tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-87206302024-03-13T20:07:21.305-07:00Get Off This!Herein was set into motion the Eristic Pattern, which would repeat Itself Five times over Seventy-Three times, after which nothing would happen. Hail Eris!Peter D Stanislawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11047318797222046289noreply@blogger.comBlogger1882125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720630.post-58310563982196454832012-05-11T00:55:00.000-07:002012-05-11T00:59:23.192-07:00Obama Comes Out In Favor Of Gay Marriage, Antebellum-Style<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<b>P. Stanislaw </b><br />
<br />
Before I get to what's on my mind, let me just say that of all the issues related to LGBT rights or the lack thereof, the ones that the corporate media seem to think are most important are military service and marriage. We don't seem to mind letting them lead the cultural and societal conversation by limiting the discussion to these two issues - well most of us, anyway. I'd like to say that it has always been my fervent hope that my LGBT friends would lead the way toward the eradication of such antiquated institutions - one, a glorified celebration of conquest, carnage, genocide and domination - the other, essentially a license to co-own another's "being".<br />
<br />
That said, let me say that the smug satisfaction being displayed by the Obamanauts regarding his "coming out" in favor of gay marriage is ridiculous, since he wiggled his way out of it by asserting "states' rights". Really? Civil rights don't come under the purview of the federal gov't anymore? Since when? Didn't we have a li'l dust-up regarding this somewhere in the 1860's. Yes, I believe we did. States are NOT allowed to dictate preferred civil rights or repeal them once conferred. Our great Hope for Change uttered an utter absurdity and we all fall to our knees over another "historic" event! Somebody shoot me, please...a Democratic graduate of Harvard Law should definitely know better. </div>Peter D Stanislawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11047318797222046289noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720630.post-57160042911305604062012-04-25T12:49:00.001-07:002012-04-25T12:49:45.033-07:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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April 25, 2012</div>
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The Real Story of the Cuban 5</div>
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<b>What Lies Across the Water</b></div>
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by STEPHEN KIMBER</div>
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I am a late-comer to the case of the Cuban
Five. I stumbled on the story a few years ago while researching a
novel—a love story—set partly in Cuba.<br />
During a trip to Havana in the spring of 2009, I struck up a
friendship with a guide who was showing me the city I wouldn’t see as a
tourist. Partly to make conversation and partly because I was curious, I
asked him what he thought of the prospects for improved relations
between Havana and Washington now that Barak Obama was in the White
House.<br />
He didn’t hesitate. “Forget Obama,” he said. “Nothing will change until the case of the Five is resolved.”<br />
The Cuban Five? I’d barely heard of them.<br />
So he gave me a history lesson—about how a group of Cuban
intelligence agents had uncovered a plot to be blow up an airplane;
about how author Gabriel Garcia Marquez had carried a secret message
from Fidel Castro to Bill Clinton with details of the plot; about how a
delegation from the FBI had gone to Havana to meet with their
counterparts in Cuban State Security to discuss it; and how, less than
three months later, the FBI had arrested not the Miami-based terrorists
who were planning to blow up the plane but the Cuban intelligence agents
who were trying to stop them.<br />
You can look it up, he said.<br />
I did. I found a Fidel Castro speech on the Internet that outlined
the Cuban version of events. Castro even read into the record the entire
4,000-word text of a previously secret report Garcia Marquez had
written to Castro following his meeting with White House officials in
Washington.<br />
I was hooked. I put the novel on hold and began researching<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B007UBKF0C/counterpunchmaga"> the nonfiction story of the Cuban Five</a>.<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
***</div>
I came at it as a “story” rather than a “cause,” and I think that’s
important. Too often there is a sense of rote in our rhetoric about the
Five. They are the “five heroes” who were “unjustly accused,” “unfairly
tried and convicted” and then “punitively punished” simply for being
“anti-terrorist fighters.”<br />
It’s all true, of course, but it doesn’t help convince those who
aren’t already convinced. Many Americans, I don’t have to tell you, are
prepared to believe the worst about Cuba, and especially about Cuban
government agents.<br />
My goal was to tell the story—and it is a fascinating story—as a nonfiction narrative.<br />
It begins in 1990 when a civilian Cuban pilot named René González
“stole” a plane in Havana and flew it to Key West where he “defected.”
González, in fact, was the first of the five Cuban intelligence agents
sent to set up shop in Florida.<br />
He arrived soon after a debate about the fate of Orlando Bosch had
raged in the Miami media. Bosch—a well known anti-Cuban terrorist
considered one of the masterminds behind a 1976 explosion aboard a
Cubana Airlines plane that killed 73 people—had applied for residency in
the U.S.. The justice department (though not necessarily the White
House) opposed his application; Miami’s exile community supported Bosch.
Guess who won?<br />
I wanted to incorporate into the unfolding narrative details about
what the various Miami exile groups were actually plotting (a lot), what
the U.S. government was doing to stop them (precious little) and what
the Cuban intelligence agents were learning about what the exiles were
really up to (plenty).<br />
As part of my research, I read the 20,000-plus pages of transcript
from the trial of the Five, examined the binders-full of even more
thousands of pages of decoded documents and correspondence between the
Cuban agents and their bosses back in Havana.<br />
I began a still-ongoing, still un-won battle with the FBI for
documents relating to what I believe is a critically important meeting
between the FBI and Cuban State Security in Havana in June 1998. After
two years of appeals, I have only finally gotten the FBI to admit there
are documents. But I’m still waiting to see them.<br />
I also, of course, interviewed key figures in Havana, Miami and Washington—none of them more intriguing than Percy Alvarado.<br />
Though not one of the Five, Alvarado too was a Cuban intelligence
agent who operated in Miami around the same time as the Five. He claims
he infiltrated the powerful Cuban American National Foundation. Key
members of the Foundation recruited him to plant bombs in Cuba, he says.
And Luis Posada himself—an acknowledged anti-Castro terrorist—trained
him how to assemble the bombs he was supposed to sneak into Cuba.<br />
Now let’s be clear. Everyone in this business lies. It is the nature
of the clandestine world, and you should never take it on faith that
anyone—American or Cuban—is telling the whole truth. That said, I was
struck by the fact that what Alvarado publicly alleged in 1999 was later
corroborated—inadvertently—by a senior official of CANF who just
happened to be suing his former comrades in arms.<br />
I also interviewed, by mail and email, members of the Five. I found them to be impressive, courageous figures.<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
***</div>
I want to talk today about some of what I learned in that process. It
wasn’t always what I expected. Or what I’d been told to expect.<br />
The versions I’d read from some Cuban Five supporters, for instance,
made it appear as if the FBI had learned the identities of the Five
because of the information Cuban State Security turned over to them at
those meetings in June 1998.<br />
That’s not true. The FBI had been following the Cubans since at least 1996.<br />
Which raises an intriguing question. Why did the FBI arrest them when they did?<br />
I’ll come back to that.<br />
The Cubans have also been at pains to argue that their agents were
only in Florida to monitor the activities of exile terrorists groups.<br />
Again, not entirely true.<br />
One of the agents, Antonio Guerrero had an almost exclusively
military mission. That inconvenient truth—rarely acknowledged by Cuban
authorities—has provided anti-Castro mainstream journalists and
commentators the opportunity to make it appear as if the Cubans’ primary
mission was to “infiltrate” American military bases or steal U.S.
secrets.<br />
It wasn’t. The military aspect of their duties was minor—and there is
an important context to it. Guerrero’s primary function was to serve as
the canary in the coal mine, an early warning system of a possible U.S.
invasion of Cuba.<br />
The U.S. has satellites to keep an eye on its enemies—a variation on
spying we accept as legitimate. The Cubans can’t afford satellites. They
have human observers instead. Like Tony Guerrero.<br />
His job was to pay attention to the comings and goings of military
aircraft at the Boca Chica Naval Station. Was there a sudden build up of
planes on the runways? What kinds? An unusual number of brass-hat
visitors to the base?<br />
The Cubans had legitimate reasons to fear an invasion—and not just
because that’s what the influential Miami exile leadership prayed for
each night. The Cubans knew what had already happened in Haiti, in
Panama.<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
***</div>
What did the Cuban agents actually do in Florida?<br />
Most of the time they kept a close watch on exile groups they
believed were plotting attacks on their homeland. They knew that those
militant exile groups were rarely arrested, even more rarely tried and
almost never convicted.<br />
To keep the exiles from succeeding, the agents had to be inventive.<br />
Consider just one example from July of 1998, two months before they were arrested.<br />
Gerardo Hernandez, the controller of the Miami agents, received an
urgent coded message from Havana that there was a vaguely identified
“boat bomb” filled with weapons and explosives docked in the Miami
River. The vessel was destined to be used as a weapon against Cuba.<br />
Hernandez and his team of agents soon tracked down the vessel at a marina near a populated area.<br />
What to do about it?<br />
They certainly didn’t want to allow the vessel to sail, of course,
but Hernandez realized the options Havana had suggested—blowing up the
vessel, or sinking it—were all too risky, and might endanger innocent
civilians.<br />
Instead, Hernandez messaged his bosses, cleverly suggesting someone
call the FBI anonymously and tip them off about the boat’s cargo.<br />
A week later, a story appeared in the Miami <em>Herald</em>. The
headline: ANTI TERRORISM RAID COMES UP EMPTY. The story detailed how
members of Miami’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, acting on an anonymous
tip, had raided vessels in a Miami River marina. They were looking for
explosives and guns destined for a “third country.” But the raid was a
“bust,” according to an FBI spokesman. They didn’t find anything.<br />
How hard were they looking? The FBI agent in charge was a guy named George Kisynzki. Two weeks earlier, in the pages of the <em>New York Times, </em>Luis Posada himself had described the agent as a “very good friend.”<br />
What was going on? “Law enforcement veterans saw the search as an FBI hint… to cancel any conspiracies,” the Miami <em>Herald</em> reported. “That’s a common practice in South Florida… known as ‘admonishing’ or ‘demobilizing’ an operation.”<br />
We later learned more about this particular incident. The boat’s
owner was a man named Enrique Bassas. Bassas, a wealthy Miami
businessman, had been one of the co-founders of a sixties-era terrorist
umbrella group called CORU, which had been responsible for blowing up
that Cuban plane in 1976. More recently, Cuban intelligence had
identified Bassas as one of the financiers of a new mercenary,
anti-Castro army being organized in Miami.<br />
Perhaps most significantly, the month before the raid, Bassas had
been in Guatemala City meeting with Luis Posada. They were, according to
a later report, trying to figure out how to sneak weapons and
explosives into the Dominican Republic.<br />
The Dominican Republic? That just happened to be where Fidel Castro was scheduled to speak the following month.<br />
The Miami <em>Herald</em> later reported on this botched
assassination plot and came up with its own—close to the
money—explanation for what had gone wrong. Cuban intelligence agents,
explained the Herald, “presumed by most law enforcement and exile
experts to have penetrated many exile organizations, tipped the FBI to
protect Castro’s life during the visit to the Dominican Republic.”<br />
There are a lot of episodes like that in the trial records. It’s also
clear from those records the Cuban agents weren’t interested in using
violence to achieve their objective of preventing exile attacks on their
homeland.<br />
Which is more than can be said for the exiles.<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
***</div>
But what then are we to make of the most damaging charge—conspiracy to commit murder—against Gerardo Hernandez?<br />
That charge relates to the February 1996 shootdown of two unarmed
Brothers to the Rescue aircraft in the Straits of Florida that killed
four civilians.<br />
There’s no doubt that charge—filed seven months after the
arrests—affected the cases of all five defendants and unduly influenced
the harsh sentences they all received. Including, of course, Hernandez
himself, who is currently serving two life sentences plus 15 years in
prison for his supposed role in the shootdown.<br />
And the allegation continues to resonate today. Whenever the question
of pardoning the Five, or swapping them for the American Alan Gross is
raised, the inevitable answer is that the U.S. could never consider such
a deal because the Five were responsible for the deaths of four
innocent men.<br />
I spent a lot of time focusing on that allegation. I read the
transcript. I studied the court documents. I read the International
Civil Aviation report on the incident.<br />
The reality is that there is not a shred of compelling evidence to
suggest Gerardo Hernandez knew about the plan to shoot down the planes,
or that he had any control over, or role in what happened.<br />
Indeed the evidence paints a very different picture of what Hernandez really knew.<br />
Cuban State Security is famed for its compartmentalization. I tell
another story in the book about two agents who’d infiltrated the same
exile group and the efforts Havana undertook to make sure neither man
knew the other was actually working for the same side.<br />
The back-and-forth memos between Havana and its field officers in the
lead-up to the shootdown make it clear everything was on a need-to-know
basis—and Gerardo Hernandez didn’t need to know what the Cuban military
was considering.<br />
There are, of course, plenty of other unresolved issues about the shootdown.<br />
Were the Brothers’ planes in international waters as the Americans
claim, or in Cuban airspace as Havana argues? The best answer to that
question could come from U.S. satellite images taken by any one of more
than a half-dozen satellites the American government and its agencies
had tracking events that day, but Washington so far refuses to release
them.<br />
More importantly, was shooting down the planes a reasonable response to the Brothers’ provocation?<br />
Those provocations had been going on for seven intense months prior
to the shootdown. The Cubans had complained. Washington had tried—and
failed—to prevent the continuing overflights. And the Cubans had sent
several clear messages to Washington that it would take action if there
were any more illegal incursions into their territory.<br />
To make matters worse, the Cubans knew—thanks to their agents—that
Brothers to the Rescue were test firing air-to-ground weapons they could
conceivably decide to use against Cuba. They were more than a nuisance;
they were a threat.<br />
That said, I don’t believe the shootdown was the most reasonable
response. There were alternatives, including forcing the planes down and
putting the pilots on trial.<br />
But my view doesn’t change the only important reality: Gerardo
Hernandez was not involved in shooting down the planes and he should
never have been charged.<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
***</div>
Which leads to yet another question: should the Five themselves have ever been charged with anything?<br />
Well, they did commit crimes. They failed to register as foreign
agents, and three of them carried false identity documents. Those are
minor, commonplace crimes in the world of intelligence; American agents
operating in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Moscow and elsewhere commit
them everyday.<br />
But there is no evidence the Cuban agents stole military secrets or
threatened American security. That’s why they were never charged with
actual espionage—just “conspiracy to commit espionage.” A thought crime
versus an actual crime.<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
***</div>
The other point that’s worth making is that the FBI knew exactly who
the Cuban agents were and what they were doing in Florida. They’d been
following them for at least two years. They’d broken into their
apartments, stolen their computer disks, decoded them. They knew what
they did each day, even about their love lives.<br />
Let me give you just one example of how closely the FBI followed the
Cuban agents. In April 1998, one of the Five traveled to New York to
meet—supposedly secretly—with an intelligence officer from the Cuban
Mission there. The FBI knew about the rendezvous—at a Wendy’s on the
Hempstead Turnpike—far enough in advance that they were not able to have
seven video cameras and countless still cameras recording the meeting
but they were also able to plant of their own 35 agents at the fast food
restaurant that day. It must have been a surprisingly good day for the
operators of that Wendy’s!<br />
So let’s consider the situation from the point of view of the FBI.
You have complete access to a Cuban intelligence network and, better,
the Cubans don’t know you do. You know that they’re not doing anything
to threaten U.S. security; in fact, much of what they’re
doing—monitoring compliance with the U.S. Neutrality Act—is your job.<br />
So why arrest them?<br />
The moment you arrest them, you lose access to this unfolding
intelligence gold mine. And, worse, you know these captured agents will
simply be replaced by another group of agents—and then you’ll have to
discover the new guys and start all over again.<br />
So why arrest the Five when they did?<br />
There are things we don’t know about that. But there are some things we do.<br />
In May 1998, the FBI appointed a new Special Agent in Charge of its
Miami Field Office. His name was Hector Pesquera, the first Hispanic to
head up that very important, very political FBI field office in the
heartland of Cuban America.<br />
We know Pesquera quickly made friends with key leaders in the Miami
Cuban exile community, including a convicted felon who’d been a former
police officer in Batista’s pre-Castro Cuba—not to forget a number of
high-profile exile leaders Cuban intelligence had identified as
terrorists.<br />
It was just a month after Pesquera arrived on the scene, of course,
that the FBI delegation flew to Havana to meet with their Cuban
counterparts. That’s when the Cubans gave the FBI documents fingering
some of Pesquera’s new friends as terrorists.<br />
The Cubans would later say they believed the agents who came to
Havana treated the information they turned over to them seriously, and
genuinely intended to follow up.<br />
And yet, three months later, FBI swat teams swooped in and arrested the Five, ignoring the exile plotters entirely.<br />
We know Pesquera made that decision. We know because he said so.
After he’d initially been appointed, Pesquera told a Spanish language
radio station following the arrests, “I was updated on everything there
was. We then began to concentrate on this investigation. As far as
intelligence[-gathering] is concerned, [I decided] it shouldn’t be there
anymore; it should change course and become a criminal investigation.”<br />
We know his agents on the ground objected.<br />
We also know—because Pesquera himself bragged about it—that he
lobbied all the way to the top of the FBI food chain in Washington for
authorization to make the arrests. He later told the Miami Herald the
case “never would have made it to court” if he hadn’t lobbied FBI
Director Louis Freeh directly. “To this day there are people in my
headquarters who are not completely sold.”<br />
No kidding.<br />
I’ve tried to interview Pesquera, who retired from the FBI in
2003—after authorizing the destruction of the FBI’s files on Luis
Posada—but he continues to give me the runaround.<br />
Late last month, however, Pesquera popped up in the news again; he’s
just been appointed the chief of police in his native Puerto Rico.<br />
The universe continues to unfold…<br />
And the Cuban Five remain stuck in the United States, four still in prison, one in the prison of parole.<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
***</div>
It will not be easy to right this injustice, not in a country where
in the past week the manager of a Miami baseball team was forced to make
a groveling apology for offering the mildest of praise for Fidel
Castro, and where the owner of a Miami restaurant faced anonymous
threats because her restaurant just happened to be located on the ground
floor of a building whose roof featured (however briefly) a billboard
calling for Freedom for the Five.<br />
Those prejudices and fears will be difficult to overcome. But they
must be. And that’s why it’s especially important to make the case based
on the facts.<br />
I hope my forthcoming book, <em>What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five</em>, will contribute to that conversation.<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
***</div>
We hear a lot these days about Alan Gross, a U.S. government
contractor who is currently serving 15 years in a Cuban prison for
smuggling illegal communications equipment into Cuba.<br />
His supporters, like those of the Five, are demanding his
release. While the two cases are different in many important ways, the
key reality is that the Cuban government is unlikely to consider
releasing Alan Gross unless the U.S. government reciprocates by
releasing the Cuban Five. And the U.S. government won’t release the Five
without considerable public pressure.<br />
That’s why those who are arguing Alan Gross’ case need to know about the Cuban Five.<br />
They need to look beyond the rhetoric, both from supporters of the
Five but also—and more importantly—from an American government that
disingenuously insists the Five were somehow threatening U.S. security
and responsible for the deaths of innocent civilians.<br />
I will close with a quote from Jane Franklin, a widely respected
expert on Cuban-American relations. She was responding to a recent
column in the Washington <em>Post</em> in which Alan Gross’ wife, Judith, drew heartfelt but false parallels between her husband’s situation and that of the Five.<br />
If she were Judith Gross, Franklin wrote, “I would study the cases of
the Cuban Five to find out exactly how they came to be arrested, tried
in Miami, convicted, and sent to separate prisons around the United
States. Having come to grips with the outrageous injustice of their
imprisonment, I would then commit my life to a campaign for releasing
the Cuban Five in exchange for my husband Alan Gross.”<br />
<em><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">This
essay is an abridged version of a talk by Stephen Kimber about his
forthcoming book, What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the
Cuban Five, on April 18, 2012 at the Center for International Policy in
Washington, D.C.. </span></em><br />
<em><strong>STEPHEN KIMBER</strong>, a Professor of Journalism at the
University of King’s College in Halifax, is an award-winning writer,
editor and broadcaster. He is the author of one novel — Reparations —
and seven non-fiction books.</em><br />
<em><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
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</div>Peter D Stanislawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11047318797222046289noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720630.post-55045854569914199012012-04-22T16:32:00.000-07:002012-04-22T16:35:53.930-07:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b>An Envoi for Christopher HitchensAt the Pearly Gates</b><br />
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by ALEXANDER COCKBURN</div>
<i>On April 20 there’s a memorial for
Christopher Hitchens at the Cooper Union in Manhattan. There’s a PEN
tribute, also in Manhattan, on April 30. Here’s my own little envoi.
The regular Diary, tumbrils and all, will resume next week.</i><br />
<br />
SCENE ONE<br />
<i>Antechamber to Heaven, a large reception room in the Baroque
style. A door opens and an angel ushers in Christopher Hitchens, dressed
in hospital clothing. The angel gestures for CH to take a seat. He is
about to do so when he espies a familiar figure reading some newspapers.</i><br />
<br />
CH Dr. Kissinger! The very last person I would have expected to
encounter here. All the more so, since I don’t recall any recent reports
of your demise.<br />
HK You will no doubt be cast down by the news that I am indeed
alive. This is a secret trip, to spy out the terrain diplomatically,
assess the odds.<br />
CH You think you have the slightest chance of entering the celestial sphere?<br />
HK Everything is open to negotiation.<br />
CH Have you threatened to bomb Heaven — secretly of course?<br />
HK Very funny. As a matter of fact, Woytila — Pope John Paul II, I
should say — has kindly offered to intercede at the highest level. And
talking of negotiation, perhaps we could have a quiet word.<br />
CH What about?<br />
HK That worthless book you wrote about me — <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1859843980/counterpunchmaga">The Trial of Henry Kissinger</a></i>.
John Paul says that the prosecutors here have been using it in drawing
up preliminary drafts of their case against me. Now, he also says it
would be extraordinarily helpful if you would sign this affidavit — my
lawyers have already prepared it — saying that you unconditionally
withdraw the slurs and allegations, the baseless charges of war
criminality, and attest under eternal pain of perjury that these were
forced on you by your <i>Harper’s</i> editors.<br />
CH Dr Kissinger! Your idea is outrageous. I stand behind every word I wrote!<br />
HK Hmm. Too bad. After all, you certainly have experience in, how
shall we say, adjusting sworn affidavits to changing circumstance. I
believe Mr. Sidney Blumenthal could comment harshly on the matter.<br />
CH Dr. Kissinger, let me reiterate…<br />
HK My dear fellow, spare me your protestations. Let us consider the
matter as mature adults — both of us, if I may say, now in potentially
challenging circumstances.<br />
CH Speak for yourself, Dr. Kissinger. I do not recognize this as
Heaven’s gate, or you as a genuine physical presence. I do not believe
in the afterlife and therefore regard this as some last-second
hallucination engendered in my brain in my room in M.D. Anderson
hospital in Houston, Texas. I may be dying, but I am not dead yet. I
have not dropped off the perch.<br />
HK Off the perch… How very English. You will dismiss these as a
mere last-second hallucination, a terminal orgy of self-flattery on your
part, but (<i>flourishes bundle of newspapers</i>) <i>The New York Times</i> certainly thinks you’re dead. <i>The Washington Post</i> thinks you’re dead.<br />
CH Let me look at those… (<i>snatches the papers from HK’s hand; skims them intently</i>)<br />
HK Rather too flattering, if I may be frank. But, of course, as you say, all fantasy.<br />
CH They’re very concrete. Far more amiable than I would have dared to imagine…. I… I… (<i>passes hand over brow</i>) Is it possible to get a drink in this anteroom?<br />
HK Ah, after the soaring eagle of certainty, the fluttering magpie of doubt. I think we can bend the sumptuary laws a little (<i>pulls a large flask from his pocket</i>). Some schnapps?<br />
CH I would have preferred Johnnie Walker Black, but any port in a storm. (<i>drinks</i>)<br />
HK Bishop Berkeley, a philosopher, claimed, like you, that the
world could be all in one’s imagination. It was your Doctor Samuel
Johnson who sought to rebut Berkeley’s idealist theories by kicking a
stone. And what did Dr. Johnson say when he kicked that stone?<br />
CH He said, “Sir, I refute it thus.”<br />
HK Precisely. Let the schnapps be your empirical stone. Now, if I
may, let me continue with my proposition. As you know, you wrote another
pamphlet, equally stuffed with lies and foul abuse, called <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1455523003/counterpunchmaga">The Missionary Position</a></i>.<br />
CH Yes, a fine piece of work about that old slag, Mother Teresa.<br />
HK The “old slag”, as you ungallantly term the woman, is now part
of an extremely influential faction in Heaven, including Pope John Paul
II. Mother Teresa remains vexed by your portrait. She says it is in
libraries and all over the Internet. She, like me, would dearly love to
see you make an unqualified retraction of your slurs.<br />
CH And that, of course, I will not do!<br />
HK You’re aware of the fate of Giordano Bruno?<br />
CH Certainly. One of reason’s noblest martyrs. Burned at the stake
in the Campo de Fiore in Rome in 1600 for heresy. He insisted, with
Copernicus, that the earth revolves around the sun and that the universe
is infinite.<br />
HK Quite so. A noble end, but an extremely painful one. Perhaps, with Satanic assistance, I can remind you of it.<br />
<i>He claps his hands, and two fallen angels in black robes draw
open a pair of heavy red velvet curtains at the far end of the room.</i> <i>HK
makes a theatrical bow and motions CH forward. The latter edges near
the space are now suffused with leaping flames. For a brief moment
there’s a ghastly wailing, and CH leaps back into the room.</i><br />
CH Great God!<br />
HK You seem to have reverted to religious belief with startling speed.<br />
CH No, no. It was purely a <i>façon de parler</i>. Not a pretty sight.<br />
HK But in your view, a pure hallucination, nein? No need to kick the stone, like Dr. Johnson.<br />
<i>Before CH can answer, the fallen angels seize him and start
dragging him toward the open curtains. They are about to hurl him into
the pit, when…</i><br />
ST. MICHAEL (<i>suddenly appearing through the gates of Heaven) </i> Stop!<br />
<i>He hands CH and HK tickets.</i><br />
These are one-day passes to Heaven. In Mr. Hitchens’ case, for
purposes of interrogation by the Board of Inquiry and Final Judgment. <i></i><br />
<i>Exeunt St. Michael, HK and CH through ornate gilded doors to Heaven.</i><i> </i><br />
<br />
SCENE TWO<br />
<i>Heaven. A vast Baroque gallery, in which an animated throng is enjoying itself in something closely resembling a cocktail party.</i><br />
ST. MICHAEL We’ve just remodeled. Before, we had something in the
Gothic style, but the feeling was that in keeping with the times there
should be more gold, more sense of extravagant illusion. And that of
course brought us to the Baroque. You will no doubt detect many echoes
of the Palazzo Colonna in Rome.<br />
HK I think I see His Holiness John Paul II, over there. With your permission, I might have a word?<br />
ST. MICHAEL Of course. And Mr. Hitchens, before we get to the Board
of Inquiry, I’m sure there are some immortals you’d like to tip your
hat to.<br />
CH The hat is all very well, but….<br />
ST. MICHAEL How forgetful of me! In general we’re an abstemious crowd here, but there’s no ban on moderate enjoyment.<br />
<i>A cherub swoops down, proffering a well-stocked tray.</i><br />
CH (<i>gulping down one glass quickly and taking another</i>) Angel!<br />
POPE PIUS V (<i>joining the group</i>) Michael, I couldn’t help
overhearing your reference to the Palazzo Colonna, built in the late
seventeenth century, and of course memorable for the marvelous
depictions on the ceiling of its Grand Gallery of the Battle of Lepanto
in 1571, our Holy League’s historic defeat of the Ottomans.<br />
CH Ha! The wily Turk, lurking like a cobra ’midst the fairest
flowers of God’s creation, lies ever ready to pounce upon the
unsuspecting traveler and bugg…<br />
PIUS V I don’t believe I’ve had the honor.<br />
ST. MICHAEL This is Mr. Hitchens, a British-American writer here on a possibly brief visit. And (<i>to CH)</i> this is St. Pius V, who indeed occupied the Holy See at the time of Lepanto.<br />
CH (<i>theatrical bow)</i> The honor is mine.<br />
PIUS V Those were the days, when the wind was truly at our backs!
210 ships of the Ottoman armada — almost their entire fleet — sent to
the bottom of the Gulf of Patras; the Counter Reformation in full spate;
the Council of Trent a magnificent success; heresy confronted and
extirpated by our Inquisitors.<br />
CH The screams of their victims no doubt inaudible amid the general brays of triumph.<br />
PIUS V Speaking as a former Inquisitor, let me say that by modern
standards of bloodshed consequent upon religious or ideological
conflicts, the number of those who perished by reason of their adamant
heresy was startlingly small. Have you kept up with recent scholarship
on the topic? I thought not. Out of 62,000 cases judged by the
Inquisition in Italy after 1542, only 1,250 ended with death sentences.
The Spanish Inquisition held an average of 350 trials a year between
1560-1700 and executed between 3,000 and 5,000 people.<br />
CH (<i>snatching two more glasses from the tray of a passing cherub</i>)
I do not propose to stand silently here, your so-called Holiness, and
endure from a dotard in a white petticoat filthy apologias for atrocious
barbarism in the name of his so-called God.<br />
ST. MICHAEL Mr. Hitchens! I suggest you moderate your language immediately.<br />
PIUS V (<i>walking away</i>) Brutto insolente, ignorante, ubriacone pieno di merda!<br />
MOTHER TERESA (<i>approaching, with Pope John Paul II; HK lurking discreetly)</i>
Brutto insolente, indeed! Mr. Hitchens, I understand from Dr. Kissinger
that you are prepared to repudiate your libels upon me.<br />
CH Certainly not.<br />
JOHN PAUL II But why not? After all, your arguments against the
Blessed Teresa were either trivial or absurd, and in all instances
morally odious. To focus on the latter: by 1996, the Blessed Teresa was
operating 517 missions in more than 100 countries. And you, what were
you doing for the poor? Would a starving person near death be more
likely to get a bowl of soup or shelter from the Blessed Teresa or from
Christopher Hitchens?<br />
CH I have never had pretensions to be in the professional charity business.<br />
MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE If I may intrude. Of course, as a great admirer
of Mother Teresa, I was in receipt of Mr. Hitchens’ barbs, so I do speak
as a biased witness. I regard it as truly extraordinary that while Mr.
Hitchens was blithely ladling his sewage over our heads, he was — as a
sometime US correspondent, I have followed these matters closely from
here in Heaven — a fierce and influential advocate of one of the most
violent onslaughts on the poor in recent historical memory: first, the
sanctions on Iraq, which caused untold misery to Iraq’s poorest
citizens; then the actual attack of 2003, which eventually prompted the
deaths of over a million Iraqis and a crisis that still virtually
paralyses that wretched nation.<br />
CH I would not change a syllable of what I wrote.<br />
MM Worse still — I speak also as someone who reported from the
Soviet Union during Stalin’s rule — Mr. Hitchens displayed himself as a
craven apparatchik of the Bush White House, actually going to 1600
Pennsylvania Avenue the night before the invasion to give a pep talk to
the President’s staff about their noble mission.<br />
Since Beatrice Webb was my wife’s aunt, I am intimately familiar with
the follies of socialists. You, in your contempt for “lesser”
cultures, remind me of the German social democrat Eduard Bernstein, who
argued that to oppose Rhodes’s suppression of the Matabele uprising was
to oppose “the spread of civilization”, and that “the higher culture
always has the greater right on its side over the lower; if necessary it
has the historical right, yea, the duty, to subjugate it.”<br />
CH The mission to Baghdad <i>was </i>noble: the eviction of a filthy tyrant…<br />
MM …was worth the denial of medicine and medical equipment for
babies, the forcing of hundreds of thousands of poor Iraqis into near
starvation, the creation of millions of internal refugees plus those who
managed to flee the country, the unleashing of sectarian bloodshed on
an unparalleled scale? Just so that your hero, Tony Blair, and your
supreme leader, Mr. Bush, could boast, “Mission Accomplished”?<br />
CH Since His Holiness St. Pius V, who has departed the field of
disputation, was invoking the Battle of Lepanto, I’m surprised not to
hear any parallels drawn between that engagement and the Crusade against
Islam, of which the war in Iraq — and the terror axis of Hussein and
Osama — was a significant element.<br />
MM You mean your precious crusade against so-called
“Islamo-fascism”, the bizarre coinage of a Trotskyite, such as you once
were? Lepanto at least saw the Ottoman armada, and the unfortunate
slaves who rowed their galleys, sent to the bottom of the sea. Your
crusade in Iraq saw the triumph of the Shi’a, and a significant victory
for Iran. With Vice President Cheney you must be the last two men alive
who believe in the Hussein/Osama axis.<br />
JOHN PAUL II The Holy See strongly opposed the war. Before it
began, I sent Cardinal Pio Laghi to tell Bush it would be a disaster and
would destroy human life. The war was useless, served no purpose and
was a defeat for humanity. Such was my view, which was the recorded
opinion of the Holy See.<br />
MM Surely, a more humane posture than your own hosannas to cluster
bombs: “Those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out
the other side and through somebody else. So they won’t be able to say,
‘Ah, I was bearing a Koran over my heart and, guess what, the missile
stopped halfway through.’ No way, ’cause it’ll go straight through that
as well. They’ll be dead, in other words.”<br />
CH Rather well put, if I say so myself.<br />
MM You are impervious to rebuke, which is not surprising, since if
one rebuke is let in the door, it can usher in another, and then some
serious inner reflection may become unavoidable. As Cardinal Newman put
it, “To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.”<br />
CH Newman, that old queen!<br />
MM Like St. Pius, I’ll quit the field now, but let me return to
something His Holiness John Paul II said. “Would a starving person near
death be more likely to get a bowl of soup or shelter from the Blessed
Teresa or from Christopher Hitchens?”<br />
What has constantly struck me is the desolate sterility of your
atheism. We had atheists in our generation, of course, but they lived in
a world and consorted with people for whom religion had profound
meaning, often inspiring them to acts of nobility and extraordinary
self-sacrifice. In your book, religious people are stupid. But they
weren’t stupid, and the atheists — I’m thinking of my dear friend, a man
you profess to have admired, Claud Cockburn — didn’t deride them, but
cheerfully swapped quotations from the Sermon on the Mount. The context
was one of respect and mutual striving for a better world.<br />
What sort of moral leadership did you, the great and ultimately
rather wealthy exponent of atheism display? Extreme disloyalty to close
friends, constant public drunkenness and brutish rudeness, particularly
to women, and a life, if I may say so, of almost psychotic
self-centeredness and exhibitionism. You had your claque — Messrs Amis,
Fenton and the others — and their energies in promoting you as a major
intellectual and stylist were unceasing, and in their somewhat
homoerotic loyalty, rather touching, but I don’t think the verdict of
history will be quite so kind.<br />
<br />
SCENE THREE<br />
<i>Antechamber to Heaven. CH is sitting on a bench. Door opens and St. Michael bids HK a cheerful goodbye.</i><br />
HK Mr. Hitchens. You seem somewhat subdued. (<i>proffering flask)</i> A little schnapps?<br />
CH My dear fellow! (<i>drinks deeply</i>) You arranged your affairs successfully?<br />
HK Entirely so. In large part owing to you. Pope John Paul II and
Mother Teresa, not to mention St. Pius V, were so shocked by your views
and by your language that they entirely discounted the charges you
leveled against me, and believe me to have been vilely traduced.<br />
CH I suppose I should be glad to have been of service. But let me
ask a question: since you are Jewish, why would you be taking such
trouble to build up contacts in what is clearly a Christian Heaven?<br />
HK Between ourselves, I am preparing for a final conversion and
absolution. Jews are vague about heaven and, after a lifetime’s
observation, I am inclined to think that the atmosphere in Gehenna would
be extremely acrimonious. Your plans?<br />
CH Once again, I feel it necessary to insist that I do not
recognize myself as being in Heaven, or disputing with a
sixteenth-century pope, or indeed being reprimanded by St. Michael and
Malcolm Muggeridge. Or talking affably with Henry Kissinger. So, please,
regard this as ongoing cerebral activity on the part of C.H. Hitchens,
patient at M.D. Anderson.<br />
HK As you wish. But here, (<i>slips him the flask</i>)<i> </i>just remember Dr. Johnson’s stone. Farewell, my friend.<br />
<i>Lights fade to a dark red.</i><br />
<div align="center">
END</div>
<b><i>Alexander Cockburn</i></b><i> can be reached at <a href="mailto:alexandercockburn@asis.com">alexandercockburn@asis.com</a></i></div>Peter D Stanislawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11047318797222046289noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720630.post-19928645381768370442012-03-11T14:27:00.001-07:002012-03-11T14:27:50.326-07:00Banking on the Bomb<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br />
<div class="subheadlinestyle"><b>The Nuclear Weapons Industry & Its Financial Backers</b></div><div class="subheadlinestyle"></div><div class="mainauthorstyle">by JOHN STANTON</div><br />
<div class="main-text"><blockquote>“Most financial institutions don’t consider the social and environmental consequences of their investments. Unless members speak up and take action, they’re unlikely to take ethical considerations into account. Our research shows that teachers’ pension funds in the United States, Canada and Britain invest heavily in companies involved in the nuclear weapons industry. Yet polls show that teachers — the guardians of our future, in many ways — are overwhelmingly opposed to nuclear weapons. Through their daily work, teachers promote understanding, tolerance and cooperation. Nuclear weapons are the very antithesis of these virtues. Teachers should refuse to have their retirement savings invested in this horrible industry.”<br />
<i>– Daniela Varano International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.</i></blockquote><b>“TIAA-CREF declines to comment.” </b><br />
The most open and forthright firm on this matter has been TIAA-CREF. Though they will be in the firing line they have tried to make decent investments.<br />
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons released an <a href="http://www.icanw.org/node/5869">eye-popping</a> report on 5 March 2012 titled Don’t Bank on the Bomb. In that report are listings of banks, financial institutions and funds that, in some form, fund the research, design, development, production, deployment and maintenance of nuclear weapons.<br />
Nobel Laureate Bishop Desmond Tutu penned the introduction to the report. He indicated that battling against the entrenched interests (government/military and banks/financial firms) that sustain nuclear weapons and fund their modernization will be a long and arduous struggle. But he points to the model of boycott and disinvestment used to pressure the apartheid government of South Africa as both inspiring and successful.<br />
<blockquote>“Banks and other financial institutions should be called upon to do the right thing and assist, rather than impede, efforts to eliminate the threat of radioactive incineration by divesting from the immoral nuclear arms industry. In the long struggle to end racial segregation in South Africa, our freedom was won with the help of concerned individuals around the world who pressured their leaders and corporate actors to stop funding the racist regime. To those who invested in our country, we said: you are doing us no favor; you are buttressing one of the most vicious systems. Divestment was vital in the campaign to end apartheid in South Africa. Today, the same tactic can – and must – be employed to challenge man’s most evil creation: the nuclear bomb. No one should be profiting from this terrible industry of death, which threatens us all.”</blockquote><b><i>Teach Your Children Well</i></b><br />
Don’t Bank on the Bomb offers a treasure trove of data on the financial institutions that invest either directly or tangentially in the nuclear weapons industry. Some financial entities referenced are surprising. One of those is TIAA-CREF which the report describes as “TIAA-CREF: Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association, College Retirement Equities Fund is a financial services organization that is the leading retirement provider for people who work in the academic, research, medical and cultural fields. It has US$453 billion in combined assets under management, reported revenue of US$32.22 billion in 2010 and employs 7,200 people. It has major offices in Denver, Charlotte and Dallas as well as 70 local offices throughout the United States. It invests in: Alliant Tech Systems, Babcock & Wilcox, BAE Systems, Boeing, General Dynamics, Finmeccanica, GenCorp, Honeywell International, Jacobs Engineering, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman.”<br />
TIAA-CREF manages the funds for thousands of K-12, college and graduate school educators in public and private/parochial-religious educational institutions across the United States. Arguably ironic, and certainly contradictory, is that religious affiliated schools, whose leadership preaches peace and cultural unity at home and abroad, find that their retirement funds depend, in part, on the financial performance of the nuclear weapons industry and military strategists in Washington, DC, Moscow, Beijing, Tel Aviv, London, Delhi and Islamabad.<br />
<b><i>Landmines and Nukes</i></b><br />
The International Campaign to Ban Landmines (<a href="http://www.icbl.org/">ICBL</a>) recently celebrated its 13th Anniversary in March 2012. Next to Bishop Tutu’s South Africa boycott and disinvestment model stands the ICBL’s tireless effort to ban the use of landmines around the world. The grassroots organization was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its work which culminated in the signing of the Mine Ban Treaty in “Ottawa, Canada, on 3 December 1997. It entered into force less than two years later, more quickly than any treaty of its kind in history.”<br />
Unfortunately, the flaw in ICBL’s model is that the United States of America and 36 other countries refuse to become parties to the treaty. The USA has splendid company that includes Russia, China, Israel, India and Pakistan. Coincidently, these are the same countries that hold the world’s largest arsenals of nuclear weapons (the UK has signed the Ban Mine Treaty). If these countries are not willing to forsake the use of landmines, then the prospects for eliminating nuclear weapons seems dismal.<br />
At the moment, President Obama has requested $11.5 billion for the FY2013 budget for the National Nuclear Security Administration. Only $2.5 billion of that amount is directed to nonproliferation with the remainder to be funneled to national security purposes.<br />
<b><i>Religion’s Role</i></b><br />
For FY2012, according to the Arms Control Association, the situation was this: “The United States military maintains a modern arsenal of 1,790 deployed strategic nuclear warheads, according to the September 2011 accounting under the New START treaty. These warheads are deployed on Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missiles (SLBMs), and Strategic Bombers. The Departments of Defense and Energy currently spend approximately $31 billion per year to maintain and upgrade these systems. For Fiscal Year (FY) 2012, the Obama administration is requesting $7.6 billion in funding for weapons activities in the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which oversees the U.S. nuclear stockpile and production complex, a 10 percent increase over the FY 2011 appropriation of $6.9 billion.<br />
In the next four years NNSA plans to spend $9.6 billion on maintaining, securing, and modernizing the nuclear stockpile, and $34 billion on all of its weapons activities programs. The U.S. military is in the process of modernizing all of its existing strategic delivery systems and refurbishing the warheads they carry to last for the next 20-30 years or more. These systems are in many cases being completely rebuilt with essentially all new parts.”<br />
And that’s big business.<br />
Perhaps some flavor of religion as a stimulant to mobilize a campaign against nuclear weapons development and their haunting presence is necessary. Bishop Tutu is correct, of course. And so is the Ayatollah Khamenei, “…the Islamic Republic, logically, religiously and theoretically, considers the possession of nuclear weapons a grave sin and believes the proliferation of such weapons is senseless, destructive and dangerous.”<br />
<b><i>John Stanton</i></b><i> is a Virginia based writer specializing in national security matters. Reach him at <a href="mailto:cioran123@yahoo.com">cioran123@yahoo.com</a></i></div></div>Peter D Stanislawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11047318797222046289noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720630.post-62916271727494568252012-03-11T14:06:00.000-07:002012-03-11T14:06:47.001-07:00The Blood on Stratfor’s Hands<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div class="subheadlinestyle"></div><div class="subheadlinestyle"><b>Intelligence for the Highest Bidder</b></div><div class="subheadlinestyle"><b> </b></div><div class="mainauthorstyle">by KHADIJA SHARIFE, <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/03/09/the-blood-on-stratfors-hands/">Counterpunch</a></div><div class="mainauthorstyle"><br />
</div><div class="main-text"> Even if we were to place epistemological and ethical questions aside, certain Stratfor’s analysts are turning out to be rather twisted creatures.<br />
While some turn party tricks for intelligence, except in AIDS-infested Africa, others, such as Fred Burton – a counter-terrorism and security expert, alleged to frequently service US intelligence, are a tad aggressive. One of Fred’s <a href="http://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/364817_fw-ct-fw-guidance-on-the-leaks-.htm">gems includ</a>e: “The owner is a peacenik. He needs his head dunked in a full toilet bowl at Gitmo.”<br />
So much for niceties.<br />
But beyond the flippant remarks (and who isn’t facetious from time to time?) there exists a more dangerous reality: Stratfor – as evidenced by their own content – is neither a politically nor ideologically neutral intelligence agency.<br />
They have clearly picked a side.<br />
When analyst Lauren Goodrich had lunch with former Federal Judge Sam Kent, found guilty of consensual sexual misconduct and perjury, she tried to convince him that Halliburton – a company he ruled a major case against – was not responsible for his suffering. “Isn’t it strange that the Justice Department begins sniffing around for dirt to throw at me just weeks after I ruled a heavy case against Halliburton. Then a small set of affairs turn into an untrue situation and then spun up into an unprecedented case against a Federal Judge,” asked Kent.<br />
“Of course, I told him he was nuts to rule anything against Halliburton. I also told him that this sounds like a John Grisham plotline,” responded Goodrich. Allegedly, Halliburton – like Lockheed Martin and others, is a client.<br />
Similarly, Stratfor’s internal narrative reveals that organizations such as International Rivers (one email promoting Nnimmo Bassey’s new mega-dam video was listed) are monitored. There is nothing wrong with this.<br />
It is their intent that matters.<br />
Clients from Coca-Cola and Dow Chemicals frequently dole out cash, around $8000 per average report, to investigate civil society ‘opponents’ from PETA to comedy spoof crew, the Yes Men. And the latter is one example of why and where Stratfor gets really dirty: the company was paid to spy on activists protesting the gas leak from Union Carbide’s Bhopal pesticide plant (1984), considered one of the world’s worst industrial catastrophes, causing mass environmental damage, killing over 15 000 people and injuring 500 000 others.<br />
In one fundamental sense, there is no such thing as objectivity. Humans are essentially subjective beings, and even if one were to consciously engage an issue from a perceived neutral stance, the habitus of personal development (absorbed, learned, or acquired) extending from ideological collective myths to class aesthetics, comes to the fore of man’s identity.<br />
And vulgarity is cultivated, through tribalism, nationalism, ethnicity, religion and culture, rather than weeded out. Modern civilisation, rooted in amoral scientificity, tells us that ethical behaviour is relative and not a ‘factual’ reality. Capitalism tells us that man operates from the premise of self-interest.<br />
But history – and our own innate nature – tells us otherwise.<br />
Wars may be the delusional and dangerous creatures of politicians but most humans join these bloody battlefields, going to certain death or worse – an injured life – driven by the urge to defend and protect; to fight the good fight. They may not understand the reality of it, but in their own minds, they are doing the right thing. And never are such men more inspired than when their leaders lead from the front. What men like South Africa’s heroic Mandela have showed us, is that humans are willing to put life, aside, for what they believe to be a just cause, especially when led by a seemingly just leader.<br />
This is why Hollywood movies, with their fairy-tale endings, are so successful: never do we, as individual or collective audiences, honor or respect a human being more than when he rises above the worst, to become his best.<br />
So, when indifference to the destruction of what is irreplaceable, for something as common as money constitutes the core foundation of intelligence agencies – the microcosms of the forces that drive foreign policy – and this indifference, as Balzac noted in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1164404725/counterpunchmaga">Lost Illusions</a>, deadens the world, it is no wonder that the world is in a state of hell.<br />
With their emails, Stratfor appears to advocate for a world where polluters and murderers, circumvent accountability by obtaining information to pre-empt – and in the process destroy – their opposition. And this is the rule, rather than the exception, for any agency gathering intelligence for the highest bidder.<br />
In this sense, it is a company with blood on their hands.<br />
<br />
<em><strong>Khadija Sharife</strong> is a journalist; visiting scholar at the Center for Civil Society (CCS) based in South Africa and contributor to the Tax Justice Network. She is the Southern Africa correspondent for The Africa Report magazine, assistant editor of the Harvard “World Poverty and Human Rights” journal and author of Tax Us If You Can (Africa). </em><br />
<em>This article originally appeared in <a href="http://www.theafricareport.com/">Africa Report</a>.</em></div></div>Peter D Stanislawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11047318797222046289noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720630.post-65739871777165342882011-12-18T20:28:00.000-08:002011-12-18T20:28:32.324-08:00Face-to-Face with the NYPD<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><img src="http://www.counterpunch.org/images/flag-print.gif" /> <br />
<strong><br />
</strong> <br />
<br />
<div class="entry-date">Weekend Edition December 16-18, 2011</div><div class="subheadlinestyle">What They Look Like to a Guinean American</div><div class="article-title"><br />
</div><div class="mainauthorstyle">by IBRAHIM DIALLO</div><blockquote><em>“It is far more important to hold accountable the enforcers of the law than the perpetrators because if you don’t, you will have a nation of warlords.</em><br />
<em></em>– Mahmood Mamdani.</blockquote>New York’s Finest (also known as the NYPD) have come under a lot of scrutiny since activists from the Occupy Wall Street Movement took to the streets of New York City on September 17, 2011. From the pepper spraying videos on YouTube to the massive arrests, the brutality of the NYPD has shocked many. However, this only comes as a shock to those who never before had to deal with a police force inspired by a culture of brutality that encourages police officers to instill fear and contempt in those whom they are supposed to serve and protect. From the yellowcab driver, to the street vendor and from the high school students in working class neighborhoods to young men in Harlem, Brooklyn and the Bronx, this culture of unprofessionalism, fear and brutality is a daily occurrence. What Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioner Kelly call the “best police force in the world,” whose mission is to “preserve the peace, reduce fear and provide for a safe environment,” has in fact been the greatest fear factor in many communities.<br />
<br />
Under Commissioner Kelly, the policy of “Stop, Question and Frisk” was expanded – giving NYPD officers the authority to stop civilians, question and search them. Officers will then proceed to enter the names of those searched into a database, which they claim is “valuable in helping solve future crimes.” The reason for the stops, you might ask? “Because you fit a description,” as I was told following a search where the officers did not ask me a single question. I will give details of my encounter later.<br />
<br />
The “Stop and Frisk” policy has systematically terrorized and humiliated young men of color, especially those living in working class neighborhoods in New York City, from Harlem to Brownsville. The NYPD continues on a daily basis to disrupt the lives of young men of color in this city through what has become an institutionalized approach stemming directly from a culture of brutality, take-no-prisoners and shoot-now-and-ask-questions-later attitude under the false presumption of “crime prevention.” One of the many successes of the Occupy Wall Street movement is in its exposure of this culture of brutality, disrespect and unprofessionalism of New York’s Finest to the general public. Indeed, over the last few months, the world has seen what has long since been the reality of many young men in New York City: the police officer acting with impunity, knowing that they’ll be protected as they brutally assault peaceful civilians.<br />
<br />
In response to the media attention that these police altercations with peaceful protestors received, the NYPD aggressively mischaracterized these incidents with mere fabrications. When Brooklyn Councilman Jumaane Williams was thrown to the ground, along with his aide, and handcuffed during the West Indian Day Parade, the NYPD immediately responded that “a crowd formed and an unknown individual punched a police captain on the scene,” suggesting that somehow the councilman had been part of that crowd. We witnessed the same level of denial on behalf of the police when Deputy Inspector Bologna, a repeat offender, indiscriminately pepper sprayed into a crowd of peaceful female protesters. The Department immediately rose to the officer’s defense, claiming rather forcefully that the office did nothing wrong and that the use of pepper spray was “appropriate.” The Deputy Inspector (the “white shirt”) was punished: a loss of ten vacation days.<br />
<br />
In NYC, there are endless examples of police brutality. The NYPD has managed to create an environment of fear in many neighborhoods in New York City and they do so with impunity. Commissioner Kelly said that he wants to instill fear in young blacks and Hispanics. In a private meeting, the Commissioner told lawmakers, “the reason we stop and frisk and target the groups that we do is because we want all people who fit that group to feel that anytime they leave their house they can be searched by the police.” Walking down the street in my neighborhood today, I know that this is what I can expect. The nakedness and constant fear that one feels knowing that at any moment a group of police officers, whether in uniform or in plain clothes, can approach you, take your identification and pat you down, is overwhelming.<br />
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This reality was brought close to home for me four years ago when I came home for winter break during my first semester in college. I was walking to the subway from my apartment in Brooklyn, when I was approached by two undercover police officers. “Spread your legs and place your hands behind your head,” they shouted, running out of an unmarked police car. I was with my cousin at the time, who simply responded to the command as if it was second nature – this was not his first time. I, on the other hand, was home from my first semester in college and after having just completed a seminar entitled “Debating Human Rights,” I naively thought I should demand the reason for my search and debate with the officers. But before I could utter a word, the officers went ahead and patted both of us down and asked for our IDs. “Can I ask why we are being searched?” I asked. My request went ignored, as we were never given a reason for the search. Before we could even ask for their badge numbers, one of the officers handed me my ID and wished me a “happy birthday.” The experience left me distraught. After consulting with a friend, I decided the next day to call my local precinct to notify them of the incident and file a complaint. I was surprised when the operator informed me that the officers reported the search, claiming that the reason was because my cousin and I “fit a description.”<br />
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Human rights organizations, activists and lawmakers and other concerned citizens continue to work tirelessly to bring an end to the constant fear tactics many citizens are submitted to at the hands of the NYPD. They are demanding that some checks and balances be instituted in order to reel in the power of the police, and increase transparency in their interactions with citizens. Legal Aid and the NAACP pleaded with lawmakers to intervene during a City Council Hearing on September 27. Despite the efforts of the Council members, their requests have all been ignored. To be fair, my criticism of the NYPD is not directed at the poorly trained police officers caught up in a corrupt, arrogant and unethical system of criminal injustice.<br />
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There are indeed hardworking police officers struggling to just get by. These officers do not set the culture of the NYPD; rather their actions simply reproduce an offensive culture that is shaped from upstairs: a culture which supports, defends and encourages, a police officer to pepper spray, punch and beat peaceful protesters. There is something fundamentally wrong with a system in which officers can stop and search innocent civilians because they fit a “description,” meaning that they are Black or Latino. There is more to it than the individual actions of any one police officer raping a woman at gun point, or lodging dozens of bullets in the bodies of innocent New Yorkers such as Sean Bell and my fellow countryman Amadou Diallo. There are systemic abuses in the NYPD and it is no surprise to those who live it or have been paying attention.<br />
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<em><strong>Ibrahim Diallo</strong> is a Guinean-American living in New York City.</em></div>Peter D Stanislawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11047318797222046289noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720630.post-29495906782553241872011-07-21T15:55:00.000-07:002011-07-21T15:55:46.148-07:00Bill Quigley: Time for US Revolution - Fifteen Reasons<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-quigley/time-for-us-revolution_b_489068.html?view=print">Bill Quigley: Time for US Revolution - Fifteen Reasons</a><br /><br /><div class="entry_body_text"> <p>It is time for a revolution. Government does not work for regular people. It appears to work quite well for big corporations, banks, insurance companies, military contractors, lobbyists, and for the rich and powerful. But it does not work for people.</p> <p>The 1776 Declaration of Independence stated that when a long train of abuses by those in power evidence a design to reduce the rights of people to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it is the peoples right, in fact their duty to engage in a revolution. </p> <p>Martin Luther King, Jr., said forty three years ago next month that it was time for a radical revolution of values in the United States. He preached "a true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies." It is clearer than ever that now is the time for radical change.</p> <p>Look at what our current system has brought us and ask if it is time for a revolution?</p> <p>Over 2.8 million people lost their homes in 2009 to foreclosure or bank repossessions - nearly 8000 each day - higher numbers than the last two years when millions of others also lost their homes.</p> <p>At the same time, the government bailed out Bank of America, Citigroup, AIG, Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the auto industry and enacted the troubled asset (TARP) program with $1.7 trillion of our money.</p> <p>Wall Street then awarded itself over $20 billion in bonuses in 2009 alone, an average bonus on top of pay of $123,000.<br /> <br />At the same time, over 17 million people are jobless right now. Millions more are working part-time when they want and need to be working full-time. </p> <p>Yet the current system allows one single U.S. Senator to stop unemployment and Medicare benefits being paid to millions. </p> <p>There are now 35 registered lobbyists in Washington DC for every single member of the Senate and House of Representatives, at last count 13,739 in 2009. There are eight lobbyists for every member of Congress working on the health care fiasco alone.</p> <p>At the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that corporations now have a constitutional right to interfere with elections by pouring money into races. </p> <p>The Department of Justice gave a get out of jail free card to its own lawyers who authorized illegal torture. </p> <p>At the same time another department of government, the Pentagon, is prosecuting Navy SEALS for punching an Iraqi suspect. </p> <p>The US is not only involved in senseless wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the U.S. now maintains 700 military bases world-wide and another 6000 in the US and our territories. Young men and women join the military to protect the U.S. and to get college tuition and healthcare coverage and killed and maimed in elective wars and being the world's police. Wonder whose assets they are protecting and serving?</p> <p>In fact, the U.S. spends $700 billion directly on military per year, half the military spending of the entire world - much more than Europe, China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, and Venezuela - combined. </p> <p>The government and private companies have dramatically increased surveillance of people through cameras on public streets and private places, airport searches, phone intercepts, access to personal computers, and compilation of records from credit card purchases, computer views of sites, and travel. </p> <p>The number of people in jails and prisons in the U.S. has risen sevenfold since 1970 to over 2.3 million. The US puts a higher percentage of our people in jail than any other country in the world. </p> <p>The tea party people are mad at the Republicans, who they accuse of selling them out to big businesses.<br /><br />Democrats are working their way past depression to anger because their party, despite majorities in the House and Senate, has not made significant advances for immigrants, or women, or unions, or African Americans, or environmentalists, or gays and lesbians, or civil libertarians, or people dedicated to health care, or human rights, or jobs or housing or economic justice. Democrats also think their party is selling out to big business.</p> <p>Forty three years ago next month, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached in Riverside Church in New York City that "a time comes when silence is betrayal." He went on to condemn the Vietnam War and the system which created it and the other injustices clearly apparent. "We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing oriented" society to a "person oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered."</p> <p>It is time.<br /></p> </div>Peter D Stanislawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11047318797222046289noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720630.post-40851726570547575332011-05-27T14:44:00.000-07:002011-05-27T14:44:31.144-07:00Save the Economy, Hike the Deficit!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">May 27 - 29, 2011<br />
Careening Toward a Third Depression<br />
<br />
By MIKE WHITNEY<br />
<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney05272011.html">http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney05272011.html</a><br />
How do you light a fire under Congress? How do you get these guys to do what they're paid to do?<br />
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We're 5 years into this slump, millions of people have lost their homes and jobs, 44 million people are on food stamps, the economy is in the tank, and congress won't lift a finger to help. What's that all about? You'd think that the revision in GDP and the uptick in unemployment claims would set off alarms on Capitol Hill. But it hasn't. They just shrug it off and move on. What do they care? They get their fat paycheck one way or another, so what difference does it make to them? Besides, if they play their cards right, they'll nab a 6-figure lobbying job as soon as they retire and spend the rest of their lives working on their chip-shot and swilling single-malt at the club with their moneybags friends. Doesn't that piss you off?<br />
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Congress just doesn't seem to "get it". They don't understand what people are going through; how maxed out they are. We're in the middle of a Depression and all they want to do is score points playing political circlejerk by stonewalling the debt ceiling or jacking-around with Medicare. Meanwhile, unemployment is on the rise (Initial claims rose to 424,000 on Thursday), GDP is falling (1Q GDP revised to 1.8%), durable goods are down 3.6 percent in April, the market is topping out, business investment is flat, Europe's on the ropes, Japan is in a historic slump, China is overheating, the output gap is as wide as it was 6 quarters ago, bank balance sheets are bleeding red from falling home prices and non-performing loans, and the housing market is crashing.<br />
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Did I miss something?<br />
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Oh yeah, and the Fed's goofy QE2 program is winding down, which means that the last drop of monetary stimulus will be wrung-out by the end of June. That ought to be good for stocks.<br />
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So, excuse me for asking, Mr. Bigshot Congressman, but would you mind lending a hand? A little stimulus would be nice. You know, just enough so we can get a job and feed the kids. And if you're worried about the deficits; don't be. They're not a problem. That's just more GOP scaremongering. Here's how economics professor Bradford DeLong sums it up:<br />
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"The biggest problem generated by this right now is that Washington DC's focus on the Dingbat Kabuki theater of the long-run fiscal stability of America is keeping it from taking any effective steps to use government to boost employment and output now. And things aren't helped by the fact that the way the rescue of the banking system was carried out convinced a lot of people that stimulus policies exist to enrich the top 1% of Americans at the expense of everybody else.<br />
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This means that our hopes for economic recovery right now rest not on any government boost to aggregate demand--whether through fiscal, monetary, or banking policy--but rather on the natural equilibrium-restoring full-employment achieving market forces of the economy, especially in the labor market.<br />
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And so we are in trouble: right now there are no signs that the economy is crawling up back to anything like full employment on its own. ... The economy will grow, but we won't close the gap between actual and potential output. We will not for a long time to come get back to the 62 to 64% of the adult population having jobs that we thought was normal back in the decades of the 2000.<br />
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And that is the depressing overall macroeconomic picture. I wish I could paint a better one....("DeLong: The Economic Outlook as of May 2011", Economist's View)<br />
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Deficits aren't the problem, they're the solution. The government needs to increase spending to make up for the loss of activity in the private sector, otherwise, we're back in the soup. But, here's the good part; the government can borrow at rates that are lower than ever. Just look at the bond market. The 10-year is stuck at 3.12. That means that money is cheap because no one is borrowing, because, well, because the economy is dead-in-the-water. It's like Treasuries are yelling, "Wake up, you idiots, we're in a Depression!"<br />
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Besides, deficit spending isn't always a bad thing anyway. Just ask a guy who's been out of work for 99 weeks how much he cares about deficits. Not much, I'll bet. All he cares about is getting a job and paying the bills. Here's a clip from economist Mark Thoma who explains how deficits can actually rev up the economy:<br />
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"When the economy goes into recession, deficit spending through tax cuts or the purchase of goods and services by the government can stop the downward spiral and help to turn the economy back around. Thus, deficits can help us to stabilize the economy. In addition, as the economy improves due to the deficit spending the outlook for businesses also improves, and this can lead to increased investment, an effect known as crowding in. Deficits also allow us to purchase infrastructure and spread the bills across time similar to the way households finance the purchase of a car or house, or the way local governments finance schools with bond issues." (Government Deficits: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Mark Thoma, CBS Moneywatch)<br />
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Deficits are just a way of investing in the future, like student loans. You don't hear anyone crybabying about paying for college, do you? No, because it improves their chances for making more money in the future. Sometimes you have to take on a little debt to create better opportunities for yourself. That's just the way it is. It's the same with the economy, the deficits are a bridge to the next credit expansion. But once things are up-and-running and revenues increase, then the government can throttle-back on spending and balance the budget. That's how we've always done it in the past, until we started listening to the Voodoo crackpots, that is. Besides, if we don't increase the deficits now and put people back to work fast, we're going to be stuck in this "underperforming" funk for a very long time. So, we're just shooting ourselves in the foot.<br />
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How did we get to where we are today?<br />
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Well, when the financial system crashed, the economy plunged and then reset at a lower level of output. So--while we're no longer in freefall--we're still no where near where we should be. And, guess what, we can't get back to trend when 9% of the workforce (16.5% underemployed) is on the sidelines. We have to put people back to work and get them spending. That's the only way to boost demand and kickstart the economy. Of course, big business doesn't mind the current policy, because more of the profits from productivity go to them during a sluggish recovery. So, they're just fine with the way things are right now. They also like the fact that high unemployment puts more pressure on wages. CEO's love that part.<br />
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So, how dire is the situation right now?<br />
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Well, consider this: QE2 ends on June 30, right? But according to economist David Rosenberg, there's a "89% correlation between the Fed's balance sheet and the movements in the S&P 500 over the past two years." So when the Fed stops purchasing US Treasuries, then stocks will retreat.<br />
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Add that to the fact that the states are cutting costs and laying off state workers at record pace to balance their budgets. That just increases deflationary pressures. When money is drained from the system, activity slows, demand weakens, revenues shrink, deficits bulge, and more people are laid off. It's a vicious circle.<br />
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Here's how Paul Krugman breaks it down on his blog this week:<br />
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<blockquote>"Last year I warned that we seemed to be heading into the "Third Depression" — by which I meant a prolonged period of economic weakness:<br />
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' Neither the Long Depression of the 19th century nor the Great Depression of the 20th was an era of nonstop decline — on the contrary, both included periods when the economy grew. But these episodes of improvement were never enough to undo the damage from the initial slump, and were followed by relapses.<br />
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We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost — to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs — will nonetheless be immense.'.....<br />
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And nobody in power cares! (Third Depression Watch, Paul Krugman, New York Times)</blockquote><br />
And that's what makes this political burlesque on Capitoll Hill so excruciating to watch, because it's such a waste. Peoples lives are being ruined for nothing, just because Congress doesn't have the courage to do the right thing. Do you think they'd hesitate if they had to pony-up for another multi-billion dollar weapons system, or another bailout for Wall Street, or more tax cuts for their tycoon friends? Of course not. The only time congress worries about red ink is when it might help working people. Then they throw a major hissyfit, waving their hands overhead and babbling hysterically about the free market. Give me a break. The world's not going to end. The truth is, the rest of the world WANTS us to borrow more because they want to maintain strong demand for their exports and keep their workers busy. That's why they're willing to lend us money so cheap.<br />
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So, why don't we oblige them? Why don't we borrow enough money to whittle down unemployment to 4 or 5% and get back on track? After all, we know that fiscal stimulus works, because the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released another report on Wednesday saying that Obama's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) was a booming success.<br />
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Here's a clip from the report:<br />
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<blockquote>"The economic stimulus package passed by Congress in 2009 raised gross domestic product, created jobs and helped lower the country's unemployment rate this year..... the Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday.</blockquote><br />
The Obama administration and Congressional Democrats said the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, passed while the U.S. struggled to emerge from a severe recession, would save or create 3.5 million jobs while cutting taxes, investing in roads, bridges and other infrastructure, extending unemployment benefits and expanding aid to states....<br />
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The CBO report out Wednesday said the plan increased the number of people employed by between 1.2 million and 3.3 million, and lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.6 and 1.8 percentage points in the first quarter of 2011.<br />
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The stimulus package also raised gross domestic product, the broadest measure of economic output, by between 1.1% and 3.1% in the same period...." ("CBO Says Stimulus Boosted Growth, Will Add More to Deficit", Wall Street Journal)<br />
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Okay, so ARRA boosted growth by roughly 2% and added about 2 million new jobs to the workforce just like the administration predicted. So, that settles it, right? We now have solid proof that the program worked, so what are we waiting for? Congress needs to push through a second round of stimulus, put people back to work and get the economy firing on all 6 cylinders. No more foot dragging.<br />
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Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at <a href="mailto:fergiewhitney@msn.com">fergiewhitney@msn.com</a><br />
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</div>Peter D Stanislawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11047318797222046289noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720630.post-37598964142588482452011-05-08T11:11:00.000-07:002011-05-08T11:11:32.271-07:00Guernica / Mike Elk: Major Union Victory for Rite Aid Workers Offers Roadmap for Labor Movement<a href="http://www.guernicamag.com/blog/2648/mike_elk_major_union_victory_f/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Guernica%2FBlog+%28Guernica+%2F+Blog%29">Guernica / Mike Elk: Major Union Victory for Rite Aid Workers Offers Roadmap for Labor Movement</a><br /><br />By Mike Elk<br />By arrangement with Alternet.Org. <br /><br />On Sunday, 500 Rite Aid workers at the company’s massive Southwest Distribution Center in Lancaster, California signed a three-year tentative agreement with the management of Rite Aid. The contract was a strong one, providing affordable health care, protections against jobs being outsourced to subcontractors (a common practice in the warehousing industry), job safety requirements, and most stunningly, wage increases in each of the next three years. While many unions are making concessions to keep companies open, the Longshoremen Union was actually able to win a wage increase—an extraordinarily rare feat.<br /><br />“Helping workers win a union contract today usually requires a long struggle, a comprehensive campaign on the outside and strong leadership and rank and file action on the inside, in order to overcome the vicious anti-union attacks by employers, but victories are still possible as the Rite Aid Campaign shows” says ILWU Spokesman Craig Merrilees. “It takes an incredible amount of perseverance, determination and creativity to win, but we can do it.”<br /><br />The victory is a testament to the resolve of the workers and organizers—it’s a success five years in the making. It reveals how tough the environment for rehabilitating the labor movement is, but also how it is still possible to win through creative, direct action.<br />Rite Aid engaged in bad faith bargaining known as “surface bargaining“ for over a year before finally bargaining with workers. <br /><br />“We’re excited about winning this victory, even if it took longer than it should have” said Carlos “Chico” Rubio, a 10-year warehouse worker who was on the union bargaining committee. Unlike many unions that do win a good contract, the union was quick not to praise the boss for agreeing to a contract, but to point out instead that the process was a long and costly one. Workers decided to first start organizing a union in March of 2006 and hoped to have a new contract within several months, not five years.<br /><br />Rite Aid management responded with the typical toolbox of anti-union tactics.<br /><br />They hired a team of expensive union busters to hold anti-union intimidation sessions and captive audience meetings. They threatened to fire workers if they supported the union and even fired two workers for wanting to a join a union. They asked a delay of over 18 months from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on scheduling a vote so that they could have more time to run intimidation sessions to make workers wary of joining a union. Finally after two years of organizing and despite massive anti-union attacks, workers voted to join a union 283 to 261 in an NLRB supervised election in June of 2008.<br /><br />Then when Rite Aid workers finally won a union election, Rite Aid engaged in bad faith bargaining known as “surface bargaining” for over a year before finally bargaining with workers.<br /><br />“Rite Aid made this process much more difficult on workers and families than it needed to” said ILWU International Vice President Ray Familathe, who helped workers reach their May 1 settlement. Workers though did not give up; they organized a tough and dogged campaign to counter the anti-union efforts of Rite Aid management.<br /><br />Using a creative campaign Rite Aid workers were able to force management to sit down at the table and bargain with them. Workers started by attending yearly stockholder meetings and opening lines of communications with stockholders and board members. They released detailed reports about how much money the union busting efforts of Rite Aid was costing the company. Workers were able to persuade some stockholders to put pressure on Rite Aid to negotiate a fair and equitable contract.<br /><br />Likewise, they used their leverage against Rite Aid by expanding the fight across various unions and the country. They formed a coalition of nationwide Rite Aid workers from various unions including UFCW, SEIU, and Teamsters who coordinated their strategy. Workers reached out to powerful community allies with groups like United Students against Sweatshops and Jobs with Justice. They held protests in nearly 50 cities across the country against Rite Aid and promised to apply more heat if Rite Aid didn’t settle the contract dispute in California.<br /><br />Most importantly, the workers union had a strong presence within the distribution center in Lancaster, California. Workers even engaged in “work to rule,” where they purposely slowed down movement in the distribution center in order to put pressure on the company to settle a contract. Even last year, 75 workers walked off the job for a day in Lancaster, California to protest Rite Aid’s lack of good faith bargaining.<br /><br />Finally, when negotiations seemed to be breaking down at the last second, they launched a “pinpoint” boycott campaign at two Rite Aid workers at two Rite Aid Stores in San Pedro, California on April 1, 2011. They persuaded hundreds of seniors to switch their prescriptions to other pharmacies. The threat of a larger boycott spreading forced Rite Aid to finally settle the contract a month later.<br /><br />The feat that the Longshoremen’s Union (ILWU) achieved is a rare one in the labor movement. Nearly half of all union drives result in defeats for workers trying to organize a contract. Less than half of the workers who do get a contract are able to get one within the first year. Often failure to reach a contract in the first year can kill a union all together. Overall, fewer than 1 in 6 organizing drives ever results in a union contract for workers in the workplace.<br /><br />Many unions have now negotiated card checks agreements, wherein the union agrees to weaker, concessionary contracts ahead of time in exchange for the right to organize a workplace without the type of brutal interference from the employer. While these types of agreements can often result in contracts for workers, they are weak contracts—the type of contracts that ultimately the employer wants. It gives all the power to the boss in terms of what type of contract to give workers and very little to the workers. The ILWU campaign at Rite Aid shows that it is still possible for unions to win good first contracts.<br /><br />Copyright 2011 Mike Elk<br /> ________________________________________________________________________<br /><br />By arrangement with <a href="http://www.alternet.org/news/150841/major_union_victory_for_rite_aid_workers_offers_roadmap_for_labor_movement_/?page=entire">Alternet.Org</a>.<br /><br />Mike Elk is a third-generation union organizer who writes for Campaign for America’s Future.Peter D Stanislawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11047318797222046289noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720630.post-32776504523318564682011-05-08T10:54:00.000-07:002011-05-08T10:54:10.290-07:00Guernica / Joshua Holland: Did Osama bin Laden Win the “War on Terror”?<a href="http://www.guernicamag.com/blog/2644/joshua_holland_did_osama_bin_laden_win/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Guernica%2FBlog+%28Guernica+%2F+Blog%29">Guernica / Joshua Holland: Did Osama bin Laden Win the “War on Terror”?</a><br /><br />By Joshua Holland<br />By arrangement with AlterNet.Org.<br /><br />We now have conflicting accounts of Osama bin Laden’s death at the hands of a U.S. special forces team in a tony Pakistani suburb this week.<br /><br />President Obama, in his address to the nation Sunday night, painted a picture of a perfectly clean, morally unambiguous operation: he said the U.S. was prepared to take the terror leader alive, but a major firefight ensued and, after trying to use his wife as a human shield, bin Laden went down with guns blazing.<br /><br />The White House “revised” several key details of the raid in the following days. Bin Laden wasn’t armed after all (he still “resisted,” officials say, although it’s unclear how one resists a heavily armed special forces team without a weapon), and he didn’t use a human shield. One official told CNN that there were no armed guards at the compound, another told Reuters that the Navy Seals team had been ordered to kill rather than capture bin Laden and NBC News reported that nobody fired a shot at the SEALs. Bin Laden’s daughter, who was present during the raid, said that U.S. forces first captured their quarry alive and then executed him.<br /><br />We don’t know what happened that night. But we should at least acknowledge that there were any number of reasons why dumping bin Laden’s corpse in the ocean would have been seen as far less problematic than taking him alive. What, exactly, would they have done with him? The International Criminal Court can only consider cases committed after 2001, and trying him in a domestic court with its evidentiary procedures was never an option. He could have been tried by military commission, but that process hasn’t been widely accepted as legitimate.<br /><br />On the margins, there has been some debate about the morality—and legality—of such a “kill team” operation, but most Americans, understandably, couldn’t care less. Even if we did assassinate him, so what? Bin Laden was a mass murderer, the bastard got his just rewards, and the U.S. government proved it could still accomplish a major national goal. The country got closure for the attacks of 9/11, and perhaps could now begin to wind down its “war on terror.”<br /><br />That discussion has overlooked an important question, however. Setting aside the moral and legal implications, and our visceral, emotional satisfaction at seeing an outlaw shot down, would the decision to kill rather than capture him have been in the best interests of the U.S. and the international fight against terrorism?<br />Martyrdom has always been a powerful inspiration for others. I certainly don’t blame Americans for rejoicing in the news of bin Laden’s death, but we may have given him the exact ending he would have wanted.<br /><br />I would argue that it would not have been—that, in fact, the reverse would hold true. Osama bin Laden is widely seen to have become a figurehead without direct operational command of the organization he founded. His importance, at this point in time, was largely symbolic. He served as an inspiration for extremists around the globe. Had he a choice in the matter, I have no doubt that he would have wanted nothing more than to die in a hail of gunfire by foreign troops in a predominantly Muslim country, a martyr to his cause, rather than rot away in a military prison, aging poorly and providing living proof that the world’s most prominent terrorist—a figure who had been elevated to an existential threat—was ultimately impotent in the face of the world’s greatest super-power.<br /><br />Martyrdom has always been a powerful inspiration for others. I certainly don’t blame Americans for rejoicing in the news of bin Laden’s death, but we may have given him the exact ending he would have wanted, and, in doing so, we may have inspired others to follow his path to a “glorious” expiration.<br /><br />This, again, is entirely speculative so long as the details of the raid remain obscure. But it mirrors another argument that is not so: that Osama bin Laden’s attacks provoked the U.S. into a disastrous over-reaction—drawing it into an unwinnable and often hellish ground-war in Afghanistan and ultimately costing us thousands of American lives, trillions of dollars in national wealth, an enormous amount of international prestige and, more importantly, influence over global affairs.<br /><br />That argument was ably sketched out this week by Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, based on an interview he conducted with Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, the Director of the Center for the Study of Terrorist Radicalization at the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies. As Klein put it, Gartenstein-Ross thinks bin Laden “had a strategy that we never bothered to understand, and thus that we never bothered to defend against.” His goal was not some fantasy about establishing a worldwide caliphate or imposing “Sharia law” on Greenwich Village; having seen the Soviet Union decline in large part by bankrupting itself in an arms race with the U.S., with a huge assist from the Mujahadeen fighting them in Afghanistan, his objective was to wage economic war against the United States by drawing it into a similar conflict.<br /><br />Writing in Foreign Policy, Gartenstein-Ross noted that “the Soviet Union didn’t just withdraw from Afghanistan in ignominious defeat, but the Soviet empire itself collapsed soon thereafter, in late 1991.”<br /><blockquote><br /> Thus, bin Laden thought that he hadn’t just bested one of the world’s superpowers on <br /> the battlefield, but had actually played an important role in its demise. It is indisputable<br /> that the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan did not directly collapse the Soviet Union; <br /> the most persuasive connection that can be drawn between that war and the Soviet <br /> empire’s dissolution is through the costs imposed by the conflict.</blockquote><br /><br />“The campaign [against the Soviets] taught bin Laden a lot,” wrote Klein:<br /><br /> <blockquote>For one thing, superpowers fall because their economies crumble, not because they’re <br /> beaten on the battlefield. For another, superpowers are so allergic to losing that they'll <br /> bankrupt themselves trying to conquer a mass of rocks and sand. This was bin Laden’s <br /> plan for the United States, too.</blockquote><br /><br />Did it work? Well, that depends on how you look at it. The U.S. economy is far more resilient than the Soviet economy of the 1980s, and we haven’t gone anywhere, so in that sense it did not. But prior to the attacks, the Congressional Budget Office projected that we’d see budget surpluses throughout the decade. We face a large deficit now, in large part, because of Bush’s decision to declare a “war” on terrorism—and to wage conventional wars against Afghanistan and Iraq—and then pass the first war-time tax cuts in the history of the Republic.<br />It would be a mistake to link the so-called “Arab Spring” directly to the decline of American influence in the Middle East, but it would be equally shortsighted to dismiss it as a contributing factor.<br /><br />I would take the analysis a step further. The decision to go to “war” against a tactic also brought with it significant restrictions on our civil liberties; no longer could we credibly claim to be a beacon of freedom that the world ought to emulate.<br /><br />Finally, we have to consider some geopolitics. University of Chicago scholar Robert Pape, one of the world’s foremost experts on suicide terrorism, argues that all such acts have a common goal: to induce Democracies to withdrawal from lands they occupy (either directly or by proxy). The decision to declare “war” on terrorism—and a couple of nation-states—led directly to the death and displacement of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, as well as the scandals surrounding Abu Ghraib, the CIA’s secret detention facilities, extraordinary renditions, Guantanamo Bay, and all the rest. And all of those things resulted in a very significant decline in the United States’ global prestige, and our ability to influence global events.<br /><br />Since its founding, al Qaeda has had two big, fat targets aside from the United States: the Saudi and Egyptian governments. Ten years after 9/11, the regime of Hosni Mubarak is gone, and last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Israeli officials were “urging Washington to make it clear that the U.S. would intervene in Saudi Arabia should the survival of that government be threatened.” It would be a mistake to link the so-called “Arab Spring” directly to the decline of American influence in the Middle East, but it would be equally shortsighted to dismiss it as a contributing factor.<br /><br />Perhaps this argument gives bin Laden too much credit. But terrorism is ultimately a tactic used by marginal extremist groups against far more powerful enemies. Bin Laden couldn’t have known that we’d invade Iraq, but the idea that the United States under George W. Bush would react to acts of terror with acts of war against at least Afghanistan was not terribly difficult to predict. And the ruinous results of that reaction are apparent. We’re still around, and it’s likely that we have now killed or captured every single human being who was operationally involved in the attacks of 9/11, so perhaps it was a draw. But a superpower spending trillions to fight with a handful of terrorists to a draw may have been the best outcome for which bin Laden realistically could have hoped.<br /><br />This is important to understand for one reason. As Daveed Gartenstein-Ross noted, “bin Laden’s strategic ideas for beating a superpower…have permeated his organization, and are widely shared by al Qaeda’s affiliates.” Osama bin Laden may be dead, but his ideology remains, and we continue to hemorrhage blood and treasure in a futile conflict into which the “terror mastermind” may well have drawn us. It’s time that we stop doing what international terrorists want us to do.<br /><br />Copyright 2011 Joshua Holland ________________________________________________________________________<br /><br />This essay originally appeared at <a href="http://www.alternet.org/world/150842/did_osama_bin_laden_win_the_%22war_on_terror%22/?page=entire">AlterNet.Org</a>.<br /><br />Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The Fifteen Biggest Lies about the Economy: And Everything Else the Right Doesn’t Want You to Know about Taxes, Jobs, and Corporate AmericaPeter D Stanislawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11047318797222046289noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720630.post-1805208580340086832011-05-07T14:14:00.000-07:002011-05-07T15:06:47.212-07:00Guernica / Noam Chomsky: My Reaction to Osama bin Laden’s Death<a href="http://www.guernicamag.com/blog/2652/noam_chomsky_my_reaction_to_os/">Guernica / Noam Chomsky: My Reaction to Osama bin Laden’s Death</a><br />
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<span style="font-weight:bold;">Noam Chomsky: My Reaction to Osama bin Laden’s Death</span><br />
May 6, 2011<br />
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We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.</span><br />
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By Noam Chomsky<br />
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It’s increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law. There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 80 commandos facing virtually no opposition—except, they claim, from his wife, who lunged towards them. In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress “suspects.” In April 2002, the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it “believed” that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, though implemented in the UAE and Germany. What they only believed in April 2002, they obviously didn’t know 8 months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know, because they were instantly dismissed) to extradite bin Laden if they were presented with evidence—which, as we soon learned, Washington didn’t have. Thus Obama was simply lying when he said, in his White House statement, that “we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda.”<br />
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Nothing serious has been provided since. There is much talk of bin Laden’s “confession,” but that is rather like my confession that I won the Boston Marathon. He boasted of what he regarded as a great achievement.<br />
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There is also much media discussion of Washington’s anger that Pakistan didn’t turn over bin Laden, though surely elements of the military and security forces were aware of his presence in Abbottabad. Less is said about Pakistani anger that the U.S. invaded their territory to carry out a political assassination. Anti-American fervor is already very high in Pakistan, and these events are likely to exacerbate it. The decision to dump the body at sea is already, predictably, provoking both anger and skepticism in much of the Muslim world.<br />
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It’s like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It’s as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”<br />
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We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.<br />
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There’s more to say about [Cuban airline bomber Orlando] Bosch, who just died peacefully in Florida, including reference to the “Bush doctrine” that societies that harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves and should be treated accordingly. No one seemed to notice that Bush was calling for invasion and destruction of the U.S. and murder of its criminal president.<br />
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Same with the name, Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so profound, throughout western society, that no one can perceive that they are glorifying bin Laden by identifying him with courageous resistance against genocidal invaders. It’s like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It’s as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”<br />
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There is much more to say, but even the most obvious and elementary facts should provide us with a good deal to think about.<br />
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Copyright 2011 Noam Chomsky<br />
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Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works. His latest books are a new edition of Power and Terror, The Essential Chomsky (edited by Anthony Arnove), a collection of his writings on politics and on language from the 1950s to the present, Gaza in Crisis, with Ilan Pappé, and Hopes and Prospects, also available as an audiobook.<br />
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To read more blog entries from Noam Chomsky click <a href="http://www.guernicamag.com/blog/">HERE</a> . Read Guernica’s interview with Noam Chomsky <a href="http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/1409/chomsky_half_full/">here</a>.Peter D Stanislawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11047318797222046289noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720630.post-67680684980616776192011-05-04T18:06:00.000-07:002011-05-04T18:06:36.897-07:00What The Internet Is Hiding From You<a href="http://bit.ly/iWC8Qa">What The Internet Is Hiding From You</a><br /><br />TED's own Eli Pariser telling you what you're not seeing on the web.Peter D Stanislawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11047318797222046289noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720630.post-43629740637992987482011-05-01T11:50:00.000-07:002011-05-01T11:50:07.999-07:00Drug Laws, Prisons and the Economy<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">The U.S. imprisons more people per capita than any country on earth, accounting for 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, despite having just five percent of the world’s population. <br />
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America currently holds over two million in prisons with double that number under supervision of parole and probation, according to federal government figures. <br />
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Mass incarceration consumes over $50-billion annually across America – money far better spent on creating jobs and improving education. <br />
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Under federal law persons with drug convictions are permanently barred from receiving financial aid for education, food stamps, welfare and publicly funded housing. <br />
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Only drug convictions trigger these exclusions under federal law. Violent bank robbers, white-collar criminals like Wall Street scam artists who steal billions, and even murderers who’ve done their time do not face the post-release deprivations slapped on those with drug convictions on their records, including those imprisoned for simple possession, and not major drug sales.</div>Peter D Stanislawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11047318797222046289noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720630.post-71896260097025028522011-04-23T14:31:00.000-07:002011-04-23T14:31:12.086-07:00Jury Awards $82,000 To Oregon Woman Arrested For Asking Police for a Business Card<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">A Multnomah County jury awarded a 33-year-old woman $82,000 Thursday, saying they wanted to send Portland police a message: Hand over a business card the next time a citizen asks for one.<br />
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Several jurors who spoke to The Oregonian after the verdict in Multnomah County Circuit Court said police weren’t dealing with an urgent or dangerous situation on the evening of Feb. 13, 2009 — when Shei’Meka Newmann questioned what she thought was an unnecessarily rough arrest of a fellow MAX rider. It would have taken only a few seconds for an officer to hand Newmann a card, jurors said.<br />
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“I think that police need to be reminded that it’s part of their job to de-escalate and defuse situations,” said juror Chris Bolles. Instead, jurors say police overreacted to Newmann’s queries.<br />
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From the <a href="http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2011/04/jury_awards_woman_82000_after.html">Oregonian</a></div>Peter D Stanislawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11047318797222046289noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720630.post-76220270790905069892011-04-23T14:26:00.000-07:002011-04-23T14:26:27.408-07:00Police beating of Las Vegas man caught on tape - News - ReviewJournal.com<a href="http://www.lvrj.com/news/exclusive-police-beating-of-las-vegas-man-caught-on-tape-120509439.html">Police beating of Las Vegas man caught on tape - News - ReviewJournal.com</a>Peter D Stanislawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11047318797222046289noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720630.post-82683161294042472082011-02-17T11:11:00.000-08:002011-02-17T11:11:06.598-08:00Theft of the Commons<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">A deceptive term like "austerity program" which makes us feel like sacrifice must be shared equally even when the problem was and is always caused by the private sector, must be ignored by the majority of low and mid-income citizens and "theft of the commons" inserted in its place. The term was recently (ab)used by the compromised Democratic Governor Jerry Brown in regards to his "slash and burn" budget proposal. So much for a party of the people/labor, eh?<br />
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Just like in Oregon, corporations who want to make profits in CA should be advised that they will have to pay their fair share in taxes. If this leads to corporations leaving the state, we can rest assured that there are many, many smaller companies ready to pony up for a shot at our citizen/consumers. The same increased tax rate should hold for the extremely wealthy who desire to live here. This would EASILY solve CA's budget problem without starving more women and children.</div>Peter D Stanislawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11047318797222046289noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720630.post-42004638278597127762011-02-14T07:19:00.000-08:002011-02-14T07:19:41.071-08:00Palestinian cabinet resigns - Middle East - Al Jazeera English<a href="http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2011/02/201121484520923682.html">Palestinian cabinet resigns - Middle East - Al Jazeera English</a>Peter D Stanislawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11047318797222046289noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720630.post-55696389107912113032011-02-14T07:08:00.000-08:002011-02-14T07:08:26.837-08:00Army urges protesters to end strikes - Politics - Egypt - Ahram Online<a href="http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/5601.aspx">Army urges protesters to end strikes - Politics - Egypt - Ahram Online</a>Peter D Stanislawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11047318797222046289noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720630.post-21426089524831478472011-02-10T13:51:00.000-08:002011-02-10T13:52:50.211-08:00Armchair Dispatch From A Sympathizer With The Egyption Revolution<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">The word from the ground in Cairo following Mubarak's address to the nation is a bit confused. Early reports today held that the military was making coordinated moves for a transition of power, leading the street to believe that Mubarak had seen the light and was about to abdicate. Spirits were high all day with the opposition groups convinced that the army was on their side, which would make peaceful change much easier. After the president's speech, however, which was the very picture of entitled, arrogant power, the street is absolutely enraged, leading some to predict violent overthrow is deliberately being provoked in order to justify a violent state clampdown in return. There is talk of a march on the nearest military base to insist that the army declare their unity with the people.<br />
Labor across the nation has been on strike for 5 days, virtually shutting down the entire economy. The demands are very clear and simple - Mubarak is out and Suleiman will not be accepted, his having had a large hand in the US "extraordinary rendition" program which essentially outsourced illegal torture tactics for prisoner interrogations. The president seems to be quite out of touch, telling the youth to "go home".<br />
Who allowed this speech to occur? If, in fact, the military sides with the opposition groups, wouldn't they have prevented this state-sponsored and clueless address? To this viewer, it appears that the street may lose patience and make some ill-advised moves if their chosen leadership doesn't strongly make the case for continued coordinated organization.<br />
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</div>Peter D Stanislawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11047318797222046289noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720630.post-59582125409328535292011-02-01T12:25:00.000-08:002011-02-01T12:25:14.654-08:00Interview with anti-government protester at Tahir Square<iframe width="480" height="295" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/RtLJpzUp2Z8?fs=1" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>Peter D Stanislawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11047318797222046289noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720630.post-6170180149852262882010-10-05T18:33:00.001-07:002010-10-05T18:36:13.183-07:00Obama Reneges on Key Agreement with Immigration Advocates<div><br />
ICE Mutiny?<br />
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By STEWART J. LAWRENCE <br />
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One of the key provisions of the Obama administration's tough new immigration enforcement strategy is coming under fire again. The program, known as "Secure Communities," allows federal immigration authorities to obtain the fingerprints of any illegal alien booked in the nation's jails, and to have that alien detained for deportation. It's already resulted in an unprecedented number of deportations - some 400,000 in 2009 alone - with an equal number expected this year. And when the program's finally extended nationwide in 2013 – it's currently active in about 30 states, but in only a third of the nation's jails - the annual rate could reach 700,000 or more.<br />
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Immigration activists -- furious with the Obama administration for laying the groundwork for what amounts to a mass deportation program -- thought they'd extracted an agreement from the White House and from the Director of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, to scale back Secure Communities in two ways. First, to refocus the program on hard-core felony offenders, rather than low-level misdemeanor cases, and second, to allow local jurisdictions like San Francisco – still officially a "sanctuary" city - to completely opt out of participating in the program if their citizens objected.<br />
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In addition, lobbying by Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), chief sponsor of the DREAM Act that would legalize as many as 2 million illegal alien youth, had apparently secured a personal guarantee from President Obama that prospective DREAM beneficiaries would not be processed for deportation until the full Congress had had a chance to vote on his long-stalled bill. Obama, in fact, publicly endorsed DREAM in his first-ever speech on immigration policy at American University last July. It is also strongly supported by Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and other senior Democrats who recently tried to force a floor vote on the bill, to no avail.<br />
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But now it appears that the administration has reneged on key parts of its deal with pro-immigration activists. Why? Largely because career Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials who are heavily invested in the agency's expanding enforcement empire are refusing to go along. These officials don't want to suspend deportation proceedings against selected classes of immigrants, like the DREAM kids, or even to refocus the program narrowly on "criminal" aliens - no matter what the ICE leadership says. And because of their near-revolt, it appears that senior ICE officials have reversed themselves, and will require that all local jurisdictions participate in Secure Communities, whether they actually want to or not.<br />
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News of the internal ICE revolt first came to light in an article published in the Washington Post on August 27, based on investigative reporting by journalist Andrew Beck. Beck found that the center of resistance to Obama policy was from middle level field managers, ICE attorneys and the ICE employee union. The conflict is as old as the agency itself, which for years when it was known as the Immigration and naturalization Service, or INS, frequently found itself torn between directives from the political appointees named to lead the agency, and its career personnel. But because Congress and the country are unusually divided on basic immigration policy issues, the internal conflicts have become especially fierce.<br />
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And dissenting career ICE personnel, like federal bureaucrats elsewhere, are known to share information with sympathetic members of Congress to get their point across – and to try to forestall the policies that they object to. That's probably how GOP conservatives obtained a series of internal ICE memos earlier this year that revealed that the Obama administration was reviewing options for how it might use executive authority to legalize selected classes of illegal aliens, circumventing the need for a possible vote by Congress. That prospect – dubbed an "executive amnesty" by critics – has infuriated GOP leaders, and has even caused senior Republicans like Orrin Hatch (R-UT), who otherwise support immigration reform, to break ranks with the White House.<br />
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The main options review memo, which was prepared by ICE's chief of policy, Denise Vanson, an Obama appointee, makes for interesting reading. The memo, entitled "Administrative Options to Comprehensive Immigration Reform," reviews a handful of ways that Obama could decide to re-classify prospective deportation cases, including the granting of "temporary protected status" (TPS) or "deferred enforced departure" (DED) to some or even all of the 11 million illegal aliens currently in the US. In addition to focusing on a specific class of aliens like the DREAM kids, the memo discusses the possibility that all illegal aliens present in the country since 1996 – in other words, those with at least 15 years of residency – could be granted "deferred" status. <br />
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The memo warns, though, that any attempt to utilize TPS or DED to legalize all 11 million aliens would likely cause enormous and unacceptable public controversy. Anonymous ICE officials who have since commented on the Vanson memo say that Obama has no intention of using TPS or DED to conduct a sweeping amnesty. But despite repeated urgings by Sen. Charles Grassley and other Republican critics, White House officials have steadfastly refused to rule out more selective use of TPS or DED, should Congress fail to pass a legalization bill. No such timetable for doing so has been discussed, however, and it appears that Obama wants to use the threat more as leverage to bring GOP leaders to the table – at least eventually. <br />
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It's still unclear whether Napolitano herself change her mind about the opt-out or whether, as appears more likely senior ICE officials are seeking to circumvent her authority, and indeed, by discussing their position off the record, are engaged in what amounts to a bureaucraticmutiny. Immigration advocates were counting on the "opt out" clause as a way or organizing local citizens to pressure their county and city governments to refuse to go along with the program until a legalization bill was passed. In addition to San Francisco, Washington, DC and several other localities have already voted formally not to participate. <br />
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But at least one senior ICE official - possibly John Morton, the ICE chief – has made clear to reporters there's nothing dissenting county and local government can actually do to stop Secure Communities. Once the fingerprints of arrested suspects are forwarded to the FBI, to check for outstanding warrants, and past criminal history, the FBI has an agreement to send the same fingerprints to ICE to verify legal status. As I have reported here previously, it doesn't matter whether the suspects are guilty of a crime, let alone a major one. Once ICE gets their fingerprints, and verifies that the suspect is in the country illegally, it asks local officials to detain the suspect for deportation. Under current US law, local officials are obligated to comply.<br />
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Immigration activists are reviewing whether it might be possible to administratively sever the link between the FBI and ICE that allows the two agencies to verify the status of arrestees without the compliance of local elected officials, and without the fingerprints being sent to ICE from local jails, which was the established procedure. But ICE and FBI already collaborate in the identification and arrest of fugitive aliens as well as criminal alien smuggling gangs. It might take a special executive order, but in an election year, with Obama already under fire for going "soft" on his own crackdown, and amid fears of an "executive amnesty," the president is unlikely to pursue such an option. <br />
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In the final analysis, all of these simmering policy disputes and bureaucratic battles are only a morbid symptom the current federal deadlock on immigration reform. Officially, Obama says he favors a third way between "mass deportation" and "mass amnesty." But mass amnesty is virtually impossible to push through Congress in the current climate, which will only get worse after November. Most of the likely incoming GOP members of the House and Senate are already on record opposing even a partial amnesty like DREAM. Which means all we're left with – failing high-risk executive action, or a different legislative compromise formula, which has yet to emerge – is the current de facto policy of mass deportation. <br />
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Stewart J. Lawrence is a Washington, DC-based immigration policy specialist. He can be reached at stewartlawrence81147@gmail.com.<br />
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</div></div>Peter D Stanislawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11047318797222046289noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720630.post-62417313477898161612010-09-21T18:37:00.000-07:002010-09-21T18:38:11.092-07:00Fallout From the Mesherle Verdict<div><br>More Arrests, New Charges <br><br>By JESSE STRAUSS</div><div><a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/strauss09212010.html">http://www.counterpunch.org/strauss09212010.html</a><br><br>Approximately seventeen people have been charged over the past three weeks with crimes related to the protests against former BART cop Johannes Mehserle's involuntary manslaughter verdict on July 8th. Some of those recently charged were arrested that night, while others have been identified by police in photos, and have been newly arrested. The latest set of arraignments on Monday morning saw three Oaklanders charged with Unlawful Assembly, Remaining at the Scene of a Riot, and Rioting. They are set to reappear in court within the next month.<br><br>Five people arrested on July 8th remain in the Santa Rita County Jail, and at least three who were arrested last week remain incarcerated. Accordingto the Oakland 100 Support Committee, one of the earlier arrestees was held for over 30 days before charges were filed against him. He now faces a slew of charges which include failure to disperse, although, again according to the Oakland 100 Support Committee, he was arrested before the order to disperse was given.<br><br>Art Jackson, who spent 45 days in jail after being arrested on the night of the protests has been charged with crimes related to the looting of the Footlocker shoe store on Broadway Avenue by 14th Street. In a recent statement, Jackson explained that he did not commit any of the crimes he is being charged with. Among those charges are second degree burglary, petty theft with a prior, and receiving stolen property.<br><br>Soon after the protests, the Oakland Police Department issues a press release explaining that some of the people arrested were taking "advantage of a chaotic situation by looting Oakland businesses." While to some extent this appears true, Rachel Lederman and Walter Riley of the Bay Area chapter of the National Lawyers Guild make it very clear that it was the police forces themselves who made the situation chaotic.<br><br>In a statement condemning the police action on that evening, Lederman said that "The aggressive use of police formations, baton beatings and indiscriminate arrests were unnecessary and violated people's constitutional right to protest. To make things even worse, OPD violated state law by jailing people for long periods of time who had been arrested for very minor offenses."<br><br>Long time community activist and NLG member Riley agreed that in the protests, which in some cases turned into legal violations, the police, fully clad in riot gear, were not keeping the peace. Soon after the protests he said, "The police were provocative and seemed determined to instigate violence, which of course, served their police contract negotiations with Oakland at a time when they are facing layoffs of 80 officers." He added, "The police helped to perpetuate a narrative of violence by allowing a small number of people to vandalize businesses when they could have stopped it."<br><br>On the other hand, however, at a press conference on the day following the verdict, Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums made a statement praising the OPD for restraining itself and respecting the civil rights of community members. The number of people charged with crimes relating to the protests against Mehserle's verdict continues to increase, apparently in relation to responses the police have gotten to a press release pressing community members to "Please take a moment to review the images [on their website] and help us identfy individuals who looted Oakland businesses"—spelling error and all.<br><br>The Oakland 100 Support Committee is calling for support from the community to help in the defense of the people who were arrested during those protests. A list of court dates and locations as well as a way to donate to support court and lawyer fees are available on their website.<br><br>Jesse Strauss is an independent journalist, born and raised in Oakland, <br>Reach him at jstrauss (at) riseup.net.<br><br></div> <div id="M2Signature"><div>-- </div><div>Pete<br>Belief is the death of intelligence--Robert Anton Wilson</div></div>Peter D Stanislawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11047318797222046289noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720630.post-50987885601188760762010-09-18T10:39:00.000-07:002010-09-18T10:48:41.701-07:00Autumn of the Driveler<div>CounterPunch Diary<br><br>By ALEXANDER COCKBURN</div><div><a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn09172010.html">http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn09172010.html</a><br><br>Some world leaders mature as they head into the sunset: Jimmy Carter often makes more sense in his eighties than he did as president nearly four decades ago. Others spare the world their midnight thoughts, not always voluntarily. Ronald Reagan succumbed to Alzheimers; Ariel Sharon is still animate, albeit effectively dead to the world. Alas, Fidel Castro just broke an arm and a kneecap when he tripped on that fateful concrete step six years ago. Would that he had bitten off his tongue and thus spared his erstwhile admirers, myself included, the sound of this once great revolutionary plunging into kookdom. <br><br>If President Raúl Castro wants to defend Cuba's record on human rights, all he needs to do point to the fact that his brother has not been deposed from his formal position as First Secretary of the Communist Party, and carted off to an isolation ward in the Casa de Dementes, Havana's psychiatric hospital. Instead he has unstinted access to the state radio and the newspaper Granma.<br><br>In both of these media Castro, now 84, has spouted a steady stream of drivel. <br><br>Memorable among these forays intonutdom was his outburst of conspiracism on the sixth anniversary of the Trade Center/Pentagon attacks with the whole slab of nonsense read out by a Cuban television presenter.<br><br>Castro claimed that the Pentagon was hit by a rocket, not a plane, because no traces were found of its passengers. "Only a projectile could have created the geometrically round orifice created by the alleged airplane," according to Fidel. "We were deceived as well as the rest of the planet's inhabitants." All nonsense of course. There were remains of the passengers on the plane that hit the Pentagon, in the form of teeth and other bits traced through DNA. Hundreds of people saw the plane -- people who know the difference between a plane and a cruise missile. The wreckage of the plane was hauled out from the site.<br><br>It's logical that maximum leaders like Castro are conspiracists by disposition. Since they are control freaks, the random and the accidental are alien to their frame of reference. If it happened, it happened for a reason. And if a bad thing happened, it was very probably a conspiracy. <br><br>More recently, in early August of this year Castro touted to his audience in Cuba and across the world his sympathy with one of the standard mantras of nutdom, which is the belief that the world is run by the Bilderberg Club.<br><br>The 84-year-old former Cuban president published an article on August 18, spread across three of the eight pages of the Communist Party newspaper Granma, quoting in extenso from the Lithuanian-born writer Daniel Estulin's 'The Secrets of the Bilderberg Club,' (2006) alleging the Bilderbergers control everything, which must mean that they pack a lot in to the three-day session the Club holds each year as its sole public activity. Of course they probably skype each other a lot too and rot out their brains plotting and planning on their cell phones. <br><br>Followers of the Alex Jones (Radio) Show, a sanctuary of conspiracism, no doubt remember Estulin's claim in 2007 that he had "received information from sources inside the U.S. intelligence community which suggests that people from the highest levels of the U.S. government are considering an assassination attempt against Congressman Ron Paul because they are threatened by his burgeoning popularity." The bits of Estulin's book reverently quoted by Castro, who called Estulin honest and well informed, retread some of the doctrines of Lyndon LaRouche, one of the most lurid conspiracists in political history, (though I do have affectionate memories of LaRouche's claim in 1984 in a ad running on the CBS network that former vice president Walter Mondale, then running against Ronald Reagan for the Oval Office, was an "agent of influence" of the Soviet Intelligence services. At the time LaRouchies were in close contact with the Reagan White House.) <br><br>On the evidence of his quotes from Estulin, Castro is much taken by Estulin's view that members of the Marxist Frankfurt School such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who fled to the US from the Nazis before World War Two, had been recruited by the Rockefellers to popularize rock music to "control the masses" by seducing them from the fight for civil rights and social justice. According to Estulin, reverently quoted by Castro, 'The man charged with ensuring that the Americans liked the Beatles was Walter Lippmann himself.' <br><br>So Fidel Castro believes that the Beatles were invented by the Rockefellers, and that Walter Lippmann, the pundit who drafted President Wilson's Fourteen Points in 1918, crowned his literary/political career in 1968 by sending John Lennon the lyrics for "Revolution", with its demobilizing message: "You say you want a revolution /Well, you know /We all want to change the world /… But when you talk about destruction /Don't you know that you can count me out." (In fact I seem to remember that Lennon actually wrote the song as an answer to my friends Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn, who as members of New Left Review and the Fourth International had suggested to Lennon that the Beatles pony up some dough to finance the revolutionary cause.) <br><br>And now Castro's latest outing into political asininity has been to give an interview to Jeffrey Goldberg, of the Atlantic, allowing the man Castro cordially describes as "a great journalist" to cite Castro as saying that the Cuban economic model has been a disaster. <br><br>Goldberg is an appalling journalist, whose most notable achievement was to run an enormous piece in the New Yorker in the run-up to the attack on Iraq in 2003, which was one of the most effective exercises in disinformation designed to stoke up the Congress and public opinion in favor of the war. The piece was billed as containing disclosures of "Saddam Hussein's possible ties to al Qaeda."<br><br>This was at a moment when the FBI and CIA had just shot down the war party's claim of a meeting between Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague before the 9/11 attacks. Goldberg saved the day for the Bush crowd. At the core of his rambling, 16,000-word article was an interview in the Kurdish-held Iraqi town of Sulaimaniya with Mohammed Mansour Shahab, who offered the eager Goldberg a wealth of detail about his activities as a link between Osama bin Laden and the Iraqis, shuttling arms and other equipment.<br><br>The piece was gratefully seized upon by the Administration as proof of The Link. The coup de grâce to Goldberg's credibility came on February 9, 2003 in the London Observer, administered by Jason Burke, its chief reporter. Burke visited the same prison in Sulaimaniya, talked to Shahab and established beyond doubt that Goldberg's great source is a clumsy liar, not even knowing the physical appearance of Kandahar, whither he had claimed to have journeyed to deal with bin Laden; and confecting his fantasies in the hope of a shorter prison sentence. Needless to say, Burke's demolition was not picked up in the U.S. press, nor has the New Yorker ever apologized for Goldberg's story, certainly as pernicious as anything offered by Judy Miller in the New York Times.<br><br>Since Castro has been sounding tremendous alarums about a possible attack on Iran, it's bizarre to find him lofting Goldberg, a former member of the Israeli Defense Force, to the journalistic pantheon and taking pains to paint his fellow 9/11 conspiracist, president Ahmadinejad of Iran, as an anti-Semite. <br><br>Some on the left see Castro's deprecating remarks about the failure of the Cuban economic model as part of a tactical maneuver to help his brother institute the "reforms" that will see somewhere between half a million and million Cubans lose their jobs. I see it as a spectacularly foolish misjudgement by Castro, who told Goldberg "The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore" and later said he was misinterpreted and that he meant the exact opposite, which is obvious nonsense.<br><br>Then Castro took Goldberg to – of all disgusting things – a dolphin exhibition. Lock the old fool up I say, free the dolphins and turn the exhibition into a theme park for all the CIA's efforts to kill Castro, including booby-trapping a coral reef. The ironies of history: the CIA failed, and here's Castro taking up the task, methodically assassinating his reputation, week after week.<br><br></div> <div id="M2Signature"><div><br></div></div>Peter D Stanislawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11047318797222046289noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720630.post-21741268816033165422010-09-14T17:35:00.000-07:002010-09-14T17:36:00.292-07:00Glenn Beck Channels Lunatic, Disassociated Rage Into a Quasi-Movement...<div><br>By Wallace C. Turbeville, NewDeal 2.0<br><a href="http://www.alternet.org/story/148126/">http://www.alternet.org/story/148126/</a><br><br><br>A little over a week ago we were treated to Glenn Beck's quasi-religious extravaganza on the anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech. I have had a gnawing sense that there was some greater meaning to this event, despite the absence of any apparent substance in the messages delivered.<br><br>Then it hit me: I recalled that, in a 2009 New York Times interview, Glenn Beck compared himself with Howard Beale, the character portrayed magnificently by Peter Finch in the 1976 film "Network." The metamorphosis of Beck into a self-proclaimed prophet of an ideologically conservative God suddenly made complete sense.<br><br>In Paddy Chayefsky's screenplay, Beale was a newscaster who suffered a psychological break when informed that he was to be fired because of low ratings. He wandered into the studio wearing his pajamas, drenched from walking in a thunderstorm, and delivered the famous speech urging viewers to throw open their windows and scream, "I'm as mad as hell, and I am not going to take it any more." Of course, the viewers complied en masse and Beale was given his own show that featured his lunatic rants. Ratings soared.<br><br>Before his famous exhortation, Beale recounted a list of problems plaguing society and admitted that he was totally clueless as to any solutions. Chayefsky was unsympathetic with Beale's audience. He brilliantly described the mass insanity of a public willing to follow a prophet with no inkling of a way to address problems, based only lunatic, disassociated anger. Chayefsky intended that "mad" be read as having both of its meanings. He was appalled by the public's self-indulgent eagerness to transform the immediate gratification of a primal scream into a social movement.<br><br>It is instructive to recall how Beale met his end. Network management found it necessary to restrain Beale when his rants put corporate strategy at risk. In redirecting Beale, they inadvertently reattached his mind, however tenuously, with rationality. Beale started speaking (quite eloquently) about the dehumanization of society, advising his viewers to make the best of the situation because the trend was irreversible. Ratings plummeted, not because the public disagreed, but because they became bored. As the film's narrator put it, "No one particularly cared to hear that his life was utterly valueless." The amoral head of programming, Diana Christensen, arranged to have Beale gunned down on live TV by the Ecumenical Liberation Army (they also had a prime time reality show, "The Mao Tse-Tung Hour"). That final show was a great success for the Network, if not for Beale.<br><br>Glenn Beck proves that Paddy Chayefsky's observations of American society in the 1970's are just as valid today.<br><br>I have often wondered whether Beck is a lunatic, exploited by Fox News and deserving of our sympathy. After all, he suffers from macular dystrophy, an inability to focus vision on the real world. (Chayefsky would have loved the irony.) But I now believe that he is sane (and I suppose deserving of no sympathy). He understands that disassociated anger is cathartic for today's public. Nonsensical conspiracy theories and baseless ridicule are entertaining fillers, but his real stock-in-trade is the public's rage at a "system" that must have betrayed them because their dreams have not been fulfilled. People are angry because they feel powerless to change conditions that they dislike. They cannot even describe what the problem is because no leader has articulated it. A rational explanation would at least mitigate the rage by calming anxieties. But no progressive leader has the courage to try it, and it is not in the conservatives' interest to do so. You might say that the public's experience is dehumanizing (but if you did, you would bore the audience).<br><br>The facts suggest that Beck is more Diana Christensen than Howard Beale. Like her, he understands that news, in the sense of events and public policies, cannot contend with entertainment in a world dominated by fear and uncertainty. He has simply chosen to be his own prophet. His claim to be a mouthpiece of God appears cynically calculated to complete the construction of a modern-day equivalent of Chayefsky's Network. As Max Schumacher, the only principled character in the film said of Christensen: "You are television incarnate, Diana [read, Glenn] — indifferent to suffering, insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality."<br><br>This is all far more important than Glenn Beck. I believe that this disassociated rage has been an important characteristic of American society for at least 40 years. It is a product of the self-important and self-indulgent baby boomers (like me), who have always been susceptible to the message that they should hold on to their own money rather than sharing it, in the form of taxes, in pursuit of the greater good. The anger and cynicism, initially directed at the "system," was eventually turned on the government. The only leader whose message resonated in this era was Ronald Reagan — "Government cannot solve the problem; it is the problem."<br><br>Ideological conservatism has ruled the day for 40 years. The genius of the New Deal, in retreat throughout this period, was not ideology. It was the pragmatic observation that the only way to achieve long-term prosperity is for the government to draw the weak and less wealthy into participation in the economy. Left to their own devices, the strong and wealthy will rationally act in their own short-term interests. Only government can act in the collective long-term interest. The unbridled free enterprise and deregulation advocated by conservative ideologues can make a few people wealthy in the short-run, but it is unsustainable because middle- and lower- income families will inevitably be left behind.<br><br>What has been missing is a progressive leader willing to risk telling the public the truth. The middle- and lower-classes have been getting poorer. The quality of their employment in good times has deteriorated; and progressively, in each downturn, unemployment persists for longer and longer periods after the economy improves. As high school and college graduation rates have stagnated, the American dream of boundless opportunity has withered away, even for their children. Even the apparent success of the wealthiest is unsustainable unless increasing income disparity is reversed.<br><br>What an opportunity for progressives to redirect this anger toward conservative ideologies that have decimated the American Dream! For Mr. Obama, the path to a transformational presidency was, and hopefully still is, to channel this energy into an all-out effort to restore balance to the economy.<br><br>Chayefsky also created a character, Arthur Jensen, who was the head of the Network. Assuming his best voice-of-God tone, he tried to convince Beale to proclaim a utopian world view in which businesses roamed free of government interference, his "corporate cosmology." When Beale nervously asked why he should be the chosen prophet for this new world order, Jensen answered: "Because you are on the television, you dummy." Glenn Beck needs to be reminded that Arthur Jensen was not God; he was just a character in a movie.<br><br><br>Wallace C. Turbeville is the former CEO of VMAC LLC and a former Vice President of Goldman, Sachs & Co. He is Visiting Scholar at the Roosevelt Institute.<br><br></div> <div id="M2Signature"><div><br></div></div>Peter D Stanislawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11047318797222046289noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720630.post-28868395066992771882010-09-13T14:10:00.001-07:002010-09-13T14:10:29.034-07:00SUPREME COURT RULING ALLOWS CORPORATIONS TO LEGALLY BRIBE JUDGES<div>William K. Black, Naked Capitalism - The Supreme Court's Citizens United decision allows businesses to make unlimited political contributions to judges and politicians. When judges are elected, the need for these contributions inherently turns judges into politicians. Sympathetic judges are corrupt businesses' most valuable allies. Corporations and their senior officials can commit civil or criminal wrongs with impunity if their case is assigned to a friendly judge. The Robber Barons often had judges on their payrolls. Judges can serve a corporation as both a shield and a sword. They can declare statutes and regulations unlawful. They can issue favorable decisions when corporations sue their critics, which can intimidate, tie up, or even bankrupt the critics.<br><br>The fact that corporations are "investing" so heavily in getting pro-business judges elected demonstrates that their CEOs believe that the election of friendly judges will increase their incomes and decrease the risk that they will ever be sanctioned.<br></div> <div id="M2Signature"><div><br></div></div>Peter D Stanislawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11047318797222046289noreply@blogger.com0