Published on Thursday, November 3, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
The News of Empire
by Robert C. Koehler
“Mr. Obama and his senior national security advisers have sought to reassure allies and answer critics, including many Republicans, that the United States will not abandon its commitments in the Persian Gulf even as it winds down the war in Iraq and looks ahead to doing the same in Afghanistan by the end of 2014.”
I pluck a paragraph from the New York Times and for an instant I’m possessed by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, aquiver with puzzlement down to my deepest sensibilities. I hold you here, root and all, little paragraph. But if I could understand what you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what empire is, and hubris . . . and maybe even, by its striking absence, democracy.
The paragraph contains the careful verbiage of exclusion, which is the only language in which the geopolitical powers that be are able to communicate.
The paragraph, one of many that could have been plucked for study and put under the microscope of outrage, is from a story just before Halloween, by Thom Shanker and Steven Lee Myers, informing us that, while the United States will be pulling troops out of Iraq at the end of the year, the regional war is anything but over: The U.S. military will be massing troops in Kuwait, sending more warships to the region and tightening its military alliance with the six nations that make up the Gulf Cooperation Council (including Saudi Arabia and Bahrain), in order to develop “a new security architecture” in the Gulf and establish its “post-Iraq footprint.”
Or in the words of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: “We will have a robust continuing presence throughout the region.” And this, she explains, “is proof of our ongoing commitment to Iraq and to the future of that region,” which we care about because it “holds such promise” — oh God, the compassion is killing me — “and should be freed from outside interference to continue on a pathway to democracy.”
What’s striking, first of all, is that the “news” is presented to us, under the guise of objective reporting, as a fait accompli: Our supreme leaders have the following plans, the cursory details of which they are nice enough to let us in on.
There is no countertide present in reporting that emanates from the national defense beat — no acknowledgement of a rising national disgust at war or our enormous military failures of the past decade, which the plans the Times story outlines merely continue. There’s no acknowledgment even of obvious contradictions or hypocrisies, such as the fact that our presence in the Gulf arguably constitutes the very “outside interference” from which, according to Clinton, the region should be freed.
And certainly there isn’t the least irreverence: no suggestion, for instance, that we have an interest in this oil-rich region beyond a deep love for the people and their democratic aspirations; or that our partners in the Gulf Cooperation Council are autocrats who brutally repress dissent and, ahem, democracy.
The story reads, instead, like interlocking blocks of propaganda dropped into place, not so much disseminating information as protecting the security state planners from questions and challenges. This is the news of empire.
Note that when the story does acknowledge critics, those critics are Republicans, that is to say, empire fanatics as opposed to empire moderates, thus implying that the only reasonable question our post-Iraq footprint raises is whether we should be “post-Iraq” at all. “. . . American military officers and diplomats, as well as officials of several countries in the region, worry that the withdrawal could leave instability or worse in its wake.”
This much should be clear: War is a given. Got it?
And war could follow more than one trajectory. If there’s a “security collapse” in Iraq, our troops in Kuwait could quickly redeploy to the country we’ve already destroyed. But those same troops could also respond to “a military confrontation with Iran.”
Perhaps the most telling quote in the Times story was from Bahrain’s foreign minister, Sheik Khalid bin Ahmed al-Khalifa. With the United States out of Iraq, a regional alliance is necessary because, he said, “Now the game is different.”
Yeah, well . . .
The only thing wrong with this comment is that this isn’t a game: not our eight and a half years in Iraq, our decade in Afghanistan or our possible invasion of Iran. Innocent people have died and will continue to die in horrific numbers, toxins will spread, lives will be destroyed. The consequences cannot be contained. They are bleeding now and will continue to bleed into the future. But the Times story affects no awareness of this; it has the depth of a gamer review.
Is there a democracy at either end of the missiles, warships or troop deployments? Suddenly I’m back on the sidewalk with the Occupy movement, which has arisen at last in this era of passive citizenship to confront the embedded helplessness and hopelessness that come with the corporatocracy and its subservient media.
Citizens are standing up to the assumptions of empire. Their numbers are small — for the moment — but their spirit could prove to be irresistible.
© 2011 Tribune News Services
Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His new book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound is now available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his website at commonwonders.com.
Published on Thursday, November 3, 2011 by New Scientist
Revealed – The Capitalist Network That Runs the World
by Andy Coghlan and Debora MacKenzie
As protests against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.
The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.
The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).
"Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. "Our analysis is reality-based."
Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world's economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy - whether it made it more or less stable, for instance.
The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.
The work, to be published in PLoS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.
When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.
John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability.
Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core's tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. "If one [company] suffers distress," says Glattfelder, "this propagates."
"It's disconcerting to see how connected things really are," agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank.
Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), warns that the analysis assumes ownership equates to control, which is not always true. Most company shares are held by fund managers who may or may not control what the companies they part-own actually do. The impact of this on the system's behaviour, he says, requires more analysis.
Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could help make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest measures to prevent future collapses spreading through the entire economy. Glattfelder says we may need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs. Sugihara says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess interconnectivity to discourage this risk.
One thing won't chime with some of the protesters' claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. "Such structures are common in nature," says Sugihara.
Newcomers to any network connect preferentially to highly connected members. TNCs buy shares in each other for business reasons, not for world domination. If connectedness clusters, so does wealth, says Dan Braha of NECSI: in similar models, money flows towards the most highly connected members. The Zurich study, says Sugihara, "is strong evidence that simple rules governing TNCs give rise spontaneously to highly connected groups". Or as Braha puts it: "The Occupy Wall Street claim that 1 per cent of people have most of the wealth reflects a logical phase of the self-organising economy."
So, the super-entity may not result from conspiracy. The real question, says the Zurich team, is whether it can exert concerted political power. Driffill feels 147 is too many to sustain collusion. Braha suspects they will compete in the market but act together on common interests. Resisting changes to the network structure may be one such common interest.
The top 50 of the 147 superconnected companies
1. Barclays plc
2. Capital Group Companies Inc
3. FMR Corporation
4. AXA
5. State Street Corporation
6. JP Morgan Chase & Co
7. Legal & General Group plc
8. Vanguard Group Inc
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc
11. Wellington Management Co LLP
12. Deutsche Bank AG
13. Franklin Resources Inc
14. Credit Suisse Group
15. Walton Enterprises LLC
16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp
17. Natixis
18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
19. T Rowe Price Group Inc
20. Legg Mason Inc
21. Morgan Stanley
22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
23. Northern Trust Corporation
24. Société Générale
25. Bank of America Corporation
26. Lloyds TSB Group plc
27. Invesco plc
28. Allianz SE 29. TIAA
30. Old Mutual Public Limited Company
31. Aviva plc
32. Schroders plc
33. Dodge & Cox
34. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc*
35. Sun Life Financial Inc
36. Standard Life plc
37. CNCE
38. Nomura Holdings Inc
39. The Depository Trust Company
40. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance
41. ING Groep NV
42. Brandes Investment Partners LP
43. Unicredito Italiano SPA
44. Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan
45. Vereniging Aegon
46. BNP Paribas
47. Affiliated Managers Group Inc
48. Resona Holdings Inc
49. Capital Group International Inc
50. China Petrochemical Group Company
* Lehman still existed in the 2007 dataset used
Graphic: The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy
(Data: PLoS One)
© 2011 The New Scientist
Andy Coghlan and Debora MacKenzie write for the New Scientist
Published on Wednesday, November 2, 2011 by Huffington Post
Tax the One Percent -- Make Wall Street Fund America
by Van Jones
The giant cries of protest sweeping across the country are starting to reverberate in the halls of Congress. Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Representative Peter DeFazio (D-OR) are proposing a Wall Street Tax. Their bill would establish a tiny financial transaction tax of 0.03% on every single trade of stocks, bonds, options, futures, swaps, and credit default swaps.
I think this is a great idea, and Congress should pass the bill. Rebuild the Dream and MoveOn.org started a petition so you can show support for the Wall Street Tax.
Notably, a Wall Street Tax is in the Contract for the American Dream, the 10-point plan to fix our economy that more than 131,000 people created earlier this year, through a grassroots, bottom-up process. To date, more than 300,000 people have signed the Contract for the American Dream. In other words, the idea of a Wall Street Tax is already popular.
The Wall Street Tax would be a tiny cost for those of us socking away our savings for retirement or our children's education -- the average person paying into a 401(k) would pay only one dollar per year.
But Wall Street traders could no longer bet thousands of times a second for free. Much of the risk in today's market comes from rapid-fire "flash trading," where financial firms use computer algorithms to make thousands of trades per second. This doesn't add any real value to the market or to our economy.
When we buy something of real value, like a winter coat for our kids, we pay a sales tax, and rightly so. Yet these Wall Street speculators pay zero taxes while making a fortune passing electrons back and forth millions of times a day, all the while destabilizing our economy.
The Harkin-DeFazio Wall Street Tax is common sense. The concept has been around for a while. Hundreds of economists and responsible investors have long called for it, including Nobel Laureates Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, plus stock market billionaire Warren Buffett and former Goldman Sachs Chairman John Whitehead.
This idea is already law in several countries, including financial centers like the UK and Hong Kong. And the European Union is currently considering a much steeper version of what's on the table in the U.S.
The Wall Street Tax would raise somewhere between $700 billion and $1.2 trillion over ten years, critical funds we need to create jobs and protect vital programs.
Meanwhile, the Super Committee has been charged with finding $1.5 trillion in deficit reductions and has floated the idea of targeting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Notice: the Wall Street Tax would cover nearly all of the Super Committee's mandated deficit reductions.
Congress is about to face a telling choice. Will they vote to tax Wall Street gamblers in the 1%, or cut the Social Security checks of senior citizens in the 99%?
Members of Congress should take note: If they vote against the 99% on this bill, they should be prepared for the 99% to vote against them next November.
Go here to learn more about the bill and what citizens can do.
© 2011 Huffington Post
Published on Thursday, November 3, 2011 by PRWatch.org
18 Arrested in Wisconsin Assembly for Using Cameras; Guns Still Allowed
by Brendan Fischer
Eighteen people were arrested Tuesday for using cameras in the Wisconsin Assembly gallery, including the editor of The Progressive magazine, Matt Rothschild.
Rothschild and others had gone to the capitol to protest a series of arrests in recent weeks of individuals who carried signs or took photos or video in defiance of an Assembly ban.
"We ought to have a right to take a picture," Rothschild said.
Guns, Yes. Cameras, No.
The protest was organized through a Facebook event called "Concealed Camera Day at the Capitol!" The event coincided with the implementation of Wisconsin's new concealed carry law, which allows residents to carry a concealed firearm -- including inside the Assembly gallery.
Stephen Colbert said Governor Walker was bringing "a new freedom to America's dairyland" with the concealed carry law, but said people would not see "images of gunfire in the statehouse" because of the camera ban. "Thank God. Cameras are dangerous," he said.
On the agenda in Tuesday's session was a bill to institute the Castle Doctrine, a "shoot first, ask questions later" bill that gives a person immunity from civil and criminal liability if they shoot another in self defense in their home, work, or vehicle. The American Legislative Exchange Council also has a model Castle Doctrine bill -- see the side-by-side here.
Event organizers were clear that the protests were not about the gun laws, but instead about protecting First Amendment rights.
But is it Legal?
The Open Meetings law includes this provision (§19.90):
"Use of equipment in open session. Whenever a governmental body holds a meeting in open session, the body shall make a reasonable effort to accommodate any person desiring to record, film or photograph the meeting. This section does not permit recording, filming or photographing such a meeting in a manner that interferes with the conduct of the meeting or the rights of the participants."
The statute also contains this provision (§ 19.87(2)):
"No provision of this subchapter which conflicts with a rule of the senate or assembly or joint rule of the legislature shall apply to a meeting conducted in compliance with such rule."
The legal issue here appears similar to the one that arose in the challenge to Governor Walker's collective bargaining law. In that case, Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne alleged that the union-busting law should be struck down because it was passed in violation of another provision of the Open Meetings law requiring notice. In part, Ozanne's challenge failed because the legislature had passed a rule that trumped the Open Meetings law.
Likewise, here the Assembly had a rule banning cameras and video, but under the court's ruling in the Ozanne suit, that rule trumped the Open Meetings law permitting their use.
Despite this, both the Wisconsin and U.S. Constitutions have provisions protecting the right to free speech, free assembly, and a free press. "The gallery is a free speech area," says attorney Jim Mueller, who was ticketed in October for violating the Assembly rule. "Even if there are rules against signs, they're unconstitutional. It is our right to peaceably assemble and petition the government."
© 2011 Center for Media and Democracy
Brendan M. Fischer is a law fellow with the Center for Media and Democracy and a student at the University of Wisconsin Law School in the class of 2011.
Published on Thursday, November 3, 2011 by Salon.com
The Human Toll of the US Drone Campaign
by Glenn Greenwald
The principal reason so little attention is paid to the constant victims of American violence in the Muslim world is because the U.S. Government refuses to disclose anything about these attacks and media outlets virtually never report on those victims...[]
It’s easy to cheer for a leader who regularly extinguishes the lives of innocent men, women, teeangers and young children when you can remain blissfully free of hearing about the victims. It’s even easier when the victims all have Muslim-ish names and live in the parts of the Muslim world we’ve been taught to view as a cauldron of sub-human demons. That’s why it’s periodically worth highlighting the actual impact of those drones and the actual people they kill, as the BBC did [yesterday]:
When tribal elders from the remote Pakistani region of North Waziristan travelled to Islamabad last week to protest against CIA drone strikes, a teenager called Tariq Khan was among them.
A BBC team caught him on camera, sitting near the front of a tribal assembly, or jirga, listening carefully.
Four days later he was dead – killed by one of the drones he was protesting against.
His family told us two missiles hit the 16-year-old on Monday near Miranshah, the main town in North Waziristan. His 12-year-old cousin Wahid was killed alongside him. . . .
After the missile strike on Monday, Pakistani officials said four suspected militants had been killed.
If the strike actually killed two young boys – as appears to be the case – it’s unlikely anyone will ever be held to account. . . .
Many senior commanders from the Taliban and al-Qaeda are among the dead. But campaigners claim there have been hundreds of civilian victims, whose stories are seldom told.
A shy teenage boy called Saadullah is one of them. He survived a drone strike that killed three of his relatives, but he lost both legs, one eye and his hope for the future.
“I wanted to be a doctor,” he told me, “but I can’t walk to school anymore. When I see others going, I wish I could join them.”
Like Tariq, Saadullah travelled to Islamabad for last week’s jirga. Seated alongside him was Haji Zardullah, a white-bearded man who said he lost four nephews in a separate attack.
“None of these were harmful people,” he said. “Two were still in school and one was in college.”
The article quotes the international human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith arguing that because Pakistan is not a war zone, these killings are “murder.”
Read the full article at Salon.com
© 2011 Salon.com
Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book "How Would a Patriot Act?," a critique of the Bush administration's use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, "A Tragic Legacy", examines the Bush legacy. His just-released book is titled "With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful." He is the recipient of the first annual I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism.
Published on Thursday, November 3, 2011 by TruthDig.com
Too Big to Jail
by Robert Scheer
Can we all agree that a $1 billion swindle represents a lot of money, and the fact that Citigroup agreed last week to pay a $285 million fine to settle SEC charges for “misleading investors” demonstrates a damning admission of culpability?
So why has Robert Rubin, the onetime treasury secretary who went on to become Citigroup chairman during the time of the corporation’s financial shenanigans, never been held accountable for this and other deep damage done to the U.S. economy on his watch?
Rubin’s tenure atop the world of high finance began when he was co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, before he became Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary and pushed through the reversal of the Glass-Steagall Act, an action that legalized the formation of Citigroup and other “too big to fail” banking conglomerates.
Rubin’s destructive impact on the economy in enabling these giant corporate banks to run amok was far greater than that of swindler Bernard Madoff, who sits in prison under a 150-year sentence while Rubin sits on the Harvard Board of Overseers, as chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and as a leader of the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project.
Rubin was rewarded for his efforts on behalf of Citigroup with a top job as chairman of the bank’s executive committee and at least $126 million in compensation. That was “compensation” for steering the bank to the point of a bankruptcy avoided only by a $45 billion taxpayer bailout and a further guarantee of $300 billion of the bank’s toxic assets.
Those toxic assets and other collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps were exempted from government regulation by the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which Rubin helped design while he was treasury secretary and which was turned into law when Rubin protégé Lawrence Summers took over that Cabinet post.
In arguing that the derivatives market in housing mortgages and other debt obligations required no government oversight, Summers told Congress, “First, the parties to these kinds of contracts are largely sophisticated financial institutions that would appear to be eminently capable of protecting themselves from fraud and counterparty insolvencies. ... Second, given the nature of the underlying assets—namely supplies of financial exchange and other financial instruments—there would seem to be little scope for market manipulation. ...”
Oops. One wonders if Summers, who went on to be president of Harvard after playing such a disastrous role in the federal government, ever asked his mentor Rubin what went wrong. After all, it was Rubin who was a honcho at the “sophisticated financial institution” of Citigroup when, as the Securities and Exchange Commission filing against the bank explains, Citigroup structured and marketed a $1 billion toxic asset to investors without disclosing that it was simultaneously betting against that asset.
Back in January of 2008, knowing full well of the chicanery of his own bank and others with which he was quite familiar, Rubin nonetheless told an audience at Cooper Union in New York that the turmoil in the markets was “all part of a cycle of periodic excess leading to periodic disruption.” CNNMoney, reporting on his talk, noted that Rubin “doesn’t seem particularly alarmed. ... And the economic problems that he did acknowledge were blamed on just about everyone but the major financial players.”
Rubin, who became a key adviser to the Obama campaign, has long cultivated an image as a do-gooder by making philanthropic contributions that deflect attention from the consequences of his own grievous actions. He has played a major role in shaping Obama administration economic policy not only through former aides like Summers and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner but through the Hamilton Project, which he has funded at the Brookings Institution. The Hamilton Project has had much influence over the Democratic Party, and President Barack Obama as a young senator was the project’s first public speaker.
But facts these days tend to intrude in ways inconvenient to the superrich, who assume they can control the narrative. This month the Hamilton Project released a depressing assessment of the results of the era of radical market deregulation that Rubin’s policies launched, particularly as it had a horrendous effect on children.
Referring to the “Great Recession,” dismissed by Rubin at its inception as a mere blip in the business cycle, the report noted that the family income of the median child in the U.S. has fallen nearly 14 percent in the past five years and is now 7 percent lower than in 1975, concluding that while the income of the top 10 percent of families with children has increased 45 percent in the last 35 years, “half of America’s children are worse-off than their counterparts 35 years ago.”
That’s a telling obituary for the illusion, fostered by Robert Rubin as effectively as anyone, that the 22 percent of children in the United States who suffer below the poverty line and the offspring of multimillionaires like Rubin are living in the same America.
© 2011 TruthDig.com
Robert Scheer is editor of Truthdig.com and a regular columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle.
Imploding culture watch: Hardball’s school for stupid!
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 2011
A very bad, very dumb man: Joan Walsh played some Hardball last night. More on that below.
But first, let’s consider something Chris Matthews said during Tuesday night’s opening segment. Let’s understand why he said the very strange thing he said.
Matthews devoted that opening segment to the problem he called “Obama derangement syndrome.” First, he discussed the man who heckled Obama on Monday night—though he didn’t seem to know what the man had said, and he didn’t have the right part of the videotape ready to show.
Matthews is seldom prepared on the facts—but he’s always prepared on the narrative. That explains the weird thing he said about Wayne Lapierre’s latest statement.
Lapierre is head of the NRA. Last week, he made an absurdly stupid claim about Obama. After vouching for Lapierre, Matthews played tape of his statement, then made a peculiar comparison.
Matthews spoke with Ron Christie, a Republican spokesman. To watch the full segment, click this:
MATTHEWS (9/27/11): Well, here’s something—another strain of the crazy far right. Here’s the National Rifle Association’s Wayne Lapierre—and I’ve known this guy a long time. I’m astounded by this new accusation that the president is leading some conspiracy. Anyway, here he is, Wayne Lapierre, head of the NPR [sic]—not National Public Radio, National Rifle Association, at the conservative conference in Florida last week. Let’s listen to Wayne Lapierre of the National Rifle Association.
LAPIERRE (videotape): The president will offer the Second Amendment lip service and hit the campaign trail saying he’s actually been good for the Second Amendment. But it’s a big, fat, stinking lie! It’s all part—it’s all part of a massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and hide his true intentions to destroy the Second Amendment in our country! Before the president was even sworn into office, they met and they hatched a conspiracy of public deception to try to guarantee his reelection in 2012.
MATTHEWS: You know, I got to tell you, again, Ron. This—the language, “lie," "conspiracy.” It’s almost like, I don’t know, Lincoln talking about what was going on in the Civil War below the Mason-Dixon line! I mean, this is Civil War talk about a president of the United States!
RON CHRISTIE: Oh, come on, Chris. Look—
MATTHEWS: Well, yes! Look at what he just said.
Lapierre’s statement was patently crazy. In this post, Steve Benen described it as a “self-parody,” then explained the obvious motive for such an absurd set of claims. But Matthews never got around to explaining how stupid Lapierre’s statement was. Instead, he made a peculiar comparison: Lapierre’s statement was “almost like…Lincoln talking about what was going on in the Civil War below the Mason-Dixon line!”
Huh?
Why did Matthews make this peculiar comparison? It has to do with the comfort food he’s currently serving the troops. To please his gullible liberal viewers, Matthews is trying to turn every such statement into race war against Obama. He especially likes playing his Civil War cards, no matter how strained they may be.
In this case, his weirdly strained comparison didn’t seem to make any sense; it led to a pointless exchange of culture-war insults with Christie. But it’s obvious why Matthews said what he did—it’s obvious, and it’s stupid and ugly. But then, Matthews has always been like this, even when he was making up ugly shit to please his past owner, Republican honcho Jack Welch, the man who made him wealthy.
This brings us back to what Joan Walsh said about Matthews’ past approach to Bill Clinton. When we saw her on Hardball last night, we finally realized what she must have meant in her recent statement about white liberals and Obama. For our previous post on this topic, click here:
WALSH (9/25/11): In terms of media, today's progressive media infrastructure didn't exist during the Clinton presidency…Salon came to national prominence to defend the president from the GOP witch hunt, but our writers and editors divided over Clinton's various achievements and disappointments. On MSNBC, liberals Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews helmed a lineup that was hugely critical of Clinton (today Matthews is one of Obama's leading defenders, while Olbermann, once a passionate supporter, has left both MSNBC and the Obama camp). The New York Times editorial pages, helmed by white liberal Clinton critic Howell Raines and featuring (once-liberal) Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich, savaged Clinton and Al Gore. White progressives at the Nation attacked Clinton harshly on NAFTA, welfare reform and his Wall Street-friendly economic policies, while defending him from impeachment, much like Salon.
Good lord! Walsh’s probable meaning is so absurd that it didn’t occur to us at first. But she probably meant that Matthews was “hugely critical of [President] Clinton” because he, Matthews, was such a big liberal! Within the context of her overall column, this put Matthews on the side of gods. It showed that he, as a major white liberal, was willing to criticize the white Democratic president!
In this case, the story is ever better. In Walsh’s construction, Matthews criticized the white Democratic president—but he’s supporting Obama, who’s black!
One part of Walsh’s statement is true, of course. Matthews was in fact “hugely critical” of President Clinton. After that, he spent two years savaging Candidate Gore in the ugliest, most dishonest ways possible. This had nothing to do with being a liberal. There’s no way on the face of the earth Joan Walsh doesn’t know that.
(Matthews spent the next seven years trashing Hillary Clinton.)
Last night, Walsh played Hardball again. Her lying has kept her alive. Her country stays uninformed.
Timesday: Old times there are now forgotten!
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2011
Trend story/Times-in-the-South: The New York Times has long been mocked for its inane, unfounded “trend stories.” Jack Shafer did a million such pieces in his time at Slate.
This morning, the famous paper may have presented the most absurd such effort in its storied history.
“Southern Charm Is Alive, but Ailing.” So Times readers are told today, in a tease beneath a photo out on the paper’s front page.
The photo shows several couples dancing. Everyone seems to be twelve years old. The girls are all wearing white gloves.
The potential for dumbness is apparent in the front-page photograph’s caption: “Students in Augusta, Ga., learn ballroom dancing, but others lament lapses in civility.”
Eagerly, we turned to page A16, just as the caption directed.
Is this the dumbest “trend story” the Times has ever produced? “A Last Bastion of Civility, the South, Sees Manners Decline,” the on-line headline says.
Manners are slipping in this whole region? We were eager to see how the Times was able to document this latest trend! Of course, since the Times was talking about “those people”—those people, the ones who live in “that region”—the rules of the game were clear. Kim Severson’s analysis of the region’s manners had to start with an odd racial hook:
SEVERSON (11/2/11): One August night, two men walked into a popular restaurant attached to this city’s fanciest shopping mall. They sat at the bar, ordered drinks and pondered the menu. Two women stood behind them.
A bartender asked if they would mind offering their seats to the ladies. Yes, they would mind. Very much.
Angry words came next, then a federal court date and a claim for more than $3 million in damages.
The men, a former professional basketball player and a lawyer, also happen to be black. The women are white. The men’s lawyers argued that the Tavern at Phipps used a policy wrapped in chivalry as a cloak for discriminatory racial practices.
After a week’s worth of testimony in September, a jury decided in favor of the bar.
Certainly, the owners conceded, filling the bar with women offers an economic advantage because it attracts more men. But in the South, they said, giving up a seat to a lady is also part of a culture of civility.
Did the men sue the bar for the three million bucks? Or did the bar sure the men? Whatever! In fairness, this opening hook was a bit odd for the Times-in-the-South, since it wasn’t abundantly clear that “those people” were committing an outrage against the presumptive good people.
Severson had found a slightly odd way to begin her tale of a region’s decline. But as she continued, she let Times readers know that hers was a scholarly effort:
SEVERSON (continuing directly): At least, it used to be. The Tavern at Phipps case, and a growing portfolio of examples of personal and political behavior that belies a traditional code of gentility, have scholars of Southern culture and Southerners themselves wondering if civility in the South is dead, or at least wounded.
“Manners are one of many things that are central to a Southerner’s identity, but they are not primary anymore. Things have eroded,” said Charles Reagan Wilson, a professor of history and Southern culture at the University of Mississippi.
"Things have eroded!" And you knew it just had to be true. You see, a professor of history and Southern culture was telling us this tale!
Times readers must always be told that what they are reading is highly intelligent—a bit of a cut above. In this case, Times readers were told that they would be reading about the musings of “scholars.” But who could possibly believe the claim which made for Severson’s hook? Does the Tavern at Phipps case really have scholars of Southern culture wondering if civility in the South is dead?
Even professors can’t be that witless! Just a guess: If you can believe the improbable claim around which Severson builds her story, the New York Times has a twelve-week subscription it’s willing to sell at half price!
Manners in the South are eroding! As she pretends to document this claim, Severson treats New York Times readers to some of the silliest work ever seen in this silliest newspaper. Before long, she's leaning on the greatest crutch known to the writer of trend stories. Severson is letting us know what “some say” about this vast trend:
SEVERSON: Some say the South’s great cities seem to be losing civility faster than country communities, where stopping to ask for directions can still end in an invitation to supper.
Too many outsiders trying to escape the pressures of life in bigger cities have migrated to Atlanta and Birmingham, said Saahara Glaude, a media specialist whose clients include some members of the Martin Luther King Jr. family.
As a result, reliable affinities once based on race or religion are gone. “It used to be that an African-American could trust an African-American down here,” she said. “Those days are long gone.”
Some say it’s worse in the cities! And blacks can’t trust blacks in the South any more! We know that because one person said!
In the future, on-line dictionaries will link to this piece in their entry for “anecdotal.” Consider the strength of the evidence provided to Times readers here:
SEVERSON: Dana Mason, who teaches second grade in Birmingham, says manners have been at the lowest level she has seen in her 36 years in the classroom. Parents who move South tell her they don’t want their children to learn to say “yes, sir” or “yes, ma’am.” Too demeaning, they say.
But she and others point out that manners are on the slide everywhere. Mrs. Mason blames a faster pace of life and the demise of the home-cooked family meal.
It isn’t just in the second grade! Manners are on the slide everywhere! And yes, we do mean everywhere. Once again, we know that what follows is true because one person said it:
SEVERSON: Civility is also waning at that most civil of events, the Southern wedding. How comfortable a bride made guests feel was once the mark of a successful event. Now, weddings are more selfish affairs, said Barbara S. Clark, the owner of An Elegant Affair in Raleigh, N.C., and a graduate of the Emily Post Institute.
“It’s more about the bride and groom and what are we going to get out of it,” she said.
“Life in Charlotte is not as pleasant as it once was,” we’re later stupidly told. As evidence, we’re told that, although the city's crime rate has dropped, some people got arrested at a NASCAR event. And this happened just six months ago!
This sort of nonsense goes on and on. This has to be one of the dumbest reports ever put in print, even by the Times. On the plus side, self-impressed subscribers get treated to a real easy-reader, served to them under the guise of scholarly inquisition. By now, though, you’re probably asking a question:
What about those scrub-faced kids at that ballroom dancing class? Aren’t they at least learning good manners? And that’s a question we asked ourselves as we plowed through Severson’s nonsense.
Severson’s story gets major play in the Times. It’s the featured report in the newspaper’s “National” section. And those white-gloved kids are smeared all over the paper. They’re shown in that photograph out on page one—and they’re shown in three more photos inside the paper, including a large, color photo at the top of the “National” page.
(You can see all the photos in this slide show. The slide show carries a comical title: "Civility on the Brink.")
Photos of those kids are everywhere. But Severson plows on and on, talking about lawsuits in bars, greedy brides and second-graders who won’t-say-ma’am, without citing the scrub-faced kids who litter the paper. Until we hit paragraph 37, out of 41 total:
SEVERSON: Keepers of Southern civility maintain that manners will always be a defining characteristic of the region.
One of them is Dorothy McLeod, 70, of Augusta, Ga., who has spent decades teaching thousands of children ballroom dance and etiquette through her program, Social Inc.
Mrs. McLeod attributes the slide of civility on the stress of families with two working parents and children who have not been held accountable for their actions.
But she is undaunted.
“I will not give up,” she said, firm in her belief that Southerners still want to raise children who are kind and well-mannered.
“They must,” she said, “or my classes wouldn’t be full.”
McLeod, the last of Augusta's Mohicans, simply refuses to throw in the towel. With that, we get a happy ending to a big bag of post-journo fail.
Presumably, no one was “hurt” by this big bag of dumb—by this most absurd of all trend stories. Sure, the nation’s IQ may have dropped a few points. But somehow, we’ll struggle forward.
But your nation’s top paper is just dead-dog dumb. We couldn’t help observing this fact as we leafed through this morning’s edition. And a modern nation really can’t function if its “elites” are this dumb.
Coming in today’s other posts: Several more big bags of dumb
CULT OF DUMB: Timesday reveries!
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2011
Interlude—Wondrously dumb: Whatever else one might say for the New York Times, it’s clearly our dumbest newspaper.
It’s performance today is so wonderfully comic that we think it deserves feature status.
We’ll therefore postpone part 3 of our ongoing series, in which we’ll see how the liberal world responded to the Washington Post’s latest bomb—that gruesome report on Sunday’s front page about the Social Security system.
Today, let’s enjoy an odd interlude. Let’s examine the comical work which is marbled all through Gotham’s Times.
Additional posts to follow.
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2011
Part 3—Your side can’t explain and has failed: Can we talk?
The mainstream press corps simply [HEART] the sexy-time Herman Cain sex chase.
We know, we know: Sexual harassment is not about sex! Except it is—for the mainstream press! Just consider the way this sexy-time tale has played in the New York Times.
This morning, Cain sits at the top of the Times front page. But then, Cain has sat at the top of page one for three consecutive days now! These sexy-time, three-part headlines have all appeared at the top of the Times front page this week. We’re looking at our hard-copy newspapers as we type them up:
Tuesday, November 1:
CAIN CONFRONTS CLAIM FROM 90s OF HARASSMENT
HE DENIES WRONGDOING
New Media Whirlwind Becomes Exercise in Damage Control
Wednesday, November 2:
CAIN ACCUSER GOT A YEAR’S SALARY IN SEVERANCE PAY
CHARGE OF HARASSMENT
Candidate Played Down Outlay by Restaurent Group He Led
Thursday, November 3:
CAIN SAYS PERRY IS ORCHESTRATING SMEAR CAMPAIGN
ACCUSES AIDE OF LEAKS
Denial by G.O.P. Rival—Third Harassment Case Is Reported
Long lists of reporters’ names adorn these thrilling sexy-time tales. The Times has pulled out all the stops to get you the full information. Compare this to the lazy, desultory attempts which were made to explain the Cain/Perry tax proposals and you see the way the balance of interest swings toward sexy-time tales.
(Sorry: Toward important news stories in which the press corps addresses key issues involving the rights of women!)
The post-journalistic cabal called the press corps adores these sexy-time tales. Last night, on our liberal cable channel, Lawrence O’Donnell spent the vast majority of his hour chasing this sexy-time tale all around. Earlier, Chris Matthews devoted about one-third of his program—the first one-third—to this same sexy-time topic, even though he burned two later segments trying to sell his new book.
“The third woman. Let’s play Hardball,” Matthews said as he started his program. Just so you can enjoy a good laugh, this is what this big nut said as he introduced his first guests:
MATTHEWS (11/2/11): We’ll get to the latest with the allegations against Herman Cain, but we start with this big foreign policy blunder this week.
Howard Fineman is Huffington Post’s editorial director and David Corn is the Washington Post (sic) bureau chief for Mother Jones. Both are MSNBC political analysts.
We’ve got to get to this new development here tonight, Howard. How do we weigh the fact this third woman—and now we’re getting to me a graphic depiction, at least, of what one woman is saying. “He offered—he asked me to go to the company apartment.” I’ll read, it’s on the— NBC News hasn’t independently confirmed these allegations, but let me read what the Associated Press is reporting late this afternoon...
Too funny! Chris “started with this big foreign policy blunder”—until the lure of "a graphic depiction" made him forget what he said! For the record, no one has spent more time tugging his dinghy while limning such sexy-time tales than this big socio has. And no, we haven’t done any deletions in that transcript. To watch that comical Hardball opening, go ahead—just click here.
Fineman and Corn knerw they mustn't laugh at the funny thing Matthews had said. For the record, Matthews harassed (liberal) women all through the Clinton-Gore years (and beyond), although the “liberal world” never complained. Now, he’s appalled by such conduct!
The mainstream press and our own cable channel are in love with these sexy-time tales. They devote big time and big reportorial effort to running down every detail. But when it comes to the biggest policy issues—the topics which define the shape of American life—a very different culture obtains within this small, stupid mafia. Just look what happened when the Washington Post ran that top-of-the-front-page report in this Sunday’s paper (click here).
Lori Montgomery did it again—she pushed the standard disinformation about Social Security’s impending failure. Let’s be fair: Some of her report was even accurate, or at least it was technically accurate—but all of her report was grossly misleading. Needless to say, Montgomery’s piece rated three headlines, just like Cain’s sexy-time tales:
Sunday, October 30:
Social Security adding billions to U.S. budget woes
‘CASH NEGATIVE’ MILESTONE CAME EARLY
Fearing backlash, parties reluctant to pursue fix
Montgomery’s report got a very big spread. The report itself ran almost 2500 words. Inside the paper, it was accompanied by a large, sprawling graphic.
Montgomery’s report was grossly misleading. It worked off various misleading frameworks which have been completely standard over the past thirty years. There was nothing new about what she said. It has all been said many times in the past, confusing tens of millions of voters over the past several decades.
And how sad! When this standard disinformation piece led the front page of the Washington Post, your thoroughly hopelessly “liberal” team didn’t know how to discuss it!
Paul Krugman is, by far, our smartest, most important player. It isn’t Krugman’s “fault”—not at all—that the “liberal” world has never developed a way to discuss this particular topic. A sensible person can’t expect Krugman to solve every policy and/or rhetorical problem. In the past dozen years, Krugman has been our team’s most valuable journalistic player by a good strong country mile.
But here’s the way Krugman critiqued that piece. This critique, by our smartest, most valuable player, just massively/totally fails:
KRUGMAN (10/30/11): Social Security Bait And Switch, A Continuing Series
Dean Baker is angry at the Washington Post for spreading disinformation about Social Security. He’s right, of course—and it’s shocking that a well-known fallacy is the subject of a “news analysis” that purports to inform readers.
You see, the WaPo makes a big deal of the fact that Social Security is currently taking in less in payroll taxes than it’s paying out in benefits. Yet this means nothing, except as a favorite point used to create confusion by those who want to kill the program.
I’ve written about this repeatedly in the past, but here it is again: Social Security is a program that is part of the federal budget, but is by law supported by a dedicated source of revenue. This means that there are two ways to look at the program’s finances: in legal terms, or as part of the broader budget picture.
In legal terms, the program is funded not just by today’s payroll taxes, but by accumulated past surpluses—the trust fund. If there’s a year when payroll receipts fall short of benefits, but there are still trillions of dollars in the trust fund, what happens is, precisely, nothing—the program has the funds it needs to operate, without need for any Congressional action.
Alternatively, you can think about Social Security as just part of the federal budget. But in that case, it’s just part of the federal budget; it doesn’t have either surpluses or deficits, no more than the defense budget.
Both views are valid, depending on what questions you’re trying to answer.
What you can’t do is insist that the trust fund is meaningless, because SS is just part of the budget, then claim that some crisis arises when receipts fall short of payments, because SS is a standalone program. Yet that’s exactly what the WaPo claims.
This is what you call negative journalistic value added.
That explanation isn’t “wrong.” It’s something worse—it’s useless. You could never use that explanation to help average voterS understand what’s wrong with that Post report. It’s muddled, murky, wonky and geeky—unlike the carefully crafted talking-points which have produced the massive confusion upon which Montgomery drew.
As a way of informing regular voters, that explanation is a big gigantic fail.
This isn’t an indictment of Krugman; it isn’t his job to solve every problem faced by the liberal world. It is an indictment of that “liberal world” over the past thirty years. It’s an indictment of Dionne and Robinson and the people populating the “liberal journals.” It’s an indictment of Corn and Walsh and the rest of the clowns who kiss the keister of Matthews. It’s an indictment of the new Josh Marshal, who plays the fool and stuffs bucks in his pants. It’s an indictment of Chait and Ezra and the rest of the children who never get too far out of line in pursuit of good jobs at good wages.
It’s an indictment of the whole charade in which you’ve been told that you’re represented within the press. But more than anything else, it’s a failure. That post is an epic fail.
Thirty years into this nasty campaign, your side has wallowed hard this week, enjoying the fun of those sexy-time tales. The New York Times has spared no resources as it tries to run down the truth. But how amazing! After thirty years of disinformation concerning the Social Security program, Krugman’s hopelessly wonky post was the best your side could do. And it was a massive fail.
No, this isn’t Krugman’s fault. By light-years, he has been our most valuable journalistic player. But that post is a fruit of the culture of dumb—even though our self-impressed tribe is much too dumb to see it.
Tomorrow: The eds can’t imagine—again!
Test score watch: Bungling the SATs further!
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2011
Who needs summer school now: Now they’ve even started to cheat on the SATs!
So says the New York Times, which reports that some students have hired brighter folk to take the SATs for them. One kid even got arrested!
In its report, the Times describes the lazy security protocols which have governed such affairs until now. This recalled a recent Times editorial, at which we mordantly chuckled.
“Ways to Prevent Cheating,” the headline said. As they began, the editors described the way New York State is toughening up its own testing procedures:
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (9/21/11): Ways to Prevent Cheating
The Board of Regents took an important step this month when it directed the New York State Education Department to develop a plan for eliminating glaring weaknesses in the state testing system. As a first move, the Regents voted to require that state tests for third through eighth grades be given on the same day all over the state. And, from now on, teachers and administrators will have to certify that they have received and will follow the same administrative protocols.
The state is relying ever more heavily on standardized exams to make schools accountable for student performance. The Regents exams now determine whether high school students can graduate, and the yearly tests in elementary and middle schools are used in decisions on how schools are run. In coming years, teachers will also be judged, in part, on how much their students improve on state tests. Given their growing importance, the tests have to have better security measures than exist now.
Sad. Cheating on standardized tests has been an issue for decades. (We wrote columns on this topic in the Baltimore Sun—in the late 1970s!) In New York itself, questions were raised about various testing practices all through the last decade. But the editors of the New York Times kissed the ass of their billionaire mayor, applauding his brilliance, singing his praise and enjoying free booze at his parties. When Gail Collins ruled this roost, she mocked the rubes who were raising those questions—the rubes who turned out to be right.
The paragraphs we have posted speak to a sad dysfunction. Had it really never occurred to anyone that teachers and principals have to follow standardized “administrative protocols” in administering standardized tests? This represents a failure of the state board—but also of the Times itself. The Times likes to talk a good game on these topics. But its own board has slumbered and snored in the face of those “glaring weaknesses.”
Then too, we thought of the letters the New York Times published about this year’s SAT scores.
Average scores dropped a bit this year, even as student participation grew to record levels. Anyone would understand that average scores may tend to drop if more students take part—anyone but the Times and its far-flung correspondents. The paper basically missed this bone-simple point in its news report on the scores. It then published this unfortunate column by E. D. Hirsch, which bungled the point even further. (For our previous posts, click this.)
The Washington Post explained in detail about the way growth in participation might tend to affect average SAT scores. But this bone-simple factor escaped the Times. And then, they published these letters.
The letters appeared beneath this headline: "How to Stop the Drop in Verbal Scores." That headline extends the sense that the drop in scores means that something is going wrong. In fact, the drop in scores may reflect nothing beyond the fact that many more students were tested.
There’s nothing “wrong” with those four letters, but we were struck by the sample the Times selected. Surely, someone must have written the Times to alert them to life as it’s lived on the planet—to let them know how tricky it is to use average SAT scores as a measure of the student population’s progress.
Everyone has always known that the SAT isn’t made for that use. Everyone has always known that, except the New York Times.
Our public school students are very dumb, our biggest newspapers like to cry. When we read complaints of that type, we try to consider the source.
NOVEMBER 03, 2011
4
How Corruption in the U.S. Puts Everyday Corruption in Africa to Shame
The Great American Shakedown
by LAWRENCE WESCHLER
A bit over an hour into the five-hour drive across the ferrous red plateau, heading south toward Uganda’s capital Kampala, suddenly, there’s the Nile, a boiling, roiling cataract at this time of year, rain-swollen and ropy and rabid below the bridge that vaults over it. If Niagara Falls surged horizontally and a rickety bridge arced, shudderingly, over the torrent below, it might feel like the Nile at Karuma.
Naturally, I take out my iPhone and begin snapping pics.
On the other side of the bridge, three soldiers standing in wait in the middle of the road, rifles slung over their shoulders, direct my Kampalan driver Godfrey and me to pull over.
“You were photographing the bridge,” one of them announces, coming up to my open window. “We saw you.”
“Taking photos of the bridge is expressly forbidden,” the second offers by way of clarification, as the first reaches in and grabs the iPhone out of my hand. “National security. Terrorists could use such photos to help in planning to blow up the bridge.”
“Do I look like a terrorist to you?” I ask. “And anyway,” I shout as Soldiers One and Two walk off with their prize, oblivious, “I wasn’t photographing the bridge. I was photographing the rapids. The bridge was precisely the one thing I wasn’t photographing!”
To no avail. I open my car door and begin to get out — but the third soldier pushes me gently back and then leans into the window, peering amiably. “And besides,” I continue, “there were no signs forbidding such photographs. Anyway, if it’s such a big deal just give me back the phone and I’ll delete the photos. You can watch.”
I’m beginning to panic. As with most of us nowadays, pretty much my entire life is couched inside that bloody little device: contacts, calendars, hotel reservations, all my appointment coordinates for the coming days.
“Ah no,” Soldier Three smiles in a silkily practiced manner. “You are not to worry. This is not an affair about you. This is an affair between Ugandans. It is your driver who was at fault. He is a Ugandan, he should have known about our national security and how no one should photograph the bridge. Let them work it out.”
And indeed, when I turn around Godfrey is no longer behind the steering wheel. He’s with the other soldiers, remonstrating away. “Don’t you worry,” repeats my guy indulgently, a broad smile spreading across his face as if we are the best of buddies. “Give them time.” And then, as if to pass the time himself, he adds, “So, how do you like our excellent country?”
Minutes go by with Godfrey and his two interlocutors on the other side of the road, locked in fervent colloquy — much hand waving, arm flinging, rifle toying, shouting, cajoling, and then smiling, even guffawing — until finally, 15 minutes and $20 later, Godfrey comes ambling back to the car, climbs into the driver’s seat, and hands me the iPhone.
(Memo to would-be terrorists: If any of you are planning to blow up the Karuma bridge, make sure to budget an extra $20 photography fee during the planning phase.)
Anyway, Godfrey turns the key, revs up the car’s engine, and we resume our climb out of the canyon of the Nile and back onto the flat, red, shrubby plateau.
“Does that kind of thing happen often?” I ask Godfrey, who in much of the rest of his life is a Kampala taxi driver.
“All the time,” he assures me. Two or three times a week. He has to figure it into his budget, and it’s a large item. Just the other day, he adds, he turned down a one-way street in the middle of Kampala and found, a couple hundred yards on, that it was completely flooded. As he gingerly made his way back to the intersection, a traffic cop was happily standing in wait to give him a hefty fine for driving the wrong way on a one-way street — either that or a 10,000 shilling tip (about $5, which in Kampala might otherwise pay for two good meals) to make the problem go away.
It’s to be expected, Godfrey went on. The soldiers are conscripts, the traffic cop a lowly underling, and they’re all notoriously underpaid. Or rather, their superiors carve out a substantial part of their salaries for themselves, leaving these men with hardly enough to live on, let alone maintain a family. The opportunity to garnish bribes becomes a necessary perk of the job. The trouble is, he continued, such corruption riddles the entire country, infesting virtually every transaction with the state.
We are silent for a few moments, the scrub brush racing by. Then Godfrey asks, “Doesn’t this sort of thing happen in America?”
I don’t even hesitate. Not really, I tell him: not blatantly like that, and not frequently, certainly not all the time.
Only, then I get to thinking, because that answer turns out to be way too glib. It’s not that the United States lacks corruption, I go on to say — or even pervasive corruption. It’s just not of the low-level and petty variety like the kind we just went through, not most of the time anyway. In America, corruption is concentrated at the highest levels of society — and it masquerades, for example, under the name of “campaign finance.”
Election campaigns have become so expensive that candidates have to go begging, hat in hand, to anyone who will finance them. And the billionaires and millionaires and bankers and hedge-fund operators and portfolio managers and CEOs and their lobbyists are, in turn, only too happy to contribute. They lard the “people’s representatives” with grotesque “contributions” after which those representatives prove only too willing to turn around and carve out billions of dollars in specifically targeted tax breaks and subsidies structured exclusively for them — precious dollars which then can’t be used to fund schools or clinics or playgrounds or to further the public good in any way.
And it’s worse than that: once congressional representatives or their senior staff retire, they almost invariably get much higher paying lobbying jobs working for the very industries over which they had once held sway — a further incentive not to upset those monied interests when still on the public payroll.
So regulations get gutted, calamities ensue, and guess who gets stuck cleaning up the inevitable mess, whether financial, environmental, or of any other sort: yup, the taxpayers. Tax laws get dictated or often just written by the lobbyists of those same monied interests, with all sorts of sweet loopholes carved out especially for them — not infrequently for them individually — so that, in the end, the richest man in America reports he’s getting off with a lower tax rate than his secretary.
“You’re kidding,” Godfrey interjected.
No: even he’s embarrassed! Education, meanwhile, is funded according to narrowly local property taxes — and the rich make sure it stays that way. The result? Their kids get a far better education than those living in poorer neighborhoods. When people try to remedy that injustice through affirmative action programs which at least recognize the unfairness of the competition for access to, for example, university slots, the rich protest and get judges to overturn such programs as racist. They are, however, perfectly happy to take advantage of other programs that assure the acceptance of the children of alumni, no matter their scholarly performance, and no one says boo. It’s all perfectly legal.
In America, as W.E.B. Du Bois noted toward the end of his life, “We let men take wealth which is not theirs; if the seizure is ‘legal’ we call it high profits. And the profiteers help decide what is legal.”
In Uganda, corruption often arises out of desperation. In America, more typically, its wellsprings are greed, pure and simple. And it’s hard to decide which is the more dismaying, the more disfiguring, the more disgusting.
Or actually, no, it’s not. It’s not that hard at all.
Lawrence Weschler is director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU. His newest book, just published, is Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative (Counterpoint).
NOVEMBER 03, 2011
2
We Need True Debates, Not Parallel Interviews
The Road to the 2012 Presidential Debates
by RALPH NADER
What people would not want Presidential Debates in multiple cities all over America in September and October 2012? Why, the people at the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD). CPD is a private corporation created in 1987. It is controlled by the Republican and Democratic Parties and acts as the iron gatekeeper regarding the number of debates, who is chosen to ask the questions and who is excluded from most important forums for reaching millions of people interested in the presidential elections.
Powered by the television networks that transmit the debates to the public, the CPD is set in concrete when it comes to entrenching the status quo for the two party dictatorship’s orchestrated bubble of exclusion and manipulation.
Citizen groups such as Open Debates have exposed the CPD’s inner workings, picketed its Washington, D.C. headquarters and used federal courts to try to pry open the presidential debate process. Aside from a modest settlement and apology for one of its nasty transgressions, the Commission has emerged unchanged. After all it is a corporation that has mocked the Bill of Rights and side-stepped the Federal Election Commission and IRS rules.
Presidential campaigns are repetitious, tedious, often sterile and trivial. They narrow down to half a dozen issues many months before Election Day, ignore very important domestic and foreign subjects and public necessities by common implied consent. And they deliberately ignore local and regional matters.
Campaigns are so boring that the media jumps on silly comments and gaffes and focuses on the almost daily polling to add some spice to their monotonous campaign coverage of the “horse race”
True debates, rather than parallel interviews of the CPD model, would offer depth, variety, and unpredictability to counter the scripted nature of the candidates’ political consultants.
So, why ration debates? We need twenty-one debate sites all over the country, ending this blue state-red state divide where over half of the voters never see a major Presidential campaign in their states. Republicans have not campaigned, for example, in Massachusetts, New York and California and Democrats don’t bother with Texas, Alabama and Georgia.
From Maine to California and Alaska to Florida, citizens in cities and rural areas such as Appalachia and along the Rio Grande should band together to demand that the candidates crisscross the country participating in debate after debate.
In each community, mayors, labor unions, chambers of commerce, farm organizations, religious groups, non-profits, charities and advocacy organizations, neighborhood groups, good government associations and others should band together and sign letters saying: “We want you to come to Portland, Oregon or Dallas, Texas, or Los Angeles, California, Pittsburgh, Pa. Miami, Florida or Chicago, Illinois or Cleveland, Ohio or Salt Lake City, Utah or Minneapolis, Minnesota or Clairton, Pennsylvania, Worcester, Massachusetts or Mingo County, West Virginia, or New Orleans, Louisiana.”
The Congressionally disenfranchised colony of the District of Columbia deserves a presidential debate for its being denied simple democracy.
Each community would select its debate format, subjects to be discussed, mode of interaction with the audience and other debate criteria to generate excitement and engagement by Americans of all ages.
Suddenly the people–where they live and work–will shift the dynamic of shaping the Presidential races and agenda to them where it belongs.
The celluloid slogans and sound bytes will be replaced by candidate preparedness for each region or else risk losing political ground.
The community brainpower behind these debates will raise the quality of these debate challenges to new heights.
Instead of the present, stifling, programmed three debates by the CPD, these twenty one debates would throw aside many of the taboos, bring the people into the process, address regional needs, excite larger voter turnout and compel the candidates to be better, more forthright candidates. Reporters will have real news to report instead of having to strain to make stories out of mind-numbing redundancies.
Fresh agendas and personas will be allowed in these debates including third-party candidates who meet reasonable criteria of ballot presence and public support. (See OpenDebates.org for the 2007 Appleseed Citizens’ Task Force on Fair Debates.)
Imagine three real debates a week for seven weeks between Labor Day and mid-October. Determined coalitions in one community after another that stick together can make these candidates treat voters not as powerless spectators but in one of Thomas Jefferson’s favorite words “participators.”
Representing tens of millions of Americans from everywhere, these grand and historic invitations would be very hard to turn down. (For more information, see No Debate: How the Republican and Democratic Parties secretly Control the Presidential Debates by George Farah, Seven Stories Press 2004)
To get this grand series of nationwide debates realized, all we have to realize is that it is all in our hands. Here, the people have the power. Your comments are welcome at info@nader.org.
Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer and author of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!
NOVEMBER 03, 2011
Between the sentiment at the Occupy encampments and the liberal wing of the Democratic establishment lies a moat unbridgeable even by the tallest trees. Between Occupy and the Republicans lies a universe.
What seems reasonable to the Democratic leadership in Washington and to their far-flung minions in the districts is a tepid negotiation with finance capital. The corridors of the White House might as well be renamed Wall Street: apart from the Banks’ errand-boy Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, there is the Chief of Staff, Bill Daley (previously on J. P. Morgan Chase’s Executive Committee where he was in charge of Corporate Responsibility) and there is newly hired Senior Campaign Advisor Broderick Johnson (recently lobbyist for Bank of America, Fannie Mae, J. P. Morgan Chase, and Keystone XL). These are the scum of Wall Street and Washington, emblems of the pay-to-play system and of Financial Power. To them, the Occupy movement is an irritant, and a potential liability come election time.
President Obama came into office on the shoulders of a robust liberalism that took him as its delegate and hoped that he would enact its agenda. But much of that program was just dirt off Obama’s shoulders. If there were one political gesture that might have held fast to those commitments and helped build the confidence of the people it would have been the Employee Free Choice Act. Currently only 6.9 percent of workers in the private sectors are in unions. If more workers were unionized, and if unions continued to be touched by the social movements that gather around them for a wide range of social issues along the fault lines of gender, sexuality, and race, then the continent of the Left would be infinitely stronger. But Obama’s support for even this modest gesture was not to be. The President walked away from the Act and has put no political capital behind it.
The Occupy movement is quite right to prevent incorporation by the Democratic establishment on terms that would be odious. It wants for something much grander, which is a complete overhaul of the system. The feel at the encampments is similar to that in France’s 1968: réforme mon cul, reform, my ass. The ensemble of the present has to be thrust into the air, spun around, expunged of its toxins and then reassembled in practice as justice incarnate. It is exhilarating to be around such sentiments that are totally fed up with reality, and have already grasped the future in jolts in the general assemblies and in the joy of social interaction.
Mind the gap. Avoid the corruptions of Reality.
But then one has to walk the plank into the present. There is a way to do that without being mesmerized into Ordinary Politics. I recommend the following tonic:
Down With the Three Capitalist Ministers. It is right for the Occupy movement to call for the unconditional surrender of the delegates of the Bankers from the White House. Geither must go, but so too Daley and Johnson. That’s a start. It is a minimum demand. If we think of others among them, let’s list them. They must all go.
Up with the Delegates of the People. It is right for the Occupy movement to call for the election of those among us who have demonstrated their commitment to the broad ideals of the 99%ers. I have in mind people like Cheri Honkala, running for the Sheriff of Philadelphia, Amaad Rivera, running for City-Councilor-at-large in Springfield (MA), Luis Cotto, running for City Council in Hartford, Bill Dwight, running for City-Councilor-at-large in Northampton (MA) – fearless people who we need to stuff into the bureaucracy so that they can put forward the kind of creative endeavors to further the people’s approach. For example, Amaad Rivera is the legislative arm of the No One Leaves Coalition, which has created mayhem for the banks as they try to maintain Springfield’s place as the city with the highest number of foreclosures in New England. We need to have such delegates in positions of authority to carve out space for the political movements such as Occupy and No One Leaves, and to throw the contradictions of the system (its values against its reality) in the face of the 1%. The movement must harness electoral politics as its adjutant, to use when necessary and in homeopathic doses.
Celebrate the Multiplying Social Body. One of the great occasions of the Occupy movement has been its lack of narrow demands. This has allowed the million grievances of the various fragments of our social reality to be aired and to make them present. Nothing has been purposely left outside the movement. The door is open. There are some who under cover of what Jo Freeman called the “tyranny of structurelessness” try to hijack the movement; but they will be unmasked for their arrogance. There is too much popular expectation to allow things to go backstage. If we demand that sexual violence and police brutality be at the forefront, as important demands as bankers’ compensation, then it should be so. It is because there are a million grievances that the millions feel that this is our movement.
The debate around demands bewilders. As Ruth Jennison and Jordana Rosenberg put it at Lenin’s Tomb, “What, after all, is a demand? That we liberate New York, or Oakland, or Cleveland from the grips of financiers? That we must have returned what was stolen from us and given to the banks and to the 1%? That we deserve to live a life free of police repression and violence? That we want an end to imperialist projects and wars, and the restoration of social services and education? If any of our hesitation to demand comes from a fear of losing, let’s look around us and see how strong we are. For the first time in a lifetime.” After the remarkable General Strike in Oakland, that strength is now before us. It is true that struggles like these do not follow a text-book, and that it is in the fight that we learn how to fight, as Rosa Luxemburg put it a century ago. And it is also the true that in the heat of these struggles, slogans emerge that germinate programs and agendas. It is time for us to agglomerate these and throw them in the face of Order.
To move from celebration of our strength to the creation of a sharp political instrument is tricky and it must be done with care, and with patience. Of course we shall need concrete demands, and of course we will need to build a political carapace around the energy of the Occupy movement. These things shall come.
The Future only contains what we put into it now.
VIJAY PRASHAD is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History and Director of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT His most recent book, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, won the Muzaffar Ahmad Book Prize for 2009. The Swedish and French editions are just out. He can be reached at: vijay.prashad@trincoll.edu
NOVEMBER 03, 2011
22
Thinking About the Prison Industrial Complex, the 99%, and Movement Forward
The Other One Percent
by ISAAC LEV SZMONKO and ISAAC ONTIVEROS
On the morning of October 25, police from nearly twenty law enforcement agencies descended upon the Occupy Oakland encampment located outside city hall. They removed its occupants using chemical weapons, and arrested nearly 100 people before destroying the encampment. The mayor of Oakland lauded the police raid while SWAT and riot police occupied the city. Workers had to show ID to get to their jobs. Later that evening over a thousand people marched through the streets to protest the morning’s police action and attempted to retake the plaza. Images circulated around the world showed police repeatedly using chemical weapons, rubber bullets, and flash grenades against the march. The crowd only seemed to swell. The next night, thousand retook to the street, overcame the plaza and during a general assembly, reached consensus to organize a general strike on November 2nd.
While October 25th’s violence was a grim if not surprising reminder of how those in power perpetuate, manage, and respond to social and economic crisis, so too is it a reminder of the adage, “repression breeds resistance”. As people working to abolish the prison industrial complex (PIC), we are eager to relate to the dynamism of the occupations and to act at the intersections of economic and social devastation, state violence, and people’s resistance. We take up the call of our comrades from Cairo to “let the boundaries of [our] occupations grow” and to “build larger and larger networks.”
Over the past two months, thousands of people have been thinking about, talking about and mobilizing around gross inequity between the 1% and the 99%. The last thirty years has led to unprecedented concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the 1% as well as the creation of another 1%: the 1 in 100 people currently locked in US prisons and jails. Examining the connections between these two polarized ends of the US economy helps us understand why resistance to the PIC points a way forward toward building participatory and democratic economies centered on strong, stable, and healthy national, regional, and local communities.
Between 1979 and 2007, the nation’s highest earners saw their household income triple, while during the same period the prison population increased from 500,000 to 2.3 million, not including juvenile and immigrant detentions. In 2011, with 1% of the US population controlling 40% of the wealth, 7.2 million adults — or 3.1% of the population, mostly poor and of color–are under correctional supervision (probation, parole, jail, or prison). Federal, state, and local budgets for imprisonment, surveillance, and policing have exploded while “austerity” budgets driven by the elite 1% have forced brutal cuts with the claims that governments cannot afford to fund education, healthcare, housing, transportation, infrastructure, community centers, and other life-affirming projects. How did the rich get so rich, and poor get so arrested?
The rise of law and order regimes made notorious by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan (and pushed forward by every administration following) can be seen as a response to liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s inside and outside the US, the strength of unions, and the end to the post-war economic expansion. The rise of the post-war PIC has played an integral role in broader plans to free markets from their regulatory, geographic, and political constraints — leading to deregulation, outsourcing, union-busting, mechanization, privatization and elimination of social goods and services, and wage and benefit reductions now familiarly recognized as neoliberalism.
All workers are disciplined and punished by these economic programs, making the call of the 99% resonate with the majority of the population who are deeply impacted by unemployment, foreclosures, social service and education cuts, and steeply mounting debt. The most vulnerable — poor people, people of color, immigrants, queer and gender non-conforming people, and people with disabilities — have also been targeted for further coercion, containment, and control by policing and imprisonment and legalized discrimination against formerly imprisoned people. Currently, sixty-five million people have criminal records and are barred from most employment, as well as public housing and food assistance. Eleven million undocumented workers are targeted for wage theft, harassment, raids, detentions and deportations while often working for less than minimum wage in unsafe conditions.
Of those who are paid to work, an increasing number are forced to work for some aspect of the military and prison industrial complexes. As the right wing offensive attacks public sector unions from teachers to postal workers — and vital social services get sacrificed in the name of austerity and artificial budget crises — police, prison, and military budgets are the last to be cut. In this economic context, police crackdowns on the Occupy encampments mirror the rise and militarization of policing that the most marginalized sections of the 99% have lived through and resisted for generations. Police attacks, the mass arrest of protestors, and the threat and reality of police-led evictions have galvanized scores of supporters from across the country to move from passive to active dissent. In the face of this repression, new social solidarities are being formed and solidified as people recognize how policing is used to protect and perpetuate the violent economic and social relationships that have brought thousands of people into the streets.
In Oakland, these solidarities have started to become more formal, as Occupy Oakland’s General Assembly voiced support for the California Prisoner Hunger Strikers, declared opposition to gang injunctions and youth curfews in solidarity with the local Stop the Injunctions Coalition, and held a rally and march against police violence. This resistance draws from the memory and experience of the last several years of protests against police brutality that were sparked by the police murder of Oscar Grant III, as well as the preceding history made by such organizations as the Black Panther Party. With no small amount of contradiction to work through, those whose race, class, and gender status have placed them at less oppressive ends of the PIC have opportunities to stand alongside those who experience the onslaught of policing and imprisonment all day, every day.
Police suppressed the Occupy protests amidst one of the worst budget crises in Oakland history. The very day after the raid, five schools were closed to save the city $2 million, while estimates at the cost of policing the night of the crackdown are around the same amount. Unemployment in Oakland is at least twice the national average and Black residents, especially hard hit, are leaving the city at alarming rates. At the same time nearly half the city’s budget goes toward policing. In Oakland and across the country, neighborhoods hit hardest by policing through gang injunctions, ICE raids, DEA invasions, and police murder are the same hit hardest by budget cuts and economic inequity. But those hit hardest often fight hardest.
Amplifying the voices and supporting the leadership of the millions of people living under the PIC is one crucial way to keep building the strength of the occupy movement. Can we incorporate work by former prisoners to ban the box that marks one as a convicted felon on employment applications by elaborating employment demands coming from the occupations? If we use this moment to pull organized labor to the left, can we call on unions to advocate for the millions of potential workers denied access to work because of felony convictions and to take a stand against prison and jail construction that is bleeding state economies? When we celebrate international solidarity with current and historic uprisings, can we include the uprising of thousands of prisoners who went on work strikes throughout the Georgia prison system last winter, and the thousands who went on hunger strike throughout the California system this past July and September simultaneously with a hunger strike by thousands of Palestinian political prisoners held in Israeli prisons? Can we imagine what it would look like for imprisoned people to participate in General Assemblies? How will we include the voices of communities for which police violence and murder is a daily occurrence that rarely makes the headlines?
As the 1% continues to unleash its police forces on encampments across the country, many people will be politically ignited for the first time. Others will mark this moment as a continuation of decades of struggle. The PIC is central to the unequal distribution of resources and the systematic denial of life chances. Its violence protects oppressive economic relationships, steals resources that make communities strong, and quells dissent. But even in social and economic crisis, opportunities abound. This is a moment when our work can have a profound impact in dismantling the forces that keep us down, making fundamental changes in the balance of power, and building the new and better world we want and need.
Isaac Lev Szmonko and Isaac Ontiveros are members of the Oakland Chapter of Critical Resistance, a national grassroots organization working to abolish the prison industrial complex.
This time, my lame excuse is that I couldn't get my computer connected to the internet.
WELL, of COURSE not, fool, you hadn't plugged the cable connecting the modem to the computer back in after you jiggled all the little wire guys and turned off the computer for 10 seconds at a time - wow, modern technology - ain't it the greatest?
Strolling down memory lane, here's a letter I sent to one of my Streator, Illinois classmates from grade school and junior high school days - Peggy (Moore) Horton, on whom, OF COURSE, I had a crush at the time.
Fortunately, she was able to do far better in the life time partner department than with me, and thus is living happily, I am most pleased to report.
Here is my message to her (receiving a message, or an e-mail, or a snail mail from a long time friend, or even acquaintance is a WONEERFUL thrilling gift, the likes of which can hardly be descrbied.
Go ahead, ALL OF YOU, take that chance, and reach out and touch some one you once knew and cared for. PLEASE ... don't do it for me ... do it for THEM .... do it for YOU!
You probably won't remember me, but I sure remember you, always so sweet, and so lovely. It was probably because I was such a Streator Basketball Junkie, and I think it was your brother who played the last year we lived in Streator, school year 1963-64, when my dad, who was the varsity wrestling coach and varsity golf coach took a job teaching mathematics at Barrington consolidated HS in, of course, Barrington, Illinois.
Moving here was mildly traumatic, because dad, in addition to being for a while, the only winning varsity coach at Streator, was also the Golf Professional at Streator Country Club, a full time job in the summer, and full ltime on the weekends in the spring and Fall, so, as a result, he was accorded a decent measure of respect, both amongst his fellow teachers, and from his students (we used to play some basketball with some of the "older" kids - Terry Whalen, for one, and Tony(?) Lazzarius - we being Greg Williams, Bill Cox, and me - the three mouseketters! (And I most surely DO remembe watching the MIckey Mouse Club!
It was heart warming to read your story, meeintg the love of your life at college, getting married, settling into a town smaller than Streator, and the three wonderful children you were blessed with. I was so saddened to learn about your youngest daughter. My mom died this year, July 31, just two days shy of her 80th birthday. I was with her in the car when she had her stroke, but it was the congenitive heart failure that killed her -- she should have been far more diligent in following up on that - she had double pneumonia, and no matter how much I tried, I couldn't get any breath into her lungs. But i was very lucky, because I got to spend the last hour and a half of her life with her - and did we ever have a great time - SHOPPING AT ALDI's, of all things! Racking up $178.00 and change, and getting through the checkout line, bagged, and groceries loaded in less than 7 minutes - laughing like lunatics all the way ...
“Now, mother dearest, explain to me once again why it is we shop at Jewel in Barrington?”
“Oh, yes, of course, because the food is so much more expensive, it is obviously of high quality and nutritional value.”
“And, oh, yes, too, because it takes so long to be processed throught the check out line, get the groceries bagged, and loaded into the car ... that is MOST excellent for helping to teach us PATIENCE!!”
“But, praise the Lord, at least we do not go there simply because of the convenience ... no, no, no no no! That would never do, what with you being a child of the depression and all, and me being the child orf oa child of the depression ... it would be almost as if . ... we never learnt the value of a $$$$$$!!!”
May the Lord's Peace and Blessing always be found in your house, and in your family, and in the lives of all your friends.
Mark Raymond Ganzer
ps - I'm a recording musician now - you can actually hear a couple of my songs on YouTube:
http://youtu.be/vNvF4A_TRUE (St James Infirmary - sad, melancholy, old tune)
http://youtu.be/UYlo70FGxPg
Motherless Child / Freedom - the song Richies improvised to open the concert at Woodstock, in upstate NY in 1969 -- except, whereas my beloved Richie sang it as a hymn of priase and thanksgiving, I take a most 60's perspective, and even more aught's and teens, and make it sound almost a desperate plea -- I have become an extremely political creature and I do not approave of the road my country has been led down, nor do I approve of the leaders who have led us there ...
Oh, I have but one son - and I am so blessed - although my marriage was a disaster (pregnant girl friend and all, at the ripe young age of 33) Adam James Ganzer was and remains the best thing that ever happened for both his mother and for me, and in fact, for our respective families who have come a long, long, long, long way together, and can legitimately say, we have come to love one another -- my son, the youth leader, chatechism teacher, 1st degree black belt in tae kwon do, mixed martial artist, paid drummer for Holy Family Roman Catholic church in Inverness, and he also drums at my parents' church - the Lutheran church of the Atonement, in Barrington. After a terribly rocky academic start - he found his niche around the age o 24, and only spent 3 months in HS, eventually getting his GEDs in all four subjects, including .. .gasp, a 99 in Science (“Adam, how in the world did you do THAT? Science was my 2nd worst subject, behind philosophy?”
“Oh, Markus, it's easy, you just have to watch the Discovery Channel”)
So he trained for and get registered and certified as a phlebotomist, but could only get about 18 hours / week, and so started working part time as a food server at one of the exclusive country clubs in the area (there are many - their numbers are legion), and began making SO mnuch money there that he "retired" from phlebotomy, and works full time as a server ... but he is young ... he'll be 27 on 11-11-11 and the whole world awaits for him to reach out, grasp it and give back to it (all of which he has done and continues to do). sorry about braggin' on my kid - although ... he does NOT return phone calls, and I only see him twice a year, although he lives now with my sister and bother (intentional misspelling) -in-law but a mere 8 miles away ... ah, youth, so much to do and so little time to do it in ... and my, oh my, how quickly it recedes!
Be well.
Mark
