paper empire

pssssst...

2010-07-28T22:03:00.001-07:00

sleep western liberals, sleep...

2010-07-09T01:54:00.000-07:00

the liberal favorite steve chu stumbles through a soft spoken rachel maddow interview on may 28th. two days before that he was 'outed' by mother jones for his ties to bp, including his work for the 100% bp funded $500 million u.c. berkeley energy-bio sciences lab, a snippet:

"The fact that Steven Chu selected Steve Koonin, BP's chief scientist, to be his undersecretary would predispose them to think that they could maybe negotiate with BP, could be more like partners regarding the oil cleanup," Jennifer Washburn, the author of a forthcoming Center for American Progress report called, "Big Oil Goes to College," told the New York Times. While the DOE doesn't have jurisdiction over the spill, 150 people at its national laboratories have been working on it, and some consumer watchdogs have accused the department of reacting too slowly. Chu has also been an optimist regarding the clean-up and containment efforts, telling reporters two weeks ago that "things are looking up."

he uses gamma ray scans (like a 'modern day marvel super hero' cries the atlantic's joshua green) to find out what's really going on on the ocean floor. the answer: no one knows. now journalists and scientists are not allowed within 75 feet of the spill area without the approval of...'beyond petroleum', thank-you-very-much. anyone heard from steven chu lately? heard about the estimated 40,000 decaying, deserted and leaking oil platforms in the gulf? heard about the west's 'cheap' petroleum playground for the american giants shell and chevron in the niger delta; which has spilled more than the exxol valdez spill every single year for 50 years? sleep western liberals, sleep.

the republicans are wild fanatics, but the democrats in the us are the most power hungry, political opportunists still kicking. barely. every single corner of the obama team should be called out as reckless and criminal.

now it's the administration's 'unbreakable' linkage to israel? linkage to breaches of isreali, us and international law? no? everytime i hear anyone speak from this administration, i'm ready to be smeared in shit and lies. everytime. is the us ready to support isreal in a simultaneous war against lebanon, syria, and iran? maybe they'll sneak it in after the november elections, in the lame duck session. loads of distractions brought by a holiday season then. sleep western liberals, sleep.

sane take

2010-06-03T01:23:00.000-07:00

June 2, 2010

Mad-Dog of the Planet

Notch Up Another Disaster for Israel's Well-Oiled Propaganda Machine

By PATRICK COCKBURN

An old Israeli saying describing various less-than-esteemed military leaders says: "He was so stupid that even the other generals noticed." The same derisive remark could be applied almost without exception to the present generation of Israeli politicians.

Such healthy skepticism among Israelis about the abilities of their military and political leaders has unfortunately ebbed in recent decades. As a result, Israelis are left perplexed as to why their wars, military interventions and armed actions have so often ended in failure since the 1973 war, despite the superiority of their armed forces.

The latest example of this is the assault on the Gaza aid convoy by naval commandos, a confrontation initiated by Israel which thereby ensured that the convoy's organizers achieved their objectives to a degree beyond their wildest dreams. By using assault troops in a police action against civilians with predictably bloody results Israel managed to focus international attention on its blockade of Gaza, which the world had hitherto largely ignored. The Israeli action infuriated Turkey, once its strongest ally in the region, and strengthened the claim of Hamas to Palestinian leadership.

The capacity of Israel to shoot itself in the foot needs explanation. From the beginning the operation was idiotic, since Israel was always likely to look bad after any confrontation between élite troops and civilian protesters. Even more ludicrous is the Israeli explanation that their élite and heavily armed soldiers were at risk of their lives because they had to use thick gloves to protect their hands when sliding down cables from a helicopter and therefore could not use their weapons.

The nature of the fiasco should cause little surprise because such botched Israeli military actions have been the norm for years. The 1982 invasion of Lebanon was discredited by the massacre of Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by Christian militias loosed on them by Israeli army commanders. Syria, not Israel, became the predominant power in Lebanon. In south Lebanon, the Israeli army fought a long and unsuccessful guerrilla war against Hizbollah. The bombardments of Lebanon in 1996 and 2006 left Hizbollah stronger, and a similar attack on Gaza in 2008 failed to weaken Hamas.

The problem is that nobody believes Israeli propaganda as much as Israelis. Pro-Palestinian activists often lament the fluency and mendacity of Israeli spokesmen on the airwaves and the pervasive influence of Israel's supporters abroad. But, in reality, these PR campaigns are Israel's greatest weakness, because they distort Israelis' sense of reality. Defeats and failures are portrayed as victories and successes.

The slaughter of civilians is justified as a military necessity or somehow the fault of the other side. Opponents are demonized as bloodthirsty terrorists. Comforted by such benign accounts of their activities, Israeli leaders are consumed by arrogance because they come to believe they have never made a mistake. Denial that errors have occurred makes it extremely difficult to sack generals or ministers, however gross their incompetence or record of failure.

Many Israelis privately take their own propaganda with a pinch of salt, though the number is diminishing. But abroad, the most third-rate Israeli politicians strut before fawning audiences as heroic defenders of the state. Not surprisingly they return home with a dangerously inflated idea of their own abilities and in a perilously self-important mood.

The Israeli propaganda machine, official and private, has been running full throttle in the last few days justifying the assault on the aid convoy to Gaza. Probably spokesmen feel they are performing well given the weakness of their case. In fact, they do nothing but harm to Israel. The greater their success in denying gross and culpable mistakes, the more likely it is that the perpetrators will hold their jobs – and the more likely it is that the mistakes will be endlessly repeated.

Patrick Cockburn is the author of "Muqtada: Muqtada Al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq."

2010-05-31T00:38:00.000-07:00

there are no solar spills!!!

what a statement...

to be continued...

a night out on the town

2010-04-08T22:11:00.000-07:00

last night some girl told me that i had a jerk's face. i just smiled and pretended she was a lamp. all in polite company and around an intimate little table at a bar. i had met her an hour before with a friend of mine. she comes from money, has no sense of style, wears disgusting makeup and says mean shit constantly.

i was dragged out by the promise of free drinks. i drank. the little poshy lounge was an awful sight. my pot brownie was kicking in. standing room only all over the bar. everyone's dressed like an expensive whore or a macy's spring sale male model with a hot boy haircut. everyone positioned to grope, touch, not care, offend or snub. me too. i hate when i get like that. i get pressed in a corner and hate my way out of it.

'if you like people, don't bartend in a club,' my friend says. i remember two hours ago he told me we should come out and make an appearance to meet someone or other and get put up. i was suspicious,'who's out there?' my friend's a bad liar: 'some chill ass folks, it's gonna be cool.' i snapped with a half laugh,'chris, i hate people!' 'so? come out.'

i hopped the bart turnstiles. i'm not gonna pay to go out on wednesday! i swear, the best part of going out is getting there, and then the intimate drunk moments with friends hours later. everyone's a sheep in transit. they all pretend they aren't listening. hate hate hate. repeat...

people are purely evil. you gotta applaud the ones that do it with style. they can dish it out, then take it with a nasty smile. i love making the innocent bystander admit they're evil even though they don't even show a trace. the old joke goes: a fairy appears to a farmer and gives him two options. one is he gets one additional cow and his neighbor gets two. and the second option is that one of his cows is killed and his neighbor has two cows killed. in their private moments, without any repercussions or even lingering memory of choice made, i think most people will choose the second option. it's not even up to them. they just spend too much time around people, or better yet people's virtual personalities. there was a couple in south korea that was so consumed on raising a virtual baby that they let their real baby die of malnutrition. ever hang out with people that constantly text or im? what they're really saying is 'i've got better things to do. could you fuck off for a minute?'

with all this social 'evolution' and technology available to everyone (let's face it, even i can afford a 4g device) it's no surprise neither the left nor the right has come up with a new idea or program in 40 years. we're just playing with genitalia, watching others play with their genitalia, or playing with ourselves. every tv show or movie is like a long handjob. oh my god, it's been almost an hour and a half and i haven't come yet!!! the stars align, everything works out perfect! even better than you expected, and you come really hard. you brush yourself off, half dazed, look around at the dark living room or theatre and carry on like you're living in a democracy.

you can't beat em. seclusion is for the really strong or the really rich. the lounge is all spectacle. it doesn't look like alcohol is much of a social lubricant. people can't offer each other much comfort, just sleazy promises. carrots and sticks. give me access to your resources and i'll captivate your attention, let you smell my fine leather, see my war chest, i'll reprise my best moves. i'm just a killer for your love, vote, attention. if the laughing hyena could only understand. all of this makes me down my drink and head out.

the first few minutes of a deep lush buzz from expensive alcohol is a heater. you feel like a symphony, like you wanna run free, laugh, have a good time, fuck a precious love, seduce, hit the gas pedal, finish the exam first cocksure and glorious, feel your wit coming on, best your opponent. the problem is it doesn't last long and it's downhill from there. if you drink any more it dissolves and if you stop drinking you get tired and bored. and you never want to get tired and bored. never.

someone should tell that to these people. thank god we got out of there to catch the last bart train.

too tired to blog, but look!!

2010-03-31T23:14:00.001-07:00

saturday serenade

2010-02-27T19:25:00.000-08:00

as i sit and watch my outside neighborhood from the back porch of the duplex, i begin to realize how exposed the kitchens and backrooms are around here. so is mine, there are no less than three un-curtained rooms. the breeze blows during the day, and begins to harden and get cold at night. people sitting around on decks and back porches casually glance over as i pour this vodka tonic.

my roommate chris, 28, clean shave, and with a new found proclivity for the fairer sex leaves his dishes sitting dirty. plays poker on his computer and smokes a joint with me in exchange for cleaning the floors. he doesn't sigh, doesn't worry. his biggest letdown is not being up to a jog in this muggy weather. my other roommate sarah, 28, a michigan transplant seemed little cookie cutter at first, but then over a beer and some time to waste, she began to break down for me her feelings on the local singles scene. the bay area is full of singles that will end up being single, or constantly about to be single, or about to be in some relationship. a sea of fools, i intone. yup, a sea of fools. well done sarah, cheers.

but it's no pleasure cruise, the dishes washed, the floors clean and the fridge stocked. no duck pate, no pinot noir, no big screen tele. a stack of criterion collection dvds from the library, and stacks of cds sit around to be put away, or not. a front and back porch outfitted with ashtrays and a view. curious cats mingle and scurry about. the helicopter roars towards its landing pad five blocks away. time for another drink, and to watch on some old paul newman flick...

'new' headlines

2010-02-23T23:51:00.000-08:00

this just in: hustler (the magazine[?]) has broken open a long lived investigation of government corruption, blackmail, espionage, etc....

if yr suffering from depression or bipolar, twitter may make you feel 'bad.'

'...Mattel, Inc., owner of the brand, says computer engineering Barbie comes "dressed in a funky tee with binary code design . . . with Bluetooth headset, laptop bag, and pink laptop."'

and:

L'Osservatore Romano, the official newspaper of the Vatican, released its Top Ten Albums list this past week.
They are:

1: Revolver...The Beatles
2: Dark Side Of The Moon...Pink Floyd
3: (What's The Story) Morning Glory...Oasis
4: Thriller... Michael Jackson
5: Achtung Baby...U2
6: Rumours...Fleetwood Mac
7: The Nightfly...Donald Fagen
8: Supernatural...Carlos Santana
9. Graceland...Paul Simon
10. If I Could Only Remember My Name...David Crosby

see rest of article here

--

bye for now kids...

more from alex cockburn

2010-02-20T00:32:00.000-08:00

...and to think that alex cockburn used to write for the los angeles times and the wall street journal:

In 1975 Stewart Brand printed in the summer issue of his CoEvolution Quarterly Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock’s “The Gaia Hypothesis,” which advanced the notion that “living matter, the air, the oceans, the land surface” are “parts of a giant system” that exhibits “the behavior of a single organism, even a living creature.”
Thirty-five years later, James Cameron gives us Avatar and the planet Pandora, which is Gaia brought to life in the most savage denunciation of imperial exploitation—explicitly American—ever brought to screen. Now a huge hit, Avatar is the most expensive antiwar film ever made (at $200 million, about half the cost of a single F-22). “It is nature which today no longer exists anywhere,” a peppery German called Marx wrote in 1845. But Rousseau is having his revenge on Karl. The night I went to Avatar the audience cheered when Pandora, as a single Gaian organism, puts Earth’s predatory onslaught to flight and man’s war machines are crushed by natural forces. Against Genesis and the Judeo-Christian tradition, pagan mysticism is carrying the day, at the level of fantasy as it is in those astrological manuals down in the Bible belt.

But alas, it is all fantasy, as a beautiful creature with a tail whacks USMC colonel Quaritch with a couple of well-placed arrows. Here on earth, the Gaian crowd are all devotees of the Man-Made Global Warming Cult, which this last week, in the world of the real, fulfilled its basic mission of smoothing the way for the renaissance of nuclear power, with Obama announcing last Tuesday, February 16, – see Karl Grossman’s useful piece on this site last week - that his administration is moving ahead on $8.3 billion in federal government loan guarantees to build new nuclear plants.

“My budget proposes tripling the loan guarantees we provide to help finance safe, clean nuclear facilities,” Obama proclaimed on Tuesday, referring to a DOE plan which would add $36 billion and bring the loan guarantee fund to $54.5. The $8.3 billion in loan guarantees is to go toward the Southern Company of Atlanta constructing two nuclear power reactors in Burke, Georgia. These are to be AP1000 nuclear power plants designed by the Westinghouse nuclear division (now owned by Toshiba) although in October the designs were rejected by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission as likely being unable to withstand events like tornadoes and earthquakes.
Yes, Obama did denounce the dangers of nuclear power on the campaign trail. And yes, he has always been in receipt of hefty campaign funds from the nuclear industry. The huge nuke corporation Exelon donated $US200,000 to Obama's 2008 election campaign and his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, and prime political advisor David Axelrod, have links to the company. And yes, on February 1, the Obama administration unveiled a budget in which both of the University of California’s weapons labs would receive huge boosts in government funding. The proposed funding increase of 23 per cent at Los Alamos would be the facility's largest since 1944. Much of that funding is for a new factory to produce plutonium bomb cores, the explosive triggers of modern thermo-nuclear warheads, for the purpose of outfitting the first new nukes to be developed since the end of the Cold War.

You can trace the hand of the nuclear power lobby in the confection of the global warming scare as far back as the 1970s. It’s been a four-decade push which took a giant step towards fruition last Tuesday. A quarter of a century ago, nuclear power was dead in this country, so far as new plant construction as concerned. In the wake of Obama’s announcement last week, there were some bleats from the greens, some pro forma yaps from the big Green organizations, but nothing with real teeth. The executives at these big green outfits knew long ago that this was a “bait and switch” exercise. Watch Obama festoon the requests for the new nuke plant licenses with all manner of pleasing drapery about “cap and trade” and so forth. It’s meaningless.
The camel is in the tent and if you look down, there’s another camel’s nose coming through. On Thursday February 18, Obama formally signed into law the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, an admittedly non-binding presidential commission on entitlements and the deficit. The air is thick with Obamian self congratulation about Doing the Right Thing, whatever the political cost. The line from the Democratic strategists is that this is all mere positioning for the fall elections and in due course the Commission will fire off a couple of blanks and then quit the stage of history.

What does the president really think about cutting the social safety net? As I remarked last week, To ask which is the “real” Obama is to drift towards the illusion of thinking there is one – as opposed to an infinitely mutable organism, endlessly adapting to political circumstance, with an eye eternally cocked to the main chance. Nonetheless, everything Obama has done so far suggests that by philosophical disposition and political instinct he’s a neoliberal eager to please the elites and can thus be counted on, when the chips are down, to do the wrong thing. After the second camel’s nose could well come the unmistakable hump of a bipartisan compromise, eroding basic social protections and delighting Wall Street.

There’s a gift for the grandchildren! Retirement postponed to 72, and benefits slashed. Hunker down in your shanty next to the new nuclear power plant and spend your last remaining dollars on the mandatory health insurance policy. Thank you, President Obama.

my brush with social rev planning

2010-02-11T23:13:00.000-08:00

ahhh, the year rolls along sluggish and discontent. new experiences with the commie pacifists deals me a new social phobia. the overtly accepting nature of these half-assed enablers terrifies me. every under privileged person's attempt at creative expression is rewarded the obligatory 'awesome!!' or 'thanks for sharing that!!' beyond patronizing, they've gone crazy and, it seems to me, that they don't care anymore. that's where the 'street spirit' and similar atrocities come from... bad writing, bad editing, no readership and something that legitimizes people that clearly need some real help into spending their whole day out on the street. keep your newspaper, man. here's a dollar and get drunk! fuck that job! most people alleviate some burden when giving these people a dollar. if i had the money, i'd give em each twenty bucks, tell em to recycle the papers somewhere out of sight and enjoy the rest of their day...

i'm a believer in clear statements. like: 'we're fucked.' or: 'i don't believe you should aim for a career in acting.' or: 'dude, don't try to learn a second language, learn to correctly speak your native english first.' don't try! don't try!! fucking do it... i've been around a significant amount of 'community organizers' lately, attending a homeless and poor people's art event, then the obligatory self-congratulations orgy. everyone seemed to believe that a communist revolution is around the corner, with the self righteous meek in the lead and the petty bourgeois academics trailing along, trying to keep everyone in ideological line. that was essentially the topic of the evening. i went straight for the strong drink. i came back just as the joint was being passed around, and armed with the courage of warm cognac and a brush with a pretty, young fellow reveller, i told the crowd that the time was ripe for a dictatorship! a communist dictatorship! instant change, overnight! all wants satiated, all needs met, all boredom amused, all antagonisms discharged! a central committee horizontally administered! a thriving black barter market to keep the weed, peep shows, and fight clubs going! but, most important of all, a revolving, but strong dictator, alternating gender roles weekly.

after some hour and a half of ruckus, i quietly slipped out. i was opposed on all counts, mostly because there just isn't any room for humor in serious consciousness raising circles. sensing i was half serious didn't help my isolated position in the 'struggle.' ahhh, back to the drawing board.

i'm back living in the east bay after this weekend, on the heels of a hot job lead, and a room with a view of a lemon tree...

new year scandals

2010-01-19T21:31:00.000-08:00

from juan cole's informed comment:

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Top Ten Counter-Terrorism Scandals 2010

The new year is not very old, but several recent revelations cast the the US fight against al-Qaeda (a tiny if deadly fraternity of a couple thousand fanatics spread in dozens of countries) in a bad light, if not to say a scandalous one. The entire premise of combating al-Qaeda as though it were an enemy army, using the Pentagon as the lead agency, while simultaneously militarizing the CIA, needs to be questioned. But so too do a lot of other premises about a so-called American 'Long War' with parts of the Muslim world, including drone strikes, secret bases, and torture. Worst of all, embarrassing revelations are coming out about damaging or even criminal actions and policies that can only harm any genuine counter-terrorism program.

1. Evidence is surfacing, according to Scott Horton writing in Harper's, that the supposed group suicide of three prisoners at Guantanamo in summer of 2006 may have in fact been murder--that is, they may have died of asphyxiation during aggressive interrogation that involved stuffing rags in their throats to cut off air. The explosive allegations may put further pressure on President Obama to fulfill his pledge to close the prison.

2. The FBI falsely invoked terrorism emergencies 2000 times between 2002 and 2006 to engage in illegal phone wiretapping of Americans without obtaining a warrant. The agency was using a provision of the PATRIOT act, which Bush administration officials had assured Congress would never be used for ordinary domestic cases.

3. The FBI photoshopped the face of leftist Spanish parliamentarian Gaspar Llamazares, combining it with the features of Usama Bin Laden, to produce a supposed portrait of what the aging terrorist now looks like. Spain was furious and the whole incident spoke of amateurism and stupidity in an area, counter-terrorism, where neither is desirable. Hint to the FBI: Usama Bin Laden has not produced a video message since October 2004. We may conclude that he is either badly disfigured by a strike on his position that almost succeeded, or that he is dead. You can't project his appearance forward with photoshop usefully either way.

4. George W. Bush claimed that he had misspoken when he called his 'war on terror' a 'crusade.' But it turns out that the Michigan company that makes rifle sights for the US military inscribes them with Bible verses. The capture of the US Air Force Academy by Christian fundamentalists is worrisome enough, but a Military-Evangelical Complex is truly frightening.

5. The Iraqi government that came to power under the auspices of George W. Bush is spearheading a class action suit against the Xe (then known as Blackwater) mercenary corporation for injuries its security men inflicted on Iraqis. Xe, headed by militant fundamentalist Christian, is a prime Pentagon contractor, which replicates the work of GIs but charges 12 times as much for it. The Iraqis were furious when a government case against Blackwater mercenaries for shooting up Nisour Square in Baghdad and killing over a dozen civilians collapsed because of prosecutorial misbehavior. Based on this good recommendation, the US military has brought Xe mercenaries to Pakistan where they are allegedly involved in US drone attacks on that country, further winnning hearts and minds.

6. Worse, the Pentagon is considering bringing thousands more Blackwater security men to Afghanistan. The great Rep. Jan Schakowski (D-Ill.) is introducing a bill banning the use of such mercernary firms.

7. Der Spiegel has revealed yet another CIA plot to kidnap a citizen of an allied country on suspicion of involvement in terrorism (a suspicion years of investigation by German authorities was unable later to support). Allies don't take kindly to this sort of thing. An Italian judge recently convicted 23 CIA operatives in absentia for carrying out a kidnapping in Italy.

8. It has been revealed that then British foreign minister Jack Straw wrote a letter to PM Tony Blair in 2002 warning him that a war on Iraq would be illegal, that many Labor MPs would oppose it, that Saddam was not connected to 9/11 or al-Qaeda, that Iraq likely had no weapons of mass destruction of any importance, and that there was no guarantee that the condition of Iraqis in the wake of such a war would be an improvement on their situation in 2002. The letter shows that Blair committed to the war at Crawford, TX in April 2002, even though he later repeatedly told his own MPs that no decision had been made. The letter vindicates the 'Downing Street memo' from a few months later in which the head of British intelligence complained that the decision to go to war had been made and that the intelligence was being fixed around the policy. It also shows that the mantra of the Bush administration, that all US allies had made the same errors of judgment about Iraq as had Bush-Cheney, is simply incorrect. The British foreign ministry knew better.

9. The Obama administration has been forced by an ACLU suit to release the names of the prisoners it holds at Bagram base in Afghanistan. The Obama administration maintains that these individual have no human rights at all, though some are scheduled to be tried in military tribunals. It is hard to see why Guantanamo is bad but Bagram is good. There have been allegations of torture of inmates, including of teenagers. The whole facility and its prisoners are to be turned by the US over to the Afghan government later this year.

10. The Obama administration's initial reaction to the underpants bomber was flatfooted and included forbidding children to hold teddy bears on their laps during the last hour of a flight, as well as renewed drone strikes and deeper involvement in Yemen, on the grounds that there are 300 al-Qaeda members in that craggy, inaccessible and tribally-organized country. Al-Qaeda has dug trapping pits for the US to fall into as it pursues its small, nimble foe, and the US keeps lumbering into them. The prospect of a US troop presence in Yemen provoked its council of clerics to threaten to call a jihad or holy war on the US if any attempt were made to occupy the country. The US attempted to allay such concerns with a firm statement it would not send troops, but not before the Yemenis had already gotten their backs up and anti-Americanism increased.

bore to blitz

2010-01-13T23:39:00.000-08:00

i just saw the flaming lips documentary called fearless freaks. they're right, the punks have got to eat the acid, hold on to a day job and explore the possibilities of life before some dumb housewife driving and talking on a blackberry takes em out splat. a punk is indistinguishable from anyone anyway. till they get sloppy, arrested, acts mean to the real criminals and gets fucked by some brute in a corporate/public holding facility. it's where the name came from for christ's sake.

i'm still brushing up on my history. i can't speed read the national archives or the russell archives, or the foia request trapeze set. i'll leave that to the mental compartmentalizers and read their books, thank you very much. god, i realize how little i 'learned' in school. forget 'school,' just a few months ago i was swimming in paranoid 'v for vendetta' realities, which proved to be just a change-of-the-guard-waltz the democrats do every time they emerge victorious: 'we're ready to kill! we're ready to squeeze labor, women, racial minorities, vulnerable populations and sure, the babies! we're ready to make more billionaires! come on in! sorry about all the bullshit on the ol' campaign, we remember how much you've all shelled out! oh, and we're ready to nuke someone! geez, show us a dam, hospital, wedding party, some grieving widow, some orphans. wham! we're fucking crazy, we'll spend more money than rumsfeld, and ask for more!'

i forgot about that. i was pretty young and ignorant in 92/93, when some ignorant southern democrat fucked anything that moved, sent a bunch of military equipment to all the bad men around, destroyed mexico's economy, militarized the border, killed well-fare, killed a million iraqis, tried to censor music...

the possibilities have shifted, that's true, but that's only because i slept on my promises. mostly promises to myself, sometimes these might have encountered others. friends, lovers, and foes don't have to guess. let's take it all in, and blow it all out. enjoy the new year...

tid bits

2009-12-11T23:21:00.000-08:00

alex cockburn writes in counterpunch:

Obama was in peak form as self-righteous blowhard, proclaiming that “America cannot insist that others follow the rules of the road if we refuse to follow them ourselves. That is why I ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed. And that is why I have reaffirmed America’s commitment to abide by the Geneva Conventions. We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. And we honor those ideals by upholding them not just when it is easy, but when it is hard.”

As his words hang in the air, captives of the Empire are being kidnapped and rendered to Bagram and other dungeons and tortured, all the while with no legal standing as “enemy combatants”. Stand naked in a cold cell, waiting for the next beating from your interrogators and listen to Obama being piped through the PA at max volume, right after ‘Born in the USA’ (sorry, Birthers): “We do not have to think that human nature is perfect for us to still believe that the human condition can be perfected. We do not have to live in an idealized world to still reach for those ideals that will make it a better place… So let us reach for the world that ought to be -- that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls.”

McCain loves the speech. Sarah Palin loves the speech. But that doesn’t mean Obama’s Oslo address was a Republican speech. When it comes to invoking “just wars” Republican presidents can go through the motions, but they haven’t got their hearts in it. Who needs to talk about justice as you drop high explosive and scrawl Death to Ragheads on the side of the bombs? When you want a just war, whistle up a Democrat who can talk with a straight face about installing democracy in the Balkans. After eight years of Bushian crudities the Empire needed an upgrade in its salespitch, which is why we have Obama. Back at the time of the medieval crusades, the Western kings used to take Holy Communion from their Archbishops before heading east to battle Islam and scour the land for booty. I thought the ceremony in that austere hall in Oslo was a straight lineal descent – as Obama accepted his wafer, in the form of the prize -- in this modern age a substantial check – and then pledged his holy war.

and he's right, obama is a great pitch man. his souring rhetoric is the kind of empty performance we're all accustomed to, from our education system to anything we see on tv. so it goes...

polls...

2009-12-09T20:09:00.000-08:00

republicans warm up to obama's imperial policies... according to a new york times/cbs poll, republicans increase their support of afghanistan's nato occupation, due to the new troop escalation. while democrats, republicans, and independents still overwhelmingly concerned about jobs and the economy. the time's leading story here.

a pew research center poll of the council on foreign relations members was also published recently. obama's policies are given preference to the last administration. not surprising as most of the obama administration is made up of cfr members. the poll contrasts 642 cfr members' answers to 2000 members of the general public. incidentally, not a single major us newspaper thought this poll newsworthy.

ahh, the green fest

2009-11-18T00:23:00.000-08:00

so i went to this party amid disaster. i wanted to see laura flanders and caroline casey. no one else was really telling any good stories. no one really had any appeal. even to me, a hard core leftist. it's easy to please me. right?

i cringed at all of the paper napkins, fliers, maps, sign-up sheets, and other soon to be discarded shit floating around. everyone who was in a leadership position was over 50. the luminaries were congratulating themselves to no fanfare. the green yuppies brought their kids, which was a hopeful sign. since the 70's, the environmentalists had worked hard to bring their fight to an international audience. great. anyone in the obama administration listening?

if the liberals are gonna have a flea market for green trendy wares, then fine, let's have it. but a festival is a celebration. signifying the end of some godawful struggle, the reaffirmation of some sacred vows, or a beginning to some new mission/season/whatever.... the kinds of proposals or potential solutions being offered were, well, old hat. i agree with all of them: reusable materials for building, clothing, and manufacturing, local sustainable agriculture, local food banks and community centers, environmental protection, transparent food safety, and de-funding the military in order to fund infrastructure jobs. these have always been the proposals... for how long now? let's admit some defeat for once. and keep pushing and living these green lives we're all proclaiming. and keep the marketplace booths outside.

the new york times had a booth, i couldn't wait to ask them how it felt being owned by a mexican billionaire gangster. she told me they were the best in press journalism, and i asked if she could tell the me the name of their chief white house correspondent. she couldn't. i'll rant and rave and begrudge and decry, and someone will always invariably ask: so what would be your ideal? jesus, i think to myself, that's soooo tired. make your impact, your way, try to make sense of the world, and don't sell me a bag of goods. unless i could get it from the local library.

2009-11-10T00:32:00.000-08:00

patrick cockburn reports:

In disputes in Washington and London about sending more troops it is seldom mentioned that Afghans are against the deployment. Contrary to western plans, just 18 per cent of Afghans want more US and NATO/ISAF forces in Afghanistan according to an opinion poll carried out earlier this year by the BBC, ABC News and ARD. A much greater number of Afghans, 44 per cent, want a decrease in foreign forces in Afghanistan.

In the light of these figures, it is hardly surprising that the Taliban have been able to win support. The cruelty of their rule before 2001 is becoming a distant memory. They are successfully portraying themselves as the defender of the country against foreign occupation. Matthew P. Hoh, the senior American civilian representative in Zabul province east of Kandahar, resigned last week because he had become convinced that the US military should not be in Afghanistan. A former US Marine officer who served in Iraq, he says in his resignation letter that the US has joined in one side in a 35-year-old civil war between the traditional Pashtun community and its enemies. “The United States military presence in Afghanistan greatly contributes to the legitimacy and strategic message of the Pashtun insurgency,” he says. “In a like manner our backing of the Afghan government in its current form continues to distance the government from the people.” He says that most of the insurgents fight again the presence of foreign soldiers and not for the Taliban.

What is true for the Americans in Zabul is true for the British in Helmand. It may seem to military commanders on the ground that, with more troops, they could hold more ground and send out more patrols. This is hardly surprising. Throughout history generals have believed that they are a few thousand troops short of victory. But Afghans, who have long experience of war, think that more foreign troops means greater violence and more dead and wounded Afghans. Support for the Taliban is highest in those areas where there have been US or NATO shelling or air strikes inflicting civilian casualties. In other words the Taliban’s best recruiting sergeants are the American and British armies.

2009-10-28T01:54:00.000-07:00

anyone reading this?

biking with yer mouth open and yer balls out

2009-10-28T00:30:00.000-07:00

god, i feel like i must say something. so, i'm taking this series of adult enrichment courses, and i'm onto my newest and last one; when i break out. i've got my money for the course in my hand. here in adult education, you paying fucking cash, and on the first day too. i don't need to 'learn' excel. i'm out of here. the one girl in class who's within my age group (which, by the way is expanding all of the time; as i check out all of the 40 something secretaries in the room) is seeming to flirt eye and dodge. not now sweetheart. i'm through with classroom crush and neighbor crush. i'm done with microsoft software classes. i get on my bike swiftly. through the misty south san francisco mix use trail i gallop. i've got a seriously fast bike right now. sometimes when i pedal really hard going through these neighborhoods, i feel the gaze of suburbans on me as i pass. if they only knew what i was running away from. would they join in? the climb on chestnut to hillside in south city is always windy, even a few month ago in the middle of the day. it's getting late now. then the old carnage of colma and daly city. cemeteries, liquor stores, nurseries, and condos. death everywhere. it's nice with shorts on at 25 miles an hour. the scenery isn't much through west portal till you get to the mission. even thought the traffic lights are all wrong, and not helping anyone, valencia is great. it's got all the violently pretty girls, the tragically hip dumps and miles and miles of bikers. the mission is still where i feel exploited, safe and adventurous. where people have charm, charms and are charmed. elsewhere, i feel what cedrars wrote about. a hole. the need to get rubbed off. i feel like screaming: i know what gets me off! don't we all? the people who come out to the mission know. i've spent nights in donut shops here, totally drunk, writing scribbles i couldn't even later decipher. i've spoken to cops at length about arcane subjects, forgot where i was going and started on new tangents. well, it's important that we agreed to disagree. the city goes on, as if i'm biking in place. downtown, where all the beautiful women swarm till the stock market closes at 1pm pacific time. i see old ghosts, people i used to know. we stop and chat. i buy the coffee, they give me the benefit of the doubt, even though i'm dressed like a baby (like my friend asa tells me). people working downtown still want what we've been trained to want. 'i'm gonna sacrifice my time, my best years. treat me right.' give me a tasty $15 drink at cesar's. a fabulous spa treatment (i wouldn't know where). access to hot singles, or if not single then hot couples who have fun. if butch, then a dissatisfied gay man. if gay, then a wide eyed straight boy. everyone's looking for something out here. not an easy option. for most of the bay, it's modestly priced wine and a tv show. i'm riding along the embarcadero, as people continue to stream past. stretch limos, followed by audis, and inline skaters with headphones on. the preachers with testament. random chatter and banter. you are far away from me. my frozen friends. as i must come back to the place i left.

social science laisons

2009-10-16T22:12:00.000-07:00

david price writes in the counterpunch newsletter:

“While political science was the academic discipline, which the wars of the twentieth century drew upon, the asymmetrical wars of the twenty-first century now look toward anthropology with hopes of finding models of culture, or data on specific cultures, to be conquered or to be used in counterinsurgency operations. ..

“The counterinsurgency program generating the greatest friction among anthropologists is the Human Terrain Systems (HTS) – a program with over 400 employees, originally operating through private contractors and now in the process of being taken over by the U.S. Army. Human Terrain embeds anthropologists with military units to ease the occupation and conquest of Iraqi and Afghanis – with plans to extend these operations in Africa through expanding units with AFRICOM. Some HTS social scientists are armed, others choose not to. In the last two years, three HTS social scientists have been killed in the course of their work, and HTS member Don Ayala recently pled guilty in U.S. District Court to killing the Afghan (whom Ayala shot in the head-execution style while the victim was detained with his hands cuffed behind him) who had attacked THS social scientist Paula Loyd…

“Supporters of HTS claim the program uses embedded social scientists to help reduce “kinetic engagements,” or unnecessary violent contacts with the populations they encounter. The idea is to use these social scientists to interact with members of the community, creating liaison relationships between occupiers and occupied, as well as using HTS’s social scientists’ cultural knowledge to reduce misunderstandings that can lead to unnecessarily violent interactions.”

headlines

2009-10-13T11:07:00.001-07:00

a piece on where to start looking for terrorist havens.

headlines, theirs and mine

2009-10-06T21:00:00.000-07:00

robert fisk's latest on world moving away from dollar reserves.

pepe escobar writing in asia times:

United States President Barack Obama - now running three wars (Iraq and the AfPak combo) - demanded that Iran (which is not at war with anybody) demonstrate "its peaceful intentions or be held accountable to international standards and international law".

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu announced to the UN, "the greatest threat facing the world today is the marriage between religious fundamentalism and the weapons of mass destruction". Impervious to irony, Netanyahu obviously forgot that Iran - like Iraq in 2003 - has no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Israel not only has WMDs, but still refuses to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) or allow its weapons to be inspected, as Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan rushed to clarify. As for religious fundamentalism, Zionism is more than a match to Iran's Shi'itism.

the rise of the student sex column:

Within a few years, the sex column had spread to campuses across the country, becoming the "most publicized, electrifying, and divisive phenomena in student journalism," in the words of Dan Reimold, leading expert on the student newspaper sex column.
Reimold estimates that "during any given semester more than 200 sex and dating columns are being published in U.S. student newspapers, magazines, and online outlets.... What's most important here is perspective. In the mid-nineties, the number of student sex columns: zero."

dirty hippies at hardly strictly still sell fake acid...the music is still pretty bad...the crowd bored, looking on...no reprieve, no overcoming, sight unseen. to be continued...

change?

2009-09-23T23:02:00.000-07:00

the winds of change.

a wish for america to get beyond an empty performance. obama's been overexposed and his voice is loud. yawn. the hard left are scrambling. not one thing they proposed, along with a few progressives in d.c., has even been up for debate. freezing israeli settlements in the occupied territories? sorry. medicare for all? not even a public option. stop the insane military budget? an INCREASE in military spending, the most expensive in history. scrapping eastern european nuclear weapons system? no, just sidelined by a larger armada of nuclear armed warships in south and northeastern europe. reining in military contractors in iraq and afghanistan? no, they now outnumber nato troops; completely subsidized by the us taxpayer through no bid contracts through the dept of treasury (plus the kickbacks, the waste, the corruption, scandals, incompetence. joy joy). how's our post race president doing on racism? people of color who could afford prime loans were 9 times more likely to get stuck with subprime loans as their white counterparts. which spells out a massive land theft from the black and latino middle class. racism is pretty much served daily on cable news. almost all of (a democrat lead) congress took away acorn's federal funding.

obama's losing his overwhelming approval (down to 55%) faster than any post war president. makes sense to me. 20% of americans say the rapture is around the corner. yawn. i say read a paper. we, lazy depoliticized atomized multi cultural compassionate liberals are the endgame. the terror i feel in knowing that i might be right, that the slim margin of power and privilege american liberals have may mean survival or destruction of our planet is CRAZY.

in comparison, i could look the judeo christian rapture/2012/end of times/armageddon a thousand times straight in the eyes, with a yawn.

2009-09-11T00:22:00.000-07:00

a snippet of a new noam chomsky piece from his website:

"In July 2009, the US and Colombia concluded a secret deal to permit the US to use seven military bases in Colombia. The official purpose is to counter narcotrafficking and terrorism, "but senior Colombian military and civilian officials familiar with negotiations told The Associated Press that the idea is to make Colombia a regional hub for Pentagon operations," AP reported. There are reports that the agreement provides Colombia with privileged access to US military supplies. Colombia had already become the leading recipient of US military aid (apart from Israel-Egypt, a separate category). Colombia has had by far the worst human rights record in the hemisphere since the Central American wars of the 1980s wound down. The correlation between US aid and human rights violations has long been noted by scholarship

"AP also cited an April 1999 document of the U.S. Air Mobility Command, which proposes that the Palanquero base in Colombia could become a "cooperative security location" (CSL) from which "mobility operations could be executed." The report noted that from Palanquero, "Nearly half the continent can be covered by a C-17 (military transport) without refueling." This could form part of "a global en route strategy," which "helps achieve the regional engagement strategy and assists with the mobility routing to Africa." For the present, "the strategy to place a CSL at Palanquero should be sufficient for air mobility reach on the South American continent," the document concludes, but it goes on to explore options for extending the routing to Africa with additional bases.

"On August 28, UNASUR met in Bariloche (Argentina) to consider the military bases. After intense internal debate, the final declaration stressed that South America must be kept as "a land of peace," and that foreign military forces must not threaten the sovereignty or integrity of any nation of the region. It instructed the South American Defense Council to investigate the document of the Air Mobility Command. Problems of implementation were left to subsequent meetings.

"The official purpose of the bases did not escape criticism. President Morales was particularly bitter, with his background in a coca growers union. He said he witnessed U.S. soldiers accompanying Bolivian troops who fired at his union members. "So now we're narcoterrorists," he continued. "When they couldn't call us communists anymore, they called us subversives, and then traffickers, and since the September 11 attacks, terrorists.'' He warned that "the history of Latin America repeats itself."

"Morales observed that the ultimate responsibility for Latin America's violence lies with U.S. consumers of illegal drugs: "If UNASUR sent troops to the United States to control consumption, would they accept it? Impossible!"

"Morales's rhetorical question can be extended. Suppose that UNASUR, or China, or many others claimed the right to establish military bases in Mexico to implement their programs to eradicate tobacco in the US, by aerial fumigation in North Carolina and Kentucky, interdiction by sea and air forces, and dispatch of inspectors to the US to ensure it was eradicating this poison -- which is far more lethal than cocaine or heroin, incomparably more than cannabis. The toll of tobacco use, including "passive smokers" who are seriously affected though they do not use tobacco themselves, is truly fearsome, overwhelming the lethal effects of other dangerous substances.

"The idea that outsiders should interfere with the production and distribution of these lethal substances is plainly unthinkable. The fact that the US justification for its drug programs abroad is accepted as plausible, even regarded as worthy of discussion, is yet another illustration of the depth of the imperial mentality.

"Even if we adopt the imperial premises, it is hard to take seriously the announced goals of the "drug war," which persists despite extensive evidence that other measures -- prevention and treatment -- are far more cost-effective, and despite the persistent failure of the resort to criminalization at home and violence and chemical warfare abroad.

"Last February, the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy issued its analysis of the US "war on drugs" in past decades. The Commission, led by former Latin American presidents Fernando Cardoso (Brazil), Ernesto Zedillo (Mexico), and César Gavíria (Colombia), concluded that the drug war had been a complete failure and urged a drastic change of policy, away from forceful measures at home and abroad and towards much less costly and more effective measures. Their report had no detectable impact, just as earlier studies and the historical record have had none. That again reinforces the natural conclusion that the "drug war" -- like the "war on crime" and "the war on terror" -- is pursued for reasons other than the announced goals, which are revealed by the consequences.

"Establishing US military bases in Colombia is only one part of a much broader effort to restore Washington's capacity for military intervention. There has been a sharp increase in US military aid and training of Latin American officers, focusing on light infantry tactics to combat "radical populism" -- a concept that sends shivers up the spine in the Latin American context. Military training is being shifted from the State Department to the Pentagon, eliminating human rights and democracy conditionalities under congressional supervision, which has always been weak, but was at least a deterrent to some of the worst abuses. The US Fourth Fleet, disbanded in 1950, was reactivated in 2008, shortly after Colombia's invasion of Ecuador, with responsibility for the Caribbean, Central and South America, and the surrounding waters. The official announcement defines its "various operations" to "include counter-illicit trafficking, Theater Security Cooperation, military-to-military interaction and bilateral and multinational training."

"Militarization of South America is a component of much broader global programs, as the "global en route strategy" indicates. In Iraq, there is virtually no information about the fate of the huge US military bases, so they are presumably being maintained for force projection. The immense city-with-in-a-city embassy in Baghdad not only remains but its cost is to rise to $1.8 billion a year, from an estimated $1.5 billion this year. The Obama administration is also constructing megaembassies that are completely without precedent in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The US and UK are demanding that the US military base in Diego Garcia, used heavily in recent US wars after Britain expelled the inhabitants, be exempted from the planned African nuclear-free-weapons zone, just as U.S.bases are exempted from similar efforts in the Pacific to reduce the nuclear threat. Not even on the agenda, of course, is a NFWZ in the Middle East, which would mitigate, perhaps end, the alleged Iranian threat. The enormous global support for this move, including a large majority of Americans, is as usual irrelevant.

"In short, moves towards "a world of peace" do not fall within the "change you can believe in," to borrow Obama's campaign slogan."

liberal lion? give me a break...

2009-08-30T00:46:00.000-07:00

alex cockburn on his site counterpunch:

"The deadly attacks on the working class and on organized labor are Ted Kennedy’s true monument. But as much as his brothers Jack and Bobby he was adept at persuading the underdogs that he was on their side. If it hadn’t been for Kennedy, a lot more people would have health coverage . In 1971 Nixon, heading into his relection bid, put up the legislative ancestor of all recent Democratic proposals, but Kennedy shot it down, preferring to have this as his campaign plank sometime in the political future.

"After reelection, Nixon did promote a health plan in his 1974 State of the Union speech, with a call for universal access to health insurance. He followed up with his Comprehensive Health Insurance Act on February 6, 1974. Nixon said his plan would build on existing employer-sponsored insurance plans and would provide government subsidies to the self-employed and small businesses to ensure universal access to health insurance. Kennedy went through the motions of cooperation, but in the end the AFL-CIO, with a covert nudge from Kennedy, killed the bill because Nixon was vanishing under the Watergate scandal and the Democrats did not want to hand the President and the Republicans one of their signature issues. Now the Republicans scream “socialism” at exactly what Nixon proposed and Kennedy killed off 38 years ago, in 1971.

"To this day there are deluded souls who argue that Jack was going to pull US troops out of Vietnam and that is why he was killed; that Bobby, who worked for Roy Cohn and supervised a "Murder Inc" in the Caribbean, was really and truly on the side of the angels; that Ted was the mighty champion of the working people, even though he helped deliver them into the inferno of neoliberalism.

"By his crucial endorsement last year he helped give them Obama too, now holidaying six miles from Chappaquiddick, on Martha's Vineyard, another salesman for the inferno. But because his mishaps were so dramatic, few remember quite how toxic his political “triumphs” were for those who now foolishly mourn him as their lost leader. "

what's working you up?

2009-08-18T22:11:00.000-07:00

massive investigative report on fiji water by anna lenzer in new mother jones will have your head spinning.

from david michael green's new article:

"Will healthcare be universal in America, bringing this country into line with the standards of what every other industrialized democracy has practiced for the better part of a century? No. Will we massively increase the amount of actual health care we provide while eliminating the incredible bloat in costs of our predatory, special-interest oriented system by adopting the obvious no-brainer choice of the single-payer model? Fat chance. Will a real public option even be created, which might instantly show up the incredible profiteering and waste in the insurance industry, while simultaneously giving lie to the endless rhetoric about private sector efficiency and government bungling? No, there won’t (but President Obama wants you to know he appreciates your asking). The Capitulation Administration signaled this week that it is giving up on that as well. Because of Republican opposition, of course. You remember those guys don’t you? The folks who have such small minorities in Congress that they can’t even muster forty percent of Senate votes to block consideration of legislation by filibuster?"

"That’s who Obama is caving to. That’s who’s in charge. It seems that we regular folks are in the process of getting a fresh education about the way American politics really works. Evidently, there’s a new algorithm I wasn’t aware of. It goes like this: When Republicans control Congress and the White House, they rule. When Democrats control Congress and the White House... Republicans still rule. Okay. Well at least we know how it works. And it’s not necessarily all bad news, either. No point in fussing with those messy elections anymore!"

"Meanwhile, one needn’t dig deep into the bowels of the thousands of pages of legalese contained within the five separate health-care proposals now making their way through Congress in order to figure out whether they contain good news or not. You can tell a lot about somebody or something just by the company they keep. Suffice it to say that both the insurance and pharmaceutical industries are now spending hundreds of millions of dollars running ads on television in favor of healthcare “reform”. I can hardly think of a handier or more pure litmus test for determining whether this is good legislation or not. If those guys are for it, and especially if they’re spending millions to make it happen, it’s a very safe bet that I’m against it. And if those industries are for it, it’s a very safe bet that the deal is they get rich and we get nothing. Except maybe poor. And sick."

more of his writing here.

quick thought. you thing if some real pinkos dressed in zapatista garb, singing militant chants, and visibly armed to the teeth came to bush's public avents, they wouldn't be arrested and held in a black hole somewhere?

2009-08-17T00:20:00.000-07:00

alex cockburn writing in counterpunch, here:

Typically, Democratic presidents like Clinton and now Obama commit during their campaigns for some kind of “reform,” usually meaning some pledge that the “disgrace” of 45 million or so uninsured Americans will end. In 1993 the Clintons tried “health reform”– a monstrosity that I described at the time as looking like a collaboration between Mondrian and Jackson Pollock - and the insurance industry and lobbyists ate it for breakfast. The radical reformers argue for a national insurance scheme, like Canada’s or the NHS, where the state can use its purchasing weight to drive down drug prices, set rates, clean up the system. This plan go back to the Health Service Act introduced by Ron Dellums in Congress on May 4, 1977, providing for comprehensive , community-based health services with progressive national financing. The Dellums bill had been under discussion since the early 1970s when the Medical Committee for Human Rights proposed a set of principles for a national health plan.

It’s not going to happen, any more than Obama will nationalize the banks and tell householders to repudiate their mortgages. The insurance industry, the drug industry, the real estate and finance sector are the most powerful forces in the country. They’ve just got Obama to commit $23 trillion to their enduring welfare. They’re not going to surrender the treasure trove known as healthcare without serious blood-letting on the barricades. They own the Congress. Men like former Democratic senate leader Tom Daschle spring to do their bidding. So, Obama finally produced a timid compromise, whereby uninsured people would be herded under various health insurance umbrellas with “a public component.” Even if the health industry’s hired man, Senator Max Baucus, had not deep-sixed the public component, the insurance industry could swallow it like a python swallowing a field mouse. Though Obama sometimes confides that the public component of his plan is the springboard to full-bore single payer national health, this is transparent fantasy. In present political conditions, the publicly insured component would soon become a ghetto, offering minimal care to the indigent, and gradually shriveled into some sort of punitive maintenance scheme.

whole foods op ed rant

2009-08-14T01:26:00.000-07:00

whole foods' ceo john mackey wrote an op ed in the washington post against obamacare. his beef is entitlements, and who's gonna pay for em. i say read that same newspaper moron. the rich are heavily undertaxed in the us. i say fuck obamacare, it's an unreadable insurance-pharma-hospital industry disaster area/orgy.

the government has purchasing power. it buys trucks, building materials, paperclips, christmas trees, cell phones, professional killers, shirts, hats, name tags, guns, and sometimes newspeople for real fucking cheap. using tax payer money.

buy me some root extract, fix my right shoulder with therapy, give me acupressure and puncture, some new teeth, a therapist i can unload on, and buy me some chinese herbs. then tax me for being happier.

obama drinks bud light...and other sad realities

2009-08-12T00:48:00.000-07:00

powerful men uncomfortably discussing race, while drinking crap beer.

think we live in a sexist world? look yourself in the mirror. helen boyd found some fascinating things about herself (and the murky coordinates we call society) after her husband transitioned.

harvard university launches the harvard yard, a new menswear line. it's what all the future dictators, commercial attaches, and counterinsurgency advisers are wearing. keepin' it classy boys.

article from mother jones

2009-08-04T21:48:00.000-07:00

How You Finance Goldman Sachs’ Profits

An insider’s view of Wall Street’s rebound.

—By Nomi Prins

This is perhaps the most important thing I learned over my years working on Wall Street, including as a managing director at Goldman Sachs: Numbers lie. In a normal time, the fact that the numbers generated by the nation's biggest banks can't be trusted might not matter very much to the rest of us. But since the record bank profits we're now hearing about are essentially created by massive federal funding, perhaps it behooves us to dig beneath their data. On July 27, 10 congressmen, led by Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), did just that, writing a letter to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke questioning the Fed's role in Goldman's rapid return to the top of Wall Street.

To understand this particular giveaway, look back to September 21, 2008. It was a frenzied night for Goldman Sachs and the only other remaining major investment bank, Morgan Stanley. Their three main competitors were gone. Bear Stearns had been taken over by JPMorgan Chase in March, 2008, Lehman Brothers had just declared bankruptcy due to lack of capital, and Bank of America had been pushed to acquire Merrill Lynch because the firm didn't have enough cash to survive on its own. Anxious to avoid a similar fate, hat in hand, they came to the Fed for access to desperately needed capital. All they had to do was become bank holding companies to get it. So, without so much as clearing the standard five-day antitrust waiting period for such a change, the Fed granted their wish.

Bank holding companies (which all the biggest financial firms now are) come under the regulatory purview of the Fed, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the FDIC. The capital they keep in reserve in case of emergency (like, say, toxic assets hemorrhaging on their books, or credit derivatives trades not being paid) is supposed to be greater than investment banks'. That's the trade-off. You get access to federal assistance, you pony up more capital, and you take less risk.

Goldman didn't like the last part. It makes most of its money speculating, or trading. So it asked the Fed to be exempt from what's called the Market Risk Rules that bank holding companies adhere to when computing their risk.

Keep in mind that by virtue of becoming a bank holding company, Goldman received a total of $63.6 billion in federal subsidies (that we know about—probably more if the Fed were ever forced to disclose its $7.6 trillion of borrower details). There was the $10 billion it got from TARP (which it repaid), the $12.9 billion it grabbed from AIG's spoils—even though Goldman had stated beforehand that it was protected from losses incurred by AIG's free fall, and if that were the case, would not have needed that money, let alone deserved it. Then, there's the $29.7 billion it's used so far out of the $35 billion it has available, backed by the FDIC's Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program, and finally, there's the $11 billion available under the Fed's Commercial Paper Funding Facility.

Tactically, after bagging this bounty, Goldman asked the Fed, its new regulator, if it could use its old risk model to determine capital reserves. It wanted to use the model that its old investment bank regulator, the SEC, was fine with, called VaR, or value at risk. VaR pretty much allows banks to plug in their own parameters, and based on these, calculate how much risk they have, and thus how much capital they need to hold against it. VaR was the same lax SEC-approved risk model that investment banks such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers used, with the aforementioned results.

On February 5, 2009, the Fed granted Goldman's request. This meant that not only was Goldman getting big federal subsidies, but also that it could keep betting big without saving aside as much capital as the other banks. Using VaR gave Goldman more leeway to, well, accentuate the positive. Yes, Goldman is a more risk-prone firm now than it was before it got to play with our money.

Which brings us back to these recent quarterly earnings. Goldman posted record profits of $3.4 billion on revenues of $13.76 billion. More than 78 precent of those revenues came from its most risky division, the one that requires the most capital to operate, Trading and Principal Investments. Of those, the Fixed Income, Currency and Commodities (FICC) area within that division brought in a record $6.8 billion in revenues. That's the division, by the way, that I worked in and that Lloyd Blankfein managed on his way up the Goldman totem pole. (It's also the division that would stand to gain the most if Waxman's cap-and-trade bill passes.)

Since Goldman is trading big with our money, why not also use it to pay big bonuses? It's not like there are any strings attached. For the first half of 2009, Goldman set aside $11.4 billion for compensation—34 percent more than for the first half of 2008, keeping them on target for a record bonus year—even though they still owe the federal government $53.6 billion, a sum more than four times that bonus amount.

But capital is still key. Capital is the lifeblood that pumps through a financial organization. You can't trade without it. As of June 26, 2009, Goldman's total capital was $254 billion, but that included $191 billion in unsecured long-term borrowing (meaning money it had borrowed without putting up any collateral for it). On November 28, 2008 (4Q 2008), it had only $168 billion in unsecured long-term borrowing. Thus, its long-term unsecured debt jumped 14 percent. Though Goldman doesn't disclose exactly where all this debt comes from, given the $23 billion jump, we can only wonder whether some of it has come from government subsidies or the Fed's secret facilities.

Not only that, by virtue of how it's set up, most of Goldman's unsecured funding comes in through its parent company, Group Inc. (Think the top point of an umbrella with each spoke being a subsidiary.) This parent parcels that money out to Goldman's subsidiaries, some of which are regulated, some of which aren't. This means that even though Goldman is supposed to be regulated by the Fed and other agencies, it has unregulated elements receiving unsecured funding—just like before the crisis, but with more of our money involved.

As for JPMorgan Chase, its profit of $2.7 billion was up 36 percent for the second quarter of 2009 vs. the same quarter last year, but a lot of that also came from trading revenues, meaning its speculative endeavors are driving its profits. Over on the consumer side, the firm had to set aside nearly $30 billion in reserve for credit-related losses. Riding on its trading laurels, when its consumer business is still in deterioration mode, is not a recipe for stability, no matter how much cheering JPMorgan Chase's results got from Wall Street. Betting is betting.

Let's pause for some reflection: The bank "stars" made most of their money on speculation, got nearly $124 billion in government guarantees and subsidies between them over the past year and a half, yet saw continued losses in the credit products most affected by consumer credit problems. Both are setting aside top-dollar bonuses. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon mentioned that he's concerned about attracting talent, a translation for wanting to pay investment bankers big bucks—because, after all, they suffered so terribly last year, and he needs to stay competitive with his friends at Goldman. This doesn't add up to a really healthy scenario. It's more like bad déjà vu.

As a recent New York Times article (and many other publications in different words) said, "For the most part, the worst of the financial crisis seems to be over." Sure, the crisis may appear to be over because the major banks of Wall Street are speculating well with government subsidies. But that's a dangerous conclusion. It doesn't mean that finance firms could thrive without the artificial, public-funded assistance. And it certainly doesn't mean that consumers are any better off than they were before the crisis emerged. It's just that they didn't get the same generous subsidies.

Additional research by Clark Merrefield.

Nomi Prins is an economist and frequent contributor for Mother Jones. Her most recent book is It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bailouts, Bonuses, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street. To read more articles by Nomi Prins, click here.

oh, you know, more depressing links

2009-07-30T01:04:00.000-07:00

report from the ap regarding military linguist contractors.

the politics of appearance will always be with us. we just can't help ourselves. but let's throw some mud at the fashion aristocracy anyway. an article on 'lady mags' here.

and here's to newsweek, this week's 'you can't make this shit up' recipient. this time for their article suggesting obama take george w. bush to israel for the ol' 'good cop bad cop' routine. god i wish i was kidding, but you can read it here. read it. print it out and fact check it. i just read it for the fourth straight time. and i'm going to cry now.

why isn't thomas friedman getting sacked?

2009-07-29T00:21:00.000-07:00

friedman, the virtual state department rep who happens to reside at the new york times' foreign affairs desk, has some lesson to teach the 'children' of the middle east: its residents and the west's occupation forces.

here's a take on friedman's loose ignorance by belen fernandez.

mr. ishmael reed's 'post-race scholar yells racism'

2009-07-28T00:54:00.000-07:00

this article by ishmael reed is a beautiful angry read. it's written by someone who doesn't have a comfy editorial board to perch on, a dinner club to attend, or a bloated professor 'skip' gates to caress.

fuck yeah.

read it here.

empire's pashtun paranoia

2009-07-28T00:17:00.000-07:00

...the conclusion of juan cole's recent essay:

"Today, we are again hearing that the Waziris and the Mahsuds are dire threats to Western civilization. The tribal struggle for control of obscure villages in the foothills of the Himalayas is being depicted as a life-and-death matter for the North Atlantic world. Again, there is aerial surveillance, bombing, artillery fire, and -- this time -- displacement of civilians on a scale no British viceroy ever contemplated.

In 1921, vague threats to the British Empire from a small, weak principality of Afghanistan and a nascent, if still supine, Soviet Union underpinned a paranoid view of the Pashtuns. Today, the supposed entanglement with al-Qaeda of those Pashtuns termed "Taliban" by U.S. and NATO officials -- or even with Iran or Russia -- has focused Washington's and Brussels's military and intelligence efforts on the highland villagers once again.

Few of the Pashtuns in question, even the rebellious ones, are really Taliban in the sense of militant seminary students; few so-called Taliban are entwined with what little is left of al-Qaeda in the region; and Iran and Russia are not, of course, actually supporting the latter. There may be plausible reasons for which the U.S. and NATO wish to spend blood and treasure in an attempt to forcibly shape the politics of the 38 million Pashtuns on either side of the Durand Line in the twenty-first century. That they form a dire menace to the security of the North Atlantic world is not one of them."

read the whole thing here.

1953 how-to-assissinate manual writ by the cia

2009-07-25T01:28:00.000-07:00

from an article by alex cockburn:

In fact the Agency took a practical interest in torture and assassination from its earliest days, studying Nazi interrogation techniques avidly and sheltering noted Nazi practitioners. As it prepared its coup against the Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1953 the Agency distributed to its agents and operatives a killer’s training manual (made public in 1997) full of hands-on advice:

“The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stair wells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve. … The act may be executed by sudden, vigorous [excised] of the ankles, tipping the subject over the edge. If the assassin immediately sets up an outcry, playing the "horrified witness", no alibi or surreptitious withdrawal is necessary.

“…In all types of assassination except terroristic, drugs can be very effective. An overdose of morphine administered as a sedative will cause death without disturbance and is difficult to detect. The size of the dose will depend upon whether the subject has been using narcotics regularly. If not, two grains will suffice.

“If the subject drinks heavily, morphine or a similar narcotic can be injected at the passing out stage, and the cause of death will often be held to be acute alcoholism.”

debranding rebranding

2009-07-25T00:57:00.000-07:00

de-branding. it's the new shit-storm hitting your hipster enclaves. a great article by priyamvada gopal, here's a snippet:

"The transformation of the quirky, the unique and the countercultural into mainstream commodity culture is not new, and Starbucks is hardly alone in enacting this relentless corporate logic. As the ubiquitous HSBC adverts insist, global success is dependent on exploiting local knowledge and cultures. Coca-Cola came to India in the 90s waving the national flag and insisting, in local languages, on its indigenity; McDonald's succeeds in Asian countries by serving variants of local cuisines. Don't be too surprised if fast-food joints begin to cater to the "slow food" movement, just as gigantic petroleum corporations now sport bright "green" logos."

arbitrary links

2009-07-23T23:01:00.000-07:00

'a perfect world' by steven colbert

hilarious would-be-editing job of palin's resignation speech by vanity fair staff here.

mr. tim lott takes it to the 'classic' movies. good fun.

a year ago, i remember reading this tim lott article on morrissey and felt really good. then shortly got stoned, listened to the smiths and cried in the middle of my old living room floor.

2009-07-14T14:55:00.000-07:00

"God has always been hard on the poor."
Jean-Paul Marat

Bastille Day Edition
July 14, 2009

Bono, U2 and the Crisis of World Capitalism

The Emperors of Bombast

By EAMONN McCANN

Shuffling out from U2’s Popmart tour — the one with the McDonalds-style Golden Arch — at Lansdowne Road 10 years ago, I chanced on Philip King, singer, songwriter, television producer and music adviser to the Irish Arts Council.

“Whaddya think?”

“Whatever it is,” pronounced the elfin Kerry sage, “it’s a fucking big one of them.”

Which has always been the way with the emperors of bombast. Now they, or at least their stage sets, are bigger than ever. Biggest ever seen, the PR propaganda assures me. As if that were a measure of musical stature.

The tour kicked off in Barcelona on June 30 to gasps of ecstatic approval, most breathlessly from Irish commentators flown out for the occasion, many of whom apparently believe that saying a bad word about Bono might render them liable for prosecution under the Republic’s new Blasphemy Law.

The Belfast Telegraph reported that, according to the environmental monitoring group carbonfootprint.com, the 18-month, 100 gig tour will involve the band travelling 70,000 miles in their private jet, the 390-tonne set following on cargo planes.

The volume of CO2 spewed out in the process would be enough to transport U2 34,125 million miles to Mars and back. (Of course, the damage would be cut by half if they were just flown to Mars and left there.)

This odyssey of environmental obliteration — how many endangered species will have been rendered extinct by the time Bono croons a final chorus? I despair for the panda — follows Bono’s dreamy pronouncement last year that: “My prayer is that we become better in looking after our planet.”

We should be used by now to the clanging contradictions of U2. It’s been noted here before that Bono’s castigation of the Irish Government for directing too small a proportion of its tax receipts to aid for the developing world was swiftly followed by the band transferring its business operation to the Netherlands to avoid paying tax to the Irish Government.

Now Larry Mullen has noticed “a new resentment of rich people in this country ... We have experienced [a situation] where coming in and out of the country at certain times is made more difficult than it should be — not only for us, but for a lot of wealthy people ... The better-off (are) being sort of humiliated.”

So it isn’t the people writhing on trolleys in hospital corridors because wards have been closed on account of the economy or children learning arithmetic from the relative speed of rats scuttling across the classroom as a result of the education budget being slashed to bail out the bankers who are being humiliated in Ireland but....the better off.

The little drummer boy’s distress at the rich being reduced to tears by hard-faced officialdom was aroused by seeing billionaire tax-exile property developer Dermot Desmond being dissed at Dublin airport. “If this is what (the rich) experience, how can I fly the Irish flag and tell people ‘come to Ireland because it's great? ’... All those rich guys with all those balls [?], all those women that you see organising this and organising that, without them we'd be in a very, very different state.”

Perhaps Larry was angry that peasants arriving on no-frills airlines hadn’t formed a human carpet on the tarmac for people like himself and Dermot Desmond to walk over.

Larry has been particularly saddened by the plight of his pal Ronan Ryan, whose Dublin nosherie, the Town Bar and Grill, has hit hard times on account of fewer people being able to afford the prices. “He got eaten alive,” mourned Larry. By ravenous hordes of enraged proletarians, possibly.

Another cook, a Jay Bourk, is threatening to shut up shop if the Government doesn’t use tax-payers’ money to subsidise the rent of his Temple Bar eaterie. “It's my favourite restaurant,” laments Larry. “I'll be broken-hearted if that goes down.”

Broken-hearted? That’s what you feel when somebody you love leaves you, Larry. Or dies. But I suppose when your bubble-brained tendency towards emotional incontinence is daily indulged by the crass acolytes who surround you, you lose perspective on such matters.

And anyway, if the diner means so much to you, why not give Mr. Bourk the money yourself.

U2? Pat Boone (ask your granny) was more rock and roll.

In a special treat for Irish fans, the band’s Croke Park stint at the end of this month will open with a minute’s hushed silence followed by an inspirational incantation from Bono: “Blessed are the rich, for they shall enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Followed by, I can exclusively reveal, a guest appearance by Sir Bob Geldof with his new raggle-taggle novelty number: “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a poor man to enter the kingdom of God.”

Yep. More than ever, it’s all arsy-versy with the musical wing of global capitalism these days

U2 now have their heads inserted so far up their anterior orifices it’s doubtful they’ll ever succeed in uncorking themselves. Does it not occur to them that the reason there might be a new resentment of the rich on this island is that we have just seen the mass of the people ripped off, homes lost, jobs destroyed, wages slashed, to save the sin-crinkled skin of the hoodlums who have run the economy into ruin? I suppose not.

Then there’s Geldof. Kruger Crowe Celebrity Management is currently marketing his services as an “inspirational speaker” on poverty in Africa and other topics at $80,000 a gig. This may be a special offer: the south Dublin ego-warrior last year charged $100,000 for a talk on alleviating poverty to an organisation called Diversity@Work in Melbourne. Would it not have been better if he’d sent them a postcard suggesting the money be spent instead on, say, alleviating poverty?

Not better for Bob Geldof, I suppose.

The fee included payment for a bodyguard, luxury hotel suite and first-class travel.

Can anyone think of a single individual on the planet who has benefited more than Sir Geldof from Live Aid?

Come the revolution into rationality, U2 and Geldof will be recognised as national embarrassments.

Not yet, sadly. Many thousands, it seems, fully intend to congregate with trusting innocence at Croke Park later this month. And good luck to them. Each to her own, say I.

But what’s this? Who are these folk assembled outside Cool Discs in Foyle Street where the buses for Croke Park leave, shouldering pitchforks and scythes, muttering? Whatever can it mean?

Eamonn McCann is a troublemaker and can be reached at Eamonderry@aol.com

can the rejection to bush one policies be a guide to a change of the 'regime change' model?

2009-07-10T01:42:00.000-07:00

a take on the persian gulf war can be found here from different sides. very good.

random chomsky quotes from 'chomsky on the mind-body problem' by wlliam lycan

2009-07-09T23:57:00.000-07:00

Ontological questions are generally beside the point, hardly more than a form of
harassment. (Chomsky unpublished c: 14)

The human mind is a biologically given system with certain powers and limits . . .
The fact that “admissible hypotheses” are available to this specific biological system
accounts for its ability to construct rich and complex explanatory theories. But the
same properties of mind that provide admissible hypotheses may well exclude other
successful theories as unintelligible to humans. Some theories might simply not be
among the admissible hypotheses determined by the specific properties of mind
that adapt us “to imagining correct theories of some kinds,” though these theories
might be accessible to a differently organized intelligence. (Chomsky 1975: 15–56)

[T]he naturalistic temper . . . takes for granted that humans are part of the
natural world, not angels, and will therefore have capacities with specific scope and
limits, determined by their special structure. For a rat, some questions are problems
that it can solve, others are mysteries that lie beyond its cognitive reach; the same
should be true of humans, and to first approximation, that seems a fair conclusion.
What we call “natural science” is a kind of chance convergence between aspects of
the world and properties of the human mind/brain, which has allowed some rays
of light to penetrate the general obscurity, excluding, it seems, central domains of
the “mental.” (Chomsky unpublished d: 3)

find the whole paper here.

more gag orders?

2009-07-09T00:22:00.000-07:00

from a lead article in tomorrow's new york times regarding the c.i.a. having 'deceived' democrats for 8 years:

"In a related development, President Obama threatened to veto the pending Intelligence Authorization Bill if it included a provision that would allow information about covert actions to be given to the entire House and Senate Intelligence Committees, rather than the so-called Gang of Eight — the Democratic and Republican leaders of both houses of Congress and the two Intelligence Committees."

if you have more than an hour a day, you can get a main gist of these 'covert' activities. as the late great claud cockburn said, 'Since becoming a journalist I had often heard the advice to "believe nothing until it has been officially denied"'

to all the die hard democrats: autopilot isn't working. your 'leaders' are spineless warmongers. the time is past urgent for a complete reappraisal of our imperial aims. covert and overt.

a counterpunch piece

2009-07-08T01:01:00.000-07:00

July 7, 2009

Gag Order

Obama Hushes Health Care Advocates

By LAURA FLANDERS

Don't like the way the Wall Street bail-out turned out? It looks as if we're in for something similar regarding healthcare.

With popular fury at the status quo rising and hunger for a real, public option attracting over 70 percent approval in polls, the White House is urging public-option advocates to hush.

According to the Washington Post, in a pre-holiday call with half a dozen top House and Senate Democrats, Obama asked health care advocates to ratchet back their pressure for a public option. He's apparently concerned about advertisements and on-line campaigns targeting foot-dragging Democrats.

We've been here before. Back in the fall and spring, when popular fury at private bankers was soaring, Washington urged liberal lobbying groups to focus more on backing the White House plan and less on attacking bankers and banks.

What happened? Washington allowed Wall Street insiders, many of whom had overseen the breaking apart of the economy, to manage the so called recovery, putting most of what was rotten back in place. The re-distributions of wealth to the top continued, while civilian unemployment headed through the roof.

As Barney Frank told bankers back in February, “People really hate you, and they're starting to hate us because we're hanging out with you.”

The health care debate is suffering from the same dynamic.

Specifically, on July 4, Obama said he is hoping left-leaning organizations will rally support for "advancing legislation" that fulfills his goal of expanding coverage. But the words public option were left out.

Pro-reform activists are pushing a public plan because it's popular, it's doable -- and it's at least a step closer to the only thing most actually think will work -- which is a totally public system.

Why are they pushing so hard? Well, consider what they're up against. Pulling against anything remotely public, is the biggest lobbying blitz Washington's ever seen. The Washington Post reports that private insurers, drug companies and their representatives spent more than $126 million on lobbying in the first quarter of this year. That's over $1.4 million a day.

And they've hired more than 350 former government staff members and retired members of Congress to do all that lobbying work.

When Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, sat down with health-care lobbyists on June 10, two were his former chiefs of staff. Their aim: to minimize the "damage" in profits to insurers, hospitals and drug makers from any change in approach from government. Specifically, they oppose any even remotely public option, the details of which are right now up for debate.

Want to hush the activists? The real scandal, it seems to me, shouldn't be the thousands of dollars that on-line organizers are spending on advertising to the public and Congress. The real scandal should be the millions that private insurers and pharmaceutical firms are spending infiltrating the government.

If the public option lobbyists had the access Big Pharma's got, they might not need to buy all those ads. Besides -- $1.4 million a day. Imagine what real-life nurses could do with that!

Laura Flanders is the host of GRITtv, which broadcasts weekdays on satellite TV (Dish Network Ch. More...9415 Free Speech TV) on cable, public television and online at GRITtv.org and TheNation.com. Follow GRITtv or GritLaura on Twitter.com

let freedom ring

2009-07-04T00:01:00.000-07:00

but first, obama's seven deadly (potentially) sins.

is mrs. palin on crack? her resignation video here.

and in the you can't make this shit up file, the washington post's remedy for its financially failing newspaper: bribes for access to obama's inner circle!

enjoy the fireworks...

background

2009-06-30T00:55:00.000-07:00

good background piece on the honduran coup.

special messages to go: ladies. please don't let your male friends behave like they should be in high school. a simple 'are you a soul less idol worshipping sugar drink machine?' should wake em up. or just tell em to stop harassing over-exposed drunk girls. in a time warp of sorts, my late night walk to top dog yielded more nausea and discomfort. i needed to walk it off. i popped a pill and estimated west. the summer has dried up the east bay. only the truly desperate are out past 1 in the morning. women are staring at everyone. and men are staring past you in conversation seeing if some new prey has opted for another try at the watering hole. thank you california for t-shirt weather at 3 in the morning. the cops hover. berkeley, you have no possibilities to entertain after 1:45am except crime. on a saturday night? that's a crime.

!links!

2009-06-25T17:01:00.000-07:00

commodity-based derivatives are behind the current rise in gas prices.

israeli bank, companies and state bodies are accused of withholding billions from holocaust victims(?!)

the independent prints state sponsored bbc's top brass salary and expense list

michael jackson. dead at 50.

today's news links

2009-06-24T21:08:00.000-07:00

the pakistani nuke program is managed by us taxpayers since the carter years.

the uss john s. mccain (not joking) and some 28,500 us troops monitor n. korea against nuking the 'us imperialists'

another reason to keep a shitty old cellphone in your pocket and some good old postage stamps in your wallet

down is the new up...

demonstrations...

2009-06-23T16:21:00.000-07:00

having seen and heard hours and hours of iranian election's 'coverage,' i have to ask: how courageous are these commentators, urging protesters to risk life and limb 7000 miles removed? these impassioned armchair revolutionaries rant about the specter of 'real' democracy being too much for an autocratic paranoid regime, whose probably stolen election even they concede had 'irregularities.' while correct, these same shameless writers and pundits seem to forget the regular irregularities in the american political system.

all of the candidates in the iranian election were handpicked by the powerful clerical councils. comparably, the viable candidates of the two powerful american political parties were well vetted and financed by powerful american (and sometimes foreign) elite interests. these similarities can't be mentioned in litanies of american exceptionalism. peaceful protests outside of both the democratic and republican conventions were extremely militarized, protesters gassed and beaten and mass arrests ensued. these dissidents, while representing broad socioeconomic interests were brushed off as meddlesome fringe elements, extremists enemies of democracy and sometimes terrorists. and of course the stolen us elections of 2000 and 2004 were covered internationally, but could not be mentioned in respectable media discussions in the american free press, while deriding the iranian revolutionary guard's clampdown.

this shameless hypocrisy is a standard overtone regarding other people's elections. no one is really mentioning the fact that real 'reform' in iran would entail kicking out the imf, stopping the privatization of the economy, and move onto socioeconomic justice, gender equality, regional integration and other familiar issues. this is unacceptable to us media interests which are owned by huge multinationals. and virtually no one mentions (apart from the margins) that the ultimate kiss of death for any iranian candidate is any form of western endorsement. the cia backed overthrow of popular prime minister mohammed mosaddeq in the 50's, replaced by the brutal shah is common knowledge. america hasn't had diplomatic relations with iran for three decades, and iranians remember the us backing iraq with economic, diplomatic, and military aid during the iran-iraq war. while at same time, selling iran weapons with israeli collusion in order to supply the south american death squads. not to mention the cia holding up the iranian-held us hostages until the day mr. reagan won the election.

this western passion for other people's democracy goes on and on. this is easily picked up in the world press, and well known by most us policy makers and elites. madison avenue pr men, various pollsters and political consultants regularly influence, affect, and 'guide' elections from ireland to south africa to bolivia to poland to (hey!) the us. political subversion is an american export of extreme value, it relieves the old guard of any democratic challenge to their economic dominance and gives the rich minority 4 (or more) years of squeezing the poor majority of 'terrorists' and 'backwards special interests.' a serious look at the american political system reveals these same undemocratic results. so the real question these brave western pundits and media barons should be asking is: is the democracy they praise on the streets of tehran coming to the usa?

today's news links

2009-06-22T14:05:00.000-07:00

bamboo and hemp bike(!)

congress to vote on top gun gear to fight the russian air fleet.

diplomacy industry moves to militarize africa.

obama's secretary of education is a disaster area.

enjoy the sunshine summer fun...

personal public

2009-06-18T22:45:00.000-07:00

how are you girl? hope these times don't knock a god damn step out of yr stride. and with it, the breeze, summer clouds and swelter leaves you some space to play, relax and be yourself for christ's sake. do you get a vacation? if so, it probably isn't due to the benevolence of the gallows of middle and upper management. it looks as though i may be working for an urban gardening project in the city of san fran. i'd like to take it to south america and get out of this hipster slum of a bay. families, families, families....i had a dream about being a father, i turned over violently in my bed, but to no avail. the damn thing started from the beginning. i think i had another one the other night, but i can't be sure. ah, women, they give two frightful things: broken hearts and children. and so much more....if you haven't any summer reading planned, then let me push either 'tropic of cancer' by henry miller or 'hunger' by knut hamsun. and whatever they're selling in the pinko commie isle at your local anarchist collective cruelty-free non-profit sustainable independent kiosk.

ciao
peter

linky links

2009-06-17T20:27:00.000-07:00

the queen grows an organic garden(!)

japanese water powered car

abc-white house infomercial

an archive of british newspapers 1800-1900

rumblings...

2009-06-17T20:17:00.000-07:00

Washington cannot call all the shots

By Michael Hudson

Published: June 14 2009 19:06 | Last updated: June 14 2009 19:06

Challenging America will be the focus of meetings in Yekaterinburg, Russia, on Monday and Tuesday for Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other leaders of the six-nation Shanghai Co-operation Organisation. The alliance comprises Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, with observer status for Iran, India, Pakistan and Mongolia.

The attendees have assured American diplomats that dismantling the US financial and military hegemony is not their aim. They simply want to discuss mutual aid – but in a way that has no role for the US or for the dollar as a vehicle for trade among these countries.

The meeting is an opportunity for China, Russia and India to “build an increasingly multipolar world order”, as Mr Medvedev put it in a St Petersburg speech this month. What he meant was this: we have reached our limit in subsidising the US military encirclement of Eurasia while also allowing the US to appropriate our exports, companies and real estate in exchange for paper money of questionable worth. “The artificially maintained unipolar system”, Mr Medvedev said, was based on “one big centre of consumption, financed by a growing deficit, and thus growing debts, one formerly strong reserve currency, and one dominant system of assessing assets and risks”.

Keen observers of America, if not effective managers of their own economies, these countries argue that the root of the global financial crisis is that the US makes too little and spends too much. Especially upsetting is US military expenditure – such as military aid to Georgia or the presence in the oil-rich Middle East and central Asia – using money that foreign central banks recycle.

Overconsumption by US citizens, US buy-outs of foreign companies and dollars the Pentagon spends abroad all end up in foreign central banks. These governments face a hard choice: either recycle the dollars back to America by buying US Treasury bonds or let the “free market” force up their currencies relative to the dollar – thereby pricing their exports out of world markets, creating domestic unemployment and business failures. US-style free markets hook them into a system that forces them to accept unlimited dollars. Now they want out.

This means creating an alternative. Rather than making merely “cosmetic changes as some countries and perhaps the international financial organisations themselves might want”, Mr Medvedev concluded his St Petersburg speech: “What we need are financial institutions of a completely new type, where particular political issues and motives, and particular countries, will not dominate.”

For starters, the six countries intend to trade in their own currencies so as to get the benefit of mutual credit, rather than give it to the US. In recent months China has struck bilateral deals with Brazil and Malaysia to trade in renminbi rather than the dollar, sterling or euros.

Many foreigners see the US as a lawless nation. How else to characterise a country that holds out a set of laws for others – on war, debt repayment and the treatment of prisoners – but ignores them itself?

The US is the world’s largest debtor, yet has avoided the pain of “structural adjustments” imposed on other debtor nations. US interest rate and tax reductions in the face of exploding trade and budget deficits are seen as the height of hypocrisy in view of the austerity programmes that Washington has forced on other countries via the International Monetary Fund and other vehicles.

It is no mystery to other countries how the US remains above the law. Foreigners see a financial system backed by American military bases encircling the globe. The IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organisation and other Washington surrogates are seen as vestiges of a lost American empire no longer able to rule by economic strength, left only with military domination. They see this hegemony cannot continue without adequate revenues and are attempting to hasten the bankruptcy of the US financial-military world order. If China, Russia and their allies have their way, the US will no longer live off the savings of others, nor have the money for unlimited military spending.

US officials wanted to attend Yekaterinburg as observers. They were told no. It is a word that Americans will hear much more in the future.

The writer is professor of economics at the University of Missouri

round out

2009-06-04T00:36:00.000-07:00

let's vegetate on this one. sledgehammer rhetoric is accessible if spoken with a megaphone, with an audience ready to pounce. not all is lost in such a meeting of, well, desperation. finger pointing aside (see last post). it's high time to retreat and gather new insights. seriously, if you want to talk politics like it's 1992, then go to a cal seminar, listen to npr, buy the lakoff book. whatever. the far left has two positions right now. the moralist (arrest the war criminals) and the legalist (arrest the war criminals). out on a huge sound stage (the world) without a map or spotlight (a local audience). these are the most immediate panaceas to getting hold of a lever of power, and yanking it permanently. does it mean that bernie sanders, dennis kucinich and ron paul are the only ones left standing. is america the most de-politicized country ever? i fear the answer, so i'll just side step it. america has politicized the body, ethnicity, and (somewhat) gender assignment. anything else? is the centrist democrat, with a soft spot for reagan, an international trojan horse for the triumpth of state-corporate capitalism? if there aren't any 1st world economies, then we're still a upstanding success, right?

a roundup

2009-06-02T23:59:00.000-07:00

it's an unforgiving, fast paced back alley this run up to the summer season. city attorneys are forgoing their usual $16 martinis for a 'cold beer.' others have moved from their comfortable slummune, packed up the pirate flag and move back east. hipsters are packing the cinemas to see the new summer blockbusters (?). back up singers envision grandeur past these walls. other people's grilfriends flirt eye to their favorite songs. as i write, it's starting to rain outside. in june, for christ's sake. a venture to the pub on solano proves why the future cultural and civic managers are the worst nightmarish mishmash of elitism, multiculturalism and pragmatic neo-liberalism ever concocted.

why can't people just give up the idea that you can explain human action. philosophy can't even find a way to ask, never mind answer that query. no one really knows anything. do people ever consider how little evolution really means? the world is pure chaos. perhaps 500 million people don't know that they live on a planet, or a continent, or a country. if i was head of the sociology department at cal, i'd start ranting about the purple-scare, fear monger an attack of the post-ideologists, post-racists, post-classists and post-feminists, then send everyone off on sabbatical. let's give up on pretending we're the adults in the room. forget freud, bourdieu, foucault, harvey, and berger. a whole list of lock pickers and peeping toms. it isn't in 'the revenge of gaia' or gould or dawkins.

people are better off reading fiction, it leaves more to the imagination. and not new fiction, a poverty of the imagination as far as i can see. i cringe at the idea of writers trying to win me over with ecotopias and free-for-alls with apocalypse/brilliance/terror/heaven/mass-awakening just around the corner. and not the beat-generations' ambassadors of mediocrity, with grimy longing stares and exotic third world fetish. seems like the folks that lived through the first world war saw life for what it was. the workers work, die and pass on their poverty. the rulers rule, die and pass on their wealth. and the bourgeoisie prance around. doctors aren't going to cure cancer. the 'wilsonian idealist' liberals are the most depraved maniacs around. even your own children are little unrepentant devils. the nuns want to seduce your daughters. the rectors are trying to have their way with your sons. your husbands want to fuck every woman younger than you. your wife wants to fuck your best friend, and maybe, you do too. your dog just lays there and your cat doesn't come around anymore. war will take all the young, and refurbish the town with corpses and broken men. the church choir will sing, the gypsies dance and everyone will stuff themselves at mother's. it's a more honest world...

2009-06-02T13:26:00.000-07:00

Obama Has 250,000 "Contractors" in Iraq and Afghan Wars, Increases Number of Mercenaries

Newly released Pentagon statistics show that in both Iraq and Afghanistan the number of armed contractors is rising. The DoD says it sees “similar dependence on contractors in future.”

By Jeremy Scahill

A couple of years ago, Blackwater executive Joseph Schmitz seemed to see a silver lining for mercenary companies with the prospect of US forces being withdrawn or reduced in Iraq. “There is a scenario where we could as a government, the United States, could pull back the military footprint,” Schmitz said. “And there would then be more of a need for private contractors to go in.”

When it comes to armed contractors, it seems that Schmitz was right.

According to new statistics released by the Pentagon, with Barack Obama as commander in chief, there has been a 23% increase in the number of “Private Security Contractors” working for the Department of Defense in Iraq in the second quarter of 2009 and a 29% increase in Afghanistan, which “correlates to the build up of forces” in the country. These numbers relate explicitly to DoD security contractors. Companies like Blackwater and its successor Triple Canopy work on State Department contracts and it is unclear if these contractors are included in the over-all statistics. This means, the number of individual “security” contractors could be quite higher, as could the scope of their expansion.

Overall, contractors (armed and unarmed) now make up approximately 50% of the “total force in Centcom AOR [Area of Responsibility].” This means there are a whopping 242,657 contractors working on these two US wars. These statistics come from two reports just released by Gary J. Motsek, the Assistant Deputy Under Secretary of Defense (Program Support): “Contractor Support of U.S. Operations in USCENTCOM AOR, IRAQ, and Afghanistan and “Operational Contract Support, ‘State of the Union.’”

“We expect similar dependence on contractors in future contingency operations,” according to the contractor “State of the Union.” It notes that the deployment size of both military personnel and DoD civilians are “fixed by law,” but points out that the number of contractors is “size unfixed,” meaning there is virtually no limit (other than funds) to the number of contractors that can be deployed in the war zone.

At present there are 132,610 in Iraq and 68,197 in Afghanistan. The report notes that while the deployment of security contractors in Iraq is increasing, there was an 11% decrease in overall contractors in Iraq from the first quarter of 2009 due to the “ongoing efforts to reduce the contractor footprint in Iraq.”

Both Pentagon reports can be downloaded here.

source: http://rebelreports.com

even rachel maddow smells a rat

2009-05-28T23:24:00.000-07:00

are they kidding?

2009-05-26T00:01:00.000-07:00

Biblical Prophesy and the Iraq War

Bush, God, Iraq and Gog

By CLIVE HAMILTON

The revelation this month in GQ magazine that Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary embellished top-secret wartime memos with quotations from the Bible prompts a question. Why did he believe he could influence President Bush by that means?

The answer may lie in an alarming story about George Bush’s Christian millenarian beliefs that has yet to come to light.

In 2003 while lobbying leaders to put together the Coalition of the Willing, President Bush spoke to France’s President Jacques Chirac. Bush wove a story about how the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Middle East and how they must be defeated.

In Genesis and Ezekiel Gog and Magog are forces of the Apocalypse who are prophesied to come out of the north and destroy Israel unless stopped. The Book of Revelation took up the Old Testament prophesy:

“And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle … and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.”

Bush believed the time had now come for that battle, telling Chirac:

“This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins”.

The story of the conversation emerged only because the Elysée Palace, baffled by Bush’s words, sought advice from Thomas Römer, a professor of theology at the University of Lausanne. Four years later, Römer gave an account in the September 2007 issue of the university’s review, Allez savoir. The article apparently went unnoticed, although it was referred to in a French newspaper.

The story has now been confirmed by Chirac himself in a new book, published in France in March, by journalist Jean Claude Maurice. Chirac is said to have been stupefied and disturbed by Bush’s invocation of Biblical prophesy to justify the war in Iraq and “wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs”.

In the same year he spoke to Chirac, Bush had reportedly said to the Palestinian foreign minister that he was on “a mission from God” in launching the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and was receiving commands from the Lord.

There can be little doubt now that President Bush’s reason for launching the war in Iraq was, for him, fundamentally religious. He was driven by his belief that the attack on Saddam’s Iraq was the fulfilment of a Biblical prophesy in which he had been chosen to serve as the instrument of the Lord.

Many thousands of Americans and Iraqis have died in the campaign to defeat Gog and Magog. That the US President saw himself as the vehicle of God whose duty was to prevent the Apocalypse can only inflame suspicions across the Middle East that the United States is on a crusade against Islam.

There is a curious coda to this story. While a senior at Yale University George W. Bush was a member of the exclusive and secretive Skull & Bones society. His father, George H.W. Bush had also been a “Bonesman”, as indeed had his father. Skull & Bones’ initiates are assigned or take on nicknames. And what was George Bush Senior’s nickname? “Magog”.

Clive Hamilton is a Visiting Professor at Yale University He can be reached at: mail@clivehamilton.net.au.

Notes.

Jocelyn Rochat, ‘George W. Bush et le Code Ezéchiel’, Allez Savoir!, No. 39, September 2007

http://www.rue89.com/2007/09/17/un-petit-scoop-sur-bush-chirac-dieu-gog-et-magog

http://www.plon.fr/ficheLivre.php?livre=9782259210218

http://www.palestinechronicle.com/view_article_details.php?id=14890

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/oct/07/iraq.usa

what's in a name? rebranding us terror

2009-05-18T23:32:00.000-07:00

(class)icky

2009-05-13T23:07:00.000-07:00

a lag over from mother's day included seeing the san francisco symphony rehearse handel. great stuff, the coronation of king george and king george II, 'god save the king,' 'the king shall rejoice,' 'kings shall be thy nursing fathers' etc... it was an rehearsal by invitation, only for 'friends' of the symphony. so the players were dressed casual, the conductor dressed like a hip restaurant owner. the audience was drab, posturing, and smelt of expensive old perfume and liquor. after some introductions the conductor politely addressed the audience, 'thank you for your ongoing support. i will pretend you're not here. (audience laughter) it's the economy (more laughter).' apparently, the visiting conductor had never worked with this symphony until tonight. during the rehearsal there were only about a half dozen stops and start overs, a testament to these musicians. it was nice to see an unfinished product, a work in progress. a huge choir joined the chamber symphony, thundering through powerful walls of sound and stroking through the whimpering bits.

you need to see music being performed live to really appreciate it. classical performance is exemplary. but by god, i won't ever go on my own accord. in order to please my mother, i'd see sammy hagar or norah jones or even fleetwood mack and conceal my hate like i'm watching the president speak while i'm eating in a public restaurant. and tonight, i did just that. the symphony crowd is the intelligentsia brought down to size. the smell of meat and gravy, leather and hair product. stained mustache and bad makeup. finger pointing at gay folks and shushing and hashing the non devout patrons. plucking and snotting their petty pretty adornments. repeating their favored myths they've just heard on npr this morning (yeah, i heard it too). and generally not pretending to hide their pill popping and empty errand filled sad lives.

i've had my wallet stolen at a radiohead concert. got in a fight while pearl jam played at bridge school. had a car towed at another radiohead concert. passed out by myself and left untouched at an outkast concert. searched and handcuffed at a dylan concert. kicked out of various venues/bars while live music played as my soundtrack. and of course, i've dealt with hundreds of bored/drunk/lame/rowdy friends, while sweet live music beckoned in the back ground. these minor setbacks, perversions and downright hangups i can take. and will take on for as long as i can stand. but being in a crowd of old children, i can do without.

wanda sykes

2009-05-12T23:24:00.000-07:00

2009-05-12T23:20:00.000-07:00

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

M - Th 11p / 10c

Wanda Sykes' Jokes

thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Economic Crisis

Political Humor

the new math of change(?)

2009-05-12T01:03:00.000-07:00

"The overall number of vehicles GM will be importing in 2014 represents the production of four assembly plants, the same number that GM plans to close in the United States." - UAW legislative director Alan Reuther.

the swine flu pandemic. in 1976.

2009-05-05T21:40:00.000-07:00

2009-05-05T21:05:00.000-07:00

techies gather round for wolfram alpha. which should make google look like a porn retrieval site. which it is.

100 days of obama

2009-04-30T00:22:00.000-07:00

man oh man, one hundred days into this administration. early on, maybe less than a year into the clinton administration, chomsky remarked upon the democratic party being an organ of big business, and the republican party as a generalized business party, referring to health reform and NAFTA passage. capital flight is one indicator. according to this index, its been steady since the 1970's. real wages and the overall economy have been on a slide since the carter presidency. the biggest military budget in world history is on obama's watch. if you are still in the grips of messianic adulation for this centrist democrat, then you should watch this video, which describes his general policies, from 1993.

earth to obama: all of criminal law is looking backward

2009-04-27T23:57:00.000-07:00

2009-04-27T22:28:00.001-07:00

the mayor of new york wasn't aware of an apparent air force junket. what?

2009-04-27T21:39:00.000-07:00

American Casino movie trailer from Leslie and Andrew Cockburn on Vimeo.

2009-04-21T00:18:00.000-07:00

lead wall street journal article on the recent hacking into the military industrial complex. here.

do you have a facebook?

2009-04-20T23:53:00.000-07:00

more and more obama-clinton disasters...

2009-04-16T23:44:00.000-07:00

great article about coming haitian elections here. the usa et al. want the haitian people to vote the right way, against they're own interests. in this case, it's diverting democracy by political exclusion, and arbitrary tumult. other forms of western swindling: public relations, power broker, pollster, think tank, and behind the scenes massaging of elections is covered very well in a film called 'our brand is crisis.' i highly recommend it.

great pirate article

2009-04-14T00:32:00.000-07:00

You Are Being Lied to About Pirates

April 13, 2009 By Johann Hari
Source: Huffington Post

Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy - backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China - is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labeling as "one of the great menace of our times" have an extraordinary story to tell -- and some justice on their side.

Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the "golden age of piracy" - from 1650 to 1730 - the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage thief that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda-heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often rescued from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can't? In his book Villains of All nations, the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence to find out. If you became a merchant or navy sailor then - plucked from the docks of London's East End, young and hungry - you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off for a second, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the Cat O' Nine Tails. If you slacked consistently, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.

Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied against their tyrannical captains - and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls "one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century." They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed "quite clearly - and subversively - that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal navy." This is why they were popular, despite being unproductive thieves.

The words of one pirate from that lost age - a young British man called William Scott - should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: "What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirating to live." In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa - collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish-stocks by over-exploitation - and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea-life is being stolen every year by vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia's unprotected seas. The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods, and they are starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."

This is the context in which the men we are calling "pirates" have emerged. Everyone agrees they were ordinary Somalian fishermen who at first took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least wage a 'tax' on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia - and it's not hard to see why. In a surreal telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was "to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters... We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas." William Scott would understand those words.

No, this doesn't make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters - especially those who have held up World Food Programme supplies. But the "pirates" have the overwhelming support of the local population for a reason. The independent Somalian news-site WardherNews conducted the best research we have into what ordinary Somalis are thinking - and it found 70 percent "strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence of the country's territorial waters." During the revolutionary war in America, George Washington and America's founding fathers paid pirates to protect America's territorial waters, because they had no navy or coastguard of their own. Most Americans supported them. Is this so different?

Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our nuclear waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We didn't act on those crimes - but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 percent of the world's oil supply, we begin to shriek about "evil." If we really want to deal with piracy, we need to stop its root cause - our crimes - before we send in the gun-boats to root out Somalia's criminals.

The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know "what he meant by keeping possession of the sea." The pirate smiled, and responded: "What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor." Once again, our great imperial fleets sail in today - but who is the robber?

Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent newspaper.

i usually don't publish personal emails, but...

2009-04-09T00:16:00.000-07:00

z,

how's the home front? i've resigned from worrying all too generously about minor infractions in the fucked up state of human behavior. let it shower, thunder or smolder. men and women are fucked almost equally. almost. being a forthright feminist, it gives me great displeasure to announce i've lost my faith in womanhood. it's ok, i'll get over it. one must keep one's head above water. and keep one's nose plugged in order not to smell the stench.
i've been working for the u.s. census. making and saving some money to live like a decent human soon. maybe latin america. vermont. or elsewhere.

cheers love,

peter

interview about vampires

2009-04-08T22:31:00.000-07:00

bill moyers' journal had a great interview with economist william k. black. arrest the culprit!! here.

special messages to go (spellchecked and upright)

2009-04-08T00:24:00.000-07:00

what a week! the world of commerce and information is spitting out more than i can catch in my kid size glove. where shall i start? let's venture somewhere close to my heart. THE US ECONOMY! influential economist jeffrey sachs has a piece that dresses down the geithner-summers public-private plan to buy up 'toxic assets.' mind you mr. sachs, along with lawrence summers and other free marketeers are complicit in bankrupting bolivia in 1985, poland in 1990, and russia in 1991, largely through their economic 'shock therapy' programs. i don't know if geithner-obama-summers et al. are aware that these 'shocks' of 'stimulus' are from the same neoliberal text (not subtext). i'm glad mr. sachs is turning a new leaf, because i agonized reading his book 'end of poverty' while in school. noticably, his critics just rolled their eyes, they must have thought he was taking blue pills and hanging out with bono and angelina jolie so much he lost grip with reality. no mr. sachs, africa is poor because it's resource rich, all the west has given it (and the rest of the global south) are artificial borders, resource extraction, slave labor, political cover for friendly dictators, usury loans, guns, desertification, slave trade, liberation theology, and denial. despite it, i'd like to have lunch with him. i'd ask him how it feels to go from telling heads of state what to do, armed with legalese to privatize entire economies and holding the funnel to billions in imf loans, to sharing web page space with 'sexiest vegetarians alive' on the huffington post?
i am that rude. and incidentally, i read the huffington post. special cheers goes to one ms. smith who gave me 'the shock doctrine' right on time; at about the time it came out, and although she doesn't know it, needs speakers and a receiver to complete her living space.

my 100's post. take it away dean. no comment...

2009-04-07T00:46:00.000-07:00

Why Aren't "Free Traders" Bothered by Protectionism for Banks?

USA Today had a piece about the growing threat of protectionism. It then listed a series of measures in the various G-20 countries that it viewed as protectionist. For some reason, it excluded from its list the trillions of dollars in below market rate loans that the United States is giving to its financial system. It did not even include the "buy America" provision in the Geithner plan that requires that the financial firms managing investment funds in the plan be headquartered in the United States.

--Dean Baker

official blah blah

2009-04-02T20:27:00.001-07:00

official G20 communique.

chomsky prolific, again.

2009-04-01T00:48:00.000-07:00

great interview with chomsky. here.

2009-03-31T23:47:00.000-07:00

The silence surrounding Sri Lanka

April 01, 2009 By Arundhati Roy
Source: Boston Globe

NEW DELHI -- THE HORROR that is unfolding in Sri Lanka becomes possible because of the silence that surrounds it. There is almost no reporting in the international press - or in the mainstream media in India, where I live - about what is happening. From the little information that is filtering through, it looks as though the Sri Lankan government is using the propaganda of "the war on terror" as a fig leaf to dismantle any semblance of democracy in the country and commit unspeakable crimes against the Tamil people.

The government is working on the principle that every Tamil is a terrorist unless he or she can prove otherwise, and civilian areas, hospitals, and shelters are being bombed and turned into a war zone. Reliable estimates put the number of civilians trapped at over 200,000. The Sri Lankan army is advancing, armed with tanks and aircraft.

Meanwhile, there are reports that several "welfare villages" have been established to house displaced Tamils in the Vavuniya and Mannar districts. The Daily Telegraph in London reports that these villages "will be compulsory holding centers for all civilians fleeing the fighting." Is this a euphemism for concentration camps?

Mangala Samaraweera, a former foreign minister of Sri Lanka, told The Daily Telegraph: "A few months ago the government started registering all Tamils in Colombo on the grounds that they could be a security threat, but this could be exploited for other purposes like the Nazis in the 1930s. They're basically going to label the whole civilian Tamil population as potential terrorists."

Given the government's stated objective of "wiping out" the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelan, this malevolent collapse of civilians and "terrorists" does seem to signal that the government is on the verge of committing what could end up being genocide. According to a United Nations estimate, several thousand people have already been killed. Thousands more are critically wounded.

What we are witnessing - or, rather, what is happening in Sri Lanka and is being so effectively hidden from public scrutiny - is a brazen, openly racist war. The impunity with which the Sri Lankan government is able to commit these crimes unveils the deeply ingrained racist prejudice that is precisely what led to the marginalization and alienation of the Tamils of Sri Lanka in the first place. That racism has a long history, involving social ostracization, economic blockades, pogroms, and torture. The brutal nature of the decades-long civil war, which started as a peaceful, nonviolent protest, has its roots here.

Why the silence? In another interview, Mangala Samaraweera said, "A free media is virtually nonexistent in Sri Lanka today." He described death squads and "white van abductions," which have made society "freeze with fear." Voices of dissent have been abducted and assassinated. The International Federation of Journalists accuses the government of Sri Lanka of using a combination of anti-terrorism laws, disappearances, and assassinations to silence journalists.

There are unconfirmed reports that the Indian government is lending material and logistical support to the Sri Lankan government. If this is true, it is outrageous. What about the governments of other countries? Pakistan? China? What are they doing to help or harm the situation?

In Tamil Nadu, India, the war in Sri Lanka has fueled passions that have led to more than 10 people immolating themselves. The public anger and anguish - much of it genuine, but some of it obviously cynical political manipulation - has become an election issue.

It is extraordinary that this concern has not traveled to the rest of India. Why is there silence?

Given the scale of what is happening in Sri Lanka, the silence is inexcusable. More so because of the Indian government's long history of irresponsible dabbling in the conflict, first taking one side and then the other. Several of us who should have spoken out much earlier, have not done so, simply because of a lack of information about the war.

So while the killing continues, while tens of thousands of people are being barricaded into concentration camps, while more than 200,000 face starvation, and a genocide waits to happen, there is dead silence from this great country. It's a colossal humanitarian tragedy. The world must step in. Now. Before it's too late.

Arundhati Roy is a novelist based in New Delhi. She is author of "The God of Small Things," and a forthcoming book of essays, "Field Notes on Democracy."

pixies in 1991

2009-03-31T23:06:00.001-07:00

this song is my life circa 2004-06, in under 3 minutes.

more tv i'd watch

2009-03-30T20:06:00.000-07:00

tv i'd watch

2009-03-30T01:15:00.000-07:00

2009-03-26T23:34:00.000-07:00

the only thing that really feels good lately is shooting a basketball. i don't have to sleep it off. i don't have to exercise it off. in fact i can skip a day if i want. but when i have time, i do it. it's best when there's no one around. i start getting hot and imagine someone looking on, 'man, that guy's fighting something.' i push myself to exhaustion. i've been on this course for a good two months. i feel my chemicals balancing. my fingers still, back straighter, eyes brighter, hair stronger. yet broken and sad. but in this park, alone with ball and hoop, i am able to completely enjoy solitude. and it feels better than many a company. it's a conversation, a dance, a flirtation; it leaves me dizzy. the next day, it's there again! put on the radio, stretch, short range, mid range, off the left pivot, off the right pivot, fade away repertoire, stop and pop, long range and coast. the last half hour i just coast. my mind trying to work out chaotic things while i methodically dribble and shoot. i remember years ago, i lay for a couple of days crying in bed at a friends house, after i had just quit school. she finally came in and threw my shoes and ball at me saying, 'go, (with quote, unquote finger motions) play,' and left for work. i remember a year of working doubles at the restaurant, getting off at 11, playing basketball alone at the gym till 2 in the morning and coming home smelling like spaghetti sauce, booze, weed and sweat to a house of partying selfish strangers. every time i've ever moved, within a day i would find a basketball court. and i must say, i've been lucky. within a block both times in san bruno, around the corner in mountain view, two blocks away in sunnyvale, two blocks in san mateo, a block and a half in daly city and three and a half blocks in berkeley. these short distances kept me out complete seclusion. out of therapist's intimately lit offices that charge so much it's cheaper to stay in bed, cry and not eat for two days. out of yoga studios with people who have no soul, no use for one, but want yours anyway. out of dance floors where free-love and acceptance flows hazily alongside bargain-hunting and limited liability partnership. out of lover's beds that are so cold and selfish that it'd be saner to forgive and forget. makes me want to shoot some more baskets. and finally get some real sleep.

up next time: belligerent rants about the dalai lama, guru-led-non-emotive-soviet-purge-like sex fraternities, doggie and kitty dating services, thieving ex-millitary squatters, spaced out hippies, and other social maladies.

hmmm

2009-03-26T19:18:00.001-07:00

A world currency moves nearer after Tim Geithner's slip

US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner confessed on Wednesday that he had not read the plans by China's central bank governor for a "super-sovereign reserve currency" run by the International Monetary Fund, but nevertheless let slip that Washington was "open" to the idea. Whoops.

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Last Updated: 9:16PM GMT 25 Mar 2009

As President Barack Obama - pictured with Geithner - put it, the US is going through a 'rough patch' Photo: AP

This is how matters quickly escalate in geo-finance. China's suggestion – backed by Russia, Brazil, and India, and clearly aimed at breaking US dollar hegemony – is making its way onto the agenda of the G20 Summit next week. 'Dollar-dämmerung' no longer looks so far-fetched.

China's paper, by Governor Zhou Xiaochuan, is couched in understated language – more a 'thought experiment' than a declaration of monetary war. His ideas could be mistaken for the musings of an academic theorist. Nobody should be fooled by decorum.

It comes days after premier Wen Jiabow demanded US action to safeguard the value of China's holdings of US bonds - $740bn of US Treasuries and a further $600bn or so of other debt. "We have lent huge amounts of money to the US. Of course we are concerned about the safety of our assets," he said.

China's Communist Party seems to fear that the Federal Reserve is orchestrating a beggar-thy-neighbour devaluation - and a disguised default on America's foreign debt - by resorting to the nuclear option of printing money to buy US Treasury bonds.

China's proposal is to activate the IMF's power to issue Special Drawing Rights (SDRs). The IMF would be groomed as de facto central bank for the planet. The SDRs would gradually become an "accepted means of payment". Call it the 'globo'.

It would be an error dismiss this idea as a pipe-dream. Cynics once ridiculed Maastricht plans to launch the euro. John Major famously said chatter about a European currency had "all the quaintness of a rain-dance and about the same potency". Yet once officialdom began assembling the machinery for monetary union, EMU acquired a life of its own.

The pitfalls of a world central bank are obvious. It is hard enough for the European Central Bank to run policy for 16 states in a region with a shared history, and shared EU institutions (Commission, Court of Justice, competition police, etc). The politics of global monetary management would be poisonous.

The heads of the Fed, the ECB, and the Bank of England, must all testify before parliaments and answer to democracy. There is no world parliament, no world government. Who would control a super-IMF?

In theory, this world reserve bank would be above politics. China's plan suggests a resource currency along the lines of the "Bancor" floated by Keynes at Bretton Woods. This was anchored on 30 commodities, giving it a broader base than the Gold Standard. Such a currency would prevent the "credit-based" debauchery of today's fiat system, says Mr Zhou.

True, but this would be jumping from frying pan to fire. If the world is running out of oil, metals, freshwater, and arable land – as many believe – then the price of commodities must rise over time. The 'globo' would become a deflation machine, like the late 19th Century gold as it asphyxiated endebted US farmers.

The China-Russia plans may never come to much. As President Barack Obama put it, the US is going through a "rough patch" but still commands the world's biggest economy, under a stable democracy and the rule of law. He might have added that it will largely avoid the aging crisis already dulling Japan's dynamism, and soon to ensnare Germany, Italy, above all China.

For all its bluster, Beijing must move with care. After years of export-driven mercantilism China is even more dependent on US markets than America is dependent on Chinese capital. The risks of currency and trade conflict are not symmetric. The hegemon must prevail.

But 10 years hence the picture may look different. If the G20 opens the door wide enough next week, a world currency may yet come into being.

source: telegraph.co.uk

on to some music...

2009-03-22T23:53:00.001-07:00

more accountabilty?

2009-03-22T21:49:00.000-07:00

Geithner, AIG, and Sourcing 101 at the NYT

2009-03-20T00:42:00.000-07:00

One of the issues in the AIG bonuses is what did the administration know and when did they know it. The NYT tells readers that:

"On Tuesday last week, as he prepared for a meeting in London of the finance ministers of the Group of 20 nations, Mr. Geithner learned that A.I.G. by Sunday would send out the bonuses to employees at its financial products unit, which developed the risky derivatives now blamed for the global credit crisis."

It's impressive that the New York Times knows when Mr. Geithner "learned" this information. Did this information come to the NYT directly from God?

We get a bit more insight on the source in the next paragraph where we find out that:

"With few senior political appointees on hand, the word came from one of the numerous career civil servants who keep the Treasury functioning through changes of administration, according to an official (emphasis added)."

Perhaps this same "official" is the person who also told the NYT when Geithner learned of the AIG bonuses and provided the article's unsourced description of subsequent events. It would have been helpful to have some additional information on this unnamed official since it is possible that this person has a stake in minimizing Geithner's knowledge of the AIG bonuses.

The facts presented in the article lend themselves to an alternative explanation of events.The article tells reports that: "once A.I.G. was under the Fed’s control, its executive compensation plans hardly came up, according to officials," noting that Geithner was overseeing the takeover.

One may reasonably conclude that Geithner, as head of the New York Fed, had a good understanding of the sort of compensation packages that were used at financial institutions like AIG. It is also reasonable to assume that if he didn't explicitly take steps to change these practices following the Fed's takeover of AIG, that the practices would still be in place.

In other words, insofar as he gave the matter any thought at all, it is reasonable to assume that Geithner knew that AIG would be paying large bonuses to most-valued employees. If he did not give it any thought then it was because he did not care that a firm receiving more $160 billion worth of taxpayer dollars was paying multi-million dollar bonuses to its top executives. It is implausible on its face that Geithner was surprised by this situation.

--Dean Baker

john perkins wasn't kidding, they do send in the jackals

2009-03-13T23:53:00.000-07:00

here is a scary article regarding a speech seymour hersh just gave on our country's little international assassination ring. by executive fiat. the link is from the minnesota post and complete with an audio of the speech. hersh's statement comes in the 7th minute. go ahead, check it out...

XXX rated

2009-03-13T23:18:00.000-07:00

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Companies ranging from Eastman Kodak (EK.N) to Unisys (UIS.N) are at risk of defaulting on their debt in the eyes of credit ratings agency Moody's Investors Service, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Moody's is expected on Tuesday to publish a list detailing 283 such companies, called "The Bottom Rung," which it will update monthly, according to a story published on the newspaper's website on Monday.

About 45 percent of companies on the list will default on debt in the next year, Moody's says, which could include anything from filing for bankruptcy to missing debt payments.

Companies in the U.S. car industry, retail chains, media and casino gambling dominate the list, and energy firms, airlines and restaurant chains appear often, the newspaper said.

The story quoted a Kodak spokesman as saying that speculation of this kind was "irresponsible" and added that the company "is financially solid."

A Unisys spokesman was not immediately available.

(Reporting by Franklin Paul; Editing by Jan Dahinten)

earth to obama and congress: empire maintenance is killing us!

2009-03-11T00:35:00.000-07:00

stop e.d. (empire dysfunction) at the source. its funding...

hot damn, MoMA is encouraging innovation?(!!!)

2009-03-09T23:23:00.000-07:00

your email is 'not treated like a sealed envelope' but 'a post card'

2009-03-09T01:36:00.000-07:00

rest assured, the current president wants to read em too.

more secrecy-we can't handle the truth!

2009-03-06T01:34:00.000-08:00

here's some startling news from that pinko-commie source on the margins. bloomberg media! they're cranky as of late, they've sued the fed. they want answers. they won't get any straight lines, because it seems no one knows how something like $600-$1800 TRILLION is baseless fantasy, 'troubled' or missing from the world economy.

staring you in the face

2009-03-04T01:52:00.000-08:00

if anyone cares, there is a iddy bitty piece of a large puzzle that has been divulged to us; the privileged, unrepentant, but none the less unwilling fund providers for these wars in mesopotamia. here.

a shout out goes to wikileaks, and more especially the military and intelligence community, for telling us what they really think. in this classified survey of interviews by the RAND corporation, there isn't any posturing or histrionics. an invaluable source, all with a neat appendix at the end. smile, you're on record. here's a sample:

We also spent a lot of time, money, blood, and treasure on going after MVTs [medium- value targets] and HVTs . . . and I dont think it had a great deal of effect on the Taliban because they are not hierarchical. If we killed one guy, they just replaced him in about 10minutes. . . . [In that regard,] they are not that different [from] us.

read some. and you might come away with a sense of disconnect from OUR reality. our NEWS. OUR POLITICIANS. driving a population into a third world catastrophe is messy. don't speak truth to power, because power (RAND corporation, chiefs of staff, think tanks, war planners, top brass, war committees et al.) already know the truth. enjoy your freedom, folks.

scenes from a sickness

2009-02-28T17:37:00.000-08:00

getting to the gist of the matter, i try an inquiry. into, where these men live? work? i find them all crazy eyed at every woman here, and especially new women to the place. they're ALL aware of this and that, unshakable, and have heard it ALL. what have they heard? their blank stares away from conversations with others inform me of something. i don't know whether i can be certain of it, but they seem to be miserably bored. one drink leads to another. and after i talk to about a half dozen of these men, all within twenty feet of each other at the bar, i tumble outside. for a break! god, if you were real, you'd flood this place clean. smoke these fly traps out. with comfortable eyes, they prey, their nostrils glisten, and their confidence sneers. ready with one and a two. a little jab and slap. a discreet touch and fondle. they haven't debated ANYTHING, they have the main-line access to the SOURCE. watch out! anything! the black arts, magic, astrology, and deep conspiracy. they've got a wife, a bike, a house and a business. they're here to stay 'fresh'. and they're staying. as stale as cardboard, dead as carcass, and pale as sin. how quickly they throw it in. and they'll be out there the next day, all jubilant and proud they haven't been struck by lightning. their mornings will somberly creep, and their fattened fingers will reach for SOMETHING. a reprieve. a newspaper. a microwavable lunch packet. and that same blasted sun will come and meet them half way...

Johann Hari: Clint Eastwood shows how America is changing

2009-02-27T11:48:00.000-08:00

The shift in one of America's greatest icons is a hopeful sign of cultural change

Friday, 27 February 2009
The Independent of London

In the endless babbling torrent of news, it's easy to miss the small signs of how a culture – and a country – changes. For me, a marker almost as sweet as a black man in the White House has just flickered into Britain's cinemas.

Clint Eastwood is the quintessential icon of the old America: an icy Everyman who made his fame cursing liberals, shooting down suspects, and slaying Injuns on screen. But now, in his eighth decade, Eastwood has done something remarkable. He has been making beautiful, understated movies that apologise for the filth he pumped out early in his career – and propagandise for a very different America. Yes: Dirty Harry has turned pinko-peacenik.

Eastwood strutted into the American consciousness in the 1950s in the TV series Rawhide and a string of big-screen Westerns. He caught the tail-end of the uncomplicated Us vs Them cowboy flicks where the Indians were evil, scalping savages who had to be destroyed by the white heroes. The films were gorgeous, romantic accounts of a genocide, told adoringly from the perspective of the genocidaires. The attitude of the genre was typified by John Wayne's jeer: "I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them... the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves."

But Eastwood found his most iconic role as a new kind of urban cowboy. In the 1971 film Dirty Harry, he plays Inspector Harry Callahan. It was the first of the wave of backlash movies, explicitly taking on the Sixties counter-culture and accusing it of destroying America. The plot focuses on a serial killer called Scorpio, who is a pansy-parody of the peace movement: a long-haired, androgynous, lisping hippie who wears the peace logo. He shoots random civilians, and says he will only stop if he is paid a ransom of $100,000.

Dirty Harry is an old-style cop, fond of beating and torturing confessions out of suspects. He summarises his approach by saying: "I shoot the bastard, that's my policy." His colleagues boast that Harry "is an equal opportunities hater – spicks, niggers, kikes, dagoes – especially spicks." He sets out to catch the killer – but at every turn he is emasculated by insane liberal regulations. The new laws prevent him from breaking into homes without a warrant, committing torture, or harassing suspects. Appalled, Harry spits: "That man has rights? The law is crazy!"

As a result of the evil liberals fettering Harry, Scorpio is left free to suffocate a 14-year-old girl and hijack a schoolbus full of kids. In the end, Harry shoots Scorpio in cold blood and throws his police badge away in disgust. Pauline Kael, the greatest film critic of her time (or any time), famously called the film "fascist." Dirty Harry's motto – "Go ahead, punk. Make my day" – became a classic.

But then something odd happened. The old black-and-white world of Dirty Harry bled away – and a subtle, supple film-maker emerged in his place. There were hints of a change in Unforgiven, his 1992 Western. Suddenly, the old gun-slinger at the centre of the film – played by Eastwood – was broken and traumatised by the sadism he had inflicted in his earlier life. We no longer yelled for him to kill more: we felt uncomfortable, and ambiguous.

Since then, Eastwood's films have been populated with people broken by the kind of casual violence inflicted to such noisy cheers by Dirty Harry. The Changeling is the true story of what happens when the police disobey the rules and embark on torture and violence to achieve their goals – told from the perspective of the victim. The Flags of Our Fathers is the true story of the soldiers who raised the US flag on Iwo Jima during the Second World War – and how the Native American soldier there, Ira Hayes, returned to face internal apartheid and abuse. The companion-film, Letters From Iwo Jima, is even more bold, telling the story of the war from the other side – that of the Japanese soldiers. Eastwood began to be attacked by the likes of Rush Limbaugh for becoming "liberal".

But with his latest film, Gran Torino, Eastwood makes his repentance explicit. He plays Walt Kowalski, a cussed old widow and Korean war vet living alone in a neighbourhood that is increasingly populated by immigrants. Walt could be Harry Callahan in retirement: he curses the "babbling gooks" who move in next door and clings to his fat guns.

But one day, Walt sees a gang attacking his Hmong-immigrant neighbours, as they stumble on to his lawn – and he scares them off with a gun. The Hmong family begin to shower him with gifts and affection, as the gang circles ever closer. It becomes clear that Walt is broken by the violence he committed more than fifty years ago in Korea. "You want to know what it's like to kill a man?" he asks. "It's gooddam awful and the only thing worse is being given a medal of honour for killing a guy who just wants to live."

Yet it becomes clear that Walt will fight back against the gang to defend his neighbours – and it seems like progress from Dirty Harry, but not much. Yes, liberal vigilantism is better than illiberal vigilantism, but only by inches.

But then the film surprises you – and shows how far Eastwood has really come. (If you don't want to know the ending of the film, skip this paragraph.) He goes to confront the gang, and we expect a gleeful shoot-out. But the gang are waiting for him, armed like a militia. Walt watches them slowly, sadly, and reaches into his jacket. As he does, he dares the gang to shoot him first. "Go ahead," he says – deliberately echoing Dirty Harry. They fill him with lead, there, in the street. But it turns out Walt was unarmed – and now the gang is going down for life. His neighbours are free at last. The echo of the old catch-phrase is ironic: Eastwood's smiling form of apology. The first time the actor said "Go ahead" on the big screen, he was sacrificing the law with violence to attack liberals. This time, he was using the law and non-violence, to defend immigrants.

In an age of forced apologies, here is a real one. This shift in one of America's greatest icons is – I think – a helpful, hopeful sign of the wider shift in American culture. Although it was obscured by the back-lash jolts of 9/11 and the Bush years, the US has been slowly becoming a more liberal and open-minded society. Look at the difference between the reaction to the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the Abu Graib horror in Iraq. When My Lai broke – the deliberate massacre of a whole village, including children – 40 per cent of Americans defended it, and songs celebrating it topped the charts. When Abu Ghraib broke, only the madder fringes of talk radio praised it; more than 90 per cent were repulsed.

The old Dirty Harry racism and brutality is abating, as the country's great civil rights movements slowly win. Of course, that doesn't mean the actions of the government will necessarily follow Walt and public opinion. They are often driven by forces that aren't as accountable to democratic pressure, like corporate power, or the super-rich – but in time, they too can be eroded. If Inspector Harry Callahan can say sorry and change, anyone can.

Go ahead, America – make our day.

j.hari@independent.co.uk

paint a picture. and miss the 'so what?'

2009-02-23T00:10:00.000-08:00

so i'm sitting in a bar a few days ago with a few friends, walk outside for a cigarette and get into a conversation with a patron about some sad novel he just read. i tell him i'm not for new fiction, but what's it about? the theme? the title. he states, with a glimmer in his half drunk-eye, about how perfect the theme is, about some university professor falling in love with a student, and how the student rejects him. he smothers his bald head, and does his best michael stipe, pulling on his sweater sleeves. sounds fucking miserable, i tell him, not inquiring further, and totally blocking the author and title out of my mind. i looked over and he seemed to be thinking dark thoughts right into the puddle in front of the bar. not that miserable people can't transcend misery even when they write about it, i offer. he looks away from the puddle, appearing more drunk than a minute ago. yeah, well, i'm a pretty miserable person, he says. there's nothing wrong with that, i counter. he smiles, yeah, there's a lot more people reading this stuff. which stuff? i wonder. he straightens himself out and heads for the bar entrance. nice to talk to you, he says as he shakes my hand, maybe we'll talk again.

i didn't really say much to him though. and as i sat down next to my friends, at the round edge of the bar where my beer was, i suddenly looked up and saw him sitting at the other end of the bar. in a seat congruent to mine, where i could see him looking at me the remainder of the hour. or was i looking at him? i remember getting out a cigarette and putting it behind my ear and seeing as he fetched one out, and reluctantly went towards the exit. my friends distracted me at that point with some arcane observation about the female sex, which made sense, and i stuck around, raising my voice and pointing my fingers at both of them. i check out all women, one of them said, not cuz i wanna fuck them, but to see what they seem to be saying with their body. see how they age, i add, see how they walk, how they react, posture about, get mad. i glance over and see the guy gone, and take the opportunity to scoop out some popcorn from the gratis popcorn machine which sits right next to his bar stool, at the other side of the bar.

i walk outside after getting the popcorn, light up a cigarette and shield myself under the ledge, away from the occasional walker-by on the slim sidewalk. i could hear his voice around the soft corner where the other ledge is located. his voice is alive now, a touch of queen and with a sprinkle of salesperson. he makes his way to the bar entrance, sees me and makes a awkward hi! while on the phone. i like him. he lost interest earlier while the my two friends and i charmed the bartender into giving us a student special on pitcher(s) even though we couldn't make with a student id. she charmed us right back and we took it in with signs of gratitude and glee. she kept coming back and making fun of the crick in my neck, as i bent my whole body over to watch a game on the tv. we all made her laugh heartily, and i watched the man look away from us. we all sat silent for a while. we had just came from a good hike in the hills. we walked up a nice hill, taking an old muddy trail, talking about the women in our lives, making obscene gestures at people walking by, and trying to trip each other. we all agreed to drink beer and walked down our hill.

we were to wait for a lady friend of mine at this bar. she was running about an hour late and not answering her phone...

Tom Friedman's Terrorism Hypocrisy

2009-02-23T00:08:00.000-08:00

02/21/2009 by Isabel Macdonald
source: FAIR

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman referred disparagingly this week to the praise that terrorism allegedly receives in "mainstream Arab media, like Al Jazeera." In his February 18 column, Friedman wrote:

'To be sure, Mumbai’s Muslims are a vulnerable minority in a predominantly Hindu country. Nevertheless, their in-your-face defiance of the Islamist terrorists stands out. It stands out against a dismal landscape of predominantly Sunni Muslim suicide murderers who have attacked civilians in mosques and markets--from Iraq to Pakistan to Afghanistan--but who have been treated by mainstream Arab media, like Al Jazeera, or by extremist Islamist spiritual leaders and websites, as "martyrs" whose actions deserve praise.'

Actually, Al Jazeera refers to such attacks as "suicide attacks"--as a quick search of the Al Jazeera website, where one can view programs online, can attest.

But if Friedman were really concerned about media praise of terrorism, he might start by raising alarms about a certain New York Times columnist by the name of Thomas Friedman.

In a January 14 column defending Israel's attacks on the Gaza Strip, Friedman praised the 2006 Israeli attacks on Lebanon, which killed about 1,000 Lebanese civilians, as the "education" of Lebanese militant group Hezbollah:

'Israel's counterstrategy was to use its air force to pummel Hezbollah and, while not directly targeting the Lebanese civilians with whom Hezbollah was intertwined, to inflict substantial property damage and collateral casualties on Lebanon at large. It was not pretty, but it was logical. Israel basically said that when dealing with a nonstate actor, Hezbollah, nested among civilians, the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians--the families and employers of the militants--to restrain Hezbollah in the future.'

See FAIR's Action Alert: "Terrorism on the NY Times Op-Ed Page (1/14/09).

Barack Obama Administration Continues US Military Global Dominance

2009-02-21T19:51:00.000-08:00

February 21, 2009 By Peter Phillips
souce: zmag

The Barack Obama administration is continuing the neo-conservative agenda of US military domination of the world— albeit with perhaps with a kinder-gentler face. While overt torture is now forbidden for the CIA and Pentagon, and symbolic gestures like the closing of the Guantanamo prison are in evidence, a unilateral military dominance policy, expanding military budget, and wars of occupation and aggression will likely continue unabated.

The military expansionists from within the Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Clinton, G. W. Bush administrations all put into place solid support for increased military spending. Clinton's model of supporting the US military industrial complex was hold steady defense spending and to increase foreign weapons sales from 16% of global orders to over 60% by end of his administration.

The neo-conservatives, who dominated the most recent Bush administration, amplified this trend for increased military spending. The neo-cons laid out their agenda for military global dominance in the 2000 Project for a New American Century (PNAC) report Rebuilding America's Defenses. The report called for the protection of the American Homeland, the ability to wage simultaneous theater wars, to perform global constabulary roles, and to control space and cyberspace. The report claimed that in order to maintain a Pax Americana, potential rivals — such as China, Iran, Iraq, and North Korea — needed to be held in check. Their military global dominance agenda required forward deployment of US forces worldwide and increasing defense/war spending well into the 21st century. The result was a doubling of the US military budget to over $700 billion in the last eight years. The US now spends as much on war/defense as the rest of the world combined making American taxpayers the highest war tax providers in the world.

Barack Obama's election brought a moment of hope for many. However, the Obama administration is not calling for deceased military spending, or a reversal of US military global dominance. Instead, Obama retained Robert Gates, thus making Obama the first president from an opposing party, in US history, to keep in place the outgoing administrations' Secretary of Defense/War. Additionally, Obama is calling for an expanded war in Afghanistan and only minimal long-range reductions in Iraq.

The US military industrial complex is deeply embedded inside the Washington beltway. According to the most recent reports from OpenSecrets.org, 151 members of Congress in 2006 had up to $195.5 million invested in defense companies.

Major defense contractors were seriously involved in the 2008 elections. Lockheed Martin gave $2,612,219 in total political campaign donations with 49% to Democrats ($1,285,493) and 51% to Republicans ($1,325,159). Boeing gave $2,225,947 in 2008 with 58% to Democrats and General Dynamics provided $1,682,595 to both parties. Northrop Grumman spent over $20 million in 2008 hiring lobbyists to consult to Congress, and Raytheon spent $6 million on lobbyists in the same period. Nancy Pelosi received more money from registered lobbyists than any other House candidate in the recent election cycle.

The International Monetary Fund's prediction for global economic growth in 2009 is 0.5 percent—the worst since World War II. The United Nations' International Labor Organization estimates that some 50 million workers will lose their jobs worldwide this year. There are an estimated 62,000 U.S. companies expected to close this year, and while official unemployment is at 7 percent in the US, when you add people no longer looking for jobs and part-time workers, it is closer to 14 percent. The military-industrial-political elite are worried about the potential of increasing global insecurity. The answer inside the Obama Administration is to continue high defense/war spending to insure military control of both domestic and foreign instabilities.

The military, industrial, congressional, and administrative elite profit from defense spending, both financially and ideologically. Insider profit taking from pentagon spending is widespread in Washington. But perhaps more important is the belief that this global military machine is seen as necessary for the protection of US corporate interests and the American upper classes in a increasingly destabilized world. Given that belief, the Obama administration is unlikely to change the established defense spending policies of the previous US administrations.

Peter Phillips is a Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University and Director of Project Censored a media research organization. His 2006 study on the Global Dominance Group in the US is available on line at: http://www.projectcensored.org/articles/story/the-global-dominance-group/

Asia: The Coming Fury

2009-02-10T23:22:00.000-08:00

February 11, 2009 By Walden Bello
Source: FPF

As goods pile up in wharves from Bangkok to Shanghai, and workers are laid off in record numbers, people in East Asia are beginning to realize they aren't only experiencing an economic downturn but living through the end of an era.

For over 40 years now, the cutting edge of the region's economy has been export-oriented industrialization (EOI). Taiwan and Korea first adopted this strategy of growth in the mid-1960s, with Korean dictator Park Chung-Hee coaxing his country's entrepreneurs to export by, among other measures, cutting off electricity to their factories if they refused to comply.

The success of Korea and Taiwan convinced the World Bank that EOI was the wave of the future. In the mid-1970s, then-Bank President Robert McNamara enshrined it as doctrine, preaching that "special efforts must be made in many countries to turn their manufacturing enterprises away from the relatively small markets associated with import substitution toward the much larger opportunities flowing from export promotion."

EOI became one of the key points of consensus between the Bank and Southeast Asia's governments. Both realized import substitution industrialization could only continue if domestic purchasing power were increased via significant redistribution of income and wealth, and this was simply out of the question for the region's elites. Export markets, especially the relatively open U.S. market, appeared to be a painless substitute.

Japanese Capital Creates an Export Platform

The World Bank endorsed the establishment of export processing zones, where foreign capital could be married to cheap (usually female) labor. It also supported the establishment of tax incentives for exporters and, less successfully, promoted trade liberalization. Not until the mid-1980s, however, did the economies of Southeast Asia take off, and this wasn't so much because of the Bank but because of aggressive U.S. trade policy. In 1985, in what became known as the Plaza Accord, the United States forced the drastic revaluation of the Japanese yen relative to the dollar and other major currencies. By making Japanese imports more expensive to American consumers, Washington hoped to reduce its trade deficit with Tokyo. Production in Japan became prohibitive in terms of labor costs, forcing the Japanese to move the more labor-intensive parts of their manufacturing operations to low-wage areas, in particular to China and Southeast Asia. At least $15 billion worth of Japanese direct investment flowed into Southeast Asia between 1985 and 1990.

The inflow of Japanese capital allowed the Southeast Asian "newly industrializing countries" to escape the credit squeeze of the early 1980s brought on by the Third World debt crisis, surmount the global recession of the mid-1980s, and move onto a path of high-speed growth. The centrality of the endaka, or currency revaluation, was reflected in the ratio of foreign direct investment inflows to gross capital formation, which leaped spectacularly in the late 1980s and 1990s in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand.

The dynamics of foreign-investment-driven growth was best illustrated in Thailand, which received $24 billion worth of investment from capital-rich Japan, Korea, and Taiwan in just five years, between 1987 and 1991. Whatever might have been the Thai government's economic policy preferences — protectionist, mercantilist, or pro-market — this vast amount of East Asian capital coming into Thailand could not but trigger rapid growth. The same was true in the two other favored nations of northeast Asian capital, Malaysia and Indonesia.

It wasn't just the scale of Japanese investment over a five-year period that mattered, however; it was the process. The Japanese government and keiretsu, or conglomerates, planned and cooperated closely in the transfer of corporate industrial facilities to Southeast Asia. One key dimension of this plan was to relocate not just big corporations like Toyota or Matsushita, but also small and medium enterprises that provided their inputs and components. Another was to integrate complementary manufacturing operations that were spread across the region in different countries. The aim was to create an Asia Pacific platform for re-export to Japan and export to third-country markets. This was industrial policy and planning on a grand scale, managed jointly by the Japanese government and corporations and driven by the need to adjust to the post-Plaza Accord world. As one Japanese diplomat put it rather candidly, "Japan is creating an exclusive Japanese market in which Asia Pacific nations are incorporated into the so-called keiretsu [financial-industrial bloc] system."

China Masters the Model

If Taiwan and Korea pioneered the model and Southeast Asia successfully followed in their wake, China perfected the strategy of export-oriented industrialization. With its reserve army of cheap labor unmatched by any country in the world, China became the "workshop of the world," drawing in $50 billion in foreign investment annually by the first half of this decade. To survive, transnational firms had no choice but to transfer their labor-intensive operations to China to take advantage of what came to be known as the "China price," provoking in the process a tremendous crisis in the advanced capitalist countries' labor forces.

This process depended on the U.S. market. As long as U.S. consumers splurged, the export economies of East Asia could continue in high gear. The low U.S. savings rate was no barrier since credit was available on a grand scale. China and other Asian countries snapped up U.S. treasury bills and loaned massively to U.S. financial institutions, which in turn loaned to consumers and homebuyers. But now the U.S. credit economy has imploded, and the U.S. market is unlikely to serve as the same dynamic source of demand for a long time to come. As a result, Asia's export economies have been marooned.

The Illusion of "Decoupling"

For several years China has seemed to be a dynamic alternative to the U.S. market for Japan and East Asia's smaller economies. Chinese demand, after all, had pulled the Asian economies, including Korea and Japan, from the depths of stagnation and the morass of the Asian financial crisis in the first half of this decade. In 2003, for instance, Japan broke a decade-long stagnation by meeting China's thirst for capital and technology-intensive goods. Japanese exports shot up to record levels. Indeed, China had become by the middle of the decade, "the overwhelming driver of export growth in Taiwan and the Philippines, and the majority buyer of products from Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, and Australia."

Even though China appeared to be a new driver of export-led growth, some analysts still considered the notion of Asia "decoupling" from the U.S. locomotive to be a pipe dream. For instance, research by economists C.P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh, underlined that China was indeed importing intermediate goods and parts from Japan, Korea, and ASEAN, but only to put them together mainly for export as finished goods to the United States and Europe, not for its domestic market. Thus, "if demand for Chinese exports from the United States and the EU slow down, as will be likely with a U.S. recession," they asserted, "this will not only affect Chinese manufacturing production, but also Chinese demand for imports from these Asian developing countries."

The collapse of Asia's key market has banished all talk of decoupling. The image of decoupled locomotives — one coming to a halt, the other chugging along on a separate track — no longer applies, if it ever had. Rather, U.S.-East Asia economic relations today resemble a chain-gang linking not only China and the United States but a host of other satellite economies. They are all linked to debt-financed middle-class spending in the United States, which has collapsed.

China's growth in 2008 fell to 9%, from 11% a year earlier. Japan is now in deep recession, its mighty export-oriented consumer goods industries reeling from plummeting sales. South Korea, the hardest hit of Asia's economies so far, has seen its currency collapse by some 30% relative to the dollar. Southeast Asia's growth in 2009 will likely be half that of 2008.

The Coming Fury

The sudden end of the export era is going to have some ugly consequences. In the last three decades, rapid growth reduced the number living below the poverty line in many countries. In practically all countries, however, income and wealth inequality increased. But the expansion of consumer purchasing power took much of the edge off social conflicts. Now, with the era of growth coming to an end, increasing poverty amid great inequalities will be a combustible combination.

In China, about 20 million workers have lost their jobs in the last few months, many of them heading back to the countryside, where they will find little work. The authorities are rightly worried that what they label "mass group incidents," which have been increasing in the last decade, might spin out of control. With the safety valve of foreign demand for Indonesian and Filipino workers shut off, hundreds of thousands of workers are returning home to few jobs and dying farms. Suffering is likely to be accompanied by rising protest, as it already has in Vietnam, where strikes are spreading like wildfire. Korea, with its tradition of militant labor and peasant protest, is a ticking time bomb. Indeed, East Asia may be entering a period of radical protest and social revolution that went out of style when export-oriented industrialization became the fashion three decades ago.

Walden Bello is a Foreign Policy In Focus columnist, a senior analyst at the Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South, president of the Freedom from Debt Coalition, and a professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines.

Sources

Hisahiko Okasaki, "New Strategies toward Super-Asian Bloc," This Is (Tokyo), August 1992. Reproduced in Foreign Broadcast Information Service Daily Report: East Asia Supplement, Oct. 7, 1992.

"China: the Locomotive," The Straits Times, February 23, 2004.

coming soon...

2009-02-09T23:38:00.001-08:00

the vermont teddy bear soft core porn wont stop. these things are everywhere!
but not on c-span! and not while the president speaks, yawn...
but it'll be all over in four days. when people stop trying to get a "positive response" from "their" women. submission and ownership never looked so cheap and on prime time too!
for saner time check out john pilger's latest:

The Politics Of Bollocks

2009-02-09T23:36:00.000-08:00

February, 06 2009
By Pilger, John

Growing up in an Antipodean society proud of its rich variety of expletives, I never heard the word bollocks. It was only on arrival in England that I understood its majesterial power. All classes used it. Judges grunted it; an editor of the Daily Mirror used it as noun, adjective and verb. Certainly, the resonance of a double vowel saw off its closest American contender. It had authority.

A high official with the Gilbertian title of Lord West of Spithead used it to great effect on 27 January. The former admiral, who is security adviser to Gordon Brown, was referring to Tony Blair's famous assertion that invading countries and killing innocent people did not increase the threat of terrorism at home.

"That was clearly bollocks," said his lordship, who warned of the perceived "linkage between the US, Israel and the UK" in the horrors inflicted on Gaza and the effect on the recruitment of terrorists in Britain. In other words, he was stating the obvious: that state terrorism begets individual or group terrorism at source. Just as Blair was the prime mover of the London bombings of 7 July 2005, so Brown, having pursued the same cynical crusades in Muslim countries and having armed and disported himself before the criminal regime in Tel Aviv, will share responsibility for related atrocities at home.

There is a lot of bollocks about at the moment.

The BBC's explanation for banning an appeal on behalf of the stricken people of Gaza is a vivid example. Mark Thompson, the director general, cited the BBC's legal requirement to be "impartial ... because Gaza is a major ongoing news story in which humanitarian issues ... are both at the heart of the story and contentious."

In a letter to Thomson, David Bracewell, illuminated the deceit behind this. He pointed to previous BBC appeals for the Disasters Emergency Committee that were not only made in the midst of "an ongoing news story" in which humanitarian issues were "contentious", but demonstrated how the BBC took sides. In 1999, at the height of the illegal Nato bombing of Serbia and Kosovo, the TV presenter Jill Dando made an appeal on behalf of Kosovar refugees. The BBC web page for that appeal was linked to numerous articles meant to support the gravity of the humanitarian issue. These included quotations from Blair himself, such as" "This will be a daily pounding until [Slobodan Milosevic] comes into line with the terms that Nato has laid down." There was no significant balance of view from the Yugoslav side, and not a single mention that the flight of Kosovar refugees began only after Nato had started bombing. Similarly, in an appeal for the victims of the civil war in the Congo, the BBC favoured the regime of Joseph Kabila without referring to the Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and other reports accusing his forces of atrocities. In contrast, the rebel leader Nkunda was "accused of committing atrocities" and was ordained the BBC's bad guy. Kabila, who represented western interests, was clearly the good guy - just like Nato in the Balkans and Israel in the Middle East.

While Mark Thompson and his satraps richly deserve the Lord West of Spithead Bollocks Blue Ribbon, that honour goes to the cheer squad of President Barack Obama, whose cult-like obeisance goes on and on.

On 23 January, the Guardian's front page declared, "Obama shuts network of CIA 'ghost prisons' ". The "wholesale deconstruction [sic] of George Bush's war on terror", said the report, had been ordered by the new president who would be "shutting down the CIA's secret prison network, banning torture and rendition ...".

The bollocks quotient on this was so high that it read like the press release it was, citing "officials briefing reporters at the White House yesterday". Obama's orders, according to a group of 16 retired generals and admirals who attended a presidential signing ceremony, "would restore America's moral standing in the world". What moral standing? It never ceases to astonish that experienced reporters can transmit PR stunts like this, bearing in mind the moving belt of lies from the same source under only nominally different management.

Far from "deconstructing [sic] the war on terror", Obama is clearly pursuing it with the same vigour, ideological backing and deception as the previous administration. George W. Bush's first war, in Afghanistan, and last war, in Pakistan, are now Obama's wars - with thousands more US troops to be deployed, more bombing and more slaughter of civilians. On 22 January, the day he described Afghanistan and Pakistan as "the central front in our enduring struggle against terrorism and extremism", 22 Afghan civilians died beneath Obama's bombs in a hamlet populated mainly by shepherds and which, by all accounts, had not laid eyes on the Taliban. Women and children were among the dead, which is normal.

Far from "shutting down the CIA's secret prison network", Obama's executive orders actually give the CIA authority to carry out renditions, abductions and transfers of prisoners in secret without the threat of legal obstruction. As the Los Angeles Times disclosed, "current and former intelligence officials said the rendition program might be poised to play an expanded role." A semantic sleight of hand is that "long term prisons" are changed to "short term prisons"; and while Americans are now banned from directly torturing people, foreigners working for the US are not. This means that America's numerous "covert actions" will operate as they did under previous presidents, with proxy regimes, such as Augusto Pinochet's in Chile, doing the dirtiest work.

Bush's open support for torture, and Donald Rumsfeld's extraordinary personal overseeing of certain torture techniques, upset many in America's "secret army" of subversive military and intelligence operators as it exposed how the system worked. Obama's nominee for director of national intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair, has said the Army Field Manual may include new forms of "harsh interrogation", which will be kept secret.

Obama has chosen not to stop any of this. Neither do his ballyhooed executive orders put an end to Bush's assault on constitutional and international law. He has retained Bush's "right" to imprison anyone, without trial or charges. No "ghost prisoners" are being released or are due to be tried before a civilian court. His nominee for attorney-general, Eric Holder, has endorsed an extension of Bush's totalitarian USA Patriot Act, which allows federal agents to demand Americans' library and bookshop records. The man of "change", is changing little. That ought to be front page news from Washington.

The Lord West of Spithead Bollocks Prize (Runner-up) is shared. On 28 January, a national Greenpeace advertisement opposing a third runway at London's Heathrow airport summed up the almost willful naivety that has obstructed informed analysis of the Obama administration. "Fortunately," declared Greenpeace beneath a God-like picture of Obama, "the White House has a new occupant, and he has asked us all to roll back the spectre of a warming planet." This was followed by Obama's rhetorical flourish about "putting off unpleasant decisions". In fact, Obama has made no commitment to curtail the America's infamous responsibility for the causes of global warming. As with Bush and most modern era presidents, it is oil, not stemming carbon emissions, that informs the new administration. Obama's national security adviser, General Jim Jones, a former Nato supreme commander, made his name planning US military control over the exploitation of oil and gas reserves from the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea to the Gulf of Guinea in Africa.

Sharing the Bollocks Runner-up Prize is the Observer, which on 25 January published a major news report headlined, "How Obama set the tone for a new US revolution". This was reminiscent of the Observer almost a dozen years ago when liberalism's other great white hope, Tony Blair, came to power. "Goodbye Xenophobia" was the Observer's post-election front page in 1997 and "The Foreign Office says Hello World, remember us". The government, said the breathless text, would push for "new worldwide rules on human rights and the environment" and implement "tough new limits" on arms sales. The opposite happened. Last year, Britain was the biggest arms dealer in the world; currently it is second only to the United States.

In the Blair mould, the Obama White House "sprang into action" with its "radical plans". The new president's first phone call was to that Palestinian quisling, the unelected and deeply unpopular Mohammed Abbas. There was a "hot pace" and a "new era", in which a notorious name from an ancien regime, Richard Holbrooke, was dispatched to Pakistan. In 1978, Holbrooke betrayed a promise to normalise relations with the Vietnamese on the eve of a vicious embargo that ruined the lives of countless Vietnamese children. Under Obama, the "sense of a new era abroad", declared the Observer, "was reinforced by the confirmation of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state". Clinton has threatened to "entirely obliterate Iran" on behalf of Israel.

What the childish fawning over Obama obscures is the dark power assembled under cover of America's first "post-racial president". Apart from the US, the world's most dangerous state is demonstrably Israel, having recently killed and maimed some 4,000 people in Gaza with impunity. On 10 February, a bellicose Israeli electorate is likely to put Binyamin Netanyahu into power. Netanyahu is a fanatic's fanatic who has made clear his intention of attacking Iran. In the Wall Street Journal on 24 January, he described Iran as the "terrorist mother base" and justified the murder of civilians in Gaza because "Israel cannot accept an Iranian terror base (Gaza) next to its major cities". On 31 January, unaware he was being filmed, Israel's ambassador in Australia described the massacres in Gaza as a "pre-introduction" -- dress rehearsal -- for an attack on Iran.

For Netanyahu, the reassuring news is that Obama's administration is the most Zionist in living memory - a truth that has struggled to be told from beneath the soggy layers of Obama-love. Not a single member of Obama's team demurred from Obama's support for Israel's barbaric actions in Gaza. Obama himself likened the safety of his two young daughters with that of Israeli children while making not a single reference to the thousands of Palestinian children killed with American weapons -- a violation of both international and US law. He did, however, demand that the people of Gaza be denied "smuggled" small arms with which to defend themselves against the world's fourth largest military power. And he paid tribute to the Arab dictatorships, such as Egypt, which are bribed by the US Treasury to help the US and Israel enforce policies described by the United Nations Rapporteur, Richard Falk, a Jew, as "genocidal".

It is time the Obama lovers grew up. It is time those paid to keep the record straight gave us the opportunity to debate informatively. In the 21st century, people power remains a huge and exciting and largely untapped force for change, but it is nothing without truth. "In the time of universal deceit," wrote George Orwell, "telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

www.johnpilger.com