Apparently, one of the writers for The Onion has read Greg Palast’s Armed Madhouse; otherwise, how do we explain that the video gets the result exactly right for a future 9 months from now? Thanks to Janet Gilles for finding this gem.
Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog
Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early
While we’re at it, here’s the Onion’s definition of debate: A contest to see which candidate can answer the fewest questions.
Bush’s Censored Library May Have Secret Foreign Donors
By Think Progress / February 29, 2008
Southern Methodist University in Dallas announced last week that the university will be home to President Bush’s $200 million presidential library. Bush’s library, however, will be shrouded in secrecy.
An executive order Bush signed in 2001 “gives presidents and their families more control over presidential papers” and “could result in material being censored” from the library. The order also gives Bush “the right to veto requests to open any presidential records.”
The secrecy efforts are already beginning. In a press conference yesterday, President Bush admitted that his library would likely take foreign donations but said he would consider keeping the donors’ names confidential:
BUSH: We’ll look at the disclosure requirements and make a decision. There’s some people who like to give and don’t particularly want their names disclosed. […]
Q Any restrictions on who can give? Will you take foreign money for this?
BUSH: Yeah, probably take some foreign money, but don’t know yet, Ken. We just haven’t — we just announced the deal and I, frankly, have been focused elsewhere.
So, who are the likely candidates? In Nov. 2006, the New York Daily News reported that Bush hoped to get roughly $250 million in “megadonations” from some key allies:
Bush loyalists have already identified wealthy heiresses, Arab nations and captains of industry as potential “mega” donors.
Based on history, there may already be some specifics. Bush 41’s presidential library received donations from a sheik from the UAE, who contributed at least $1 million, the “state of Kuwait, the Bandar bin Sultan family, the Sultanate of Oman, King Hassan II of Morocco and the amir of Qatar. The former Korean prime minister and China also gave tens of thousands of dollars to the library.”
When asked if the public has “right to know,” Bush replied, “We’re weighing, taking a look, taking consideration, giving it a serious consideration. Nice try, though.”
Great – I just start buying CFBs to increase my energy efficiency and reduce my carbon footprint, and now we discover that CFBs are serious sources of mercury pollution.
I recall arguing with a member of the East Lake Washington Audubon Society several years ago about a Seattle-area referendum on high-speed rail. Although I do not remember the details of the argument anymore, I do recall two specific things: (1) one of his questions of me was, “Richard, do you want to go back to horse-drawn transportation?” and (2) I (immaturely) ceased my volunteer work with ELWAS.
I think I can answer the question now: “Yes, I do want to go back in many respects.” Going forward is not really going forward when we defeat the purpose of our progress with the insidious nature of our “improvements.” I think of things such as depleted uranium munitions (not that we should have munitions for any goddamned purpose), the internal combustion engine, or these new compact fluorescent bulbs. And what about all the toxins in our new-fangled computing equipment? And intensive agriculture has to be one of the most insidious developments of the industrial age. The list seems endless.
You can read a couple of great blogs on all this business. They’re both in our sidebar – Earth Family Alpha and How Many Miles from Babylon.
Good luck to all of us in the coming years – we’re gonna need it. Our ingenuity doesn’t seem to be helping us one bit.
Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog
Loaded with Mercury: Casual Threats
By RICHARD RHAMES
“The public awareness has been raised by the sequential wave of experiences … Including mercury exposure from additives, fish, contaminated air, bird deaths from eating mercury-contaminated seed grains, dental amalgam leakage, mercury allergy, etc … .” Dr. Maurice Hilleman, 1991
Maine’s Department of Environmental Protection led the nation in its recent study of mercury loosed by compact florescent light bulb (CFL) breakage. The DEP is very clear that the overall environmental impacts of reducing carbon emissions through more energy efficient lighting is positive and substantial. Still, since CFLs contain a potent neurotoxin, mercury, staffers in the Bureau of Remediation and Waste Management wanted to offer Maine citizens good advice just in case they dropped a bulb and had an unexpected “release” in their homes.
So they studied the matter. Their February 2008 report explains, “Forty five (45) experimental trials where … CFLs were broken in a small/ moderate sized room were conducted in May through September of 2007.” Various cleanup procedures were followed. Importantly, “[t]he mercury concentrations at the five foot height (adult breathing zone) and one foot height (infant/ toddler breathing zone) above the study room floor were continuously monitored.”
Though the amount of mercury in a CFL is small —-5 milligrams (“enough to fit on the tip of a ball-point pen”), much of that may be in vapor form. But when a bulb is broken there is a “burst” of neurotoxin often driving mercury levels in room air well above the Maine standard of 300 nanograms per cubic meter. Spikes of 25,000 nanograms, 50,000 to perhaps over 100,000 nanograms were measured. Spikes sometimes recurred after ventilation ceased and after vacuuming.
“Consumers,” the report advised, ” … may consider not utilizing florescent lamps in … bedrooms or over carpeted areas frequented by infants, small children or pregnant women … .”
The DEP is to be congratulated for their ground breaking (bulb breaking) work. It’s a real contribution to better understanding the casual threats to life in our times. Exposing the next generation or their pregnant moms to mercury just isn’t a good idea. The metal’s catastrophic impact on the brain and central nervous system is well understood.
Read the rest here.
We’ve said before that you could be next. It seems clear based on everything we’ve seen this criminal administration do in the past seven years that they are beyond the law, they will steam-roll anyone in their way, and they will jail the dissidents. You (or I) could be next.
Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog
It Does Happen in America: The Political Trial of Don Siegelman
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Don Siegelman, a popular Democratic governor of Alabama, a Republican state, was framed in a crooked trial, convicted on June 29, 2006, and sent to Federal prison by the corrupt and immoral Bush administration.
The frame-up of Siegelman and businessman Richard Scrushy is so crystal clear and blatant that 52 former state attorney generals from across America, both Republicans and Democrats, have urged the US Congress to investigate the Bush administration’s use of the US Department of Justice to rid themselves of a Democratic governor who “they could not beat fair and square,” according to Grant Woods, former Republican Attorney General of Arizona and co-chair of the McCain for President leadership committee. Woods says that he has never seen a case with so “many red flags pointing to injustice.”
The abuse of American justice by the Bush administration in order to ruin Siegelman is so crystal clear that even the corporate media organization CBS allowed “60 Minutes” to broadcast on February 24, 2008, a damning indictment of the railroading of Siegelman. Extremely coincidental “technical difficulties” caused WHNT, the CBS station covering the populous northern third of Alabama, to go black during the broadcast. The station initially offered a lame excuse of network difficulties that CBS in New York denied. The Republican-owned print media in Alabama seemed to have the inside track on every aspect of the prosecution’s case against Siegelman. You just have to look at their editorials and articles following the 60 Minutes broadcast to get a taste of what counts for “objective journalism” in their mind.
The injustice done by the US Department of Justice (sic) to Siegelman is so crystal clear that a participant in Karl Rove’s plan to destroy Siegelman can’t live with her conscience. Jill Simpson, a Republican lawyer who did opposition research for Rove, testified under oath to the House Judiciary Committee and went public on “60 Minutes.” Simpson said she was told by Bill Canary, the most important GOP campaign advisor in Alabama, that “my girls can take care of Siegelman.”
Canary’s “girls” are two US Attorneys in Alabama, both appointed by President Bush. One is Bill Canary’s wife, Leura Canary. The other is Alice Martin. According to Harper’s Scott Horton,a law professor at Columbia University, Martin is known for abusive prosecutions.
What was the “crime” for which Siegelman and Scrushy were convicted? Scrushy made a contribution to the Alabama Education Foundation, a not-for-profit organization set up to push for a lottery to benefit secondary education in Alabama, to retire debt associated with the Alabama education lottery proposal. Scrushy was a member of Alabama’s Certificate of Need board, a nonpaid group that oversaw hospital expansion. Scrushy had been a member of the board through the terms of the prior three governors, and Siegelman asked him to serve another term.
Federal prosecutors claimed that Scrushy’s contribution was a bribe to Siegelman in exchange for being appointed to the Certificate of Need board. In the words of federal prosecutor Stephen Feaga, the contribution was “given in exchange for a promise for an official act.”
Feaga’s statement is absolute nonsense. It is well known that Scrushy had served on the board for years, felt he had done his duty, and wanted off the board. It was Siegelman who convinced Scrushy to remain on the board. Moreover, Scrushy gave no money to Siegelman. The money went to a foundation.
As a large number of attorneys have pointed out, every US president appoints his ambassadors and cabinet members from people who have donated to his campaign. Under the reasoning applied in the Siegelman case, a large number of living former presidents, cabinet members and ambassadors should be in federal prison_not to mention the present incumbents.
How in the world did a jury convict two men of a non-crime?
Read all of this horror story, which includes a tale of Republican election theft, utter perversion of the justice system, BushCo rewards for loyal criminals, and ruin of one man’s life here.
This article has already been on European Tribune in late December, and there is an update now concerning the fact that I have registered an LLC in Washington for the purposes outlined in this piece. I will send the update along after folks have had a chance to consider the idea.
This – or something like – will be happening, so I’d appreciate any input. The update piece is essentially a draft Members’ Agreement, which spells out the legal protections, suggested relationships between membership classes, and other components of such enterprises. It has been critiqued by several people who are involved in such endeavors, and who will probably invest, so things are moving along. I can see something concretely happening this year.
One other thing – although this piece is all about and for the potential principals, this same approach can be used for almost every conceivable economic arrangement – including ‘charity’. For instance, affordable housing could be arranged via the same basic set-up. The investors would be people looking for a ‘reasonable’ return with transparent terms and conditions and real assets supporting the investment. In fact, what would you think about creating a section of TRB to ‘tag’ co-operative movement type articles and discussions?
Paul
A Real Estate Co-op – Dollar Hedge Or Lifestyle – Or Both
By Paul Spencer / The Rag Blog
More than 100 years ago, somebody (J.S. Mill? Henry George? Ricardo?) stated or implied that land is the only real (tangible) value. Far as I’m concerned, that’s pretty close to true (except that love and honor count for at least as much, even if less tangible). Land gives us the best opportunity to earn a living on our own terms. On the other hand, if we have dollars, we are participants in a system that relies on the large-scale interaction of the self-interests of untrustworthy gamesters. Now – if you can have land in concert with peer stakeholders, you have the potential advantage of larger-scale action, and your partners should be natural allies in the pursuit of added value.
———————————————————-
[One caveat – this is not a solicitation or a prospectus. This is a discussion of hypothetical business/personal relationships and arrangements. If some individuals express an interest in actual development of some of the concepts developed, then we will get together on another channel to discuss specific proposals.]
[Second caveat – when I bring up an example to illustrate some suggestion, you can assume that the example represents my personal preference in the matter.]
Over time, and since the inception of capitalism, land is the one inflation, deflation, stagnation, bust, you-name-it hedge. In ‘boom’ times land-price appreciation may not keep up with other investments. In ‘bust’ periods land “values” may fall in terms of some particular currency. But the value of the land is inherent: home, food source, aesthetic, psychological grounding, work site.
Co-operatives – in this case, registered as a Limited Liability Company or a Limited Liablity Partnership – give the stakeholders a scale of buying power that lone individuals of similar means cannot match. In other words there is an immediate financial advantage in terms of our means. After that, it’s all about the membership: what do they want to accomplish? What do they bring to the task?
So – what does a co-op do? What are the relationships of the members to each other? To the land? How is it funded? How are funds channeled? Protections? Duties? These are all questions that can be resolved by articles of incorporation and by bylaws. Here are a few possible answers:
It is legally registered in one corporate form or another, which form automatically defines some constraints and responsibilities. I have a copy of the Washington state LLC regulation, for instance; and, based on several readings, it appears to cover every concern that a member might have. However, it allows the membership – advised in a sense by the provisions of the regulation – to construct their own, majority-defined rules for operation and control of the organization.
The co-op can have a fiduciary function. It can be the ‘bank’ for transactions or construction loans; it can hold a fund for maintenance or for common-use construction projects; it can serve as a company for intra-cooperative distribution or for outside sales of products produced by common-ownership areas – e.g., solar- or wind-generated electrical power, agricultural produce, timber.
Members can own individual lots and the ‘improvements’ thereon. Or the co-op can own the land, and members can rent the land for purposes of – whatever the co-op registration articles allow (e.g., building a house {presumably for the member to inhabit or let}, gardening, raising llamas {they’re quiet}).
They can participate in economic activities that are generated on common-owned (co-op owned) property (e.g., growing hops and barley to brew beer, timber harvest, solar-based generation of electricity).
Members can collectively decide (in my opinion based on some kind of super-majority) what kinds of activities are appropriate to the commons. They can collectively decide on restrictions or covenants on activities and standards appropriate to the member-owned properties (again, my position would be to require some kind of super-majority basis).
There could be classes of membership, including ownership, worker, investor, renter. But the essential principle for me would be that they are essentially equitable. For instance, a long-term worker – say, a Utilities technician (for common water projects, solar generation station, common ‘geothermal’ pipe beds, wind turbines) – would be paid some standard wage, but could also gain some dollar-equivalent share of the commons value of the co-op. (This is because labor creates/adds value to the organization.) A renter might have some kind of equity relationship to the property where he/she resides, arising from all or some portion of rents paid within a formula that incorporates some measure of the owner’s prior equity – perhaps a market appraisal performed at the commencement of the renter’s occupation of the property.
An important matter – I strongly recommend that some elements of such an LLC contract should be set in perpetuity. They should not be subject to amendment or dilution by addition. For instance, if the Purpose is to create a fully democratic device to purchase, hold, and improve property in pursuit of an appropriate balance of sustainability, sustenance, and social health – well, this should not be subject to modification in my opinion.
Those are some suggestions for some elements of an organizational scheme. There are many elements to be covered in the creation of such an entity; I am just trying to demonstrate some of the considerations in order to encourage discussion.
Concretely – speaking for myself – I want to buy land in Klickitat County between Goldendale and WA Route 141 (preferably with others in an LLC). It is mostly high-prairie land with arboreal remnants from the eastern edges of the Cascades mountain range. There is water, good soil, substantial sunlight, plenty of wind, four seasons, clean air – all of the best stuff. Down the road we – or you and your friends – can talk about doing this in Umbria, New Zealand, South Africa, Romania (Bulgaria?), Viet Nam, Tasmania, Costa Rica, Wales, or ??. But we need to prove something first; we need to model this idea in some form. And western Klickitat County has everything needed to do that – plus good prices for large chunks of land.
The region of interest for me is mostly Rural Residence with a 5 acre minimum lot size (RR5). There is a subcategory that allows cluster development, as long as the lot plus the lot’s share of the commons equals 5 acres minimum. Generally, 200 to 1,000 + acres range from $2,000 to 5,000 per acre in this area, counter-respectively. So the base investment is $10,000 to 25,000 per lot. To develop water, roads, utilities – and to get started on common solar- and wind-generation systems would about double the investment. For example, if an LLC buys 300 acres total for $1 million U.S, leaves 50 acres in common ownership, then it will need 50 investor/owners @ approximately $40,000 each. The extra million would be used for infrastructure, but best practice would be to leave some part in a contingency fund, too.
[Quick aside – property of this sort goes for about $70,000 for bare land currently in this area. The infrastructure raises this to a minimum of $100,000 per 5-acre lot.]
[Second aside – look up Bend, OR to see the probable future of this area. Most people like or love Bend and the surrounding resort developments. This area is essentially the same, except closer to Portland, OR. Why hasn’t it been similarly developed? I’d say that, first, Bend is closer to California, and the phenomenon has a certain cycle of discovery and cautious growth; then a threshold is reached at which point the whole boom mentality takes over, until the area is overgrown and over-developed, and ‘smart money’ looks to the next cycle. Secondly, there is a town named Hood River, OR (located about 30 miles to the southwest of Goldendale, WA) that is the current ‘darling’ for development. It is reaching geographical saturation in several senses of the phrase. Klickitat’s time is coming, and there’s two ways to look at it from our viewpoint: 1) take the money and run, or 2) create the new paradigm, enjoy your home and community, and thumb your nose at the ‘smart money’. I’m for the second option.]
I’m posting this here, where the members appreciate the underlying concerns and can propose solutions. Plus, I will be discussing these ideas with some of my friends and relations.
One question that might arise is: What’s in it for paul spencer? The answer would be: the same share as yours at the same price. If enough people indicate interest, then I would want to charge, say, $40 per hour to draft an agreement, to coordinate the creation of the details, and to register the LLC. The invoice for this could be credited against my share of some eventual membership’ purchase price.
If we were to get some such organization going, there would also be the matter of how to draw the subdivision and how to allot the lots. Actually, there would be many details of this sort. By the end of the process, it might behoove all participants to agree quickly, or you could be buying my share for me, after all.
Just for fun, here are some samples of possible parcels from Klickitat County, Washington, U.S.A.
http://68.178.238.98/coltprintcr.asp?brn=CR1&lid=23555
http://68.178.238.98/coltprintcr.asp?brn=CR1&lid=23118
http://68.178.238.98/coltprintcr.asp?brn=CR1&lid=23288
Last items: I have been discussing these concepts with Chris Cook in the UK and a nearby friend, Steve Nieman (who is a Founding Member of an aircraft-owning co-op called Downwind Corp.). They have several strong opinions about the how-tos and what-fors. One particular matter is that they both think that all of any land that might be involved should be commonly held. A second matter is that they look more to a Founders’ group – or a Sustaining Members class – in ultimate control of any such potential LLC or LLP. I’m probably in disagreement with both points, as I am inclined to: 1) vest property rights in the owner/members, keeping some agreed portion of the total parcel for common purposes and ownership; and 2) rely on some level of full-membership supermajority assent for any changes to rules and relationships to best preserve the individual rights of members.
Folks on Humphrey Hill Drive were still waking up on the icy Saturday morning the shark hunters came to town. They rounded the suburban traffic circle in a pair of rented school buses after a half-hour ride from far more modest neighborhoods, rumbling to a stop at the Garmone family’s driveway. Forty-two caffeinated Clevelanders piled out, their leaders carrying bullhorns.
Their quarry, Mike Garmone — a regional vice president at Countrywide Financial Corp., the nation’s largest mortgage lender — didn’t answer his door. So they deployed, ringing bells at the big homes with three-car garages, handing out accusatory fliers and lambasting Garmone and his company’s loans. Before departing, they left their calling card — thousands of 2 1/2-inch plastic sharks — flung across Garmone’s frozen flower beds, up into the gutters, littering the doorstep.
The commotion was the work of an in-your-face activist group called the East Side Organizing Project, with a paid staff then of just two, mobilized to battle Cleveland’s mortgage “loan sharks.” Years before the rest of the country was rocked by the fallout from aggressive lending, their neighborhoods were already home to the nation’s highest concentration of foreclosures — and they were fed up.
ESOP’s people are proudly loud and abrasive, and they’ve long reveled in needling people with pull. But could they get a distant behemoth like Countrywide to the table?
On that morning in February 2006, ESOP executive director Mark Seifert had his doubts. For starters, he wasn’t sure his group’s research on Garmone even had the family’s correct address.
Until two evenings later, when Seifert checked his e-mail and found a message from a top public relations executive at Countrywide’s California headquarters.
Seifert broke into a wide grin.
Now that David had Goliath’s ear, he wasn’t about to let go.
___
The foreclosure epidemic that has infected Cleveland’s neighborhoods started earlier and has been even more punishing than the crisis much of the rest of the country is enduring. It’s a symptom of the lax lending that became widely common, without the run-up in home prices that long camouflaged it.
“The problems that exist everywhere now … showed themselves earlier here because there was no getting out of them,” says Zach Schiller of Policy Matters Ohio, a Cleveland nonprofit focused on the state’s economy.
The problem is well documented — Cleveland and the surrounding county saw more than 15,000 foreclosures last year. But to grasp its impact, walk with Nita Gardner down the block of East 113th Street where she raised two boys.
When Gardner, a retired machinist, bought the gray wood-frame house 33 years ago, this part of the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood was filled with families. Their homes on small lots were modest, but maintained with pride.
Have a look at what’s left.
The white house on the opposite corner — its front porch ripped away by scavengers — fell to foreclosure last year. The home behind it — blue with plank-covered windows — went soon after.
A few doors down from Gardner, three homes in a row are abandoned. Three of the four across from them are vacant, too. It’s not like some manicured suburban neighborhood, where it’s a guess if a house is empty. Here, shredded curtains flap from holes where windows used to be. The silver fringes of insulation hang from walls where aluminum siding has been stripped for resale.
In early 2006, Gardner’s adult sons — who had bought the house from her — fell behind on their mortgage and the lender, Countrywide, began foreclosure.
Gardner stepped in to fight, although looking at the home’s drab exterior and the surrounding neighborhood, it’s not immediately clear why.
Until, that is, Gardner opens the front door and light spills over the floor to a mural of an Egyptian pharaoh she painted in gold and azure across the living room wall. Upstairs, a closet door still bears the markings in pen where her sons charted their heights, year after year.
“I just feel like I’m a whole person with this house,” says Gardner, explaining her battle to save it. “Because this is not just a house. It’s me.”
___
When ESOP held its annual meeting in 1999, organizers were surprised to see empty chairs. They called the missing and found many phones had been disconnected. They knocked on doors and found empty homes.
It was the first sign, Seifert recalls, that people in some of Cleveland’s poorest neighborhoods were losing their homes to foreclosure.
ESOP’s organizers, until then working with parents on safety around public schools, knew nothing about mortgage lending. But they did know how to raise hell.
That was clear in the mid-1990s, when ESOP demanded that Cleveland officials give money seized in drug busts to struggling city schools.
When Mayor Michael White put them off, ESOP members picketed White’s church and ask the pastor to excommunicate him. They set up outside the house of the mayor’s father, demanding he talk with his son. To drive the message home, ESOP activists figured out the married mayor had a girlfriend and went to her door with a letter demanding the cash.
The tactics came back to bite them.
“We lost about 90 percent of our funding overnight,” Seifert recalls.
The nonprofit staggered. If it was going to be confrontational, it needed to keep the foundations that fed its budget in the loop.
Fighting foreclosures became their new cause. But they brought along old tactics — a brand of confrontation honed by Saul Alinsky, the legendarily radical Chicago organizer.
“Power is not only what you have,” Alinsky schooled his followers, “but what the enemy thinks you have.”
ESOP was banking on anger. Clevelanders were losing their homes, organizers concluded, because aggressive lenders had put people in mortgages they couldn’t possibly afford.
Read all of it here.
Arizona Sen. John McCain happily donned the “maverick” mantle in 2000 as he climbed aboard the Straight Talk Express and set off on his quest for the presidency. And he’s still wearing it today, if a nappier version, as he rides into Tuesday’s Texas primary as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
A bad fit, claimed my old friend Maury — a Maverick by birthright and a maverick by inclination.
A San Antonio human rights lawyer and former state legislator who wrote a fervidly liberal newspaper column almost until the day he died in 2003 at 82, Maury Maverick Jr. considered himself a zealot for freedom. He was proud that his family had bequeathed its name to the vernacular, but he could be downright cantankerous about what he considered the illegitimate use of the eponym.
Just as not every cola is a Coke and not every tissue is a Kleenex, not every nonconformist is a maverick, the last of the maverick Mavericks insisted. As a former Marine who served in the Pacific during World War II, he saluted McCain’s military service and his bravery during years of captivity. But Maury insisted that any conservative Republican, by definition, adhered too closely to the status quo to deserve the hallowed label.
“Many times Maury was furious that the Dallas Mavericks would be called Mavericks,” said Texas writer Jan Jarboe Russell. “A maverick wasn’t just a contrarian for contrary’s sake — and certainly not a basketball team.”
No matter that the Mavericks’ owner, Mark Cuban, is something of an NBA iconoclast. A basketball team owner, like a conservative Republican, runs with the herd, so he can’t be a true maverick, Maury insisted.
Russell, who honored her friend by naming her daughter Maury, was relieved he didn’t live long enough to see George W. Bush name as Mavericks those individuals who raised $50,000 for his 2004 reelection.
To Maury, a maverick deserving of the name stood up to the crowd, went against the grain, marched to the beat of his own drummer for the sake of principle, on behalf of liberty. When his colleagues in the state legislature in the ’50s drafted a resolution inviting Joseph McCarthy to come to Austin and address them, Maury drafted a resolution inviting Mickey Mouse. “If we are going to invite a rat,” he intoned, “why not a good rat?”
Irascibility was key. Maury and his wife, Julia, lived in separate houses with adjoining backyards for much of their 37-year marriage. He’d carry his cup to the back fence each morning; she’d come out and pour him fresh coffee. She’d do anything for him. She just couldn’t live with him.
Maury’s own maverick ideal was an early ancestor, Samuel Maverick, a 17-year-old apprentice who died from wounds he received in the Boston Massacre, the deadly prelude to revolution between Boston colonists and British soldiers on March 5, 1770. When Maury visited Russell during her year as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, she took him to the burial place of his ancestor, who lay near runaway slave Crispus Attucks, the first African American to die in the incipient revolution. He teared up at the grave site.
Maury Maverick Sr. was a New Deal congressman and mayor of San Antonio from 1939 to 1941. And while father and son had a famously fractious relationship, Maury Jr. admired the old man’s cussedness.
Maury Sr.’s maverick ways prompted death threats and ended his political career when he insisted on a generous interpretation of the First Amendment. San Antonians went on a rampage when he refused to ban a local Communist Party group from using the Municipal Auditorium for a rally on behalf of poor Mexican women working long hours for low wages as pecan shellers.
The eponymous transformation of the family name was pure happenstance. Samuel Augustus Maverick, Maury’s great-grandfather, ran a small herd of cattle in the Texas Gulf Coast area in the 1840s. When the Mavericks moved to San Antonio, he left the unbranded animals with a trusted slave named Jack. Soon coastal settlers were referring to any unbranded cow as “one of Maverick’s.”
In 1854, Maverick had his wayward cattle herded back to his San Antonio ranch, where they again were allowed to roam unbranded. Two years later, when he sold his cattle and brand to a man named A. Toutant Beauregard, the new owner’s cowhands had to hunt for the critters across several South Texas counties. Any unbranded cattle they came across were claimed as “Mavericks,” and by the decades after the Civil War, maverick became a handy term for both cattle and people who roamed widely.
It certainly fit Maury Maverick Jr.
“Maury believed in the idea of destiny,” Russell said. “He felt his family’s role in America defined his role.”
US: Vets Break Silence on War Crimes
By Aaron Glantz
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb 28 (IPS) – U.S. veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are planning to descend on Washington from Mar. 13-16 to testify about war crimes they committed or personally witnessed in those countries.
“The war in Iraq is not covered to its potential because of how dangerous it is for reporters to cover it,” said Liam Madden, a former Marine and member of the group Iraq Veterans Against the War. “That’s left a lot of misconceptions in the minds of the American public about what the true nature of military occupation looks like.”
Iraq Veterans Against the War argues that well-publicised incidents of U.S. brutality like the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the massacre of an entire family of Iraqis in the town of Haditha are not the isolated incidents perpetrated by “a few bad apples”, as many politicians and military leaders have claimed. They are part of a pattern, the group says, of “an increasingly bloody occupation”.
“The problem that we face in Iraq is that policymakers in leadership have set a precedent of lawlessness where we don’t abide by the rule of law, we don’t respect international treaties, so when that atmosphere exists it lends itself to criminal activity,” argues former U.S. Army Sergeant Logan Laituri, who served a tour in Iraq from 2004 to 2005 before being discharged as a conscientious objector.
Laituri told IPS that precedent of lawlessness makes itself felt in the rules of engagement handed down by commanders to soldiers on the front lines. When he was stationed in Samarra, for example, he said one of his fellow soldiers shot an unarmed man while he walked down the street.
“The problem is that that soldier was not committing a crime as you might call it because the rules of engagement were very clear that no one was supposed to be walking down the street,” he said. “But I have a problem with that. You can’t tell a family to leave everything they know so you can bomb the shit out of their house or their city. So while he definitely has protection under the law, I don’t think that legitimates that type of violence.”
Iraq Veterans Against the War is calling the gathering “Winter Soldier,” after a quote from the U.S. revolutionary Thomas Paine, who wrote in 1776: “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”
Organisers say video and photographic evidence will also be presented, and the testimony and panels will be broadcast live on Satellite TV and streaming video on ivaw.org.
Winter Soldier is modeled on a similar event held by Vietnam Veterans 37 years ago.
Read all of it here.
Human Rights, Torture and the Presidency
By Naomi Wolf / February 28, 2008
I just flew back from Australia, where I was speaking about the erosions of our civil liberties. Believe me, the rest of the world is agog at our inaction as what makes us Americans is being set aflame; and they are more scared of what an unsheathed US could do to the rest of the world than we are.
They also get more news out in the rest of the world about these depredations than we do here in our media bubble.
For instance: As the Australian reported earlier this week, New South Wales Justice of the Peace Mamdouh Habib is suing the Australian federal government — which under the Howard administration had colluded with the US in committing various abuses against detainees and due process — for having allowed him to be arrested wrongly in Pakistan in 2001, kidnapped and sent illegally to Egypt. There this Justice of the Peace was illegally imprisoned and tortured for six months. After that the United States held him for FOUR YEARS in Guantanamo. His complaint notes that he is a law-abiding citizen who was swept up under false pretexts. “It turns out that Habib has incontrovertible proof of his good standing,” the Australian noted. “[H]e is a fully accredited Justice of the Peace in NSW.
A search of the NSW Attorney General’s Department website reveals that not only Habib, but his wife Maha Habib, is a JP.” To become justice of the peace in New South Wales, the Australian added, “you have to be NOMINATED BY A MEMBER OF THE NSW PARLIAMENT and submit to a full character inquiry, including a criminal records check by NSW Police.” (ALL CAPS mine)
Get that? A justice of the peace in a developed-world democracy. Had you heard of that?
Me neither.
This gave me chills because, once again, it is so scarily predictable: when I first started trying to alert people about the ramifications of the Military Commissions Act, and how it gives the US power to seize innocent people off the street simply by the President’s naming them ‘enemy combatants’, I pointed out that nothing would prevent the US from rendering an EU minister off the streets of Belgium — and flying him or her to a `black site’ for torture — if he or she opposed a US pipeline plan, or was prosecuting US war criminals such as Rumsfeld in the Hague. And that the clear lesson of Germany and other closing societies such as Argentina is that once those ‘disappearances’ begin, that is it; few are then brave enough to object — and at that point objection is too weak to be effective anyway.
They rendered an Australian justice of the peace — and that rendition did not even make the US news. So how can we be sure there is something so sacred about an American justice of the peace or even a judge? Say, an American judge who ruled against the Military Commissions?
This kind of leap to the next level of threat to us as citizens seems implausible to many people because they assume that there is an orderly and effective democratic response to this kind of eruption of lawlessness — (oh gosh, actually it isn’t lawlessness any more, now is it) — or, I should say, to this kind of abrupt shift to a heightened level of state sadism; Well — someone would bring charges!, one assumes. Or: someone would sue! Or: surely the ACLU would do something!
But seriously, I ask you to consider: What would indeed happen as a countermove if a US justice of the peace or a judge was rendered? The Bar Association would protest? Scary. Intimidating.
I raise this as an urgent matter in part because of a recent conference call I participated in with Hamid Khan, the head of the courageous movement of Pakistani lawyers and judges. In the call, which he made in spite of great danger to himself and probably to his family, there was a moment when he described the internecine warfare and factionalism of the opposition to Musharraf.
In his voice was the tired, frustrated sound I have heard so often in this country when groups on the left JUST CAN’T GET IT TOGETHER. No matter how urgent the need is. Whereas in Pakistan’s case they were having trouble getting the anti-Musharraf forces to act together — and there was so much at stake.
What became clear from that call is that we are fools to assume that if the government makes a dramatically violent move, which all the laws I have highlighted now make entirely possible, that anyone will know clearly what to do or how to implement what should be done in response. In Pakistan, it was clear, in spite of this powerful grassroots movement, no one had a clear Plan B when Musharraf declared a state of emergency and began rounding up the lawyers and arresting the judges. No one had an unquestioned leadership structure in place for the countermovement; no one had a subcontinent-sized phone tree or a nice big — oh, nation-sized — conference room in which to meet.
We need to consider this right now when we think about our own country: In a sudden sharp move on the part of the US government, even a `small’ one such as this imagined scenario of the rendition of a handful of US judges, there is nothing a democracy is prepared effectively to do; that is the nature of democracy. There is no War Room for democracy; no one has an organizational chart detailing who would do what; no one would have a master strategy.
When people think about the many laws that invite this kind of overreaching now in the US — the National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD 51), for instance, that would give the President control over all branches of government — executive, legislative, and judicial — in the event of an emergency — they just assume that, gosh darn it, WE WON’T TAKE IT. And it may well be that we wouldn’t want to take it and we would be willing in great numbers to run to the ramparts. But here is what I have to report to you, that the conference call made clear, and my Pakistani friend would confirm this: in a crackdown, even in the best-case scenario, NO ONE KNOWS WHERE THE RAMPARTS ARE.
Read all of it here
From David Hamilton / The Rag Blog
Thorne Webb Dreyer, Editor
