Friday, May 17, 2013
Weekly reminder
As of May 14, at least 4,094 people had been killed in the US by gunfire since Newtown, 32 of them in Massachusetts.
Left Side of the Aisle #108 - Part 6
The real Obama scandal: government secrecy and surveillance
It is finally, it is at last, it is in fact long past time that we stopped believing the boldfaced lie that President Hopey-Changey has any commitment at all to the "transparency" in government that he promised. He came into office promising the most transparent administration ever only to prove himself more committed to government secrecy and domestic spying than anyone who preceded him.
For example, I've talked before about his unprecedented war on whistleblowers, prosecuting more of them under the 1917 Espionage Act than all previous presidents combined. That includes the persecution of Bradley Manning, the American hero who dared to tell the public the truth about Iraq and other parts of US foreign policy. He was held in solitary confinement for month after month - which is considered torture by international standards - in an attempt to break him and make him give false testimony against Julian Assange so that the White House could destroy WikiLeaks. When that failed, he is now in what increasingly looks like a kangaroo military court. The government is building a wall of secrecy around the trial, with secret witnesses testifying in disguise in secret locations, secret "dry runs" of future court proceedings, something even the prosecutors say is unprecedented, and the petty refusal of the government to release transcripts of the public parts of the proceedings, making accurate reporting difficult.
Now, just recently, we have scandal on scandal on scandal, or at least the appearance of them. I have to say, to be fair, and of course I am always scrupulously fair, some of them bother me a lot less than others.
For one, all the frothing about the "scrubbing of the talking points" in the wake of the attack on the consulate in Benghazi really fails to impress me. For one thing, the deaths of US diplomats is hardly unprecedented. Between January of 2002 and September of 2008, 60 US diplomats were killed, including 12 in Karachi in 2002 and 16 in Yemen in 2008, none of which, to my memory, produced the wailing and rending of garments and gnashing of teeth seen in this case. What's more, the memo itself was little more than typical political CYA and the "scrubbing" amounted to the State Department and the CIA each trying to preemptively blame the other for any screw-ups that might emerge later on.
It's clear the administration was, as the term of art goes, "less than forthcoming" about Benghazi and there are questions about the routine level of security available at the consulate, so there are legitimate concerns that can be raised - but this memo ain't one of them.
Another one, frankly, is the business about the IRS supposedly "targeting" teabagger groups. A few days ago, I would have condemned the IRS using political standards as strongly as anyone else, but the fact is, the more I learn about this, the less of an OMIGOD! it becomes.
First, these were not criminal investigations, they were investigations of eligibility for 501(c)3 and 501(c)4 tax-exempt status. Obtaining and maintaining that status requires that the primary focus of the organization is social welfare. Only limited political activity is allowed.
Second, there was no "targeting" of teabagger groups. The idea was that a group with "Tea Party" or "Patriot" in its name should get a closer look because that raised a reasonable possibility that they may well be engaged in political advocacy rather than social welfare and so be ineligible for 501(c)3 or (c)4 status.
Third, "tea party" and "patriot" were not the only triggers for closer examination. CBS News reports that according to Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt organizations, only about 300 of the 3400 applications for 501(c)3 or (c)4 status in 2012 were given extra attention and only a quarter of those involved "tea party" or "patriot."
Finally, if this was an attempt "to punish political enemies," is was a damned inefficient one: Lerner says that 150 of those cases have been closed and while some groups withdrew their application, no group had its tax-exempt status revoked.
In reality, the whole thing was an attempt by the IRS to find a way to deal with the soaring number of applications. The method they chose - or, more accurately, this part of the method they chose - was surely not the best. Scratch that, it was stupid. But to turn it into some conspiracy (directed by who?) to attack political opponents is total nonsense.
A buzzword of fairly recent vintage is "optics," the idea that what something is, is less important than what one side or another can make it appear to be. This is definitely a case of that.
Which brings us to the third scandal of recent weeks, and this is the real one.
The Associated Press was just informed by the Justice Department that it had secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for AP. For the months of April and May of 2012, it got lists of all outgoing calls for both the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for the general AP office numbers in New York, Washington, DC, and Hartford, Connecticut, and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery. In all, it covered 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists, including general office ones that might be used by any of about 100 reporters and an office-wide shared fax line.
AP President and CEO Gary Pruitt called it a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into how news organizations gather the news that went far beyond anything that could be justified by any specific investigation.
He was hardly alone: The ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the New York Times' Editorial Page Editor, the Washington Post's Executive Editor, and a number of other journalists all used terms like "unacceptable abuse of power," "a terrible blow against the freedom of the press," "outrageous," and "shocking." Even Democratic stalwart Sen. Pat Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said: "I am very troubled by these allegations and want to hear the government's explanation." Even some GOPpers got in on it: Rep. Darrell Issa and Sen. Rand Paul both criticized the intrusion into the press. Lo, and the word "Nixonian" was heard in the land.
The government wouldn't say why it wanted the records, but the belief is that it was another whistleblower case, this one looking for the source of an AP story from May 7, 2012, which revealed some details of a CIA operation in Yemen that stopped an al-Qaida plot to detonate a bomb on an airplane bound for the US - a story which, by the way, the AP obtained and then held off from publishing at the request of the White House until the day before the administration itself was going to release it. Put more directly, it grew out of this White House's continuing drive to achieve complete control over what the public does and doesn't know about what the administration is doing and when it knows it. I wonder how long it will be before they finally just cut to the chase and propose a Ministry of Truth.
The thing is, the Obama gang can't even be trusted to obey their own rules. The Department of Justice has its own regulations about obtaining the telephone records of journalists, which require that "all reasonable attempts should be made to obtain information from alternative sources" and that "negotiations with the media shall be pursued in all cases in which a subpoena to a member of the news media is contemplated." What's more, a subpoena to the media must be "as narrowly drawn as possible" and "should be directed at relevant information regarding a limited subject matter and should cover a reasonably limited time period." None of that happened.
But that didn't matter to Eric Holder, the man who leaped to launch an investigation into the "inappropriate" behavior of the IRS in thinking that politically-oriented right-wing groups might actually be politically-oriented. In this case, he insisted that he knew everything was on the up and up and did it at the same press conference where he did his Sgt. Schultz impression and claimed that he had recused himself from the investigation and had chosen to "not be fully informed."
They can't even be trusted to obey their own rules. Not when their secrecy fetish is involved. And the other thing is, you have to bear in mind that the flip side of government secrecy is always, always, government knowledge: us knowing less and less about them and them knowing more and more about us.
You want to know how bad it's getting? I'll give you an idea.
In response to a Freedom of Information Act filing, the ACLU just this month obtained documents on FBI and Justice Department policies which show that the feds believe they can read your emails without a warrant - and were advising agents of that over two years after a federal court ruled that the Fourth Amendment requires warrants for all emails because their contents are just as private as our letters or phone calls.
But simply ignoring the courts is just a holding action. According to documents obtained in April by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC, the Obama administration has authorized a new government program involving the interception of internet communications, part of which involves promising telcoms that the government will not prosecute them if they violate US wiretapping laws by illegally handing over the information the feds want without the legally-required warrants. That is, rather than even worrying about warrants one way or another, the government will simply "ask" for the information, the companies will hand it over - illegally - and the feds won't prosecute. How much more blatantly corrupt can it be?
And the surveillance authorization here - the legal basis for which is classified, of course - is quite broad, covering all "critical infrastructure sectors" including the military, energy, healthcare, and finance.
If you think I'm being paranoid, just remember that like the bumper sticker says, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. The extent of government intrusion into what we would like to think remains our private - or at least our not overtly-public - lives has become astonishing:
Tim Clemente, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, has twice asserted on CNN in recent weeks that "no digital communication is secure," by which he means not only that the government can actively monitor any of our digital communications, including phone calls, emails, online chats, and all the rest, but that all such communications are automatically recorded and stored and available to the government after the fact.
If that sounds incredible, bear in mind it's not the first indication. Columnist Glenn Greenwald points to some: In 2007, former AT&T engineer Mark Klein revealed that AT&T and other telecoms had built a special network that allowed the National Security Agency, the NSA, full and unlimited access to the phone calls and emails of all of their customers.
In 2008, two NSA employees claimed to have witnessed and even participated in the interception of hundreds of personal, intimate calls from American service members and aid workers and that NSA employees routinely intercepted calls of individuals with no connection to terrorism.
In 2009, government intelligence officials told the New York Times that the NSA had been engaged in what they called significant and systemic “overcollection” of domestic communications of Americans.
In 2010, the Washington Post reported that the NSA was intercepting and storing 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls, and other types of communications every day.
In 2012, NSA official-turned-whistleblower William Binney estimated that the agency has assembled 20 trillion records of phone calls, emails, and other forms of data from Americans, including copies of almost all of the emails sent and received from most people living in the United States. Also in 2012, Sens. Ron Wyden and Mark Udall said Americans would be "stunned" to learn what the administration thought it had the legal power to do under the Patriot Act.
Remember I said earlier about same-sex marriage that on that one, we're winning? Well, I have to say that on this one, we're losing. Badly. And we're running out of time.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/18/bradley-manning-trial-lawsuit_n_3109822.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/09/hawking-israel-manning-transparency-fcc
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57584051/irs-targeted-tea-party-groups-earlier-than-2012/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/05/14/holder-has-ordered-irs-investigation/?wpisrc=al_national
http://crooksandliars.com/nicole-belle/tea-party-complaints-irs-audits-just-
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/govt-obtains-wide-ap-phone-records-probe
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/13/ap-phone-records-government-intrusion-unprecedented_n_3268569.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/14/justice-department-ap-phone-records-whistleblowers
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/13/journalists-ap-government-phone-records_n_3269001.html?ref=topbar
http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/05/14/attorney-general-eric-holders-contemptible-defense-of-the-dojs-seizure-of-ap-phone-records/
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/04/25-7
http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/05/08/aclu-obtains-documents-showing-fbi-doesnt-always-get-warrants-before-reading-emails/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/04/telephone-calls-recorded-fbi-boston
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1305/01/ebo.01.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/07/AR2007110700006.html
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/10/new-nsa-whistleblowers
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/us/16nsa.html?pagewanted=all
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/print/
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/20/whistleblower_the_nsa_is_lying_us
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/16/us/politics/democratic-senators-warn-about-use-of-patriot-act.html
It is finally, it is at last, it is in fact long past time that we stopped believing the boldfaced lie that President Hopey-Changey has any commitment at all to the "transparency" in government that he promised. He came into office promising the most transparent administration ever only to prove himself more committed to government secrecy and domestic spying than anyone who preceded him.
For example, I've talked before about his unprecedented war on whistleblowers, prosecuting more of them under the 1917 Espionage Act than all previous presidents combined. That includes the persecution of Bradley Manning, the American hero who dared to tell the public the truth about Iraq and other parts of US foreign policy. He was held in solitary confinement for month after month - which is considered torture by international standards - in an attempt to break him and make him give false testimony against Julian Assange so that the White House could destroy WikiLeaks. When that failed, he is now in what increasingly looks like a kangaroo military court. The government is building a wall of secrecy around the trial, with secret witnesses testifying in disguise in secret locations, secret "dry runs" of future court proceedings, something even the prosecutors say is unprecedented, and the petty refusal of the government to release transcripts of the public parts of the proceedings, making accurate reporting difficult.Now, just recently, we have scandal on scandal on scandal, or at least the appearance of them. I have to say, to be fair, and of course I am always scrupulously fair, some of them bother me a lot less than others.
For one, all the frothing about the "scrubbing of the talking points" in the wake of the attack on the consulate in Benghazi really fails to impress me. For one thing, the deaths of US diplomats is hardly unprecedented. Between January of 2002 and September of 2008, 60 US diplomats were killed, including 12 in Karachi in 2002 and 16 in Yemen in 2008, none of which, to my memory, produced the wailing and rending of garments and gnashing of teeth seen in this case. What's more, the memo itself was little more than typical political CYA and the "scrubbing" amounted to the State Department and the CIA each trying to preemptively blame the other for any screw-ups that might emerge later on.It's clear the administration was, as the term of art goes, "less than forthcoming" about Benghazi and there are questions about the routine level of security available at the consulate, so there are legitimate concerns that can be raised - but this memo ain't one of them.
Another one, frankly, is the business about the IRS supposedly "targeting" teabagger groups. A few days ago, I would have condemned the IRS using political standards as strongly as anyone else, but the fact is, the more I learn about this, the less of an OMIGOD! it becomes.
First, these were not criminal investigations, they were investigations of eligibility for 501(c)3 and 501(c)4 tax-exempt status. Obtaining and maintaining that status requires that the primary focus of the organization is social welfare. Only limited political activity is allowed.
Second, there was no "targeting" of teabagger groups. The idea was that a group with "Tea Party" or "Patriot" in its name should get a closer look because that raised a reasonable possibility that they may well be engaged in political advocacy rather than social welfare and so be ineligible for 501(c)3 or (c)4 status.
Third, "tea party" and "patriot" were not the only triggers for closer examination. CBS News reports that according to Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt organizations, only about 300 of the 3400 applications for 501(c)3 or (c)4 status in 2012 were given extra attention and only a quarter of those involved "tea party" or "patriot."
Finally, if this was an attempt "to punish political enemies," is was a damned inefficient one: Lerner says that 150 of those cases have been closed and while some groups withdrew their application, no group had its tax-exempt status revoked.
In reality, the whole thing was an attempt by the IRS to find a way to deal with the soaring number of applications. The method they chose - or, more accurately, this part of the method they chose - was surely not the best. Scratch that, it was stupid. But to turn it into some conspiracy (directed by who?) to attack political opponents is total nonsense.
A buzzword of fairly recent vintage is "optics," the idea that what something is, is less important than what one side or another can make it appear to be. This is definitely a case of that.
Which brings us to the third scandal of recent weeks, and this is the real one.
The Associated Press was just informed by the Justice Department that it had secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for AP. For the months of April and May of 2012, it got lists of all outgoing calls for both the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for the general AP office numbers in New York, Washington, DC, and Hartford, Connecticut, and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery. In all, it covered 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists, including general office ones that might be used by any of about 100 reporters and an office-wide shared fax line.AP President and CEO Gary Pruitt called it a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into how news organizations gather the news that went far beyond anything that could be justified by any specific investigation.
He was hardly alone: The ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the New York Times' Editorial Page Editor, the Washington Post's Executive Editor, and a number of other journalists all used terms like "unacceptable abuse of power," "a terrible blow against the freedom of the press," "outrageous," and "shocking." Even Democratic stalwart Sen. Pat Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said: "I am very troubled by these allegations and want to hear the government's explanation." Even some GOPpers got in on it: Rep. Darrell Issa and Sen. Rand Paul both criticized the intrusion into the press. Lo, and the word "Nixonian" was heard in the land.
The government wouldn't say why it wanted the records, but the belief is that it was another whistleblower case, this one looking for the source of an AP story from May 7, 2012, which revealed some details of a CIA operation in Yemen that stopped an al-Qaida plot to detonate a bomb on an airplane bound for the US - a story which, by the way, the AP obtained and then held off from publishing at the request of the White House until the day before the administration itself was going to release it. Put more directly, it grew out of this White House's continuing drive to achieve complete control over what the public does and doesn't know about what the administration is doing and when it knows it. I wonder how long it will be before they finally just cut to the chase and propose a Ministry of Truth.
The thing is, the Obama gang can't even be trusted to obey their own rules. The Department of Justice has its own regulations about obtaining the telephone records of journalists, which require that "all reasonable attempts should be made to obtain information from alternative sources" and that "negotiations with the media shall be pursued in all cases in which a subpoena to a member of the news media is contemplated." What's more, a subpoena to the media must be "as narrowly drawn as possible" and "should be directed at relevant information regarding a limited subject matter and should cover a reasonably limited time period." None of that happened.
But that didn't matter to Eric Holder, the man who leaped to launch an investigation into the "inappropriate" behavior of the IRS in thinking that politically-oriented right-wing groups might actually be politically-oriented. In this case, he insisted that he knew everything was on the up and up and did it at the same press conference where he did his Sgt. Schultz impression and claimed that he had recused himself from the investigation and had chosen to "not be fully informed."
They can't even be trusted to obey their own rules. Not when their secrecy fetish is involved. And the other thing is, you have to bear in mind that the flip side of government secrecy is always, always, government knowledge: us knowing less and less about them and them knowing more and more about us.
You want to know how bad it's getting? I'll give you an idea.
In response to a Freedom of Information Act filing, the ACLU just this month obtained documents on FBI and Justice Department policies which show that the feds believe they can read your emails without a warrant - and were advising agents of that over two years after a federal court ruled that the Fourth Amendment requires warrants for all emails because their contents are just as private as our letters or phone calls.But simply ignoring the courts is just a holding action. According to documents obtained in April by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC, the Obama administration has authorized a new government program involving the interception of internet communications, part of which involves promising telcoms that the government will not prosecute them if they violate US wiretapping laws by illegally handing over the information the feds want without the legally-required warrants. That is, rather than even worrying about warrants one way or another, the government will simply "ask" for the information, the companies will hand it over - illegally - and the feds won't prosecute. How much more blatantly corrupt can it be?
And the surveillance authorization here - the legal basis for which is classified, of course - is quite broad, covering all "critical infrastructure sectors" including the military, energy, healthcare, and finance.
If you think I'm being paranoid, just remember that like the bumper sticker says, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. The extent of government intrusion into what we would like to think remains our private - or at least our not overtly-public - lives has become astonishing:
Tim Clemente, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, has twice asserted on CNN in recent weeks that "no digital communication is secure," by which he means not only that the government can actively monitor any of our digital communications, including phone calls, emails, online chats, and all the rest, but that all such communications are automatically recorded and stored and available to the government after the fact.
If that sounds incredible, bear in mind it's not the first indication. Columnist Glenn Greenwald points to some: In 2007, former AT&T engineer Mark Klein revealed that AT&T and other telecoms had built a special network that allowed the National Security Agency, the NSA, full and unlimited access to the phone calls and emails of all of their customers.In 2008, two NSA employees claimed to have witnessed and even participated in the interception of hundreds of personal, intimate calls from American service members and aid workers and that NSA employees routinely intercepted calls of individuals with no connection to terrorism.
In 2009, government intelligence officials told the New York Times that the NSA had been engaged in what they called significant and systemic “overcollection” of domestic communications of Americans.
In 2010, the Washington Post reported that the NSA was intercepting and storing 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls, and other types of communications every day.
In 2012, NSA official-turned-whistleblower William Binney estimated that the agency has assembled 20 trillion records of phone calls, emails, and other forms of data from Americans, including copies of almost all of the emails sent and received from most people living in the United States. Also in 2012, Sens. Ron Wyden and Mark Udall said Americans would be "stunned" to learn what the administration thought it had the legal power to do under the Patriot Act.
Remember I said earlier about same-sex marriage that on that one, we're winning? Well, I have to say that on this one, we're losing. Badly. And we're running out of time.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/18/bradley-manning-trial-lawsuit_n_3109822.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/09/hawking-israel-manning-transparency-fcc
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57584051/irs-targeted-tea-party-groups-earlier-than-2012/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/05/14/holder-has-ordered-irs-investigation/?wpisrc=al_national
http://crooksandliars.com/nicole-belle/tea-party-complaints-irs-audits-just-
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/govt-obtains-wide-ap-phone-records-probe
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/13/ap-phone-records-government-intrusion-unprecedented_n_3268569.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/14/justice-department-ap-phone-records-whistleblowers
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/13/journalists-ap-government-phone-records_n_3269001.html?ref=topbar
http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/05/14/attorney-general-eric-holders-contemptible-defense-of-the-dojs-seizure-of-ap-phone-records/
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/04/25-7
http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/05/08/aclu-obtains-documents-showing-fbi-doesnt-always-get-warrants-before-reading-emails/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/04/telephone-calls-recorded-fbi-boston
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1305/01/ebo.01.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/07/AR2007110700006.html
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/10/new-nsa-whistleblowers
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/us/16nsa.html?pagewanted=all
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/print/
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/20/whistleblower_the_nsa_is_lying_us
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/16/us/politics/democratic-senators-warn-about-use-of-patriot-act.html
Left Side of the Aisle #108 - Part 5
Outrage of the Week: elevating corporations in new trade deal
From the ridiculous to the outrageous. If you needed any more evidence that there is a need for dramatic, dare I say revolutionary, changes in our social and economic system, this should do it: It's the Outrage of the Week.
On May 13, President Hopey-Changey and British Prime Minister David Cameron pledged to achieve a new, broad trade agreement between the US and the European Union. But since tariffs between the two are already low or nonexistent, what is the point?
The point, my friends, is what are called regulatory issues and who gets to decide what the standards are for everything from environmental protection to food safety to worker protection and back again. And the "who" is just who you might expect.
The Amazing Mr. O and Cameron are pushing for what's called "investor-state resolution" to be included in any new pact. Currently, trade between the US and the EU is governed by the rules of the World Trade Organization, or WTO. Under those rules, if a corporation feels it has been wronged by some aspect of a nation's trade policies, it has to persuade a national government to take its case to the WTO court. Under investor-state resolution, that's not necessary and corporations are given the political power to sue governments directly. If the court - composed of supposed trade experts - finds the government policy in question violates some trade agreement, it can impose financial penalties and other sanctions.
Put more bluntly, investor-state resolution provides corporations a forum in which they can attack and try to roll back whatever nation's food safety rules or environmental laws or banking regulations or whatever are the strongest at a given moment on the grounds that they create "unfair barriers to trade" - and do it before a panel of people whose interest is in trade, not in food safety or the environment or consumer protection or whatever.
This is not the first time the US has done this; similar provisions have been included in bilateral pacts since the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, in 1994. But including it in a trade agreement with the EU is unprecedented and gives the lie to the claimed purpose of investor-state resolution, which is to protect companies from dictators or weak court systems in developing countries. Instead, it reveals the real purpose: to formally place corporations on the same legal level as national governments.
Keep reminding yourself: These people are not on your side. And it is an outrage.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/13/obama-cameron-trade-corporations_n_3269002.html?utm_hp_ref=world&ir=World
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/04/eu-trade-deal_n_2994410.html
From the ridiculous to the outrageous. If you needed any more evidence that there is a need for dramatic, dare I say revolutionary, changes in our social and economic system, this should do it: It's the Outrage of the Week.On May 13, President Hopey-Changey and British Prime Minister David Cameron pledged to achieve a new, broad trade agreement between the US and the European Union. But since tariffs between the two are already low or nonexistent, what is the point?
The point, my friends, is what are called regulatory issues and who gets to decide what the standards are for everything from environmental protection to food safety to worker protection and back again. And the "who" is just who you might expect.
The Amazing Mr. O and Cameron are pushing for what's called "investor-state resolution" to be included in any new pact. Currently, trade between the US and the EU is governed by the rules of the World Trade Organization, or WTO. Under those rules, if a corporation feels it has been wronged by some aspect of a nation's trade policies, it has to persuade a national government to take its case to the WTO court. Under investor-state resolution, that's not necessary and corporations are given the political power to sue governments directly. If the court - composed of supposed trade experts - finds the government policy in question violates some trade agreement, it can impose financial penalties and other sanctions.
Put more bluntly, investor-state resolution provides corporations a forum in which they can attack and try to roll back whatever nation's food safety rules or environmental laws or banking regulations or whatever are the strongest at a given moment on the grounds that they create "unfair barriers to trade" - and do it before a panel of people whose interest is in trade, not in food safety or the environment or consumer protection or whatever.
This is not the first time the US has done this; similar provisions have been included in bilateral pacts since the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, in 1994. But including it in a trade agreement with the EU is unprecedented and gives the lie to the claimed purpose of investor-state resolution, which is to protect companies from dictators or weak court systems in developing countries. Instead, it reveals the real purpose: to formally place corporations on the same legal level as national governments.
Keep reminding yourself: These people are not on your side. And it is an outrage.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/13/obama-cameron-trade-corporations_n_3269002.html?utm_hp_ref=world&ir=World
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/04/eu-trade-deal_n_2994410.html
Left Side of the Aisle #108 - Part 4
Clown Award: US Customs Dept.
Time for our regular feature, the Clown Award, given as always for acts of meritorious stupidity.
The winner of the big red nose this week is that ever-reliable source of bitterly amusing inanity, the DHS, the Department for the Protection of the Fatherland, in this case in the form of Customs agents, part of our front-line troops in the battle to preserve and protect our forever-endangered levels of paranoia.
Hussain Al-Khawahir is a 33-year-old Saudi Arabian man who was arrested at Detroit Metropolitan Airport on May 11. According to reports, agents at Customs became suspicious when it appeared that a couple of pages - pages 33 and 34, to be specific - were missing from his passport. Okay, fair enough. So they searched his luggage.
And then they found it, the item, the thing, the reason for his arrest: He was trying to bring into a US a pressure cooker! And then, they claimed, he "changed his story" about why he had it.
First, the agents claimed, Al-Khawahir said he bought it for his nephew, who attends the University of Toledo in Ohio because he couldn't buy them in the US. Then, later, he said he brought the pressure cooker because the one his nephew purchased was "cheap" and had broken the first time he used it. Omigosh! The blatant contradictions! Caught in a lie! And let's not forget, it was a pressure cooker!
Let's also not forget that he doesn't speak a word of English and was questioned by Customs via an interpreter. So the questions went from English to Arabic and the answers from Arabic to back to English. It is so terribly unreasonable of me to suspect that something might have been literally lost in translation and Al-Khawahir's first statement was actually that his son had been unable to buy a "decent" one in the US or that he can't get one "like this" in the US? Or are we supposed to think, as Customs apparently does, that international terrorists are so stupid that they are trying to smuggle pressure cookers into the US because they actually don't know you can buy them here?
The clownishness of the DHS here is matched by the clownishness of the media: Most every story I saw on this - and I looked at several - wrote as if it really is a crime to bring a pressure cooker into the US and every single one of them just had to mention the Boston Marathon bombing. Because, after all, pressure cooker!
This is insane. I mean it. Really. The day before Al-Khawahir was arrested on I'm still not sure just what charge, a young Saudi Arabian student living in Michigan told a Saudi newspaper that cops issued him with a warning after he was seen outside carrying a pressure cooker full of rice to a friend’s house for dinner.
Apparently, a neighbor saw a "suspicious" man carrying a pressure cooker and called police. Cops came to his house, questioned him about his education in the US, the date of his arrival, and his activities outside the university. They also examined the pressure cooker and then told him "to be careful while handling such items in public." Maybe they should have remembered Richard Reid and Umar Abdulmutallab and warned him to be careful about appearing in public wearing shoes - or underwear.
The Saudi Arabian embassy in Washington, DC, reports that a number of Saudi students in the US had their homes raided in the aftermath of the Boston bombing. Nothing was found.
Meanwhile, Hussain Al-Khawahir remains in prison until a preliminary hearing on May 28.
Clowns. We are governed by clowns.
Sources:
http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2013/05/saudi_who_tried_to_bring_press.html
http://www.metro.us/newyork/news/national/2013/05/10/michigan-cops-warned-saudi-student-not-to-carry-pressure-cooker-around-claim/
http://gulfnews.com/news/gulf/saudi-arabia/saudi-with-pressure-cooker-questioned-by-us-police-1.1181604
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Reid_%28shoe_bomber%29
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umar_Farouk_Abdulmutallab
Time for our regular feature, the Clown Award, given as always for acts of meritorious stupidity.The winner of the big red nose this week is that ever-reliable source of bitterly amusing inanity, the DHS, the Department for the Protection of the Fatherland, in this case in the form of Customs agents, part of our front-line troops in the battle to preserve and protect our forever-endangered levels of paranoia.
Hussain Al-Khawahir is a 33-year-old Saudi Arabian man who was arrested at Detroit Metropolitan Airport on May 11. According to reports, agents at Customs became suspicious when it appeared that a couple of pages - pages 33 and 34, to be specific - were missing from his passport. Okay, fair enough. So they searched his luggage.
And then they found it, the item, the thing, the reason for his arrest: He was trying to bring into a US a pressure cooker! And then, they claimed, he "changed his story" about why he had it.
First, the agents claimed, Al-Khawahir said he bought it for his nephew, who attends the University of Toledo in Ohio because he couldn't buy them in the US. Then, later, he said he brought the pressure cooker because the one his nephew purchased was "cheap" and had broken the first time he used it. Omigosh! The blatant contradictions! Caught in a lie! And let's not forget, it was a pressure cooker!
Let's also not forget that he doesn't speak a word of English and was questioned by Customs via an interpreter. So the questions went from English to Arabic and the answers from Arabic to back to English. It is so terribly unreasonable of me to suspect that something might have been literally lost in translation and Al-Khawahir's first statement was actually that his son had been unable to buy a "decent" one in the US or that he can't get one "like this" in the US? Or are we supposed to think, as Customs apparently does, that international terrorists are so stupid that they are trying to smuggle pressure cookers into the US because they actually don't know you can buy them here?
The clownishness of the DHS here is matched by the clownishness of the media: Most every story I saw on this - and I looked at several - wrote as if it really is a crime to bring a pressure cooker into the US and every single one of them just had to mention the Boston Marathon bombing. Because, after all, pressure cooker!
This is insane. I mean it. Really. The day before Al-Khawahir was arrested on I'm still not sure just what charge, a young Saudi Arabian student living in Michigan told a Saudi newspaper that cops issued him with a warning after he was seen outside carrying a pressure cooker full of rice to a friend’s house for dinner.
Apparently, a neighbor saw a "suspicious" man carrying a pressure cooker and called police. Cops came to his house, questioned him about his education in the US, the date of his arrival, and his activities outside the university. They also examined the pressure cooker and then told him "to be careful while handling such items in public." Maybe they should have remembered Richard Reid and Umar Abdulmutallab and warned him to be careful about appearing in public wearing shoes - or underwear.
The Saudi Arabian embassy in Washington, DC, reports that a number of Saudi students in the US had their homes raided in the aftermath of the Boston bombing. Nothing was found.
Meanwhile, Hussain Al-Khawahir remains in prison until a preliminary hearing on May 28.
Clowns. We are governed by clowns.
Sources:
http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2013/05/saudi_who_tried_to_bring_press.html
http://www.metro.us/newyork/news/national/2013/05/10/michigan-cops-warned-saudi-student-not-to-carry-pressure-cooker-around-claim/
http://gulfnews.com/news/gulf/saudi-arabia/saudi-with-pressure-cooker-questioned-by-us-police-1.1181604
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Reid_%28shoe_bomber%29
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umar_Farouk_Abdulmutallab
Left Side of the Aisle #108 - Part 3
RIP: Ray Harryhausen, Joyce Brothers
We're going to go from the good news to the bad news. We have two RIPs this week.
The first is to Ray Harryhausen, the master of stop-motion animation, who died last week in London. He was 92.
You may not have heard his name, but you very likely know his work. Often working alone or with a small crew, he created and photographed many of the most memorable fantasy-adventure creatures in movie history: the dinosaur in “The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms,” shown in the picture shortly before it destroyed Palisades Amusement Park (which I note fore the benefit of anyone for who that may ring a bell), the skeleton warriors in “Jason and the Argonauts,” the pterodactyl in “One Million Years B.C.,” the alien beast in "20 Million Miles to Earth," and many more dating all the way back to "Mighty Joe Young." He developed a way, which he called Dynamation, for his models to appear to interact directly with the actors.
George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Peter Jackson - all cite his films as antecedents for their work. I just remember the fun of watching his movies.
RIP, Ray Harryhausen.
Our other RIP this week is for Dr. Joyce Brothers, "the mother of media psychology," who turned a victory on the television game show "The $64,000 Question" into a decades-long career popularizing psychology through radio, TV, and a syndicated newspaper column. She was 85.
I remember encountering Dr. Joyce through the TV when I was quite young. She had a 5-minute show that was tagged onto something or another and she would answer a mailed-in viewer question while sitting stiffly and properly behind a desk, square-shouldered and facing the camera directly. I thought she was a little creepy.
But I grew up and she thawed out and I came to respect what appeared to be her determination to remain open-minded.
And another part of my childhood slips away. RIP, Joyce Brothers.
Sources:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/08/movies/ray-harryhausen-cinematic-special-effects-innovator-dies-at-92.html
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/americas/united-states/130513/psychologist-dr-joyce-brothers-dies-at-85
We're going to go from the good news to the bad news. We have two RIPs this week.The first is to Ray Harryhausen, the master of stop-motion animation, who died last week in London. He was 92.
You may not have heard his name, but you very likely know his work. Often working alone or with a small crew, he created and photographed many of the most memorable fantasy-adventure creatures in movie history: the dinosaur in “The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms,” shown in the picture shortly before it destroyed Palisades Amusement Park (which I note fore the benefit of anyone for who that may ring a bell), the skeleton warriors in “Jason and the Argonauts,” the pterodactyl in “One Million Years B.C.,” the alien beast in "20 Million Miles to Earth," and many more dating all the way back to "Mighty Joe Young." He developed a way, which he called Dynamation, for his models to appear to interact directly with the actors.George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Peter Jackson - all cite his films as antecedents for their work. I just remember the fun of watching his movies.
RIP, Ray Harryhausen.
Our other RIP this week is for Dr. Joyce Brothers, "the mother of media psychology," who turned a victory on the television game show "The $64,000 Question" into a decades-long career popularizing psychology through radio, TV, and a syndicated newspaper column. She was 85.I remember encountering Dr. Joyce through the TV when I was quite young. She had a 5-minute show that was tagged onto something or another and she would answer a mailed-in viewer question while sitting stiffly and properly behind a desk, square-shouldered and facing the camera directly. I thought she was a little creepy.
But I grew up and she thawed out and I came to respect what appeared to be her determination to remain open-minded.
And another part of my childhood slips away. RIP, Joyce Brothers.
Sources:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/08/movies/ray-harryhausen-cinematic-special-effects-innovator-dies-at-92.html
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/americas/united-states/130513/psychologist-dr-joyce-brothers-dies-at-85
Left Side of the Aisle #108 - Part 2
Good news: "death with dignity" in VT
And in another bit of good news - probably actually a bit more controversial these days than even same-sex marriage, but which I think is good news - on May 13 the Vermont legislature gave final passage to what is usually called a "death with dignity" bill and sometimes an "assisted suicide" bill. The governor has promised to sign it.
The new law allows doctors to help terminally ill patients die by prescribing lethal doses of medications to patients with no more than six months to live. The rules are rather strict: The patient must specifically request it, of course, in fact they must do so on three separate occasions. They must also get a second medical opinion confirming the prognosis, be offered a psychiatric examination, and wait 17 days to fill the prescription.
Vermont is the fourth state with such a "death with dignity" procedure; a court order in Montana and ballot initiatives in Washington and Oregon had previously legalized the practice in those places.
A big concern of opponents is the idea that people may end their lives unnecessarily, that maybe they would outlive the prognosis or, worse, had been misdiagnosed. But the experience of Washington state helps to allay those fears: Since assisted suicide was legalized there in 2010, only 255 people have received a lethal prescription, some of who chose not to full it. For them, the fact that they had the prescription and could fill it if they so chose gave them enough comfort, enough of a sense of control, so that they never felt to necessity of doing so. So the prospect of this as a lightly or easily-chosen option seem rather far-fetched.
Sources:
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/05/14/2006491/vermont-lawmakers-approve-bill-allowing-doctors-to-help-terminally-ill-patients-die/
And in another bit of good news - probably actually a bit more controversial these days than even same-sex marriage, but which I think is good news - on May 13 the Vermont legislature gave final passage to what is usually called a "death with dignity" bill and sometimes an "assisted suicide" bill. The governor has promised to sign it.
The new law allows doctors to help terminally ill patients die by prescribing lethal doses of medications to patients with no more than six months to live. The rules are rather strict: The patient must specifically request it, of course, in fact they must do so on three separate occasions. They must also get a second medical opinion confirming the prognosis, be offered a psychiatric examination, and wait 17 days to fill the prescription.
Vermont is the fourth state with such a "death with dignity" procedure; a court order in Montana and ballot initiatives in Washington and Oregon had previously legalized the practice in those places.
A big concern of opponents is the idea that people may end their lives unnecessarily, that maybe they would outlive the prognosis or, worse, had been misdiagnosed. But the experience of Washington state helps to allay those fears: Since assisted suicide was legalized there in 2010, only 255 people have received a lethal prescription, some of who chose not to full it. For them, the fact that they had the prescription and could fill it if they so chose gave them enough comfort, enough of a sense of control, so that they never felt to necessity of doing so. So the prospect of this as a lightly or easily-chosen option seem rather far-fetched.
Sources:
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/05/14/2006491/vermont-lawmakers-approve-bill-allowing-doctors-to-help-terminally-ill-patients-die/
Left Side of the Aisle #108 - Part 1
Good news: same-sex marriage in three more states
On May 2, Gov. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island took to the steps of the State House and said "I am proud to say that now, at long last, you are free to marry the person you love." He then signed into law the state's recognition of same-sex marriage. With the addition of Rhode Island, there were 10 states and the District of Columbia where same-sex couples can get married.
Five days later, on May 7, Delaware became the 11th state to legalize same-sex marriage. Gov. Jack Markell signed the legislation into law immediately after its passage by the legislature, telling the assembled crowd, “I do not intend to make any of you wait one minute longer.”
And exactly a week after that, on May 14, Gov. Mark Dayton of Minnesota signed a measure passed the day before by the state legislature, making Minnesota the 12th state - and the third in less than two weeks - to recognize same-sex marriage. It was also the first state in Midwest to do so by legislative vote.
In response to the victory, the mayor of St. Paul ordered a downtown bridge decorated with rainbow-striped gay pride flags and temporarily renamed it the "Freedom to Marry Bridge." He also proclaimed "Freedom to Marry Week."
Meanwhile, Minnesota's most famous opponent of same-sex marriage, Rep. Michele Bonkersmann, ambassador to Earth from the Ori, claimed the vote "denies religious liberty to people who believe in traditional marriage." Which only goes to prove that for people like her, "religious liberty" means the ability to force everyone else to believe the way you do.
Believe this people, this is one - and it may be the only one - but on this one, we are winning.
Oh, a footnote to the Minnesota vote: Brian Brown, president of the anti-gay hate group the National Organization for Marriage was left spluttering that you'd better get an anti-same-sex marriage provision into your state constitution because if you don't, "the powerful and wealthy gay marriage lobby will target your state for their next campaign."
Remarking on the "wealthy gays" is a rather odd comment, coming as it does from a man who is paid $508,000 a year in salary and benefits for his politicking. Then again, recognizing how odd it is would require a certain level of self-reflection, so there's little chance of that.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/02/rhode-island-gay-marriage-approved_n_3203618.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/07/delaware-gay-marriage-law-_n_3232771.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/13/minnesota-senate-gay-marriage_n_3266722.html
http://pamshouseblend.firedoglake.com/2013/05/11/noms-brian-brown-gets-500000-paycheck-complains-about-wealthy-gays/
On May 2, Gov. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island took to the steps of the State House and said "I am proud to say that now, at long last, you are free to marry the person you love." He then signed into law the state's recognition of same-sex marriage. With the addition of Rhode Island, there were 10 states and the District of Columbia where same-sex couples can get married.Five days later, on May 7, Delaware became the 11th state to legalize same-sex marriage. Gov. Jack Markell signed the legislation into law immediately after its passage by the legislature, telling the assembled crowd, “I do not intend to make any of you wait one minute longer.”
And exactly a week after that, on May 14, Gov. Mark Dayton of Minnesota signed a measure passed the day before by the state legislature, making Minnesota the 12th state - and the third in less than two weeks - to recognize same-sex marriage. It was also the first state in Midwest to do so by legislative vote.
In response to the victory, the mayor of St. Paul ordered a downtown bridge decorated with rainbow-striped gay pride flags and temporarily renamed it the "Freedom to Marry Bridge." He also proclaimed "Freedom to Marry Week."
Meanwhile, Minnesota's most famous opponent of same-sex marriage, Rep. Michele Bonkersmann, ambassador to Earth from the Ori, claimed the vote "denies religious liberty to people who believe in traditional marriage." Which only goes to prove that for people like her, "religious liberty" means the ability to force everyone else to believe the way you do.
Believe this people, this is one - and it may be the only one - but on this one, we are winning.
Oh, a footnote to the Minnesota vote: Brian Brown, president of the anti-gay hate group the National Organization for Marriage was left spluttering that you'd better get an anti-same-sex marriage provision into your state constitution because if you don't, "the powerful and wealthy gay marriage lobby will target your state for their next campaign."
Remarking on the "wealthy gays" is a rather odd comment, coming as it does from a man who is paid $508,000 a year in salary and benefits for his politicking. Then again, recognizing how odd it is would require a certain level of self-reflection, so there's little chance of that.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/02/rhode-island-gay-marriage-approved_n_3203618.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/07/delaware-gay-marriage-law-_n_3232771.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/13/minnesota-senate-gay-marriage_n_3266722.html
http://pamshouseblend.firedoglake.com/2013/05/11/noms-brian-brown-gets-500000-paycheck-complains-about-wealthy-gays/
Left Side of the Aisle #108
Left Side of the Aisle
for the week of May 16-22, 2013
This week:
Good news: same-sex marriage in three more states
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/02/rhode-island-gay-marriage-approved_n_3203618.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/07/delaware-gay-marriage-law-_n_3232771.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/13/minnesota-senate-gay-marriage_n_3266722.html
http://pamshouseblend.firedoglake.com/2013/05/11/noms-brian-brown-gets-500000-paycheck-complains-about-wealthy-gays/
Good news: "death with dignity" in VT
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/05/14/2006491/vermont-lawmakers-approve-bill-allowing-doctors-to-help-terminally-ill-patients-die/
RIP: Ray Harryhausen, Joyce Brothers
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/08/movies/ray-harryhausen-cinematic-special-effects-innovator-dies-at-92.html
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/americas/united-states/130513/psychologist-dr-joyce-brothers-dies-at-85
Clown Award: US Customs Dept.
http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2013/05/saudi_who_tried_to_bring_press.html
http://www.metro.us/newyork/news/national/2013/05/10/michigan-cops-warned-saudi-student-not-to-carry-pressure-cooker-around-claim/
http://gulfnews.com/news/gulf/saudi-arabia/saudi-with-pressure-cooker-questioned-by-us-police-1.1181604
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Reid_%28shoe_bomber%29
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umar_Farouk_Abdulmutallab
Outrage of the Week: elevating corporations in new trade deal
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/13/obama-cameron-trade-corporations_n_3269002.html?utm_hp_ref=world&ir=World
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/04/eu-trade-deal_n_2994410.html
The real Obama scandal: government secrecy and surveillance
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/18/bradley-manning-trial-lawsuit_n_3109822.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/09/hawking-israel-manning-transparency-fcc
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57584051/irs-targeted-tea-party-groups-earlier-than-2012/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/05/14/holder-has-ordered-irs-investigation/?wpisrc=al_national
http://crooksandliars.com/nicole-belle/tea-party-complaints-irs-audits-just-
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/govt-obtains-wide-ap-phone-records-probe
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/13/ap-phone-records-government-intrusion-unprecedented_n_3268569.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/14/justice-department-ap-phone-records-whistleblowers
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/13/journalists-ap-government-phone-records_n_3269001.html?ref=topbar
http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/05/14/attorney-general-eric-holders-contemptible-defense-of-the-dojs-seizure-of-ap-phone-records/
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/04/25-7
http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/05/08/aclu-obtains-documents-showing-fbi-doesnt-always-get-warrants-before-reading-emails/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/04/telephone-calls-recorded-fbi-boston
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1305/01/ebo.01.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/07/AR2007110700006.html
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/10/new-nsa-whistleblowers
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/us/16nsa.html?pagewanted=all
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/print/
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/20/whistleblower_the_nsa_is_lying_us
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/16/us/politics/democratic-senators-warn-about-use-of-patriot-act.html
Thursday, May 09, 2013
Left Side of the Aisle #107 - Part 6
Outrage of the Week: death penalty proposed in Massachusetts
I'm going to start with some good news: On May 2, Maryland became the sixth state in six years to abolish the death penalty. The other five were Connecticut, Illinois, New Jersey, New Mexico, and New York. Eighteen states and the District of Columbia now ban the death penalty and, according to Ben Jealous of the NAACP, repeal advocates are within striking distance of a ban in four more states: Delaware, Colorado, New Hampshire, and Kansas.
Even in the states that retain the death penalty, many are using it sparingly. Last year, 77 people were sentenced to death in the entire country; that's the second-lowest number since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976. State governments are gradually coming to realize that the death penalty is too expensive, too likely to be biased, and the risk of executing an innocent person - considering that since 1989, 18 people on death row have been positively exonerated by DNA evidence - is just too great.
Unhappily, one state is insisting on going the other way. Florida is considering ways to speed up executions, to make it easier to kill people by limiting appeals and shortening time frames. It's already unusually easy to convict someone of a capital crime in Florida, and now the state wants to make sure that the convicted get as few chances as possible to change anyone's mind.
But the outrage I wanted to address here is not in Florida or in Texas, which remains the death penalty capital of America. No, it's here at home.
There is a bill in the Massachusetts state House of Representatives, with a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee set for July 9, to reinstate the death penalty in Massachusetts.
Why?
Now, I freely admit that this bill has little chance of passing: An attempt to attach it as an amendment to a spending bill got rejected by 119-38 in favor of a substitute calling for a study of the issue, which is a standard means in the state legislature of effectively tabling a bill. But that doesn't change the fact that it's being pushed and doesn't answer the question why?
This was not even an emotional response to the Boston Marathon bombings; the bill's chief sponsor, James Miceli, introduced it a couple of days before that attack. And the main argument for it was that it would be a “gold standard” for capital punishment cases since it aimed to provide safeguards against wrongful convictions, including using verifiable scientific evidence such as DNA testing, and was limited to certain specific cases.
But that only raises yet again, the question of why? If your death penalty bill is so narrowly and carefully tailored that in practice it would hardly ever be applied, what is the point?
Has there been some big surge in murders in Massachusetts? Hardly; in fact the murder rate in Massachusetts has been consistently below the national average and is little changed from 15 years ago. So again, why? What is the point?
The point, to answer my own question, is to have a death penalty. Any death penalty. Even if it's one that might be applied once in 50 years. It doesn't matter. They don't care. Just have a death penalty. Miceli himself said he would favor a broader capital punishment bill but pushed this one because he thinks it has a better chance of passing.
They just want to see blood. They want to have dreams of flesh sizzling in an electric chair, the gagging and choking of the gas chamber, the jerking and twitching of the lethal drug cocktail. They just want to have officially-sanctioned death.
They want to bring back this symbol of savagery, this badge of barbarism, to a state that got rid of it nearly thirty years ago. The good news is that it is very unlikely they will succeed. The outrage is that they are even trying.
Sources:
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-03-15/local/37737059_1_death-penalty-capital-punishment-repeal-bill
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-05-02/local/38969834_1_penalty-capital-punishment-new-law
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/05/06/florida-tries-to-speed-up-executions-as-maryland-other-states-repeal-death/
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/04/florida-passes-law-speed-executions
http://www.boston.com/politicalintelligence/2013/04/23/lawmakers-citing-marathon-bombings-propose-restoring-death-penalty-massachusetts/HCroqiN6xqRHwxl289zQmO/story.html
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/regionals/north/2013/05/04/area-lawmakers-remain-divided-over-restoring-death-penalty-massachusetts/RfBVecgQaDpUZfd66EaXPP/story.html
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-nationally-and-state
I'm going to start with some good news: On May 2, Maryland became the sixth state in six years to abolish the death penalty. The other five were Connecticut, Illinois, New Jersey, New Mexico, and New York. Eighteen states and the District of Columbia now ban the death penalty and, according to Ben Jealous of the NAACP, repeal advocates are within striking distance of a ban in four more states: Delaware, Colorado, New Hampshire, and Kansas.Even in the states that retain the death penalty, many are using it sparingly. Last year, 77 people were sentenced to death in the entire country; that's the second-lowest number since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976. State governments are gradually coming to realize that the death penalty is too expensive, too likely to be biased, and the risk of executing an innocent person - considering that since 1989, 18 people on death row have been positively exonerated by DNA evidence - is just too great.
Unhappily, one state is insisting on going the other way. Florida is considering ways to speed up executions, to make it easier to kill people by limiting appeals and shortening time frames. It's already unusually easy to convict someone of a capital crime in Florida, and now the state wants to make sure that the convicted get as few chances as possible to change anyone's mind.
But the outrage I wanted to address here is not in Florida or in Texas, which remains the death penalty capital of America. No, it's here at home.
There is a bill in the Massachusetts state House of Representatives, with a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee set for July 9, to reinstate the death penalty in Massachusetts.
Why?
Now, I freely admit that this bill has little chance of passing: An attempt to attach it as an amendment to a spending bill got rejected by 119-38 in favor of a substitute calling for a study of the issue, which is a standard means in the state legislature of effectively tabling a bill. But that doesn't change the fact that it's being pushed and doesn't answer the question why?This was not even an emotional response to the Boston Marathon bombings; the bill's chief sponsor, James Miceli, introduced it a couple of days before that attack. And the main argument for it was that it would be a “gold standard” for capital punishment cases since it aimed to provide safeguards against wrongful convictions, including using verifiable scientific evidence such as DNA testing, and was limited to certain specific cases.
But that only raises yet again, the question of why? If your death penalty bill is so narrowly and carefully tailored that in practice it would hardly ever be applied, what is the point?
Has there been some big surge in murders in Massachusetts? Hardly; in fact the murder rate in Massachusetts has been consistently below the national average and is little changed from 15 years ago. So again, why? What is the point?
The point, to answer my own question, is to have a death penalty. Any death penalty. Even if it's one that might be applied once in 50 years. It doesn't matter. They don't care. Just have a death penalty. Miceli himself said he would favor a broader capital punishment bill but pushed this one because he thinks it has a better chance of passing.
They just want to see blood. They want to have dreams of flesh sizzling in an electric chair, the gagging and choking of the gas chamber, the jerking and twitching of the lethal drug cocktail. They just want to have officially-sanctioned death.
They want to bring back this symbol of savagery, this badge of barbarism, to a state that got rid of it nearly thirty years ago. The good news is that it is very unlikely they will succeed. The outrage is that they are even trying.
Sources:
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-03-15/local/37737059_1_death-penalty-capital-punishment-repeal-bill
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-05-02/local/38969834_1_penalty-capital-punishment-new-law
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/05/06/florida-tries-to-speed-up-executions-as-maryland-other-states-repeal-death/
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/04/florida-passes-law-speed-executions
http://www.boston.com/politicalintelligence/2013/04/23/lawmakers-citing-marathon-bombings-propose-restoring-death-penalty-massachusetts/HCroqiN6xqRHwxl289zQmO/story.html
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/regionals/north/2013/05/04/area-lawmakers-remain-divided-over-restoring-death-penalty-massachusetts/RfBVecgQaDpUZfd66EaXPP/story.html
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-nationally-and-state
Left Side of the Aisle #107 - Part 4
Clown Award: Penny Nance of CWA
Now for the Clown Award, given as always for acts of meritorious stupidity.
This week, winner of big red nose is Penny Nance, the CEO of Concerned Women for America.
Speaking on - where else - Fox News last week, she attacked Anthony Foxx, who is the mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina and Obama's pick to head the Department of Transportation. Why? Well, he issued a proclamation making May 2 a “National Day of Prayer” in line with a Congressional resolution.
Wait - that can't be it. No, his crime was that he also issued a proclamation making May 2 a “Day of Reason,” supporting a movement that advocates Jefferson's "wall of separation" between church and state. And reason is the one thing Nance and the rest of her clown car compatriots can't tolerate.
After claiming that "the Doctrine of Original Sin" has "3,000 years of empirical evidence to back it up," she went on to say that "the Age of Enlightenment and Reason gave way to moral relativism. And moral relativism is what led us all the way down the dark path to the Holocaust."
You heard it right: According to Penny Nance, enlightenment and reason head a "dark path" that leads to the Holocaust.
I wonder if she thinks that the cameras and microphones picking up her words in that TV studio were prayed into existence. She is such a clown, perhaps she does.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/02/fox-news-penny-nance-holocaust-reason_n_3202343.html?ir=Politics&ref=topbar
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/05/01/4015442/foxx-proclaims-day-of-reason-day.html
Now for the Clown Award, given as always for acts of meritorious stupidity.This week, winner of big red nose is Penny Nance, the CEO of Concerned Women for America.
Speaking on - where else - Fox News last week, she attacked Anthony Foxx, who is the mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina and Obama's pick to head the Department of Transportation. Why? Well, he issued a proclamation making May 2 a “National Day of Prayer” in line with a Congressional resolution.
Wait - that can't be it. No, his crime was that he also issued a proclamation making May 2 a “Day of Reason,” supporting a movement that advocates Jefferson's "wall of separation" between church and state. And reason is the one thing Nance and the rest of her clown car compatriots can't tolerate.
After claiming that "the Doctrine of Original Sin" has "3,000 years of empirical evidence to back it up," she went on to say that "the Age of Enlightenment and Reason gave way to moral relativism. And moral relativism is what led us all the way down the dark path to the Holocaust."
You heard it right: According to Penny Nance, enlightenment and reason head a "dark path" that leads to the Holocaust.
I wonder if she thinks that the cameras and microphones picking up her words in that TV studio were prayed into existence. She is such a clown, perhaps she does.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/02/fox-news-penny-nance-holocaust-reason_n_3202343.html?ir=Politics&ref=topbar
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/05/01/4015442/foxx-proclaims-day-of-reason-day.html
Left Side of the Aisle #107 - Part 3
An introduction to a "steady-state economy"
There's an odd thing about that suit against the EPA's authority to regulated greenhouse gases; odd, that is, if you have a functioning grasp of logic and a basic sense of morality. It's that the drive by those industries to prevent regulation of greenhouse gases may appear to make selfish sense in the short run, it is of course profoundly stupid and destructive in the long run. Now it's possible that the folks involved are thinking that their wealth will protect them from the effects of climate change and by the time it really starts to bite, well, they'll be dead so what do they care.
But going on the assumption that while they might not care about what sort of future most of us will face they might still care about the future their own children and grandchildren will face, a perhaps more likely notion is found in the comment - I don't remember the originator - the comment that "It's hard to make someone see the truth when their livelihood depends on them not seeing it."
Last week I mentioned the criticism of Matt Yglesias over his comments about the factory collapse in Bangladesh - the death total is over 500 now, by the way - but I said that what his comments really showed was the grip the concept of "The Market" had on his thinking. That kind of thinking, one that has as its root the idea that "The Market" is the source of all economic wisdom, is the same thinking that these captains of industry are expressing in the suit against the EPA. In that case, it works to their selfish advantage, obviously, but - here's an important point - that doesn't mean they don't believe it. It doesn't mean that they don't actually believe that "letting 'The Market' work" without hindrances like government regulation is the best way to go.
And it's not just them, the commitment to the idea of "The Market" pervades our society, it surrounds us, it's part of our shared social experience, it's an assumption that we all have absorbed to some degree or another. It is a basic part of our culture, and the real distinction across most of our entire political spectrum is whether or not there needs to be some regulation of "The Market" to smooth its rough edges and if so, how much. The idea of "The Market" is sacrosanct.
And it is true that it has produced for us here in the US abundance for - in comparison to what's been seen in societies over the long run of history - a large portion of the population.
But right there is where it starts to get sticky. For one thing, that abundance has been based to a significant degree on economic domination and exploitation of other nations, other cultures, other peoples. In less polite times we used more direct but more emotionally-charged terms like colonialism and imperialism. But even if you feel those terms are overdrawn, the indisputable fact remains that our abundance has been to a fair degree built on others' lack of abundance.
Related to that is the fact that while "The Market" has produced opulence for some of us and abundance for many, it has not provided sufficiency for all. Let me expand on that to make it clear: "The Market" has produced sufficient for all - there is more than enough to go around - but it has not provided sufficiency for all; there always have been, are, and will be those left behind and out despite their best efforts. And that will remain true despite our best efforts to change it so long as we continue to let the idea of "The Market" determine the limits of our concepts.
Because "The Market" can't provide sufficiency for all. By its very nature it can't. "The Market" by its nature requires that a few have a lot, others can have some, and still others must little or nothing. It can't function any other way.
Which means that of necessity "The Market" runs smack into a moral wall. And now, it's coming up against physical walls: Our economic system depends on growth, on there always being more stuff, on people buying more stuff and wanting still more stuff. But that means using up resources, it means depletion of food stocks, degrading the environment, it means global warming. And the bigger it gets, the more it grows, the faster those problems grow and the faster those ultimate physical limits approach. The bottom line, which is a particularly appropriate expression in this context, is that "The Market" not only requires large and growing inequality, it simply is not sustainable in long term.
So I want to raise an alternative, an alternative that's often called a "no-growth economy," but which I prefer to call a "steady-state economy." It's an economy where growth, where improvement, is reflected in things which the Gross Domestic Product does not measure. I intend to get into the shortcomings of the GDP as a measure of our condition next week, but for now I'll just say that the problem is the the GDP measures economic activity - all economic activity, whether it improves our lives or not. If a corporation produces and dumps toxic wastes, that adds to the GDP. The money we have to spend to clean up their waste adds to the GDP. If you get sick from exposure to that waste and have to go to the hospital, that adds to the GDP. It's all the same to the GDP.
A steady-state economy would measure things differently. I'm going to give you a simple, even a grossly oversimplified, example just to give an idea. Suppose you have a job working five days a week, a full-time job that provides for you and your family. Congratulations, I'm happy for you. But you're offered a raise which you can take one of two ways: You can continue to work five days and get paid more, or you can have your same income and benefits but only work four days.
The first way increases the GDP: You can get more stuff, more money is flowing through the economy. Your gain is in stuff. The second way you can't get more stuff - but you get more time to do whatever it is you want to do apart from work. Your gain is in time - which is not reflected in the GDP.
Again, that's a very oversimplified example, but it's just to make the point that there are ways to measure gains that do not involve getting more stuff. And to say that it's possible to build an economy that is sustainable into the future by bearing that fact in mind.
There's an odd thing about that suit against the EPA's authority to regulated greenhouse gases; odd, that is, if you have a functioning grasp of logic and a basic sense of morality. It's that the drive by those industries to prevent regulation of greenhouse gases may appear to make selfish sense in the short run, it is of course profoundly stupid and destructive in the long run. Now it's possible that the folks involved are thinking that their wealth will protect them from the effects of climate change and by the time it really starts to bite, well, they'll be dead so what do they care.But going on the assumption that while they might not care about what sort of future most of us will face they might still care about the future their own children and grandchildren will face, a perhaps more likely notion is found in the comment - I don't remember the originator - the comment that "It's hard to make someone see the truth when their livelihood depends on them not seeing it."
Last week I mentioned the criticism of Matt Yglesias over his comments about the factory collapse in Bangladesh - the death total is over 500 now, by the way - but I said that what his comments really showed was the grip the concept of "The Market" had on his thinking. That kind of thinking, one that has as its root the idea that "The Market" is the source of all economic wisdom, is the same thinking that these captains of industry are expressing in the suit against the EPA. In that case, it works to their selfish advantage, obviously, but - here's an important point - that doesn't mean they don't believe it. It doesn't mean that they don't actually believe that "letting 'The Market' work" without hindrances like government regulation is the best way to go.
And it's not just them, the commitment to the idea of "The Market" pervades our society, it surrounds us, it's part of our shared social experience, it's an assumption that we all have absorbed to some degree or another. It is a basic part of our culture, and the real distinction across most of our entire political spectrum is whether or not there needs to be some regulation of "The Market" to smooth its rough edges and if so, how much. The idea of "The Market" is sacrosanct.
And it is true that it has produced for us here in the US abundance for - in comparison to what's been seen in societies over the long run of history - a large portion of the population.
But right there is where it starts to get sticky. For one thing, that abundance has been based to a significant degree on economic domination and exploitation of other nations, other cultures, other peoples. In less polite times we used more direct but more emotionally-charged terms like colonialism and imperialism. But even if you feel those terms are overdrawn, the indisputable fact remains that our abundance has been to a fair degree built on others' lack of abundance.
Related to that is the fact that while "The Market" has produced opulence for some of us and abundance for many, it has not provided sufficiency for all. Let me expand on that to make it clear: "The Market" has produced sufficient for all - there is more than enough to go around - but it has not provided sufficiency for all; there always have been, are, and will be those left behind and out despite their best efforts. And that will remain true despite our best efforts to change it so long as we continue to let the idea of "The Market" determine the limits of our concepts.
Because "The Market" can't provide sufficiency for all. By its very nature it can't. "The Market" by its nature requires that a few have a lot, others can have some, and still others must little or nothing. It can't function any other way.
Which means that of necessity "The Market" runs smack into a moral wall. And now, it's coming up against physical walls: Our economic system depends on growth, on there always being more stuff, on people buying more stuff and wanting still more stuff. But that means using up resources, it means depletion of food stocks, degrading the environment, it means global warming. And the bigger it gets, the more it grows, the faster those problems grow and the faster those ultimate physical limits approach. The bottom line, which is a particularly appropriate expression in this context, is that "The Market" not only requires large and growing inequality, it simply is not sustainable in long term.
So I want to raise an alternative, an alternative that's often called a "no-growth economy," but which I prefer to call a "steady-state economy." It's an economy where growth, where improvement, is reflected in things which the Gross Domestic Product does not measure. I intend to get into the shortcomings of the GDP as a measure of our condition next week, but for now I'll just say that the problem is the the GDP measures economic activity - all economic activity, whether it improves our lives or not. If a corporation produces and dumps toxic wastes, that adds to the GDP. The money we have to spend to clean up their waste adds to the GDP. If you get sick from exposure to that waste and have to go to the hospital, that adds to the GDP. It's all the same to the GDP.
A steady-state economy would measure things differently. I'm going to give you a simple, even a grossly oversimplified, example just to give an idea. Suppose you have a job working five days a week, a full-time job that provides for you and your family. Congratulations, I'm happy for you. But you're offered a raise which you can take one of two ways: You can continue to work five days and get paid more, or you can have your same income and benefits but only work four days.
The first way increases the GDP: You can get more stuff, more money is flowing through the economy. Your gain is in stuff. The second way you can't get more stuff - but you get more time to do whatever it is you want to do apart from work. Your gain is in time - which is not reflected in the GDP.
Again, that's a very oversimplified example, but it's just to make the point that there are ways to measure gains that do not involve getting more stuff. And to say that it's possible to build an economy that is sustainable into the future by bearing that fact in mind.
Left Side of the Aisle #107 - Part 2
Global warming: recent news
The other day, I had a neighbor tell me that he hasn't gone ice fishing in three years - because there just isn't enough ice and when there is, it's not thick enough to be safe. Which reminded me that we haven't covered global warming for a time, so I thought I'd catch us up on a few things.
First, last month we got more evidence that glaciers are shrinking all over the world.
The Quelccaya Ice Cap, over 18,000 feet up in the Peruvian Andres, is the largest tropical glacier in the world. About 25 years ago, researchers discovered long-dead plants near a lake formed from meltwater from the glacier. Chemical analysis showed that these plants lived about 4,700 years ago, meaning that the ice cap had shrunk to its smallest in nearly five thousand years - because the only way those plants could have preserved that long was by being frozen in the glacier. Otherwise, they would have decayed to dust.
Fast forward from 25 years ago to the present: In the April issue of the peer-reviewed magazine Science, those same researchers report having found at the glacier remains of plants that lived 6,300 years ago - which means that the Quelccaya Ice Cap has lost 1600 years of ice in just 25 years.
It's not the only example. Across the world, glaciers are melting at a rate not seen since the last ice age. In the short term, it might seem like a good thing: For communities that depend on annual glacial runoff for fresh water, it increases local water supply. But in the longer run, it spells disaster for those same communities as their source of fresh water dries up.
Second and also last month, the Northeast Fisheries Science Center, which is part of NOAA, issued its latest Ecosystem Advisory on sea surface temperatures in the Northeast Shelf Large Marine Ecosystem. That's the region of the Atlantic Ocean which extends from Cape Hatteras to the Gulf of Maine and from the shoreline outward to the edge of the continental shelf.
I love this: The Christian Science Monitor headlined its article with "Waters off Northeast US coast unusually warm, says NOAA." The advisory actually said that during the second half of 2012 those temperatures were the highest recorded in 150 years. "Unusually warm," indeed. The advisory also noted that population centers of seven key fishery species are shifting in response to the changing temperatures.
The report notes that the ultimate effect on the Northeast Shelf ecosystem is unknown - but what is known is that the ecosystem is changing and while the report, with the usual scientific caution, does not say this, I will: That change is being driven by global warming.
Finally and most recently, a new study out of NASA in the first week of May says that climate change will increase the risk of extreme rainfall in the tropics as well as extended drought in the world's temperate zones. It's what one climatologist called "the worst of all possible worlds" with already wet areas getting wetter and already dry areas getting drier.
The study examined computer simulations from 14 different climate models to reach its conclusion about the effect of every degree of global warming on rainfall patterns. It found that for every 1 degree Fahrenheit increase in global average temperature due to climate change, heavy rainfall will increase globally by nearly four percent while the length of time a region goes without rain could increase globally by over two and a-half percent. The study essentially confirmed a long-standing prediction of global warming science that warming would lead to more severe weather, but it was the first to quantify the effects on rainfall in various regions.
The impact of the increased rainfall will be mitigated somewhat by the fact that a lot of the increased rain will occur over the oceans. But the increased and lengthened droughts will mostly affect the temperate zones, which is where most of the population of the Earth lives, setting up a future not only of increased crop failures with attendant food shortages and soaring prices but increased competition for water supplies.
To top all this off, at the same time that all this is being learned, a collection of industry groups (including the American Chemistry Council, the American Petroleum Institute, and the National Association of Manufacturers), a bunch of polluters including an association of electric utilities, and - get this one - the Energy-Intensive Manufacturers Working Group on Greenhouse Gas Regulation, have joined with some other "I love me some fossil-fuel" types and assorted anti-government twits to petition the Supreme Court to overturn a lower court decision allowing the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases.
They are arguing, in effect, that the federal government has no lawful authority to regulate greenhouse gases; in other words, that the government has no legal authority actually to do anything about climate change - because that, after all, might hurt their corporate profits and therefore their individual bank accounts and yearly bonuses. And we just can't have that!
Sources:
http://www.care2.com/causes/how-could-1600-years-of-ice-melt-in-just-25-years.html
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2013/04/03/science.1234210
http://www.newsroomamerica.com/story/360943/sea_surface_temperatures_at_highest_level_in_150_years_on_northeast_continental_shelf_.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2013/0426/Waters-off-Northeast-US-coast-unusually-warm-says-NOAA
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-nasa-climate-20130504,0,2772152.story
http://www.sciencerecorder.com/news/nasa-global-warming-may-increase-risk-for-extreme-rainfall/
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/wetter-wet.html
http://news.yahoo.com/supreme-court-asked-hear-epa-greenhouse-gas-challenge-004741380.html
The other day, I had a neighbor tell me that he hasn't gone ice fishing in three years - because there just isn't enough ice and when there is, it's not thick enough to be safe. Which reminded me that we haven't covered global warming for a time, so I thought I'd catch us up on a few things.First, last month we got more evidence that glaciers are shrinking all over the world.
The Quelccaya Ice Cap, over 18,000 feet up in the Peruvian Andres, is the largest tropical glacier in the world. About 25 years ago, researchers discovered long-dead plants near a lake formed from meltwater from the glacier. Chemical analysis showed that these plants lived about 4,700 years ago, meaning that the ice cap had shrunk to its smallest in nearly five thousand years - because the only way those plants could have preserved that long was by being frozen in the glacier. Otherwise, they would have decayed to dust.
Fast forward from 25 years ago to the present: In the April issue of the peer-reviewed magazine Science, those same researchers report having found at the glacier remains of plants that lived 6,300 years ago - which means that the Quelccaya Ice Cap has lost 1600 years of ice in just 25 years.
It's not the only example. Across the world, glaciers are melting at a rate not seen since the last ice age. In the short term, it might seem like a good thing: For communities that depend on annual glacial runoff for fresh water, it increases local water supply. But in the longer run, it spells disaster for those same communities as their source of fresh water dries up.
Second and also last month, the Northeast Fisheries Science Center, which is part of NOAA, issued its latest Ecosystem Advisory on sea surface temperatures in the Northeast Shelf Large Marine Ecosystem. That's the region of the Atlantic Ocean which extends from Cape Hatteras to the Gulf of Maine and from the shoreline outward to the edge of the continental shelf.
I love this: The Christian Science Monitor headlined its article with "Waters off Northeast US coast unusually warm, says NOAA." The advisory actually said that during the second half of 2012 those temperatures were the highest recorded in 150 years. "Unusually warm," indeed. The advisory also noted that population centers of seven key fishery species are shifting in response to the changing temperatures.
The report notes that the ultimate effect on the Northeast Shelf ecosystem is unknown - but what is known is that the ecosystem is changing and while the report, with the usual scientific caution, does not say this, I will: That change is being driven by global warming.
Finally and most recently, a new study out of NASA in the first week of May says that climate change will increase the risk of extreme rainfall in the tropics as well as extended drought in the world's temperate zones. It's what one climatologist called "the worst of all possible worlds" with already wet areas getting wetter and already dry areas getting drier.
The study examined computer simulations from 14 different climate models to reach its conclusion about the effect of every degree of global warming on rainfall patterns. It found that for every 1 degree Fahrenheit increase in global average temperature due to climate change, heavy rainfall will increase globally by nearly four percent while the length of time a region goes without rain could increase globally by over two and a-half percent. The study essentially confirmed a long-standing prediction of global warming science that warming would lead to more severe weather, but it was the first to quantify the effects on rainfall in various regions.
The impact of the increased rainfall will be mitigated somewhat by the fact that a lot of the increased rain will occur over the oceans. But the increased and lengthened droughts will mostly affect the temperate zones, which is where most of the population of the Earth lives, setting up a future not only of increased crop failures with attendant food shortages and soaring prices but increased competition for water supplies.
To top all this off, at the same time that all this is being learned, a collection of industry groups (including the American Chemistry Council, the American Petroleum Institute, and the National Association of Manufacturers), a bunch of polluters including an association of electric utilities, and - get this one - the Energy-Intensive Manufacturers Working Group on Greenhouse Gas Regulation, have joined with some other "I love me some fossil-fuel" types and assorted anti-government twits to petition the Supreme Court to overturn a lower court decision allowing the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases.
They are arguing, in effect, that the federal government has no lawful authority to regulate greenhouse gases; in other words, that the government has no legal authority actually to do anything about climate change - because that, after all, might hurt their corporate profits and therefore their individual bank accounts and yearly bonuses. And we just can't have that!
Sources:
http://www.care2.com/causes/how-could-1600-years-of-ice-melt-in-just-25-years.html
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2013/04/03/science.1234210
http://www.newsroomamerica.com/story/360943/sea_surface_temperatures_at_highest_level_in_150_years_on_northeast_continental_shelf_.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2013/0426/Waters-off-Northeast-US-coast-unusually-warm-says-NOAA
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-nasa-climate-20130504,0,2772152.story
http://www.sciencerecorder.com/news/nasa-global-warming-may-increase-risk-for-extreme-rainfall/
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/wetter-wet.html
http://news.yahoo.com/supreme-court-asked-hear-epa-greenhouse-gas-challenge-004741380.html
Left Side of the Aisle #107 - Part 1
Hero Award: Connie Picciotto
This week, happily, we can start with a Hero Award, given as the occasion arises to someone who just does the right thing.
In this case, it's being given to someone I just learned about. Her name is Connie Picciotto and she has been maintaining a daily vigil on the sidewalk across from the White House about the threat of nuclear war - and she has been doing it, almost without interruption, for 32 years.
Her story is long and complex, too long and complex to go into here. She has become such a fixture in DC that tour guides point her out. Educators use her protest in lessons about social activism. She was in Michael Moore’s 2004 film “Fahrenheit 9/11.” She even figured in a documentary about protests at the White House.
Not surprisingly, there are many who would dismiss her, saying the threat of nuclear war is gone, over. Those people are wrong. The threat is not got and it does not consist solely in the specters of a nuclear North Korea or a hypothetical nuclear Iran. There are over 18,000 nuclear weapons in the world today, with a combined destructive force of about 120,000 Hiroshimas. Nine nations have nuclear weapons. But virtually all of those weapons are in the hands of just two nations: the US and Russia. And they are at the ready, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year; about 2,000 of them on such high alert that they could be launched in just minutes.
It would take just one large blunder, just one panicky response to a real or even imagined threat, to turn much of the world to ashes. The risk of nuclear war may be less than it once was - but it is not over.
So Connie Picciotto keeps her vigil, keeps talking to whoever will listen. The Serious People, deploying ther phony concern for her welfare as a mask for their cynicism, say she is just another harmless kook, just another crazy crank more in need of intervention by psychiatrists than of reasoned attention to her arguments. And indeed, there are some aspects to her story that give one pause about her mental health.
But ultimately those concerns take nothing away from the importance of the issue she espouses and are useful only to those who want to turn their indifference to the issue into a considered judgment on it.
Those people may not have to play that game much longer: Connie is 77 and her health is starting to decline and Peace House, the activist hub in DC where Connie lives, is having financial troubles and may have to close.
Whatever the future, and whatever her other personal issues may be, one thing is clear: Connie Picciotto, who has spent 32 yesrs in an unrelating effort to remind people of a danger that has not passed, is a hero.
Footnote: On July 28, 2012, three people - Sister Megan Rice, 83, Michael Walli, 64, and Greg Boertje-Obed, 56 - used bolt cutters to cut through fences at the Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility in the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. That's a national security plant involved in the building, maintaining, and taking apart of every nuclear weapon in the US arsenal. They hung up a banner that read “Transform Now Plowshares,” strung up red crime-scene tape, splashed human blood on the walls, and painted the walls with things like “Woe to the empire of blood” and “The fruit of justice is peace."
After refusing to plead guilty to tresspass, with a one-year prison term, they were charged with sabotage and face 20 years in prison in what the trial judge said is a normal part of plea bargaining, otherwise known as "sparing the government the trouble of actually having to prove anything."
Jury selection in the case began on May 6.
Sources:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/feature/wp/2013/05/02/connie-picciotto-has-kept-vigil-near-the-white-house-for-32-years-why-and-at-what-cost/?tid=ts_carousel
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/05/01/terrorism-nuclear-weapons-column/2116263/
http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/news-events/all-stories/nuclear-weapons-state-play#.UYg8AMpsKSq
http://www.occupypeacehouse.org/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/anti-nuclear-weapons-protesters-on-trial-this-week-for-incursion-into-tenn-nuclear-facility/2013/05/06/96cf679e-b685-11e2-b568-6917f6ac6d9d_story.html
http://my.firedoglake.com/davidswanson/2013/04/29/the-revolution-thats-not-being-televised/
This week, happily, we can start with a Hero Award, given as the occasion arises to someone who just does the right thing.In this case, it's being given to someone I just learned about. Her name is Connie Picciotto and she has been maintaining a daily vigil on the sidewalk across from the White House about the threat of nuclear war - and she has been doing it, almost without interruption, for 32 years.
Her story is long and complex, too long and complex to go into here. She has become such a fixture in DC that tour guides point her out. Educators use her protest in lessons about social activism. She was in Michael Moore’s 2004 film “Fahrenheit 9/11.” She even figured in a documentary about protests at the White House.
Not surprisingly, there are many who would dismiss her, saying the threat of nuclear war is gone, over. Those people are wrong. The threat is not got and it does not consist solely in the specters of a nuclear North Korea or a hypothetical nuclear Iran. There are over 18,000 nuclear weapons in the world today, with a combined destructive force of about 120,000 Hiroshimas. Nine nations have nuclear weapons. But virtually all of those weapons are in the hands of just two nations: the US and Russia. And they are at the ready, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year; about 2,000 of them on such high alert that they could be launched in just minutes.
It would take just one large blunder, just one panicky response to a real or even imagined threat, to turn much of the world to ashes. The risk of nuclear war may be less than it once was - but it is not over.
So Connie Picciotto keeps her vigil, keeps talking to whoever will listen. The Serious People, deploying ther phony concern for her welfare as a mask for their cynicism, say she is just another harmless kook, just another crazy crank more in need of intervention by psychiatrists than of reasoned attention to her arguments. And indeed, there are some aspects to her story that give one pause about her mental health.But ultimately those concerns take nothing away from the importance of the issue she espouses and are useful only to those who want to turn their indifference to the issue into a considered judgment on it.
Those people may not have to play that game much longer: Connie is 77 and her health is starting to decline and Peace House, the activist hub in DC where Connie lives, is having financial troubles and may have to close.
Whatever the future, and whatever her other personal issues may be, one thing is clear: Connie Picciotto, who has spent 32 yesrs in an unrelating effort to remind people of a danger that has not passed, is a hero.
Footnote: On July 28, 2012, three people - Sister Megan Rice, 83, Michael Walli, 64, and Greg Boertje-Obed, 56 - used bolt cutters to cut through fences at the Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility in the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. That's a national security plant involved in the building, maintaining, and taking apart of every nuclear weapon in the US arsenal. They hung up a banner that read “Transform Now Plowshares,” strung up red crime-scene tape, splashed human blood on the walls, and painted the walls with things like “Woe to the empire of blood” and “The fruit of justice is peace."
After refusing to plead guilty to tresspass, with a one-year prison term, they were charged with sabotage and face 20 years in prison in what the trial judge said is a normal part of plea bargaining, otherwise known as "sparing the government the trouble of actually having to prove anything."
Jury selection in the case began on May 6.
Sources:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/feature/wp/2013/05/02/connie-picciotto-has-kept-vigil-near-the-white-house-for-32-years-why-and-at-what-cost/?tid=ts_carousel
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/05/01/terrorism-nuclear-weapons-column/2116263/
http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/news-events/all-stories/nuclear-weapons-state-play#.UYg8AMpsKSq
http://www.occupypeacehouse.org/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/anti-nuclear-weapons-protesters-on-trial-this-week-for-incursion-into-tenn-nuclear-facility/2013/05/06/96cf679e-b685-11e2-b568-6917f6ac6d9d_story.html
http://my.firedoglake.com/davidswanson/2013/04/29/the-revolution-thats-not-being-televised/
Left Side of the Aisle #107
Left Side of the Aisle
for the week of May 10-16, 2013
This week:
Hero Award: Connie Picciotto
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/feature/wp/2013/05/02/connie-picciotto-has-kept-vigil-near-the-white-house-for-32-years-why-and-at-what-cost/?tid=ts_carousel
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/05/01/terrorism-nuclear-weapons-column/2116263/
http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/news-events/all-stories/nuclear-weapons-state-play#.UYg8AMpsKSq
http://www.occupypeacehouse.org/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/anti-nuclear-weapons-protesters-on-trial-this-week-for-incursion-into-tenn-nuclear-facility/2013/05/06/96cf679e-b685-11e2-b568-6917f6ac6d9d_story.html
http://my.firedoglake.com/davidswanson/2013/04/29/the-revolution-thats-not-being-televised/
Global warming: recent news
http://www.care2.com/causes/how-could-1600-years-of-ice-melt-in-just-25-years.html
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2013/04/03/science.1234210
http://www.newsroomamerica.com/story/360943/sea_surface_temperatures_at_highest_level_in_150_years_on_northeast_continental_shelf_.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2013/0426/Waters-off-Northeast-US-coast-unusually-warm-says-NOAA
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-nasa-climate-20130504,0,2772152.story
http://www.sciencerecorder.com/news/nasa-global-warming-may-increase-risk-for-extreme-rainfall/
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/wetter-wet.html
http://news.yahoo.com/supreme-court-asked-hear-epa-greenhouse-gas-challenge-004741380.html
An introduction to "steady-state economy"
Clown Award: Penny Nance of CWA
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/02/fox-news-penny-nance-holocaust-reason_n_3202343.html?ir=Politics&ref=topbar
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/05/01/4015442/foxx-proclaims-day-of-reason-day.html
Iraq: renewed violence in the land we forgot
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/02/april-deadliest-month-iraq_n_3200317.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/18/iraq-war-costs_n_2885071.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/03/iraq-violence_n_3208161.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/the-civil-war-in-iraq-has-already-begun-politician-claims-conflict-has-started-and-warns-it-will-be-worse-than-syria-8601732.html
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/international-troops-should-be-ready-operationally-to-invade-syria-says-john-mccain/article11595592/
http://www.policymic.com/articles/38993/john-mccain-lindsey-graham-senators-demand-syria-intervention-encouraging-another-stupid-war
http://thehill.com/blogs/defcon-hill/policy-and-strategy/298109-menendez-presses-to-arm-rebels-as-syria-pulls-us-toward-conflict
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505263_162-57583191/sen-corker-on-syria-u.s-will-be-arming-the-rebels-soon/
Outrage of the Week: death penalty proposed in Massachusetts
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-03-15/local/37737059_1_death-penalty-capital-punishment-repeal-bill
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-05-02/local/38969834_1_penalty-capital-punishment-new-law
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/05/06/florida-tries-to-speed-up-executions-as-maryland-other-states-repeal-death/
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/04/florida-passes-law-speed-executions
http://www.boston.com/politicalintelligence/2013/04/23/lawmakers-citing-marathon-bombings-propose-restoring-death-penalty-massachusetts/HCroqiN6xqRHwxl289zQmO/story.html
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/regionals/north/2013/05/04/area-lawmakers-remain-divided-over-restoring-death-penalty-massachusetts/RfBVecgQaDpUZfd66EaXPP/story.html
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-nationally-and-state
Left Side of the Aisle #107 - Part 5
Iraq: renewed violence in the land we forgot
Over 700 people were killed in Iraq in political violence in April, nearly 600 of who were civilians. It was the deadliest month in Iraq in five years.
For the past few months, Sunni Muslims have been gathering in public squares in massive protests against the oppressive Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who has been engaging in an increasing crackdown on political opponents. On April 21, a sudden raid by security forces on a Sunni protest encampment in the city of Hawija, north of Baghdad, resulted in three dozen protesters being killed.
That sparked a wave of retaliations, counter-retaliations, and counter-counter retaliations that has continued into May.
The US spent eight years and $800 billion the Iraq mission, as well as costing the lives of more than 4,000 US soldiers, 32,000 more wounded, an absolute minimum of over 100,000 Iraqi dead, all of which wound up producing an authoritarian government that no better and in some ways perhaps worse than the one it replaced. So I ask you: Was any of that money, were any of those lives, wasted? Better yet, was any of it not wasted?
Now, Baghdad residents are reported to be stocking up on rice, vegetables, and other foodstuffs in case they can't get to the shops because of fighting or curfews and a senior Iraqi politician was quoted as saying “It is wrong to say we are getting close to a civil war. The civil war has already started.” A civil war that, officials fear, could be worse than Syria's.
And speaking of Syria, we have the terrible twins, the mad mavens of militarism, the Chang and Eng of "blow it up" foreign policy, Sens. John McCain and Lindsay Graham, demanding that the US directly attack Syrian air bases with cruise missiles, establish a "no fly zone," arm the rebels with heavy weapons, and prepare an "international force" to go into Syria - and we should do this even if the unproven claims that the Assad government has used chemical weapons are false. Oh, and that "international force," they are quick to emphasize, would not include Americans. We'll let others take the risk
They're not the only ones. The chair and the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Democrat Bob Menendez and GOPper Bob Corker, respectively, agree. Menendez has introduced a bill to directly arm the rebels and Corker says the US is already "doing a lot more on the ground than really is known."
Clearly, we're doing all this because we learned so much from our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But in fact we did learn something - or, rather, the militarists learned something from our military adventures over the past few decades: the sad fact that we as a people will tolerate almost any level of death and destruction so long as we are not the ones doing the bleeding.
And now, based on exactly that premise, we are being herded towards producing more of the same in Syria.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/02/april-deadliest-month-iraq_n_3200317.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/18/iraq-war-costs_n_2885071.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/03/iraq-violence_n_3208161.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/the-civil-war-in-iraq-has-already-begun-politician-claims-conflict-has-started-and-warns-it-will-be-worse-than-syria-8601732.html
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/international-troops-should-be-ready-operationally-to-invade-syria-says-john-mccain/article11595592/
http://www.policymic.com/articles/38993/john-mccain-lindsey-graham-senators-demand-syria-intervention-encouraging-another-stupid-war
http://thehill.com/blogs/defcon-hill/policy-and-strategy/298109-menendez-presses-to-arm-rebels-as-syria-pulls-us-toward-conflict
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505263_162-57583191/sen-corker-on-syria-u.s-will-be-arming-the-rebels-soon/
Over 700 people were killed in Iraq in political violence in April, nearly 600 of who were civilians. It was the deadliest month in Iraq in five years.For the past few months, Sunni Muslims have been gathering in public squares in massive protests against the oppressive Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who has been engaging in an increasing crackdown on political opponents. On April 21, a sudden raid by security forces on a Sunni protest encampment in the city of Hawija, north of Baghdad, resulted in three dozen protesters being killed.
That sparked a wave of retaliations, counter-retaliations, and counter-counter retaliations that has continued into May.
The US spent eight years and $800 billion the Iraq mission, as well as costing the lives of more than 4,000 US soldiers, 32,000 more wounded, an absolute minimum of over 100,000 Iraqi dead, all of which wound up producing an authoritarian government that no better and in some ways perhaps worse than the one it replaced. So I ask you: Was any of that money, were any of those lives, wasted? Better yet, was any of it not wasted?
Now, Baghdad residents are reported to be stocking up on rice, vegetables, and other foodstuffs in case they can't get to the shops because of fighting or curfews and a senior Iraqi politician was quoted as saying “It is wrong to say we are getting close to a civil war. The civil war has already started.” A civil war that, officials fear, could be worse than Syria's.
And speaking of Syria, we have the terrible twins, the mad mavens of militarism, the Chang and Eng of "blow it up" foreign policy, Sens. John McCain and Lindsay Graham, demanding that the US directly attack Syrian air bases with cruise missiles, establish a "no fly zone," arm the rebels with heavy weapons, and prepare an "international force" to go into Syria - and we should do this even if the unproven claims that the Assad government has used chemical weapons are false. Oh, and that "international force," they are quick to emphasize, would not include Americans. We'll let others take the riskThey're not the only ones. The chair and the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Democrat Bob Menendez and GOPper Bob Corker, respectively, agree. Menendez has introduced a bill to directly arm the rebels and Corker says the US is already "doing a lot more on the ground than really is known."
Clearly, we're doing all this because we learned so much from our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But in fact we did learn something - or, rather, the militarists learned something from our military adventures over the past few decades: the sad fact that we as a people will tolerate almost any level of death and destruction so long as we are not the ones doing the bleeding.
And now, based on exactly that premise, we are being herded towards producing more of the same in Syria.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/02/april-deadliest-month-iraq_n_3200317.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/18/iraq-war-costs_n_2885071.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/03/iraq-violence_n_3208161.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/the-civil-war-in-iraq-has-already-begun-politician-claims-conflict-has-started-and-warns-it-will-be-worse-than-syria-8601732.html
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/international-troops-should-be-ready-operationally-to-invade-syria-says-john-mccain/article11595592/
http://www.policymic.com/articles/38993/john-mccain-lindsey-graham-senators-demand-syria-intervention-encouraging-another-stupid-war
http://thehill.com/blogs/defcon-hill/policy-and-strategy/298109-menendez-presses-to-arm-rebels-as-syria-pulls-us-toward-conflict
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505263_162-57583191/sen-corker-on-syria-u.s-will-be-arming-the-rebels-soon/
Thursday, May 02, 2013
Left Side of the Aisle #106 - Part 6
Outrage of the Week: Matt Yglesias and The Market (pbui)
If you want an example of why we need that re-think of the economy, here's one. It's the Outrage of the Week.
You heard, I'm sure, about the collapse of a factory in Bangladesh on April 24. The death toll has passed 400 with 149 people still missing and some 2,500 people injured.
The people inside were garment workers, paid a pittance and forced by the bosses to work in a factory with great big cracks in the walls and foundation that actually had been ordered closed by government inspectors the day before, all so that we can wear overpriced fashion jeans.
What you probably didn't hear unless you're attuned to the internet was that Matt "I'm not a progressive, I just play one online" Yglesias, a columnist for Slate, wasn't particularly troubled by that. He was more troubled by the suggestion that what is needed is some minimum international standards for factory safety. In a column titled, I'm serious, "Different Places Have Different Safety Rules and That's OK," he argued that "it's entirely appropriate for Bangladesh to have lower workplace safety standards than the United States" because it's a poorer country and "in a free society it's good that different people are able to make different choices on the risk–reward spectrum." In other words, the people who worked in that factory willingly accepted the risk in order to get the pay and that was their "choice." His proud conclusion? "The current system of letting different countries have different rules is working fine."
Put bluntly, because Bangladesh is poor and the people are poor, it's entirely reasonable that they should have to risk having a building fall on them in order to not let their families starve.
Yglesias was roundly and justifiably denounced in various quarters, but the real point here is that he was not being immoral, he was being amoral. He wasn't being cruel about the deaths so much as he was being indifferent to them. He was trapped inside the logic of The Market (pbui) and its powerful grip did not allow him to see the actual human component of his own words, the actual human impact of their meaning.
As another writer put it,
Sources:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-22364891
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2013/04/gilded-age-conceptions-of-labor-contracts-wrong-then-wrong-now
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2013/04/we-can-choose-that-workers-not-die-in.html
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/24/international_factory_safety.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rj-eskow/media-coverage-bangladesh-fire_b_3166299.html
http://americablog.com/2013/04/matt-yglesias-resigns-from-the-presumed-progressive-community-with-prejudice.html
http://scrutinyhooligans.us/2013/04/28/what-are-little-company-men-made-of/
If you want an example of why we need that re-think of the economy, here's one. It's the Outrage of the Week.You heard, I'm sure, about the collapse of a factory in Bangladesh on April 24. The death toll has passed 400 with 149 people still missing and some 2,500 people injured.
The people inside were garment workers, paid a pittance and forced by the bosses to work in a factory with great big cracks in the walls and foundation that actually had been ordered closed by government inspectors the day before, all so that we can wear overpriced fashion jeans.
What you probably didn't hear unless you're attuned to the internet was that Matt "I'm not a progressive, I just play one online" Yglesias, a columnist for Slate, wasn't particularly troubled by that. He was more troubled by the suggestion that what is needed is some minimum international standards for factory safety. In a column titled, I'm serious, "Different Places Have Different Safety Rules and That's OK," he argued that "it's entirely appropriate for Bangladesh to have lower workplace safety standards than the United States" because it's a poorer country and "in a free society it's good that different people are able to make different choices on the risk–reward spectrum." In other words, the people who worked in that factory willingly accepted the risk in order to get the pay and that was their "choice." His proud conclusion? "The current system of letting different countries have different rules is working fine."
Put bluntly, because Bangladesh is poor and the people are poor, it's entirely reasonable that they should have to risk having a building fall on them in order to not let their families starve.Yglesias was roundly and justifiably denounced in various quarters, but the real point here is that he was not being immoral, he was being amoral. He wasn't being cruel about the deaths so much as he was being indifferent to them. He was trapped inside the logic of The Market (pbui) and its powerful grip did not allow him to see the actual human component of his own words, the actual human impact of their meaning.
As another writer put it,
[i]t is the unacknowledged, dehumanizing effect of long-term immersion in a business culture that treats every human interaction as an economic transaction first and foremost.It is what The Market (pbui) does to your soul. It is why we need that re-think and it is an outrage.
Sources:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-22364891
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2013/04/gilded-age-conceptions-of-labor-contracts-wrong-then-wrong-now
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2013/04/we-can-choose-that-workers-not-die-in.html
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/24/international_factory_safety.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rj-eskow/media-coverage-bangladesh-fire_b_3166299.html
http://americablog.com/2013/04/matt-yglesias-resigns-from-the-presumed-progressive-community-with-prejudice.html
http://scrutinyhooligans.us/2013/04/28/what-are-little-company-men-made-of/
Left Side of the Aisle #106 - Part 5
Intro to re-thinking the economy
I have been talking recently about what I've been calling the economic state in which we find ourselves. In doing so, I've been talking more about broad concerns, overall conditions, rather than the details of budgets and wonky figures about this percentage of that program.
What I've tried to point our is, in short, that more and more of our wealth, more and more of our income, is going to fewer and fewer people, that inequality is not only large, it is growing, the proportional divide is growing, even within the ranks of the rich and super-rich. Not that long ago we used to talk about richest 20% versus the other 80%. Then it became the richest 10% versus the other 90%. Now we talk about the richest 1% versus the other 99%. But again, even that doesn't show how the divide is growing. As big as the divide is between the 10% and the 90%, there is a proportionately equally large divide between the 1% and the next 9% and withing the 1% there is a proportionately equally large divide between the 0.1% and the rest of the 1%. More and more is going to fewer and fewer.
At the same time, more and more of our economy is dominated by fewer and fewer, larger and larger, corporations. Again, it's more and more going to fewer and fewer.
`
I've raised this gently before, but I'm going to raise it more bluntly now. We are at a point where we have to start asking basic questions. We have spent decades now careening from one social, economic, political, or military crisis to another only to find in each case that at the end of it all we are at best but little removed from where we started.
And despite what we get told, this is not because of a lack of “leadership” or insufficient "bipartisanship" but because of a shared attitude among all our leaders across both major parties, an attitude that says we can combat our problems without examining the basic premises of our policies or the social and economic structures out of which those policies grow. In fact, the assumption is that those economic and social structures are entirely sound and the national political debate - in fact, often even on the state level, the debate comes down to whether we need to “tinker” a little more with those supposedly sound basic structures or whether we’ve already “tinkered” a little too much.
As a British writer whose name I've forgotten put it, “American leaders seem to think ‘what we did hasn’t worked, so let’s do it again, only harder.’”
But “doing it harder” won’t work because our society’s structures are not sound, they’re seriously flawed. Our social structure divides us by race and sex, favoring some and brutalizing others; our political structure divides us constantly into majority and minority, rulers and ruled, telling us they’re the same thing while actually maintaining the power of a privileged few; and our economic structure slices us into rich and poor, boss and worker, and, to a greater extent than most of us care to admit, owner and owned.
We have got to admit at some point that the problems, the worst long-term unemployment ever recorded, the persistence of poverty, the growing inequality, the growing political power of the rich and corporations, the persistence of racism and sexism, the too-easy reach to drones as a tool of foreign policy, the inability to act against global warming, the knee-jerk reflex to answer every economic problem with "cut spending," the expanding and encroaching police state, all those and more are not aberrations of “the system,” they are the system. They’re direct outgrowths of a socioeconomic system that places it’s greatest value on power and control, that encourages competition and selfishness and discourages cooperation, that persistently divides America and the world into a variety of "we"s and "they"s.
I said it last week: We have to face the fact that we need to re-think our society, we need to re-think our economy.
You want to know what perspective I bring to such as re-think, well, I'll tell you. One way to answer that question is how I describe myself on my blog, Lotus - Surviving a Dark Time: "I'm a democratic socialist/green with an anarchist bent and a civil liberties absolutist who has, by both logical conclusion and moral compulsion, a commitment to active nonviolence. The only isms I wholeheartedly endorse are skepticism and eclecticism."
Or, as I used to put it rather more flippantly, I'm a socialist anarchist communalist capitalist eclecticist iconoclast - a description which caused most people to smile somewhat confusedly, the doctrinaire rightists to call me a communist and the doctrinaire leftists to start going on about "contradictions."
But more broadly, it means that I'm a capitalist in that I believe in the small business, the community-level business, the neighborhood store, the small factory. I'm a communalist in that I believe that cooperative ventures are better than competitive ones - and there actually is ample evidence for that; if you want competition, take up sports or chess. I'm a socialist in that I believe that beyond a certain point, profit-oriented enterprises can't be trusted to be responsible to the communities in which they operate and at that point the community as a whole has the right, the responsibility, and the duty to step in and start making some decisions. I'm an anarchist in that I'm a strong believer in individual rights and personal freedom and I amend Henry David Thoreau's comment "that government is best which governs least" to "that government is best which governs as little as necessary." I'm an eclecticist in that I believe you can pull those bits together into a coherent philosophy. And I'm an iconoclast in that I believe that there is no perfect state, no perfect society or, put another way, "the only ultimate answer is that there is no other ultimate answer." So if a society ever was created along the lines I imagine, the first thing I would do would be to try to see what was wrong with that society and how it could be improved.
So that's the perspective I bring to this.
I have been talking recently about what I've been calling the economic state in which we find ourselves. In doing so, I've been talking more about broad concerns, overall conditions, rather than the details of budgets and wonky figures about this percentage of that program.
What I've tried to point our is, in short, that more and more of our wealth, more and more of our income, is going to fewer and fewer people, that inequality is not only large, it is growing, the proportional divide is growing, even within the ranks of the rich and super-rich. Not that long ago we used to talk about richest 20% versus the other 80%. Then it became the richest 10% versus the other 90%. Now we talk about the richest 1% versus the other 99%. But again, even that doesn't show how the divide is growing. As big as the divide is between the 10% and the 90%, there is a proportionately equally large divide between the 1% and the next 9% and withing the 1% there is a proportionately equally large divide between the 0.1% and the rest of the 1%. More and more is going to fewer and fewer.
At the same time, more and more of our economy is dominated by fewer and fewer, larger and larger, corporations. Again, it's more and more going to fewer and fewer.
`
I've raised this gently before, but I'm going to raise it more bluntly now. We are at a point where we have to start asking basic questions. We have spent decades now careening from one social, economic, political, or military crisis to another only to find in each case that at the end of it all we are at best but little removed from where we started.And despite what we get told, this is not because of a lack of “leadership” or insufficient "bipartisanship" but because of a shared attitude among all our leaders across both major parties, an attitude that says we can combat our problems without examining the basic premises of our policies or the social and economic structures out of which those policies grow. In fact, the assumption is that those economic and social structures are entirely sound and the national political debate - in fact, often even on the state level, the debate comes down to whether we need to “tinker” a little more with those supposedly sound basic structures or whether we’ve already “tinkered” a little too much.
As a British writer whose name I've forgotten put it, “American leaders seem to think ‘what we did hasn’t worked, so let’s do it again, only harder.’”
But “doing it harder” won’t work because our society’s structures are not sound, they’re seriously flawed. Our social structure divides us by race and sex, favoring some and brutalizing others; our political structure divides us constantly into majority and minority, rulers and ruled, telling us they’re the same thing while actually maintaining the power of a privileged few; and our economic structure slices us into rich and poor, boss and worker, and, to a greater extent than most of us care to admit, owner and owned.
We have got to admit at some point that the problems, the worst long-term unemployment ever recorded, the persistence of poverty, the growing inequality, the growing political power of the rich and corporations, the persistence of racism and sexism, the too-easy reach to drones as a tool of foreign policy, the inability to act against global warming, the knee-jerk reflex to answer every economic problem with "cut spending," the expanding and encroaching police state, all those and more are not aberrations of “the system,” they are the system. They’re direct outgrowths of a socioeconomic system that places it’s greatest value on power and control, that encourages competition and selfishness and discourages cooperation, that persistently divides America and the world into a variety of "we"s and "they"s.
I said it last week: We have to face the fact that we need to re-think our society, we need to re-think our economy.
You want to know what perspective I bring to such as re-think, well, I'll tell you. One way to answer that question is how I describe myself on my blog, Lotus - Surviving a Dark Time: "I'm a democratic socialist/green with an anarchist bent and a civil liberties absolutist who has, by both logical conclusion and moral compulsion, a commitment to active nonviolence. The only isms I wholeheartedly endorse are skepticism and eclecticism."Or, as I used to put it rather more flippantly, I'm a socialist anarchist communalist capitalist eclecticist iconoclast - a description which caused most people to smile somewhat confusedly, the doctrinaire rightists to call me a communist and the doctrinaire leftists to start going on about "contradictions."
But more broadly, it means that I'm a capitalist in that I believe in the small business, the community-level business, the neighborhood store, the small factory. I'm a communalist in that I believe that cooperative ventures are better than competitive ones - and there actually is ample evidence for that; if you want competition, take up sports or chess. I'm a socialist in that I believe that beyond a certain point, profit-oriented enterprises can't be trusted to be responsible to the communities in which they operate and at that point the community as a whole has the right, the responsibility, and the duty to step in and start making some decisions. I'm an anarchist in that I'm a strong believer in individual rights and personal freedom and I amend Henry David Thoreau's comment "that government is best which governs least" to "that government is best which governs as little as necessary." I'm an eclecticist in that I believe you can pull those bits together into a coherent philosophy. And I'm an iconoclast in that I believe that there is no perfect state, no perfect society or, put another way, "the only ultimate answer is that there is no other ultimate answer." So if a society ever was created along the lines I imagine, the first thing I would do would be to try to see what was wrong with that society and how it could be improved.
So that's the perspective I bring to this.
Left Side of the Aisle #106 - Part 4
Clown Award: Chris Broussard of ESPN
Time for the Clown Award, given as needed for acts of meritorious stupidity.
The photo is that of Jason Collins. He is NOT the recipient of the big red nose this week. By no means.
What he is, is a 34-year old journeyman center in the NBA. He has never been a star in the league, although he was the starting center for the New Jersey Nets team that made the NBA Finals in the 2002-2003 season.
But he became a star of a different sort when in the May 6 issue of Sports Illustrated, which came out on April 29, he revealed that he is gay. He thus became the first active male athlete in a major US team sport to do so. "Major US team sport" includes the NFL, the NHL, the NBA, and major league baseball. Six former players in one of those leagues have come out, but they all did it after they retired. He is the first active player ever to do so.
(There have been cases of active pro athletes in non-team sports such as tennis or Olympic diving coming out, and some of the women in the WNBA are out, as well.)
Leaving aside twits like Phil Jackson, who claimed he never encountered a single gay NBA player in his entire coaching career, the reaction in the sports world was overwhelmingly positive.
His current team, Washington Wizards, released a statement that the team is "extremely proud of Jason and support his decision to live his life proudly and openly. He has been a leader on and off the court and an outstanding teammate."
Even the White House got in on the act: Michelle Obama tweeted a statement of support and the Prez phoned Collins to express his support.
So who's the clown? It's this guy:
His name is Chris Broussard and he's a sportscaster for ESPN. In response to Collins coming out, he launched into a bigoted rant.
"I don’t believe that you can live an openly homosexual lifestyle.... If you’re openly living that type of lifestyle, then the Bible says you know them by their fruits. It says that, that’s a sin." Collins is, he said, "openly living in unrepentant sin."
Even though Collins said that "My parents instilled Christian values in me" and "I take the teachings of Jesus seriously, particularly the ones that touch on tolerance and understanding," Broussard apparently wasn't paying attention to that last part.
Instead, he ranted that Collins is, quoting, "walking in open rebellion to God and to Jesus Christ" and that he "would not characterize [him] as a Christian."
So apparently, Chris Broussard, who thinks that everything would have been okay if only Collins had kept his mouth shut (since it's the "openly" part that really seems to have riled him up), believes he can personally decide who is and is not a Christian. Well, I can personally decide who is and who is not a clown. And Chris Broussard is most assuredly on the "is" list.
Sources:
http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/news/story?id=2757105
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/magazine/news/20130429/jason-collins-gay-nba-player/
http://www.cbsnews.com/2300-201_162-10016671.html
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/nba-player-comes-out-as-gay-first-ever?ref=fpb
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/02/phil-jackson-gay-basketball-players_n_3000925.html#slide=2070762
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/sporting-world-celebrates-jason-collins-for-coming-out
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/30/charles-barkley-jason-collins-gay-inside-the-nba_n_3186663.html
http://www.nba.com/wizards/wizards-statement-jason-collins-announcement
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/obama-phones-nbas-jason-collins-to-express-support
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/espn-sportscaster-out-nba-player-living-in-open?ref=fpb
Time for the Clown Award, given as needed for acts of meritorious stupidity.The photo is that of Jason Collins. He is NOT the recipient of the big red nose this week. By no means.
What he is, is a 34-year old journeyman center in the NBA. He has never been a star in the league, although he was the starting center for the New Jersey Nets team that made the NBA Finals in the 2002-2003 season.
But he became a star of a different sort when in the May 6 issue of Sports Illustrated, which came out on April 29, he revealed that he is gay. He thus became the first active male athlete in a major US team sport to do so. "Major US team sport" includes the NFL, the NHL, the NBA, and major league baseball. Six former players in one of those leagues have come out, but they all did it after they retired. He is the first active player ever to do so.(There have been cases of active pro athletes in non-team sports such as tennis or Olympic diving coming out, and some of the women in the WNBA are out, as well.)
Leaving aside twits like Phil Jackson, who claimed he never encountered a single gay NBA player in his entire coaching career, the reaction in the sports world was overwhelmingly positive.
His current team, Washington Wizards, released a statement that the team is "extremely proud of Jason and support his decision to live his life proudly and openly. He has been a leader on and off the court and an outstanding teammate."
Even the White House got in on the act: Michelle Obama tweeted a statement of support and the Prez phoned Collins to express his support.
So who's the clown? It's this guy:
His name is Chris Broussard and he's a sportscaster for ESPN. In response to Collins coming out, he launched into a bigoted rant. "I don’t believe that you can live an openly homosexual lifestyle.... If you’re openly living that type of lifestyle, then the Bible says you know them by their fruits. It says that, that’s a sin." Collins is, he said, "openly living in unrepentant sin."
Even though Collins said that "My parents instilled Christian values in me" and "I take the teachings of Jesus seriously, particularly the ones that touch on tolerance and understanding," Broussard apparently wasn't paying attention to that last part.
Instead, he ranted that Collins is, quoting, "walking in open rebellion to God and to Jesus Christ" and that he "would not characterize [him] as a Christian."
So apparently, Chris Broussard, who thinks that everything would have been okay if only Collins had kept his mouth shut (since it's the "openly" part that really seems to have riled him up), believes he can personally decide who is and is not a Christian. Well, I can personally decide who is and who is not a clown. And Chris Broussard is most assuredly on the "is" list.
Sources:
http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/news/story?id=2757105
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/magazine/news/20130429/jason-collins-gay-nba-player/
http://www.cbsnews.com/2300-201_162-10016671.html
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/nba-player-comes-out-as-gay-first-ever?ref=fpb
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/02/phil-jackson-gay-basketball-players_n_3000925.html#slide=2070762
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/sporting-world-celebrates-jason-collins-for-coming-out
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/30/charles-barkley-jason-collins-gay-inside-the-nba_n_3186663.html
http://www.nba.com/wizards/wizards-statement-jason-collins-announcement
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/obama-phones-nbas-jason-collins-to-express-support
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/espn-sportscaster-out-nba-player-living-in-open?ref=fpb
Left Side of the Aisle #106 - Part 3
Boston bombing reaction: why do some events affect us more than others?
The other thing I wanted to raise is more philosophical.
In the same week as the Boston bombings, at least 34 people killed, over 100 injured, and up to 1,000 homes were damaged in an earthquake on the Iran-Pakistan border.
In the same week as the Boston bombings, another earthquake struck China's Sichuan province, leaving whole villages in ruins, over 200 people either dead or missing, over 11,000 injured, and 17,000 more homeless.
In the same week as the Boston bombings, in the small town of West, Texas, a fertilizer plant that hadn't had a federal safety inspection in 28 years caught fire and exploded, resulting in the deaths of at least 14 people and the injuries of at least 200 along with the destruction of nearby neighborhoods.
Every one of those cases involved more people killed, as many or more - a whole lot more - people injured, and more property damage than occurred in Boston. By every standard measure, deaths, injuries, and property damage, all of them were greater tragedies.
So why don't they feel that way? Why the difference? Why do some things strike us so much more than others?
We can say two of them involved foreign countries and Americans don't care about disasters in foreign countries but that's hardly a satisfying answer both because that's not entirely true and because it doesn't answer the question: Why does that make a difference? And in any event it can't be applied to Texas. I know some people say Texas acts like a foreign country, but I'm not looking for the joke here.
And I want to emphasize that I'm not making a judgment here. I'm not saying that people are callous by not caring as much about this as about that or that they are being overly sensitive by caring more about that than this. What I'm thinking about is why. And what does that say about the psychology of being on the left or on the right, if anything? Why do some kinds of events just strike us more, hit us harder emotionally, than others?
Just something I wanted to put out there for you to think about.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/16/iran-earthquake-2013_n_3090799.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular
http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2013/s3743845.htm
http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/04/in-china-even-earthquakes-are-political/275232/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/20/texas-plant-explosion-workplace_n_3122643.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular
http://crooksandliars.com/juanita-jean/come-texas-where-its-better-business
The other thing I wanted to raise is more philosophical.
In the same week as the Boston bombings, at least 34 people killed, over 100 injured, and up to 1,000 homes were damaged in an earthquake on the Iran-Pakistan border.
In the same week as the Boston bombings, another earthquake struck China's Sichuan province, leaving whole villages in ruins, over 200 people either dead or missing, over 11,000 injured, and 17,000 more homeless.
In the same week as the Boston bombings, in the small town of West, Texas, a fertilizer plant that hadn't had a federal safety inspection in 28 years caught fire and exploded, resulting in the deaths of at least 14 people and the injuries of at least 200 along with the destruction of nearby neighborhoods.
Every one of those cases involved more people killed, as many or more - a whole lot more - people injured, and more property damage than occurred in Boston. By every standard measure, deaths, injuries, and property damage, all of them were greater tragedies.
So why don't they feel that way? Why the difference? Why do some things strike us so much more than others?
We can say two of them involved foreign countries and Americans don't care about disasters in foreign countries but that's hardly a satisfying answer both because that's not entirely true and because it doesn't answer the question: Why does that make a difference? And in any event it can't be applied to Texas. I know some people say Texas acts like a foreign country, but I'm not looking for the joke here.
And I want to emphasize that I'm not making a judgment here. I'm not saying that people are callous by not caring as much about this as about that or that they are being overly sensitive by caring more about that than this. What I'm thinking about is why. And what does that say about the psychology of being on the left or on the right, if anything? Why do some kinds of events just strike us more, hit us harder emotionally, than others?
Just something I wanted to put out there for you to think about.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/16/iran-earthquake-2013_n_3090799.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular
http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2013/s3743845.htm
http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/04/in-china-even-earthquakes-are-political/275232/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/20/texas-plant-explosion-workplace_n_3122643.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular
http://crooksandliars.com/juanita-jean/come-texas-where-its-better-business
Left Side of the Aisle #106 - Part 2
Boston bombing reaction: why are we such a frightened people?
I'm going to talk briefly, I hope, I intend, about two thoughts prompted by the Boston bombing. They are thoughts I want to put out there for your consideration.
One has to do with the reactions to the hunt for Dzohkar Tsarnaev. When he was caught, people were in the streets cheering and chanting "USA! USA!"
Why? I mean, this was not just relief. This went way beyond relief. If he had been, say, a bank robber who had killed a bank guard, carjacked a car, and killed a cop and was described as armed and dangerous and in the vicinity, would the reaction of the cops have been the same? Would there have been city-wide lockdowns? Would there have been tanks in the streets of Watertown?
Would the reaction of the people have been the same? Would his capture have brought them out in the streets, cheering and waving flags?
Why are we such a frightened people? Why are we such a frightened people that this one guy was able to turn Boston and Watertown into ghost towns?
Schools and business were closed. Trains and subways were halted. Roads were blocked off and empty. The streets resembled, in the words of one writer, a post-apocalyptic movie set. Even baseball games and cultural events were cancelled. This was all in response to a single 19-year-old fugitive - an armed and dangerous fugitive, yes, but still alone and on foot and clearly identified by the news media.
And don't give me any of this "Boston strong" crap because it's utter nonsense. Cops were telling people to stay inside. Nobody in, nobody out. It was lock your doors, be afraid to be in the streets, be afraid to answer your door; people were even told to stay away from windows, be afraid even to look outside; hide in your home with the lights out and the blinds drawn until you're told it's safe. And then after the guy is caught, you come strutting out going "Oh yeah, we strong, we strong." No, you're not. You're scared. Scared enough to surrender your civil liberties without a fuss.
Former Rep. Ron Paul, a man who gives a political meaning to the term idiot-savant, wrote the other day that the response of law enforcement to the bombings should frighten Americans more than the attack itself.
And we're supposed to think this is okay! We're supposed to accept this! And, somehow, passively sumbitting to this is supposed to prove that "We strong!" It proves no such thing; in fact it proves the opposite. It proves just how frightened we are, just how fragile our freedoms are and just how readily we will surrender them to the demands of power as soon as the magic talisman of "terrorism" is waved in our faces, the Constitution and all that nonsense about "rights" be damned.
And I don't want to hear the blather about it being necessary for "public safety." Daniel Webster said it well:
It's like a conditioned reflex: We hear word the word "terrorism" and any legitimate fear we may have felt, any rational concern we may have had, goes up by an order of magnitude or more and the words "legitimate" and "rational" are dropped from the lexicon. Why? Why has a people that likes to pride itself on its supposed daring spirit as we tell ourselves stories of how we dared to cross the oceans, we dared to cross the plains and prairies, we dared to step out into space, why has a people whose nation was born in revolution, whose third president, Thomas Jefferson, said "the spirit of resistance to government is so valuable at times that I wish it to be always alive," why has such a people become so timorous, so afraid, that we regard our freedoms as being based on nothing more than the sufferance of the state? Why are we such a frightened people?
And there is a clear political aspect to this question. Since 9/11, a total of sixteen people have been killed by Islamic terrorism on American soil. Even if we are to speculate on motives, including Boston brings the total to nineteen. That is one more than the number who died as the result of gunfire in the US on the day of the bombings and little more than half the daily average. The average American is more likely to die of malaria than as the result of Muslim terrorism. Meanwhile, the number of anti-government so-called “patriot” groups, defined as those dedicated to overthrowing the federal government in the belief it intends to confiscate weapons and impose socialism, reached an all-time high in 2012 and according to a study by Arie Perliger of the Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point, in that same period, that is, since 9/11, over 250 people have been killed in the US in right-wing violence. But we don't talk about that; in fact, when the DHS - the Department for the Protection of the Fatherland - issued a report on right-wing extremism in 2009, the reactionaries in Congress screamed so loud that the agency had to withdraw the report. So not only don't we talk about that, politically, we're not even allowed to talk about it.
So I ask again? Why are we such a frightened people? How did that come to be? Why is that fear so narrowly - and wrongly - focused? And, now, and perhaps most importantly, I will ask, who does that fear serve?
Ultimately, I think Ben Franklin had it right:
Sources:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/21/boston-marathon-bombs-us-gun-law
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/DC-Decoder/Decoder-Wire/2013/0430/Ron-Paul-slams-Boston-police.-Has-he-gone-too-far
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/29/ron-paul-boston-bombings_n_3179489.html
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/ron-paul-government-response-scarier-than-boston-bombing
http://lewrockwell.com/paul/paul858.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_Gb6i5DF9k
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LrbsUVSVl8
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2013/04/after-boston-a-few-facts-about-terrorism.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/05/southern-poverty-law-center-patriot-groups-_n_2814768.html
http://www.ctc.usma.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/ChallengersFromtheSidelines.pdf
https://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/rightwing.pdf
http://www.catb.org/~esr/fortunes/liberty.html
http://www.bartleby.com/73/1056.html
I'm going to talk briefly, I hope, I intend, about two thoughts prompted by the Boston bombing. They are thoughts I want to put out there for your consideration.
One has to do with the reactions to the hunt for Dzohkar Tsarnaev. When he was caught, people were in the streets cheering and chanting "USA! USA!"
Why? I mean, this was not just relief. This went way beyond relief. If he had been, say, a bank robber who had killed a bank guard, carjacked a car, and killed a cop and was described as armed and dangerous and in the vicinity, would the reaction of the cops have been the same? Would there have been city-wide lockdowns? Would there have been tanks in the streets of Watertown?
Would the reaction of the people have been the same? Would his capture have brought them out in the streets, cheering and waving flags?
Why are we such a frightened people? Why are we such a frightened people that this one guy was able to turn Boston and Watertown into ghost towns?Schools and business were closed. Trains and subways were halted. Roads were blocked off and empty. The streets resembled, in the words of one writer, a post-apocalyptic movie set. Even baseball games and cultural events were cancelled. This was all in response to a single 19-year-old fugitive - an armed and dangerous fugitive, yes, but still alone and on foot and clearly identified by the news media.
And don't give me any of this "Boston strong" crap because it's utter nonsense. Cops were telling people to stay inside. Nobody in, nobody out. It was lock your doors, be afraid to be in the streets, be afraid to answer your door; people were even told to stay away from windows, be afraid even to look outside; hide in your home with the lights out and the blinds drawn until you're told it's safe. And then after the guy is caught, you come strutting out going "Oh yeah, we strong, we strong." No, you're not. You're scared. Scared enough to surrender your civil liberties without a fuss.Former Rep. Ron Paul, a man who gives a political meaning to the term idiot-savant, wrote the other day that the response of law enforcement to the bombings should frighten Americans more than the attack itself.
Forced lockdown of a city. Militarized police riding tanks in the streets. Door-to-door armed searches without warrant. Families thrown out of their homes at gunpoint to be searched without probable cause. Businesses forced to close. Transport shut down.There are tanks in the streets of an American city and it's not an Armed Forces Day parade! There is video of the door-to-door searches - some folks have video taken from their windows and channel 7 in Boston covered this as well - there is video of heavily armed and heavily armored cops banging on doors, sticking loaded guns in the faces of people who answered the doors, forcing everyone in the house to leave at gun point with their hands in the air, sending them to be searched without warrant or cause, then storming in the house like they were going into combat. They were going down streets doing this, house after house - and in a move that would have Orwell grinning in recognition, offcials had the utter, the monumental, gall to refer to these armed home invasions as "rescuing" the occupants!
These were not the scenes from a military coup in a far off banana republic, but rather scenes in Boston as the United States got a taste of martial law. The Boston bombing provided the opportunity for the government to turn what should have been a police investigation into a military-style occupation of an American city.
And we're supposed to think this is okay! We're supposed to accept this! And, somehow, passively sumbitting to this is supposed to prove that "We strong!" It proves no such thing; in fact it proves the opposite. It proves just how frightened we are, just how fragile our freedoms are and just how readily we will surrender them to the demands of power as soon as the magic talisman of "terrorism" is waved in our faces, the Constitution and all that nonsense about "rights" be damned.
And I don't want to hear the blather about it being necessary for "public safety." Daniel Webster said it well:
Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.
It's like a conditioned reflex: We hear word the word "terrorism" and any legitimate fear we may have felt, any rational concern we may have had, goes up by an order of magnitude or more and the words "legitimate" and "rational" are dropped from the lexicon. Why? Why has a people that likes to pride itself on its supposed daring spirit as we tell ourselves stories of how we dared to cross the oceans, we dared to cross the plains and prairies, we dared to step out into space, why has a people whose nation was born in revolution, whose third president, Thomas Jefferson, said "the spirit of resistance to government is so valuable at times that I wish it to be always alive," why has such a people become so timorous, so afraid, that we regard our freedoms as being based on nothing more than the sufferance of the state? Why are we such a frightened people?And there is a clear political aspect to this question. Since 9/11, a total of sixteen people have been killed by Islamic terrorism on American soil. Even if we are to speculate on motives, including Boston brings the total to nineteen. That is one more than the number who died as the result of gunfire in the US on the day of the bombings and little more than half the daily average. The average American is more likely to die of malaria than as the result of Muslim terrorism. Meanwhile, the number of anti-government so-called “patriot” groups, defined as those dedicated to overthrowing the federal government in the belief it intends to confiscate weapons and impose socialism, reached an all-time high in 2012 and according to a study by Arie Perliger of the Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point, in that same period, that is, since 9/11, over 250 people have been killed in the US in right-wing violence. But we don't talk about that; in fact, when the DHS - the Department for the Protection of the Fatherland - issued a report on right-wing extremism in 2009, the reactionaries in Congress screamed so loud that the agency had to withdraw the report. So not only don't we talk about that, politically, we're not even allowed to talk about it.
So I ask again? Why are we such a frightened people? How did that come to be? Why is that fear so narrowly - and wrongly - focused? And, now, and perhaps most importantly, I will ask, who does that fear serve?
Ultimately, I think Ben Franklin had it right:
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.America in 2013 appears to be among Franklin's undeserving.
Sources:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/21/boston-marathon-bombs-us-gun-law
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/DC-Decoder/Decoder-Wire/2013/0430/Ron-Paul-slams-Boston-police.-Has-he-gone-too-far
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/29/ron-paul-boston-bombings_n_3179489.html
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/ron-paul-government-response-scarier-than-boston-bombing
http://lewrockwell.com/paul/paul858.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_Gb6i5DF9k
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LrbsUVSVl8
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2013/04/after-boston-a-few-facts-about-terrorism.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/05/southern-poverty-law-center-patriot-groups-_n_2814768.html
http://www.ctc.usma.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/ChallengersFromtheSidelines.pdf
https://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/rightwing.pdf
http://www.catb.org/~esr/fortunes/liberty.html
http://www.bartleby.com/73/1056.html
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