May 18th, 2012 :: Year 9, Issue 18

May-18-2012 | Comments (0)

1. Europe Swerves Left

Bird’s Eye: In the past fortnight Greece, France, and Germany all have voted against austerity as a solution to economic problems. We precede individual articles about each with two overviews: Paul Krugman looks at the possible breakup of the Euro, while Adam Gopnik writes about how successful the EU has been at reining in European nationalism. It remains unclear where we’re going, or why everyone is in these hand-baskets.

* Eurodämmerung Paul Krugman New York Times

Some of us have been talking it over, and here’s what we think the end game looks like:

1. Greek euro exit, very possibly next month.

2. Huge withdrawals from Spanish and Italian banks, as depositors try to move their money to Germany.

3a. Maybe, just possibly, de facto controls, with banks forbidden to transfer deposits out of country and limits on cash withdrawals.

3b. Alternatively, or maybe in tandem, huge draws on ECB credit to keep the banks from collapsing.

4a. Germany has a choice. Accept huge indirect public claims on Italy and Spain, plus a drastic revision of strategy — basically, to give Spain in particular any hope you need both guarantees on its debt to hold borrowing costs down and a higher eurozone inflation target to make relative price adjustment possible; or:

4b. End of the euro.

* Hollande, Sarkozy, and Democracy in France Adam Gopnik The New Yorker

The hope of American liberals that an Hollande victory would vindicate their position that austerity is bad policy—even though that may be the case—seems unlikely to take hold here. To the American right, anything that goes wrong in Europe does so because Europe is wrong, and not because of austerity, because austerity is right.

This anti-European bias is producing an indecent-seeming amount of schadenfreude—on the right but also on the left—about the prospect of the dissolution of the European Union. The potential Franco-German split, Germany’s own ambivalences, the Greek crisis, the fall of the Dutch government, the backslide of the British economy—the tone about all this is oddly punitive here, as though the E.U. had been the product of some Brussels bureaucrat’s utopian folly rather than a miracle of coexistence wrought by a handful of quiet visionaries after more than fifty years of catastrophe. In thinking about Europe and its union, the number that one needs to keep in mind is not the rate of the euro exchange or the measure of the Greek deficit but a simpler one, of sixty million.

That is the approximate (and probably understated) number of Europeans killed in the thirty years between 1914 and 1945, victims of wars of competing nationalisms on a tragically divided continent. The truth needs re-stating: social democracy in Europe, embodied by its union, has been one of the greatest successes in history.

* Eurozone crisis: Merkel tells Athens and Paris to stick to spending limits  The Guardian

Europe’s 30-month effort to save the euro by slashing spending and debt levels risks turning into a crisis of political legitimacy after EU leaders’ strategies collided spectacularly with the wishes of voters inGreece and France.

The impasse was most graphically demonstrated when Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, insisted Athens must comply with the stringent terms of its €130bn (£100bn) bailout even though more than 60% of the Greek electorate had voted for parties rejecting those terms.

Following a French election campaign in which she strongly backed the loser, Nicolas Sarkozy, and snubbed the president-elect, François Hollande, Merkel stressed her opposition to Hollande’s central campaign pledge: reopening the euro’s new rulebook, or fiscal pact.

“That’s just not on,” she told a Berlin press conference called to address the huge shift from right to left in France.

* In Rebuke to Merkel, Social Democrats Win German Vote New York Times

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party suffered a stinging defeat in Germany’s most populous state, one likely to embolden her opposition both at home and abroad as the European debt crisis enters a critical new phase.

One week after Socialists seized the French presidency, the Social Democrats won the parliamentary election in North Rhine-Westphalia, early results and exit polls released Sunday showed….The strong showing for Ms. Kraft and the Social Democrats, as well as what the German news media described as a “debacle” and a “disaster” for the conservatives, sends a clear signal that Ms. Merkel could face a difficult road to re-election.

* Greece Takes A Leap Into The Dark, Driven By Defiance And Despair  Maria Magaronis The Guardian

The message of Sunday’s election in Greece is clear: the Greeks have said no to more of the cuts and austerity measures that have devastated the country, pushing unemployment above 20%, shattering the healthcare system, tearing families apart and leading some to suicide. It was above all a vote of rage against the two major parties, Pasok and New Democracy, which between them ran the economy into the ground, signed up to a disastrous austerity programme in exchange for dead-end bailouts from the EU and IMF, and then allowed the blows to fall on the most vulnerable.

The medium, though, is more confused and troubling. As elsewhere in Europe, the draining away of the centre has revealed a jagged landscape: the shorthand of “extremes of left and right” doesn’t begin to map it. The most obvious rift in Greece in the last months – a rift that’s been described to me more than once as a “civil war”– has been between those who are for and against the “memorandum”, the EU/IMF schedule of demands. The pro-memorandum forces want to keep Greece in the eurozone at any cost; most of their opponents also want to stay in Europe – but not of “Merkozy”, austerity and the banks.



2. Right Wing Enviro–Denial

May-18-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Few aspects of reality threaten unbridled capitalism more than the increasing evidence that it’s destroying the planet. So clearly, that news must be blocked. In the US, right-wingers fund outrageous campaigns of lies; in Canada, where they control the government they simply muzzle scientists, or defund research that might report the wrong results. Elizabeth May, the head of Canada’s Green Party, lists 18 items attacking environmental protection, all buried in Bill C-38.

US Think Tank Compares Belief In Global Warming To Mass Murder Guardian

It really is hard to know where to begin with this one. But let’s start with: “What on earth were they thinking?”

The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based rightwing thinktank notorious for promoting climate scepticism, has launched quite possibly one of the most ill-judged poster campaigns in the history of ill-judged poster campaigns.

I’ll let its own press release for its upcoming conference explain, as there’s simply no need to finesse it further:

“Billboards in Chicago paid for by The Heartland Institute point out that some of the world’s most notorious criminals say they “still believe in global warming” – and ask viewers if they do, too…The billboard series features Ted Kaczynski, the infamous Unabomber; Charles Manson, a mass murderer; and Fidel Castro, a tyrant. Other global warming alarmists who may appear on future billboards include Osama bin Laden and James J. Lee (who took hostages inside the headquarters of the Discovery Channel in 2010).
These rogues and villains were chosen because they made public statements about how man-made global warming is a crisis and how mankind must take immediate and drastic actions to stop it.
Why did Heartland choose to feature these people on its billboards? Because what these murderers and madmen have said differs very little from what spokespersons for the United Nations, journalists for the “mainstream” media, and liberal politicians say about global warming.”

But then comes the best bit:

“Of course, not all global warming alarmists are murderers or tyrants.”

* Conservative Thinktanks Step Up Attacks Against Obama’s Clean Energy Strategy The Guardian

A network of ultra-conservative groups is ramping up an offensive on multiple fronts to turn the American public against wind farms and Barack Obama’s energy agenda. A number of rightwing organisations, including Americans for Prosperity, which is funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, are attacking Obama for his support for solar and wind power. The American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), which also has financial links to the Kochs, has drafted bills to overturn state laws promoting wind energy.

Now a confidential strategy memo seen by the Guardian advises using “subversion” to build a national movement of wind farm protesters. The strategy proposal was prepared by a fellow of the American Tradition Institute (ATI) – although the thinktank has formally disavowed the project. The proposal was discussed at a meeting of self-styled ‘wind warriors’ from across the country in Washington DC last February.

* Tories Admit To Closing Enviro Research Group Because They Disliked Results   The Hook

The federal government has confirmed what the rumour mill suspected: it shut down an arm’s length, independent advisory group because it didn’t like the advice it was getting on addressing climate change. Funding for the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy (NRTEE) was cut in the last budget, giving the group just one year to live. Since 1988, it has been producing research on how business and government policies can work together for sustainable development — including the idea of introducing carbon taxes.

Environment Minister Peter Kent had initially said the reason for the closure was because such research can now be easily accessed through the Internet, and through universities and other think tanks. But Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird said Monday the shuttering of the round table had more to do with the content of the research itself.

“Why should taxpayers have to pay for more than 10 reports promoting a carbon tax, something that the people of Canada have repeatedly rejected?” Baird said in response to a question by Liberal Leader Bob Rae during question period. “It should agree with Canadians. It should agree with the government.

* Bill C-38: the Environmental Destruction Act Elizabeth May The Tyee

Here’s what is in C-38 on the environment. (C-38 threatens more than environmental damage, but this should give you a sense of why I am determined to stop this bill.)

Canadian Environmental Assessment Act ditched. 

Canadian Environmental Protection Act undercut. 

Fisheries Act seriously weakened.

Energy Board Act neutered. 

Species at Risk Act hamstrung. 

Canadian Oil and Gas Operations Act made more industry friendly. 

Canada Seeds Act inspections privatized.

Editor’s note: 11 more items in full list, with explanations



3. Israel: Dramatic Changes

May-18-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Two major developments in Israel: Netanyahu ditches the far-right for the centre-right, and manages to survive without an election, and the Palestinian hunger-strikers wins most of what they wanted. We offer two reports on each.

* The Netanyahu-Mofaz Pact Uri Avnery Counterpunch

THE MASTER magician has drawn another rabbit from his top hat. A real and very lively rabbit. He has confounded everybody, including the leaders of all parties, the top political pundits and his own cabinet ministers. He has also shown that in politics, everything can change – literally – overnight.

At 2 a.m. the Knesset was busy putting the finishing touches to a law to dissolve itself – condemning half of its members to political oblivion. At 3 a.m. there was a huge new government coalition. No elections, thank you very much.

An operetta in 5 acts.

Act One:  Everything tranquil. Public opinion polls show Binyamin Netanyahu in absolute control. His popularity is approaching 50%; nobody else’s even approaches 20%. The largest party in the Knesset, Kadima, sinks in the polls from 28 seats to 11, with all indications that it will continue to fall. Its new leader, former Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz, gets even less points as candidate for Prime Minister. Netanyahu could sun himself on the roof of his luxury villa and contemplate the future with equanimity. All is well in the best of all Jewish states….

New Israeli Government Likely Won’t Launch Iran Attack Juan Cole Informed Comment

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu moved from the far right to just the Right on Tuesday by bringing into his government the center-right Kadima Party, led by Shaul Mofaz.

Mofaz has been sharply critical of reported plans by Netanyahu and his defense minister Ehud Barak, to launch a go-it-alone military attack on Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. Mofaz is not opposed to military action against Iran in and of itself, but wants it coordinated with the United States. He last week aligned himself with the views of former Israel domestic intelligence head Yuval Diskin, who strongly opposed a unilateral Israeli strike on Iran and who attacked Netanyahu as erratic. Mofaz said, “Let President Obama handle Iran. We can trust him…”

Having Mofaz in the cabinet makes Netanyahu less dependent on extreme hawks, and makes it highly unlikely that Israel will act on its own against Iran. 

* Many Winners, Few Losers In Deal To End Palestinian Prisoners’ Hunger Strike   Haaretz Daily Newspaper 

The agreement that brought the Palestinian prisoners’ hunger strike to an end on Monday, alongside a decision to return 100 bodies of Palestinian terrorists buried in Israel, as a gesture to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, were less about possible progress in peace attempts as much as they were about an Israeli effort to preserve the relative silence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Despite the fact that peace negotiations aren’t likely to restart, the Palestinian Authority, Hamas and Israel are all interested in getting rid of anything that could pose a threat to stability in the region. And so, while the Middle East continues burning (Bahrain, Syria, Lebanon and others), and on a day that was once considered highly likely to draw violent confrontations in the Palestinian territories, the Shin Bet and prisoner’s leadership managed to reach a deal that essentially had many winners and few losers.

The Shin Bet has emphasized their significant “achievement” in the deal: having the Palestinian prisoners sign that they will not return to terrorist activities within the prison walls. One does not need to be a security analyst to understand that despite the deal, at least some of them will repeatedly engage in terrorist activity. Their real achievement lies elsewhere: the fact they could neutralize the ticking bomb of 1,500 hunger-striking prisoners.

In Support of the “Battle of the Empty Stomachs” Rabbi Brant Rosen

After nearly a full month of fasting, around 2,000 Palestinian political prisoners ended last night their mass hunger strike upon reaching an agreement with the Israeli Prison Service (IPS) to attain certain core demands…This is heartening news to be sure, particularly for the families of the strikers.  But on an even deeper level, this deal is a testimony to the astonishing moral/political power of fasting in response to oppression. 

Hunger striking is, of course, is an ancient time-honored form of protest. As a Jew, I’m particularly mindful that the Book of Isaiah passionately connects the act of fasting to the pursuit of justice:

Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of wickedness,
to undo the straps of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?

Indeed, it is critical that we understand that the Palestinians’ “Battle of the Empty Stomachs” as part of this long and honorable tradition of nonviolent resistance. As we have seen from the events of the past several months, it has lasted so long largely because it is a tactic that works.



4. Student Protest in Québec

May-18-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: From the Charest government’s perspective, the students have offered a most useful crisis. Could that be why they sabotaged their own negotiated settlement, as Michèle Ouimet reports? (Her report is from LaPresse, and is translated by Google. Translation clearly remains a work in progress). Chantal Hébert thinks it’s just incompetent governance, but the Gazette points out that since the strike began, the governing Liberals have edged ahead of the PQ in the polls, for the first time in a year. Tikkunista cites Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

* To End The Strike Michèle Ouimet LaPresse via  Google translate

First negotiate. And if it does not work, a moratorium on rising tuition. Yes, a moratorium until the next elections to end the conflict that is rotting and becoming more radical. Because the crisis will not disappear by magic.

But before a moratorium must be allowed one last chance for negotiations. Student leaders are willing to negotiate, even if their past experience left a bitter taste. The last weekend, students, ministers, presidents and labor leaders negotiated. After a sleepless night, they came out, pale, bloodless, a room where they had been cooped up for 23 hours. The frenzied marathon has produced results: a tentative agreement.

…The next day, Jean Charest and Education Minister Line Beauchamp, lifted the nose of the agreement. Jean Charest has repeatedly said he had not sold, and Line Beauchamp has added minimizing the gains made by students. A bit like if they had spat in the soup after it simmered for 23 hours.

Students had the impression of having been had. However, student leaders and ministers had negotiated in good faith an agreement that seemed to satisfy them, but the irresponsible statements of Charest and Beauchamp have screwed up.

* Quebec Student Crisis Badly Mismanaged By Jean Charest Chantel Hébert The Hamilton Spectator

When crisis management experts dissect the ongoing standoff between Quebec and its student movement, they will be hard-pressed to find any evidence of a coherent government strategy. The surprise resignation Monday of Line Beauchamp, Premier Jean Charest’s lead minister on the file, fits that haphazard pattern.

Over the course of three rancorous months, Charest and his ex-education minister have proven unable to talk the province’s way out of a messy confrontation with the students over a planned increase in tuition fees. Every government move has either misfired or backfired. From one resolution attempt to the next, it has become harder to follow the thread of its thinking.

One has to go back 22 years to find a Quebec crisis as mismanaged as this one. The 1990 Oka standoff that saw a major Montreal bridge blockaded by armed Mohawk activists started off as a local dispute over land use. It festered for the better part of a summer before the army was called in to restore some order to the community. That crisis accelerated the demise of the then-Liberal government, not because it was on the wrong side of public opinion but because its clumsy handling exposed a fatigued regime suffering from a beyond-repair case of wear and tear. History is repeating itself.

* Student Protests Pushing Quebec Liberals Into Lead, Poll Suggests The Montreal Gazette

 Forum Research poll, offered exclusively to The Gazette, suggests the Quebec Liberals have edged into the lead, in the 14th week of the tuition-fee conflict pitting university and CEGEP students against the Liberal government of Premier Jean Charest.

Pollster Lorne Bozinoff concluded that Quebecers are losing patience with the students. “The Liberals have improved their standings incrementally, and this may be due to increasing public impatience with the striking students,” Bozinoff said. “Certainly Quebecers now see the Liberals as the best party to deal with the situation.”

Previous Forum Research polls this year have given the advantage to the Parti Québécois under Pauline Marois.



5. Prisons, and Profits

May-18-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: A reminder: here’s last month’s graphic of the number of people incarcerated in the US. When crime is dropping, why are more people in prison? Because it pays, just as the slave trade paid. And of course, it targets the same people. A tremendous evil and a brutal destruction of what might be achieved: the closing article from the Atlantic has an excellent infographic on the human and financial cost of this system.

Private Prison Corporations Are Modern Day Slave Traders  AlterNet

The nation’s largest private prison company, the Corrections Corporation of America, is on a buying spree. With a war chest of $250 million, the corporation, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, earlier this year sent letters to 48 states, offering to buy their prisons outright. To ensure their profitability, the corporation insists that it be guaranteed that the prisons be kept at least 90 percent full. Plus, the corporate jailers demand a 20-year management contract, on top of the profits they expect to extract by spending less money per prisoner.

…The attempted prison grab is also defensive in nature. If private companies can gain both ownership and management of enough prisons, they can set the prices without open-bid competition for prison services, creating a guaranteed cost-plus monopoly like that which exists between the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex. But, for a better analogy, we must go back to the American slave system, a thoroughly capitalist enterprise that reduced human beings to units of labor and sale… Investors are warned that profits would go down if the demand for prisoners declines. That is, if the world’s largest police state shrinks, so does the corporate bottom line. Dangers to profitability include “relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws.” The corporation spells it out: “any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.” 

At the Corrections Corporation of America, human freedom is a dirty word.

* Louisiana Is The World’s Prison Capital nola 

The state imprisons more of its people, per head, than any of its U.S. counterparts. First among Americans means first in the world. Louisiana’s incarceration rate is nearly triple Iran’s, seven times China’s and 10 times Germany’s. The hidden engine behind the state’s well-oiled prison machine is cold, hard cash. A majority of Louisiana inmates are housed in for-profit facilities, which must be supplied with a constant influx of human beings or a $182 million industry will go bankrupt.

Several homegrown private prison companies command a slice of the market. But in a uniquely Louisiana twist, most prison entrepreneurs are rural sheriffs, who hold tremendous sway in remote parishes like Madison, Avoyelles, East Carroll and Concordia. A good portion of Louisiana law enforcement is financed with dollars legally skimmed off the top of prison operations. If the inmate count dips, sheriffs bleed money. Their constituents lose jobs. The prison lobby ensures this does not happen by thwarting nearly every reform that could result in fewer people behind bars.

* One Year of Prison Costs More Than One Year at Princeton Atlantic Magazine

One year at Princeton University: $37,000. One year at a New Jersey state prison: $44,000. Prison and college “are the two most divergent paths one can take in life,” Joseph Staten, an info-graphic researcher with Public Administration, says. Whereas one is a positive experience that increases lifetime earning potential, the other is a near dead end, which is why Staten found it striking that the lion’s share of government funding goes toward incarceration…..

[T]his chart helps illustrate a large discrepancy in this country: America has the highest incarceration rate by population, but is only 6th in the world when it comes to college degrees. Our government’s spending reflects that fact accordingly.



6. Followups

May-18-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: When we’re away for two weeks, there are more items to followup. In Canada, most of the press on the F35 has focussed on the financial debacle, and the lies the Conservatives have used to cover up. But it’s becoming clearer that the plane itself is a disaster, at any price. Then, a long New Yorker article looks in detail at geo-engineering, (correcting global warming by changing the planet) and why we’re probably going to try it, and the political disasters that will ensue. We missed Mother’s Day, but it’s worth noting that it started as a political act, not as a Hallmark promo. And there’s a fine summary of all the things that aren’t torture according to the US. May they never happen to any of us.

* F35: The Jet That Ate The Pentagon The Toronto Star

Already unaffordable, the F-35’s price is headed in one direction — due north. The F-35 isn’t only expensive — it’s way behind schedule. The first plan was to have an initial batch of F-35s available for combat in 2010. Then first deployment was to be 2012. More recently, the military services have said the deployment date is “to be determined.” A new target date of 2019 has been informally suggested in testimony — almost 10 years late.

If the F-35’s performance were spectacular, it might be worth the cost and wait. But it is not. Even if the aircraft lived up to its original specifications — and it will not — it would be a huge disappointment. The reason it is such a mediocrity also explains why it is unaffordable and, for years to come, unobtainable.

….This grotesquely unpromising plan has already resulted in multitudes of problems — and 80 per cent of the flight testing remains. A virtual flying piano, the F-35 lacks the F-16’s agility in the air-to-air mode and the F-15E’s range and payload in the bombing mode, and it can’t even begin to compare to the A-10 at low-altitude close air support for troops engaged in combat. Worse yet, it won’t be able to get into the air as often to perform any mission — or, just as important, to train pilots — because its complexity prolongs maintenance and limits availability. The aircraft most like the F-35, the F-22, was able to get into the air on average for only 15 hours per month in 2010 when it was fully operational….

The bottom line: The F-35 is not the wonder its advocates claim. It is a gigantic performance disappointment, and in some respects a step backward. The problems, integral to the design, cannot be fixed without starting from a clean sheet of paper.

* Geo-Engineering The New Yorker

For years, even to entertain the possibility of human intervention on such a scale—geoengineering, as the practice is known—has been denounced as hubris. Predicting long-term climatic behavior by using computer models has proved difficult, and the notion of fiddling with the planet’s climate based on the results generated by those models worries even scientists who are fully engaged in the research. “There will be no easy victories, but at some point we are going to have to take the facts seriously,’’ David Keith, a professor of engineering and public policy at Harvard and one of geoengineering’s most thoughtful supporters, told me. “Nonetheless,’’ he added, “it is hyperbolic to say this, but no less true: when you start to reflect light away from the planet, you can easily imagine a chain of events that would extinguish life on earth.” There is only one reason to consider deploying a scheme with even a tiny chance of causing such a catastrophe: if the risks of not deploying it were clearly higher. No one is yet prepared to make such a calculation, but researchers are moving in that direction.

….Unfortunately, the least risky approach politically is also the most dangerous: do nothing until the world is faced with a cataclysm and then slip into a frenzied crisis mode. The political implications of any such action would be impossible to overstate. What would happen, for example, if one country decided to embark on such a program without the agreement of other countries? Or if industrialized nations agreed to inject sulfur particles into the stratosphere and accidentally set off a climate emergency that caused drought in China, India, or Africa?

“Let’s say the Chinese government decides their monsoon strength, upon which hundreds of millions of people rely for sustenance, is weakening,” Caldeira said. “They have reason to believe that making clouds right near the ocean might help, and they started to do that, and the Indians found out and believed—justifiably or not—that it would make their monsoon worse. What happens then? Where do we go to discuss that? We have no mechanism to settle that dispute.”

* The Radical History of Mother’s Day Nation of Change

Mother’s Day began in America in 1870 when Julia Ward Howe wrote the Mother’s Day Proclamation. Written in response to the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War, her proclamation called on women to use their position as mothers to influence society in fighting for an end to all wars. She called for women to stand up against the unjust violence of war through their roles as wife and mother, to protest the futility of their sons killing other mothers’ sons.

Howe wrote:

Arise, then, women of this day!

Arise, all women who have hearts, Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!

Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy, and patience. We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

* Would the Last Civil Right in America Please Remember to Close the Door on Its Way Out?   Lowering the Bar

Q: What do all of the following have in common?

  • Prolonged isolation;
  • Deprivation of light;
  • Exposure to prolonged periods of light and/or darkness;
  • Extreme variations in temperature;
  • Sleep adjustment;
  • Threats of severe physical abuse;
  • Death threats;
  • Administration of psychotropic drugs;
  • Shackling and manacling for hours at a time;
  • Use of “stress” positions;
  • Noxious fumes that caused pain to eyes and nose;
  • Withholding of any mattress, pillow, sheet or blanket;
  • Constant surveillance;
  • Incommunicado detention, including denial of all contact with family and legal counsel for a 21-month period;
  • Denial of medical care for serious and potentially life-threatening ailments, including chest pain and difficulty breathing, as well as for treatment of the chronic, extreme pain caused by being forced to endure stress positions, resulting in severe and continuing mental and physical harm, pain, and profound disruption of the senses and personality.

Any guesses? Time’s up!

A: They’re all things that government officials could do to an American citizen and still claim later that they didn’t know they were “torturing” that citizen, according to a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.



10. Images of Resistance

May-18-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: OK, I hear you ask. Do you mean resistance, as in politics? Or resistance as in wind resistance? Or get out of my way resistance? Or merely physical friction type resistance? Which is it? Well, we have them all! Aren’t you lucky….

* May Day Around the World   In Focus – The Atlantic

* Ways of the Wind   The Big Picture

* Truck Meets Bus at Hairpin Curve Youtube

* Skating   The Big Picture



12. Quote of the Week

May-18-2012 | Comments (0)

“How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?” Charles de Gaulle



May 4th, 2012 :: Year 9, Issue 17

May-04-2012 | Comments (0)

No Tikkunista next week, due to travel plans. Back on May 18th, insh’Allah.

 

1. How’s that Global War on Terror Thing Working Out for Ya?

Bird’s Eye: The US has been waging war on terror for twelve years now. Originally framed as a hunt for Osama and Al-Qaida, the goals seemed to have …uh…diffused. Andrew Bacevitch breaks the war into three parts (Rumsfeld, Petraeus, and Michael Vickers) and examines the characteristics of each part. Glenn Greenwald looks at how the nature of the war has escalated since bin Laden’s death. And Schneier, whose log on security is always a treat, looks at the costs in money and lives of the farce through which we go when we travel via US airports.

* Scoring the Global War on Terror   NationofChange

With the United States now well into the second decade of what the Pentagon has styled an “era of persistent conflict,” the war formerly known as the global war on terrorism (unofficial acronym WFKATGWOT) appears increasingly fragmented and diffuse.  Without achieving victory, yet unwilling to acknowledge failure, the United States military has withdrawn from Iraq.  It is trying to leave Afghanistan, where events seem equally unlikely to yield a happy outcome. 

…Viewed close-up, the “war” appears to have lost form and shape.  Yet by taking a couple of steps back, important patterns begin to appear.  What follows is a preliminary attempt to score the WFKATGWOT, dividing the conflict into a bout of three rounds.  Although there may be several additional rounds still to come, here’s what we’ve suffered through thus far.

So what tentative judgments can we offer regarding the ongoing WFKATGWOT?  Operationally, a war launched by the conventionally minded has progressively fallen under the purview of those who inhabit what Dick Cheney once called “the dark side,” with implications that few seem willing to explore.  Strategically, a war informed at the outset by utopian expectations continues today with no concretely stated expectations whatsoever, the forward momentum of events displacing serious consideration of purpose.  Politically, a war that once occupied center stage in national politics has now slipped to the periphery, the American people moving on to other concerns and entertainments, with legal and moral questions raised by the war left dangling in midair…..

Round 3. The Vickers Era: Assassination.  Unlike Donald Rumsfeld or David Petraeus, Michael Vickers has not achieved celebrity status.  Yet more than anyone else in or out of uniform, Vickers, who carries the title Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, deserves recognition as the emblematic figure of the WFKATGWOT’s round three….The Vickers approach means acting aggressively to eliminate would-be killers wherever they might be found, employing whatever means are necessary.  Vickers “tends to think like a gangster,” one admirer comments. “He can understand trends then change the rules of the game so they are advantageous for your side.” Round three of the WFKATGWOT is all about bending, breaking, and reinventing rules in ways thought to be advantageous to the United States.  Much as COIN supplanted “shock and awe,” a broad-gauged program of targeted assassination has now displaced COIN as the prevailing expression of the American way of war

* Since Bin Ladin’s Death Glenn Greenwald Salon

In the wake of Osama bin Laden’s summary execution one year ago, many predicted that the War on Terror would finally begin to recede. Here’s what has happened since then:

*With large bipartisan majorities, Congress renewed the once-controversial Patriot Act without a single reform, and it was signed into law by President Obama; Harry Reid accused those urging reforms of putting the country at risk of a Terrorist attack.

* For the first time, perhaps ever, a U.S. citizen was assassinated by the CIA, on orders from the President, without a shred of due process and far from any battlefield; two weeks later, his 16-year-old American son was also killed by his own government; the U.S. Attorney General then gave a speech claiming the President has the power to target U.S. citizens for death based on unproven, secret accusations of Terrorism.

* With large bipartisan majorities, Congress enacted, and the President signed, a new law codifying presidential powers of worldwide indefinite detention and an expanded statutory defintion of the War on Terror.

* Construction neared completion for a sprawling new site in Utah for the National Security Agency to enable massive domestic surveillance and to achieve “the realization of the ‘total information awareness’ program created during the first term of the Bush administration.”

* President Obama authorized the use of “signature” drone strikes in Yemen, whereby the CIA can target people for death “even when the identity of those who could be killed is not known.”

* Harms of Post-9/11 Airline Security  Schneier on Security

[Previously] I made two basic arguments about post-9/11 airport security. One, we are not doing the right things: the focus on airports at the expense of the broader threat is not making us safer. And two, the things we are doing are wrong: the specific security measures put in place since 9/11 do not work. Kip Hawley doesn’t argue with the specifics of my criticisms, but instead provides anecdotes and asks us to trust that airport security—and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in particular—knows what it’s doing.

He wants us to trust that a 400-ml bottle of liquid is dangerous, but transferring it to four 100-ml bottles magically makes it safe. He wants us to trust that the butter knives given to first-class passengers are nevertheless too dangerous to be taken through a security checkpoint. He wants us to trust the no-fly list: 21,000 people so dangerous they’re not allowed to fly, yet so innocent they can’t be arrested. He wants us to trust that the deployment of expensive full-body scanners has nothing to do with the fact that the former secretary of homeland security, Michael Chertoff, lobbies for one of the companies that makes them. He wants us to trust that there’s a reason to confiscate a cupcake (Las Vegas), a 3-inch plastic toy gun (London Gatwick), a purse with an embroidered gun on it (Norfolk, VA), a T-shirt with a picture of a gun on it (London Heathrow) and a plastic light saber that’s really a flashlight with a long cone on top (Dallas/Fort Worth).

The humiliation, the dehumanisation and the privacy violations are also harms. That Mr Hawley dismisses these as mere “costs in convenience” demonstrates how out-of-touch the TSA is from the people it claims to be protecting. Additionally, there’s actual physical harm: the radiation from full-body scanners still not publicly tested for safety; and the mental harm suffered by both abuse survivors and children: the things screeners tell them as they touch their bodies are uncomfortably similar to what child molesters say.

In 2004, the average extra waiting time due to TSA procedures was 19.5 minutes per person. That’s a total economic loss—in –America—of $10 billion per year, more than the TSA’s entire budget. The increased automobile deaths due to people deciding to drive instead of fly is 500 per year. Both of these numbers are for America only, and by themselves demonstrate that post-9/11 airport security has done more harm than good.



2. American Despair

May-04-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: To the Hopi Indians, the word “koyaanisqatsi” means  “crazy life”, “life in turmoil”, “life disintegrating”, or “a state of life that calls for another way of living”.Starting with famed author E.I.Doctorow (Ragtime, World’s Fair, etc.) we offer three despairing views of what the US has had stripped away due to the last dozen years of war. Whether you believe it to be coincidence or cabal, you can’t help but see the parallels to what Naomi Klein calls “Shock Doctrine”, the use of a crisis to effect unpopular changes in governance. Chris Hedges thinks there’s hope in a return to animism…we’ll explore that further in part 5, below.

* Unexceptionalism – A Primer EL Doctorow New York Times

TO achieve unexceptionalism, the political ideal that would render the United States indistinguishable from the impoverished, traditionally undemocratic, brutal or catatonic countries of the world, do the following:

Phase One: If you’re a justice of the Supreme Court, ignore the first sacrament of a democracy and suspend the counting of ballots in a presidential election. Appoint the candidate of your choice as president. If you’re the newly anointed president, react to a terrorist attack by invading a non-terrorist country. Despite the loss or disablement of untold numbers of lives, manage your war so that its results will be indeterminate.

Using the state of war as justification, order secret surveillance of American citizens, data mine their phone calls and e-mail, make business, medical and public library records available to government agencies, perform illegal warrantless searches of homes and offices. Take to torturing terrorism suspects, here or abroad, in violation of the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, which prohibits the infliction of cruel and unusual punishment….Commit to indeterminate detention without trial those you decide are enemies.  

Suspend progressive taxation so that the wealthiest pay less proportionately than the middle class. See to it that the wealth of the country accumulates to a small fraction of the population so that the gap between rich and poor widens exponentially….Deregulate the banking industry so as to create a severe recession in which enormous numbers of people lose their homes and jobs.

Before you leave office add to the Supreme Court justices like the ones who awarded you the presidency.

Phase Two….

* The US Does Not Have Justice Or Even The Rule Of Law  Ian Welsh

…and whether the public approves or disapproves is irrelevant.  Black letter law, on the books, makes most of what the banks did leading up to the subprime crisis illegal.  It was fraud.  Black letter law makes the war on Iraq a war crime, and no one went to jail for that.  Black letter law does not allow freestanding resisting arrest charges, and those happen all the time.  Basic law states that an accused has a right to face their accuser and see the evidence against them, that no longer occurs in many cases.  Basic justice says that you can’t punish someone without a trial, and the “no-fly list” indicates that is no longer true (along with being unable to face your accusers and see the evidence against you.)  The US Congress retroactively made wiretapping without a warrant “legal” and if I have to explain why retroactive immunity is wrong I give up.  Basic justice says that secret laws and secret courts are unjust, yet the US has plenty of both.

This is not just an issue with the US.  During the G20 up here in Toronto the Ontario government used a SECRET LAW to strip civil liberties from anyone in the downtown Toronto core.  Of course, it must be said that the public couldn’t give a shit, it was not an issue in the next election. In Britain, after the riots, family members of those convicted of crimes were evicted from public housing.  Collective punishment of family members is unjust…

* The Implosion of Capitalism Chris Hedges

When civilizations start to die they go insane. Let the ice sheets in the Arctic melt. Let the temperatures rise. Let the air, soil and water be poisoned. Let the forests die. Let the seas be emptied of life. Let one useless war after another be waged. Let the masses be thrust into extreme poverty and left without jobs while the elites, drunk on hedonism, accumulate vast fortunes through exploitation, speculation, fraud and theft. Reality, at the end, gets unplugged. We live in an age when news consists of Snooki’s pregnancy, Hulk Hogan’s sex tape and Kim Kardashian’s denial that she is the naked woman cooking eggs in a photo circulating on the Internet. Politicians, including presidents, appear on late night comedy shows to do gags and they campaign on issues such as creating a moon colony….

The quest by a bankrupt elite in the final days of empire to accumulate greater and greater wealth, as Karl Marx observed, is modern society’s version of primitive fetishism. This quest, as there is less and less to exploit, leads to mounting repression, increased human suffering, a collapse of infrastructure and, finally, collective death. It is the self-deluded, those on Wall Street or among the political elite, those who entertain and inform us, those who lack the capacity to question the lusts that will ensure our self-annihilation, who are held up as exemplars of intelligence, success and progress. The World Health Organization calculates that one in four people in the United States suffers from chronic anxiety, a mood disorder or depression—which seems to me to be a normal reaction to our march toward collective suicide. Welcome to the asylum.

When the most basic elements that sustain life are reduced to a cash product, life has no intrinsic value. The extinguishing of “primitive” societies, those that were defined by animism and mysticism, those that celebrated ambiguity and mystery, those that respected the centrality of the human imagination, removed the only ideological counterweight to a self-devouring capitalist ideology. Those who held on to pre-modern beliefs, such as Native Americans, who structured themselves around a communal life and self-sacrifice rather than hoarding and wage exploitation, could not be accommodated within the ethic of capitalist exploitation, the cult of the self and the lust for imperial expansion. The prosaic was pitted against the allegorical. And as we race toward the collapse of the planet’s ecosystem we must restore this older vision of life if we are to survive.



3. Israel: Netanyahu’s Critics are Circling

May-04-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: The head of Israel’s internal security, Shin Bet, and the head of the Israeli military both attack Netanyahu and deny that there are reasons to wage war on Iran. Tzipi Livni, ex head of Katima (the “middle” party)  says the country’s leaders are putting Israel at risk, and resigns in despair from the Knesset. And a fascinating piece from the Tikkun Daily Blog argues for the rights and obligations of Diaspora Jews to speak out on Israel’s politics.

* Ex-Israeli spy boss attacks Netanyahu and Barak over Iran The Guardian

Israel’s former security chief has censured the country’s “messianic” political leadership for talking up the prospects of a military strike on Iran’s nuclear programme. In unusually candid comments set to ratchet up tensions over Iran at the top of Israel’s political establishment, Yuval Diskin, who retired as head of the internal intelligence agency Shin Bet last year, said he had “no faith” in the abilities of the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, and the defence minister, Ehud Barak, to conduct a war.

The pair, who are the foremost advocates of military action against Iran’s nuclear programme, were “not fit to hold the steering wheel of power”, Diskin told a meeting on Friday night. “My major problem is that I have no faith in the current leadership, which must lead us in an event on the scale of war with Iran or a regional war,” he said.

“I don’t believe in either the prime minister or the defence minister. I don’t believe in a leadership that makes decisions based on messianic feelings. Believe me, I have observed them from up close … They are not people who I, on a personal level, trust to lead Israel to an event on that scale and carry it off. They are misleading the public on the Iran issue. They tell the public that if Israel acts, Iran won’t have a nuclear bomb. This is misleading. Actually, many experts say that an Israeli attack would accelerate the Iranian nuclear race.”

Diskin’s remarks followed a furore over comments made on Wednesday by Israel’s serving military chief, Benny Gantz, which starkly contrasted with Netanyahu’s rhetoric on Iran. Gantz said he did not believe the Iranian leadership was prepared to “go the extra mile” to acquire nuclear weapons because it was “composed of very rational people” who understood the consequences.

* Israeli Security Elite Slams Netanyahu, sidetracks War on Iran Juan Cole Informed Comment

Not only are high officials and former officials of the Israeli security establishment pushing hard back against Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s seeming rush to war with Iran, they appear actually to be attempting to unseat him, as it becomes possible that Israel may go to early elections in September. Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert has become the latest former high-ranking figure to savage Netanyahu and his defense minister Ehud Barak, for their threats to attack Iran unilaterally and soon. In contrast to Netanyahu’s circles, who have threatened a unilateral Israeli strike this summer, Olmert said categorically in a television interview that this is “definitely not to initiate an Israeli military strike.” Olmert, no dove, had himself launched the 2006 Lebanon and the 2008-9 Gaza Wars. But neither went well for Israel, and Olmert may have learned something from that.

…Former officials and opposition leaders have also been scathing about Netanyahu’s lack of interest in negotiating in good faith with Palestine Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, alleging that Netanyahu has zero interest in genuine peace talks.

Tzipi Livni Quits Knesset, Says Israel’s Leaders Put Country At Existential Risk Haaretz Daily 

Former Kadima leader Tzipi Livni resigned from the Knesset on Tuesday, warning in her resignation address that Israel’s leaders are putting the country’s existence at risk by choosing to ignore the mounting impatience on the part of the international community.

…The former Kadima leader also hinted at the possibility of her return to politics through different avenues, that she was “leaving the Knesset at this point, but I’m not retiring from public life,” saying that Israel was “too dear to me.” In her speech, Livni warned of an existential threat Israel faced under its current leadership, saying that “Israel is on a volcano, the international clock is ticking, and the existence of a Jewish, democratic state is in mortal danger.”

“The real danger is a politics that buries its head in the sand,” Livni said, adding that it didn’t “take a Shin Bet chief to know that.”

* I Own Israel: A Diaspora Jew’s Claim  Tikkun Daily Blog

I own Israel because the country insists upon such an arrangement, flailing as it struggles to be both Jewish and democratic. I’m a stakeholder because, as a legally-recognized member of the people of Israel (having in the past proven to the State that I have a Jewish mother and father), I’m granted the unequivocal right to return to my country at a moment’s notice. I am encouraged, even solicited, to return to my country at a moment’s notice.

This ownership stake I hold in Israel is less a possession than it is a responsibility – a responsibility I accept willingly and with a seriousness of purpose. I don’t own an apartment in Jerusalem or an Israeli passport, but I do own the shared responsibility of ensuring that Israel, as the national outgrowth of my people, creates a just society. It is a responsibility that has its origins in tradition, in the Talmudic precept that all those within “Israel” are responsible for one another (כל ישראל ערבים זה לזה).

However, in political terms, it’s a responsibility that comes directly from Israel’s Declaration of Independence, a declaration which established the country as one “based on freedom, justice and peace” for all its inhabitants. It’s a declaration that appeals to me directly, in the diaspora, to help Israel realize this reality:

We appeal to the Jewish people throughout the Diaspora to rally round the Jews of Eretz-Israel in the tasks of immigration and upbuilding and to stand by them in the great struggle for the realization of the age-old dream – the redemption of Israel.

The redemption of Israel. This is why I often sharply critique Israel’s hawkish political elite, its settlement enterprise, its brutal suppression of the Palestinian people. It is why, when Israeli journalist Noam Sheizaf recently wrote in his review of Peter Beinart’s The Crisis of Zionism that “the occupation is the greatest moral challenge of my generation,” I nodded in agreement. I nodded instinctively to the words my generation. For his generation is mine. As Jews, we are responsible for this. I am responsible for this – responsible for realizing the Israel envisioned upon its founding, an Israel created to “ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants.”



4. Revisiting the Holocaust

May-04-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: No revisionism here, but a look at three very different ways the Holocaust has been cited in the past weeks. In the Guardian, there is a long and fascinating piece about Claude Lanzmann, who made the 9½ hour film “Shoah”. It is an essential read. In Israel, Haaretz newspaper attacks the misuse of Holocaust imagery to demonize political opponents, correctly observing that it cannot be both a unique horror in history, and a one-size-fits-all analogy. And we have a review of Shalom Auslander’s new book,Hope: A Tragedy, which is getting a lot of buzz. If you missed “Death Camp Blues” his powerful Moth podcast about his visit to Auschwitz, it’s also highly recommended.

* Claude Lanzmann: The Man Who Stood Witness For The World  The Observer

Lanzmann is a witness of his time. He is one of the few people still living who can testify at close range to the epic events by which the second half of the 20th century is defined and measured.

During the second world war, he was a teenage guerrilla in the French resistance. In its aftermath, he was among the first western writers to probe communist East Germany, the USSR, Chairman Mao’s China and even North Korea, where he fell in love. He lived and worked among that Left Bank, leftwing existentialist avant-garde around his close friend Sartre, and was for many years the lover, travelling companion and confidant of De Beauvoir. He accompanied fighters of the Algerian revolution in desert redoubts under bombardment by the French air force, befriended both its leaders and General de Gaulle, only to be tear-gassed on the streets of the Latin Quarter during the événements of May 1968. He “embedded” himself (as we would say today) with the Israeli armed forces as deeply as is possible without actually joining the IDF, or Tsahal, as he calls them, by their Hebrew name.

But most famously of all, Lanzmann researched, directed and conducted the searing interviews for what is arguably the greatest film of all time, and certainly the most ambitious: the nine-and-a-half hour – “it could have been much longer”, he says – Shoah, which, more than any archive project, history book or attempt on film, remains the definitive and inimitable record for all time of the most appalling catastrophe in history.

*Israeli Politicians, Left And Right, Must Lay Holocaust To Rest  Haaretz (Thanks David!)

When the Shoah is invoked by Benjamin Netanyahu to make the claim that “It’s 1938 and Iran is Germany,” the victims of the Shoah are forgotten, not remembered.

Peter Beinart, the American left-leaning Jewish and Zionist journalist, recently lambasted Netanyahu – and other elements of the Israeli right – for instrumentalizing the Shoah for blatant political purposes. This is a familiar accusation. What exposes its cynicism is its inherent contradiction: One cannot claim at one and the same time that the Shoah occupies a singular place in the history of the “crimes and horrors of humanity,” and yet use it as a one-size-fits-all analogy, whenever politically convenient (Ahmadinejad, however dangerous and appalling, is not Hitler ). The same tendency to use the Shoah as a political analogy to scare and condemn can be found in many political persuasions, not all of them on the right. But there is more: In incessantly invoking the Shoah for political purposes of the moment, as is often done in Israel, we are stirring the victims of the Shoah from the quiet of their death, turning them into phantoms and specters, and in effect ordering them to haunt the living, with no rest.

What is a phantom? A phantom is a dead person who haunts us because she did not get proper burial, and has been conjured from the dead to serve the needs of the living. Its spectral presence, caught between the realms of the dead and the living, makes it scary. Phantoms are very good instruments of fear because they are the dead who never go away.

* Hope: A Tragedy by Shalom Auslander   reviewed by Naomi Alderman (who’s she?)  The Guardian

Jews watch Holocaust films differently: we’re looking for advice. When should those schmucks have left the country? What do you do if you have to hide? How do you survive in a concentration camp? It constantly surprises my non-Jewish friends that I don’t feel, as they do, that this event is in the past. That I wonder if they’d hide me if the economy went really bad and people started voting for Nick Griffin. My non-Jewish friends are shocked when they suggest that I could move to (cheap, artsy) Berlin and I say “No, can’t. Too many ghosts of dead Jews.” The thing might be over for you, but it’s still alive for us.

In Shalom Auslander’s funny and acerbic new novel, Hope: A Tragedy, the Holocaust is still alive in the most real way possible. His hero, Kugel (a Dickensian name – kugel is a bland, puddingy Jewish potato dish), an ineffectual worrier with a troubled, overbearing mother, moves his wife and son into a new house only to find the elderly Anne Frank living in the attic.

Is she the real Anne Frank? Yes, it becomes clear, she’s not an apparition, she’s the real woman, grown old hiding in attics. When she tried to tell the world she was still alive, the publisher of her diary – 32m copies sold and counting, as Hope repeatedly reminds us – told her to stay dead. Frank herself is now hideous, deformed – as you would be. “They were survivors,” says Auslander elsewhere in the novel of superficially adorable chipmunks Kugel sees on his walks in the wood, “and survival wasn’t pretty.”



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