Fluxed Up World

You Are What You Monsanto

2012-03-07T17:02:00.002-08:00

Source / Pragmatic Progressive Page

Thanks to Alan Brodrick / Fluxed Up World

Right-Wing Morons: How Much More Can We Take?

2012-03-03T16:01:00.004-08:00

Ethan Miller/Getty Images.
A Sex Ed 101 Curriculum for Conservatives
By Amanda Marcotte / March 2, 2012

Recent national kerfuffles over abortion and contraception access bring up many important questions: Should employers retain control over your wages and benefits after they sign them over to you? Is contraception, a service used by 99 percent of American women, really so controversial? How much state regulation should there be over women’s most private decisions? But amidst all those questions is one overarching one: Do conservatives need a crash course in sex ed? [Radio show host Rush Limbaugh speaks at a forum hosted by the Heritage Foundation on the similarities between the war on terrorism and the television show 24, in Washington, June 23, 2006.

Usually, when we think of the sex education debate, we think of junior high and high school kids putting condoms on bananas. But recent events indicate that this country needs remedial sex education for adults, specifically social conservatives who wish to hold forth on reproductive rights without seeming to know the basics regarding who has sex and how it works in 2012. With that in mind, I designed a quick curriculum for these surprisingly necessary courses.

Intercourse 101: It Takes Two to Tango. After voting for a mandatory ultrasound bill that serves no other purpose than to shame abortion patients for their sexuality, Virginia delegate David Albo complained in the legislature that he’s not getting the sex he feels entitled to from his wife. CNSNews columnist Craig Bannister shamed women on the pill for being “sex-crazed co-eds” who exhibit too much “sexual zeal” — before ending his piece by wistfully wishing he could have sex with all the sexually active women he just insulted. Rush Limbaugh, who is on his fourth marriage and is an admitted Viagra user, called Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown University law student who testified before Congress about her use of contraception, a “slut” and a “prostitute.”

In this first section of the remedial sex education course, we will discuss this sexual double standard: When having sex, men are behaving well and women behaving badly. The midterm will be an essay on the following prompt: “If women are supposed to say no to sex, whom do you propose straight men sleep with?”

Contraception 101: History as Prologue. Many conservatives appear to believe that prior to the Obama administration requiring employers to fully cover contraceptive care as part of their health plans, contraception wasn’t considered a medical service, but something more like a party item you pick up with your beer and cigarettes. Tina Korbe of Hot Air argued that supporters of the new regulation “labor under the illusion that contraception is a medical necessity.” Limbaugh argued that health insurance covering contraception means women are “paid to have sex.” The reaction on the right suggests that this is the first time in history someone has suggested that contraception care be included in general health benefits.

During this portion of the class, we will look at the history of medicalized birth control. Students will learn (in conjunction with another mandatory class, The Pill 101) that the birth control pill has always been controlled by doctors and pharmacies, and that insurance companies treat it as medical care by offering the drug with a co-pay. Special attention will be paid to the 28 states that already require contraception coverage, the existing Medicaid coverage of contraception, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission decision that found that contraception coverage is a normal part of women’s healthcare that should be covered by healthcare plans.

Premarital Sex 101: A Quantitative Look. Underlying many of the arguments over women’s reproductive healthcare is a widespread fear of women using these rights to have sex outside of marriage. During the Arizona Republican primary debate, Rick Santorum blamed contraception for the problem of teen pregnancy, presuming that teenagers in a contraception-free world would instead abstain. Utah Republican state representative Bill Wright defended a bill banning discussion of contraception in schools by saying: “Why don’t we just be honest with them upfront that sex outside marriage is devastating?”

Contrary to students’ expectations, there is no high-level math prerequisite for this course. The statistics involved are relatively straightforward. Students will learn that 95 percent of Americans have premarital sex and have done so for decades [centuries - rdj] without bringing ruin to the nation. In addition, students will read literature showing that the teen pregnancy rate actually declined after the sexual revolution, leaving it at half the rate it was in the 1950s. Students will be asked to research why it is that blue states, where residents are more likely to use contraception and delay marriage, have lower rates of divorce and teen pregnancy.

The Pill 101: A Scientific Look. The ignorance on display on the right regarding the birth control pill, which has been around as a contraceptive for over 50 years, has been astounding. Limbaugh’s comment — “she’s having so much sex she can’t afford her own birth control pills” — indicates that he believes there’s a correlation between the number of sexual encounters and the number of pills necessary. Limbaugh also seems to think mothers and women who use birth control are mutually exclusive categories, saying: “How do you become a mom if you’re into birth control?” Additionally, with words such as “slut,” “prostitute” and “sex-crazed” flying around to describe women on hormonal contraception, it appears many conservatives believe that the drugs exist primarily for use by single women with multiple partners.

Students in our remedial sex ed course will take their time learning about hormonal contraception. They will learn that women on the pill must take one every day for it to work, no matter how much sex they’re having. Students will discover that monogamy isn’t enough to prevent unintended pregnancy, and thus married and monogamous women use the pill just as single women do. To drive home what not using contraception would mean for women, married and otherwise, students will be asked to watch the TLC show about the Duggar family, with its 19 children, and then offer a five-minute presentation in class.

As evidenced by the ignorant rot tumbling out of various right-wing mouths in response to these controversies, a curriculum of this kind is sorely needed. Perhaps female Democrats in Congress can write a bill funding Sex Education for Grown-Up Pundits and help elevate the conversation with a little basic understanding.

[Amanda Marcotte blogs every day at Pandagon.net, and contributes a weekly podcast to RH Reality Check. She lives in Austin, TX with her two cats, boyfriend, and environmentally correct commuter bicycle.]

Source / Reuters

Fluxed Up World

How Many 'High-Level Targets' Could There Be?

2012-03-02T14:59:00.005-08:00

Photo: Source.
Drone-Strike Survivors Ask, "What Kind of Democracy Is America?"
By Kathy Kelly / March 1, 2012

Fazillah, age 25, lives in Maidan Shar, the central city of Afghanistan’s Wardak province. She married about six years ago, and gave birth to a son, Aymal, who just turned five without a father. Fazillah tells her son, Aymal, that his father was killed by an American bomber plane, remote-controlled by computer.

That July, in 2007, Aymal’s father was sitting in a garden with four other men. A weaponized drone, what we used to call an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle or UAV, was flying, unseen, overhead, and fired missiles into the garden, killing all five men.

Now Fazillah and Aymal share a small dwelling with the deceased man’s mother. According to the tradition, a husband’s relatives are responsible to look after a widow with no breadwinner remaining in her immediate family. She and her son have no regular source of bread or income, but Fazillah says that her small family is better off than it might have been: one of the men killed alongside her husband left behind a wife and child but no other living relatives that could provide them with any source of support, at all.

Aymal’s grandmother becomes agitated and distraught speaking about her son’s death, and that of his four friends. “All of us ask, ‘Why?’” she says, raising her voice. “They kill people with computers and they can’t tell us why. When we ask why this happened, they say they had doubts, they had suspicions. But they didn’t take time to ask ‘Who is this person?’ or ‘Who was that person?’ There is no proof, no accountability. Now, there is no reliable person in the home to bring us bread. I am old, and I do not have a peaceful life.”

Listening to them, I recall an earlier conversation I had with a Pakistani social worker and with Safdar Dawar, a journalist, both of whom had survived drone attacks in the area of Miran Shah, in Pakistan’s Waziristan province. Exasperated at the increasingly common experience which they had survived and which too many others have not, they began firing questions at us.

“Who has given the license to kill and in what court? Who has declared that they can hit anyone they like?”

“How many ‘high level targets’ could there possibly be?”

“What kind of democracy is America,” Safdar asks, “where people do not ask these questions?”

One question Fazillah cannot answer for her son is whether anyone asked the question at all of whether to kill his father. Forbes Magazine reports that the Air Force has sixty-five to seventy thousand analysts processing drone video surveillance; a Rand review states they actually need half again that number to properly handle the data. Asked to point to the human who actually made the decision to kill her husband, she can only point to another machine.

In June 2010, Philip G. Alston, then the UN’s Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, appeared before the UN Human Rights Council and testified that “targeted killings pose a rapidly growing challenge to the international rule of law … In a situation in which there is no disclosure of who has been killed, for what reason, and whether innocent civilians have died, the legal principle of international accountability is, by definition, comprehensively violated.”

“Such an expanded and open-ended interpretation of the right to self defense comes close to destroying the prohibition on the use of armed force contained in the United Nations Charter. If invoked by other states in pursuit of those they deemed to be terrorists and to have attacked them, it would cause chaos.”

This past week, on February 23, the legal action charity "Reprieve" spoke up on behalf of more than a dozen Pakistani families who had lost loved ones in drone strikes, and asked the UN Human Rights Council to condemn the attacks as illegal human rights violations.

“In Pakistan, the CIA is creating desolation and calling it peace,” said Reprieve’s Director Clive Stafford Smith. “The illegal programme of drone strikes has murdered hundreds of civilians in Pakistan. The UN must put a stop to it before any more children are killed. Not only is it causing untold suffering to the people of North West Pakistan – it is also the most effective recruiting sergeant yet for the very ‘militants’ the US claims to be targeting.”

The lawyer representing the families, Shahzad Akbar of Pakistan’s “Foundation for Fundamental Rights”, said:

“If President Obama really believes the drone strikes have ‘pinpoint’ accuracy, it has to be asked where the deaths of kids like Maezol Khan’s eight-year-old son fit into the CIA’s plan. If the US is not prepared to face up to the reality of the suffering the strikes are causing, then the UN must step in. The international community can no longer afford to ignore the human rights catastrophe which is taking place in North West Pakistan in the name of the ‘War on Terror’.”

Drone warfare, ever more widely used from month to month from the Bush through the Obama administrations, has seen very little meaningful public debate. We don’t ask questions – our minds straying no nearer these battlefields than in the coming decades the bodies of our young people will – that is, if the chaos our war making engenders doesn’t bring the battlefields to us. An expanding network of devastatingly lethal covert actions spreading throughout the developing world passes with minimal concern or comment.

A member of the 214th Reconnaissance Group flies a Predator aircraft drone. Photo: Jim Wilson/The New York Times.

So who does Fazillah blame? Who does one blame when confronted with the actions of a machine? Our Pakistani friend asks, “What kind of a democracy is America where people do not ask these questions?” Becoming an actual democracy, with an actual choice at election-time between war and peace rather than between political machines vying for the chance to bring us war, seems to many Americans, if some of the less-reported polls are to be believed, a near-unachievable goal. The U.S. has become a process that churns out war – today Afghanistan and (in any real sense) Iraq; tomorrow Iran and Pakistan, with China securely, however distantly, on the horizon - and for those of us with any concern for peace, a principled opposition to war ultimately requires a determination to make the U.S. at long last into a democracy, striving as Dr. King enjoined us, in “molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.”

It must begin with compassion - powerless compassion perhaps, perhaps only the ghost of dissent, but compassion for people like Fazillah and Aymal, - and with deciding to be human, maybe only the ghost of a human, but alive in some way and alive to what our assent, and perhaps especially our silence are accomplishing in the world. Humanity is the first thing to be won back - and then, if we have the strength, relentlessly defended - against indifference, complacency, and, above all, inaction. If enough of us refuse to be machines, if enough of us refuse enough, can democracy, and even peace, not be at last achieved? But first comes the refusal.

Fazillah wants a peaceful life. She doesn’t want to see any more people killed, any more ghosts like that of her husband. Any more bodies, burned (as she recalls) so charred that they are almost unrecognizable one from another.

“I don’t want this to happen to anyone,” says Fazillah. "I don’t want any children to be left without parents.”

And,” she adds, “I want the U.S. troops to leave.”

Source / Truthout

Thanks to Bix Burkhart / Fluxed Up World

The Real Moral Majority Speaks

2012-02-19T21:31:00.000-08:00

Source / The Pragmatic Progressive

Thank you to Alan Brodrick / Fluxed Up World

Your Tax Dollars Hard at Work, But Not on Your Children's Education, Your Health Care, or Anything Else Meaningful

2012-02-14T12:16:00.000-08:00

450 Bases and It’s Not Over Yet: The Pentagon’s Afghan Basing Plans for Prisons, Drones, and Black Ops
By Nick Turse / February 13, 2012

In late December, the lot was just a big blank: a few burgundy metal shipping containers sitting in an expanse of crushed eggshell-colored gravel inside a razor-wire-topped fence. The American military in Afghanistan doesn’t want to talk about it, but one day soon, it will be a new hub for the American drone war in the Greater Middle East.

Next year, that empty lot will be a two-story concrete intelligence facility for America’s drone war, brightly lit and filled with powerful computers kept in climate-controlled comfort in a country where most of the population has no access to electricity. It will boast almost 7,000 square feet of offices, briefing and conference rooms, and a large “processing, exploitation, and dissemination” operations center -- and, of course, it will be built with American tax dollars.

Nor is it an anomaly. Despite all the talk of drawdowns and withdrawals, there has been a years-long building boom in Afghanistan that shows little sign of abating. In early 2010, the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) had nearly 400 bases in Afghanistan. Today, Lieutenant Lauren Rago of ISAF public affairs tells TomDispatch, the number tops 450.

The hush-hush, high-tech, super-secure facility at the massive air base in Kandahar is just one of many building projects the U.S. military currently has planned or underway in Afghanistan. While some U.S. bases are indeed closing up shop or being transferred to the Afghan government, and there’s talk of combat operations slowing or ending next year, as well as a withdrawal of American combat forces from Afghanistan by 2014, the U.S. military is still preparing for a much longer haul at mega-bases like Kandahar and Bagram airfields. The same is true even of some smaller camps, forward operating bases (FOBs), and combat outposts (COPs) scattered through the country’s backlands. “Bagram is going through a significant transition during the next year to two years,” Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Gerdes of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Bagram Office recently told Freedom Builder, a Corps of Engineers publication. “We’re transitioning... into a long-term, five-year, 10-year vision for the base.”

Whether the U.S. military will still be in Afghanistan in five or 10 years remains to be seen, but steps are currently being taken to make that possible. U.S. military publications, plans and schematics, contracting documents, and other official data examined by TomDispatch catalog hundreds of construction projects worth billions of dollars slated to begin, continue, or conclude in 2012.

While many of these efforts are geared toward structures for Afghan forces or civilian institutions, a considerable number involve U.S. facilities, some of the most significant being dedicated to the ascendant forms of American warfare: drone operations and missions by elite special operations units. The available plans for most of these projects suggest durability. “The structures that are going in are concrete and mortar, rather than plywood and tent skins,” says Gerdes. As of last December, his office was involved in 30 Afghan construction projects for U.S. or international coalition partners worth almost $427 million.

The Big Base Build-Up

Recently, the New York Times reported that President Obama is likely to approve a plan to shift much of the U.S. effort in Afghanistan to special operations forces. These elite troops would then conduct kill/capture missions and train local troops well beyond 2014. Recent building efforts in the country bear this out.

A major project at Bagram Air Base, for instance, involves the construction of a special operations forces complex, a clandestine base within a base that will afford America’s black ops troops secrecy and near-absolute autonomy from other U.S. and coalition forces. Begun in 2010, the $29 million project is slated to be completed this May and join roughly 90 locations around the country where troops from Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Afghanistan have been stationed.

Elsewhere on Bagram, tens of millions of dollars are being spent on projects that are less sexy but no less integral to the war effort, like paving dirt roads and upgrading drainage systems on the mega-base. In January, the U.S. military awarded a $7 million contract to a Turkish construction company to build a 24,000-square-foot command-and-control facility. Plans are also in the works for a new operations center to support tactical fighter jet missions, a new flight-line fire station, as well as more lighting and other improvements to support the American air war.

Last month, Afghan President Hamid Karzai ordered that the U.S.-run prison at Bagram be transferred to Afghan control. By the end of January, the U.S. had issued a $36 million contract for the construction, within a year, of a new prison on the base. While details are sparse, plans for the detention center indicate a thoroughly modern, high-security facility complete with guard towers, advanced surveillance systems, administrative facilities, and the capacity to house about 2,000 prisoners.

At Kandahar Air Field, that new intelligence facility for the drone war will be joined by a similarly-sized structure devoted to administrative operations and maintenance tasks associated with robotic aerial missions. It will be able to accommodate as many as 180 personnel at a time. With an estimated combined price tag of up to $5 million, both buildings will be integral to Air Force and possibly CIA operations involving both the MQ-1 Predator drone and its more advanced and more heavily-armed progeny, the MQ-9 Reaper.

The military is keeping information about these drone facilities under extraordinarily tight wraps. They refused to answer questions about whether, for instance, the construction of these new centers for robotic warfare are in any way related to the loss of Shamsi Air Base in neighboring Pakistan as a drone operations center, or if they signal efforts to increase the tempo of drone missions in the years ahead. The International Joint Command’s chief of Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) operations, aware that such questions were to be posed, backed out of a planned interview with TomDispatch.

“Unfortunately our ISR chief here in the International Joint Command is going to be unable to address your questions,” Lieutenant Ryan Welsh of ISAF Joint Command Media Outreach explained by email just days before the scheduled interview. He also made it clear that any question involving drone operations in Pakistan was off limits. “The issues that you raise are outside the scope under which the IJC operates, therefore we are unable to facilitate this interview request.”

Whether the construction at Kandahar is designed to free up facilities elsewhere for CIA drone operations across the border in Pakistan or is related only to missions within Afghanistan, it strongly suggests a ramping up of unmanned operations. It is, however, just one facet of the ongoing construction at the air field. This month, a $26 million project to build 11 new structures devoted to tactical vehicle maintenance at Kandahar is scheduled for completion. With two large buildings for upkeep and repairs, one devoted strictly to fixing tires, another to painting vehicles, as well as an industrial-sized car wash, and administrative and storage facilities, the big base’s building boom shows no sign of flickering out.

Construction and Reconstruction

This year, at Herat Air Base in the province of the same name bordering Turkmenistan and Iran, the U.S. is slated to begin a multimillion-dollar project to enhance its special forces’ air operations. Plans are in the works to expand apron space -- where aircraft can be parked, serviced, and loaded or unloaded -- for helicopters and airplanes, as well as to build new taxiways and aircraft shelters.

That project is just one of nearly 130, cumulatively valued at about $1.5 billion, slated to be carried out in Herat, Helmand, and Kandahar provinces this year, according to Army Corps of Engineers documents examined by TomDispatch. These also include efforts at Camp Tombstone and Camp Dwyer, both in Helmand Province as well as Kandahar’s FOB Hadrian and FOB Wilson. The U.S. military also recently awarded a contract for more air field apron space at a base in Kunduz, a new secure entrance and new roads for FOB Delaram II, and new utilities and roads at FOB Shank, while the Marines recently built a new chapel at Camp Bastion.

Seven years ago, Forward Operating Base Sweeney, located a mile up in a mountain range in Zabul Province, was a well-outfitted, if remote, American base. After U.S. troops abandoned it, however, the base fell into disrepair. Last month, American troops returned in force and began rebuilding the outpost, constructing everything from new troop housing to a new storage facility. “We built a lot of buildings, we put up a lot of tents, we filled a lot of sandbags, and we increased our force protection significantly,” Captain Joe Mickley, commanding officer of the soldiers taking up residence at the base, told a military reporter.

Decommission and Deconstruction

Hesco barriers are, in essence, big bags of dirt. Up to seven feet tall, made of canvas and heavy gauge wire mesh, they form protective walls around U.S. outposts all over Afghanistan. They’ll take the worst of sniper rounds, rifle-propelled grenades, even mortar shells, but one thing can absolutely wreck them -- the Marines’ 9th Engineer Support Battalion.

At the beginning of December, the 9th Engineers were building bases and filling up Hescos in Helmand Province. By the end of the month, they were tearing others down.

Wielding pickaxes, shovels, bolt-cutters, powerful rescue saws, and front-end loaders, they have begun “demilitarizing” bases, cutting countless Hescos -- which cost $700 or more a pop -- into heaps of jagged scrap metal and bulldozing berms in advance of the announced American withdrawal from Afghanistan. At Firebase Saenz, for example, Marines were bathed in a sea of crimson sparks as they sawed their way through the metal mesh and let the dirt spill out, leaving a country already haunted by the ghosts of British and Russian bases with yet another defunct foreign outpost. After Saenz, it was on to another patrol base slated for destruction.

Not all rural outposts are being torn down, however. Some are being handed over to the Afghan Army or police. And new facilities are now being built for the indigenous forces at an increasing rate. “If current projections remain accurate, we will award 18 contracts in February,” Bonnie Perry, the head of contracting for the Army Corps of Engineers’ Afghanistan Engineering District-South, told military reporter Karla Marshall. “Next quarter we expect that awards will remain high, with the largest number of contract awards occurring in May.” One of the projects underway is a large base near Herat, which will include barracks, dining facilities, office space, and other amenities for Afghan commandos.

Tell Me How This Ends

No one should be surprised that the U.S. military is building up and tearing down bases at the same time, nor that much of the new construction is going on at mega-bases, while small outposts in the countryside are being abandoned. This is exactly what you would expect of an occupation force looking to scale back its “footprint” and end major combat operations while maintaining an on-going presence in Afghanistan. Given the U.S. military’s projected retreat to its giant bases and an increased reliance on kill/capture black-ops as well as unmanned air missions, it’s also no surprise that its signature projects for 2012 include a new special operations forces compound, clandestine drone facilities, and a brand new military prison.

There’s little doubt Bagram Air Base will exist in five or 10 years. Just who will be occupying it is, however, less clear. After all, in Iraq, the Obama administration negotiated for some way to station a significant military force -- 10,000 or more troops -- there beyond a withdrawal date that had been set in stone for years. While a token number of U.S. troops and a highly militarized State Department contingent remain there, the Iraqi government largely thwarted the American efforts -- and now, even the State Department presence is being halved.

It’s less likely this will be the case in Afghanistan, but it remains possible. Still, it’s clear that the military is building in that country as if an enduring American presence were a given. Whatever the outcome, vestiges of the current base-building boom will endure and become part of America’s Afghan legacy.

On Bagram’s grounds stands a distinctive structure called the “Crow’s Nest.” It’s an old control tower built by the Soviets to coordinate their military operations in Afghanistan. That foreign force left the country in 1989. The Soviet Union itself departed from the planet less than three years later. The tower remains.

America’s new prison in Bagram will undoubtedly remain, too. Just who the jailers will be and who will be locked inside five years or 10 years from now is, of course, unknown. But given the history -- marked by torture and deaths -- of the appalling treatment of inmates at Bagram and, more generally, of the brutality toward prisoners by all parties to the conflict over the years, in no scenario are the results likely to be pretty.

[Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com. An award-winning journalist, his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and regularly at TomDispatch. This article is the sixth in his new series on the changing face of American empire, which is being underwritten by Lannan Foundation. You can follow him on Twitter @NickTurse, on Tumblr, and on Facebook.]

Source / TomDispatch

Thanks to Juan Cole / Fluxed Up World

Let's Be Sure Our Facts Are Clear: Who Did What to Whom?

2012-02-14T10:48:00.000-08:00

Source / True Activist FB

Fluxed Up World

NASCAR and the US Senate

2012-01-30T19:36:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Alan Brodrick / Fluxed Up World

OWS Could Take Lessons from This, Part 2

2012-01-27T10:38:00.000-08:00

A march in Ådalen, Sweden, in 1931.
How Swedes and Norwegians broke the power of the ‘1 percent’
By George Lakey | January 25, 2012

While many of us are working to ensure that the Occupy movement will have a lasting impact, it’s worthwhile to consider other countries where masses of people succeeded in nonviolently bringing about a high degree of democracy and economic justice. Sweden and Norway, for example, both experienced a major power shift in the 1930s after prolonged nonviolent struggle. They “fired” the top 1 percent of people who set the direction for society and created the basis for something different.

Both countries had a history of horrendous poverty. When the 1 percent was in charge, hundreds of thousands of people emigrated to avoid starvation. Under the leadership of the working class, however, both countries built robust and successful economies that nearly eliminated poverty, expanded free university education, abolished slums, provided excellent health care available to all as a matter of right and created a system of full employment. Unlike the Norwegians, the Swedes didn’t find oil, but that didn’t stop them from building what the latest CIA World Factbook calls “an enviable standard of living.”

Neither country is a utopia, as readers of the crime novels by Stieg Larsson, Kurt Wallender and Jo Nesbro will know. Critical left-wing authors such as these try to push Sweden and Norway to continue on the path toward more fully just societies. However, as an American activist who first encountered Norway as a student in 1959 and learned some of its language and culture, the achievements I found amazed me. I remember, for example, bicycling for hours through a small industrial city, looking in vain for substandard housing. Sometimes resisting the evidence of my eyes, I made up stories that “accounted for” the differences I saw: “small country,” “homogeneous,” “a value consensus.” I finally gave up imposing my frameworks on these countries and learned the real reason: their own histories.

Then I began to learn that the Swedes and Norwegians paid a price for their standards of living through nonviolent struggle. There was a time when Scandinavian workers didn’t expect that the electoral arena could deliver the change they believed in. They realized that, with the 1 percent in charge, electoral “democracy” was stacked against them, so nonviolent direct action was needed to exert the power for change.

In both countries, the troops were called out to defend the 1 percent; people died. Award-winning Swedish filmmaker Bo Widerberg told the Swedish story vividly in Ådalen 31, which depicts the strikers killed in 1931 and the sparking of a nationwide general strike. (You can read more about this case in an entry by Max Rennebohm in the Global Nonviolent Action Database.)

The Norwegians had a harder time organizing a cohesive people’s movement because Norway’s small population—about three million—was spread out over a territory the size of Britain. People were divided by mountains and fjords, and they spoke regional dialects in isolated valleys. In the nineteenth century, Norway was ruled by Denmark and then by Sweden; in the context of Europe Norwegians were the “country rubes,” of little consequence. Not until 1905 did Norway finally become independent.

When workers formed unions in the early 1900s, they generally turned to Marxism, organizing for revolution as well as immediate gains. They were overjoyed by the overthrow of the czar in Russia, and the Norwegian Labor Party joined the Communist International organized by Lenin. Labor didn’t stay long, however. One way in which most Norwegians parted ways with Leninist strategy was on the role of violence: Norwegians wanted to win their revolution through collective nonviolent struggle, along with establishing co-ops and using the electoral arena.

In the 1920s strikes increased in intensity. The town of Hammerfest formed a commune in 1921, led by workers councils; the army intervened to crush it. The workers’ response verged toward a national general strike. The employers, backed by the state, beat back that strike, but workers erupted again in the ironworkers’ strike of 1923–24.

The Norwegian 1 percent decided not to rely simply on the army; in 1926 they formed a social movement called the Patriotic League, recruiting mainly from the middle class. By the 1930s, the League included as many as 100,000 people for armed protection of strike breakers—this in a country of only 3 million!

The Labor Party, in the meantime, opened its membership to anyone, whether or not in a unionized workplace. Middle-class Marxists and some reformers joined the party. Many rural farm workers joined the Labor Party, as well as some small landholders. Labor leadership understood that in a protracted struggle, constant outreach and organizing was needed to a nonviolent campaign. In the midst of the growing polarization, Norway’s workers launched another wave of strikes and boycotts in 1928.

The Depression hit bottom in 1931. More people were jobless there than in any other Nordic country. Unlike in the U.S., the Norwegian union movement kept the people thrown out of work as members, even though they couldn’t pay dues. This decision paid off in mass mobilizations. When the employers’ federation locked employees out of the factories to try to force a reduction of wages, the workers fought back with massive demonstrations.

Many people then found that their mortgages were in jeopardy. (Sound familiar?) The Depression continued, and farmers were unable to keep up payment on their debts. As turbulence hit the rural sector, crowds gathered nonviolently to prevent the eviction of families from their farms. The Agrarian Party, which included larger farmers and had previously been allied with the Conservative Party, began to distance itself from the 1 percent; some could see that the ability of the few to rule the many was in doubt.

By 1935, Norway was on the brink. The Conservative-led government was losing legitimacy daily; the 1 percent became increasingly desperate as militancy grew among workers and farmers. A complete overthrow might be just a couple years away, radical workers thought. However, the misery of the poor became more urgent daily, and the Labor Party felt increasing pressure from its members to alleviate their suffering, which it could do only if it took charge of the government in a compromise agreement with the other side.

This it did. In a compromise that allowed owners to retain the right to own and manage their firms, Labor in 1935 took the reins of government in coalition with the Agrarian Party. They expanded the economy and started public works projects to head toward a policy of full employment that became the keystone of Norwegian economic policy. Labor’s success and the continued militancy of workers enabled steady inroads against the privileges of the 1 percent, to the point that majority ownership of all large firms was taken by the public interest. (There is an entry on this case as well at the Global Nonviolent Action Database.)

The 1 percent thereby lost its historic power to dominate the economy and society. Not until three decades later could the Conservatives return to a governing coalition, having by then accepted the new rules of the game, including a high degree of public ownership of the means of production, extremely progressive taxation, strong business regulation for the public good and the virtual abolition of poverty. When Conservatives eventually tried a fling with neoliberal policies, the economy generated a bubble and headed for disaster. (Sound familiar?)

Labor stepped in, seized the three largest banks, fired the top management, left the stockholders without a dime and refused to bail out any of the smaller banks. The well-purged Norwegian financial sector was not one of those countries that lurched into crisis in 2008; carefully regulated and much of it publicly owned, the sector was solid.

Although Norwegians may not tell you about this the first time you meet them, the fact remains that their society’s high level of freedom and broadly-shared prosperity began when workers and farmers, along with middle class allies, waged a nonviolent struggle that empowered the people to govern for the common good.

Source / Waging Nonviolence

Fluxed Up World

A Better Question May Be, "How Is It NOT Fascism?"

2012-01-25T18:55:00.000-08:00

The 14 Defining Characteristics Of Fascism
Free Inquiry / Spring 2003

Dr. Lawrence Britt has examined the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia) and several Latin American regimes. Britt found 14 defining characteristics common to each:

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism - Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.
2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights - Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.
3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause - The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.
4. Supremacy of the Military - Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.
5. Rampant Sexism - The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution.
6. Controlled Mass Media - Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.
7. Obsession with National Security - Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.
8. Religion and Government are Intertwined - Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed
to the government's policies or actions.
9. Corporate Power is Protected - The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.
10. Labor Power is Suppressed - Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.
11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts - Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts and letters is openly attacked.
12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment - Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.
13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption - Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.
14. Fraudulent Elections - Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

Source / Rense.com

And many thanks to an article by Thomas S. Harrington on Common Dreams for identifying the list from Rense.

Fluxed Up World

When Will YOU Acknowledge the Democratic Facade That is the USA?

2012-01-20T12:14:00.000-08:00

Aurelie Marie-Lisette Talate, the ageless face of the Chagossian people’s “sagrin” in exile, and mouthpiece of their collective experience and memory. Photo: Source.
The World War on Democracy
By John Pilger / January 19, 2012

Lisette Talate died the other day. I remember a wiry, fiercely intelligent woman who masked her grief with a determination that was a presence. She was the embodiment of people’s resistance to the war on democracy. I first glimpsed her in a 1950s Colonial Office film about the Chagos islanders, a tiny creole nation living midway between Africa and Asia in the Indian Ocean. The camera panned across thriving villages, a church, a school, a hospital, set in a phenomenon of natural beauty and peace. Lisette remembers the producer saying to her and her teenage friends, “Keep smiling girls!”

Sitting in her kitchen in Mauritius many years later, she said, “I didn’t have to be told to smile. I was a happy child, because my roots were deep in the islands, my paradise. My great-grandmother was born there; I made six children there. That’s why they couldn’t legally throw us out of our own homes; they had to terrify us into leaving or force us out. At first, they tried to starve us. The food ships stopped arriving [then] they spread rumours we would be bombed, then they turned on our dogs.”

In the early 1960s, the Labour government of Harold Wilson secretly agreed to a demand from Washington that the Chagos archipelago, a British colony, be “swept” and “sanitised” of its 2,500 inhabitants so that a military base could be built on the principal island, Diego Garcia. “They knew we were inseparable from our pets,” said Lizette, “When the American soldiers arrived to build the base, they backed their big trucks against the brick shed where we prepared the coconuts; hundreds of our dogs had been rounded up and imprisoned there. Then they gassed them through tubes from the trucks’ exhausts. You could hear them crying.”

Lisette and her family and hundreds of islanders were forced on to a rusting steamer bound for Mauritius, a distance of 2,500 miles. They were made to sleep in the hold on a cargo of fertiliser: bird shit. The weather was rough; everyone was ill; two women miscarried. Dumped on the docks at Port Louis, Lizette’s youngest children, Jollice, and Regis, died within a week of each other. “They died of sadness,” she said. “They had heard all the talk and seen the horror of what had happened to the dogs. They knew they were leaving their home forever. The doctor in Mauritius said he could not treat sadness.”

This act of mass kidnapping was carried out in high secrecy. In one official file, under the heading, “Maintaining the fiction”, the Foreign Office legal adviser exhorts his colleagues to cover their actions by “re-classifying” the population as “floating” and to “make up the rules as we go along”. Article 7 of the statute of the International Criminal Court says the “deportation or forcible transfer of population” is a crime against humanity. That Britain had committed such a crime -- in exchange for a $14 million discount off an American Polaris nuclear submarine -- was not on the agenda of a group of British “defence” correspondents flown to the Chagos by the Ministry of Defence when the US base was completed. “There is nothing in our files,” said a ministry official, “about inhabitants or an evacuation.”

Today, Diego Garcia is crucial to America’s and Britain’s war on democracy. The heaviest bombing of Iraq and Afghanistan was launched from its vast airstrips, beyond which the islanders’ abandoned cemetery and church stand like archaeological ruins. The terraced garden where Lisette laughed for the camera is now a fortress housing the “bunker-busting” bombs carried by bat-shaped B-2 aircraft to targets in two continents; an attack on Iran will start here. As if to complete the emblem of rampant, criminal power, the CIA added a Guantanamo-style prison for its “rendition” victims and called it Camp Justice.

What was done to Lisette’s paradise has an urgent and universal meaning, for it represents the violent, ruthless nature of a whole system behind its democratic façade, and the scale of our own indoctrination to its messianic assumptions, described by Harold Pinter as a “brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.” Longer and bloodier than any war since 1945, waged with demonic weapons and a gangsterism dressed as economic policy and sometimes known as globalisation, the war on democracy is unmentionable in western elite circles. As Pinter wrote, “it never happened even while it was happening”. Last July, American historian William Blum published his “updated summary of the record of US foreign policy”. Since the Second World War, the US has:

Attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, most of them democratically-elected.
Attempted to suppress a populist or national movement in 20 countries.
Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.
Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries.
Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.

In total, the United States has carried out one or more of these actions in 69 countries. In almost all cases, Britain has been a collaborator. The “enemy” changes in name – from communism to Islamism -- but mostly it is the rise of democracy independent of western power or a society occupying strategically useful territory, deemed expendable, like the Chagos Islands.

The sheer scale of suffering, let alone criminality, is little known in the west, despite the presence of the world’s most advanced communications, nominally freest journalism and most admired academy. That the most numerous victims of terrorism – western terrorism – are Muslims is unsayable, if it is known. That half a million Iraqi infants died in the 1990s as a result of the embargo imposed by Britain and America is of no interest. That extreme jihadism, which led to 9/11, was nurtured as a weapon of western policy (“Operation Cyclone”) is known to specialists but otherwise suppressed.

While popular culture in Britain and America immerses the Second World War in an ethical bath for the victors, the holocausts arising from Anglo-American dominance of resource-rich regions are consigned to oblivion. Under the Indonesian tyrant Suharto, anointed “our man” by Thatcher, more than a million people were slaughtered. Described by the CIA as “the worst mass murder of the second half of the 20th century”, the estimate does not include a third of the population of East Timor who were starved or murdered with western connivance, British fighter-bombers and machine guns.

These true stories are told in declassified files in the Public Record Office, yet represent an entire dimension of politics and the exercise of power excluded from public consideration. This has been achieved by a regime of un-coercive information control, from the evangelical mantra of consumer advertising to sound-bites on BBC news and now the ephemera of social media.

It is as if writers as watchdogs are extinct, or in thrall to a sociopathic zeitgeist, convinced they are too clever to be duped. Witness the stampede of sycophants eager to deify Christopher Hitchens, a war lover who longed to be allowed to justify the crimes of rapacious power. “For almost the first time in two centuries”, wrote Terry Eagleton, “there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life”. No Orwell warns that we do not need to live in a totalitarian society to be corrupted by totalitarianism. No Shelley speaks for the poor, no Blake proffers a vision, no Wilde reminds us that “disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue”. And grievously no Pinter rages at the war machine, as in American Football:

Hallelujah.
Praise the Lord for all good things ...
We blew their balls into shards of dust,
Into shards of fucking dust …

Into shards of fucking dust go all the lives blown there by Barack Obama, the Hopey Changey of western violence. Whenever one of Obama’s drones wipes out an entire family in a faraway tribal region of Pakistan, or Somalia, or Yemen, the American controllers in front of their computer-game screens type in “Bugsplat”. Obama likes drones and has joked about them with journalists. One of his first actions as president was to order a wave of Predator drone attacks on Pakistan that killed 74 people. He has since killed thousands, mostly civilians; drones fire Hellfire missiles that suck the air out of the lungs of children and leave body parts festooned across scrubland.

Remember the tear-stained headlines when Brand Obama was elected: “momentous, spine-tingling”: the Guardian. “The American future,” wrote Simon Schama, “is all vision, numinous, unformed, light-headed ...” The San Francisco Chronicle’s columnist saw a spiritual “lightworker [who can] usher in a new way of being on the planet”. Beyond the drivel, as the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg had predicted, a military coup was taking place in Washington, and Obama was their man. Having seduced the anti-war movement into virtual silence, he has given America’s corrupt military officer class unprecedented powers of state and engagement. These include the prospect of wars in Africa and opportunities for provocations against China, America’s largest creditor and new “enemy” in Asia. Under Obama, the old source of official paranoia Russia, has been encircled with ballistic missiles and the Russian opposition infiltrated. Military and CIA assassination teams have been assigned to 120 countries; long planned attacks on Syria and Iran beckon a world war. Israel, the exemplar of US violence and lawlessness by proxy, has just received its annual pocket money of $3bn together with Obama’s permission to steal more Palestinian land.

Obama’s most “historic” achievement is to bring the war on democracy home to America. On New Year’s Eve, he signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a law that grants the Pentagon the legal right to kidnap both foreigners and US citizens and indefinitely detain, interrogate and torture, or even kill them. They need only “associate” with those “belligerent” to the United States. There will be no protection of law, no trial, no legal representation. This is the first explicit legislation to abolish habeus corpus (the right to due process of law) and effectively repeal the Bill of Rights of 1789.

On 5 January, in an extraordinary speech at the Pentagon, Obama said the military would not only be ready to “secure territory and populations” overseas but to fight in the “homeland” and provide “support to the civil authorities”. In other words, US troops will be deployed on the streets of American cities when the inevitable civil unrest takes hold.

America is now a land of epidemic poverty and barbaric prisons: the consequence of a “market” extremism which, under Obama, has prompted the transfer of $14 trillion in public money to criminal enterprises in Wall Street. The victims are mostly young jobless, homeless, incarcerated African-Americans, betrayed by the first black president. The historic corollary of a perpetual war state, this is not fascism, not yet, but neither is it democracy in any recognisable form, regardless of the placebo politics that will consume the news until November. The presidential campaign, says the Washington Post, will “feature a clash of philosophies rooted in distinctly different views of the economy”. This is patently false. The circumscribed task of journalism on both sides of the Atlantic is to create the pretence of political choice where there is none.

The same shadow is across Britain and much of Europe where social democracy, an article of faith two generations ago, has fallen to the central bank dictators. In David Cameron’s “big society”, the theft of 84bn pounds in jobs and services even exceeds the amount of tax “legally” avoid by piratical corporations. Blame rests not with the far right, but a cowardly liberal political culture that has allowed this to happen, which, wrote Hywel Williams in the wake of the attacks on 9/11, “can itself be a form of self righteous fanaticism”. Tony Blair is one such fanatic. In its managerial indifference to the freedoms that it claims to hold dear, bourgeois Blairite Britain has created a surveillance state with 3,000 new criminal offences and laws: more than for the whole of the previous century. The police clearly believe they have an impunity to kill. At the demand of the CIA, cases like that of Binyam Mohamed, an innocent British resident tortured and then held for five years in Guantanamo Bay, will be dealt with in secret courts in Britain “in order to protect the intelligence agencies” – the torturers.

This invisible state allowed the Blair government to fight the Chagos islanders as they rose from their despair in exile and demanded justice in the streets of Port Louis and London. “Only when you take direct action, face to face, even break laws, are you ever noticed,” said Lisette. “And the smaller you are, the greater your example to others.” Such an eloquent answer to those who still ask, “What can I do?”

I last saw Lisette’s tiny figure standing in driving rain alongside her comrades outside the Houses of Parliament. What struck me was the enduring courage of their resistance. It is this refusal to give up that rotten power fears, above all, knowing it is the seed beneath the snow.

Source / Z-Net

Fluxed Up World

Chris Hedges on Thwarting Threats to the Corporate State, AKA Facism Personified

2012-01-18T17:02:00.000-08:00

Guards search detainees at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility. Photo: Zuma Press.
Why I’m Suing Barack Obama
By Chris Hedges / January 16, 2012

Attorneys Carl J. Mayer and Bruce I. Afran filed a complaint Friday in the Southern U.S. District Court in New York City on my behalf as a plaintiff against Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to challenge the legality of the Authorization for Use of Military Force as embedded in the latest version of the National Defense Authorization Act, signed by the president Dec. 31.

The act authorizes the military in Title X, Subtitle D, entitled “Counter-Terrorism,” for the first time in more than 200 years, to carry out domestic policing. With this bill, which will take effect March 3, the military can indefinitely detain without trial any U.S. citizen deemed to be a terrorist or an accessory to terrorism. And suspects can be shipped by the military to our offshore penal colony in Guantanamo Bay and kept there until “the end of hostilities.” It is a catastrophic blow to civil liberties.

I spent many years in countries where the military had the power to arrest and detain citizens without charge. I have been in some of these jails. I have friends and colleagues who have “disappeared” into military gulags. I know the consequences of granting sweeping and unrestricted policing power to the armed forces of any nation. And while my battle may be quixotic, it is one that has to be fought if we are to have any hope of pulling this country back from corporate fascism.

Section 1031 of the bill defines a “covered person”—one subject to detention—as “a person who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.”

The bill, however, does not define the terms “substantially supported,” “directly supported” or “associated forces.”

I met regularly with leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza. I used to visit Palestine Liberation Organization leaders, including Yasser Arafat and Abu Jihad, in Tunis when they were branded international terrorists. I have spent time with the Revolutionary Guard in Iran and was in northern Iraq and southeastern Turkey with fighters from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. All these entities were or are labeled as terrorist organizations by the U.S. government. What would this bill have meant if it had been in place when I and other Americans traveled in the 1980s with armed units of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua or the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front guerrillas in El Salvador? What would it have meant for those of us who were with the southern insurgents during the civil war in Yemen or the rebels in the southern Sudan? I have had dinner more times than I can count with people whom this country brands as terrorists. But that does not make me one.

Once a group is deemed to be a terrorist organization, whether it is a Palestinian charity or an element of the Uighur independence movement, the military can under this bill pick up a U.S. citizen who supported charities associated with the group or unwittingly sent money or medical supplies to front groups. We have already seen the persecution and closure of Islamic charity organizations in the United States that supported the Palestinians. Now the members of these organizations can be treated like card-carrying “terrorists” and sent to Guantanamo.

But I suspect the real purpose of this bill is to thwart internal, domestic movements that threaten the corporate state. The definition of a terrorist is already so amorphous under the Patriot Act that there are probably a few million Americans who qualify to be investigated if not locked up. Consider the arcane criteria that can make you a suspect in our new military-corporate state. The Department of Justice considers you worth investigating if you are missing a few fingers, if you have weatherproof ammunition, if you own guns or if you have hoarded more than seven days of food in your house. Adding a few of the obstructionist tactics of the Occupy movement to this list would be a seamless process. On the whim of the military, a suspected “terrorist” who also happens to be a U.S. citizen can suffer extraordinary rendition—being kidnapped and then left to rot in one of our black sites “until the end of hostilities.” Since this is an endless war that will be a very long stay.

This demented “war on terror” is as undefined and vague as such a conflict is in any totalitarian state. Dissent is increasingly equated in this country with treason. Enemies supposedly lurk in every organization that does not chant the patriotic mantras provided to it by the state. And this bill feeds a mounting state paranoia. It expands our permanent war to every spot on the globe. It erases fundamental constitutional liberties. It means we can no longer use the word “democracy” to describe our political system.

The supine and gutless Democratic Party, which would have feigned outrage if George W. Bush had put this into law, appears willing, once again, to grant Obama a pass. But I won’t. What he has done is unforgivable, unconstitutional and exceedingly dangerous. The threat and reach of al-Qaida—which I spent a year covering for The New York Times in Europe and the Middle East—are marginal, despite the attacks of 9/11. The terrorist group poses no existential threat to the nation. It has been so disrupted and broken that it can barely function. Osama bin Laden was gunned down by commandos and his body dumped into the sea. Even the Pentagon says the organization is crippled. So why, a decade after the start of the so-called war on terror, do these draconian measures need to be implemented? Why do U.S. citizens now need to be specifically singled out for military detention and denial of due process when under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force the president can apparently find the legal cover to serve as judge, jury and executioner to assassinate U.S. citizens, as he did in the killing of the cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen? Why is this bill necessary when the government routinely ignores our Fifth Amendment rights—“No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law”—as well as our First Amendment right of free speech? How much more power do they need to fight “terrorism”?

Fear is the psychological weapon of choice for totalitarian systems of power. Make the people afraid. Get them to surrender their rights in the name of national security. And then finish off the few who aren’t afraid enough. If this law is not revoked we will be no different from any sordid military dictatorship. Its implementation will be a huge leap forward for the corporate oligarchs who plan to continue to plunder the nation and use state and military security to cow the population into submission.

The oddest part of this legislation is that the FBI, the CIA, the director of national intelligence, the Pentagon and the attorney general didn’t support it. FBI Director Robert Mueller said he feared the bill would actually impede the bureau’s ability to investigate terrorism because it would be harder to win cooperation from suspects held by the military. “The possibility looms that we will lose opportunities to obtain cooperation from the persons in the past that we’ve been fairly successful in gaining,” he told Congress.

But it passed anyway. And I suspect it passed because the corporations, seeing the unrest in the streets, knowing that things are about to get much worse, worrying that the Occupy movement will expand, do not trust the police to protect them. They want to be able to call in the Army. And now they can.

SEE:

The text of Hedges' legal complaint

NDAA official text

Source / Truthout

Fluxed Up World

The Bright Side: Defeating the Forces of the 1%

2012-01-15T17:09:00.000-08:00

Photo: A New Haven rally. Photo: Joelle Fishman/PW.
Lessons from the grassroots for 2012
By Joelle Fishman / January 13 2012

Last fall's municipal elections in New Haven, Connecticut made history. The implications, if heeded, bode well for 2012.

When the new 30-member Board of Aldermen was sworn into office on New Year's Day at the Hill Career High School, the auditorium was packed. This was no ordinary inauguration. It marked the largest number of new elected officials ever here, and the largest number of union members and pro-union community residents ever to take office at the same time. Their composition, including many African American, Latino, women and youth is the most representative of the city's population.

New Haven's new governing body is the product of a reawakened activism throughout the city. Union workers at Yale University, the dominant employer in the city, led the effort neighborhood by neighborhood, ward by ward, door knocking since last spring to find out what was on people's minds and lay the groundwork for 15 primary challenges to incumbent aldermen. When 14 won it was a stunning victory. In the general election a total of 21 aldermen elected are a part of the labor-community movement.

Anger and dissatisfaction was widespred at the lack of investment in neighborhoods compared to downtown, the lack of jobs for community residents created by big new development, and the shocking number of youth killed in street violence.

At first people shrugged off the home visits saying that nothing will ever change. But as the summer wore on and attitudes shifted, more and more residents began joining the team of door knockers in their wards. The idea became contagious that participation and unity can win positive change. Across the city over 400 people, many for the first time, and many youth, made the commitment to knock on the doors of their neighbors and make the case for why they should come out and vote.

There was electricity in the air at an overflow rally before primary election day. No one could remember a campaign rally with such a diverse turnout truly reflecting every section and population of the city including the youth. This composition was duplicated on a larger scale in December at a community gathering held to develop the grassroots agenda that will guide the priorities of these aldermen going forward.

As the bigger challenge of governing unfolds, leadership-building at the ward and neighborhood level to establish permanent organization that can mobilize year round will be the test.

It was the relationships built during door knocking that negated an all-out effort aided by the media to discredit the movement by claiming that union members holding public office would only represent their union's agenda and not the agenda of the neighborhoods. Residents could see for themselves that the agenda is one and the same. The working class values of these candidates were clear. The fact that these candidates had learned their leadership skills within the union became a positive factor. The anti-union split and divide tactic fell flat.

This leadership is already being tested with attempts to create racial divisions by the old political structure. They are going onto the offensive to support the priorities set out by the community. At a jammed crowd of students and parents protesting at the Board of Education and a big community meeting demanding that the Q House, a closed youth center, be re-opened, the newly elected aldermen provided direction and a unity message.

As the challenge to address extreme poverty in the midst of Yale's great wealth unfolds in New Haven, the lessons learned in this election will be critical for the 2012 elections in Connecticut and beyond.

The presidential campaign and the open U.S. Senate seat in Connecticut provide the bigger context. The right of workers to a voice at work with union representation, the role of government for the common good, the equal rights of racially oppressed people and women, the chance for youth to earn, learn and live are all at stake in 2012.

It will take the leadership of the labor movement, the mobilization of the community, and tireless one-on-one conversations about whose interests each candidate represents, in every election district across this country, to win this epic election battle on the side of working people.

Source / People's World

Fluxed Up World

The Rapid Descent Into Police State Facism

2012-01-14T21:45:00.000-08:00

10 Reasons the US is No Longer the Land of the Free
By Jonathan Turley / January 14, 2012

Every year, the State Department issues reports on individual rights in other countries, monitoring the passage of restrictive laws and regulations around the world. Iran, for example, has been criticized for denying fair public trials and limiting privacy, while Russia has been taken to task for undermining due process. Other countries have been condemned for the use of secret evidence and torture.

Even as we pass judgment on countries we consider unfree, Americans remain confident that any definition of a free nation must include their own — the land of free. Yet, the laws and practices of the land should shake that confidence. In the decade since Sept. 11, 2001, this country has comprehensively reduced civil liberties in the name of an expanded security state. The most recent example of this was the National Defense Authorization Act, signed Dec. 31, which allows for the indefinite detention of citizens. At what point does the reduction of individual rights in our country change how we define ourselves?

While each new national security power Washington has embraced was controversial when enacted, they are often discussed in isolation. But they don’t operate in isolation. They form a mosaic of powers under which our country could be considered, at least in part, authoritarian. Americans often proclaim our nation as a symbol of freedom to the world while dismissing nations such as Cuba and China as categorically unfree. Yet, objectively, we may be only half right. Those countries do lack basic individual rights such as due process, placing them outside any reasonable definition of “free,” but the United States now has much more in common with such regimes than anyone may like to admit.

These countries also have constitutions that purport to guarantee freedoms and rights. But their governments have broad discretion in denying those rights and few real avenues for challenges by citizens — precisely the problem with the new laws in this country.

The list of powers acquired by the U.S. government since 9/11 puts us in rather troubling company.

Assassination of U.S. citizens

President Obama has claimed, as President George W. Bush did before him, the right to order the killing of any citizen considered a terrorist or an abettor of terrorism. Last year, he approved the killing of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaqi and another citizen under this claimed inherent authority. Last month, administration officials affirmed that power, stating that the president can order the assassination of any citizen whom he considers allied with terrorists. (Nations such as Nigeria, Iran and Syria have been routinely criticized for extrajudicial killings of enemies of the state.)

Indefinite detention

Under the law signed last month, terrorism suspects are to be held by the military; the president also has the authority to indefinitely detain citizens accused of terrorism. While the administration claims that this provision only codified existing law, experts widely contest this view, and the administration has opposed efforts to challenge such authority in federal courts. The government continues to claim the right to strip citizens of legal protections based on its sole discretion. (China recently codified a more limited detention law for its citizens, while countries such as Cambodia have been singled out by the United States for “prolonged detention.”)

Arbitrary justice

The president now decides whether a person will receive a trial in the federal courts or in a military tribunal, a system that has been ridiculed around the world for lacking basic due process protections. Bush claimed this authority in 2001, and Obama has continued the practice. (Egypt and China have been denounced for maintaining separate military justice systems for selected defendants, including civilians.)

Warrantless searches

The president may now order warrantless surveillance, including a new capability to force companies and organizations to turn over information on citizens’ finances, communications and associations. Bush acquired this sweeping power under the Patriot Act in 2001, and in 2011, Obama extended the power, including searches of everything from business documents to library records. The government can use “national security letters” to demand, without probable cause, that organizations turn over information on citizens — and order them not to reveal the disclosure to the affected party. (Saudi Arabia and Pakistan operate under laws that allow the government to engage in widespread discretionary surveillance.)

Secret evidence

The government now routinely uses secret evidence to detain individuals and employs secret evidence in federal and military courts. It also forces the dismissal of cases against the United States by simply filing declarations that the cases would make the government reveal classified information that would harm national security — a claim made in a variety of privacy lawsuits and largely accepted by federal judges without question. Even legal opinions, cited as the basis for the government’s actions under the Bush and Obama administrations, have been classified. This allows the government to claim secret legal arguments to support secret proceedings using secret evidence. In addition, some cases never make it to court at all. The federal courts routinely deny constitutional challenges to policies and programs under a narrow definition of standing to bring a case.

War crimes

The world clamored for prosecutions of those responsible for waterboarding terrorism suspects during the Bush administration, but the Obama administration said in 2009 that it would not allow CIA employees to be investigated or prosecuted for such actions. This gutted not just treaty obligations but the Nuremberg principles of international law. When courts in countries such as Spain moved to investigate Bush officials for war crimes, the Obama administration reportedly urged foreign officials not to allow such cases to proceed, despite the fact that the United States has long claimed the same authority with regard to alleged war criminals in other countries. (Various nations have resisted investigations of officials accused of war crimes and torture. Some, such as Serbia and Chile, eventually relented to comply with international law; countries that have denied independent investigations include Iran, Syria and China.)

Secret court

The government has increased its use of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has expanded its secret warrants to include individuals deemed to be aiding or abetting hostile foreign governments or organizations. In 2011, Obama renewed these powers, including allowing secret searches of individuals who are not part of an identifiable terrorist group. The administration has asserted the right to ignore congressional limits on such surveillance. (Pakistan places national security surveillance under the unchecked powers of the military or intelligence services.)

Immunity from judicial review

Like the Bush administration, the Obama administration has successfully pushed for immunity for companies that assist in warrantless surveillance of citizens, blocking the ability of citizens to challenge the violation of privacy. (Similarly, China has maintained sweeping immunity claims both inside and outside the country and routinely blocks lawsuits against private companies.)

Continual monitoring of citizens

The Obama administration has successfully defended its claim that it can use GPS devices to monitor every move of targeted citizens without securing any court order or review. (Saudi Arabia has installed massive public surveillance systems, while Cuba is notorious for active monitoring of selected citizens.)

Extraordinary renditions

The government now has the ability to transfer both citizens and noncitizens to another country under a system known as extraordinary rendition, which has been denounced as using other countries, such as Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan, to torture suspects. The Obama administration says it is not continuing the abuses of this practice under Bush, but it insists on the unfettered right to order such transfers — including the possible transfer of U.S. citizens.

These new laws have come with an infusion of money into an expanded security system on the state and federal levels, including more public surveillance cameras, tens of thousands of security personnel and a massive expansion of a terrorist-chasing bureaucracy.

Some politicians shrug and say these increased powers are merely a response to the times we live in. Thus, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) could declare in an interview last spring without objection that “free speech is a great idea, but we’re in a war.” Of course, terrorism will never “surrender” and end this particular “war.”

Other politicians rationalize that, while such powers may exist, it really comes down to how they are used. This is a common response by liberals who cannot bring themselves to denounce Obama as they did Bush. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), for instance, has insisted that Congress is not making any decision on indefinite detention: “That is a decision which we leave where it belongs — in the executive branch.”

And in a signing statement with the defense authorization bill, Obama said he does not intend to use the latest power to indefinitely imprison citizens. Yet, he still accepted the power as a sort of regretful autocrat.

An authoritarian nation is defined not just by the use of authoritarian powers, but by the ability to use them. If a president can take away your freedom or your life on his own authority, all rights become little more than a discretionary grant subject to executive will.

The framers lived under autocratic rule and understood this danger better than we do. James Madison famously warned that we needed a system that did not depend on the good intentions or motivations of our rulers: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”

Benjamin Franklin was more direct. In 1787, a Mrs. Powel confronted Franklin after the signing of the Constitution and asked, “Well, Doctor, what have we got — a republic or a monarchy?” His response was a bit chilling: “A republic, Madam, if you can keep it.”

Since 9/11, we have created the very government the framers feared: a government with sweeping and largely unchecked powers resting on the hope that they will be used wisely.

The indefinite-detention provision in the defense authorization bill seemed to many civil libertarians like a betrayal by Obama. While the president had promised to veto the law over that provision, Levin, a sponsor of the bill, disclosed on the Senate floor that it was in fact the White House that approved the removal of any exception for citizens from indefinite detention.

Dishonesty from politicians is nothing new for Americans. The real question is whether we are lying to ourselves when we call this country the land of the free.

[Jonathan Turley is a professor of law at George Washington University.]

Source / Washington Post

Fluxed Up World

Food Sovereignty: Taking Back Our Lives

2012-01-10T16:50:00.000-08:00

Here's a Way to Eliminate the Regulators and Lawyers, and Build Community At the Same Time: Organize and Declare "Food Sovereignty," Like Sedgwick, Maine
By David E. Gumpert / March 7, 2011

Maybe the citizens of tiny Sedgwick on the Maine coast were listening to the calls of Dave Milano, Ken Conrad, and others for more trust and community, and less rigid one-size-fits-all food regulation.

On Saturday morning, Sedgwick became likely the first locale in the country to pass a "Food Sovereignty" law. It's the proposed ordinance I first described last fall, when I introduced the "Five Musketeers", a group of farmers and consumers intent on pushing back against overly aggressive state food regulators. The regulators were interfering with farmers who, for example, took chickens to a neighbor for slaughtering, or who sold raw milk directly to consumers.

The proposed ordinance was one of 78 being considered at the Sedgwick town meeting, that New England institution that has stood the test of time, allowing all of a town's citizens to vote yea or nay on proposals to spend their tax money and, in this case, enact potentially far-reaching laws with national implications. They've been holding these meetings in the Sedgwick town hall (pictured above) since 1794. At Friday's meeting, about 120 citizens raised their hands in unanimous approval of the ordinance.

Citing America's Declaration of Independence and the Maine Constitution, the ordinance proposed that "Sedgwick citizens possess the right to produce, process, sell, purchase, and consume local foods of their choosing." These would include raw milk and other dairy products and locally slaughtered meats, among other items.

This isn't just a declaration of preference. The proposed warrant added, "It shall be unlawful for any law or regulation adopted by the state or federal government to interfere with the rights recognized by this Ordinance." In other words, no state licensing requirements prohibiting certain farms from selling dairy products or producing their own chickens for sale to other citizens in the town.

What about potential legal liability and state or federal inspections? It's all up to the seller and buyer to negotiate. "Patrons purchasing food for home consumption may enter into private agreements with those producers or processors of local foods to waive any liability for the consumption of that food. Producers or processors of local foods shall be exempt from licensure and inspection requirements for that food as long as those agreements are in effect." Imagine that--buyer and seller can agree to cut out the lawyers. That's almost un-American, isn't it?

This from a press release put out after the vote by supporters:

"Local farmer Bob St.Peter noted the importance of this ordinance for beginning farmers and cottage producers. 'This ordinance creates favorable conditions for beginning farmers and cottage-scale food processors to try out new products, and to make the most of each season's bounty,' said St.Peter. 'My family is already working on some ideas we can do from home to help pay the bills and get our farm going.'

"Mia Strong, Sedgwick resident and local farm patron, was overwhelmed by the support of her town. 'Tears of joy welled in my eyes as my town voted to adopt this ordinance,' said Strong. 'I am so proud of my community. They made a stand for local food and our fundamental rights as citizens to choose that food.'"

The ordinance comes up for a vote in three other Maine towns upcoming--Penobscott, Brooksville, and Blue Hill.

(Thanks to Deborah Evans, a Sedgwick area farmer, for providing information for this post, and the photo above.)

Source / The Complete Patient

Fluxed Up World

Moving Through the End of Growth

2012-01-08T13:28:00.000-08:00

And Possibly the Collapse of the US
By Richard D. Jehn / January 9, 2012

Although my headline implies catastrophe, and I firmly believe that there are now factors beyond our control that strongly suggest we are in for an unprecedented hard time, this article is actually one of hope and a call to action for those who are inclined. First I will discuss briefly those things I think are conspiring to bring on the collapse of US society. I will conclude the article with things that I believe every one of us should become involved in to make the end of growth easier and the transition to a steady-state economy less painful.

It is now five years since Richard Heinberg published The Party's Over (2nd edition), a chronicle of peak oil and why there are few strategies that will help us come up with the shortage in energy as oil production truly begins to fall. He just published a more encompassing undertaking titled The End of Growth that provides some concrete evidence for things I have begun saying in the past two years.

I believe there are four prime factors which may bring us to economic and social collapse: (1) peak oil (which has just begun to have its effects; gasoline prices will never fall again); (2) climate change (which I now suspect cannot be reversed even if every nation world-wide adopted the equivalent of the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change tomorrow); (3) the financial crisis (which is far from over; signs are that the US is even closer to bankruptcy than previously believed); and (4) the crisis of industrial agriculture (which is slowly killing us off, despite its best intentions). There are related factors which are of equal importance that I won't discuss, such as 'peak water' and 'peak food' (see The End of Growth).

I am not an expert on petroleum extraction or any of its related activities. Nonetheless, it is apparent from even casual reading that we have passed the point known as peak oil (where world oil production begins to decline), probably about 5 years ago. Alternative meaningful sources of energy have not seen the level of development that will be necessary to make a smooth transition from oil to something else (although China is pouring significant resources into the development of renewable energy). No matter what we do in the next 20 years, peak oil will have a profound impact on everything about our present-day lives. Remember that a typical grocery store will empty within three days with no truck deliveries, 80% of our electricity is supplied by generation plants that use some form of hydrocarbons, the source of all plastic goods is oil, and a myriad of other things too numerous to list.

Global warming is now a fait accompli in the eyes of most climate scientists world-wide. The polar ice caps are melting, California, Texas, Arizona and New Mexico are burning, storms are becoming more intense with each passing season, and we have really just begun to see the first impacts of this new climate regime. I believe that each passing season we will witness more intense storms and greater climate chaos across the globe. I also believe that there is exactly one solution available to us: adaptation. We are no longer capable of reversing the effects of what has begun in earnest, and the impact, particularly on agriculture, will be devastating.

The financial crisis of 2008 was precipitated by a corrupt capitalist system in the US driven by greed, but it was dramatically accelerated by a largely unsupervised financial sector's activities that emulated gambling. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission report provides a large number of reasons for what happened, but what they fail to do adequately is summarize the structural issues that remain and will likely lead to the financial collapse that I believe is imminent. There are now numerous publications (see Reinventing Collapse, The Myth of Endless Growth: Exposing Capitalism's Insustainability, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed) suggesting that capitalism is really at fault.

Do you remember the advertising from the 1950s where some fellow with a deep, resonant voice reminds us that we will achieve "Better Living Through Chemistry"? Industrial agriculture is one of the results of that perspective, as are our toxic bodies and surroundings, numerous poisons used in war, and an endless reliance on unhealthy, unnatural solutions to our problems. Industrial agriculture is frequently touted as the solution to the imminent food shortages world-wide, but in Diet for a Hot Planet, Anna Lappé argues that industrial agriculture may not be necessary to feed a hungry world. Regardless, the use of poisonous substances on our food supply to control pests, weeds, and diseases is counterintuitive at best, sheer stupidity at worst. In more recent years, growth hormones and antibiotics used in raising our meat have yielded horrible results - antibiotic-resistant bacteria, MRSA in hospitals, and the proliferation of truly dangerous diseases that require ever-stronger drugs to combat.

All these negatives do not have to give us a catastrophic outcome; however, we really cannot waste time and we must personally start with concrete positive actions. What I believe has happened is that we have completely disconnected from a large number of the things that actually matter, such as ensuring we have a healthy food supply, expressing compassion for each other, cooperating to achieve common goals.

The first obvious step we all should be taking is to grow our own gardens including preserving the food produced to last the Winter. We should all make every effort to reject industrial agriculture completely, refusing to purchase processed foods, rejecting fruits and vegetables that are treated with chemical herbicides and pesticides (that are mostly based on chemicals left over from previous miltary research efforts into nasty things like nerve gas) and fertilizers that are based on petroleum products, and also rejecting meats that contain antibiotics and other drug or chemical treatments. Failing to do so could have quite negative impacts personally - cancer or other diseases such as asthma related to poisons in our immediate environment, or less obvious illnesses such as chronic allergies.

The second clear step is to reduce energy usage to the greatest extent possible. This is really not a trivial proposition, since it entails eliminating car travel from your life if you mean it. There is no realistic way that North America is going to keep up its oil/car habit at present levels for very long. The likelihood is that pricing will drive some to stop driving, but for others, it will take more to change their priorities. If you want to be realistic about what is coming, the time to do it is now - get cars out of your life to the extent possible.

Other energy conservation steps would be to install solar panels, or a wind or water power generator for your home, eliminating the purchase of plastics, and taking daily concrete steps to eliminate your reliance on hydrocarbons.

Another necessary step is to recycle everything. In today's world, there is not much excuse for failing to recycle as much as humanly possible, and laziness does not qualify as a good reason. Especially non-renewable natural resources such as mined metals and minerals, and hydrocarbons should be maximally recycled.

Finally, get involved in the Transition movement. Taken from the Transition Whatcom Web site, "The goal of [...] all Transition Initiatives is to create a long term Energy Descent Action Pathway, a blueprint - by the community, for the community - of how to significantly reduce energy use and yet provide for our basic needs in times of energy scarcity." There are other similar organizations that are moving toward a different world, for example Business Alliance for Local Living Economies and all its myriad local organization members such as Bellingham's Sustainable Connections. Get involved as it is very likely that you have a local organization that is doing remarkably good works to turn this planet around.

There are myriad examples of remarkable things happening around the country and around the world. For example, a New England town recently enacted 'food sovereignty' legislation that rejects federal and state overview of the production and distribution of local food. In Diet for a Hot Planet, Anna Lappé relates cases of replacing industrial agriculture with sustainable organic farming with comparable yields and much higher quality produce.

We must reject the status quo capitalist approach and build a new society. Welcome to the New World.

References

Diamond, Jared. 2005, 2011. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Penguin.
Flannery, Tim. 2010. Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet. Atlantic Monthly Press.
Heinberg, Richard. 2005. The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, 2nd edition. New Society Publishers.
_______. 2011. The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality. New Society Publishers.
Lappé, Anna. 2010. Diet for a Hot Planet: The climate crisis at the end of your fork and what you can do about it. Bloomsbury.
Orlov, Dmitry. 2008. Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects. New Society Publishers.
Strauss, William. 2010. The Myth of Endless Growth: Exposing Capitalism's Insustainability. Lulu Press.

Fluxed Up World

A Thousand Words ....

2012-01-05T21:55:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Kerry Johnson and Demand Progress / Fluxed Up World

William Blum: Leaving Iraq with Dishonor

2012-01-03T20:49:00.000-08:00

Chris Floyd, The Moscow Times (June 2, 2006): Many observers have compared the methodical murder of 24 innocent civilians by U.S. Marines in the Iraqi town of Haditha (now confirmed by Pentagon and Congressional sources) to the infamous My Lai massacre in Vietnam, when American troops slaughtered hundreds of civilians in a bloody rampage. But this is a false equation, one that gravely distorts the overall reality of the Coalition effort in Iraq. Read more.
The Anti-Empire Report: Iraq. Began with big lies. Ending with big lies. Never forget.
By William Blum / January 3, 2012

"Most people don't understand what they have been part of here," said Command Sgt. Major Ron Kelley as he and other American troops prepared to leave Iraq in mid-December. "We have done a great thing as a nation. We freed a people and gave their country back to them."

"It is pretty exciting," said another young American soldier in Iraq. "We are going down in the history books, you might say." (Washington Post, December 18, 2011)

Ah yes, the history books, the multi-volume leather-bound set of "The Greatest Destructions of One Country by Another." The newest volume can relate, with numerous graphic photos, how the modern, educated, advanced nation of Iraq was reduced to a quasi failed state; how the Americans, beginning in 1991, bombed for 12 years, with one dubious excuse or another; then invaded, then occupied, overthrew the government, tortured without inhibition, killed wantonly, ... how the people of that unhappy land lost everything — their homes, their schools, their electricity, their clean water, their environment, their neighborhoods, their mosques, their archaeology, their jobs, their careers, their professionals, their state-run enterprises, their physical health, their mental health, their health care, their welfare state, their women's rights, their religious tolerance, their safety, their security, their children, their parents, their past, their present, their future, their lives ... More than half the population either dead, wounded, traumatized, in prison, internally displaced, or in foreign exile ... The air, soil, water, blood, and genes drenched with depleted uranium ... the most awful birth defects ... unexploded cluster bombs lying anywhere in wait for children to pick them up ... a river of blood running alongside the Euphrates and Tigris ... through a country that may never be put back together again.

"It is a common refrain among war-weary Iraqis that things were better before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003," reported the Washington Post on May 5, 2007.

No matter ... drum roll, please ... Stand tall American GI hero! And don't even think of ever apologizing or paying any reparations. Iraq is forced by Washington to continue paying reparations to Kuwait for Iraq's invasion in 1990 (an invasion instigated in no small measure by the United States). And — deep breath here! — Vietnam has been compensating the United States. Since 1997 Hanoi has been paying off about $145 million in debts left by the defeated South Vietnamese government for American food and infrastructure aid. Thus, Hanoi is reimbursing the United States for part of the cost of the war waged against it. (William Blum, Rogue State, p.304) How much will the United States pay the people of Iraq?

On December 14, at the Fort Bragg, North Carolina military base, Barack Obama stood before an audience of soldiers to speak about the Iraq war. It was a moment in which the president of the United States found it within his heart and soul — as well as within his oft-praised (supposed) intellect — to proclaim:

This is an extraordinary achievement, nearly nine years in the making. And today, we remember everything that you did to make it possible. ... Years from now, your legacy will endure. In the names of your fallen comrades etched on headstones at Arlington, and the quiet memorials across our country. In the whispered words of admiration as you march in parades, and in the freedom of our children and grandchildren. ... So God bless you all, God bless your families, and God bless the United States of America. ... You have earned your place in history because you sacrificed so much for people you have never met.

Does Mr. Obama, the Peace Laureate, believe the words that come out of his mouth?

Barack H. Obama believes only in being the President of the United States. It is the only strong belief the man holds.

Items of interest from a journal I've kept for 40 years, part VI

If the US really believed in 2002-3 that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction why did they send in more than 100,000 troops, who were certain to be annihilated?
In a letter released August 17, 2006, 21 former generals and high ranking national security officials called on President George W. Bush to reverse course and embrace a new area of negotiation with Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. The group told reporters Bush's "hard line" policies had undermined national security and made America less safe.
Throughout most of the 20th century, the Catholic Church in Latin America taught its flocks of the poor that there was no need to do battle with the ruling elite because the poor would get their just rewards in the afterlife.
The US overthrew the Sandinistas in Nicaragua because the Sandinistas "intended to create a country where there was only a colony before." — Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan writer
"[George W.] Bush said last week that part of the purpose of the Indonesia trip 'is to make sure that the people who are suspicious of our country understand our motives are pure'." (Washington Post, October 22, 2003)
"Wars may be aberrant experiences in the lives of most human individuals, but some nations are serial aggressors. American society is unique in having been formed almost wholly by processes of aggression against external and internal Others." — The Black Commentator, June 8, 2006
President Obama should accompany the military people when they inform parents that their child has died in the latest of America's never-ending wars. And maybe ask George W. to come along as well.
During the Vietnam War some University of Michigan students created a brouhaha when they threatened to napalm a puppy dog on the steps of a campus building. The uproar of indignation at their cruelty was heard nationwide. Of course, when the time came they didn't do it, having successfully made the point that people cared more about napalming a dog than they did about napalming people.
"It's a lie and an illusion that we have an inefficient government. This government is only inefficient if you think its job is, as stated in the Constitution, 'to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.' These objectives are beyond our government's talents only because they are beyond its intentions." — Michael Ventura
"Get some new lawyers" - US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook when he told her he was informed that the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 (which Albright championed) was illegal under international law.
The two countries of the world, along with the United States, which have the greatest national obsession with baseball are two of the main targets of US foreign policy: Venezuela and Cuba.
The Cuban Five case: This is the first case in American history of alleged spying and espionage without a single page from a secret document. The government never presented any evidence of a stolen official document or any attempt to steal an official document. This is the first spy case without secrets from the government. (Read more)
"If a bomb is deliberately dropped on a house or a vehicle on the grounds that a 'suspected terrorist' is inside, the resulting deaths of women and children may not be intentional. But neither are they accidental. The proper description is 'inevitable'. So if an action will inevitably kill innocent people, it is as immoral as a deliberate attack on civilians." — Howard Zinn
"The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously Saturday to impose limited sanctions on North Korea for its recent missile tests, and demanded that the reclusive communist nation suspend its ballistic missile program." (Associated Press, July 15, 2006) ... Internet commentator: "Test some missiles that land harmlessly in the ocean? Unanimous condemnation. Fire some missiles at targets on land, kill hundreds of people, and destroy hundreds of civilian targets including power plants, airports, roads, bridges, TV stations, etc., all in violation of the Geneva Convention? Hey, no problem."
For some nine years, American B-52 bombers relentlessly dropped tons of ordnance on a southeast Asian country (Vietnam) that still cultivated rice fields using draft animals.
"The messianism of American foreign policy is a remarkable thing. When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice speaks it seems like Khrushchev reporting to the party congress: 'The whole world is marching triumphantly toward democracy but some rogue states prefer to stay aside from that road, etc. etc'." — Natalia Narochnitskaya, vice chairman of the international affairs committee in the State Duma, the lower house of Russia's parliament. (Washington Post, April 3, 2006)
Washington ... Propagandistan
The bulldozer, driven by an Israeli army soldier on assignment to demolish a home, rolled over Rachel Corrie, who was 23 years old. She had taken a nonviolent position for human rights; she lost her life as a result. But she was rarely praised in the same US media outlets that had gone into raptures over the image of a solitary unarmed man standing in front of Chinese tanks at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre. — Norman Solomon
American sovereignty hasn't faced a legitimate foreign threat to its existence since the British in 1812.
There are two major patterns in foreign policy: the rule of force or the rule of law. On February 8, 1819 the US decided, after a very long debate in the House, to reject the rule of law in foreign policy. The vote was 100 to 70 against requiring the Congress to approve illegal invasions of other countries or peoples. This pertained to the "Seminole War", actually the invasion of Florida. Since then every president has had the right to "defend America", code words for the use of force against whomever he chooses. — Kelly Gelgering

Source / Anti-Empire Report

Fluxed Up World

Our Current Economic Situation Is a Choice !!! And We Can Change the Choice If We Want

2012-01-01T14:42:00.000-08:00

How We Got Here With the Economy and How to Get Out
By Robert Freeman / January 1, 2012

It’s easy to get fixated with small-bore issues on the economy, even if they don’t seem so small-bore at the time. Stimulus packages. Bailouts. Debt ceilings. Deficit commissions. Payroll tax-cut extensions. They seem like life and death issues while they’re being fought out.

But, in fact, they are distractions from the one real question that dominates all others, which is this: for whom should the economy be run? Should it be operated “to promote the general welfare” of 297 million people, the 99 percent? Or should it be run to benefit 3 million, the one percent?

Right now, the answer is that the economy is a machine, with the government as its operator, for transferring two hundred years of accumulated national wealth to those who are already the most wealthy, the one percent. And we should be clear about two things: this is a choice; and it’s working. The rich are getting much richer while everyone else is being stripped of their incomes, their assets, their retirement security, and all the elements of the social safety net enacted since the Great Depression.

Until we confront the fact that the collective impoverishment of the many for the selective enrichment of the few is a choice — the consequence of an explicit policy regime going back 30 years — nothing will change. But if we can muster the maturity to confront this fact, that we are here by choice, and find the courage to act on it, we might yet be able to save the country. If we do not, then we are surely lost.

To understand how we got here, we need to quickly review the economic history of the last sixty years. Then we can discuss what to do going forward.

At the end of World War II, the U.S. bestrode the world like a colossus. Its only industrial rival, Europe, had blown its brains out 30 years before, in World War I. And it did it again, in World War II, with Japan joining in. In the history of the world, there has never been such asymmetry in power between one country and all the rest.

It was U.S. capital that rebuilt its allies’ economies, through the Marshall Plan in Europe, and through military spending in Asia. U.S. factories boomed, to service not only its own vast and ravenous market, but those of all the rest of the world. All the equipment (and much of the food) to rebuild the industrial world came from America.

It was truly the Golden Age. There was enough wealth so that capital, labor, and government could all drink deeply from the seemingly inexhaustible spring of capitalism.

But by the 1960s something began to go wrong. Our allies’ economies had by then been rebuilt, and with the newest equipment and technologies. Theirs were more efficient than ours. The Volkswagens and Toyotas that would later become a tsunami began to trickle in. Same with the Sonys and Panasonics in consumer electronics. Shipbuilding, steel, machine tools, industrial electronics and other major industries began to migrate out of the U.S. and into the hands of foreign companies.

At the same time, the then-99% began to place serious claims on national resources, and to insist on being a player in major national decisions.

Johnson launched the Great Society program withthe goal of eradicating poverty. The women’s rights movement, the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and the environmental movement all proved dramatically effective in redirecting national priorities and resources away from those favored by the wealthy elites and toward those of the rest of the people.

In other words, at exactly the time the profits of corporations were under assault by growing international competition, the people began to claim a greater share of society’s fruits. It couldn’t square. There was not enough output from the faltering economy to both satisfy people’s expectations of middle class affluence and economic security and capital’s demands for higher and higher returns. Something had to give.

Equally, the elites who had run the country for decades were indignant at the presumption of a mangy mob of un-bathed, pot-smoking, long-haired, bra-less, draft card-burning, tree-hugging hooligans who didn’t even have a job but wanted a seat at the table of national decision-making (sound familiar?). They were certainly never again going to allow such a scabrous cabal to decide that the country should not fight a major war (Vietnam) that was so enriching to the elites who had lied the country into it.

So the elites decided to take “their” country back.

The election of 1980 was the real watershed in modern American history. Ronald Reagan ran for president promising to cut taxes, increase military spending, and balance the budget — all at the same time. He called it “supply side economics.” His rival for the Republican nomination, George H.W. Bush, called it “voodoo economics” which, of course, it was. But people bought it and Reagan proceeded to rearrange economic power more substantially than at any time since Roosevelt enacted the New Deal.

Reagan cut marginal tax rates on the wealthy from 75% to 35%. At the same time, he dramatically increased military spending. The result was entirely predictable: with less money coming in but more going out, the government began to run massive deficits. Where Jimmy Carter’s worst deficit was $79 billion, Reagan was soon running deficits of $150 billion a year, year after year and increasing.

By 1992, the end of George H.W. Bush’s presidency, the annual deficit had reached $292 billion. In only 12 years, the supply side “revolution” had quadrupled the nation’s debt, from $1 trillion to $4 trillion. And this, in a time of peace and prosperity.

But that was always the hidden intention of supply side economics, to bind the nation to massive debts, debts from which it would never be released. Despite their sanctimonious pretenses, Republicans love debt because they are lenders. When there is more demand for debt, as when the government borrows hundred of billions of dollar a year, it commands a higher price, which is interest. This is simply supply and demand. And if you’re a lender, higher interest rates are better. This is why, even though Republicans controlled the White House for 26 of the past 40 years, they never once in any of those years produced a single balanced budget.

Clinton came to power in 1993 but proved an ambiguous leader, at least from standpoint of economics. He once described himself as “an Eisenhower Republican” which seems fair. He did raise marginal tax rates on the rich, but only from 36% to 39%. (They were at 75% under the real Eisenhower.) For this, he was pilloried as a socialist. Worse, after the fall of the Soviet Union he cut military spending as a percent of GDP to the lowest level since before Vietnam.

With lower military spending, slightly higher taxes on the rich, and a technology-driven economic boom, Clinton was able to pay down the deficits left to him by Bush I. By 1997, the government actually produced budgetary surpluses, the first since the 1960s. The consequence was a 40% fall in long term interest rates. Again, it was simply supply and demand. With less demand for borrowed money, rates fell.

This is the real reason Clinton was so relentlessly hounded by the right. It wasn’t because he was being serviced by a stalking intern, though he played into that one with astonishing recklessness. It was because he interfered with the three primary mechanisms for transferring wealth to the already-wealthy: tax cuts, massive military spending, and skyrocketing national debt.

The rest of Clinton’s economic legacy is far less positive. He pushed through NAFTA, pitting blue collar workers from the industrial Midwest against workers in Mexico making $1 an hour. He “ended welfare as we know it,” destroying an essential element of the social safety net. He enacted telecommunications “reform” that ended up as grotesque consolidation in the nation’s media, to where five companies now control more than 80% of the nation’s media.

But by far the most damaging of Clinton’s economic accomplishments was the deregulation of the finance industry. He overturned Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era law that separated commercial and investment banking. Together with his deregulation of derivatives, what Warren Buffet called “financial weapons of mass destruction,” this opened the economy to what would be the financial mad house of the first decade of the twenty-first century.

George W. Bush took office in 2001 and would serve the very wealthy in six important ways. First, he cut their taxes substantially, first in 2001 and again in 2003. Over their life, the Bush Tax Cuts for the top 1% will cost more than it would take to restore Social Security to solvency forever.

Second, he massively increased military spending with his fraudulently-justified and incompetently-prosecuted War in Iraq, and his equally-over-hyped and phony Global War on Terror.

As with Reagan, these two actions produced his third gift to his “base,” as he called the rich: massive deficits. He turned Clinton’s budget surpluses into deficits within one year. He would eventually double the national debt in only eight years, from $5.6 trillion to $12 trillion.

Fourth, he helped major industrial corporations move some seven million high paying manufacturing jobs out of the country, to low-wage countries where they could pay less for labor while putting downward pressure on American wages.

Fifth, he turned a blind eye as the financial industry carried out one of the greatest economic frauds in American history: the housing bubble.

Bush’s ideological soul-mate, Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, held interest rates at historically low levels to induce a boom in housing. This created illusory “wealth” that served to distract and pacify the working class as their jobs were being shipped overseas. He turned a blind eye to massive fraud in mortgage lending so that busboys, bartenders, gardeners, and day workers could buy homes they could never hope to afford. And he encouraged the securitzation of mortgages so that banks could offload the toxic sludge to unsuspecting buyers around the world. It was all so carefully engineered.

However, as had happened in the 1960s, something started to go wrong. Incomes began to fall as jobs were shipped overseas. The Iraq war caused oil prices to jump from $26 a barrel the day Bush took office to over $100 a barrel. It was a massive gain for the oil companies, his family’s business, but the inflationary effect coursed through everything in the economy. The busboys couldn’t make the notes on their houses, so started unloading them. But there were no “greater fools” left to buy them so prices started a downward avalanche which is still under way.

Since the height of the bubble in 2006, more than $8 trillion of housing wealth has been wiped out. Eleven million homes have been lost to foreclosure. More than one in four mortgages are underwater, with more owed on them than the home is worth. The share of home equity owned by homeowners themselves is now at the lowest level it has been since World War II. The balance has been transferred from the owners to the mortgage holders, the banks.

But the banks, in an almost psychotic orgy of greed, had leveraged their equity 30-to-1. They borrowed 30 dollars for every one dollar they held in capital. It makes for prodigious profits when prices are rising. If they go up only 3% (1/30) you double your investment! But if prices fall by 3%, your capital is wiped out. That is what actually happened. Housing prices, inflated far beyond what a rational market could bear, fell for the first time in American history. The banks went bankrupt. That was the financial collapse of late 2008.

Fortunately for the banks, Bush and his Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, formerly head of Goldman Sachs, were there to bestow the sixth and greatest gift on the wealthy: they bailed out the banks and their owners.

They arranged for the Treasury and the Federal Reserve to buy the banks’ toxic sludge so they wouldn’t have to take any losses on it. They paid 100 cents on the dollar for crap securities that that couldn’t fetch 20 cents on the dollar in open markets. They gave the banks trillions of dollars of loans at effectively no interest. And they allowed the banks to print trillions of dollars which they then used to inflate commodity and stock markets around the world, greatly enriching their wealthy owners.

What Bush and company didn’t do was require any givebacks from the banks. No equity. No firings. No changes in bonuses. No regulation of explosive derivatives. No restructuring of “too big to fail.” No settlements with consumers for intentionally defective mortgages. No re-investment in the economy they had plundered. And certainly, no prosecutions for any of the willful perpetrators of the Greatest Economic Collapse Since the Great Depression.

By 2009, Obama inherited an economy in free fall, for which he is perhaps owed some sympathy. But his policy responses have been inept at best, complicit at worst. He carried through with Bush’s bailout of the banks, passed phony “financial reform” which changed nothing, and studiously refused to prosecute any wrong-doing. He pushed through a tepid stimulus package where fully one third went to tax cuts for the wealthy. And he groveled to get a payroll tax cut that, in fact, does more to damage Social Security than anything any Republican president has ever managed.

In many other ways, however, he has proven to be Clinton II, or Bush III. He staffed his economic team with the very intellectual lights — Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke — who had engineered the Collapse, ensuring that capital’s right to pillage would not be qustioned. He went back on his word to fight for a public option that would have lowered the cost of health care insurance. He waved through the Bush tax cuts, not once but twice.

He never attempted anything so ambitious as a Rooseveltian jobs program. He made sure the Copenhagen climate talks failed so as to not burden American industrialists. He more than tripled Bush II’s deficits. And in his most damning assault on the economic security of more than 80 million Americans, he “put Social Security on the table” as part of his budget negotiations. With “friends” like this we should pray for enemies. At least we would know them for what they are.

Which brings us to today.

Over 56 million people are in poverty. The Census Bureau reports that half of all Americans (!) are in or near poverty. Almost 30% of those in the middle class have fallen out of it, and the rate of collapse is accelerating. A smaller share of men have jobs today than at any time since World War II. The past ten year’s wage gains have been the worst for any ten year period in the nation’s history, even worse than during the Great Depression.

The national debt that stood at $1 trillion when Reagan took office now exceeds $15 trillion. Debt as a percent of GDP is higher than it was in 1929, the year before the Great Depression. Meanwhile, corporate profits are at record highs, with corporations sitting on $2 trillion in cash, not investing it in the economy. They have $1.3 trillion parked in offshore tax havens like the Cayman Islands, out of reach of U.S. tax collectors.

Who could have imagined we could have fallen so far, and so quickly? Actually, in retrospect, it all makes sense. As wealth was steadily transferred upward and incomes were undermined, the damaging effects were masked by increased recourse to debt, both public and private. And the debt itself served to both accelerate and consolidate the transfer. But eventually the burden of payments became too much for an enfeebled workforce to carry and the whole thing came crashing down.

Any meaningful recovery will require a major investment by the federal government. The combination of lost incomes and lost consumer wealth have undercut the ability of consumers to generate demand, leaving the government as the only agent in the economy with the capacity to do the job. Clearly, private markets are not going to do it. Indeed, corporations have learned how to prosper mightily by crushing their American workers, a truly dysfunctional state of affairs that cannot stand.

The government should invest in the nation’s infrastructure which the American Society of Civil Engineers rates a “D”, down from “D+” only three years ago. This would employ potentially millions of now-unemployed workers, turning unemployment checks into tax payments to the Treasury. It would also bring the platform on which all the rest of the economy operates up to twenty-first century standards. Fortunately, the government can borrow long term at 2%, a fraction of the payback from such investments.

I’ve written elsewhere about a Manhattan Project-like investment in a green economy. Such an investment would revive employment, restore American competitiveness, help pay down the national debt, reduce our crippling dependency on middle east oil, and reduce carbon emissions into the environment. In all of these ways, it would be a win for virtually everybody in the economy, everybody in the nation, and for much of the planet.

I say “virtually” because it would not benefit those who have wrecked the economy and profited so mightily in the process: the money lenders, who would see less demand for borrowed money; the weapons makers, who would face a less hostile world; and the oil companies, whose crippling grip on the economy would be reduced. And we shouldn’t have any illusions about how hard these forces will fight to ensure that nothing changes. They will, and unless we fight back, well, nothing will change.

It is important to state once again that virtually all of the predation, all of the plunder of the last thirty years has been a policy choice, primarily enacted by Republicans, but more and more abetted by Democrats who have thrown in for a piece of the action. It’s also important to understand that nothing has changed in carrying out the agenda. Obama is as much about true “Hope” and “Change” as Bush was about “Compassionate Conservatism.” In fact, he and his wealthy masters are accelerating the looting.

Military spending is still growing at almost double digit rates after a decade of such increases. He is clearly going to put the knife into Social Security and Medicare when re-elected. He clearly has no plan, no “grand narrative” to restore the nation to prosperity. He clearly will not, can not, go after the banking industry, his biggest underwriter. And he gives all the signals of starting a war with Iran, which will make Iraq look like a silly child’s board-game gone awry.

The wealthy elites, fronted by Obama, have effectively abandoned the U.S. economy and the American people who are trapped inside. What this means is that the elections of 2012 are the last chance for the American people to reclaim their economic security, to fight off the neo-feudal servitude that is being foisted on them, and reclaim their political self-determination. As you can see from the above, most of the damage to the economy is the result of political decisions made to carry out nefarious economic ends. And they’ve worked.

We desperately need to elect a reliably progressive Congress to serve as an effective counterweight to the hopelessly corrupt, craven, and cowardly Obama and company. We need to demonstrate that it is people, not money, and not rigged voting machines, that still matter most in American elections. We need every man, woman, and child on deck with a sense of existential urgency that if we do not reclaim our country now, it will be lost forever. For it will.

In the American Revolution, Thomas Paine declared, “We have the chance to make the world anew.” He was thinking of the escape from the European world of economic feudalism, social privilege, and political autocracy. Today, we have one last chance to save that “new world” from the retrograde civilization it pulled itself out of, but whose claim on it has never been renounced.

If we can muster a Paine-like courage to fight and win this new Revolution, the Revolution to Save the Country, we shall be worthy of respect equal to that which we reserve for Paine and his fellow Founders. If we do not, we will get what we deserve. As with so much of the past thirty years, it’s our choice.
Robert Freeman

[Robert Freeman teaches history and economics at a public high school in northern California. He is the founder of One Dollar For Life, a national non-profit that helps American schools build schools in the developing world with donations of one dollar. He can be reached at robertfreeman10@yahoo.com.]

Source / Common Dreams

Fluxed Up World

Christmas: End Our Cultural Narcissism, Renounce Empire, and Make Room for the Poor and the Weak

2011-12-19T20:56:00.000-08:00

Christmas is No Time to Talk About War and Peace
By Jim Rigby / December 19, 2011

When I heard the President speak to returning troops last week, my mind flashed back to an article I once wrote for our local newspaper. Each week a different member of the local clergy would write a column, and I had been asked to write the piece for Christmas. That year all I could hear was the drumbeat leading toward a war with Iraq. I racked my brain trying to think of a way to put faces on the people we were about to bomb. Looking at a nativity scene I thought, “the people we are about to kill look like that.” Maybe a reframed Christmas story could help Americans stop hating Saddam long enough to care about the people who will pay the real cost of this invasion. I submitted the following article, covering the Christmas story the way the U.S. press was covering the build-up to the Iraq war. Looking back, I should have known what was about to happen.

Christmas Cancelled as a Security Measure

ELLIS ISLAND -- The three wise men were arrested today attempting to enter the country. The Iraqi nationals were carrying massive amounts of flammable substances known as “frankincense” and “myrrh.” While not explosives themselves, experts revealed that these two substances could be used as a fuse to detonate a larger bomb. The three alleged terrorists were also carrying gold, presumably to finance the rest of their mission.

Also implicated in the plot were two Palestinians named Joseph and Mary. An anonymous source close to the family overheard Mary bragging that her son would “bring down the mighty from their thrones and lift up the lowly.” In what appears to be a call to anarchy, the couple claims their son will someday “help prisoners escape captivity.” “These people match our terrorist profile perfectly,” an official source reported.

All of the suspects claimed they heard angels singing of a new era of hope for the afflicted and poor. As one Wall Street official put it, “These one world wackos are talking about overturning the entire economic and political hierarchy that holds the civilized world together. I don’t care what some angel sang; God wants the status quo -by definition.”

A somber White House press secretary announced that it might be prudent to cancel Christmas until others in the plot are rounded up. “I assure you that this measure is temporary. The President loves Christmas as much as anyone. People can still shop and give expensive gifts, but we’re asking them not to think about world peace until after we have rid the world of evil people. For Americans to sing, ‘peace on earth, good will to all’, is just the wrong message to send to our enemies at this time.”

The strongest opponents of the Christmas ban were the representatives of retail stores, movie chains and makers of porcelain Christmas figurines. “This is a tempest in a teapot,” fumed one unnamed business owner. “No one thinks of the political meaning of Christmas any more. Christmas isn’t about a savior who will bring hope to the outcasts of the world; it’s about nativity scenes and beautiful lights. History has shown that mature people are perfectly capable of singing hymns about world peace while still supporting whatever war our leaders deem necessary. People long ago stopped tying religion to the real events in the world.”

There has been no word on where the suspects are being kept, or when their trial might be held. Authorities are asking citizens who see other foreigners resembling nativity scene figures to contact the Office of Homeland Security.

A few days after submitting that piece, I received a nervous call from an editor. “We love your story. It’s very funny.”

“Thank you,” I said waiting for the other shoe to fall.

“The thing is, we want to take out the part about Iraq and Palestine.”

After a horrified pause, I explained that had been the whole point of writing the story -- to humanize the people who were about to be killed. When I refused to gut the story, he told me they would have to drop it all together.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. Clergy who want to talk about real events in the world are seen as too political for the religious section, and too religious for the political section. Of course, if a minister gets in the pulpit and waves the flag and prays for the troops, that’s not called “political”, but if a minister questions any war, then it is considered mixing religion and politics. The resulting pablum in most clergy columns validates their strategic placement somewhere between the obituaries and the comics.

President Obama welcomes home troops at Fort Bragg, NC, on Dec. 14, 2011.

What have we learned as a result of the war? That was answered by Obama’s words to the returning troops:

“Because of you -- because you sacrificed so much for a people that you had never met -- Iraqis have a chance to forge their own destiny. That’s part of what makes us special as Americans. Unlike the old empires, we don’t make these sacrifices for territory or for resources. We do it because it’s right. There can be no fuller expression of America’s support for self-determination than our leaving Iraq to its people. That says something about who we are.”

Looking back at my earlier Christmas article, I feel pain not pride at what the President said. His speech to returning troops could have been taken from any leader, of any nation, from any period of history, simply by changing the names and places. It is the kind of speech every leader has given since the emperors: brave and noble words, written in someone else’s blood. This President who ran, in part, against this war, has come to repeat the party line. This President, who once spoke of respect for all people of the world, has now deported more immigrants than Bush.

Hearing another speech expressing our nation’s narcissistic delusion made me physically ill. I could not help but think of the bloody wake such rhetoric leaves behind when put into action. The fact that we are leaving Iraq at this point says nothing about the purity of our initial motives. Even bank robbers don’t stay around after the crime has been committed. I appreciate trying to make our young soldiers not feel like they were pawns in someone else’s parlor game, but for the sake of future generations we must painfully remember and affirm, that is exactly what happened.

We, from the United States, are not like the people in our nativity scenes. We are like the Romans looming ominously in the background of the story. Christmas is about the little people of the world who find joy and meaning while living under someone else’s boot. We from the United States can only celebrate Christmas by ending our cultural narcissism, renouncing empire, and making room for the poor and the weak of the world like Joseph and Mary.

Christmas is not a fact of history, but Christianity’s particular symbol of every human being’s hope for world peace and universal happiness. When the angels sang, “peace on earth good will to all,” they were expressing the song written in every heart. But, that song calls us out of empire and into our entire human family. Maybe stopping the frenzy of Christmas long enough to really hear the song the angels sang to the wretched of the earth, would give us the humanity to stop hanging our Christmas lights until we no longer kill our brothers and sisters for the fuel to illumine them.

“O ye beneath life's crushing load, whose forms are bending low,

Who toil along the climbing way with painful steps and slow;

Look now, for glad and golden hours come swiftly on the wing;

Oh rest beside the weary road and hear the angels sing.”

[Jim Rigby is pastor of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, TX. He can be reached at jrigby0000@aol.com, and videos of his sermons are available online at www.staopen.com/sermons.]

Source / Common Dreams

Fluxed Up World

And We Shall Keep You Where We Want You

2011-12-19T08:22:00.000-08:00

Source / YouTube

Fluxed Up World

Who Should Be On Trial? Who Should Be In Jail?

2011-12-18T17:05:00.000-08:00

A Man in Tunisia, a Movement on Wall Street, and the Soldier Who Ignited the Fuse
By Michael Moore / December 17, 2011

It's Saturday night and I didn't want the day to end before I sent out this note to you.

One year ago today (December 17th), Mohamed Bouazizi, a man who had a simple produce stand in Tunisia, set himself on fire to protest his government's repression. His singular sacrifice ignited a revolution that toppled Tunisia's dictator and launched revolts in regimes across the Middle East.

Three months ago today, Occupy Wall Street began with a takeover of New York's Zuccotti Park. This movement against the greed of corporate America and its banks -- and the money that now controls most of our democratic institutions -- has quickly spread to hundreds of towns and cities across America. The majority of Americans now agree that a nation where 400 billionaires have more wealth than 160 million Americans combined is not the country they want America to be. The 99% are rising up against the 1% -- and now there is no turning back.

Twenty-four years ago today, U.S. Army Spc. Bradley Manning was born. He has now spent 570 days in a military prison without a trial -- simply because he allegedly blew the whistle on the illegal and immoral war in Iraq. He exposed what the Pentagon and the Bush administration did in creating this evil and he did so by allegedly leaking documents and footage to Wikileaks. Many of these documents dealt not only with Iraq but with how we prop up dictators around the world and how our corporations exploit the poor on this planet. (There were even cables with crazy stuff on them, like one detailing Bush's State Department trying to stop a government minister in another country from holding a screening of 'Fahrenheit 9/11.')

The Wikileaks trove was a fascinating look into how the United States conducts its business -- and clearly those who don't want the world to know how we do things in places like, say, Tunisia, were not happy with Bradley Manning.

Mohamed Bouazizi was being treated poorly by government officials because all he wanted to do was set up a cart and sell fruit and vegetables on the street. But local police kept harassing him and trying to stop him. He, like most Tunisians, knew how corrupt their government was. But when Wikileaks published cables from the U.S. ambassador in Tunis confirming the corruption -- cables that were published just a week or so before Mohamed set himself on fire -- well, that was it for the Tunisian people, and all hell broke loose.

People across the world devoured the information Bradley Manning revealed, and it was used by movements in Egypt, Spain, and eventually Occupy Wall Street to bolster what we already thought was true. Except here were the goods -- the evidence that was needed to prove it all true. And then a democracy movement spread around the globe so fast and so deep -- and in just a year's time! When anyone asks me, "Who started Occupy Wall Street?" sometimes I say "Goldman Sachs" or "Chase" but mostly I just say, "Bradley Manning." It was his courageous action that was the tipping point -- and it was not surprising when the dictator of Tunisia censored all news of the Wikileaks documents Manning had allegedly supplied. But the internet took Manning's gift and spread it throughout Tunisia, a young man set himself on fire and the Arab Spring that led eventually to Zuccotti Park has a young, gay soldier in the United States Army to thank.

And that is why I want to honor Bradley Manning on this, his 24th birthday, and ask the millions of you reading this to join with me in demanding his immediate release. He does not deserve the un-American treatment, including cruel solitary confinement, he's received in over eighteen months of imprisonment. If anything, this young man deserves a friggin' medal. He did what great Americans have always done -- he took a bold stand against injustice and he did it without stopping for a minute to consider the consequences for himself.

The Pentagon and the national security apparatus are hell-bent on setting an example with Bradley Manning. But we as Americans have a right to know what is being done in our name and with our tax dollars. If the government tries to cover up its malfeasance, then it is the duty of each and every one of us, should the situation arise, to drag the truth, kicking and screaming if necessary, into the light of day.

The American flag was lowered in Iraq this past Thursday as our war on them officially came to an end. If anyone should be on trial or in the brig right now, it should be those men who lied to the nation in order to start this war -- and in doing so sent nearly 4,500 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to their deaths.

But it is not Bush or Rumsfeld or Cheney or Wolfowitz who sit in prison tonight. It is the hero who exposed them. It is Bradley Manning who has lost his freedom and that, in turn, becomes just one more crime being committed in our name.

I know, I know, c'mon Mike -- it's the holiday season, there's presents to buy and parties to go to! And yes, this really is one of my favorite weeks of the year. But in the spirit of the man whose birth will be celebrated next Sunday, please do something, anything, to help this young man who spends his birthday tonight behind bars. I say, enough. Let him go home and spend Christmas with his family. We've done enough violence to the world this decade while claiming to be a country that admires the Prince of Peace. The war is over. And a whole new movement has a lot to thank Bradley Manning for.

© 2011 Michael Moore

[Michael Moore is an activist, author, and filmmaker. See more of his work at his website MichaelMoore.com.]

Source / Common Dreams

Fluxed Up World

In Pursuit of Life, Liberty and A Less F***ed-Up Government

2011-12-18T12:16:00.000-08:00

Source /

THanks to Fishmael / Fluxed Up World

Who Increased the Size of the US Deficit?

2011-12-10T07:02:00.000-08:00

Source / US Treasury

Thanks to Dan Shapiro / Fluxed Up World

And Another Continent Gets a Divorce from American Colonialism and Globalism

2011-12-09T15:05:00.000-08:00

Leaders of Latin American and Caribbean states pose for a photo during the 33-member CELAC summit in Caracas.
A Union is Born: Latin America in Revolution
By Eva Golinger / December 8, 2011

While much of the world is in crisis and protests are erupting throughout Europe and the United States, Latin American and Caribbean nations are building consensus, advancing social justice and increasing positive cooperation in the region. Social, political and economic transformations have been taking place through democratic processes in countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil throughout the past decade, leading to a massive reduction in poverty and income disparity in the region, and a substantial increase in social services, quality of life and direct participation in political process.

One of the major initiatives of progressive Latin American governments this century has been the creation of new regional organizations that promote integration, cooperation and solidarity amongst neighboring nations. Cuba and Venezuela began this process in 2004 with the founding of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), that now includes Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Dominica, St. Vincent’s and the Grenadines and Antigua and Barbuda. ALBA was initially launched in response to the US government’s failed attempt to impose its Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) throughout the region. Today ALBA is a thriving multilateral organization with member nations that share similar political visions for their countries and for the region, and includes numerous cooperation agreements in economic, social and cultural areas. The fundamental basis of trade amongst ALBA nations is solidarity and mutual benefit. There is no competition, exploitation or attempt to dominate amongst ALBA states. ALBA even counts on its own currency, the SUCRE, which allows for trade between member nations without dependence on the US dollar.

In 2008, the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) was formally established as a regional body representing South American states. While ALBA is much more consolidated as a unified political voice, UNASUR represents a diversity of political positions, economic models and visions for the region. But UNASUR members share the common goal of working towards regional unity and guaranteeing the resolution of conflicts through peaceful and diplomatic means. UNASUR has already played a key role in peacefully resolving disputes in Bolivia, particularly during an attempted coup against the government of Evo Morales in 2008, and has also successfully moderated a severe conflict between Colombia and Venezuela, leading to the reestablishment of relations in 2010.

Two hundred years ago, South American Independence hero Simon Bolivar, a native of Venezuela, dreamed of building regional unity and creating a “Patria Grande” (Grand Homeland) in Latin America. After achieving independence for Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Colombia, and fighting colonialists in several Caribbean nations, Bolivar attempted to turn this dream of Latin American unity into reality. His efforts were sabotaged by powerful interests opposing the creation of a solid regional bloc, and eventually, with the aid of the United States, Bolivar was ousted from his rule in Venezuela and died isolated in Colombia several years later. Meanwhile, the US government had proceeded to implement its Monroe Doctrine, a decree first declared by President James Monroe in 1823 to ensure US domination and control over the newly-freed nations in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Nearly two hundred years of invasions, interventions, aggressions, coup d’etats and hostilities led by the US government against Latin American nations shadowed the 19th and 20th centuries. By the end of the 20th century, Washington had successfully imposed governments in every Latin American and Caribbean nation that were subordinate to its agenda, with the exception of Cuba. The Monroe Doctrine had been achieved, and the US felt confident in its control over its “backyard”.

The unexpected turn at the beginning of the 21st century in Venezuela, formerly one of Washington’s most stable and subservient partners, came as a shock to the US. Hugo Chavez had been elected President and a Revolution had begun. A coup d’etat attempt in 2002 failed to subvert the advancement of the Bolivarian Revolution and the spread of revolutionary fever throughout the region. Soon Bolivia followed, then Nicaragua and Ecuador. Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay elected socialist presidents, two of them former guerrilla fighters. Major changes began to occur throughout the region as the peoples of this vast, diverse and rich continent assumed power and made their voices heard.

Social transformations in Venezuela that gave voice to people’s power became exemplary for others in the region, as did President Chavez’s defiance of US imperialism. A powerful sentiment of Latin American sovereignty and independence grew stronger, even reaching those with governments aligned with US interests and multinational control.

On December 2-3, 2011, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) was born and the overwhelming force of a continent nearly 600 million strong, achieved a 200-year dream of unity. The 33 member nations of CELAC all agree on the unquestionable necessity to build a regional organization that represents their interests, and that excludes the overbearing presence of the US and Canada. While CELAC will take time to consolidate, the exceptional commitment evidenced by the 33 states present at its launching in Caracas, Venezuela, cannot be underestimated.

CELAC will have to overcome attempts to sabotage and neutralize its expansion and endurance, and the threats against it and intents to divide member nations will be numerous and frequent. But the resistance of the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean who have resumed this path of unity and independence after nearly two hundred years of imperialist aggression, demonstrates the powerful force that has led this region to become an inspiration for those seeking social justice and true freedom around the world.

Source / Postcards from the Revolution

Thanks to "Cuba Inside Out" / Fluxed Up World

Signs of a Sick Society: Prisons Housing a Huge Proportion of the Population

2011-12-06T14:18:00.001-08:00

Source / YouTube

Thanks to Alan Brodrick / Fluxed Up World

When Your Health Is Less Important Than Your Bank Balance

2011-12-04T13:45:00.000-08:00

An Occupy Wall Street protestor holds his sign against a police barricade as pedestrians pass Zuccotti Park in New York. Photograph: John Minchillo/AP.
A New York spider gave me an insight into US private healthcare
By Laurie Penny / December 4, 2011

Occupy Wall Street is right – a rash of bites showed me how private healthcare keeps Americans cowed and compliant

It started with a spider. Someone with a taste for narrative justice might call it retribution, but there's really no moral correlation between the wisdom of absconding with a relative stranger after a party and waking up the next morning in Brooklyn with a rash of poisonous bites on your arm. When the angels of sexual continence want to punish you, they send crabs not spiders.

I assumed, at first, that the maddeningly itchy marks were the work of common-or-flophouse New York bedbugs, but 12 hours later, with my right arm swollen to the width and purplish colour of a prize turnip, my friend identified the hallmarks of the brown recluse spider, and uttered words I had hoped never to hear on this side of the Atlantic: "You should really get that checked out by a doctor."

I first came to New York to write about the emerging social justice movements associated with Occupy Wall Street. Through my conversations with the protesters in Zucotti Park, I began to understand how profoundly the stranglehold of American private healthcare keeps ordinary people cowed and compliant in the land of the notionally free.

It's not just the 59 million Americans living without health insurance and unable to access treatment for everyday maladies without crippling expense. It's the millions more who dare not risk a dispute with their boss for fear of losing their medical cover, who expect to remortgage their homes in old age to meet the costs of failing health, or who live in fear of bankruptcy should they develop a chronic condition or have an accident.

The notion of a society that sanctions companies to profit from sickness feels barbaric enough, without then forcing ordinary people to choose between medical treatment and the financial future of their families. President Obama's attempt to reform the system in 2009 roundly failed to remove healthcare as a source of perennial anxiety for most American citizens, or to lighten the dead hand of the market on medical provision in the US.

Socialised healthcare is in my blood but, unfortunately last Wednesday, so was a hefty dose of spider venom and several billion extra bacteria – the unfriendly sort that make an infected limb sweat and swell like a rotten root vegetable. I had travel insurance, but no idea if it stretched to the snacking habits of urban arachnids. So I uttered the words familiar to any uninsured or precariously insured American: "I'll just wait for a little bit and see if it gets better."

Had I waited another 24 hours, I might have lost my arm. By the time I was persuaded to go to the emergency response unit at Beth Israel hospital I could no longer move the limb, which was developing worrying purple track-marks. The triage nurse sent me straight through to ER, where I was given a bunk next to a groaning man in his mid-30s who, like me, had been so worried about the cost of treatment that he had allowed an infection to spread, in this case from a rotten tooth. He was already missing several teeth. He told me he was a postal worker with no health insurance, and that he wouldn't have come for treatment had his girlfriend not driven him to hospital when he collapsed with a fever.

Compared to the accident and emergency unit at my local London hospital, the waiting period was civilised; it was a mere hour before a stern-looking registrar arrived to take my money. He explained the covering clauses of my travel insurance and showed me where to sign on several complicated forms. When I explained I was unable to do so because my arm wasn't working, he gave me a look that suggested I'd have had to find a way to sign even if I'd come in with all four limbs off. I signed with my left hand.

After that, the service was exceptional. I was whisked off to intensive care for intravenous antibiotics. I was put in a quiet bed near a window, with no cracks or mildew in the walls, and brought cool water and a clean towel. And when, in the middle of the night, I went into near-fatal anaphylactic shock, the staff's reaction was swift and efficient. I felt, in other words like a valued customer. But it also meant that, at 2am and thousands of miles from home, I was already wondering how I would afford the prescription for all the antibiotics I needed.

This is the difference that social medicine makes to the fabric and quality of life in a civilised country. When I finally wobbled out of the shiny lobby of the Beth Israel, clutching a bag of drugs, follow-up advice and complimentary hospital toiletries, I understood what it really means to be without means in America. Those who are wealthy enough to afford decent healthcare have their needs met in relative luxury, while those who are poor live in fear of getting ill, worrying that one misadventure might leave you with yet more debts to pay off.

No amount of fresh towels and edible breakfasts can make up for the feeling that your health is less important than the capacity of your chequebook. Which is why children and pensioners are still standing in Manhattan's financial district with placards telling the world they cannot afford healthcare, as police patrol the perimeter. And why, when I got out of hospital, I went straight back down to Liberty Plaza to stand with them.

Source / The Guardian

Fluxed Up World

US Military: Still Killing Civilians in Fallujah

2011-11-27T08:29:00.000-08:00

Punching through Fallujah with maximum carnage. Photo: Source.
The Under-Examined Story of Fallujah
By Hannah Gurman, November 23, 2011

Seven years after the U.S. invasion of Fallujah, there are reports of an alarming rise in the rates of birth defects and cancer. But the crisis, and its possible connection to weapons deployed by the United States during the war, remains woefully under-examined.

On November 8, 2004, U.S. military forces launched Operation Phantom Fury 50 miles west of Baghdad in Fallujah, a city of 350,000 people known for its opposition to the Saddam regime.

The United States did not expect to encounter resistance in Fallujah, nor did it initially face any in the early days of the war. The first sign of serious hostility appeared in April 2003, after U.S. soldiers from the 82nd Airborne division fired into a crowd of protesters demonstrating against the occupation and the closure of their local school building, killing 17 civilians and injuring 70. The following February, amid mounting tensions, a local militia beheaded four Blackwater employees and strung their bodies from a bridge across the Euphrates River. U.S. forces temporarily withdrew from Fallujah and planned for a full onslaught.

Following the evacuation of civilians, Marines cordoned off the city, even as some residents scrambled to escape. Thirty to fifty thousand people were still inside the city when the U.S. military launched a series of airstrikes, dropping incendiary bombs on suspected insurgent hideouts. Ground forces then combed through targeted neighborhoods house by house. Ross Caputi, who served as a first private Marine during the siege, has said that his squad and others employed “reconnaissance by fire,” firing into dwellings before entering to make sure nobody inside was still alive. Caputi later co-founded the group Justice for Fallujah, which dedicated the week of November 14 to a public awareness campaign about the impact of the war on the city’s people

By the end of the campaign, Fallujah was a ghost town. Though the military did not tally civilian casualties, independent reports put the number somewhere between 800 and 6,000. As The Washington Post reported in April 2005, more than half of Fallujah’s 39,000 homes were damaged, of which 10,000 were no longer habitable. Five months after the campaign, only 90,000 of the city’s evacuated residents had returned. The majority still lacked electricity, and the city’s sewage and water systems, badly damaged in the campaign, were not functional. A mounting unemployment crisis — exacerbated by security checkpoints, which blocked the flow of people and goods into and out of the city — left young residents of Fallujah especially vulnerable to recruitment by the resistance.

The Official Success Story

Although the initial picture of the devastated city looked grim, by 2007 Fallujah had become a key part of the emerging narrative of successful counterinsurgency in Iraq. At a press conference in April of that year, Marine Colonel Richard Simcock declared that progress was “phenomenal” and that Fallujah was an “economically strong and flourishing city.” According to the official narrative that has since crystallized, the second siege of Fallujah turned out to be a major turning point in the war. “By taking down Fallujah, the Marines denied a sanctuary for the insurgents,” said Richard Natonski, commander of the 1st Marine Division during Phantom Fury, in an oral history published by the Marines in 2009. In contrast to the insurgents who relied on “brutal tactics,” he explained, the Marines were able to win over the good will of the people. This contributed to the larger “Awakening” in Anbar province, the linchpin of counterinsurgency’s “success” in Iraq.

Official “progress” narratives of war rarely tell the whole story, especially when it comes to the war’s long-term effects on the civilian population. Seven years after the second siege of Fallujah, despite lucrative U.S.-funded contracts to rebuild infrastructure, much of the city is still in ruins, and unemployment remains high. As terrorist attacks in Anbar and across the country have risen in the past year, security is increasingly tenuous. In August, a car bomb exploded at a police station near Fallujah, killing five officers and wounding six more.

Of the current problems in Fallujah, the most alarming is a mounting public health crisis. In the years since the invasion, doctors in Fallujah have reported drastic increases in the number of premature births, infant mortality, and birth defects—babies born without skulls, missing organs, or with stumps for arms and legs. Fallujah General Hospital reported that, out of 170 babies born in September 2009, 24 percent died within the first seven days, of which 75 percent were deformed — as compared to August 2002, when there were 530 babies born, only six deaths, and one deformity. As the years go by, the problem seems to be getting worse, and doctors are increasingly warning women not to have children.

Many residents have suspected a link between the drastic rise in birth defects and the weapons deployed by U.S. military during the war. The United States has admitted to using white phosphorus in Fallujah, a toxin in incendiary bombs that causes severe burns. But it denies targeting civilians or employing a class of armor-piercing weapons that contain depleted uranium, a byproduct of nuclear weapons used in the production of munitions and armory and known to cause mutagenic illnesses.

The Science and Its Critics

Two recent studies led by Dr. Christopher Busby, a chemistry professor at the University of Ulster who specializes in environmental toxicology, have attempted to document and explain Fallujah’s health crisis. The first was an epidemiological study conducted by a team of 11 researchers who visited 711 households in Fallujah. Published in the December 2010 issue of the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, it found that congenital birth defects, including neural tube, cardiac, and skeletal malformations, were 11 times higher than normal rates, and rose to their highest levels in 2010. The study also found a seven-to-38-fold increase in several site-specific cancers, as well as a drastic shift in the ratio of female-to-male births, with 15 percent fewer boys born in the study period.

In a follow-up study, Busby and his team tested hair samples from 25 mothers and fathers of children with genetic abnormalities in Fallujah. In addition to normally occurring elements, they found uranium. The study, published in the October 2011 issue of the Journal of Conflict and Health, concluded that this was a “primary” or “related cause” of the increase in birth defects and cancer in Fallujah. In a recent interview on Russia Today, Busby explained that, although the research team expected to find depleted uranium, they actually found a slightly enriched form of the element. This has led him to speculate that a “whole new set of anti-personnel weapons” was secretly deployed in Fallujah and possibly elsewhere.

Busby, who wears a black beret and speaks with a burning intensity in his voice, is not your typical laboratory scientist prone to avoid superlatives or qualify claims. “This is like nothing we’ve ever found in any epidemiological study ever,” he said. Yet the journal Lancet rejected his studies without explanation. Busby believes it is part of an intentional sabotage: “There are some serious operators out there,” he says, “and they don’t want the story to get out.” These stark conclusions and provocative conspiracy theories deliberately blur the line between science and politics. In a world in which these two realms are generally sharply divided, there is something refreshing about a scientist who is not afraid to get political.

Yet, as experts at NYU Medical Center confirmed in their response to my queries about the quality of these studies, Busby’s findings are not without their problems.

In their assessment of the epidemiology study, NYU Professors Paolo Toniolo, Judith Zelikoff, and George Friedman-Jimenez were critical of the study’s methodology and cast doubt on the accuracy of its conclusions. They acknowledged the challenge of conducting epidemiological research in wartime and postwar conditions, but argued that the study did not adequately address the inevitable biases involved. Toniolo questioned the report’s claim that the researchers conducted a random sampling of houses in the study area and observed that, among other biases, the study did not address socioeconomics as a factor in the health of the population still living in Fallujah. Zelikoff explained that the findings omitted important information concerning the background of the individuals in the study, including smoking, contagious disease, and the quality of maternal health care.

Friedman-Jimenez noted that, especially in a climate of fear and mistrust, the method of gathering information through questionnaires to households would likely result in an overestimate of risk. “The magnitude of these biases, however, is not likely to be big enough to completely explain the extraordinarily large observed relative risks,” he said. “What fraction of the increased risk is due to these and other biases is very unclear. The role of ‘quick and dirty’ studies like this one, conducted under difficult conditions, is not to inform policy, but rather to generate hypotheses about important questions when resources are not yet available and other research methods are not possible.”

Terry Gordon, a professor in NYU’s Department of Environmental Medicine, referred to the toxicology study as both “strange” and “interesting.” He too cited methodological issues, including the lack of a baseline for local levels of uranium. (The study compared levels in Fallujah to those in southern Israel, Japan, Brazil, Sweden, and Slovenia.) Several of the experts challenged the study’s conclusion that the discovery of mutagens can be indisputably linked to a rise in cancers. Zelikoff explained that the study does not address the lack of information about duration or amounts of exposure. Gordon also noted that, “While congenital effects can be seen after such short term exposures, it is unlikely that cancers would be elevated 6 or 7 years after the war.” Toniolo was critical of the statement that the goal of this second study was to determine “the cause of the increased risk” and its specific connection to U.S. weaponry deployed during the war. “This is a statement that most scientists would not have the guts to make. One cannot determine the cause of anything.”

Despite the serious problems with Busby’s findings, the respondents generally agreed that the studies should not be dismissed but instead should be regarded as prompts for more investigation and attention to the issue

Further Investigation

Unfortunately, the situation in Fallujah today makes further investigation difficult. The Fallujah Hospital is understaffed and lacking in research capacity. The Shia-dominated Iraqi government has not made studies of health risks in Fallujah, a center of the Sunni-based insurgency, a priority.

According to Busby, his own team had barely completed gathering their data when the government declared them terrorists and threatened to jail anyone who responded to further questionnaires. For obvious reasons, the U.S. Defense Department isn’t lining up to support any further study of the issue and routinely rejects or ignores any claim that there is a serious health crisis in Fallujah or that the U.S. military is responsible for it.

In November 2009, British and Iraqi doctors petitioned the UN to investigate the cause of Fallujah’s health crisis. In response, the World Health Organization (WHO) agreed to conduct its own investigation, although it too has been delayed. A WHO representative in Iraq said the delay was due to changes in methodological design and informed me that the Iraqi Ministry of Health will gather data from households in 18 districts from January-February 2012. Meanwhile, the United States has simply dismissed the petitions as “anecdotal” and “inconclusive.”

Media Response

Scientists are not the only ones with a role to play here. It is also the job of the media and other public commentators to report on the situation. In addition to giving us a better picture of what is happening from the perspective of the population living in Fallujah, they should draw attention to the Iraqi and U.S. governments’ obfuscations as well as convey the strengths and weaknesses of the studies done thus far. The issue demands principled, critical journalism.

So far, the media’s coverage of the birth defects and cancer epidemic in Fallujah has been disappointing, to say the least. In 2010, major British newspapers—including the Guardian, the Telegraph, and the Independent—ran brief, suggestive stories on Busby’s first study. These simply reported the study’s conclusions without addressing the methodological problems or framing the political challenges. In the short run, these kinds of reports are valuable for drawing attention to the issue. In the long run, however, such superficial reportage fails both to inform readers and to advance the possibility of formal justice for the population of Fallujah. None of these newspapers has covered the second study at all.

Feurat Alani’s 2011 documentary, Fallujah: A Lost Generation?, shown on French television earlier this year and screened in New York, Boston, and Los Angeles as part of Justice for Fallujah’s awareness campaign, offers one of the few in-depth reports on the evolving issue. Alani is French, with parents from Fallujah. In the film, he interviews doctors and parents of deformed children in Fallujah and Iraqi and American participants in the 2004 battle, as well as researchers and activists. Although the film also glosses over the problems concerning the current science, it is nonetheless extremely informative and an invaluable tool for raising public consciousness.

So far, the mainstream press in the United States has been completely silent. As far as I can tell, no major U.S. news outlet has devoted even a single article or segment to the issue.

A generous explanation of this U.S. media blackout might grant that, in light of questions about the quality of the scientific evidence backing the anecdotal claims, American journalists are just being cautious. But considering the huge stakes, there is no reason they could not report on the studies with a tentative critical eye, just as the researchers who responded to my query did. And given the kind of rampant speculation that regularly peppers mainstream news in the United States, caution is probably not the main factor here. It is more likely that this is yet another example of the U.S. media’s complicity when it comes to America’s wars.

As long as the U.S. press continues to ignore the issue, the U.S. government will feel free to do the same, and the chances of making much progress on the interrelated fronts of scientific investigation, international law, and policy will remain slim.

Illusory Visions of a Post-American Iraq

The current silence of the U.S. press on the health crisis in Fallujah reflects an understandable, though problematic, desire to leave behind a shameful chapter in the history of U.S. foreign policy. If we give in to that desire, we risk losing sight of what is actually happening in Iraq right now. This has implications not only for how we understand the ongoing health crisis in Fallujah but also for how we understand the current and future role of the United States in Iraq more broadly.

Since Obama’s election, coverage of Iraq has followed the administration’s public emphasis on the drawing down of the war. Following the announcement in October of a full withdrawal of U.S. troops by the end of the year, reports in major U.S. newspapers have focused on issues of security in Iraq after the U.S. military’s departure from the country. On November 6, for example, The New York Times ran a front-page story with the title, “Leaving Iraq, U.S. Fears New Surge of Qaeda Terror.” This echoed a news analysis piece published two weeks earlier, which focused on the scaling back of plans to build huge U.S. consulates in politically and economically important cities in Iraq.

This picture of an Iraq emptied of U.S. influence is illusory. In the end, the neocon dream of Iraq as a U.S. client state didn’t come true. But long after December 31, 2011, the United States will continue to have a significant diplomatic and military presence there. Although the Iraqi parliament rejected the U.S. proposal to allow 5-10,000 U.S. troops to remain in Iraq, Obama and Prime Minister Maliki are scheduled to meet in December to continue discussing the issue. Meanwhile, the United States has already established an agreement to keep at least that many troops in neighboring Kuwait. Within Iraq, there will be private security contractors, and Baghdad will be host to the largest embassy in the world – the main base for an army of diplomatic personnel that will carry out security and covert intelligence operations throughout the country.

For Americans who opposed the war, visions of a post-American Iraq are especially tempting. But they are also deceptive. In addition to sparking our consciousness about the health and environmental impact of the war, the ongoing crisis in Fallujah should wake us up to the fact that in multiple ways — most of which are currently ignored or suppressed by the U.S. spin machine — the legacy of the U.S. war in Iraq is far from over.

Source / Foreign Policy in Focus

Fluxed Up World

Our National Leaders Are Now Making War On Us

2011-11-26T09:04:00.000-08:00

Occupy Wall Street protester Brandon Watts lies injured on the ground after clashes with police over the eviction of OWS from Zuccotti Park. Photograph: Allison Joyce/Getty Images.
The shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy
By Naomi Wolf / November 25, 2011

The violent police assaults across the US are no coincidence. Occupy has touched the third rail of our political class's venality

US citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality in a coordinated crackdown against peaceful OWS protesters in cities across the nation this past week. An elderly woman was pepper-sprayed in the face; the scene of unresisting, supine students at UC Davis being pepper-sprayed by phalanxes of riot police went viral online; images proliferated of young women – targeted seemingly for their gender – screaming, dragged by the hair by police in riot gear; and the pictures of a young man, stunned and bleeding profusely from the head, emerged in the record of the middle-of-the-night clearing of Zuccotti Park.

But just when Americans thought we had the picture – was this crazy police and mayoral overkill, on a municipal level, in many different cities? – the picture darkened. The National Union of Journalists and the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a Freedom of Information Act request to investigate possible federal involvement with law enforcement practices that appeared to target journalists. The New York Times reported that "New York cops have arrested, punched, whacked, shoved to the ground and tossed a barrier at reporters and photographers" covering protests. Reporters were asked by NYPD to raise their hands to prove they had credentials: when many dutifully did so, they were taken, upon threat of arrest, away from the story they were covering, and penned far from the site in which the news was unfolding. Other reporters wearing press passes were arrested and roughed up by cops, after being – falsely – informed by police that "It is illegal to take pictures on the sidewalk."

In New York, a state supreme court justice and a New York City council member were beaten up; in Berkeley, California, one of our greatest national poets, Robert Hass, was beaten with batons. The picture darkened still further when Wonkette and Washingtonsblog.com reported that the Mayor of Oakland acknowledged that the Department of Homeland Security had participated in an 18-city mayor conference call advising mayors on "how to suppress" Occupy protests.

To Europeans, the enormity of this breach may not be obvious at first. Our system of government prohibits the creation of a federalised police force, and forbids federal or militarised involvement in municipal peacekeeping.

I noticed that rightwing pundits and politicians on the TV shows on which I was appearing were all on-message against OWS. Journalist Chris Hayes reported on a leaked memo that revealed lobbyists vying for an $850,000 contract to smear Occupy. Message coordination of this kind is impossible without a full-court press at the top. This was clearly not simply a case of a freaked-out mayors', city-by-city municipal overreaction against mess in the parks and cranky campers. As the puzzle pieces fit together, they began to show coordination against OWS at the highest national levels.

Why this massive mobilisation against these not-yet-fully-articulated, unarmed, inchoate people? After all, protesters against the war in Iraq, Tea Party rallies and others have all proceeded without this coordinated crackdown. Is it really the camping? As I write, two hundred young people, with sleeping bags, suitcases and even folding chairs, are still camping out all night and day outside of NBC on public sidewalks – under the benevolent eye of an NYPD cop – awaiting Saturday Night Live tickets, so surely the camping is not the issue. I was still deeply puzzled as to why OWS, this hapless, hopeful band, would call out a violent federal response.

That is, until I found out what it was that OWS actually wanted.

The mainstream media was declaring continually "OWS has no message". Frustrated, I simply asked them. I began soliciting online "What is it you want?" answers from Occupy. In the first 15 minutes, I received 100 answers. These were truly eye-opening.

The No 1 agenda item: get the money out of politics. Most often cited was legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets boundless sums enter the campaign process. No 2: reform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being to restore the Glass-Steagall Act – the Depression-era law, done away with by President Clinton, that separates investment banks from commercial banks. This law would correct the conditions for the recent crisis, as investment banks could not take risks for profit that create kale derivatives out of thin air, and wipe out the commercial and savings banks.

No 3 was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.

When I saw this list – and especially the last agenda item – the scales fell from my eyes. Of course, these unarmed people would be having the shit kicked out of them.

For the terrible insight to take away from news that the Department of Homeland Security coordinated a violent crackdown is that the DHS does not freelance. The DHS cannot say, on its own initiative, "we are going after these scruffy hippies". Rather, DHS is answerable up a chain of command: first, to New York Representative Peter King, head of the House homeland security subcommittee, who naturally is influenced by his fellow congressmen and women's wishes and interests. And the DHS answers directly, above King, to the president (who was conveniently in Australia at the time).

In other words, for the DHS to be on a call with mayors, the logic of its chain of command and accountability implies that congressional overseers, with the blessing of the White House, told the DHS to authorise mayors to order their police forces – pumped up with millions of dollars of hardware and training from the DHS – to make war on peaceful citizens.

But wait: why on earth would Congress advise violent militarised reactions against its own peaceful constituents? The answer is straightforward: in recent years, members of Congress have started entering the system as members of the middle class (or upper middle class) – but they are leaving DC privy to vast personal wealth, as we see from the "scandal" of presidential contender Newt Gingrich's having been paid $1.8m for a few hours' "consulting" to special interests. The inflated fees to lawmakers who turn lobbyists are common knowledge, but the notion that congressmen and women are legislating their own companies' profits is less widely known – and if the books were to be opened, they would surely reveal corruption on a Wall Street spectrum. Indeed, we do already know that congresspeople are massively profiting from trading on non-public information they have on companies about which they are legislating – a form of insider trading that sent Martha Stewart to jail.

Since Occupy is heavily surveilled and infiltrated, it is likely that the DHS and police informers are aware, before Occupy itself is, what its emerging agenda is going to look like. If legislating away lobbyists' privileges to earn boundless fees once they are close to the legislative process, reforming the banks so they can't suck money out of fake derivatives products, and, most critically, opening the books on a system that allowed members of Congress to profit personally – and immensely – from their own legislation, are two beats away from the grasp of an electorally organised Occupy movement … well, you will call out the troops on stopping that advance.

So, when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence. It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organised suppression against the people they are supposed to represent. Occupy has touched the third rail: personal congressional profits streams. Even though they are, as yet, unaware of what the implications of their movement are, those threatened by the stirrings of their dreams of reform are not.

Sadly, Americans this week have come one step closer to being true brothers and sisters of the protesters in Tahrir Square. Like them, our own national leaders, who likely see their own personal wealth under threat from transparency and reform, are now making war upon us.

Source / Guardian

Fluxed Up World

A Lesson in Stopping the Police State

2011-11-19T17:15:00.000-08:00

Video Spreads of UC Davis Cops Pepper Spraying Occupy Students
Demonstrators were protesting dismantling of encampment

A video of police in riot gear pepper spraying demonstrators is spreading after 10 Occupy protesters were arrested on the University of California, Davis campus Friday, Sacramento NBC station KCRA reported.

The demonstrators were protesting the dismantling of the "Occupy UC Davis" encampment that was set up in the school's quad area.

"Police came and brutalized them and tore their tents down and all that stuff. It was really scary. It felt like there was anarchy everywhere," said student Hisham Alihbob.

Police told Sacramento's KTXL TV station that the students were given until 3 p.m. Friday to remove their tents from the campus. When students refused, police arrived at the given time. Students sat down cross-legged and locked arms when cops showed up and the pepper spraying began.

UC Davis Police Chief Annette Spicuzza said it would not be safe or sustainable for demonstrators to camp in the quad.

"It's not safe for multiple reasons," Spicuzza said.

At least one woman left by ambulance for treatment of chemical burns.

"We just successfully booted the police off campus in a non-violent way," Chris Wong, a student protester who said he was speaking for himself, not the Occupy group, told the Sacramento Bee.

Wong said he was one of the students sprayed, but he looked down and didn't get a full dose. He said students then circled the police and tried to hold their ground. The police eventually left.

Source / MSNBC

Fluxed Up World

Signs of a Sick Society: Schools That Look and Act Like Prisons

2011-11-17T17:50:00.000-08:00

Metal detector at a school in Boston. Photo: Seth Tisue.
The 'School to Prison Pipeline': Education Under Arrest
By Kanya D'Almeida / November 16, 2011

Metal detectors. Teams of drug-sniffing dogs. Armed guards and riot police. Forbiddingly high walls topped with barbed wire.

Such descriptions befit a prison or perhaps a high-security checkpoint in a war zone. But in the U.S., these scenes of surveillance and control are most visible in public schools, where in some areas, education is becoming increasingly synonymous with incarceration.

The United Nations, along with various human rights bodies and international courts, have recognised that "free education is the cornerstone of success and social development for young people".

The landmark Brown v. Board of Education court ruling, which officially desegregated U.S. schools in 1954, stated, "It is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if (he/she is) denied the opportunity of an education."

Yet hundreds of thousands of children in the U.S. are being systematically stripped of their right to education and transferred from the schoolhouse to the jailhouse.

Knowledge v. test scores

A 2011 report by the New York Civil Liberties Union found that 3.3 million students were suspended between 2005-2006.

Analysing data from the U.S. Department of Education (DOE), the report also found that half a million students in New York City alone have served suspensions in the last decade, resulting in the loss of 2.2 million days of education. These numbers reflect the combined impacts of zero tolerance policies and ‘high-stakes’ testing, which have created an education system that is based less on endowing students with knowledge and life skills and more on achieving the test scores required to secure state and federal funding. "High stakes testing has led to high stress classrooms, where teachers are under immense pressure to raise test scores and thus take a harder line on misbehaving students," Jim Freeman, director of ‘ending the schoolhouse to jailhouse track’ at the Advancement Project, told IPS. "Schools use harsh disciplinary measure s to exclude so called "low- scoring" students (through suspensions, expulsions or arrests), to make overall test scores look better – every school arresting young people is falling prey to that impulse," he added. "This overemphasis on testing has changed the classroom environment and school culture: it has made it difficult to engage youth, and watered down the curriculum so much that students are more likely to be disruptive, which loops back to harsh disciplinary measures." "This is a downward spiral that has turned schools into hostile, alienating environments and justified to an extent the increased use of police in educational institutions." As a result of these policies, the number of out of school suspensions in Chicago quadrupled in just six years; 16,000 young people in Florida and 10,000 students in Colorado were arrested or referred to the department of juvenile justice in 2010; and school-based arrests in Pennsylvania have tripled since 2003.

Along with tough disciplinary measures such as "zero tolerance policies", the last two decades have seen a huge influx of law enforcement officers into playgrounds and classrooms.

Statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) indicate that the number of school resource officers (SROs) increased by 38 percent over the last ten years, even while reported incidents of theft and violence in schools are at their lowest since the National Center for Education Statistics first gathered comprehensive data in 1992.

A report released Tuesday by the Justice Policy Institute (JPI) detailing the extent and impact of policing in public schools confirmed what education and justice experts have argued for years: increased law enforcement does not make schools safer for students or foster better learning.

In fact, the report found that police presence in schools devastates the learning environment, increases the number of arrests and referrals of youth into the juvenile "justice" system, and disrupts a child’s educational process by favouring suspension and expulsion over communal learning.

"Police in schools undermine the education of thousands of students each year," Amanda Petteruti, lead author of JPI’s report, told IPS.

"The impact of arresting and incarcerating students is significant: research has shown that within a year of reenrolling after spending time confined, two-thirds to three- fourths of formerly incarcerated youth withdraw or drop out of school. After four years, less than 15 percent of these youth had completed secondary education," she stressed.

"Even contact with courts increases the chances that a high school student will drop out," she added.

Children under siege

According to ‘Derailed! The Schoolhouse to Jailhouse Track’, a detailed study undertaken by the Advancement Project, a six year-old student in Palm Beach County, Florida was arrested back in 2003 for ‘trespassing on school property’, while walking through the schoolyard on his way home.

In Indianola, Mississippi, elementary school students have been hauled off to jail for talking during an assembly.

Two elementary school kids from Irvington, New Jersey were charged with ‘terroristic threatening’ for playing cops and robbers – with a paper plane.

In 2007, school security cameras captured footage of two guards in Palmdale, California assaulting a 16-year-old girl and breaking her arm for dropping a piece of cake on the floor. Both armed guards pushed the high-school student down on a table, throwing racial slurs like "nappy-head" at her while twisting her arm.

These stories, unfortunately, are not exceptional, but have become the norm in hundreds of public schools across the country. Most of the thousands of arrests and referrals that happen each year are for minor infractions, misdemeanors or perceived 'threats' such as those outlined above, based on the subjective opinions of teachers or security guards.

Students of color often bear the brunt of these punitive policies.

"Data from (think tanks) suggest that students of color are disproportionately affected by the presence of SROs," Petteruti told IPS, particularly "in districts like Pinellas County, Florida, South Carolina, Colorado and, according to the ACLU in Connecticut, East Hartford".

The Advancement Project also found that it was 58 percent more likely for police to be called into schools whose student body was majority black, Latino, Native American or Asian American.

"Data from the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) indicates that students of color are more likely to be suspended than white students, and are more likely to go to schools where there are more law enforcement responses. Students of color are more also more likely to come into contact with police and surveillance in schools," Petteruti said.

The severe policing of urban schools in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color is an extension of a nationwide racially biased strategy that hounds minorities and swallows them up in burgeoning prisons. The strategy has roots in the ‘get tough on crime’ movements of the 1980s and early 1990s.

According to the Advancement Project, "the media and political world focused on a growing crime problem and a few brutal crimes to create a new type of criminal, the 'superpredator'.

"Superpredators were brutal, conscienceless, incorrigible and, most frighteningly, they were young. They were presented as the products of permissive single-parent families, poverty and a lenient judicial system," it continued.

"The public and political system responded with outrage and with draconian changes to juvenile law - boot camps, and a zero tolerance attitude that made even the slightest offence a crime.

Source / IPS (Inter Press Service)

Fluxed Up World

Our Elites Can Destroy, But They Cannot Build

2011-11-15T20:09:00.000-08:00

Members of the Occupy Wall Street movement clash with New York Police Department officers after being removed from Zuccotti Park in New York, November 15, 2011. Lucas Jackson/Reuters.
This Is What Revolution Looks Like
By Chris Hedges / November 15, 2011

Welcome to the revolution. Our elites have exposed their hand. They have nothing to offer. They can destroy but they cannot build. They can repress but they cannot lead. They can steal but they cannot share. They can talk but they cannot speak. They are as dead and useless to us as the water-soaked books, tents, sleeping bags, suitcases, food boxes and clothes that were tossed by sanitation workers Tuesday morning into garbage trucks in New York City. They have no ideas, no plans and no vision for the future.

Our decaying corporate regime has strutted in Portland, Oakland and New York with their baton-wielding cops into a fool’s paradise. They think they can clean up “the mess”—always employing the language of personal hygiene and public security—by making us disappear. They think we will all go home and accept their corporate nation, a nation where crime and government policy have become indistinguishable, where nothing in America, including the ordinary citizen, is deemed by those in power worth protecting or preserving, where corporate oligarchs awash in hundreds of millions of dollars are permitted to loot and pillage the last shreds of collective wealth, human capital and natural resources, a nation where the poor do not eat and workers do not work, a nation where the sick die and children go hungry, a nation where the consent of the governed and the voice of the people is a cruel joke.

Get back into your cages, they are telling us. Return to watching the lies, absurdities, trivia and celebrity gossip we feed you in 24-hour cycles on television. Invest your emotional energy in the vast system of popular entertainment. Run up your credit card debt. Pay your loans. Be thankful for the scraps we toss. Chant back to us our phrases about democracy, greatness and freedom. Vote in our rigged political theater. Send your young men and women to fight and die in useless, unwinnable wars that provide corporations with huge profits. Stand by mutely as our bipartisan congressional supercommittee, either through consensus or cynical dysfunction, plunges you into a society without basic social services including unemployment benefits. Pay for the crimes of Wall Street.

The rogues’ gallery of Wall Street crooks, such as Lloyd Blankfein at Goldman Sachs, Howard Milstein at New York Private Bank & Trust, the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, the Koch brothers and Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase & Co., no doubt think it’s over. They think it is back to the business of harvesting what is left of America to swell their personal and corporate fortunes. But they no longer have any concept of what is happening around them. They are as mystified and clueless about these uprisings as the courtiers at Versailles or in the Forbidden City who never understood until the very end that their world was collapsing. The billionaire mayor of New York, enriched by a deregulated Wall Street, is unable to grasp why people would spend two months sleeping in an open park and marching on banks. He says he understands that the Occupy protests are “cathartic” and “entertaining,” as if demonstrating against the pain of being homeless and unemployed is a form of therapy or diversion, but that it is time to let the adults handle the affairs of state. Democratic and Republican mayors, along with their parties, have sold us out. But for them this is the beginning of the end.

Oakland cops in action.

The historian Crane Brinton in his book “Anatomy of a Revolution” laid out the common route to revolution. The preconditions for successful revolution, Brinton argued, are discontent that affects nearly all social classes, widespread feelings of entrapment and despair, unfulfilled expectations, a unified solidarity in opposition to a tiny power elite, a refusal by scholars and thinkers to continue to defend the actions of the ruling class, an inability of government to respond to the basic needs of citizens, a steady loss of will within the power elite itself and defections from the inner circle, a crippling isolation that leaves the power elite without any allies or outside support and, finally, a financial crisis. Our corporate elite, as far as Brinton was concerned, has amply fulfilled these preconditions. But it is Brinton’s next observation that is most worth remembering. Revolutions always begin, he wrote, by making impossible demands that if the government met would mean the end of the old configurations of power. The second stage, the one we have entered now, is the unsuccessful attempt by the power elite to quell the unrest and discontent through physical acts of repression.

I have seen my share of revolts, insurgencies and revolutions, from the guerrilla conflicts in the 1980s in Central America to the civil wars in Algeria, the Sudan and Yemen, to the Palestinian uprising to the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania as well as the wars in the former Yugoslavia. George Orwell wrote that all tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but that once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force. We have now entered the era of naked force. The vast million-person bureaucracy of the internal security and surveillance state will not be used to stop terrorism but to try and stop us.

Despotic regimes in the end collapse internally. Once the foot soldiers who are ordered to carry out acts of repression, such as the clearing of parks or arresting or even shooting demonstrators, no longer obey orders, the old regime swiftly crumbles. When the aging East German dictator Erich Honecker was unable to get paratroopers to fire on protesting crowds in Leipzig, the regime was finished. The same refusal to employ violence doomed the communist governments in Prague and Bucharest. I watched in December 1989 as the army general that the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu had depended on to crush protests condemned him to death on Christmas Day. Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak lost power once they could no longer count on the security forces to fire into crowds.

The process of defection among the ruling class and security forces is slow and often imperceptible. These defections are advanced through a rigid adherence to nonviolence, a refusal to respond to police provocation and a verbal respect for the blue-uniformed police, no matter how awful they can be while wading into a crowd and using batons as battering rams against human bodies. The resignations of Oakland Mayor Jean Quan’s deputy, Sharon Cornu, and the mayor’s legal adviser and longtime friend, Dan Siegel, in protest over the clearing of the Oakland encampment are some of the first cracks in the edifice. “Support Occupy Oakland, not the 1% and its government facilitators,” Siegel tweeted after his resignation.

There were times when I entered the ring as a boxer and knew, as did the spectators, that I was woefully mismatched. Ringers, experienced boxers in need of a tuneup or a little practice, would go to the clubs where semi-pros fought, lie about their long professional fight records, and toy with us. Those fights became about something other than winning. They became about dignity and self-respect. You fought to say something about who you were as a human being. These bouts were punishing, physically brutal and demoralizing. You would get knocked down and stagger back up. You would reel backward from a blow that felt like a cement block. You would taste the saltiness of your blood on your lips. Your vision would blur. Your ribs, the back of your neck and your abdomen would ache. Your legs would feel like lead. But the longer you held on, the more the crowd in the club turned in your favor. No one, even you, thought you could win. But then, every once in a while, the ringer would get overconfident. He would get careless. He would become a victim of his own hubris. And you would find deep within yourself some new burst of energy, some untapped strength and, with the fury of the dispossessed, bring him down. I have not put on a pair of boxing gloves for 30 years. But I felt this twinge of euphoria again in my stomach this morning, this utter certainty that the impossible is possible, this realization that the mighty will fall.

[Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.]

Source / Truthdig

Fluxed Up World

Makana Speaks Truth to Power, for 45 Minutes

2011-11-14T20:44:00.000-08:00

Source / YesLab

Fluxed Up World

Don't Kid Yourself - This Is How Capitalism Works

2011-11-13T11:22:00.000-08:00

If you have any misconception that this is not exactly how every aspect of your life works, it is time to shed that misconception now. Your job, no matter what you do, is to demonstrate your productivity for the system, be it with production numbers, improvements in efficiency, or increasing arrests. Richard Jehn

Source / YouTube

Fluxed Up World

There Have Been Fearful Governments Forever

2011-11-12T15:20:00.000-08:00

Kayford mountain in West Virginia is demolished by 'mountaintop removal': the historic site of Blair Mountain is under similar threat. Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images.
Blair Mountain, West Virginia and Labor's Living History
By Clancy Sigal / November 11, 2011

Ninety years on, the coal seams of West Virginia are a battlefield once more: for working people, the struggle goes on

My first time in Westminister Abbey, London, I was taken inside by a coal miner friend who was down from South Wales for a brief London holiday. Suitably awed, we gawked at Poets' Corner, the Coronation Throne, the tombs and effigies of prelates, admirals, generals and prime ministers – England in all its majesty and pageantry. Gazing at the Gothic Revival columns, transepts and amazing fan-vaulted ceiling, my friend said, "Impressive, isn't it? Of course, it's their culture not ours."

Our culture – class conscious, bolshie, renegade – rarely lay in plaques and statues, hardly ever in school texts, but mainly in orally transmitted memories passed down generation to generation, in songs and stories. "Labor history" has become a province of passionately committed specialists and working-class autodidacts, keepers of the flame of a human drama at least as fascinating and blood-stirring as the dead royal souls in the Abbey. It belongs to all of us who claim it.

I'm lucky because my family's secular religion is union. They include cousin Charlie (shipbuilders), cousin Davie (electrical workers), cousin Bernie (printers), my mother (ladies' garment) and father (butchers and barbers), and cousin Fred (San Quentin prisoners). Establishment history may have its Battle of Trafalgar and Gallipoli; we have Haymarket Square, Ludlow, Centralia and Cripple Creek: labor's battle sites, more often slaughtering defeats than victories.

Until recently, a lot of this history casually disappeared down Orwell's "memory hole", forgotten, censored or ignored. But with the spectacular emergence of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and fight-backs in states like Wisconsin and Ohio, young people especially seem to be regaining and reinvigorating a living history. Memory stirs.

This contest for memory is a class struggle by other means.

Half our story – the half where unions created the modern middle class – is written in the pedestrian language of contracts, negotiations, wages and hours laws … the nuts and bolts of deals. After all, unions exist to make a deal.

But the other half is inscribed in the whizzing bullets, shootouts and pistol duels of out-and-out combat. Labor has its own Lexington and Gettysburg. And none more bloodily inscribed than in the hills and hollows of the West Virginia coal fields.

Members of Chafin's army rest during a lull in the fighting at Blair Mountain September 10, 1921.

The 1921 five-day Battle of Blair Mountain was the largest domestic insurrection in the nation's post-Civil War history, pitting 15,000 armed "redneck" miners, with their fierce and family passions, against an army of imported gun-thugs, strikebreakers, federal troops and even a US army bomber, hired by the coal companies who owned the state and federal governments and believed they owned the human beings who dug the raw coal.

The Blair Mountain shootout had been preceded and provoked by the "Matewan massacre" when a local sheriff and his deputies, sympathetic to the young miners' union, took on the coal company's hired gorillas who were evicting pro-union miners and their families from their shanties. (See John Sayles's film, Matewan.) Enraged miners marched on to Blair Mountain in the next county.

When the smoke cleared over Blair mountain, along an eight-mile front reminiscent of Flanders trenches, a hundred on both sides had been killed with many more wounded. Outgunned and under a presidential order, the miners, led by the fabulously named Bill Blizzard, took their squirrel-hunting rifles and went home – to face indictments for treason and murder, drawn up by the coal owners and their bought judges. Sympathetic juries freed most of them. (For further interest: Bill Blizzard's son, the late William C, has a book, When Miners March.)

The beautiful, heartbreaking thing is that today the Battle of Blair Mountain goes on. With protest hikes, films and pamphlets, the campaign to save the mountain – again – sets local miners and their families and friends, including archaeologists and historians, against West Virginia coal owners like notorious Massey Energy, still being investigated by the FBI for possible criminal negligence in the deaths of 29 miners in the Upper Big Branch disaster of 2010.

A billion dollars of undug coal inside the mountain is at stake. The world is in the middle of a coal rush. Dynamite is cheaper than people. Incorrigible companies like Massey aim to blow up Blair, via "mountaintop removal" (aka "strip mining on steroids"), to get at the coal and, while they're at it, destroy the people's battleground, the ecology and any inheritance of resistance.

It is a fight over memory and honor, with very practical consequences for the coal valleys, its displaced families, poisoned rivers, contaminated communities. For a while, it looked as if the miners and their union had won a great victory by getting Blair Mountain on the National Register of Historic Places. But with a Democratic state governor and a Democratic president refusing to take sides, the coal owners – who still control West Virginia – at the last minute suddenly found some landowners to object. With the connivance of Obama's departments of interior and environment and the Park Service, Blair Mountain was de-registered and thrown open to the pillagers.

Coal mining is where open class warfare is often at its sharpest, most visible and violent. Something about the job underground, and the shrewd tactical skills it takes not to get yourself killed by roof falls and methane gas explosions, binds miner to miner in what the military likes to call "unit cohesion". Historically, miners worldwide have been in the advance guard of social progress. It's one reason why coal companies in America, and Mrs Thatcher in Britain, always despised the miners and became obsessed with breaking their union.

Labor does not have its Westminister Abbey and probably shouldn't. Museums are no substitute for "talking union".
© 2011 Clancy Sigal
Clancy Sigal

Clancy Sigal, is a screenwriter and novelist in Los Angeles. Chicago-born, he has worked precincts for Democratic candidates since his teens. He emigrated to the UK during what David Caute calls the 'Great Fear' and returned to America after the 1984 miners' strike. He is a reformed Fleet Street journalist

Source / Guardian

Fluxed Up World

Beating up the Wall Street Bull

2011-11-10T17:43:00.000-08:00

Wall Street bull survives attack by matador; clowns arrested
By Andy Bichlbaum / November 9, 2011

CLOWNS ARRESTED IN NEAR-SUCCESSFUL ATTACK ON WALL STREET BULL
Matador, bull both survive to fight another day

Earlier today, a small group of Occupy Wall Street activists engaged in a near-successful corrida against the Wall Street Bull.

The incident began when two clowns, Hannah Morgan and Louis Jargow, scaled the steel barricades protecting the landmark. The clowns began spanking and climbing the beast, traditional ways of coaxing a bull into anger in preparation for a Castilian corrida, or bullfight.

Within seconds, police officers grabbed both clowns by their colorful shirts and wrestled one of them (Jargow) to the ground. The other (Morgan) continued to play the harmonica until an officer removed it from her mouth.

With the officers thus occupied, a matador in full traje de luces leapt onto the hood of the patrol vehicle parked in front of the bull and boldly presented his blood-red cape to the beast.

"I wondered whether I, neophyte matador, could bring down this behemoth, world-famous for charging towards profit while trampling underfoot the average worker," said the OWS activist/torero whose first fight this was. "Come what may, I knew I must try."

Police officers took no notice of the matador, occupied as they were with the clowns.

"This bull has ruined millions of lives!" wailed clown Jargow as he lay on the ground face-down. "Yet he and his accomplices have been rewarded with billions of our tax dollars—and we, here to put a stop to it all, are thrown to the ground. ¡Un escándalo!"

Both clowns were charged with disorderly conduct and released an hour later; they returned to Zuccotti Park to great fanfare. The Wall Street bull continues to rage.

Photos: www.yeslab.org/bull#photos
Video: www.yeslab.org/bull#video
Contact: Mary Notari, 443-540-6865, bull@yeslab.org

Source / YesLab

Fluxed Up World

As the US Slowly Loses Its Sense of Self to Fear

2011-10-26T17:48:00.000-07:00

Occupy Oakland & Mercenaries of the Oligarchy:
The 99% vs. The Iron Heel
By Nima Shirazi / October 26, 2011

"We are in power. Nobody will deny it. By virtue of that power we shall remain in power...We have no words to waste on you. When you reach out your vaunted strong hands for our palaces and purpled ease, we will show you what strength is. In roar of shell and shrapnel and in whine of machine-guns will our answer be couched. We will grind you revolutionists down under our heel, and we shall walk upon your faces. The world is ours, we are its lords, and ours it shall remain. As for the host of labor, it has been in the dirt since history began, and I read history aright. And in the dirt it shall remain so long as I and mine and those that come after us have the power. There is the word. It is the king of words--Power. Not God, not Mammon, but Power. Pour it over your tongue till it tingles with it. Power." -- Mr. Wickson, The Iron Heel by Jack London (1908), chapter 4

Jack London didn't just write tales of the Klondike Gold Rush and canine adventure stories. Sometimes he foretold the future. The above quote, written over a century ago and spoken by an aristocratic one-percenter in response to the rising tide of anti-plutocratic sentiment among the working class, is taken from London's dystopic novel, The Iron Heel.

The novel depicts a society of unregulated and unrestrained capitalism; a society of the impoverished and disenfranchised, the unemployed and the unrepresented, at the mercy of a tiny but ruthlessly aggressive corporate elite that controls the government. London describes the perception of "the great mass of the people [who] still persisted in the belief that they ruled the country by virtue of their ballots," when "[i]n reality, the country was ruled by what were called political machines. At first the machine bosses charged the master capitalists extortionate tolls for legislation; but in a short time the master capitalists found it cheaper to own the political machines themselves and to hire the machine bosses."

Furthermore, London delves into the deluded arrogance of the wealthy, stock-holding plutocrats, explaining, "They believed absolutely that their conduct was right. There was no question about it, no discussion. They were convinced that they were the saviours of society, and that it was they who made happiness for the many. And they drew pathetic pictures of what would be the sufferings of the working class were it not for the employment that they, and they alone, by their wisdom, provided for it." Journalists are excoriated for their willingness, for fear of losing their jobs, "to twist truth at the command of [their] employers, who, in turn, obey the behests of the corporations."

The revolutionary hero of the book, Ernest Everhard, at one point addresses an exclusive gathering of the local aristocracy known as The Philomath Club, consisting of "the wealthiest in the community, and the strongest-minded of the wealthy, with, of course, a sprinkling of scholars to give it intellectual tone." Everhard tells the crowd,

"No other conclusion is possible than that the capitalist class has mismanaged, that you have mismanaged, my masters, that you have criminally and selfishly mismanaged...You have failed in your management. You have made a shambles of civilization. You have been blind and greedy."

The Iron Heel preceded Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here by about two and a half decades and George Orwell's 1984 by over 40 years. It anticipated the rise of totalitarianism in Europe over a decade before Mussolini's Blackshirts marched on Rome. In his Introduction to the 1980 edition of the book, Rutgers professor H. Bruce Franklin explains that London essentially defined Fascism before it even officially existed as "the form that the capitalist state assumes when the oligarchy feels that its economic and political power is seriously threatened by working class revolution."

Franklin proceeds to catalogue the brutal and authoritarian actions and abuses of The Iron Heel's ruling elite as envisioned by its prophetic author:
London foresees: the creation of attractive suburbs for the relatively privileged strata of the working class while the central cities are turned into what he calls "ghettoes" for the masses of unemployed and menial laborers, shoved into the darkest depths of human misery; the deliberate economic subversion of public education in order to spread illiteracy and ignorance; adequate food, health care, and housing priced above the reach of more and more people; the ubiquitous secret police infiltrating all organizations opposing the government; the establishment of a permanent mercenary army; the government conspiring in real and phony bomb plots, in the suppression of books and the destruction of printing presses, in witch hunts aimed at dissident labor leaders, professors, and authors, in destroying the reputations of some of its opponents, imprisoning many others and murdering the few it finds too formidable; spontaneous mass rebellions of the downtrodden people of the central cities; urban guerrillas battling the government's army of mercenaries and police in the canyons of the cities.

Clearly, from historic income inequality and over 15% of Americans living in poverty (that's 46.2 million people) to massive budget cuts for public education to FBI infiltration of peace groups to the ever-expanding surveillance state to the stifling of free speech to spooky terrorist plots allegedly thwarted by the very agencies that planned and funded them in the first place, Jack London was on to something. To say the least. The Occupy Wall Street movement around the globe is a testament to our new reality, as presaged by one of our renowned writers.

The Iron Heel is set primarily in California's Bay Area, London's home turf. Yesterday morning, Tuesday October 25, 2012, the non-violent, anti-corporatist protesters occupying two parks in Oakland met their own city's iron heel, jackboots in full riot-gear.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported, "Under cover of darkness early Tuesday, hundreds of police swept into Oakland's Occupy Wall Street protest, firing tear gas and beanbag rounds before clearing out an encampment that demonstrators had hoped would stir a revolution," continuing, "Officers and sheriff's deputies from across the San Francisco Bay area surrounded the plaza in front of City Hall at around 5 a.m. and closed in. Eighty-five people were arrested, mostly on suspicion of misdemeanor unlawful assembly and illegal camping, police said." Reflecting on the raid and arrests which were carried out at the behest Oakland mayor Jean Quan, interim Police Chief Howard Jordan said, "I'm very pleased with the way things went."

In response, thousands of protesters gathered later that same day and faced down a phalanx of Oakland's ~~Finest~~ Fascist, who responded by repeatedly attacking the crowd with more tear gas, batons, rubber bullets, beanbags, concussion grenades, flashbombs, and sound cannons. At one point, Oakland authorities, claiming the protest was "an unlawful assembly," issued this threat: "If you refuse to move now, you will be arrested. If you refuse to move now, chemical agents will be used" (see here) and later warned those peacefully standing their ground, "If you have respiratory problems now is the time to leave." They weren't kidding.

Despite protester's solidarity appeals advancing riot police that "You are the 99%," Oakland forces carried out the bidding of the government on behalf of its Wall Street donors. Just as the NYPD, which last year accepted a massive $4.6 million donation from J.P. Morgan Chase via the New York City Police Foundation, the OPD has demonstrated its willingness to become the private army of the wealthy, abrogating free speech, freedom of assembly, and civil rights in order to crack down on peaceful protests against an unfair system. As London wrote, "hired fighting men of the capitalists...ultimately developed into the Mercenaries of the Oligarchy."

Meanwhile, as gas clouds wafted through the Oakland air, just across the bay in San Francisco, President Barack Obama was at a reelection fundraiser at the W Hotel for which guests shelled out at least $5,000 to attend. It was the latest stop on one of the president's "busiest donor outreach trips of the season." Last week, the Washington Post reported that "despite frosty relations with the titans of Wall Street, President Obama has still managed to raise far more money this year from the financial and banking sector than Mitt Romney or any other Republican presidential candidate."

It remains to be seen whether Obama addresses the police brutality and stifling of dissent that occurred just a few miles from where he dined with his donors, especially in light of what he had to say about the post-election protests and police response in Iran in mid-2009: "We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people." Earlier this year, Obama recalled what he termed the "peaceful protests...in the streets of Tehran, where the government brutalized women and men, and threw innocent people into jail."

In the speech he delivered upon accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Obama noted his apparent belief that "peace is unstable where citizens are denied the right to speak freely" or "assemble without fear." He affirmed his support of "the hundreds of thousands who have marched silently through the streets of Iran," continuing, "It is telling that the leaders of these governments fear the aspirations of their own people more than the power of any other nation. And it is the responsibility of all free people and free nations to make clear to these movements that hope and history are on their side."

Just last month, in front of the United Nations General Assembly, the president stated, "The Syrian people have shown dignity and courage in their pursuit of justice — protesting peacefully, standing silently in the streets, dying for the same values that this institution is supposed to stand for. And the question for us is clear: Will we stand with the Syrian people, or with their oppressors?"

One can only wonder if Obama will heed the words he spoke at the UN in September 2009, when he told world leaders, "The test of our leadership will not be the degree to which we feed the fears and old hatreds of our people. True leadership will not be measured by the ability to muzzle dissent, or to intimidate and harass political opponents at home. The people of the world want change. They will not long tolerate those who are on the wrong side of history."

Will the president remember what he said at the same podium a year later? "The arc of human progress has been shaped by individuals with the freedom to assemble and by organizations outside of government that insisted upon democratic change and by free media that held the powerful accountable," he declared.

Replying to Mr. Wickson's threats of violence and repression in order to maintain the Oligarchy's stranglehold on society, Ernest Everhard, noble protagonist of The Iron Heel, declares:

"We know, and well we know by bitter experience, that no appeal for the right, for justice, for humanity, can ever touch you. Your hearts are hard as your heels with which you tread upon the faces of the poor. So we have preached power. By the power of our ballots on election day will we take your government away from you."

With the Occupy movement growing stronger, more determined, fearless and united with every tear gas canister launched and each protester beaten, pepper sprayed, and arrested, it is surely a movement that can no longer be silenced or suppressed.

As Ernest's wife, fellow revolutionary, and narrator of The Iron Heel, Avis Cunningham Everhard asserts:

"The solidarity of labor is assured, and for the first time will there be an international revolution wide as the world is wide."

[Nima Shirazi is a political commentator from New York City.]

Source / Wide Asleep in America

Fluxed Up World

Harsh Realities for Us All: Just Since the Reagan Era Has Homelessness Become Illegal

2011-10-23T10:28:00.000-07:00

Throw Them Out With the Trash: Why Homelessness Is Becoming an Occupy Wall Street Issue
By Barbara Ehrenreich / October 20, 2011

As anyone knows who has ever had to set up a military encampment or build a village from the ground up, occupations pose staggering logistical problems. Large numbers of people must be fed and kept reasonably warm and dry. Trash has to be removed; medical care and rudimentary security provided -- to which ends a dozen or more committees may toil night and day. But for the individual occupier, one problem often overshadows everything else, including job loss, the destruction of the middle class, and the reign of the 1%. And that is the single question: Where am I going to pee?

Some of the Occupy Wall Street encampments now spreading across the U.S. have access to Port-o-Potties (Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C.) or, better yet, restrooms with sinks and running water (Fort Wayne, Indiana). Others require their residents to forage on their own. At Zuccotti Park, just blocks from Wall Street, this means long waits for the restroom at a nearby Burger King or somewhat shorter ones at a Starbucks a block away. At McPherson Square in D.C., a twenty-something occupier showed me the pizza parlor where she can cop a pee during the hours it’s open, as well as the alley where she crouches late at night. Anyone with restroom-related issues -- arising from age, pregnancy, prostate problems, or irritable bowel syndrome -- should prepare to join the revolution in diapers.

Of course, political protesters do not face the challenges of urban camping alone. Homeless people confront the same issues every day: how to scrape together meals, keep warm at night by covering themselves with cardboard or tarp, and relieve themselves without committing a crime. Public restrooms are sparse in American cities -- "as if the need to go to the bathroom does not exist," travel expert Arthur Frommer once observed. And yet to yield to bladder pressure is to risk arrest. A report entitled “Criminalizing Crisis,” to be released later this month by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, recounts the following story from Wenatchee, Washington:

"Toward the end of 2010, a family of two parents and three children that had been experiencing homelessness for a year and a half applied for a 2-bedroom apartment. The day before a scheduled meeting with the apartment manager during the final stages of acquiring the lease, the father of the family was arrested for public urination. The arrest occurred at an hour when no public restrooms were available for use. Due to the arrest, the father was unable to make the appointment with the apartment manager and the property was rented out to another person. As of March 2011, the family was still homeless and searching for housing."

What the Occupy Wall Streeters are beginning to discover, and homeless people have known all along, is that most ordinary, biologically necessary activities are illegal when performed in American streets -- not just peeing, but sitting, lying down, and sleeping. While the laws vary from city to city, one of the harshest is in Sarasota, Florida, which passed an ordinance in 2005 that makes it illegal to “engage in digging or earth-breaking activities” -- that is, to build a latrine -- cook, make a fire, or be asleep and “when awakened state that he or she has no other place to live.”

It is illegal, in other words, to be homeless or live outdoors for any other reason. It should be noted, though, that there are no laws requiring cities to provide food, shelter, or restrooms for their indigent citizens.

The current prohibition on homelessness began to take shape in the 1980s, along with the ferocious growth of the financial industry (Wall Street and all its tributaries throughout the nation). That was also the era in which we stopped being a nation that manufactured much beyond weightless, invisible “financial products,” leaving the old industrial working class to carve out a livelihood at places like Wal-Mart.

As it turned out, the captains of the new “casino economy” -- the stock brokers and investment bankers -- were highly sensitive, one might say finicky, individuals, easily offended by having to step over the homeless in the streets or bypass them in commuter train stations. In an economy where a centimillionaire could turn into a billionaire overnight, the poor and unwashed were a major buzzkill. Starting with Mayor Rudy Giuliani in New York, city after city passed “broken windows” or “quality of life” ordinances making it dangerous for the homeless to loiter or, in some cases, even look “indigent,” in public spaces.

No one has yet tallied all the suffering occasioned by this crackdown -- the deaths from cold and exposure -- but “Criminalizing Crisis” offers this story about a homeless pregnant woman in Columbia, South Carolina:

"During daytime hours, when she could not be inside of a shelter, she attempted to spend time in a museum and was told to leave. She then attempted to sit on a bench outside the museum and was again told to relocate. In several other instances, still during her pregnancy, the woman was told that she could not sit in a local park during the day because she would be ‘squatting.’ In early 2011, about six months into her pregnancy, the homeless woman began to feel unwell, went to a hospital, and delivered a stillborn child."

Well before Tahrir Square was a twinkle in anyone’s eye, and even before the recent recession, homeless Americans had begun to act in their own defense, creating organized encampments, usually tent cities, in vacant lots or wooded areas. These communities often feature various elementary forms of self-governance: food from local charities has to be distributed, latrines dug, rules -- such as no drugs, weapons, or violence -- enforced. With all due credit to the Egyptian democracy movement, the Spanish indignados, and rebels all over the world, tent cities are the domestic progenitors of the American occupation movement.

There is nothing “political” about these settlements of the homeless -- no signs denouncing greed or visits from leftwing luminaries -- but they have been treated with far less official forbearance than the occupation encampments of the “American autumn.” LA’s Skid Row endures constant police harassment, for example, but when it rained, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa had ponchos distributed to nearby Occupy LA.

All over the country, in the last few years, police have moved in on the tent cities of the homeless, one by one, from Seattle to Wooster, Sacramento to Providence, in raids that often leave the former occupants without even their minimal possessions. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, last summer, a charity outreach worker explained the forcible dispersion of a local tent city by saying, “The city will not tolerate a tent city. That’s been made very clear to us. The camps have to be out of sight.”

What occupiers from all walks of life are discovering, at least every time they contemplate taking a leak, is that to be homeless in America is to live like a fugitive. The destitute are our own native-born “illegals,” facing prohibitions on the most basic activities of survival. They are not supposed to soil public space with their urine, their feces, or their exhausted bodies. Nor are they supposed to spoil the landscape with their unusual wardrobe choices or body odors. They are, in fact, supposed to die, and preferably to do so without leaving a corpse for the dwindling public sector to transport, process, and burn.

But the occupiers are not from all walks of life, just from those walks that slope downwards -- from debt, joblessness, and foreclosure -- leading eventually to pauperism and the streets. Some of the present occupiers were homeless to start with, attracted to the occupation encampments by the prospect of free food and at least temporary shelter from police harassment. Many others are drawn from the borderline-homeless “nouveau poor,” and normally encamp on friends’ couches or parents’ folding beds.

In Portland, Austin, and Philadelphia, the Occupy Wall Street movement is taking up the cause of the homeless as its own, which of course it is. Homelessness is not a side issue unconnected to plutocracy and greed. It’s where we’re all eventually headed -- the 99%, or at least the 70%, of us, every debt-loaded college grad, out-of-work school teacher, and impoverished senior -- unless this revolution succeeds.

[Barbara Ehrenreich, TomDispatch regular, is the author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (now in a 10th anniversary edition with a new afterword).]

Source / TomDispatch

Fluxed Up World

Occupy Wall Street Could Take Lessons from This

2011-10-08T14:02:00.000-07:00

Chilean demonstrators are hit by a jet of water during a rally against the public state education system in Santiago. Photograph: Ivan Aldarado/Reuters.
Chilean girls stage 'occupation' of their own school in education rights protest
By Jonathan Franklin / October 7, 2011

For five months, girls demanding free university education for all have defied police to occupy their state school

Sleeping on a tiled classroom floor, sharing cigarettes and always on the lookout for police raids, the students of Carmela Carvajal primary and secondary school are living a revolution.

It began early one morning in May, when dozens of teenage girls emerged from the predawn darkness and scaled the spiked iron fence around Chile's most prestigious girl's school. They used classroom chairs to barricade themselves inside and settled in. Five months later, the occupation shows no signs of dying and the students are still fighting for their goal: free university education for all.

A tour of the school is a trip into the wired reality of a generation that boasts the communication tools that feisty young rebels of history never dreamed of. When police forces move closer, the students use restricted Facebook chat sessions to mobilise. Within minutes, they are able to rally support groups from other public schools in the neighbourhood. "Our lawyer lives over there," said Angelica Alvarez, 14, as she pointed to a cluster of nearby homes. "If we yell 'Mauricio' really loud, he leaves his home and comes over."

For five months, the students at Carmela Carvajal have lived on the ground floor, sometimes sleeping in the gym, but usually in the abandoned classrooms where they hauled in a television, set up a private changing room, and began to experience school from a different perspective.

The first thing they did after taking over the school was to hold a vote. Approximately half of the 1,800 students participated in the polls to approve the takeover, and the yays outnumbered the nays 10 to one.

Now the students pass their school days listening to guest lecturers who provide free classes on topics ranging from economics to astronomy. Extracurricular classes include yoga and salsa lessons. At night and on weekends, visiting rock bands set up their equipment and charge 1,000 pesos (£1.25) per person to hear a live jam on the basketball court. Neighbours donate fresh baked cakes and, under a quirk of Chilean law, the government is obliged to feed students who are at school – even students who have shut down education as usual.

So much food has poured in that the students from Carmela Carvajal now regularly pass on their donations to hungry students at other occupied schools.

Municipal authorities have repeatedly attempted to retake the school, sending in police to evict the rebel students and get classes back on schedule, but so far the youngsters have held their ground.

"It was the most beautiful moment, all of us in [school] uniform climbing over the fence, taking back control of our school. It was such an emotional moment, we all wanted to cry," Alvarez said. "There have been 10 times that the police have taken back the school and every time we come and take it back again."

The students have built a hyper-organised, if somewhat legalistic, world, with votes on everything including daily duties, housekeeping schedules and the election of a president and spokeswoman. The school rules now include several new decrees: no sex, no boys and no booze. That last clause has been a bit abused, the students admit.

"We have had a few cases of classmates who tried to bring in alcohol, but we caught them and they were punished," said Alvarez, who was stationed at the school entrance questioning visitors. Alvarez, who has lived at the school for about four months, laughed as she described the punishment. "They had to clean the bathrooms," she said.

Carmela Carvajal is among Chile's most successful state schools. Nearly all the graduates are assured of a place in top Chilean universities, and the school is a magnet, drawing in some of the brightest minds from across Santiago, the nation's capital and a metropolis of six million.

But the story playing out in its classrooms is just a small part of a national student uprising that has seized control of the political agenda, wrongfooted conservative president Sebastián Piñera, and called into question the free-market orthodoxy that has dominated Chilean politics since the Pinochet era.

The students are demanding a return to the 1960s, when public university education was free. Current tuition fees average nearly three times the minimum annual wage, and with interest rates on student loans at 7%, the students have made financial reform the centrepiece of their uprising.

At the heart of the students' agenda is the demand that education be recognised as a common right for all, not a "consumer good" to be sold on the open market.

Currently, many Chilean schools are for-profit institutions, run as businesses. Until recently, the classified section of the leading newspaper, el Mercurio, regularly featured schools for sale, in adverts that often described the institutions as highly profitable investments.

The Chilean uprising has changed that. Now owners of public schools have begun posting employment ads in local newspapers for security guards to fend off attempts by students to seize the schools. One advert offered employment to able-bodied men who could use dogs to repel potential student takeovers. ("No experience necessary," it read.)

Politicians and many parents fret that the cancellation of classes has turned 2011 into "a lost year" for public education, but for many of the students the past five months has been the most intensive education of their life.

"I have become a lot more mature. I used to judge my classmates by their looks. Now I understand them and together we stand up for what we believe," said Camila Gutierrez, 15, a freshman at Carmela Carvajal. "It has been exhausting, but if you want something in life, you have to fight for it."

The first murmurings of the "Chilean Winter" came in in late May with the first takeover of a public school. Five months later, around 200 state elementary and high schools as well as a dozen universities have now been occupied by students. Weekly protest marches gather between 50,000-100,000 students throughout the nation, with especially large turnouts in coastal cities of Valparaiso and Concepcion. Charismatic student leader Camila Vallejo - known as Comandante Camila - has become a cult hero across Latin America. Initially, the protestors's demands for free universal education was flatly rejected by the conservative administration of president Sebastian Pinera, but the government is now moving incrementally towards meeting their demands.

Talks between the ruling conservative government and striking students collapsed on Wednesday evening with irate students accusing the government of failing to provide new proposals. But Government officials responded that the students would be welcomed back to negotiate.

On Thursday when thousands of students gathered for a protest march in downtown Santiago, Government officials refused to authorize a march route that included a central thoroughfare and defiant students used social media to send out a singular message – the march is on. For much of Thursday, downtown Santiago was awash in tear gas and rioting youth. Smashed cars, 137 arrests and mutual accusations that the violence was avoidable further highlighted the gulf between student leaders and the Pinera government.

With imaginative protests including a kiss-a-thon in which 3,000 couples groped and smooched for exactly fifteen minutes, the Chilean student movement has captured the imagination of a long dormant but apparently disenchanted Chilean public. The unified front of students also counts on support from an estimated 6 of 10 adults in Chile, far higher than the nation's political coalitions or President Sebastian Pinera whose recent approval ratings has ranged from 22% to 30%. However the frequent violence which accompanies the street marches has outraged many Chileans who see their cherished stability now on the edge of social chaos.

Source / Guardian

Fluxed Up World

Why Is the Right Wing Always So Hypocritical?

2011-10-04T07:51:00.001-07:00

Iran Business Partners: Cheney & Reagan, not Just the Koch Brothers
By Juan Cole / October 4, 2011

Bloomberg’s revelations that a subsidiary company owned by the radical rightwing billionaire brothers, Charles and David Koch, sold millions of dollars in refinery equipment to Iran has produced widespread outrage on the blogosphere, given that Koch-backed politicians of the Tea Bagger persuasion have been among the more vociferous hawks calling for war on Iran.

The report alleges that the Koch brothers’ companies routinely paid bribes to get contracts abroad, that they essentially usurped petroleum from federal lands, that they knowingly exposed consumers to benzene poisoning, and that they did business with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as recently as 2007. The Koches are perhaps the most far-right figures in American politics that do not actually wear white robes; their father was among the founders of the extremist John Birch Society.

But the cries of outrage won’t likely do any good. Their companies do $100 billion a year in business and each of the bothers is worth $20 billion. In the United States, which is ruled by its business class the way medieval England was ruled by the Norman aristocracy, being a billionaire is most often a get out of jail free card. Some troglodyte from the Wall Street Journal that CNN kept serving up to us for economic analysis actually once said on air that there is no point in punishing financiers guilty of securities fraud legally, since they are being taken out of the game and won’t be able to play the markets any more, and that is all the punishment anyone needs. It was like listening to a squire explain why his lord did not deserve to be drawn and quartered for his crimes because just not being able to visit the royal court was condign punishment in itself.

Those innocent of recent history are being overly breathless about this revelation. You want a billionaire trading illegally with Iran and a happy ending? How about numerous examples?

There is Iran-Contra, in which Ronald Reagan had his underlings steal T.O.W. missiles and missile launchers from the Pentagon warehouses, sell them illegally to Iran, take the black money paid by Ayatollah Khomeini to Reagan and launder it through Swiss accounts, and send it to right wing death squads in Nicaragua trying to overthrow the left leaning Sandinista government. The Right wing beatified Reagan and named an airport after him, and nobody ever brings up Iran-Contra any more. Rupert Murdoch made Oliver North, one of the conspirators who shredded the US constitution, a millionaire by putting him on television to tell us war fairy tales.

Bill Clinton had Eric Holder do the paperwork to pardon billionaire Marc Rich, who is alleged to have done illegal oil deals with Iran on behalf of Israel as part of the Iran-Contra scandal and then was accused of declining to pay millions in taxes to the US on his profits. (I don’t know. Do you have to pay taxes on money you make from dealing with a government on the State Department’s terrorism list? I mean, the money is sort of in the subjunctive mood and isn’t supposed to exist in the first place.)

Then, Dick Cheney did business with Iran when he was CEO of Halliburton in 1995-2000. All you have to do is set up an offshore subsidiary run by non-Americans, and you can do all the business you like with Iran. Cheney liked a lot of business with the ayatollahs.

The cries of hypocrisy miss the genius of these scams run on the American public. The companies that defy the spirit of the sanctions on countries like Iran gain valuable experience working on projects there. If the same companies can successfully lobby Washington to go to war against their client, then in Phase IV they will be awarded no-bid contracts on the grounds that no other company has their experience on the ground in the now-conquered country.

Nothing will come of it. Koch-backed politicians will go on rattling sabers at Iran even while they find ways to do business with it. They will go on denying global climate change, and denying that breathing gasoline fumes is bad for you. If they do get up a war on Iran, they’ll make money on that, too. This is because, as OccupyWallStreet.org points out, the system is set up for the 1 percent, not for the 99 percent (us). Your keyboard outrage will pass, and they will go on making billions, and go on making money from the enemy, whether before or after the war.

Source / Informed Comment

Fluxed Up World

Pete Seeger: Banks of Marble

2011-09-18T17:18:00.000-07:00

Source / YouTube

Thanks to Deva Wood / Fluxed Up World

PNAC Laid the Foundation for US Bankruptcy

2011-09-10T09:00:00.000-07:00

Osama Crippled the American Century
By Jim Lobe / September 10, 2011

WASHINGTON - A decade after its spectacular September 11, 2001, attacks on New York City's twin World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon and despite the killing earlier this year of its charismatic leader, Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda appears to have largely succeeded in its hopes of accelerating the decline of United States global power, if not bringing it to the brink of collapse.

That appears to be the strong consensus of the foreign-policy elite which, with only a few exceptions, believes that the administration of president George W Bush badly "over-reacted" to the attacks and that that over-reaction continues to this day.

That over-reaction was driven in major part by a close-knit group of neo-conservatives and other hawks who seized control of Bush's foreign policy even before the dust had settled over Lower Manhattan and set it on a radical course designed to consolidate Washington's dominance of the Greater Middle East and "shock and awe" any aspiring global or regional rival powers into acquiescing to a "unipolar" world.

Led within the administration by vice president Dick Cheney, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and their mostly neo-conservative aides and supporters, the hawks had four years before joined the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). The letter-head organization was co-founded by neo-conservative ideologues William Kristol and Robert Kagan, who, in an important 1996 article, called for the US to preserve its post-Cold War "hegemony as far into the future as possible".

In a series of subsequent letters and publications, they urged ever more military spending; pre-emptive, and if necessary, unilateral military action against possible threats; and "regime change" for rogue states, beginning with Iraq's Saddam Hussein.

On the eve of 9/11, PNAC's notion that Washington could extend its "benevolent global hegemony" indefinitely did not appear unreasonable. With more than 30% of the global economy, the strongest fiscal position in a generation, and a defense budget greater than the 20 next-most-powerful militaries combined, Washington looked unchallengeable, a perception soon enhanced by the show of national unity that followed the attacks and the speed and apparent ease with which Washington orchestrated the defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan later that year.

"I've gone back in world history and never seen anything like it," exclaimed Yale University historian Paul Kennedy, a leading exponent of the "declinist" school of US power 15 years before, about Washington's dominance, which he compared favorably to the British Empire in its day.

PNAC's associates were similarly impressed. "People are now coming out of the closet on the word 'empire'," exulted the Washington Post's neo-conservative columnist, Charles Krauthammer, a Cheney favorite and long-time advocate of a US-led "unipolar" world. "The fact is no country has been as dominant culturally, economically, technologically, and militarily in the history of the world since the Roman Empire."

Such exuberance (or hubris) naturally fueled the next phase in PNAC's quest - originally laid out in an open letter to Bush published by the group just nine days after 9/11 - for victory in what was now called the "global war on terror": regime change in Iraq.

"Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism," PNAC had warned, arguing that Washington must expand its target list to include states - particularly those hostile to Israel - that support terrorist groups, as well as the terrorist groups themselves.

So, instead of focusing on capturing Bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders and providing the kind of security and material assistance needed to pacify and begin rebuilding Afghanistan, Bush turned his attention - and diverted US military and intelligence resources - to preparing for war against Iraq.

That decision is now seen universally - with the exception of Cheney and his diehard PNAC supporters - as perhaps the single-most disastrous foreign policy decision by a US president in the past decade, if not the past century.

Not only did it effectively set the stage for an eventual Taliban comeback in Afghanistan (which is now costing the US some US$10 billion a month), but it also destroyed the international support and solidarity Washington had enjoyed immediately after the 9/11 attacks - a fact made excruciatingly clear by Bush's failure to gain United Nations Security Council backing for his invasion of Iraq in March 2003. It also helped persuade tens of millions of Muslims that the US was waging war on Islam, according to dozens of public-opinion surveys.

Indeed, by invading Iraq, the US fell into a trap set by Bin Laden who, convinced that Moscow's decade-long occupation of Afghanistan contributed critically to the Soviet Union's eventual collapse, clearly believed that the US was susceptible to the same kind of over-extension.

"We, alongside the mujahideen, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat," he said in a 2004 video-tape describing what he called a "war of attrition".

"We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy," he added. "All that we have to do is to send two mujahideen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written 'al-Qaeda', in order to make generals race there and to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations," he went on.

By the time Bin Laden recorded those remarks, the US forces in Iraq were battling a growing insurgency, one that not only would result in hugely costly abuses by US forces at Abu Ghraib that inflicted serious damage to Washington's already-tattered moral image, but that would also push Iraq to the very brink of civil war and lead to an even deeper and more expensive intervention by the US military.

True to Bin Laden's prediction, Washington, goaded by PNAC associates and alumni, also deployed forces - or drone missiles at the very least - to virtually wherever al-Qaeda or its alleged affiliates raised its flag, often at the cost of weakening local governments and incurring the wrath of local populations, particularly in Somalia and Yemen.

More importantly, the same held true in nuclear-armed Pakistan, not to mention Afghanistan, where Bush's successor, Barack Obama, more than doubled US troop strength to 100,000 in his first two years in office, even as he withdrew an equivalent number from Iraq.

The costs have been staggering in almost every respect. The estimated $3 trillion to $4.4 trillion Washington has incurred either directly or indirectly in conducting the "global war on terror" account for a substantial portion of the fiscal crisis that transformed the country's politics and brought it to the edge of bankruptcy last month.

And while the US military remains by far the strongest in the world, its veil of invincibility has been irreparably pierced by the success with which rag-tag groups of guerrillas have defied and frustrated it. The result, according to conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, has been "a steady erosion of America's position in the world", which Obama has so far been unable to reverse.

"[F]or a long time," wrote Richard Clarke, a top national-security official under Bush who warned the White House several months before 9/11 that al-Qaeda was planning a major operation against the US homeland, in the dailybeast.com, "we actually played into the hands of our opponents, doing precisely what they had wanted us to do, responding in the ways that they had sought to provoke, damaging our economy and alienating much of the Middle East."

And leading the charge were precisely those hawks whose fondest wish was to extend, rather than cut short, Washington's global hegemony.

[Jim Lobe's blog on US foreign policy can be read at www.lobelog.com.]

Source / Asia Times

Thanks to Roger Baker / Fluxed Up World

"In My Time": A Memoir Written Out of Fear

2011-08-31T12:29:00.000-07:00

Cheney, Rumsfeld and the Dark Art of Propaganda
By Amy Goodman / August 30, 2011

“When one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it,” wrote Joseph Goebbels, Germany’s Reich minister of propaganda, in 1941. Former Vice President Dick Cheney seems to have taken the famous Nazi’s advice in his new book, “In My Time.” Cheney remains staunch in his convictions on issues from the invasion of Iraq to the use of torture. Telling NBC News in an interview that “there are gonna be heads exploding all over Washington” as a result of the revelations in the book, Cheney’s memoir follows one by his colleague and friend Donald Rumsfeld. As each promotes his own version of history, there are people challenging and confronting them.

Rumsfeld’s book title, “Known and Unknown,” is drawn from a notorious response he gave in one of his Pentagon press briefings as secretary of defense. In Feb. 12, 2002, attempting to explain the lack of evidence linking Iraq to weapons of mass destruction, Rumsfeld said: “[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

Rumsfeld’s cryptic statement gained fame, emblematic of his disdain for reporters. It stands as a symbol of the lies and manipulations that propelled the U.S. into the disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq.

One person convinced by Rumsfeld’s rhetoric was Jared August Hagemann.

Hagemann enlisted in the Army to serve his country, to confront the threats repeated by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. When the U.S. Army Ranger received the call for his most recent deployment (his wife can’t recall if it was his seventh or eighth), the pressure became too much. On June 28, 2011, 25-year-old Hagemann shot himself on the Joint Base Lewis-McChord, near Seattle. The Pentagon notes that Hagemann died of a “self-inflicted” gunshot wound, but has not yet called it a suicide.

Hagemann had threatened suicide several times before. He was not alone. Five soldiers reportedly committed suicide at Fort Lewis in July. It has been estimated that more than 300,000 returning troops suffer from PTSD or depression.

Hagemann’s widow, Ashley Joppa-Hagemann, found out that Rumsfeld was doing a book signing on the base. On Friday, Aug. 26, she handed Rumsfeld a copy of the program from her late husband’s memorial service. She recounted, “I told him that I wanted him to see my husband, and so he would know—he could put a face with at least one of the soldiers that had lost their lives because of his lies from 9/11.”

I asked her about Rumsfeld’s response: “All I remember is him saying, ‘Oh, I heard about that.’ And after that, all I remember is being bombarded with security personnel and being pushed out and told not to return.” Unfortunately, it’s Staff Sgt. Hagemann who will never return to his wife and two little children.

In his NBC interview, Cheney claimed to have played a role in the January 2005 resignation of then-Secretary of State Colin Powell. Powell’s former chief of staff, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, called the claim “utter nonsense.” More important, though, is Wilkerson’s unflinching call for accountability for those involved in leading the nation to war in Iraq—including punishment for himself. A central pillar of the invasion of Iraq was Powell’s Feb. 5, 2003, speech before the United Nations, which laid out the case of weapons of mass destruction. Wilkerson, who takes full responsibility for coordinating Powell’s address, told me: “It was probably the biggest mistake of my life. I regret it to this day. I regret not having resigned over it.”

The Center for Constitutional Rights and lawyer/blogger Glenn Greenwald are among those who have long called for criminal prosecution of Cheney, Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials. Said Wilkerson, “I’d be willing to testify, and I’d be willing to take any punishment I’m due.”

Wilkerson says Cheney’s book is “written out of fear, fear that one day someone will ‘Pinochet’ Dick Cheney,” referring to the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who was arrested in Britain and held for a year before being released. A Spanish judge had wanted him extradited to be tried for crimes against humanity.

As we approach the 10th anniversary of 9/11, and the casualties mount on all sides, the books by Rumsfeld and Cheney remind us once again of war’s first casualty: truth.

[Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America. She is the author of “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.

© 2011 Amy Goodman]

Source / Truthdig

Fluxed Up World

Signs of a Sick Society: Throw Away Your TV

2011-08-30T10:07:00.000-07:00

National Park Service Ranger Jeff Goad views the destruction to N.C. Hwy 12 on the north edge of Rodanthe, North Carolina due to the storm surge from Hurricane Irene. Photo: Chuck Liddy/Raleigh News & Observer/MCT/Getty Images.
Disaster Perversion
By OHollern / August 29, 2011

I don’t know about you, but I’m spent from this disaster porn marathon. I feel seedy and low. I need a cigarette. I need to think about something that doesn’t have the power to titillate me in any way, like baseball or algebra. I don’t usually care about weather, but yesterday I just had to watch. I was like a man possessed. There was just something about Michael Bloomberg and Chris Christie, each so different in style — one a rich little prick, the other a rich fat prick — but both so bold in the face of danger! I swear I could hear the courtiers in the big media whispering a collective prayer: “Why, oh Lord, can’t they both become president?” And the coverage, the endlessly redundant, jaw-droppingly pointless saturation coverage. It kept me utterly transfixed. I haven’t been that dumbly sedated since the time I took four Vicodin for a severe headache and watched Jurassic Park III.

When we were invading Iraq, I was watching the McNeil Lehrer Newshour one night and the guest was Zbigniew Brzezinski. At the end of the discussion, he said something totally out of left field that was very interesting. He said, and I’m paraphrasing, “There is something perverse about this.” He had this sort of weird, uncomfortable look on his face. If the sound had been turned down I’d have guessed he was suffering from gas. When asked to explain, he said, “I’m not exactly sure why, but there is just something perverse about people sitting at home watching a bombing on TV.”

I thought about that while sitting around in lurid anticipation waiting for the hurricane to make landfall. Will Atlantic City be destoyed? Will Lower Manhattan flood? Boston even? Which network will be the first to seize on the phrase “The Storm of the Century,” leaving the others to fight over “The Perfect Storm” or “Disaster on the Eastern Seaboard” or some other ludicrous appellation that reeks of action movie melodrama. How long until some conservative toad on FOX starts gloating about this being Obama’s Katrina? (Actually, I think some of them already may have.) How long until Pat Roberston said it was God punishing New York because they legalized gay marriage? There was something perverse about it.

But there I sat, glass in hand, watching in a kind of numb stupor as a lethal hurricane rolled over the East Coast. I felt like a debauched Roman. This thing has killed people, and it could have killed hundreds more, just wiped them clean off the earth for all eternity, and I swear it takes a determined, conscious effort to differentiate it in my mind from a fictional media event. The coverage just makes it all feel unreal.

Did it seem to you that there was a noticeable sense of disappointment in the media when Irene was downgraded to a category 1 hurricane, and then, more distressingly, a mere tropical storm? They seemed to spend the greater part of the day convincing us that it was still a dangerous storm, mind you. So stay afraid, stay cautious, keep watching, and help us justify the gargantuan, over-the-top hype with which we greeted this event.

The sad, the perverse thing, is this: I bet you a lot of them secretely wanted it to be worse. I’m not saying they are evil people. I’m suggesting that their professional interests conflicted with basic morality in this case. Deep in their media hearts, they wanted a category 3 to slam straight into New York City. Imagine, wall to wall coverage of death and destruction for weeks. It’s the only thing in mainstream media land more fun than making pointless predictions about our pointless elections, or turning sinister whack balls like Rick Perry into legitimate presidential contenders.

They’d get to wallow in death and gore under the cover of journalism. They could gush with praise over the first responders and all the ordinary heroes who pitched in and helped out and did extraordinary things. They could create lots of poignant human interest stories that make us feel all right about being Americans. We’d pat ourselves on the back. Hey, you know, we’re not so bad after all.

Then those heroes would be callously ignored when they needed help paying the doctor bills. That is to say, after the bodies were buried, the water drained, and the rubble swept away, lots and lots of Americans would revert to their instinctive natural ethic, which is perfectly reflected in our current politics: I’ve got mine, fuck you.

They’d canonize Bloomberg, and then give every rat-fuck politician in the country an opportunity to stick his face in front of a camera and bleed concern for the sake of his own petty aggrandisement, even the vicious bastards who want to cut budgets and lay those first responders off, or let them die like dogs without proper health care when they fall ill. You’d need to tape a barf bag to your chest, and then lay a towel down in front of your TV so their tears wouldn’t stain the rug.

Obama will arrive in full “commander-in-chief-on-the-disaster-scene mode,” which means he’ll be wearing khakis and a denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the standard uniform politicians wear when surveying wreckage or getting face time with blue-collar workers. The Republican candidates, dressed the same, will do the same, and the media will treat is as if it’s something other than a hackneyed political stunt.

In short, we would (will) be deluged, no pun intended, with same formulaic narratives that the media always rolls out on these occasions. That’s what happens when monopolies run things. Choices are restricted and quality suffers.

I’m not making light of tragedy or saying we shouldn’t praise those who help the victims and clean up the mess. Of course we should. My beef is with the scripted, overblown, almost phony way the media depicts it. It’s a screen play for a TV show. We have a disaster. Now we need victims, now heroes, now villians. Now a photo collage, and now endless retrospectives. Cue fear, cue horror, cue hope, cue anger. Time for a Levitra commercial. …

There’s something perverse about it.

I just can’t feel genuine grief or sadness, or compassion or concern, when some six figure hairdo is telling me exactly when and how I am supposed to, and then suddenly switch it off to watch a commercial for a pill that will make my pecker hard. There’s something perverse about it.

(I do, however, feel genuine humor when all of those TV clowns pretend to be courageous journalists by standing on the beach in a raincoat, bowling us over with such profundities as “It’s really windy right now” or “It’s really wet!”)

Source / Bad Attitudes

Fluxed Up World

September 11th: We Didn't Learn Anything

2011-08-28T11:11:00.000-07:00

I find it moronic that we would want to commemorate September 11th in any fashion. It is the same as celebrating other criminal acts, which we generally do not do. How about commemorating the obliteration of 400 Iraqi civilians when bunker-buster bombs penetrated a bomb shelter in downtown Baghdad? What about commemorating the deliberate Valentine's Day fire-bombing of Dresden and the 40,000 deaths there? Criminal acts could serve as teachable moments, and we are learning sweet fuck all. Revenge is evil. -- Richard Jehn

9/11: Ten Years Later, Americans Still Stupid and Vulnerable
By Ted Rall / August 28, 2011

They say everything changed on 9/11. No one can dispute that. But we didn't learn anything.

Like other events that forced Americans to reassess their national priorities (the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, Sputnik) the attacks on New York and Washington were a traumatic, teachable moment.

The collective attention of the nation was finally focused upon problems that had gone neglected for many years. 9/11 was a chance to get smart—but we blew it.

First and foremost the attacks gave the United States a rare opportunity to reset its international reputation. Even countries known for anti-Americanism offered their support. "We are all Americans," ran the headline of the French newspaper Le Monde.

The century of U.S. foreign policy that led to 9/11—supporting dictators, crushing democratic movements, spreading gangster capitalism at the point of a thousand nukes—should and could have been put on hold and reassessed in the wake of 9/11.

It wasn't time to act. It was time to think.

It was time to lick our wounds, pretend to act confused, and play the victim. It was time to hope the world forgot how we supplied lists of pro-democracy activists to a young Saddam Hussein so he could collect and kill them, and forget the "Made in USA" labels on missiles shot into the Gaza Strip from U.S.-made helicopter gunships sold to Israel.

It was time, for once, to take the high road. The Bush Administration ought to have treated 9/11 as a police investigation, demanding that Pakistan extradite Osama bin Laden and other individuals wanted in connection with the attacks for prosecution by an international court.

Instead of assuming a temperate, thoughtful posture, the Bush Administration exploited 9/11 as an excuse to start two wars, both against defenseless countries that had little or nothing to do with the attacks. Bush and company legalized torture and ramped up support for unpopular dictatorships in South and Central Asia and the Middle East, all announced with bombastic cowboy talk.

Smoke 'em out! Worst of the worst! Dead or alive!

By 2003 the world hated us more than ever. A BBC poll showed that people in Jordan and Indonesia—moderate Muslim countries where Al Qaeda had killed locals with bombs—considered the U.S. a bigger security threat than the terrorist group.

In fairness to Condi Rice, Don Rumsfeld and Bush's other leading war criminals, everyone else went along with them. The media refused to question them. Democratic politicians, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, cast votes in favor of Bush's wars. Democrats and leftist activists ought to have pushed for Bush's impeachment; they were silent or supportive.

9/11 was "blowback"—proof that the U.S. can't wage its wars overseas without suffering consequences at home. But we still haven't learned that lesson. Ten years later, a "Democratic" president is fighting Bush's wars as well as new ones against Libya, Somalia and Yemen. Now he's saber-rattling against Syria.

American officials correctly inferred from 9/11 that security, particularly at airports but also in ports where container ships arrive daily from around the world, had been lax. Rather than act proactively to close gaps in transportation security, however, bureaucrats for the new Department of Homeland Security created a gauntlet of police-state harassment so onerous that it has threatened the financial health of the aviation industry.

"Aviation security is a joke, and it's only a matter of time before terrorists destroy another airplane full of innocent passengers," wrote Barbara Hollingsworth of The Washington Examiner after the 2009 "underwear bomber" scare. As Hollingsworth pointed out, the much-vaunted federal air marshals have been removed from flights because the TSA is too cheap to pay their hotel bills. (This is illegal.) What's the point of taking off your shoes, she asked, when planes are still serviced overseas in unsecured facilities? No one has provided an answer.

Ten years after 9/11, there is still no real security check when you board a passenger train or bus. Perhaps the sheer quantity of goods arriving at American ports makes it impossible to screen them all, but we're not even talking about the fact that we've basically given up on port security.

While we're on the subject of post-9/11 security, what about air defenses? On 9/11 the airspace over the Lower 48 states was assigned to a dozen "weekend warrior" air national guard jets. Every last one of them was on the ground when the attacks began, allowing hijacked planes to tool around the skies for hours after they had been identified as dangerous.

Which could easily happen again. According to a 2009 report by the federal General Accounting Office on U.S. air defenses: "The Air Force has not implemented ASA [Air Sovereignty Alert] operations in accordance with DOD, NORAD, and Air Force directives and guidance, which instruct the Air Force to establish ASA as a steady-state (ongoing and indefinite) mission. The Air Force has not implemented the 140 actions it identified to establish ASA as a steady-state mission, which included integrating ASA operations into the Air Force's planning, programming, and funding cycle. The Air Force has instead been focused on other priorities, such as overseas military operations."

Maybe if it stopped spending so much time and money killing foreigners the American government could protect Americans.

On 9/11 hundreds of firefighters and policemen died because they couldn't communicate on antiquated, segregated bandwidth. "Only one month away from the 10th anniversary of 9/11," admits FCC chairman Julius Genachowski, "our first responders still don't have an interoperable mobile broadband network for public safety. Our 911 call centers still can't handle texts or pictures or video being sent by the phones that everyone has."

Because the corporate masters of the Democratic and Republican parties love the low wage/weak labor environment created by illegal immigration, American land borders are intentionally left unguarded.

A lot changed on 9/11, but not everything.

We're still governed by corrupt idiots. And we're still putting up with them.

What does that say about us?

Source / Common Dreams

Fluxed Up World

Naomi Klein: El Saqueo on a Grander Scale

2011-08-16T15:36:00.000-07:00

Daylight Robbery, Meet Nighttime Robbery
By Naomi Klein / August 16, 2011

I keep hearing comparisons between the London riots and riots in other European cities—window smashing in Athens, or car bonfires in Paris. And there are parallels, to be sure: a spark set by police violence, a generation that feels forgotten.

But those events were marked by mass destruction; the looting was minor. There have, however, been other mass lootings in recent years, and perhaps we should talk about them too. There was Baghdad in the aftermath of the US invasion—a frenzy of arson and looting that emptied libraries and museums. The factories got hit too. In 2004 I visited one that used to make refrigerators. Its workers had stripped it of everything valuable, then torched it so thoroughly that the warehouse was a sculpture of buckled sheet metal.

Back then the people on cable news thought looting was highly political. They said this is what happens when a regime has no legitimacy in the eyes of the people. After watching for so long as Saddam and his sons helped themselves to whatever and whomever they wanted, many regular Iraqis felt they had earned the right to take a few things for themselves. But London isn’t Baghdad, and British Prime Minister David Cameron is hardly Saddam, so surely there is nothing to learn there.

How about a democratic example then? Argentina, circa 2001. The economy was in freefall and thousands of people living in rough neighborhoods (which had been thriving manufacturing zones before the neoliberal era) stormed foreign-owned superstores. They came out pushing shopping carts overflowing with the goods they could no longer afford—clothes, electronics, meat. The government called a “state of siege” to restore order; the people didn’t like that and overthrew the government.

Argentina’s mass looting was called El Saqueo — the sacking. That was politically significant because it was the very same word used to describe what that country’s elites had done by selling off the country’s national assets in flagrantly corrupt privatization deals, hiding their money offshore, then passing on the bill to the people with a brutal austerity package. Argentines understood that the saqueo of the shopping centers would not have happened without the bigger saqueo of the country, and that the real gangsters were the ones in charge.

But England is not Latin America, and its riots are not political, or so we keep hearing. They are just about lawless kids taking advantage of a situation to take what isn’t theirs. And British society, Cameron tells us, abhors that kind of behavior.

This is said in all seriousness. As if the massive bank bailouts never happened, followed by the defiant record bonuses. Followed by the emergency G-8 and G-20 meetings, when the leaders decided, collectively, not to do anything to punish the bankers for any of this, nor to do anything serious to prevent a similar crisis from happening again. Instead they would all go home to their respective countries and force sacrifices on the most vulnerable. They would do this by firing public sector workers, scapegoating teachers, closing libraries, upping tuitions, rolling back union contracts, creating rush privatizations of public assets and decreasing pensions – mix the cocktail for where you live. And who is on television lecturing about the need to give up these “entitlements”? The bankers and hedge-fund managers, of course.

This is the global Saqueo, a time of great taking. Fueled by a pathological sense of entitlement, this looting has all been done with the lights left on, as if there was nothing at all to hide. There are some nagging fears, however. In early July, the Wall Street Journal, citing a new poll, reported that 94 percent of millionaires were afraid of "violence in the streets.” This, it turns out, was a reasonable fear.

Of course London’s riots weren’t a political protest. But the people committing nighttime robbery sure as hell know that their elites have been committing daytime robbery. Saqueos are contagious.

The Tories are right when they say the rioting is not about the cuts. But it has a great deal to do with what those cuts represent: being cut off. Locked away in a ballooning underclass with the few escape routes previously offered — a union job, a good affordable education — being rapidly sealed off. The cuts are a message. They are saying to whole sectors of society: you are stuck where you are, much like the migrants and refugees we turn away at our increasingly fortressed borders.

David Cameron’s response to the riots is to make this locking-out literal: evictions from public housing, threats to cut off communication tools and outrageous jail terms (five months to a woman for receiving a stolen pair of shorts). The message is once again being sent: disappear, and do it quietly.

At last year’s G-20 “austerity summit” in Toronto, the protests turned into riots and multiple cop cars burned. It was nothing by London 2011 standards, but it was still shocking to us Canadians. The big controversy then was that the government had spent $675 million on summit “security” (yet they still couldn’t seem to put out those fires). At the time, many of us pointed out that the pricey new arsenal that the police had acquired—water cannons, sound cannons, tear gas and rubber bullets—wasn’t just meant for the protesters in the streets. Its long-term use would be to discipline the poor, who in the new era of austerity would have dangerously little to lose.

This is what David Cameron got wrong: you can't cut police budgets at the same time as you cut everything else. Because when you rob people of what little they have, in order to protect the interests of those who have more than anyone deserves, you should expect resistance—whether organized protests or spontaneous looting.

And that’s not politics. It’s physics.

[Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and syndicated columnist and the author of the international and New York Times bestseller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, now out in paperback. Her earlier books include the international best-seller, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (which has just been re-published in a special 10th Anniversary Edition); and the collection Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate (2002). To read all her latest writing visit www.naomiklein.org.]

Source / The Nation

Fluxed Up World

Afghan Civilian Carnage: Why Does the American MSM Ignore It?

2011-08-12T21:36:00.000-07:00

The Invisible Dead and "The Last Word": Lawrence O'Donnell 'Rewrites' the Occupation of Afghanistan
By Nima Shirazi / August 12, 2011

"It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder." -- Albert Einstein

On Saturday August 6, 2011, a U.S. military Chinook transport helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan, killing 30 American soldiers, including 17 elite Navy SEALs, and eight Afghans. The mainstream news media was awash with somber reports about this being the "deadliest day" for U.S. forces in the ten years since the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan began.

Notably, many news outlets such as ABC, NBC, CBS, and The Washington Post claimed the helicopter crash and its 30 American casualties marked the "deadliest day of the war", without adding the vital qualification, "for United States military personnel." Even the progressive website Truthout provided its daily email blast that day with the headline: "Deadliest Day in Decade-Long Afghanistan War: 31 Troops Killed in Shootdown."

The obvious implication of these reports was that on no single day since October 7, 2001, when the U.S.-led invasion and bombing campaign began, had as many people been killed in Afghanistan as on August 6, 2011.

Perhaps most brazen and sanctimonious regarding this claim was MSNBC's primetime anchor Lawrence O'Donnell. Introducing the "Rewrite" segment of his Monday August 8 broadcast of "The Last Word", O'Donnell looked directly into the camera and, in his measured and most heartfelt serious voice, told his viewers:

"This weekend saw the worst single loss of life in the ten years of the Afghan War."

He was lying. Unless, of course, like so many Americans, O'Donnell doesn't count Afghan civilians as human beings worthy of being allowed to stay alive. In fact, the invisibility of the native population of Afghanistan is so ubiquitous in the American media, O'Donnell and his writers probably didn't even think they needed to acknowledge civilian death tolls at the hands of foreign armies. As General Tommy Franks, who led the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, told reporters at Bagram Air Base in March 2002 when asked about how many people the U.S. military has killed, "You know we don't do body counts."

After showing a video clip of CIA Directer-cum-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's statement that the helicopter crash served as "a reminder to the American people that we remain a nation still at war," O'Donnell took seven minutes of airtime to lecture his viewers about a country that has forgotten the hardships of warfare, due to the absence of a draft or rationing or war taxation. Clearly passionate and frustrated, he rhetorically wondered, "What kind of nation would need to be reminded that it is still at war?" He continued,

"There will be other nights for us to discuss the way forward or the way out of Afghanistan. Tonight is not that night. Tonight is for reminding this nation that it is indeed at war. And tonight is for reminding the nation of the price of war. The ultimate sacrifice."

At this point, O'Donnell displayed photographs of some of the soldiers killed in the crash while delivering brief biographies, a sort of "Last Word" eulogy for the dead.

In his effort to tug at his viewers heartstrings, O'Donnell told us of one young soldier who had only "been in Afghanistan for less than two weeks." Another was described by his mother as "a gentle giant." A SEAL Team 6 member also killed in the crash, we were told, had a wife, a two-year-old son and a two-month old baby girl while another solider was survived by his pregnant wife and three children. O'Donnell eulogized one of the deceased servicemen by telling us of his personal history as a high school wrestler and his lifelong dream of becoming a Navy SEAL.

O'Donnell concluded the segment with the assurance that none of the family members of those soldiers who had died - as opposed to the million of Americans whose lives are totally unaffected by the ongoing occupation - needed any "reminding" that "we are a nation at war."

Never once during this paean to the military did O'Donnell make even a passing reference to the thousands upon thousands of Afghan men, women, and children killed by U.S. and NATO forces in their own homeland, their own country, their own towns, their own communities, their own homes, hospitals, mosques, and schools, and at their own weddings.

The Afghan village of Karam was completely destroyed on October 12, 2001 when American forces dropped a one-ton bomb on it and killed over 100 people. On October 21, 2001, "At least twenty-three civilians, the majority of them young children, were killed when U.S. bombs hit a remote Afghan village," according to a report by Human Rights Watch.

Not a solitary syllable was uttered to honor the seven children blown apart "as they ate breakfast with their father" when "a US bomb flattened a flimsy mud-brick home in Kabul" on Sunday October 29, 2001. The Times of India, citing a Reuters report, revealed that "the blast shattered a neighbour's house killing another two children."

A few weeks later, on November 17, 2001, U.S. bombs fired at the village of Chorikori murdered "two entire families, one of 16 members and the other of 14, who lived, and perished, together in the same house," reported The Los Angeles Times. Shortly thereafter, heavy American bombing in Khanabad near Kunduz was said to have killed 100 people. The same day, a religious school in Khost was bombed, killing 62 people.

Around the same time, James S. Robbins, a professor of International Relations at the National Defense University, published an article in The National Review entitled, "Humanity of the Air War: Look how far we've come." The piece began this way: "Think airpower can't bring victory in Afghanistan? Think again."

Robbins continued his claim that "the air campaign over Afghanistan has been effective by most reports" and that "critics of the air campaign at home and abroad make as much of civilian casualties as suits their purposes, but arguments over whether a few, a dozen, or hundreds of people have died only show how civilized warfare has become." He averred that "[a]ny civilian deaths caused by allied bombs are unintended deaths" (emphasis in original), declared that the U.S. was using the "tools and means of the humane" to bomb Afghan civilians to death on a regular basis, and concluded, "The allied air campaign is demonstrating how moral a war can be."

On December 31, 2001, U.S. ground forces confirmed an enemy target in the village of Qalaye Niazi and "three bombers, a B-52 and two B-1Bs, did the rest, zapping Taliban and al-Qaida leaders in their sleep as well as an ammunition dump." A military spokesman, Matthew Klee, proudly told reporters that the strike was an unmitigated success, saying, "Follow-on reporting indicates that there was no collateral damage." However, The Guardian reported:

Some of the things his follow-on reporters missed: bloodied children's shoes and skirts, bloodied school books, the scalp of a woman with braided grey hair, butter toffees in red wrappers, wedding decorations.

The charred meat sticking to rubble in black lumps could have been Osama bin Laden's henchmen but survivors said it was the remains of farmers, their wives and children, and wedding guests.

They said more than 100 civilians died at this village in eastern Afghanistan.

In the first three months of the Afghanistan assault, Carl Conetta of the Project on Defense Alternatives found that upwards of 4,200-4,500 Afghan civilians had been killed as a result of the U.S.-led bombing campaign and the "starvation, exposure, associated illnesses, or injury sustained while in flight from war zones" that followed the invasion and airstrikes. In May 2002, Jonathan Steele of The Guardian reported that, up to that point, "As many as 20,000 Afghans may have lost their lives as an indirect consequence of the US intervention."

For O'Donnell, it appears the "price of war" doesn't include the 48 civilians killed and 117 wounded, many of them women and children, when U.S. jets bombed a wedding party in Oruzgan in July 2002, the 17 civilians, mostly women and children, killed by coalition bombs in Helmand in February 2003, the eight civilians killed by a U.S. gunship and bomber in Bagram Valley the same month, the eleven civilians killed, including seven women, by a U.S. laser-guided bomb that hit a house outside the village of Shkin in April 2003, the six family members killed by U.S. bombs that hit the village of Aranj in October 2003, or the nine children (seven boys and two girls aged 9 to 12) murdered by two U.S. A-10 Thunderbolt II planes which attacked the village of Hutala while the children were playing ball.

The human cost of the Afghan occupation, so far as O'Donnell is concerned, doesn't include the eleven people, four of them children, killed by an American helicopter which fired on the village of Saghatho in January 2004, the scores of civilians bombed to death by NATO airstrikes in October 2006, eight civilians shot by American soldiers in Kandahar in 2007, the more than 100 civilians killed in numerous U.S. and NATO bombings in May 2007, the seven children killed by a U.S.-led airstrike in June 2007, the group of bus passengers gunned down by US troops on December 12, 2008, the seven civilians killed by American troops in a rural village near Nad-E'ali in 2009, the 26 civilians, including 16 children, killed by British forces, the scores of dead civilians in Kunduz and Helmand who were killed by 500-pound bombs dropped by U.S. jets in September 2009, the 27 civilians killed by a NATO strike in the Afghan province of Uruzgan in February 2010, the five civilians, including two pregnant women and a teenage girl killed in Khataba, the 45 civilians (most of whom were women and children) murdered by a NATO rocket in Afghanistan in July 2010, the 30 or more civilians killed in two NATO air strikes on two villages in the Nangarhar province in August 2010, or the numerous civilian men, women, children, dogs, donkeys, and chickens slaughtered by Task Force 373, a clandestine black ops unit which NATO uses as an assassination squad.

On March 23, 2011, U.S. Army Specialist Jeremy Morlock was sentenced to 24 years in prison for the willful murder and mutilation of three Afghan civilians - a fifteen-year-old boy, a mentally-retarded man, and a religious leader. Other members of Morlock's platoon, the 5th Stryker Combat Brigade, have been "charged with dismembering and photographing corpses, as well as hoarding a skull and other human bones," The Washington Post previously reported. At the beginning of the court-martial proceedings, Morlock admitted to the military judge presiding over the case that the murders he and four fellow soldiers were charged with committing had been deliberate and intentional. "The plan was to kill people, sir," he said.

Broadcasting live across the country that evening, Lawrence O'Donnell didn't cover the story. Instead, he spent a considerable amount of airtime justifying Barack Obama's decision to begin bombing Libya, interviewing Anthony Weiner about healthcare, and poking fun at potential GOP presidential candidates. He ended the program that night, however, with a touching and earnest memorial for someone who had recently died: Elizabeth Taylor.

For O'Donnell, the "ultimate sacrifice" he spoke of this week naturally didn't include the Afghan man, four women, and baby murdered at a wedding party by a Polish mortar strike on the village of Wazi Khwa on August 16, 2007, which also injured three other women, one of whom was nine months pregnant. Nor does it include the "nineteen unarmed civilians killed and 50 wounded" when, during "a frenzied escape" on March 4, 2007, U.S. Marines "open[ed] fire with automatic weapons as they tore down a six-mile stretch of highway, hitting almost anyone in their way – teenage girls in fields, motorists in their cars, old men as they walked along the road." The April 2009 U.S. raid on Khost, which killed four civilians, including a woman and two children, didn't receive a sad obituary on primetime cable television either. The American soldiers on that raid "also shot a pregnant woman and killed her unborn baby, which had almost come to term."

To O'Donnell, the "worst single loss of life" in Afghanistan during the last decade wasn't the more than 140 civilians reportedly killed when "U.S. aircraft bombed villages in the Bala Boluk district of Afghanistan's western Farah province" on May 3, 2009 in what is now known as the the Granai airstrike. Reuters revealed that "93 of those killed were children -- the youngest eight days old," and that "[a]ccording to villagers, families were cowering in houses when the U.S. aircraft bombed them." The death toll of this one airstrike is nearly five times larger than the U.S. helicopter crash, which took the life of not a single civilian, let alone child.

255 civilians were killed in military operations in June 2008. In early July 2008, near the village of Kacu, "a U.S. air strike killed 47 civilians, including 39 women and children, as they were travelling to a wedding in Afghanistan...The bride was among the dead."

The following month, 90 civilians, including 60 children and 15 women, were killed during military operations in Herat province alone.

Sixty-five civilians, including 40 children, were killed in a NATO assault on Kunar in February 2011. A few weeks later, NATO helicopter gunners shot nine boys - aged 9 to 15 - to death as they gathered firewood. On May 28, 2011, NATO bombs killed two women and 12 children in Helmand. In the month leading up to the Chinook crash last week, dozens of Afghan civilians were killed in NATO airstrikes and raids.

O'Donnell didn't feel the need to show pictures of any of these victims or quote what their loved ones had to say about them.

The "deadliest day", in O'Donnell's estimation, could not possibly have been when, in July 2007, "U.S. special forces dropped six 2,000lb bombs on a compound where they believed a 'high-value individual' was hiding, after 'ensuring there were no innocent Afghans in the surrounding area'. A senior US commander reported that 150 Taliban had been killed. Locals, however, reported that up to 300 civilians had died."

Lawrence O'Donnell didn't tell his viewers of the hopes and dreams of the hundreds of Afghan children liberated forever from this world by noble American troops and their stalwart allies. He didn't mention how some of the young boys murdered by U.S. missiles loved to play soccer and couldn't wait to learn how to drive. He didn't solemnly note that many of the young girls shot to death by soldiers who love what they do wanted to become doctors and lawyers and human rights activists and teachers and wives and mothers. He didn't devote a segment of his show to the murder of Mohammed Yonus, "a 36-year-old imam and a respected religious authority", killed in Kabul in early 2010 while commuting to a madrasa where he taught 150 students." The New York Times reported, "A passing military convoy raked his car with bullets, ripping open his chest as his two sons sat in the car."

O'Donnell didn't tearfully point out that the bullets and bombs that have killed so many men and women have left countless orphans and widows and taken countless children away from countless parents all sacrificed on the altar of the so-called "War on Terror" and American security and exceptionalism.

None of these innocents - people obliterated in their own houses, in their own fields, and in their own cars on their own roads - was accorded a second of screen time or a moment of acknowledgment during O'Donnell's "Rewrite."

It is unsurprising that, in March 2010, General Stanley A. McChrystal told U.S. troops during a video-conference about civilian deaths at checkpoints in Afghanistan, "We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat." Nevertheless, upon McChrystal's dishonorable retirement only a few months later, Defense Secretary Robert Gates delivered the following tribute: "Over the past decade, arguably no single American has inflicted more fear, more loss of freedom and more loss of life on our country's most vicious and violent enemies than Stan McChrystal."

Lawrence O'Donnell, while chastising the American public for not paying enough attention to our myriad military invasions, occupations and war crimes, said that only "a nation whose news media is more troubled by the loss of credit-ratings than the loss of life" could act in such a way. He didn't mean, of course, the loss of Afghan lives, only of American soldiers. The U.S. government operates the same way; it still doesn't compile death tolls for its murderous operations. Earlier this year, the ACLU revealed [PDF]:

The Department of Defense has confirmed that it does not compile statistics about the total number of civilians that have been killed by its unmanned drone aircraft.

[...]

According to the DOD, the military’s estimates of civilian casualties do not distinguish between deaths caused by remote-controlled drones and those caused by other aircraft. While each drone strike appears to be subject to an individual assessment after the fact, there is no total number of casualties compiled. Moreover, information contained in the individual assessments is classified – making it impossible for the public to learn how many civilians have been killed overall.

On July 5, 2005, journalist Peter Symonds wrote:

In what can only be regarded as a bloody act of revenge, the US military last Sunday killed as many as 17 civilians in an air raid on the remote village of Chechal in the northeast Afghan province of Kunar.

The attack took place just five kilometres from where a US Chinook helicopter was shot down, four days before, resulting in the deaths of 16 US special forces personnel — the largest single loss of American troops since the US-led invasion of the country in 2001.

While it remains to be seen what kind of lethal punishment Afghan civilians will bear in retaliation for the most recent Chinook crash with its record-breaking American death toll, one thing is certain: Lawrence O'Donnell will offer no words of sorrow or condolence, no melancholy homage to the dead, no decorous harangue of the American public for not caring enough, for not knowing the names, faces, and stories of those killed by our own soldiers whose salaries we pay and bombs we build.

To mourn only fallen soldiers of one's own country and not even notice the civilians they are trained to kill in their own country is to rewrite the history of war and violence and further entrenches the vile ideology of "us vs. them", inverts aggressor and victim, and praises invasion and empire. Lawrence O'Donnell, by deliberately ignoring the thousands of Afghan dead during his encomium for the dead American soldiers, has proven that, as far as the mainstream media is concerned, justice will never have the last word.

[Nima Shirazi is a political commentator from New York City. His analysis of United States foreign policy and Middle East issues is published on his website, WideAsleepInAmerica.com, and can also be found in numerous other online and print publications.]

Source / Wide Asleep in America

Fluxed Up World

Climate Change: We've Just Seen the Beginning

2011-08-03T16:17:00.000-07:00

The Fires This Time
By Neil deMause / August 3, 2011

In coverage of extreme weather, media downplay climate change

On April 14, a massive storm swept down out of the Rocky Mountains into the Midwest and South, spawning more than 150 tornadoes that killed 43 people across 16 states (Capital Weather Gang, 4/18/11). It was one of the largest weather catastrophes in United States history—but was soon upstaged by an even larger storm, the 2011 Super Outbreak that spread more than 300 tornadoes across 14 states from April 25 to 28 (including an all-time one-day record of 188 twisters on April 27), killing 339 people, including 41 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama (CNN, 5/1/11).

Ensuing weeks saw Texas wildfires that had been burning since December expand to consume more than 3 million acres (Texas Forest Service, 6/28/11; CNN, 4/25/11), plus record flooding along the Mississippi River, which couldn’t contain the water from April’s storms on top of the spring snowmelt. On May 22, a super-strong F5 tornado killed 153 people as it flattened a large part of Joplin, Missouri (National Weather Service Weather Forecast Office, 5/22/11) ; in the first two weeks of June, a heat wave broke temperature records in multiple states, and the Wallow fire became the largest in Arizona state history (Washington Post, 6/14/11).

It was an unprecedented string of severe weather: By mid-June, more than 1,000 tornadoes had killed 536 people (NOAA, 6/13/11), nearly as many deaths as in the entire preceding decade. And it was only natural to ask: Were we seeing the effects of climate change?

Most scientists would say yes, or at least “probably.” The Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change, a global scientific body that has been a target of conservatives despite a record of soft-pedaling its findings to avoid controversy (Extra!, 7/8/07), warned on February 2, 2007, “It is very likely that hot extremes, heat waves and heavy precipitation events will continue to become more frequent.” (In science-speak, “very likely” refers to a certainty of greater than 90 percent, and is as near as you get to a definitive conclusion.) Other forecasts (e.g., Environment America, 9/8/10) have projected that wet regions will receive record rainfall thanks to increasing evaporation, while dry ones get record drought, as climate patterns shift to accommodate the new normal.

Yet despite these dire predictions, U.S. media were hesitant to investigate the links between climate change and this spring’s extreme weather. Much coverage settled for the cheap irony of contrasting extreme phenomena, as when NBC’s Saturday Today show meteorologist Bill Karins (6/11/11) quipped:

Feast or famine’s been the rule this spring. The northern half of the country, we’ve dealt with the heavy rain, the record snow pack that’s now melting in the northern Rockies. That’s causing the flooding. The southern half of the country, you would love some of that rain.

Even news reports that probed deeper into the causes of the spring’s extreme weather, though, often stopped short of looking at climate factors. A Chicago Tribune story (4/29/11) headlined, “Why April Record for Twisters? Experts Call It Random, Say Nature Varies,” noted that “some meteorologists” blame the periodic weather pattern known as La Niña, but then cited other scientists as saying the tornado outbreak was just random variation, with University of Illinois meteorologist Bob Rauber saying, “Global warming is occurring, but this is not a manifestation of it.”

On the CBS Evening News (6/9/11), meanwhile, John Blackstone noted, “Perhaps the biggest weather troublemaker has been in the Gulf of Mexico, where sea surface temperatures have been almost 2 degrees [Fahrenheit] above average. That warm, moist Gulf air meeting the powerful jet stream created the string of tornadoes that killed 525 people.” Yet, asked by anchor Scott Pelley why the Gulf of Mexico is hotter than usual, Blackstone replied only: “Well, it’s related to the drought in the South—in the South-Southwest, with little clouds, lots of sunshine, the waters warming up and those warm waters could add energy to this hurricane season as well.”

But while La Niña is a natural cyclical variation, the warming Gulf is not—at the very least, it’s exacerbated by the global warming trend, which has pumped at least four times the heat energy into the oceans that it has into the atmosphere (NPR, 3/19/08). As National Center for Atmospheric Research climatologist Kevin Trenberth explained to Extra!, the air over oceans now averages 1 degree Fahrenheit warmer and 4 percent wetter than it was before 1970. “So there is more warm moist air from the Gulf flowing into all spring storms that travel across the U.S. That destabilizes the air, provides fuel for thunderstorms and converts some thunderstorms into supercell storms, which in turn provide the environment for tornadoes to form.”

The easiest connection for most reporters to make was with heat waves, probably because they match best with the popular image of “global warming.” “Intense hot conditions will increase dramatically over the next 30 years,” ABC News’ Jim Avila (6/8/11) reported after June’s record-setting heat wave. “Climatologists say it’s clear: Global warming is beginning to show itself in plain sight.”

For other extreme weather events, though, climate change only merited occasional mention. The wildfires that raged out of control across the Southwest in May and June were mostly covered as an unexpected natural disaster, without much thought of causes; in one exception, the Arizona Republic (6/12/11) fixed the blame squarely on the state having too many trees—a charge also brought up by the New York Times (6/11/11), which reported that, among other things, “Some [residents and experts] complained that it was environmentalists who had caused the forests to become tinderboxes by preventing the thinning of trees as they sought to protect wildlife.”

This common conservative claim, Climate Progress blogger Joe Romm noted (6/12/11), was refuted in a 2006 paper (Science, 8/16/06) that found that fires were increasing the most at higher elevations, where forest restoration is less of an issue, but where warmer temperatures have a huge impact by melting winter snows earlier and increasing summer drought.

In fact, scientists have long predicted that one result of climate change would be a dramatic increase in Western wildfires, as Pete Spotts of the Christian Science Monitor explained in a rare article making such connections (6/9/11). The National Academy of Sciences projected (7/16/10) that a 1-degree Celsius increase in global temperatures—just half the best-case scenario in most climate models—could more than triple the acreage burned by wildfires in the U.S. West. Washington Post blogger Jason Samenow (6/14/11) reported on this study, but it went unmentioned in the newspaper’s wildfire coverage.

Similarly, a NASA wildfire model released last year (10/27/10) projected that climate change would lead to an increase of fires in the U.S. West of between 30 and 60 percent by 2100. “I want you to think a little bit of fire as a metaphor for the many things that climate change holds for us,” NASA earth sciences director Peter Hildebrand told a conference in Colorado in early April—though the only reporter to note this statement was environmental journalist Brendon Bosworth on his self-titled blog (4/8/11).

As for tornadoes, news coverage was openly dismissive of their connection to climate change. A New York Times Q & A following the Joplin tornado (5/25/11) asked: “Can the intensity of this year’s tornadoes be blamed on climate change?” and answered “Probably not. Over all, the number of violent tornadoes has been declining in the United States, even as temperatures have increased.”

Indeed, while the number of reported tornadoes has steadily risen in recent years, prior to this year the number of strong tornadoes (category F4 or F5) had not, leading most scientists to conclude that the rising totals for weak storms are merely a result of more thorough reporting, thanks to sprawling development in tornado-prone regions that has put more people within sighting distance. And because the mechanics of tornado generation are poorly understood—and they depend on vertical temperature differential, so a warming lower atmosphere would predict more tornadoes, but a warming upper atmosphere would tend to reduce them—most scientists say that stronger and more frequent tornadoes can’t be definitively linked to climate.

Still, Trenberth told the blog Think Progress (4/29/11) that it’s “irresponsible” not to mention climate change in tornado coverage. “The basic driver of thunderstorms is the instability in the atmosphere: warm moist air at low levels with drier air aloft,” he told the site. “With global warming, the low-level air is warm and moister and there is more energy available to fuel all of these storms.”

Most reporters, though, chose to stick to the narrower question of whether these particular tornadoes were caused by climate change—which, given all the factors involved to create any particular storm, is impossible to answer, except in the sense in which all weather today is the product of a warmed climate.

“Contributing to the thrashing were the La Niña conditions in the Pacific Ocean, unusually warm ocean temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico and the increase of moisture in the atmosphere caused by the warming climate,” wrote the Washington Post (6/15/11) on the spring’s tornadoes, fires and floods. The piece cited National Oceanographic and Atmo-spheric Administration climate director Thomas Karl as “caution[ing] against focusing on any single cause for the unusual chain of events,” quoting him as saying that “clearly these things interconnect.”

Karl also featured prominently in an article by the New York Times’ John Broder (6/15/11) that reported, “Government scientists said Wednesday that the frequency of extreme weather has increased over the past two decades, in part as a result of global warming,” but quickly added that scientists “were careful not to blame humans for this year’s rash of deadly events.” Broder’s only evidence: Karl’s statement that “since 1980, indeed, extreme climatological and meteorological events have increased. But in the early part of the 20th century, there was also a tendency for more extreme events followed by a quiet couple of decades.”

The story’s headline: “Scientists See More Deadly Weather, but Dispute the Cause.” (Broder later apologized to Romm—Climate Progress, 6/18/11—for what he called a “crappy headline.”)

In fact, though, Karl had previously made clear that climate change would result in more extreme weather. “How climate change will be felt by you and impact your neighbors is probably going to be through extreme weather and climate events,” he told EarthSky (3/15/10). “We may be fine for many years, and all of a sudden, one particular season, one particular year, the extremes are far worse than we’ve ever seen before.”

In many ways, articles like Broder’s parallel the decades-long public debate over carcinogens: It’s just as difficult to say whether any one person’s cancer was caused by pollutants as whether one weather event was caused by climate change. And in both cases, statistical studies have a literally fatal drawback: By the time you’ve gathered enough data, it’s too late to prevent the consequences.

Scientists, then, may conclude that it’s “too soon to tell” exactly how climate change affects tornadoes and other severe weather, but that’s not the same as saying it has no effect. As Trenberth tells Extra! of the spring’s string of catastrophes: “Much of what goes on is natural variability and weather. But there is a component from human influences through global warming. While it may be modest, it is real and significant.”

As noted, the role of climate change in the spring’s severe weather wasn’t entirely ignored. The Christian Science Monitor (6/9/11), in its report on Arizona wildfires that had “blackened an area half the size of Rhode Island,” called them “the latest poster child for what some scientists see as a long-term trend toward larger, longer-lived wildfires in the American West,” noting that “climate change appears to be an important contributor.”

Urgency was left to op-ed pages: Climate activist Bill McKibben wrote a scathing op-ed in the Washington Post (5/23/11) that sarcastically suggested: “It’s very important to stay calm. If you got upset about any of this, you might forget how important it is not to disrupt the record profits of our fossil fuel companies.” Environmental writer Chip Ward wrote an opinion piece on CBS News.com (6/16/11): “Global warming, global weirding, climate change—whatever you prefer to call it—is not just happening in some distant, melting Arctic land out of a storybook. It is not just burning up far-away Russia. It’s here now.” (CBS News’ television programs, meanwhile, never once mentioned climate change in their coverage of the spring’s wildfires.)

One example of how to cover the story differently came from the Edmonton Journal (5/17/11), where columnist Graham Thomson wrote:

No scientist can guarantee that any of these events are caused by human-induced climate change. Climate change is all about trends.

However, the trends are consistent: The atmosphere is warming, the climate is changing and we are largely responsible through our burning of fossil fuels.

What scientists can tell us is that as the climate warms we’ll experience more extreme weather events leading to floods, droughts, forest fires and crop failures. In other words, it’s what we’re seeing now.

Even Thomson, though, didn’t try to suggest that we change our behavior to prevent extreme weather from becoming the norm.

Similarly, when the New York Times editorial page weighed in on what can be done about climate change (6/1/11), it was to praise the city of Chicago for building more rooftop gardens and adding air conditioning to classrooms as part of “long-term preparations for a warmer, stormier climate.” Never mind that the electricity needed to power air conditioners is a major contributor of carbon emissions, or that air conditioning in schools is unlikely to do much to stem the additional 166 to 2,217 annual deaths that researchers Roger Peng and Francesca Domenici estimate Chicago will suffer by the end of the century as the result of climate change (Environmental Health Perspectives, 5/11).

And then there was the counsel given by Nightline anchor Bill Weir (4/26/11), who bent over backwards to avoid definitive conclusions on the causes of the deadly weather:

After months of epic droughts and floods, blizzards and heat waves, some are seeing proof of warnings past, while others refuse to believe that man could ever wreck God’s planet. But neither side can deny that we are having one hellacious spring.

He informed viewers that a NASA scientist says blaming individual weather events on climate change is “a leap too far,” then signed off with this advice: “In the near term, the best you can do is get a weather radio and try to stay dry.”

SIDEBAR: Don’t Need a Weather Channel to Know Which Way the Wind Blows

When NBC Universal purchased the Weather Channel in 2008, it was described by company CEO Jeffrey Zucker (New York Times, 7/7/08) as making the network “the pre-eminent leader in news and information. We’re No. 1 in business news, No. 1 in general broadcast news, and now we’re No. 1 in weather news too.”
During this spring’s extreme weather events, NBC certainly made use of its new property, with repeated appearances by familiar Weather Channel faces on its news programs. After the late April tornadoes, NBC anchor Brian Williams asked meteorologist Greg Forbes (4/28/11): “People ask the same question, what’s going on here? Is this something we have done?” Forbes avoided the climate question: “Certainly the atmosphere has been in a frenzy. The jet stream just keeps blasting across the country, and then the warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico just keeps feeding with instability, and so we’ve had tornado after tornado.”

The next night (4/29/11), it was the Weather Channel’s Jim Cantore—familiar to millions of viewers as the face peering out from inside a rain slicker during any number of hurricanes—who was similarly questioned by Williams, with no clearer results:

CANTORE: Brian, when you go back and you look for evidence of something, sometimes the most obvious things don’t hit you until you just—they’re right there in front of your face. If we have a warmer Earth, and the purpose of the jet stream is to help equalize all of that, well, because it’s warmer, it’s going to have to work a lot harder. And that, in addition to the fact that we have so much instability out there in this month of April, heat and humidity, those two things create this monster outbreak....

WILLIAMS: I guess we’re all looking for ways to explain away what happened here.

CANTORE: It’s hard to do that.

Forbes and Cantore should perhaps be cut some slack, as they’re meteorologists, not climate experts. The Weather Channel used to have an environmental reporting team, including a weekly show called Forecast Earth that focused on climate change—but they were all laid off as one of NBC’s first cost-cutting moves after purchasing the channel (WashingtonPost.com,11/21/08).

[Neil deMause is a frequent contributor to Extra! and a contributing editor for City Limits magazine. He can be followed on Twitter @neildemause.]

Source / Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting

Fluxed Up World