frame stretching 2065 keeping baboons stupid admitting dont know happens earths atmosphere therefore cant know climate changes affecting global temperature ultimate blogmaterial nono option case simply precaution reject possibility time limited al gore needs cash propaganda overkill arrived gores pews empty left hitandrun street preachers one key benefit comeuppance global warming losing status unquestionable except misfits psychotics badlymotivated climate change able emerge real subject interest likely near point blindest faithful cult followers global warming co2 hypothesis admit theyve sold pup160the computermodeled sciencecorrect politicallycorrect theory manmade co2 causing global warming secondbest rebranded title climate change thirdbest extreme weather 10year trip oblivion along welltrod path dumbing global warming dumb capital goretheory proved nothing sole benefit waltz propaganda lane know climate changing dont know able admit difficult high intellect baboons baboons fact lot resultsoriented much less time waste trivial pursuits human beings reason invent new enemies make ones always know well real global warming crisis movement example mass hysteria invented allnew enemy mankind called mankind also called misanthropy little dated warmists pushed misanthropy button hard asked think destroying planet unlike al gore personal gulfstream 5 jet expanding waistline penchant fillet mignon massage parlors happy endings unlike richard branson virgin jetliners average humans use far much fossil energy branson hollywood playboy pal apparently saving planet us dont island caribbean mental constipation one logical readout human beings operate mass cull dieoff prevent us killing planet belongs nice persons like gore branson even lowiq baboons would reject embarked logic inside mental masturbation would much prefer serious endeavors like looking rapidlycooling potatoes snow officially evolutionary crisis feral160monkeys start looking smarter jetsetting monkeys suits maybe time put feral baboons suits ties let realize true darwinian potential westminster brussels washington read climate change news 21st century wire climate files | 1,341 |
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>Baghdad.</p>
<p>“Be careful,” warned a senior Iraqi government official living in the Green Zone in Baghdad,” be very careful and above all do not trust the police or the army.” He added that insecurity in the Iraqi capital is now as bad as it was before the US security plan came into operation in the city in February.</p>
<p>The so-called ‘surge’, the dispatch of 20,000 extra American troops to Iraq with the prime mission of getting control of Baghdad, is visibly failing.</p>
<p>There are army and police checkpoints everywhere but Iraqis are terrified approaching them because they do not know if the men in uniform they see are in reality death squad members. Omar, the 15-year-old brother-in-law of a friend, was driving with two other boys through al-Mansur in west Baghdad a fortnight ago. Their car was stopped at a police checkpoint. Most of the police in Baghdad are Shia. They took him away saying they suspected that his ID card was a fake. The real reason was probably that the name Omar is used only by Sunni. Three days later the boy was found dead.</p>
<p>I was driving through central Baghdad yesterday. Our car was pulled to one side at an army checkpoint. I was sitting in the back seat and had hung my jacket from a hook above the window so nobody could easily see I was a foreigner. A soldier leaned in the window and asked who I was.</p>
<p>We were lucky. He merely looked surprised when told I was a foreign journalist and said softly: “Keep well hidden.” The problem about the US security plan is that it does not provide security. It had some impact to begin with and the number of dead bodies found in the street went down. This was mainly because the largest Shia militia, the Mehdi Army, was stood down by its leader, Muqtada al-Sadr. But the Sunni insurgent groups escalated the number of sectarian suicide bombings against Shia markets. The US was unable to stop this.</p>
<p>Now the sectarian body count is on the rise again. Some 30 bodies, each shot in the head, were found on Wednesday alone. The main new American tactic is proving counter-productive. This is the sealing off entire neighbourhoods either by concrete walls or barriers of rubbish so there is only a single entrance and exit. Speaking of Sunni districts like al-Adhamiyah a government official said: “We are creating mini- Islamic republics.”</p>
<p>This is born out by anecdotal evidence. The uncle of a friend called Mohammed ­ it is in the nature of Baghdad that nobody wants their full name published ­ died of natural causes. The family, all Sunni, wanted to bury him but they were unable to reach the nearest cemetery in Abu Ghraib. Instead they went to one in Adhamiyah. As they entered the cemetery armed civilians, whom they took to be al Qaida from their way of speaking, asked directly: “Are any of you Shia?” Only when reassured that they were all Sunni were they allowed to bury their relative.</p>
<p>The failure of the ‘surge’ comes because it is not accompanied by any political reconciliation. On the contrary the government is wholly factionalised. For instance the two vice presidents, the Sunni Tariq al- Hashimi, and the Shia Adel Abdel Mehdi, may make conciliatory statements in public but one Iraqi observer notes that “Tariq only employs Sunni and Adel only Shia.”</p>
<p>The Sunni feel they are fighting for their lives. Their last redoubts in east Baghdad ­ aside from Adhamiyah ­ are being over-run by the Mehdi Army. The Sunni insurgent groups, notably al Qaeda, are on the offensive in west Baghdad where they are strongest. When the Americans succeed in driving away the militia of, say, the Shia in any district their place is taken, not by government forces, but by the Sunni militia. People in Baghdad are terrified of being killed by a car bomb or bundled into the boot of a car and murdered. Less dramatic, but equally significant in forcing people to flee Iraq for Jordan or Syria, is the sheer difficulty of maintaining a normal life. Much of the trade in the city used to take place in open air markets. But because of repeated bombs attacks only one is now open. This is in Karada but many people no longer go there because it has come under repeated attack.</p>
<p>So many areas are now sealed off in Baghdad that there are continuous traffic jams. This presents a problem for drivers. If they try to avoid the jam by driving off the main road they may enter an area where militiamen rule who may kill them. One friend who got back from Syria found that, because of an attack on a government patrol, his neighbourhood was closed off to traffic. “I had to walk for 40 minutes with my heavy suitcase,” he lamented.</p>
<p>Even in dangerous neighbourhoods like Beitawin off Saadoun Street in central Baghdad, notorious for its criminal gangs even in Saddam Hussein’s time, people were queuing for petrol for hours yesterday evening because they have no choice if they want to fill their tanks.</p>
<p>A bizarre flavour has been given to Saadoun Street because the government has encouraged artists to paint the giant concrete blast barriers with uplifting if unlikely scenes of mountain torrents, meadows in spring and lake side scenes. Many of the pictures, all in garish greens, blues and yellows, look more like Switzerland than Iraq. Muqtada al-Sadr, for his part, is encouraging artists to paint the blast barriers with scenes illustrating the anguish inflicted on the Iraqi people by the US occupation.</p>
<p>The only ‘gated community’ that functions successfully in Baghdad is the Green Zone itself, the four square miles on the right bank of the Tigris that is home to the Iraqi government and the US embassy. It is sealed off from the rest of Iraq by multiple security barriers and fortifications in depth.</p>
<p>Entering the zone recently I was questioned and searched, at different stages, by Kurds, Georgians, Peruvians and Nepalese. No country in the world has such rigorous frontier procedures as what one American called “this little chunk of Texas.” Living cut off in the zone it is impossible for the ruling elite of Iraq to understand the terrible suffering and terror beyond its gates.</p>
<p>PATRICK COCKBURN is the author of ‘ <a href="" type="internal">The Occupation: War, resistance and daily life in Iraq</a>‘, a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for best non-fiction book of 2006.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | true | 4 | 160 baghdad careful warned senior iraqi government official living green zone baghdad careful trust police army added insecurity iraqi capital bad us security plan came operation city february socalled surge dispatch 20000 extra american troops iraq prime mission getting control baghdad visibly failing army police checkpoints everywhere iraqis terrified approaching know men uniform see reality death squad members omar 15yearold brotherinlaw friend driving two boys almansur west baghdad fortnight ago car stopped police checkpoint police baghdad shia took away saying suspected id card fake real reason probably name omar used sunni three days later boy found dead driving central baghdad yesterday car pulled one side army checkpoint sitting back seat hung jacket hook window nobody could easily see foreigner soldier leaned window asked lucky merely looked surprised told foreign journalist said softly keep well hidden problem us security plan provide security impact begin number dead bodies found street went mainly largest shia militia mehdi army stood leader muqtada alsadr sunni insurgent groups escalated number sectarian suicide bombings shia markets us unable stop sectarian body count rise 30 bodies shot head found wednesday alone main new american tactic proving counterproductive sealing entire neighbourhoods either concrete walls barriers rubbish single entrance exit speaking sunni districts like aladhamiyah government official said creating mini islamic republics born anecdotal evidence uncle friend called mohammed nature baghdad nobody wants full name published died natural causes family sunni wanted bury unable reach nearest cemetery abu ghraib instead went one adhamiyah entered cemetery armed civilians took al qaida way speaking asked directly shia reassured sunni allowed bury relative failure surge comes accompanied political reconciliation contrary government wholly factionalised instance two vice presidents sunni tariq al hashimi shia adel abdel mehdi may make conciliatory statements public one iraqi observer notes tariq employs sunni adel shia sunni feel fighting lives last redoubts east baghdad aside adhamiyah overrun mehdi army sunni insurgent groups notably al qaeda offensive west baghdad strongest americans succeed driving away militia say shia district place taken government forces sunni militia people baghdad terrified killed car bomb bundled boot car murdered less dramatic equally significant forcing people flee iraq jordan syria sheer difficulty maintaining normal life much trade city used take place open air markets repeated bombs attacks one open karada many people longer go come repeated attack many areas sealed baghdad continuous traffic jams presents problem drivers try avoid jam driving main road may enter area militiamen rule may kill one friend got back syria found attack government patrol neighbourhood closed traffic walk 40 minutes heavy suitcase lamented even dangerous neighbourhoods like beitawin saadoun street central baghdad notorious criminal gangs even saddam husseins time people queuing petrol hours yesterday evening choice want fill tanks bizarre flavour given saadoun street government encouraged artists paint giant concrete blast barriers uplifting unlikely scenes mountain torrents meadows spring lake side scenes many pictures garish greens blues yellows look like switzerland iraq muqtada alsadr part encouraging artists paint blast barriers scenes illustrating anguish inflicted iraqi people us occupation gated community functions successfully baghdad green zone four square miles right bank tigris home iraqi government us embassy sealed rest iraq multiple security barriers fortifications depth entering zone recently questioned searched different stages kurds georgians peruvians nepalese country world rigorous frontier procedures one american called little chunk texas living cut zone impossible ruling elite iraq understand terrible suffering terror beyond gates patrick cockburn author occupation war resistance daily life iraq finalist national book critics circle award best nonfiction book 2006 160 160 | 578 |
<p>There is no sugar-coating the fact: the failure to recall Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin was a defeat for organized labor and the entire American working class, and for everyone with interests opposed to those of the plutocrats for whom Walker fronts. By some estimates, this would be 99% of us.</p>
<p>Still, judging by the reaction of the corporate media, the election was barely newsworthy – except, for a night or two, to the Republican flacks at Fox News and their Democratic counterparts at “left leaning” MSNBC.&#160; What they both cared about was the impact on Barack Obama’s reelection.</p>
<p>Predictably, at Fox, Walker’s victory spelled doom for Obama; at MSNBC, also predictably, it wasn’t that big a deal. &#160; Sure, Ed Schultz, self-declared friend of the working stiff, was mad as hell, but he’ll get over it; Rachel Maddow, growing more tiresome by the day, seemed over it before she even got into it.</p>
<p>To the extent that they offered any analysis at all it was about how zillionaires, the Koch Brothers especially, pumped in so much money for Walker that he outspent Tom Barrett, the Democratic candidate, seven to one.</p>
<p>This translates into seven times more mind-numbing commercials.&#160; No one bothered to fault a political culture where this has become what it’s all about.&#160; Nobody complained that these ad campaigns leave little or no time or space for rational deliberation, the hallmark supposedly of collective decision-making in democratic states.</p>
<p>What the “left leaning” talking heads complained about instead was how unfair the PR wars have become now that the Supreme Court has given corporate “persons” carte blanche to spend all they please.</p>
<p>There was hardly a word, therefore, about how Obama remained aloof from the events in Wisconsin throughout 2011, as people from all walks of life mounted the most sustained revolt in decades against capital’s escalating attack on the working class.&#160; And neither was there much discussion of how, in the days before the election, Obama couldn’t even be bothered with the recall election – except to send a bland tweet of support for Barrett the day before.</p>
<p>He was too busy palling around with corporate CEOs in adjacent states, and chatting up hedge fund managers and banksters in Chicago; too busy, in other words, showing his true colors.</p>
<p>And, of course, no one thought to mention how little the Barrett campaign had to do with the aspirations of the tens of thousands of people who occupied the state Capital in the winter and spring of 2011; or of how the class offensive Walker launched was only an extreme version of the neo-liberal assault on the gains of the middle decades of the twentieth century, a regressive project that Democrats and Republicans alike have been pursuing for more than thirty years.</p>
<p>Therefore no one pointed out how the most one could have hoped for from a Barrett victory was a kinder and gentler version of Walker’s overreaching.</p>
<p>None of this is surprising.&#160; Serious discussions of anything other than the horse race between Romney and Obama would be too much to expect from the pundits at MSNBC. &#160; They are basically cheerleaders for Obama.&#160; They work a different angle.</p>
<p>Because they have so little to cheer, they fear monger shamelessly — making much, perhaps too much, of Republican idiocy.&#160; It’s nice work if you can get it because Republicans are easy prey – their plutocrats are more than usually repellent, their elected officials are morons, and their useful idiots wear their ridiculousness on their sleeves.</p>
<p>Rubbing all this in is well and good.&#160; But it is also diversionary.&#160; It helps Obama and Company go ahead with their endless (and largely secret) wars.&#160; It draws attention away from their war-induced disregard of the rule of law.&#160; And it frees them up to toady to the capitalists whose hearts and minds they yearn, in vain, to win over.</p>
<p>While Obama and the others do all this and more, liberals don’t notice or else they notice but still cut them slack.&#160; And why shouldn’t they?&#160; By their lights, Obama and his minions are all that stand between those who still have the wits they were born with and the demented theocrats and market theologians on the other side.</p>
<p>No matter that if there was anything like equal justice under law in the Land of the Free, Obama would have been indicted or impeached long ago.&#160; Having American citizens put to death without even a semblance of due process is only the most egregious of the high crimes and misdemeanors with which he could be charged.&#160; Nixon did no worse; by comparison, Clinton was impeached for a trifle.</p>
<p>No matter too that many of the Nobel laureate’s machinations abroad are actionable under international law.&#160; Were the mighty held to the standards they impose on others, Obama, like Bush and Cheney before him, could count on spending the rest of his life in an orange jump suit.</p>
<p>But none of this matters to the “liberal” media — not when there are Republicans to mock and Democratic voters to frighten.</p>
<p>On most domestic issues, Kennedy and Johnson and even Nixon were better than Obama by orders of magnitude.&#160; But like Obama and Bush before him, they waged ruinous wars that outraged the moral sensibilities of people throughout the world.&#160; Then, like now, the situation they brought about seemed impossible to set right; not, anyway, through the usual political channels.</p>
<p>The apparent impossibility of changing the old order from within led some of the opponents of Kennedy’s, Johnson’s, and Nixon’s wars to call on intellectual traditions that transcend the horizons of normal politics by focusing on the contradictory character of prevailing institutions and norms.</p>
<p>The most venerable and soundest of these radical currents, and the most influential in that period, derived from the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831).&#160; The usual point of entry to this tradition for anti-war and anti-imperialist militants in the <a href="" type="internal" />United States in the sixties and seventies was through the writings of thinkers associated with the so-called Frankfurt School.</p>
<p>Herbert Marcuse was not the most eminent exponent of Frankfurt School thought but he was by far the most influential propagator of it in the United States.&#160; As such, he quickly rose from obscurity to fame, becoming a target of adoration in New Left circles and, needless to say, of media vilification.&#160; Today, he is an all but forgotten figure.</p>
<p>But his work remains a source of suggestive – and timely – insights that can be useful for thinking about overcoming hopelessness in the Age of Obama and in the aftermath of the Wisconsin defeat.</p>
<p>* * *</p>
<p>Four decades ago, Marcuse published a widely read essay with a seemingly self-contradictory title, “Repressive Tolerance.”</p>
<p>His aim in that essay was to account for the astonishing degree of political conformity he observed in the United States and other liberal democracies.&#160; What struck him was the fact that, despite a comparative absence of overt repression, “critical” thinking, counter-systemic thinking opposed to the established order, was, if anything, even less evident in liberal democracies than in societies where speech and other forms of expression were subject to government suppression and control.</p>
<p>For Hegelians like Marcuse, history is the story of the career and ultimate realization of Reason in society or, what comes to the same thing in the Hegelian view, of a certain idea of human freedom, according to which, at the end of history, universal principles of Right govern human interactions and institutional arrangements.&#160; The United States, for all its liberal virtues, was nothing like the ideal.&#160; Marcuse was struck by how politically inconsequential this fact was, and at how much support there was instead for the existing order.</p>
<p>From within a broadly Hegelian perspective, one possible explanation for political conformity could be a rational consensus supporting the status quo.&#160; It could be, in other words, that there is little critical thinking in societies like ours because the goal of criticism has already been realized.&#160; Marcuse, for obvious reasons, rejected this explanation.&#160; For him, as for all “left Hegelians” since the 1840s, liberal democracy was, at best, History’s penultimate stage; not its “end.”</p>
<p>How then can the inherently conservative, non-critical “one dimensionality” of our politics be explained? &#160; Marcuse’s ideas were sketchy and problematic, but they grew out of a striking insight that warrants careful consideration.</p>
<p>He thought that while liberalism had been and in many ways still is part of Reason’s forward advance, and while tolerance of speech and other forms of expression is a defining element of liberal doctrine, tolerance can and sometimes does work to maintain an oppressive status quo.&#160; Marcuse claimed that tolerance did for the regime in place in the United States and similar societies what repression did for societies on the other side of the “iron curtain.”</p>
<p>He was vague about how this comes about.&#160; Much like his contemporary, Marshall McLuhan, his reflections focused on the nature of modern mass media and, for reasons he never made clear, he ascribed great causal significance to the differences between, say, flat screens and printed words.&#160; His reflections were at most only suggestive.&#160; They were also vague enough to be ignored or dismissed once the political moment that had made them seem timely passed.</p>
<p>But however unsatisfactory or obscure his explanations were, he was clear as can be about the phenomenon itself:&#160; in (literally) repressive societies, subversive ideas are potent.&#160; On the other hand, where repressive tolerance reigns, anybody can say anything, but it doesn’t matter; critical thought is effectively neutered.</p>
<p>According to Marcuse, it is not the potency of critical ideas that necessitates their repression in authoritarian societies; quite the contrary, it is their repression that renders them potent.&#160; Similarly, it is not the impotence of critical thinking that makes pure tolerance possible in liberal regimes.&#160; Tolerance, Marcuse argued, is what renders criticism impotent.</p>
<p>To be clear: Marcuse was not an opponent of liberal values.&#160; For him as much as for any defender of pure tolerance, an ideal world would be a tolerant world.&#160; And he agreed with the founding figures of modern liberalism — John Stuart Mill, for example –when they maintained that in general tolerance is a means for advancing the ideal; that the end and the most effective means for achieving it are in many cases one and the same.&#160; His point was just that in societies like ours, for any of a variety of barely specified reasons, tolerance had “turned into its opposite”; that what had been and ideally is an instrument of human liberation had become a means for impeding humanity’s forward march.</p>
<p>Marcuse’s account of repressive tolerance was not just an idle philosophical reflection.&#160; It was a contribution to on-going philosophical debates about free speech, but it was also a political intervention at a time when students and others engaged in struggles for civil rights and against the Vietnam War would sometimes disrupt the speeches of racists and war defenders.</p>
<p>His views on disrupting speech were more subtle than those of many of the disruptors: he held that illiberal means are almost always counter-productive, even if there is no moral constraint in deploying them.&#160; Still, his brief against pure tolerance was taken as a theoretical justification for a political practice that had taken on illiberal colorations.&#160; This was yet another reason why Marcuse’s fame was brief.</p>
<p>But his position was not as out of line with mainstream thinking as might appear. &#160; For example, among those who think that violence has no place in an ideal world, there are some (the vast majority) who think that a judicious use of violence in the actual world can be, and often is, useful for advancing the ideal.&#160; Only pacifists, for whom violence is everywhere and always morally proscribed, think otherwise.</p>
<p>Liberals who uphold tolerance in any and all circumstances are like pacifists.&#160; Marcuse’s position is analogous to the non-pacifist’s. &#160; He thought that, in certain circumstances, a judicious use of intolerance can be beneficial for bringing a more tolerant society into being, just as others think that a judicious use of violence can help bring about a more peaceful world.&#160; Presumably, the bar with respect to both transgressions of the ideal is best set high.</p>
<p>Whatever we ultimately make of Marcuse’s position on free speech, his main point, properly generalized, is unassailable: that in the actual world, where the misfortunes consequent upon the indefinite prolongation of capitalist civilization are manifest, it can be and often is counter-productive to act as one should in a world closer to the Hegelian ideal.</p>
<p>In that spirit, it bears reflection whether, in our circumstances, democracy, or at least the electoral system that captures a large part of what we nowadays mean by that word, can work to the detriment of democratic ideals, whether it too can function repressively (or, more precisely anti-democratically).</p>
<p>This is a possibility that the Wisconsin insurgents would have done well to worry about more, and that people involved with the Occupy movements should think carefully about as well, especially now that Team Obama is eager to coopt their energy while quashing the ideas and not-yet-fully-articulated intuitions that spurred them into action.</p>
<p>* * *</p>
<p>The analogy with repressive tolerance is imperfect, of course. Marcuse’s target was pure tolerance, tolerance of speech and expression regardless of content.&#160; His point was that acting as if we are already living in a world in which pure tolerance can work the beneficial effects its defenders imputed to it can impede efforts to bring that condition about; that there are times and places – our own, for example – where tolerance that takes no account of content actually works to the detriment of the ideal.</p>
<p>But our democracy is anything but ‘pure.’&#160; It is an amalgam of institutional arrangements and practices concocted long ago by lawyers, merchants and slave owners who sought democratic legitimacy at the same time that they were intent on shielding themselves from the consequences of government of, by, and for the people.&#160; Thus we don’t even pretend to implement anything like the principle of one person, one vote.</p>
<p>In addition, our democracy has lately been sullied further by Republican Supreme Court Justices intent on making plutocratic domination – they call it “free speech” — the law of the land.&#160; And lately, again thanks to the GOP, efforts at voter suppression are rife.</p>
<p>Therefore even if we identify democracy with competitive elections that, like ours, are more or less “free and fair,” our democracy is not nearly as ‘pure’ as our tolerance is. Nevertheless, Marcuse’s reflections on how tolerance turned into its opposite are applicable to what passes for democracy in our time and place.</p>
<p>Implicitly, the people fighting Walker’s depredations in Wisconsin realized this before the force of circumstances caused their efforts to take an electoral turn.&#160; The masses of people involved in the Occupy movement realized it too with even greater clarity.&#160; They grasped what had not yet become clear to many of them a year or two earlier or indeed to the millions who voted for Obama in 2008: that if the idea is to make the world a better place, forget about an electoral regime dominated by Democrats and Republicans.</p>
<p>If only it could have stayed that way!</p>
<p>When the electoral season was still far off, it was still possible to ignore Obama and the national Democratic Party, to pay back Obama’s indifference in kind. [In Wisconsin, the state Democratic Party was a different story; at key moments – for instance, when the entire Democratic caucus in the Senate fled the state – Democrats actually played a constructive role.]</p>
<p>But it soon became apparent that democracy in the streets would have to assume a more political focus.&#160; It was not possible to ignore Obama and the Democrats indefinitely, especially in an election year.</p>
<p>After what happened in Wisconsin, it has become as plain as can be that, in a repressive democracy, it is essential to name the enemy.&#160; The enemy includes benighted theocrats and free marketeers and, of course, the plutocrats who bankroll GOP candidates.&#160; But the list includes Obama too, and the Democratic Party, and their paymasters.</p>
<p>That’s not exactly news, but it is a point that that not everyone in the MSNBC demographic and in the ranks of organized labor realizes yet.&#160; Or, if they do, they don’t dare draw the obvious conclusion.</p>
<p>It’s that lesser evil thing again.&#160; And who can deny the reality of the menace?&#160; Romney and the Republicans truly are pieces of work.</p>
<p>Even so, it’s not clear what follows.&#160; Lesser evil voting almost always has race to the bottom consequences that must not be overlooked and that can be devastating over time.&#160; And it is demonstrably the case that when a Republican is in the White House, Democrats in Congress become better (less bad).</p>
<p>Compare the period from 2006 to 2008, when the executive branch was still in Republican hands and Democrats controlled Congress, with the period between 2008 and 2010, when Democrats controlled both branches of government.&#160; A case could be made that we were better off in the earlier period, even despite Nancy Pelosi’s, Harry Reid’s and other leading Democrats best efforts to keep the party on its rightward, Clintonite, course.</p>
<p>On the other hand, it is almost certainly the case that we can’t get from here back to there because a Romney victory in November would all but assure another Democratic “shellacking” in the House and Senate.&#160; And there is the additional consideration that a Republican administration would make worse judicial appointments than Obama would, and that we’d be living with the consequences for decades to come.</p>
<p>In short, the coming election raises problems for which there is no obvious solution.&#160; The only sure thing is that the outcome, whatever it is, will be awful – for everyone for whom the failure to recall Walker is awful, but on a grander scale.</p>
<p>A first step in gaining a sound purchase on just how bad the situation is, and therefore for figuring out what to do about it eventually – there may be nothing that can be done in the short run — is to realize, in the spirit of Marcuse’s account of repressive tolerance, that our democracy is indeed a repressive democracy, and that the electoral system itself — not in general but in our time and place – has become a means for keeping an oppressive status quo in place.</p>
<p>* * *</p>
<p>The problem would be mitigated, of course, if elements of the old liberal-labor coalition would break free from the Democratic Party by voting for candidates who run on platforms that plutocrats don’t own. &#160; In the presidential contest this time around that would mean voting for Jill Stein of the Green Party.</p>
<p>However it is a deeply entrenched dogma of our political culture that third party votes are wasted.&#160; This self-fulfilling prophecy is all but impossible to dislodge, and so its consequences cannot be evaded.&#160; If even a deeply respected national figure like Ralph Nader could only garner 2.74 per cent of the vote in 2000, running against Al Gore and George W. Bush, what chance is there for someone who is unknown and massively underfunded to break out of the iron cage?</p>
<p>The short answer is: none at all.&#160; But that doesn’t mean that her candidacy can’t be useful for telling people, those who are able to listen, what they need to hear.&#160; And it doesn’t mean that it there is no point in casting a protest vote when the alternative is piling on votes for the lesser evil, especially when it isn’t clear who the lesser evil is.</p>
<p>In our very impure repressive democracy, the only way to cast a protest vote against Obama is to vote for somebody else.&#160; Since voting for Romney is unthinkable for any ninety-nine percenter with minimally developed moral and intellectual capacities, voting for the Greens may be all that’s left.</p>
<p>To be sure, voting for someone, no matter how estimable, who has no chance of garnering a single electoral vote is making the best of a very bad situation.&#160; But at least it is not, as the conventional wisdom would have it, wasting a vote – at least not in states where, thanks to our impure democratic institutions, the electoral votes are already effectively cast.</p>
<p>In those cases, the best, perhaps the only, way to waste a vote is to cast it for the purported lesser evil, the drone-besotted corporate flunky who has made it all but impossible even to speak without derision of “hope” or “change.”</p>
<p>ANDREW LEVINE&#160;is a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY (Routledge) and&#160; <a href="" type="internal">POLITICAL KEY WORDS</a>&#160;(Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most recent book is <a href="" type="internal">&#160;In Bad Faith: What’s Wrong With the Opium of the People</a>. He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor (philosophy) at the University of Maryland-College Park. &#160;He is a contributor to&#160; <a href="" type="internal">Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion</a>&#160;(AK Press).</p>
<p /> | true | 4 | sugarcoating fact failure recall governor scott walker wisconsin defeat organized labor entire american working class everyone interests opposed plutocrats walker fronts estimates would 99 us still judging reaction corporate media election barely newsworthy except night two republican flacks fox news democratic counterparts left leaning msnbc160 cared impact barack obamas reelection predictably fox walkers victory spelled doom obama msnbc also predictably wasnt big deal 160 sure ed schultz selfdeclared friend working stiff mad hell hell get rachel maddow growing tiresome day seemed even got extent offered analysis zillionaires koch brothers especially pumped much money walker outspent tom barrett democratic candidate seven one translates seven times mindnumbing commercials160 one bothered fault political culture become about160 nobody complained ad campaigns leave little time space rational deliberation hallmark supposedly collective decisionmaking democratic states left leaning talking heads complained instead unfair pr wars become supreme court given corporate persons carte blanche spend please hardly word therefore obama remained aloof events wisconsin throughout 2011 people walks life mounted sustained revolt decades capitals escalating attack working class160 neither much discussion days election obama couldnt even bothered recall election except send bland tweet support barrett day busy palling around corporate ceos adjacent states chatting hedge fund managers banksters chicago busy words showing true colors course one thought mention little barrett campaign aspirations tens thousands people occupied state capital winter spring 2011 class offensive walker launched extreme version neoliberal assault gains middle decades twentieth century regressive project democrats republicans alike pursuing thirty years therefore one pointed one could hoped barrett victory kinder gentler version walkers overreaching none surprising160 serious discussions anything horse race romney obama would much expect pundits msnbc 160 basically cheerleaders obama160 work different angle little cheer fear monger shamelessly making much perhaps much republican idiocy160 nice work get republicans easy prey plutocrats usually repellent elected officials morons useful idiots wear ridiculousness sleeves rubbing well good160 also diversionary160 helps obama company go ahead endless largely secret wars160 draws attention away warinduced disregard rule law160 frees toady capitalists whose hearts minds yearn vain win obama others liberals dont notice else notice still cut slack160 shouldnt they160 lights obama minions stand still wits born demented theocrats market theologians side matter anything like equal justice law land free obama would indicted impeached long ago160 american citizens put death without even semblance due process egregious high crimes misdemeanors could charged160 nixon worse comparison clinton impeached trifle matter many nobel laureates machinations abroad actionable international law160 mighty held standards impose others obama like bush cheney could count spending rest life orange jump suit none matters liberal media republicans mock democratic voters frighten domestic issues kennedy johnson even nixon better obama orders magnitude160 like obama bush waged ruinous wars outraged moral sensibilities people throughout world160 like situation brought seemed impossible set right anyway usual political channels apparent impossibility changing old order within led opponents kennedys johnsons nixons wars call intellectual traditions transcend horizons normal politics focusing contradictory character prevailing institutions norms venerable soundest radical currents influential period derived philosophy gwf hegel 17701831160 usual point entry tradition antiwar antiimperialist militants united states sixties seventies writings thinkers associated socalled frankfurt school herbert marcuse eminent exponent frankfurt school thought far influential propagator united states160 quickly rose obscurity fame becoming target adoration new left circles needless say media vilification160 today forgotten figure work remains source suggestive timely insights useful thinking overcoming hopelessness age obama aftermath wisconsin defeat four decades ago marcuse published widely read essay seemingly selfcontradictory title repressive tolerance aim essay account astonishing degree political conformity observed united states liberal democracies160 struck fact despite comparative absence overt repression critical thinking countersystemic thinking opposed established order anything even less evident liberal democracies societies speech forms expression subject government suppression control hegelians like marcuse history story career ultimate realization reason society comes thing hegelian view certain idea human freedom according end history universal principles right govern human interactions institutional arrangements160 united states liberal virtues nothing like ideal160 marcuse struck politically inconsequential fact much support instead existing order within broadly hegelian perspective one possible explanation political conformity could rational consensus supporting status quo160 could words little critical thinking societies like goal criticism already realized160 marcuse obvious reasons rejected explanation160 left hegelians since 1840s liberal democracy best historys penultimate stage end inherently conservative noncritical one dimensionality politics explained 160 marcuses ideas sketchy problematic grew striking insight warrants careful consideration thought liberalism many ways still part reasons forward advance tolerance speech forms expression defining element liberal doctrine tolerance sometimes work maintain oppressive status quo160 marcuse claimed tolerance regime place united states similar societies repression societies side iron curtain vague comes about160 much like contemporary marshall mcluhan reflections focused nature modern mass media reasons never made clear ascribed great causal significance differences say flat screens printed words160 reflections suggestive160 also vague enough ignored dismissed political moment made seem timely passed however unsatisfactory obscure explanations clear phenomenon itself160 literally repressive societies subversive ideas potent160 hand repressive tolerance reigns anybody say anything doesnt matter critical thought effectively neutered according marcuse potency critical ideas necessitates repression authoritarian societies quite contrary repression renders potent160 similarly impotence critical thinking makes pure tolerance possible liberal regimes160 tolerance marcuse argued renders criticism impotent clear marcuse opponent liberal values160 much defender pure tolerance ideal world would tolerant world160 agreed founding figures modern liberalism john stuart mill example maintained general tolerance means advancing ideal end effective means achieving many cases one same160 point societies like variety barely specified reasons tolerance turned opposite ideally instrument human liberation become means impeding humanitys forward march marcuses account repressive tolerance idle philosophical reflection160 contribution ongoing philosophical debates free speech also political intervention time students others engaged struggles civil rights vietnam war would sometimes disrupt speeches racists war defenders views disrupting speech subtle many disruptors held illiberal means almost always counterproductive even moral constraint deploying them160 still brief pure tolerance taken theoretical justification political practice taken illiberal colorations160 yet another reason marcuses fame brief position line mainstream thinking might appear 160 example among think violence place ideal world vast majority think judicious use violence actual world often useful advancing ideal160 pacifists violence everywhere always morally proscribed think otherwise liberals uphold tolerance circumstances like pacifists160 marcuses position analogous nonpacifists 160 thought certain circumstances judicious use intolerance beneficial bringing tolerant society others think judicious use violence help bring peaceful world160 presumably bar respect transgressions ideal best set high whatever ultimately make marcuses position free speech main point properly generalized unassailable actual world misfortunes consequent upon indefinite prolongation capitalist civilization manifest often counterproductive act one world closer hegelian ideal spirit bears reflection whether circumstances democracy least electoral system captures large part nowadays mean word work detriment democratic ideals whether function repressively precisely antidemocratically possibility wisconsin insurgents would done well worry people involved occupy movements think carefully well especially team obama eager coopt energy quashing ideas notyetfullyarticulated intuitions spurred action analogy repressive tolerance imperfect course marcuses target pure tolerance tolerance speech expression regardless content160 point acting already living world pure tolerance work beneficial effects defenders imputed impede efforts bring condition times places example tolerance takes account content actually works detriment ideal democracy anything pure160 amalgam institutional arrangements practices concocted long ago lawyers merchants slave owners sought democratic legitimacy time intent shielding consequences government people160 thus dont even pretend implement anything like principle one person one vote addition democracy lately sullied republican supreme court justices intent making plutocratic domination call free speech law land160 lately thanks gop efforts voter suppression rife therefore even identify democracy competitive elections like less free fair democracy nearly pure tolerance nevertheless marcuses reflections tolerance turned opposite applicable passes democracy time place implicitly people fighting walkers depredations wisconsin realized force circumstances caused efforts take electoral turn160 masses people involved occupy movement realized even greater clarity160 grasped yet become clear many year two earlier indeed millions voted obama 2008 idea make world better place forget electoral regime dominated democrats republicans could stayed way electoral season still far still possible ignore obama national democratic party pay back obamas indifference kind wisconsin state democratic party different story key moments instance entire democratic caucus senate fled state democrats actually played constructive role soon became apparent democracy streets would assume political focus160 possible ignore obama democrats indefinitely especially election year happened wisconsin become plain repressive democracy essential name enemy160 enemy includes benighted theocrats free marketeers course plutocrats bankroll gop candidates160 list includes obama democratic party paymasters thats exactly news point everyone msnbc demographic ranks organized labor realizes yet160 dont dare draw obvious conclusion lesser evil thing again160 deny reality menace160 romney republicans truly pieces work even clear follows160 lesser evil voting almost always race bottom consequences must overlooked devastating time160 demonstrably case republican white house democrats congress become better less bad compare period 2006 2008 executive branch still republican hands democrats controlled congress period 2008 2010 democrats controlled branches government160 case could made better earlier period even despite nancy pelosis harry reids leading democrats best efforts keep party rightward clintonite course hand almost certainly case cant get back romney victory november would assure another democratic shellacking house senate160 additional consideration republican administration would make worse judicial appointments obama would wed living consequences decades come short coming election raises problems obvious solution160 sure thing outcome whatever awful everyone failure recall walker awful grander scale first step gaining sound purchase bad situation therefore figuring eventually may nothing done short run realize spirit marcuses account repressive tolerance democracy indeed repressive democracy electoral system general time place become means keeping oppressive status quo place problem would mitigated course elements old liberallabor coalition would break free democratic party voting candidates run platforms plutocrats dont 160 presidential contest time around would mean voting jill stein green party however deeply entrenched dogma political culture third party votes wasted160 selffulfilling prophecy impossible dislodge consequences evaded160 even deeply respected national figure like ralph nader could garner 274 per cent vote 2000 running al gore george w bush chance someone unknown massively underfunded break iron cage short answer none all160 doesnt mean candidacy cant useful telling people able listen need hear160 doesnt mean point casting protest vote alternative piling votes lesser evil especially isnt clear lesser evil impure repressive democracy way cast protest vote obama vote somebody else160 since voting romney unthinkable ninetynine percenter minimally developed moral intellectual capacities voting greens may thats left sure voting someone matter estimable chance garnering single electoral vote making best bad situation160 least conventional wisdom would wasting vote least states thanks impure democratic institutions electoral votes already effectively cast cases best perhaps way waste vote cast purported lesser evil dronebesotted corporate flunky made impossible even speak without derision hope change andrew levine160is senior scholar institute policy studies author recently american ideology routledge and160 political key words160blackwell well many books articles political philosophy recent book 160in bad faith whats wrong opium people professor philosophy university wisconsinmadison research professor philosophy university marylandcollege park 160he contributor to160 hopeless barack obama politics illusion160ak press | 1,804 |
<p>Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald met with the grand jury investigating the leak of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson for several hours Friday. Short of a last minute intervention by Rove’s attorney, Fitzgerald is expected to ask a grand jury-possibly as soon as next week–the to indict Rove for making false statements to the FBI and Justice Department investigators in October 2003, lawyers close to the case say.</p>
<p>Moreover, Fitzgerald is said to believe that there is a possibility Rove either hid or destroyed evidence related to his role in the leak, lawyers close to the case said.</p>
<p>A few weeks after he took over the investigation into the leak of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson in early 2004, Fitzgerald had already become suspicious that Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney’s then-chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby were hindering his investigation.</p>
<p>In late January 2004, Fitzgerald sent a letter to his boss, then acting Attorney General James Comey, seeking confirmation that he had the authority to investigate and prosecute individuals for additional crimes, including obstruction of justice, perjury, and destroying evidence. The leak investigation had been centered up to that point on an obscure law making it a felony for any government official to knowingly disclose the identity of an undercover CIA officer.</p>
<p>Comey responded to Fitzgerald <a href="" type="internal">in writing</a> Feb. 6, 2004, confirming that Fitzgerald had the authority to prosecute those crimes, including “perjury, obstruction of justice, destruction of evidence, and intimidation of witnesses.”</p>
<p>Fitzgerald was concerned that Rove had hidden or destroyed a very important document tying him to the leak. His suspicions may have been right: an email he sent to then Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley in early July 2003 later proved Rove had spoken to Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper about Plame-a fact that Rove omitted when he was first interviewed by the FBI.</p>
<p>The same day Fitzgerald received the response letter from Comey the White House faced a deadline of turning over administration contacts with 25 journalists to the grand jury investigating the leak. One of the journalists cited in the subpoena sent to the White House Jan. 22, 2004 was Cooper. Three months earlier, in late 2003, then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales <a href="" type="internal">enjoined all White House staff</a>to turn over any communication about Valerie Plame Wilson and her husband. Gonzales’ request came 12 hours after senior White House officials had been told of the pending investigation. The email Rove sent to Hadley which specifically cited “Matt Cooper from Time” never turned up in that request either, people close to the investigation said.</p>
<p>Other journalists cited in the Jan. 22, 2004 <a href="" type="internal">subpoena</a>, one of three sent to the White House that day are:</p>
<p>Robert Novak, “Crossfire,” “Capital Gang” and the Chicago Sun-Times; Knut Royce and Timothy M. Phelps, Newsday; Walter Pincus, Richard Leiby, Mike Allen, Dana Priest and Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post; Matthew Cooper, John Dickerson, Massimo Calabresi, Michael Duffy and James Carney, Time magazine; Evan Thomas, Newsweek; Andrea Mitchell, “Meet the Press,” NBC; Chris Matthews, “Hardball,” MSNBC; Tim Russert, Campbell Brown, NBC; Nicholas D. Kristof, David E. Sanger and Judith Miller, The New York Times; Greg Hitt and Paul Gigot, The Wall Street Journal; John Solomon, The Associated Press; and Jeff Gannon, Talon News.</p>
<p>Whether or not Fitzgerald knew in late January or early February 2004 about the existence of the email Rove sent to Hadley remains unknown. The email did not show up during a search ordered by then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales in 2003. Gonzales enjoined all White House staff to turn over any communication about Valerie Plame Wilson and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a vocal critic of the Iraq war who accused the Bush administration of twisting prewar Iraq intelligence. Gonzales’ request came 12 hours after senior White House officials had been told of the pending investigation.</p>
<p>Neither Hadley nor Rove’s attorney, Robert Luskin, responded to repeated requests for comment.</p>
<p>Over the past few weeks, the time frame when Fitzgerald became increasingly suspicious-specifically February 2004-has become crucial for Rove. He testified before Fitzgerald’s grand jury that month without revealing he had been a source for Cooper and Novak, saying only that he had shared information about Plame Wilson with other journalists-including Chris Matthews, the host of MSNBC’s Hardball-after her name had appeared in Novak’s column.</p>
<p>In a bid to keep Rove out of Fitzgerald’s crosshairs, Robert Luskin, Rove’s attorney, recently told Fitzgerald that he had a conversation with Time Magazine reporter Viveca Novak in February 2004 where she inadvertently revealed that Rove had been a source for her colleague Matt Cooper. Luskin said this prompted an exhaustive search for the Hadley email which was promptly turned over to Fitzgerald and led Rove to change his testimony.</p>
<p>Luskin testified Dec. 2 that the Novak meeting took place in late January or early February 2004, the very month in which Fitzgerald had sought the authority to prosecute officials if they were found to have hindered his investigation into the leak.</p>
<p>Novak, however, testified that she met Luskin in either March or May 2004, those close to the case said. This discrepancy is at the crux of what Fitzgerald is investigating. Rove didn’t reveal to the grand jury that he had spoken with Cooper until <a href="" type="internal">Oct. 15, 2004</a>.</p>
<p>According to those familiar with the case, in February 2004, Fitzgerald had already obtained the cooperation of a key witness, former Deputy National Security Adviser for Vice President Dick Cheney, John Hannah. Hannah agreed to cooperate with Fitzgerald when the special prosecutor uncovered evidence tying Hannah to the leak and threatened to indict him, the sources said.</p>
<p>Hannah gave Fitzgerald the names of some White House officials who knew about Plame Wilson and disseminated her CIA status to reporters and other White House officials, the laywers said. One of the officials Hannah appears to have implicated was Rove, they added. Cheney <a href="" type="internal">promoted Hannah</a> to be his assistant national security adviser following Libby’s indictment.</p>
<p>Rove failed to tell investigators at the time that he had spoken about Plame to Time Magazine reporter Matthew Cooper and conservative columnist Robert Novak, both of whom later cooperated in the case. Novak outed Plame in a July 14, 2003 column.</p>
<p>The Chicago prosecutor briefed the second grand jury investigating the outing last week for more than three hours. During that time, he brought them up to speed on the latest developments involving Rove and at least one other White House official, the sources said. The attorneys refused to identify the second person.</p>
<p>As of Friday, neither Rove nor Luskin have explained Rove’s misstatements to Fitzgerald’s satisfaction, those familiar with the case said. Eleventh-hour testimony from Time Magazine reporter Viveca Novak-who Luskin pointed to as a crucial witness in keeping his client out of court-does not appear to have been helpful in dodging an indictment, they added.</p>
<p>A woman who answered the phone at Patton Boggs, the law firm where Luskin is a partner, said Luskin would not answer specific questions about the probe.</p>
<p>Rove’s alleged failure to disclose his conversations with Cooper and Novak and the fact that he didn’t turn over the Hadley email on two separate occasions is the reason he’s been in Fitzgerald’s crosshairs and may end up being indicted, people close to the investigation said.</p>
<p>It’s also the reason Fitzgerald had grown suspicious at the time that Rove may have hid or destroyed evidence related to his role in the leak, they said, adding that Fitzgerald may have already been aware of the existence of the email, perhaps even obtaining a copy from a witness or another White House official, and waited to see if Rove would cite it or his conversations with Cooper in his grand jury testimony.</p>
<p>It may also explain why Rove’s attorney, Robert Luskin, has reportedly testified that he had a conversation with one of Cooper’s Time magazine colleagues, Viveca Novak, in February 2004. Luskin maintains that he and Novak met in February of 2004 over drinks in Washington, D.C. and Novak tipped him off that she heard Rove was Cooper’s source. “What Luskin is doing is trying to say that he found the email after his conversation with Ms. Novak but before the White House turned over evidence of administration contacts with journalists,” one attorney close to the case said. “He understands that it would be quite difficult to explain to the prosecutor how this email miraculously turned up in either March or May but not in January or February. That’s why it appears he is stating that he spoke with Ms. Novak in February.”</p>
<p>Luskin has said that Rove did not intentionally withhold information from Fitzgerald or the grand jury about his conversation with Cooper. Rather, he says Rove had simply forgotten about it, and Luskin’s meeting with Novak had jogged his memory.</p>
<p>Before Novak testified in a sworn deposition last week, Rove faced the prospect of being indicted on numerous counts, including obstruction of justice, perjury and making false statements for failing to disclose conversations he had with reporters about Plame Wilson, sources close to the case said. Several reporters close to Novak said they believe Luskin’s decision to draw her into the case was made to keep Rove’s indictment from being handed up on the day Libby was charged.</p>
<p>Rove could be indicted on those counts if Fitzgerald determines that Novak’s testimony did not go far enough in clearing up questions about why Rove did not tell investigators about his conversations with other reporters. Her testimony may, however, shield Rove from more serious charges, attorneys close to the case said.</p>
<p>Novak (who is not related to the conservative columnist Robert Novak, the journalist who first published Plame Wilson’s name and CIA status,) is the latest in a lengthy list of longtime Washington, D.C. reporters who have become embroiled in the leak investigation, and the third to have withheld crucial information from editors about her involvement while still reporting on the story.</p>
<p>In a first-person account Novak posted on Time magazine’s website Sunday about her role in the case, she said she had met with Luskin, Rove’s attorney, for drinks in October 2003. Luskin asked Novak what she was working on for Time and Novak said the Plame Wilson leak.</p>
<p>“Well you’re sitting next to Karl Rove’s attorney,” Luskin said to her, according to Novak’s account.</p>
<p>The two began spending more time together and during the course of several meetings during the first half of 2004, either in March or May, Novak wrote, Luskin had told her that Rove had not been a source for Matt Cooper, Novak’s Time colleague, who had been the second reporter to write about Plame Wilson on July 17, 2003.</p>
<p>Novak said she inadvertently tipped Luskin off to the fact that Cooper’s source was Rove. She said she sensed she was being spun by Luskin and her knee-jerk response led to her divulging information that could be used to help Rove escape serious charges.</p>
<p>Following his meeting with Novak, Luskin told Rove that Novak said he was Cooper’s source. Luskin and Rove then did an exhaustive search through White House phone logs and emails to find any evidence that Rove spoke with Cooper. That’s when the email Rove sent to Hadley was discovered, Luskin said, which he promptly turned over to Fitzgerald. However, Luskin won’t say when he turned it over, or why the email wasn’t found when the White House was subpoenaed on Jan. 22, 2004 or when White House counsel Alberto Gonzales ordered all White House staff in October 2003 to turn over emails and other documentary evidence that showed officials spoke with journalists.</p>
<p>Moreover, it’s not known why Rove did not change his grand jury testimony to reflect that he had been Cooper’s source until October 2004, some six or eight months after Novak’s meeting with Luskin.</p>
<p>This article originally appeared on Truthout.</p>
<p>JASON LEOPOLD is the former Los Angeles bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires where he spent two years covering the energy crisis and the Enron bankruptcy. He just finished writing a book about the crisis, due out in December through Rowman &amp; Littlefield. He can be reached at: <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a></p>
<p>&#160;</p> | true | 4 | special prosecutor patrick fitzgerald met grand jury investigating leak covert cia agent valerie plame wilson several hours friday short last minute intervention roves attorney fitzgerald expected ask grand jurypossibly soon next weekthe indict rove making false statements fbi justice department investigators october 2003 lawyers close case say moreover fitzgerald said believe possibility rove either hid destroyed evidence related role leak lawyers close case said weeks took investigation leak covert cia agent valerie plame wilson early 2004 fitzgerald already become suspicious karl rove vice president cheneys thenchief staff lewis scooter libby hindering investigation late january 2004 fitzgerald sent letter boss acting attorney general james comey seeking confirmation authority investigate prosecute individuals additional crimes including obstruction justice perjury destroying evidence leak investigation centered point obscure law making felony government official knowingly disclose identity undercover cia officer comey responded fitzgerald writing feb 6 2004 confirming fitzgerald authority prosecute crimes including perjury obstruction justice destruction evidence intimidation witnesses fitzgerald concerned rove hidden destroyed important document tying leak suspicions may right email sent deputy national security adviser stephen hadley early july 2003 later proved rove spoken time magazine reporter matthew cooper plamea fact rove omitted first interviewed fbi day fitzgerald received response letter comey white house faced deadline turning administration contacts 25 journalists grand jury investigating leak one journalists cited subpoena sent white house jan 22 2004 cooper three months earlier late 2003 thenwhite house counsel alberto gonzales enjoined white house staffto turn communication valerie plame wilson husband gonzales request came 12 hours senior white house officials told pending investigation email rove sent hadley specifically cited matt cooper time never turned request either people close investigation said journalists cited jan 22 2004 subpoena one three sent white house day robert novak crossfire capital gang chicago suntimes knut royce timothy phelps newsday walter pincus richard leiby mike allen dana priest glenn kessler washington post matthew cooper john dickerson massimo calabresi michael duffy james carney time magazine evan thomas newsweek andrea mitchell meet press nbc chris matthews hardball msnbc tim russert campbell brown nbc nicholas kristof david e sanger judith miller new york times greg hitt paul gigot wall street journal john solomon associated press jeff gannon talon news whether fitzgerald knew late january early february 2004 existence email rove sent hadley remains unknown email show search ordered thenwhite house counsel alberto gonzales 2003 gonzales enjoined white house staff turn communication valerie plame wilson husband former ambassador joseph wilson vocal critic iraq war accused bush administration twisting prewar iraq intelligence gonzales request came 12 hours senior white house officials told pending investigation neither hadley roves attorney robert luskin responded repeated requests comment past weeks time frame fitzgerald became increasingly suspiciousspecifically february 2004has become crucial rove testified fitzgeralds grand jury month without revealing source cooper novak saying shared information plame wilson journalistsincluding chris matthews host msnbcs hardballafter name appeared novaks column bid keep rove fitzgeralds crosshairs robert luskin roves attorney recently told fitzgerald conversation time magazine reporter viveca novak february 2004 inadvertently revealed rove source colleague matt cooper luskin said prompted exhaustive search hadley email promptly turned fitzgerald led rove change testimony luskin testified dec 2 novak meeting took place late january early february 2004 month fitzgerald sought authority prosecute officials found hindered investigation leak novak however testified met luskin either march may 2004 close case said discrepancy crux fitzgerald investigating rove didnt reveal grand jury spoken cooper oct 15 2004 according familiar case february 2004 fitzgerald already obtained cooperation key witness former deputy national security adviser vice president dick cheney john hannah hannah agreed cooperate fitzgerald special prosecutor uncovered evidence tying hannah leak threatened indict sources said hannah gave fitzgerald names white house officials knew plame wilson disseminated cia status reporters white house officials laywers said one officials hannah appears implicated rove added cheney promoted hannah assistant national security adviser following libbys indictment rove failed tell investigators time spoken plame time magazine reporter matthew cooper conservative columnist robert novak later cooperated case novak outed plame july 14 2003 column chicago prosecutor briefed second grand jury investigating outing last week three hours time brought speed latest developments involving rove least one white house official sources said attorneys refused identify second person friday neither rove luskin explained roves misstatements fitzgeralds satisfaction familiar case said eleventhhour testimony time magazine reporter viveca novakwho luskin pointed crucial witness keeping client courtdoes appear helpful dodging indictment added woman answered phone patton boggs law firm luskin partner said luskin would answer specific questions probe roves alleged failure disclose conversations cooper novak fact didnt turn hadley email two separate occasions reason hes fitzgeralds crosshairs may end indicted people close investigation said also reason fitzgerald grown suspicious time rove may hid destroyed evidence related role leak said adding fitzgerald may already aware existence email perhaps even obtaining copy witness another white house official waited see rove would cite conversations cooper grand jury testimony may also explain roves attorney robert luskin reportedly testified conversation one coopers time magazine colleagues viveca novak february 2004 luskin maintains novak met february 2004 drinks washington dc novak tipped heard rove coopers source luskin trying say found email conversation ms novak white house turned evidence administration contacts journalists one attorney close case said understands would quite difficult explain prosecutor email miraculously turned either march may january february thats appears stating spoke ms novak february luskin said rove intentionally withhold information fitzgerald grand jury conversation cooper rather says rove simply forgotten luskins meeting novak jogged memory novak testified sworn deposition last week rove faced prospect indicted numerous counts including obstruction justice perjury making false statements failing disclose conversations reporters plame wilson sources close case said several reporters close novak said believe luskins decision draw case made keep roves indictment handed day libby charged rove could indicted counts fitzgerald determines novaks testimony go far enough clearing questions rove tell investigators conversations reporters testimony may however shield rove serious charges attorneys close case said novak related conservative columnist robert novak journalist first published plame wilsons name cia status latest lengthy list longtime washington dc reporters become embroiled leak investigation third withheld crucial information editors involvement still reporting story firstperson account novak posted time magazines website sunday role case said met luskin roves attorney drinks october 2003 luskin asked novak working time novak said plame wilson leak well youre sitting next karl roves attorney luskin said according novaks account two began spending time together course several meetings first half 2004 either march may novak wrote luskin told rove source matt cooper novaks time colleague second reporter write plame wilson july 17 2003 novak said inadvertently tipped luskin fact coopers source rove said sensed spun luskin kneejerk response led divulging information could used help rove escape serious charges following meeting novak luskin told rove novak said coopers source luskin rove exhaustive search white house phone logs emails find evidence rove spoke cooper thats email rove sent hadley discovered luskin said promptly turned fitzgerald however luskin wont say turned email wasnt found white house subpoenaed jan 22 2004 white house counsel alberto gonzales ordered white house staff october 2003 turn emails documentary evidence showed officials spoke journalists moreover known rove change grand jury testimony reflect coopers source october 2004 six eight months novaks meeting luskin article originally appeared truthout jason leopold former los angeles bureau chief dow jones newswires spent two years covering energy crisis enron bankruptcy finished writing book crisis due december rowman amp littlefield reached jasonleopoldhotmailcom 160 | 1,231 |
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>On September 19 the first federal conspiracy trial of civilian war resisters to the US invasion of Iraq will take place in Binghamton, New York, a declining and decaying city in upstate New York, 3 hours northwest of New York City. This is the second trial of the “St Patrick Four” ­ they were acquitted a year earlier by a jury in Ithaca, New York by a 9 to 3 vote in which the presiding Judge David Peeble conceded that the four had represented themselves “probably better than some of the attorneys that practice in this court.”</p>
<p>The trial of the St. Pat Four has national significance because it raises several fundamental issues regarding constitutional freedoms and the Bush-Gonzalez ongoing campaign to silence and intimidate dissent and public expressions of opposition to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The trial of the St. Pat Four will establish whether the Federal Government can jail dissenters engaging in civil disobedience for up to six years and fine them up to $250,000 on feckless charges of “conspiracy to impede an officer of the United States by threat, intimidation or force”. Even more ominous, in terms of the procedures for a fair trial, the senior US District Judge for Northern New York, Thomas McAvoy, has ruled that the defendants cannot discuss the reasons and motivation for their action. According to McAvoy, “This court offers no opinion on the war in Iraq as it is entirely irrelevant to this matterassuming an illegal war, it does not provide a justification for violating the criminal laws of the United States.”</p>
<p>The trial is not only about the right to dissent but the right of defendants to represent themselves and to secure due process, through a proper defense in which all relevant evidence can be presented to the jury. In true Kafkaesque style ­ the federal government seeks to criminalize dissent, by inventing a bogus accusation of conspiracy and intimidation of federal officials.</p>
<p>There was nothing conspiratorial or intimidating about the act of civil disobedience committed by the “Four”. On March 17, 2003, two days before the invasion of Iraq, four pacifists, members of the Catholic Workers movement, walked into a military recruiting center near Ithaca, New York and poured a pint of their own blood around the vestibule. They then knelt down, prayed for peace and awaited the police. There were no secret plots: it was a public act about which there was nothing threatening to the officials unless sending a divine message of peace can be interpreted as evoking the wrath of heaven on the war makers. During their April 2004 trial on charges of criminal mischief and trespassing the four defendants’ eloquent testimony resonated with the local citizen’s jury. Peter De Mott, a Vietnam veteran spoke to his witnessing the horrors of war and the long-term psychological scars on returning soldiers. Danny Burns explained how the US invasion of Iraq was in violation of international treaties and the UN Charter. Clare and Teresa Grady spoke to their religious obligation to oppose the Iraq war which would disproportionately harm infants who posed no threat to US security.</p>
<p>Having failed to secure a conviction of the “Four” in a local court, the Bush Administration upped the ante from criminal mischief to the far more serious charge of conspiracy and intimidation charges and moved the venue of the second trial away from the sympathetic university town of Ithaca to Binghamton, a city which has lost 30% of its workforce due to capital flight over the past 25 years. The Feds are betting that a guilty verdict in Binghamton will establish a judicial precedent for intimidating and prosecuting anti-war dissidents throughout the US.</p>
<p>Despite outward appearances, the choice of Binghamton, a depressed, de-industrialized, non-union upstate city, as a docile venue for a federal ‘show trial’ could backfire. This July, the Binghamton City Council passed a resolution opposing the Iraq War by a 5 to 4 vote and the city has consistently provided a majority of votes for Congressman Maurice Hinchey, one of the most progressive anti-war representatives in the US Congress. During the past Presidential elections, Nader got over 10% of the vote in some Binghamton precincts. In other words, despite the visible and vocal presence of right-wing Legionnaires, it is not a forgone conclusion that the jury will buy into a guilty verdict, especially since its neighbors in Ithaca voted to acquit the “Four” last year.</p>
<p>To counter the Feds gag order on the defendants, local supporters of the St. Pat Four have organized a national network of solidarity and education through a five-day Citizens Tribunal on Iraq. The Tribunal will hear expert testimony on the illegality of the invasion and occupation of Iraq as well as a legal and moral defense of civil disobedience to oppose crimes against humanity.</p>
<p>Former CIA agent, Ray McGovern, Global Exchange director, Medea Benjamin, anti-war soldier, Camilo Mejia and many other critics of the war have accepted the invitation to participate in panels to counter the pro-war case of the government and local media.</p>
<p>The city of Binghamton is a microcosm of the increasingly polarized country; the outcome of the trial in this obscure corner of New York however will have a major impact on whether the Bush Administration will have the judicial weapons to intimidate the opposition and proceed with its war plans or suffer another defeat in the courts as well as in the streets.</p>
<p>For information on the trial of the St. Patrick Four and the Tribunal and to organize support visit the website <a href="http://www.stpatricksfour.org/" type="external">www.stpatricksfour.org</a> or call 607-651-9109.</p>
<p>JAMES PETRAS, a former Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York, owns a 50 year membership in the class struggle, is an adviser to the landless and jobless in brazil and argentina and is co-author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1856499383/counterpunch" type="external">Globalization Unmasked</a> (Zed). His new book with Henry Veltmeyer, <a href="" type="internal">Social Movements and the State: Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia and Argentina</a>, will be published in October 2005. He can be reached at: <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a></p>
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<p>CLARIFICATION</p>
<p>ALEXANDER COCKBURN, JEFFREY ST CLAIR, BECKY GRANT AND THE INSTITUTE FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF JOURNALISTIC CLARITY, COUNTERPUNCH</p>
<p>We published an article entitled “A Saudiless Arabia” by Wayne Madsen dated October 22, 2002 (the “Article”), on the website of the Institute for the Advancement of Journalistic Clarity, CounterPunch, www.counterpunch.org (the “Website”).</p>
<p>Although it was not our intention, counsel for Mohammed Hussein Al Amoudi has advised us the Article suggests, or could be read as suggesting, that Mr Al Amoudi has funded, supported, or is in some way associated with, the terrorist activities of Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda terrorist network.</p>
<p>We do not have any evidence connecting Mr Al Amoudi with terrorism.</p>
<p>As a result of an exchange of communications with Mr Al Amoudi’s lawyers, we have removed the Article from the Website.</p>
<p>We are pleased to clarify the position.</p>
<p>August 17, 2005</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | true | 4 | 160 september 19 first federal conspiracy trial civilian war resisters us invasion iraq take place binghamton new york declining decaying city upstate new york 3 hours northwest new york city second trial st patrick four acquitted year earlier jury ithaca new york 9 3 vote presiding judge david peeble conceded four represented probably better attorneys practice court trial st pat four national significance raises several fundamental issues regarding constitutional freedoms bushgonzalez ongoing campaign silence intimidate dissent public expressions opposition iraq afghanistan wars trial st pat four establish whether federal government jail dissenters engaging civil disobedience six years fine 250000 feckless charges conspiracy impede officer united states threat intimidation force even ominous terms procedures fair trial senior us district judge northern new york thomas mcavoy ruled defendants discuss reasons motivation action according mcavoy court offers opinion war iraq entirely irrelevant matterassuming illegal war provide justification violating criminal laws united states trial right dissent right defendants represent secure due process proper defense relevant evidence presented jury true kafkaesque style federal government seeks criminalize dissent inventing bogus accusation conspiracy intimidation federal officials nothing conspiratorial intimidating act civil disobedience committed four march 17 2003 two days invasion iraq four pacifists members catholic workers movement walked military recruiting center near ithaca new york poured pint blood around vestibule knelt prayed peace awaited police secret plots public act nothing threatening officials unless sending divine message peace interpreted evoking wrath heaven war makers april 2004 trial charges criminal mischief trespassing four defendants eloquent testimony resonated local citizens jury peter de mott vietnam veteran spoke witnessing horrors war longterm psychological scars returning soldiers danny burns explained us invasion iraq violation international treaties un charter clare teresa grady spoke religious obligation oppose iraq war would disproportionately harm infants posed threat us security failed secure conviction four local court bush administration upped ante criminal mischief far serious charge conspiracy intimidation charges moved venue second trial away sympathetic university town ithaca binghamton city lost 30 workforce due capital flight past 25 years feds betting guilty verdict binghamton establish judicial precedent intimidating prosecuting antiwar dissidents throughout us despite outward appearances choice binghamton depressed deindustrialized nonunion upstate city docile venue federal show trial could backfire july binghamton city council passed resolution opposing iraq war 5 4 vote city consistently provided majority votes congressman maurice hinchey one progressive antiwar representatives us congress past presidential elections nader got 10 vote binghamton precincts words despite visible vocal presence rightwing legionnaires forgone conclusion jury buy guilty verdict especially since neighbors ithaca voted acquit four last year counter feds gag order defendants local supporters st pat four organized national network solidarity education fiveday citizens tribunal iraq tribunal hear expert testimony illegality invasion occupation iraq well legal moral defense civil disobedience oppose crimes humanity former cia agent ray mcgovern global exchange director medea benjamin antiwar soldier camilo mejia many critics war accepted invitation participate panels counter prowar case government local media city binghamton microcosm increasingly polarized country outcome trial obscure corner new york however major impact whether bush administration judicial weapons intimidate opposition proceed war plans suffer another defeat courts well streets information trial st patrick four tribunal organize support visit website wwwstpatricksfourorg call 6076519109 james petras former professor sociology binghamton university new york owns 50 year membership class struggle adviser landless jobless brazil argentina coauthor globalization unmasked zed new book henry veltmeyer social movements state brazil ecuador bolivia argentina published october 2005 reached jpetrasbinghamtonedu 160 160 160 160 160 clarification alexander cockburn jeffrey st clair becky grant institute advancement journalistic clarity counterpunch published article entitled saudiless arabia wayne madsen dated october 22 2002 article website institute advancement journalistic clarity counterpunch wwwcounterpunchorg website although intention counsel mohammed hussein al amoudi advised us article suggests could read suggesting mr al amoudi funded supported way associated terrorist activities osama bin laden al qaeda terrorist network evidence connecting mr al amoudi terrorism result exchange communications mr al amoudis lawyers removed article website pleased clarify position august 17 2005 160 | 657 |
<p>On January 25, President Donald Trump acted on his campaign promise to get the ball rolling on building what he often called a “ <a href="" type="internal">big, beautiful, powerful wall</a>” situated along the U.S.-Mexico&#160;border.</p>
<p>At his <a href="" type="internal">speech</a> announcing the <a href="" type="internal">executive order</a> at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Trump cited&#160;drugs&#160;pouring across the border, increasing crime, and other national security concerns as the rationale for its construction. The main questions center around who will fund it and if Trump can deliver on his promise to have Mexico pay for it, given Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto <a href="" type="internal">canceling a planned trip to the U.S.</a> to meet with Trump in the aftermath of the announcement. Peña Nieto has&#160; <a href="" type="internal">said Mexico will not foot the bill</a>.</p>
<p>Answering the question about funding, <a href="" type="internal">Trump’s press secretary Sean Spicer has revealed</a>&#160;that U.S. taxpayers will fork over the money at first, with Mexico paying for it over time through a 20 percent tax on Mexican imports. At least some of those fees, it turns out, could be generated by offering tax incentives to increase U.S. oil exports to Mexico and&#160;beyond.</p>
<p>A “ <a href="" type="internal">border adjustment</a>” is the name of a tax policy which may become part of&#160;Speaker of the House U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI)’s <a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/house/316156-ryan-maps-out-gop-time-line-for-obamacare-tax-reform" type="external">looming proposed tax reform package</a>. A border adjustment&#160;hits imports into the U.S. with a 20 percent tariff, while exported commodities would get a tax&#160;refund.</p>
<p>“Under the border adjustment, the United States would refund the tax on exports and charge it on imports — so the net revenue would be negative if we had a trade surplus, and positive if we had a trade deficit,” wrote <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Marc_Thiessen" type="external">Marc Thiessen</a> of the&#160; <a href="https://www.desmogblog.com/american-enterprise-institute" type="external">American Enterprise Institute</a>, a conservative think-tank, in an <a href="" type="internal">article published by The Washington Post</a>. “One of the countries with whom we have a large trade deficit is … Mexico … So if Mexican imports are taxed at a rate of 20 percent, the United States would raise about $13 billion a year in revenue from Mexico via the border&#160;adjustment.”</p>
<p>Theissen, pointing to report that says the prospective&#160; <a href="" type="internal">wall could cost between $15 billion and $25 billion</a> to construct, does the math from there and points out that it could be paid for in two years through such an&#160;arrangement.</p>
<p>Spicer cited similar figures in his comments about financing the&#160;wall.</p>
<p>“When you look at the plan that’s taking shape now, using comprehensive tax reform as a means to tax imports from countries that we have a trade deficit from, like Mexico,” said Spicer. “We can do $10 billion a year and easily pay for the wall just through that mechanism alone. That’s really going to provide the&#160;funding.”</p>
<p>In a January 25&#160; <a href="" type="internal">interview with ABC News</a>,&#160;Trump had hinted at&#160;but did not yet name&#160;the border tax adjustment as the potential funding stream for the proposed wall, while also suggesting Peña Nieto was merely posturing in opposing it and will come around to supporting the&#160;plan.</p>
<p>“He has to say that. But I’m just telling you there will be a payment. It will be in a form, perhaps a complicated form,”&#160;Trump told ABC News. “We will have the wall and in a very serious form Mexico will pay for the wall … I never said they’re gonna pay from the start. I said Mexico will pay for the&#160;wall.”</p>
<p>And that’s where exports of oil come into&#160;play.</p>
<p>Oil Exports “Made in&#160;America”</p>
<p>At the forefront, Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX), who is&#160;Chairman of the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee, has <a href="" type="internal">spearheaded the push</a> for the border adjustment tax. He has&#160;rebranded it as the “ <a href="https://waysandmeans.house.gov/ending-made-america-tax-three-major-wins-american-people/" type="external">Ending the Made in America Tax</a>.”</p>
<p>Brady’s congressional district houses ExxonMobil’s massive new&#160; <a href="http://cdn.exxonmobil.com/~/media/global/files/houston/exxonmobil-houston-campus-fact-sheet.pdf" type="external">385 acre campus</a> north of Houston, and during his congressional career, Brady has received <a href="http://dirtyenergymoney.org/view.php?searchvalue=Kevin+Brady&amp;com=&amp;can=&amp;zip=&amp;search=1&amp;type=search#view=connections" type="external">$44,000 in campaign donations</a> from the <a href="" type="internal">oil exports-promoting Exxon</a>.</p>
<p>“Ending the ‘Made in America’ export tax will bring our tax code into the 21st century, level the playing field for our businesses and workers, and make the United States a magnet for investment and job creation,” <a href="https://waysandmeans.house.gov/compete-win-worldwide-must-end-made-america-export-tax/" type="external">reads the House Ways and Means Committee website</a>. “Most importantly, it will help ‘Made in America’ products compete and succeed anywhere in the&#160;world.”</p>
<p>The U.S. has a handful of&#160;gas pipelines proposed to cross the U.S. border into Mexico, <a href="" type="internal">several of them owned</a> by <a href="https://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/5857" type="external">Keystone XL</a>builder&#160; <a href="" type="internal">TransCanada</a>&#160;and <a href="" type="internal">another&#160;one</a> owned by <a href="https://www.desmogblog.com/energy-transfer-partners-bakken-oil-pipeline-through-iowa" type="external">Dakota Access pipeline</a> owner Energy Transfer Partners, which would send natural gas obtained via <a href="https://www.desmogblog.com/fracking-the-future/" type="external">hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”)</a> south of the&#160;border.</p>
<p>Mexico, according to U.S. Energy Information Agency&#160;data, is currently the <a href="" type="internal">largest importer</a> of U.S. crude oil products in the&#160;world.</p>
<p>U.S.-Advocated Mexico Energy&#160;Privatization</p>
<p>Under U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton,&#160;the State Department’s Bureau of Energy Resources <a href="" type="internal">advocated for the privatization</a> of Mexico’s energy grid, which at the time was run&#160;by state-owned company&#160; <a href="https://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/15839" type="external">Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX)</a>.</p>
<p>“Mexico officials remain extremely sensitive about any public — especially US — comments regarding energy reform and production,” reads a February 2010 cable written by the U.S. Embassy in Mexico, which was published by Wikileaks and previously <a href="" type="internal">reported by DeSmog</a>. “We should retain the [U.S. government’s] long-standing policy of not commenting publicly on these issues while quietly offering to provide assistance in areas of interest to the [Mexican&#160;government].”</p>
<p>Coming through constitutional amendments signed into law by Peña Nieto in December 2013, the country’s oil and gas industry’s spigots are now <a href="" type="internal">open to international companies</a>. And several key U.S. officials who helped make it possible <a href="" type="internal">now work as lobbyists, consultants and think-tank analysts</a> where they have continued to crusade for the&#160;cause.</p>
<p>Energy Information Agency data also shows that Mexico&#160; <a href="" type="internal">exports the third greatest volume</a> of crude oil products to the U.S.,&#160;behind Canada and Saudi Arabia. If the tax scheme&#160;passes and as Mexico continues to develop its onshore shale and offshore oil reserves, that volume could rise. Companies looking to ship that oil to the U.S. would then owe a 20 percent tax to the U.S. treasury.</p>
<p>The proposal has split the oil refining and oil-producing sectors, with producers supportive and refiners critical of the tax scheme. A case in point:&#160; <a href="https://www.desmogblog.com/american-fuel-petrochemical-manufacturers-afpm" type="external">American Fuels and Petrochemical Manufacturers</a>&#160;and&#160; <a href="https://www.desmogblog.com/koch-industries-inc-lobbying-activities" type="external">Koch Industries</a> have come out against&#160;it.</p>
<p>“While companies like Koch who manufacture and produce many products domestically would greatly benefit in the short-term, the long-term consequences to the economy and the American consumer could be devastating,” Philip Ellender, president of government and public affairs for Koch Companies Public Sector, <a href="" type="internal">said in a press release</a>. “The proposed border tax adjustment will distort the market, increase consumer prices and create an uneven playing field for companies and consumers&#160;alike.”</p>
<p>Trump’s nominee for U.S. Secretary of State, recently retired ExxonMobil CEO <a href="https://www.desmogblog.com/rex-tillerson" type="external">Rex Tillerson</a>, said at his&#160;Senate Committee on Foreign Relations <a href="" type="internal">confirmation hearing</a>&#160;that he supports <a href="" type="internal">using oil and gas exports as a geopolitical tool</a>. The Democratic Senate Finance Committee staff published a <a href="" type="internal">December 8 report</a> in opposition to the&#160;tax.</p>
<p>Trump Donor, Aide Harold Hamm Stands to&#160;Gain</p>
<p>Wall Street goliath Goldman Sachs recently published a memorandum stating that a border adjustment would serve as a boon for oil exports, but would hurt consumers and domestic refiners, also potentially spiking the global price of oil by 25&#160;percent.</p>
<p>“The proposal means that domestic refiners would lean toward consuming only U.S.-produced crude instead of importing it, and U.S. producers would have ‘incentive only to export crude rather than to sell to domestic refiners as there would be no taxes on exports,’”&#160; <a href="" type="internal">wrote&#160;Marketwatch about the report</a>.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/9859" type="external">Harold Hamm</a>, the Trump&#160;presidential campaign’s top energy aide and a <a href="" type="internal">major donor</a> who runs&#160; <a href="https://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/15658" type="external">Continental Resources</a>, waged a <a href="" type="internal">sophisticated lobbying and public relations campaign</a>&#160;and successfully maneuvered&#160;the Obama administration to lift the oil export ban in 2015. Hamm&#160; <a href="" type="internal">sat near the podium</a> at Trump’s inaugural&#160;address.</p>
<p>Continental owns the <a href="" type="internal">largest net acreage</a>&#160;in North Dakota’s prolific <a href="https://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/7174" type="external">Bakken Shale</a> basin, and its oil is set to flow through the proposed Dakota Access, which now has a <a href="" type="internal">green light from President Trump</a>. Dakota Access will bring fracked oil from the Bakken to the U.S. Gulf of Mexico-area refineries and the global export market via the <a href="http://www.energytransfer.com/documents/ETCOP_Overall_System_Map.pdf" type="external">connecting Energy Transfer Crude Oil Company Pipeline</a>.</p> | true | 4 | january 25 president donald trump acted campaign promise get ball rolling building often called big beautiful powerful wall situated along usmexico160border speech announcing executive order us department homeland security trump cited160drugs160pouring across border increasing crime national security concerns rationale construction main questions center around fund trump deliver promise mexico pay given mexicos president enrique peña nieto canceling planned trip us meet trump aftermath announcement peña nieto has160 said mexico foot bill answering question funding trumps press secretary sean spicer revealed160that us taxpayers fork money first mexico paying time 20 percent tax mexican imports least fees turns could generated offering tax incentives increase us oil exports mexico and160beyond border adjustment name tax policy may become part of160speaker house us rep paul ryan rwis looming proposed tax reform package border adjustment160hits imports us 20 percent tariff exported commodities would get tax160refund border adjustment united states would refund tax exports charge imports net revenue would negative trade surplus positive trade deficit wrote marc thiessen the160 american enterprise institute conservative thinktank article published washington post one countries large trade deficit mexico mexican imports taxed rate 20 percent united states would raise 13 billion year revenue mexico via border160adjustment theissen pointing report says prospective160 wall could cost 15 billion 25 billion construct math points could paid two years an160arrangement spicer cited similar figures comments financing the160wall look plan thats taking shape using comprehensive tax reform means tax imports countries trade deficit like mexico said spicer 10 billion year easily pay wall mechanism alone thats really going provide the160funding january 25160 interview abc news160trump hinted at160but yet name160the border tax adjustment potential funding stream proposed wall also suggesting peña nieto merely posturing opposing come around supporting the160plan say im telling payment form perhaps complicated form160trump told abc news wall serious form mexico pay wall never said theyre gon na pay start said mexico pay the160wall thats exports oil come into160play oil exports made in160america forefront rep kevin brady rtx is160chairman us house ways means committee spearheaded push border adjustment tax has160rebranded ending made america tax bradys congressional district houses exxonmobils massive new160 385 acre campus north houston congressional career brady received 44000 campaign donations oil exportspromoting exxon ending made america export tax bring tax code 21st century level playing field businesses workers make united states magnet investment job creation reads house ways means committee website importantly help made america products compete succeed anywhere the160world us handful of160gas pipelines proposed cross us border mexico several owned keystone xlbuilder160 transcanada160and another160one owned dakota access pipeline owner energy transfer partners would send natural gas obtained via hydraulic fracturing fracking south the160border mexico according us energy information agency160data currently largest importer us crude oil products the160world usadvocated mexico energy160privatization us secretary state hillary clinton160the state departments bureau energy resources advocated privatization mexicos energy grid time run160by stateowned company160 petróleos mexicanos pemex mexico officials remain extremely sensitive public especially us comments regarding energy reform production reads february 2010 cable written us embassy mexico published wikileaks previously reported desmog retain us governments longstanding policy commenting publicly issues quietly offering provide assistance areas interest mexican160government coming constitutional amendments signed law peña nieto december 2013 countrys oil gas industrys spigots open international companies several key us officials helped make possible work lobbyists consultants thinktank analysts continued crusade the160cause energy information agency data also shows mexico160 exports third greatest volume crude oil products us160behind canada saudi arabia tax scheme160passes mexico continues develop onshore shale offshore oil reserves volume could rise companies looking ship oil us would owe 20 percent tax us treasury proposal split oil refining oilproducing sectors producers supportive refiners critical tax scheme case point160 american fuels petrochemical manufacturers160and160 koch industries come against160it companies like koch manufacture produce many products domestically would greatly benefit shortterm longterm consequences economy american consumer could devastating philip ellender president government public affairs koch companies public sector said press release proposed border tax adjustment distort market increase consumer prices create uneven playing field companies consumers160alike trumps nominee us secretary state recently retired exxonmobil ceo rex tillerson said his160senate committee foreign relations confirmation hearing160that supports using oil gas exports geopolitical tool democratic senate finance committee staff published december 8 report opposition the160tax trump donor aide harold hamm stands to160gain wall street goliath goldman sachs recently published memorandum stating border adjustment would serve boon oil exports would hurt consumers domestic refiners also potentially spiking global price oil 25160percent proposal means domestic refiners would lean toward consuming usproduced crude instead importing us producers would incentive export crude rather sell domestic refiners would taxes exports160 wrote160marketwatch report harold hamm trump160presidential campaigns top energy aide major donor runs160 continental resources waged sophisticated lobbying public relations campaign160and successfully maneuvered160the obama administration lift oil export ban 2015 hamm160 sat near podium trumps inaugural160address continental owns largest net acreage160in north dakotas prolific bakken shale basin oil set flow proposed dakota access green light president trump dakota access bring fracked oil bakken us gulf mexicoarea refineries global export market via connecting energy transfer crude oil company pipeline | 829 |
<p>Doctors seek a unifying diagnosis to explain symptoms and inform a prognosis. My diagnosis for a Trumped-up White House with pseudo-populism as a diversion is naked greed. “Trust me” winks from the far-right wing predict a dire prognosis for the 99 percent.</p>
<p>In one career, my 38 working years as an oncologist, U.S. society has done a “180”—from a Peace Corps legacy to TV’s “Apprentice” and a mentality of social Darwinism. Rupert Murdoch’s Fox, echoing the Koch brother’s <a href="https://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed" type="external">ALEC</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato_Institute" type="external">the Cato Institute</a>, and James Buchanan/Milton Friedman libertarianism have made “you eat what you kill” the sacred creed of their right-wing propaganda machine. And much of America has joined in the chant of “money over all.”</p>
<p>Soul searching over civil rights, the Pentagon Papers and Watergate once prompted a national catharsis and predicted an era of enlightened, transparent governance of America. But since those innocent days, the decades of my medical career have witnessed health care turned from a noble profession into “profit center” exploitation among Big Insurance, Big Pharma and Big Hospitals.</p>
<p>Many physicians joined in the gold rush, emboldened by Wall Street’s “greed is great” mantra. One of the executives over me, his salary measured in the millions per year, would interrogate me regularly—“Fangman, is there any money in stem cell transplants” or other research trends du jour he’d seen a headline for in The Wall Street Journal. Never did the question he was paid to ask arise: Will innovation x, y or z improve our community’s health care?</p>
<p />
<p>That same slickster CEO was also an early adopter of Beltway hyper-polarization. His oft-used curse—“those dirty Democrats”—was a warning to anyone with a liberal instinct in his sphere of influence.</p>
<p>Understand that I am no socialist or partisan advocate. I’ve always been an independent. I earned money by hard work and respect a foundational tenet of capitalism: If you snooze, you lose. There was bad governance by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Lee_Gramm" type="external">Wendy Lee Gramm</a>, Bill Clinton, Lawrence Summers, George W. Bush, Barack Obama. They coddled and then bailed out the pervasive greed of Wall Street and that of greedy mortgage bankers like Angelo Mozilo at Countrywide, as it flushed away much of my career’s work and the security of millions of others in the Great Recession. This casino mentality is still taking the 99 percent for suckers. Trump’s “tax reform” is yet another smoke screen for unvarnished greed. Read about <a href="http://thehill.com/policy/finance/370498-kimberly-clark-to-use-savings-from-tax-cuts-to-pay-for-layoffs" type="external">Kimberly Clark’s tax cut plans</a> as an example.</p>
<p>I don’t write to grind my ax. I write because con men running this nation are confusing American voters. Since the 1980s, hucksters too numerous to recount—see Bush/Dick Cheney, Henry Paulson, Lloyd Blankfein and now Donald Trump—have seduced solid, hard-working Americans to believe in bogus scams like invading Iraq. The Koch brothers’ anti-democracy libertarianism has taken Friedman’s dog-eat-dog “trickle down” to new lows.</p>
<p>Today’s ruling “Republi-cons” have no kinship with Dwight Eisenhower’s Republican Party or with principled Republican moderates of the Watergate era. Their stealth service to billionaires is simply not divulged, and the corporate media obliges their secretive agenda with distractions about conventional boogeymen and hype.</p>
<p>Implausible Ayn Rand theories espoused by greed merchants support party-over-country gridlock and the culture of unconscionable partisanship that never brings introspection to Washington, D.C. Sen. Jeff Flake’s book, “ <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Conscience-Conservative-Rejection-Destructive-Principle/dp/0399592911" type="external">Conscience of a Conservative</a>” and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8Mnv3WcQPk" type="external">his speeches</a> should have done that. A sobering array of deregulatory-, regulatory- and privatization-induced wounds plague our society, yet they never get airtime or congressional action, overshadowed continually by the raging scandals that hyper-partisanship makes inevitable.</p>
<p>In health care, poor leadership has cursed us with the labors of Sisyphus, in the form of counterproductive electronic medical records, billing, data collection and prescribing systems. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Commission" type="external">Joint Commission</a> watchdogs once did good work but now seem like a bloated bureaucracy nitpicking health care to death. We have irrational drug-pricing burdens, artificial intelligence threatening to sweep away human interactions from even medical care, and much more that complicates (rather than streamlines) the whole system.</p>
<p>Society is battered on many different fronts: poisonous GMO foods, crumbling infrastructure, a corporate tax gift to the wealthiest (cut too low at 21 percent from too high at 35 percent), Amazon and robotics decimating jobs (as offshoring already has). The right wing wages incessant attacks on all that works well for the “general welfare” espoused by our Constitution: Social Security, Medicare, the U.S. Postal Service, our struggling passenger rail system, <a href="https://www.nrel.gov" type="external">NREL research</a> and renewable energy development … the list goes on.</p>
<p>And, yes, even with the Olympics of peace in South Korea underway, we’re reminded of greed in our U.S. Olympic Committee, a wealthy organization that provides essentially no help to our hard-working athletes. Most of these “best of the best” have to suffer deprivation and hardship to refine their skills and make America proud. Meanwhile, our Olympic committee holds tightly to its monetary bounty, some $600 million in endowments, with pay scales for its management ranging from several hundreds of thousands to millions per year. The Olympic Committee receives hundreds of millions in TV money, and over 40 governing bodies like that of track and field are often headed up by individuals making between $1 million and $2 million a year. Rather than offering helping hand financially, the Olympic Committee aggressively enforces rules against athletes securing their own endorsements from commercial interests willing to defray athletes’ costs for training and travel.</p>
<p>These examples are a few of the many more facets of greed firmly rooted in our society. Ascendant for nearly 40 years, misbegotten libertarianism, worship of private property rights over the common good and the ensuing social Darwinism that it all demands have masqueraded as “conservative prudence.” What it’s really become is quite different than what Barry Goldwater would countenance.</p>
<p>Insidious corruption unparalleled in American history—what I regard as Deception Inc.—is in control of our society. Partisan propaganda pits Main Street Americans against one another to distrust the “other” and vote for con artists and thieves doing the bidding of billionaires.</p>
<p>We, the people, must learn the details of all this corruption in the service of greed. Scholars and investigative journalists exposing our corrupt system of dysfunctional leadership must become household names among the 99 percent. We must unite to demand moderation and fairness from authentic leaders who respect democracy.</p>
<p>If we are to regain balance and cohesiveness in our society, we must understand genuine facts and interpret the truth required to vote rationally. This type of sophistication must replace polarization. To encourage the brightest to govern in Washington, D.C., scholars must uncover and convey verified evidence. This kind of work can promote citizen participation in the pursuit of centrist, pragmatic consensus.</p>
<p>Knowledge, organized and available to all motivated voters, can win out. And we can get our country back.</p> | true | 4 | doctors seek unifying diagnosis explain symptoms inform prognosis diagnosis trumpedup white house pseudopopulism diversion naked greed trust winks farright wing predict dire prognosis 99 percent one career 38 working years oncologist us society done 180from peace corps legacy tvs apprentice mentality social darwinism rupert murdochs fox echoing koch brothers alec cato institute james buchananmilton friedman libertarianism made eat kill sacred creed rightwing propaganda machine much america joined chant money soul searching civil rights pentagon papers watergate prompted national catharsis predicted era enlightened transparent governance america since innocent days decades medical career witnessed health care turned noble profession profit center exploitation among big insurance big pharma big hospitals many physicians joined gold rush emboldened wall streets greed great mantra one executives salary measured millions per year would interrogate regularlyfangman money stem cell transplants research trends du jour hed seen headline wall street journal never question paid ask arise innovation x z improve communitys health care slickster ceo also early adopter beltway hyperpolarization oftused cursethose dirty democratswas warning anyone liberal instinct sphere influence understand socialist partisan advocate ive always independent earned money hard work respect foundational tenet capitalism snooze lose bad governance wendy lee gramm bill clinton lawrence summers george w bush barack obama coddled bailed pervasive greed wall street greedy mortgage bankers like angelo mozilo countrywide flushed away much careers work security millions others great recession casino mentality still taking 99 percent suckers trumps tax reform yet another smoke screen unvarnished greed read kimberly clarks tax cut plans example dont write grind ax write con men running nation confusing american voters since 1980s hucksters numerous recountsee bushdick cheney henry paulson lloyd blankfein donald trumphave seduced solid hardworking americans believe bogus scams like invading iraq koch brothers antidemocracy libertarianism taken friedmans dogeatdog trickle new lows todays ruling republicons kinship dwight eisenhowers republican party principled republican moderates watergate era stealth service billionaires simply divulged corporate media obliges secretive agenda distractions conventional boogeymen hype implausible ayn rand theories espoused greed merchants support partyovercountry gridlock culture unconscionable partisanship never brings introspection washington dc sen jeff flakes book conscience conservative speeches done sobering array deregulatory regulatory privatizationinduced wounds plague society yet never get airtime congressional action overshadowed continually raging scandals hyperpartisanship makes inevitable health care poor leadership cursed us labors sisyphus form counterproductive electronic medical records billing data collection prescribing systems joint commission watchdogs good work seem like bloated bureaucracy nitpicking health care death irrational drugpricing burdens artificial intelligence threatening sweep away human interactions even medical care much complicates rather streamlines whole system society battered many different fronts poisonous gmo foods crumbling infrastructure corporate tax gift wealthiest cut low 21 percent high 35 percent amazon robotics decimating jobs offshoring already right wing wages incessant attacks works well general welfare espoused constitution social security medicare us postal service struggling passenger rail system nrel research renewable energy development list goes yes even olympics peace south korea underway reminded greed us olympic committee wealthy organization provides essentially help hardworking athletes best best suffer deprivation hardship refine skills make america proud meanwhile olympic committee holds tightly monetary bounty 600 million endowments pay scales management ranging several hundreds thousands millions per year olympic committee receives hundreds millions tv money 40 governing bodies like track field often headed individuals making 1 million 2 million year rather offering helping hand financially olympic committee aggressively enforces rules athletes securing endorsements commercial interests willing defray athletes costs training travel examples many facets greed firmly rooted society ascendant nearly 40 years misbegotten libertarianism worship private property rights common good ensuing social darwinism demands masqueraded conservative prudence really become quite different barry goldwater would countenance insidious corruption unparalleled american historywhat regard deception incis control society partisan propaganda pits main street americans one another distrust vote con artists thieves bidding billionaires people must learn details corruption service greed scholars investigative journalists exposing corrupt system dysfunctional leadership must become household names among 99 percent must unite demand moderation fairness authentic leaders respect democracy regain balance cohesiveness society must understand genuine facts interpret truth required vote rationally type sophistication must replace polarization encourage brightest govern washington dc scholars must uncover convey verified evidence kind work promote citizen participation pursuit centrist pragmatic consensus knowledge organized available motivated voters win get country back | 701 |
<p>“When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.”</p>
<p>— Edward O. Wilson</p>
<p>In early October 1983, I found myself pacing the terminal at the old Weir Cook Airport in Indianapolis, awaiting the arrival of David Brower, the great environmentalist. Brower emerged from the plane, his face aglow with impish triumph. We hustled down the terminal to the airport bar where he imparted the momentous news that his nemesis James Watt, the messianic Secretary of Interior, had just been evicted from his post in the Reagan administration.</p>
<p>Watt had doomed himself by denouncing the members of the federal coal-leasing commission as “a black, a woman, two Jews, and a cripple.” The commissioners had shown the audacity to resist Watt’s demented shale-oil scheme, which sought to transform the Great Plains into a moonlike landscape of craters and toxic slush ponds. So, like Earl Butz before him, Watt’s political obituary was written with a racist slur. It’s probably fitting that he fell from such a self-inflicted trifle. After all, Watt was an instinctive and unrepentant bigot, just like his boss Reagan. Ask any Apache.</p>
<p>Of course, the Christian fundamentalist and apostle of strip-mining from Wyoming nearly lost his job over another bone-headed misdemeanor: his attempt to bar the Beach Boys from performing at a 4th of July concert on the National Mall. Reagan had to intervene personally on behalf of that All-American band, whose music could have provided the soundtrack for the sunny brand of trickle-down utopianism the president was trying to force-feed the country in those days. The Gipper, who, if nothing else, always demonstrated a keen PR sense, may well have lost confidence in Watt at that precise moment.</p>
<p>But the Interior Secretary, who once declared that the end of the Earth was so close at hand that there was no reason to fret about conserving ecosystems for the long haul, had been on the ropes from the beginning of his tenure, due, in large part, to the Dump Watt campaign initiated by Brower and his group, Friends of the Earth, only weeks after Watt’s nomination was confirmed by the US senate. Within a few months, Friends of the Earth had gathered more than two million signatures on a petition calling for Watt’s removal. In those days, the right to petition the government still seemed to stand for something.</p>
<p>Brower loathed Watt, but viewed him as a comical figure, a corrupt moralist sprung from the pages of a Thackeray novel. He reserved his real animosity for the appalling Reagan, the supreme Confidence Artist of American politics.</p>
<p>Unlike many progressives, Brower never wrote off Reagan as an incompetent and incoherent stooge. He knew better. Brower, the arch-druid, and Reagan, the union-busting snitch, had sparred with each other across the decades—first in California over parks and wild rivers, pesticide spraying, nuclear power, and the governor’s brutal attacks on the peaceable citizens of Brower’s hometown of Berkeley; and later around the globe over wilderness, endangered species, the illegal war on Nicaragua, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>During the pitched battles to save some of the world’s largest trees, Brower and his cohorts goaded Reagan into making his infamous declaration: “Once you’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen them all.” That Zen koan-like pronouncement pretty much summed up Reagan’s philosophy of environmental tokenism. Later, Reagan propounded the thesis that trees generated more air pollution than coal-fired power plants. For the Gipper, the only excuse for Nature was to serve as a backdrop for photo-ops, just like in his intros for Death Valley Days, the popular western TV series that served as a catwalk for the rollout of Reagan as a politician.</p>
<p>Brower viewed Reagan as a mean-spirited and calculating figure, entirely cognizant of and culpable for his crimes. He refused to allow the old man access to the twin escape hatches of plausible deniability and senile dementia.</p>
<p>Born a year apart, the two men were part of the same generation and both spent most of their lives in California. Yet, the tenor of their lives couldn’t have been more different. In World War II, Brower served as an instructor for the famous 10th Mountain Division and returned home a pacifist. He didn’t talk much about his war experience, preferring to brag about the number of Sierran peaks he’d bagged (seventy first ascents) or the wild rivers he’d floated.</p>
<p>Reagan spent World War II in Hollywood making racist propaganda films to inflame the fever for a war that tens of thousands of others would die fighting in. Years later he boasted (that is: lied) about liberating the Nazi death camps, even as he was forced to defend his demented decision to bestow presidential honors on the dead at the cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, final resting place for the blood-drenched butchers of the Waffen SS. Reagan possessed a special talent for the suspension of disbelief when it came to the facts of his own life. Perhaps, if the earth in Simi Valley refuses to receive his corpse, the custodians of Bitburg could erect a cenotaph for Reagan on those chilly grounds.</p>
<p>After a couple of hours spent draining Tanqueray-powered martinis at that airport bar in Indianapolis, some of the initial glow gradually dissipated from Brower’s face. “You know, Jeffrey, we may soon come to miss old Watt,” Brower predicted.</p>
<p>He was right, of course. James Watt proved to be the greatest fundraising gimmick the big environmental groups ever stumbled across, far outperforming panda calendars and postcards of baby Harp seals about to fall victim to the fur-trader’s skull-crushing club. During Watt’s tenure, the top ten environmental groups more than doubled their combined budgets, and for a brief time, became the most powerful public interest lobby on the Hill.</p>
<p>Watt’s approach to the plunder of the planet seethed with an evangelical fervor. He brought with him to Washington a gang of libertarian missionaries, mostly veterans of the Coors-funded Mountain States Legal Foundation, who referred to themselves as “The Colorado Crazies.” Their mission: privatize the public estate. Many of them were transparent crooks who ended up facing indictment and doing time in federal prison for self-dealing and public corruption. They gave away billions in public timber, coal, and oil to favored corporations, leaving behind toxic scars where there used to be wild forests, trout streams, and deserts. These thieves were part of the same claque of race-baiting zealots who demonized welfare mothers as swindlers of the public treasury.</p>
<p>Watt, who was himself charged with twenty-five felony counts of lying and obstruction of justice, never hid his rapine agenda behind soft, made-for-primetime rhetoric. He never preached about win-win solutions, ecological forestry, or sustainable development. From the beginning, James Watt’s message was clear: grab it all, grab it now. God wills it so. The message was so high-pitched and unadulterated that it provoked a fierce global resistance that frustrated Watt at nearly every turn. In the end, he achieved almost nothing for the forces of darkness.</p>
<p>Soon, Watt’s divinely-inspired vigilantism against nature would be replaced by a more calculating approach, a kinder and gentler path to exploitation, that reached a terrible crescendo under Clinton and Gore, a team which, according to Brower’s expert calculation, did more damage to the American environment in their first four years in office than Reagan and Bush the Father accomplished in twelve years.</p>
<p>Still there’s reason to miss Watt and Reagan. Their brazen contempt for the world inspired ordinary people to rise up against their government’s leaders on behalf of the spotted owl and Yellowstone grizzly—rise up, and on occasion, actually rout them. Even Watt’s minions, like Steven Griles and Gale Norton, who directed the berserker environmental policies of the Bush the Younger administration, didn’t ride nearly as tall in the saddle as Reagan and Watt did in the early 1980s, when it seemed that real demons stalked the earth.</p>
<p>Fade to black.</p>
<p>This essay is excerpted from <a href="http://www.easycartsecure.com/CounterPunch/CounterPunch_Books.html" type="external">Born Under a Bad Sky</a>.</p>
<p>JEFFREY ST. CLAIR is the author of <a href="http://www.easycartsecure.com/CounterPunch/CounterPunch_Books.html" type="external">Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature</a> and <a href="" type="internal">Grand Theft Pentagon</a>. His newest book, <a href="http://www.easycartsecure.com/CounterPunch/CounterPunch_Books.html" type="external">Born Under a Bad Sky</a>, is published by AK Press / CounterPunch books. He can be reached at: <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a>.</p>
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<p /> | true | 4 | seen one ant one bird one tree seen edward wilson early october 1983 found pacing terminal old weir cook airport indianapolis awaiting arrival david brower great environmentalist brower emerged plane face aglow impish triumph hustled terminal airport bar imparted momentous news nemesis james watt messianic secretary interior evicted post reagan administration watt doomed denouncing members federal coalleasing commission black woman two jews cripple commissioners shown audacity resist watts demented shaleoil scheme sought transform great plains moonlike landscape craters toxic slush ponds like earl butz watts political obituary written racist slur probably fitting fell selfinflicted trifle watt instinctive unrepentant bigot like boss reagan ask apache course christian fundamentalist apostle stripmining wyoming nearly lost job another boneheaded misdemeanor attempt bar beach boys performing 4th july concert national mall reagan intervene personally behalf allamerican band whose music could provided soundtrack sunny brand trickledown utopianism president trying forcefeed country days gipper nothing else always demonstrated keen pr sense may well lost confidence watt precise moment interior secretary declared end earth close hand reason fret conserving ecosystems long haul ropes beginning tenure due large part dump watt campaign initiated brower group friends earth weeks watts nomination confirmed us senate within months friends earth gathered two million signatures petition calling watts removal days right petition government still seemed stand something brower loathed watt viewed comical figure corrupt moralist sprung pages thackeray novel reserved real animosity appalling reagan supreme confidence artist american politics unlike many progressives brower never wrote reagan incompetent incoherent stooge knew better brower archdruid reagan unionbusting snitch sparred across decadesfirst california parks wild rivers pesticide spraying nuclear power governors brutal attacks peaceable citizens browers hometown berkeley later around globe wilderness endangered species illegal war nicaragua proliferation nuclear weapons pitched battles save worlds largest trees brower cohorts goaded reagan making infamous declaration youve seen one redwood youve seen zen koanlike pronouncement pretty much summed reagans philosophy environmental tokenism later reagan propounded thesis trees generated air pollution coalfired power plants gipper excuse nature serve backdrop photoops like intros death valley days popular western tv series served catwalk rollout reagan politician brower viewed reagan meanspirited calculating figure entirely cognizant culpable crimes refused allow old man access twin escape hatches plausible deniability senile dementia born year apart two men part generation spent lives california yet tenor lives couldnt different world war ii brower served instructor famous 10th mountain division returned home pacifist didnt talk much war experience preferring brag number sierran peaks hed bagged seventy first ascents wild rivers hed floated reagan spent world war ii hollywood making racist propaganda films inflame fever war tens thousands others would die fighting years later boasted lied liberating nazi death camps even forced defend demented decision bestow presidential honors dead cemetery bitburg germany final resting place blooddrenched butchers waffen ss reagan possessed special talent suspension disbelief came facts life perhaps earth simi valley refuses receive corpse custodians bitburg could erect cenotaph reagan chilly grounds couple hours spent draining tanqueraypowered martinis airport bar indianapolis initial glow gradually dissipated browers face know jeffrey may soon come miss old watt brower predicted right course james watt proved greatest fundraising gimmick big environmental groups ever stumbled across far outperforming panda calendars postcards baby harp seals fall victim furtraders skullcrushing club watts tenure top ten environmental groups doubled combined budgets brief time became powerful public interest lobby hill watts approach plunder planet seethed evangelical fervor brought washington gang libertarian missionaries mostly veterans coorsfunded mountain states legal foundation referred colorado crazies mission privatize public estate many transparent crooks ended facing indictment time federal prison selfdealing public corruption gave away billions public timber coal oil favored corporations leaving behind toxic scars used wild forests trout streams deserts thieves part claque racebaiting zealots demonized welfare mothers swindlers public treasury watt charged twentyfive felony counts lying obstruction justice never hid rapine agenda behind soft madeforprimetime rhetoric never preached winwin solutions ecological forestry sustainable development beginning james watts message clear grab grab god wills message highpitched unadulterated provoked fierce global resistance frustrated watt nearly every turn end achieved almost nothing forces darkness soon watts divinelyinspired vigilantism nature would replaced calculating approach kinder gentler path exploitation reached terrible crescendo clinton gore team according browers expert calculation damage american environment first four years office reagan bush father accomplished twelve years still theres reason miss watt reagan brazen contempt world inspired ordinary people rise governments leaders behalf spotted owl yellowstone grizzlyrise occasion actually rout even watts minions like steven griles gale norton directed berserker environmental policies bush younger administration didnt ride nearly tall saddle reagan watt early 1980s seemed real demons stalked earth fade black essay excerpted born bad sky jeffrey st clair author brown long looked like green politics nature grand theft pentagon newest book born bad sky published ak press counterpunch books reached sitkacomcastnet | 792 |
<p>If there’s one thing Republicans do much better than Democrats, it’s market themselves in fairly effective ways. Not because they have better ideas, but because they have a few “natural advantages” over Democrats. For example, one of the pillars of conservatism is the resistance to change, which human beings naturally tend to do.</p>
<p>But there are several other tactics Republicans use to manipulate and fool their supporters into believing blatant and ridiculous lies that are easily debunked. While I’m not going to cover all of them, here are five that I feel they’re most effective at utilizing.</p>
<p>1. They keep their talking points incredibly simple: I <a href="" type="internal">often refer to GOP rhetoric</a> as “bumper sticker politics.” If it can’t fit neatly on a bumper sticker, or be easily remembered and repeated, then it’s not going to be effective, therefore they’re unlikely to use it. Here are a few examples of what I mean:</p>
<p>There are plenty more, but you get the point. It’s a classic case of how to indoctrinate people into believing all sorts of foolish nonsense that doesn’t actually make sense.</p>
<p>2. They cherry pick outliers to fear-monger against overwhelming truth:&#160;You see this when <a href="" type="internal">they claim snow</a> proves the Earth isn’t rapidly warming when discussing climate change or they seek out negative stories from countries with universal health care. They fear-monger by exploiting&#160;exceptions to the rule, by absurdly claiming that&#160;those exceptions&#160;discredit the rule. Republicans&#160;also like to claim that any type&#160;of uncertainty is “proof” that something isn’t true. Who cares if you have overwhelming evidence, they’ll dig to find&#160;anything&#160;flawed in your argument, even if that flaw has&#160;nothing to do with the overall consensus of fact — then spin that as “proof”&#160;that your argument is wrong.</p>
<p>You’ve seen&#160;people do this to defend Trump’s ties to Russia. They’ll find one inaccurate claim that has nothing to do with the overall report concerning possible links with&#160;Russian officials, then they’ll push the idea that because that one non-important detail wasn’t 100 percent accurate, that means everything else must be inaccurate, too.</p>
<p>3. Religion: This one is very simple and straightforward. Decades ago Republicans realized that one of the easiest ways to get people to <a href="" type="internal">act against their own interests</a> is through religion. They branded themselves as the “party of the moral Christian majority,” manipulated people using their faith, and built a party supported by millions of “Christians” who support policies and beliefs that aren’t remotely in-line with the values of Jesus Christ. But because Republicans managed to basically make being a Republican and a Christian (at least in their minds) one in the same, many conservatives seem even more devoted to their political party than their religion.</p>
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<p>4. Fear is much easier to sell than hope: Even when Republicans claim they’re being hopeful, they’re pushing fear. Donald Trump’s slogan was entirely based on the idea that things are awful, we never win, and the country is a disaster. We saw historic economic growth during both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama’s presidencies. However, if you asked Republicans during those times, you’d think everything was awful. One of the key talking points Republicans constantly push is that “your values are under attack and America is being destroyed by (fill in the blank).” They almost always paint a bleak, negative picture of the world. They want conservatives to be afraid of anyone and everyone who isn’t just like them. They want their supporters to feel like the hapless victim whose values and way of life are under seize by liberals, minorities, Muslims, homosexuals, and practically anyone else they can vilify.</p>
<p>The motto of the GOP: Be afraid, be very…&#160;very&#160;afraid.</p>
<p>5. They know how to stay on the offensive: I’ll say this much, Republicans are masters at getting ahead of a message, pushing it, and staying on the offensive. By doing so, they distract their supporters from realizing that they’re “selling their ideas,” not because they actually have any, but by simply running against whatever Democrats support.</p>
<p>Look at health care, for example. For years Republicans&#160;kept ahead of Democrats by pushing the idea that “Obamacare” was everything from a “job killer” to a law that contained “death panels.” All you heard&#160;Republicans say over and over again (See #1) was they were going to “repeal and replace Obamacare.” They even shut down our government and voted over 60 times to repeal the law even though they knew they never had the power to get rid of the law.</p>
<p>However, now that they have the power to “repeal and replace Obamacare on Day 1,” like they spent years saying they were going to do, not only has the law not been repealed — but it’s clear they <a href="" type="internal">never actually had&#160;a plan to replace it</a>.</p>
<p>Yet most of their supporters don’t seem all that upset that, clearly, they were lied to for the past few years. These con artists&#160;wasted millions of taxpayer dollars&#160;on pointless repeals and a government shutdown to do something that, after finally having the power to do what they built a large part of their party’s platform on for the last several years, they’re not actually doing.</p>
<p>But that’s how Republicans operate. They spend years on the offensive, forcing Democrats to defend their ideas, distracting their voters so they don’t realize that, at the end of the day, the GOP really doesn’t have any ideas — except the same old ones rehashed in the same tired ways.</p>
<p>Again, while I could have listed many others, I’ll end it here. It’s just a shame that the GOP is so transparent in how they manipulate their supporters, yet tens of millions of conservatives don’t see that they’re being played for fools.</p>
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<p><a href="" type="internal">Bumper Sticker Politics: How Republicans Manipulate the Ignorant</a></p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">5 Stories the Media Constantly Lets Republicans Blatantly Lie About</a></p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Exposing 5 of the Biggest Lies Republicans Tell About the Economy</a></p>
<p>32 Facebook comments</p> | true | 4 | theres one thing republicans much better democrats market fairly effective ways better ideas natural advantages democrats example one pillars conservatism resistance change human beings naturally tend several tactics republicans use manipulate fool supporters believing blatant ridiculous lies easily debunked im going cover five feel theyre effective utilizing 1 keep talking points incredibly simple often refer gop rhetoric bumper sticker politics cant fit neatly bumper sticker easily remembered repeated going effective therefore theyre unlikely use examples mean plenty get point classic case indoctrinate people believing sorts foolish nonsense doesnt actually make sense 2 cherry pick outliers fearmonger overwhelming truth160you see claim snow proves earth isnt rapidly warming discussing climate change seek negative stories countries universal health care fearmonger exploiting160exceptions rule absurdly claiming that160those exceptions160discredit rule republicans160also like claim type160of uncertainty proof something isnt true cares overwhelming evidence theyll dig find160anything160flawed argument even flaw has160nothing overall consensus fact spin proof160that argument wrong youve seen160people defend trumps ties russia theyll find one inaccurate claim nothing overall report concerning possible links with160russian officials theyll push idea one nonimportant detail wasnt 100 percent accurate means everything else must inaccurate 3 religion one simple straightforward decades ago republicans realized one easiest ways get people act interests religion branded party moral christian majority manipulated people using faith built party supported millions christians support policies beliefs arent remotely inline values jesus christ republicans managed basically make republican christian least minds one many conservatives seem even devoted political party religion 4 fear much easier sell hope even republicans claim theyre hopeful theyre pushing fear donald trumps slogan entirely based idea things awful never win country disaster saw historic economic growth bill clinton barack obamas presidencies however asked republicans times youd think everything awful one key talking points republicans constantly push values attack america destroyed fill blank almost always paint bleak negative picture world want conservatives afraid anyone everyone isnt like want supporters feel like hapless victim whose values way life seize liberals minorities muslims homosexuals practically anyone else vilify motto gop afraid very160very160afraid 5 know stay offensive ill say much republicans masters getting ahead message pushing staying offensive distract supporters realizing theyre selling ideas actually simply running whatever democrats support look health care example years republicans160kept ahead democrats pushing idea obamacare everything job killer law contained death panels heard160republicans say see 1 going repeal replace obamacare even shut government voted 60 times repeal law even though knew never power get rid law however power repeal replace obamacare day 1 like spent years saying going law repealed clear never actually had160a plan replace yet supporters dont seem upset clearly lied past years con artists160wasted millions taxpayer dollars160on pointless repeals government shutdown something finally power built large part partys platform last several years theyre actually thats republicans operate spend years offensive forcing democrats defend ideas distracting voters dont realize end day gop really doesnt ideas except old ones rehashed tired ways could listed many others ill end shame gop transparent manipulate supporters yet tens millions conservatives dont see theyre played fools bumper sticker politics republicans manipulate ignorant 5 stories media constantly lets republicans blatantly lie exposing 5 biggest lies republicans tell economy 32 facebook comments | 524 |
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<p>A gathering threat from Iraq, a safe haven for Al Qaeda; stockpiles of chemical weapons in the hands of forces hostile to the United States; Iraqi terrorist groups capable of attacking American allies and even, perhaps, the homeland itself. That was the utterly false portrait of Iraq that the Bush administration painted in constructing a rationale to invade. Four and a half years later, Bush is once again touting the threat from terrorists in Iraq as the key justification for continuing the war in Iraq. But in a hideously ironic twist, what was once fiction is now a dangerous fact on the ground. The president is still wrong when he claims that withdrawal would mean “surrendering the future of Iraq to Al Qaeda”; the group’s few thousand fighters have no chance of ever taking over the entire country. But it is now deeply entrenched in Iraq and is carrying out scores of attacks each week, some of them using chemical weapons—chlorine-gas bombs. Al Qaeda has used Iraq as a training ground for thousands of jihadist terrorists, and it has said it will use its stronghold there as a base from which to attack the United States. As the nation wrestles with the question of how to execute the inevitable withdrawal, it is incumbent on all of us to ask the questions the Bush administration has not: What exactly is Al Qaeda in Iraq? How dangerous is it really, to Iraqis and to Americans? And how can it be fought or contained? Using Al Qaeda’s Iraq presence as a propaganda tool is inexcusable and irresponsible. But so is ignoring it.</p>
<p>al qaeda didn’t establish itself in Iraq until October 2004—more than 18 months after the U.S. invasion—when the notorious Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi fused his group with Osama bin Laden’s organization. Back in 2002, Zarqawi’s ragtag band of around 25 foreign fighters—mostly hardline Salafist Sunnis on the run from the authorities in Amman—had set up shop in Kurdistan under the auspices of Ansar al-Islam, a small Kurdish Islamist (and deeply anti-Saddam) group. Like bin Laden, Zarqawi had been a jihadist in Afghanistan, but he kept his distance from Al Qaeda and until 2002 sought to attack only Israeli, Jewish, and Jordanian targets—the near enemy, in jihadist parlance, not the far enemy, a.k.a. the United States. The Bush administration blithely ignored this fact when it made Zarqawi the core of its case for a “sinister nexus” between Saddam and Al Qaeda. In his infamous address to the United Nations in February 2003, Colin Powell argued that “Iraq today harbors a deadly network headed by Abu Musabal-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden.” Powell claimed that Zarqawi’s forces were operating (and getting bioweapons training) in Kurdistan with Saddam’s approval, even though the area was essentially out of Baghdad’s control thanks to the U.S.-imposed no-fly zone.</p>
<p>When the far enemy came to his terrain in 2003, however, Zarqawi did begin attacking coalition forces as well as international institutions—to devastating effect. One of the group’s bombs killed the U.N. special envoy to Iraq while another left 19 Italians dead, the two attacks together serving to deter much of the international community from getting involved in Iraq.</p>
<p>But Zarqawi’s biggest impact was in provoking sectarian warfare. On August 30, 2003, his group—still not affiliated with Al Qaeda—exploded a massive car bomb outside a Shiite mosque in Najaf. Among the 125 dead was one of Iraq’s top Shiite clerics. Then in 2004, U.S. forces released a letter they said Zarqawi had written to Al Qaeda associates in Afghanistan; though the letter’s authenticity is disputed, its content is consistent with Zarqawi’s other statements. The letter argued that getting Shiites to attack Sunnis was crucial to bolstering the Sunni insurgency because Sunnis “have little expertise or experience” in fighting and “most of the groups are working in isolation with no political horizon.</p>
<p>“The Shia in our opinion are the key to change,” it continued. “I mean that targeting them…will provoke them to show the Sunnis their hidden rancor. If we succeed in dragging them into the arena of sectarian war, it will become possible to awaken the inattentive Sunnis as they feel imminent danger and annihilating death.”</p>
<p>By this time, a closer alliance made sense to both Zarqawi and Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda wanted a foothold in the Iraqi insurgency, seeing it as the cause célèbre for jihadists worldwide, while Zarqawi presumably recognized the power of Al Qaeda’s global brand. After months of negotiations, Zarqawi released an online statement on October 17, 2004, promising obedience to Al Qaeda’s leader: “By God, O sheikh of the mujahideen, if you bid us plunge into the ocean, we would follow you. If you ordered it so, we would obey!” (Since Zarqawi’s death in June 2006, his successor, Abu Ayyub al-Masri—an Egyptian operative thought to have ties to Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s second in command—has deepened cooperation with Al Qaeda’s top leadership.)</p>
<p>Zarqawi’s strategy has, unfortunately, proved wildly successful. It was his group’s February 2006 bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, a sacred shrine for the Shiites, that tipped Iraq into full-blown civil war. As Sunnis faced growing Shiite violence, Al Qaeda in Iraq—largely made up of foreign volunteers as late as 2004—dramatically increased its local membership; it now has at least 3,000 fighters, and according to Edward Gistaro, a top U.S. intelligence official, around 90 percent are Iraqi.</p>
<p>Though smaller than most insurgent groups, Al Qaeda in Iraq—often referred to as aqi—has been punching above its weight, contributing more significantly to the bloodshed than is generally understood. Mohammed Hafez, author of the authoritative 2007 book Suicide Bombers in Iraq, says the U.S. government has counted more than 800 suicide bombings in Iraq to date; because of improvements in American armor, more and more of them are directed against Shiite civilians, and an estimated 10,000 people have been killed. The military estimates aqi has been responsible for up to 90 percent of those attacks.</p>
<p>Of all the Sunni insurgent groups, aqi is also the only one that has declared an interest in targeting Americans outside Iraq. Its current leader, al-Masri, declared last November that “we will not rest from jihad until we have blown up the White House.” Zarqawi himself believed that establishing a stronghold in Iraq would provide “strategic depth and reach” for jihadists throughout the Middle East. If that failed, he wrote in the 2004 letter, “we pack our bags and search for another land, as is the sad recurrent story in the arenas of jihad.”</p>
<p>To be sure, aqi currently poses less of a threat to the U.S. homeland than Al Qaeda Central in Pakistan—in part because Al Qaeda’s safe haven there is considerably more reliable. Inside Iraq, Al Qaeda constantly faces attack from the U.S. military, and the country’s relatively flat terrain makes it difficult to conceal training camps. The lack of operational safety has meant that only the most committed and hardcore jihadists are willing to go to Iraq, limiting aqi‘s numbers.</p>
<p>Still, it is an oversimplification to maintain that the central front of the war on terror is either in Iraq, as many Republicans insist, or on the Afghan-Pakistan border, as Democrats are fond of saying. The sad fact is that today there are two key havens for Al Qaeda: Iraq and Pakistan’s tribal areas.</p>
<p>Ironically, perhaps the most effective force working against Al Qaeda in Iraq is Al Qaeda itself. The barbaric violence, radicalism, and extreme puritanism of its recruits have turned off many Iraqi Sunnis. In some areas, aqi imposed Taliban-style restrictions on local people and kidnapped and beheaded civilians as well as fellow insurgents. Tensions between aqi and homegrown insurgent groups—composed mostly of former Iraqi Army troops and Sunni tribals—were rising as far back as 2005, when aqi intimidated Sunnis to boycott the national election.</p>
<p>In March of this year, aqi assassinated the leader of a key Sunni insurgent group, the 1920 Revolution Brigades, after he refused to pledge allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq, aqi‘s latest nom de guerre. Shortly afterward, a commander of the 1920 Brigades told the London Arabic daily Al Hayat that aqi‘s actions had “left resistance groups with two options: either to fight Al Qaeda and negotiate with the Americans, or fight the Americans and join aqi, which divides Iraq. Both options are bitter.”</p>
<p>A month later, the major insurgent group Islamic Army of Iraq issued an online communiqués condemning aqi. It is worth quoting in some detail:</p>
<p>“These people became insolent against us and wrongly and hostilely killed some mujahideen brothers from this group, more than 30 to date…Indeed, Sunnis in general have become a legitimate target for them, especially the wealthy…. Anyone who criticizes them or goes against them and demonstrates their error in such actions they try to kill…[We] appeal to Shaykh Osama Bin Laden, may God Almighty preserve him… Let him vindicate his religion and honor and take legal and organizational responsibility for the Al Qaeda organization.”</p>
<p>By this summer, various insurgent groups had formed the Jihad and Reform Front to combat aqi, and fierce fighting between insurgent and aqi forces was raging in several Baghdad neighborhoods.</p>
<p>Nowhere has this schism been more evident than in Al Anbar province, the Sunni-dominated region to the west of Baghdad whose population centers of Ramadi, Fallujah, and Haditha serve as gateways to the western desert. By the summer of 2006, aqi had become, according to a U.S. Marine intelligence report authored by Colonel Peter Devlin and obtained by the Washington Post, “the dominant organization of influence” in the province, more powerful than the Iraqi government and U.S. troops “in its ability to control the day-to-day life of the average Sunni.” It was, he wrote, “an integral part of the social fabric of western Iraq,” so deeply entrenched that there was no longer the option of defeating it with a “decapitating strike.”</p>
<p>To counter this dangerous reality, Devlin proposed creating a local paramilitary force to protect Sunnis and strengthen the police. In the months that followed, the U.S. military did just that, persuading or paying the region’s tribes to work with them in fighting aqi. They gained a crucial ally in Sheikh Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, whose father had been assassinated by aqi and who subsequently helped organize the Anbar Salvation Council, a coalition of tribal leaders opposed to aqi. (Sheikh Sattar himself was killed on September 13, with aqi taking credit.)</p>
<p>A number of offensives in November by U.S. and Iraqi troops weakened aqi and helped convince the tribes that the tide was turning; the U.S. has also promised to funnel some $300 million in aid into the region, likely through tribal sheikhs. The sheikhs in turn instructed their followers—many of them former insurgents—to join the police force, swelling its number from a paltry 3,500 in October 2006 to more than 20,000 in June of this year. Today, the “Anbar Awakening” has become Exhibit A in the Bush administration’s argument for why the war is winnable (see “ <a href="#MiracleInRamadiTable" type="external">Miracle in Ramadi?</a>“); in other words, by shooting itself in the foot, aqi has handed the White House its sole pr victory in Iraq.</p>
<p>As history shows, this kind of self-defeating behavior by radical Islamists is not uncommon. In Algeria during the 1990s, a collection of Islamist groups battled the military regime. But the radical gia soon broke away from the more moderate fis and began to target anyone who disagreed with its hardcore “takfiri” ideology, helping to precipitate a civil war that left more than 100,000 dead. By 1997 the Islamist insurgency was so fractured and unpopular that it imploded—a process accelerated by the termination of its key mouthpiece, the London-based journal Al Ansar, whose editors could no longer keep up with the infighting.</p>
<p>Yet Algeria only offers so many parallels. aqi‘s pioneering manipulation of the Internet means that it is in no danger of losing its ability to issue communiqués. Unlike the Algerian gia, aqi seems to be waking up to the fact that violent excesses such as executing ice cream vendors (because there were no sorbets at the time of the Prophet) might not be good for their cause. In a July video, Al Qaeda Central’s al-Zawahiri pointedly reminded aqi that “unity is the gateway to victory.”</p>
<p>But the most crucial difference between Iraq and Algeria is the role of sectarian conflict, which was largely nonexistent in Algeria. In Iraq, Shiite on Sunni violence legitimizes Al Qaeda’s hardline approach, and it is no coincidence that wherever sectarian conflict rages, aqi remains strong. Unfortunately, the civil war is likely to provide fuel for aqi for some time, saving it from collapsing under the weight of its own mistakes.</p>
<p>could an american withdrawal help starve Al Qaeda of oxygen? Some have argued that pulling the troops would automatically weaken the terrorist group’s power by erasing its main raison d’être. And clearly, Al Qaeda and other jihadists have benefited enormously from the occupation, which has increased their recruiting exponentially.</p>
<p>In <a href="/news/featurex/2007/03/iraq_effect_1.html" type="external">a study published in Mother Jones in March</a>, we found that the global rate of fatal jihadist attacks had increased by 265 percent outside Iraq since the March 2003 invasion. Four months later, the administration’s National Intelligence Estimate concluded that aqi “helps Al Qaeda energize the broader Sunni extremist community, raise resources, and to recruit and indoctrinate operatives, including for Homeland attacks.” aqi seems to have, among other things, developed into an effective fundraising apparatus for Al Qaeda Central, using kidnappings, oil smuggling, and other criminal activities; insurgent groups as a whole are raising up to $200 million each year, according to the U.S. military. (The 9/11 operation cost only $500,000.)</p>
<p>A rapid and total withdrawal from Iraq, however, is not going to deflate jihadist energy around the world anytime soon, whereas it will strengthen Al Qaeda in Iraq immediately, removing its top military adversary and potentially increasing the sectarian violence that drives Sunnis into its arms. Colonel Pat Lang, a former top official at the Defense Intelligence Agency who is a critic of the Bush administration (and an Arabic speaker), argues that to counter that threat the United States should leave at a minimum a force of around 30,000, including a reinforced division of around 20,000 soldiers, thousands to handle supply and logistics, and around 500 Special Forces. Others argue for an even larger contingent, in the high tens of thousands, or for accelerating U.S. aid to Sunni tribes.</p>
<p>Whatever the strategy ultimately chosen, there is no doubt that the bomb-making and urban-warfare skills developed by veterans of a jihad against the most effective fighting force in history will help sustain terrorist groups for at least a generation. This fact alone makes the Iraq War perhaps the largest strategic blunder in recent American history. But it also makes it even more vital for the United States to now pursue the right policies.</p>
<p>The Bush administration says the recent “Anbar Awakening” heralds a new way of winning in Iraq. The truth is more complicated.</p>
<p /> | true | 4 | gathering threat iraq safe al qaeda stockpiles chemical weapons hands forces hostile united states iraqi terrorist groups capable attacking american allies even perhaps homeland utterly false portrait iraq bush administration painted constructing rationale invade four half years later bush touting threat terrorists iraq key justification continuing war iraq hideously ironic twist fiction dangerous fact ground president still wrong claims withdrawal would mean surrendering future iraq al qaeda groups thousand fighters chance ever taking entire country deeply entrenched iraq carrying scores attacks week using chemical weaponschlorinegas bombs al qaeda used iraq training ground thousands jihadist terrorists said use stronghold base attack united states nation wrestles question execute inevitable withdrawal incumbent us ask questions bush administration exactly al qaeda iraq dangerous really iraqis americans fought contained using al qaedas iraq presence propaganda tool inexcusable irresponsible ignoring al qaeda didnt establish iraq october 2004more 18 months us invasionwhen notorious jordanian terrorist abu musab alzarqawi fused group osama bin ladens organization back 2002 zarqawis ragtag band around 25 foreign fightersmostly hardline salafist sunnis run authorities ammanhad set shop kurdistan auspices ansar alislam small kurdish islamist deeply antisaddam group like bin laden zarqawi jihadist afghanistan kept distance al qaeda 2002 sought attack israeli jewish jordanian targetsthe near enemy jihadist parlance far enemy aka united states bush administration blithely ignored fact made zarqawi core case sinister nexus saddam al qaeda infamous address united nations february 2003 colin powell argued iraq today harbors deadly network headed abu musabalzarqawi associate collaborator osama bin laden powell claimed zarqawis forces operating getting bioweapons training kurdistan saddams approval even though area essentially baghdads control thanks usimposed nofly zone far enemy came terrain 2003 however zarqawi begin attacking coalition forces well international institutionsto devastating effect one groups bombs killed un special envoy iraq another left 19 italians dead two attacks together serving deter much international community getting involved iraq zarqawis biggest impact provoking sectarian warfare august 30 2003 groupstill affiliated al qaedaexploded massive car bomb outside shiite mosque najaf among 125 dead one iraqs top shiite clerics 2004 us forces released letter said zarqawi written al qaeda associates afghanistan though letters authenticity disputed content consistent zarqawis statements letter argued getting shiites attack sunnis crucial bolstering sunni insurgency sunnis little expertise experience fighting groups working isolation political horizon shia opinion key change continued mean targeting themwill provoke show sunnis hidden rancor succeed dragging arena sectarian war become possible awaken inattentive sunnis feel imminent danger annihilating death time closer alliance made sense zarqawi al qaeda al qaeda wanted foothold iraqi insurgency seeing cause célèbre jihadists worldwide zarqawi presumably recognized power al qaedas global brand months negotiations zarqawi released online statement october 17 2004 promising obedience al qaedas leader god sheikh mujahideen bid us plunge ocean would follow ordered would obey since zarqawis death june 2006 successor abu ayyub almasrian egyptian operative thought ties ayman alzawahiri bin ladens second commandhas deepened cooperation al qaedas top leadership zarqawis strategy unfortunately proved wildly successful groups february 2006 bombing golden mosque samarra sacred shrine shiites tipped iraq fullblown civil war sunnis faced growing shiite violence al qaeda iraqlargely made foreign volunteers late 2004dramatically increased local membership least 3000 fighters according edward gistaro top us intelligence official around 90 percent iraqi though smaller insurgent groups al qaeda iraqoften referred aqihas punching weight contributing significantly bloodshed generally understood mohammed hafez author authoritative 2007 book suicide bombers iraq says us government counted 800 suicide bombings iraq date improvements american armor directed shiite civilians estimated 10000 people killed military estimates aqi responsible 90 percent attacks sunni insurgent groups aqi also one declared interest targeting americans outside iraq current leader almasri declared last november rest jihad blown white house zarqawi believed establishing stronghold iraq would provide strategic depth reach jihadists throughout middle east failed wrote 2004 letter pack bags search another land sad recurrent story arenas jihad sure aqi currently poses less threat us homeland al qaeda central pakistanin part al qaedas safe considerably reliable inside iraq al qaeda constantly faces attack us military countrys relatively flat terrain makes difficult conceal training camps lack operational safety meant committed hardcore jihadists willing go iraq limiting aqis numbers still oversimplification maintain central front war terror either iraq many republicans insist afghanpakistan border democrats fond saying sad fact today two key havens al qaeda iraq pakistans tribal areas ironically perhaps effective force working al qaeda iraq al qaeda barbaric violence radicalism extreme puritanism recruits turned many iraqi sunnis areas aqi imposed talibanstyle restrictions local people kidnapped beheaded civilians well fellow insurgents tensions aqi homegrown insurgent groupscomposed mostly former iraqi army troops sunni tribalswere rising far back 2005 aqi intimidated sunnis boycott national election march year aqi assassinated leader key sunni insurgent group 1920 revolution brigades refused pledge allegiance islamic state iraq aqis latest nom de guerre shortly afterward commander 1920 brigades told london arabic daily al hayat aqis actions left resistance groups two options either fight al qaeda negotiate americans fight americans join aqi divides iraq options bitter month later major insurgent group islamic army iraq issued online communiqués condemning aqi worth quoting detail people became insolent us wrongly hostilely killed mujahideen brothers group 30 dateindeed sunnis general become legitimate target especially wealthy anyone criticizes goes demonstrates error actions try killwe appeal shaykh osama bin laden may god almighty preserve let vindicate religion honor take legal organizational responsibility al qaeda organization summer various insurgent groups formed jihad reform front combat aqi fierce fighting insurgent aqi forces raging several baghdad neighborhoods nowhere schism evident al anbar province sunnidominated region west baghdad whose population centers ramadi fallujah haditha serve gateways western desert summer 2006 aqi become according us marine intelligence report authored colonel peter devlin obtained washington post dominant organization influence province powerful iraqi government us troops ability control daytoday life average sunni wrote integral part social fabric western iraq deeply entrenched longer option defeating decapitating strike counter dangerous reality devlin proposed creating local paramilitary force protect sunnis strengthen police months followed us military persuading paying regions tribes work fighting aqi gained crucial ally sheikh abdul sattar abu risha whose father assassinated aqi subsequently helped organize anbar salvation council coalition tribal leaders opposed aqi sheikh sattar killed september 13 aqi taking credit number offensives november us iraqi troops weakened aqi helped convince tribes tide turning us also promised funnel 300 million aid region likely tribal sheikhs sheikhs turn instructed followersmany former insurgentsto join police force swelling number paltry 3500 october 2006 20000 june year today anbar awakening become exhibit bush administrations argument war winnable see miracle ramadi words shooting foot aqi handed white house sole pr victory iraq history shows kind selfdefeating behavior radical islamists uncommon algeria 1990s collection islamist groups battled military regime radical gia soon broke away moderate fis began target anyone disagreed hardcore takfiri ideology helping precipitate civil war left 100000 dead 1997 islamist insurgency fractured unpopular implodeda process accelerated termination key mouthpiece londonbased journal al ansar whose editors could longer keep infighting yet algeria offers many parallels aqis pioneering manipulation internet means danger losing ability issue communiquÃs unlike algerian gia aqi seems waking fact violent excesses executing ice cream vendors sorbets time prophet might good cause july video al qaeda centrals alzawahiri pointedly reminded aqi unity gateway victory crucial difference iraq algeria role sectarian conflict largely nonexistent algeria iraq shiite sunni violence legitimizes al qaedas hardline approach coincidence wherever sectarian conflict rages aqi remains strong unfortunately civil war likely provide fuel aqi time saving collapsing weight mistakes could american withdrawal help starve al qaeda oxygen argued pulling troops would automatically weaken terrorist groups power erasing main raison dêtre clearly al qaeda jihadists benefited enormously occupation increased recruiting exponentially study published mother jones march found global rate fatal jihadist attacks increased 265 percent outside iraq since march 2003 invasion four months later administrations national intelligence estimate concluded aqi helps al qaeda energize broader sunni extremist community raise resources recruit indoctrinate operatives including homeland attacks aqi seems among things developed effective fundraising apparatus al qaeda central using kidnappings oil smuggling criminal activities insurgent groups whole raising 200 million year according us military 911 operation cost 500000 rapid total withdrawal iraq however going deflate jihadist energy around world anytime soon whereas strengthen al qaeda iraq immediately removing top military adversary potentially increasing sectarian violence drives sunnis arms colonel pat lang former top official defense intelligence agency critic bush administration arabic speaker argues counter threat united states leave minimum force around 30000 including reinforced division around 20000 soldiers thousands handle supply logistics around 500 special forces others argue even larger contingent high tens thousands accelerating us aid sunni tribes whatever strategy ultimately chosen doubt bombmaking urbanwarfare skills developed veterans jihad effective fighting force history help sustain terrorist groups least generation fact alone makes iraq war perhaps largest strategic blunder recent american history also makes even vital united states pursue right policies bush administration says recent anbar awakening heralds new way winning iraq truth complicated | 1,476 |
<p>Last Sunday’s <a href="" type="internal">New York Times</a> front page carried a front story about a statue that honored New Mexico’s Spanish “founder” and discussing the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.</p>
<p>When I visited Santa Fe a decade earlier I came upon a statue relating to the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 by honoring the conquistador who suppressed it. This was my response.</p>
<p>During a May 2009 visit to Santa Fe, which was eagerly preparing to celebrate its four hundredth anniversary, I met the official planners of the event. I also met with the executive board of the NAACP and representatives of Native American cultural organizations. I learned that the white organizers were planning a celebration when local people of color persuaded them it should also be a commemoration.</p>
<p>I accidentally learned even more one day as I sat in a small Santa Fe park waiting for the Native American Art Museum across the street to open.</p>
<p>The park’s statue and plaque celebrated a leading figure in the 1680 Pueblo revolt that overthrew Spanish colonial rule. This revolt was no minor event for the city, the southwest, and Spain’s claims in North America. As Spanish conquistadores penetrated the southwest, enslaved Africans among them escaped whenever they could. The Navaho, Apache, Ute, and the western Pueblo— which included Hopi and Zuni Nations—welcomed those who deserted the conquerors, and found Africans had much to offer.</p>
<p>Resentment grew in the southwest as Spain’s missionaries undermined Pueblo culture, and its officials ordered the execution of Pueblo priests. In 1650 and 1667, Pueblo villages erupted in violence. Then in 1675, Spain provoked a crisis with a public hanging of three Pueblo priests and whipping forty-three others. One of those whipped was Popé, an elderly Tewa and charismatic medicine man devoted to his people. He also proved to be a master of military tactics. With a small band of officers he planned a broad-based, massive rising.</p>
<p>In a sacred room at Taos, Popé and his commanders spent five years plotting to overthrow Spanish rule, end Christianity, and return to ancient ways. One of his African commander’s was Domingo Naranjo, described as “very tall, black with very large, yellow eyes.” Their recruits, seventeen thousand fighters from dozens of villages spread over more than hundreds of miles, included young men like Naranjo who were born of African-Pueblo marriages. Since his troops spoke six different languages and many dialects, Popé’s officers created a unique communication system based on tying knots in ropes.</p>
<p>In August 1680 a thousand soldiers bearing muskets, swords, and knives launched Popé’s Revolt and were followed by unarmed men ready to seize arms from fallen Europeans. Spanish missionaries, settlers, and soldiers fled to Santa Fe with stories of burning homes, murdered ranch families, and fields set afire. Jubilant rebels surrounded Santa Fe—some on horses, others on foot, many waving weapons, dancing exuberantly, and yelling defiance.</p>
<p>Although Spanish governor Antonio de Otermín claimed Pueblo forces “burned the holy temple and many houses,” Popé opposed massacres, and his field commanders rejected random violence. The rebels generously granted thousands of Spaniards safe passage from Santa Fe.</p>
<p>Once in control of the region, Popé’s forces took careful aim at Christian symbols. Pueblos marched from village to village destroying Christian religious and cultural artifacts. They killed twenty-one of thirty-three priests, set fire to churches, and buried holy icons in manure. Pueblo families renounced their baptismal names and some leaped into streams to wash away Christian holy oils. Farmers promised not to grow European crops. A document by Commander Naranjo revealed how Popé instructed villagers to “break the lands and enlarge their cultivated fields . . . [as] in ancient times. He said that this is the legitimate cause and the reason they had for rebelling. . . . They had always desired to live as they had. . . .”</p>
<p>The Revolt of 1680 led to years of Pueblo self-rule. But then Popé died, and his followers were crushed by Spain’s troops and native allies.</p>
<p>The statue and plaque (erected in 1956) in the park did not celebrate Popé, Commander Naranjo, other Pueblo officers, nor even the July Fourth nature of this stunning victory for liberty and self-determination. It celebrated New Mexico governor Diego de Vargas. The plaque described Vargas as “a devout Christian with a strong devotion to Nuestra Señora, La Conquistadora, Our Lady of Peace.” It praised his “accomplishments,” “competency and talent,” and his “remarkable reconciliation with Pueblo Indian leaders” that “forged a lasting peace that has endured for more than three hundred years.”</p>
<p>Governor Vargas undoubtedly played a crucial role during those years. But The Journals of don Diego de Vargas reveals a different person and story. In 1692, Vargas led the Spanish armies that overthrew the Pueblo revolt. He ordered the execution of seventy leaders and sentenced four hundred men and women to slavery. Then he initiated his own dictatorship. In 1696 fourteen Pueblo villages united again, this time to overthrow their new tyrant.</p>
<p>Governor Vargas again prevailed and conducted a deadly retribution one historian has described as “unmerciful, thorough and prolonged.”</p>
<p>Governor Diego de Vargas deserves recognition only if our American standard is unremittingly violent, ruthless, and sys- tematic opposition to the ideals of Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and Ben Franklin. If a twenty-first-century democracy still celebrates men who battled those who bravely sought freedom and justice, new thinking is needed. &#160;When monuments, schools, and textbooks heap admiring words on a long dead and dishonored slaveholding elite or Indian-fighting class, children are being taught the wrong lessons.</p> | true | 4 | last sundays new york times front page carried front story statue honored new mexicos spanish founder discussing pueblo revolt 1680 visited santa fe decade earlier came upon statue relating pueblo revolt 1680 honoring conquistador suppressed response may 2009 visit santa fe eagerly preparing celebrate four hundredth anniversary met official planners event also met executive board naacp representatives native american cultural organizations learned white organizers planning celebration local people color persuaded also commemoration accidentally learned even one day sat small santa fe park waiting native american art museum across street open parks statue plaque celebrated leading figure 1680 pueblo revolt overthrew spanish colonial rule revolt minor event city southwest spains claims north america spanish conquistadores penetrated southwest enslaved africans among escaped whenever could navaho apache ute western pueblo included hopi zuni nationswelcomed deserted conquerors found africans much offer resentment grew southwest spains missionaries undermined pueblo culture officials ordered execution pueblo priests 1650 1667 pueblo villages erupted violence 1675 spain provoked crisis public hanging three pueblo priests whipping fortythree others one whipped popé elderly tewa charismatic medicine man devoted people also proved master military tactics small band officers planned broadbased massive rising sacred room taos popé commanders spent five years plotting overthrow spanish rule end christianity return ancient ways one african commanders domingo naranjo described tall black large yellow eyes recruits seventeen thousand fighters dozens villages spread hundreds miles included young men like naranjo born africanpueblo marriages since troops spoke six different languages many dialects popés officers created unique communication system based tying knots ropes august 1680 thousand soldiers bearing muskets swords knives launched popés revolt followed unarmed men ready seize arms fallen europeans spanish missionaries settlers soldiers fled santa fe stories burning homes murdered ranch families fields set afire jubilant rebels surrounded santa fesome horses others foot many waving weapons dancing exuberantly yelling defiance although spanish governor antonio de otermín claimed pueblo forces burned holy temple many houses popé opposed massacres field commanders rejected random violence rebels generously granted thousands spaniards safe passage santa fe control region popés forces took careful aim christian symbols pueblos marched village village destroying christian religious cultural artifacts killed twentyone thirtythree priests set fire churches buried holy icons manure pueblo families renounced baptismal names leaped streams wash away christian holy oils farmers promised grow european crops document commander naranjo revealed popé instructed villagers break lands enlarge cultivated fields ancient times said legitimate cause reason rebelling always desired live revolt 1680 led years pueblo selfrule popé died followers crushed spains troops native allies statue plaque erected 1956 park celebrate popé commander naranjo pueblo officers even july fourth nature stunning victory liberty selfdetermination celebrated new mexico governor diego de vargas plaque described vargas devout christian strong devotion nuestra señora la conquistadora lady peace praised accomplishments competency talent remarkable reconciliation pueblo indian leaders forged lasting peace endured three hundred years governor vargas undoubtedly played crucial role years journals diego de vargas reveals different person story 1692 vargas led spanish armies overthrew pueblo revolt ordered execution seventy leaders sentenced four hundred men women slavery initiated dictatorship 1696 fourteen pueblo villages united time overthrow new tyrant governor vargas prevailed conducted deadly retribution one historian described unmerciful thorough prolonged governor diego de vargas deserves recognition american standard unremittingly violent ruthless sys tematic opposition ideals patrick henry thomas jefferson ben franklin twentyfirstcentury democracy still celebrates men battled bravely sought freedom justice new thinking needed 160when monuments schools textbooks heap admiring words long dead dishonored slaveholding elite indianfighting class children taught wrong lessons | 579 |
<p>Photo Credit: via youtube</p>
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<p>As Iraq was unraveling last week and the possible outlines of the first jihadist state in modern history were coming into view, I remembered this nugget from the summer of 2002.&#160; At the time, journalist Ron Suskind had a meeting with “a senior advisor” to President George W. Bush (later&#160; <a href="https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/speech/danner.htm" type="external">identified</a>&#160;as Karl Rove).&#160; Here’s how he&#160; <a href="//www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html" type="external">described</a>&#160;part of their conversation:</p>
<p>“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off.&#160; ‘That's not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued.&#160; ‘We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’”</p>
<p>As events unfold increasingly chaotically across the region that officials of the Bush years liked to call the Greater Middle East, consider the eerie accuracy of that statement.&#160; The president, his vice president Dick Cheney, his defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and his national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, among others, were indeed “history’s actors.” &#160;They did create “new realities” and, just as Rove suggested, the rest of us are now left to “study” what they did.&#160;</p>
<p>And oh, what they did!&#160; Their geopolitical dreams couldn’t have been grander or more global.&#160; (Let’s avoid the word "megalomaniacal.")&#160; They expected to pacify the Greater Middle East,&#160; <a href="//www.tomdispatch.com/post/174807/" type="external">garrison</a>&#160;Iraq for generations, make Syria and Iran bow down before American power, " <a href="//www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1357781/US-asks-Nato-for-help-in-draining-the-swamp-of-global-terrorism.html" type="external">drain</a>" the global "swamp" of terrorists, and create a global&#160;Pax Americana&#160;based on a military so dominant that no other country or bloc of countries would ever challenge it.</p>
<p>It was quite a dream and none of it, not one smidgen, came true.&#160; Just as Rove suggested they would -- just as in the summer of 2002, he&#160; <a href="//www.nytimes.com/2002/09/07/nyregion/quotation-of-the-day-766518.html" type="external">already knew</a>&#160;they would -- they acted to create a world in their image, a world they imagined controlling like no imperial power in history.&#160; Using that unchallengeable military, they launched an invasion that blew a hole through the oil heartlands of the Middle East.&#160; They took a major capital, Baghdad, while “ <a href="//www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1212-01.htm" type="external">decapitating</a>” (as the phrase then went) the regime that was running Iraq and had, in a particularly brutal fashion, kept the lid on internecine tensions.</p>
<p>They lacked nothing when it came to confidence.&#160; Among the first moves of L. Paul Bremer III, the proconsul they appointed to run their occupation, was an order&#160; <a href="//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_Provisional_Authority_Order_2" type="external">demobilizing</a>&#160;Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein’s&#160; <a href="//www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/05/23/sprj.nitop.army.dissolve/" type="external">350,000-man army</a>&#160;and the rest of his military as well.&#160; Their plan: to replace it with a lightly armed border protection force -- initially of 12,000 troops and in the end perhaps&#160; <a href="//www.nytimes.com/2003/06/24/world/after-war-new-army-us-british-project-build-postwar-iraqi-armed-force-40000.html" type="external">40,000</a>&#160;-- armed and trained by Washington.&#160; Given their vision of the world, it made total sense.&#160; Why would Iraq need more than that with the U.S. military hanging around for, well, ever, on a series of permanent bases the Pentagon's contractors were building?&#160; What dangers could there be in the neighborhood with that kind of force on hand?&#160; Soon enough, it became clear that what they had really done was turn the Iraqi officer corps and most of the country’s troops out onto unemployment lines, creating the basis for a militarily skilled Sunni insurgency.&#160; A brilliant start!</p>
<p>Note that these days the news is filled with commentary on the lack of a functional Iraqi air force.&#160; That’s why, in recent months, Prime Minister Maliki has been&#160; <a href="//www.nytimes.com/2014/06/12/world/middleeast/iraq-asked-us-for-airstrikes-on-militants-officials-say.html" type="external">calling on</a>&#160;the Obama administration to send American air power back into the breach.&#160; Saddam Hussein did have an air force.&#160; Once it had been one of the biggest in the Middle East.&#160; The Bush administration, however, came to the conclusion that the new Iraqi military would have&#160; <a href="//www.tomdispatch.com/post/175106/tom_engelhardt_biking_out_or_Iraq" type="external">no need</a>&#160;for fighter planes, helicopters, or much of anything else, not when the U.S. Air Force would be in the neighborhood on&#160; <a href="//www.tomdispatch.com/post/174807/" type="external">bases</a>&#160;like Balad in Central Iraq.&#160; Who needed two air forces?</p>
<p>Be Careful What You Wish For</p>
<p>It was all to be a kind of war-fighting miracle. The American invaders would be greeted as liberators, the mission quickly accomplished,&#160;and “major combat operations” ended in a flash -- as George Bush so infamously&#160; <a href="//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Accomplished_speech" type="external">announced</a>&#160;on May 1, 2003, after his&#160; <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=landing,+USS+abraham+lincoln,+bush&amp;client=firefox-a&amp;hs=Nue&amp;rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&amp;channel=sb&amp;source=lnms&amp;tbm=isch&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=F06fU9GQEvi-sQSjs4CwAg&amp;ved=0CAgQ_AUoAQ&amp;biw=1920&amp;bih=923#facrc=_&amp;imgdii=_&amp;imgrc=QH9qLEMTGuByoM%253A%3BHWTDrj3tqy9JCM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fmedia3.washingtonpost.com%252Fwp-srv%252Fphoto%252Fgallery%252F101104%252FGAL-10Nov04-6320%252Fmedia%252FPHO-10Nov04-266045.jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.washingtonpost.com%252Fwp-dyn%252Fcontent%252Fgallery%252F2010%252F11%252F05%252FGA2010110502574.html%3B817%3B1024" type="external">Top Gun landing</a>&#160;on the deck of the USS&#160;Abraham Lincoln.&#160; No less miraculous was the fact that it would essentially be a freebie.&#160; After all, as undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz&#160; <a href="//www.tomdispatch.com/post/22859/michael_klare_on_iraq_s_missing_sea_of_oil" type="external">pointed out</a>&#160;at the time, Iraq “floats on a sea of oil,” which meant that a “liberated” country could cover all “reconstruction” costs without blinking.</p>
<p>The Busheviks entered Iraq with a powerful sense that they were building an American protectorate.&#160; So why wouldn't it be a snap to carry out their ambitious plans to privatize the Iraqi economy, dismantle the country’s vast public sector (throwing another army of employees out of work), and bring in crony corporations to help run the country and giant oil companies to rev up the energy economy, lagging from years of sanctions and ill-repair?&#160; In the end, Washington’s Iraq would -- so they believed -- pump enough crude out of one of the greatest fossil fuel reserves on the planet to sink OPEC, leaving American power free to float to ever greater heights on that sea of oil.&#160; As the occupying authority, with a hubris stunning to behold, they issued “orders” that&#160; <a href="//www.tomdispatch.com/post/174840" type="external">read</a>&#160;as if they had been written by officials from some nineteenth-century imperial power.</p>
<p>In short, this was one for the history books. And not a thing --&#160;nothing&#160;-- worked out as planned.&#160; You could almost say that whatever it was they dreamed, the opposite invariably occurred.&#160; For those of us in the reality-based community, for instance, it’s long been apparent that their war and occupation would cost the U.S., literally and figuratively, an arm and a leg (and that the costs to Iraqis would prove beyond calculating).&#160; More than&#160; <a href="//www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/14/us-iraq-war-anniversary-idUSBRE92D0PG20130314" type="external">two trillion dollars</a>&#160;later -- without figuring in astronomical post-war costs still to come -- Iraq is a catastrophe.</p>
<p>And&#160; <a href="//www.nytimes.com/2014/06/13/world/middleeast/american-intelligence-officials-said-iraqi-military-had-been-in-decline.html" type="external">$25 billion</a>&#160;later, the last vestige of American Iraq, the security forces that, in the end, Washington built up to&#160; <a href="//www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/06/13/billions-spent-thousands-lives-lost-us-investment-in-training-iraqi-forces/" type="external">massive proportions</a>, seem to be in a state of dissolution.&#160; Just over a week ago, faced with the advance of a reported&#160; <a href="//www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/11/mosul-isis-gunmen-middle-east-states" type="external">800</a>- <a href="//www.independent.co.uk/voices/iraq-crisis-capture-of-mosul-ushers-in-the-birth-of-a-sunni-caliphate-9530600.html" type="external">1,300</a>&#160;militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and the opposition of tribal militias and local populations, close to <a href="//www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/13/baghdad-faces-the-abyss-after-its-military-melts-away" type="external">50,000</a>&#160;army officers and troops&#160; <a href="//www.washingtonpost.com/world/insurgents-seize-iraqi-city-of-mosul-as-troops-flee/2014/06/10/21061e87-8fcd-4ed3-bc94-0e309af0a674_story.html" type="external">abandoned</a>&#160;their American weaponry to Sunni insurgents and foreign jihadis, shed their uniforms by various roadsides, and fled.&#160; As a result, significant parts of Iraq, including Mosul, its second largest city, fell into the hands of Sunni insurgents, <a href="//www.nytimes.com/2014/06/19/world/middleeast/former-loyalists-of-saddam-hussein-crucial-in-helping-isis.html" type="external">some</a>&#160;of a&#160; <a href="//warincontext.org/2014/06/12/the-isis-baathist-alliance/" type="external">Saddamist coloration</a>, and a small army of jihadis evidently&#160; <a href="//www.commondreams.org/view/2014/06/13-7" type="external">funded</a>&#160;by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, both U.S. allies.</p>
<p>The arrogance of those occupation years should still take anyone’s breath away. Bush and his top officials remade reality on an almost unimaginable scale and, as we study the region today, the results bear no relation to the world they imagined creating. &#160;None whatsoever.&#160; On the other hand, there were two dreams they had that, after a fashion, did come into existence.</p>
<p>Many Americans still remember the Bush administration’s bogus pre-invasion&#160; <a href="//www.tomdispatch.com/post/9301/%20jim_lobe_on_timing_the_cheney_nuclear_drumbeat" type="external">claims</a>&#160;-- complete with visions of mushroom clouds&#160; <a href="//transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0209/08/le.00.html" type="external">rising</a>&#160;over American cities -- that Saddam Hussein had a thriving nuclear program in Iraq.&#160; But who remembers that, as part of the justification for the invasion it had decided would be its destiny, the administration also&#160; <a href="//news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6533367.stm" type="external">claimed</a>&#160;a “mature and symbiotic” relationship between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and al-Qaeda? &#160;In other words, the invasion was to be justified in some fashion as a response to the attacks of 9/11 (which Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with).&#160; Who remembers that, the year after American troops took Baghdad, evidence of the nuclear program having gone down the toilet, Vice President Dick Cheney,&#160; <a href="//www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2004/06/16/bush_backs_cheney_on_assertion_linking_hussein_al_qaeda/?page=full" type="external">backed</a>&#160;by George W. Bush, doubled down on the al-Qaeda claim?</p>
<p>"There clearly was a relationship. It's been testified to,"&#160; <a href="//www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/06/18/cheney.iraq.al.qaeda/" type="external">said</a>&#160;the vice president on CNBC in June 2004. "The evidence is overwhelming.&#160; It goes back to the early '90s. It involves a whole series of contacts, high-level contacts with Osama bin Laden and Iraqi intelligence officials." Based on cherry-picked intelligence, such claims proved fraudulent, too, or as David Kay, the man assigned by the administration to hunt down that missing weaponry of mass destruction and those al-Qaeda links, put it politely, "evidence free."&#160; By then, however, 57% of Americans had been convinced that there was indeed some significant relationship between Saddam’s Iraq and al-Qaeda, and 20% believed that Saddam was linked directly to the 9/11 attacks.</p>
<p>Be careful, as they say, what you wish for.&#160; More than a decade after its invasion and occupation, after Cheney made those fervent claims, no administration would have the slightest problem linking al-Qaeda to Iraq (or Syria, Yemen, or a number of other countries).&#160; A decade later, the evidence is in.&#160; Sunni Iraq, along with areas of neighboring Syria, one of the countries that was supposed to bow down before American might, now houses a rudimentary jihadist state, a creature birthed into the world in significant part thanks to the dreams and fantasies of the visionaries of the Bush administration.&#160; Across the Greater Middle East, jihadism and al-Qaeda wannabes of every sort are on the rise, while terror groups are destabilizing regions from Pakistan to northern Africa.</p>
<p>Creating an Arc of Instability</p>
<p>In the period before and after the invasion of Iraq, top Bush officials and their neocon supporters spoke with relish about taming an area stretching from northern Africa through the Middle East and deep into Central Asia that they termed an “arc of instability.”&#160; In a February 2006 address to the American Legion focused on his Global War on Terror, for instance, President Bush&#160; <a href="//2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ei/wh/rem/62075.htm" type="external">typically said</a>, “Slowly but surely, we're helping to transform the broader Middle East from an arc of instability into an arc of freedom. And as freedom reaches more people in this vital region, we'll have new allies in the war on terror, and new partners in the cause of moderation in the Muslim world and in the cause of peace.”</p>
<p>By then that “arc,” which in the period before 9/11 had been reasonably stable, was already&#160; <a href="//www.tomdispatch.com/post/101850/engelhardt_bush%27s_faith" type="external">aflame</a>.&#160; Today, it is ablaze.&#160; Almost 13 years after the launching of the Global War on Terror and the first bombing runs in Afghanistan, 11 years after a global antiwar protest went unheard and the invasion of Iraq was launched, and three years after Americans gathered in front of the White House to&#160; <a href="//www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/Live-Video-Crowds-Gather-Outside-White-House-121066754.html" type="external">cheer</a>&#160;the&#160; <a href="//www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175388/engelhardt_Osama_dead_and_alive" type="external">death</a>&#160;of Osama bin Laden, that arc has been destabilized in a stunning way.</p>
<p>As things recently went from bad to worse in Iraq, jihadist militants in Pakistan&#160; <a href="//online.wsj.com/articles/karachi-attack-shows-global-reach-of-jihadists-1402503881" type="external">attacked</a>&#160;Karachi International Airport, an assault that stunned the country and suggested that the reach of the Pakistani Taliban was growing.&#160; At the same time, after a six-month pause, the Obama administration&#160; <a href="//www.thenews.com.pk/Todays-News-6-256108-What-made-CIA-resume-drone-attacks" type="external">resumed</a>&#160;its CIA drone assassination campaign in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, a deeply unpopular program that has been a significant destabilizing factor in its own right.&#160; Meanwhile, in Yemen, where the U.S. has for years been conducting a special operations and drone war against a growing al-Qaeda wannabe outfit, unknown militants&#160; <a href="//uk.reuters.com/article/2014/06/11/yemen-energy-protests-idUKL5N0OS28K20140611" type="external">knocked out</a>&#160;the electricity in Sanaa, the capital, for days.&#160; The Syrian bloodbath, of course, continues with estimates of&#160; <a href="//www.cbc.ca/news/world/syria-war-death-toll-tops-160-000-1.2647285" type="external">160,000</a>&#160;or more deaths in that multi-sided conflict, while in Libya, now an essentially ungovernable and chaotic land of jihadist and other militias and ambitious generals, tensions and fighting increased.</p>
<p>Think of this as George W. Bush’s nightmare and Osama bin Laden’s wet dream.&#160; On September 11, 2001, a relatively small, modestly funded organization with a knack for planning terror surprises every couple of years had a remarkable stroke of&#160; <a href="//www.tomdispatch.com/post/118775/9_11_an_explosion_out_of_the_towering_inferno_" type="external">televised luck</a>.&#160; From those falling towers, everything followed, thanks in large part to the acts of the fundamentalists of the Bush administration, whose top officials thought they had spotted their main chance, geopolitically speaking, in the carnage of the moment.</p>
<p>Almost 13 years later, there is a jihadist proto-state, a fantasy caliphate, in the heart of the Middle East.&#160; Now a&#160; <a href="//online.wsj.com/articles/seth-jones-the-accelerating-spread-of-terrorism-1401837824" type="external">dime a dozen</a>&#160;in the region, jihadists of an al-Qaedan bent are armed to the teeth with&#160; <a href="//www.nytimes.com/2014/06/11/world/middleeast/mosul-iraq-militants-seize-us-weapons.html" type="external">cast-off American weaponry</a>.&#160; In&#160; <a href="//www.washingtonpost.com/world/libyan-weapons-flooded-egypts-black-weapons-market/2011/10/12/gIQA2YQufL_story.html" type="external">northern Africa</a>, other jihadists are using weaponry from the former arsenals of Libyan autocrat Muammar Gaddafi, looted in the aftermath of President Obama’s can’t-miss 2011 intervention in that country.&#160; The jihadists of ISIS now have hundreds of millions of dollars&#160; <a href="//www.ibtimes.co.uk/mosul-seized-jihadis-loot-429m-citys-central-bank-make-isis-worlds-richest-terror-force-1452190" type="external">stolen</a>&#160;from the Mosul branch of the Iraqi central bank for funding and have advanced toward Baghdad.&#160; Even Osama bin Laden might not have assumed things would go quite so swimmingly.</p>
<p>The Guns of Folly</p>
<p>In the wake of Mosul's fall, ISIS advanced even more rapidly than the American army heading for Baghdad in the spring of 2003. &#160;In some Sunni-dominated cities and towns, the takeovers were remarkably bloodless.&#160; In Baiji, with a power plant that supplies electricity to Baghdad and Iraq’s&#160; <a href="//www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/11/iraq-mosul-militants_n_5483570.html" type="external">largest oil refinery</a>&#160;(now&#160; <a href="//www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/18/isis-fighters-iraq-oil-refinery-baiji" type="external">under attack</a>), the insurgents reportedly&#160; <a href="//www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/iraq-crisis-500000-forced-to-flee-mosul-after-islamist-militants-take-control-9526838.html" type="external">called</a>the police and asked them to leave town -- and they complied.&#160; In Kirkuk, a city in northern Iraq that the Kurds have long claimed as the natural capital for an independent Kurdistan, Iraqi troops quietly abandoned their weaponry and uniforms and left town, while armed Kurdish forces moved in, undoubtedly permanently.</p>
<p>All in all, it’s been a debacle the likes of which we’ve seen only twice in our history.&#160; In China, when in 1949 Chiang Kai-shek’s largely American armed and trained military disintegrated before the insurgent forces of Communist leader Mao Zedong and a quarter-century later, when a purely American military creation, the South Vietnamese army, collapsed in the face of an offensive by North Vietnamese troops and local rebel forces.&#160; In each case, the resulting defeat was psychologically unnerving in the United States and led to bitter, exceedingly strange, and long-lasting debates about who “lost” China and who “lost” Vietnam.</p>
<p>Early signs of an equally bizarre debate over the “loss” of Iraq are already appearing here. &#160;This should surprise no one, as the only thing left to pass around is blame.&#160; Senator John McCain, a fervent supporter of the 2003 invasion and occupation, launched the most recent round of the&#160; <a href="//www.politico.com/story/2014/06/john-mccain-iraq-criticize-barack-obama-107780.html" type="external">blame game</a>. He pinned fault for the onrushing events on the Obama administration’s decision to pull U.S. forces out of Iraq in 2011 (thanks to an agreement negotiated by the Bush administration) without leaving a significant presence behind.&#160; Citing himself as if he were someone else, he said, “Lindsey Graham and John McCain were right.&#160; Our failure to leave forces in Iraq is why Senator Graham and I predicted this would happen.”</p>
<p>Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri was typical of the Republican politicians who began promoting this line. &#160;“It’s a desperate situation,” he said. “It’s moving quickly. It appears to me that the chickens are coming home to roost for our policy of not leaving anybody there to be a stabilizing force.” &#160;In a similar blast, the&#160;Wall Street Journal&#160;editorial page&#160; <a href="//online.wsj.com/articles/the-fall-of-mosul-1402442628" type="external">wrote</a>, “In withdrawing from Iraq in toto, Mr. Obama put his desire to have a talking point for his re-election campaign above America's strategic interests. Now we and the world are facing this reality: A civil war in Iraq and the birth of a terrorist haven that has the confidence, and is fast acquiring the means, to raise a banner for a new generation of jihadists, both in Iraq and beyond.”</p>
<p>And so it goes.&#160; In this case, however, none of it may matter much.&#160; In a country visibly sick of our wars of this century in which even many elite figures find further intervention in Iraq distasteful, “Who lost Iraq?” may never gain the sort of traction the other two “lost” debates did.</p>
<p>In the meantime, however, the world of the Middle East is being turned upside down.&#160; Take the example of Iran.&#160; Once upon a time, Iraq was thought to be just a way station.&#160; As neocons of that moment liked to&#160; <a href="//www.nytimes.com/2003/03/18/opinion/things-to-come.html" type="external">quip</a>, “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad.&#160; Real men want to go to Tehran.”&#160; As it happened, the neighborhood around Baghdad quickly grew so ugly and the Bush administration soon found itself so bogged down in unwinnable minority insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan that it never put the U.S. military on that road to Tehran.</p>
<p>Today, the Iranians, it seems, are riding to Washington’s rescue in Iraq.&#160; It's already&#160; <a href="//online.wsj.com/articles/iran-deploys-forces-to-fight-al-qaeda-inspired-militants-in-iraq-iranian-security-sources-1402592470" type="external">rumored</a>&#160;that they may be sending, or considering sending, elements of the Republican Guard in to protect Baghdad.&#160; As a result, the U.S. finds itself in a tacit alliance with Iran in Iraq, while still in opposition to it in Syria.&#160; At the same time, it's still allied with Saudi Arabia in Syria against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, while facing the disastrous fruits of Saudi funding of the&#160; <a href="//www.nytimes.com/2014/06/16/world/middleeast/iraq.html" type="external">brutal</a>&#160;newborn jihadi state at least temporarily coming into existence in the Sunni borderlands of Iraq and Syria.</p>
<p>The Middle Eastern system as once known has, with the singular exception of Israel, largely evaporated and where it was, there is now increasingly chaos.&#160; In all likelihood, it will only get worse.&#160; “We” may not have “lost” Iraq, but can there be any question that Washington lost in Iraq?&#160; American goals in the region went down in flames in a fashion so spectacular, so ignominious, that today nothing is left of them.&#160; To the question, “Who won Iraq?” there may be no answer at all, or perhaps just the grim response: no one.&#160; In the end, Iraqis will surely be the losers, big time, as Syrians are just across the now nonexistent border between what until recently were two countries.</p>
<p>As for the future Washington has on offer, the Obama administration is, it seems,&#160; <a href="//www.reuters.com/article/2014/06/16/us-iraq-security-idUSKBN0EP0KJ20140616" type="external">considering</a>&#160;responding to the crisis in Iraq in the&#160; <a href="//www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175854/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_a_record_of_unparalleled_failure/" type="external">only way</a>&#160;it knows how: with&#160; <a href="//www.nbcnews.com/storyline/iraq-turmoil/u-s-aircraft-carrier-cruiser-destroyer-arrive-persian-gulf-n131596" type="external">bombs</a>, cruise missiles, and drones.&#160; The geopolitical dreams of the Bush era are buried somewhere deep in the rubble of Iraq, while the present White House has neither visionaries nor global dreams, grandiose or otherwise.&#160; There are only managers and bureaucrats desperately trying to handle an uncooperative planet.&#160; The question that remains is: Will they or won’t they send American air power back into Iraq?&#160; Will they or won’t they, that is, loose the guns of folly and so quite predictably destabilize a terrible situation further?</p>
<p>In the meantime, a small footnote to future history: given what we’ve just seen, it might be worth taking with a grain of salt the&#160; <a href="//www.armytimes.com/article/20140601/NEWS05/306010016/Hagel-discuss-progress-Afghanistan-forces" type="external">news</a>&#160;out of Afghanistan about the&#160; <a href="//online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304361604579288413792632566" type="external">increasingly</a>&#160;impressive&#160; <a href="//www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=122151" type="external">abilities</a>&#160;of the Afghan security forces, another gigantic crew set up, funded, trained, and armed by the U.S. military (and associated private contractors).&#160; After all, haven’t we heard that somewhere before?</p>
<p>Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the <a href="http://www.americanempireproject.com/" type="external">American Empire Project</a> and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/155849586X/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20" type="external">The End of Victory Culture</a>. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/" type="external">TomDispatch.com</a>. His latest book is <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1608463656/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20" type="external">Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World</a>.</p> | true | 4 | photo credit via youtube stay top important articles like sign receive latest updates tomdispatchcom160 iraq unraveling last week possible outlines first jihadist state modern history coming view remembered nugget summer 2002160 time journalist ron suskind meeting senior advisor president george w bush later160 identified160as karl rove160 heres he160 described160part conversation aide said guys like call realitybased community defined people believe solutions emerge judicious study discernible reality nodded murmured something enlightenment principles empiricism cut off160 thats way world really works anymore continued160 empire act create reality youre studying reality judiciously well act creating new realities study thats things sort historys actors left study events unfold increasingly chaotically across region officials bush years liked call greater middle east consider eerie accuracy statement160 president vice president dick cheney defense secretary donald rumsfeld national security adviser condoleezza rice among others indeed historys actors 160they create new realities rove suggested rest us left study did160 oh did160 geopolitical dreams couldnt grander global160 lets avoid word megalomaniacal160 expected pacify greater middle east160 garrison160iraq generations make syria iran bow american power drain global swamp terrorists create global160pax americana160based military dominant country bloc countries would ever challenge quite dream none one smidgen came true160 rove suggested would summer 2002 he160 already knew160they would acted create world image world imagined controlling like imperial power history160 using unchallengeable military launched invasion blew hole oil heartlands middle east160 took major capital baghdad decapitating phrase went regime running iraq particularly brutal fashion kept lid internecine tensions lacked nothing came confidence160 among first moves l paul bremer iii proconsul appointed run occupation order160 demobilizing160iraqi autocrat saddam husseins160 350000man army160and rest military well160 plan replace lightly armed border protection force initially 12000 troops end perhaps160 40000160 armed trained washington160 given vision world made total sense160 would iraq need us military hanging around well ever series permanent bases pentagons contractors building160 dangers could neighborhood kind force hand160 soon enough became clear really done turn iraqi officer corps countrys troops onto unemployment lines creating basis militarily skilled sunni insurgency160 brilliant start note days news filled commentary lack functional iraqi air force160 thats recent months prime minister maliki been160 calling on160the obama administration send american air power back breach160 saddam hussein air force160 one biggest middle east160 bush administration however came conclusion new iraqi military would have160 need160for fighter planes helicopters much anything else us air force would neighborhood on160 bases160like balad central iraq160 needed two air forces careful wish kind warfighting miracle american invaders would greeted liberators mission quickly accomplished160and major combat operations ended flash george bush infamously160 announced160on may 1 2003 his160 top gun landing160on deck uss160abraham lincoln160 less miraculous fact would essentially freebie160 undersecretary paul wolfowitz160 pointed out160at time iraq floats sea oil meant liberated country could cover reconstruction costs without blinking busheviks entered iraq powerful sense building american protectorate160 wouldnt snap carry ambitious plans privatize iraqi economy dismantle countrys vast public sector throwing another army employees work bring crony corporations help run country giant oil companies rev energy economy lagging years sanctions illrepair160 end washingtons iraq would believed pump enough crude one greatest fossil fuel reserves planet sink opec leaving american power free float ever greater heights sea oil160 occupying authority hubris stunning behold issued orders that160 read160as written officials nineteenthcentury imperial power short one history books thing 160nothing160 worked planned160 could almost say whatever dreamed opposite invariably occurred160 us realitybased community instance long apparent war occupation would cost us literally figuratively arm leg costs iraqis would prove beyond calculating160 than160 two trillion dollars160later without figuring astronomical postwar costs still come iraq catastrophe and160 25 billion160later last vestige american iraq security forces end washington built to160 massive proportions seem state dissolution160 week ago faced advance reported160 800 1300160militants islamic state iraq syria isis opposition tribal militias local populations close 50000160army officers troops160 abandoned160their american weaponry sunni insurgents foreign jihadis shed uniforms various roadsides fled160 result significant parts iraq including mosul second largest city fell hands sunni insurgents some160of a160 saddamist coloration small army jihadis evidently160 funded160by saudi arabia kuwait us allies arrogance occupation years still take anyones breath away bush top officials remade reality almost unimaginable scale study region today results bear relation world imagined creating 160none whatsoever160 hand two dreams fashion come existence many americans still remember bush administrations bogus preinvasion160 claims160 complete visions mushroom clouds160 rising160over american cities saddam hussein thriving nuclear program iraq160 remembers part justification invasion decided would destiny administration also160 claimed160a mature symbiotic relationship saddam husseins iraq alqaeda 160in words invasion justified fashion response attacks 911 saddam hussein nothing with160 remembers year american troops took baghdad evidence nuclear program gone toilet vice president dick cheney160 backed160by george w bush doubled alqaeda claim clearly relationship testified to160 said160the vice president cnbc june 2004 evidence overwhelming160 goes back early 90s involves whole series contacts highlevel contacts osama bin laden iraqi intelligence officials based cherrypicked intelligence claims proved fraudulent david kay man assigned administration hunt missing weaponry mass destruction alqaeda links put politely evidence free160 however 57 americans convinced indeed significant relationship saddams iraq alqaeda 20 believed saddam linked directly 911 attacks careful say wish for160 decade invasion occupation cheney made fervent claims administration would slightest problem linking alqaeda iraq syria yemen number countries160 decade later evidence in160 sunni iraq along areas neighboring syria one countries supposed bow american might houses rudimentary jihadist state creature birthed world significant part thanks dreams fantasies visionaries bush administration160 across greater middle east jihadism alqaeda wannabes every sort rise terror groups destabilizing regions pakistan northern africa creating arc instability period invasion iraq top bush officials neocon supporters spoke relish taming area stretching northern africa middle east deep central asia termed arc instability160 february 2006 address american legion focused global war terror instance president bush160 typically said slowly surely helping transform broader middle east arc instability arc freedom freedom reaches people vital region well new allies war terror new partners cause moderation muslim world cause peace arc period 911 reasonably stable already160 aflame160 today ablaze160 almost 13 years launching global war terror first bombing runs afghanistan 11 years global antiwar protest went unheard invasion iraq launched three years americans gathered front white house to160 cheer160the160 death160of osama bin laden arc destabilized stunning way things recently went bad worse iraq jihadist militants pakistan160 attacked160karachi international airport assault stunned country suggested reach pakistani taliban growing160 time sixmonth pause obama administration160 resumed160its cia drone assassination campaign pakistani tribal borderlands deeply unpopular program significant destabilizing factor right160 meanwhile yemen us years conducting special operations drone war growing alqaeda wannabe outfit unknown militants160 knocked out160the electricity sanaa capital days160 syrian bloodbath course continues estimates of160 160000160or deaths multisided conflict libya essentially ungovernable chaotic land jihadist militias ambitious generals tensions fighting increased think george w bushs nightmare osama bin ladens wet dream160 september 11 2001 relatively small modestly funded organization knack planning terror surprises every couple years remarkable stroke of160 televised luck160 falling towers everything followed thanks large part acts fundamentalists bush administration whose top officials thought spotted main chance geopolitically speaking carnage moment almost 13 years later jihadist protostate fantasy caliphate heart middle east160 a160 dime dozen160in region jihadists alqaedan bent armed teeth with160 castoff american weaponry160 in160 northern africa jihadists using weaponry former arsenals libyan autocrat muammar gaddafi looted aftermath president obamas cantmiss 2011 intervention country160 jihadists isis hundreds millions dollars160 stolen160from mosul branch iraqi central bank funding advanced toward baghdad160 even osama bin laden might assumed things would go quite swimmingly guns folly wake mosuls fall isis advanced even rapidly american army heading baghdad spring 2003 160in sunnidominated cities towns takeovers remarkably bloodless160 baiji power plant supplies electricity baghdad iraqs160 largest oil refinery160now160 attack insurgents reportedly160 calledthe police asked leave town complied160 kirkuk city northern iraq kurds long claimed natural capital independent kurdistan iraqi troops quietly abandoned weaponry uniforms left town armed kurdish forces moved undoubtedly permanently debacle likes weve seen twice history160 china 1949 chiang kaisheks largely american armed trained military disintegrated insurgent forces communist leader mao zedong quartercentury later purely american military creation south vietnamese army collapsed face offensive north vietnamese troops local rebel forces160 case resulting defeat psychologically unnerving united states led bitter exceedingly strange longlasting debates lost china lost vietnam early signs equally bizarre debate loss iraq already appearing 160this surprise one thing left pass around blame160 senator john mccain fervent supporter 2003 invasion occupation launched recent round the160 blame game pinned fault onrushing events obama administrations decision pull us forces iraq 2011 thanks agreement negotiated bush administration without leaving significant presence behind160 citing someone else said lindsey graham john mccain right160 failure leave forces iraq senator graham predicted would happen senator roy blunt missouri typical republican politicians began promoting line 160its desperate situation said moving quickly appears chickens coming home roost policy leaving anybody stabilizing force 160in similar blast the160wall street journal160editorial page160 wrote withdrawing iraq toto mr obama put desire talking point reelection campaign americas strategic interests world facing reality civil war iraq birth terrorist confidence fast acquiring means raise banner new generation jihadists iraq beyond goes160 case however none may matter much160 country visibly sick wars century even many elite figures find intervention iraq distasteful lost iraq may never gain sort traction two lost debates meantime however world middle east turned upside down160 take example iran160 upon time iraq thought way station160 neocons moment liked to160 quip everyone wants go baghdad160 real men want go tehran160 happened neighborhood around baghdad quickly grew ugly bush administration soon found bogged unwinnable minority insurgencies iraq afghanistan never put us military road tehran today iranians seems riding washingtons rescue iraq160 already160 rumored160that may sending considering sending elements republican guard protect baghdad160 result us finds tacit alliance iran iraq still opposition syria160 time still allied saudi arabia syria regime bashar alassad facing disastrous fruits saudi funding the160 brutal160newborn jihadi state least temporarily coming existence sunni borderlands iraq syria middle eastern system known singular exception israel largely evaporated increasingly chaos160 likelihood get worse160 may lost iraq question washington lost iraq160 american goals region went flames fashion spectacular ignominious today nothing left them160 question iraq may answer perhaps grim response one160 end iraqis surely losers big time syrians across nonexistent border recently two countries future washington offer obama administration seems160 considering160responding crisis iraq the160 way160it knows with160 bombs cruise missiles drones160 geopolitical dreams bush era buried somewhere deep rubble iraq present white house neither visionaries global dreams grandiose otherwise160 managers bureaucrats desperately trying handle uncooperative planet160 question remains wont send american air power back iraq160 wont loose guns folly quite predictably destabilize terrible situation meantime small footnote future history given weve seen might worth taking grain salt the160 news160out afghanistan the160 increasingly160impressive160 abilities160of afghan security forces another gigantic crew set funded trained armed us military associated private contractors160 havent heard somewhere tom engelhardt cofounder american empire project author united states fear well history cold war end victory culture fellow nation institute runs tomdispatchcom latest book shadow government surveillance secret wars global security state singlesuperpower world | 1,816 |
<p>Senior military officials decided to launch the current U.S.-British military campaign to seize Marja in large part to influence domestic U.S. opinion on the war in Afghanistan, the Washington Post reported Monday.</p>
<p>The Post report, by Greg Jaffe and Craig Whitlock, both of whom cover military affairs, said the town of Marja would not have been chosen as a target for a U.S. military operation had the criterion been military significance instead of impact on domestic public opinion.</p>
<p>The primary goal of the offensive, they write, is to “convince Americans that a new era has arrived in the eight-year long war….” U.S. military officials in Afghanistan “hope a large and loud victory in Marja will convince the American public that they deserve more time to demonstrate that extra troops and new tactics can yield better results on the battlefield,” according to Jaffe and Whitlock.</p>
<p>A second aim is said to be to demonstrate to Afghans that U.S. forces can protect them from the Taliban.</p>
<p>Despite the far-reaching political implications of the story, the Post buried it on page A9, suggesting that it was not viewed by editors as a major revelation.</p>
<p>Jaffe and Whitlock cite no official sources for the report, but the evidence supporting the main conclusion of the article clearly came from information supplied by military or civilian Pentagon sources. That suggests that officials provided the information on condition that it could not be attributed to any official source.</p>
<p>Some advisers to Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the commander of the International Security Assistance Force, told him last June that Kandahar City is far more important strategically than Marja, according to Jaffe and Whitlock.</p>
<p>Marja is a town of less than 50,000 people, even including the surrounding villages, according to researcher Jeffrey Dressler of the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, D.C.</p>
<p>That makes it about one-tenth the population of Kandahar City. Marja is only one of a number of logistical centres used by the Taliban in Helmand province, as Dressler observed in a study of Helmand province published by the Institute last September.</p>
<p>Kandahar, on the other hand, is regarded as symbolically important as the place where the Taliban first arose and the location of its leadership organs even during the period of Taliban rule.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, McChrystal decided to commit 15,000 U.S. troops and Afghan troops to get control of Marja as the first major operation under the new strategy of the Barack Obama administration.</p>
<p>That decision has puzzled many supporters of the war, such as author Steve Coll, who wrote a definitive history of U.S. policy toward Afghanistan and is now executive director of the New America Foundation. Coll wrote in the New Yorker last week that he did not understand “why surging U.S. forces continue to invest their efforts and their numbers so heavily in Helmand.”</p>
<p>Coll pointed to the much greater importance of Kandahar in the larger strategic picture.</p>
<p>The real reason for the decision to attack Marja, according to Jaffe and Whitlock, was not the intrinsic importance of the objective, but the belief that an operation to seize control of it could “deliver a quick military and political win for McChrystal.”</p>
<p>Choosing Kandahar as the objective of the first major operation under the new strategy would have meant waiting to resolve political rivalries in the province, according to the Post article.</p>
<p>In public comments in recent days, CENTCOM chief Gen. David Petraeus has put forward themes that may be used to frame the Marja operation and further offensives to come in Kandahar later this year.</p>
<p>Last Thursday, an unnamed “senior military official” told reporters, “This is the start point of a new strategy,” adding, “This is our first salvo.”</p>
<p>On Sunday, Petraeus appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and said the flow of 30,000 new troops that President Obama recently ordered to the region is starting to produce “output”. Marja is “just the initial operation of what will be a 12-to-18-month campaign,” he said, calling it the “initial salvo”.</p>
<p>Petraeus suggested that Taliban resistance to the offensive in Marja was intense, as if to underline the importance of Marja to Taliban strategy. “When we go on the offensive,” said Petraeus, “when we take away sanctuaries and safe havens from the Taliban and other extremist elements…they’re going to fight back.”</p>
<p>In fact, most of the Taliban fighters who had been in Marja before the beginning of the operation apparently moved out of the town before the fighting started.</p>
<p>Petraeus seemed to be laying the basis for presenting Marja as a pivotal battle as well as a successful model for the kind of operations to follow.</p>
<p>The Post article implies that Petraeus and McChrystal are concerned that the Obama administration is pushing for a rapid drawdown of U.S. forces after mid-2011. The military believes, according to Jaffe and Whitlock, that a public perception of U.S. military success “would almost certainly mean a slower drawdown.”</p>
<p>As top commander in Iraq in 2007-2008, Petraeus established a new model for reestablishing public support for a war after it had declined precipitously. Through constant briefings to journalists and Congressional delegations, he and his staff convinced political elites and public opinion that his counterinsurgency plan had been responsible for the reduction in insurgent activities that occurred during this command.</p>
<p>Evidence from unofficial sources indicates, however, that the dynamics of Sunni-Shi’a sectarian conflict and Shi’a politics were far more important than U.S. military operations in producing that result.</p>
<p>McChrystal himself seemed to be hinting at the importance of the Marja offensive’s potential impact on the domestic politics of the war in remarks he made in Istanbul just before it began.</p>
<p>“This is all a war of perceptions,” McChrystal said. “This is not a physical war in terms of how many people you kill or how much ground you capture, how many bridges you blow up. This is all in the minds of the participants.”</p>
<p>McChrystal went on to include U.S. citizens as well as Afghans among those who needed to be convinced. “Part of what we’ve had to do is convince ourselves and our Afghan partners that we can do this,” he said.</p>
<p>The decision to launch a military campaign primarily to shape public opinion is not unprecedented in U.S. military history.</p>
<p>When President Richard M. Nixon and his National Security Adviser Henry A. Kissinger launched a major bombing campaign against the North Vietnamese capital in late December 1972, they were consciously seeking to influence public opinion to view their policy as much tougher in the final phase of peace negotiations with Hanoi.</p>
<p>The combination of the heavy damage to Hanoi and the administration’s heavy spin about its military pressure on the North Vietnamese contributed to broad acceptance of the later conclusion that Kissinger had gotten a better agreement in Paris in February 1973.</p>
<p>In fact, Kissinger had compromised on all the demands he had made before the bombing began. But the public perception was more important to the Nixon White House.</p>
<p>GARETH PORTER is an investigative historian and journalist with Inter-Press Service specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “ <a href="" type="internal">Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam</a>“, was published in 2006.</p> | true | 4 | senior military officials decided launch current usbritish military campaign seize marja large part influence domestic us opinion war afghanistan washington post reported monday post report greg jaffe craig whitlock cover military affairs said town marja would chosen target us military operation criterion military significance instead impact domestic public opinion primary goal offensive write convince americans new era arrived eightyear long war us military officials afghanistan hope large loud victory marja convince american public deserve time demonstrate extra troops new tactics yield better results battlefield according jaffe whitlock second aim said demonstrate afghans us forces protect taliban despite farreaching political implications story post buried page a9 suggesting viewed editors major revelation jaffe whitlock cite official sources report evidence supporting main conclusion article clearly came information supplied military civilian pentagon sources suggests officials provided information condition could attributed official source advisers gen stanley mcchrystal commander international security assistance force told last june kandahar city far important strategically marja according jaffe whitlock marja town less 50000 people even including surrounding villages according researcher jeffrey dressler institute study war washington dc makes onetenth population kandahar city marja one number logistical centres used taliban helmand province dressler observed study helmand province published institute last september kandahar hand regarded symbolically important place taliban first arose location leadership organs even period taliban rule nevertheless mcchrystal decided commit 15000 us troops afghan troops get control marja first major operation new strategy barack obama administration decision puzzled many supporters war author steve coll wrote definitive history us policy toward afghanistan executive director new america foundation coll wrote new yorker last week understand surging us forces continue invest efforts numbers heavily helmand coll pointed much greater importance kandahar larger strategic picture real reason decision attack marja according jaffe whitlock intrinsic importance objective belief operation seize control could deliver quick military political win mcchrystal choosing kandahar objective first major operation new strategy would meant waiting resolve political rivalries province according post article public comments recent days centcom chief gen david petraeus put forward themes may used frame marja operation offensives come kandahar later year last thursday unnamed senior military official told reporters start point new strategy adding first salvo sunday petraeus appeared nbcs meet press said flow 30000 new troops president obama recently ordered region starting produce output marja initial operation 12to18month campaign said calling initial salvo petraeus suggested taliban resistance offensive marja intense underline importance marja taliban strategy go offensive said petraeus take away sanctuaries safe havens taliban extremist elementstheyre going fight back fact taliban fighters marja beginning operation apparently moved town fighting started petraeus seemed laying basis presenting marja pivotal battle well successful model kind operations follow post article implies petraeus mcchrystal concerned obama administration pushing rapid drawdown us forces mid2011 military believes according jaffe whitlock public perception us military success would almost certainly mean slower drawdown top commander iraq 20072008 petraeus established new model reestablishing public support war declined precipitously constant briefings journalists congressional delegations staff convinced political elites public opinion counterinsurgency plan responsible reduction insurgent activities occurred command evidence unofficial sources indicates however dynamics sunnishia sectarian conflict shia politics far important us military operations producing result mcchrystal seemed hinting importance marja offensives potential impact domestic politics war remarks made istanbul began war perceptions mcchrystal said physical war terms many people kill much ground capture many bridges blow minds participants mcchrystal went include us citizens well afghans among needed convinced part weve convince afghan partners said decision launch military campaign primarily shape public opinion unprecedented us military history president richard nixon national security adviser henry kissinger launched major bombing campaign north vietnamese capital late december 1972 consciously seeking influence public opinion view policy much tougher final phase peace negotiations hanoi combination heavy damage hanoi administrations heavy spin military pressure north vietnamese contributed broad acceptance later conclusion kissinger gotten better agreement paris february 1973 fact kissinger compromised demands made bombing began public perception important nixon white house gareth porter investigative historian journalist interpress service specialising us national security policy paperback edition latest book perils dominance imbalance power road war vietnam published 2006 | 673 |
<p>“The American way of life is not negotiable.” GHW Bush, 1992</p>
<p>“The American way of life is non-negotiable.” RB (“Dick”) Cheney, 2001</p>
<p>“We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense…” BH Obama, 1/20/09</p>
<p>Barack Obama went to the mall in Washington, D.C. to give a speech. He brought his family. Powerful people sat behind him as he addressed his powerless fans. He wore a flag pin. He often invoked a certain jealous sky-god and directed “Him” to “bless America”: His first act as commander-in-chief.</p>
<p>The “soaring rhetoric” he deployed was then endlessly parsed by the chattering classes for hints of what it all might mean. Like ragged miners, sifting though gravely stream beds questing for shiny flecks of precious metals, they bent doggedly to their task.</p>
<p>But mostly Number 44 continued his announced strategy of being toweringly vague and allowing political consumers to project their dreams onto his “blank screen” (Audacity of Hope).</p>
<p>Typically, he demeaned much historical struggle and ideology as so many “petty grievances, false promises, … recriminations and worn-out dogmas.” He pledged to “set aside (these) childish things.” He never said which grievances he considered “petty” or which dogmas were “worn-out,” though he was very clear that the organized slaughter of ferocious military adventures past and present, and “freedom”- expanding “markets” were praiseworthy and very grown-up keepers indeed.</p>
<p>Mr. Obama described the current deflation-fest as “a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some.” In the run-up to the inauguration there was much loose talk invoking the memory of FDR and even Lincoln as figures perhaps comparable to Number 44.</p>
<p>Contrasting inaugural addresses reveals something of an Obamian substance-gap. FDR didn’t blink at naming the economic malefactors in his first presidential speech. Referring to the financial wreckage of the 30s he was characteristically blunt: “Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.” Mr. Roosevelt was evidently not given to Kumbaya singing. Or perhaps he was just pathetically lashed to the now happily outmoded “petty grievances, recriminations and dogmas” of his unenlightened time.</p>
<p>Mr. Obama repeatedly expressed his devotion to “the ideals of our forebears,” and “our founding documents.” So too, Abraham Lincoln in his first inaugural was at pains to declare his dedication to First Principles. “I have no purpose,” he said, “directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”</p>
<p>As he spoke, the forces of Civil War gathered. The secessionist Confederate States insisted on their white citizens’ sacred constitutional property right to own and traffic in other people. Lincoln continued, “There is much controversy about the delivering up of fugitives from service or labor. The clause I now read is as plainly written in the Constitution as any other of its provisions:</p>
<p>‘No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall in consequence of any law or regulation therein be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.’”</p>
<p>As Daniel Lazare (The Frozen Republic) has convincingly demonstrated, slavery was so deeply imbedded in the country’s founding document, that nothing short of war and “setting aside” the constitution could bring it down. Lincoln had to retreat to the Declaration of Independence ( “Four score and seven years ago…”) in his 1863 Gettysburg Address to find some documentary rationale for ending chattel slavery. Cheap labor was (and is) as American as apple pie.</p>
<p>As uncivil butchery raged four years later, Lincoln’s second inaugural now bemoaned slavery and the (still) common practice of “wringing … bread from the sweat of other men’s’ faces.” But unlike today’s feel-good proto-fascists, The Great Emancipator described the war as a national atonement, even if “… it (should) continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword…”</p>
<p>Obama’s fog-speak and serial evasions are no match for the powerful clarity of past presidents like Lincoln and FDR. Of course, their listeners and constituents brought expectations, not just hope for some hazily imagined deliverence to previous inaugural events.</p>
<p>It’s actually quite unlikely that the incoming Obama administration will differ radically from the Bush/Clinton/Bush regimes. The long-standing pursuit of cheap oil to fuel consumerism, sprawl, and metastatic growth — “The American way of life” — is famously non-negotiable. No candidate who thought otherwise could ever raise enough corporate money to buy his/her way into high office. It is, after all a pay-to-play system.</p>
<p>While Mr. Obama favors continued tax cuts for the rich, and “selflessness”/ “service” for everyone else, he is on the bipartisan track to “reforming” Social Security and Medicare. The New York Times reports that “overhauling Social Security and Medicare (will) be ‘a central part’ of his administration’s efforts to contain federal spending, signaling for the first time that he would wade into the thorny politics of entitlement programs.” (1/7/09)</p>
<p>Such buzz-killing plots were largely unmentionable in the BHO inaugural. Number 44 could summon blunt clarity only when it came to his willingness to wage traditional resource wars. The USA intends to have other peoples’ oil and labor at prices conducive to a sprawling Way Of Life. “We will not waver in its defense,” he said. And we will “outlast” anyone with other ideas.</p>
<p>In a speech littered with weasel words and fatuous fudge-factors, the new president was brutally candid on this central point; Mall America forever.</p>
<p>Blood-for-oil 2.0!</p>
<p>RICHARD RHAMES is a dirt-farmer in Biddeford, Maine.</p> | true | 4 | american way life negotiable ghw bush 1992 american way life nonnegotiable rb dick cheney 2001 apologize way life waver defense bh obama 12009 barack obama went mall washington dc give speech brought family powerful people sat behind addressed powerless fans wore flag pin often invoked certain jealous skygod directed bless america first act commanderinchief soaring rhetoric deployed endlessly parsed chattering classes hints might mean like ragged miners sifting though gravely stream beds questing shiny flecks precious metals bent doggedly task mostly number 44 continued announced strategy toweringly vague allowing political consumers project dreams onto blank screen audacity hope typically demeaned much historical struggle ideology many petty grievances false promises recriminations wornout dogmas pledged set aside childish things never said grievances considered petty dogmas wornout though clear organized slaughter ferocious military adventures past present freedom expanding markets praiseworthy grownup keepers indeed mr obama described current deflationfest consequence greed irresponsibility part runup inauguration much loose talk invoking memory fdr even lincoln figures perhaps comparable number 44 contrasting inaugural addresses reveals something obamian substancegap fdr didnt blink naming economic malefactors first presidential speech referring financial wreckage 30s characteristically blunt practices unscrupulous money changers stand indicted court public opinion rejected hearts minds men mr roosevelt evidently given kumbaya singing perhaps pathetically lashed happily outmoded petty grievances recriminations dogmas unenlightened time mr obama repeatedly expressed devotion ideals forebears founding documents abraham lincoln first inaugural pains declare dedication first principles purpose said directly indirectly interfere institution slavery states exists believe right inclination spoke forces civil war gathered secessionist confederate states insisted white citizens sacred constitutional property right traffic people lincoln continued much controversy delivering fugitives service labor clause read plainly written constitution provisions person held service labor one state laws thereof escaping another shall consequence law regulation therein discharged service labor shall delivered claim party service labor may due daniel lazare frozen republic convincingly demonstrated slavery deeply imbedded countrys founding document nothing short war setting aside constitution could bring lincoln retreat declaration independence four score seven years ago 1863 gettysburg address find documentary rationale ending chattel slavery cheap labor american apple pie uncivil butchery raged four years later lincolns second inaugural bemoaned slavery still common practice wringing bread sweat mens faces unlike todays feelgood protofascists great emancipator described war national atonement even continue wealth piled bondsmans two hundred fifty years unrequited toil shall sunk every drop blood drawn lash shall paid another drawn sword obamas fogspeak serial evasions match powerful clarity past presidents like lincoln fdr course listeners constituents brought expectations hope hazily imagined deliverence previous inaugural events actually quite unlikely incoming obama administration differ radically bushclintonbush regimes longstanding pursuit cheap oil fuel consumerism sprawl metastatic growth american way life famously nonnegotiable candidate thought otherwise could ever raise enough corporate money buy hisher way high office paytoplay system mr obama favors continued tax cuts rich selflessness service everyone else bipartisan track reforming social security medicare new york times reports overhauling social security medicare central part administrations efforts contain federal spending signaling first time would wade thorny politics entitlement programs 1709 buzzkilling plots largely unmentionable bho inaugural number 44 could summon blunt clarity came willingness wage traditional resource wars usa intends peoples oil labor prices conducive sprawling way life waver defense said outlast anyone ideas speech littered weasel words fatuous fudgefactors new president brutally candid central point mall america forever bloodforoil 20 richard rhames dirtfarmer biddeford maine | 560 |
<p><a href="http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/08/world/isis-fast-facts/" type="external">The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria</a> (ISIS) is our Frankenstein. The United States after a decade of war in Iraq pieced together its body parts. We jolted it into life. We bathed it in blood and trauma. And we gave it its intelligence. Its dark and vicious heart of vengeance and war is our heart. It kills as we kill. It tortures as we torture. It carries out conquest as we carry out conquest. It is building a state driven by hatred for American occupation, a product of the death, horror and destruction we visited on the Middle East. ISIS now controls an area the size of Texas. It is erasing the borders established by French and British colonial powers through the 1916 <a href="http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/britain-and-france-conclude-sykes-picot-agreement" type="external">Sykes-Picot Agreement</a>. There is little we can do to stop it.</p>
<p>ISIS, ironically, is perhaps the only example of successful nation-building in the contemporary Middle East, despite the billions of dollars we have squandered in Iraq and Afghanistan. Its quest for an ethnically pure Sunni state mirrors the quest for a Jewish state eventually carved out of Palestine in 1948. Its tactics are much like those of the Jewish guerrillas who used violence, terrorism, foreign fighters, clandestine arms shipments and foreign money, along with horrific ethnic cleansing and the massacre of hundreds of Arab civilians, to create Israel. Antagonistic ISIS and Israeli states, infected by religious fundamentalism, would be irreconcilable neighbors. This is a recipe for apocalyptic warfare. We provided the ingredients.</p>
<p>I and Loretta Napoleoni, the author of the book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Islamist-Phoenix-Islamic-Redrawing/dp/160980628X" type="external">“The Islamic Phoenix,”</a> spoke at <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=735lA9oF9PM&amp;feature=youtu.be" type="external">a Dec. 2 event</a> in Manhattan at the headquarters of the New York Society for Ethical Culture. Napoleoni pointed out that the message imparted to Muslims by ISIS is radically different from that of other jihadist groups, especially al-Qaida. ISIS does not call for martyrdom and self-immolation. It has launched a jihad against secular and discredited regimes in the Middle East rather than against Western targets abroad. It is seeking to establish, as the Zionists did in Palestine, a utopian, religious state. It holds up the ancient Caliphate — which united Muslims throughout the Middle East in the seventh century and whose time is considered the golden age of Islam — as an ideal, much as Jews held up the biblical kingdoms chronicled in the Hebrew Bible. ISIS, to build its state, has called on engineers, doctors and technicians to immigrate to the area it controls. And ISIS, although devoted to a fundamentalist form of <a href="http://www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/nuh/salafi.htm" type="external">Salafist Islam</a>, is thoroughly modern. It has mastered sophisticated forms of electronic communication and delivers its messages through social media. And unlike groups such as al-Qaida, which bans television sets and radios, it views the technical advances of modern society as an asset. The mixture of fundamentalist religion with modernity is a potent and intoxicating brew for disenfranchised Muslims. And ISIS has attained what peaceful uprisings in the Middle East have not — liberation from detested regimes, at least for now.</p>
<p>“Modern technology and a clear understanding of how our multipolar world functions, however, are not enough to succeed,” Napoleoni writes of the uprisings known as the Arab Spring. “Is it possible that the ‘smartphone uprisings,’ including the Arab Spring, failed where the Islamic State has succeeded because the latter is managed by a professional elite, which guides the rank and file, while the former finds itself at the mercy of their constant interaction and participation? If so, is the Islamic State’s model of nation-building more modern than that of the Arab Spring?”</p>
<p />
<p>Terror, as was true for the Jewish fighters in Palestine in the late 1940s, is an effective tool to intimidate opponents and accelerate ethnic cleansing. The fear of ISIS is its most potent weapon. Iraqi army troops, although better armed than ISIS fighters and outnumbering them, drop their U.S.-supplied weapons and flee before ISIS. Shiites abandon whole villages to ISIS. And all the U.S. advisers sent to put some spine in the Iraqi government forces have so far been unable to significantly stem the advance.</p>
<p>Sunni militants in Iraq consciously orchestrated the conflict between Sunnis and Shiites. This clash, as was true in the former Yugoslavia, is not the result of ancient ethnic hatreds. It was created for political expediency.When Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian radical, arrived in Iraq, he founded al-Tawhid al-Jihad. His group used forged documents to infiltrate over 100 fighters from al-Qaida, most of whom had been in Afghanistan, into Iraq. Zarqawi’s goal was to spark, under the cover of fighting the Western coalition forces, a sectarian conflict with the Shiites. He understood that a unified Shiite and Sunni state would thwart the dream of a Sunni Islamic state. He had to ignite a religious war. His group, in 2004, eventually became al-Qaida in Iraq and declared its loyalty to Osama bin Laden, who had initially rejected Zarqawi’s tactic of attacking Shiites. Zarqawi was killed in 2006. His death was followed a year later by the so-called <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2014/11/sunni-awakening-20-dont-hold-your-breath" type="external">Sunni awakening</a>. By 2010 the radical group was almost extinct. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who claims to be a direct descendant of the Prophet and who holds a degree in Islamic studies from the University of Baghdad, was held in 2004 by U.S. forces in southern Iraq’s Camp Bucca, where he built a following among his fellow prisoners. He took over the leadership of Zarqawi’s organization, changed the name of the group to the Islamic State of Iraq and moved its members to Syria to fight in the civil war there. Once there, he amassed weapons and cash pouring into Syria from countries such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar. He used these resources to rebuild his group, not to help the rebels overthrow the Syrian regime. He began attacking other jihadist and rebel groups and craved out territory under his exclusive control. Al-Nusra, the al-Qaida-affiliated group in Syria, merged with the Islamic State of Iraq. The new group became the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. ISIS has now seized control of enough resources to be self-sufficient. The group is estimated by The Wall Street Journal to earn $2 million a day in oil exports alone. And it has attracted an estimated 12,000 foreign fighters, including 2,000 from Europe. In June 2014 it declared the establishment of a new caliphate. The historical Caliphate, which lasted from the Prophet Muhammad’s death in 632 to 661, controlled a vast empire that stretched from the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant across North Africa and up to Central Asia. And religious militants have long held it up as the ideal for the Muslim state they seek to create. By 2011 Baghdadi had been designated by the U.S. State Department as a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specially_Designated_Global_Terrorist" type="external">“specially designated global terrorist.”</a> The United States has posted a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to his capture or death.</p>
<p>“Technically speaking, the Caliphate is the religious and political authority that is above everybody else,” Napoleoni said earlier this month before the Society for Ethical Culture. “Every single Muslim government is automatically below the Caliph. This is a huge threat to countries like Saudi Arabia.”</p>
<p>ISIS is a mortal threat to the House of Saud. It is a open challenge to the religious authority of the Saudi ruling family, which is the custodian of Mecca, the site of the holiest shrine in Islam. It challenges, by anointing Baghdadi as caliph, the right of the Saudis to determine religious doctrine. And Baghdadi, in the eyes of many Muslims, has the aura that surrounded partisan leaders such as the Yugoslav Josip Broz Tito during World War II. Foreign recruits, crossing over the border from Turkey into Syria, will often fall to their knees, weep and pray before entering ISIS’ new Caliphate.</p>
<p>The danger, Napoleoni pointed out, is not that ISIS will invade Saudi Arabia, but that it will delegitimize the Saudi monarchy. This, she said, could trigger an upheaval inside the kingdom and threaten the viability of one of Washington’s most important allies in the Middle East. The group is seen as an anti-imperialist force because it is erasing the borders within the old Middle East drawn after World War I by European cartographers and because it defies the client states that are allied with Washington or, in the case of Syria, with Russia and the Shiite government in Tehran. Tribal communities, cut in half in the wake of World War I, are being reunited. At the same time ISIS is restoring a semblance of law and order, although the harsh Islamic law it imposes is unforgiving to those deemed to be apostates, including the Shiites.</p>
<p>“They are very sensitive to the needs of the population,” Napoleoni said of ISIS. The population, she pointed out, has “been plagued by war for a very long time. They have been plagued by warlords, by criminal groups, by jihadi groups, you name it. All of a sudden the Islamic State comes in and works so that people can have access to basic infrastructure such as water or electricity. They set up joint ventures with the local people in order to give the local people the opportunity to grow economically … and also to go back to the normality of life.”</p>
<p>This brutal order has ended the chaos that has dominated much of the region following the U.S. occupation of Iraq. It has instilled in Sunnis pride and even a feeling of omnipotence. And it has exposed as weak and ineffectual the corrupt forces that Washington put into place to administer Iraq.</p>
<p>“They are protecting the people from the internal, criminal organizations, warlords,” Napoleoni went on. “They are protecting the borders from the outside enemies. … I call it the shell state because of course these people don’t have the right of self-determination. They seek their consensus inside in order to achieve the kind of political identity that will transform a state shell into a real state. I think this is absolutely outstanding for an armed organization, because you know at the end of the day these guys are terrorists.”</p> | true | 4 | islamic state iraq syria isis frankenstein united states decade war iraq pieced together body parts jolted life bathed blood trauma gave intelligence dark vicious heart vengeance war heart kills kill tortures torture carries conquest carry conquest building state driven hatred american occupation product death horror destruction visited middle east isis controls area size texas erasing borders established french british colonial powers 1916 sykespicot agreement little stop isis ironically perhaps example successful nationbuilding contemporary middle east despite billions dollars squandered iraq afghanistan quest ethnically pure sunni state mirrors quest jewish state eventually carved palestine 1948 tactics much like jewish guerrillas used violence terrorism foreign fighters clandestine arms shipments foreign money along horrific ethnic cleansing massacre hundreds arab civilians create israel antagonistic isis israeli states infected religious fundamentalism would irreconcilable neighbors recipe apocalyptic warfare provided ingredients loretta napoleoni author book islamic phoenix spoke dec 2 event manhattan headquarters new york society ethical culture napoleoni pointed message imparted muslims isis radically different jihadist groups especially alqaida isis call martyrdom selfimmolation launched jihad secular discredited regimes middle east rather western targets abroad seeking establish zionists palestine utopian religious state holds ancient caliphate united muslims throughout middle east seventh century whose time considered golden age islam ideal much jews held biblical kingdoms chronicled hebrew bible isis build state called engineers doctors technicians immigrate area controls isis although devoted fundamentalist form salafist islam thoroughly modern mastered sophisticated forms electronic communication delivers messages social media unlike groups alqaida bans television sets radios views technical advances modern society asset mixture fundamentalist religion modernity potent intoxicating brew disenfranchised muslims isis attained peaceful uprisings middle east liberation detested regimes least modern technology clear understanding multipolar world functions however enough succeed napoleoni writes uprisings known arab spring possible smartphone uprisings including arab spring failed islamic state succeeded latter managed professional elite guides rank file former finds mercy constant interaction participation islamic states model nationbuilding modern arab spring terror true jewish fighters palestine late 1940s effective tool intimidate opponents accelerate ethnic cleansing fear isis potent weapon iraqi army troops although better armed isis fighters outnumbering drop ussupplied weapons flee isis shiites abandon whole villages isis us advisers sent put spine iraqi government forces far unable significantly stem advance sunni militants iraq consciously orchestrated conflict sunnis shiites clash true former yugoslavia result ancient ethnic hatreds created political expediencywhen abu musab alzarqawi jordanian radical arrived iraq founded altawhid aljihad group used forged documents infiltrate 100 fighters alqaida afghanistan iraq zarqawis goal spark cover fighting western coalition forces sectarian conflict shiites understood unified shiite sunni state would thwart dream sunni islamic state ignite religious war group 2004 eventually became alqaida iraq declared loyalty osama bin laden initially rejected zarqawis tactic attacking shiites zarqawi killed 2006 death followed year later socalled sunni awakening 2010 radical group almost extinct abu bakr albaghdadi claims direct descendant prophet holds degree islamic studies university baghdad held 2004 us forces southern iraqs camp bucca built following among fellow prisoners took leadership zarqawis organization changed name group islamic state iraq moved members syria fight civil war amassed weapons cash pouring syria countries saudi arabia kuwait qatar used resources rebuild group help rebels overthrow syrian regime began attacking jihadist rebel groups craved territory exclusive control alnusra alqaidaaffiliated group syria merged islamic state iraq new group became islamic state iraq syria isis isis seized control enough resources selfsufficient group estimated wall street journal earn 2 million day oil exports alone attracted estimated 12000 foreign fighters including 2000 europe june 2014 declared establishment new caliphate historical caliphate lasted prophet muhammads death 632 661 controlled vast empire stretched arabian peninsula levant across north africa central asia religious militants long held ideal muslim state seek create 2011 baghdadi designated us state department specially designated global terrorist united states posted reward 10 million information leading capture death technically speaking caliphate religious political authority everybody else napoleoni said earlier month society ethical culture every single muslim government automatically caliph huge threat countries like saudi arabia isis mortal threat house saud open challenge religious authority saudi ruling family custodian mecca site holiest shrine islam challenges anointing baghdadi caliph right saudis determine religious doctrine baghdadi eyes many muslims aura surrounded partisan leaders yugoslav josip broz tito world war ii foreign recruits crossing border turkey syria often fall knees weep pray entering isis new caliphate danger napoleoni pointed isis invade saudi arabia delegitimize saudi monarchy said could trigger upheaval inside kingdom threaten viability one washingtons important allies middle east group seen antiimperialist force erasing borders within old middle east drawn world war european cartographers defies client states allied washington case syria russia shiite government tehran tribal communities cut half wake world war reunited time isis restoring semblance law order although harsh islamic law imposes unforgiving deemed apostates including shiites sensitive needs population napoleoni said isis population pointed plagued war long time plagued warlords criminal groups jihadi groups name sudden islamic state comes works people access basic infrastructure water electricity set joint ventures local people order give local people opportunity grow economically also go back normality life brutal order ended chaos dominated much region following us occupation iraq instilled sunnis pride even feeling omnipotence exposed weak ineffectual corrupt forces washington put place administer iraq protecting people internal criminal organizations warlords napoleoni went protecting borders outside enemies call shell state course people dont right selfdetermination seek consensus inside order achieve kind political identity transform state shell real state think absolutely outstanding armed organization know end day guys terrorists | 904 |
<p>Thursday, December 1, 2011</p>
<p>By Alejandra R??os</p>
<p>This Wednesday, some 2 million public-sector workers joined a 24-hour strike while they were leading a "Day of Action" in the streets, in defense of their pensions, against the planned reforms of the Conservative-Liberal Democratic coalition headed by Prime Minister David Cameron.</p>
<p>With a high degree of support, it was the biggest public-sector strike this country had experienced since the General Strike of 1926, and, because of the level of opposition to the government's plans, the atmosphere is comparable to that of the 1979 Winter of Discontent. The measure, called by the TUC, the labor union federation of the United Kingdom, was actively prepared for, during several weeks, with the distribution of fliers, rallies and public talks at several points in the country. Workers joined from 29 unions, of which, among the biggest, in terms of membership, we can mention UNITE (hospitals and cleaning workers), UNISON (hospitals, schools and university administrators, and local governments), NUT and NASUTW, teachers, UCU (university and further education teachers) and PCS (employees of government departments).</p>
<p>The groups that went out on strike are the primary, second, tertiary, and university teachers, health care workers (nurses and technicians), workers at national and municipal government offices and departments, customs officers, sanitation workers, and highway administration workers. Almost 70% of the schools remained closed, and those that opened only did so partially and were practically deserted. The hospitals rescheduled operations and routine examinations, and they only kept up emergency services. Social work and distribution centers, city libraries and universities also closed their doors, in order to join the "Day of Action." Sanitation workers and highway administration workers also joined in.</p>
<p>The main reforms of the retirement plan that the government is pursuing are increasing the age of retirement - that was already raised from 65 to 67, and from 60 to 65, for men and women, respectively, although they postponed the year of implementation; the increase of pension contributions by 3.2%, calculating the pension according to the [worker's] average wage, instead of the wage at the age of retirement, as it currently is, and increasing the pension according to the wholesale price index (WPI), and not the consumer price index (CPI), which is the one used to measure inflation. This cocktail of measures could be summed up as working more and contributing more, to obtain a smaller pension.</p>
<p>The arguments of the government, that accuses public-sector workers of being "selfish," because they are only thinking about their future, in spite of receiving "privileged retirements," in a tactic to bring public-sector workers into conflict with those from the private sector, appear to be unfounded, and it is clear that the only aim the government is pursuing is that workers should contribute to pay the deficit, since, with the increase of the contributions for retirement, the government is attempting to cover a deficit of 2.8 billion pounds for 2014-2015.</p>
<p>Although it is true that pension reform is at the center of the stage, anger has been growing in the public sector for several reasons, one of which is the nearly two year long freeze on wages, while inflation in September was above 5.2%. In view of this loss in wages, which, according to the unions, would reach 16%, the announcement of a likely, measly 1% raise, absolutely failed to calm the anger. Another cause for uncertainty is the announcement of cuts in jobs. At first, they were talking about a loss of 400,000 jobs, but George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, in his latest budget announcement, explained that the number of reductions in public-sector jobs could reach 700,000, between 2011 and 2017. It is also feared that these cuts will be in the most vulnerable regions of the country, with the highest level of poverty. With an average unemployment rate of 8%, the highest figure since 1994, that, among young people, reaches 20% or more, according to area, the announcement of new cuts only provided more reasons for joining the strike, even in spite of the limitations imposed by the anti-strike laws inherited from Margaret Thatcher's government.</p>
<p>None of the government's arguments can hide the fact that more than 70% of the workers from 29 unions consulted in the vote to go on strike, as the laws implemented by Thatcher and still in force require, voted in favor of going on strike.</p>
<p>At midnight, when the strike began, hospital workers in several cities left their jobs and began to organize picket lines, to guarantee adherence to the strike. Throughout the day, thousands of pickets at the entrances of workplaces, giving out leaflets and holding small demonstrations, were displaying a high level of militancy. In the afternoon, contingents at different locations in the country began to be organized, and marches were organized by city; thousands of demonstrators went through the streets of London (30,000), Birmingham (10,000), Leeds and Bristol, and demonstrations of several thousand people were also conspicuous in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.</p>
<p>The November 30 strike and "Day of Action" are not an isolated event; they are the continuation of a series of expressions of struggle in different groups. On November 9, 2010, thousands of students went out to the streets of London in opposition to the increase of university fees and burst into Conservative Party headquarters. A series of actions by university students throughout the country followed this march. On March 26, more than 500,000 people marched through the center of London, in the so-called "March for an Alternative," in repudiation of the cuts in social services, and on June 30, more than a million public-sector workers and teachers joined the 24-hour strike, in defense of their pensions. With the freezing and reduction of social services as a backdrop, in an economic context of inflation and increased unemployment, in which the pictures of the uprising and looting by young people in the slums in August are still fresh, the November 30 strike transcends the complaint about the attack on retirement.</p>
<p>For a country that has experienced only one general strike in its entire history, the two strikes with a mobilization of the public sector (June 30 and November 30) express profound unrest and could be foreshadowing a new dynamic of the class struggle. Although the situation of the crisis is not so serious as in Greece, Italy or Spain, it sheds light on the offensive by the capitalist governments that want the workers to pay for the crisis. These actions express a lot of willingness to fight. Nevertheless, we cannot leave the organizing of the steps to follow in the hands of the union leaderships. This strike could be a great beginning for organizing a staggered plan of struggle, that will present a workers' independent alternative, to make the capitalists pay for the crisis.</p> | true | 4 | thursday december 1 2011 alejandra ros wednesday 2 million publicsector workers joined 24hour strike leading day action streets defense pensions planned reforms conservativeliberal democratic coalition headed prime minister david cameron high degree support biggest publicsector strike country experienced since general strike 1926 level opposition governments plans atmosphere comparable 1979 winter discontent measure called tuc labor union federation united kingdom actively prepared several weeks distribution fliers rallies public talks several points country workers joined 29 unions among biggest terms membership mention unite hospitals cleaning workers unison hospitals schools university administrators local governments nut nasutw teachers ucu university education teachers pcs employees government departments groups went strike primary second tertiary university teachers health care workers nurses technicians workers national municipal government offices departments customs officers sanitation workers highway administration workers almost 70 schools remained closed opened partially practically deserted hospitals rescheduled operations routine examinations kept emergency services social work distribution centers city libraries universities also closed doors order join day action sanitation workers highway administration workers also joined main reforms retirement plan government pursuing increasing age retirement already raised 65 67 60 65 men women respectively although postponed year implementation increase pension contributions 32 calculating pension according workers average wage instead wage age retirement currently increasing pension according wholesale price index wpi consumer price index cpi one used measure inflation cocktail measures could summed working contributing obtain smaller pension arguments government accuses publicsector workers selfish thinking future spite receiving privileged retirements tactic bring publicsector workers conflict private sector appear unfounded clear aim government pursuing workers contribute pay deficit since increase contributions retirement government attempting cover deficit 28 billion pounds 20142015 although true pension reform center stage anger growing public sector several reasons one nearly two year long freeze wages inflation september 52 view loss wages according unions would reach 16 announcement likely measly 1 raise absolutely failed calm anger another cause uncertainty announcement cuts jobs first talking loss 400000 jobs george osborne chancellor exchequer latest budget announcement explained number reductions publicsector jobs could reach 700000 2011 2017 also feared cuts vulnerable regions country highest level poverty average unemployment rate 8 highest figure since 1994 among young people reaches 20 according area announcement new cuts provided reasons joining strike even spite limitations imposed antistrike laws inherited margaret thatchers government none governments arguments hide fact 70 workers 29 unions consulted vote go strike laws implemented thatcher still force require voted favor going strike midnight strike began hospital workers several cities left jobs began organize picket lines guarantee adherence strike throughout day thousands pickets entrances workplaces giving leaflets holding small demonstrations displaying high level militancy afternoon contingents different locations country began organized marches organized city thousands demonstrators went streets london 30000 birmingham 10000 leeds bristol demonstrations several thousand people also conspicuous northern ireland scotland wales november 30 strike day action isolated event continuation series expressions struggle different groups november 9 2010 thousands students went streets london opposition increase university fees burst conservative party headquarters series actions university students throughout country followed march march 26 500000 people marched center london socalled march alternative repudiation cuts social services june 30 million publicsector workers teachers joined 24hour strike defense pensions freezing reduction social services backdrop economic context inflation increased unemployment pictures uprising looting young people slums august still fresh november 30 strike transcends complaint attack retirement country experienced one general strike entire history two strikes mobilization public sector june 30 november 30 express profound unrest could foreshadowing new dynamic class struggle although situation crisis serious greece italy spain sheds light offensive capitalist governments want workers pay crisis actions express lot willingness fight nevertheless leave organizing steps follow hands union leaderships strike could great beginning organizing staggered plan struggle present workers independent alternative make capitalists pay crisis | 618 |
<p>On Thanksgiving Day in the USA, Nov.23, 2006, I traveled to Bogota,Colombia, in order to attend an International Tribunal on Impunity. My friend Patricia Dahl had agreed to be one of the judges on this Tribunal, and I decided that this would be an important event for me to witness.</p>
<p>We took three planes that day to get there, but we arrived safely and were met at the airport by persons from the organizing group, Justicia y Vida (Justice and Life). We were brought to the apartment of the main organizer of the Tribunal, Prof. Lilia Solano, of the National University of Colombia in Bogota. The following morning we went as a group to the Senate of the Republic of Colombia. The other organizer, Senator Alejandro Lopez, had arranged for use of Senate chambers for an official hearing on Impunity. Over the course of the next two days judges from all over Europe and North America heard testimony by the relatives of victims who had been assassinated by paramilitaries in two specific neighborhoods of Bogota: Ciudad Bolivar and Cazuca.</p>
<p>In Colombia, I have been told, only three out of every one hundred murders lead to governmental prosecution. It is a country where one can obviously get away with murder, and many, many do. This is what impunity is all about. The president of Colombia arranged for members of paramilitary death squads to be demobilized last year, if only they would confess to their crimes and get a light sentence. Many of these paramilitaries have gotten off and have regrouped in new death squads and continue their murderous activities. In Ciudad Bolivar and Cazuca, over one hundred and fifty young men have been assassinated over the past two years. Their offenses? They did not want to become members of the paramilitaries. They just wanted to be left alone to go to school or to work. Following the Bush Doctrine:¨You are either with us or you are against us!¨, the paramilitaries killed them.</p>
<p>It was painful to watch as family member after familly testified as to how their son or their brother was assassinated on the streets of their poor barrios. In Colombia, if you stand up and denounce the government or the military or the paramilitaries you stand a chance of being killed yourself. So it was amazing to see how many brave people came into the Senate chamber and publicly testified. Some chose not to speak in public, and spoke from behind a wall into a microphone so that all of the people in the hall could hear what they had to say, but could not see them. At the end of the second day, the judges met and pronounced judgement: the Colombia government had allowed the existence of paramilitary death squads and had been complicit in the deaths of these young men. Not only that, but the US government had also been complicit in aiding and abetting the Colombian government by providing arms to the Colombian military which then turned them over to the paramilitaries. The entire judgement should be available by now on the Colombian website, which I believe is www.justiciayvida.org. I can provide additional information regarding this matter at a later date.</p>
<p>The day after the Tribunal ended a woman from Jusiticia y Vida brought us to the areas where the murders had taken place, Ciudad Bolivar and Cazuca, the paramilitary stronghold. In this area the dominant industry is the manufacture of cement and most of the community life is centered around the huge area where cement is made on the side of a mountain quarry. There is housing built by the company in the valley for thousands of people, and it actually looks decent. There is also a shopping mall(!!) where families take their children for amusement rides, food,etc. I was surprised to see how nice the mall was. Far different from the squallor in the hills surrounding the valley. Thousand more live in shacks on the side of a mountain where there is one dirt road in and out. There are no sidestreets. People have to walk down the side of the mountain to go anywhere, and, of course, walk or climb back up. Their houses houses are tin shacks for the most part. There is no running water. I was told by my guide that the families were allowed a gallon of fresh water a week!</p>
<p>There was plenty of beer and Coca Cola. If you live in the ¨Heights,¨ on the side of the mountain, you do not go outside at night. The paramilitaries will kill you if you do not obey their curfew. If you look at them the wrong way they will kill you. I had heard testimony to that effect over the last two days and they were not kidding. This is what impunity means in Colombia: the lack of a government which has respect for law and order; state terrorism.</p>
<p>The remarkable thing is that women like the one who guided us around worked in that community and tried to teach the children and educate their parents about the need for human rights. When I return to Bogota in about ten days I hope to video this woman and her struggle to empower the members of this community. Colombia is a country where many people are struggling to end the violence of the past century, and she is one of the extraordinary people I have met in my travels there.</p>
<p>The next day, Monday, Nov.27, 2006, my delegation traveled for another hearing under the auspices of the Senate of the Republic of Colombia. I was flown to the town of San Onofre, not far from Cartagena, in the northwest part of the country. I was actually flown in an airplane owned by the military, out of a military base and into a military base, and from there by bus for another hour. We were protected by dozens of soldiers on motorcyles to and from the town of San Onofre.</p>
<p>This public hearing was attended by about a thousand local residents in a sports stadium. This event was co-sponsored by another organization representing the families of victims of the violence in Colombia. We spent hours listening to people testify as to how their relatives were either assassinated on the street or brought to a concentration camp called Palmar to be tortured and killed.</p>
<p>Over the last ten years the paramilitaries in this area have killed more than three thousand people. Over six hundred bodies have been found on the hacienda of Palmar. There has been so much corruption in this area that several weeks ago the Supreme Court of Colombia arrested three of the state Senators from this area. This has been a great scandal in Colombia, and there have been rumors that many in the Urribe administration may follow with prosecutions in the coming months. President Urribe has been implicated in the past for being involved with not only paramilitaries, but with drug trafficking in Antioquia, the region where he formerly served as Governor. (The area to which I will be flying tomorrow, by the way).</p>
<p>So, what do these tribunals and public showings accomplish? One could be cynical and say nothing. But, I think not. I think that the issue of impunity has for a long time been one of a taboo in Colombia, and now people are finally getting up the nerve to talk about it openly and trying to end it. People have had enough. ¡Ya Basta! Enough is enough! Only time will tell what significance these events will have for Colombia. But, I can tell you that I am glad to have witnessed the uprising of the poor people in this country and their cries for justice.</p>
<p>ROBERT GOLD is an activist with the Brooklyn Greens.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | true | 4 | thanksgiving day usa nov23 2006 traveled bogotacolombia order attend international tribunal impunity friend patricia dahl agreed one judges tribunal decided would important event witness took three planes day get arrived safely met airport persons organizing group justicia vida justice life brought apartment main organizer tribunal prof lilia solano national university colombia bogota following morning went group senate republic colombia organizer senator alejandro lopez arranged use senate chambers official hearing impunity course next two days judges europe north america heard testimony relatives victims assassinated paramilitaries two specific neighborhoods bogota ciudad bolivar cazuca colombia told three every one hundred murders lead governmental prosecution country one obviously get away murder many many impunity president colombia arranged members paramilitary death squads demobilized last year would confess crimes get light sentence many paramilitaries gotten regrouped new death squads continue murderous activities ciudad bolivar cazuca one hundred fifty young men assassinated past two years offenses want become members paramilitaries wanted left alone go school work following bush doctrineyou either us us paramilitaries killed painful watch family member familly testified son brother assassinated streets poor barrios colombia stand denounce government military paramilitaries stand chance killed amazing see many brave people came senate chamber publicly testified chose speak public spoke behind wall microphone people hall could hear say could see end second day judges met pronounced judgement colombia government allowed existence paramilitary death squads complicit deaths young men us government also complicit aiding abetting colombian government providing arms colombian military turned paramilitaries entire judgement available colombian website believe wwwjusticiayvidaorg provide additional information regarding matter later date day tribunal ended woman jusiticia vida brought us areas murders taken place ciudad bolivar cazuca paramilitary stronghold area dominant industry manufacture cement community life centered around huge area cement made side mountain quarry housing built company valley thousands people actually looks decent also shopping mall families take children amusement rides foodetc surprised see nice mall far different squallor hills surrounding valley thousand live shacks side mountain one dirt road sidestreets people walk side mountain go anywhere course walk climb back houses houses tin shacks part running water told guide families allowed gallon fresh water week plenty beer coca cola live heights side mountain go outside night paramilitaries kill obey curfew look wrong way kill heard testimony effect last two days kidding impunity means colombia lack government respect law order state terrorism remarkable thing women like one guided us around worked community tried teach children educate parents need human rights return bogota ten days hope video woman struggle empower members community colombia country many people struggling end violence past century one extraordinary people met travels next day monday nov27 2006 delegation traveled another hearing auspices senate republic colombia flown town san onofre far cartagena northwest part country actually flown airplane owned military military base military base bus another hour protected dozens soldiers motorcyles town san onofre public hearing attended thousand local residents sports stadium event cosponsored another organization representing families victims violence colombia spent hours listening people testify relatives either assassinated street brought concentration camp called palmar tortured killed last ten years paramilitaries area killed three thousand people six hundred bodies found hacienda palmar much corruption area several weeks ago supreme court colombia arrested three state senators area great scandal colombia rumors many urribe administration may follow prosecutions coming months president urribe implicated past involved paramilitaries drug trafficking antioquia region formerly served governor area flying tomorrow way tribunals public showings accomplish one could cynical say nothing think think issue impunity long time one taboo colombia people finally getting nerve talk openly trying end people enough ya basta enough enough time tell significance events colombia tell glad witnessed uprising poor people country cries justice robert gold activist brooklyn greens 160 160 | 617 |
<p>“Time is running out fast. I think we have maybe a few months — it could be weeks, it could be days — before there is a material risk of a fundamentally unnecessary default by a country like Spain or Italy which would be a financial catastrophe dragging the European banking system and North America with it. So they have to act now.”</p>
<p>— Willem Buiter, Citi Chief Economist</p>
<p>As the boycott of sovereign bonds in Europe has spread beyond the south to triple-A-rated countries like Finland, the Netherlands and France, it’s become increasingly difficult for banks and corporations to get short-term financing. The cost of swapping euros for dollars is steadily rising while interbank lending has started to break down. As banks hoard more capital (to comply with new regulations) and scale-back their lending, companies will be forced to curtail operations and trim investment. This is how a debt crisis morphs into a credit crunch that slows growth and sends the economy hurtling back into recession.</p>
<p>According to the Financial Times, the four biggest banks in the UK have already cut “interbank loan volumes by more than 24 percent” a clear indication of the severity of the crisis. If policymakers are unable to settle on remedy that will calm the markets, then banks will continue to withhold credit and the economy will plunge.</p>
<p>On Friday, the ECB announced that it would increase its bond purchasing program (the Securities Markets Programme) to $27 billion per week in order stop the contagion and shore up teetering sovereigns like Italy and Spain. Here’s an excerpt from Bloomberg:</p>
<p>“European Central Bank governing council members have agreed on a 20 billion-euro ($27 billion) weekly upper limit for sovereign debt purchases as resistance among members grows, the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported…..</p>
<p>Council members from the Netherlands and Austria have added their voices to skepticism over the bond-purchase program, the newspaper said. Those objecting to buying include Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann, Executive Board member Juergen Stark and Yves Mersch, governor of Luxembourg’s central bank, FAZ said.” (“ECB Backs $27 Billion Weekly Limit on Government Bond Purchases, FAZ Says”, Bloomberg)</p>
<p>The battle between Germany–the largest economy in the eurozone–and the ECB has been brewing for months. Germany is adamantly opposed to any pooling of debts and, thus, will not support eurobonds, fiscal transfers or allowing the ECB to act as lender of last resort. Here’s how the Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann summed it up in a recent interview:</p>
<p>“The eurosystem… must not be a lender of last resort for sovereigns because this would violate Article 123 of the EU treaty [prohibiting monetary financing – or central bank funding of governments]. I cannot see how you can ensure the stability of a monetary union by violating its legal provisions.</p>
<p>I think the prohibition of monetary financing is very important in ensuring the credibility and independence of the central bank, which allow us to deliver on our primary objective of price stability.”</p>
<p>While the German position is principled, it is also impractical. Europe is in crisis, a slow-motion bank run is rapidly turning into a full-blown panic. Policymakers will have to be flexible if they want to avert another Lehman-type meltdown.</p>
<p>In contrast, the ECB position is not only unprincipled but also calculating and cynical. Everyone who’s followed events, knew that the emergency fund (EFSF) would never be ready in time to address the firestorm in the bond markets. That meant that yields would continue to rise (which they did) until the ECB provided some form of backstop. But the ECB &#160;delayed its intervention until it had toppled Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and inserted its own agent (Mario Monti) to carry out its diktats. In other words, ECB chief, Mario Draghi, &#160;deliberately&#160;manipulated bond purchases to effect regime change before thumbing his nose at Germany and doing exactly what he planned to do from the very beginning. For those who still doubt this, take a look at this article by Reuters on Friday:</p>
<p>“The European Central Bank is ready to show some flexibility in its response to the euro zone debt crisis, despite vocal resistance from a German-led group of ECB policymakers to the bank unleashing the overwhelming firepower it can muster….</p>
<p>ECB officials beyond the German-led group are ready to use the bank’s controversial bond-buying program to help lower government borrowing costs if they reach unsustainable levels, as Italy is experiencing….</p>
<p>ECB officials have welcomed the appointment of Mario Monti as Italy’s new prime minister and look forward to his administration delivering austerity measures to restore confidence in Italy’s strained public finances….</p>
<p>Marko Kranjec, chief of Slovenia’s central bank and, like Weidmann, a member of the ECB’s 23-member Governing Council, told Reuters on Saturday Italy’s austerity reforms go in the right direction and the ECB was willing to support sovereign borrowers as long as it does not put price stability at risk.</p>
<p>“We are flexible,” Kranjec said. He declined to comment in detail on the ECB’s bond purchases but said they would go “as far as needed.” (“Analysis: Despite fuss, ECB ready for some crisis flexibility”, Reuters)</p>
<p>“As far as needed”? &#160;So the matter had already been decided?</p>
<p>Can you see what’s going on here? Draghi and his banker cohorts never had any intention of following the terms of the treaty. (“No bail outs”) &#160;It’s just a big game. They just needed time to bump-off Berlusconi and&#160;install&#160;their own puppet regime before they went on their bond buying binge. Here’s more from Reuters:</p>
<p>“Euro zone and International Monetary Fund officials have discussed the idea of the European Central Bank lending to the IMF, to provide the fund with sufficient resources for bailing out even the biggest euro zone sovereigns, officials said….</p>
<p>But EU law forbids the ECB to finance government borrowing…..Policymakers have discussed, therefore, how to get the ECB involved in crisis-fighting without endangering its independence. Lending money to the IMF, rather than any euro zone government, could achieve that, officials said…</p>
<p>Article 23 of the ECB statute says that “the ECB may conduct all types of banking transactions in relations with third countries and international organizations, including borrowing and lending operations”.</p>
<p>The IMF could then use the ECB money to finance various rescue operations in the euro zone like bailouts, precautionary credit lines, on its own, or in cooperation with the EFSF.</p>
<p>“It is doable,” a second euro zone official said. Two further euro zone officials said they had heard of the idea.” (“ECB could lend to IMF for euro zone rescue: officials”, Reuters)</p>
<p>Can you believe how dishonest these people are? Treaties mean nothing to them; they’re just an inconvenience that can be brushed aside whenever they choose. And this is the way the eurocrats conduct all their business. Just consider the proposal for the European Stability Mechanism. The ESM is supposed to create a permanent facility that can provide loans to countries that are in distress due to rising yields on sovereign bonds. But the ESM’s real purpose is to establish a supra-national fiscal authority whose directors and staff share absolute “immunity from every form of judicial process.” The ESM is essentially a stealth government with unreviewable power to implement the policies of unelected banksters and bureaucrats.</p>
<p>The ESM creates the legal basis for an EU dictatorship. If the treaty is ratified, the ESM will be able to draw from a pool of $700,000 billion euros to purchase sovereign bonds of struggling countries. But that’s just the beginning, because according to Article 10: “the Board of Governors may decide to change the authorized capital and amend Article 8 accordingly”. In other words, the fund’s managers are free to increase the amount of the fund whenever they like and the individual states are “irrevocably and unconditionally” required to provide the money.</p>
<p>How’s that for democracy?</p>
<p>But what if a country is either unable or unwilling to pay extra money to the ESM?</p>
<p>Well, then, under Article 27, (titled) “Legal Status, privileges and immunities”…”The ESM …shall have full legal capacity to …institute legal proceedings.” So, the ESM has the right to sue the countries for damages for failure to meet the terms of the contract.</p>
<p>On the other hand, neither the ESM nor any of its managers or staff can be sued regardless of the offense. They have complete immunity from action taken by executive, judicial, or legislative branches of government. The treaty essentially repeals all civil and criminal statutes for anyone connected to the fund. Take a look:</p>
<p>Article 27–The ESM, its property, funding and assets shall enjoy immunity from every form of judicial process.</p>
<p>Article 27 (again): The property, funding and assets of the ESM shall…be immune from search, requisition, confiscation, expropriation, or any other form of seizure, taking or foreclosure by executive, judicial, administrative or legislative action.</p>
<p>Article 30: Immunities of persons: 1–Governors, alternate governors, directors, alternate directors, the Manging Director and staff members shall be immune from legal process with respect to acts performed by them …and shall enjoy inviolability in respect to their official papers and documents.</p>
<p>No one working for the ESM can be held accountable for anything regardless of how egregious the crime may be. And all personal and official documentation can be withheld from public review. No transparency whatsoever, complete secrecy.</p>
<p>Naturally, bankers, politicians, and other elites are trying to rush this anti-democratic abomination through the ratification process before the public figures out what’s really in it. &#160;They’re promoting the ESM as an essential tool for dealing with potential crises in the future. But, don’t believe it. &#160;The fatcats are just setting up for another round of looting.</p>
<p>See the full video– <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CZr17HLH5U&amp;amp;feature=player_embedded#%21" type="external">ESM; Treaty of Debt; Stop it Now</a>!</p>
<p>Paul Krassner’s&#160;dialogue with Andrew Breitbart appears in the December issue of&#160; <a href="http://www.playboy.com/magazine/krassner-vs-breitbart" type="external">Playboy</a>.&#160;He is a contributor to&#160; <a href="" type="internal">Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion</a>, forthcoming from AK Press.&#160;</p> | true | 4 | time running fast think maybe months could weeks could days material risk fundamentally unnecessary default country like spain italy would financial catastrophe dragging european banking system north america act willem buiter citi chief economist boycott sovereign bonds europe spread beyond south triplearated countries like finland netherlands france become increasingly difficult banks corporations get shortterm financing cost swapping euros dollars steadily rising interbank lending started break banks hoard capital comply new regulations scaleback lending companies forced curtail operations trim investment debt crisis morphs credit crunch slows growth sends economy hurtling back recession according financial times four biggest banks uk already cut interbank loan volumes 24 percent clear indication severity crisis policymakers unable settle remedy calm markets banks continue withhold credit economy plunge friday ecb announced would increase bond purchasing program securities markets programme 27 billion per week order stop contagion shore teetering sovereigns like italy spain heres excerpt bloomberg european central bank governing council members agreed 20 billioneuro 27 billion weekly upper limit sovereign debt purchases resistance among members grows german newspaper frankfurter allgemeine zeitung reported council members netherlands austria added voices skepticism bondpurchase program newspaper said objecting buying include bundesbank president jens weidmann executive board member juergen stark yves mersch governor luxembourgs central bank faz said ecb backs 27 billion weekly limit government bond purchases faz says bloomberg battle germanythe largest economy eurozoneand ecb brewing months germany adamantly opposed pooling debts thus support eurobonds fiscal transfers allowing ecb act lender last resort heres bundesbank president jens weidmann summed recent interview eurosystem must lender last resort sovereigns would violate article 123 eu treaty prohibiting monetary financing central bank funding governments see ensure stability monetary union violating legal provisions think prohibition monetary financing important ensuring credibility independence central bank allow us deliver primary objective price stability german position principled also impractical europe crisis slowmotion bank run rapidly turning fullblown panic policymakers flexible want avert another lehmantype meltdown contrast ecb position unprincipled also calculating cynical everyone whos followed events knew emergency fund efsf would never ready time address firestorm bond markets meant yields would continue rise ecb provided form backstop ecb 160delayed intervention toppled prime minister silvio berlusconi inserted agent mario monti carry diktats words ecb chief mario draghi 160deliberately160manipulated bond purchases effect regime change thumbing nose germany exactly planned beginning still doubt take look article reuters friday european central bank ready show flexibility response euro zone debt crisis despite vocal resistance germanled group ecb policymakers bank unleashing overwhelming firepower muster ecb officials beyond germanled group ready use banks controversial bondbuying program help lower government borrowing costs reach unsustainable levels italy experiencing ecb officials welcomed appointment mario monti italys new prime minister look forward administration delivering austerity measures restore confidence italys strained public finances marko kranjec chief slovenias central bank like weidmann member ecbs 23member governing council told reuters saturday italys austerity reforms go right direction ecb willing support sovereign borrowers long put price stability risk flexible kranjec said declined comment detail ecbs bond purchases said would go far needed analysis despite fuss ecb ready crisis flexibility reuters far needed 160so matter already decided see whats going draghi banker cohorts never intention following terms treaty bail outs 160its big game needed time bumpoff berlusconi and160install160their puppet regime went bond buying binge heres reuters euro zone international monetary fund officials discussed idea european central bank lending imf provide fund sufficient resources bailing even biggest euro zone sovereigns officials said eu law forbids ecb finance government borrowingpolicymakers discussed therefore get ecb involved crisisfighting without endangering independence lending money imf rather euro zone government could achieve officials said article 23 ecb statute says ecb may conduct types banking transactions relations third countries international organizations including borrowing lending operations imf could use ecb money finance various rescue operations euro zone like bailouts precautionary credit lines cooperation efsf doable second euro zone official said two euro zone officials said heard idea ecb could lend imf euro zone rescue officials reuters believe dishonest people treaties mean nothing theyre inconvenience brushed aside whenever choose way eurocrats conduct business consider proposal european stability mechanism esm supposed create permanent facility provide loans countries distress due rising yields sovereign bonds esms real purpose establish supranational fiscal authority whose directors staff share absolute immunity every form judicial process esm essentially stealth government unreviewable power implement policies unelected banksters bureaucrats esm creates legal basis eu dictatorship treaty ratified esm able draw pool 700000 billion euros purchase sovereign bonds struggling countries thats beginning according article 10 board governors may decide change authorized capital amend article 8 accordingly words funds managers free increase amount fund whenever like individual states irrevocably unconditionally required provide money hows democracy country either unable unwilling pay extra money esm well article 27 titled legal status privileges immunitiesthe esm shall full legal capacity institute legal proceedings esm right sue countries damages failure meet terms contract hand neither esm managers staff sued regardless offense complete immunity action taken executive judicial legislative branches government treaty essentially repeals civil criminal statutes anyone connected fund take look article 27the esm property funding assets shall enjoy immunity every form judicial process article 27 property funding assets esm shallbe immune search requisition confiscation expropriation form seizure taking foreclosure executive judicial administrative legislative action article 30 immunities persons 1governors alternate governors directors alternate directors manging director staff members shall immune legal process respect acts performed shall enjoy inviolability respect official papers documents one working esm held accountable anything regardless egregious crime may personal official documentation withheld public review transparency whatsoever complete secrecy naturally bankers politicians elites trying rush antidemocratic abomination ratification process public figures whats really 160theyre promoting esm essential tool dealing potential crises future dont believe 160the fatcats setting another round looting see full video esm treaty debt stop paul krassners160dialogue andrew breitbart appears december issue of160 playboy160he contributor to160 hopeless barack obama politics illusion forthcoming ak press160 | 969 |
<p />
<p>Truth is stranger than dystopian fiction. Last May, for example, United States President Barack Obama announced the opening of the U.S.-sponsored Fulbright University of Vietnam (FUV), the first private university in a small nation the U.S. tried to “bomb back to the Stone Age” half a century ago. Intended to be “ <a href="" type="internal">a U.S.-style university</a> not under control of the Communist Party of Vietnam,” FUV hopes to begin teaching students about how to be good global-era capitalists and world capitalist citizens in the fall of 2017. It’s a collaboration between the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and the U.S. State Department. The U.S. government has so far invested roughly$20 million in the project.</p>
<p>Bronze Star Butcher</p>
<p>The chair of FUV’s board of trustees is Bob Kerrey, a man with an interesting resume. It’s a curiously Orwellian choice. He is a former governor of Nebraska (1983-1987), a former U.S. Senator from the same state (1988-2000), and the former president of the New School University (a curious position for a man whose “higher” educational credentials stopped with a 1966 bachelors’ degree in Pharmacy at the University of Nebraska) in New York City (2001-2010). He is also a highly decorated war criminal in the “crucifixion of Southeast Asia” (as <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62666.American_Power_and_the_New_Mandarins" type="external">Noam Chomsky once aptly described</a> the U.S. War on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) that was planned by the “ <a href="" type="internal">best and the brightest</a>” from Harvard and other Ivy League institutions.</p>
<p>From 1966 through early 1969, Kerrey was a gung-ho Navy SEALs officer. In February of his final year, Kerrey’s unit slaughtered 21 innocent women and children in the Vietnamese village of Thanh Phong. This horrific incident is commemorated in a display at the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Remnants_Museum" type="external">War Remnants Museum</a> in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ho_Chi_Minh_City" type="external">Ho Chi Minh City</a>. The display includes several photos, a drain pipe, and a placard that includes the <a href="http://www.rustycompass.com/blog/bob-kerrey-the-war-remnants-museum-and-fulbright-university-253/#.V8WaqDH6tes" type="external">following historical crime-scene background:</a></p>
<p>“From 8PM to 9PM February 25th, 1969, a group of Seal Rangers [ <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic" type="external">sic</a>] (one of the most selective rangers of U.S. Army): led by Lieutenant Bob Kerry [ <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic" type="external">sic</a>] reached for Hamlet 5, Thanh Phong Village, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanh_Phu_District" type="external">Thanh Phu District</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Tre_Province" type="external">Ben Tre Province</a>. They cut 66 year-old Bui Van Vat and 62 year-old Luu Thi Canh’s necks and pulled their three grandchildren out from their hiding place in a drain and killed two, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disembowelment" type="external">disembowelled</a> one. Then, these rangers moved to dug-outs of other families, shot dead 15 civilians (including three pregnant women), disembowelled a girl…It was not until April 2001 that U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey confessed his crime to the international public.”</p>
<p>It was a CIA operation, part of the Agency’s notorious <a href="" type="internal">Phoenix Program</a>. Kerrey, historian John Mariciano notes, hardly just fell into a chaotic situation that led inadvertently to unpredictable civilian deaths. As <a href="http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/37316-slaughter-in-vietnam-haunts-bob-kerrey-s-appointment-to-fulbright-university" type="external">Marciano explains</a>:</p>
<p>“he was on a CIA mission and participated in an ‘illegal, premeditated mass murder.’ According to an investigative report in The New York Times, one thing is certain: Around midnight on February 25, 1969, Kerrey’s unit killed at least 13 innocent civilians….no guerrillas were killed in action and the official report was a lie…Attacks such as these…were part of the Phoenix Program and run by the CIA. Kerrey and his team were part of a larger campaign to murder and terrorize Vietnamese civilians. The object of this program was to target not only individual members of the [revolutionary Vietnamese] National Liberation Front’s political infrastructure, but also their families, friends and neighbors. These war crimes were a central part of the CIA’s actions during the war.”</p>
<p>According to witnesses from his unit and the village, Kerrey helped kill the elderly Bui Van Vat and gave the order to shoot women and children. A “baby was the last one alive,” unit member <a href="" type="internal">Gerhard Klann recalled</a>. “There were blood and guts splattered everywhere.”</p>
<p>Kerrey was awarded the Bronze Star for commanding this “heroic” action, falsely reported by Kerrey and the U.S. military as having “killed 21 Viet Cong guerillas.”</p>
<p>“Imagine,” Vietnam-based educational consultant Mark Ashwill <a href="" type="internal">wrote last July,</a> “what would happen if a foreign university in the United States appointed an individual who had killed US civilians…to serve as chair of its board of trustees? Or…‘If the post-war West German government had selected a former German army officer who had killed (or ordered the killing of) unarmed French civilians to head the Goethe Institute in Paris [historian David Marr]…’”</p>
<p>“The Destruction Was Mutual”</p>
<p>Kerrey admitted that he’d killed noncombatant Vietnamese women and children after 16 years in higher political office, after one initially promising but failed presidential bid (1991-92), and just <a href="" type="internal">two months after</a> he was installed atop the New School. The compelling force behind his long- overdue confession was not a sudden surge of moral guilt and courage on his part but rather his knowledge that the New York Times and <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/memories-of-a-massacre-part-i/" type="external">CBS News</a> were about to expose his war crime. The confession came with the nauseating excuse that “both sides did a lot of damage in the Vietnam War” – a preposterous suggestion of moral equivalence for the colossal calamities resulting from a prolonged assault on a poor peasant nation by the most potent military killing machine in history.</p>
<p>During a book tour after the facts surrounding his war crime came out, Marciano notes, Kerrey said angrily that “Both sides did a lot of damage in the Vietnam War.” It’s a standard U.S. claim, one that deletes the incomparable devastation the world’s most powerful military empire and industrial state inflicted on Vietnam and neighboring states. The United States lost 58,000 soldiers in an imperial invasion that killed as many as 5 million Southeast Asians between 1962 and 1975. The massive U.S. imperial assault laid waste to vast stretches of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. It spread disease and birth defects across the region. The Vietnamese did not kill a single American solider – much less a U.S. civilian – on U.S. soil. Their American “victims” were invading gendarmes sent by Washington to keep Vietnam savagely unequal and under the thumb of the world’s rich nations.</p>
<p>But, as Jimmy Carter claimed in 1977, explaining why the U.S. owed no special reparations or apologies to Vietnam, “ <a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter" type="external">the destruction was mutual</a>.”</p>
<p>Indeed. What good American Baby Boomer can ever forget the fearsome fleets of Vietnamese bombers that wreaked havoc on major U.S. cities and pulverized and poisoned our fields and farms during the 1960s and 1970s, the legions of Vietnamese killers who descended from attack helicopters to murder U.S. citizens in their homes…the Vietnamese gunships that strafed our schools and hospitals…the Vietnamese bombing and mining of U.S. harbors…the naked American children running down streets in flight from Vietnamese napalm attacks. Yes, the Vietnamese occupation of the U.S. was Hell.</p>
<p>Really Existing Crimes That Never Happened</p>
<p>What led Obama, the U.S. State Department, and Harvard to tactlessly place a man whose cold-blooded massacre of Vietnamese innocents is captured in a Vietnamese war museum atop a new U.S.-sponsored university set up just miles away from that museum in Ho Chi Minh City? What were they thinking? Ashwill surmises that Kerrey’s appointment reflects a morally blind combination of Ivy League insider-politics, intra-elite friendship, and American supremacism. The vanguard role goes to Tommy Vallely, a Kennedy School graduate who is pals with both Kerrey and Kerrey’s close buddy, the current U.S. Secretary of State and Vietnam veteran John F. Kerry:</p>
<p>“Why was he selected? In a phrase, ‘the Harvard connection.’….one of the driving forces behind the establishment of the Fulbright University Vietnam is Harvard’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation and, in particular, Tommy Vallely, its senior advisor for Mainland Southeast Asia. Vallely founded the Harvard Vietnam Program in 1989, which led to the establishment of the Fulbright Economics Teaching Program in 1994 in Ho Chi Minh City – a partnership between the University of Economics, HCMC, and the Harvard Kennedy School. Himself a veteran of the American War in Viet Nam, Vallely also happens to be a close friend and confidant of John Kerry, who in turn is a friend of his long-time US Senate colleague, Bob Kerrey.”</p>
<p>“Perhaps Kerrey’s appointment was in part the result of this perfect storm of friendship and loyalty, in addition to his desire to give back…What parallel universe do his supporters inhabit? They either do not comprehend the implications of selecting such a polarizing figure for such an important position, or do not care. Could it be that sense of superiority and exceptionalism that distinguishes nationalists from patriots, what [onetime U.S. Senator William] Fulbright wrote about so eloquently and passionately in [the Senator’s famous book] The Arrogance of Power?”</p>
<p>Yes to all that but let us not forget also the likely calculation of Kerrey’s appointers that nobody who really matters all that much would really care about ancient imperial butchery in the glorious new all-capitalist neoliberal age. Kerrey’s position atop FUM is (like so much else) sadly consistent with the terrible official amnesia that holds official and doctrinal sway across “elite” Western culture and mass media when it comes to American imperial arrogance and criminality. In the U.S. and indeed across much of the West, the record of past and ongoing US imperialism and international law-breaking has long been airbrushed out from permissible collective memory even as it unfolds. As the great British playwright Harold Pinter noted in his acceptance speech (recounted by <a href="http://johnpilger.com/books/freedom-next-time" type="external">John Pilger</a>) for the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature, dominant Western cultural authorities behave as if US imperial violence does not exist and never has. Washington has committed mass murder and suffering on a monumental scale over the last six decades and more. “But you wouldn’t know it,” Pinter observed. “It never happened. Even while it was happening,” Pinter added, “it never happened.&#160; It didn’t matter.&#160; It was of no interest” – this thanks to a corporate mass media and an “elite” intellectual culture that cleanse history for reasons of capital, race, empire, and state.</p>
<p>Mistakes Happen</p>
<p>And besides, the conventional imperial American exceptionalist wisdom holds. mistakes happen. It’s true, dominant media and reputable intellectuals acknowledge, Uncle Sam and his innately gallant gendarmes occasionally make “mistakes” in their inherently noble (because American) zeal to improve an often nasty and unruly world. It’s a messy, imperfect planet on which the intrinsically benevolent, peace- and freedom-loving United States struggles selflessly to make its righteous mark. Slip-ups and oversteps occur. “Mistakes,” you know, like the so-called Vietnam War and its many My Lais and Thanh Phongs. “Mistakes” like the U.S. invasion of Mesopotamia, which led to the premature death of more than a millions Iraqis. Still, the reigning American thought-habit holds, U.S. intentions are always virtuous. The “blunders” take place in the context of an ugly and dangerous world where evil is rife – a world where the United States always strives mightily to stay morally upright while dealing with “bad guys” like “the Viet Cong” (the American military and media’s racist label for Vietnamese revolutionaries who fought for national independence and social justice). As Bill Clinton’s second Secretary of State Madeline Albright (the one who said that the death of more than half a million Iraqi children through U.S-led economic sanctions was “ <a href="" type="internal">a price worth paying</a>” for the advance of U.S. foreign policy goals) <a href="" type="internal">once explained</a>, “The United States is good…We try to do our best everywhere.”</p>
<p>We must never forget how splendid we are, something that makes it essential for us to toss vast volumes of U.S. “foreign relations” (imperial) history down Orwell’s “memory hole.”</p>
<p>Beyond Disgrace: “Not a Memory at All”</p>
<p>And furthermore, conventional U.S.-led Western mass media and elite cultural wisdom runs, it’s time to move past old grievances. We need to transcend all that unpleasant old history in the glorious neoliberal world order. We need to let go of all that antiquated stuff in the munificent age of hyper-globalization – this brave new “free market” (state and corporate-/finance-capitalist) world. We’ve got to stop being stuck in the past. Listen to Bob Kerrey’s good friend John F. Kerry, the Vietnam veteran who <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucY7JOfg6G4" type="external">once testified</a> about U.S war crimes in Vietnam at Winter Soldier hearings during the early 1970s. Here is Secretary Kerry reflecting on the Vietnam conflict’s distant over-ness during his comments at the event in Ho Chi Minh City announcing Fulbright University’s formation <a href="" type="internal">last May 25th</a>”: &#160;</p>
<p>“As I’m sure everybody here knows, the relationship between Vietnam and the United States, the relationship for Tommy [Villely], for Bob Kerrey, for myself, has always been personal. And I think it is personal for many people on both sides of the ocean, the Pacific. I first came here in 1968 and I can still remember securing a short pass to come up from the Mekong Delta to then Saigon, and sitting on the deck of this hotel in a momentary pause from all the craziness. And from that vantage point I could look out at the city in the evening, and I did, and I could see flares popping around the city, lighting up the night and the perimeter. And in the distance, you could even hear the bursts of gunfire or occasionally a C-130 with something called Puff the Magic Dragon shooting in the distance. It was literally surreal – an oasis of sorts, but still a war zone. Standing here today, same hotel, same rooftop up there; a very different view, a very different country, a very different time. The traffic outside, the remarkable amount of energy, is just bursting. You feel it and you see it pulsating. And the sounds you hear are of people today energetically joining together peacefully going about the business of their lives.”</p>
<p>“So the war is an indelible but an increasingly distant memory. And for most, it’s not a memory at all. Certainly, the students who are going to enroll at this university are far more interested in plugging into the world economy than in being stuck in the past or re-living memories of events that took place long before they were born” (emphasis added).</p>
<p>It was all pretty personal for the villages of Thanh Phong.</p>
<p>Nearly four million Vietnamese killed in their own homeland by the criminal U.S. Empire? The country carpet-bombed and poisoned on a monumental scale by cynical and vicious Washington planners? Untold masses of Vietnamese children born with hideous birth defects thanks to U.S. chemical defoliation? Forty-thousand Vietnamese (including Kerrey’s victims in Thanh Phong) – more than two-thirds of the total U.S. “Vietnam War” body count – killed in Operation Phoenix alone? Oh well. The elite-born boarding school- and Yale-minted Winter Soldier who came in from the New Left cold to rise to the top of the <a href="http://monthlyreview.org/product/wall_streets_think_tank/" type="external">Council on Foreign Relations ruling class</a>, now says, in essence: “Get over it, people. It’s distant history now. Let’s get on with business, with global capitalism – with this great new post-Cold War all-capitalist world where happy and energetic people get to use the Internet and go to universities to learn about “economics,” accounting, and “business management.”</p>
<p>“Not a memory all – and let’s keep it that way,” Kerry might have said if he’d been completely honest about his mission.</p>
<p>(Remember John “Reporting to Duty’s” Kerry failed presidential bid in 2004? Democratic delegates opposed to George W. Bush’s arch-criminal invasion of Iraq were instructed by John <a href="" type="internal">“I am Not a Redistribution Democrat”</a> Kerry’s campaign staff and the Democratic National Committee to <a href="http://boston.indymedia.org/feature/display/24712/index.php" type="external">keep their mouths shut about the war</a>. For Kerry and indeed for the not-so “antiwar” Obama, whose stardom was launched with his <a href="" type="internal">stealthily imperial Keynote Address</a> to the Democratic National Convention that year, the issue was no longer the invasion and occupation itself but rather who was in charge of it.)</p>
<p>I sent John Kerry’s May 25th Fulbright University speech to Marciano a few days ago. He wrote back: “As my father used to say, ‘Another great American.’ He [Kerry] is beyond disgrace.”</p>
<p>“We’ve Got to Put This War Behind Us”</p>
<p>In Kerrey’s account reported by University World News reporter Mary Beth Marklein, “there was never a grand plan to create [Fulbright University]. It came about ‘just as a result of a number of us saying, ‘We’ve got to put this war behind us’”(emphasis added). <a href="" type="internal">Marklein finds</a> that Kerrey and Kerry’s desire to bury the memory of the criminal and imperialist “Vietnam War” is “shared by key leaders” atop the authoritarian. state-capitalist Vietnamese regime:</p>
<p>“In an opinion column published in the state-run Tuoi Tre newspaper, Dinh La Thang, the secretary of the Communist Party in Ho Chi Minh City, called FUV ‘a concrete symbol of the shared determination of Vietnam and the US to set the past aside, overcome differences, pursue shared interests, and look to the future in a practical and effective manner.’ The criticism of Kerrey’s appointment ‘is understandable,’ he wrote, but only ‘if we … look at its emotional side. … When we reflect on a historical event, we must see it in relationship to the present. Therefore, emotional responses alone are inadequate’” (emphasis added).</p>
<p>How nice to see such warm consensus between bloodless, state-capitalist elites across the Pacific Ocean and two very different sides (imperial and neo-colonial) of the Cold War decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Vietnamese “Communist” Party leaders and imperialist American war criminals agree: “emotion” and history must not get in the dysfunctional way of rational economic growth and corporate globalization.</p>
<p>The United States Won the Vietnam War</p>
<p>Surprised by Dinh La Thang’s determination to “set the past aside”? You shouldn’t be. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Noam Chomsky has tried to tell us for many years, the United States actually won “the Vietnam War.” It pulverized Vietnam with such awesome imperial force as to prevent it from ever becoming a model of successful model of independent and popular, bottom-up revolutionary development outside and against the world capitalist system that now poses the ultimate threat to a decent and viable future for humanity.</p>
<p>“Contrary to what virtually everyone-left or right-says,” <a href="http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/ChomOdon_SEAsia.html" type="external">Chomsky noted thirteen years ago</a> “the United States achieved its major objectives in Indochina. Vietnam was demolished. There’s no danger that successful development there will provide a model for other nations in the region. Of course, it wasn’t a total victory for the US. Our larger goal was to reincorporate Indochina into the US-dominated global system, and that has not yet been achieved.”</p>
<p>Finishing the Job</p>
<p>Which reminds me, the “pathological liar” ( <a href="" type="internal">historian Doug Valentine’s characterization</a>) Bob Kerrey is, well, lying when he claims that FUV emerged only from some sudden and shared desire to overcome the memory of the Vietnam War. That claim is transparent historical nonsense. Who is he trying to kid? As Marklein reports:</p>
<p>“The university grows out of years of planning and negotiation. The US government to date has invested about US$20 million in it, primarily in the form of federal grants to the Trust for University Innovation in Vietnam, a US non-profit that was created in 2012 in support of the establishment of Fulbright University Vietnam…Education has been a central platform for the United States’ soft power strategy in Vietnam in the 20-plus years since the two countries resumed diplomatic relations” (emphasis added).</p>
<p>“Two members of the Vietnamese Politburo received funding from the US State Department’s Fulbright academic exchange programme to earn graduate degrees at US universities.”</p>
<p>“Since 2000, more than 600 Vietnamese have studied at US universities through a separate fellowship programme, this one championed by Kerrey while in the [US] Senate. He was one of several prominent Vietnam war veterans to push for US legislation for the fellowship, with a goal of ensuring that repayment for wartime debts owed by South Vietnam to the United States would go toward educating Vietnamese students.”</p>
<p>“As that exchange programme draws to a close, excess funds are shifting toward the development of Fulbright University Vietnam, itself an offshoot of the Fulbright Economics Teaching Program, a Harvard-led project that opened its doors in 1994 in Ho Chi Minh City.”</p>
<p>As is reflected in its distinctly “free market” and globalization-friendly curriculum and staff, with a heavy emphasis on capitalist economics, FUV is part of the Western, US-led neoliberal ideological offensive – a two-decades’ long “soft power strategy” – in East Asia. It is also part of the Obama44 and coming Clinton45 administrations’ Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)- approved “tilt to Asia” and Western transnational capital’s Obama-led drive to put the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) in place.</p>
<p>As two top members of the bipartisan corporate-imperial ruling class, Obama and Kerry went to Vietnam last May not just to sell Fulbright University but also and more importantly, above all, to sell the arch-authoritarian and global-corporatist TPP. The TTP is a giant scheme both to insulate the eco-cidal multinational investor class from governmental regulation and popular resistance and to enhance the power of U.S. and allied Western capital relative to that of the competing state-capitalist super-state China. The full and ugly history of what Washington did to Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 1970s is not a particularly good fit for that neoliberal and imperial agenda and so down the memory hole it goes.</p>
<p>In short, Kerrey, Vallely and other U.S. operatives (including Kerry and now Obama) have been trying to achieve what Chomsky called “the larger [U.S.] goal…to reincorporate Indochina into the US-dominated global system.” The mission they “served” back in the “surreal” Sixties lives on. They’re trying to finish the imperial job, in softer ways. Good imperial soldiers to the end.</p>
<p>Who Controls the Past</p>
<p>Orwell would be impressed. In his famous dystopian novel 1984, history is deleted and otherwise altered in accord with the shifting accumulation and propaganda needs of the totalitarian state-capitalist state of Oceana, whose reigning party proclaims that “Who controls the past, controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”</p>
<p>Sadly enough, it’s all about selling a false and lethal promise. There is no glorious future of mutually beneficial peace and commerce to be enjoyed over a horizon enabled by forgiving and forgetting past imperial crimes. The global capitalist system the U.S. was defending and advancing against Vietnamese national independence and socialist revolution in the deceptive name of the Cold War struggle against “international communism” has brought humanity to the brink of catastrophic <a href="" type="internal">ecosystem collapse</a>. It has also concentrated wealth and power into ever fewer hands on a scale that would make plutocrats of past eras blush. According to Oxfam earlier this year, just <a href="" type="internal">sixty-two super-opulent billionaires own as much wealth between them as half the planet’s population</a>.</p>
<p>The crimes of the American Empire continue to be committed beneath the <a href="https://zcomm.org/zmagazine/uncle-sam-top-menace-to-peace-onand-earth/" type="external">airbrushing cover</a> of the reigning Western media and intellectual culture, including that of the United States’ supposedly “leftist” system of “higher education,” which is shockingly rife in elite posts with US war criminals, few as directly blood-soaked as the longtime New School president an current FU chair Bob Kerrey but no less real nonetheless – a topic to which I shall turn in a coming special “Back to School” report.</p> | true | 4 | truth stranger dystopian fiction last may example united states president barack obama announced opening ussponsored fulbright university vietnam fuv first private university small nation us tried bomb back stone age half century ago intended usstyle university control communist party vietnam fuv hopes begin teaching students good globalera capitalists world capitalist citizens fall 2017 collaboration kennedy school government harvard us state department us government far invested roughly20 million project bronze star butcher chair fuvs board trustees bob kerrey man interesting resume curiously orwellian choice former governor nebraska 19831987 former us senator state 19882000 former president new school university curious position man whose higher educational credentials stopped 1966 bachelors degree pharmacy university nebraska new york city 20012010 also highly decorated war criminal crucifixion southeast asia noam chomsky aptly described us war vietnam laos cambodia planned best brightest harvard ivy league institutions 1966 early 1969 kerrey gungho navy seals officer february final year kerreys unit slaughtered 21 innocent women children vietnamese village thanh phong horrific incident commemorated display war remnants museum ho chi minh city display includes several photos drain pipe placard includes following historical crimescene background 8pm 9pm february 25th 1969 group seal rangers sic one selective rangers us army led lieutenant bob kerry sic reached hamlet 5 thanh phong village thanh phu district ben tre province cut 66 yearold bui van vat 62 yearold luu thi canhs necks pulled three grandchildren hiding place drain killed two disembowelled one rangers moved dugouts families shot dead 15 civilians including three pregnant women disembowelled girlit april 2001 us senator bob kerrey confessed crime international public cia operation part agencys notorious phoenix program kerrey historian john mariciano notes hardly fell chaotic situation led inadvertently unpredictable civilian deaths marciano explains cia mission participated illegal premeditated mass murder according investigative report new york times one thing certain around midnight february 25 1969 kerreys unit killed least 13 innocent civiliansno guerrillas killed action official report lieattacks thesewere part phoenix program run cia kerrey team part larger campaign murder terrorize vietnamese civilians object program target individual members revolutionary vietnamese national liberation fronts political infrastructure also families friends neighbors war crimes central part cias actions war according witnesses unit village kerrey helped kill elderly bui van vat gave order shoot women children baby last one alive unit member gerhard klann recalled blood guts splattered everywhere kerrey awarded bronze star commanding heroic action falsely reported kerrey us military killed 21 viet cong guerillas imagine vietnambased educational consultant mark ashwill wrote last july would happen foreign university united states appointed individual killed us civiliansto serve chair board trustees orif postwar west german government selected former german army officer killed ordered killing unarmed french civilians head goethe institute paris historian david marr destruction mutual kerrey admitted hed killed noncombatant vietnamese women children 16 years higher political office one initially promising failed presidential bid 199192 two months installed atop new school compelling force behind long overdue confession sudden surge moral guilt courage part rather knowledge new york times cbs news expose war crime confession came nauseating excuse sides lot damage vietnam war preposterous suggestion moral equivalence colossal calamities resulting prolonged assault poor peasant nation potent military killing machine history book tour facts surrounding war crime came marciano notes kerrey said angrily sides lot damage vietnam war standard us claim one deletes incomparable devastation worlds powerful military empire industrial state inflicted vietnam neighboring states united states lost 58000 soldiers imperial invasion killed many 5 million southeast asians 1962 1975 massive us imperial assault laid waste vast stretches vietnam cambodia laos spread disease birth defects across region vietnamese kill single american solider much less us civilian us soil american victims invading gendarmes sent washington keep vietnam savagely unequal thumb worlds rich nations jimmy carter claimed 1977 explaining us owed special reparations apologies vietnam destruction mutual indeed good american baby boomer ever forget fearsome fleets vietnamese bombers wreaked havoc major us cities pulverized poisoned fields farms 1960s 1970s legions vietnamese killers descended attack helicopters murder us citizens homesthe vietnamese gunships strafed schools hospitalsthe vietnamese bombing mining us harborsthe naked american children running streets flight vietnamese napalm attacks yes vietnamese occupation us hell really existing crimes never happened led obama us state department harvard tactlessly place man whose coldblooded massacre vietnamese innocents captured vietnamese war museum atop new ussponsored university set miles away museum ho chi minh city thinking ashwill surmises kerreys appointment reflects morally blind combination ivy league insiderpolitics intraelite friendship american supremacism vanguard role goes tommy vallely kennedy school graduate pals kerrey kerreys close buddy current us secretary state vietnam veteran john f kerry selected phrase harvard connectionone driving forces behind establishment fulbright university vietnam harvards ash center democratic governance innovation particular tommy vallely senior advisor mainland southeast asia vallely founded harvard vietnam program 1989 led establishment fulbright economics teaching program 1994 ho chi minh city partnership university economics hcmc harvard kennedy school veteran american war viet nam vallely also happens close friend confidant john kerry turn friend longtime us senate colleague bob kerrey perhaps kerreys appointment part result perfect storm friendship loyalty addition desire give backwhat parallel universe supporters inhabit either comprehend implications selecting polarizing figure important position care could sense superiority exceptionalism distinguishes nationalists patriots onetime us senator william fulbright wrote eloquently passionately senators famous book arrogance power yes let us forget also likely calculation kerreys appointers nobody really matters much would really care ancient imperial butchery glorious new allcapitalist neoliberal age kerreys position atop fum like much else sadly consistent terrible official amnesia holds official doctrinal sway across elite western culture mass media comes american imperial arrogance criminality us indeed across much west record past ongoing us imperialism international lawbreaking long airbrushed permissible collective memory even unfolds great british playwright harold pinter noted acceptance speech recounted john pilger 2005 nobel prize literature dominant western cultural authorities behave us imperial violence exist never washington committed mass murder suffering monumental scale last six decades wouldnt know pinter observed never happened even happening pinter added never happened160 didnt matter160 interest thanks corporate mass media elite intellectual culture cleanse history reasons capital race empire state mistakes happen besides conventional imperial american exceptionalist wisdom holds mistakes happen true dominant media reputable intellectuals acknowledge uncle sam innately gallant gendarmes occasionally make mistakes inherently noble american zeal improve often nasty unruly world messy imperfect planet intrinsically benevolent peace freedomloving united states struggles selflessly make righteous mark slipups oversteps occur mistakes know like socalled vietnam war many lais thanh phongs mistakes like us invasion mesopotamia led premature death millions iraqis still reigning american thoughthabit holds us intentions always virtuous blunders take place context ugly dangerous world evil rife world united states always strives mightily stay morally upright dealing bad guys like viet cong american military medias racist label vietnamese revolutionaries fought national independence social justice bill clintons second secretary state madeline albright one said death half million iraqi children usled economic sanctions price worth paying advance us foreign policy goals explained united states goodwe try best everywhere must never forget splendid something makes essential us toss vast volumes us foreign relations imperial history orwells memory hole beyond disgrace memory furthermore conventional usled western mass media elite cultural wisdom runs time move past old grievances need transcend unpleasant old history glorious neoliberal world order need let go antiquated stuff munificent age hyperglobalization brave new free market state corporatefinancecapitalist world weve got stop stuck past listen bob kerreys good friend john f kerry vietnam veteran testified us war crimes vietnam winter soldier hearings early 1970s secretary kerry reflecting vietnam conflicts distant overness comments event ho chi minh city announcing fulbright universitys formation last may 25th 160 im sure everybody knows relationship vietnam united states relationship tommy villely bob kerrey always personal think personal many people sides ocean pacific first came 1968 still remember securing short pass come mekong delta saigon sitting deck hotel momentary pause craziness vantage point could look city evening could see flares popping around city lighting night perimeter distance could even hear bursts gunfire occasionally c130 something called puff magic dragon shooting distance literally surreal oasis sorts still war zone standing today hotel rooftop different view different country different time traffic outside remarkable amount energy bursting feel see pulsating sounds hear people today energetically joining together peacefully going business lives war indelible increasingly distant memory memory certainly students going enroll university far interested plugging world economy stuck past reliving memories events took place long born emphasis added pretty personal villages thanh phong nearly four million vietnamese killed homeland criminal us empire country carpetbombed poisoned monumental scale cynical vicious washington planners untold masses vietnamese children born hideous birth defects thanks us chemical defoliation fortythousand vietnamese including kerreys victims thanh phong twothirds total us vietnam war body count killed operation phoenix alone oh well eliteborn boarding school yaleminted winter soldier came new left cold rise top council foreign relations ruling class says essence get people distant history lets get business global capitalism great new postcold war allcapitalist world happy energetic people get use internet go universities learn economics accounting business management memory lets keep way kerry might said hed completely honest mission remember john reporting dutys kerry failed presidential bid 2004 democratic delegates opposed george w bushs archcriminal invasion iraq instructed john redistribution democrat kerrys campaign staff democratic national committee keep mouths shut war kerry indeed notso antiwar obama whose stardom launched stealthily imperial keynote address democratic national convention year issue longer invasion occupation rather charge sent john kerrys may 25th fulbright university speech marciano days ago wrote back father used say another great american kerry beyond disgrace weve got put war behind us kerreys account reported university world news reporter mary beth marklein never grand plan create fulbright university came result number us saying weve got put war behind usemphasis added marklein finds kerrey kerrys desire bury memory criminal imperialist vietnam war shared key leaders atop authoritarian statecapitalist vietnamese regime opinion column published staterun tuoi tre newspaper dinh la thang secretary communist party ho chi minh city called fuv concrete symbol shared determination vietnam us set past aside overcome differences pursue shared interests look future practical effective manner criticism kerreys appointment understandable wrote look emotional side reflect historical event must see relationship present therefore emotional responses alone inadequate emphasis added nice see warm consensus bloodless statecapitalist elites across pacific ocean two different sides imperial neocolonial cold war decades collapse soviet union vietnamese communist party leaders imperialist american war criminals agree emotion history must get dysfunctional way rational economic growth corporate globalization united states vietnam war surprised dinh la thangs determination set past aside shouldnt contrary conventional wisdom noam chomsky tried tell us many years united states actually vietnam war pulverized vietnam awesome imperial force prevent ever becoming model successful model independent popular bottomup revolutionary development outside world capitalist system poses ultimate threat decent viable future humanity contrary virtually everyoneleft rightsays chomsky noted thirteen years ago united states achieved major objectives indochina vietnam demolished theres danger successful development provide model nations region course wasnt total victory us larger goal reincorporate indochina usdominated global system yet achieved finishing job reminds pathological liar historian doug valentines characterization bob kerrey well lying claims fuv emerged sudden shared desire overcome memory vietnam war claim transparent historical nonsense trying kid marklein reports university grows years planning negotiation us government date invested us20 million primarily form federal grants trust university innovation vietnam us nonprofit created 2012 support establishment fulbright university vietnameducation central platform united states soft power strategy vietnam 20plus years since two countries resumed diplomatic relations emphasis added two members vietnamese politburo received funding us state departments fulbright academic exchange programme earn graduate degrees us universities since 2000 600 vietnamese studied us universities separate fellowship programme one championed kerrey us senate one several prominent vietnam war veterans push us legislation fellowship goal ensuring repayment wartime debts owed south vietnam united states would go toward educating vietnamese students exchange programme draws close excess funds shifting toward development fulbright university vietnam offshoot fulbright economics teaching program harvardled project opened doors 1994 ho chi minh city reflected distinctly free market globalizationfriendly curriculum staff heavy emphasis capitalist economics fuv part western usled neoliberal ideological offensive twodecades long soft power strategy east asia also part obama44 coming clinton45 administrations council foreign relations cfr approved tilt asia western transnational capitals obamaled drive put trans pacific partnership tpp place two top members bipartisan corporateimperial ruling class obama kerry went vietnam last may sell fulbright university also importantly sell archauthoritarian globalcorporatist tpp ttp giant scheme insulate ecocidal multinational investor class governmental regulation popular resistance enhance power us allied western capital relative competing statecapitalist superstate china full ugly history washington southeast asia 1960s 1970s particularly good fit neoliberal imperial agenda memory hole goes short kerrey vallely us operatives including kerry obama trying achieve chomsky called larger us goalto reincorporate indochina usdominated global system mission served back surreal sixties lives theyre trying finish imperial job softer ways good imperial soldiers end controls past orwell would impressed famous dystopian novel 1984 history deleted otherwise altered accord shifting accumulation propaganda needs totalitarian statecapitalist state oceana whose reigning party proclaims controls past controls future controls present controls past sadly enough selling false lethal promise glorious future mutually beneficial peace commerce enjoyed horizon enabled forgiving forgetting past imperial crimes global capitalist system us defending advancing vietnamese national independence socialist revolution deceptive name cold war struggle international communism brought humanity brink catastrophic ecosystem collapse also concentrated wealth power ever fewer hands scale would make plutocrats past eras blush according oxfam earlier year sixtytwo superopulent billionaires much wealth half planets population crimes american empire continue committed beneath airbrushing cover reigning western media intellectual culture including united states supposedly leftist system higher education shockingly rife elite posts us war criminals directly bloodsoaked longtime new school president current fu chair bob kerrey less real nonetheless topic shall turn coming special back school report | 2,298 |
<p>Here’s a game: Compare the following two passages about American politics, both from writers associated with the New Republic, and see if you can identify which is more recent:</p>
<p>[T]he separation of the democratic idea from the national principle and organization has issued not merely in sterility, but in moral and political mischief.</p>
<p>and</p>
<p>Dear Red-State Trump Voter, Let’s face it, guys: We’re done.… What I mean is that it’s time for blue states and cities to effectively abandon the American national enterprise, as it is currently constituted. Call it the New Federalism. Or Virtual Secession. Or Conscious Uncoupling—though that’s already been used. Or maybe Bluexit.</p>
<p>The first quote <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=3BASAAAAYAAJ&amp;dq=%22moral%20and%20political%20mischief%22&amp;pg=PA51" type="external">comes from</a> 1909’s The Promise of American Life, the major statement of political thought from TNR co-founder Herbert Croly. The second comes from a <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/140948/bluexit-blue-states-exit-trump-red-america" type="external">piece that ran last week</a> in his magazine. Okay: this is not a terribly fun (or challenging) game. But it suffices to convey the gap between Croly’s democratic-nationalist form of liberalism and the 4,500-word sneer that his magazine just published in favor of blue-state secessionism.</p>
<p>Cathartic venting for shellshocked leftists is, it apparently bears repeating, not about politics. Successful democracies require a willingness among citizens to accept losses today in&#160;order to preserve the same forum of contestation that makes victory possible tomorrow. Democracy is poorly served by a “take my ball and go home” attitude, since democratic citizens have to assume shared responsibility for the political system under which they all live.</p>
<p>None of this is to dismiss the legitimate questions raised by Trump’s unusual accession to the presidency, but Baker’s recommendations go far beyond resistance to Trump, advocating divorce from Red America for reasons that largely predate his&#160;rise. But, insofar as his essay reflects the temptations of&#160;left-wing political engagement in the Trump era, it illustrates (at least) two impulses that it would be wise to avoid:</p>
<p>Misguided contractualism: Yascha Mounk <a href="" type="internal">recently noted in these pages</a> that today, “we are further away from [T.H.] Marshall’s vision than at any point since World War II.” He was referring to the British sociologist’s <a href="http://delong.typepad.com/marshall-citizenship-and-social-class.pdf" type="external">postwar vision</a> of “social citizenship,” which, as Mounk writes, envisioned for all citizens a “social safety net that would help people as a matter of right, regardless of the reasons for their misfortune.” (Emphasis added.) <a href="http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?ISBN=9780521793940" type="external">Contemporary sociologists note</a> that, in contrast, today’s citizenship discourse is rife with the language of contracts—indicating that we’ve moved away from the idea that all citizens, qua citizens, should enjoy meaningful membership in society, in favor of a market-oriented conception that asks citizens: “What have you done for us lately?” Normally, these changes map onto right-wing politics, but Baker (in a left-wing magazine!) chides “you red states” for not “pulling your weight” while reserving plenty of self-congratulation for what he calls “self-supporting America.” (That this latter phrase could have come from the mouth of Bill O’Reilly or Newt Gingrich is just one example of the essay’s bizarro-world quality. At one point, he says: “We’ll focus on getting our own house in order, while yours falls into disrepair and ruin.”)</p>
<p>A politics of insularity: Baker makes the following&#160;argument about the rebuilding of the left under Trump: “This, sadly, is not a time for connecting or reaching out. It is a time for retrenchment and rebuilding. If we in the blue states want to make America great again, we must first demonstrate that we can make our own states into models of civic participation and economic equality.” This statement strangely implies an&#160;opposition between “rebuilding” and “reaching out,” as if successful politics in a large, pluralistic democracy were at odds with the work of persuasion and coalition-building. At some point, the left is going to have to face the fact that, despite a popular-vote victory, Democrats&#160;lost the election—in part because they&#160;lost voters who have, in the past pulled the lever for them. Turning away from the project of persuasion, especially in winnable states like Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida, and Wisconsin, is the exact opposite of “rebuilding.” Writing off people who voted for the other party as irredeemable or no longer worthy of engagement is bad enough from the perspective of the democratic ethos; as a political strategy for a party that controls neither the White House, nor Congress, nor the majority of state houses, it is sheer madness.</p>
<p>These assembled arguments for Baker’s (only partly sarcastic) Bluexit proposal have, in totality, a strange quality. First, there’s the contemptuous language of contractual&#160;citizenship. (Perhaps the most cringe-inducing passage, which would rightly be regarded as morally horrid if it were directed against an underdeveloped country, reads: “Take Mississippi (please!), famous for being 49th or 50th in just about everything that matters. When it comes to sucking at the federal teat, the Magnolia State is the undisputed champ.”) Add to that the inward political turn, giving up on the project of persuasion in favor of ideological fortress-building. A&#160;political movement that amounts to saying&#160;“to hell with you” to about half of the country&#160;cannot avoid the stain of what amounts to undemocratic populism: the designation of certain fellow-citizens as not really part of our political concern, not really partners in our democratic life. And is it surprising that this should be paired with mockery of&#160;the disadvantaged and dispossessed? (As other critics of the piece <a href="http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/the-blue-state-secession-thing-is-not-helping-1793210337" type="external">have noted</a>, the piece’s half-in-jest tone doesn’t excuse its&#160;basic nastiness.)</p>
<p>In other words, this amounts to little more than inverted Trumpism. The left ought to be resisting, rather than assisting, attempts to reduce citizenship to the language of contract. It should be choosing the hard work of argument and persuasion over the temptations of ideological bubbles.&#160;Above all, it should never sneer at the poor, the sick, and the left behind, whatever their politics. In other words, we should oppose what the modern conservative movement has become—not refashion ourselves as its left-wing mirror image.</p> | true | 4 | heres game compare following two passages american politics writers associated new republic see identify recent separation democratic idea national principle organization issued merely sterility moral political mischief dear redstate trump voter lets face guys done mean time blue states cities effectively abandon american national enterprise currently constituted call new federalism virtual secession conscious uncouplingthough thats already used maybe bluexit first quote comes 1909s promise american life major statement political thought tnr cofounder herbert croly second comes piece ran last week magazine okay terribly fun challenging game suffices convey gap crolys democraticnationalist form liberalism 4500word sneer magazine published favor bluestate secessionism cathartic venting shellshocked leftists apparently bears repeating politics successful democracies require willingness among citizens accept losses today in160order preserve forum contestation makes victory possible tomorrow democracy poorly served take ball go home attitude since democratic citizens assume shared responsibility political system live none dismiss legitimate questions raised trumps unusual accession presidency bakers recommendations go far beyond resistance trump advocating divorce red america reasons largely predate his160rise insofar essay reflects temptations of160leftwing political engagement trump era illustrates least two impulses would wise avoid misguided contractualism yascha mounk recently noted pages today away th marshalls vision point since world war ii referring british sociologists postwar vision social citizenship mounk writes envisioned citizens social safety net would help people matter right regardless reasons misfortune emphasis added contemporary sociologists note contrast todays citizenship discourse rife language contractsindicating weve moved away idea citizens qua citizens enjoy meaningful membership society favor marketoriented conception asks citizens done us lately normally changes map onto rightwing politics baker leftwing magazine chides red states pulling weight reserving plenty selfcongratulation calls selfsupporting america latter phrase could come mouth bill oreilly newt gingrich one example essays bizarroworld quality one point says well focus getting house order falls disrepair ruin politics insularity baker makes following160argument rebuilding left trump sadly time connecting reaching time retrenchment rebuilding blue states want make america great must first demonstrate make states models civic participation economic equality statement strangely implies an160opposition rebuilding reaching successful politics large pluralistic democracy odds work persuasion coalitionbuilding point left going face fact despite popularvote victory democrats160lost electionin part they160lost voters past pulled lever turning away project persuasion especially winnable states like michigan ohio pennsylvania north carolina florida wisconsin exact opposite rebuilding writing people voted party irredeemable longer worthy engagement bad enough perspective democratic ethos political strategy party controls neither white house congress majority state houses sheer madness assembled arguments bakers partly sarcastic bluexit proposal totality strange quality first theres contemptuous language contractual160citizenship perhaps cringeinducing passage would rightly regarded morally horrid directed underdeveloped country reads take mississippi please famous 49th 50th everything matters comes sucking federal teat magnolia state undisputed champ add inward political turn giving project persuasion favor ideological fortressbuilding a160political movement amounts saying160to hell half country160cannot avoid stain amounts undemocratic populism designation certain fellowcitizens really part political concern really partners democratic life surprising paired mockery of160the disadvantaged dispossessed critics piece noted pieces halfinjest tone doesnt excuse its160basic nastiness words amounts little inverted trumpism left ought resisting rather assisting attempts reduce citizenship language contract choosing hard work argument persuasion temptations ideological bubbles160above never sneer poor sick left behind whatever politics words oppose modern conservative movement becomenot refashion leftwing mirror image | 536 |
<p>Jakarta</p>
<p>Secret documents have leaked from inside Kopassus, Indonesia’s red berets, which say that Indonesia’s US-backed security forces engage in “murder [and] abduction” and&#160;show that Kopassus targets churches in West Papua and defines civilian dissidents as the “enemy.”</p>
<p>The documents include a Kopassus enemies list headed by Papua’s top Baptist minister and describe a covert network of surveillance, infiltration and disruption of Papuan institutions</p>
<p>The disclosure comes as US President Barack Obama is touching down in Indonesia. His administration recently announced the restoration of &#160;US aid to Kopassus.</p>
<p>Kopassus is the most notorious unit of &#160;Indonesia’s armed forces, TNI, &#160;which along with POLRI, the &#160;national police, have killed civilians by the hundreds of thousands.</p>
<p>The leaked cache of secret Kopassus documents includes operational, &#160;intelligence and field reports as well as personnel records which list the names and details of Kopassus “agents.”</p>
<p>The documents are classified “SECRET” (“RAHASIA”) and include extensive background reports on &#160;Kopassus &#160;civilian targets &#160;— reports that are apparently of uneven accuracy.</p>
<p>The authenticity of the documents has been verified by Kopassus personnel who have seen them and by external evidence regarding the authors and the internal characteristics of the documents.</p>
<p>Some of the Kopassus documents will be released in the days to come, in part via my <a href="http://www.allannairn.com" type="external">website.</a></p>
<p>Those being released with this article concern West Papua, where tens of thousands of civilians have been murdered and where Kopassus is most active. &#160;Jakarta has attempted to largely seal off Papua to visits by non-approved outsiders.</p>
<p>When the US restored Kopassus aid last July the rationale was fighting terrorism, but the documents show that Kopassus in fact systematically targets civilians.</p>
<p>A detailed 25-page secret report by a Kopassus task force in Kotaraja, Papua defines Kopassus’ number-one “enemy” as unarmed civilians. &#160; It calls them the “separatist political movement” “GSP/P, ” lists what they say are the top 15 leaders and discusses the “enemy order of battle.”</p>
<p>All of those listed are civilians, starting with the head of the Baptist Synod of Papua. The others include evangelical ministers, activists, traditional leaders, legislators, students and intellectuals as well as local establishment figures and the head of the Papua Muslim Youth organization.</p>
<p>The secret Kopassus study says that in their 400,000 – person area of operations the civilians they target as being political are&#160; “much more dangerous than” any armed opposition since the armed groups “hardly do anything” but the civilians — with popular support — have “reached the outside world” with their “obsession” with “merdeka” (independence/ freedom) and persist in “propagating the issue &#160;of severe human rights violations in Papua,” ie. “murders and abductions that are done by the security forces.”</p>
<p>The Kopassus document cited above is embedded below, followed by supplementary field reports. [The documents can be viewed <a href="" type="internal">here</a>. <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/41522587/Satgas-Ban-5-Kopassus-Triw" type="external">Satgas Ban – 5 Kopassus Triw</a> <a href="" type="internal">lapharian</a>.]</p>
<p>Given that the Kopassus report states as settled fact that security forces do “murder, abduction,” those who they define as being the enemy can be presumed to be in some danger.</p>
<p>In its discussion of “State of the enemy” Kopassus identifies the enemy with two kinds of actions: “the holding of press conferences” where they “always criticize the government and the work being done by the security forces”&#160;and the holding of private meetings where they engage in the same kind of prohibited speech.</p>
<p>The Kopassus “enemies” list — the “leaders” of the “separatist political movement” includes fifteen civic leaders. &#160;In the order listed by Kopassus they are:</p>
<p>— Reverend Socrates Sofyan Yoman, chair of the Papua Baptist Synod</p>
<p>— Markus Haluk head of the Association of Indonesian Middle Mountains Students (AMPTI) and an outspoken critic of the security forces and the US mining giant Freeport McMoRan;</p>
<p>— Buchtar Tabuni, an activist who, after appearing on the Kopassus list, was sentenced to three years prison for speech and for waving Papuan flags and was beaten bloody by three soldiers, a guard, and a policeman because he had a cell phone;</p>
<p>— Aloysius Renwarin, a lawyer who heads a local human rights foundation;</p>
<p>— Dr. Willy Mandowen, Mediator of PDP, the Papua Presidium Council, a broad group including local business people, former politcal prisoners, women’s and youth organizations, and Papuan traditional leaders.&#160; &#160;His most prominent predecessor, Theys Eluay, had his throat slit by Kopassus in 2001;</p>
<p>— Yance Kayame, a committee chair in the Papuan provincial legislature;</p>
<p>— Lodewyk Betawi;</p>
<p>— Drs. Don Agustinus Lamaech Flassy of the Papua Presidium Council staff</p>
<p>— Drs. Agustinus Alue Alua, head of the MRP, the Papuan People’s Council, which formally represents Papuan traditional leaders and was convened and recognized by the Jakarta government;</p>
<p>— Thaha Al Hamid, Secretary General of the Papua Presidium Council;</p>
<p>— Sayid Fadal Al Hamid, head of the Papua Muslim Youth;</p>
<p>— Drs. Frans Kapisa, head of Papua National Student Solidarity;</p>
<p>— Leonard Jery Imbiri, public secretary of DAP, the Papuan Customary Council, which organizes an annual plenary of indigenous groups, has staged Papua’s largest peaceful demonstrations, and has seen its offices targeted for clandestine arson attacks;</p>
<p>— Reverend Dr. Beny Giay, minister of the Protestant evangelical KINGMI Tent of scripture church of Papua;</p>
<p>— Selfius Bobby, student at the Fajar Timur School of Philosophy and Theology.</p>
<p>Reached for comment, Reverend Socrates Sofyan Yoman of the Baptist Synod laughed when told he headed the Kopassus list. He said that churches were targeted by TNI/ Kopassus because “We can’t condone torture, kidnapping or killing.” He said that he has received anonymous death threats “all the time, everywhere,” but that as a church leader he must endure it .&#160; He said the real problem was for Papua’s poor who “live daily in pressure and fear.”</p>
<p>Markus Haluk said that he is constantly followed on foot and by motorcycle, has been the subject of apparent attempts to kill him, and receives so many sms text death threats that he has difficulty keeping current with the death-threat archive he tries to maintain for historical and safety purposes.</p>
<p>One threat, written months after his name appeared as a target in the Kopassus documents, promised to decapitate him and bury his head 200 meters deep, while another imagined his head as a succulent fruit to be devoured and swallowed by security forces.</p>
<p>But as a famous figure in Papua, Haluk enjoys, he thinks, a certain kind of protection since when security forces have actually arrested him it has at times touched off street uprisings.</p>
<p>Village Papuans, he said, enjoy no such advantage. For them, being targeted by Kopassus “can get you killed. If there’s a report against you, you can die.”</p>
<p>Contacted in prison, Buctar Tabuni, the number three enemy on the Kopassus list, told of getting a death threat with a rat cadaver, described living with round-the-clock surveillance, and said the threats to him repeatedly stated that “you will be killed unless you stop your human rights activities.”</p>
<p>Three days ago, writing from his prison cell, Buctar Tabuni called on President Obama to cut off aid to TNI and back a democratic vote on Papuan independence. He told me that Indonesia follows the US lead and that the US was complicit since, as he wrote Obama, US-trained “troops in cities and villages all over West Papua treat the people like terrorists that must be exterminated.”</p>
<p>Anti-terrorism was indeed Obama’s main argument for restoring US aid to Kopassus, but the documents make clear that Kopassus mainly targets unarmed civilians, not killers.</p>
<p>In fact, the main unit that wrote the secret documents, SATGAS BAN – 5 KOPASSUS, is ostensibly doing anti-terrorism, with the Kopassus Unit 81, Gultor.</p>
<p>Obama justified the Kopassus aid restoration to Congress by saying that the initial US training would be given not to Kopassus as a whole but only to its anti-terror forces. The White House and Pentagon suggested that these forces were less criminal than the rest of Kopassus and of TNI/POLRI, but the documents establish that they, like the rest, go after civilians like the Papuan reverends and activists.</p>
<p>Reverend Giay said, when reached for comment that TNI, Kopassus and POLRI were making the case that “it’s OK to kill pastors and burn churches since the churches are separatist.”</p>
<p>Among Giay’s collection of anonymous sms death threats was a political missive demanding that “the reverend stop using the platform of the church to spread the ideology of free Papua.”</p>
<p>Giay said that “they need ideological and moral support from the Indonesian majority and the media” so they use Kopassus and others to attack the churches as constituting security threats.</p>
<p>He compared TNI/Kopassus actions in Papua now to those earlier in East Timor and the Malukus where “they created this conflict between Muslims and Christians” to expand their presence and get more money and power.</p>
<p>Reverend Giay said that “local pastors have been targeted. They kill them off and report them as separatists.”</p>
<p>The Kopassus documents boast that “in carrying out the operational mission of intelligence in the kotaraja area, we apportion work in order to cover all places and avenues of kotaraja society.”</p>
<p>The files show that Kopassus indeed penetrates most every part of popular life. In addition to plainclothes Kopassus officers who go undercover in multiple roles, Kopassus fields a small army of non-TNI “agents” — real people with real lives and identities, who are bought, coerced or recruited into working covertly.</p>
<p>Kopassus Kotaraja area agents discussed in the secret personnel files include reporters for a local newspaper and for a national TV news channel, students, hotel staff, a court employee, a senior civil servant who works on art and culture, a 14 year old child, a broke, “emotional, drunken” farmer who needs money and “believes” that Kopassus will “take care of his safety,” a “hardworking” “emotionally stable” farmer who also is a need of funds, a worker who “likes to drink hard liquor,” is poor and “likes to believe things,” a motorcycle taxi driver, a cellphone kiosk clerk who watches people who buy SIM card numbers, and a driver for a car rental company who “frequently informs on whether there are elements from the Separatist Political Movement who hire rental cars and speak regarding independence/freedom (merdeka).”</p>
<p>In the file, though, the word “merdeka” is not spelled out. In accord with Kopassus practice, only an initial is written, in quotation marks: “‘M'”, the unwritable, unspeakable M-word.</p>
<p>The documents support the longtime word on the street: you rarely know who is Kopassus. So best watch what you say if you care for safety, especially if what you say is “freedom.”</p>
<p>ALLAN NAIRN is a journalist living in Indonesia.</p>
<p />
<p>&#160;</p>
<p /> | true | 4 | jakarta secret documents leaked inside kopassus indonesias red berets say indonesias usbacked security forces engage murder abduction and160show kopassus targets churches west papua defines civilian dissidents enemy documents include kopassus enemies list headed papuas top baptist minister describe covert network surveillance infiltration disruption papuan institutions disclosure comes us president barack obama touching indonesia administration recently announced restoration 160us aid kopassus kopassus notorious unit 160indonesias armed forces tni 160which along polri 160national police killed civilians hundreds thousands leaked cache secret kopassus documents includes operational 160intelligence field reports well personnel records list names details kopassus agents documents classified secret rahasia include extensive background reports 160kopassus 160civilian targets 160 reports apparently uneven accuracy authenticity documents verified kopassus personnel seen external evidence regarding authors internal characteristics documents kopassus documents released days come part via website released article concern west papua tens thousands civilians murdered kopassus active 160jakarta attempted largely seal papua visits nonapproved outsiders us restored kopassus aid last july rationale fighting terrorism documents show kopassus fact systematically targets civilians detailed 25page secret report kopassus task force kotaraja papua defines kopassus numberone enemy unarmed civilians 160 calls separatist political movement gspp lists say top 15 leaders discusses enemy order battle listed civilians starting head baptist synod papua others include evangelical ministers activists traditional leaders legislators students intellectuals well local establishment figures head papua muslim youth organization secret kopassus study says 400000 person area operations civilians target political are160 much dangerous armed opposition since armed groups hardly anything civilians popular support reached outside world obsession merdeka independence freedom persist propagating issue 160of severe human rights violations papua ie murders abductions done security forces kopassus document cited embedded followed supplementary field reports documents viewed satgas ban 5 kopassus triw lapharian given kopassus report states settled fact security forces murder abduction define enemy presumed danger discussion state enemy kopassus identifies enemy two kinds actions holding press conferences always criticize government work done security forces160and holding private meetings engage kind prohibited speech kopassus enemies list leaders separatist political movement includes fifteen civic leaders 160in order listed kopassus reverend socrates sofyan yoman chair papua baptist synod markus haluk head association indonesian middle mountains students ampti outspoken critic security forces us mining giant freeport mcmoran buchtar tabuni activist appearing kopassus list sentenced three years prison speech waving papuan flags beaten bloody three soldiers guard policeman cell phone aloysius renwarin lawyer heads local human rights foundation dr willy mandowen mediator pdp papua presidium council broad group including local business people former politcal prisoners womens youth organizations papuan traditional leaders160 160his prominent predecessor theys eluay throat slit kopassus 2001 yance kayame committee chair papuan provincial legislature lodewyk betawi drs agustinus lamaech flassy papua presidium council staff drs agustinus alue alua head mrp papuan peoples council formally represents papuan traditional leaders convened recognized jakarta government thaha al hamid secretary general papua presidium council sayid fadal al hamid head papua muslim youth drs frans kapisa head papua national student solidarity leonard jery imbiri public secretary dap papuan customary council organizes annual plenary indigenous groups staged papuas largest peaceful demonstrations seen offices targeted clandestine arson attacks reverend dr beny giay minister protestant evangelical kingmi tent scripture church papua selfius bobby student fajar timur school philosophy theology reached comment reverend socrates sofyan yoman baptist synod laughed told headed kopassus list said churches targeted tni kopassus cant condone torture kidnapping killing said received anonymous death threats time everywhere church leader must endure 160 said real problem papuas poor live daily pressure fear markus haluk said constantly followed foot motorcycle subject apparent attempts kill receives many sms text death threats difficulty keeping current deaththreat archive tries maintain historical safety purposes one threat written months name appeared target kopassus documents promised decapitate bury head 200 meters deep another imagined head succulent fruit devoured swallowed security forces famous figure papua haluk enjoys thinks certain kind protection since security forces actually arrested times touched street uprisings village papuans said enjoy advantage targeted kopassus get killed theres report die contacted prison buctar tabuni number three enemy kopassus list told getting death threat rat cadaver described living roundtheclock surveillance said threats repeatedly stated killed unless stop human rights activities three days ago writing prison cell buctar tabuni called president obama cut aid tni back democratic vote papuan independence told indonesia follows us lead us complicit since wrote obama ustrained troops cities villages west papua treat people like terrorists must exterminated antiterrorism indeed obamas main argument restoring us aid kopassus documents make clear kopassus mainly targets unarmed civilians killers fact main unit wrote secret documents satgas ban 5 kopassus ostensibly antiterrorism kopassus unit 81 gultor obama justified kopassus aid restoration congress saying initial us training would given kopassus whole antiterror forces white house pentagon suggested forces less criminal rest kopassus tnipolri documents establish like rest go civilians like papuan reverends activists reverend giay said reached comment tni kopassus polri making case ok kill pastors burn churches since churches separatist among giays collection anonymous sms death threats political missive demanding reverend stop using platform church spread ideology free papua giay said need ideological moral support indonesian majority media use kopassus others attack churches constituting security threats compared tnikopassus actions papua earlier east timor malukus created conflict muslims christians expand presence get money power reverend giay said local pastors targeted kill report separatists kopassus documents boast carrying operational mission intelligence kotaraja area apportion work order cover places avenues kotaraja society files show kopassus indeed penetrates every part popular life addition plainclothes kopassus officers go undercover multiple roles kopassus fields small army nontni agents real people real lives identities bought coerced recruited working covertly kopassus kotaraja area agents discussed secret personnel files include reporters local newspaper national tv news channel students hotel staff court employee senior civil servant works art culture 14 year old child broke emotional drunken farmer needs money believes kopassus take care safety hardworking emotionally stable farmer also need funds worker likes drink hard liquor poor likes believe things motorcycle taxi driver cellphone kiosk clerk watches people buy sim card numbers driver car rental company frequently informs whether elements separatist political movement hire rental cars speak regarding independencefreedom merdeka file though word merdeka spelled accord kopassus practice initial written quotation marks unwritable unspeakable mword documents support longtime word street rarely know kopassus best watch say care safety especially say freedom allan nairn journalist living indonesia 160 | 1,052 |
<p>Syrian refugees arrive at the Athens' port of Piraeus on September 1.Thanassis Stavrakis/AP</p>
<p />
<p>With the refugee crisis in Europe worsening dramatically, the Obama administration announced on Thursday that it would accept at least 10,000 Syrian refugees in the next year. That’s a significant step: Over the past four years, as millions of Syrians have been displaced by a brutal civil war, the United States&#160;has admitted <a href="" type="internal">only about 1,500 Syrian</a> refugees. But humanitarian advocates say President Barack Obama’s move doesn’t go nearly far enough.</p>
<p>The US offer “is cold comfort to the victims of the Syrian conflict,” said International Rescue Committee president David Miliband in a press release Friday. “With 4 million living in limbo and tens of thousands making desperate choices to reach safety, the US has a moral responsibility to lead and is fully equipped to respond in a far more robust way.” Part of the solution, experts argue, is for the United States to help organize a program to send refugees to developed countries around the world. After all, they point out, we’ve done it before.</p>
<p>“This is not science fiction,” said Francois Crepeau, the United Nations’s special rapporteur for the human rights of migrants. “We resettled almost 2 million Indochinese 40 years ago. We can do it again.”</p>
<p>After the end of the Vietnam War, hundreds of thousands of people attempted to flee Southeast Asia, mostly from Vietnam, by riding rickety, overloaded boats to nearby countries. Those countries, like many European countries during the current crisis, felt overwhelmed by the unyielding and disorganized flow of people arriving on their shores. They eventually announced that they would refuse to take in any more “boat people,” prompting the international community to create a global resettlement program with the help of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. The UNHCR ultimately <a href="http://www.unhcr.org/3ebf9bad0.pdf" type="external">resettled 1.3 million Southeast Asians</a> in countries around the world, including more than 800,000 in the United States.</p>
<p />
<p />
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>Two million is now about the number that Crepeau thinks should be resettled today across the “global north”—essentially the European Union, plus the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. “Two million refugees resettled over five years means 400,000 per year,” he said. “Four hundred thousand per year divided by 32 countries&#160;representing 850 million inhabitants is not much.”</p>
<p>That’s still a small fraction of the nearly 12 million people exiled or internally displaced by the war in Syria, not to mention the significant number of people fleeing violence in Afghanistan and Iraq or repression in Eritrea and other countries. “It’s going to be a small percentage. I don’t see any way it’s not going to be that,” acknowledged Larry Yungk, a senior resettlement officer with the UNHCR. “That being said, we have always said that we need more resettlement places, whether it’s for Syrians or globally. And the Syrian conflict, I think, has shown why we need more places.”</p>
<p>Finding those places has been particularly difficult in Europe. Yungk praised the “very generous response” of Germany, which expects to take in 800,000 asylum seekers this year, but several other EU countries are openly hostile to accepting refugees. The government of Denmark <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/09/denmark-advert-lebanon-newspapers-warns-refugees-150907225146384.html" type="external">ran newspaper ads in Lebanon</a> telling Syrian refugees they’re not welcome in the Scandinavian country. Hungary has subjected migrants to <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/11/refugees-roszke-hungary-police-food-camp" type="external">humiliating treatment</a>, even as it builds a border fence to stop the influx. Such countries helped block <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32719014" type="external">a mandatory refugee quota system</a> for EU members in May, and Germany’s efforts to try again are meeting with little success.</p>
<p />
<p>Yungk, who spoke with Mother Jones prior to the administration’s announcement on Thursday, isn’t optimistic that the United States will ultimately admit a dramatically higher number of people for resettlement. Not only is the United States far from the Middle East, where the bulk of the refugees are, but its system for investigating and approving refugees is already heavily taxed.&#160;The United States takes in about 70,000 refugees from across the world every year. But the 1,500 Syrians granted refugee status so far are just a small fraction of the 18,000 or so Syrian cases that the UNHCR has submitted to the US government.</p>
<p>“Our goal is to try to work with [the United States] to reduce that gap,” Yungk said. “If we do, then the ability is there to talk, I think, about more referrals. And the United States will be probably more willing to look at it.” The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.</p>
<p>But even if the United States doesn’t accept a large number of refugees—the 10,000 that will now be allowed into the United States is about half the number of refugees who arrived in Munich from Hungary last weekend—merely taking action could help convince other nations to pitch in. “Yes, it would be nice to resettle some more refugees today,” said&#160;James Hathaway, the director of the Program in Refugee and Asylum Law at the University of Michigan. “But the important thing that they should be doing is leading—not a new refugee convention, but a new mechanism to share the responsibilities of protection around the world. The US needs to show leadership on that.”</p>
<p>Pressure is growing on the United States to do more. In May, a group of 14 Senate Democrats <a href="https://www.durbin.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/senators-urge-president-to-allow-more-syrian-refugees-to-resettle-in-us" type="external">wrote a letter</a> urging the Obama administration to accept up 65,000 Syrians. A coalition of American groups including the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, and the International Rescue Committee is <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/refugee-organizations-syrians-us_55ef4f47e4b03784e276f8b1" type="external">now calling for the United States</a> to take in up to 100,000 Syrians. Even GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump has <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2015/09/donald-trump-syrian-refugees-213430" type="external">come out in support</a> of expanded resettlement in the United States. But even if the magnitude of the refugee crisis has prompted some change, large-scale progress will be much harder.</p>
<p>“If you do go back to some of the big situations like Bosnia and Southeast Asia, what you did see is, frankly, a coalition of countries all coming together to say, ‘We’ll do this,'” Yungk said. “So that’s what it would take.”</p>
<p>Max J. Rosenthal is reporting from Berlin as part of the Arthur F. Burns Fellowship, a two-month reporting program in Germany run by the <a href="http://www.icfj.org/" type="external">International Center for Journalists</a>. Gabrielle Canon contributed reporting to this article from San Francisco.</p>
<p /> | true | 4 | syrian refugees arrive athens port piraeus september 1thanassis stavrakisap refugee crisis europe worsening dramatically obama administration announced thursday would accept least 10000 syrian refugees next year thats significant step past four years millions syrians displaced brutal civil war united states160has admitted 1500 syrian refugees humanitarian advocates say president barack obamas move doesnt go nearly far enough us offer cold comfort victims syrian conflict said international rescue committee president david miliband press release friday 4 million living limbo tens thousands making desperate choices reach safety us moral responsibility lead fully equipped respond far robust way part solution experts argue united states help organize program send refugees developed countries around world point weve done science fiction said francois crepeau united nationss special rapporteur human rights migrants resettled almost 2 million indochinese 40 years ago end vietnam war hundreds thousands people attempted flee southeast asia mostly vietnam riding rickety overloaded boats nearby countries countries like many european countries current crisis felt overwhelmed unyielding disorganized flow people arriving shores eventually announced would refuse take boat people prompting international community create global resettlement program help un high commissioner refugees unhcr ultimately resettled 13 million southeast asians countries around world including 800000 united states 160 two million number crepeau thinks resettled today across global northessentially european union plus united states canada australia new zealand two million refugees resettled five years means 400000 per year said four hundred thousand per year divided 32 countries160representing 850 million inhabitants much thats still small fraction nearly 12 million people exiled internally displaced war syria mention significant number people fleeing violence afghanistan iraq repression eritrea countries going small percentage dont see way going acknowledged larry yungk senior resettlement officer unhcr said always said need resettlement places whether syrians globally syrian conflict think shown need places finding places particularly difficult europe yungk praised generous response germany expects take 800000 asylum seekers year several eu countries openly hostile accepting refugees government denmark ran newspaper ads lebanon telling syrian refugees theyre welcome scandinavian country hungary subjected migrants humiliating treatment even builds border fence stop influx countries helped block mandatory refugee quota system eu members may germanys efforts try meeting little success yungk spoke mother jones prior administrations announcement thursday isnt optimistic united states ultimately admit dramatically higher number people resettlement united states far middle east bulk refugees system investigating approving refugees already heavily taxed160the united states takes 70000 refugees across world every year 1500 syrians granted refugee status far small fraction 18000 syrian cases unhcr submitted us government goal try work united states reduce gap yungk said ability talk think referrals united states probably willing look state department respond request comment even united states doesnt accept large number refugeesthe 10000 allowed united states half number refugees arrived munich hungary last weekendmerely taking action could help convince nations pitch yes would nice resettle refugees today said160james hathaway director program refugee asylum law university michigan important thing leadingnot new refugee convention new mechanism share responsibilities protection around world us needs show leadership pressure growing united states may group 14 senate democrats wrote letter urging obama administration accept 65000 syrians coalition american groups including us conference catholic bishops us committee refugees immigrants international rescue committee calling united states take 100000 syrians even gop presidential candidate donald trump come support expanded resettlement united states even magnitude refugee crisis prompted change largescale progress much harder go back big situations like bosnia southeast asia see frankly coalition countries coming together say well yungk said thats would take max j rosenthal reporting berlin part arthur f burns fellowship twomonth reporting program germany run international center journalists gabrielle canon contributed reporting article san francisco | 602 |
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<p><a href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-255315040/stock-photo-lisbon-portugal-february-photo-of-the-nsa-national-security-agency-page.html?src=DQAH2k86Nn9KTf7hHYX5Jw-1-24" type="external">Shutterstock</a></p>
<p>I don’t like to be a wet blanket, but at the risk of mixing metaphors, I’m going to throw some cold water on the decision last week in <a href="http://www.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/isysquery/5b758b27-c77d-44a2-b6e5-dbf456f5c142/1/doc/14-42_complete_opn.pdf#xml=http://www.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/isysquery/5b758b27-c77d-44a2-b6e5-dbf456f5c142/1/hilite/" type="external">American Civil Liberties Union v. Clapper</a>, which held that the National Security Agency’s vast telephone metadata collection program is illegal.</p>
<p>While the ruling by the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals is a clear advance for civil liberties — and the <a href="https://www.aclu.org/blog/speak-freely/why-todays-landmark-court-victory-against-mass-surveillance-matters%20" type="external">ACLU legal team</a> that engineered it has every right to be proud — the advance, in fact, is modest and incremental.</p>
<p />
<p>To understand why I’m less enthused than some others, let’s deconstruct what the decision actually said as well as what it didn’t say.</p>
<p>The ACLU, in concert with its New York affiliate — the New York Civil Liberties Union — filed the case to have the NSA’s mammoth and indiscriminate surveillance sweeps conducted under Section 215 of the Patriot Act declared unconstitutional. They also sued to have the sweeps invalidated under the terms of the statute itself for exceeding the scope of the statute, and they sought an injunction to stop the sweeps. They succeeded only with their statutory claim.</p>
<p>The unanimous 97-page opinion was penned by Judge Gerard Lynch — and joined by Judges Robert Sack and Vernon Broderick with a separate 13-page concurrence by Sack. Both Lynch and Sack are circuit court members, but Broderick is a district court judge designated to sit on the panel. (Appellate courts do this to give lower-court judges experience and to relieve staffing shortages.) All three were appointed to the bench by former President Bill Clinton. But then, so was William H. Pauley III, the U.S. District Court judge for the Southern District of New York whose earlier pro-government <a href="https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/order_granting_governments_motion_to_dismiss_and_denying_aclu_motion_for_preliminary_injunction.pdf" type="external">order</a> dismissing the case was under appeal.</p>
<p>Lynch’s opinion is a model of clarity but also of caution. He begins with a historical overview that takes us back to the bad old days of the early 1970s, when the intelligence agencies of the Nixon era were running roughshod over civil liberties. The Nixonian abuses begat the hearings of the famed select committee on intelligence headed by Sen. Frank Church that resulted in passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978 and the creation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) that were designed to curb the abuses.</p>
<p>Lynch’s narrative then fast-forwards through the attacks of 9/11 and the enactment of the Patriot Act in 2001. Section 215 of that legislation, together with subsequent revisions and congressional reauthorizations, amended FISA (as codified in 50 United States Code § 1861) to create the Frankenstein monster that is the NSA’s present telephone metadata program.</p>
<p>As Lynch notes, Section 215 allows the FBI — on behalf of the NSA — to “make an application [to the FISC] for an order requiring the production of any tangible things (including books, records, papers, documents, and other items) for an investigation to obtain foreign intelligence information not concerning a United States person [meaning, basically, a citizen or lawful resident] or to protect against international terrorism or clandestine activities.”</p>
<p>The section requires such applications to include “a statement of facts” showing that there are “reasonable grounds to believe the tangible things sought are relevant to an authorized investigation … to obtain foreign intelligence information. …”</p>
<p>Astonishingly, the government has interpreted this language to mean that it can force telecom companies on an ongoing and easily renewable basis to turn over digital records of virtually every phone call made in the country. Such records reveal not only the length of each call but the number on each end of the call and sometimes the location of the callers. And far from acting as a gatekeeper winnowing out frivolous surveillance requests, the FISC — which convenes in secret and whose members are appointed by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court — has <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/06/fisa-court-nsa-spying-opinion-reject-request" type="external">performed</a> as a rubber stamp, approving surveillance applications at a rate exceeding 99 percent.</p>
<p>With this framework in place, the NSA has amassed a trove of metadata that it stores for rolling five-year periods, which it can access at any time with specific and detailed searches aimed at individual phone numbers.</p>
<p>The key to understanding Lynch’s rejection of the government’s interpretation are the words “relevant” and “authorized investigation” as used in Section 215. Lynch’s discussion of the terms is masterful, but before parsing them, he first had to rebuff two preliminary objections by the Department of Justice — following a long-established litigation script — that the case should be dismissed to avoid an embarrassing ruling on the merits. First, Lynch held that the ACLU plaintiffs, as phone subscribers, had sustained the necessary legal injury to establish standing to sue. Second, he determined that the NSA’s practices may be examined in courts of general jurisdiction rather than solely by the FISC. As a result, he found the ACLU’s lawsuit was not blocked or precluded by any need to maintain state secrecy.</p>
<p>Dispensing with the preliminaries, Lynch, to put it tenderly, proceeded to tear the government a proverbial new one, writing: “The records sought are all-encompassing; the government does not even suggest that all of the records sought, or even necessarily any of them, are relevant to any specific defined inquiry.”</p>
<p>Exposing the absurdity of the government’s position, he continued: “[T]he government effectively argues that there is only one enormous ‘anti-terrorism investigation’’ and that any records that might ever be of use in developing any aspect of that investigation are relevant to the overall counterterrorism effort.”</p>
<p>Lynch concluded that “such an expansive concept of ‘relevance’ is unprecedented and unwarranted.” He found, too, that Congress never intended to endorse such an astounding reading.</p>
<p>From there, however, the decision largely fell apart, as Lynch not only refused to rule on the constitutionality of the NSA’s implementation of Section 215 but also declined to order the government to stop its bulk metadata collection program. Instead, he wound up kicking the case back to Pauley on the District Court for further consideration, and inviting Congress to weigh in on whether to redraft and revamp the metadata program before Section 215 is due to <a href="http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-112publ14/html/PLAW-112publ14.htm" type="external">expire</a> on June 1.</p>
<p>To be fair to Lynch, judges often decline to make constitutional rulings when they can dispose of cases on lesser statutory grounds. Sometimes, however, judges are compelled to issue rulings on both statutory and constitutional bases, depending on the urgency of the matters before them or as a safeguard in the event that their statutory analyses are later found wanting by a higher court.</p>
<p>The ACLU’s case plainly was sufficiently urgent to necessitate constitutional adjudication.</p>
<p>To be fair again, it’s not as though Lynch ignored the constitutional concerns. In fact, he devoted 12 pages to what he termed the “vexing” Fourth Amendment questions implicated by the NSA’s data sweeps.</p>
<p>But after noting the seriousness of the issues, he ducked them, citing a series of old Supreme Court opinions which instruct that individuals have no reasonable expectation of privacy under the Fourth Amendment in information (such as the phone numbers they dial) that they voluntarily turn over to third parties. The cited cases include the decision most frequently invoked by the DOJ to uphold the constitutionality of the NSA’s dragnet surveillance — <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/442/735" type="external">Smith v. Maryland</a>, a 1979 case that upheld the constitutionality of installing a pen register without a warrant at a telephone company’s office to record the numbers dialed from a criminal suspect’s home.</p>
<p>In his concurrence, Sack ventured further, reminding us that one of the core functions of the judiciary is to examine the constitutionality of government actions. He even compared Edward Snowden’s disclosure of the metadata program to those of Daniel Ellsberg, which “gave rise to the legendary ‘Pentagon Papers’ litigation.” Alas, Stack’s views did not command a majority.</p>
<p>So where does the 2nd Circuit’s decision leave us? In the absence of any directive halting the NSA’s practices, the practices will continue at least until June 1 and even after that for any “investigations” initiated before that date. Meanwhile, the spotlight is now on Congress, which has three basic options as the June 1 deadline approaches. None, regrettably, would fundamentally alter the landscape of government surveillance.</p>
<p>Option No. 1 is to pass the <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/3361" type="external">USA Freedom Act</a>, a version of which cleared the House in 2014 but has since stalled in the Senate.</p>
<p>If this bill becomes law, telephone metadata would be stored by phone companies rather than the NSA. Intelligence agencies could still access the data, but only with FISC approval upon specific showings of need. As under current law, however, the attorney general could authorize limited data sweeps in an “emergency” for seven days before seeking court endorsement.</p>
<p>The act would also make very minor changes to Section 702 of FISA (codified in 50 U.S.C. § 1881a) and the so-called <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/prism-collection-documents/" type="external">PRISM</a> and “upstream” programs designed under that section to intercept the content of emails and phone calls from terror suspects abroad. Unfortunately, as the NSA has <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story_2.html" type="external">acknowledged</a>, such programs also “incidentally” sweep up the communications of Americans.</p>
<p>Additionally, under the act, a panel of amicus curiae (friends of the court) would be established to give “independent” advice to the FISC on privacy matters, and more FISC decisions would be declassified. However, the act would not repeal <a href="http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/codification/executive-order/12333.html" type="external">Executive Order 12333</a>, promulgated by President Reagan in 1981, which empowers intelligence agencies to do nearly everything that they can under Section 702 but without any court oversight.</p>
<p>Both President Obama and Hillary Clinton have announced their <a href="http://firedoglake.com/2015/05/08/obama-and-clinton-endorse-usa-freedom-act-after-court-ruling/" type="external">support</a> for the Freedom Act. Sen. Rand Paul has <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/05/07/house-senate-republicans-at-odds-over-patriot-act-extension/" type="external">opposed</a> the Freedom Act, arguing that it doesn’t go far enough to protect privacy interests.</p>
<p>Option No. 2 for Congress would be to reject the USA Freedom Act and instead ratify the <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/262649489/Patriot-Act-Reauthorization" type="external">Patriot Act Reauthorization bill</a> sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. The bill would leave the status quo entirely unchanged until December 31, 2020.</p>
<p>The third option is for Congress to do nothing.</p>
<p>Doing nothing would allow Section 215 to sunset and expire. But as tempting as that choice may seem from a civil liberties perspective, it would actually do little to rein in the NSA. As Harley Geiger of the Center for Democracy and Technology has <a href="http://www.lawfareblog.com/2015/02/what-happens-if-we-sunset215/" type="external">written</a> on the influential Lawfare blog, the NSA could simply substitute another provision of FISA (50 U.S.C. § 1842) dealing with electronic pen registers and trap devices that would similarly permit it to acquire bulk telephone and email metadata. What we’re involved in, it now seems clear, is a game of move and countermove.</p>
<p>What then should our next move be? Politically, what we need at a minimum is an open, ongoing and informed national debate about the pervasive reach, cost, effectiveness and proper limits of government surveillance. Legally, at a minimum, we need judges willing to confront the full constitutional dimensions of whatever actions the legislative and executive branches undertake.</p>
<p>With the 2nd Circuit’s decision, we’ve made an incremental advance on the legal front. Politically, with all respect to Snowden, we’ve only barely begun.</p> | true | 4 | shutterstock dont like wet blanket risk mixing metaphors im going throw cold water decision last week american civil liberties union v clapper held national security agencys vast telephone metadata collection program illegal ruling 2nd circuit court appeals clear advance civil liberties aclu legal team engineered every right proud advance fact modest incremental understand im less enthused others lets deconstruct decision actually said well didnt say aclu concert new york affiliate new york civil liberties union filed case nsas mammoth indiscriminate surveillance sweeps conducted section 215 patriot act declared unconstitutional also sued sweeps invalidated terms statute exceeding scope statute sought injunction stop sweeps succeeded statutory claim unanimous 97page opinion penned judge gerard lynch joined judges robert sack vernon broderick separate 13page concurrence sack lynch sack circuit court members broderick district court judge designated sit panel appellate courts give lowercourt judges experience relieve staffing shortages three appointed bench former president bill clinton william h pauley iii us district court judge southern district new york whose earlier progovernment order dismissing case appeal lynchs opinion model clarity also caution begins historical overview takes us back bad old days early 1970s intelligence agencies nixon era running roughshod civil liberties nixonian abuses begat hearings famed select committee intelligence headed sen frank church resulted passage foreign intelligence surveillance act fisa 1978 creation foreign intelligence surveillance court fisc designed curb abuses lynchs narrative fastforwards attacks 911 enactment patriot act 2001 section 215 legislation together subsequent revisions congressional reauthorizations amended fisa codified 50 united states code 1861 create frankenstein monster nsas present telephone metadata program lynch notes section 215 allows fbi behalf nsa make application fisc order requiring production tangible things including books records papers documents items investigation obtain foreign intelligence information concerning united states person meaning basically citizen lawful resident protect international terrorism clandestine activities section requires applications include statement facts showing reasonable grounds believe tangible things sought relevant authorized investigation obtain foreign intelligence information astonishingly government interpreted language mean force telecom companies ongoing easily renewable basis turn digital records virtually every phone call made country records reveal length call number end call sometimes location callers far acting gatekeeper winnowing frivolous surveillance requests fisc convenes secret whose members appointed chief justice supreme court performed rubber stamp approving surveillance applications rate exceeding 99 percent framework place nsa amassed trove metadata stores rolling fiveyear periods access time specific detailed searches aimed individual phone numbers key understanding lynchs rejection governments interpretation words relevant authorized investigation used section 215 lynchs discussion terms masterful parsing first rebuff two preliminary objections department justice following longestablished litigation script case dismissed avoid embarrassing ruling merits first lynch held aclu plaintiffs phone subscribers sustained necessary legal injury establish standing sue second determined nsas practices may examined courts general jurisdiction rather solely fisc result found aclus lawsuit blocked precluded need maintain state secrecy dispensing preliminaries lynch put tenderly proceeded tear government proverbial new one writing records sought allencompassing government even suggest records sought even necessarily relevant specific defined inquiry exposing absurdity governments position continued government effectively argues one enormous antiterrorism investigation records might ever use developing aspect investigation relevant overall counterterrorism effort lynch concluded expansive concept relevance unprecedented unwarranted found congress never intended endorse astounding reading however decision largely fell apart lynch refused rule constitutionality nsas implementation section 215 also declined order government stop bulk metadata collection program instead wound kicking case back pauley district court consideration inviting congress weigh whether redraft revamp metadata program section 215 due expire june 1 fair lynch judges often decline make constitutional rulings dispose cases lesser statutory grounds sometimes however judges compelled issue rulings statutory constitutional bases depending urgency matters safeguard event statutory analyses later found wanting higher court aclus case plainly sufficiently urgent necessitate constitutional adjudication fair though lynch ignored constitutional concerns fact devoted 12 pages termed vexing fourth amendment questions implicated nsas data sweeps noting seriousness issues ducked citing series old supreme court opinions instruct individuals reasonable expectation privacy fourth amendment information phone numbers dial voluntarily turn third parties cited cases include decision frequently invoked doj uphold constitutionality nsas dragnet surveillance smith v maryland 1979 case upheld constitutionality installing pen register without warrant telephone companys office record numbers dialed criminal suspects home concurrence sack ventured reminding us one core functions judiciary examine constitutionality government actions even compared edward snowdens disclosure metadata program daniel ellsberg gave rise legendary pentagon papers litigation alas stacks views command majority 2nd circuits decision leave us absence directive halting nsas practices practices continue least june 1 even investigations initiated date meanwhile spotlight congress three basic options june 1 deadline approaches none regrettably would fundamentally alter landscape government surveillance option 1 pass usa freedom act version cleared house 2014 since stalled senate bill becomes law telephone metadata would stored phone companies rather nsa intelligence agencies could still access data fisc approval upon specific showings need current law however attorney general could authorize limited data sweeps emergency seven days seeking court endorsement act would also make minor changes section 702 fisa codified 50 usc 1881a socalled prism upstream programs designed section intercept content emails phone calls terror suspects abroad unfortunately nsa acknowledged programs also incidentally sweep communications americans additionally act panel amicus curiae friends court would established give independent advice fisc privacy matters fisc decisions would declassified however act would repeal executive order 12333 promulgated president reagan 1981 empowers intelligence agencies nearly everything section 702 without court oversight president obama hillary clinton announced support freedom act sen rand paul opposed freedom act arguing doesnt go far enough protect privacy interests option 2 congress would reject usa freedom act instead ratify patriot act reauthorization bill sponsored senate majority leader mitch mcconnell bill would leave status quo entirely unchanged december 31 2020 third option congress nothing nothing would allow section 215 sunset expire tempting choice may seem civil liberties perspective would actually little rein nsa harley geiger center democracy technology written influential lawfare blog nsa could simply substitute another provision fisa 50 usc 1842 dealing electronic pen registers trap devices would similarly permit acquire bulk telephone email metadata involved seems clear game move countermove next move politically need minimum open ongoing informed national debate pervasive reach cost effectiveness proper limits government surveillance legally minimum need judges willing confront full constitutional dimensions whatever actions legislative executive branches undertake 2nd circuits decision weve made incremental advance legal front politically respect snowden weve barely begun | 1,052 |
<p>Robert Koehler</p>
<p>Ah, 1961. The year – certain aspects of it, anyway – are almost impossible to remember. “Whites only” bathrooms, for instance.</p>
<p>U.S. Rep. John Lewis, legendary civil rights leader and crosser of lines, recently tweeted an ancient mugshot memorializing his arrest that year for using a “whites only” bathroom in Mississippi and, in the process, amping up outrage against Jim Crow segregation in the South and intensifying the civil rights movement’s global resonance.</p>
<p>He was charged with disorderly conduct and spent 37 days at the Parchman Penitentiary. How difficult it is to fathom such smug, legally sanctified certainty. It all seems so long ago . . . those days when the people who ran things were so wrong.</p>
<p>I say this facetiously, of course.</p>
<p>The emergence of this mugshot from 53 years ago, and the memories of a long-gone era that unavoidably accompany it, somehow speaks volumes to the numerous movements for change that are simmering today. One reason is because the civil rights movement of the 1960s was actually successful. It turned the country around. It undid every last legal and moral justification that held together a whites-only Old South, and it seriously undermined much of the legally ensconced racism of the North.</p>
<p>No, it didn’t end racism per se, which regrouped “legally” around a bloated prison-industrial complex, but it woke the nation up and created an enduring legacy of nonviolent, human-rights-based change. It set a standard for what’s possible, at the same time exposing the vicious hatred, masquerading as moral sanctity, which held together the existing social order.</p>
<p>Perhaps what it also established was the legitimacy and necessity of nonviolent revolution – a cognizance of the never-ending need to stand up against social wrong, to keep demanding change, to keep evolving.</p>
<p>Also: The moral value of the civil rights movement and the courageous actions of John Lewis and innumerable others, often at great personal hardship, sometimes at the cost of their lives, was not confined to one particular issue. An extraordinary antiwar movement emerged in the ’60s, followed by a women’s rights movement, a gay rights movement and an environmental movement. The civil rights struggle laid the groundwork for all of them. They’re all connected – which implies that a common core value underlies all these movements.</p>
<p>A few days ago, Jim Hightower, in an interview with Bill Moyers, said: “There is a growing rebellion and an increasing awareness among different groups fighting different battles that they are connected. . . . People are beginning to get together and see their common interest.”</p>
<p>Certainly there are endless ways to attempt to describe this underlying value, but usually these attempts lack a pragmatic component. How does “getting together” actually unify and strengthen, rather than scatter, a given movement for social change?</p>
<p>This question – this void – hasn’t been something I’ve devoted much conscious attention to, but when I began reading about the remarkable success in recent months and weeks of the “SuperPAC to end all SuperPACs,” which has just raised $12 million to engage head on with the influence big money has in the U.S. political system, I felt like I’d found an answer I didn’t know I’d been seeking.</p>
<p>Money has the potential to commodify everything we value. It eats the human commons. Not only is its heedless pursuit wrecking the planet, it is devouring all that remains of American democracy. And without democracy – without a core sense of public empowerment – every social change movement would collapse. Not only does corporate money wield an outrageous, and growing, influence on the political system at all levels, but even more ominously, public acceptance of this fact – that Big Money rules – gnaws away the belief that change is possible. We’re drifting dangerously toward becoming Spectator Nation. This is a social coffin.</p>
<p>Pushing back against this possibility is MaydayPAC, founded by Harvard Law School professor, author and long-time activist Lawrence Lessig. He and his co-conspirators, urging people to “embrace the irony” of raising money to fight big money, have devised a remarkable, multi-stage, long-term political action plan aimed at winning key congressional races in 2014 and 2016, revving up national momentum and producing, by 2017, national legislation reforming the way elections are funded.</p>
<p>Such reform would, in one way or another – through matching grants or vouchers –“produce a radical change in the range and nature of ‘relevant funders’ to congressional campaigns. If implemented effectively, candidates for Congress could run winning campaigns without being dependent upon large contributors,” according to the MaydayPAC website.</p>
<p>What a stunning idea: devising a system that magnifies the giving power of the little guy – or a hundred million little guys – and allows women and men who embrace their beliefs, on reducing military funding, let us say, to run for office free of any dependence on corporate money and the interests of the military-industrial complex.</p>
<p>In 1961, bathrooms for white people commanded an outrageous, “this is the way things are” inevitability, which the civil rights movement obliterated. Could corporate ownership of democracy come to be seen, in the not too distant future, as no less outrageous and absurd?</p>
<p>Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His new book,&#160;Courage Grows Strong at the Wound&#160;is now available. Contact him at&#160; <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a>&#160;or visit his website at&#160; <a href="http://commonwonders.com/" type="external">commonwonders.com</a>.&#160;This piece was reprinted by <a href="" type="internal">RINF Alternative News</a> with permission or license.&#160;</p> | true | 4 | robert koehler ah 1961 year certain aspects anyway almost impossible remember whites bathrooms instance us rep john lewis legendary civil rights leader crosser lines recently tweeted ancient mugshot memorializing arrest year using whites bathroom mississippi process amping outrage jim crow segregation south intensifying civil rights movements global resonance charged disorderly conduct spent 37 days parchman penitentiary difficult fathom smug legally sanctified certainty seems long ago days people ran things wrong say facetiously course emergence mugshot 53 years ago memories longgone era unavoidably accompany somehow speaks volumes numerous movements change simmering today one reason civil rights movement 1960s actually successful turned country around undid every last legal moral justification held together whitesonly old south seriously undermined much legally ensconced racism north didnt end racism per se regrouped legally around bloated prisonindustrial complex woke nation created enduring legacy nonviolent humanrightsbased change set standard whats possible time exposing vicious hatred masquerading moral sanctity held together existing social order perhaps also established legitimacy necessity nonviolent revolution cognizance neverending need stand social wrong keep demanding change keep evolving also moral value civil rights movement courageous actions john lewis innumerable others often great personal hardship sometimes cost lives confined one particular issue extraordinary antiwar movement emerged 60s followed womens rights movement gay rights movement environmental movement civil rights struggle laid groundwork theyre connected implies common core value underlies movements days ago jim hightower interview bill moyers said growing rebellion increasing awareness among different groups fighting different battles connected people beginning get together see common interest certainly endless ways attempt describe underlying value usually attempts lack pragmatic component getting together actually unify strengthen rather scatter given movement social change question void hasnt something ive devoted much conscious attention began reading remarkable success recent months weeks superpac end superpacs raised 12 million engage head influence big money us political system felt like id found answer didnt know id seeking money potential commodify everything value eats human commons heedless pursuit wrecking planet devouring remains american democracy without democracy without core sense public empowerment every social change movement would collapse corporate money wield outrageous growing influence political system levels even ominously public acceptance fact big money rules gnaws away belief change possible drifting dangerously toward becoming spectator nation social coffin pushing back possibility maydaypac founded harvard law school professor author longtime activist lawrence lessig coconspirators urging people embrace irony raising money fight big money devised remarkable multistage longterm political action plan aimed winning key congressional races 2014 2016 revving national momentum producing 2017 national legislation reforming way elections funded reform would one way another matching grants vouchers produce radical change range nature relevant funders congressional campaigns implemented effectively candidates congress could run winning campaigns without dependent upon large contributors according maydaypac website stunning idea devising system magnifies giving power little guy hundred million little guys allows women men embrace beliefs reducing military funding let us say run office free dependence corporate money interests militaryindustrial complex 1961 bathrooms white people commanded outrageous way things inevitability civil rights movement obliterated could corporate ownership democracy come seen distant future less outrageous absurd robert koehler awardwinning chicagobased journalist nationally syndicated writer new book160courage grows strong wound160is available contact at160 koehlercwgmailcom160or visit website at160 commonwonderscom160this piece reprinted rinf alternative news permission license160 | 537 |
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<p /> Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He received a dual Ph.D. in Sociology of Culture and Islamic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. He wrote his dissertation on Max Weber's theory of charismatic authority with Philip Rieff (1922-2006), the most distinguished Freudian cultural critic of his time. Professor Dabashi has taught and delivered lectures in many North American, European, Arab, and Iranian universities. PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in New York. In Syria the conflict continues. The rebellion seems to be spreading and the Assad regime teetering. Well, that's one version of the events. The other version of the events is Syria's put down these kinds of uprisings before, and the Syrian elite is likely to hang together. So which is it? Or maybe it's somewhere in between. Now to help us understand what's going on in Syria is Hamid Dabashi. Hamid teaches at Columbia University, and he's the author of the book Brown Skin, White Masks. Thanks for joining us.
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<p />PROF. HAMID DABASHI, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY: Thank you, Paul.
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<p />JAY: So what's your take on Syria?
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<p />DABASHI: Yes, Syria has managed to put down these events in the past, especially Bashar al-Assad's father, Hafez al-Assad. But we didn't have Arab Spring going on. Now Arab Spring is happening. And the Syrian uprising was in response to the Arab Spring. After Egypt, the greatest apple that will fall is Syria. It is going to so fundamentally change the situation, 'cause with the fall of Egypt, you had the ally of United States to fall. With the fall of Syria or any--by fall I mean any democratic change in Syria--you will have a major adversary of United States and Israel to fall. That will change the geopolitics of the region. Anything, any democratic change that may happen--as we speak, leading intellectuals, journalists of Syria have been allowed to have a meeting in a hotel in downtown Damascus, a miracle nobody would have imagined. I mean, one of my dearest friends recently--Syrian filmmaker Omar Amiralay--passed away. I mean, if he were alive to see a day like this--it's just unimaginable. Has happened. I mean, it's not totally credible. People are criticizing it. But the fact of the matter is that this sea change, these seismic changes that are happening with various degrees of success or failure, or temporary failure, are coming to the fore and will happen in Syria. Right now what is on the record is more than 1,000 civilians have been killed. You have a mass humanitarian crisis on the border with Turkey. Turkey is very agitated and incensed with Syria, which means there is international crisis for Syria generated on its borders. Whatever factor of the Syrian elite coming together, they're facing the most fundamental challenge of their history since the Assads have been in power.
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<p />JAY: There seems to be quite a debate or difference in interpretation about just what the [crosstalk] you had, Hillary Clinton's calling Assad a reformer. He's not really the--almost putting him in the same basket with the way they talk about the Gulf Cooperation Council: oh, yes, it's not democratic, but they're reforming. And they kind of put Assad there in that basket early on. Is US policy itself somewhat confused here, in the sense that better the Assad you know than what the hell's coming next?
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<p />DABASHI: Exactly, exactly, because, you see, these democratic uprisings have thrown a monkey wrench at these--precisely these arrangements. So far as you have Bashar al-Assad in there, you know who you are dealing with. And what it exactly Bashar--when I hear the word Maghouama, resistance, Syria is in the forefront of resistance, what exactly--. Golan Height is still under the Israeli occupation. The Palestinians are in fact going their own way. The rapprochement between Hamas and Fatah is extremely important in terms of Hamas has given up hope on Islamic Republic or on Hezbollah or on the Syrians coming to its aid and trying to have their own, you know, rapprochement. The thing is, United States, Israel, European Union, all of these, NATO, they have lost the plot because the plot has changed. Suddenly we have a democratic will of the Syrians involved in a factor, and it is, like all democratic [incompr.] open-ended. We don't know in what direction it will go. The only thing that it has done, it has destabilized, it has made it impossible for you to have regular sort of chess player with all of these arrangements. And in what direction it will go, they cannot control it. The confusion of Secretary Clinton, by extension American foreign policy, is because the rug from under their feet is pulled. And they're trying to control it, they're trying to micromanage it, but it's very difficult, fortunately.
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<p />JAY: In terms of what could happen next in Syria, if the Syrian army doesn't split--and I don't think there's any too serious signs that it has--and there's no outside intervention, which is impossible to imagine, that--I mean, not impossible, but highly unlikely there's going to be some foreign intervention, and I think the majority of Syrian people don't want it--how does this shift? Because the dictatorship's willing to use any force necessary.
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<p />DABASHI: If a year--Paul, think a year back. If six months ago somebody would tell you that Bashar al-Assad is going to lift the emergency condition, allow for some of the leading intellectuals, activists, and oppositional forces to gather in downtown Damascus and negotiate democratic issues, you would have said you're out of your--our mind. But it has happened.
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<p />JAY: So it's not so much about, perhaps, the fall of the Assad regime as an opening up of a democratic space in Syria.
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<p />DABASHI: Exactly. Exactly. And, also, if you go to the models of Tunisia and Egypt, in Egypt all that has fallen is just a figurehead. There are many, as you know, mini-Mubaraks lurking in the army. But the thing is, because the people--as of yesterday, there was a demonstration in Tahrir square. Because people are present, those mini-Mubaraks are not coming out. This is the synergy. So this, in fact, we are reconsidering what exactly it means, revolution. It's not a revolution on the model of the French Revolution or American Revolution. It is a revolution in terms of the expansion of the political space and participation. That expansion is a Hannah Arendt conception of revolution. That expansion of the public space is already taking place. People have agency. Journalists, intellectuals, activists are out; they're articulating their positions. And in the absence of democratic institutions, political party, freedom of expression, freedom of peaceful assembly, etc., we are for the first time witness to the formation of democratic institutions for enduring democracy. To me that is far more important in enduring for future than just a figurehead falling and so forth.
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<p />JAY: And from the Western press point of view, they always look at it just from the point of view of figurehead, leaders, geopolitics, alliances within the imperialist game. But for the people it's about a democratic state.
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<p />DABASHI: Of course, because in much of this so-called Western press, still the Orientalist imagination is. I mean, just one figurehead goes; another figurehead comes. But that--now we are in fact reinventing, reconvening the idea of democracy from ground up, from the vox populi, from the will of the people, is something that the Western press also has to stand up in awe and admiration and behold.
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<p />JAY: And still don't understand. Thanks for joining us.
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<p />DABASHI: Thanks.
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<p />JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.
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<p />End of Transcript
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<p />DISCLAIMER: Please note that transcripts for The Real News Network are typed from a recording of the program. TRNN cannot guarantee their complete accuracy. | true | 4 | hamid dabashi hagop kevorkian professor iranian studies comparative literature columbia university received dual phd sociology culture islamic studies university pennsylvania 1984 followed postdoctoral fellowship harvard university wrote dissertation max webers theory charismatic authority philip rieff 19222006 distinguished freudian cultural critic time professor dabashi taught delivered lectures many north american european arab iranian universities paul jay senior editor trnn welcome real news network im paul jay new york syria conflict continues rebellion seems spreading assad regime teetering well thats one version events version events syrias put kinds uprisings syrian elite likely hang together maybe somewhere help us understand whats going syria hamid dabashi hamid teaches columbia university hes author book brown skin white masks thanks joining us prof hamid dabashi columbia university thank paul jay whats take syria dabashi yes syria managed put events past especially bashar alassads father hafez alassad didnt arab spring going arab spring happening syrian uprising response arab spring egypt greatest apple fall syria going fundamentally change situation cause fall egypt ally united states fall fall syria anyby fall mean democratic change syriayou major adversary united states israel fall change geopolitics region anything democratic change may happenas speak leading intellectuals journalists syria allowed meeting hotel downtown damascus miracle nobody would imagined mean one dearest friends recentlysyrian filmmaker omar amiralaypassed away mean alive see day like thisits unimaginable happened mean totally credible people criticizing fact matter sea change seismic changes happening various degrees success failure temporary failure coming fore happen syria right record 1000 civilians killed mass humanitarian crisis border turkey turkey agitated incensed syria means international crisis syria generated borders whatever factor syrian elite coming together theyre facing fundamental challenge history since assads power jay seems quite debate difference interpretation crosstalk hillary clintons calling assad reformer hes really thealmost putting basket way talk gulf cooperation council oh yes democratic theyre reforming kind put assad basket early us policy somewhat confused sense better assad know hells coming next dabashi exactly exactly see democratic uprisings thrown monkey wrench theseprecisely arrangements far bashar alassad know dealing exactly basharwhen hear word maghouama resistance syria forefront resistance exactly golan height still israeli occupation palestinians fact going way rapprochement hamas fatah extremely important terms hamas given hope islamic republic hezbollah syrians coming aid trying know rapprochement thing united states israel european union nato lost plot plot changed suddenly democratic syrians involved factor like democratic incompr openended dont know direction go thing done destabilized made impossible regular sort chess player arrangements direction go control confusion secretary clinton extension american foreign policy rug feet pulled theyre trying control theyre trying micromanage difficult fortunately jay terms could happen next syria syrian army doesnt splitand dont think theres serious signs hasand theres outside intervention impossible imagine thati mean impossible highly unlikely theres going foreign intervention think majority syrian people dont want ithow shift dictatorships willing use force necessary dabashi yearpaul think year back six months ago somebody would tell bashar alassad going lift emergency condition allow leading intellectuals activists oppositional forces gather downtown damascus negotiate democratic issues would said youre yourour mind happened jay much perhaps fall assad regime opening democratic space syria dabashi exactly exactly also go models tunisia egypt egypt fallen figurehead many know minimubaraks lurking army thing peopleas yesterday demonstration tahrir square people present minimubaraks coming synergy fact reconsidering exactly means revolution revolution model french revolution american revolution revolution terms expansion political space participation expansion hannah arendt conception revolution expansion public space already taking place people agency journalists intellectuals activists theyre articulating positions absence democratic institutions political party freedom expression freedom peaceful assembly etc first time witness formation democratic institutions enduring democracy far important enduring future figurehead falling forth jay western press point view always look point view figurehead leaders geopolitics alliances within imperialist game people democratic state dabashi course much socalled western press still orientalist imagination mean one figurehead goes another figurehead comes thatnow fact reinventing reconvening idea democracy ground vox populi people something western press also stand awe admiration behold jay still dont understand thanks joining us dabashi thanks jay thank joining us real news network end transcript disclaimer please note transcripts real news network typed recording program trnn guarantee complete accuracy | 690 |
<p>Omar S. Dahi is an associate professor of economics. He received his B.A. in economics from California State University at Long Beach, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of economic development and international trade, with a special focus on South-South economic cooperation, and on the political economy of the Middle East and North Africa.</p>
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<p /> JESSICA DESVARIEUX, TRNN PRODUCER: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Jessica Desvarieux in Baltimore.
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<p />A recently released report commissioned by the Qatari government claims that more than 11,000 people have been tortured and executed by the Syrian government.
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<p />Please be warned that there are some graphic images here.
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<p />Now joining us to discuss the timing of the report and its significance is Omar Dahi. Omar is an associate professor of economics at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, and a visiting fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut.
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<p />Thanks for joining us again, Omar.
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<p />DAHI, ASSOC. PROF. ECONOMICS, HAMPSHIRE COLLEGE: Great to be here.
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<p />DESVARIEUX: So, Omar, let's pick up where we left off and discuss a little bit more about this report. What do you make of the timing of the report? And can you just give a bit more background about how this came to be released?
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<p />DAHI: Sure. Well, basically, in terms of the timing of the report, there has been a pattern that many critics of the opposition have been pointing out, which is that on the eve of crucial talks or on the eve of votes in the Security Council back one year or two years ago, when there was discussion in the Security Council on resolutions which would have increased the sanctions against Syria, there's a been a lot of discussion that on the eve of such reports there was a release of new findings of human rights violations by the regime or a massacre by the regime and have basically been arguing that since a lot of the Syrian opposition has been framing its goals as inviting foreign intervention, that the timing of these reports are basically coincided to have the maximum impact in order to facilitate foreign intervention, and therefore that the timing's suspicious. And in this case there is evidence that the report was funded by the Qatari government, and therefore it basically points to the same pattern of behavior by some of the Syrian opposition.
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<p />Now, what we do know, however--and we should not be surprised--is that the human rights violations by the Syrian government have been severe. And, in fact, they may have amounted to crimes against humanity, war crimes, and that this has been documented not just by this report but by the United Nations human rights fact-finding mission, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch, in other words, other human rights organizations and local activist groups. And so it's certainly true that there has been a timing aspect of this in the last several weeks to basically turn the narrative upside down against the regime when the regime's narrative seemed to be prevailing in terms of it was fighting terrorism and so forth, but I think we should not be surprised about the violations of the regime, and these allegations should be investigated. And, in fact, we know that there are tens of thousands of prisoners, political prisoners that are still held by the regime under horrific circumstances.
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<p />But what's--has been missing from a lot of these discussions is critical thought and critical reporting about the human rights violations being committed from different sides. And there has been increasingly a number that has been discussed by many people both inside and outside Syria that the regime itself has lost up to 40,000 or 50,000 soldiers or fighters or, basically, people from the regime side in total, totaling up to the tens of thousands. In other words, it's basically the case where each side is--they're focusing on the human rights violation done by the other without critical thought of the violations, the deaths, and the destruction that's being made by, basically, people on their side. In many cases, many groups fighting against the regime have been documented to have been committing mass human rights violations.
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<p />So what we can tell about the report itself is that it's not--it would not be shocking to find out that this report is true, but that the critical reporting about the massive human rights violations and the other types of killings that have been taking place is not always there. And it needs to be more surfaced, to show that there is a civil war dynamic and that both sides have reason to believe that the other side wants to achieve total victory. Both sides have reasons to believe that if they lay down their weapons, they might face annihilation. And I'm talking about the social bases of both sides, not just the fighting forces, but the people who support it, the ordinary Syrians who support each of these sides.
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<p />DESVARIEUX: Let's talk more about the ordinary Syrians and get a sense of what a resolution would look like if it was in the interests of ordinary Syrians.
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<p />DAHI: Well, I would say more Syrians are desperate, although I would start that with the caveat that I've been very wary over the last two or three years of people speaking on behalf of or claiming to know what most Syrians want. So I'll just speak about what I have seen in terms of the research among the refugees and in terms of talking to many Syrians outside of Syria in the neighboring countries who have been displaced by the conflict, which is that they want an end to the violence. And they are increasingly critical of the vanguards or the maximalist position of each of those sides.
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<p />But I would say there has to be four elements for a meaningful transition. One of them is a ceasefire, which is not going to happen overnight but is going to be gradual because there are many groups, including many groups that are fighting against the government, that may not stick immediately to any political deal--and, in fact, many have already rejected it. But a ceasefire and an improvement in the security situation is an essential for basically Syrian society to be able to breathe once again, to not be on the constant--the edge of war.
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<p />Second is a legitimate government that has to be inclusive and that has to be legitimate, not in the sense that it represents only one side, but that different social bases, different social forces within Syria view their own future or can see that they have representation in this government, and a democratic transition, eventually, where not only in this transitional government they see some legitimacy, but they see some hope that their voices will be eventually represented.
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<p />And finally, I return to economic life, I return to basically the reconstruction, economic recovery, aid, ability for people who are displaced to return to their homes, ability to increase and get access, basic needs and basic food and other requirements.
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<p />Without those four elements, I find it very hard for a political deal to stick. And even if one was in force today, a year from now it might basically collapse. And these are very complicated. As you know, there are very different actors involved in the issue. But so long as, I would say, four of these four elements are not there, it's going to be very hard to move forward.
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<p />DESVARIEUX: Alright. Omar, we greatly appreciate your analysis. Thank you so much for joining us.
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<p />DAHI: Thank you.
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<p />DESVARIEUX: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.
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<p />End
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<p />DISCLAIMER: Please note that transcripts for The Real News Network are typed from a recording of the program. TRNN cannot guarantee their complete accuracy. | true | 4 | omar dahi associate professor economics received ba economics california state university long beach phd economics university notre dame indiana research teaching interests areas economic development international trade special focus southsouth economic cooperation political economy middle east north africa jessica desvarieux trnn producer welcome real news network im jessica desvarieux baltimore recently released report commissioned qatari government claims 11000 people tortured executed syrian government please warned graphic images joining us discuss timing report significance omar dahi omar associate professor economics hampshire college amherst massachusetts visiting fellow carnegie middle east center beirut thanks joining us omar dahi assoc prof economics hampshire college great desvarieux omar lets pick left discuss little bit report make timing report give bit background came released dahi sure well basically terms timing report pattern many critics opposition pointing eve crucial talks eve votes security council back one year two years ago discussion security council resolutions would increased sanctions syria theres lot discussion eve reports release new findings human rights violations regime massacre regime basically arguing since lot syrian opposition framing goals inviting foreign intervention timing reports basically coincided maximum impact order facilitate foreign intervention therefore timings suspicious case evidence report funded qatari government therefore basically points pattern behavior syrian opposition know howeverand surprisedis human rights violations syrian government severe fact may amounted crimes humanity war crimes documented report united nations human rights factfinding mission amnesty international human rights watch words human rights organizations local activist groups certainly true timing aspect last several weeks basically turn narrative upside regime regimes narrative seemed prevailing terms fighting terrorism forth think surprised violations regime allegations investigated fact know tens thousands prisoners political prisoners still held regime horrific circumstances whatshas missing lot discussions critical thought critical reporting human rights violations committed different sides increasingly number discussed many people inside outside syria regime lost 40000 50000 soldiers fighters basically people regime side total totaling tens thousands words basically case side istheyre focusing human rights violation done without critical thought violations deaths destruction thats made basically people side many cases many groups fighting regime documented committing mass human rights violations tell report notit would shocking find report true critical reporting massive human rights violations types killings taking place always needs surfaced show civil war dynamic sides reason believe side wants achieve total victory sides reasons believe lay weapons might face annihilation im talking social bases sides fighting forces people support ordinary syrians support sides desvarieux lets talk ordinary syrians get sense resolution would look like interests ordinary syrians dahi well would say syrians desperate although would start caveat ive wary last two three years people speaking behalf claiming know syrians want ill speak seen terms research among refugees terms talking many syrians outside syria neighboring countries displaced conflict want end violence increasingly critical vanguards maximalist position sides would say four elements meaningful transition one ceasefire going happen overnight going gradual many groups including many groups fighting government may stick immediately political dealand fact many already rejected ceasefire improvement security situation essential basically syrian society able breathe constantthe edge war second legitimate government inclusive legitimate sense represents one side different social bases different social forces within syria view future see representation government democratic transition eventually transitional government see legitimacy see hope voices eventually represented finally return economic life return basically reconstruction economic recovery aid ability people displaced return homes ability increase get access basic needs basic food requirements without four elements find hard political deal stick even one force today year might basically collapse complicated know different actors involved issue long would say four four elements going hard move forward desvarieux alright omar greatly appreciate analysis thank much joining us dahi thank desvarieux thank joining us real news network end disclaimer please note transcripts real news network typed recording program trnn guarantee complete accuracy | 628 |
<p>Given its small population, the rural northern California county where I live is home to an extraordinary number of successful artists. Two of these artists, Jan Hoyman and Doug Browe, also participate in a remarkable organization, Potters for Peace ( <a href="http://www.potpaz.org/" type="external">www.potpaz.org</a>), which began twenty years ago when a group of US potters sought ways to support the work of Nicaraguan potters while simultaneously opposing US aid to the Contras. While this support has grown to involve a wide range of cultural, artistic, and technical exchanges between potters, the organization is increasingly involved in providing the technical expertise to establish ceramic water filtration projects, a “high technique, low technology” system, as Doug puts it, for purifying water.</p>
<p>Last year, as untreated sewage continued to flow into drinking water supplies in Iraq and outbreaks of bacteriological diseases such as cholera and typhoid were reported in Basra, Najaf, Sadr City, and elsewhere, Doug was returning from two months in Thailand, spent in a refugee camp on the Burmese border, assisting residents of the camp in the final stages of a ceramic water filter project. It was his second trip to the refugee camp. During the first trip, he had located a source of accessible local clay, supervised the construction of an adobe kiln, and trained several residents in basic pottery techniques.</p>
<p>This second trip focused on the manufacture and firing of the water filters. Ceramic water filters, as Potters for Peace designs them, are essentially urns created from a careful mix of clay and a readily available “fibrous” material–sawdust, rice hulls, straw, etc.–and lined with colloidal silver. The fibrous material, when sized precisely and mixed with the clay in the proper portion, produces a porous urn that will allow the passage of water, but not bacteria–the bacteria are trapped by the fibers in the clay. The colloidal silver, which coats the outside of the urn, provides an additional anti-bacterial barrier. When poured into the filter, water polluted with a bacteriological disease such as e-coli, typhoid, or cholera, emerges bacteriologically clean.</p>
<p>It was my twelve year old daughter who, during a slide-show presentation by Doug of his experiences in Thailand, first suggested the obvious application of ceramic water filtration to Iraq. Clearly, low-tech water filtration is no substitute for reparation of Iraq’s water and sewage treatment systems; but while the US occupation focuses on military goals, and “rebuilding” seems permanently stalled in the planning stages or utterly undermined by corruption and violence, a project which provides clean water to people can prevent illness and save lives, albeit on a small scale. This at least was our thinking. Doug and I met several times to discuss our interest in traveling to Iraq, and the basic raw material and equipment needs of the project, and I began to do some research.</p>
<p>The project, however, has never gotten beyond preliminary inquiries because neither of us can quite imagine leaving our families and traveling to Iraq given the reality of violence and kidnappings. The news coming out of Iraq is unremittingly bad. Two years ago, I visited Iraq in the months leading up to the US invasion. While in Basra, after spending the morning visiting leukemia patients in a hospital and having lunch in our semi-air-conditioned hotel, I waded back out into the sickeningly hot day with two other members of Voices in the Wilderness ( <a href="http://www.vitw.org/" type="external">vitw.org</a>). Hassan, one of the shoeshine boys who slept on the lawn outside the hotel, flagged us down. He was exultant. “Look what we’ve got,” he said. Inside the box, of all things, lay an injured pigeon, captured with a slingshot. The terrified pigeon lay on its side, struggling to breathe and futilely trying to right itself and escape. “We’ll keep it alive until later,” the boys told us, “and then meat for dinner!”</p>
<p>I thought at the time that the abject pigeon was a bloody symbol for Iraq itself. As difficult as it may have been for people to imagine scaling the sanctions wall to visit Iraq, it wasn’t in actuality that difficult to do. But the occupation wall is another thing altogether. The battlefield in Iraq has no borders. As a result, Iraq today is even more isolated than it was during the sanctions regime, when isolation was decreed by fiat.</p>
<p>The news is not only bad, it is also demoralizing. Who hasn’t felt worn down by the unremitting violence? Who doesn’t know others–people who had been empowered two years ago by worldwide opposition to the invasion–who now feel powerless and are immobilized by it?</p>
<p>It isn’t only the lawlessness in Iraq, the daily reports of people killed or injured by violence, it is also the ongoing pictures and reports of conditions at prisons which give a nightmarish quality to popular images of Iraq and work to keep people at a distance. Consider the recent news from US-run Abu Ghraib prison. Last week we learned that Manadel al-Jamadi, a prisoner who died last year in what was labeled a “homicide,” actually died during a CIA interrogation, <a href="" type="internal">while suspended from his wrists</a>.</p>
<p>We also learned that medical care at the prison has been so haphazard that “Physician’s assistants and general practitioners amputated limbs, [and] a dentist did heart surgery Sometimes the hospital ran out of chest tubes, intravenous fluids or medicines. Medical staff members improvised, taking tubes from patients when they died and reusing them, without sterilization” (NYT, 2/4/05). Despite the availability of psychotropic drugs, the hundreds of people at the prison who are mentally ill have gone without treatment, because no psychiatrist has been available to work with them and prescribe the medication. In at least one case, staff <a href="" type="internal">used a leash to restrain a prisoner</a>..</p>
<p>While opposition to the US occupation is the central contribution that we can make to the welfare of people in Iraq, its flipside, concrete and productive exchanges with Iraqi people, is also vital. For many people, supporting a worthy humanitarian project is a doorway into Iraq, a way to make a contribution and to connect positively with people there; for others, it is a way to revitalize, leading to greater political involvement. Apart from their intrinsic value, humanitarian projects can be a focus for education about the effects of US policies, and they can be rallying points around which political actions are organized.</p>
<p>In this regard, an opportunity is about to present itself. Over the next six weeks, US citizens in cities from Boston to Seattle to Los Angeles will have an opportunity to talk with and learn from Gino Strada, co-founder of an extraordinary international medical relief agency, Emergency – Life support for civilian war victims, currently operating medical facilities in war zones in Iraq, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Sierra Leone, Sudan, and Angola. It has conducted and concluded projects in Rwanda, Eritrea, Algeria, and Palestine ( <a href="http://www.emergency.it/" type="external">www.emergency.it</a>). Emergency builds and runs surgical hospitals, rehabilitation centers for landmine victims, and medical clinics; and it builds them in places where no one else will, places which need specialist medical and surgical services: for example in Anabah, in a remote and dangerous region of Afghanistan.</p>
<p>Strada is in the U.S. on a book tour ( <a href="http://www.emergencyusa.org/" type="external">www.emergencyusa.org</a>), after the recent translation into English of his book, Green Parrots – A War Surgeon’s Diary, a journal of his experiences as a surgeon for Emergency. Green Parrots is named after the antipersonnel landmine that looks like a toy and has maimed or killed many of the children Emergency has seen in its clinics in Afghanistan, where an estimated ten million anti-personnel mines and innumerable unexploded cluster bombs dot the landscape. Strada comes to the US directly from work in Afghanistan.</p>
<p>Strada’s training as a surgeon and his wide and very personal experience of war and its immediate consequences give him a unique perspective on modern war and a powerful incentive to oppose it. He writes “Today there are many possible causes of war, but there is only one sure outcome: death, injuries, refugees, orphans. Wherever a war is fought, whatever weapons are used, it no longer consists of a clash between armies in a well-defined, limited battlefield. There is no official battle front. The front is the road, the marketplace, the village: the people who live there are the victims. 90% of them are civilians. 34% are children. Many armed groups deliberately mix with the population to avoid identification. Sometimes they actually use civilians as shields. Quite often, targeting and terrorizing large civilian groups are part of an army’s primary military strategy.”</p>
<p>Emergency has been in Afghanistan for five years and in northern Iraq–Erbil, Sulaimaniya, and Choman–for ten years. It has hopes of staffing a medical facility in Karbala, in South-Central Iraq. Strada’s visit to the US is an important opportunity not only because of the critical medical care his organization provides, but also because of the information he can share about the causes and consequences of war around the globe. Perhaps his visit can be a catalyst for individuals and groups to initiate or deepen their commitment to people in war-torn countries such as Iraq, and to oppose US militarism. For information about Strada’s tour, visit <a href="http://www.emergencyusa.org/GP/tour.php" type="external">http://www.emergencyusa.org/GP/tour.php</a>.</p>
<p>DAVID SMITH-FERRI is a member of Voices in the Wilderness, a campaign to end U.S. economic and military warfare abroad and at home. He lives in Ukiah, CA. He can be reached at: <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a></p> | true | 4 | given small population rural northern california county live home extraordinary number successful artists two artists jan hoyman doug browe also participate remarkable organization potters peace wwwpotpazorg began twenty years ago group us potters sought ways support work nicaraguan potters simultaneously opposing us aid contras support grown involve wide range cultural artistic technical exchanges potters organization increasingly involved providing technical expertise establish ceramic water filtration projects high technique low technology system doug puts purifying water last year untreated sewage continued flow drinking water supplies iraq outbreaks bacteriological diseases cholera typhoid reported basra najaf sadr city elsewhere doug returning two months thailand spent refugee camp burmese border assisting residents camp final stages ceramic water filter project second trip refugee camp first trip located source accessible local clay supervised construction adobe kiln trained several residents basic pottery techniques second trip focused manufacture firing water filters ceramic water filters potters peace designs essentially urns created careful mix clay readily available fibrous materialsawdust rice hulls straw etcand lined colloidal silver fibrous material sized precisely mixed clay proper portion produces porous urn allow passage water bacteriathe bacteria trapped fibers clay colloidal silver coats outside urn provides additional antibacterial barrier poured filter water polluted bacteriological disease ecoli typhoid cholera emerges bacteriologically clean twelve year old daughter slideshow presentation doug experiences thailand first suggested obvious application ceramic water filtration iraq clearly lowtech water filtration substitute reparation iraqs water sewage treatment systems us occupation focuses military goals rebuilding seems permanently stalled planning stages utterly undermined corruption violence project provides clean water people prevent illness save lives albeit small scale least thinking doug met several times discuss interest traveling iraq basic raw material equipment needs project began research project however never gotten beyond preliminary inquiries neither us quite imagine leaving families traveling iraq given reality violence kidnappings news coming iraq unremittingly bad two years ago visited iraq months leading us invasion basra spending morning visiting leukemia patients hospital lunch semiairconditioned hotel waded back sickeningly hot day two members voices wilderness vitworg hassan one shoeshine boys slept lawn outside hotel flagged us exultant look weve got said inside box things lay injured pigeon captured slingshot terrified pigeon lay side struggling breathe futilely trying right escape well keep alive later boys told us meat dinner thought time abject pigeon bloody symbol iraq difficult may people imagine scaling sanctions wall visit iraq wasnt actuality difficult occupation wall another thing altogether battlefield iraq borders result iraq today even isolated sanctions regime isolation decreed fiat news bad also demoralizing hasnt felt worn unremitting violence doesnt know otherspeople empowered two years ago worldwide opposition invasionwho feel powerless immobilized isnt lawlessness iraq daily reports people killed injured violence also ongoing pictures reports conditions prisons give nightmarish quality popular images iraq work keep people distance consider recent news usrun abu ghraib prison last week learned manadel aljamadi prisoner died last year labeled homicide actually died cia interrogation suspended wrists also learned medical care prison haphazard physicians assistants general practitioners amputated limbs dentist heart surgery sometimes hospital ran chest tubes intravenous fluids medicines medical staff members improvised taking tubes patients died reusing without sterilization nyt 2405 despite availability psychotropic drugs hundreds people prison mentally ill gone without treatment psychiatrist available work prescribe medication least one case staff used leash restrain prisoner opposition us occupation central contribution make welfare people iraq flipside concrete productive exchanges iraqi people also vital many people supporting worthy humanitarian project doorway iraq way make contribution connect positively people others way revitalize leading greater political involvement apart intrinsic value humanitarian projects focus education effects us policies rallying points around political actions organized regard opportunity present next six weeks us citizens cities boston seattle los angeles opportunity talk learn gino strada cofounder extraordinary international medical relief agency emergency life support civilian war victims currently operating medical facilities war zones iraq afghanistan cambodia sierra leone sudan angola conducted concluded projects rwanda eritrea algeria palestine wwwemergencyit emergency builds runs surgical hospitals rehabilitation centers landmine victims medical clinics builds places one else places need specialist medical surgical services example anabah remote dangerous region afghanistan strada us book tour wwwemergencyusaorg recent translation english book green parrots war surgeons diary journal experiences surgeon emergency green parrots named antipersonnel landmine looks like toy maimed killed many children emergency seen clinics afghanistan estimated ten million antipersonnel mines innumerable unexploded cluster bombs dot landscape strada comes us directly work afghanistan stradas training surgeon wide personal experience war immediate consequences give unique perspective modern war powerful incentive oppose writes today many possible causes war one sure outcome death injuries refugees orphans wherever war fought whatever weapons used longer consists clash armies welldefined limited battlefield official battle front front road marketplace village people live victims 90 civilians 34 children many armed groups deliberately mix population avoid identification sometimes actually use civilians shields quite often targeting terrorizing large civilian groups part armys primary military strategy emergency afghanistan five years northern iraqerbil sulaimaniya chomanfor ten years hopes staffing medical facility karbala southcentral iraq stradas visit us important opportunity critical medical care organization provides also information share causes consequences war around globe perhaps visit catalyst individuals groups initiate deepen commitment people wartorn countries iraq oppose us militarism information stradas tour visit httpwwwemergencyusaorggptourphp david smithferri member voices wilderness campaign end us economic military warfare abroad home lives ukiah ca reached smithferripacificnet | 880 |
<p />
<p>Interviews conducted by:</p>
<p>Josh Clark, Michael Krasny, and Jay Walljasper.</p>
<p>Statistical research by Leora Broydo. Timeline by Nora E. Connell. Lani Guinier interview by Lise Funderburg.</p>
<p />
<p>What did our interviewers have to say about the past 20 years? After they’d listened to dozens of others, we turned the mike on them:</p>
<p />
<p>Josh Clark is an associate producer of documentaries for WGBH public television, Boston.</p>
<p />
<p>“In working recently on a documentary about Andrew Carnegie and 19th-century industrialism, I explored a period of greed, of rapidly growing wealth inequality, of painful structural changes in the economy, of a frustrated labor movement, and of unethical business dealings born from an absence of regulation. I found it surprisingly good preparation for my next project, a documentary about the Reagan years.” (The Carnegie documentary will premiere next fall on PBS.)</p>
<p />
<p>Michael Krasny is a professor of English at San Francisco State University, a host of the award-winning “Forum” radio show on KQED, and a Mother Jones contributing writer.</p>
<p />
<p>“Twenty years ago Mother Jones was new. ‘The magazine for the rest of us,’ it called itself. The rest of us are 20 years older now, with more to conserve, and therefore mostly less radical. But who are we? A magazine with as many years as this one has created many friends, built up a lot of capital. It’s pissed people off, created enemies. The redoubtable Camille Paglia let me know right off, ‘I’ll do this interview for you, Michael, but I loathe Mother Jones. I detest them. They are unconscionable.’ Yet the magazine still opens doors. Kindles fond progressive linked memories and real admiration. Inspires trust.</p>
<p>“Certain themes emerged despite the fact that I talked with poets, economists, columnists, ecologists, feminists, politicians, novelists, psychoanalysts, editors, publishers, the left and the right. For many, what we need to learn is seen as a matter of self-interest. Poet Gary Snyder and Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham both spoke of our need to find a new American story. I realized the ‘we’ they were talking about truly is ‘the rest of us,’ those of us trying to hear or tell the story so it makes some sense and follows a path that tells us who we are by looking back on who we were and considering who we might become.”</p>
<p />
<p>Jay Walljasper is editor at large at Utne Reader.</p>
<p />
<p>“Twenty years ago I believed a great progressive upsurge was just around the corner. What happened? Progressives vastly underestimated the political will of America’s privileged classes to protect and expand their economic power, including rubbing salt in the wounds of racial strife-as Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and Newt Gingrich have done. At the same time, the American left largely ignored its historical strength: a genuine concern and understanding for the everyday lives of everyday people.</p>
<p>Where do we go from here? Some political observers point in the direction of thinking Green-not just in the strict environmental sense, but in the more encompassing philosophy embraced by Europe’s Green parties. They emphasize community over bureaucracy, quality of life over economic growth, real-life</p>
<p>experience over abstract theory, local over multinational, sustainability over consumerism, spirituality over materialism, democratic participation over corporate rule, and human comfort over institutional efficiency.”</p>
<p>Victor Juhasz, who illustrated the interviewees for this piece, created his first Mother Jones cover illustration-of Ronald Reagan-in 1981. He thinks the most important change in the past 20 years is the fax.</p>
<p>Special thanks to: David Beers, Chris Johnson, John Judis, R. Taggart Murphy, Robert Schaeffer, William Smock, Mollie Tremain, and Daniel Yankelovich.</p>
<p>Special design assistance by Lori Reed. Additional research by Dee Dee Bollong.</p>
<p />
<p>Sources for statistics, listed by trend: 1. Matrix Information and Directory Services, Personal Communications Industry Association, Information Technology Industry Council, Goddard Space Flight Center 2. Visa International, Global Trends-The World Almanac of Development and Peace (New York: Continuum, 1994) 3. U.S. Department of Commerce, American Bankers Association 4. Center for Defense Information, Vital Signs 1995 (New York: W.W. Norton &amp; Co., 1995), United Nations, Freedom House 5. Vital Signs 1995 6. Vital Signs 1995, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service 7. 1995 World Almanac (New Jersey: Funk &amp; Wagnalls, 1995), National Association of Home Builders of the United States, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 8. U.S. Bureau of the Census 9. Common Cause, Federal Election Commission, Washington Post, Gallup Organization, Lou Harris &amp; Associates 10. Gallup Organization, Council for Excellence in Government, Newspaper Association of America 11. Walt Disney Co., Information Technology Industry Council, American Society for Reproductive Medicine 12. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. Department of Education 13. Vital Signs 1995 14. Office of National Health Statistics 15. Statistical Record of Women Worldwide (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1995), U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 16. U.S. Bureau of the Census 17. U.S. Bureau of the Census 18. Gallup Organization, World Almanac 1995 19. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Promise Keepers, California Department of Motor Vehicles 20. Gallup Organization, New Editions.</p>
<p>Timeline sources: Chronicle of America (New York: Dorling Kindersley Publishing, 1995), 1995 World Almanac; Britannica Book of the Year, (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 1975-1995).</p>
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<p>Research assistance provided by Lexis-Nexis.</p>
<p /> | true | 4 | interviews conducted josh clark michael krasny jay walljasper statistical research leora broydo timeline nora e connell lani guinier interview lise funderburg interviewers say past 20 years theyd listened dozens others turned mike josh clark associate producer documentaries wgbh public television boston working recently documentary andrew carnegie 19thcentury industrialism explored period greed rapidly growing wealth inequality painful structural changes economy frustrated labor movement unethical business dealings born absence regulation found surprisingly good preparation next project documentary reagan years carnegie documentary premiere next fall pbs michael krasny professor english san francisco state university host awardwinning forum radio show kqed mother jones contributing writer twenty years ago mother jones new magazine rest us called rest us 20 years older conserve therefore mostly less radical magazine many years one created many friends built lot capital pissed people created enemies redoubtable camille paglia let know right ill interview michael loathe mother jones detest unconscionable yet magazine still opens doors kindles fond progressive linked memories real admiration inspires trust certain themes emerged despite fact talked poets economists columnists ecologists feminists politicians novelists psychoanalysts editors publishers left right many need learn seen matter selfinterest poet gary snyder harpers editor lewis lapham spoke need find new american story realized talking truly rest us us trying hear tell story makes sense follows path tells us looking back considering might become jay walljasper editor large utne reader twenty years ago believed great progressive upsurge around corner happened progressives vastly underestimated political americas privileged classes protect expand economic power including rubbing salt wounds racial strifeas ronald reagan george bush newt gingrich done time american left largely ignored historical strength genuine concern understanding everyday lives everyday people go political observers point direction thinking greennot strict environmental sense encompassing philosophy embraced europes green parties emphasize community bureaucracy quality life economic growth reallife experience abstract theory local multinational sustainability consumerism spirituality materialism democratic participation corporate rule human comfort institutional efficiency victor juhasz illustrated interviewees piece created first mother jones cover illustrationof ronald reaganin 1981 thinks important change past 20 years fax special thanks david beers chris johnson john judis r taggart murphy robert schaeffer william smock mollie tremain daniel yankelovich special design assistance lori reed additional research dee dee bollong sources statistics listed trend 1 matrix information directory services personal communications industry association information technology industry council goddard space flight center 2 visa international global trendsthe world almanac development peace new york continuum 1994 3 us department commerce american bankers association 4 center defense information vital signs 1995 new york ww norton amp co 1995 united nations freedom house 5 vital signs 1995 6 vital signs 1995 us immigration naturalization service 7 1995 world almanac new jersey funk amp wagnalls 1995 national association home builders united states us bureau labor statistics 8 us bureau census 9 common cause federal election commission washington post gallup organization lou harris amp associates 10 gallup organization council excellence government newspaper association america 11 walt disney co information technology industry council american society reproductive medicine 12 centers disease control prevention us department education 13 vital signs 1995 14 office national health statistics 15 statistical record women worldwide detroit gale research inc 1995 us bureau labor statistics 16 us bureau census 17 us bureau census 18 gallup organization world almanac 1995 19 us bureau census promise keepers california department motor vehicles 20 gallup organization new editions timeline sources chronicle america new york dorling kindersley publishing 1995 1995 world almanac britannica book year chicago encyclopædia britannica inc 19751995 research assistance provided lexisnexis | 581 |
<p>Plant geneticist Stan Cox, senior research scientist at the Kansas-based Land Institute, explains in his brilliant book “ <a href="" type="internal">Sick Planet</a>” how two industries that are supposed to give life, agribusiness and the health sector, are doing the exact opposite: they destroy the environment, poison our bodies and turn disasters of their own making into opportunities for profit and growth to boot.</p>
<p>Cox shows numerous specific instances of the social and ecological wreckage inflicted all over the world by corporations like GlaxoSmithkline, Tyson, Walmart and Monsanto: the toxic pollution spewed by pharmaceutical factories in India, the horrors of industrial cattle and poultry operations, and how the health industry afflicts us not only with unaffordable health care but also with an endless stream of unnecessary drugs and treatments, among many other wrongs.</p>
<p>The author is not the first to warn of the dangers and threats presented by these two industries (Vandana Shiva, Michael Pollan and Michael Moore, among others, preceded him). “Sick Planet”‘s main merit is its profound and serious contribution to the debate and reflection on solutions.</p>
<p>Cox does not dedicate the bulk of his outrage to the depredations of capitalists but to the false solutions proposed by certain environmentalist sectors which he views as naive and delusional, and are doing more harm than good. Parting from a solid Marxist base, he establishes that the political and economic changes necessary to get us out of the ecological debacle will have to be much more radical than the technocratic, eco-capitalist proposals that are bandied about in these days.</p>
<p>“The planet’s current predicament is not necessarily the work of evil, scheming tycoons bent on personal enrichment”, says Cox. “It is the natural product of a system that rewards the industrious capitalist… Just as we can’t blame the current global predicament on ‘bad’ corporate executives, we can’t expect the ‘good’ ones to come to the rescue. When corporate owners and managers claim they can’t operate in greener ways without sacrificing essential profits, they aren’t just being stubborn and greedy; they are acknowledging material reality.” (From the preface)</p>
<p>The author sees no merit in green capitalism proposals, which advocate “win-win” scenarios, as he considers that these part from an awesome and outrageous naivete. But neither does he take refuge in the triumphalistic vanity of some leftist sectors that hold that capitalism will self destruct due to its own internal contradictions. He warns, quoting James Bellamy Foster, that capitalism has a practically unlimited ability to transform itself when facing crises, and even profit from them.</p>
<p>Cox also advises us to reject another triumphalist notion treasured by some left-leaning enviros: that the ravages of global warming will make the citizenry conscious of the evils of capitalism. If the horrendous things that capitalism has done in the last few centuries have not “created awareness”, neither will global warming, argues the author.</p>
<p>Apart from Marx, Cox also draws from the observations of other- less well known- thinkers. One is the Romanian economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1906-1994), author of “The Entropy Law and the Economic Process” (1971). Combining physics and biology with classical economic theory, Georgescu-Roegen applied the second law of thermodynamics (entropy) to economic activities and he arrived at a terrifying conclusion: no matter what we do, the world is headed to the depletion of all its natural resources, meaning total entropy. The sum total of all economic activity only accelerates this inevitable decline. All economic activity, no matter how abstract and electronic, is founded ultimately on physical exploitation of natural resources. Therefore, the more economic growth there is, the faster we are headed to the fateful day of oblivion.</p>
<p>Based on the ideas of Georgescu Roegen, Cox reasons that, “provided our species survives, there lies somewhere in its future another Stone Age, and the faster our economic growth, the steeper the decline will be. The next Stone Age will be more resource-poor and probably more toxic than the last, and there will be no shot at a comeback.” (p. 159-160)</p>
<p>Not surprisingly, the ideas of this prophet of doom were relegated to the Orwellian memory hole, but throughout the 1970’s several visionary ecological thinkers welcomed his thesis. Two of these were Jeremy Rifkin and Ted Howard, who in 1980 co-wrote “Entropy: A New World View”, whose afterword is written by Georgescu-Roegen himself. Rifkin and Howard hold that an understanding of the law of entropy is a fundamental requisite for a profound and revolutionary ecological wisdom.</p>
<p>Cox makes reference to another ahead-of-the-curve scholar that gave serious consideration to Georgescu-Roegen’s ideas: economist Herman Daly. From being a World Bank economist he went on to become one of the leading lights in the budding field of ecological economics, and has dedicated a good part of his intellectual energy to finding ways to postone the next Stone Age to the unforeseeably far future. The alternative that Daly proposes includes among its main elements a reduction in the use of natural resources down to sustainable levels and reducing the income gap between social classes. Daly presents this thesis in his books “Steady State Economics” (1977) and “For the Common Good” (1989), the latter co-authored with John Cobb. In 2004 he published, with co-author Joshua Farley,”Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications”, an economics tex book in which they propose the modification of existing institutions to rescue the environment.</p>
<p>“While recognizing that inequality breeds insupportable growth, most ecological economists reject direct expropriation of wealth and property from those who have the most, preferring instead to put a limit on the human economy’s overall physical ‘throughput’ and have the capitalist class pay the costs of its resource use and ecological destruction”, says Cox (p. 160). “But is capitalism the kind of creature that can survive in captivity? The small, powerful class of people who today reap its economic benefits can be counted upon to rush headlong into ecological catastrophe rather than to permit the creation of institutions like those proposed by Daly and Farley… Manufacturers would simply refuse to slash their use of resources, production of goods, and discard of wastes. And, most crucially, the investing class would never agree to limit its accumulation of wealth in favor of the world’s impoverished majority.” (p. 161)</p>
<p>No wonder then that so many entrepreneurs and politicians, even the ones who fancy themselves green, support economic growth. Advocating growth is more simpatico and “kumba-ya” and less controversial and taking up the unpleasant subject of wealth redistribution.</p>
<p>Faced with this ineludible dilemma, advocates of green capitalism and technological optimism seek refuge in the efficiency mantra. On first sight, efficiency is universally good and devoid of controversy. ¿Who can object to efficiency? Both business people and environmentalists agree on this point. The idea of using technological innovation so that economic activity uses less materials and energy and generates less waste is an apolitical proposal that gives the impression that we can save the planet without stopping economic growth and without acknowledging the conflict between social classes.</p>
<p>But Cox cuts off our escape to that easy exit, using as a reference another little-known thinker: British economist William Stanley Jevons. In his book “The Coal Question” (1865), Jevons presents the results of his thourough study of mid-nineteenth century coal mining, which took a particularly close look at technological innovations that made it possible to extract more coal at a lesser cost. His study’s conclusions were unsettling, as unsettling as Georgescu-Roegen’s thesis: the increase in efficiency does not lead to conservation of the resource in question, BUT RATHER THE OPPOSITE. Increases in efficiency lead to increases in consumption, thus accelerating the resource’s depletion, concluded Jevons.</p>
<p>From the point of view of capitalist economics this makes plenty of sense. If a capitalist finds a way to reduce costs, the savings will not result in a reduction in the exploitation of labor and natural resources. No way, what a capitalist would do is take those savings and reinvest them in his operation in order to increase his profit margin (You really think a capitalist would do otherwise?). In other words, production will increase. And in ecological terms this means more plunder and exploitation of natural resources.</p>
<p>But Cox does not end there. For him it is not enough to smash any illusion that the reader might have about reconciling capitalism with ecological sustainability. He delivers his coup de grace with his refusal to end the book with a hopeful chapter filled with solutions to the crisis. It is very premature, presumptuous and frivolous to do such a thing at this moment, argues Cox.</p>
<p>The author concludes that one cannot conceive- much less build- an ecological society without there being a broad consensus that the current economic system, founded on never ending growth, cannot be part of a new society. We must understand that all economic growth is destructive and that therefore we cannot have both capitalism and a habitable planet, says Cox. He goes on to warn that if we do not achieve such an understanding, any proposal or solution to the ecological crisis will be a pretentious and futile exercise, with a high entertainment value but with absolutely no usefulness in the real world.</p>
<p>In conclusion, “ <a href="" type="internal">Sick Planet</a>” is a very modest book, for it simply invites the reader to question the inevitability and desirability of capitalism in a sick and shrinking planet.</p>
<p>(This review was originally published in Spanish in the Puerto Rican weekly Claridad on November 28 2008)</p>
<p>CARMELO RUIZ-MARRERO, a self-described renaissance hack and impractical humanist, is a Puerto Rican journalist, environmental educator and author. He is as Senior Fellow of the Environmental Leadership Program, a Fellow of the Oakland Institute, and directs the Puerto Rico Project on Biosafety ( <a href="http://bioseguridad.blogspot.com/" type="external">http://bioseguridad.blogspot.com/</a>). Whenever he is not writing or working at a call center, he distributes farm produce for something that resembles a CSA. Ruiz-Marrero, a compulsive blogger, blogs away at: <a href="http://carmeloruiz.blogspot.com/" type="external">http://carmeloruiz.blogspot.com/</a></p>
<p>&#160;</p> | true | 4 | plant geneticist stan cox senior research scientist kansasbased land institute explains brilliant book sick planet two industries supposed give life agribusiness health sector exact opposite destroy environment poison bodies turn disasters making opportunities profit growth boot cox shows numerous specific instances social ecological wreckage inflicted world corporations like glaxosmithkline tyson walmart monsanto toxic pollution spewed pharmaceutical factories india horrors industrial cattle poultry operations health industry afflicts us unaffordable health care also endless stream unnecessary drugs treatments among many wrongs author first warn dangers threats presented two industries vandana shiva michael pollan michael moore among others preceded sick planets main merit profound serious contribution debate reflection solutions cox dedicate bulk outrage depredations capitalists false solutions proposed certain environmentalist sectors views naive delusional harm good parting solid marxist base establishes political economic changes necessary get us ecological debacle much radical technocratic ecocapitalist proposals bandied days planets current predicament necessarily work evil scheming tycoons bent personal enrichment says cox natural product system rewards industrious capitalist cant blame current global predicament bad corporate executives cant expect good ones come rescue corporate owners managers claim cant operate greener ways without sacrificing essential profits arent stubborn greedy acknowledging material reality preface author sees merit green capitalism proposals advocate winwin scenarios considers part awesome outrageous naivete neither take refuge triumphalistic vanity leftist sectors hold capitalism self destruct due internal contradictions warns quoting james bellamy foster capitalism practically unlimited ability transform facing crises even profit cox also advises us reject another triumphalist notion treasured leftleaning enviros ravages global warming make citizenry conscious evils capitalism horrendous things capitalism done last centuries created awareness neither global warming argues author apart marx cox also draws observations less well known thinkers one romanian economist nicholas georgescuroegen 19061994 author entropy law economic process 1971 combining physics biology classical economic theory georgescuroegen applied second law thermodynamics entropy economic activities arrived terrifying conclusion matter world headed depletion natural resources meaning total entropy sum total economic activity accelerates inevitable decline economic activity matter abstract electronic founded ultimately physical exploitation natural resources therefore economic growth faster headed fateful day oblivion based ideas georgescu roegen cox reasons provided species survives lies somewhere future another stone age faster economic growth steeper decline next stone age resourcepoor probably toxic last shot comeback p 159160 surprisingly ideas prophet doom relegated orwellian memory hole throughout 1970s several visionary ecological thinkers welcomed thesis two jeremy rifkin ted howard 1980 cowrote entropy new world view whose afterword written georgescuroegen rifkin howard hold understanding law entropy fundamental requisite profound revolutionary ecological wisdom cox makes reference another aheadofthecurve scholar gave serious consideration georgescuroegens ideas economist herman daly world bank economist went become one leading lights budding field ecological economics dedicated good part intellectual energy finding ways postone next stone age unforeseeably far future alternative daly proposes includes among main elements reduction use natural resources sustainable levels reducing income gap social classes daly presents thesis books steady state economics 1977 common good 1989 latter coauthored john cobb 2004 published coauthor joshua farleyecological economics principles applications economics tex book propose modification existing institutions rescue environment recognizing inequality breeds insupportable growth ecological economists reject direct expropriation wealth property preferring instead put limit human economys overall physical throughput capitalist class pay costs resource use ecological destruction says cox p 160 capitalism kind creature survive captivity small powerful class people today reap economic benefits counted upon rush headlong ecological catastrophe rather permit creation institutions like proposed daly farley manufacturers would simply refuse slash use resources production goods discard wastes crucially investing class would never agree limit accumulation wealth favor worlds impoverished majority p 161 wonder many entrepreneurs politicians even ones fancy green support economic growth advocating growth simpatico kumbaya less controversial taking unpleasant subject wealth redistribution faced ineludible dilemma advocates green capitalism technological optimism seek refuge efficiency mantra first sight efficiency universally good devoid controversy object efficiency business people environmentalists agree point idea using technological innovation economic activity uses less materials energy generates less waste apolitical proposal gives impression save planet without stopping economic growth without acknowledging conflict social classes cox cuts escape easy exit using reference another littleknown thinker british economist william stanley jevons book coal question 1865 jevons presents results thourough study midnineteenth century coal mining took particularly close look technological innovations made possible extract coal lesser cost studys conclusions unsettling unsettling georgescuroegens thesis increase efficiency lead conservation resource question rather opposite increases efficiency lead increases consumption thus accelerating resources depletion concluded jevons point view capitalist economics makes plenty sense capitalist finds way reduce costs savings result reduction exploitation labor natural resources way capitalist would take savings reinvest operation order increase profit margin really think capitalist would otherwise words production increase ecological terms means plunder exploitation natural resources cox end enough smash illusion reader might reconciling capitalism ecological sustainability delivers coup de grace refusal end book hopeful chapter filled solutions crisis premature presumptuous frivolous thing moment argues cox author concludes one conceive much less build ecological society without broad consensus current economic system founded never ending growth part new society must understand economic growth destructive therefore capitalism habitable planet says cox goes warn achieve understanding proposal solution ecological crisis pretentious futile exercise high entertainment value absolutely usefulness real world conclusion sick planet modest book simply invites reader question inevitability desirability capitalism sick shrinking planet review originally published spanish puerto rican weekly claridad november 28 2008 carmelo ruizmarrero selfdescribed renaissance hack impractical humanist puerto rican journalist environmental educator author senior fellow environmental leadership program fellow oakland institute directs puerto rico project biosafety httpbioseguridadblogspotcom whenever writing working call center distributes farm produce something resembles csa ruizmarrero compulsive blogger blogs away httpcarmeloruizblogspotcom 160 | 931 |
<p>Francis Boyle is a Professor of Law at the University of llinois School of Law, where he currently teaches courses on Public International Law and International Human Rights. He was a part of the prosecutionteam that tried former US President George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their legal advisors in absentia in Malaysia.</p>
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<p /> PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Washington.
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<p />There have been many attempts over the last few years to prosecute former president Bush, vice president Cheney, and other senior members of his administration for war crimes of various sorts. None of those until recently were successful. Well, one of those prosecutions has now ended up in a conviction—in absentia, of course. And that took place in Malaysia.
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<p />Now joining us is one of the members of the prosecutorial team [snip] Francis Boyle. He's a professor of law at the University of Illinois school of law, where he currently teaches courses on public international law and international human rights. He was a part of the prosecution team, as I mentioned, that tried President Bush—former president Bush, former vice president Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, their legal advisers, in Malaysia, and were successful, as I said. Thanks for joining us.
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<p />FRANCIS BOYLE, PROF. INTERNATIONAL LAW, UNIV. OF ILLINOIS COLLEGE OF LAW: Well, Paul, thank you very much for having me on, and my best to your audience.
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<p />JAY: Thank you. So what were the charges? And tell us a bit about the process.
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<p />BOYLE: Well, the charges were twofold: first, torture, and then, second, since torture in wartime constitutes war crimes, the second charge were war crimes. There was four days of hearings by the prosecution and the defense. And then, on the end of the fifth day, the tribunal issued a unanimous judgment to the effect that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and five of their top lawyers advising them on this, including Yoo, Bybee, Haynes, and Gonzalez, Addington, were personally responsible for and guilty of torture and war crimes as defined by the Convention against Torture, to which the United States government is a party, and the four Geneva conventions of 1949, to which the United States government is a party as well.
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<p />JAY: Right. Now, under whose auspices was this process held? What kind of official status did it have?
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<p />BOYLE: The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal Foundation is a private organization set up and chartered under Malaysian law. So it is a creature of Malaysian law.
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<p />JAY: But most nonprofits and such can be registered with the government. But let me—what I'm saying is it didn't have direct government endorsement of any sort, did it?
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<p />BOYLE: No, it was like a U.S. corporation being set up under U.S. corporation law. But it was not run by the government. Indeed, my guess is the current government in Malaysia probably found it to be somewhat embarrassing, since the current government in Malaysia is trying to get into good cahoots with the United States government. But I can't speak for them.
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<p />JAY: And was there a defense offered? And who offered it?
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<p />BOYLE: Yes, a defense team was appointed for them. It consisted of four or five Malaysian lawyers. And they did the best they could with a very difficult case, because effectively Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld repeatedly incriminated themselves publicly, both in their public statements and in their memoirs and otherwise, in acts of torture. So it is hard to defend people who have already incriminated themselves, but, you know, the defense did try.
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<p />JAY: So what will be the effect of this? I understand you have a separate process going at the International Criminal Court. So how do these two relate to each other? And then, also, how do you have something going at the International Criminal Court when the United States is not a signatory to it?
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<p />BOYLE: Well, that's correct. Over the years now, I've tried to get Bush indicted three times in Canada, working with Canadian lawyers, and then in Switzerland, where we scared Bush out of giving a speech in Switzerland because he feared prosecution. It got back to Bush that we were going to try to get him indicted in Switzerland for torture.
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<p />So this is the first conviction anywhere of Bush and the rest of them for torture and war crimes. Efforts have been made in Spain and in Germany. So far as WikiLeaks points out, the United States government has applied enormous pressure to both the Spanish governments and the German governments not to prosecute. So, so far that hasn't been done. But this is the first conviction. I think it's a good sign. We will be attempting to get this conviction enforced in all other states that are parties to the Convention against Torture and all other states that are parties to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which in fact is almost every state in the world.
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<p />JAY: But the fact that this is a nongovernmental tribunal, it's going to make it rather difficult to get governments to recognize it, isn't it?
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<p />BOYLE: Well, it'll be prima facie evidence of their guilt, pretty much like any other conviction around the world. If you have individuals convicted in one state, there's not necessarily any obligation by another state to prosecute those individuals. There could be an obligation to extradite if there is an extradition treaty in effect. So this is a question of enforcement of foreign judgments. It depends on treaties and statutes of the country involved. It also—international comity, principles of international legal comity.
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<p />JAY: So how were you able to get something going at the ICC, and where is it at?
<p />
<p />BOYLE: Right. Well, numerous complaints have been filed against Bush and the rest of them at the International Criminal Court, but they got nowhere, because the United States government is not a party to the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court. And I was the first one to figure out a way around this conundrum by filing a complaint against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Gonzalez, Bybee, Yoo, Tenet, and Rice for their policy of so-called extraordinary rendition, which, as I pointed out to the ICC, is really a euphemism for the enforced disappearance of human beings and torture, both of which are Rome Statutory crimes. And as I pointed out to the ICC, these defendants have committed Rome Statutory crimes in Rome party states. Indeed most of Europe, where these extraordinary renditions in part took place, are parties to the Rome statute, as well as Afghanistan. And therefore I argued to the ICC that the court did have jurisdiction to prosecute them and should exercise that jurisdiction.
<p />
<p />JAY: Well, how has the ICC responded to your arguments?
<p />
<p />BOYLE: They responded to me saying they gave me a docket number, they were inquiring into the matter, and they would get back to me in writing. [crosstalk]
<p />
<p />JAY: How long ago was that?
<p />
<p />BOYLE: Pardon me?
<p />
<p />JAY: How long ago was that?
<p />
<p />BOYLE: That was two years. It's going to take time, obviously, because there's massive documentation of the extraordinary rendition policy and also the torture. So I believe they are engaging in a good-faith investigation of this complaint and I will get an answer.
<p />
<p />JAY: Why do you believe that?
<p />
<p />BOYLE: Well, because everyone before me has been rejected, and I have not been rejected in writing. They've all gotten letters from the ICC prosecutor's office saying, we don't have jurisdiction to prosecute. That did not happen to me, and they did promise a response in writing. In any event, we'll be filing the Kuala Lumpur judgment with the ICC, and I believe that will further support the complaint I already have against Bush and the rest of them.
<p />
<p />JAY: Right. Now, what is the obligation, if any, on the Obama administration in regards to all of this? I mean, when President Obama was elected, he said it's time to look forward, not back, which, you know, a lot of people have suggested that would mean no crimes of any kind would ever be punished, 'cause it's always happened already. But is there any legal obligation on the Obama administration to investigate/prosecute? And if so, the fact that they haven't, what does that mean?
<p />
<p />BOYLE: Yes, the Obama administration has all along had an obligation to prosecute Bush and the rest of them under the Convention against Torture, including U.S. implementing legislation for that convention, making torture a crime, a felony, and in some circumstances punishable by death if death has occurred, which it has, although I don't support the death penalty. But it does give you an idea of the severity of the crimes. And also the Obama administration has an obligation to prosecute these individuals under the four Geneva conventions of 1949, including the U.S. implementing legislation, the U.S. War Crimes Act. So there is an obligation by Obama to prosecute. Perhaps in a second term they might. We'll just have to see what happens.
<p />
<p />You are correct to indicate that so far they said they were looking to the forward and not to the past. I pointed out then to the ICC prosecutor that this is definitive proof that the Obama administration is not going to prosecute at this time and therefore satisfies the element known as subsidiarity, which requires the ICC to defer to the national state for prosecution before the ICC steps in. And if you already have Obama and Holder saying they're not going to prosecute, that satisfies that requirement and puts it firmly in the hands of the ICC.
<p />
<p />JAY: And is the Obama administration then itself in violation of the law by not pursuing this?
<p />
<p />BOYLE: That's correct. It's clearly in violation of the Convention against Torture and the four Geneva conventions of 1949, and, I regret to report, technically this would make them accessories after the fact to these offenses.
<p />
<p />JAY: Right. Now, you focused on torture at the Malaysia tribunals, but why not the issue of the Iraq War itself? Kofi Annan—it was little late coming, but eventually said the war was illegal. What is a bigger war crime than invading a country and killing several hundreds of thousands of people?
<p />
<p />BOYLE: Yes. Actually, we did that last November. The charge on torture and war crimes was charge two. Charge one last November—I was out there for that prosecution as well. We prosecuted—well, indicted and then prosecuted Bush and Blair for committing a crime against peace by invading Iraq. And there were, again, close to four days of hearings, there were a defense counsel, and a judgment did come back that Bush and Blair were guilty of crimes against peace for their invasion against Iraq. And we are making efforts to get that judgment enforced, too.
<p />
<p />Obviously, these things take time. Pinochet stepped down as president of Chile, and it took eight years before he was finally hauled to court there in Britain. So, you know, if you're pursuing major war criminals such as Bush, Blair, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and the rest of them, you're not going to have justice tomorrow. You know, you can take a look at the Balkans with Milosevic. I first went after him in the World Court in 1993, and finally got him indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for what he did in Bosnia in 2000. So that took seven years, and he was finally on trial for these crimes. Unfortunately, he died before we were able to get a final verdict. So, you know, you have to view these things as a long-term effort.
<p />
<p />JAY: Thanks very much for joining us.
<p />
<p />BOYLE: Well, again, thanks for having me on. And my best to Real News. Keep the good work up.
<p />
<p />JAY: Thank you. And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.
<p />
<p />End
<p />
<p />DISCLAIMER: Please note that transcripts for The Real News Network are typed from a recording of the program. TRNN cannot guarantee their complete accuracy. | true | 4 | francis boyle professor law university llinois school law currently teaches courses public international law international human rights part prosecutionteam tried former us president george w bush dick cheney donald rumsfeld legal advisors absentia malaysia paul jay senior editor trnn welcome real news network im paul jay washington many attempts last years prosecute former president bush vice president cheney senior members administration war crimes various sorts none recently successful well one prosecutions ended convictionâin absentia course took place malaysia joining us one members prosecutorial team snip francis boyle hes professor law university illinois school law currently teaches courses public international law international human rights part prosecution team mentioned tried president bushâformer president bush former vice president dick cheney donald rumsfeld legal advisers malaysia successful said thanks joining us francis boyle prof international law univ illinois college law well paul thank much best audience jay thank charges tell us bit process boyle well charges twofold first torture second since torture wartime constitutes war crimes second charge war crimes four days hearings prosecution defense end fifth day tribunal issued unanimous judgment effect bush cheney rumsfeld five top lawyers advising including yoo bybee haynes gonzalez addington personally responsible guilty torture war crimes defined convention torture united states government party four geneva conventions 1949 united states government party well jay right whose auspices process held kind official status boyle kuala lumpur war crimes tribunal foundation private organization set chartered malaysian law creature malaysian law jay nonprofits registered government let meâwhat im saying didnt direct government endorsement sort boyle like us corporation set us corporation law run government indeed guess current government malaysia probably found somewhat embarrassing since current government malaysia trying get good cahoots united states government cant speak jay defense offered offered boyle yes defense team appointed consisted four five malaysian lawyers best could difficult case effectively bush cheney rumsfeld repeatedly incriminated publicly public statements memoirs otherwise acts torture hard defend people already incriminated know defense try jay effect understand separate process going international criminal court two relate also something going international criminal court united states signatory boyle well thats correct years ive tried get bush indicted three times canada working canadian lawyers switzerland scared bush giving speech switzerland feared prosecution got back bush going try get indicted switzerland torture first conviction anywhere bush rest torture war crimes efforts made spain germany far wikileaks points united states government applied enormous pressure spanish governments german governments prosecute far hasnt done first conviction think good sign attempting get conviction enforced states parties convention torture states parties geneva conventions 1949 fact almost every state world jay fact nongovernmental tribunal going make rather difficult get governments recognize isnt boyle well itll prima facie evidence guilt pretty much like conviction around world individuals convicted one state theres necessarily obligation another state prosecute individuals could obligation extradite extradition treaty effect question enforcement foreign judgments depends treaties statutes country involved alsoâinternational comity principles international legal comity jay able get something going icc boyle right well numerous complaints filed bush rest international criminal court got nowhere united states government party rome statute international criminal court first one figure way around conundrum filing complaint bush cheney rumsfeld ashcroft gonzalez bybee yoo tenet rice policy socalled extraordinary rendition pointed icc really euphemism enforced disappearance human beings torture rome statutory crimes pointed icc defendants committed rome statutory crimes rome party states indeed europe extraordinary renditions part took place parties rome statute well afghanistan therefore argued icc court jurisdiction prosecute exercise jurisdiction jay well icc responded arguments boyle responded saying gave docket number inquiring matter would get back writing crosstalk jay long ago boyle pardon jay long ago boyle two years going take time obviously theres massive documentation extraordinary rendition policy also torture believe engaging goodfaith investigation complaint get answer jay believe boyle well everyone rejected rejected writing theyve gotten letters icc prosecutors office saying dont jurisdiction prosecute happen promise response writing event well filing kuala lumpur judgment icc believe support complaint already bush rest jay right obligation obama administration regards mean president obama elected said time look forward back know lot people suggested would mean crimes kind would ever punished cause always happened already legal obligation obama administration investigateprosecute fact havent mean boyle yes obama administration along obligation prosecute bush rest convention torture including us implementing legislation convention making torture crime felony circumstances punishable death death occurred although dont support death penalty give idea severity crimes also obama administration obligation prosecute individuals four geneva conventions 1949 including us implementing legislation us war crimes act obligation obama prosecute perhaps second term might well see happens correct indicate far said looking forward past pointed icc prosecutor definitive proof obama administration going prosecute time therefore satisfies element known subsidiarity requires icc defer national state prosecution icc steps already obama holder saying theyre going prosecute satisfies requirement puts firmly hands icc jay obama administration violation law pursuing boyle thats correct clearly violation convention torture four geneva conventions 1949 regret report technically would make accessories fact offenses jay right focused torture malaysia tribunals issue iraq war kofi annanâit little late coming eventually said war illegal bigger war crime invading country killing several hundreds thousands people boyle yes actually last november charge torture war crimes charge two charge one last novemberâi prosecution well prosecutedâwell indicted prosecuted bush blair committing crime peace invading iraq close four days hearings defense counsel judgment come back bush blair guilty crimes peace invasion iraq making efforts get judgment enforced obviously things take time pinochet stepped president chile took eight years finally hauled court britain know youre pursuing major war criminals bush blair rumsfeld cheney rest youre going justice tomorrow know take look balkans milosevic first went world court 1993 finally got indicted international criminal tribunal former yugoslavia bosnia 2000 took seven years finally trial crimes unfortunately died able get final verdict know view things longterm effort jay thanks much joining us boyle well thanks best real news keep good work jay thank thank joining us real news network end disclaimer please note transcripts real news network typed recording program trnn guarantee complete accuracy | 1,007 |
<p>The recent death of the right-wing evangelist and founder of the Moral Majority, Rev. Jerry Falwell, has provided an opportunity for many people to comment on the influence of the Christian Right on American politics and culture. Falwell relentlessly attacked Hollywood, blaming it for the decline of “traditional values.”</p>
<p>Calling actors “moral perverts,” he was fanatically obsessed with rooting out any sign of tolerance toward gays and lesbians. Most famously, he complained about on the long-running PBS children’s program Teletubbies, claiming that Tinky Winky was gay.</p>
<p>Falwell’s crusade during the last decade was taken over by James Dobson’s Focus on the Family and the Traditional Values Coalition (TVC). The Shrek series, produced by Dreamworks, has particularly irked them (Shrek the Third was just released). They have repeatedly attacked the widely seen and highly profitable series for “promoting homosexuality” and tolerance toward transgender characters.</p>
<p>Focus on the Family and the TVC complained for example about a scene in Shrek 2 where Pinocchio’s nose grows when he is asked if he wears women’s underwear and a bar scene featuring a female bartender with the voice of Larry King and a five o’clock shadow. The TVC accused Dreamworks of “promoting cross-dressing and transgenderism.”</p>
<p>The gay sex-obsessed right has failed to notice other subversive scenes in this and other cartoon features. There’s the evil fairy godmother, who is, according to Shrek, “the largest producer of hexes and potions in the whole kingdom.” Shrek and Co. attempt to infiltrate her factory posing as union organizers:</p>
<p>Shrek: We represent the workers in all magical industries, both evil and benign…Are you feeling at all degraded or oppressed?</p>
<p>Security guard: Uh…a little. We don’t even have dental.</p>
<p>Moreover, one of the key themes in Shrek is that physical beauty and passive femininity aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.</p>
<p>The 1998 animated productions Antz and Bug’s Life dealt respectively with exploitation and national liberation. In one scene in Antz, worker ants down tools and engage in a sit-down strike, while the evil General Formica, who has a secret plan to snuff out the worker ants, demands that they get back to work. “Buzz off, I’m important!” answers one of the strikers. Formica notices a couple leading the chants:</p>
<p>Formica: Notice the big one, holding hands with the female?</p>
<p>Carpenter: Well, uh, who notices workers, sir?</p>
<p>Formica: No one should have to. Have him brought to me.</p>
<p>Most Hollywood producers agree with Formica. “Class is often invisible in America in the movies, and usually not the subject of the film,” film critic Roger Ebert once remarked.</p>
<p>Naturally, not all cartoons contain dangerous messages. The 1995 Disney film Pocahontas, for example, offered its young viewers a cloying love story between the conquering hero John Smith and Pocahontas, whose animated form was apparently based on supermodel Christy Turlington.</p>
<p>Robert Eaglestaff, the principal of the American Indian Heritage School in Seattle, commented at the time that portraying a love story between John Smith and Pocahontas was like “trying to teach about the Holocaust and putting in a nice story about Anne Frank falling in love with a German officer.'”</p>
<p>* * *</p>
<p>THIS HIGHLIGHTS an aspect of the Hollywood system–that popular animated, fantasy or science fiction films can become vehicles for dealing with controversial subjects while a suffocating conformity is imposed on most high-profile mainstream films as studios search for the next mega-blockbuster.</p>
<p>During the long nightmare of McCarthyism, stretching into the mid-1960s, TV and film writers, producers and directors who wanted to tackle controversial issues were forced to present their content behind a screen of science fiction or fantasy.</p>
<p>“I found that it was all right to have Martians saying things Democrats and Republicans could never say,” producer and host of the Twilight Zone Rod Serling once explained. As the PBS American Masters online profile of Serling notes, he “was often hounded by the conservative censors for his uncompromising attention to issues such as lynching, union organizing and racism.”</p>
<p>The stifling atmosphere change slowly but surely under the impact of the civil rights and antiwar movements–the high point was the airing of Roots in 1977, the first and only television miniseries that dealt with slavery (and was, by the way, very popular with both whites and Blacks).</p>
<p>Movies, within certain limits, reflect the changing social context in which they are made. The late Gene Siskel, Roger Ebert’s longtime collaborator, made this observation in 1991: “In a fine 1979 book called The Movie Brats, Michael Pye and Lynda Myles profiled six filmmakers who were among the first wave of film school graduates and who had come to prominence in the 1970s …</p>
<p>“The authors argued that the film revolution these directors participated in grew out of social changes in the culture itself. That makes sense. And so, believing that the past is prelude, if you want my prediction about the future of the movies, I believe things will not get better or more exciting until we have some good old-fashioned upheaval in this country and the world beyond.”</p>
<p>What will it take to put real issues back into mainstream films? That process may already be underway.</p>
<p>Take, for example, Shooter, a typically overblown 2007 thriller about a former military sniper Bobby Lee Swagger (Mark Wahlberg) who gets drawn by an ex-general back into service, ostensibly to protect the president from assassination, only to find that he is being framed.</p>
<p>“Do we let America be ruled by thugs?” the general asks Swagger. “Sure, some years we do,” quips Swagger. When Wahlberg’s character confronts the senator who is behind setting him up, the senator makes a speech in which he explains that there are no heroes and villains, no Democrats and Republicans–only “haves and have nots.”</p>
<p>Joe Allen is a movie buff, who writes regularly for Socialist Worker and the International Socialist Review. He lives in Chicago. Email: <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a></p>
<p>Paul D’Amato is the author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1931859299/counterpunchmaga" type="external">The Meaning of Marxism</a>.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | true | 4 | recent death rightwing evangelist founder moral majority rev jerry falwell provided opportunity many people comment influence christian right american politics culture falwell relentlessly attacked hollywood blaming decline traditional values calling actors moral perverts fanatically obsessed rooting sign tolerance toward gays lesbians famously complained longrunning pbs childrens program teletubbies claiming tinky winky gay falwells crusade last decade taken james dobsons focus family traditional values coalition tvc shrek series produced dreamworks particularly irked shrek third released repeatedly attacked widely seen highly profitable series promoting homosexuality tolerance toward transgender characters focus family tvc complained example scene shrek 2 pinocchios nose grows asked wears womens underwear bar scene featuring female bartender voice larry king five oclock shadow tvc accused dreamworks promoting crossdressing transgenderism gay sexobsessed right failed notice subversive scenes cartoon features theres evil fairy godmother according shrek largest producer hexes potions whole kingdom shrek co attempt infiltrate factory posing union organizers shrek represent workers magical industries evil benignare feeling degraded oppressed security guard uha little dont even dental moreover one key themes shrek physical beauty passive femininity arent theyre cracked 1998 animated productions antz bugs life dealt respectively exploitation national liberation one scene antz worker ants tools engage sitdown strike evil general formica secret plan snuff worker ants demands get back work buzz im important answers one strikers formica notices couple leading chants formica notice big one holding hands female carpenter well uh notices workers sir formica one brought hollywood producers agree formica class often invisible america movies usually subject film film critic roger ebert remarked naturally cartoons contain dangerous messages 1995 disney film pocahontas example offered young viewers cloying love story conquering hero john smith pocahontas whose animated form apparently based supermodel christy turlington robert eaglestaff principal american indian heritage school seattle commented time portraying love story john smith pocahontas like trying teach holocaust putting nice story anne frank falling love german officer highlights aspect hollywood systemthat popular animated fantasy science fiction films become vehicles dealing controversial subjects suffocating conformity imposed highprofile mainstream films studios search next megablockbuster long nightmare mccarthyism stretching mid1960s tv film writers producers directors wanted tackle controversial issues forced present content behind screen science fiction fantasy found right martians saying things democrats republicans could never say producer host twilight zone rod serling explained pbs american masters online profile serling notes often hounded conservative censors uncompromising attention issues lynching union organizing racism stifling atmosphere change slowly surely impact civil rights antiwar movementsthe high point airing roots 1977 first television miniseries dealt slavery way popular whites blacks movies within certain limits reflect changing social context made late gene siskel roger eberts longtime collaborator made observation 1991 fine 1979 book called movie brats michael pye lynda myles profiled six filmmakers among first wave film school graduates come prominence 1970s authors argued film revolution directors participated grew social changes culture makes sense believing past prelude want prediction future movies believe things get better exciting good oldfashioned upheaval country world beyond take put real issues back mainstream films process may already underway take example shooter typically overblown 2007 thriller former military sniper bobby lee swagger mark wahlberg gets drawn exgeneral back service ostensibly protect president assassination find framed let america ruled thugs general asks swagger sure years quips swagger wahlbergs character confronts senator behind setting senator makes speech explains heroes villains democrats republicansonly haves nots joe allen movie buff writes regularly socialist worker international socialist review lives chicago email josephallen4attnet paul damato author meaning marxism 160 160 160 | 575 |
<p>Iraqi defector Hussein Kamel revealed in 1995 that Iraq’s WMDs had been destroyed.</p>
<p>On February 24, Newsweek broke what may be the biggest story of the Iraq crisis. In a revelation that “raises questions about whether the WMD [weapons of mass destruction] stockpiles attributed to Iraq still exist,” the magazine’s issue dated March 3 reported that the Iraqi weapons chief who defected from the regime in 1995 told U.N. inspectors that Iraq had destroyed its entire stockpile of chemical and biological weapons and banned missiles, as Iraq claims.</p>
<p>Until now, Gen. Hussein Kamel, who was killed shortly after returning to Iraq in 1996, was best known for his role in exposing Iraq’s deceptions about how far its pre-Gulf War biological weapons programs had advanced. But Newsweek‘s John Barry– who has covered Iraqi weapons inspections for more than a decade– obtained the transcript of Kamel’s 1995 debriefing by officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the U.N. inspections team known as UNSCOM.</p>
<p>Inspectors were told “that after the Gulf War, Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them,” Barry wrote. All that remained were “hidden blueprints, computer disks, microfiches” and production molds. The weapons were destroyed secretly, in order to hide their existence from inspectors, in the hopes of someday resuming production after inspections had finished. The CIA and MI6 were told the same story, Barry reported, and “a military aide who defected with Kamel…backed Kamel’s assertions about the destruction of WMD stocks.”</p>
<p>But these statements were “hushed up by the U.N. inspectors” in order to “bluff Saddam into disclosing still more.”</p>
<p>CIA spokesperson Bill Harlow angrily denied the Newsweek report. “It is incorrect, bogus, wrong, untrue,” Harlow told Reuters (2/24/03) the day the report appeared.</p>
<p>But on Wednesday (2/26/03), a complete copy of the Kamel transcript– an internal UNSCOM/IAEA document stamped “sensitive”–was obtained by Glen Rangwala, the Cambridge University analyst who in early February revealed that Tony Blair’s “intelligence dossier” was plagiarized from a student thesis. This transcript is posted <a href="" type="internal">here</a>(pdf) at the FAIR website.</p>
<p>In the transcript (p. 13), Kamel says bluntly: “All weapons–biological, chemical, missile, nuclear, were destroyed.”</p>
<p>Who is Hussein Kamel?</p>
<p>Kamel is no obscure defector. A son-in-law of Saddam Hussein, his departure from Iraq carrying crates of secret documents on Iraq’s past weapons programs was a major turning point in the inspections saga. In 1999, in a letter to the U.N. Security Council (1/25/99), UNSCOM reported that its entire eight years of disarmament work “must be divided into two parts, separated by the events following the departure from Iraq, in August 1995, of Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel.”</p>
<p>Colin Powell cited Kamel’s data on WMDs without noting that Kamel had said these weapons had been destroyed.</p>
<p>Kamel’s defection has been cited repeatedly by George W. Bush and leading administration officials as evidence that 1) Iraq has not disarmed; 2) inspections cannot disarm it; and 3) defectors such as Kamel are the most reliable source of information on Iraq’s weapons.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>The quotes from Bush and Powell cited above refer to anthrax and VX produced by Iraq before the 1991 Gulf War. The administration has cited various quantities of chemical and biological weapons on many other occasions–weapons that Iraq produced but which remain unaccounted for. All of these claims refer to weapons produced before 1991.</p>
<p>But according to Kamel’s transcript, Iraq destroyed all of these weapons in 1991.</p>
<p>According to Newsweek, Kamel told the same story to CIA analysts in August 1995. If that is true, all of these U.S. officials have had access to Kamel’s statements that the weapons were destroyed. Their repeated citations of his testimony– without revealing that he also said the weapons no longer exist– suggests that the administration might be withholding critical evidence. In particular, it casts doubt on the credibility of Powell’s February 5 presentation to the U.N., which was widely hailed at the time for its persuasiveness. To clear up the issue, journalists might ask the CIA to release the transcripts of its own conversations with Kamel.</p>
<p>Kamel’s disclosures have also been crucial to the arguments made by hawkish commentators on Iraq. The defector has been cited four times on the New York Times op-ed page in the last four months in support of claims about Iraq’s weapons programs–never noting his assertions about the elimination of these weapons. In a major Times op-ed calling for war against Iraq (2/21/03), Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution wrote that Kamel and other defectors “reported that outside pressure had not only failed to eradicate the nuclear program, it was bigger and more cleverly spread out and concealed than anyone had imagined it to be.” The release of Kamel’s transcript makes this claim appear grossly at odds with the defector’s actual testimony.</p>
<p>The Kamel story is a bombshell that necessitates a thorough reevaluation of U.S. media reporting on Iraq, much of which has taken for granted that the nation retains supplies of prohibited weapons. (See FAIR Media Advisory, “Iraq’s Hidden Weapons: From Allegation to Fact,” <a href="" type="internal">2/4/03</a>.) Kamel’s testimony is not, of course, proof that Iraq does not have hidden stocks of chemical or biological weapons, but it does suggest a need for much more media skepticism about U.S. allegations than has previously been shown.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, Newsweek chose a curious way to handle its scoop: The magazine placed the story in the miscellaneous “Periscope” section with a generic headline, “The Defector’s Secrets.” Worse, Newsweek‘s online version added a subhead that seemed almost designed to undercut the importance of the story: “Before his death, a high-ranking defector said Iraq had not abandoned its WMD ambitions.” So far, according to a February 27 search of the Nexis database, no major U.S. newspapers or national television news shows have picked up the Newsweek story.</p>
<p>Subscribe: <a href="" type="internal">Android</a> | <a href="" type="internal">RSS</a></p> | true | 4 | iraqi defector hussein kamel revealed 1995 iraqs wmds destroyed february 24 newsweek broke may biggest story iraq crisis revelation raises questions whether wmd weapons mass destruction stockpiles attributed iraq still exist magazines issue dated march 3 reported iraqi weapons chief defected regime 1995 told un inspectors iraq destroyed entire stockpile chemical biological weapons banned missiles iraq claims gen hussein kamel killed shortly returning iraq 1996 best known role exposing iraqs deceptions far pregulf war biological weapons programs advanced newsweeks john barry covered iraqi weapons inspections decade obtained transcript kamels 1995 debriefing officials international atomic energy agency iaea un inspections team known unscom inspectors told gulf war iraq destroyed chemical biological weapons stocks missiles deliver barry wrote remained hidden blueprints computer disks microfiches production molds weapons destroyed secretly order hide existence inspectors hopes someday resuming production inspections finished cia mi6 told story barry reported military aide defected kamelbacked kamels assertions destruction wmd stocks statements hushed un inspectors order bluff saddam disclosing still cia spokesperson bill harlow angrily denied newsweek report incorrect bogus wrong untrue harlow told reuters 22403 day report appeared wednesday 22603 complete copy kamel transcript internal unscomiaea document stamped sensitivewas obtained glen rangwala cambridge university analyst early february revealed tony blairs intelligence dossier plagiarized student thesis transcript posted herepdf fair website transcript p 13 kamel says bluntly weaponsbiological chemical missile nuclear destroyed hussein kamel kamel obscure defector soninlaw saddam hussein departure iraq carrying crates secret documents iraqs past weapons programs major turning point inspections saga 1999 letter un security council 12599 unscom reported entire eight years disarmament work must divided two parts separated events following departure iraq august 1995 lt gen hussein kamel colin powell cited kamels data wmds without noting kamel said weapons destroyed kamels defection cited repeatedly george w bush leading administration officials evidence 1 iraq disarmed 2 inspections disarm 3 defectors kamel reliable source information iraqs weapons 160 quotes bush powell cited refer anthrax vx produced iraq 1991 gulf war administration cited various quantities chemical biological weapons many occasionsweapons iraq produced remain unaccounted claims refer weapons produced 1991 according kamels transcript iraq destroyed weapons 1991 according newsweek kamel told story cia analysts august 1995 true us officials access kamels statements weapons destroyed repeated citations testimony without revealing also said weapons longer exist suggests administration might withholding critical evidence particular casts doubt credibility powells february 5 presentation un widely hailed time persuasiveness clear issue journalists might ask cia release transcripts conversations kamel kamels disclosures also crucial arguments made hawkish commentators iraq defector cited four times new york times oped page last four months support claims iraqs weapons programsnever noting assertions elimination weapons major times oped calling war iraq 22103 kenneth pollack brookings institution wrote kamel defectors reported outside pressure failed eradicate nuclear program bigger cleverly spread concealed anyone imagined release kamels transcript makes claim appear grossly odds defectors actual testimony kamel story bombshell necessitates thorough reevaluation us media reporting iraq much taken granted nation retains supplies prohibited weapons see fair media advisory iraqs hidden weapons allegation fact 2403 kamels testimony course proof iraq hidden stocks chemical biological weapons suggest need much media skepticism us allegations previously shown unfortunately newsweek chose curious way handle scoop magazine placed story miscellaneous periscope section generic headline defectors secrets worse newsweeks online version added subhead seemed almost designed undercut importance story death highranking defector said iraq abandoned wmd ambitions far according february 27 search nexis database major us newspapers national television news shows picked newsweek story subscribe android rss | 577 |
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<p>An aerial view of the Hollister Underground Mine Project in the Tosawihi Quarries in Elko County, Nevada. Recently acquired by Waterton Global Mining Company/Carlin Resources, the site has long been regarded as sacred by Native people. &#160; (Bureau of Land Management, Elko District Office, Tuscarora Field Office, Nevada)</p>
<p>This isn’t the “new” world for the Western Shoshone. And their West was never “wild.” It is a place of deep cultural connections to a homeland that at one time extended across portions of Idaho, Nevada, Utah and California. For more than 10,000 years, they have met in what is today called the Tosawihi Quarries, a stretch of Elko County, Nevada, to gather a type of white flint and to practice their sacred rituals.</p>
<p>“That stone is very sacred to us,” says Joe Holley, chairman of the Battle Mountain Band of the Te-Moak Western Shoshone, one of several federally recognized, related tribes. “We use it every day and have done so for millennia, for tools, ceremonies and healing. The stone, the water, the entire place is sacred.” The word Tosawihi means White Knives, an ancestral Shoshone tribal name that ties the land and its features to their culture and identity. The Tosawihi Quarries has been deemed eligible for the National Register of Historic Places and part of it was declared an Archaeological District in 2010.</p>
<p>However, gold lies under the flint, also called chert, and a multinational mining group wants it.</p>
<p>In 2013, Nevada-based <a href="http://www.watertonglobal.com" type="external">Waterton Global Mining Company</a>, owned by a firm registered in the Cayman Islands, bought a bankrupt gold-mining operation that had been exploring for and extracting gold in the Tosawihi Quarries. In March 2014, an official at a related Canadian private-equity firm, Waterton Global Resource Management, told <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/09/mining-pdac-privateequity-idUSL1N0M41EE20140309" type="external">Reuters</a> it had been snapping up struggling U.S. mining concerns hurt by the several-year downturn in gold prices. Reuters quoted the firm’s chief investment officer as saying, “This year I think [acquisitions] will pick up dramatically.”</p>
<p>By 2014, mining operations had resumed on the Shoshone's ancestral lands, and Waterton Global Mining Company had changed its name to <a href="http://thediggings.com/owners/2348055" type="external">Carlin Resources</a>. The new work began in previously disturbed ground and moved out from there. “A drilling pad was built in a once-pristine area,” says Holley, “and several rock shelters were demolished when they pushed through a road.” On a recent trip to the area, he saw that several ancient stone hunting blinds, from which concealed hunters observed their prey, were gone. Tribal members report that workers have videotaped them when they visit.</p>
<p>The band has also expressed concern to federal authorities that the mining company does not have the required groundwater monitoring well in place. “This is critical,” says Holley. “At the center of all our ceremonies is water. It is the lifeblood of the universe.”</p>
<p>Mining was already engulfing the sacred landscape, says the Battle Mountain Band’s attorney Rollie Wilson, who works in the Washington, D.C. office of the Omaha law firm <a href="http://www.ndnlaw.com" type="external">Fredericks Peebles &amp; Morgan</a>. “Now matters are getting worse. With important sites damaged or destroyed, tribal members are being pushed into an ever-smaller area.” Wilson has filed an emergency appeal with the Interior Board of Land Appeals (IBLA), an Interior Department administrative court. It asks the court to suspend mining until a plan can be devised that safeguards the site.</p>
<p>In 1992 (on the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ first visit), protection of Native American cultural resources was added to the <a href="http://www.achp.gov/nhpa.html" type="external">National Historic Preservation Act</a>. Since then, federal agencies have been required to consult with tribes when mining, constructing dams, road building and other projects on federal land that could affect their traditional cultural properties (TCPs). These may include locations where culturally important practices occur, or occurred in the past, as well as structures.</p>
<p>This process is a part of the federal government’s trust relationship with the tribes, which requires the United States to protect Native treaty rights, land and other assets. In practice, tribes and their representatives regularly report that they aren’t notified early enough in the process to make a difference and when they do speak up federal officials don’t pay attention.</p>
<p>Holley says working with the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management (BLM) can be like “talking to a wall.” As the Nevada State Historic Preservation Office puts it: The BLM can operate “unilaterally.”</p>
<p>Some officials may have a hard time understanding a complex Native cultural landscape like the Tosawihi Quarries, which has been subtly shaped for many centuries by a range of activities including ceremonies, tool making, medicine-plant gathering and hunting. “The concept of ‘cultural landscape’ emerged in the late 1980s, which really isn’t that long ago,” says Paul Loether, Chief of the National Register of Historic Places, a National Park Service program. As a result, Loether says, most evaluators are better at assessing an historic house than a tract of land, no matter what culture, Native or non-Native, shaped it.</p>
<p>Carlin Resources has less patience for the process than the Battle Mountain Band would wish. In Carlin’s legal response to the band’s attempt to temporarily halt drilling, the mining company said their IBLA appeal was based on “erroneous and sensationalistic assertions” that “the entire Tosawihi Quarries constitutes a TCP.” Carlin, in its brief, told the court that it had complied with all obligations and that the band’s ongoing objections had already caused it to run up substantial additional costs.</p>
<p>Because the Tosawihi Quarries are on federal land administered by the BLM, that agency handled the area’s TCP evaluation. Earlier mining had already taken a big chunk out of the Shoshone landscape, but Holley’s band hoped it could work with the BLM to prevent further destruction. “We were hoping to keep the mining out of what’s left of our most important areas,” Holley says.</p>
<p>To study and protect a landscape, archaeology is often the discipline of choice. At Tosawihi Quarries, the BLM focused on items of archaeological interest that might be saved—including what it termed “loci,” with a certain number of artifacts, such as stone tools, per square meter. The agency marked the items on maps, drew lines around them and told the mining company to stay at least 250 feet away.</p>
<p>“Archaeology is a great field,” says Loether. “But unfortunately, used that way, the result is like seeing the Mona Lisa’s smile, but not the rest of the painting. You can’t understand its beauty and meaning without considering the entire thing.”</p>
<p>“Mainstream science looks at sites differently from Indian people, who see the spiritual significance,” says Ted Howard, cultural resources director and member of the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes.</p>
<p>With about 500 enrolled members and a 683-acre reservation that has “little economic activity,” according to its <a href="http://www.temoaktribe.com/battlemtn.shtml" type="external">website</a>, the tiny Battle Mountain Band has set itself a gargantuan task. “I grew up in this fight,” says Holley. “My grandfather, father and uncle all fought mining in the Tosawihi Quarries. I’ve lived my whole life hearing them talk about this.”</p>
<p>“Chairman Holley and the Battle Mountain Band have taken the lead in this struggle,” says Howard. “However, many of the Shoshone people came from or used that area. Now we are separated on different reservations, but that is not how we lived before the reservation era. Our shared oral history goes way back. And the Tosawihi Quarries are the center of our spiritual being.”</p>
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<p>The sun rises over the Tosawihi Quarries. &#160;(Photo courtesy of Joe Holley, Chairman of the Battle Mountian Band of the Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone)</p>
<p>Sometimes, lack of understanding isn’t the only problem at a federal agency. Other interests can weigh heavily. In spring 2014, the BLM’s analysis of the mine project was still under review. It had yet to issue its final approval, or Record of Decision (ROD).</p>
<p>But then the mining company needed the gold—and fast.</p>
<p>According to public documents obtained by Rural America In These Times, Waterton contacted the BLM on Friday, March 28, 2014. It wanted the agency to issue the Record of Decision by the following Monday, March 31. A BLM official,&#160;Steph Connolly, the acting-senior special assistant to the director, notified colleagues of this request with an email headed “URGENT.”</p>
<p>Thomas Schmidt, a&#160;BLM&#160;geologist in a Nevada field office, replied, “I do not believe we have completely satisfied Tribe concerns.”</p>
<p>Another BLM geologist, Janice Stadelman, chimed in, warning against delay. “I received a call from Waterton’s legal counsel,” she emailed. “They are requesting that the ROD and approval be signed or dated no later than March 31 [2014]. March 31 is the end (last day) of the first quarter. ... Waterton’s concern is with the first quarter auditing and financial reporting to there [sic] investors and the ramifications that they will encounter.”</p>
<p>By March 31, the ROD was signed, sealed and delivered. Thanks to the BLM rushing it through, the mining group had its gold and the window-dressing for its quarterly report. In May, Waterton issued a press release announcing a “ <a href="http://www.watertonglobal.com/waterton-global-mining-company-announces-significant-permitting-milestone-for-the-hollister-mine/" type="external">significant permitting milestone</a>” for the mine.</p>
<p>In response to a query from Rural America In These Times, BLM spokesperson Jeff Krauss described the permitting process as “robust” and “not hurried,” with full consideration under the law for the Battle&#160;Mountain Band's concerns. He added the agency would continue to work with the band going forward. Further, according to Krauss, the BLM would require the mine's operator to “implement sufficient monitoring and mitigation strategies in order to prevent unnecessary or undue degradation&#160;of the lands” and its sacred sites.</p>
<p>Educating officials, legislators and the public about responsible protection of our nation’s shared legacy is an “uphill battle,” says Rebecca Knuffke, public lands project manager for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a nonprofit chartered by Congress to safeguard our shared heritage places. Building awareness for a given site can help protect it, she says, pointing to the Trust’s <a href="http://www.savingplaces.org" type="external">National Treasures</a> program, which describes campaigns to save places that are important to varied and sometimes multiple cultures.</p>
<p>In the case of a Native landscape, public awareness is handled very carefully, adds Denise Ryan, public lands policy director at the Trust. Such places may include vision sites, sacred springs, medicine-gathering areas and other geographic features that tribes consider private or secret. Like the Tosawihi hunting blinds and rock shelters, these fragile features can also be destroyed by vandals or inadvertently trampled by hikers. “In a protection plan, tribes don’t have to give us details. They just tell us what’s significant and what they require,” says Ryan.</p>
<p>Holley wants a complete review of the Tosawihi Quarries that accounts for subtleties that aren’t apparent to outsiders. “We Shoshone are the only ones who can say where these important things are,” Holley says. “Tosawihi is not a ‘prehistoric’ place, used only by long-ago people. We Shoshone have used all of it continuously for cultural and spiritual purposes since time immemorial.”</p>
<p>Meanwhile, gold mining operations continue.</p>
<p>Holley laments, “All those years of struggle, and we’re still losing ground.”</p>
<p>Editor's note: &#160;</p>
<p>Since publication of&#160;Eve of Destruction,&#160;the Battle Mountain Band of the Te-Moak Western Shoshone has continued to try and protect its sacred site from destruction by gold mining. In September 2015, an Interior Department administrative court turned down the Band’s request to suspend mining until a way could be found to safeguard traditional cultural properties more effectively.</p>
<p>The Band then turned to the influential Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP), which is named as the final arbiter of disputes under the so-called <a href="http://www.blm.gov/wo/st/en/prog/more/CRM/blm_preservation_board/prog_agreement.html" type="external">Programmatic Agreement</a> issued by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to govern mining activities. In December, ACHP issued a cautious decision that encouraged BLM to “clarify” the agreement.</p>
<p>“The&#160;Programmatic Agreement doesn’t need to be clarified, it needs to be implemented,” said Band attorney Rollie Wilson, of Fredericks Peebles &amp; Morgan.&#160;“The document, signed by ACHP, requires ongoing evaluation of specific areas as mining exploration is considered. BLM is not doing that. It is relying on old and generalized surveys of the entire area, which makes no sense. The document and the law require current evaluations for project-specific proposals.”</p>
<p>BLM spokesperson Jeff Krauss has disagreed, saying that consultation with the Band is ongoing.</p>
<p>Like what you’ve read? <a href="https://secure.actblue.com/contribute/page/itt-subscription-offer?refcode=WS_RAITT_Article_Footer&amp;noskip=true" type="external">Subscribe to In These Times magazine</a>, or <a href="https://secure.actblue.com/contribute/page/support-in-these-times?refcode=WS_RAITT_Article_Footer&amp;noskip=true" type="external">make a tax-deductible donation to fund this reporting</a>.</p> | true | 4 | email name recipients email comma separated message captcha aerial view hollister underground mine project tosawihi quarries elko county nevada recently acquired waterton global mining companycarlin resources site long regarded sacred native people 160 bureau land management elko district office tuscarora field office nevada isnt new world western shoshone west never wild place deep cultural connections homeland one time extended across portions idaho nevada utah california 10000 years met today called tosawihi quarries stretch elko county nevada gather type white flint practice sacred rituals stone sacred us says joe holley chairman battle mountain band temoak western shoshone one several federally recognized related tribes use every day done millennia tools ceremonies healing stone water entire place sacred word tosawihi means white knives ancestral shoshone tribal name ties land features culture identity tosawihi quarries deemed eligible national register historic places part declared archaeological district 2010 however gold lies flint also called chert multinational mining group wants 2013 nevadabased waterton global mining company owned firm registered cayman islands bought bankrupt goldmining operation exploring extracting gold tosawihi quarries march 2014 official related canadian privateequity firm waterton global resource management told reuters snapping struggling us mining concerns hurt severalyear downturn gold prices reuters quoted firms chief investment officer saying year think acquisitions pick dramatically 2014 mining operations resumed shoshones ancestral lands waterton global mining company changed name carlin resources new work began previously disturbed ground moved drilling pad built oncepristine area says holley several rock shelters demolished pushed road recent trip area saw several ancient stone hunting blinds concealed hunters observed prey gone tribal members report workers videotaped visit band also expressed concern federal authorities mining company required groundwater monitoring well place critical says holley center ceremonies water lifeblood universe mining already engulfing sacred landscape says battle mountain bands attorney rollie wilson works washington dc office omaha law firm fredericks peebles amp morgan matters getting worse important sites damaged destroyed tribal members pushed eversmaller area wilson filed emergency appeal interior board land appeals ibla interior department administrative court asks court suspend mining plan devised safeguards site 1992 500th anniversary columbus first visit protection native american cultural resources added national historic preservation act since federal agencies required consult tribes mining constructing dams road building projects federal land could affect traditional cultural properties tcps may include locations culturally important practices occur occurred past well structures process part federal governments trust relationship tribes requires united states protect native treaty rights land assets practice tribes representatives regularly report arent notified early enough process make difference speak federal officials dont pay attention holley says working interior departments bureau land management blm like talking wall nevada state historic preservation office puts blm operate unilaterally officials may hard time understanding complex native cultural landscape like tosawihi quarries subtly shaped many centuries range activities including ceremonies tool making medicineplant gathering hunting concept cultural landscape emerged late 1980s really isnt long ago says paul loether chief national register historic places national park service program result loether says evaluators better assessing historic house tract land matter culture native nonnative shaped carlin resources less patience process battle mountain band would wish carlins legal response bands attempt temporarily halt drilling mining company said ibla appeal based erroneous sensationalistic assertions entire tosawihi quarries constitutes tcp carlin brief told court complied obligations bands ongoing objections already caused run substantial additional costs tosawihi quarries federal land administered blm agency handled areas tcp evaluation earlier mining already taken big chunk shoshone landscape holleys band hoped could work blm prevent destruction hoping keep mining whats left important areas holley says study protect landscape archaeology often discipline choice tosawihi quarries blm focused items archaeological interest might savedincluding termed loci certain number artifacts stone tools per square meter agency marked items maps drew lines around told mining company stay least 250 feet away archaeology great field says loether unfortunately used way result like seeing mona lisas smile rest painting cant understand beauty meaning without considering entire thing mainstream science looks sites differently indian people see spiritual significance says ted howard cultural resources director member shoshonepaiute tribes 500 enrolled members 683acre reservation little economic activity according website tiny battle mountain band set gargantuan task grew fight says holley grandfather father uncle fought mining tosawihi quarries ive lived whole life hearing talk chairman holley battle mountain band taken lead struggle says howard however many shoshone people came used area separated different reservations lived reservation era shared oral history goes way back tosawihi quarries center spiritual sun rises tosawihi quarries 160photo courtesy joe holley chairman battle mountian band temoak tribe western shoshone sometimes lack understanding isnt problem federal agency interests weigh heavily spring 2014 blms analysis mine project still review yet issue final approval record decision rod mining company needed goldand fast according public documents obtained rural america times waterton contacted blm friday march 28 2014 wanted agency issue record decision following monday march 31 blm official160steph connolly actingsenior special assistant director notified colleagues request email headed urgent thomas schmidt a160blm160geologist nevada field office replied believe completely satisfied tribe concerns another blm geologist janice stadelman chimed warning delay received call watertons legal counsel emailed requesting rod approval signed dated later march 31 2014 march 31 end last day first quarter watertons concern first quarter auditing financial reporting sic investors ramifications encounter march 31 rod signed sealed delivered thanks blm rushing mining group gold windowdressing quarterly report may waterton issued press release announcing significant permitting milestone mine response query rural america times blm spokesperson jeff krauss described permitting process robust hurried full consideration law battle160mountain bands concerns added agency would continue work band going forward according krauss blm would require mines operator implement sufficient monitoring mitigation strategies order prevent unnecessary undue degradation160of lands sacred sites educating officials legislators public responsible protection nations shared legacy uphill battle says rebecca knuffke public lands project manager national trust historic preservation nonprofit chartered congress safeguard shared heritage places building awareness given site help protect says pointing trusts national treasures program describes campaigns save places important varied sometimes multiple cultures case native landscape public awareness handled carefully adds denise ryan public lands policy director trust places may include vision sites sacred springs medicinegathering areas geographic features tribes consider private secret like tosawihi hunting blinds rock shelters fragile features also destroyed vandals inadvertently trampled hikers protection plan tribes dont give us details tell us whats significant require says ryan holley wants complete review tosawihi quarries accounts subtleties arent apparent outsiders shoshone ones say important things holley says tosawihi prehistoric place used longago people shoshone used continuously cultural spiritual purposes since time immemorial meanwhile gold mining operations continue holley laments years struggle still losing ground editors note 160 since publication of160eve destruction160the battle mountain band temoak western shoshone continued try protect sacred site destruction gold mining september 2015 interior department administrative court turned bands request suspend mining way could found safeguard traditional cultural properties effectively band turned influential advisory council historic preservation achp named final arbiter disputes socalled programmatic agreement issued bureau land management blm govern mining activities december achp issued cautious decision encouraged blm clarify agreement the160programmatic agreement doesnt need clarified needs implemented said band attorney rollie wilson fredericks peebles amp morgan160the document signed achp requires ongoing evaluation specific areas mining exploration considered blm relying old generalized surveys entire area makes sense document law require current evaluations projectspecific proposals blm spokesperson jeff krauss disagreed saying consultation band ongoing like youve read subscribe times magazine make taxdeductible donation fund reporting | 1,234 |
<p>Dennis Kucinich, while denouncing the president’s decision to send another 33,000 troops to Afghanistan and questioning the constitutionality of the conflict, confessed to Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly that though the surge would undoubtedly be a waste of lives and resources, “You know what? To me this isn’t even about the personality of the president, whom I admire.” Speaking later to Esquire on why he was voting for a healthcare bill he had ripped to shreds on policy grounds just days before, Kucinich cited a “a higher responsibility” to “my president and his presidency.” The Ohio congressman went on to say that a victory on healthcare was essential so that the power of the president would not be “weakened,” arguing that with passage the “president will have a stronger hand in domestic and international affairs, and that will be good for the country.” Nowhere in his 2,300-word remarks on the need to boost the president’s popularity did he mention any of the ongoing wars and military occupations for which his friend Obama is responsible.</p>
<p>At the signing of the bill, he not just figuratively but, with a smile on his face, literally embraced the president.</p>
<p>Michael Moore, meanwhile, in a letter to Obama on the eve of his decision to expand the Afghan war declared that with that one move he would “destroy the hopes and dreams so many millions have placed in you. With just one speech tomorrow night you will turn a multitude of young people who were the backbone of your campaign into disillusioned cynics.” But at the same time, and after the president had already expanded the war soon after taking office by nearly 20,000 troops, Moore implored Obama to “listen to your heart, and your own clear thinking,” adding: “We the people still love you.”</p>
<p>After the decision to expand the war, which brings weekly tales of the atrocities that always accompany military occupations and counter-insurgency operations, there probably are a few more Obamaphiles turned disillusioned cynics — but Moore isn’t one of them. “You’re such a good guy, Mr. President,” he writes in a more recent correspondence.</p>
<p>The tradeoff seems to be this: in exchange for a president that can speak in complete sentences and not embarrass Americans in front of Western European audiences, and who is willing to throw a few more crumbs to the middle and lower classes, liberals will accept a little murder abroad. Oh, there might be an open letter or two, but few are willing to call the current occupant of the White House what he is — a war criminal with a million dollar smile — instead going to great lengths to defend this administration, working earnestly to support Obama’s agenda even when it’s entirely at odds with their own stated views.</p>
<p>This isn’t something new, by the way. When the U.S. military was killing Vietnamese by the tens of thousands in the 1960s, many rank-and-file Democrats and the whole of the liberal establishment were willing to put up with a little senseless murder abroad in exchange for Lyndon Johnson’s promise of a “Great Society” at home. Even after pressure from the antiwar movement forced LBJ to give up his reelection bid, the Democratic nominee in 1968 nonetheless was Hubert Humphrey, a bland pro-war liberal. And given the orgiastic glee with which today’s liberals and progressives greeted the passing of a healthcare bill whose proponents are lukewarm about, can you imagine how much murder they’d put up with in return for something like Medicare?</p>
<p>Of course, this probably isn’t the trade-off the president’s liberal supporters imagine they’re making, and I don’t doubt that people like Moore and Kucinich are sincere in their opposition to the Afghan war, if misguided in how to end it. But their view of the president as a man, or rather what they imagine him to be, colors — distorts — their views of his policies, resulting in some embarrassing attempts to excuse Obama, The Man We Thought We Voted For, for the policies enacted by Obama, The Man You Actually Got. Sadly, all too many liberals and progressives remain captivated by the former Obama ™, the persona they’ve been marketed these last couple years: the philosopher-king.</p>
<p>While Obama might seem like a nice, smart guy who tucks his kids in and gives them a kiss on the forehead good night, remember that because of his decisions there are Pakistani and Afghan fathers who will never get to do the same. And remember too that Obama chose to escalate the war on terror within mere days of taking office, signing off on a drone strike in Pakistan that killed 18 people before even moving his orthopedic chair into the Oval Office. As documented by the New America Foundation, Obama has continued the bombing ever, dramatically increasing the use of drones in Pakistan — a country, mind you, with which the U.S. is not officially at war — killing more than 500 people since taking office, likely many more, a third of them civilians. Weeks later Obama sent another 17,000 troops to Afghanistan, bringing his escalation of that war since taking office to roughly 50,000 troops and at least that many private contractors.</p>
<p>Getting on my soapbox: Once you come to grasp the basic moral truth that murder does not become acceptable simply because a majority of registered voters lucky enough to be born in the world’s most powerful country sanction it, nor is one’s complicity in it lessened by the fact that some 18 year old kid pulls the trigger for you — that politician’s deserve to be held to the same standard of accountability to which you’d hold a casual acquaintance — then it becomes a lot harder to maintain the fiction that Obama is not stained with blood shed by his wars. But then I haven’t been reading Daily Kos lately.</p>
<p>CHARLES DAVIS is a journalist based in Washington, DC. More of his work may be found on his <a href="http://charliedavis.blogspot.com/" type="external">Web site</a>.</p>
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<p><a href="http://greentags.bigcartel.com/" type="external">WORDS THAT STICK</a></p>
<p /> | true | 4 | dennis kucinich denouncing presidents decision send another 33000 troops afghanistan questioning constitutionality conflict confessed fox news bill oreilly though surge would undoubtedly waste lives resources know isnt even personality president admire speaking later esquire voting healthcare bill ripped shreds policy grounds days kucinich cited higher responsibility president presidency ohio congressman went say victory healthcare essential power president would weakened arguing passage president stronger hand domestic international affairs good country nowhere 2300word remarks need boost presidents popularity mention ongoing wars military occupations friend obama responsible signing bill figuratively smile face literally embraced president michael moore meanwhile letter obama eve decision expand afghan war declared one move would destroy hopes dreams many millions placed one speech tomorrow night turn multitude young people backbone campaign disillusioned cynics time president already expanded war soon taking office nearly 20000 troops moore implored obama listen heart clear thinking adding people still love decision expand war brings weekly tales atrocities always accompany military occupations counterinsurgency operations probably obamaphiles turned disillusioned cynics moore isnt one youre good guy mr president writes recent correspondence tradeoff seems exchange president speak complete sentences embarrass americans front western european audiences willing throw crumbs middle lower classes liberals accept little murder abroad oh might open letter two willing call current occupant white house war criminal million dollar smile instead going great lengths defend administration working earnestly support obamas agenda even entirely odds stated views isnt something new way us military killing vietnamese tens thousands 1960s many rankandfile democrats whole liberal establishment willing put little senseless murder abroad exchange lyndon johnsons promise great society home even pressure antiwar movement forced lbj give reelection bid democratic nominee 1968 nonetheless hubert humphrey bland prowar liberal given orgiastic glee todays liberals progressives greeted passing healthcare bill whose proponents lukewarm imagine much murder theyd put return something like medicare course probably isnt tradeoff presidents liberal supporters imagine theyre making dont doubt people like moore kucinich sincere opposition afghan war misguided end view president man rather imagine colors distorts views policies resulting embarrassing attempts excuse obama man thought voted policies enacted obama man actually got sadly many liberals progressives remain captivated former obama persona theyve marketed last couple years philosopherking obama might seem like nice smart guy tucks kids gives kiss forehead good night remember decisions pakistani afghan fathers never get remember obama chose escalate war terror within mere days taking office signing drone strike pakistan killed 18 people even moving orthopedic chair oval office documented new america foundation obama continued bombing ever dramatically increasing use drones pakistan country mind us officially war killing 500 people since taking office likely many third civilians weeks later obama sent another 17000 troops afghanistan bringing escalation war since taking office roughly 50000 troops least many private contractors getting soapbox come grasp basic moral truth murder become acceptable simply majority registered voters lucky enough born worlds powerful country sanction ones complicity lessened fact 18 year old kid pulls trigger politicians deserve held standard accountability youd hold casual acquaintance becomes lot harder maintain fiction obama stained blood shed wars havent reading daily kos lately charles davis journalist based washington dc work may found web site words stick | 523 |
<p>Daniel Knighton/Zuma</p>
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<p>From cracking down on milk spills to regulating human respiration, the power-crazed bureaucrats at the Environmental Protection Agency will stop at nothing to impose their sinister, tree-hugging agenda on the American public. At least, that’s what Republican lawmakers, tea party activists, and industry groups would have you believe.</p>
<p>Conservatives have never been big fans of the EPA and its regulations, but lately the right has ramped up its assault on the agency. During the recent budget battle, House Republicans sought to decimate the agency’s funding and handcuff it from acting on a long list of environmental concerns. GOP Presidential contender Newt Gingrich, meanwhile, has made <a href="" type="internal">abolishing the agency</a> part of his campaign platform.</p>
<p>As Republicans attack the EPA, they are deploying an array of conspiratorial claims about all the things the agency plans to regulate. Here are some of our favorites:</p>
<p>BULLETS Last August, a rumor began circulating among pro-hunting and fishing groups that the agency was poised to ban the use of lead in bullets and shotgun shells. The claim soon went viral on right-wing blogs and TV shows. Before long, the president of the National Rifle Association joined the fray <a href="http://www.usnews.com/news/washington-whispers/articles/2010/08/27/nra-warns-against-new-gun-control-push--from-epa" type="external">freakout</a>, warning that this might be yet another “vehicle to implement gun control.” GOP House members proceeded to l <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/gop-congressman-potential-lead-bullet-ban-assault-rural-america-obama-administration" type="external">ash out at the nonexistent move</a> as an “assault on rural America.”</p>
<p>Where did the claim come from? Earlier that month, the Center for Biological Diversity and other environmental groups <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/03/science/earth/03lead.html" type="external">filed a petition</a> asking the EPA to consider banning the use of lead in ammo and fishing tackle, arguing that these products are exposing wildlife—and the people who consume it—to harmful levels of the heavy metal. But the EPA, for its part, had <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/677-e2-wire/116173-epa-denies-enviro-petition-to-ban-lead-in-bullets" type="external">no plans to implement</a> this agenda. “EPA was not and is not considering taking action on whether the lead content in hunting ammunition poses an undue threat to wildlife,” the agency said in a statement.</p>
<p>This unambiguous statement, however, hasn’t stopped Fox News <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/04/21/senators-join-battle-lead-ammunition-fishing-tackle/?test=latestnews" type="external">from continuing to hype</a> the imagined gun grab.</p>
<p>SPILLED MILK In late January, the Wall Street Journal <a href="http://%22http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704698004576104040647573056.html" type="external">published an editorial</a> decrying a new EPA rule that the paper said would require milk spills to be treated like oil slicks. You can imagine the ensuing flurry of commentary ranting about how the agency was “crying over spilled milk.”</p>
<p>House Republicans made this claim a focal point in their EPA attacks. “How can the EPA promulgate new rules like this?” asked Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) during a March 3 hearing featuring testimony by EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson. “What’s next—sippy cups in the House cafeteria?” Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.) <a href="http://www.mtstandard.com/news/state-and-regional/article_358cc568-32fb-11e0-a11b-001cc4c03286.html" type="external">made a joke of the milk-spill myth</a> in a speech back home: “If anyone wants a ‘first responder’ for spilled milk, just adopt a cat!”</p>
<p>At the heart of this claim is the EPA’s Spill Prevention, Control and Countermeasure rule, which requires oil and gas companies to develop a plan for preventing spills. Because milk contains animal fat, an oil, milk has been included since the rules were first drafted in 1973. The rules were updated in January 2009 and took effect at the end of February, which appears to have prompted the new outrage on the right. The Chamber of Commerce named the EPA’s supposed regulation of spilled milk the <a href="http://www.uschambermagazine.com/column/outrage-of-the-month" type="external">“Outrage of the Month”</a> in April.</p>
<p>But here’s the thing: Contrary to how the agency’s foes spun the update, the EPA’s proposed new rules <a href="http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/6fa790d452bcd7f58525750100565efa/a6f13f775bec6906852575390069faaa!OpenDocument" type="external">explicitly proposed excluding</a> milk storage tanks from the spill prevention program. In April, the agency followed through with a <a href="http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/a883dc3da7094f97852572a00065d7d8/722b4e05c8312d528525787000692b36!OpenDocument" type="external">permanent exemption</a>. You’d think this would put an end to the milk-spill meme. Nope. Business groups <a href="http://www.nfib.com/issues-elections/issues-elections-item?cmsid=56900" type="external">are still milking it</a>.</p>
<p>DUST The EPA regulates particulate matter under the Clean Air Act, which is mostly aimed at dealing with soot and other emissions from power plants, factories, and automobiles. But the act also includes dust, and the EPA is <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/19/us-usa-epa-dust-idUSTRE73I72Y20110419" type="external">revisiting its dust standards</a>, which have been in place since 1987, after <a href="http://yosemite.epa.gov/sab/sabproduct.nsf/368203f97a15308a852574ba005bbd01/8bee96ad3228eabe8525760400702786!OpenDocument&amp;TableRow=2.3#2." type="external">an agency panel</a> suggested lowering the limits. However, EPA chief Jackson <a href="http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/0/EBC9CF14B126FB318525784F006AF60B" type="external">told the House Committee on Agriculture</a> in March that the agency has “no plans” to regulate dust, though the agency is compelled by law to complete its scientific review. A decision on how to proceed is expected this July.</p>
<p>Of course, at the mere mention of dust regulations, members of Congress—and others—promptly began freaking out. Last September, a bipartisan group of 75 western lawmakers <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/677-e2-wire/121135-western-lawmakers-push-back-on-epa-farm-dust-regs" type="external">wrote to the EPA</a> warning that this “lays the foundation for establishing the most stringent and unparalleled regulation of dust in our nation’s history.” And last month, Rep. Robert Hurt (R-Va.) <a href="http://hurt.house.gov/press-release/robert-hurt-introduces-bipartisan-bill-stop-unneeded-rural-dust-regulations" type="external">introduced a law</a> that would ban the EPA from taking any action on the issue.</p>
<p>Even with no rules proposed, let alone implemented, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association is <a href="http://naturalresourcereport.com/2011/05/cuation-over-epa-dust-rule/" type="external">ginning up fears</a> of “heavy fines for creating dust by simply driving down a dirt road.”</p>
<p>HOME ENERGY USE When it comes to the government’s efforts to make homes more energy-efficient, EPA haters have come up with all kinds of reasons to fear government. Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) has warned that energy-efficiency measures contained in the House climate bill <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9FX1fojAJM" type="external">would create a “global warming Gestapo”</a>.</p>
<p>Obama conspiracy theorist extraordinaire Jerome Corsi has <a href="http://thesop.org/story/20101115/here-come-the-energy-police-california-installing-millions-of-smart-meters.html" type="external">similarly warned that the</a> “energy police are about to invade your home with ‘smart meters.'”</p>
<p>Meanwhile, tea party darling Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) has been <a href="" type="internal">leading the charge</a> to repeal a law phasing out incandescent bulbs in favor of more efficient compact fluorescents. Shortly after decrying a government that “tells us which light bulbs to buy” in her televised State of the Union rebuttal earlier this year, she reintroduced her “Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act.”</p>
<p>BREATHING The agency began phasing in new greenhouse gas regulations in January, targeting major emitters, such as coal-fired power plants. That hasn’t stopped tea partiers, industry groups, and their allies in Congress from dreaming up things the EPA will soon be cracking down on in the name of climate change— <a href="http://westinstenv.org/news/2008/11/20/epa-proposes-cow-fart-tax/" type="external">cow farts</a>, <a href="http://erlc.com/article/comment-to-epa-regulating-greenhouse-gas-emissions-under-the-clean-air-act/" type="external">hedge trimmers</a>, <a href="http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.PressReleases&amp;ContentRecord_id=fd7a0056-802a-23ad-4798-d91c266c0bbd&amp;Region_id=&amp;Issue_id=87c0f70e-7e9c-9af9-742c-e26bf9b76447" type="external">nursing homes</a>, and, yes, even human respiration. “Every living person is now a source of pollution by exhaling CO2 and water vapor,” Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.) said in a January 2010 <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljvKCsGBH_Q" type="external">speech on the House floor</a>. “Every breath you take, every word you utter is now subject to EPA regulations,” Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.) said in a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljvKCsGBH_Q" type="external">speech on the House floor</a>. “The American people need room to breathe.”</p>
<p>In reality land, the EPA has <a href="http://www.epa.gov/NSR/actions.html" type="external">issued a rule</a> specifically limiting the emission regulations to the largest sources in the country—meaning a person would have to emit quite a bit of hot air to qualify. Not that we’re writing off that possibility in Rehberg’s case.</p>
<p /> | true | 4 | daniel knightonzuma cracking milk spills regulating human respiration powercrazed bureaucrats environmental protection agency stop nothing impose sinister treehugging agenda american public least thats republican lawmakers tea party activists industry groups would believe conservatives never big fans epa regulations lately right ramped assault agency recent budget battle house republicans sought decimate agencys funding handcuff acting long list environmental concerns gop presidential contender newt gingrich meanwhile made abolishing agency part campaign platform republicans attack epa deploying array conspiratorial claims things agency plans regulate favorites bullets last august rumor began circulating among prohunting fishing groups agency poised ban use lead bullets shotgun shells claim soon went viral rightwing blogs tv shows long president national rifle association joined fray freakout warning might yet another vehicle implement gun control gop house members proceeded l ash nonexistent move assault rural america claim come earlier month center biological diversity environmental groups filed petition asking epa consider banning use lead ammo fishing tackle arguing products exposing wildlifeand people consume itto harmful levels heavy metal epa part plans implement agenda epa considering taking action whether lead content hunting ammunition poses undue threat wildlife agency said statement unambiguous statement however hasnt stopped fox news continuing hype imagined gun grab spilled milk late january wall street journal published editorial decrying new epa rule paper said would require milk spills treated like oil slicks imagine ensuing flurry commentary ranting agency crying spilled milk house republicans made claim focal point epa attacks epa promulgate new rules like asked rep jeff flake rariz march 3 hearing featuring testimony epa administrator lisa jackson whats nextsippy cups house cafeteria rep denny rehberg rmont made joke milkspill myth speech back home anyone wants first responder spilled milk adopt cat heart claim epas spill prevention control countermeasure rule requires oil gas companies develop plan preventing spills milk contains animal fat oil milk included since rules first drafted 1973 rules updated january 2009 took effect end february appears prompted new outrage right chamber commerce named epas supposed regulation spilled milk outrage month april heres thing contrary agencys foes spun update epas proposed new rules explicitly proposed excluding milk storage tanks spill prevention program april agency followed permanent exemption youd think would put end milkspill meme nope business groups still milking dust epa regulates particulate matter clean air act mostly aimed dealing soot emissions power plants factories automobiles act also includes dust epa revisiting dust standards place since 1987 agency panel suggested lowering limits however epa chief jackson told house committee agriculture march agency plans regulate dust though agency compelled law complete scientific review decision proceed expected july course mere mention dust regulations members congressand otherspromptly began freaking last september bipartisan group 75 western lawmakers wrote epa warning lays foundation establishing stringent unparalleled regulation dust nations history last month rep robert hurt rva introduced law would ban epa taking action issue even rules proposed let alone implemented national cattlemens beef association ginning fears heavy fines creating dust simply driving dirt road home energy use comes governments efforts make homes energyefficient epa haters come kinds reasons fear government rep steve scalise rla warned energyefficiency measures contained house climate bill would create global warming gestapo obama conspiracy theorist extraordinaire jerome corsi similarly warned energy police invade home smart meters meanwhile tea party darling michele bachmann rminn leading charge repeal law phasing incandescent bulbs favor efficient compact fluorescents shortly decrying government tells us light bulbs buy televised state union rebuttal earlier year reintroduced light bulb freedom choice act breathing agency began phasing new greenhouse gas regulations january targeting major emitters coalfired power plants hasnt stopped tea partiers industry groups allies congress dreaming things epa soon cracking name climate change cow farts hedge trimmers nursing homes yes even human respiration every living person source pollution exhaling co2 water vapor rep denny rehberg rmont said january 2010 speech house floor every breath take every word utter subject epa regulations rep denny rehberg rmont said speech house floor american people need room breathe reality land epa issued rule specifically limiting emission regulations largest sources countrymeaning person would emit quite bit hot air qualify writing possibility rehbergs case | 681 |
<p>“From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first, America first.”</p>
<p>~Inaugural Address, January 20, 2017</p>
<p>“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” &#160;George Santayana, the philosopher and poet, once wrote.&#160; In the context of Europe’s history in the first half of the 20th century, Santayana’s warning has a special meaning.&#160; It’s evokes searing memories of war and genocide.</p>
<p>Santayana was born in Spain at a time of civil war in America.&#160; He lived long enough to see the world consumed in the flames of two world wars and his own native land torn apart in the Spanish Civil War.</p>
<p>When war broke out in Europe in 1914, the United States tried to stay out.&#160; When U.S. finally intervened in World War I, a reluctant President Wilson declared the purpose was “to make the world safe for democracy”.&#160; Of course, it did no such thing:&#160; World War I was the crucible of Soviet Communism and set the stage for Hitler’s rise to power and World War II.</p>
<p>Far from following through on the Wilson’s implied commitment, the United States turned it’s back on the League of Nations and withdrew into its prewar isolationist shell.</p>
<p>A decade later, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff passed in 1930 signaled America’s withdrawal into an even deeper economic isolation.&#160;&#160; U.S. imports from Europe plummeted from $1334 million to $390 million between 1929 and 1932 , while U.S. exports to Europe fell to less than a third. &#160;Overall, world trade declined by 66% between 1929 and 1934.&#160; Unemployment &#160;doubled in the six months between June and November 1930.&#160;&#160; Thousands of farmers defaulted on loans, loan defaults led to bank crashes, and the Great Depression was on.</p>
<p>Ironically, it was the grim sequel to “the war to end all wars” that supercharged the U.S. economy and lifted America to an exalted position as undisputed leader of the Free World.</p>
<p>In the aftermath of World War II, isolationism gave way to internationalism and a foreign policy calling for “a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.”[1] &#160;The United States had learned its lesson:&#160; Never again would America sit on the sidelines as the world descended into the abyss. &#160;The made-in-America North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949 was a first for the United States, the end of a tradition&#160; dating back to 1796 and George Washington’s famous warning against “entangling alliances” in his Farewell Address.</p>
<p>Playing the leading role in the international system has been a strong commitment neither major political party in the &#160;has questioned for more than seven decades.&#160; The idea that “politics stops at the waters’ edge” meant parties accepted &#160;self-imposed limits in matters of foreign policy and national security – it was called bipartisanship.&#160; That principle was largely abandoned by a Republican Congress bent on beating down the Democrat in the White House during Barack Obama’s second term.</p>
<p>Then came the election that shook the world.&#160; The rise of &#160;Donald Trump as the face and voice of America has thrown our constructive engagement with the rest of the world into more serious question than at any time in last three quarters of a century.&#160;</p>
<p>The Ice Age Cometh</p>
<p>There are disturbing signs that the United States is teetering on the edge of a new isolationist Ice Age.&#160; Here’s a partial list of Mr. Trump’s recent declarations and actions:</p>
<p>a) A newly elected president publicly calling into question whether NATO – the major Western alliance since 1949 – is still relevant or necessary.</p>
<p>b) Promising to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico.</p>
<p>c) Threatening to kill the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) treaty.</p>
<p>d) Withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade pact.</p>
<p>e) A major restructuring of the National Security Council (NSC) that marginalizes key players and is all but certain to undercut professional expertise, discourage doubt, and preclude dissent in the Situation Room of the White House when the fate of the country and the world hinges on making the right decision in a crisis.</p>
<p>These and other signs are reminiscent of attitudes with deep roots in American history, geography, and the national psyche – so deep that even a world war did not fundamentally change the way we related to – or did&#160; business with – the rest of the world between 1920 and 1940.</p>
<p>The White House Amateur Hour</p>
<p>When Mr.&#160; Trump was informed that North Korea had just conducted a missile test, he was at dinner at his Mar-a-Largo resort in Palm Spring, Florida.&#160; It turned into the foreign-policy amateur hour, an opportunity for the President of the United States to reprise his role as a&#160; reality TV star.</p>
<p>Mr. Trump and his aides conferred on the sport.&#160; The Commander in Chief talked on a (presumably) secure phone in full view of other diners!</p>
<p>Forget privacy – the issue at such times is security.&#160; National security, to be more precise.&#160; Which requires, at a minimum, secure communications.&#160; Responding to just such a situation is why there is a Situation Room in the White House.</p>
<p>News of a major reshuffling of the National Security Council (NSC) had set off plenty alarm bells in the days before the incident in Florida.&#160; Diplomats, the intelligence community, journalists, and foreign-policy analysts, were busy trying to parse the meaning and implications of Mr. Trump’s picks for key national security posts.</p>
<p>After less than a month on the job, Michael Flynn, the President’s National Security Advisor, suddenly “resigned”. &#160;Flynn, a retired army general, was no amateur, but he acted like one.&#160; The general in charge of the U.S. military’s Special Operations Command described the situation in the Trump &#160;White House in two words – “unbelievable turmoil”.</p>
<p>The Presidential Memorandum –&#160; called NSPM-2 – elevates Stephen Bannon, the President’s chief strategist and political advisor, to full membership on the NSC.&#160; At the same time, it downgrades the director of national intelligence and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. &#160;None of this makes any sense to professionals either on the military or civilian side of the government.&#160; It only makes sense if you don’t understand that national security is too important to left to amateurs or an&#160; imposter with a personal agenda and a gift for self-promotion.</p>
<p>&#160;Doomsday Clock – Time to Set the Alarm?</p>
<p>Xenophobia is the generic form of Islamophobia.&#160; Mr. Trump has lost no time in using his bully pulpit to exploit lingering public fear of terrorist attacks and post-911 prejudice against Muslims – a clear indication of how the new President intends to govern.</p>
<p>If patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, xenophobia is often the first resort of a would-be dictator. History is replete with examples of dictators who use hatred of foreigners to fan the flames of nationalism, patriotism, and militarism.</p>
<p>Given a natural suspicion of strangers we literally don’t understand,&#160; xenophobia is the path of least resistance for a leader bent on consolidating absolute power. &#160;There’s nothing like a well-timed and -executed war scare to justify declaring a state of emergency, strict press censorship, warrantless wiretaps, mass arrests, and preventive detention.</p>
<p>Much as dictatorships can be destabilized by popular discontent – pressure building from below – open societies are vulnerable to subversion from above.&#160; They require constant vigilance against the misuse of national security to silence the press, demonize dissent, and manipulate public opinion.</p>
<p>As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump repeatedly denounced the mainstream media, often calling negative polls and reporting “fake news”.&#160;&#160; Many believed he would moderate his war on the press after the November 8 election, but it continued unabated.&#160; To have a sitting president intent upon discrediting the press is arguably as dangerous as one who seeks to marginalize judges and courts of law.</p>
<p>Consider Mr. Trump’s widely reported naiveté on the subject nuclear weapons. &#160;That’s the sort of thing the American public needs to know about it’s new Commander-in-Chief.&#160; If there’s ever been time for complacency, it’s clearly not now.</p>
<p>The Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.&#160; Two decades later it happened again with the less-well-known “Able Archer War Scare” when the Soviet Union believed Ronald Reagan had his finger on the nuclear red button. [2]&#160; There is no legal or treaty proscription against the pre-emptive or preventive use of nuclear weapons – the “no-first-use” doctrine – but the argument for prudence in word and deed in the Nuclear Age is compelling.</p>
<p>The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists warns that it’s now 2 ½ minutes to “midnight” &#160;— the closest the Doomsday Clock has been to Armageddon since 1953, &#160;the year the Soviet Union first conducted successful hydrogen bomb test, thus setting the stage of the nuclear arms race that ensued. &#160;In 2016, these scientists say, “the global security landscape darkened as the international community failed to come effectively to grips with humanity’s most pressing existential threats, nuclear weapons and climate change.” [3] &#160;Physicist Lawrence Krauss and retired Navy Rear Adm.&#160;David Titley blame “a single person” for taking America and the world dangerous close to the edge of the nuclear abyss:</p>
<p>&#160;“Never before has the Bulletin decided to advance the clock largely because of the statements of a single person. But when that person is the new president of the United States, his words matter.”[4]&#160;</p>
<p>Back to the Future: Protection vs. Protectionism&#160;</p>
<p>The&#160; lifeblood of the global economy is international trade and the free flow of labor and capital. &#160;&#160;That wasn’t always true.</p>
<p>In the 19th century when Manifest Destiny and the westward expansion provided abundant land and vast natural resources made the ever-proliferating United States self-sufficient, while two great oceans insulated the Western Hemisphere from the rest of the world and created a natural, impregnable barrier against any unwanted foreign interventions.</p>
<p>Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, speaking before the Council on Foreign Relations in 2007:</p>
<p>Should the United States seek so-called energy independence in an elusive effort to insulate this country from the impact of world events on the economy, or should Americans pursue the path of international engagement, seeking ways to better compete within the global market for energy? Like the Council’s founders, I believe we must choose the course of greater international engagement… [5]</p>
<p>Nice words, but if Tillerson meant what he said in 10 years ago, he has his work cut out for him.</p>
<p>When called a meeting with the chief executives of&#160; Detroit’s three big automakers, Toyota, Honda, and other foreign automakers were not invited even foreign-owned European and Asian companies account for roughly 40 percent of the vehicles assembled in this country. &#160;&#160;Ford Motor Co. cancelled plans to build a $1.6 billion factory south of the border after a Trump broadside attacking GM, Ford, and Toyota for investing in Mexico.</p>
<p>President Trump has not been content to bully Detroit’s automakers and Mexico or the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims.&#160; He has also made no secret of his belief that trade with China has caused massive unemployment in the United States.&#160; In his fact-free world, China is a “currency manipulator” responsible for the closure of some 50,000 factories and the loss of tens of millions of jobs. [6]</p>
<p>A few not-alternative-facts will suffice to make the point the Trump White House appears to be missing.&#160; The popular Dodge Ram 1500 is only 59.5% made in America.&#160; The Honda Accord, on the other hand, is 81% American, partly because some of the Ram 1500s are made not in Detroit at all, but in Saltillo, Mexico. [7] &#160;Where cars are assembled is only the tip of the global supply-chain iceberg: components often come from dozens of countries on several continents and just-in-time delivery is crucial to production schedules and profits.</p>
<p>Stephen Miller, a 31-year-old anti-immigration firebrand who is now a senior White House advisor, called Ted Cruz &#160;“a radical Wall Street globalist who will rip the beating heart of manufacturing out of the United States of America,” at a rally in the spring of 2016. “Ted Cruz sided with Goldman Sachs and the globalists over the issue of trade…” Miller railed.&#160; “We cannot let that happen.”[8]</p>
<p>Globalism is not negotiable.&#160; All the alternative facts in the world won’t make it go away, but a protectionist America could greatly disrupt the global economy if not destroy it.</p>
<p>It took two world wars for America’s leaders to face up to the fact that isolationism was no longer a viable option.&#160; Today, &#160;foolish talk of “America first” as the guiding principle for U.S.&#160; foreign policy – the theme of Mr. Trump’s Inaugural address – risks the unraveling of U.S. diplomatic ties with the rest of the world.&#160; A world that well remembers the consequences of U.S. isolationism.&#160; The question is:&#160; Do we?</p>
<p>Notes</p>
<p>[1] “X”, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,”&#160; Foreign Affairs, July 1947, pp. 575-576. &#160;(“X” was a career diplomat and Russia expert named George Kennan.)</p>
<p>[2] <a href="http://nsarchive.gwu.edu" type="external">http://nsarchive.gwu.edu</a></p>
<p>[3]&#160; Peter Holley, et.al., “The Doomsday Clock Just Advanced ‘thanks to trump’…” Washington Post, January 26, 2017</p>
<p>[4] Lawrence M. Krauss and David Titley, “Thanks to Trump, the Nuclear Clock Advances Toward Midnight,&#160; New York Times, January 26, 2017.</p>
<p>[5] <a href="" type="internal">https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2016-12-07/rex-tillerson-secretary-of-state-what-it-would-mean</a></p>
<p>[6] <a href="" type="internal">https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/09/trumps-economic-policies-protectionism-low-taxes-and-coal-mines</a></p>
<p>[7] Jamie Robertson, “Why carmakers have the most to fear from protectionism,” BBC, February 8, 2017.&#160;&#160; <a href="" type="internal">http://www.bbc.com/news/business-38570387</a> [8] <a href="" type="internal">http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/04/04/trump_senior_policy_advisor_stephen_miller_ted_cruz_sided_with_goldman_sachs_and_the_globalists_on_trade_tpp.html</a></p> | true | 4 | day forward new vision govern land day forward going america first america first inaugural address january 20 2017 remember past condemned repeat 160george santayana philosopher poet wrote160 context europes history first half 20th century santayanas warning special meaning160 evokes searing memories war genocide santayana born spain time civil war america160 lived long enough see world consumed flames two world wars native land torn apart spanish civil war war broke europe 1914 united states tried stay out160 us finally intervened world war reluctant president wilson declared purpose make world safe democracy160 course thing160 world war crucible soviet communism set stage hitlers rise power world war ii far following wilsons implied commitment united states turned back league nations withdrew prewar isolationist shell decade later smoothawley tariff passed 1930 signaled americas withdrawal even deeper economic isolation160160 us imports europe plummeted 1334 million 390 million 1929 1932 us exports europe fell less third 160overall world trade declined 66 1929 1934160 unemployment 160doubled six months june november 1930160160 thousands farmers defaulted loans loan defaults led bank crashes great depression ironically grim sequel war end wars supercharged us economy lifted america exalted position undisputed leader free world aftermath world war ii isolationism gave way internationalism foreign policy calling longterm patient firm vigilant containment russian expansive tendencies1 160the united states learned lesson160 never would america sit sidelines world descended abyss 160the madeinamerica north atlantic treaty organization nato 1949 first united states end tradition160 dating back 1796 george washingtons famous warning entangling alliances farewell address playing leading role international system strong commitment neither major political party 160has questioned seven decades160 idea politics stops waters edge meant parties accepted 160selfimposed limits matters foreign policy national security called bipartisanship160 principle largely abandoned republican congress bent beating democrat white house barack obamas second term came election shook world160 rise 160donald trump face voice america thrown constructive engagement rest world serious question time last three quarters century160 ice age cometh disturbing signs united states teetering edge new isolationist ice age160 heres partial list mr trumps recent declarations actions newly elected president publicly calling question whether nato major western alliance since 1949 still relevant necessary b promising build wall us mexico c threatening kill north american free trade association nafta treaty withdrawing transpacific partnership tpp trade pact e major restructuring national security council nsc marginalizes key players certain undercut professional expertise discourage doubt preclude dissent situation room white house fate country world hinges making right decision crisis signs reminiscent attitudes deep roots american history geography national psyche deep even world war fundamentally change way related did160 business rest world 1920 1940 white house amateur hour mr160 trump informed north korea conducted missile test dinner maralargo resort palm spring florida160 turned foreignpolicy amateur hour opportunity president united states reprise role a160 reality tv star mr trump aides conferred sport160 commander chief talked presumably secure phone full view diners forget privacy issue times security160 national security precise160 requires minimum secure communications160 responding situation situation room white house news major reshuffling national security council nsc set plenty alarm bells days incident florida160 diplomats intelligence community journalists foreignpolicy analysts busy trying parse meaning implications mr trumps picks key national security posts less month job michael flynn presidents national security advisor suddenly resigned 160flynn retired army general amateur acted like one160 general charge us militarys special operations command described situation trump 160white house two words unbelievable turmoil presidential memorandum 160 called nspm2 elevates stephen bannon presidents chief strategist political advisor full membership nsc160 time downgrades director national intelligence chairman joint chiefs staff 160none makes sense professionals either military civilian side government160 makes sense dont understand national security important left amateurs an160 imposter personal agenda gift selfpromotion 160doomsday clock time set alarm xenophobia generic form islamophobia160 mr trump lost time using bully pulpit exploit lingering public fear terrorist attacks post911 prejudice muslims clear indication new president intends govern patriotism last refuge scoundrel xenophobia often first resort wouldbe dictator history replete examples dictators use hatred foreigners fan flames nationalism patriotism militarism given natural suspicion strangers literally dont understand160 xenophobia path least resistance leader bent consolidating absolute power 160theres nothing like welltimed executed war scare justify declaring state emergency strict press censorship warrantless wiretaps mass arrests preventive detention much dictatorships destabilized popular discontent pressure building open societies vulnerable subversion above160 require constant vigilance misuse national security silence press demonize dissent manipulate public opinion presidential candidate donald trump repeatedly denounced mainstream media often calling negative polls reporting fake news160160 many believed would moderate war press november 8 election continued unabated160 sitting president intent upon discrediting press arguably dangerous one seeks marginalize judges courts law consider mr trumps widely reported naiveté subject nuclear weapons 160thats sort thing american public needs know new commanderinchief160 theres ever time complacency clearly cuban missile crisis brought world brink nuclear war160 two decades later happened lesswellknown able archer war scare soviet union believed ronald reagan finger nuclear red button 2160 legal treaty proscription preemptive preventive use nuclear weapons nofirstuse doctrine argument prudence word deed nuclear age compelling bulletin atomic scientists warns 2 ½ minutes midnight 160 closest doomsday clock armageddon since 1953 160the year soviet union first conducted successful hydrogen bomb test thus setting stage nuclear arms race ensued 160in 2016 scientists say global security landscape darkened international community failed come effectively grips humanitys pressing existential threats nuclear weapons climate change 3 160physicist lawrence krauss retired navy rear adm160david titley blame single person taking america world dangerous close edge nuclear abyss 160never bulletin decided advance clock largely statements single person person new president united states words matter4160 back future protection vs protectionism160 the160 lifeblood global economy international trade free flow labor capital 160160that wasnt always true 19th century manifest destiny westward expansion provided abundant land vast natural resources made everproliferating united states selfsufficient two great oceans insulated western hemisphere rest world created natural impregnable barrier unwanted foreign interventions secretary state rex tillerson speaking council foreign relations 2007 united states seek socalled energy independence elusive effort insulate country impact world events economy americans pursue path international engagement seeking ways better compete within global market energy like councils founders believe must choose course greater international engagement 5 nice words tillerson meant said 10 years ago work cut called meeting chief executives of160 detroits three big automakers toyota honda foreign automakers invited even foreignowned european asian companies account roughly 40 percent vehicles assembled country 160160ford motor co cancelled plans build 16 billion factory south border trump broadside attacking gm ford toyota investing mexico president trump content bully detroits automakers mexico worlds 16 billion muslims160 also made secret belief trade china caused massive unemployment united states160 factfree world china currency manipulator responsible closure 50000 factories loss tens millions jobs 6 notalternativefacts suffice make point trump white house appears missing160 popular dodge ram 1500 595 made america160 honda accord hand 81 american partly ram 1500s made detroit saltillo mexico 7 160where cars assembled tip global supplychain iceberg components often come dozens countries several continents justintime delivery crucial production schedules profits stephen miller 31yearold antiimmigration firebrand senior white house advisor called ted cruz 160a radical wall street globalist rip beating heart manufacturing united states america rally spring 2016 ted cruz sided goldman sachs globalists issue trade miller railed160 let happen8 globalism negotiable160 alternative facts world wont make go away protectionist america could greatly disrupt global economy destroy took two world wars americas leaders face fact isolationism longer viable option160 today 160foolish talk america first guiding principle us160 foreign policy theme mr trumps inaugural address risks unraveling us diplomatic ties rest world160 world well remembers consequences us isolationism160 question is160 notes 1 x sources soviet conduct160 foreign affairs july 1947 pp 575576 160x career diplomat russia expert named george kennan 2 httpnsarchivegwuedu 3160 peter holley etal doomsday clock advanced thanks trump washington post january 26 2017 4 lawrence krauss david titley thanks trump nuclear clock advances toward midnight160 new york times january 26 2017 5 httpswwwbloombergcomgadflyarticles20161207rextillersonsecretaryofstatewhatitwouldmean 6 httpswwwtheguardiancomusnews2016nov09trumpseconomicpoliciesprotectionismlowtaxesandcoalmines 7 jamie robertson carmakers fear protectionism bbc february 8 2017160160 httpwwwbbccomnewsbusiness38570387 8 httpwwwrealclearpoliticscomvideo20160404trump_senior_policy_advisor_stephen_miller_ted_cruz_sided_with_goldman_sachs_and_the_globalists_on_trade_tpphtml | 1,326 |
<p><a href="" type="internal" />I try not to overly politicize tragedies just for the sake of “making a point” or “pushing an agenda ( <a href="" type="internal">as some folks frequently&#160;do</a>), but if there’s a valid, rational point to be made — <a href="" type="internal">I have no problem making it</a>. I wanted to wait a couple of&#160;days before writing this to let everyone have some time&#160;to process what happened on Thursday night in Dallas, Texas.</p>
<p>As I sat back on Friday, watching the usual “blame game” go back and forth between the left and the right, I couldn’t help but notice something was missing — the usual pro-gun “macho” propaganda&#160;that often goes along with most of these mass shootings.</p>
<p>Maybe I’m simply not remembering things correctly, but don’t gun fanatics typically&#160;claim that the reason why mass shootings (and even terrorist attacks) happen is because “gun free zones” prevent “good guys with guns” from being able to take out the “bad guys”?</p>
<p>Yeah, I’m fairly&#160;certain that’s what they usually say.</p>
<p>Heck, here’s what Donald Trump <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/14/politics/paris-terror-attacks-donald-trump-guns/" type="external">had to say</a> following the terrorist attack in Paris:</p>
<p>When you look at Paris — you know the toughest gun laws in the world, Paris — nobody had guns but the bad guys. Nobody had guns. Nobody. They were just shooting them one by one and then they (security forces) broke in and had a big shootout and ultimately killed the terrorists. You can say what you want, but if they had guns, if our people had guns, if they were allowed to carry — it would’ve been a much, much different situation.</p>
<p>And here’s what <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-san-bernardino-victims-couldve-protected-themselves-if-they-had-guns/" type="external">he said</a> after the San Bernardino shooting:</p>
<p>I think it would’ve been a lot better if they had guns in that room, somebody could protect. They could’ve protected themselves if they had guns.</p>
<p>Then this is what the presumptive GOP presidential nominee <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/trump-guns-prevented-orlando-massacre-article-1.2671668" type="external">said</a> after the Orlando nightclub massacre:</p>
<p>If you had some guns in that club the night that this took place, if you had guns on the other side, you wouldn’t have had the tragedy that you had. If people in that room had guns with the bullets flying in the opposite direction right at him… right at his head, you wouldn’t have had the same tragedy that you ended up having.</p>
<p>I can’t help but notice that there’s definitely a common theme of “if they had guns…” in each and every one of those statements. All Trump’s doing is parroting rhetoric Republicans, the NRA and gun fanatics <a href="" type="internal">have been using for years</a>. You know, the whole “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun” idiocy.</p>
<p>Well, on Thursday night in Dallas, where the shooting took place wasn’t a “gun free zone.”&#160;Not only that, but in Texas, it’s completely&#160;legal to openly carry your gun(s) with you almost anywhere you go. Heck, there were people openly carrying guns with them at the protest.</p>
<p>Before I go forward, just think about that for a moment: Technically, the animal who killed five police officers, while wounding six others, could have literally&#160;been marching around and stalking his eventual victims while&#160;openly carrying the very same high-powered assault rifle he would later use to carry out his attack&#160;and there’s nothing they could have done about it because, at&#160;that point, he was just a “good guy with a gun exercising his Second Amendment rights.”</p>
<p>Furthermore,&#160;I think it’s important to point out the real “elephant in the room.” On Thursday night, there&#160;were over 100 police officers&#160;at that protest — which means there were more than 100 guns where the shooting took place.&#160;Yet, that didn’t stop a madman from killing five, and wounding six others, in an assassination-type ambush.</p>
<p>So, were there not enough “good guys”&#160;with guns at the scene of this massacre to prevent it?</p>
<p>Based on his comments, it’s clear that if you ask <a href="" type="internal">someone like Donald Trump</a> (or most every other gun fanatic), he believes that the&#160;attacks in Paris, San Bernandino and Orlando (as well as many other mass shootings) mainly happened&#160;because there weren’t “good guys with guns” there to stop the “bad guy.”</p>
<p>Even when it comes to mass shootings at&#160;schools,&#160;gun fanatics&#160;typically say we need police officers&#160;at every single one&#160;to protect the children, right? So, wait, do we need more than 100 cops at every single one of our nation’s schools? After all, there were 100 police officers there on Thursday night and&#160;one&#160;prepared gunman managed to be extremely effective at killing innocent people in a fairly short amount of time. So, if 100 armed and trained police officers weren’t enough of a deterrent to dissuade the Dallas shooter from carrying out his murderous plot — then what are one or two going to do?</p>
<p>I have another question: Since we had around 100 police officers with over 100 guns on the scene of Thursday night’s shooting — just how many more members of law enforcement, firearms&#160;and other “good guys with guns” would we&#160;have needed to be there to prevent what happened?</p>
<p>200? 300? 1,000?</p>
<p>How many?</p>
<p>Or, maybe —&#160;just maybe, what was&#160;proven&#160;Thursday night is that, instead of this nonsense about “good guys being the only thing that stops bad guys” we learned what we need to be doing is making damn sure the “bad guys” don’t get their hands on guns. Dallas showed us that, even with 100 police officers and more than 100 guns on scene,&#160;one&#160;“bad guy” was able to effectively murder five innocent people and wound six others, not because there weren’t any “good guys with guns,” but <a href="" type="internal">because our laws</a> make it too damn easy for “bad guys” to get them.</p>
<p>Image via “ <a href="https://www.facebook.com/ChadRMacDonald/?fref=ts" type="external">The Good, the Chad, &amp; the Ugly</a>” on Facebook.</p>
<p />
<p><a href="" type="internal">Dallas Mayor Destroys the Danger and Stupidity of Open Carry Laws (Video)</a></p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">8 of the Dumbest Things Republicans Say About Gun Violence</a></p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">5 Questions Republicans and Other Gun Nuts Must Answer About Mass Shootings</a></p>
<p>0 Facebook comments</p> | true | 4 | try overly politicize tragedies sake making point pushing agenda folks frequently160do theres valid rational point made problem making wanted wait couple of160days writing let everyone time160to process happened thursday night dallas texas sat back friday watching usual blame game go back forth left right couldnt help notice something missing usual progun macho propaganda160that often goes along mass shootings maybe im simply remembering things correctly dont gun fanatics typically160claim reason mass shootings even terrorist attacks happen gun free zones prevent good guys guns able take bad guys yeah im fairly160certain thats usually say heck heres donald trump say following terrorist attack paris look paris know toughest gun laws world paris nobody guns bad guys nobody guns nobody shooting one one security forces broke big shootout ultimately killed terrorists say want guns people guns allowed carry wouldve much much different situation heres said san bernardino shooting think wouldve lot better guns room somebody could protect couldve protected guns presumptive gop presidential nominee said orlando nightclub massacre guns club night took place guns side wouldnt tragedy people room guns bullets flying opposite direction right right head wouldnt tragedy ended cant help notice theres definitely common theme guns every one statements trumps parroting rhetoric republicans nra gun fanatics using years know whole way stop bad guy gun good guy gun idiocy well thursday night dallas shooting took place wasnt gun free zone160not texas completely160legal openly carry guns almost anywhere go heck people openly carrying guns protest go forward think moment technically animal killed five police officers wounding six others could literally160been marching around stalking eventual victims while160openly carrying highpowered assault rifle would later use carry attack160and theres nothing could done at160that point good guy gun exercising second amendment rights furthermore160i think important point real elephant room thursday night there160were 100 police officers160at protest means 100 guns shooting took place160yet didnt stop madman killing five wounding six others assassinationtype ambush enough good guys160with guns scene massacre prevent based comments clear ask someone like donald trump every gun fanatic believes the160attacks paris san bernandino orlando well many mass shootings mainly happened160because werent good guys guns stop bad guy even comes mass shootings at160schools160gun fanatics160typically say need police officers160at every single one160to protect children right wait need 100 cops every single one nations schools 100 police officers thursday night and160one160prepared gunman managed extremely effective killing innocent people fairly short amount time 100 armed trained police officers werent enough deterrent dissuade dallas shooter carrying murderous plot one two going another question since around 100 police officers 100 guns scene thursday nights shooting many members law enforcement firearms160and good guys guns would we160have needed prevent happened 200 300 1000 many maybe 160just maybe was160proven160thursday night instead nonsense good guys thing stops bad guys learned need making damn sure bad guys dont get hands guns dallas showed us even 100 police officers 100 guns scene160one160bad guy able effectively murder five innocent people wound six others werent good guys guns laws make damn easy bad guys get image via good chad amp ugly facebook dallas mayor destroys danger stupidity open carry laws video 8 dumbest things republicans say gun violence 5 questions republicans gun nuts must answer mass shootings 0 facebook comments | 531 |
<p>I was in Singapore when Kim Jong-il died on 17&#160;December, so I was reading from a salutary distance what passed for expert American commentary. “North Korea as we know it is over,” according to a piece in&#160;The New York Times&#160;written by a specialist who had served in the George W Bush administration; the country would come apart within weeks or months. Another asked how could the callow son grapple with octogenarian leaders in the army — wouldn’t there be a coup? Might Kim Jong-un “lash out” to prove his toughness to the military? Others worried that a collapse might require US Marines on Okinawa to swoop in to corral loose nukes (a key mission for several years).</p>
<p>The Obama administration fretted about a power struggle, something Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had spoken of after Kim’s stroke three years earlier. The model seemed to be the USSR after Stalin died, or China after Mao. They ignored what happened when Kim Il-sung died in 1994 — which was nothing.</p>
<p>My first visit to North Korea was in 1981. I flew from Beijing and hoped to go out through the Soviet Union on the Trans-Siberian railway. Consular officials said I should obtain a visa at the Soviet embassy in Pyongyang. When I got there, a friendly (read KGB) counsellor offered me cognac and inquired what I might be doing in Pyongyang. Then he asked what I thought of Kim Jong-il, who had just been officially designated as successor to Kim Il-sung at the 6th Party Congress in 1980. “Well, he doesn’t have his father’s charisma,” I said; “He’s diminutive, pear-shaped, homely. Looks like his mother.” The counsellor replied: “Oh, you Americans, always thinking about personality. Don’t you know they have a bureaucratic bloc behind him, they all rise or fall with him — these people really know how to do this. You should come back in 2020 and see his son take power.”</p>
<p>It was the best prediction I’ve ever heard about this communist state-cum-dynasty, even if Kim Jong-il’s heart attack at 69 hastened the succession to Kim Jong-un by a few years. North Korea has known only millennia of monarchy and then a century of dictatorship — Japanese from <a href="" type="internal" />1910-1945 (in the late stages of colonial rule Koreans had to worship the Japanese emperor), and then for the past 66&#160;years the hegemony of the Kim family.</p>
<p>On the grandson’s birthday, 8&#160;January (his birth year, 1983 or 1984, still seems to be a secret), Pyongyang television ran an hour-long documentary attributing to him every North Korean virtue and identifying him with every place or monument visited by Kim Il-sung, but especially White Head Mountain, the vast volcanic peak on the Sino-Korean border, mythical fount of the Korean people, site of some of Kim’s anti-Japanese guerrilla battles in the 1930s and purported birthplace of Kim Jong-il in 1942. Most interesting, though, was Jong-un’s body language: tall, hefty, grinning, he already looked like a politician, at home with his sudden role as “beloved successor”. Gone was the dour, dyspeptic, cynical, ill-at-ease Kim Jong-il, swaddled in a puffy ski jacket, his face hidden behind sunglasses. Jong-un, in looks and style, is the spitting image of his grandfather when he came to power in the late 1940s; he even shaves his sideburns up high (the documentary showed photos of Kim Il-sung with the same haircut). It was as if his DNA had passed uncontaminated to the grandson (as no doubt the regime wants its people to believe).</p>
<p>Korean culture is steeped in the ceremony, ritual, literature, poetry, folklore and gossip of royal families — especially which son will succeed the king. Many did so at a young age. The greatest of the kings, Sejong, under whom the unique Korean writing system was promulgated, took office in 1418 at the age of 21, assisted by the regency of his father. Like Jong-un, he was the third son: the eldest son was banished from Seoul for rudeness, the middle son became a Buddhist monk. Kim Jong-nam, Kim Jong-il’s first son, was caught entering Japan under a pseudonym (hoping to visit Disneyland, it is said), and lives in Macao. Almost nothing is known about the middle son. Neither appeared at their father’s funeral.</p>
<p>Asians dislike anything that damages or threatens their dignity, their honour. In North Korean eyes, the prestige of the nation is bound up with the image of the leader. On the way in from the airport in 1981, as we sped by Kim Il-sung billboards, my friendly guide had one solemn admonition: please do not insult our leader. (I hadn’t planned to.) The leader’s ideology, then and now, waschuch’e,&#160;which means to put Korea first. The scholar Gari Ledyard has written that the second character used in writing&#160;chuch’e,&#160;when joined to the word for nation —&#160;kukch’e&#160;— was classically used to mean national dignity. Ledyard writes: “The&#160;kukch’e&#160;can be hurt, it can be embarrassed, it can be insulted, it can be sullied. The members of the society must behave in such a way that thekukch’e&#160;will not be lost. This sense of the word resonates with emotions and ethics that spring from deep sources in the traditional psyche.” In North Korea this idea is alive and well — often displayed in overweening pride and grandiose monuments, but at bottom, in an insistence on national dignity.</p>
<p>The penultimate Korean king, Kojong, was just 11 when he took the throne in 1864, guided by his father — a powerful regent known as the Taewon’gun — until he reached maturity. During his regency, his father reenergised the dominant ideology (neo-Confucianism), practiced a strict seclusion policy against several empires knocking at the door, and fought serious wars against both France (1866) and the US (1871); two years later the new Meiji leadership in Japan came close to invading Korea. This was the Hermit Kingdom at its height; and&#160;kukch’ewas a prominent concept under the Taewon’gun.</p>
<p>But when Kojong came of age he sought modern reforms, signed unequal treaties opening Korea to commerce and tried to play the imperial powers off against each other. It worked for 25&#160;years, and then it didn’t: opening up merely staved off the predictable end — the obliteration of Korean sovereignty in 1910. At the Revolutionary Museum in Pyongyang, fronted by a 60-foot statue of Kim Il-sung, visitors encounter a paean of praise to the Taewon’gun, stone monuments from his era meant to ward off foreign barbarians, and tributes to Korean “victories” against the French and the Americans.</p>
<p>During the recent funeral procession, Kim Jong-il’s brother-in-law, Chang Song-t’aek, walked behind Kim Jong-un. Chang, 65, has long been entrusted with command of the most sensitive security agencies. Behind him was Kim Ki-nam, now in his eighties, who was a close associate of Kim Il-sung. Three generations walked solemnly alongside the vintage 1970s armoured Lincoln Continental carrying the coffin of Kim Jong-il, while strolling on the other side of the limousine were top commanders of the military. North Korea is modern history’s most amazing garrison state, with the fourth largest army in the world.</p>
<p>The rituals were very similar to those when Kim Il-sung died. Pundits and officials had said the same then:&#160;Newsweek&#160;ran a cover story, “The Headless Beast” (18&#160;July 1994), the US military commander in the South said the North would “implode or explode”, and the imminent collapse of the regime became a CIA mantra. Almost two decades later, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) is still here. And in a few more years, it will have been in existence for as long as the Soviet Union. Yet a few months before Kim Il-sung’s death, I heard a US scholar of North Korea tell a conference that when Kim died, the people would rise up and overthrow the regime. Instead the masses wept in the streets — just as they did when King Kojong died in 1919, touching off a nationwide uprising against the Japanese.</p>
<p>After his father died, Kim Jong-il disappeared, causing rumours of power struggles. He was doing what the heir-apparent prince was supposed to do under the ancien regime: mourn his father for three years. By the 50th anniversary of the DPRK’s founding in 1998, it was clear that Kim Jong-il was in full charge, and he launched its first long-range missile to mark the moment. He often said that communism had fallen in the West because of the dilution and erosion of ideological purity. North Korea has turned Marx on his head — or put Hegel back on his feet — by arguing that “ideas determine everything”, a formulation the Taewon’gun’s neo-Confucian scribes would have liked.</p>
<p>Will Kim Jong-un follow the same mourning ritual? So far he has not. He has visited military units and appeared in public. It is in his interest to lay low and gain experience while the old guard runs the country. With US and South Korean presidential elections later in the year (the current South Korean president, a hardliner whom the North loathes, cannot run again), top leader Hu Jin-tao stepping down in China and Putin’s election now less of a certainty in Russia, biding his time is smart. He has become the face of the regime, hoped to be more agreeable to the public than that of his father.</p>
<p>My Soviet informant was right: I had been wrong about the significance of bodily appearances. Whatever he looks like, the king can do no wrong: he can even hit eagles on his first golf round (as Kim Jong-il was claimed to have done). In a classic European text,&#160;The King’s Two Bodies&#160;(Princeton, 1957), Ernst Kantorowicz wrote that there were two kings: the frail, human and mortal vessel who happens to be king, and the perfect eternal king who endures forever as the symbol of the monarchy. The Koreans made the dead Kim Il-sung president for eternity, all imperfections erased, and now his elaborate mausoleum is the most important edifice in the country. Will Jong-un’s face, so similar to his, make people quickly forget about Kim Jong-il, whose 17-year reign brought flood, drought, famine, the effective collapse of the economy, and mass starvation leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths? He had one singular, if dubious achievement: the acquisition of nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>We all, consciously or not, live within and search for a usable past. Kim Jong-un may not yet be 30, but if my Soviet interlocutor is right, we are going to see his face for a long, long time.</p>
<p>This article appears in the excellent Le Monde Diplomatique, whose English language edition can be found at&#160; <a href="http://www.mondediplo.com/" type="external">mondediplo.com.</a>&#160;This full text appears by agreement with Le Monde Diplomatique. CounterPunch features two or three articles from LMD every month.</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal" /></p> | true | 4 | singapore kim jongil died 17160december reading salutary distance passed expert american commentary north korea know according piece in160the new york times160written specialist served george w bush administration country would come apart within weeks months another asked could callow son grapple octogenarian leaders army wouldnt coup might kim jongun lash prove toughness military others worried collapse might require us marines okinawa swoop corral loose nukes key mission several years obama administration fretted power struggle something secretary state hillary clinton spoken kims stroke three years earlier model seemed ussr stalin died china mao ignored happened kim ilsung died 1994 nothing first visit north korea 1981 flew beijing hoped go soviet union transsiberian railway consular officials said obtain visa soviet embassy pyongyang got friendly read kgb counsellor offered cognac inquired might pyongyang asked thought kim jongil officially designated successor kim ilsung 6th party congress 1980 well doesnt fathers charisma said hes diminutive pearshaped homely looks like mother counsellor replied oh americans always thinking personality dont know bureaucratic bloc behind rise fall people really know come back 2020 see son take power best prediction ive ever heard communist statecumdynasty even kim jongils heart attack 69 hastened succession kim jongun years north korea known millennia monarchy century dictatorship japanese 19101945 late stages colonial rule koreans worship japanese emperor past 66160years hegemony kim family grandsons birthday 8160january birth year 1983 1984 still seems secret pyongyang television ran hourlong documentary attributing every north korean virtue identifying every place monument visited kim ilsung especially white head mountain vast volcanic peak sinokorean border mythical fount korean people site kims antijapanese guerrilla battles 1930s purported birthplace kim jongil 1942 interesting though jonguns body language tall hefty grinning already looked like politician home sudden role beloved successor gone dour dyspeptic cynical illatease kim jongil swaddled puffy ski jacket face hidden behind sunglasses jongun looks style spitting image grandfather came power late 1940s even shaves sideburns high documentary showed photos kim ilsung haircut dna passed uncontaminated grandson doubt regime wants people believe korean culture steeped ceremony ritual literature poetry folklore gossip royal families especially son succeed king many young age greatest kings sejong unique korean writing system promulgated took office 1418 age 21 assisted regency father like jongun third son eldest son banished seoul rudeness middle son became buddhist monk kim jongnam kim jongils first son caught entering japan pseudonym hoping visit disneyland said lives macao almost nothing known middle son neither appeared fathers funeral asians dislike anything damages threatens dignity honour north korean eyes prestige nation bound image leader way airport 1981 sped kim ilsung billboards friendly guide one solemn admonition please insult leader hadnt planned leaders ideology waschuche160which means put korea first scholar gari ledyard written second character used writing160chuche160when joined word nation 160kukche160 classically used mean national dignity ledyard writes the160kukche160can hurt embarrassed insulted sullied members society must behave way thekukche160will lost sense word resonates emotions ethics spring deep sources traditional psyche north korea idea alive well often displayed overweening pride grandiose monuments bottom insistence national dignity penultimate korean king kojong 11 took throne 1864 guided father powerful regent known taewongun reached maturity regency father reenergised dominant ideology neoconfucianism practiced strict seclusion policy several empires knocking door fought serious wars france 1866 us 1871 two years later new meiji leadership japan came close invading korea hermit kingdom height and160kukchewas prominent concept taewongun kojong came age sought modern reforms signed unequal treaties opening korea commerce tried play imperial powers worked 25160years didnt opening merely staved predictable end obliteration korean sovereignty 1910 revolutionary museum pyongyang fronted 60foot statue kim ilsung visitors encounter paean praise taewongun stone monuments era meant ward foreign barbarians tributes korean victories french americans recent funeral procession kim jongils brotherinlaw chang songtaek walked behind kim jongun chang 65 long entrusted command sensitive security agencies behind kim kinam eighties close associate kim ilsung three generations walked solemnly alongside vintage 1970s armoured lincoln continental carrying coffin kim jongil strolling side limousine top commanders military north korea modern historys amazing garrison state fourth largest army world rituals similar kim ilsung died pundits officials said then160newsweek160ran cover story headless beast 18160july 1994 us military commander south said north would implode explode imminent collapse regime became cia mantra almost two decades later democratic peoples republic korea dprk still years existence long soviet union yet months kim ilsungs death heard us scholar north korea tell conference kim died people would rise overthrow regime instead masses wept streets king kojong died 1919 touching nationwide uprising japanese father died kim jongil disappeared causing rumours power struggles heirapparent prince supposed ancien regime mourn father three years 50th anniversary dprks founding 1998 clear kim jongil full charge launched first longrange missile mark moment often said communism fallen west dilution erosion ideological purity north korea turned marx head put hegel back feet arguing ideas determine everything formulation taewonguns neoconfucian scribes would liked kim jongun follow mourning ritual far visited military units appeared public interest lay low gain experience old guard runs country us south korean presidential elections later year current south korean president hardliner north loathes run top leader hu jintao stepping china putins election less certainty russia biding time smart become face regime hoped agreeable public father soviet informant right wrong significance bodily appearances whatever looks like king wrong even hit eagles first golf round kim jongil claimed done classic european text160the kings two bodies160princeton 1957 ernst kantorowicz wrote two kings frail human mortal vessel happens king perfect eternal king endures forever symbol monarchy koreans made dead kim ilsung president eternity imperfections erased elaborate mausoleum important edifice country jonguns face similar make people quickly forget kim jongil whose 17year reign brought flood drought famine effective collapse economy mass starvation leading hundreds thousands deaths one singular dubious achievement acquisition nuclear weapons consciously live within search usable past kim jongun may yet 30 soviet interlocutor right going see face long long time article appears excellent le monde diplomatique whose english language edition found at160 mondediplocom160this full text appears agreement le monde diplomatique counterpunch features two three articles lmd every month | 1,000 |
<p>The Iraqi resistance to U.S. occupation is growing, as is its support among ordinary Iraqis. Iraq’s interim government recently admitted that the insurgency involves at least 40,000 “hardcore fighters” and up to 200,000 active sympathizers–a far cry from the isolated 5,000 “Baathist remnants” and “foreign fighters” the Pentagon initially claimed to be fighting.</p>
<p>A USA Today/Gallup poll conducted in March concluded, “The insurgents…seem to be gaining broad acceptance, if not outright support. If the [pro-U.S.] Kurds, who make up about 13 percent of the poll, are taken out of the equation, more than half of Iraqis say killing U.S. troops can be justified in at least some cases.”</p>
<p>That was shortly before the first siege on Falluja, in which U.S. forces killed over 600 civilians before the armed resistance drove them out. Support for the resistance can only have grown now that U.S. bombs have flattened Falluja, killing hundreds more civilians and driving 200,000 residents to live in the squalor of refugee camps–while dispersing the resistance fighters to other localities.</p>
<p>In mid-December, for example, Knight Ridder reported on a 41-year-old Iraqi woman, Kifah Khudhair, injured in a car bombing in Baghdad–whose rage was directed not at the car bombers, but at the Americans. “What can we do?” her son said. “These things happen every day, like looting and murder. I am angry at the Americans because it is all their fault. This is all because of them.”</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>* * *</p>
<p>IRAQIS SUPPORT the resistance against the U.S. occupation of their country for one simple reason: they want the Americans to get out–now.</p>
<p>Yet many in the U.S. antiwar movement have had difficulty accepting this black-and-white reasoning, preferring to see the world in shades of gray. “[Iraqi] jihadis or America’s terror-using hypocrites? If we are truly to stop the terrorists, the world must take sides against both,” wrote New Left veteran Steve Weissman recently on Truthout.</p>
<p>This argument by Weissman is faulty on two counts.</p>
<p>First, Weissman equates the 500-pound bombs and high-tech weapons used by the world’s biggest superpower occupying Iraq (at the cost of $7.8 billion per month) to the rocket-propelled grenades and roadside bombs of those resisting that occupation. One side aims to control Iraq to fulfill its grand plan to dominate the Middle East and its oil. The other merely seeks the right for Iraqis to determine their own future.</p>
<p>Some 100,000 Iraqi civilians are now estimated dead because of the war and occupation. This followed the roughly 1 million Iraqis killed from the deprivation caused by more than a decade of economic sanctions. And this followed a death toll of up to 200,000 in the 1991 Gulf War. Choosing sides should not be so difficult. Without for a moment endorsing the tactic of targeting civilians, which is used by parts of the resistance, the sheer magnitude of the death and destruction inflicted by the U.S. upon ordinary Iraqis should dispel any myth that the two sides in this war deserve equal condemnation.</p>
<p>Moreover, Weissman accepts at face value the Bush administration’s absurd characterization of the insurgency as dominated by “terrorists” and Islamic “extremists.”</p>
<p>On December 15, the Boston Globe published a report by Molly Bingham, who lived from August 2003 until June 2004 in Baghdad researching the resistance. She observed, “The composition of the Iraqi resistance is not what the U.S. administration has been calling it, and the more it is oversimplified, the harder it is to explain its complexity. I met Shia and Sunnis fighting together, women and men, young and old. I met people from all economic, social and educational backgrounds.”</p>
<p>She continued: “The original impetus for almost all of the individuals I spoke to was a nationalistic one–the desire to defend their country from occupation, not to defend Saddam Hussein or his regime.” Bingham’s conclusion should help focus the aims of every antiwar activist in the U.S.: “The resistance will continue until American influence has disappeared from Iraq’s political system.”</p>
<p>* * *</p>
<p>SUPPORT FOR the right of Iraqis to resist occupation must extend beyond an abstract principle for the U.S. antiwar movement.</p>
<p>While recognizing “the right of the Iraqi people to resist as a point of principle,” Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies–in widely circulated notes for a speech to the steering committee of United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) on December 18–argued, “We should not call for ‘supporting the resistance’ because we don’t know who most of them are and what they really stand for, and because of those we do know, we mostly don’t support their social program beyond opposition to the occupation.”</p>
<p>To be meaningful, however, supporting the “right to resist” must include support for that resistance once it actually emerges.</p>
<p>Award-winning Indian writer and global justice activist Arundhati Roy got to the heart of the issue in a San Francisco speech on August 16: “It is absurd to condemn the resistance to the U.S. occupation in Iraq, as being masterminded by terrorists,” she said. “After all, if the United States were invaded and occupied, would everybody who fought to liberate it be a terrorist?”</p>
<p>If we are waiting for the “ideologically pure” movement–assuming the unlikely scenario that all those opposed to the war could agree on one–we could be waiting forever.</p>
<p>As Roy explained, “Like most resistance movements, [the Iraqis] combine a motley range of assorted factions. Former Baathists, liberals, Islamists, fed-up collaborationists, communists, etc. Of course, it is riddled with opportunism, local rivalry, demagoguery and criminality. But if we were to only support pristine movements, then no resistance will be worthy of our purity.</p>
<p>“Before we prescribe how a pristine Iraqi resistance must conduct their secular, feminist, democratic, nonviolent battle, we should shore up our end of the resistance by forcing the U.S. and its allied governments to withdraw from Iraq.”</p>
<p>Focus on the Global South’s Walden Bello made a similar point in June. “What western progressives forget is that national liberation movements are not asking them mainly for ideological or political support,” he wrote. “What they really want from the outside is international pressure for the withdrawal of an illegitimate occupying power so that internal forces can have the space to forge a truly national government based on their unique processes. Until they give up this dream of having an ideal liberation movement tailored to their values and discourse, U.S. peace activists will, like the Democrats they often criticize, continue to be trapped within a paradigm of imposing terms for other people.”</p>
<p>* * *</p>
<p>THE U.S. antiwar movement should heed this advice and expend less energy in judging the character of the Iraqi resistance and more effort on building a visible resistance to the Iraq occupation from inside the U.S.</p>
<p>When the U.S. invaded Falluja and the Abu Ghraib torture scandal broke in the spring of 2004, the U.S. antiwar movement–already ensconced in its misguided effort to elect prowar John Kerry–declined to mount a visible response to these and other atrocities committed by the U.S. in Iraq, effectively sparing the Bush administration from the need to account for its war crimes.</p>
<p>The main challenge for antiwar activists in the United States is to rebuild a visible, national antiwar movement. That means opposing the January 30 election–held under martial law, which will effectively exclude 50 percent of the population–and supporting the resistance that exposes its utter hypocrisy.</p>
<p>Is this strategy too ambitious–too far to the left for “mainstream” America? That is unlikely, since a majority of Americans continue to oppose the war.</p>
<p>U.S. troops are also divided, and we need to actively support those troops who–at great personal risk–are resisting. The latest is U.S. Army Sgt. Kevin Benderman, who refused to redeploy to Iraq earlier this month after serving there from March to September 2003.</p>
<p>“The people that we are fighting now are for the most part people like you and me, people who are defending themselves against a superior military force and fighting to keep that which is rightfully theirs,” Benderman said. He added that the Iraqi people have the right to choose their own form of government, “just like we did in America after the revolution.”</p>
<p>The antiwar movement must not lose sight of the fact that its main enemy is at home–and any resistance to that enemy deserves our unconditional support.</p>
<p>SHARON SMITH writes for the <a href="http://www.socialistworker.org/" type="external">Socialist Worker</a>.</p> | true | 4 | iraqi resistance us occupation growing support among ordinary iraqis iraqs interim government recently admitted insurgency involves least 40000 hardcore fighters 200000 active sympathizersa far cry isolated 5000 baathist remnants foreign fighters pentagon initially claimed fighting usa todaygallup poll conducted march concluded insurgentsseem gaining broad acceptance outright support prous kurds make 13 percent poll taken equation half iraqis say killing us troops justified least cases shortly first siege falluja us forces killed 600 civilians armed resistance drove support resistance grown us bombs flattened falluja killing hundreds civilians driving 200000 residents live squalor refugee campswhile dispersing resistance fighters localities middecember example knight ridder reported 41yearold iraqi woman kifah khudhair injured car bombing baghdadwhose rage directed car bombers americans son said things happen every day like looting murder angry americans fault 160 iraqis support resistance us occupation country one simple reason want americans get outnow yet many us antiwar movement difficulty accepting blackandwhite reasoning preferring see world shades gray iraqi jihadis americas terrorusing hypocrites truly stop terrorists world must take sides wrote new left veteran steve weissman recently truthout argument weissman faulty two counts first weissman equates 500pound bombs hightech weapons used worlds biggest superpower occupying iraq cost 78 billion per month rocketpropelled grenades roadside bombs resisting occupation one side aims control iraq fulfill grand plan dominate middle east oil merely seeks right iraqis determine future 100000 iraqi civilians estimated dead war occupation followed roughly 1 million iraqis killed deprivation caused decade economic sanctions followed death toll 200000 1991 gulf war choosing sides difficult without moment endorsing tactic targeting civilians used parts resistance sheer magnitude death destruction inflicted us upon ordinary iraqis dispel myth two sides war deserve equal condemnation moreover weissman accepts face value bush administrations absurd characterization insurgency dominated terrorists islamic extremists december 15 boston globe published report molly bingham lived august 2003 june 2004 baghdad researching resistance observed composition iraqi resistance us administration calling oversimplified harder explain complexity met shia sunnis fighting together women men young old met people economic social educational backgrounds continued original impetus almost individuals spoke nationalistic onethe desire defend country occupation defend saddam hussein regime binghams conclusion help focus aims every antiwar activist us resistance continue american influence disappeared iraqs political system support right iraqis resist occupation must extend beyond abstract principle us antiwar movement recognizing right iraqi people resist point principle phyllis bennis institute policy studiesin widely circulated notes speech steering committee united peace justice ufpj december 18argued call supporting resistance dont know really stand know mostly dont support social program beyond opposition occupation meaningful however supporting right resist must include support resistance actually emerges awardwinning indian writer global justice activist arundhati roy got heart issue san francisco speech august 16 absurd condemn resistance us occupation iraq masterminded terrorists said united states invaded occupied would everybody fought liberate terrorist waiting ideologically pure movementassuming unlikely scenario opposed war could agree onewe could waiting forever roy explained like resistance movements iraqis combine motley range assorted factions former baathists liberals islamists fedup collaborationists communists etc course riddled opportunism local rivalry demagoguery criminality support pristine movements resistance worthy purity prescribe pristine iraqi resistance must conduct secular feminist democratic nonviolent battle shore end resistance forcing us allied governments withdraw iraq focus global souths walden bello made similar point june western progressives forget national liberation movements asking mainly ideological political support wrote really want outside international pressure withdrawal illegitimate occupying power internal forces space forge truly national government based unique processes give dream ideal liberation movement tailored values discourse us peace activists like democrats often criticize continue trapped within paradigm imposing terms people us antiwar movement heed advice expend less energy judging character iraqi resistance effort building visible resistance iraq occupation inside us us invaded falluja abu ghraib torture scandal broke spring 2004 us antiwar movementalready ensconced misguided effort elect prowar john kerrydeclined mount visible response atrocities committed us iraq effectively sparing bush administration need account war crimes main challenge antiwar activists united states rebuild visible national antiwar movement means opposing january 30 electionheld martial law effectively exclude 50 percent populationand supporting resistance exposes utter hypocrisy strategy ambitioustoo far left mainstream america unlikely since majority americans continue oppose war us troops also divided need actively support troops whoat great personal riskare resisting latest us army sgt kevin benderman refused redeploy iraq earlier month serving march september 2003 people fighting part people like people defending superior military force fighting keep rightfully benderman said added iraqi people right choose form government like america revolution antiwar movement must lose sight fact main enemy homeand resistance enemy deserves unconditional support sharon smith writes socialist worker | 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<p>I have before me one of those thumbnail accounts of the birth of rock–the most recent among many dozens, it doesn’t matter which. It says what they always say: that rock was born when white kids ripped off–and sanitized–the raw sexual energy of black blues, or rhythm and blues.</p>
<p>This used to be the standard account of how rock was born. We are now blessed with excellent rock historians like Greil Marcus, Peter Guralnik and a host of Europeans who write on the blues: they paint a far more complex picture. It provides background for what I will argue: that the ripoff version of rock history, in its very attempt to do justice to black artists, perpetuates the racial stereotypes it should be fighting.</p>
<p>The ripoff account rests on generalizations about black blues, and about other black music, that are offensively wrong. Some black music is indeed raw, but some is–has always been–exquisitely refined. Some is intensely sexual, made by tough-sounding black men and black women who boast of their erotic power. At least as often, relations between the sexes in black music have all the emotional range you would expect of relations between males and females anywhere. Charlie Spand (in Good Gal, 1929) doesn’t tell his babe he’s gonna put her down. He doesn’t have to get rollin’ down the road, doesn’t warn her she bettah change her ways or else. He speaks with the very same direct, cruel honestly that you hear in any culture when love grows cold:</p>
<p>You wonder why I treat you so, You should have sense enough to know, Good gal, good gal, I don’t love you no more, Good gal, good gal, I don’t love you no more</p>
<p>–and the painful words are belied by his beautiful, almost fragmentary piano. The guitar fills by Josh White are complex, delicate figures, a thousand music miles from the tough-guy licks that today form the public face of blues music. And much more could be said in the same vein. Blues singers, often as not, do not have slap-your-bitch deep he-man voices. Often–and this goes for some of the genuine tough guys, like Huddie Leadbetter–they have high voices, not deep, ‘manly’ ones.</p>
<p>The prevailing atmosphere of many blues numbers is not raw defiance but–unsurprisingly–anxiety. Maceo Merriweather is quite shaken to wake up and find his girlfriend standing over him with a .45; he pleads for his life. The incomparable Jimmy Yancey doesn’t conjure up a violent or sex-charged world; he evokes an atmosphere of quiet contemplation. And when Peetie Wheatstraw sings sex, he doesn’t come over like a big black stallion; he has, as one critic noted, a ‘lazy, arrogant’ delivery, full of irony and wit.</p>
<p>No doubt there is much to learn from considering black blues as the product and possession of an ethnic group. But familiarity with that music quickly proves that stereotypes about the blues are as wrong as stereotypes about the race–and crude histories of rock build on both these stereotypes. When you begin to consider the music in all its diversity, you realize that there it doesn’t just involve a huge range of subject material, mood, and presentation. It also involves a huge range of quality. To tell the full story, you need to do a lot of something that even good rock historians do very sparingly. You need to make aesthetic judgements within the area of black music, just as people habitually make them within the area of white music.</p>
<p>To put it bluntly, you can’t trace the careers of black and white music without acknowledging that some blues ‘artists’–even the most ‘authentic’- are mediocre, and some stink. This is what you would expect of any music played by a large number of people who are themselves diverse. And it is only by recognizing this range of quality, by distinguishing the masters from the second- and third- and twelveth-raters, that the great achievements of black music can be honored as they deserve. No one can, with a straight face, put ‘the blues’ up against Mozart or Beethoven. No amount of wishful thinking will make, say, Sonny Terry or Furry Lewis, into great artists. It is only when you admit how three or four black artists–among them, I’d think, Robert Johnson and Little Walter–utterly dwarfed those around them, that you can speak of black Mozarts and Beethovens. And of course black audiences have always been ruthless in their evaluations of second-raters: you won’t find many black Sonny Terry worshippers. On the other hand, Robert Johnson’s contemporaries said that he–the black Faust–must have sold his soul to the devil to play like that.</p>
<p>Once aesthetic judgements are plugged into musical history, a number of things become apparent, including the absurdity of dating white attempts at blues from the mid-1950s. What matters here is not that a few minor white artists like Harmonica Frank mastered the black blues idiom to the extent that passed for black among the black record-buying public. The answers to “can a white man play the blues?” have little interest compared to the real interplay between rhythm and race.</p>
<p>Black blues and white music have intertwined since before the dawn of recording history. Of course there is no question but that the blues are black music, created by blacks for blacks. But by the time the first blues–if you can call it that–was recorded by the black nightclub singer Mamie Smith in 1920, the blues were already something of a half-breed.(*) Her orchestra, for instance, was probably the same one that backed the white (and sometimes blackface) singer Sophie Tucker. It was a jazz ensemble and quite far removed from blues roots. The first recorded blues were therefore already ‘sanitized’. This may be part of the reason why <a href="http://www.openair.org/maxwell/papacj.html" type="external">one writer on the history of the blues</a> tactfully tells us that</p>
<p>“The first commercially successful self-accompanied artist in the “race field” was Papa Charlie Jackson…”</p>
<p>You could also say that Papa Charlie Jackson was the first artist to record a blues not tailored to the night-club environment of Mamie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Bessie Smith. He did that in 1924. In the same year–before Blind Lemon Jefferson, before Charley Patton, twelve years before Robert Johnson–the white songster Uncle Dave Macon recorded Hill Billie Blues. It was this song–a blues!–which brought the word ‘hillbilly’ into music. Years before the earliest known masters of the blues recorded, blues and country music were already interbreeding.</p>
<p>The intermingling of musical traditions was not confined to the blues format. Papa Charley Jackson and Uncle Dave Macon both recorded their numbers on banjo. This was a kind of historical crossroads: not so long before that, guitar was a white instrument, and banjo a black instrument. So black people ‘stole’ Robert Johnson’s instrument from the whites, and bluegrass–not blues or rock–owes its soul to an instrument ‘stolen’ from black people.</p>
<p>The commerce between black and white music was not intermittent but constant. White musicians never produced really first-rate blues–though Jimmie Rogers, recording nine years before Robert Johnson, came fairly close. On the other hand, white artists had developed their own version of the music, nothing like a ripoff or a cover technique, long before the blues had even begun to evolve into a precursor of rock and roll. Even more important, the great black artists had long ago both appreciated and incorporated white idioms into their music.</p>
<p>This should not be surprising. Black artists–sometimes to the annoyance of their white fans and patrons–have always shown a fondness for all kinds of white musical idioms. The jug bands of the 1920’s are one example. Another is Blind Willie McTell, who covered such white tunes as “Pal of Mine” and “Wabash Cannonball”. In one remarkable number, “Don’t Say Goodbye”, Leroy Carr does about half the song as a perfectly nice but predictable blues and then–one almost imagines him saying, “Oh, screw it”–finishes the track as what can only be described as a country song. Some of Washboard Sam’s finest numbers, like “Good Old Cabbage Greens”, are as close to country as to blues. Black blues musicians were people, not stereotypes. They loved music, all kinds of music. They were not concerned with the racial purity of their own work.</p>
<p>Even Robert Johnson, who more than anyone else formed contemporary notions of the blues, was happy to play little decidedly unbluesy jingles like “Hot Tamales”. Yet Robert Johnson had a fateful and perhaps fatal influence on the development of the blues: he was so toweringly, utterly brilliant, and his influence so overwhelmingly powerful, that he did much to push the blues towards the stereotype under which it suffers today. For one thing, Mississippi Delta Blues, which itself showed great range in the works of earlier artists like Charley Patton and King Solomon Hill, was all but reduced to the work of the master who overshadowed his predecessors, themselves artists of the highest calibre. For another, Robert Johnson became virtually the single source of modern Chicago blues. Elmore James, a superb artist, all but built his entire career on one Johnson lick. Muddy Waters shaped the music by electrifying some small portion of Robert Johnson’s guitar work. The whole rest of the blues–not only the blues of Texas, Atlanta, and the Carolinas, but also the fine piano blues that fluorished in Northern cities like Detroit and Chicago itself, became at best a sideshow, more often, an obscurity. Paradoxically, Johnson’s very brilliance, his very inventiveness, ultimately impoverished the music of which he was the greatest exponent. Virtually the whole range of black blues was theoretically available well into the 1950s, but it had a minimal public presence, even among blacks. People wanted to hear it Robert Johnson style, even if they’d never heard of the man.</p>
<p>More ominously, and increasingly, they didn’t want to hear it at all. By the time white musicians were imitating the blues–not as they had done for decades, but in that special way that produced rock and roll–the blues was on its deathbed. The rock and rollers might have covered black material, but they also gave it new life. Black people, apparently unwilling to confirm expectations about their raw, sexual, violent nature, had to a great extent gone on to other things. From just around the time of Robert Johnson’s last recordings in 1938, new trends were taking over. That was the year Louis Jordan started recording. His work was quick, slick, witty, and almost joyfully lighthearted even when it tackled serious subjects. But it was also, at its best, music of the highest quality, something that commanded attention. If its approach was not so different from some of the urban blues of the time, it was miles away from the aggressive, ultraserious idiom that was on its way to becoming modern Chicago blues. And black people as well as white loved it, just as they loved that man who collaborated, not only with Jordan, but with Jimmie Rogers–Louis Armstrong. From the jive of Louis Jordan and the urban blues of the 1930s came rhythm and blues, usually considered the precursor of rock and roll.</p>
<p>At about the same time another trend in black music surfaced with the Ink Spots, who started recording in 1935 and were best sellers from 1939 to 1943. They were the first really famous black vocal group. Like Louis Jordan, they may have been popular because they provided relief from the stark, dark, rough blues which had begun to wear out its welcome. But they also became popular because, like Louis Jordan, they were damn good. They didn’t produce a mere sell-out; they produced something new and even beautiful.</p>
<p>The short of it is that whites did not rip blues off in the 1950s. Blacks and whites played each other’s music as far back as we can hear, and each contributed to the development of the others’ music. And the blues did not develop forever. It also narrowed, at least in public perceptions, and declined. Meanwhile, blacks explored and forged other musical paths, typically further and further away from the ‘raw sexual’ stereotypes.</p>
<p>And here, as we approach the birth of rock and roll, qualitative judgements become all the more important. On the one hand, blacks increasingly turned away from hard-core blues. This was partly obscured by the appearance of another musical giant, Little Walter, who topped the R&amp;B charts in the early 1950s and made it seem as if Chicago blues was a true art form, robust and musically nuanced. Not so. Chicago blues involved many excellent artists like Muddy Waters, Junior Wells, Magic Sam, Otis Span, and Elmore James. But it never again produced anyone like Little Walter. Its best work was laced, not only with clichés, but obvious and desperate efforts to avoid them. There was no greatness, no beauty, and black audiences turned their attention elsewhere. The music, after Little Walter’s masterpieces, failed to command a national black following, let alone a white one. Little Walter–whose “My Babe” in 1955 was the last Chicago blues to make number one on the R&amp;B charts–had a total of two number 1 R&amp;B hits. So did the Everly Brothers. Muddy Waters never made it past number 4. Unlike Elvis and Nat King Cole, not one Chicago blues player appears in the top 60 R&amp;B artists’ listings. There are still many fine black blues musicians, but their music is going nowhere. The blues has left a beautiful corpse, but it is dead.</p>
<p>What then of rhythm and blues–not the catchall category of today, but the classic numbers that preceded rock and roll? If the white kids didn’t steal the blues, did they steal R&amp;B?</p>
<p>There are four problems with any such claim.</p>
<p>The first is that some of the very greatest R&amp;B hits of the early 1950s–Little Willie Littlefield’s “Kansas City”, Big Mamma Thornton’s “Hound Dog”, Charles Brown’s “Hard Times”, The Robins’ “Riot in Cell Block 9”–were written by two whites, Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller. They were not alone–Nat King Cole’s wonderful Route 66 also had white authorship.(**) Johnny Otis, a white band leader who lived as if he was black, was central to the careers of several important R&amp;B artists. Moreover, an astounding number of the greatest R&amp;B hits came from white producers like Sam Phillips and Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records–this at a time when the studio owners didn’t just sign papers and rake in cash, but would help out with the writing chores, clap out a beat, or even join in on a chorus. It was precisely the bluesier, rougher sort of R&amp;B–the kind that had the most influence on rock and roll–that also had the most influential white involvement.</p>
<p>The second problem is that Elvis’ original Sun sessions, the sessions that make rock and roll, were not mere covers. To varying degrees, they radically changed the quality of the music: his performances were neither R&amp;B nor sanitized pseudo-R&amp;B, but something with a more nervously frantic, less precisely rhythmic, with a pronounced country sensibility. The third is that, whether or not whites can play the blues, they certainly mastered R&amp;B before rock and roll. Moon Mullican’s compositions–recorded with King Record’s black studio band–are ample evidence of that. Finally, when the ripoff account is offered, you have to pay close attention to chronology. Elvis first recorded in 1954. The black ‘kings’ of rock and roll–Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Bo Diddley–recorded later. Even Big Joe Turner’s unambiguously rock numbers came after Elvis’, and were a wonderful but also a patent attempt to cash in on the new sensibility.</p>
<p>Beyond arguments about who took what from whom, something more fundamental shows how the ripoff account is an injustice to black music. As black artists and black audiences moved away from the blues, they did not simply move towards R&amp;B in the narrow sense of blues-oriented electric combos. They did not gravitate towards the tough stuff, nor was it here that they truly excelled in some way they could call entirely their own. On the contrary, the greatest achievements in black R&amp;B were not the over-the-top rough-hewn numbers of someone like Howlin’ Wolf, who never made the R&amp;B charts. Black music prospered in two forms.</p>
<p>First, there were the exquisitely urbane and sophisticated piano numbers of people like Cecil Gant, Willie Mabon, Camille Howard, Amos Milburn, and others. This music was very popular with black audiences, but white never gave it the attention accorded to Big Joe Turner, Howlin’ Wolf, Big Mama Thornton, and similar artists. It seems that white audiences would rather lavish praise on black artists who fit the stereotypes–the big mama, the animal, the 300-pound night club bouncer. It is telling that when Joe Turner recorded with one of the greatest exponents of subtle, intricate, refined piano blues–Pete Johnson–he got nothing like the response he received in the persona of a big lusty black guy.</p>
<p>Then there was the sweet, sometimes naïve, unbluesy world of doo-wop. It is not in violent, sexual music that postwar black artists achieved fame and excellence. Perhaps whites can sing the blues, but they never quite equalled the either the elegance of the postwar black pianists, or the utter sweetness of the vocal groups.</p>
<p>Doo-wop and its precursors drew on gospel and a variety of white music, including barbership quartets. They almost always avoided blues, but ‘stole’ all sorts of white pop material, and there are even musical versions of Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees”. The earlier groups were often composed of highly professional, very disciplined adults: there were not only practices, but fines imposed for those who missed them. Yet doo-wop has been trivialized as the more or less inconsequential music of cute but amateurish high-school kids. The magnificent recordings of the Orioles, Dominoes, Flamingos, Five Keys, Five Royales and other groups will not receive the broad recognition they deserve as long as white audiences care only for black popular music that fits the tough, sexual stereotype.</p>
<p>It was doo-wop–sweet, beautiful, innocent, gentle music–that set black youth on fire. The black counterpart of the rockabilly bands that kids across the South assembled had nothing to do with the blues, nothing to do even with the hard-edged R&amp;B that influenced white rock and roll. While white kids were forming hard-driving combos playing in a blues idiom, black kids in their tens of thousands were forming vocal groups whose music had left the blues far, far behind. Black rock and roll artists had far more impact on white youth than on black youth, whose gospel-drenched harmonies fed into Motown and soul. While white musicians mined a blues tradition that no longer lived in black sensibilities, it was doo wop that really ruled the streets of the ghettos. Black musicians by and large wouldn’t have been caught dead covering Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson like the Rolling Stones, and the leading black rockers of the fifties–Bo Diddley, Little Richard and Chuck Berry–never did nearly as well on the black music charts as Elvis. Far exceeding all of these on the black charts were Ray Charles and Fats Domino, whose relaxed style fits awkwardly with the ‘they stole black raw sexuality’ historians. When the great harpist Sonny Boy Williamson (Rice Miller) at last attained some popular success, it was with those whitest of black music afficionados, the Yardbirds. The idea that he would have played with any popular black group recording at the same time is simply inconceivable.</p>
<p>None of this is in any way to deny what clichéd histories of rock and roll affirm: that in music as in everything else, blacks were shamefully robbed and exploited. Black artists encountered racism almost everywhere they went, and, though black record producers also exploited black musicians, most of the ripoffs were at the hands of white recording entrepreneurs. But the injustices of the ripoff account, which all but dismiss the true geniuses of black music as mere instances of the black stereotype, are as outrageous as the very robberies so justly condemned.</p>
<p>——————————————————————————–</p>
<p>(*) You could say the same for country music. The very first song on the Grand Old Opry in 1926 was “Pan American Blues”, performed by the black harmonica player DeFord Bailey.</p>
<p>(**) As for black songwriters, perhaps the greatest of them was Otis Blackwell. Here is his account of his musical formation:</p>
<p>“TBE–Who were some of your early influences?”</p>
<p>“OB–Tex Ritter was my idol. In my neighborhood there was a movie theatre called the Tompkins. I used to sit from morning to night watching cowboy pictures. I grew up with cowboys–Tex was my man. I would have preferred to sing country but when I went out I used to sing ‘Ill Get Along Somehow,’ by Larry Darnell, that was one of the songs I enjoyed doing. Larry Darnell and Chuck Willis were two other idols.” see <a href="http://www.kyleesplin.com/jllsb/JLLSBDIR/pages/68apage.htm" type="external">http://www.kyleesplin.com/</a></p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>MICHAEL NEUMANN is a professor of philosophy at Trent University in Ontario, Canada. Professor Neumann’s views are not to be taken as those of his university. His book <a href="" type="internal">What’s Left: Radical Politics and the Radical Psyche</a> has just been republished by Broadview Press. He can be reached at: <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected].</a></p>
<p>&#160;</p> | true | 4 | 160 one thumbnail accounts birth rockthe recent among many dozens doesnt matter says always say rock born white kids ripped offand sanitizedthe raw sexual energy black blues rhythm blues used standard account rock born blessed excellent rock historians like greil marcus peter guralnik host europeans write blues paint far complex picture provides background argue ripoff version rock history attempt justice black artists perpetuates racial stereotypes fighting ripoff account rests generalizations black blues black music offensively wrong black music indeed raw ishas always beenexquisitely refined intensely sexual made toughsounding black men black women boast erotic power least often relations sexes black music emotional range would expect relations males females anywhere charlie spand good gal 1929 doesnt tell babe hes gon na put doesnt get rollin road doesnt warn bettah change ways else speaks direct cruel honestly hear culture love grows cold wonder treat sense enough know good gal good gal dont love good gal good gal dont love painful words belied beautiful almost fragmentary piano guitar fills josh white complex delicate figures thousand music miles toughguy licks today form public face blues music much could said vein blues singers often slapyourbitch deep heman voices oftenand goes genuine tough guys like huddie leadbetterthey high voices deep manly ones prevailing atmosphere many blues numbers raw defiance butunsurprisinglyanxiety maceo merriweather quite shaken wake find girlfriend standing 45 pleads life incomparable jimmy yancey doesnt conjure violent sexcharged world evokes atmosphere quiet contemplation peetie wheatstraw sings sex doesnt come like big black stallion one critic noted lazy arrogant delivery full irony wit doubt much learn considering black blues product possession ethnic group familiarity music quickly proves stereotypes blues wrong stereotypes raceand crude histories rock build stereotypes begin consider music diversity realize doesnt involve huge range subject material mood presentation also involves huge range quality tell full story need lot something even good rock historians sparingly need make aesthetic judgements within area black music people habitually make within area white music put bluntly cant trace careers black white music without acknowledging blues artistseven authentic mediocre stink would expect music played large number people diverse recognizing range quality distinguishing masters second third twelvethraters great achievements black music honored deserve one straight face put blues mozart beethoven amount wishful thinking make say sonny terry furry lewis great artists admit three four black artistsamong id think robert johnson little walterutterly dwarfed around speak black mozarts beethovens course black audiences always ruthless evaluations secondraters wont find many black sonny terry worshippers hand robert johnsons contemporaries said hethe black faustmust sold soul devil play like aesthetic judgements plugged musical history number things become apparent including absurdity dating white attempts blues mid1950s matters minor white artists like harmonica frank mastered black blues idiom extent passed black among black recordbuying public answers white man play blues little interest compared real interplay rhythm race black blues white music intertwined since dawn recording history course question blues black music created blacks blacks time first bluesif call thatwas recorded black nightclub singer mamie smith 1920 blues already something halfbreed orchestra instance probably one backed white sometimes blackface singer sophie tucker jazz ensemble quite far removed blues roots first recorded blues therefore already sanitized may part reason one writer history blues tactfully tells us first commercially successful selfaccompanied artist race field papa charlie jackson could also say papa charlie jackson first artist record blues tailored nightclub environment mamie smith rainey bessie smith 1924 yearbefore blind lemon jefferson charley patton twelve years robert johnsonthe white songster uncle dave macon recorded hill billie blues songa blueswhich brought word hillbilly music years earliest known masters blues recorded blues country music already interbreeding intermingling musical traditions confined blues format papa charley jackson uncle dave macon recorded numbers banjo kind historical crossroads long guitar white instrument banjo black instrument black people stole robert johnsons instrument whites bluegrassnot blues rockowes soul instrument stolen black people commerce black white music intermittent constant white musicians never produced really firstrate bluesthough jimmie rogers recording nine years robert johnson came fairly close hand white artists developed version music nothing like ripoff cover technique long blues even begun evolve precursor rock roll even important great black artists long ago appreciated incorporated white idioms music surprising black artistssometimes annoyance white fans patronshave always shown fondness kinds white musical idioms jug bands 1920s one example another blind willie mctell covered white tunes pal mine wabash cannonball one remarkable number dont say goodbye leroy carr half song perfectly nice predictable blues thenone almost imagines saying oh screw itfinishes track described country song washboard sams finest numbers like good old cabbage greens close country blues black blues musicians people stereotypes loved music kinds music concerned racial purity work even robert johnson anyone else formed contemporary notions blues happy play little decidedly unbluesy jingles like hot tamales yet robert johnson fateful perhaps fatal influence development blues toweringly utterly brilliant influence overwhelmingly powerful much push blues towards stereotype suffers today one thing mississippi delta blues showed great range works earlier artists like charley patton king solomon hill reduced work master overshadowed predecessors artists highest calibre another robert johnson became virtually single source modern chicago blues elmore james superb artist built entire career one johnson lick muddy waters shaped music electrifying small portion robert johnsons guitar work whole rest bluesnot blues texas atlanta carolinas also fine piano blues fluorished northern cities like detroit chicago became best sideshow often obscurity paradoxically johnsons brilliance inventiveness ultimately impoverished music greatest exponent virtually whole range black blues theoretically available well 1950s minimal public presence even among blacks people wanted hear robert johnson style even theyd never heard man ominously increasingly didnt want hear time white musicians imitating bluesnot done decades special way produced rock rollthe blues deathbed rock rollers might covered black material also gave new life black people apparently unwilling confirm expectations raw sexual violent nature great extent gone things around time robert johnsons last recordings 1938 new trends taking year louis jordan started recording work quick slick witty almost joyfully lighthearted even tackled serious subjects also best music highest quality something commanded attention approach different urban blues time miles away aggressive ultraserious idiom way becoming modern chicago blues black people well white loved loved man collaborated jordan jimmie rogerslouis armstrong jive louis jordan urban blues 1930s came rhythm blues usually considered precursor rock roll time another trend black music surfaced ink spots started recording 1935 best sellers 1939 1943 first really famous black vocal group like louis jordan may popular provided relief stark dark rough blues begun wear welcome also became popular like louis jordan damn good didnt produce mere sellout produced something new even beautiful short whites rip blues 1950s blacks whites played others music far back hear contributed development others music blues develop forever also narrowed least public perceptions declined meanwhile blacks explored forged musical paths typically away raw sexual stereotypes approach birth rock roll qualitative judgements become important one hand blacks increasingly turned away hardcore blues partly obscured appearance another musical giant little walter topped rampb charts early 1950s made seem chicago blues true art form robust musically nuanced chicago blues involved many excellent artists like muddy waters junior wells magic sam otis span elmore james never produced anyone like little walter best work laced clichés obvious desperate efforts avoid greatness beauty black audiences turned attention elsewhere music little walters masterpieces failed command national black following let alone white one little walterwhose babe 1955 last chicago blues make number one rampb chartshad total two number 1 rampb hits everly brothers muddy waters never made past number 4 unlike elvis nat king cole one chicago blues player appears top 60 rampb artists listings still many fine black blues musicians music going nowhere blues left beautiful corpse dead rhythm bluesnot catchall category today classic numbers preceded rock roll white kids didnt steal blues steal rampb four problems claim first greatest rampb hits early 1950slittle willie littlefields kansas city big mamma thorntons hound dog charles browns hard times robins riot cell block 9were written two whites jerry lieber mike stoller alonenat king coles wonderful route 66 also white authorship johnny otis white band leader lived black central careers several important rampb artists moreover astounding number greatest rampb hits came white producers like sam phillips ahmet ertegun atlantic recordsthis time studio owners didnt sign papers rake cash would help writing chores clap beat even join chorus precisely bluesier rougher sort rampbthe kind influence rock rollthat also influential white involvement second problem elvis original sun sessions sessions make rock roll mere covers varying degrees radically changed quality music performances neither rampb sanitized pseudorampb something nervously frantic less precisely rhythmic pronounced country sensibility third whether whites play blues certainly mastered rampb rock roll moon mullicans compositionsrecorded king records black studio bandare ample evidence finally ripoff account offered pay close attention chronology elvis first recorded 1954 black kings rock rollchuck berry little richard bo diddleyrecorded later even big joe turners unambiguously rock numbers came elvis wonderful also patent attempt cash new sensibility beyond arguments took something fundamental shows ripoff account injustice black music black artists black audiences moved away blues simply move towards rampb narrow sense bluesoriented electric combos gravitate towards tough stuff truly excelled way could call entirely contrary greatest achievements black rampb overthetop roughhewn numbers someone like howlin wolf never made rampb charts black music prospered two forms first exquisitely urbane sophisticated piano numbers people like cecil gant willie mabon camille howard amos milburn others music popular black audiences white never gave attention accorded big joe turner howlin wolf big mama thornton similar artists seems white audiences would rather lavish praise black artists fit stereotypesthe big mama animal 300pound night club bouncer telling joe turner recorded one greatest exponents subtle intricate refined piano bluespete johnsonhe got nothing like response received persona big lusty black guy sweet sometimes naïve unbluesy world doowop violent sexual music postwar black artists achieved fame excellence perhaps whites sing blues never quite equalled either elegance postwar black pianists utter sweetness vocal groups doowop precursors drew gospel variety white music including barbership quartets almost always avoided blues stole sorts white pop material even musical versions joyce kilmers trees earlier groups often composed highly professional disciplined adults practices fines imposed missed yet doowop trivialized less inconsequential music cute amateurish highschool kids magnificent recordings orioles dominoes flamingos five keys five royales groups receive broad recognition deserve long white audiences care black popular music fits tough sexual stereotype doowopsweet beautiful innocent gentle musicthat set black youth fire black counterpart rockabilly bands kids across south assembled nothing blues nothing even hardedged rampb influenced white rock roll white kids forming harddriving combos playing blues idiom black kids tens thousands forming vocal groups whose music left blues far far behind black rock roll artists far impact white youth black youth whose gospeldrenched harmonies fed motown soul white musicians mined blues tradition longer lived black sensibilities doo wop really ruled streets ghettos black musicians large wouldnt caught dead covering muddy waters robert johnson like rolling stones leading black rockers fiftiesbo diddley little richard chuck berrynever nearly well black music charts elvis far exceeding black charts ray charles fats domino whose relaxed style fits awkwardly stole black raw sexuality historians great harpist sonny boy williamson rice miller last attained popular success whitest black music afficionados yardbirds idea would played popular black group recording time simply inconceivable none way deny clichéd histories rock roll affirm music everything else blacks shamefully robbed exploited black artists encountered racism almost everywhere went though black record producers also exploited black musicians ripoffs hands white recording entrepreneurs injustices ripoff account dismiss true geniuses black music mere instances black stereotype outrageous robberies justly condemned could say country music first song grand old opry 1926 pan american blues performed black harmonica player deford bailey black songwriters perhaps greatest otis blackwell account musical formation tbewho early influences obtex ritter idol neighborhood movie theatre called tompkins used sit morning night watching cowboy pictures grew cowboystex man would preferred sing country went used sing ill get along somehow larry darnell one songs enjoyed larry darnell chuck willis two idols see httpwwwkyleesplincom 160 michael neumann professor philosophy trent university ontario canada professor neumanns views taken university book whats left radical politics radical psyche republished broadview press reached mneumanntrentuca 160 | 2,032 |
<p>My social media feeds are filled with dead children. Small bodies, washing up on the shores of a Mediterranean beach.</p>
<p>Why are they washing up on the shores? European governments want us to blame traffickers. The advantage of blaming traffickers is that it actually licenses those governments to implement even more repressive measures. But traffickers are only out to make a quick buck off the system that European governments have created.</p>
<p>It is incredibly difficult to get into “Fortress Europe” as a refugee. Apart from all the legal obstacles, according to the&#160; <a href="http://ecre.org/component/content/article/70-weekly-bulletin-articles/486-pro-asyl-accuses-greece-of-systematically-pushing-back-refugees-at-the-greek-turkish-border.html" type="external">European Council of Refugees and Exiles</a>,&#160;even refugees face a policy of “illegal pushback,” wherein Greek government forces illegitimately use violence and threats to prevent those seeking asylum — many coming from Syria via Turkey — from entering the European Union.</p>
<p>If they go through Bulgaria, they are locked up in prison “camps.” &#160;They live on miserly rations of food, in what&#160;Amnesty International <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/articles/news/2013/11/bulgaria-inhuman-conditions-spark-protest-refugee-camp/" type="external">calls</a>&#160;cruel and inhumane conditions, and live in fear of&#160; <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/articles/news/2013/11/bulgaria-migrants-living-fear-after-xenophobic-attacks/" type="external">racist attacks</a>.&#160;If they try to cross&#160; <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-28770346" type="external">from Morocco to Spain</a>, or from Libya to Italy, they risk sinking to their deaths in the middle of the Mediterranean.</p>
<p>And this is the context in which there is an emergency at sea. As the&#160; <a href="http://publications.iom.int/bookstore/free/FatalJourneys_CountingtheUncounted.pdf" type="external">International Organisation of Migration</a>&#160;points out,&#160;there has been a drastic ramping up of border controls, particularly maritime border controls in Europe, particularly in the form of Operation Triton — a repressive counter-migration measure often misleadingly described as a search and rescue operation.</p>
<p>This partly explains why the rate of deaths is drastically increasing in the Mediterranean, while decreasing in other parts of the world. Denied other means to travel, denied legal entry as refugees, migrants&#160; <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/aylan-kurdi-syrian-boys-family-took-deadly-voyage-after-canada-refused-refugee-application-10483968.html" type="external">take the boat</a>. And it’s a rickety boat, sailing in precarious conditions, under circumstances of terrifying surveillance.</p>
<p>As&#160;Al Jazeera <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/2014/09/deadliest-year-migrants-crossing-med-201492916854120649.html" type="external">reported</a>&#160;last year, the number of deaths in the Mediterranean sea is rising — over three thousand&#160;in the first nine months of 2014, the worst figure since the beginning of the century, adding to the total of forty thousand who&#160; <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2014/09/30/world/migrant-deaths/" type="external">CNN said</a>&#160;have died like this across the world since 2000. A humanitarian catastrophe.</p>
<p>Most of the bodies don’t wash up on the shore. &#160;Most of them are never recovered; the ones that are usually don’t have documents. No one knows who they are, or even what sex&#160;they&#160;are in most cases.</p>
<p>At long last, there is a backlash. People may get swept up in racist propaganda, but nobody likes to think of themselves as so brutally inhumane that they’d let cheerfully let children drown at sea. The European governments are being shamed into accepting some refugees, although the British government remains intransigent. The&#160; <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4aed6842-518a-11e5-b029-b9d50a74fd14.html#axzz3kfPgl8L6" type="external">Financial Times</a> reports:</p>
<p>During the negotiations on relocating 40,000 refugees earlier this summer, one EU diplomat said British officials joked that they would take zero people “and double that if they were really pushed.”</p>
<p>But it’s important to say that these refugees only constitute a small minority of the immigrants within and coming to the European Union. The success of anti-immigrant racism depends on us accepting the idea that Europe “can’t take” so many migrants. But the fact is that most immigrants to Europe arrive by air, with work visas. When you see statistics claiming a large number of “illegal immigrants,” the majority of that is migrants whose visa ran out while they were at their work placement.</p>
<p>Thus, it is not that Europe “can’t take” the number of immigrants that arrive, which consideration can only be temporarily set aside in emergencies. It is that European economies need, and depend upon the immigrants that arrive. The determination of the European Union to maintain a “fortress” has nothing to do with the supposed material burden that refugees place upon those states, and far more to do with the political management of the labor&#160;force.</p>
<p>But in setting up non-nationals as parasites, as a burden, as usurpers of national resources, and so on, European governments and their loyal media are generating a dangerous political fantasy.</p>
<p>Ultimately, if the migrants coming&#160;to Europe are&#160;a problem, then the ones who are already there&#160;(first, second, or third generation, depending on how one is racially coded) must also be a problem. No matter that they have citizenship, the mere fact that we put up with such a burden, according to this logic, is a sign of “our” benevolence, generosity, and tolerance.</p>
<p>But that can only be pushed so far, and in moments of crisis, when the economy is depressed, when newspapers tell us that Europe is being driven to the brink of civil war by immigration, when cultural diversity is no longer a bland multicultural shibboleth but actually fighting talk .&#160;.&#160;. well, if “they” are a problem, wouldn’t it be nice if we could somehow, not have to live with “them” any more? That’s the fantasy which ultimately grounds support for <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/nigel-farage" type="external">Farageism</a>, Trumpism, or at worst <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/marine-le-pen" type="external">Marine Le Pen</a> and&#160; <a href="" type="internal">Golden Dawn</a>.</p>
<p>And that is also the limitation of humanitarianism in this situation. As I see it, it is not that despite all the racism and xenophobia some baseline, fundamental human sympathy has kicked in.</p>
<p>Rather, what we are witnessing playing out is what in good old-fashioned Marxist terminology might be called the contradictions of the dominant ideology. The liberal-humanitarian element of European ideology has come into stark and obvious conflict with the nationalist and racist elements.</p>
<p>And it is good that the liberal-humanitarian reflex is prevailing for now. That does give antiracists breathing space and an angle from which to attack the fortress: for now, <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/refugees-welcome-campaign-leading-politicians-and-tens-of-thousands-back-the-independents-campaign--so-when-will-david-cameron-act-10484022.html" type="external">the slogan</a> “Refugees are welcome here” has a clear resonance. But it doesn’t in itself affect the underlying ideological coordinates according to which immigrants are a burden, and a menace, and a problem population to be controlled.</p>
<p>We shouldn’t expect the momentary shock of devastation and disaster to do our political work for us.</p> | true | 4 | social media feeds filled dead children small bodies washing shores mediterranean beach washing shores european governments want us blame traffickers advantage blaming traffickers actually licenses governments implement even repressive measures traffickers make quick buck system european governments created incredibly difficult get fortress europe refugee apart legal obstacles according the160 european council refugees exiles160even refugees face policy illegal pushback wherein greek government forces illegitimately use violence threats prevent seeking asylum many coming syria via turkey entering european union go bulgaria locked prison camps 160they live miserly rations food what160amnesty international calls160cruel inhumane conditions live fear of160 racist attacks160if try cross160 morocco spain libya italy risk sinking deaths middle mediterranean context emergency sea the160 international organisation migration160points out160there drastic ramping border controls particularly maritime border controls europe particularly form operation triton repressive countermigration measure often misleadingly described search rescue operation partly explains rate deaths drastically increasing mediterranean decreasing parts world denied means travel denied legal entry refugees migrants160 take boat rickety boat sailing precarious conditions circumstances terrifying surveillance as160al jazeera reported160last year number deaths mediterranean sea rising three thousand160in first nine months 2014 worst figure since beginning century adding total forty thousand who160 cnn said160have died like across world since 2000 humanitarian catastrophe bodies dont wash shore 160most never recovered ones usually dont documents one knows even sex160they160are cases long last backlash people may get swept racist propaganda nobody likes think brutally inhumane theyd let cheerfully let children drown sea european governments shamed accepting refugees although british government remains intransigent the160 financial times reports negotiations relocating 40000 refugees earlier summer one eu diplomat said british officials joked would take zero people double really pushed important say refugees constitute small minority immigrants within coming european union success antiimmigrant racism depends us accepting idea europe cant take many migrants fact immigrants europe arrive air work visas see statistics claiming large number illegal immigrants majority migrants whose visa ran work placement thus europe cant take number immigrants arrive consideration temporarily set aside emergencies european economies need depend upon immigrants arrive determination european union maintain fortress nothing supposed material burden refugees place upon states far political management labor160force setting nonnationals parasites burden usurpers national resources european governments loyal media generating dangerous political fantasy ultimately migrants coming160to europe are160a problem ones already there160first second third generation depending one racially coded must also problem matter citizenship mere fact put burden according logic sign benevolence generosity tolerance pushed far moments crisis economy depressed newspapers tell us europe driven brink civil war immigration cultural diversity longer bland multicultural shibboleth actually fighting talk 160160 well problem wouldnt nice could somehow live thats fantasy ultimately grounds support farageism trumpism worst marine le pen and160 golden dawn also limitation humanitarianism situation see despite racism xenophobia baseline fundamental human sympathy kicked rather witnessing playing good oldfashioned marxist terminology might called contradictions dominant ideology liberalhumanitarian element european ideology come stark obvious conflict nationalist racist elements good liberalhumanitarian reflex prevailing give antiracists breathing space angle attack fortress slogan refugees welcome clear resonance doesnt affect underlying ideological coordinates according immigrants burden menace problem population controlled shouldnt expect momentary shock devastation disaster political work us | 517 |
<p>“Branding Obamessiah: The Rise of an American Idol” A book by Mark Edward Taylor</p>
<p>Mark Edward Taylor, in “Branding Obamessiah: The Rise of an American Idol,” carefully reconstructs how six sacred branding strategies turned a mere mortal into an American savior. Taylor clearly believes that Barack Obama was too politically inexperienced to become president of the United States. Our current president was, however, very skilled at branding. Obama’s strategies were composing a creation story, chanting sacred words, venerating sacred images, observing sacred rituals, bringing in believers and coloring the messiah.</p>
<p>Although the sacred six are an unoriginal appropriation from the world of advertising, Taylor neatly grafts them onto the 2008 presidential campaign by beginning with Obama’s creation story of racial angst during his childhood in Hawaii. Taylor goes to great pains to argue that Obama’s memories within “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance” were manipulated to create a racial consciousness that Obama most likely did not experience and furthermore did not even write. He critiques the text for having “so little real evidence of abject, institutional racism,” and suggests that “Obama understood the power of race to open doors, and so he created a story that would make his skin’s color more vivid.”</p>
<p>As evenhanded as Taylor is throughout the book, his dismissal of Obama is rarely as stark as when he claims being a black boy in Hawaii couldn’t have been that bad. Irrespective of who crafted Obama’s memoir and why, Taylor is wrong to dismiss Obama’s account of racial trauma. An outsider has no right to estimate the psychological impact of racism, especially if the outsider has never lived as a person of color.</p>
<p />
<p>In the same way that race is a key word in “Dreams from My Father,” hope and change were the sacred words of Obama’s campaign. Whether used individually or combined as hope for change, Obama’s words addressed Americans’ desperate need for anything other than the George W. Bush legacy. So desperate were his constituents that no one ever queried the actual meaning of the terms. Taylor points out that ”&#160;‘change’ doesn’t indicate direction, ‘hope’ isn’t a strategy and ‘believe’ doesn’t refer to an object beyond itself.” Taylor historicizes the consistency of “change” as a presidential campaign motif, but explains how Obama embodied change as a young, handsome, part-black political novice who starkly contrasted his opponents’ stagnant “experience.” He continues:</p>
<p>A troubled and anxious people are susceptible to promises of an easy fix. Obama was careful to utter just enough for many Americans to hear what they wanted to hear in his sacred words — words that motivated but did not explain. Words that moved voters to act but not to reflect. Words that triggered emotion but not critical understanding. People translated Obama’s words into their own image and in turn projected that image onto him. And by creating images of a utopian future that went far beyond dull, policy-driven reality, they unwittingly became a band of prophets proclaiming the coming of a messiah who was promising everything — and promising nothing.</p>
<p>Similarly, the sacred images of the campaign asked audiences to project positive messages onto Obama’s visual representations. Not only was Obama depicted with halos of light above his head, but visual incorporations of Obama imagery with figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. “made him into an historical figure before he even had a chance to make history,” according to Ron English, an artist quoted by Taylor. Lest he get too wrapped up in history, Taylor explores Obama’s rock star appeal by analyzing his appearances in Rolling Stone, Vibe and other popular magazines. Because an unflattering picture of the presidential candidate never emerged, each handsome, virile image made Obama increasingly attractive to voters. Additionally, Taylor describes how “Team Obama” masterminded “logobama” — a logo that would appeal to everyone at once. The open O of the campaign logo allowed various communities to accommodate their individual priorities into Obama’s message.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781937532918?aff=Truthdig" type="external" /></p>
<p>By Mark Edward Taylor</p>
<p>Edenridge Press, 386 pages</p>
<p><a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781937532918?aff=Truthdig" type="external" /></p>
<p>Throughout the book, Taylor assures readers that nothing was left to chance during the Obama campaign. And although he never says that the 10 rallies where women attendees passed out and were sympathetically acknowledged by Obama were staged, one wonders about the regularity of the ritual and begins to view Team Obama with an aura of suspicion. Taylor describes Team Obama’s uncanny knack for maximizing social media, and how some sectors of the ailing economy profited from Obama paraphernalia and tours of his Hyde Park, Chicago haunts.</p>
<p>Not only did Obama believers swoon and faint at rallies, follow him on Facebook and buy merchandise, but his devotees voted for him because the campaign focused on his parasocial relationships with the public. People who didn’t know Obama became convinced that they could have a beer with him, play a game of pickup basketball or have dinner with his beautiful family. People simply loved him. His Hollywood appeal even persuaded celebrities to contribute to the “Barockstar” idolization.</p>
<p>Taylor concludes where he began, discussing the role of race in Obama’s appeal. He writes, “Obama’s skin was a magnet, pulling black voters together in one near-monolithic block, unmovable and resounding with his praises.” All the while absolving white voters of their guilt. Blacks and whites could vote for their first black president and be proud of how far their country had come. And so they did. “Branding Obamamessiah” was published near the beginning of the 2012 primaries, and it curiously ends with Obama’s 2008 election. Certainly, the strength of the book is its compendium of sources, but should it have taken four years to publish them? Where is the projection to the future? The book feels unfinished. It also appears to lack the salient marketing feature of relevance. Or so I thought before I went to the website. <a href="http://www.brandingobamessiah.com/" type="external">Brandingobamessiah.com</a> includes everything the book lacks. From Twitter feeds and a Facebook friending opportunity to author biographical sketches, images, videos and recent blog posts about the 2012 campaign, Taylor reminds readers that branding was for products long before it was for presidents.</p>
<p>It is the 21st century, after all. Most Americans connected via social media acquiesce to some level of personal branding or identity management as an integral part of our lives. When we want to acquire friends, employment, fame or profits from selling our own products, our mediated representations of ourselves do not always reflect who we are in other areas of our lives. A man or woman running for the most venerated public office in the United States of America should most certainly not leave any aspect of his or her image to chance. But, as the final sentence of the epilogue asks, “Would Obamessiah be resurrected for the next election?” It is too soon to tell, but it doesn’t look good.</p>
<p>Taylor makes a rather convincing argument that Obama’s success was built on his being a neophyte. He had no national familiarity before his 2004 Democratic National Convention appearance. Quite strategically, he had no voting record to speak of as a senator because he voted “present” more than “yea” or “nay.” On the campaign trail, he had no previous political persona to overcome. And he made no clear promises. Today, Obama’s tabula rasa days are over. As president he has an indisputable record of decision making that has left many former believers feeling duped. It seems impossible that Obamessiah could be resurrected.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781937532918?aff=Truthdig" type="external" /></p>
<p>By Mark Edward Taylor</p>
<p>Edenridge Press, 386 pages</p>
<p><a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781937532918?aff=Truthdig" type="external" /></p>
<p>People frustrated with the decimation of state budgets, high unemployment, extremely high gas prices and the faint but constant beating of the drums of war — with Iran and against women’s bodies — may feel the messiah failed to deliver on his promises. It is essential, however, to remember two things. 1) Not everyone, including the black voters who Taylor alludes to as a monolithic block, believed Obama was a savior. And 2) Obama made no promises. Taylor observes, “Obama’s greatest political asset was his affable ambiguity. Devotees projected their own personal vision onto the candidate and required that he offer nothing back in detail to see if their notions matched his reality.” The machinations behind Team Obama and the 2008 campaign say more about the American people than they say about the president. Remember “Yes we can”? Frustrated citizenry must acknowledge responsibility as the “we” in making a man into a messiah.</p>
<p>2012 presents the nation with another opportunity to “change.” Let’s hope that this time voters will be less enamored by a personality and be savvier participants in the implications of policy. Instead of waiting for a messiah, what if U.S. citizens saved themselves? Protests that led to the reversal of the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s decision to divest from Planned Parenthood and Occupy movements are excellent examples of the potential for people to work with public leaders instead of waiting on their leaders to work for them. This is the lesson of “Branding Obamessiah.” It is easy to be disappointed when we buy into a leader. Perhaps in the future, we will invest more in ourselves. Yes, we can.</p>
<p /> | true | 4 | branding obamessiah rise american idol book mark edward taylor mark edward taylor branding obamessiah rise american idol carefully reconstructs six sacred branding strategies turned mere mortal american savior taylor clearly believes barack obama politically inexperienced become president united states current president however skilled branding obamas strategies composing creation story chanting sacred words venerating sacred images observing sacred rituals bringing believers coloring messiah although sacred six unoriginal appropriation world advertising taylor neatly grafts onto 2008 presidential campaign beginning obamas creation story racial angst childhood hawaii taylor goes great pains argue obamas memories within dreams father story race inheritance manipulated create racial consciousness obama likely experience furthermore even write critiques text little real evidence abject institutional racism suggests obama understood power race open doors created story would make skins color vivid evenhanded taylor throughout book dismissal obama rarely stark claims black boy hawaii couldnt bad irrespective crafted obamas memoir taylor wrong dismiss obamas account racial trauma outsider right estimate psychological impact racism especially outsider never lived person color way race key word dreams father hope change sacred words obamas campaign whether used individually combined hope change obamas words addressed americans desperate need anything george w bush legacy desperate constituents one ever queried actual meaning terms taylor points 160change doesnt indicate direction hope isnt strategy believe doesnt refer object beyond taylor historicizes consistency change presidential campaign motif explains obama embodied change young handsome partblack political novice starkly contrasted opponents stagnant experience continues troubled anxious people susceptible promises easy fix obama careful utter enough many americans hear wanted hear sacred words words motivated explain words moved voters act reflect words triggered emotion critical understanding people translated obamas words image turn projected image onto creating images utopian future went far beyond dull policydriven reality unwittingly became band prophets proclaiming coming messiah promising everything promising nothing similarly sacred images campaign asked audiences project positive messages onto obamas visual representations obama depicted halos light head visual incorporations obama imagery figures abraham lincoln martin luther king jr made historical figure even chance make history according ron english artist quoted taylor lest get wrapped history taylor explores obamas rock star appeal analyzing appearances rolling stone vibe popular magazines unflattering picture presidential candidate never emerged handsome virile image made obama increasingly attractive voters additionally taylor describes team obama masterminded logobama logo would appeal everyone open campaign logo allowed various communities accommodate individual priorities obamas message mark edward taylor edenridge press 386 pages throughout book taylor assures readers nothing left chance obama campaign although never says 10 rallies women attendees passed sympathetically acknowledged obama staged one wonders regularity ritual begins view team obama aura suspicion taylor describes team obamas uncanny knack maximizing social media sectors ailing economy profited obama paraphernalia tours hyde park chicago haunts obama believers swoon faint rallies follow facebook buy merchandise devotees voted campaign focused parasocial relationships public people didnt know obama became convinced could beer play game pickup basketball dinner beautiful family people simply loved hollywood appeal even persuaded celebrities contribute barockstar idolization taylor concludes began discussing role race obamas appeal writes obamas skin magnet pulling black voters together one nearmonolithic block unmovable resounding praises absolving white voters guilt blacks whites could vote first black president proud far country come branding obamamessiah published near beginning 2012 primaries curiously ends obamas 2008 election certainly strength book compendium sources taken four years publish projection future book feels unfinished also appears lack salient marketing feature relevance thought went website brandingobamessiahcom includes everything book lacks twitter feeds facebook friending opportunity author biographical sketches images videos recent blog posts 2012 campaign taylor reminds readers branding products long presidents 21st century americans connected via social media acquiesce level personal branding identity management integral part lives want acquire friends employment fame profits selling products mediated representations always reflect areas lives man woman running venerated public office united states america certainly leave aspect image chance final sentence epilogue asks would obamessiah resurrected next election soon tell doesnt look good taylor makes rather convincing argument obamas success built neophyte national familiarity 2004 democratic national convention appearance quite strategically voting record speak senator voted present yea nay campaign trail previous political persona overcome made clear promises today obamas tabula rasa days president indisputable record decision making left many former believers feeling duped seems impossible obamessiah could resurrected mark edward taylor edenridge press 386 pages people frustrated decimation state budgets high unemployment extremely high gas prices faint constant beating drums war iran womens bodies may feel messiah failed deliver promises essential however remember two things 1 everyone including black voters taylor alludes monolithic block believed obama savior 2 obama made promises taylor observes obamas greatest political asset affable ambiguity devotees projected personal vision onto candidate required offer nothing back detail see notions matched reality machinations behind team obama 2008 campaign say american people say president remember yes frustrated citizenry must acknowledge responsibility making man messiah 2012 presents nation another opportunity change lets hope time voters less enamored personality savvier participants implications policy instead waiting messiah us citizens saved protests led reversal susan g komen foundations decision divest planned parenthood occupy movements excellent examples potential people work public leaders instead waiting leaders work lesson branding obamessiah easy disappointed buy leader perhaps future invest yes | 865 |
<p>The “War on Terror” is a fraud and a façade, a mere label concocted and trumpeted by an Administration known for its signature dishonesty.&#160; The label conceals the Bush Administration’s international crimes of unprovoked military aggression-the armed invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, two sovereign nations the Administration meant to attack from its first days in office.[1]</p>
<p>With its pathological lying, secrecy, and brilliant propagandizing the Administration has prevented a compliant mainstream press from communicating fully the realities of the war.&#160; But now, as the country chooses a new president, the truth must prevail, to foreclose another catastrophic Administration-candidate McCain says “No surrender!”-and to make certain instead the fraudulent war is terminated with dispatch.</p>
<p>The “War on Terror” was launched in retaliation for 9/11, we were told, to apprehend Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.&#160; Then, justifying a quantum escalation in the war with 935 deliberate lies, the Bush Administration sought “regime change” in Iraq.[2]</p>
<p>These alleged objectives were elements of the façade.&#160; Osama bin Laden could have been brought to justice easily and without armed conflict.&#160; Regime change in Iraq could have been achieved with equal facility.&#160;&#160; George Bush rejected both opportunities.</p>
<p>Saddam Hussein, hoping to forestall warfare, yielded a series of increasingly attractive concessions to the Bush Administration, finally offering to leave his country for exile in Egypt. [3],[4]&#160; But the Bush Administration was unalterably committed to the invasion and occupation of Iraq.&#160; If “regime change” were to be achieved by Saddam’s voluntary departure, there would be no excuse for proceeding with the attack:&#160; the Administration kept the offers from public view-and ignored them all.</p>
<p>Also kept secret was a standing offer from the Taliban to surrender Osama bin Laden-an offer awaiting George Bush when he took office in January of 2001.[5],[6],[7]&#160; But capturing bin Laden was also a façade: the Administration was fully committed as well to the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. Three times before 9/11 and twice afterward the Bush Administration refused the turnover of Osama bin Laden.</p>
<p>The incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq-planned and in motion months before 9/11-were unprovoked wars of conquest and territorial occupation, to control Middle Eastern oil and gas resources.&#160; Suspected for years, this can no longer be seriously questioned.</p>
<p>Searching beyond the mainstream media you uncover a story strikingly at odds with the Bush Administration’s narrative about a “War on Terror.”</p>
<p>You discover the Administration, when it took office, brushing off explicit warnings about al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.[8]&#160; You unearth instead the Administration, on behalf of the Unocal Corporation, angrily and unsuccessfully negotiating pipeline rights-of-way with the Taliban through the summer of 2001.[9],[10]&#160; Finally, after threatening the Taliban with “a carpet of bombs,” the Bush Administration notified Pakistan and India-five weeks before 9/11-that Afghanistan would be attacked “before the end of October.” [11],[12]&#160; On schedule, it was.&#160; A year later a former Unocal consultant is serving as the President of Afghanistan, and another as the United States Ambassador.[13]&#160; Then you read in an industry trade journal the Bush Administration is standing ready to finance a trans-Afghanistan pipeline and protect it with a permanent military presence.[14]</p>
<p>You discover repeated written proposals to invade Iraq, spanning the two Bush Administrations and made by four men who served in both: Zalmay Khalilzad, Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis “Scooter” Libby-and Richard Cheney.[15] You witness their triumph when the National Security Council formalizes the commitment to invade Iraq, on January 30, 2001-seven months before 9/11.[16] You read how the Security Council was ordered to “meld” its work with Cheney’s Energy Task Force, which in March of 2001 was studying maps of the Iraqi oil fields.[17],[18] You come across a leaked top-secret memorandum dated February 3, 2001, discussing the “capture of new and existing oil and gas fields” in Iraq.[19]&#160; You discover the State Department designing, at least a year before the invasion, the deconstruction of Iraq’s nationalized oil industry.[20]&#160; You find the State Department’s plan was written into a draft “hydrocarbon law” for Iraq-by Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority, aided by American and British oil companies.[21]&#160; You watch President Bush on television in January of 2007, demanding as a mandatory “benchmark” the enactment of the hydrocarbon law.&#160; And you come to understand why Exxon/Mobil, Conoco/Phillips, Royal Dutch/Shell, and BP/Amoco are now poised to profit immensely from 81% of Iraq’s undeveloped crude.[22]</p>
<p>This is not a “War on Terror.” [23]&#160; Afghanistan and Iraq today are occupied countries, administered by puppet governments and dotted with permanent military bases securing the energy assets.&#160; This is not a by-product of the Bush Administration’s warmaking: this was its purpose.</p>
<p>The Congress is at least vaguely aware.&#160; The Defense Authorization Act of 2008 included a Section 1222, prohibiting expenditures for the “permanent stationing of United States Armed Forces in Iraq,” or “to exercise United States control of the oil resources of Iraq.” [24]</p>
<p>President Bush nullified Section 1222 with a signing statement.[25]&#160; And at his sufferance, the arch-terrorist Osama bin Laden remains free.</p>
<p>The “War on Terror” is a certifiable fraud.[26]</p>
<p>RICHARD W. BEHAN lives and writes on Lopez Island, off the northwest coast of Washington state.&#160; He has published on the Internet over two dozen articles exposing and criticizing the criminal wars of the Bush Administration. He has summarized his research in an electronic book, The Fraudulent War, available for downloading at <a href="http://coldtype.net" type="external">http://coldtype.net</a>/ .&#160; He can be reached at <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a>.</p>
<p>NOTES</p>
<p>[1] Jason Leopold, “The Road to Operation Iraqi Freedom,” Atlantic Free Press website, March 22, 2008.</p>
<p>[2] “False Pretenses in Iraq,” in Iraq: the War Card: Orchestrated Deception on the Path to War, published by the Center for Public Integrity, Washington, D.C., January 2008.&#160; The 935 “false statements” are catalogued and available in a searchable database.</p>
<p>[3] George Monbiot, “Dreamers and Idiots: Britain and the US did everything to avoid a peaceful solution in Iraq and Afghanistan,”&#160; The UK Guardian, November 11, 2003.</p>
<p>[4]&#160; Anon., “Llego el momento de deshacerse de Saddam,”&#160; El Pais&#160; (Spain), September 26, 2007. This is a transcript of a conversation between George Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Anzar in Crawford, Texas,&#160; February 22, 2003.&#160; The President acknowledges the prospective exile, but vigorously rejects it, declaring, “We will be in Baghdad at the end of March.”</p>
<p>[5] Anon., “Bush Rejects Taliban Offer to Hand bin Laden Over,”&#160; UK Guardian Unlimited, October 14, 2001.</p>
<p>[6] Andrew Buncombe, “Bush Rejects Taliban Offer to Surrender bin Laden, the UK Independent, October 15, 2001</p>
<p>[7] Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, “How Bush Was Offered bin Laden and Blew It,”&#160; CounterPunch, November 1, 2004.</p>
<p>[8] Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror. New York: the Free Press, 2004.</p>
<p>[9] Wayne Madsen, “Afghanistan, the Taliban, and the Bush Oil Team,” Centre for Research on Globalization website, January 23, 2003.</p>
<p>[10] Paul Sperry, Crude Politics: How Bush’s Oil Cronies Hijacked the War on Terrorism, Nashville, WND Books, 2003.</p>
<p>[11] Anon., “Afghanistan: A Timeline of Oil and Violence,”&#160; at <a href="http://www.ringnebula.com" type="external">www.ringnebula.com</a></p>
<p>[12] Larry Chin, “Parts I and II: Players on a rigged chessboard:&#160; Bridas, Unocal, and the Afghanistan pipeline,” Online Journal, March 2002.</p>
<p>[13] Hamid Karzai and Zalmay Khalilzad, respectively.&#160; Mr. Khalilzad’s predecessor as Ambassador was Mr. John J. Maresca, a Unocal vice president.</p>
<p>[14] Alexander’s’ Gas and Oil Connections, February 23, 2003.</p>
<p>[15] This statement encapsulates the origin and development of the Project for the New American Century and its tragic fantasy of U.S. global hegemony. For details of the actions of these four men, see the author’s electronic book, The Fraudulent War, available for downloading at <a href="http://coldtype.net" type="external">http://coldtype.net</a>/ .</p>
<p>[16] Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill, New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004.</p>
<p>[17] Jane Mayer, “Contract Sport,” The New Yorker, February 16, 2004.</p>
<p>[18]&#160; The maps can be downloaded from the website of Judicial Watch, <a href="http://www.judicialwatch.org" type="external">www.judicialwatch.org</a>.&#160; This organization obtained the maps with a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, which the Bush Administration appealed all the way to the Supreme Court.</p>
<p>[19] Mayer, op. cit..</p>
<p>[20] Gregg Mutitt, Crude Designs: the Ripoff of Iraq’s Oil Wealth,&#160; United Kingdom, The Platform Group.</p>
<p>[21] Gregg Mutitt and Erik Leaver, “Slick Connections: U.S. Influence on Iraqi Oil,” Foreign Policy in Focus, July 18, 2007.</p>
<p>[22] Joshua Holland, “Bush’s Petro-Cartel Almost Has Iraq’s Oil,” published on the AlterNet website, October 16, 2006.</p>
<p>[23] In fact, the war in Iraq has been counterproductive: it has exacerbated, not diminished the threat of terrorism.&#160; See Karen de Young, “Spy agencies Say Iraq War Hurting U.S. Terror Fight,” Washington Post, September 24, 2006.</p>
<p>[24] H.R. 4986: National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008, Title XII, Section 1222.</p>
<p>[25]&#160; “President Bush Signs H.R. 4986, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008 into Law,” The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, January 28, 2008.&#160; See at <a href="" type="internal">http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/01/20080128-10.html</a></p>
<p>[26]&#160; Elizabeth de la Vega, United States v. George W. Bush et al.,&#160; New York:&#160;&#160; Seven Stories Press, 2006.&#160; Ms. de la Vega, a former U.S. Attorney, has documented a compelling case against the Bush Administration for conspiracy to commit fraud.</p>
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<p>&#160;</p> | true | 4 | war terror fraud façade mere label concocted trumpeted administration known signature dishonesty160 label conceals bush administrations international crimes unprovoked military aggressionthe armed invasions afghanistan iraq two sovereign nations administration meant attack first days office1 pathological lying secrecy brilliant propagandizing administration prevented compliant mainstream press communicating fully realities war160 country chooses new president truth must prevail foreclose another catastrophic administrationcandidate mccain says surrenderand make certain instead fraudulent war terminated dispatch war terror launched retaliation 911 told apprehend osama bin laden afghanistan160 justifying quantum escalation war 935 deliberate lies bush administration sought regime change iraq2 alleged objectives elements façade160 osama bin laden could brought justice easily without armed conflict160 regime change iraq could achieved equal facility160160 george bush rejected opportunities saddam hussein hoping forestall warfare yielded series increasingly attractive concessions bush administration finally offering leave country exile egypt 34160 bush administration unalterably committed invasion occupation iraq160 regime change achieved saddams voluntary departure would excuse proceeding attack160 administration kept offers public viewand ignored also kept secret standing offer taliban surrender osama bin ladenan offer awaiting george bush took office january 2001567160 capturing bin laden also façade administration fully committed well invasion occupation afghanistan three times 911 twice afterward bush administration refused turnover osama bin laden incursions afghanistan iraqplanned motion months 911were unprovoked wars conquest territorial occupation control middle eastern oil gas resources160 suspected years longer seriously questioned searching beyond mainstream media uncover story strikingly odds bush administrations narrative war terror discover administration took office brushing explicit warnings al qaeda osama bin laden8160 unearth instead administration behalf unocal corporation angrily unsuccessfully negotiating pipeline rightsofway taliban summer 2001910160 finally threatening taliban carpet bombs bush administration notified pakistan indiafive weeks 911that afghanistan would attacked end october 1112160 schedule was160 year later former unocal consultant serving president afghanistan another united states ambassador13160 read industry trade journal bush administration standing ready finance transafghanistan pipeline protect permanent military presence14 discover repeated written proposals invade iraq spanning two bush administrations made four men served zalmay khalilzad paul wolfowitz lewis scooter libbyand richard cheney15 witness triumph national security council formalizes commitment invade iraq january 30 2001seven months 91116 read security council ordered meld work cheneys energy task force march 2001 studying maps iraqi oil fields1718 come across leaked topsecret memorandum dated february 3 2001 discussing capture new existing oil gas fields iraq19160 discover state department designing least year invasion deconstruction iraqs nationalized oil industry20160 find state departments plan written draft hydrocarbon law iraqby paul bremers coalition provisional authority aided american british oil companies21160 watch president bush television january 2007 demanding mandatory benchmark enactment hydrocarbon law160 come understand exxonmobil conocophillips royal dutchshell bpamoco poised profit immensely 81 iraqs undeveloped crude22 war terror 23160 afghanistan iraq today occupied countries administered puppet governments dotted permanent military bases securing energy assets160 byproduct bush administrations warmaking purpose congress least vaguely aware160 defense authorization act 2008 included section 1222 prohibiting expenditures permanent stationing united states armed forces iraq exercise united states control oil resources iraq 24 president bush nullified section 1222 signing statement25160 sufferance archterrorist osama bin laden remains free war terror certifiable fraud26 richard w behan lives writes lopez island northwest coast washington state160 published internet two dozen articles exposing criticizing criminal wars bush administration summarized research electronic book fraudulent war available downloading httpcoldtypenet 160 reached rwbehanrockislandcom notes 1 jason leopold road operation iraqi freedom atlantic free press website march 22 2008 2 false pretenses iraq iraq war card orchestrated deception path war published center public integrity washington dc january 2008160 935 false statements catalogued available searchable database 3 george monbiot dreamers idiots britain us everything avoid peaceful solution iraq afghanistan160 uk guardian november 11 2003 4160 anon llego el momento de deshacerse de saddam160 el pais160 spain september 26 2007 transcript conversation george bush condoleezza rice spanish prime minister jose maria anzar crawford texas160 february 22 2003160 president acknowledges prospective exile vigorously rejects declaring baghdad end march 5 anon bush rejects taliban offer hand bin laden over160 uk guardian unlimited october 14 2001 6 andrew buncombe bush rejects taliban offer surrender bin laden uk independent october 15 2001 7 alexander cockburn jeffrey st clair bush offered bin laden blew it160 counterpunch november 1 2004 8 richard clarke enemies inside americas war terror new york free press 2004 9 wayne madsen afghanistan taliban bush oil team centre research globalization website january 23 2003 10 paul sperry crude politics bushs oil cronies hijacked war terrorism nashville wnd books 2003 11 anon afghanistan timeline oil violence160 wwwringnebulacom 12 larry chin parts ii players rigged chessboard160 bridas unocal afghanistan pipeline online journal march 2002 13 hamid karzai zalmay khalilzad respectively160 mr khalilzads predecessor ambassador mr john j maresca unocal vice president 14 alexanders gas oil connections february 23 2003 15 statement encapsulates origin development project new american century tragic fantasy us global hegemony details actions four men see authors electronic book fraudulent war available downloading httpcoldtypenet 16 ron suskind price loyalty george w bush white house education paul oneill new york simon schuster 2004 17 jane mayer contract sport new yorker february 16 2004 18160 maps downloaded website judicial watch wwwjudicialwatchorg160 organization obtained maps freedom information act lawsuit bush administration appealed way supreme court 19 mayer op cit 20 gregg mutitt crude designs ripoff iraqs oil wealth160 united kingdom platform group 21 gregg mutitt erik leaver slick connections us influence iraqi oil foreign policy focus july 18 2007 22 joshua holland bushs petrocartel almost iraqs oil published alternet website october 16 2006 23 fact war iraq counterproductive exacerbated diminished threat terrorism160 see karen de young spy agencies say iraq war hurting us terror fight washington post september 24 2006 24 hr 4986 national defense authorization act fiscal year 2008 title xii section 1222 25160 president bush signs hr 4986 national defense authorization act fiscal year 2008 law white house office press secretary january 28 2008160 see httpwwwwhitehousegovnewsreleases2008012008012810html 26160 elizabeth de la vega united states v george w bush et al160 new york160160 seven stories press 2006160 ms de la vega former us attorney documented compelling case bush administration conspiracy commit fraud 160 160 160 160 160 160 160 160 160 160 | 1,012 |
<p>By Alan Minsky and Meleiza Figueroa</p>
<p>The quadrennial men’s World Cup soccer tournament is the most popular, and most fervently followed, spectacle in the world. Not surprisingly then, the games are the source of parallel political contests — witness the street demonstrations in Brazil and the competition between nations to host the event. Indeed, the World Cup is so grand, its scale so vast, that it merits serious social, economic and political analysis.</p>
<p>The following is the first installment of a three-part series on the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, which begins Thursday. The first essay is on the history of soccer, both on and off the field, as it informs this year’s Cup. Read part two <a href="" type="internal">here</a>. Part three can be read <a href="" type="internal">here</a>.</p>
<p>Global soccer 2014 through the prism of history</p>
<p />
<p>Across most of the globe, soccer has long been associated with the working class and the poor. There are exceptions, such as in the United States, where, outside of immigrant communities, Volvo-driving suburbanites define the sport. Soccer as part of working-class culture has been with us since its early growth in industrializing England in the 19th century — and the archetype extends today to barefoot youth playing in tropical slums. Yet, just as the masses have the greatest passion for the game, the profits have largely flowed to the 1 percent. Thus, class conflict is inscribed across soccer’s entire history.</p>
<p>Before elaborating on big-money spectacle soccer 21st century style, a few words about the sport’s poetics. Soccer is a source of joy and transcendent pleasure. Of course, one of the few things in the world more popular than watching soccer is playing it. All you need is a ball, gravity and a slice of open space. Indeed, the only participant sport more popular than organized soccer is the pickup game. The vast majority of the billions who will watch the World Cup have played the game, which is one element of the spectacle’s appeal. The billions are watching the world’s greatest practitioners of a craft they themselves plied.</p>
<p>Soccer as a spectator sport brings a unique set of joys that contrast with other team sports, and these have become a common shared language for contemporary humanity. As opposed to baseball, cricket, basketball and American football, soccer never stops: two halves, 45 minutes straight, no commercial interruptions. In the ebb and flow of almost every game, in a relatively close competition, any team will string together a series of attractive passes, make astonishing runs and threaten the opponent’s goal, lifting the spirits of every partisan. Your team may lose, but every game offers this analog for when everything is clicking in life: You’re one with your muse; you smile and he or she smiles back. This aspect of the game is important if we’re to understand the ever-increasing popularity of the sport. Soccer historians rhapsodize about the glorious creativity players displayed in the soccer of yore, and bemoan the evolution of the game toward more constraint. Yes, we’re in an era of defensive tactics when the final outcome is prioritized over beauty; but no amount of cagey gamesmanship can suffocate the flow of the game across midfield, can eliminate this oxygen that fills the spirit, even if goals become less frequent.</p>
<p>Of course, the infrequency of goals adds its own pleasures. The underdog will hunker down to defend, hold out, all hands on deck, counting down the seconds, with nail-biting tension, feeling the beauty of solidarity, believing against all received wisdom that “you” can slay a Spain or Brazil. Fans of all teams strive for their side to hit their rhythm, control the ball, move it forward with ingenuity and astonishing skill, break down a world-class defense, and produce that most orgasmic of all sporting moments: the soccer goal, pure rhapsodic joy shared with millions.</p>
<p>Coming back to reality, outside the heavenly cocoon of the game itself, elite global soccer in the 21st century is, like the rest of the world, dominated by the seemingly unlimited resources of global capitalism. In between games, rumors of huge money deals dominate the international soccer discourse. Top players and coaches climb the ladder and join the most elite clubs (Real Madrid, Manchester United, Barcelona, et al.) that buy the best talent from around the world to ensure their continued domination. This exclusive group of elite teams remains relatively stable — the only time a new member crashes the party is when some billionaire oligarch decides to match or raise the stakes, as has happened recently with Manchester City, Paris St. Germain and Chelsea. This, in effect, creates astonishing inflation in the upper-most echelons of the sport, as transfer fees reach mind-boggling proportions. The domination of the club sport by these super-elite European teams strips the best talent from elsewhere in the world, replicating a core-and-periphery structure that itself parallels global capitalism. As such, the TV broadcasts of the top European leagues now reach everywhere on the planet. Corporate globalization, soccer style.</p>
<p>The World Cup tournament stands in a paradoxical relationship to the club soccer system. On the one hand, FIFA, which puts on the World Cup, is in harmony with the logic of neoliberal 21st century global capitalism, imposing demands on host nations analogous to those imposed by the IMF and World Bank. And yet, in spite of FIFA and its staggering level of corruption, the World Cup itself is a thorn in the side of those elite corporations that are the top clubs. The greatest passion of both the fans and the players is reserved for this tournament, even though the direct payouts are miniscule compared with club soccer. Real Madrid, Barcelona and the oligarchic owners of other European clubs can buy the services of the players, but they can’t buy their hearts.</p>
<p>In this regard, soccer is unique. In no other major club sport is the international competition the main course, for which the teams are not built by the purchasing power of big money, but by the nations and regions where the players come from. Although there is a reactionary, ugly, jingoistic logic of playing for the homeland, there is something archetypically appealing about playing alongside others from your region, often with other stars you grew up with — especially when it’s a slap in the face to the logic of global finance. Club soccer is the richest, most popular club sport in the world but it falls far short in popularity to a tournament organized around national teams, not oligarchic money.</p>
<p>Yet we’ve seen this very tension influence the World Cup tournament itself. It’s our sense that over the past decade, the proliferation of yellow and red cards in international tournaments is in response to pressure from the clubs that don’t want to see their elite commodities — the players — harmed in a tournament. This is a real problem for the clubs because the tournament remains more important to the players than the club competition, and they will push themselves every way possible to participate and shine. For superstars such as Cristiano Ronaldo and Leo Messi, or any slightly lesser celebrity who might emerge in the next few weeks as the tournament’s star or goat, the World Cup remains by far the defining event. As great as Ronaldo and Messi have been in club play, their standing in the history of soccer will be defined by their performances in the World Cup. Entry into the all-time pantheon requires greatness on the greatest stage, and in soccer that’s not the domain of private ownership.</p>
<p>Take that, oligarchs! Notch one for the people’s game.</p>
<p>The proliferation of referee whistles is just one factor among many that have conspired to slow down recent World Cup games and sap them of beauty. Another contributing factor is that the players care so much — in careers that can end in an instant and last only two, maybe three, World Cup cycles — that the magnitude of the moment induces a tentative approach, as teams strive to stay alive for a shot at the grand prize. This tendency is compounded by coaching innovations that have skewed conservative. “Control and contain” is the order of the day. The heralded Barcelona/Spain “tiki-taka” style puts a priority on playing keep-away as opposed to majesty. Indeed, Spain won in 2010 scoring three fewer goals than any previous champion, even though it played three more games than some of the early World Cup winners.</p>
<p>One thing we will hear much of in the coming weeks is the comparison of 2014 with previous World Cups. Will the measure of the tournament be on par with the great years such as 1954, 1970 or 1982, or will it be too conservative like 1990? The play on the field in 1998 and 2006 got passing grades, less so in 2002 and 2010 — but it’s been a while since it has reached mythological heights. The legends of previous World Cups are shared culture in the core soccer-playing countries, each tournament adding to the lore; the greatest moments cherished by millions and branded with meaning comparable to literature/art/religious ecstasy/romantic love, spoken about in hushed tones of reverence. The fans in the newer soccer nations will gain fluency in this vernacular over the next few weeks, as they hear tales of Diegolito, England ’66, Zidane in glory and disgrace — all working-class heroes canonized by the people. Who will make his mark on this World Cup and enter the pantheon in the most competitive sport in the world in which the field is level and everybody has an equal chance? And will the interpretation of history and its newest entries be determined by the multinational corporate image machine, or will new forms of communication prove uncontainable, giving voice once again to the people?</p>
<p>For no team does this hold as much relevance as for the host itself. Brazil will be compared against the great teams of its past: those of Pele, Garrincha and Carlos Alberto that dazzled the world, winning three out of four World Cups from 1958 to 1970; the 1982 squad that played so beautifully, so fluidly, but went down in legendary defeat to Italy; and, of course, the teams of Ronaldo, Ronaldinho and Rivaldo, which challenged gloriously in 1998 and won in 2002. This year’s Brazil team will have the pressure not only of winning the Cup, but of playing beautifully, and those judging will include the legions of protesters who have already spilled onto the streets.</p>
<p>Part two of this series will examine the circumstances and controversy surrounding the 2014 tournament in Brazil.</p>
<p>Meleiza Figueroa is a doctoral candidate in geography at UC Berkeley who is doing her dissertation research in Brazil. Alan Minsky is program director of KPFK Radio in Los Angeles, and a frequent contributor to Truthdig. They are the co-producers of <a href="http://www.thepeoplesgame.org" type="external">“The People’s Game” radio show</a>, which can be listened to live each Wednesday during the World Cup at kpfk.org. Show archives and daily podcasts will be available online at thepeoplesgame.org.</p>
<p>Part two of this series, about Brazil and the protests that have sprung up around its World Cup, is now available. Read it <a href="" type="internal">here</a>.</p> | true | 4 | alan minsky meleiza figueroa quadrennial mens world cup soccer tournament popular fervently followed spectacle world surprisingly games source parallel political contests witness street demonstrations brazil competition nations host event indeed world cup grand scale vast merits serious social economic political analysis following first installment threepart series 2014 world cup brazil begins thursday first essay history soccer field informs years cup read part two part three read global soccer 2014 prism history across globe soccer long associated working class poor exceptions united states outside immigrant communities volvodriving suburbanites define sport soccer part workingclass culture us since early growth industrializing england 19th century archetype extends today barefoot youth playing tropical slums yet masses greatest passion game profits largely flowed 1 percent thus class conflict inscribed across soccers entire history elaborating bigmoney spectacle soccer 21st century style words sports poetics soccer source joy transcendent pleasure course one things world popular watching soccer playing need ball gravity slice open space indeed participant sport popular organized soccer pickup game vast majority billions watch world cup played game one element spectacles appeal billions watching worlds greatest practitioners craft plied soccer spectator sport brings unique set joys contrast team sports become common shared language contemporary humanity opposed baseball cricket basketball american football soccer never stops two halves 45 minutes straight commercial interruptions ebb flow almost every game relatively close competition team string together series attractive passes make astonishing runs threaten opponents goal lifting spirits every partisan team may lose every game offers analog everything clicking life youre one muse smile smiles back aspect game important understand everincreasing popularity sport soccer historians rhapsodize glorious creativity players displayed soccer yore bemoan evolution game toward constraint yes era defensive tactics final outcome prioritized beauty amount cagey gamesmanship suffocate flow game across midfield eliminate oxygen fills spirit even goals become less frequent course infrequency goals adds pleasures underdog hunker defend hold hands deck counting seconds nailbiting tension feeling beauty solidarity believing received wisdom slay spain brazil fans teams strive side hit rhythm control ball move forward ingenuity astonishing skill break worldclass defense produce orgasmic sporting moments soccer goal pure rhapsodic joy shared millions coming back reality outside heavenly cocoon game elite global soccer 21st century like rest world dominated seemingly unlimited resources global capitalism games rumors huge money deals dominate international soccer discourse top players coaches climb ladder join elite clubs real madrid manchester united barcelona et al buy best talent around world ensure continued domination exclusive group elite teams remains relatively stable time new member crashes party billionaire oligarch decides match raise stakes happened recently manchester city paris st germain chelsea effect creates astonishing inflation uppermost echelons sport transfer fees reach mindboggling proportions domination club sport superelite european teams strips best talent elsewhere world replicating coreandperiphery structure parallels global capitalism tv broadcasts top european leagues reach everywhere planet corporate globalization soccer style world cup tournament stands paradoxical relationship club soccer system one hand fifa puts world cup harmony logic neoliberal 21st century global capitalism imposing demands host nations analogous imposed imf world bank yet spite fifa staggering level corruption world cup thorn side elite corporations top clubs greatest passion fans players reserved tournament even though direct payouts miniscule compared club soccer real madrid barcelona oligarchic owners european clubs buy services players cant buy hearts regard soccer unique major club sport international competition main course teams built purchasing power big money nations regions players come although reactionary ugly jingoistic logic playing homeland something archetypically appealing playing alongside others region often stars grew especially slap face logic global finance club soccer richest popular club sport world falls far short popularity tournament organized around national teams oligarchic money yet weve seen tension influence world cup tournament sense past decade proliferation yellow red cards international tournaments response pressure clubs dont want see elite commodities players harmed tournament real problem clubs tournament remains important players club competition push every way possible participate shine superstars cristiano ronaldo leo messi slightly lesser celebrity might emerge next weeks tournaments star goat world cup remains far defining event great ronaldo messi club play standing history soccer defined performances world cup entry alltime pantheon requires greatness greatest stage soccer thats domain private ownership take oligarchs notch one peoples game proliferation referee whistles one factor among many conspired slow recent world cup games sap beauty another contributing factor players care much careers end instant last two maybe three world cup cycles magnitude moment induces tentative approach teams strive stay alive shot grand prize tendency compounded coaching innovations skewed conservative control contain order day heralded barcelonaspain tikitaka style puts priority playing keepaway opposed majesty indeed spain 2010 scoring three fewer goals previous champion even though played three games early world cup winners one thing hear much coming weeks comparison 2014 previous world cups measure tournament par great years 1954 1970 1982 conservative like 1990 play field 1998 2006 got passing grades less 2002 2010 since reached mythological heights legends previous world cups shared culture core soccerplaying countries tournament adding lore greatest moments cherished millions branded meaning comparable literatureartreligious ecstasyromantic love spoken hushed tones reverence fans newer soccer nations gain fluency vernacular next weeks hear tales diegolito england 66 zidane glory disgrace workingclass heroes canonized people make mark world cup enter pantheon competitive sport world field level everybody equal chance interpretation history newest entries determined multinational corporate image machine new forms communication prove uncontainable giving voice people team hold much relevance host brazil compared great teams past pele garrincha carlos alberto dazzled world winning three four world cups 1958 1970 1982 squad played beautifully fluidly went legendary defeat italy course teams ronaldo ronaldinho rivaldo challenged gloriously 1998 2002 years brazil team pressure winning cup playing beautifully judging include legions protesters already spilled onto streets part two series examine circumstances controversy surrounding 2014 tournament brazil meleiza figueroa doctoral candidate geography uc berkeley dissertation research brazil alan minsky program director kpfk radio los angeles frequent contributor truthdig coproducers peoples game radio show listened live wednesday world cup kpfkorg show archives daily podcasts available online thepeoplesgameorg part two series brazil protests sprung around world cup available read | 1,011 |
<p>“Aerial attacks by the Saudi-led coalition have already caused immense carnage, and destroyed much of the country’s medical facilities and other vital civilian infrastructure.”</p>
<p>A version of this post <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176222/" type="external">first appeared</a> at TomDispatch.</p>
<p>The long national nightmare that was the 2016 presidential election is finally over. Now, we’re facing a worse terror: the reality of a Trump presidency. Donald Trump has already promised to nominate a&#160; <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/fighting-one-segregationist-jeff-sessions-backed-another/508526/" type="external">segregationist</a>&#160;attorney general, a national security adviser who is a&#160; <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/18/us/politics/michael-flynn-national-security-adviser-donald-trump.html" type="external">raging Islamophobe,</a>&#160;a secretary of education who&#160; <a href="https://www.democracynow.org/2016/12/1/public_school_enemy_no_1_billionaire" type="external">doesn’t believe</a>&#160;in public schools, and a secretary of defense whose sobriquet is “Mad Dog.” How worried should we be that General James “Mad Dog” Mattis may well be&#160; <a href="http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/01/18/the-obama-administrations-inexplicable-mishandling-of-marine-gen-james-mattis-2/" type="external">the soberest</a>&#160;among them?</p>
<p>Along with a&#160; <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/opinion/blow-a-nation-divided-against-itself.html" type="external">deeply divided country</a>, the worst&#160; <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/12/05/u-s-income-inequality-on-rise-for-decades-is-now-highest-since-1928/" type="external">income inequality</a>&#160;since at least the 1920s, and a&#160; <a href="http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/washington-d-c-s-metro-catches-fire-more-than-four-times-a-week/" type="external">crumbling infrastructure</a>, Trump will inherit a 15-year-old, apparently never-ending worldwide war. While the named enemy may be a mere emotion (“terror”) or an incendiary strategy (“terrorism”), the victims couldn’t be more real, and as in all modern wars, the majority&#160;of them are civilians.</p>
<p>On how many countries is U.S. ordnance falling at the moment? Some put the total at&#160; <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/a-reminder-of-the-permanent-wars-dozens-of-us-airstrikes-in-six-countries/2016/09/08/77cde914-7514-11e6-be4f-3f42f2e5a49e_story.html" type="external">six</a>; others,&#160; <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=57&amp;v=NNIKQM6E4pk" type="external">seven</a>. For the record, those seven would be Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and, oh yes, Yemen.</p>
<p>The United States has been directing drone strikes against what it calls al-Qaeda targets in Yemen&#160; <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_Yemen#US_air_attacks" type="external">since 2002</a>, but our military involvement in that country increased dramatically in 2015 when U.S. ally Saudi Arabia inserted itself into a civil war there. Since then, the United States has been supplying intelligence and mid-air refueling for Saudi bombers (many of them American-made F-15s sold to that country). The State Department has also&#160; <a href="http://securityassistance.org/fact_sheet/us-arms-transfers-saudi-arabia-and-war-yemen" type="external">approved sales</a>&#160;to the Saudis of $1.29 billion worth of bombs—“smart” and otherwise—together with $1.15 billion worth of tanks, and half a billion dollars of ammunition. And that, in total, is only a small part of the&#160; <a href="http://securityassistance.org/fact_sheet/us-arms-transfers-saudi-arabia-and-war-yemen" type="external">$115 billion</a>&#160;total in military sales the United States has offered Saudi Arabia since President Obama took power in 2009. &#160;&#160;</p>
<p>On Tuesday, Reuters <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-saudiarabia-yemen-exclusive-idUSKBN1421UK" type="external">reported</a> that the United States would stop selling precision-guided munitions to Saudi Arabia&#160;out of concerns over civilian casualties. However, most of our support for the Saudi military will continue. So, why are American bombs being dropped on Yemen by&#160; <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2011/03/2011316131230188238.html" type="external">American-trained pilots</a>&#160;from American-made planes? I’ll get to that in a moment. But first, a glimpse of the results.</p>
<p>The&#160; <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/04/yemen-famine-feared-as-starving-children-fight-for-lives-in-hospital" type="external">photographs</a>&#160;are&#160; <a href="http://www.hngn.com/articles/121250/20150820/yemen-famine-continues-un-says%E2%80%A8.htm" type="external">devastating</a>: tiny, large-eyed children with sticks for limbs&#160; <a href="http://www.independent.ie/world-news/africa/yemen-on-brink-of-famine-as-civil-war-rages-35037590.html" type="external">stare</a>&#160;out at the viewer. In some, their mothers touch them gently, tentatively, as if a stronger embrace would snap their bones. These are just a few victims of the famine that war has brought to Yemen, which was already the poorest country in the Arab world before the present civil war and Saudi bombing campaign even began. UNICEF spokesman Mohammed Al-Asaadi&#160; <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/10/yemen-war-children-starving-death-161011092610430.html" type="external">told</a>&#160;al-Jazeera&#160;that, by August 2016, the agency had counted 370,000 children “suffering from severe acute malnutrition,” and the U.N. World Food Program (WFP)&#160; <a href="https://www.wfp.org/emergencies/yemen/" type="external">says</a>&#160;14.4 million people in Yemen are “food insecure,” seven million of them—one fifth of the country’s population—“in desperate need of food assistance.” Before the war began, Yemen&#160; <a href="https://theintercept.com/2016/08/15/doctors-without-borders-hospital-bombing-in-yemen-earns-rare-saudi-rebuke-at-state-department/" type="external">imported</a> 90% of its food.&#160; Since April 2015, however, Saudi Arabia has blockaded the country’s ports. Today, 80% of Yemenis depend on some kind of U.N. food aid for survival, and the war has made the situation immeasurably worse.</p>
<p>As the WFP reports:</p>
<p>The nutrition situation continues to deteriorate. According to WFP market analysis, prices of food items spiked in September as a result of the escalation of the conflict. The national average price of wheat flour last month was 55 percent higher compared to the pre-crisis period.</p>
<p>The rising price of wheat matters, because in many famines, the problem isn’t that there’s no food, it’s that what food there is people <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/aug/16/africa-famine-food-prices-world-bank" type="external">can’t afford</a>&#160;to buy.</p>
<p>And that was before the cholera outbreak. In October, medical workers began to see cases of that water-borne diarrheal disease, which is easily transmitted and kills quickly, especially when people are malnourished. By the end of the month,&#160; <a href="http://www.emro.who.int/surveillance-forecasting-response/surveillance-news/update-on-the-cholera-situation-in-yemen-30-october-2016.html" type="external">according</a>&#160;to the World Health Organization, there were 1,410 confirmed cases of cholera, and 45 known deaths from it in the country. ( <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/11/7000-killed-37000-wounded-yemen-conflict-161107142503485.html" type="external">Other estimates</a>&#160;put the number of cases at more than 2,200.)</p>
<p>Both these health emergencies have been exacerbated by the ongoing Saudi air war, which has&#160; <a href="http://www.unocha.org/yemen/crisis-overview" type="external">destroyed</a>&#160;or otherwise forced the closure of more than 600 healthcare centers, including four hospitals operated by Doctors Without Borders, along with 1,400 schools. More than half of all health facilities in the country have either&#160; <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/11/7000-killed-37000-wounded-yemen-conflict-161107142503485.html" type="external">closed</a>&#160;or are only partially functional.</p>
<p>The day before the U.S. election, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, the U.N.’s envoy on Yemen,&#160; <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/11/7000-killed-37000-wounded-yemen-conflict-161107142503485.html" type="external">described</a>&#160;the situation this way: “People are dying …&#160;the infrastructure is falling apart …&#160;and the economy is on the brink of abyss.” Every time it seems the crisis can’t get any worse, it does. A recent&#160;Washington Post&#160;story&#160; <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/in-yemens-war-trapped-families-ask-which-child-should-we-save/2016/11/30/c2240cf4-7d60-4132-989f-2128b077efbb_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_yemenhunger-735pm:homepage/story&amp;utm_term=.ad5641e1ee20" type="external">describes</a>&#160;such “wrenching” choices now commonly faced by Yemeni families as whether to spend the little money they have to take one dying child to a hospital or to buy food for the rest of the family.</p>
<p>The Saudi-led coalition includes Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain. Between March 2015 and the end of August 2016,&#160; <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2016/sep/16/how-saudi-arabias-airstrikes-have-hit-civilian-life-in-yemen" type="external">according to</a>&#160;the Yemen Data Project, an independent, nonpartisan group of academics and human rights organizations, the coalition launched more than 8,600 air strikes. At least a third of them struck civilian targets, including, the&#160;Guardian&#160;reports, “school buildings, hospitals, markets, mosques and economic infrastructure.” Gatherings like&#160; <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/yemen-wedding-bombing-15-year-old-survivor-tells-of-devastation-wreaked-on-family-party-a6697331.html" type="external">weddings</a>&#160;and&#160; <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/10/13/yemen-saudi-led-funeral-attack-apparent-war-crime" type="external">funerals</a>&#160;have come under attack, too. To get a sense of the scale and focus of the air war, consider that one market in the town of Sirwah about 50 miles east of the capital, Sana’a, has already been hit 24 separate times.</p>
<p>Casualty estimates vary, but the World Health Organization&#160; <a href="https://www.japantoday.com/category/world/view/yemen-war-death-toll-surpasses-7000-who" type="external">says</a>&#160;that, as of October 25th, “more than 7,070 people have been killed and over 36,818 injured.” As early as last January, the U.N. High Commission for Refugees&#160; <a href="http://www.unhcr.org/4c907a4a9.html" type="external">reported</a>&#160;that 2.4 million people (nearly one-tenth of the population) were already internally displaced—that is, uprooted from their homes by the war. Another 170,000 have fled the country, including Somali and Ethiopian refugees, who had sought asylum from their own countries in Yemen, mistakenly believing that the war there had died down. Leaving Yemen has, however, gotten harder for the desperate and uprooted since the Saudis and Egypt began blockading the country’s ports. Yemen shares land borders with Saudi Arabia to the north and Oman—the only Arab monarchy that is not part of the Saudi-led coalition—to the east.</p>
<p>In early October, Saudi planes attacked a funeral hall in Sana’a where the father of the country’s interior minister was being memorialized, killing at least 135 people and wounding more than 500. Gathered at the funeral,&#160; <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/10/13/yemen-saudi-led-funeral-attack-apparent-war-crime" type="external">according</a>&#160;to Human Rights Watch (HRW), were a wide range of Yemenis, including journalists, government officials, and some military men. HRW’s on-the-ground report on the incident claims that the attack, which intentionally targeted civilians and involved an initial air strike followed by a second one after rescuers had begun to arrive 30 minutes later, constitutes a war crime. The Saudi-led coalition&#160; <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/15/saudi-led-coalition-admits-to-bombing-yemen-funeral" type="external">acknowledged</a>&#160;responsibility for the bombing, blaming the attack on “wrong information.”&#160;</p>
<p>U.N. General Secretary Ban Ki-Moon was horrified and called for a full investigation. “Aerial attacks by the Saudi-led coalition,” he&#160; <a href="http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=55255#.WCKDpdzLPgd" type="external">said</a>, “have already caused immense carnage, and destroyed much of the country’s medical facilities and other vital civilian infrastructure.”</p>
<p>For once in this forgotten war, the international outcry was sufficient to force the Obama administration to say something vaguely negative about its ally. “U.S. security cooperation with Saudi Arabia,” <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/08/middleeast/yemen-airstrikes/" type="external">commented</a> National Security Council Spokesman Ned Price, “is not a blank check.” He added:</p>
<p>In light of this and other recent incidents, we have initiated an immediate review of our already significantly reduced support to the Saudi-led coalition and are prepared to adjust our support so as to better align with U.S. principles, values&#160;and interests, including achieving an immediate and durable end to Yemen's tragic conflict.</p>
<p>That “check” from Washington did at least include the bombs used in the funeral attack. According to HRW’s on-the-ground reporters, U.S.-manufactured, air-dropped GBU-12 Paveway II 500-pound laser-guided bombs were used.</p>
<p>Why is Saudi Arabia, along with its allies, aided by the United States and, to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom, fighting in Yemen? That country has&#160; <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/briefly/2015/03/26/why-does-yemen-matter-to-the-worlds-oil-market-the-short-answer/" type="external">little oil</a>, although petroleum products are its largest export, followed by among other things “non-fillet fresh fish.” It does lie along one of the world’s main oil trading routes on the Bab el-Mandeb strait between the Suez Canal at the north end of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden in the south. But neither Saudi nor U.S. access to the canal is threatened by the forces Saudi Arabia is fighting in Yemen.</p>
<p>The Saudis have specifically targeted the&#160; <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houthis" type="external">Houthis</a>, a political movement named for its founder Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, a Zaidi Shi’a Muslim religious and political leader who died in 2004. The Zaidis are an ancient branch of Shi’a Islam, most of whose adherents live in Yemen.</p>
<p>Officially known as Ansar Allah (Partisans of God), the Houthi movement&#160; <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/08/yemen-houthis-hadi-protests-201482132719818986.html" type="external">began</a>&#160;in the 1990s as a religious revival among young people, who described it as a vehicle for their commitment to peace and justice. Ansar Allah soon adopted a series of slogans opposing the United States and Israel, along with any Arab countries collaborating with them, presumably including Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states. As Zaidi Muslims, the movement also opposed any significant role for Salafists (fundamentalist Sunnis) in Yemeni life and held demonstrations at mosques, including in the capital, Sana’a.</p>
<p>In 2004, this led to armed confrontations when Yemeni security forces, commanded by then-President Ali Abdullah Saleh, attacked the demonstrators. Badreddin al-Houthi, the movement’s founder, was killed in the intermittent civil war that followed and officially&#160; <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/blogs/middleeast/2014/02/98466.html" type="external">ended</a>&#160;in 2010.&#160;Al-Jazeera, the Qatar government’s news agency,&#160; <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/blogs/middleeast/2014/02/98466.html" type="external">has suggested</a>&#160;that President Saleh may have used his war with the Houthis unsuccessfully to get at his real&#160;rival, a cousin and general in the Yemeni army named Ali Mohsen.</p>
<p>During the Arab Spring in 2011, the Houthis supported a successful effort to oust President Saleh, and as a reward,&#160; <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/blogs/middleeast/2014/02/98466.html" type="external">according to</a>&#160;al-Jazeera, that same General Mohsen gave them control of the state of Saadra, an area where many Houthi tribespeople live. Having helped unseat Saleh, the Houthis—and much of the rest of Yemen—soon&#160; <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-29319423" type="external">fell out</a>&#160;with his Saudi-supported replacement, Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi. In January 2015, the Houthis took over Sana’a and placed Hadi under effective house arrest. He later fled to Saudi Arabia and is believed to be living in the Saudi capital Riyadh. The Houthis for their part have now allied with their old enemy Saleh.</p>
<p>So, once again, why do the Saudis (and their Sunni Gulf State allies) care so much about the roiling internal politics and conflicts of their desperately poor neighbor to the south? It’s true that the Houthis have managed to lob some rockets into Saudi Arabia and conduct a few cross-border raids, but they hardly represent an existential threat to that country.</p>
<p>The Saudis firmly believe, however, that Iran represents such a threat. As Saudi diplomatic documents&#160; <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/17/world/middleeast/wikileaks-saudi-arabia-iran.html" type="external">described</a>&#160;in the&#160;New York Times&#160;suggest, that country has “a near obsession with Iran.” They see the hand of that Shi’a nation everywhere, and certainly everywhere that Shi’a minorities have challenged Sunni or secular rulers, including Iraq.</p>
<p>There seems to be little evidence that Iran supported the Houthis (who represent a minority variant of Shi’a Islam) in any serious way—at least until the Saudis got into the act. Even now,&#160; <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/05/16/contrary-to-popular-belief-houthis-arent-iranian-proxies/" type="external">according to</a>&#160;a report in the&#160;Washington Post, the Houthis “are not Iranian puppets.” Their fight is local and the support they get from Iran remains “limited and far from sufficient to make more than a marginal difference to the balance of forces in Yemen, a country awash with weapons. There is therefore no supporting evidence to the claim that Iran has bought itself any significant measure of influence over Houthi decision-making.”</p>
<p>So to return to where we began: why exactly has Washington supported the Saudi war in Yemen so fully and with such clout? The best guess is that it’s a make-up present to Saudi Arabia, a gesture to help heal the rift that opened when the Obama administration concluded its July 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran. Under that agreement’s terms, Iran vowed “that it will under no circumstances ever seek, develop, or acquire any nuclear weapons” in return for the United States lifting years of economic sanctions.</p>
<p>The munitions the United States has supplied to the Saudis for their war in Yemen include&#160; <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/20/opinion/obama-saudi-arabia-trade-cluster-bombs.html" type="external">cluster bombs</a>, which sprinkle hundreds of miniature bomblets around an area as big as several football fields. Unexploded bomblets can go off years later, one reason why their use is now generally considered to violate the laws of war. In fact, 119 countries have signed a&#160; <a href="http://www.clusterconvention.org/" type="external">treaty</a>&#160;to outlaw cluster bombs, although not the United States. (As it happens, Saudi Arabia isn't the only U.S. ally to favor cluster bombs. Israel has also used them, for instance&#160; <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/news/idf-commander-we-fired-more-than-a-million-cluster-bombs-in-lebanon-1.197099" type="external">deploying</a>&#160;“more than a million” bomblets in its 2006 war against Lebanon, according to an Israel Defense Forces commander.)</p>
<p>We know that U.S.-made cluster bombs have already&#160; <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/a-cluster-bomb-made-in-america-shattered-lives-in-yemens-capital/2016/07/08/e3b722cc-283d-11e6-8329-6104954928d2_story.html" type="external">killed</a>&#160;civilians in Yemen, and in June 2016, many Democratic members of Congress tried to outlaw their sale to Saudi Arabia. They lost in a close 216-204 vote. Only 16 Democrats backed President Obama’s request to continue supplying cluster bombs to the Saudis. Congressional Republicans and the Defense Department, however, fought back fiercely, as the&#160;Intercept&#160;has&#160; <a href="https://theintercept.com/2016/06/16/worried-about-stigmatizing-cluster-bombs-house-approves-more-sales-to-saudi-arabia/" type="external">reported</a>:</p>
<p>“The Department of Defense strongly opposes this amendment,”&#160;said Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-N.J., chairman of the House Committee on Defense Appropriations, during floor debate. “They advise us that it would stigmatize cluster munitions, which are legitimate weapons with clear military utility.”</p>
<p>Perhaps some weapons deserve to be stigmatized.</p>
<p>These days it’s not just American bombs that are landing in Yemen. U.S. Special Operations forces&#160; <a href="https://news.vice.com/story/what-are-us-special-operations-forces-doing-in-yemen" type="external">have landed</a>&#160;there, too, ostensibly to fight al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, the local terror outfit that has been expanding its operations amid the chaos of the war in that country. If anything, the air war has actually strengthened AQAP’s position, allowing it to seize more territory in the chaos of the ongoing conflict. In the ever-shifting set of alliances that is Yemeni reality, those U.S. special ops troops find themselves allied with the United Arab Emirates against AQAP and the local branch of the Islamic State, or ISIS, and also, at least temporarily, with a thriving movement of southern Yemeni separatists, who would like to see a return to the pre-1990 moment when there were two Yemens, north and south.</p>
<p>In the beginning, the White House claimed that the special ops deployment was temporary. But by June 2016, the&#160;Washington Post&#160;was&#160; <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/06/17/u-s-special-operations-forces-shift-to-long-term-mission-in-yemen/" type="external">reporting</a>&#160;that “the U.S. military now plans to keep a small force of Special Operations advisers in Yemen …&#160;for the foreseeable future.” And that has yet to change, so consider us now directly involved in an undeclared land war in that country.</p>
<p>Compared to the horrors of Iraq and Syria, the slaughter, displacement, and starvation in Yemen may seem like small potatoes—except, of course, to the people living and dying there. But precisely because there are no U.S. economic or military interests in Yemen, perhaps it could be the first arena in Washington’s endless war on terror to be abandoned.</p>
<p>I vividly recall a political cartoon of the 1980s that appeared at a moment when Congress was once again voting to send U.S. aid to the Contra&#160;forces fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Having witnessed firsthand the effects of the Contra war there, with its intentional military strategy of attacking civilians and public services as well as its use of torture,&#160;kidnapping&#160;and mutilation, I found those Congressional debates on sending money, weapons&#160;and CIA trainers to the Contras frustrating. The cartoon’s single panel caught my mood exactly.&#160; It was set in the cloakroom of the House of Representatives. Suspended from each hanger was a backbone. A blob-like creature in a suit could just be seen slithering out of the frame. The point was clear: Congress had checked its spine at the door.</p>
<p>In fact, in every war the United States has fought since World War II, Congress has effectively abdicated its constitutional right to declare war, repeatedly rolling over and playing dead for the executive branch. During the last 50 years, from the Reagan administration’s illegal Contra war to the “war on terror,” this version of a presidential power grab has only accelerated. By now, we’ve become so used to all of this that the term “commander-in-chief” has become&#160; <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/the-administration/235517-the-president-is-not-our-commander-in-chief" type="external">synonymous</a>&#160;with “president”—even in domestic contexts. With a Trump administration on the horizon, it should be easier to see just what an irresponsible folly it’s been to allow the power of the presidency and the national security state to balloon in such an uncontrolled, unchecked way.</p>
<p>I wish I had the slightest hope that our newly elected Republican Congress would find its long-lost spine in the age of Donald Trump and reassert its right and duty to decide whether to commit the country to war, starting in Yemen. Today, more than ever, the world needs our system of checks and balances to work again. The alternative, unthinkable as it might be, is looming.</p>
<p>It’s 2016. We know where our bombs are. Isn’t it time to bring them home?</p>
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<p>Rebecca Gordon is the author of Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States. She teaches in the philosophy department at the University of San Francisco. She is a member of the War Times/Tiempo de Guerras collective.</p> | true | 4 | aerial attacks saudiled coalition already caused immense carnage destroyed much countrys medical facilities vital civilian infrastructure version post first appeared tomdispatch long national nightmare 2016 presidential election finally facing worse terror reality trump presidency donald trump already promised nominate a160 segregationist160attorney general national security adviser a160 raging islamophobe160a secretary education who160 doesnt believe160in public schools secretary defense whose sobriquet mad dog worried general james mad dog mattis may well be160 soberest160among along a160 deeply divided country worst160 income inequality160since least 1920s a160 crumbling infrastructure trump inherit 15yearold apparently neverending worldwide war named enemy may mere emotion terror incendiary strategy terrorism victims couldnt real modern wars majority160of civilians many countries us ordnance falling moment put total at160 six others160 seven record seven would afghanistan iraq libya pakistan somalia syria oh yes yemen united states directing drone strikes calls alqaeda targets yemen160 since 2002 military involvement country increased dramatically 2015 us ally saudi arabia inserted civil war since united states supplying intelligence midair refueling saudi bombers many americanmade f15s sold country state department also160 approved sales160to saudis 129 billion worth bombssmart otherwisetogether 115 billion worth tanks half billion dollars ammunition total small part the160 115 billion160total military sales united states offered saudi arabia since president obama took power 2009 160160 tuesday reuters reported united states would stop selling precisionguided munitions saudi arabia160out concerns civilian casualties however support saudi military continue american bombs dropped yemen by160 americantrained pilots160from americanmade planes ill get moment first glimpse results the160 photographs160are160 devastating tiny largeeyed children sticks limbs160 stare160out viewer mothers touch gently tentatively stronger embrace would snap bones victims famine war brought yemen already poorest country arab world present civil war saudi bombing campaign even began unicef spokesman mohammed alasaadi160 told160aljazeera160that august 2016 agency counted 370000 children suffering severe acute malnutrition un world food program wfp160 says160144 million people yemen food insecure seven million themone fifth countrys populationin desperate need food assistance war began yemen160 imported 90 food160 since april 2015 however saudi arabia blockaded countrys ports today 80 yemenis depend kind un food aid survival war made situation immeasurably worse wfp reports nutrition situation continues deteriorate according wfp market analysis prices food items spiked september result escalation conflict national average price wheat flour last month 55 percent higher compared precrisis period rising price wheat matters many famines problem isnt theres food food people cant afford160to buy cholera outbreak october medical workers began see cases waterborne diarrheal disease easily transmitted kills quickly especially people malnourished end month160 according160to world health organization 1410 confirmed cases cholera 45 known deaths country estimates160put number cases 2200 health emergencies exacerbated ongoing saudi air war has160 destroyed160or otherwise forced closure 600 healthcare centers including four hospitals operated doctors without borders along 1400 schools half health facilities country either160 closed160or partially functional day us election ismail ould cheikh ahmed uns envoy yemen160 described160the situation way people dying 160the infrastructure falling apart 160and economy brink abyss every time seems crisis cant get worse recent160washington post160story160 describes160such wrenching choices commonly faced yemeni families whether spend little money take one dying child hospital buy food rest family saudiled coalition includes egypt morocco jordan sudan united arab emirates kuwait qatar bahrain march 2015 end august 2016160 according to160the yemen data project independent nonpartisan group academics human rights organizations coalition launched 8600 air strikes least third struck civilian targets including the160guardian160reports school buildings hospitals markets mosques economic infrastructure gatherings like160 weddings160and160 funerals160have come attack get sense scale focus air war consider one market town sirwah 50 miles east capital sanaa already hit 24 separate times casualty estimates vary world health organization160 says160that october 25th 7070 people killed 36818 injured early last january un high commission refugees160 reported160that 24 million people nearly onetenth population already internally displacedthat uprooted homes war another 170000 fled country including somali ethiopian refugees sought asylum countries yemen mistakenly believing war died leaving yemen however gotten harder desperate uprooted since saudis egypt began blockading countrys ports yemen shares land borders saudi arabia north omanthe arab monarchy part saudiled coalitionto east early october saudi planes attacked funeral hall sanaa father countrys interior minister memorialized killing least 135 people wounding 500 gathered funeral160 according160to human rights watch hrw wide range yemenis including journalists government officials military men hrws ontheground report incident claims attack intentionally targeted civilians involved initial air strike followed second one rescuers begun arrive 30 minutes later constitutes war crime saudiled coalition160 acknowledged160responsibility bombing blaming attack wrong information160 un general secretary ban kimoon horrified called full investigation aerial attacks saudiled coalition he160 said already caused immense carnage destroyed much countrys medical facilities vital civilian infrastructure forgotten war international outcry sufficient force obama administration say something vaguely negative ally us security cooperation saudi arabia commented national security council spokesman ned price blank check added light recent incidents initiated immediate review already significantly reduced support saudiled coalition prepared adjust support better align us principles values160and interests including achieving immediate durable end yemens tragic conflict check washington least include bombs used funeral attack according hrws ontheground reporters usmanufactured airdropped gbu12 paveway ii 500pound laserguided bombs used saudi arabia along allies aided united states lesser extent united kingdom fighting yemen country has160 little oil although petroleum products largest export followed among things nonfillet fresh fish lie along one worlds main oil trading routes bab elmandeb strait suez canal north end red sea gulf aden south neither saudi us access canal threatened forces saudi arabia fighting yemen saudis specifically targeted the160 houthis political movement named founder hussein badreddin alhouthi zaidi shia muslim religious political leader died 2004 zaidis ancient branch shia islam whose adherents live yemen officially known ansar allah partisans god houthi movement160 began160in 1990s religious revival among young people described vehicle commitment peace justice ansar allah soon adopted series slogans opposing united states israel along arab countries collaborating presumably including saudi arabia gulf states zaidi muslims movement also opposed significant role salafists fundamentalist sunnis yemeni life held demonstrations mosques including capital sanaa 2004 led armed confrontations yemeni security forces commanded thenpresident ali abdullah saleh attacked demonstrators badreddin alhouthi movements founder killed intermittent civil war followed officially160 ended160in 2010160aljazeera qatar governments news agency160 suggested160that president saleh may used war houthis unsuccessfully get real160rival cousin general yemeni army named ali mohsen arab spring 2011 houthis supported successful effort oust president saleh reward160 according to160aljazeera general mohsen gave control state saadra area many houthi tribespeople live helped unseat saleh houthisand much rest yemensoon160 fell out160with saudisupported replacement abdrabbuh mansour hadi january 2015 houthis took sanaa placed hadi effective house arrest later fled saudi arabia believed living saudi capital riyadh houthis part allied old enemy saleh saudis sunni gulf state allies care much roiling internal politics conflicts desperately poor neighbor south true houthis managed lob rockets saudi arabia conduct crossborder raids hardly represent existential threat country saudis firmly believe however iran represents threat saudi diplomatic documents160 described160in the160new york times160suggest country near obsession iran see hand shia nation everywhere certainly everywhere shia minorities challenged sunni secular rulers including iraq seems little evidence iran supported houthis represent minority variant shia islam serious wayat least saudis got act even now160 according to160a report the160washington post houthis iranian puppets fight local support get iran remains limited far sufficient make marginal difference balance forces yemen country awash weapons therefore supporting evidence claim iran bought significant measure influence houthi decisionmaking return began exactly washington supported saudi war yemen fully clout best guess makeup present saudi arabia gesture help heal rift opened obama administration concluded july 2015 nuclear agreement iran agreements terms iran vowed circumstances ever seek develop acquire nuclear weapons return united states lifting years economic sanctions munitions united states supplied saudis war yemen include160 cluster bombs sprinkle hundreds miniature bomblets around area big several football fields unexploded bomblets go years later one reason use generally considered violate laws war fact 119 countries signed a160 treaty160to outlaw cluster bombs although united states happens saudi arabia isnt us ally favor cluster bombs israel also used instance160 deploying160more million bomblets 2006 war lebanon according israel defense forces commander know usmade cluster bombs already160 killed160civilians yemen june 2016 many democratic members congress tried outlaw sale saudi arabia lost close 216204 vote 16 democrats backed president obamas request continue supplying cluster bombs saudis congressional republicans defense department however fought back fiercely the160intercept160has160 reported department defense strongly opposes amendment160said rep rodney frelinghuysen rnj chairman house committee defense appropriations floor debate advise us would stigmatize cluster munitions legitimate weapons clear military utility perhaps weapons deserve stigmatized days american bombs landing yemen us special operations forces160 landed160there ostensibly fight alqaeda arabian peninsula aqap local terror outfit expanding operations amid chaos war country anything air war actually strengthened aqaps position allowing seize territory chaos ongoing conflict evershifting set alliances yemeni reality us special ops troops find allied united arab emirates aqap local branch islamic state isis also least temporarily thriving movement southern yemeni separatists would like see return pre1990 moment two yemens north south beginning white house claimed special ops deployment temporary june 2016 the160washington post160was160 reporting160that us military plans keep small force special operations advisers yemen 160for foreseeable future yet change consider us directly involved undeclared land war country compared horrors iraq syria slaughter displacement starvation yemen may seem like small potatoesexcept course people living dying precisely us economic military interests yemen perhaps could first arena washingtons endless war terror abandoned vividly recall political cartoon 1980s appeared moment congress voting send us aid contra160forces fighting sandinista government nicaragua witnessed firsthand effects contra war intentional military strategy attacking civilians public services well use torture160kidnapping160and mutilation found congressional debates sending money weapons160and cia trainers contras frustrating cartoons single panel caught mood exactly160 set cloakroom house representatives suspended hanger backbone bloblike creature suit could seen slithering frame point clear congress checked spine door fact every war united states fought since world war ii congress effectively abdicated constitutional right declare war repeatedly rolling playing dead executive branch last 50 years reagan administrations illegal contra war war terror version presidential power grab accelerated weve become used term commanderinchief become160 synonymous160with presidenteven domestic contexts trump administration horizon easier see irresponsible folly allow power presidency national security state balloon uncontrolled unchecked way wish slightest hope newly elected republican congress would find longlost spine age donald trump reassert right duty decide whether commit country war starting yemen today ever world needs system checks balances work alternative unthinkable might looming 2016 know bombs isnt time bring home like youve read subscribe times magazine make taxdeductible donation fund reporting rebecca gordon author mainstreaming torture ethical approaches post911 united states teaches philosophy department university san francisco member war timestiempo de guerras collective | 1,758 |
<p>War, terrorism and violence have been around since the dawn of written history. Since 9/11, terrorism has been a topic of renewed, widespread and vigorous discussion in the United States and in the Western countries. Yet the lack of intensive, balanced, and fair discussion incorporating both retail and wholesale terrorism is rare in the annals of Western intellectuals.</p>
<p>Most high-paid pundits of mainstream newspapers, such as Thomas Friedman, William Safire, and Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, and avant-garde chic radicals such as Christopher Hitchens of the Nation refuse to look at the underlying causes of terrorism or consider the devastating effects of Western state terrorism. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1583224939/counterpunchmaga" type="external">Terrorism and War</a>, a collection of interviews with Howard Zinn by Anthony Arnove, is an honourable and rare exception. It is a part of a series of publication that includes 9/11 by Noam Chomsky, Bin Laden, Islam, and America’s new war on terrorism by As’ad Abu Khalil, and Terrorism: theirs and ours by Eqbal Ahmad. There is now clearly a public demand for an alternative perspective on war and terrorism. Seven Stories Press is to be lauded for trying to fill a critical gap.</p>
<p>The atrocities of 9/11, which was a massive terrorist attack against American civilians, must be condemned, and its perpetrators should be brought to justice and be punished in accordance with national and international law. It is a pity that instead of undertaking a lengthy and painstaking investigation and searching for the culprits, the US authorities chose the option of war. The Taliban’s demand for evidence as a precondition for handing over Osama bin Laden was not an unreasonable request. Whether the Taliban regime’s offer was a serious one or merely a ruse, one will never know because the US authorities refused to even pursue negotiations and instead chose to fight that increased the scale of violence and suffering and did little to reduce the risk of war and terrorism.</p>
<p>This book will benefit those readers who seek to understand the situation rather than resort to jingoist polemics. Arnove successfully follows David Barsamian who has established a literary tradition of probing, through indepth interviews, the thinking of progressive intellectuals from the left. Zinn’s writings remain refreshingly clear and &lt;poignant.Arnove&gt;’s questions allow Zinn to elaborate on his views. The book starts with Zinn’s analysis of the events of September 11. As a historian, he provides an overview of United States’ long record of war and state terrorism. He rejects the notion of lining up behind the president and calls for dissent.</p>
<p>By reading establishment newspapers such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Business Week one can gain a good understanding of the events of the world if one reads between the lines and the inside pages of these papers. As always a critical eye and a skeptical mind if what one needs to uncover the truth. Zinn agrees with the historian Gabriel Kolko that war increasingly is war on civilians despite the talk about precision bombing and high technology. He recalls America’s long history of anti-war activism and opposition to war.</p>
<p>There are seven interviews in the book. Zinn’s conversations with Arnove are lucid and vibrant. Appendix A of the book lists the key passages from the Geneva Convention which explicitly states that civilians should not be objects of attack and that acts that are designed to promote terror among civilians are prohibited. All the evidence gathered so far suggest that the United States war in Afghanistan and Israel’s military assault on the West Bank have been in violation of the Geneva Conventions.</p>
<p>Several suggestions can be made to enhance the value of the book. It contains two useful maps of Afghanistan, but an additional map showing the country’s location in Asia would help readers who may be unfamiliar with Afghanistan’s location on the globe since geography is not yet taught as a subject in many schools in the US.</p>
<p>If the publisher plans to bring out a second edition of the same book, Arnove and Zinn may find it worth while to discuss in details the wars of terrorism in Colombia and Palestine. Having edited an excellent study of the US sanctions against Iraq, Arnove is particularly well placed to analyze the devastating effects and after-effects of wars on civilians.</p>
<p>Moreover, Arnove and Zinn can explore the practical issues of broad-based anti-war coalition in the United States. Interestingly in the US not only progressive people and the admittedly marginal left political groups are opposed to the war but also many anti-state right libertarians and old-style conservatives, such as those at <a href="http://www.antiwar.com/" type="external">antiwar.com</a>, have voiced strong, consistent and honourable opposition to the war, much to their credit, albeit for somewhat different reasons that of the left. It is hoped, however, new alliances surmounting the traditional divisions between left and right can be formed on the anti-war issue. Broad-based opposition to war of terrorism is much needed in our times.</p>
<p>The struggle for peace is likely to be long and arduous. In times of war, most “intellectuals” support state power and the social sciences’ and humanities’ establishment is devoted to serving power interests even in relatively free and open societies such as the United States.</p>
<p>Hence, books from alternative perspective, such as Terrorism and War, become indispensable because they provide a glimpse of truth and aid in deciphering the news in the leading journals of our times and the distortions of governments and corporations.</p>
<p>Tanweer Akram lives in Alexandria, Virginia and can be reached at: <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a></p>
<p>Today’s Other Features:</p>
<p>Tom Turnipseed <a href="" type="internal">A Crisis of Confidence in US Leadership</a></p>
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<p>&#160;</p> | true | 4 | war terrorism violence around since dawn written history since 911 terrorism topic renewed widespread vigorous discussion united states western countries yet lack intensive balanced fair discussion incorporating retail wholesale terrorism rare annals western intellectuals highpaid pundits mainstream newspapers thomas friedman william safire nicholas kristof new york times avantgarde chic radicals christopher hitchens nation refuse look underlying causes terrorism consider devastating effects western state terrorism terrorism war collection interviews howard zinn anthony arnove honourable rare exception part series publication includes 911 noam chomsky bin laden islam americas new war terrorism asad abu khalil terrorism eqbal ahmad clearly public demand alternative perspective war terrorism seven stories press lauded trying fill critical gap atrocities 911 massive terrorist attack american civilians must condemned perpetrators brought justice punished accordance national international law pity instead undertaking lengthy painstaking investigation searching culprits us authorities chose option war talibans demand evidence precondition handing osama bin laden unreasonable request whether taliban regimes offer serious one merely ruse one never know us authorities refused even pursue negotiations instead chose fight increased scale violence suffering little reduce risk war terrorism book benefit readers seek understand situation rather resort jingoist polemics arnove successfully follows david barsamian established literary tradition probing indepth interviews thinking progressive intellectuals left zinns writings remain refreshingly clear ltpoignantarnovegts questions allow zinn elaborate views book starts zinns analysis events september 11 historian provides overview united states long record war state terrorism rejects notion lining behind president calls dissent reading establishment newspapers new york times wall street journal business week one gain good understanding events world one reads lines inside pages papers always critical eye skeptical mind one needs uncover truth zinn agrees historian gabriel kolko war increasingly war civilians despite talk precision bombing high technology recalls americas long history antiwar activism opposition war seven interviews book zinns conversations arnove lucid vibrant appendix book lists key passages geneva convention explicitly states civilians objects attack acts designed promote terror among civilians prohibited evidence gathered far suggest united states war afghanistan israels military assault west bank violation geneva conventions several suggestions made enhance value book contains two useful maps afghanistan additional map showing countrys location asia would help readers may unfamiliar afghanistans location globe since geography yet taught subject many schools us publisher plans bring second edition book arnove zinn may find worth discuss details wars terrorism colombia palestine edited excellent study us sanctions iraq arnove particularly well placed analyze devastating effects aftereffects wars civilians moreover arnove zinn explore practical issues broadbased antiwar coalition united states interestingly us progressive people admittedly marginal left political groups opposed war also many antistate right libertarians oldstyle conservatives antiwarcom voiced strong consistent honourable opposition war much credit albeit somewhat different reasons left hoped however new alliances surmounting traditional divisions left right formed antiwar issue broadbased opposition war terrorism much needed times struggle peace likely long arduous times war intellectuals support state power social sciences humanities establishment devoted serving power interests even relatively free open societies united states hence books alternative perspective terrorism war become indispensable provide glimpse truth aid deciphering news leading journals times distortions governments corporations tanweer akram lives alexandria virginia reached ta63columbiaedu todays features tom turnipseed crisis confidence us leadership home subscribe us books archives search links 160 160 | 535 |
<p>The chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Deborah Platt Majoras, is leaving her job. She’s going to become vice president and general counsel for Procter &amp; Gamble (P&amp;G).</p>
<p>Should it raise eyebrows for the head of the leading U.S. consumer protection agency to leave and take a job with the largest consumer products company?</p>
<p>Not in Washington, D.C.</p>
<p>Asked about the propriety of the move, FTC spokesperson Nancy Judy explains that Majoras will need to abide by a year-long “cooling off” period. She’ll never be able to represent P&amp;G before the Commission on matters on which she worked while at the FTC. And once she announced that she would be taking a job with P&amp;G, she removed herself from any matters that might affect the company.</p>
<p>Shira Mintz, who is the assistant general counsel for ethics at the FTC, says that Majoras is “extremely conscientious” about ethical matters, and that everything she has done is above board.</p>
<p>OK, but is there any concern about appearances here? Or is this just how things work?</p>
<p>“It is how things work,” says Mintz. “The nature of the business is the revolving door.”</p>
<p>Wow.</p>
<p>“You get extremely qualified people to come into government, and then they go back into the real world,” says Mintz. “Real world” means well-paying corporate work.</p>
<p>Majoras came to the FTC from the Bush Justice Department. Prior to that, she worked for the corporate law firm Jones Day. Jones Day claims more than half of the Fortune 500, including P&amp;G, as clients.</p>
<p>Procter &amp; Gamble is the largest consumer goods company in the United States (not counting Altria/Philip Morris, which is breaking itself apart later this week). It makes Old Spice deodorant, Charmin toilet paper, Pampers diapers, Duracell batteries, Ivory soap, CoverGirl cosmetics, Dawn dish washing soap, Clairol hair dye, Pepto-Bismol, Tide laundry detergent, Crest toothpaste, Bounty paper towels, Gillette shaving products, Folgers coffee and Pringles potato chips, among many other products.</p>
<p>The FTC is an independent federal agency with authority over both consumer protection and competition policy. Given the breadth of the FTC’s jurisdiction and the breadth of P&amp;G’s product line, what the FTC does — and does not do — is of potentially enormous importance to P&amp;G.</p>
<p>Under the Bush administration, including the period since 2004, when Majoras became chair, the FTC hasn’t done much.</p>
<p>Consider just a few of the issues that touch on Procter &amp; Gamble’s interests:</p>
<p>* P&amp;G is the leading company involved in “buzz marketing” — employing regular people to talk up company products, often in exchange for free merchandise. P&amp;G says it has 250,000 teens working for its Tremor division. P&amp;G sends them stuff, and they are supposed to talk to friends about the products.</p>
<p>The head of the Tremor division told USA Today in 2005, “If we’ve done our work correctly, they talk to their friends about” the gifts. Tremor doesn’t tell members to say they are part of Tremor, he explained, “because you never tell a [panelist] what to say.”</p>
<p>An organization with which I work, Commercial Alert, petitioned the FTC in 2005 to investigate whether buzz marketing operations violate federal rules on deceptive advertising. The basic FTC rule is that paid marketers must disclose that they are paid.</p>
<p>The Commercial Alert petition asked the FTC to review evidence that “companies are perpetrating large-scale deception upon consumers by deploying buzz marketers who fail to disclose that they have been enlisted to promote products. This failure to disclose is fundamentally fraudulent and misleading.”</p>
<p>The petition specifically focused on P&amp;G, arguing that “the Commission should carefully examine the targeting of minors by buzz marketing, because children and teenagers tend to be more impressionable and easy to deceive. The Commission should do this, at a minimum, by issuing subpoenas to executives at Proctor &amp; Gamble’s Tremor and other buzz marketers that target children and teenagers, to determine whether their endorsers are disclosing that they are paid marketers.”</p>
<p>A year later, the FTC responded. The Commission agreed with the thrust of Commercial Alert’s argument: “In some word of mouth marketing contexts, it would appear that consumers may reasonably give more weight to statements that sponsored consumers make about their opinions or experience with a product based on their assumed independence from the marketer.” But then the Commission declined to undertake an investigation or rule-making, saying it would consider matters only a case-by-case basis. The P&amp;G case — involving a quarter of a million teens who are not instructed to disclose their relationship to the company — apparently was not noteworthy enough.</p>
<p>Said Gary Ruskin, Commercial Alert’s executive director at the time, “Instead of acting like a watchdog, the Commission is more like a docile lapdog nestled in the lap of its corporate masters.”</p>
<p>* A major emerging technology for consumer products is RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) systems. These systems, involving the attachment of tiny, trackable electronic chips to products (or people, pets and cars), offer the possibility of precise inventory control and management. They also portend some major privacy concerns.</p>
<p>The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) warns of the possibility of “an Orwellian world where law enforcement officials and nosy retailers could read the contents of a handbag — perhaps without a person’s knowledge — simply by installing RFID readers nearby.” There are concerns about retailers and manufacturers being able to track consumers once they leave the store.</p>
<p>These issues are being taken seriously in Europe. There, says EPIC executive director Marc Rotenberg, “the European Commission has undertaken an extensive public consultation and has recently held several high-level events.” The European Commission is now soliciting comments on proposed privacy standards for RFID technologies.</p>
<p>In the United States, in 2004, the Federal Trade Commission held a workshop on RFID issues. P&amp;G presented at the workshop, detailing the company’s privacy policies and how it would ensure that RFID technologies were not abused. EPIC also presented.</p>
<p>“EPIC submitted very detailed comments with clear recommendations,” says Rotenberg. “No action since.”</p>
<p>* Childhood obesity rates in the United States have more than tripled over the past four decades. The childhood rate of type 2 diabetes, once known as “adult-onset” diabetes, has more than doubled in the past decade. No serious person believes skyrocketing childhood obesity rates are unrelated to the onslaught of junk food marketing targeting kids. The staid Institute of Medicine finds, “food and beverage marketing practices geared to children and youth are out of balance with healthful diets and contribute to an environment that puts their health at risk.”</p>
<p>It has been impossible for the FTC to completely ignore this issue. But the FTC has doubly worked to protect the junk food marketers. It emphasized that many factors besides marketing are driving the obesity epidemic — which is true, but a way to divert attention from the agency’s regulatory role. And, as Majoras said in 2007, “the focus of the FTC/HHS [Department of Health and Human Services] joint initiative on childhood obesity has been on marketing and industry self-regulation.”</p>
<p>In recent years, facing the threat of litigation, federal legislation, state and local regulation, and citizen pressure campaigns — just about everything but serious FTC action — the junk food companies have adopted some modestly helpful marketing guidelines to curb some of their most aggressive practices. But the guidelines remain voluntary and are non-enforceable. Although it has held some interesting meetings, the FTC has been absent on the regulatory front.</p>
<p>These are just three among many examples. Other FTC policy issues implicating Procter &amp; Gamble include online marketing to kids, product placement on TV, and mergers (the FTC in 2005 approved a controversial, $57 billion P&amp;G takeover of Gillette, a decision from which Majoras recused herself.) There are many others.</p>
<p>There’s no reason to suspect Majoras is violating any laws in going to work for Procter &amp; Gamble, or that she will in the future. There is no reason to believe she did favors for P&amp;G in anticipation of a job with the company. From her new, high post, she personally may never take up a matter before the FTC.</p>
<p>But the deep corruption inside the beltway is not the illegal, Jack-Abramoff stuff. The real corrupting influences are the things that are legal. The things that Washington insiders view as just “how things work.”</p>
<p>ROBERT WEISSMAN is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based <a href="http://www.multinationalmonitor.org/" type="external">Multinational Monitor</a> and director of <a href="http://www.essentialaction.org/" type="external">Essential Action</a>.</p>
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<p>&#160;</p> | true | 4 | chair federal trade commission ftc deborah platt majoras leaving job shes going become vice president general counsel procter amp gamble pampg raise eyebrows head leading us consumer protection agency leave take job largest consumer products company washington dc asked propriety move ftc spokesperson nancy judy explains majoras need abide yearlong cooling period shell never able represent pampg commission matters worked ftc announced would taking job pampg removed matters might affect company shira mintz assistant general counsel ethics ftc says majoras extremely conscientious ethical matters everything done board ok concern appearances things work things work says mintz nature business revolving door wow get extremely qualified people come government go back real world says mintz real world means wellpaying corporate work majoras came ftc bush justice department prior worked corporate law firm jones day jones day claims half fortune 500 including pampg clients procter amp gamble largest consumer goods company united states counting altriaphilip morris breaking apart later week makes old spice deodorant charmin toilet paper pampers diapers duracell batteries ivory soap covergirl cosmetics dawn dish washing soap clairol hair dye peptobismol tide laundry detergent crest toothpaste bounty paper towels gillette shaving products folgers coffee pringles potato chips among many products ftc independent federal agency authority consumer protection competition policy given breadth ftcs jurisdiction breadth pampgs product line ftc potentially enormous importance pampg bush administration including period since 2004 majoras became chair ftc hasnt done much consider issues touch procter amp gambles interests pampg leading company involved buzz marketing employing regular people talk company products often exchange free merchandise pampg says 250000 teens working tremor division pampg sends stuff supposed talk friends products head tremor division told usa today 2005 weve done work correctly talk friends gifts tremor doesnt tell members say part tremor explained never tell panelist say organization work commercial alert petitioned ftc 2005 investigate whether buzz marketing operations violate federal rules deceptive advertising basic ftc rule paid marketers must disclose paid commercial alert petition asked ftc review evidence companies perpetrating largescale deception upon consumers deploying buzz marketers fail disclose enlisted promote products failure disclose fundamentally fraudulent misleading petition specifically focused pampg arguing commission carefully examine targeting minors buzz marketing children teenagers tend impressionable easy deceive commission minimum issuing subpoenas executives proctor amp gambles tremor buzz marketers target children teenagers determine whether endorsers disclosing paid marketers year later ftc responded commission agreed thrust commercial alerts argument word mouth marketing contexts would appear consumers may reasonably give weight statements sponsored consumers make opinions experience product based assumed independence marketer commission declined undertake investigation rulemaking saying would consider matters casebycase basis pampg case involving quarter million teens instructed disclose relationship company apparently noteworthy enough said gary ruskin commercial alerts executive director time instead acting like watchdog commission like docile lapdog nestled lap corporate masters major emerging technology consumer products rfid radio frequency identification systems systems involving attachment tiny trackable electronic chips products people pets cars offer possibility precise inventory control management also portend major privacy concerns electronic privacy information center epic warns possibility orwellian world law enforcement officials nosy retailers could read contents handbag perhaps without persons knowledge simply installing rfid readers nearby concerns retailers manufacturers able track consumers leave store issues taken seriously europe says epic executive director marc rotenberg european commission undertaken extensive public consultation recently held several highlevel events european commission soliciting comments proposed privacy standards rfid technologies united states 2004 federal trade commission held workshop rfid issues pampg presented workshop detailing companys privacy policies would ensure rfid technologies abused epic also presented epic submitted detailed comments clear recommendations says rotenberg action since childhood obesity rates united states tripled past four decades childhood rate type 2 diabetes known adultonset diabetes doubled past decade serious person believes skyrocketing childhood obesity rates unrelated onslaught junk food marketing targeting kids staid institute medicine finds food beverage marketing practices geared children youth balance healthful diets contribute environment puts health risk impossible ftc completely ignore issue ftc doubly worked protect junk food marketers emphasized many factors besides marketing driving obesity epidemic true way divert attention agencys regulatory role majoras said 2007 focus ftchhs department health human services joint initiative childhood obesity marketing industry selfregulation recent years facing threat litigation federal legislation state local regulation citizen pressure campaigns everything serious ftc action junk food companies adopted modestly helpful marketing guidelines curb aggressive practices guidelines remain voluntary nonenforceable although held interesting meetings ftc absent regulatory front three among many examples ftc policy issues implicating procter amp gamble include online marketing kids product placement tv mergers ftc 2005 approved controversial 57 billion pampg takeover gillette decision majoras recused many others theres reason suspect majoras violating laws going work procter amp gamble future reason believe favors pampg anticipation job company new high post personally may never take matter ftc deep corruption inside beltway illegal jackabramoff stuff real corrupting influences things legal things washington insiders view things work robert weissman editor washington dcbased multinational monitor director essential action 160 160 160 160 160 | 824 |
<p>Mexico City With immense sorrow etched into his weather-beaten face, the Tzotzil Indian farmer slowly mounted the imposing granite steps of Mexico’s Supreme Court.&#160; Sebastian Perez Vazquez’s job was a thankless one.&#160; As president of the civil group “Las Abejas” (“The Bees”), he was obliged to communicate the bad news to the villagers who had trekked up to the capital from their homes in the highlands of Chiapas (“Los Altos”) that, after 12 years, the killers who had been convicted of murdering their mothers and fathers and grandparents and children at Acteal on December 22, 1997 would now be freed from prison on the instructions of four out of five Supreme Court justices because of procedural errors in their prosecutions.</p>
<p>The Abejas had dressed in their best clothes for the court hearing, the men in their short ornamental chujs (serapes) and the women in their finest huipiles (traditional blouses) and long embroidered skirts they wear as emblems of their Tzotzil roots but they had not even been allowed inside the courtroom to bear witness to the verdict of the justices.&#160; Heavily armed federal police patrolled the marble hallways of the court building on one corner of Mexico City’s great Zocalo plaza intent on keeping the Indians out in the street.</p>
<p>Elena Perez Perez looked like the air had been sucked out of her.&#160; She had expected the exoneration of the killers but still could not staunch the tears that washed her bladed cheekbones.&#160; “We cry because we cannot find justice anywhere,” Elena, who was 19 when the accused murdered her father and two eldest siblings, told a U.S. reporter.&#160; Maria Vazquez had lost nine family members in the massacre.&#160; She too had expected the justices’ decision.&#160; “This court releases the killers but it cannot resuscitate the dead.”</p>
<p>Early on the morning of December 22, 1997 three dozen armed men gathered on a lonely roadside in Chenalho county in the Altos of Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state, and began firing on women and children clustered around a clapboard chapel who were praying for peace on a promontory below.&#160; A detachment of 40 Chiapas police officers were stationed at a schoolhouse just meters away but made no effort to stop the killing.</p>
<p>The gunfire continued for the better part of the day, the shooters scouring the hillside for those who had escaped the first assault and finishing them off one by one.&#160; When they were done seven hours later, 49 Abejas were dead: 15 children, 21 women, nine men, and four babies who had been cut out of the wombs of their mothers and dashed against the rocks.&#160; The killers were determined to exterminate the “seed” of the Abejas.</p>
<p>The outside world learned of the massacre at Acteal when survivors straggled into San Cristobal de las Casas, the old colonial city that crowns the highlands, several hours later.&#160; A call went out to doctors to come to the Civil Hospital to treat the many wounded.&#160; One medic who responded to the call was Hermann Bellinghausen who doubles as correspondent for the left daily La Jornada in Chiapas.&#160; Hermann has accompanied the rebellion of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) since it exploded in the mountains and jungle of this deeply indigenous state on January 1, 1994. The Abejas were supporters of the Zapatistas but rejected the insurgents’ use of weapons.</p>
<p>Around 10 PM that night, a Red Cross ambulance braved gunfire to reach the village of Acteal enclaved in the saw-toothed mountains about 45 minutes above San Cristobal and discovered state police officers stacking the corpses of the Indians, apparently preparing them for burning.&#160; Caught in the act, the cops gathered up the bodies and tossed them in a dump truck where they were driven down to the state capital in Tuxtla Gutierrez for “autopsies.”</p>
<p>The contamination of the crime scene was corroborated by Bellinghausen and two colleagues, Jesus Ramirez Cuevas and Juan Balboa, the next morning and later that day, Hermann posted his first dispatch.&#160; Bellinghausen would go on to write a book, Acteal: A Crime of State that has become a definitive text on understanding the massacre.</p>
<p>The Abejas are a civil association of honey gatherers and coffee growers who had been forced from their home villages in the months previous to the murders – the massacre took place at the height of the coffee harvest – by armed bands affiliated with the long-ruling PRI party and its surrogates in the “Cardenas Front.”&#160; Unlike the Abejas who were devout Catholics, the PRIistas lined up with the evangelical National Presbyterian Church that first established itself in Los Altos back in the 1930s.&#160; Since spring, they had been burning the Bees’ homes and stealing their coffee and their cattle.&#160; Abeja families from Quextic had been particularly persecuted and the Zapatista community of Acteal offered them sanctuary on the hillside where they would later be murdered.</p>
<p>All of the dead Abejas and those who killed them were Tzotzil Mayan Indians.</p>
<p>Although they supported the EZLN’s struggle, the Abejas’ allegiances were to the liberation bishop of San Cristobal Samuel Ruiz who had been instrumental in their formation.&#160; The Bees were indeed a Sui Genero grouping amongst the Tzotziles of Los Altos.&#160; They were resolutely non-violent and eschewed the “posh”, sugar-cane aguardiente that is obligatory in many highland villages.&#160; Unlike their neighbors, they defended the right of women to own land in the community.</p>
<p>Bellinghausen’s reportage triggered a chain reaction of indignation around the world.&#160; Demonstrators circled Mexican embassies in European cities.&#160; Pope John Paul II expressed his grief and U.S. president Bill Clinton lamented the violence.&#160; International human rights workers flocked to Chiapas.</p>
<p>As commander-in-chief, Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo ordered U.S.-trained troops into the Chiapas highlands to restore order and separate the paramilitaries responsible for the massacre from the EZLN. The military invaded dozens of Zapatista villages purportedly looking for weapons but, at first, left the paramilitaries alone.&#160; Fear of a new massacre panicked villagers and 10,000 Indians abandoned their homes and sought refuge in Polho, a Zapatista refugee camp.</p>
<p>The bodies of the dead were returned to the Abejas on Christmas day for burial.&#160; As the funeral procession advanced up the mountain road from Polho to Acteal, the mourners encountered a truck speeding in the opposite direction that was carrying stolen Abeja coffee. The Abejas recognized the men in the truck as their killers – many of them were PRIistas who had run them off their land and at least one was the cousin of a victim.&#160; Bishop Ruiz moved swiftly to prevent a lynching and 24 of the presumed assassins were taken into custody.&#160; They would not be released until the Supreme Court’s August 12th decree a dozen years later.</p>
<p>Other suspects were rounded up by federal police during raids in Los Chorros, Quextic, and Pechiquil.&#160; One old Indian farmer was reportedly handed a list of 100 suspects and forced to sign it.&#160; Agustin Luna did not read or write Spanish.</p>
<p>According to Zedillo’s attorney general Jorge Madrazo Cuellar, 124 arrest warrants were issued but apparently only 87 were ever served.&#160; Almost all of those who were taken into custody were Tzotziles – 14 mostly mestizo public servants served less than six years for their roles in the massacre.&#160; Two high-ranking Mexican Army officers who functioned as commandants in Chiapas public security agencies simply disappeared and more than a decade later remain at large.</p>
<p>The Indians were heavily punished for the killings, dealt 20 to 40 year sentences for premeditated homicide and possession of weapons that only the military was licensed to carry.&#160; Two of the 70 Tzotzil defendants were let go because of old age and another died in custody.&#160; Several more were re-sentenced and released.&#160; Of the 57 Indians who remained in prison only five confessed to participating in the massacre.</p>
<p>There is little question that the prosecution of those rounded up for the killings at Acteal was slipshod. &#160;Witnesses were pressured and declarations obtained by force.&#160; In the Zedillo government’s rush to judgment, many were swept up who were not in Acteal on the day of the massacre.&#160; Translators who are required by law to be available to defendants who do not speak Spanish were not.&#160; Weapons were seized that did not match the caliber of the bullets that killed the Bees.&#160; The Supreme Court decried the disappearance of evidence and the destruction of the crime scene and the falsification of testimony.</p>
<p>To mark the first anniversary of the killings, Madrazo’s Federal Prosecutor’s Office (PGR) published The White Book of Acteal that blamed the murders on “inter-communal conflicts” and underscored the savage nature of the killings, intimating that the violence had cultural roots.&#160; Although many of the victims had been brutally slashed by machete blows, one autopsy lists gunshot wounds as the cause of death for 43 of the slain villagers and writer Carlos Montemayor, an outspoken defender of indigenous culture, concluded that the bodies of the Abejas were further brutalized by police to emphasize the “primitive” nature of the Indians.&#160; Madrazo’s White Book absolved the Zedillo government of all crimes of commission and omission.</p>
<p>Once convictions were obtained and the presumed killers sentenced, Acteal was relegated to the cold case file.&#160; Although the PRI quickly washed its hands of the prisoners, the National Presbyterian Church soon came to their defense.&#160; The evangelicals’ point man was an influential politico and preacher, Hugo Eric Flores, who is described as being close to the “theology of prosperity.”&#160; During the 2006 presidential campaign, Flores, the founder and “moral leader” of Encuentro Social (“Social Encounter”), an evangelical political association that had been tied to the PRI, met with right-wing PAN party candidate Felipe Calderon and offered to deliver the evangelical vote (the PAN had none) if Calderon would agree to reopen the cases of those he described as “political prisoners.” According to La Jornada op-ed editor Luis Hernandez Navarro, the deal went down that April.</p>
<p>Months later, after Calderon had been awarded the fraud-marred election, Hugo Eric Flores emerged as the director of the Environmental Secretariat’s PRO-ARBOL (“pro-tree”) program but within a year was fired from the post and barred from working for the agency for the next ten years.&#160; No explanation has ever been offered for Flores’ removal but despite the stain on his resume, the evangelical preacher had no difficulty finding “chamba” (“work”) and today serves as back-up (“suplente”) for a PANista senator.</p>
<p>Soon after he was fired from his environmental sinecure, Hugo Eric Flores hired on with the prestigious Center for Investigation &amp; Teaching of Economics (CIDE), an entity of the Secretary of Public Education, and published a defense of those convicted for the Acteal massacre, The Other Acteal , chapters of which appeared in Nexos magazine, a glossy monthly edited by the prominent PRIista writer and Televisa talking head Hector Aguilar Camin who in 1997 on the tenth anniversary of the killings published his own three part vindication of the incarcerated paramilitaries.</p>
<p>Amongst Aguilar Camin’s revelations: there had been no massacre at Acteal, a hypothesis that rested largely on the testimony of Lorenzo Perez Vazquez who at 17 was the youngest of the convicted killers.&#160; According to Perez, the Abejas were caught in a crossfire between the Zapatistas and PRIistas.&#160; Lorenzo Perez himself was one of the five paramilitaries who confessed to the murders.&#160; Notwithstanding, his name was listed among the first batch of 20 the Supreme Court set free.</p>
<p>Eric Flores used his growing clout to recruit young lawyers from the CIDE’s law clinic and in December 2007, the same month as Aguilar Camin’s vindication appeared, they officially filed an appeal for the release of the 57 imprisoned indigenas, citing discriminatory treatment of Indians by the courts.&#160; According to the CIDE’s general secretary Dr Sergio Lopez Ayllon, the legal costs were offset by sizeable grants from both the Hewitt Foundation and George Soros’ Open Society Institute.</p>
<p>How many of those released actually have blood on their hands? Miguel Angel De los Santos, a prominent human rights attorney in San Cristobal, thinks that the government case was so “flojo” (lazily assembled) that separating the guilty from the innocent at this late date may be next to impossible – in the Mexican justice system, “fabricando cupables” (literally “manufacturing the guilty”) is an “art form.”&#160; De los Santos charges that government prosecutors often leave big holes in unpopular cases to establish grounds for appeal and ultimately absolution for the perpetrators.&#160; “The release of the accused paramilitaries,” he writes in La Jornada, “is a confession of the Mexican state’s failure in the administration of justice.”</p>
<p>During a decade and more, imprisoned first at the crumbling old Cerro Hueco fortress above Tuxtla, those convicted of the Acteal murders&#160; (the “material assassins” in legal jargon) have been demonized by the Abejas and the Zapatistas and their supporters as cold-blooded killers – the phrase “paramilitary” is an ugly curse in the rebels’ lexicon and those who suggest that some of those railroaded by the Zedillo government’s inept prosecution are not guilty are deemed “politically incorrect.”</p>
<p>On the other hand, government officials who conceived, put in motion, and covered up the Acteal killings – “the intellectual authors” – have evaded justice for a decade.</p>
<p>At the top of the list is ex-president Ernesto Zedillo whose xenophobic jeremiads against non-Mexican human rights workers animated a lethal atmosphere of fear and loathing in Chiapas.&#160; As commander-in-chief of Mexico’s Armed Forces, Zedillo signed off on the counter-insurgency initiative that culminated with the massacre at Acteal. The former Mexican president now heads up the Yale University Globalization Studies Institute and sits on the board of major U.S. corporations.</p>
<p>Zedillo’s Secretary of Defense and the commander of Mexican Army forces in the region, Mario Renon Castillo, collaborated on a “Chiapas Campaign Plan”, a counter-insurgency strategy to develop paramilitary groups in 39 municipalities in which the EZLN had influence.&#160; Renon Castillo is a graduate of Center for Special Forces in Fort Bragg North Carolina where he was trained in counter-insurgency warfare. According to diplomatic cables unearthed by investigator Kate Doyle at the Washington-based National Security Archives, the Mexican military trained and financed paramilitaries in Chenalho – one corporal was briefly jailed as a trainer.</p>
<p>Chiapas Governor Julio Ruiz Ferro, a Zedillo appointee, had ample prior knowledge of the violence brewing in the highlands and did nothing to head it off. The deaths of 32 Indians in Chenalho in the months before the massacre set the stage for Acteal.&#160; Ruiz Ferro was bumped up to agricultural attaché at Mexico’s Washington embassy after he resigned as governor as reward for his inattention.</p>
<p>Interior Secretary Emilio Chuayffet, who supervised national security, was forced to resign for failing to anticipate Acteal but remained active in the PRI hierarchy and may soon become head of the PRI’s majority delegation in the lower house of congress.</p>
<p>Former Attorney General Jorge Madrazo’s flawed prosecution may have jailed innocent Indians for a dozen years. The National Fraternity of Christian Churches now demands that he be incarcerated.</p>
<p>Finally, Raul Vera, auxiliary bishop of San Cristobal during Acteal, suggests that by freeing the accused killers, the justices of Mexico’s Supreme Court are now “accomplices” in this lurid plot.</p>
<p>Although the Supreme Court did not rule on the innocence or guilt of the prisoners and only considered the poisoned judicial procedures, 20 of the accused killers were released August 13 from El Amate prison on the western edge of Chiapas and transported to a small hotel outside of Tuxtla Gutierrez where they met with worried state officials behind closed doors for 12 hours.&#160; Authorities are fearful that the ex-prisoners will return to Chenalho and seek revenge against the Abejas for their long incarceration.</p>
<p>Indeed, fear permeates Acteal and Polho in the wake of the prisoners’ release – the Abejas have long charged that the paramilitaries still have weapons cached in the region.&#160; “I survived the first time but I won’t survive another massacre,” Catalina Perez, who was shot nine times during the attack, told La Jornada.</p>
<p>The freed Indians are also under the gun.&#160; If they were not the real killers then they know who the real killers were and local “caciques” (rural bosses) will try and silence them.</p>
<p>Governor Juan Sabines, whose father was also Juan and served as Chiapas governor when dozens of Indians were gunned down by army troops in another massacre at Wolonchan in 1981, vowed that the prisoners’ release would not rupture the fragile calm in the state.&#160; The ex-prisoners would be relocated as far from Chenalho as the borders of Chiapas would allow and provided with land and animals and generous pensions.&#160; Even though the accused were being closely watched by state officials, by week’s end six had already escaped for parts unknown.</p>
<p>Conspicuously absent from the controversy over the released paramilitaries is the EZLN which has yet to comment on the Supreme Court decision. The Zapatistas’ key public outpost in the highlands at Oventic has been reportedly closed to outside visitors since the Supreme Court ordered the paramilitaries released from prison.</p>
<p>Since the evangelical Summer Language Institute was installed in Los Altos by President Lazaro Cardenas in the 1930s, the political clout of the “sects” as the Catholic Church labels the Protestants, has grown precipitously.</p>
<p>Each Sunday, the Army of God marches in military cadence through San Cristobal.&#160; With their red berets, spit-shined army boots, and camouflage cargo pants, the marchers are dead ringers for paramilitaries but Army of God commander-in-chief Esdras Alonso, a fiery highland preacher with connections to the National Presbyterian Church, claims that his followers are armed only with the “Word of God.”&#160; According to Bellinghausen, Esdras Alonso’s home base is in San Cristobal’s Hormiga Colony where the killers of the Abejas are said to have acquired their weapons.&#160; Reverend Esdras also claims that fallen-away Zapatista comandantes have joined the Army of God.</p>
<p>Alonso’s evangelicals have considerable influence in Mitziton just outside San Cristobal which Governor Sabines has designated as the starting point for a super highway that will connect up the tourist corridor between that old colonial city and the Mayan ruins at Palenque in the lowlands to the east.&#160; Although the actual route remains under wraps, the new highway is expected to invade autonomous Zapatista communities and tensions are running tall in Mitziton where farmers are aligned with the EZLN’s “Other Campaign.”&#160; This past July 21, when ski-masked protestors blocked road-building equipment, the Army of God counter-attacked, killing one villager.</p>
<p>Commander-in-chief Esdras responded to unfavorable news coverage of the confrontation by filing a complaint with the local prosecutor against both the Fray Bartolome Human Rights Center, founded by Bishop Ruiz, and Hermann Bellinghausen for allegedly spreading libelous rumors on the Internet.&#160; Esdras also demanded that Immigration authorities investigate Bellinghausen’s immigration status – the Jornada reporter is a third generation Mexican.</p>
<p>The Supreme Court’s decision to free those convicted of killing 49 Abejas at Acteal is the latest finding of the high court to grant impunity to those deemed responsible for notorious crimes.&#160; In 2006, the court barred citizens from access to ballots cast in the presidential elections, one of the most egregious frauds in Mexican electoral history.&#160; In 2007, the justices absolved Puebla governor Mario Marin after evidence implicated him in the kidnapping of independent journalist Lydia Cacho who had blown the whistle on the governor’s pederast associates.</p>
<p>In 2008, the Supreme Court declared Mexico state governor and current PRI presidential frontrunner Enrique Pena Nieto innocent of ordering state mayhem at San Salvador Atenco where 200 protesters were attacked and arrested, a score of women sexually abused by Pena Nieto’s police, and two young men gunned down by the cops.&#160; Later that year, the justices concluded that Oaxaca governor Ulysis Ruiz had used “legitimate” force to suppress protests by the Oaxaca Peoples Popular Assembly or APPO during which 26 civilians lost their lives.</p>
<p>Just a week before the Acteal ruling, the Supreme Court concurred that a Sinaloa woman whose husband had been shot down at an Army checkpoint had no standing and turned the matter over to a military tribunal that has no civilian oversight.&#160; By sustaining the military’s “fuero” or immunity from prosecution by civil authorities, the court assured the army of continued impunity.</p>
<p>Release of those prisoners sentenced for the Acteal massacre because of judicial errors will have far reaching impacts on Mexican courts, observes Barbara Zamora, lawyer for the prisoners of Atenco and other high profile government targets.&#160; Zamora affirms that she has never defended a case that was not contaminated by gross judicial error.&#160; “The Mexican judicial system is rotten to the core. But from now on, whether they are guilty or not, anyone who can afford a powerful lawyer and has been sentenced for homicide, narco, kidnapping, or organized crime will be able to claim judicial impropriety and appeal to the Supreme Court to be set free.&#160; This could empty out the jails,” the lawyer adds with a mischievous smile.</p>
<p>JOHN ROSS’s monstrous tome El Monstruo – Dread &amp; Redemption in Mexico City will be published by Nation Books this November. The author is soliciting venues for book presentations this fall and next spring.&#160; If you have further information, write <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a></p>
<p>&#160;</p> | true | 4 | mexico city immense sorrow etched weatherbeaten face tzotzil indian farmer slowly mounted imposing granite steps mexicos supreme court160 sebastian perez vazquezs job thankless one160 president civil group las abejas bees obliged communicate bad news villagers trekked capital homes highlands chiapas los altos 12 years killers convicted murdering mothers fathers grandparents children acteal december 22 1997 would freed prison instructions four five supreme court justices procedural errors prosecutions abejas dressed best clothes court hearing men short ornamental chujs serapes women finest huipiles traditional blouses long embroidered skirts wear emblems tzotzil roots even allowed inside courtroom bear witness verdict justices160 heavily armed federal police patrolled marble hallways court building one corner mexico citys great zocalo plaza intent keeping indians street elena perez perez looked like air sucked her160 expected exoneration killers still could staunch tears washed bladed cheekbones160 cry find justice anywhere elena 19 accused murdered father two eldest siblings told us reporter160 maria vazquez lost nine family members massacre160 expected justices decision160 court releases killers resuscitate dead early morning december 22 1997 three dozen armed men gathered lonely roadside chenalho county altos chiapas mexicos southernmost state began firing women children clustered around clapboard chapel praying peace promontory below160 detachment 40 chiapas police officers stationed schoolhouse meters away made effort stop killing gunfire continued better part day shooters scouring hillside escaped first assault finishing one one160 done seven hours later 49 abejas dead 15 children 21 women nine men four babies cut wombs mothers dashed rocks160 killers determined exterminate seed abejas outside world learned massacre acteal survivors straggled san cristobal de las casas old colonial city crowns highlands several hours later160 call went doctors come civil hospital treat many wounded160 one medic responded call hermann bellinghausen doubles correspondent left daily la jornada chiapas160 hermann accompanied rebellion zapatista army national liberation ezln since exploded mountains jungle deeply indigenous state january 1 1994 abejas supporters zapatistas rejected insurgents use weapons around 10 pm night red cross ambulance braved gunfire reach village acteal enclaved sawtoothed mountains 45 minutes san cristobal discovered state police officers stacking corpses indians apparently preparing burning160 caught act cops gathered bodies tossed dump truck driven state capital tuxtla gutierrez autopsies contamination crime scene corroborated bellinghausen two colleagues jesus ramirez cuevas juan balboa next morning later day hermann posted first dispatch160 bellinghausen would go write book acteal crime state become definitive text understanding massacre abejas civil association honey gatherers coffee growers forced home villages months previous murders massacre took place height coffee harvest armed bands affiliated longruling pri party surrogates cardenas front160 unlike abejas devout catholics priistas lined evangelical national presbyterian church first established los altos back 1930s160 since spring burning bees homes stealing coffee cattle160 abeja families quextic particularly persecuted zapatista community acteal offered sanctuary hillside would later murdered dead abejas killed tzotzil mayan indians although supported ezlns struggle abejas allegiances liberation bishop san cristobal samuel ruiz instrumental formation160 bees indeed sui genero grouping amongst tzotziles los altos160 resolutely nonviolent eschewed posh sugarcane aguardiente obligatory many highland villages160 unlike neighbors defended right women land community bellinghausens reportage triggered chain reaction indignation around world160 demonstrators circled mexican embassies european cities160 pope john paul ii expressed grief us president bill clinton lamented violence160 international human rights workers flocked chiapas commanderinchief mexican president ernesto zedillo ordered ustrained troops chiapas highlands restore order separate paramilitaries responsible massacre ezln military invaded dozens zapatista villages purportedly looking weapons first left paramilitaries alone160 fear new massacre panicked villagers 10000 indians abandoned homes sought refuge polho zapatista refugee camp bodies dead returned abejas christmas day burial160 funeral procession advanced mountain road polho acteal mourners encountered truck speeding opposite direction carrying stolen abeja coffee abejas recognized men truck killers many priistas run land least one cousin victim160 bishop ruiz moved swiftly prevent lynching 24 presumed assassins taken custody160 would released supreme courts august 12th decree dozen years later suspects rounded federal police raids los chorros quextic pechiquil160 one old indian farmer reportedly handed list 100 suspects forced sign it160 agustin luna read write spanish according zedillos attorney general jorge madrazo cuellar 124 arrest warrants issued apparently 87 ever served160 almost taken custody tzotziles 14 mostly mestizo public servants served less six years roles massacre160 two highranking mexican army officers functioned commandants chiapas public security agencies simply disappeared decade later remain large indians heavily punished killings dealt 20 40 year sentences premeditated homicide possession weapons military licensed carry160 two 70 tzotzil defendants let go old age another died custody160 several resentenced released160 57 indians remained prison five confessed participating massacre little question prosecution rounded killings acteal slipshod 160witnesses pressured declarations obtained force160 zedillo governments rush judgment many swept acteal day massacre160 translators required law available defendants speak spanish not160 weapons seized match caliber bullets killed bees160 supreme court decried disappearance evidence destruction crime scene falsification testimony mark first anniversary killings madrazos federal prosecutors office pgr published white book acteal blamed murders intercommunal conflicts underscored savage nature killings intimating violence cultural roots160 although many victims brutally slashed machete blows one autopsy lists gunshot wounds cause death 43 slain villagers writer carlos montemayor outspoken defender indigenous culture concluded bodies abejas brutalized police emphasize primitive nature indians160 madrazos white book absolved zedillo government crimes commission omission convictions obtained presumed killers sentenced acteal relegated cold case file160 although pri quickly washed hands prisoners national presbyterian church soon came defense160 evangelicals point man influential politico preacher hugo eric flores described close theology prosperity160 2006 presidential campaign flores founder moral leader encuentro social social encounter evangelical political association tied pri met rightwing pan party candidate felipe calderon offered deliver evangelical vote pan none calderon would agree reopen cases described political prisoners according la jornada oped editor luis hernandez navarro deal went april months later calderon awarded fraudmarred election hugo eric flores emerged director environmental secretariats proarbol protree program within year fired post barred working agency next ten years160 explanation ever offered flores removal despite stain resume evangelical preacher difficulty finding chamba work today serves backup suplente panista senator soon fired environmental sinecure hugo eric flores hired prestigious center investigation amp teaching economics cide entity secretary public education published defense convicted acteal massacre acteal chapters appeared nexos magazine glossy monthly edited prominent priista writer televisa talking head hector aguilar camin 1997 tenth anniversary killings published three part vindication incarcerated paramilitaries amongst aguilar camins revelations massacre acteal hypothesis rested largely testimony lorenzo perez vazquez 17 youngest convicted killers160 according perez abejas caught crossfire zapatistas priistas160 lorenzo perez one five paramilitaries confessed murders160 notwithstanding name listed among first batch 20 supreme court set free eric flores used growing clout recruit young lawyers cides law clinic december 2007 month aguilar camins vindication appeared officially filed appeal release 57 imprisoned indigenas citing discriminatory treatment indians courts160 according cides general secretary dr sergio lopez ayllon legal costs offset sizeable grants hewitt foundation george soros open society institute many released actually blood hands miguel angel de los santos prominent human rights attorney san cristobal thinks government case flojo lazily assembled separating guilty innocent late date may next impossible mexican justice system fabricando cupables literally manufacturing guilty art form160 de los santos charges government prosecutors often leave big holes unpopular cases establish grounds appeal ultimately absolution perpetrators160 release accused paramilitaries writes la jornada confession mexican states failure administration justice decade imprisoned first crumbling old cerro hueco fortress tuxtla convicted acteal murders160 material assassins legal jargon demonized abejas zapatistas supporters coldblooded killers phrase paramilitary ugly curse rebels lexicon suggest railroaded zedillo governments inept prosecution guilty deemed politically incorrect hand government officials conceived put motion covered acteal killings intellectual authors evaded justice decade top list expresident ernesto zedillo whose xenophobic jeremiads nonmexican human rights workers animated lethal atmosphere fear loathing chiapas160 commanderinchief mexicos armed forces zedillo signed counterinsurgency initiative culminated massacre acteal former mexican president heads yale university globalization studies institute sits board major us corporations zedillos secretary defense commander mexican army forces region mario renon castillo collaborated chiapas campaign plan counterinsurgency strategy develop paramilitary groups 39 municipalities ezln influence160 renon castillo graduate center special forces fort bragg north carolina trained counterinsurgency warfare according diplomatic cables unearthed investigator kate doyle washingtonbased national security archives mexican military trained financed paramilitaries chenalho one corporal briefly jailed trainer chiapas governor julio ruiz ferro zedillo appointee ample prior knowledge violence brewing highlands nothing head deaths 32 indians chenalho months massacre set stage acteal160 ruiz ferro bumped agricultural attaché mexicos washington embassy resigned governor reward inattention interior secretary emilio chuayffet supervised national security forced resign failing anticipate acteal remained active pri hierarchy may soon become head pris majority delegation lower house congress former attorney general jorge madrazos flawed prosecution may jailed innocent indians dozen years national fraternity christian churches demands incarcerated finally raul vera auxiliary bishop san cristobal acteal suggests freeing accused killers justices mexicos supreme court accomplices lurid plot although supreme court rule innocence guilt prisoners considered poisoned judicial procedures 20 accused killers released august 13 el amate prison western edge chiapas transported small hotel outside tuxtla gutierrez met worried state officials behind closed doors 12 hours160 authorities fearful exprisoners return chenalho seek revenge abejas long incarceration indeed fear permeates acteal polho wake prisoners release abejas long charged paramilitaries still weapons cached region160 survived first time wont survive another massacre catalina perez shot nine times attack told la jornada freed indians also gun160 real killers know real killers local caciques rural bosses try silence governor juan sabines whose father also juan served chiapas governor dozens indians gunned army troops another massacre wolonchan 1981 vowed prisoners release would rupture fragile calm state160 exprisoners would relocated far chenalho borders chiapas would allow provided land animals generous pensions160 even though accused closely watched state officials weeks end six already escaped parts unknown conspicuously absent controversy released paramilitaries ezln yet comment supreme court decision zapatistas key public outpost highlands oventic reportedly closed outside visitors since supreme court ordered paramilitaries released prison since evangelical summer language institute installed los altos president lazaro cardenas 1930s political clout sects catholic church labels protestants grown precipitously sunday army god marches military cadence san cristobal160 red berets spitshined army boots camouflage cargo pants marchers dead ringers paramilitaries army god commanderinchief esdras alonso fiery highland preacher connections national presbyterian church claims followers armed word god160 according bellinghausen esdras alonsos home base san cristobals hormiga colony killers abejas said acquired weapons160 reverend esdras also claims fallenaway zapatista comandantes joined army god alonsos evangelicals considerable influence mitziton outside san cristobal governor sabines designated starting point super highway connect tourist corridor old colonial city mayan ruins palenque lowlands east160 although actual route remains wraps new highway expected invade autonomous zapatista communities tensions running tall mitziton farmers aligned ezlns campaign160 past july 21 skimasked protestors blocked roadbuilding equipment army god counterattacked killing one villager commanderinchief esdras responded unfavorable news coverage confrontation filing complaint local prosecutor fray bartolome human rights center founded bishop ruiz hermann bellinghausen allegedly spreading libelous rumors internet160 esdras also demanded immigration authorities investigate bellinghausens immigration status jornada reporter third generation mexican supreme courts decision free convicted killing 49 abejas acteal latest finding high court grant impunity deemed responsible notorious crimes160 2006 court barred citizens access ballots cast presidential elections one egregious frauds mexican electoral history160 2007 justices absolved puebla governor mario marin evidence implicated kidnapping independent journalist lydia cacho blown whistle governors pederast associates 2008 supreme court declared mexico state governor current pri presidential frontrunner enrique pena nieto innocent ordering state mayhem san salvador atenco 200 protesters attacked arrested score women sexually abused pena nietos police two young men gunned cops160 later year justices concluded oaxaca governor ulysis ruiz used legitimate force suppress protests oaxaca peoples popular assembly appo 26 civilians lost lives week acteal ruling supreme court concurred sinaloa woman whose husband shot army checkpoint standing turned matter military tribunal civilian oversight160 sustaining militarys fuero immunity prosecution civil authorities court assured army continued impunity release prisoners sentenced acteal massacre judicial errors far reaching impacts mexican courts observes barbara zamora lawyer prisoners atenco high profile government targets160 zamora affirms never defended case contaminated gross judicial error160 mexican judicial system rotten core whether guilty anyone afford powerful lawyer sentenced homicide narco kidnapping organized crime able claim judicial impropriety appeal supreme court set free160 could empty jails lawyer adds mischievous smile john rosss monstrous tome el monstruo dread amp redemption mexico city published nation books november author soliciting venues book presentations fall next spring160 information write johnrossigcorg 160 | 2,054 |
<p>There is no clinical way to measure pain or its absence. You have to rely on confession. Luckily, trouble and pain make talk easy. Medicine seems increasingly defined as relief from pain, or at least that is how we know medicine best. The modification of time is the goal of pain relief: If I forget my pain, it does not exist. After all, I have been quick to forget yours because I am always told that it is apart from mine. You cannot work with the reality of pain because it has no place, even though we feel our bodies sharpest when in pain. There are only ways of saying it, this strange painful present-tense.</p>
<p>Enter Dr. William E. Hurwitz, the subject of Eve Marson’s engrossing documentary Dr. Feelgood: Dealer or Healer? – and either Gabriel or Azriel, depending on who you listen to. Hurwitz was Ivy League (Columbia, Harvard, Stanford too), practical (a stint in the Peace Corps, Brazil), and down to earth (he worked out of a small clinic). In 2004, he was convicted of pushing pain relief in the form of many thousands of opium-derived pills. Opium and its children – heroin, Dilaudid, morphine and many others – are the most powerful ways of suspending pain this side of life. Hurwitz got 25 years.</p>
<p>Many of Hurwitz’s patients turned their large prescriptions into surplus value. A higher dosage demanded a higher premium, so patient-addicts needed more pills to sell in order to buy more pills and so on. Since only an amateur dealer does drugs, the amateur usually ends up either dead or in jail. The trail of terrified informants and overdoses lead back to the clinic, Hurwitz’s among many. By this time, the OxyContin Scare was in full swing and a media show-trial ensured him a verdict of conviction for trafficking. It was overturned due to the shoddiness of the case in 2006; he was retried, found guilty, and has since been released, license permanently revoked.</p>
<p>Dr. Feelgood arraigns all the familiar suspects. A reel of ads from the legal days of narcotics gives us a charming one-page for heroin, courtesy of Bayer. Bayer was always at the forefront of pharmaceuticals. It invested a great deal in chemical research in Germany and its parent company I G Farben introduced the pesticide Zyklon B to about one million people in the early 1940s. OxyContin is the property of Perdue Pharma and is related to Oxycodone, an opioid created to fill the vacuum after poor Bayer was forced to stop selling real heroin in 1917. Its nickname, ‘hillbilly heroin’, shows just how illiterate the mass media really is. Heroin has always been a cheap drug, easily available to the working class in dime bags, kept affordable for reasons of national security (narcotic ghettos mean sleeping ghettos; safely, for some). If anything, OxyContin is a gentrified property whose rent plummeted due to oversaturation in the marketplace thanks to Perdue’s relentless PR campaigns. It is only natural that it would hit the streets to compete with heroin and, unlike methadone for example, you can shoot it up.</p>
<p>The wealth extraction which follows our working life does not give up the body when work and life really start to kill us. Unhealth is a major cash cow. A new drug appears, is quickly passed by the FDA, and is then lauded as a miracle (cures proper have given way to drugs that merely claim that we’ll be able to cope). When the full spectrum of side effects comes to bear (happily this will take decades for some lucky companies and their meds), the whole therapeutic consortium falls apart and the cops and law courts are inevitably involved. By then, large numbers of people have already died and pay-outs are merely a fraction of the yield Pharma had accumulated before the roof fell in.</p>
<p>As OxyContin was easily available from doctors, it was able to penetrate areas and classes more difficult for the heroin market. It is obvious why the courts and law enforcement began to take notice of it. According to a cop in the film, it ruins ‘good families’. Doubtlessly true, which means its ‘personality’ is more duplicitous than honest heroin, which only ruins those already ruined through poverty (or success, in the case of the odd celebrity). The same snag hits serial killers when they mistakenly kill a college prep girl instead of the usual prostitutes who are, after all, also targets of the law. At this point the extremities of both men and chemicals become unconscionable.</p>
<p>Every few months a new drug epidemic is announced by the usual crowd of experts, moralists, and terrified Congressmen, each one more insidious than the last. You might recall Angel Dust, but few remember the Great Jimson Weed Scare of ‘97. Variety and availability are examples of the dynamism of capitalism and the killing of a Pablo Escobar could be seen as a Neocon strike at price controls with the attendant disaster of the product’s bloody search for a ‘natural price’. If one drug becomes too expensive or too scarce, another will surely arise to take its place. Readers of Das Kapital may recall that De Quincey also wrote on economics.</p>
<p>An important footnote in the film is one Dr. Russell Portenoy, the man who opened the floodgates for mass-volume painkiller prescriptions by his classic 1986 paper with the catchy title Chronic use of opioid analgesics in non-malignant pain <a href="#_ftn1" type="external">[1]</a>.&#160; Before this watershed, we were in the grip of one our periodic narcophobic fits. According to Portenoy, higher pain decrees higher dosage. Earlier data on addiction had created an unnecessarily dour picture of life-long dependency. Portenoy’s thin 36 case studies proved that this was all wrong: the Docs should scribble like Proust; addiction was purely a loop in the brain, genetic in 1 out of 10 humans. Despite the often-touted rigors of scientific research, Portenoy’s (complaint) seems to have won over a vast community in record time using no hard evidence at all. Or the hesitant pens of doctors must have hit the opium products divisions of the great drug supply houses especially hard that year. Ask the angel….</p>
<p>Portenoy now admits that he underestimated the power of addiction – his Greenspan Moment, one presumes – in the grim face of some 16,500 prescription ODs a year, outnumbering the feral street kind. Who tallies this kind of information, I wonder, and how? Where did the grants come from for Portenoy’s original study? Vide The Wall Street Journal, Dec 17 2012:</p>
<p>“In 1998, the&#160; <a href="http://www.fsmb.org/" type="external">Federation of State Medical Boards</a>&#160;released a recommended policy reassuring doctors that they wouldn’t face regulatory action for prescribing even large amounts of narcotics, as long as it was in the course of medical treatment. In 2004 the group called on state medical boards to make under-treatment of pain punishable for the first time.</p>
<p>That policy was drawn up with the help of several people with links to opioid makers, including David Haddox, a senior Purdue Pharma [manufacturer of&#160; <a href="http://www.drugs.com/oxycontin.html" type="external">OxyContin</a>] executive then and now. The federation said it received nearly $2 million from opioid makers since 1997. . . .</p>
<p>A federation-published book outlining the opioid policy was funded by opioid makers including Purdue Pharma, Endo Health Solutions Inc. and others, with proceeds totaling $280,000 going to the federation <a href="#_ftn2" type="external">[2]</a>.”</p>
<p>There is very little to say beyond that. All the loose ends are tied up.</p>
<p>Dr Feelgood examines the case of Dr Hurwitz with great balance. There can be no question that he made unbearable lives more than bearable, that he merely supplied the street with what was generously supplied to him, that he probably made little money on the enterprise (Unlike Perdue: $3.1 billion from OxyContin alone in 2010 <a href="#_ftn3" type="external">[3]</a>), that he wanted to ease the pain in others, that he lead more than one dope fiend to their grave. Hurwitz maintains that his job was to alleviate pain, no matter the patient. Damning wire taps show that he probably knew some of his patients were selling the stuff. His story is a locus of hypocrisies and indifference, all of them official and all of them untroubled in sleep.</p>
<p>Our bodies are the only pain we can call our own; the mind has never truly had a location. As what is left of our gutted medical coverage withers away, do not doubt that the market and its double will come to our rescue in our most agonized moments. Like everything else, speculation runs the show from the back while Angel Azrael works the corner on foot. The patient can hope for very little under the present circumstances, with the present interests running wild.</p>
<p>Notes.</p>
<p><a href="#_ftnref1" type="external">[1]</a> <a href="" type="internal">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2873550</a></p>
<p><a href="#_ftnref2" type="external">[2]</a> <a href="" type="internal">https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324478304578173342657044604</a></p>
<p><a href="#_ftnref3" type="external">[3]</a> <a href="" type="internal">http://fortune.com/2011/11/09/oxycontin-purdue-pharmas-painful-medicine/</a></p> | true | 4 | clinical way measure pain absence rely confession luckily trouble pain make talk easy medicine seems increasingly defined relief pain least know medicine best modification time goal pain relief forget pain exist quick forget always told apart mine work reality pain place even though feel bodies sharpest pain ways saying strange painful presenttense enter dr william e hurwitz subject eve marsons engrossing documentary dr feelgood dealer healer either gabriel azriel depending listen hurwitz ivy league columbia harvard stanford practical stint peace corps brazil earth worked small clinic 2004 convicted pushing pain relief form many thousands opiumderived pills opium children heroin dilaudid morphine many others powerful ways suspending pain side life hurwitz got 25 years many hurwitzs patients turned large prescriptions surplus value higher dosage demanded higher premium patientaddicts needed pills sell order buy pills since amateur dealer drugs amateur usually ends either dead jail trail terrified informants overdoses lead back clinic hurwitzs among many time oxycontin scare full swing media showtrial ensured verdict conviction trafficking overturned due shoddiness case 2006 retried found guilty since released license permanently revoked dr feelgood arraigns familiar suspects reel ads legal days narcotics gives us charming onepage heroin courtesy bayer bayer always forefront pharmaceuticals invested great deal chemical research germany parent company g farben introduced pesticide zyklon b one million people early 1940s oxycontin property perdue pharma related oxycodone opioid created fill vacuum poor bayer forced stop selling real heroin 1917 nickname hillbilly heroin shows illiterate mass media really heroin always cheap drug easily available working class dime bags kept affordable reasons national security narcotic ghettos mean sleeping ghettos safely anything oxycontin gentrified property whose rent plummeted due oversaturation marketplace thanks perdues relentless pr campaigns natural would hit streets compete heroin unlike methadone example shoot wealth extraction follows working life give body work life really start kill us unhealth major cash cow new drug appears quickly passed fda lauded miracle cures proper given way drugs merely claim well able cope full spectrum side effects comes bear happily take decades lucky companies meds whole therapeutic consortium falls apart cops law courts inevitably involved large numbers people already died payouts merely fraction yield pharma accumulated roof fell oxycontin easily available doctors able penetrate areas classes difficult heroin market obvious courts law enforcement began take notice according cop film ruins good families doubtlessly true means personality duplicitous honest heroin ruins already ruined poverty success case odd celebrity snag hits serial killers mistakenly kill college prep girl instead usual prostitutes also targets law point extremities men chemicals become unconscionable every months new drug epidemic announced usual crowd experts moralists terrified congressmen one insidious last might recall angel dust remember great jimson weed scare 97 variety availability examples dynamism capitalism killing pablo escobar could seen neocon strike price controls attendant disaster products bloody search natural price one drug becomes expensive scarce another surely arise take place readers das kapital may recall de quincey also wrote economics important footnote film one dr russell portenoy man opened floodgates massvolume painkiller prescriptions classic 1986 paper catchy title chronic use opioid analgesics nonmalignant pain 1160 watershed grip one periodic narcophobic fits according portenoy higher pain decrees higher dosage earlier data addiction created unnecessarily dour picture lifelong dependency portenoys thin 36 case studies proved wrong docs scribble like proust addiction purely loop brain genetic 1 10 humans despite oftentouted rigors scientific research portenoys complaint seems vast community record time using hard evidence hesitant pens doctors must hit opium products divisions great drug supply houses especially hard year ask angel portenoy admits underestimated power addiction greenspan moment one presumes grim face 16500 prescription ods year outnumbering feral street kind tallies kind information wonder grants come portenoys original study vide wall street journal dec 17 2012 1998 the160 federation state medical boards160released recommended policy reassuring doctors wouldnt face regulatory action prescribing even large amounts narcotics long course medical treatment 2004 group called state medical boards make undertreatment pain punishable first time policy drawn help several people links opioid makers including david haddox senior purdue pharma manufacturer of160 oxycontin executive federation said received nearly 2 million opioid makers since 1997 federationpublished book outlining opioid policy funded opioid makers including purdue pharma endo health solutions inc others proceeds totaling 280000 going federation 2 little say beyond loose ends tied dr feelgood examines case dr hurwitz great balance question made unbearable lives bearable merely supplied street generously supplied probably made little money enterprise unlike perdue 31 billion oxycontin alone 2010 3 wanted ease pain others lead one dope fiend grave hurwitz maintains job alleviate pain matter patient damning wire taps show probably knew patients selling stuff story locus hypocrisies indifference official untroubled sleep bodies pain call mind never truly location left gutted medical coverage withers away doubt market double come rescue agonized moments like everything else speculation runs show back angel azrael works corner foot patient hope little present circumstances present interests running wild notes 1 httpswwwncbinlmnihgovpubmed2873550 2 httpswwwwsjcomarticlessb10001424127887324478304578173342657044604 3 httpfortunecom20111109oxycontinpurduepharmaspainfulmedicine | 820 |
<p>It’s like entering a minefield to seriously discuss Israel and Palestine, a tale of two peoples who claim the same land.</p>
<p>I’ve entered this minefield before and have been called an ”anti-semite” and an “Israel hater” for saying pretty much what the sentence above suggests, that Palestinians feel a legitimate bond with the land Israel claims and holds with its military prowess. The individual who called me those names is an antiwar liberal on everything but Israel, at which point he becomes a jackboot militarist without a shred of mercy.</p>
<p>I’ve also been critical of governments like El Salvador’s, but I’ve never been called anti-Hispanic or an El Salvador hater. My concern was for the Salvadoran government and its US patron to stop the repression of the poor. I’m also opposed to the repression of democracy in places like Iran.</p>
<p>Israel trips on its own hard line</p>
<p>The killing by Israeli commandos of nine Turkish passengers or crew members on the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara has, on one hand, raised the bar on public discussion of Israel and Palestine, while on the other, it has thrown a monkey wrench into talks among the US, Israel and the Palestinian Authority as it has moved Turkey from a tentative friend of Israel to a bitter enemy.</p>
<p>Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was to meet Tuesday with Barack Obama to patch up the embarrassment over Jerusalem settlements during Vice President Joe Biden’s visit. Netanyahu canceled and returned to Israel.</p>
<p>The Hamas government in Gaza is noticeably absent from the shambles known as The Proximity Talks. It has been branded a “terrorist” organization and it has to cope with an Israeli, Egyptian and US supported blockade of supplies into the sliver of land on the Mediterranean. (Following the ship incident, Egypt opened its border with Gaza.)</p>
<p>It all might have been different.</p>
<p>In January 2006, Hamas won a parliamentary election, which included Palestinian voters from the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. Hamas received 44.5 percent of the vote to Fatah’s 41.4 percent, giving Hamas the right to form a government.</p>
<p>The US and Israel then connived with the losing Fatah element in the Palestinian Authority to mount military attacks on Hamas, as they worked to financially starve Hamas so it could not run the government it had been elected to run. When the dust settled, Hamas governed only Gaza. Then, Israel began the blockade and in December 2008 launched a punitive military attack into Gaza to wreck the place.</p>
<p>While Hamas is certainly not without sin, a UN report makes it clear the vast amount of violence and destruction was on the part of Israel.</p>
<p>As a shameful example how Americans are kept ignorant in this journalistic minefield, on Tuesday, in a New York Times story by Isabel Kershner, absolutely no mention of the 2006 election is made and instead she writes Hamas “took over [Gaza] by force in 2007.” Considering its famous motto — “All the news that’s fit to print” – I guess the full truth just didn’t fit.</p>
<p>The fact is a legal, democratic plurality of Palestinians felt Fatah and the Palestinian Authority were corrupt and too cozy with Israel, and they voted in candidates they felt had more integrity and that presented a tougher face to the Israelis. The fact they were then attacked and were able to defend their mandate at least in Gaza cannot even remotely be described as taking the place “by force.”</p>
<p>In this context, it’s good to remember that the first Likud prime minister of Israel, Menachem Begin, began his career leading the Irgun, the group that blew up the King David Hotel at midday, killing 91 Brits, Arabs and Jews. The British put a 10,000 pound price on Begin’s head. Begin was a “terrorist.”</p>
<p>So there’s plenty of “terror” to go around. What needs to happen is less demonizing and more honest, civilized negotiations to move beyond the cycle of killing.</p>
<p>There have been a number of attempts to break the Gaza blockade by sea and through Egypt. The early sea-based efforts got through. But they grew and eventually were stopped. This latest was the largest and was clearly seen by Israel as an action with serious symbolic power.</p>
<p>Einat Wilf, a Labor member of the Knesset, said she warned Defense Minister Ehud Barak that the flotilla was a public relations issue and not something to respond to militarily. “This had nothing to do with security,” she told The New York Times. “The armaments for Hamas were not coming from this flotilla.”</p>
<p>Force cannot solve Israel’s problem</p>
<p>Israel’s history, from the vantage point of many Israelis, is a strange echo of US Manifest Destiny, where land already populated by one people is coveted as the exclusive property of a second people. Many Israelis feel they have made the desert bloom and Palestinians are second class citizens in their land.</p>
<p>Israel identifies itself as a “western” nation, something that was intensified with the ascendancy of the Likud right. We all know the basic history: The Zionist movement began in Europe in the mid-1800s, and following the Holocaust Jews fled Europe, arriving in Palestine with frightful baggage and a propaganda-driven mission of renewal and regeneration in a new land.</p>
<p>But this is not 16th or 19th Century America, when a people could be destroyed. Instead, we have a modern human disaster, the dark underside of that post-Holocaust destiny: Israelis have created a modern culture with all the western comforts — while they virtually imprison the Palestinians who also have a legitimate claim to the land.</p>
<p>The Israeli writer Amos Oz says, “Force cannot solve the problem that we are not alone in this land.”</p>
<p>A friend of mine who was a tank driver in the Six Day War lives outside Jerusalem. He thinks my views are wrong-headed and hostile to Israel, yet we remain friends. When I saw him here in early May, his mood was especially dark and fatalistic. Enemies were everywhere; at one point, he said Israel might have to resign itself to an exchange of nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>I suspect this cornered point-of-view is the way many Israelis feel in the current intractable climate with a blockheaded Likud on one side and Iran on the other.</p>
<p>According to former US Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk, “the international blockade of Gaza is not sustainable” and the US “responsibility to Israel is to help them find a way out of this situation.” So far, the US has done a notably lousy job in this area. We have only dug Israel in deeper, hardening its sense of military-enforced exceptionalism, which is basically the mirror of our own distorted sense of exceptionalism.</p>
<p>We have become mutual admiration National Security States, one a huge giant, the other a tiny fortress surrounded by enemies. We model our policies on Israel’s anti-terrorism strategies and tactics, while they cite our preemptive strike into Iraq as a model for their behavior.</p>
<p>The attempt to marginalize the duly elected government of Hamas in Gaza was a terrible decision. To recognize Hamas’ electoral victory did not mean anybody had to like them. But it would have almost certainly had a moderating effect on them. Of course, we don’t know if that’s true thanks to the decision to, instead, crush the democratically elected government.</p>
<p>The point is Hamas is real, its existence is based on real Palestinian sentiment and it is not going to go away. Attacking a humanitarian flotilla intent on calling international attention to the blockade was, maybe, the stupidest thing Israel could have done.</p>
<p>Savvy with You Tube, Israeli propagandists have now loaded the internet with videos purporting to show they were attacked, while the flotilla activists are running their own videos. The competing back-and-forth video battle is a bit like the Abbott and Costello routine “Who’s on first?” This kind of absurd overload, of course, is exactly what the Israelis want.</p>
<p>It doesn’t really matter precisely when Turkish crew members brought out their pipes. The important fact is clear: Israelis attacked the ship, thus initiating the violence. If history means anything, Gazans have the right to decide who sails into their ports. The Gaza blockade is indefensible.</p>
<p>It’s time for the US to get tough</p>
<p>A 1,200 ton merchant ship named the Rachel Corrie after the American protester killed by an Israel bulldozer is now steaming toward Gaza full of supplies intent on breaking the blockade. An Israeli naval commander said: “We boarded the [Mavi Marmara] and were attacked as if it was a war. That will mean that we will have to come prepared in the future as if it was a war.”</p>
<p>If they have any instincts at all as peace-makers, the Obama administration will clear its throat and make an unequivocal statement that this sort of Israeli posture will have consequences, such as the cutting of US aid.</p>
<p>It may be stepping on a mine, but a humanitarian ship named Rachel Corrie is no more an act of war than a Jewish shtetl was an act of war in Europe circa 1940. The blockade is meant to demoralize and disempower a people and nothing more.</p>
<p>US citizens need to lobby their government to end the costly appeasement of the Israeli right wing and its powerful American lobby. This attack on the high seas calls for a profile in courage moment, not the continued enabling of disaster.</p>
<p>It’s time to demand the recognition of Hamas and face-to-face talks among Israel and the two, divided elements of Palestinian governance, with the goal being their integration. Obama should do it for the good of everyone, Israelis, Palestinians and Americans.</p>
<p>The Likud march to the apocalypse must be checked.</p>
<p>JOHN GRANT is a founding member of the new journalist-owned, journalist-run news collective and online newspaper ThisCantBeHappening.net. Read his stories and stories by colleagues Dave Lindorff, Linn Washington and Charles Young, at <a href="http://www.thiscantbehappening.net" type="external">www.thiscantbehappening.net</a></p>
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<p /> | true | 4 | like entering minefield seriously discuss israel palestine tale two peoples claim land ive entered minefield called antisemite israel hater saying pretty much sentence suggests palestinians feel legitimate bond land israel claims holds military prowess individual called names antiwar liberal everything israel point becomes jackboot militarist without shred mercy ive also critical governments like el salvadors ive never called antihispanic el salvador hater concern salvadoran government us patron stop repression poor im also opposed repression democracy places like iran israel trips hard line killing israeli commandos nine turkish passengers crew members turkish ship mavi marmara one hand raised bar public discussion israel palestine thrown monkey wrench talks among us israel palestinian authority moved turkey tentative friend israel bitter enemy prime minister benjamin netanyahu meet tuesday barack obama patch embarrassment jerusalem settlements vice president joe bidens visit netanyahu canceled returned israel hamas government gaza noticeably absent shambles known proximity talks branded terrorist organization cope israeli egyptian us supported blockade supplies sliver land mediterranean following ship incident egypt opened border gaza might different january 2006 hamas parliamentary election included palestinian voters west bank gaza east jerusalem hamas received 445 percent vote fatahs 414 percent giving hamas right form government us israel connived losing fatah element palestinian authority mount military attacks hamas worked financially starve hamas could run government elected run dust settled hamas governed gaza israel began blockade december 2008 launched punitive military attack gaza wreck place hamas certainly without sin un report makes clear vast amount violence destruction part israel shameful example americans kept ignorant journalistic minefield tuesday new york times story isabel kershner absolutely mention 2006 election made instead writes hamas took gaza force 2007 considering famous motto news thats fit print guess full truth didnt fit fact legal democratic plurality palestinians felt fatah palestinian authority corrupt cozy israel voted candidates felt integrity presented tougher face israelis fact attacked able defend mandate least gaza even remotely described taking place force context good remember first likud prime minister israel menachem begin began career leading irgun group blew king david hotel midday killing 91 brits arabs jews british put 10000 pound price begins head begin terrorist theres plenty terror go around needs happen less demonizing honest civilized negotiations move beyond cycle killing number attempts break gaza blockade sea egypt early seabased efforts got grew eventually stopped latest largest clearly seen israel action serious symbolic power einat wilf labor member knesset said warned defense minister ehud barak flotilla public relations issue something respond militarily nothing security told new york times armaments hamas coming flotilla force solve israels problem israels history vantage point many israelis strange echo us manifest destiny land already populated one people coveted exclusive property second people many israelis feel made desert bloom palestinians second class citizens land israel identifies western nation something intensified ascendancy likud right know basic history zionist movement began europe mid1800s following holocaust jews fled europe arriving palestine frightful baggage propagandadriven mission renewal regeneration new land 16th 19th century america people could destroyed instead modern human disaster dark underside postholocaust destiny israelis created modern culture western comforts virtually imprison palestinians also legitimate claim land israeli writer amos oz says force solve problem alone land friend mine tank driver six day war lives outside jerusalem thinks views wrongheaded hostile israel yet remain friends saw early may mood especially dark fatalistic enemies everywhere one point said israel might resign exchange nuclear weapons suspect cornered pointofview way many israelis feel current intractable climate blockheaded likud one side iran according former us ambassador israel martin indyk international blockade gaza sustainable us responsibility israel help find way situation far us done notably lousy job area dug israel deeper hardening sense militaryenforced exceptionalism basically mirror distorted sense exceptionalism become mutual admiration national security states one huge giant tiny fortress surrounded enemies model policies israels antiterrorism strategies tactics cite preemptive strike iraq model behavior attempt marginalize duly elected government hamas gaza terrible decision recognize hamas electoral victory mean anybody like would almost certainly moderating effect course dont know thats true thanks decision instead crush democratically elected government point hamas real existence based real palestinian sentiment going go away attacking humanitarian flotilla intent calling international attention blockade maybe stupidest thing israel could done savvy tube israeli propagandists loaded internet videos purporting show attacked flotilla activists running videos competing backandforth video battle bit like abbott costello routine whos first kind absurd overload course exactly israelis want doesnt really matter precisely turkish crew members brought pipes important fact clear israelis attacked ship thus initiating violence history means anything gazans right decide sails ports gaza blockade indefensible time us get tough 1200 ton merchant ship named rachel corrie american protester killed israel bulldozer steaming toward gaza full supplies intent breaking blockade israeli naval commander said boarded mavi marmara attacked war mean come prepared future war instincts peacemakers obama administration clear throat make unequivocal statement sort israeli posture consequences cutting us aid may stepping mine humanitarian ship named rachel corrie act war jewish shtetl act war europe circa 1940 blockade meant demoralize disempower people nothing us citizens need lobby government end costly appeasement israeli right wing powerful american lobby attack high seas calls profile courage moment continued enabling disaster time demand recognition hamas facetoface talks among israel two divided elements palestinian governance goal integration obama good everyone israelis palestinians americans likud march apocalypse must checked john grant founding member new journalistowned journalistrun news collective online newspaper thiscantbehappeningnet read stories stories colleagues dave lindorff linn washington charles young wwwthiscantbehappeningnet 160 160 160 words stick 160 | 914 |
<p>January 20</p>
<p>Americans cry tears of joy and relief as Barack Obama is inaugurated. His supporters include millions of citizens who hope the new President will take steps to end marijuana Prohibition.</p>
<p>Jan. 22</p>
<p>DEA agents conduct a raid on a South Lake Tahoe cannabis dispensary run by a wheelchair-bound entrepreneur named Ken Estes. They seize about five pounds of herbal medicine and a few thousands dollars. No arrests are made. “It was a typical rip-and-run” says Estes… Pro-Cannabis (PC) activists protest that DEA was ignoring promises made by the new President during the campaign.</p>
<p>Feb. 2</p>
<p>Eric H. Holder, Jr. is confirmed by the U.S. Senate as Attorney General, the top federal law-enforcement post. The AG heads the Department of Justice, which oversees the Drug Enforcement Administration as well as the network of U.S. Attorneys who prosecute cases in U.S District Court.</p>
<p>Feb. 3</p>
<p>Four cannabis dispensaries in the Los Angeles area are raided simultaneously by DEA squads:. “They took everything,” says an employee of the Beach Center in Playa Del Rey, “right down to the television. The computer, patient files, medicine, cash in the register. That’s it, we’re done. It’s just too bad. Our patients have epilepsy, cancer, MS, diabetes. Two of our patients have one leg. They’re gonna have to travel a lot farther and go to places that aren’t as safe for them.” PC activists led by Americans for Safe Access protest at a rally in LA and deluge the White House with emails.</p>
<p>Feb. 4</p>
<p>White House spokesman Nick Shapiro appears to blame the raids on Bush-Administration holdovers, telling the Washington Times, “The President believes that federal resources should not be used to circumvent state laws, and as he continues to appoint senior leadership to fill out the ranks of the federal government, he expects them to review their policies with that in mind.” PC reform groups spin Shapiro’s comment as a conclusive victory. According to the Marijuana Policy Project, the White House is “signaling an end to the federal war on state medical laws” and the new approach represents “a sea change.”</p>
<p>Feb. 11</p>
<p>DEA agents take part in a raid on the MendoHealing Co-operative farm in Fort Bragg, California.</p>
<p>Feb. 25</p>
<p>Attorney General Holder holds a press conference with Acting DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart (a Bush appointee) to discuss drug-related violence in Mexico. More than 20 minutes in, a reporter asks, “Right after the inauguration there were some raids on California medical marijuana dispensaries. Was that a deliberate decision by you, by the Justice Department? Is that a prediction of policy going forward? Do you expect those sorts of raids to continue despite what the President said during the campaign?”</p>
<p>Holder replies: “Well, what the president said during the campaign, you’ll be surprised to know, will be consistent with what we’ll be doing here in law enforcement. He was my boss during the campaign. He is formally and technically and by law my boss now. So what he said during the campaign is now American policy.” Holder’s response is worth checking out on YouTube (search “Holder marijuana”). He’s been in office less than a month, the press conference was called on another topic, it’s obvious that he doesn’t know what promises, exactly, his boss may have made regarding medical marijuana, but he gamely commits to carrying them out.</p>
<p>Reformers spin Holder’s line as another win. MPP posts a video clip headlined “Holder Says ‘No More DEA Raids’ in Press Conference.” But Holder never spoke those words, the quotation marks are duplicitous.</p>
<p>Feb. 27</p>
<p>In Los Angeles, Southern District US Attorney Thomas P. O’Brien directs prosecutors in his office to stop filing charges, issuing subpoenas, and applying for search warrants in cases involving medical marijuana dispensaries. O’Brien’s order is emailed by Christine Ewell, head of the office’s Criminal Division.</p>
<p>March 6</p>
<p>US Attorney O’Brien rescinds his week-old order and instructs prosecutors to go forward with medical marijuana cases. Evidently O’Brien had believed media reports that Holder intended to end such prosecutions, and was complying in hopes of keeping his job. (US Attorneys traditionally submit pro forma letters of resignation, enabling a newly elected President to replace them at will.)</p>
<p>Somehow O’Brien got word during the week that the old approach was still acceptable. His flip-flop was reported by Scott Glover in the LA Times, along with his spokesman’s attempt to rationalize it: “prosecutors target people they consider egregious offenders, such as those accused of selling drugs to minors or proprietors with past drug convictions.”&#160; (California law does not prohibit the use of marijuana by minors who have physician approval. Glover, relatively new to the beat, reported the disinformation as fact.)</p>
<p>March 18</p>
<p>AG Holder tells reporters in Washington that the Justice Department does not intend to prosecute cannabis dispensaries that comply with state law. “The policy is to go after those people who violate both federal and state law. To the extent that people do that and try to use medical marijuana laws as a shield for activity that is not designed to comport with what the intention was of the state law, those are the organizations, the people, that we will target. And that is consistent with what the president said during the campaign.”</p>
<p>March 19</p>
<p>PC activists tell the media that Holder’s remarks represent another big win. “Today’s comments clearly represent a change in policy out of Washington,” says Ethan Nadelmann&#160; of the Drug Policy Alliance to the LA Times. “He [Holder] is sending a clear message to the DEA.” But Drug Warriors contend that Holder’s policy statement vindicates the approach they’ve taken all these years. The US Attorney’s spokesman in Los Angeles, Thom Mrozek, tells the Times: “In every single case we have prosecuted, the defendants violated state as well as federal law.”</p>
<p>LA Times reporters summarize Holder’s announcement of the new Obama policy thus: “Holder said the priority of the new administration is to go after egregious offenders.” Note how close this is to their previous summary of the US Attorney’s priorities under the old Bush policy: “prosecutors target people they consider egregious offenders.”</p>
<p>March 20</p>
<p>The New York Times runs a piece by Solomon Moore headlined “Dispensers of Marijuana Find Relief in Policy Shift” -a subtle pun. Ethan Nadelmann is&#160; quoted saying that the feds now recognize state medical marijuana laws as “kosher.” But the DEA thinks Holder is serving up a tasty pork loin. Spokesman Garrison Courtney “pointed out that the attorney general’s statement indicated that the federal authorities would continue to go after marijuana dispensaries that broke state and federal laws by selling to minors, selling excessive amounts, or selling marijuana from unsanctioned growers.”</p>
<p>March 25</p>
<p>DEA agents, guns drawn, raid a San Francisco dispensary, Emmalyn’s, confiscating their inventory and cash on hand. No arrests are made.</p>
<p>March 26 President Barack Obama, answering questions at an “online town hall,” initiates an exchange (ostensibly ad lib) with the moderator, economist Jared Bernstein:</p>
<p>Can I just interrupt, Jared, before you ask the next question, just to say that we, we took votes about which questions were going to be asked and I think 3 million people voted or—</p>
<p>DR. BERNSTEIN: Three point five million.</p>
<p>THE PRESIDENT: Three point five million people voted. I have to say that there was one question that was voted on that ranked fairly high and that was whether legalizing marijuana would improve the economy (laughter) and job creation. And I don’t know what this says about the online audience (laughter) but I just want, I don’t want people to think that… This was a fairly popular question, we want to make sure that it was answered. The answer is, no, I don’t think that is a good strategy (laughter) to grow our economy. (Applause.)</p>
<p>By choosing to comment on total legalization (an abstract future possibility­), the President avoids answering the concrete question of the moment: will he allow DEA to keep raiding medical marijuana “dispensing collectives” and their affiliated growers? Equally slick is the script that makes it seem as if he insists on addressing a topic his handlers want him to avoid. The lighthearted, unspoken “stoner” charge aimed at everyone who emailed a marijuana-policy question —and the attendant laughter—&#160;is just a way of saying “we know that the herb is widely used and hardly dangerous.”&#160; Tell it to the DEA.</p>
<p>April 8</p>
<p>Joe Russoniello, US Attorney for the Northern District of California (a Bush appointee), says at a Hastings Law School forum that all medical marijuana dispensaries are profiteering operations in violaton of state law and therefore “fair game” for DEA raiders. He asserts that marijuana is “a more dangerous substance” than alcohol or tobacco… Dispensary operators who draw “reasonable compensation” and who only obtain their cannabis from and sell it to collective members hope they can be distinguished from “egregious offenders.”</p>
<p>The borderline between Hope and Denial is hard to make out sometimes.</p>
<p>Obama’s Campaign Statements: The Ominous Side</p>
<p>Three-quarters of the American people want the laws changed so that marijuana can be used as medicine. What Barack Obama actually said while running for President in 2008 suggests that he will reprise the Clinton approach to this demand: stall in the name of science. The appointment of Eric Holder and Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel —two veterans of the Clinton White House— is further evidence that we’re in for a re-run.</p>
<p>Sen. Obama was twice drawn out on the subject by reporters in Oregon (the state where a primary win sealed the nomination for him). In March the candidate told Gary Nelson of the Medford Mail Tribune:</p>
<p>“When it comes to medical marijuana, I have more of a practical view than anything else. My attitude is that if it’s an issue of doctors prescribing medical marijuana as a treatment for glaucoma or as a cancer treatment, I think that should be appropriate because there really is no difference between that and a doctor prescribing morphine or anything else.</p>
<p>“I think there are legitimate concerns in not wanting to allow people to grow their own or start setting up mom and pop shops because at that point it becomes fairly difficult to regulate. Again, I’m not familiar with all the details of the initiative that was passed [in Oregon] and what safeguards there were in place, but I think the basic concept that using medical marijuana in the same way, with the same controls as other drugs prescribed by doctors, I think that’s entirely appropriate…</p>
<p>“I would not punish doctors if it’s prescribed in a way that is appropriate. That may require some changes in federal law. I will tell you that -I mean I want to be honest with you: whether I want to use a whole lot of political capital on that issue when we’re trying to get health care passed or end the war in Iraq, the likelihood of that being real high on my list is not likely… What I’m not going to be doing is using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue simply because I want folks to be investigating violent crimes and potential terrorism. We’ve got a lot of things for our law enforcement officers to deal with.”</p>
<p>In May James Pitkin of the Willamette Week asked, Would you stop the DEA’s raids on Oregon medical marijuana growers?”</p>
<p>To which Obama replied: “I would because I think our federal agents have better things to do, like catching criminals and preventing terrorism. The way I want to approach the issue of medical marijuana is to base it on science, and if there is sound science that supports the use of medical marijuana and if it is controlled and prescribed in a way that other medicine is prescribed, then it’s something that I think we should consider.”</p>
<p>Expect a Commission to Study the Marijuana Question to be appointed in due course. Our lobbyists will hail it as a big step in the right direction. And you’ll start hearing that Obama really had to restrain himself during the first term, but during the second term he can really implement… change.</p>
<p>FRED GARDNER edits O’Shaughnessy’s, the Journal of Cannabis in Clinical Practice. He can be reached at <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a></p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | true | 4 | january 20 americans cry tears joy relief barack obama inaugurated supporters include millions citizens hope new president take steps end marijuana prohibition jan 22 dea agents conduct raid south lake tahoe cannabis dispensary run wheelchairbound entrepreneur named ken estes seize five pounds herbal medicine thousands dollars arrests made typical ripandrun says estes procannabis pc activists protest dea ignoring promises made new president campaign feb 2 eric h holder jr confirmed us senate attorney general top federal lawenforcement post ag heads department justice oversees drug enforcement administration well network us attorneys prosecute cases us district court feb 3 four cannabis dispensaries los angeles area raided simultaneously dea squads took everything says employee beach center playa del rey right television computer patient files medicine cash register thats done bad patients epilepsy cancer ms diabetes two patients one leg theyre gon na travel lot farther go places arent safe pc activists led americans safe access protest rally la deluge white house emails feb 4 white house spokesman nick shapiro appears blame raids bushadministration holdovers telling washington times president believes federal resources used circumvent state laws continues appoint senior leadership fill ranks federal government expects review policies mind pc reform groups spin shapiros comment conclusive victory according marijuana policy project white house signaling end federal war state medical laws new approach represents sea change feb 11 dea agents take part raid mendohealing cooperative farm fort bragg california feb 25 attorney general holder holds press conference acting dea administrator michele leonhart bush appointee discuss drugrelated violence mexico 20 minutes reporter asks right inauguration raids california medical marijuana dispensaries deliberate decision justice department prediction policy going forward expect sorts raids continue despite president said campaign holder replies well president said campaign youll surprised know consistent well law enforcement boss campaign formally technically law boss said campaign american policy holders response worth checking youtube search holder marijuana hes office less month press conference called another topic obvious doesnt know promises exactly boss may made regarding medical marijuana gamely commits carrying reformers spin holders line another win mpp posts video clip headlined holder says dea raids press conference holder never spoke words quotation marks duplicitous feb 27 los angeles southern district us attorney thomas p obrien directs prosecutors office stop filing charges issuing subpoenas applying search warrants cases involving medical marijuana dispensaries obriens order emailed christine ewell head offices criminal division march 6 us attorney obrien rescinds weekold order instructs prosecutors go forward medical marijuana cases evidently obrien believed media reports holder intended end prosecutions complying hopes keeping job us attorneys traditionally submit pro forma letters resignation enabling newly elected president replace somehow obrien got word week old approach still acceptable flipflop reported scott glover la times along spokesmans attempt rationalize prosecutors target people consider egregious offenders accused selling drugs minors proprietors past drug convictions160 california law prohibit use marijuana minors physician approval glover relatively new beat reported disinformation fact march 18 ag holder tells reporters washington justice department intend prosecute cannabis dispensaries comply state law policy go people violate federal state law extent people try use medical marijuana laws shield activity designed comport intention state law organizations people target consistent president said campaign march 19 pc activists tell media holders remarks represent another big win todays comments clearly represent change policy washington says ethan nadelmann160 drug policy alliance la times holder sending clear message dea drug warriors contend holders policy statement vindicates approach theyve taken years us attorneys spokesman los angeles thom mrozek tells times every single case prosecuted defendants violated state well federal law la times reporters summarize holders announcement new obama policy thus holder said priority new administration go egregious offenders note close previous summary us attorneys priorities old bush policy prosecutors target people consider egregious offenders march 20 new york times runs piece solomon moore headlined dispensers marijuana find relief policy shift subtle pun ethan nadelmann is160 quoted saying feds recognize state medical marijuana laws kosher dea thinks holder serving tasty pork loin spokesman garrison courtney pointed attorney generals statement indicated federal authorities would continue go marijuana dispensaries broke state federal laws selling minors selling excessive amounts selling marijuana unsanctioned growers march 25 dea agents guns drawn raid san francisco dispensary emmalyns confiscating inventory cash hand arrests made march 26 president barack obama answering questions online town hall initiates exchange ostensibly ad lib moderator economist jared bernstein interrupt jared ask next question say took votes questions going asked think 3 million people voted dr bernstein three point five million president three point five million people voted say one question voted ranked fairly high whether legalizing marijuana would improve economy laughter job creation dont know says online audience laughter want dont want people think fairly popular question want make sure answered answer dont think good strategy laughter grow economy applause choosing comment total legalization abstract future possibility president avoids answering concrete question moment allow dea keep raiding medical marijuana dispensing collectives affiliated growers equally slick script makes seem insists addressing topic handlers want avoid lighthearted unspoken stoner charge aimed everyone emailed marijuanapolicy question attendant laughter160is way saying know herb widely used hardly dangerous160 tell dea april 8 joe russoniello us attorney northern district california bush appointee says hastings law school forum medical marijuana dispensaries profiteering operations violaton state law therefore fair game dea raiders asserts marijuana dangerous substance alcohol tobacco dispensary operators draw reasonable compensation obtain cannabis sell collective members hope distinguished egregious offenders borderline hope denial hard make sometimes obamas campaign statements ominous side threequarters american people want laws changed marijuana used medicine barack obama actually said running president 2008 suggests reprise clinton approach demand stall name science appointment eric holder chief staff rahm emmanuel two veterans clinton white house evidence rerun sen obama twice drawn subject reporters oregon state primary win sealed nomination march candidate told gary nelson medford mail tribune comes medical marijuana practical view anything else attitude issue doctors prescribing medical marijuana treatment glaucoma cancer treatment think appropriate really difference doctor prescribing morphine anything else think legitimate concerns wanting allow people grow start setting mom pop shops point becomes fairly difficult regulate im familiar details initiative passed oregon safeguards place think basic concept using medical marijuana way controls drugs prescribed doctors think thats entirely appropriate would punish doctors prescribed way appropriate may require changes federal law tell mean want honest whether want use whole lot political capital issue trying get health care passed end war iraq likelihood real high list likely im going using justice department resources try circumvent state laws issue simply want folks investigating violent crimes potential terrorism weve got lot things law enforcement officers deal may james pitkin willamette week asked would stop deas raids oregon medical marijuana growers obama replied would think federal agents better things like catching criminals preventing terrorism way want approach issue medical marijuana base science sound science supports use medical marijuana controlled prescribed way medicine prescribed something think consider expect commission study marijuana question appointed due course lobbyists hail big step right direction youll start hearing obama really restrain first term second term really implement change fred gardner edits oshaughnessys journal cannabis clinical practice reached fredplebesitecom 160 160 | 1,185 |
<p><a href="" type="internal" />Andrew McKillop <a href="http://wp.me/p3bwni-5ef" type="external">21st Century Wire</a></p>
<p>The oil rags are soaked in many things, including blood. So how can men in key positions create wealth from nothing?</p>
<p>Ask Prince Bandar, who has just thrown his toys out of the pram, screaming that because of dithering over Syria and Iran, <a href="http://wp.me/p3bwni-5eq" type="external">he now wants Saudi Arabia to ‘cut off’ diplomatic relations</a> with the US…</p>
<p>OIL AND BANDAR BIN SULTAN Saudi histrionics and princely rage didn’t resolve the US to go bomb Syria, but certainly did work on France, where government-friendly media wheeled out the Syria bombing maps and models for days and days after the US had already cowed and bowed to Russian reason, but Saudi royals can (almost) always count on high oil prices.</p>
<p>Saudi oil revenues accounting for 92% of government income were around $330 billion in 2012 according to the US EIA. As we know, the word “government” in Saudi Arabia means the royal clique and the 4800 princes dreaming of their 48-72 virgins to come in the Afterlife.</p>
<p>For the past 10 years oil is kept high by Wall Street’s mightiest (we mean Goldman Sachs) and the so-called market maker banks with the fattest fingers in the oil market pie – JP Morgan, Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Societe Generale. When oil prices are high Saudi Arabia can count on a hearing.</p>
<p>So if oil prices fall this is very bad news for Saudi fantasy schemes to dominate the Sunni Muslim world. And much further afield – inch’allah – according to the antique plans hatched by US president Eisenhower, his vice president Richard Nixon, Secretary of State John F. Dulles, and other rightly named “players” following the 1957 state visit of King Saud to Washington.</p>
<p>Brother of Dulles, Allen Welsh Dulles, then head of the CIA had cooked up simply the wackiest plot anybody could imagine. King Saud, with US firepower, was to become the Islamic Pope ruling all Muslim lands but Saud turned down the plan. He only wanted to rule all of the Middle East. As I cover in another story ( http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article42271.html ) the Dulles team of great strategists wanted to find an Islamic Billy Graham to move things along.</p>
<p>The Islamic Pope idea, even if wacky, likely still circulates in the small head of Saudi&#160;Prince&#160;Bandar bin Sultan and a few of his US friends, some of them rather influential, but recent weeks have tested the great Saudi plan for an all-new Muslim Caliphate with a Saudi king playing Islamic pope. Oil prices have to stay high to help the strange plan caressed by Saudi Dr Strangelove aka&#160;Bandar bin Sultan.</p>
<p>Some investigative journalists like Glenn Greenwald say that Prince Bandar bin Sultan was or still is more than somewhat friendly with outright extremists of the Project for a&#160;New American Century (PNAC). Former NATO supreme chief General Wesley Clark, in an October 2007 speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco&#160;described the aspirations of a “coup” being plotted by Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and what he said were “a half dozen other collaborators from the Project for the New American Century” in late September 2001, just weeks after 9/11</p>
<p>They had said ”We are going to attack and&#160;destroy the governments in 7 countries in five years – we’re going to start with Iraq, and then we’re going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.”</p>
<p>TOAST WITHOUT HIGH OIL PRICES</p>
<p>Paying for all this craziness isn’t easy without Saudi revenues swollen by overpriced oil, in fact without it the plan is toast for war-crazy US neocon dreamers and their Saudi friends. Maybe the plan is also toast with high oil prices – because creating a Saudi Islamic pope to rule his war-made Caliphate stretching all across the Sunni Muslim majority countries of the region will surely and certainly need nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>Without overpriced oil, paying for the war is going to be a lot more than the US or downsized Little France can afford. Even supplying a few aged airborne refuelling planes to Friendly France, to refuel its fighter planes for Mali war operations – fighting Saudi-paid Islamic militants – the US had demanded payment of $50 000-per-hour for each KC135 tanker plane. Otherwise no airborne refuelling. John Kerry backed off when the price tag was revealed in the French press.</p>
<p>On October 21 however, a strange thing happened – the New York Nymex market price for oil actually dipped below $100 a barrel. For Bandar and his Islamic boy soldiers in Syria shooting up the local populace this is really bad news. Bandar’s friends, most notably a Jewish-owned, Israeli-friendly and run Goldman Sachs and the bankster crowd which controls and fixes oil prices round the clock will have to act if prices slip into those dismal double-digit numbers. Bandar needs triple-digit priced oil!</p>
<p>When oil prices are high enough all kinds of persons, like Mr B. Obama will be anxious to hear what Bandar wants – and can pay for. When the oil price drops they care less about him than they care about Paul Anka recordings from the 78 rpm bakelite disk era. If the oil price drops enough, they won’t answer his phone call, even on their clunky presidential Blackberry.</p>
<p>U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, Four-Star General and CENTCOM commander John Abizaid, key war architect John Bolton,&#160;Bush-era speechwriter David Frum, Senator John McCain, former Fed boss Alan Greenspan and many others have said the Iraq war was about oil.</p>
<p>They didn’t add the most important bit. Keeping oil prices high. Al Qaeda is another US-Saudi invention that only works wonders if oil prices stay high.</p>
<p>When oil prices drop to their right level, which is maybe $75 a barrel, Bandar the Islamic Dr Strangelove’s wacky plan for a Saudi “pope” ruling all of the Middle East, and beyond, can be placed straight back in the trash can from which it came from.</p>
<p>READ MORE SAUDI NEWS AT: <a href="" type="internal">21st Century Wire Saudi Files</a></p> | true | 4 | andrew mckillop 21st century wire oil rags soaked many things including blood men key positions create wealth nothing ask prince bandar thrown toys pram screaming dithering syria iran wants saudi arabia cut diplomatic relations us oil bandar bin sultan saudi histrionics princely rage didnt resolve us go bomb syria certainly work france governmentfriendly media wheeled syria bombing maps models days days us already cowed bowed russian reason saudi royals almost always count high oil prices saudi oil revenues accounting 92 government income around 330 billion 2012 according us eia know word government saudi arabia means royal clique 4800 princes dreaming 4872 virgins come afterlife past 10 years oil kept high wall streets mightiest mean goldman sachs socalled market maker banks fattest fingers oil market pie jp morgan barclays deutsche bank societe generale oil prices high saudi arabia count hearing oil prices fall bad news saudi fantasy schemes dominate sunni muslim world much afield inchallah according antique plans hatched us president eisenhower vice president richard nixon secretary state john f dulles rightly named players following 1957 state visit king saud washington brother dulles allen welsh dulles head cia cooked simply wackiest plot anybody could imagine king saud us firepower become islamic pope ruling muslim lands saud turned plan wanted rule middle east cover another story httpwwwmarketoraclecoukarticle42271html dulles team great strategists wanted find islamic billy graham move things along islamic pope idea even wacky likely still circulates small head saudi160prince160bandar bin sultan us friends rather influential recent weeks tested great saudi plan allnew muslim caliphate saudi king playing islamic pope oil prices stay high help strange plan caressed saudi dr strangelove aka160bandar bin sultan investigative journalists like glenn greenwald say prince bandar bin sultan still somewhat friendly outright extremists project a160new american century pnac former nato supreme chief general wesley clark october 2007 speech commonwealth club san francisco160described aspirations coup plotted dick cheney rumsfeld paul wolfowitz said half dozen collaborators project new american century late september 2001 weeks 911 said going attack and160destroy governments 7 countries five years going start iraq going move syria lebanon libya somalia sudan iran toast without high oil prices paying craziness isnt easy without saudi revenues swollen overpriced oil fact without plan toast warcrazy us neocon dreamers saudi friends maybe plan also toast high oil prices creating saudi islamic pope rule warmade caliphate stretching across sunni muslim majority countries region surely certainly need nuclear weapons without overpriced oil paying war going lot us downsized little france afford even supplying aged airborne refuelling planes friendly france refuel fighter planes mali war operations fighting saudipaid islamic militants us demanded payment 50 000perhour kc135 tanker plane otherwise airborne refuelling john kerry backed price tag revealed french press october 21 however strange thing happened new york nymex market price oil actually dipped 100 barrel bandar islamic boy soldiers syria shooting local populace really bad news bandars friends notably jewishowned israelifriendly run goldman sachs bankster crowd controls fixes oil prices round clock act prices slip dismal doubledigit numbers bandar needs tripledigit priced oil oil prices high enough kinds persons like mr b obama anxious hear bandar wants pay oil price drops care less care paul anka recordings 78 rpm bakelite disk era oil price drops enough wont answer phone call even clunky presidential blackberry us secretary defense chuck hagel fourstar general centcom commander john abizaid key war architect john bolton160bushera speechwriter david frum senator john mccain former fed boss alan greenspan many others said iraq war oil didnt add important bit keeping oil prices high al qaeda another ussaudi invention works wonders oil prices stay high oil prices drop right level maybe 75 barrel bandar islamic dr strangeloves wacky plan saudi pope ruling middle east beyond placed straight back trash came read saudi news 21st century wire saudi files | 627 |
<p>I just retired and am 62 years old today, so I guess it’s natural to reminisce a little on this birthday. All youth seem to share a disbelief that someday they actually will reach this ripe old age. It certainly was true of me in my early teens.</p>
<p>In fact, I especially could not visualize my contemporary celebrities aging. Not Elvis, Bob Dylan, the Beatles or, my favorites, the rebellious Rolling Stones who never would force a smile just to sell a record.</p>
<p>Certainly not Chicago Cub Ernie Banks who hit 40 home runs each year. Or New York Yankee Ryne Duren who threw nothing but ‘smokin’ fast balls that terrified even the best hitters.</p>
<p>As a young teen, my imagination just couldn’t fathom what these public figures would look like in fifty years. I used my own personal boyhood heroes as reference markers for my own aging process. I figured as long as they were still around, I had nothing to worry about.</p>
<p>Then ever so slowly and somewhat imperceptively, things began to happen. Mortality became reality.</p>
<p>My youthful heroes began dropping from the front pages only rarely appearing on the public stage they had dominated just a few short years before. And then, as the years inched forward, some began dropping from the scene entirely.</p>
<p>I recall Mickey Mantle famously saying before his 1995 death that he would have taken better care of himself if he knew he was going to live so long. When Mickey died, I realized right then and there that I was getting old for sure.</p>
<p>I found myself screening the obituaries looking for more names that coincided with various important stages of my own life. I was always told this was a sure sign of growing old and tried very hard to resist my secret temptation to peek at these back pages.</p>
<p>But there is no denying, it’s time now to contemplate my own mortality as more and more recognizable voices are silenced and as I am just about ready to collect my first social security check.</p>
<p>As I do so, I find myself pondering certain themes that have stood out over the years in my life.</p>
<p>Could I actually pinpoint childhood influences that aroused my early distrust of authority, soon to flower into four decades of consistent rebellion against the rich and their greedy system?</p>
<p>Why was I always so proud to be working class and still to this day so confident of it’s potential to change the world for the better? Thus, I begin my search.</p>
<p>The Big Brain Theory</p>
<p>We now know that the most critical development of the brain actually occurs in the first three years after birth. Sensory stimulation is essential during this formative stage. I can only hope the lore of both my mom and dad playing accordion and singing in Italian as our cradles rocked back and forth were good influences on us three kids.</p>
<p>Of course, individual conscious choices shaping our personality and character occur a few years later. In my case, I recall one early pre-teen observation that greatly affected my adult life.</p>
<p>My dad’s way of teaching us how lucky we were living in our comfortable Chicago northwest-side neighborhood was to drive us to the old inner-city area where he was raised and I was born.</p>
<p>Barely 10 years old, I distinctly remember scruffy, hunched-over homeless men wearing thick coats, bulky rain boots, and large scarves draped over their wool caps and wrapped around their ears. They were huddled in freezing temperatures around rusty, dirty fuel-oil drums discarded from gas stations.</p>
<p>Old, tore-up, worn tires and wood scraps would be burning. Ugly, black, toxic smoke bellowed out but nobody dared stray too far from the direct heat of the flames.</p>
<p>The image is burned into my memory. Lesson number one, life just didn’t seem fair. Why were these men outside in the cold when I could return to my warm house?</p>
<p>I didn’t have the answers quite yet but I already had lots of questions from my limited experience living in my working-class neighborhood. Soon, broader social and political ideas began affecting me that reflected the new world taking shape before my eyes.</p>
<p>Maybe now I could get some answers?</p>
<p>Blowing in the Wind</p>
<p>I was very much influenced as a young teen by the rebellious attitude of the 1960s. I listened to every voice of dissent and watched every protest.</p>
<p>I began to deepen my instinctive dislike and even hatred of Chicago cops who always were hassling us kids “hanging out” and I easily extended these suspicions to the upper crust of society. I didn’t trust the rich and powerful. I didn’t think they played fair. We used to say they lived on ‘easy street.’</p>
<p>I already pretty much understood that living high on the hog and having lots of money had little to do with how hard you actually worked. Heck, I figured my family should have easily been millionaires the way my parents worked so long and hard.</p>
<p>I was also beginning to see that the rich had more career options than working class folks. You see by this time, shortly after John F. Kennedy became President, my older brother was already a Marine fighting in Vietnam. He left high school early and joined up at the tender age of 17. This happened to lots of guys in my neighborhood.</p>
<p>In that kind of social environment, I naturally sided with the underdog.</p>
<p>It also probably had something to do with being a Cub fan. When I would ask my Dad sitting in his living room recliner watching the game how it was going, he would mostly say despairingly, “the usual.”</p>
<p>Sometimes he would change it up with “the Cubs are ahead, getting ready to lose.” Nonetheless, he stayed an avid fan all his life.</p>
<p>Another sport was also a big influence on me. There were no rich guys in the boxing ring. Even my athletic dad tried his hand in the ring during the depression just to make an extra buck. It was not uncommon in those days.</p>
<p>Almost all fighters came from working class backgrounds. It was another situation where I found myself rooting for the person who didn’t start with much but who tried with all their heart to get ahead.</p>
<p>The fight game was a huge spectator sport in my youth. I can still see the grace, talent and good looks of Sugar Ray Robinson. But I also remember the busted up, pushed-in faces and cauliflower ears of Carmen Basilio and Gene Fullmer.</p>
<p>Like many of my generation, I greatly admired those who had the guts to step into the ring. In boxing, fighters who got knocked out received sympathy but those who kept getting up from a knockdown got respect even if they ultimately lost the decision. I think we all prefer respect to sympathy.</p>
<p>This boxing image came to mind as a young boy when I watched other young kids standing up to fire hoses and racist harassment at lunch counters. I recognized that Black youth were getting back up each time they got knocked down. They were fighting for a fair shake. As a result, they received from me something far more profound than sympathy.</p>
<p>Respect is basic and fundamental for working class youth so I was able to instinctively grasp the essential meaning of the civil rights movement perhaps even more intensely than other more-educated observers.</p>
<p>I made the same comparisons with the Vietnamese youth who never let up. I was very impressed to learn they persistently fought for national independence against the British and French long before opposing the interference of my own powerful country. My head was changed forever.</p>
<p>And then Muhammad Ali arrived. He dramatically blended the attractive warrior aspect of boxing with the fighting spirit of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements.</p>
<p>He remains one of my heroes, an athlete who by resisting the war sacrificed earned privileges in order to help those of us who never would make it to the center ring of society.</p>
<p>Outside My Neighborhood</p>
<p>I continued to change as I grew out of my teens and it was again a direct result of listening to the debates and discussions appearing everywhere about civil rights and Vietnam. Eventually, I became convinced to actually throw myself directly into the political ring as an activist fighter.</p>
<p>Like most working class teens with limited education, I was accustomed to confidently basing my decisions almost exclusively on practical street smarts and personal experience. But more and more I began to realize that there were other ideas and conceptions outside of my limited neighborhood existence that should also be considered.</p>
<p>Around the age of 21, I recall two ideas that I knew would affect my life forever. They were quite simple but, nonetheless, for me extremely meaningful.</p>
<p>The first new idea that exploded into my consciousness came from reading about the great 1912 Lawrence, Massachusetts Textile Strike. I thought a lot about what would make so many thousands of poor immigrants leave their jobs.</p>
<p>The working class is often unfairly ridiculed for wanting little more than a few extra dollars in their pockets.</p>
<p>The despicable notion attributed to both JP Morgan and Jay Gould that “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half” is the most repulsive example of the condescension and arrogance of the rich class.</p>
<p>But on the contrary, against the odds, the Lawrence strikers shut down the east coast textile mills for “Bread and Roses,” symbolizing their desire for both decent wages and fewer work hours. Workers wanted more time to enjoy life. At times when I would get buried in my own work over the years, I would often recall the desires of these impoverished toilers to “smell the roses.”</p>
<p>I always thought it was a remarkable example of the working class representing the best of the human spirit. I was proud of my origins, strongly identified with my class and saw none of this noble vision from the elites.</p>
<p>My next major influence occurred soon after learning about the Lawrence strike. I had the accidental, good fortune of reading a 1883 pamphlet by socialist Paul Lefargue provocatively titled “The Right to be Lazy.“ True to his theme, Lefargue only wrote a brief four chapters.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, it was an inspiring message arguing to free the working class from the drudgery of daily work; a theme echoing the same desires of the Lawrence strikers.</p>
<p>Written in 19th Century prose, the words spoke eloquently of a vision neither realized nor even much considered even now into the 21st Century.</p>
<p>“O Laziness, have pity on our long misery! O Laziness, mother of the arts and noble virtues, be thou the balm of human anguish!” writes Lefargue.</p>
<p>At my age, it is now time for me to enjoy more fully the “Roses” of the Lawrence Strike and the “Laziness” of Lefargue. How sad that our society requires we postpone these dreams for so many decades of our life.</p>
<p>Today’s youth may themselves sometimes imagine what they will look like fifty years from now. But, as I have described, it is more important to ask yourself who you will be once you get there.</p>
<p>CARL FINAMORE is former President (ret), Air Transport Employees, Local Lodge 1781, IAMAW. He can be distracted from his many leisurely pursuits and awakened from his frequent naps by writing <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a></p>
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<p>&#160;</p> | true | 4 | retired 62 years old today guess natural reminisce little birthday youth seem share disbelief someday actually reach ripe old age certainly true early teens fact especially could visualize contemporary celebrities aging elvis bob dylan beatles favorites rebellious rolling stones never would force smile sell record certainly chicago cub ernie banks hit 40 home runs year new york yankee ryne duren threw nothing smokin fast balls terrified even best hitters young teen imagination couldnt fathom public figures would look like fifty years used personal boyhood heroes reference markers aging process figured long still around nothing worry ever slowly somewhat imperceptively things began happen mortality became reality youthful heroes began dropping front pages rarely appearing public stage dominated short years years inched forward began dropping scene entirely recall mickey mantle famously saying 1995 death would taken better care knew going live long mickey died realized right getting old sure found screening obituaries looking names coincided various important stages life always told sure sign growing old tried hard resist secret temptation peek back pages denying time contemplate mortality recognizable voices silenced ready collect first social security check find pondering certain themes stood years life could actually pinpoint childhood influences aroused early distrust authority soon flower four decades consistent rebellion rich greedy system always proud working class still day confident potential change world better thus begin search big brain theory know critical development brain actually occurs first three years birth sensory stimulation essential formative stage hope lore mom dad playing accordion singing italian cradles rocked back forth good influences us three kids course individual conscious choices shaping personality character occur years later case recall one early preteen observation greatly affected adult life dads way teaching us lucky living comfortable chicago northwestside neighborhood drive us old innercity area raised born barely 10 years old distinctly remember scruffy hunchedover homeless men wearing thick coats bulky rain boots large scarves draped wool caps wrapped around ears huddled freezing temperatures around rusty dirty fueloil drums discarded gas stations old toreup worn tires wood scraps would burning ugly black toxic smoke bellowed nobody dared stray far direct heat flames image burned memory lesson number one life didnt seem fair men outside cold could return warm house didnt answers quite yet already lots questions limited experience living workingclass neighborhood soon broader social political ideas began affecting reflected new world taking shape eyes maybe could get answers blowing wind much influenced young teen rebellious attitude 1960s listened every voice dissent watched every protest began deepen instinctive dislike even hatred chicago cops always hassling us kids hanging easily extended suspicions upper crust society didnt trust rich powerful didnt think played fair used say lived easy street already pretty much understood living high hog lots money little hard actually worked heck figured family easily millionaires way parents worked long hard also beginning see rich career options working class folks see time shortly john f kennedy became president older brother already marine fighting vietnam left high school early joined tender age 17 happened lots guys neighborhood kind social environment naturally sided underdog also probably something cub fan would ask dad sitting living room recliner watching game going would mostly say despairingly usual sometimes would change cubs ahead getting ready lose nonetheless stayed avid fan life another sport also big influence rich guys boxing ring even athletic dad tried hand ring depression make extra buck uncommon days almost fighters came working class backgrounds another situation found rooting person didnt start much tried heart get ahead fight game huge spectator sport youth still see grace talent good looks sugar ray robinson also remember busted pushedin faces cauliflower ears carmen basilio gene fullmer like many generation greatly admired guts step ring boxing fighters got knocked received sympathy kept getting knockdown got respect even ultimately lost decision think prefer respect sympathy boxing image came mind young boy watched young kids standing fire hoses racist harassment lunch counters recognized black youth getting back time got knocked fighting fair shake result received something far profound sympathy respect basic fundamental working class youth able instinctively grasp essential meaning civil rights movement perhaps even intensely moreeducated observers made comparisons vietnamese youth never let impressed learn persistently fought national independence british french long opposing interference powerful country head changed forever muhammad ali arrived dramatically blended attractive warrior aspect boxing fighting spirit civil rights antivietnam war movements remains one heroes athlete resisting war sacrificed earned privileges order help us never would make center ring society outside neighborhood continued change grew teens direct result listening debates discussions appearing everywhere civil rights vietnam eventually became convinced actually throw directly political ring activist fighter like working class teens limited education accustomed confidently basing decisions almost exclusively practical street smarts personal experience began realize ideas conceptions outside limited neighborhood existence also considered around age 21 recall two ideas knew would affect life forever quite simple nonetheless extremely meaningful first new idea exploded consciousness came reading great 1912 lawrence massachusetts textile strike thought lot would make many thousands poor immigrants leave jobs working class often unfairly ridiculed wanting little extra dollars pockets despicable notion attributed jp morgan jay gould hire one half working class kill half repulsive example condescension arrogance rich class contrary odds lawrence strikers shut east coast textile mills bread roses symbolizing desire decent wages fewer work hours workers wanted time enjoy life times would get buried work years would often recall desires impoverished toilers smell roses always thought remarkable example working class representing best human spirit proud origins strongly identified class saw none noble vision elites next major influence occurred soon learning lawrence strike accidental good fortune reading 1883 pamphlet socialist paul lefargue provocatively titled right lazy true theme lefargue wrote brief four chapters nonetheless inspiring message arguing free working class drudgery daily work theme echoing desires lawrence strikers written 19th century prose words spoke eloquently vision neither realized even much considered even 21st century laziness pity long misery laziness mother arts noble virtues thou balm human anguish writes lefargue age time enjoy fully roses lawrence strike laziness lefargue sad society requires postpone dreams many decades life todays youth may sometimes imagine look like fifty years described important ask get carl finamore former president ret air transport employees local lodge 1781 iamaw distracted many leisurely pursuits awakened frequent naps writing local1781yahoocom 160 160 160 160 160 160 | 1,051 |
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<p>A faction of right-wing Republicans who believe in governing by the Bible has already taken control of the California Republican Party. Now they’re poised to duplicate that feat in 35 other states—and counting—under the banner of the new National Federation of Republican Assemblies. Their immediate goal: to cultivate a Reaganesque candidate who can win the presidency in 2000. Their long-term goal: an America ruled by the word of God.</p>
<p>The story begins a decade ago. Frustrated by the failure of Pat Robertson’s 1988 presidential bid, some of his followers in Sacramento hatched a plan to take over the California Republican Party. First they packed the then-moderate <a href="http://www.he.net/%7Ecra/" type="external">California Republican Assembly</a> (CRA), a mainstream caucus with a heavy hand in the state party’s nominating process, with their Bible-minded colleagues. By 1990 they controlled the CRA, and since then the CRA’s clout has helped the religious conservatives nominate and elect local candidates and—crucially—catapult true believers into state party leadership slots.</p>
<p>Ten years of dedication and planning later, the operation is a stunning success. Members of the Bible-waving CRA—which now bills itself as the “conservative conscience” of the state GOP—hold the top 13 elected spots in the <a href="http://www.cagop.org/board.htm" type="external">party leadership</a>, from state chair on down to second assistant secretary. In addition to the top posts, CRA members now make up roughly two-thirds of the California Republican Party’s 1,700 voting members. That means they decide whom to nominate in the primaries—and whom to smear using their considerable resources of influence and money. Today every statewide GOP candidate courts CRA for its endorsement, including Attorney General Dan Lungren, who has already “interviewed” with CRA for his gubernatorial bid next year.</p>
<p>Nationwide in ’98 But California was just the beginning. Flush with their success, the leaders of the CRA have exported their model of state party infiltration nationwide. In 1993 they helped set up a sister Arizona Republican Assembly, and last August they founded the new <a href="http://www.nf-ra.org" type="external">National Federation of Republican Assemblies</a> (NFRA) to help coordinate affiliate groups in every state. The NFRA boasts the blessing of such right-wing shakers as Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum and Bay Buchanan, sister of Pat, on its honorary advisory board, along with Gary Bauer of the Family Research Council and other conservative noteworthies.</p>
<p>Already 36 states have Republican Assemblies modeled on the CRA, and organizers expect conservative groups in the remaining 14 to organize their own affiliates by Easter. NFRA membership now stands at about 15,000, says NFRA president Stephen Frank, a former president of the CRA who advocates legislating by biblical principles.</p>
<p>“Give us another year and we’ll triple that number,” Frank says. “The important part here is that we have the ability not to sit at the table but to own the table. Who cares if you can eat if you can’t set the menu? We want to set the menu.” He adds, “We are the masters of government, not servants.”</p>
<p>Says Frank: “Our goal is to organize grassroots support to win primaries for Constitutional conservatives, and elections for principled Republicans.”</p>
<p>The NFRA’s first move was to establish communication among religious-right groups. “What we have found is that there are conservative coffee clubs throughout other states, but each one in a community didn’t realize there were others. We’re creating a community of conservatives,” Frank explains.</p>
<p>The NFRA plans an early August conference in Dallas, where it expects visits from likely GOP presidential contenders. Next year, it’ll hold its first full-fledged national convention and endorse a candidate for president. Its motto: “United in ’98; Victory in 2000.”</p>
<p>As NFRA chief Frank criss-crosses the country recruiting new assembly affiliates, his travel and accomodations are paid for by the CRA’s 2-year-old PAC, the <a href="http://www.he.net/%7Ecra/cr/3-4-97/rvf.htm" type="external">Republican Victory Fund</a>, which pumped nearly $70,000 into the campaigns of CRA-endorsed candidates in 1996. To keep the coffers filled, Frank urges members to sign up for <a href="http://www.amerivision.com/" type="external">Amerivision LifeLine</a> phone service, a Working Assets-type service which donates 10 percent of a member’s bill to conservative causes such as the Republican Victory Fund, Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association, and more than 500 anti-abortion groups including Operation Rescue’s ex-chief Randall Terry and various Right-to-Life chapters. Believers are also urged to use the Republican Victory Fund <a href="http://www.he.net/%7Ecra/cr/3-4-97/rvf.htm" type="external">Visa card</a>, which similarly kicks back a donation for each bill.</p>
<p>The NFRA game plan is grassroots politicking, CRA style: “We need to win council seats, school boards, statehouse races, assembly races, and Congress, and the cumulative will be winning the presidency,” Frank says. “We’re doing it the old-fashioned way: community by community.”</p>
<p>Such cocksure talk might be easily dismissed if it weren’t for CRA’s proven success with just such a method in California. Dominating the GOP nomination process, CRA has racked up dozens of big primary victories, including that of U.S. Rep. Richard Pombo (R-Calif.) in 1992, and last week’s special election primary victory of CRA member Tom Bordonaro for U.S. Congress over liberal Republican Brooks Firestone. CRA also claims credit for the winning ballot initiatives Prop. 187, which denied benefits to illegal immigrants, and Prop. 209, which dismantled affirmative action; and CRA now champions the English for Children initiative, which would end bilingual education, and the Payroll Protection for Unionized Workers initiative, which would abolish the automatic payroll checkoff for union dues.</p>
<p>Plan Ahead From radical fringe to kingmakers in a decade — how did they do it? “Basically, there’s two places you have influence: one is in the nominating process in the primaries, where you can elect people in ideological agreement with your views, and the other is in the party structure,” says former CRA vice president <a href="http://apocalypse.berkshire.net/%7Eifas/fw/9504/stoos.html" type="external">John Stoos</a>, a former gun lobbyist, member of the fundamentalist Christian Reconstructionist movement, and senior consultant to the State Assembly. “And who pays attention to this stuff? You literally have to plan months and years ahead to know where the openings are.”</p>
<p>That’s just what CRA did, patiently building their base below the political radar. Beginning in the early 1990s, they filled school boards, city councils, and Republican Party county central committees with like-minded religious, anti-abortion colleagues. Under the <a href="http://www.cagop.org/bylaws-src.htm" type="external">bylaws</a> of the state party, these elected officials—and even nominees who lose in the general election—are allowed to appoint voting members of the state party.</p>
<p>The party entity called the county central committee was key to the CRA’s technique, says Bob Larkin, a Simi Valley Republican who has battled the CRA conservatives for years. Before 1990, he says, it was hard to find people interested in running for these lowly local committee seats. Then conservative Republicans stepped in and filled them with their people. Seven years later, the CRA swept the party elections of February 1997, winning every elected seat on the state party board.</p>
<p>Larkin felt the wrath of the CRA when he ran for the California Assembly in 1996. In 1992 he had angered the CRA by launching a campaign to wrest control of the party’s Ventura County Central Committee away from the conservatives. In reprisal, the CRA backed conservative Tom McClintock, who defeated Larkin in the 1996 primary and ultimately won the general election.</p>
<p>“They’re organized and dedicated,” says Larkin, “and mainstream Republicans are neither, so a very small group can take over.”</p>
<p>To counter the conservative juggernaut, Larkin last fall formed the California Coalition of Responsible Republicans, a conference of moderate groups working to “restore some sanity to the California Republican Party.”</p>
<p>God’s Vice-Regents While the CRA controls the state GOP, they don’t yet control the statehouse. On the CRA’s immediate agenda is putting a lock on the majority of the California State Assembly’s 80 seats up for election this year. By a slight margin, Democrats won control in 1996. Republicans have a good shot at taking the Assembly back in the 1998 elections, and Stoos says the CRA has already identified 34 target seats for conservative Republicans.</p>
<p>What would CRA control mean for California?</p>
<p>The CRA’s principles support the right to bear arms, strict interpretation of the Constitution, limited government, and “fair” trade and sovereignty. They condemn the separation of church and state, abortion, affirmative action, women in combat, and homosexuality. And members—even Frank, who is Jewish—advocate legislating by the Bible.</p>
<p>“Legislation should be biblical principles put into action,” Frank says. Asked about the differing versions of the Bible used by various religions, he contended that every religion—even Buddhism—espouses a set of principles similar to the Ten Commandments.</p>
<p>Stoos, in an article for the Chalcedon Report, a journal of the radical Christian Reconstructionist movement, goes so far as to call Christian politicians God’s “vice-regents…those who believe in the Lordship of Christ and the dominion mandate.”</p>
<p>The “dominion mandate,” Stoos told the MoJo Wire, “is that individuals are impacted by salvation. You will want to obey God’s commandments, and to the extent you do that, you start being a better person. …If there are enough of these groups in a community, the community is different. If government has a rule of law that is biblical justice, you will have freedom and liberty.”</p>
<p>As proof of his theory, he points to the repeal in the 1970s of laws prohibiting homosexual sex acts—biblical offenses. “The proof is in the pudding,” said Stoos. “Since we lifted those laws, we’ve had the biggest epidemic in history.”</p>
<p>Chapter and Verse Now the CRA’s fundamentalist beliefs and savvy grassroots politics are putting on a serious road show.</p>
<p>One of the first states to buy in to the CRA model was Utah. <a href="http://www.ut-ra.org" type="external">Utah Republican Assembly</a> president and co-founder Don Ruzicka, a Salt Lake area businessman, got interested after he and his wife Gayle, state president of the Eagle Forum, were talking with Schlafly.</p>
<p>Chartered in 1997, URA already has started making known its dissatisfaction with certain Republican lawmakers. “We have the grassroots strength to influence elections, and we are going to control as much of the process as we can and steer the party back to its roots,” Ruzicka says.</p>
<p>In Pennsylvania, the conservative group Mainstream Republicans chartered the Pennsylvania Republican Assembly as its grassroots wing last August. Mainstream Republicans, an unofficial caucus of state committees, helped convince the party in 1994 to endorse staunch abortion opponent Rick Santorum, who beat out popular U.S. Sen. Harris Wofford.</p>
<p>Thanks to this pedigree, the PRA already has a strong showing in the state party. “We have the wherewithal on a real important vote to mobilize 50 percent of the state committee,” says PRA chairman Ted Meehan. “When we want it to go one way and the leadership wants it another way, it’s darn close.”</p>
<p>Meehan’s group, like its California counterpart, has spent years identifying like-minded Republicans and convincing them to join political committees and run for office. “We held receptions and tried to find out who the pro-life conservative people were, and we started to form a network,” he says. “After the first reception we had identified maybe 15 or so. Five years down the road we’re at about 81, better than a quarter of the state committee, including eight county chairmen.”</p>
<p>In Florida, the assembly idea will be popular because people are dissatisfied with both political parties, says Rob Ross, general counsel for the new Florida Republican Assembly, chartered last month. “This is the last straw for a lot of Republicans. If this doesn’t work, there’s going to be a lot of people who are going to leave the party.”</p>
<p>A House Divided Some Republican critics say it’s the CRA and its fundamentalist cousins that are scaring voters away from the party. Bob Larkin points out that in California, for example, only 11 percent of new voters last year registered as Republican, compared to 26 percent Democrat and 50 percent independent. “They are converting us to a third party,” he says.</p>
<p>GOP critics also take issue with the Republican Assemblies’ practice of campaigning against Republicans who don’t support a strict conservative platform. Utah’s Ruzicka doesn’t deny this: “We’re not afraid to come out against a Republican who is a Republican in Democrat’s clothing.”</p>
<p>In New Jersey, for example, the Christian Coalition sent out more than 1 million fliers against the re-election of pro-choice Republican Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, Larkin says. CRA president John Courtney then sent a memo to U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich citing Whitman’s narrow victory as proof that moderate Republican candidates just don’t win. “Where I come from,” Larkin says, “we call that treason, and people who do that traitors.”</p>
<p>Love them or loathe them, the CRA and its 35 counterparts in the NFRA have their finger on the money. In politics, perception is reality, says Ruzicka. “You can wield a considerable amount of power if people think you have the power and you exercise it in some effective way. If we can organize and mold the conservatives across the U.S. into an effective lobby—and I see no reason why we can’t—then we will be a political force that the Republican Party will have to reckon with.”</p>
<p /> | true | 4 | faction rightwing republicans believe governing bible already taken control california republican party theyre poised duplicate feat 35 statesand countingunder banner new national federation republican assemblies immediate goal cultivate reaganesque candidate win presidency 2000 longterm goal america ruled word god story begins decade ago frustrated failure pat robertsons 1988 presidential bid followers sacramento hatched plan take california republican party first packed thenmoderate california republican assembly cra mainstream caucus heavy hand state partys nominating process bibleminded colleagues 1990 controlled cra since cras clout helped religious conservatives nominate elect local candidates andcruciallycatapult true believers state party leadership slots ten years dedication planning later operation stunning success members biblewaving crawhich bills conservative conscience state gophold top 13 elected spots party leadership state chair second assistant secretary addition top posts cra members make roughly twothirds california republican partys 1700 voting members means decide nominate primariesand smear using considerable resources influence money today every statewide gop candidate courts cra endorsement including attorney general dan lungren already interviewed cra gubernatorial bid next year nationwide 98 california beginning flush success leaders cra exported model state party infiltration nationwide 1993 helped set sister arizona republican assembly last august founded new national federation republican assemblies nfra help coordinate affiliate groups every state nfra boasts blessing rightwing shakers phyllis schlafly eagle forum bay buchanan sister pat honorary advisory board along gary bauer family research council conservative noteworthies already 36 states republican assemblies modeled cra organizers expect conservative groups remaining 14 organize affiliates easter nfra membership stands 15000 says nfra president stephen frank former president cra advocates legislating biblical principles give us another year well triple number frank says important part ability sit table table cares eat cant set menu want set menu adds masters government servants says frank goal organize grassroots support win primaries constitutional conservatives elections principled republicans nfras first move establish communication among religiousright groups found conservative coffee clubs throughout states one community didnt realize others creating community conservatives frank explains nfra plans early august conference dallas expects visits likely gop presidential contenders next year itll hold first fullfledged national convention endorse candidate president motto united 98 victory 2000 nfra chief frank crisscrosses country recruiting new assembly affiliates travel accomodations paid cras 2yearold pac republican victory fund pumped nearly 70000 campaigns craendorsed candidates 1996 keep coffers filled frank urges members sign amerivision lifeline phone service working assetstype service donates 10 percent members bill conservative causes republican victory fund donald wildmons american family association 500 antiabortion groups including operation rescues exchief randall terry various righttolife chapters believers also urged use republican victory fund visa card similarly kicks back donation bill nfra game plan grassroots politicking cra style need win council seats school boards statehouse races assembly races congress cumulative winning presidency frank says oldfashioned way community community cocksure talk might easily dismissed werent cras proven success method california dominating gop nomination process cra racked dozens big primary victories including us rep richard pombo rcalif 1992 last weeks special election primary victory cra member tom bordonaro us congress liberal republican brooks firestone cra also claims credit winning ballot initiatives prop 187 denied benefits illegal immigrants prop 209 dismantled affirmative action cra champions english children initiative would end bilingual education payroll protection unionized workers initiative would abolish automatic payroll checkoff union dues plan ahead radical fringe kingmakers decade basically theres two places influence one nominating process primaries elect people ideological agreement views party structure says former cra vice president john stoos former gun lobbyist member fundamentalist christian reconstructionist movement senior consultant state assembly pays attention stuff literally plan months years ahead know openings thats cra patiently building base political radar beginning early 1990s filled school boards city councils republican party county central committees likeminded religious antiabortion colleagues bylaws state party elected officialsand even nominees lose general electionare allowed appoint voting members state party party entity called county central committee key cras technique says bob larkin simi valley republican battled cra conservatives years 1990 says hard find people interested running lowly local committee seats conservative republicans stepped filled people seven years later cra swept party elections february 1997 winning every elected seat state party board larkin felt wrath cra ran california assembly 1996 1992 angered cra launching campaign wrest control partys ventura county central committee away conservatives reprisal cra backed conservative tom mcclintock defeated larkin 1996 primary ultimately general election theyre organized dedicated says larkin mainstream republicans neither small group take counter conservative juggernaut larkin last fall formed california coalition responsible republicans conference moderate groups working restore sanity california republican party gods viceregents cra controls state gop dont yet control statehouse cras immediate agenda putting lock majority california state assemblys 80 seats election year slight margin democrats control 1996 republicans good shot taking assembly back 1998 elections stoos says cra already identified 34 target seats conservative republicans would cra control mean california cras principles support right bear arms strict interpretation constitution limited government fair trade sovereignty condemn separation church state abortion affirmative action women combat homosexuality memberseven frank jewishadvocate legislating bible legislation biblical principles put action frank says asked differing versions bible used various religions contended every religioneven buddhismespouses set principles similar ten commandments stoos article chalcedon report journal radical christian reconstructionist movement goes far call christian politicians gods viceregentsthose believe lordship christ dominion mandate dominion mandate stoos told mojo wire individuals impacted salvation want obey gods commandments extent start better person enough groups community community different government rule law biblical justice freedom liberty proof theory points repeal 1970s laws prohibiting homosexual sex actsbiblical offenses proof pudding said stoos since lifted laws weve biggest epidemic history chapter verse cras fundamentalist beliefs savvy grassroots politics putting serious road show one first states buy cra model utah utah republican assembly president cofounder ruzicka salt lake area businessman got interested wife gayle state president eagle forum talking schlafly chartered 1997 ura already started making known dissatisfaction certain republican lawmakers grassroots strength influence elections going control much process steer party back roots ruzicka says pennsylvania conservative group mainstream republicans chartered pennsylvania republican assembly grassroots wing last august mainstream republicans unofficial caucus state committees helped convince party 1994 endorse staunch abortion opponent rick santorum beat popular us sen harris wofford thanks pedigree pra already strong showing state party wherewithal real important vote mobilize 50 percent state committee says pra chairman ted meehan want go one way leadership wants another way darn close meehans group like california counterpart spent years identifying likeminded republicans convincing join political committees run office held receptions tried find prolife conservative people started form network says first reception identified maybe 15 five years road 81 better quarter state committee including eight county chairmen florida assembly idea popular people dissatisfied political parties says rob ross general counsel new florida republican assembly chartered last month last straw lot republicans doesnt work theres going lot people going leave party house divided republican critics say cra fundamentalist cousins scaring voters away party bob larkin points california example 11 percent new voters last year registered republican compared 26 percent democrat 50 percent independent converting us third party says gop critics also take issue republican assemblies practice campaigning republicans dont support strict conservative platform utahs ruzicka doesnt deny afraid come republican republican democrats clothing new jersey example christian coalition sent 1 million fliers reelection prochoice republican gov christine todd whitman larkin says cra president john courtney sent memo us house speaker newt gingrich citing whitmans narrow victory proof moderate republican candidates dont win come larkin says call treason people traitors love loathe cra 35 counterparts nfra finger money politics perception reality says ruzicka wield considerable amount power people think power exercise effective way organize mold conservatives across us effective lobbyand see reason cantthen political force republican party reckon | 1,277 |
<p>The New York Times, whose regional bureau chief has a son in the Israeli military, reports that Israel has just appointed a panel charged with investigating its attack on an aid flotilla that killed nine aid volunteers, including a 19-year-old American.</p>
<p>Isabel Kershner, who is an Israeli citizen and has refused to answer questions about her possible family ties to the Israeli military, writes the report.</p>
<p>Kershner reports that the White House hailed the announcement of the panel as an “important step forward,” stating that “the structure and terms of reference of Israel’s proposed independent public commission can meet the standard of a prompt, impartial, credible and transparent investigation.”</p>
<p>In her story, Kershner reports that the panel will include eminent Irish Nobel Peace Laureate Lord David Trimble as an observer, but omits the fact that Trimble is a leader of the newly formed pro-Israel organization “Friends of Israel” and is close to Netanyahu associate Dore Gold.</p>
<p>Irish journalist Patrick Roberts writes, “This is a little like putting the fox in charge of the hen house.”</p>
<p>Kershner reports that the other foreign observer is Brig. Gen. Ken Watkins, former judge advocate general of Canadian Forces, but fails to mention that Watkins is known for stonewalling a 2009 House of Commons investigation into Afghan prisoner abuse.</p>
<p>One House of Commons member commented at the time about Watkins’ lack of cooperation with the investigation: “Obviously the cover-up continues.”</p>
<p>Kershner informs readers that the panel will be led by a retired Israeli Supreme Court Justice, but fails to mention reports that he does not believe in such a panel and opposed foreign participation.</p>
<p>Kershner reports in the bottom half of her story that Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper calls the proposed panel a “farce,” but does not mention that this is a longstanding pattern for Israeli governmental investigations (and lack thereof) into military human rights abuses. For example:</p>
<p>° From 2001 through 2006 the Israeli State Attorney’s office received more than 500 complaints about abuse of interrogees. There was not a single criminal investigation.</p>
<p>° In 2005 Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem released a report entitled “Israeli military grants impunity when soldiers kill Palestinian civilians,” finding that although Israeli soldiers had killed at least 1,694 Palestinian civilians, including 536 minors, only one soldier had been convicted of “causing the death of a Palestinian.”</p>
<p>° In 2009 eleven Israeli human rights organizations released a joint report in which they called on the Israeli government to “Stop whitewashing suspected crimes in Gaza.”</p>
<p>° In 2010 B’Tselem found that the Israeli military’s “cover-up of phosphorous shelling in Gaza proves army cannot investigate itself.” An Amnesty International report concurred in this conclusion, finding that Israel’s investigations into Cast Lead had not met “international standards of independence, impartiality, transparency, promptness and effectiveness.”</p>
<p>In her story Kershner reports Netanyahu’s allegation that the blockade “is necessary to prevent Hamas from smuggling in weapons or materials needed to make them, and to weaken Hamas control.” She goes on to acknowledge that “there is a growing consensus abroad that the blockade has taken a toll mainly on civilians,” but neglects to report the fact that Israeli closures of Gaza preceded the election of Hamas and that the “toll” is massive and calamitous.</p>
<p>She also fails to include any of the vast evidence for such a consensus, for example:</p>
<p>Nearly 99 percent of Gaza’s 4,000 fishermen are now considered either poor (making between $100 and $190 a month) or very poor (earning less than $100 a month); there are acute, sometimes lethal shortages of fuel, cash, cooking gas and other basic supplies; 98 percent of industrial operations have been shut down since 2007; and 3,500 families are still displaced from last year’s invasion due to Israel’s blockade on building materials.</p>
<p>Although the Israeli government has failed to investigate itself honestly and thoroughly through the years, a great many respected international human rights organizations from Christian Aid to the Red Cross have done so, documenting a pattern of widespread human rights abuses by the Israeli military.</p>
<p>In 2006 independent researchers Patrick O’Connor and Rachel Roberts found that since fall 2000:</p>
<p>“[T]hree of the leading human rights organizations focusing on Israel/Palestine – Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Israeli organization B’Tselem – published 76 reports focused primarily on Israeli abuses of Palestinian rights, and four reports primarily focused on Palestinians abuses of Israeli or Palestinian rights. This weighting suggests that Israel has committed a disproportionate share of the human rights violations.”</p>
<p>During this time, the New York Times published two news stories on reports documenting Israeli human rights abuses and two stories on reports documenting Palestinian human rights abuses.</p>
<p>In other words, in its “even-handed” style, the New York Times covered fifty percent of the reports on human rights abuses committed by Palestinians, while covering under three percent of those detailing human abuses perpetrated by Israelis.</p>
<p>ALISON WEIR is executive director of If Americans Knew and a board member of the Council for the National Interest. She can be reached at <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a></p>
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<p /> | true | 4 | new york times whose regional bureau chief son israeli military reports israel appointed panel charged investigating attack aid flotilla killed nine aid volunteers including 19yearold american isabel kershner israeli citizen refused answer questions possible family ties israeli military writes report kershner reports white house hailed announcement panel important step forward stating structure terms reference israels proposed independent public commission meet standard prompt impartial credible transparent investigation story kershner reports panel include eminent irish nobel peace laureate lord david trimble observer omits fact trimble leader newly formed proisrael organization friends israel close netanyahu associate dore gold irish journalist patrick roberts writes little like putting fox charge hen house kershner reports foreign observer brig gen ken watkins former judge advocate general canadian forces fails mention watkins known stonewalling 2009 house commons investigation afghan prisoner abuse one house commons member commented time watkins lack cooperation investigation obviously coverup continues kershner informs readers panel led retired israeli supreme court justice fails mention reports believe panel opposed foreign participation kershner reports bottom half story israels haaretz newspaper calls proposed panel farce mention longstanding pattern israeli governmental investigations lack thereof military human rights abuses example 2001 2006 israeli state attorneys office received 500 complaints abuse interrogees single criminal investigation 2005 israeli human rights organization btselem released report entitled israeli military grants impunity soldiers kill palestinian civilians finding although israeli soldiers killed least 1694 palestinian civilians including 536 minors one soldier convicted causing death palestinian 2009 eleven israeli human rights organizations released joint report called israeli government stop whitewashing suspected crimes gaza 2010 btselem found israeli militarys coverup phosphorous shelling gaza proves army investigate amnesty international report concurred conclusion finding israels investigations cast lead met international standards independence impartiality transparency promptness effectiveness story kershner reports netanyahus allegation blockade necessary prevent hamas smuggling weapons materials needed make weaken hamas control goes acknowledge growing consensus abroad blockade taken toll mainly civilians neglects report fact israeli closures gaza preceded election hamas toll massive calamitous also fails include vast evidence consensus example nearly 99 percent gazas 4000 fishermen considered either poor making 100 190 month poor earning less 100 month acute sometimes lethal shortages fuel cash cooking gas basic supplies 98 percent industrial operations shut since 2007 3500 families still displaced last years invasion due israels blockade building materials although israeli government failed investigate honestly thoroughly years great many respected international human rights organizations christian aid red cross done documenting pattern widespread human rights abuses israeli military 2006 independent researchers patrick oconnor rachel roberts found since fall 2000 three leading human rights organizations focusing israelpalestine human rights watch amnesty international israeli organization btselem published 76 reports focused primarily israeli abuses palestinian rights four reports primarily focused palestinians abuses israeli palestinian rights weighting suggests israel committed disproportionate share human rights violations time new york times published two news stories reports documenting israeli human rights abuses two stories reports documenting palestinian human rights abuses words evenhanded style new york times covered fifty percent reports human rights abuses committed palestinians covering three percent detailing human abuses perpetrated israelis alison weir executive director americans knew board member council national interest reached contactifamericanskneworg 160 words stick 160 | 521 |
<p>On the first night of my annual autumn foray into North America to poison the minds of budding journalists and sample the first fruits of the Near North Woods’ cannabis harvest, I invested my senior citizens’ discount in a viewing of “Goodnight and Good Luck”, George Clooney’s version of the Edward R. Murrow saga. Despite the flick’s glaring debilities, “Goodnight” colored my visit to an America at war with itself in striking black and white.</p>
<p>When I remember Murrow, I always see the signature swirls of cigarette smoke with which Clooney has laced his movie–the Kents that sponsored the broadcaster eventually murdered him. I first knew Murrow on the radio, a program called “You Are There” which recreated great moments in history for young adults. Then, after television installed itself in our living room, there was “Person To Person”–my mom, a Broadway publicist, arranged the idiotic Liberace interview immortalized in the film. But it was Murrow’s showdown with Joe McCarthy that galvanized my dysfunctional family.</p>
<p>Mom and Pop, you see, were showbiz commies, members of the CP USA and frequent congressional investigations into the entertainment industry terrorized them into drunken stupors. Edward R. Murrow became a kind of secular hero to them although in many respects, the saintly broadcaster was as fierce a redbaiter as old Joe–the film accurately depicts his exclusion of a staffer because his wife had attended a CP function and the suicide of a colleague tarred by leftist ties.</p>
<p>It is a miserable measure of the temper of the times that “Goodnight” has contributed to Joe McCarthy’s rehabilitation. Now in repose in the boneyard of an Appleton Wisconsin Catholic Church where he was once an altar boy, Neo-McCarthyites celebrate his birthday each year with a solemn graveside ceremony. Both the National White Peoples’ Party and the John Birch Society have moved their general command to Appleton, an All-American burg just south of Oshkosh By Gosh, a hometown which the great red hunter shares with Harry Houdini, where they campaign for a national holiday and the issuance of a postage stamp to honor their martyr, and sell cute bumper stickers (“McCarthy Was Right!”) on the Internet.</p>
<p>When Rep. Steve King, a shifty-eyed Republican from Storm Lake Iowa was accused of McCarthyism after he orchestrated a cruel congressional vote against the naming of a Berkeley California post office for Maudelle Shirock, a 92 year-old emeritus member of that city’s council who suffers from Alzheimer’s, because she once supported the CP, the solon responded that “Joseph McCarthy was a great American.”</p>
<p>The Army-McCarthy hearings which culminated in Joseph Welch’s classic upbraiding (“have you no decency, sir?”) and Murrow’s crusade to abort the Senator’s vicious bigotry, signaled the beginning of the end of a craven politico who trashed anyone who stood in his way as a traitor. Staggeringly drunk on the Senate floor, McCarthy plunged deep into the bottle until cirrhosis finally laid him out in the Appleton churchyard.</p>
<p>McCarthy’s plummet from power bears an eerie resemblance to what has begun to look like George W. Bush’s stumble from grace here in the autumn of our discontent 2005. Indeed, some keen-eyed ex-alcoholics speculate that Bush, a dry drunk, is back on the groove juice again.</p>
<p>It is hardly a stretch to note that Bushwa’s governance is seriously unraveling. Maybe it began with Katrina but here on the first anniversary of his tainted re-election, the bad vibes have swollen to Tsunami-size. From Scooter Libby and Tom Delay, both candidates for RICO indictments, to Harriet Miers and Sam Alito, to $5 dollar a gallon gasoline at the pump, to an ill-advised trip south to sell his reviled Free Trade Area of the Americas and a one punch knockout by Comandante Chavez at Mar de Plata, to the secret “cabal” to the secret prisons to Chalibi’s triumphal return to Washington (did he sleep with Judith Miller?) to John Murtha and the 2000th death in Iraq to his wildly tumbling numbers, the fall season has looked a lot like Bush’s waterloo.</p>
<p>Even the long-bottled-up U.S. Navy accounts of how LBJ faked the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964 that triggered the bombing of North Vietnam, the initial salvo of that terrible war, have conspired to haunt a president whose own lies led the American people by the nose into the contemporary debacle in the desert.</p>
<p>George Bush’s response to the deluge has been clownishly McCarthyesque (the second time around is always farce.) In fact, Dubya’s October speech at the Reagan Library in Simi California conflated his War on Terrorism with McCarthy’s crusade against Godless Communism in one stinking cowpie of a speech, a discourse repeated to a luncheon of Air Force Officers’ Wives the following week and which has since become an obligatory part of the Bush-Cheney patter, perhaps peaking in the President’s venomous Veteran’s Day tirade to cheering troops at the Tobyhanna Pennsylvania Army Depot where he assailed those who marked the 2000th G.I. death in Iraq as lending aid and comfort to the enemy and accused 63% of the U.S. public who now question his mad, calculated rush to war as betraying our brave boys and girls over there.</p>
<p>We have heard this song and dance before. Joe McCarthy lashed out in similar slurs to save his mangy ass. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon similarly hounded opponents of the slaughter in Vietnam. Carter, Reagan, the first Bush, and Clinton all sought to silence critics of their imperialist excesses in similar style. But such attacks are, of course, always an admission of defeat.</p>
<p>Bush’s fracaso stares back at him from three pages of the October 26th New York Times, 2000 thumbnail photos of the men and women he has sent to their death out there in the desert. Depiction of the Iraqi dead would have filled every page of every Sunday Times for a month. Iraqis appear to be dying at a 50 to 1 ratio over our brave boys and girls, a number zealously guarded by the Pentagon, which pretends that it keeps no body count.</p>
<p>Despite the delusional optimism of Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld, Iraq is all downhill from here. A quick look at the vital stats informs that while it took 20 months for the first thousand Americanos to die, it’s only been 13 months for the second thousand to top off the corpse heap. On the ground, the shit is getting stickier every day. From the fragging of officers by our own brave boys and girls to the stolen constitutional election (decided by a handful of unmonitored votes in Diyabi province) to White Prosperous in Falujah to 173 starving, tortured Sunnis in the basement of the Interior Ministry, the Big Lie shrivels up a little bit everyday. Now with the correpsondents’ hotels under the gun, the so-called journalists who have brought us these lies in daily installments, are packing up and beating a retreat to Amman, the home turf of the dread Al Zarqawi who reportedly has now opened franchises in 40 countries, topping the former world terror Champ Osama Bin Laden, a has-been.</p>
<p>Despite its current feeding frenzy, the U.S. press has served Bush’s Big Lie well. When the NYT finally got around to checking out the White Phosphorus story, it reported not on the horrific damage Whiskey Pete did in Fallujah where bodies burned to the bone were stacked up in makeshift morgues, but rather how U.S. officials bungled their responses to charges of war crimes, begging the question is Scott Shane Jason Blair’s new by-line? Across the page this past November 21st, Michelle O’Donnell shows us she is the new Judith Miller when rather than reporting on the largest School of Americas demonstration ever (19,000), she chose instead to focus on “God Bless Fort Benning” week.</p>
<p>The Washington Post has been just as complicit in covering up war crimes when, at the Pentagon’s behest, it voluntarily declined to name the secret European prisons where the U.S. is torturing hundreds and perhaps thousands of Muslim men in violation of the Geneva Convention. The stenography of mainstream media all-stars like Bob Woodward and Judith Miller has spread Bush’s bullshit all over the front pages of their respective gazettes and made the U.S. more vulnerable to terrorist retaliation. Both are indictable for their felonies–Woodward for withholding information that fingered the White House in the Valerie Plame imbroglio and Miller with her license to lie, for fabricating the WMDs that was Bushwa’s stepping stone to an illegal war. Along with Scooter, the three of them ought to be forwarded forthwith to Gitmo and tortured in the style so passionately advocated by Scooter’s boss and his replacement David Addington, until they roll over and give up the Boss of All Bosses.</p>
<p>Here at Thanksgiving 2005, the nation seems more etched in black and white than I can recall since the final days of the Vietnam holocaust. Bush Lied, People Died is now the majority sentiment–it took Vietnam around 40 months to achieve the same status of unpopularity. Meanwhile, although this war is ostensibly about Peak Oil, racism is still the principle energy source that powers the land of the tree and the home of the grave. Katrina was only the first circle of hell.</p>
<p>Now Halliburton is flooding New Orleans with undocumented workers from Mexico and Central America who the subcontractors rat out to Homeland Security when they protest that they haven’t been paid, Big Oil reaps unprecedented billions even as Congress tries to throw 300,000 legal immigrants and their children off food stamps, the Minutemen are on both borders, north and south hunting down swarthy intruders and five Muslim men were taken into custody for praying during the halftime of a New York Football Giants home game (Bush was in attendance.) On the printed page, the L.A. Times terminated its in-house left-winger Robert Scheer and Fox bully Bill O’Reilly calls for a terrorist attack on Coit Tower because San Francisco voters barred military recruiters from the city’s high schools. Not to be outshone, the very Reverend Pat Robertson called upon God to obliterate Dover Pennsylvania for turning down “Intelligent Design” and Kansas criminalizes evolution, This is anti-diluvium black and whiteness that would do Joe McCarthy and Edward R. Murrow proud.</p>
<p>For the first time since the war in Iraq kicked in, I just got around to checking out the new print of “The Battle of Algiers”, another black and white film that inflames the political imagination. The parallels to Bush’s flawed invasion and occupation of Iraq are quite startling. It is hard to understand why the Pentagon sponsored lunchtime showings of Portecorvo’s insightful film whose only lesson is that colonial occupations of Arab countries are doomed to abject failure.</p>
<p>“The Battle of Algiers” remains a paragon of resistance movie making and although this epic struggle is told in black and white, resistance is not all black and white these days. The color scheme has been enlivened of late by the red orange glow of 3300 automobiles blazing in the streets of France and banks being torched in Mar de Plata. The chromatic spectrum of the resistance raging around the globe from Baghdad and back these days are indeed in living–and dying – color.</p>
<p>JOHN ROSS is back in Mexico pounding away on his latest Zapatista opus “Making Another World Possible–Zapatista Chronicles 2000-2006” to be published next year by Nationbooks.</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | true | 4 | first night annual autumn foray north america poison minds budding journalists sample first fruits near north woods cannabis harvest invested senior citizens discount viewing goodnight good luck george clooneys version edward r murrow saga despite flicks glaring debilities goodnight colored visit america war striking black white remember murrow always see signature swirls cigarette smoke clooney laced moviethe kents sponsored broadcaster eventually murdered first knew murrow radio program called recreated great moments history young adults television installed living room person personmy mom broadway publicist arranged idiotic liberace interview immortalized film murrows showdown joe mccarthy galvanized dysfunctional family mom pop see showbiz commies members cp usa frequent congressional investigations entertainment industry terrorized drunken stupors edward r murrow became kind secular hero although many respects saintly broadcaster fierce redbaiter old joethe film accurately depicts exclusion staffer wife attended cp function suicide colleague tarred leftist ties miserable measure temper times goodnight contributed joe mccarthys rehabilitation repose boneyard appleton wisconsin catholic church altar boy neomccarthyites celebrate birthday year solemn graveside ceremony national white peoples party john birch society moved general command appleton allamerican burg south oshkosh gosh hometown great red hunter shares harry houdini campaign national holiday issuance postage stamp honor martyr sell cute bumper stickers mccarthy right internet rep steve king shiftyeyed republican storm lake iowa accused mccarthyism orchestrated cruel congressional vote naming berkeley california post office maudelle shirock 92 yearold emeritus member citys council suffers alzheimers supported cp solon responded joseph mccarthy great american armymccarthy hearings culminated joseph welchs classic upbraiding decency sir murrows crusade abort senators vicious bigotry signaled beginning end craven politico trashed anyone stood way traitor staggeringly drunk senate floor mccarthy plunged deep bottle cirrhosis finally laid appleton churchyard mccarthys plummet power bears eerie resemblance begun look like george w bushs stumble grace autumn discontent 2005 indeed keeneyed exalcoholics speculate bush dry drunk back groove juice hardly stretch note bushwas governance seriously unraveling maybe began katrina first anniversary tainted reelection bad vibes swollen tsunamisize scooter libby tom delay candidates rico indictments harriet miers sam alito 5 dollar gallon gasoline pump illadvised trip south sell reviled free trade area americas one punch knockout comandante chavez mar de plata secret cabal secret prisons chalibis triumphal return washington sleep judith miller john murtha 2000th death iraq wildly tumbling numbers fall season looked lot like bushs waterloo even longbottledup us navy accounts lbj faked gulf tonkin incident august 1964 triggered bombing north vietnam initial salvo terrible war conspired haunt president whose lies led american people nose contemporary debacle desert george bushs response deluge clownishly mccarthyesque second time around always farce fact dubyas october speech reagan library simi california conflated war terrorism mccarthys crusade godless communism one stinking cowpie speech discourse repeated luncheon air force officers wives following week since become obligatory part bushcheney patter perhaps peaking presidents venomous veterans day tirade cheering troops tobyhanna pennsylvania army depot assailed marked 2000th gi death iraq lending aid comfort enemy accused 63 us public question mad calculated rush war betraying brave boys girls heard song dance joe mccarthy lashed similar slurs save mangy ass lyndon johnson richard nixon similarly hounded opponents slaughter vietnam carter reagan first bush clinton sought silence critics imperialist excesses similar style attacks course always admission defeat bushs fracaso stares back three pages october 26th new york times 2000 thumbnail photos men women sent death desert depiction iraqi dead would filled every page every sunday times month iraqis appear dying 50 1 ratio brave boys girls number zealously guarded pentagon pretends keeps body count despite delusional optimism bushcheneyrumsfeld iraq downhill quick look vital stats informs took 20 months first thousand americanos die 13 months second thousand top corpse heap ground shit getting stickier every day fragging officers brave boys girls stolen constitutional election decided handful unmonitored votes diyabi province white prosperous falujah 173 starving tortured sunnis basement interior ministry big lie shrivels little bit everyday correpsondents hotels gun socalled journalists brought us lies daily installments packing beating retreat amman home turf dread al zarqawi reportedly opened franchises 40 countries topping former world terror champ osama bin laden hasbeen despite current feeding frenzy us press served bushs big lie well nyt finally got around checking white phosphorus story reported horrific damage whiskey pete fallujah bodies burned bone stacked makeshift morgues rather us officials bungled responses charges war crimes begging question scott shane jason blairs new byline across page past november 21st michelle odonnell shows us new judith miller rather reporting largest school americas demonstration ever 19000 chose instead focus god bless fort benning week washington post complicit covering war crimes pentagons behest voluntarily declined name secret european prisons us torturing hundreds perhaps thousands muslim men violation geneva convention stenography mainstream media allstars like bob woodward judith miller spread bushs bullshit front pages respective gazettes made us vulnerable terrorist retaliation indictable felonieswoodward withholding information fingered white house valerie plame imbroglio miller license lie fabricating wmds bushwas stepping stone illegal war along scooter three ought forwarded forthwith gitmo tortured style passionately advocated scooters boss replacement david addington roll give boss bosses thanksgiving 2005 nation seems etched black white recall since final days vietnam holocaust bush lied people died majority sentimentit took vietnam around 40 months achieve status unpopularity meanwhile although war ostensibly peak oil racism still principle energy source powers land tree home grave katrina first circle hell halliburton flooding new orleans undocumented workers mexico central america subcontractors rat homeland security protest havent paid big oil reaps unprecedented billions even congress tries throw 300000 legal immigrants children food stamps minutemen borders north south hunting swarthy intruders five muslim men taken custody praying halftime new york football giants home game bush attendance printed page la times terminated inhouse leftwinger robert scheer fox bully bill oreilly calls terrorist attack coit tower san francisco voters barred military recruiters citys high schools outshone reverend pat robertson called upon god obliterate dover pennsylvania turning intelligent design kansas criminalizes evolution antidiluvium black whiteness would joe mccarthy edward r murrow proud first time since war iraq kicked got around checking new print battle algiers another black white film inflames political imagination parallels bushs flawed invasion occupation iraq quite startling hard understand pentagon sponsored lunchtime showings portecorvos insightful film whose lesson colonial occupations arab countries doomed abject failure battle algiers remains paragon resistance movie making although epic struggle told black white resistance black white days color scheme enlivened late red orange glow 3300 automobiles blazing streets france banks torched mar de plata chromatic spectrum resistance raging around globe baghdad back days indeed livingand dying color john ross back mexico pounding away latest zapatista opus making another world possiblezapatista chronicles 20002006 published next year nationbooks 160 | 1,100 |
<p>The first thing you do in Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, the latest in the ultra-popular first-person shooter franchise, is jump out of a plane in the middle of a cloudy sky. As far as these big, bombastic games go, this is pretty par for the course. But things change once you see the ground, because it’s not a war-torn city you’re jumping down into. It’s… ice? You land. A squadmate says, “Surface temp is 300 below.” You look up and see a giant red planet. And then you remember that Europa is the name of Jupiter’s moon. And then you pause, and you think, “This is Call of Duty?” The franchise sure has come a long way in its 13 years, from World War II to modern times to the near future…and now it’s gone to space.</p>
<p>This isn’t out of nowhere, of course. 2012’s Black Ops II was set in the near-future. And after a deviation with the thoroughly unexciting <a href="" type="internal">Ghosts</a>, both <a href="" type="internal">Advanced Warfare</a> and <a href="" type="internal">Black Ops III</a> continued down Black Ops II’s path, setting themselves in the decades to come. The games became increasingly ridiculous, culminating in the absolutely bonkers Black Ops III, which we here described last year as a “really, really dark cartoon.” In that sense, Infinite Warfare feels a little more typical—it’s not cartoonish, it’s a blockbuster like most of its predecessors. Part of that difference comes from the strange way that Call of Duty games get made.</p>
<p>There are now three developers working on the franchise, each releasing games one after another, allowing for annual releases with multiple years of polish from teams that don’t have to be stretched so thin. But though they all share the same underlying technology and have similar content—single player, multiplayer, zombies—each developer brings their own spin and their own vision for the future. This is the first time that Infinity Ward, the original creators of the Call of Duty franchise, have really gone into the future, and that means going to space. Because, really, what is there left for the franchise on earth? Ghosts had a scene that took place on the International Space Station, but even that is at least a real place where people have actually been. At some point, playing through the destruction of either actual cities or approximations of them becomes numbing. So, we go somewhere different like, say, Europa, or our own moon—with our beautiful blue-and-green planet visible in a tense sequence as you frantically jump in zero-gravity trying to reach a base before you run out of oxygen.</p>
<p>If you opt for Infinite Warfare’s “Legacy Edition,” you’ll receive a code for Modern Warfare Remastered. It is exactly what it sounds like: the 2007 classic with all of the gloss of a modern shooter. And going from Infinite Warfare directly into Modern Warfare Remastered is kind of fascinating. It’s been nine years (wow) since Modern Warfare released, and re-experiencing it is really cool. It looks pretty much the way I remember it, which means that I’m definitely thinking back on the game with rose-tinted glasses, but that also means they did a great job with the visual update. And from all that comes this odd feeling that nothing has changed in nine years and also that everything has.</p>
<p>Modern Warfare was a very serious game, and that’s not a bad thing. Early on, you “play” as the president of an African country who is taken by terrorists. You spend the entire sequence unable to move, as you are dragged or driven through a country in turmoil. In the end, you are brought out in public, a gun is put to your face, and the trigger is pulled. A bang. A flash of light. Everything goes black. It set the tone for a different kind of first-person shooter, one that features a sequence through the monitor of an AC-130 gunship, wherein you rain down death onto black-and-white human shapes. It’s the game where an atomic bomb goes off and you slowly crawl around your helicopter crash site until you succumb to your wounds.</p>
<p>These moments defined Modern Warfare’s campaign, and their effects have been felt in every subsequent iteration (and in so many of their competitors). And Infinite Warfare feels them, too. That opening sequence on Europa ends with your death, at the hands of Jon Snow himself, Mr. Kit Harington. Like Advanced Warfare, the latest Call of Duty turned to a recognizable face for its antagonist. Harington’s Admiral Salen Kotch doesn’t play as big a role as Kevin Spacey’s Johnathan Irons, but he appears here and there to berate you and tell you about your inevitable failure and/or demise. Now, as then, it feels a little odd to see a not-quite-right digital incarnation of a familiar face, but it was less distracting here in large part because—finally—the game has lost its self-serious pretensions.</p>
<p>No game in the Call of Duty franchise ever really recaptured the effectiveness of Modern Warfare’s most intense moments. Instead, they’ve just cranked up the dial until it had become self-parody. Unfortunately, the games still thought they were creating drama that would work on the same level. Modern Warfare 2’s infamous “No Russian,” where you gun down an airport full of civilians; Modern Warfare 3’s London bombing sequence, which starred a little girl dancing up to a truck as it explodes; and all of these other sequences tried to tug at your heart strings in a way that ultimately just felt manipulative and sort of disturbing.</p>
<p>There is some intense violence in Infinite Warfare, but barring one or two quick moments, it’s different. When Infinite Warfare tugs at your heartstrings, it’s doing so in the same way a Hollywood blockbuster does: by sending off characters the screenwriter assumes you care about in a blaze of glory. This isn’t a game that wants you to contemplate your actions or consider the horrors of war. It isn’t interested in making you think much at all. Sometimes, <a href="" type="internal">that’s a problem</a>. Heck, it’s been a problem in past iterations of Call of Duty.</p>
<p>Here, though, it feels okay. In fact, it’s kind of nice, coming as it does after the problematically violent Black Ops III. It’s refreshing to have a game that just accepts its own silliness. And that’s the best thing to come out of the decision to go into space. By leaving our world, it is able to remove itself from the politics inherent in a typical war game, such as the recently released Battlefield 1, which brought the series all the way back to World War I. The last few Call of Duty games have had sci-fi technology in semi-familiar settings, while this one actually has comparatively down-to-earth tech yet jumps off-world for its narrative. The switch lets Infinite Warfare feel genuinely different.</p>
<p>Throughout the story, I kept coming back to that initial question: “This is Call of Duty?” When I was dogfighting in outer space or looking over a solar system map deciding whether or not to check out some side missions, I would forget what game (and what franchise) I was in. It may look and feel like Call of Duty on a superficial level, but there are moments where it’s closer to something like Destiny than it is to Modern Warfare.</p>
<p>Infinity Ward won’t be making next year’s Call of Duty installment, and so the franchise may well go back to its old ways, working to recapture Modern Warfare’s seriousness while somehow also topping itself in scope and scale. There haven’t been many hints from Sledgehammer Games, whose last title was Advanced Warfare, about what they’ll be doing. But wherever it goes from here, I’ll be thankful that we got this nice little sci-fi reprieve.</p> | true | 4 | first thing call duty infinite warfare latest ultrapopular firstperson shooter franchise jump plane middle cloudy sky far big bombastic games go pretty par course things change see ground wartorn city youre jumping ice land squadmate says surface temp 300 look see giant red planet remember europa name jupiters moon pause think call duty franchise sure come long way 13 years world war ii modern times near futureand gone space isnt nowhere course 2012s black ops ii set nearfuture deviation thoroughly unexciting ghosts advanced warfare black ops iii continued black ops iis path setting decades come games became increasingly ridiculous culminating absolutely bonkers black ops iii described last year really really dark cartoon sense infinite warfare feels little typicalits cartoonish blockbuster like predecessors part difference comes strange way call duty games get made three developers working franchise releasing games one another allowing annual releases multiple years polish teams dont stretched thin though share underlying technology similar contentsingle player multiplayer zombieseach developer brings spin vision future first time infinity ward original creators call duty franchise really gone future means going space really left franchise earth ghosts scene took place international space station even least real place people actually point playing destruction either actual cities approximations becomes numbing go somewhere different like say europa moonwith beautiful blueandgreen planet visible tense sequence frantically jump zerogravity trying reach base run oxygen opt infinite warfares legacy edition youll receive code modern warfare remastered exactly sounds like 2007 classic gloss modern shooter going infinite warfare directly modern warfare remastered kind fascinating nine years wow since modern warfare released reexperiencing really cool looks pretty much way remember means im definitely thinking back game rosetinted glasses also means great job visual update comes odd feeling nothing changed nine years also everything modern warfare serious game thats bad thing early play president african country taken terrorists spend entire sequence unable move dragged driven country turmoil end brought public gun put face trigger pulled bang flash light everything goes black set tone different kind firstperson shooter one features sequence monitor ac130 gunship wherein rain death onto blackandwhite human shapes game atomic bomb goes slowly crawl around helicopter crash site succumb wounds moments defined modern warfares campaign effects felt every subsequent iteration many competitors infinite warfare feels opening sequence europa ends death hands jon snow mr kit harington like advanced warfare latest call duty turned recognizable face antagonist haringtons admiral salen kotch doesnt play big role kevin spaceys johnathan irons appears berate tell inevitable failure andor demise feels little odd see notquiteright digital incarnation familiar face less distracting large part becausefinallythe game lost selfserious pretensions game call duty franchise ever really recaptured effectiveness modern warfares intense moments instead theyve cranked dial become selfparody unfortunately games still thought creating drama would work level modern warfare 2s infamous russian gun airport full civilians modern warfare 3s london bombing sequence starred little girl dancing truck explodes sequences tried tug heart strings way ultimately felt manipulative sort disturbing intense violence infinite warfare barring one two quick moments different infinite warfare tugs heartstrings way hollywood blockbuster sending characters screenwriter assumes care blaze glory isnt game wants contemplate actions consider horrors war isnt interested making think much sometimes thats problem heck problem past iterations call duty though feels okay fact kind nice coming problematically violent black ops iii refreshing game accepts silliness thats best thing come decision go space leaving world able remove politics inherent typical war game recently released battlefield 1 brought series way back world war last call duty games scifi technology semifamiliar settings one actually comparatively downtoearth tech yet jumps offworld narrative switch lets infinite warfare feel genuinely different throughout story kept coming back initial question call duty dogfighting outer space looking solar system map deciding whether check side missions would forget game franchise may look feel like call duty superficial level moments closer something like destiny modern warfare infinity ward wont making next years call duty installment franchise may well go back old ways working recapture modern warfares seriousness somehow also topping scope scale havent many hints sledgehammer games whose last title advanced warfare theyll wherever goes ill thankful got nice little scifi reprieve | 690 |
<p>A month after he won the White House Barack Obama is drawing a chorus of approval from conservatives who spent most of this year denouncing him as a man of the extreme left. “Reassuring”, says Karl Rove, of Obama’s cabinet selections. Max Boot, a rabid right-wing commentator, confesses, “I am gobsmacked by these appointments, most of which could just as easily have come from a President McCain.” In Murdoch’s Weekly Standard, mouthpiece of the neocons, Michael Goldfarb reviewed Obama’s appointments and declared that he sees “nothing that represents a drastic change in how Washington does business. The expectation is that Obama is set to continue the course set by Bush in his second term.”</p>
<p>But on the liberal-left end of the spectrum, where Obama kindled extraordinary levels of enthusiasm throughout his campaign, the mood is swiftly swinging to dismay and bitterness. “How… to explain that not a single top member of Obama’s foreign policy/national security team opposed the war?”&#160; Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, asked last Monday. She went on, “For Obama, who’s said he wants to be challenged by his advisors, wouldn’t it have made sense to include at least one person on the foreign policy/national security team who would challenge him with some new and fresh thinking about security in the 21st century?”</p>
<p>“How nice, how marvelously nice it would be,” wrote the left-wing historian William Blum sarcastically here on the CounterPunch site last&#160; week, “to have an American president who was infused with progressive values and political courage.”&#160; Blum speedily made it clear that in his estimation Obama is not endowed with these desirable qualities: “He’s not really against the war. Not like you and I are. During Obama’s first four years in the White House, the United States will not leave Iraq. I doubt that he’d allow a complete withdrawal even in a second term. “</p>
<p>Similar sentiments came from another popular left-wing reporter, Jeremy Scahill, who wrote here on Tuesday, “The assembly of Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, Susan Rice and Joe Biden is a kettle of hawks with a proven track record of support for the Iraq war, militaristic interventionism, neoliberal economic policies and a worldview consistent with the foreign policy arch that stretches from George HW Bush’s time in office to the present.”</p>
<p>Suddenly a familiar specter is shuffling back under the spotlights. A long piece on Obama’s foreign policy advisors last Tuesday carried the headline, “Are Key Obama Advisors in Tune with Neocon Hawks who wants to Attack in Iran.” The author is Robert Dreyfuss, a level headed leftish commentator.&#160; He sketched in the&#160; political backgrounds of advisers to Obama and concluded that “Tony Lake, UN Ambassador-designate Susan Rice, Tom Daschle, and Dennis Ross, along with leading Democratic hawks like Richard Holbrooke, close to Vice-President-elect Joe Biden or Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton — have made common cause with war-minded think-tank hawks at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and other hardline institutes.” These Obama-hawks, Dreyfuss gloomily told his readers, reckon that talks with Iran about its nuclear program will fail. On the heels of this failure they urge “a kinetic action” in the form of a savage bombing campaign by the US Air Force.</p>
<p>Four more years of anxious articles about the impending attack on Iran? I’d rather read Piers Plowman again, the dullest work I ever had to trudge through when I read Eng Lit at Oxford. Criticisms of Obama’s foreign policy team are, if anything, outstripped by&#160; gloom and indignation over his economic team. The economist&#160; Michael Hudson complained here recently that Obama was meekly following the advice of banker and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, putting Rubin’s&#160; protégés in key Obama administration posts: “Larry Summers, who as head of the World Bank forced privatization at give-away prices to kleptocrats; Geithner of the New York Fed; and a monetarist economist from Berkeley, as right-wing a university as Chicago. These are the protective guard-dogs of America’s vested interests.”</p>
<p>More mouldy cabbages are being hurled at Obama’s picks at the Pentagon, starting with the familiar visage of Robert Gates, already in occupation of the top job, having been put there by George Bush Jr, to replace Donald Rumsfeld. Winslow Wheeler, for many years a senor Republican staffer in Congress, has a solid reputation as one of the best-informed of all the observers of that vast sink hole of fraud and waste, the US Defense Department.</p>
<p>During Gates’ tenure, Wheeler complains in an interview by Andrew Cockburn here last Wednesday, “things have only gotten worse.&#160; The budget’s going up faster than ever before in recent history; the size of our forces is going south; the equipment continues to get older.”</p>
<p>Wheeler says “the second tier of appointments that they’re talking about in the press for the Obama team are mostly holdovers from the Clinton era, when things were almost as bad as they were during the Bush era.&#160; Most of the major hardware programs that are now coming a cropper as major cost and performance disasters were conceived during the Clinton era.&#160; Things such as the Future Combat Systems, or &#160;the Navy’s DDG 1000 Destroyer known as the Arsenal Ship and later the DDX Destroyer, spawned when Richard Danzig was Secretary of the Navy.&#160; Danzig is under active consideration to be deputy secretary of defense and Gates’ natural successor when Gates finishes whatever short timer term he has under Obama.&#160; The F-22 fighter, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, it goes on, all these programs that are cost and performance disasters had their genesis during the Clinton era.”</p>
<p>Asked by Andrew about Obama’s National Security Advisor, Jim Jones, Wheeler replied tartly , “He is a man of great stature, physically and figuratively, in Washington.&#160; He is a Washington ‘heavy’ but if you look at his record, nothing much ever happened.&#160; Things went south in Afghanistan pretty rapidly when he was supreme commander of all Nato forces in Afghanistan.&#160;&#160; When he was Commandant of the Marine Corps, a lot of the marines’ overpriced underperforming hardware programs, such as the V-22 [vertical takeoff troop transport plane] and the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle were endorsed and continued happily along.&#160; He seems to have been mostly a placeholder when he had these very senior and important positions.</p>
<p>In Jones’ favor I have heard that at some point in Bush time he lodged with Condoleezza Rice a report on Israeli conduct that was so harsh it had to be swiftly tossed to the shredder. I look forward to reports of a mano a mano between the vast Jones and the diminutive Emanuel. One striking feature of these complaints is that if the many of&#160; complainers had their suspicions about Obama during the campaign, they kept their mouths firmly shut. Across eight presidential campaigns, since Jimmy Carter’s successful run in 1976, I’ve never seen such collective determination by the liberal left to think only positive thoughts about a Democratic candidate. Indeed, some of the present fury may stem from a certain embarrassment at their own political naivety. In fairness to Obama, beyond the vaguely radical afflatus of his campaign rhetoric about “change”, Obama never concealed his true political stance, which is of the center-right. In every sense of the phrase, he can say to his left critics, “I told you so.” And indeed he did.</p>
<p>The obvious question is whether this chorus of political disillusion on the liberal left is of any political consequence. Obama is sensitive on the matter. He defended himself last week by saying that in these dire times Americans need to be comforted by the installation of familiar and respected figures in the new administration. The polls bear him out. The public is mostly happy with what it has seen thus far. The new President, Obama insisted, will be the man setting the new course.</p>
<p>In his salvoes against Obama’s awful economic team&#160; Michael Hudson brought up one ominous parallel. Jimmy Carter won the presidency in 1976, after eight years of Richard Nixon. The hopes of the liberal left were similarly high. Almost immediately Carter dashed their hopes with hawkish foreign policy appointments. Two years after Carter took over the Oval Office, Jim Ridgeway and I, working for the Village Voice,&#160; went to&#160; interview William Winpisinger, president of the Machinists’ Union and one of the most powerful labor leaders in America. We put a tape recorder on his desk and asked, “Is there anything President Carter could do to redeem himself in your eyes? Winpisinger eyed the tape recorder bleakly and said, “Die.”</p>
<p>A year later Carter was grimly fighting a liberal-left challenge to his re-nomination by the Democrats&#160; for a second term. The challenger was Teddy Kennedy. Though Carter beat off the Kennedy threat, he was seriously weakened and lost his relection bid. One can surmise that one reason Obama has made Hillary Clinton Secretary of State is to head off a Kennedy-type challenge. The trouble with slogans like “change” is that they are like zeppelins. The wind can whistle out of their pretensions with dreadful speed.</p>
<p>But it would be foolishly premature to conjure up the possibility of serious left resistance emerging in any form that would be bothersome to Obama. All it will take for now will be a bone tossed out of the limo, in the form of&#160; one or two halfways decent appointments on the enviro side. Nixon launched his green crusade (Earth Day, EPA, etc) in an effort to split the left and Obama could do the same. How about a “war” on global warming, with some version of the Roosevelt era’s&#160; Civilian Conservation Corps waging “war”&#160; on the fictive foe known as man-made global warming.</p>
<p>In the present juncture, with untrammeled “free enterprise” reeling in bankrupt disorder into the state’s vital, albeit servile embrace, Obama’s rallying of youth to the cause of “hope” and “change” could head off into some unpalatable directions, as a glance at the popular “crusades” launched in the 30s will swiftly attest. As has often been pointed out, there were close similarities between the CCC and similar quasi-militarised bodies of this nature in Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. If you want to see fascism in action, don’t look in the direction of militia men in camo clustered around Hayden Lake, Idaho. Look at the Air Quality Management District in Los Angeles, the model Rep Waxman will be brandishing in the coming&#160; war on bad things in the air, though not – to be sure – the bad things&#160; in the air that make serious money for big corporations.&#160; If the price of a rhetorical crusade against “global warming” is to be bombing Teheran, I think most of the GW fanatics will echo Madeleine Albright and cry out, “We think the price is worth it.”</p>
<p>Off He Goes</p>
<p>Bush’s new house in Dallas scarcely looks palatial. I suppose he will spend most of his time in Crawford, while Laura smokes in the Dallas living room and gets on with her memoirs.</p>
<p>Pending her report I offer in our latest CounterPunch newsletter a review of her husband’s unrelenting onslaughts on freedom, with the caveat that he built on the sound foundations of similarly unrelenting assaults in Clinton’s terms. Here are some of my opening paragraphs:</p>
<p>If there’s one thing defenders of civil liberties know, it’s surely that assaults on constitutional freedoms are bipartisan. Just as constitutional darkness didn’t suddenly fall with the arrival in the Oval Office of George Bush Jr., darkness will not dissipate with his departure and the entry of President Barack Obama. There’s no more eager and self-righteous hand reaching out to the Bill of Rights to drop it in the shredder than that of a liberal intent on legislating freedom. As illustration, simply take “freedom from hate,” expressed in the great liberal drive to criminalize expressions of hate and to impose fierce punitive enhancements if the criminal had been imprudent enough to perpetrate verbal breaches of sexual or ethnic etiquette while bludgeoning his victim to death.</p>
<p>For years, I have reminded my left and liberal friends of a juror’s constitutional right to set the law aside and issue a verdict consonant with the dictates of conscience. Each time, I sadly rediscover that most liberals mistrust juries and have no interest in an institution, which is the ultimate bedrock protector of liberty. This steady push to erode the role of the jury has continued steadily through every administration. We are&#160; thankfully near the exit door from the Bush years, after enduring appalling assaults on freedom, built on the sound foundation of kindred assaults in Clinton time –perhaps most memorably expressed in the screams of parents and children fried by U.S. government forces in the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, and in Bill Clinton’s flouting of all constitutional “war powers” inhibitions on his executive decision to wage war and order his commanders to rain bombs on the civilian population of the former Yugoslavia.</p>
<p>Also in our fresh newsletter are fierce exposes by Kathleen and Bill Christison on the horrifying siege of Gaza, and by Barbara Rose Johnston on the efforts to obtain justice for those murdered in Guatemala, to make way for the Chixoy Dam. In a just world, the directors of the Word Bank would be doing time for these crimes, but the world isn’t just and they moved on to wreak fresh destruction elsewhere and in the case of Larry Summers will be comfortably ensconced in the Obama White House.</p>
<p>A crackerjack newsletter and I strongly urge you to read it. <a href="http://www.easycartsecure.com/CounterPunch/Annual_Subscriptions.html" type="external">Subscribe</a>, and read on.</p>
<p>ALEXANDER COCKBURN can be reached at <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a></p>
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<p>&#160;</p> | true | 4 | month white house barack obama drawing chorus approval conservatives spent year denouncing man extreme left reassuring says karl rove obamas cabinet selections max boot rabid rightwing commentator confesses gobsmacked appointments could easily come president mccain murdochs weekly standard mouthpiece neocons michael goldfarb reviewed obamas appointments declared sees nothing represents drastic change washington business expectation obama set continue course set bush second term liberalleft end spectrum obama kindled extraordinary levels enthusiasm throughout campaign mood swiftly swinging dismay bitterness explain single top member obamas foreign policynational security team opposed war160 katrina vanden heuvel editor nation asked last monday went obama whos said wants challenged advisors wouldnt made sense include least one person foreign policynational security team would challenge new fresh thinking security 21st century nice marvelously nice would wrote leftwing historian william blum sarcastically counterpunch site last160 week american president infused progressive values political courage160 blum speedily made clear estimation obama endowed desirable qualities hes really war like obamas first four years white house united states leave iraq doubt hed allow complete withdrawal even second term similar sentiments came another popular leftwing reporter jeremy scahill wrote tuesday assembly hillary clinton robert gates susan rice joe biden kettle hawks proven track record support iraq war militaristic interventionism neoliberal economic policies worldview consistent foreign policy arch stretches george hw bushs time office present suddenly familiar specter shuffling back spotlights long piece obamas foreign policy advisors last tuesday carried headline key obama advisors tune neocon hawks wants attack iran author robert dreyfuss level headed leftish commentator160 sketched the160 political backgrounds advisers obama concluded tony lake un ambassadordesignate susan rice tom daschle dennis ross along leading democratic hawks like richard holbrooke close vicepresidentelect joe biden secretary statedesignate hillary clinton made common cause warminded thinktank hawks washington institute near east policy winep american enterprise institute aei hardline institutes obamahawks dreyfuss gloomily told readers reckon talks iran nuclear program fail heels failure urge kinetic action form savage bombing campaign us air force four years anxious articles impending attack iran id rather read piers plowman dullest work ever trudge read eng lit oxford criticisms obamas foreign policy team anything outstripped by160 gloom indignation economic team economist160 michael hudson complained recently obama meekly following advice banker former treasury secretary robert rubin putting rubins160 protégés key obama administration posts larry summers head world bank forced privatization giveaway prices kleptocrats geithner new york fed monetarist economist berkeley rightwing university chicago protective guarddogs americas vested interests mouldy cabbages hurled obamas picks pentagon starting familiar visage robert gates already occupation top job put george bush jr replace donald rumsfeld winslow wheeler many years senor republican staffer congress solid reputation one bestinformed observers vast sink hole fraud waste us defense department gates tenure wheeler complains interview andrew cockburn last wednesday things gotten worse160 budgets going faster ever recent history size forces going south equipment continues get older wheeler says second tier appointments theyre talking press obama team mostly holdovers clinton era things almost bad bush era160 major hardware programs coming cropper major cost performance disasters conceived clinton era160 things future combat systems 160the navys ddg 1000 destroyer known arsenal ship later ddx destroyer spawned richard danzig secretary navy160 danzig active consideration deputy secretary defense gates natural successor gates finishes whatever short timer term obama160 f22 fighter f35 joint strike fighter goes programs cost performance disasters genesis clinton era asked andrew obamas national security advisor jim jones wheeler replied tartly man great stature physically figuratively washington160 washington heavy look record nothing much ever happened160 things went south afghanistan pretty rapidly supreme commander nato forces afghanistan160160 commandant marine corps lot marines overpriced underperforming hardware programs v22 vertical takeoff troop transport plane expeditionary fighting vehicle endorsed continued happily along160 seems mostly placeholder senior important positions jones favor heard point bush time lodged condoleezza rice report israeli conduct harsh swiftly tossed shredder look forward reports mano mano vast jones diminutive emanuel one striking feature complaints many of160 complainers suspicions obama campaign kept mouths firmly shut across eight presidential campaigns since jimmy carters successful run 1976 ive never seen collective determination liberal left think positive thoughts democratic candidate indeed present fury may stem certain embarrassment political naivety fairness obama beyond vaguely radical afflatus campaign rhetoric change obama never concealed true political stance centerright every sense phrase say left critics told indeed obvious question whether chorus political disillusion liberal left political consequence obama sensitive matter defended last week saying dire times americans need comforted installation familiar respected figures new administration polls bear public mostly happy seen thus far new president obama insisted man setting new course salvoes obamas awful economic team160 michael hudson brought one ominous parallel jimmy carter presidency 1976 eight years richard nixon hopes liberal left similarly high almost immediately carter dashed hopes hawkish foreign policy appointments two years carter took oval office jim ridgeway working village voice160 went to160 interview william winpisinger president machinists union one powerful labor leaders america put tape recorder desk asked anything president carter could redeem eyes winpisinger eyed tape recorder bleakly said die year later carter grimly fighting liberalleft challenge renomination democrats160 second term challenger teddy kennedy though carter beat kennedy threat seriously weakened lost relection bid one surmise one reason obama made hillary clinton secretary state head kennedytype challenge trouble slogans like change like zeppelins wind whistle pretensions dreadful speed would foolishly premature conjure possibility serious left resistance emerging form would bothersome obama take bone tossed limo form of160 one two halfways decent appointments enviro side nixon launched green crusade earth day epa etc effort split left obama could war global warming version roosevelt eras160 civilian conservation corps waging war160 fictive foe known manmade global warming present juncture untrammeled free enterprise reeling bankrupt disorder states vital albeit servile embrace obamas rallying youth cause hope change could head unpalatable directions glance popular crusades launched 30s swiftly attest often pointed close similarities ccc similar quasimilitarised bodies nature hitlers germany mussolinis italy want see fascism action dont look direction militia men camo clustered around hayden lake idaho look air quality management district los angeles model rep waxman brandishing coming160 war bad things air though sure bad things160 air make serious money big corporations160 price rhetorical crusade global warming bombing teheran think gw fanatics echo madeleine albright cry think price worth goes bushs new house dallas scarcely looks palatial suppose spend time crawford laura smokes dallas living room gets memoirs pending report offer latest counterpunch newsletter review husbands unrelenting onslaughts freedom caveat built sound foundations similarly unrelenting assaults clintons terms opening paragraphs theres one thing defenders civil liberties know surely assaults constitutional freedoms bipartisan constitutional darkness didnt suddenly fall arrival oval office george bush jr darkness dissipate departure entry president barack obama theres eager selfrighteous hand reaching bill rights drop shredder liberal intent legislating freedom illustration simply take freedom hate expressed great liberal drive criminalize expressions hate impose fierce punitive enhancements criminal imprudent enough perpetrate verbal breaches sexual ethnic etiquette bludgeoning victim death years reminded left liberal friends jurors constitutional right set law aside issue verdict consonant dictates conscience time sadly rediscover liberals mistrust juries interest institution ultimate bedrock protector liberty steady push erode role jury continued steadily every administration are160 thankfully near exit door bush years enduring appalling assaults freedom built sound foundation kindred assaults clinton time perhaps memorably expressed screams parents children fried us government forces branch davidian compound waco bill clintons flouting constitutional war powers inhibitions executive decision wage war order commanders rain bombs civilian population former yugoslavia also fresh newsletter fierce exposes kathleen bill christison horrifying siege gaza barbara rose johnston efforts obtain justice murdered guatemala make way chixoy dam world directors word bank would time crimes world isnt moved wreak fresh destruction elsewhere case larry summers comfortably ensconced obama white house crackerjack newsletter strongly urge read subscribe read alexander cockburn reached alexandercockburnasiscom 160 160 160 160 | 1,295 |
<p>More than 50% of counties in the United States are now <a href="" type="internal">officially designated “disaster”</a> zones.&#160; The reason given in 90% of cases is due to the continent-wide drought that has been devastating crop production.&#160; 48% of the US corn crop is rated as “poor to very poor”, along with 37% of soy; 73% of cattle acreage is suffering drought, along with 66% of land given to the production of hay.</p>
<p>The ramifications of the drought go far beyond what happens to food prices in the United States.&#160; With the US producing half of all world corn exports, as corn and soy crops wilt from the heat, without coordinated governmental action we can expect a replay of the disastrous rise in food prices of 2008, which caused desperate, hungry people to riot in 28 countries.&#160; In that instance, food was available, but hundreds of millions of people couldn’t afford to buy it.&#160; Should food prices increase to anywhere near the levels of four years ago, it will be a catastrophe for the two billion people who are forced to scrape by on less than $2/day.</p>
<p>The poor in developing countries spend 80% of their income on food, much of it directly as grain, rather than as manufactured products like bread or cereal, and so any increase in the price of basic necessities immediately puts them in dire food distress.&#160; In the US, prices for a loaf of bread or a corn muffin are unlikely to see major increases because, in a nod to capitalist priorities, the cost of those products <a href="" type="internal">is largely determined by packaging</a>, advertizing, transportation and storage costs – and ultimately the labor that is embodied in those activities, not the cost of growing the corn or other natural base material.</p>
<p>However, because about one third of corn in the US goes to feed animals, the US dept. of agriculture predicts that the price of animal products such as beef, dairy products, chicken, eggs and turkey will increase by 4.5% or more, depending on just how bad the harvest turns out to be.&#160; There will be a similar impact on vegetable oil due to the dire predictions on soy production, though these effects will likely not be felt <a href="" type="internal">until early 2013</a>.&#160; The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) publishes its monthly Food Price Index figures on August 9th.&#160; Abdolreza Abbassian, a senior economist at the FAO commented, “ <a href="" type="internal">It will be up</a>…How much up is anyone’s guess”, ominously, he adds; “It would really surprise me if we didn’t see a significant increase.”</p>
<p>For the 1 in 5 children in the United States living in food insecure households and the millions of Americans living from hand to mouth, still trying to recover homes, jobs and a stable livelihood after the crash of 2008, let alone tens of millions of other poor people around the world, any rise in food costs will be a crushing, and for many, life-threatening, calamity.</p>
<p>With the possibility of food shortages, the vultures of finance, otherwise known as commodity speculators, will once again begin to circle the food markets, looking for a killing.&#160; As the financial markets were not re-regulated after the economic crisis of 2008, hedge funds and short-sellers will inevitably be on the look-out for additional profits by gambling on the price of food, exactly as they did four years ago.&#160; Rather than any lack of actual food, most analysis indicates that the primary cause of the dramatic escalation in food prices that caused the 2008 food crisis was financial speculation in the food commodity sector.&#160; That is to say, a human tragedy manufactured by the laws of motion of capitalism, rather than the laws of nature.</p>
<p>The US dept of agriculture could and should be taking pro-active steps to ensure that there is no replay of 2008 as the number of people who became “food insecure”, which is to say starving, topped 1 billion worldwide. &#160;In the short-term, any crop failures need to be compensated by changing the allocation of US corn and preventing commodity speculation on food.&#160; In the longer-term, measures to raise grain storage volumes, address infrastructure deficiencies through appropriate investment, re-evaluate inhumane, environmentally-destructive and dangerously-unhealthy industrialized livestock feeding practices and examine the location, sustainability and type of crops and monoculture farming, are all issues that need attention.</p>
<p>Up to now however, US secretary of agriculture, Tom Vilsack, has resisted calls to reduce or eliminate the federal mandate that sees more than one third of the US corn crop diverted to ethanol refineries to make “bio-fuel” to burn in car engines.&#160; The federal government has mandated that over 13 billion gallons of ethanol is made from corn this year, which would equate to 40% of this year’s crop.&#160; Supposedly adopted to reduce demand for “overseas oil” and associated geopolitical concerns after oil almost topped $150/barrel in 2008, the Obama administration raised the federal requirement to 36 billion gallons by 2022, with at least 15 billion coming directly from corn.</p>
<p>Even on the best of days, turning corn into ethanol is an idiotic thing to do.&#160; Many studies have shown that it takes more energy to turn the corn into ethanol than is recovered when the ethanol is burnt in a car engine.&#160; Not only that, but ethanol doesn’t have&#160; the energy density of gasoline, so cars running on a mixture of ethanol and gasoline have to <a href="" type="internal">burn more fuel</a> to go the same distance and the blended mix costs more to transport.&#160; In any year, this is bad policy; in a year of extreme drought, it should be a criminal offense to waste food resources in this manner.</p>
<p>Additionally, in one of the more ridiculous circular irrationalities to emerge from the anarchy of capitalist decision-making, because growing crops in the West is heavily dependent on oil for fertilizer production and mechanization – to the extent that it takes 10 calories of oil to produce 1 calorie of food, and because ethanol derived from corn – which in turn is derived from oil, is increasing in price because the corn is dying, means that the cost of ethanol-blended gasoline in the US is also on the rise.</p>
<p>Immediate elimination of the biofuel mandate is a concrete step that Vilsack could be promoting, particularly after he predicted at a Whitehouse press briefing that the drought would cause “ <a href="" type="internal">significant increases in prices</a>” by the end of the year.</p>
<p>The large-scale effect of such a move on the price of corn is disputed, in part because “It turns out it’s really the price of gasoline and the profitability of selling ethanol” whereby the abstract and impersonal thing called “the market” determines whether corn will be distilled or sold as corn. Oil companies, which are required to blend ethanol into gasoline as part of the utterly inappropriately-named, “renewable fuel standard” (RFS), are allowed to carry RFS credits over year to year and thus have 2.4 billion credits available to allow the continued <a href="" type="internal">acquisition of corn for ethanol refineries</a>.</p>
<p>But it’s hard to imagine suddenly freeing up 40% of whatever remains of the US corn crop for livestock and human use, having a negligible impact on corn prices, even accounting for the activities of the oil companies.&#160; As <a href="" type="internal">Gawain Kripke</a>, director of policy and research for Oxfam America has argued, “The federal government can … put an end to the biofuel mandates, which are diverting food into fuel, and work to cut greenhouse gas emissions, which are leading to ever more erratic and extreme weather”.&#160; Vilsack should be arguing for such a policy shift; significantly, Lisa Jackson, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, has the power to make it happen without waiting on legislation.</p>
<p>This is especially necessary as some experts are beginning to worry about next year’s crop.&#160; For much of the US corn-belt, the main precipitation period has already passed.&#160; So, without some unseasonal weather events releasing massive amounts of rain, <a href="" type="internal">Mark Svoboda</a>, a climatologist at the National Drought Mitigation Center, based at the University of Nebraska, has said what matters is getting enough rain for the beginning of next year’s crop, “This drought isn’t going anywhere…The damage is already done. What you are looking for is enough moisture to avert a second year of drought.”</p>
<p>Vilsack could also offer to annul small farmer debt to the banks.&#160; The only step he’s taken in this direction is to allow farmers an extra 30 days to pay insurance premiums –as if an extra month is going to make any difference if you’ve got no crops to sell.&#160;&#160; He could campaign for greater agricultural aid for farmers in the Global South, specifically to build food storage facilities.&#160; Investment in this kind of food infrastructure to smooth out harvests saw drastic cuts in developing countries throughout the 1980’s and ‘90’s as international lenders demanded cuts to government spending in exchange for loans. In <a href="" type="internal" />addition, such insurance was seen as unnecessary when “the market” would automatically adjust for any shortfall; similarly in the United States, grain reserves are low and unable to make up any deficit because of a reduction in grain storage.</p>
<p>Perhaps more importantly still, if Vilsack, and the Obama administration in general, had any concern for humanity and the world’s poor, they could begin an aggressive campaign to re-regulate financial speculation on food prices in international commodity markets; such an attack on the bankers, stockbrokers and speculators would, no doubt, prove wildly popular.</p>
<p>In practice, the myopic priorities of capitalism dictate the solutions on offer.&#160; Vilsack has enacted short-term palliatives which are highly likely to make the long-term situation far worse.&#160; The $383 million in emergency drought payments to farmers that was just voted for in Congress is appropriating the money directly from cuts to conservation programs designed to promote more sustainable farming practices.&#160; Indeed, cuts to those programs are three times what is allocated for emergency drought relief, leading a coalition of environmental groups to <a href="" type="internal">write a letter</a> to all members of Congress stating their opposition: “Using disproportionate cuts to conservation to fund disaster assistance undermines the successful conservation programs that are currently being utilized…Disproportionately cutting conservation dollars to pay for disaster aid is shortsighted, and the long-term investment in conservation should not be usurped by the short-term thinking to address severe drought.”</p>
<p>Rather than downsize the powerful corn-to-ethanol industry, much of it situated in Obama’s home state of Illinois which has the third largest production capacity (Iowa, a campaign-defining state for Obama in 2008 and a swing state this time around, produces the most ethanol), Vilsack has instead sacrificed 3.8 million acres of conservation land for grazing and the production of hay in order to circumvent livestock owner’s anger directed at ethanol producers.</p>
<p>Most absurdly, considering this is, after all, the 21st century, at the same press conference where Vilsack predicted food price increases, he offered his own personal solution to the drought crisis: “I get on my knees every day, and I’m saying an extra prayer now. If I had a rain prayer or a rain dance I could do, I would do it.”</p>
<p>So, while there is a clear and easily achievable solution at hand – reallocation of corn from ethanol distillation to food production, the agriculture secretary of the world’s biggest corn exporter believes a more useful way of spending his time is in genuflecting to an all-powerful, invisible deity in the sky.</p>
<p>In the medium term, rather than being driven by profit, for the good of animal and human welfare, the industry practice of feeding corn to cattle in huge, enclosed feeding lots to speed the fattening process needs urgent re-examination.&#160; To enhance profit margins, successively larger animals have been selected for so that over time, the animals themselves have changed.&#160;&#160; The larger a single animal is, the larger the profit ratio you obtain from chopping it up.</p>
<p>Cows in giant feed lots are typically around 1200-1300 lbs rather than the more usual 900-1000lb.&#160; A cow in the open field would have to eat a simply enormous amount of grass or hay to fatten when its overall body mass is almost 30% larger.&#160; Hence corporations have created a cow that can’t survive except through being force-fed high-energy corn meal.&#160; Apart from the misallocation of corn, the knock on effects of that decision for animal and human welfare, the incubation and mutation of pathogens, the disposal of huge volumes of toxic animal waste laden with antibiotics and growth hormones concentrated in small areas, all feed in to the incredibly wasteful, dangerous and unsustainable nature of capitalist agriculture.</p>
<p>At a time when the reality of anthropogenic climate change has become so hard to ignore even some famous climate skeptics have <a href="" type="internal">given up protesting</a>, drought is going to be an increasing factor that agricultural planners need to take into account.&#160; Therefore, cutting money from programs designed to manage the land more sustainably is a suicidal policy.</p>
<p>As climate blogger <a href="" type="internal">Joseph Romm</a> pointed out in an article in Nature, assuming business-as-usual, which is exactly what is going to happen without a mobilization of the people that dwarfs the revolts of 2011, there will be a cascading series of destabilizing changes which will all negatively impact our ability to grow food:</p>
<p>“Precipitation patterns are expected to shift, expanding the dry subtropics. What precipitation there is will probably come in extreme deluges, resulting in runoff rather than drought alleviation. Warming causes greater evaporation and, once the ground is dry, the Sun’s energy goes into baking the soil, leading to a further increase in air temperature. That is why, for instance, so many temperature records were set for the United States in the 1930s Dust Bowl; and why, in 2011, drought-stricken Texas saw the hottest summer ever recorded for a US state. Finally, many regions are expected to see earlier snowmelt, so less water will be stored on mountain tops for the summer dry season.”</p>
<p>Even worse, the recent results of <a href="" type="internal">19 different climate models</a> predict that drought will become a permanent feature of large areas of the North American continent:</p>
<p>“If climate change pushes the global average temperature to 2.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial era levels, as many experts now expect,&#160; [almost all of Mexico, the midwestern United States and most of Central America] will be under severe and permanent drought conditions.</p>
<p>Future conditions are projected to be worse than Mexico’s current drought or the U.S. Dust Bowl era of the 1930s that forced hundreds of thousands of people to migrate.”</p>
<p>In other words, we are only beginning to glimpse the outlines of a situation that will become far worse without drastic ameliorative action in the near-term future.&#160; Climate change, caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels, is creating extended droughts that threaten to undermine agriculture and, thereby, our ability to feed ourselves.&#160; Rather than a swift redirection of societal priorities – toward energy conservation, renewable technologies and sustainable farming practices, instead there’s a continuation and extension of the policies that got us here in the first place.</p>
<p>Nothing can explain this paradox between, on the one hand, the prolongation of unsustainable food production practices that don’t even feed people successfully, and on the other, the way in which the natural world functions as an inter-connected whole, other than to examine the factors that drive a society artificially divided into antagonistic classes with opposing priorities.&#160; We live under a system that is inexorably leading to greater and greater climatic dislocations, due to its inherently anti-ecological dynamic that is predicated on exponential growth and the prioritization of short-term measures in the interest of profit.</p>
<p>We see the same irrational process played out in India, which is suffering from a 20% shortfall in precipitation, with some states recording 70% reductions from historic averages. &#160;60% of India’s 1.2 billion people work in agriculture, which accounts for 20% of Indian GDP.&#160; But less rain doesn’t just affect farmers directly.</p>
<p>Less rain leads to less hydroelectric power, which means farmers have to use their own pumps to obtain water from underground aquifers for crop irrigation to save their harvest.&#160; Those pumps run on electricity.&#160; So at a time when there was less electricity available because of drought, there was an increased demand for electricity to overcome the drought, a factor contributing to the massive blackout in India.&#160; Additionally, pumping groundwater has led to aquifers dropping in some areas by between <a href="" type="internal">60-200 meters</a>, requiring bigger, more powerful pumps for deeper wells to continue the unsustainable practice of tapping groundwater supplies at such volumes.</p>
<p>This is despite the fact that while 90% of water use in India is for agriculture, only about 10-15% ends up reaching the crops, as most of it evaporates on the ground before it gets to them.&#160; Rather than investing in sustainable agricultural practices to combat the problem, the Indian government bought heavily into the Western-backed Green Revolution of the 1960’s, and promoted the planting of water-intensive crops such as rice.</p>
<p>According to Upmanu Lall, director of the Columbia Water Center at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, “the whole water and energy problem [in India] is dire, and it’s caused by government policy.”&#160; He gives the example of the Punjab, which has an annual rainfall of .40-.80 meters, but now grows rice, which requires 1.8 m of annual rainfall.&#160; The intersection of energy, water and food with capitalist development is illustrated in India in stark form.&#160; But the solution, abstracting the limitations imposed by class society, is once again quite simple, in that crops should be grown where the climate makes most sense, not where they will make the most money or merely to add to foreign cash reserves or national status.&#160; However, rather than taking those kind of measures or addressing climate change, India is building more coal and nuclear plants and is one of the country’s most resistant to taking effective action on climate change.</p>
<p>Around the world, the evidence is mounting that, apparently, there are no circumstances, even ones as cataclysmic as drastic changes to planetary climate that take precedence over the need to accumulate capital by the tiny segment of society that actively benefits from the process.</p>
<p>If we are to survive at all, given all of the above, it seems impossible to avoid the conclusion that to survive on a planet that looks remotely like the one we were born on, we must confront the system that produces a society at odds both with itself and the natural world for the same reason – class stratification.&#160; That means the building of an organized resistance in every workplace, community, school and farm all across the world.&#160; The exploitation and oppression that is meted out to the vast majority of the world’s population as a consequence of the way system works, is the mirror image of the exploitation of the biosphere which, ultimately, forms the basis for life; a scientific fact the capitalists seem capable of ignoring.&#160; We can’t afford to let them get away with it.&#160; That’s why we have to organize, in order to say: for the good of humanity and the rest of the biosphere upon which we depend, you need to go.</p>
<p>Chris Williams&#160;is a professor in the&#160;Dept of Chemistry &amp; Physical Science, Pace University&#160;and author of&#160; <a href="" type="internal">Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis</a>&#160;(Haymarket Books, 2010)</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | true | 4 | 50 counties united states officially designated disaster zones160 reason given 90 cases due continentwide drought devastating crop production160 48 us corn crop rated poor poor along 37 soy 73 cattle acreage suffering drought along 66 land given production hay ramifications drought go far beyond happens food prices united states160 us producing half world corn exports corn soy crops wilt heat without coordinated governmental action expect replay disastrous rise food prices 2008 caused desperate hungry people riot 28 countries160 instance food available hundreds millions people couldnt afford buy it160 food prices increase anywhere near levels four years ago catastrophe two billion people forced scrape less 2day poor developing countries spend 80 income food much directly grain rather manufactured products like bread cereal increase price basic necessities immediately puts dire food distress160 us prices loaf bread corn muffin unlikely see major increases nod capitalist priorities cost products largely determined packaging advertizing transportation storage costs ultimately labor embodied activities cost growing corn natural base material however one third corn us goes feed animals us dept agriculture predicts price animal products beef dairy products chicken eggs turkey increase 45 depending bad harvest turns be160 similar impact vegetable oil due dire predictions soy production though effects likely felt early 2013160 uns food agriculture organization fao publishes monthly food price index figures august 9th160 abdolreza abbassian senior economist fao commented uphow much anyones guess ominously adds would really surprise didnt see significant increase 1 5 children united states living food insecure households millions americans living hand mouth still trying recover homes jobs stable livelihood crash 2008 let alone tens millions poor people around world rise food costs crushing many lifethreatening calamity possibility food shortages vultures finance otherwise known commodity speculators begin circle food markets looking killing160 financial markets reregulated economic crisis 2008 hedge funds shortsellers inevitably lookout additional profits gambling price food exactly four years ago160 rather lack actual food analysis indicates primary cause dramatic escalation food prices caused 2008 food crisis financial speculation food commodity sector160 say human tragedy manufactured laws motion capitalism rather laws nature us dept agriculture could taking proactive steps ensure replay 2008 number people became food insecure say starving topped 1 billion worldwide 160in shortterm crop failures need compensated changing allocation us corn preventing commodity speculation food160 longerterm measures raise grain storage volumes address infrastructure deficiencies appropriate investment reevaluate inhumane environmentallydestructive dangerouslyunhealthy industrialized livestock feeding practices examine location sustainability type crops monoculture farming issues need attention however us secretary agriculture tom vilsack resisted calls reduce eliminate federal mandate sees one third us corn crop diverted ethanol refineries make biofuel burn car engines160 federal government mandated 13 billion gallons ethanol made corn year would equate 40 years crop160 supposedly adopted reduce demand overseas oil associated geopolitical concerns oil almost topped 150barrel 2008 obama administration raised federal requirement 36 billion gallons 2022 least 15 billion coming directly corn even best days turning corn ethanol idiotic thing do160 many studies shown takes energy turn corn ethanol recovered ethanol burnt car engine160 ethanol doesnt have160 energy density gasoline cars running mixture ethanol gasoline burn fuel go distance blended mix costs transport160 year bad policy year extreme drought criminal offense waste food resources manner additionally one ridiculous circular irrationalities emerge anarchy capitalist decisionmaking growing crops west heavily dependent oil fertilizer production mechanization extent takes 10 calories oil produce 1 calorie food ethanol derived corn turn derived oil increasing price corn dying means cost ethanolblended gasoline us also rise immediate elimination biofuel mandate concrete step vilsack could promoting particularly predicted whitehouse press briefing drought would cause significant increases prices end year largescale effect move price corn disputed part turns really price gasoline profitability selling ethanol whereby abstract impersonal thing called market determines whether corn distilled sold corn oil companies required blend ethanol gasoline part utterly inappropriatelynamed renewable fuel standard rfs allowed carry rfs credits year year thus 24 billion credits available allow continued acquisition corn ethanol refineries hard imagine suddenly freeing 40 whatever remains us corn crop livestock human use negligible impact corn prices even accounting activities oil companies160 gawain kripke director policy research oxfam america argued federal government put end biofuel mandates diverting food fuel work cut greenhouse gas emissions leading ever erratic extreme weather160 vilsack arguing policy shift significantly lisa jackson head environmental protection agency power make happen without waiting legislation especially necessary experts beginning worry next years crop160 much us cornbelt main precipitation period already passed160 without unseasonal weather events releasing massive amounts rain mark svoboda climatologist national drought mitigation center based university nebraska said matters getting enough rain beginning next years crop drought isnt going anywherethe damage already done looking enough moisture avert second year drought vilsack could also offer annul small farmer debt banks160 step hes taken direction allow farmers extra 30 days pay insurance premiums extra month going make difference youve got crops sell160160 could campaign greater agricultural aid farmers global south specifically build food storage facilities160 investment kind food infrastructure smooth harvests saw drastic cuts developing countries throughout 1980s 90s international lenders demanded cuts government spending exchange loans addition insurance seen unnecessary market would automatically adjust shortfall similarly united states grain reserves low unable make deficit reduction grain storage perhaps importantly still vilsack obama administration general concern humanity worlds poor could begin aggressive campaign reregulate financial speculation food prices international commodity markets attack bankers stockbrokers speculators would doubt prove wildly popular practice myopic priorities capitalism dictate solutions offer160 vilsack enacted shortterm palliatives highly likely make longterm situation far worse160 383 million emergency drought payments farmers voted congress appropriating money directly cuts conservation programs designed promote sustainable farming practices160 indeed cuts programs three times allocated emergency drought relief leading coalition environmental groups write letter members congress stating opposition using disproportionate cuts conservation fund disaster assistance undermines successful conservation programs currently utilizeddisproportionately cutting conservation dollars pay disaster aid shortsighted longterm investment conservation usurped shortterm thinking address severe drought rather downsize powerful corntoethanol industry much situated obamas home state illinois third largest production capacity iowa campaigndefining state obama 2008 swing state time around produces ethanol vilsack instead sacrificed 38 million acres conservation land grazing production hay order circumvent livestock owners anger directed ethanol producers absurdly considering 21st century press conference vilsack predicted food price increases offered personal solution drought crisis get knees every day im saying extra prayer rain prayer rain dance could would clear easily achievable solution hand reallocation corn ethanol distillation food production agriculture secretary worlds biggest corn exporter believes useful way spending time genuflecting allpowerful invisible deity sky medium term rather driven profit good animal human welfare industry practice feeding corn cattle huge enclosed feeding lots speed fattening process needs urgent reexamination160 enhance profit margins successively larger animals selected time animals changed160160 larger single animal larger profit ratio obtain chopping cows giant feed lots typically around 12001300 lbs rather usual 9001000lb160 cow open field would eat simply enormous amount grass hay fatten overall body mass almost 30 larger160 hence corporations created cow cant survive except forcefed highenergy corn meal160 apart misallocation corn knock effects decision animal human welfare incubation mutation pathogens disposal huge volumes toxic animal waste laden antibiotics growth hormones concentrated small areas feed incredibly wasteful dangerous unsustainable nature capitalist agriculture time reality anthropogenic climate change become hard ignore even famous climate skeptics given protesting drought going increasing factor agricultural planners need take account160 therefore cutting money programs designed manage land sustainably suicidal policy climate blogger joseph romm pointed article nature assuming businessasusual exactly going happen without mobilization people dwarfs revolts 2011 cascading series destabilizing changes negatively impact ability grow food precipitation patterns expected shift expanding dry subtropics precipitation probably come extreme deluges resulting runoff rather drought alleviation warming causes greater evaporation ground dry suns energy goes baking soil leading increase air temperature instance many temperature records set united states 1930s dust bowl 2011 droughtstricken texas saw hottest summer ever recorded us state finally many regions expected see earlier snowmelt less water stored mountain tops summer dry season even worse recent results 19 different climate models predict drought become permanent feature large areas north american continent climate change pushes global average temperature 25 degrees celsius preindustrial era levels many experts expect160 almost mexico midwestern united states central america severe permanent drought conditions future conditions projected worse mexicos current drought us dust bowl era 1930s forced hundreds thousands people migrate words beginning glimpse outlines situation become far worse without drastic ameliorative action nearterm future160 climate change caused primarily burning fossil fuels creating extended droughts threaten undermine agriculture thereby ability feed ourselves160 rather swift redirection societal priorities toward energy conservation renewable technologies sustainable farming practices instead theres continuation extension policies got us first place nothing explain paradox one hand prolongation unsustainable food production practices dont even feed people successfully way natural world functions interconnected whole examine factors drive society artificially divided antagonistic classes opposing priorities160 live system inexorably leading greater greater climatic dislocations due inherently antiecological dynamic predicated exponential growth prioritization shortterm measures interest profit see irrational process played india suffering 20 shortfall precipitation states recording 70 reductions historic averages 16060 indias 12 billion people work agriculture accounts 20 indian gdp160 less rain doesnt affect farmers directly less rain leads less hydroelectric power means farmers use pumps obtain water underground aquifers crop irrigation save harvest160 pumps run electricity160 time less electricity available drought increased demand electricity overcome drought factor contributing massive blackout india160 additionally pumping groundwater led aquifers dropping areas 60200 meters requiring bigger powerful pumps deeper wells continue unsustainable practice tapping groundwater supplies volumes despite fact 90 water use india agriculture 1015 ends reaching crops evaporates ground gets them160 rather investing sustainable agricultural practices combat problem indian government bought heavily westernbacked green revolution 1960s promoted planting waterintensive crops rice according upmanu lall director columbia water center columbia universitys earth institute whole water energy problem india dire caused government policy160 gives example punjab annual rainfall 4080 meters grows rice requires 18 annual rainfall160 intersection energy water food capitalist development illustrated india stark form160 solution abstracting limitations imposed class society quite simple crops grown climate makes sense make money merely add foreign cash reserves national status160 however rather taking kind measures addressing climate change india building coal nuclear plants one countrys resistant taking effective action climate change around world evidence mounting apparently circumstances even ones cataclysmic drastic changes planetary climate take precedence need accumulate capital tiny segment society actively benefits process survive given seems impossible avoid conclusion survive planet looks remotely like one born must confront system produces society odds natural world reason class stratification160 means building organized resistance every workplace community school farm across world160 exploitation oppression meted vast majority worlds population consequence way system works mirror image exploitation biosphere ultimately forms basis life scientific fact capitalists seem capable ignoring160 cant afford let get away it160 thats organize order say good humanity rest biosphere upon depend need go chris williams160is professor the160dept chemistry amp physical science pace university160and author of160 ecology socialism solutions capitalist ecological crisis160haymarket books 2010 160 160 | 1,819 |
<p>What if you had $1 million in public money? How would you use it to make your community a better place?</p>
<p>Thousands of Chicago residents are getting the opportunity to make those decisions, allocating city dollars to projects in their own neighborhoods through “participatory budgeting.”</p>
<p>Although the term itself isn’t exactly catchy, the idea is becoming popular among grassroots activists from coast to coast. This year, it’s especially taken hold &#160;in New York City and in Chicago, where the city plans to hire a designated manager in the central budget office.</p>
<p>“Over and over again, I’ve seen if you give people power, they step up,” said Josh Lerner, executive director of the <a href="http://www.participatorybudgeting.org" type="external">Participatory Budgeting Project</a>, which helps communities launch these efforts.</p>
<p>This isn’t just a play exercise, where the community writes wish lists but officials get the last word. Instead, residents come up with their own roster of potential projects and then vote on them. The projects with the most votes win.</p>
<p>“Real people have real power to make real decisions,” Lerner explained. “If you come out to a meeting, you can help directly decide how to spend a million dollars.”</p>
<p>The process was developed in the 1980s in Porto Alegre, Brazil, a city with a big inequality problem. At that time, the budgeting process lacked transparency and was seen as corrupt, according to a Harvard study. A new government brought in new ideas, including participatory budgeting – often referred to as PB. Since then, interest has grown significantly, and today, some cities in Brazil let citizens allocate as much as 20 percent of the budget. Researchers say residents can see the <a href="http://www.mef.gob.pe/contenidos/pol_econ/documentos/Presupuesto_Participativo_Brasil_Efectos.pdf" type="external">impact</a>&#160;in the amount of public dollars flowing to low-income neighborhoods.</p>
<p>“It engages people who are typically the most marginalized and disenfranchised,” said Rachel Laforest, executive director at <a href="http://www.righttothecity.org/" type="external">Right to the City Alliance</a>, who is involved in the process in <a href="http://www.Pbnyc.org" type="external">New York City</a>.</p>
<p />
<p>Participatory budgeting has been gaining steam around the world, but only recently has taken off in the U.S. Map courtesy of <a href="http://www.participatorybudgeting.org/" type="external">Participatory Budgeting Project</a>. View <a href="https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&amp;hl=en&amp;msa=0&amp;msid=210554752554258740073.00045675b996d14eb6c3a&amp;t=m&amp;source=embed&amp;ll=40.979898,14.765625&amp;spn=145.175291,298.828125" type="external">in a larger map</a></p>
<p>Participatory budgeting is now used in more than 1,500 places around the world. But it was slow to catch on in the United States.</p>
<p>“We think we know how to do democracy best,” Lerner sighed.</p>
<p>It took 20 years from that first experiment, in fact, before anyone in American officialdom decided to give it a try.</p>
<p>That someone was Alderman Joe Moore, in Chicago’s <a href="http://www.ward49.com" type="external">49th Ward</a>. In that city, each ward gets an annual lump sum called “menu money.” Before 2009, Moore’s decision-making approach was pretty straightforward: “I would spend a day, drive around the neighborhood, examine constituent requests that had come in over the previous year,” Moore recalled. Then he would fill out a form and send it off to City Hall. “Ultimately, it was my call.”</p>
<p>When he decided to open the allocation process to ward residents, other aldermen thought he was crazy.</p>
<p>Citizens felt differently.</p>
<p>Maria Hadden was one. She saw a flier for Moore’s PB meetings at a time she was having major issues with the developer of her condo building. Residents were being dragged into court regularly to deal with the fallout, she said, but they couldn’t get any relief from the city.</p>
<p>“Nothing was geared to help solve these issues in a way I could touch as a regular on-the-ground community person,” she said. It turned out that PB “wasn’t an answer to my specific problems. But it was an answer to ‘How do I as a community member effect change?’ It’s pretty powerful.”</p>
<p>Hadden liked the experience so much that she later took a job with Lerner’s Participatory Budgeting Project.</p>
<p>Alderman Moore, who at that point had been in office for nearly two decades, learned something, too: Driving around the ward didn’t tell him everything he needed to know. He’d been spending the menu money on “traditional basic infrastructure”: resurfacing streets, repairing sidewalks, installing streetlights and the like. It turned out residents wanted some of that, but they also wanted things like wheelchair-accessible walkways, murals or a dog park.</p>
<p>“I think through this process you end up getting better projects that are more truly reflective of the wants and needs in the community,” he said.</p>
<p>Other aldermen have since decided to try Moore’s PB approach. This year, it’s being used in three wards, including the 22nd.</p>
<p>The first lesson they learned? It’s not easy.</p>
<p>“A million dollars goes very fast,” said Adrian Esquivel of <a href="http://www.Enlacechicago.org" type="external">Enlace Chicago</a>, a grassroots organization that works for safe and healthy environments. In one of the first brainstorming sessions, residents tossed out so many ideas, “we were up to a few million dollars in about 10 minutes,” he said.</p>
<p>Just as quickly, though, they learned to rein in their wish list and focus on what would give the most bang for the buck. Still, this is about a lot more than learning to pencil out a bottom line. Residents are learning about the trade-offs elected officials have to make, about how things get built, about how government works. And they’re learning about their own communities.</p>
<p>In the 22nd Ward, most of the residents are Latino, but there’s a far-flung corner that’s mostly African-American – and they had felt disempowered. At the first meeting, Hadden recalled, they were skeptical and had a list of complaints. As they got answers, Hadden said, “You could feel the shift in the room.” They’ve been participating ever since, in great numbers.</p>
<p>One of the priorities that has emerged is light. What makes for good street lighting? Where is it most needed? Residents have been checking out parts of the ward they might not have otherwise visited to take a look, Esquivel said. And they’re seeing the picture beyond their own personal needs. That, he said, is what participatory budgeting is really about.</p>
<p>There are, of course, disagreements. Sometimes, the meetings can be tense. And the process isn’t always perfect. Even supporters concede it can be cumbersome. What took a day for an alderman is now spread over nine months. That eats up city staff time – and time, of course, is money.</p>
<p>Also, participation rates are sometimes low. One alderman that went through the process last year decided against it this time around, citing concerns over staff time. Participation was low: Only about 100 people there had voted.</p>
<p>Elsewhere, there have been reports of stalled projects and of officials usurping the people’s will.</p>
<p>Some also point to <a href="http://arp.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/03/07/0275074013478152.abstract" type="external">disappointments</a>&#160;in the concept itself.</p>
<p>One aim is community change and empowerment, but often the focus is on the details of specific projects rather than on broader social and economic issues.</p>
<p>Still, supporters say the concept has great potential. In New York, nine city council members are using participatory budgeting. There is talk of allowing public housing residents there to vote on infrastructure projects via PB.The idea is also taking hold in San Francisco, Boston, St. Louis and other cities. And the Obama administration touted the concept in a December <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/12/06/united-states-releases-its-second-open-government-national-action-plan" type="external">report&#160;</a>on open government.</p>
<p>“It’s a great way,” Enlace Chicago’s Esquivel said, “to get people engaged about something that doesn’t always seem that exciting – budgeting.”</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Maureen O’Hagan</a>&#160;is the reporter for Equal Voice News.&#160;</p>
<p>2014 © Equal Voice for America’s Families Newspaper</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Contact author</a></p>
<p>&#160;&#160; <a href="" type="internal">Chicago</a>, <a href="" type="internal">Enlace Chicago</a>, <a href="" type="internal">participatory budgeting</a>, <a href="" type="internal">participatory budgeting news</a></p> | true | 4 | 1 million public money would use make community better place thousands chicago residents getting opportunity make decisions allocating city dollars projects neighborhoods participatory budgeting although term isnt exactly catchy idea becoming popular among grassroots activists coast coast year especially taken hold 160in new york city chicago city plans hire designated manager central budget office ive seen give people power step said josh lerner executive director participatory budgeting project helps communities launch efforts isnt play exercise community writes wish lists officials get last word instead residents come roster potential projects vote projects votes win real people real power make real decisions lerner explained come meeting help directly decide spend million dollars process developed 1980s porto alegre brazil city big inequality problem time budgeting process lacked transparency seen corrupt according harvard study new government brought new ideas including participatory budgeting often referred pb since interest grown significantly today cities brazil let citizens allocate much 20 percent budget researchers say residents see impact160in amount public dollars flowing lowincome neighborhoods engages people typically marginalized disenfranchised said rachel laforest executive director right city alliance involved process new york city participatory budgeting gaining steam around world recently taken us map courtesy participatory budgeting project view larger map participatory budgeting used 1500 places around world slow catch united states think know democracy best lerner sighed took 20 years first experiment fact anyone american officialdom decided give try someone alderman joe moore chicagos 49th ward city ward gets annual lump sum called menu money 2009 moores decisionmaking approach pretty straightforward would spend day drive around neighborhood examine constituent requests come previous year moore recalled would fill form send city hall ultimately call decided open allocation process ward residents aldermen thought crazy citizens felt differently maria hadden one saw flier moores pb meetings time major issues developer condo building residents dragged court regularly deal fallout said couldnt get relief city nothing geared help solve issues way could touch regular ontheground community person said turned pb wasnt answer specific problems answer community member effect change pretty powerful hadden liked experience much later took job lerners participatory budgeting project alderman moore point office nearly two decades learned something driving around ward didnt tell everything needed know hed spending menu money traditional basic infrastructure resurfacing streets repairing sidewalks installing streetlights like turned residents wanted also wanted things like wheelchairaccessible walkways murals dog park think process end getting better projects truly reflective wants needs community said aldermen since decided try moores pb approach year used three wards including 22nd first lesson learned easy million dollars goes fast said adrian esquivel enlace chicago grassroots organization works safe healthy environments one first brainstorming sessions residents tossed many ideas million dollars 10 minutes said quickly though learned rein wish list focus would give bang buck still lot learning pencil bottom line residents learning tradeoffs elected officials make things get built government works theyre learning communities 22nd ward residents latino theres farflung corner thats mostly africanamerican felt disempowered first meeting hadden recalled skeptical list complaints got answers hadden said could feel shift room theyve participating ever since great numbers one priorities emerged light makes good street lighting needed residents checking parts ward might otherwise visited take look esquivel said theyre seeing picture beyond personal needs said participatory budgeting really course disagreements sometimes meetings tense process isnt always perfect even supporters concede cumbersome took day alderman spread nine months eats city staff time time course money also participation rates sometimes low one alderman went process last year decided time around citing concerns staff time participation low 100 people voted elsewhere reports stalled projects officials usurping peoples also point disappointments160in concept one aim community change empowerment often focus details specific projects rather broader social economic issues still supporters say concept great potential new york nine city council members using participatory budgeting talk allowing public housing residents vote infrastructure projects via pbthe idea also taking hold san francisco boston st louis cities obama administration touted concept december report160on open government great way enlace chicagos esquivel said get people engaged something doesnt always seem exciting budgeting ___________ maureen ohagan160is reporter equal voice news160 2014 equal voice americas families newspaper 160 contact author 160160 chicago enlace chicago participatory budgeting participatory budgeting news | 700 |
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<p>And now for the jury.</p>
<p>The jury system had a moment of glory with the Jackson acquittal, as your CounterPunch editors pointed out last week on this website. But the jury, our last best bulwark, is in dire straits. Chief U.S. District Court Judge William G. Young of Boston has said that “the American jury system is dying. It is dying faster in civil cases than in criminal cases. It is dying faster in Federal courts than in State courts. But it is dying, nonetheless.” Clay Conrad, one of the jury’s great defenders, recently cited Judge Young’s remark and pointed out that “the percentage of civil cases reaching trial in the federal courts has fallen from 11 percent in 1962 to 1.8 percent in 2002 On the criminal side, some 15 percent of criminal defendants were tried in 1962, but less than 5 percent in 2002. In spite of rising numbers of defendants, the absolute number of trials was 30 percent lower in 2002 than in 1962.</p>
<p>Reasons? Conrad cites the rise in settlements, summary judgments, arbitration and other alternative forms of dispute resolution. It’s getting more expensive and riskier to go to trial. And there ar “institutional changes in procedure that encourage such avoidance; and a corresponding shift in the ideology of judges, who increasingly view their role as dispute resolvers rather than adjudicators.” They win, we lose. Jury trials decline even as the rest of the legal system balloons.</p>
<p>As I’ve said more than once, part of the problem is that a lot of liberals aren’t particularly concerned about the jury. Next week we’ll run a good piece by Clay Conrad on this vital issue.</p>
<p>In our piece Jeffrey St Clair and I stressed the point that what so-called “celebrity justice” does is level the playing field. Because celebs have money they can afford the good lawyers, expert witnesses, private investigators to rebut charges which typically turn out to be based on shoddy police work, and lying testimony. We contrasted the trials of Michael Jackson and Paul Shanley, the former priest convicted in Boston earlier this year.</p>
<p>This prompted Jeff Morgan to write to us from the Mayo Clinic asking, “If it is so obvious that Father Shanley was poorly represented in court and convicted on flimsy evidence (recovered memories) then his case should surely be overturned on appeal. I don’t see any mention of an appeal in your article.”</p>
<p>We passed this on to CounterPuncher JoAnn Wypijewski who has written extensively on the Shanley case, and here’s her forceful answer:</p>
<p>The reason there’s no appeal (yet) in the case is the same as the reason you and Jeffrey cited in your piece on the Jackson trial: money. Shanley has none, and had none by the time the case was being tried. And there’s no money in his family. Contrary to the belief of some, the Boston archdiocese contributed nothing to his defense. Plus once he was defrocked ­ before trial ­ he lost the small pension and other benefits he had been receiving. He was held on $300,000 bail, which his family and friends had to raise, largely by his niece mortgaging her home. They also had to raise money for the lawyer, which, I was told, had run out by last summer. The trial was in February.</p>
<p>There was, to my knowledge, no full-time investigator on the case. In fact, much of the close analysis of the mountains of depositions taken in the civil case against the archdiocese involving these same claims against Shanley was done by Shanley’s niece for free ­ in the hours she squeezed in between taking care of her family and working full time for Boston’s Big Dig. Shanley’s lawyer, Frank Mondano, did kick up a tremendous mound of doubt in the trial, but it’s also true that had Shanley had deep resources Mondano might have been more motivated, would have had a full team and would have put on a better defense.</p>
<p>It is possible that, once the recovered memory claim was allowed to go forward, no defense could have won the day, of course. Shanley was in a quite different position from Jackson vis-a-vis the press as well as the legal system. Plus Jackson did not have his former employer settle with his accuser for half a million pretrial, essentially ratifying the accuser’s claim.</p>
<p>Unlike the Jackson jurors, the Boston jurors bore the heavy expectation of the whole city, including or perhaps especially the Catholic Church, that they would pronounce guilt. Not to have done so ­ when the town’s press, political establishment, law enforcement, legal establishment, church, victims lobby and mainstream gay community had already de facto convicted him ­ would have taken uncommon courage. In this case, no one wanted to be the one who let the pervert go.</p>
<p>Let’s not forget too that Shanley is, as his accuser so frequently put it in his confidential correspondence to his own attorney, “a faggot”. Jackson is something else, a freak, an eccentric, a star. And Shanley is something else as well: the figure whom the state could get, whose case the statute of limitations had not run out on, who could stand for all the priests who ‘got away’. Everyone needed Shanley to go down ­ everyone who counted. Jackson’s case was never attended by the same totalizing certainty, the same hysteria gripping the community.</p>
<p>The question now, apart from money, is grounds for appeal. People suggest ineffective counsel, but courts rarely allow this as grounds for appeal unless the case is so extreme that there is patent incompetence, double-dealing, etc. That, among other reasons, is why the jails are full of poor people. It seems the most fertile ground would be to challenge the science ­ the whole basis of ‘recovered memory’ on which the case was laid. The courts have been giving recovered memory a drubbing over the past few years, though not in Massachusetts. Such an appeal would require a massed legal-scientific team, which ordinarily does not come cheap. It might yet come to pass for Shanley, because some of the biggest names in the psych/memory arena were galvanized by this case following the verdict. His niece, who pretty much guides his legal decisions, is still recovering from very complicated brain surgery, which she underwent immediately after the trial.</p>
<p>Sex and Perversion in Japan</p>
<p>From Tokyo, Japan, come an interesting series of letters from Robert McKinney who begin by commenting on the lynch mob atmosphere we’d noted on CNN and other nnetworks covering the Jackson trial. After evoking earlier lynch history, McKinney continues, apropos mob hysteria:</p>
<p>As an aside – in Tokyo after the terrible earthquake of l923 (Great Kanto Earthquake), about 7,000 Korean residents (and an assortment of other “undesirables”) were lynched in a matter of days after the disaster. Rumor had it that these Korean ‘dogs’ were putting poison in the drinking water. Lynching is not exclusively an American tradition.</p>
<p>I live in Japan. And here everyone jokes about the trial and Michael’s perversions. The Japanese are not hypocritical. Until recently, it was acceptable to buy child pornography in any fine upscale bookshop. There was one magazine called “The Alice Club” that actually advertised the availability of underage child prostitutes. And the police never took any notice. Yes, child molestation is a crime and something to discourage, but there is no hysteria in Japan. They get much more hot and bothered if someone is using marijuana or cocaine.</p>
<p>Drugs, especially hard drugs, are the witch hunt item in Japan. A first time conviction for using marijuana is usually three years in prison. No exceptions. A murder conviction could result in a prison term of about six years.And in Japan it is “normal” for a father or uncle to bath with the children, sometimes children as old as twelve. Some fathers enjoy sharing their futon with a child.</p>
<p>Enough said.</p>
<p>This prompted me to write back to McKinney:</p>
<p>Thanks for this, Robert. Could I quote from it in the CounterPunch Diary next week? Mind you, don’t get carried away by our dissing of Massachusetts to the advantage of other states. [When it comes to “satanaic abuse witch hunts and trials, ] California and other western states [such as Washington, with the Wenatchee trials] have awful records too, though none as bad as Massachusetts, I think. In your last sentence are you implying that these bath and futon-sharing adults abuse the kids they’re with?</p>
<p>Alex, no one in Japan, certainly not the Japanese, can say for certain how often a child is abused while bathing with a parent or another adult relative. But bathing in the Japanese style “ofuro” (a bath about 36″ deep and box shaped) is very different from our western style bath that is more shallow and elongated.</p>
<p>Actually pedophilia is a growing issue in Japan and authorities are beginning to take it more seriously. They are also making a very belated effort to start cracking down on “human trafficking”, but I am not optimistic. The sex industry in Japan is a major source of income for both the underworld and club owners. I’m sure various politicians get their share of the pie and the pick of the stable.</p>
<p>“Enjo Kosai” or compensated dating is another form of prostitution in Japan where junior high school girls as young as thirteen will trade sex favors for cash and expensive gifts. It too is against the law, but the police are lax in enforcing such laws. It was after one of the American weekly news magazines (“Newsweek” I think) did a cover story about “enjo kosai” that Japanese politicians finally took plodding steps to stop this practice.</p>
<p>However even Japanese sociologists and family therapists would be hard pressed to say how widespread child abuse is in Japan, especially since very few Japanese parents or their children would talk about family life outside the privacy of their homes. Whether or not a parent or relative might abuse a child who regularly shares the futon or bath is rarely disclosed in the media. A few years ago a Japanese psychologist, who did graduate studies in America, did complain of one case where a very disturbed father slept with his daughter from the time she was a small child until she reached her teenage years. The mother kept her mouth shut. The psychologist said that he was very disturbed by the apparent widespread abuse in Japan and wanted to raise his own children in America. The case was reported in The Japan Times.</p>
<p>The Japanese love to hear about scandal and crime in America but tend to sweep their own dirt under the carpet. They don’t like to air their dirty laundry in public is a common expatriate observation here in Tokyo. The “Alice Club” magazine is no longer being sold in bookstores, but last summer I did stumble across some kiddie porn in what seemed to be an ordinary bookstore. When I first arrived in Japan some twenty years ago, I was often shocked by the nature of porn seen being read openly on Tokyo subways. Most “gaijin” or foreign residents try to ignore this aspect of daily life in Japan but it ain’t easy since even the local convenience stores like “7-11” and “Family Mart” sell adult pornography very openly. It is a hot item in all convenience stores. No pun intended. Most of this manga might not be sold in stores in the USA since the content might violate local obscenity laws. Just a cultural difference?</p>
<p>In Japan many of the adult comics or “manga” feature pedophilia as part of the drama. Even school girls read these magazines. In today’s edition [June 16] of the Daily Yomiuri there is a short article on page 2 about a Tokyo High Court case that found a “comic book publisher guilty of distributing obscene comic books containing graphic sex scenes in a landmark criminal trial”. These are known even in Japan as “adult” comics and are not to be confused with Batman type comic books. This was the first time in Japan that such porn has been targeted under the Penal Code. So maybe publishers in Japan are finally beginning to realize that public tolerance is changing towards their perverse comic books, which display very graphic sexual violence that even your typical Japanese school girl might read.</p>
<p>But Japan still looks upon pornography and human sexuality in a different manner from the west. One Japanologist from the US once said “that in Japan there is no sin original or otherwise” (when it comes to sex). However, homosexuality is very much in the closet in this nation. There are adult comics that pander to queer themes, but these are called “Lady’s manga” since only the bored housewife might have any interest in such pulp drama. And always the gay characters in the comic are fem high school boys in love with each other. There are a great deal of lesbian portrayals as well, even in the men’s weekly manga. And yes, bondage has always been a popular theme in most manga magazines and in the soft porn video industry.</p>
<p>As you might already know Japan had about 80% of the global kiddie video porn until the US began to pressure the Japanese government to crack down on this illicit trade. At adult porn video shops in Tokyo you can still find child pornography sold openly. It is strange that there is so much pornography displayed on the streets in Tokyo, but then you discover that Japanese are very shy about talking about sex-related topics. Women never talk about sex with men, it is not acceptable. Most high school kids do not date. You can’t get a driver’s license in Japan until you are 18.</p>
<p>There are “love hotels” all over Tokyo that are by design renting rooms by the hour. Young couples enjoy going to these hotels for a bit of privacy since they cannot visit in each other’s home! And homes in Tokyo are very small to begin with.</p>
<p>Check out today’s Daily Yomiuri if you have access.Friday June 17th.</p>
<p>All the best from Tokyo, Robert McKinney</p>
<p>This Just In: Malthus Was Alive and Kicking in 2nd Century AD!</p>
<p>“… we men have actually become a burden to the earth, the fruits of nature hardly suffice to sustain us, there is a general pressure of scarcity giving rise to complaints, since the earth can no longer support us. Need we be astonished that plague and famine, warfare and earthquake come to be regarded as remedies, serving, as it were, to trim and prune the superfluity of population.”</p>
<p>Tertullian, circa 150 AD.</p>
<p>And remember: start clicking now.</p> | true | 4 | google ads ads bottom page readers written saying introduce sordid spirit commercialism site thats whole idea need money look ad make little bit adds right diehard fans sordid commercialism need close eyes think counterpunch jury jury system moment glory jackson acquittal counterpunch editors pointed last week website jury last best bulwark dire straits chief us district court judge william g young boston said american jury system dying dying faster civil cases criminal cases dying faster federal courts state courts dying nonetheless clay conrad one jurys great defenders recently cited judge youngs remark pointed percentage civil cases reaching trial federal courts fallen 11 percent 1962 18 percent 2002 criminal side 15 percent criminal defendants tried 1962 less 5 percent 2002 spite rising numbers defendants absolute number trials 30 percent lower 2002 1962 reasons conrad cites rise settlements summary judgments arbitration alternative forms dispute resolution getting expensive riskier go trial ar institutional changes procedure encourage avoidance corresponding shift ideology judges increasingly view role dispute resolvers rather adjudicators win lose jury trials decline even rest legal system balloons ive said part problem lot liberals arent particularly concerned jury next week well run good piece clay conrad vital issue piece jeffrey st clair stressed point socalled celebrity justice level playing field celebs money afford good lawyers expert witnesses private investigators rebut charges typically turn based shoddy police work lying testimony contrasted trials michael jackson paul shanley former priest convicted boston earlier year prompted jeff morgan write us mayo clinic asking obvious father shanley poorly represented court convicted flimsy evidence recovered memories case surely overturned appeal dont see mention appeal article passed counterpuncher joann wypijewski written extensively shanley case heres forceful answer reason theres appeal yet case reason jeffrey cited piece jackson trial money shanley none none time case tried theres money family contrary belief boston archdiocese contributed nothing defense plus defrocked trial lost small pension benefits receiving held 300000 bail family friends raise largely niece mortgaging home also raise money lawyer told run last summer trial february knowledge fulltime investigator case fact much close analysis mountains depositions taken civil case archdiocese involving claims shanley done shanleys niece free hours squeezed taking care family working full time bostons big dig shanleys lawyer frank mondano kick tremendous mound doubt trial also true shanley deep resources mondano might motivated would full team would put better defense possible recovered memory claim allowed go forward defense could day course shanley quite different position jackson visavis press well legal system plus jackson former employer settle accuser half million pretrial essentially ratifying accusers claim unlike jackson jurors boston jurors bore heavy expectation whole city including perhaps especially catholic church would pronounce guilt done towns press political establishment law enforcement legal establishment church victims lobby mainstream gay community already de facto convicted would taken uncommon courage case one wanted one let pervert go lets forget shanley accuser frequently put confidential correspondence attorney faggot jackson something else freak eccentric star shanley something else well figure state could get whose case statute limitations run could stand priests got away everyone needed shanley go everyone counted jacksons case never attended totalizing certainty hysteria gripping community question apart money grounds appeal people suggest ineffective counsel courts rarely allow grounds appeal unless case extreme patent incompetence doubledealing etc among reasons jails full poor people seems fertile ground would challenge science whole basis recovered memory case laid courts giving recovered memory drubbing past years though massachusetts appeal would require massed legalscientific team ordinarily come cheap might yet come pass shanley biggest names psychmemory arena galvanized case following verdict niece pretty much guides legal decisions still recovering complicated brain surgery underwent immediately trial sex perversion japan tokyo japan come interesting series letters robert mckinney begin commenting lynch mob atmosphere wed noted cnn nnetworks covering jackson trial evoking earlier lynch history mckinney continues apropos mob hysteria aside tokyo terrible earthquake l923 great kanto earthquake 7000 korean residents assortment undesirables lynched matter days disaster rumor korean dogs putting poison drinking water lynching exclusively american tradition live japan everyone jokes trial michaels perversions japanese hypocritical recently acceptable buy child pornography fine upscale bookshop one magazine called alice club actually advertised availability underage child prostitutes police never took notice yes child molestation crime something discourage hysteria japan get much hot bothered someone using marijuana cocaine drugs especially hard drugs witch hunt item japan first time conviction using marijuana usually three years prison exceptions murder conviction could result prison term six yearsand japan normal father uncle bath children sometimes children old twelve fathers enjoy sharing futon child enough said prompted write back mckinney thanks robert could quote counterpunch diary next week mind dont get carried away dissing massachusetts advantage states comes satanaic abuse witch hunts trials california western states washington wenatchee trials awful records though none bad massachusetts think last sentence implying bath futonsharing adults abuse kids theyre alex one japan certainly japanese say certain often child abused bathing parent another adult relative bathing japanese style ofuro bath 36 deep box shaped different western style bath shallow elongated actually pedophilia growing issue japan authorities beginning take seriously also making belated effort start cracking human trafficking optimistic sex industry japan major source income underworld club owners im sure various politicians get share pie pick stable enjo kosai compensated dating another form prostitution japan junior high school girls young thirteen trade sex favors cash expensive gifts law police lax enforcing laws one american weekly news magazines newsweek think cover story enjo kosai japanese politicians finally took plodding steps stop practice however even japanese sociologists family therapists would hard pressed say widespread child abuse japan especially since japanese parents children would talk family life outside privacy homes whether parent relative might abuse child regularly shares futon bath rarely disclosed media years ago japanese psychologist graduate studies america complain one case disturbed father slept daughter time small child reached teenage years mother kept mouth shut psychologist said disturbed apparent widespread abuse japan wanted raise children america case reported japan times japanese love hear scandal crime america tend sweep dirt carpet dont like air dirty laundry public common expatriate observation tokyo alice club magazine longer sold bookstores last summer stumble across kiddie porn seemed ordinary bookstore first arrived japan twenty years ago often shocked nature porn seen read openly tokyo subways gaijin foreign residents try ignore aspect daily life japan aint easy since even local convenience stores like 711 family mart sell adult pornography openly hot item convenience stores pun intended manga might sold stores usa since content might violate local obscenity laws cultural difference japan many adult comics manga feature pedophilia part drama even school girls read magazines todays edition june 16 daily yomiuri short article page 2 tokyo high court case found comic book publisher guilty distributing obscene comic books containing graphic sex scenes landmark criminal trial known even japan adult comics confused batman type comic books first time japan porn targeted penal code maybe publishers japan finally beginning realize public tolerance changing towards perverse comic books display graphic sexual violence even typical japanese school girl might read japan still looks upon pornography human sexuality different manner west one japanologist us said japan sin original otherwise comes sex however homosexuality much closet nation adult comics pander queer themes called ladys manga since bored housewife might interest pulp drama always gay characters comic fem high school boys love great deal lesbian portrayals well even mens weekly manga yes bondage always popular theme manga magazines soft porn video industry might already know japan 80 global kiddie video porn us began pressure japanese government crack illicit trade adult porn video shops tokyo still find child pornography sold openly strange much pornography displayed streets tokyo discover japanese shy talking sexrelated topics women never talk sex men acceptable high school kids date cant get drivers license japan 18 love hotels tokyo design renting rooms hour young couples enjoy going hotels bit privacy since visit others home homes tokyo small begin check todays daily yomiuri accessfriday june 17th best tokyo robert mckinney malthus alive kicking 2nd century ad men actually become burden earth fruits nature hardly suffice sustain us general pressure scarcity giving rise complaints since earth longer support us need astonished plague famine warfare earthquake come regarded remedies serving trim prune superfluity population tertullian circa 150 ad remember start clicking | 1,378 |
<p>This past weekend, President Donald Trump took to a podium in front of dozens of leaders of Muslim-majority countries in Saudi Arabia to discuss their role in the fight against “Islamic Terrorism.” During his visit, we heard a noticeably different tone compared to his previous rhetoric, regarding his administration’s attitude towards the Islamic faith and the relationship it has with the United States. No longer was Trump calling for the ban of all Muslims, but rather, asserting that “this is not a battle between different faiths…” [1].&#160; The entire speech illustrated a new rhetorical approach for the president, who had previously taken to blanket attacks on Muslims and Islam. Trump preached the rhetoric of diversity and respect, stating that “we must practice tolerance and respect for each other once again, and make this region a place where every man and woman, no matter their faith or ethnicity, can enjoy a life of dignity and hope.” But he also embraced paternalistic rhetoric that lectured Muslims about being soft on terrorism, announcing that “Muslim-majority countries must take the lead in combating radicalization” and that “Muslim nations must be willing to take on the burden if we are going to defeat terrorism and send its wicked ideology into oblivion.” Such language reinforces a broader discourse in America that is misinformed about and prejudiced toward the Islamic faith.</p>
<p>Western media have long been an accomplice in purveying Orientalist stereotypes against Muslims. The way in which religion and theology are used to generalize about massive numbers of individuals throughout the world is an enduring concern in modern politics and political discourse. Two of the most prominent targets in Western media include Islam and followers of the Islamic faith. In a recent study of the British media reported on by Aljazeera, imbalanced reporting on Muslims in the media was found to contribute significantly to “hostility” and Islamophobia in western political discourse [2]. Countless other studies have exposed anti-Muslim discourse in the American media as well. These findings are consistent with the theory of Orientalism, pioneered by the famous intellectual and scholar Edward Said. One of the most common associations made in conjunction with Islam in Western culture is to associate it with “terror” or “terrorism.” This conflation of “Islam” with “terror” is an egregious distortion. With the rise of Islamophobia in the west, it begs the question of the precise role of the media, particularly regarding attempts to link Islam and “terror.” &#160;Accompanying the rise in Islamophobia worldwide, associations between “Islam” and “terror” in the media have increased significantly in recent years. In contrast, the use of the term “terror” in relation to other religions, such as Christianity, is far less common, revealing a clear double standard.</p>
<p>To measure Orientalism in American discourse, I analyzed use of the word “terror” in conjunction with Islam over several years. The 2 time frames I examined were the five years from 2000-2005 and the five years from 2012 to 2017. These periods were selected to document the changes in rhetoric over time, at first immediately before and after September 11, and more recently in the early-to-mid 2010s. From 2000 to 2005, CNN produced 73 web reports and 103 transcripts in total including the word “Islamic” within five words of “terror.” In most cases, the two terms appeared side-by-side, in reference to “Islamic terror” and terrorist acts committed by people reported to be followers of the Islamic faith. In comparison, over the last five years (2012-2017), CNN produced 184 web publications and 380 transcripts in total containing “Islamic” and “terror.” This represents a clear increase in journalists’ efforts to link Islam to extremism over time.&#160; For other news outlets, we see a similar trend. From 2000-2005, USA Today produced 26 reports associating Islam with terror, compared to 106 reports from 2012-2017. The Washington Post produced 85 reports from 2000-2005, compared to 116 reports from 2012-2017. All these news outlets demonstrated a similar trend in reporting in terms of their growing reliance on Orientalism.&#160; The only exception was the New York Times. The Times produced 180 reports associating Islam and terror from 2000-2005 compared to only 116 reports in the last five years. Granted, a significant number of these stories were still produced in the last half-decade, but much of the context has also changed. A significant shift in tone is taking place at the “paper of record.” As the most liberal newspaper in America, the Times is apparently becoming more cognizant of the dangers of blanket stereotypes against those of Islamic faith. This awareness is seen, for example, in a recent Times commentary piece by Richard Stengel, the former Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs under Obama. Stengel warns of the backlash against Islamophobic rhetoric. In his piece, “Saying ‘Radical Islamic Terrorism’ Isn’t Enough,” Stengel reflects that “the reason” why the [Obama] administration avoided the term “Islamic terrorism” was practically driven; it was an effort to avoid alienating an entire region of people based on the actions of the few [3]. The findings from the New York Times do raise questions about how uniform Orientalism is in the news. Still, the decline in such rhetoric in a single paper does not negate the larger Orientalist trend in the U.S. media.</p>
<p>I also examined how often the words “Islamic” and “Terror” were used in comparison to “Christian” and “Terror.” Over the last year, the New York Times produced 28 articles associating “Islamic” with “terror.” USA Today produced 52 stories, the Washington Post produced 24, and Fox News produced 33. Such language was common across all news outlets in question. Interestingly enough, the words “Christian” and “terror” appeared not a single time in the New York Times and USA Today, only once in the Washington Post, and just four times on Fox News. Upon closer inspection, the single article in the Washington Post did not involve condemning any “Christian” acts of “terror” at all. In fact, the only time the association appeared was in a line describing “Christians fleeing war and terror.” A similar trend was at work in the Fox News articles as well. Using more specific terms to measure media content yields comparable results in terms of documenting the imbalance in how Islam and Christianity are portrayed in the news. Looking at the terms “Islamic terror” and “Christian terror” over the last five years, I find that “Islamic terror” appeared in 29 New York Times publications, 22 Washington Post pieces, and 16 articles in USA Today. As expected, both the Washington Post and USA Today published no stories with the term “Christian terror” while the New York Times published only one.</p>
<p>Contrary to Orientalist stereotypes, there is no shortage of terrorist crimes committed by Christian perpetrators. Many mass shootings are committed by Christians, despite the media’s efforts to play down the Christian identity of the assailants. The Charleston Church shooter in 2016 is just one of the most recent examples. Despite these attacks, there is a persistent reluctance in the media to label crimes committed by Christians as acts of terror. But for acts of violence undertaken by Islamic perpetrators, such as the recent bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, or the San Bernardino shootings (2016), the media do not hesitate to link Islam with extremism.</p>
<p>Reactionaries and Islamophobes would respond to these findings by arguing that Islamic terror is referenced more often because it is a larger threat than Christian terrorism. But this claim is difficult to take seriously considering that religious violence and terror come in many different forms. One need look no further than George W. Bush, who believed he was on holy mission from God to fight the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. As Bush boasted to a Palestinian delegation four months after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, “God told me to end the tyranny in Iraq.” But in addition to the complete destruction of Iraq, various estimates suggest that the death toll from the war was in the hundreds of thousands, if not more than a million, by the time the U.S. withdrew in 2011. Such devastation is a reminder that Muslims hold no monopoly over violent religious extremism.</p>
<p>It seems likely that the rising association of Islam and terror in western rhetoric and media is contributing to a global rise in islamophobia. This trend is alarming. It shows how effective propaganda and the rhetoric of hatred are in poisoning public discourse. The rhetoric of “they are outsiders” is perpetuated by politicians to advance their own agendas. And this propaganda begins to influence the thoughts of mass publics. With Trump’s recent visit to Saudi Arabia, we can be sure that Orientalism is alive and well in western political discourse.</p>
<p>Notes.</p>
<p>[1] Donald J. Trump, “ <a href="" type="internal">Transcript of Trump’s Speech in Saudi Arabia,</a>” CNN, May 21, 2017,</p>
<p>[2] Anealla Safdar, “ <a href="" type="internal">U.K.: Poor Reporting, Media Illiteracy Fuel Islamophobia</a>,” Aljazeera English, March 29, 2016,</p>
<p>[3] Richard Stengel, “ <a href="" type="internal">Why Saying ‘Radical Islamic Terrorism’ Isn’t Enough</a>,” New York Times, February 13, 2017,</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | true | 4 | past weekend president donald trump took podium front dozens leaders muslimmajority countries saudi arabia discuss role fight islamic terrorism visit heard noticeably different tone compared previous rhetoric regarding administrations attitude towards islamic faith relationship united states longer trump calling ban muslims rather asserting battle different faiths 1160 entire speech illustrated new rhetorical approach president previously taken blanket attacks muslims islam trump preached rhetoric diversity respect stating must practice tolerance respect make region place every man woman matter faith ethnicity enjoy life dignity hope also embraced paternalistic rhetoric lectured muslims soft terrorism announcing muslimmajority countries must take lead combating radicalization muslim nations must willing take burden going defeat terrorism send wicked ideology oblivion language reinforces broader discourse america misinformed prejudiced toward islamic faith western media long accomplice purveying orientalist stereotypes muslims way religion theology used generalize massive numbers individuals throughout world enduring concern modern politics political discourse two prominent targets western media include islam followers islamic faith recent study british media reported aljazeera imbalanced reporting muslims media found contribute significantly hostility islamophobia western political discourse 2 countless studies exposed antimuslim discourse american media well findings consistent theory orientalism pioneered famous intellectual scholar edward said one common associations made conjunction islam western culture associate terror terrorism conflation islam terror egregious distortion rise islamophobia west begs question precise role media particularly regarding attempts link islam terror 160accompanying rise islamophobia worldwide associations islam terror media increased significantly recent years contrast use term terror relation religions christianity far less common revealing clear double standard measure orientalism american discourse analyzed use word terror conjunction islam several years 2 time frames examined five years 20002005 five years 2012 2017 periods selected document changes rhetoric time first immediately september 11 recently earlytomid 2010s 2000 2005 cnn produced 73 web reports 103 transcripts total including word islamic within five words terror cases two terms appeared sidebyside reference islamic terror terrorist acts committed people reported followers islamic faith comparison last five years 20122017 cnn produced 184 web publications 380 transcripts total containing islamic terror represents clear increase journalists efforts link islam extremism time160 news outlets see similar trend 20002005 usa today produced 26 reports associating islam terror compared 106 reports 20122017 washington post produced 85 reports 20002005 compared 116 reports 20122017 news outlets demonstrated similar trend reporting terms growing reliance orientalism160 exception new york times times produced 180 reports associating islam terror 20002005 compared 116 reports last five years granted significant number stories still produced last halfdecade much context also changed significant shift tone taking place paper record liberal newspaper america times apparently becoming cognizant dangers blanket stereotypes islamic faith awareness seen example recent times commentary piece richard stengel former secretary state public diplomacy public affairs obama stengel warns backlash islamophobic rhetoric piece saying radical islamic terrorism isnt enough stengel reflects reason obama administration avoided term islamic terrorism practically driven effort avoid alienating entire region people based actions 3 findings new york times raise questions uniform orientalism news still decline rhetoric single paper negate larger orientalist trend us media also examined often words islamic terror used comparison christian terror last year new york times produced 28 articles associating islamic terror usa today produced 52 stories washington post produced 24 fox news produced 33 language common across news outlets question interestingly enough words christian terror appeared single time new york times usa today washington post four times fox news upon closer inspection single article washington post involve condemning christian acts terror fact time association appeared line describing christians fleeing war terror similar trend work fox news articles well using specific terms measure media content yields comparable results terms documenting imbalance islam christianity portrayed news looking terms islamic terror christian terror last five years find islamic terror appeared 29 new york times publications 22 washington post pieces 16 articles usa today expected washington post usa today published stories term christian terror new york times published one contrary orientalist stereotypes shortage terrorist crimes committed christian perpetrators many mass shootings committed christians despite medias efforts play christian identity assailants charleston church shooter 2016 one recent examples despite attacks persistent reluctance media label crimes committed christians acts terror acts violence undertaken islamic perpetrators recent bombing ariana grande concert manchester san bernardino shootings 2016 media hesitate link islam extremism reactionaries islamophobes would respond findings arguing islamic terror referenced often larger threat christian terrorism claim difficult take seriously considering religious violence terror come many different forms one need look george w bush believed holy mission god fight iraq afghanistan wars bush boasted palestinian delegation four months march 2003 invasion iraq god told end tyranny iraq addition complete destruction iraq various estimates suggest death toll war hundreds thousands million time us withdrew 2011 devastation reminder muslims hold monopoly violent religious extremism seems likely rising association islam terror western rhetoric media contributing global rise islamophobia trend alarming shows effective propaganda rhetoric hatred poisoning public discourse rhetoric outsiders perpetuated politicians advance agendas propaganda begins influence thoughts mass publics trumps recent visit saudi arabia sure orientalism alive well western political discourse notes 1 donald j trump transcript trumps speech saudi arabia cnn may 21 2017 2 anealla safdar uk poor reporting media illiteracy fuel islamophobia aljazeera english march 29 2016 3 richard stengel saying radical islamic terrorism isnt enough new york times february 13 2017 160 | 875 |
<p>An alt-right internet meme.</p>
<p>What does alt-right mean? Literally, it means an alternative version of right-wing politics; can’t get blander than that. The movement doesn’t deserve such a neutral description.So should we call it a Nazi, fascist or extreme faction of the GOP? That may feel right and there’s nothing wrong with calling a spade a spade. Still I don’t think that nails it, and it’s not a strategically smart choice. Breitbart fans like it when we call it that. Name calling is useful but only when it lands and sticks, a bullseye at the target.</p>
<p>Breitbart, however fascist or Nazi, is not really about politics, morals, principles or beliefs. It’s about the fun of being naughty, the kind of puerile fun little bullies have. Our indignation at their naughtiness fills them with “we glee,” the glee of being part of their naughty little gang.</p>
<p>My guess is we should call them the brat-right and bratbart news.&#160;</p>
<p>Linguist and political analyst Geoffrey Nunberg <a href="//people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~nunberg/coulter.html" type="external">nails a point</a> that’s often overlooked by those I call the left’s “backfirebrands”—the leftist firebrands whose understandably passionate indignation backfires. This is from Nunberg’s Fresh Air commentary in 2006 about Ann Coulter’s comment that 9/11 widows were enjoying their husband’s deaths.</p>
<p>Coulter's celebrity is a good measure of what has become of political discussion. You'd scarcely describe her as a political thinker, no more than you'd describe Simon Cowell as a critic of the arts. But like Cowell, she has an unerring gift for media theatrics. It isn't just her penchant for making snarky or outrageous remarks. Plenty of people do that without being invited onto the Today Show, and in fact Coulter doesn't get a lot of national attention for her run-of-the-mill ruminations about giving rat poison to Justice Stevens or fragging John Murtha. But the remark about the 9/11 widows was irresistible for its brazen tastelessness and the obvious pleasure Coulter took in the consternation she created.</p>
<p>Is Coulter sincere about the things she says? That's a silly question, like asking whether schoolchildren are sincere in the taunts they throw at each other across the school yard. But that doesn't make her a satirist, as her defenders like to claim, usually with the implication that her literal-minded liberal critics don't get the joke.</p>
<p>It’s a formula: Say outrageously heartless things with the gleeful attitude that you’re “telling it like it is.” Don’t worry if you don’t mean what you say or haven’t even thought about whether you do. The point is to entertain enough to gain audience.</p>
<p>Audience will come for the entertainment but stay for the smugness. They won’t know that’s why they stayed. They’ll say “I thought it was entertaining but the more I listened to it, the more I realized that it what they were speaking truth.” They think they were drawn in by the content, but they may not have thought about the content any more than Coulter thinks about it. The audience really stays because they learned a new formula for feeling invincible. That’s what Coulter, Limbaugh, Trump and Bratbart really sell.</p>
<p>It’s a simple formula. Any idiot can use it:</p>
<p>The know-it-all formula is a drug. You come for the high; you stay for the addiction. The drug is deliverable wrapped in beliefs of any stripe. You can buy the drug from self-help, spiritual or religious gurus, from pundits on the right and on the left. The beliefs on the right happen to be a perfect wrapper for the drug since the right prides itself on faith in moral absolutism. But there are plenty of people on the right who aren’t addicted to the drug.</p>
<p>Many of us were addicted to the know-it-all formula in our teens or earlier as elementary school bullies back when we had little impulse control and little conscience, guilt or critical thinking skills that would make us nauseous when we used the drug. When conscience, guilt and critical thinking eventually kicked in, many of us kicked the habit. We sobered up out of childish self-certainty.</p>
<p>Some never kicked it. Some kicked it but returned to it as adults when life got too uncertain. Trump may have won because white middle-class Midwesterners feel trapped, frustrated and alienated. That’s true, but an incomplete account without noticing their solution. They bought the drug. For them, expedient self-certainty trumped thought.Trump is the most successful drug-pusher of our age. Bannon is his enabler. He’s been made head of strategy as his reward for goading Trump to push the drug harder instead of softening toward electable sobriety. Bannon said in effect, When you’re in a hole, keep digging, and helped with the shoveling.Our best strategy is to focus on their addiction to the bratty know-it-all formula. Bratbart supporters think they’re rebels with a cause but their cause isn’t the cause of their rebellion. The cause is the self-satisfaction of giving offense and dismissing the offense taken by others as a result, feeling like they’re standing up for what’s true, even though they’ve given what’s true as little thought as possible.The know-it-all formula is the shortest, cheapest path to feeling like the expert, much shorter than actually gaining any expertise. It winds people up like a watch’s self-winding movement. No matter how the addict is shaken, their confidence gets wound up tighter and tighter. If people agree with them, it confirms them. If people disagree with them, it confirms them. They’re like drug addicts who take interventions as evidence that they should double down on their addiction. That’s why it’s useless or counterproductive to call them fascists. It’s not just that they have no shame, they take pride in having no shame. It’s all part of the know-it-all game. &#160;</p>
<p>Recognizing and understanding the know-it-all formula puts the right’s attacks on “Political correctness” in context. What is it really? I’d define “political correctness as taking offense not because you’re really offended but because it’s fun to act offended. And “political incorrectness” is the reverse—giving offense not because the situation demands it, but because it’s naughty fun, an indulgence.</p>
<p>Among the rhetorical tricks for saying “I know you are but what am I,” one of the easiest is ambiguous name-calling you apply to others and not yourself. Political correctness is just that, an accusation that the right levels exclusively at the left. How is #boycottHamilton not an example of political correctness, taking easy, proud, indulgent offense? The left has had its share of indulgent punks over the decades, folks who gave offense for the glee of it like little brats. These days, the right is out-punking the leftist punks. Bratbart is just that. Punks without a cause pretending they have the cause that trumps reason once and for all.</p>
<p>Yes, what they’re doing is dangerous. Brats can gain enough power that you can no longer afford to call them brats. But we’re not there yet and to keep from getting there we’re best calling them names that are more likely to land and stick, getting them where they live, in their little fantasy of superiority, infallibility and invincibility.</p>
<p>What advice would you give other teachers considering a strike?</p> | true | 4 | altright internet meme altright mean literally means alternative version rightwing politics cant get blander movement doesnt deserve neutral descriptionso call nazi fascist extreme faction gop may feel right theres nothing wrong calling spade spade still dont think nails strategically smart choice breitbart fans like call name calling useful lands sticks bullseye target breitbart however fascist nazi really politics morals principles beliefs fun naughty kind puerile fun little bullies indignation naughtiness fills glee glee part naughty little gang guess call bratright bratbart news160 linguist political analyst geoffrey nunberg nails point thats often overlooked call lefts backfirebrandsthe leftist firebrands whose understandably passionate indignation backfires nunbergs fresh air commentary 2006 ann coulters comment 911 widows enjoying husbands deaths coulters celebrity good measure become political discussion youd scarcely describe political thinker youd describe simon cowell critic arts like cowell unerring gift media theatrics isnt penchant making snarky outrageous remarks plenty people without invited onto today show fact coulter doesnt get lot national attention runofthemill ruminations giving rat poison justice stevens fragging john murtha remark 911 widows irresistible brazen tastelessness obvious pleasure coulter took consternation created coulter sincere things says thats silly question like asking whether schoolchildren sincere taunts throw across school yard doesnt make satirist defenders like claim usually implication literalminded liberal critics dont get joke formula say outrageously heartless things gleeful attitude youre telling like dont worry dont mean say havent even thought whether point entertain enough gain audience audience come entertainment stay smugness wont know thats stayed theyll say thought entertaining listened realized speaking truth think drawn content may thought content coulter thinks audience really stays learned new formula feeling invincible thats coulter limbaugh trump bratbart really sell simple formula idiot use knowitall formula drug come high stay addiction drug deliverable wrapped beliefs stripe buy drug selfhelp spiritual religious gurus pundits right left beliefs right happen perfect wrapper drug since right prides faith moral absolutism plenty people right arent addicted drug many us addicted knowitall formula teens earlier elementary school bullies back little impulse control little conscience guilt critical thinking skills would make us nauseous used drug conscience guilt critical thinking eventually kicked many us kicked habit sobered childish selfcertainty never kicked kicked returned adults life got uncertain trump may white middleclass midwesterners feel trapped frustrated alienated thats true incomplete account without noticing solution bought drug expedient selfcertainty trumped thoughttrump successful drugpusher age bannon enabler hes made head strategy reward goading trump push drug harder instead softening toward electable sobriety bannon said effect youre hole keep digging helped shovelingour best strategy focus addiction bratty knowitall formula bratbart supporters think theyre rebels cause cause isnt cause rebellion cause selfsatisfaction giving offense dismissing offense taken others result feeling like theyre standing whats true even though theyve given whats true little thought possiblethe knowitall formula shortest cheapest path feeling like expert much shorter actually gaining expertise winds people like watchs selfwinding movement matter addict shaken confidence gets wound tighter tighter people agree confirms people disagree confirms theyre like drug addicts take interventions evidence double addiction thats useless counterproductive call fascists shame take pride shame part knowitall game 160 recognizing understanding knowitall formula puts rights attacks political correctness context really id define political correctness taking offense youre really offended fun act offended political incorrectness reversegiving offense situation demands naughty fun indulgence among rhetorical tricks saying know one easiest ambiguous namecalling apply others political correctness accusation right levels exclusively left boycotthamilton example political correctness taking easy proud indulgent offense left share indulgent punks decades folks gave offense glee like little brats days right outpunking leftist punks bratbart punks without cause pretending cause trumps reason yes theyre dangerous brats gain enough power longer afford call brats yet keep getting best calling names likely land stick getting live little fantasy superiority infallibility invincibility advice would give teachers considering strike | 630 |
<p>An Iraq war protest, March 2003.&lt;a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/malcubed/10530958/sizes/l/in/photostream/"&gt;Mal Cubed&lt;/a&gt;/Flickr</p>
<p>This <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175701/" type="external">story</a> first appeared on the <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/" type="external">TomDispatch</a> website.</p>
<p>Ten years ago, my part of the world was full of valiant opposition to the new wars being launched far away and at home—and of despair. And like despairing people everywhere, whether in a personal depression or a political tailspin, these activists believed the future would look more or less like the present. If there was nothing else they were confident about, at least they were confident about that. Ten years ago, as a contrarian and a person who prefers not to see others suffer, I tried to undermine despair with the case for hope.</p>
<p>A decade later, the present is still contaminated by the crimes of that era, but so much has changed. Not necessarily for the better—a decade ago, most spoke of climate change as a distant problem, and then it caught up with us in 10,000 ways. But not entirely for the worse either—the vigorous climate movement we needed arose in that decade and is growing now. If there is one thing we can draw from where we are now and where we were then, it’s that the unimaginable is ordinary, and the way forward is almost never a straight path you can glance down, but a labyrinth of surprises, gifts, and afflictions you prepare for by accepting your blind spots as well as your intuitions.</p>
<p>The despairing of May 2003 were convinced of one true thing, that we had not <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ysva-csAg8A" type="external">stopped</a> the invasion of Iraq, but they extrapolated from that a series of false assumptions about our failures and our powerlessness across time and space. They assumed—like the neoconservatives themselves—that those neocons would be atop the world for a long time to come. Instead, the neocon and <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/04/22/four-signs-neoliberalism-is-almost-dead/neoliberal" type="external">neoliberal ideologies</a> have been widely reviled and renounced around the world; the Republicans’ <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/03/19/1195227/-The-GOP-s-admitted-demographic-problem" type="external">demographic hemorrhage</a> has weakened them in this country; the failures of their wars are evident to everyone; and though they still grasp fearsome power, everything has indeed changed. Everything changes: there lies most of our hope and some of our fear.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com" type="external" /></p>
<p>I’ve seen extraordinary change in my lifetime, some of it in the last decade. I was born in a country that had been galvanized and unsettled by the civil rights movement, but still lacked a meaningful <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/magazine/how-silent-spring-ignited-the-environmental-movement.html" type="external">environmental movement</a>, women’s movement, or queer rights movement (beyond a couple of <a href="http://web-static.nypl.org/exhibitions/1969/daughters.html" type="external">small organizations</a> founded in California in the 1950s). Half a century ago, to be gay or lesbian was to live in hiding or be treated as mentally ill or criminal. That <a href="http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/05/14/18257967-minnesota-now-12th-state-to-approve-gay-marriage?lite" type="external">12 states</a> and several countries would legalize <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/SAME-SEX-MARRIAGE-TIMELINE-3214219.php" type="external">same-sex marriage</a> was beyond imaginable then. It wasn’t even on the table in 2003. San Francisco’s spring run of same-sex weddings in 2004 flung open the doors through which so many have passed since.</p>
<p>If you take the long view, you’ll see how startlingly, how unexpectedly but regularly things change. Not by magic, but by the incremental effect of countless acts of courage, love, and commitment, the small drops that wear away stones and carve new landscapes, and sometimes by torrents of popular will that change the world suddenly. To say that is not to say that it will all come out fine in the end regardless. I’m just telling you that everything is in motion, and sometimes we are ourselves that movement.</p>
<p>Unstoppabilities</p>
<p>Hope and history are sisters: one looks forward and one looks back, and they make the world spacious enough to move through freely. Obliviousness to the past and to the mutability of all things imprisons you in a shrunken present. Hopelessness often comes out of that amnesia, out of forgetting that everything is in motion, everything changes. We have a great deal of history of defeat, suffering, cruelty, and loss, and everyone should know it. But that’s not all we have.</p>
<p>There’s the <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/174913/tomgram%3A_howard_zinn%2C_the_end_of_empire" type="external">people’s history</a>, the <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/1691/counter-history" type="external">counterhistory</a> that you didn’t necessarily get in school and don’t usually get on the news: the history of the battles we’ve won, of the rights we’ve gained, of the differences between then and now that those who live in forgetfulness lack. This is often the history of how individuals came together to produce that behemoth civil society, which stands astride nations and topples regimes—and mostly does it without weapons or armies. It’s a history that undermines most of what you’ve been told about authority and violence and your own powerlessness.</p>
<p>Civil society is our power, our joy, and our possibility, and it has written a lot of the history in the last few years, as well as the last half century. If you doubt our power, see how it terrifies those at the top, and remember that they fight it best by convincing us it doesn’t exist. It does exist, though, like lava beneath the earth, and when it erupts, the surface of the earth is remade.</p>
<p>Things change. And people sometimes have the power to make that happen, if and when they come together and act (and occasionally act alone, as did writers Rachel Carson and Harriet Beecher Stowe—or <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/20/tunisian-fruit-seller-mohammed-bouazizi" type="external">Mohammed Bouazizi</a>, the young man whose suicide triggered the Arab Spring).</p>
<p>If you fix your eye on where we started out, you’ll see that we’ve come a long way by those means. If you look forward, you’ll see that we have a long way to go—and that sometimes we go backward when we forget that we fought for the <a href="http://www.pbs.org/livelyhood/workday/weekend/studsterkel.html" type="external">eight-hour workday</a> or <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/22/texas-explosion-workplace-safety-cuts" type="external">workplace safety</a> or women’s rights or voting rights or affordable education, forget that we won them, that they’re precious, and that we can lose them again. There’s much to be proud of, there’s much to mourn, there’s much yet to do, and the job of doing it is ours, a heavy gift to carry. And it’s made to be carried, by people who are unstoppable, who are movements, who are change itself.</p>
<p>Too Soon to Tell</p>
<p>Ten years ago I began writing about hope and speaking about it. My online essay “ <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/677/" type="external">Acts of Hope</a>,” posted on May 19, 2003, was my first encounter with Tomdispatch.com, which would change my work and my life. It gave me room for another kind of voice and another kind of writing. It showed me how the Internet could give wings to words. What I wrote then and subsequently for the site spread around the world in remarkable ways, putting me in touch with people and movements, and deeper into conversations about the possible and the impossible (and into a cherished friendship with the site’s founder and editor, Tom Engelhardt).</p>
<p>For a few years, I spoke about hope around this country and in Europe. I repeatedly ran into comfortably situated people who were hostile to the idea of hope: they thought that hope somehow betrayed the desperate and downtrodden, as if the desperate wanted the solidarity of misery from the privileged, rather than action. Hopelessness for people in extreme situations means resignation to one’s own deprivation or destruction. Hope can be a survival strategy. For comfortably situated people, hopelessness means cynicism and letting oneself off the hook. If everything is doomed, then nothing is required (and vice versa).</p>
<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1560258284/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20" type="external" />Despair is often premature: it’s a form of impatience as well as certainty. My favorite comment about political change comes from Zhou En-Lai, the premier of the People’s Republic of China under Chairman Mao. Asked in the early 1970s about his opinion of the French Revolution, he reportedly answered, “Too soon to tell.” Some say that he was talking about the <a href="http://mediamythalert.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/too-early-to-say-zhou-was-speaking-about-1968-not-1789/" type="external">revolutions of 1968</a>, not 1789, but even then it provides a generous and expansive perspective. To hold onto uncertainty and possibility and a sense that even four years later, no less nearly two centuries after the fact, the verdict still isn’t in is more than most people I know are prepared to offer. A lot of them will hardly give an event a month to complete its effects, and many movements and endeavors are ruled failures well before they’re over.</p>
<p>Not long ago, I ran into a guy who’d been involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement, that great upwelling in southern Manhattan in the fall of 2011 that catalyzed a global conversation and a series of actions and occupations nationwide and globally. He offered a tailspin of a description of how Occupy was over and had failed.</p>
<p>But I wonder: How could he possibly know? It really is too soon to tell. First of all, maybe the kid who will lead the movement that will save the world was catalyzed by what she lived through or stumbled upon in Occupy Fresno or Occupy Memphis, and we won’t reap what she sows until 2023 or 2043. Maybe the seeds of something more were sown, as they were in Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring of 1968 and Charter 77, for the great and unforeseen harvest that was the <a href="http://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/index.php/movements-and-campaigns/movements-and-campaigns-summaries?sobi2Task=sobi2Details&amp;sobi2Id=18" type="external">Velvet Revolution of 1989</a>, the nonviolent overthrow of the Soviet totalitarian state in that country.</p>
<p>Second, Occupy began to say what needed to be said about greed and capitalism, exposing a brutality that had long been hushed up, revealing both the victims of debt and the rigged economy that created it. This country changed because those things were said out loud. I can’t say exactly how, but I know it mattered. So much that matters is immeasurable, unquantifiable, and beyond price. Laws around banking, foreclosure, and student loans are changing—not enough, not everywhere, but some people will benefit, and they matter. Occupy didn’t cause those changes directly, but it did much to make the voice of the people audible and the sheer wrongness of our debt system visible—and gave momentum to the ongoing endeavors to overturn Citizens United and abolish corporate personhood.</p>
<p>Third, I only know a little of what the thousands of local gatherings and networks we mean by “Occupy” are now doing, but I know that Occupy Sandy is still doing vital work in the destruction zone of that hurricane and was about the best grassroots disaster relief endeavor this nation has ever seen. I know that <a href="http://strikedebt.org" type="external">Strike Debt</a>, a direct offshoot of Occupy Wall Street, has relieved <a href="http://www.courier-journal.com/usatoday/article/2151479" type="external">millions of dollars</a> in medical debt, not with the sense that we can fix all debt this way, but that we can demonstrate the malleability, the artifice, and the immorality of the student, medical, and housing debt that is destroying so many lives. I know that the Occupy Homes foreclosure defenders have been doing amazing things, often one home at a time, from Atlanta to Minneapolis. (Last Friday, Occupy Our Homes organized a “showdown at the Department of Justice” in Washington, D.C.; that Saturday, Strike Debt Bay Area held their second Debtors’ Assembly: undead from coast to coast.)</p>
<p>Fourth, I know people personally whose lives were changed, and who are doing work they never imagined they would be involved in, and I’m friends with remarkable people who, but for Occupy, I would not know existed. People connected across class, racial, and cultural lines in the flowering of that movement. Like Freedom Summer, whose consequences were to be felt so far beyond Mississippi in 1964, this will have reach beyond the moment in which I write and you read.</p>
<p>Finally, there was great joy at the time , the joy of liberation and of solidarity, and joy is worth something in itself. In a sense, it’s worth everything, even if it’s always fleeting, though not always as scarce as we imagine.</p>
<p>Climates of Hope and Fear</p>
<p>I had lunch with Middle East and nonviolence scholar <a href="http://stephenzunes.org" type="external">Stephen Zunes</a> the other day and asked him what he would say about the Arab Spring now. He had, he told me, been in Egypt several months ago watching television with an activist. Formerly, the news was always about what the leaders did, decided, ordained, inflicted. But the news they were watching was surprisingly focused on civil society, on what ordinary people initiated or resisted, on how they responded, what they thought. He spoke of how so many in the Middle East had lost their fatalism and sense of powerlessness and awoken to their own collective power.</p>
<p>This civil society remains awake in Egypt and the other countries. What will it achieve? Maybe it’s too soon to tell. Syria is a turbulent version of hell now, but it could be leaving the dynasty of the Assads in the past; its future remains to be written. Perhaps its people will indeed write the next chapter in its story, and not only with explosives.</p>
<p>You can tell the arc of the past few years as, first, the Arab Spring, then extraordinary civil society actions in Chile, Quebec, Spain, and elsewhere, followed by Occupy. But don’t stop there.</p>
<p>After Occupy came <a href="http://idlenomore.ca" type="external">Idle No More</a>, the Canada-based explosion of indigenous power and resistance (to a Canadian government that has <a href="http://e360.yale.edu/feature/oh_canada_the_governments_broad_assault_on_environment/2548/" type="external">gone over</a> to the far right and to environmental destruction on a grand scale). It was founded by <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/sarah-van-gelder/idle-no-more-founders_b_2708644.html" type="external">four women</a> in November of 2012 and it’s spread across North America, sparking new environmental actions and new coalitions around environmental and climate issues, with flash-mob-style powwows in shopping malls and other places, with a thousand-mile walk (and snowshoe) by seven Cree youth this winter. (There were 400 people with them by the time they <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/story/2013/03/25/ottawa-walk-nishiyuu-journey-ends-ottawa-parliament-victoria.html" type="external">arrived</a> at Canada’s Parliament in Ottawa.)</p>
<p>Idle No More activists have vowed to block the construction of any pipeline that tries to transport the particularly dirty crude oil from the Alberta tar sands, whether it heads north, east, or <a href="http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/201305/grapple-tar-sands-first-nations-northern-gateway-pipeline.aspx" type="external">west</a> from northern Alberta. Each of those directions takes it over native land. This is part of the reason why tar sands supporters are pushing so hard to build the <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175648/michael_klare_keystoneXL_pipeline" type="external">Keystone XL pipeline</a> from Alberta to the US Gulf Coast.</p>
<p>Thankfully, the push back is also strong. Our fate may depend on it. As climate scientist James Hansen <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/opinion/game-over-for-the-climate.html" type="external">wrote</a> a year ago, “Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas, and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now.”</p>
<p>The news just came in that we reached <a href="http://400.350.org/#2" type="external">400 parts per million</a> of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, the <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/global-carbon-dioxide-levels-near-worrisome-milestone-1.12900" type="external">highest level</a> in more than five million years. This is terrible news on a scale that eclipses everything else, because it encompasses everything else. We are wrecking our world, for everyone for all time, or at least the next several thousand years. But “we” is a tricky word here. Some of the people I most love and admire are doing extraordinary things to save the world, for you, for us, for generations unborn, for species yet to be named, for the oceans and sub-Saharan Africans and Arctic dwellers and everyone in-between, for the whole unbearably beautiful symphony of life on Earth that is imperiled.</p>
<p>Part of what sustains me in the face of this potential cataclysm is remembering that, in 2003, there hardly was a climate movement. It was small, polite, mostly believed the troubles were decades away, and was populated with people who thought that lifestyle changes could save the planet—rather than that you have to get out there and fight the power. And they were the good ones. Too many of us didn’t think about it at all.</p>
<p>Only a few years later, things have changed. There’s a vibrant climate movement in North America. If you haven’t quite taken that in, it might be because it’s working on so many disparate fronts that are often treated separately: mountaintop coal removal, <a href="http://content.sierraclub.org/coal/" type="external">coal-fired power plants</a> (closing 145 existing ones to date and preventing more than 150 planned ones from opening), fracking, oil exploration in the Arctic, the Tar Sands pipeline, and 350.org’s juggernaut of a <a href="http://gofossilfree.org" type="external">campus campaign</a> to promote disinvestment from oil, gas, and coal companies. Only started in November 2012, there are already divestment movements underway on more than 380 college and university campuses, and now cities are getting on board. It has significant victories; it will have more.</p>
<p>Some countries—notably Germany, with Denmark not far behind—have done remarkable things when it comes to promoting non-fossil-fuel renewable energy. Copenhagen, for example, in the cold gray north, is on track to become a <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/apr/12/copenhagen-push-carbon-neutral-2025" type="external">carbon-neutral city</a> by 2025 (and in the meantime reduced its carbon emissions 25% between 2005 and 2011). The United States has a host of promising smaller projects. To offer just two examples, <a href="http://www.kcet.org/news/rewire/utilities/its-official-los-angeles-coal-free-by-2025.html" type="external">Los Angeles</a> has committed to being coal-free by 2025, while San Francisco will offer its citizens electricity from 100% renewable and carbon-neutral sources and its supervisors just <a href="http://350.org/en/about/blogs/san-francisco-board-supervisors-unanimously-pass-resolution-urging-fossil-fuel" type="external">voted</a> to divest the city’s fossil-fuel stocks.</p>
<p>There are so many pieces of the potential solution to this puzzle, and some of them are for you to put together. Whether they will multiply or ever add up to enough we don’t yet know. We need more: more people, more transformations, more ways to conquer and dismantle the oil companies, more of a vision of what is at stake, more of the great force that is civil society. Will we get it? I don’t know. Neither do you. Anything could happen.</p>
<p>But here’s what I’m saying: you should wake up amazed every day of your life, because if I had told you in 1988 that, within three years, the Soviet satellite states would liberate themselves nonviolently and the Soviet Union would cease to exist, you would have thought I was crazy. If I had told you in 1990 that South America was <a href="http://www.revolutionbythebook.akpress.org/water-wars-climate-wars-and-change-from-below-david-solnit-reports-back-on-bolivia/%20" type="external">on its way</a>to liberating itself and becoming a continent of progressive and democratic experiments, you would have considered me delusional. If, in November 2010, I had told you that, within months, the autocrat Hosni Mubarak, who had dominated Egypt since 1981, would be overthrown by 18 days of popular uprisings, or that the dictators of <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175455/" type="external">Tunisia</a> and Libya would be ousted, all in the same year, you would have institutionalized me. If I told you on September 16, 2011, that a bunch of kids <a href="http://billmoyers.com/content/arun-gupta-and-marina-sitrin-on-occupys-anniversary/" type="external">sitting in a park</a> in lower Manhattan would rock the country, you’d say I was beyond delusional. You would have, if you believed as the despairing do, that the future is invariably going to look like the present, only more so. It won’t.</p>
<p>I still value hope, but I see it as only part of what’s required, a starting point. Think of it as the match but not the tinder or the blaze. To matter, to change the world, you also need devotion and will and you need to act. Hope is only where it begins, though I’ve also seen people toil on without regard to hope, to what they believe is possible. They live on principle and they gamble, and sometimes they even win, or sometimes the goal they were aiming for is reached long after their deaths. Still, it’s action that gets you there. When what was once hoped for is realized, it falls into the background, becomes the new normal; and we hope for or carp about something else.</p>
<p>The future is bigger than our imaginations. It’s unimaginable, and then it comes anyway. To meet it we need to keep going, to walk past what we can imagine. We need to be unstoppable. And here’s what it takes: you don’t stop walking to congratulate yourself; you don’t stop walking to wallow in despair; you don’t stop because your own life got too comfortable or too rough; you don’t stop because you won; you don’t stop because you lost. There’s more to win, more to lose, others who need you.</p>
<p>You don’t stop walking because there is no way forward. Of course there is no way. You walk the path into being, you make the way, and if you do it well, others can follow the route. You look backward to grasp the long history you’re moving forward from, the paths others have made, the road you came in on. You look forward to possibility. That’s what we mean by hope, and you look past it into the impossible and that doesn’t stop you either. But mostly you just walk, right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot. That’s what makes you unstoppable.</p>
<p>Rebecca Solnit’s first essay for Tomdispatch.com turned into the book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1560258284/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20" type="external">Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities</a>, since translated into eight languages. Portions of this essay began life as the keynote speech at the National Lawyers’ Guild gala in honor of attorney and human rights activist Walter Riley, whose own life is a beautiful example of unstoppability. Solnit’s latest book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0670025968/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20" type="external">The Faraway Nearby</a>, will be published in June. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com <a href="http://tomdispatch.us2.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=6cb39ff0b1f670c349f828c73&amp;id=1e41682ade" type="external">here</a>.</p> | true | 4 | iraq war protest march 2003lta hrefhttpwwwflickrcomphotosmalcubed10530958sizeslinphotostreamgtmal cubedltagtflickr story first appeared tomdispatch website ten years ago part world full valiant opposition new wars launched far away homeand despair like despairing people everywhere whether personal depression political tailspin activists believed future would look less like present nothing else confident least confident ten years ago contrarian person prefers see others suffer tried undermine despair case hope decade later present still contaminated crimes era much changed necessarily bettera decade ago spoke climate change distant problem caught us 10000 ways entirely worse eitherthe vigorous climate movement needed arose decade growing one thing draw unimaginable ordinary way forward almost never straight path glance labyrinth surprises gifts afflictions prepare accepting blind spots well intuitions despairing may 2003 convinced one true thing stopped invasion iraq extrapolated series false assumptions failures powerlessness across time space assumedlike neoconservatives themselvesthat neocons would atop world long time come instead neocon neoliberal ideologies widely reviled renounced around world republicans demographic hemorrhage weakened country failures wars evident everyone though still grasp fearsome power everything indeed changed everything changes lies hope fear ive seen extraordinary change lifetime last decade born country galvanized unsettled civil rights movement still lacked meaningful environmental movement womens movement queer rights movement beyond couple small organizations founded california 1950s half century ago gay lesbian live hiding treated mentally ill criminal 12 states several countries would legalize samesex marriage beyond imaginable wasnt even table 2003 san franciscos spring run samesex weddings 2004 flung open doors many passed since take long view youll see startlingly unexpectedly regularly things change magic incremental effect countless acts courage love commitment small drops wear away stones carve new landscapes sometimes torrents popular change world suddenly say say come fine end regardless im telling everything motion sometimes movement unstoppabilities hope history sisters one looks forward one looks back make world spacious enough move freely obliviousness past mutability things imprisons shrunken present hopelessness often comes amnesia forgetting everything motion everything changes great deal history defeat suffering cruelty loss everyone know thats theres peoples history counterhistory didnt necessarily get school dont usually get news history battles weve rights weve gained differences live forgetfulness lack often history individuals came together produce behemoth civil society stands astride nations topples regimesand mostly without weapons armies history undermines youve told authority violence powerlessness civil society power joy possibility written lot history last years well last half century doubt power see terrifies top remember fight best convincing us doesnt exist exist though like lava beneath earth erupts surface earth remade things change people sometimes power make happen come together act occasionally act alone writers rachel carson harriet beecher stoweor mohammed bouazizi young man whose suicide triggered arab spring fix eye started youll see weve come long way means look forward youll see long way goand sometimes go backward forget fought eighthour workday workplace safety womens rights voting rights affordable education forget theyre precious lose theres much proud theres much mourn theres much yet job heavy gift carry made carried people unstoppable movements change soon tell ten years ago began writing hope speaking online essay acts hope posted may 19 2003 first encounter tomdispatchcom would change work life gave room another kind voice another kind writing showed internet could give wings words wrote subsequently site spread around world remarkable ways putting touch people movements deeper conversations possible impossible cherished friendship sites founder editor tom engelhardt years spoke hope around country europe repeatedly ran comfortably situated people hostile idea hope thought hope somehow betrayed desperate downtrodden desperate wanted solidarity misery privileged rather action hopelessness people extreme situations means resignation ones deprivation destruction hope survival strategy comfortably situated people hopelessness means cynicism letting oneself hook everything doomed nothing required vice versa despair often premature form impatience well certainty favorite comment political change comes zhou enlai premier peoples republic china chairman mao asked early 1970s opinion french revolution reportedly answered soon tell say talking revolutions 1968 1789 even provides generous expansive perspective hold onto uncertainty possibility sense even four years later less nearly two centuries fact verdict still isnt people know prepared offer lot hardly give event month complete effects many movements endeavors ruled failures well theyre long ago ran guy whod involved occupy wall street movement great upwelling southern manhattan fall 2011 catalyzed global conversation series actions occupations nationwide globally offered tailspin description occupy failed wonder could possibly know really soon tell first maybe kid lead movement save world catalyzed lived stumbled upon occupy fresno occupy memphis wont reap sows 2023 2043 maybe seeds something sown czechoslovakia prague spring 1968 charter 77 great unforeseen harvest velvet revolution 1989 nonviolent overthrow soviet totalitarian state country second occupy began say needed said greed capitalism exposing brutality long hushed revealing victims debt rigged economy created country changed things said loud cant say exactly know mattered much matters immeasurable unquantifiable beyond price laws around banking foreclosure student loans changingnot enough everywhere people benefit matter occupy didnt cause changes directly much make voice people audible sheer wrongness debt system visibleand gave momentum ongoing endeavors overturn citizens united abolish corporate personhood third know little thousands local gatherings networks mean occupy know occupy sandy still vital work destruction zone hurricane best grassroots disaster relief endeavor nation ever seen know strike debt direct offshoot occupy wall street relieved millions dollars medical debt sense fix debt way demonstrate malleability artifice immorality student medical housing debt destroying many lives know occupy homes foreclosure defenders amazing things often one home time atlanta minneapolis last friday occupy homes organized showdown department justice washington dc saturday strike debt bay area held second debtors assembly undead coast coast fourth know people personally whose lives changed work never imagined would involved im friends remarkable people occupy would know existed people connected across class racial cultural lines flowering movement like freedom summer whose consequences felt far beyond mississippi 1964 reach beyond moment write read finally great joy time joy liberation solidarity joy worth something sense worth everything even always fleeting though always scarce imagine climates hope fear lunch middle east nonviolence scholar stephen zunes day asked would say arab spring told egypt several months ago watching television activist formerly news always leaders decided ordained inflicted news watching surprisingly focused civil society ordinary people initiated resisted responded thought spoke many middle east lost fatalism sense powerlessness awoken collective power civil society remains awake egypt countries achieve maybe soon tell syria turbulent version hell could leaving dynasty assads past future remains written perhaps people indeed write next chapter story explosives tell arc past years first arab spring extraordinary civil society actions chile quebec spain elsewhere followed occupy dont stop occupy came idle canadabased explosion indigenous power resistance canadian government gone far right environmental destruction grand scale founded four women november 2012 spread across north america sparking new environmental actions new coalitions around environmental climate issues flashmobstyle powwows shopping malls places thousandmile walk snowshoe seven cree youth winter 400 people time arrived canadas parliament ottawa idle activists vowed block construction pipeline tries transport particularly dirty crude oil alberta tar sands whether heads north east west northern alberta directions takes native land part reason tar sands supporters pushing hard build keystone xl pipeline alberta us gulf coast thankfully push back also strong fate may depend climate scientist james hansen wrote year ago canadas tar sands deposits sand saturated bitumen contain twice amount carbon dioxide emitted global oil use entire history fully exploit new oil source continue burn conventional oil gas coal supplies concentrations carbon dioxide atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher pliocene era 25 million years ago sea level least 50 feet higher news came reached 400 parts per million carbon dioxide atmosphere highest level five million years terrible news scale eclipses everything else encompasses everything else wrecking world everyone time least next several thousand years tricky word people love admire extraordinary things save world us generations unborn species yet named oceans subsaharan africans arctic dwellers everyone inbetween whole unbearably beautiful symphony life earth imperiled part sustains face potential cataclysm remembering 2003 hardly climate movement small polite mostly believed troubles decades away populated people thought lifestyle changes could save planetrather get fight power good ones many us didnt think years later things changed theres vibrant climate movement north america havent quite taken might working many disparate fronts often treated separately mountaintop coal removal coalfired power plants closing 145 existing ones date preventing 150 planned ones opening fracking oil exploration arctic tar sands pipeline 350orgs juggernaut campus campaign promote disinvestment oil gas coal companies started november 2012 already divestment movements underway 380 college university campuses cities getting board significant victories countriesnotably germany denmark far behindhave done remarkable things comes promoting nonfossilfuel renewable energy copenhagen example cold gray north track become carbonneutral city 2025 meantime reduced carbon emissions 25 2005 2011 united states host promising smaller projects offer two examples los angeles committed coalfree 2025 san francisco offer citizens electricity 100 renewable carbonneutral sources supervisors voted divest citys fossilfuel stocks many pieces potential solution puzzle put together whether multiply ever add enough dont yet know need people transformations ways conquer dismantle oil companies vision stake great force civil society get dont know neither anything could happen heres im saying wake amazed every day life told 1988 within three years soviet satellite states would liberate nonviolently soviet union would cease exist would thought crazy told 1990 south america wayto liberating becoming continent progressive democratic experiments would considered delusional november 2010 told within months autocrat hosni mubarak dominated egypt since 1981 would overthrown 18 days popular uprisings dictators tunisia libya would ousted year would institutionalized told september 16 2011 bunch kids sitting park lower manhattan would rock country youd say beyond delusional would believed despairing future invariably going look like present wont still value hope see part whats required starting point think match tinder blaze matter change world also need devotion need act hope begins though ive also seen people toil without regard hope believe possible live principle gamble sometimes even win sometimes goal aiming reached long deaths still action gets hoped realized falls background becomes new normal hope carp something else future bigger imaginations unimaginable comes anyway meet need keep going walk past imagine need unstoppable heres takes dont stop walking congratulate dont stop walking wallow despair dont stop life got comfortable rough dont stop dont stop lost theres win lose others need dont stop walking way forward course way walk path make way well others follow route look backward grasp long history youre moving forward paths others made road came look forward possibility thats mean hope look past impossible doesnt stop either mostly walk right foot left foot right foot left foot thats makes unstoppable rebecca solnits first essay tomdispatchcom turned book hope dark untold histories wild possibilities since translated eight languages portions essay began life keynote speech national lawyers guild gala honor attorney human rights activist walter riley whose life beautiful example unstoppability solnits latest book faraway nearby published june stay top important articles like sign receive latest updates tomdispatchcom | 1,821 |
<p>The State Department authorized these projects even as the Obama administration was making its celebrated "pivot” toward acting on climate change.</p>
<p>After years of political jostling, environmental groups celebrated President Obama’s Nov. 6, 2015, rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline. “America is now a global leader when it comes to taking serious action to fight climate change,” he said.</p>
<p>As he spoke, another pipeline known as the Alberta Clipper was already transporting some 800,000 barrels per day (BPD) of tar sands crude—the same type and essentially the same volume of oil as the proposed Keystone—to U.S. refineries.</p>
<p>While Keystone has monopolized public outrage, the State Department has quietly allowed a similar project to move ahead. The Clipper is one link in a broader network of pipelines, operated by Canadian oil giant Enbridge, Inc., that extends from the Alberta tar sands all the way to refineries on the Gulf Coast. Environmental groups warn that this could lead to a dramatic increase in the production of tar-sands oil—one of the dirtiest and most environmentally hazardous types of fuel— with little public scrutiny</p>
<p>Keystone and the Clipper</p>
<p>Keystone and the Alberta Clipper, or Line 67, were both proposed at roughly the same time for the same purpose: transport tar sands oil from the Alberta tar sands to the United States in huge quantities. But while Keystone was condemned to regulatory purgatory and eventually blocked, the Clipper and its associated projects have been allowed to go ahead.</p>
<p>Keystone’s biggest regulatory liability was the fact that it was a single 2,000-mile long&#160;stretch of pipeline that would cross a national border and various state boundaries.&#160;The fact that it stretched across both Canada and the United States meant both governments would have to agree to the environmentally sensitive project, while its sheer scale meant it was bound to attract unwanted attention and controversy.</p>
<p>Enbridge, meanwhile, appears to have deftly avoided these problems. Rather than one massive pipeline project, Enbridge has instead built or proposed many smaller, seemingly disparate pipeline projects from the Upper Midwest southward.</p>
<p>The Alberta Clipper, or Line 67, is the centerpiece of Enbridge’s crossborder pipeline network. The challenge of exploiting Albertan tar sands oil is that it is not only relatively remote, but land-locked. Upon extraction, it has to be transported to be refined, processed and exported. This was the purpose of the Clipper, which was meant to move the oil from the Alberta tar sands across the U.S.-Canada border to a distribution terminal in Superior, Wisconsin.&#160;However, under federal law, any infrastructure project that crosses a U.S. border first requires a federal permit and an accompanying environmental review—the same process that doomed Keystone.</p>
<p>A brief history of the Clipper</p>
<p>Enbridge’s legal maneuvering began from the start. In 2007, the company proposed, and the State Department approved, a permit for the Clipper to operate strictly at 450,000 barrels per day (BPD)—even though Enbridge had built the pipeline with a design capacity of almost double that.</p>
<p>When the State Department carried out an environmental impact statement (EIS) for the project, it only considered the potential impact of the first, smaller capacity—not the pipeline’s full capacity. Several environmental groups challenged the permit in court in 2009 on the basis that the EIS was inadequate.&#160;According to those involved, it was known that Enbridge aimed to use the pipeline’s full capacity down the line.</p>
<p>“Enbridge had already made it clear to investors that that was the plan,” says Doug Hayes, staff attorney with the Sierra Club, who was involved in the original lawsuit.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, Enbridge denied they had any current plans&#160;to expand, and the judge sided with them and the State Department. The permit for 450,000 BPD was allowed to proceed. By October 2010, Line 67 was operational and was sending this quantity of tar sands oil over the Canadian-U.S. border—around the same time Keystone XL began to capture national attention.</p>
<p>Despite its denials, two years after Line 67 was up and running, in November 2012, Enbridge informed the State Department that it did indeed wish to operate the pipeline at its full design capacity of 800,000 BPD, for which it would need a new permit. This time, however, it would have to go through the process in a post-Keystone America.</p>
<p>In the two years since the Alberta Clipper began transporting oil, Keystone had gone from a little-known project to a full-fledged political controversy. Anti-Keystone protesters had been arrested outside the White House,&#160;and celebrities like Mark Ruffalo and Julia Louis-Dreyfus were speaking out against the pipeline.</p>
<p>Sure enough, Enbridge began to feel the pressure. Crowds of protesters turned out for Minnesota’s Public Utilities Commission’s proceeding on the pipeline,&#160;and there was massive involvement in the first public comment period held by the State Department in 2013.</p>
<p>On top of this, the permitting process for the Clipper dragged on for more than a year with no progress.&#160;Enbridge had already applied for approval from Stephen Harper’s oil-friendly Conservative government to start pushing 800,000 BPD of crude through the 670 miles of Line 67 that lay on Canada’s side of the border.&#160;It just needed the State Department’s approval for the project to go ahead.</p>
<p>“Enbridge saw what happened to Keystone XL and some of these other pipelines, and … they decided to avoid this public review process,” says Hayes.</p>
<p>The Clipper “switcheroo”&#160;</p>
<p>It was at this point, in 2014, that Enbridge switched tack and utilized what some environmental activists have called an “illegal switcheroo.” Instead of relying on Line 67 to transport 800,000 BPD of crude oil across the U.S.-Canada border, the company would briefly divert the crude to another existing pipeline called Line 3. This segment would then transport the oil across the border before it was ultimately transferred back to Line 67 in Minnesota.</p>
<p>In June 2014, Enbridge’s lawyers outlined the project in a letter to the State Department. They cited the more than year-long “unforeseen Line 67 project permitting delay” as the reason for the project, but also presented Enbridge as a custodian of the public interest.&#160;The company had a duty to shippers and refiners, they explained, who would be hit with higher transportation costs if Enbridge didn’t step up its capacity, as well as to ordinary consumers, who might see domestic oil prices spike.&#160;Enbridge’s lawyers wrote that the company would proceed with this plan “whether or not a new Presidential Permit is issued.”</p>
<p>This dubious maneuver relied on what critics say was an additional sleight of hand: another new segment of pipeline to carry the crude across the border, packaged as an update to Line 3. In February and March 2014, Enbridge informed the State Department it planned to undertake a “maintenance-driven replacement” of the nearly 50-year old Line 3, which stretched from Edmonton to Superior. But rather than swapping it with an identical but improved replacement, it proposed an entirely new pipeline of a larger diameter that would travel through a different route for 238 miles.</p>
<p>To complete the plan, Enbridge would construct four totally new pipeline interconnections between Line 67 and its new “replacement” Line 3: two at the company’s Gretna, Manitoba station in Canada, and two more in the United States just south of the border.</p>
<p>Because Enbridge already regularly constructed interconnections between adjacent lines “in the event of unforeseen events or contingencies, such as power outages or maintenance,” it argued, it didn’t need a permit for these interconnections.</p>
<p>Ultimately, the State Department acceded to these changes without requiring new permits or environmental reviews. In November 2014, a coalition of tribal and environmental groups filed suit against the department, claiming that it had violated federal preservation and environmental laws and calling for an injunction on the bypass project until it went through the full permitting process.</p>
<p>Emails between Enbridge’s lawyers and the State Department, made public in April 2015 as part of the suit, show staffers apparently working to help Enbridge tiptoe around regulations.</p>
<p>“Enbridge needs to do the horizontal drilling under the 2 rivers in the border segment for Line 3 … two weeks from now,” Ona Hahs, attorney-advisor for the State Department’s Office of the Legal Advisor told State staff in <a href="http://www.desmogblog.com/2015/04/20/emails-state-department-secretly-approved-expansion-enbridge-keystone-xl-clone" type="external">one email</a>. “So we’re running out of time on that one.”</p>
<p>On December 9, the federal judge ruled in favor of Enbridge and the State Department, arguing that the State Department’s decision is not subject to judicial review. For the groups who filed the suit, one option will be to appeal the decision.</p>
<p>As with Keystone, Obama or the State Department could step in and tell Enbridge it needs a permit to keep pumping 800,000 BPD of oil over the border.&#160;If left to their own devices, they’re unlikely to do so.</p>
<p>“Through the Keystone campaign, America learned that it could fight pipelines,”&#160;says Andy Pearson, Minnesota350’s Midwest tar sands co-ordinator. “The normal has changed. You’re not going to be able to put a pipeline without facing opposition, anywhere in the country.”</p>
<p>In the meantime, Enbridge has already completed construction of the new border segment that connects to the Alberta Clipper, which, since mid-2015, has allowed the company to transport increased volumes of tar-sands crude over the border without further delay.</p>
<p>In an emailed statement, Enbridge spokesperson Lorraine Little told In These Times: “The United States Department of State is well aware of our replacement of Line 3 at the border for maintenance reasons and has advised us that that replacement was consistent with our existing Line 3 permit and requires no further approval and/or environmental review by the Department. … Our operation of Line 67 at the border is likewise fully consistent with the capacity allowed for that line by the existing presidential permit. Further, the Department has acknowledged that is has no regulatory authority beyond the area near the border and our interconnects are located outside that area, thus raising no question as to their legality.”</p>
<p>Enbridge’s end game</p>
<p>Ken Rumelt, staff attorney at Vermont Law School's Environmental and Natural Resources Law Clinic,&#160;says that Enbridge’s endgame has always been clear: Even though projects have been proposed piecemeal, they constitute one large network capable of ramping up transport of Canadian tar sands to the Gulf Coast. More than <a href="http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=19591" type="external">50 percent of U.S. refining capacity</a> and most of U.S. heavy crude processing capacity is located on the Gulf.</p>
<p>To that apparent end, Enbridge has a number of other pipeline projects either already in existence or in the works, which form links in this network. The rest of the Line 3 replacement, for one, is due to go online in 2017, at which point it will open up a new corridor for tar sands oil to flow in through the Upper Midwest.</p>
<p>Then there’s Line 61, a huge, 42-inch pipeline built in 2007 that runs from Superior to Flanagan, Ill. Enbridge wanted to triple its currently approved capacity to a massive 1.2 million BPD, which would make it the largest tar sands pipeline in North America. Rather than building anew, Enbridge plans to simply pump more oil through the pipeline, and in September 2015 it was finally able to break ground on the 13th and final additional pumping station.&#160;The expansion is expected to go online in summer 2016.&#160;Enbridge also has plans to build a “twin” for Line 61 to help carry the flood of extra oil pumped by the Line 3 expansion.</p>
<p>The final links in this tar sands chain have been around for some time. Two pipelines will run nearly 800,000 BPD from Flanagan to Cushing, Okla.,&#160;where they link up with Enbridge’s 500-mile long Seaway pipeline and its 850,000 BPD capacity “twin.” These pipelines extend all the way to the Gulf Coast.</p>
<p>Two days before Obama’s Keystone rejection, Enbridge <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/enbridge-to-invest-5-billion-in-gulf-coast-oil-terminals-1446659115" type="external">announced</a> plans to build import and export facilities at the Gulf of Mexico region. With Congress and President Obama having lifted the United States' <a href="http://news.investors.com/business/121815-786003-oil-export-ban-lift-needs-obama-ok.htm" type="external">40-year ban</a> on oil exports in December, Enbridge is now perfectly positioned to export tar sands oil through the Gulf.</p>
<p>“It’s Keystone times two,” says Rumelt.</p>
<p>Enbridge’s incremental approach to pipeline building, critics charge, has helped obscure its endgame of connecting the pipelines into one vast transportation network.&#160;By only proposing small local and interstate projects, Enbridge has skirted the much more stringent federal regulation process, while also keeping pipeline fights localized and out of the national press.</p>
<p>This strategy has worked. TransCanada fought and lost a very public, five-year long battle with the federal government over Keystone. When was the last time you heard about Enbridge’s pipelines?</p>
<p>Stonewalling and seizures</p>
<p>To get these projects off the ground, Enbridge has often resorted to underhanded tactics.</p>
<p>“Enbridge has a history of strong arming individual landowners … threatening eminent domain and a slew of other threats and forms of intimidation,” says Elizabeth Ward, the Sierra Club’s conservation programs coordinator.</p>
<p>Eminent domain, the seizure of private property without the owner’s consent for public use, has traditionally been employed by the government for the “public use” of land, such as building highways or schools.&#160;In 2004, however, the Supreme Court ruled that private entities could also be granted this power if their plans brought “public benefit”—in other words, if they created jobs or brought other economic gains.&#160;While Enbridge prefers to negotiate with landowners over the fair price of their property, if they dispute the price or refuse to sell, the company can use eminent domain to take it—a <a href="http://archive.lansingstatejournal.com/article/20120913/NEWS01/309130066/Enbridge-pipeline-company-using-eminent-domain-project" type="external">tactic</a> it has a <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/georgianne-nienaber/farmer-wont-sell-family-f_b_7960084.html" type="external">history</a> of <a href="http://herald-review.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/some-landowners-continue-enbridge-pipeline-fight/article_a581ff28-1406-5e79-9f1b-2ddf91e7651f.html" type="external">using</a>.</p>
<p>The company has also been accused of stonewalling environmental groups, local tribes and communities, and, in some cases, governmental bodies, keeping projects under a strict veil of secrecy. Several people I spoke with have said the company outright refuses to engage with them about their concerns.</p>
<p>A helping hand from government</p>
<p>The degree to which local and federal governments have been complicit in approving these projects also raises questions.</p>
<p>The State Department was authorizing Enbridge’s ”bypass project” at the same time the Obama administration was making its much celebrated “pivot” toward acting on climate change. In <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/for-president-obama-a-renewed-focus-on-climate/2014/05/04/6b81412c-d144-11e3-9e25-188ebe1fa93b_story.html" type="external">May 2014</a>, two months before the State Department approved the project and one month after it allowed the Line 3 replacement to go ahead, the Washington Post quoted aides and advisers who claimed Obama viewed climate change as “one of the key components of his legacy.” “This is personal for him,” said one.</p>
<p>That same month, the White House put out a <a href="http://theweek.com/speedreads/453869/obamas-climate-change-challenge-americans-just-dont-care" type="external">report</a> warning of the catastrophe ahead if climate change wasn’t curbed. Later that year, Obama used the occasion of the G20 summit for a <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/11/17/3592966/g20-obama-australia-climate-action/" type="external">dressing down</a> of Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbot over his inaction on climate change. Meanwhile, in February 2014, John Kerry, the head of the same State Department that bent over backwards for Enbridge, <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/16/politics/kerry-climate/" type="external">declared climate change</a> “the greatest challenge of our generation.”</p>
<p>In fact, Doug Hayes credits the Obama administration with creating the “turning point” for pipeline building.</p>
<p>In the midst of his reelection campaign in 2012, Obama gave a speech in Cushing, Okla., boasting that, under his administration, America had “added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth and then some.” The same day, he issued an executive order cutting the time involved in the federal permitting and review process for infrastructure projects. Since then, says Hayes, federal agencies have regularly segmented oil pipelines when reviewing them and taken the narrowest view of their own jurisdiction, in order to avoid the need for environmental reviews.</p>
<p>Joe Plumer, attorney for Ojibwe of the White Earth Nation in Minnesota, asserts that state agencies haven’t helped either. Rather than regulating Enbridge’s projects, Plumer says, the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission has been rubber stamping them for years.</p>
<p>Opponents say it’s the same across the border in Wisconsin. The Line 61 expansion had faced steep opposition from the residents of Dane County, which had passed a local ordinance requiring Enbridge to purchase extra insurance to cover the county in case of a spill arising from the project. Fortunately for Enbridge, Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) government slipped a last minute amendment into the state budget, extending the power of eminent domain to Enbridge and overruling the county’s ordinance.</p>
<p>Anger at this state of affairs is growing. On June 6, 5,000 protesters took part in the <a href="http://tarsandsresistance.org" type="external">Tar Sands Resistance March</a> in St. Paul, partly aimed at the Clipper. Two months later, 100 protesters from a coalition of environmental groups staged a more than four hour-long <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/environmental-protesters-john-kerry_55dcf3c8e4b0a40aa3aca74a" type="external">protest</a> outside John Kerry’s house in Washington, D.C., where 20 protesters were arrested.</p>
<p>More dramatically, on November 2, a broad alliance of protesters staged a sit-in at Enbridge’s office in Duluth, Minn. Two indigenous community leaders attempted to hand Enbridge staff a letter of demands, which included ceasing the Bypass Project. The Enbridge staff physically refused to accept the letter, leading the protesters to slide the letter beneath a locked door. Later that day, Enbridge issued a statement saying it would “continue to engage in conversations with individuals and communities in areas where we have operations or active projects.”</p>
<p>Activists see raising the profile of Enbridge’s projects to a Keystone-like level as essential to stopping it. Mahyar Sorour, an organizer at the Minnesota Public Research Group and one of those involved in the protests, says the key will be to turn the Clipper and its associated projects into large-scale issues with impact beyond the Midwest. She notes that the Clipper crosses twice through the Mississippi river, which nearly <a href="http://www.nps.gov/miss/riverfacts.htm" type="external">15 million</a> Americans rely on as a source of freshwater.</p>
<p>The trouble with tar sands</p>
<p>Enbridge’s pipelines have a slew of other potential environmentally destructive consequences, chief among them the danger of spilling tar sands oil.</p>
<p>Tar sands crude is a mix of sand, clay, water and bitumen, an extremely heavy type of oil often compared to molasses or peanut butter. Bitumen is so heavy, in fact, it can only flow if heated or mixed with lighter types of oil, which often turn out to be carcinogens.&#160;Longstanding health concerns are associated with the stuff. <a href="http://www.nrdc.org/energy/files/tar-sands-health-effects-IB.pdf" type="external">Numerous</a> <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2679626/" type="external">studies</a> have linked tar sands to cancer, and residents living near one bitumen site in Alberta <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/industry-news/energy-and-resources/oil-sands-link-to-health-concerns-report-says/article17751916/" type="external">complained</a> of symptoms such as spasms, headaches, memory loss&#160;and pains as a result of heavy oil odors.</p>
<p>The acute density of bitumen makes cleaning it up a Herculean labor. The existing technology for cleaning up oil spills assumes that oil floats in water.&#160;But bitumen typically sinks to the bottom of whatever water body it spills in, mixing in with rock and sediment, making it hard to scoop out and <a href="http://tarsandssolutions.org/tar-sands/spills-and-leaks" type="external">necessitating dredging</a>. The result is a <a href="https://www.nrdc.org/energy/files/tarsandssafetyrisks.pdf" type="external">costlier and more difficult</a> clean-up operation.</p>
<p>This is all the more alarming when considering where Line 67 alone runs through.&#160;The pipeline not only traverses privately owned land, threatening the homes and livelihoods of property owners—it also crosses a number of ecologically significant sites. Aside from the Mississippi River, this includes the Northern Divide, a key juncture from which water flows to the Great Lakes and the Hudson and Mississippi Rivers, and the <a href="http://www.fs.usda.gov/attmain/chippewa/specialplaces" type="external">Chippewa National Forest</a>, location of Minnesota’s five largest lakes, site of eight of its last remaining wetlands and home to the highest breeding population of bald eagles in the lower 48 states.</p>
<p>Indigenous communities are especially impacted. Enbridge’s pipelines go through the Fond du Lac, Red Lake Nation and Leech Lake Indian Reservations, today the home of the Ojibwe people. Pipelines also travel through the region’s wild rice lands, central to both the indigenous communities’ livelihoods and their <a href="http://www.midwestliving.com/food/fruits-veggies/native-harvest-ojibwe-wild-rice-gathering-minnesota/" type="external">cultural identities</a>. According to <a href="http://www.glifwc.org/publications/pdf/Goodberry_Brochure.pdf" type="external">tradition</a>, the Ojibwe originally travelled to and settled in the region because of its wild rice beds, which became a staple of their diet. An oil spill would devastate these wild rice beds, not to mention ravage the land on which the Ojibwe have hunting and fishing rights.</p>
<p>Enbridge’s history is riddled with spills. More than <a href="http://www.polarisinstitute.org/enbridge_profile" type="external">800 have occurred</a> across the company’s operations between 1999 and 2010. The Clipper itself leaked <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/01/19/enbridge-clipper-idUSL2N0KT02220140119#dWpET4dgQbCOQDHB.97" type="external">125 barrels worth</a> of oil last year at a Canadian pumping station. The transport of tar sands makes spills especially likely.</p>
<p>“Tar sands is like liquid sandpaper,” says Plumer. “It wears the pipe out from the inside.”</p>
<p>To see the potential consequences of a spill, one need only look at what happened in 2010, when a spill on one of Enbridge’s Michigan pipelines poured more than <a href="http://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/five-years-on-weve-learned-nothing-from-the-largest-onshore-oil-spill-in-us-history" type="external">1 million gallons of tar sands crude</a> into the Kalamazoo River, resulting in the most expensive onshore clean up in U.S. history.</p>
<p>Once in the water, the diluted bitumen separated, with the natural gas liquids that were blended into the mix contaminating the surrounding air and the bitumen sinking to the river bed. A combination of a slow and inadequate response by the EPA and a botched clean-up effort by Enbridge has meant that the river is still contaminated today. Nearby residents were forced to evacuate and many still haven’t returned, while Enbridge, unable to clean the toxic air, resorted to simply buying up some of the abandoned homes.</p>
<p>A new direction on climate change?</p>
<p>The exploitation of tar sands oil has broader implications than these more immediate environmental impacts. In the global effort to halt catastrophic warming of the planet, keeping tar sands in the ground is vital.</p>
<p>Tar sands oil is one of the dirtiest forms of fossil fuels that exists. Because of its complex and energy-intensive extraction and separation processes, producing diluted bitumen ends up burning <a href="http://news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=11252" type="external">8 to 24 percent</a> more carbon than conventional oil. According to the National Resources Defense Council, an average open-pit mine spits out as much greenhouse gas every day as do <a href="http://www.nrdc.org/onearth/07fal/alberta.pdf" type="external">1.35 million cars</a>. John Abraham, a professor of thermal sciences at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota,&#160;believes that burning all the Albertan tar sands oil—which comprises an area the size of Florida—would by itself raise the world’s temperature by <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tar-sands-and-keystone-xl-pipeline-impact-on-global-warming/" type="external">0.4 degrees Celsius</a>.&#160;</p>
<p>In other words, for the sake of the planet, the Alberta tar sands have to stay in the ground.</p>
<p>“[The oil industry] only has a few limited pipelines that can get this stuff out of Canada and into other markets,” says Lena Moffitt, director of the Sierra Club’s Dirty Fuels campaign. “The Alberta Clipper is one of only two dedicated tar sands pipelines in existence right now.”</p>
<p>If oil prices continue to stay low, this could make exploiting the tar sands simply uneconomical for companies like Enbridge.</p>
<p>“It’s such a high capital investment,” says Doug Hayes. “The break even point is so high that if oil prices are low and there’s not these cheap pipeline transportation options on the market, they are going to curtail production.”</p>
<p>Sure enough, a State Department review found that, since transporting oil by rail is more expensive than via a pipeline, tar sands <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/oilprices/12009687/Oil-prices-to-stay-lower-for-longer.html" type="external">demand would drop</a> if the price for a barrel of oil fell below $65. The price of oil this year has already fallen to <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/oilprices/12009687/Oil-prices-to-stay-lower-for-longer.html" type="external">less than $50</a> a barrel.&#160;</p>
<p>President Obama may have put it best, when he rejected Keystone: “Ultimately, if we’re going to prevent large parts of this Earth from becoming not only inhospitable but uninhabitable in our lifetimes, we’re going to have to keep some fossil fuels in the ground rather than burn them,” he said.</p>
<p>Halting the Clipper could be critical to this end. And fortunately, Keystone’s failure has shown that enough pressure can force the government to do the right thing.</p>
<p>A shorter version of this article appears in the January 2016 issue of&#160;In These Times.</p>
<p>Branko Marcetic is a regular contributor to In These Times. He hails from Auckland, New Zealand, where he received his Masters in American history, a fact that continues to puzzle everyone who meets him. You can follow him on Twitter at @BMarchetich or email him at [email protected].</p> | true | 4 | state department authorized projects even obama administration making celebrated pivot toward acting climate change years political jostling environmental groups celebrated president obamas nov 6 2015 rejection keystone xl pipeline america global leader comes taking serious action fight climate change said spoke another pipeline known alberta clipper already transporting 800000 barrels per day bpd tar sands crudethe type essentially volume oil proposed keystoneto us refineries keystone monopolized public outrage state department quietly allowed similar project move ahead clipper one link broader network pipelines operated canadian oil giant enbridge inc extends alberta tar sands way refineries gulf coast environmental groups warn could lead dramatic increase production tarsands oilone dirtiest environmentally hazardous types fuel little public scrutiny keystone clipper keystone alberta clipper line 67 proposed roughly time purpose transport tar sands oil alberta tar sands united states huge quantities keystone condemned regulatory purgatory eventually blocked clipper associated projects allowed go ahead keystones biggest regulatory liability fact single 2000mile long160stretch pipeline would cross national border various state boundaries160the fact stretched across canada united states meant governments would agree environmentally sensitive project sheer scale meant bound attract unwanted attention controversy enbridge meanwhile appears deftly avoided problems rather one massive pipeline project enbridge instead built proposed many smaller seemingly disparate pipeline projects upper midwest southward alberta clipper line 67 centerpiece enbridges crossborder pipeline network challenge exploiting albertan tar sands oil relatively remote landlocked upon extraction transported refined processed exported purpose clipper meant move oil alberta tar sands across uscanada border distribution terminal superior wisconsin160however federal law infrastructure project crosses us border first requires federal permit accompanying environmental reviewthe process doomed keystone brief history clipper enbridges legal maneuvering began start 2007 company proposed state department approved permit clipper operate strictly 450000 barrels per day bpdeven though enbridge built pipeline design capacity almost double state department carried environmental impact statement eis project considered potential impact first smaller capacitynot pipelines full capacity several environmental groups challenged permit court 2009 basis eis inadequate160according involved known enbridge aimed use pipelines full capacity line enbridge already made clear investors plan says doug hayes staff attorney sierra club involved original lawsuit nonetheless enbridge denied current plans160to expand judge sided state department permit 450000 bpd allowed proceed october 2010 line 67 operational sending quantity tar sands oil canadianus borderaround time keystone xl began capture national attention despite denials two years line 67 running november 2012 enbridge informed state department indeed wish operate pipeline full design capacity 800000 bpd would need new permit time however would go process postkeystone america two years since alberta clipper began transporting oil keystone gone littleknown project fullfledged political controversy antikeystone protesters arrested outside white house160and celebrities like mark ruffalo julia louisdreyfus speaking pipeline sure enough enbridge began feel pressure crowds protesters turned minnesotas public utilities commissions proceeding pipeline160and massive involvement first public comment period held state department 2013 top permitting process clipper dragged year progress160enbridge already applied approval stephen harpers oilfriendly conservative government start pushing 800000 bpd crude 670 miles line 67 lay canadas side border160it needed state departments approval project go ahead enbridge saw happened keystone xl pipelines decided avoid public review process says hayes clipper switcheroo160 point 2014 enbridge switched tack utilized environmental activists called illegal switcheroo instead relying line 67 transport 800000 bpd crude oil across uscanada border company would briefly divert crude another existing pipeline called line 3 segment would transport oil across border ultimately transferred back line 67 minnesota june 2014 enbridges lawyers outlined project letter state department cited yearlong unforeseen line 67 project permitting delay reason project also presented enbridge custodian public interest160the company duty shippers refiners explained would hit higher transportation costs enbridge didnt step capacity well ordinary consumers might see domestic oil prices spike160enbridges lawyers wrote company would proceed plan whether new presidential permit issued dubious maneuver relied critics say additional sleight hand another new segment pipeline carry crude across border packaged update line 3 february march 2014 enbridge informed state department planned undertake maintenancedriven replacement nearly 50year old line 3 stretched edmonton superior rather swapping identical improved replacement proposed entirely new pipeline larger diameter would travel different route 238 miles complete plan enbridge would construct four totally new pipeline interconnections line 67 new replacement line 3 two companys gretna manitoba station canada two united states south border enbridge already regularly constructed interconnections adjacent lines event unforeseen events contingencies power outages maintenance argued didnt need permit interconnections ultimately state department acceded changes without requiring new permits environmental reviews november 2014 coalition tribal environmental groups filed suit department claiming violated federal preservation environmental laws calling injunction bypass project went full permitting process emails enbridges lawyers state department made public april 2015 part suit show staffers apparently working help enbridge tiptoe around regulations enbridge needs horizontal drilling 2 rivers border segment line 3 two weeks ona hahs attorneyadvisor state departments office legal advisor told state staff one email running time one december 9 federal judge ruled favor enbridge state department arguing state departments decision subject judicial review groups filed suit one option appeal decision keystone obama state department could step tell enbridge needs permit keep pumping 800000 bpd oil border160if left devices theyre unlikely keystone campaign america learned could fight pipelines160says andy pearson minnesota350s midwest tar sands coordinator normal changed youre going able put pipeline without facing opposition anywhere country meantime enbridge already completed construction new border segment connects alberta clipper since mid2015 allowed company transport increased volumes tarsands crude border without delay emailed statement enbridge spokesperson lorraine little told times united states department state well aware replacement line 3 border maintenance reasons advised us replacement consistent existing line 3 permit requires approval andor environmental review department operation line 67 border likewise fully consistent capacity allowed line existing presidential permit department acknowledged regulatory authority beyond area near border interconnects located outside area thus raising question legality enbridges end game ken rumelt staff attorney vermont law schools environmental natural resources law clinic160says enbridges endgame always clear even though projects proposed piecemeal constitute one large network capable ramping transport canadian tar sands gulf coast 50 percent us refining capacity us heavy crude processing capacity located gulf apparent end enbridge number pipeline projects either already existence works form links network rest line 3 replacement one due go online 2017 point open new corridor tar sands oil flow upper midwest theres line 61 huge 42inch pipeline built 2007 runs superior flanagan ill enbridge wanted triple currently approved capacity massive 12 million bpd would make largest tar sands pipeline north america rather building anew enbridge plans simply pump oil pipeline september 2015 finally able break ground 13th final additional pumping station160the expansion expected go online summer 2016160enbridge also plans build twin line 61 help carry flood extra oil pumped line 3 expansion final links tar sands chain around time two pipelines run nearly 800000 bpd flanagan cushing okla160where link enbridges 500mile long seaway pipeline 850000 bpd capacity twin pipelines extend way gulf coast two days obamas keystone rejection enbridge announced plans build import export facilities gulf mexico region congress president obama lifted united states 40year ban oil exports december enbridge perfectly positioned export tar sands oil gulf keystone times two says rumelt enbridges incremental approach pipeline building critics charge helped obscure endgame connecting pipelines one vast transportation network160by proposing small local interstate projects enbridge skirted much stringent federal regulation process also keeping pipeline fights localized national press strategy worked transcanada fought lost public fiveyear long battle federal government keystone last time heard enbridges pipelines stonewalling seizures get projects ground enbridge often resorted underhanded tactics enbridge history strong arming individual landowners threatening eminent domain slew threats forms intimidation says elizabeth ward sierra clubs conservation programs coordinator eminent domain seizure private property without owners consent public use traditionally employed government public use land building highways schools160in 2004 however supreme court ruled private entities could also granted power plans brought public benefitin words created jobs brought economic gains160while enbridge prefers negotiate landowners fair price property dispute price refuse sell company use eminent domain take ita tactic history using company also accused stonewalling environmental groups local tribes communities cases governmental bodies keeping projects strict veil secrecy several people spoke said company outright refuses engage concerns helping hand government degree local federal governments complicit approving projects also raises questions state department authorizing enbridges bypass project time obama administration making much celebrated pivot toward acting climate change may 2014 two months state department approved project one month allowed line 3 replacement go ahead washington post quoted aides advisers claimed obama viewed climate change one key components legacy personal said one month white house put report warning catastrophe ahead climate change wasnt curbed later year obama used occasion g20 summit dressing australian prime minister tony abbot inaction climate change meanwhile february 2014 john kerry head state department bent backwards enbridge declared climate change greatest challenge generation fact doug hayes credits obama administration creating turning point pipeline building midst reelection campaign 2012 obama gave speech cushing okla boasting administration america added enough new oil gas pipeline encircle earth day issued executive order cutting time involved federal permitting review process infrastructure projects since says hayes federal agencies regularly segmented oil pipelines reviewing taken narrowest view jurisdiction order avoid need environmental reviews joe plumer attorney ojibwe white earth nation minnesota asserts state agencies havent helped either rather regulating enbridges projects plumer says minnesota public utilities commission rubber stamping years opponents say across border wisconsin line 61 expansion faced steep opposition residents dane county passed local ordinance requiring enbridge purchase extra insurance cover county case spill arising project fortunately enbridge gov scott walkers r government slipped last minute amendment state budget extending power eminent domain enbridge overruling countys ordinance anger state affairs growing june 6 5000 protesters took part tar sands resistance march st paul partly aimed clipper two months later 100 protesters coalition environmental groups staged four hourlong protest outside john kerrys house washington dc 20 protesters arrested dramatically november 2 broad alliance protesters staged sitin enbridges office duluth minn two indigenous community leaders attempted hand enbridge staff letter demands included ceasing bypass project enbridge staff physically refused accept letter leading protesters slide letter beneath locked door later day enbridge issued statement saying would continue engage conversations individuals communities areas operations active projects activists see raising profile enbridges projects keystonelike level essential stopping mahyar sorour organizer minnesota public research group one involved protests says key turn clipper associated projects largescale issues impact beyond midwest notes clipper crosses twice mississippi river nearly 15 million americans rely source freshwater trouble tar sands enbridges pipelines slew potential environmentally destructive consequences chief among danger spilling tar sands oil tar sands crude mix sand clay water bitumen extremely heavy type oil often compared molasses peanut butter bitumen heavy fact flow heated mixed lighter types oil often turn carcinogens160longstanding health concerns associated stuff numerous studies linked tar sands cancer residents living near one bitumen site alberta complained symptoms spasms headaches memory loss160and pains result heavy oil odors acute density bitumen makes cleaning herculean labor existing technology cleaning oil spills assumes oil floats water160but bitumen typically sinks bottom whatever water body spills mixing rock sediment making hard scoop necessitating dredging result costlier difficult cleanup operation alarming considering line 67 alone runs through160the pipeline traverses privately owned land threatening homes livelihoods property ownersit also crosses number ecologically significant sites aside mississippi river includes northern divide key juncture water flows great lakes hudson mississippi rivers chippewa national forest location minnesotas five largest lakes site eight last remaining wetlands home highest breeding population bald eagles lower 48 states indigenous communities especially impacted enbridges pipelines go fond du lac red lake nation leech lake indian reservations today home ojibwe people pipelines also travel regions wild rice lands central indigenous communities livelihoods cultural identities according tradition ojibwe originally travelled settled region wild rice beds became staple diet oil spill would devastate wild rice beds mention ravage land ojibwe hunting fishing rights enbridges history riddled spills 800 occurred across companys operations 1999 2010 clipper leaked 125 barrels worth oil last year canadian pumping station transport tar sands makes spills especially likely tar sands like liquid sandpaper says plumer wears pipe inside see potential consequences spill one need look happened 2010 spill one enbridges michigan pipelines poured 1 million gallons tar sands crude kalamazoo river resulting expensive onshore clean us history water diluted bitumen separated natural gas liquids blended mix contaminating surrounding air bitumen sinking river bed combination slow inadequate response epa botched cleanup effort enbridge meant river still contaminated today nearby residents forced evacuate many still havent returned enbridge unable clean toxic air resorted simply buying abandoned homes new direction climate change exploitation tar sands oil broader implications immediate environmental impacts global effort halt catastrophic warming planet keeping tar sands ground vital tar sands oil one dirtiest forms fossil fuels exists complex energyintensive extraction separation processes producing diluted bitumen ends burning 8 24 percent carbon conventional oil according national resources defense council average openpit mine spits much greenhouse gas every day 135 million cars john abraham professor thermal sciences university st thomas minnesota160believes burning albertan tar sands oilwhich comprises area size floridawould raise worlds temperature 04 degrees celsius160 words sake planet alberta tar sands stay ground oil industry limited pipelines get stuff canada markets says lena moffitt director sierra clubs dirty fuels campaign alberta clipper one two dedicated tar sands pipelines existence right oil prices continue stay low could make exploiting tar sands simply uneconomical companies like enbridge high capital investment says doug hayes break even point high oil prices low theres cheap pipeline transportation options market going curtail production sure enough state department review found since transporting oil rail expensive via pipeline tar sands demand would drop price barrel oil fell 65 price oil year already fallen less 50 barrel160 president obama may put best rejected keystone ultimately going prevent large parts earth becoming inhospitable uninhabitable lifetimes going keep fossil fuels ground rather burn said halting clipper could critical end fortunately keystones failure shown enough pressure force government right thing shorter version article appears january 2016 issue of160in times branko marcetic regular contributor times hails auckland new zealand received masters american history fact continues puzzle everyone meets follow twitter bmarchetich email branko95mgmailcom | 2,352 |
<p>Evan Vucci/AP</p>
<p />
<p>The alt-right movement, reveling in the spotlight cast upon it by the Donald Trump campaign, made its debut to the mainstream media on Friday with a press conference to lay out its goal of an all-white society and its love for Trump.</p>
<p>The once-fringe movement has suddenly found a prominent place in the Trump campaign and among its most loyal backers. Stephen Bannon, the Trump campaign CEO, was until recently the head of the conservative website Breitbart News, which he <a href="" type="internal">called</a> “the platform for the alt-right.” But the movement’s moment in the limelight got off to a rough start.</p>
<p>Originally set to be held at the National Press Club, Friday’s event was canceled earlier in the week when the venue scuttled it amid security concerns. Not to be deterred, the alt-right leaders came up with a new plan: a secret location.</p>
<p>Reporters covering the event were instructed to go to the entrance of the Old Ebbitt Grill, near the White House. There, they would encounter a man in a charcoal suit and brown tie who would reveal the new location of the conference. Shortly after 1 p.m., I approached the restaurant and saw the man in the gray suit standing outside. He instructed me to round the corner to the Willard Hotel and make my way downstairs to the Peacock Lounge. Soon after I arrived, Richard Spencer, the man who coined the term “alt-right,” kicked off the event.</p>
<p>“I’m sorry we had to put you through this wild goose chase,” said Spencer, who runs a white nationalist group called the National Policy Institute. Spencer noted that the National Press Club has previously held three NPI events. “We are, from what we can tell, the first guest that have been censored for what is clearly ideological reasons.”</p>
<p>Spencer invited <a href="" type="internal">two prominent members</a> of the movement to join him. One was Peter Brimelow, the founder of the website VDARE.com, which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as an “immigrant-bashing hate site that regularly publishes works by white supremacists, anti-Semites, and others on the radical right.” (Brimelow freely admitted during the event that he publishes white nationalists.) The other was Jared Taylor, a self-described “race realist” who explained why the white race is superior to all others (except for East Asians, he said, who are superior to whites). The audience was a mix of reporters and what appeared to be alt-right members and fans.</p>
<p>Spencer had fashioned a logo for the occasion, consisting of a golden triangular letter A followed by an R made of two stacked triangles. He said it had a young, futuristic look, in contrast to the flags and eagles that adorn the logos of the past. So what did these futuristic triangles represent? Spencer proposed the following “mantra” for his movement: “Race is real, race matters, and race is the foundation of identity.” The ultimate ideal is that the world be divided into ethno-states so that white people could have a “homeland.”</p>
<p>Spencer’s ideas about race are intertwined with his support for Trump. Spencer explained that he likes Trump’s immigration policy, which not only calls for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants but also reduces legal immigration into the country. (Spencer’s ideal policy would also favor immigrants from Europe.) But as Spencer put it, it’s Trump’s more intangible qualities that make him a hero of the alt-right. To Spencer, Trump’s brash style suggests a white savoir, unwilling to be bullied by the politically correct crowd.</p>
<p>“I don’t think our support of Trump is really about policy at the end of the day,” Spencer said. “I think it’s really about Trump’s style, the fact that he doesn’t back down, the fact that he’s willing to confront his enemies…You look at that and you think, ‘This is what a leader looks like.'”</p>
<p>Spencer continued, “It really is about him and it’s about, in a way, projecting onto him our hopes and dreams. There’s something called ‘meme magic,’ <a href="#correction" type="external">*</a> and that is a self-fulfilling prophecy…We want to make Trump; we want to imagine him in our image. And that is maybe—you can see that in a meme of Trump as a Napoleon or Trump as some figure out of the Dune novels in an arcade of the future in a robotic suit of armor fighting enemies. All of that stuff is silly, all of that stuff is ridiculous, but it actually gets at something real and that is that we want something more, we want something heroic, we want something that is not defined by liberalism or individual rights or bourgeois norms. We want something that is truly European and truly heroic.”</p>
<p>For this description, Spencer was greeted with much applause by his fans in the room. He elaborated that rather than a multicultural America, his ideal is a white empire. He described his “dream…ethno-state” as “a homeland for all Europeans,” which would take an “imperial form.”</p>
<p>“It’s very similar to the idea of Zionism for Jews in the 19th century,” he said. “It’s actually very similar to the ideal of communism for the left in the 19th century. It’s not here, it’s in the future, we should dream about it.”</p>
<p>What would this utopia look like? Spencer said it’s too far off to get into specifics. But he and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/26/jared-taylor-alt-right-clinton-trump" type="external">Taylor</a>, whose role at Friday’s event was to give academic assurances that the races of the world are not equal, disagreed on whether Jews would be welcomed into the white utopia homeland. Spencer took the position that they were not “European” and therefore would take their place in their own ethno-state. Taylor countered, “I don’t think that if a Jewish person identifies with the West and with Europe than that’s something that we should deny.” As Spencer acknowledged, the alt-right has yet to sort out these mere details.</p>
<p>But Spencer did offer up a vision of an alt-right society. “If the alt-right were in power, we would all have arrived here via magnetic levitation trains,” he said. “We would have passed by great forests and beautiful images of blond women in a wheat field with their hands, running them through the wheat.” The audience tittered. “It would be a wonderful sight.”</p>
<p />
<p>Correction: An earlier version of this article contained a transcription error.</p>
<p /> | true | 4 | evan vucciap altright movement reveling spotlight cast upon donald trump campaign made debut mainstream media friday press conference lay goal allwhite society love trump oncefringe movement suddenly found prominent place trump campaign among loyal backers stephen bannon trump campaign ceo recently head conservative website breitbart news called platform altright movements moment limelight got rough start originally set held national press club fridays event canceled earlier week venue scuttled amid security concerns deterred altright leaders came new plan secret location reporters covering event instructed go entrance old ebbitt grill near white house would encounter man charcoal suit brown tie would reveal new location conference shortly 1 pm approached restaurant saw man gray suit standing outside instructed round corner willard hotel make way downstairs peacock lounge soon arrived richard spencer man coined term altright kicked event im sorry put wild goose chase said spencer runs white nationalist group called national policy institute spencer noted national press club previously held three npi events tell first guest censored clearly ideological reasons spencer invited two prominent members movement join one peter brimelow founder website vdarecom southern poverty law center describes immigrantbashing hate site regularly publishes works white supremacists antisemites others radical right brimelow freely admitted event publishes white nationalists jared taylor selfdescribed race realist explained white race superior others except east asians said superior whites audience mix reporters appeared altright members fans spencer fashioned logo occasion consisting golden triangular letter followed r made two stacked triangles said young futuristic look contrast flags eagles adorn logos past futuristic triangles represent spencer proposed following mantra movement race real race matters race foundation identity ultimate ideal world divided ethnostates white people could homeland spencers ideas race intertwined support trump spencer explained likes trumps immigration policy calls mass deportation undocumented immigrants also reduces legal immigration country spencers ideal policy would also favor immigrants europe spencer put trumps intangible qualities make hero altright spencer trumps brash style suggests white savoir unwilling bullied politically correct crowd dont think support trump really policy end day spencer said think really trumps style fact doesnt back fact hes willing confront enemiesyou look think leader looks like spencer continued really way projecting onto hopes dreams theres something called meme magic selffulfilling prophecywe want make trump want imagine image maybeyou see meme trump napoleon trump figure dune novels arcade future robotic suit armor fighting enemies stuff silly stuff ridiculous actually gets something real want something want something heroic want something defined liberalism individual rights bourgeois norms want something truly european truly heroic description spencer greeted much applause fans room elaborated rather multicultural america ideal white empire described dreamethnostate homeland europeans would take imperial form similar idea zionism jews 19th century said actually similar ideal communism left 19th century future dream would utopia look like spencer said far get specifics taylor whose role fridays event give academic assurances races world equal disagreed whether jews would welcomed white utopia homeland spencer took position european therefore would take place ethnostate taylor countered dont think jewish person identifies west europe thats something deny spencer acknowledged altright yet sort mere details spencer offer vision altright society altright power would arrived via magnetic levitation trains said would passed great forests beautiful images blond women wheat field hands running wheat audience tittered would wonderful sight correction earlier version article contained transcription error | 549 |
<p>With apologies to Ernest Tubbs</p>
<p>I.</p>
<p>Paranoia stalks the skies. At LAX, flying towards Texas, I am pulled out of the line and the TSA goon swabs my hands for explosives. I figure it must be my kaffiya but a friend who flies into L.A. the next day from Puerto Rico is ordered to remove her skirt. She has to chase down her carry-ons in her tights.</p>
<p>Airports have become deep ponds of fear and loathing in Obama’s America ever since the Nigerian Unabomber almost pulled off his Christmas Day caper. I am putting myself on my own no-fly list.</p>
<p>This is not to say that terrorists are not prepared to assault us from the friendly skies. The morning after I touched down in Austin, a native-born terrorista of the Christian Caucasian persuasion flies a small plane into the local IRS offices 9-11 style, killing himself and one government worker. Joe Stack had a longstanding beef with the revenooers and has since become a martyr for the Glenn Beck vigilantes. Wesley Snipes is probably not going to be invited to Michelle’s White House cultural klatches anytime soon.</p>
<p>II.</p>
<p>Two years nearly to the day that Raul R. Salinas, the Xicano warrior-poeta, passed on to the Great Beyond, I read at Resistencia, the bookstore-cultural center he grew in south Austin. Before the reading, Rene shows clips of the last time Raul and myself and Roberto Vargas, the fine Nicaraguan/La Mision compa, read at Resistencia. Raul blows a poem from the grave for Lester Young and he is Prez himself, the slow blue notes surging out of the bell of his voice.</p>
<p>I read a poem that I had just penned on the flight in (writing poems on commercial flights may soon be a federal felony), “Remission” (I have liver cancer): “I am in remission/ I am on a mission/ To wake up the brain-dead and dying…”</p>
<p>The Journalism Department at the University of Texas houses me in a cheese box motel that seemed to be run by the Corrections Corporation of America. I talk to the brain-dead and dying in one of Bob Jensen’s classes. “You don’t have a career in journalism,” I warn them, “you have a responsibility to seek out the truth. To tell the stories with which you have been entrusted. To protect those who have told you their stories.</p>
<p>“You must go to the place where it happened. They will not like you there but you will learn much from their anger. Write it all down right away in your head. Do not let the details leak out no matter how badly they beat you…”</p>
<p>Some in the audience squirmed. Rigor mortis has not yet set in.</p>
<p>III.</p>
<p>I eschew the big box bookstores that are committing commercial genocide on the independents. Mostly I work anarchist enclaves with names like Monkeywrench and Sedition, tiny emporiums of subversion in Austin and Houston. At the University of Houston, I spoke about impending revolution in a class on the Mexican revolution taught by John Mason Hart, the maestro of Mexican anarchism. The usually brain-dead students seemed measurably animated. “I am in remission/ I am on a mission/ to raise the corpses of comatose students…”</p>
<p>IV.</p>
<p>David Carlson, a professor of radical history with a vault of fascinating minutiae running all ’round his brain, and his partner Deirdre, drove me down to the Rio Grande Valley. David first saw me reading Subcomandante Marcos’s latest communiqué from my dim laptop to a roomful of anarchos at the Black Cat Café, a slimy vegan soup kitchen, in a driving rain storm in Seattle circa 1995 and invited me to speak at the UT-Pan American – the university, which graduates 800 members of the Migra a year and through which David avows the CIA washes oodles of greenbacks, did not invite me but we rented a room and I spread my verbal curare anyway to a handful of the undead.</p>
<p>The signs along the highway on the way south told the story of today’s Texas: GUNS! MEAT! PAWN! The paranoia amped up the closer we came to the border. Motorists are stopped and frisked at surprise checkpoints and the nether parts of their vehicles probed in a not-very successful campaign to stop the bales of USD bills and displays of machine guns from pipelining into Mexico. At one point, David’s mobile was penetrated by mysterious red and blue rays radiating from roadside sensors. There were no UFOs hovering overhead so I assume this electronic pat-down was your Homeland Security at work. Why do I keep getting the chilly sensation that this is no country for old men?</p>
<p>V.</p>
<p>We went to visit the Wall where Hidalgo Texas fronts up Reynosa Tamaulipas across the bends of the Rio Grande (it’s called the Rio Bravo on the Other Side.) In Hidalgo, the Separation Wall is built around a restored pump house and bird sanctuary and resembles one of Richard Serra’s hideous installations. The aluminum cylinders that form the wall have enough room between them to allow a snake to squiggle through but the jabalis and other mid-sized mammals whose habitat this is are caged up north and south of this man-made North American monstrosity.</p>
<p>Down here where even dogs and their fleas are subject to deportation (the fleas were born here), everyone carries two sets of picture I.D. and flies multiple Stars &amp; Stripes from their front porches.</p>
<p>The pinnacle of my sojourn in the Valley was an evening at the Narciso Martinez Cultural Center in San Benito. Narciso Martinez was one of the original maestros of the TexMex School of conjunto accordionistics and his instruments – ornate squeezeboxes – are on display at the center. The afternoon we parked in San Benito, Pfc. Adriana Alvarez who had fallen in Iraq (no cause of death was revealed in the Valley Morning Star story) was buried out of a local chapel. A hundred mourners were on hand, many of them representing local public safety agencies and Adriana was made an honorary member of the San Benito Police Department.</p>
<p>The gig at the Narciso Martinez was a joy. Irma Guadarrama, still the most beautiful woman in south Texas, warbled two handmade songs and my energies were choogling. Rogelio Nunez, a mainstay of the Center, also directs the fortunes of Project Libertad, which has stood up to the Migra and defended newly arrived indocumentados for decades. Rogelio offered me a three month writer-in-residence at the crumbling Stonewall Jackson Hotel in San Benito. Being a connoisseur of fleabag hotels. I just might take him up on it.</p>
<p>IV.</p>
<p>At the other end of Texas, El Paso is trapped in the crossfire between two wars: the bloodcurdling drug war right across the river in Juarez, and the U.S. war on the world out at Fort Bliss where soldiers freshly flown home from Iraq and Afghanistan and now Pakistan and all the other Last Stans, strangle their wives in their sleep, apparently hallucinating that they are the enemy.</p>
<p>The daily body count over in Juarez outpaces the kill count in the besieged Taliban stronghold of Marjah. At every presentation, hands shoot up to probe my opinions on the drug violence. Sometimes I refuse to answer. The U.S. skew on Mexico has become synonymous with severed heads, the slaughter of innocents, naked castrated men dangling from freeway overpasses with signs pinned to their chests paying obeisance to Santa Muerte. Mexico is so much more than this macabre Gran Guignol, it is a civilization and a political crucible where the fightback of El Pueblo should be an inspiration to brain dead and dying gavachos.</p>
<p>At UTEP (University of Texas – El Paso) attendance is plummeting because students from Juarez can no longer traverse the big river. I spoke about prospects for a new Mexican revolution – the old one exploded in Ciudad Juarez an even hundred years ago – seeking to measure the objective conditions which are overripe for fresh uprising and the dearth of social forces that could ignite a new one. The audience listened for a while but inevitably the questions about the glut of gore spilled daily across the river took over.</p>
<p>Ironically, El Paso is flourishing in the wake of all the killing (over a thousand in 2009.) Restaurateurs and retailers have packed up and moved their inventories to the Texas side and the city is enjoying a real estate boom as the exodus of middle and upper classes seeking to escape the carnage crests.</p>
<p>Felipe Calderon’s ill-advised drug war drowns out all other news. Even Las Muertas, the hundreds of women raped and slain in Juarez since 1993, have disappeared from public attentions. The untimely passing of Esther Garcia, the mother of the mothers of the murdered and disappeared, has only compounded the silence.</p>
<p>Driving through El Paso en route to Las Cruces, Bobby Byrd, the patriarch of the Byrd clan whose Cinco Puntos Press is a beacon of culture in this high desert wasteland, is on his cell phone – gabbing while driving is still legal in Texas as several near side-swipes by distracted chauffeurs underscored. Bobby is hobnobbing with Reyes Tejirina whose takeover of the Tierra Amarilla courthouse in a land grant dispute back in 1967 is now enshrined in southwest school textbooks. Reyes, now a doddering elder who preaches The Protocols of Zion, wants Bobby to drive him to the airport when he flies up to Chicago for an appearance with Minister Farrakhan.</p>
<p>El Paso, of all tank towns, now has its very own Holocaust Museum financed by local Zionist moneybags. As we drift past the shuttered stacks and smelters of ASARCO (Bobby’s daughter and a member of the El Paso City Council, led the battle to squelch the reopening of this death trap), the elder Byrd muses on this unlikely turn of events. “The real El Paso holocaust is buried out there in the Smeltertown cemetery.”</p>
<p>We cross the state line into New Mexico, the Land of Enchantment and private prisons, a saga to be reviewed in the next installment of this quixotic journey through the underbelly of Obama’s America.</p>
<p>JOHN ROSS is on a book tour with his new cult classic “ <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1568584245/counterpunchmaga" type="external">El Monstruo – Dread &amp; Redemption in Mexico City</a>.” You can catch him at The Tattered Cover Friday March 5th and at the Mercury Café on the 6th, both in Denver. Ross will invade the frozen north for a week’s worth of presentations in Minneapolis/St Paul March 7th-13th – consult <a href="http://www.nationbooks.org" type="external">www.nationbooks.org</a> for dates and venues.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p /> | true | 4 | apologies ernest tubbs paranoia stalks skies lax flying towards texas pulled line tsa goon swabs hands explosives figure must kaffiya friend flies la next day puerto rico ordered remove skirt chase carryons tights airports become deep ponds fear loathing obamas america ever since nigerian unabomber almost pulled christmas day caper putting nofly list say terrorists prepared assault us friendly skies morning touched austin nativeborn terrorista christian caucasian persuasion flies small plane local irs offices 911 style killing one government worker joe stack longstanding beef revenooers since become martyr glenn beck vigilantes wesley snipes probably going invited michelles white house cultural klatches anytime soon ii two years nearly day raul r salinas xicano warriorpoeta passed great beyond read resistencia bookstorecultural center grew south austin reading rene shows clips last time raul roberto vargas fine nicaraguanla mision compa read resistencia raul blows poem grave lester young prez slow blue notes surging bell voice read poem penned flight writing poems commercial flights may soon federal felony remission liver cancer remission mission wake braindead dying journalism department university texas houses cheese box motel seemed run corrections corporation america talk braindead dying one bob jensens classes dont career journalism warn responsibility seek truth tell stories entrusted protect told stories must go place happened like learn much anger write right away head let details leak matter badly beat audience squirmed rigor mortis yet set iii eschew big box bookstores committing commercial genocide independents mostly work anarchist enclaves names like monkeywrench sedition tiny emporiums subversion austin houston university houston spoke impending revolution class mexican revolution taught john mason hart maestro mexican anarchism usually braindead students seemed measurably animated remission mission raise corpses comatose students iv david carlson professor radical history vault fascinating minutiae running round brain partner deirdre drove rio grande valley david first saw reading subcomandante marcoss latest communiqué dim laptop roomful anarchos black cat café slimy vegan soup kitchen driving rain storm seattle circa 1995 invited speak utpan american university graduates 800 members migra year david avows cia washes oodles greenbacks invite rented room spread verbal curare anyway handful undead signs along highway way south told story todays texas guns meat pawn paranoia amped closer came border motorists stopped frisked surprise checkpoints nether parts vehicles probed notvery successful campaign stop bales usd bills displays machine guns pipelining mexico one point davids mobile penetrated mysterious red blue rays radiating roadside sensors ufos hovering overhead assume electronic patdown homeland security work keep getting chilly sensation country old men v went visit wall hidalgo texas fronts reynosa tamaulipas across bends rio grande called rio bravo side hidalgo separation wall built around restored pump house bird sanctuary resembles one richard serras hideous installations aluminum cylinders form wall enough room allow snake squiggle jabalis midsized mammals whose habitat caged north south manmade north american monstrosity even dogs fleas subject deportation fleas born everyone carries two sets picture id flies multiple stars amp stripes front porches pinnacle sojourn valley evening narciso martinez cultural center san benito narciso martinez one original maestros texmex school conjunto accordionistics instruments ornate squeezeboxes display center afternoon parked san benito pfc adriana alvarez fallen iraq cause death revealed valley morning star story buried local chapel hundred mourners hand many representing local public safety agencies adriana made honorary member san benito police department gig narciso martinez joy irma guadarrama still beautiful woman south texas warbled two handmade songs energies choogling rogelio nunez mainstay center also directs fortunes project libertad stood migra defended newly arrived indocumentados decades rogelio offered three month writerinresidence crumbling stonewall jackson hotel san benito connoisseur fleabag hotels might take iv end texas el paso trapped crossfire two wars bloodcurdling drug war right across river juarez us war world fort bliss soldiers freshly flown home iraq afghanistan pakistan last stans strangle wives sleep apparently hallucinating enemy daily body count juarez outpaces kill count besieged taliban stronghold marjah every presentation hands shoot probe opinions drug violence sometimes refuse answer us skew mexico become synonymous severed heads slaughter innocents naked castrated men dangling freeway overpasses signs pinned chests paying obeisance santa muerte mexico much macabre gran guignol civilization political crucible fightback el pueblo inspiration brain dead dying gavachos utep university texas el paso attendance plummeting students juarez longer traverse big river spoke prospects new mexican revolution old one exploded ciudad juarez even hundred years ago seeking measure objective conditions overripe fresh uprising dearth social forces could ignite new one audience listened inevitably questions glut gore spilled daily across river took ironically el paso flourishing wake killing thousand 2009 restaurateurs retailers packed moved inventories texas side city enjoying real estate boom exodus middle upper classes seeking escape carnage crests felipe calderons illadvised drug war drowns news even las muertas hundreds women raped slain juarez since 1993 disappeared public attentions untimely passing esther garcia mother mothers murdered disappeared compounded silence driving el paso en route las cruces bobby byrd patriarch byrd clan whose cinco puntos press beacon culture high desert wasteland cell phone gabbing driving still legal texas several near sideswipes distracted chauffeurs underscored bobby hobnobbing reyes tejirina whose takeover tierra amarilla courthouse land grant dispute back 1967 enshrined southwest school textbooks reyes doddering elder preaches protocols zion wants bobby drive airport flies chicago appearance minister farrakhan el paso tank towns holocaust museum financed local zionist moneybags drift past shuttered stacks smelters asarco bobbys daughter member el paso city council led battle squelch reopening death trap elder byrd muses unlikely turn events real el paso holocaust buried smeltertown cemetery cross state line new mexico land enchantment private prisons saga reviewed next installment quixotic journey underbelly obamas america john ross book tour new cult classic el monstruo dread amp redemption mexico city catch tattered cover friday march 5th mercury café 6th denver ross invade frozen north weeks worth presentations minneapolisst paul march 7th13th consult wwwnationbooksorg dates venues 160 | 967 |
<p>Jeff Madrick is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, and a former economics columnist for The New York Times. He is editor of Challenge Magazine, visiting professor of humanities at The Cooper Union, and senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis, The New School. His last book, The Case for Big Government (Princeton), was named one of two 2009 PEN Galbraith Non-Fiction Award Finalists. His new book is titled, Age of Greed, The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970-Present and is published by Alfred A. Knopf.</p>
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<p /> PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay, today in New York City. Back in Washington, the debate continues: government's too big; the deficit's the problem. Of course, that's the fight being waged over whether to raise the debt ceiling or not. Not a lot of discussion, really, about why there's so much debt to begin with. At any rate, we're told the real problem is how to cut. And joining us now to discuss this debate in DC and some of the history leading up to it is Jeff Madrick. Jeff is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and a former economics columnist for The New York Times. He's a senior fellow at the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis, a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. His new book is The Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and Decline of America, 1970 to Present. And now joining us is Jeff Madrick. Thanks for joining us.
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<p />JEFF MADRICK, AUTHOR: Thank you, Paul. Good to be here.
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<p />JAY: So talk about this debate that's taking place in DC.
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<p />MADRICK: Well, it's not an economics debate. It's political showmanship, a carnival, I think, mostly the Republicans trying to get the edge. But Obama threw in the towel on the essence of this argument some time ago, when he agreed that balancing the budget was a primary goal of his administration earlier rather than later. Once he gave in on that, by naming the Bowles-Simpson commission to come up with a plan, he was going to start losing the debate.
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<p />JAY: So let's back up for just a second. If people don't remember, Bowles-Simpson commission was all about a bipartisan approach to cutting the deficit.
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<p />MADRICK: Right.
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<p />JAY: And there it becomes--the deficit becomes the problem, and not unemployment and not a stagnant economy.
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<p />MADRICK: Well, you know, the tragedy of this is we've got a serious jobs crisis. I've begun, like all of us, to hate the word "crisis". It's applied to everything. But the relationship between the growth of income in America, which is the growth in GDP, and the growth of jobs has changed radically. In fact, there is no relationship. Obama should be sounding the alarm about that. Had he been--had some passion about that before the last elections, he probably would have got--the Democrats, at least, wouldn't have gotten clobbered as badly. But he doesn't seem to have passion. And now he's going with this argument, which is a false necessity at the moment. We have to worry about the economy now and the budget deficit way down the road--not just a little down the road, but way down the road when it takes off. That's in the late 2020s, not in the near term. So this is--I would like to say it's a charade, but it's worse than a charade. It's a folly. It's one of the great historical follies. And it shouldn't be surprising, because we've had many follies in our history, as have had most nations.
<p />
<p />JAY: Well, is it folly, or is it interests that Obama is balancing who want to take advantage of this situation and beat back workers and labor wherever they can? Like, I know we did--in Wisconsin, there's a good example of something that happened. Three plants--Harley Davidson, Mercury Marine, and Kohler plumbing--were all able to win two-tier contracts where new workers are going to start at half the wages workers had previously. And they of course threatened to leave Wisconsin. Like, there's this whole atmosphere being created that not only is the problem the deficit; the problem is even wages are too high. So they're taking advantage of this. And as Obama just--essentially that's who helps fund so much of his election campaign.
<p />
<p />MADRICK: Well, it might be some of that. Of course, Wall Street was big on the funding of the Clinton campaign. But this idea of the suppression of wages in order to control inflation goes back to the 1970s. And that's part of my book Age of Greed.
<p />
<p />JAY: Take us back there, because this debate that's going on in DC now has been repeated over and over and over, and the underlying thing, the problem's the deficit, the problem is big government.
<p />
<p />MADRICK: Right. Well, I do want to say this: it is easy to arouse people's fears over deficits. But I do think a lot of people are arousing their fears because of their own vested interests. Some of it is pure ideology, a desire to make government smaller. That's driving a lot of people. A lot of it is that people make money off of this. But let's go back a way, because in the late 1960s, America believed in government, had faith in government, and was even willing to pay taxes to support new social programs which we thought were necessary. That included Medicare, expansion of Social Security, and indeed the war on poverty. Let's not forget that the poverty rates were 22 and 23 percent before the 1960s and the late '50s, 22 and 23 percent. Poverty rates for the elderly were even higher. That all came down to 11 or 12 percent because of those social programs. They succeeded. Now, they may have needed some reform and so forth, but they did succeed.
<p />
<p />JAY: So 1970 for you is a turning point, particularly in this battle. You frame it as a finance sector taking dominance. Maybe I could add one more thing to it. Over the last 100 years, there seems to be this kind of contradiction or fight between sections of capital that try to do what's good systemically for the whole elite and the system, and sections of capital that are for, you know, what's good for me today and tomorrow, and apres moi le deluge.
<p />
<p />MADRICK: You know, what we learned in the 1930s was finance run amok in the 1920s can lead to disaster. What we learned further was we knew how to regulate that. We learned how to regulate that. The New Deal supplied us regulations and the Glass-Steagall Act, federal insurance, the Glass-Steagall Act separating commercial and investment banks [crosstalk]
<p />
<p />JAY: Okay. Just one thing. Just--I want to just quickly interject, 'cause I was refreshing my mind today and I think a lot of people forgot why we had Glass-Steagall. And my understanding of it is is 'cause the banks who were selling stocks were lending people money to buy the stocks, and they were lending it--.
<p />
<p />MADRICK: Well, that was part of it, but they were also lending those companies money. So you had this conflict of interest that you were trying to sell the stocks of the companies you were lending money to. Well, let's say those companies were doing badly or something, you had a lot of customers and stocks, and you yourself, your own bank was involved [incompr.] Well, you just lend them a lot more of your savers' money to try and keep them out of trouble. There was a big contradiction there, a big conflict. That was just one of the things. We had the SEC to force disclosure. All these securities were issued in the dark, opaquely. We'd stopped speculation in commodities. We had insurance on deposits, which was one of the big things.
<p />
<p />JAY: So the idea is, for the good of the system as a whole, this segment of the banking sector has to have serious controls on it.
<p />
<p />MADRICK: Absolutely. Capital controls, controls on speculative behavior, controls on conflicts of interest, controls on disclosure. And it got us through the '50s and '60s quite remarkably well.
<p />
<p />JAY: So then we get to 1970.
<p />
<p />MADRICK: Brings us to the 1970s. I think the catalyst that changed things was the harsh economic circumstances of the 1970s: very high inflation, very high unemployment. Economists told us that couldn't happen, I grew up thinking that couldn't happen, and it did. People were--.
<p />
<p />JAY: Yeah, 'cause it's supposed to be high wages cause inflation.
<p />
<p />MADRICK: Yeah. Well, they also thought that high--in fact, unions and high wages indexed to inflation were also considered causes of inflation. That was the beginning of an anti-union sentiment. Americans became very confused. Politicians started crying it's the government. Federal deficits started growing. We didn't really have big federal deficits. It was easy, again, to arouse fears about a deficit. That's why I said earlier, you know, it's so easy to take advantage of--when you have a deficit, take advantage of people's fears. Americans started to distrust government. And along came an economic theory, essentially simplistic, led by Milton Friedman, that said government was almost always the problem. So can I frame the change in America? It wasn't only, of course, economics. America became distrustful after the Vietnam War. Racial tensions arose 'cause a lot of the Great Society was directed at helping minorities and so forth. But in 1972, '73, Governor Reagan of the state of California wanted to leave a conservative legacy. So he said, and with the--and I talk about this at length in this book Age of Greed--he said, let's propose an amendment to the state constitution to cut state income taxes permanently, significantly and permanently. Californians voted it down in early 1973. California said, no, we don't want to cut our taxes. America still believed in government. They still believed government was doing [incompr.] opinion surveys supported that. Nineteen seventy-eight, you know what happened. Proposition 13 cut property taxes drastically, overwhelmingly voted as an amendment to the state constitution in California--the beginning of a tax revolt across America. Five years--in my view, Americans change in those five years. And that led to the weakening of government and the abdication of government responsibility in controlling finance.
<p />
<p />JAY: Why was that able to happen? And there'd been a contention on these issues for years, and then that side proposing this kind of tax cuts and all of that sort of wins.
<p />
<p />MADRICK: Yeah.
<p />
<p />JAY: Why?
<p />
<p />MADRICK: I think I described why. Americans got afraid. Americans turned against government. Politicians exploited it. Media fell for Friedmanite economics. A fair amount of the economics profession started to adopt Friedmanite economics, which meant worry about inflation and keep wages down so it doesn't jack up inflation. That's remained in place in the economic lexicon for a long time, even, by and large, until this moment, led by men like Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve. And gradually, in that vacuum of weakened government and lost confidence by government officials, and especially by Democrats in the Carter administration, business, finance in particular, plowed through government regulation. There was an assault on government regulation. And as I write in the book, it was led by the head of First National City Bank, Walter Wriston, who many people haven't heard of, but they should have heard of him. He's the first long chapter in this book, and I think people will find that story quite interesting.
<p />
<p />JAY: Yeah. I should say that the book is--first of all, I'm just getting into it, and I have to admit that, but it's a great read. And it's based on individual personalities that--through these personalities, you learn about the main stages of how this process took place. So, well, keep going.
<p />
<p />MADRICK: So Wriston--to take one example, there was Regulation Q. It came out of the New Deal. It said there should be a maximum rate you can pay savers. Now, some of--deposit their money with you. Well, some--but you say, why? Let them pay what they want to pay. Well, even Adam Smith, in 1776, The Wealth of Nations, said, don't allow financial institutions to pay savers any amount of interest, because then they're going to use that money and chase fanciful speculative deals to try to make a lot of money. That was the basis of it. It made some sense. Wriston, of course, hated it. It restrained the growth of his bank. To some degree it could have been loosened up. But he devised ways to get around it. Maybe it's too long a story to tell. But, in any case, he devised at first a negotiable certificate of deposit to pay big depositors--corporations and rich people--more money. It had to be negotiable, however, like a stock. You had to be able to trade it like a bond.
<p />
<p />JAY: And the idea here is he's bypassing regulation to do this.
<p />
<p />MADRICK: Bypassing regulation.
<p />
<p />JAY: And this is the beginning of the unraveling of these kinds of regulations.
<p />
<p />MADRICK: The upshot is he got it done. His lawyers said, you know, the Fed's going to object to this; we'd better ask the Federal Reserve, our regulator. He said, let's not go to the Fed; let's just do it and let them stop us. That characterized Wriston, and he did it time and again, most notably in lending all those petrodollars, the Arab oil money, when they raised the oil price in '73, '74, and again in the late '70s. He recycled that money mostly to Latin America, some to Africa and a few other Third World countries, based on commodities prices. The government could have been involved. A quasi-government or ad hoc group of countries could have been involved.
<p />
<p />JAY: Could have been involved in making these loans.
<p />
<p />MADRICK: In recycling some of the--making the loans, and making equity investments, changing the terms. Wriston barged ahead. Paul Volcker was disturbed by this. Even a couple of people in the Ford administration back then were. He barged ahead.
<p />
<p />JAY: And it's important, I think. A lot of people on the other end of these loans in Latin America are actually tin pot dictators who are pocketing big whacks of these, you know, in their own Swiss bank accounts. And if I understand [incompr.] correctly, a lot of these loans were for the first time floating interest rate loans. So they're very cheap when they first lend the money, and then the rates start to skyrocket.
<p />
<p />MADRICK: Well, the rates went way up later.
<p />
<p />JAY: Like, about 19, 20 percent.
<p />
<p />MADRICK: Yeah. That was when Volcker, Paul Volcker, chairman of the Fed, appointed by Jimmy Carter, raised rates to stop our own inflation. The upshot is almost all those loans turned bad by the 1980s. So here the great free market advocate Walter Wriston had to be bailed out, basically, by the federal government.
<p />
<p />JAY: And that's one of the big points of your story. The big bad government that they're railing against is always coming in and bailing out the banks after they take these high-risk ventures.
<p />
<p />MADRICK: And that kind of story kept repeating. And Washington did not step up to stop, or at least restrain or regulate, these guys. Meantime, the markets change. Stock prices stop going up in the 1970s. People on Wall Street started investing and utilizing new derivatives contracts to make investments in currencies which were newly floated, international currencies. Interest rates, which were bobbing all over the place with inflation, that replaced the old equity investment, but regulation did not keep up with it.
<p />
<p />JAY: So in the next segment of our interview we'll talk further about the rise of finance--or should we say the rise of the parasitical segment of capital? And so please join us with Jeff Madrick on The Real News Network for part two.
<p />
<p />End of Transcript
<p />
<p />DISCLAIMER: Please note that transcripts for The Real News Network are typed from a recording of the program. TRNN cannot guarantee their complete accuracy. | true | 4 | jeff madrick regular contributor new york review books former economics columnist new york times editor challenge magazine visiting professor humanities cooper union senior fellow roosevelt institute schwartz center economic policy analysis new school last book case big government princeton named one two 2009 pen galbraith nonfiction award finalists new book titled age greed triumph finance decline america 1970present published alfred knopf paul jay senior editor trnn welcome real news network im paul jay today new york city back washington debate continues governments big deficits problem course thats fight waged whether raise debt ceiling lot discussion really theres much debt begin rate told real problem cut joining us discuss debate dc history leading jeff madrick jeff regular contributor new york review books former economics columnist new york times hes senior fellow schwartz center economic policy analysis senior fellow roosevelt institute new book age greed triumph finance decline america 1970 present joining us jeff madrick thanks joining us jeff madrick author thank paul good jay talk debate thats taking place dc madrick well economics debate political showmanship carnival think mostly republicans trying get edge obama threw towel essence argument time ago agreed balancing budget primary goal administration earlier rather later gave naming bowlessimpson commission come plan going start losing debate jay lets back second people dont remember bowlessimpson commission bipartisan approach cutting deficit madrick right jay becomesthe deficit becomes problem unemployment stagnant economy madrick well know tragedy weve got serious jobs crisis ive begun like us hate word crisis applied everything relationship growth income america growth gdp growth jobs changed radically fact relationship obama sounding alarm beenhad passion last elections probably would gotthe democrats least wouldnt gotten clobbered badly doesnt seem passion hes going argument false necessity moment worry economy budget deficit way roadnot little road way road takes thats late 2020s near term isi would like say charade worse charade folly one great historical follies shouldnt surprising weve many follies history nations jay well folly interests obama balancing want take advantage situation beat back workers labor wherever like know didin wisconsin theres good example something happened three plantsharley davidson mercury marine kohler plumbingwere able win twotier contracts new workers going start half wages workers previously course threatened leave wisconsin like theres whole atmosphere created problem deficit problem even wages high theyre taking advantage obama justessentially thats helps fund much election campaign madrick well might course wall street big funding clinton campaign idea suppression wages order control inflation goes back 1970s thats part book age greed jay take us back debate thats going dc repeated underlying thing problems deficit problem big government madrick right well want say easy arouse peoples fears deficits think lot people arousing fears vested interests pure ideology desire make government smaller thats driving lot people lot people make money lets go back way late 1960s america believed government faith government even willing pay taxes support new social programs thought necessary included medicare expansion social security indeed war poverty lets forget poverty rates 22 23 percent 1960s late 50s 22 23 percent poverty rates elderly even higher came 11 12 percent social programs succeeded may needed reform forth succeed jay 1970 turning point particularly battle frame finance sector taking dominance maybe could add one thing last 100 years seems kind contradiction fight sections capital try whats good systemically whole elite system sections capital know whats good today tomorrow apres moi le deluge madrick know learned 1930s finance run amok 1920s lead disaster learned knew regulate learned regulate new deal supplied us regulations glasssteagall act federal insurance glasssteagall act separating commercial investment banks crosstalk jay okay one thing justi want quickly interject cause refreshing mind today think lot people forgot glasssteagall understanding cause banks selling stocks lending people money buy stocks lending madrick well part also lending companies money conflict interest trying sell stocks companies lending money well lets say companies badly something lot customers stocks bank involved incompr well lend lot savers money try keep trouble big contradiction big conflict one things sec force disclosure securities issued dark opaquely wed stopped speculation commodities insurance deposits one big things jay idea good system whole segment banking sector serious controls madrick absolutely capital controls controls speculative behavior controls conflicts interest controls disclosure got us 50s 60s quite remarkably well jay get 1970 madrick brings us 1970s think catalyst changed things harsh economic circumstances 1970s high inflation high unemployment economists told us couldnt happen grew thinking couldnt happen people jay yeah cause supposed high wages cause inflation madrick yeah well also thought highin fact unions high wages indexed inflation also considered causes inflation beginning antiunion sentiment americans became confused politicians started crying government federal deficits started growing didnt really big federal deficits easy arouse fears deficit thats said earlier know easy take advantage ofwhen deficit take advantage peoples fears americans started distrust government along came economic theory essentially simplistic led milton friedman said government almost always problem frame change america wasnt course economics america became distrustful vietnam war racial tensions arose cause lot great society directed helping minorities forth 1972 73 governor reagan state california wanted leave conservative legacy said theand talk length book age greedhe said lets propose amendment state constitution cut state income taxes permanently significantly permanently californians voted early 1973 california said dont want cut taxes america still believed government still believed government incompr opinion surveys supported nineteen seventyeight know happened proposition 13 cut property taxes drastically overwhelmingly voted amendment state constitution californiathe beginning tax revolt across america five yearsin view americans change five years led weakening government abdication government responsibility controlling finance jay able happen thered contention issues years side proposing kind tax cuts sort wins madrick yeah jay madrick think described americans got afraid americans turned government politicians exploited media fell friedmanite economics fair amount economics profession started adopt friedmanite economics meant worry inflation keep wages doesnt jack inflation thats remained place economic lexicon long time even large moment led men like ben bernanke chairman federal reserve gradually vacuum weakened government lost confidence government officials especially democrats carter administration business finance particular plowed government regulation assault government regulation write book led head first national city bank walter wriston many people havent heard heard hes first long chapter book think people find story quite interesting jay yeah say book isfirst im getting admit great read based individual personalities thatthrough personalities learn main stages process took place well keep going madrick wristonto take one example regulation q came new deal said maximum rate pay savers ofdeposit money well somebut say let pay want pay well even adam smith 1776 wealth nations said dont allow financial institutions pay savers amount interest theyre going use money chase fanciful speculative deals try make lot money basis made sense wriston course hated restrained growth bank degree could loosened devised ways get around maybe long story tell case devised first negotiable certificate deposit pay big depositorscorporations rich peoplemore money negotiable however like stock able trade like bond jay idea hes bypassing regulation madrick bypassing regulation jay beginning unraveling kinds regulations madrick upshot got done lawyers said know feds going object wed better ask federal reserve regulator said lets go fed lets let stop us characterized wriston time notably lending petrodollars arab oil money raised oil price 73 74 late 70s recycled money mostly latin america africa third world countries based commodities prices government could involved quasigovernment ad hoc group countries could involved jay could involved making loans madrick recycling themaking loans making equity investments changing terms wriston barged ahead paul volcker disturbed even couple people ford administration back barged ahead jay important think lot people end loans latin america actually tin pot dictators pocketing big whacks know swiss bank accounts understand incompr correctly lot loans first time floating interest rate loans theyre cheap first lend money rates start skyrocket madrick well rates went way later jay like 19 20 percent madrick yeah volcker paul volcker chairman fed appointed jimmy carter raised rates stop inflation upshot almost loans turned bad 1980s great free market advocate walter wriston bailed basically federal government jay thats one big points story big bad government theyre railing always coming bailing banks take highrisk ventures madrick kind story kept repeating washington step stop least restrain regulate guys meantime markets change stock prices stop going 1970s people wall street started investing utilizing new derivatives contracts make investments currencies newly floated international currencies interest rates bobbing place inflation replaced old equity investment regulation keep jay next segment interview well talk rise financeor say rise parasitical segment capital please join us jeff madrick real news network part two end transcript disclaimer please note transcripts real news network typed recording program trnn guarantee complete accuracy | 1,440 |
<p>The Revenge of the Sith, the sixth movie in the Star Wars saga, is drawing record crowds and grossing millions by the week. George Lucas, heady with the success of American Graffiti in 1973, conceived the series two years later. It was to be the story of Anakin Skywalker’s rise, fall and ultimate redemption. Since the story was too large for one film, he divided it into two trilogies and decided (for reasons best known to him) to make the second trilogy before the first one.</p>
<p>He offered the science fiction concept to Universal Studios, who had produced American Graffiti. In a decision they would regret badly in the years to come, Universal passed on it because they dismissed the story as “unfathomable and silly.” In fact, every single studio in Hollywood passed on it except for 20th Century Fox.</p>
<p>The first film in the series was released in 1977. By the end of its first theatrical run, it had become the most successful in the history of cinema and turned Lucas into a multi-millionaire. In the decades to come, the Star Wars brand would acquire a cult following equally among the young and the old. Some would be drawn to it because of the lure of space travel. Others would love the stunning special effects that became its hallmark. And many would love its portrayal of war between good and evil. Located in a “galaxy far, far away,” war seemed glorious.</p>
<p>However, it you strip the exotic location and the stunning special effects, the film is a gripping portrayal of the arrogance, anger and hostility that drive people to make war on planet Earth. By not calling it “Earth Wars,” Lucas ensured that millions of people seeking to escape the real wars going on around them would become moviegoers.</p>
<p>Addressing the Asian defense ministers in Singapore earlier this month, an indignant US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld asked why China was increasing its defense spending in consecutive years by double-digit percentages since it faced no immediate threats. He said such high spending rates could destabilize the Asian military balance. One may, of course, ask the same question of Rumsfeld. The only known enemies of the US are non-state actors that hardly justify the type and level of military spending that it is engaged in.</p>
<p>While accounting for only 5 percent of the world’s population, the US accounts for half of global defense spending, according to figures released by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. For the first time since the end of the Cold War, global military spending topped a trillion dollars last year. This amounts to 2.6 percent of the world’s gross domestic product and represents an expenditure of $162 for every man, woman and child on the planet.</p>
<p>In addition to spending $500 billion annually on its military, the US has allocated $238 billion to prosecute the global war on terror since 2003. As Jeffrey Sachs of the Earth Institute argues in his new book, “The End Of Poverty,” the US has unfortunately neglected the deeper causes of global instability that lead to terror. Its spending on extremely poor people who live on a daily income of less than a dollar a day is about 3 percent of its defense budget. These people are chronically hungry, ill, and uneducated. They lack basic housing and clothing. Today, there are 1.1 billion such people in the globe, all in danger of being killed by poverty.</p>
<p>Yet a callous world continues to increase military spending. No where is this more evident than in South Asia, where defense spending grew by 14 percent last year, compared to a global average growth rate of 5 percent.</p>
<p>While always arguing that it is not engaged in an arms race with India, Pakistan has just raised its defense spending by 16 percent to $3.8 billion. The saving grace is that in the same budget, the government has announced it will raise infrastructure development spending by almost 35 percent to $4.6 billion. Higher economic growth rates in the 6 to 8 percent range have made it possible to raise spending on both defense and development. However, this should not be taken to mean that there is no trade-off between spending on development and defense. If there is any ironclad law in economics, it is that there is no free lunch.</p>
<p>Peace economist Kanta Marwah and Nobel laureate Lawrence Klein have published an analysis of the impact of defense spending on economic growth, drawing upon data from five Latin American countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Peru. During the 1970s and 1980s, these countries spent on average 3.3 percent of their GDP on defense, which translated into an annual military expenditure of $7.4 billion (measured in 1990 US dollars). Marwah and Klein quantify the “hidden cost” of defense spending during this period, by assessing how much it lowered the rate of economic growth.</p>
<p>Applying econometric methods to annual data over the 1970-91 time frame, they find that military spending had a negative impact on economic growth in all five countries. The worst affected country was Paraguay and the least affected was Bolivia. To determine the impact of the defense burden, they simulated what would have happened had the burden been reduced to 1 percent of GDP, emulating the spending cap set by the Central American nation of Costa Rica.</p>
<p>Marwah and Klein find that high military spending caused Argentina to lose nearly 2 percentage points in its annual economic growth rate during the 1976-81 period. It was during this time that the generals in Argentina waged a “dirty war” after having overthrown the civilian government of Isabel Peron.</p>
<p>Similarly, Chile lost annually 1 to 1.5 percentage points in its economic growth rate between 1974 to 1988, when the military government of August Pinochet held sway, after having overthrown the government of Salvadore Allende. For the five countries collectively, excessive military spending took off 1.5 percentage points of the annual rate of economic growth.</p>
<p>The findings of this exercise in revisionist history are very revealing and worth pondering over by governments in all developing countries who are seeking a brighter future for their citizens. In particular, they should be of interest to the leaders of South Asia, which is home to a third of the world’s poor.</p>
<p>Pakistan and India need to take the lead in reducing the defense burden on their populations, especially now that their longstanding tensions seem to be dissipating. Capping (and eventually reducing) military spending would be the ultimate confidence building measure on the road to peace.</p>
<p>AHMAD FARUQUI is a member of <a href="http://www.epsusa.org/" type="external">Economists for Peace and Security</a> and can be reached at <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a>.</p>
<p>This article was first published in Daily Times, Pakistan.</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | true | 4 | revenge sith sixth movie star wars saga drawing record crowds grossing millions week george lucas heady success american graffiti 1973 conceived series two years later story anakin skywalkers rise fall ultimate redemption since story large one film divided two trilogies decided reasons best known make second trilogy first one offered science fiction concept universal studios produced american graffiti decision would regret badly years come universal passed dismissed story unfathomable silly fact every single studio hollywood passed except 20th century fox first film series released 1977 end first theatrical run become successful history cinema turned lucas multimillionaire decades come star wars brand would acquire cult following equally among young old would drawn lure space travel others would love stunning special effects became hallmark many would love portrayal war good evil located galaxy far far away war seemed glorious however strip exotic location stunning special effects film gripping portrayal arrogance anger hostility drive people make war planet earth calling earth wars lucas ensured millions people seeking escape real wars going around would become moviegoers addressing asian defense ministers singapore earlier month indignant us defense secretary donald rumsfeld asked china increasing defense spending consecutive years doubledigit percentages since faced immediate threats said high spending rates could destabilize asian military balance one may course ask question rumsfeld known enemies us nonstate actors hardly justify type level military spending engaged accounting 5 percent worlds population us accounts half global defense spending according figures released stockholm international peace research institute first time since end cold war global military spending topped trillion dollars last year amounts 26 percent worlds gross domestic product represents expenditure 162 every man woman child planet addition spending 500 billion annually military us allocated 238 billion prosecute global war terror since 2003 jeffrey sachs earth institute argues new book end poverty us unfortunately neglected deeper causes global instability lead terror spending extremely poor people live daily income less dollar day 3 percent defense budget people chronically hungry ill uneducated lack basic housing clothing today 11 billion people globe danger killed poverty yet callous world continues increase military spending evident south asia defense spending grew 14 percent last year compared global average growth rate 5 percent always arguing engaged arms race india pakistan raised defense spending 16 percent 38 billion saving grace budget government announced raise infrastructure development spending almost 35 percent 46 billion higher economic growth rates 6 8 percent range made possible raise spending defense development however taken mean tradeoff spending development defense ironclad law economics free lunch peace economist kanta marwah nobel laureate lawrence klein published analysis impact defense spending economic growth drawing upon data five latin american countries argentina bolivia chile paraguay peru 1970s 1980s countries spent average 33 percent gdp defense translated annual military expenditure 74 billion measured 1990 us dollars marwah klein quantify hidden cost defense spending period assessing much lowered rate economic growth applying econometric methods annual data 197091 time frame find military spending negative impact economic growth five countries worst affected country paraguay least affected bolivia determine impact defense burden simulated would happened burden reduced 1 percent gdp emulating spending cap set central american nation costa rica marwah klein find high military spending caused argentina lose nearly 2 percentage points annual economic growth rate 197681 period time generals argentina waged dirty war overthrown civilian government isabel peron similarly chile lost annually 1 15 percentage points economic growth rate 1974 1988 military government august pinochet held sway overthrown government salvadore allende five countries collectively excessive military spending took 15 percentage points annual rate economic growth findings exercise revisionist history revealing worth pondering governments developing countries seeking brighter future citizens particular interest leaders south asia home third worlds poor pakistan india need take lead reducing defense burden populations especially longstanding tensions seem dissipating capping eventually reducing military spending would ultimate confidence building measure road peace ahmad faruqui member economists peace security reached faruquipacbellnet article first published daily times pakistan 160 | 652 |
<p>In early August, as the latest Gaza war raged, two pro-Israel consultants, Meagan Buren and Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, circulated a memo addressed to “Top leaders who care about Israel and protecting Jews.” The memo discussed “significant, problematic issues in public opinion about Israel among key American demographics including liberals, minorities and young people.” Citing a recent focus group of “Capitol Hill senior staff from both parties,” the pair warned that the views and opinions they had encountered stood in “stark contrast to the public statements and votes that indicate support for our issues,” such as a recently passed (and typically one-sided) congressional resolution supporting Israel’s military operation.</p>
<p>“Congress is supposed to be our fortress,” the consultants wrote. “While Israel faces Hamas tunnels, it appears that the negativity and lack of support among young people is tunneling its way into congressional offices, even while the Congressmen and Senators remain steadfast on the surface.”</p>
<p>The two went on to list a set of tried and tested messages that Israel’s advocates should use: “Consistently connect Hamas to Iran,” they wrote. “[I]t isn’t Hamas, it is Iran-backed Hamas” (italics in original). This device, they wrote, reminds listeners “that this conflict is larger than one between Israel and the Palestinians in which Israel is the big bad guy and Hamas is the little guy just doing what it can to fight an occupying power.”</p>
<p>The memo was a great example of the practice of hasbara, a Hebrew word meaning “explanation,” but which has come to mean simply pro-Israel propaganda. Coping with obvious power disparity has proven to be a huge challenge for those attempting to explain Israel’s case. The contrast between these two images—Israel as embattled and democratic underdog amid a sea of hostile Arabs; Israel as oppressive colonial occupier—is highlighted by two recent books by very different authors, both of which engage in what can be understood as an expression of, or a reaction to, hasbara.</p>
<p>Joshua Muravchik is a fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, and is someone I’ve always considered to be one of the more serious neoconservatives. Unlike, say, Bill Kristol, whose advocacy of various new wars is shot through with an element of political opportunism and bad faith, Muravchik has wrestled far more rigorously with some of the issues of American power. One wouldn’t know this, however, from reading this book.</p>
<p>Muravchik’s purpose, as one may gather from his title, is to track how Israel went from being seen by Western liberals as a scrappy, liberal-democratic David to being perceived now as a Goliath, and to argue that today’s view of the conflict is incorrect. “The Six Day War,” Muravchik writes, “. . . set in motion a redefinition of the conflict. No longer was it Israel versus the Arabs. Now it was Israel versus the homeless Palestinians.” By reframing the Arab-Israeli conflict as primarily an Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and then establishing the Palestinian national cause as a progressive one, the Arabs pulled a fast one on the global left, Muravchik contends.</p>
<p>Muravchik fondly remembers the days when Americans’ views were shaped by Leon Uris’s novel Exodus (1958), which he reminds us was “the best-selling novel in America since Gone with the Wind.” It’s a fitting comparison, though not necessarily in ways Muravchik would choose to emphasize. Both novels presented a highly sanitized version of history—both, in their own way, racist and reactionary—and dramatically downplayed those on the suffering end of these stories. Gone with the Wind’s slaves are portrayed as simple, happy folk, serving as decorations in Scarlett O’Hara’s drama. Exodus’s Arabs are uniformly duplicitous and conniving, cast as villains in a Jewish redemption story. The fact that, in both cases, the history is now understood as far more complex and problematic is something to be applauded, not lamented.</p>
<p>Muravchik spends considerable effort trying to draw connections between the Palestinian cause and the Nazis, as if to remind us who the real bad guys are. For example, he writes that the 1936-39 Palestinian Arab revolt was “apparently financed by Adolf Hitler’s government.” It’s hard to know exactly how much work “apparently” is doing here, as Muravchik, tellingly, includes no citation. This is unsurprising, as it flies in the face of most scholarship on the Arab revolt. “There does not appear to have been much discussion or debate in German government circles over the Arab revolt and general strike,” writes historian Francis R. Nicosia, distinguished professor of Holocaust studies at the University of Vermont, in his 2000 book, The Third Reich and the Palestine Question. “The attempts of Arab leaders to secure German weapons for the Palestinian insurgents and Germany’s refusal to grant such assistance…indicate that Germany maintained a policy of noninvolvement in Palestinian affairs.”</p>
<p>In a similar vein, Muravchik quotes Six Days in June: Israel’s Fight for Survival, written by Robert J. Donovan and the staff of the Los Angeles Times, as saying that “[t]he Arabs, on the whole, sided with the Nazis with whom they shared common hatreds.” Again, this is contradicted by the scholarly consensus on the issue (at least he includes a footnote this time, even if it’s somewhat odd to base so broad a claim on one out-of-print book from the 1960s). In reality, the historical record on this subject “is a complex, mixed, and nuanced one,” as Hussein Ibish, a senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine, wrote in a June 2014 piece marking the anniversary of D-Day, “but the overarching fact is that Arab and Muslim involvement in the war was overwhelmingly on the Allied side, and was a significant factor in fighting on the ground.” Ibish notes that a total of around 6,000 Arabs are estimated to have fought on the Axis side, whereas tens of thousands fought and died on the Allied side, including 9,000 Palestinians in the British army alone.</p>
<p>It is true, as Muravchik recounts, that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, sought an alliance with the Nazis in hopes of gaining advantage against British and Zionist forces in Palestine. But while his work recruiting Bosnian Muslims to the fascist cause is indefensible, al-Husseini’s pro-Hitler propaganda found little traction among its intended audience, as the numbers cited by Ibish show.</p>
<p>Tracking what he sees as increased hostility to Israel on the part of the media, Muravchik laments the passing of the days “before the advent of ‘political correctness’ ”—almost always code employed by a white guy lamenting a past in which people could be more open about certain biases—when writers like “Russell Baker poured ridicule on the Arabs, going so far…as to make fun of ‘the Arab mind.’ ” Muravchik himself has developed no such compunction, writing of “the Arabs” as “hungry for violence,” and for whom “a bomb in a market is a routine form of warfare.” (Muravchik may not be aware that a bomb in a market was also a routine form of warfare for the Zionist terror group Irgun, but if he is, he doesn’t let it spoil his story.)</p>
<p>In Muravchik’s telling, the Palestinians, after gauging the anti-colonialist direction of international opinion, expertly refashioned themselves into an oppressed people. He attempts to revive the canard that Palestinian national identity is of recent vintage, a view long debunked by scholarly works such as Rashid Khalidi’s Palestinian Identity and Joel S. Migdal and Baruch Kimmerling’s The Palestinian People. He further argues that the Arab states then manipulated international organizations like the UN to use this invented identity as a weapon against Israel.</p>
<p>It’s worth recognizing here that bias against Israel at the UN does undeniably exist and is inexcusable. What’s unclear is how much this actually matters to resolving the conflict. Muravchik writes that the UN’s one-sidedness empowers Palestinian rejectionists, but of course the same could be said of the U.S. Congress empowering Israeli rejectionists, Benjamin Netanyahu being chief among them. Muravchik attributes a great deal of messaging skill and organization to a coalition of regimes that have proven time and again to lack both. At no point does Muravchik consider that the Palestinian Arabs might have had a good reason to object to the demand that they give up half of Palestine to its Jewish minority (there is, of course, no example in history of any people ever having agreed to any similar deal), or that Arabs in general might have a reason to be bothered by it.</p>
<p>Muravchik makes no effort to confront the reality of Palestinian life under occupation. In his view, simply by virtue of Israel being a democracy, its leaders should be taken at their word that all the policies they enact (which include, presumably, the ban on the importation of cumin and pasta into Gaza) are entirely justifiable. To the extent that Israel’s nearly half-century-old military control of the West Bank and Gaza presents any problem, it’s primarily one of perception. For Muravchik, the election of a former terrorist as Israel’s prime minister in 1977 (Menachem Begin), and the subsequent ramping up of settlement efforts, was mainly a public-relations problem. “The harm to Israel’s reputation caused by Begin’s policies was multiplied many times over by the divisions they exacerbated within Israeli society,” Muravchik writes. “There they nurtured a subculture of alienation that proved to be an inexhaustible resource for Israel’s enemies,” just as critics of the Vietnam War had affirmed anti-Americanism.</p>
<p>Muravchik dings Daniel Levy, a British-born Israeli peace negotiator, for having called the creation of Israel “an act that was wrong.” It’s worth exploring just how mendacious this is. Levy (who is, I should note, a friend) made the remarks, at an Al Jazeera forum, in defense of Israel: “I believe that where Jewish history was in 1948 excused—for me, it was good enough for me—an act that was wrong.” The “act” in question here was not the creation of the Jewish state itself but the expulsion of Palestinians that accompanied that creation. Levy continued, “I don’t expect Palestinians to think that. There’s no reason that Palestinians should think there was justice in the creation of Israel. But if we’re going to live as neighbors, or in one state, one has to begin to develop an understanding and a respect for who the other is. And to compare a Zionist to a Nazi doesn’t really get you very far down that road.”</p>
<p>In the same vein, Muravchik attacks B’Tselem, an Israeli group widely respected in the liberal human rights community, as “devoted deliberately to damaging Israel’s standing in the world.” Here, Muravchik exemplifies a peculiar tendency found among those who most aggressively trumpet Israel’s liberalism (as Muravchik did in his earlier e-book Liberal Oasis): They seem to have contempt for actual, existing Israeli liberals. This was beautifully captured in a comment made to a friend of mine, an Israeli national-security analyst critical of the current government, by an official from a conservative American pro-Israel advocacy group: “You make our job so much harder.” That is, the actual practice of Israeli liberals is inconvenient for those trying to burnish its image abroad.</p>
<p>Even if one would agree with all of Muravchik’s points, from UN bias to the instrumentality of Palestinian nationalism, we are still confronted with the same reality: the displacement of an indigenous population in 1948, and almost half a century of military control over a civilian population, which the current Israeli government admits it has no intention of ending. The central problem of the book is not that it’s biased or ideological—though it’s both—but that it misses the very thing it seeks to narrate and explain: how an ongoing occupation and colonization effort has made people reevaluate the Israeli story. The notion that those Hill staffers are simply being taken in by pro-Palestinian PR isn’t a convincing one.</p>
<p>Having previously covered the radical American right wing, Max Blumenthal would seem a good choice to report on Israel’s own rightward drift. One reads Blumenthal’s harrowing account of Operation Cast Lead—the three-week conflict beginning in December 2008 and ending in January 2009—with particular grief, knowing that it was even worse this time around in Operation Protective Edge, the seven-week conflict beginning in July 2014 and ending in August, which killed more people and destroyed far more homes and property, while similarly achieving little of value for anyone. One of the first of many short chapters (many with inflammatory names that, along with the book’s generally churlish tone, severely undermine the book’s reporting) is “The Hill of Shame,” which discusses the hilltop overlooking Gaza where Israelis gather to watch—even exult in—the destruction. We saw this scene replayed during the most recent Gaza war, too. It’s a side of Israel that most Americans remain unaware of.</p>
<p>Blumenthal thoroughly documents the system of discriminatory policies that privileges Jews over Palestinians within Israel. Among these is a law—recently and astonishingly upheld by the Israeli Supreme Court—effectively allowing communities to refuse residency based on Palestinian ethnicity. He also documents the daily abuses of the occupation in the West Bank. There is, at all times, an enormous machinery of violence pointed at the Palestinians under occupation. And it’s a machinery that owes them zero accountability. What Blumenthal doesn’t demonstrate, though, is that this discrimination is inseparable from, and intrinsic to, Zionism. In Blumenthal’s telling, Zionism is fundamentally illiberal and historically indefensible. He recounts the story of Benjamin Netanyahu’s ring, an ancient trinket he shows to visitors to his office, inscribed with the name “Netanyahu,” which he brandishes as evidence of his claim to the land of Israel. As Blumenthal notes, Netanyahu’s grandfather, Nathan Milikovsky, had changed his name to Netanyahu upon emigrating from Lithuania to Palestine. “Netanyahu’s magical ring tale rested on the same logical fallacy as my own dubious assertion to a historical mandate to rule over Mexico because my grandfather, Hymie Blumenthal, had changed his name to Hymie Quetzalcoatl,” he writes. It’s a funny line, but its ahistoricism should be obvious. The Jewish faith wasn’t forged in Mexico, and Jews haven’t spent centuries ending Seders with “Next year in Jalisco.”</p>
<p>Special attention is paid to the rise of Avigdor Lieberman, the Moldovan bouncer-turned-foreign minister whose rhetoric, Blumenthal writes, “rivaled the most sinister of James Bond villains.” (Not just any old Bond villains, mind you, but the most sinister.) “Lieberman and his growing band of hard-right henchmen gave expression to the authentically authoritarian attitudes that radiated from the heart of Jewish Israeli society,” he continues. Blumenthal demonstrates through his reporting that these attitudes, and the policies they support, are quite real and damaging. But he doesn’t show why these attitudes are any more “authentic” than the attitudes that led to the creation of a network of strongly progressive human rights organizations of which many Israelis are rightly proud (more on them below), and which set a high standard for liberal-progressive advocacy and activism.</p>
<p>Both Blumenthal and Muravchik are dismissive, though for different reasons, of liberal groups working to change the status quo. They can’t seem to stand real, live Israeli liberals. Writing of young Israelis who try to bring a greater sense of moral responsibility to their service in the Israeli Defense Forces—for example, by acting more aggressively to prevent settler violence against Palestinians— Blumenthal dismisses them as “well-educated Ashkenazi teens [who] insert themselves into frontline combat units to civilize their less cultivated, lower-class peers from Mizrahi and Russian backgrounds.” Similarly, Blumenthal repeatedly cites the work of the Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence, which collects testimonies of Israeli soldiers in order to confront Israeli society with the brutal realities of the occupation, but he doesn’t let this testimony—through which soldiers, many of them self-identified Zionists, are trying, in various ways, to change the situation for the better—infringe on his thesis that Zionism is irredeemable.</p>
<p>For Blumenthal, particularly culpable are the liberals and progressive Zionists who, by giving morally pained cover to Israel’s excesses, perpetuate them. “According to the philosophy of liberal Zionism,” Blumenthal writes, “Israel was an enlightened, European-style democracy before the rise of the settlement movement.” It’s quite right to push back on the tendency of some Israeli liberals to locate the cause of Israel’s problems among the settlers, although I’m unaware of any prominent liberal Zionists who hold this philosophy, at least as Blumenthal caricatures it. But it provides Blumenthal’s desired context for a pivotal scene, in which he visits the home of Israeli author David Grossman, an actual prominent Israeli liberal. Grossman shares his hopes that, under Obama, Israel’s pro-settlement right wing will be forced to comply with American efforts toward a two-state solution. (As Blumenthal observes, now in hindsight, this hope has been sadly misplaced.)</p>
<p>But Blumenthal’s inability, or unwillingness, or both, to understand the value that Grossman places on Jewish statehood is emblematic of his lack of empathy. “For two thousand years,” Grossman tells Blumenthal, “we have been kept out, we have been excluded. And so for our whole history we were outsiders. Because of Zionism, we finally have a chance to be insiders.” Blumenthal flippantly responds that lots of Jews are insiders in America, including his own father, Sidney Blumenthal, who was a senior aide in the Clinton Administration.</p>
<p>As with Muravchik’s refusal to engage seriously with the Palestinian perspective or the reality on the ground, at no point does Blumenthal consider that there’s anything reasonable in the Jewish desire for national self-determination, or that contemporary Jewish Israeli fears might have a basis in reality, especially in the wake of the second intifada, which saw Israel’s urban centers terrorized by bombs in buses, shopping centers, and restaurants. One needs to understand the grievances that give rise to a Lieberman, just as one needs to understand the grievances that give rise to a Khaled Meshaal, the Hamas leader. A small measure of empathy would have made this a far better and useful book. But then, it would have been a far different one.</p>
<p>A key shortcoming of both books is that they simply preach to their own respective choirs. If Muravchik’s book can be treated as hasbara—and I think it can—then Blumenthal is engaged in a sort of reverse hasbara, relentlessly bombarding us with Israel’s ugliness. The challenge for progressives is to find a space between these two views, one that recognizes the political facts of fear, mistrust, and oppression that drive Israeli policy and Palestinian resistance, both violent and nonviolent. This isn’t to suggest a familiar, comforting “both sides are to blame” equivalence—there is no equivalence between occupier and occupied—but to suggest that empathy for both sides’ experiences and fears is necessary to understanding this most-written-about of conflicts. It should also be said that, while the progressive side is properly most concerned with the occupation, it should make demands of the Palestinians, too. Living under occupation does not create a special dispensation for terrorism, corruption, or authoritarianism, and it would be an enormous tragedy if the occupation were merely to give way to yet another Arab security state in its place.</p>
<p>A key question is whether there is a common denominator to be found among all the groups that we might define as within the progressive camp: one-staters, two-staters, liberal Zionists, and post-Zionists. Progressives will disagree on a lot, but I would suggest that one thing we can agree on is that ending the occupation—that is, the U.S.-sponsored domination of Palestinians by Israeli forces—is imperative. The formulation “no nation in the world would tolerate . . .” is often used to defend Israeli actions. Rarely is it said of the Palestinians, but it’s true: No nation in the world would tolerate living under perpetual occupation. Its people would resist in any way they could. (The early Zionists certainly did; we don’t have to theorize about that.)</p>
<p>To return to the memo from the two consultants, while it’s true that Operation Protective Edge increased the level of antipathy toward Israel among progressives, this doesn’t seem to have resulted in any sense of mobilization, but rather of resignation, and a decision not to engage. This is a huge mistake. Progressives need to be more engaged on this issue, not less. Specifically, we need to be bolder in asserting solidarity with our progressive Israeli colleagues—that is, the very people Muravchik and Blumenthal both, in their own way, disdain—as we go about the common work of creating more just and equitable societies. American and Israeli conservatives have for years worked closely together, developing networks and pushing common messages. Progressives should look to imitate this. Can the U.S.-Israel relationship be used to advance mutual progressive goals, rather than simply empowering an ascendant Israeli right? We won’t find out if progressives simply throw up their hands and walk away.</p> | true | 4 | early august latest gaza war raged two proisrael consultants meagan buren jennifer laszlo mizrahi circulated memo addressed top leaders care israel protecting jews memo discussed significant problematic issues public opinion israel among key american demographics including liberals minorities young people citing recent focus group capitol hill senior staff parties pair warned views opinions encountered stood stark contrast public statements votes indicate support issues recently passed typically onesided congressional resolution supporting israels military operation congress supposed fortress consultants wrote israel faces hamas tunnels appears negativity lack support among young people tunneling way congressional offices even congressmen senators remain steadfast surface two went list set tried tested messages israels advocates use consistently connect hamas iran wrote isnt hamas iranbacked hamas italics original device wrote reminds listeners conflict larger one israel palestinians israel big bad guy hamas little guy fight occupying power memo great example practice hasbara hebrew word meaning explanation come mean simply proisrael propaganda coping obvious power disparity proven huge challenge attempting explain israels case contrast two imagesisrael embattled democratic underdog amid sea hostile arabs israel oppressive colonial occupieris highlighted two recent books different authors engage understood expression reaction hasbara joshua muravchik fellow foreign policy institute johns hopkins universitys school advanced international studies someone ive always considered one serious neoconservatives unlike say bill kristol whose advocacy various new wars shot element political opportunism bad faith muravchik wrestled far rigorously issues american power one wouldnt know however reading book muravchiks purpose one may gather title track israel went seen western liberals scrappy liberaldemocratic david perceived goliath argue todays view conflict incorrect six day war muravchik writes set motion redefinition conflict longer israel versus arabs israel versus homeless palestinians reframing arabisraeli conflict primarily israelipalestinian conflict establishing palestinian national cause progressive one arabs pulled fast one global left muravchik contends muravchik fondly remembers days americans views shaped leon uriss novel exodus 1958 reminds us bestselling novel america since gone wind fitting comparison though necessarily ways muravchik would choose emphasize novels presented highly sanitized version historyboth way racist reactionaryand dramatically downplayed suffering end stories gone winds slaves portrayed simple happy folk serving decorations scarlett oharas drama exoduss arabs uniformly duplicitous conniving cast villains jewish redemption story fact cases history understood far complex problematic something applauded lamented muravchik spends considerable effort trying draw connections palestinian cause nazis remind us real bad guys example writes 193639 palestinian arab revolt apparently financed adolf hitlers government hard know exactly much work apparently muravchik tellingly includes citation unsurprising flies face scholarship arab revolt appear much discussion debate german government circles arab revolt general strike writes historian francis r nicosia distinguished professor holocaust studies university vermont 2000 book third reich palestine question attempts arab leaders secure german weapons palestinian insurgents germanys refusal grant assistanceindicate germany maintained policy noninvolvement palestinian affairs similar vein muravchik quotes six days june israels fight survival written robert j donovan staff los angeles times saying arabs whole sided nazis shared common hatreds contradicted scholarly consensus issue least includes footnote time even somewhat odd base broad claim one outofprint book 1960s reality historical record subject complex mixed nuanced one hussein ibish senior fellow american task force palestine wrote june 2014 piece marking anniversary dday overarching fact arab muslim involvement war overwhelmingly allied side significant factor fighting ground ibish notes total around 6000 arabs estimated fought axis side whereas tens thousands fought died allied side including 9000 palestinians british army alone true muravchik recounts grand mufti jerusalem haj amin alhusseini sought alliance nazis hopes gaining advantage british zionist forces palestine work recruiting bosnian muslims fascist cause indefensible alhusseinis prohitler propaganda found little traction among intended audience numbers cited ibish show tracking sees increased hostility israel part media muravchik laments passing days advent political correctness almost always code employed white guy lamenting past people could open certain biaseswhen writers like russell baker poured ridicule arabs going faras make fun arab mind muravchik developed compunction writing arabs hungry violence bomb market routine form warfare muravchik may aware bomb market also routine form warfare zionist terror group irgun doesnt let spoil story muravchiks telling palestinians gauging anticolonialist direction international opinion expertly refashioned oppressed people attempts revive canard palestinian national identity recent vintage view long debunked scholarly works rashid khalidis palestinian identity joel migdal baruch kimmerlings palestinian people argues arab states manipulated international organizations like un use invented identity weapon israel worth recognizing bias israel un undeniably exist inexcusable whats unclear much actually matters resolving conflict muravchik writes uns onesidedness empowers palestinian rejectionists course could said us congress empowering israeli rejectionists benjamin netanyahu chief among muravchik attributes great deal messaging skill organization coalition regimes proven time lack point muravchik consider palestinian arabs might good reason object demand give half palestine jewish minority course example history people ever agreed similar deal arabs general might reason bothered muravchik makes effort confront reality palestinian life occupation view simply virtue israel democracy leaders taken word policies enact include presumably ban importation cumin pasta gaza entirely justifiable extent israels nearly halfcenturyold military control west bank gaza presents problem primarily one perception muravchik election former terrorist israels prime minister 1977 menachem begin subsequent ramping settlement efforts mainly publicrelations problem harm israels reputation caused begins policies multiplied many times divisions exacerbated within israeli society muravchik writes nurtured subculture alienation proved inexhaustible resource israels enemies critics vietnam war affirmed antiamericanism muravchik dings daniel levy britishborn israeli peace negotiator called creation israel act wrong worth exploring mendacious levy note friend made remarks al jazeera forum defense israel believe jewish history 1948 excusedfor good enough mean act wrong act question creation jewish state expulsion palestinians accompanied creation levy continued dont expect palestinians think theres reason palestinians think justice creation israel going live neighbors one state one begin develop understanding respect compare zionist nazi doesnt really get far road vein muravchik attacks btselem israeli group widely respected liberal human rights community devoted deliberately damaging israels standing world muravchik exemplifies peculiar tendency found among aggressively trumpet israels liberalism muravchik earlier ebook liberal oasis seem contempt actual existing israeli liberals beautifully captured comment made friend mine israeli nationalsecurity analyst critical current government official conservative american proisrael advocacy group make job much harder actual practice israeli liberals inconvenient trying burnish image abroad even one would agree muravchiks points un bias instrumentality palestinian nationalism still confronted reality displacement indigenous population 1948 almost half century military control civilian population current israeli government admits intention ending central problem book biased ideologicalthough bothbut misses thing seeks narrate explain ongoing occupation colonization effort made people reevaluate israeli story notion hill staffers simply taken propalestinian pr isnt convincing one previously covered radical american right wing max blumenthal would seem good choice report israels rightward drift one reads blumenthals harrowing account operation cast leadthe threeweek conflict beginning december 2008 ending january 2009with particular grief knowing even worse time around operation protective edge sevenweek conflict beginning july 2014 ending august killed people destroyed far homes property similarly achieving little value anyone one first many short chapters many inflammatory names along books generally churlish tone severely undermine books reporting hill shame discusses hilltop overlooking gaza israelis gather watcheven exult inthe destruction saw scene replayed recent gaza war side israel americans remain unaware blumenthal thoroughly documents system discriminatory policies privileges jews palestinians within israel among lawrecently astonishingly upheld israeli supreme courteffectively allowing communities refuse residency based palestinian ethnicity also documents daily abuses occupation west bank times enormous machinery violence pointed palestinians occupation machinery owes zero accountability blumenthal doesnt demonstrate though discrimination inseparable intrinsic zionism blumenthals telling zionism fundamentally illiberal historically indefensible recounts story benjamin netanyahus ring ancient trinket shows visitors office inscribed name netanyahu brandishes evidence claim land israel blumenthal notes netanyahus grandfather nathan milikovsky changed name netanyahu upon emigrating lithuania palestine netanyahus magical ring tale rested logical fallacy dubious assertion historical mandate rule mexico grandfather hymie blumenthal changed name hymie quetzalcoatl writes funny line ahistoricism obvious jewish faith wasnt forged mexico jews havent spent centuries ending seders next year jalisco special attention paid rise avigdor lieberman moldovan bouncerturnedforeign minister whose rhetoric blumenthal writes rivaled sinister james bond villains old bond villains mind sinister lieberman growing band hardright henchmen gave expression authentically authoritarian attitudes radiated heart jewish israeli society continues blumenthal demonstrates reporting attitudes policies support quite real damaging doesnt show attitudes authentic attitudes led creation network strongly progressive human rights organizations many israelis rightly proud set high standard liberalprogressive advocacy activism blumenthal muravchik dismissive though different reasons liberal groups working change status quo cant seem stand real live israeli liberals writing young israelis try bring greater sense moral responsibility service israeli defense forcesfor example acting aggressively prevent settler violence palestinians blumenthal dismisses welleducated ashkenazi teens insert frontline combat units civilize less cultivated lowerclass peers mizrahi russian backgrounds similarly blumenthal repeatedly cites work israeli ngo breaking silence collects testimonies israeli soldiers order confront israeli society brutal realities occupation doesnt let testimonythrough soldiers many selfidentified zionists trying various ways change situation betterinfringe thesis zionism irredeemable blumenthal particularly culpable liberals progressive zionists giving morally pained cover israels excesses perpetuate according philosophy liberal zionism blumenthal writes israel enlightened europeanstyle democracy rise settlement movement quite right push back tendency israeli liberals locate cause israels problems among settlers although im unaware prominent liberal zionists hold philosophy least blumenthal caricatures provides blumenthals desired context pivotal scene visits home israeli author david grossman actual prominent israeli liberal grossman shares hopes obama israels prosettlement right wing forced comply american efforts toward twostate solution blumenthal observes hindsight hope sadly misplaced blumenthals inability unwillingness understand value grossman places jewish statehood emblematic lack empathy two thousand years grossman tells blumenthal kept excluded whole history outsiders zionism finally chance insiders blumenthal flippantly responds lots jews insiders america including father sidney blumenthal senior aide clinton administration muravchiks refusal engage seriously palestinian perspective reality ground point blumenthal consider theres anything reasonable jewish desire national selfdetermination contemporary jewish israeli fears might basis reality especially wake second intifada saw israels urban centers terrorized bombs buses shopping centers restaurants one needs understand grievances give rise lieberman one needs understand grievances give rise khaled meshaal hamas leader small measure empathy would made far better useful book would far different one key shortcoming books simply preach respective choirs muravchiks book treated hasbaraand think canthen blumenthal engaged sort reverse hasbara relentlessly bombarding us israels ugliness challenge progressives find space two views one recognizes political facts fear mistrust oppression drive israeli policy palestinian resistance violent nonviolent isnt suggest familiar comforting sides blame equivalencethere equivalence occupier occupiedbut suggest empathy sides experiences fears necessary understanding mostwrittenabout conflicts also said progressive side properly concerned occupation make demands palestinians living occupation create special dispensation terrorism corruption authoritarianism would enormous tragedy occupation merely give way yet another arab security state place key question whether common denominator found among groups might define within progressive camp onestaters twostaters liberal zionists postzionists progressives disagree lot would suggest one thing agree ending occupationthat ussponsored domination palestinians israeli forcesis imperative formulation nation world would tolerate often used defend israeli actions rarely said palestinians true nation world would tolerate living perpetual occupation people would resist way could early zionists certainly dont theorize return memo two consultants true operation protective edge increased level antipathy toward israel among progressives doesnt seem resulted sense mobilization rather resignation decision engage huge mistake progressives need engaged issue less specifically need bolder asserting solidarity progressive israeli colleaguesthat people muravchik blumenthal way disdainas go common work creating equitable societies american israeli conservatives years worked closely together developing networks pushing common messages progressives look imitate usisrael relationship used advance mutual progressive goals rather simply empowering ascendant israeli right wont find progressives simply throw hands walk away | 1,919 |
<p>It seems fitting that a president who was brought into office because of a scandalous election would enact a law to overhaul the electoral process to make it easier for people to choose their leaders the second time around.</p>
<p>But that’s not what the Omnibus Appropriations Bill, signed into law by President Bush in October 2002, will do. Instead, the law will force most states to switch from paper balloting to a fully computerized system—one that is currently rife with programming flaws and is incapable of being audited_that could call into question the legitimacy of future local and national elections and put the wrong candidates into office.</p>
<p>The bill contains $1.515 billion to fund activities related to the Help America Vote Act, a federal election reform bill that provides money to states for the improvement of elections; including $15 million to the General Services Administration to reimburse states that purchased optical scan or electronic voting equipment prior to the November 2000 election.</p>
<p>Bev Harris, a Seattle resident who runs a small public relations business, is credited with uncovering the flaws in electronic voting machines and has recently written a book on the subject called “Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century.”</p>
<p>Harris’ muckraking on electronic voting have been featured on Scoop, an award-winning Internet news site based in New Zealand, (full disclosure: I am a regular contributor to Scoop) that is quickly developing a reputation in the United States for its groundbreaking investigative news stories.</p>
<p>Harris recently uncovered “some 40,000 files that included user manuals, source code and executable files for voting machines made by Diebold, a corporation based in North Canton, Ohio,” according to an Aug. 21 feature story on Harris in the Seattle Times, and exposed the massive flaws in Diebold’s software that can easily be manipulated. An in-depth report on Diebold’s electronic voting machines can be found at &lt;www.scoop.co.nz&gt;</p>
<p>Diebold’s chief executive, Walden O’Dell, in a fundraiser his company sponsored for President Bush last week promised the president that his company would “deliver” the necessary votes needed to keep Bush in the White House for a second term, prompting Democrats in Congress to call for Diebold to remove its machines from being used during next year’s primary election.</p>
<p>Michelle Griggy, a Diebold spokeswoman, dismissed any appearance of a conflict-of-interest saying the company routinely holds fundraisers for other political causes absent of any bias.</p>
<p>While much ink has been spilled in the mainstream media on the so-called benefits of computerized voting (cheaper, faster, more reliable), you would be hard-pressed to find an equal number of stories highlighting the side effects that comes from computerized voting.</p>
<p>The disastrous 2000 presidential election and the subsequent ballot recount in Florida, in which hanging chads made it nearly impossible to figure out whether people in the Sunshine State voted for Al Gore or George Bush, led to a full-scale campaign by lawmakers to outlaw paper balloting in favor of user-friendly computerized voting machines.</p>
<p>The problem with the Omnibus bill, according to Rebecca Mercuri, a computer science professor at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and one of the most vocal opponents of paperless balloting, is that it leaves no paper trail, making it ripe for manipulation.</p>
<p>“Any programmer can write code that displays one thing on a screen, records something else, and prints yet another result,” Mercuri told a reporter for Common &lt;Dreams.org&gt;. “There is no known way to ensure that this is not happening inside of a voting system. No electronic voting system has been certified to even the lowest level of the U.S. government or international computer security standards…” The Federal Election Commission provides only voluntary standards, and even those don’t ensure election “integrity,” she says.</p>
<p>That’s exactly what happened in Cleveland on May 7, 2003. Election officials said they ran into problems with the electronic voting machines when they tried to merge the numbers from their Lorain and Elyria offices.</p>
<p>The elections board used two different kinds of ”touch-screen” voting machines in two Cleveland counties and the results couldn’t be merged with totals from another county, which came from more familiar punch cards.</p>
<p>”I don’t know exactly what happened … we’re having software people look into that now,” said Marilyn Jacobcik, the board of elections executive director. ”But we are assured that all the numbers are accurate.”</p>
<p>One of the biggest problems, according to one election worker, was that the office wasn’t prepared to compile data from three different computer systems.</p>
<p>John Blevins, a member of the board of elections, attributed the breakdown to ”growing pains.”</p>
<p>Because of the Help America Vote Act passed last year, he said, elections boards are required to install electronic voting machines by the 2004 election.</p>
<p>”We were basically trying two different computer systems,” Blevins said, noting the county used machines provided by Diebold in North Ridgeville and MicroVote in the Amherst race. ”I realize maybe things move a little slower but in the end it will be a much smoother operation. We have to do this by November 2004.”</p>
<p>Computerized voting and the technological problems related to the system had already been realized before hanging chads became a household phrase. In November 1998, an election in Hawaii was held using state-of-the-art computers designed by Electronic Systems &amp; Software, a company with close ties to Republican lawmakers in Washington, D.C.</p>
<p>One such lawmaker, Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb, was part owner and former chairman and chief executive of ES&amp;S, a company that made all the equipment that counted the votes during his last two runs for office, yet he failed to list his ties to the company on federal disclosure forms.</p>
<p>Seven of ES&amp;S’ 361 voting machines used in Hawaii on Election Day in November 1998 malfunctioned (five units had lens occlusion, one unit had a defective cable and one unit had a defective “read head”), which led to Hawaii’s first ever statewide election review and a first in the history of the United States. Hundreds of people who used the machines complained mightily to local election officials that the candidates they picked did not register in the computerized system.</p>
<p>Mercuri said in an interview with Common Dreams last year that in order for an electronic voting system to be foolproof, five components must be present – a voter, a ballot, a computerized voting machine, a printer, and an optical scanner – and three basic steps must be taken.</p>
<p>“First, the voting machine registers a voter’s selection both electronically and on a paper ballot. Second, the machine then displays the paper ballot behind clear glass or plastic so that the voter can review their selection, but not take the ballot home by mistake. If the voter’s selection doesn’t agree with the ballot or the voter makes a mistake, the voter can call a poll worker to void the ballot, and then re-vote. And third, the paper ballot is optically scanned (most likely at the county administration building), providing a second electronic tally. If anything goes wrong with either the voting machines or the optical scanner, the paper ballots can be hand-counted as a last resort or as part of an audit. And voila! We have a fully auditable voting system with checks and balances, review and redundancy.”</p>
<p>There are dozens of other horror stories that spawned from the signing of the Omnibus bill by President Bush and these too involve Florida and a Bush.</p>
<p>The new touch-screen equipment used during the September 2002 Florida elections wrongfully credited GOP gubernatorial candidate Jeb Bush in one precinct when votes were cast for the Democratic candidate for governor because of a “misaligned” touch screen. No one knows how many votes were misrecorded. Miami-Dade was still licking its wounds over the 2000 presidential election that helped put George Bush in office. For the primary election, the county spent $24.5 million for 7,200 voting machines, but many polling places opened late or did not have enough machines up and running. Many poll workers had problems collecting votes from the machines, delaying the final results of the election for a week.</p>
<p>The November general election was relatively glitch-free, but the county had to turn the logistics of the election over to the Miami-Dade police department and dedicate at least three county employees to each polling place.</p>
<p>In May, a Miami-Dade Inspector General released the results of a seven-month investigation into the use of the electronic voting machine that were credited with helping Bush secure a second term in office. The results of the probe are damning.</p>
<p>For one, the company that sold the touch-screen voting machines, ES&amp;S, to Miami-Dade county misled county officials about the “about the equipment and delivered goods that were ”hardly state-of-the-art technology,” according to the Miami Herald, which obtained a copy of the inspector general’s report.</p>
<p>“The draft report by the county inspector general’s office following a seven-month investigation provides a critical account of the process leading to the $25 million purchase of a voting system that was expected to lead to trouble-free elections. Instead, the Sept. 10, 2002, election — a national black eye for Miami-Dade — was plagued with problems caused in part by the lengthy start-up time for the machines,” the Herald reported.</p>
<p>Moreover, the report found that ES&amp;S told county officials that its electronic voting machines would provide voters with a system that could run a trilingual ballot, in English, Spanish and Creole. Although state certification was pending for the trilingual ballot software, the county only considered the possibility of having separate English/Spanish and English/Creole machines as a backup plan.</p>
<p>In its oral sales presentation, ES&amp;S told the county that having a trilingual system would not require additional data capacity. Yet, the company’s own documentation from 2001 indicated that the type of files that would be required for such a system would require an additional storage device.</p>
<p>The report questions why the boot-up time for each machine under the software used in the primary election was so lengthy, noting that the processor for each machine is an Intel 386 EX processor, technology that is more than a decade old.</p>
<p>Testing by the State of Florida found numerous “anomalies and deficiencies” in newer versions of voting machine software that would have sped up the boot-up process. The report also cautions the county not to be “overly reliant” on representations made by ES&amp;S about what a highly touted upcoming version of the software will do.</p>
<p>Still, because Miami-Dade invested more than $25 million into the technology, the inspector general did not recommend scrapping the electronic voting machines, but rather work within the limitations of the system and “hope” that it will pull off a successful general election come 2004.</p>
<p>Linda Rodriguez-Taseff, president of the South Florida chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and a leading advocate of voting reform in Miami-Dade, said the report was not surprising.</p>
<p>“It’s everything we said it would be,” she said. “The time to act is now. Let’s scrap this system and get a new system in place.”</p>
<p>Despite the malfeasance, it’s become difficult for county officials to challenge the results of tainted elections.</p>
<p>In city council elections in Palm Beach last March, when a losing candidate challenged the results, a local judge denied the challenger and his consultant the opportunity to inspect the machines, citing the rights of the manufacturer, Sequoia, to protect its trade secrets.</p>
<p>In February 2003, Daniel Spillane blew the whistle on his former employer, VoteHere, a privately held electronic voting machine company in Washington, D.C., run by a former senior military aide to Vice President Dick Cheney and whose board includes former CIA Director Robert Gates, claiming the company’s patented digital balloting software contained severe programming errors, which could lead to, among other disasters, the massive deletion of ballots.</p>
<p>Spillane, who was fired from VoteHere in 2001, alleged in a wrongful termination lawsuit against his former employer, that VoteHere’s undertook measures to thwart an independent review of its software. He said he voiced his concerns with company executives and that he was fired hours before VoteHere was scheduled to meet with representatives from the Independent Test Authority, an auditing group that scrutinizes electronic voting equipment and software, and the U.S. General Accounting Office.</p>
<p>Spillane is one of a half-dozen experts to question the wisdom behind the Omnibus bill and warns that the law’s true goal is to facilitate the sale of electronic voting machines.</p>
<p>He and Mercuri wrote in November about Sequoia Voting Systems, an outfit seeking to install electronic voting booths in Santa Clara County, California. Most of Sequoia’s machines provide nothing in the way of receipts or physical audit trails, which would facilitate a recount, ripening the prospects for electronic election fraud. She and other experts have also been barred from examining Sequoia’s product, because it is sold under restrictive trade-secret agreements.</p>
<p>Spillane, Mercuri, and 453 other technologists have endorsed a “Resolution on Electronic Voting” which warns of the dangers inherent in electronic voting systems that keep only digital records of ballots cast. The resolution states that programming error, equipment malfunction, and malicious tampering are serious risks which call for a voter-verifiable audit trail — a permanent, physical, tamper-resistant record of each vote which can be checked by the voter before casting their ballot, and retained afterward.</p>
<p>Despite the resolution, Santa Clara County made its final decision on Tuesday to spend $20 million on 5,000 touch-screen voting booths made by Sequoia, most of which will not include a printed audit trail. Sequoia has a history of involvement with government corruption, including the pay-off of Louisiana election official Jerry Fowler.</p>
<p>The San Francisco Chronicle is one of only a handful of news organizations that called into question the veracity of electronic voting when it became clear that the new technology could lead to voter fraud in Santa Clara County.</p>
<p>David Dill, professor of computer science at Stanford University and leader of an anti-electronic voting campaign told the Chronicle that the electronic voting machines Santa Clara planned to purchase “pose an unacceptable risk that errors or deliberate election-rigging will go undetected, since they do not provide a way for the voters to verify independently that the machine correctly records and counts the votes they have cast.”</p>
<p>Dill, in consultation with other experts and his Stanford colleagues, had voiced their concern via a petition urging that voting machines not be purchased or used unless they provide a voter-verifiable audit trail, according to the Chronicle.</p>
<p>When such machines are already in use, the petition stated, they should be replaced or modified to provide such a record. And Dill had collected the signatures of hundreds of technologists, including many of the best-known names in computer science, security and election technology.</p>
<p>The opposition movement caught the eye of Kevin Shelley, California’s new secretary of state. In January 2003, Shelley appointed a task force to advise him and the board charged with certifying voting equipment in the state on security and audit ability issues raised by touch-screen voting.</p>
<p>Peter Coyote, who narrated a documentary film last year on the disasters surrounding the 2000 presidential election, has launched a grassroots letter writing campaign urging federal lawmakers to take a second look at how the Help America Vote Act can put the wrong candidates in office.</p>
<p>In his letter to California’s Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer, Coyote writes: “Last year, I narrated a film called “Unprecedented” by American journalist Greg Palast. This film documents the illegal expunging of 54,000 black and overwhelmingly Democratic voters from the Florida rolls just before the presidential election. We interviewed the computer company that did the work, filmed their explanations of the instructions they received and their admissions that they knew that their instructions would produce massive error. That figure has now been revised to 91,000. Jeb Bush was sued, and was supposed to have returned these voters to the rolls, and did not, which explains his last re-election. The Republicans have something far worse in mind for the next presidential election and Democrats need to be prepared.”</p>
<p>“Unless the issue of voter fraud is elevated to an issue of national importance, not only is it highly probable that Democrats will lose again and again, but eventually voters will “sense” even if they cannot prove, that elections are rigged, and the current 50% of those boycotting elections will swell to the majority. Privatization of the vote is tantamount to turning over the control of democracy to the corporate sector. I urge you to use your considerable powers and influence to address this issue.”</p>
<p>JASON LEOPOLD can be reached at: <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a></p>
<p>&#160;</p> | true | 4 | seems fitting president brought office scandalous election would enact law overhaul electoral process make easier people choose leaders second time around thats omnibus appropriations bill signed law president bush october 2002 instead law force states switch paper balloting fully computerized systemone currently rife programming flaws incapable audited_that could call question legitimacy future local national elections put wrong candidates office bill contains 1515 billion fund activities related help america vote act federal election reform bill provides money states improvement elections including 15 million general services administration reimburse states purchased optical scan electronic voting equipment prior november 2000 election bev harris seattle resident runs small public relations business credited uncovering flaws electronic voting machines recently written book subject called black box voting ballot tampering 21st century harris muckraking electronic voting featured scoop awardwinning internet news site based new zealand full disclosure regular contributor scoop quickly developing reputation united states groundbreaking investigative news stories harris recently uncovered 40000 files included user manuals source code executable files voting machines made diebold corporation based north canton ohio according aug 21 feature story harris seattle times exposed massive flaws diebolds software easily manipulated indepth report diebolds electronic voting machines found ltwwwscoopconzgt diebolds chief executive walden odell fundraiser company sponsored president bush last week promised president company would deliver necessary votes needed keep bush white house second term prompting democrats congress call diebold remove machines used next years primary election michelle griggy diebold spokeswoman dismissed appearance conflictofinterest saying company routinely holds fundraisers political causes absent bias much ink spilled mainstream media socalled benefits computerized voting cheaper faster reliable would hardpressed find equal number stories highlighting side effects comes computerized voting disastrous 2000 presidential election subsequent ballot recount florida hanging chads made nearly impossible figure whether people sunshine state voted al gore george bush led fullscale campaign lawmakers outlaw paper balloting favor userfriendly computerized voting machines problem omnibus bill according rebecca mercuri computer science professor bryn mawr college pennsylvania one vocal opponents paperless balloting leaves paper trail making ripe manipulation programmer write code displays one thing screen records something else prints yet another result mercuri told reporter common ltdreamsorggt known way ensure happening inside voting system electronic voting system certified even lowest level us government international computer security standards federal election commission provides voluntary standards even dont ensure election integrity says thats exactly happened cleveland may 7 2003 election officials said ran problems electronic voting machines tried merge numbers lorain elyria offices elections board used two different kinds touchscreen voting machines two cleveland counties results couldnt merged totals another county came familiar punch cards dont know exactly happened software people look said marilyn jacobcik board elections executive director assured numbers accurate one biggest problems according one election worker office wasnt prepared compile data three different computer systems john blevins member board elections attributed breakdown growing pains help america vote act passed last year said elections boards required install electronic voting machines 2004 election basically trying two different computer systems blevins said noting county used machines provided diebold north ridgeville microvote amherst race realize maybe things move little slower end much smoother operation november 2004 computerized voting technological problems related system already realized hanging chads became household phrase november 1998 election hawaii held using stateoftheart computers designed electronic systems amp software company close ties republican lawmakers washington dc one lawmaker sen chuck hagel rneb part owner former chairman chief executive esamps company made equipment counted votes last two runs office yet failed list ties company federal disclosure forms seven esamps 361 voting machines used hawaii election day november 1998 malfunctioned five units lens occlusion one unit defective cable one unit defective read head led hawaiis first ever statewide election review first history united states hundreds people used machines complained mightily local election officials candidates picked register computerized system mercuri said interview common dreams last year order electronic voting system foolproof five components must present voter ballot computerized voting machine printer optical scanner three basic steps must taken first voting machine registers voters selection electronically paper ballot second machine displays paper ballot behind clear glass plastic voter review selection take ballot home mistake voters selection doesnt agree ballot voter makes mistake voter call poll worker void ballot revote third paper ballot optically scanned likely county administration building providing second electronic tally anything goes wrong either voting machines optical scanner paper ballots handcounted last resort part audit voila fully auditable voting system checks balances review redundancy dozens horror stories spawned signing omnibus bill president bush involve florida bush new touchscreen equipment used september 2002 florida elections wrongfully credited gop gubernatorial candidate jeb bush one precinct votes cast democratic candidate governor misaligned touch screen one knows many votes misrecorded miamidade still licking wounds 2000 presidential election helped put george bush office primary election county spent 245 million 7200 voting machines many polling places opened late enough machines running many poll workers problems collecting votes machines delaying final results election week november general election relatively glitchfree county turn logistics election miamidade police department dedicate least three county employees polling place may miamidade inspector general released results sevenmonth investigation use electronic voting machine credited helping bush secure second term office results probe damning one company sold touchscreen voting machines esamps miamidade county misled county officials equipment delivered goods hardly stateoftheart technology according miami herald obtained copy inspector generals report draft report county inspector generals office following sevenmonth investigation provides critical account process leading 25 million purchase voting system expected lead troublefree elections instead sept 10 2002 election national black eye miamidade plagued problems caused part lengthy startup time machines herald reported moreover report found esamps told county officials electronic voting machines would provide voters system could run trilingual ballot english spanish creole although state certification pending trilingual ballot software county considered possibility separate englishspanish englishcreole machines backup plan oral sales presentation esamps told county trilingual system would require additional data capacity yet companys documentation 2001 indicated type files would required system would require additional storage device report questions bootup time machine software used primary election lengthy noting processor machine intel 386 ex processor technology decade old testing state florida found numerous anomalies deficiencies newer versions voting machine software would sped bootup process report also cautions county overly reliant representations made esamps highly touted upcoming version software still miamidade invested 25 million technology inspector general recommend scrapping electronic voting machines rather work within limitations system hope pull successful general election come 2004 linda rodrigueztaseff president south florida chapter american civil liberties union leading advocate voting reform miamidade said report surprising everything said would said time act lets scrap system get new system place despite malfeasance become difficult county officials challenge results tainted elections city council elections palm beach last march losing candidate challenged results local judge denied challenger consultant opportunity inspect machines citing rights manufacturer sequoia protect trade secrets february 2003 daniel spillane blew whistle former employer votehere privately held electronic voting machine company washington dc run former senior military aide vice president dick cheney whose board includes former cia director robert gates claiming companys patented digital balloting software contained severe programming errors could lead among disasters massive deletion ballots spillane fired votehere 2001 alleged wrongful termination lawsuit former employer voteheres undertook measures thwart independent review software said voiced concerns company executives fired hours votehere scheduled meet representatives independent test authority auditing group scrutinizes electronic voting equipment software us general accounting office spillane one halfdozen experts question wisdom behind omnibus bill warns laws true goal facilitate sale electronic voting machines mercuri wrote november sequoia voting systems outfit seeking install electronic voting booths santa clara county california sequoias machines provide nothing way receipts physical audit trails would facilitate recount ripening prospects electronic election fraud experts also barred examining sequoias product sold restrictive tradesecret agreements spillane mercuri 453 technologists endorsed resolution electronic voting warns dangers inherent electronic voting systems keep digital records ballots cast resolution states programming error equipment malfunction malicious tampering serious risks call voterverifiable audit trail permanent physical tamperresistant record vote checked voter casting ballot retained afterward despite resolution santa clara county made final decision tuesday spend 20 million 5000 touchscreen voting booths made sequoia include printed audit trail sequoia history involvement government corruption including payoff louisiana election official jerry fowler san francisco chronicle one handful news organizations called question veracity electronic voting became clear new technology could lead voter fraud santa clara county david dill professor computer science stanford university leader antielectronic voting campaign told chronicle electronic voting machines santa clara planned purchase pose unacceptable risk errors deliberate electionrigging go undetected since provide way voters verify independently machine correctly records counts votes cast dill consultation experts stanford colleagues voiced concern via petition urging voting machines purchased used unless provide voterverifiable audit trail according chronicle machines already use petition stated replaced modified provide record dill collected signatures hundreds technologists including many bestknown names computer science security election technology opposition movement caught eye kevin shelley californias new secretary state january 2003 shelley appointed task force advise board charged certifying voting equipment state security audit ability issues raised touchscreen voting peter coyote narrated documentary film last year disasters surrounding 2000 presidential election launched grassroots letter writing campaign urging federal lawmakers take second look help america vote act put wrong candidates office letter californias democratic senator barbara boxer coyote writes last year narrated film called unprecedented american journalist greg palast film documents illegal expunging 54000 black overwhelmingly democratic voters florida rolls presidential election interviewed computer company work filmed explanations instructions received admissions knew instructions would produce massive error figure revised 91000 jeb bush sued supposed returned voters rolls explains last reelection republicans something far worse mind next presidential election democrats need prepared unless issue voter fraud elevated issue national importance highly probable democrats lose eventually voters sense even prove elections rigged current 50 boycotting elections swell majority privatization vote tantamount turning control democracy corporate sector urge use considerable powers influence address issue jason leopold reached jasonleopoldhotmailcom 160 | 1,649 |
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<p>Summoning the Humanitarian Pretext</p>
<p>The arch pragmatist Machiavelli once wrote that, “If you watch the ways of men, you will see that those who obtain great wealth and power do so either by force or fraud, and having got them they conceal under some honest name the foulness of their deeds.” You couldn’t pen a better description of the relationship between the imperial corporate state and its supplicant media. Once the coffers of vulnerable nations are ransacked by American wars of aggression, it is the media that sweeps the crimes of state beneath a carpet of piety. The truth may come out in due time, although it is always ex post facto. Thanks to the the coordination between the corporate sector, the state, and the media, the American doctrinal system is largely a self-contained narrative. It comes complete with a smooth internal logic. Corporations set priorities, the state produces a storyline that rationalizes the pursuit of those priorities, and the media distributes and reifies the storyline until it is gospel. This is no surprise, since the corporations own the politicians and the presses. Yet one way to examine the functioning of this kind of systemic propaganda is by looking at some of the keywords on which the stories hinge.</p>
<p>The foul deeds Machiavelli mentioned now principally occur in the Middle East, where vast resources lie and where power may be usefully projected deep into Eurasia. The Syrian proxy war between forces east and west is a nice example of how the dissimulations initiated in Washington are disseminated through the MSM. For instance, The New York Times, and its deputies in the vast clearinghouses of state propaganda, would have us <a href="" type="internal">believe</a> that the White House is supporting freedom-loving rebels in Syria who are politically <a href="" type="internal">moderate</a> and <a href="" type="internal">fighting</a> for their lives in a civil war against a despotic regime led by an evil optometrist, Bashar al-Assad.</p>
<p>But we know that the entire Syrian fiasco was <a href="" type="internal">engineered</a> by the CIA with cash, guns, and training, and unceasing support from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) at our behest. It is a <a href="" type="internal">long-standing</a> neoconservative plan to break the so-called Shia Crescent that runs from Lebanon through Syria to Iran. These are, of course, the independent-minded states that have thus far refused to accept either Israeli colonization of Palestinian land or permit Western-backed energy <a href="" type="internal">projects</a> to take shape on their territory. Hence the need to dismember them into tiny, feckless statelets that pose no challenge to either Tel Aviv or Washington.</p>
<p>But this is hidden behind the fog of war and a domestic haze of media nuance. This entire conflict could reasonably be said to hinge on a single phrase: “moderate rebels.” The words “moderate” and “rebel” make all the difference in the telling of this <a href="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/egypt-plane-crash-this-attack-shows-that-russia-is-hurting-isis-a6725566.html&amp;usd=2&amp;usg=AFQjCNEjrGAXWXMSgcGaIYI-T1ycWT5pqQ" type="external">fable</a>. The truth is that we have <a href="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.alternet.org/world/america-has-fueled-bloody-civil-war-syria&amp;usd=2&amp;usg=AFQjCNGfWY3wwJwpCIPSAFAK5bSSP7BpgQ" type="external">hijacked</a> Arab Spring discontent and festooned it with brigades of <a href="" type="internal">terrorist</a> mercenaries procured from around the Middle East and Asia, all with the singular mandate to take down the Assad government. <a href="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.rt.com/news/316644-jihadists-flow-double-syria/&amp;usd=2&amp;usg=AFQjCNGkcemLzANGKrzgndJbuHLQxAyHZQ" type="external">Tens</a> of thousands of jihadists have been <a href="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://mobile.todayszaman.com/anasayfa_report-turkeys-spy-agency-transported-radical-fighters-to-syria_383371.html&amp;usd=2&amp;usg=AFQjCNGGBNmgAal8t72upQSaq3FILUdeQg" type="external">injected</a> by NATO into a multi-confessional state governed by an <a href="" type="internal">elected</a> leader who won a larger percentage of the electorate than our liberal messiah Barack Obama.</p>
<p>But this more truthful interpretation of events is unacceptable. To concede that the White House is now backing <a href="" type="internal">al-Qaeda</a> terrorists in an effort to capsize a Middle Eastern democracy would implode the religion of American exceptionalism on which elite power depends. Thus the media cannot point out that the Pentagon’s recent admission of having troops in Syria violates the Nuremberg Principles on wars of aggression as well as the United Nations Charter. Omissions of this kind are what prevent average Americans from a) knowing what we’re really doing; and b) resisting it.</p>
<p>Demonize and Distract</p>
<p>But it isn’t enough to simply cloak our own crimes in the holy cloth of exceptionalism. We must defame our enemies. We must plant false flags in their soil now so that we can bury bombs in them later. It happens the same way every time. ‘Shocking’ discoveries are made about one of our most reviled <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1514824892/counterpunchmaga" type="external" />enemies, usually provided by a defector with a farcical alias (think “Curveball”). Instantaneous mainstream reports issue a coordinated condemnation of the country in question. Each media outlet chooses a particular keyword to drive home the horror. Popular terms include “crimes against humanity”, “war crimes”, the words “industrial scale” in front of any noun or verb, the word “mass” in front of any noun or verb, “brutal crackdown”, “regime”, and so on. Grisly images are plastered across the front pages of the MSM. Often the images are fakes or are from unrelated incidents.</p>
<p>Once the reader has been stupefied, at least one columnist or politician will draw a deep breath, and then ‘draw comparisons’ to either Hitler and Auschwitz or Slobodan Milosevic and mass graves. (Recently Milosevic was declared innocent of all genocidal charges by the International Criminal Tribunal on Yugoslavia, albeit years after he died in prison after being denied medical treatment by his civilized captors. This process of posthumous exoneration is now practiced on an “industrial scale” by Obama’s drone assassination when various innocents are discovered to have been innocent after they’ve been “terminated”.)</p>
<p>Not only is the supposedly noble Syrian uprising a <a href="" type="internal">fraud</a>, but so is our equally principled goal of wiping ISIS from the face of the earth, if the facts on the ground are of any import. Washington has gone after ISIS in a strangely half-hearted way. Why hasn’t it provided air cover for Syrian Arab Army when its helicopters were rendered useless by terrorist TOW missiles? Missiles sold by the United States to Saudi Arabia, likely for the express purpose of funneling them to al Nusrah and other rogue bandits in Syria. Why did the U.S. not immediately attack ISIS-controlled oil wells and oil trading routes–ISIS’ chief source of funding–as Russia did on its entry into the conflict? Why did the Obama administration produce a record-setting arms deal with the Saudis, the leading proselytizer of Wahhabism in the world? Why do we refuse to work with Moscow or the SAA or Iran? Why do we not share grids and <a href="" type="internal">intelligence</a> and join their joint operations room in Baghdad?</p>
<p>Isn’t it obvious? We have different goals. We want Assad out and a daft, pliant puppet in charge, presiding over a vast arsenal of domestic police, ready to crush resistance on contact. Of course, any such resisters would be legitimate freedom fighters, as are the Palestinians. But the media takes care to call Palestinians “terrorists” and called citizens resisting the Iraqi occupation “insurgents”. Words matter. They shade the story and bring neutral readers over to the side of empire. They blame the victim for the violence that victimized them.</p>
<p>The dissimulation becomes even clearer when you realize that ISIS <a href="" type="internal">emerged</a> from an American interrogation camp in Iraq, in a way that <a href="" type="internal">suggests</a> CentCom was more than happy to release radicalized Islamists into the wild. To what purpose? The failed state in Libya and the collapsing scenery of the Syrian state provide plenty of fodder for speculation.</p>
<p>The Wages of Propaganda</p>
<p>Thanks to years of conditioning by the media, the population will do little to resist the escalation to come. Eventually the Syrian “regime” to be eventually overthrown by relentless American-backed violence. Hillary Clinton will win the election and gain control of the Oval Office. As Glen Ford <a href="" type="internal">wrote</a> at Black Agenda Report, Clinton will “…ride into the White House on a warhorse”. She is the thinking man’s neocon, unlike President Bush, who represented the anti-intellectual strain of the American character, and Barack Obama, whose reluctance to pour troops into Arab prairie fires was widely predictably condemned as a sign of weakness.</p>
<p>Hillary is neither stupid nor soft. She will doubtless find a useful pretext by which to declare a no-fly zone in Syria, which would inhibit the efficacy of Russia’s campaign against various terrorist clans. (A House resolution is already afoot to lay the groundwork.) She will move more troops into the polder of northern Syria, violating all kinds of charters and conventions and declarations with an icy mixture of contempt and indifference. (See the UN Charter, Geneva Conventions, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for the bootless scraps of paper she will trample.) Perhaps most importantly, she will green light the transport of more arms, ammunition, and psychopaths into Syria to make a push for Damascus in the hopes of repeating the Libyan calamity.</p>
<p>Should that project succeed, Hillary will quite possibly ‘discover’ that Iran has been violating its bogus nuclear agreement with the P5 +1. Anonymous administration sources will be “troubled” by the development. This isn’t idle speculation. For lack of a better title, the long-term strategy for the “new world order,” as George H.W. Bush put it, is contingent on splitting the Shia Crescent, removing Iran as a regional antagonist, then moving farther into Eurasia to control Sino-Russian development. And we know how a confrontation with Tehran would play out. With rabid spittle cresting his white beard, Wolf Blitzer will escort numberless brigadier generals through The Situation Room to reassure Americans that the bearded mullahs in Qom are indeed a fearsome clan. Hillary will threaten, and perhaps use, tactical nuclear weapons (B-61s) on Iranian nuclear sites, backed by either a UN Security Council resolution of dubious authority or a coalition of the bullied, bought, and willing. As the mushroom cloud envelops the region in radioactive waste, Israel will be seen fastidiously colonizing more West Bank land, Benjamin Netanyahu rubbing his hands in frenzied anticipation, a dogeared copy of the Yinon plan stuffed in his jacket pocket. Saudi Arabia’s Deputy and Crown Princes will celebrate the fall of their hated rivals. Laconic onlookers in Washington and Europe will shrug and say nothing. CIA plants in D.C. will fastidiously distance Hillary’s bombs from Hiroshima’s, and Tel Aviv will move against Hezbollah in a final confrontation, since the Shia Crescent will by then be nothing more than a few shards of Mesopotamian culture atop a flaming midden.</p>
<p>With the Middle East finally brought “to heel,” as Hillary once proposed doing to young black boys, the ground will have been cleared for the pulse-racing showdown with Russia itself, the greatest thorn in Washington’s side. With Assad out of the way and Tehran chastened, the Kremlinologists and conspiracy theorists can be set loose to harrow the public into a state of high anxiety about the “expansionist” state to the East. NATO will inch closer to Russian borders and shout that Russia is moving closer to NATO. Destabilization will proceed apace. It will be called “democracy promotion” and will be paid for by fronts called “endowments”. Sanctions will tighten the economic screws. Verbal salvos will hit targets on either side of the water. New proxy wars will be touched off. Only a giant peace movement or stray asteroid could prevent something like this from happening. Perhaps the BRICS will halt the spread of empire with a collective stance, but Washington is agile if not artful at executing its core strategy to destabilize, divide, and rule its rivals. Until then, if you want to know what contempt looks like, <a href="" type="internal">look</a> at this picture of Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin meeting at the G20 in China last week. The tenor of tomorrow is written all over their faces.</p> | true | 4 | orlok160160 shutterstockcom 160 summoning humanitarian pretext arch pragmatist machiavelli wrote watch ways men see obtain great wealth power either force fraud got conceal honest name foulness deeds couldnt pen better description relationship imperial corporate state supplicant media coffers vulnerable nations ransacked american wars aggression media sweeps crimes state beneath carpet piety truth may come due time although always ex post facto thanks coordination corporate sector state media american doctrinal system largely selfcontained narrative comes complete smooth internal logic corporations set priorities state produces storyline rationalizes pursuit priorities media distributes reifies storyline gospel surprise since corporations politicians presses yet one way examine functioning kind systemic propaganda looking keywords stories hinge foul deeds machiavelli mentioned principally occur middle east vast resources lie power may usefully projected deep eurasia syrian proxy war forces east west nice example dissimulations initiated washington disseminated msm instance new york times deputies vast clearinghouses state propaganda would us believe white house supporting freedomloving rebels syria politically moderate fighting lives civil war despotic regime led evil optometrist bashar alassad know entire syrian fiasco engineered cia cash guns training unceasing support gulf cooperation council gcc behest longstanding neoconservative plan break socalled shia crescent runs lebanon syria iran course independentminded states thus far refused accept either israeli colonization palestinian land permit westernbacked energy projects take shape territory hence need dismember tiny feckless statelets pose challenge either tel aviv washington hidden behind fog war domestic haze media nuance entire conflict could reasonably said hinge single phrase moderate rebels words moderate rebel make difference telling fable truth hijacked arab spring discontent festooned brigades terrorist mercenaries procured around middle east asia singular mandate take assad government tens thousands jihadists injected nato multiconfessional state governed elected leader larger percentage electorate liberal messiah barack obama truthful interpretation events unacceptable concede white house backing alqaeda terrorists effort capsize middle eastern democracy would implode religion american exceptionalism elite power depends thus media point pentagons recent admission troops syria violates nuremberg principles wars aggression well united nations charter omissions kind prevent average americans knowing really b resisting demonize distract isnt enough simply cloak crimes holy cloth exceptionalism must defame enemies must plant false flags soil bury bombs later happens way every time shocking discoveries made one reviled enemies usually provided defector farcical alias think curveball instantaneous mainstream reports issue coordinated condemnation country question media outlet chooses particular keyword drive home horror popular terms include crimes humanity war crimes words industrial scale front noun verb word mass front noun verb brutal crackdown regime grisly images plastered across front pages msm often images fakes unrelated incidents reader stupefied least one columnist politician draw deep breath draw comparisons either hitler auschwitz slobodan milosevic mass graves recently milosevic declared innocent genocidal charges international criminal tribunal yugoslavia albeit years died prison denied medical treatment civilized captors process posthumous exoneration practiced industrial scale obamas drone assassination various innocents discovered innocent theyve terminated supposedly noble syrian uprising fraud equally principled goal wiping isis face earth facts ground import washington gone isis strangely halfhearted way hasnt provided air cover syrian arab army helicopters rendered useless terrorist tow missiles missiles sold united states saudi arabia likely express purpose funneling al nusrah rogue bandits syria us immediately attack isiscontrolled oil wells oil trading routesisis chief source fundingas russia entry conflict obama administration produce recordsetting arms deal saudis leading proselytizer wahhabism world refuse work moscow saa iran share grids intelligence join joint operations room baghdad isnt obvious different goals want assad daft pliant puppet charge presiding vast arsenal domestic police ready crush resistance contact course resisters would legitimate freedom fighters palestinians media takes care call palestinians terrorists called citizens resisting iraqi occupation insurgents words matter shade story bring neutral readers side empire blame victim violence victimized dissimulation becomes even clearer realize isis emerged american interrogation camp iraq way suggests centcom happy release radicalized islamists wild purpose failed state libya collapsing scenery syrian state provide plenty fodder speculation wages propaganda thanks years conditioning media population little resist escalation come eventually syrian regime eventually overthrown relentless americanbacked violence hillary clinton win election gain control oval office glen ford wrote black agenda report clinton ride white house warhorse thinking mans neocon unlike president bush represented antiintellectual strain american character barack obama whose reluctance pour troops arab prairie fires widely predictably condemned sign weakness hillary neither stupid soft doubtless find useful pretext declare nofly zone syria would inhibit efficacy russias campaign various terrorist clans house resolution already afoot lay groundwork move troops polder northern syria violating kinds charters conventions declarations icy mixture contempt indifference see un charter geneva conventions universal declaration human rights bootless scraps paper trample perhaps importantly green light transport arms ammunition psychopaths syria make push damascus hopes repeating libyan calamity project succeed hillary quite possibly discover iran violating bogus nuclear agreement p5 1 anonymous administration sources troubled development isnt idle speculation lack better title longterm strategy new world order george hw bush put contingent splitting shia crescent removing iran regional antagonist moving farther eurasia control sinorussian development know confrontation tehran would play rabid spittle cresting white beard wolf blitzer escort numberless brigadier generals situation room reassure americans bearded mullahs qom indeed fearsome clan hillary threaten perhaps use tactical nuclear weapons b61s iranian nuclear sites backed either un security council resolution dubious authority coalition bullied bought willing mushroom cloud envelops region radioactive waste israel seen fastidiously colonizing west bank land benjamin netanyahu rubbing hands frenzied anticipation dogeared copy yinon plan stuffed jacket pocket saudi arabias deputy crown princes celebrate fall hated rivals laconic onlookers washington europe shrug say nothing cia plants dc fastidiously distance hillarys bombs hiroshimas tel aviv move hezbollah final confrontation since shia crescent nothing shards mesopotamian culture atop flaming midden middle east finally brought heel hillary proposed young black boys ground cleared pulseracing showdown russia greatest thorn washingtons side assad way tehran chastened kremlinologists conspiracy theorists set loose harrow public state high anxiety expansionist state east nato inch closer russian borders shout russia moving closer nato destabilization proceed apace called democracy promotion paid fronts called endowments sanctions tighten economic screws verbal salvos hit targets either side water new proxy wars touched giant peace movement stray asteroid could prevent something like happening perhaps brics halt spread empire collective stance washington agile artful executing core strategy destabilize divide rule rivals want know contempt looks like look picture barack obama vladimir putin meeting g20 china last week tenor tomorrow written faces | 1,059 |
<p>Photo courtesy of wikimedia used under a &lt;a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:746px-Hip_replacement_Image_3684-PH.jpg"&gt;Creative Commons&lt;/a&gt; license.</p>
<p />
<p>So your doctor says it’s time to consider that hip replacement. Trouble is, more than a dozen firms make artificial hips, and there’ve been plenty of recalls—no small inconvenience when the recalled product resides in your pelvis. So how do you know which implant—or arterial stent, or prosthetic knee joint—performs best? Can you trust your doctor’s judgment? We’ve been left jaded, after all, by the endless reports of drugmakers’ seducing physicians with golf and spa weekends, expensive gifts, and lucrative consulting contracts. Well, now that federal investigators have quietly turned their sights on the makers of medical devices—a $200 billion industry whose marketing practices have seen relatively little scrutiny—it’s becoming clear that implant companies are just as solicitous of doctors as Big Pharma has been.</p>
<p>Consider Minneapolis-based <a href="http://www.medtronic.com/" type="external">Medtronic</a>, the country’s leading device maker, which hauled in nearly $15 billion in 2009 sales despite having become a repeat target for state and federal prosecutors. In 2006, Medtronic agreed to pay the feds $40 million to settle allegations that from 1998 through 2003 it had set up sham consulting and royalty agreements, trips to strip clubs in Tennessee, and other incentives to entice surgeons to use its spinal products.</p>
<p>Last year, Medtronic signed a $75 million settlement related to charges that <a href="http://www.kyphon.com/us/home.aspx?siteid=1" type="external">Kyphon</a>, a firm it acquired in 2007, helped bilk Medicare of hundreds of millions of dollars. Kyphon allegedly encouraged hospitals to keep patients—mostly Medicare beneficiaries—overnight for what should have been an outpatient procedure. This allowed hospitals to bill up to five times more for the operation. Kyphon also allegedly boosted sales by giving kickbacks and perks to doctors and administrators.</p>
<p>Now Medtronic is again in hot water with the feds, who are asking whether the company has promoted one of its most lucrative products—a bone-growth-stimulating protein called <a href="https://www.infusebonegraft.com/clinical_research.html" type="external">Infuse</a>—for purposes not authorized by the Food and Drug Administration. In July 2008, FDA officials warned that Infuse, approved only for oral, facial, and lower spine procedures, can cause severe breathing problems when used off-label for neck surgeries. The public warning, together with the probe and the resulting bad press, put a crimp in sales, prompting CEO William Hawkins to fret that Medtronic faced a “perfect storm.”</p>
<p>It wasn’t over. This past May, the New York Times ran an <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/13/business/13surgeon.html" type="external">exposé</a> indicating that Timothy Kuklo—a former Army surgeon whom Medtronic had paid nearly $800,000 in consulting fees over several years—had falsified data for a medical journal article citing an unusually high success rate in treating wounded soldiers with Infuse. He also reportedly forged the signatures of four former colleagues on the manuscript. (The article was retracted.) The company said it paid Kuklo to do other research on Infuse but didn’t review his falsified study prior to publication. In June, Medtronic revealed in a financial filing that it had received a Justice Department subpoena related to the case.</p>
<p>Medtronic is hardly the only device maker to fall under federal scrutiny. From June 2006 through July 2009, various industry players have paid more than $535 million to settle 11 federal whistleblower cases involving illegal marketing activities, according to <a href="http://www.taf.org/abouttaf.htm" type="external">Taxpayers Against Fraud</a>, a DC nonprofit. “The medical device industry right now is where the pharmaceutical industry was five to ten years ago, both in terms of kickbacks and off-label marketing,” explains Tim McCormack, a lawyer with <a href="http://www.phillipsandcohen.com/" type="external">Phillips &amp; Cohen</a>, a Washington law firm that specializes in whistleblower cases. “Individual sales reps sometimes serve as concierge services for the doctors,” plying them with tickets to pricey concerts, spa excursions, and golf outings, he adds.</p>
<p>In September 2007, four of the top five manufacturers of artificial hips and knees—among them <a href="http://www.zimmer.com/z/ctl/op/global/action/1/template/HM/id/" type="external">Zimmer Inc.</a> and Johnson &amp; Johnson subsidiary <a href="http://www.depuy.com/" type="external">DePuy Orthopaedics</a>—said they would pay $311 million to settle federal charges that they gave doctors millions of dollars in kickbacks, often in the guise of consulting fees. The government deferred prosecution of the four companies so long as they complied with the settlement terms. In a separate case, device maker <a href="http://www.synthes.com/html/" type="external">Synthes</a> didn’t get off so easy. The firm was indicted, along with four executives, for testing an unapproved bone-mending cement on human subjects—three of whom died following their surgeries. This past summer, all four of the execs pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges.</p>
<p>The government is also scrutinizing doctors who moonlight for the device industry, promises Lewis Morris, chief counsel to the Department of Health and Human Services inspector general. “We in law enforcement are focusing on physicians who accept kickbacks at the same time we’re looking at companies who give kickbacks,” he says. “It takes two to tango.”</p>
<p>In February 2008, the Senate Special Committee on Aging held a <a href="http://aging.senate.gov/hearing_detail.cfm?id=316278&amp;" type="external">“Surgeons for Sale” hearing</a> to document the pervasiveness of what <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herb_Kohl" type="external">Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.)</a> deemed “unethical payments.” This past January, Kohl and several colleagues, including <a href="" type="internal">Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa)</a>, introduced the <a href="http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s111-301" type="external">Physician Payments Sunshine Act of 2009</a>, which would compel makers of medical devices, drugs, vaccines, and the like to publicly disclose any payment of more than $100 to a doctor; failure to report could result in fines of up to $1 million. “Studies show that when the device and drug industries have an influence on what doctors prescribe, health care costs go up,” Kohl told me. His bill, Kohl promises, “will help remove industry bias from the medical world.”</p>
<p>Getting device makers in line may hinge on the fate of health care reform. Kohl’s aides expect his legislation will be folded into the Senate health bill; at press time the House was considering an even tougher provision. More than 80 drug and device firms are lobbying on the issue, and many, including Medtronic, say they favor some unspecified level of transparency. But it’s also clear they’re aiming to simplify their regulatory paperwork; the top device trade group, for instance, supports “appropriate” disclosures, so long as the bill in question preempts a “patchwork approach by all 50 states.”</p>
<p /> | true | 4 | photo courtesy wikimedia used lta hrefhttpcommonswikimediaorgwikifile746pxhip_replacement_image_3684phjpggtcreative commonsltagt license doctor says time consider hip replacement trouble dozen firms make artificial hips thereve plenty recallsno small inconvenience recalled product resides pelvis know implantor arterial stent prosthetic knee jointperforms best trust doctors judgment weve left jaded endless reports drugmakers seducing physicians golf spa weekends expensive gifts lucrative consulting contracts well federal investigators quietly turned sights makers medical devicesa 200 billion industry whose marketing practices seen relatively little scrutinyits becoming clear implant companies solicitous doctors big pharma consider minneapolisbased medtronic countrys leading device maker hauled nearly 15 billion 2009 sales despite become repeat target state federal prosecutors 2006 medtronic agreed pay feds 40 million settle allegations 1998 2003 set sham consulting royalty agreements trips strip clubs tennessee incentives entice surgeons use spinal products last year medtronic signed 75 million settlement related charges kyphon firm acquired 2007 helped bilk medicare hundreds millions dollars kyphon allegedly encouraged hospitals keep patientsmostly medicare beneficiariesovernight outpatient procedure allowed hospitals bill five times operation kyphon also allegedly boosted sales giving kickbacks perks doctors administrators medtronic hot water feds asking whether company promoted one lucrative productsa bonegrowthstimulating protein called infusefor purposes authorized food drug administration july 2008 fda officials warned infuse approved oral facial lower spine procedures cause severe breathing problems used offlabel neck surgeries public warning together probe resulting bad press put crimp sales prompting ceo william hawkins fret medtronic faced perfect storm wasnt past may new york times ran exposé indicating timothy kukloa former army surgeon medtronic paid nearly 800000 consulting fees several yearshad falsified data medical journal article citing unusually high success rate treating wounded soldiers infuse also reportedly forged signatures four former colleagues manuscript article retracted company said paid kuklo research infuse didnt review falsified study prior publication june medtronic revealed financial filing received justice department subpoena related case medtronic hardly device maker fall federal scrutiny june 2006 july 2009 various industry players paid 535 million settle 11 federal whistleblower cases involving illegal marketing activities according taxpayers fraud dc nonprofit medical device industry right pharmaceutical industry five ten years ago terms kickbacks offlabel marketing explains tim mccormack lawyer phillips amp cohen washington law firm specializes whistleblower cases individual sales reps sometimes serve concierge services doctors plying tickets pricey concerts spa excursions golf outings adds september 2007 four top five manufacturers artificial hips kneesamong zimmer inc johnson amp johnson subsidiary depuy orthopaedicssaid would pay 311 million settle federal charges gave doctors millions dollars kickbacks often guise consulting fees government deferred prosecution four companies long complied settlement terms separate case device maker synthes didnt get easy firm indicted along four executives testing unapproved bonemending cement human subjectsthree died following surgeries past summer four execs pleaded guilty misdemeanor charges government also scrutinizing doctors moonlight device industry promises lewis morris chief counsel department health human services inspector general law enforcement focusing physicians accept kickbacks time looking companies give kickbacks says takes two tango february 2008 senate special committee aging held surgeons sale hearing document pervasiveness sen herb kohl dwis deemed unethical payments past january kohl several colleagues including chuck grassley riowa introduced physician payments sunshine act 2009 would compel makers medical devices drugs vaccines like publicly disclose payment 100 doctor failure report could result fines 1 million studies show device drug industries influence doctors prescribe health care costs go kohl told bill kohl promises help remove industry bias medical world getting device makers line may hinge fate health care reform kohls aides expect legislation folded senate health bill press time house considering even tougher provision 80 drug device firms lobbying issue many including medtronic say favor unspecified level transparency also clear theyre aiming simplify regulatory paperwork top device trade group instance supports appropriate disclosures long bill question preempts patchwork approach 50 states | 621 |
<p>The charter school saga gets more sordid and pernicious from city to city, day by day. The new fiasco involving taxpayer bailouts to Wall Street and the role of junk bonds in financing charter school ‘start-ups’ came to light in Minnesota in November of this year; Minnesota, ironically being the home of the first charter school law in the US in 1991.</p>
<p>Originally, charter school funding in Minnesota offered no extra money for start-up facilities to charter schools, just general aid payments per student.&#160; Former state Senator Ember Reichgott Junge, who wrote the 1991 law, said the intent was to keep charter schools focused on education and out of the real estate business. &#160;Of course many advocates of public schools in opposition to the new law had put a jaundiced eye on the whole mess from the beginning, arguing it was the first step towards the privatization of education.&#160; Never mind, for business and charter support for a ‘lease aid program’ for charter school start-ups crystallized in 1998, after lawmakers discovered many new charter schools were operating in cheap retail storefronts that lawmakers said were unfit for young children (See “State charter schools program is ‘out of control’,” Tony Kennedy, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, November 29, 2009.&#160; In their largesse, they would now begin a formal private sector partnership that would prove to be devastating for Minnesota schools and their citizens.</p>
<p>Charter Schools, owning property and the Minnesota Law</p>
<p>Minnesota state law prohibits charter schools from owning property.&#160; Seedy politicians and Wall Street firms and their consultants and lawyers, found a legal loophole in the law allowing charter proponents to use millions of dollars in public money to build these schools even though the properties would remain in the hands of private non-profit corporations.&#160; Yet another brilliant scam in the ongoing yarn of the American charter school and neo-liberal capitalism.</p>
<p>Here is how it worked.&#160; The state has a lease aid program, which it created 11 years ago that it said would help stimulate ‘competition’ in public education by offering rental assistance to charter groups promoting alternatives to district schools.&#160; The charter proponents argued the schools needed money for new facilities due to the fact that at their inception many charters sprang up in malls or strip malls, as they were not conversion charter schools.&#160; How would they finance the construction of these new start-up charter schools?&#160; By turning to Wall Street and the money-changers, of course.&#160; According to the Star Tribune:</p>
<p>In the past decade, 18 charter schools have been built with $178 million in junk bonds, with financing costs on some projects chewing up nearly a quarter of the funds raised. Twelve more charter schools have taken steps to buy or build facilities, and the state projects annual spending on lease aid to reach $54 million in 2013, up from just $1.1 million in 1998 (State charter schools program is ‘out of control’. Tony Kennedy, Star Tribune Last update: November 29, 2009.</p>
<p>In order to lure the investors they needed for new charter start-up buildings, the administration abandoned the small campus idea which stimulated the movement close to 20 years ago in favor of building large factory style schools that delight in mirroring the more conventional institutions that the families were fleeing from in the first place.&#160; Again, never mind, for that is where construction money is to be made, in large concrete buildings, whether they house kids or stock goods.&#160; With education reduced to simply a ‘commodity vehicle’ for junk bond lenders and developers the interests of students and families become secondary interests while the huge construction financing costs became paramount.</p>
<p>Start-up financing</p>
<p>It all began in the year 2000 when American Express purchased $8.3 million dollars in bonds from the state.&#160; They said the bonds would be used to convert an old Science Museum in Minnesota into a charter school.&#160; It would be called, ironically, the Minnesota Business Academy and what a business it was, at least for some.&#160; In tandem with the junk bonds the charter school also bled the city out of $1 million dollars in community development funds, from the city of St. Paul — government funds paid for by taxpayers.&#160; Not surprisingly, former Lt. Governor Joanne Benson, who headed the Minnesota Business Academy at the time, put the whole crisp multi-million dollar money making deal together.&#160; American Express was delighted with the 8 per cent ‘vig’ it got from the deal and accepted the risk of default and non-payment as a part of the transaction.</p>
<p>It didn’t take more than one year for the school to begin teetering on the edge of financial failure.&#160; Cost overruns and fundraising shortfalls forced the school to turnaround and borrow another $1.6 million from taxpayers.&#160; To pay off its climbing debts, the school dreadfully needed capital in the form of students, bodies – 440 to be exact — with each student representing more than one thousand dollars in annual lease payments.&#160; Unfortunately, the grim recruitment plan backfired and total enrollment never got larger than 292 students in 2004, sending the school into a dizzying economic free fall right into the laps of the public.</p>
<p>Not to worry, the encrusted leaders and city officials approved another bond in 2005.&#160; This time it allowed the school to reorganize its finances with American Express getting $ 6 million, while the city and the working people who comprise it and support it recovered the orts, little more than chicken scratch: a total of a mere $451,352.&#160; The unsecured creditors were paid 10 cents on the dollar.&#160; Ah, the priorities of capital.&#160; As St. Paul City Council Member Lee Helgen, who voted against the bond, said so perspicaciously: “The corporate folks got their dough .”</p>
<p>Meanwhile, since 2000, at least 64 public school buildings in the metro area closed because of declining enrollment. Charter schools are responsible for recruiting away some of those students while pushing more finance costs on to taxpayers.</p>
<p>The first charter school start-up (as they are known, as opposed to charter school conversions of existing state buildings) was built with lease aid money and it went to the Minnesota New Country School in Henderson.&#160; The school originally occupied three abandoned storefronts, including a defunct bar, but this was now all about to change. With the help of neo-liberal government policies of deregulation and reregulation, and an analyst with the state Education Department, charter school promoters deregulated the state ban on ownership by forming an affiliated building company.&#160; They then used this non-profit building company to borrow $1.4 million from a bank for the charter start-up construction project. Like subsequent projects, the loan is currently being repaid with lease aid funds financed through bonds passed by citizen voters who never had a clue the money would be illegitimately used and they would be left cash strapped in debt.</p>
<p>In the past decade, 18 charter schools in Minnesota have been built with $178 million in junk bonds, with financing costs and fees on some projects eating up nearly a quarter of the funds raised. &#160;All for the kids and parental choice, remember?&#160; Twelve more Minnesota charter schools have taken steps to buy or build facilities, and the state projects annual spending on lease aid to reach $54 million in 2013, up from just $1.1 million in 1998.&#160; This is all great news for the entrepreneurs and Wall Street, as well as for the insiders, as we will see.&#160; It is simply another example of the great charter school adventure known as school privatization, or as Arne Duncan, Obama’s&#160; Secretary of Education would call it,&#160; “The Race to the Top”, and no better can it be represented than right in the backyard of the state the was responsible for the first law allowing for charter schools.</p>
<p>Enter the Wall Street boys: leveraging disaster capitalism for profits</p>
<p>Wall Street jumped in with both feet as they and their charter school patrons discovered they no longer had to deal with rental properties if they were willing to create building companies overnight through the use of crafty lawyers and consultants and then use junk bonds to fund and finance them.&#160; Junk bonds are high-cost debt bonds issued by borrowers considered to be at a much greater risk for default than regular bonds. Never mind, the bonds are repaid with lease aid money from taxpayers, remember?&#160; This is money that comes from the government in the form of student FTE funds which Minnesota capped at 90 percent of property costs, or $1,200 per student, whichever number is lower. This year, Minnesota will distribute an estimated $42.4 million in lease aid funds, a figure that has doubled in just four years.</p>
<p>On average, it costs more to own land than to rent it (charter schools built or bought with junk bonds cost taxpayers an average of $13.50 a foot, or 17 percent more in lease aid payments than all charter facilities, according to Education Department records begging the question of why charter applicants would prefer to own buildings and start building companies rather than simply rent the buildings they need?).&#160; The answer is simple: the humungous amounts of money to be made on the lending and construction deals for the private interests involved.&#160; Here is a typical example of the havoc wrought by neo-liberal economic policies that slash and burn while allowing government collusion in transferring public funds to private coffers.</p>
<p>Prairie Seeds Charter School in Brooklyn Park and the Faribault Public School District, both in Minnesota, each raised about $15 million through the sale of tax-exempt bonds to investors in March of 2009. &#160;After paying underwriting expenses and other costs, the charter school project was left with only 78 percent of the proceeds of the bonds; the public school retained 96 percent.&#160; The rest of the money went to the private fees of deal makers and Wall Street courtesans.&#160; Records show the Prairie Seeds project generated $928,000 in fees and other underwriting costs, with $630,800 going to Dougherty &amp; Co., the sales agent for the bonds. The Faribault deal generated $200,000 in fees.&#160; All these fees to private firms in the name of helping kids and giving parents a “public choice” while over the next 30 years taxpayers are estimated to pay $32.4 million in lease aid to cover just the interest payments at Prairie Seeds alone, where the interest rate on most of the bonds is a whopping 9.25 percent.&#160; That’s five times more than the interest expense in Faribault Public Schools.&#160; Wall Street must be exuberant, but what about the kids and the taxpayers?</p>
<p>State Education Department officials now say lawmakers should either forbid such junk-bond deals or rigorously regulate them, but where were they when they were authorized?&#160; They were right there, nodding and winking the projects and deal making into existence.&#160; I guess it is easier to ask for forgiveness than it is permission.</p>
<p>Insider Fees: “Top of the world Ma’”</p>
<p>Two years ago, when the Otsego City Council refused to finance a charter school start-up, the school promoters went 35 miles down the road to Falcon Heights, Minnesota where officials were persuaded to authorize the bond issue in exchange for a $45,000 “processing fee”, a handsome payoff.&#160; Of course as is standard in such financial wheeling and dealing, the city of Falcon Heights was indemnified against default. They merely acted as a government “conduit” or better said an “enabler” in an effort to give the bonds tax-exempt status so that the public would be enticed to buy them.&#160; This of course is the role of government under the current economic regime of neo-liberalism, to provide lax regulation and an open ‘free’ market to the privatizers and profit maximizers.</p>
<p>At St. Croix Preparatory Academy, a K-12 charter school that opened in its new space this year near Stillwater, according to the Star Tribune, three insiders rewarded themselves with $140,000 in fees related to the $21.7 million bond deal that financed the facility. &#160;Former computer software salesman Jon Gutierrez, who co-founded St. Croix Prep and serves as its executive director, took $25,000 in fees, on top of his annual salary of $110,000. His wife, Kelly Gutierrez, the school’s chief financial officer, received $15,000 in fees.&#160; Jim Markoe, a board member of both St. Croix Prep and the building company that enabled the financing said the insider payments were cleared by bond lawyers involved in the deal.&#160; The lawyers did it, is the defense.&#160; “Everybody has done everything morally, ethically and legally, and I’ll stand by that until the day I die,” Markoe said.</p>
<p>Yet according to the report in the Star Tribune, the largest piece of the cash pie went to Carroll Davis-Johnson, chairperson of the school’s building company.&#160; She received $100,000, this although she served as a project manager on the new school.&#160; The project’s architect told school officials the payment to Johnson was “unnecessary.”&#160; Architect Ed Kodet, was another fortunate financial recipient, earning about $1 million on the school.&#160; Evidently he was one of several construction experts overseeing the failed project. Add to all this fact that the general contractor had a full-time supervisor at the job site and the school had a four-person facilities committee to evaluate “progress” on construction and we’ve got a real public feeding trough.</p>
<p>Speaking with the Star Tribune, Davis-Johnson who also served on the school’s board of directors, stated she and Gutierrezes earned the money and deserved it “based on the huge number of hours” they worked.&#160; Gutierrez said he had “no idea” how he received his management fee, even though he was present at the board meetings when it was authorized and approved. He abstained from the vote, which Davis-Johnson approved. Similarly, Davis-Johnson abstained from the vote on her bonus, which was approved by Gutierrez’s wife, according to the Star Tribune..&#160; A nice&#160; business relationship all subsidized, condoned and neatly rolled up by the neo-liberal charter reform agenda.</p>
<p>Not according to Representative, Jim Abeler a Republican from Anoka: “When district schools are closing, should we allow charter schools to build new buildings?&#160; These are being built with 100 percent state moneys, but who is minding the store on using that money well?”</p>
<p>Good question. The champion for people’s rights, Jim Abeler himself couldn’t be held responsible could he? After all he was cleared in 2001 of legislative ethics charges for voting to boost lease aid even though he personally received the funds from a charter school he helped start.</p>
<p>Neo-liberalism: socializing the costs while privatizing the profits</p>
<p>Unlike 26 other states that have imposed caps on charter school start-up expansion, Minnesota has no limits on the size of its program or on state support. There’s nothing in any law that would return the facilities to the public once they are paid for.&#160; This is true even if the schools were to fail. In fact, school backers can continue to obtain lease aid even after construction bonds are paid off.&#160; Even though the state’s top education official must sign off on new construction projects, few charter school start-ups are ever halted because of state interference.&#160; That would be an anathema, blasphemous and counter to free market fundamentalism and scant oversight.&#160; And as for taxpayers, their approval is also unnecessary. All a charter school needs to do is simply find a municipality willing to lend its name to a financial deal (as we saw above with Falcon Heights), even if that community is far removed from the school, and then: bango, bingo, bango the public money start to flow into private coffers.</p>
<p>While junk-bond promoters always claim taxpayers will never be forced to cover the costs of a failed charter school built with state lease-aid funds, that’s exactly what happened in St. Paul.&#160; They call it “restructuring” now, when Wall Street can reorganize its business plans in face of catastrophe and the government is more than willing to help.&#160; The recent restructuring lowered the St. Paul Minnesota Business Academy’s long term debt from $10.7 million to $6.6 million.&#160; However, much to the chagrin of the parent and students, less than 12 months from the restructuring date the school went belly up and closed.&#160; What great news for the new bondholders!&#160; They now had downtown land paid for by taxpayers and improved buildings and equipment then valued at $7.4 million dollars.&#160; So what did they do?&#160; They sold the land and improvements for $3.5 million dollars to the Church of Scientology.&#160; This is truly a race to the slop.</p>
<p>DANNY WEIL&#160;is soon to publish “Charter Schools”, dissecting neo-liberalism’s plan for reforming education in America. He can be reached at <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a></p>
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<p /> | true | 4 | charter school saga gets sordid pernicious city city day day new fiasco involving taxpayer bailouts wall street role junk bonds financing charter school startups came light minnesota november year minnesota ironically home first charter school law us 1991 originally charter school funding minnesota offered extra money startup facilities charter schools general aid payments per student160 former state senator ember reichgott junge wrote 1991 law said intent keep charter schools focused education real estate business 160of course many advocates public schools opposition new law put jaundiced eye whole mess beginning arguing first step towards privatization education160 never mind business charter support lease aid program charter school startups crystallized 1998 lawmakers discovered many new charter schools operating cheap retail storefronts lawmakers said unfit young children see state charter schools program control tony kennedy minneapolis startribune november 29 2009160 largesse would begin formal private sector partnership would prove devastating minnesota schools citizens charter schools owning property minnesota law minnesota state law prohibits charter schools owning property160 seedy politicians wall street firms consultants lawyers found legal loophole law allowing charter proponents use millions dollars public money build schools even though properties would remain hands private nonprofit corporations160 yet another brilliant scam ongoing yarn american charter school neoliberal capitalism worked160 state lease aid program created 11 years ago said would help stimulate competition public education offering rental assistance charter groups promoting alternatives district schools160 charter proponents argued schools needed money new facilities due fact inception many charters sprang malls strip malls conversion charter schools160 would finance construction new startup charter schools160 turning wall street moneychangers course160 according star tribune past decade 18 charter schools built 178 million junk bonds financing costs projects chewing nearly quarter funds raised twelve charter schools taken steps buy build facilities state projects annual spending lease aid reach 54 million 2013 11 million 1998 state charter schools program control tony kennedy star tribune last update november 29 2009 order lure investors needed new charter startup buildings administration abandoned small campus idea stimulated movement close 20 years ago favor building large factory style schools delight mirroring conventional institutions families fleeing first place160 never mind construction money made large concrete buildings whether house kids stock goods160 education reduced simply commodity vehicle junk bond lenders developers interests students families become secondary interests huge construction financing costs became paramount startup financing began year 2000 american express purchased 83 million dollars bonds state160 said bonds would used convert old science museum minnesota charter school160 would called ironically minnesota business academy business least some160 tandem junk bonds charter school also bled city 1 million dollars community development funds city st paul government funds paid taxpayers160 surprisingly former lt governor joanne benson headed minnesota business academy time put whole crisp multimillion dollar money making deal together160 american express delighted 8 per cent vig got deal accepted risk default nonpayment part transaction didnt take one year school begin teetering edge financial failure160 cost overruns fundraising shortfalls forced school turnaround borrow another 16 million taxpayers160 pay climbing debts school dreadfully needed capital form students bodies 440 exact student representing one thousand dollars annual lease payments160 unfortunately grim recruitment plan backfired total enrollment never got larger 292 students 2004 sending school dizzying economic free fall right laps public worry encrusted leaders city officials approved another bond 2005160 time allowed school reorganize finances american express getting 6 million city working people comprise support recovered orts little chicken scratch total mere 451352160 unsecured creditors paid 10 cents dollar160 ah priorities capital160 st paul city council member lee helgen voted bond said perspicaciously corporate folks got dough meanwhile since 2000 least 64 public school buildings metro area closed declining enrollment charter schools responsible recruiting away students pushing finance costs taxpayers first charter school startup known opposed charter school conversions existing state buildings built lease aid money went minnesota new country school henderson160 school originally occupied three abandoned storefronts including defunct bar change help neoliberal government policies deregulation reregulation analyst state education department charter school promoters deregulated state ban ownership forming affiliated building company160 used nonprofit building company borrow 14 million bank charter startup construction project like subsequent projects loan currently repaid lease aid funds financed bonds passed citizen voters never clue money would illegitimately used would left cash strapped debt past decade 18 charter schools minnesota built 178 million junk bonds financing costs fees projects eating nearly quarter funds raised 160all kids parental choice remember160 twelve minnesota charter schools taken steps buy build facilities state projects annual spending lease aid reach 54 million 2013 11 million 1998160 great news entrepreneurs wall street well insiders see160 simply another example great charter school adventure known school privatization arne duncan obamas160 secretary education would call it160 race top better represented right backyard state responsible first law allowing charter schools enter wall street boys leveraging disaster capitalism profits wall street jumped feet charter school patrons discovered longer deal rental properties willing create building companies overnight use crafty lawyers consultants use junk bonds fund finance them160 junk bonds highcost debt bonds issued borrowers considered much greater risk default regular bonds never mind bonds repaid lease aid money taxpayers remember160 money comes government form student fte funds minnesota capped 90 percent property costs 1200 per student whichever number lower year minnesota distribute estimated 424 million lease aid funds figure doubled four years average costs land rent charter schools built bought junk bonds cost taxpayers average 1350 foot 17 percent lease aid payments charter facilities according education department records begging question charter applicants would prefer buildings start building companies rather simply rent buildings need160 answer simple humungous amounts money made lending construction deals private interests involved160 typical example havoc wrought neoliberal economic policies slash burn allowing government collusion transferring public funds private coffers prairie seeds charter school brooklyn park faribault public school district minnesota raised 15 million sale taxexempt bonds investors march 2009 160after paying underwriting expenses costs charter school project left 78 percent proceeds bonds public school retained 96 percent160 rest money went private fees deal makers wall street courtesans160 records show prairie seeds project generated 928000 fees underwriting costs 630800 going dougherty amp co sales agent bonds faribault deal generated 200000 fees160 fees private firms name helping kids giving parents public choice next 30 years taxpayers estimated pay 324 million lease aid cover interest payments prairie seeds alone interest rate bonds whopping 925 percent160 thats five times interest expense faribault public schools160 wall street must exuberant kids taxpayers state education department officials say lawmakers either forbid junkbond deals rigorously regulate authorized160 right nodding winking projects deal making existence160 guess easier ask forgiveness permission insider fees top world two years ago otsego city council refused finance charter school startup school promoters went 35 miles road falcon heights minnesota officials persuaded authorize bond issue exchange 45000 processing fee handsome payoff160 course standard financial wheeling dealing city falcon heights indemnified default merely acted government conduit better said enabler effort give bonds taxexempt status public would enticed buy them160 course role government current economic regime neoliberalism provide lax regulation open free market privatizers profit maximizers st croix preparatory academy k12 charter school opened new space year near stillwater according star tribune three insiders rewarded 140000 fees related 217 million bond deal financed facility 160former computer software salesman jon gutierrez cofounded st croix prep serves executive director took 25000 fees top annual salary 110000 wife kelly gutierrez schools chief financial officer received 15000 fees160 jim markoe board member st croix prep building company enabled financing said insider payments cleared bond lawyers involved deal160 lawyers defense160 everybody done everything morally ethically legally ill stand day die markoe said yet according report star tribune largest piece cash pie went carroll davisjohnson chairperson schools building company160 received 100000 although served project manager new school160 projects architect told school officials payment johnson unnecessary160 architect ed kodet another fortunate financial recipient earning 1 million school160 evidently one several construction experts overseeing failed project add fact general contractor fulltime supervisor job site school fourperson facilities committee evaluate progress construction weve got real public feeding trough speaking star tribune davisjohnson also served schools board directors stated gutierrezes earned money deserved based huge number hours worked160 gutierrez said idea received management fee even though present board meetings authorized approved abstained vote davisjohnson approved similarly davisjohnson abstained vote bonus approved gutierrezs wife according star tribune160 nice160 business relationship subsidized condoned neatly rolled neoliberal charter reform agenda according representative jim abeler republican anoka district schools closing allow charter schools build new buildings160 built 100 percent state moneys minding store using money well good question champion peoples rights jim abeler couldnt held responsible could cleared 2001 legislative ethics charges voting boost lease aid even though personally received funds charter school helped start neoliberalism socializing costs privatizing profits unlike 26 states imposed caps charter school startup expansion minnesota limits size program state support theres nothing law would return facilities public paid for160 true even schools fail fact school backers continue obtain lease aid even construction bonds paid off160 even though states top education official must sign new construction projects charter school startups ever halted state interference160 would anathema blasphemous counter free market fundamentalism scant oversight160 taxpayers approval also unnecessary charter school needs simply find municipality willing lend name financial deal saw falcon heights even community far removed school bango bingo bango public money start flow private coffers junkbond promoters always claim taxpayers never forced cover costs failed charter school built state leaseaid funds thats exactly happened st paul160 call restructuring wall street reorganize business plans face catastrophe government willing help160 recent restructuring lowered st paul minnesota business academys long term debt 107 million 66 million160 however much chagrin parent students less 12 months restructuring date school went belly closed160 great news new bondholders160 downtown land paid taxpayers improved buildings equipment valued 74 million dollars160 do160 sold land improvements 35 million dollars church scientology160 truly race slop danny weil160is soon publish charter schools dissecting neoliberalisms plan reforming education america reached weilunionaolcom 160 | 1,655 |
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<p>On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee voted 22-17 along party lines to refer to the full chamber a report that recommends holding former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten in statutory contempt of Congress. Citing the Bush administration’s assertion of executive privilege, Miers and Bolten have ignored House subpoenas concerning their role in the firing of nine U.S. Attorneys last December.</p>
<p>Laying the groundwork for Wednesday’s action has been a long and complicated process for House Democratic leaders. To avoid a possible loss in the courts as well as charges of partisanship, they have spent weeks establishing a pattern of White House obstructionism, built a detailed legal argument against the assertions of executive privilege on this issue, and structured a narrow case based upon the flouting of committee subpoenas. If the contempt charge passes the House, the case will be referred to Jeff Taylor, the U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C., who was appointed by Bush.</p>
<p>On Tuesday, Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) circulated a 52-page memo to all members of the House Judiciary Committee. Intended to serve as a compendium of the offenses that warrant the subpoenas, the memo details just about every facet of the scandal: It includes the apparent motives for the attorney firings, the seemingly false statements White House and Justice Department officials have made about the case, and legal arguments against the executive privilege the president has cited as justification for blocking the investigation from moving forward.</p>
<p>It remains unclear how far Congress can proceed in the long term. A July 25 Associated Press article indicated that the House will likely wait until after Congress’ August recess to rule on the contempt citations. If they eventually pass the citations, it would be up to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to refer the case to Taylor. The administration has insisted that Congress cannot force the U.S. Attorney’s office to pursue contempt charges, and Taylor, like all U.S. Attorneys, serves at the pleasure of the president.</p>
<p>But Democrats argue that if they don’t pursue contempt proceedings against Bolten and Miers, they’ll create a perverse set of incentives for future presidents to block Congressional oversight. Republicans responded that a loss in court might actually make that situation worse. “Our failure is not here,” said Rep. Chris Cannon (R-UT) at the hearing. “You have the votes here. If we fail in the courts…that’s when we make the imperial presidency.”</p>
<p>Several Democrats responded that a worse incentive is created when the president believes that Congress will not vigorously attend to its oversight duties. “Some may argue that the stakes in this confrontation are so high we cannot afford the risk that we might lose,” said Conyers, “I would say to them that if we countenance a process where our subpoenas can be readily ignored, where a witness under a duly authorized subpoena doesn’t even bother to show up, where privilege can be asserted on the thinnest of bases and in the broadest possible manner, then we have already lost.”</p>
<p>Other Republicans advanced a less technical argument against the citations. Rep. Ric Keller (R-FL) suggested that the Judiciary Committee accept an offer of an off-the-record, closed-door meeting with White House officials in lieu of escalating the Constitutional crisis.</p>
<p>“There has been no attempt to gather this information through alternative means,” Keller said. “For example, the White House has made Harriet Miers available to talk about any communications that she had with DOJ officials, members of Congress or outside sources on an informal basis. They’ve turned down that interview opportunity. Similarly they’re seeking the documents for Josh Bolten. Josh Bolten said, ‘I will provide you with any documents regarding this situation between the White House and DOJ as well as any documents between the White House and Congress or other third parties.’They’ve turned down that…as well.”</p>
<p>Though no Democrat at the hearing specifically questioned his assertions on this point, Keller ignored the fact that the president’s offer is contingent upon a host of restrictions, including a refusal to provide the committee with any internal White House correspondence and a refusal to participate at all thereafter. Conyers addressed those restrictions in the 52-page memo.</p>
<p>“On March 20, 2007, White House Counsel made a ‘take it or leave it’proposal, under which the Committee was offered limited availability to some documents and limited access to witnesses, but without any transcripts and under severe limitations as to permissible areas for questioning,” the memo read. “The White House also insisted that a condition of its proposal was that the Committee commit in advance not to subsequently pursue any additional White House-related information by any other means, regardless of what initial review of documents and informal discussions should reveal.”</p>
<p>If the court does not overrule the executive privilege claims and hold Miers and Bolten in contempt—or if it refuses to hear the citation in the first place—House Democrats will face some difficult choices. One option would be to pursue citations of inherent—as opposed to statutory—contempt of Congress, and try Bolten and Miers before the full House of Representatives. That would require dispatching the House Sergeant-at-Arms to arrest the pair and holding them in jail, an option House aides have suggested Democrats have little appetite for. Failing that, they could begin impeachment proceedings against the president himself, or any Senate-approved appointee involved in the obstruction. Or they could do nothing at all. If that happens, it may well end the congressional inquiry into the U.S. Attorney scandal forever.</p>
<p /> | true | 4 | wednesday house judiciary committee voted 2217 along party lines refer full chamber report recommends holding former white house counsel harriet miers white house chief staff josh bolten statutory contempt congress citing bush administrations assertion executive privilege miers bolten ignored house subpoenas concerning role firing nine us attorneys last december laying groundwork wednesdays action long complicated process house democratic leaders avoid possible loss courts well charges partisanship spent weeks establishing pattern white house obstructionism built detailed legal argument assertions executive privilege issue structured narrow case based upon flouting committee subpoenas contempt charge passes house case referred jeff taylor us attorney washington dc appointed bush tuesday chairman john conyers dmi circulated 52page memo members house judiciary committee intended serve compendium offenses warrant subpoenas memo details every facet scandal includes apparent motives attorney firings seemingly false statements white house justice department officials made case legal arguments executive privilege president cited justification blocking investigation moving forward remains unclear far congress proceed long term july 25 associated press article indicated house likely wait congress august recess rule contempt citations eventually pass citations would house speaker nancy pelosi dca refer case taylor administration insisted congress force us attorneys office pursue contempt charges taylor like us attorneys serves pleasure president democrats argue dont pursue contempt proceedings bolten miers theyll create perverse set incentives future presidents block congressional oversight republicans responded loss court might actually make situation worse failure said rep chris cannon rut hearing votes fail courtsthats make imperial presidency several democrats responded worse incentive created president believes congress vigorously attend oversight duties may argue stakes confrontation high afford risk might lose said conyers would say countenance process subpoenas readily ignored witness duly authorized subpoena doesnt even bother show privilege asserted thinnest bases broadest possible manner already lost republicans advanced less technical argument citations rep ric keller rfl suggested judiciary committee accept offer offtherecord closeddoor meeting white house officials lieu escalating constitutional crisis attempt gather information alternative means keller said example white house made harriet miers available talk communications doj officials members congress outside sources informal basis theyve turned interview opportunity similarly theyre seeking documents josh bolten josh bolten said provide documents regarding situation white house doj well documents white house congress third partiestheyve turned thatas well though democrat hearing specifically questioned assertions point keller ignored fact presidents offer contingent upon host restrictions including refusal provide committee internal white house correspondence refusal participate thereafter conyers addressed restrictions 52page memo march 20 2007 white house counsel made take leave itproposal committee offered limited availability documents limited access witnesses without transcripts severe limitations permissible areas questioning memo read white house also insisted condition proposal committee commit advance subsequently pursue additional white houserelated information means regardless initial review documents informal discussions reveal court overrule executive privilege claims hold miers bolten contemptor refuses hear citation first placehouse democrats face difficult choices one option would pursue citations inherentas opposed statutorycontempt congress try bolten miers full house representatives would require dispatching house sergeantatarms arrest pair holding jail option house aides suggested democrats little appetite failing could begin impeachment proceedings president senateapproved appointee involved obstruction could nothing happens may well end congressional inquiry us attorney scandal forever | 523 |
<p>Will the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) bloc ever really challenge the world financial order, as is often advertised? New Development Bank (NDB) leaders meet in Delhi this weekend, to restate a vision of financial alternatives to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). Indeed the NDB began with environmentally-oriented loans last year, and in 2017 <a href="" type="internal">aims</a> to add $3 billion in new credits.</p>
<p>But from South Africa’s standpoint, chaos reigns. Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan was one of 20 ministers and deputy ministers fired or shifted by President Jacob Zuma at midnight on Thursday. The new labour federation headed by Zwelinzima Vavi and Irvin Jim plus a ‘Save South Africa’ movement combining progressives and liberals have called for an #OccupyTreasury protest in Pretoria, given the prospects – they argue – for a full-fledged looting of state resources by Zuma’s patronage-oriented allies.</p>
<p>Gordhan, who was one of the NDB’s five Governors, is replaced by Malusi Gigaba, a former African National Congress (ANC) Youth League leader who since 2010 has served at cabinet level overseeing public enterprises and home affairs, replete with controversies over <a href="" type="internal">excessive visa control-freakery</a> and <a href="" type="internal">white-elephant</a> infrastructure. Surprisingly to all observers, the SA Communist Party’s leaders (including Blade Nzimande who is higher education minister, Jeremy Cronin who is deputy public works minister and a half-dozen others) were not touched in the Cabinet reshuffling. They had threatened that if Gordhan was fired, they would quit en masse, so this weekend’s House-of-Cards-style <a href="" type="internal">maneuvers</a> will be of unprecedented intensity.</p>
<p>Financiers reacted by driving the currency 5% lower in the first hours of Friday, and with renewed threats of an international junk rating imposed on the country’s bonds. Parliamentary opposition parties had on Thursday launched the 8th attempt at impeachment (if 50 ANC members of parliament agree when the vote comes up in early May, that could end Zuma’s political career – a prospect he takes into account regularly). The left opposition party launched a court challenge. None of these is likely to sway Zuma, who wants his last two years as president to be unencumbered by an austerity-oriented Treasury.</p>
<p>Chaos is not limited to South Africa’s conflict over the Finance Minister job and hence BRICS NDB representation, but also entails the unwillingness of the only local NDB borrower so far – the electricity parastatal Eskom – to support renewable energy; the apparent state manipulation by an Indian family (the Guptas) and a Russian nuclear vendor; and perhaps most importantly, the country’s (and continent’s) capitalisation and debt repayment capacities.</p>
<p>Greenwashing finance and multilateral deform</p>
<p>Why green loans? The original NDB designers were two former World Bank chief economists, Joe Stiglitz and Nick Stern. Although their public <a href="https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-benefits-of-the-brics-development-bank?barrier=accessreg" type="external">endorsements</a> of the NDB stressed sustainable development and climate change, in private Stern <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZKQ6wQ-29w" type="external">offered</a> a different rationale during a 2013 conference of the elite British Academy (which he chairs): “If you have a development bank that is part of a [major business] deal then it makes it more difficult for governments to be unreliable.”</p>
<p>Stern <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZKQ6wQ-29w," type="external">asked</a>, “are there any press here, by the way? OK, so this bit’s off the record. We started to move the idea of a BRICS-led development bank for those two reasons. Coupled with the idea that the rich countries would not let the balance sheets of the World Bank and some of the regional development banks expand very much, and they would not allow their share in those banks to be diluted.”</p>
<p>While this is true, the BRICS gained substantial IMF voting power increases in the 2015 restructuring (e.g. China up 37%, India 23%, Brazil 11% and Russia 8%), but with negligible United States or European dilution. Instead, the rising BRICS shares were as a result of Nigeria and Venezuela losing 41% of their vote, along with Libya at -39%, Morocco -27%, Gabon -26%, Algeria -26%, Namibia -26%, Cameroon -23%, Mauritius -21% and even South Africa lost 21%.</p>
<p>Four BRIC countries stood on African and Latin American heads to get better executive director seats at the IMF table. When they got there, the BRICS directors approved the reappointment of Christine Lagarde in 2016 and after she was convicted on a $430 million corruption charge last December, the IMF directors unanimously <a href="https://www.pambazuka.org/governance/lagarde-trial-business-class-get-out-jail-free-card" type="external">endorsed</a> her continued employment.</p>
<p>The NDB’s first loans did <a href="" type="internal">boost</a> environmentally-oriented projects, as $300 million went to Brazil, $81 million to China, $250 million to India and $180 million to SA, the latter to connect renewable Independent Power Producer generators to the main grid. But these processes are accomplished with mostly local-currency inputs, hence the US$ loans were inappropriate. Like the other multilaterals, NDB repayments are in US dollars, which adversely affect the borrower’s balance of payments, although the NDB has <a href="" type="internal">started</a> fund-raising from yuan and rupee markets so this may eventually change.</p>
<p>But worse, Eskom’s two most recent leaders, Brian Molefe and Matshela Koko, simultaneously <a href="" type="internal">announced</a> that they wanted nothing more to do with renewable energy. A massive battle over renewables was only resolved a month ago when Gordhan’s Budget Statement <a href="" type="internal">recommitted</a> to the IPP contracts. (Koko may well have to step down after last week’s conflict-of-interest revelations involving a scandalous $100 million tender <a href="" type="internal">suspiciously</a> won by his stepdaughter’s company.) Gordhan also refused Eskom further nuclear energy financing, beyond an initial $15 million: a tiny downpayment on the in-principle reactor <a href="" type="internal">purchase agreement</a> that Zuma had made with Moscow-based Rosatom, at an anticipated cost of $50-100 billion. The main supplier of raw inputs to the nukes will be Oakbay, a uranium (and coal) company owned by the <a href="" type="internal">notorious</a> Gupta brothers.</p>
<p>Gupta gyrations</p>
<p>This week’s Gupta-versus-Gordhan turmoil is extremely important to the BRICS not only because the former finance minister was an NDB Governor. (The Guptas spent this week in court fighting Gordhan over his failure to reverse the main SA commercial banks’ boycott of Oakbay and other Gupta-owned firms. That boycott is the widely understood reason that Gordhan was recalled from a UK-US investment trip on Tuesday morning: to be <a href="" type="internal">fired</a>.)</p>
<p>Also, the oft-rumoured ascension of Molefe to a Cabinet post has been postponed – unless Communist Party members Rob Davies and Ebrahim Patel now leave Zuma’s government in protest. Molefe was SA’s BRICS Business Council leader until recently (now he is one of five), until forced to resign as Eskom chief executive as a result of the Public Protector’s “State of Capture” <a href="" type="internal">report</a>, revealing manipulation of Eskom by the Guptas including phone records and a GPS tracker. After implying that the Gupta’s lush Johannesburg neighbourhood hosts a shebeen (pub) that could explain his regular presence in Saxonwold, Molefe’s credibility was permanently destroyed. Nevertheless, in January, Molefe was appointed to parliament amidst fresh <a href="" type="internal">controversies</a> over Gupta meddling and predictions of Molefe’s appointment to Cabinet.</p>
<p>Just before the Eskom resignation, Molefe made an articulate <a href="" type="internal">appeal</a> for a replacement of “the current ‘casino’ financial system or ‘law of the jungle’ with a project that expressly promotes the common good among nations… BRICS and its allies are taking bold corrective measures by building a world system based on real value and to create a system capable of fundamentally shaping socio-economic growth and development. There have been some significant steps taken, in particular the launch of the NDB, which has already started funding key projects.”</p>
<p>Yet these are the very ‘key projects’ – renewable energy – that Molefe was sabotaging at that time, suggesting his NDB pronouncements simply cannot be taken seriously. The NDB website itself <a href="http://ndb.int/about-us.php" type="external">observes</a> “a need for Multilateral Development Banks to reinvent themselves” on the one hand, but on the other, its president KV Kamath last September <a href="" type="internal">signed</a> a deal with the World Bank for “co-financing of projects; facilitating knowledge exchange… and facilitating secondments and staff exchanges.”</p>
<p>NDB personnel</p>
<p>In contrast to Molefe, two other NDB executives from SA receive regular <a href="http://www.ujuh.co.za/profiles-of-south-africas-candidates-for-brics-bank-mboweni-maasdorp/" type="external">praise</a>. Ironically, Pretoria’s Non-Executive Director is former Reserve Bank Governor (1999-2009) Tito Mboweni, who had <a href="" type="internal">slammed</a> the NDB as “very costly” in 2013. Upon accepting the NDB directorship two years later (as the only one of the five not employed by a BRICS state), he promptly <a href="" type="internal">declared</a> that nuclear energy financing “falls squarely within the mandate of the NDB.”</p>
<p>Mboweni is International Advisor to Goldman Sachs. That should have been an embarrassment in January 2016 when <a href="" type="internal">according</a> to financial journalists, the bank “identified shorting the rand as one of its top trades for this year due to falling commodity prices and SA’s current account deficit.” At that point the SA currency was rapidly pushed down to its historic low of R18/$. (It since recovered to R12/$ after the speculative wave ebbed, but recent Treasury turmoil just drove it below R13/$.)</p>
<p>SA’s NDB Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Leslie Maasdorp, also <a href="" type="internal">worked</a> at Goldman Sachs (and Barclays and Bank of America), led Pretoria’s failed privatisation strategy and was an unsuccessful, <a href="" type="internal">short-lived</a> chief executive of privatised education firm AdvTech.</p>
<p>One other NDB job remains open: the <a href="" type="internal">much-advertised</a> head of the NDB Africa Regional Centre in Johannesburg. In December 2015, Zuma announced that his 2014-15 finance minister, Nhlanhla Nene, would urgently take that job. It appeared to be a fig-leaf appointment, so as to replace the fiscally-conservative Nene with a man – Desmond van Rooyen – considered close to the Guptas.</p>
<p>This caused such an uproar that not only did three top white bankers communicate to Zuma that he must reverse course, but also a “critical intervention” ( <a href="" type="internal">according</a> to the country’s leading business writer, Peter Bruce) was made by Beijing’s owners of the Johannesburg-based Standard Bank, leading to van Rooyen’s firing within four days, and Gordhan’s appointment.</p>
<p>Zuma, acting as clumsily as usual, never had a guarantee of Nene’s job from the NDB officials, who subsequently stalled the Africa Regional Centre’s launch. It was originally scheduled for March 2016. Then last September, the BRICS Business Council website <a href="http://bricsbusinesscouncil.co.za/africa-welcomes-ndb-regional-centre/" type="external">declared</a> that the new Centre’s Johannesburg headquarters would be ready by November. (The Africa Regional Centre is still to be launched, now more than a year late.)</p>
<p>The location was ‘well received’ in the rest of Africa, according to the Business Council, because the NDB will lend to other countries, not just the BRICS. Leading Ugandan official Louis Kasekende <a href="http://bricsbusinesscouncil.co.za/africa-welcomes-ndb-regional-centre/" type="external">argued</a> that Africa should “have access to credit as quickly as possible at low rates,” especially to “reduce the timeframe of projects finalisation and approval process.”</p>
<p>Inappropriate finance for Africa</p>
<p>Reducing the timeframe would logically mean reducing attention to environmental and social dimensions (the critique of development banks and the NDB most often <a href="" type="internal">made</a> by civil society). But the larger problem is the exceptionally high debt burden African countries now shoulder, following the world crash of commodity prices from 2011-15. The NDB would offer Africa only hard-currency loans that are extremely expensive when currencies crash.</p>
<p>As the Financial Times recently <a href="" type="internal">reported</a>, “One factor Africa’s indebted countries have in common is sharp devaluations of their currencies against the US dollar. Since mid-2014, the Mozambique metical is down 56 per cent against the dollar, the Angolan kwanza 41 per cent and the Ghanaian cedi 36 per cent, for example.” In 2011, 6.3 South African rand bought a US dollar; today it costs twice as much.</p>
<p>After multilateral lenders’ and G7 debt relief in 2006, the foreign debt of SubSaharan Africa was <a href="" type="internal">cut</a> by $100 billion, to $200 billion. But thanks mainly to Chinese state loans (associated with the extractive industries), it is now up again above $400 billion, with countries like Angola, Chad and Ghana <a href="" type="internal">paying</a> more than 30% of their governments’ revenues on debt servicing.</p>
<p>South Africa’s own payment obligations to the BRICS NDB will become onerous as well. To capitalise the NDB, $680 million was <a href="" type="internal">allocated</a> by Nene in 2015-16, rising steadily to $3.2 billion this year and $6.2 billion by 2020. The NDB’s capital base, which is notionally $100 billion, is shared equally by all five (unlike the $100 billion Contingent Reserve Arrangement which treats South Africa the way the IMF does, with a much smaller share of the quota: $10 billion). Other multilateral financiers <a href="" type="internal">cost</a> South Africa $19.2 billion in ‘provisions’ made in the current budget (i.e. to be paid when called for by the financier); indeed only the IMF capital subscription will be more costly ($6.4 billion this year, rising to $7.2 billion in 2020) than the NDB.</p>
<p>Paying these substantial subscriptions is onerous, given that they contribute to enforcing the neo-liberal ideology that continues oppressing the continent’s people. But moreover, South Africa also faces a terrifying rise in its own foreign debt, which according to the March 2017 SA Reserve Bank Quarterly Bulletin <a href="" type="internal">had risen</a> to $143 billion in September 2016, a $10.6 billion rise over the prior three months. At 50% of GDP, this is the highest debt burden in the country’s modern history; the only prior default was in 1985 when the ratio was 40%.</p>
<p>The main reason for soaring foreign debt is that multinational corporations are taking SA-sourced profits and dividends to London and other offshore financial headquarters, causing a persistent current account deficit. Indeed, as Chinese lenders, Indian steelmakers, other BRICS mining houses and the Gupta family externalise their own funding flows, the tragic irony of the NDB emerges.</p>
<p>In short, the unnecessary NDB loans to Eskom contribute to more BRIC power over the one African country, South Africa, that once had the potential to stand up and fight for justice. But perhaps just like Molefe in the Gupta’s lush Johannesburg suburb, that liberatory rhetoric might just have been Saxonwold shebeen talk.</p>
<p>Meanwhile in Delhi, the NDB annual meeting will be preceded by a day-long critique by the <a href="" type="internal">BRICS People’s Forum</a> at the Indian Social Institute on March 30. It’s appropriate to conclude with their similar misgivings:</p>
<p>“the Bank is shrouded under a veil of secrecy. The website of the Bank lacks information about its activities to the extent that more than official records, one has to rely on secondary and tertiary sources of information… the NDB is yet to draft any such [socio-economic and environmental] operational guidelines and redressal… communities may face threats of displacement, evictions, ecological destruction, loss of livelihoods, and severe curtailment of basic rights to life. These issues have recurred for decades due to projects funded by other multilateral development banks. Moreover, as a co-financier with other development institutions, the intensity of NDB’s seriousness on the objectives of promoting transparency, accountability and probity stands questioned.”</p>
<p>Patrick Bond is professor of political economy at the Wits University School of Governance in Johannesburg and co-editor of <a href="https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/756-brics" type="external">BRICS: An anti-capitalist critique</a> (published by Haymarket, Pluto, Jacana and Aakar).</p> | true | 4 | brazilrussiaindiachinasouth africa brics bloc ever really challenge world financial order often advertised new development bank ndb leaders meet delhi weekend restate vision financial alternatives world bank international monetary fund imf indeed ndb began environmentallyoriented loans last year 2017 aims add 3 billion new credits south africas standpoint chaos reigns finance minister pravin gordhan one 20 ministers deputy ministers fired shifted president jacob zuma midnight thursday new labour federation headed zwelinzima vavi irvin jim plus save south africa movement combining progressives liberals called occupytreasury protest pretoria given prospects argue fullfledged looting state resources zumas patronageoriented allies gordhan one ndbs five governors replaced malusi gigaba former african national congress anc youth league leader since 2010 served cabinet level overseeing public enterprises home affairs replete controversies excessive visa controlfreakery whiteelephant infrastructure surprisingly observers sa communist partys leaders including blade nzimande higher education minister jeremy cronin deputy public works minister halfdozen others touched cabinet reshuffling threatened gordhan fired would quit en masse weekends houseofcardsstyle maneuvers unprecedented intensity financiers reacted driving currency 5 lower first hours friday renewed threats international junk rating imposed countrys bonds parliamentary opposition parties thursday launched 8th attempt impeachment 50 anc members parliament agree vote comes early may could end zumas political career prospect takes account regularly left opposition party launched court challenge none likely sway zuma wants last two years president unencumbered austerityoriented treasury chaos limited south africas conflict finance minister job hence brics ndb representation also entails unwillingness local ndb borrower far electricity parastatal eskom support renewable energy apparent state manipulation indian family guptas russian nuclear vendor perhaps importantly countrys continents capitalisation debt repayment capacities greenwashing finance multilateral deform green loans original ndb designers two former world bank chief economists joe stiglitz nick stern although public endorsements ndb stressed sustainable development climate change private stern offered different rationale 2013 conference elite british academy chairs development bank part major business deal makes difficult governments unreliable stern asked press way ok bits record started move idea bricsled development bank two reasons coupled idea rich countries would let balance sheets world bank regional development banks expand much would allow share banks diluted true brics gained substantial imf voting power increases 2015 restructuring eg china 37 india 23 brazil 11 russia 8 negligible united states european dilution instead rising brics shares result nigeria venezuela losing 41 vote along libya 39 morocco 27 gabon 26 algeria 26 namibia 26 cameroon 23 mauritius 21 even south africa lost 21 four bric countries stood african latin american heads get better executive director seats imf table got brics directors approved reappointment christine lagarde 2016 convicted 430 million corruption charge last december imf directors unanimously endorsed continued employment ndbs first loans boost environmentallyoriented projects 300 million went brazil 81 million china 250 million india 180 million sa latter connect renewable independent power producer generators main grid processes accomplished mostly localcurrency inputs hence us loans inappropriate like multilaterals ndb repayments us dollars adversely affect borrowers balance payments although ndb started fundraising yuan rupee markets may eventually change worse eskoms two recent leaders brian molefe matshela koko simultaneously announced wanted nothing renewable energy massive battle renewables resolved month ago gordhans budget statement recommitted ipp contracts koko may well step last weeks conflictofinterest revelations involving scandalous 100 million tender suspiciously stepdaughters company gordhan also refused eskom nuclear energy financing beyond initial 15 million tiny downpayment inprinciple reactor purchase agreement zuma made moscowbased rosatom anticipated cost 50100 billion main supplier raw inputs nukes oakbay uranium coal company owned notorious gupta brothers gupta gyrations weeks guptaversusgordhan turmoil extremely important brics former finance minister ndb governor guptas spent week court fighting gordhan failure reverse main sa commercial banks boycott oakbay guptaowned firms boycott widely understood reason gordhan recalled ukus investment trip tuesday morning fired also oftrumoured ascension molefe cabinet post postponed unless communist party members rob davies ebrahim patel leave zumas government protest molefe sas brics business council leader recently one five forced resign eskom chief executive result public protectors state capture report revealing manipulation eskom guptas including phone records gps tracker implying guptas lush johannesburg neighbourhood hosts shebeen pub could explain regular presence saxonwold molefes credibility permanently destroyed nevertheless january molefe appointed parliament amidst fresh controversies gupta meddling predictions molefes appointment cabinet eskom resignation molefe made articulate appeal replacement current casino financial system law jungle project expressly promotes common good among nations brics allies taking bold corrective measures building world system based real value create system capable fundamentally shaping socioeconomic growth development significant steps taken particular launch ndb already started funding key projects yet key projects renewable energy molefe sabotaging time suggesting ndb pronouncements simply taken seriously ndb website observes need multilateral development banks reinvent one hand president kv kamath last september signed deal world bank cofinancing projects facilitating knowledge exchange facilitating secondments staff exchanges ndb personnel contrast molefe two ndb executives sa receive regular praise ironically pretorias nonexecutive director former reserve bank governor 19992009 tito mboweni slammed ndb costly 2013 upon accepting ndb directorship two years later one five employed brics state promptly declared nuclear energy financing falls squarely within mandate ndb mboweni international advisor goldman sachs embarrassment january 2016 according financial journalists bank identified shorting rand one top trades year due falling commodity prices sas current account deficit point sa currency rapidly pushed historic low r18 since recovered r12 speculative wave ebbed recent treasury turmoil drove r13 sas ndb vice president chief financial officer leslie maasdorp also worked goldman sachs barclays bank america led pretorias failed privatisation strategy unsuccessful shortlived chief executive privatised education firm advtech one ndb job remains open muchadvertised head ndb africa regional centre johannesburg december 2015 zuma announced 201415 finance minister nhlanhla nene would urgently take job appeared figleaf appointment replace fiscallyconservative nene man desmond van rooyen considered close guptas caused uproar three top white bankers communicate zuma must reverse course also critical intervention according countrys leading business writer peter bruce made beijings owners johannesburgbased standard bank leading van rooyens firing within four days gordhans appointment zuma acting clumsily usual never guarantee nenes job ndb officials subsequently stalled africa regional centres launch originally scheduled march 2016 last september brics business council website declared new centres johannesburg headquarters would ready november africa regional centre still launched year late location well received rest africa according business council ndb lend countries brics leading ugandan official louis kasekende argued africa access credit quickly possible low rates especially reduce timeframe projects finalisation approval process inappropriate finance africa reducing timeframe would logically mean reducing attention environmental social dimensions critique development banks ndb often made civil society larger problem exceptionally high debt burden african countries shoulder following world crash commodity prices 201115 ndb would offer africa hardcurrency loans extremely expensive currencies crash financial times recently reported one factor africas indebted countries common sharp devaluations currencies us dollar since mid2014 mozambique metical 56 per cent dollar angolan kwanza 41 per cent ghanaian cedi 36 per cent example 2011 63 south african rand bought us dollar today costs twice much multilateral lenders g7 debt relief 2006 foreign debt subsaharan africa cut 100 billion 200 billion thanks mainly chinese state loans associated extractive industries 400 billion countries like angola chad ghana paying 30 governments revenues debt servicing south africas payment obligations brics ndb become onerous well capitalise ndb 680 million allocated nene 201516 rising steadily 32 billion year 62 billion 2020 ndbs capital base notionally 100 billion shared equally five unlike 100 billion contingent reserve arrangement treats south africa way imf much smaller share quota 10 billion multilateral financiers cost south africa 192 billion provisions made current budget ie paid called financier indeed imf capital subscription costly 64 billion year rising 72 billion 2020 ndb paying substantial subscriptions onerous given contribute enforcing neoliberal ideology continues oppressing continents people moreover south africa also faces terrifying rise foreign debt according march 2017 sa reserve bank quarterly bulletin risen 143 billion september 2016 106 billion rise prior three months 50 gdp highest debt burden countrys modern history prior default 1985 ratio 40 main reason soaring foreign debt multinational corporations taking sasourced profits dividends london offshore financial headquarters causing persistent current account deficit indeed chinese lenders indian steelmakers brics mining houses gupta family externalise funding flows tragic irony ndb emerges short unnecessary ndb loans eskom contribute bric power one african country south africa potential stand fight justice perhaps like molefe guptas lush johannesburg suburb liberatory rhetoric might saxonwold shebeen talk meanwhile delhi ndb annual meeting preceded daylong critique brics peoples forum indian social institute march 30 appropriate conclude similar misgivings bank shrouded veil secrecy website bank lacks information activities extent official records one rely secondary tertiary sources information ndb yet draft socioeconomic environmental operational guidelines redressal communities may face threats displacement evictions ecological destruction loss livelihoods severe curtailment basic rights life issues recurred decades due projects funded multilateral development banks moreover cofinancier development institutions intensity ndbs seriousness objectives promoting transparency accountability probity stands questioned patrick bond professor political economy wits university school governance johannesburg coeditor brics anticapitalist critique published haymarket pluto jacana aakar | 1,492 |
<p>Jared A. Ball is a father and husband. After that he is a multimedia host, producer, journalist and educator. Ball is also a founder of "mixtape radio" and "mixtape journalism" about which he wrote I MiX What I Like: A MiXtape Manifesto (AK Press, 2011) and is co-editor of A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable's Malcolm X (Black Classic Press, 2012). Ball is an associate professor of communication studies at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland and can be found online at <a href="http://imixwhatilike.org/" type="external">IMIXWHATILIKE.ORG</a>.</p>
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<p /> JARED BALL, ASST. PROF., MORGAN STATE UNIVERSITY: And welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Jared Ball. And welcome to our new segment, The Real News on Race. You know, despite there being a black president and plenty of black famous faces from people to choose from, there remains a great degree of inequality along the lines of race in this country and around the world. For instance, within the broader economic crisis there remains a persistent gap in income levels between black and white Americans that sees black people earning only about $0.62 on the white dollar. Single working-age women of color have a median net worth of only $5 compared to $42,000 for their white female counterparts. And even before this most recent economic crisis, the Economic Policy Institute concluded that for black America the recession is permanent. There is also the burgeoning prison-industrial complex, which is now one of America's biggest businesses. And because black America is only 13 percent of the population but more than half of the prison population, where 80 percent are there for nonviolent drug-related offenses, scholars like Lawrence Bobo refer to this as creating new internal colonies. And Michelle Alexander has called this the new Jim Crow. Theologian James Cone has also called this a modern-day lynching and has equated the prison-industrial complex and the continuance of ghettos and projects as terrorism. This and more has led people like legal scholar Derek Bell to conclude that the public policy impact of this nation on black America is tantamount to having hundreds of black people weekly taken randomly to secluded places and shot. And in this city, Washington, DC, we see similar inequality, where 49 percent of black adults are unemployed, while nationally, black America is suffering the greatest long-term unemployment rate it has seen since 1948. So what we want to do is actually talk with people who are doing something about these kinds of issues. And joining us to talk about these and other related issues are Linda Leaks and Parisa Norouzi of Empower DC, a locally based Washington, DC, nonprofit grassroots organization committed to challenging and confronting these and many related issues. Linda, [Parisa] Norouzi, welcome. Thank you for joining us. Why don't we start off? Tell us a little bit about Empower DC, its history, and how long you've been around, and particularly what you deal with.
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<p />PARISA NOROUZI, EMPOWER DC: Empower DC was founded by Linda and I in 2003. And we saw the need for an organization that was solely focused on developing the confident self-advocacy of low- and moderate-income DC residents who are directly impacted by the housing crisis and other social issues. So we--as a principle, we work with groups of people who share a common concern and we assist groups of residents with developing an action plan and carrying it out to demand that their voices be heard, that they have influence on the policies and decisions that are directly impacting their lives. And we are citywide, we're membership-based, and we have hundreds of members throughout the district who are working on affordable housing, quality affordable child care, improving public education, and saving public property.
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<p />BALL: You know, the president spoke this past week. We've been hearing a lot lately about these austerity measures and the freezing of government spending on nonmilitary issues. President Obama said this again during the State of the Union just this past week. Linda, tell us a little bit about how this impacts specifically the work you all are doing around public housing and housing in general in the city.
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<p />LINDA LEAKS, EMPOWER DC: [inaudible] Well, we are looking at some serious issues around housing. We are looking at losing the little, quote-unquote, "affordable" housing, subsidized, federally subsidized housing that we have in this country, as of March 4, when the continuing resolution expired. But what is happening with these historic cuts, we're looking to lose, like, 750,000, almost half of the Section 8 housing subsidy and the public housing subsidy. And in DC it's going to be a major, major kind of devastation, because we are looking at losing about 5,000 Section 8 vouchers, tenant-based voucher. We only have 11,000. And so we're looking to lose that. And people don't have anyplace to go. We're looking--the public housing budget, which has already been cut almost in half over the last eight years--people say eight. I say 16, 'cause I count the Clinton years. They were not good to low-income people. But the Bush administration in particular had already almost decimated the budget for affordable housing. So when we have Mr. [John] Boehner and the Republican come in and say they're going to cut the discretionary budget by 21 percent--and that's what they said January 5 when he received a gavel and they took charge--we're talking about almost eliminating the HUD [Department of Housing and Urban Development] budget which subsidized low-income housing. And that's going to be really, really a serious problem for families in this country, in this city, for elderly and people who are disabled. We are looking at some serious, serious housing issues. That's not even to consider talking about getting rid of the Pell Grant and talking about getting rid of other funding that help support people. This is just the housing budget. And so we're looking to some really historic hard times we're facing.
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<p />BALL: Now, DC is not unlike other major cities, in that there is a pretty serious racial divide in the city in terms of where people live and how different communities are treated in this city. We have what is called in this city the "east of the river" divide, which is sort of meant to simplify that point. Gentrification is a major problem, people moving in, other people being forced out. DC is now down to 52 percent black population, once--which was once chocolate city. What are the numbers specifically? Can we go further into those numbers in terms of people being moved out and the impact that these austerity measures will have that you started to touch on just a moment ago?
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<p />LEAKS: Well, I can't tell you the numbers in terms of how many African people, how many people of color are going to be hurt. We know it's the majority. And when we talk about gentrification, it's racial-based, in that gentrification is about disinvestment, period, disinvestment and bringing in--when you bring in a new group of people into a area, then the money flow, the loans from banks flow in. So you bring in a new population and the money flow behind them. But before that, you know, 'cause we like to talk about how gentrification, the goodness of gentrification--which for me is a myth, because nobody like to live in bad conditions, but our folks were not able to get loans from the banks. You know, you had [inaudible] there's no [inaudible] So African people were not able to get loans, people of African descent in this city and other people of color. So, yes, of course our community become blighted. And disinvestment by the government [inaudible] you don't come in and fix the roads. You don't do anything. So, yes, the neighborhood become blighted. And then that sets it up. That's what [inaudible] it sets it up to bring in a new population of people. So that's what has happened in the District of Columbia. And we see this process moving to east of the river, as we call it, to other--Ward 7 and Ward 8, where most of the African-American people live, across a river, we see this effort moving. And we look at this Ward 1 area in particular that has been, quote-unquote, "gentrified", where our people have been forced out, where we look at that and we see this whole nimbyism, which is a serious problem in this city. It's a serious problem in other places, but it is really serious here. We have--with the little resources that some of the nonprofits have to develop housing for people who have to live on the street, we have folks who just moved in who have housing and have secure jobs right this minute are saying no, you cannot put those low-income people in my neighborhood. What kind of sense does that make? And that's what we have here in the District of Columbia.
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<p />BALL: Now, in just a few quick minutes here, we have, again, a black president, and this city has had black mayors for as long as I can remember. We just have a reelection--or a new election, where Mayor Fenty, Adrian Fenty, was replaced by Vincent Gray, another longtime black DC resident. How has that, if at all, impacted--'cause we hear the austerity measures coming down from the presidency, we hear Vincent Gray saying the same thing, more or less, in terms of what is going to be cut in terms of DC's budget. To what extent is this, you know, impacting the response to all of this, the race of the president, the race of the mayors? Like, how does that play out in the work that you do?
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<p />LEAKS: Well, as far as I see it, it's about power, who has the power. We see--if we look at the so-called black mayors, the African-American mayors, they pander to people with money. That's who they move after. When our new mayor comes in and talk about, what, one city, well, we need to say one city, everybody helping each other, because we are looking at people around housing, in particular with the local budget, looking at losing our little system with emergency housing, losing housing with this $600 million cut that we're looking at. But we're not looking at how we can raise the taxes on the $200,000 and above. So we're not saying one city, everybody helping everybody; we're just saying one city. And we saw our new mayor run to those people who voted against him and voted for the other mayor and say, oh, listen, you all--. That's probably what he said. I would have said, listen y'all, but he said, listen, you all, we need to--you know, we need to come together, and this is one city. No, not one--one city, everybody helping everybody. Let's share the problems that we are having.
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<p />BALL: So there's a lot more to get to. In another segment, let's talk about child care, public schools, and other related issues that you all are dealing with. And thank you for joining us. This has been Jared Ball with The Real News Network, our first segment on The Real News on Race. Please stay tuned and find one of those donate buttons somewhere on the screen here and contribute to this discussion, which we know is lacking in most other places in your media environment. Thank you very much.
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<p />End of Transcript
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<p />DISCLAIMER: Please note that transcripts for The Real News Network are typed from a recording of the program. TRNN cannot guarantee their complete accuracy. | true | 4 | jared ball father husband multimedia host producer journalist educator ball also founder mixtape radio mixtape journalism wrote mix like mixtape manifesto ak press 2011 coeditor lie reinvention correcting manning marables malcolm x black classic press 2012 ball associate professor communication studies morgan state university baltimore maryland found online imixwhatilikeorg jared ball asst prof morgan state university welcome real news network im jared ball welcome new segment real news race know despite black president plenty black famous faces people choose remains great degree inequality along lines race country around world instance within broader economic crisis remains persistent gap income levels black white americans sees black people earning 062 white dollar single workingage women color median net worth 5 compared 42000 white female counterparts even recent economic crisis economic policy institute concluded black america recession permanent also burgeoning prisonindustrial complex one americas biggest businesses black america 13 percent population half prison population 80 percent nonviolent drugrelated offenses scholars like lawrence bobo refer creating new internal colonies michelle alexander called new jim crow theologian james cone also called modernday lynching equated prisonindustrial complex continuance ghettos projects terrorism led people like legal scholar derek bell conclude public policy impact nation black america tantamount hundreds black people weekly taken randomly secluded places shot city washington dc see similar inequality 49 percent black adults unemployed nationally black america suffering greatest longterm unemployment rate seen since 1948 want actually talk people something kinds issues joining us talk related issues linda leaks parisa norouzi empower dc locally based washington dc nonprofit grassroots organization committed challenging confronting many related issues linda parisa norouzi welcome thank joining us dont start tell us little bit empower dc history long youve around particularly deal parisa norouzi empower dc empower dc founded linda 2003 saw need organization solely focused developing confident selfadvocacy low moderateincome dc residents directly impacted housing crisis social issues weas principle work groups people share common concern assist groups residents developing action plan carrying demand voices heard influence policies decisions directly impacting lives citywide membershipbased hundreds members throughout district working affordable housing quality affordable child care improving public education saving public property ball know president spoke past week weve hearing lot lately austerity measures freezing government spending nonmilitary issues president obama said state union past week linda tell us little bit impacts specifically work around public housing housing general city linda leaks empower dc inaudible well looking serious issues around housing looking losing little quoteunquote affordable housing subsidized federally subsidized housing country march 4 continuing resolution expired happening historic cuts looking lose like 750000 almost half section 8 housing subsidy public housing subsidy dc going major major kind devastation looking losing 5000 section 8 vouchers tenantbased voucher 11000 looking lose people dont anyplace go lookingthe public housing budget already cut almost half last eight yearspeople say eight say 16 cause count clinton years good lowincome people bush administration particular already almost decimated budget affordable housing mr john boehner republican come say theyre going cut discretionary budget 21 percentand thats said january 5 received gavel took chargewere talking almost eliminating hud department housing urban development budget subsidized lowincome housing thats going really really serious problem families country city elderly people disabled looking serious serious housing issues thats even consider talking getting rid pell grant talking getting rid funding help support people housing budget looking really historic hard times facing ball dc unlike major cities pretty serious racial divide city terms people live different communities treated city called city east river divide sort meant simplify point gentrification major problem people moving people forced dc 52 percent black population oncewhich chocolate city numbers specifically go numbers terms people moved impact austerity measures started touch moment ago leaks well cant tell numbers terms many african people many people color going hurt know majority talk gentrification racialbased gentrification disinvestment period disinvestment bringing inwhen bring new group people area money flow loans banks flow bring new population money flow behind know cause like talk gentrification goodness gentrificationwhich myth nobody like live bad conditions folks able get loans banks know inaudible theres inaudible african people able get loans people african descent city people color yes course community become blighted disinvestment government inaudible dont come fix roads dont anything yes neighborhood become blighted sets thats inaudible sets bring new population people thats happened district columbia see process moving east river call otherward 7 ward 8 africanamerican people live across river see effort moving look ward 1 area particular quoteunquote gentrified people forced look see whole nimbyism serious problem city serious problem places really serious havewith little resources nonprofits develop housing people live street folks moved housing secure jobs right minute saying put lowincome people neighborhood kind sense make thats district columbia ball quick minutes black president city black mayors long remember reelectionor new election mayor fenty adrian fenty replaced vincent gray another longtime black dc resident impactedcause hear austerity measures coming presidency hear vincent gray saying thing less terms going cut terms dcs budget extent know impacting response race president race mayors like play work leaks well far see power power seeif look socalled black mayors africanamerican mayors pander people money thats move new mayor comes talk one city well need say one city everybody helping looking people around housing particular local budget looking losing little system emergency housing losing housing 600 million cut looking looking raise taxes 200000 saying one city everybody helping everybody saying one city saw new mayor run people voted voted mayor say oh listen thats probably said would said listen yall said listen need toyou know need come together one city oneone city everybody helping everybody lets share problems ball theres lot get another segment lets talk child care public schools related issues dealing thank joining us jared ball real news network first segment real news race please stay tuned find one donate buttons somewhere screen contribute discussion know lacking places media environment thank much end transcript disclaimer please note transcripts real news network typed recording program trnn guarantee complete accuracy | 998 |
<p>Photo Credit: YouTube</p>
<p>A white nationalist group that was involved in a violent brawl with anti-racist protesters this weekend in Sacramento has announced its plans to be at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland on&#160;July 18-21&#160;to protect Donald Trump supporters. A spokesman for the Traditionalist Worker Party (TWP), which organized Sunday’s march where at least five people were stabbed, told <a href="//www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article86317537.html" type="external">McClatchy</a> that roughly 30 members of the group would be in attendance at the GOP event. “We’re essentially just going to show up and make sure that the Donald Trump supporters are defended from the leftist thugs,” he said.</p>
<p>This has become a bit of a party line for TWP. The group, which was joined by the Golden State Skinheads (GSS) in planning Sunday’s rally, <a href="//www.newyorker.com/news/benjamin-wallace-wells/how-real-is-the-new-far-right" type="external">said on its</a> website ahead of the demonstration that it would serve “to make a statement about the precarious situation our race is in,” as evidenced by protesters'&#160;previous “brutal assaults” against Donald Trump supporters.</p>
<p>The Southern Poverty Law Center <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2016/06/27/violent-clashes-erupt-sacramento-between-white-nationalists-and-antifascists" type="external">notes</a> that TWP head Matthew Heimbach—who previously made a mainstream name for himself after he was captured <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/this-white-nationalist-who-shoved-a-trump-protester-may-be-the-next-david-duke/2016/04/12/7e71f750-f2cf-11e5-89c3-a647fcce95e0_story.html" type="external">on video</a> physically assaulting a young black woman at a Trump rally—tweeted before the event, “We won’t bow down to leftist scum.”</p>
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<p>The conflict at Sunday’s event reportedly occurred instantaneously, with the estimated 30 TWP and GSS in attendance being met by 400 counter-protesters. (“I don’t think there was any verbal exchange, just full-on fight,” the press officer for the California Highway Patrol told the <a href="//www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-neo-nazi-event-stabbings-capitol-20160627-snap-story.html" type="external">Los Angeles Times</a>.) Although followup reports have stated the injured represent both sides in attendance, Heimbach has boasted that the majority of those wounded were anti-racism protesters. “They got 1 of ours, but we got 6 of them,” Heimbach tweeted after the clash, according to the SPLC. “[Six anti-fascists] on the way to the hospital.”</p>
<p>TWP, which on its website states that “European-American identity is under constant attack by members of American institutions such as the state, education, culture and even churches,” is just one of several <a href="//elections.ap.org/content/anti-trump-groups-among-those-receiving-rnc-protest-permits" type="external">pro</a>- and anti-Trump groups gearing up for the convention. Other Trump-supporting factions include “Bikers for Trump...Tea Party-affiliated organizations, a new group called Stop The Steal led by Trump ally Roger Stone, Citizens for Trump, and Truckers for Trump,” according to <a href="//www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-trump-convention-idUSKCN0XQ1YJ" type="external">the AP</a>.</p>
<p>Conventions always have a healthy turnout of demonstrators, but the rancorous tone of Trump’s campaign and the violence that has become a staple of his rallies have made this year’s RNC of particular concern to authorities. In anticipation of potential skirmishes between opposing groups, the city of Cleveland&#160;planned to have a nearly four-square-mile “event zone” with high-level security and bans on protests, but a judge just ruled against those measures, citing <a href="//www.clevescene.com/scene-and-heard/archives/2016/06/23/federal-judge-overturns-citys-rnc-security-measures" type="external">free speech violations</a>. City officials say they will have 200 beds ready for “fresh arrests” during the convention, <a href="//talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/cleveland-reserving-200-beds-jail-republican-national-convention" type="external">according to</a> Talking Points Memo.</p>
<p>TWP’s self-appointment as the guardian of Trump’s masses is only vaguely surprising, considering the candidate has become a favorite among white nationalists and various other racists who form the base of his coalition. In Trump, America’s white power types see a candidate who speaks directly to their bigotry; a presidential nominee who goes beyond dog-whistles and subtle codes to shout their racism out loud.</p>
<p>The Trump camaign selected a white nationalist as a delegate, then asked him to step down once <a href="//www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/05/trump-white-nationalist-california-delegate-response-email-pledge-database-error" type="external">Mother Jones</a> ran a story that inspired outrage.&#160; <a href="https://news.vice.com/video/the-movement-thats-fueling-donald-trumps-white-nationalist-supporters" type="external">Vice</a> magazine recently covered the annual American Renaissance conference, held by the white supremacist magazine of the same name, where the suit-and-tie braintrust of the white nationalist crowd gathered to discuss how Trump has energized racists, embolding them to be loud and proud with their hatred. Attendance at this year’s conference was up 50 percent over 2015, thanks in no small measure to the GOP’s current bright, shining star.</p>
<p>“Donald Trump has not thought through questions of race in any depth at all, as far as I can tell,” Jared Taylor, founder of American Renaissance, told Vice. ”He just has instincts. His instincts, I’m guessing, are opposed to having to press one for English when he turns on the telephone. His instincts are against walking into a 7-11 and being surrounded by people that he can’t understand. His instincts are against walking down a street in New York City and finding more people from Asia or Africa or the Middle East than people of European origin.”</p>
<p>“I think Donald Trump is an expression of this general angst amongst white people,” says Richard Spencer, head of the National Policy Institute—an “independent organization dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent”—in the video. “It’s a kind of implicit identity politics.”&#160;</p>
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<p>From here, it’s hard to know how disruptive a presence TWP, or any of the other white nationalists and racists supporting Trump, will be to the RNC. But they are, by virtue of their very presence, attempting to play up the idea of white people in America as victims of an increasingly multicultural society that has denied them every right to which they are entitled—emphasis on "entitled"—including free speech.</p>
<p>Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State University, tells <a href="https://news.vice.com/video/the-movement-thats-fueling-donald-trumps-white-nationalist-supporters" type="external">Raw Story</a> that violence against white supremacists allows them to keep up the falsified narrative of a class "under siege.” While he acknowledged that “some of the anti-fascists” in Sacramento wanted to have a violent face-off with the white nationalists, being under attack is good for the white power crowd’s image.</p>
<p>"Make no mistake,” says Levin “I think the hatemongers wanted to have this violence take place.”</p>
<p>Kali&#160;Holloway is a senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet.</p> | true | 4 | photo credit youtube white nationalist group involved violent brawl antiracist protesters weekend sacramento announced plans republican national convention cleveland on160july 1821160to protect donald trump supporters spokesman traditionalist worker party twp organized sundays march least five people stabbed told mcclatchy roughly 30 members group would attendance gop event essentially going show make sure donald trump supporters defended leftist thugs said become bit party line twp group joined golden state skinheads gss planning sundays rally said website ahead demonstration would serve make statement precarious situation race evidenced protesters160previous brutal assaults donald trump supporters southern poverty law center notes twp head matthew heimbachwho previously made mainstream name captured video physically assaulting young black woman trump rallytweeted event wont bow leftist scum conflict sundays event reportedly occurred instantaneously estimated 30 twp gss attendance met 400 counterprotesters dont think verbal exchange fullon fight press officer california highway patrol told los angeles times although followup reports stated injured represent sides attendance heimbach boasted majority wounded antiracism protesters got 1 got 6 heimbach tweeted clash according splc six antifascists way hospital twp website states europeanamerican identity constant attack members american institutions state education culture even churches one several pro antitrump groups gearing convention trumpsupporting factions include bikers trumptea partyaffiliated organizations new group called stop steal led trump ally roger stone citizens trump truckers trump according ap conventions always healthy turnout demonstrators rancorous tone trumps campaign violence become staple rallies made years rnc particular concern authorities anticipation potential skirmishes opposing groups city cleveland160planned nearly foursquaremile event zone highlevel security bans protests judge ruled measures citing free speech violations city officials say 200 beds ready fresh arrests convention according talking points memo twps selfappointment guardian trumps masses vaguely surprising considering candidate become favorite among white nationalists various racists form base coalition trump americas white power types see candidate speaks directly bigotry presidential nominee goes beyond dogwhistles subtle codes shout racism loud trump camaign selected white nationalist delegate asked step mother jones ran story inspired outrage160 vice magazine recently covered annual american renaissance conference held white supremacist magazine name suitandtie braintrust white nationalist crowd gathered discuss trump energized racists embolding loud proud hatred attendance years conference 50 percent 2015 thanks small measure gops current bright shining star donald trump thought questions race depth far tell jared taylor founder american renaissance told vice instincts instincts im guessing opposed press one english turns telephone instincts walking 711 surrounded people cant understand instincts walking street new york city finding people asia africa middle east people european origin think donald trump expression general angst amongst white people says richard spencer head national policy institutean independent organization dedicated heritage identity future people european descentin video kind implicit identity politics160 hard know disruptive presence twp white nationalists racists supporting trump rnc virtue presence attempting play idea white people america victims increasingly multicultural society denied every right entitledemphasis entitledincluding free speech brian levin director center study hate extremism cal state university tells raw story violence white supremacists allows keep falsified narrative class siege acknowledged antifascists sacramento wanted violent faceoff white nationalists attack good white power crowds image make mistake says levin think hatemongers wanted violence take place kali160holloway senior writer associate editor media culture alternet | 528 |
<p>James Harris and Josh Scheer</p>
<p>Former Assistant Secretary of Defense Philip Coyle knows a thing or two about the “staggering” amounts of money the U.S. funnels into the military-industrial complex, and why it is so difficult to stanch the profiteering.</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Click here</a> to listen to this and other Truthdig interviews.</p>
<p>James Harris:</p>
<p />
<p>This is Truthdig. James Harris here again with Josh Scheer. Today we are talking to Philip Coyle, he’s the former assistant secretary of defense, and currently is a senior adviser at the Center for Defense Information. Recently an article was published announcing that UC Berkeley had won a contract to develop defense, a contract worth some $1.6 billion each year. In doing the research for this interview, I found that there was no cap to the trillions of dollars spent on defense. Seeing these astronomic figures, I cannot help but think about the forgotten social programs, the failing education structure. Can you tell me, what do we spend this money on? Where does it go? And are we spending too much?</p>
<p>Philip Coyle: The amount of money that the United States spends on defense is really quite staggering. Over $750 billion a year, if you count everything. Typically, those numbers are not counted. Typically you hear numbers like 450, not 750 or more. But when you count everything, it’s a very large amount of money. And that doesn’t count the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. With the president’s latest request, the total amount of money, either appropriated or requested for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and all, is now over $800 billion, 808 billion to be exact, and that doesn’t include, that is not included, in the 750 or so that we spend each year on regular defense spending.</p>
<p>Josh Scheer: It’s actually interesting, a lot of people forget that the DOE, and the Veterans Affairs, and a lot of those departments, also get quite a bit of money from the military-industrial complex. And from the president.</p>
<p>Coyle: Exactly.</p>
<p>Harris: What are you doing to either defeat this spending mentality or work within the system to change some of these things?</p>
<p>Coyle: Well, it’s very difficult, of course. Some defense programs, some defense procurements, spend money in every single state of the union. One of the displays that the U.S. Congress can get from the Pentagon is where exactly all the money is being spent on each particular program. And so sometimes this means jobs all across the country that makes it very difficult to attack.</p>
<p>Scheer: And the companies do that on purpose. I’ve talked to a lot of people on this whole subject and companies will make, as they say, the F-22 or the B-2 or one of those planes, wingtips, will be made in a state to guarantee jobs and to guarantee votes, right?</p>
<p>Coyle: Yes, they will, and of course once a factory or a plant is established in some city or town or state, the people there don’t want to lose it.</p>
<p>Scheer: Yep. … I know in the news recently we’ve been trying to sell missile defense again and again, and it happens every year, and you were involved in testing for a number of years. Were the tests ever really positive? Because I only read the negative, and maybe that’s the way I look at the news that comes out, but I want to know what you think and, when you were there, were there positive tests; why do we keep putting money in this program year after year?</p>
<p>Coyle: Well, the United States is spending about $10 billion a year, sometimes 11, but about $10 billion a year on missile defense and has been since President Bush came to office. All in all, since Ronald Reagan gave his famous “Star Wars” speech, the United States has spent over $100 billion on missile defense. And it’s the most difficult thing the Pentagon has ever tried to do. Much more difficult than any jet fighter or ship or tank or what have you. The tests are sometimes successful; for example, the ground-based system that is being deployed in Alaska and California, there have been 12 flight intercept tests in that system and six of them were successful and six failed. But these tests are scripted to improve the chances for success, and so they don’t really represent battlefield conditions, the fog of war so to speak, all of the uncertainties that you would have in an actual missile fight, in battle.</p>
<p>Scheer: So basically they’re giving it a failing grade, 50 percent, in optimal conditions?</p>
<p>Coyle: Yes, I think that is fair. There’s nothing wrong with these tests; they need to do them of course if they are ever going to try to make the system be effective. But there is just — they don’t capture all of the realism of war. Remember now that what we’re talking about is nuclear weapons being launched towards the United States and perhaps some of them get through and go off, so talk about the fog of war would be hard to imagine.</p>
<p>Scheer: I remember, and this was many years ago, maybe 5-6 years ago, a lecture given at Stanford by an atomic scientist that the missile systems that they had then, and that they had when they were working on them during the “Star Wars” program, that missiles fired from subs, or from a dirty bomb that would be brought from a city — how, what country, besides say North Korea, could fire a missile, and how much do we have to fear from a dirty bomb that these missile systems wouldn’t work on.</p>
<p>Coyle: Well, currently the only countries that have missiles that can reach the United States are Russia and China. And neither one of those countries is an enemy of the United States today. People worry very much about Iraq, excuse me, I beg our pardon, about Iran and North Korea.Scheer: Don’t worry, the country made that mistake about four years ago.</p>
<p>Coyle: People worry about North Korea and Iran, but neither country has missiles that could reach the United States.</p>
<p>Scheer: And another question I have, is this a fear factor kind of thing? … Nuclear weapons are a fearful subject, nobody want a nuclear bomb to go off in this country, but also a fear that other countries will develop missile shields on their own, or they’ll weaponize space. … How much does fear play in preventing a nuclear bomb?</p>
<p>Coyle: I think it’s very important, I think there are many members of Congress who genuinely fear what North Korea or Iran might be able to do some day. And it’s very hard to pass that up. The fear of something is a stronger motivator sometimes than the thing itself.</p>
<p>Harris: Many people say that drafting policy and even acting on policy in response to fear is a very bad thing. I’d love to hear your thoughts on that.</p>
<p>Coyle: Well, indeed. You get irrational if you get too frightened by something, you become irrational. Unfortunately, 9/11 was such a horrible event that it just scared Americans out of their wits. When you let that happen you run into the situation where you make irrational choices.</p>
<p>Scheer: It would scare people but we look at, say, a 9/11 or we look at what those terrorists could do, that’s what I was saying about the dirty bomb, we’re fighting a war against people who had box cutters and kicked in [airplane] doors … do you really think, are they going to be able to get nuclear materials within the next 30 years?</p>
<p>Coyle: Well, that’s of course a very important question, and we certainly hope not. The United States has a program to try to better secure nuclear materials, not only here in the United States but in Russia and elsewhere around the world. Recently the U.S. government secured some highly enriched uranium that was in a research reactor in Vietnam. Successful effort. So that effort to try to secure nuclear materials all around the world is an important part of dealing with the threat that terrorists might get ahold of such materials.</p>
<p>Scheer: … Is what the Europeans are saying with the new missile shield that if you put something like that up, it may encourage a country to build nuclear weapons and that the greatest thing would be to try to take them all off the market? Would that be a better way of doing it? Taking nuclear weapons, nonproliferation, and using a different type of weapon. …</p>
<p>Coyle: Well, the new missile shield that the United States is proposing to deploy in Poland and in the Czech Republic is supposedly to defend against missiles from Iran either attacking Europe or the United States. But the system supposed for Poland and the Czech Republic have no demonstrated capability to actually defend Europe, let alone the United States, under realistic operational conditions. Just the same, there are people in Europe who think that just putting it there, whether it would work or not, would help to deter Iran if Iran really believed that it worked.</p>
<p>Scheer: And now I want to get off missile defense — I don’t know if James wants to come back to it — because I know that another subject that you’re obviously an expert on is universities and working with the Livermore Labs. I want to know how much does the defense budget pie is say, from, two universities for research or through the DOE to the Livermore Labs, how much money are we giving to say these universities to do military-type research?</p>
<p>Coyle: Well, it’s quite a small part of the total. For example, I think the nuclear weapons budget of the United States, for everything it does with the military and every place else, is on the order of 20 billion, and at a place like Lawrence Livermore, their weapons budget is probably only a half a billion. They have other programs in energy and in the environment and biology and medicine and so forth. But they’re not weapons programs.</p>
<p>Scheer: And when you worked there, did they ever ask you to hold back findings because there [was] a lot of secrecy when you were working at the labs?</p>
<p>Coyle: Well, they did not ever ask me to hold back any findings, no. Obviously some of the weapons work is classified, but not even all of the nuclear weapons work is classified. The lab puts out a regular newspaper and a magazine and other things that describe its research. So except for the things which actually need to be classified, that’s where the secrecy is.</p>
<p>Scheer: It has always interested me when I read anything about, not the labs, I’m getting more to the university side with, say, UC Berkeley doing things like roboflies and smart dust, and there was an ABC report I think from this June about gay bombs and arming sharks and things like that. Are those programs, are they expected to work in the next 20 years? Are they giving them a lot of the money? Are they giving them a lot of thought? Or was it just something that, say, smart dust sounds interesting, so we’ll give a little bit of money? What’s your take on that?</p>
<p>Coyle: Well, the Defense Department does fund some pretty far-out ideas. But again the amount of spending is quite low compared to, say, the war in Iraq or other things we might discuss. And yes, small pieces of it go to ideas that don’t pan out. But that’s part of the research and development process.Scheer: … I know that recently [at] Santa Clara University, there were student groups who were starving themselves because of the university’s involvement in nuclear weapons and this kind of thing. You’re saying that it’s just a small part? So why would these students be kind of concerned about it, do you think?</p>
<p>Coyle: Well, they could be concerned on principle if they just don’t like the idea, no matter what it costs. But, usually the things that will draw protests are actually a relatively small part of the defense budget. The exception these days, of course, being the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.</p>
<p>Harris: With due respect, you have just in conversation mentioned over a trillion dollars. And we’re just getting started.</p>
<p>Coyle: Right.</p>
<p>Harris: Does the military have carte blanche to spend what they want to spend, develop what they want to develop, and no one is going to ask a question. Is that a safe assumption? Is that a safe statement? No one is going to question these things.</p>
<p>Coyle: I don’t think it is; I don’t think that’s correct. As the old saying goes, the president of the United States proposes, and the U.S. Congress disposes. So if the Congress doesn’t appropriate the money, if they don’t authorize the funds, it won’t happen. Now, unfortunately with respect to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, right now, Congress, the majority of the Congress, is trying not to authorize what the president wants, but unfortunately they don’t have the votes to make it happen.</p>
<p>Scheer: It’s strange though, because again, talking about this with a lot of people, Congress, their staffers, seem to be getting government jobs. The congressmen can become lobbyists, no one wants to be against defense, there is a kind of a carte blanche, a little bit, to do this, because there’s no oversight from Congress, and there’s no, these defense contractors are pitching something that people want. They want defense and they don’t want to sacrifice that need, right?</p>
<p>Coyle: Exactly. If you ask in the context of missile defense or any other defense program, if you ask most Americans, shouldn’t we defend ourselves? They say, in polls, they say yes. It’s only when you start to talk about the difficulty, or the cost, of a program that then American voters will say, “Well, wait a minute, I didn’t realize that.”</p>
<p>Scheer: And besides some groups like yours and other arms trade research, and even OMB watch, and other of these groups, there’s no one in Congress really going in and saying, there are some that are doing oversight, but it’s really these private institutions that are doing all the oversight, right?</p>
<p>Coyle: That’s where a lot of it comes from. The Congress does have investigative powers but they were not using them as aggressively, prior to last November.</p>
<p>Scheer: How much lobbying do you think the universities do? Because I know with Lockheed and Halliburton, obviously, they have powerful lobbies; they have the whole revolving-door policy where they are hiring people, congressmen, or people in the Pentagon. What do you think the universities are doing? Do they lobby as much, or are they just so trusted to get the job done, say, with Livermore or with roboflies, that they are just getting these contracts?</p>
<p>Coyle: It’s quite different for universities, any university, whether you’re talking about the University of California or the University of Pennsylvania. Big contractors like Boeing and Lockheed and so forth have large Washington offices and very substantial lobbying budgets. Universities do not have, they may have a Washington office but most universities don’t. Some do but they usually are small, a handful of people and very limited budgets. And the way they operate is quite different. Universities are obviously interested in their own futures, but they’re also trying to give straight answers to straight questions.</p>
<p>Scheer: Yeah, but it is interesting because in this last thing in May that James was talking about earlier about Lockheed, Lockheed was in that running and the university beat them out. So it is interesting that the University of California could beat out that major player in Washington. I guess the government trusts them, right? Would that be correct?</p>
<p>Coyle: I think that’s correct, yeah.</p>
<p>Scheer: It makes you wonder what they think about Lockheed, but. …</p>
<p>Harris: They must love Lockheed. They spend tons and tons of money with Lockheed. Philip, it seems that as we hear more and more about private entities, as we hear about private entities and corporate America running amuck, does the government need to take more responsibility for the money that is being spent, and for the way it is being spent, because the groups that are doing it now seem like they are spending a lot of money and don’t have a lot of accountability for how that money is being spent.</p>
<p>Coyle: I think the Blackwater case is a very interesting one because it appears that they did not have to operate under the same rules as other security contractors who were there in Iraq. And there’s a long complicated story about how that came about, but nevertheless, our government ought to know what rules these contractors are operating under. And examine whether it’s right for some contractors to basically have no rules and others to have lots of rules.</p>
<p>Harris: Do you think some of the inconsistencies that exist in Blackwater and related organizations? Do you think those things are true for companies like Boeing and Lockheed that do major services for us on the military-defense end?</p>
<p>Coyle: I think the situation with Blackwater is quite special because, you know, it was involving, providing security in Iraq, which is a very difficult place to provide security. I don’t believe that Lockheed does that kind of work; I don’t think Boeing does that kind of work. But that doesn’t mean that greater oversight isn’t appropriate for those kinds of defense contractors, also. They spend billions and billions of dollars, and if the government is going to be a good customer, the government needs to know how its money is being spent.Scheer: It’s interesting about Lockheed, just one little wrap-up question for James, that when you look into Lockheed and you go even on their Web site, not only do they provide, they’re not only a defense company. But they also work for the Welfare Administration, they work for the Department of Interior, they used to do work for the Education Department, they don’t do any of that anymore. They do work for most parts of the government. That’s where they get even more money, NASA, a whole slew of non-defense entities, I mean. …</p>
<p>Coyle: Yes, and some of these companies are truly global companies. In the same sense that some oil companies are truly global. They are not really national oil companies, they’re global. …</p>
<p>Scheer: They put their mailboxes in Bermuda so they can pay $20,000 in taxes and not … but thank you very much, it was great to talk to you.</p>
<p>Coyle: It was nice talking to you anytime.</p>
<p>Harris: Indeed, and one thing Philip said earlier was that people when asked, are definitely for defense, but when they find out how much it costs, hey, they want to be against defense. So if you want to make a change, or look into how some of this money is being spent, you have to take an active role. It can’t be something you bitch about and leave alone; you have to be consistent in that. So Philip Doyle, former assistant secretary of defense and currently senior adviser at the Center of Defense Information, thank you for joining us. For Josh Scheer, for Philip Coyle, this is James Harris, and this is Truthdig.</p>
<p /> | true | 4 | james harris josh scheer former assistant secretary defense philip coyle knows thing two staggering amounts money us funnels militaryindustrial complex difficult stanch profiteering click listen truthdig interviews james harris truthdig james harris josh scheer today talking philip coyle hes former assistant secretary defense currently senior adviser center defense information recently article published announcing uc berkeley contract develop defense contract worth 16 billion year research interview found cap trillions dollars spent defense seeing astronomic figures help think forgotten social programs failing education structure tell spend money go spending much philip coyle amount money united states spends defense really quite staggering 750 billion year count everything typically numbers counted typically hear numbers like 450 750 count everything large amount money doesnt count war iraq afghanistan presidents latest request total amount money either appropriated requested wars iraq afghanistan 800 billion 808 billion exact doesnt include included 750 spend year regular defense spending josh scheer actually interesting lot people forget doe veterans affairs lot departments also get quite bit money militaryindustrial complex president coyle exactly harris either defeat spending mentality work within system change things coyle well difficult course defense programs defense procurements spend money every single state union one displays us congress get pentagon exactly money spent particular program sometimes means jobs across country makes difficult attack scheer companies purpose ive talked lot people whole subject companies make say f22 b2 one planes wingtips made state guarantee jobs guarantee votes right coyle yes course factory plant established city town state people dont want lose scheer yep know news recently weve trying sell missile defense happens every year involved testing number years tests ever really positive read negative maybe thats way look news comes want know think positive tests keep putting money program year year coyle well united states spending 10 billion year sometimes 11 10 billion year missile defense since president bush came office since ronald reagan gave famous star wars speech united states spent 100 billion missile defense difficult thing pentagon ever tried much difficult jet fighter ship tank tests sometimes successful example groundbased system deployed alaska california 12 flight intercept tests system six successful six failed tests scripted improve chances success dont really represent battlefield conditions fog war speak uncertainties would actual missile fight battle scheer basically theyre giving failing grade 50 percent optimal conditions coyle yes think fair theres nothing wrong tests need course ever going try make system effective dont capture realism war remember talking nuclear weapons launched towards united states perhaps get go talk fog war would hard imagine scheer remember many years ago maybe 56 years ago lecture given stanford atomic scientist missile systems working star wars program missiles fired subs dirty bomb would brought city country besides say north korea could fire missile much fear dirty bomb missile systems wouldnt work coyle well currently countries missiles reach united states russia china neither one countries enemy united states today people worry much iraq excuse beg pardon iran north koreascheer dont worry country made mistake four years ago coyle people worry north korea iran neither country missiles could reach united states scheer another question fear factor kind thing nuclear weapons fearful subject nobody want nuclear bomb go country also fear countries develop missile shields theyll weaponize space much fear play preventing nuclear bomb coyle think important think many members congress genuinely fear north korea iran might able day hard pass fear something stronger motivator sometimes thing harris many people say drafting policy even acting policy response fear bad thing id love hear thoughts coyle well indeed get irrational get frightened something become irrational unfortunately 911 horrible event scared americans wits let happen run situation make irrational choices scheer would scare people look say 911 look terrorists could thats saying dirty bomb fighting war people box cutters kicked airplane doors really think going able get nuclear materials within next 30 years coyle well thats course important question certainly hope united states program try better secure nuclear materials united states russia elsewhere around world recently us government secured highly enriched uranium research reactor vietnam successful effort effort try secure nuclear materials around world important part dealing threat terrorists might get ahold materials scheer europeans saying new missile shield put something like may encourage country build nuclear weapons greatest thing would try take market would better way taking nuclear weapons nonproliferation using different type weapon coyle well new missile shield united states proposing deploy poland czech republic supposedly defend missiles iran either attacking europe united states system supposed poland czech republic demonstrated capability actually defend europe let alone united states realistic operational conditions people europe think putting whether would work would help deter iran iran really believed worked scheer want get missile defense dont know james wants come back know another subject youre obviously expert universities working livermore labs want know much defense budget pie say two universities research doe livermore labs much money giving say universities militarytype research coyle well quite small part total example think nuclear weapons budget united states everything military every place else order 20 billion place like lawrence livermore weapons budget probably half billion programs energy environment biology medicine forth theyre weapons programs scheer worked ever ask hold back findings lot secrecy working labs coyle well ever ask hold back findings obviously weapons work classified even nuclear weapons work classified lab puts regular newspaper magazine things describe research except things actually need classified thats secrecy scheer always interested read anything labs im getting university side say uc berkeley things like roboflies smart dust abc report think june gay bombs arming sharks things like programs expected work next 20 years giving lot money giving lot thought something say smart dust sounds interesting well give little bit money whats take coyle well defense department fund pretty farout ideas amount spending quite low compared say war iraq things might discuss yes small pieces go ideas dont pan thats part research development processscheer know recently santa clara university student groups starving universitys involvement nuclear weapons kind thing youre saying small part would students kind concerned think coyle well could concerned principle dont like idea matter costs usually things draw protests actually relatively small part defense budget exception days course wars iraq afghanistan harris due respect conversation mentioned trillion dollars getting started coyle right harris military carte blanche spend want spend develop want develop one going ask question safe assumption safe statement one going question things coyle dont think dont think thats correct old saying goes president united states proposes us congress disposes congress doesnt appropriate money dont authorize funds wont happen unfortunately respect wars iraq afghanistan right congress majority congress trying authorize president wants unfortunately dont votes make happen scheer strange though talking lot people congress staffers seem getting government jobs congressmen become lobbyists one wants defense kind carte blanche little bit theres oversight congress theres defense contractors pitching something people want want defense dont want sacrifice need right coyle exactly ask context missile defense defense program ask americans shouldnt defend say polls say yes start talk difficulty cost program american voters say well wait minute didnt realize scheer besides groups like arms trade research even omb watch groups theres one congress really going saying oversight really private institutions oversight right coyle thats lot comes congress investigative powers using aggressively prior last november scheer much lobbying think universities know lockheed halliburton obviously powerful lobbies whole revolvingdoor policy hiring people congressmen people pentagon think universities lobby much trusted get job done say livermore roboflies getting contracts coyle quite different universities university whether youre talking university california university pennsylvania big contractors like boeing lockheed forth large washington offices substantial lobbying budgets universities may washington office universities dont usually small handful people limited budgets way operate quite different universities obviously interested futures theyre also trying give straight answers straight questions scheer yeah interesting last thing may james talking earlier lockheed lockheed running university beat interesting university california could beat major player washington guess government trusts right would correct coyle think thats correct yeah scheer makes wonder think lockheed harris must love lockheed spend tons tons money lockheed philip seems hear private entities hear private entities corporate america running amuck government need take responsibility money spent way spent groups seem like spending lot money dont lot accountability money spent coyle think blackwater case interesting one appears operate rules security contractors iraq theres long complicated story came nevertheless government ought know rules contractors operating examine whether right contractors basically rules others lots rules harris think inconsistencies exist blackwater related organizations think things true companies like boeing lockheed major services us militarydefense end coyle think situation blackwater quite special know involving providing security iraq difficult place provide security dont believe lockheed kind work dont think boeing kind work doesnt mean greater oversight isnt appropriate kinds defense contractors also spend billions billions dollars government going good customer government needs know money spentscheer interesting lockheed one little wrapup question james look lockheed go even web site provide theyre defense company also work welfare administration work department interior used work education department dont anymore work parts government thats get even money nasa whole slew nondefense entities mean coyle yes companies truly global companies sense oil companies truly global really national oil companies theyre global scheer put mailboxes bermuda pay 20000 taxes thank much great talk coyle nice talking anytime harris indeed one thing philip said earlier people asked definitely defense find much costs hey want defense want make change look money spent take active role cant something bitch leave alone consistent philip doyle former assistant secretary defense currently senior adviser center defense information thank joining us josh scheer philip coyle james harris truthdig | 1,604 |
<p><a href="" type="internal" /></p>
<p>Niraj Srivastava <a href="" type="internal">21st Century Wire&#160;</a></p>
<p>The saga of the Saudi-Qatar dispute continues. This week saw some important developments, which might provide pointers to what is likely to happen in the coming weeks and months, and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/06/us/politics/us-says-dispute-between-qatar-and-its-neighbors-is-at-impasse.html?_r=0" type="external">possibly years.</a></p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">As expected</a>, the US stepped in to ensure that the Saudis, UAE, and Bahrain did not escalate their actions against Qatar. In particular, it was necessary to prevent any military adventure, which the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammad bin Sultan (MbS), was perfectly capable of launching, going by his record in Yemen.</p>
<p>This had to be done urgently if the Americans wanted to continue their operations at the <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/jun/5/al-udeid-air-base-open-to-us-despite-qatars-rift-w/" type="external">Al Udeid air base</a> in Qatar, the forward headquarters of CENTCOM.</p>
<p>In the event, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson undertook a <a href="http://www.dw.com/en/in-qatar-tillerson-calls-for-resolution-to-gulf-dispute/a-39634260" type="external">visit to Qatar</a>and Saudi Arabia, during which he <a href="http://www.dw.com/en/us-qatar-sign-anti-terror-deal-to-end-diplomatic-spat/a-39650462" type="external">signed an agreement</a> with the Qatari foreign minister on June 11 to <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/07/qatar-combat-terrorism-financing-170711134808172.html" type="external">combat “terrorism financing.</a>” He said he was trying, along with the Emir of Kuwait, to find a peaceful solution to the crisis.</p>
<p>He also <a href="http://www.dw.com/en/in-qatar-tillerson-calls-for-resolution-to-gulf-dispute/a-39634260" type="external">said:</a> “I think Qatar has been quite clear in its positions [regarding terrorism] and I think those have been very reasonable.”</p>
<p>He, however, said on July 13 that the final resolution of the dispute might take “ <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-13/tillerson-diplomacy-is-seen-yielding-ideas-for-gulf-resolution" type="external">quite a while</a>.”</p>
<p>By signing the anti-terrorism agreement with Qatar and describing Qatar’s position as “very reasonable,” Tillerson sent a clear signal to the Saudis and their allies that the US will not allow an invasion of Qatar.</p>
<p>In short, from the US standpoint, Qatar was <a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/07/10/536440875/suspected-cholera-cases-pass-300-000-in-yemen-red-cross-says" type="external">not Yemen</a>, where the Americans are helping the <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/07/11/yemen-suffering-hands-saudi-arabia-and-uk-profiting" type="external">Saudis and the UAE to destroy that country.</a></p>
<p>Tillerson had good reasons to do so. In addition to the Al Udeid air base mentioned above, there is another critical reason why the US cannot let the Saudis invade Doha.</p>
<p>Like most Gulf currencies, the Qatari Riyal is also pegged to the US dollar, and Qatari gas is priced in the same currency.</p>
<p>According to a <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-12/saudi-led-bloc-says-u-s-qatar-anti-terror-pact-isn-t-enough" type="external">report by Commerzbank AG</a>, the longer the Saudi-Qatar dispute goes on, the higher the likelihood that Qatar will abandon the Riyal peg to the USD, which would be disastrous for the Dollar, which is already under some pressure.</p>
<p>The USD is often referred to as the “petrodollar,” because most of the global oil exports are priced in the US currency. This is, however, changing, with some countries pricing their oil or gas in the Chinese Yuan and the Euro. If Qatar, the largest exporter of LNG in the world, begins pricing its gas in Euros or some other currency, the underpinnings of the USD will erode, ending the hegemony of the petrodollar.</p>
<p>By openly supporting Qatar, which was the first stop on Tillerson’s Gulf tour, the US was protecting not only its military but also its economic and financial interests, notwithstanding the massive Saudi purchase of US arms, etc., which MbS and his friends [wrongly] interpreted as a license to intimidate Qatar.</p>
<p>As in the past, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/05/world/middleeast/qatar-saudi-arabia-egypt-bahrain-united-arab-emirates.html?_r=1" type="external">MbS overplayed his hand</a>, eliciting a sharp rebuke from Qatar and its partners such as the US and some EU countries.</p>
<p>Earlier, in a bid to sabotage Tillerson’s visit to Doha, the Saudis accused Qatar on July 10 of failing to meet its commitments under the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2017/07/11/world/middleeast/11reuters-gulf-qatar-documents.html?rref=collection/spotlightcollection/world-news-from-ap-and-reuters&amp;action=click&amp;contentCollection=world&amp;reg;ion=stream&amp;module=stream_unit&amp;version=latest&amp;contentPlacement=31&amp;pgtype=collection" type="external">2013 “Riyadh Agreement,</a>” signed by Qatar and Kuwait.</p>
<p>Under that agreement, members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) pledged to combat funding of terrorism, and refrain from backing any “political currents that pose a threat to any member of the GCC.” They also agreed to expel any member of the Muslim Brotherhood who was not a citizen of a GCC state.</p>
<p>The Riyadh Agreement was supposed to be secret but <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2017/07/11/world/middleeast/11reuters-gulf-qatar-documents.html?rref=collection/spotlightcollection/world-news-from-ap-and-reuters&amp;action=click&amp;contentCollection=world&amp;reg;ion=stream&amp;module=stream_unit&amp;version=latest&amp;contentPlacement=31&amp;pgtype=collection" type="external">was leaked,</a> most probably by the Saudis or their allies, to CNN hours before Tillerson’s arrival in the region.</p>
<p>Not to be outdone, the Qataris <a href="http://en.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13960418000768" type="external">leaked their own set of documents</a> to an Egyptian newspaper which suggested that the Saudi and UAE Crown Princes had supported ISIS and Al Qaida. Thus, both sides indulged in the washing of some dirty linen in public, to the amusement of outsiders.</p>
<p>The Saudis were also discomfited by the publication of a <a href="http://www.dw.com/en/saudi-arabia-exports-extremism-to-many-countries-including-germany-study-says/a-39618920" type="external">report</a>by the UK’s Henry Jackson Society on <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/News/uk/terror-funding-report-home-office-saudi-arabia-jihadis-attacks-suppress-tory-uk-release-sensitive-a7773146.html" type="external">foreign funding of Islamic extremism in the UK.</a></p>
<p>The report claimed that <a href="http://www.dw.com/en/saudi-arabia-vs-qatar-vs-iran/a-39137531" type="external">Saudi Arabia had exported Wahhabism</a> and other extremist ideas to many European countries including Britain and Germany, and was thus responsible for the <a href="https://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/wahhabism-isis-and-the-saudi-connection/" type="external">radicalization of many Muslims</a>in these countries. It also stated that the Saudis had spent around USD 86 billion in the past 50 years on spreading Wahhabi extremism in Europe.</p>
<p>According to the report, in 2015 there were 110 mosques in the UK preaching Wahhabism and Salafism compared to 28 mosques in 2007. Saudi money was primarily funnelled through mosques, schools, and use of Saudi textbooks in the UK’s independent Islamic schools.</p>
<p>The Saudis, however, remained unfazed by the Report, confident that their oil exports to, and arms purchases from, the West will insulate them from any action by the US, UK, France, etc. This has been the case so far and is likely to be so in the foreseeable future.</p>
<p>They also said that the US-Qatar agreement signed by Tillerson <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-12/saudi-led-bloc-says-u-s-qatar-anti-terror-pact-isn-t-enough" type="external">“isn’t enough,”</a>and that Saudi Arabia and its allies will continue their measures against Qatar until their demands were met.</p>
<p>It is important to understand that, fundamentally, the Saudi-Qatar quarrel is about overlordship in the Persian Gulf [the Saudis prefer to call it the “Arabian Gulf”].</p>
<p>For a very long time, the Saudis have seen themselves as the lords of the Gulf, mainly on account of their size, oil, and financial clout. In doing so, they have been supported by the Americans and their allies for their own reasons, such as being one of the biggest buyers of US, UK, and French arms, and the biggest producer of oil in the world.</p>
<p>The Saudis have gotten used to laying down red lines in the Gulf, which no GCC country may cross. Qatar committed the cardinal sin of crossing not only one, but many Saudi red lines, including those pertaining to relations with Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Al Jazeera.</p>
<p>As Qatar became ultra rich in the last decade or so through <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-06/saudi-arabia-s-feud-with-qatar-has-22-year-history-rooted-in-gas" type="external">exports of its LNG,</a> it began harbouring ambitions of punching above its weight. And in the last few years, it actually started doing so.</p>
<p>Its <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-11/qatar-sovereign-wealth-fund-s-335-global-empire" type="external">Sovereign Wealth Fund</a> is of the order of USD 335 billion. It has bought prime real estate in the US, UK, and other European countries, in addition to large chunk of shares in many Western multinationals. The West, therefore, cannot allow Qatar to sink, or be invaded.</p>
<p>The Saudis have not been happy with Qatar’s behaviour for quite some time now. They showed their displeasure in 2014 by engineering a crisis which took about eight months to resolve.</p>
<p>But Qatar, apparently, learnt nothing from it and continued to “misbehave,” by crossing Saudi red lines again and again. This included, among other things, opposing some Saudi-backed Jihadi groups in countries like Libya and Syria.</p>
<p>The Qataris also carved out a niche for themselves in regional trouble spots by <a href="https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/qatar-and-the-gulf-arab-boycott-by-barak-barfi-2017-06" type="external">rescuing some Western nationals,</a> who were held hostage by terrorist and Jihadi groups.</p>
<p>Thus, Qatar used its links with the Taliban to secure the release of US soldier Bowe Bergdahl in May 2014. Three months later it rescued Peter Theo Curtis, a US journalist held by the Nusra Front. Qatar was able to do so because of its close links with such outfits as the Taliban, Hamas, Al Qaida and even Hezbollah.</p>
<p>The US and some other Western countries started viewing Qatar as a regional arbiter of conflicts. Qatar reportedly paid a huge ransom to secure the freedom of 26 members of a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/21/world/middleeast/big-ransom-and-syria-deals-win-release-of-royal-qatari-hunters.html" type="external">Qatari falcon hunting party</a> in April 2017, who were taken hostage by some Iran-backed militias in Iraq. Qatar’s cordial relations with Iran must have come in handy in this operation.</p>
<p>Qatar also sponsored the “ <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-39426162" type="external">Four Towns Agreement</a>” in Syria and negotiated with Iran and Hezbollah to free civilians trapped in areas under siege by Jihadi or government troops.</p>
<p>The Saudis obviously did not like Qatar’s growing regional and international profile, and the country’s increasingly independent foreign policy, which was often not in line with the boundaries laid down by them. They started seeing Qatar as an upstart, the new kid on the block, who had to be put in his place.</p>
<p>A sharp rap on Qatar’s knuckles was necessary, they believed.</p>
<p>The opportunity to do so, they thought, arose after Trump’s visit to Riyadh last month, during which arms deals worth hundreds of billions of USD were signed by the two sides.</p>
<p>Trump also made some statements which were [mistakenly] interpreted by MbS and the UAE Crown Prince Mohammad bin Zayed al Nahyan as a license to do whatever they liked in the Gulf.</p>
<p>MbS was also emboldened by his close personal relations with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, &#160;an Orthodox Jew, who has emerged as Trump’s point-man on the Middle East.</p>
<p>It has been reported recently that <a href="https://theintercept.com/2017/07/10/jared-kushner-tried-and-failed-to-get-a-half-billion-dollar-bailout-from-qatar/" type="external">Kushner tried and failed</a>to get a half billion dollar loan from a Qatari billionaire to bail out one of his real estate projects in New York which is in serious financial trouble. The Kushners bought a building located at <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/03/nyregion/kushner-companies-666-fifth-avenue.html" type="external">666 Fifth Avenue</a>in 2007 for $1.8 billion.</p>
<p>Throughout 2015 and 2016 Kushner and his father Charles negotiated with former Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/18/former-qatari-pm-sheikh-hamad-bin-jassim-bin-jaber-al-thani-diplomatic-immunity" type="external">Hamid bin Jassim al-Thani (HBJ</a>) to refinance the above property, but the deal did not come through.</p>
<p>As a result, Kushner’s $500 million investment in the project has almost been wiped out.</p>
<p>It has been suggested that Kushner was, therefore, not very happy with Qatar, though it would be unfair to penalise a country for the [private] actions of one of its nationals. But it is entirely possible that Kushner would not have minded if the Saudis caused some trouble for the Qataris.</p>
<p>And someone rash like MbS could easily have [mis]interpreted Kushner’s displeasure with HBJ as a green signal to blockade that country, secure in the knowledge that the US would support him against the Qataris.</p>
<p>And he was not completely wrong. It may be noted that for a couple of days after the Saudi action against Qatar, no less than Trump himself kept tweeting his support for the Saudi action, even though his own Secretaries of State and Defence were making statements in support of Qatar!</p>
<p>It took them a few days to educate Trump about the importance of Qatar. The situation was ludicrous; some uncharitable commentators suggested that both Trump and Kushner probably did not know that the Al Udeid air base was located in Qatar!</p>
<p>Be that as it may, Trump finally came around to their point of view and took corrective action, which included sending Tillerson to the Gulf to defuse the crisis and prevent any further reckless behaviour by MbS.</p>
<p>Another important development in this context was the <a href="http://theduran.com/trumps-post-g20-reality-broken-full/" type="external">bilateral meeting</a> between Trump and Putin on the margins of the G-20 Summit in Hamburg on July 7. The meeting, which was scheduled for 35 minutes, went on for two hours and fifteen minutes. A <a href="http://russia-insider.com/en/politics/putin-and-trump-stage-manage-win-win-meeting/ri20317?ct=t(Russia_Insider_Daily_Headlines11_21_2014)&amp;mc_cid=4cd799a3cf&amp;mc_eid=488af7a3dd" type="external">number of issues were discussed</a>, including the situation in Syria.</p>
<p>The two <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/07/trump-time-work-constructively-russia-170709205131138.html" type="external">leaders agreed</a>in principle to enforce a <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/07/russia-agree-syria-ceasefire-deal-170707174828206.html" type="external">cease-fire in southwestern Syria</a>, close to the border with Jordan and the Golan Heights, illegally occupied by Israel since 1967.</p>
<p>Subsequently, Russian, US, and Jordanian experts agreed to sign an MOU to create a “de-escalation zone” in the Syrian areas of Quneitra, Deraa, and Suweida.</p>
<p>According to some reports, the ceasefire came into effect at 0900 hrs. GMT on July 9 and is <a href="http://theduran.com/trump-putin-ceasefire-syria-may-hold-heres/" type="external">holding so far</a>. It also appears, from the <a href="http://theduran.com/us-france-drop-regime-change-syria/" type="external">statements made by Trump</a>during his recent visit to Paris, that the goal of regime change in Syria has been given up by the West.</p>
<p>However, it would be unwise to take these statements at their face value, because neocons such as Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and their acolytes are still baying for Assad’s blood.</p>
<p>The proof of the pudding should be in the eating. “Wait and Watch” would be a <a href="https://consortiumnews.com/2017/07/08/the-syrian-test-of-trump-putin-accord/" type="external">more prudent approach</a> to adopt in the matter.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, life is gradually returning to normal in Doha, after the political earthquake of June 5. In a recent <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/tiny-qatar-is-living-large-despite-monthlong-arab-siege/2017/07/12/b8e6d5d8-66cb-11e7-94ab-5b1f0ff459df_story.html?utm_term=.bdb158e33274" type="external">report</a> entitled “Tiny Qatar is living large despite month long Arab siege,” the Washington Post indicated that there was little sign of shortages and hardship in the country. Grocery stores had been restocked with food.</p>
<p>Alternative supply chains for import of fresh produce etc. are now operational, mainly from Iran and Turkey. On July 12, <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/business-40578167" type="external">165 Holstein dairy cows</a> arrived in Doha by air from Germany, the first consignment of about 4000 cattle that Qatar wants to import. They will meet about 30% of the country’s dairy requirements. A new Qatari dairy brand will be introduced.</p>
<p>Qatar’s stock exchange has stabilised after dropping by around 10% immediately following the Saudi sanctions. The country’s Sovereign Wealth Fund of around $350 billion should help in exploiting financial and economic opportunities around the world and absorbing the shocks caused by the blockade.</p>
<p>Qatar is <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/04/business/energy-environment/qatar-gas-lng-saudi-blockade.html?action=click&amp;contentCollection=Politics&amp;module=RelatedCoverage&amp;region=EndOfArticle&amp;pgtype=article" type="external">simply too wealthy</a>to be treated shabbily. Even with the trade and travel bans, Qatar’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/02/world/middleeast/qatar-saudi-arabia-blockade.html?action=click&amp;contentCollection=Energy%20&amp;%20Environment%20&amp;module=RelatedCoverage&amp;region=EndOfArticle&amp;pgtype=article" type="external">economy will not suffer significant damag</a>e, according to some experts.</p>
<p>Personal hardships, involving separation of family members, however, continue. These will take some time to resolve.</p>
<p>The above developments suggest that Qatar is preparing for the long haul, and new realignments are emerging in the region involving Iran, Turkey, and Russia.</p>
<p>It is likely that the Saudi-Qatar rift will continue for months, if not years, further fragmenting the Middle East. Outsiders will get opportunities to fish in troubled waters. Regional instability will grow.</p>
<p>But, in the long term, the Saudis and their allies perhaps <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/markaz/2017/06/15/the-high-cost-of-high-stakes-economic-implications-of-the-2017-gulf-crisis/" type="external">stand to lose more</a> than Qatar, in terms of lost business opportunities, tourism, and foreign direct investment.</p>
<p>And the Saudi hegemony over the GCC is likely to be eroded. Kuwait and Oman have not shunned Qatar, which, along with Iran and Turkey, could emerge as a second power centre in the Gulf.</p>
<p>The Saudi Crown Prince could not have imagined this outcome when he tried to isolate Iran and punish Qatar on June 5, 2017. Such are the vagaries of international politics. One wrong move and the law of unintended consequences kicks in.</p>
<p>***</p>
<p>Niraj Srivastava is a former Ambassador of India who has served in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Libya, and the United States, among other countries.</p>
<p>READ MORE TRUMP NEWS AT:&#160; <a href="" type="internal">21st Century Wire Trump Files</a></p>
<p>SUPPORT OUR&#160;WORK BY SUBSCRIBING &amp; BECOMING A MEMBER&#160; <a href="https://21wire.tv/membership/plans/" type="external">@21WIRE.TV</a></p> | true | 4 | niraj srivastava 21st century wire160 saga saudiqatar dispute continues week saw important developments might provide pointers likely happen coming weeks months possibly years expected us stepped ensure saudis uae bahrain escalate actions qatar particular necessary prevent military adventure saudi crown prince mohammad bin sultan mbs perfectly capable launching going record yemen done urgently americans wanted continue operations al udeid air base qatar forward headquarters centcom event us secretary state rex tillerson undertook visit qatarand saudi arabia signed agreement qatari foreign minister june 11 combat terrorism financing said trying along emir kuwait find peaceful solution crisis also said think qatar quite clear positions regarding terrorism think reasonable however said july 13 final resolution dispute might take quite signing antiterrorism agreement qatar describing qatars position reasonable tillerson sent clear signal saudis allies us allow invasion qatar short us standpoint qatar yemen americans helping saudis uae destroy country tillerson good reasons addition al udeid air base mentioned another critical reason us let saudis invade doha like gulf currencies qatari riyal also pegged us dollar qatari gas priced currency according report commerzbank ag longer saudiqatar dispute goes higher likelihood qatar abandon riyal peg usd would disastrous dollar already pressure usd often referred petrodollar global oil exports priced us currency however changing countries pricing oil gas chinese yuan euro qatar largest exporter lng world begins pricing gas euros currency underpinnings usd erode ending hegemony petrodollar openly supporting qatar first stop tillersons gulf tour us protecting military also economic financial interests notwithstanding massive saudi purchase us arms etc mbs friends wrongly interpreted license intimidate qatar past mbs overplayed hand eliciting sharp rebuke qatar partners us eu countries earlier bid sabotage tillersons visit doha saudis accused qatar july 10 failing meet commitments 2013 riyadh agreement signed qatar kuwait agreement members gulf cooperation council gcc pledged combat funding terrorism refrain backing political currents pose threat member gcc also agreed expel member muslim brotherhood citizen gcc state riyadh agreement supposed secret leaked probably saudis allies cnn hours tillersons arrival region outdone qataris leaked set documents egyptian newspaper suggested saudi uae crown princes supported isis al qaida thus sides indulged washing dirty linen public amusement outsiders saudis also discomfited publication reportby uks henry jackson society foreign funding islamic extremism uk report claimed saudi arabia exported wahhabism extremist ideas many european countries including britain germany thus responsible radicalization many muslimsin countries also stated saudis spent around usd 86 billion past 50 years spreading wahhabi extremism europe according report 2015 110 mosques uk preaching wahhabism salafism compared 28 mosques 2007 saudi money primarily funnelled mosques schools use saudi textbooks uks independent islamic schools saudis however remained unfazed report confident oil exports arms purchases west insulate action us uk france etc case far likely foreseeable future also said usqatar agreement signed tillerson isnt enoughand saudi arabia allies continue measures qatar demands met important understand fundamentally saudiqatar quarrel overlordship persian gulf saudis prefer call arabian gulf long time saudis seen lords gulf mainly account size oil financial clout supported americans allies reasons one biggest buyers us uk french arms biggest producer oil world saudis gotten used laying red lines gulf gcc country may cross qatar committed cardinal sin crossing one many saudi red lines including pertaining relations iran muslim brotherhood al jazeera qatar became ultra rich last decade exports lng began harbouring ambitions punching weight last years actually started sovereign wealth fund order usd 335 billion bought prime real estate us uk european countries addition large chunk shares many western multinationals west therefore allow qatar sink invaded saudis happy qatars behaviour quite time showed displeasure 2014 engineering crisis took eight months resolve qatar apparently learnt nothing continued misbehave crossing saudi red lines included among things opposing saudibacked jihadi groups countries like libya syria qataris also carved niche regional trouble spots rescuing western nationals held hostage terrorist jihadi groups thus qatar used links taliban secure release us soldier bowe bergdahl may 2014 three months later rescued peter theo curtis us journalist held nusra front qatar able close links outfits taliban hamas al qaida even hezbollah us western countries started viewing qatar regional arbiter conflicts qatar reportedly paid huge ransom secure freedom 26 members qatari falcon hunting party april 2017 taken hostage iranbacked militias iraq qatars cordial relations iran must come handy operation qatar also sponsored four towns agreement syria negotiated iran hezbollah free civilians trapped areas siege jihadi government troops saudis obviously like qatars growing regional international profile countrys increasingly independent foreign policy often line boundaries laid started seeing qatar upstart new kid block put place sharp rap qatars knuckles necessary believed opportunity thought arose trumps visit riyadh last month arms deals worth hundreds billions usd signed two sides trump also made statements mistakenly interpreted mbs uae crown prince mohammad bin zayed al nahyan license whatever liked gulf mbs also emboldened close personal relations trumps soninlaw jared kushner 160an orthodox jew emerged trumps pointman middle east reported recently kushner tried failedto get half billion dollar loan qatari billionaire bail one real estate projects new york serious financial trouble kushners bought building located 666 fifth avenuein 2007 18 billion throughout 2015 2016 kushner father charles negotiated former qatari prime minister sheikh hamid bin jassim althani hbj refinance property deal come result kushners 500 million investment project almost wiped suggested kushner therefore happy qatar though would unfair penalise country private actions one nationals entirely possible kushner would minded saudis caused trouble qataris someone rash like mbs could easily misinterpreted kushners displeasure hbj green signal blockade country secure knowledge us would support qataris completely wrong may noted couple days saudi action qatar less trump kept tweeting support saudi action even though secretaries state defence making statements support qatar took days educate trump importance qatar situation ludicrous uncharitable commentators suggested trump kushner probably know al udeid air base located qatar may trump finally came around point view took corrective action included sending tillerson gulf defuse crisis prevent reckless behaviour mbs another important development context bilateral meeting trump putin margins g20 summit hamburg july 7 meeting scheduled 35 minutes went two hours fifteen minutes number issues discussed including situation syria two leaders agreedin principle enforce ceasefire southwestern syria close border jordan golan heights illegally occupied israel since 1967 subsequently russian us jordanian experts agreed sign mou create deescalation zone syrian areas quneitra deraa suweida according reports ceasefire came effect 0900 hrs gmt july 9 holding far also appears statements made trumpduring recent visit paris goal regime change syria given west however would unwise take statements face value neocons hillary clinton john mccain acolytes still baying assads blood proof pudding eating wait watch would prudent approach adopt matter meanwhile life gradually returning normal doha political earthquake june 5 recent report entitled tiny qatar living large despite month long arab siege washington post indicated little sign shortages hardship country grocery stores restocked food alternative supply chains import fresh produce etc operational mainly iran turkey july 12 165 holstein dairy cows arrived doha air germany first consignment 4000 cattle qatar wants import meet 30 countrys dairy requirements new qatari dairy brand introduced qatars stock exchange stabilised dropping around 10 immediately following saudi sanctions countrys sovereign wealth fund around 350 billion help exploiting financial economic opportunities around world absorbing shocks caused blockade qatar simply wealthyto treated shabbily even trade travel bans qatars economy suffer significant damage according experts personal hardships involving separation family members however continue take time resolve developments suggest qatar preparing long haul new realignments emerging region involving iran turkey russia likely saudiqatar rift continue months years fragmenting middle east outsiders get opportunities fish troubled waters regional instability grow long term saudis allies perhaps stand lose qatar terms lost business opportunities tourism foreign direct investment saudi hegemony gcc likely eroded kuwait oman shunned qatar along iran turkey could emerge second power centre gulf saudi crown prince could imagined outcome tried isolate iran punish qatar june 5 2017 vagaries international politics one wrong move law unintended consequences kicks niraj srivastava former ambassador india served saudi arabia syria libya united states among countries read trump news at160 21st century wire trump files support our160work subscribing amp becoming member160 21wiretv | 1,345 |
<p>Still from “The Young Marx.”</p>
<p>I’ve been waiting for this film since I first heard about it a year or so ago. Forget your&#160;preconceived&#160;notions, cold war paranoia or the USSR. This movie takes place in the 1840s, long before any of the later revolutions or rise of socialist governments. This film might better have been called “Young Marx &amp; Engels.” I’m glad to see attention paid to Frederick Engels, a brilliant thinker and a clear writer. Where Marx was a historian, number-crunching economist and systems analyst, Engels was possibly the first modern sociologist. Both researched and described in detail the inner workings, successes and basic problems with the then new economic system of capitalism. Both were also keenly aware of the oppression and the alienation from basic humanity of those driven off the land and into dangerous and monotonous factory work which impoverished workers spiritually as well as economically while enriching and empowering a rising class of manufacturers and later, paper shuffling, parasitic market gamblers.</p>
<p>This film was produced by Raoul Peck who also brilliantly produced. “I Am Not Your Negro” based on James Baldwin’s unfinished manuscripts regarding the civil rights struggle. About “The Young Marx,” Peck states,</p>
<p>The project was initiated more than 10 years ago, at almost the same time as I started&#160;I Am Not Your Negro. For me, it was my responsibility as a filmmaker, with what I have seen happening around me, with the world today. This is a film about the evolution of ideas – not only of ideas, but of those specific ideas of Marx and Engels. And showing the contradictions of the socialist movement itself at its birth, explaining scientific socialism to a wider public, in contrast to populism, to mysticism, to utopianism. When I say that I wanted to stick to the reality, that means not to do the usual biopic, but rather to tell the story of what happened.&#160;We didn’t want to go to the books that summarize what Marxism is. We’re going to go to the correspondence, the same way I did for [James] Baldwin, using his words – in this case using the correspondence between Marx, Engels, Jenny and their friends. Eighty percent of the material is from that correspondence.&#160;It was very important to show the actual relationship, the partnership of Marx and Engels as it took shape.</p>
<p>I find Peck’s efforts and goals admirable, though in seeing the film I felt there were some shortcomings. It seemed more of a drama-driven biopic than I would have liked, but then that is what theatergoers want.&#160;Given my own philosophical bent, I was hoping for more in-depth conversations between the characters regarding the meat of the concepts at hand. Though there were snippets, I found it inadequate, as most viewers have little or no familiarity with these concepts and are likely to miss them. There are attempts to show that Marx raised the socialist struggle beyond utopianism but they are insufficient, references to Engel’s book “The Condition of the Working Class in England” aside,&#160;in showing the scientific basis related to the analysis of capitalism beyond the emotional reaction to conditions. In this regard, while this film is hardly a crash course in Marxism, it will hopefully inspire interest and further reading. I would suggest Marx’s essays, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,” “The Civil War in France” and, of course, “Capital.”</p>
<p>Though Marx’s interactions with and criticism of the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon are important, there were not, in my opinion, sufficient descriptions of the concepts of the labor-basis of value and of profits derived from the surplus value created, or of the nature or private property as opposed to personal property. Private property in this context refers to factories, mines and mills where value is produced socially by many with profits hoarded by a few owners. I would also like to have seen more on the alienation and dehumanization of the industrial productive model under the near serfdom of this system.</p>
<p>I was glad to see the emphasis on Engels but the attempt to humanize and to dramatize, sadly took precedent over the meat of Marx &amp; Engels’ message &amp; achievements.&#160;The film begins with the image of poor people scavenging for wood, being unmercifully attacked and slaughtered by land owners. This was based on historic reality in Germany at the time. It proceeds to Marx getting fired from the Rheinische Zeitung newspaper in Cologne, as it is getting raided by police. This is the run-up to the failed German revolution of 1848 from which many Germans emigrated to our own country. Marx moves to Brussels.</p>
<p>The film proceeds to the Ermen &amp; Engels cotton mill in Manchester England, owned by the father of Frederick Engels. This is an accurate portrayal in which angry workers, some fingerless from injuries on the job, are cruelly confronted for daring to complain by his father. A beautiful rebellious woman played by Hannah Steele is fired. The younger Engels, witnessing the terrible conditions sympathizes with the employees. He goes to the slums were workers live to learn more and proceeds to write his famous aforementioned book. He marries the rebellions woman who continues to play an important role in the process of philosophical development, as does Jenny Marx. Another great book by Engels that I highly recommend, not mentioned in this film, is “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.”</p>
<p>There is a satisfying scene where Engels introduces Marx to a London industrialist and friend of his father. This becomes a critical conversation regarding the use of child labor in the mills and the nature of competition, labor costs and profits. The disapproval Engels gets from his industrialist father over his writing and association with Marx is an ongoing theme as are political and economic difficulties suffered by Marx and his wife Jenny as they are pushed from country to country with a growing family.</p>
<p>The threats Engels faces down and the exiles and arrests Marx and other socialist thinkers face reflects the fear of the moneyed ruling class even today. As the Paris Commune and the initial response and invasion of the early USSR demonstrate, nothing has the power to&#160;unite erstwhile enemies than the notion that they are not necessary – that people can govern ourselves without them. This has remained true of the corporate ruling class. We have continued to see anti-socialist demonization and the crushing of populist regimes ever since. As an old labor song says, “you ain’t done nothin’ if you ain’t been called a red.”</p>
<p>Marx finally settles in London where he and Engels join a utopian socialist group called “The League of the Just” whose motto is “All Men are Brothers.” They take it over, changing it to the “Communist League” with the new motto “Workers of All Countries Unite.” Much of the rest of the film has to do with the writing of the famous Communist Manifesto. It is here is where more essential concepts come through.</p>
<p>The great achievement of Marx and Engels that doesn’t come through adequately in this film is their contribution in moving socialism from utopian idealism and anarchist thought to scientific method, based on solid analysis of economics, history and social reality. This is applied philosophy in the public interest — a tool never meant to be a dogma. It is about the nature of work, of property and of society with the goal of returning us to productive work that feeds our spiritual needs and of sharing in the gains of our common labor rather than being disposable serfs working for a pittance to further enrich a few billionaires. It is about our gaining democratic ownership of the workplace and of society. It has always been at root, about building participatory democracy – a humane society where everyone is able to fulfill their potential. This comes through to a degree, but it could have been clearer.</p>
<p>This film takes place in the 1840s and we live today in a very different world, but the beast that is capitalism has not changed its spots. Much of the description of capitalism in the original Manifesto remains accurate today. Capital indeed has knocked down national barriers, becoming in essence a country of its own without borders. The wealthiest today are connected inseparably in global knots of commerce and entangled offshore accounts while most of us continue to work our lives away with little if any real control or democratic voice. We are slaves to mortgages, rents, utilities, bosses and the debt we accrue just to survive – if we are lucky. The parliaments and congresses of capitalist countries can still be described as they were in the 19&#160;th&#160;century, acting as the unofficial board of directors of major industries.</p>
<p>The film ends by connecting to our time with flashes of modern struggles like Occupy, World Bank protests and others with the background of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” At first I thought Communist anthem “The International” would have been more appropriate but in truth, without an understanding of the system in which we live, without a knowledge of the historic and continuing struggles of working people, without an understanding of class, of militant solidarity and organization – without the tool of Marxist analysis, we are all, each and every one of us, on our own, with no direction home, a complete unknown — like a rolling stone.</p>
<p>Al Markowitz is an activist, poet and author of <a href="" type="internal">BALK!</a> and other collections, publisher of the <a href="http://www.partisanpress.org/" type="external">Blue Collar Review</a>, Journal of Progressive Working Class Literature, and a professional writer.</p> | true | 4 | still young marx ive waiting film since first heard year ago forget your160preconceived160notions cold war paranoia ussr movie takes place 1840s long later revolutions rise socialist governments film might better called young marx amp engels im glad see attention paid frederick engels brilliant thinker clear writer marx historian numbercrunching economist systems analyst engels possibly first modern sociologist researched described detail inner workings successes basic problems new economic system capitalism also keenly aware oppression alienation basic humanity driven land dangerous monotonous factory work impoverished workers spiritually well economically enriching empowering rising class manufacturers later paper shuffling parasitic market gamblers film produced raoul peck also brilliantly produced negro based james baldwins unfinished manuscripts regarding civil rights struggle young marx peck states project initiated 10 years ago almost time started160i negro responsibility filmmaker seen happening around world today film evolution ideas ideas specific ideas marx engels showing contradictions socialist movement birth explaining scientific socialism wider public contrast populism mysticism utopianism say wanted stick reality means usual biopic rather tell story happened160we didnt want go books summarize marxism going go correspondence way james baldwin using words case using correspondence marx engels jenny friends eighty percent material correspondence160it important show actual relationship partnership marx engels took shape find pecks efforts goals admirable though seeing film felt shortcomings seemed dramadriven biopic would liked theatergoers want160given philosophical bent hoping indepth conversations characters regarding meat concepts hand though snippets found inadequate viewers little familiarity concepts likely miss attempts show marx raised socialist struggle beyond utopianism insufficient references engels book condition working class england aside160in showing scientific basis related analysis capitalism beyond emotional reaction conditions regard film hardly crash course marxism hopefully inspire interest reading would suggest marxs essays eighteenth brumaire louis napoleon civil war france course capital though marxs interactions criticism french anarchist pierrejoseph proudhon important opinion sufficient descriptions concepts laborbasis value profits derived surplus value created nature private property opposed personal property private property context refers factories mines mills value produced socially many profits hoarded owners would also like seen alienation dehumanization industrial productive model near serfdom system glad see emphasis engels attempt humanize dramatize sadly took precedent meat marx amp engels message amp achievements160the film begins image poor people scavenging wood unmercifully attacked slaughtered land owners based historic reality germany time proceeds marx getting fired rheinische zeitung newspaper cologne getting raided police runup failed german revolution 1848 many germans emigrated country marx moves brussels film proceeds ermen amp engels cotton mill manchester england owned father frederick engels accurate portrayal angry workers fingerless injuries job cruelly confronted daring complain father beautiful rebellious woman played hannah steele fired younger engels witnessing terrible conditions sympathizes employees goes slums workers live learn proceeds write famous aforementioned book marries rebellions woman continues play important role process philosophical development jenny marx another great book engels highly recommend mentioned film origin family private property state satisfying scene engels introduces marx london industrialist friend father becomes critical conversation regarding use child labor mills nature competition labor costs profits disapproval engels gets industrialist father writing association marx ongoing theme political economic difficulties suffered marx wife jenny pushed country country growing family threats engels faces exiles arrests marx socialist thinkers face reflects fear moneyed ruling class even today paris commune initial response invasion early ussr demonstrate nothing power to160unite erstwhile enemies notion necessary people govern without remained true corporate ruling class continued see antisocialist demonization crushing populist regimes ever since old labor song says aint done nothin aint called red marx finally settles london engels join utopian socialist group called league whose motto men brothers take changing communist league new motto workers countries unite much rest film writing famous communist manifesto essential concepts come great achievement marx engels doesnt come adequately film contribution moving socialism utopian idealism anarchist thought scientific method based solid analysis economics history social reality applied philosophy public interest tool never meant dogma nature work property society goal returning us productive work feeds spiritual needs sharing gains common labor rather disposable serfs working pittance enrich billionaires gaining democratic ownership workplace society always root building participatory democracy humane society everyone able fulfill potential comes degree could clearer film takes place 1840s live today different world beast capitalism changed spots much description capitalism original manifesto remains accurate today capital indeed knocked national barriers becoming essence country without borders wealthiest today connected inseparably global knots commerce entangled offshore accounts us continue work lives away little real control democratic voice slaves mortgages rents utilities bosses debt accrue survive lucky parliaments congresses capitalist countries still described 19160th160century acting unofficial board directors major industries film ends connecting time flashes modern struggles like occupy world bank protests others background bob dylans like rolling stone first thought communist anthem international would appropriate truth without understanding system live without knowledge historic continuing struggles working people without understanding class militant solidarity organization without tool marxist analysis every one us direction home complete unknown like rolling stone al markowitz activist poet author balk collections publisher blue collar review journal progressive working class literature professional writer | 831 |
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<p>Barack Obama signing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act at the White House in March 2010. ( <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Obama_signs_health_care-20100323.jpg" type="external">Wikimedia Commons</a>)</p>
<p>In this week’s episode of “ <a href="https://www.kcrw.com/news-culture/shows/scheer-intelligence/dr-paul-song-obamacare-is-not-the-progressive-answer" type="external">Scheer Intelligence</a>,” Truthdig Editor in Chief <a href="" type="internal">Robert Scheer</a> interviews Dr. Paul Song, a radiation oncologist and an outspoken critic of the current U.S. health-care system. Read the full transcript of the conversation below.</p>
<p />
<p>Song argues that the <a href="" type="internal">Affordable Care Act</a> (ACA), also known as Obamacare, does not go far enough in insuring Americans and keeping health-care costs down.</p>
<p>“It did do a tremendous amount of good, but we need to take one step back to realize that there were 3,300 registered health care lobbyists for the 535 members of Congress, and more was spent in the run-up to the Affordable Care Act than what was spent on the Bush-Kerry election,” Song explains. “That’s why large parts of the Affordable Care Act look like [they were] written by the private insurance industry or the pharmaceutical industry.”</p>
<p>Song, who supported Bernie Sanders during the 2016 presidential election, explains how he has seen many patients go bankrupt because of high health-care costs under the “corporate welfare” of the ACA. He adds that it’s “encouraging” that many senators now support <a href="" type="internal">Medicare-for-all legislation</a>.</p>
<p>“The insurance industry hires so many people with the explicit mandate to deny people care,” Song tells Scheer. “If we were able to take that element out, and basically just have one universal payer that handled all the claims — but with the idea that they’re not here to make profit, they’re here to pay for correct treatment … that type of system would actually increase coverage for everyone.”</p>
<p>Listen to the full conversation above, and listen to past editions of “Scheer Intelligence” <a href="https://www.kcrw.com/news-culture/shows/scheer-intelligence" type="external">here</a>.</p>
<p>Full transcript:</p>
<p>Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes from my guests, I hasten to add. In this case, it’s Dr. Paul Song, an oncologist of 20 years’ experience, radiation oncologist. But probably best known to listeners here as somebody who has been an advocate for a robust public option in health care, was a key adviser to Bernie Sanders, spoke often during his campaign on the need for a stronger system of control of prices and benefit for consumers, and what was developing under the Affordable Care Act.</p>
<p>But the reason I wanted to have you come in here is that everyone I know is saying it’s just horrible that the Affordable Care Act is actually being revisited and maybe wrecked, and so forth. And I, while I feel it’s an improvement–we took in people who had preexisting conditions, and more aid to poorer people who didn’t quite qualify for Medicaid, and so forth–but it seems to me that there’s also an exaggeration of the benefit of this plan. And so I read a piece that you wrote called “The Real Healthcare Debate Democrats Should Be Having.” And I thought it was the best single thing I’ve read on this whole issue.</p>
<p>And let me just say something, every once in a while in these interviews and in other things I do, I run into trouble; I say I would love to be on Medicare, all the doctors I know want me to be on Medicare, but unfortunately I still teach full time and I have the university health care. So I can use Medicare, I guess, when I go into the hospital, but the rest of the time I can’t. And I’m one of those people who’s paying the $800 for, you know, particular tests, of my portion, and hit with these big bills and everything. And so you know, I’m looking forward to when I can be.</p>
<p>So when I read your proposal, basically Medicare for all, but certainly they could have lowered the age of eligibility for Medicare as a start, if they wanted to be more pragmatic. I thought, this guy is right on target, and Bernie Sanders has now reissued some of that appeal. And so just to summarize for listeners what’s the objection of folks like myself and I guess Dr. Song, is that there is no cost control built into the Affordable Care Act, and that’s why it’s unpopular with so many people. You know, the Republicans would not be calling for repeal if the thing was wildly popular. They don’t touch Social Security and they don’t touch Medicare. So why don’t we begin there?</p>
<p>Paul Song: Well, thanks for having me on, and that’s a really great introduction to a large part of the dilemma in our health care and the Affordable Care Act. And as you mentioned, it did do a tremendous amount of good, but we need to take one step back to realize that there were 3,300 registered health care lobbyists for the 535 members of Congress, and more was spent in the run-up to the Affordable Care Act than what was spent on the Bush-Kerry election. And that’s why large parts of the Affordable Care Act look like it was written by the private insurance industry or the pharmaceutical industry.</p>
<p>Most notably, there’s no insurance rate regulation, so that’s where, as you mention, premiums have continued to climb. Here in the state of California just this last year, the exchange Covered California, premiums went up three times as much as they did the prior several years before that. There’s no prescription drug pricing controls. So in terms of how people who may have benefited by the Affordable Care Act still feel the pain on a daily basis, it’s when you go to fill your prescriptions.</p>
<p>You know, one out of 10 seniors can’t afford to buy the medications they’re prescribed, because they are so expensive. So there are a lot of real, inherent problems, and that was where the Republicans rightfully seized upon that. Unfortunately, the solutions that they had would have made things worse. But it doesn’t take away from the fact that the Affordable Care Act did fall short in many regards, despite the good that it did. The other thing I would say is, 29 million Americans still remain uninsured in the United States, even if the Republicans don’t touch the Affordable Care Act at all.</p>
<p>Here we have over 3 million in California, of which 250,000 are kids. The other thing that’s really important to recognize is that, you know, having insurance–so even though 20 million people gained insurance under the Affordable Care Act, doesn’t mean necessarily that that was having great access to care. Because one-third of all those people that got insurance under the Affordable Care Act have what we call underinsurance. Meaning that the copays or deductibles are so expensive that it sort of discourages them from seeking care. These Bronze Plans, which I think are kind of a scam, which are the cheapest plan that you can purchase under the Affordable Care Act–they have a $6,500 deductible before the insurance starts to kick in.</p>
<p>Most people are barely struggling to pay the premium to buy the Bronze Plan, but then when they have to realize that the first $6,500 of any care that they go to get has to come out of their own pocket, they can’t afford that. So we’ve seen, still, continued medical-related bankruptcies, which is the number one cause of bankruptcies here in the United States; we’ve seen people who, quote, got coverage, but they don’t go to see a doctor because they just can’t afford it. And now we’re seeing, even after the Affordable Care Act, more people having trouble paying their premiums each month than prior to the Affordable Care Act.</p>
<p>So as I say, it’s done some good, but I really look back on this and I think part of the reason the Republicans kind of punted on this–privately, they realize this was a Republican plan. Remember, this was instituted in Massachusetts by Governor [Mitt] Romney; before that, the individual mandate was initially proposed by Richard Nixon as sort of a foil to Ted Kennedy’s universal health care plan many, many years ago. This idea of tax credits and personal responsibility, quote, the individual mandate. But now what’s happened is because, again, it was proposed by a Democrat or even, I would even go as far to say, an African-American, they couldn’t get behind it.</p>
<p>RS: Well, and one of the points you’ve made is that when he was a state senator, before he was in Congress, Barack Obama said he was in favor of a public option. And it’s interesting, you mention Ted Kennedy; I knew Ted Kennedy quite well, and interviewed him frequently. And he was very much devoted to having something like the system you have in most advanced countries. And he knew you could not leave it up to the tender mercy of the insurance companies and the pharmaceutical companies; he understood the lobbying.</p>
<p>And the statement that got you into trouble when you were a key adviser to Bernie Sanders is when you were referring–they said you were referring to Hillary Clinton, but you really were referring, in the plural, to the Democratic Party, to many people in the Congress. And you said “whores for”–I forget the sentence–</p>
<p>PS: So, well first of all, I just want to point out that I was not a key adviser to Senator Sanders; I was a surrogate for the campaign, but not for, I was not actively advising him. But what I said was, I used the unfortunate term “corporate Democratic whores.”</p>
<p>RS: OK. So let me, I know, I’ve read your apology and so forth. So I think, you know, “corporate whores” is a very good description for Republicans and Democrats who’ve prevented us from having sensible health care. And to the degree that Hillary Clinton–not because she’s a woman, but because she’s one of those Democrats who played up to corporate power, whether it’s on banking deregulation or on the health care plan she devised–the whole emphasis was to have win-win. Get the big, rich companies, the big powerful interests to be on your side; get the lobbyists on your side. And you go to them and say, what can you live with.</p>
<p>Well, what they can live with is not necessarily what ordinary people can live with. And to my mind, the key thing in Trump being able to get away with denouncing this plan–if in fact it had been a better plan, they wouldn’t be able to get away with denouncing it. American people want sensible health care. And what Obamacare did, as far as I can see, is give it a bad name–for many people, not for everybody; it works out well for people who have preexisting conditions and so forth. But I think the key thing here is something you’ve written about and spoken about very eloquently; Democrats and Republicans both let the corporate lobbyists write these bills. And I want to get to one question that’s always raised–well, it was a start, it was a start. Well, if we had lowered Medicare eligibility, that would have been a big start.</p>
<p>Let’s say you lowered it by five years, OK, and see if it works. I think it would become like Medicare itself or like Social Security; people would say, hey, I want that, lower it even more. OK? Because you make a very important point that is often missed in the debate. You say, it’s not a question of the free market versus a government monopoly or something. There is no free market, because there’s concentration of ownership in the medical insurance industry, and you’re going to end up with very few players, so it’s going to be a tightly–it’s the old cartel model–tightly concentrated ownership. And then the consumers have to deal with that, and hopefully government is a bit on their side; but government just opted out of controlling price, controlling costs.</p>
<p>So the way you’ve posted it in speeches that I’ve heard by you, you say look, it’s concentrated power; the question is, is government preferable, where at least we get to throw them out of office and vote for them–isn’t that better, which is what we have with Medicare–or do you want to have the insurance companies have this concentrated power. Isn’t it–and so, I mean, Bernie Sanders seems to get that, right?</p>
<p>PS: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>RS: And that’s what Ted Kennedy understood. Did you have any pushback from Senator Sanders on this stuff?</p>
<p>PS: No, Senator Sanders is actually championing, now, reintroducing a Medicare-for-all bill in the Senate. As you know, John Conyers has been introducing a bill in the House, HR-676, for probably the last 20-plus years. It’s encouraging to know that this year there are more sponsors in the House than there have ever been, which is a Medicare-for-all bill. As you mentioned, Medicare, despite the fact that it takes care of an older, aging population that has more preexisting conditions, most of the people are on numerous medications, still is much more cost effective than the private insurance market. Because, again, their interests are aligned with patients’.</p>
<p>The private insurance industry, you know, they only make money by denying care. So one of the things that I say about the Affordable Care Act, it wasn’t really welfare for people to buy health care; it was corporate welfare. It was basically using tax dollars to give to people to mandate that they buy a product for a for-profit entity that only makes money by denying care. Had we been able to eliminate the middleman or the insurers from this, that’s where the real cost savings of a universal health care system would have happened. By doing that, you know, the insurance industry spends so much money hiring people with the explicit mandate to deny care. That’s why we have this explosion of administrators and people on the phone who make your life, your physician’s life, your hospital’s life, miserable in terms of denying care; even the pharmacies that you go to fill your prescriptions, oh, they won’t cover this one. That is all designed to maximize their profits.</p>
<p>And in doing so, that takes about 25 to 30 cents of every health care dollar away from actual patient care, that is going to basically fight to just generate more profit for themselves. If we were able to take that element out and basically just have one universal payer that handled all the claims–but with the idea that they’re not here to make profit, they’re here to pay for correct treatment. And whatever treatment that is paid for, that money–or saved–that money left over is basically designed to take care of more people. That type of system would actually increase coverage for everyone. You mentioned Medicare; right now Medicare only covers 80 percent of outpatient services, but this would cover everyone, do away with copays and deductibles; it would help, allow us to take care of our undocumented brothers and sisters as well as everyone else. Because one way or another, we pay for that.</p>
<p>RS: You know, this whole show that I do here, this is to find American originals. And as I usually say, the crazy-quilt of immigration and different religions, ethnicities, produces interesting people. So to my mind, you’re one of the most interesting doctors we have in this country, not for your medical research because I don’t know anything about it, or your practice, but for [being] willing to stand up and challenge, you know, the profit model of the industry. So, take me through your own personal journey in this regard.</p>
<p>PS: So my mom actually came as a refugee to the Korean War. Her sister was a student here that was speaking out, because she was well-spoken in English and she was one of the few Koreans that was living here. And when she was speaking in New York to various women’s organizations and churches, people said well, what about your family? And [she] said oh, my sister is stuck in a refugee camp in Busan. And somehow some women got together and raised enough money to have her come to the United States. Fast forward, she graduated from Columbia Teachers College and during her last year, she was working as a student teacher in Harlem. And the parents in that community really took to my mom, and they went to the director, who at the time was Shirley Chisholm, before Shirley Chisholm ran for Congress. And they said, we would really like Grace Kim to become a teacher here after she graduates. So Ms. Chisholm went to my mom and said, the parents really love you; would you consider working in Harlem?</p>
<p>So here’s my mom, a Korean immigrant, about to lose her student visa to go back, and my mom said sure. So Ms. Chisholm wrote all the paperwork to get my mom her green card, and my mom became a teacher at this preschool in Harlem. When Ms. Chisholm decided to run for Congress, she asked my mom to consider a job in Newark; Newark, New Jersey, was looking for–Head Start was just really developing, and they were looking for their first educational director. And lo and behold, Ms. Chisholm said, I think you’re ready; I’ve been training you. And then my mom became the director. From that, my mom used to take my sister and I to the Newark preschool system during our breaks in summers, because she really wanted us to interact with all kids. And she also wanted us to see that, you know, the only difference between those kids and my sister and I were that we had, we were luckier to have more things, sometimes have two parents versus one, but that we were no different than those kids. And that’s really sort of what was embedded in us.</p>
<p>The other thing is, with my grandfather, so he fought the fight against the Japanese occupation, when Korea was under the Japanese occupation. And then, very much like we installed Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, the U.S. government installed a very corrupt person in Korea, after Korea gained its independence, Syngman Rhee. And Syngman Rhee was very much like Karzai, very–consolidation of power, enrichment for his friends and family, but very corrupt. And ultimately there was a student uprising, and then they had the first democratic elections. And my grandfather became the first elected mayor of Seoul, popularly elected mayor of Seoul. Shortly after that, there was a military coup d’etat and he fought for democracy up until his death. So we were exiled; we were, the reason I was actually born in the United States was because my family wasn’t allowed to go back to Korea until 1992.</p>
<p>RS: [omission] Well, we’re back with my guest, Dr. Paul Song, a radiologist, oncologist and a leading advocate for health care reform who was a surrogate for Bernie Sanders during the campaign. Why were undocumented people left out of a major health care initiative, since the well-being of undocumented people living among us is a threat or a concern, right, to the rest of us? We’ve had periodic scandals–I remember at the L.A. Times that we had a headline, leprosy spreading because we have refugees bringing it in. I called Shirley Fannon here, who was the medical director, and I said, is this really true? And she said, no! And it turns out [laughs] you don’t spread leprosy that way; this is all phony. It was the banner headline in the L.A. Times.</p>
<p>But they made a good point: if undocumented people are cooking your food, taking your children to school, raising them, in your home cleaning and so forth, don’t you want them to have health care? And did it come up at all in the proposal for the Affordable–?</p>
<p>PS: So that’s what’s the most scandalous part, to me, about the Affordable Care Act, is that the Democrats–remember, when they started this they had a clear supermajority; Ted Kennedy was still alive. They only lost that when Ted Kennedy–Max Baucus dragged this on so long that Ted Kennedy succumbed to his brain tumor. But they–</p>
<p>RS: And Max Baucus is one of those people you would call a corporate whore, who really blocked any sensible health care and took a lot of money.</p>
<p>PS: Absolutely, he took the most money from pharma and the health insurance industry in the run-up to the Affordable Care Act; he was head of the Senate Finance Committee. But what people need to realize is, you know, Republicans are clear in terms of what they’re going to say and do, right? They were against the expansion of health care; they were against undocumented people gaining coverage; that was the whole [Rep.] Joe Wilson [yelling] “You lie” to President Obama in the State of the Union. But we didn’t need one Republican vote. If we had gone through this and said, we are going to cover our undocumented brothers and sisters, it could have been done. But that was the only part of the Affordable Care Act where Democrats and Republicans agreed, which was to exclude our undocumented brothers and sisters.</p>
<p>And here’s the insidious part to that: one way or another, we are paying for their health care. When you go to Cedars-Sinai or any of the hospitals, and they charge a ridiculous amount of money for an appendectomy, maybe twice as much as what it really costs, they justify it in terms of, well, we have to charge more so we can cover our uncompensated care. And that’s why all of us have this hidden tax, in terms of higher premiums, higher costs, because we’re excluding certain people from our health care system. So when an undocumented person does use our emergency rooms, obviously many times they can’t pay for that, and then we end up–meaning those of us who have insurance–subsidizing that in terms of higher premiums or higher hospital charges.</p>
<p>RS: And at the point when they’re most expensive, because if they’d had any of the preventive care, or any of the earlier treatment, it would be much less costly.</p>
<p>PS: Absolutely. And here’s the other part that I think has completely misled the public, is that the undocumented population are all takers–they actually, a lot of them pay taxes; they just don’t realize the benefits of that, right? They have to–wages–when they work for a company and they get their payments, Social Security tax is taken out of there; Medicare tax–even though they cannot qualify for those things, they’re taken out of it. So it’s estimated that, you know, the billions of dollars that the undocumented community pays in taxes here in the state of California, and then nationwide–they are entitled to health care as much as anyone else.</p>
<p>RS: I want to talk about the medical profession. And you’ve spent your life as a good guy, OK, and trying to make sense. And all the doctors I know–I once spoke for Physicians for Social Responsibility; I went around the country, their international group won the Nobel Prize; marvelous people, the doctors who picked me up at the airport or introduced me, great people. And then I wondered, where–but they were so exceptional–I wondered, where were the other doctors? You know? And what’s going on here? You know, these people–and this includes the professionals in the insurance companies, and the pharmaceutical, and so on–they know the thing doesn’t work, the current system. Even with the Affordable Care Act, what is the percentage of our GDP which we pay for medical?</p>
<p>PS: About 18 percent.</p>
<p>RS: Yeah. That’s enormous. And we’re not getting this quality service that everybody agrees we need. And so where are your colleagues? OK, we understand you; you’re the oddball Korean who, you know, OK, had a history of human rights struggle, and you’re the exception. But what do they teach in medical school? Who are these people? Why do they go with the lobbyists? Why–I mean, what’s going on?</p>
<p>PS: So I will say this: that I am very encouraged now by the new wave of physicians that are going into medical school and coming out of medical school. A lot of them think far more than about themselves. I will say when I was in medical school some 30 years ago, it was a lot more, it was a time when Reagan was president and some people were going into medicine because they felt it was a lucrative field. Nowadays, the people that are going into medicine, you really have to want to go into medical school and into medicine for the right reasons. It’s $70,000 a year tuition; sometimes even more, and then the reimbursements are such, and the bureaucracy and all the headaches, so it’s something you really have to want to do. So I’m very encouraged.</p>
<p>When I go and speak to medical students throughout the state of California or elsewhere, a lot of them are all big, already, Medicare-for-all activists. Because they don’t, they’ve never practiced in a system when it was, quote, the good old days, when they could charge whatever they wanted, have nobody telling them what they could do. But that’s what’s changed, certainly, that I think, the people that are going into medical school now. The older population, a lot of them practiced at a time when the doctors were king. That they could do anything without any accountability. And that was really one of the reasons that led to the HMO movement here in California, is you had doctors, unfortunately, who were milking the system and, you know, extracting every bit of profit out of it.</p>
<p>So I think doctors have [had] as much of a blame in the health care woes as anyone else for a period of time. Now I think the insurance industry has become all too powerful, and really dominating any sort of discussion in the way patients are treated. But I would say in the run-up to the HMO movement, particularly here in California, you had a lot of doctors that were being quite excessive. I think that population is bitter and angry and really in it for themselves, but now you have this newer wave.</p>
<p>RS: When you say “in [it for] yourself”–I mean, you’re a radiation oncologist, and you’ve talked about cancer patients and so forth who go bankrupt trying to stay alive. And so don’t these people have a heart, I mean, these other doctors? I mean, don’t they see that, don’t they know that there are people suffering, and their patients? Who are these people?</p>
<p>PS: I wonder. Because I wonder how you can practice for a long period of time and become numb or blind to that, or just, you don’t care. Because what it came, what happened to me was, you know, over the years of taking care of patients, you get to know these patients really, really well. And particularly those patients that have long, year-long battles with cancer, and you see each time the emotional toll, the physical toll, but then you see the economic toll and you say, wait–you have insurance, why are you going bankrupt?</p>
<p>You can’t then go home and just get on with your life; it was too upsetting to me to see that. So I personally experienced it, and that was my epiphany, to see my own patients that I had been fighting and caring for. And I think it goes against our whole Hippocratic oath, which is to really look out for our patients, do no harm, but also not allow our patients to participate in a system that is mischievous or deleterious. And I think our system truly is all those things. So for those doctors who think the system is fine, or believe in more privatization and more free market–um, I think that’s political ideology that is blinding what’s really happening in the real world.</p>
<p>RS: So in terms of this real world, we don’t know what’s going to happen with–I mean, here’s a guy, Trump, who got elected saying he was going to get rid of this thing. However, cooler heads prevailed, even in Republican Party and maybe around Trump, and said, you’ve got to replace it with something. Is this an opportunity, in a way? I mean, you know, clearly there’s a message for the Democrats who think Obamacare has just been the greatest, and that’s if you can’t control costs, you’re not going to have the people with you. That–I don’t know why that was lost; maybe some people have a lot of income and they don’t worry about it. But I mean, I, you know, I’m an older guy, so I’m in a lot of these places getting health care. [Laughs] I’ve had a few operations and so forth.</p>
<p>I hear a lot of talk, and most people I run into who, you know, are on private health plans or currently now on Affordable, they talk about those deductibles. And I keep getting back to that point: Obamacare would not be, or the Affordable Care Act would not be, in trouble if it had addressed cost. I think that’s the key thing. So why did someone like Paul Krugman, who people think is a well-intentioned, liberal guy and all that, why does he say–when Bernie Sanders came out for, you know, very into Medicare for all, why did he denounce it as unrealistic?</p>
<p>PS: Well, I think there are two arguments. Ah, you know, and I took exception to Krugman’s statements, too. There’s the political reality, which I get; you know, with a Republican Congress and Senate–</p>
<p>RS: Well, let me ask you, then; now, why is that true? Because, for instance, right now you have to be, you know, of a certain age to get Medicare. So you’re going to tell me that if they had lowered that by five years that that would be so difficult politically? You’d suddenly hear from a lot of people who said, that’s good–and everybody should remember, by the way–you know, again, I had a birthday yesterday. I’m now 81, full confession, I’m working like a dog at five different jobs including this one, teaching full time and everything else. But as I point out to my children and even my grandchildren, if I didn’t, you know, have health care, if I didn’t–I’d be a burden on you. Hopefully you’d still care about me, right?</p>
<p>So you know, my children would be–they wouldn’t have so much disposable income. They would be worried, how do you keep grandpa alive, OK? So Social Security–I remember this, because I took care of my mother and my father; they were working-class people. If they didn’t have Social Security, if they didn’t have some kind of medical coverage coming in, I remember in my father’s case, you know, I would think–well, where would I be? You know? I couldn’t have gone to graduate school, I couldn’t have done any–or I could have been heartless and said, OK, you know, go live in some, I don’t know where, skid row or something. So I just don’t get why Medicare for all is not a practical–how can they just dismiss it?</p>
<p>PS: What the facts show–and I think every one shows Medicare for all is much more efficient; in the countries that are doing it, there’s proof that it works–</p>
<p>RS: What countries are doing it?</p>
<p>PS: So, Canada has a Medicare-for-all system; Korea has a Medicare-for-all system; you know, more of the other countries like Denmark and the U.K. have socialized medicine, where it’s not just [that] the government runs the insurance aspect, but they own the hospitals and employ the doctors and such. But the idea is that in all of those countries, no one ever goes bankrupt because they get sick. Here, you know, the medical-related bankruptcies are the number one cause of bankruptcies, and two-thirds of the people that go bankrupt due to an illness actually have insurance. So how is that supposed to happen when you have–insurance is supposed to protect us, right, from catastrophic illnesses and issues and expenses. But that doesn’t, that doesn’t occur.</p>
<p>So getting back to the argument, I think that, so if you try to argue just the nuts and bolts of single-payer, there is no defense that you can say that it’s not better. That’s where I was saying with Krugman, I think if he has any legitimate argument, it may be that the political will is not there. And I will say, the political will is not there because it gets back to the whole corporatist agenda. You have people on both sides of the aisle that are beholden to the pharmaceutical industry, insurance industry. You know, when Senator Sanders recently introduced an amendment to allow reimportation of drugs from Canada, 12 Republicans actually voted in favor of that, but 13 Democrats voted no. And those 13 Democrats were the highest group of people that receive money from the pharmaceutical industry. So it gets back to the idea that you have Democrats and Republicans, and then you have corporatists that will block any meaningful legislation.</p>
<p>RS: Well, I want to thank you for being with us, Dr. Paul Song. And [he] brings great authority to the subject, but I think more important, brings great humanity; worry about the patient, worry about the people who don’t get coverage. Our producers have been Josh Scheer and Rebecca Mooney. Our technical staff engineers, brilliant engineers, are Mario Diaz and Kat Yore. This is another edition of Scheer Intelligence, back next week with another informative guest. Thank you.</p>
<p>—Posted by <a href="" type="internal">Emma Niles</a></p> | true | 4 | barack obama signing patient protection affordable care act white house march 2010 wikimedia commons weeks episode scheer intelligence truthdig editor chief robert scheer interviews dr paul song radiation oncologist outspoken critic current us healthcare system read full transcript conversation song argues affordable care act aca also known obamacare go far enough insuring americans keeping healthcare costs tremendous amount good need take one step back realize 3300 registered health care lobbyists 535 members congress spent runup affordable care act spent bushkerry election song explains thats large parts affordable care act look like written private insurance industry pharmaceutical industry song supported bernie sanders 2016 presidential election explains seen many patients go bankrupt high healthcare costs corporate welfare aca adds encouraging many senators support medicareforall legislation insurance industry hires many people explicit mandate deny people care song tells scheer able take element basically one universal payer handled claims idea theyre make profit theyre pay correct treatment type system would actually increase coverage everyone listen full conversation listen past editions scheer intelligence full transcript robert scheer hi robert scheer another edition scheer intelligence intelligence comes guests hasten add case dr paul song oncologist 20 years experience radiation oncologist probably best known listeners somebody advocate robust public option health care key adviser bernie sanders spoke often campaign need stronger system control prices benefit consumers developing affordable care act reason wanted come everyone know saying horrible affordable care act actually revisited maybe wrecked forth feel improvementwe took people preexisting conditions aid poorer people didnt quite qualify medicaid forthbut seems theres also exaggeration benefit plan read piece wrote called real healthcare debate democrats thought best single thing ive read whole issue let say something every interviews things run trouble say would love medicare doctors know want medicare unfortunately still teach full time university health care use medicare guess go hospital rest time cant im one people whos paying 800 know particular tests portion hit big bills everything know im looking forward read proposal basically medicare certainly could lowered age eligibility medicare start wanted pragmatic thought guy right target bernie sanders reissued appeal summarize listeners whats objection folks like guess dr song cost control built affordable care act thats unpopular many people know republicans would calling repeal thing wildly popular dont touch social security dont touch medicare dont begin paul song well thanks thats really great introduction large part dilemma health care affordable care act mentioned tremendous amount good need take one step back realize 3300 registered health care lobbyists 535 members congress spent runup affordable care act spent bushkerry election thats large parts affordable care act look like written private insurance industry pharmaceutical industry notably theres insurance rate regulation thats mention premiums continued climb state california last year exchange covered california premiums went three times much prior several years theres prescription drug pricing controls terms people may benefited affordable care act still feel pain daily basis go fill prescriptions know one 10 seniors cant afford buy medications theyre prescribed expensive lot real inherent problems republicans rightfully seized upon unfortunately solutions would made things worse doesnt take away fact affordable care act fall short many regards despite good thing would say 29 million americans still remain uninsured united states even republicans dont touch affordable care act 3 million california 250000 kids thing thats really important recognize know insuranceso even though 20 million people gained insurance affordable care act doesnt mean necessarily great access care onethird people got insurance affordable care act call underinsurance meaning copays deductibles expensive sort discourages seeking care bronze plans think kind scam cheapest plan purchase affordable care actthey 6500 deductible insurance starts kick people barely struggling pay premium buy bronze plan realize first 6500 care go get come pocket cant afford weve seen still continued medicalrelated bankruptcies number one cause bankruptcies united states weve seen people quote got coverage dont go see doctor cant afford seeing even affordable care act people trouble paying premiums month prior affordable care act say done good really look back think part reason republicans kind punted thisprivately realize republican plan remember instituted massachusetts governor mitt romney individual mandate initially proposed richard nixon sort foil ted kennedys universal health care plan many many years ago idea tax credits personal responsibility quote individual mandate whats happened proposed democrat even would even go far say africanamerican couldnt get behind rs well one points youve made state senator congress barack obama said favor public option interesting mention ted kennedy knew ted kennedy quite well interviewed frequently much devoted something like system advanced countries knew could leave tender mercy insurance companies pharmaceutical companies understood lobbying statement got trouble key adviser bernie sanders referringthey said referring hillary clinton really referring plural democratic party many people congress said whores fori forget sentence ps well first want point key adviser senator sanders surrogate campaign actively advising said used unfortunate term corporate democratic whores rs ok let know ive read apology forth think know corporate whores good description republicans democrats whove prevented us sensible health care degree hillary clintonnot shes woman shes one democrats played corporate power whether banking deregulation health care plan devisedthe whole emphasis winwin get big rich companies big powerful interests side get lobbyists side go say live well live necessarily ordinary people live mind key thing trump able get away denouncing planif fact better plan wouldnt able get away denouncing american people want sensible health care obamacare far see give bad namefor many people everybody works well people preexisting conditions forth think key thing something youve written spoken eloquently democrats republicans let corporate lobbyists write bills want get one question thats always raisedwell start start well lowered medicare eligibility would big start lets say lowered five years ok see works think would become like medicare like social security people would say hey want lower even ok make important point often missed debate say question free market versus government monopoly something free market theres concentration ownership medical insurance industry youre going end players going tightlyits old cartel modeltightly concentrated ownership consumers deal hopefully government bit side government opted controlling price controlling costs way youve posted speeches ive heard say look concentrated power question government preferable least get throw office vote themisnt better medicareor want insurance companies concentrated power isnt itand mean bernie sanders seems get right ps mmhmm rs thats ted kennedy understood pushback senator sanders stuff ps senator sanders actually championing reintroducing medicareforall bill senate know john conyers introducing bill house hr676 probably last 20plus years encouraging know year sponsors house ever medicareforall bill mentioned medicare despite fact takes care older aging population preexisting conditions people numerous medications still much cost effective private insurance market interests aligned patients private insurance industry know make money denying care one things say affordable care act wasnt really welfare people buy health care corporate welfare basically using tax dollars give people mandate buy product forprofit entity makes money denying care able eliminate middleman insurers thats real cost savings universal health care system would happened know insurance industry spends much money hiring people explicit mandate deny care thats explosion administrators people phone make life physicians life hospitals life miserable terms denying care even pharmacies go fill prescriptions oh wont cover one designed maximize profits takes 25 30 cents every health care dollar away actual patient care going basically fight generate profit able take element basically one universal payer handled claimsbut idea theyre make profit theyre pay correct treatment whatever treatment paid moneyor savedthat money left basically designed take care people type system would actually increase coverage everyone mentioned medicare right medicare covers 80 percent outpatient services would cover everyone away copays deductibles would help allow us take care undocumented brothers sisters well everyone else one way another pay rs know whole show find american originals usually say crazyquilt immigration different religions ethnicities produces interesting people mind youre one interesting doctors country medical research dont know anything practice willing stand challenge know profit model industry take personal journey regard ps mom actually came refugee korean war sister student speaking wellspoken english one koreans living speaking new york various womens organizations churches people said well family said oh sister stuck refugee camp busan somehow women got together raised enough money come united states fast forward graduated columbia teachers college last year working student teacher harlem parents community really took mom went director time shirley chisholm shirley chisholm ran congress said would really like grace kim become teacher graduates ms chisholm went mom said parents really love would consider working harlem heres mom korean immigrant lose student visa go back mom said sure ms chisholm wrote paperwork get mom green card mom became teacher preschool harlem ms chisholm decided run congress asked mom consider job newark newark new jersey looking forhead start really developing looking first educational director lo behold ms chisholm said think youre ready ive training mom became director mom used take sister newark preschool system breaks summers really wanted us interact kids also wanted us see know difference kids sister luckier things sometimes two parents versus one different kids thats really sort embedded us thing grandfather fought fight japanese occupation korea japanese occupation much like installed hamid karzai afghanistan us government installed corrupt person korea korea gained independence syngman rhee syngman rhee much like karzai veryconsolidation power enrichment friends family corrupt ultimately student uprising first democratic elections grandfather became first elected mayor seoul popularly elected mayor seoul shortly military coup detat fought democracy death exiled reason actually born united states family wasnt allowed go back korea 1992 rs omission well back guest dr paul song radiologist oncologist leading advocate health care reform surrogate bernie sanders campaign undocumented people left major health care initiative since wellbeing undocumented people living among us threat concern right rest us weve periodic scandalsi remember la times headline leprosy spreading refugees bringing called shirley fannon medical director said really true said turns laughs dont spread leprosy way phony banner headline la times made good point undocumented people cooking food taking children school raising home cleaning forth dont want health care come proposal affordable ps thats whats scandalous part affordable care act democratsremember started clear supermajority ted kennedy still alive lost ted kennedymax baucus dragged long ted kennedy succumbed brain tumor rs max baucus one people would call corporate whore really blocked sensible health care took lot money ps absolutely took money pharma health insurance industry runup affordable care act head senate finance committee people need realize know republicans clear terms theyre going say right expansion health care undocumented people gaining coverage whole rep joe wilson yelling lie president obama state union didnt need one republican vote gone said going cover undocumented brothers sisters could done part affordable care act democrats republicans agreed exclude undocumented brothers sisters heres insidious part one way another paying health care go cedarssinai hospitals charge ridiculous amount money appendectomy maybe twice much really costs justify terms well charge cover uncompensated care thats us hidden tax terms higher premiums higher costs excluding certain people health care system undocumented person use emergency rooms obviously many times cant pay end upmeaning us insurancesubsidizing terms higher premiums higher hospital charges rs point theyre expensive theyd preventive care earlier treatment would much less costly ps absolutely heres part think completely misled public undocumented population takersthey actually lot pay taxes dont realize benefits right towageswhen work company get payments social security tax taken medicare taxeven though qualify things theyre taken estimated know billions dollars undocumented community pays taxes state california nationwidethey entitled health care much anyone else rs want talk medical profession youve spent life good guy ok trying make sense doctors knowi spoke physicians social responsibility went around country international group nobel prize marvelous people doctors picked airport introduced great people wondered wherebut exceptionali wondered doctors know whats going know peopleand includes professionals insurance companies pharmaceutical onthey know thing doesnt work current system even affordable care act percentage gdp pay medical ps 18 percent rs yeah thats enormous getting quality service everybody agrees need colleagues ok understand youre oddball korean know ok history human rights struggle youre exception teach medical school people go lobbyists whyi mean whats going ps say encouraged new wave physicians going medical school coming medical school lot think far say medical school 30 years ago lot time reagan president people going medicine felt lucrative field nowadays people going medicine really want go medical school medicine right reasons 70000 year tuition sometimes even reimbursements bureaucracy headaches something really want im encouraged go speak medical students throughout state california elsewhere lot big already medicareforall activists dont theyve never practiced system quote good old days could charge whatever wanted nobody telling could thats whats changed certainly think people going medical school older population lot practiced time doctors king could anything without accountability really one reasons led hmo movement california doctors unfortunately milking system know extracting every bit profit think doctors much blame health care woes anyone else period time think insurance industry become powerful really dominating sort discussion way patients treated would say runup hmo movement particularly california lot doctors quite excessive think population bitter angry really newer wave rs say yourselfi mean youre radiation oncologist youve talked cancer patients forth go bankrupt trying stay alive dont people heart mean doctors mean dont see dont know people suffering patients people ps wonder wonder practice long period time become numb blind dont care came happened know years taking care patients get know patients really really well particularly patients long yearlong battles cancer see time emotional toll physical toll see economic toll say waityou insurance going bankrupt cant go home get life upsetting see personally experienced epiphany see patients fighting caring think goes whole hippocratic oath really look patients harm also allow patients participate system mischievous deleterious think system truly things doctors think system fine believe privatization free marketum think thats political ideology blinding whats really happening real world rs terms real world dont know whats going happen withi mean heres guy trump got elected saying going get rid thing however cooler heads prevailed even republican party maybe around trump said youve got replace something opportunity way mean know clearly theres message democrats think obamacare greatest thats cant control costs youre going people thati dont know lost maybe people lot income dont worry mean know im older guy im lot places getting health care laughs ive operations forth hear lot talk people run know private health plans currently affordable talk deductibles keep getting back point obamacare would affordable care act would trouble addressed cost think thats key thing someone like paul krugman people think wellintentioned liberal guy saywhen bernie sanders came know medicare denounce unrealistic ps well think two arguments ah know took exception krugmans statements theres political reality get know republican congress senate rs well let ask true instance right know certain age get medicare youre going tell lowered five years would difficult politically youd suddenly hear lot people said thats goodand everybody remember wayyou know birthday yesterday im 81 full confession im working like dog five different jobs including one teaching full time everything else point children even grandchildren didnt know health care didntid burden hopefully youd still care right know children would bethey wouldnt much disposable income would worried keep grandpa alive ok social securityi remember took care mother father workingclass people didnt social security didnt kind medical coverage coming remember fathers case know would thinkwell would know couldnt gone graduate school couldnt done anyor could heartless said ok know go live dont know skid row something dont get medicare practicalhow dismiss ps facts showand think every one shows medicare much efficient countries theres proof works rs countries ps canada medicareforall system korea medicareforall system know countries like denmark uk socialized medicine government runs insurance aspect hospitals employ doctors idea countries one ever goes bankrupt get sick know medicalrelated bankruptcies number one cause bankruptcies twothirds people go bankrupt due illness actually insurance supposed happen haveinsurance supposed protect us right catastrophic illnesses issues expenses doesnt doesnt occur getting back argument think try argue nuts bolts singlepayer defense say better thats saying krugman think legitimate argument may political say political gets back whole corporatist agenda people sides aisle beholden pharmaceutical industry insurance industry know senator sanders recently introduced amendment allow reimportation drugs canada 12 republicans actually voted favor 13 democrats voted 13 democrats highest group people receive money pharmaceutical industry gets back idea democrats republicans corporatists block meaningful legislation rs well want thank us dr paul song brings great authority subject think important brings great humanity worry patient worry people dont get coverage producers josh scheer rebecca mooney technical staff engineers brilliant engineers mario diaz kat yore another edition scheer intelligence back next week another informative guest thank posted emma niles | 2,775 |
<p>A scrutinizing media is President Trump’s greatest threat because he is a documented pathological liar who has much to hide.&#160; One would think that the demand for transparency also would come from one’s god, as religion requires soul-searching.&#160; But Trump says he has “a great relationship with God,” and also “with evangelicals,” and has little need for forgiveness.&#160; <a href="" type="internal">(“Trump on God: ‘Hopefully I won’t have to be asking for much forgiveness,’ “</a> By Michelle Boorstein, The Washington Post, June8, 2016) &#160;So no demand for soul-searching from God or most evangelical Christians.</p>
<p>In fact, President Trump has fostered a symbiotic-like relationship with many white evangelical Christians especially, which is authoritarian in nature.&#160; He is their “great White hope,” promising bans, barriers, bombs and bargains to make “America First” again – for them.&#160; Finally, a strong white leader, who is not “politically correct” who tells it like it is, i.e., like “it” was for them and should be again.&#160; “It” is authoritarian: seen in their unreflective, enthusiastic support of Trump’s verbal aggression against protestors and critics and countries, his lies about the (black) president he succeeded, his stereotyping of whole groups of people as The Other, his narcissistic anti-introspective self-adulation, and his ethnocentric promises to restore America’s greatness and superiority.</p>
<p>President Trump and his supporters are bonded.&#160; Together in what often appears to be a symbiotic relationship.&#160; With Trump falsely promising them great jobs, wonderful healthcare for everyone and “winning,” enthralling his audiences.&#160; Spinning lies about himself and others that have become applause lines.&#160; Branding his opponents with abusive name-calling to the delight of his supporters.&#160; Spouting “politically correct” patriotic pronouncements about “American first” and its greatness that brings his supporters to their feet, clapping and roaring in unison.&#160; Telling his base whom to hate, especially the media, with audiences, responding in lockstep, gleefully “booing” and “hissing” those reporters present.</p>
<p>President Trump’s symbiotic embrace of his base is revealed in a televised news conference in which he called the major media “the enemy of the American people” because of the media’s “dishonesty,” which “is out of control.”&#160; Proof is when he watches television or reads newspapers and sees only “chaos” being reported.&#160; But he knows that “this administration is running a fine tuned machine.”&#160; <a href="" type="internal">(“Trump calls the media ‘the enemy of the American people,’ “</a> By Jenna Johnson and Matea Gold, The Washington Post, Feb. 17, 2017) So don’t believe all the “fake news” the media are falsely spouting about his “machine.”</p>
<p>Actually, the “machine” backfired early on when national security advisor Michael T. Flynn was fired for lying to Vice President Pence about having a conversation with the Russian ambassador regarding U.S. sanctions imposed on Russia for meddling in the presidential election in support of Trump.&#160; The “machine” continues to sputter in its attempts to replace Obamacare with, in Trump’s words, “a great health care plan” – a plan that is actually the real enemy of millions of the American people.&#160; And the “machine” is now stalled, with emails disclosing Donald Trump, Jr. saying, “I love it” when a Russian government representative offered to share “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. <a href="" type="internal">(“Russian Dirt on Clinton?&#160; ‘I Love It,’</a> Donald Trump Jr. Said,” By Jo Becker, Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo, The New York Times, July 11, 2017)</p>
<p>These malfunctions demanded the “machine” receive additional religious tune-up.&#160; Thus President Trump spoke at a Fourth of July Weekend faith and freedom rally, thrilling his evangelical supporters in declaring that America worships God and not the government, and that he is taking the power seized by Washington and giving it back to the people, and reminding his devoted audience that “the fake news tried to stop us from going to the White House,” and failed. ( <a href="" type="internal">“ ‘I’m President and They’re Not’: Trump Attacks Media at Faith Rally,”</a> By Michael Shear, The New York Times, July 1, 2017)</p>
<p>In addition, evangelical Christian leaders have come to President Trump’s rescue.&#160; They responded to his invitation to join him in the Oval Office for prayer.&#160; Thus we have photographs of faith leaders encircling Trump in prayer, with their hands on his shoulders and his head bowed.&#160; What better way to transcend the catching of his son’s hand in Russia’s cookie jar than by surrounding himself in prayer with godly people.&#160; As Johnnie Moore, one of the faith leaders present, said about the president: “He was as strong and focused as I have ever seen him.&#160; He was entirely above the fray.” <a href="" type="internal">(“Trump seen bowing in prayer during Oval Office session,”</a> By Dan Merica and Kevin Liptak, CNNPolitics.com, July 13, 2017)</p>
<p>Johnnie Moore, “a former senior vice president” at large evangelical Liberty University, was also quoted as saying about the evangelicals praying with President Trump: “We similarly prayed for President Obama but it is different with President Trump.&#160; When we prayed for President Trump, we are praying within the context of a real relationship, of true friendship.” (Ibid)&#160; Moore is not quoted as saying what he meant by “the context”.&#160; Did it have anything to do with color?</p>
<p>Power is corrupting, as is access to power.&#160; The evangelical Christian leaders’ blessing of a psychopathic president with Divine legitimacy is enough to lead one to ask, “Fake news”?&#160; Or fake faith?</p>
<p>In time, reality and moral truth will catch up with President Trump and his administration.&#160; Sadly, it will take the suffering he and his administration will inflict on many that will force them – and others – to confront his false promises, delusions of grandeur, pathological lies and destructive impulsivity.&#160; In time, the evangelistic Christians’ “Faustian bargain” with Trump – giving up their moral integrity in exchange for his appointment of a pro-life Supreme Court Justice and his promise of “religious freedom” to discriminate against LGBTQ persons – will come back to haunt them and many other Americans.&#160; Jesus’ warning is timely here: “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothes, but inwardly are ferocious wolves.&#160; You will know them by their fruits.” ( <a href="" type="internal">Matthew 7: 15-17</a>)</p>
<p>Scrutiny is the critical mission of the media in the service of democracy. &#160;Similarly, soul-searching is a major emphasis of religious faith.&#160; Self-scrutiny that leads to integrated self-understanding, which, rather than casting the first stone, enables people to open their hands in empathy and solidarity.</p> | true | 4 | scrutinizing media president trumps greatest threat documented pathological liar much hide160 one would think demand transparency also would come ones god religion requires soulsearching160 trump says great relationship god also evangelicals little need forgiveness160 trump god hopefully wont asking much forgiveness michelle boorstein washington post june8 2016 160so demand soulsearching god evangelical christians fact president trump fostered symbioticlike relationship many white evangelical christians especially authoritarian nature160 great white hope promising bans barriers bombs bargains make america first them160 finally strong white leader politically correct tells like ie like again160 authoritarian seen unreflective enthusiastic support trumps verbal aggression protestors critics countries lies black president succeeded stereotyping whole groups people narcissistic antiintrospective selfadulation ethnocentric promises restore americas greatness superiority president trump supporters bonded160 together often appears symbiotic relationship160 trump falsely promising great jobs wonderful healthcare everyone winning enthralling audiences160 spinning lies others become applause lines160 branding opponents abusive namecalling delight supporters160 spouting politically correct patriotic pronouncements american first greatness brings supporters feet clapping roaring unison160 telling base hate especially media audiences responding lockstep gleefully booing hissing reporters present president trumps symbiotic embrace base revealed televised news conference called major media enemy american people medias dishonesty control160 proof watches television reads newspapers sees chaos reported160 knows administration running fine tuned machine160 trump calls media enemy american people jenna johnson matea gold washington post feb 17 2017 dont believe fake news media falsely spouting machine actually machine backfired early national security advisor michael flynn fired lying vice president pence conversation russian ambassador regarding us sanctions imposed russia meddling presidential election support trump160 machine continues sputter attempts replace obamacare trumps words great health care plan plan actually real enemy millions american people160 machine stalled emails disclosing donald trump jr saying love russian government representative offered share dirt hillary clinton russian dirt clinton160 love donald trump jr said jo becker adam goldman matt apuzzo new york times july 11 2017 malfunctions demanded machine receive additional religious tuneup160 thus president trump spoke fourth july weekend faith freedom rally thrilling evangelical supporters declaring america worships god government taking power seized washington giving back people reminding devoted audience fake news tried stop us going white house failed im president theyre trump attacks media faith rally michael shear new york times july 1 2017 addition evangelical christian leaders come president trumps rescue160 responded invitation join oval office prayer160 thus photographs faith leaders encircling trump prayer hands shoulders head bowed160 better way transcend catching sons hand russias cookie jar surrounding prayer godly people160 johnnie moore one faith leaders present said president strong focused ever seen him160 entirely fray trump seen bowing prayer oval office session dan merica kevin liptak cnnpoliticscom july 13 2017 johnnie moore former senior vice president large evangelical liberty university also quoted saying evangelicals praying president trump similarly prayed president obama different president trump160 prayed president trump praying within context real relationship true friendship ibid160 moore quoted saying meant context160 anything color power corrupting access power160 evangelical christian leaders blessing psychopathic president divine legitimacy enough lead one ask fake news160 fake faith time reality moral truth catch president trump administration160 sadly take suffering administration inflict many force others confront false promises delusions grandeur pathological lies destructive impulsivity160 time evangelistic christians faustian bargain trump giving moral integrity exchange appointment prolife supreme court justice promise religious freedom discriminate lgbtq persons come back haunt many americans160 jesus warning timely beware false prophets come sheeps clothes inwardly ferocious wolves160 know fruits matthew 7 1517 scrutiny critical mission media service democracy 160similarly soulsearching major emphasis religious faith160 selfscrutiny leads integrated selfunderstanding rather casting first stone enables people open hands empathy solidarity | 598 |
<p>Laid-off American workers will be getting temporary extended benefits as the nation sinks into recession, thanks to Congressional Democrats, who cleverly tacked a funding provision onto a bill giving the president all the money he asked for (and then some) to fund the Iraq and Afghanistan wars on out through next June. Veterans of the Iraq War will also be getting tuition benefits equal to the full cost of in-state public college tuition plus $1000 a year for books and supplies.</p>
<p>When workers pick up those unemployment checks from their state Department of Labor offices, though, they should see them as dripping blood. Those checks have been bought with the blood of American men and women in uniform who have been sent over and over into harm’s way in those two countries in misbegotten and criminal adventures that have nothing to do with defending America and everything to do with boosting the profits of oil companies and defense contractors, and with getting Bush re-elected and Republicans elected.</p>
<p>Iraq Vets, too, should not overlook the blood on their VA education benefits checks, because their tuition will be paid by the blood of active-duty comrades still left stranded in battle zones overseas.</p>
<p>It didn’t have to be like this.</p>
<p>For generations, Congress has voted supplemental funding for unemployment benefits to be extended during economic downturns—not always willingly, but always eventually, following enough pressure from workers and the labor movement.</p>
<p>For generations, too, Congress has voted for education benefits for veterans.</p>
<p>This being an election year, passage of a freestanding supplemental benefits bill for unemployment insurance and a restoration of decent education benefits for Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans would have been a sure thing. Even Republicans facing the prospect of re-election campaigns would have signed on to both measures by Labor Day and the votes would have been their to override any Bush veto. Neither measure—both important in themselves and badly needed—had to be tied to a war-funding bill.</p>
<p>But Democrats in the House and Senate leadership weren’t really thinking about the plight of the unemployed or the needs of returning veterans in this case. They were, rather, thinking of a way of putting some “progressive” window-dressing on a war-funding bill that they wanted to pass without having to take responsibility for it. Their objective was to push the whole issue of funding the wars out past Election Day, in hopes of not having to discuss it in the coming campaign.</p>
<p>Funding Bush’s and Cheney’s war in Iraq especially has, after all, become a more and more unpopular and difficult affair for Democrats. In this last go-round, fully 141 House Democrats voted against further funding of the war—nearly the same number as voted for it (149).&#160; At first, back in mid-May, the measure didn’t even pass, because Republicans cleverly joined with the anti-war Democrats in blocking the measure, forcing Democratic leaders to scramble to round up the votes to pass a bill the second time around.</p>
<p>Americans clearly don’t want the war to continue, and Democrats don’t want to have to face the voters, as every member of the House and a third of the Senate have to do this November, being labeled as war backers. That’s why they come up with these pathetic excuses like, “I’m opposed to the war but we have to support the troops.”</p>
<p>Any sentient being in the country by now knows that most of the long-suffering and abused troops, as polls have shown, think that the best way to support them is to bring them home immediately. A Zogby poll of active-duty troops in Iraq taken in 2006 found that 72% wanted the US out within a year, while one in four wanted all US troops out immediately. Only one in five supported staying “as long as necessary.” (With many of those troops on yet another rotation, in some cases their fifth, those numbers are probably even more in favor of immediate withdrawal today.) Military experts have also written about how all the troops in Iraq could be pulled out safely in as little as two weeks’ time. All the Pentagon would need to do is start running a constant convoy of trucks south to Kuwait, carrying troops and weapons systems. They could leave the porta-potties, the McDonalds stands, the bowling alleys, the gyms and the barracks to the Iraqis and then blow up whatever they didn’t want falling into the wrong hands. It would be easy and fast. There’s no need for Obama’s proposed 16-month staged withdrawal, which would just mean more unnecessary deaths and killings.</p>
<p>Democrats in Congress know all this, but congenitally spineless and devoid of principle, they’re afraid if they don’t fund the war they could be accused by Republicans of being “soft” on defense—as though the Iraq War had anything at all to do with protecting America.</p>
<p>And so they have come up with this shameless ruse of attaching a $95-billion domestic spending package, including unemployment funding measure and a veterans’ education benefits measure, to a $162-billion atrocity—a measure that assures more death and destruction in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more dead and maimed American military personnel. They’re pretending that they “pulled one over” on Bush by forcing him to sign an unemployment extension bill and a veterans’ bill, when they know Republicans would have forced him to sign those anyway, later in the summer.</p>
<p>The real joke is on the American people, and on those very workers and veterans who will be receiving the unemployment checks and tuition reimbursements funded as a result of this duplicitous tactic.</p>
<p>The $162 billion that Congress has voted for the continuation of the two pointless and disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, together with the money already allocated for the so-called “War on Terror,” is all borrowed, and is a major contributor to the collapse of the dollar and to the resulting soaring of the price of oil, electricity and imported goods. It is thus a major contributor to the credit crisis and the collapse in the housing market that has pushed the nation into what may be the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression.</p>
<p>Furthermore, the blood-money unemployment and tuition checks bought through his gutless subterfuge by House and Senate Democrats will be pissed away in no time on higher gas prices spent by workers on desperate job searches, or on long commutes to distant jobs or commutes if they are lucky enough to find them. It will be pissed away too for veteran/students on their commutes to college, and on higher heating bills for their families at home.</p>
<p>Equally important, the $160 billion wasted in Iraq, along with the half trillion dollars being wasted every year on military spending for a military colossus that encircles the globe for no good purpose other than intimidation of other nations, assures that those Democrats who control Congress can do nothing of consequence to shore up retirement funds, to develop a national health program, to improve our dismal school system, to repair our crumbling infrastructure, or to develop alternative, non-polluting energy sources that could combat global warming.</p>
<p>The Democratic Congress has shown itself to be worse than useless. It is part of the problem. That includes Sen. Barack Obama, who like Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. John McCain, signed onto this contemptible funding bill.</p>
<p>DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at <a href="http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/" type="external">www.thiscantbehappening.net</a></p>
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<p>&#160;</p> | true | 4 | laidoff american workers getting temporary extended benefits nation sinks recession thanks congressional democrats cleverly tacked funding provision onto bill giving president money asked fund iraq afghanistan wars next june veterans iraq war also getting tuition benefits equal full cost instate public college tuition plus 1000 year books supplies workers pick unemployment checks state department labor offices though see dripping blood checks bought blood american men women uniform sent harms way two countries misbegotten criminal adventures nothing defending america everything boosting profits oil companies defense contractors getting bush reelected republicans elected iraq vets overlook blood va education benefits checks tuition paid blood activeduty comrades still left stranded battle zones overseas didnt like generations congress voted supplemental funding unemployment benefits extended economic downturnsnot always willingly always eventually following enough pressure workers labor movement generations congress voted education benefits veterans election year passage freestanding supplemental benefits bill unemployment insurance restoration decent education benefits iraq afghanistan war veterans would sure thing even republicans facing prospect reelection campaigns would signed measures labor day votes would override bush veto neither measureboth important badly neededhad tied warfunding bill democrats house senate leadership werent really thinking plight unemployed needs returning veterans case rather thinking way putting progressive windowdressing warfunding bill wanted pass without take responsibility objective push whole issue funding wars past election day hopes discuss coming campaign funding bushs cheneys war iraq especially become unpopular difficult affair democrats last goround fully 141 house democrats voted funding warnearly number voted 149160 first back midmay measure didnt even pass republicans cleverly joined antiwar democrats blocking measure forcing democratic leaders scramble round votes pass bill second time around americans clearly dont want war continue democrats dont want face voters every member house third senate november labeled war backers thats come pathetic excuses like im opposed war support troops sentient country knows longsuffering abused troops polls shown think best way support bring home immediately zogby poll activeduty troops iraq taken 2006 found 72 wanted us within year one four wanted us troops immediately one five supported staying long necessary many troops yet another rotation cases fifth numbers probably even favor immediate withdrawal today military experts also written troops iraq could pulled safely little two weeks time pentagon would need start running constant convoy trucks south kuwait carrying troops weapons systems could leave portapotties mcdonalds stands bowling alleys gyms barracks iraqis blow whatever didnt want falling wrong hands would easy fast theres need obamas proposed 16month staged withdrawal would mean unnecessary deaths killings democrats congress know congenitally spineless devoid principle theyre afraid dont fund war could accused republicans soft defenseas though iraq war anything protecting america come shameless ruse attaching 95billion domestic spending package including unemployment funding measure veterans education benefits measure 162billion atrocitya measure assures death destruction iraq afghanistan dead maimed american military personnel theyre pretending pulled one bush forcing sign unemployment extension bill veterans bill know republicans would forced sign anyway later summer real joke american people workers veterans receiving unemployment checks tuition reimbursements funded result duplicitous tactic 162 billion congress voted continuation two pointless disastrous wars iraq afghanistan together money already allocated socalled war terror borrowed major contributor collapse dollar resulting soaring price oil electricity imported goods thus major contributor credit crisis collapse housing market pushed nation may worst economic collapse since great depression furthermore bloodmoney unemployment tuition checks bought gutless subterfuge house senate democrats pissed away time higher gas prices spent workers desperate job searches long commutes distant jobs commutes lucky enough find pissed away veteranstudents commutes college higher heating bills families home equally important 160 billion wasted iraq along half trillion dollars wasted every year military spending military colossus encircles globe good purpose intimidation nations assures democrats control congress nothing consequence shore retirement funds develop national health program improve dismal school system repair crumbling infrastructure develop alternative nonpolluting energy sources could combat global warming democratic congress shown worse useless part problem includes sen barack obama like sen hillary clinton sen john mccain signed onto contemptible funding bill dave lindorff philadelphiabased journalist columnist latest book case impeachment st martins press 2006 available paperback edition work available wwwthiscantbehappeningnet 160 160 160 160 160 160 160 | 686 |
<p>By Rebecca Solnit, TomDispatchThis piece first appeared at TomDispatch. Read Tom Engelhardt’s introduction <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175788/tomgram%3A_rebecca_solnit%2C_the_future_needs_us/#more" type="external">here</a>.</p>
<p>North American cicada nymphs live underground for 17 years before they emerge as adults. Many seeds stay dormant far longer than that before some disturbance makes them germinate. Some trees bear fruit long after the people who have planted them have died, and one Massachusetts <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endicott_Pear_Tree" type="external">pear tree</a>, planted by a Puritan in 1630, is still bearing fruit far sweeter than most of what those fundamentalists brought to this continent. Sometimes cause and effect are centuries apart; sometimes Martin Luther King’s arc of the moral universe that bends toward justice is so long few see its curve; sometimes hope lies not in looking forward but backward to study the line of that arc.</p>
<p>Three years ago at this time, after a <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175455/" type="external">young Tunisian</a> set himself on fire to protest injustice, the Arab Spring was on the cusp of erupting. An even younger man, a rapper who went by the name El Général, was on the verge of being arrested for “ <a href="http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2049456,00.html" type="external">Rais Lebled</a>” (a tweaked version of the phrase “head of state”), a song that would help launch the revolution in Tunisia.</p>
<p>Weeks before either the Tunisian or Egyptian revolutions erupted, no one imagined they were going to happen. No one foresaw them. No one was talking about the Arab world or northern Africa as places with a fierce appetite for justice and democracy. No one was saying much about unarmed popular power as a force in that corner of the world. No one knew that the seeds were germinating.</p>
<p />
<p>A small but striking aspect of the Arab Spring was the role of hip-hop in it. Though the U.S. government often exports repression — its <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/05/world/middleeast/egypts-arrests-of-islamists-pose-test-to-us-over-military-aid.html" type="external">billions in aid</a> to the Egyptian military over the decades, for example — American culture can be something else altogether, and often has been.</p>
<p>Henry David Thoreau wrote books that not many people read when they were published. He famously said of his unsold copies, “I have now a library of nearly 900 volumes over 700 of which I wrote myself.” But a South African lawyer of Indian descent named Mohandas Gandhi read Thoreau on civil disobedience and found ideas that helped him fight discrimination in Africa and then liberate his own country from British rule. Martin Luther King studied Thoreau and Gandhi and put their ideas to work in the United States, while in 1952 the African National Congress and the young Nelson Mandela were collaborating with the South African Indian Congress on civil disobedience campaigns. You wish you could write Thoreau a letter about all this. He had no way of knowing that what he planted would still be bearing fruit 151 years after his death. But the past doesn’t need us. The past guides us; the future needs us.</p>
<p>An influential <a href="http://issuu.com/hamsa/docs/mlkcomic-eng" type="external">comic book</a> on civil disobedience and Martin Luther King published by the <a href="http://comicsalliance.com/martin-luther-king-comic-egypt/" type="external">Fellowship of Reconciliation</a> in the U.S. in 1957 was translated into Arabic and distributed in Egypt in 2009, four decades after King’s death. What its impact was cannot be measured, but it seems to have had one in the Egyptian uprising which was a dizzying mix of social media, outside pressure, street fighting, and huge demonstrations.</p>
<p>The past explodes from time to time, and many events that once seemed to have achieved nothing turn out to do their work slowly. Much of what has been most beautifully transformative in recent years has also been branded a failure by people who want instant results guaranteed or your money back. The Arab Spring has just begun, and if some of the participant nations are going through their equivalent of the French Revolution, it’s worth remembering that France, despite the Terror and the Napoleonic era, never went back either to absolutist monarchy or the belief that such a condition could be legitimate. It was a mess, it was an improvement, it’s still not finished.</p>
<p>The same might be said of the South African upheaval Mandela catalyzed. It made things better; it has not made them good enough. It’s worth pointing out as well that what was liberated by the end of apartheid was not only the nonwhite population of one country, but a sense of power and possibility for so many globally who had participated in the boycotts and other campaigns to end apartheid in that miraculous era from 1989 to 1991 that also saw the collapse of the Soviet Union, successful revolutions across Eastern Europe, the student uprising in Beijing, and the beginning of the end of many authoritarian regimes in Latin America.</p>
<p>In the hopeful aftermath of that transformation, Mandela <a href="http://www.anc.org.za/show.php?id=3665" type="external">wrote</a>, “The titanic effort that has brought liberation to South Africa and ensured the total liberation of Africa constitutes an act of redemption for the black people of the world. It is a gift of emancipation also to those who, because they were white, imposed on themselves the heavy burden of assuming the mantle of rulers of all humanity. It says to all who will listen and understand that, by ending the apartheid barbarity that was the offspring of European colonization, Africa has, once more, contributed to the advance of human civilization and further expanded the frontiers of liberty everywhere.”</p>
<p>Congo Square</p>
<p>The arc of justice is long. It travels through New Orleans, the city I’ve returned to again and again since Hurricane Katrina.&#160; It’s been my way of trying to understand not just disaster, but community, culture, and continuity, three things that city possesses as no place else in the nation. Hip-hop comes most directly from the South Bronx, but if you look at the 1970s founders of that genre of popular music, you see that some of the key figures were Caribbean, and if you look at their formative music, it included the ska and reggae that were infused with the influence of New Orleans. (In addition, that city’s native son and major jazz figure, Donald Harrison, Jr., was a mentor to seminal New York City rapper Notorious B.I.G.)</p>
<p>If you look at New Orleans, what you see is an astonishing example of the survival of culture — and of the culture of survival.</p>
<p>Maybe you’d have to do what I was doing in early 2011 — poke around in the origins of American music in New Orleans — to be struck by the way so many essential parts of it came from Africa in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and some of it returned to that continent again in recent years. I was looking at maps, making maps, thinking about how to chart the unexpected ways immaterial things move through time and space.</p>
<p>The saddest map I have ever seen is the oft-published one of the triangle trade, a vicious circle that isn’t even a circle. It depicts the routes of the eighteenth and nineteenth century European traders who brought manufactured goods from their continent to West Africa to exchange for human beings who were then transported to the United States and the Caribbean to be exchanged for raw materials, especially sugar, rum, and tobacco. It’s a map that tells of people made into tools and commodities, but it tells us nothing of what the enslaved brought with them.</p>
<p>Stripped bare of all possessions and rights, they carried memory, culture, and resistance in their heads. New Orleans let those things flourish as nowhere else in the United States during the long, obscene era of slavery, while the <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/01/09/new-orleans-forgotten-slave-revolt-by-dan-rasmussen-american-uprising-author.html" type="external">biggest slave uprising</a> in U.S. history took place nearby in 1811 (its participants including two young Asante warriors who had arrived in New Orleans on slave ships five years earlier). From the mid-eighteenth century to the 1840s, the enslaved of New Orleans were permitted to gather on Sundays in the plaza on the edge of the old city known then and now as <a href="http://www.gonola.com/2012/07/02/nola-history-congo-square-and-the-roots-of-new-orleans-music.html" type="external">Congo Square</a>.</p>
<p>“On sabbath evening,” the visitor H.C. Knight famously wrote in 1819, “the African slaves meet on the green, by the swamp, and rock the city with their Congo dances.” The great music historian Ned Sublette observes that this is the first use of rock as a verb about music, and in his marvelous book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1556529589/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20" type="external">The World That Made New Orleans</a> notes that what is arguably the first rock and roll record, Roy Brown’s 1947 “ <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgdzS4OSQ1M" type="external">Good Rocking Tonight</a>,” was recorded <a href="http://rockhall.com/inductees/cosimo-matassa/bio/" type="external">a block away</a>.</p>
<p>In between, what Africans had brought with them continued its metamorphosis in the city: jazz famously arose from black culture near Congo Square, as did important rhythm and blues strains and influences, as well as performers, then funk, and eventually hip-hop. Funk arose in part from Afro-Cuban influences and from the African-American tradition of the Mardi Gras Indians — not Native Americans, but working-class African Americans. Their elaborate outfits and rites officially pay homage to the Native Americans who sheltered runaway slaves (and sometimes intermarried with them), but have a startling resemblance to African beaded costumes. The Mardi Gras Indians still parade on that day and other days, chanting and singing, challenging each other through song. One of the recurrent chants <a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/we-wont-bow-down" type="external">declares</a>, “We won’t bow down.” &#160;&#160;</p>
<p>Though New Orleans is mainly famous for other things, it has also been a city of resistance — from the slave revolts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to late nineteenth century segregation-breaker Homer Plessy to Ruby Bridges, the six-year-old who in 1960 was the first Black child to integrate a white school in the South. The span of time is not as long as you might think: Fats Domino, one of the founding fathers of rock and roll, is still alive and has a home in the Lower Ninth Ward. The midwife at his birth a few blocks away was his grandmother, who had been born into slavery. &#160;</p>
<p>New Orleanian Herreast Harrison, a woman in her seventies, mother of jazzman Donald Harrison Jr., widow of a <a href="http://architecture.tulane.edu/news/2013/01/article-267" type="external">Mardi Gras Indian chief</a>, cultural preserver, and a dynamic force in the city, said to me of Mardi Gras Indian culture:</p>
<p>“But those groups remembered their cultural heritage and practiced it there, that memory, they had this overarching memory of their pasts. And when they were there, they were free. And their spirits soared to the high heavens. They were themselves. In spite of limitations in every aspect of their lives. Where they should have felt like, ‘we are nothing,’ because you get brainwashed constantly about the fact that you’re a nobody… but they didn’t, they brought back. And now it’s part of the world, that music.”</p>
<p>And her son, <a href="http://www.donaldharrison.com/?section=news" type="external">Donald Harrison, Jr.</a>, added:</p>
<p>“One other very important thing that Congo Square represented in the culture was that no matter what’s going on in life you transcend the culture and Congo Square helps you. It transcends and puts you into a transcendental state so that you are free at that moment. Even today, that’s the power of the music and that’s why it brings us together. You have a moment of freedom where you transcend everything that’s going on around you. Berthold Auerbach said it so eloquently: ‘Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.’&#160; At that moment you become free, which is why the music is part of the world now. Everybody wants a moment to transcend. It goes inside of you and you know where you can go to be free. No matter if you’re in Norway, South American, or Beijing, you know, ‘this music sets me free.’ So Congo Square set the world free, basically. It gives freedom to everyone around it.”</p>
<p>In my latest project, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0520274040/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20" type="external">Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas</a>, I tried to convey what New Orleans music gave the world in a map labeled “Repercussions: Rhythm and Resistance Across the Atlantic.” Those involuntary émigrés brought by slave ship were said to have nothing, but what they had still reaches and spreads and liberates.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/images/managed/repercussionsgraphic_large.jpg" type="external">Click here to see a larger version</a>Repercussions: Rhythm and Resistance Across the Atlantic. Map concept and research: Rebecca Solnit. Cartography: Shizue Seigel. Design: Lia Tjandra. c Univ. of CA Press, 2013.</p>
<p>What we call the Arab Spring was first of all the North African Spring — in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya — and hip-hop was already there. It has, in fact, become a global means of dissent, from indigenous Oaxaca, Mexico, to Cairo, Egypt. Which does not mean that everything is fine (or that hip-hop can’t also be used for consumerism or misogyny). It’s a reminder, however, that even in the most horrific of circumstances, something remarkable more than survived; it throve and grew and eventually reached around the Earth.</p>
<p>Nearly three years after the first sparks of the Arab Spring began, it’s wiser to consider it, too, barely begun rather than ended in failure. More than two years after the first members of Occupy Wall Street began decamping in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, that movement is not over either, though almost all the encampments have subsided and the engagement has new names: <a href="http://occupysandy.net" type="external">Occupy Sandy</a>, <a href="http://strikedebt.org" type="external">Strike Debt</a>, and more. That everything continues to metamorphose seems a better way to think of social upheavals than obituaries and epitaphs.</p>
<p>Maps of the Unpredictable</p>
<p>Whenever I look around me, I wonder what old things are about to bear fruit, what seemingly solid institutions might soon rupture, and what seeds we might now be planting whose harvest will come at some unpredictable moment in the future. The most magnificent person I met in 2013 quoted a line from Michel Foucault to me: “People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does.” Someone saves a life or educates a person or tells her a story that upends everything she assumed. The transformation may be subtle or crucial or world changing, next year or in 100 years, or maybe in a millennium. You can’t always trace it but everything, everyone has a genealogy.</p>
<p>In her forthcoming book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1451629230/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20" type="external">The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery</a>, Sarah Lewis tells how a white teenager in Austin, Texas, named Charles Black heard a black trumpet player in the 1930s who changed his thinking — and so our lives. He was riveted and transformed by the beauty of New Orleans jazzman Louis Armstrong’s music, so much so that he began to reconsider the segregated world he had grown up in. “It is impossible to overstate the significance of a 16-year-old Southern boy’s seeing genius, for the first time, in a black,” he <a href="http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/March-April-2003/review_marapr03_soifer.msp" type="external">recalled</a> decades later. As a lawyer dedicated to racial equality and civil rights, he would in 1954 help overturn segregation nationwide, aiding the plaintiffs in <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wnet/supremecourt/rights/landmark_brown.html" type="external">Brown v. Board of Education</a>, the landmark Supreme Court case ending segregation (and overturning <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wnet/supremecourt/antebellum/landmark_plessy.html" type="external">Plessy v. Ferguson</a>, the failed anti-segregation lawsuit launched in New Orleans 60 years earlier).</p>
<p>How do you explain what Louis Armstrong’s music does? Can you draw a map of the United States in which the sound of a trumpeter in 1930s Texas reaches back to moments of liberation created by slaves in Congo Square and forward to the Supreme Court of 1954?</p>
<p>Or how do you chart the way in which the capture of three young American hikers by Iranian border guards on the Iraq-Iran border in 2009 and their imprisonment — the men for 781 days — became the occasion for secret talks between the U.S. and Iran that led to the interim nuclear agreement signed last month? Can you draw a map of the world in which three idealistic young people out on a walk become prisoners and then catalysts?</p>
<p>Looking back, one of those three prisoners, Shane Bauer, wrote, “One of my fears in prison was that our detention was only going to fuel hostility between Iran and the U.S. It feels good to know that those two miserable years led to something, that could lead to something better than what was before.”</p>
<p>Bauer later <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/12/shane-bauer-iran-hostages-nuclear-deal" type="external">added</a>:</p>
<p>“The reason our tragedy led to an opening between the United States and Iran was that many people were actively working to end our suffering. To do so, our friends and families had to strive to build a bridge between the U.S. and Iran when the two governments were refusing to do it themselves. Sarah [Shourd, the third prisoner] is not a politician and she has no desire to be, but when she was released a year before Josh and me, she made herself into a skilled and unrelenting diplomat, strengthening connections between Oman and the U.S. that ultimately led to these talks.”</p>
<p>A <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/677/rebecca_solnit_acts_of_hope" type="external">decade ago</a> I began writing about hope, an orientation that has nothing to do with optimism. Optimism says that everything will be fine no matter what, just as pessimism says that it will be dismal no matter what. Hope is a sense of the grand mystery of it all, the knowledge that we don’t know how it will turn out, that anything is possible. It means recognizing that the sound of a trumpet at a school dance in Austin, Texas, may resound in the Supreme Court 20 years later; that an unfortunate hike in the borderlands might help turn two countries away from war; that Edward Snowden, a young NSA contractor and the biggest surprise of this year, might revolt against that agency’s sinister invasions of privacy and be surprised himself by the vehemence of the global reaction to his leaked data; that culture which left Africa more than 200 years ago might return to that continent as a tool for liberation — that we don’t know what we do does.</p>
<p>That Massachusetts pear tree is still bearing fruit almost 400 years after it was planted. The planter of that tree also helped instigate the war against the Pequots, who were massacred in 1637. “The survivors were sold into slavery or given over to neighboring tribes. The colonists even barred the use of the Pequot name, ‘in order to cut off the remembrance of them from the earth,’ as the leader of the raiding party later wrote,” <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/magazine/mike-sokolove-foxwood-casinos.html" type="external">according to</a> the New York Times.</p>
<p>For centuries thereafter, that Native American nation was described as extinct, erased, gone. It was written about in the past tense when mentioned at all. In the 1970s, however, the Pequots achieved federal recognition, entitling them to the rights that Native American tribes have as “subject sovereign nations”; in the 1980s, they opened a bingo hall on their reservation in Connecticut; in the 1990s, it became the biggest casino in the western world. (Just for the record, I’m not a fan of the gambling industry, but I am of unpredictable narratives.)</p>
<p>With the enormous income from that project, the tribe funded a Native American history museum that opened in 1998, also the biggest of its kind. The new empire of the Pequots has been on rocky ground since the financial meltdown of 2008, but the fact that it arose at all is astonishing more than 150 years after Herman Melville stuck a ship called the Pequod in the middle of his novel Moby Dick and mentioned that it was named after a people “now extinct as the ancient <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medes" type="external">Medes</a>.” Are there are longer odds in New England than that a people long pronounced gone would end up profiting from the bad-math optimism of their neighbors?&#160;</p>
<p>Meanwhile, that pear tree continues to bear fruit; meanwhile, hip-hop continues to be a vehicle for political dissent from the Inuit far north to Latin America; meanwhile, diplomatic relations with Iran have had some surprising twists and turns, most recently away from war.</p>
<p>I see the fabric of my country’s rights and justices fraying and I see <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175756/rebecca_solnit_the_age_of_inhuman_scale" type="external">climate change advancing</a>. There are terrible things about this moment and it’s clear that the consequences of climate change will get worse (though how much worse still depends on us). I also see that we never actually know how things will play out in the end, that the most unlikely events often occur, that we are a very innovative and resilient species, and that far more of us are idealists than is good for business and the status quo to acknowledge.</p>
<p>What I learned first in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was how calm, how resourceful, and how generous people could be in the worst times: the “Cajun Navy” that came in to rescue people by boat, the stranded themselves who formed communities of mutual aid, the hundreds of thousands of volunteers, from middle-aged Mennonites to young anarchists, who arrived afterward to help salvage a city that could have been left for dead.</p>
<p>I don’t know what’s coming. I do know that, whatever it is, some of it will be terrible, but some of it will be miraculous, that term we reserve for the utterly unanticipated, the seeds we didn’t know the soil held. And I know that we don’t know what we do does. As Shane Bauer points out, the doing is the crucial thing. &#160;</p>
<p>Rebecca Solnit co-directed <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0520274040/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20" type="external">Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas</a>, the sequel to her 2010 <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0520262506/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20" type="external">Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas</a>. &#160;A <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175756/rebecca_solnit_the_age_of_inhuman_scale" type="external">TomDispatch regular</a>, she has written the final article of the year for that site for the last nine years.</p>
<p>Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/tomdispatch" type="external">Facebook</a> or <a href="http://tomdispatch.tumblr.com/" type="external">Tumblr</a>. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Ann Jones’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608463710/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20" type="external">They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return From America’s Wars — The Untold Story</a>.</p>
<p>Copyright 2013 Rebecca Solnit</p> | true | 4 | rebecca solnit tomdispatchthis piece first appeared tomdispatch read tom engelhardts introduction north american cicada nymphs live underground 17 years emerge adults many seeds stay dormant far longer disturbance makes germinate trees bear fruit long people planted died one massachusetts pear tree planted puritan 1630 still bearing fruit far sweeter fundamentalists brought continent sometimes cause effect centuries apart sometimes martin luther kings arc moral universe bends toward justice long see curve sometimes hope lies looking forward backward study line arc three years ago time young tunisian set fire protest injustice arab spring cusp erupting even younger man rapper went name el général verge arrested rais lebled tweaked version phrase head state song would help launch revolution tunisia weeks either tunisian egyptian revolutions erupted one imagined going happen one foresaw one talking arab world northern africa places fierce appetite justice democracy one saying much unarmed popular power force corner world one knew seeds germinating small striking aspect arab spring role hiphop though us government often exports repression billions aid egyptian military decades example american culture something else altogether often henry david thoreau wrote books many people read published famously said unsold copies library nearly 900 volumes 700 wrote south african lawyer indian descent named mohandas gandhi read thoreau civil disobedience found ideas helped fight discrimination africa liberate country british rule martin luther king studied thoreau gandhi put ideas work united states 1952 african national congress young nelson mandela collaborating south african indian congress civil disobedience campaigns wish could write thoreau letter way knowing planted would still bearing fruit 151 years death past doesnt need us past guides us future needs us influential comic book civil disobedience martin luther king published fellowship reconciliation us 1957 translated arabic distributed egypt 2009 four decades kings death impact measured seems one egyptian uprising dizzying mix social media outside pressure street fighting huge demonstrations past explodes time time many events seemed achieved nothing turn work slowly much beautifully transformative recent years also branded failure people want instant results guaranteed money back arab spring begun participant nations going equivalent french revolution worth remembering france despite terror napoleonic era never went back either absolutist monarchy belief condition could legitimate mess improvement still finished might said south african upheaval mandela catalyzed made things better made good enough worth pointing well liberated end apartheid nonwhite population one country sense power possibility many globally participated boycotts campaigns end apartheid miraculous era 1989 1991 also saw collapse soviet union successful revolutions across eastern europe student uprising beijing beginning end many authoritarian regimes latin america hopeful aftermath transformation mandela wrote titanic effort brought liberation south africa ensured total liberation africa constitutes act redemption black people world gift emancipation also white imposed heavy burden assuming mantle rulers humanity says listen understand ending apartheid barbarity offspring european colonization africa contributed advance human civilization expanded frontiers liberty everywhere congo square arc justice long travels new orleans city ive returned since hurricane katrina160 way trying understand disaster community culture continuity three things city possesses place else nation hiphop comes directly south bronx look 1970s founders genre popular music see key figures caribbean look formative music included ska reggae infused influence new orleans addition citys native son major jazz figure donald harrison jr mentor seminal new york city rapper notorious big look new orleans see astonishing example survival culture culture survival maybe youd early 2011 poke around origins american music new orleans struck way many essential parts came africa eighteenth early nineteenth centuries returned continent recent years looking maps making maps thinking chart unexpected ways immaterial things move time space saddest map ever seen oftpublished one triangle trade vicious circle isnt even circle depicts routes eighteenth nineteenth century european traders brought manufactured goods continent west africa exchange human beings transported united states caribbean exchanged raw materials especially sugar rum tobacco map tells people made tools commodities tells us nothing enslaved brought stripped bare possessions rights carried memory culture resistance heads new orleans let things flourish nowhere else united states long obscene era slavery biggest slave uprising us history took place nearby 1811 participants including two young asante warriors arrived new orleans slave ships five years earlier mideighteenth century 1840s enslaved new orleans permitted gather sundays plaza edge old city known congo square sabbath evening visitor hc knight famously wrote 1819 african slaves meet green swamp rock city congo dances great music historian ned sublette observes first use rock verb music marvelous book world made new orleans notes arguably first rock roll record roy browns 1947 good rocking tonight recorded block away africans brought continued metamorphosis city jazz famously arose black culture near congo square important rhythm blues strains influences well performers funk eventually hiphop funk arose part afrocuban influences africanamerican tradition mardi gras indians native americans workingclass african americans elaborate outfits rites officially pay homage native americans sheltered runaway slaves sometimes intermarried startling resemblance african beaded costumes mardi gras indians still parade day days chanting singing challenging song one recurrent chants declares wont bow 160160 though new orleans mainly famous things also city resistance slave revolts late eighteenth early nineteenth centuries late nineteenth century segregationbreaker homer plessy ruby bridges sixyearold 1960 first black child integrate white school south span time long might think fats domino one founding fathers rock roll still alive home lower ninth ward midwife birth blocks away grandmother born slavery 160 new orleanian herreast harrison woman seventies mother jazzman donald harrison jr widow mardi gras indian chief cultural preserver dynamic force city said mardi gras indian culture groups remembered cultural heritage practiced memory overarching memory pasts free spirits soared high heavens spite limitations every aspect lives felt like nothing get brainwashed constantly fact youre nobody didnt brought back part world music son donald harrison jr added one important thing congo square represented culture matter whats going life transcend culture congo square helps transcends puts transcendental state free moment even today thats power music thats brings us together moment freedom transcend everything thats going around berthold auerbach said eloquently music washes away soul dust everyday life160 moment become free music part world everybody wants moment transcend goes inside know go free matter youre norway south american beijing know music sets free congo square set world free basically gives freedom everyone around latest project unfathomable city new orleans atlas tried convey new orleans music gave world map labeled repercussions rhythm resistance across atlantic involuntary émigrés brought slave ship said nothing still reaches spreads liberates click see larger versionrepercussions rhythm resistance across atlantic map concept research rebecca solnit cartography shizue seigel design lia tjandra c univ ca press 2013 call arab spring first north african spring tunisia egypt libya hiphop already fact become global means dissent indigenous oaxaca mexico cairo egypt mean everything fine hiphop cant also used consumerism misogyny reminder however even horrific circumstances something remarkable survived throve grew eventually reached around earth nearly three years first sparks arab spring began wiser consider barely begun rather ended failure two years first members occupy wall street began decamping zuccotti park lower manhattan movement either though almost encampments subsided engagement new names occupy sandy strike debt everything continues metamorphose seems better way think social upheavals obituaries epitaphs maps unpredictable whenever look around wonder old things bear fruit seemingly solid institutions might soon rupture seeds might planting whose harvest come unpredictable moment future magnificent person met 2013 quoted line michel foucault people know frequently know dont know someone saves life educates person tells story upends everything assumed transformation may subtle crucial world changing next year 100 years maybe millennium cant always trace everything everyone genealogy forthcoming book rise creativity gift failure search mastery sarah lewis tells white teenager austin texas named charles black heard black trumpet player 1930s changed thinking lives riveted transformed beauty new orleans jazzman louis armstrongs music much began reconsider segregated world grown impossible overstate significance 16yearold southern boys seeing genius first time black recalled decades later lawyer dedicated racial equality civil rights would 1954 help overturn segregation nationwide aiding plaintiffs brown v board education landmark supreme court case ending segregation overturning plessy v ferguson failed antisegregation lawsuit launched new orleans 60 years earlier explain louis armstrongs music draw map united states sound trumpeter 1930s texas reaches back moments liberation created slaves congo square forward supreme court 1954 chart way capture three young american hikers iranian border guards iraqiran border 2009 imprisonment men 781 days became occasion secret talks us iran led interim nuclear agreement signed last month draw map world three idealistic young people walk become prisoners catalysts looking back one three prisoners shane bauer wrote one fears prison detention going fuel hostility iran us feels good know two miserable years led something could lead something better bauer later added reason tragedy led opening united states iran many people actively working end suffering friends families strive build bridge us iran two governments refusing sarah shourd third prisoner politician desire released year josh made skilled unrelenting diplomat strengthening connections oman us ultimately led talks decade ago began writing hope orientation nothing optimism optimism says everything fine matter pessimism says dismal matter hope sense grand mystery knowledge dont know turn anything possible means recognizing sound trumpet school dance austin texas may resound supreme court 20 years later unfortunate hike borderlands might help turn two countries away war edward snowden young nsa contractor biggest surprise year might revolt agencys sinister invasions privacy surprised vehemence global reaction leaked data culture left africa 200 years ago might return continent tool liberation dont know massachusetts pear tree still bearing fruit almost 400 years planted planter tree also helped instigate war pequots massacred 1637 survivors sold slavery given neighboring tribes colonists even barred use pequot name order cut remembrance earth leader raiding party later wrote according new york times centuries thereafter native american nation described extinct erased gone written past tense mentioned 1970s however pequots achieved federal recognition entitling rights native american tribes subject sovereign nations 1980s opened bingo hall reservation connecticut 1990s became biggest casino western world record im fan gambling industry unpredictable narratives enormous income project tribe funded native american history museum opened 1998 also biggest kind new empire pequots rocky ground since financial meltdown 2008 fact arose astonishing 150 years herman melville stuck ship called pequod middle novel moby dick mentioned named people extinct ancient medes longer odds new england people long pronounced gone would end profiting badmath optimism neighbors160 meanwhile pear tree continues bear fruit meanwhile hiphop continues vehicle political dissent inuit far north latin america meanwhile diplomatic relations iran surprising twists turns recently away war see fabric countrys rights justices fraying see climate change advancing terrible things moment clear consequences climate change get worse though much worse still depends us also see never actually know things play end unlikely events often occur innovative resilient species far us idealists good business status quo acknowledge learned first new orleans hurricane katrina calm resourceful generous people could worst times cajun navy came rescue people boat stranded formed communities mutual aid hundreds thousands volunteers middleaged mennonites young anarchists arrived afterward help salvage city could left dead dont know whats coming know whatever terrible miraculous term reserve utterly unanticipated seeds didnt know soil held know dont know shane bauer points crucial thing 160 rebecca solnit codirected unfathomable city new orleans atlas sequel 2010 infinite city san francisco atlas 160a tomdispatch regular written final article year site last nine years follow tomdispatch twitter join us facebook tumblr check newest dispatch book ann joness soldiers wounded return americas wars untold story copyright 2013 rebecca solnit | 1,909 |
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