Published on Thursday, October 27, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
We Shall Not Be Moved: Police Repression, Official Mendacity and Why OWS Has Already Overcome
by Phil Rockstroh
Until recent events proved otherwise, the hyper-commercialized surface of the corporate state gave the appearance of being too diffuse--too devoid of a center to pose a threat of totalitarian excess. Accordingly, as of late, due to the violent response to OWS protesters by local police departments in Oakland, Atlanta, Chicago, and in other U.S. cities, the repressive nature of the faux republic is beginning to be revealed.
Behind the bland face of the political establishment (purchased by the bloated profits of the plundering class) are riot cops, outfitted and armed with the accoutrements of oppression, who are ready and willing to enforce the dictates of the elitist beneficiaries of the degraded status quo. In deed and action, as of late, the police state embedded within neo-liberal economic oligarchy is showing its hyper-authoritarian proclivities to the world.
In general, existence within the present societal structure inflicts on the individual a sense of atomization and its concomitant feelings of alienation, vague unease, free floating anxiety and anomie. The coercion is implicit and internalized.
Because of its mundane, ubiquitous nature, the system is reliant on an individual's sense of isolation (even ignorance of the existence of the structure itself) to remain in place. In short, the exploitive system continues to exist because its denizens are bereft of other models of comparison.
The public commons inherent in the OWS movement provides a model of comparison. Apropos, that is why we are beginning to receive reports such as the following:
On Tuesday Oct. 25, 2011, the Oakland Tribune reported that police raided and demolished the local OWS encampment after declaring the area a “crime scene”. This is revelatory regarding the character of the enforcers of the present order: Those in positions of power within a police state view freedom of assembly and freedom of expression as a punishable offense.
It is a given that: Authoritarian personality types take particular umbrage when citizens are expressing their displeasure with official abuses of power and begin to do so in an effective manner.
Too many in the U.S. have bought the fiction that the nation was, is and will remain a democratic republic. Therefore, by drawing its brutal operatives and mendacious apologist into the open, the state will reveal itself in all its ugliness. As a result, all concerned will be able to observe the true nature of the police/national security/oligarchic state in place in the U.S.
Ideally, few illusions will remain intact regarding the ruthless, brutal forces against which we struggle.
Moreover, the actions of the police in regard to public protest are premeditated tactics aimed at the suppression of the right to public assembly. The goal of the power brokers, their political operatives and police enforcers is to render one's (allegedly) constitutionally guaranteed right to dissent too prohibitive to be practiced.
The economically dispossessed and members of minority communities have known for many years what OWSers are suffering, presently, at the hands of official power and its enforcers.
In turn, individual police officers are well aware of whom they are sworn to protect (and it isn't those who desire to exercise their rights to free assembly and free speech). In most cases, if an individual police officer ever refused an order to make an unconstitutional arrest, he/she would be committing an act of careercide; their chance of advancement within the department would have to be scraped off the sidewalk on the spot and transported to the city morgue.
Are you willing to leave the confines of your comfort zone and go to jail for justice?
Rarely, does reform arrive without the arrest of frontline agitators. Power does not yield without a fight, without attempting to silence dissent by brutality and forced detention. The powerful demand that those of us who notice their excesses and crimes be placed out of sight and out of mind.
Hence, in Oakland, the local corporate news affiliates, to their shame, turned off their cameras when the violent attacks and mass arrest of protesters began.
Are you willing to risk injury to body and reputation to bear witness? The survival of the OWS movement depends on having bodies on the ground and eyes (as well as cameras) on the thugs in uniform.
True to form, a servile corporate media will proclaim how unsightly dissenters are, inferring that sensible folk, simply as a matter of good taste and public propriety should disregard the protesters’ entreaties and that these malcontents and cranks should be denied entrance into the realm of legitimate discourse, that these disheveled interlopers be barred by walls of silence.
To be in the world is to be confronted with walls. How we respond to these barriers is called character and art.
Many brave souls have confronted walls such as these.
Often, as I gaze upon the blue wall of mindless repression surrounding Zuccotti Park and reflect on other OWS sites nationwide, I am induced to feel the sadness and longing of the repressed souls of the earth, of those throughout time who have met walls of blind hatred, of economic exploitation, of institutional repression….
I empathize with all of those who faced walls of smug indifference, walls of internalized shame and walls of official lies--those who stood powerless before the stark reality of seemingly implacable circumstances. I reflect upon the lives and work of itinerate blues musicians of the U.S. Deep South and the manner they met walls of both official repression and collective blind, ignorant fear and hatred, and how they transformed those prison walls into the numinous architecture of The Blues…How they alchemicalized the barriers into guitar technique.
Musical instruments, like word meeting meter to a poet, serve as both barrier and salvation; the limits of the self are tested, explored, and by effort, failure and moments of elation are transformed by confrontation and union with the instrument, personal circumstance and audience.
As is the case with those on the front lines of OWS encampments, millions of people throughout history have met seemingly implacable barriers in the form of walls of human brutality e.g., Jim Crow laws, union busting management goon squads, the Zionist apartheid wall, various secret police and public bullies--but they weren't going to let the bastards "turn them 'round…"
If you choose to resist entrenched power, when confronted by mindless authority, your heart will know the drill; it will guide you--its natural trajectory is towards freedom. Hence, you will know what to do when the moment arrives--and will gain the knowledge that your predecessors discovered in their struggle for justice…that the cry arose forth from deep in their souls, "We shall not be moved."
The practitioners of the Delta Blues came upon walls of oppression…walls of raging hatred, and responded by passing through those walls…to inhabit a landscape more alive, more resonant, more ensouled than their oppressors will ever know possible. They occupied their own hearts and draw us still into the immediacy of the world by their victory over their degraded circumstances by their appropriating the very barriers that were placed in their path by their oppressors and transforming the criteria of their oppression into the living architecture of the soul.
Those who know this--have already won…have already overcome.
Lorca limned the situation (one extant as well in the enfolding OWSmovement) in his theory of "the duende". His concept of the duende reveals why people, when faced by the ossified order of an inhuman system, either become caught up--even compelled--by the challenge to begin to make the world anew--while others are seized with mortification, indifference, resignation and hostility.
In which direction does your soul wend? "The arrival of the duende always presupposes a transformation on every plane. It produces a feeling of totally unedited freshness. It bears the quality of a newly created rose, of a miracle that produces an almost religious enthusiasm." -- from The Havana Lectures, Federico Garcia Lorca.
When I witness police harassing, arresting and brutalizing those exercising their rights to free assembly, I find myself gripped by a surge of rage…The rage rises in me in an animalistic fury--an urge to fight tooth and nail, to tear at the throats of these vicious intruders into the territory of authentic social discourse.
As of late, instead of pushing down the fury rising from within me or acting upon it, I let it inundate my being. As a result, the coursing rage transforms into a penetrating, powerful force--enveloping and demarcating the geography of my convictions…arriving to bring acceptance and to define and defend the contours of my true self.
Rage can appear as an angel of self-definition, the protector of one's authentic nature and a source of personal power…"ain't gonna let nobody turn me around, turn me 'round …"
One's anger is vital to one's existence; it is a valuable gift; therefore, it should not be squandered…no need to waste it on fools and idiots.
When rage arrives, invite him in; his presence will fill the room with alacrity, and his surging vitality will allow you to push farther and deeper into the unexplored regions of your soul.
In contrast, the world of the neoliberal oligarchs, the duopolistic political class and of the cops has been called into question. They have grown accustomed to having their way, of having a compliant and complicit peasantry. In this they are not unique; what they are experiencing is universal: The world we know (or at least believe we do) and struggle to maintain, from time to time, is apt to reveal an aspect of itself that seems alien and unmanageable e.g., the growing dissent across the nation, perhaps too vast and potent to be kettled, penned, tear gassed, cuffed and detained. The otherness of the world seems too large…has become an army of aggrieved angels
I once saw a Great Dane on Second Avenue attempt to engage in canine communion with his fellows. In order to display his intentions were benign, friendly, he crouched down on the sidewalk, making his massive frame as small as possible, even placing his large head on the concrete…doing all he could to produce the artifice of submission, to even the smallest dog that approached him. In other words, to enlarge his world he created the illusion of smallness. He did not reduce his essence; he created the artifice of smallness so he could grow larger than himself by his union with the otherness of the world.
We are not requestingthat cops crouch before us. They just need not bristle so. To grow in each other's presence, we are required to meet the other at eye level, even if one has to descend a bit from a habitual position of power and authority.
Officers, your guns, rubber bullets, nightsticks, pepper spray--the looming wall of blue intimidation that you brandish merely creates the illusion of strength. If you truly want to grow strong, meet us on these sidewalks, sans the display of empty power.
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com. Visit Phil's website or at FaceBook.
Thursday, October 27, 2011
If you blinked, you might have missed a recent movie called Machine Gun Preacher.
Motormouth Limbaugh Meets the Machine Gun Preacher
by Michael Winship
If you blinked, you might have missed a recent movie called Machine Gun Preacher. The film hasn’t burned up the box office and the title may have kept you away from your local picture palace in the mistaken belief that it was some kind of exploitation flick or the latest Quentin Tarantino exercise in post-modernism and ironic bloodbaths. In which case, who could blame you?
In fact, Machine Gun Preacher is the improbable but true story of Sam Childers (played by the improbable but true Gerard Butler, the shiny, muscle-bound Spartan king of 300 fame). After a misbegotten life as a violent biker/drug dealer/ex-con, Childers had a come-to-Jesus epiphany and became a born-again Christian with his own congregation in rural Pennsylvania. But it was when he heard a missionary speak about church work in East Africa that he found his true calling, building an orphanage in the Sudan and protecting the kids there by becoming a vigilante fighting alongside the ill-equipped and undermanned local militia. That’s where the machine gun part comes in.
Apparently, Rush Limbaugh didn’t see Machine Gun Preacher either. If he had, he might have known a thing or two about the enemy Sam Childers was battling against: the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rabid rebel group that for some 25 years has made simple, day-to-day existence a living hell for civilians -- especially children -- in Uganda, Southern Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Instead, as is his usual way -- in other words, not having any idea what he’s talking about -- Old Motormouth Limbaugh recently defended the Lord’s Resistance Army on his radio program because they "are Christians. They are fighting the Muslims in Sudan."
His defense came solely because anything or anyone Barack Obama is against must ipso facto be okay. President Obama has sent 100 military advisers to Africa to try to help end the LRA’s atrocities once and for all. But in the Gospel According to Rush, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, even if said friend engages in murder and mutilation.
"That’s a new war," Limbaugh declared, "a hundred troops to wipe out Christians in Sudan, Uganda." Yet just last Thursday the Lord’s Resistance Army was described by the evangelical Christian Post as "East Africa’s greatest evil... the region’s most malicious militia group." The paper quoted Jedidiah Jenkins of the non-profit group Invisible Children: "The LRA is an abuse of the Christian religion… a small, vicious cult."
The New York Times has called the LRA "a notorious renegade group that has terrorized villagers in at least four countries with marauding bands that kill, rape, maim and kidnap with impunity," and Reuters reports, "Over the years the LRA became known for chilling violence including what human rights groups say were the abductions of thousands for use as child soldiers or sex slaves, [and] brutal club and machete attacks on victims."
Just ask former Bush White House chief speechwriter Michael Gerson. "The LRA is a brutal rebel group headed by a messianic madman," he wrote in The Washington Post. "Its victims... have been the focus of activism by Christian organizations and human rights groups for decades."
Presented with the inconvenient facts, Rush harrumphed, "Well, we just found out about this today. We’re gonna do, of course, our due diligence research on it." A couple of days later Limbaugh admitted that he had been "misinformed," then proceeded to laugh the whole thing off.
This lethal combination of ignorance and abject dismissal typifies the Republican right’s current approach to foreign policy, as evidenced by everything from Michele Bachmann’s suggestion that the Iraqi people reimburse the United States for the privilege of having had their country invaded to Herman Cain’s declaration that, "When they ask me who is the president of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan I’m going to say, 'You know, I don’t know. Do you know?' ... Knowing who is the head of some of these small insignificant states around the world I don’t think that is something that is critical to focusing on national security and getting this economy going."
That jobs and the economy should be our first priority is a no-brainer, but in its zeal to simplistically reject all things governmental, the GOP is turning its back on decades of the experience, craft and skill essential to an effective, bipartisan foreign policy. Nowhere is that more evident than the dilemma currently confronted by five-term Republican Senator Dick Lugar of Indiana, a venerated and respected, conservative expert on global affairs now facing a serious primary challenge from Tea Party candidate Richard Mourdock, the state treasurer. Mourdock’s making political hay over Lugar’s mentoring of Barack Obama in the world of international relations when Obama was a freshman senator, a partnership brayingly portrayed in a Mourdock campaign video titled, "Dick and Barry: The Unforgettable Bromance."
Jacob Heilbrunn, senior fellow at the public policy Center for the National Interest (formerly The Nixon Center) wrote on the website of Foreign Policy magazine, "It isn’t just the career of the Senate’s senior-most Republican that is at stake here; it is an entire tradition of Republican foreign policy that is being repudiated by the party faithful."
This, he continues, "should evoke apprehension in anyone who thinks that America's leading role in the world has, by and large, been a force for good."
Whether you agree with the decision or not, it is that perception of the American role as a force for good that partially informs Obama’s dispatch of military advisors to East Africa, a move that not only is consonant -- so far -- with Congress’ 2010 passage of the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act, but also the Bush administration’s Operation Lightning Thunder in December 2008, when American military intelligence assisted African troops in an unsuccessful attempt to corner LRA leader Joseph Kony in eastern Congo. (According to Human Rights Watch, in retaliation after that failure, "the LRA attacked villages and towns in northern Congo and southern Sudan, killing more than 865 civilians during the Christmas 2008 holiday season and in the weeks thereafter.")
President Obama’s new move in Africa jibes with the National Security Strategy he presented last year: "The burdens of a young century cannot fall on American shoulders alone,” he wrote, but “democracy does not merely represent our better angels, it stands in opposition to aggression and injustice, and our support for human rights is both fundamental to American leadership and a source of our strength in the world."
Yet as Adam Serwer of Mother Jones points out, “The atrocities committed by the LRA aside, nations don't use military force out of altruism. Uganda provides a substantial number of troops for the African Union Force in Somalia, where the al-Qaeda linked group al-Shabaab has control over a significant part of that country. I have no doubt that Barack Obama believes that the world would be better off without Kony and the LRA. But although it hasn't been explicitly said, it's a good bet the Obama administration feels obligated to assist Uganda because Uganda is helping the US fight a proxy war against an al-Qaeda affiliate, a mission that hasn't been without cost for Uganda."
Meanwhile, Rush Limbaugh and his right wing cohort emptily natter on, chattering, as my old man used to say, just to hear their heads rattle.
by Michael Winship
If you blinked, you might have missed a recent movie called Machine Gun Preacher. The film hasn’t burned up the box office and the title may have kept you away from your local picture palace in the mistaken belief that it was some kind of exploitation flick or the latest Quentin Tarantino exercise in post-modernism and ironic bloodbaths. In which case, who could blame you?
In fact, Machine Gun Preacher is the improbable but true story of Sam Childers (played by the improbable but true Gerard Butler, the shiny, muscle-bound Spartan king of 300 fame). After a misbegotten life as a violent biker/drug dealer/ex-con, Childers had a come-to-Jesus epiphany and became a born-again Christian with his own congregation in rural Pennsylvania. But it was when he heard a missionary speak about church work in East Africa that he found his true calling, building an orphanage in the Sudan and protecting the kids there by becoming a vigilante fighting alongside the ill-equipped and undermanned local militia. That’s where the machine gun part comes in.
Apparently, Rush Limbaugh didn’t see Machine Gun Preacher either. If he had, he might have known a thing or two about the enemy Sam Childers was battling against: the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rabid rebel group that for some 25 years has made simple, day-to-day existence a living hell for civilians -- especially children -- in Uganda, Southern Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Instead, as is his usual way -- in other words, not having any idea what he’s talking about -- Old Motormouth Limbaugh recently defended the Lord’s Resistance Army on his radio program because they "are Christians. They are fighting the Muslims in Sudan."
His defense came solely because anything or anyone Barack Obama is against must ipso facto be okay. President Obama has sent 100 military advisers to Africa to try to help end the LRA’s atrocities once and for all. But in the Gospel According to Rush, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, even if said friend engages in murder and mutilation.
"That’s a new war," Limbaugh declared, "a hundred troops to wipe out Christians in Sudan, Uganda." Yet just last Thursday the Lord’s Resistance Army was described by the evangelical Christian Post as "East Africa’s greatest evil... the region’s most malicious militia group." The paper quoted Jedidiah Jenkins of the non-profit group Invisible Children: "The LRA is an abuse of the Christian religion… a small, vicious cult."
The New York Times has called the LRA "a notorious renegade group that has terrorized villagers in at least four countries with marauding bands that kill, rape, maim and kidnap with impunity," and Reuters reports, "Over the years the LRA became known for chilling violence including what human rights groups say were the abductions of thousands for use as child soldiers or sex slaves, [and] brutal club and machete attacks on victims."
Just ask former Bush White House chief speechwriter Michael Gerson. "The LRA is a brutal rebel group headed by a messianic madman," he wrote in The Washington Post. "Its victims... have been the focus of activism by Christian organizations and human rights groups for decades."
Presented with the inconvenient facts, Rush harrumphed, "Well, we just found out about this today. We’re gonna do, of course, our due diligence research on it." A couple of days later Limbaugh admitted that he had been "misinformed," then proceeded to laugh the whole thing off.
This lethal combination of ignorance and abject dismissal typifies the Republican right’s current approach to foreign policy, as evidenced by everything from Michele Bachmann’s suggestion that the Iraqi people reimburse the United States for the privilege of having had their country invaded to Herman Cain’s declaration that, "When they ask me who is the president of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan I’m going to say, 'You know, I don’t know. Do you know?' ... Knowing who is the head of some of these small insignificant states around the world I don’t think that is something that is critical to focusing on national security and getting this economy going."
That jobs and the economy should be our first priority is a no-brainer, but in its zeal to simplistically reject all things governmental, the GOP is turning its back on decades of the experience, craft and skill essential to an effective, bipartisan foreign policy. Nowhere is that more evident than the dilemma currently confronted by five-term Republican Senator Dick Lugar of Indiana, a venerated and respected, conservative expert on global affairs now facing a serious primary challenge from Tea Party candidate Richard Mourdock, the state treasurer. Mourdock’s making political hay over Lugar’s mentoring of Barack Obama in the world of international relations when Obama was a freshman senator, a partnership brayingly portrayed in a Mourdock campaign video titled, "Dick and Barry: The Unforgettable Bromance."
Jacob Heilbrunn, senior fellow at the public policy Center for the National Interest (formerly The Nixon Center) wrote on the website of Foreign Policy magazine, "It isn’t just the career of the Senate’s senior-most Republican that is at stake here; it is an entire tradition of Republican foreign policy that is being repudiated by the party faithful."
This, he continues, "should evoke apprehension in anyone who thinks that America's leading role in the world has, by and large, been a force for good."
Whether you agree with the decision or not, it is that perception of the American role as a force for good that partially informs Obama’s dispatch of military advisors to East Africa, a move that not only is consonant -- so far -- with Congress’ 2010 passage of the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act, but also the Bush administration’s Operation Lightning Thunder in December 2008, when American military intelligence assisted African troops in an unsuccessful attempt to corner LRA leader Joseph Kony in eastern Congo. (According to Human Rights Watch, in retaliation after that failure, "the LRA attacked villages and towns in northern Congo and southern Sudan, killing more than 865 civilians during the Christmas 2008 holiday season and in the weeks thereafter.")
President Obama’s new move in Africa jibes with the National Security Strategy he presented last year: "The burdens of a young century cannot fall on American shoulders alone,” he wrote, but “democracy does not merely represent our better angels, it stands in opposition to aggression and injustice, and our support for human rights is both fundamental to American leadership and a source of our strength in the world."
Yet as Adam Serwer of Mother Jones points out, “The atrocities committed by the LRA aside, nations don't use military force out of altruism. Uganda provides a substantial number of troops for the African Union Force in Somalia, where the al-Qaeda linked group al-Shabaab has control over a significant part of that country. I have no doubt that Barack Obama believes that the world would be better off without Kony and the LRA. But although it hasn't been explicitly said, it's a good bet the Obama administration feels obligated to assist Uganda because Uganda is helping the US fight a proxy war against an al-Qaeda affiliate, a mission that hasn't been without cost for Uganda."
Meanwhile, Rush Limbaugh and his right wing cohort emptily natter on, chattering, as my old man used to say, just to hear their heads rattle.
Michael Winship, senior writing fellow at Demos and president of the Writers Guild of America, East, is senior writer of the new public television series Moyers & Company, premiering in January 2012.
This won’t be Vietnam, exactly.
Iraq Syndrome
by Robert C. Koehler
This won’t be Vietnam, exactly. No helicopter whisking the last remaining Americans off the roof of the embassy. A contingent of 16,000 State Department contract employees — over 5,000 of them armed mercenaries — will be staying on, running what’s left of the American operation in Iraq.
But there’s little doubt we lost this war — by every rational measure. Everyone lost, except those who profited from (and continue to profit from) the trillions we bled into the invasion and occupation; and those who planned it, most of whom remain in positions to plan or at least promote the wars we’re still fighting and the wars to come.
But in a certain profound sense, the war in Iraq, as we have come to know it over the last almost nine years, is shutting down. The Obama team couldn’t get “Iraq’s inspiring but fragile democracy” (in the immortal words of Joe Lieberman, waxing absurd in a USA Today opinion piece) to approve immunity from local prosecution for American troops. Our noble cause trembled, collapsed, and for a moment we became a democracy. The will of the sick-of-war public prevailed.
I find myself reflecting on this the way I might reflect on a berserk car alarm that finally shuts off — with the ringing still in my ears, with anger and frustration still wracking my body. Something that shouldn’t be happening has finally ceased happening, or soon will, but I hardly feel like celebrating.
“If any good comes of the Iraq war,” Michael Lind wrote recently in Salon, “it will come in the form of an Iraq syndrome, like the Vietnam syndrome that made Americans wary of large-scale military intervention abroad from the fall of Saigon in 1975 until the Gulf War of 1990-91. The mantra then was ‘No more Vietnams.’ That needs to be updated: ‘No more Iraqs.’”
I agree, but I don’t think this goes far enough. “No more Vietnams” is still operative: The public still hates war; even neocons acknowledge that Nam was a disaster. Because of it, the war interests spent a generation retooling their agenda, and ultimately American society, to work around this fact. Elimination of the draft, for instance, while seemingly a progressive step, took self-interest out of the antiwar movement.
And war propaganda became savvy and benign. Our post-Vietnam military adventures, while still fear-driven, also had “humanitarian” components, like spreading democracy or defending women’s rights. We developed “smart bombs,” which only destroyed, you know, infrastructure. And as Colin Powell famously proclaimed, as the Iraq adventure was starting to get ugly, “We don’t do body counts.” No daily kill reports this go-around; that would just turn the American stomach. With the help of an embedded media, war became largely invisible. The public went shopping.
Whatever “syndrome” does coalesce around this disastrous mistake must develop an intelligence that transcends the machinations that brought it on. For this to happen, we must stare deeply into the heart of the war’s consequences.
Most commentary has focused on the two most glaring failures from the point of view of national interest: strategic and economic. Strategically, we “lost” in that the war failed to turn Iraq into a stable, subservient ally. Instead, as Jonathan Steele put it recently in the UK Sunday Observer, “thanks to Bush’s toppling of Saddam Hussein, Iran’s greatest enemy, Tehran’s influence in Iraq is much stronger today than is America’s.”
Economically, the Iraq adventure cost more than World War II, as David R. Francis pointed out recently in The Christian Science Monitor. It wasted more than $800 billion in direct appropriations. And when other costs such as ongoing medical treatment for injured vets are figured in, the money bleed grows staggering beyond all imagination — as much as $6 trillion, according to the well-publicized calculations of economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes. To realize that such money could have gone into education, health care and the rebuilding of our crumbling, bankrupt nation is to start to feel the weight and scope of Iraq Syndrome.
Then there’s the death toll. Officially, almost 5,000 U.S. troops have died, with another 32,000 wounded. These numbers hardly begin to measure the extent to which vets’ lives have been shattered; most of them return from extended duty with some form of PTSD.
But the numbers go wild, and Iraq Syndrome swells into a raging antiwar movement, when we consider the war’s consequences from the Iraqi point of view. We don’t do body counts, but some years ago the British medical journal Lancet calculated the civilian death toll at more than 650,000. Other estimates go beyond a million dead. In addition, 4.7 million Iraqis were displaced from their homes. And what about the “inspiring democracy” we’ve created? According to Transparency International, Iraq is virtually a failed state, ranking 175th globally in corruption, ahead of only Somalia, Myanmar and (ahem) Afghanistan, as Medea Benjamin and Charles Davis noted on Common Dreams.
Finally, Iraq Syndrome must include awareness of our toxic legacy, in particular the radioactive fallout resulting from exploding several thousand tons of depleted uranium munitions. Last year, the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health published a study of the devastated city of Fallujah, pointing out that, among much else, it is experiencing higher rates of cancer, leukemia and infant mortality than Hiroshima and Nagasaki did in 1945. And birth defects abound: “Young women in Fallujah are terrified of having children,” a group of British and Iraqi doctors reported.
The failure of the Iraq war is the failure of all wars, past and future: national policy grounded the dehumanization of a people. A military-industrial economy requires such policy to continue, and so it does. Iraq Syndrome may be our best hope in thwarting the power of the war consensus, especially if it includes the awareness that what we do to others we eventually do to ourselves.
more Robert C. Koehler
by Robert C. Koehler
This won’t be Vietnam, exactly. No helicopter whisking the last remaining Americans off the roof of the embassy. A contingent of 16,000 State Department contract employees — over 5,000 of them armed mercenaries — will be staying on, running what’s left of the American operation in Iraq.
But there’s little doubt we lost this war — by every rational measure. Everyone lost, except those who profited from (and continue to profit from) the trillions we bled into the invasion and occupation; and those who planned it, most of whom remain in positions to plan or at least promote the wars we’re still fighting and the wars to come.
But in a certain profound sense, the war in Iraq, as we have come to know it over the last almost nine years, is shutting down. The Obama team couldn’t get “Iraq’s inspiring but fragile democracy” (in the immortal words of Joe Lieberman, waxing absurd in a USA Today opinion piece) to approve immunity from local prosecution for American troops. Our noble cause trembled, collapsed, and for a moment we became a democracy. The will of the sick-of-war public prevailed.
I find myself reflecting on this the way I might reflect on a berserk car alarm that finally shuts off — with the ringing still in my ears, with anger and frustration still wracking my body. Something that shouldn’t be happening has finally ceased happening, or soon will, but I hardly feel like celebrating.
“If any good comes of the Iraq war,” Michael Lind wrote recently in Salon, “it will come in the form of an Iraq syndrome, like the Vietnam syndrome that made Americans wary of large-scale military intervention abroad from the fall of Saigon in 1975 until the Gulf War of 1990-91. The mantra then was ‘No more Vietnams.’ That needs to be updated: ‘No more Iraqs.’”
I agree, but I don’t think this goes far enough. “No more Vietnams” is still operative: The public still hates war; even neocons acknowledge that Nam was a disaster. Because of it, the war interests spent a generation retooling their agenda, and ultimately American society, to work around this fact. Elimination of the draft, for instance, while seemingly a progressive step, took self-interest out of the antiwar movement.
And war propaganda became savvy and benign. Our post-Vietnam military adventures, while still fear-driven, also had “humanitarian” components, like spreading democracy or defending women’s rights. We developed “smart bombs,” which only destroyed, you know, infrastructure. And as Colin Powell famously proclaimed, as the Iraq adventure was starting to get ugly, “We don’t do body counts.” No daily kill reports this go-around; that would just turn the American stomach. With the help of an embedded media, war became largely invisible. The public went shopping.
Whatever “syndrome” does coalesce around this disastrous mistake must develop an intelligence that transcends the machinations that brought it on. For this to happen, we must stare deeply into the heart of the war’s consequences.
Most commentary has focused on the two most glaring failures from the point of view of national interest: strategic and economic. Strategically, we “lost” in that the war failed to turn Iraq into a stable, subservient ally. Instead, as Jonathan Steele put it recently in the UK Sunday Observer, “thanks to Bush’s toppling of Saddam Hussein, Iran’s greatest enemy, Tehran’s influence in Iraq is much stronger today than is America’s.”
Economically, the Iraq adventure cost more than World War II, as David R. Francis pointed out recently in The Christian Science Monitor. It wasted more than $800 billion in direct appropriations. And when other costs such as ongoing medical treatment for injured vets are figured in, the money bleed grows staggering beyond all imagination — as much as $6 trillion, according to the well-publicized calculations of economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes. To realize that such money could have gone into education, health care and the rebuilding of our crumbling, bankrupt nation is to start to feel the weight and scope of Iraq Syndrome.
Then there’s the death toll. Officially, almost 5,000 U.S. troops have died, with another 32,000 wounded. These numbers hardly begin to measure the extent to which vets’ lives have been shattered; most of them return from extended duty with some form of PTSD.
But the numbers go wild, and Iraq Syndrome swells into a raging antiwar movement, when we consider the war’s consequences from the Iraqi point of view. We don’t do body counts, but some years ago the British medical journal Lancet calculated the civilian death toll at more than 650,000. Other estimates go beyond a million dead. In addition, 4.7 million Iraqis were displaced from their homes. And what about the “inspiring democracy” we’ve created? According to Transparency International, Iraq is virtually a failed state, ranking 175th globally in corruption, ahead of only Somalia, Myanmar and (ahem) Afghanistan, as Medea Benjamin and Charles Davis noted on Common Dreams.
Finally, Iraq Syndrome must include awareness of our toxic legacy, in particular the radioactive fallout resulting from exploding several thousand tons of depleted uranium munitions. Last year, the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health published a study of the devastated city of Fallujah, pointing out that, among much else, it is experiencing higher rates of cancer, leukemia and infant mortality than Hiroshima and Nagasaki did in 1945. And birth defects abound: “Young women in Fallujah are terrified of having children,” a group of British and Iraqi doctors reported.
The failure of the Iraq war is the failure of all wars, past and future: national policy grounded the dehumanization of a people. A military-industrial economy requires such policy to continue, and so it does. Iraq Syndrome may be our best hope in thwarting the power of the war consensus, especially if it includes the awareness that what we do to others we eventually do to ourselves.
© 2011 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
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.
more Robert C. Koehler
Rise of the Planet of the People
Published on Thursday, October 27, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
Rise of the Planet of the People
by Zoltan Grossman
I first heard about Occupy Wall Street in August, when I visited my former home of Madison, Wisconsin. Shortly after protesting in the Wisconsin State Capitol rotunda against 13% pay cuts for state workers, and being impressed with the energy and creativity of the protesters, I attended the Democracy Convention nearby. Some of the speakers at the Convention were inspiring, but others were repeating the same vague rhetoric and tactics I’ve heard for many decades.
As I was doodling, a young speaker mentioned that Wall Street would be occupied starting September 17 (Constitution Day), and I sat bolt upright. It took only about two seconds to understand the rationale of Occupy Wall Street, so most Americans would be able to grasp its message without complex explanations. Americans have historically put on great marches and uprisings, but have rarely stayed in one place to make their demands. OWS seemed to draw from the examples of past occupations in Manila, Beijing, Belgrade, Kiev and Cairo.
Above all, spreading occupations around the country and world would mobilize our home communities, rather than expecting us to spend time and money to travel to (and be repressed in) a central place. We could educate our own local towns and cities, and they could show support by joining and bringing food and supplies. So far, I have been just as impressed by the Occupy movement back in my current home of Olympia, Washington, as I have been of the mass protests back home in Wisconsin.
The 10-Year Delay
OWS is the natural follow-up to the Seattle WTO protests, but this follow-up has been delayed for a decade. If we remember back to the WTO protests in 1999, and the clashes at global free-trade summits in 2000-01, we can recall that the anti-corporate movement was reaching a critical point. Summit-hopping had reached its limits, because only younger people could run from police, and the police were learning how to brutalize enough protesters to prevent a repeat of the Seattle victory. The movement was starting to talk about spreading the movement by bringing it to their hometowns.
Then 9/11 happened, followed by the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and the war on civil liberties. Most activist and community organizers drew back from directly fighting corporations in order to fight the State that wages war for the corporations. Now we are back to taking on the banks and oil companies that are at the root of the crisis. What we are now seeing is an anti-corporate movement on almost exactly a 10-year delay.
The rebellions of 2011 are not merely a response to the recession of 2008, because they focus on a lack of true democracy, which will still be our main problem after the economy recovers. (Climate change and prisons, for example, will still be there even if the recession ends and the Tea Party is defeated.) The current uprisings should have happened—and may have happened in some form—in 2002 or 2003, if it wasn’t for 9/11 and Iraq.
Waiting out the movement
Now the political leadership wants to wait out OWS, anticipating that it may split or discredit itself, be whittled away by police raids, or that the oncoming winter will drive the protesters away. Much more likely is that police raids (like the brutal attack in Oakland) will draw in more public support for OWS, and that cold temperatures will convince protesters to find warmer buildings to sleep in, such as banks and Capitol rotundas.
Here in Olympia, the legislative special session to cut the state budget begins on November 28. With enough people inside the Capitol, and enough supporters outside singing and resisting, the legislators may have to find another place to meet. (Perhaps they would have to apply for a permit to meet, and Occupy Olympia could set conditions for issuing a permit. If the people are exercising sovereignty, we can do it in creative ways that turn the authority around.) Like in Madison, colleges and high schools could have their own feeder marches (walking or biking) to the central protest site.
The Occupy camps have an unprecedented opportunity to get out into their community, and connect with existing grievances and issues in the neighborhoods and workplaces (such as the rallies against police brutality last weekend). In our area, we have seen major strikes by Tacoma teachers and Longview longshore workers. We can also connect with the concerns of people outside the labor movement, including Iraq/Afghanistan veterans who have been abandoned by the military, Indigenous peoples who are trying to “unoccupy” their nations, and single nonpolitical moms just trying to feed their kids and keep them safe.
The Occupy camps are also an ideal venue for continuous teach-ins, for the participants to share knowledge and skills, and draw lessons from social movement in other times and places. It sucks that the only way to get an education in this country is to pay huge amounts of money. In the Occupy movement, different generations can share ideas on effective tactics and strategies, rather than just repeating stale and predictable slogans from the past. Younger folks can educate older folks about how strategies from the 1960s or 1980s may not be as effective in the age of Facebook, Twitter and hiphop. Older folks can tell younger folks about past strategies that have been effective or ineffective, and the State’s predictable pitfalls to avoid.
Pitfalls
The first pitfall is the electoral morasse. With an election year coming up, there will be intense pressure from Democrats to put down the protest signs and pick up the ballot box. Historically, this has been the worst possible choice to maintain momentum--holding the protest signs high is the best way to influence elections.. Only pressure from the streets has secured real reforms, and both Republicans and Democrats have to be pressured to move on anything. The Environmental Protection Agency was established under the Nixon Administration, not because Nixon loved nature, but because of a powerful and growing Earth Day movement. In Wisconsin this year, the Democratic establishment channeled the massive protests into the Recall campaign, which so far has failed to wrestle state government from the Republicans. Whenever anyone asks me about Wisconsin now, they ask “how is the Recall going,” rather than “how is the movement going?,” even though political campaigns are just part of the story.
Elections are one of many available tactics--only one tool in the toolbox--not a strategy. Very few OWS supporters are going to actively work for Obama in 2012, but some may become volunteers for Senate or House races, and some of those local races may actually make a difference. But we cannot put all our eggs in one basket, and have to use the full range of tactics, including direct action, strikes, and cultural work. Together, we can think up newer, creative tactics and strategies that are not predictable, and therefore not as easy for the State to co-opt or repress.
The second pitfall is reliance on the Internet. The 2011 rebellions have drawn in youth around the world through the use of Facebook, Twitter, etc. But social network technologies tend to reach a certain ceiling, leaving out many older and working-class people that either do not have a computer or are not technically savvy. The new social media also tend to ignore the listservs of organizations, campuses, etc. that only a few years ago were the main mobilizing forums on the Internet.
It is easy to look at all the hits on your Facebook group page, and think you have a vibrant and thriving movement, but it generally will not move beyond a limited demographic circle. A Facebook group page (or listserv) is not a substitute for face-to-face community organizing. Posting on a blog is not a substitute for postering in laundromats, bowling alleys and barbershops, or posting PSAs on local radio stations.
The third pitfall is the narrowing of the movement’s culture and language, not through a conscious policy, but inadvertently. When they encounter “insider” language, people who are not in the “in-group” end up feel excluded from the movement, and will probably never tell you why they left. Sometimes the in-group is defined by class, race or age (or a combination), and sometimes by a more subtle use of “insider” terms that are not shared by people who are still part of the mainstream culture. To be successful, this movement needs to include people who watch TV and shop at big-box stores.
For example, at OWS general assemblies, “twinkling” (shaking all fingers in the air) is a sign of approval. Although “twinkling” was originally intended to be inclusive (for the deaf and hard-of-hearing) it can end up excluding people who are not culturally clued into this movement “language.” To put it another way, 99% of Americans clap when they approve of something, and they should not be meant to feel they are breaking the rules. If the OWS movement is to be truly intergenerational, and to bridge class and racial barriers, we need to be conscious of the tone we set. Occupy Olympia has set an inclusive tone, and welcomes people from all walks of life to its Heritage Park site, including an Elders’ Circle tent.
Activism and organizing
Activism and organizing are not the same thing. Activism is the action taken by the people who are already convinced, but activists will become isolated if they fail to enlarge the movement through organizing. Organizing is the art of convincing the unconvinced, but organizers will have little effect if they do not offer effective ways to make an impact through activism. A balance of organizing and activism can help avoid both social isolation and the political/legal "hoops" we are always made to jump through.
Activism is a way to set our own agenda, instead of simply responding to crises. Organizing is about attracting new people into the movement to keep it alive and kicking.
For the first time in my life, there is a movement in the United States that has a real potential to break through old, naïve illusions, and strike that balance between depth and breadth. It may be for the capitalist bloc what the Prague Spring and Polish Solidarity eventually became for the Soviet Bloc. The Occupy movement may be giving us one of our first glimpses of a future world.
Rise of the Planet of the People
by Zoltan Grossman
I first heard about Occupy Wall Street in August, when I visited my former home of Madison, Wisconsin. Shortly after protesting in the Wisconsin State Capitol rotunda against 13% pay cuts for state workers, and being impressed with the energy and creativity of the protesters, I attended the Democracy Convention nearby. Some of the speakers at the Convention were inspiring, but others were repeating the same vague rhetoric and tactics I’ve heard for many decades.
As I was doodling, a young speaker mentioned that Wall Street would be occupied starting September 17 (Constitution Day), and I sat bolt upright. It took only about two seconds to understand the rationale of Occupy Wall Street, so most Americans would be able to grasp its message without complex explanations. Americans have historically put on great marches and uprisings, but have rarely stayed in one place to make their demands. OWS seemed to draw from the examples of past occupations in Manila, Beijing, Belgrade, Kiev and Cairo.
Above all, spreading occupations around the country and world would mobilize our home communities, rather than expecting us to spend time and money to travel to (and be repressed in) a central place. We could educate our own local towns and cities, and they could show support by joining and bringing food and supplies. So far, I have been just as impressed by the Occupy movement back in my current home of Olympia, Washington, as I have been of the mass protests back home in Wisconsin.
The 10-Year Delay
OWS is the natural follow-up to the Seattle WTO protests, but this follow-up has been delayed for a decade. If we remember back to the WTO protests in 1999, and the clashes at global free-trade summits in 2000-01, we can recall that the anti-corporate movement was reaching a critical point. Summit-hopping had reached its limits, because only younger people could run from police, and the police were learning how to brutalize enough protesters to prevent a repeat of the Seattle victory. The movement was starting to talk about spreading the movement by bringing it to their hometowns.
Then 9/11 happened, followed by the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and the war on civil liberties. Most activist and community organizers drew back from directly fighting corporations in order to fight the State that wages war for the corporations. Now we are back to taking on the banks and oil companies that are at the root of the crisis. What we are now seeing is an anti-corporate movement on almost exactly a 10-year delay.
The rebellions of 2011 are not merely a response to the recession of 2008, because they focus on a lack of true democracy, which will still be our main problem after the economy recovers. (Climate change and prisons, for example, will still be there even if the recession ends and the Tea Party is defeated.) The current uprisings should have happened—and may have happened in some form—in 2002 or 2003, if it wasn’t for 9/11 and Iraq.
Waiting out the movement
Now the political leadership wants to wait out OWS, anticipating that it may split or discredit itself, be whittled away by police raids, or that the oncoming winter will drive the protesters away. Much more likely is that police raids (like the brutal attack in Oakland) will draw in more public support for OWS, and that cold temperatures will convince protesters to find warmer buildings to sleep in, such as banks and Capitol rotundas.
Here in Olympia, the legislative special session to cut the state budget begins on November 28. With enough people inside the Capitol, and enough supporters outside singing and resisting, the legislators may have to find another place to meet. (Perhaps they would have to apply for a permit to meet, and Occupy Olympia could set conditions for issuing a permit. If the people are exercising sovereignty, we can do it in creative ways that turn the authority around.) Like in Madison, colleges and high schools could have their own feeder marches (walking or biking) to the central protest site.
The Occupy camps have an unprecedented opportunity to get out into their community, and connect with existing grievances and issues in the neighborhoods and workplaces (such as the rallies against police brutality last weekend). In our area, we have seen major strikes by Tacoma teachers and Longview longshore workers. We can also connect with the concerns of people outside the labor movement, including Iraq/Afghanistan veterans who have been abandoned by the military, Indigenous peoples who are trying to “unoccupy” their nations, and single nonpolitical moms just trying to feed their kids and keep them safe.
The Occupy camps are also an ideal venue for continuous teach-ins, for the participants to share knowledge and skills, and draw lessons from social movement in other times and places. It sucks that the only way to get an education in this country is to pay huge amounts of money. In the Occupy movement, different generations can share ideas on effective tactics and strategies, rather than just repeating stale and predictable slogans from the past. Younger folks can educate older folks about how strategies from the 1960s or 1980s may not be as effective in the age of Facebook, Twitter and hiphop. Older folks can tell younger folks about past strategies that have been effective or ineffective, and the State’s predictable pitfalls to avoid.
Pitfalls
The first pitfall is the electoral morasse. With an election year coming up, there will be intense pressure from Democrats to put down the protest signs and pick up the ballot box. Historically, this has been the worst possible choice to maintain momentum--holding the protest signs high is the best way to influence elections.. Only pressure from the streets has secured real reforms, and both Republicans and Democrats have to be pressured to move on anything. The Environmental Protection Agency was established under the Nixon Administration, not because Nixon loved nature, but because of a powerful and growing Earth Day movement. In Wisconsin this year, the Democratic establishment channeled the massive protests into the Recall campaign, which so far has failed to wrestle state government from the Republicans. Whenever anyone asks me about Wisconsin now, they ask “how is the Recall going,” rather than “how is the movement going?,” even though political campaigns are just part of the story.
Elections are one of many available tactics--only one tool in the toolbox--not a strategy. Very few OWS supporters are going to actively work for Obama in 2012, but some may become volunteers for Senate or House races, and some of those local races may actually make a difference. But we cannot put all our eggs in one basket, and have to use the full range of tactics, including direct action, strikes, and cultural work. Together, we can think up newer, creative tactics and strategies that are not predictable, and therefore not as easy for the State to co-opt or repress.
The second pitfall is reliance on the Internet. The 2011 rebellions have drawn in youth around the world through the use of Facebook, Twitter, etc. But social network technologies tend to reach a certain ceiling, leaving out many older and working-class people that either do not have a computer or are not technically savvy. The new social media also tend to ignore the listservs of organizations, campuses, etc. that only a few years ago were the main mobilizing forums on the Internet.
It is easy to look at all the hits on your Facebook group page, and think you have a vibrant and thriving movement, but it generally will not move beyond a limited demographic circle. A Facebook group page (or listserv) is not a substitute for face-to-face community organizing. Posting on a blog is not a substitute for postering in laundromats, bowling alleys and barbershops, or posting PSAs on local radio stations.
The third pitfall is the narrowing of the movement’s culture and language, not through a conscious policy, but inadvertently. When they encounter “insider” language, people who are not in the “in-group” end up feel excluded from the movement, and will probably never tell you why they left. Sometimes the in-group is defined by class, race or age (or a combination), and sometimes by a more subtle use of “insider” terms that are not shared by people who are still part of the mainstream culture. To be successful, this movement needs to include people who watch TV and shop at big-box stores.
For example, at OWS general assemblies, “twinkling” (shaking all fingers in the air) is a sign of approval. Although “twinkling” was originally intended to be inclusive (for the deaf and hard-of-hearing) it can end up excluding people who are not culturally clued into this movement “language.” To put it another way, 99% of Americans clap when they approve of something, and they should not be meant to feel they are breaking the rules. If the OWS movement is to be truly intergenerational, and to bridge class and racial barriers, we need to be conscious of the tone we set. Occupy Olympia has set an inclusive tone, and welcomes people from all walks of life to its Heritage Park site, including an Elders’ Circle tent.
Activism and organizing
Activism and organizing are not the same thing. Activism is the action taken by the people who are already convinced, but activists will become isolated if they fail to enlarge the movement through organizing. Organizing is the art of convincing the unconvinced, but organizers will have little effect if they do not offer effective ways to make an impact through activism. A balance of organizing and activism can help avoid both social isolation and the political/legal "hoops" we are always made to jump through.
Activism is a way to set our own agenda, instead of simply responding to crises. Organizing is about attracting new people into the movement to keep it alive and kicking.
For the first time in my life, there is a movement in the United States that has a real potential to break through old, naïve illusions, and strike that balance between depth and breadth. It may be for the capitalist bloc what the Prague Spring and Polish Solidarity eventually became for the Soviet Bloc. The Occupy movement may be giving us one of our first glimpses of a future world.
Dr. Zoltan Grossman is a professor of geography at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. His website is at http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz and can be reached at grossmaz@evergreen.edu He is a civilian Member of the Board of G.I. Voice, an antiwar veterans group that runs the Coffee Strong resource center for soldiers outside Fort Lewis. His list of U.S. military interventions since 1890 is athttp://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz/interventions.html
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
This will come as no surprise whatsoever in the poor communities, and the communities of color
Published on Wednesday, October 26, 2011 by Black Agenda Report
FBI 'Mapping': Racial Profiling on a People-Wide Scale
A Black Agenda Radio commentary
by Glen Ford
Until the events of 9/11, Black America seemed to be winning lots of battles in the fight against racial profiling. The term “Driving While Black” had become almost a household word due to heavy media exposure of wildly disproportionate stops of Black drivers by police on Interstate highways. Racial profiling had become politically and socially unacceptable, with few public advocates even among law and order Republicans. And then the Twin Towers came down. Almost instantaneously, racial profiling was back, with a vengeance – directed most dramatically against people who “appeared” to be Muslim, whatever that looks like, but with renewed vigor against African Americans, the historical targets. The FBI, which was never a respecter of the rights of darker peoples, repositioned itself to aggressively pre-empt any threat to national security. That means going after people even when there is no evidence of a crime. Although it remained against the rules for FBI agents to launch investigations based solely on race, religion of ethnicity, those factors could be taken into account. It was a loophole big enough to drive a busload of Knights of the Ku Klux Klan through. By asserting that certain racial, religious and ethnic groups – Blacks, Muslims (especially Black Muslims) and Latinos – were more prone to crime and acts of terror, the FBI cold justify all manner of methods to massively penetrate these groups in the interest of national security.
The vocabulary changed to suit the mission. Ethnic, racial and religious communities became “domains” in FBI parlance, large geographic and social spaces in which national security demanded that the Bureau make itself acutely “aware.” Thus, the new strategy was called “domain awareness” – meaning, the FBI’s job was to learn everything about the people who lived in these ethnic, religious and racial “domains.” All that was required to launch massive intelligence gathering campaigns against, say, Black people in the state of Georgia, Arabs in the Detroit area, Chinese and Russians in the San Francisco Bay Area, or almost any group in New York City, was the invocation of a vague criminal or national security “threat.”
Like magic, threats started appearing all over the place. In October 2009, the Atlanta office of the FBI sent out a threat “alert” about supposed “Black Separatist” groups. It turned out that the alert involved peaceful protests and support of a congressional candidate, but the FBI set about collecting information on the growth of the entire Black population in the Atlanta area, the better to understand the “domain.” The FBI has used the presence of street gangs like MS13 in some Latino communities to launch domain-wide dragnets of information on area Hispanic populations. Muslims of any extraction – but especially Black American Muslims – are considered domains worthy of endless mapping. According to the ACLU, which is urging people to tell the FBI “Don't Map Me or My Community,” the Bureau is studying racial and ethnic “behaviors.” That means “behaving while Black” - or behaving while Latino, or behaving while Muslim. The FBI also studies racial, ethnic and religious “facilities” - that is, the places where people...exist. The ACLU says the FBI's own behavior is unconstitutional. It also seems very much like the FBI is preparing to put the people it is studying under some kind of siege.
FBI 'Mapping': Racial Profiling on a People-Wide Scale
A Black Agenda Radio commentary
by Glen Ford
Until the events of 9/11, Black America seemed to be winning lots of battles in the fight against racial profiling. The term “Driving While Black” had become almost a household word due to heavy media exposure of wildly disproportionate stops of Black drivers by police on Interstate highways. Racial profiling had become politically and socially unacceptable, with few public advocates even among law and order Republicans. And then the Twin Towers came down. Almost instantaneously, racial profiling was back, with a vengeance – directed most dramatically against people who “appeared” to be Muslim, whatever that looks like, but with renewed vigor against African Americans, the historical targets. The FBI, which was never a respecter of the rights of darker peoples, repositioned itself to aggressively pre-empt any threat to national security. That means going after people even when there is no evidence of a crime. Although it remained against the rules for FBI agents to launch investigations based solely on race, religion of ethnicity, those factors could be taken into account. It was a loophole big enough to drive a busload of Knights of the Ku Klux Klan through. By asserting that certain racial, religious and ethnic groups – Blacks, Muslims (especially Black Muslims) and Latinos – were more prone to crime and acts of terror, the FBI cold justify all manner of methods to massively penetrate these groups in the interest of national security.
The vocabulary changed to suit the mission. Ethnic, racial and religious communities became “domains” in FBI parlance, large geographic and social spaces in which national security demanded that the Bureau make itself acutely “aware.” Thus, the new strategy was called “domain awareness” – meaning, the FBI’s job was to learn everything about the people who lived in these ethnic, religious and racial “domains.” All that was required to launch massive intelligence gathering campaigns against, say, Black people in the state of Georgia, Arabs in the Detroit area, Chinese and Russians in the San Francisco Bay Area, or almost any group in New York City, was the invocation of a vague criminal or national security “threat.”
Like magic, threats started appearing all over the place. In October 2009, the Atlanta office of the FBI sent out a threat “alert” about supposed “Black Separatist” groups. It turned out that the alert involved peaceful protests and support of a congressional candidate, but the FBI set about collecting information on the growth of the entire Black population in the Atlanta area, the better to understand the “domain.” The FBI has used the presence of street gangs like MS13 in some Latino communities to launch domain-wide dragnets of information on area Hispanic populations. Muslims of any extraction – but especially Black American Muslims – are considered domains worthy of endless mapping. According to the ACLU, which is urging people to tell the FBI “Don't Map Me or My Community,” the Bureau is studying racial and ethnic “behaviors.” That means “behaving while Black” - or behaving while Latino, or behaving while Muslim. The FBI also studies racial, ethnic and religious “facilities” - that is, the places where people...exist. The ACLU says the FBI's own behavior is unconstitutional. It also seems very much like the FBI is preparing to put the people it is studying under some kind of siege.
© 2011 Black Agenda Report
Back Agenda Report executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
FINALLY - we fight a war on a species we can beat! U.S.A.!
Published on Wednesday, October 26, 2011 by San Francisco Chronicle
Magical Seashells of Fun and Horror
by Mark Morford
"A horrendous slaughter is going on out here."
Thus spake one Peter D. Ward, exasperated biologist from the University of Washington, probably not trying to be all that hyperbolic but apparently not able to help himself because Jesus H. Christ, have you not seen the state of the world these days? The oceans? Nature? Do you not know? You really should know.
"They're nearly wiped out," Ward added, not at all talking about whales, or dolphins, or bluefin tuna, or blind baby albino penguins, or anything else you might wish guess WRT to the horribly abused oceans and the ongoing devastation therein because, well, that would be a rather boring column indeed.
Ward is speaking, sadly, about the amazing chambered nautilus, that ancient, gorgeous, spiraling cephalopod of mystical wonder, the shells of which are prized the world over for their beauty and shine, splendid design and mesmerizing pearlescence, so much so that the astonishing creature is now apparently being harvested, hacked, earringed, necklaced and paper-weighted into near extinction. Isn't that grand?
Here is what you do. You observe and you engage, you read and you partake, you march and you Occupy and you feel it all, way down deep. (photo: Travis)
Did you know? Have you already added "chambered nautilus slaughter" to your ever-growing list of bewildering atrocities unleashed by the human race upon this tiny blue dot we call home, about which you can do almost nothing and therefore have almost zero mental or emotional space to fully integrate without, say, imploding?
Do you even have such a list? I bet you do. I bet it's buried somewhere deep in your subconscious and you don't wish to take it out all that often because really, who wants to feel that sinking, helpless feeling all the damn time? Who wants to see the world as an endless parade of ugly abuses and degradation? What are you, a masochist?
I know how it is. If your list is anything like mine, it includes roughly 5,000 things much along the lines of the nautilus massacre, things you can only look at in sidelong, slightly nauseated awe, recognizing how powerless you are to do anything about it except sigh or scream and wonder at the fate of the human species.
How do you parse and absorb? What is your dance? Do you say, "Move over pollution, genocide, water shortages, Tea Party ignorance, that strange growth on my knee, for here is yet another environmental tragedy wrought by a weird cultural conflation of beauty and art and poverty (poor fisherman in the Philippines harvest the nautilus without restraint or legal limit), one of those odd mash-ups of socioeconomic forces that no one could have predicted 50 years ago"?
Do you ignore it completely, jam your fingers in your ears and hum a cute Disney tune? Do you say nothing at all as you shop for nautilus shell doorstops on eBay?
Or do you partake in the exact flipside, overfeeling it all to the point of road rage and manic depression and seething misanthropy like a drug? That's the easy way, really.
I know how it is. You take this stuff in all day, you allow in only death, exploitation and the abject grossness of the human experiment in to your consciousness, you can begin to suffer what's called disaster fatigue, or perhaps devastation fatigue, or abuse fatigue, hereby defined as the overwhelming feeling that all is deeply lost and everything is rape and pillage and oh my God please not another documentary about the horrors of industrial pig farming in the American "heartland." I just can't take it.
But then again, if you don't take it in, if you ignore, reject and hate on the media for exposing you to so much cruelty, if you aren't fully engaging in the world around you, well, you merely stumble around in a detached stupor, a numb kind of willful ignorance that serves exactly no one. And who wants that?
Because you know what happens then? Someone mentions something about the devastation in Turkey, the death of Gaddafi or maybe Obama's new mortgage plan, and you get that blank look in your eyes, scared and lost and adrift as you can only retreat to the corner of the intellectual party and nurse your watery cocktail of abject disgruntlement. Fun for you!
So what do you do? Here is what you do. You observe and you engage, you read and you partake, you march and you Occupy and you feel it all, way down deep.
You get in there and participate the hell out of the messyglorious world because you are, after all, bound to it, part of it, one of a billion nautilus shells floating in the great slipstream. It's like we say in yoga philosophy: What, you think you're special? You are not special. You are merely God. Then again, so is everyone else.
But at the same time, you maybe realize one mandatory, life-saving, overarching idea: the karma of the world is not yours to take on. This is what the wise ones say: Care about your issues, change what you can in your own world, love the hell out of everyone around you like a dog loves peanut butter, but realize the collective burdens of the planet will crush you dead in an instant if you try shoulder them all.
So here is my humble advice in this nautilus-deprived world: Do not be one of those people. Do not succumb to the boring hellpit of teeming misery. It's just too easy. Care deeply, love messily, handle your own karma like an awestruck child handles a pile of wet clay. As the mystics remind us again and again, it's the only thing that ever seems to work.
Magical Seashells of Fun and Horror
by Mark Morford
"A horrendous slaughter is going on out here."
Thus spake one Peter D. Ward, exasperated biologist from the University of Washington, probably not trying to be all that hyperbolic but apparently not able to help himself because Jesus H. Christ, have you not seen the state of the world these days? The oceans? Nature? Do you not know? You really should know.
"They're nearly wiped out," Ward added, not at all talking about whales, or dolphins, or bluefin tuna, or blind baby albino penguins, or anything else you might wish guess WRT to the horribly abused oceans and the ongoing devastation therein because, well, that would be a rather boring column indeed.
Ward is speaking, sadly, about the amazing chambered nautilus, that ancient, gorgeous, spiraling cephalopod of mystical wonder, the shells of which are prized the world over for their beauty and shine, splendid design and mesmerizing pearlescence, so much so that the astonishing creature is now apparently being harvested, hacked, earringed, necklaced and paper-weighted into near extinction. Isn't that grand?
Here is what you do. You observe and you engage, you read and you partake, you march and you Occupy and you feel it all, way down deep. (photo: Travis)
Did you know? Have you already added "chambered nautilus slaughter" to your ever-growing list of bewildering atrocities unleashed by the human race upon this tiny blue dot we call home, about which you can do almost nothing and therefore have almost zero mental or emotional space to fully integrate without, say, imploding?
Do you even have such a list? I bet you do. I bet it's buried somewhere deep in your subconscious and you don't wish to take it out all that often because really, who wants to feel that sinking, helpless feeling all the damn time? Who wants to see the world as an endless parade of ugly abuses and degradation? What are you, a masochist?
I know how it is. If your list is anything like mine, it includes roughly 5,000 things much along the lines of the nautilus massacre, things you can only look at in sidelong, slightly nauseated awe, recognizing how powerless you are to do anything about it except sigh or scream and wonder at the fate of the human species.
How do you parse and absorb? What is your dance? Do you say, "Move over pollution, genocide, water shortages, Tea Party ignorance, that strange growth on my knee, for here is yet another environmental tragedy wrought by a weird cultural conflation of beauty and art and poverty (poor fisherman in the Philippines harvest the nautilus without restraint or legal limit), one of those odd mash-ups of socioeconomic forces that no one could have predicted 50 years ago"?
Do you ignore it completely, jam your fingers in your ears and hum a cute Disney tune? Do you say nothing at all as you shop for nautilus shell doorstops on eBay?
Or do you partake in the exact flipside, overfeeling it all to the point of road rage and manic depression and seething misanthropy like a drug? That's the easy way, really.
I know how it is. You take this stuff in all day, you allow in only death, exploitation and the abject grossness of the human experiment in to your consciousness, you can begin to suffer what's called disaster fatigue, or perhaps devastation fatigue, or abuse fatigue, hereby defined as the overwhelming feeling that all is deeply lost and everything is rape and pillage and oh my God please not another documentary about the horrors of industrial pig farming in the American "heartland." I just can't take it.
But then again, if you don't take it in, if you ignore, reject and hate on the media for exposing you to so much cruelty, if you aren't fully engaging in the world around you, well, you merely stumble around in a detached stupor, a numb kind of willful ignorance that serves exactly no one. And who wants that?
Because you know what happens then? Someone mentions something about the devastation in Turkey, the death of Gaddafi or maybe Obama's new mortgage plan, and you get that blank look in your eyes, scared and lost and adrift as you can only retreat to the corner of the intellectual party and nurse your watery cocktail of abject disgruntlement. Fun for you!
So what do you do? Here is what you do. You observe and you engage, you read and you partake, you march and you Occupy and you feel it all, way down deep.
You get in there and participate the hell out of the messyglorious world because you are, after all, bound to it, part of it, one of a billion nautilus shells floating in the great slipstream. It's like we say in yoga philosophy: What, you think you're special? You are not special. You are merely God. Then again, so is everyone else.
But at the same time, you maybe realize one mandatory, life-saving, overarching idea: the karma of the world is not yours to take on. This is what the wise ones say: Care about your issues, change what you can in your own world, love the hell out of everyone around you like a dog loves peanut butter, but realize the collective burdens of the planet will crush you dead in an instant if you try shoulder them all.
So here is my humble advice in this nautilus-deprived world: Do not be one of those people. Do not succumb to the boring hellpit of teeming misery. It's just too easy. Care deeply, love messily, handle your own karma like an awestruck child handles a pile of wet clay. As the mystics remind us again and again, it's the only thing that ever seems to work.
© 2011 Hearst Communications Inc.
Mark Morford's new book, 'The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism,' is now available at daringspectacle.com, Amazon, BN.com, and beyond. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. His website is markmorford.com. Mark's column appears every Wednesday on SFGate.
It's nature's way of telling you, something's wrong!
Published on Wednesday, October 26, 2011 by the Huffington Post
The War Against Climate Science Unravels
by Kelly Rigg
The skeptic case against climate change is unraveling before our eyes like someone walking away from an old sweater, thread in hand.
For those who have ever put the skeptic arguments to the test, it has always been clear that their criticisms rarely stand up to even the most basic level of academic rigor. But last week's release of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) study delivered a decisive blow to the edifice of climate skepticism.
The key skeptic pillar, summarized by arch skeptic Anthony Watts, has always been this: "How do we know if global warming is a problem if we can't trust the temperature record?"
His 2009 study of US weather monitoring stations argued that many were located in areas where temperatures were likely to be higher than in surrounding areas, suggesting that estimates of warming were exaggerated. So the BEST study, partly funded by the climate denial industry, was undoubtedly meant to corroborate Watt's fundamental tenet.
NASA Goddard, 2010
Instead, the BEST study confirmed quite the opposite -- that rapid warming trends found by previous studies of climate change are in fact correct. While the study must still undergo peer review, it is a climate change denial killer for two reasons:
• The research was led by a prominent climate skeptic with funding by denial bankroller Charles Koch. It was given the seal of approval by Watts and other skeptics. Watts: "I'm prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong." Fred Singer, another long-term denier said: "I applaud and support what is being done by the Project -- a very difficult but important undertaking."
• It annihilates the "climategate" accusations. Skeptics claimed that climate scientists had tried to hide discrepancies in the temperature record which were inconsistent with global warming trends. Even though every one of the six independent inquiries has exonerated the scientists as well as the science, deniers have been relentless. BEST shows that these discrepancies are inconsequential.
It's important to remember, however, that climate denial is not about getting at the truth. It is a well-funded, carefully orchestrated campaign to block regulations on greenhouse gas emissions. So once the skeptics realized their own study was going to fly in the face of their main talking points, they figured BEST would have to be neutralized somehow. Indeed, Watts has been back-pedaling for months, ever since the preliminary findings were known. Their counter-strategy generally went like this:
1) Create Confusion and Sow Doubt: On October 19, the day of BEST's release, climate denier command central Heartland Institute ran a story headlined: "GAO Confirms: Anthony Watts Is Right, UN Temperature Data Rigged To Show Warming"
Was the timing a coincidence? Hardly. The GAO study in question (PDF) was more than six weeks old and had already been reported widely in the blogosphere based on a distorted press release issued by the skeptics' very own Sen. James Inhofe. (And Heartland further distorted it beyond all recognition, I might add. Rigged data? GAO didn't even imply this, let alone confirm it.)
So why the sudden re-release of an old story, but this time focused specifically on vindicating Watts? Because it was his work that BEST eviscerates. As Watts himself admits, "I knew that behind the scenes, they were planning a media blitz" (and he of course is scrambling to cast doubt on the findings). It was a preemptive strike meant to imply that there were two sides to the story. And why refer to "UN temperature data" when the story had nothing to do with the UN? Because tapping into public mistrust of the UN is part of the denial narrative.
2) Change the Subject: The press didn't buy the standard "two sides" gambit. Virtually every major media outlet ran stories with headlines like this one from The Economist: "The heat is on: A new analysis of the temperature record leaves little room for the doubters. The world is warming."
So the next move was to pretend this was never a key tenet of the denier argument. The day after publication, Heartland's line was:
The mere assertion that the planet has warmed some tells us absolutely nothing we didn't already know... Few skeptics claim the earth has not warmed during the past 100 years...What defines global warming skeptics is the assertion that our present warming is not a crisis (human-induced or otherwise) - not an assertion that the planet has not warmed.
Um, right. I Googled "Earth is cooling not warming" and got 13 million results. The Urban Heat Island effect has been a lynchpin argument of the deniers, led by Watts, for years.
Perhaps the most blatant example comes from the very man who coined the term climategate, James Delingpole. Just one year ago, in a piece titled Global Cooling and the New World Order, he wrote "the global elite is perfectly well aware that global cooling represents a far more serious and imminent threat to the world than global warming..." The same guy last week?
'The planet has been warming,' says a new study of temperature records, conducted by Berkeley professor Richard Muller. I wonder what he'll be telling us next: that night follows day? That water is wet? That great white sharks have nasty pointy teeth? That sheep go "baaaa"? ...It has been a truth long acknowledged by climate sceptics, deniers and realists of every conceivable hue that since the mid-19th century, the planet has been on a warming trend."
Outright denial is increasingly hard to defend, so the new talking point is "Yes, there is some climate change, and yes, a little might be man-made, but don't worry, most of it is natural so we don't need to do anything about it." This friendly face of climate denial is backed up by Heartland's insidiously deceptive "Encyclopedia" on Climate Change.
3) Silence Climate Scientists: climate scientists have been subjected to a veritable witch hunt. As a bunch of people understandably deficient in PR craft, they've proved an easy target for the skeptics. The most recent attack can be found in an obscure amendment (SA 862) to a Senate "minibus" budget bill (HR 2112). The amendment would prohibit federal employees (including scientists from NOAA, NASA, and other government institutions) from participating "in any password-protected electronic forum that involves the participation in a process or production of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."
Of course the IPCC uses password-protected fora. Anyone who has ever used online tools (like Google docs) to work on joint papers knows they are far more efficient than using email. Having draft versions in the public domain would simply create confusion (see 1 above). It would be like conducting climate science as if it were a reality TV show, with every spat judged in the court of public opinion, although in this case the public is far less qualified to pass judgement than on whether Britney should be voted out of the house.
The War Against Climate Science Unravels
by Kelly Rigg
The skeptic case against climate change is unraveling before our eyes like someone walking away from an old sweater, thread in hand.
For those who have ever put the skeptic arguments to the test, it has always been clear that their criticisms rarely stand up to even the most basic level of academic rigor. But last week's release of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) study delivered a decisive blow to the edifice of climate skepticism.
The key skeptic pillar, summarized by arch skeptic Anthony Watts, has always been this: "How do we know if global warming is a problem if we can't trust the temperature record?"
His 2009 study of US weather monitoring stations argued that many were located in areas where temperatures were likely to be higher than in surrounding areas, suggesting that estimates of warming were exaggerated. So the BEST study, partly funded by the climate denial industry, was undoubtedly meant to corroborate Watt's fundamental tenet.
NASA Goddard, 2010
Instead, the BEST study confirmed quite the opposite -- that rapid warming trends found by previous studies of climate change are in fact correct. While the study must still undergo peer review, it is a climate change denial killer for two reasons:
• The research was led by a prominent climate skeptic with funding by denial bankroller Charles Koch. It was given the seal of approval by Watts and other skeptics. Watts: "I'm prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong." Fred Singer, another long-term denier said: "I applaud and support what is being done by the Project -- a very difficult but important undertaking."
• It annihilates the "climategate" accusations. Skeptics claimed that climate scientists had tried to hide discrepancies in the temperature record which were inconsistent with global warming trends. Even though every one of the six independent inquiries has exonerated the scientists as well as the science, deniers have been relentless. BEST shows that these discrepancies are inconsequential.
It's important to remember, however, that climate denial is not about getting at the truth. It is a well-funded, carefully orchestrated campaign to block regulations on greenhouse gas emissions. So once the skeptics realized their own study was going to fly in the face of their main talking points, they figured BEST would have to be neutralized somehow. Indeed, Watts has been back-pedaling for months, ever since the preliminary findings were known. Their counter-strategy generally went like this:
1) Create Confusion and Sow Doubt: On October 19, the day of BEST's release, climate denier command central Heartland Institute ran a story headlined: "GAO Confirms: Anthony Watts Is Right, UN Temperature Data Rigged To Show Warming"
Was the timing a coincidence? Hardly. The GAO study in question (PDF) was more than six weeks old and had already been reported widely in the blogosphere based on a distorted press release issued by the skeptics' very own Sen. James Inhofe. (And Heartland further distorted it beyond all recognition, I might add. Rigged data? GAO didn't even imply this, let alone confirm it.)
So why the sudden re-release of an old story, but this time focused specifically on vindicating Watts? Because it was his work that BEST eviscerates. As Watts himself admits, "I knew that behind the scenes, they were planning a media blitz" (and he of course is scrambling to cast doubt on the findings). It was a preemptive strike meant to imply that there were two sides to the story. And why refer to "UN temperature data" when the story had nothing to do with the UN? Because tapping into public mistrust of the UN is part of the denial narrative.
2) Change the Subject: The press didn't buy the standard "two sides" gambit. Virtually every major media outlet ran stories with headlines like this one from The Economist: "The heat is on: A new analysis of the temperature record leaves little room for the doubters. The world is warming."
So the next move was to pretend this was never a key tenet of the denier argument. The day after publication, Heartland's line was:
The mere assertion that the planet has warmed some tells us absolutely nothing we didn't already know... Few skeptics claim the earth has not warmed during the past 100 years...What defines global warming skeptics is the assertion that our present warming is not a crisis (human-induced or otherwise) - not an assertion that the planet has not warmed.
Um, right. I Googled "Earth is cooling not warming" and got 13 million results. The Urban Heat Island effect has been a lynchpin argument of the deniers, led by Watts, for years.
Perhaps the most blatant example comes from the very man who coined the term climategate, James Delingpole. Just one year ago, in a piece titled Global Cooling and the New World Order, he wrote "the global elite is perfectly well aware that global cooling represents a far more serious and imminent threat to the world than global warming..." The same guy last week?
'The planet has been warming,' says a new study of temperature records, conducted by Berkeley professor Richard Muller. I wonder what he'll be telling us next: that night follows day? That water is wet? That great white sharks have nasty pointy teeth? That sheep go "baaaa"? ...It has been a truth long acknowledged by climate sceptics, deniers and realists of every conceivable hue that since the mid-19th century, the planet has been on a warming trend."
Outright denial is increasingly hard to defend, so the new talking point is "Yes, there is some climate change, and yes, a little might be man-made, but don't worry, most of it is natural so we don't need to do anything about it." This friendly face of climate denial is backed up by Heartland's insidiously deceptive "Encyclopedia" on Climate Change.
3) Silence Climate Scientists: climate scientists have been subjected to a veritable witch hunt. As a bunch of people understandably deficient in PR craft, they've proved an easy target for the skeptics. The most recent attack can be found in an obscure amendment (SA 862) to a Senate "minibus" budget bill (HR 2112). The amendment would prohibit federal employees (including scientists from NOAA, NASA, and other government institutions) from participating "in any password-protected electronic forum that involves the participation in a process or production of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."
Of course the IPCC uses password-protected fora. Anyone who has ever used online tools (like Google docs) to work on joint papers knows they are far more efficient than using email. Having draft versions in the public domain would simply create confusion (see 1 above). It would be like conducting climate science as if it were a reality TV show, with every spat judged in the court of public opinion, although in this case the public is far less qualified to pass judgement than on whether Britney should be voted out of the house.
Kelly Rigg is the Executive Director of the GCCA, a global alliance of 250 organizations cooperating under the banner of the tcktcktck campaign. She has been leading international campaigns for nearly 30 years on climate, energy, oceans, Antarctica and other issues
Hey, CANADA - with 80% of the world's fresh water resources y'all better be thinking how you'll repel the coming US invasion for H2O!
Published on Wednesday, October 26, 2011 by Food & Water Watch Blog
Is the EPA Selling Out Your Water?
by Kate Fried
We were disheartened to learn this week that Nancy Stoner, the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) acting assistant administrator for water, is an advocate for water privatization. In an interview with Greenwire (Sorry, but subscription required.), Stoner expressed doubt about the federal government’s ability to help provide the public with drinking and wastewater service, citing them as “too expensive.” She then went on to say,
“I think there’s big money in to be made in how to address the water resources needs for our country, particularly when we are going to have population growth, development, the decay of existing infrastructure and climate change.”
Hearing a top government official in charge of protecting one of our most essential shared resources laud a scheme that has been linked to the degradation of municipal water supplies definitely makes us wonder where our government is placing its priorities. Across the U.S., privatization has been linked to deteriorating water quality, rate hikes, job force reductions and poor customer service.
If there is any money to be made in water privatization, it’s among wealthy corporations and their shareholders, who time and time again have proven that they are not responsible patrons of common resources such as water. Privatization has led to disasters around the U.S., especially in Illinois, where customers of the water systems purchased by Illinois American Water and Aqua Illinois over the last fifteen years have seen their water bills more than double on average since privatization.
The EPA should be ensuring the abundance of safe, clean, affordable water, not encouraging corporations to swindle more Americans.
Stoner is correct in her assessment of the challenges facing municipal water systems, which every year fall at least $22 billion short of the funds needed to safely and affordably deliver this basic resource to Americans. Many public water systems in the United States were built over a century ago, around the same time that Henry Ford was tinkering around with the first Model T. Few people rely on cars from that era for their basic transportation needs, yet much of our water flows through pipes just as old.
While Stoner supports the President’s proposed infrastructure bank, which wouldn’t even address the needs of small and rural water systems, she fails to mention a bill recently introduced in Congress that would create a clean water trust. Food & Water Watch has been actively engaged in the fight to establish such a fund for several years now because it would create a sustainable, dedicated source of federal funding for community water systems, freeing them from the funding whims of congress and the president. According to our research, closing the gap in federal infrastructure funding could also create up to 750,000 new jobs.
Today Food & Water Watch issued an open letter to Stoner that encapsulated many of the points above, and can best be summed up with this: When looked at from the perspective of environmental protection or job creation, privatization is a problem, not a solution.
It’s no secret that our nation’s prolonged economic crunch has drained local and federal coffers alike. Perhaps we’re so accustomed to recession-era hysteria that just about every fix to raise money seems like a sound one. Regardless, it’s extremely irresponsible of the EPA to advocate for water privatization.
Municipal water systems deliver an essential resource that belongs to us all. Our government should remember that before turning it into a cash cow.
Is the EPA Selling Out Your Water?
by Kate Fried
We were disheartened to learn this week that Nancy Stoner, the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) acting assistant administrator for water, is an advocate for water privatization. In an interview with Greenwire (Sorry, but subscription required.), Stoner expressed doubt about the federal government’s ability to help provide the public with drinking and wastewater service, citing them as “too expensive.” She then went on to say,
“I think there’s big money in to be made in how to address the water resources needs for our country, particularly when we are going to have population growth, development, the decay of existing infrastructure and climate change.”
Hearing a top government official in charge of protecting one of our most essential shared resources laud a scheme that has been linked to the degradation of municipal water supplies definitely makes us wonder where our government is placing its priorities. Across the U.S., privatization has been linked to deteriorating water quality, rate hikes, job force reductions and poor customer service.
If there is any money to be made in water privatization, it’s among wealthy corporations and their shareholders, who time and time again have proven that they are not responsible patrons of common resources such as water. Privatization has led to disasters around the U.S., especially in Illinois, where customers of the water systems purchased by Illinois American Water and Aqua Illinois over the last fifteen years have seen their water bills more than double on average since privatization.
The EPA should be ensuring the abundance of safe, clean, affordable water, not encouraging corporations to swindle more Americans.
Stoner is correct in her assessment of the challenges facing municipal water systems, which every year fall at least $22 billion short of the funds needed to safely and affordably deliver this basic resource to Americans. Many public water systems in the United States were built over a century ago, around the same time that Henry Ford was tinkering around with the first Model T. Few people rely on cars from that era for their basic transportation needs, yet much of our water flows through pipes just as old.
While Stoner supports the President’s proposed infrastructure bank, which wouldn’t even address the needs of small and rural water systems, she fails to mention a bill recently introduced in Congress that would create a clean water trust. Food & Water Watch has been actively engaged in the fight to establish such a fund for several years now because it would create a sustainable, dedicated source of federal funding for community water systems, freeing them from the funding whims of congress and the president. According to our research, closing the gap in federal infrastructure funding could also create up to 750,000 new jobs.
Today Food & Water Watch issued an open letter to Stoner that encapsulated many of the points above, and can best be summed up with this: When looked at from the perspective of environmental protection or job creation, privatization is a problem, not a solution.
It’s no secret that our nation’s prolonged economic crunch has drained local and federal coffers alike. Perhaps we’re so accustomed to recession-era hysteria that just about every fix to raise money seems like a sound one. Regardless, it’s extremely irresponsible of the EPA to advocate for water privatization.
Municipal water systems deliver an essential resource that belongs to us all. Our government should remember that before turning it into a cash cow.
© 2011 Food & Water Watch
Can it really be 10 years? Or have I Rip Van Winked it?
Published on Wednesday, October 26, 2011 by Deeplinks Blog / EFF
Ten Years After the Patriot Act, a Look at Three of the Most Dangerous Provisions Affecting Ordinary Americans
by Trevor Timm
Ten years ago today, in the name of protecting national security and guarding against terrorism, President George W. Bush signed into law some of the most sweeping changes to search and surveillance law in modern American history. Unfortunately known as the USA PATRIOT Act, many of its provisions incorporate decidedly unpatriotic principles barred by the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution. Provisions of the PATRIOT Act have been used to target innocent Americans and are widely used in investigations that have nothing to do with national security.
Much of the PATRIOT Act was a wish list of changes to surveillance law that Congress had previously rejected because of civil liberties concerns. When reintroduced as the PATRIOT Act after September 11th, those changes -- and others -- passed with only limited congressional debate.
Just what sort of powers does the PATRIOT Act grant law enforcement when it comes to surveillance and sidestepping due process? Here are three provisions of the PATRIOT Act that were sold to the American public as necessary anti-terrorism measures, but are now used in ways that infringe on ordinary citizens’ rights:
1. SECTION 215 – “ANY TANGIBLE THING”
Under this provision, the FBI can obtain secret court orders for business records and other “tangible things” so long as the FBI says that the records are sought "for an authorized investigation . . . to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities." The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court must issue the order if the FBI so certifies, even when there are no facts to back it up. These “things” can include basically anything—driver’s license records, hotel records, car-rental records, apartment-leasing records, credit card records, books, documents, Internet history, and more. Adding insult to injury, Section 215 orders come with a "gag " prohibiting the recipient from telling anyone, ever, that they received one.
As the New York Times reported, the government may now be using Section 215 orders to obtain “private information about people who have no link to a terrorism or espionage case.” The Justice Department has refused to disclose how they are interpreting the provision, but we do have some indication of how they are using Section 215. While not going into detail, Senator Mark Udall indicated the FBI believes it to allows them “unfettered” access to innocent Americans’ private data, like “a cellphone company’s phone records” in bulk form. The government’s use of these secret orders is sharply increasing -- from 21 orders in 2009 to 96 orders in 2010, an increase of over 400% -- and according to a brand new report from the Washington Post, 80% of those requests are for Internet records.
Today, EFF sued the Justice Department to turn over records related to the government’s secret interpretation and use of Section 215, regarding which Senator Ron Wyden, like Senator Udall, has offered ominous warnings: "When the American people find out about how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act,” said Wyden on the Senate floor in May, “they are going to be stunned and they are going to be angry.”
2. NATIONAL SECURITY LETTERS
Among the most used -- and outright frightening -- provisions in the PATRIOT Act are those that enhanced so-called National Security Letters (NSLs). The FBI can issue NSLs itself, without a court order, and demand a variety of records, from phone records to bank account information to Internet activity. As with 215 orders, recipients are gagged from revealing the orders to anyone.
While NSLs existed prior to 2001, they were infrequently used. The PATRIOT Act lowered the standard making it easier for the FBI to use NSLs to obtain the records of innocent people with no direct link to terrorists or spies, and their use skyrocketed. According to the ACLU’s report on PATRIOT Act abuses, there were 8,500 NSLs issued in 2000 but approximately 192,000 issued between 2003-2006. All of these NSL’s led to one terror conviction, and in that case, the NSL wasn’t even needed.
Not surprisingly, EFF FOIA requests have found abuse of their NSL authority: “mistakes” that led to getting information on the wrong people, ISPs handing over extra or wrong information, and dozens of “exigent letters” that “circumvented the law and violated FBI guidelines and policies.” EFF has successfully challenged the NSL gag orders in multiple cases as unconstitutional under the First Amendment, but the overall scheme still survives to this day.
3. SNEAK AND PEEK WARRANTS
Section 213 of the PATRIOT Act normalized “sneak-and-peek” warrants. These allow law enforcement to raid a suspect’s house without notifying the recipient of the seizure for months. These orders usually don't authorize the government to actually seize any property — but that won't stop them from poking around your computers. Again, sneak-and-peek warrants could be used for any investigation, even if the crime was only a misdemeanor.
From 2006-2009, sneak-and-peek warrants were used a total of 1,755 times. Only fifteen of those cases—a microscopic 0.8%—involved terrorism. The rest were used in cases involving drugs or fraud.
These uses and abuses of the PATRIOT Act against ordinary Americans are only the tip of the iceberg. EFF has repeatedly documented how federal law enforcement agencies have abused our nation’s broken secrecy system to hide specific instances of illegal and unconstitutional conduct related to the PATRIOT Act. EFF’s Freedom of Information Act requests have painted a picture of “an [FBI] engaged in excessive illegal intelligence gathering.”
After ten years, it’s crystal clear that the “emergency” measure sold as a necessary step in the fight against terrorism is being used routinely to violate the privacy of regular people in non-terrorism cases, threatening the Constitutional rights of every one of us. And after ten years, EFF is even more dedicated to fighting against PATRIOT overreach, both in Congress and the courts. Help us in that fight by becoming an EFF member, so that we can work together in making the next ten years better for civil liberties than the last.
Ten Years After the Patriot Act, a Look at Three of the Most Dangerous Provisions Affecting Ordinary Americans
by Trevor Timm
Ten years ago today, in the name of protecting national security and guarding against terrorism, President George W. Bush signed into law some of the most sweeping changes to search and surveillance law in modern American history. Unfortunately known as the USA PATRIOT Act, many of its provisions incorporate decidedly unpatriotic principles barred by the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution. Provisions of the PATRIOT Act have been used to target innocent Americans and are widely used in investigations that have nothing to do with national security.
Much of the PATRIOT Act was a wish list of changes to surveillance law that Congress had previously rejected because of civil liberties concerns. When reintroduced as the PATRIOT Act after September 11th, those changes -- and others -- passed with only limited congressional debate.
Just what sort of powers does the PATRIOT Act grant law enforcement when it comes to surveillance and sidestepping due process? Here are three provisions of the PATRIOT Act that were sold to the American public as necessary anti-terrorism measures, but are now used in ways that infringe on ordinary citizens’ rights:
1. SECTION 215 – “ANY TANGIBLE THING”
Under this provision, the FBI can obtain secret court orders for business records and other “tangible things” so long as the FBI says that the records are sought "for an authorized investigation . . . to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities." The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court must issue the order if the FBI so certifies, even when there are no facts to back it up. These “things” can include basically anything—driver’s license records, hotel records, car-rental records, apartment-leasing records, credit card records, books, documents, Internet history, and more. Adding insult to injury, Section 215 orders come with a "gag " prohibiting the recipient from telling anyone, ever, that they received one.
As the New York Times reported, the government may now be using Section 215 orders to obtain “private information about people who have no link to a terrorism or espionage case.” The Justice Department has refused to disclose how they are interpreting the provision, but we do have some indication of how they are using Section 215. While not going into detail, Senator Mark Udall indicated the FBI believes it to allows them “unfettered” access to innocent Americans’ private data, like “a cellphone company’s phone records” in bulk form. The government’s use of these secret orders is sharply increasing -- from 21 orders in 2009 to 96 orders in 2010, an increase of over 400% -- and according to a brand new report from the Washington Post, 80% of those requests are for Internet records.
Today, EFF sued the Justice Department to turn over records related to the government’s secret interpretation and use of Section 215, regarding which Senator Ron Wyden, like Senator Udall, has offered ominous warnings: "When the American people find out about how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act,” said Wyden on the Senate floor in May, “they are going to be stunned and they are going to be angry.”
2. NATIONAL SECURITY LETTERS
Among the most used -- and outright frightening -- provisions in the PATRIOT Act are those that enhanced so-called National Security Letters (NSLs). The FBI can issue NSLs itself, without a court order, and demand a variety of records, from phone records to bank account information to Internet activity. As with 215 orders, recipients are gagged from revealing the orders to anyone.
While NSLs existed prior to 2001, they were infrequently used. The PATRIOT Act lowered the standard making it easier for the FBI to use NSLs to obtain the records of innocent people with no direct link to terrorists or spies, and their use skyrocketed. According to the ACLU’s report on PATRIOT Act abuses, there were 8,500 NSLs issued in 2000 but approximately 192,000 issued between 2003-2006. All of these NSL’s led to one terror conviction, and in that case, the NSL wasn’t even needed.
Not surprisingly, EFF FOIA requests have found abuse of their NSL authority: “mistakes” that led to getting information on the wrong people, ISPs handing over extra or wrong information, and dozens of “exigent letters” that “circumvented the law and violated FBI guidelines and policies.” EFF has successfully challenged the NSL gag orders in multiple cases as unconstitutional under the First Amendment, but the overall scheme still survives to this day.
3. SNEAK AND PEEK WARRANTS
Section 213 of the PATRIOT Act normalized “sneak-and-peek” warrants. These allow law enforcement to raid a suspect’s house without notifying the recipient of the seizure for months. These orders usually don't authorize the government to actually seize any property — but that won't stop them from poking around your computers. Again, sneak-and-peek warrants could be used for any investigation, even if the crime was only a misdemeanor.
From 2006-2009, sneak-and-peek warrants were used a total of 1,755 times. Only fifteen of those cases—a microscopic 0.8%—involved terrorism. The rest were used in cases involving drugs or fraud.
These uses and abuses of the PATRIOT Act against ordinary Americans are only the tip of the iceberg. EFF has repeatedly documented how federal law enforcement agencies have abused our nation’s broken secrecy system to hide specific instances of illegal and unconstitutional conduct related to the PATRIOT Act. EFF’s Freedom of Information Act requests have painted a picture of “an [FBI] engaged in excessive illegal intelligence gathering.”
After ten years, it’s crystal clear that the “emergency” measure sold as a necessary step in the fight against terrorism is being used routinely to violate the privacy of regular people in non-terrorism cases, threatening the Constitutional rights of every one of us. And after ten years, EFF is even more dedicated to fighting against PATRIOT overreach, both in Congress and the courts. Help us in that fight by becoming an EFF member, so that we can work together in making the next ten years better for civil liberties than the last.
Trevor Timm is an Activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He specializes in free speech issues and government transparency.
Heu - y'all U.S. elites - what if the damn thing is like a VIRUS and you cain't stop et, no how, no way?
Published on Wednesday, October 26, 2011 by TruthDig.com
Globalizing Dissent, From Tahrir Square to Liberty Plaza
by Amy Goodman
The winds of change are blowing across the globe. What triggers such change, and when it will strike, is something that no one can predict.
Last Jan. 18, a courageous young woman in Egypt took a dangerous step. Asmaa Mahfouz was 25 years old, part of the April 6 Youth Movement, with thousands of young people engaging online in debate on the future of their country. They formed in 2008 to demonstrate solidarity with workers in the industrial city of Mahalla, Egypt. Then, in December 2010, a young man in Tunisia, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire to protest the frustration of a generation. His death sparked the uprising in Tunisia that toppled the long-reigning dictator, President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.
Similar acts of protest spread to Egypt, where at least four men attempted self-immolation. One, Ahmed Hashem el-Sayed of Alexandria, died. Asmaa Mahfouz was outraged and posted a video online, staring directly into the camera, her head covered, but not her face. She identified herself and called for people to join her on Jan. 25 in Tahrir Square. She said (translated from Arabic): “I’m making this video to give you one simple message: We want to go down to Tahrir Square on January 25. If we still have honor and want to live in dignity on this land, we have to go down on January 25. We’ll go down and demand our rights, our fundamental human rights. … I won’t even talk about any political rights. We just want our human rights and nothing else. This entire government is corrupt—a corrupt president and a corrupt security force. These self-immolators were not afraid of death but were afraid of security forces. Can you imagine that?”
Nine months later, Asmaa Mahfouz was giving a teach-in at Occupy Wall Street. Standing on steps above the crowd Monday night, she had a huge smile on her face as she looked out on a sea of faces. After she finished, I asked her what gave her strength. She answered with characteristic humility, speaking English: “I can’t believe it when I saw a million people join in the Tahrir Square. I’m not more brave, because I saw my colleagues, Egyptian, were going towards the policemen, when they just pushing us, and they died for all of us. So they are the one who are really brave and really strong. … I saw people, really, died in front of me, because they were protecting me and protecting others. So, they were the most brave, bravest men.”
I asked how it felt to be in the United States, which had for so long supported the Mubarak regime in Egypt. She replied: “While they giving money and power and support to Mubarak regime, our people, Egyptian people, can success against all of this, against the U.S. power. So, the power to the people, not for the U.S. bullets or bombs or money or anything. The power to the people. So that I am here to be in solidarity and support the Wall Street Occupy protesters, to say them ‘the power to the people,’ and to keep it on and on, and they will success in the end.”
The Egyptian revolution has not been without consequences for her. Last August, she was arrested by the Egyptian military. As my colleague Sharif Abdel Kouddous reported from Cairo, Asmaa sent two controversial tweets that prompted the arrest by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, the military government that has ruled Egypt since Mubarak’s fall.
Her arrest provoked a worldwide response, with groups ranging from the Muslim Brotherhood to Amnesty International condemning it. She was released, but, as Sharif noted at the time, Asmaa was only one of 12,000 civilians arrested since the revolution.
The arrests are happening here in the U.S. now, at many of the protest sites across the country. As Asmaa was preparing to head back to Egypt, hundreds of riot police descended on Occupy Oakland, firing beanbag rounds and tear gas. The University of New Mexico is threatening to evict the encampment there, which is called “(Un)occupy Albuquerque” to highlight that the land there is occupied native land.
Asmaa Mahfouz is running for a seat in the Egyptian Parliament, and maybe someday, she says, the presidency. When I asked her what she had to say to President Barack Obama, who had given his speech to the Muslim world in Cairo, she replied: “You promised the people that you are the change and ‘yes, we can.’ So we are here from the Wall Street Occupy, and we are saying the same word: ‘yes, we can.’ We can make the freedom, and we can get our freedom, even if it’s from you.”
Globalizing Dissent, From Tahrir Square to Liberty Plaza
by Amy Goodman
The winds of change are blowing across the globe. What triggers such change, and when it will strike, is something that no one can predict.
Last Jan. 18, a courageous young woman in Egypt took a dangerous step. Asmaa Mahfouz was 25 years old, part of the April 6 Youth Movement, with thousands of young people engaging online in debate on the future of their country. They formed in 2008 to demonstrate solidarity with workers in the industrial city of Mahalla, Egypt. Then, in December 2010, a young man in Tunisia, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire to protest the frustration of a generation. His death sparked the uprising in Tunisia that toppled the long-reigning dictator, President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.
Similar acts of protest spread to Egypt, where at least four men attempted self-immolation. One, Ahmed Hashem el-Sayed of Alexandria, died. Asmaa Mahfouz was outraged and posted a video online, staring directly into the camera, her head covered, but not her face. She identified herself and called for people to join her on Jan. 25 in Tahrir Square. She said (translated from Arabic): “I’m making this video to give you one simple message: We want to go down to Tahrir Square on January 25. If we still have honor and want to live in dignity on this land, we have to go down on January 25. We’ll go down and demand our rights, our fundamental human rights. … I won’t even talk about any political rights. We just want our human rights and nothing else. This entire government is corrupt—a corrupt president and a corrupt security force. These self-immolators were not afraid of death but were afraid of security forces. Can you imagine that?”
Nine months later, Asmaa Mahfouz was giving a teach-in at Occupy Wall Street. Standing on steps above the crowd Monday night, she had a huge smile on her face as she looked out on a sea of faces. After she finished, I asked her what gave her strength. She answered with characteristic humility, speaking English: “I can’t believe it when I saw a million people join in the Tahrir Square. I’m not more brave, because I saw my colleagues, Egyptian, were going towards the policemen, when they just pushing us, and they died for all of us. So they are the one who are really brave and really strong. … I saw people, really, died in front of me, because they were protecting me and protecting others. So, they were the most brave, bravest men.”
I asked how it felt to be in the United States, which had for so long supported the Mubarak regime in Egypt. She replied: “While they giving money and power and support to Mubarak regime, our people, Egyptian people, can success against all of this, against the U.S. power. So, the power to the people, not for the U.S. bullets or bombs or money or anything. The power to the people. So that I am here to be in solidarity and support the Wall Street Occupy protesters, to say them ‘the power to the people,’ and to keep it on and on, and they will success in the end.”
The Egyptian revolution has not been without consequences for her. Last August, she was arrested by the Egyptian military. As my colleague Sharif Abdel Kouddous reported from Cairo, Asmaa sent two controversial tweets that prompted the arrest by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, the military government that has ruled Egypt since Mubarak’s fall.
Her arrest provoked a worldwide response, with groups ranging from the Muslim Brotherhood to Amnesty International condemning it. She was released, but, as Sharif noted at the time, Asmaa was only one of 12,000 civilians arrested since the revolution.
The arrests are happening here in the U.S. now, at many of the protest sites across the country. As Asmaa was preparing to head back to Egypt, hundreds of riot police descended on Occupy Oakland, firing beanbag rounds and tear gas. The University of New Mexico is threatening to evict the encampment there, which is called “(Un)occupy Albuquerque” to highlight that the land there is occupied native land.
Asmaa Mahfouz is running for a seat in the Egyptian Parliament, and maybe someday, she says, the presidency. When I asked her what she had to say to President Barack Obama, who had given his speech to the Muslim world in Cairo, she replied: “You promised the people that you are the change and ‘yes, we can.’ So we are here from the Wall Street Occupy, and we are saying the same word: ‘yes, we can.’ We can make the freedom, and we can get our freedom, even if it’s from you.”
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
© 2011 Amy Goodman
Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 900 stations in North America. She was awarded the 2008 Right Livelihood Award, dubbed the “Alternative Nobel” prize, and received the award in the Swedish Parliament in December.
The US government as Tooth Fairy to the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex - your tax $ at work
Published on Wednesday, October 26, 2011 by CEPR Blog
The Military Spending Fairy
by Dean Baker
Faced with the prospect of cuts to the Defense Department's budget, the defense industry is pushing the story of the military spending fairy on members of Congress. They are telling them that these cuts will lead to the loss of more than 1 million jobs over the next decade.
Believers in the military spending fairy say things like "the government can't create jobs," but also think that military spending creates jobs. Under the military spending fairy story, if the government spends $1 billion dollars paying people to do research or to build items related to the civilian economy it is just a drag on the private economy; however if the same spending goes to military related purposes, then it creates jobs.
It's not clear exactly how the military fairy blesses projects to make them helpful to the economy rather than harmful. For example, the highways were built in the 50s ostensibly in part for defense purposes. They made it easier to move troops and military equipment around the country in the event of an attack. Government subsidized student loans were also originally dubbed as defense loans since they were ostensibly intended in part to produce more graduates in science and engineering who could help us compete with the Soviet Union in defense related technologies.
Using this same logic, perhaps President Obama could get the military spending fairy to bless some of his stimulus spending so that it will be economically useful. He could again call student loans "defense loans." He could also have the research into clean energy technologies be viewed as providing alternative sources for energy for the military in the event we are cut off from oil imports in a war. (It makes as much sense as the highway story.) Then the military spending fairy can bless the stimulus as creating jobs.
For people who don't believe in the military spending fairy, the story is simple. During a downturn where there are lots of unemployed workers, any government spending will create jobs, regardless of whether or not it is on the military. In fact, military spending is likely to create fewer jobs than spending in most other areas (e.g. education, health care, conservation) because it is more capital intensive.
When the economy is near full employment, military spending is a drag on the economy. It pulls resources away from private sector uses, lowering investment and increasing the trade deficit. This leads to job losses, which are likely to be felt most severely in manufacturing and construction.
In short, for those who do not believe in the military spending fairy, military spending will cost jobs in either the short-term of long-term. If the spending doesn't make sense in terms of advancing national security, then it doesn't make sense period: end of story.
The Military Spending Fairy
by Dean Baker
Faced with the prospect of cuts to the Defense Department's budget, the defense industry is pushing the story of the military spending fairy on members of Congress. They are telling them that these cuts will lead to the loss of more than 1 million jobs over the next decade.
Believers in the military spending fairy say things like "the government can't create jobs," but also think that military spending creates jobs. Under the military spending fairy story, if the government spends $1 billion dollars paying people to do research or to build items related to the civilian economy it is just a drag on the private economy; however if the same spending goes to military related purposes, then it creates jobs.
It's not clear exactly how the military fairy blesses projects to make them helpful to the economy rather than harmful. For example, the highways were built in the 50s ostensibly in part for defense purposes. They made it easier to move troops and military equipment around the country in the event of an attack. Government subsidized student loans were also originally dubbed as defense loans since they were ostensibly intended in part to produce more graduates in science and engineering who could help us compete with the Soviet Union in defense related technologies.
Using this same logic, perhaps President Obama could get the military spending fairy to bless some of his stimulus spending so that it will be economically useful. He could again call student loans "defense loans." He could also have the research into clean energy technologies be viewed as providing alternative sources for energy for the military in the event we are cut off from oil imports in a war. (It makes as much sense as the highway story.) Then the military spending fairy can bless the stimulus as creating jobs.
For people who don't believe in the military spending fairy, the story is simple. During a downturn where there are lots of unemployed workers, any government spending will create jobs, regardless of whether or not it is on the military. In fact, military spending is likely to create fewer jobs than spending in most other areas (e.g. education, health care, conservation) because it is more capital intensive.
When the economy is near full employment, military spending is a drag on the economy. It pulls resources away from private sector uses, lowering investment and increasing the trade deficit. This leads to job losses, which are likely to be felt most severely in manufacturing and construction.
In short, for those who do not believe in the military spending fairy, military spending will cost jobs in either the short-term of long-term. If the spending doesn't make sense in terms of advancing national security, then it doesn't make sense period: end of story.
Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer and the more recently published Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of The Bubble Economy. He also has a blog, "Beat the Press," where he discusses the media's coverage of economic issues.
more Dean Baker
FINALLY we get a Juilliardist who asks the most obvious of Q's: WHAT free market?
OCTOBER 26, 2011
3
What Free Market?
The Clichés of Economic History
by WILLIAM E. SHAUB
Understanding economic theory, in law and in principle, requires a certain perception of the world. One perception requires an understanding of the world as one would like it to be. The other, which is perhaps more in touch with reality, demands an acceptance of the world as it actually is, and for that, one must look to cases and examples in history.
Similarly, a close look at the realities of economic history in the United States and elsewhere requires major adjustments to what is called ‘free market theory.’ These modifications lead to what should be called ‘really existing free market theory’, and this is the economic theory that is actually applied in practice.
For this, we can take a look at a rather perplexing example – a country that supposedly developed based on market principles and free enterprise – namely the United States. In the mid 18th century, the U.S was one of the richest societies (in terms of resources) in the world, yet it was pre-industrial.
Adam Smith, widely considered the father of modern economics, had surprisingly specific advice for the 13 colonies. Smith requested precisely what today’s economists recommend to many third world countries, advocating that the U.S maintain a commitment to its comparative advantages and sell what it’s best at producing. At the time, the U.S was most capable of catching fish and hunting fur, then exporting it to England, all while importing superior British manufactured goods.
Perhaps unpredictably in the eyes of Smith, the U.S gained its independence from Britain, and proceeded to completely ignore Smith’s free market advice. Under Alexander Hamilton, the liberated colonies immediately set up high protective barriers (such as tariffs) to try to bar superior British textiles, then later British steel. This allowed the new country to construct its own manufacturing base under specialized protective barriers and by other forms of incredible state intervention.
A staple in American manufacturing in the 19th century was cotton, which is often referred to as the fuel of American industrialization. The U.S produced cotton and became the world’s leading cotton exporter following its elimination of a massive indigenous population, which according to Howard Zinn, could have easily totalled “thousands upon thousands” of Indians.
The conquering of almost half of Mexico and annexation of Texas was also in order, which was land needed to monopolize cotton and “bring England to our knees,” to quote the Jacksonian Democrats. The U.S then ramped up production of this 19th century ‘fuel’ through its development of a slave society, which was followed by the criminalization of black life for the purpose of exploiting their labor.
Thus far, American society clearly industrialized in opposition, not supposed adherence, to market principles. It took radical violation of free enterprise undertaken to develop (change) its comparative advantages. Obviously, no small business or group of entrepreneurs could have conquered the northern half of Mexico; a publicly subsidized institution—the government—was the missing piece.
A brief look at the 20th century also reveals exactly this revelation, or the concept that the U.S did notdevelop and modernize because of a devout faithfulness to market principles.
Ronald Reagan is now considered a champion of free markets, and the 1980s a decade in U.S history in which entrepreneurial economics flourished. However, the Reagan administration’s efforts to protect American businesses from market discipline were unprecedented right up until their implementation. For example, the imposed 100% tariff on select Japanese electronics was done to “enforce the principles of free and fair trade,” according to President Reagan. His Treasury Secretary, James A. Baker, would later boast to the US Chamber of Commerce that the administration “granted more import relief to US industry that any of his predecessors in more than half a century.”
According to a comprehensive review of the Reagan era in Foreign Affairs by Clyde Sanger, a Senior Fellow for International Finance at the Council on Foreign Relations, “The postwar chief executive with the most passionate love of laissez-faire, presided over the greatest swing toward protectionism since the 1930s.” In a scholarly review by Patrick Low, a GATT secretariat economist, he estimates that the restrictive effects of Reagan’s policies measured at approximately three times those of other leading industrial countries.
Clyde Sanger notes some thematic irony, namely that advocation of market discipline is a tool used by those with power, who manage to avoid the ravages of the market as a result of astonishing state intervention. Those without power are then exposed to the free market discipline, and are therefore left with little, if any, protection from the subsidized structures of power. This theme is strikingly dominant in the economic history of the past three centuries.
The Reagan administration was following a common course of action that has been in practice in the U.S (and elsewhere) for its entire existence. However, modern neo-liberals have shed new light on the free market theory charade. Presidential candidate Michelle Bachman commonly extolls the victories of the free market and issues tough lectures about the immoral culture of welfare-dependence of American poor and working people. But an Environmental Working Group analysis points to evidence that her family farm received over $250,000 over eleven years.
A major piece of America’s dedication to ‘free market’ economics includes the massive transfers of taxpayer funds to private corporations, generally hidden under the masks of ‘defense’ or ‘security.’ However, pretending that these (purposefully) initiated transfers by the Pentagon to private industry hasn’t been economically effective isn’t, in fact, realistic. The U.S automotive, steel, high-tech, fiber-optic, airline and other industries would never have been able to survive international competition, innovate or develop through research without these fundamental violations of market principles, as MIT professor Noam Chomsky notes in Hegemony or Survival.
Whether this radical protectionism in a state-guided mercantilist system is a position worth advocating is perhaps a worthy subject for debate, but its usage is unquestionably in substantial defiance of any standard (classical) free market theory in principle. Since our analytical focus is centered on the world as it is, our attention should be focused on really existing free market theory, or the economic theory that is actually applied.
President Barack Obama, unlike his predecessor, hasn’t shied away from the belief and acceptance that protectionism is effective (and profoundly disguised). Of course, when his administration’s market interventions saved thousands of union jobs during the financial bailouts of General Motors and Chrysler in 2009, American media commentators eagerly termed them ‘free market infringements’ and ‘giveaways’ to undeserving corporations and the unions. However, when President Reagan subsidized an enormous amount of GM’s capital costs in the 1980′s to save the company’s management from a massive restructuring bankruptcy, that was simply necessary in the country’s effort to save American industry.
In 2011, President Obama handily announced a ‘new’ federal project that exemplifies exactly what U.S free market policy has always been: “a joint effort by industry, universities and the federal government to help reposition the United States as a leader…” In desperate need of economic growth before his re-election bid that’s just one year and half away, the U.S President turned to the application of what existing free market economic theory has always been: an incredibly confounding cliché.
3
What Free Market?
The Clichés of Economic History
by WILLIAM E. SHAUB
Understanding economic theory, in law and in principle, requires a certain perception of the world. One perception requires an understanding of the world as one would like it to be. The other, which is perhaps more in touch with reality, demands an acceptance of the world as it actually is, and for that, one must look to cases and examples in history.
Similarly, a close look at the realities of economic history in the United States and elsewhere requires major adjustments to what is called ‘free market theory.’ These modifications lead to what should be called ‘really existing free market theory’, and this is the economic theory that is actually applied in practice.
For this, we can take a look at a rather perplexing example – a country that supposedly developed based on market principles and free enterprise – namely the United States. In the mid 18th century, the U.S was one of the richest societies (in terms of resources) in the world, yet it was pre-industrial.
Adam Smith, widely considered the father of modern economics, had surprisingly specific advice for the 13 colonies. Smith requested precisely what today’s economists recommend to many third world countries, advocating that the U.S maintain a commitment to its comparative advantages and sell what it’s best at producing. At the time, the U.S was most capable of catching fish and hunting fur, then exporting it to England, all while importing superior British manufactured goods.
Perhaps unpredictably in the eyes of Smith, the U.S gained its independence from Britain, and proceeded to completely ignore Smith’s free market advice. Under Alexander Hamilton, the liberated colonies immediately set up high protective barriers (such as tariffs) to try to bar superior British textiles, then later British steel. This allowed the new country to construct its own manufacturing base under specialized protective barriers and by other forms of incredible state intervention.
A staple in American manufacturing in the 19th century was cotton, which is often referred to as the fuel of American industrialization. The U.S produced cotton and became the world’s leading cotton exporter following its elimination of a massive indigenous population, which according to Howard Zinn, could have easily totalled “thousands upon thousands” of Indians.
The conquering of almost half of Mexico and annexation of Texas was also in order, which was land needed to monopolize cotton and “bring England to our knees,” to quote the Jacksonian Democrats. The U.S then ramped up production of this 19th century ‘fuel’ through its development of a slave society, which was followed by the criminalization of black life for the purpose of exploiting their labor.
Thus far, American society clearly industrialized in opposition, not supposed adherence, to market principles. It took radical violation of free enterprise undertaken to develop (change) its comparative advantages. Obviously, no small business or group of entrepreneurs could have conquered the northern half of Mexico; a publicly subsidized institution—the government—was the missing piece.
A brief look at the 20th century also reveals exactly this revelation, or the concept that the U.S did notdevelop and modernize because of a devout faithfulness to market principles.
Ronald Reagan is now considered a champion of free markets, and the 1980s a decade in U.S history in which entrepreneurial economics flourished. However, the Reagan administration’s efforts to protect American businesses from market discipline were unprecedented right up until their implementation. For example, the imposed 100% tariff on select Japanese electronics was done to “enforce the principles of free and fair trade,” according to President Reagan. His Treasury Secretary, James A. Baker, would later boast to the US Chamber of Commerce that the administration “granted more import relief to US industry that any of his predecessors in more than half a century.”
According to a comprehensive review of the Reagan era in Foreign Affairs by Clyde Sanger, a Senior Fellow for International Finance at the Council on Foreign Relations, “The postwar chief executive with the most passionate love of laissez-faire, presided over the greatest swing toward protectionism since the 1930s.” In a scholarly review by Patrick Low, a GATT secretariat economist, he estimates that the restrictive effects of Reagan’s policies measured at approximately three times those of other leading industrial countries.
Clyde Sanger notes some thematic irony, namely that advocation of market discipline is a tool used by those with power, who manage to avoid the ravages of the market as a result of astonishing state intervention. Those without power are then exposed to the free market discipline, and are therefore left with little, if any, protection from the subsidized structures of power. This theme is strikingly dominant in the economic history of the past three centuries.
The Reagan administration was following a common course of action that has been in practice in the U.S (and elsewhere) for its entire existence. However, modern neo-liberals have shed new light on the free market theory charade. Presidential candidate Michelle Bachman commonly extolls the victories of the free market and issues tough lectures about the immoral culture of welfare-dependence of American poor and working people. But an Environmental Working Group analysis points to evidence that her family farm received over $250,000 over eleven years.
A major piece of America’s dedication to ‘free market’ economics includes the massive transfers of taxpayer funds to private corporations, generally hidden under the masks of ‘defense’ or ‘security.’ However, pretending that these (purposefully) initiated transfers by the Pentagon to private industry hasn’t been economically effective isn’t, in fact, realistic. The U.S automotive, steel, high-tech, fiber-optic, airline and other industries would never have been able to survive international competition, innovate or develop through research without these fundamental violations of market principles, as MIT professor Noam Chomsky notes in Hegemony or Survival.
Whether this radical protectionism in a state-guided mercantilist system is a position worth advocating is perhaps a worthy subject for debate, but its usage is unquestionably in substantial defiance of any standard (classical) free market theory in principle. Since our analytical focus is centered on the world as it is, our attention should be focused on really existing free market theory, or the economic theory that is actually applied.
President Barack Obama, unlike his predecessor, hasn’t shied away from the belief and acceptance that protectionism is effective (and profoundly disguised). Of course, when his administration’s market interventions saved thousands of union jobs during the financial bailouts of General Motors and Chrysler in 2009, American media commentators eagerly termed them ‘free market infringements’ and ‘giveaways’ to undeserving corporations and the unions. However, when President Reagan subsidized an enormous amount of GM’s capital costs in the 1980′s to save the company’s management from a massive restructuring bankruptcy, that was simply necessary in the country’s effort to save American industry.
In 2011, President Obama handily announced a ‘new’ federal project that exemplifies exactly what U.S free market policy has always been: “a joint effort by industry, universities and the federal government to help reposition the United States as a leader…” In desperate need of economic growth before his re-election bid that’s just one year and half away, the U.S President turned to the application of what existing free market economic theory has always been: an incredibly confounding cliché.
William E. Shaub is a violin performance major at the Juilliard School of Music in Manhattan and an active political journalist.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)