Posted on March 16, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

I do cartoons for the Starbucks workers who are trying to unionize and get better working conditions. This rape case shows the total lack of care for an employee and automatic defense of anything a manager does. I think more people need to hear about the struggles of average people and the way our corporate masters use all kinds of extremely expensive methods to get their way.

When I first heard that the majority at a NYC Starbucks announced that they wanted a union contract I was amazed. When I was growing up, almost everyone I knew had either worked at McDonalds at some time or had family working there. My father had tried organizing McDonalds workers in Connecticut when he worked there. The biggest problem seemed to be that no union wanted fast food workers. I’ll never forget seeing the mothers of two of my friends, almost in tears, talking about how unfair it was that the men at Pratt and Whitney, or Colts could have unions but not them. McDonalds work is hot, greasy, hard, fast exhausting work.

So I try to help the Starbucks Workers Union, which is an IWW union in the US. and Canada. There is a union organizing campaign well under way in Chile and efforts have started in Europe. In New Zealand all the fast food chain restaurants are owned by one man and the employees are all union.

The Starbuck’s workers face severa unique problems. The company has a nationwide policy of no full time employment for non-management workers. This way they avoid having to pay benefits. Their U.S. employees also have no set schedules. A lawyer for Starbucks once said that this is to prevent the part-time staff from getting another job. If you work there you won’t know the next wee’s schedule until two or three days before the week starts.

Starbucks boasts that they offer health insurance for their employees but they make it almost impossible to get or to keep. To have the option of buying this insurance you need to work an average of 20 hours per week for the three-month quarter. The employees have no say in how many hours they work. Some weeks they may work 45 hours and the next week only seven. So the health insurance is really only a public relations stunt to impress customers.

In the shops where the baristas have announced their desire to unionize, Starbucks has refused to recognize the union. BUT in those shops, improvements have suddenly occurred. The first shop to go union soon became the first Starbucks to give all employees a December holiday cash bonus. In other locations safety and other improvements were made. In the U.S. the union has taken the company to court and won every time so far. The company spends large amounts of money on their lawyers in these cases.


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Marc Estrin : Happy Birthday, Albert Einstein

Posted on March 15, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Albert Einstein and Marie Curie.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ALBERT

(Albert Einstein was born on March 14th, 1879.)

Blanchot : “La réponse est le malheur de la question.” (The answer is the misfortune of the question.)

ALBERT EINSTEIN SAID

Sometimes I ask myself how it came about that I happened to be the one to discover the theory of relativity. The reason is, I think, that the normal adult never stops to think about space and time. Whatever thinking he or she did about these things will already have been done as a small child. It, on the other hand, was so slow to develop that I only began thinking about space and time when I was already grown up. Naturally I then went more deeply into the problem than an ordinary child.

THE ANSWER IS THE MISFORTUNE OF THE QUESTION

There exists a remarkable photograph of Einstein and Marie Curie standing together on a naked, blasted heath, both dressed in black — he in a cape, she in a hooded cloak. They look like allegorical figures from an early Bergman film — set eternally there for us to ponder their meaning, their relationship to one another, their relationship to us.

I’d been carrying that mysterious image around for a long time when I came upon a poem by Adrienne Rich which explained it to me:

Today I was reading about Marie Curie

She must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified.
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her
finger ends
till she could no longer hold a test tube or a
pencil

She died a famous woman denying her wounds
denying her wounds came from the same source
as her power.

Einstein, too, suffered from radiation sickness. Einstein, too, denied. Two kinds of radiation sickness, actually. Sickness over his unintended contribution — in theory and in practice — to the deaths of so many and the poisoning of the planet. And sickness about from-radiation-born physics, a disease within the whole swing of science which left him behind, an oddball, a hermit, a naysaying party pooper, a pathetic, has-been, once-important old man.

His wounds came from the same source as his power. The power to imagine an entirely other view of the world, of the universe, the view of someone who rides on a light beam. The power of the light-beam-rider to see the light also enabled him to envision a world without war, a world beyond nations, beyond power, greed and corruption. One can’t see these visions without being seriously wounded. One can’t be wounded without denying.

“God does not play at dice,” he said. Events in the world must have a cause, in spite of what the quantum mechanics were saying. At its deepest level the universe must be orderly, not random. If he could only find this statement which would describe it. “Forget it,” said the mechanics.

He wouldn’t forget it. His eyes were glued on the universe and the possibility of penetrating to the ultimate core where all secrets would be resolved and understood as the emanation of a single law. This law, the unified field theory, would be for him the name of God. He could never name the Name. His wounds came from the same source as his power. He could never name the Name

ALBERT EINSTEIN SAID

Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifested in the laws of the Universe — a spirit vastly superior to that of humanity, and one in the face of which we, with our modest powers, must feel humble. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is quite different from the religiosity of someone more naïve.

THE ANSWER IS THE MISFORTUNE OF THE QUESTION

MOSES AND ARON

He could never name the name of God. It is a remarkable coincidence that just at the time Einstein was leaving the physics community, beginning his retreat into the desert of his solitary vision quest, another German seeker was articulating something very similar. Let’s switch our eyes over to the power and wounds of Arnold Schoenberg, the great revolutionary who broke open a millennium of Western tradition to lead music into uncharted territory. Between 1923 in 1928 he worked on his largest, most ambitious and shattering work, his opera, Moses and Aron. This piece is a radical and comprehensive act of the imagination, an attempted human song in the face of the unspeakable immensity of God.

At the opening of the first act, Moses hears the wordless voice of God, and understands that it is einziger, ewiger, everywhere, invisible and inconceivable. Standing in relation to such a God, he cannot sing, he is almost dumb, he can express himself only in a halting, halfway manner, using a vocal technique of Schoenberg’s called Sprechstimme — half singing, half speaking, limited, frustrated, fallen. The voice from the burning Bush instructs him to prophesy the name of the eternal God. But he resists. He is too simple, he cannot speak, he cannot express the infinite.

No prob. Aron, his brother, sizes up the situation, and is ready for the job. He has a beautiful tenor voice, sight-sings well, and although describing the infinite God is a difficult task, he’ll give it a shot. Granted, it may be only an approximation, but it’s close enough for church work, and besides, the people need an image to hang onto, or they just won’t buy the whole business.

The opera concerns the conflict between Moses and Aron over trying to enclose the boundless in a finite image. Like Einstein.

ALBERT EINSTEIN SAID

I do not believe in a personal God. If something is in me which can be called religious, it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as science can reveal it. My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality.

THE ANSWER IS THE MISFORTUNE OF THE QUESTION

THE RETREAT FROM THE WORD

A nine-year-old asked me the other day “What did Einstein do?” I found it hard to describe. If he had invented the steam engine or discovered penicillin, or the charge on the electron, I could’ve explained more easily. But just try telling a child what Einstein did — it ain’t easy. And that is in large part because what he did is not in English. It’s not in German either. As his futile search dragged on, it was conducted more and more in the language of mathematical symbols, unrepresented by the tongue.

This was new, but not, perhaps, inappropriate. New because until relatively recently, our Judeo-Christian culture bore witness to the belief that all truth and realness — with the exception of a small, clear margin at the very top — could be housed inside the walls of spoken language. Until the 17th century, the predominant bias and content of the natural sciences were descriptive. But with the invention of analytic geometry and the theory of algebraic functions, with the development of calculus, mathematics transcended being an instrument to characterize certain aspects of nature, and became its own independent language, one of progressive untranslated ability. Mathematical forms and meanings have receded from spoken language at an ever accelerating pace. For no dictionaries to relate the vocabulary and grammar of contemporary higher mathematics to ordinary speech. One cannot even paraphrase.

This was the world in which Einstein ended. No more railroad cars and flashing lights of special relativity. Gone were the elevators of general relativity. Just pages and pages of reiterative tensor equations. The small, queer margin at the top. No song; beyond speech; never expressible even in its own terms. Einstein. Moses. The Unspeakable, Unreachable Absolute Idea of God.

ALBERT EINSTEIN SAID

The religious feeling engendered by experiencing the logical comprehensibility of profound interrelations is a somewhat different sort from the feeling that one usually calls religious. It is more a feeling of awe at this scheme that is manifested in the material universe. It does not lead us to fashion a godlike being in our own image — a personage who makes demands of us and to take some interest in us as individuals. There is in this neither will nor goal, but only sheer being.

THE ANSWER IS THE MISFORTUNE OF THE QUESTION

THE TRIAL OF ALBERT EINSTEIN

PROSECUTOR
Is it not true that your discoveries of mass and energy equivalence led directly to the production of atomic weapons?

EINSTEIN
(Shakes his head vehemently)

PROSECUTOR
Is it not true that you wrote a series of letters to President Roosevelt recommending that the United States develop an atomic bomb?

EINSTEIN
(Thinks, then shakes his head decisively)

GEORGE GAMOW
When Einstein accepted a consulting ship with the Bureau of Ordinance he said he would be unable to travel to Washington regularly, and that someone from the Division of High Explosives would have to come up to meet him at Princeton. I was selected to carry out the job. And so, on every other Friday, I took a morning train to Princeton, carrying a briefcase packed with secret Navy projects. Einstein would meet me in his study at home, and we would go through all the proposals one by one. He approved practically all of them, saying, “Oh, yes, very interesting, very, very ingenious,” and the next day the admiral in charge was quite happy with Einstein’s comments.

EINSTEIN (screams out)
I have never worked in the field of applied science, let alone for the military! I condemn the military mentality of our time just as you do! I have been a pacifist all my life, and I regard Gandhi as the only truly great political figure of our time!
(Pause, quietly…)
I just served as a mailbox. They brought me a letter and all I had to do was sign…

AUDIENCE APPLAUSE FOR FAMOUS SPEAKER EINSTEIN

EINSTEIN
Our time is distinguished by wonderful achievements in the fields of scientific understanding and technical application. But let us not forget that knowledge and skills alone cannot lead humanity to a happy and dignified life. What humanity owes to Buddha, Moses and Jesus ranks for me higher than all the achievements of the inquiring and constructive mind. What these blessed men have given us we must guard and try to keep alive with all our strength if humanity is not to lose its dignity, the security of its existence, and the joy in living.

APPLAUSE

EINSTEIN
The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our ways of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe. A new way of thinking is essential if humanity is to survive and move toward higher levels.

HUGE APPLAUSE

EINSTEIN
The big political doings of our time are so disheartening that one feels quite alone. It is as if people had lost the passion for justice and dignity and no longer treasured what better generations have won by extraordinary sacrifice. The foundation of all human value is morality. To have recognized this clearly in primitive times is the unique greatness of our Moses. In contrast, look at the people today…

POLITE APPLAUSE

EINSTEIN
(Yelling)
It is easier to change the nature of plutonium than people’s evil spirit!
(He looks at the clappers, who do not respond)
People grow cold faster than the planet they inhabit.
(He looks for God)
Mine eyes fail with looking upward.
(Pause)
Three great powers rule the world: stupidity, fear and greed.

SILENCE
THE ANSWER IS THE MISFORTUNE OF THE QUESTION

ALBERT EINSTEIN SAID

People like you and me, though mortal like everyone else, do not grow old no matter how long we live. What I mean is that we never cease to stand like curious children before the great Mystery into which we are born.

THE JEWISH QUEST FOR THE ABSOLUTE

Aron puts forth a comprehensible image so that Israel may live and not fall into despair. Moses loves an idea, an absolute vision, relentless in its purity. He would make of Israel the hollow, tormented vessel of an inconceivable presence.

Here, in George Steiner’s imagination (in The Portage to San Cristóbal of A.H.), is Hitler’s self-defense after he was captured as an old man in the Brazilian jungle:

“There had to be a solution, a FINAL solution. For what is the Jew if he is not a long cancer of unrest? Gentlemen I beg your attention. Was there ever a crueler invention, a contrivance more calculated to harrow human existence, than that of a non-impotent, all seeing, yet invisible, impalpable, inconceivable God?… the Jew emptied the world by setting his God apart. No image. No concrete embodiment. No imagining even. A blank emptier than the desert. Yet with a terrible nearness. Spying on our every misdeed, searching out the heart of our heart for motive… the Jew mocks those who have pictures of their God. HIS God is purer than any other. And because His inconceivable, unimaginable presence and develops us, we must obey every jot and tittle of the Law. We must bottle up our rages in desires, chastise the flesh and walk bent in the rain. You call me a tyrant, and enslaver. What tyranny, what enslavement has been more oppressive, has branded the skin and soul of man more deeply than the sick fantasies of the Jew? You are not God killers, but GOD makers. And that is infinitely worse. The Jew invented conscience and left humanity guilty serfs.

“But that was only the first piece of blackmail. There was worse to come. The white-faced Nazarene. Gentleman, I find it difficult to contain myself. But the facts speak for themselves. What did that epileptic rabbi ask of us? That we renounce the world, that we leave mother and father behind, that we offer the other cheek when slapped, that we render good for evil, that we love our neighbor as ourselves, no, far better, for self-love is an evil thing to be overcome. Oh grand castration! Note the cunning of it. Demand of human beings more than they can give, demand that they give up their stained, selfish humanity in the name of a higher ideal, and you will make of them cripples, hypocrites, mendicants for salvation. The Nazarene said that his kingdom, his purities were not of this world. Lies, honeyed lies. It was here on earth that he founded his slave-church. It was men and women, creatures of flesh, he abandoned to the blackmail of hell, of eternal punishment. What were our camps compared to THAT? What can be crueler than the Jew’s addiction to the ideal?

“First the invisible but all seeing, the unattainable but all demanding God of Sinai. Second the terrible sweetness of Christ. Had the Jew not done enough to sicken man? No, gentlemen, there is a third act to our story.

“‘Sacrifice yourself for the good of your fellow man. Relinquish your possessions so that there may be equality for all. So that justice may be achieved on earth. So that history may be fulfilled and society be purged of all imperfection.’ Do you recognize that sermon, gentlemen? Rabbi Marx. Was there ever a greater promise? ‘The classless society, to each according to his needs, brotherhood for all humanity, the earth made a garden again, a rational Eden.’ In the name of which promise tyranny, torture, war, extermination were a necessity, a historical necessity! It is no accident that Marx and his minions were Jews, that the congregations of Bolshevism — Trotsky, Rosa Luxembourg, the whole fanatic, murderous pack — were of Israel. Look at them: prophets, martyrs, smashers of images drunk with the terror of the absolute. It was only a step, gentleman, a small inevitable step, from Sinai to Nazareth, from Nazareth to the covenant of Marxism. The Jew had grown impatient. Let the kingdom of justice come here and now, next Monday morning. Let us have a secular messiah instead. But with a long beard and his bowels full of vengeance.

“You are not humanity’s conscience, Jew. You are only its bad conscience. And we shall vomit you so we may live and have peace.”

The Nazis set a price of 50,000 marks on Albert Einstein’s head.

ALBERT EINSTEIN SAID

You believe in a God who plays dice, and I in complete law and order in a world which objectively exists, and which I, in a wildly speculative way, am trying to capture. I hope that someone will discover a more realistic way, or rather a more tangible basis than it has been my lot to find.

THE ANSWER IS THE MISFORTUNE OF THE QUESTION

The physicists walked away from Einstein to follow Schrodinger’s cat. The old man was left alone on his deathbed, pad and pencil in hand.

ALBERT EINSTEIN SAID

God does not play at dice.

THE ANSWER IS THE MISFORTUNE OF THE QUESTION

[Marc Estrin is a writer and activist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

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Duh! Glenn Beck Discovers Springsteen’s a Pinko

Posted on March 13, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer


Glenn Beck finally listens to
‘Born in the USA’ — and freaks

By Jason Linkins / March 12, 2010

You wouldn’t think this was possible, but Glenn Beck had apparently never actually sat down and listened to Bruce Springsteen’s “Born In The USA,” never heard the lyrics, never formed a familiarity with the song’s storied history in American politics, until this week, I guess? Anyway, now that he’s heard that the song isn’t some glorious tongue-bath to American exceptionalism, he’s denouncing it on the radio. Per Lindsay Beyerstein:

Twenty-six years after the release of Bruce Springsteen’s hit song, “Born in The USA,” conservative talk show host/performance artist Glenn Beck finally got around to listening to the lyrics.

Beck was shocked, shocked to discover that for all these years he’d been rocking out to a song about a bitter down-and-out Vietnam vet who has been kicked to the curb by the aforementioned USA.

Via Spencer Ackerman , here’s what Beck had to say about it:

BECK: You get filled with patriotic pride, and then you find out that Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born In The U.S.A.’ is anti-American. ‘Born down in a dead man’s town/ the first kick I took is when I hit the ground/ you end up like a dog that’s been beat too much/ so you spend half your life just covering up…’ [He reads the entire lyrics in an incredulous tone of voice; manages to mispronounce ‘Khe Sanh’]

Hmm. Yeah! [crosstalk] … It’s time for us to wake up out of our dream state. Out of the propaganda… This is the thing that people who come from the Soviet bloc or Cuba, they’re all saying, ‘How do you guys not hear this? How are you not seeing this?’ Well, because we don’t ever expect it.

All of this gives me the opportunity to bring up one thing that’s always puzzled me about Beck: his love of the band Muse. Beck follows Muse on Twitter , and he took the stage at CPAC to the tune of their recent hit, “Uprising.” Here’s the video, you can hear the song pretty clearly:

Don’t get me wrong, Muse is awesome. But what’s weird about Beck’s embrace of Muse is that their lead singer, Matthew Bellamy, is a 9/11 “Truther.”

From Spin Magazine, August, 2009:

“When I was younger, my mother communicated with ghosts,” says Bellamy as the limo snakes its way to Manhattan’s South Street Seaport and the posed and dissected cadavers that constitute the “Bodies” exhibit. “She and my dad would invite friends over to use a Ouija board and talk with spirits. I was allowed to watch. I imagine my interest in the unknown started then.”

That curiosity about what lies beyond has never gone away, and it has taken a particularly sinister turn. “I’ve always been quite interested in conspiracy theory, and I still am,” says the slight Bellamy, dressed for the macabre occasion in a light-blue striped button-down shirt, black slacks, and black loafers, his brown hair styled in the irregular thatch favored by Brit rockers since 1965. “But I’ve learned to be careful in talking about this stuff. People take my curiosity as evidence of belief. I think as I get older, I’ll become more and more interested in pursuing verifiable lines of thinking rather than blurting out my opinions.”

Until then:

On 9/11: “There is evidence that suggests the powers that be knew of the attacks beforehand and let them happen. There’s a video on YouTube called Loose Change that explains it.”

I hate to take Bellamy’s “curiosity as evidence of belief,” but he’s been
talking up 9/11 as an “inside job” for a long time.

Music is just music. But Beck very recently torched Texas gubernatorial candidate Debra Medina for espousing these same “Truther” beliefs, so it’s sort of funny to see him making allowances for Muse, while assailing The Boss for being un-American for that time he thought we should take better care of our veterans.

Source / Huffington Post

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John Ross in Obamalandia : Death Waltz Across Texas

Posted on March 13, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

John Ross. Photo from Con Carlitos.

Loose in Obamalandia:
Death waltz across Texas
(With apologies to Ernest Tubbs)

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / March 13, 2010

I.

Paranoia stalks the skies. At LAX, flying towards Texas, I am pulled out of the line and the TSA goon swabs my hands for explosives. I figure it must be my kaffiya but a friend who flies into L.A. the next day from Puerto Rico is ordered to remove her skirt. She has to chase down her carry-ons in her tights.

Airports have become deep ponds of fear and loathing in Obama’s America ever since the Nigerian Unabomber almost pulled off his Christmas Day caper. I am putting myself on my own no-fly list.

This is not to say that terrorists are not prepared to assault us from the friendly skies. The morning after I touched down in Austin, a native-born terrorista of the Christian Caucasian persuasion flies a small plane into the local IRS offices 9-11 style, killing himself and one government worker. Joe Stack had a longstanding beef with the revenooers and has since become a martyr for the Glenn Beck vigilantes. Wesley Snipes is probably not going to be invited to Michelle’s White House cultural klatches anytime soon.

Altar for Raul R. Salinas (1934-2008). Photo by Jane Madrigal / San Antonio Current photostream / Flickr.

II.

Two years nearly to the day that Raul R. Salinas, the Xicano warrior-poeta, passed on to the Great Beyond, I read at Resistencia, the bookstore-cultural center he grew in south Austin. Before the reading, Rene shows clips of the last time Raul and I and Roberto Vargas, the fine Nicaraguan/La Mision compa, read at Resistencia. Raul blows a poem from the grave for Lester Young and he is Prez himself, the slow blue notes surging out of the bell of his voice.

I read a poem that I had just penned on the flight in (writing poems on commercial flights may soon be a federal felony), “Remission” (I have liver cancer): “I am in remission / I am on a mission / To wake up the brain-dead and dying…”

The Journalism Department at the University of Texas houses me in a cheese box motel that seems to be run by the Corrections Corporation of America. I talk to the brain-dead and dying in one of Bob Jensen’s classes. “You don’t have a career in journalism,” I warn them, “you have a responsibility to seek out the truth. To tell the stories with which you have been entrusted. To protect those who have told you their stories.

“You must go to the place where it happened. They will not like you there but you will learn much from their anger. Write it all down right away in your head. Do not let the details leak out no matter how badly they beat you…”

Some in the audience squirmed. Rigor mortis has not yet set in.

III.

I eschew the big box bookstores that are committing commercial genocide on the independents. Mostly I work anarchist enclaves with names like Monkeywrench and Sedition, tiny emporiums of subversion in Austin and Houston. At the University of Houston, I spoke about impending revolution in a class on the Mexican revolution taught by John Mason Hart, the maestro of Mexican anarchism. The usually brain-dead students seemed measurably animated. “I am in remission / I am on a mission / to raise the corpses of comatose students…”

IV.

David Carlson, a professor of radical history with a vault of fascinating minutiae running all ’round his brain, and his partner Deirdre, drove me down to the Rio Grande Valley. David first saw me reading Subcomandante Marcos’s latest communiqué from my dim laptop to a roomful of anarchos at the Black Cat Café, a slimy vegan soup kitchen, in a driving rain storm in Seattle circa 1995 and invited me to speak at the UT-Pan American campus — the university, which graduates 800 members of the Migra a year and through which David avows the CIA washes oodles of greenbacks, did not invite me but we rented a room and I spread my verbal curare anyway to a handful of the undead.

The signs along the highway on the way south told the story of today’s Texas: GUNS! MEAT! PAWN! The paranoia amped up the closer we came to the border. Motorists are stopped and frisked at surprise checkpoints and the nether parts of their vehicles probed in a not-very successful campaign to stop the bales of USD bills and displays of machine guns from pipelining into Mexico. At one point, David’s mobile was penetrated by mysterious red and blue rays radiating from roadside sensors. There were no UFOs hovering overhead so I assume this electronic pat-down was your Homeland Security at work. Why do I keep getting the chilly sensation that this is no country for old men?

The border wall at the Hidalgo Pump House and World Birding Center.Photo from swarthmore.edu.

V.

We went to visit the Wall where Hidalgo Texas fronts up Reynosa Tamaulipas across the bends of the Rio Grande (it’s called the Rio Bravo on the Other Side.) In Hidalgo, the Separation Wall is built around a restored pump house and bird sanctuary and resembles one of Richard Serra’s hideous installations. The aluminum cylinders that form the wall have enough room between them to allow a snake to squiggle through but the jabalis and other mid-sized mammals whose habitat this is are caged up north and south of this man-made North American monstrosity.

Down here where even dogs and their fleas are subject to deportation (the fleas were born here), everyone carries two sets of picture I.D. and flies multiple Stars & Stripes from their front porches.

The pinnacle of my sojourn in the Valley was an evening at the Narciso Martinez Cultural Center in San Benito. Narciso Martinez was one of the original maestros of the TexMex School of conjunto accordionistics and his instruments — ornate squeezeboxes — are on display at the center. The afternoon we parked in San Benito, Pfc. Adriana Alvarez who had fallen in Iraq (no cause of death was revealed in the Valley Morning Star story) was buried out of a local chapel. A hundred mourners were on hand, many of them representing local public safety agencies and Adriana was made an honorary member of the San Benito Police Department.

The gig at the Narciso Martinez was a joy. Irma Guadarrama, still the most beautiful woman in south Texas, warbled two handmade songs and my energies were choogling. Rogelio Nunez, a mainstay of the Center, also directs the fortunes of Project Libertad, which has stood up to the Migra and defended newly arrived indocumentados for decades. Rogelio offered me a three month writer-in-residence at the crumbling Stonewall Jackson Hotel in San Benito. Being a connoisseur of fleabag hotels. I just might take him up on it.

VI.

At the other end of Texas, El Paso is trapped in the crossfire between two wars: the bloodcurdling drug war right across the river in Juarez, and the U.S. war on the world out at Fort Bliss where soldiers freshly flown home from Iraq and Afghanistan and now Pakistan and all the other Last Stans, strangle their wives in their sleep, apparently hallucinating that they are the enemy.

The daily body count over in Juarez outpaces the kill count in the besieged Taliban stronghold of Marjah. At every presentation, hands shoot up to probe my opinions on the drug violence. Sometimes I refuse to answer.

The U.S. skew on Mexico has become synonymous with severed heads, the slaughter of innocents, naked castrated men dangling from freeway overpasses with signs pinned to their chests paying obeisance to Santa Muerte. Mexico is so much more than this macabre Gran Guignol, it is a civilization and a political crucible where the fightback of El Pueblo should be an inspiration to brain dead and dying gavachos.

At UTEP (University of Texas – El Paso) attendance is plummeting because students from Juarez can no longer traverse the big river. I spoke about prospects for a new Mexican revolution – the old one exploded in Ciudad Juarez an even hundred years ago – seeking to measure the objective conditions which are overripe for fresh uprising and the dearth of social forces that could ignite a new one. The audience listened for a while but inevitably the questions about the glut of gore spilled daily across the river took over.

Ironically, El Paso is flourishing in the wake of all the killing (over a thousand in 2009.) Restaurateurs and retailers have packed up and moved their inventories to the Texas side and the city is enjoying a real estate boom as the exodus of middle and upper classes seeking to escape the carnage crests.

Felipe Calderon’s ill-advised drug war drowns out all other news. Even Las Muertas, the hundreds of women raped and slain in Juarez since 1993, has disappeared from public attentions. The untimely passing of Esther Garcia, the mother of the mothers of the murdered and disappeared, has only compounded the silence.

Lee and Bobby Byrd / Cinco Puntos Press.

Driving through El Paso en route to Las Cruces, Bobby Byrd, the patriarch of the Byrd clan whose Cinco Puntos Press is a beacon of culture in this high desert wasteland, is on his cell phone – gabbing while driving is still legal in Texas as several near side-swipes by distracted chauffeurs underscored. Bobby is hobnobbing with Reyes Tejirina whose takeover of the Tierra Amarilla courthouse in a land grant dispute back in 1967 is now enshrined in southwest school textbooks. Reyes, now a doddering elder who preaches The Protocols of Zion, wants Bobby to drive him to the airport when he flies up to Chicago for an appearance with Minister Farrakhan.

El Paso, of all tank towns, now has its very own Holocaust Museum financed by local Zionist moneybags. As we drift past the shuttered stacks and smelters of ASARCO (Bobby’s daughter and a member of the El Paso City Council, led the battle to squelch the reopening of this death trap), the elder Byrd muses on this unlikely turn of events. “The real El Paso holocaust is buried out there in the Smeltertown cemetery.”

We cross the state line into New Mexico, the Land of Enchantment and private prisons, a saga to be reviewed in the next installment of this quixotic journey through the underbelly of Obama’s America

[John Ross, who contributes to The Rag Blog from Mexico, made appearances in Texas in mid-March as part a book tour for his new cult classic El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City (“gritty and pulsating” — New York Post). He continues to, in his words, “slog across Obama’s America,” and will be in Madison, Wisconsin; Traverse City and Grand Rapids, Michigan; and Chicago (Heartland Café, March 31st) during the final two weeks of March. Consult johnross@igc.org or www.nationbooks.org for local dates.]

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Realm of the Census : Partisan Fundraising Fracas

Posted on March 13, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer


Bunch of partisan baloney?
GOP census knockoff and Dem rejoinder

By Larry Ray / The Rag Blog / March 12, 2010

‘Breaking News: House Bans GOP FAKE Census Surveys’

The headline on the email sent by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, DCCC, forwarded to me the evening of March 11, 2009, by a family friend, certainly caught my attention. Fake census surveys mailed out by the Republicans? The Dynamic Democrats lead a charge and the house bans such underhanded things in a 416-0 vote?

The breathless email began:

Executive Director Jon Vogel just sent this message to DCCC supporters:

Friend — The House of Representatives voted today 416-0 to ban misleading fundraising (sic) letters disguised as 2010 Census forms.

Our Republican counterparts at the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) and the Republican National Committee (RNC) recently sent out deceptive political fundraising (sic) letters that looked like U.S. Census letters so they could fill their campaign accounts with cash from a misleading and deceptive fake census letter, leaving taxpayers like us to foot the bill!

I had not seen or heard anything on the evening news about this “breaking news” so I checked out the latest on The New York Times, CNN, Huffington Post, Christian Science Monitor and a couple of others’ web sites. Nothing.

But something didn’t whoof right. I finally found a short AP dispatch about a House Resolution submitted a month ago, February 9, 2009, by Representative Carolyn B. Maloney of New York, “To protect the integrity of the constitutionally-mandated United States census and prohibit deceptive mail practices that attempt to exploit the decennial census.” Seems the Republicans mailed out a right leaning poll recently with boxes to check for answers and the word “census” was used instead of “poll” and appeared on a page.

The breaking news was that “The legislation passed the House 416-0, after two Republicans who sit on the House panel overseeing the census, Rep. Darrell Issa of California and Jason Chaffetz of Utah, agreed to co-sponsor the measure.”

This particular legislation, a page and a half resolution, H.R. 4621, is titled, “To protect the integrity of the constitutionally-mandated United States census and prohibit deceptive mail practices that attempt to exploit the decennial census.”

The short title as passed in the house is, “Prevent Deceptive Census Look Alike Mailings Act.” The real title should be “To stop the GOP fundraisers from sending out loaded right-leaning questionnaires using the word ‘census’ for their slanted poll.” This kind of subterfuge could confuse really dumb folks, or really mad folks who might think it is a census form and send money back with it to help fill up the Repug coffers. Sounds like Tea Party logic to me.

So, wow! The House bans these repugnant fake GOP census surveys according to this DCCC Email? In spite of the DCCC newsletter headline, nothing is banned at all. All that has happened so far is a regular sausage-grinder vote.

This short resolution was one in a stack of other resolutions agreeing unanimously to fearlessly support God, Country and even the Census. The vote came, “On a motion to suspend the rules and pass the bill, as amended. Agreed to by the Yeas and Nays (2/3 required).” And Varooooom! It passed… like wind in an Aristophanes play.

The Library of Congress web site is a great place to follow the traffic jam of tough, detailed proposed laws as well as apple pie proclamations, resolutions and bills as they inch forward like marbles in a twisted tube.

The “Prevent Deceptive Census Look Alike Mailings Act” passed the House at 2:09 P.M., March 10th. The following day it was, “received in the Senate and read twice and referred to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs” where it will certainly be rushed through by Senators in a huge show of bipartisanship.

In these tough times, finally a resolution to be remembered. A gutsy move to protect the census is now getting underway. Certainly it will zip right out of committee and the winning Senate vote will come on the very day a flight of pigs swoops over that august chamber.

Quick review:

Democrats tore themselves away from getting a health care bill passed and cobbling together 216 votes needed to do that and instead went to bat to stop the possibility of anyone misrepresenting the Census form with evil intent.

They got not just 216 votes but 416 votes to protect the census. The DCCC email newsletter concluded,

Republicans once again made clear they will do anything for campaign cash. The news of these fake Census surveys comes on the heels of the leaked outrageously offensive RNC presentation which showed they planned to use fear through socialist imagery to win the elections next November. You have my assurance that the DCCC will never send anything like this to you, our valued supporters, or to any American taxpayer.

Please take this time to forward this information to your friends and family to warn and make sure they are filling out their official US Census form.”

I thought Orrin Hatch’s Republican Senate Committee email newsletters asking for money were loopy, but the Dems have him beat. The DCCC could have also told us that if a poll comes from the Republicans with their letterhead and logos on the top of the page, on the envelope and below the closing signature it is not a census form, even if the word “census” can be found somewhere on the page.

Another sure check of a legit census form is that it does not have a box to check with how much money you are sending back with it and no elephant or donkey designs on it either.

[Retired journalist Larry Ray is a Texas native and former Austin television news anchor. He also posts at The iHandbill.]

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Posted on March 12, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

By Dr. Stephen R. Keister. Even though many in the Congressional fight for health care reform are primarily driven by personal political agendas (read: abortion and Rep. Bart Stupak), it appears that some form of legislation may actually be passed. But will it be worth the paper it’s written on?

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Colombia: Six Decades of Fighting for Peace : Paramilitary Reemerges

Posted on March 12, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer


A Promise of Peace:
Colombia and the paramilitary successor groups

By Marion Delgado / The Rag Blog / March 11, 2010

Part three: Resurgence

In my last posting I looked at the demobilization of Colombia’s paramilitary blocs in an agreement with the government of Álvaro Uribe Velez, overseen by the OAS (Organization of American States) that took place in 2003-2006. The government estimated that there were between 7,000 and 9,000 paracos when the process began. By February 2006 they claimed 17,000 were “demobilized”; now it appears, according to Human Rights Watch, that 31,671 persons participated in the demobilization process.

For the most part this peace process was Uribe’s gift to the paramilitaries that he and his cousin, Mario Uribe, helped to create when Alvaro was a senator, a sort of “get out of jail free card” with many benefits. Besides a few dozen leaders of the blocs who were extradited to the U.S. to stand trial for drug trafficking and money laundering, the paracos were shuffled through a loose process and sent out to become good citizens again. Now it appears that it didn’t happen that way.

The Colombian Attorney General has said repeatedly that the paramilitars no longer exist. Only recently has the government taken notice of two social phenomena that the Colombian people have known about all along. First, in many cases, the paracos, although going through a demobilization ceremony, never really demobilized at all, but continued to maintain control over vast areas of Colombia, and specifically over the cocaine trade.

Second, there are a growing number of successor groups, new paracos, if you will, that have organized and stepped up to fill the power vacancies left by the demobilization process. A third phenomenon combines both of these. Middle level leaders from the old blocs are back in business as organizers and controllers of “new” successor groups.

There are differences between the successors of the paramilitary groups and the demobilized Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC). First, the successor groups seem to operate relatively independently of each other; apparently they have not yet formed a coalition to articulate common goals and interests, coordinate their criminal activities, and, in some cases, their military-type operations.

Second, leaders have less visibility than some of the leaders of the AUC — for example, AUC founder Carlos Castaño. Most of the successor groups seem less focused on fighting guerrilla insurgents than was the AUC. What they have in common with the AUC is a strong involvement in Mafia-type criminal activity, including drug trafficking, as reported not only by the government but also by the Mission to Support the Peace Process in Colombia of the OAS (MAPP/OE).

According to police reports about the structure of the successor groups, most are led by former mid-level leaders of the AUC who never demobilized or simply continued to operate after a supposed demobilization. This is the case with Pedro Oliverio Guerrero (“Cuchillo”), leader of ERPAC (El Ejército Revolucionario Popular Antisubversivo de Colombia), several leaders of groups operating in Medellin, and Ovidio Isaza in the Magdalena Medio region, among others.

Daniel Rendon (see below), who directed the Urabeños bloc until his capture in 2009, also was a member of the AUC and a brother of Freddy Rendon, leader of the Elmer Cardenas Bloc. The main exception is the group Rastrojos that reportedly originated as an armed drug cartel in the North Valley and was not allowed to participate in the demobilization process.

As with the blocs of the AUC, the successor groups are deeply involved in crime, including drug smuggling, extortion, and money laundering. Early AUC blocs were formed from the group “Muerte a Secuestradores” (MAS; Death to Kidnappers), an alliance formed in the eighties by drug lords Pablo Escobar, Fidel Castano, Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, and others, in order to free traffickers or smugglers who had been abducted by guerrilla groups.

In Norte de Santander, for example, even though the Catatumbo Bloc of the AUC participated in horrific massacres of civilians who were identified as “guerrilla sympathizers,” sources report that seldom did they have direct combat with the guerrillas. Its main activity was to control lucrative drug running and smuggling operations along the border with Venezuela, as well as extortion and other criminal activities.

Many paramilitaries, such as “Don Berna” and “Macaco,” were simply drug traffickers who were presented before the world as paracos.

A senior officer of the police said that he saw a clear continuity between paramilitary groups and successor groups, in the sense that some AUC blocs “were not paramilitaries but were drug mafias who grabbed the paramilitary identity during demobilization. [The successor groups] are the product of a deception for demobilization. These guys tricked us all. They recruited displaced children. Then they killed some of the demobilized.”

Emergence and development of the successor groups

Demobilization of the AUC officially ended on August 15, 2006. Subsequently, many successor groups closely linked with the AUC appeared.

MAPP/OAS, relying on official information from the Colombian police, reported in early 2007 that it had identified “22 structures in which there is participation of mid-level demobilized [persons], recruitment of former combatants of the AUC, and control of illicit economies.” MAPP/OAS said that such groups then had approximately 3,000 members.

Since then, numbers of members of these groups and areas in which they operate have grown steadily. Estimates of the number of successor groups and their membership vary significantly according to the source, but in some cases reach 10,200 members.

In mid 2008, MAPP/OAS expressed concern that “these factions continue and even increase, despite the actions taken by the security forces. This shows a significant capacity for resistance and renewal, with resources that allow for constant recruitment and maintenance of corruption at the local level.”

According to police, who produce the most conservative figures, the total number of groups has declined, as many have merged or been absorbed within each other, and some have disappeared or been defeated. However, membership has grown and continues to grow. As of July 17, 2009, police said that the successor groups had 4,037 members, an increase over the 3,760 that they had estimated a few months earlier, in February 2009. Successor groups operate in 24 of the 32 departments of Colombia.

Police figures also show that during the same period, groups began to operate in 21 new municipalities, and went from having a presence in 152 municipalities to 173.

Paramilitary leader Edwin Mauricio Gómez luna was extradited in 2008. Photo by Raul Arboleda / AFP / Getty Images.

The main successor groups

In mid-2009, police records indicated there were nine successor groups in business. According to police sources and the Attorney General, four are significantly stronger than the rest, and are the main focus of the authorities.

  • The Urabá or Urabeños: Previously, this group was led by Daniel Rendon (also known as “Don Mario“), who was demobilized from the AUC and is the brother of Freddy Rendon Arias (“The German”), former leader of the Elmer Cárdenas Bloc that supposedly demobilized in 2006. After the capture of Don Mario in early 2009, police documents indicated that the group came under the command of Juan de Dios Usuga David, also known as “Giovanni.”

    However, in October 2009 police arrested another man, Omar Alberto Gomez, known as “El Guajiro,” who they identified as the group’s leader. According to police records, this group, that had previously used other names such as “Castaño’s Heroes” (referring to the late AUC leader Carlos Castaño) and “Self-Defense Forces of Colombia Gaitanistas,” has extended its area of operations from the Urabá region of Chocó and Antioquia to nine departments and 79 municipalities. It is reported that the group has 1,120 members.

  • The Stubble: According to multiple reports received by Human Rights Watch, Stubble was the armed drug cartel “Valle Norte” (North Valley), that historically was linked to Wilber Varela (also known as “Jabon“), a drug dealer murdered in Venezuela in January 2008. It is believed that they had links with the demobilized paramilitary leader Carlos Mario Jimenez Naranjo (also known as “Macaco“). The group attempted to participate in the demobilization process, but ultimately it was not allowed because the government considered them a criminal organization.

  • Paisas: Paisas are the heirs of paramilitary leader Don Berna, and have links with their “Office of Envigado,” a criminal organization operating in Medellin. According to multiple sources, Don Berna continued to control these groups from prison. It’s been reported that, since his extradition, there have been many internal struggles and possible splits of the group. Official documents indicate that Paisa operates in seven departments and 45 municipalities with 415 members. It is said that their current leader is Fabio Velez (also known as “Nito“).

  • Popular Revolutionary Army or ERPAC: This group is led by Pedro Oliverio Guerrero Castillo (also known as “Cuchillo“). Cuchillo is a longtime paraco leader who first operated in the private army of drug trafficker Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, and then joined the Centaurs Bloc of the AUC. It is said that Miguel Arroyave (aka “Arcangel”) led the Centaurs Bloc. He participated in the demobilization process as leader of the Heroes of Guaviare, but continued his illegal activity. The ERPAC operates mainly in the plains east of Bogota, in the departments of Meta, Casanare, Guaviare and Vichada, although police reports indicate that it also has a presence in Arauca and Guainía. Police estimate that it has 770 members.

In addition, the police say that they have identified the following groups:

  • Renacer: Police say the group operates in 11 municipalities in Chocó department under the command of Jose Maria Negrete (also known as “Raul“), and has 100 members.

  • New generation or “n”: Human Rights Watch has received credible information that this group was created by members of the Bloque Libertadores del Sur of the AUC almost immediately after their supposed demobilization. Police say they operate in three municipalities of Nariño, under the orders of Omar Grannobles (also known as “El Tigre“), with 114 members.

  • The Middle Magdalena: Police report that this group operates in eight municipalities in four departments, with 80 members. Its leader is Ovidio Isaza (also known as “Roque”). Isaza is a former leader of the AUC in the Magdalena Medio region. He is the son of Ramon Isaza, one of the earliest and most prominent leaders of the AUC. After their supposed demobilization, although they were never involved in the process of Justice and Peace, Ramon was released by the authorities for lack of evidence.

  • Males: Like the Stubble, it is said that this group is the armed wing of a drug cartel that existed previously. Police say it operates in two municipalities of Valle del Cauca department and has 44 members.

  • Rastrojos: The Rastrojos operate in 10 departments and 50 municipalities, have 1394 members, and are under the command of Antonio Calle Javier Serna (also known as “The Doctor”).

Interviews with victims and local authorities across the country suggest that police figures underestimate the number of members and the number of successor groups. In some areas, Human Rights Watch received information about the existence of groups that the police did not recognize.

For example, in an interview with Human Rights Watch, a senior member of the police forces said the group Black Eagles of Narino is “more myth” that reality. However, on several occasions, Human Rights Watch received matching information from inhabitants of Nariño about the operations of the Black Eagles, who control various parts of the territory, threatening civilians and, apparently, waging a bloody battle against Rastrojos for control of Tumaco.

Less than two months after denying the existence of the Black Eagles, police announced the capture of 36 members of the group in Nariño. Similarly, although the police indicate that the ERPAC has only 770 members, news reports have quoted data from the Army and the Technical Research Office estimating that it has 1,120 members and is growing rapidly through active recruitment.

“Masacre en Colombia.” Painting by Fernando Botero.

Who are the Black Eagles?

In many parts of the country, witnesses who contacted Human Rights Watch said that people who ordered crimes of murder, forced displacement, rape, and threats of the same were identified as members of the Black Eagles. Leaflets and written threats against human rights defenders often bear the signature of Black Eagles.

Police told Human Rights Watch that the Black Eagles were not a single group, but merely a name that had been appropriated by various groups, including local gangs, to instill fear among the population.

However, Nariño Human Rights Watch received similar complaints from several residents and authorities in that region indicating that the Black Eagles are actually a single successor group with a high degree of coordination which operates in many respects like a Bloc of the AUC.

In Urabá, Human Rights Watch received reports that local successor groups (the Urabeños) have sometimes been identified as Black Eagles, and have used this name interchangeably with others. These groups are not merely local gangs. But Human Rights Watch received no solid information that the various groups using the name Black Eagles were a single national group.

Successor groups actively recruit members by offering very high salaries and, sometimes, using threats to force people to join their ranks. They often seek potential members among the demobilized population.

According to a former paraco from Sucre, when he was demobilized in 2005, his boss told the group, “Whoever… wants to return, can return” to their area of operations in Antioquia. “They’re there. The story is not over,” he said.

Another demobilized paraco said, “There are people who go to the new groups… There are guys who ask me if I would be ready to go again. You feel afraid to speak. Many people have been killed for talking. The AUC has not been dissolved… There are others who go, new people. [Payment] is never less than half a million pesos ($250 U.S.). It’s easy to enter, but it’s hard to leave.”

As reported by Human Rights Watch and officials of MAPP, it is estimated that over 50% of successor group members are recently recruited individuals. Mission members say the groups often use threats and deception to persuade new members to join.

So, it appears that the “AUC peace process” was just a sham perpetrated from the very beginning by Álvaro Uribe to pay off his friends and to cover up his and his government’s complicity in the unspeakable crimes of the AUC.

This should be enough reporting on the indignities the Colombian people suffer at the hands of criminals and the criminal government that bring suffering to every aspect of life here in Colombia. But it isn’t, there is one more atrocity to add. Read this story from The Colombian newspaper:

Up to 14,000 Colombian children recruited by armed groups

Friday, 12 February 2010

There are between 8,000 and 14,000 children involved in Colombia’s ongoing conflict, working for gangs and armed groups, according to figures released by an NGO on Friday to mark the International Day Against the Use of Child Soldiers.
The Humanitarian Diplomatic Mission, a Medellin-based NGO, reports that Colombia has the fourth-highest number of child soldiers in the world, behind Burma, Sudan, and the Congo.

“In the last two years, the conflict in Colombia has changed, and there are now children in the intermediate structures of these armed groups doing intelligence work and drug trafficking,” their report says.

Children as young as six are involved in the conflict, either carrying arms or doing intelligence work.

The level of violence against children in Colombia is “very high,” according to the report. Sergio Tapia, the NGO’s president, told Caracol Radio that, “We suspect that 10% of victims of paramilitaries are children,” and that thousands of these deaths have not been reported to authorities.

The International Day Against the Use of Child Soldiers, February 12, commemorates the UN protocol which came into force on this date in 2002, banning the recruitment of minors under the age of 18 into armed groups.

The report supports remarks made by Colombian Vice President Santos on Wednesday, in which he called the [Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia] FARC’s recruitment of minors “a disgrace,” and expressed the government is very concerned about this phenomenon, the recruitment of children.

There was no mention of his friends and supporters, the paramilitars.

Also see:

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SUNDAY : Celebrate Albert Einstein’s Birthday With Us

Posted on March 11, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

THIS SUNDAY!


Rag Blog Benefit Bash and
Albert Einstein Birthday Party

The Rag Blog, the Austin-based progressive internet newsmagazine, is celebrating Albert Einstein’s 131st birthday with a big benefit bash at Jovita’s, 1617 South 1st Street in Austin, from 6-9 p.m., this Sunday, March 14.

The event features a stellar lineup of musicians including Barbara K, Leeann Atherton, Noëlle Hampton, Elizabeth Wills, Karen Abrahams, and Richard Bowden with Instruments for Peace.

There will also be a sneak preview of the first 15 minutes of a documentary film being made by People’s History in Texas (working title: The Truth as We Saw It) — about The Rag, the legendary underground newspaper published in Austin from 1966-1977.

Jovita’s full bar and food menu will be available. There is no charge, but a donation of $10 is suggested.

If you are unable to join us in this celebration, please help us out with a $10 one-time or recurring donation. Click the DONATE button on the sidebar, or click HERE. The funds go to support The Rag Blog, published by the New Journalism Project, a Texas 510(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

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MEDIA / ACORN Hoax : Times Won’t Admit It Was Wrong

Posted on March 11, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Pimp and ho: James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles went undercover at ACORN. But guess what: They weren’t dressed like this!

NYT and the ACORN Hoax:
Paper won’t admit its mistakes

March 11, 2010

Ignoring calls from numerous critics, the New York Times refuses to own up to mistakes in the paper’s coverage of the now-famous right-wing videotapes attacking the community organizing group ACORN. Instead, the paper’s public editor, Clark Hoyt, is relying on an absurd semantic justification in order to claim the paper does not need to print any corrections.

As conventionally reported in the Times and elsewhere, right-wing activists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles dressed up as a pimp and a prostitute and visited several local ACORN offices, where office workers gave the duo advice on setting up a brothel, concealing a child prostitution ring and so forth. But many of the key “facts” surrounding the videos are either in dispute or are demonstrable fabrications.

Though O’Keefe appears in various scenes in the videos wearing a garish and absurd “pimp” costume, he in fact did not wear the outfit when he appeared in the ACORN offices (Washington Independent, 2/19/10); he was dressed in a button-down shirt and slacks. This fact undermines one of the key contentions of the ACORN smear–that the group is so hopelessly corrupt that they would dispense advice to an obvious criminal.

What’s more, the “advice” that they received, according to the transcripts released by O’Keefe and Giles, does not appear to be as incriminating as it was portrayed in the videos–and echoed in outlets like the New York Times.

A review of the Times coverage:

  • In an early piece (9/16/09), readers were told of the “amateur actors, posing as a prostitute and a pimp and recorded on hidden cameras in visits to ACORN offices…. Conservative advocates and broadcasters were gleeful about the success of the tactics in exposing ACORN workers, who appeared to blithely encourage prostitution and tax evasion.” The Times explained:

    The undercover videos showed a scantily dressed young woman, Hannah Giles, posing as a prostitute, while a young man, James O’Keefe, played her pimp. They visited ACORN offices in Baltimore, Washington, Brooklyn and San Bernardino, Calif., candidly describing their illicit business and asking the advice of ACORN workers. Among other questions, they asked how to buy a house to use as a brothel employing underage girls from El Salvador.

    The paper also reported that O’Keefe “was dressed so outlandishly that he might have been playing in a risque high school play. But in the footage made public–initially by a new website, BigGovernment.com–ACORN employees raised no objections to the criminal plans. Instead, they eagerly counseled the couple on how to hide their activities from the authorities, avoid taxes and make the brothel scheme work.”

  • Three days later (9/19/09): “Their travels in the gaudy guise of pimp and prostitute through various offices of ACORN, the national community organizing group, caught its low-level employees in five cities sounding eager to assist with tax evasion, human smuggling and child prostitution.”

  • New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt weighed in (9/27/09), chiding the paper for not being more aggressive in promoting the ACORN videos–lamenting that Times readers weren’t as up-to-speed on the story as “followers of Fox News,” who already knew “that a video sting had caught ACORN workers counseling a bogus prostitute and pimp on how to set up a brothel staffed by under-age girls, avoid detection and cheat on taxes.”

  • The following week (10/4/09), Hoyt was on the ACORN case again: “To recap: Two conservative activists with a concealed video camera, posing as a prostitute and her pimp, visited offices of ACORN, the community organizing group, and lured employees into bizarre conversations about how to establish a bordello, cheat on taxes and smuggle in underage girls from Central America.”

  • After O’Keefe was charged in January with attempting to tamper with the phone system in Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office, the Times reported under the headline, “After Arrest, Provocateur’s Tactics Are Questioned”
    (1/28/10): “Mr. O’Keefe is a conservative activist who gained fame last year by posing as a pimp and secretly recording members of the community group ACORN giving him advice on how to set up a brothel.”

  • On January 31, 2010: “Mr. O’Keefe made his biggest national splash last year when he dressed up as a pimp and trained his secret camera on counselors with the liberal community group ACORN — eliciting advice on financing a brothel on videos that would threaten to become ACORN’s undoing.

  • On March 2, 2010, under the headline, “ACORN’s Advice to Fake Pimp Was No Crime, Prosecutor Says, “the Times reported: “The ACORN employees in Brooklyn who were captured on a hidden camera seeming to offer conservative activists posing as a pimp and a prostitute creative advice on how to get a mortgage have been cleared of wrongdoing by the Brooklyn district attorney’s office.”

But the story the Times continues to tell is wildly misleading, as a review of the publicly available transcripts of his visit (BigGovernment.com) makes clear. O’Keefe never dressed as a pimp during his visits to ACORN offices, seems to never actually represent himself as a “pimp,” and the advice he solicits is usually about how to file income taxes (which is not “tax evasion”). In at least one encounter (at a Baltimore ACORN office), the pair seemed to first insist that Giles was a dancer, not a prostitute.

In the case recounted in the March 2 Times story, the transcripts show that O’Keefe did not portray himself as a pimp to the ACORN workers in Brooklyn, but told them that he was trying to help his prostitute girlfriend. In part of the exchange, O’Keefe and his accomplice seem to be telling ACORN staffers that they are attempting to buy a house to protect child prostitutes from an abusive pimp.

Throughout the months the Times covered the story, it made a major mistake: believing that Internet videos produced by right-wing activists were to be trusted uncritically, rather than approached with the skepticism due to anything you’d come across on the Web. O’Keefe and the Web publisher Andrew Breitbart refused to make unedited copies of the videotape public, and with good reason: A more complete viewing, as the transcripts show, would produce a much different impression.

While the Times decide to skip the standard rules of journalism, ACORN commissioned an independent investigation led by former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger (12/7/09), which noted that the

unedited videos have never been made public. The videos that have been released appear to have been edited, in some cases substantially, including the insertion of a substitute voiceover for significant portions of Mr. O’Keefe’s and Ms.Giles’ comments, which makes it difficult to determine the questions to which ACORN employees are responding. A comparison of the publicly available transcripts to the released videos confirms that large portions of the original video have been omitted from the released versions.

So what has the Times done in response? As reported extensively by blogger Brad Friedman (Brad Blog), several Times staffers have been asked to justify the paper’s lack of accountability. In the most remarkable exchange, public editor Clark Hoyt–who had criticized the paper for not doing enough reporting on the tapes–wrote that the paper had made no errors that merited a correction (Brad Blog, 2/23/10). He explained that the January 31 story “says O’Keefe dressed up as a pimp and trained his hidden camera on ACORN counselors. It does not say he did those two things at the same time.”

It is hard to believe that Hoyt actually believes what he’s saying here. The obvious implication from the language of the article (and the others documented above) is that ACORN was dispensing advice to someone dressed up in an absurd pimp outfit. The Times chose to believe that O’Keefe’s work was journalism that didn’t need to be treated skeptically. The videos were in fact a hoax, and the Times was duped. Its readers deserve to know as much–and ACORN, which suffered serious political damage as a result of the false stories, deserves an apology.

In his September column criticizing the paper for being slow to report the ACORN videos, Hoyt wrote: “Some stories, lacking facts, never catch fire. But others do, and a newspaper like the Times needs to be alert to them or wind up looking clueless or, worse, partisan itself.” Worse than looking partisan, though, is being wrong.

ACTION: Encourage New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt to recommond that the paper investigate the ACORN videos and produce a report that clarifies the record.

CONTACT:
New York Times
Clark Hoyt, Public Editor
public@nytimes.com
Phone: (212) 556-7652

Source / Fair.org

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Kate Braun : Vernal Equinox Seasonal Message

Posted on March 11, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

The egg and the emergence of Lord Sun: Egg tulip image from uphilldowndale.

Vernal Equinox:
Honor Eoster, the goddess of Spring

By Kate Braun / The Rag Blog / March 11, 2010

Every day’s another dawning/
Give the morning winds a chance/
Always catch your thunder yawning/
Lift your mind into the dance.

Saturday. March 20, 2010, is the Vernal Equinox/Ostara/Lady Day. Lady Moon is in her first quarter, in Taurus, the fixed Earth sign.

The name Ostara comes from the Indo-European root “aus” which gives us Eos (the maiden aspect of the Goddess, also the name of a Greek goddess of the dawn) and Aurora (Roman dawn goddess, also the name of Sleeping Beauty). Taurus’ energy bonds us with the earth, enforces our connection to the earth, reminds us we are dependent on the earth. I recommend that your Ostara celebration acknowledge this deep, stubborn, earthy aspect of the season.

We are still welcoming Lord Sun and encouraging his continuing growth, so burning candles and/or a fire is appropriate. However, since Ostara honors Eoster the goddess of Spring, a balance of masculine and feminine energies is required in your celebration. Using a solar cross (one with arms of equal length) in your decorations will do nicely in this respect.

Pink, light yellow, and light green are your first color choices for your dress and decoration, with all pastel shades being appropriate as accent colors. Other decorations may include living plants, eggs (both real and artificial), and rabbit images.

Eggs are an important part of this celebration as the Earth continues to be reborn and the egg is a symbol of rebirth.

An activity you and your guests may care to pursue involves egg imagery. Let each guest pick a hard-boiled egg from a basket serving as a centerpiece at your table and share this lore with them: the yolk and white of a hard-boiled egg represents the Sun hidden in the worm of the White Goddess.

We crack the shell (all crack shells), symbolizing the cracking of winter’s ice. We peel the white (all peel away the white), symbolizing the melting of the snow, freeing the golden yolk that represents Lord Sun emerging from his wintry seclusion. We share bits of egg (each guest gives a bit of egg to his neighbors at the table), sharing in Lord Sun’s rebirth as we eat (all eat the bits of egg).

Another ritual associated with this celebration is to bury a real egg, cooked or raw, in the east corner of your garden. This is said to bring fertility to the garden.

Put eggs at the center of your menu. Serve quiches, custards, egg salad, deviled eggs; accompany them with ham, cheeses, toasted pumpkin seeds and/or pine nuts, sprouts, leafy green vegetables, and hot cross buns. And don’t forget some chocolate for dessert. Eoster is fond of chocolate; eating some honors her.

[Kate Braun’s website is www.tarotbykatebraun.com. She can be reached at kate_braun2000@yahoo.com.]

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Farrah’s Story : How Could the Academy Forget Her?

Posted on March 11, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer


Survivors remember…
How could the Academy forget Farrah?

By Jody Schoger / The Rag Blog / March 11, 2010

American icon and Emmy-award winning actress Farah Fawcett was notably absent in the traditional memorial included each year as part of the annual Academy Awards ceremony, which aired last Sunday. Roger Ebert, writing on Twitter, quickly noted, “No Farrah Fawcett in the memorial tribute? Major fail.”

Major fail is right. From a purely historical standpoint, based on the length or her career and her social impact, she should have been there, along with Bea Arthur.

But perhaps the omission is as it should be. Like icons before her (Marilyn Monroe comes to mind) Ms. Fawcett did not seem like part of Hollywood, or even of Hollywood. In both cases, separating the woman from the image became as intriguing as the image itself.

In the real world I think Ms. Fawcett was an incredible artist who unintentionally saved her best public work until last.

She gave the most extraordinary gift of her intelligence, grace and spirit in Farrah’s Story, the no-holds-barred documentary that chronicled her struggle with the cancer that prematurely ended her life last summer. Both she and Michael Jackson died on the same day.

In 2006 Ms. Fawcett was diagnosed with anal cancer, one of those cancers people don’t talk about very much, if at all. In the last 30 years its incidence has risen by 78% in women, according to an article in US News & World Report. While only one in 640 women will be diagnosed with anal cancer over the course of their lifetime, not even half of anal cancers are detected early, when they are most easily treated.

The fact that this engaging woman, who fought on many fronts to retain her privacy, chose to let us in on this last chapter of her life certainly says more than I can. Farrah’s Story shows us a rare courage and also the unflinching nature of enduring friendship and love. Alana Stewart is by her side filming through treatments, illness, laughter, and tears. If you’ve had cancer, you know what these moments feel like. Of all the moments shared, one of my favorite is one all of us can identify with: the two friends cooking dinner and laughing in the kitchen.

When the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences decided “that we can’t include everybody” in their “memoriam,” they rendered the rest of the segment meaningless.

So to Ms. Fawcett? What a life you lived. Thank you.

[Jody Schoger is a writer, public relations consultant, and cancer advocate who lives in the Woodlands near Houston. He blogs at Women with Cancer.]

Farrah Fawcett. Photo from Getty Images.

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Marc Estrin : Our Unsingable National Anthem

Posted on March 11, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer


Bombs bursting in air…
Oh say can you sing?

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / March 11, 2010

Oh, say can you see? o sa cn u c? When did we have to stand and sing this at hockey games? Revolutionary War? The War of 1812? Maybe the Civil War? Actually it wasn’t until this week in another Great Depression year, 1931, that President Hoover signed a congressional resolution creating “our national anthem.”

Originally a British drinking song, the octave and a half tune is quite unsingable — at least for the average Joe when sober — to the point that “the rockets’ red glare” or “conquer we must,” or even “freeeeeee” take on a grotesque crowd cacophony so beautifully illustrative of our drone attacks for democracy around the world.

In November of 2001, shortly after 9/11, along with the music to be played (one piece being Grieg’s Two Elegiac Melodies) the players found on their stands the music to The Star Spangled Banner. The orchestra board had decided that from here on, we would begin each concert, to a standing audience, with this hymn to patriotism. I stood up and objected, to glares from the other players, and did not participate in the short play-through.

At the next rehearsal, the players found on their stands a little manifesto:

A PERSONAL STATEMENT
For those who find perplexing the opposition to playing the Star-Spangled Banner.

At the present moment, the Star-Spangled Banner is not just the Star-Spangled Banner, but is also a clear, even fierce, political CODE. For those of us in the peace movement, here is what the code signifies:

— My country right or wrong.
— Rally behind the President, regardless of his agenda.
There are corollaries to the code, not as universally espoused:
— You are with America or against it.
— If you don’t support the war, you are a traitor.

As I stand daily at a Burlington peace vigil, I am acutely aware of a dangerously violent strain of jingoism, as some people yell obscenities at us, and advise us loudly to “Kill ’em all!” or “Nuke ’em.” One guy even swerved onto the sidewalk yesterday threatening to swipe the vigilers. Invariably, these cars are flying the largest possible flags on antennas and windows, and the comments often accuse us of not supporting America. [This was back then; mostly we get thumbs up now.]

There are those of us who believe that democracy involves multiple opinions, not unanimity, and that patriotism can require criticizing the government, especially in a thrust involving killing innocent civilians, skewing domestic budgets toward military spending, and tightening down on civil rights in the name of “security.” I personally — and I am not alone — believe that our current course, far from increasing national security, will seriously increase the odds of further attacks against hated Americans.

It would surely be appropriate to acknowledge the tragedies spinning around us, and to dedicate the Grieg elegiac pieces to the victims of terrorism — which I understand to mean ALL victims of ALL terrorism, individual, group and state terrorism, everywhere. But playing the Star-Spangled Banner transforms the sentiment into the CODE, and implies the orchestra’s support for the Bush/Cheney agenda. I think this inappropriate for us to do.

Sincerely,

Marc Estrin

By the first rehearsal of next spring’s concert, it seems all this had been forgotten — no Star Spangled Banner was on the stands or at the concert. Did I win? I doubt it. Probably the “good intentions” were just gobbled up by the memory hole.

But what wasn’t gobbled was the jingoist military muscularity — now enshrined ever more fiercely in our foreign and domestic policies — making any “national anthem” (much less the unsingable SSB) stick in the craw of peace-loving, humane singers except of course those who have substituted the far simpler-to-sing obsessive compulsive chant, USA! USA! USA! USA!

Franklin warned us as he left the Constitutional Convention in 1787. A reporter asked: “Well, Doctor, what have we got — a Republic or a Monarchy?” The good doctor famously responded: “A Republic, if you can keep it.”

When the bankers and political crooks seized on the opportunities offered them by the nation’s founding documents, the founders, whatever their differences, lamented:

Hamilton spoke of “the culpable desire of gaining or securing popularity at an immediate expense of public utility.”

John Adams: ”Oh my country, how I mourn over thy contempt of Wisdom and Virtue and overweening admiration of fools and knaves!”

Jefferson feared the onslaught of “pseudo-citizens infected with the mania of rambling and gambling” among those obsessed with commerce and moneymaking.

Madison had hoped that ordinary people would have the “virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom” as their representatives; if not, he warned, no government could “render us secure.”

Oh, say, could they see? You betcha. We, as a nation, are just beginning to understand what they saw.

[Marc Estrin is a writer and activist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

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