Skateboarders, Bloggers and Cops : One Little Victory for the People

Posted on March 9, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

No Skateboards / calaggie.

Gerry Storm, aka Dr. Mesmo, is a former Austin musician, activist and union leader who now lives in rural New Mexico. His interests combine the political with the spiritual.

He recounts here a triumphant parable of skateboarders and cops, and the role local bloggers play in one little victory for the people.

Gerry’s dispatch grew out of an exchange on the Rag Blog Group, a listserv that brings together contributors to and followers of The Rag Blog in a spirited discussion of our little mag, its role and potential in the besieged world of today’s journalism.

Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / March 9, 2009

‘All the cops are fat, some are really fat, in tight shiny black outfits with bright buttons which reveal their waistlines and fat asses, with not quite shaved heads, and utility belts that include a pistol, handcuffs, etc.’

By Gerry Storm / The Rag Blog / March 9, 2009

I live in (or rather, outside) a small community (10,000) in New Mexico that has a regular blog with activists using it, sometimes quite effectively. Lots of posts announcing local events, political rants, newcomers getting acquainted, the High Desert Gardening Club, various Messiahs, and healers, etc. Desert people’s activism often involves long rides but events are often well attended. Recently a city council meeting drew an over capacity crowd (over 200) on an issue that was talked up on the blog. There was open discussion of the council members and their reputations, times and places to be, names to remember, agendas, etc. Much of the fervor that was whipped up can be credited to the blog.

Last year the state came up with some money and built a skateboard park in Silver City. It is an attractive design, naturally landscaped, big curves with concrete surfaces, very nice shadows. The kids love it, first time they have seen government work for them personally; it built them a place to play. It cost over $700,000, a big deal in this little town. The old park had been a disgrace, rickety wooden ramps, the ramshackle wooden and concrete fence and all other paintable surfaces covered with less than artistic graffiti.

This is a town with almost equally sized Mexican American and Anglo communities. It has a sizeable retiree population. The white kids are about equally divided between straight and hippie origins. Home schooling is quite common, especially among families that live a good distance from town. The Mexican kids are generally from families that work at the copper mine which has been supporting the community for well over 100 years. There is little tension between the communities and much inbreeding over the years. The county has voted Democratic forever and the mine has had a powerful union presence for generations.

Meanwhile, back at the new skateboard park, the local constabulary moves in. As is the custom in places that are dominated by Mexican American traditions, the law operates under wide suspicion. Some of the cops have old family issues and allegiance to traditions that they remain more loyal to than their badges, not to mention their image. The park is too popular and they have to claim it. It is too free.

Couple of cop cars pull up and announce that they are enforcing the “helmet law,” everyone must wear a helmet. Of course helmets are a symbol of sissyhood among the boys. Morning after the announcement, a Saturday, a cop car shows up and busts a kid for not wearing a helmet. He attempts to handcuff the prisoner who resists. The cop tackles the kid (about 13) and attempts to straddle him. Kid’s big brother is watching. He blindsides the cop. Brothers run away. Within minutes there are a dozen cop cars on the scene, lights flashing. One of the brothers is located and arrested for whipping a cop’s ass. The park is closed. Next day kids are arrested for trespassing when they attempt to skate. Kids are very disappointed, can’t use their park. What government giveth, government taketh away. But wait…

Among the skateboarders are sharp kids who attend hippie schools. They do their research and discover that the “law” being enforced is the Child Helmet Safety Act of 2007. This act is designed to persuade and educate bicycle riders and other riders of recreational vehicles to wear helmets. Yes, even though it was designed for bicycle safety, it applies to skateboards as well. What is the sentence for violators under this law? A $10 fine.

Turns out that someone at city hall feared for the potential of a law suit by a party injured at the skateboard park and instructed to police to enforce the helmet law. The police, ignorant of the intent of the law and seeing an opening to establish a presence at the park, simply overreacted. They made up their own law.

There is an annual downtown puppet parade shortly after the attempted arrest. The boys from the skateboard park show up carrying signs — “Save Our Park,” “Police Brutality,” etc. This appearance not only stirs up the cops who raid the parade, cornering and bluffing the protestors, forbidding them the right to march, but inflames much of the crowd which includes activists, it stirs up old resentments against the cops in general.

Who is the old papa-san witnessing much of this through the window of the cafe, a sidewalk away from the action? My goodness, it’s Dr. Mesmo in a rare visit to town on a Saturday and even rarer visit to the restaurant which revived all the reasons why these visits are rare. But history was being made and there I was with a ring side seat. All the cops are fat, some are really fat, in tight shiny black outfits with bright buttons which reveal their waistlines and fat asses, with not quite shaved heads, and utility belts that include a pistol, handcuffs, etc. Ninety percent are Hispanic. At first I thought they were a comedy act, a part of the parade. Then I realized that they were real, disgustingly real.

They were trying to run but could only shuffle forward, what a strange dance, quite entertaining. The most shocking thing about the spectacle to me was how small the boys are, none of them over 18 and many only 13 or 14. I have been proclaiming for some time now that the kids born in the early ‘90’s will change it all when they come of age. The most amazing generation since the kids born in the early 1940’s, they have a Neptune/Uranus conjunction, a very rare and powerful aspect that has not been seen on Earth for hundreds of years. Sure enough, here they are, in Silver City no less, demonstrating for a cause, in the face of the local police. Their face is the skateboarder cult. How appropriate! And they are as non-violent as Martin Luther King in Selma.

The local blog comes alive with indignation over the affair. All the details are revealed, freedom of speech, etc. For all I know the kids have their own blog. Anyway, on the adult blog it looks like MoveOn.com. People are really inflamed. By the time the city council meets the next week the cops are on the spot. Overflow crowd, dozens turned away. Citizens testify and ask hard questions, some of the boys testify (eloquently). The consensus is that cops are a general pain in the ass, bullies with bad attitudes who need to be taken down a few notches, given a crash course in the constitution, and that the park should be opened immediately and the cops should forget the helmet law. It also turns out that the city already has insurance that will cover any lawsuit over injuries at the park. In general the council and chief of police apologize and free the park.

Charges against the brothers and trespassers are dropped. Couple of local attorneys put up $10,000 to pay for educating the kids on helmet safety and provide them with free helmets. The park is livelier than ever, now, no doubt, the place to find kids who are simpatico. Democracy in action. It is on my weekly route so I have watched it develop, albeit at a distance. Now I am proud of it too.

Without the community blog, it is doubtful that the rescue would have happened. It took years for the blog to develop but one man in particular, a devotee of community awareness, stuck with it and made it into a rather impressive forum. No big deal, but well done.

To tell the truth I find the blog to be quite boring most of the time. There are more than a few crazies among the membership, people who live in isolation in the desert and develop some extreme ideas about society and community, some very spiritual with a broad understanding of the natural and others who are seemingly always looking for a fight…not always the brightest lights in the block and easy to inflame.

So I skim it very rapidly as a rule. But I do value it and can see its potential as an organizing forum of progressive thinkers and activists. Communication, Communication, Communication. And I pray that these kids, raised on cell phones and international connections, myspace and ipods, completely at home with computers and skateboards, inheriting a society which is coming apart in an economic crisis, will have the awareness and the courage that will enable them to create a new way, an alternative and constitutional society.

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Medical Ethics : The Campus Invasion of Big Pharma

Posted on March 9, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Graphic by Mike Licht / NotionsCapital

Big Pharma and Medical Ethics

Drug companies are ‘funneling money through universities for advertising and trying to disguise it as education.’

Dr. Gerry Lower / The Rag Blog / March 9, 2009

The New York Times reports that “In a first-year pharmacology class at Harvard Medical School, Matt Zerden grew wary as the professor promoted the benefits of cholesterol drugs and seemed to belittle a student who was concerned about side effects.”

Zerden did a bit of Google searching online and he began sharing his findings with classmates. The professor was not only a full-time member of the Harvard Medical faculty, but a paid consultant to 10 drug companies, including five makers of cholesterol treatments.

David Tian, 24, a first-year Harvard Medical student, said: “Before coming here, I had no idea how much influence companies had on medical education. And it’s something that’s purposely meant to be under the table, providing information under the guise of education when that information is also presented for marketing purposes.”

This is the unjustifiable degree to which corporate influence has invaded even our medical schools in the U.S. Zerden’s minor stir four years ago has since grown into a full-blown movement with more than 200 Harvard Medical School students and sympathetic faculty, “intent on exposing and curtailing the industry influence in their classrooms and laboratories.”

Big Pharma does not have a very good reputation in testing new drugs for safety and it has no interest in and does not do a very good job of assessing relative efficacy, i.e., CER, comparative effectiveness research), mostly out of fear of losing market share.

As argued in Newsweek, “doctors have long resisted having science guide their practice. That’s obvious from the disparity in clinical practices from one region of the U.S. to another.”

One solution?

“An unbiased source of data, not drug companies, could really help us in primary care. There have to be allowances for individual differences, but you need standards.”

No kidding.

In dealing with this extraordinary lapse in medical ethics, one approach is to deal with the symptoms of the problem, e.g., pass laws forbidding contributions from Big Pharma to medical school faculty members so as to curtail the conflicts of interest that would not exist without Big Pharma.

Consider that drug companies are “funneling money through universities for advertising and trying to disguise it as education. For example, from 2002 until 2008, Wyeth funded an online course promoting hormone therapy at the University of Wisconsin. Thousands of physicians took the course, backed by a $12 million grant.

The course “touted the benefits of hormone therapy and downplayed its risk” in a program described as “pure, undisguised marketing.” The increased risks we are talking about here are an increased risk of breast cancer, heart disease, stroke and blood clots.

Even the director of the course, on the take to Wyeth, admitted that the hormone material was “presented in a more positive light” than she would have preferred. But, what the hell is one supposed to do?

Dealing with symptoms, of course, has never cured anything, providing only relief at best, because we need to be dealing with the cause of the symptoms. In getting to the core of this problem in medical ethics, it must be pointed out that this scenario did not “just happen.” It was overtly promoted under the dominion of greed-driven capitalism.

It is not individuals who are unethical by nature, it is the entire capitalist socioeconomic system that is unethical by design, as well as being immoral on the international front (e.g., the Bush administration’s preemptive attack on Iraq). It is best all left behind.

The fact that right wing Roman politics have been “voted to the edge of political irrelevance,” must be taken into consideration here as well. If the Republican Party fails utterly, as it seems destined to do under the “leadership” of Rush Limbaugh, the world will have to fill the void with human rights and democracy. That would be our only chance to get medicine back into the hands of physicians and government back into the hands of the People.

“Physician, Heal Thyself.”

Please see the following references for this story:

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Hirschhorn Suggests Some Obama Integrity Checks

Posted on March 8, 2009 by RagBlog


Four Integrity Tests for President Obama
By Joel S. Hirschhorn / March 8, 2009

A great smile does not make a truth teller. A talker of change does not define a reformer. Make no mistake, for the good of the nation I want President Obama to succeed in getting us out of the scandalous economic meltdown we are immersed in. But I do not like many of his actions, policies and strategies for accomplishing this, nor does the stock market.

I always had my doubts that he was a true agent of change and reformer when it came to the structure of the political and government system. He took an awful lot of money from the very rich and powerful in his campaign. Sure, with his superb speaking skills he has the capacity to win public approval, but most Americans are not deep, critical thinkers, nor do most have the best detailed information. What if he is just another untrustworthy politician? What if he does not keep his promises? With these questions in mind, I have examined four areas where I find President Obama’s behavior disappointing.

Most distressing is that he put people in power who failed to prevent the economic disaster, notably the Treasury Secretary. As someone with significant experience in government, I was appalled that President Obama has selected so many experienced people for his cabinet and high level White House positions who previously had powerful positions in government or the financial sector but failed to prevent the economic meltdown that is still worsening. Or even sound loud alarms about what was profoundly wrong with economic system. Why not look hard for people that had been criticizing various aspects of the mortgage and financial areas? People from the academic world, watch dog groups and public interest organizations that might have worked previously in government could bring more creativity to the problems. For someone who made a big campaign deal of being against politics as usual, Obama has shown precious little evidence that he wants true outsiders to steer his administration. His chief of staff Rahm Emanuel is the epitome of a protector of the status quo political system. Rather than selecting many big name Democrats and a few Republicans, why not seek out independents, whistle blowers and reformers to fix the economic meltdown?

Accepting a huge spending bill loaded with pork earmarks it starkly contradictory to what Obama promised during the campaign. During the campaign this is what candidate Obama said: “We need earmark reform. And when I’m president, I will go line by line to make sure we’re not spending money unwisely.” He has talked repeatedly about fiscal responsibility and real change in politics. Talk is cheap. This spending bill is not. Not with over 9,000 earmarks totaling some $12 billion. It is sheer nonsense for him and his supporters to say shamelessly that the spending bill is something left over from the Bush administration. Well, so is the Iraq war, but Obama certainly was ready to make changes with it. Why not have the integrity and courage to veto this spending bill and send it back to Congress with the mandate to cut out the pork? Why should we believe promises to wait until he cuts earmarks from future spending bills when clearly Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, are not willing to give up earmarks. And why won’t they? Simple, they create earmarks as part of the legal corruption that allows campaign contributors to get the earmarks they want.

Consider this example. Representative Anthony Weiner, Democrat, New York, received more than $160,000 in campaign contributions from for the Sephardic Addiction and Family Education (SAFE) Foundation in Brooklyn, New York, which has an earmark from him for $238,000. He was also sole sponsor on a $300,000 earmark for Brooklyn’s Ohel Children’s Home and Family Services, whose board members and employees have also given him money; its director has personally given $6,240. And the bill includes 14 earmarks requested by lawmakers for projects sought by PMA Group, a lobbying company used by all sorts of entities to get earmarks, which is at the center of a federal corruption investigation.

And consider this: Not supporting congressional efforts to form a truth commission to look into Bush administration misdeeds, such as allowing torture of supposed terrorists, secret detention, and domestic spying, is also hard to fathom. Obama keeps up the malarkey about wanting to look forward, not backward. But the pursuit of justice and discovering how our Constitution has been flagrantly violated by President George W. Bush and others are imperative tasks for a real democracy. “Nothing has done more damage to America’s place in the world than the revelation that this nation stretched the law and the bounds of executive power to authorize torture and cruel treatment. Such a commission of inquiry would shed light on what mistakes were made so that we can learn from those errors and not repeat them,” said Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the chief advocate for a commission.

Significantly, a USA Today/Gallup poll in February found that 62 percent of Americans favor a criminal investigation or an independent panel to look into the use of torture, illegal wiretapping, and other alleged abuses of power by the Bush administration. So how can we understand why Obama does not passionately support doing this? I like what Georgetown University professor David Cole said: “in the face of credible evidence that high-level Bush administration officials authorized torture, a crime against humanity, the least we should do is undertake a serious, independent investigation.” What is scary is that perhaps Obama fears one day facing something similar for his misdeeds as president. It all comes down to this simple but profoundly important idea that Americans are supposed to embrace: absolutely no one should be above the law.

That President Obama has expressed no interest in a new 9/11 investigation reveals a lack of truth-seeking by someone who surely knows just how corrupt, unethical and dishonest the Bush administration was. The nationwide 9/11 truth movement is alive and well, because the vast majority of Americans still have many doubts about the official stories of what happened on 9/11, especially when it comes to the sudden collapse of three World Trade Center buildings, one of which was not even hit by an airplane. Countless scientists, engineers and architects have seriously examined mountains of data and evidence and come to the disheartening conclusion that something besides the official story must explain what happened. We are still paying an insane price in money and blood for the unjustified Iraq war that was largely justified by Bush because of 9/11. Searching for the truth about 9/11 is not about conspiracy theories; it is all about discovering if our government somehow had a hand in causing 9/11 in a so-called false flag operation. If it did, then the way to prevent any future such government action requires discovering the truth about 9/11. Why wouldn’t President Obama support this?

[Contact Joel S. Hirschhorn through delusionaldemocracy.com.]

Source / Nolan Chart

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Porno and Politics : Mapping America

Posted on March 8, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Graphic from Gallop Poll.

Three of the five red Republican states top the list of states with the highest number of people who subscribe to online pornography sites.

By Larry Ray / The Rag Blog / March 8, 2009

Political party advantage shifted strongly toward the Democratic party in a large-sample Gallup poll released at the end of January, 2009. Gallup pollsters tell us, “One would have to go back to 1983, when Democrats held a decisive 19-point advantage in party identification (43% to 24%), to find a significantly better showing for the Democratic Party in any Gallup polling.”

The map above tells an interesting story. Solidly Democratic states are in light blue, dark blue indicates states leaning Democratic, the neutral gray states are considered “competitive,” the dark red state, Nebraska leans Republican, and the remaining four states are Solidly Republican.

Those few bright red states are also at the center of another study making headlines in today’s newspapers. Three of the five red Republican states top the list of states with the highest number of people who subscribe to online pornography sites. The study, “Red Light States: Who Buys Online Entertainment?” is the work of Harvard professor, Benjamin Edelman, Ph.D, whose scientific study from 2006 to 2008 utilized information from a top 10 seller of adult entertainment.

Mormon-dominated Utah tops the list as the number one state for porno surfing. Sarah Palin’s Alaska is a close second, followed in third place by Former Republican National Committee Chairman, Governor Haley Barbour’s Mississippi. Alaska and Mississippi also make the top of Gallup poll’s list of “highly religious” states.

There seems to be several reasons for the penchant for porno. Anonymity and ease of high speed broadband internet is one possibility. Census numbers indicate Utah and Alaska are in the top 10 in percentage of households with high-speed Internet access, but Mississippi ranks near the bottom. Mississippi frequently ranks near or at the bottom of lists, but they make it almost to the top of this one. With a will there is a way.

I had to wonder what religion’s role may be in this commonality for lusty sexual voyeurism. Forbidden fruit versus God-given sexual drive? Could very conservative political views also be linked to these jarring findings? These outwardly very religious and Republican states have clearly repressed desires that even Rush Limbaugh can not satisfy. Is this an hypocrisy of horniness?

Pornography has deviled religion for a very long time. From Pompeii to Provo, the faithful who partake of varying versions of Debbie doing Dallas are condemned as sinners. The Southern Baptists never miss an opportunity to use even the very word pornography as an attack weapon.

Confirmation of Obama Department of Justice nominee David Ogden, whose previous representation of pornographers as an attorney, has pro-family religious groups up in arms. Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, told “Baptist Press” regarding Ogden’s defense. “… A person’s views on pornography are a window to a person’s worldview.”

So, using Brother Land’s reasoning, professional defense attorneys defending serial murderer, Jeffery Dahmer, would have held positive views on chopping up street hustlers if we looked into their worldview window. Actually, Brother Land has other real world worries right outside his window.

“The Christian Post” reports. “Half of males who apply to serve as a missionary for the Southern Baptist Convention’s international mission agency are turned down, according to a Baptist pastor. The primary reason is the use of internet porn.”

And right up there with internet porn is the way one prays. “The Christian Post” continues, “Both pornography and a private prayer language are treated as activities from which a person must repent in order to serve as a Southern Baptist missionary.”

It took a little research to get a handle on ‘private prayer language’ but it is Southern Baptist code-speak for glossolalia, the speaking in tongues when the holy spirit takes over some folks, like we have seen in the videos from Sarah Palin’s little church in Wasilla, Alaska.

As far as Utah’s Mormons topping the list of internet porno subscribers, there are some real conflicts going on there. Pillars of the Mormon Church and top tithers, the Marriott hotel family, are an example of that conflict. In 2007, “Morality in Media” blasted then CEO Bill Marriott for their in-room pay-TV “Adults Only” offerings like “XXX Fantasies” and “Sophomore Sluts” which reportedly produce hundreds of millions of dollars yearly for the hotel chain.

Nonetheless, all the Marriott family hotel magnates are listed as “Famous Mormons in Business” by the church. Time Magazine declared in their cover story on Mormons, “The church’s material triumphs rival even its evangelical advances.

Whether Mitt Romney, Glen Beck and Orrin Hatch’s magic underwear acts as a Mormon porno shield, I just won’t hazard a guess. However, sanctimonious, bible thumping right wing conservatives pietists who rail against godless, irresponsible liberals day and night on cable TV would better first lecture their own.

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

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Obama’s New Drug Czar: The Good, The Bad, …

Posted on March 8, 2009 by RagBlog

Gil Kerlikowske, Seattle Police Chief, Obama Drug Czar.

Cop Swap
By Geov Parrish / March 5, 2009

Here’s the good, the bad, and the ugly regarding Seattle police chief Gil Kerlikowske’s nomination to become the Obama administration’s new “Drug Czar.”

First, the good: Kerlikowske is about as good a pick as can be imagined for a federal job whose very conception–promotion of the deeply flawed “War on Drugs”–is problematic. Unlike his SPD predecessor, Norm Stamper, who has since gone on to become one of the country’s leading law enforcement critics of the War on Drugs, Kerlikowske is no abolitionist. But in his decade on the job in Seattle he has overseen some remarkably progressive drug policies.

Kerlikowske has championed “drug court” and other reforms that have diverted nonviolent drug offenders out of the justice system and, when appropriate, into treatment. That approach recognizes drug abuse as a public health problem, not a law enforcement one, and has not only helped improve thousands of lives, but saved them from being wrecked by our pointlessly punitive drug laws. Unlike City Attorney Tom Carr, Kerlikowske did not campaign against I-75, the voter-sponsored initiative that made marijuana possession SPD’s lowest enforcement priority; and, when I-75 overwhelmingly passed, he honored it. And Hempfest, the nation’s largest annual pro-pot festival, has evolved in the last decade from being at perpetual war with SPD to having cops and toking festival-goers freely mingle.

It’s hard to imagine a more tolerant attitude filling the federal office that, under both Dubya and his predecessors, routinely pumped out ludicrously hysterical anti-drug propaganda and persecuted states that tried to question the War on Drugs’ rationale or tactics. The irony, of course, is that those federal efforts only undermined any chance of dealing constructively with the very real societal problems that drug abuse poses. Rather than scaring kids straight, it encouraged them to blow off the dangers–of both the drugs and, far more often, the drug laws that have filled the country’s jails with nonviolent offenders.

A fresh approach couldn’t come sooner–and with Kerlikowske, Obama has picked someone with both local federal law enforcement background, and someone who’s no wild-eyed radical–someone, in other words, with both the credentials and the chops to make a shift in priorities happen. He is a fine choice.

That’s the good. However, Kerlikowske’s overall record running SPD is more mixed; and, in gushing over his pick and his tenure, local pols and media have been happy to overlook the bad. Most notably, Kerlikowske was ferociously resistant to meaningful civilian oversight of SPD, and was involved in a number of incidents where his discipline of misbehaving officers amounted to little more than a slap on the wrist. Between that tendency and a number of shootings of unarmed civilians (often non-white), especially earlier in his reign, Kerlikowske’s SPD has not had a good or trusting relationship with many in Seattle’s minority communities. In recent years the force has also been short-staffed at times, leaving SPD to defund community policing and to simply push drug and prostitution problems from neighborhood to neighborhood rather than having any real impact.

But that is little compared to the truly ugly: After eight years on the job, mayor Greg Nickels will now get to pick his own police chief.

What do we know about Nickels’ priorities? As I mentioned last issue, it can pretty much be summed up in the phrase “class war”: gentrification good, poor and downtrodden bad. Given that much of what a modern urban police force does is dealing with the folks who’ve fallen through our society’s frayed safety net, therein lies a lot of potential for a problematic pick. Nickels’ wars on the homeless, on nightclubs that cater to the “wrong” people, and on local neighborhood concerns will be that much worse if he picks a new chief that will be an enthusiastic enforcer of his priorities. For the last 15 or more years–even through the “civility law” era of former city attorney Mark Sidran–SPD has always been run by a chief that mostly steered clear of political posturing. That could change. Tellingly, Nickels’ current budget included massive cuts for Kerlikowske’s highly successful drug diversion programs. It would be naive not to expect a mayor who politicizes everything (much like our recently departed President) not to demand that a new pick for chief hew to his class-war priorities.

Moreover, Nickels’ pick will need to be confirmed by city council. Unlike, say, two years ago, when Nick Licata headed the public safety committee, the lead councilman for law enforcement now is ex-cop Tim Burgess. In his 15 months on council, Burgess has dismayed local police accountability activists, who had welcomed his relatively thoughtful campaign rhetoric, by displaying a strong law-and-order streak once in office. Our conflict-averse council is likely to defer to his sensibilities on Nickels’ pick. And Burgess, arguably the council’s most conservative member, pulled his name out of this year’s mayoral race only a week after forming an exploratory committee–strongly suggesting a back room deal with Nickels that might well include both SPD issues and future mayoral aspirations.

In other words, don’t expect any meaningful opposition from city council if Nickels’ choice veers sharply from SPD’s recent history in its top position. Gil Kerlikowske’s nomination as Drug Czar is great news for our country’s drug policies. What it means going forward for Seattle is a very different matter.

Source / Eat the State

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International Women’s Day: Not Much to Celebrate in Many Parts of the World

Posted on March 8, 2009 by RagBlog

An Indian vendor waits for customers in Mumbai. Conceived in 1910, International Women’s Day serves as a reminder that women are still battling for fundamental rights and remain victims of violence and enduring inequalities. Photo: Sajjad Hussain/AFP.

Women’s Day Marks Crisis of Poverty, Violence for Some
March 8, 2009

NEW DELHI – Indian activists marked International Women’s Day on Sunday by protesting over a spate of violent attacks launched on women by religious extremists in the name of “moral policing.”

A collective formed by residents in Bangalore, in India’s south, met in parks and open areas where young Hindu extremists have targeted women for wearing jeans, or being seen in public with men.

While women from Australia to Liberia gathered to hail achievements and to campaign on issues such as work equality, voting rights and abortion access, there was little to celebrate for the female population in many parts of the world.

Women are still forced into marriages or subjected to domestic violence in countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh, activists say.

In Iraq, according to aid agency Oxfam, they are trapped in a “silent emergency” of poverty.

An Iraqi woman walks at a garbage dump in the outskirts of Baghdad on March 8, 2009. Photo: Getty Images.

Despite the billions of dollars poured into Iraq’s reconstruction, many women – especially those widowed – are too poor to provide families with basic nourishment, health and education, according to a report by the agency, published to mark International Women’s Day.

Yet Iraq’s minister for women’s rights, who resigned in despair over lack of support last month, has not been replaced.

“I was convinced that I could improve conditions for women, but I ran into a wall,” Nawal al-Samarrai said.

Another female politician who has risen to the top in a male-dominated society, Shukria Barakzai, an Afghan member of parliament, also lamented her gender’s plight.

She is campaigning against forced and child marriages – practices still common in Afghanistan – after her husband took a second spouse.

“It is very painful for me that my husband has another wife. I myself am a victim of male violence against women in this country. My husband married his second wife without even telling me,” she said.

Under Afghanistan’s sharia law, men are allowed up to four wives.

The strict Islamic law also curtails the rights of women in Pakistan’s Swat valley, where the government last month signed an agreement with Taliban rebels who promised peace in exchange for the law.

Militants have destroyed 191 schools in the valley, 122 of them for girls, local officials say, and women are only allowed out if heavily veiled and accompanied by a male relative.

Muslim women around the world are facing a “growing crisis” as Islamic governments fail to honour commitments to end inequality and violence against them, a senior UN official warned.

Yakin Erturk, the UN’s rapporteur on violence against women, told a weekend conference in Malaysia that women must demand their governments carry out pledges to grant them equal rights and ensure their safety.

The theme of this year’s International Women’s Day is “women and men united to end violence against women and girls.”

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said this week one woman in five around the globe has been a victim of rape or attempted rape, and that in some countries one woman in three has been beaten or subjected to some kind of violent act.

At a conference of more than 400 high-profile women in Liberia on Saturday, female leaders pressed for equal rights and highlighted the role better political representation can play in reducing violence.

But Margot Wallstrom, vice-president of the European Commission told the conference that despite being better off than their peers in much of the world, women in the West struggle to have their voices heard in the corridors of power.

“Still today in governments and parliaments, less than a quarter of members are women,” she said.

“One half of the population is seriously under-represented.”

Source / Agence France Presse / Common Dreams

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Environmental Fears Are Driving Youth Protests

Posted on March 8, 2009 by RagBlog


This is not youthful rebellion. We see the catastrophe ahead
By Joss Garman / March 8, 2009

Great Britain: Climate change has provoked a war between the generations. Younger members of the government need to choose their side.

Lily Kember is 21 years old. Late last year, with 50 other activists, she shut down Stansted airport, in the process preventing thousands of tonnes of CO2 being released into the atmosphere. A few minutes before her arrest she told listeners of the Today programme: “We’re here because our parents’ generation has failed us and it’s now down to young people to stop climate change by whatever peaceful means we have left.”

She was by no means the youngest person who cut through the security fence that December morning – one of her co-protesters was born in 1991. You might conclude something extremely interesting is happening when kids are bunking off school not to play the arcades but instead to risk jail by invading runways to indict an entire generation. Last week it was my friend Leila Deen throwing custard over Peter Mandelson and twentysomethings in Aberdeen getting on to another runway to protest against airport expansion. In the summer 29 others will go on trial for hijacking a train that was carrying coal to Drax power station. Meanwhile in the US 12,000 young people last week marched on the coal plant that provides power to congress to demand that the new president act on his promise to “roll back the spectre of a warming planet”.

Contrast this explosion of determined political activity by society’s youngest voters with the image of Mandelson banging his head on the cabinet table. He was, according to the newspapers, frustrated that some of his younger colleagues had failed to grasp the ineluctable logic of his argument in favour of making Heathrow airport the biggest single point-source of carbon in the UK. The intergenerational gap articulated so poignantly by Lily Kember most certainly exists, and it’s getting wider.

‘This is not a fad’: one of the activists at last summer’s climate change camp protesting against plans for a third runway at Heathrow. Photograph: Graeme Robertson.

Some social commentators have placed this burgeoning carbon movement in the same bracket as earlier social movements populated by young people. They say the Sixties was the anti-war decade; the Seventies saw marches against racism at home and apartheid abroad; if it’s the Eighties it must be Ban the Bomb and Maggie Out!; the Nineties was roads and anti-globalisation; and the Noughties, this decade, is about climate change. We’ll soon be on to something else, right?

Wrong. We’re not the Noughties. This isn’t the next fad. The naive popular narrative that “every generation has their thing” and that climate is ours – that we’re the “Facebook generation” – simply does not hold. This isn’t about being disaffected and rebellious without a cause. This isn’t about dropping out, rejecting the norm, culture jamming and hacking the system. This isn’t even about altruism. It’s not just about defending the rights and lives of those who are less fortunate than us, and it certainly isn’t about polar bears. This is about us. For the millennial generation the patronising cliches fall apart, because this isn’t about ideals so much as hard science and the terrifying reality that what the scientists have been warning us all about for years – those sea level rises, catastrophic droughts and melting ice caps – will now happen in our lifetimes.

So we become angry when we witness the same generation which let the economic system collapse, and that is leaving my generation with an unfathomable burden of debt – Brown and Mandelson and the old men of politics – now knowingly setting us on another disastrous course. We know how this story ends, but not because we’ve read obscure economic treatises or dense theories from Friedman and Hayek or Hobsbawm and Marx. We know because scientists are providing measurable objective evidence that the high-carbon economic model has an in-built self-destruct mechanism.

The only difference between capitalism in crisis and the climate crisis is that almost nobody predicted the economic collapse, whereas almost every single qualified expert predicted with steady and unerring accuracy the effect that carbon dioxide is having on the climate. Now compare the reactions of our leaders to the two crises. If the world was a bank, Brown would have saved it already. Instead it is my generation, with our taxes for decades to come, which is bankrolling a bail-out that ranks at the bottom of the developed world for its focus on greening the economy. For us it’s all pain and no gain.

For us there’s no difference between the scant regard paid by President Bush for the victims of Hurricane Katrina, and the attitude taken by these British baby-boomer politicians who gave us dodgy Saudi arms deals then blocked the inquiry because they value oil over truth. They stole our right to protest outside parliament and now they try to mollify us with sombre talk of “tough decisions for turbulent times” before attacking us for “silly stunts” (as Geoff Hoon did last week) when we get a bit uppity about climate change. Increasingly, as I can testify, his generation even resorts to political policing and legal injunctions.

Yet against this gloomy backdrop emerges what US marketers Eric Greenberg and Karl Weber have called “history’s most active volunteering generation” – or “Generation We”. Independent of the old ideologies and tribal loyalties that have stained mainstream politics in Britain, we’re determined to capture the moment. We believe 2009 can be a transformative year, that the economic crisis presents an opportunity to reject old assumptions just as the ecological crisis focuses minds on the last chance UN climate summit in Denmark in December. The Copenhagen meeting has the potential – more than any gathering of human beings before it – to affect how our civilisation develops. This is Westphalia, Versailles and Bretton Woods rolled into one, and it’s happening this year.

Some of you who have read this far will by now be sniggering with cynicism, and when this article is published online many of the comments will exhibit a similar scorn. But with respect to the keyboard commandos, we’ll take our cue instead from Professor James Hansen, director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies who said: “In the nuclear standoff between the Soviet Union and United States, a crisis could be precipitated only by the action of one of the parties. In contrast, the present threat to the planet and civilisation requires only inaction in the face of clear scientific evidence of the danger.”

So inaction is the greatest threat, and that’s why young people are breaking through airport fences and shutting down coal plants. Because rather like the Israeli government building West Bank settlements on land that’s supposed to be under negotiation in an effort to scupper a Middle East peace deal, our own governments are creating “facts on the ground” in the run up to Copenhagen – at Heathrow and Kingsnorth for example – which will destroy what hope we have of striking a deal in December. And we won’t let them get away with it.

Ed Miliband, the energy and climate change secretary, is 39 years old. He is closer in age to Lily Kember than he is to Gordon Brown, and on his desk today sits the Kingsnorth decision which, according to Professor Hansen, has “the potential to influence the future of the planet”. Our best chance of arresting runaway climate change, says Hansen, is to rule out new coal plants unless all of their emissions are captured and buried. If Miliband stands up to his older colleagues and demands – on pain of resignation – that the UK, the nation where the industrial revolution was born, the nation with a greater historical per capita responsibility for climate change than any other, will no longer emit CO2 from coal, then we might have found a British politician we can finally believe in.

It’s time for Ed Miliband to decide which generation he is with. Ours, or Brown’s.

[Joss Garman is co-founder of Plane Stupid and a columnist for the Ecologist.]

Source / The Guardian – Comment Is Free

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The Problem Is That the Democrats Will Implicate Themselves If There Are Prosecutions for Torture

Posted on March 8, 2009 by RagBlog


“I Was Only Following Orders!” Being serious about torture. Or not.
By William Blum / March 5, 2009

In Cambodia they’re once again endeavoring to hold trials to bring some former senior Khmer Rouge officials to justice for their 1975-79 war crimes and crimes against humanity. The current defendant in a United Nations-organized trial, Kaing Guek Eav, who was the head of a Khmer Rouge torture center, has confessed to atrocities, but insists he was acting under orders.1

As we all know, this is the defense that the Nuremberg Tribunal rejected for the Nazi defendants. Everyone knows that, right? No one places any weight on such a defense any longer, right? We make jokes about Nazis declaring: “I was only following orders!” (“Ich habe nur den Befehlen gehorcht!“) Except that both the Bush and Obama administrations have spoken in favor of it.

Here’s the new head of the CIA, Leon Panetta: “What I have expressed as a concern, as has the president, is that those who operated under the rules that were provided by the Attorney General in the interpretation of the law [concerning torture] and followed those rules ought not to be penalized. And … I would not support, obviously, an investigation or a prosecution of those individuals. I think they did their job.”2 Operating under the rules … doing their job … are of course the same as following orders.

The UN Convention Against Torture (first adopted in 1984), which has been ratified by the United States, says quite clearly, “An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.” The Torture Convention enacts a prohibition against torture that is a cornerstone of international law and a principle on a par with the prohibition against slavery and genocide.

Of course, those giving the orders are no less guilty. On the very day of Obama’s inauguration, the United Nation’s special torture rapporteur invoked the Convention in calling on the United States to pursue former president George W. Bush and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld for torture and bad treatment of Guantanamo prisoners.3

On several occasions, President Obama has indicated his reluctance to pursue war crimes charges against Bush officials, by expressing a view such as: “I don’t believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” This is the same excuse Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen has given for not punishing Khmer Rouge leaders. In December 1998 he asserted: “We should dig a hole and bury the past and look ahead to the 21st century with a clean slate.”4 Hun Sen has been in power all the years since then, and no Khmer Rouge leader has been convicted for their role in the historic mass murder.

And by not investigating Bush officials, Obama is indeed saying that they’re above the law. Like the Khmer Rouge officials have been. Michael Ratner, a professor at Columbia Law School and president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said prosecuting Bush officials is necessary to set future anti-torture policy. “The only way to prevent this from happening again is to make sure that those who were responsible for the torture program pay the price for it. I don’t see how we regain our moral stature by allowing those who were intimately involved in the torture programs to simply walk off the stage and lead lives where they are not held accountable.”5

One reason for the non-prosecution may be that serious trials of the many Bush officials who contributed to the torture policies might reveal the various forms of Democratic Party non-opposition and collaboration.

It should also be noted that the United States supported Pol Pot (who died in April 1998) and the Khmer Rouge for several years after they were ousted from power by the Vietnamese in 1979. This support began under Jimmy Carter and his National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and continued under Ronald Reagan.6 A lingering bitterness by American cold warriors toward Vietnam, the small nation which monumental US power had not been able to defeat, and its perceived closeness to the Soviet Union, appears to be the only explanation for this policy. Humiliation runs deep when you’re a superpower.

Neither should it be forgotten in this complex cautionary tale that the Khmer Rouge in all likelihood would never have come to power, nor even made a serious attempt to do so, if not for the massive American “carpet bombing” of Cambodia in 1969-70 and the US-supported overthrow of Prince Sihanouk in 1970 and his replacement by a man closely tied to the United States.7 Thank you Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Well done, lads.

By the way, if you’re not already turned off by many of Obama’s appointments, listen to how James Jones opened his talk at the Munich Conference on Security Policy on February 8: “Thank you for that wonderful tribute to Henry Kissinger yesterday. Congratulations. As the most recent National Security Advisor of the United States, I take my daily orders from Dr. Kissinger.”8

Lastly, Spain’s High Court recently announced it would launch a war crimes investigation into an Israeli ex-defense minister and six other top security officials for their role in a 2002 attack that killed a Hamas commander and 14 civilians in Gaza.9 Spain has for some time been the world’s leading practitioner of “universal jurisdiction” for human-rights violations, such as their indictment of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet a decade ago. The Israeli case involved the dropping of a bomb on the home of the Hamas leader; most of those killed were children. The United States does this very same thing every other day in Afghanistan or Pakistan. Given the refusal of American presidents to invoke even their “national jurisdiction” over American officials-cum-war criminals, we can only hope that someone reminds the Spanish authorities of a few names, names like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, Feith, Perle, Yoo, and a few others with a piece missing, a piece that’s shaped like a conscience. There isn’t even a need to rely on international law alone, for there’s an American law against war crimes, passed by a Republican-dominated Congress in 1996.10

The noted Israeli columnist, Uri Avnery, writing about the Israeli case, tried to capture the spirit of Israeli society that produces such war criminals and war crimes. He observed: “This system indoctrinates its pupils with a violent tribal cult, totally ethnocentric, which sees in the whole of world history nothing but an endless story of Jewish victimhood. This is a religion of a Chosen People, indifferent to others, a religion without compassion for anyone who is not Jewish, which glorifies the God-decreed genocide described in the Biblical book of Joshua.”11

It would take very little substitution to apply this statement to the United States — like “American” for “Jewish” and “American exceptionalism” for “a Chosen People”.

Notes

1. Associated Press, August 1, 2007 ↩
2. Press conference, February 25, 2009, transcript by Federal News Service ↩
3. Agence France Presse (AFP), January 20, 2009 ↩
4. New York Times, December 29, 1998 ↩
5. Associated Press, November 17, 2008 ↩
6. See William Blum, “Rogue State”, chapter 10 (“Supporting Pol Pot”) ↩
7. See William Blum, “Killing Hope”, chapter 20 (“Cambodia, 1955-1973”) ↩
8. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/02/jones_munich_conference.html ↩
9. Reuters news agency, January 30, 2009 ↩
10. The War Crimes Act (18 U.S.C. 2441) ↩
11. Haaretz, leading Israeli newspaper, January 30, 2009 ↩

[William Blum is the author of:

* Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
* Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower
* West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
* Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire

Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at www.killinghope.org.]

Source / Information Clearing House

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Crowded Classrooms and Crowded Prisons – Why Is It So Hard to See the Connection?

Posted on March 7, 2009 by RagBlog


The Dog Eats Its Tail: Oversized Classes, Overpopulated Prisons
By Jesse Hagopian / March 7, 2009

One in thirty one.

As a public school teacher I am quite familiar with this figure — it’s a typical teacher to student ratio in the classroom. But now that proportion has taken on new significance: A report released on March 2nd by the Pew Center on the States found that one in every thirty-one adults reside in the US corrections system — now totaling some 7.3 million people.

That means roughly one student per classroom in America will end up in prison, on parole, or on probation.

As New School Foundation board member Lisa Fitzhugh notes in her January 19th Seattle Times op-ed, states like Washington even determine how many prison cells to build based on 4th grade reading scores and graduation rates. So rest assured, if your 9-year-old stumbles over syntax or has trouble sounding out the word “priorities,” the state has readied the necessary cellblock accommodations. Why flush money down the sinkhole of reading improvement teachers when there are solitary confinement cells to be built? As the Pew study reports,

“In the past two decades, state general fund spending on corrections increased by more than 300 percent, outpacing other essential government services from education, to transportation and public assistance. Only Medicaid spending has grown faster. Today, corrections imposes a national taxpayer burden of $68 billion a year.”

In Seattle, where I teach, our politicians have magnified this absurdity by simultaneously proposing two pieces of public policy:

1) Mayor Greg Nickels has proposed the construction of a new municipal jail, projected to cost taxpayers over $200 million.

2) Seattle’s School Board voted recently to close five schools and disrupt or discontinue eight other programs.

If you like these policies of planning prison construction based on elementary reading levels, and of closing schools while opening jails, you might consider a couple of other equally rewarding ventures: smashing holes in your boat and investing in buckets to bail out the water, or, equally clever, slashing holes in the tires of your car and subsequently investing in tire patches.

How do we end this illogical, anti-hope scenario and reverse increases in prison spending?

After years of deregulation and outlandish speculation that caused an implosion of the economy, many politicians and corporate heads are venturing out of their boardrooms to examine the rubble at “Main Street Middle School.” Realizing something must be done, they tout their education schemes as “school reform”—including paying teachers according to culturally biased/curriculum narrowing tests their students take, the breaking of teachers’ unions, and the privatization of education through charter schools.

But in an era when CEOs and bankers sabotage the economy and then get to float to the ground on golden parachutes worth tens of millions of dollars, it’s unclear how merit pay for teachers would be structured—in this new age, would it mean that the more students who flunk the test, the bigger bonuses teachers get?

Given the current free market meltdown, they can’t really believe that our public schools are better off following the laissez-faire predisposition for privatized charter schools run by CEOs.

A genuine first step on the path to improving education should center on what teachers, students, and parents have known for a long time: class size matters.

Unfortunately, this common sense approach missed Mayor Bloomberg who was quoted in the New York Times on February 22nd giving his explanation of how to improve education: “It’s the teacher looking a child in the eye, and teachers can look lots of children in the eye,” he added. “If you have to have smaller class size or better teachers, go with the better teachers every time.”

I’ll go for option C: The skilled teacher with the smaller class.

Tennessee’s Project STAR (Student Teacher Achievement Ratio)—the most comprehensive class size study ever conducted—showed students who had been randomly assigned to smaller classes of 13 to 17 students in grades K-3 outperformed their peers in regular classes of 22 to 25 students (and in regular classes with an educational aide). Additionally, by eighth grade, those students who had been placed in small classes through Project STAR were still outperforming students who had been placed in regular classes or regular-plus-aide classes in K-3.

While proven to help, lower class sizes are not popular with the guardians of the bottom line because training and hiring more teachers costs money. I should admit I am not a trained economist like the financial intellectuals who managed asset-backed securities at AIG. However, I feel qualified to assert that unlike the purchase of collateralized debt obligations, spending on our children is a sound investment—morally and financially.

The American Economic Review, one of the longest running journals in the field, recently released a study revealing that only “A one percent increase in the high school completion rate of all men ages 20-60 would save the United States as much as $1.4 billion per year in reduced costs from crime incurred by victims and society at large.”

Having missed this statistic, states across the country are reacting to the financial crisis with school closures and teacher layoffs. While some of the largest districts have postponed massive layoffs for now, recently the Los Angeles Unified Schools threatened 2,300 teachers with pink slips and New York City Schools said they could lay off 15,000. The Seattle School District is planning to terminate or disrupt 13 schools, and Chicago is shuttering 16 of its own. Federal stimulus dollars for education will help ease some of the cuts, but politicians—from governors to local school officials—have promised closures and layoffs nonetheless.

Activists in Seattle, however, are working on an alternative lesson plan for our city that may prove to be a model for saving schools and halting jails.

Representatives from all the schools slated for closure and other community members have formed ESP Vision: Educators, Students and Parents for a Better Vision of the Seattle Schools—rallying hundreds against the school closures, teaming up with the local NAACP to help parents file over 200 grievances with Department of Education, and assisting parents in a formal appeals process to block the closures. Moreover, ESP Vision has teamed up with the Initiative-100 campaign that is attempting to block the building of a new city jail by collecting the 23,000 signatures needed to put its construction to a vote.

Mark Twain once said, “Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It’s like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won’t fatten the dog.” While Twain leaves us with a distasteful image, far more repugnant is a social order that invests in metal bars rather than in cultivating our children’s talents.

[Jesse D. Hagopian is a teacher, education journalist, and a co-founder of ESP Vision: Educators, Students, and Parents for a Better Vision of the Seattle Schools (espvision.org). He can be reached at: jdhagopian@gmail.com.]

Source / Common Dreams

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House Demolitions in East Jerusalem Could Spark More Mid-East Violence

Posted on March 7, 2009 by RagBlog

40-year-old Palestinian Mahmoud al-Abbasi stands amid the rubble of his home after it was demolished by the Jerusalem municipality in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan. Photograph: Gali Tibbon.

East Jerusalem Settlements Ratchet Up Tensions
By Helena Cobban / March 6, 2009

JERUSALEM – As the fires of human misery continue to smolder in Gaza, the situation in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem is emerging as another potentially explosive issue in, and far beyond, the Middle East.

The long-term governance of the city is considered an issue of prime importance to both Palestinians and Israelis, as well as to their supporters around the world. Jerusalem-related tensions have been sparked several earlier rounds of violence between the two peoples, including when former (and future) Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu started work on the new East Jerusalem settlement of Har Homa in 1997.

In September 2000, it was a visit by opposition leader Ariel Sharon to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount – accompanied by 1,000 armed security people – that sparked the Second Intifada. Now, Israeli and Palestinian peace activists warn that the provocative actions of government-backed settler activists within Jerusalem could spark yet another serious escalation of tensions.

Some 220,000 Palestinians live in East Jerusalem, which until 1967 was the commercial and administrative hub of the whole West Bank region, of which it is an integral part. Since Israel occupied the city in 1967, successive Israeli governments have implanted vast (and very expensive) Israeli settlements into the city, whose boundaries they also unilaterally expanded.

Now, around 200,000 Israeli settlers live in those settlements, which surround the Palestinian-peopled core of the city. And for some years now settler activists, most of whose money comes from supporters in the United States, have also been building webs of settlement “outposts” deep inside the Palestinian core.

Two current areas of concern are Silwan, where the Jerusalem municipality recently issued demolition orders to the owners of 88 Palestinian homes, to establish a Jewish-history theme park there, and Sheikh Jarrah, where a massive armed police force last November evicted an older couple from their longtime home so that a group of settlers could move in.

That latter eviction occurred at 3:30 a.m. The man of the house, Abu Kamel al-Kurd, was already chronically sick. He and his wife, Um Kamel, moved into a tent on a vacant lot nearby and a few days later Abu Kamel had a heart attack and died. Um Kamel has continued living in the tent, even through the winter cold and storms.

Her campaign to stay in the tent until her home is restored to her has emerged as a potent rallying point of nonviolent resistance to Israel’s plans to continue colonising East Jerusalem. Israeli police have dismantled her tent six times, most recently on Feb. 23. But on each occasion her supporters – who include both Islamist and secular Palestinians – have re-erected it.

Tents like Um Kamel’s have been evocative symbols of the eviction of Palestinians from their homes ever since 1948, when some 750,000 Palestinians were evicted or fled from their homes in what became Israel. (None have been allowed back, despite United Nations resolutions calling for a return.)

Most recently, many of the displaced Palestinians in Gaza – most of them descendants of refugees from 1948 – have once again been living in tents. And across Jerusalem in Silwan, local residents protesting their latest eviction orders, which will affect some 1,500 family members, have also erected a tent as a focal point for their protest.

In an interview in her tent Tuesday, Um Kamel told IPS, “Though we’re forced into tents, we Palestinians don’t seek tents or donations of things like clothes from the international community. All we seek is our rights! No one can overthrow the rights of other people in the way the Israelis do to us… We need all three groups, the Jews, the Christians, and the Muslims to live here together in Palestine, in peace and equality.”

The Palestinians of East Jerusalem have been in a precarious situation for many decades. In late June 1967 the city’s new Israeli occupiers expanded the municipal boundaries and declared that thenceforth Israel’s law would be applied directly to the city. That act of annexation was further cemented by Israel’s Knesset (parliament) in 1980.

Though the annexation was illegal under international law it has never been vigorously protested by the U.S. Indeed, U.S. government officials engage in complex verbal gymnastics to avoid openly acknowledging that – as all the members of the international community agree – East Jerusalem is indeed still occupied territory. This judgment means that all Israeli settlements there are quite illegal, and the city’s indigenous Palestinian residents should receive all the other protections specified in the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Instead of that happening, the Palestinians’ situation has become progressively worse. Almost immediately after the 1993 Oslo Accords were concluded, the Israeli authorities erected roadblocks and other measures designed to cut off the city’s Palestinians from their compatriots (and often, close family members) elsewhere in the West Bank.

Palestinians from elsewhere in the West Bank were meanwhile suddenly prevented from entering East Jerusalem, and many of the city’s once-thriving institutions – like schools, hospitals, and publishing houses – began to wither.

Until 1993, East Jerusalem had been the national hub of Palestinian politics. After Yasser Arafat returned to the West Bank to establish the new, Oslo-mandated Palestinian Authority (PA), he was forced to do so in nearby Ramallah, not Jerusalem. The Israelis prevented the PA from locating any of its institutions in East Jerusalem and Jerusalem’s people came under mounting pressures to leave their ancestral city.

After Oslo, successive Israeli governments also accelerated their building of new Jews-only settlements inside the city. Har Homa, started by Netanyahu in 1997, now has more than 6,000 residents and vast additional construction projects are now underway there and in nearby Gilo.

In 2001, after the start of the Second Intifada, newly installed Israeli premier Ariel Sharon started solidifying the separation of Jerusalem from the West Bank by building the 30-foot-high concrete walls, punctuated by forbidding cylindrical watch-towers, that now snake around – and sometimes, capriciously, right through – the built-up areas of the city.

The Jerusalem Palestinians always refused to take up Israeli citizenship, arguing that to do so would be an endorsement of Israel’s claim to the whole city. Without citizenship and the voting clout that would come with it, they have suffered grave discrimination at all levels, including in the provision of basic municipal services.

Their voice is excluded from city planning processes. The Israeli authorities prohibit all but a few Jerusalem Palestinians from building on even their own wholly-owned real estate. Eviction orders are routinely issued to Palestinians regarding either homes built long before 1967 or homes built since then whose owners have not gone through the burdensome and expensive process of amassing all the required permits. (Most Israeli Jewish developers meantime receive the government’s strong financial and administrative support for their projects.)

In recent weeks, the settler activists of Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah have received strong support from a rightist-dominated municipality to escalate their activities. The municipality has also stepped up its demolitions of Palestinian homes deemed “illegal” in many parts of the city, to the level of two or three per week.

With Netanyahu now poised to return as prime minister, the scene seems set for further confrontations in this city so dear to millions of believers around the world.

[Helena Cobban is a veteran Middle East analyst and author. She blogs at www.JustWorldNews.org.]

Source / IPS News

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The Machiavellian Game of Distraction: Will It Continue with Obama?

Posted on March 7, 2009 by RagBlog

Bagram Air Force Base, Afghanistan

Obama’s Guantanamo? Bush’s Living Legacy at Bagram Prison
By Karen J. Greenberg / March 5, 2009

Just when you think you’ve woken up from a bad dream…

When it comes to offshore injustice and secret prisons, especially our notorious but little known prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, let’s hope the Obama years mean never having to complete that sentence.

In the Bush era, those of us who followed his administration’s torture, detention, and interrogation policies often felt like we were unwilling participants in a perverse game of hide-and-seek. Whenever one of us stumbled upon a startling new document, a horrific new practice, a dismal new prison environment, or yet another individual implicated in torture policy, the feeling of revelation would soon be superseded by a sneaking suspicion that we were once again looking in the wrong direction, that the Bush administration was playing a Machiavellian game of distraction with us.

Okay, call it paranoia — a state of mind well suited to the Age of Cheney — but when Abu Ghraib finally came to light, it turned out that our real focus should have been on the administration’s program of “extraordinary rendition” and the CIA secret flights to the foreign countries that were serving as proxy torturers for the United States. And when one case of torture by proxy, that of Maher Arar, achieved some prominence, we began looking at proxy torturers for the United States, when we should have been looking at legalized policies of torture by the U.S.

Several years ago, British human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith placed that jewel in the Bush administration’s offshore crown of injustice, Guantanamo, in the category of distraction as well — distraction, that is, from the far grimmer and more important American detention facility at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

Distracted or not, for at least five years some of us have been seeking the hidden outlines of the torture story. Now, President Obama has given it a visible shape by providing a potential endpoint if not to our investigations, then to our focus. Much of what we focused on in these last years he’s declared to be history. Guantanamo will be closed within a year and the American role in the war in Iraq will end as well; torture will once again be banned; a new task force, already assembled, will review all the Bush administration’s detention policies; and people like me will, assumedly, finally be out of work and able to write those novels we used to dream about. For us, no more unwelcome obsessions with detention, abuse, and torture.

Bad Times at Bagram

Still, ever since the Oval Office changed hands in January, I’ve had a nagging feeling that something was amiss. And when I finally focused on it, a single question kept coming to mind: Whatever happened to the U.S. prison at Bagram?

I knew that it had been opened in 2002 on an abandoned Soviet air base the U.S. had occupied and was being massively upgraded after the invasion of Afghanistan, and that its purpose was to hold prisoners in the Global War on Terror at a place as far removed as possible from the prying eyes of American courts or international oversight bodies of any sort. In fact, many of those eventually transported to Guantanamo were originally held under even worse conditions at Bagram and, from early on, they had reported beatings, abuse, and a startlingly wide range of other forms of mistreatment there.

But what else did I know? Thanks to New York Times reporters Carlotta Gall, David Rohde, Tim Golden, and Eric Schmitt, as well as to Alex Gibney’s documentary film Taxi to the Dark Side, I knew that two Afghans, Dilawar and Jullah Habibullah, had been beaten to death by U.S. Army interrogators at the prison in December 2002. I also knew that the use of such beatings, as well as various other forms of torture, had been normalized at Bagram at the very beginning of the Bush administration’s long march of pain that led to Guantanamo and then on to Abu Ghraib and other prisons in Iraq as well as foreign torture chambers.

From the 2004 Church Report (written by Naval Inspector General Admiral T. Church), I knew that military interrogators and guards at Bagram had been given next to no relevant training for the mission of detention and interrogation. I knew as well that a secret CIA prison was allegedly located apart from the regular detention cells at Bagram. I knew that military officials had declared that the interrogation techniques at Bagram seemed to work better than those being used at Guantanamo in the same period. And that, after the Supreme Court issued a decision in 2004 to allow prisoners at Guantanamo to challenge their detentions, the prison population at Bagram began to grow.

What We Don’t Know About a Prison Nightmare

But that was the past. What did I know about the situation in the first weeks of the Obama era?

The unnerving answer was precious little. So, as I had done with Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, I began by asking the simple questions that had once been so difficult to answer about so many offshore detention facilities of the Bush era: Who was being held at Bagram? How many prisoners were there and from which countries? What status did they have? Were they currently classified as “enemy prisoners of war” or — in the phrase the Bush administration had so favored in an attempt to confound U.S. courts — “unlawful enemy combatants”? How were they being treated? What reports on prison conditions had either the U.S. government or interested non-governmental organizations released?

Setting aside the frustrations of the past seven years, I naively tried a basic Google search to see just what was instantly available, only to discover that the answer was essentially nothing.

It turns out that we can say very little with precision or confidence about that prison facility or even the exact number of prisoners there. News sources had often reported approximately 500-600 prisoners in custody at Bagram, but an accurate count is not available. A federal judge recently asked for “the number of detainees held at Bagram Air Base; the number of Bagram detainees who were captured outside Afghanistan; and the number of Bagram detainees who are Afghan citizens,” but the information the Obama administration offered the court in response remains classified and redacted from the public record.

We don’t even know the exact size of the prison or much about the conditions there, although they have been described as more spartan and far cruder than Guantanamo’s in its worst days. The International Committee of the Red Cross has visited the prison, but it remains unclear whether they were able to inspect all of it. A confidential Red Cross report from 2008 supposedly highlighted overcrowding, the use of extreme isolation as a punishment technique, and various violations of the Geneva Convention.

We do know that a planned expansion of the facility is underway and will — if President Obama chooses to continue the Bush project there — enable up to 1,100 prisoners to be held (a step which will grimly complement the “surge” in American troops now underway in Afghanistan). There are no figures available on how long most of Bagram’s prisoners have been held — although some, it seems, have been imprisoned without charges or recourse for years — or how legal processes are being applied there, if at all. Last spring, the International Herald Tribune reported that Afghans from Bagram were sometimes tried in Afghan criminal proceedings where little evidence and no witnesses were presented.

To students of Guantanamo, this sounds uncomfortably familiar. And there’s more that’s eerily reminiscent of Gitmo’s bleak history. According to the New York Times, even four years after Bagram was established, wire cages were being used as cells, with buckets for toilets — as was also true of the original conditions at Camp X-Ray, the first holding facility at Guantanamo. Similarly, as with Guantanamo, the U.S. has no status of forces agreement with Afghanistan, and so the base and prison can be closed or turned over to the Afghans only on U.S. say-so. Above all, while some Bagram detainees do have lawyers, most do not.

The Prison Where It All Began

While I was wondering about the state of our black hole of incarceration in Afghanistan, the Obama administration issued its first terse statement on the subject. When it came to granting Bagram detainees habeas rights (that is, the right to challenge their detention in U.S. courts), the administration simply stated that it “adheres to [the Justice Department’s] previously articulated position”: habeas would not be granted.

After all, reasoned the new government lawyers (like their predecessors), Bagram is in an indisputable war zone and different legal considerations should apply. But here’s the catch neither the Bush administration, nor evidently the Obama administration, has cared to consider: It’s quite possible that these four individuals, like others at Bagram, were not captured on an Afghan battlefield (as the prisoners claim), but elsewhere on what Bush officials liked to think of as the “global battlefield” of the War on Terror, and then conveniently transported to Bagram to be held indefinitely.

The U.S. government refuses to make public any documentation that would support its case and the new court documents, submitted by the lawyers of the Obama Justice Department, are frustratingly blacked out just as those of the Bush era Justice Department always were. At least for the moment then, when it comes to Bagram, tactics and arguments remain unchanged from the Bush years. No wonder journalists and human rights lawyers have lately taken to referring to that prison as the “other Guantanamo,” or “Guantanamo II,” or more combatively, “Obama’s Guantanamo.”

Sadly, however, even this is inaccurate. From the get-go, Guantanamo was actually the “other Bagram.” The obvious question now is: How will the Obama administration deal with this facility and, in particular, with matters of detention, “enforced disappearance,” and coerced testimony? Will these be allowed to continue into the future, Bush-style, or will the Obama administration extend its first executive orders on Guantanamo and torture practices to deal in new ways with the prison where it all began?

Facing Crimes of the Bush Era

President Obama has given a newly convened task force six months — a long time when people are being held in harsh conditions without charges or recourse — to consider the matter of Bush administration detention practices and formulate new policies (or, of course, retain old ones). Here are some guidelines that may prove helpful when it comes to Bagram:

1. On secrecy: The appeal to secrecy and national security has been an all-purpose refuge of official rogues for the last seven years. Reconsider it. A sunshine policy should apply, above all else, to detention practices. Ideally, the U.S. should simply release full information on Bagram and the prisoners being held there. When, in specific cases, information is not divulged, the reasons for not doing so should be fully revealed. Otherwise, the suspicion will always arise that such withheld information might be part of a cover-up of government incompetence or illegality. That must be ruled out. It is imperative that President Obama’s administration not double down on the Bush administration’s secrecy policy from a desire not to look back and so to avoid future prosecutions of Bush officials.

2. On classification of prisoners: The Obama administration should seriously consider declaring the prisoners at Bagram to be “prisoners of war,” and so subject to the Geneva Conventions. Currently, they are classified as enemy combatants, as are the prisoners at Guantanamo, and so, in the perverse universe of the Bush administration, free from any of the constraints of international law. The idea that the Conventions are too “rigid” for our moment and need to be put aside for this new extra-legal category has always been false and pernicious, primarily paving the way for the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

3. On “ghost prisoners”: The Obama administration should reject out of hand the idea that prisoner invisibility is acceptable anywhere, including at Bagram. The International Committee of the Red Cross must be granted access to all of the prisons or prison areas at Bagram, while conditions of detention there should be brought into accordance with humane treatment and standards. No “ghost prisoners” should be allowed to exist there.

4. On guilt and innocence: The belief that there is a categorical difference between guilt and innocence, which went by the wayside in the last seven years, must be restored. All too often, the military brass still assumes that if you were rounded up by U.S. forces, you are, by definition, guilty. It’s time to change this attitude and return to legal standards of guilt.

In the Bush years, we taught the world a series of harmful lessons: Americans can be as cruel as others. Americans can turn their backs on law and reciprocity among nations as efficiently as any tribally organized dictatorship. Americans, relying on fear and the human impulse toward vengeance, can dehumanize other human beings with a fervor equal to that of others on this planet.

It’s time for a change. It’s time, in fact, to face the first and last legacy of Bush detention era, our prison at Bagram Air Base, and deal with it.

Call me a perpetual optimist, but President Obama has the right team in place to address this nightmarish legacy in a wise and timely way. We should expect no less from them than a full restoration of a government responsible to the law, and confident of its power to deter enemies legally — be it on the battlefield or in the courtroom. So, too, we must expect them to possess the courage to confront truths, even if those truths mean heading down the path towards the prosecution of crimes of the Bush years.

[Karen J. Greenberg is the Executive Director of the Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law. Her latest book, The Least Worst Place, Guantanamo’s First 100 Days (Oxford University Press), has just been published. She is also the co-editor of The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib, among other works.]

Copyright 2009 Karen J. Greenberg

Source / TomDispatch

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Naomi Wolf’s ‘The End of America’

Posted on March 7, 2009 by RagBlog

Naomi Wolf – 2009. Photo by HeyokayMagazine.

Naomi Wolf – The End of America Outlines Path From Freedom To Dictatorship – Compares George Bush To Adolf Hitler
By Tom Madison / March 4, 2009

Although many people compared President Bush and his policies with the actions of Adolph Hitler in Nazi Germany, few were able to itemize the process of converting a free society into a dictatorship like Naomi Wolf in her book and movie titled “The End of America”.

Naomi outlined what President Bush did in his two terms and illustrated the parallels to Germany, Italy and Russia during the 1930s, and Chile during the 1970s. She says there are ten steps to removing freedom from a society.

The great dictators learned from one another on how to close down a society. There were 10 steps taken. Naomi Wolf studied the Pinochet regime 1973. Over the past 8 years, Naomi says that a small group of people set out to undermine the U.S. constitution.

Germany would not have looked much different from the US today. Germany in 1931 had human rights and gay rights organizations. They were relatively free.

Heimat (Homeland) became a popular phrase in discourse within Germany during the 1930s. The Nazis used the historic term, first patriotically but later nationalistically. They employed Heimat to convince their citizens that anything foreign was bad. Soon after September 11th 2001, the government used the term in the newly created mega-agency called “Homeland Security”.

Wolf lays out ten steps necessary to convert a free society to a dictatorship.

1) Invoke an internal and external threat – The Bush Administration used a terrible crime against our nation after 9-11 to launch a “war on terror”. Other countries hit by terrorists went after the bad guys without destroying their own liberty. The government created the Dept of Homeland security to manipulate our levels of fear. Israel does not make some days orange and some days red. They take pride in not trying to frighten their citizens.

In Berlin in 1933 the Reichstag (German parliament) was set on fire by an arsonist. The Nazis used that event to subvert the German constitution. They passed Clause 2 of the Enabling Acts that basically gave Hitler dictatorial power. The state could open the mail and listen to phone calls. Parliament gave up their power. In 2001 the Bush Administration pushed through the Patriot Act. This gave the government power to wiretap without a warrant among other things.

2) Secret Prisons where Torture takes place – Both Hitler and the Bush Administration called torture the same thing – “enhanced interrogation”. They needed prisons outside the rule of law. Wolf said the U.S. government put electrodes on genitals, hung prisoners by their hands, exposed them to heat and cold over and over again, among other things.

The administration said they tortured people because it was necessary to save American lives. Military Order number one stated that the President can pick up any non-citizen anywhere in the world that he thinks is a terrorist. In 2002 John Yoo, a member of Bush’s legal council, wrote a memo that narrowly redefined torture. Severe suffering had to be inflicted with specific intent, according to Yoo. There were 16 approved methods of interrogation. Rumsfeld expanded that to 35.

Wolf says we should care if brown people with Muslim names are tortured. In 1931-32 torture was still illegal in Germany, but the SA would drag people out of their homes and put them in torture chambers. They also called it “enhanced interrogation”. Bush stated that the Geneva Convention does not apply to our detainees.

Retired General James Cullen, Chief Judge of the U.S. Army, said “This is not the last war… What we do today is creating a precedent as to how American prisoner of wars who are not yet born will be treated in the future.”

In 2006 Congress passed the Military Commissions Act (HR-6166) which stripped prisoners of any rights. Prisoners can now be held indefinitely without a trial. This is modeled after Hitler’s People’s Court – you can be tried without anyone knowing it. A US citizen could also be defined as an enemy combatant.

3) Paramilitary Force – Hitler had his brown shirts, and the US has Blackwater. These groups can act outside the Constitution because they are not government agencies.

The Eric Prince family has contributed 2.4 million to Republican Party. Naomi says Blackwater picked torturers and killers from other countries to fight for the US. Naomi says that the government started protecting agents who were accused of murder.

Wolf considers Blackwater a “stealth threat”. Mussolini started using soldiers who came back from war to beat up his own people. His Black Shirts were outside the rule of law. Blackwater has been used in the US during the Katrina disaster. Armed to the teeth, they drove up and down the streets in New Orleans. Jeremy Scahill, author of “Blackwater”, saw contractors shoot at civilians.

Naomi said the Blackwater website stated they hope to focus on protests in the United States (like Manhattan NY). There is a concern that there may be civil unrest if the U.S. economy falls apart.

4) Survail ordinary citizens – Germany kept lists of their citizens. It is a way to keep people in order. You are afraid you might get on the list so you don’t speak up. Hitler developed lists of the Jews so they could quickly round them up.

Later Stasi files were used in East Germany. Every society keeps a list before they remove freedom. You want to make everyone fearful of speaking out.

In the US normal people can get on a “watch list”. The boarding passes will have a SSSS on it. Naomi Wolf has this on her boarding pass and she is always taken away from the line and searched separately.

There are one million people on the list including Edward Kennedy and Nelson Mandela. Many outspoken Americans get on the list. Drew Griffin of CNN was on the list. After one person gets on the list, everyone in the family gets on the watch list.

5) Infiltrate Citizens Groups – The ACLU has received many complaints of government agents infiltrating citizen groups. In 2004 police and FBI agents spied on citizens who protested the war. Undercover state police officers infiltrated various groups including anti-death penalty assemblies.

David Zirin said one informant was named Lucy. He questions whether this is a good way to spend taxpayer money. Wolf says they may send agents into groups to disrupt them.

6) Detain and Release Ordinary Citizens – The Nazis did this at random to keep people in line. This happened to James Yee. He was while returning from service in Guantanamo. He had printed articles from the Internet and was accused of being a terrorist spy. Yee was held in solitary confinement for 76 days. Now every time he crosses a border the government detains him.

Yee was held in Charleston South Carolina where other US enemy combatants are held. This is commonly done to Muslims today. The Nazis began to detain people arbitrarily before they focused on Jews and Gypsies.

7) Target Key Individuals – Similar to book burnings in Germany, The Dixie Chicks were banned by Clear Channel. People began burning their CDS. Members of the popular country group said they were embarrassed that President Bush was from Texas.

CIA agent Valarie Plame was singled out too. Joe Wilson said the Bush Administration exposed his wife to cover up government lies. Later Plame said she noticed that bolts holding her backyard deck up were loosened.

In 1938 Joseph Goebbels targeted key individuals. Goebbels also burned books.

8) Restrict the Press – The Bush Administration targeted the New York Times. “There is no excuse for Newspapers to print it,” President said. They wanted to prosecute reporters under the Espionage Act.

Bilal Hussein was an AP photographer in Iraq. He was arrested by the U.S. military and imprisoned for possessing bomb parts. He was later released for lack of evidence. There are still political questions raised about his arrest.

Josh Wolf was imprisoned in the United States. After a San Francisco Bay area protest, he spent 226 days in jail because he refused to give his tapes to investigators. His sentence was longer than any other journalist in US history. Wolf says the government wanted to know who was protesting the government.

Stalin trampled on the rights of the press and even executed a journalist.

9) Recast Criticism as Espionage and Dissent as Treason – Amy Goodman of Democracy Now was arrested at the Republican Convention. Dozens of reporters were arrested at that political event. Even people who were not protesting at a nearby park were arrested. Police seized all videos at the park except one that was hidden.

The Patriot Act of 2001 may redefine protest as treason. The espionage act can be used to send people away for 10 years, and if you are convicted of treason the defendant can be executed. HR 1955 didn’t pass but it could make speeches against the law.

10) Subvert the Rule of Law – In an investigation by the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten ignored subpoenas. The House wanted to find out if the Whitehouse wanted to replace all of the US Attorneys. Miers and Bolton blatantly ignored the rule of law.

The President also subverted the law with signing statements. These signing statements changed the intent of the law. President Bush did it 110 times to challenge 750 laws passed by Congress.

Joseph Goebbels purged all of the state attorneys in 1933. Mussolini ignored parliament. Wolf says ignoring the law is the final step before transitioning to a dictatorship.

Naomi Wolf says this is the last stage before declaring martial law. Beginning October 1st 2008, the army began planning to station an active unit inside the United States to serve as an “on call” response to an active emergency. Some 3,000 to 4,000 soldiers will appear on the streets for crowd control and maintain public order.

The American Freedom Agenda

The National Socialists (Nazis) began unloading their war dead off of trains in the middle of the night so no one could see the casualties. Bush didn’t allow pictures of the coffins coming back from Iraq. President Obama recently overturned this policy.

Wolf recommends all Americans stand up for freedom and join the movement to support the American Freedom Agenda Act. The act will stop torture and rendition. The act would also stop the abuse of the Espionage Act and violations caused by the Patriot Act, like illegal wire taps and the ability of police to break into your home without a warrant.

President Obama has already made some moves to overturn Bush signing statements and policies.

www.americanfreedomcampaign.org

Source / Best Syndication

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