Since at least the Reagan administration and before, conservative zealots in this nation have been hard at work trying to dismantle government and all it stands for. Attacks on the EPA, the FDA, social security, and most regulatory agencies have become standard fare. In recent years, though, the most sustained attack has targeted public education—witness the school districts in Washington, DC, New Orleans after Katrina, and New York City under Michael Bloomberg. With Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the rallying cry of “accountability” has been codified into a mantra that Democrats, including President Obama, have slavishly echoed.
Now we have a book that tells us what all this has been about, and it is not pretty. Diane Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System, goes behind the scenes to explain the programs, the facts, and the failure of charter schools, testing regimes, and much more. If you’re at all interested in education (and what is a democracy without an educated electorate?), it’s a must-read. Ravitch might seem an unlikely critic of these conservative dogmas, because she’s been on the conservative side for years. She supported the takeover of the NY Public Schools, NCLB, charter schools and all the rest. But to her credit, she stopped to examine the data and, horrified by what she found, has written a stinging criticism of the whole mess. Whether it will stop the train wreck that’s coming is something else, but this is a noble effort.
To begin with, let’s be clear: conservative Republican hatred for the public schools has its roots in racism (and classism). That’s what the public schools signify: mixed-race classes, busing, early childhood education to compensate for years of discrimination, and teachers’ unions encouraging black and brown people to enter the education workforce. Vouchers were an attempt to have government pay for private schools—“school choice” in their lingo—which was a thinly-disguised way to get separate-but-equal back. It was also a convenient way to get god back in the classroom, and godless evolution out. But vouchers were too transparently discriminatory. So the always-busy conservatives came up with charter schools and now NCLB, and that seems to be working. If, that is, you can call destroying public education “working.”
Ravitch slams NCLB from several angles (and isn’t it strange that anyone expected George W. Bush, one of the dumbest men ever to sit in the White House, to come up with a plan to improve public schools?) To begin with, NCLB never refers to what students should learn, i.e. there’s no curriculum in it at all. That’s left up to each state. All NCLB did was demand that schools produce higher test scores, proficiency, in basic skills—math and reading. Even so, proficiency might seem a reasonable goal until one realizes that the states are left to determine what “proficiency” means as well. All they are told is that their schools have to show regular increases in proficiency (average yearly progress or AYP), until—and this is the laughable part—in 2014 all schools in all states produce students who are fully proficient. If schools fail to show AYP, or, in 2014 fail to show full proficiency (fully mastering the grade standards) for ALL students, they will be closed, teachers will be fired, principals will lose their jobs, and “some—perhaps many—public schools will be privatized.” According to Ravitch, this is an impossible goal. But there’s more:
the most dangerous potential effect of the 2014 goal is that it is a timetable for the demolition of public education in the United States….indeed, scores of schools in New York City, Chicago, Washington DC, and other districts were closed because they were unable to meet the unreasonable demands of NCLB. Superintendents in those districts boasted of how many schools they had closed, as if it were a badge of honor rather than an admission of defeat. 204.
Now one might think, well, those schools in those districts were ‘bad’ schools and deserved to be closed. But Ravitch has the facts:
…In the year 2006-2007, 25,000 schools did not make AYP. In 2007-2008, the number grew to nearly 30,000, or 35.6 percent of all public schools. That number included more than half the public schools in Massachusetts, whose students scored highest in the nation on the rigorous tests of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)….To date, there is no substantial body of evidence that demonstrates that low-performing schools can be turned around by any of the remedies prescribed in the law. Converting a “failing” school to a charter school or handing it over to private management efforts offers no certainty that the school will be transformed into a successful school. 204.
So what can we expect from public schools and states put under this kind of gun (“in 2008, a team of researchers funded by the National Science Foundation predicted that by 2014, nearly 100% of California’s elementary schools would fail to make Adequate Yearly Progress”)? You guessed it, they will cheat. States, that is, define “proficiency” themselves. So a state like Mississippi recently claimed that 89% of its fourth graders were at or above proficiency in reading, but, according to a national test given by NAEP, only 18% were proficient. How does this happen? The variety of ways to cheat is impressive. First of all, under the testing regime, teachers are incentivized to teach to the test (in some cases, this means actually giving the children practice in the actual test they will take.) Second, states change both the tests (making them easier) and the scoring required for “proficiency,” to make it easier to pass the tests. This is what New York State did. So,
Between 2006, when the state introduced a new test, and 2009, the proportion of students in grades 3 through 8 who reached proficiency on the state math test leapt from 28.6% to an incredible 63.3% in Buffalo, from 30.1% to 58.2% in Syracuse, and from 57% to 81.8% in New York City….But in reality, state officials made it easier to pass the tests. In 2006, a student in 7th grade was required to get 59.6% of the points on the test to meet state standards in math; by 2009, a student in that grade needed only 44% to be considered proficient. 157.
The same thing is documented in Chicago—where Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, took credit for huge increases in scores. You get the picture: if you can’t make the grade, cheat. One wonders how teachers in such a system can urge students to be honest when cheating reigns all up and down the line. As Ravitch concludes: “This sort of fraud (fiddling with scores, teaching to the test) ignores the students’ interests while promoting the interests of adults who take credit for nonexistent improvements.”
Perhaps the most alarming news in Ravitch’s book comes from her chapter called “The Billionaire Boys’ Club.” This refers to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation (Wal-Mart) and the Broad Foundation, among others, who are now pouring billions of dollars into the effort to change American education in the ways noted above. The basic idea of these “venture philanthropies” is to reform education to mimic the business model that made them their money: schools should be accountable (or be closed, or fired), should advance school choice (charter schools or vouchers), be competitive as in business, and move towards privatization as a final goal. In this effort, they fund charter schools (many run as private enterprises by people who know nothing about education; in that regard, the foundations have funded the hiring and mayhem of “chancellors” such as Joel Klein, a lawyer, in New York and Michelle Rhee, with two years with Teach-for-America and no education training, in Washington DC) that will compete with the public schools. The irony, pointed out by Ravitch, is massive:
There is something fundamentally antidemocratic about relinquishing control of the public education policy agenda to private foundations run by society’s wealthiest people; when the wealthiest of these foundations are joined in a common purpose, they represent an unusually powerful force that is beyond the reach of democratic institutions…The foundations demand that public schools and teachers be held accountable for performance, but they themselves are accountable to no one…They are bastions of unaccountable power. 200-01.
She also quotes the Broad Foundation: “We don’t know anything about how to teach or reading curriculum or any of that. But what we do know about is management and governance.”
There is much more in this crucial book. It deserves to be read and brought to the attention of all legislators, including the President himself—who, as Ravitch points out bitterly, has “warmly endorsed” the Gates-Broad agenda by hiring Arne Duncan, one of the biggest beneficiaries of foundation money when he headed the Chicago public schools. Not surprisingly, and despite his hype, the schools there are still failing. Thousands more will be put on the chopping block in 2014 when NCLB comes due. Which will be nothing less than a tragedy, this death of American public schools, for, as Ravitch points out, going to school is not like shopping: “Schools are not businesses; they are a public good.” Privatizing them makes about as much sense as privatizing police and fire departments. What should be attended to is not testing, but what is being taught—the curriculum. One of the few states that does this is Massachusetts, and its students have the “highest academic performance in the nation on the NAEP and rank near the top when compared to their peers in other nations.” In other words, we know how it should be done, and it is not by testing, not by privatizing, not by killing public education in America. Most decidedly, it is not by letting the worst boondoggle in education history, the NCLB, to come to its bloody fruition. Look to it.
Lawrence DiStasi
Monday, September 27, 2010
The Fallout of War
Two books I’ve read recently have led to my musings on the fallout from humanity’s favorite pastime—and I don’t mean the obvious stuff like thousands of deaths, more thousands with absent limbs or battered brains, and still more with PTSD and other anti-social maladies. I’m talking about the lovely by-products of war which shape our societies for years afterwards. Jaron Lanier in his recent book, You Are Not a Gadget, for example, points out that modern computers were developed to guide missiles and break secret military codes. He lumps chess and computers as having derived from violence and competition. Even more specific, however, is Sandra Steingraber’s Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment (first published 1997; recently expanded and reissued). There she points out the often-direct relationship between war innovations and the chemicals that cause cancer. In commenting about the steep rise in lymphomas, for example, she writes that they seem to be correlated with exposure to synthetic chemicals, “especially a class of pesticides known as phenoxy herbicides.” And where did these originate? They were “born in 1942 as part of a never-implemented plan by the U.S. military to destroy rice fields in Japan” (52). Never implemented, of course, because we dropped two atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki instead. Nonetheless, the chemicals referred to are the now-infamous 2,4,5-T (2,4,5 trichlorophenoxyacetic acid) and 2,4-D (2,4, dichlorophenoxyacetic acid). In combination, they are known as Agent Orange, which the military was finally able to use in Vietnam between 1962 and 1970, and which contributed to uncounted deaths among Vietnamese, and a still rising incidence of non-Hodgkins lymphomas and lesser ailments among American veterans of Vietnam. The combination was outlawed in 1970, but one of the pair, 2,4-D is still in use, having become one of our most popular domestic weed killers for lawns, gardens, golf courses and farm fields. Its use on lawns may be one of the reasons why so many of our dogs—rolling happily in our chemicalized lawns--have been contracting lymphomas.
More generally, war provides industry, including the chemical industry, with a wonderful testing ground for all kinds of products. And when the war is over, those products find a new home in our homes. Steingraber again points out that after 1940,
…synthetic organic chemical production [doubled] every seven to eight years. By the end of the 1980s, total production had exceeded 200 billion pounds per year. In other words, production of synthetic organic chemicals increased 100-fold between the time my mother was born and the year I finished graduate school. Two human generations (90.)
These “synthetic organics” are marvelous little concoctions, perfectly designed, because of their similarity to our natural body chemicals, to react with us, but different enough to be hard to excrete. And what they do? “Some interfere with our hormones, some cripple the immune system, and some overstimulate the activity of certain enzymes.” And they are associated with what the World Health Organization concluded are the “80% of all cancers attributable to environmental influences.” Yes, you read that correctly: 80%.
Why don’t we know this? Why isn’t someone investigating this stuff? That’s the job Steingraber assumed. And her conclusions are not encouraging. First of all, cancer is not some random misfortune; it is specific in that fully “one-half of all the world’s cancers occur among people living in industrialized countries…especially North America and Northern Europe. Breast cancer rates are 30 times higher in the U.S. than in parts of Africa.” The places, in other words, where the fallout from two world wars and countless smaller ones has been greatest. Among them are those chemicals we’ve been hearing about recently, the estrogen mimickers which, “at a low level inside the human body mimic the female hormone estrogen.” Regarding this estrogenic fallout of war, Steingraber then gives us this zinger:
Many of the hypermasculine weapons of conquest and progress are, biologically speaking, emasculating (109.)
Read that again. And then consider further facts: In 1939 (i.e., pre-WWII) there were a mere 32 pesticidal active ingredients registered with the federal government, while
At present, 860 active ingredients are so registered and are formulated into 20,000 different pesticidal products. Current U.S. annual use is estimated at 2.23 billion pounds….82% of U.S. households use pesticides of some kind….Between 45,000 and 100,000 chemicals are now in common commercial use…Of these only about 1.5 to 3% (1200 to 1500 chemicals) have been tested for carcinogenicity. (95 & 97).
You get the picture. We are being bathed in a chemical soup (much of our drinking water is also contaminated; worse, the effects of bathing and showering in such water may be as bad or worse than drinking it, so don’t count on bottled water) whose effects are unknown to us because governments pass laws that sound good, but lack implementation. For example, in Illinois, Steingraber’s home state, the legislature passed a Health and Hazardous Substances Registry Act but though the State Cancer Registry compiles cancer deaths, it does nothing to try to correlate these deaths with exposure to hazardous substances: the state funded the cancer registry, but not a hazardous substances registry. In fact, from the data that Steingraber compiles, it is clear that a concerted effort has been made to keep the environmental causes of cancer out of the public’s consciousness.
This is clear from Steingraber’s rundown of the information on cancer prevention. There’s the much-heralded “war on cancer.” There are marches on behalf of funding for breast cancer and other cancer research. But with regard to causes, the onus is placed on—your guessed it—the victims. DNA, we are told, will solve the cancer puzzle because cancer is hereditary (you got it from your parents.) Or it’s your lifestyle that’s at fault: eat less fats, eat vegetables, don’t smoke, get lots of exercise. After that, if you still get cancer, it’s your own fault. But what Steingraber points out (with some suppressed fury, for she herself got bladder cancer in her teens), is that hereditary cancers are rare: “Collectively, fewer than 10% of all malignancies are thought to involve inherited mutations.” That leaves 85 to 90% unaccounted for; and thus likely due to environmental influences. It also leaves 30% to 40% of Americans due to get cancer in their lifetimes.
What are those environmental influences? Consider the class of chemicals called “triazines.” These must be some of the most diabolic substances ever conceived. Why? Because some of these emissaries from hell actually “strike directly at the process by which plants use sunlight to transform water and carbon dioxide into sugar and oxygen.” That is, they block the most fundamental process in life—photosynthesis—the process whereby earth produces plants not only to eat, but to be used as food by herbivores upon whom we depend for meat and dairy products as well. In short, the entire food chain. Imagine this! Aside from the question (which is all the pooh-bahs would like to consider) of whether such chemicals cause cancer, consider, as Steingraber puts it, “the wisdom of broadcasting over the landscape (atrazine is one of the top two most widely used pesticides in U.S. agriculture) chemicals that extinguish the miraculous fact of photosynthesis—which after all, furnishes us our sole supply of oxygen” (160). I mean, if this be not madness, what is? Soluble in water, traces of atrazine have now been found in ground water, 98% of surface waters in the Midwest, and in raindrops. Meanwhile, the EPA dithers and delays, no doubt influenced by mega-farmers and the chemical industry, to the point that 30 years from the time they were introduced, we still do not know the cancer risks of triazines coating our corn, our peaches, our plums, our apples, our cherries, peaches, cranberries, blueberries, strawberries, grapes and pears. Not to mention the long-term effects of interfering with photosynthesis (algae are also affected).
There’s more in this courageous, disturbing book, and I haven’t even looked at the updated edition. Read it if you dare. And the truth is, we all need to dare, or have our lives controlled by the conscienceless hucksters who now drive our agriculture, our household cleaning habits, our drinking water, our immune systems, our entire way of life. DuPont used to have a commercial slogan: “Better things, for better living…through chemistry.” We don’t hear that too much anymore. I wonder why.
Lawrence DiStasi
=
More generally, war provides industry, including the chemical industry, with a wonderful testing ground for all kinds of products. And when the war is over, those products find a new home in our homes. Steingraber again points out that after 1940,
…synthetic organic chemical production [doubled] every seven to eight years. By the end of the 1980s, total production had exceeded 200 billion pounds per year. In other words, production of synthetic organic chemicals increased 100-fold between the time my mother was born and the year I finished graduate school. Two human generations (90.)
These “synthetic organics” are marvelous little concoctions, perfectly designed, because of their similarity to our natural body chemicals, to react with us, but different enough to be hard to excrete. And what they do? “Some interfere with our hormones, some cripple the immune system, and some overstimulate the activity of certain enzymes.” And they are associated with what the World Health Organization concluded are the “80% of all cancers attributable to environmental influences.” Yes, you read that correctly: 80%.
Why don’t we know this? Why isn’t someone investigating this stuff? That’s the job Steingraber assumed. And her conclusions are not encouraging. First of all, cancer is not some random misfortune; it is specific in that fully “one-half of all the world’s cancers occur among people living in industrialized countries…especially North America and Northern Europe. Breast cancer rates are 30 times higher in the U.S. than in parts of Africa.” The places, in other words, where the fallout from two world wars and countless smaller ones has been greatest. Among them are those chemicals we’ve been hearing about recently, the estrogen mimickers which, “at a low level inside the human body mimic the female hormone estrogen.” Regarding this estrogenic fallout of war, Steingraber then gives us this zinger:
Many of the hypermasculine weapons of conquest and progress are, biologically speaking, emasculating (109.)
Read that again. And then consider further facts: In 1939 (i.e., pre-WWII) there were a mere 32 pesticidal active ingredients registered with the federal government, while
At present, 860 active ingredients are so registered and are formulated into 20,000 different pesticidal products. Current U.S. annual use is estimated at 2.23 billion pounds….82% of U.S. households use pesticides of some kind….Between 45,000 and 100,000 chemicals are now in common commercial use…Of these only about 1.5 to 3% (1200 to 1500 chemicals) have been tested for carcinogenicity. (95 & 97).
You get the picture. We are being bathed in a chemical soup (much of our drinking water is also contaminated; worse, the effects of bathing and showering in such water may be as bad or worse than drinking it, so don’t count on bottled water) whose effects are unknown to us because governments pass laws that sound good, but lack implementation. For example, in Illinois, Steingraber’s home state, the legislature passed a Health and Hazardous Substances Registry Act but though the State Cancer Registry compiles cancer deaths, it does nothing to try to correlate these deaths with exposure to hazardous substances: the state funded the cancer registry, but not a hazardous substances registry. In fact, from the data that Steingraber compiles, it is clear that a concerted effort has been made to keep the environmental causes of cancer out of the public’s consciousness.
This is clear from Steingraber’s rundown of the information on cancer prevention. There’s the much-heralded “war on cancer.” There are marches on behalf of funding for breast cancer and other cancer research. But with regard to causes, the onus is placed on—your guessed it—the victims. DNA, we are told, will solve the cancer puzzle because cancer is hereditary (you got it from your parents.) Or it’s your lifestyle that’s at fault: eat less fats, eat vegetables, don’t smoke, get lots of exercise. After that, if you still get cancer, it’s your own fault. But what Steingraber points out (with some suppressed fury, for she herself got bladder cancer in her teens), is that hereditary cancers are rare: “Collectively, fewer than 10% of all malignancies are thought to involve inherited mutations.” That leaves 85 to 90% unaccounted for; and thus likely due to environmental influences. It also leaves 30% to 40% of Americans due to get cancer in their lifetimes.
What are those environmental influences? Consider the class of chemicals called “triazines.” These must be some of the most diabolic substances ever conceived. Why? Because some of these emissaries from hell actually “strike directly at the process by which plants use sunlight to transform water and carbon dioxide into sugar and oxygen.” That is, they block the most fundamental process in life—photosynthesis—the process whereby earth produces plants not only to eat, but to be used as food by herbivores upon whom we depend for meat and dairy products as well. In short, the entire food chain. Imagine this! Aside from the question (which is all the pooh-bahs would like to consider) of whether such chemicals cause cancer, consider, as Steingraber puts it, “the wisdom of broadcasting over the landscape (atrazine is one of the top two most widely used pesticides in U.S. agriculture) chemicals that extinguish the miraculous fact of photosynthesis—which after all, furnishes us our sole supply of oxygen” (160). I mean, if this be not madness, what is? Soluble in water, traces of atrazine have now been found in ground water, 98% of surface waters in the Midwest, and in raindrops. Meanwhile, the EPA dithers and delays, no doubt influenced by mega-farmers and the chemical industry, to the point that 30 years from the time they were introduced, we still do not know the cancer risks of triazines coating our corn, our peaches, our plums, our apples, our cherries, peaches, cranberries, blueberries, strawberries, grapes and pears. Not to mention the long-term effects of interfering with photosynthesis (algae are also affected).
There’s more in this courageous, disturbing book, and I haven’t even looked at the updated edition. Read it if you dare. And the truth is, we all need to dare, or have our lives controlled by the conscienceless hucksters who now drive our agriculture, our household cleaning habits, our drinking water, our immune systems, our entire way of life. DuPont used to have a commercial slogan: “Better things, for better living…through chemistry.” We don’t hear that too much anymore. I wonder why.
Lawrence DiStasi
=
Wednesday, September 01, 2010
Toxicity on Wall Street
A couple of recent pieces on the late financial debacle have me puzzling over this stuff again—mostly because I still understand little of it (the big boys, naturally, like it that way). But here goes.
Too Big to Fail is a 2009 book by reporter Andrew Sorkin treating the agonizing days in September 2008 when the system almost collapsed. It’s a fascinating read, if for nothing else than the fact that it familiarizes us with the major mandarins of finance and government. We become chummy with then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and NY Fed chairman Tim Geithner, the latter now Obama’s Treasury Secretary. Of the two, Paulson comes off as the better man—more capable, more sensitive to the personalities he had to deal with (and therefore more respected by them), more concerned to save the system. Geithner strikes us as a bit of a tyrant, jealous of his perks, prone to order his bankers to jump through the hoops he has set for them. Paulson, by contrast, always solicits the ideas of those he tries to persuade. We also get the feeling that the entire ordeal—having to bail out the free-market system he was and is so much a part of—was one Paulson would have avoided if he could. He was perfectly happy as CEO of Goldman Sachs. As Treasury Secretary, on the other hand, he has to persuade, cajole, and take crap from Congress; at various points, we are told that he actually vomits from the political tension he is under. No wonder. If all reports are to be believed, the financial system was on the very brink of collapse. The way Sorkin tells the story also indicates that the renowned TARP bailout of major financial institutions was actually a political/psychological ploy meant to calm markets and the American people—a plan that forced nine major banks to accept an infusion of billions of dollars each, whether they needed it or not. Many did: Citibank, Morgan Stanley, and AIG. Others, especially Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo, did not. But in order to create the illusion of equality and stability, Paulson’s plan required all banks to accept the money.
The story begins with the impending collapse of Lehman Brothers. We feel almost sorry for the CEO, Dick Fuld, who had spent his life building the firm, and who, until the very end, thinks he can work a deal to get another bank to rescue his. Such a buyout is what Geithner and Paulson spend most of their time trying to arrange. But Lehman’s problems, coming after the bailout of Bear Stearns, suffered from bad timing: the public was already alarmed by the first bailout and it was clear another would ignite a firestorm of protest. So Lehman’s failure was political as much as financial. Indeed, one of the failings of this book is that we never really get a clear explanation of why any of these financial giants was hemorrhaging so badly. We learn about the fall in their stock prices; we hear that the “short sellers” are driving their price down; but we don’t really quite understand what the root problems or mistakes are. What we get mostly are vignettes dramatizing little episodes in the long series of near-mergers and deal collapses. Some of these vignettes are telling: Bob Diamond, CEO of Barclay’s Bank, approached by Geithner to buy Lehman, wants the Federal Reserve to guarantee the deal (it is amazing to realize how alergic these financial “geniuses” are to the free market economics they’re always preaching).
“We need to be seen, to be invited by you and shepherded by you,” Diamond insisted. “You guys asked me if there was a price at which we’d be interested and you asked me, if so, ‘What do you need?’ That doesn’t mean I’m gonna call Fuld. That’s completely different.”
Giethner, growing frustrated with his equivocation, asked again, “Why can’t you just call Fuld? Why can’t you do it?”
“I’m not going to ask a guy if I can buy him, you know, at a distressed price,” Diamond said. “It only works if you guys are looking to arrange a deal. If you’re not, fine, no hard feelings, we’re okay.”
Then comes Sorkin’s comment:
However much Barclays may have wished to avoid giving the impression that they might be taking advantage of someone else’s misfortune, it was, of course, precisely what they were seeking to do. (p. 262)
This is really the key to the entire skein of deals and deal-making that Sorkin portrays. All these pooh bahs knew each other, played golf with each other, sat on boards together, had dinners together (at the finest restaurants on the planet, of course). They wanted to appear to be friends; but, in fact, they were sharks, circling each other, keen always to detect the smell of blood from a wounded competitor.
Unfortunately, during those terrible days of September, there was a lot of blood in the water. Once Lehman was allowed to fail, fear ruled Wall Street and Washington as well. No one knew who would be next because all the firms were interrelated financially. AIG had written enormous amounts of insurance—credit default swaps—for Goldman Sachs and others. If banks tried to collect on these insurance policies, which many did, AIG was going down. It was this domino of collapses that Paulson and Geithner, in Sorkin’s telling, were so desperate to prevent. At one point, before Paulson promoted his TARP program, we listen in on one of his conversations with Steve Schwarzman, chair of private-equity giant, the Blackstone Group. Schwarzman says:
“I have to tell you, the system’s going to collapse in the next few days. I doubt you’re going to be able to open the banks on Monday….People are shorting financial institutions, they’re withdrawing money from brokerage firms because they don’t want to be the last people in—like in Lehman—which is going to lead to the collapse of Goldman and Morgan Stanley. Everybody is just pursuing his self-interest,” Schwarzman told him. “You have to do something.” (emphasis mine).
What strikes me here is the language: Everybody is pursuing his self-interest. Well now, isn’t that a damn shame! These are the people who have raised the individual pursuit of self-interest to the level of holy dogma: this is what makes capitalism, free markets great. But when it happens within the club, when the dogs turn on each other, then they cry foul! You have to do something! And of course, Paulson did do something, for it was right after this that he put together, and rammed through Congress, the TARP bailout program.
This is fascinating stuff. We actually find ourselves rooting for the Treasury Department, for financial leaders like Dick Fuld, to succeed. I liken this feeling to the similar feeling one gets when watching mafia movies: no matter how heinous their behavior, we root for the characters who are portrayed from the inside as protagonists. Their cause becomes our cause. Sadly, what Too Big to Fail leaves out are the series of fraudulent, near-criminal activities that led these Wall Street powerhouses to run aground: the sub-prime mortgages, the collateralized debt obligations, the credit default swaps, all the exotic instruments whereby they and their executives enriched themselves to obscene levels, and brought the entire financial system and the economy it supports to near ruin. A recent article, “Banks Self-Dealing Super-Charged Financial Crisis,” indicates just how culpable these guys were. What the analysis by ProPublica reveals is that when these Wall Street banks saw how the market for the mortgage-backed securities they’d been packaging at great profit was faltering, they “created fake demand.” They simply bought their own products—the worst of the mortgages in their CDOs—and put them together in new CDOs, which they then proceeded to sell. They knew these new CDOs were junk, because that’s why they’d separated them out in the first place. And when the new ones proved hard to sell in full, they created yet more CDOs to buy those. ProPublica calls this a “daisy chain that solved one problem but created another.” And when the daisy chain could no longer be hidden, when, as we learn in Too Big to Fail, the banks could no longer get away with valuing these toxic assets at the inflated levels they claimed for them, the banks started to collapse.
That’s when we American taxpayers came to the rescue: TARP, Toxic Asset Relief, means that the U.S. government was forced to buy the worst of these bank “assets” to get them off their books—because with them, the big banks would fail.
I don’t know about you, but this just gives me a warm feeling all over.
Lawrence DiStasi
Too Big to Fail is a 2009 book by reporter Andrew Sorkin treating the agonizing days in September 2008 when the system almost collapsed. It’s a fascinating read, if for nothing else than the fact that it familiarizes us with the major mandarins of finance and government. We become chummy with then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and NY Fed chairman Tim Geithner, the latter now Obama’s Treasury Secretary. Of the two, Paulson comes off as the better man—more capable, more sensitive to the personalities he had to deal with (and therefore more respected by them), more concerned to save the system. Geithner strikes us as a bit of a tyrant, jealous of his perks, prone to order his bankers to jump through the hoops he has set for them. Paulson, by contrast, always solicits the ideas of those he tries to persuade. We also get the feeling that the entire ordeal—having to bail out the free-market system he was and is so much a part of—was one Paulson would have avoided if he could. He was perfectly happy as CEO of Goldman Sachs. As Treasury Secretary, on the other hand, he has to persuade, cajole, and take crap from Congress; at various points, we are told that he actually vomits from the political tension he is under. No wonder. If all reports are to be believed, the financial system was on the very brink of collapse. The way Sorkin tells the story also indicates that the renowned TARP bailout of major financial institutions was actually a political/psychological ploy meant to calm markets and the American people—a plan that forced nine major banks to accept an infusion of billions of dollars each, whether they needed it or not. Many did: Citibank, Morgan Stanley, and AIG. Others, especially Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo, did not. But in order to create the illusion of equality and stability, Paulson’s plan required all banks to accept the money.
The story begins with the impending collapse of Lehman Brothers. We feel almost sorry for the CEO, Dick Fuld, who had spent his life building the firm, and who, until the very end, thinks he can work a deal to get another bank to rescue his. Such a buyout is what Geithner and Paulson spend most of their time trying to arrange. But Lehman’s problems, coming after the bailout of Bear Stearns, suffered from bad timing: the public was already alarmed by the first bailout and it was clear another would ignite a firestorm of protest. So Lehman’s failure was political as much as financial. Indeed, one of the failings of this book is that we never really get a clear explanation of why any of these financial giants was hemorrhaging so badly. We learn about the fall in their stock prices; we hear that the “short sellers” are driving their price down; but we don’t really quite understand what the root problems or mistakes are. What we get mostly are vignettes dramatizing little episodes in the long series of near-mergers and deal collapses. Some of these vignettes are telling: Bob Diamond, CEO of Barclay’s Bank, approached by Geithner to buy Lehman, wants the Federal Reserve to guarantee the deal (it is amazing to realize how alergic these financial “geniuses” are to the free market economics they’re always preaching).
“We need to be seen, to be invited by you and shepherded by you,” Diamond insisted. “You guys asked me if there was a price at which we’d be interested and you asked me, if so, ‘What do you need?’ That doesn’t mean I’m gonna call Fuld. That’s completely different.”
Giethner, growing frustrated with his equivocation, asked again, “Why can’t you just call Fuld? Why can’t you do it?”
“I’m not going to ask a guy if I can buy him, you know, at a distressed price,” Diamond said. “It only works if you guys are looking to arrange a deal. If you’re not, fine, no hard feelings, we’re okay.”
Then comes Sorkin’s comment:
However much Barclays may have wished to avoid giving the impression that they might be taking advantage of someone else’s misfortune, it was, of course, precisely what they were seeking to do. (p. 262)
This is really the key to the entire skein of deals and deal-making that Sorkin portrays. All these pooh bahs knew each other, played golf with each other, sat on boards together, had dinners together (at the finest restaurants on the planet, of course). They wanted to appear to be friends; but, in fact, they were sharks, circling each other, keen always to detect the smell of blood from a wounded competitor.
Unfortunately, during those terrible days of September, there was a lot of blood in the water. Once Lehman was allowed to fail, fear ruled Wall Street and Washington as well. No one knew who would be next because all the firms were interrelated financially. AIG had written enormous amounts of insurance—credit default swaps—for Goldman Sachs and others. If banks tried to collect on these insurance policies, which many did, AIG was going down. It was this domino of collapses that Paulson and Geithner, in Sorkin’s telling, were so desperate to prevent. At one point, before Paulson promoted his TARP program, we listen in on one of his conversations with Steve Schwarzman, chair of private-equity giant, the Blackstone Group. Schwarzman says:
“I have to tell you, the system’s going to collapse in the next few days. I doubt you’re going to be able to open the banks on Monday….People are shorting financial institutions, they’re withdrawing money from brokerage firms because they don’t want to be the last people in—like in Lehman—which is going to lead to the collapse of Goldman and Morgan Stanley. Everybody is just pursuing his self-interest,” Schwarzman told him. “You have to do something.” (emphasis mine).
What strikes me here is the language: Everybody is pursuing his self-interest. Well now, isn’t that a damn shame! These are the people who have raised the individual pursuit of self-interest to the level of holy dogma: this is what makes capitalism, free markets great. But when it happens within the club, when the dogs turn on each other, then they cry foul! You have to do something! And of course, Paulson did do something, for it was right after this that he put together, and rammed through Congress, the TARP bailout program.
This is fascinating stuff. We actually find ourselves rooting for the Treasury Department, for financial leaders like Dick Fuld, to succeed. I liken this feeling to the similar feeling one gets when watching mafia movies: no matter how heinous their behavior, we root for the characters who are portrayed from the inside as protagonists. Their cause becomes our cause. Sadly, what Too Big to Fail leaves out are the series of fraudulent, near-criminal activities that led these Wall Street powerhouses to run aground: the sub-prime mortgages, the collateralized debt obligations, the credit default swaps, all the exotic instruments whereby they and their executives enriched themselves to obscene levels, and brought the entire financial system and the economy it supports to near ruin. A recent article, “Banks Self-Dealing Super-Charged Financial Crisis,” indicates just how culpable these guys were. What the analysis by ProPublica reveals is that when these Wall Street banks saw how the market for the mortgage-backed securities they’d been packaging at great profit was faltering, they “created fake demand.” They simply bought their own products—the worst of the mortgages in their CDOs—and put them together in new CDOs, which they then proceeded to sell. They knew these new CDOs were junk, because that’s why they’d separated them out in the first place. And when the new ones proved hard to sell in full, they created yet more CDOs to buy those. ProPublica calls this a “daisy chain that solved one problem but created another.” And when the daisy chain could no longer be hidden, when, as we learn in Too Big to Fail, the banks could no longer get away with valuing these toxic assets at the inflated levels they claimed for them, the banks started to collapse.
That’s when we American taxpayers came to the rescue: TARP, Toxic Asset Relief, means that the U.S. government was forced to buy the worst of these bank “assets” to get them off their books—because with them, the big banks would fail.
I don’t know about you, but this just gives me a warm feeling all over.
Lawrence DiStasi
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Lazio Takes the Low Road
Rick Lazio has always had boyish good looks and a charming personality. I discovered this working with him on the World War II legislation—the Wartime Violation of Italian American Civil Liberties Act—of which he was the co-sponsor, and which was signed into Public Law #106-451 on November 7, 2000. Lazio was able to work with Democrat Eliot Engel and others in the House of Representatives, and, as a Republican, seems to have had some influence with then-Judiciary Committee Chairman, Henry Hyde, in granting the Una Storia Segreta project the critical Judiciary hearings that ensured the bill’s passage. For all this I was and am grateful, as is the entire Italian American community.
Recently, however, in his attempt to become New York State’s governor, another side of Rick Lazio has come to the fore, and it is neither handsome nor charming. Though he seems to have repudiated the Tea Party in his state (partly, at least, because his Republican primary opponent, Carl Paladino, has become their darling of the moment), Lazio has concluded that the silly flap over the building of an Islamic Cultural Center near Ground Zero can be a winning issue for him, and, despite vigorous criticism from all sides, is milking it for all it’s worth. Some have accused Lazio of being so desperate for campaign funds that he has sunk to this level to raise money. Whether or not this is true, his words and his position in this controversy make clear that Lazio’s moral compass can easily go missing when he senses an opportunity. In this, of course, he has ample company—including most of the Republican Party and a large number of Democrats as well.
To briefly review the controversy: plans to build a 13-story Islamic Cultural Center once known as Cordoba House, now known as Park51, two blocks from Ground Zero, were recently approved by the New York State landmark preservation board. Tea Party activists including Sarah Palin, have raised hell about this “insult” to the memory of 9/11 victims and the alleged sacrilege to what is called “hallowed ground.” Notwithstanding the fact that the structure is the brainchild of Imam Faisel Abdul Rauf—a man so associated with bridge-building among faiths that he was chosen as an ambassador without portfolio to help the Bush Administration reach out to Muslim nations and promote the American image abroad—and notwithstanding the Constitution’s guarantee of religious freedom, the project is being compared to planting a Nazi sign at Auschwitz, or building “a memorial to kamikaze pilots next to the USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor.” (this last from Carl Paladino, Lazio’s opponent in the Republican primary.)
Incredibly, Lazio has taken the accusations several steps further. Claiming that his objection is not religious (President Obama has stated publicly that religious freedom guarantees Muslims the same rights to build a center as anyone else), but involves only a plea for “transparency,” Lazio has raised the issue of “safety and security.” He has therefore attacked his expected opponent and current Attorney General of New York, Democrat Andrew Cuomo, for failing to investigate the “books” of the project to find out who is funding it. This call for transparency is clearly shorthand for raising the issue of terrorism—a barely veiled warning that mosques should be suspected as fronts for terrorist groups bent on harming New Yorkers. Here is how he framed it in an appearance on the PBS News Hour on August 16:
“What I’ve been calling for is transparency. There’s a certain defiance about the need to put it right there…This Cordoba initiative has $18,000. right now for a $100 million mosque…Where is this money coming from? Who’s behind this?....Let’s open the books, let’s find out where it’s coming from, whether it’s a foreign government or militant organizations that are funding this. The question here is whether or not we should feel safe, this is about safety and security…This is about what’s right, what’s ethical, what’s decent, what’s fair, and from a standpoint of safety…”
Thus, where most criticism of the Islamic Center project focused on its alleged insult to the memory of the dead, Lazio, though he refers to “what’s ethical, what’s decent, what’s fair,” has abandoned ethics, decency and fairness to foreground the element of fear: is this project funded by the same terrorists who funded 9/11?
As if to amplify his verbal raising of the fear factor, Lazio has recently released a two-minute video described as “a collage of various opinions from people filmed near Ground Zero,” featuring “images taken on September 11, 2001 depicting firefighters running into the debris of the former World Trade Center Towers.” So outrageous is this ad that it has incited criticisms from the very people Lazio was trying to associate himself with. According to an August 20 NBC.com report, both the NY Fire Department and the Police Department have demanded the video’s removal:
“The Uniformed Fire Officers Association and the NYPD’s Sergeants Benevolent Association has sent Lazio letters denouncing the use of the 9/11 footage. ‘We have always been opposed to the use of images from the attack on the World Trade Center in political advertising. Virtually every candidate for public office has honored that sentiment to date. So it was with a mix of surprise and disappointment to see your new video that seeks to capture the attention of the viewer with graphic images of Ground Zero that day,’ read a letter signed by UFOA President Alexander Hagan. ‘For someone whose argument against the mosque is that it is insensitive to those who lost loved ones on that day, it is unconscionable that he would display similar insensitivity by evoking these painful memories for his own political purposes,’ wrote SBA President Edward Mullins.”
Whether Rick Lazio can summon the courage to come in from the moral desert he’s placed himself in remains to be seen. Given the national attention his stance has garnered for him, though, and given the Tea Party competition from his rival Paladino, such an attack of conscience doesn’t appear likely. Rather, in this year when the twin specters of racism and McCarthyism seem to have risen from what we hoped was their grave, we can probably expect more of the same, if not worse. And though the politics are sad, sadder still is what is likely to result from all this—the conviction among Muslims worldwide that our so-called war on terror is really a war on them.
Lawrence DiStasi
Recently, however, in his attempt to become New York State’s governor, another side of Rick Lazio has come to the fore, and it is neither handsome nor charming. Though he seems to have repudiated the Tea Party in his state (partly, at least, because his Republican primary opponent, Carl Paladino, has become their darling of the moment), Lazio has concluded that the silly flap over the building of an Islamic Cultural Center near Ground Zero can be a winning issue for him, and, despite vigorous criticism from all sides, is milking it for all it’s worth. Some have accused Lazio of being so desperate for campaign funds that he has sunk to this level to raise money. Whether or not this is true, his words and his position in this controversy make clear that Lazio’s moral compass can easily go missing when he senses an opportunity. In this, of course, he has ample company—including most of the Republican Party and a large number of Democrats as well.
To briefly review the controversy: plans to build a 13-story Islamic Cultural Center once known as Cordoba House, now known as Park51, two blocks from Ground Zero, were recently approved by the New York State landmark preservation board. Tea Party activists including Sarah Palin, have raised hell about this “insult” to the memory of 9/11 victims and the alleged sacrilege to what is called “hallowed ground.” Notwithstanding the fact that the structure is the brainchild of Imam Faisel Abdul Rauf—a man so associated with bridge-building among faiths that he was chosen as an ambassador without portfolio to help the Bush Administration reach out to Muslim nations and promote the American image abroad—and notwithstanding the Constitution’s guarantee of religious freedom, the project is being compared to planting a Nazi sign at Auschwitz, or building “a memorial to kamikaze pilots next to the USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor.” (this last from Carl Paladino, Lazio’s opponent in the Republican primary.)
Incredibly, Lazio has taken the accusations several steps further. Claiming that his objection is not religious (President Obama has stated publicly that religious freedom guarantees Muslims the same rights to build a center as anyone else), but involves only a plea for “transparency,” Lazio has raised the issue of “safety and security.” He has therefore attacked his expected opponent and current Attorney General of New York, Democrat Andrew Cuomo, for failing to investigate the “books” of the project to find out who is funding it. This call for transparency is clearly shorthand for raising the issue of terrorism—a barely veiled warning that mosques should be suspected as fronts for terrorist groups bent on harming New Yorkers. Here is how he framed it in an appearance on the PBS News Hour on August 16:
“What I’ve been calling for is transparency. There’s a certain defiance about the need to put it right there…This Cordoba initiative has $18,000. right now for a $100 million mosque…Where is this money coming from? Who’s behind this?....Let’s open the books, let’s find out where it’s coming from, whether it’s a foreign government or militant organizations that are funding this. The question here is whether or not we should feel safe, this is about safety and security…This is about what’s right, what’s ethical, what’s decent, what’s fair, and from a standpoint of safety…”
Thus, where most criticism of the Islamic Center project focused on its alleged insult to the memory of the dead, Lazio, though he refers to “what’s ethical, what’s decent, what’s fair,” has abandoned ethics, decency and fairness to foreground the element of fear: is this project funded by the same terrorists who funded 9/11?
As if to amplify his verbal raising of the fear factor, Lazio has recently released a two-minute video described as “a collage of various opinions from people filmed near Ground Zero,” featuring “images taken on September 11, 2001 depicting firefighters running into the debris of the former World Trade Center Towers.” So outrageous is this ad that it has incited criticisms from the very people Lazio was trying to associate himself with. According to an August 20 NBC.com report, both the NY Fire Department and the Police Department have demanded the video’s removal:
“The Uniformed Fire Officers Association and the NYPD’s Sergeants Benevolent Association has sent Lazio letters denouncing the use of the 9/11 footage. ‘We have always been opposed to the use of images from the attack on the World Trade Center in political advertising. Virtually every candidate for public office has honored that sentiment to date. So it was with a mix of surprise and disappointment to see your new video that seeks to capture the attention of the viewer with graphic images of Ground Zero that day,’ read a letter signed by UFOA President Alexander Hagan. ‘For someone whose argument against the mosque is that it is insensitive to those who lost loved ones on that day, it is unconscionable that he would display similar insensitivity by evoking these painful memories for his own political purposes,’ wrote SBA President Edward Mullins.”
Whether Rick Lazio can summon the courage to come in from the moral desert he’s placed himself in remains to be seen. Given the national attention his stance has garnered for him, though, and given the Tea Party competition from his rival Paladino, such an attack of conscience doesn’t appear likely. Rather, in this year when the twin specters of racism and McCarthyism seem to have risen from what we hoped was their grave, we can probably expect more of the same, if not worse. And though the politics are sad, sadder still is what is likely to result from all this—the conviction among Muslims worldwide that our so-called war on terror is really a war on them.
Lawrence DiStasi
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Banana Split Economics
We may never get out of the woods
To make and export our goods
If amidst all the sobs
We export our jobs
Instead of our handiwork
For that’s where big troubles lurk
The top banana wears a crown
And the rest of us wear a frown
Immersed in our tears and bankrupt
To support the rich and inept
One of the telling differences between the mixed democracies of Mexico and Central America and our own democratic republic has been the relatively high upward mobility of our citizens. Much of the mobility came from education and the public school system of the United States as well as excellent colleges and universities that came within reach of millions of citizens after World War II. Perhaps the single most influential factor was the GI Bill that provided the technical education that propelled the United States through the technology explosion of the 50s and 60s. We invested locally and gained internationally.
The federal government was the underwriter of advanced education and made that education easily affordable and within the reach of nearly everyone socially and even geographically. The technological cauldron was pretty much just that. It was a heated vessel that combined investment, education and labor here in the United States. While other pots were warming, our cauldron boiled over until foreign investment caught up with our market economy. Some of their catching up was through central planning as in China, India and to a lesser extent Japan where social status was subordinated to the needs of each nation to become competitive in a world marketplace. After WW II, the US had a comparative advantage in that we did not suffer major damage or loss of the capital equipment and other resources to compete in the world market. Given extended optimism and insufficient investment, that advantage eventually became a disadvantage as countries that replaced their capital infrastructure did so with more modern and efficient systems and equipment.
The economic disadvantage was made worse by some decisions in the 50s and 60s regarding wages and benefits that sought to give workers medical benefits instead of wage increases. Large corporations discouraged government investment in tax supported medical care. Two decades later, the Reagan Administration changed Medicare policy from payment based on treatment to payment based on diagnosis. Partially due to this, and due to the expansion of diagnostic techniques and equipment, diagnosis became a growth industry within medicine. Myopic labor unions did not fully consider the impact of technology on shrinking job numbers and they did not call for systemic changes in either wages or healthcare. Most developed nations adopted government-controlled healthcare when the US decided (by default) to maintain healthcare provided by corporations, mostly manufacturing. This later became unmanageable when costs skyrocketed and corporations began to cut back on inflationary benefits. The “last straw” for this rickety structure was the massive sea change resulting from labor being competed on a world-wide basis where ever lower level economies provided labor at lower and lower costs. At this point in 2010, not even China can compete in areas such as textiles and has closed hundreds of textile mills. Pakistan, a more recent entry to textiles has already had to close 600 of its 1,000 textile mills. Some of our recently purchased furniture was made in Vietnam. Years ago, it was made in New England. Later, it was made in North Carolina (a right to work state) and then in Europe, but the inexorable beat for lower labor costs accelerated the migration of manufacturing centers to a dizzying pace. Now, unions represent less than 13% of all jobs and far less in manufacturing. We got what we asked for: highly mobile workers and competition for work. Unions are powerless to slow the process. The trend is clear and the only bright spots over these decades has been technology surges when new technology combined with investment capital provided a respite in the outflow of good jobs from the US and the importing of cheap labor from Mexico and Central America. Eventually, Silicon Valley became just another brief stop on the Pony Express to economic oblivion. Executives like Carly Fiorina became famous for exporting high tech jobs (about 32,000 on her watch as CEO of HP). Unfortunately, once the process begins, it cascades and cannot be stopped without both courage and capital. Fiorina was fired and HP stock shot up 7% the following day, but the damage was done and only determined and focused management and investment helped bring HP back to life.
Despite her faulty management of HP, Fiorina was given a golden parachute worth about $20 million. Realistically, if given the opportunity, throngs could have ruined the company for half that severance. All this is describing a situation where our nation is often beatifying CEOs that appear to have only their own interests at heart. It was during the six turbulent years of Fiorina’s leadership that HP circumvented laws preventing the sale of high tech equipment to Iran while simultaneously exporting jobs. Is this in our national interest? These sainted CEOs are highly compensated for failure, perhaps because they have become our new upper class. They have been immunized from their disasters and rewarded for merely being CEOs. They are the lords and ladies of industry. What is more ironic is that now Ms. Fiorina, who seems unable to get another job in private industry, is seeking to become a senator using her name recognition despite the fact that it is negative and that she rarely, if ever, voted as part of the political process.
It is this penultimate social development that brings us back to the banana split. This style of social promotion varies significantly from that practiced in many schools. It is more akin to the social structure of the banana republics where the upper class rules politically as well as economically and that class has no need to take risks. Success becomes an element of birth and not of performance. They invest less in creation of meaningful jobs, but take control of businesses that are essentially monopolies or oligarchies with minimum risk and minimum investment. Carlos Slim is the wealthiest man in Mexico (and the world) with opportunities to assist his own nation to generate meaningful work. He sought and obtained privatization of the telecommunications in Mexico and that acquisition alone raised his net worth by nearly $20 billion. But then he also invested $250 million in the New York Times. While there is nothing wrong legally or even ethically with that purchase, it does nothing for the thousands of Mexicans who seek work here in the US due to lack of opportunity in Mexico. The “final” development is the increasing restriction of “banana republic” economics that effectively throttles the flow of youth into higher education that is needed for social and economic growth by the US. Once that process is nurtured, then relatively few families control the politics and economics of a nation and social striation is solidified. At that end point, the top banana gets economic and political control and takes fewer risks. Education becomes an artifact of the upper class and stagnation of economics is a natural result. The major variable becomes the downward pressure on wages.
The US needs to invest in technology and education and to keep the channels for vertical social movement open for all her citizens. Merit must replace the current system of rewarding birthright in industry. These are economic imperatives more than social engineering. Otherwise the lords and ladies get the ice cream sundae including the banana and the rest get the peel. Watch your step. Vote to support higher education. It may save your job through energy and innovation instead of stagnation and competing your salary.
Peace,
George Giacoppe
17 August 2010
To make and export our goods
If amidst all the sobs
We export our jobs
Instead of our handiwork
For that’s where big troubles lurk
The top banana wears a crown
And the rest of us wear a frown
Immersed in our tears and bankrupt
To support the rich and inept
One of the telling differences between the mixed democracies of Mexico and Central America and our own democratic republic has been the relatively high upward mobility of our citizens. Much of the mobility came from education and the public school system of the United States as well as excellent colleges and universities that came within reach of millions of citizens after World War II. Perhaps the single most influential factor was the GI Bill that provided the technical education that propelled the United States through the technology explosion of the 50s and 60s. We invested locally and gained internationally.
The federal government was the underwriter of advanced education and made that education easily affordable and within the reach of nearly everyone socially and even geographically. The technological cauldron was pretty much just that. It was a heated vessel that combined investment, education and labor here in the United States. While other pots were warming, our cauldron boiled over until foreign investment caught up with our market economy. Some of their catching up was through central planning as in China, India and to a lesser extent Japan where social status was subordinated to the needs of each nation to become competitive in a world marketplace. After WW II, the US had a comparative advantage in that we did not suffer major damage or loss of the capital equipment and other resources to compete in the world market. Given extended optimism and insufficient investment, that advantage eventually became a disadvantage as countries that replaced their capital infrastructure did so with more modern and efficient systems and equipment.
The economic disadvantage was made worse by some decisions in the 50s and 60s regarding wages and benefits that sought to give workers medical benefits instead of wage increases. Large corporations discouraged government investment in tax supported medical care. Two decades later, the Reagan Administration changed Medicare policy from payment based on treatment to payment based on diagnosis. Partially due to this, and due to the expansion of diagnostic techniques and equipment, diagnosis became a growth industry within medicine. Myopic labor unions did not fully consider the impact of technology on shrinking job numbers and they did not call for systemic changes in either wages or healthcare. Most developed nations adopted government-controlled healthcare when the US decided (by default) to maintain healthcare provided by corporations, mostly manufacturing. This later became unmanageable when costs skyrocketed and corporations began to cut back on inflationary benefits. The “last straw” for this rickety structure was the massive sea change resulting from labor being competed on a world-wide basis where ever lower level economies provided labor at lower and lower costs. At this point in 2010, not even China can compete in areas such as textiles and has closed hundreds of textile mills. Pakistan, a more recent entry to textiles has already had to close 600 of its 1,000 textile mills. Some of our recently purchased furniture was made in Vietnam. Years ago, it was made in New England. Later, it was made in North Carolina (a right to work state) and then in Europe, but the inexorable beat for lower labor costs accelerated the migration of manufacturing centers to a dizzying pace. Now, unions represent less than 13% of all jobs and far less in manufacturing. We got what we asked for: highly mobile workers and competition for work. Unions are powerless to slow the process. The trend is clear and the only bright spots over these decades has been technology surges when new technology combined with investment capital provided a respite in the outflow of good jobs from the US and the importing of cheap labor from Mexico and Central America. Eventually, Silicon Valley became just another brief stop on the Pony Express to economic oblivion. Executives like Carly Fiorina became famous for exporting high tech jobs (about 32,000 on her watch as CEO of HP). Unfortunately, once the process begins, it cascades and cannot be stopped without both courage and capital. Fiorina was fired and HP stock shot up 7% the following day, but the damage was done and only determined and focused management and investment helped bring HP back to life.
Despite her faulty management of HP, Fiorina was given a golden parachute worth about $20 million. Realistically, if given the opportunity, throngs could have ruined the company for half that severance. All this is describing a situation where our nation is often beatifying CEOs that appear to have only their own interests at heart. It was during the six turbulent years of Fiorina’s leadership that HP circumvented laws preventing the sale of high tech equipment to Iran while simultaneously exporting jobs. Is this in our national interest? These sainted CEOs are highly compensated for failure, perhaps because they have become our new upper class. They have been immunized from their disasters and rewarded for merely being CEOs. They are the lords and ladies of industry. What is more ironic is that now Ms. Fiorina, who seems unable to get another job in private industry, is seeking to become a senator using her name recognition despite the fact that it is negative and that she rarely, if ever, voted as part of the political process.
It is this penultimate social development that brings us back to the banana split. This style of social promotion varies significantly from that practiced in many schools. It is more akin to the social structure of the banana republics where the upper class rules politically as well as economically and that class has no need to take risks. Success becomes an element of birth and not of performance. They invest less in creation of meaningful jobs, but take control of businesses that are essentially monopolies or oligarchies with minimum risk and minimum investment. Carlos Slim is the wealthiest man in Mexico (and the world) with opportunities to assist his own nation to generate meaningful work. He sought and obtained privatization of the telecommunications in Mexico and that acquisition alone raised his net worth by nearly $20 billion. But then he also invested $250 million in the New York Times. While there is nothing wrong legally or even ethically with that purchase, it does nothing for the thousands of Mexicans who seek work here in the US due to lack of opportunity in Mexico. The “final” development is the increasing restriction of “banana republic” economics that effectively throttles the flow of youth into higher education that is needed for social and economic growth by the US. Once that process is nurtured, then relatively few families control the politics and economics of a nation and social striation is solidified. At that end point, the top banana gets economic and political control and takes fewer risks. Education becomes an artifact of the upper class and stagnation of economics is a natural result. The major variable becomes the downward pressure on wages.
The US needs to invest in technology and education and to keep the channels for vertical social movement open for all her citizens. Merit must replace the current system of rewarding birthright in industry. These are economic imperatives more than social engineering. Otherwise the lords and ladies get the ice cream sundae including the banana and the rest get the peel. Watch your step. Vote to support higher education. It may save your job through energy and innovation instead of stagnation and competing your salary.
Peace,
George Giacoppe
17 August 2010
Is Democracy Possible?
No one needs to be reminded that we’ve all just been through some pretty depressing times. The economy nearly collapsed and remains anemic, BP pretty much trashed the Gulf of Mexico with its oil eruption, the health care “reformers” couldn’t even squeeze a public option into their pathetic bill, and the promised legislation to begin to bring greenhouse gases under control was just abandoned because of a lack of votes in the Senate. Barack Obama, hailed into office with so much fanfare and hope (at least from progressives) seems shell-shocked at best, and ineffectual at worst. Hounded on the right by Tea Party idiots who call him both a socialist and a Nazi, and criticized on the left by his own supporters as disinclined to fight for his beliefs, his poll numbers have plummeted so rapidly since the BP spill that some of the Democrats running for Congress have warned him to stay away from their districts. As to the congressional and gubernatorial races coming this Fall, most seem headed for disaster, with Republican yahoos threatening to take over one or both houses of Congress—a result that would doom any prospects for reasonable legislation and perhaps result in repealing the few decent items already passed (like health care).
To counteract their looming catastrophe, the Democrats are doing their usual dance—kowtowing to conservative ideas and slogans, and courting the banks and corporations which brought the country to its knees. With their need for campaign cash as primary, such so-called “representatives of the people” make ever clearer that they represent not you and me, but the biggest, dirtiest, most ruthless elements in the nation: Wall Street operators, corporate crooks, energy barons, health care frauds, and the military-industrial complex which profits from war and terror.
In short, though we all like to think that we the people control our government because we get to vote every two or four years, the sad truth is that our control is illusory, a con game meant to pacify the masses while the same old robber barons and insiders get to set the agenda, invent the terms of debate, and offer up the candidates (in recent years, bypassing the back rooms and seeking elective office themselves—i.e. Michael Bloomberg in New York, Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina running for governor and senator in California). And in the few instances where their control fails, they hire armies of lobbyists to hamstring any legislation that might threaten their profits, their incomes, their mandarin lifestyle.
The question this raises is the one in my title: Is Democracy Possible? Or more pertinently, is democracy doomed?
I’m not sure I can answer this question (surprises are always possible), but a recent documentary raises some fascinating alternatives. That’s why I’m suggesting here that you take a look at what average people in several other parts of the world are doing. The basic idea is simple: since those who represent/rule us are captives of the moneyed interests who brought the whole system to its knees, and since our so-called leaders could think of nothing to do but to rescue these same criminals and try to restore the very system of organized thievery that failed, the people themselves are obliged to find other ways. Other ways to survive. Other ways to come together as a society of human beings. Other ways to barter and bargain and aid each other without the mediation—and rapacious profit-taking—of the banks and corporations who care nothing for people or the planet they’re daily trashing but only for their precious bottom line. Other ways; because if the bigs can’t or won’t do it—and they’ve made crystal clear that they will fight tooth and nail not to—it makes no sense to wait until they sink the whole ship; the change has to come from the bottom up.
So here’s the url for the documentary. It comes from the web site, solari.com, of Katherine Austin Fitts, a longtime economist and U.S. government official who’s talking some of the most radical economics around. Take a look. I did, and though I’m not yet sure how or if it can apply to me or my community, just the fact that ordinary people are thinking and acting in these ways—opting out of the nefarious system that has us all bound and gagged, and implementing amazing alternatives—made my day. The website:
http://solari.com/blog/?p=8543
Lawrence DiStasi
To counteract their looming catastrophe, the Democrats are doing their usual dance—kowtowing to conservative ideas and slogans, and courting the banks and corporations which brought the country to its knees. With their need for campaign cash as primary, such so-called “representatives of the people” make ever clearer that they represent not you and me, but the biggest, dirtiest, most ruthless elements in the nation: Wall Street operators, corporate crooks, energy barons, health care frauds, and the military-industrial complex which profits from war and terror.
In short, though we all like to think that we the people control our government because we get to vote every two or four years, the sad truth is that our control is illusory, a con game meant to pacify the masses while the same old robber barons and insiders get to set the agenda, invent the terms of debate, and offer up the candidates (in recent years, bypassing the back rooms and seeking elective office themselves—i.e. Michael Bloomberg in New York, Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina running for governor and senator in California). And in the few instances where their control fails, they hire armies of lobbyists to hamstring any legislation that might threaten their profits, their incomes, their mandarin lifestyle.
The question this raises is the one in my title: Is Democracy Possible? Or more pertinently, is democracy doomed?
I’m not sure I can answer this question (surprises are always possible), but a recent documentary raises some fascinating alternatives. That’s why I’m suggesting here that you take a look at what average people in several other parts of the world are doing. The basic idea is simple: since those who represent/rule us are captives of the moneyed interests who brought the whole system to its knees, and since our so-called leaders could think of nothing to do but to rescue these same criminals and try to restore the very system of organized thievery that failed, the people themselves are obliged to find other ways. Other ways to survive. Other ways to come together as a society of human beings. Other ways to barter and bargain and aid each other without the mediation—and rapacious profit-taking—of the banks and corporations who care nothing for people or the planet they’re daily trashing but only for their precious bottom line. Other ways; because if the bigs can’t or won’t do it—and they’ve made crystal clear that they will fight tooth and nail not to—it makes no sense to wait until they sink the whole ship; the change has to come from the bottom up.
So here’s the url for the documentary. It comes from the web site, solari.com, of Katherine Austin Fitts, a longtime economist and U.S. government official who’s talking some of the most radical economics around. Take a look. I did, and though I’m not yet sure how or if it can apply to me or my community, just the fact that ordinary people are thinking and acting in these ways—opting out of the nefarious system that has us all bound and gagged, and implementing amazing alternatives—made my day. The website:
http://solari.com/blog/?p=8543
Lawrence DiStasi
Wednesday, August 04, 2010
Class Warfare
In case you were wondering where all the money went and why the economy is still in the doldrums, here are a couple of clues. “The 500 largest non-financial companies are sitting on $1.8 trillion in uninvested cash.” That’s a stat from Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek, quoted by Paul Buchheit in a 7/22 CommonDreams essay. The piece goes on to note that whereas the Republicans blame big government’s lavish spending on the poor, the truth is quite a different story: IRS figures report that “the richest 1% have TRIPLED their cut of America’s income pie” since 1980 (that’s when Reagan began cutting taxes for the rich, and blaming “welfare queens” and big government for everything). From taking 1 out of every 15 income dollars, the rich now take 3 of every 15 income dollars, or a TRILLION extra dollars a year. Put another way, instead of taking $7 of every $100 of America’s income, the rich now take $20 of every $100.
If this sounds like class war, it is, only it’s the rich doing the firing (literally).
Then there’s this, from Bob Herbert’s Sunday column. Top corporations (you know, the guys who have been declared to be “persons” by the Supreme Court, and thereby free to pour as much money—it’s free speech!—as they like into buying politicians) have been using the economic collapse to fire workers in droves. Those who are left are forced to take pay cuts, or else. Here are the stats:
“from the 4th quarter of 2007 to the 4th quarter of 2009, real aggregate output in the U.S., as measured by GDP, fell by about 2.5% but employers cut their payrolls by 6%.”
Worse, when the economy started to rebound (due to that evil government stimulation), the corporations somehow forgot to start hiring again. Herbert quotes economics Prof. Andrew Sum this way:
“At the end of the 4th quarter in 2008, you see corporate profits begin to really take off, and they grow by the time you get to the first quarter of 2010 by $572 billion. And over that same time period, wage and salary payments go DOWN by $122 billion.”
In other words, the corporations are “making out like bandits” and, as Fakaria noted, sitting on mountains of cash, saved from not rehiring workers. As Prof. Sum writes: this economic recovery “has seen the most lopsided gains in corporate profits relative to real wages and salaries in our history.”
Meantime, the Republicans blame Obama and the Democrats for a “jobless” recovery (demanding lower taxes to stimulate hiring; more “trickle-down”—that’s what we need!). And the electorate appears ready to do the same thing.
Isn’t our capitalist democracy a wonder?
Lawrence DiStasi
If this sounds like class war, it is, only it’s the rich doing the firing (literally).
Then there’s this, from Bob Herbert’s Sunday column. Top corporations (you know, the guys who have been declared to be “persons” by the Supreme Court, and thereby free to pour as much money—it’s free speech!—as they like into buying politicians) have been using the economic collapse to fire workers in droves. Those who are left are forced to take pay cuts, or else. Here are the stats:
“from the 4th quarter of 2007 to the 4th quarter of 2009, real aggregate output in the U.S., as measured by GDP, fell by about 2.5% but employers cut their payrolls by 6%.”
Worse, when the economy started to rebound (due to that evil government stimulation), the corporations somehow forgot to start hiring again. Herbert quotes economics Prof. Andrew Sum this way:
“At the end of the 4th quarter in 2008, you see corporate profits begin to really take off, and they grow by the time you get to the first quarter of 2010 by $572 billion. And over that same time period, wage and salary payments go DOWN by $122 billion.”
In other words, the corporations are “making out like bandits” and, as Fakaria noted, sitting on mountains of cash, saved from not rehiring workers. As Prof. Sum writes: this economic recovery “has seen the most lopsided gains in corporate profits relative to real wages and salaries in our history.”
Meantime, the Republicans blame Obama and the Democrats for a “jobless” recovery (demanding lower taxes to stimulate hiring; more “trickle-down”—that’s what we need!). And the electorate appears ready to do the same thing.
Isn’t our capitalist democracy a wonder?
Lawrence DiStasi
Monday, August 02, 2010
Oh What a Lovely War
As we all ponder the meaning and impact of the massive release of 70,000 or 90,000 secret documents on Wikileaks this week, I can’t help but focus on just a few elements: First, the activity of drone aircraft in seeking out and killing “targets”; and second, the mistakes inevitable in relying on massive airstrikes to simply kill whatever moves in an area selected by troops on the ground. Both of these expedients—the certain result of the impeccable military logic that annoints high-tech equipment as a god capable of removing casualties from war and making its soldiers invulnerable—combine to justify massive killing to prevent any threat to Americans, even American forces armed to the teeth and invading another country.
Before looking at a few samples of the wikileak trove, it’s important to recall a June 2, 2010 report by Agence France Presse conveying a UN special rapporteur’s report on the CIA’s use of drones. Philip Alston, the special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, said that the CIA’s droning amounted to “a license to kill without accountability.” Alston worried that the U.S.’s claimed license of targeting individuals anywhere in the world runs the risk of “doing grave damage to the rules designed to protect the right to life and prevent extrajudicial executions.” He especially complained about the fact that the criteria used by the CIA to justify its targeting of individuals was shrouded in official secrecy. In other words, not only were U.S. operatives assassinating individuals with impunity, but by offering no justification for their selections, they were judge, jury and executioner all in one: “In a situation in which there is no disclosure of who has been killed, for what reason, and whether innocent civilians have died, the legal principle of international accountability is, by definition, comprehensively violated.” To add that the human agents in the drone killings were youthful pilots sitting in dark rooms in faraway Nevada, tracking shadows on a computer screen, only makes the executions more macabre.
These drones, though, are the latest and apparently the most beloved of the military’s death toys. No human need enter a danger zone. The drones fly above battlefields or villages or wherever they choose, operated from afar, carrying lethal weapons that are precisely fired. They never complain, do not get tired (drones can stay aloft for 24 hours without a break), or bored, or distracted. They are the ultimate killing machine. Except, that is, when they get lost. This is what happened to one of the Air Force’s prized drones, a Reaper (don’t you just love the names the military comes up with? surely not to evoke thoughts of McCormick’s wheat reaper, but rather the euphemism for death as “the grim reaper”—though cutting down humans as the reaper cuts wheat is no doubt what animated the metaphor in the first place). As the NY Times explained the Wikileaks report:
“Equipped with advanced radar and sophisticated cameras, as well as Hellfire missiles and 500-pound bombs, the Reaper had lost its satellite link to its pilot [the one in Nevada]. No matter how he tried, the pilot couldn’t regain control [of his toy, only with a 66-foot wingspan], so his superiors ordered an F-15E fighter jet to shoot down the $13 million aircraft before it soared unguided into neighboring Tajikistan.” (NY Times, 7.25.10)
This grim comedy continued when the jet struck the drone with a Sidewinder missile, destroying the drone’s engine, just as the remote pilot regained satellite control. But it was too late. The comedy ended when the pilot steered it “into a remote mountainside for a final fiery landing.”
Imagine. Millions in equipment crashed into a mountain—because far worse than losing a measly $13 million would have been a landing that resulted in the Taliban recovering our secrets, our technology, our technological advantage.
Imagine, too, the terror of being on the ground pursued by one of these things. Death from the sky. No protestation of innocence. No begging for mercy. No warning even. Innocent or guilty, the Reaper seeks only to complete the death sentence ordered from half a world away. By some 20-something dweeb in a bunker in Nevada.
Or by some dweebs on the ground, those Special Forces killers until recently commanded by their killer-in-chief, General McChrystal. Another Wikileaks document, from June 17, 2007, details one of their missions gone awry. Of course, they were trying, via five rockets, to dispatch Abu Laith al-Libi, reportedly a top commander for Al Quaeda, said to be hiding in the targeted compound in Paktika province. But when helicopters dropped commandos from Task Force 373 to finish the job, they found no al-Libi. Instead, they found a “group of men suspected of being militants and their children. Seven of the children had been killed by the rocket attack.” When the men tried to flee, six of them were also killed by encircling helicopters. The rest were taken prisoner. But the good Americans did try to save a child still alive in the rubble, and performed CPR.
Unaccountably, news of the attack resulted in “a wave of anger over the region.” But not to worry, with a list of “talking points” drawn up by the Americans, the local governor explained the mistake: the Americans had been after an Al Quaeda leader and no one told them women and children would be in the compound. Indeed, the attack was really their own fault, caused by the “presence of hoodlums,” he said, and “could have been prevented had the people exposed the presence of insurgents in the area.”
Finally, a Sept. 3, 2009 report, from Kunduz province, described yet another mistaken airstrike, this time attributable to a slight mishap on the part of JATC, the Joint Terminal Attack Controller team responsible for ground communications and guidance for pilots and airstrikes. Responding to a police report saying that “2X FUEL TRUCKS WERE STOLEN BY UNK [unknown] NUMBER OF INS [insurgents]” who planned to cross the Kunduz River with their booty, the JTAC claimed to have seen not only the trucks, but “UP TO 70 INS” at “THE FORD ON THE RIVER.” [As to how JTAC “saw” this, the Times account speculates that the JTAC may have received live feed to their computer from infrared video cameras in some aircraft]. Then a German commander got involved, assured everyone that “NO CIVILIANS WERE IN THE VICINITY” and “AUTHORIZED AN AIRSTIKE.” An F-15 fighter plane then dropped two 500-pound guided bombs. Naturally, those killed were “56x INS KIA [insurgents killed in action],” 14 more fled northeast, and the two trucks were also destroyed. A good night’s work.
Only that the initial report was wrong. In fact, the trucks, apparently abandoned, were surrounded by civilians trying to remove fuel. This was learned only when the military reported that “International Media reported that US airstrikes had killed 60 civiians in Kunduz.” Those dastardly Taliban, having stolen the truck, had invited civilians in the area to help themselves with fuel. Seen from above, civilians were clearly INS [insurgents].
You get the picture. War is not lovely. In the best of conditions, it is messy, gruesome, murderous to those who have the misfortune of being in its vicinity. In this case, it is Afghan villagers who most often feed the grisly appetite of the war machine. And in Afghanistan, increasingly, the machines are in control. Trouble is, machines have no sense. They are inhuman by definition. When that inhumanity, as it inevitably must, reaches back and infects the humans ostensibly in control, they too become mechanical. That is what, overall, one discerns from reading the Wikileaks material. The United States, in attempting to maintain its tottering global empire, has become a killing machine. Far from protecting us as its champions claim, that transformation imperils us all.
Lawrence DiStasi
NB: For those of you too young to recall, the title of this piece comes from a 1963 musical composed by Joan Littlewood; it premiered on Broadway in 1964, and though it’s ostensibly about WWI, it applies to other wars rather nicely.
Before looking at a few samples of the wikileak trove, it’s important to recall a June 2, 2010 report by Agence France Presse conveying a UN special rapporteur’s report on the CIA’s use of drones. Philip Alston, the special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, said that the CIA’s droning amounted to “a license to kill without accountability.” Alston worried that the U.S.’s claimed license of targeting individuals anywhere in the world runs the risk of “doing grave damage to the rules designed to protect the right to life and prevent extrajudicial executions.” He especially complained about the fact that the criteria used by the CIA to justify its targeting of individuals was shrouded in official secrecy. In other words, not only were U.S. operatives assassinating individuals with impunity, but by offering no justification for their selections, they were judge, jury and executioner all in one: “In a situation in which there is no disclosure of who has been killed, for what reason, and whether innocent civilians have died, the legal principle of international accountability is, by definition, comprehensively violated.” To add that the human agents in the drone killings were youthful pilots sitting in dark rooms in faraway Nevada, tracking shadows on a computer screen, only makes the executions more macabre.
These drones, though, are the latest and apparently the most beloved of the military’s death toys. No human need enter a danger zone. The drones fly above battlefields or villages or wherever they choose, operated from afar, carrying lethal weapons that are precisely fired. They never complain, do not get tired (drones can stay aloft for 24 hours without a break), or bored, or distracted. They are the ultimate killing machine. Except, that is, when they get lost. This is what happened to one of the Air Force’s prized drones, a Reaper (don’t you just love the names the military comes up with? surely not to evoke thoughts of McCormick’s wheat reaper, but rather the euphemism for death as “the grim reaper”—though cutting down humans as the reaper cuts wheat is no doubt what animated the metaphor in the first place). As the NY Times explained the Wikileaks report:
“Equipped with advanced radar and sophisticated cameras, as well as Hellfire missiles and 500-pound bombs, the Reaper had lost its satellite link to its pilot [the one in Nevada]. No matter how he tried, the pilot couldn’t regain control [of his toy, only with a 66-foot wingspan], so his superiors ordered an F-15E fighter jet to shoot down the $13 million aircraft before it soared unguided into neighboring Tajikistan.” (NY Times, 7.25.10)
This grim comedy continued when the jet struck the drone with a Sidewinder missile, destroying the drone’s engine, just as the remote pilot regained satellite control. But it was too late. The comedy ended when the pilot steered it “into a remote mountainside for a final fiery landing.”
Imagine. Millions in equipment crashed into a mountain—because far worse than losing a measly $13 million would have been a landing that resulted in the Taliban recovering our secrets, our technology, our technological advantage.
Imagine, too, the terror of being on the ground pursued by one of these things. Death from the sky. No protestation of innocence. No begging for mercy. No warning even. Innocent or guilty, the Reaper seeks only to complete the death sentence ordered from half a world away. By some 20-something dweeb in a bunker in Nevada.
Or by some dweebs on the ground, those Special Forces killers until recently commanded by their killer-in-chief, General McChrystal. Another Wikileaks document, from June 17, 2007, details one of their missions gone awry. Of course, they were trying, via five rockets, to dispatch Abu Laith al-Libi, reportedly a top commander for Al Quaeda, said to be hiding in the targeted compound in Paktika province. But when helicopters dropped commandos from Task Force 373 to finish the job, they found no al-Libi. Instead, they found a “group of men suspected of being militants and their children. Seven of the children had been killed by the rocket attack.” When the men tried to flee, six of them were also killed by encircling helicopters. The rest were taken prisoner. But the good Americans did try to save a child still alive in the rubble, and performed CPR.
Unaccountably, news of the attack resulted in “a wave of anger over the region.” But not to worry, with a list of “talking points” drawn up by the Americans, the local governor explained the mistake: the Americans had been after an Al Quaeda leader and no one told them women and children would be in the compound. Indeed, the attack was really their own fault, caused by the “presence of hoodlums,” he said, and “could have been prevented had the people exposed the presence of insurgents in the area.”
Finally, a Sept. 3, 2009 report, from Kunduz province, described yet another mistaken airstrike, this time attributable to a slight mishap on the part of JATC, the Joint Terminal Attack Controller team responsible for ground communications and guidance for pilots and airstrikes. Responding to a police report saying that “2X FUEL TRUCKS WERE STOLEN BY UNK [unknown] NUMBER OF INS [insurgents]” who planned to cross the Kunduz River with their booty, the JTAC claimed to have seen not only the trucks, but “UP TO 70 INS” at “THE FORD ON THE RIVER.” [As to how JTAC “saw” this, the Times account speculates that the JTAC may have received live feed to their computer from infrared video cameras in some aircraft]. Then a German commander got involved, assured everyone that “NO CIVILIANS WERE IN THE VICINITY” and “AUTHORIZED AN AIRSTIKE.” An F-15 fighter plane then dropped two 500-pound guided bombs. Naturally, those killed were “56x INS KIA [insurgents killed in action],” 14 more fled northeast, and the two trucks were also destroyed. A good night’s work.
Only that the initial report was wrong. In fact, the trucks, apparently abandoned, were surrounded by civilians trying to remove fuel. This was learned only when the military reported that “International Media reported that US airstrikes had killed 60 civiians in Kunduz.” Those dastardly Taliban, having stolen the truck, had invited civilians in the area to help themselves with fuel. Seen from above, civilians were clearly INS [insurgents].
You get the picture. War is not lovely. In the best of conditions, it is messy, gruesome, murderous to those who have the misfortune of being in its vicinity. In this case, it is Afghan villagers who most often feed the grisly appetite of the war machine. And in Afghanistan, increasingly, the machines are in control. Trouble is, machines have no sense. They are inhuman by definition. When that inhumanity, as it inevitably must, reaches back and infects the humans ostensibly in control, they too become mechanical. That is what, overall, one discerns from reading the Wikileaks material. The United States, in attempting to maintain its tottering global empire, has become a killing machine. Far from protecting us as its champions claim, that transformation imperils us all.
Lawrence DiStasi
NB: For those of you too young to recall, the title of this piece comes from a 1963 musical composed by Joan Littlewood; it premiered on Broadway in 1964, and though it’s ostensibly about WWI, it applies to other wars rather nicely.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Fair Game: the Book
And once upon a time
When treason was a crime
Before the Imperial President
Established bold precedent
Undercover operators flourished
And rarely were punished
Unless they were doubles
And thus earned their troubles
I normally enjoy biographies because they tend to illustrate how people live and solve or fail to solve their problems in life. Fair Game, by Valerie Plame Wilson is an unusual departure from that sort of biography. It is historic in outlook, but the problem solving remains unfinished.
The book is heavily redacted. In a few cases, entire pages are blacked out leaving the reader to guess what the topic was. What is not left to the reader to imagine is essentially the ordinary description of how Ms. Plame prepared herself for her career as a spy for these United States. It could just as easily been the description of hundreds of people I know preparing for a career in the military with training that spanned similar areas from map reading to jumping out of airplanes. It included descriptions of how Ms. Plame felt about all this preparation, and her descriptions are skilled and revealing of her strengths, but the description falls short of conveying an understanding of the CIA from the view of an undercover operative with increasing responsibility as her twenty years or so of service played out. A career in the Espionage is not the same as a career in Botany or Accounting, but with the critical elements redacted, it might just as well have been a career in Forest Service.
Thankfully, Ms. Plame was able to include descriptions from others within the covers. They were not redacted and they serve to fill in the blanks albeit without the direct identification of Valerie Plame Wilson. Sources including Valerie’s mom are helpful in getting some of the personal history supported and the description of other undercover agents who were not so politically handled by the agency and the US Government offers corroboration of the mechanics of espionage that, I assume, were redacted. As sometimes happens, the government was highly sensitive to criticism of how it handled the politicization of Ms. Plame and it appears to have classified activities that were embarrassing to the government and the GW Bush administration rather than because these facts would have uncovered sources and techniques or that they were threatening the security interests of the United States. If you recall the disgusting photos of Abu Ghraib were classified as SECRET, but nothing in those photos created an actual or potential threat to our security. They were especially painful for an administration that claimed to have high moral standards and authority. Similarly with Ms. Plame, the extremes to which the Vice President and his staff went to discredit her service and even cause her outing from deep cover demonstrate that embarrassment can be as powerful as the worst security situation. Politicians abhor embarrassment and, when they can control the classification process, are sorely tempted to use the process to shield themselves from embarrassment. Valerie Plame Wilson calls this self-protection by Cheney and associates a betrayal and that word is strongly personal. It may be that and more, but the effectiveness of the classification system worked well politically because it has been defended in the courts and Valerie Plame was unable to continue her career as an undercover agent.
As a relatively minor example of over-classification, Valerie Plame’s retirement annuity computations were classified because they “might have provided time-frames” of her activity. Despite the humor that offers, the initial position of the CIA was to allow publishing and yet it re-classified the information after being published by the CIA and sent to Ms. Plame. It was also included in the Congressional Record. The actual outing by powerful politicians destroyed an intelligence network dedicated to discovering weapons of mass destruction. In most circumstances, that would be regarded as treason, and for good reason. The lives of undercover agents and their contacts in several nations would be put at risk immediately with a high probability of anybody that had worked with Ms. Plame being discovered and “neutralized.” On the technical side, perhaps the classification authority of the Vice President through the President permitted the outing since he might have declared the information as unclassified despite the obvious threat to our national interests.
It is a matter of record that Vice President Cheney felt that Ambassador Wilson had undercut his position that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction prior to the invasion directed by President Bush. The claim that Iraq had sought yellowcake uranium was quickly disproved (within hours) as a forgery of a document purportedly of Italian origin, but Cheney may have felt that he needed that fiction to support the war and was upset by the loss of the fig leaf and his own vocal support of a forgery. The book provides clear support to destroy the myth that Valerie Plame recommended or sent her husband to Niger. In addition to Ms. Plame’s testimony, the CIA manager who coordinated the visit by Wilson explains how the decision was made in the absence of Plame. It is also ludicrous to believe that an undercover agent could have the power to send anybody anywhere not in her direct chain of command.
The Afterword (Laura Rozen) of Fair Game contains all the information that the reader needs to arrive at the conclusion that our nation lost a dedicated operative and her network through the actions of a proud, political and venal vice president. The Libby trial is covered, as are some of the numerous public gaffes of the CIA and the unusual personal interest of the Vice President in the entire intelligence process and his frequent trips to the CIA. There is an irony in that the CIA allowed others to write what it forbid Valerie Plame to write, but that is only part of the mystery of how we came to a position of extreme partisanship on what could have been explained as a minor misstatement by Cheney. Instead, members of Congress stood up and defended the indefensible and even generated myths like the “assignment” of Joe Wilson by his wife or that Ms. Plame was not an undercover agent. If you have doubts, then the book will satisfy your mind with documented and corroborated reports by people in the know. If you already have your mind made up, expand it with a few facts and a refreshing outlook.
Fair Game, Valerie Wilson, Simon & Schuster, 2007 with Afterword by Laura Rozen
Peace,
George Giacoppe
11 July 2010
When treason was a crime
Before the Imperial President
Established bold precedent
Undercover operators flourished
And rarely were punished
Unless they were doubles
And thus earned their troubles
I normally enjoy biographies because they tend to illustrate how people live and solve or fail to solve their problems in life. Fair Game, by Valerie Plame Wilson is an unusual departure from that sort of biography. It is historic in outlook, but the problem solving remains unfinished.
The book is heavily redacted. In a few cases, entire pages are blacked out leaving the reader to guess what the topic was. What is not left to the reader to imagine is essentially the ordinary description of how Ms. Plame prepared herself for her career as a spy for these United States. It could just as easily been the description of hundreds of people I know preparing for a career in the military with training that spanned similar areas from map reading to jumping out of airplanes. It included descriptions of how Ms. Plame felt about all this preparation, and her descriptions are skilled and revealing of her strengths, but the description falls short of conveying an understanding of the CIA from the view of an undercover operative with increasing responsibility as her twenty years or so of service played out. A career in the Espionage is not the same as a career in Botany or Accounting, but with the critical elements redacted, it might just as well have been a career in Forest Service.
Thankfully, Ms. Plame was able to include descriptions from others within the covers. They were not redacted and they serve to fill in the blanks albeit without the direct identification of Valerie Plame Wilson. Sources including Valerie’s mom are helpful in getting some of the personal history supported and the description of other undercover agents who were not so politically handled by the agency and the US Government offers corroboration of the mechanics of espionage that, I assume, were redacted. As sometimes happens, the government was highly sensitive to criticism of how it handled the politicization of Ms. Plame and it appears to have classified activities that were embarrassing to the government and the GW Bush administration rather than because these facts would have uncovered sources and techniques or that they were threatening the security interests of the United States. If you recall the disgusting photos of Abu Ghraib were classified as SECRET, but nothing in those photos created an actual or potential threat to our security. They were especially painful for an administration that claimed to have high moral standards and authority. Similarly with Ms. Plame, the extremes to which the Vice President and his staff went to discredit her service and even cause her outing from deep cover demonstrate that embarrassment can be as powerful as the worst security situation. Politicians abhor embarrassment and, when they can control the classification process, are sorely tempted to use the process to shield themselves from embarrassment. Valerie Plame Wilson calls this self-protection by Cheney and associates a betrayal and that word is strongly personal. It may be that and more, but the effectiveness of the classification system worked well politically because it has been defended in the courts and Valerie Plame was unable to continue her career as an undercover agent.
As a relatively minor example of over-classification, Valerie Plame’s retirement annuity computations were classified because they “might have provided time-frames” of her activity. Despite the humor that offers, the initial position of the CIA was to allow publishing and yet it re-classified the information after being published by the CIA and sent to Ms. Plame. It was also included in the Congressional Record. The actual outing by powerful politicians destroyed an intelligence network dedicated to discovering weapons of mass destruction. In most circumstances, that would be regarded as treason, and for good reason. The lives of undercover agents and their contacts in several nations would be put at risk immediately with a high probability of anybody that had worked with Ms. Plame being discovered and “neutralized.” On the technical side, perhaps the classification authority of the Vice President through the President permitted the outing since he might have declared the information as unclassified despite the obvious threat to our national interests.
It is a matter of record that Vice President Cheney felt that Ambassador Wilson had undercut his position that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction prior to the invasion directed by President Bush. The claim that Iraq had sought yellowcake uranium was quickly disproved (within hours) as a forgery of a document purportedly of Italian origin, but Cheney may have felt that he needed that fiction to support the war and was upset by the loss of the fig leaf and his own vocal support of a forgery. The book provides clear support to destroy the myth that Valerie Plame recommended or sent her husband to Niger. In addition to Ms. Plame’s testimony, the CIA manager who coordinated the visit by Wilson explains how the decision was made in the absence of Plame. It is also ludicrous to believe that an undercover agent could have the power to send anybody anywhere not in her direct chain of command.
The Afterword (Laura Rozen) of Fair Game contains all the information that the reader needs to arrive at the conclusion that our nation lost a dedicated operative and her network through the actions of a proud, political and venal vice president. The Libby trial is covered, as are some of the numerous public gaffes of the CIA and the unusual personal interest of the Vice President in the entire intelligence process and his frequent trips to the CIA. There is an irony in that the CIA allowed others to write what it forbid Valerie Plame to write, but that is only part of the mystery of how we came to a position of extreme partisanship on what could have been explained as a minor misstatement by Cheney. Instead, members of Congress stood up and defended the indefensible and even generated myths like the “assignment” of Joe Wilson by his wife or that Ms. Plame was not an undercover agent. If you have doubts, then the book will satisfy your mind with documented and corroborated reports by people in the know. If you already have your mind made up, expand it with a few facts and a refreshing outlook.
Fair Game, Valerie Wilson, Simon & Schuster, 2007 with Afterword by Laura Rozen
Peace,
George Giacoppe
11 July 2010
Saturday, July 10, 2010
“To Let the Punishment Fit the Crime”
The line is from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado (My Object all sublime/ I shall achieve in time/ To let the punishment fit the crime…), and as always in G&S, it is said with a bit of irony, if not sarcasm. The same is true here. Johannes Mehserle, the white BART police officer who shot and killed African-American Oscar Grant on New Year’s morning in 2009, has been convicted of “involuntary manslaughter.” And so, though Oscar Grant’s murder was caught on several video cameras, and though the video showed that the unarmed Grant was not only lying face down when shot, but also had his hands bound behind his back, the jury concluded that Mehserle’s act was unintentional (his lawyers insisting, as did he, that he thought he was using his taser), and therefore deserved only the lesser conviction of involuntary or negligent manslaughter, not murder. The conviction carries a sentence of 2 to 4 years—though the judge could add up to 10 more years for the added offense of using a gun. He could also sentence Mehserle to probation—no additional jail time at all.
Now here, without going further into the rights or wrongs of the jury’s decision (no Blacks were seated on that jury; the judge ruled out first-degree murder), it is important to understand this verdict in context. A black man is shot to death by a white man who has pledged to protect the public. The black man is bound and face down on the ground. The murderer’s culpability is undisputed. And yet, the killer is looking forward to a sentence that pales in comparison not simply to sentences in other murders, but in comparison to millions of convictions of black men in America for non-violent crimes like drug possession. To get some sense of the outrage this inspires in the African American community, it is necessary to read The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander (New Press: 2010). In fact, reading the New Jim Crow should outrage any American, even absent the Mehserle verdict. But in the context of this flagrant example of the differential “justice” in our system, well, outrage simply doesn’t cover it.
Here is some of what Michelle Alexander tells us. First, the system of mass incarceration of African Americans—a system put in place mostly as a result of the War on Drugs initiated by the Reagan Administration in 1980 and more specifically in its 1986 and 1988 legislation—is no less than a modern system for controlling black (and brown) men. It is the New Jim Crow—the old one having been ended, finally, by the 60’s Civil Rights movement and the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. So, of the approximately 2.3 million people in American prisons and jails, about ½ million are there for a drug offense (compare today’s 500,000 to 41,000 drug-related felons in 1980). Further, of the more than 31 million!!! people arrested for drug offenses since this “war” began, most are NOT charged with dealing drugs; in 2005, for example, “4 out of 5 drug arrests were for possession, and only 1 out of 5 for sales.” So what, you may say, that’s justice: use drugs and go to jail. But it’s not that simple. As Alexander writes,
…in the drug war, the enemy is racially defined.…Human Rights Watch reported in 2000 that, in seven states, African Americans constitute 80 to 90% of all drug offenders sent to prison. In at least 15 states, blacks are admitted to prison on drug charges at a rate from 20 to 57 times greater than that of white men….Although the majority of illegal drug users and dealers nationwide are white, three-fourths (¾) of all people imprisoned for drug offenses have been black or Latino.
What’s more, the penalties for “crack” cocaine (used primarily by blacks), as opposed to powder cocaine (used primarily by whites) are biased in the extreme: 500 grams of powder gets a 5-year mandatory sentence; 5 grams of crack gets a 10-year mandatory—a 100 to 1 ratio (500 grams to 5 grams). Judge Clyde Cahill of the Federal District Court of Missouri, himself an African-American, ruled in the case of Edward Clary, that this ratio was discriminatory, but his ruling was struck down by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. The result was that Clary, the 18-year old first-time violator in the case, was given and served 4 years by Judge Cahill, but upon the reversal by the Circuit Court, was forced back to jail to serve out his ten-year mandatory sentence.
The story of how this “war” got started, including the accompanying penalties for “felons” that renders them literally second-class citizens (5.1 million now on probation or parole), makes for fascinating reading, and I would recommend Alexander’s book to anyone who wants reality instead of TV propaganda. Here, I want to focus on the inequities in sentencing because that is what’s behind the rage hurled at the Mehserle verdict. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, for starters, initiated those mandatory minimum sentences for “distribution of cocaine, including far more severe punishment for crack—associated with blacks—than powder cocaine, associated with whites.” The 1988 Anti-Drug Abuse Act upped the ante even more, including the death penalty for serious drug-related offenses and a new 5-year mandatory minimum for “simple possession of cocaine base—with no evidence of intent to sell.” These mandatory sentences for possession were new, writes Alexander: up till that time, one year in prison was the maximum for possessing any amount of any drug.
The effects were immediate. And were immediately carved in stone by the Supreme Court. In 1982, “the Supreme Court upheld 40 years of imprisonment for possession and an attempt to sell 9 ounces of marijuana.” Somewhat later, the same Supreme Court in Hamelin v. Michigan upheld a life sentence for “a defendant with no prior convictions who attempted to sell 672 grams (approx. 23 ounces) of crack cocaine.” Though these two cases involved drug sellers, most of those hit with mandatory minimums, according to Alexander, are not the “drug kingpins” we are led to imagine. Weldon Angelos, for example, a 24-year-old record producer who possessed a weapon he did not use or threaten to use, was “sentenced to life for 3 marijuana sales, due to the mandatory minimum of 55 years under the law.” The judge noted even as he sentenced him that it was “unjust, cruel, and even irrational.” Another judge, William Schwarzer, “choked with tears” over the sentence he had to impose on Richard Anderson; Anderson, a longshoreman and first-time offender, got “10 years in prison without parole” not for selling or even possessing drugs, but for “what appeared to be a minor mistake in judgment in having given a ride to a drug dealer” who got caught.
That’s 10 years in prison for giving a dealer a ride! Johannes Mehserle is looking at 2 to 4 years for killing an unarmed black man. Punishment to fit the crime?
And yet, the Supreme Court, our court of last resort, the great arbiter of fairness, upholds this kind of savagery, this out-and-out racism. Consider, as Michelle Alexander forces us to consider: Professor David Baldus, of the University of Iowa Law School, (in the interest of full disclosure, Baldus was a fraternity brother of mine) led a study comparing sentencing in murder trials in Georgia. The study discovered that:
…defendants charged with killing white victims received the death penalty 11 times more often than defendants charged with killing black victims. Georgia prosecutors seemed largely to blame for the disparity; they sought the death penalty in 70% of cases involving black defendants and white victims, but only 19% of cases involving white defendants and black victims…and that defendants charged with killing white victims were 4.3 times more likely to receive a death sentence than defendants charged with killing blacks. (p. 107)
A trial appeal, by Warren McCleskey in Georgia, used the Baldus study to claim racial bias in violation of the 14th Amendment to try to reverse the death penalty conviction. The case, McCleskey v. Kemp, reached the Supreme Court in 1987. But the Supreme Court “ruled that racial bias in sentencing, even if shown through credible statistical evidence, could not be challenged under the 14th Amendment” unless McCleskey could prove that the prosecutor in his case “had sought the death penalty because of race, or that the jury had imposed it for racial reasons.” That is, the Court said that clear statistical evidence, as provided by the Baldus study, did not prove unequal treatment, and thus did not violate the 14th Amendment. This meant that the prosecutor or the jury would have to openly admit they were racially biased—an impossibility not only because few would admit such a thing, but also because litigants are barred from even attempting to discover the prosecution’s motives. In short, statistical proof of racial bias was allowed and is allowed to stand under the court’s ruling.
Add to this the consistent rulings of the Supreme Court in allowing racial profiling by police officers by giving them “discretion” in deciding whom to stop and search without a warrant—using “pretext stops” where a minor traffic violation becomes a pretext to search for drugs (where the driver “looks” like a dealer); or “consent,” where police who get a driver’s consent (most people fear refusing) can search for any reason or no reason at all—and you get rampant violations of 4th Amendment protections, and American jails filled to capacity with black and brown drug violators. In the Ohio v. Robinette case, for example, where police stopped a black driver for speeding, turned on a video camera, and asked whether he was carrying drugs and would consent to a search, the driver consented. The police thereupon found a small amount of marijuana and a single meth pill. In reviewing the case, the Ohio Supreme Court struck down the conviction, saying police must advise motorists of their right to refuse before asking them for consent to search their vehicles. At the Supreme Court, however, this “advise” requirement was struck down as “unrealistic.” No one needed to be informed of the right to refuse before being solicited for consent to a search. And in Atwater v. City of Lago Vista, the Supreme Court went even further, ruling that even when a motorist does refuse to consent to a search, the police can arrest him anyway.
What results is what pertains in Illinois, where an amazing 90% of those imprisoned for drug offenses are African-American; where “the total population of black males in Chicago with a felony record (including both current and ex-felons) is equivalent to 55% of the black adult male population and an astonishing 80% of the adult black male workforce in the Chicago area.” Nor are the effects limited to the streets. Politically, African Americans are being disenfranchised at a staggering rate, with 1 in 7 black men nationally having lost the right to vote as ex-felons. Socially, moreover, black people, especially black men, literally define criminality, and crime is defined as a black problem. However, since we live in a putatively “colorblind” society, (there are, after all, that small percentage of whites imprisoned for drugs; there is, after all, that African-American President) this entire problem can be suppressed, ignored and denied. ‘It’s not black people we target; it’s criminals.’
Only when we get to see, graphically, how white murderers like Johannes Mehserle are treated do we begin to notice that something is rotten. Only when we are exposed, chapter and verse, to the way the system is constructed to exploit every avenue for targeting black and brown men, and how that targeting is continually sanctioned by the highest court in the land, do we begin to understand how obscene it all is—how obscene for TV commentators (like those commenting on the “riot” after the Mehserle verdict) to wring their hands about a few windows broken while they ignore the broken lives, the broken families, the broken cities, the deliberately broken system that allows and encourages racism to maintain its death grip on millions, so the rest of us can prate on about democracy, about our revered system of “equal justice for all.”
Lawrence DiStasi
Now here, without going further into the rights or wrongs of the jury’s decision (no Blacks were seated on that jury; the judge ruled out first-degree murder), it is important to understand this verdict in context. A black man is shot to death by a white man who has pledged to protect the public. The black man is bound and face down on the ground. The murderer’s culpability is undisputed. And yet, the killer is looking forward to a sentence that pales in comparison not simply to sentences in other murders, but in comparison to millions of convictions of black men in America for non-violent crimes like drug possession. To get some sense of the outrage this inspires in the African American community, it is necessary to read The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander (New Press: 2010). In fact, reading the New Jim Crow should outrage any American, even absent the Mehserle verdict. But in the context of this flagrant example of the differential “justice” in our system, well, outrage simply doesn’t cover it.
Here is some of what Michelle Alexander tells us. First, the system of mass incarceration of African Americans—a system put in place mostly as a result of the War on Drugs initiated by the Reagan Administration in 1980 and more specifically in its 1986 and 1988 legislation—is no less than a modern system for controlling black (and brown) men. It is the New Jim Crow—the old one having been ended, finally, by the 60’s Civil Rights movement and the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. So, of the approximately 2.3 million people in American prisons and jails, about ½ million are there for a drug offense (compare today’s 500,000 to 41,000 drug-related felons in 1980). Further, of the more than 31 million!!! people arrested for drug offenses since this “war” began, most are NOT charged with dealing drugs; in 2005, for example, “4 out of 5 drug arrests were for possession, and only 1 out of 5 for sales.” So what, you may say, that’s justice: use drugs and go to jail. But it’s not that simple. As Alexander writes,
…in the drug war, the enemy is racially defined.…Human Rights Watch reported in 2000 that, in seven states, African Americans constitute 80 to 90% of all drug offenders sent to prison. In at least 15 states, blacks are admitted to prison on drug charges at a rate from 20 to 57 times greater than that of white men….Although the majority of illegal drug users and dealers nationwide are white, three-fourths (¾) of all people imprisoned for drug offenses have been black or Latino.
What’s more, the penalties for “crack” cocaine (used primarily by blacks), as opposed to powder cocaine (used primarily by whites) are biased in the extreme: 500 grams of powder gets a 5-year mandatory sentence; 5 grams of crack gets a 10-year mandatory—a 100 to 1 ratio (500 grams to 5 grams). Judge Clyde Cahill of the Federal District Court of Missouri, himself an African-American, ruled in the case of Edward Clary, that this ratio was discriminatory, but his ruling was struck down by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. The result was that Clary, the 18-year old first-time violator in the case, was given and served 4 years by Judge Cahill, but upon the reversal by the Circuit Court, was forced back to jail to serve out his ten-year mandatory sentence.
The story of how this “war” got started, including the accompanying penalties for “felons” that renders them literally second-class citizens (5.1 million now on probation or parole), makes for fascinating reading, and I would recommend Alexander’s book to anyone who wants reality instead of TV propaganda. Here, I want to focus on the inequities in sentencing because that is what’s behind the rage hurled at the Mehserle verdict. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, for starters, initiated those mandatory minimum sentences for “distribution of cocaine, including far more severe punishment for crack—associated with blacks—than powder cocaine, associated with whites.” The 1988 Anti-Drug Abuse Act upped the ante even more, including the death penalty for serious drug-related offenses and a new 5-year mandatory minimum for “simple possession of cocaine base—with no evidence of intent to sell.” These mandatory sentences for possession were new, writes Alexander: up till that time, one year in prison was the maximum for possessing any amount of any drug.
The effects were immediate. And were immediately carved in stone by the Supreme Court. In 1982, “the Supreme Court upheld 40 years of imprisonment for possession and an attempt to sell 9 ounces of marijuana.” Somewhat later, the same Supreme Court in Hamelin v. Michigan upheld a life sentence for “a defendant with no prior convictions who attempted to sell 672 grams (approx. 23 ounces) of crack cocaine.” Though these two cases involved drug sellers, most of those hit with mandatory minimums, according to Alexander, are not the “drug kingpins” we are led to imagine. Weldon Angelos, for example, a 24-year-old record producer who possessed a weapon he did not use or threaten to use, was “sentenced to life for 3 marijuana sales, due to the mandatory minimum of 55 years under the law.” The judge noted even as he sentenced him that it was “unjust, cruel, and even irrational.” Another judge, William Schwarzer, “choked with tears” over the sentence he had to impose on Richard Anderson; Anderson, a longshoreman and first-time offender, got “10 years in prison without parole” not for selling or even possessing drugs, but for “what appeared to be a minor mistake in judgment in having given a ride to a drug dealer” who got caught.
That’s 10 years in prison for giving a dealer a ride! Johannes Mehserle is looking at 2 to 4 years for killing an unarmed black man. Punishment to fit the crime?
And yet, the Supreme Court, our court of last resort, the great arbiter of fairness, upholds this kind of savagery, this out-and-out racism. Consider, as Michelle Alexander forces us to consider: Professor David Baldus, of the University of Iowa Law School, (in the interest of full disclosure, Baldus was a fraternity brother of mine) led a study comparing sentencing in murder trials in Georgia. The study discovered that:
…defendants charged with killing white victims received the death penalty 11 times more often than defendants charged with killing black victims. Georgia prosecutors seemed largely to blame for the disparity; they sought the death penalty in 70% of cases involving black defendants and white victims, but only 19% of cases involving white defendants and black victims…and that defendants charged with killing white victims were 4.3 times more likely to receive a death sentence than defendants charged with killing blacks. (p. 107)
A trial appeal, by Warren McCleskey in Georgia, used the Baldus study to claim racial bias in violation of the 14th Amendment to try to reverse the death penalty conviction. The case, McCleskey v. Kemp, reached the Supreme Court in 1987. But the Supreme Court “ruled that racial bias in sentencing, even if shown through credible statistical evidence, could not be challenged under the 14th Amendment” unless McCleskey could prove that the prosecutor in his case “had sought the death penalty because of race, or that the jury had imposed it for racial reasons.” That is, the Court said that clear statistical evidence, as provided by the Baldus study, did not prove unequal treatment, and thus did not violate the 14th Amendment. This meant that the prosecutor or the jury would have to openly admit they were racially biased—an impossibility not only because few would admit such a thing, but also because litigants are barred from even attempting to discover the prosecution’s motives. In short, statistical proof of racial bias was allowed and is allowed to stand under the court’s ruling.
Add to this the consistent rulings of the Supreme Court in allowing racial profiling by police officers by giving them “discretion” in deciding whom to stop and search without a warrant—using “pretext stops” where a minor traffic violation becomes a pretext to search for drugs (where the driver “looks” like a dealer); or “consent,” where police who get a driver’s consent (most people fear refusing) can search for any reason or no reason at all—and you get rampant violations of 4th Amendment protections, and American jails filled to capacity with black and brown drug violators. In the Ohio v. Robinette case, for example, where police stopped a black driver for speeding, turned on a video camera, and asked whether he was carrying drugs and would consent to a search, the driver consented. The police thereupon found a small amount of marijuana and a single meth pill. In reviewing the case, the Ohio Supreme Court struck down the conviction, saying police must advise motorists of their right to refuse before asking them for consent to search their vehicles. At the Supreme Court, however, this “advise” requirement was struck down as “unrealistic.” No one needed to be informed of the right to refuse before being solicited for consent to a search. And in Atwater v. City of Lago Vista, the Supreme Court went even further, ruling that even when a motorist does refuse to consent to a search, the police can arrest him anyway.
What results is what pertains in Illinois, where an amazing 90% of those imprisoned for drug offenses are African-American; where “the total population of black males in Chicago with a felony record (including both current and ex-felons) is equivalent to 55% of the black adult male population and an astonishing 80% of the adult black male workforce in the Chicago area.” Nor are the effects limited to the streets. Politically, African Americans are being disenfranchised at a staggering rate, with 1 in 7 black men nationally having lost the right to vote as ex-felons. Socially, moreover, black people, especially black men, literally define criminality, and crime is defined as a black problem. However, since we live in a putatively “colorblind” society, (there are, after all, that small percentage of whites imprisoned for drugs; there is, after all, that African-American President) this entire problem can be suppressed, ignored and denied. ‘It’s not black people we target; it’s criminals.’
Only when we get to see, graphically, how white murderers like Johannes Mehserle are treated do we begin to notice that something is rotten. Only when we are exposed, chapter and verse, to the way the system is constructed to exploit every avenue for targeting black and brown men, and how that targeting is continually sanctioned by the highest court in the land, do we begin to understand how obscene it all is—how obscene for TV commentators (like those commenting on the “riot” after the Mehserle verdict) to wring their hands about a few windows broken while they ignore the broken lives, the broken families, the broken cities, the deliberately broken system that allows and encourages racism to maintain its death grip on millions, so the rest of us can prate on about democracy, about our revered system of “equal justice for all.”
Lawrence DiStasi
Thursday, June 03, 2010
Israeli Massacre on the High Seas
Everyone must know by now of the most recent outrage perpetrated by the Israelis. On Sunday evening, under cover of darkness, Israeli forces and commandos attacked the Freedom Flotilla, a group of 6 ships heading for Gaza with 10,000 tons of humanitarian supplies. Included in the cargo were medical supplies (hundreds of wheelchairs for Gazans crippled in the 2009 Israeli assault, and a dental clinic for Al-Shifa Hospital), as well as much-needed supplies to repair such things as destroyed houses and water systems. This was too much for the Israelis. They had warned they would stop the ships, and they did. What they hadn’t warned about was a commando assault in international waters, with at least 9 members of the relief effort dead.
As usual, the Israeli propaganda machine, supported by its American media puppets, went into high gear as soon as the news broke. The Israelis said that they were only acting in “self-defense,” because the “activists” aboard the ship attacked them first, with clubs, knives, and “even guns.” The commandos, who had been lowered to the lead ship’s deck by helicopters, had no choice, it was claimed, but to defend themselves. Poor things. They were simply boarding a ship in international waters—clearly illegal, and at the least piracy, at the worst an act of war—and those dastardly “activists” attacked them. So who could blame these innocents for “defending themselves” against putative “Hamas sympathizers” who were really trying to spark a confrontation?
There were subtler points to be made as well. Several news reports, in describing the background in Gaza, pointed out that Israel’s blockade was only imposed “after the Palestinian militant group Hamas seized control of the tiny Mediterranean territory in 2007” (May 31, 2010 AP article, by Selcan Hacaoglu and Lea Keath). The blame for this and other Israeli acts was thus placed on Hamas—i.e. for violently “seizing control” of Gaza. But wait. Wasn’t there an election in there somewhere? Didn’t Hamas win an election judged fully open and fair on January 26, 2006, which gave it control over all Palestinian territory, including the West Bank? I think so. I also seem to remember that Israel and the United States immediately condemned this insufferable result, democratic or not, and began supplying Hamas’s rival, the Fatah movement headed by its puppet Mahmoud Abbas, with weapons to attack Hamas and prevent them from taking power. It was this engineered conflict that finally resulted in a Hamas victory over Fatah on June 14, 2007—what the media calls “seizing control.” In fact, Hamas was defending the electoral victory it had fairly and democratically won. It was then hit with a full Israeli blockade, and, in January 2009, a full-scale Israeli invasion that slaughtered some 1400 Gazans and left the territory of 1.5 million inhabitants in ruins.
It was this deadly, punitive blockade that the Israelis were trying to keep in place and the Freedom Flotilla was openly trying to breach with humanitarian goods. And in contrast to the Israeli position—that Gaza is by no means a humanitarian disaster, its inhabitants well-fed and taken care of—the United Nations has several times condemned the blockade, most recently in the form of the UN-commissioned Gaza report by Justice Richard Goldstone (known as the Goldstone Report). As laid out by Ray McGovern in a splendid article on June 1, “Obama’s Timidity and Death at Sea,” (commondreams.org) the report concluded:
“The blockade policies implemented by Israel against the Gaza Strip, in particular the closure of or restrictions imposed on border crossings in the immediate period before the military operations, subjected the local population to extreme hardship and deprivations that amounted to a violation of Israel’s obligations as an Occupying Power under the Fourth Geneva Convention. …
“Israel has essentially violated its obligation to allow free passage of all consignments of medical and hospital objects, food, and clothing that were needed to meet the urgent humanitarian needs of the civilian population …
“The Mission concludes that the conditions resulting from deliberate actions of the Israeli forces and the declared policies of the Government with regard to the Gaza Strip before, during, and after the military operation cumulatively indicate the intention to inflict collective punishment on the people of the Gaza Strip.”
This business of “collective punishment” is serious, for it constitutes “a violation of the provisions of Articles 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.”
This is the real background of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. The blockade is illegal and inhuman, and attempting to bring some relief to the Gazan people and attention to the blockade has implied international sanction. Some of the people aboard the flotilla provide not only evidence of this, but also of the shameful history of decades of United States support for such violations. I am referring to Navy veteran Joe Meadors, a past president of the USS Liberty Veterans Association. As Ray McGovern notes, Meadors was on the USS Liberty when the American intelligence-collecting ship was attacked by Israeli warplanes on June 5, 1967, during the Six-Day War (Israel apparently feared that some of its communications, proving that it had initiated the war against Egypt, had been picked up by the Liberty, and would become public). As they did two days ago, Israeli forces attacked an unarmed ship without provocation, killing 34 American sailors and wounding another 170. Incredibly, the U.S. government, fearful of exacerbating relations with an important ally, colluded in covering up the massacre. Sailors were ordered to remain silent about what happened. Joe Meadors was one of them, and, after so many years, apparently decided to take part in this latest attempt to relieve the suffering of the Palestinians. He is now among the 600 or so freedom activists being held incommunicado (stripped of all cell phones, laptops, cameras, and personal belongings) by the Israelis.
What we have, then, is yet another violation of international law by the Israeli government, and yet another instance of American timidity in response to it. The Obama administration has so far adopted a “let’s wait for the evidence” attitude, limiting itself to “regret” over the unfortunate deaths. Israel has also expressed regret that its “innocent” mission somehow turned violent when the activists attacked first. But the first comments from released activists—including those of Nilufer Cetin of Turkey, who was released because she accompanied her husband (the chief engineer of the Mavi Marmara, the lead ship) with her tiny child—tell a different story. “There was a massacre on board,” said Cetin. “The Mavi Marmara is filled with blood.” As opposed to the Israeli version, Cetin says
“the operation started immediately with firing. First it was warning shots, but when the Mavi Marmara wouldn’t stop, these warnings turned into an attack. There were sound and smoke bombs and later they used gas bombs. Following the bombings they started to come on board from helicopters.” (“Israelis Opened Fire Before Boarding Gaza Flotilla, say Released Activists” by Dorian Jones, June 1, 2010, The Guardian/UK (reprinted commondreams.org).
The above article also quoted Dimitris Gielalis, aboard a second ship:
“Suddenly from everywhere we saw inflatables coming at us, and within seconds fully equipped commandos came up on the boat. They came up and used plastic bullets, we had beatings, we had electric shocks, any method we can think of, they used.”
Yet another released survivor from another ship, Michalis Grigoropoulos, said:
“The Israelis acted like pirates…They took us hostage, pointing guns at our heads; they descended from helicopters and fired tear gas and bullets. There was absolutely nothing we could do…Those who tried to resist forming a human ring on the bridge were given electric shocks.”
So much for innocent Israelis forced into violence by fully-armed activists (it should be noted that all the dead were activists). The truth seems to be that the Israelis wanted, once again, to demonstrate who is in control in the eastern Mediterranean, and what the consequences are for international activists trying to ease the pain of those in Gaza. Israel considers such actions hostile, and is eager to convey its warning: ‘help the Palestinians and you will be treated just as they are.’ Another activist, demonstrating in Jerusalem, served as part of this warning yesterday. As reported by the AP on June 1, Emily Henochowicz of Maryland lost her eye when she was hit by a tear gas canister fired directly at her face. She joins American activists like Rachel Corrie and others who have been maimed and killed while trying to protect Palestinians, or their homes (Rachel Corrie was bulldozed to death while standing before a Palestinian house slated for demolition) or their human dignity. This in the face of all those who lament, ‘why can’t the Palestinians use non-violence?’
In response to all this, American politicians seem content to express regrets over the bloodshed, and support for Israel’s “right to defend itself.” But as Ray McGovern points out, this kind of pusillanimous behavior has consequences. Israel clearly takes America’s silence, Obama’s silence in the face of its most brutal depradations as encouragement: ‘do whatever you want to, but try to be a bit more discreet about it.’ The result is that people die, people are brutalized, people are forced to endure the kind of treatment that stands comparison with the worst tortures and oppressions in human history. And we, we are forced to contemplate the cowardice of our political “leaders” and the continuing degradation of our ethics, our standing in the world, and the very language that is used to justify piracy and the murder of aid workers as “self-defense.”
Lawrence DiStasi
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As usual, the Israeli propaganda machine, supported by its American media puppets, went into high gear as soon as the news broke. The Israelis said that they were only acting in “self-defense,” because the “activists” aboard the ship attacked them first, with clubs, knives, and “even guns.” The commandos, who had been lowered to the lead ship’s deck by helicopters, had no choice, it was claimed, but to defend themselves. Poor things. They were simply boarding a ship in international waters—clearly illegal, and at the least piracy, at the worst an act of war—and those dastardly “activists” attacked them. So who could blame these innocents for “defending themselves” against putative “Hamas sympathizers” who were really trying to spark a confrontation?
There were subtler points to be made as well. Several news reports, in describing the background in Gaza, pointed out that Israel’s blockade was only imposed “after the Palestinian militant group Hamas seized control of the tiny Mediterranean territory in 2007” (May 31, 2010 AP article, by Selcan Hacaoglu and Lea Keath). The blame for this and other Israeli acts was thus placed on Hamas—i.e. for violently “seizing control” of Gaza. But wait. Wasn’t there an election in there somewhere? Didn’t Hamas win an election judged fully open and fair on January 26, 2006, which gave it control over all Palestinian territory, including the West Bank? I think so. I also seem to remember that Israel and the United States immediately condemned this insufferable result, democratic or not, and began supplying Hamas’s rival, the Fatah movement headed by its puppet Mahmoud Abbas, with weapons to attack Hamas and prevent them from taking power. It was this engineered conflict that finally resulted in a Hamas victory over Fatah on June 14, 2007—what the media calls “seizing control.” In fact, Hamas was defending the electoral victory it had fairly and democratically won. It was then hit with a full Israeli blockade, and, in January 2009, a full-scale Israeli invasion that slaughtered some 1400 Gazans and left the territory of 1.5 million inhabitants in ruins.
It was this deadly, punitive blockade that the Israelis were trying to keep in place and the Freedom Flotilla was openly trying to breach with humanitarian goods. And in contrast to the Israeli position—that Gaza is by no means a humanitarian disaster, its inhabitants well-fed and taken care of—the United Nations has several times condemned the blockade, most recently in the form of the UN-commissioned Gaza report by Justice Richard Goldstone (known as the Goldstone Report). As laid out by Ray McGovern in a splendid article on June 1, “Obama’s Timidity and Death at Sea,” (commondreams.org) the report concluded:
“The blockade policies implemented by Israel against the Gaza Strip, in particular the closure of or restrictions imposed on border crossings in the immediate period before the military operations, subjected the local population to extreme hardship and deprivations that amounted to a violation of Israel’s obligations as an Occupying Power under the Fourth Geneva Convention. …
“Israel has essentially violated its obligation to allow free passage of all consignments of medical and hospital objects, food, and clothing that were needed to meet the urgent humanitarian needs of the civilian population …
“The Mission concludes that the conditions resulting from deliberate actions of the Israeli forces and the declared policies of the Government with regard to the Gaza Strip before, during, and after the military operation cumulatively indicate the intention to inflict collective punishment on the people of the Gaza Strip.”
This business of “collective punishment” is serious, for it constitutes “a violation of the provisions of Articles 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.”
This is the real background of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. The blockade is illegal and inhuman, and attempting to bring some relief to the Gazan people and attention to the blockade has implied international sanction. Some of the people aboard the flotilla provide not only evidence of this, but also of the shameful history of decades of United States support for such violations. I am referring to Navy veteran Joe Meadors, a past president of the USS Liberty Veterans Association. As Ray McGovern notes, Meadors was on the USS Liberty when the American intelligence-collecting ship was attacked by Israeli warplanes on June 5, 1967, during the Six-Day War (Israel apparently feared that some of its communications, proving that it had initiated the war against Egypt, had been picked up by the Liberty, and would become public). As they did two days ago, Israeli forces attacked an unarmed ship without provocation, killing 34 American sailors and wounding another 170. Incredibly, the U.S. government, fearful of exacerbating relations with an important ally, colluded in covering up the massacre. Sailors were ordered to remain silent about what happened. Joe Meadors was one of them, and, after so many years, apparently decided to take part in this latest attempt to relieve the suffering of the Palestinians. He is now among the 600 or so freedom activists being held incommunicado (stripped of all cell phones, laptops, cameras, and personal belongings) by the Israelis.
What we have, then, is yet another violation of international law by the Israeli government, and yet another instance of American timidity in response to it. The Obama administration has so far adopted a “let’s wait for the evidence” attitude, limiting itself to “regret” over the unfortunate deaths. Israel has also expressed regret that its “innocent” mission somehow turned violent when the activists attacked first. But the first comments from released activists—including those of Nilufer Cetin of Turkey, who was released because she accompanied her husband (the chief engineer of the Mavi Marmara, the lead ship) with her tiny child—tell a different story. “There was a massacre on board,” said Cetin. “The Mavi Marmara is filled with blood.” As opposed to the Israeli version, Cetin says
“the operation started immediately with firing. First it was warning shots, but when the Mavi Marmara wouldn’t stop, these warnings turned into an attack. There were sound and smoke bombs and later they used gas bombs. Following the bombings they started to come on board from helicopters.” (“Israelis Opened Fire Before Boarding Gaza Flotilla, say Released Activists” by Dorian Jones, June 1, 2010, The Guardian/UK (reprinted commondreams.org).
The above article also quoted Dimitris Gielalis, aboard a second ship:
“Suddenly from everywhere we saw inflatables coming at us, and within seconds fully equipped commandos came up on the boat. They came up and used plastic bullets, we had beatings, we had electric shocks, any method we can think of, they used.”
Yet another released survivor from another ship, Michalis Grigoropoulos, said:
“The Israelis acted like pirates…They took us hostage, pointing guns at our heads; they descended from helicopters and fired tear gas and bullets. There was absolutely nothing we could do…Those who tried to resist forming a human ring on the bridge were given electric shocks.”
So much for innocent Israelis forced into violence by fully-armed activists (it should be noted that all the dead were activists). The truth seems to be that the Israelis wanted, once again, to demonstrate who is in control in the eastern Mediterranean, and what the consequences are for international activists trying to ease the pain of those in Gaza. Israel considers such actions hostile, and is eager to convey its warning: ‘help the Palestinians and you will be treated just as they are.’ Another activist, demonstrating in Jerusalem, served as part of this warning yesterday. As reported by the AP on June 1, Emily Henochowicz of Maryland lost her eye when she was hit by a tear gas canister fired directly at her face. She joins American activists like Rachel Corrie and others who have been maimed and killed while trying to protect Palestinians, or their homes (Rachel Corrie was bulldozed to death while standing before a Palestinian house slated for demolition) or their human dignity. This in the face of all those who lament, ‘why can’t the Palestinians use non-violence?’
In response to all this, American politicians seem content to express regrets over the bloodshed, and support for Israel’s “right to defend itself.” But as Ray McGovern points out, this kind of pusillanimous behavior has consequences. Israel clearly takes America’s silence, Obama’s silence in the face of its most brutal depradations as encouragement: ‘do whatever you want to, but try to be a bit more discreet about it.’ The result is that people die, people are brutalized, people are forced to endure the kind of treatment that stands comparison with the worst tortures and oppressions in human history. And we, we are forced to contemplate the cowardice of our political “leaders” and the continuing degradation of our ethics, our standing in the world, and the very language that is used to justify piracy and the murder of aid workers as “self-defense.”
Lawrence DiStasi
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Saturday, May 15, 2010
BP and Lax Regulations
As if the Gulf Oil spill pouring from Beyond (British) Petroleum’s drilling rig weren’t bad enough, it’s beginning to appear that, as in the financial meltdown, the culprit was lax regulations. Democracy Now featured a segment on May 7 that referred to a May 6 Washington Post exposè revealing that the Minerals Management Service (part of the U.S. Interior Department) essentially gave BP a free pass on its drilling project. No environmental review was required. Here is what the Post said:
“Petrochemical giant BP didn't file a plan to specifically handle a major oil spill from an uncontrolled blowout at its Deepwater Horizon project because the federal agency that regulates offshore rigs changed its rules two years ago to exempt certain projects in the central Gulf region, according to an Associated Press review of official records.
The Minerals Management Service, an arm of the Interior Department known for its cozy relationship with major oil companies, says it issued the rule relief because some of the industrywide mandates weren’t practical for all of the exploratory and production projects operating in the Gulf region.”
According to Democracy Now, this “relief” for certain projects is called a “categorical exemption” and it is meant to circumvent cumbersome environmental reviews for SMALL projects like outhouses or hiking trails. In this case, BP was allowed to slip through this little loophole and engage in drilling without a review at all. Its own assessment was used by MMS, to wit, that spills are unlikely, and in the event one should occur, it wouldn’t exceed a few thousand gallons. This is the Big Lie of offshore drilling according to Kieran Suckling of the Center for Biological Diversity, who was interviewed on Democracy Now:
‘Offshore drilling is safe, and anyway it’s not where spills come from.’
So much for that one. The other big problem, according to Mr. Suckling, is the now head of the Interior Department, Ken Salazar. While he was a senator, Salazar was the darling of the oil drilling industry, receiving huge campaign donations from BP itself. When he became Interior Secretary, he promised, according to Suckling, to rein in the permissiveness at Minerals Management, which had routinely been granting drilling permits without reviews. Instead, Salazar has become a major proponent of offshore drilling, and even pushed MMS to pass more permits. In fact, Shell Oil Co. has a permit to begin offshore drilling in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea, where frigid waters make spills far worse than in the Gulf (witness what happened with the Exxon Valdez in 1989).
One more rat in the attic. It turns out that a major player in BP’s exploded drilling rig was our old friend Halliburton. They were the ones who did the concrete work that preceded not only the Gulf Oil spill, but another recent one off Australia. Here is what a recent piece in the Huffington Post (reprinted in Truthout) says:
“Giant oil-services provider Halliburton may be a primary suspect in the investigation into the oil rig explosion that has devastated the Gulf Coast, The Wall Street Journal reports …drilling experts agree that blame probably lies with flaws in the ‘cementing’ process - that is, plugging holes in the pipeline seal by pumping cement into it from the rig. Halliburton was in charge of cementing for Deepwater Horizon.” (“Was the Gulf Oil Spill an Act of War? You Betcha,” May 6, 2010)
So there you have it. British Petroleum, which touts itself as a major environmental player (save, of course, for its little oil-sands project in Canada—referred to in my recent blog on “Moral Economics”) ducked under environmental protection rules with a little government help, and used as its cementer, the great Halliburton of Dick Cheney and Iraq fame. Other than a minor environmental catastrophe, what could be bad?
Lawrence DiStasi
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“Petrochemical giant BP didn't file a plan to specifically handle a major oil spill from an uncontrolled blowout at its Deepwater Horizon project because the federal agency that regulates offshore rigs changed its rules two years ago to exempt certain projects in the central Gulf region, according to an Associated Press review of official records.
The Minerals Management Service, an arm of the Interior Department known for its cozy relationship with major oil companies, says it issued the rule relief because some of the industrywide mandates weren’t practical for all of the exploratory and production projects operating in the Gulf region.”
According to Democracy Now, this “relief” for certain projects is called a “categorical exemption” and it is meant to circumvent cumbersome environmental reviews for SMALL projects like outhouses or hiking trails. In this case, BP was allowed to slip through this little loophole and engage in drilling without a review at all. Its own assessment was used by MMS, to wit, that spills are unlikely, and in the event one should occur, it wouldn’t exceed a few thousand gallons. This is the Big Lie of offshore drilling according to Kieran Suckling of the Center for Biological Diversity, who was interviewed on Democracy Now:
‘Offshore drilling is safe, and anyway it’s not where spills come from.’
So much for that one. The other big problem, according to Mr. Suckling, is the now head of the Interior Department, Ken Salazar. While he was a senator, Salazar was the darling of the oil drilling industry, receiving huge campaign donations from BP itself. When he became Interior Secretary, he promised, according to Suckling, to rein in the permissiveness at Minerals Management, which had routinely been granting drilling permits without reviews. Instead, Salazar has become a major proponent of offshore drilling, and even pushed MMS to pass more permits. In fact, Shell Oil Co. has a permit to begin offshore drilling in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea, where frigid waters make spills far worse than in the Gulf (witness what happened with the Exxon Valdez in 1989).
One more rat in the attic. It turns out that a major player in BP’s exploded drilling rig was our old friend Halliburton. They were the ones who did the concrete work that preceded not only the Gulf Oil spill, but another recent one off Australia. Here is what a recent piece in the Huffington Post (reprinted in Truthout) says:
“Giant oil-services provider Halliburton may be a primary suspect in the investigation into the oil rig explosion that has devastated the Gulf Coast, The Wall Street Journal reports
So there you have it. British Petroleum, which touts itself as a major environmental player (save, of course, for its little oil-sands project in Canada—referred to in my recent blog on “Moral Economics”) ducked under environmental protection rules with a little government help, and used as its cementer, the great Halliburton of Dick Cheney and Iraq fame. Other than a minor environmental catastrophe, what could be bad?
Lawrence DiStasi
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Wednesday, May 05, 2010
Israel, Iran and Nukes
The latest public flap over the alleged nuclear weapons program engaged in by Iran, coupled with the deafening silence over the fact that Israel already has an estimated 200 nuclear weapons with no inspection by the IAEA, bespeaks more than just hypocrisy. What it also portends is an attack on Iran by Israel, with the possibility of nuclear retaliation by the United States if Iran tries to fight back. This is the opinion of Gareth Porter in a piece published on April 24 (“U.S. Nuclear Option on Iran Linked to Israeli Attack Threat”). In it, Porter noted that the Obama administration’s announced Nuclear Posture Review for the first time states publicly that “it is reserving the right to use nuclear weapons against Iran.” This is because “A war involving Iran that begins with an Israeli attack is the only plausible scenario that would fit the category of contingencies in the document.” Aside from the amazing nature of this proclamation by our so-called peacemaking nation, the question is why? Why would the Obama administration—one which most hopeful people had expected to REDUCE rather than increase the threat of nuclear war—need to publicly announce its right to use nukes, and against a nation which everyone knows has no nukes at all?
According to Porter’s analysis, which seems to make eminent sense, the announced threat is meant to persuade Iran that if Israel attacks its alleged nuclear sites (which Israel has continually threatened to do), the Iranians should not try to respond militarily against Israel. Why? Because in the event of such a ‘treacherous’ Iranian response, the United States could use its nuclear weapons against Iran. Indeed, it specifically reserves the right to do so, threatens to do so. For Iran this means that it now not only has to fear an attack by the most powerful nation in its region, Israel, but an attack by the most powerful nation in the world, the USA, and with its nuclear weapons bristling.
Now here is where it gets really disgusting. Monday, at the conference being held at the United Nations to review the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), President Ahmadinejad of Iran made a speech in which he fulminated against nuclear weapons themselves (“The nuclear bomb is a fire against humanity rather than a weapon for defense..”) and also criticized the United States for its above-noted threat to his nation. As the AP reported, “Ahmadinejad referred to the new U.S. Nuclear Posture Review’s provision retaining an option to use U.S. atomic arms against countries not in compliance with the nonproliferation pact, a charge Washington lays against Iran.” He also said, “Regrettably, the government of the United States has not only used nuclear weapons, but also continues to threaten to use such weapons against other countries, including Iran.” In response, of course, the United States and several of its European lap-dogs walked out on the Iranian President’s speech. When it came time for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to speak, she directed much of her talk at Ahmadinejad, saying that Iran was “flouting the rules” of the NPT, and trying to “do whatever it can to divert attention away from its own record and to attempt to evade accountability.” She also accused Iran of defying “the Security Council and the IAEA and plac(ing) the future of the nonproliferation regime in jeopardy.” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of South Korea added that “the onus is on Iran” to clear up doubts about its uranium enrichment program (it should be noted that so far, all that exists are accusations; Iran is perfectly within its rights as an NPT signer to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes; what it cannot do is use that enriched uranium for nuclear weapons—which our most recent CIA review said it was NOT doing.)
No one, however, mentioned either Israel’s existing nuclear weapons and refusal to join the NPT (no doubts about that), or the similar possession and refusal of Pakistan and India. It’s the unmentionable 2-ton gorilla in the room. For, as Thalif Deen points out in a May 3 Interpress Service article,
“at last month’s nuclear security summit in Washington DC, U.S. President Barack Obama was asked about Israel’s nuclear weapons program. But he diplomatically sidestepped the question when he pointedly told reporters: ‘As far as Israel goes, I’m not going to comment on their (nuclear weapons) program. What I’m going to point to is the fact that consistently we have urged all countries to become members of the NPT. So there’s no contradiction there. [Oh really?] And so whether we’re talking about Israel or any other country, we think that becoming part of the NPT is important.’”
Isn’t that cute? Though the President of the United States thinks it’s “important” to become part of the NPT, he just can’t comment on Israel’s nukes (Why? Would he be struck by lightning? Sent to jail? Caught in his own hypocrisy?). He will say, though, that he has “urged” all countries to join. So again—why won’t our closest ally join? What does Israel have to hide? What options—like using its weapons in a first strike, or obliterating one of its many enemies in the Middle East—does it refuse to give up? Indeed, how is it that the United States, the great peacemaker and promoter of the NPT, not only refuses to abandon its own nuclear arsenal (the Soviet Union no longer exists after all), but specifically claims the right to use nukes against those countries not in compliance with the NPT? (which, we are sure, does NOT refer to Pakistan or India, who never joined; or to North Korea which, though it’s not in compliance, has nukes of its own and that could be messy; could it be Iran?)
In fact, it is not just Iran, but much of the rest of the world that wants such questions answered. At the UN’s NPT Review conference, that is, 118 out of 192 nations demanded that Israel reveal its nuclear weapons program and join the NPT (NB: nations in the NPT which have nukes are pledged to make every effort to get rid of them). The 118 Non-Aligned Movement nations, through their spokesman, Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natelagawa, asserted that Israel’s refusal to sign the NPT has exposed the entire region to nuclear threats from “the only country possessing these weapons of mass destruction.” With its “unsafeguarded nuclear facilities and activities of unknown safety standards,” (because by not joining the NPT, Israel does not have to submit to IAEA inspections) Israel’s nuclear program not only exposes its neighbors to great risks, but also threatens a nuclear arms race of “catastrophic regional and international potential.” Such a situation, Natelagawa said, jeopardizes the NPT itself, as well as the proposed creation of a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East, something Ahmadinejad also referred to (see Thalif Deen, “Israel, Iran Targeted at Nuke Non-Proliferation Meet,” commondreams.org, May 3, 2010).
What, then, can one say about the prospects for a revitalized NPT—especially in light of the fact that, with a United States assurance of nuclear backing, Israel may even now be planning a military strike against Iran? One would have to say the prospects are dim. Though President Obama seems sincere in his desire to rid the world of these weapons, or at least to bring them under greater control, he also seems hamstrung by the “special relationship” with the nuclear-armed pit bull known as Israel. He seems equally committed to creating a convenient scapegoat of Iran—whose loose cannon of a president, and fundamentalist mullahs in charge, make perfect whipping boys. With such elements in place, and with the United States’ reputation in tatters from a decade of unprovoked attacks against three Islamic nations, one would have to be far more of an optimist than I am to think things nuclear might resolve any time soon. On the other hand, if a sufficient body of world opinion decides to reject blatant nuclear hypocrisy and starts demanding something like full disclosure about nuclear weapons (including those of the thus-far unmentionable nations), it might happen. For our future’s sake, we should all hope and pray that it does.
Lawrence DiStasi
According to Porter’s analysis, which seems to make eminent sense, the announced threat is meant to persuade Iran that if Israel attacks its alleged nuclear sites (which Israel has continually threatened to do), the Iranians should not try to respond militarily against Israel. Why? Because in the event of such a ‘treacherous’ Iranian response, the United States could use its nuclear weapons against Iran. Indeed, it specifically reserves the right to do so, threatens to do so. For Iran this means that it now not only has to fear an attack by the most powerful nation in its region, Israel, but an attack by the most powerful nation in the world, the USA, and with its nuclear weapons bristling.
Now here is where it gets really disgusting. Monday, at the conference being held at the United Nations to review the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), President Ahmadinejad of Iran made a speech in which he fulminated against nuclear weapons themselves (“The nuclear bomb is a fire against humanity rather than a weapon for defense..”) and also criticized the United States for its above-noted threat to his nation. As the AP reported, “Ahmadinejad referred to the new U.S. Nuclear Posture Review’s provision retaining an option to use U.S. atomic arms against countries not in compliance with the nonproliferation pact, a charge Washington lays against Iran.” He also said, “Regrettably, the government of the United States has not only used nuclear weapons, but also continues to threaten to use such weapons against other countries, including Iran.” In response, of course, the United States and several of its European lap-dogs walked out on the Iranian President’s speech. When it came time for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to speak, she directed much of her talk at Ahmadinejad, saying that Iran was “flouting the rules” of the NPT, and trying to “do whatever it can to divert attention away from its own record and to attempt to evade accountability.” She also accused Iran of defying “the Security Council and the IAEA and plac(ing) the future of the nonproliferation regime in jeopardy.” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of South Korea added that “the onus is on Iran” to clear up doubts about its uranium enrichment program (it should be noted that so far, all that exists are accusations; Iran is perfectly within its rights as an NPT signer to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes; what it cannot do is use that enriched uranium for nuclear weapons—which our most recent CIA review said it was NOT doing.)
No one, however, mentioned either Israel’s existing nuclear weapons and refusal to join the NPT (no doubts about that), or the similar possession and refusal of Pakistan and India. It’s the unmentionable 2-ton gorilla in the room. For, as Thalif Deen points out in a May 3 Interpress Service article,
“at last month’s nuclear security summit in Washington DC, U.S. President Barack Obama was asked about Israel’s nuclear weapons program. But he diplomatically sidestepped the question when he pointedly told reporters: ‘As far as Israel goes, I’m not going to comment on their (nuclear weapons) program. What I’m going to point to is the fact that consistently we have urged all countries to become members of the NPT. So there’s no contradiction there. [Oh really?] And so whether we’re talking about Israel or any other country, we think that becoming part of the NPT is important.’”
Isn’t that cute? Though the President of the United States thinks it’s “important” to become part of the NPT, he just can’t comment on Israel’s nukes (Why? Would he be struck by lightning? Sent to jail? Caught in his own hypocrisy?). He will say, though, that he has “urged” all countries to join. So again—why won’t our closest ally join? What does Israel have to hide? What options—like using its weapons in a first strike, or obliterating one of its many enemies in the Middle East—does it refuse to give up? Indeed, how is it that the United States, the great peacemaker and promoter of the NPT, not only refuses to abandon its own nuclear arsenal (the Soviet Union no longer exists after all), but specifically claims the right to use nukes against those countries not in compliance with the NPT? (which, we are sure, does NOT refer to Pakistan or India, who never joined; or to North Korea which, though it’s not in compliance, has nukes of its own and that could be messy; could it be Iran?)
In fact, it is not just Iran, but much of the rest of the world that wants such questions answered. At the UN’s NPT Review conference, that is, 118 out of 192 nations demanded that Israel reveal its nuclear weapons program and join the NPT (NB: nations in the NPT which have nukes are pledged to make every effort to get rid of them). The 118 Non-Aligned Movement nations, through their spokesman, Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natelagawa, asserted that Israel’s refusal to sign the NPT has exposed the entire region to nuclear threats from “the only country possessing these weapons of mass destruction.” With its “unsafeguarded nuclear facilities and activities of unknown safety standards,” (because by not joining the NPT, Israel does not have to submit to IAEA inspections) Israel’s nuclear program not only exposes its neighbors to great risks, but also threatens a nuclear arms race of “catastrophic regional and international potential.” Such a situation, Natelagawa said, jeopardizes the NPT itself, as well as the proposed creation of a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East, something Ahmadinejad also referred to (see Thalif Deen, “Israel, Iran Targeted at Nuke Non-Proliferation Meet,” commondreams.org, May 3, 2010).
What, then, can one say about the prospects for a revitalized NPT—especially in light of the fact that, with a United States assurance of nuclear backing, Israel may even now be planning a military strike against Iran? One would have to say the prospects are dim. Though President Obama seems sincere in his desire to rid the world of these weapons, or at least to bring them under greater control, he also seems hamstrung by the “special relationship” with the nuclear-armed pit bull known as Israel. He seems equally committed to creating a convenient scapegoat of Iran—whose loose cannon of a president, and fundamentalist mullahs in charge, make perfect whipping boys. With such elements in place, and with the United States’ reputation in tatters from a decade of unprovoked attacks against three Islamic nations, one would have to be far more of an optimist than I am to think things nuclear might resolve any time soon. On the other hand, if a sufficient body of world opinion decides to reject blatant nuclear hypocrisy and starts demanding something like full disclosure about nuclear weapons (including those of the thus-far unmentionable nations), it might happen. For our future’s sake, we should all hope and pray that it does.
Lawrence DiStasi
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