SPIKE LEE DOCUMENTARY ABOUT KATRINA AND
NEW ORLEANS PREMIERES ON HBO AUGUST 21st

From the Kansas City Star:

‘When the Levees Broke’

Spike Lee was in Venice, of all places, when the levees broke. Sitting in his hotel room in the submerged Italian city, where he was attending a film festival, Lee flipped back and forth between BBC and CNN, riding the roller coaster of emotions over what man and nature had wrought in New Orleans.

“I was really mad and sad,” Lee told TV critics during a session to promote “When the Levees Broke,” his upcoming HBO documentary. “I wanted to do something about it.”

Sad because, despite being a New York homeboy, Lee considers New Orleans America’s most distinctive city. Seeing it underwater broke his heart.

Mostly, though, Lee was, and is, angry at a country that let this happen, at a government that reacted indifferently to the suffering of black people in the Crescent City and at a short-attention-span culture that has already consigned Hurricane Katrina to the history files.

That’s how the celebrated director, who is not known for making nonfiction films about current events, decided to undertake what became a four-hour docu-opera, subtitled “A Requiem in Four Acts.” It airs in two parts, Aug. 21 and 22, repeating in full Aug. 29, the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans.

Click here for the rest.

This is going to be great. It's probably also going to be hard to watch. I still get angry or sad, or both, if I think too much about it even today, nearly a year later, and I was only watching from the sidelines here in Baton Rouge. But I'm definitely going to watch it. Spike Lee is directing.

I don't think I've mentioned it here, but years ago my buddy Brian sat me down and made me watch Spike's Do the Right Thing. I've never looked back. Spike is on my short list for greatest American film director: in addition to the sense of social conscience he brings to virtually every film he directs, which makes him a Real Artist, he's also a great storyteller, creating engaging and complex characters and situations. His movies work the intellect as well as the emotions--they both teach and entertain. Really, Malcolm X is one of my favorite films, for all those reasons.

I think it's safe to say that nobody in the world is more qualified to tell the story of what happened to New Orleans than Spike Lee. Maybe I'll head down to the Big Easy to catch the sneak-premiere at the New Orleans Arena on the 16th. Tickets are free, apparently.

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NOT "WORLD WAR III"

From WorkingForChange:

"Calling it World War III is sound packaging," he said. "You've got to call it something and five years after 9/11 with Osama [bin Laden] still roaming free and Iraq an American quagmire, and the Republican Party in danger of losing control of Congress, this ploy makes marketing sense."

Click here for the rest.

God, "marketing" is sooooo right. There are numerous reasons, some of which are mentioned here, why the "War on Terror," which isn't even really a war, is not World War III. As Bush's psychotic foreign policy spins ever more out of control, it also becomes ever more incomprehensible. Looking to capitalize on what is to many Americans a totally confusing situation in the Middle East, Newt Gingrich and others are trying to popularize a convenient and easy-to-use meme in hopes of turning around the increasing distaste for the Bush Wars, and they just might have a shot at pulling it off.

Here's why:


Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan


John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima


George C. Scott in Patton


Charlton Heston and Hal Holbrook in Midway


Robert Wagoner, Henry Fonda, Charlton Heston and James Coburn in Midway


Sig Ruman and William Holden in Stalag 17

World War II was America's Golden Age, complete with mythic heroes, legendary villains, and an overwhelmingly accepted black and white understanding that the conflict was very much about good versus evil, and Americans were on the side of good. Of course, the reality is somewhat more complicated than that, but countless movies, with the biggest stars, about "the Big One" and our mythic role in it have deeply penetrated the American psyche--you simply can't be an American without believing that we were the heroes in the fight against fascism; it's part of who we are, the good guys who won WWII. It's not rational, especially because there's so much water under the bridge since then, but it is definitely a major aspect of who we believe ourselves to be.

When the conservative war-mongers start talking about "World War III," they're obviously trying to tap that part of American consciousness. That is, as linguist George Lakoff has repeatedly observed, the conservatives are playing a completely different rhetorical game than the one liberals are playing. They're trying to craft powerful myths; we're arguing about reality. Sadly, in this case at least, myth, when widely accepted, tends to trump reality in people's minds. If this "WWIII" frame catches on, it's back to the dark and repressive days of 9/11's aftermath, when you just weren't American if you didn't want to spill Muslim blood.

Personally, I think it's too late for this kind of tactic to succeed--the situations in Iraq and elsewhere are just too far gone for people to accept highfalutin bullshit like "WWIII," but, just to be on the safe side, the left had better start crafting a few myths of its own to better counter this latest right-wing rhetorical assault.

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PALESTINIANS: NOT RELIGIOUS LUNATICS

From Rascally Rob Salkowitz over at Emphasis Added, a comparison of traditional Southern cultural and political attitudes in post Civil War America with those of Palestinians in the occupied territories:

The Dixiecrats of Gaza

Despite losing on the battlefield, Southern culture did not accept defeat and embrace the modern values of its conqueror, as Palestinians today are being urged to do under similar circumstances. Instead, they turned to terrorism (in the form of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1870s and 80s), which was ultimately successful in exhausting the reformist will of the North and restoring some measure of autonomy and the reactionary status quo.

Throughout the late 19th and early 20th century, the profound cultural, economic and political degeneracy of the Southern states was a subject of constant concern in the rest of the country. Opposition to every modern reform (women’s suffrage, labor unionism, teaching of evolution) and support for every reactionary program (Prohibition, isolationism) found its strongest base in the former Confederacy.

Even within the nominal framework of self-government, the enfranchised citizens of the South made a conscious and deliberate choice of corrupt one-party rule (first Democrats, then Republicans), legalized discrimination against minorities, severe limits to their own economic, educational and cultural potential, and the most narrow and doctrinaire forms of religious fundamentalism, because to do otherwise, their leaders convinced them, would be to surrender to the alien values of the despised interloper. Like the Palestinians, most white Southerners chose to stand by their closed and backward system even when it clearly benefited only a few at the very top, because they valued their pride and honor above their material self-interest.

Click here for the rest.

Of course, I think Salkowitz's analysis misses some pretty hefty mitigating circumstances influencing Palestinian behavior, such as Israel's severe brutality when dealing with Palestinian civilians and politicians, the IDF enforced medieval conditions in many parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the fact that peace proposals for the last decade or so have been about creating an independent "state" which is non-contiguous, and without any political influence or economic viability, unacceptable Bantustans, when you get right down to it. But I think he's onto something here: it is extraordinarily difficult to force an entire culture to become something it is not without severe repercussions. The Palestinian sense of profound resentment rising from their utter and total defeat at the hands of mighty Israel is a palpable, real thing: this decades old conflict, despite the conventional wisdom here in the US, is most decidedly not being driven by Islamic religious lunacy, although that certainly plays a role; rather, legitimate grievances about the way their conqueror has treated them, as well as a deep cultural fear of non-existence as a people, motivate Palestine.

Until the West starts addressing these issues, expect the conflict to continue as is for decades to come.

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WINNING IS IMPOSSIBLE

From the Nation, Jonathan Schell, author of the definitive history of the Nixon era, Time of Illusion, on why the neo-conservative dream of American empire is simply impossible in today's world:

Too Late for Empire

Very possibly, the United States, with all its resources, would have been the sort of globe-straddling empire that Joseph McCarthy wanted it to be had it risen to pre-eminence in an earlier age. It was the peculiar trajectory of the United States, born in opposition to empire, to wind up making its own bid for empire only after the age of imperialism was over. Though it's hard to shed a tear, you might say that there was a certain unfairness in America's timing. All the ingredients of past empires were there--the wealth, the weapons, the power, hard and soft. Only the century was wrong. The United States was not, could not be and cannot now be a new Rome, much less greater than Rome, because it cannot do what Rome did. It cannot, in a postimperial age, conquer other countries and lastingly absorb them into a great empire; it cannot, in the nuclear age, not even today, fight and win wars against its chief global rivals, who still, after all, possess nuclear arsenals. Even tiny, piteous, brutalized, famine-ridden North Korea, more a cult than a country, can deter the United States with its puny putative arsenal. The United States, to be sure, is a great power by any measure, surely the world's greatest, yet that power is hemmed in by obstacles peculiar to our era. The mistake has been not so much to think that the power of the United States is greater than it is as to fail to realize that power itself, whether wielded by the United States or anyone else--if conceived in terms of military force--has been in decline. By imagining otherwise, the United States has become the fool of force--and the fool of history.

And

The pattern is not the old Roman one in which military conquest breeds arrogance and arrogance stokes ambition, which leads to usurpation at home. Rather, in the case of the United States, misunderstanding of its historical moment leads to misbegotten wars; misbegotten wars lead to military disaster; military disaster leads to domestic strife and scapegoating; domestic strife and scapegoating lead to usurpation, which triggers a constitutional crisis. Crises born of strength and success are different from crises born of failure. Fulbright warned of the corruption of imperial ambition and the arrogance of power. But we need also to speak of the corruption of imperial failure, the arrogance of anxiety.

Click here for the rest.

Like I mentioned a few days back, I've been reading Time of Illusion. The whole experience has been really weird; history really does seem to be repeating itself in many ways. There are exceptions, of course, but the central principles are essentially the same, a quagmire of an imperial war coupled with increasing levels of executive corruption in the face of popular opposition which ultimately led to a very dangerous Constitutional crisis. I'm sure that I'll be absorbing Schell's lessons for the next two or three years--a lot of his ideas are new to me and I need to fit them into what I already understand; I mean, he's forced me to look at military and political power in ways that have never occurred to me, and they don't teach this kind of thing in high school government classes.

Anyway, coming upon this new essay of his is one of the biggest coincidences of my life. It's almost like a companion piece, connecting the dots between Time of Illusion and the current corruption of the Bush administration, and here it is right after I finished the book. For instance, he ends Illusion with an analysis of American power in the nuclear age. It's mostly a rebuttal to Henry Kissinger's assertion that "limited war," that is, conventional proxy wars against Soviet client states instead of all out nuclear exchange with the USSR itself, in order to achieve "credibility," was the only way to advance US interests in the face of paralyzing fear of atomic annihilation. The faults with Kissinger's analysis are by now obvious: it's how we ended up stuck in Vietnam, and why we backed heinous military dictatorships in Central America in the 80s; generally, our proxy wars had little to do with the Cold War, and much more to do with local issues. And when it really did seem to have to do with the Soviets, in Afghanistan, we ended up funding and training the nucleus of what would eventually become Al Qaeda.

Despite the conventional wisdom, revisionist history more accurately, that these actions caused the Soviet Union to collapse, the reality is that they simply fucked up the world on a grand scale. The USSR actually fell because, you know, communism doesn't work.

But, as the essay observes, some of the principles of Schell's power analysis are still in play, despite the absence of our Cold War foe. The threat of nuclear war continues to exist, and it's potentially worse today, as first and second tier powers, scared shitless of a mighty American military machine in the hands of drunken cowboys, scramble to get the atomic weapons that have obviously cowed the US in its dealings with North Korea. As during the conflict with the Soviets, all out war with powerful nations is no longer an option. The stakes are just too damned high. Contrariwise, at the other end of the power scale, wars against weak but determined nations are also a losing proposition. Vietnam, and then later Afghanistan, showed the third world how to bring a superpower to its knees. Iraq has only driven the lesson home. In short, we now live in a world where our waging war won't really gain much for us. In fact, it's quite the reverse: when we go to war all that happens is that we lose young men and women, kill lots of civilians, and flush billions of dollars down the toilet. Oh yeah, we also piss off the rest of the civilized world.

It's not just that war is immoral, which it is. Rather, it's that war is just fucking stupid in this day and age. We can't win. Not in a big one, which would destroy the world, and not in a small one which would destroy our economy and souls. It is conceivable, of course, that in some few situations, war can successfully accomplish some concrete goals, like in the first Gulf War, or, maybe, in the Balkans conflict. But those wars had approval of virtually the entire world; they weren't imperial wars. Those two exceptions really only serve to prove the rule: diplomacy, real diplomacy, and not unilateral war with a sham "coalition," is the only option for the Global era.

Nobody, however, in either the US political class or the American corporate press, seems to understand this. Schooled by a thousand war movies, utterly in the grips of bygone myths of the glory of battle, politicians speak seriously of the "war" on terror, or of "World War III." But it's not like that at all. People are dying and shooting and wearing combat boots and fatigues, yes, but it's all ultimately a horrifying game. No good can come of it, for anybody, in this day and age. We are failing in Iraq and Afghanistan, and signs are starting to appear in Lebanon which suggest that Israel may be failing in its drive to destroy Hezbollah. If these conflicts were old school army versus army, we and Israel would have already won decisively. But this is new school.

Nobody wins.

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Israel set war plan more than a year ago

From the San Francisco Chronicle courtesy of AlterNet:

Israel's military response by air, land and sea to what it considered a provocation last week by Hezbollah militants is unfolding according to a plan finalized more than a year ago.

In the years since Israel ended its military occupation of southern Lebanon, it watched warily as Hezbollah built up its military presence in the region. When Hezbollah militants kidnapped two Israeli soldiers last week, the Israeli military was ready to react almost instantly.

"Of all of Israel's wars since 1948, this was the one for which Israel was most prepared," said Gerald Steinberg, professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University. "In a sense, the preparation began in May 2000, immediately after the Israeli withdrawal, when it became clear the international community was not going to prevent Hezbollah from stockpiling missiles and attacking Israel. By 2004, the military campaign scheduled to last about three weeks that we're seeing now had already been blocked out and, in the last year or two, it's been simulated and rehearsed across the board."

More than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to U.S. and other diplomats, journalists and think tanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail. Under the ground rules of the briefings, the officer could not be identified.

Click here for the rest.

Okay, let's count the lies. First, Israel is not trying to get back it's two captured soldiers; rather, it had been waiting for a year for the right moment and pretense to launch an aggressive invasion of Lebanon. Second, the US does not support Israel's "right to defend herself;" rather, the US supports Israel's war of aggression against Lebanon--the Bush administration knows what's going on. Third, the mainstream US press is committing a lie of omission: they're aware of this report just as I am, yet they refuse to mention it, thereby keeping up the myth that Israel is simply "defending herself."

This shit makes me sick.

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ISRAEL/LEBANON: CONTEXT YOU'VE NEVER HEARD
Much Worse Than Abu Ghraib, Israel's Facility 1391

I was reading a new post on Noam Chomsky's rarely updated blog earlier this evening and I was startled by a reference he made to revelations a while back about a secret prison used for years by Israel to incarcerate and torture countless Palestinian and Lebanese civilians. I'm pretty used to being in the dark about the vast majority of the Jewish state's misdeeds; after all, the American corporate media and US political class are notorious for heavily distorting reality on the subject. But this strikes me as a pretty big deal, the kind of thing that would merit at least a mention somewhere in, say, the New York Times. But no. I had to go to a 2003 story from the British press to get the goods.

From the Guardian:

Those who have been through its gates know it is no illusion. One former inmate has filed a lawsuit alleging that he was raped twice - once by a man and once with a stick - during questioning. But most of those who emerge say the real torture is the psychological impact of solitary confinement in filthy, blackened cells so poorly lit that inmates can barely see their own hands, and with no idea where they are or, in many cases, why they are there.

"Our main conclusion is that it exists to make torture possible - a particular kind of torture that creates progressive states of dread, dependency, debility," says Manal Hazzan, a human rights lawyer who helped expose the prison's existence. "The law gives the army enough authority already to hide prisoners, so why do they need a secret facility?"

Unlike any other Israeli prison, the International Red Cross, lawyers and members of the Israeli parliament have been refused access. One leftwing MP, Zahava Gal-On, describes Facility 1391 as "one of the signs of totalitarian regimes and of the third world". The Israeli government declines to discuss the secret prison other than to issue a standard response: "Facility 1391 is situated on a secret military base. The base is used by the security services for various classified activities and thus its location is kept confidential."

And

Probably the first prisoners at Facility 1391 were Lebanese. The prison is part of a military camp that is home to an army intelligence group, Unit 504, which specialises in interrogation. The unit has a hard reputation, and some of its members have badly blemished records. One has been accused of murder, another of spying. Unit 504's glory days were during Israel's 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon, interrogating captured Hezbollah fighters and running an extensive network of collaborators, some of whom are still being put on trial for their lives by the Lebanese authorities.

In the late 80s, Unit 504 went in search of another kind of prisoner; men who could be held hostage and exchanged for captured Israeli soldiers and airmen. In 1989, the Israelis seized Sheikh Abd al-Karim Obeid, a spiritual leader to Hezbollah. Five years later, they snatched Mustafa Dirani, a leading Shi'ite fighter. Both were taken directly to Facility 1391.

The soldiers who grabbed Obeid also abducted his bodyguards, members of his family and Hashem Fahaf, a young man who happened to be visiting the sheikh to seek his blessing and who found himself locked up for the next 11 years, initially at 1391.

Click here for the rest.

To the best of my knowledge, Facility 1391 is still in operation today.

A couple of observations. First, this revelation, when it happened, was easily as big of a story as the Abu Ghraib revelations in 2004. The US press should have been all over it--I mean, Israel is an enormous American ally, and we fund some twenty percent of their huge military budget. That I'm only just now hearing about it is evidence enough that the US establishment is in deep with Israel's many crimes, acting as tireless propagandists in order to keep the billions of dollars flowing their way without domestic political opposition. Second, thousands of Lebanese and Palestinian civilians, many of whom have absolutely nothing to do with Hezbollah or Hamas, a fact which is well known by their Israeli captors, have been cycling in and out of Facility 1391 for at least two decades--some of them never return, "disappeared" like so many Latin Americans did under the brutal dictators supported by the US in the 70s and 80s. How could the terrorized people of Palestine and Lebanon ever forget this? Many, I'm sure, have friends and loved ones there right now. It all makes the kidnapping of three soldiers, not civilians, seem tame in comparison.

And, yet, the standard American line is that Israel is simply "defending herself." Obviously, it's far more complicated than that.

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING
Frankie and Sammy Go Rasslin'





















Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging!

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HOW TO FAIL IN IRAQ

Actually, the White House has been extraordinarily innovative in this area, producing dozens of brilliant ideas since 2003 about achieving utter failure over there, and surprising us all, again and again, with new ways to fail just when it appears they've hit their creative limits.

Here are some of their latest hits.

From the AP via Yahoo courtesy of AlterNet:

U.S. may send 5,000 more troops to Baghdad

Defense experts inside and outside the Pentagon worry that diverting U.S. troops to Baghdad could weaken their ability in other parts of the country. And they say the plan reverses an earlier effort to make Americans less visible and put Iraqi forces out front in the fight.

And

As part of the plan, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Thursday extended the tours of some 3,500 members of the 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team. It was scheduled to be leaving now, but instead, most of its 3,900 troops will serve for up to four more months.

Click here for the rest.

As the article notes, the redeployments are due to the deteriorating situation in Baghdad, which is yet another sign that the insurgency continues to not be in its "last throes," that there most definitely is a civil war going on, and that the Iraqi army is nowhere near being ready to stabilize the country by itself. That means, according to the standards Bush himself has set for withdrawal, that US forces will continue to occupy Iraq for some years to come. We're still looking for that corner to turn.

Anyway, this troop move may help to stabilize Baghdad for the time being, or not, but, because we're essentially out of reserves, all this does is rob Peter to pay Paul. Insurgents and sectarian fighters will simply move their operations to places the troops have abandoned, launching suicide bombers at the capitol city from the outside until things cool off on the inside. Or not. Beefing up the US troop presence in Baghdad may have no effect on the escalating violence at all.

I thought we had learned in Vietnam that conventional warfare fares badly against guerilla fighters. Guess not.

And what's this shit about tacking four more months onto these soldiers' tours of duty? Hasn't anyone in the Pentagon been reading about the super high rates of depression and PTSD among the troops? About US servicemen freaking out and murdering families and raping their daughters? About the spike in domestic violence among troops home on leave? This is a bad idea. Our guys are wildly overworked and stressed out over there. Nothing good can come of this.

But wait. Here's an oldie, updated for the summer.

From USA Today courtesy of the Daily Kos:

Equipment shortfalls hurt Army readiness

Up to two-thirds of the Army's combat brigades are not ready for wartime missions, largely because they are hampered by equipment shortfalls, Democratic lawmakers said Wednesday, citing unclassified documents.

In a letter to President Bush, Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said that "nearly every non-deployed combat brigade in the active Army is reporting that they are not ready" for combat. The figures, he said, represent an unacceptable risk to the nation.

Click here for the rest.

This shit's been going on for a couple of years now. As soon as it was clear that we were facing a full blown insurgency, if I recall correctly, numerous stories about massive shortages of kevlar vests and armor plating for vehicles started hitting the headlines. The news seems to have died down since then, but the shortages, apparently, have only gotten worse. This is what comes from the sublime stupidity of starting a war while massively cutting taxes, which is probably the Sergeant Pepper or Abbey Road of Bush's Iraq failure discography, the greatest album of failure of all time.

Wait, scratch that. Invading on false pretenses gets the title for greatest all time failure in Iraq. You know, I opposed the invasion, and continue to oppose the disasterous occupation, but that doesn't mean that I want our soldiers out there unprotected. I mean, if they simply can't come home until Iraq has stabilized, then stabilize the damned country!!! Either get serious about winning the fucking war, or get the fuck out of there. Every day it continues is travesty.

I guess Bush thinks there are even greater failures that he has yet to achieve. Perhaps he's fashioning his magnum opus: a failure to end all failures, a.k.a. Armageddon.

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Israeli airstrike hits U.N. observer post

From CNN courtesy of AlterNet:

An Israeli airstrike hit a United Nations post in southern Lebanon late Tuesday, killing at least two of the agency's observers, according to the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon.

The U.N. initially reported that four peacekeepers were dead, but later said there were two dead and two missing.

And

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said he was "deeply distressed" by the "apparently deliberate" strike.

"This coordinated artillery and aerial attack on a long-established and clearly marked U.N. post at Khiyam occurred despite personal assurances given to me by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that U.N. positions would be spared Israeli fire," he said in a statement.

"Furthermore, General Alain Pelligrini, the U.N. force commander in south Lebanon, had been in repeated contact with Israeli officers throughout the day on Tuesday, stressing the need to protect that particular U.N. position from attack."

Click here for the rest.

It's REALLY difficult for me to believe that Israel didn't deliberately target this UN outpost. Here's some context. Traditionally, the UN, which has issued resolution after resolution for years in condemnation of the Jewish state's heavy-handed tactics, is not considered by Israel to be much of a friend. Fortunately for them, their best buddies in the world, the United States, have used their coveted seat on the UN Security Council, again and again, to quash by veto any real action that would give those resolutions any teeth. Nonetheless, I think there is definitely a perception among the Israeli political elite that the UN is on the side of the Arab world. Like what appears to be the deliberate targeting by the American military of journalists in Iraq perceived as hostile to US interests, it strikes me that it would be hard for IDF commanders to resist using the chaos of war to "accidentally" hit non-combatants who seem to stand in the way. Throw in the numerous reports that Israel is targeting fleeing civilians and Red Cross vehicles, while overall, apparently, doing very little damage to Hezbollah's fighting ability, and also consider that Israel is essentially tearing Lebanon's physical infrastructure to pieces, and it becomes excruciatingly clear that this invasion doesn't have a damned thing to do with rescuing those two captured soldiers. I'm not really sure what their real motives are, but my best guess is that they're trying to achieve a "final solution" for the Lebanon problem: ethnic cleansing. I think they're simply trying to turn their northern neighbor's southern half into a permanent wasteland.

And our tax dollars are funding the entire operation.

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YATES INSANITY VERDICT IS A RARE SHOW OF
SANITY FOR CAPITOL OF CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

From the Houston Chronicle:

A Harris County jury has found Andrea Yates not guilty by reason of insanity during her second capital murder trial for the drowning deaths of her children in the family's bathtub in 2001.

The verdict upholding Yates' insanity defense comes after the jury deliberated more than 12 hours over three days. The decision also underscores the emotional debate on mental illness within the criminal justice system since Yates' first trial in 2002.

And

The jury's verdict means Yates, 42, will be sent to a state mental hospital for treatment, rather than be sentenced to life in prison. Yates and attorneys will return to Judge Belinda Hill's courtroom at 10 a.m. Thursday for a hearing, formalizing the details of Yates' hospitalization. She will go to a maximum security hospital initially.

Click here for the rest.

The legal standard in the United States for establishing the kind of insanity that results in a not guilty verdict for the accused is both hard to meet and completely divorced from what mental health experts define as insane: the defendant must be shown to have not known the difference between "right and wrong" when he committed his crime. Obviously, there are quite a few problems there, most notably the fact that intellectual knowledge of morality doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the uncontrollable urges or bizarre interpretations of reality that are associated with numerous forms of mental illness. So Andrea Yates had the deck stacked against her going into this second trial.

Compounding her long odds is the fact that her trial took place in Houston, and H-Town is not known for its compassion and understanding toward people who have committed murder. Indeed, even though I haven't looked at the numbers in a while, Houston has long had a reputation as "Death Penalty Capitol of the World." Fortunately, Yates lucked out because the jury in her first trial, which convicted her, opted against capital punishment, and for some arcane legal reason, this meant she wasn't facing death in the second trial. Nonetheless, the jury pool she faced in both trials is, overall, pretty bloodthirsty, as are her prosecutors. Tough crowd.

Making matters even worse for Yates is the nature of her crime. Nothing, not Presidential intern sex, war, corporate fraud, murdering non-white people, or disco, drives Americans into a self-righteous frenzy like a mother killing her kids. A lot of people just can't think straight about the subject. They freak out. And, trust me on this one, there are a lot of freaks in Houston.

So that's why I'm very pleasantly surprised that this jury did the right thing and had her committed. Really, it's what should have happened the first time around. Never have I read about a case where it was so extraordinarily clear that the killer met the criteria for legal insanity. Her conviction was both heartbreaking and utterly reinforcing of my hometown's reputation for brutal-revenge-as-justice.

I hope this is the beginning of a trend for the city of bayous and petrochemical plants.

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REAL ART: NORMAN ROCKWELL

This article from the Houston Chronicle caught my eye yesterday:

A brush with history

A print of Norman Rockwell's The Problem We All Live With hangs in Lucille Bridges' Houston apartment. But until last week, the Katrina evacuee had never seen the original painting.

It showed the scariest day of her life: Nov. 14, 1960, the day she sent her oldest daughter, Ruby, to the all-white William Frantz Public School. U.S. marshals escorted Bridges and her 6-year-old into the New Orleans school, past an angry white mob.

The story made national news, but it's Rockwell's image — the cover of Look magazine in 1964 — that lingers in the American subconscious. In his painting, skinny first-grader Ruby Bridges wears a spotless white dress, white socks and white sneakers. Schoolbooks in hand, she walks purposefully between four burly marshals, oblivious to racist graffiti behind her. A splattered tomato drips down the same wall, its juice as red as blood.

For Lucille Bridges, now 72, the moment seemed long ago and far away until she arrived at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. A longtime resident of New Orleans, she relocated to Houston after the hurricane. Most days, she thinks more about her dog or her grandkids than she does about integration.

Click here for the rest.

My father worked for Southwestern Bell in Houston for 35 or so years before he retired back in the mid 90s. I've always had a great deal of respect for how he started out at the very bottom of the corporate ladder, as an electrician's apprentice, and worked his way into middle management without the advantage of a college degree. Today, I'm especially proud of the fact that my family, despite its late bourgeois trappings, is, and always has been, working class. My people do things. But that's ultimately neither here nor there. The point is that along with my old man's telephone work goes a bit of a family legend:

The day my father was hired by the phone company, 1957 or '58 I think, one of the last questions he asked his new boss was something to the effect of "how should I dress?" As the legend goes, his supervisor pointed to a Norman Rockwell print hanging in his office and told my dad to dress like that. Dad, still in his teens and wanting to make a good impression, went shopping and managed to recreate the look almost perfectly, a Rockwell painting come-to-life. Years later when I was a kid in the 70s my mom bought the same print, nicely framed, for my dad's birthday--it still hangs in my parents living room today. It's really a great picture, very life-like, but also theatrical in that, like virtually all of Rockwell's work, it strongly suggests some kind of story. Pretty quickly, I started to recognize the artist's trademark style, and intensely grooved to his work whenever I encountered it, which was quite a bit back in those days.

By the time I was a college student in the late 80s, however, I was dismissing the great illustrator's work as fluff. Indeed, his heartwarming images of small town America, obviously intended to reinforce pro-establishment attitudes, struck me as being much more a part of the problem than the solution. This is not to say that I ever stopped liking Rockwell's work. It's just that I had developed a taste for more intellectually challenging stuff. That's college for you.

Anyway, flash forward to a couple of years ago. Louisiana Public Broadcasting was running a Norman Rockwell documentary. That's where I learned of his more politically oriented work, or, more specifically, the painting mentioned in the excerpt above. It blew me away. It was as though Charles Schulz had decided to incorporate Malcolm X as one of his Peanuts characters. Well, okay, not quite like that, but I tend to think in terms of legends and mythology whenever I can, so I hope you get the idea. It was shocking, in a good way. The warm fuzzy man of my youth had some teeth after all. Kickass.

So then, yesterday, I just happened to click on this Chronicle story about Ruby Bridges' mother finally getting to see the painting in person. "Interesting," I thought as I read the first bit of the article, but then it got more interesting: this event immortalized in Rockwell's art took place just down I-10 in the city I love, New Orleans, which makes my connection to the story just a bit more personal. Even more personalizing for me is that the painting is now in Houston, my hometown, and Lucille Bridges is only there because she had to relocate after Katrina. To top it all off, Ruby Bridges, herself, came to Baton Rouge, where I now live and go to school, after the hurricane, and, according to Wikipedia, still lives here.

Pretty weird. There was just no way that I could go without posting the story.

But here's my bottom line. While writing this I've realized that my earlier dismissal of Rockwell was unfair, and I don't mean simply because late in his career he started to incorporate political themes in his pictures. The Americana portrayed by Rockwell wasn't propaganda. I think it would be idiotic to believe that the artist wasn't aware of America's shortcomings. After all, he lived through the Great Depression, one of the worst times in this country's history, and was born in an era when he was bound to have met people who had fought in the Civil War. Consequently, I've decided that, rather than being pro-establishment, Rockwell was trying to show the country what it ought to be, trying to provide inspiration and vision, pointing us in the right direction. That's worth something. That's Real Art.





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SOUTHERN BAPTIST EXECUTIVES CONVICTED
IN ENRON STYLE INVESTOR BILKING SCHEME

From the Washington Post courtesy of Pandagon courtesy of Eschaton:

Two former executives of a failed Southern Baptist foundation were convicted here Monday in what prosecutors said was the nation's largest fraud ever targeting members of a religious group.

William Pierre Crotts, who was president of the Baptist Foundation of Arizona, and Thomas Dale Grabinski, the group's former chief legal counsel, were each convicted of three counts of fraud and one count of conducting an illegal enterprise in a scheme that lasted decades and cheated 11,000 investors across the country of about $585 million.

In a trial that lasted 10 months, prosecutors claimed that the executives were driven by shame to hide the foundation's mounting investment losses, bilking investors who were recruited in Southern Baptist churches and by Bible-quoting salesmen who visited their homes. Investors were told their money would help Southern Baptist causes, such as building new churches, and were promised above-market returns.

Instead, prosecutors said Crotts and Grabinski had designed a Ponzi scheme in which new investors were needed to pay off the secret mounting debt. Donald Conrad, an Arizona assistant attorney general, characterized Crotts and Grabinski during closing arguments as business failures who defrauded investors in part to "feed their financial fantasies" that they were savvy businessmen.

Click here for the rest.

Well, okay, I guess I can buy that as a motivation. I mean, these guys were totally small time, nothing like Ken Lay and the billions he was playing with. On the other hand, Ken Lay was also a self-styled man of God, described at his funeral by longtime associate Mark Seidl as being a "straight arrow--a Boy Scout, if you will--who lived by Christian-Judeo principles." I wonder when they removed "thou shalt not steal" and "thou shalt not bear false witness" from Christian-Judeo principles--I never got the memo. Anyway, I guess there are more similarities here than initially meet the eye.

Obviously, it doesn't really matter whether these Southern Baptist businessmen in Arizona were motivated by greed or motivated by keeping up appearances: they ripped off millions from lots of innocent people who believed their Bible-laced bullshit.

So there are a couple of lessons here. First, running around quoting the Bible doesn't make one trustworthy. (Yeah, I know, that's as plain as day, but it appears that many Americans are still pretty naive as far as the Jesus-talk is concerned.) Second, as I have observed on numerous occasions, fundamentalist Christians are extraordinarily adept at intellectually compartmentalizing contradictory thoughts. That is, I'm sure these guys, like Ken Lay, felt totally justified in committing their crimes, and their convictions, when they happened, came as a complete surprise--"But, but, I put my faith in the Lord!!!"

As the Bible says, "Not everyone who says to me 'Lord, Lord' will inherit the Kingdom of Heaven."

Heh. Book 'em Danno!


Former Baptist Foundation of Arizona president William P. Crotts is
led from a Phoenix courtroom. (By Tom Tingle -- Associated Press)

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TERRORISM AS U.S. FOREIGN POLICY
Soldiers Say Ordered to Kill Young Men

From the AP via My Way courtesy of AlterNet:

Four U.S. soldiers accused of murdering suspected insurgents during a raid in Iraq said they were under orders to "kill all military age males," according to sworn statements obtained by The Associated Press.

The soldiers first took some of the men into custody because they were using two women and a toddler as human shields. They shot three of the men after the women and child were safe and say the men attacked them.

"The ROE (rule of engagement) was to kill all military age males on Objective Murray," Staff Sgt. Raymond L. Girouard told investigators, referring to the target by its code name.

That target, an island on a canal in the northern Salahuddin province, was believed to be an al-Qaida training camp. The soldiers said officers in their chain of command gave them the order and explained that special forces had tried before to target the island and had come under fire from insurgents.

Girouard, Spc. William B. Hunsaker, Pfc. Corey R. Clagett, and Spc. Juston R. Graber are charged with murder and other offenses in the shooting deaths of three of the men during the May 9 raid.

Click here for the rest.

Okay, I know the situation is crazy and chaotic over there, but "kill all military age males" sounds very much like the "free fire zones" and "search and destroy missions" in Vietnam that created the context in which atrocities like the My Lai Massacre took place. That is, the case described above may very well be murder, but the rules of engagement were such that gung-ho soldiers in the field might have easily misinterpreted them to mean, literally, "kill all military age males." But then, if those were actually the ROE, indiscriminately shooting any man you see, these soldiers weren't misinterpreting their orders. And if that's the case, it's pretty easy to assume that, as longtime British Middle Eastern correspondent Robert Fisk has asserted on several occasions, terrorism is official US policy in Iraq.

This leads to an important question: how is the US government any different from Al Qaeda?

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The High Cost of Being Poor

From AlterNet, progressive writer Barbara Ehrenreich on how much it sucks to be poor in America:

A new study from the Brookings Institute documents the "ghetto tax," or higher cost of living in low-income urban neighborhoods. It comes at you from every direction, from food prices to auto insurance. A few examples from this study, by Matt Fellowes, that covered 12 American cities:

* Poor people are less likely to have bank accounts, which can be expensive for those with low balances, and so they tend to cash their pay checks at check-cashing businesses, which in the cities surveyed, charged $5 to $50 for a $500 check.

* Nationwide, low-income car buyers, defined as people earning less than $30,000 a year, pay two percentage points more for a car loan than more affluent buyers.

* Low-income drivers pay more for car insurance. In New York, Baltimore and Hartford, they pay an average $400 more a year to insure the exact same car and driver risk than wealthier drivers.

* Poorer people pay an average of one percentage point more in mortgage interest.

* They are more likely to buy their furniture and appliances through pricey rent-to-own businesses. In Wisconsin, the study reports, a $200 rent-to-own TV set can cost $700 with the interest included.

* They are less likely to have access to large supermarkets and hence to rely on the far more expensive, and lower quality offerings, of small grocery and convenience stores.

Click here for the rest.

So it's not simply that poor people have to make do with less money: it's that the economic deck has been stacked to make the poor literally pay more for everyday items and services than do people who are not in poverty. That is, because there is virtually no voice in government for low income Americans, the law favors predatory economic practices which victimize the poor. Throw into the mix the continual right-wing dismantling, by both Republicans and Democrats, of New Deal and Great Society programs that have historically greatly eased the burden of poverty, the permanent outsourcing of low skilled jobs that provide livable wages and benefits, the ongoing healthcare crisis, and the skyrocketing cost of college tuition and fees, and the concept of "upward mobility" becomes a sick and twisted joke.

The President recently spoke to the NAACP about how his "Ownership Society" is the best way to help out economically struggling African-Americans. Most of the audience simply rolled their eyes: they know as well as anybody that the economic barriers erected by the white power structure make joining Bush's "Ownership Society" all but impossible for blacks in poverty. And when I saw the President's remarks on television, I rolled my eyes, too. White Americans in poverty are obstructed by the same barriers.

I think I'd be much more willing to buy into the neoliberals' Horatio Alger myths about pulling oneself up by the bootstraps if the concentration of economic powers that run our country hadn't already foreclosed on the boots. The bottom line is that public discourse about poverty in this country is a sick fucking joke, and the situation is only going to continue its long decline until we can get some honesty into the conversation.

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Group: U.S. military urged abuse in Iraq

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

The group Human Rights Watch said in a report released Sunday that U.S. military commanders encouraged abusive interrogations of detainees in Iraq, even after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal called attention to the issue in 2004.

Between 2003 and 2005, prisoners were routinely physically mistreated, deprived of sleep and exposed to extreme temperatures as part of the interrogation process, the report said.

"Soldiers were told that the Geneva Conventions did not apply, and that interrogators could use abusive techniques to get detainees to talk," wrote John Sifton, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch.

The organization said it based its conclusion on interviews with military personnel and sworn statements in declassified documents

Click here for the rest.

This is what more than a few people have suspected for some time. Indeed, I've personally just assumed that all this bullshit was coming down from the top. The torture and abuse are just too widespread, too similar in manifestation, to be coming from just "a few bad apples." Furthermore, if torture wasn't official policy, why did White House lawyers spend so much time and effort drafting documents in anticipation of legal challenges? Why were the Geneva Conventions dismissed as "quaint," well before the scandals broke, by Bush administration insiders? Actually, one would have to be pretty stupid and naive, or willfully blind, to not suspect that this goes all the way up the chain to the Commander in Chief. It has amazed me how the corporate press hasn't chased down these obvious lines of reasoning, but then, I guess that's pretty much par for the course when it comes to our intrepid news media. But it sounds like a few public advocacy groups are on the case, and, hopefully, the truth will come out while the big Chimp is still in office. Then the GOP dominated House will have to explain why they won't impeach our Great White Father.

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REAL ART

Goya's The Third of May 1808



From Wikipedia:

The Third of May 1808 is a 1814 oil painting by the Spanish painter Francisco Goya. It depicts a scene from the Spanish war of liberation when many innocent citizens were shot by Napoleon's troops.

And

The white of the victim's shirt represents the innocence and purity of the some 5000 Spanish civilians who were executed between May 2 and May 3. At the time of his death, the brave Spaniard becomes a martyr, raising his arms in a Christ-like fashion.

Click here for a bit more on the painting, here for more on Goya, and here for a much closer look at the painting.

This is what we're allowing Israel to do to Lebanon, and what the US has unleashed in Iraq and Afghanistan, by both encouraging sectarian division which is causing all kinds of violence and murder, and indiscriminately targeting, well, everyone. This kind of thing, wholesale slaughter of innocent civilians, was obviously understood to be insanely immoral in the 19th century, and it is obviously insanely immoral now. The sickness that I felt during the first few days of the US invasion of Iraq has returned to me bigtime as I watch every day on television Israeli tanks and planes, which were paid for and manufactured by the US, tear up a tiny nation that is, by and large, defenseless. I understand how Hezbollah is violent, too, and how Israel has a legitimate grievance, but destroying a defenseless nation, turning 500,000 people into homeless and destitute refugees overnight, is a crime against humanity, and our government bears no small part of the responsibility.

Like I said, I'm sickened.

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Afghanistan close to anarchy, warns general

From the London Guardian courtesy of AlterNet:

The most senior British military commander in Afghanistan yesterday described the situation in the country as "close to anarchy" with feuding foreign agencies and unethical private security companies compounding problems caused by local corruption.

The stark warning came from Lieutenant General David Richards, head of Nato's international security force in Afghanistan, who warned that western forces there were short of equipment and were "running out of time" if they were going to meet the expectations of the Afghan people.

The assumption within Nato countries had been that the environment in Afghanistan after the defeat of the Taliban in 2002 would be benign, Gen Richards said. "That is clearly not the case," he said yesterday. He referred to disputes between tribes crossing the border with Pakistan, and divisions between religious and secular factions cynically manipulated by "anarcho-warlords".

Click here for the rest.

In the post immediately below, I think it's pretty clear that the White House has failed utterly in the task of making this country safe from terrorists at home. I think this latest news from Afghanistan makes it pretty clear that Bush is failing utterly abroad as well. Even though I didn't agree with the invasion there in the first place, because terrorism really can't be ended without some hardcore diplomacy and a massive change in how the US treats the rest of the world, I have to admit that there was a much better case for going into the nation that was harboring Al Qaeda than there ever was for going after Saddam Hussein. I mean, if I understand correctly, Al Qaeda really did end up being totally disorganized, incapable, for the time being, of mounting the same kind of operation that freaked everybody out and killed thousands back in 2001. After that initial success, however, the White House started pulling out troops for the Iraq operation, which, many critics say, resulted in bin Laden's escape when he was cornered at Tora Bora. Then the Iraq invasion began, which diverted the world's attention, and the situation in Afghanistan started to deteriorate.

Now it appears that both Iraq and Afghanistan have become real life training grounds for the terrorists the President said he was going to get rid of, and the whole "flypaper" theory that we're fighting them there so they wouldn't attack elsewhere was proven stupid by the Madrid and London attacks. That is, Bush's wars have made things worse, not better. It would be amusing, if it weren't so damned sad and serious, that "close to anarchy" now describes both of Bush's military adventures in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, Lebanon burns.

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PENTAGON SURPLUS SALE:
"Much of the equipment could be useful to terroriststs"

From the AP via Yahoo courtesy of AlterNet:

Undercover government investigators purchased sensitive surplus military equipment such as launcher mounts for shoulder-fired missiles and guided missile radar test sets from a Defense Department contractor.

Much of the equipment could be useful to terrorists, according to a draft report by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress.

In June, two GAO investigators spent $1.1 million on such equipment at two excess property warehouses. Their purchases included several types of body armor inserts used by troops in
Iraq and Afghanistan, an all-band antenna used to track aircraft, and a digital signal converter used in naval surveillance.

And

Thousands of items that should have been destroyed were sold to the public, the report said. Much of the equipment was sold for pennies on the dollar.

Click here for the rest.

You know, what with the crazed chainsaw murderer from Canada a couple of years back being allowed through border security with his weapon, bloodied, in his baggage, the virtual lack of protections at chemical plants throughout the land, chronically unexamined cargo containers coming into the country through the ports, the clusterfuck hurricane evacuations in Louisiana and Texas last year, the week that it took for the Department of Homeland Security to respond to the post-Katrina flooding disaster in New Orleans, the reappropriation of security dollars from New York and other obvious targets to venues such as petting zoos and stamp museums, and now this mind boggling sale of high tech military equipment for super-cheap to people without any sort of clearance, I'm really starting to wonder what, if anything, the Bush administration is doing here at home to keep us safe from the very real threat of global terrorism. It is an irony, indeed, that so many Americans in 2004 voted for Bush because, despite his total failure in Iraq, they felt safer with him at the helm. Of course, there isn't such a thing as irony anymore; the Republicans killed it shortly after 9/11. It was replaced by the simple maxim well articulated a while ago on the Senate floor by Vice President Cheney to Senator Patrick Leahy, "Go fuck yourself."

We've been lucky so far that there have been no terrorist attacks since the WTC was hit. But I'm sure it's bound to happen again eventually, especially because it appears that the White House's only strategy for homeland security is to violate civil liberties. That is, it's pretty hard for me to think that they don't want another attack. And when that happens, you can bet your booty that the Republicans will use it as an excuse to amass more power: "You see? We told you that terrorists are bad. Now line up to have your computer chip implanted."

Christ, it's like the whole fucking country's on acid.

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Dan Quayle won't listen to John Mellencamp bash Bush

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

The former vice president, miffed about a comment made by Mellencamp about Pres. Bush's administration, walked out of the singer's July 14 show at Harvey's Lake Tahoe Casino in Lake Tahoe, Calif.

Mellencamp, unaware that Quayle was in the audience, introduced the song Walk Tall by saying, "This next one is for all the poor people who've been ignored by the current administration."

Click here for the rest.

Weird. Did Quayle wander into the wrong casino or something? What was he expecting? My estimate is that something like a third of all John Cougar's radio hits are laced with images and themes of a meaningless and desolate America, with its working class left behind by the winner-take-all economic policies of the Reagan era. That is, to anybody who has been listening for the last quarter century or so, Mr. Mellencamp is obviously no friend of the Conservative Movement. Hasn't Quayle ever heard "The Authority Song" or "Pink Houses" or "Jack and Diane?" I bet he doesn't listen to the lyrics, figuring JCM as some sort of greasier Elvis for the new millenium. But then, this is the guy who got all pissed about fictional TV character Murphy Brown having a child out of wedlock, the guy who spelled "potato" incorrectly on a chalkboard when speaking to some elementary school students. Yeah, he's still an idiot.

Here are the lyrics to one of my favorites:

Pink Houses

There's a black man with a black cat
Living in a black neighborhood
He's got an interstate runnin' through his front yard
You know, he thinks that he's got it so good
And theres a woman in the kitchen cleanin' up the evening slop
And he looks at her and says:
hey darling, I can remember when you could stop a clock

Oh but ain't that america for you and me
Ain't that america we're something to see baby
Ain't that america, home of the free
Little pink houses for you and me

Well there's a young man in a t-shirt
Listening to a rockin' rollin' station
He's got a greasy hair, greasy smile
He says: lord, this must be my destination
cuz they told me, when I was younger
Boy, you're gonna be president
But just like everyting else, those old crazy dreams
Just kinda came and went

Oh but ain't that america for you and me
Ain't that america we're something to see baby
Ain't that america, home of the free
Little pink houses for you and me

Well there's people and more people
What do they know know know
Go to work in some high rise
And vacation down at the gulf of mexico
Ohhh yeah
And there's winners, and there's losers
But they ain't no big deal
cuz the simple man baby pays for the thrills,
The bills and the pills that kill

Oh but ain't that america for you and me
Ain't that america we're something to see baby
Ain't that america, home of the free
Little pink houses for you and me

Check out the video here via YouTube.



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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Sammy



Phil



Frankie



Paz



Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging!

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WHAT I LEARNED FROM THAT
AOL CANCELLATION RECORDING:
Employee Loyalty Is for Chumps

So it's been big news for a week or two, that famed telephone recording of a fed-up America Online customer trying unsuccessfully to cancel his account, but just in case you haven't noticed, here's some background.

From Philadelphia's NBC10.com:

On Tape: Rep Won't Let Customer Quit AOL

An incredible video from CNBC shows an AOL customer trying to cancel his account, but a phone rep won't let him do it. What customer Vincent Ferrari got when he tried to cancel his account was a lot of frustration.

It took him 15 minutes waiting on the phone just to reach a real, live person.

And, what happened next was recorded by Ferrari on audio and lasted about four minutes

And

He recounts how the AOL representative - as a last resort even asked if his dad was home.

"I think I could've put up with everything, but at the point when he asked to speak to my father, I came very close to losing it at that point," said the 30-year-old Ferrari.

Ferrari then posted the call online, and the response was tremendous.

AOL sent him an apology and said the customer service rep was no longer with the company.

Click here for some segments of the call's transcript; click here for streaming video, including audio of same segments, with onscreen text.

Obviously, the caller was treated like total crap, which was the angle played up about the story in the news. Like I said, obvious. What's not so obvious is why anybody with a heart ought to have some sympathy for the sacked customer service guy. Implicit in AOL's apology and employee dismissal is the suggestion that AOL doesn't really do business that way, that this was all due to an overzealous phone rep, or a stupid phone rep, something like that. But that's just not true. That is how AOL does business. There's no need for me to go into my own personal experiences with the internet giant, but suffice it to say, AOL sucks, and lots of people know it. I feel pretty certain that stonewalling and railroading customers who make trouble, and by "make trouble" I mean "insist that AOL follows the terms of the service contract," is company policy. Consequently, the AOL phone guy was made a scapegoat for doing just as he was told.

So, there's a real lesson in all of this. In this corporate dominated era in which we live, in this time of "globalism," employees are completely expendable. As if the continued hemorrhaging from all this downsizing and outsourcing didn't make that plain already. Do your job wrong, get fired. Do your job right, get fired. We simply don't matter to them: why should they matter to us? Company loyalty is for chumps. All a worker owes his employer is the work for which he is paid. Nothing else. Not "hard" work, just work. Not excitement, not overtime, not trust, not a pleasant attitude, not friendship. Just the work. Believe me, that's their attitude toward you, and you're a fool if you think otherwise. You're not on "the team." You never were.

I didn't ask for this philosophy, and I don't really like having to live my life this way either. But I was never given a choice. Employee disposability was rammed down our throats years ago; it only seems natural for workers to devalue their employers in the same way.

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BRILLIANT SATIRIST AMBUSHES CHOMSKY

First, a little bit on the comedian--you may have seen his show on HBO. From Wikipedia:

Ali G

Ali G is a satirical comic character invented and played by the British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen.

Ali G first appeared on Channel 4's Eleven O'Clock show as the "voice of da youth". He interviewed various public figures in the United Kingdom, who, too scared to appear "uncool", were completely fooled by his idiosyncratic interview technique, based mostly on the simple stratagem of pretending to be stupid.

One particularly memorable interview was with a fashion designer. Ali G suggested that the Wonderbra should be banned as it misleads men into thinking that a woman's breasts are larger than they are; he retold a story of having been disappointed when a girl he had "pulled" proved to have been wearing a Wonderbra. He also asked his interviewee if he was pleased Gianni Versace was killed, because it meant less competition, and he suggested that he'd heard a rumour that Calvin Klein did it. (This was a clear satire on the feuding which followed the deaths of the american rappers Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G., where it was thought to be the work of rival music producer Suge Knight).

And

Ali G can also be seen as a commentary on the adoption of American black street culture by both non-Americans and non-blacks. Because Baron Cohen is a middle-class, Cambridge University-educated Jewish actor portraying a suburban, presumably middle-class Briton of undetermined extraction who is, in turn, styling himself on American street life, the show maintains a certain Victor/Victoria quality. To many critics, Ali G is not satirising black urban culture, but those non-blacks and non-urbanites who appropriate it. Ali G's behaviour and clothing also parodies the UK junglist subculture of drum & bass listeners, and has many similarities to hip-hop culture. There are indications that his portrayal also typifies the UK chav subculture.

Click here for the rest.

I dare say that drum and bass listeners have had this coming for years. But I digress.

This guy's pretty damned funny in both a Spinaltap and Andy Kaufman kind of way. That is, like the film This Is Spinaltap, his humor is improvised, so there's a guerilla theater aspect to his work, and his character is over-the-top stupid, which is always good for a few laughs. On the other hand, like Kaufman, Cohen's material absolutely depends on his victims having no idea what's really going on--Kaufman generally preyed on his audiences; Cohen assaults his interview subjects. I suppose that Candid Camera was really the first to do this kind of thing, but the people Ali G interviews appear to be carefully chosen for their fame and public esteem, unlike the ordinary people taken for a ride by Allen Funt--this, I think, tends to give his comedy a sort of class consciousness.

At any rate, he makes me laugh, and the multiple levels of meaning he plays with engage me intellectually. Go check out, via Throw Away Your TV, his utterly retarded discussion of linguistics with Noam Chomsky here.



Yo, respect!

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QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES
Means "Who Polices the Police?"

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Evidence Chicago police tortured suspects

Special prosecutors investigating allegations that police tortured nearly 150 black suspects in the 1970s and '80s said Wednesday they found evidence of abuse, but any crimes are now too old to prosecute.

In three of the cases, the prosecutors said the evidence was strong enough to have warranted indictments and convictions.

"It is our judgment that the evidence in those cases would be sufficient to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt," Robert D. Boyle and Edward J. Egan wrote.

The four-year investigation focused on allegations that 148 black men were tortured in Chicago police interrogation rooms in the 1970s and '80s. The men claimed detectives under the command of Lt. Jon Burge beat them, used electric shocks, played mock Russian roulette and started to smother at least one to elicit confessions.

Click here for the rest.

Some part of me just can't get past thinking that there ought not to be a statue of limitations on torture, but hey, I'm just a guy--what do I know? The point here is that, even though this horrible tale seems to have ended for the time being, police culture in the United States is such that such a thing, institutional police support for wholesale violation of human and civil rights, is likely to happen again. Soon, if not right now. It is important to observe that this reign of terror in Chicago didn't seem to end because the people involved were caught--I mean, this information is only just now coming to light. Actually, I don't know why it ended; the article doesn't say, but what's important is that whatever legal or institutional mechanisms, internal affairs division, whatever, that were supposed to catch this didn't work. It happened anyway.

The reason why, I think, is that the hypermasculine culture of police, which exists throughout the nation, tends to put their line of work into very stark black and white terms which utterly belie reality: cops are good guys doing whatever they can to stop the bad guys, who are potentially pretty much anybody who may get in the way; Constitutional protections for the accused are belittled and dismissed as obstacles to the good guys' mission. Thus, torture becomes acceptable within police culture--enlightened cops who may object often don't out of loyalty to their brethren, the classic "code of silence" observed by both law-enforcement agents and mafiosi.

As I've said many times, I wholeheartedly agree with the notion that society needs police--that's not what my criticism is about. But these chronic and systemic police abuses that seem to be in the headlines virtually every day make plain that something is dead wrong with the way that law enforcement is approached in this country. It is police culture, I think, with its utterly simplistic worldview and morality, along with its inherent sense of social elitism, that seems to be the unifying factor for all these cases. Until this blue uniformed group-think is addressed by the powers that be, I think I'm going to continue to be just as scared of cops as I am of criminals, who, oftentimes, are one and the same.

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KING OF JEWS, KING OF BEERS

From the Houston Chronicle:

For two weeks, on a billboard near downtown Houston, a radiant, blond Jesus hoisted a can of Budweiser.

"King of Jews," the text proclaimed. "King of Beers."

Clear Channel Outdoor, which owns the billboard at La Branch and Winbern, says the professional-looking ad wasn't paid for. Essentially, a company spokesman said, the billboard — like at least two others in the past two months — was hijacked.

And

The hijacking, a misdemeanor in Texas carrying up to six months jail time and a $2,000 fine, resembles the work of New Jersey-based artist Ron English, 46. And the billboard appeared around June 21 — the same day a show including English's work opened, about a block away, at The Station Museum of Contemporary Art.

English denied any direct connection to the Houston billboards and said he no longer posts illegal signs in Texas, where legal penalties are far stiffer than in the Northeast.

"Sometimes, when I do shows, kids will put up billboards in that city," he said. "I'm glad to see young people are doing it."

Click here for the rest.

Okay, you just gotta love the message here subverting not only pious attitudes about the Lord, but also going after the "demon rum" oriented Southern Baptists deep in the heart of a stronghold state like Texas, deep in the heart of Bush country. But that's only a small part of the subversion. This work of Real Art hits America's true religion, consumerism, right in the 'nads, while at the same time attacking the widespread Christian hypocrisy which has allowed many of the faithful to somehow ignore Jesus' example of life-without-posessions in order to be Consumerists and Christians at the same time. Man, the more I think about this, the more brilliant I think it is.

Heh. "King of Beers."


Photo courtesy of KTRK-TV

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U.S. invasion responsible for deaths
of over 250,000 civilians in Iraq

From Information Clearing House courtesy of BuzzFlash:

New studies make the Bush administration's "liberation" argument for a 'pre-emptive' war against Iraq seem questionable.

The invasion of Iraq in March 2003 by U.S.-led coalition forces has been responsible for the death of at least 150,000 civilians (not including certain of Iraq), reveals a compilitation of scientific studies and corroborated eyewitness testimonies.

The majority of these deaths, which are in addition those normally expected from natural causes, illness and accidents, have been among women and children, documents a well-researched study, that had been released by The Lancet Medical Journal.

And

That estimate excludes Falluja, a hotspot for violence. If the data from this town is included, the compiled studies point to about 250,000 excess deaths since the outbreak of the U.S.-led war.

Click here for the rest.

I think these study results were actually released sometime last year--I think I even posted a link to an article about it here at Real Art. Nonetheless, BuzzFlash has picked it up now, and I think it's definitely worth posting again, especially because the Pentagon claims to not even be counting civilian casualties. Lord knows, the numbers have only gone up in the months since the study was done. It's kind of a drag that most of the discussion here in the US is pretty much in terms of American deaths only, at least as far as numbers are concerned. Granted, all deaths coming out of the occupation are horrible, but the Iraqi people aren't volunteers; they didn't sign up for this, and our government is killing them. On a massive scale.

I can't think of a single argument that would even come close to justifying this kind of slaughter.

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Bush personally blocked eavesdropping probe

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

At the time, the office said it could not obtain security clearance to examine the classified program.

Under sharp questioning from Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter, Gonzales said that Bush would not grant the access needed to allow the probe to move forward.

"It was highly classified, very important and many other lawyers had access. Why not OPR?" asked Specter, R-Pa.

"The president of the United States makes the decision," Gonzales told the committee hearing, during which he was strongly criticized on a range of national security issues by Specter and Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, the panel's senior Democrat.

Click here for the rest.

Okay, this makes a lot more sense than that bogus security clearance story. When the news broke about that last May, my gut reaction was that it was some kind of political maneuver:

What we have here is one White House agency, the NSA, refusing to allow another White House agency, the Department of Justice, to investigate the former because the latter lacks security clearance: this could be cleared up in like five seconds by, surprise surprise, the White House.

So, it's not just that the White House could have cleared up the problem but didn't; it's that the White House is the problem. Really, how can the whole country not be disgusted by this? In the realm of outrageous political plays, it easily ranks up there with Nixon firing special Watergate investigator Archibald Cox because he was getting too close to the truth. I keep on saying that Bush has placed our Constitutional system in grave danger: this is but one example of how government mechanisms for self-correction have been completely dismantled by the White House.

Bush is the law now.

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Triumph of the Authoritarians

From the Boston Globe courtesy of BuzzFlash, Watergate conspirator turned good guy John Dean laments on how traditional conservatism has morphed into weird authoritarianism:

Candid and knowledgeable Republicans on the far right concede -- usually only when not speaking for attribution -- that they are not truly conservative. They do not like to talk about why they behave as they do, or even to reflect on it. Nonetheless, their leaders admit they like being in charge, and their followers grant they find comfort in strong leaders who make them feel safe. This is what I gleaned from discussions with countless conservative leaders and followers, over a decade of questioning.

And

For almost half a century, social scientists have been exploring authoritarianism. We do not typically associate authoritarianism with our democracy, but as I discovered while examining decades of empirical research, we ignore some findings at our risk. Unfortunately, the social scientists who have studied these issues report their findings in monographs and professional journals written for their peers, not for general readers. With the help of a leading researcher and others, I waded into this massive body of work.

What I found provided a personal epiphany. Authoritarian conservatives are, as a researcher told me, "enemies of freedom, antidemocratic, antiequality, highly prejudiced, mean-spirited, power hungry, Machiavellian and amoral." And that's not just his view. To the contrary, this is how these people have consistently described themselves when being anonymously tested, by the tens of thousands over the past several decades.

Authoritarianism's impact on contemporary conservatism is beyond question.

Click here for the rest.

So, I've written a great deal about authoritarianism and public education here at Real Art over the last few years: the short version is that, despite the fact that most people believe the schools are about learning, the moment to moment reality in classrooms, hallways, and lunch rooms throughout the nation betrays public education's true purpose; education is about indoctrinating children into the culture of authority and obedience--learning, as it is more popularly understood, is a secondary and contradictory concern. You may disagree with my analysis, but think about it for a moment. Kids spend, if you include kindergarten, thirteen years in an artificially created social situation that is utterly heirarchical and authority laden before they are unleashed on the greater society. Their entire days are strictly structured and organized; there are rules out the wazoo, and rigid consequences for their violation. There are punishments and rewards, in the form of grades and institutional acceptance or rejection, for the often meaningless tasks known more popularly as "assignments." Bullying and social elitism among students is not only tolerated but often actively encouraged by teachers, administrators, and coaches. Keep in mind that children are immersed in this environment for thirteen of the most formative years of their lives. They may know their multiplication tables and the preamble to the Constitution when they graduate, but they know much better that there are rewards for people who get with the system, and punishments for people who don't.

Is it any surprise that many Americans take the tacit but overwhelmingly persuasive lessons from school about authortarianism to heart? Throw in some harsh Christian fundamentalism, and we have the modern Conservative Movement. In short, the schools have created the anti-democratic fuel, and the conservatives have provided the spark. This right wing authoritarianism has been a long time in coming. And now we have to deal with it.

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Left Behind Economics

From the New York Times via The Progressive American, the columnist and Princeton economist recently described as a "socialist" by right-wing nutcase Bill O'Reilly, Paul Krugman, considers economic growth that benefits only the rich:

Here's what happened in 2004. The U.S. economy grew 4.2 percent, a very good number. Yet last August the Census Bureau reported that real median family income — the purchasing power of the typical family — actually fell. Meanwhile, poverty increased, as did the number of Americans without health insurance. So where did the growth go?

The answer comes from the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, whose long-term estimates of income equality have become the gold standard for research on this topic, and who have recently updated their estimates to include 2004. They show that even if you exclude capital gains from a rising stock market, in 2004 the real income of the richest 1 percent of Americans surged by almost 12.5 percent. Meanwhile, the average real income of the bottom 99 percent of the population rose only 1.5 percent. In other words, a relative handful of people received most of the benefits of growth.

There are a couple of additional revelations in the 2004 data. One is that growth didn't just bypass the poor and the lower middle class, it bypassed the upper middle class too. Even people at the 95th percentile of the income distribution — that is, people richer than 19 out of 20 Americans — gained only modestly. The big increases went only to people who were already in the economic stratosphere.

The other revelation is that being highly educated was no guarantee of sharing in the benefits of economic growth. There's a persistent myth, perpetuated by economists who should know better — like Edward Lazear, the chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers — that rising inequality in the United States is mainly a matter of a rising gap between those with a lot of education and those without. But census data show that the real earnings of the typical college graduate actually fell in 2004.

Click here for the rest.

The entire philosophical notion that the right wing uses to justify its love affair with the rich is that their wealthy campaign contributers need generous handouts from the governmet so that they will invest it, which, in turn, stimulates the economy, which, in turn, creates jobs and raises--it's the old JFK notion about a rising tide "lifting all the boats." Well, that may have been the case fifty years ago, but it's obviously not true today: these old economic equations no longer work, and today, divorced from reality, they simply serve as intellectual cover for the conservatives' relentless savaging of the middle and working classes in this country.

I'm not sure why the tax cut money isn't trickling down to where it's most needed. It's probably some combination of the rich simply sitting on it, or spending it on stupid shit like yahts, with better business smarts about how to hold onto profits for themselves instead of turning them into higher wages. Of this, however, I'm sure: it's now been convincingly illustrated that economic growth is not the same thing as better economic times for the nation as a whole. The sooner the "lifting all the boats" concept is gone from public discourse, the better.

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BUSH IS FORCING A CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS

Two bigtime newspaper editorial boards today are going after the White House's steady journey toward absolute power.

From the New York Times courtesy of Eschaton:

The Real Agenda

It is only now, nearly five years after Sept. 11, that the full picture of the Bush administration’s response to the terror attacks is becoming clear. Much of it, we can see now, had far less to do with fighting Osama bin Laden than with expanding presidential power.

Over and over again, the same pattern emerges: Given a choice between following the rules or carving out some unprecedented executive power, the White House always shrugged off the legal constraints. Even when the only challenge was to get required approval from an ever-cooperative Congress, the president and his staff preferred to go it alone. While no one questions the determination of the White House to fight terrorism, the methods this administration has used to do it have been shaped by another, perverse determination: never to consult, never to ask and always to fight against any constraint on the executive branch.

Click here for more.

The editorial goes on to spell out a couple of examples of White House overreach, Guantanamo and illegal wiretapping, but their colleagues on the West Coast get much more specific about what's going on.

From the LA Times courtesy of BuzzFlash:

Bush: Worse Than Nixon

Among the many such activities are the seizure of U.S. citizens and their indefinite detention without charge or access to lawyers; warrantless wiretaps of citizens in violation of procedures mandated by Congress; and the seizing of individuals in foreign countries and their movement to third countries, where they have been subjected to torture in violation of U.S. laws and treaty obligations.

When these activities have leaked out, the president has not sought to deny them but has publicly defended them (and attacked the press for printing the information). The administration has vigorously opposed all efforts to have the courts review its actions, and when the Supreme Court has overruled the president, as it has several times now, the administration has given the court holdings the narrowest possible interpretation.

Congress has been treated with equal disdain. When the Senate voted overwhelmingly to prohibit torture and cruel and degrading treatment by all agencies, including the CIA, Vice President Dick Cheney warned lawmakers that they were overstepping their bounds and threatening national security. When Congress persisted and attached the language to a defense appropriations bill, the president signed the law with an accompanying statement declaring his right to disobey the anti-torture provisions.

The administration has repeatedly failed to inform Congress or its committees of what it was doing, or has told only a few selected members in a truncated way, preventing real oversight. Even leading Republicans, such as Michigan's Rep. Peter Hoekstra, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, have voiced strong concerns.

Click here for the rest.

So, the bottom line for both of these essays is that the accumulated effect of White House lawlessness is such that the very Constitutional structure of our government is in danger of becoming irrelevant. That is, Bush's actions are quite literally on the verge of dictatorship. It's very nice that these two corporate news outlets are at last recognizing the great peril in which we now find ourselves, but enlightened individuals were essentially saying the same thing within weeks of 9/11. I hope these loud establishment voices haven't joined the party too late to do any good--Bush has become so extraordinarily powerful that he may very well be able to follow through on his threat to prosecute newspapers for violating "national security laws;" indeed, these essays are no doubt in response to that threat.

I really like the LA Times' comparison with Nixon, who, like the Bush administration, was very successful with both bullying and covertly manipulating the press. I've been slowly working my way through what's been considered by some to be THE Watergate classic, Jonathan Schell's The Time of Illusion. It's been like deja vu. All of this has happened before. Virtually every bit of information coming to light about Bush is like it came out of Nixon's playbook: policy proposals designed to stir up political shit but not actually become law, unprecedented secrecy, consolidation and expansion of executive power justified by national security concerns, thousands of lies, and the smearing of political opponents on a mythic scale. And much, much more. It's a good comparison, but, really, the title says it all--"Worse Than Nixon." The Bush team has the benefit of both hindsight and an insanely loyal GOP dominated Congress. They're not repeating Tricky Dick's mistakes, and have the cover and legitimacy provided by the policy branch that Nixon didn't have.

Further, in the way that the Clinton impeachment was for many Republicans very much about avenging what happened to RMN, this White House power grab is about cleaning up what they believe is the mess Congress created in the wake of his resignation.

From the New Yorker:

THE HIDDEN POWER

In a revealing interview that Cheney gave last December to reporters traveling with him to Oman, he explained, “I do have the view that over the years there had been an erosion of Presidential power and authority. . . . A lot of the things around Watergate and Vietnam both, in the seventies, served to erode the authority I think the President needs.” Further, Cheney explained, it was his express aim to restore the balance of power. The President needed to be able to act as Alexander Hamilton had described it in the Federalist Papers, with “secrecy” and “dispatch”—especially, Cheney said, “in the day and age we live in . . . with the threats we face.” He added, “I believe in a strong, robust executive authority, and I think the world we live in demands it.”

Click here for the rest.

You know, I actually believe that these people really do think that they're trying to "restore the balance of power," which almost reaches the level of humorous irony because balance doesn't have a damned thing to do with what they want. But then, the conservatives, in their delusional state, have successfully rendered irony an obsolete concept. No, they want to unbalance the power shared by the three branches of the federal government such that the other two ultimately have no meaning or relevance. Do they have any idea that what they're trying to pull off would pretty much end the United States as we've always understood it? Probably not.

Another near irony: Cheney believes that "the day and age we live in" necessitates Mussolini-like White House power. He was, no doubt, invoking the conventional wisdom that 9/11 changed everything, which, for him, apparently means that there's no room for traditional American democracy anymore. Of course, that's total bullshit. 9/11 changed nothing, except for the emboldening of authoritarian strains within our own culture. Indeed, the exact opposite is true: in this day and age, with its high tech communications, weapons of mass destruction, high speed financial transactions, and a corporate press that is more concerned with sales and ratings than its role as "fourth branch" of government, investing a single individual with all of America's might is just too dangerous. Our founding fathers, recently under the yoke of King George III, understood well that monarchial power simply doesn't mix with liberty. Today, that danger is much greater than it was then. Today monarchial power destroys liberty.

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Religious valedictorian sues Nevada school

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

A high school valedictorian who had the plug pulled on her microphone as she gave an address referring to Jesus Christ has filed a lawsuit against school officials, claiming her rights to religious freedom and free speech were trampled.

Brittany McComb, 18, said she was giving her June 15 commencement address to some 400 graduates of Foothill High School and their family members when the sound was cut.

"God's love is so great that he gave his only son up," she said, before the microphone went dead. She continued without amplification, "...to an excruciating death on a cross so his blood would cover all our shortcomings and provide for us a way to heaven in accepting this grace."

And

School District lawyer Bill Hoffman has said previously that the school was following 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rulings that have obligated districts to censor student speeches for proselytizing.

Allen Lichtenstein, lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada, said the school appropriately followed the appeals court's decisions.

"Proselytizing is improper in school-sponsored speech at valedictorian graduations," he said, adding the ACLU had sued in the past to ensure proselytizing was prevented at school-sponsored events.

Click here for the rest.

I'm unfamiliar with these 9th Circuit rulings, but I think I should probably study up on them if my habitual laziness can be temporarily overcome: you see, I just don't get it. As longtime Real Art readers know, I'm no friend to Christianity, but I am fiercely devoted to the first amendment, and my understanding of what is probably the most important part of the Bill of Rights is that, as long as students aren't proxies for teachers or administrators, their freedoms of speech and worship are absolute.

That is, how can being a valedictorian make you a government official? It's the schools, not the students, who need to keep their mouths shut about religion. It has long been understood that the schools, which are organs of government, cannot proselytize in any way because that would be the legal equivalent of the government establishing a religion, which is unconstitutional; students, because they are in no way employed by the schools, are essentially incapable of violating the law in this way, unless, of course, they are in cahoots with school officials, say, plotting to sneak in some Christian prayer to a school-sponsored event, but calling it "student initiated," when it clearly is not. It pretty much looks as though this girl was not in cahoots with the school. Consequently, she should have been able to talk about her faith in Jesus as much as she wanted--conversely, if she was an atheist or Satanist, the same rules apply; these are her rights.

As the old saying goes, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." I think this whole neo-Jesus movement is totally fucking stupid, but it really pisses me off that the powers-that-be have effectively shut this girl down, and I am genuinely confused and terribly disturbed that this 9th Circuit ruling appears to support this heinous violation of her, and ultimately my and your, freedoms of speech and worship or non-worship. Ultimately, in addition to being yet another erosion of our civil liberties, all this does is add fuel to the flames of the culture war by lending credibility to the bogus notion that the "godless liberals" are overreacting, and that the best way to respond is by returning god to the schools--they're creating martyrs, for god's sake.

I'm also pissed off that circumstances have forced me to defend a stupid fundamentalist.

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IN MEMORY OF SYD BARRET

For my buddy Shane. From Wikipedia:

Roger Keith "Syd" Barrett (January 6, 1946 – July 7, 2006) was an English singer, songwriter, guitarist and artist.

Best remembered as one of the founding members of the group Pink Floyd, Barrett was active as a rock musician for only a few years before he went into seclusion. His creative legacy and quintessentially English vocal delivery have since proven remarkably influential.

Click here for the rest.

Probably sadder than Barrett's death was his life. He essentially went mad before Pink Floyd really broke out and became mega rock stars. He was only able to produce a couple of solo albums after he left the group in the late 60s before his inner demons eventually reduced his musical output to zero--at least Daniel Johnston is still working. There's a particularly sad episode from the mid 70s when Barrett showed up unannounced in the Abbey Road studios where Pink Floyd was recording "Shine on You Crazy Diamond," which is about him--check out the Wikipedia bio for the depressing details. Roger Waters took Barrett's madness particularly hard and became obsessed with themes of mental illness in his songwriting for years after his disturbed bandmate's exodus from the group, hence The Wall.

Check out this video of my favorite Barrett era Pink Floyd tune, "Astronomy Domine," shot in 1967.



Farewell, Syd.

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CHOMSKY ON THE ISRAEL WARS

From Democracy Now:

NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah. Well, he's correct that hundreds of rockets have been fired, and naturally that has to be stopped. But he didn't mention, or maybe at least in this comment, that the rockets were fired after the heavy Israeli attacks against Lebanon, which killed -- well, latest reports, maybe 60 or so people and destroyed a lot of infrastructure. As always, things have precedence, and you have to decide which was the inciting event. In my view, the inciting event in the present case, events, are those that I mentioned -- the constant intense repression; plenty of abductions; plenty of atrocities in Gaza; the steady takeover of the West Bank, which, in effect, if it continues, is just the murder of a nation, the end of Palestine; the abduction on June 24 of the two Gaza civilians; and then the reaction to the abduction of Corporal Shalit. And there's a difference, incidentally, between abduction of civilians and abduction of soldiers. Even international humanitarian law makes that distinction.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what that distinction is?

NOAM CHOMSKY: If there's a conflict going on, aside physical war, not in a military conflict going on, abduction -- if soldiers are captured, they are to be treated humanely. But it is not a crime at the level of capture of civilians and bringing them across the border into your own country. That's a serious crime. And that's the one that's not reported. And, in fact, remember that -- I mean, I don’t have to tell you that there are constant attacks going on in Gaza, which is basically a prison, huge prison, under constant attack all the time: economic strangulation, military attack, assassinations, and so on. In comparison with that, abduction of a soldier, whatever one thinks about it, doesn't rank high in the scale of atrocities.

And

The United States regards Israel as virtually a militarized offshoot, and it protects it from criticism or actions and supports passively and, in fact, overtly supports its expansion, its attacks on Palestinians, its progressive takeover of what remains of Palestinian territory, and its acts to, well, actually realize a comment that Moshe Dayan made back in the early ’70s when he was responsible for the Occupied Territories. He said to his cabinet colleagues that we should tell the Palestinians that we have no solution for you, that you will live like dogs, and whoever will leave will leave, and we'll see where that leads. That's basically the policy. And I presume the U.S. will continue to advance that policy in one or another fashion.

Click here to watch, read, or listen to the rest.

I've spent most of my life simply not understanding what the hell the whole Israel thing is all about. The US corporate news narrative simply makes no sense: Israel is pretty much always depicted as rational good guys; Palestinians and other Arabs are depicted as crazy religious bad guys. I don't know about you, but that's just way too pat, way too black and white, for me to buy. It wasn't until I started reading Chomsky and others in the late 90s that I got a narrative that, at least, was internally consistent and made sense. Not that I think Chomsky has the absolute truth about all things Israel, but he is the guy I go running to when events over there start feeling like an Escher drawing.

Probably the most important piece of context that Chomsky hits on is that, despite conventional wisdom in the US that Palestinians and their supporters are insane, these people actually have reasonable grievances against the state of Israel that have much more to do with things like access to water, economic activity, and freedom to travel, than they do with wacky Muslim fanaticism. Underneath the relatively minor concern of religious differences lies a fairly conventional disagreement between peoples competing for land and resources. It must also be understood that after countless billions in US military aid, Israel clearly has an overwhelming advantage in this competition. That is, these days Palestinians are being driven into the dirt under the wildly oppressive Israeli steel boot--of course, that point of view never makes it into the US press, which, in its tireless support for the tiny but powerful Mediterranean state no matter what atrocity they commit, essentially amounts to pro-Israeli propaganda.

Now, with all that as background, it must also be understood that pro-Palestinian terrorists really do kill innocent Israelis on a fairly regular basis. The Israeli reaction to such violence is almost always over-the-top and unacceptable, and they've been keeping up the pressure for some years now, but the threat they face is real. For instance, in the interview Chomsky notes that this latest round of hardcore violence was actually started by Israel when they abducted a couple of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, for which the kidnapping of the Israeli soldier was retaliation--right, right, this has been virtually unreported in America, but then, that's par for the course. On the other hand, Chomsky strongly criticizes the Hezbollah retaliation kidnapping in northern Israel as extraordinarily irresponsible, in that such an action would clearly invite further retaliation which stands to get lots of Lebanese civilians killed. Actually, that's happening right now.

So it's all one big clusterfuck. All parties involved are behaving pretty reprehensibly, but it's pretty clear that, since the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel was signed in 1979 which by and large removed any immediate military threat to the Israelis from neighboring Arab states, Israel is the biggest oppressor by far. And we've been both bankrolling their effort and running interference in the UN--just yesterday the US vetoed yet another resolution condemning Israel's actions, a maneuver our diplomats have performend countless times over the years. So, ultimately, it's up to Israel to end the cycle of violence by turning to diplomacy, and we could pretty easily pressure them to do it by withdrawing our support for them at the UN as well as the billions of dollars we give them for their mighty military machine. In other words, America is a pretty massive enabler to what's going on there.

Unfortunately, nobody in power here really wants to admit that horrible truth.

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Frankie and Phil



Sammy



Paz



Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for lots more cat blogging!

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PRESIDENT’S CLAIM THAT TAX CUTS
PAY FOR THEMSELVES REFUTED BY
ADMINISTRATION’S OWN ANALYSIS

From the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities courtesy of AlterNet:

These remarks mirror previous statements by the President, the Vice-President, and key Congressional leaders that the increase in revenues in 2005 and the increase now projected for 2006 prove that tax cuts “pay for themselves” — that the economy expands so much as a result of tax cuts that it produces the same level of revenue as it would have without the tax cuts.[2]

Economists and budget analysts outside of the administration have explained that these claims are not supported by data or economic theory.[3] Now a Department of Treasury analysis presented in the Mid-Session Review itself confirms what outside experts have consistently said — tax cuts do not come remotely close to paying for themselves.[4]

The Treasury analysis concludes that making the President’s tax cuts permanent — and paying for the tax cuts with future reductions in spending — may ultimately increase the level of economic output (national income) in the long run by as much as 0.7 percent. (An increase in the level of economic output of 0.7 percent — the Treasury’s best-case scenario — in 20 years would represent an increase of about 4/100ths of one percentage point in the annual growth rate of the economy.)

Click here for the rest.

Back in the spring of 1986, I was competing in the domestic extemporaneous speaking contest at the National Forensic League East Texas district tournament. I and several other students managed to make it into the final round. The rules for the event are such that contestants never know what they're going to be speaking on until half an hour before they speak, which is what makes it "extemporaneous." We would write, rehearse, and memorize seven minutes of political wonkery in thirty minutes. Not that hard once you get used to it, especially if you keep up with the news. But then, that's easy for me to say. I was good. And that day, at that tournament, I drew the topic with which I felt more familiar than pretty much anybody else my age: what is the Reagan administration doing to reduce the budget deficit?

I had in the year before that tournament made a special effort to get to the bottom of what was then called "Reaganomics," but is now more simply referred to as neoliberalism. I could spout off economic double talk as well as any idiot pundit on cable TV today. And it blew the judges away--they said that I went too fast, but it was obvious that I knew what I was talking about, and had much more command of my material than my competition. They gave me first place, which qualified me for the national tournament, where I eventually ranked fifteenth in the nation.

Yeah, those were my glory days as a young Republican mouthpiece. So thank you Ronald Reagan for your crazy, goofy, nutty ideas about the economy; they got me some massive props and made me feel damned superior. Alas, that's about all those ideas were ever good for.

The notion about tax cuts paradoxically increasing tax revenue is simple and clever, which is why it's so appealing, I think, to so many people: cutting taxes supposedly stimulates the economy, which creates more taxable wealth, which pays off into more tax dollars despite the lowered tax rate. Like I said, clever. If only it actually worked that way. Actually, I think there can be some truth to this wacky notion as long as the cuts are tailored in very specific ways that would assure that saved dollars would really be used to expand businesses and create jobs. Unfortunately, Republicans generally use an axe when they should be using precise surgical instruments. I mean, you can transplant a heart with an axe if you really want to; it's just that it would kill the patient, and that's exactly how the GOP approaches tax cuts and economic stimulus.

It's not been well reported these last few years, but the Gipper ended up seeing the error of his ways and had to go back and increase taxes massively in order to clean up the mess he'd made with his irresponsible tax cuts a couple of years before--indeed, it was the biggest tax increase in US history, but that information simply doesn't fit the Republican narrative about the Great Tax Cutter, so we're not hearing about it today.

Anyway, in summary, common sense trumps conventional wisdom here. Tax cuts generally do not mean more tax revenue; tax cuts mean less tax revenue. And if the Republicans keep this shit up for too terribly long, we're looking at total economic collapse by way of the deficit causing general stagnation and then decline in the long run, worse, conceivably, than the Great Depression.

I have a sneaking suspicion that many conservative politicians are aware of this, but don't care. As long as their wealthy supporters continue to get richer, they're cool with it all. That's pretty fucking evil if you ask me.

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Finches on Galapagos Islands evolving

From Yahoo courtesy of AlterNet:

Finches on the Galapagos Islands that inspired Charles Darwin to develop the concept of evolution are now helping confirm it — by evolving.

A medium sized species of Darwin's finch has evolved a smaller beak to take advantage of different seeds just two decades after the arrival of a larger rival for its original food source.

The altered beak size shows that species competing for food can undergo evolutionary change, said Peter Grant of Princeton University, lead author of the report appearing in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

Click here for the rest.

Oh my. What will the creationists say? It's hard to speculate about their response because their denial of evolution forces them into the realm of loopy irrationality from the get-go. Being confronted with the direct evidence that they swear up and down just doesn't exist is bound to push them even further into loopy land: who can predict the specific ravings of a lunatic? They're certain to attempt to contradict this latest addition to the already existing mountain of scientific evidence in favor of evolution, but as far as what bullshit arguments they employ to do so, your guess is as good as mine.

As Carl Sagan so defiantly stated in Cosmos, his acclaimed PBS science series in the early 80s, "Evolution is a fact. It really happened." Indeed. As with global warming, the debate is over, and it's been over for a much longer time with evolution. That there is any discussion about it's validity at all outside of serious scientific circles is a testament to just how utterly fucked up this country is. Think about it: a whole bunch of Americans actually believe that the universe was created some five thousand years ago, and that God placed fossil evidence of evolution as a test of human faith in him. Frankly, I think it's more believable that little green aliens have been kidnapping humans for decades and examining their genitalia for some reason, and that's obviously bullshit, too.

Anyway, still more evidence to rub your fundie friends' noses in. Have fun.

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Airwaves Again Safe for "South Park" Scientology Spoof

From Yahoo courtesy of AlterNet:

The episode reportedly ruffled some high-powered feathers upon its first airing. In addition to an accurate, if cartoon-depicted, primer on Scientology, the show featured a literally closeted Tom Cruise who refuses to come out, only to be joined in his hiding by fellow Scientologist John Travolta and R&B man R. Kelly, whose operatic ballad provided the show's title.

While Comedy Central failed to publicly disclose its reasons for yanking the program (which is also credited for leading Scientologist Isaac Hayes to jump ship as the longtime voice of Chef), creators Stone and Trey Parker didn't shy away from broadcasting what they claimed was the network-sanctioned reason.

As the conspiracy theory goes, the Cruise's camp had a hand in deep-sixing the episode, with the litigious actor reportedly threatening to pull out of promotional duties for Mission: Impossible III. (Viacom is the parent company for both Comedy Central and Paramount, the studio that was releasing Cruise's film.)

Cruise's reps vehemently denied such allegations, but the South Park brain trust stuck by its guns.

"I only know what we were told, that people involved with M:I:III wanted the episode off the air and that is why Comedy Central had to do it," Stone says in Variety. "I don't know why else it would have been pulled."

Click here for the rest.

For exposing the looney but lawyer-laden and extremely wealthy Hollywood UFO cult known as Scientology for the predatory organization it is, I will now think of South Park as a definitive example of Real Art. Indeed, Scientology is nothing but a money-sucking scam of immense proportions, worthy of only scorn, ridicule, and maybe government action shutting them down for good. Their existence is an insult to anyone in the world with a brain. Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who I already liked a great deal, have my eternal respect and admiration for using their show to go after these con-artists.

And Tom Cruise totally deserves this, the big fucking idiot.

Haven't seen it yet? Here you go, via Throw away your TV. It's pretty darned funny; the final lines of the episode, where Stone and Parker speak directly to Scientology lawsuit-command through Stan, is sublime.

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THE STAR TREK CALENDAR PICTURE OF THE MONTH IS...



...Mr. Sulu!!!

Read an interview from the Progressive with the newly out-of-the-closet George Takei, here.

More Sulu pics:







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The Politics of American Greed

From AlterNet, uber-Texan Molly Ivins weighs in on the excesses of the super-class:

Anyone who doesn't think this is a country where the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer needs to check the numbers -- this is Bush country, where a rising tide lifts all yachts.

According to the current issue of Mother Jones:

* One in four U.S. jobs pays less than a poverty-level income.

* Since 2000, the number of Americans living below the poverty line at any one time has risen steadily. Now, 13 percent -- 37 million Americans -- are officially poor.

* Bush's tax cuts (extended until 2010) save those earning between $20,000 and $30,000 an average of $10 a year, while those making $1 million are saved $42,700.

* In 2002, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, compared those who point out such statistics as the one above to Adolph Hitler (surely he meant Stalin?).

* Bush has diverted $750 million to "healthy marriages" by shifting funds from social services, mostly childcare.

* Bush has proposed cutting housing programs for low-income people with disabilities by 50 percent.

* A series of related stats -- starting with the news that two out of three new jobs are in the suburbs -- shows how the poor are further disadvantaged in the job hunt by lack of public or private transportation.

Click here for the rest.

What most people didn't realize when Clinton said that we were changing "welfare as we know it," is that the phrase actually meant changing the economic class of welfare recipients rather than abolishing it or downgrading the amount of money handed out. Indeed, the super-class class is getting waaaay more money from the government these days than its downscale counterpart ever dreamed of getting. In order for all this welfare for the rich to become a reality, however, it is a no-brainer that the poverty class needs to be much larger. That is, this disgusting transfer of wealth to the already-wealthy necessitates that the governmental economic structures which have made a broad middle class possible in this country since the end of WWII be abolished. I mean, the money has to come from somewhere, doesn't it? Besides, financially nervous Americans make for more docile and obedient workers who'll put up with the vilest bullshit just to keep their jobs. It's a win-win situation for the rich: more money and a better variety of peasant in the bargain. On the other hand, I don't see any upside to this at all for everybody else--for that matter, changing the shape of the US class dynamic from our traditional big-in-the-middle form into the hourglass figure found most often in the third world is bound to invite civic instability.

That's when we finally eat the rich.

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LIBERAL FREEDOM, CONSERVATIVE FREEDOM

From the American Prospect, an interview with Berkeley linguist George Lakoff:

It is recognized by both sides that wealth and property contributes to freedom. That’s the part that is assumed in both cases. The question is, what is the role of government in all of this? And what is being hidden by the right-wing economic myth? Many things. First, there is what I call the commonwealth principle. From the beginning of America, we called our states commonwealths, because there was a principle that we put together our common wealth for the common good, to build an infrastructure that benefits everybody, benefits each person’s goals. So you built railroads, schools, and libraries, and so on. Nowadays, that has grown enormously. For example, if you want to start a business, you need to get a bank loan. What secures the banks? The common wealth. Taxpayer money. If you want to sell stock in a business, you need to have a stock market, which has to be run honestly and sufficiently according to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is funded by taxpayer money. It’s run by the government. In the courts, nine-tenths of the publicly supported costs go for business law. If you want to ship goods, you need highways. That’s supported by taxpayer money. If you want to communicate with people, you need the Internet, the satellite system, and other parts of the communications system -- which were put together and maintained by taxpayer money.

The more money you make, the more you’re using that infrastructure. But what’s happened is that the right wing takes the infrastructure for granted, doesn’t know that it’s there. But no one makes it on their own. No one becomes rich by themselves. There is no such thing as a self-made man. If you’ve made a lot of money, you’ve used the common wealth, and you have a duty to replenish it. You have a duty to keep it there so that other people can use it. And that is one of the things not said in the economic liberty myth.

Click here for the rest.

And the wealthy elite, and by that I mean the fabulously wealthy elite, are well aware of this. Bullshit notions about how the government interferes with wealth creation are for politicians, economists, and the non-fabulously rich--on the other hand, these last three groups' embrace of free market mythology is clearly useful in that their relentless propaganda attacks against the welfare state and government regulation make it that much easier for the super-class to do its dirty work. No, the fabulously wealthy elite understand all too well that the goverment serves as their proverbial money tree, a reverse Robin Hood who takes tax money from the poor and relatively poor and lavishes it on the rich. Indeed, former Nixon staffer Kevin Phillips' book Wealth and Democracy convincingly illustrates that, almost without exception, the wealthiest American familes throughout our entire history owe everything to close contacts with the federal government.

Real freedom means taking away all of that ill gotten booty and using it to improve the lives of ordinary Americans. That is, real freedom is liberal freedom, not conservative freedom, which is something of an oxymoron when you get right down to it.

The Lakoff interview is all over the place and, overall, pretty much as interesting and compelling as the excerpt above. Go check it out--I'm starting to think this guy's the next Noam Chomsky.

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Could Bush Be Prosecuted for War Crimes?

The short answer is "yes." From AlterNet:

Perhaps no person on the planet is better equipped to identify and describe our crimes in Iraq than Benjamin Ferenccz, a former chief prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trials who successfully convicted 22 Nazi officers for their work in orchestrating death squads that killed more than one million people in the famous Einsatzgruppen Case. Ferencz, now 87, has gone on to become a founding father of the basis behind international law regarding war crimes, and his essays and legal work drawing from the Nuremberg trials and later the commission that established the International Criminal Court remain a lasting influence in that realm.

Ferencz's biggest contribution to the war crimes field is his assertion that an unprovoked or "aggressive" war is the highest crime against mankind. It was the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 that made possible the horrors of Abu Ghraib, the destruction of Fallouja and Ramadi, the tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths, civilian massacres like Haditha, and on and on. Ferencz believes that a "prima facie case can be made that the United States is guilty of the supreme crime against humanity, that being an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign nation."

Interviewed from his home in New York, Ferencz laid out a simple summary of the case:

"The United Nations charter has a provision which was agreed to by the United States formulated by the United States in fact, after World War II. Its says that from now on, no nation can use armed force without the permission of the U.N. Security Council. They can use force in connection with self-defense, but a country can't use force in anticipation of self-defense. Regarding Iraq, the last Security Council resolution essentially said, 'Look, send the weapons inspectors out to Iraq, have them come back and tell us what they've found -- then we'll figure out what we're going to do. The U.S. was impatient, and decided to invade Iraq -- which was all pre-arranged of course. So, the United States went to war, in violation of the charter."

Click here for the rest.

As Noam Chomsky has observed repeatedly for decades, if you held post WWII US Presidents to the Nuremberg principles, they'd all be hanged. But no. The staggering double standard, "doublethink" really, which allows Americans to condemn the crimes of enemy or hostile nations while ignoring our government's crimes and those of official allies, makes that actually happening a remote possibility, as the essay observes. Americans believe that it is simply impossible for the US to commit war crimes; we're not that kind of people--we're Americans. What a grand delusion. Our entire history, from the slave trade, to the Indian wars, to the Philippines, to Panama, to Iraq today, American history is written in imperialistic blood. This is a fact; there is no compelling argument to the contrary. Nonetheless, the "Americans don't do that" perception continues to exist.

But make no mistake about it: Bush is one of the greatest war criminals in history, and if we're ever going to be able to look at our own faces in the mirror again, impeachment is a moral necessity.

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NYC Tunnel Plot Just Online Chatter

From Raw Story via AlterNet:

One former intelligence field officer says, and two other CIA officials confirm, that the alleged plot by Muslim extremists to bomb the Holland Tunnel in New York City was nothing more than chatter by unaffiliated individuals with no financing or training in an open forum already monitored extensively by the United States Government, Raw Story has learned.

"The so-called New York tunnel plot was a result of discussions held on an open Jihadi web site," said Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer and contributor to American Conservative magazine, in a late Friday afternoon conversation. Although Giraldi acknowledges that the persons involved -- "three of whom have already been arrested in Lebanon and elsewhere -- are indeed extremists," their online chatter is considerably overblown by allegations of an actual plot.

"They are not professionally trained terrorists, however, and had no resources with which to carry out the operation they discussed," Giraldi added. "Despite press reports that they had asked Abu Musab Zarqawi for assistance, there is no information to confirm that. It is known that the members discussed the possibility of approaching Zarqawi but none of them knew him or had any access to him."

Click here for the rest.

In other words some terrorist sympathizers in a chat room were like "hey, we should do this." But they didn't do it, didn't even try, didn't even come close to having the ability to do so, and had no contact with the people who actually might be able to help them pull it off. Strangely, the government thought it was a good idea to plaster this bust all over the news. The article speculates that bad publicity for the White House coming from leaked news last week about the CIA's depriortizing the capture of bin Laden is what's motivated these theatrical arrests, but my take is that it could be anything, low poll numbers, ever-increasing violence in Iraq, the resurgance of the Taliban, high gas prices, stagnant wages, you name it, motivating this bullshit. Whatever the reasons for aggrandizing these would-be terrorists, one thing's for sure, like the bullshit-terrorist arrests down in Florida a few weeks back, this new stunt is just so much PR.

Does anybody fall for this crap anymore?

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QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES: IRAQ EDITION
Brutality and corruption are rampant in Iraq's police force

From the LA Times courtesy of Huffington Post courtesy of AlterNet:

Brutality and corruption are rampant in Iraq's police force, with abuses including the rape of female prisoners, the release of terrorism suspects in exchange for bribes, assassinations of police officers and participation in insurgent bombings, according to confidential Iraqi government documents detailing more than 400 police corruption investigations.

A recent assessment by State Department police training contractors echoes the investigative documents, concluding that strong paramilitary and insurgent influences within the force and endemic corruption have undermined public confidence in the government.

Officers also have beaten prisoners to death, been involved in kidnapping rings, sold thousands of stolen and forged Iraqi passports and passed along vital information to insurgents, the Iraqi documents allege.

Click here for more.

So, if the US isn't going to withdraw until Iraq is stable, it looks like we're going to be there for some time. Really, this level of corruption is absolutely no surprise: the US occupation created a corrupt Iraqi government; that government has created a corrupt police force. I know I've mentioned it before, but it's worth repeating. It increasingly appears that when the Iraqis didn't welcome US troops with laurel leaves and bottles of wine, plan B was to pursue policies that would divide the country along ethnic lines, fan the flames a bit, and let Sunnis and Shia go at it like madmen. Or, more simply, plan B was the classic Roman imperial strategy of "divide and conquer." So, Iraq is in utter chaos, but also utterly weak in terms of self-control or regional influence. They can kill our soldiers, but they can't drive them out. Thus, the stage is now set for permanent occupation of the second largest oil reserve in the world. Messy, but effective. Clearly, this atrocious police behavior is all part of the plan.

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Slavery Reparations Gaining Momentum

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Advocates who say black Americans should be compensated for slavery and its Jim Crow aftermath are quietly chalking up victories and gaining momentum.

Fueled by the work of scholars and lawyers, their campaign has morphed in recent years from a fringe-group rallying cry into sophisticated, mainstream movement. Most recently, a pair of churches apologized for their part in the slave trade, and one is studying ways to repay black church members.

And

Reparations opponents insist that no living American should have to pay for a practice that ended more than 140 years ago. Plus, programs such as affirmative action and welfare already have compensated for past injustices, said John H. McWhorter, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute.

"The reparations movement is based on a fallacy that cripples the thinking on race _ the fallacy that what ails black America is a cash problem," said McWhorter, who is black. "Giving people money will not solve the problems that we have."

Click here for the rest.

In principle, I support reparations. For me, it all depends on how the money is disbursed. That is, I think direct cash payments to all African-Americans is a pretty bad idea--as the conservatives often say, you can't solve problems by throwing money at them. However, if the payments are in the form of measures and funds that would be certain to spur economic growth and education in the black community, I'm all for it--I'm thinking in terms of a GI Bill, or a massive endowment to provide free loans for education, business, and community reconstruction and repair, a sort of Marshall Plan for black America. That, I think, ought to get us somewhere, and avoids all the many criticisms over the years of welfare.

And on top of that, you know, the United States fucking owes black people, without whose labor this country would have never been built. Think of it as back pay with interest.

As for the criticisms in the excerpt above, I must admit that I don't really understand them. It's not living citizens who would be paying these reparations; it's the government, which was most definitely around then--it is a massive understatement to say that the government had something to do with slavery; indeed, the government made it all possible. Affirmative action and welfare were never reparations, either. They were about solving modern problems, not about disbursing back wages--besides, lots of white people have benefitted from these programs, too; it's not really a race issue when you get right down to it. Probably the best criticism of the reparations movement I've heard isn't even mentioned here: reparations are paid to victims, not their descendents. Well, okay, but ultimately that's so much hair-splitting. Let's just do what I've been doing and call it earned wages or damages and stop worrying about the word play. Like I said, I just don't understand why people oppose this. Nobody is really trying to explain why the government isn't liable here. I mean, come on, how can the feds not be liable?

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Stop the Waffling

From the Nation:

"I have loyalties that are greater than those to my party," said the former vice presidential candidate, who last December made the anti-democratic claim that, "We undermine the president's credibility at our nation's peril."

Less overt is the waffling of New York Senator Hillary Clinton, but her confusion is arguably more damaging to the Democrats, given her position as the party's front-running presidential aspirant. At least Lieberman stands exposed as a true believer in the Bush crusade, whereas Clinton continues to support a war that her confidants tell us she knows is wrong.

If Clinton does indeed know better than to support the war, let her say it out loud--and clearly. Why is it so difficult for the Democrats to grasp that waffling doesn't work as a form of leadership? The public takes it as a sign of moral disarray. Does anyone doubt that John Kerry lost the 2004 presidential election when he whiffed on Bush's curveball question: Knowing what you know now, would you have supported the Iraq invasion? He should have instantly said, "Hell no, you lied to Congress and the American people and deserve to be defeated precisely for that betrayal of the public trust."

Click here for the rest.

While the Republicans have been busy defining the terms for national debate this last quarter century or so, the Democrats have been busy freaking out about it, finally deciding during the 90s that their best response is to concede to their right-wing rivals the overall agenda for discussion. President Clinton led the way, doing so well that "out conservative the Republicans" eventually became wildly popular as a philosophy for the Democrats. Call me stupid, but this "strategy," if you want to call it that, strikes me as retarded: as Nietzsche said, "he who hunts the dragon becomes the dragon." That is, if Democrats have decided that the best way to win elections is to emulate the politics of the Republicans, become "Republican lite," why shouldn't everybody simply vote for the real deal? "Republican lite" neither tastes good, nor is it less filling.

I am so extraordinarily sick of the consultant-driven, poll-heavy, everything-to-everyone, veer-to-the-right-veer-to-the-left style of the Democrats that I still kick myself for my Kerry vote a couple of years ago. Hell, a real and honest conservative is almost preferable to me these days, anything but these phony liberal/moderate personas carefully constructed by the party. Is it too much for me to ask that the people who want to be our leaders actually lead for a change?

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Frank Zeidler, Last Socialist Mayor, Dies

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Frank Zeidler, a former Milwaukee mayor who was the last Socialist to run a major American city, has died. He was 93.

Zeidler died late Friday of congestive heart failure and diverticulitis, hospital spokesman Gregg Hartzog said. He led Milwaukee from 1948 through 1960.

Born in Milwaukee on Sept. 10, 1912, Zeidler was part of the Socialist Party's city stronghold, which was fueled by German immigrants who flocked there. The party had thousands of members, a congressional seat and control of the mayor's office for nearly a half-century, ending with Zeidler.

Click here for the rest.

Of course, I'm not a socialist myself in that I don't really believe that the state ought to own all industry. On the other hand, I'm not particularly opposed to the state owning some specific industries, like maybe energy or healthcare, depending on the circumstances and prospects for the future. On the whole, however, I certainly am in solidarity with socialist aims overall: meeting the economic needs of all individuals, and creating a more fair and just society. The quote I've had under the rotating photo I keep up in the left corner of this page is from one of the great American Socialists, Eugene Debs: who with any morality at all couldn't agree with that statement? Anyway, it still weirds me out to think that socialism was once such a viable point of view in this country that they actually got a lot of people elected to lower office--Debs made a couple of serious runs for the Presidency back in the day, probably just enough to turn the Democrats liberal once the Great Depression hit.

You know, because Zeidler ruled Milwaukee during the 50s, it means that Richie, Potsie, Ralph, and Fonzie all lived in what would have been considered by much of the rest of the country to be a communist city. I wonder if Mr. and Mrs. C were voting for him. Probably not; Richie's dad was a small business owner, and on record as having voted at least once for Eisenhower, a Republican. Those Cunninghams, I'm sure, were no America-haters, let me tell you.

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Hate Groups Are Infiltrating the Military, Group Asserts

From the New York Times courtesy of Eschaton:

A decade after the Pentagon declared a zero-tolerance policy for racist hate groups, recruiting shortfalls caused by the war in Iraq have allowed "large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists" to infiltrate the military, according to a watchdog organization.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks racist and right-wing militia groups, estimated that the numbers could run into the thousands, citing interviews with Defense Department investigators and reports and postings on racist Web sites and magazines.

"We've got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad," the group quoted a Defense Department investigator as saying in a report to be posted today on its Web site, www.splcenter.org. "That's a problem."

Click here for the rest.

As if it weren't bad enough that the American right wing is in the grips of what Seattle journalist David Neiwert calls pseudo-fascism, or, to put it into more plain language, “movements that employ authentically American themes in ways that resemble fascism functionally,” a quote Neiwert pulled from Robert Paxton's book The Anatomy of Fascism. This is a very bad development. As the Times article observes, it was in the army that Timothy McVeigh was turned on to neo-Nazi philosophy, which, in turn, inspired him to commit his own homegrown act of terrorism, which, I might add, apparently didn't "change everything"--for that, we had to wait until non-white people pulled their own horrifying stunt on September 11, 2001. Needless to say, recruiting Nazis into the US armed forces is tantamount to training terrorists to kill Americans. It cannot be tolerated.


photo courtesy of the Southern Poverty Law Center

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Paz



Phil



Frankie and Sammy



Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for links to more cat blogging posts!

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I LOVE ROCK AND ROLL
And I Love Joan Jett

One of the best live rock shows I've seen in my life was Joan Jett and the Blackhearts back in the summer of 1982. They played a venue at Astroworld, which is how I managed to get access to the seedy world of rock concerts at the tender age of 14. Even though both the album and single named "I Love Rock and Roll" had gone to the top of the charts, and even though their follow-up single releases were strong sellers at the time, they played like a hungry nightclub band, totally rocking out as though they were trying to outdo the headliner, even though they had been top-billed. Twenty four years later, after seeing numerous other bands play live, the Blackhearts show still resonates with me, along with Frank Zappa, U2, and only a few others, as the standard by which I judge other bands. It was that good of a show.

It's not simply that they're such a great live act, either. Jett is, in my humble opinion, one of the all time great rock writers. Her songs are simple, usually following the classic verse/chorus, verse/chorus, solo/chorus structure. Her lyrics are simple, too, but always finding a way to draw blood--there's never a hint of self-aggrandizing pretention in a Joan Jett song; she's working class, and just gets the job done, always effectively. The arrangements are usually to the point, as well, two guitars, heavily distorted, bass, and drums, often evoking a sort of cool tribal sound. You don't get any closer to the essence of rock and roll than this.

Anyway, they haven't topped the charts since I saw them play, but they're still together, releasing new material and touring every few years, which brings me to the subject of this post: Joan Jett's new single is pretty darned good. It also pretty much answers a question that's been on many fans' minds for many years.

From GLBTQ:

Joan Jett (b. 1960)

Jett's leather-clad, bad-girl image, and her collaboration with seminal Riot Grrrl act Bikini Kill, as well as with (female) rock groups L7 and Babes in Toyland, helped cement her reputation as a kind of queercore role model despite her lack of a genuine niche. The queercore movement, characterized by hardcore punk music and militant lyrics, embraced her, though she had already achieved prominence when queercore came to the fore in the late 1980s.

While she has not issued a public statement regarding her sexuality, Jett has performed publicly with a sticker on her guitar that proclaims, "Dykes Rule," and her sizable lesbian following is a formidable presence at her shows. With the Blackhearts, Joan has performed at numerous gay-rights events, headlining at St. Louis's Pride Fest in 2001, and she often appears at queer-themed shows and clubs in New York City.

In response to the rumors surrounding her sexuality, Jett has said, "I don't really care what people call me. I think it's important to support people you want to support and not be afraid of being called names."

Click here for the rest.

Because dykes, in fact, do rule, and because it means nothing about a performer's sexual orientation if he or she attracts a large gay following...okay, I'm just kidding. I think it's as obvious as George Michael, Rob Halford, and Mr. Sulu that Joan Jett is a lesbian, although such a thing never occurred to me when I was a young teen. But for whatever reason, probably old-school music business paranoia, Jett has been coy about whether she likes boys or girls for many years.

Her new song, "ACDC," and, yes, it is about bisexuality, but not hers, seems to wipe away the shy act. And it's a fucking great tune; gone is the absurd late 80s heavy metal production style she used for a while on songs like "I Hate Myself for Loving You," which is still pretty good in spite of the hairspray: this new tune goes back to the classic Blackhearts hard rock sound that I grooved to when I was in the eighth grade.

Check out the video here.

And just because I can, check out the video for "I Love Rock and Roll" here.

And, what the hell, have a Joan Jett rockin' video feast: "Do You Wanna Touch Me" (which sounds to me these days like a really heavy Gary Glitter UPDATE: I just found out that the song was written by Gary Glitter), "Crimson and Clover" (the Blackhearts covering the 60s bubblegum hit, featuring a very important pair of leather pants that permanently marked itself on my libido back in the day), and, while I'm at it, the aforementioned metal-goofy, but still pretty cool, "I Hate Myself for Loving You."



Dykes rule!

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Judge's ruling keeps DeLay on ballot

From the Houston Chronicle:

DeLay had sought to have state Republican Chair Tina Benkiser declare him ineligible by moving from Sugar Land to his condominium in Virginia. But Sparks said that would not make him ineligible because the requirement under the Constitution is whether DeLay is an inhabitant of Texas on election day.

Sparks said contradicting evidence raised questions about whether DeLay planned to remain a resident of Virginia, but he said that did not matter because DeLay could not say where he would be on election day.

"The court holds that allowing Benkiser to declare DeLay ineligible at this time would amount to a de facto residency requirement in violation of the United States Constitution,'' Sparks said in his opinion.

Sparks' ruling halts the process of replacing DeLay on the ballot, but the GOP has appealed the decision to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. James Bopp Jr., a GOP lawyer said the party will ask that the case be rendered this month.

If the Republicans lose on appeal, DeLay will have to decide whether to campaign for an office from which he already has resigned.

Click here for the rest.

Hahaha!

I have no idea how the appeal is going to turn out because, you know, I'm not a lawyer. However, I am going to bask in this ruling for the time being. It's pretty obvious that this maneuver is pretty much more of the same from DeLay. He's pushed so hard against the legal limit time and again that he has undoubtedly crossed the line on more than one occasion--that's why he's why he's under indictment, for playing fast and loose with campaign law. It strikes me that he's been pretty lucky in his aggressiveness over the years, but my gut instinct tells me that his luck has run out. That is, I have a feeling, for whatever it's worth, that the ruling will stand, and DeLay will either have to run an embarrassing campaign for an office that he will most certainly lose, or sit it out, allowing the his Democratic opponent Nick Lampson to win unopposed. Either way, the former bug exterminator from Sugarland will be utterly humiliated.

And I will be very happy.

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KEN LAY'S DEATH CIRCUS

So Ken Lay died early this morning. I must admit that when I heard it on the radio as I was getting ready for work, it was so exciting, in a "big news" kind of way, that I ran out of the bathroom and told Becky. But that's about it. I don't really have anything else to say about Lay's death other than that, even though I'm sure he was a nice guy, and he will be greatly missed by his loved ones, Lay symbolized, as the greedy, law-breaking, arrogant, peasant-squashing, corrupt scumbag that he was, virtually everything that's wrong with this country. I, for one, won't miss him at all. Good riddance: America, and consequently the world, is a better place without him--ultimately, being a "nice guy" doesn't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world of ours, especially when a "nice guy" uses his wealth and power to fuck over thousands of people, and thinks that there's nothing wrong with it.

Fuck you, Ken Lay.

Anyway, what is interesting about his death is the weird death circus that's been happening all day.

From Yahoo courtesy of AlterNet:

Ken Lay's death prompts confusion on Wikipedia

At 10:06 a.m., Wikipedia's entry for Lay said he died "of an apparent suicide."

At 10:08, it said he died at his Aspen, Colorado home "of an apparent [[heart attack] or suicide.]."

Within the same minute, it said the cause of death was "yet to be determined."

At 10:09 a.m., it said "no further details have been officially released" about the death.

Two minutes later, it said: "The guilt of ruining so many lives finally [sic] led him to his suicide."

At 10.12 a.m., this was replaced by: "According to Lay's pastor the cause was a 'massive coronary' heart attack."

By 10:39 a.m., Lay's entry said: "Speculation as to the cause of the heart attack lead many people to believe it was due to the amount of stress put on him by the Enron trial." This statement was later dropped.

By early Wednesday afternoon, the entry said Lay was pronounced dead at Aspen Valley Hospital, citing the Pitkin, Colorado sheriff's department. It said he apparently died of a massive heart attack, citing KHOU-TV in Houston.

Click here for the rest.

Apparently, lots of people were speculating that it was a suicide, but, no, it was just a heart attack. However, I can't personally escape the notion that it was brought on by stress from his trial and conviction. Sure, his arteries were clogged and all, but stress is also often a factor in heart attacks. Anyway, even though I link to it like every other day, I'm not particularly disturbed by Wikipedia's confusion. Generally, despite the online encyclopedia's much criticized collective nature as far as writing and editing is concerned, at least one notable study has shown that it is actually on par in terms of accuracy with the Encyclopedia Britannica. The shifting descriptions of Lay's death are only the result of Wikipedia being so instantaneous--paper encyclopedias would have months before publishing to get it right; and, in a week or two, Wikipedia will no doubt get it right as well. That's the internet for you.

But online Wikipedia writers weren't the only ones in confusion.

From Think Progress, again courtesy of AlterNet:

Snow On Lay’s Death: ‘I Don’t Know, What Do You
Think Would Be The Appropriate Thing To Say?’

At today’s press briefing, Press Secretary Tony Snow was asked about the death of Ken Lay, the convicted former Enron CEO whom President Bush nicknamed “Kenny Boy.”

First, Snow dodged the question, asking the reporter: “I don’t know, what do you think would be the appropriate thing to say?” Later, he played down the relationship between the two, refusing to let Bush be described as a “friend” of Lay’s. “[T]he President has described Ken Lay as an acquaintance, and many of the President’s acquaintances have passed on during his time in office,” he said.

Click here to watch some video of our new TV-friendly White House press secretary project a suave and in-control image while he spouts bullshit to the American people.

Snow's only been on the job for a few weeks, and already he's lying like a pro. Lay and Bush were most definitely friends. They were so close that Bush gave him one of those stupid nicknames years ago, "Kenny Boy." Furthermore, Lay and Bush went way back. They met first in the late 80s. Lay was funneling Bush campaign money all through the 90s when he was governor of Texas. "Kenny Boy" was also one of Bush's biggest campaign donors in 2000; he even allowed Tom DeLay to use the Enron corporate jet to fly Republican Congressional staffers to Florida to stage the "bourgeois riot" that effectively stopped the recount in Gore-heavy Dade County. That is, Bush probably wouldn't occupy the White House right now if not for Lay: the President owed the corrupt businessman a great deal, and he's well aware of that.

But no, Enron was "a business scandal, not a political scandal." Yeah right. Today, Bush lost an old pal, which, no doubt, makes him just a little bit less nervous about being dragged into the Enron story.

Fuck you, Bush.

You know, there is one thing about Lay's death that I found vaguely interesting.

From the Houston Chronicle:

Preliminary report says Lay died of natural causes

Both men were expected to receive lengthy prison sentences. However, Lay's death likely means his conviction will be vacated and it will be as if he were never charged, legal observers said.

Lay had not been sentenced and the appeal process had barely started. That means a final judgment has not been issued and the conviction will be set aside, said Richard Barnett, a San Diego attorney who specializes in forfeitures.

What is not clear, however, is whether the government's efforts to seize money and assets from Lay can continue.

Click here for the rest.

You know, this part hits my moral center in the much the same way that the news about the CIA's de-prioritizing bin Laden's capture did. That is, what about justice? Why should Lay's conviction be set aside simply because he died? My point here is that justice isn't simply about making things fair and comforting the afflicted. It's also about society making declarations about right and wrong. Convicting Lay was an unambiguous statement by our culture that it is wrong for people with power to fuck over everybody else, that the rich cannot do whatever they want. Setting aside Lay's conviction needlessly creates ambiguity about might making right, and, needless to say, we need more, not less, societal assertions about power and morality, especially these days.

And why the hell would anybody think that Lay's assets cannot be seized? He fucking stole that money; it was never his, and it doesn't belong to his wife and family. Besides, I'm sure that Mrs. Lay will get along just fine on her Social Security checks and food stamps.

Eat the rich, baby.

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IT'S NOT THE INCOMPETENCE; IT'S THE CONSERVATISM

From AlterNet, UC Berkeley linguist George Lakoff on how Bush isn't really incompetent; instead, he's been wildly successful advancing the tenents of modern conservatism, which, in turn, is causing everything to go to hell:

Conservative philosophy has three fundamental tenets: individual initiative, that is, government's positive role in people's lives outside of the military and police should be minimized; the President is the moral authority; and free markets are enough to foster freedom and opportunity.

The conservative vision for government is to shrink it - to "starve the beast" in Conservative Grover Norquist's words. The conservative tagline for this rationale is that "you can spend your money better than the government can." Social programs are considered unnecessary or "discretionary" since the primary role of government is to defend the country's border and police its interior. Stewardship of the commons, such as allocation of healthcare or energy policy, is left to people's own initiative within the free market. Where profits cannot be made -- conservation, healthcare for the poor -- charity is meant to replace justice and the government should not be involved.

Given this philosophy, then, is it any wonder that the government wasn't there for the residents of Louisiana and Mississippi in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina? Conservative philosophy places emphasis on the individual acting alone, independent of anything the government could provide. Some conservative Sunday morning talk show guests suggested that those who chose to live in New Orleans accepted the risk of a devastating hurricane, the implication being that they thus forfeited any entitlement to government assistance. If the people of New Orleans suffered, it was because of their own actions, their own choices and their own lack of preparedness. Bush couldn't have failed if he bore no responsibility.

Click here for the rest.

Lakoff was one of the first academics in public discourse to analyze the way that conservatives frame themselves and their issues--it was just a hop, skip, and jump from that analysis to his urgent assertion that liberals, who stand to do much better in this game than conservatives, ought to start doing the same thing immediately, or face extinction. Nearly three years after I initially heard about his work, it looks like it's starting to pay off: numerous left-wing essays are now talking about the framing concept for liberals; others are rhetorically assaulting right-wing frames, generally coming to the conclusion that conservatism, as a philosophy, is simply ill-suited for modern governance.

Really, it's kind of sad what's happened. Don't get me wrong; in no way do I consider myself to be a conservative. However, conservatism was my foundational understanding of politics and culture, and, in principle, there are some good things about right-wing thinking. That is, in addition to keeping liberalism honest by continually challenging it, conservatism's sense of caution when approaching social change is just good common sense. I'm also quite fond of conservatism's reverence for tradition and history, and its love of country, even though I'm usually in complete disagreement with how that love has been manifesting itself lately.

Conservatism today, however, seems to be stripped of most of the principles it once championed, moribund in it's new cult of personality, power, and everlasting pique. Somewhere along the line, contempt for the idea of government itself, rather than than simple vigilance, took hold of the conservative imagination, and this one kind of contempt, which ultimately made the right wing the joke it now is, begat other forms of contempt. True conservatism is now dead, leaving as its legacy a public discourse dominated by bile and venom, a once proud nation crumbling from neglect, and a world in utter chaos.

Like I said, sad.

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CIA Reportedly Disbands Bin Laden Unit

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

The officials told the Times that the change reflects a view that al-Qaida's hierarchy has changed, and terrorist attacks inspired by the group are now being carried out independently of bin Laden and his second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

The CIA said hunting bin Laden remains a priority, but resources needed to be directed toward other people and groups likely to initiate new attacks.

Click here for the rest.

Well, that kind of makes sense. If the invasion of Afghanistan really did, as they say, throw Al-Qaeda into utter organizational disarray, then bin Laden can't possibly be the terrorist threat he was back in September of '01. Yet terrorism continues to be a global danger; the torch has been passed to others.

But...

...shouldn't the people responsible for 9/11 be brought to justice despite the fact that they're incapable of doing it again? Doesn't justice count for something?

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FOURTH OF JULY SPECIAL:
REAL ARTISTS AND REAL AMERICANS
PETE SEEGER AND WALLACE SHAWN

I've pushed my concept of Real Art here at Real Art many times: Real Art is consciously political; it concerns itself always with improving the condition of humanity. For my money Real Art is the art which matters most. But at the same time I've pushed this idea, that artists ought to play a political role in society, I've also strongly asserted that all Americans ought to do the same thing in whatever ways are most appealing to them--when you get right down to it, I actually have much more respect for foaming-at-the-mouth psychotic conservatives than I do for Americans who are apolitical or consider themselves to be somehow above the fray; at least the right-wing nutcases care enough about the country to make themselves heard. Anyway, my point is that Real Artists in the United States are necessarily Real Americans, too. They're people who take their citizenship seriously, trying to make this country a better and more just nation.

Today, for your Independence Day pleasure, I've dug up some TV interviews with two such men.

From Democracy Now, an hour with legendary folk singer Pete Seeger, speaking here about his father:

We Shall Overcome

He was originally in charge of the music department there at the young age of 24, the youngest full professor at the university. But along comes World War I, and he’d been radicalized, as people tend to do when they go to Berkeley, and he made speeches against imperialist war.

My mother said, “Can’t you keep your mouth shut?”

He said, “But something’s wrong, you should speak out about it.” The whole New England idea, goes back to Sam Adams and before that, I guess.

Well, he got fired.

Click here to watch or listen to the rest.

I have to admit that I've only recently started to appreciate Seeger's influence. I've always been a bit suspicious of the whole folk thing: it strikes me that a lot of the "respect" for the common man is just so much posing condescension. On the other hand, it's not fair to dismiss an entire social movement simply because some adherents to the scene are posers. Seeger's the real deal, and it was only when my own songwriting became political that I was able to understand that. He really is as great as they say.

Check out the lyrics to his great Vietnam era protest song "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy."

But wait! There's more. From PBS's Now, an interview with actor and playwright Wallace Shawn:

a bubble of denial, distracted by gossip,
entertainment and our own, acquisitive habits

DAVID BRANCACCIO: So you have for instance Jonathan Schell write a piece about "Invitation to a Degraded World" in which he believes that terrorists know how to get to our collective psyche through the violent narratives that we've grown up as Americans seeing in films, seeing on television.

He writes: "The very quality of public events has seemed to undergo a certain deterioration, as if from that day forward history was being authored by a third rate writer rather than a master or is being compelled to really follow the plot of a bad comic book."

WALLACE SHAWN: In a way the invitation to a degraded world in a sense was offered by Bin Laden to Bush. And Bin Laden, influenced by American comic books, influenced by disaster movies says: "well this is the way I'm gonna look at life from now on. Would you like to join me?" And Bush says: "Yes I think that's an absolutely wonderful way to look at the world and I will also enter into that disaster movie frame of mind and my actions will mimic yours really."

Click here to read the transcript, or here to watch the interview (be sure to find the video section at the bottom of the page).

Of course, I've loved Shawn for many years, in Woody Allen films, as a TV character actor, which includes his work on DS9 as the Grand Nagus of the Ferengi, and, can't forget this one, as the evil mastermind Vizzini in The Princess Bride. I had no idea how political his plays are until I read his extended monologue The Fever a couple of years ago.

Here's an excerpt from it that I've performed in class:

About a year ago I spent a day at a nude beach with a group of people I didn’t know that well. Lying out there, naked, in the sun, there was a man who kept talking about “the ruling class,” “the elite,” “the rich.” All day long, “The rich are pigs, they are all pigs, some day those pigs will get what they deserve,” and things like that. He was a thin man with a large mustache, unhealthy-looking but very handsome, a chain-smoker. As he talked, he would laugh—sort of bitter barks that came out always unexpectedly. I’d heard about these words and these phrases all of my life, but I’d never met anyone who actually used them. I thought it was quite entertaining. But for about a month afterward a strange thing happened. Everywhere I went I started getting into conversations with people I met—on a train, on a bus, at parties, in the line for a movie—and everyone I met was talking like him: The rich are pigs, their day will come, they’re all pigs, and on and on. I started to think that maybe I was crazy. I thought I was insane. Could this really be happening? Was everyone now a Communist but me?

Actually, I think I posted this a while back, but, what the hell, it's the Fourth of July! I can repeat myself today, of all days, if I want. Ah, no, sorry. Google informs me that I excerpted another section of The Fever, so I guess I'm not repeating myself. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's just that I think Shawn is so fucking great.

Anyway, happy Patriot's Day.


Pete Seeger


Wallace Shawn

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ARTISTS ON POLITICS: WHY SHOULD ANYONE LISTEN?

From my buddy Matt's blog Caffeinated, a quick missive on a recent Bruce Springsteen interview:

O’BRIEN: There is a whole school of thought, as you well know, that says that musicians – I mean you see it with the Dixie Chicks - you know, go play your music and stop.

SPRINGSTEEN: Well, if you turn it on, present company included, the idiots rambling on on cable television on any given night of the week, and you’re saying that musicians shouldn’t speak up? It’s insane. It’s funny.

The question is not if Bruce or Bono or Angelina are qualified to talk politics, it’s why Ann Coulter, Chris Matthews, Bill O’Reilly, Anderson Cooper, et al are assumed to be qualified. They work for entertainment companies. They are entertainers, too. Bruce has just as much right to sound wise or foolish as anyone else.

Click here for the rest.

Matt is so extraordinarily correct: whether or not artists have valid political opinions is essentially a moot point now that it's obvious that the corporate news media are simply so much entertainment. But, being an artist who speaks out on politics myself, I just can't help but throw in my two cents.

Never mind the fact that actors are part of a four thousand year old theatrical tradition which has always, from the civic minded plays of ancient Athens, through the state-craft oriented themes running through virtually all of Shakespeare's work, to the socially conscious scripts of American playwrights like Arthur Miller or Tony Kushner, directly concerned itself with that which is political. Never mind the fact that musicians like Springsteen, the Dixie Chicks, or Neil Young, are coming, to some extent, out of an American folk music tradition that has been explicitly political since at least the 1930s, if not earlier. Forget all that for just a moment. Just consider the fact that all these artists who have felt compelled to speak out during this time of national insanity are American citizens: it is their patriotic obligation to make their opinions known; without such citizen injections into the marketplace of ideas, democracy is certain to fail. That is, everyone should be proclaiming their political vision and analysis from the highest mountain peaks. That's what America is all about. That's what democracy is all about.

The real problem here, if there actually is one, is the massive soapbox that the corporate media provides for celebrities. If big stars weren't treated as gods, with an entire sub-industry of news media devoted to their every waking breath, there wouldn't be any controversy to speak of. In other words, famous artists who speak out on political issues are doing exactly what we should all be doing--it's not at all their fault that their celebrity status gives their voices more weight than yours or mine. Hell, if my career ends up being successful enough to make me famous, you can totally bet that I'm going to mouth off about my views every opportunity I get, which I do now anyway.

The only real response that a famous artist should have when asked by a hostile reporter or pundit why his opinion matters is something along the lines of, "if my thoughts are so unimportant, why are you interviewing me?" I wonder how the hell Bill O'Reilly would respond to that.

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WHY FUNDAMENTALISM? WHY NOW?

In his new PBS mini-series, Faith & Reason, Bill Moyers, by interviewing in depth prominent intellectuals, both believers and skeptics, attempts to find some pragmatic common ground between rationality and religion. I didn't even know about the series until earlier this evening when I caught an episode on our local PBS affiliate. And, lemme tell ya, if the rest of the series is anything like what I saw today, it's a pretty kickass show.

Anyway, to the point. The interview that really grabbed me was with philosopher and skeptic Colin McGinn. The popular thinker raised insightful point after point until toward the end of the interview when he launched this ambiguous stinker:

BILL MOYERS: How do you account for this resurgence of fundamentalism?

COLIN MCGINN: I don't know what the reason is for it. Because especially as you say it's a worldwide phenomenon, so if we just considered say America and Europe, we might say, "Well, look, we've had the scientific viewpoint." And the scientific viewpoint is too narrow to encompass everything about human values. It doesn't encompass art. It doesn't encompass morality. It doesn't encompass emotion in many ways. And so there's a sort of backlash and I sympathize with that. I think having a view of the world which is solely dominated by science is a limited view of the world. I think everything in science is good, just not that science is the only way to think about things, as that's why I think philosophy is a valuable subject. It's not science.

But the trouble with that is it doesn't seem to apply very well to the Muslim world. It's hard to see it as a backlash against science, because science never gained a strong ideological hold there. So it's very difficult to see. It seems almost like a coincidence where this religious fervor is coming up in different parts of the world. I think some of it has to do with the ordinary as disappointing. The ordinary world is disappointing to people. It may have something to do with the kinds of lives they live in the ordinary world.

For example, they don't have the spiritual connection with nature anymore. That doesn't seem to exist in the way it did. An old pagan idea is fading away, and so people need religion to get them away from the boringness, the dullness of ordinary life. And it's true of course. And it's the same with myth. If you've been plowing the field all day in the rain and you come home at night and you're eating gruel and life is not very enjoyable and somebody starts telling you a story about these magnificent creatures doing all these wonderful things in myth or in religion, the human imagination can conjure up another world, and it gives you an escape from the ordinary world. So, part of it I think is a difficulty of living in the ordinary, humdrum world. The ordinary, humdrum world is often just that.

Click here for the rest of the transcript, or go to the show's mainpage, linked above, to watch streaming video of the interview.

I agree with McGinn's overall analysis of the question. That is, he's right in that science, as a philosophy, is incapable of providing all the answers that humans seek about their existence, and when relied on exclusively leaves Westerners morally and emotionally short-changed; he's also correct in his observation that Enlightenment values never flew well in the Muslim world. He then, however, suggests that the simultaneous rise of Christian and Islamic fundamentalism is something of a coincidence, and goes on to offer a generic explanation that seems to be answering another question--why do people believe in God? In other words, at the end of a really great discussion that makes me want to read a book or two by him, McGinn essentially throws up his hands and shrugs his shoulders.

That's such a drag because the answer seems obvious to me.

The one force that affects, and has been affecting for many years, both the East and the West is corporate globalism or "free trade" or neoliberalism or whatever else you want to call it. There is no way to underestimate what's going on here. The corporate fist now encircling and squeezing the world has caused countless severe and savage social disruptions from San Diego to Sri Lanka. In the United States, the middle class, as a broadly based social stratum, is very nearly a thing of the past. Americans, to a great extent, are unaware of the overall machinations and maneuverings of the wealthy elite which have been causing their extreme anxiety about job loss, health care, and a whole host of other economic and social ills--many can't shake the propagandistic notion that it's somehow their fault if they can't make ends meet, never even imagining that their lot in life was decided by guys in suits who neither know them nor care about their best interests. Same thing in the developing world, except that the social and economic situation is far worse. Did you know that as gigantic agri-business breaks into the East Indian market, family farmers who can no longer compete under these circumstances have been killing themselves in droves? In both the US and abroad millions of people, by economic necessity, have been forced to abandon their family homes of many years to seek work. Amid all these depressing and fear-inducing social trends, lonely desperate people no longer trust each other.

It is completely clear that corporate globalism has turned on its ear the way that people around the world have lived for a long time, in the West for decades, in the East for centuries. How can anyone at all be surprised that religious fundamentalism, which offers community, love, meaning, and the tradition of an idyllic past that never really existed, has stepped in to fill the void? I must personally admit that these qualities are what I most miss about being a Southern Baptist: if you don't know any better, fundamentalism is extraordinarily appealing.

Now what I'd like to know is why McGinn, an obviously intelligent and analytical man, totally missed the link between corporate globalism and the rise of fundamentalism. I suppose there really is something to the notion of the Ivory Tower.

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THIS KILLS BUSH'S ENTIRE LEGAL PARADIGM
Justices, 5-3, Broadly Reject Bush Plan to Try Detainees

From the New York Times courtesy of AlterNet:

The Supreme Court on Thursday repudiated the Bush administration's plan to put Guantánamo detainees on trial before military commissions, ruling broadly that the commissions were unauthorized by federal statute and violated international law.

"The executive is bound to comply with the rule of law that prevails in this jurisdiction," Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the 5-to-3 majority, said at the end of a 73-page opinion that in sober tones shredded each of the administration's arguments, including the assertion that Congress had stripped the court of jurisdiction to decide the case.

A principal flaw the court found in the commissions was that the president had established them without Congressional authorization.

Definitely a good ruling. But that last little bit, about Congressional authorization, leads to this fascinating little tidbit:

In ruling that the Congressional "authorization for the use of military force," passed in the days immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, cannot be interpreted to legitimize the military commissions, the ruling poses a direct challenge to the administration's legal justification for its secret wiretapping program.

Representative Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who has also introduced a bill with procedures for trying the Guantánamo detainees, said the court's refusal to give an open-ended ruling to the force resolution meant that the resolution could not be viewed as authorizing the National Security Agency's domestic wiretapping.

Click here for the rest.

Let's just accept it. The Congressional resolution regarding the use of military force, a poor substite for the Constitutionally described "declaration of war" in my humble opinion, authorized only the use of military force. That is, Congress gave the White House permission to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, and any other "Axis of Evil" country that Bush manages to link to terrorism, but nothing else. It's understood that the executive branch does, indeed, get to have some expanded powers during a war, but there are, as this Supreme Court ruling shows, limits to that expansion. But then, Bush aside, the people in the White House aren't stupid: they already knew that they couldn't just do whatever they wanted. That's why they were insisting that the Congressional force resolution gave them super-extra powers, even though the actual wording said no such thing. So domestic wiretapping, "enemy combatant" status, drumhead military tribunal trials, torture, all this shit is just plain illegal. Thank god some federal officials still take their jobs seriously, even if it's only five out of nine Supreme Court Justices.

Fuck you, Bush.

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Getting Busted for Wearing a Peace T-Shirt

From CounterPunch:

Yesterday afternoon, drinking a cup of coffee while sitting in the Jesse Brown V.A. Medical Center on Chicago's south side, a Veterans Administration cop walked up to me and said, "OK, you've had your 15 minutes, it's time to go."

"Huh?", I asked intelligently, not quite sure what he was talking about.

"You can't be in here protesting," Officer Adkins said, pointing to my Veterans For Peace shirt.

"Well, I'm not protesting, I'm having a cup of coffee," I returned, thinking that logic would convince Adkins to go back to his earlier duties of guarding against serious terrorists.

Flipping his badge open, he said, "No, not with that shirt. You're protesting and you have to go."

Beginning to get his drift, I said firmly, "Not before I finish my coffee."

He insisted that I leave, but still not quite believing my ears, I tried one more approach to reason.

"Hey, listen. I'm a veteran. This is a V.A. facility. I'm sitting here not talking to anybody, having a cup of coffee. I'm not protesting and you can't kick me out."

"You'll either go or we'll arrest you," Adkins threatened.

Click here for the rest.

Needless to say, this guy was arrested when he refused to leave. Why the hell is this shit still going on? Sixty percent of this country, or more, is now against the war in Iraq. It strikes me as nutty, at the very least, that people are still acting like it's two days after 9/11. Not that it was excusable then, but the insanity gripping this nation was far more tangible at that point. And it doesn't really matter that this was a VA hospital either. Vets are entitled to their freedom of speech, same as everybody else, and quite a few soldiers are now quietly opposing the war too. Anybody who wants to get tough because of a simple peace t-shirt has a hole in his head.

Man, this country is so sinisterly weird.

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