Greg Palast: A Resounding Denouncement of George Galloway

(Written on the eve of their debate--see earlier post for video of the debate)

WHAT'S LEFT? GALLOWAY VERSUS HITCHENS; PROGRESSIVES VERSUS OURSELVES
By Greg Palast

Man, it just felt so good watching George Galloway rip Senator Coleman an extra exit hole. In May 2005, you'll remember, while most American politicians were mincing and cowering, the Honorable Member of the British Parliament, George Galloway, told a panel of stunned US congressmen:

Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.

It was one hell of a performance.

Tonight, Galloway will launch his American tour, a kind of extended curtain call to his US Senate debut, starting with a Punch-and-Judy show with Christopher Hitchens in New York.

In May, our Bush-kissing Congressmen could only respond to Galloway's challenge with dusty old smears and lame-ass questions.

But before we rally 'round this stand-up guy from Britain, we should ask him a few questions of our own.

Honorable Mr. Galloway, you met with Saddam Hussein in Baghdad in 1994 and said, "Sir, I salute your courage, your strength your indefatigability. And I want you to know that we are with you until victory, until victory, until Jerusalem."

After this effusive praise for Saddam, the two of you shared some Quality Street chocolates and some funny stories about Winston Churchill.

In 1990, Saddam executed a troublesome reporter, Farzad Bazoft, of the Observer newspaper of London. You complained about it at the time. Some time later, Saddam finished off about 100,000 Shi'ites and Kurds.

My questions are, "Are Quality Street chocolates your favorite brand? And did you forget the name of the reporter that Saddam executed? And how is it that you found the courage to challenge a bunch of US Senators but became such a pussy cat when confronted with a man whose killing spree easily exceeds theirs?"

And when you were challenged on your arse-licking praise of the dictator, why did you prevaricate and obfuscate by saying the worshipful words were for the Iraqi people, not Saddam. In fact, your words were very specific: "Your Excellency, I thought the president would appreciate to know that even today, three years after the war, I still meet families who are calling their newborn sons Saddam."

I have to say, Mr. Galloway, you are a charitable man with a big heart. But the charity is for whom? You founded something called the Mariam Appeal, which raised cash on your solemn promise that, "The balance after Mariam?s hospital bills have been paid will be sent as medicine and medical supplies to the children she had to leave behind." But little of the money seems to have gone there, isn't that correct, Mr. Galloway? It seems that nearly a million dollars can't be accounted for. And the diversion of most of the money was, you said, for "emergency" purposes. Was one of those emergencies the payments to your wife?

And the source of nearly half a million dollars of that money, Honorable Sir, came from a trader in the corrupt Oil-for-Food program. The payment was equal to the profits earned by this oil trader who was blessed with discount oil from Saddam. Is that correct?

So if we add it up, Mr. Galloway, while you were railing about medicines denied Iraqis by Messrs. Bush and Blair, you were taking money skimmed from the program earmarked to pay for those medicines. And other moneys donated for medicine for Iraqis you and your group also skimmed off for "legitimate expenses" of yours, is that correct?

George Bush took money from unnamed Persian Gulf sources, as you apparently have. Should I question him, or simply ask him if his purposes were "legitimate" or an "emergency"?

And might I have a copy of the financial records of your "charity"? You promised to make them public but the records now seemed to have disappeared into Jordan. Would you mind retrieving those?

And why did you tell the US Senate the British Charity Commission "recovered all money in and all money out ... they found no impropriety"? I have read their findings. In fact, the Commission excoriated you for failing to record where your million came from and where it went. And they recovered none of it.

I remember when Paul Wolfowitz told the US Congress the war in Iraq would not cost taxpayers one penny. Wolfowitz avoids prosecution for perjury because he did not testify under oath. Did you lie in your testimony because, as a foreign legislator, Mr. Galloway, you are immune from prosecution for perjury?

And when you said, "The Arabs must have a mentality that says, I want to be like Hizbollah." Sir, you mean the Hizbollah that took hostages in Lebanon and guns from Reagan, or the Hizbollah who joined Argentine military Fascists on a killing spree?

And why have you ducked, for two months, my request to answer questions?

Friends and comrades, this is not about George Galloway. He's just another self-promoting fart. Six months from now, even his smell will be gone.

This is not about George, but about us. What's Left? Are we about standing for the defenseless -- or the cruel and senseless?

A couple of months after the invasion of Iraq, I was in Los Angeles and some drunk accosted me, saying, "George Bush was right about everything he said about Iraq!" -- weapons of mass destruction, the al-Qaeda connection and more. It was Christopher Hitchens, "debating" me, and furious. His confusing our President's assertions with reality was a verbal pie he threw in the air and caught on his face.

He was flustered not because I disagreed with him -- he enjoys that, being the look-at-me bad boy -- but because I agreed with him: Saddam was a monster and Iraqis, overwhelmingly, wanted him gone.

But I could not, like Hitchens, shill for Mr. Bush's war of "liberation." I could see where it would end. When a snake devours a rat, it doesn't liberate the captive mice. The mice are "saved" -- for lunch.

But it is not good enough for the Left to oppose Mr. Bush's re-colonization of Iraq. We needed to have actively supported Iraqis fighting to remove their Mesopotamian Stalin. And now, we'd better come up with something a little less nutty than a recent suggestion by one otherwise thoughtful writer that we, "unconditionally support the insurgency" of berserker killers and fundamentalist madmen. If that's
the Left's program for Iraq, count me out.

We can't define ourselves as the "anti-Bush," blindly supporting those he opposes, and thereby letting the nitwit Napoleon in the White House pick our enemies for us. Nor can our revulsion for Bush's horrors throw us into the arms of swamp-things like George Galloway.

Don't get me wrong. Unlike Hitchens, I cannot support the Prevaricator-in-Chief, the President who ordered Cindy Sheehan's son, Casey, to march to his death in Najaf. But I'll be damned if I'll cheer some rich white Brit-hole who brings joy to those who killed him.

*********
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Subscribe to his commentaries at Greg Palast

Arthur Miller: Why I Wrote "The Crucible"

(From 1996)

Why I Wrote "The Crucible"
by Arthur Miller
The New Yorker

As I watched "The Crucible" taking shape as a movie over much of the past year, the sheer depth of time that it represents for me kept returning to mind. As those powerful actors blossomed on the screen, and the children and the horses, the crowds and the wagons, I thought again about how I came to cook all this up nearly fifty years ago, in an America almost nobody I know seems to remember clearly. In a way, there is a biting irony in this film's having been made by a Hollywood studio, something unimaginable in the fifties. But there they are—Daniel Day-Lewis (John Proctor) scything his sea-bordered field, Joan Allen (Elizabeth) lying pregnant in the frigid jail, Winona Ryder (Abigail) stealing her minister-uncle's money, majestic Paul Scofield (Judge Danforth) and his righteous empathy with the Devil-possessed children, and all of them looking as inevitable as rain.

I remember those years—they formed "The Crucible" 's skeleton—but I have lost the dead weight of the fear I had then. Fear doesn't travel well; just as it can warp judgment, its absence can diminish memory's truth. What terrifies one generation is likely to bring only a puzzled smile to the next. I remember how in 1964, only twenty years after the war, Harold Clurman, the director of "Incident at Vichy," showed the cast a film of a Hitler speech, hoping to give them a sense of the Nazi period in which my play took place. They watched as Hitler, facing a vast stadium full of adoring people, went up on his toes in ecstasy, hands clasped under his chin, a sublimely self-gratified grin on his face, his body swivelling rather cutely, and they giggled at his overacting.

Likewise, films of Senator Joseph McCarthy are rather unsettling—if you remember the fear he once spread. Buzzing his truculent sidewalk brawler's snarl through the hairs in his nose, squinting through his cat's eyes and sneering like a villain, he comes across now as nearly comical, a self-aware performer keeping a straight face as he does his juicy threat-shtick.

McCarthy's power to stir fears of creeping Communism was not entirely based on illusion, of course; the paranoid, real or pretended, always secretes its pearl around a grain of fact. From being our wartime ally, the Soviet Union rapidly became an expanding empire. In 1949, Mao Zedong took power in China. Western Europe also seemed ready to become Red—especially Italy, where the Communist Party was the largest outside Russia, and was growing. Capitalism, in the opinion of many, myself included, had nothing more to say, its final poisoned bloom having been Italian and German Fascism. McCarthy—brash and ill-mannered but to many authentic and true—boiled it all down to what anyone could understand: we had "lost China" and would soon lose Europe as well, because the State Department—staffed, of course, under Democratic Presidents—was full of treasonous pro-Soviet intellectuals. It was as simple as that.

If our losing China seemed the equivalent of a flea's losing an elephant, it was still a phrase—and a conviction—that one did not dare to question; to do so was to risk drawing suspicion on oneself. Indeed, the State Department proceeded to hound and fire the officers who knew China, its language, and its opaque culture—a move that suggested the practitioners of sympathetic magic who wring the neck of a doll in order to make a distant enemy's head drop off. There was magic all around; the politics of alien conspiracy soon dominated political discourse and bid fair to wipe out any other issue. How could one deal with such enormities in a play?

To Read the Entire Essay

Mickey Z.: Did the U.S. Government Ever "Support the Troops"?

Did the U.S. government ever "support the troops"? A look back at the Bonus
Army
By Mickey Z.
Alternative Press

"In the sad aftermath that always follows a great war, there is nothing sadder than the surprise of the returned soldiers when they discover that they are regarded generally as public nuisances. And not too honest." – H.L. Mencken

Long before the cries of "support the troops" became commonplace during every brutal U.S. military intervention, the powers-that-be made it clear how much they intended to follow their own counsel. From Shays Rebellion in 1787 to the quarter-million homeless vets today, generation after generation of U.S. military personnel has suffered a lack of support from their government.

For the Entire Essay

Google Fun

Go to Google and write the word "failure" then hit the "feeling lucky" button ;)

Gas Buddy

Find the location of the cheapest gas in your area:

Gas Buddy

Mike Davis: Ecology of Fear

Davis, Mike. The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. NY: Vintage Books, 1999.

(When President Clinton stepped in an offered to pay $6.6 billion of the damages/repairs of the 1994 Northridge, CA earthquake, republicans, led by Newt Gingrich, held the relief bill hostage “until the Democrats agreed to $16.3 billion in cuts to already budgeted domestic spending” (50).)

As a result of this compromise, earthquake victims in Los Angeles, including the unfortunates in Beverly Hills 90210, continued to receive relief payments and low-interest loans. Freeways were rebuilt and hospitals reopened. But all this was financed by counterpart cutbacks in low-income housing and environmental protection programs, as well as the termination of “unnecessary spending” on rural health grants, the urban parks and recreation program, and summer youth employment funds for 1996. (50)

At the same time there was a virtual media blackout about the extensive quake about the extensive quake damage in the northern part of the Crenshaw district, the retail and cultural heart of African-American Los Angeles… (51)

The Crenshaw district earthquake assistance center, which received 6,726 applications for relief, was the busiest in Los Angeles County. … These quake victims, often elderly African-American on fixed incomes, had to wait two years or longer before they qualified for a last-resort city program for low income homeowners. Community leaders bitterly contrasted the bureaucratic haste to repair the La Cienaga section of the Santa Monica Freeway, whose collapse had forced white commuters to drive through black neighborhoods, with the prolonged neglect of damaged homes and apartments in the same area. (51-52)

Certainly, other metropolitan regions, especially the Bay Area, Wasatch Front, Puget Sound, and South Florida, face comparable risks of natural disaster over the next generation, but none bear Los Angeles’s heavy burden of mass poverty and racial violence. What is most distinctive about Los Angeles is not simply its conjugation of earthquakes, wildfires, and floods, but its uniquely explosive mixture of natural hazards and social contradictions. Not even Miami, that other fallen paradise, can approach the conflagrationist potential of Los Angeles. (54)
--------------------------------------------------------------

Enter New Orleans...

Importance of Independent Media; The Vultures Circle in New Orleans; Galloway vs Hichens on the Bush Administration Response to Hurricane Katrina

(More than ever it should be clear the importance of independent media in providing a more complete story than the mainstream media does... as the mainstream corporate media, after their brief moments of outrage at the government (non) relief efforts in the Gulf Coast, fall-back-into-line and congratulate Bush on his piped-speech {scripted, no live audience} of empty promises thursday, independent news media like Democracy Now and Indy Media reporters were still fighting to bring the ignored stories to the world. Listening to the reports we have to consider whether the president's speech was directed toward the devastated, displaced citizens of New Orleans and concerned American citizens, or whether he was notifying the powerful to line up to once again sack the federal monies available in a large mobilization effort--along the lines of the stolen profits in Iraq.)

New Orleans Police Harass Independent Journalist
by Rosa Clemente and Amy Goodman
Democracy Now

Excerpt:

AMY GOODMAN: President Bush speaking on Thursday from New Orleans. We're now joined by Rosa Clemente. She’s a Malcolm X fellow for the Institute of the Black World and an organizer with the Malcolm X Grass Roots Movement. She just drove in from New Orleans. Welcome to Democracy Now!.

ROSA CLEMENTE: Thanks for having me, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, you had quite an experience for the brief time you were there. Talk about why you were there and what happened?

ROSA CLEMENTE: I felt I needed to go, particularly as a younger person of color. I think this is a watershed moment for particularly black and people of African descent in America, and I wanted to be there. I didn't want it to be filtered through anyone's eyes but my own and my partner who went down with me, Brad Young. And it's just – It was my duty to be there, to be able to report back particularly to the hip hop generation, and I was also very upset at the low, low numbers of people of color, journalists, that I saw on the ground. The only ones I really saw were folks from CNN and mainstream media, and as I'm a proud member of alternative and progressive media here in New York, it was my duty to be there.

AMY GOODMAN: So, what happened when you went, particularly to look at the shelters? You went where, to the –

ROSA CLEMENTE: Well, first we went to New Orleans, and actually, we went to the Convention Center and, you know, just saw real estate speculators there and Blackwater mercenaries protecting property and didn't realize that the Marriott and the Wyndham hotel were across the Convention Center and began to ask the question: Why weren't those hotels taken over as eminent domain? That's the question I have. If someone can take my private property for – to build a highway or a medical facility, why were these hotels not opened to let these people not languish in what can only be described as a living hell. And to see the militarization. We then went to Algiers and spent the day with Malik Rahim. We could not leave because of the curfew, and that was a first experience for me. It was an experience to have an M-16 pointed at my car and from –

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean?

ROSA CLEMENTE: When we got on I-10 West, we went to a military checkpoint, and when we pulled up, three of the National Guards just had M-16's pointed at the front of the car, and the side door and the side door, the two front doors. Then we went to the next military checkpoint, and they told us we could not go in at all. We snuck in and we got on Canal Street and we worked our way through that whole area. We then went to Algiers again to spend the day with Malik Rahim and also see the levee, and see what’s going on with that and to see the amazing work that Malik Rahim and Indymedia folks are doing by setting up a command center. It was amazing to be there to see that being built.

To Listen/Watch/Read the Entire Broadcast

More from Rosa Clemente:

Know Thy Self Promotions

Another report from Democracy Now:

The Militarization of New Orleans: Jeremy Scahill Reports from Louisiana

Excerpt:

JEREMY SCAHILL:

It's interesting, we talked earlier this week about the Blackwater mercenaries and I talked about my hour-long conversation with them when they had first arrived here, and I reported that they were saying they were on contract with the Department of Homeland Security. This, of course, was denied by the federal government. Well, now they have been forced to admit, the federal government, that Blackwater is on federal contract with FEMA to protect -- so-called protect, its rebuilding or reconstruction efforts in Louisiana. This is just one of the firms that is getting now federal money. I think that these firms view the current situation in Louisiana as the biggest pot of federal money to put their hands into since the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. I also, two days ago, had the chance to meet one of the wealthiest of citizens of New Orleans, F. Patrick Quinn III. He is the single greatest owner of private rooms in New Orleans. He owns the largest hotel chain in the state of Louisiana, to cater to hotels. He is currently -- he told me that his hotels are being looked at by FEMA to house the workers for the long haul of the so-called reconstruction. I was talking to him, as his head of security and after he pulled off in his S.U.V., about 30 Mexican workers came out of his hotel, and one of his security guards said that they had been brought in from Texas, and in fact another news report, about Patrick Quinn, said that he had brought in workers from Texas as well. So, we have the reality of these shelters full of people wanting work and then you see Mexican workers being brought in from Texas, and when they're done, doing this dirty work, they will be put on the back of trucks, piled into trucks and they go to wherever it is that they were staying.

This man, Patrick Quinn is bidding for these contracts where FEMA potentially could come in and rent out hundreds and hundreds of rooms in his hotel and other businesses are struggling to simply stay alive or scramble to get federal money to rebuild, he is standing to gain a tremendous amount of money from these lucrative federal contracts. It must be noted that he is a major contributor to the Republican party. In fact, his wife was just elected in the special election to the state Senate. Her name is Julie Quinn. And Amy, he has brought in security from a company called B.A.T.S. in Alabama: Bodyguard And Tactical Services. And I was talking to his head of security, I told him I was from New York, he said, I’ve been to New York during the daily news strike, referring to the strike the at the New York Daily News. Democracy Now! co-host, Juan Gonzalez, is a Daily News columnist was one of the leaders of the strike. I told him that Juan Gonzalez was a colleague of mine and he told me that he spiked Juan Gonzalez's car. He said he had put sugar in the gas tank of Juan Gonzalez's car. The man's name is Michael Montgomery, and he is the head of security for B.A.T.S. Security in Alabama, bragging about spiking the car of Juan Gonzalez and other strike leaders in the New York Daily News strike. He is heading up security for the Decatur Hotel chain, owned by Patrick Quinn, a major businessman in New Orleans, his wife a Republican state senator. This is just one example of cronyism that we see on the ground where the wealthy Republican contributors are being considered now for these tremendous federal contracts.

...

Right. I was just watching CNN and they were interviewing a guy they're called the pied piper of hurricane Katrina, a guy from Ohio, who has come to the Houston Astrodome to recruit 100 people who are -- who had left New Orleans to try to bring them to settle in Ohio. I mean, what they're really trying to do is to settle the poor and the African-American populations of New Orleans elsewhere. And to make New Orleans a nice, white city, for white, rich businessmen. There's no other way to put it. That's exactly what we're seeing right now. They want to take areas for instance like the ninth ward and turn them into big -- you know, Wal-Mart type neighborhoods. In fact, we heard mayor Nagin talk yesterday about how one of the first things they want to do is set up a gigantic Wal-Mart so people returning can have a place to shop in New Orleans. This hurricane is the greatest thing to happen to Wal-Mart since the superstore. And this is a very serious racist series of actions that we're seeing here right now. This is has everything to do with class and everything to do with race, and it's very, very frightening. And yes, we attended a conference where grassroots activists are talking about a plan for rebuilding New Orleans, but it's on right now, and they're not a part of it. The people that are a part of it are old-time Louisiana white Republican families working in conjunction with their friend, mayor Ray Nagin, and there's no other way to put it. They love Ray Nagin. He's pro-business. He's their guy.

Look at the comments of James Rice, a local businessman, who is one of the leaders of the private Audubon Place, the gated community. The only privately owned in the city of New Orleans. He told The Wall Street Journal, “Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way, demographically, geographically and politically. I'm not just speaking for myself here. The way we have been living is not going to happen again or we’re out.” James Rice has brought in Israeli para-militaries to guard his facility. It's Israeli company that brags about having former members of the Shin Beit, the GSS, the Israeli Defense Forces. He has brought them in. I was talking to them in front of his property. Some of them participated in the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and these are guys now who are patrolling outside on St. Charles avenue in front of Audubon Place and will potentially come into conflict with residents of New Orleans. What on earth are Israeli paramilitaries doing on the streets of New Orleans? These are the questions that people need to ask right now, defending a man like James Rice who was called for the poor to not be allowed back into New Orleans.

Also:

Amy Goodman Reporting on George Galloway vs. Christopher Hitchens on the Bush Administration Response to Hurricane Katrina

To Watch the Entire Debate Between George Galloway and Christopher Hitchens on the Bush Administration Response to Hurricane Katrina

Mr Galloway Goes to Washington

AlterNet's Continuing Coverage of the Aftermath of Hurrican Katrina

Jean Donahue: From the Shadows of Power

This awarding winning documentary is a powerful story set in the coalfields of Appalachia, Wales and England. In 1990 producers Donohue and Johnson have created a work that uncannily foreshadows the recent brutal growth of global capitalism and its impact on local economies and communities. From the Shadows of Power is a dramatic and critical look at the beginnings of the globalization of the coal industry and the eminent destruction of traditional coalfield communities and labor institutions. It chronicles the rise of working class women's activism and the critical role they played in the watershed events of Britain's Great Miner's Strike of 1984-85 and the U.S. miner's strike against Pittston Coal Company in 1989, two of the most significant labor conflicts in the post-war era. The documentary features community economist Helen Lewis, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, women miners from the Coal Employment Project, women from Britain's Women Against Pit Closures and the National Union Of Miners' Arthur Scargill.

To Watch the Entire Documentary

Film Postings

Visit Bluegrass Film Society

Louisiana Republican Congressman Richard Baker on the Benefits of Hurricane Katrina

(Tom Huckin's on the Rhetoricians for Peace listserv)

Recently a Republican Congressman from Louisiana, one Richard Baker, was quoted in national newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, as having been overheard telling lobbyists in a private conversation: "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did."

This has of course provoked quite an outpouring of national outrage, to the point where Rep. Baker has issued a "correction" on his website:

What I remember expressing, in a private conversation with a housing advocate and member of my staff, was that we have been trying for decades to clean up New Orleans public housing to provide decent housing for residents, and now it looks like God is finally making us do it.

Admittedly, there is far too little contextual information to make any sort of determination, but just for fun, just as a matter of speculation based on stylistic factors alone, which of these two versions strikes you as the sort of utterance that a politician would make in a private conversation with two close acquaintances?

Tom

Blur: Sing

Listening to the Trainspotting soundtrack today while working and this song "Sing" by Blur keeps transporting me to an ethereal realm (I can't play it just once, because I don't want to leave this place it has brought me to)... probably influenced by my multiple viewings of Donnie Darko the last couple of days in my film courses.

University of Kentucky, October 11th: Bharati Mukherjee

(Courtesy of Melissa Purdue)

NOVELIST BHARATI MUKHERJEE CAMPUS VISIT

Bharati Mukherjee, one of the nation's leading writers of fiction, will present a public reading at 7:30 p.m., October 11in the Recital Hall of the University of Kentucky's Singletary Center For The Arts.

Born in Calcutta, India, Mukherjee migrated to Canada in the early 1960s. She studied creative writing at the University of Iowa and later became a citizen of the United States.

She is the author of six novels including JASMINE and DESIRABLE DAUGHTERS, published in 2002, and two books of short stories, DARKNESS and THE MIDDLEMAN AND OTHER STORIES. She and her husband, Canadian writer Clark Blaise, have co-authored several books of non-fiction.

One of Mukherjee's primary subjects is the experience of immigrants to the United States and their struggle for personal and ethnic identity. Reviewing DESIRABLE DAUGHTERS for the International Herald Tribune, Mickhio Kakutani said: "Throughout her career, Bharati Mukherjee has depicted characters who are exiles, immigrants or outsiders...caught on the margins between two cultures, between India and the United States, between tradition and modernity, East and West."

Bharati Mukherjee's visit to the UK campus is sponsored by the Department of English as part of its "Crossing Cultures" conference October 11-13.

Zack Pelta-Heller: Teaching in America

(Courtesy of Melissa Purdue and Andy Johnson)

Teaching In America: The Impossible Dream
by Zack Pelta-Heller
AlterNet

The new book Teachers Have It Easy, which collects roughly 200 interviews with educators from around the country, couldn't have a more ironic title. Co-written by former teachers Daniel Moulthrop and Nínive Clements Calegari, and author Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius), the book highlights the bleak reality that not only are America's teachers grossly underpaid, but that teaching is simply not a sustainable profession it its current form.

Through compelling accounts, Teachers Have It Easy dispels one of the biggest myths about teaching in public schools -- that the paltry salaries educators receive are adequate compensation for summer vacations and "shorter work days." Instead, the book paints a Dickensian picture of our educational system, in which teachers routinely work 10-12 hour days that don't end when the dismissal bell rings.

The idea for the book arose from conversations between Eggers and Calegari, co-founders of the non-profit 826 Valencia, which offers tutoring and writing workshops for youth. (A new center, 826NYC, recently opened in Brooklyn.)

"The idea was Dave's to begin with," Moulthrop told me. "When he was in his twenties, he had friends, including his sister, who were teachers and loved their work. For them it was the best job on the planet. A few years later, they all quit because of the money. It was just a travesty."

Eggers' friends were not the only ones who discovered how impossible it can be to eke out a living as an educator. A recent study by the University of Pennsylvania, as noted in the book, found that 46 percent of teachers leave within their first five years. Such high turnover and instability undoubtedly wreaks havoc on public schools and their respective communities, in which teachers play a vital role.

"If teachers are just leaving at the peak of their game," Moulthrop says, "their students were ill-served by the system."

To Read the Entire Article

Coal Black Voices: What is an Affrilachian Poet?

"We're part of kentucky's history, we're part of the landscape."
--Frank X. Walker

What is an Affrilachian Poet?
Media Working Group

A term coined by Frank Walker in his poem "Affrilachia" to describe people of color living in the Appalachian region, "Affrilachian" became the name of a group of like minded poets who came together for mutual support and encouragement. As Walker explains, "One of the things I've encountered traveling outside of Kentucky is having to defend the fact that people of color actually live here... I'm trying to say, not only are we here, we're here in a very large way, we're part of Kentucky's history, we're part of the landscape..."

Coal Black Voices

H. Allen Orr: Devolution

(Courtesy of Indie Wire: Intelligent Design Advocates Embrace Wingless Birds)

Devolution: Why Intelligent Design Isn’t.
by H. ALLEN ORR
The New Yorker

If you are in ninth grade and live in Dover, Pennsylvania, you are learning things in your biology class that differ considerably from what your peers just a few miles away are learning. In particular, you are learning that Darwin’s theory of evolution provides just one possible explanation of life, and that another is provided by something called intelligent design. You are being taught this not because of a recent breakthrough in some scientist’s laboratory but because the Dover Area School District’s board mandates it. In October, 2004, the board decreed that “students will be made aware of gaps/problems in Darwin’s theory and of other theories of evolution including, but not limited to, intelligent design.”

While the events in Dover have received a good deal of attention as a sign of the political times, there has been surprisingly little discussion of the science that’s said to underlie the theory of intelligent design, often called I.D. Many scientists avoid discussing I.D. for strategic reasons. If a scientific claim can be loosely defined as one that scientists take seriously enough to debate, then engaging the intelligent-design movement on scientific grounds, they worry, cedes what it most desires: recognition that its claims are legitimate scientific ones.

Meanwhile, proposals hostile to evolution are being considered in more than twenty states; earlier this month, a bill was introduced into the New York State Assembly calling for instruction in intelligent design for all public-school students. The Kansas State Board of Education is weighing new standards, drafted by supporters of intelligent design, that would encourage schoolteachers to challenge Darwinism. Senator Rick Santorum, a Pennsylvania Republican, has argued that “intelligent design is a legitimate scientific theory that should be taught in science classes.” An I.D.-friendly amendment that he sponsored to the No Child Left Behind Act—requiring public schools to help students understand why evolution “generates so much continuing controversy”—was overwhelmingly approved in the Senate. (The amendment was not included in the version of the bill that was signed into law, but similar language did appear in a conference report that accompanied it.) In the past few years, college students across the country have formed Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness chapters. Clearly, a policy of limited scientific engagement has failed. So just what is this movement?

First of all, intelligent design is not what people often assume it is. For one thing, I.D. is not Biblical literalism. Unlike earlier generations of creationists—the so-called Young Earthers and scientific creationists—proponents of intelligent design do not believe that the universe was created in six days, that Earth is ten thousand years old, or that the fossil record was deposited during Noah’s flood. (Indeed, they shun the label “creationism” altogether.) Nor does I.D. flatly reject evolution: adherents freely admit that some evolutionary change occurred during the history of life on Earth. Although the movement is loosely allied with, and heavily funded by, various conservative Christian groups—and although I.D. plainly maintains that life was created—it is generally silent about the identity of the creator.

The movement’s main positive claim is that there are things in the world, most notably life, that cannot be accounted for by known natural causes and show features that, in any other context, we would attribute to intelligence. Living organisms are too complex to be explained by any natural—or, more precisely, by any mindless—process. Instead, the design inherent in organisms can be accounted for only by invoking a designer, and one who is very, very smart.

All of which puts I.D. squarely at odds with Darwin. Darwin’s theory of evolution was meant to show how the fantastically complex features of organisms—eyes, beaks, brains—could arise without the intervention of a designing mind. According to Darwinism, evolution largely reflects the combined action of random mutation and natural selection. A random mutation in an organism, like a random change in any finely tuned machine, is almost always bad. That’s why you don’t, screwdriver in hand, make arbitrary changes to the insides of your television. But, once in a great while, a random mutation in the DNA that makes up an organism’s genes slightly improves the function of some organ and thus the survival of the organism. In a species whose eye amounts to nothing more than a primitive patch of light-sensitive cells, a mutation that causes this patch to fold into a cup shape might have a survival advantage. While the old type of organism can tell only if the lights are on, the new type can detect the direction of any source of light or shadow. Since shadows sometimes mean predators, that can be valuable information. The new, improved type of organism will, therefore, be more common in the next generation. That’s natural selection. Repeated over billions of years, this process of incremental improvement should allow for the gradual emergence of organisms that are exquisitely adapted to their environments and that look for all the world as though they were designed. By 1870, about a decade after “The Origin of Species” was published, nearly all biologists agreed that life had evolved, and by 1940 or so most agreed that natural selection was a key force driving this evolution.

Advocates of intelligent design point to two developments that in their view undermine Darwinism. The first is the molecular revolution in biology. Beginning in the nineteen-fifties, molecular biologists revealed a staggering and unsuspected degree of complexity within the cells that make up all life. This complexity, I.D.’s defenders argue, lies beyond the abilities of Darwinism to explain. Second, they claim that new mathematical findings cast doubt on the power of natural selection. Selection may play a role in evolution, but it cannot accomplish what biologists suppose it can.

These claims have been championed by a tireless group of writers, most of them associated with the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank that sponsors projects in science, religion, and national defense, among other areas. The center’s fellows and advisers—including the emeritus law professor Phillip E. Johnson, the philosopher Stephen C. Meyer, and the biologist Jonathan Wells—have published an astonishing number of articles and books that decry the ostensibly sad state of Darwinism and extoll the virtues of the design alternative. But Johnson, Meyer, and Wells, while highly visible, are mainly strategists and popularizers. The scientific leaders of the design movement are two scholars, one a biochemist and the other a mathematician. To assess intelligent design is to assess their arguments.

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Mary Lynn F. Jones: A Radical Roberts Court

A Radical Robert's Court
by Mary Lynn F. Jones
AlterNet

With a shortened timetable and a higher position at stake, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee will today begin considering the nomination of Judge John G. Roberts Jr. to serve as the 17th chief justice of the United States.

Already, Roberts -- who was first tapped to succeed retiring Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, then nominated to the court's top job after the death earlier this month of Chief Justice William Rehnquist -- had the opportunity at age 50 to shape the court for decades to come. If confirmed, he would be the youngest chief justice since the legendary John Marshall in 1801.

Although the chief justice's vote counts the same as those of his eight colleagues, he has more than 60 statutory duties, which include running the justices' conferences; deciding who among the justices should draft decisions; setting the initial agenda as to which cases the court should consider; and leading the Judicial Conference, which, among other things, issues ethics guidelines for federal judges.

The chief justice also presides over impeachment trials; chooses members of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which allows the government to conduct secret national security surveillance; and serves as the head of the judicial branch of government.

Given the responsibilities of the job -- and President Bush's chance to nominate a second candidate to succeed O'Connor -- choosing about a quarter of the court's members will likely be one of Bush's most important acts as president.

Roberts' confirmation hearings, originally slated to begin last week, were delayed due to Rehnquist's death and congressional response to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Senate Republicans hope the Judiciary Committee hearings -- which will include opening statements today, as well as testimony from Roberts and more than two dozen other witnesses -- will wrap up later this week. That would allow the entire Senate to vote on Roberts' nomination the week of Sept. 26, so he can be seated before the court's new term begins on Oct. 3.

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University of Kentucky Colloquium: Goya at the Equinox

(Courtesy of Virginia Blum)

You are invited to a colloquium "Goya at the Equinox," which will take place Tuesday and Wednesday, 20-21 September, in the President's Room of the Singletary Center. On Tuesday evening, the 20th, at 7:30, the internationally recognized Goya scholar, Jane Tomlinson, Director of Museums at the Univ. of Delaware, will give a keynote lecture titled "Transformations in Goya's Art." There will be a reception afterwards at the UK Art Museum, upper gallery, where Goya's set of engravings, Los Disparates, is now on exhibit until 24 December. On Wednesday the 21st, there will be a one-day conference on Goya and his prints, from 9 a.m.-5 p.m. The symposium participants include students who participated in Prof. Edward Stanton’s graduate seminar on Goya last semester, Prof. Stanton, and Prof. Eileen McKiernan Gonzalez of Berea College.

Anna Brzyski, Ph.D.
University of Kentucky
Webpage

Edmon Castell: Ciudad [In]Visible

From: Edmon Castell edmon.castell@idct.gov.co

My name is Edmon Castell. I am a Geographer and Museologist and, since 2003, I have been working as exhibit's curator at Museo de Bogotá (Bogota Museum or City Musem of Bogota), Colombia. I send this message because we are putting together an exhibit about "La Exposición de 1910" entitled "La ciudad de la luz. Bogotá y la Exposición de 1910".

We want to explore and explain some ideas about the meaning of National & International Exhibits from the XIX Century. We see these events as creating a new social space for many countries where a range of issues played out; like the problem of emulation and assimilation of industry, new urban models for the cities, the construction of territorial history and national memory from the publics monuments, and defining "orientalism," among others.

I send this e-mail to the H-Urban community because I'm searching for others studies, books, ideas about this topic (The National & International Exhibits).

Of course, I'll agree all colaborations in two ways: Puting their names in the credits of this exhibit and catalogue exhibit and, also, with an electronic copy of exhibit catalogue. You can see an example of this at:

Ciudad [In]Visible

Many thanks
Edmon Castell
Museo de Bogotá

Impeach Bush Coalition

(Courtesy of Ariadne's Labyrinth)

Heard the Word of Blog?

Sheila Samples: Bush, The Man With a SNAFU Plan

Bush—The Man With a SNAFU Plan
By Sheila Samples
Alternative Press Review

"A government that terrorizes its own people can never stop. If such a government ever lets the fear subside and rational thought return to the populace, that government is finished." ~Michael Rivero, What Really Happened

It's a good thing President George Bush doesn't read newspapers or watch TV. If he did, even he could see that people from one end of this nation to the other are rapidly reaching zero tolerance with his bumbling ineptitude each time he is faced with a crisis. Those who watched in amazement as Bush sat paralyzed in a Florida elementary school on the morning of September 11, 2001 as planes were ramming into the World Trade Center and Pentagon -- who watched in dismay as he zigzagged across the country from one hidey hole to another throughout the day -- were not surprised that he dropped the ball when Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast on August 29.

Bush has dropped every ball thrown to him throughout his life. But he's a hell of a cheerleader. It's almost like being back in college. In an instant, Bush can whip a crowd into a frenzy, armed with nothing but a bullhorn and a shell-shocked firefighter. He can divert the attention of an entire nation from what is happening on the field by locking it into one massive, cheering "wave." Life is a game. Go Team.

However, Operation Hurricane Katrina is vastly different from Bush's "freedom is on the march" game that continues to wreak chaos, death and destruction throughout the Arab world. In the aftermath of Katrina, the homeless, bewildered, abandoned and starving citizens may be poverty-striken, they may be dark-skinned, but they are Americans. And, because they are Americans, the cheering has stopped. The media, led by the shaking outrage of CNN's Anderson Cooper and right-leaning curmudgeon Jack Cafferty, followed by the networks and, finally, by the wonderous on-air meltdown of Fox News' Shepard Smith, at long last is doing its job. For a time, however fleeting, the media has been shocked into telling the truth, asking the right questions and holding the administration's feet to the fire.

Thanks to the media, Bush is out there without a bullhorn -- and without a game plan.

The best-laid plans

Of course the neoconservatives who are in control of this country had a plan for Iraq. I've written about it so often I'm almost embarrassed to bring it up again. In 1992, Dick Cheney, Lewis Libby and Paul Wolfowitz laid out their obsesson for world dominance in a secret document, Defense Planning Guidance wherein they boldly asserted, "our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the region (Middle East and SW Asia) and preserve U.S. and Western access to the region's oil."

Although such arrogance caused a furor when released to the media, the war jackals merely retreated into their lair and continued to hone the policy of preemptive war to seize control of the world's resources. That was the plan then, it was the plan in 1997 when they established the warmongering think-tank, Project for a New American Century, it was the plan outlined in the September 2000 Rebuilding America's Defenses, which included another bold assertion -- to achieve their goal they would need "a catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor" -- and it remains the plan today.

It was a stroke of genius in 2000 to rig the election and put George Bush in the Cheerleader in Chief role. Bush is mean-spirited, vindictive, greedy, incapable of feeling empathy, easily manipulated, desperate for attention -- even adulation -- and has no qualms with playing the God card for political gain. Americans are a forgiving people, and most accepted without question this worthless, former booze-and-drug sodden ne'er-do-well's claim that he was born again -- a man of God. They loved him. All Cheney had to do was select himself as Number Two, slip behind the curtain, and the cabal -- as they like to call themselves -- was open for business, and waiting for a new Pearl Harbor.

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