Long Odds on Texas Education
by John Thornton
Seven Stories Press
So on March 13, conservatives in the Texas State Board of Education managed to radically rewrite state-mandated curricula for the social sciences. They made the following changes:
* The US government is no longer to be described as "democratic," but exclusively as "constitutional."
* Students are no longer required to learn that the Constitution prohibits the government from establishing one religion as superior to others. Separation between church and state as a guiding principle of the government is no longer to be emphasized, or necessarily mentioned.
* Thomas Jefferson is out as an Enlightenment thinker, replaced by dominionist Christian go-to figure John Calvin.
* The curriculum is no longer allowed to refer to sex and gender as social constructs -- otherwise, students might be exposed to "transvestites, transsexuals and who knows what else."
* The mention that Tejanos fought at the Alamo is to be omitted. (This is a big deal if you come from Texas and had to learn about the Alamo literally every year of your life until you were 16 -- it's a different Alamo without Mexican people in the picture.)
* Sociology students are no longer required to consider the possibility that American societal institutions are racist by design.
* The rise of the Moral Majority, the fight against the ERA, and Newt Gingrich's Contract With America are now required subjects in any history class, to be taught as significant cultural movements of the 1980s. Hip-hop, on the other hand, is not to be referred to as a significant cultural movement of the 1980s. (Chuck D's "Fight The Power" is another thing we never learned about in Texas schools.)
At least they got rid of the requirement to include the idea, when teaching the civil rights movement, that the movement was ultimately a failure, leading to "unrealistic expectations for equal outcomes."
I'm a product of the Texas public education system. I didn't know about the existence of the Stonewall Riots until I was 23. There's no reason it should have been so late: I was interested in modern LGBT rights debates, had read things like Confessions of a Mask and The Immoralist and far too many William Burroughs books. I knew that logically, there had to have been some signal moment at which LGBT people popped into visibility as a viable political force. Still, I didn't know about the existence of the Stonewall Riots until I was 23. Similarly, I didn't realize that our neighborhood's name for pick-up football -- "Smear the Queer" -- referred to the act of beating up a gay person, and when Matthew Shepard was talked about at all, it was as an entry point to the argument that hate crime laws involved the government violating free speech.
Texas, our Texas, huh?
What's so chilling about all of this to me is that it would literally never have occurred to me that events like Stonewall -- or Compton's Cafeteria, or the pie in Anita Bryant's face -- had happened, that LGBT people had actually won their acknowledgment by society through violent resistance, rather than waiting around patiently for their turn. I only learned about these events basically by chance: I read enough and was interested in enough that sooner or later, statistically, I was going to hit that data point.
So what about people who don't boost their statistical chances of learning things in that way? All you've got is your basic public education, and the off-chance that something you're professionally or personally interested in -- for a lot of my old classmates, computer science or mechanical engineering professionally, movies involving car racing or interplanetary war personally -- will combine with some knowledge that an oppressed group in America stood up and fought back and won some kind of right, that your government was designed to work in certain ways. If that alchemy doesn't hit, public education is it for the rest of your life.
An old classmate and I were arguing shortly after 9/11. He's since become an industrial engineer, a good one, and a born-again Christian who advocated seizing "suspects" without trial and using torture to extract information in order to "win the War on Terror." "What about the Fourteenth Amendment?" I asked. "What about the Eighth Amendment?"
"There are parts of the Constitution that are like rotten wood," he said. "They deserve to fall away." On the wall behind him was a poster of the Statue of Liberty giving the finger.
You have to forget everything you know about how the government works to say a thing like that. And if those lessons had never been there in the first place? If they're not required elements in a curriculum increasingly loaded with required No Child Left Behind test prep taking up two days out of every five, taught by underpaid instructors with zero professional stake in going beyond the strict letter of the Board of Education's law?
I'm not talking here about random violent rednecks working in gas stations in the Great Dark Regions of North America. The problem with education in the South has to do with a class of reasonably elite people -- technologists, businessmen, even teachers themselves -- who will not seek out knowledge for its own sake, and who will grow up with only a remote statistical chance of learning that violent resistance to the status quo is not only a part of our history, but a desirable and necessary part. These are the people who start tea parties. These are the people who donate to the Palin 2012 campaign. These are the people that the Board of Education wants to generate more of.
So what do we do about this mess in the Lone Star State?
I wouldn't have known about Russell Means or Wounded Knee, either -- neither were on the standard Texas educational curriculum at the time, to my knowledge -- had it not been for an excellent teacher, Mrs. Walkup, who taught my ninth grade U.S. History.
"From now on as you move out into the world," she said on the first day of class, "you need to arm yourself intellectually against people. Everyone you meet has a political agenda, whether they know it or not, and they're going to try to influence you toward believing in that agenda. You need to be able to recognize that, and to avoid being taken in."
"How do we know you're not trying to push an agenda on us?" asked a student.
"You don't," she said.
And for all her virtues, all her willingness to talk about COINTELPRO, AIM and everything else, her agenda never included Stonewall.
This kind of local resistance is nice work, as a student, if you're lucky enough to get it on your course schedule -- and lucky enough to live in socioeconomic circumstance that permit the hiring and retention of such a teacher. But for ten years, Texas students are going to have to depend exclusively on that kind of luck for any kind of balanced view of the world.
And, of course, they'll rely on textbook publishers, who are now faced with a choice: do I tailor my books for national distribution and sale to the newly-corrupted Texas curriculum? Or do I take the long-term view that it is not a good thing to have a generation of technologists and businessmen who grow up without knowing that if a minority group wants something, they generally have to fight the power for it?
As a textbook publisher, do I lose money by taking that long-term view, and is it worth it? How long are those odds, in the end?
John Thornton is an editor at Seven Stories Press.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Keith Olbermann: GOP Self Destruction Imminent
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Andy Beckett: Santiago Dreaming
Santiago dreaming
When Pinochet's military overthrew the Chilean government 30 years ago, they discovered a revolutionary communication system, a 'socialist internet' connecting the whole country. Its creator? An eccentric scientist from Surrey. Andy Beckett on the forgotten story of Stafford Beer
The Guardian
During the early 70s, in the wealthy commuter backwater of West Byfleet in Surrey, a small but rather remarkable experiment took place. In the potting shed of a house called Firkins, a teenager named Simon Beer, using bits of radios and pieces of pink and green cardboard, built a series of electrical meters for measuring public opinion. His concept - users of his meters would turn a dial to indicate how happy or unhappy they were with any political proposal - was strange and ambitious enough. And it worked. Yet what was even more jolting was his intended market: not Britain, but Chile.
Unlike West Byfleet, Chile was in revolutionary ferment. In the capital Santiago, the beleaguered but radical marxist government of Salvador Allende, hungry for innovations of all kinds, was employing Simon Beer's father, Stafford, to conduct a much larger technological experiment of which the meters were only a part. This was known as Project Cybersyn, and nothing like it had been tried before, or has been tried since.
Stafford Beer attempted, in his words, to "implant" an electronic "nervous system" in Chilean society. Voters, workplaces and the government were to be linked together by a new, interactive national communications network, which would transform their relationship into something profoundly more equal and responsive than before - a sort of socialist internet, decades ahead of its time.
When the Allende administration was deposed in a military coup, the 30th anniversary of which falls this Thursday, exactly how far Beer and his British and Chilean collaborators had got in constructing their hi-tech utopia was soon forgotten. In the many histories of the endlessly debated, frequently mythologised Allende period, Project Cybersyn hardly gets a footnote. Yet the personalities involved, the amount they achieved, the scheme's optimism and ambition and perhaps, in the end, its impracticality, contain important truths about the most tantalising leftwing government of the late 20th century.
To Read the Rest of the Article
When Pinochet's military overthrew the Chilean government 30 years ago, they discovered a revolutionary communication system, a 'socialist internet' connecting the whole country. Its creator? An eccentric scientist from Surrey. Andy Beckett on the forgotten story of Stafford Beer
The Guardian
During the early 70s, in the wealthy commuter backwater of West Byfleet in Surrey, a small but rather remarkable experiment took place. In the potting shed of a house called Firkins, a teenager named Simon Beer, using bits of radios and pieces of pink and green cardboard, built a series of electrical meters for measuring public opinion. His concept - users of his meters would turn a dial to indicate how happy or unhappy they were with any political proposal - was strange and ambitious enough. And it worked. Yet what was even more jolting was his intended market: not Britain, but Chile.
Unlike West Byfleet, Chile was in revolutionary ferment. In the capital Santiago, the beleaguered but radical marxist government of Salvador Allende, hungry for innovations of all kinds, was employing Simon Beer's father, Stafford, to conduct a much larger technological experiment of which the meters were only a part. This was known as Project Cybersyn, and nothing like it had been tried before, or has been tried since.
Stafford Beer attempted, in his words, to "implant" an electronic "nervous system" in Chilean society. Voters, workplaces and the government were to be linked together by a new, interactive national communications network, which would transform their relationship into something profoundly more equal and responsive than before - a sort of socialist internet, decades ahead of its time.
When the Allende administration was deposed in a military coup, the 30th anniversary of which falls this Thursday, exactly how far Beer and his British and Chilean collaborators had got in constructing their hi-tech utopia was soon forgotten. In the many histories of the endlessly debated, frequently mythologised Allende period, Project Cybersyn hardly gets a footnote. Yet the personalities involved, the amount they achieved, the scheme's optimism and ambition and perhaps, in the end, its impracticality, contain important truths about the most tantalising leftwing government of the late 20th century.
To Read the Rest of the Article
Red Moon: Menstruation, Culture & the Politics of Gender (Diana Fabianova, 2009)
Red Moon: Menstruation, Culture & the Politics of Gender
Media Education Foundation
When filmmaker Diana Fabianova reached puberty, she found herself irremediably trapped in menstrual etiquette. She carefully hid the evidence from her father and brother first, and later on, from most of the other men in her life. And no matter how bad she felt, she pretended she was fine. The taboo far exceeded the scope of her family: it was all around her. Periods were a "girl thing." Periods were shameful. Periods were inappropriate for public discussion. End of the story? Not quite. Something in her was reluctant to accept and suffer in silence. Why did the sign of what all societies consider a blessing -- women's ability to give birth -- happen to be described with names and expressions like "the curse" (in England), the "English war debarquement" (in France), and "to be on the rags" (in the U.S.)?
With humor and refreshing candor, Fabianova's Red Moon provides a fascinating, often ironic, take on the absurd and frequently dangerous cultural stigmas and superstitions surrounding women's menstruation. As educational as it is liberating, the film functions as both a myth-busting overview of the realities of menstruation, and a piercing cultural analysis of the ways in which struggles over meaning and power have played out through history on the terrain of women's bodies. Ideal for use in women's studies and health courses, as well as classes in anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies.
To Preview the Film
Media Education Foundation
When filmmaker Diana Fabianova reached puberty, she found herself irremediably trapped in menstrual etiquette. She carefully hid the evidence from her father and brother first, and later on, from most of the other men in her life. And no matter how bad she felt, she pretended she was fine. The taboo far exceeded the scope of her family: it was all around her. Periods were a "girl thing." Periods were shameful. Periods were inappropriate for public discussion. End of the story? Not quite. Something in her was reluctant to accept and suffer in silence. Why did the sign of what all societies consider a blessing -- women's ability to give birth -- happen to be described with names and expressions like "the curse" (in England), the "English war debarquement" (in France), and "to be on the rags" (in the U.S.)?
With humor and refreshing candor, Fabianova's Red Moon provides a fascinating, often ironic, take on the absurd and frequently dangerous cultural stigmas and superstitions surrounding women's menstruation. As educational as it is liberating, the film functions as both a myth-busting overview of the realities of menstruation, and a piercing cultural analysis of the ways in which struggles over meaning and power have played out through history on the terrain of women's bodies. Ideal for use in women's studies and health courses, as well as classes in anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies.
To Preview the Film
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Bab'Aziz: The Prince Who Contemplated His Soul (Tunisia: Nacer Khemir, 2008)
(I bought this film last year in San Francisco and finally had the opprotunity to watch it. Stunning visual poem by the Tunisian filmmaker/poet Nacer Khemir--powerful meditation on the human spirit, the great unknown, longing/belonging, belief/faith and the power of stories.)
Bab'Aziz: The Prince Who Contemplated His Soul (Tunisia: 2008)
Released by Typecast Films
Bab'Aziz: The Prince Who Contemplated His Soul (Tunisia: 2008)
Released by Typecast Films
A Celebration of Herbert Reid’s career and influence (University of Kentucky: 3/25/10)
You are invited:
A Celebration of Herbert Reid’s career and influence
Thursday, March 25th, 2010
in the Niles Gallery of the Lucille Little Fine Arts Building, University of Kentucky
Events begin at 3pm and 7:30pm
3pm: Panel Discussion of Herb Reid’s career and influence
Discussants: Hugh Bartling, Alan Banks, Virginia Blum, Stephen Fisher, Randy Ihara, Thomas Lairson, Dana Nelson, Christopher Rice, Shaunna Scott, and others
7:30pm: Celebration of Herb Reid and publication of Recovering the Commons
The Provost will provide opening remarks
Guest Speakers: Mary Hufford, Professor of Folklore and Folklife, UPenn, Hwa Yol Jung, Professor Emeritus, Political Science, Moravian University
Sponsored by UK Appalachian Studies, UK Appalachian Center and UK Political Science
Call 859-257-4852 or visit www.appalachiancenter.org for more information
A Celebration of Herbert Reid’s career and influence
Thursday, March 25th, 2010
in the Niles Gallery of the Lucille Little Fine Arts Building, University of Kentucky
Events begin at 3pm and 7:30pm
3pm: Panel Discussion of Herb Reid’s career and influence
Discussants: Hugh Bartling, Alan Banks, Virginia Blum, Stephen Fisher, Randy Ihara, Thomas Lairson, Dana Nelson, Christopher Rice, Shaunna Scott, and others
7:30pm: Celebration of Herb Reid and publication of Recovering the Commons
The Provost will provide opening remarks
Guest Speakers: Mary Hufford, Professor of Folklore and Folklife, UPenn, Hwa Yol Jung, Professor Emeritus, Political Science, Moravian University
Sponsored by UK Appalachian Studies, UK Appalachian Center and UK Political Science
Call 859-257-4852 or visit www.appalachiancenter.org for more information
Friday, March 19, 2010
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Colloquy: #18 "B for Bad Cinema"
Issue #18: "B for Bad Cinema"
Colloquy
Introduction: B for Bad Cinema
Julia Vassilieva and Claire Perkins
Excremental Ecstasy, Divine Defecation and Revolting Reception: Configuring a Scatological Gaze in Trash Filmmaking
Zoe Gross
“They don’t call ’em exploitation movies for nothing!”: Joe Bob Briggs and the Critical Commentary on I Spit on Your Grave
Tristan Fidler
Erasing the B out of Bad Cinema: Remaking Identity in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Craig Frost
“Fucking Americans”: Postmodern Nationalisms in the Contemporary Splatter Film
Phoebe Fletcher
Their Time Has Come: Bad Cinema Nerds as Late-Capitalist Paradigm
Mark Steven
Snakes on a Plane and the prefabricated cult film
Kirsten Stevens
“Bad Form”: Contemporary Cinema’s Turn to the Perverse. David Lynch: Lost Highway (1997) Lars von Trier: Breaking the Waves (1996)
Hester Joyce and Scott Wilson
The Other Side of Indonesia: New Order’s Indonesian Exploitation Cinema as Cult Films
Ekky Imanjaya
Doing It for the Kids: Rebels and Prom Queens in the Cold War Classroom Film
Anika Ervin-Ward
Family Demons: The Ghost as Domestic Inheritance
Donna McRae
B for Bad, B for Bogus and B for Bold: Rupert Kathner, The Glenrowan Affair and Ned Kelly
Stephen Gaunson
Horror-Ritual: Horror Movie Villains as Collective Representations, Uncanny Metaphors and Ritual Transgressors
Mario Rodriguez
From Kracauer to Clover: Some Reflections on Genre and Gender in 70s/80s Slasher Films
Tyson Namow
General Articles
Roland Barthes's Photobiographies: Towards an “Exemption from Meaning”
Fabien Arribert-Narce
A Re-evaluation of Literature in Active and Critical Audience Studies
John Budarick
Adding ‘Pull’ to ‘Push’ Education in the Context of Neomillennial E-learning: YouTube and the Case of “Diagnosis Wenckebach”
Julie Willems
Arriving in the Future: The Utopia of Here and Now in the Work of Modern-Day Mystics From Eric Fromm to Eckhart Tolle
Thomas Reuter
Ash’s Stasi File as a Script of Life
Catherine Karen Roy
Book Reviews
Geoff Page. 60 Classic Australian Poems. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009.
Robert Savage
William Marderness. How to Read a Myth. New York: Humanity Books, 2009.
Geoff Berry
Charles Bukowski. Hollywood. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007.
Geoff Berry
David Damrosch, ed. Teaching World Literature. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2009.
Geoff Berry
Robert Savage. Hölderlin after the Catastrophe: Heidegger –Adorno – Brecht. Rochester NY: Camden House, 2009.
David Blencowe
To Access Issue #18
Colloquy
Introduction: B for Bad Cinema
Julia Vassilieva and Claire Perkins
Excremental Ecstasy, Divine Defecation and Revolting Reception: Configuring a Scatological Gaze in Trash Filmmaking
Zoe Gross
“They don’t call ’em exploitation movies for nothing!”: Joe Bob Briggs and the Critical Commentary on I Spit on Your Grave
Tristan Fidler
Erasing the B out of Bad Cinema: Remaking Identity in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Craig Frost
“Fucking Americans”: Postmodern Nationalisms in the Contemporary Splatter Film
Phoebe Fletcher
Their Time Has Come: Bad Cinema Nerds as Late-Capitalist Paradigm
Mark Steven
Snakes on a Plane and the prefabricated cult film
Kirsten Stevens
“Bad Form”: Contemporary Cinema’s Turn to the Perverse. David Lynch: Lost Highway (1997) Lars von Trier: Breaking the Waves (1996)
Hester Joyce and Scott Wilson
The Other Side of Indonesia: New Order’s Indonesian Exploitation Cinema as Cult Films
Ekky Imanjaya
Doing It for the Kids: Rebels and Prom Queens in the Cold War Classroom Film
Anika Ervin-Ward
Family Demons: The Ghost as Domestic Inheritance
Donna McRae
B for Bad, B for Bogus and B for Bold: Rupert Kathner, The Glenrowan Affair and Ned Kelly
Stephen Gaunson
Horror-Ritual: Horror Movie Villains as Collective Representations, Uncanny Metaphors and Ritual Transgressors
Mario Rodriguez
From Kracauer to Clover: Some Reflections on Genre and Gender in 70s/80s Slasher Films
Tyson Namow
General Articles
Roland Barthes's Photobiographies: Towards an “Exemption from Meaning”
Fabien Arribert-Narce
A Re-evaluation of Literature in Active and Critical Audience Studies
John Budarick
Adding ‘Pull’ to ‘Push’ Education in the Context of Neomillennial E-learning: YouTube and the Case of “Diagnosis Wenckebach”
Julie Willems
Arriving in the Future: The Utopia of Here and Now in the Work of Modern-Day Mystics From Eric Fromm to Eckhart Tolle
Thomas Reuter
Ash’s Stasi File as a Script of Life
Catherine Karen Roy
Book Reviews
Geoff Page. 60 Classic Australian Poems. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009.
Robert Savage
William Marderness. How to Read a Myth. New York: Humanity Books, 2009.
Geoff Berry
Charles Bukowski. Hollywood. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007.
Geoff Berry
David Damrosch, ed. Teaching World Literature. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2009.
Geoff Berry
Robert Savage. Hölderlin after the Catastrophe: Heidegger –Adorno – Brecht. Rochester NY: Camden House, 2009.
David Blencowe
To Access Issue #18
Hambone Blues Rumshack: #38 Mississippi on My Mind
#38 Mississippi on My Mind
Hambone Blues Rumshack
The Mississippi on my mind episode. A lot of acoustic tunes this week and Mississippi keeps appearing. Music from New Zealand, UK, US, Italy and Denmark.
Playlist
Darren Watson - All Going Wrong
Robin Hoare Band - Ain't No Perfect Man
Rusty Wright Band - Pretty Little Lies
Tom Rigney - Rigo's Blues
Kyla Brox - All Breaking Down
Bob Meyer - Got To Get
Papaleg Acoustic Duo - Long Distance Call
Chris Cotton - Morgan City, Mississippi
Eden Brent - Darkness On The Delta
Eden Brent - Mississippi Number One
Thorbjørn Risager - Down Home Blues
Thorbjørn Risager - You Walked Right In
To Listen to the Show
Hambone Blues Rumshack
The Mississippi on my mind episode. A lot of acoustic tunes this week and Mississippi keeps appearing. Music from New Zealand, UK, US, Italy and Denmark.
Playlist
Darren Watson - All Going Wrong
Robin Hoare Band - Ain't No Perfect Man
Rusty Wright Band - Pretty Little Lies
Tom Rigney - Rigo's Blues
Kyla Brox - All Breaking Down
Bob Meyer - Got To Get
Papaleg Acoustic Duo - Long Distance Call
Chris Cotton - Morgan City, Mississippi
Eden Brent - Darkness On The Delta
Eden Brent - Mississippi Number One
Thorbjørn Risager - Down Home Blues
Thorbjørn Risager - You Walked Right In
To Listen to the Show
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Charles Gaskins: Mystery Action #54
Mystery Action #54
Garage Punk Podcast
Host: Charles Gaskins
... I’ve put together TWO HOURS of pure greatness in one show! It’s kind of a retrospective, if you will. A look back at the last three years of Mystery Action. Forty-Six songs sure to have you begging for more, not tired and bored. Only favorites. Too many bands to name off, but I’m playing mostly ’60s and modern garage with sprinkles of punk, country, surf, and white-boy R&B. In the new year I’ll donate an hour to nothing but soul and rhythm and blues, so hang tight! Punk’s not dead, he’s just resting.
To Listen to the Show
Garage Punk Podcast
Host: Charles Gaskins
... I’ve put together TWO HOURS of pure greatness in one show! It’s kind of a retrospective, if you will. A look back at the last three years of Mystery Action. Forty-Six songs sure to have you begging for more, not tired and bored. Only favorites. Too many bands to name off, but I’m playing mostly ’60s and modern garage with sprinkles of punk, country, surf, and white-boy R&B. In the new year I’ll donate an hour to nothing but soul and rhythm and blues, so hang tight! Punk’s not dead, he’s just resting.
To Listen to the Show
Richard Adams: Tampon-makers can't mention the V-word. Period.
Tampon-makers can't mention the V-word. Period.
An advertising campaign for tampons is rejected by US television networks for daring to include the word vagina
by Richard Adams
The Guardian
For years, advertising for tampons and "sanitary products" have been shrouded in nebulous euphemism. So what happens when a US tampon-maker drops the coy messaging and goes straight for the jugular (so to speak)? Its ad gets banned by the major US television networks for mentioning the word vagina.
Even when the company substituted "down there" for vagina, two of the networks still wouldn't run the ad, so the company was forced to drop the idea altogether. That provoked Amanda Hess, author of The Sexist blog, to observe: "Now, the commercial contains no direct references to female genitalia – you know, the place where the fucking tampon goes."
An executive for Kimberly-Clark, the owner of Kotex, notes that US TV networks have no such compunction about references to "erectile dysfunction" in prime-time ads for Viagra and Ciallis.
The New York Times reports that the campaign – produced by the advertising agency JWT, part of WPP – for tampon brand Kotex was "a bit too frank" for US television:
To read the rest, access links, and view video of the ad
An advertising campaign for tampons is rejected by US television networks for daring to include the word vagina
by Richard Adams
The Guardian
For years, advertising for tampons and "sanitary products" have been shrouded in nebulous euphemism. So what happens when a US tampon-maker drops the coy messaging and goes straight for the jugular (so to speak)? Its ad gets banned by the major US television networks for mentioning the word vagina.
Even when the company substituted "down there" for vagina, two of the networks still wouldn't run the ad, so the company was forced to drop the idea altogether. That provoked Amanda Hess, author of The Sexist blog, to observe: "Now, the commercial contains no direct references to female genitalia – you know, the place where the fucking tampon goes."
An executive for Kimberly-Clark, the owner of Kotex, notes that US TV networks have no such compunction about references to "erectile dysfunction" in prime-time ads for Viagra and Ciallis.
The New York Times reports that the campaign – produced by the advertising agency JWT, part of WPP – for tampon brand Kotex was "a bit too frank" for US television:
Merrie Harris, global business director at JWT, said that after being informed that it could not use the word vagina in advertising by three broadcast networks, it shot the ad cited above with the actress instead saying "down there", which was rejected by two of the three networks. (Both Ms Harris and representatives from the brand declined to specify the networks.)
"It's very funny because the whole spot is about censorship," Ms Harris said. "The whole category has been very euphemistic, or paternalistic even, and we're saying, enough with the euphemisms, and get over it. Tampon is not a dirty word, and neither is vagina."
To read the rest, access links, and view video of the ad
FAIR: CNN Scrapes Bottom of Right-Wing Barrel With Erickson Hire
CNN Scrapes Bottom of Right-Wing Barrel With Erickson Hire
FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting)
Action Alert
Since Glenn Beck left Headline News for Fox, CNN executives apparently feel that their staff is short on unbalanced hatemongers. To make up the gap, they've just hired Erick Erickson as a political commentator.
"Prominent conservative commentator and RedState.com editor Erick Erickson will join CNN as a political contributor," CNN announced in a March 16 press release. "Erickson will appear weeknights on John King, USA, which launches Monday, March 22, as well as provide perspective and commentary to other programs across the network."
Who is Erickson? Well, he's a racist who declared that Barack Obama won the Nobel Prize because of "affirmative action quotas" (Think Progress, 10/9/09). He's a misogynist who suggested that "feminazis were enraged" by an anti-abortion Super Bowl ad because "that's what being too ugly to get a date does to your brain." He urged that "ugly feminists return to their kitchens" (Media Matters, 2/8/10). He's a homophobe who asserted that "the full gay rights agenda" means that "men and boys can have sexual relationships free of prudish moral people frowning" (Media Matters, 10/9/09).
He's an all-around nasty human being who, upon Justice David Souter's retirement, called him "the only goat-fucking child molester to ever serve on the Supreme Court" (Crooks and Liars, 5/1/09). He declared that White House spokesperson Linda Douglass "really is the Joseph Goebbels of the White House healthcare shop" (TPM, 10/12/09). Meanwhile, he suggested that Obama might be worse than Hitler, writing, "Does it say more about the IOC or Obama that the IOC gave Hitler the Olympics, but not Obama?"
To Read the Rest of the Report
FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting)
Action Alert
Since Glenn Beck left Headline News for Fox, CNN executives apparently feel that their staff is short on unbalanced hatemongers. To make up the gap, they've just hired Erick Erickson as a political commentator.
"Prominent conservative commentator and RedState.com editor Erick Erickson will join CNN as a political contributor," CNN announced in a March 16 press release. "Erickson will appear weeknights on John King, USA, which launches Monday, March 22, as well as provide perspective and commentary to other programs across the network."
Who is Erickson? Well, he's a racist who declared that Barack Obama won the Nobel Prize because of "affirmative action quotas" (Think Progress, 10/9/09). He's a misogynist who suggested that "feminazis were enraged" by an anti-abortion Super Bowl ad because "that's what being too ugly to get a date does to your brain." He urged that "ugly feminists return to their kitchens" (Media Matters, 2/8/10). He's a homophobe who asserted that "the full gay rights agenda" means that "men and boys can have sexual relationships free of prudish moral people frowning" (Media Matters, 10/9/09).
He's an all-around nasty human being who, upon Justice David Souter's retirement, called him "the only goat-fucking child molester to ever serve on the Supreme Court" (Crooks and Liars, 5/1/09). He declared that White House spokesperson Linda Douglass "really is the Joseph Goebbels of the White House healthcare shop" (TPM, 10/12/09). Meanwhile, he suggested that Obama might be worse than Hitler, writing, "Does it say more about the IOC or Obama that the IOC gave Hitler the Olympics, but not Obama?"
To Read the Rest of the Report
Last Hours: Taking Over the Streets of Athens
(via Ryan Goodrich)
Taking over the streets of Athens
by Filkaler
Last Hours
Biggest general strike yet paralyses Greece
Tens of thousands of trade unionists and anti-capitalists demonstrated, bringing the centre of Athens to a standstill. The protest was perhaps twice the size of the one during the general strike of 24 February. Many locals compared it to the mass action in 2001 which defeated a government attempt to cut pensions.
Protesters chanted “Make the bosses pay” and “Where has all the money gone?”
Union leaders hailed today’s general strike as a complete success. Public services ground to a halt in all major cities from Alexandroupoli in the north to Sitia in the south. Public and private sector workers both joined the action.
“The prime minister has just returned from a tour of world leaders – including Nicolas Sarkozy in France, Angela Merkal in Germany and Barack Obama”
“They all congratulated him for his courageous neoliberal reforms which has seen outrageous attacks on peoples pensions, wages and job security. But now he has to face the anger of the Greek people and these strikes are just the beginning.”
Greek workers are stepping up their resistance to austerity measures being enforced by the European Union.
Riot police attempted to split the demonstration, but were met by fierce resistance. Skirmishes continued until the end when they were seen off from the area surrounding Athens Polytechnic.
To Access More Reports and Photographs
Taking over the streets of Athens
by Filkaler
Last Hours
Biggest general strike yet paralyses Greece
Tens of thousands of trade unionists and anti-capitalists demonstrated, bringing the centre of Athens to a standstill. The protest was perhaps twice the size of the one during the general strike of 24 February. Many locals compared it to the mass action in 2001 which defeated a government attempt to cut pensions.
Protesters chanted “Make the bosses pay” and “Where has all the money gone?”
Union leaders hailed today’s general strike as a complete success. Public services ground to a halt in all major cities from Alexandroupoli in the north to Sitia in the south. Public and private sector workers both joined the action.
“The prime minister has just returned from a tour of world leaders – including Nicolas Sarkozy in France, Angela Merkal in Germany and Barack Obama”
“They all congratulated him for his courageous neoliberal reforms which has seen outrageous attacks on peoples pensions, wages and job security. But now he has to face the anger of the Greek people and these strikes are just the beginning.”
Greek workers are stepping up their resistance to austerity measures being enforced by the European Union.
Riot police attempted to split the demonstration, but were met by fierce resistance. Skirmishes continued until the end when they were seen off from the area surrounding Athens Polytechnic.
To Access More Reports and Photographs
John Nichols: Iceland Busts the Banksters -- In a symbolic decision, democracy trumps capital as Icelanders say "no" to big bank bailouts
Iceland Busts the Banksters: In a symbolic decision, democracy trumps capital as Icelanders say "no" to big bank bailouts.
by John Nichols
Yes! Magazine
What if Americans had been asked whether they wanted to bail out big bankers and Wall Street speculators?
How many would have voted "no"?
A measure of patriotism feeds the hope that they would have made their opposition known as resoundingly as have the voters of Iceland, who on Saturday rejected demands by the United Kingdom and the Netherlands—working hand-in-hand with the rapacious International Monetary Fund—that the people of the tiny island nation cover losses triggered by the failure of a private bank.
A "yes" vote on Saturday's referendum would have saddled each citizen of Iceland with $16,400 of debt, with the money to be paid to compensate the British and Dutch governments for expenditures to cover depositor losses stemming from the failure of the Icelandic bank Icesave.
The overall debt of $5.3 billion, or 45 percent of Iceland's economic output for last year, would have impoverished the country.
As Icelandic President Olafur R. Grimsson explained this week: "Ordinary people, farmers and fishermen, taxpayers, doctors, nurses, teachers, (were) being asked to shoulder through their taxes a burden that was created by irresponsible greedy bankers."
Fortunately, Iceland is a democracy. So those farmers and fishermen, taxpayers, doctors, nurses, teachers got to decide whether they were inclined to pay for a bank bailout.
They shouted "no" as loudly as that word could be uttered.
An early analysis suggests that roughly 98 percent of the Icelanders who cast valid ballots rejected the "deal."
To Read the Rest of the Article
by John Nichols
Yes! Magazine
What if Americans had been asked whether they wanted to bail out big bankers and Wall Street speculators?
How many would have voted "no"?
A measure of patriotism feeds the hope that they would have made their opposition known as resoundingly as have the voters of Iceland, who on Saturday rejected demands by the United Kingdom and the Netherlands—working hand-in-hand with the rapacious International Monetary Fund—that the people of the tiny island nation cover losses triggered by the failure of a private bank.
A "yes" vote on Saturday's referendum would have saddled each citizen of Iceland with $16,400 of debt, with the money to be paid to compensate the British and Dutch governments for expenditures to cover depositor losses stemming from the failure of the Icelandic bank Icesave.
The overall debt of $5.3 billion, or 45 percent of Iceland's economic output for last year, would have impoverished the country.
As Icelandic President Olafur R. Grimsson explained this week: "Ordinary people, farmers and fishermen, taxpayers, doctors, nurses, teachers, (were) being asked to shoulder through their taxes a burden that was created by irresponsible greedy bankers."
Fortunately, Iceland is a democracy. So those farmers and fishermen, taxpayers, doctors, nurses, teachers got to decide whether they were inclined to pay for a bank bailout.
They shouted "no" as loudly as that word could be uttered.
An early analysis suggests that roughly 98 percent of the Icelanders who cast valid ballots rejected the "deal."
To Read the Rest of the Article
Charles Bowden: The War Next Door -- Adam Smith's invisible hand meets magical realism on the border
The War Next Door: Adam Smith's invisible hand meets magical realism on the border
by Charles Bowden
High Country News
...
The Mexican border functions as a drum that both the left and the right like to thump. For the left, it means imperialism. They decry the death of migrants, the newly built wall and the tens of thousands of armed agents patrolling the line. The right sees the border as the only thing separating us from the disintegration of our national security. They decry migrants (illegal invaders), violence spilling over the border and, in certain zany moments, see Islamic terrorists crossing the desert and leaving a litter of prayer rugs.
The migration of the Mexican poor is the largest human movement across a border on the planet. It was triggered by the destruction of peasant agriculture at the hands of the North American Free Trade Agreement, by the corruption of the Mexican state, by the growing violence in Mexico, and exacerbated by the millions of Mexicans working illegally in the U.S. who send money home to finance their families' trips north. It should be seen as a natural shift of a species. We need ecologists on the border; the politicians have become pointless.
The drug industry is the second-largest source of foreign currency in Mexico, just behind oil. It earns somewhere between $30 billion and $50 billion a year -- no one really knows, including the people in the industry. It also creates enormous numbers of jobs in the U.S.: We spend billions a year on narcs, maintain the world's largest prison industry, which is absolutely dependent on the intake of drug felons, and we have about 20,000 agents on the border who feed off drug importation. The rehab industry is also a source of a large number of jobs since many well-heeled defendants pick mandatory treatment over prison. Many county and local police departments now get fat off of RICO suits based on drug offenses.
The official line of the U.S. government, one most recently voiced by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is that drug consumers in the United States are responsible for drug murders in Mexico. Only someone who is drugged could believe this claim. The sole source of the enormous amount of money in the drug business and the accompanying violence is the U.S. prohibition of drug use by its citizens. Since President Richard Nixon proclaimed the War on Drugs 40 years ago, there have been two notable accomplishments: Drugs are cheaper than ever, and they are of much higher quality. But then, NAFTA was promoted by presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton as something that would buoy up the Mexican economy and reduce or end illegal immigration -- two claims that now are clearly refuted by facts.
The left seeks open borders or No More Deaths, the latter a protest of the 500 or so migrant deaths per year -- a rather low fatality rate, considering that at least a half-million Mexicans move illegally across the border each year. But the left seldom if ever mentions the slaughter in Mexico during the last three years that has left 17,000 citizens dead, a killing of Mexicans by Mexicans. The right constantly speaks of fortifying the border, as if this could stop a human tide lashed northward by misery. And, of course, the right promotes draconian drug laws even though the failure of such laws is increasingly apparent.
On the border, Adam Smith meets magical realism. Here the market tenets of supply and demand, the basic engine of both the migration and the drug industry, are supposed to be overturned magically by a police state. Consider one simple number: The border is 1,900 miles long. If two people slipped through each mile in a 24-hour period, that would amount to 3,800 people a day. That adds up to 1,387,000 people a year. Or consider this: One bridge from Juarez to El Paso handles 600,000 semi-trucks a year. One semi with a freight load of 24 tons could probably tote enough heroin to satisfy the U.S. market for a year. Add to the mix the inevitable corruption of the police agencies: A few months ago, a Border Patrol agent in southern Arizona was busted for running dope in his official car for 500 bucks a load.
Few discussions about the border come from facts. Most discussions of the border come from fears. We seem to prefer slogans and fantasies: free trade, "just say no," gigantic walls.
To Read the Entire Essay
More resources:
Also in High Country News: Julian Cardona's photodocumentary "Failed State"
by Charles Bowden
High Country News
...
The Mexican border functions as a drum that both the left and the right like to thump. For the left, it means imperialism. They decry the death of migrants, the newly built wall and the tens of thousands of armed agents patrolling the line. The right sees the border as the only thing separating us from the disintegration of our national security. They decry migrants (illegal invaders), violence spilling over the border and, in certain zany moments, see Islamic terrorists crossing the desert and leaving a litter of prayer rugs.
The migration of the Mexican poor is the largest human movement across a border on the planet. It was triggered by the destruction of peasant agriculture at the hands of the North American Free Trade Agreement, by the corruption of the Mexican state, by the growing violence in Mexico, and exacerbated by the millions of Mexicans working illegally in the U.S. who send money home to finance their families' trips north. It should be seen as a natural shift of a species. We need ecologists on the border; the politicians have become pointless.
The drug industry is the second-largest source of foreign currency in Mexico, just behind oil. It earns somewhere between $30 billion and $50 billion a year -- no one really knows, including the people in the industry. It also creates enormous numbers of jobs in the U.S.: We spend billions a year on narcs, maintain the world's largest prison industry, which is absolutely dependent on the intake of drug felons, and we have about 20,000 agents on the border who feed off drug importation. The rehab industry is also a source of a large number of jobs since many well-heeled defendants pick mandatory treatment over prison. Many county and local police departments now get fat off of RICO suits based on drug offenses.
The official line of the U.S. government, one most recently voiced by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is that drug consumers in the United States are responsible for drug murders in Mexico. Only someone who is drugged could believe this claim. The sole source of the enormous amount of money in the drug business and the accompanying violence is the U.S. prohibition of drug use by its citizens. Since President Richard Nixon proclaimed the War on Drugs 40 years ago, there have been two notable accomplishments: Drugs are cheaper than ever, and they are of much higher quality. But then, NAFTA was promoted by presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton as something that would buoy up the Mexican economy and reduce or end illegal immigration -- two claims that now are clearly refuted by facts.
The left seeks open borders or No More Deaths, the latter a protest of the 500 or so migrant deaths per year -- a rather low fatality rate, considering that at least a half-million Mexicans move illegally across the border each year. But the left seldom if ever mentions the slaughter in Mexico during the last three years that has left 17,000 citizens dead, a killing of Mexicans by Mexicans. The right constantly speaks of fortifying the border, as if this could stop a human tide lashed northward by misery. And, of course, the right promotes draconian drug laws even though the failure of such laws is increasingly apparent.
On the border, Adam Smith meets magical realism. Here the market tenets of supply and demand, the basic engine of both the migration and the drug industry, are supposed to be overturned magically by a police state. Consider one simple number: The border is 1,900 miles long. If two people slipped through each mile in a 24-hour period, that would amount to 3,800 people a day. That adds up to 1,387,000 people a year. Or consider this: One bridge from Juarez to El Paso handles 600,000 semi-trucks a year. One semi with a freight load of 24 tons could probably tote enough heroin to satisfy the U.S. market for a year. Add to the mix the inevitable corruption of the police agencies: A few months ago, a Border Patrol agent in southern Arizona was busted for running dope in his official car for 500 bucks a load.
Few discussions about the border come from facts. Most discussions of the border come from fears. We seem to prefer slogans and fantasies: free trade, "just say no," gigantic walls.
To Read the Entire Essay
More resources:
Also in High Country News: Julian Cardona's photodocumentary "Failed State"
Democracy Now: Charles Bowden on “The War Next Door”
Charles Bowden on “The War Next Door”
Democracy Now
In the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juárez, a US consular employee and her husband were shot dead on Saturday while driving in their SUV. In a separate incident nearby, the husband of a Mexican employee at the US consulate was shot dead. The shootings are believed to be the first deadly attacks on US officials and their families by Mexico’s powerful drug organizations. We go to the US-Mexico border to speak with reporter Charles Bowden. “There is no serious War on Drugs,” Bowden writes. “Rather, there is violence, nourished by the money to be made from drugs. And there are U.S. industries whose primary lifeblood comes from fighting a war on drugs.”
Guest:
Charles Bowden, reporter who has extensively covered the drug violence in Mexico. He is author of the forthcoming book, Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields. His latest article for High Country News is called The War Next Door.
To Watch/Listen/Read
Democracy Now
In the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juárez, a US consular employee and her husband were shot dead on Saturday while driving in their SUV. In a separate incident nearby, the husband of a Mexican employee at the US consulate was shot dead. The shootings are believed to be the first deadly attacks on US officials and their families by Mexico’s powerful drug organizations. We go to the US-Mexico border to speak with reporter Charles Bowden. “There is no serious War on Drugs,” Bowden writes. “Rather, there is violence, nourished by the money to be made from drugs. And there are U.S. industries whose primary lifeblood comes from fighting a war on drugs.”
Guest:
Charles Bowden, reporter who has extensively covered the drug violence in Mexico. He is author of the forthcoming book, Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields. His latest article for High Country News is called The War Next Door.
To Watch/Listen/Read
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Johann Hari: The Wrong Kind of Green
The Wrong Kind of Green
By Johann Hari
The Nation
Why did America's leading environmental groups jet to Copenhagen and lobby for policies that will lead to the faster death of the rainforests--and runaway global warming? Why are their lobbyists on Capitol Hill dismissing the only real solutions to climate change as "unworkable" and "unrealistic," as though they were just another sooty tentacle of Big Coal?
At first glance, these questions will seem bizarre. Groups like Conservation International are among the most trusted "brands" in America, pledged to protect and defend nature. Yet as we confront the biggest ecological crisis in human history, many of the green organizations meant to be leading the fight are busy shoveling up hard cash from the world's worst polluters--and burying science-based environmentalism in return. Sometimes the corruption is subtle; sometimes it is blatant. In the middle of a swirl of bogus climate scandals trumped up by deniers, here is the real Climategate, waiting to be exposed.
I have spent the past few years reporting on how global warming is remaking the map of the world. I have stood in half-dead villages on the coast of Bangladesh while families point to a distant place in the rising ocean and say, "Do you see that chimney sticking up? That's where my house was... I had to [abandon it] six months ago." I have stood on the edges of the Arctic and watched glaciers that have existed for millenniums crash into the sea. I have stood on the borders of dried-out Darfur and heard refugees explain, "The water dried up, and so we started to kill each other for what was left."
While I witnessed these early stages of ecocide, I imagined that American green groups were on these people's side in the corridors of Capitol Hill, trying to stop the Weather of Mass Destruction. But it is now clear that many were on a different path--one that began in the 1980s, with a financial donation.
Environmental groups used to be funded largely by their members and wealthy individual supporters. They had only one goal: to prevent environmental destruction. Their funds were small, but they played a crucial role in saving vast tracts of wilderness and in pushing into law strict rules forbidding air and water pollution. But Jay Hair--president of the National Wildlife Federation from 1981 to 1995--was dissatisfied. He identified a huge new source of revenue: the worst polluters.
Hair found that the big oil and gas companies were happy to give money to conservation groups. Yes, they were destroying many of the world's pristine places. Yes, by the late 1980s it had become clear that they were dramatically destabilizing the climate--the very basis of life itself. But for Hair, that didn't make them the enemy; he said they sincerely wanted to right their wrongs and pay to preserve the environment. He began to suck millions from them, and in return his organization and others, like The Nature Conservancy (TNC), gave them awards for "environmental stewardship."
Companies like Shell and British Petroleum (BP) were delighted. They saw it as valuable "reputation insurance": every time they were criticized for their massive emissions of warming gases, or for being involved in the killing of dissidents who wanted oil funds to go to the local population, or an oil spill that had caused irreparable damage, they wheeled out their shiny green awards, purchased with "charitable" donations, to ward off the prospect of government regulation. At first, this behavior scandalized the environmental community. Hair was vehemently condemned as a sellout and a charlatan. But slowly, the other groups saw themselves shrink while the corporate-fattened groups swelled--so they, too, started to take the checks.
Christine MacDonald, an idealistic young environmentalist, discovered how deeply this cash had transformed these institutions when she started to work for Conservation International in 2006. She told me, "About a week or two after I started, I went to the big planning meeting of all the organization's media teams, and they started talking about this supposedly great new project they were running with BP. But I had read in the newspaper the day before that the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] had condemned BP for running the most polluting plant in the whole country.... But nobody in that meeting, or anywhere else in the organization, wanted to talk about it. It was a taboo. You weren't supposed to ask if BP was really green. They were 'helping' us, and that was it."
She soon began to see--as she explains in her whistleblowing book Green Inc.--how this behavior has pervaded almost all the mainstream green organizations. They take money, and in turn they offer praise, even when the money comes from the companies causing environmental devastation. To take just one example, when it was revealed that many of IKEA's dining room sets were made from trees ripped from endangered forests, the World Wildlife Fund leapt to the company's defense, saying--wrongly--that IKEA "can never guarantee" this won't happen. Is it a coincidence that WWF is a "marketing partner" with IKEA, and takes cash from the company?
Likewise, the Sierra Club was approached in 2008 by the makers of Clorox bleach, who said that if the Club endorsed their new range of "green" household cleaners, they would give it a percentage of the sales. The Club's Corporate Accountability Committee said the deal created a blatant conflict of interest--but took it anyway. Executive director Carl Pope defended the move in an e-mail to members, in which he claimed that the organization had carried out a serious analysis of the cleaners to see if they were "truly superior." But it hadn't. The Club's Toxics Committee co-chair, Jessica Frohman, said, "We never approved the product line." Beyond asking a few questions, the committee had done nothing to confirm that the product line was greener than its competitors' or good for the environment in any way.
The green groups defend their behavior by saying they are improving the behavior of the corporations. But as these stories show, the pressure often flows the other way: the addiction to corporate cash has changed the green groups at their core. As MacDonald says, "Not only do the largest conservation groups take money from companies deeply implicated in environmental crimes; they have become something like satellite PR offices for the corporations that support them."
It has taken two decades for this corrupting relationship to become the norm among the big green organizations. Imagine this happening in any other sphere, and it becomes clear how surreal it is. It is as though Amnesty International's human rights reports came sponsored by a coalition of the Burmese junta, Dick Cheney and Robert Mugabe. For environmental groups to take funding from the very people who are destroying the environment is preposterous--yet it is now taken for granted.
This pattern was bad enough when it affected only a lousy household cleaning spray, or a single rare forest. But today, the stakes are unimaginably higher. We are living through a brief window of time in which we can still prevent runaway global warming. We have emitted so many warming gases into the atmosphere that the world's climate scientists say we are close to the climate's "point of no return." Up to 2 degrees Celsius of warming, all sorts of terrible things happen--we lose the islands of the South Pacific, we set in train the loss of much of Florida and Bangladesh, terrible drought ravages central Africa--but if we stop the emissions of warming gases, we at least have a fifty-fifty chance of stabilizing the climate at this higher level. This is already an extraordinary gamble with human safety, and many climate scientists say we need to aim considerably lower: 1.5 degrees or less.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
By Johann Hari
The Nation
Why did America's leading environmental groups jet to Copenhagen and lobby for policies that will lead to the faster death of the rainforests--and runaway global warming? Why are their lobbyists on Capitol Hill dismissing the only real solutions to climate change as "unworkable" and "unrealistic," as though they were just another sooty tentacle of Big Coal?
At first glance, these questions will seem bizarre. Groups like Conservation International are among the most trusted "brands" in America, pledged to protect and defend nature. Yet as we confront the biggest ecological crisis in human history, many of the green organizations meant to be leading the fight are busy shoveling up hard cash from the world's worst polluters--and burying science-based environmentalism in return. Sometimes the corruption is subtle; sometimes it is blatant. In the middle of a swirl of bogus climate scandals trumped up by deniers, here is the real Climategate, waiting to be exposed.
I have spent the past few years reporting on how global warming is remaking the map of the world. I have stood in half-dead villages on the coast of Bangladesh while families point to a distant place in the rising ocean and say, "Do you see that chimney sticking up? That's where my house was... I had to [abandon it] six months ago." I have stood on the edges of the Arctic and watched glaciers that have existed for millenniums crash into the sea. I have stood on the borders of dried-out Darfur and heard refugees explain, "The water dried up, and so we started to kill each other for what was left."
While I witnessed these early stages of ecocide, I imagined that American green groups were on these people's side in the corridors of Capitol Hill, trying to stop the Weather of Mass Destruction. But it is now clear that many were on a different path--one that began in the 1980s, with a financial donation.
Environmental groups used to be funded largely by their members and wealthy individual supporters. They had only one goal: to prevent environmental destruction. Their funds were small, but they played a crucial role in saving vast tracts of wilderness and in pushing into law strict rules forbidding air and water pollution. But Jay Hair--president of the National Wildlife Federation from 1981 to 1995--was dissatisfied. He identified a huge new source of revenue: the worst polluters.
Hair found that the big oil and gas companies were happy to give money to conservation groups. Yes, they were destroying many of the world's pristine places. Yes, by the late 1980s it had become clear that they were dramatically destabilizing the climate--the very basis of life itself. But for Hair, that didn't make them the enemy; he said they sincerely wanted to right their wrongs and pay to preserve the environment. He began to suck millions from them, and in return his organization and others, like The Nature Conservancy (TNC), gave them awards for "environmental stewardship."
Companies like Shell and British Petroleum (BP) were delighted. They saw it as valuable "reputation insurance": every time they were criticized for their massive emissions of warming gases, or for being involved in the killing of dissidents who wanted oil funds to go to the local population, or an oil spill that had caused irreparable damage, they wheeled out their shiny green awards, purchased with "charitable" donations, to ward off the prospect of government regulation. At first, this behavior scandalized the environmental community. Hair was vehemently condemned as a sellout and a charlatan. But slowly, the other groups saw themselves shrink while the corporate-fattened groups swelled--so they, too, started to take the checks.
Christine MacDonald, an idealistic young environmentalist, discovered how deeply this cash had transformed these institutions when she started to work for Conservation International in 2006. She told me, "About a week or two after I started, I went to the big planning meeting of all the organization's media teams, and they started talking about this supposedly great new project they were running with BP. But I had read in the newspaper the day before that the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] had condemned BP for running the most polluting plant in the whole country.... But nobody in that meeting, or anywhere else in the organization, wanted to talk about it. It was a taboo. You weren't supposed to ask if BP was really green. They were 'helping' us, and that was it."
She soon began to see--as she explains in her whistleblowing book Green Inc.--how this behavior has pervaded almost all the mainstream green organizations. They take money, and in turn they offer praise, even when the money comes from the companies causing environmental devastation. To take just one example, when it was revealed that many of IKEA's dining room sets were made from trees ripped from endangered forests, the World Wildlife Fund leapt to the company's defense, saying--wrongly--that IKEA "can never guarantee" this won't happen. Is it a coincidence that WWF is a "marketing partner" with IKEA, and takes cash from the company?
Likewise, the Sierra Club was approached in 2008 by the makers of Clorox bleach, who said that if the Club endorsed their new range of "green" household cleaners, they would give it a percentage of the sales. The Club's Corporate Accountability Committee said the deal created a blatant conflict of interest--but took it anyway. Executive director Carl Pope defended the move in an e-mail to members, in which he claimed that the organization had carried out a serious analysis of the cleaners to see if they were "truly superior." But it hadn't. The Club's Toxics Committee co-chair, Jessica Frohman, said, "We never approved the product line." Beyond asking a few questions, the committee had done nothing to confirm that the product line was greener than its competitors' or good for the environment in any way.
The green groups defend their behavior by saying they are improving the behavior of the corporations. But as these stories show, the pressure often flows the other way: the addiction to corporate cash has changed the green groups at their core. As MacDonald says, "Not only do the largest conservation groups take money from companies deeply implicated in environmental crimes; they have become something like satellite PR offices for the corporations that support them."
It has taken two decades for this corrupting relationship to become the norm among the big green organizations. Imagine this happening in any other sphere, and it becomes clear how surreal it is. It is as though Amnesty International's human rights reports came sponsored by a coalition of the Burmese junta, Dick Cheney and Robert Mugabe. For environmental groups to take funding from the very people who are destroying the environment is preposterous--yet it is now taken for granted.
This pattern was bad enough when it affected only a lousy household cleaning spray, or a single rare forest. But today, the stakes are unimaginably higher. We are living through a brief window of time in which we can still prevent runaway global warming. We have emitted so many warming gases into the atmosphere that the world's climate scientists say we are close to the climate's "point of no return." Up to 2 degrees Celsius of warming, all sorts of terrible things happen--we lose the islands of the South Pacific, we set in train the loss of much of Florida and Bangladesh, terrible drought ravages central Africa--but if we stop the emissions of warming gases, we at least have a fifty-fifty chance of stabilizing the climate at this higher level. This is already an extraordinary gamble with human safety, and many climate scientists say we need to aim considerably lower: 1.5 degrees or less.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Democracy Now: The Real Climategate -- Conservation Groups Align with World’s Worst Polluters
The Real Climategate: Conservation Groups Align with World’s Worst Polluters
Democracy Now
Major environmental groups are coming under criticism from within their own ranks for taking positions that some say are antithetical to their stated missions of saving the planet. In the latest issue of The Nation magazine, the British journalist Johann Hari writes, “As we confront the biggest ecological crisis in human history, many of the green organizations meant to be leading the fight are busy shoveling up hard cash from the world’s worst polluters—and burying science-based environmentalism in return…In the middle of a swirl of bogus climate scandals trumped up by deniers, here is the real Climategate.”
Guests:
Johann Hari, columnist for the London Independent. His article for The Nation is called ‘The Wrong Kind of Green’
Christine MacDonald, journalist who used to work for Conservation International, or CI. She is the author of Green, Inc.: An Environmental Insider Reveals How a Good Cause Has Gone Bad.
To Watch/Listen/Read
Democracy Now
Major environmental groups are coming under criticism from within their own ranks for taking positions that some say are antithetical to their stated missions of saving the planet. In the latest issue of The Nation magazine, the British journalist Johann Hari writes, “As we confront the biggest ecological crisis in human history, many of the green organizations meant to be leading the fight are busy shoveling up hard cash from the world’s worst polluters—and burying science-based environmentalism in return…In the middle of a swirl of bogus climate scandals trumped up by deniers, here is the real Climategate.”
Guests:
Johann Hari, columnist for the London Independent. His article for The Nation is called ‘The Wrong Kind of Green’
Christine MacDonald, journalist who used to work for Conservation International, or CI. She is the author of Green, Inc.: An Environmental Insider Reveals How a Good Cause Has Gone Bad.
To Watch/Listen/Read
Disclosure: CFP -- Family, Sex, and Law (7/1/10)
SUBMISSION DEADLINE: July 1st, 2010
The editorial collective of disClosure seeks submissions that explore FAMILY, SEX, AND Law as they are understood in a variety of areas and disciplines. Possible topics might include:
*Divorce
*Sex and Love Work
*Sex & Affect(ion)
*Law & Marriage
*The Business of Marriage
*Queering Family
*Family Medicine/The
*Medicalized Family
*Sexuality and Empire
*Family, Sex, and Migration
*Rethinking Childhood/
*Old Age
*Family and Trauma
*The Post-Nuclear Family
*Sex and Surveillance
*Family Secrets
*Trafficking Women
*Marriage/Sex/Family in Popular Culture
disClosure is a blind refereed journal produced in conjunction with the Committee on Social Theory at the University of Kentucky. We welcome submissions from all theoretical perspectives and genres (scholarly articles, interviews, reviews, short fiction, poetry, artwork) and from authors and artists (academically affiliated or not) concerned with social theory.
SUBMISSION INFORMATION:
Scholarly Articles, Essays, Poetry, and Fiction: Please submit electronically in Word format to disclosurejournal@gmail.com. Submissions should be double-spaced with no more than 10,000 words. Manuscripts, notes, and bibliographies should follow Chicago format, where applicable.
Book Reviews: Please submit electronically in Word format to disclosurejournal@gmail.com. These should be approximately 1,000 words and should review works published no earlier than 2007.
Art and other graphic materials: Artists should submit digital or camera-ready material. Electronic submissions should be accompanied by a hard copy. Art cannot be returned, so do not send originals. Do not submit material that has been half-toned for publication (e.g., pictures in books or catalogues). All art will be published in B&W, so please submit accordingly.
Authors are responsible for securing copyright and fair-use notices and must submit them prior to disClosure publication. All material accepted by disClosure for publication becomes property of the journal. disClosure is not responsible for loss or damage resulting from submission.
Inquiries and Submissions:
Jeffrey Zamostny and Rebecca Lane
disclosurejournal@gmail.com
Art and Other Graphic Materials:
disClosure
C/O Naomi Norasak/Jeffrey Zamostny/Rebecca Lane
1613 Patterson Office Tower
University of Kentucky
Lexington, KY 40506-0027
The editorial collective of disClosure seeks submissions that explore FAMILY, SEX, AND Law as they are understood in a variety of areas and disciplines. Possible topics might include:
*Divorce
*Sex and Love Work
*Sex & Affect(ion)
*Law & Marriage
*The Business of Marriage
*Queering Family
*Family Medicine/The
*Medicalized Family
*Sexuality and Empire
*Family, Sex, and Migration
*Rethinking Childhood/
*Old Age
*Family and Trauma
*The Post-Nuclear Family
*Sex and Surveillance
*Family Secrets
*Trafficking Women
*Marriage/Sex/Family in Popular Culture
disClosure is a blind refereed journal produced in conjunction with the Committee on Social Theory at the University of Kentucky. We welcome submissions from all theoretical perspectives and genres (scholarly articles, interviews, reviews, short fiction, poetry, artwork) and from authors and artists (academically affiliated or not) concerned with social theory.
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Scholarly Articles, Essays, Poetry, and Fiction: Please submit electronically in Word format to disclosurejournal@gmail.com. Submissions should be double-spaced with no more than 10,000 words. Manuscripts, notes, and bibliographies should follow Chicago format, where applicable.
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Art and Other Graphic Materials:
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James C. McKinley Jr.: Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change
(Dialogic recommends James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong as a good prep for the history of this American school textbook misinformation/disinformation/propaganda effort and Texas' inordinate influence on national textbook adoption policies. Report via Michael Marchman.)
Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
The New York Times
AUSTIN, Tex. — After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.
The vote was 10 to 5 along party lines, with all the Republicans on the board voting for it.
The board, whose members are elected, has influence beyond Texas because the state is one of the largest buyers of textbooks. In the digital age, however, that influence has diminished as technological advances have made it possible for publishers to tailor books to individual states.
In recent years, board members have been locked in an ideological battle between a bloc of conservatives who question Darwin’s theory of evolution and believe the Founding Fathers were guided by Christian principles, and a handful of Democrats and moderate Republicans who have fought to preserve the teaching of Darwinism and the separation of church and state.
Since January, Republicans on the board have passed more than 100 amendments to the 120-page curriculum standards affecting history, sociology and economics courses from elementary to high school. The standards were proposed by a panel of teachers.
“We are adding balance,” said Dr. Don McLeroy, the leader of the conservative faction on the board, after the vote. “History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left.”
Battles over what to put in science and history books have taken place for years in the 20 states where state boards must adopt textbooks, most notably in California and Texas. But rarely in recent history has a group of conservative board members left such a mark on a social studies curriculum.
Efforts by Hispanic board members to include more Latino figures as role models for the state’s large Hispanic population were consistently defeated, prompting one member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out of a meeting late Thursday night, saying, “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.”
To Read the Rest of the Article
More reports:
(via Betsy Taylor) Huffington Post: Texas Textbook MASSACRE -- 'Ultraconservatives' Approve Radical Changes To State Education Curriculum which provides this nugget: "The Board removed Thomas Jefferson from the Texas curriculum's world history standards on Enlightenment thinking, 'replacing him with religious right icon John Calvin.'”
Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
The New York Times
AUSTIN, Tex. — After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.
The vote was 10 to 5 along party lines, with all the Republicans on the board voting for it.
The board, whose members are elected, has influence beyond Texas because the state is one of the largest buyers of textbooks. In the digital age, however, that influence has diminished as technological advances have made it possible for publishers to tailor books to individual states.
In recent years, board members have been locked in an ideological battle between a bloc of conservatives who question Darwin’s theory of evolution and believe the Founding Fathers were guided by Christian principles, and a handful of Democrats and moderate Republicans who have fought to preserve the teaching of Darwinism and the separation of church and state.
Since January, Republicans on the board have passed more than 100 amendments to the 120-page curriculum standards affecting history, sociology and economics courses from elementary to high school. The standards were proposed by a panel of teachers.
“We are adding balance,” said Dr. Don McLeroy, the leader of the conservative faction on the board, after the vote. “History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left.”
Battles over what to put in science and history books have taken place for years in the 20 states where state boards must adopt textbooks, most notably in California and Texas. But rarely in recent history has a group of conservative board members left such a mark on a social studies curriculum.
Efforts by Hispanic board members to include more Latino figures as role models for the state’s large Hispanic population were consistently defeated, prompting one member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out of a meeting late Thursday night, saying, “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.”
To Read the Rest of the Article
More reports:
(via Betsy Taylor) Huffington Post: Texas Textbook MASSACRE -- 'Ultraconservatives' Approve Radical Changes To State Education Curriculum which provides this nugget: "The Board removed Thomas Jefferson from the Texas curriculum's world history standards on Enlightenment thinking, 'replacing him with religious right icon John Calvin.'”
Nelson D. Schwartz: Junk Bond Avalanche Looms for Credit Markets
(via Brandon Absher)
Junk Bond Avalanche Looms for Credit Markets
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ
The New York Times
When the Mayans envisioned the world coming to an end in 2012 — at least in the Hollywood telling — they didn’t count junk bonds among the perils that would lead to worldwide disaster.
Maybe they should have, because 2012 also is the beginning of a three-year period in which more than $700 billion in risky, high-yield corporate debt begins to come due, an extraordinary surge that some analysts fear could overload the debt markets.
With huge bills about to hit corporations and the federal government around the same time, the worry is that some companies will have trouble getting new loans, spurring defaults and a wave of bankruptcies.
The United States government alone will need to borrow nearly $2 trillion in 2012, to bridge the projected budget deficit for that year and to refinance existing debt.
Indeed, worries about the growth of national, or sovereign, debt prompted Moody’s Investors Service to warn on Monday that the United States and other Western nations were moving “substantially” closer to losing their top-notch Aaa credit ratings.
Sovereign debt aside, the approaching scramble for corporate financing could strain the broader economy as jobs are cut, consumer spending is scaled back and credit is tightened for both consumers and businesses.
The apocalyptic talk is not limited to perpetual bears and the rest of the doom-and-gloom crowd.
Even Moody’s, which is known for its sober public statements, is sounding the alarm.
“An avalanche is brewing in 2012 and beyond if companies don’t get out in front of this,” said Kevin Cassidy, a senior credit officer at Moody’s.
Private equity firms and many nonfinancial companies were able to borrow on easy terms until the credit crisis hit in 2007, but not until 2012 does the long-delayed reckoning begin for a series of leveraged buyouts and other deals that preceded the crisis.
To Read the Rest of the Article
Junk Bond Avalanche Looms for Credit Markets
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ
The New York Times
When the Mayans envisioned the world coming to an end in 2012 — at least in the Hollywood telling — they didn’t count junk bonds among the perils that would lead to worldwide disaster.
Maybe they should have, because 2012 also is the beginning of a three-year period in which more than $700 billion in risky, high-yield corporate debt begins to come due, an extraordinary surge that some analysts fear could overload the debt markets.
With huge bills about to hit corporations and the federal government around the same time, the worry is that some companies will have trouble getting new loans, spurring defaults and a wave of bankruptcies.
The United States government alone will need to borrow nearly $2 trillion in 2012, to bridge the projected budget deficit for that year and to refinance existing debt.
Indeed, worries about the growth of national, or sovereign, debt prompted Moody’s Investors Service to warn on Monday that the United States and other Western nations were moving “substantially” closer to losing their top-notch Aaa credit ratings.
Sovereign debt aside, the approaching scramble for corporate financing could strain the broader economy as jobs are cut, consumer spending is scaled back and credit is tightened for both consumers and businesses.
The apocalyptic talk is not limited to perpetual bears and the rest of the doom-and-gloom crowd.
Even Moody’s, which is known for its sober public statements, is sounding the alarm.
“An avalanche is brewing in 2012 and beyond if companies don’t get out in front of this,” said Kevin Cassidy, a senior credit officer at Moody’s.
Private equity firms and many nonfinancial companies were able to borrow on easy terms until the credit crisis hit in 2007, but not until 2012 does the long-delayed reckoning begin for a series of leveraged buyouts and other deals that preceded the crisis.
To Read the Rest of the Article
Monday, March 15, 2010
Democracy Now: Eamon Javers on the Secret World of Corporate Espionage and Moonlighting CIA Operatives
Eamon Javers on the Secret World of Corporate Espionage and Moonlighting CIA Operatives
Democracy Now
The CIA is under fire following the news it’s allowing active-duty operatives to work for private companies on the side. The previously undisclosed “moonlighting” has granted wealthy private entities such as financial firms and hedge funds access to top-level intelligence officials. It’s said to be viewed internally as a means to prevent agency defections to the private sector. A CIA spokesperson said “moonlighting” operatives are required to submit detailed information on their outside employment. But few details have been revealed, including how long the policy has been in place and how many operatives have taken part. We speak to Eamon Javers, author of the new book Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy: The Secret World of Corporate Espionage.
To Watch/Listen/Read
Democracy Now
The CIA is under fire following the news it’s allowing active-duty operatives to work for private companies on the side. The previously undisclosed “moonlighting” has granted wealthy private entities such as financial firms and hedge funds access to top-level intelligence officials. It’s said to be viewed internally as a means to prevent agency defections to the private sector. A CIA spokesperson said “moonlighting” operatives are required to submit detailed information on their outside employment. But few details have been revealed, including how long the policy has been in place and how many operatives have taken part. We speak to Eamon Javers, author of the new book Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy: The Secret World of Corporate Espionage.
To Watch/Listen/Read
Democracy Now: David Price -- “The CIA Is Welcoming Itself Back onto American University Campuses”
David Price: “The CIA Is Welcoming Itself Back onto American University Campuses”
Democracy Now
In the latest edition of CounterPunch magazine, the anthropologist David Price reveals the US intelligence community has established academic outposts at twenty-two US universities over the past four years. Government agencies, including the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, and Homeland Security, have helped found “Intelligence Community Centers for Academic Excellence,” or ICCAEs—pronounced “Icky.” The ICCAEs aim to create a “systematic long-term program at universities and colleges to recruit and hire eligible talent for [intelligence community] agencies and components” and “increase the [intelligence recruiting] pipeline of students.”
Guest:
David Price, founding member of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, which just published The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual: Or Notes on Demilitarizing American Society. He is also an associate professor of anthropology at St. Martin’s University in Lacey, Washington, and the author of Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War and Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists.
To Watch/Listen/Read
Democracy Now
In the latest edition of CounterPunch magazine, the anthropologist David Price reveals the US intelligence community has established academic outposts at twenty-two US universities over the past four years. Government agencies, including the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, and Homeland Security, have helped found “Intelligence Community Centers for Academic Excellence,” or ICCAEs—pronounced “Icky.” The ICCAEs aim to create a “systematic long-term program at universities and colleges to recruit and hire eligible talent for [intelligence community] agencies and components” and “increase the [intelligence recruiting] pipeline of students.”
Guest:
David Price, founding member of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, which just published The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual: Or Notes on Demilitarizing American Society. He is also an associate professor of anthropology at St. Martin’s University in Lacey, Washington, and the author of Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War and Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists.
To Watch/Listen/Read
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Glenn Greenwald: Presidential assassinations of U.S. citizens
Presidential assassinations of U.S. citizens
By Glenn Greenwald
Salon
...
Just think about this for a minute. Barack Obama, like George Bush before him, has claimed the authority to order American citizens murdered based solely on the unverified, uncharged, unchecked claim that they are associated with Terrorism and pose "a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests." They're entitled to no charges, no trial, no ability to contest the accusations. Amazingly, the Bush administration's policy of merely imprisoning foreign nationals (along with a couple of American citizens) without charges -- based solely on the President's claim that they were Terrorists -- produced intense controversy for years. That, one will recall, was a grave assault on the Constitution. Shouldn't Obama's policy of ordering American citizens assassinated without any due process or checks of any kind -- not imprisoned, but killed -- produce at least as much controversy?
Obviously, if U.S. forces are fighting on an actual battlefield, then they (like everyone else) have the right to kill combatants actively fighting against them, including American citizens. That's just the essence of war. That's why it's permissible to kill a combatant engaged on a real battlefield in a war zone but not, say, torture them once they're captured and helplessly detained. But combat is not what we're talking about here. The people on this "hit list" are likely to be killed while at home, sleeping in their bed, driving in a car with friends or family, or engaged in a whole array of other activities. More critically still, the Obama administration -- like the Bush administration before it -- defines the "battlefield" as the entire world. So the President claims the power to order U.S. citizens killed anywhere in the world, while engaged even in the most benign activities carried out far away from any actual battlefield, based solely on his say-so and with no judicial oversight or other checks. That's quite a power for an American President to claim for himself.
As we well know from the last eight years, the authoritarians among us in both parties will, by definition, reflexively justify this conduct by insisting that the assassination targets are Terrorists and therefore deserve death. What they actually mean, however, is that the U.S. Government has accused them of being Terrorists, which (except in the mind of an authoritarian) is not the same thing as being a Terrorist. Numerous Guantanamo detainees accused by the U.S. Government of being Terrorists have turned out to be completely innocent, and the vast majority of federal judges who provided habeas review to detainees have found an almost complete lack of evidence to justify the accusations against them, and thus ordered them released. That includes scores of detainees held while the U.S. Government insisted that only the "Worst of the Worst" remained at the camp.
To Read the Rest
By Glenn Greenwald
Salon
...
Just think about this for a minute. Barack Obama, like George Bush before him, has claimed the authority to order American citizens murdered based solely on the unverified, uncharged, unchecked claim that they are associated with Terrorism and pose "a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests." They're entitled to no charges, no trial, no ability to contest the accusations. Amazingly, the Bush administration's policy of merely imprisoning foreign nationals (along with a couple of American citizens) without charges -- based solely on the President's claim that they were Terrorists -- produced intense controversy for years. That, one will recall, was a grave assault on the Constitution. Shouldn't Obama's policy of ordering American citizens assassinated without any due process or checks of any kind -- not imprisoned, but killed -- produce at least as much controversy?
Obviously, if U.S. forces are fighting on an actual battlefield, then they (like everyone else) have the right to kill combatants actively fighting against them, including American citizens. That's just the essence of war. That's why it's permissible to kill a combatant engaged on a real battlefield in a war zone but not, say, torture them once they're captured and helplessly detained. But combat is not what we're talking about here. The people on this "hit list" are likely to be killed while at home, sleeping in their bed, driving in a car with friends or family, or engaged in a whole array of other activities. More critically still, the Obama administration -- like the Bush administration before it -- defines the "battlefield" as the entire world. So the President claims the power to order U.S. citizens killed anywhere in the world, while engaged even in the most benign activities carried out far away from any actual battlefield, based solely on his say-so and with no judicial oversight or other checks. That's quite a power for an American President to claim for himself.
As we well know from the last eight years, the authoritarians among us in both parties will, by definition, reflexively justify this conduct by insisting that the assassination targets are Terrorists and therefore deserve death. What they actually mean, however, is that the U.S. Government has accused them of being Terrorists, which (except in the mind of an authoritarian) is not the same thing as being a Terrorist. Numerous Guantanamo detainees accused by the U.S. Government of being Terrorists have turned out to be completely innocent, and the vast majority of federal judges who provided habeas review to detainees have found an almost complete lack of evidence to justify the accusations against them, and thus ordered them released. That includes scores of detainees held while the U.S. Government insisted that only the "Worst of the Worst" remained at the camp.
To Read the Rest
Democracy Now: Obama Administration -- US Forces Can Assassinate Americans Believed to Be Involved in Terrorist Activity
Obama Administration: US Forces Can Assassinate Americans Believed to Be Involved in Terrorist Activity
Democracy Now
The Obama administration has acknowledged it’s continuing a Bush-era policy authorizing the killing of US citizens abroad. The confirmation came from Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair in congressional testimony last week. Blair said, “Being a US citizen will not spare an American from getting assassinated by military or intelligence operatives overseas if the individual is working with terrorists and planning to attack fellow Americans.” We speak to Rep. Dennis Kucinich and blogger and attorney Glenn Greenwald.
Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), last week he wrote a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder requesting an explanation of the Obama administration’s legal basis for the extrajudicial killing of US citizens.
Glenn Greenwald, constitutional law attorney and political and legal blogger for Salon.com. He wrote a widely circulated piece for Salon last week called ‘Presidential Assassinations of US Citizens’
To Watch/Listen/Read
Democracy Now
The Obama administration has acknowledged it’s continuing a Bush-era policy authorizing the killing of US citizens abroad. The confirmation came from Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair in congressional testimony last week. Blair said, “Being a US citizen will not spare an American from getting assassinated by military or intelligence operatives overseas if the individual is working with terrorists and planning to attack fellow Americans.” We speak to Rep. Dennis Kucinich and blogger and attorney Glenn Greenwald.
Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), last week he wrote a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder requesting an explanation of the Obama administration’s legal basis for the extrajudicial killing of US citizens.
Glenn Greenwald, constitutional law attorney and political and legal blogger for Salon.com. He wrote a widely circulated piece for Salon last week called ‘Presidential Assassinations of US Citizens’
To Watch/Listen/Read
To the Best of Our Knowledge: Give Peace a Chance
Give Peace a Chance
To the Best of Our Knowledge (Wisconsin Public Radio)
Host: Steve Paulson
When asked what he thought about Western civilization, Gandhi once famously said: I think it's a good idea. Gandhi's form of extreme nonviolence led to the civilized retreat of the British from the Indian sub-continent. But does non-violence still have the right stuff to effect social change in today's world? In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, some new ideas about a very old subject - non-violence. And, could nonviolence have prevented World War II?
SEGMENT 1:
Satish Kumar is a peace activist who lives in Devon, England, and he's the author of "The Buddha and the Terrorist." A former Jain monk, he still follows Gandhi's principles of non-violence. Kumar tells Jim Fleming about some of the people he met on his 8,000 mile walk for peace, and why he thinks violence is an obsolete weapon. Also, Reihan Salam critiqued the movie "Gandhi" for Slate Magazine in an article called "Meet the Hindustani Malcolm X." Salam tells Steve Paulson that David Attenborough's bio-pic may have been about an Indian man, but it was a thoroughly Western movie.
>
SEGMENT 2:
Mark Kurlansky is the author of "Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons in the History of a Dangerous Idea." In constructing his history of non-violence, Kurlansky looks at history with a revisionist's eye and tells Steve Paulson that WWII might not have been necessary ...
SEGMENT 3:
Andrew Carroll is the Founder of the Legacy Project whose latest book is "Grace under Fire: Letters of Faith in Times of War." The Legacy Project collects and publishes letters from combatants and their families and friends, and others who have been touched by the experience of war.
To Listen to the Episode
To the Best of Our Knowledge (Wisconsin Public Radio)
Host: Steve Paulson
When asked what he thought about Western civilization, Gandhi once famously said: I think it's a good idea. Gandhi's form of extreme nonviolence led to the civilized retreat of the British from the Indian sub-continent. But does non-violence still have the right stuff to effect social change in today's world? In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, some new ideas about a very old subject - non-violence. And, could nonviolence have prevented World War II?
SEGMENT 1:
Satish Kumar is a peace activist who lives in Devon, England, and he's the author of "The Buddha and the Terrorist." A former Jain monk, he still follows Gandhi's principles of non-violence. Kumar tells Jim Fleming about some of the people he met on his 8,000 mile walk for peace, and why he thinks violence is an obsolete weapon. Also, Reihan Salam critiqued the movie "Gandhi" for Slate Magazine in an article called "Meet the Hindustani Malcolm X." Salam tells Steve Paulson that David Attenborough's bio-pic may have been about an Indian man, but it was a thoroughly Western movie.
>SEGMENT 2:
Mark Kurlansky is the author of "Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons in the History of a Dangerous Idea." In constructing his history of non-violence, Kurlansky looks at history with a revisionist's eye and tells Steve Paulson that WWII might not have been necessary ...
SEGMENT 3:
Andrew Carroll is the Founder of the Legacy Project whose latest book is "Grace under Fire: Letters of Faith in Times of War." The Legacy Project collects and publishes letters from combatants and their families and friends, and others who have been touched by the experience of war.
To Listen to the Episode
Tim Robey: David Cronenberg’s Disembodied Cinema
David Cronenberg’s Disembodied Cinema
By Tim Robey
The Point
The best word I’ve come across to describe David Cronenberg’s filmmaking style is “disembodied.” It was voiced as a criticism, but I think he’d own up to it. Whatever squelchy or peculiar or downright disgusting thing is going on in his pictures, the camera tends to exhibit an almost serene, floating detachment, like a severed head calmly looking down at its own twitching torso.
Detachment is hardly the same thing as disinterest, and if Cronenberg has shown us one thing in his now 40 year career, it’s that cinema can both squelch and think. He has a habit of reaching for Descartes in discussing his films, which consistently operate at this interface between the visceral and the cerebral. I suppose it’s possible to be put off by both sides of the equation—the chilly rigor of his tonal strategies could very well disconcert the casual viewer as much as, say, the bugs with talking anuses. But when you’ve got the hang of Cronenberg, his filmmaking comes to seem forensically exploratory, and engaged in brave and singular ways with the potentials, as well as the pathologies, of the human animal.
“Body horror” was the term coined to contextualize Cronenberg’s work in the 1970s and 1980s, the period of his career when he worked almost exclusively in the science fiction/horror genre. Like all such phrases, it’s a shortcut: there’s more to understand than just an obsession with mutation and organs falling off. Cronenberg’s great concern has always been the body—he calls it “the first fact of human existence”—but his films differ substantially from the other horror cinema of their era in exploring our anatomies from the inside out. Limbs are rarely under threat from chainsaws in his films—they are more likely to atrophy or multiply or go the way of an arthropod.
Even when he has reached across to other genres—as in his most recent picture, the London mob drama Eastern Promises (2007)—there’s a lingering interest in the totemic importance of physique. Every wound or scar stands as an entry on these gangsters’ curricula vitae. It’s notable that the film’s most heralded set piece is a knife fight in the chambers of a Turkish bath house, in which Viggo Mortensen’s hero combats two assailants while stark naked, a statuesque male nude contorted into a dance of death. Meanwhile, the ritual of gaining star tattoos, prized status symbols within the ranks of the Vory v Zakone, draws Cronenberg’s attention as an eroticized spectacle in itself, not just a cultural pointer. All this—Naked Lunch (1991) and M. Butterfly (1993) too—and he isn’t even gay.
Eastern Promises may be conceptually one of Cronenberg’s least ambitious films, but it has a kinky, perverse quality no other director could quite have approximated. No one else is quite like Cronenberg—not even his exact contemporary David Lynch, another freakshow auteur of passing resemblance but utterly distinct sensibility, or Atom Egoyan, another cerebral, bespectacled Canadian who has used a few of the same actors (Elias Koteas, Ian Holm, Sarah Polley, Don McKellar) in projects which do share a certain warped carnality with his compatriot’s. Cronenberg, like Lynch but not like Egoyan, has carved out his own genre. As he learned his craft throughout the 1970s and 1980s, developing greater skill and subtlety with actors, his films seemed to inform each other, even repeat each other, allowing roughly sketched ideas to evolve and gain emotional weight on increasingly broad canvases.
Cronenberg’s 1969 black and white featurette Stereo, made with funding obtained from the Canada Council under the pretense of writing a novel, is remarkable both in itself and as a testing ground for many of his key motifs. Though several shorts precede Stereo, he considers it his first finished, complete and autonomous film. There is the use of imposingly institutional modernist architecture—the movie was shot on the brutalist campus of the University of Toronto’s Scarborough College, a concrete prison which puts the small cast of characters on display, its dehumanizing bulk somehow exoticizing their every personal urge. They are test subjects, with Scarborough doubling as the Canadian Academy for Erotic Enquiry, a prototype for the scientific or medical institutions in Shivers (1975), Rabid (1977), The Brood (1979) and Scanners (1981). In all these subsequent films, the organizations fail, often cataclysmically, in their attempts to impose order on the human species. The more benign idea in Stereo, which feels like an experiment of Cronenberg’s own creation, is that the endowment of these volunteers with telepathic abilities will break down the heteronormative tyranny of the “obsolescent” family unit, encouraging them to fool around and form omnivorous sexual groupings.
The whole film is basically a pansexual orgy waiting to happen, its chances increased by the choice of lead actor, the dapper, overtly gay Ron Mlodzik, whose debonair gait in a black cloak, and expansive facial manner, are its funniest and most idiosyncratic assets.
Starting with Mlodzik, who reappeared in Cronenberg’s follow-up Crimes of the Future (1970), you can trace a line through the director’s male protagonists to see them consistently positioned as outsider figures, uncanny presences and the lodes of an alien sexuality which isn’t necessarily homosexual (but can be). Cronenberg’s men are both emotionally impenetrable, and all too often literally penetrated—like James Woods as the gutter-trawling TV exec Max Renn in Videodrome (1983), whose torso grows a vaginal slot into which videotapes or even firearms can be inserted, and Jude Law’s poor security guard Ted Pikul in eXistenZ (1997), who is queasy enough about having a game port installed in his lower spine before various organic appendages get lubricated and shoved up it. Jeff Goldblum, in the early stages of transformation in The Fly (1986), gains a bristling hormonal potency which makes him a demon in bed—in a good way, at least until his fingernails and ears start falling off. Meanwhile, the erotic possibilities in Naked Lunch and Crash (1996) proliferate, Stereo-like, between every cast member, not just along exclusively gay or straight lines: Holly Hunter + Rosanna Arquette + James Spader + Elias Koteas = six one-on-one copulations. There’s certainly an argument to be made that Cronenberg has done fuller justice to the permutations—the options—of how and who we fuck than any other living filmmaker, including such queer-cinema heroes as Haynes and Almodóvar. He is his own Academy for Erotic Inquiry.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
By Tim Robey
The Point
The best word I’ve come across to describe David Cronenberg’s filmmaking style is “disembodied.” It was voiced as a criticism, but I think he’d own up to it. Whatever squelchy or peculiar or downright disgusting thing is going on in his pictures, the camera tends to exhibit an almost serene, floating detachment, like a severed head calmly looking down at its own twitching torso.
Detachment is hardly the same thing as disinterest, and if Cronenberg has shown us one thing in his now 40 year career, it’s that cinema can both squelch and think. He has a habit of reaching for Descartes in discussing his films, which consistently operate at this interface between the visceral and the cerebral. I suppose it’s possible to be put off by both sides of the equation—the chilly rigor of his tonal strategies could very well disconcert the casual viewer as much as, say, the bugs with talking anuses. But when you’ve got the hang of Cronenberg, his filmmaking comes to seem forensically exploratory, and engaged in brave and singular ways with the potentials, as well as the pathologies, of the human animal.
“Body horror” was the term coined to contextualize Cronenberg’s work in the 1970s and 1980s, the period of his career when he worked almost exclusively in the science fiction/horror genre. Like all such phrases, it’s a shortcut: there’s more to understand than just an obsession with mutation and organs falling off. Cronenberg’s great concern has always been the body—he calls it “the first fact of human existence”—but his films differ substantially from the other horror cinema of their era in exploring our anatomies from the inside out. Limbs are rarely under threat from chainsaws in his films—they are more likely to atrophy or multiply or go the way of an arthropod.
Even when he has reached across to other genres—as in his most recent picture, the London mob drama Eastern Promises (2007)—there’s a lingering interest in the totemic importance of physique. Every wound or scar stands as an entry on these gangsters’ curricula vitae. It’s notable that the film’s most heralded set piece is a knife fight in the chambers of a Turkish bath house, in which Viggo Mortensen’s hero combats two assailants while stark naked, a statuesque male nude contorted into a dance of death. Meanwhile, the ritual of gaining star tattoos, prized status symbols within the ranks of the Vory v Zakone, draws Cronenberg’s attention as an eroticized spectacle in itself, not just a cultural pointer. All this—Naked Lunch (1991) and M. Butterfly (1993) too—and he isn’t even gay.
Eastern Promises may be conceptually one of Cronenberg’s least ambitious films, but it has a kinky, perverse quality no other director could quite have approximated. No one else is quite like Cronenberg—not even his exact contemporary David Lynch, another freakshow auteur of passing resemblance but utterly distinct sensibility, or Atom Egoyan, another cerebral, bespectacled Canadian who has used a few of the same actors (Elias Koteas, Ian Holm, Sarah Polley, Don McKellar) in projects which do share a certain warped carnality with his compatriot’s. Cronenberg, like Lynch but not like Egoyan, has carved out his own genre. As he learned his craft throughout the 1970s and 1980s, developing greater skill and subtlety with actors, his films seemed to inform each other, even repeat each other, allowing roughly sketched ideas to evolve and gain emotional weight on increasingly broad canvases.
Cronenberg’s 1969 black and white featurette Stereo, made with funding obtained from the Canada Council under the pretense of writing a novel, is remarkable both in itself and as a testing ground for many of his key motifs. Though several shorts precede Stereo, he considers it his first finished, complete and autonomous film. There is the use of imposingly institutional modernist architecture—the movie was shot on the brutalist campus of the University of Toronto’s Scarborough College, a concrete prison which puts the small cast of characters on display, its dehumanizing bulk somehow exoticizing their every personal urge. They are test subjects, with Scarborough doubling as the Canadian Academy for Erotic Enquiry, a prototype for the scientific or medical institutions in Shivers (1975), Rabid (1977), The Brood (1979) and Scanners (1981). In all these subsequent films, the organizations fail, often cataclysmically, in their attempts to impose order on the human species. The more benign idea in Stereo, which feels like an experiment of Cronenberg’s own creation, is that the endowment of these volunteers with telepathic abilities will break down the heteronormative tyranny of the “obsolescent” family unit, encouraging them to fool around and form omnivorous sexual groupings.
The whole film is basically a pansexual orgy waiting to happen, its chances increased by the choice of lead actor, the dapper, overtly gay Ron Mlodzik, whose debonair gait in a black cloak, and expansive facial manner, are its funniest and most idiosyncratic assets.
Starting with Mlodzik, who reappeared in Cronenberg’s follow-up Crimes of the Future (1970), you can trace a line through the director’s male protagonists to see them consistently positioned as outsider figures, uncanny presences and the lodes of an alien sexuality which isn’t necessarily homosexual (but can be). Cronenberg’s men are both emotionally impenetrable, and all too often literally penetrated—like James Woods as the gutter-trawling TV exec Max Renn in Videodrome (1983), whose torso grows a vaginal slot into which videotapes or even firearms can be inserted, and Jude Law’s poor security guard Ted Pikul in eXistenZ (1997), who is queasy enough about having a game port installed in his lower spine before various organic appendages get lubricated and shoved up it. Jeff Goldblum, in the early stages of transformation in The Fly (1986), gains a bristling hormonal potency which makes him a demon in bed—in a good way, at least until his fingernails and ears start falling off. Meanwhile, the erotic possibilities in Naked Lunch and Crash (1996) proliferate, Stereo-like, between every cast member, not just along exclusively gay or straight lines: Holly Hunter + Rosanna Arquette + James Spader + Elias Koteas = six one-on-one copulations. There’s certainly an argument to be made that Cronenberg has done fuller justice to the permutations—the options—of how and who we fuck than any other living filmmaker, including such queer-cinema heroes as Haynes and Almodóvar. He is his own Academy for Erotic Inquiry.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Robert Becker: Best Picture No Shill for War Hubris, Invasion or Empire - Robert Scheer Better at Politics than Film Criticism
(Courtesy of Danny Mayer)
Best Picture No Shill for War Hubris, Invasion or Empire - Robert Scheer Better at Politics than Film Criticism
by Robert Becker
The Smirking Chimp
...
What's brilliant about "Hurt Locker" is not just its compelling take on damaged soldiers but the enticing ambiguities, making it a telling Rorschach test. The director endorses bravery but not the mission, thus deflecting nonsense she's just a white-flag-waving traitor. U.S. Army advisers withdrew because Bigelow didn't appear pro-war enough. The director knew better, that audiences would be less engaged in experiencing the front lines when political lines in the sand are drawn (either gung ho or Scheer's).
Notably, on screen, this disposal team saves no lives or assures no American safety. Sustained, high tension makes the opposite point: no one here is safe, victory is an illusion, and justification for the occupation, AWOL. Sometimes what's not said or dramatized matters more than what so immediate, however well crafted.
My personal take: the movie presents menacing patterns of randomized violence. Dramatizing the life-long trauma of soldiers we fund, without redemptive trade-offs, questions militarized violence as solution. War here is mania, whether personal and/or political addiction, and that makes the movie qualify as both anti-war and anti-Iraq. Its opening moment quotes strident anti-war critic, Chris Hedges, on war as addiction (vs. honor), and the movie follows through with this dark view.
First hand, we experience unspeakable pain endured by sympathetic characters with little to show for it. The protagonist is brave but also an obsessed daredevil, dangerous to himself and his crew - no hero for our children or his, no exemplar for the glory of Yankee war-making. The one visible Army officer conspicuously rags on James' recklessness - without narrative offset. While Bigelow doesn't flesh in background Iraqis, nor does she detail Americans, except our team and one psychologist, foolishly getting himself blown up. Another non-hero. Yes, the movie presents Iraq as American-instigated dogfight, but neither side is honored, neither murderous insurgents, nor the more powerful, hubristic, occupying Americans.
Any Hollywood war movie not glorifying noble Americans in justified armed combat against a dastardly enemy is exceptional. If "Hurt Locker" was intended to promote positives about Iraq, count it an utter failure, from first to last scene. The movie's finale provides the simplest "statement" -- reinforcing Iraq as an endless, addictive drug for a crisis junkie doomed to tempt death, incapable of living with his own family in his home country. Imperial triumph, indeed.
To Read the Entire Essay
Best Picture No Shill for War Hubris, Invasion or Empire - Robert Scheer Better at Politics than Film Criticism
by Robert Becker
The Smirking Chimp
...
What's brilliant about "Hurt Locker" is not just its compelling take on damaged soldiers but the enticing ambiguities, making it a telling Rorschach test. The director endorses bravery but not the mission, thus deflecting nonsense she's just a white-flag-waving traitor. U.S. Army advisers withdrew because Bigelow didn't appear pro-war enough. The director knew better, that audiences would be less engaged in experiencing the front lines when political lines in the sand are drawn (either gung ho or Scheer's).
Notably, on screen, this disposal team saves no lives or assures no American safety. Sustained, high tension makes the opposite point: no one here is safe, victory is an illusion, and justification for the occupation, AWOL. Sometimes what's not said or dramatized matters more than what so immediate, however well crafted.
My personal take: the movie presents menacing patterns of randomized violence. Dramatizing the life-long trauma of soldiers we fund, without redemptive trade-offs, questions militarized violence as solution. War here is mania, whether personal and/or political addiction, and that makes the movie qualify as both anti-war and anti-Iraq. Its opening moment quotes strident anti-war critic, Chris Hedges, on war as addiction (vs. honor), and the movie follows through with this dark view.
First hand, we experience unspeakable pain endured by sympathetic characters with little to show for it. The protagonist is brave but also an obsessed daredevil, dangerous to himself and his crew - no hero for our children or his, no exemplar for the glory of Yankee war-making. The one visible Army officer conspicuously rags on James' recklessness - without narrative offset. While Bigelow doesn't flesh in background Iraqis, nor does she detail Americans, except our team and one psychologist, foolishly getting himself blown up. Another non-hero. Yes, the movie presents Iraq as American-instigated dogfight, but neither side is honored, neither murderous insurgents, nor the more powerful, hubristic, occupying Americans.
Any Hollywood war movie not glorifying noble Americans in justified armed combat against a dastardly enemy is exceptional. If "Hurt Locker" was intended to promote positives about Iraq, count it an utter failure, from first to last scene. The movie's finale provides the simplest "statement" -- reinforcing Iraq as an endless, addictive drug for a crisis junkie doomed to tempt death, incapable of living with his own family in his home country. Imperial triumph, indeed.
To Read the Entire Essay
Democracy Now: Robert McChesney and John Nichols on “The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again”
Robert McChesney and John Nichols on “The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again”
Democracy Now
University of Illinois Professor Robert McChesney and The Nation correspondent John Nichols, two leading advocates of the media reform movement, join us to talk about their new book, The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again. McChesney and Nichols argue that journalism should be seen as a public good and that the government should help save American journalism by granting more subsidies to newspapers and media outlets.
Guests:
Robert McChesney and John Nichols, McChesney is a professor at the University of Illinois, while Nichols is the Washington correspondent for The Nation magazine. Together they helped found the media reform organization Free Press. Their new book is titled The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again.
To Watch/Listen/Read
Democracy Now
University of Illinois Professor Robert McChesney and The Nation correspondent John Nichols, two leading advocates of the media reform movement, join us to talk about their new book, The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again. McChesney and Nichols argue that journalism should be seen as a public good and that the government should help save American journalism by granting more subsidies to newspapers and media outlets.
Guests:
Robert McChesney and John Nichols, McChesney is a professor at the University of Illinois, while Nichols is the Washington correspondent for The Nation magazine. Together they helped found the media reform organization Free Press. Their new book is titled The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again.
To Watch/Listen/Read
Jessica Hays: House Budget plays with Kentucky's future
House Budget plays with Kentucky's future
by Jessica Hays
Kentuckians for the Commonwealth (KFTC)
Now that the House budget proposal has been out for a few days, we’re starting to see the extent to which the House contorted numbers and ideas to avoid having to support real reforms.
The budget does a couple of things that are not bad. It puts some much needed money into community health centers and services like Meals on Wheels, and starts to fund the Boni Bill, a bill that passed in 2007 to increase the protections of social service workers. This funding is good and necessary. But in addition to the cuts to higher ed, adult education, the school year and teacher pay, and services that we need, the budget does many things that show a lack of leadership by playing with our future instead of solving our problems of today.
The budget includes $74 million dollars that is the result of moving the one paycheck for state workers back one day, from June 30, 2012 to July 1, 2012. This way, the $74 million dollars is technically part of the 2012-2014 budget cycle. This little nugget was slipped in to the 238th page of the House budget proposal. It didn’t make any headlines, but was embedded in a Herald-Leader article about the House’s proposal to halve the salary of Economic Development Secretary Larry Hayes.
It’s an important little nugget, though, because it shows the acrobatics that legislators were willing to perform to avoid taking up real solutions. A budget that’s “balanced” because it pays state workers the day after the budget cycle? It doesn’t inspire confidence, does it?
This shell game is also exactly the kind of game that jeopardizes Kentucky’s credit rating. Kentucky is already on the watch list of some of these credit rating agencies, both because of our policy makers’ failure to pass sustainable revenue reforms, and because of our dependence on a manufacturing economy. Moody’s is one such agency. When their analysts look at Kentucky, they don’t see a credible borrower. According to a memo from the Legislative Research Commission in September of 2009, Kentucky's leadership should be very concerned about what credit ranking agencies are seeing when they look at Kentucky. Here are the pieces of evidence they see:
Our lack of leadership predates the recession. The LRC echoes credit agencies' concern that Kentucky depends on one-shot, nonrecurring revenue sources to fund services and programs that we rely on every year. Eventually, the smoke and mirrors aren’t going to be able to hide the ever-worsening real-world gap between the revenue the state brings in and the cost of the services that we need.
To Read the Rest of the Report
by Jessica Hays
Kentuckians for the Commonwealth (KFTC)
Now that the House budget proposal has been out for a few days, we’re starting to see the extent to which the House contorted numbers and ideas to avoid having to support real reforms.
The budget does a couple of things that are not bad. It puts some much needed money into community health centers and services like Meals on Wheels, and starts to fund the Boni Bill, a bill that passed in 2007 to increase the protections of social service workers. This funding is good and necessary. But in addition to the cuts to higher ed, adult education, the school year and teacher pay, and services that we need, the budget does many things that show a lack of leadership by playing with our future instead of solving our problems of today.
The budget includes $74 million dollars that is the result of moving the one paycheck for state workers back one day, from June 30, 2012 to July 1, 2012. This way, the $74 million dollars is technically part of the 2012-2014 budget cycle. This little nugget was slipped in to the 238th page of the House budget proposal. It didn’t make any headlines, but was embedded in a Herald-Leader article about the House’s proposal to halve the salary of Economic Development Secretary Larry Hayes.
It’s an important little nugget, though, because it shows the acrobatics that legislators were willing to perform to avoid taking up real solutions. A budget that’s “balanced” because it pays state workers the day after the budget cycle? It doesn’t inspire confidence, does it?
This shell game is also exactly the kind of game that jeopardizes Kentucky’s credit rating. Kentucky is already on the watch list of some of these credit rating agencies, both because of our policy makers’ failure to pass sustainable revenue reforms, and because of our dependence on a manufacturing economy. Moody’s is one such agency. When their analysts look at Kentucky, they don’t see a credible borrower. According to a memo from the Legislative Research Commission in September of 2009, Kentucky's leadership should be very concerned about what credit ranking agencies are seeing when they look at Kentucky. Here are the pieces of evidence they see:
Our lack of leadership predates the recession. The LRC echoes credit agencies' concern that Kentucky depends on one-shot, nonrecurring revenue sources to fund services and programs that we rely on every year. Eventually, the smoke and mirrors aren’t going to be able to hide the ever-worsening real-world gap between the revenue the state brings in and the cost of the services that we need.
To Read the Rest of the Report
Petra Bartosiewicz: The Intelligence Factory -- How America Makes its Enemies Disappear
The intelligence factory: How America makes its enemies disappear
By Petra Bartosiewicz
Harper's
...
As the “global war on terror” enters its ninth year, under the leadership of its second commander in chief, certain ongoing assumptions have gained the force of common wisdom. One of them, as Barack Obama explained in a major policy speech last May, is that we have entered a “new era” that will “present new challenges to our application of the law” and require “new tools to protect the American people.” Another, as Obama made clear in the same speech, is that the purpose of these new tools and laws is “to prevent attacks instead of simply prosecuting those who try to carry them out.” These positions are appealing, but they fail to address what might be thought of as an underlying economic disequilibrium. The continued political appetite for a global war on terror has led to a commodification of “actionable intelligence,” which is a product, chiefly, of human prisoners like Aafia Siddiqui. Because this war, by definition, has no physical or temporal boundaries, the demand for such intelligence has no limit. But the world contains a relatively small number of terrorists and an even smaller number of terrorist plots. Our demand for intelligence far outstrips the supply of prisoners. Where the United States itself has been unable to meet that demand, therefore, it has embraced a solution that is the essence of globalization. We outsource the work to countries, like Pakistan, whose political circumstances allow them to produce prisoners with far greater efficiency.
What the CIA and the FBI understand as an acquisition solution, however, others see as a human-rights debacle. Just as thousands of political dissidents, suspected criminals, and enemies of the state were “disappeared” from Latin America over the course of several decades of CIA-funded dirty wars, so too have hundreds of “persons of interest” around the world begun to disappear as a consequence of the global war on terror, which in many ways has become a globalized version of those earlier, regional failures of democracy.
Many individual cases are well known. Binyam Mohamed, an alleged conspirator in Jose Padilla’s now debunked “dirty bomb plot,” was arrested in Karachi in 2002 and flown by the CIA to Morocco, where he was tortured for eighteen months. He eventually emerged into the non-covert prison system, as a detainee at Guantánamo, and was released earlier this year without charge. Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen, was arrested at New York City’s John F. Kennedy Airport in 2002 while on his way home from a vacation, flown by the CIA to a Syrian prison, held in a coffin-size cell for nearly a year, and then released, also without charges. Saud Memon, a Pakistani businessman rumored to own the plot of land where the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was murdered, was arrested in 2003, held by the United States at an unknown location until 2006, then “released” to Pakistan, where in April 2007 he finally emerged, badly beaten and weighing just eighty pounds, on the doorstep of his Karachi home. He died a few weeks later.
The total number of men and women who have been kidnapped and imprisoned for U.S. intelligence-gathering purposes is difficult to determine. Apart from Iraq and Afghanistan, the main theaters of combat, Pakistan is our primary source of publicly known detainees—researchers at Seton Hall University estimated in 2006 that two thirds of the prisoners at Guantánamo were arrested in Pakistan or by Pakistani authorities—and so it is reasonable to assume that the country is also a major supplier of ghost detainees. Human Rights Watch has tracked enforced disappearances in Pakistan since before 2001. The group’s counterterrorism director, Joanne Mariner, told me that the number of missing persons in the country grew “to a flood” as U.S. counterterrorism operations peaked between 2002 and 2004. In that same three-year period, U.S. aid to Pakistan totaled $4.7 billion, up from $9.1 million in the three years prior to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Correlation does not prove causation, of course, but Pakistan’s former president, Pervez Musharraf, did claim in his 2006 memoir, In the Line of Fire, that his country had delivered 369 Al Qaeda suspects to the United States for “millions of dollars” in bounties (a boast he neatly elides in the Urdu edition). It is reasonable to suspect this figure is on the low side.
One reason estimates are so inconclusive, of course, is that the business of disappearance is inherently ambiguous. Missing-person reports filed in Pakistan rarely claim that the detained individual was picked up by the CIA or the FBI. Instead, the detainee is almost always arrested by “city police” or “civilian clothed men” or unidentified “secret agency personnel” who arrive in “unmarked vehicles.” The secretary-general of the Pakistani NGO Human Rights Commission, Ibn Abdur Rehman, described the process. “A man is picked up at his house, brought to the police station,” he said. “The family comes with him and are told, ‘He’ll be released in an hour, go home.’ They come back in an hour and are told, ‘Sorry, he’s been handed off to the intelligence people and taken to Islamabad.’ After that, the individual is never heard from again. When the family tries to file a missing-person report, the police won’t take it, and no one admits to having custody of the person.” Some of the disappeared pass directly to U.S. custody and reappear months or years later at Guantánamo or Bagram air base. Others remain captives of Pakistan’s multiple intelligence agencies or are shipped to places like Uzbekistan, whose torture policies are well known. Others simply vanish, their fate revealed only by clerical errors, or when they turn up dead.
Most of the arrests and detentions take place under the auspices of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which the CIA helped expand in the 1980s largely in order to wage a proxy war against Soviet forces in Afghanistan (where the ISI continues to wield considerable influence). The agency has evolved into a powerful institution with its own agendas and alliances—it has long pursued ethnic separatists in the Baluchistan region, for instance, where the Human Rights Commission estimates that at least 600 individuals have disappeared—and the result is that the CIA itself often has little knowledge of the provenance or purpose of a given arrest.
Such may be the case with Siddiqui. To my knowledge, the only current or former U.S. official to comment publicly on the significance of her capture was John Kiriakou, a retired CIA officer who gained notoriety in 2007 when he told ABC News that the CIA waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah, an Al Qaeda lieutenant, produced life-saving intelligence in less than a minute. Although Justice Department memos later revealed that Zubaydah was waterboarded eighty-three times, Kiriakou’s comments did much to foster acceptance of the practice among the American public—and his description of Siddiqui seemed calibrated to achieve a similar effect. In 2008 he told ABC News, which had hired him as a consultant after his waterboarding interview, “I don’t think we’ve captured anybody as important and as well connected as she since 2003. We knew that she had been planning, or at least involved in the planning of, a wide variety of different operations.” When I called Kiriakou to ask him about those operations, though, he said the extent of his knowledge was that Siddiqui’s name “had popped up an awful lot” while he was in Pakistan searching for Zubaydah in 2002, and that “the FBI talked about her so often that I thought she must be a big fish.” After he left Pakistan, he forgot all about Siddiqui until ABC called for an interview. “I actually had to Google as to remember who she was,” he said.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
By Petra Bartosiewicz
Harper's
...
As the “global war on terror” enters its ninth year, under the leadership of its second commander in chief, certain ongoing assumptions have gained the force of common wisdom. One of them, as Barack Obama explained in a major policy speech last May, is that we have entered a “new era” that will “present new challenges to our application of the law” and require “new tools to protect the American people.” Another, as Obama made clear in the same speech, is that the purpose of these new tools and laws is “to prevent attacks instead of simply prosecuting those who try to carry them out.” These positions are appealing, but they fail to address what might be thought of as an underlying economic disequilibrium. The continued political appetite for a global war on terror has led to a commodification of “actionable intelligence,” which is a product, chiefly, of human prisoners like Aafia Siddiqui. Because this war, by definition, has no physical or temporal boundaries, the demand for such intelligence has no limit. But the world contains a relatively small number of terrorists and an even smaller number of terrorist plots. Our demand for intelligence far outstrips the supply of prisoners. Where the United States itself has been unable to meet that demand, therefore, it has embraced a solution that is the essence of globalization. We outsource the work to countries, like Pakistan, whose political circumstances allow them to produce prisoners with far greater efficiency.
What the CIA and the FBI understand as an acquisition solution, however, others see as a human-rights debacle. Just as thousands of political dissidents, suspected criminals, and enemies of the state were “disappeared” from Latin America over the course of several decades of CIA-funded dirty wars, so too have hundreds of “persons of interest” around the world begun to disappear as a consequence of the global war on terror, which in many ways has become a globalized version of those earlier, regional failures of democracy.
Many individual cases are well known. Binyam Mohamed, an alleged conspirator in Jose Padilla’s now debunked “dirty bomb plot,” was arrested in Karachi in 2002 and flown by the CIA to Morocco, where he was tortured for eighteen months. He eventually emerged into the non-covert prison system, as a detainee at Guantánamo, and was released earlier this year without charge. Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen, was arrested at New York City’s John F. Kennedy Airport in 2002 while on his way home from a vacation, flown by the CIA to a Syrian prison, held in a coffin-size cell for nearly a year, and then released, also without charges. Saud Memon, a Pakistani businessman rumored to own the plot of land where the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was murdered, was arrested in 2003, held by the United States at an unknown location until 2006, then “released” to Pakistan, where in April 2007 he finally emerged, badly beaten and weighing just eighty pounds, on the doorstep of his Karachi home. He died a few weeks later.
The total number of men and women who have been kidnapped and imprisoned for U.S. intelligence-gathering purposes is difficult to determine. Apart from Iraq and Afghanistan, the main theaters of combat, Pakistan is our primary source of publicly known detainees—researchers at Seton Hall University estimated in 2006 that two thirds of the prisoners at Guantánamo were arrested in Pakistan or by Pakistani authorities—and so it is reasonable to assume that the country is also a major supplier of ghost detainees. Human Rights Watch has tracked enforced disappearances in Pakistan since before 2001. The group’s counterterrorism director, Joanne Mariner, told me that the number of missing persons in the country grew “to a flood” as U.S. counterterrorism operations peaked between 2002 and 2004. In that same three-year period, U.S. aid to Pakistan totaled $4.7 billion, up from $9.1 million in the three years prior to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Correlation does not prove causation, of course, but Pakistan’s former president, Pervez Musharraf, did claim in his 2006 memoir, In the Line of Fire, that his country had delivered 369 Al Qaeda suspects to the United States for “millions of dollars” in bounties (a boast he neatly elides in the Urdu edition). It is reasonable to suspect this figure is on the low side.
One reason estimates are so inconclusive, of course, is that the business of disappearance is inherently ambiguous. Missing-person reports filed in Pakistan rarely claim that the detained individual was picked up by the CIA or the FBI. Instead, the detainee is almost always arrested by “city police” or “civilian clothed men” or unidentified “secret agency personnel” who arrive in “unmarked vehicles.” The secretary-general of the Pakistani NGO Human Rights Commission, Ibn Abdur Rehman, described the process. “A man is picked up at his house, brought to the police station,” he said. “The family comes with him and are told, ‘He’ll be released in an hour, go home.’ They come back in an hour and are told, ‘Sorry, he’s been handed off to the intelligence people and taken to Islamabad.’ After that, the individual is never heard from again. When the family tries to file a missing-person report, the police won’t take it, and no one admits to having custody of the person.” Some of the disappeared pass directly to U.S. custody and reappear months or years later at Guantánamo or Bagram air base. Others remain captives of Pakistan’s multiple intelligence agencies or are shipped to places like Uzbekistan, whose torture policies are well known. Others simply vanish, their fate revealed only by clerical errors, or when they turn up dead.
Most of the arrests and detentions take place under the auspices of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which the CIA helped expand in the 1980s largely in order to wage a proxy war against Soviet forces in Afghanistan (where the ISI continues to wield considerable influence). The agency has evolved into a powerful institution with its own agendas and alliances—it has long pursued ethnic separatists in the Baluchistan region, for instance, where the Human Rights Commission estimates that at least 600 individuals have disappeared—and the result is that the CIA itself often has little knowledge of the provenance or purpose of a given arrest.
Such may be the case with Siddiqui. To my knowledge, the only current or former U.S. official to comment publicly on the significance of her capture was John Kiriakou, a retired CIA officer who gained notoriety in 2007 when he told ABC News that the CIA waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah, an Al Qaeda lieutenant, produced life-saving intelligence in less than a minute. Although Justice Department memos later revealed that Zubaydah was waterboarded eighty-three times, Kiriakou’s comments did much to foster acceptance of the practice among the American public—and his description of Siddiqui seemed calibrated to achieve a similar effect. In 2008 he told ABC News, which had hired him as a consultant after his waterboarding interview, “I don’t think we’ve captured anybody as important and as well connected as she since 2003. We knew that she had been planning, or at least involved in the planning of, a wide variety of different operations.” When I called Kiriakou to ask him about those operations, though, he said the extent of his knowledge was that Siddiqui’s name “had popped up an awful lot” while he was in Pakistan searching for Zubaydah in 2002, and that “the FBI talked about her so often that I thought she must be a big fish.” After he left Pakistan, he forgot all about Siddiqui until ABC called for an interview. “I actually had to Google as to remember who she was,” he said.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Democracy Now: Ignoring Torture Claims and Questionable Evidence, New York Jury Convicts Pakistani Scientist Aafia Siddiqui
Ignoring Torture Claims and Questionable Evidence, New York Jury Convicts Pakistani Scientist Aafia Siddiqui
Democracy Now
A New York jury has convicted the US-educated Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui of attempted murder for shooting at US forces while jailed in Afghanistan in 2008. None of the Americans were injured, but Siddiqui was shot and wounded while in US custody. Human rights groups have long alleged that Siddiqui was forcibly disappeared by Pakistani authorities in 2003 and interrogated and tortured at the behest of the United States. In her testimony, Siddiqui claimed to have been held in a US secret prison. We speak to Siddiqui family spokesperson Tina Foster of the International Justice Network and Petra Bartosiewicz, an independent journalist who has been closely following Siddiqui’s case.
Guests:
Tina Foster, Executive Director of the International Justice Network and the spokesperson for Aafia Siddiqui’s family.
Petra Bartosiewicz, independent journalist who wrote about Aafia Siddiqui in the November 2009 edition of Harper’s Magazine and covered the trial with daily dispatches for the website Cage Prisoners. She is also working on a book titled The Best Terrorists We Could Find, an investigation of terrorism trials in the US since 9/11.
To Read/Listen/Watch
Democracy Now
A New York jury has convicted the US-educated Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui of attempted murder for shooting at US forces while jailed in Afghanistan in 2008. None of the Americans were injured, but Siddiqui was shot and wounded while in US custody. Human rights groups have long alleged that Siddiqui was forcibly disappeared by Pakistani authorities in 2003 and interrogated and tortured at the behest of the United States. In her testimony, Siddiqui claimed to have been held in a US secret prison. We speak to Siddiqui family spokesperson Tina Foster of the International Justice Network and Petra Bartosiewicz, an independent journalist who has been closely following Siddiqui’s case.
Guests:
Tina Foster, Executive Director of the International Justice Network and the spokesperson for Aafia Siddiqui’s family.
Petra Bartosiewicz, independent journalist who wrote about Aafia Siddiqui in the November 2009 edition of Harper’s Magazine and covered the trial with daily dispatches for the website Cage Prisoners. She is also working on a book titled The Best Terrorists We Could Find, an investigation of terrorism trials in the US since 9/11.
To Read/Listen/Watch
Friday, March 12, 2010
Democracy Now: The Freedom Riders -- New Documentary Recounts Historic 1961 Effort to Challenge Segregated Bus System in the Deep South
The Freedom Riders: New Documentary Recounts Historic 1961 Effort to Challenge Segregated Bus System in the Deep South
Democracy Now
The International Civil Rights Center and Museum opens ... in Greensboro, North Carolina at the site of the historic 1960 Woolworth’s sit-in. To mark ... Black History Month, we turn to the story of another group of young people who were inspired by the success of the nonviolent strategy of the Greensboro sit-in. Starting in May of 1961, mixed groups of black and white students began taking interstate buses into the Deep South, risking their lives to challenge segregation. They called themselves the Freedom Riders. White mobs responded with violence. One bus was set on fire with the Freedom Riders. Numerous Freedom Riders were brutally beaten and hospitalized. We speak to Stanley Nelson, the director of the new documentary The Freedom Riders that premiered at Sundance last week. We also speak to two of the original Freedom Riders, Bernard Lafayette and Jim Zwerg.
Guests:
Stanley Nelson, award-winning filmmaker and director of The Freedom Riders. His other films include The Murder of Emmett Till and Wounded Knee.
Bernard Lafayette, participated in the Nashville-New Orleans Freedom Ride in 1961. Dr. Bernard Lafayette is Distinguished Professor in Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding and senior scholar-in-residence at Emory University.
Jim Zwerg, participated in the Nashville-New Orleans Freedom Ride in 1961. He was severely beaten by a mob in Montgomery, Alabama.
To Read/Listen/Watch
Also check out:
The Freedom Rides, Pt. 1
The Freedom Rides, Pt. 2
Democracy Now
The International Civil Rights Center and Museum opens ... in Greensboro, North Carolina at the site of the historic 1960 Woolworth’s sit-in. To mark ... Black History Month, we turn to the story of another group of young people who were inspired by the success of the nonviolent strategy of the Greensboro sit-in. Starting in May of 1961, mixed groups of black and white students began taking interstate buses into the Deep South, risking their lives to challenge segregation. They called themselves the Freedom Riders. White mobs responded with violence. One bus was set on fire with the Freedom Riders. Numerous Freedom Riders were brutally beaten and hospitalized. We speak to Stanley Nelson, the director of the new documentary The Freedom Riders that premiered at Sundance last week. We also speak to two of the original Freedom Riders, Bernard Lafayette and Jim Zwerg.
Guests:
Stanley Nelson, award-winning filmmaker and director of The Freedom Riders. His other films include The Murder of Emmett Till and Wounded Knee.
Bernard Lafayette, participated in the Nashville-New Orleans Freedom Ride in 1961. Dr. Bernard Lafayette is Distinguished Professor in Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding and senior scholar-in-residence at Emory University.
Jim Zwerg, participated in the Nashville-New Orleans Freedom Ride in 1961. He was severely beaten by a mob in Montgomery, Alabama.
To Read/Listen/Watch
Also check out:
The Freedom Rides, Pt. 1
The Freedom Rides, Pt. 2
After the Greek Riots
An ongoing archive of reports/photos hosted by Occupied London on the general strikes and civil strife in Greece: After the Greek Riots
More resources:
Last Hours: The Situation in Greece (via Michael Marchman)
More resources:
Last Hours: The Situation in Greece (via Michael Marchman)
Democracy Now: “Blackwatergate” –- Private Military Firm in Firestorm of Controversy over Involvements in Iraq, Afghanistan and Germany
“Blackwatergate”–Private Military Firm in Firestorm of Controversy over Involvements in Iraq, Afghanistan and Germany
Democracy Now
Blackwater is all over the news. In the last seventy-two hours, a series of breaking developments involving the notorious private military firm have come to light, ranging from their involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, and even Germany, as well as legal cases here at home. We speak with investigative journalist and Democracy Now! correspondent Jeremy Scahill and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), a leading member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the chair of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, who is launching an investigation into why two Blackwater contractors were among the dead in the December 30 suicide bombing at the CIA station at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost, Afghanistan.
To Read/Listen/Watch
Democracy Now
Blackwater is all over the news. In the last seventy-two hours, a series of breaking developments involving the notorious private military firm have come to light, ranging from their involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, and even Germany, as well as legal cases here at home. We speak with investigative journalist and Democracy Now! correspondent Jeremy Scahill and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), a leading member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the chair of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, who is launching an investigation into why two Blackwater contractors were among the dead in the December 30 suicide bombing at the CIA station at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost, Afghanistan.
To Read/Listen/Watch
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Mark Benjamin: Waterboarding for Dummies
Waterboarding for dummies: Internal CIA documents reveal a meticulous protocol that was far more brutal than Dick Cheney's "dunk in the water"
By Mark Benjamin
Salon
Self-proclaimed waterboarding fan Dick Cheney called it a no-brainer in a 2006 radio interview: Terror suspects should get a "a dunk in the water." But recently released internal documents reveal the controversial "enhanced interrogation" practice was far more brutal on detainees than Cheney's description sounds, and was administered with meticulous cruelty.
Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney "specially designed" to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner's nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking – and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.
The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding "session." Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to "dam the runoff" and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee's mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second "applications" of liquid in each two-hour session – and could dump water over a detainee's nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session – a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding – the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.
"This is revolting and it is deeply disturbing," said Dr. Scott Allen, co-director of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights at Brown University who has reviewed all of the documents for Physicians for Human Rights. "The so-called science here is a total departure from any ethics or any legitimate purpose. They are saying, ‘This is how risky and harmful the procedure is, but we are still going to do it.' It just sounds like lunacy," he said. "This fine-tuning of torture is unethical, incompetent and a disgrace to medicine."
To Read the Rest of the Article
By Mark Benjamin
Salon
Self-proclaimed waterboarding fan Dick Cheney called it a no-brainer in a 2006 radio interview: Terror suspects should get a "a dunk in the water." But recently released internal documents reveal the controversial "enhanced interrogation" practice was far more brutal on detainees than Cheney's description sounds, and was administered with meticulous cruelty.
Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney "specially designed" to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner's nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking – and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.
The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding "session." Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to "dam the runoff" and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee's mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second "applications" of liquid in each two-hour session – and could dump water over a detainee's nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session – a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding – the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.
"This is revolting and it is deeply disturbing," said Dr. Scott Allen, co-director of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights at Brown University who has reviewed all of the documents for Physicians for Human Rights. "The so-called science here is a total departure from any ethics or any legitimate purpose. They are saying, ‘This is how risky and harmful the procedure is, but we are still going to do it.' It just sounds like lunacy," he said. "This fine-tuning of torture is unethical, incompetent and a disgrace to medicine."
To Read the Rest of the Article
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart: Sour Gropes
(Trust me--this is very good :)
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Sour Gropes | ||||
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