Mark Ganzer's Blog

The astounding thing about American slavery is not that it existed but that it persisted (not hardly - slave labor is the cheapest labor of all, and the wealthy plantation owners were all too happy to persist in their slavery ways, plus, slaves were never "human," were they? We are quite capable of justifying anything to ourselves that suits or justifies our self interests!

2012-01-28T09:16:00.000-06:00

January 26, 2012

Life, Liberty and the Fact of Slavery

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

WASHINGTON — The astounding thing about American slavery is not that it existed — the enslavement of one people by another may be one of history’s universals — but that it persisted. It lasted into an era when its absence could be imagined and its presence could become an outrage.

That was one of the chilling peculiarities of slavery in the United States: As revolutionary ideas of human rights and liberty were being formulated, slavery was so widely accepted that contradictions between the evolving ideals and the brutish reality of enslavement were overlooked or tolerated.

We look back now, shocked at the cognitive and moral perversity. And that is one reason why a prevalent reaction has been to assert that the champions of those revolutionary ideals were hypocrites, including 12 of the first 18 American presidents, who were slave owners.

But that too-familiar judgment brings us to the most challenging example of all: Thomas Jefferson. And two new exhibitions come to a far more subtle and illuminating assessment of the past. Jefferson’s relationship to slavery is the subject of an important exhibition opening on Friday at the National Museum of American History here, “Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello: Paradox of Liberty.” It was created by the nascent National Museum of African American History and Culture in conjunction with the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which runs Jefferson’s extraordinary plantation, Monticello, as a historical home and museum in Charlottesville, Va.

The Washington exhibition will have a permanent counterpart opening next month at Monticello itself, where Jefferson, the writer of the Declaration of Independence, kept as many as 130 slaves. Expanding the already significant examination of slavery at the estate, “Landscape of Slavery: Mulberry Row at Monticello,” will consist of outdoor displays mounted alongside sites of labor uncovered through archeological digs.

Such research has been going on for two generations, disclosing the material lives of both hired and enslaved workers: their demolished dwellings and work houses are revealed through Jefferson’s notes, stone foundations, kitchen utensils, shattered pottery, belt buckles and other artifacts. Monticello’s outdoor exhibition is also part of a major transformation over the past two generations; once a sacral architectural monument to Jefferson’s genius, Monticello has evolved into a more complex reflection of the man and the 5,000-acre plantation that he owned.

These projects are difficult and ambitious, not just for Monticello but also for the African-American museum, which is scheduled to open in 2015. Lonnie G. Bunch III, the museum’s director, emphasized in a conversation that the Washington show is part of the institution’s attempt to explore how slavery might ultimately be presented.

Could any example pose a greater challenge? Jefferson didn’t just embrace the new nation’s ideals; he gave voice to our conception of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” What does it mean that such a man not only held slaves but also devoted considerable attention to their status, their mode of life and, yes, their profitability? What was the connection between his ideals and the blunt reality? These are not just biographical questions; they are national ones.

It is to the credit of the Washington exhibition’s creators — Rex Ellis, associate director of the African-American museum and Elizabeth Chew, a curator at Monticello — that we are not given the answers but are given enough information and perspective to begin to think about the issues, helped along by objects from Monticello as well as the new museum’s growing collection.

We enter the show’s 3,000-square-foot space seeing a life-size statue of Jefferson (created by StudioEIS in Brooklyn), standing in front of a red panel on which are inscribed the names (when known) of some 600 slaves who worked on his estates during his lifetime. In front of the display is the lap desk on which Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, a desk that was probably constructed by John Hemmings, Jefferson’s enslaved cabinetmaker (who used that spelling of his name), part of the now-renowned Hemings family (one of whom, Sally, is thought by many historians to have had a special relationship with Jefferson and borne him children).

The contradictions in notions of liberty could not be more graphically presented. The intention is not to turn a great man into a villain but rather to examine just how those contradictions expressed themselves. Jefferson called slavery an “abominable crime,” we are told, but also felt unable to extricate himself from what he called its “deplorable entanglement.”

We learn of his practical efforts to restrict slavery, including his introduction of a Virginia law in 1778 prohibiting the importation of slaves, and signing, as president, a national version of that law in 1807, just weeks before Britain outlawed the slave trade. We read too that in 1788, he wrote, “Nobody will be more willing to encounter every sacrifice” in order to abolish slavery.

Clearly, though, he was not so willing. He also harbored some condescending racial views (partly contradicted by other writings). And Jefferson inherited his father’s plantation and slaves; at one point he was one of the wealthiest men in Virginia (though to pay his enormous debts after his death, Monticello and “130 valuable negroes” — as the advertisement put it — were auctioned).

As the exhibition also emphasizes, he was a man of the Enlightenment represented by his books (Homer, Livy, Shakespeare), his scientific apparatus (including a telescope) and his devotion to the powers of reason and the value of skepticism (his inkwell here is in the shape of Voltaire’s head).

But we do not learn of these passions in order to have them dismissed. Gradually, as we work through the central gallery, we see them haltingly, falteringly applied, affecting the enslaved communities at Monticello. Displays are organized around a series of slave families, many of whom were at the estate for generations — the Hemingses, of course (as many as 70 family members were at Monticello), but also the Fossett family, the Grangers and the Hubbard brothers. (Perhaps no other plantation has such extensive documentation of its slaves.)

As the historian Lucia Stanton points out in an invaluable new companion book (“ ‘Those Who Labor for My Happiness’: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello”), Jefferson paternalistically referred to the slave community as part of his family. He encouraged marriages within the Monticello world and tried to keep families together; the exhibition points out that “slave marriage was illegal in Virginia,” but that at Monticello “enduring unions were the norm.” Some slaves were also taught to read and write by the Jeffersons.

There is no idealization here of course. Each family became associated with particular kinds of labor, represented here by archeological artifacts. We see the products, for example, of the “nailery” that Jefferson had set up in order to turn a profit on the manufacture of nails. There is acknowledgment too of cruelty, of overseers who overstepped, of ideals put aside.

But there is also a growing sense that within a system of corrupting ideas and Jefferson’s crippling self-interest a struggle was going on for some other vision of humanity, not just within Jefferson but also among the enslaved.

The most remarkable phenomenon is evident in the last gallery: Many descendants of Monticello slaves became community leaders. A project interviewing them began at Monticello in 1993; it discovered, we are told, a tradition of dedication to education, faith, family and freedom.

Peter Fossett, a descendant of the blacksmith Joseph Fossett , for example, became a minister active in the Underground Railroad and founded the First Baptist Church in Cumminsville, Ohio, in 1870. Another Fossett descendant, William Monroe Trotter, founded the Niagara Movement with W. E. B. Dubois in 1905, declaring that “all men were created free and equal, with certain inalienable rights.” One of the Hemings descendants, Frederick Madison Roberts, became the first black member of the California legislature.

This suggests that there was something distinctive about this community, but also that Jefferson’s own ideals must have had an impact, surviving even the debilitating and humiliating institution of slavery.

This is something that comes through at Monticello as well. Its senior curator Susan R. Stein has made it clear that in Jefferson’s day, Monticello wasn’t a temple on a hill (though it is so beautiful, one warms to worship) but a miniature city in the countryside with its central home just yards from Mulberry Row, where the sounds of small industry — textile making, blacksmithing, woodworking — must have mixed with voices of laborers in the fields and where the lives of the enslaved were enmeshed with the life of their master. But this does not undercut our sense of Jefferson’s genius.

Yes, there are times when the balance teeters a bit. Just as Monticello must be seen whole so too must Jefferson’s achievements, and right now the exhibitions need a more deliberate elaboration of his ideas and life. There are times when the Washington exhibition also seems to push too far; it begins by observing that Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence “did not extend ‘Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness’ to African-Americans, Native Americans, indentured servants, or women.” This is political boilerplate; each of those cases needs different qualifications and examinations. They distract from the subject.

But the fates of Monticello descendants suggest that alongside the tragic consequences of American slavery there is something else: a growing belief in clearly defined rights and promised possibilities. If slavery was, throughout global history, the rule, the exception was the last 200 years of gradual worldwide abolition. And Jefferson, for all his “deplorable entanglement,” helped make it possible.

Where Jefferson’s Practices Fought With His Ideals

In Washington:

SLAVERY AT JEFFERSON’S MONTICELLO: PARADOX OF LIBERTY Through Oct. 14, Smithsonian National Museum of American History, National Museum of African American History and Culture Gallery, on the National Mall, at 14th Street and Constitution Avenue, NW; (202) 633-1000, americanhistory.si.edu.

In Virginia:

MONTICELLO 931 Thomas Jefferson Parkway, Charlottesville, Va.; (434) 984-9822, monticello.org.

A two-hour tour, “Waiting on Liberty: Slavery in Jefferson’s ‘Great House,’ ” will run on Saturdays and Sundays in February at 1 p.m.; meet at the Woodland Pavilion next to the Thomas Jefferson Visitor Center.

ASH LAWN-HIGHLAND Home of Jefferson’s neighbor and friend James Monroe, also aslave-holding president, at 2050 James Monroe Parkway, Charlottesville, Va.; (434) 293-8000, ashlawnhighland.org.

POPLAR FOREST, Another home of Jefferson’s, at 1542 Bateman Bridge Road, Forest, Va.; opens on March 15 for the season; (434) 525-1806, poplarforest.org.

WHERE TO STAY IN CHARLOTTESVILLE

Boar’s Head Inn, 200 Ednam Drive; (434) 296-2181, boarsheadinn.com.
Dinsmore House, 1211 West Main Street; (434) 974-4663, dinsmorehouse.com.
Keswick Hall, 701 Club Drive, Keswick, Va.; (434) 979-3440, keswick.com.

WHERE TO EAT

Bashir’s Taverna, 507 East Main Street, Charlottesville, Va.; (434) 923-0927, bashirs.com.L’étoile, 817 West Main Street, Charlottesville, Va.; (434) 979-7957, letoilerestaurant.com.

Miller’s Downtown, 109 West Main Street, Charlottesville, Va.; (434) 971-8511, millersdowntown.com.

The so-called "Land of the free and the home of the brave" is looking not so free, and not so brave, at the present moment

2012-01-26T15:32:00.000-06:00

Sending the Military to Put Down Workers:

Is This America, or What?

Solidarity America

By John Funiciello

BlackCommentator.com Columnist

The U.S. government is prepared to send a fully armed Coast Guard ship to escort an empty grain ship owned by a transnational corporation up the Columbia River to the port in Longview, Wash., where it will be loaded with grain by non-union labor in the next several days or weeks.

The ship, owned by EGT, a company owned by several other companies, including Bunge, is aiming to show members of the International Longshore Workers Union (ILWU) Local 21 that their agreement with the port means nothing to the corporation. The ILWU agreement, like that of other West Coast ports, requires that the work done in those ports be by union labor.

It’s not the first time in American history that the military has been called out to protect the interests of capital. It has rarely, if ever, been called out to protect the interests of trade unionists, other workers, or the poor. In today’s climate, however, ordering a Coast Guard escort for a scab multinational ship is another matter.

There are many examples of presidents calling out the military to protect Corporate America, but in 2012, rank-and-file citizens should be alarmed and wary. Since September 11, 2001, it has become easier for the powers that be to demonize workers and other citizens who are expressing their rights under the First Amendment.

During the Bush-Cheney Administration, the use of “free speech pens” was honed to perfection. These were chain-link-fenced enclosures near likely protest areas, which effectively prevented the objects of the protest from having to encounter the protesters. In fact, often, they were so far away that they neither could be seen nor heard. If that was ever found to be legal, it surely violated the spirit and heart of the First Amendment.

A little background is in order. EGT is a joint venture, but a principal “owner” is Bunge, a giant transnational corporation that was founded in 1818 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. It is now headquartered in White Plains, N.Y. Bunge competes with Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, and so it is among the big names in the shipping of food and feed. The cargo that would be loaded by scabs in Longview would be destined for Asian markets.

Police in Longview have engaged in what appears to be a massive assault on the picket lines and demonstrations of the 225 members of ILWU Local 21, who have tried to maintain the integrity of their agreement with the port by demanding that grain be loaded by union labor. In that process in recent months, there have been 220 arrests of Local 21 members. The objective of EGT has been, simply, to break the union.

The San Francisco Labor Council has condemned the use of the military to escort the grain ship and, in a resolution adopted on Jan. 9, said, “…this is the first known use of the U.S. military to intervene in a labor dispute on the side of management in 40 years, not since the great 1970 postal strike when President Nixon called out the Army and National Guard in an (unsuccessful) attempt to break the strike. The use of the Armed Forces against labor unions is something you expect to see in a police state. This is part of a disturbing trend where the U.S. military, acting as enforcers for the 1 percent, is poised to be used against our own people, as exemplified by the new law allowing the military to imprison U.S. citizens indefinitely without trial…”

San Francisco’s council refers to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, which many see as the opening to the military to replace the police in certain situations and to hold indefinitely, without charge, those who would be charged with threats to the national security. President Obama has added a statement to his signing of the NDAA of 2012, saying that he would not use such power against American citizens, but his “signing statement” (shades of George W. Bush) will mean nothing to other presidents who choose to hold people without charge and even send them to Guantanamo Bay. The law will be there, to be used by anyone who has little respect for the U.S. Constitution or the Bill of Rights.

The problem for American citizens, of course, is that, in the national security state that the U.S. has become, anyone can be judged to be a “terrorist,” and can be dealt with in the manner in which one deals with terrorists. One could be a terrorist on a union (or non-union) picket line, or in an “Occupy” encampment, or in a civil rights demonstration. It depends on who is looking and determining who the terrorist is. That’s arbitrary and that’s not what a country based on law should ever be.

Precedent for use of the military against American citizens was set long ago, but here are a few examples: the Bonus Army Marchers of 1932, when about 15,000 veterans marched (hitchhiked, hopped freight trains, or walked) to Washington, D.C., to protest the government in its failure to pay their $1,000 bonuses, a promise which they had waited since 1924 for the U.S. to fulfill, and the Battle of Blair Mountain that took place in 1921 in Logan County, West Virginia, between thousands of coal miners and an array of representatives of the coal operators (deputy sheriffs; coal company “detectives,” whom the miners called “gun thugs,” and the Army, including airplanes).

Congress had rewarded the World War I service of the veterans with certificates that would give them the $1,000 in 1945, but the Great Depression, which had impoverished most of the veterans by 1932, asked the government to pay the money earlier and that’s what they were doing in Washington. They built an encampment (think the “Occupy” movement) and, in keeping order, the police killed two of the marchers. There were other deaths, as well. President Hoover, fearing the influence of communists and anarchists, sent in a regiment under General Douglas MacArthur, who entered the scene with troops and tanks, and the marchers fled.

At Blair Mountain, the coal miners and their families and communities were under the control of the coal companies, which owned company stores, as well as much of the housing, and they used that power to control the workers and to keep out union organizers. Labor strife brought on by maltreatment of the miners and all of the grievances that such power brings to the situation, ended with armed confrontation. In the wake of widespread union organizing efforts through West Virginia coal country for several years, the fight between the coal operators and the miners and their supporters broke out in open battle for a few weeks in August and September of 1921.

Tens of thousands of armed miners came to defend the miners of Matewan and Logan County and the battle of Blair Mountain was said to have been the biggest shooting confrontation in America since the Civil War. The Army was dispatched by presidential order and there were even military reconnaissance aircraft sent in to give the miners’ positions to the strikebreakers, police, and the “detective” agencies. The confrontation ended before any massive casualties could result.

Members of other ILWU locals and many other supporters, including “Occupy” groups from other West Coast cities, are prepared to travel to Longview to protest the military escort of EGT grain ship. It won’t be anything like Blair Mountain and it won’t be like the Bonus Army, but it will be a fight for the living standards of those who work in the Port of Longview and all other West Coast ports.

Over a long history, the ILWU has been one of the strongest unions for its solidarity with other unions, but also solidarity with others around the world struggling for social and economic justice. Now, they are fighting for their own way of life and that of their families and communities.

The EGT effort is clear and it is simple: It will try to break the union contract by force at Longview and, in doing so, it would pave the way for similar union busting in other ports. The company is doing what Occupiers all across the country have said of the actions of Corporate America. EGT, like other corporations, is paving the way for the 1 percent to further exploit the 99 percent and drive them into a low-wage existence, if not into penury.

America has wandered far from the path set forth by the founders, who designed the structure of the country to be a “nation of laws, not men.” EGT is going to try to show that men, not laws, rule America. They are trying to show that wealth and power rule America, not the people, under law. EGT must be proven wrong.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, John Funiciello, is a labor organizer and former union organizer. His union work started when he became a local president of The Newspaper Guild in the early 1970s. He was a reporter for 14 years for newspapers in New York State. In addition to labor work, he is organizing family farmers as they struggle to stay on the land under enormous pressure from factory food producers and land developers. Click here to contact Mr. Funiciello.

Revolutionary Jose Maria Sison on US Imperialism and a Way Forward for the Philippines

2012-01-26T15:28:00.003-06:00

The African World

By Bill Fletcher, Jr.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board

In 2002, seemingly out of nowhere, then US Secretary of State Colin Powell announced that the USA henceforth considered the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and their armed wing, the New People’s Army (NPA), to be terrorist organizations. Additionally, they labeled a long-time Philippine revolutionary leader and theorist - Jose Maria Sison - to be a supporter of terrorism. Sison had been living in exile in the Netherlands. This labeling, denounced immediately by civil liberties advocates in the USA, the Philippines and other parts of the world, has resulted in myriad of legal ramblings and complications for all those associated with the NDFP and CPP. What made this announcement by Powell so odd was that the conflict in the Philippines represented a long-running - and internationally recognized - civil war and the NDFP (and Sison) had been engaged in peace negotiations, a process that was certainly harmed by the Bush administration’s allegations. These allegations also emerged at a time of increasing usage by the US government of the label of “terrorist” or “supporter of terrorism” to describe opponents.

The following is drawn from a longer interview with Professor Sison. This component focuses upon his analysis of the current situation in the Philippines, negotiations with the Philippine government and the question of the terrorist label used by the US government against various forces.

If you apply your search engine to research Professor Sison you will find a considerable number of references, including his own website which provides biographical background.

Sison, born in 1939, has been a major leader in Philippine radical politics since the 1960s. He served as the founding chair of the revamped Communist Party of the Philippines in 1968 and helped in the creation of the New People’s Army the following year. He was captured by the government forces of then dictator Ferdinand Marcos at which time he was both imprisoned and tortured. He gained release in 1986 when Marcos was overthrown in the famous “People Power” uprising. He then attempted to assist in negotiations between the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (the broad umbrella group coordinating the insurrection in which the CPP and NPA can be found) and the government of President Corazon Aquino, but these came to nothing as the government moved more to the Right and repression was imposed on opponents of the government. Sison found himself in exile when he was traveling and his passport was cancelled.

Though in exile, Sison was tapped to serve as the chief political consultant to the National Democratic Front of the Philippines. As a result he has been very much in touch with the unfolding of the struggle on that archipelago, a struggle that includes the armed insurrection led by the CPP/NPA, as well as a secessionist movement on the southern island of Mindanao among the largely Muslim Moro people (a movement supported by the NDFP).

Despite the length of the immediate insurrection, and the long-term struggle that the Philippine people have conducted to achieve genuine freedom from US domination - a struggle dating back to the Spanish-American War - the Philippines rarely receives much attention except when the US government discusses alleged Muslim terrorism on Mindanao. For that reason it is useful for US audiences to understand the point of view of the insurrectionists irrespective of whether one agrees with their objectives and/or means.

1. You have described the Philippines as semi-colonial/semi-feudal. Please explain what this means in practical terms. We are in the early years of the 21st century. How could there be a semi-feudal situation in the Philippines? The Philippines seems, for all intents and purposes, to be tied into global capitalism.

You can say bluntly that the Philippines is capitalist and has long been capitalist since the 19th century if you mean that the commodity system of production and exchange through money has come on top of the natural economy of feudalism when local communities could subsist on a diversified agriculture and engage mainly in barter. The specialization in crops for domestic food (rice and corn) and for export (tobacco, hemp and sugar) and the import of a certain amount of manufactures from Europe for consumption pushed the domestic commodity system of production as well as integration with global capitalism through colonialism as a part of the primitive accumulation of capital in Europe and subsequently under the banner of colonial free trade.

But it is utterly wrong to say that the Philippines is industrial capitalist or even semi-industrial capitalist. The Philippines does not have an industrial foundation. Its floating kind of industry consists of imported equipment paid for by the export of raw materials and by foreign loans necessitated by the chronic trade deficits. It is most precise to describe the Philippine economy as semi-feudal to denote the persistence of the large vestiges of feudalism in the form of disguised and undisguised landlord- tenant relations and usury at the base of the economy, the peasant class constituting 75 per cent of the population and the combination of the big compradors and landlords as the main exploiting classes. The big compradors are the chief financial and trading agents of the foreign monopolies and are often big landlords themselves, especially on land producing crops for export.

Global capitalism under the neoliberal policy of "free trade" globalization has not changed but has aggravated and deepened the pre-industrial and underdeveloped semi-feudal character of the Philippine economy. The share of manufacturing with the use of imported equipment and raw materials under the policy of low-value added export-oriented manufacturing in the last three decades has decreased in comparison to that share under the previous policy of import substitution. The illusion of industrial development has been conjured by excessive foreign borrowing for consumption of foreign manufactures, by conspicuous private construction projects and by the sweat shops that engage in the fringe-processing of imported manufactured components and yield little net export income.

Neither the series of bogus land reform programs since decades ago nor the neoliberal policy of imperialist globalization has broken up feudalism completely and given way to a well-founded industrialization. The backward agrarian and semi-feudal character of the Philippine economy is now increasingly exposed by its depression and ruination due to the decreasing demand for its type of exports, the closure of many sweatshops of semi-manufacturing for export, the tightening of international credit and the decrease of remittances by overseas contract workers in the current prolonged global economic and financial crisis in this 21st century of desperate, barbaric and imploding global capitalism. The conditions have become more fertile for people's war in the Philippines.

In the 1980s,certain elements in the Philippines pushed the notion that the Philippine economy was no longer semi-feudal but semi-capitalist or semi-industrial capitalist in order to glorify the Marcos fascist dictatorship as having industrialized the Philippines. This notion also aimed to undercut the Communist Party's strategic line of protracted people’s war involving the encirclement of the cities from the countryside by the armed revolutionary movement of the workers and peasants until such time that they have accumulated enough politico-military strength to seize the cities on a nationwide scale in a strategic offensive.

The bureaucratic big comprador Ferdinand Marcos conjured the illusion of industrial development by borrowing heavily from abroad and by importing consumption goods and luxuries and construction equipment and structural steel in order to build roads, bridges, hotels and other tourist facilities. The profligate spending of foreign loans only served to maintain the agrarian and pre-industrial character of the Philippine economy. Cognizant of the persistent semi-feudal reality, the New People's Army under CPP leadership has been able to wage people's war successfully with the main support of the peasantry and under the class leadership of the working class.

2. When one talks of the Philippine working class, what are the main sectors in which it is found and how is neo-liberalism affecting it?

The Philippine working class is found in such main sectors as the following: food and beverages, hotels and restaurants, public utilities (power generation, water and sewage system), mining and quarrying, metal fabrication (imported metals), car assembly, ship assembly, transportation, communications, mass media, assembly of electronic and electrical products, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, oil refining, construction, construction materials (cement and wood), banks and other financial institutions and public sector services (education, health, etc.).

In the Philippines, the neoliberal policy has favored certain enterprises away from industrial development and has expanded employment in such enterprises during boom periods. The favored enterprises include those in mining and export-crop plantations, the assembly of electronic and electrical products, the semi-manufacturing of garments, shoes and other low-value added products for re-export, car assembly, construction of office and residential towers, cement production, hotels and restaurants, business call centers and financial services. They are vulnerable to the ups and downs characteristic of global capitalism under neoliberal policy and now to the worst crisis since the Great Depression. Closures and reduction of production have resulted in a high rate of unemployment and the further immiseration of the people.

Under the neoliberal policy, the working class has been subjected to wage freezes and reductions, loss of job security, flexibilization or casualization (reducing the number of regular employees and increasing the number of temporaries or casuals), systematic prevention or break up of workers' unions and ceaseless attack on union rights and other democratic rights. The kinds of enterprises generated by the neoliberal policy involve cheap labor and the most tiring and health-damaging processes and conditions. They also limit the number of regular employees and expand the ranks of the casuals subjected to a series of short-term employment contracts in order to circumvent the law on regular employment. The scarcity of employment opportunities in the Philippines has compelled nearly 10 per cent of the population to seek employment abroad as overseas contract workers and undocumented workers with practically no rights. This fact proves the lack of national industrial development.

3. Would you sum-up the situation in the Philippines, particularly the state of negotiations between the NDFP and the government; the situation facing workers and farmers; the overall economy; and fighting that may be taking place?

The Philippines is severely stricken by crisis because of the rotting semi-colonial and semi-feudal ruling system and the growing impact of the crisis of the US and global capitalist system. The prices of the raw materials and semi-manufactures produced for export by the Philippines are depressed and foreign loans to cover the trade deficits and debt service are becoming more onerous than before. There is now less demand for overseas contract workers and thus their remittances are decreasing. The global economic and financial crisis is hitting hard the Philippines. The growing public deficits (budgetary and trade) and the public debt are growing and exposing the bankruptcy of the big comprador-landlord state.

Various forms of popular resistance, including people’s war, are ever growing because of the extreme and ever worsening conditions of exploitation and oppression of more than 90 per cent of the people, the toiling masses of workers and peasants. Like preceding regimes, the Aquino regime wants to destroy the armed revolutionary movement. It is implementing the US-designed Oplan Bayanihan, which is the same dog as Arroyo's Oplan Bantay Laya but which tries to be different by dressing up brutal military operations as peace and development operations and maintaining human rights desks in the reactionary army and national police for the purpose of shifting the blame for human rights violations to the revolutionaries. On the other hand, the New People's Army led by the Communist Party of the Party is carrying out a five-year plan to advance from the strategic defensive to strategic stalemate in the people's war, increasing the number of guerrilla fronts from 120 to 180.

While their respective armed forces continue to fight, the Government of the Philippines (GPH) and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) are supposed to engage in peace negotiations in order to address the roots of the armed conflict by forging agreements on social, economic and political reforms. But the GPH has paralyzed the peace negotiations by refusing to release a few political prisoners who are NDFP consultants in the negotiations and thus violating the Joint Agreement on Safety and Immunity Guarantees (JASIG). The GPH is also grossly violating the Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law (CARHRIL) by refusing to release more than 350 political prisoners who are imprisoned on false charges of common crimes.

4. What have been the chief obstacles to a negotiated settlement between the NDFP and the government?

The Manila government and NDFP have their respective constitutions, governments and armies. To lay the ground for peace negotiations, they issued The Hague Joint Declaration to define the framework for peace negotiations. They agreed to address the roots of the armed conflict or the civil war by negotiating and forging agreements on human rights and international humanitarian law and on social, economic and political reforms. They also agreed that they are guided by the mutually acceptable principles of national sovereignty, democracy and social justice and that no precondition shall be made by any side to negate the inherent character and purpose of peace negotiations, i.e. no side can demand the surrender of the other side.

Under the current Aquino régime, his presidential adviser and his negotiating panel want to undermine and nullify the aforesaid declaration by asserting that it is a document of perpetual division. They are practically demanding the immediate surrender of the revolutionary movement. They do not respect the agreement on the sequence, formation and operationalization of the reciprocal working committees that are to negotiate and work out the agreements on reforms. The question of what kind of authority will be formed to implement the comprehensive agreements on reforms shall be settled when the time comes for negotiating the political and constitutional reforms.

The Benigno Aquino III regime has shown no respect for and has in fact violated the Joint Agreement on Safety and Immunity Guarantees (JASIG) by refusing to release some 14 political prisoners who are NDFP negotiating personnel and are therefore JASIG-protected. It has not called to account those military and police personnel who have abducted, tortured and murdered NDFP consultants who are JASIG-protected. Also, it has violated the Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law by condoning violations of human rights of suspected revolutionaries and sympathizers by the Arroyo regime and by his own troops and by refusing to release 350 political prisoners who are unjustly imprisoned on trumped up charges of common crimes.

The regime keeps on demanding ceasefire in order to distract public attention from the agreement to address the roots of the civil war though basic reforms. The NDFP has offered truce and alliance on the basis of a general declaration on common intent on ten points, including the assertion of national independence, empowerment of the working people, land reform and national industrialization, immediate assistance and employment for the impoverished and unemployed, promotion of a patriotic, scientific and popular culture, self-determination of national minorities and independent foreign policy for peace and development.

The biggest obstacle to the peace negotiations is US political and military intervention. The US has upset the peace negotiations by unjustly designating the CPP, the NPA and the NDFP chief political consultant as terrorists. It has dictated upon the Aquino regime to draw up Oplan Bayanihan under the US Counterinsurgency Guide, which considers peace negotiations as a mere psy-war2device for outwitting, isolating and destroying the revolutionary movement. Oplan Bayanihan is a campaign plan of military suppression. But it masquerades as a peace and development plan. It regards peace negotiations only as a means to enhance the triad of psy-war, intelligence-gathering and combat operations. Many people think that the US does not allow the puppet regime to make the overall agreement for a just and lasting peace with the NDFP.

5. Are you optimistic that negotiations can result in a just settlement?

Frankly speaking, I am not optimistic that negotiations can result in a just settlement. Like its predecessors, the Aquino regime is too servile to US imperialism and stands as the current chief representative of the local exploiting classes, the comprador big bourgeoisie and landlord class. It has shown no inclination to assert national independence and undo unequal treaties, agreements and arrangements that keep the Philippines semi-colonial. It also has shown no inclination to realize democracy through significant representation of workers and peasants in government and through land reform and national industrialization.

It has become clear that the reactionary government is not seriously interested in peace negotiations as a way of addressing the roots of the armed conflict through agreements on basic reforms. Especially under the Aquino regime, the negotiators are always trying to lay aside the substantive agenda and to push the NDFP towards capitulation and pacification. Failing to accomplish their vile objective, they paralyze the peace negotiations by refusing to comply with obligations under the Joint Agreement on Safety and Immunity Guarantees.

6. What has been the role of the USA? And, have US policies towards the Philippines changed under President Obama? If so, how? What is your overall assessment of the Obama administration?

The USA has not been helpful to the peace negotiations. In fact, it has obstructed these. The US designation of the Communist Party of the Philippines, New People’s Army and myself (the National Democratic Front of the Philippines’ chief political consultant) as terrorists is meant to intimidate and put pressure on the NDFP in the peace negotiations. The US Counterinsurgency Guide actually tells the Philippine reactionary government that peace negotiations are dispensable but are useful only for purposes of psy-war to mislead the people, possibly split the revolutionary forces and make the reactionary killing machine more efficient. But the US policy against peace negotiations with the NDFP has served to make the revolutionary force and people more vigilant and more resolute in opposing US intervention in the internal affairs of the Philippines.

From the Bush II to the Obama regime, there has been no change in US policy towards the Philippines. Obama continues the policy of serving the interests of the US imperialists in the economic, political, military and cultural fields, collaborating with the big compradors and landlords, manipulating the puppet regime and its military forces, preventing land reform and national industrialization, controlling the fundamentals and direction of the Philippine cultural and educational system and stationing US troops in the Philippines and maintaining a permanent relay of US military forces under the US-RP3Mutual Defense Pact and the Visiting Forces Agreement. Obama is a good servant of US imperialism. He used his glibness to make himself look better than the brazenly brutal Bush. But he is using the same glibness to cover many acts as bad as or even worse than those that made Bush infamous.

7. How did the CPP and NPA end up on a list of terrorist organizations? How did you end up on a list of supporters of terrorism? What steps are being taken to remove this label from you, the CPP and the NPA?

During the November 2001 visit of then Philippine president Gloria M. Arroyo to Washington, she requested then US President Bush to have the US agencies(State Department and the Office of Foreign Asset Control of the Treasury Department)designate the CPP, NPA and myself as "terrorists". When US state secretary Colin Powell visited the Philippines in the early days of August 2002, he was reminded of the request and he assured Arroyo that he would act on it immediately upon his return to the US. Indeed, within August 2002 the CPP, NPA and I were designated as "terrorists."

The Philippine and U.S. governments connived to take advantage of the terrorism scare that followed 9-11. They themselves engaged in terrorism by deciding to undertake harmful actions against the CPP, NPA and myself. The designation of the CPP and NPA as "terrorist" is absolutely absurd because they [the NPA - interviewer] have carried out revolutionary actions strictly within the Philippines, have not engaged in any cross-border attacks against the US and up to now have not been discovered to keep bank accounts in the US or anywhere else outside of the Philippines.

In my case, I have been falsely accused of being the current CPP chairman and being responsible for the alleged terrorist acts, in fact the revolutionary actions, of the NPA despite the fact that I have been out of the Philippines since 1986 when I was released from nearly a decade of detention under the Marcos fascist dictatorship. The malicious intention of the US and Philippine governments is to pressure the entire NDFP negotiating panel and me as its chief political consultant. Like the Arroyo regime, the Aquino regime uses the terrorist designation as a kind of lever against the NDFP in the peace negotiations.

It is impossible for the CPP, NPA or myself to begin any legal process for undoing the terrorist designation in the US or in any other country tailing after the US in the so-called war on terror, without proving first the legal personality and material interest of the plaintiff. In my case, I could take legal action against the Dutch government for putting me in the terrorist list because I live in The Netherlands. After my administrative complaint, the Dutch government repealed its decision to put me in its terrorist list but took the initiative in having me put in the terrorist list of the European Union in October 2002. I went to the European Court of Justice and I succeeded in having my name removed from the EU terrorist list in December 2010 after eight years of legal struggle.

8. Do you think that the US media has consciously mischaracterized the situation in the Philippines by focusing on groups like Abu Sayyaf4?

Yes, the US media drum up US policy and corporate interests and consciously misrepresent the Philippine situation, as in the focusing on the Abu Sayyaf. This small bandit gang, whose origin can be traced to the CIA and intelligence operatives of the Philippine army who organized and used it against the Moro revolutionaries (MNLF and then MILF),is magnified as an extension of Al Qaeda in order to serve the false claim of [President] Bush that the Philippines is the second front of a global war on terror as well as to rationalize state terrorism and US military intervention in the Philippines.

Through the mass media, the US has spread the scare about terrorism in order to justify a whole range of actions: the curtailment of democratic rights in the US and on a global scale, the stepping up of war production to please the military-industrial complex and the unleashing of wars of aggression.

9. Has the "terrorism" designation made it difficult for NDFP supporters in the Philippines and in other parts of the world? If so, how? Have civilian political activists faced increased government-inspired violence as a result of this terrorism designation?

The "terrorism" designation is an incitation to hatred and violence and various forms of discrimination and harassment against known or suspected NDFP supporters in the Philippines and other parts of the world. Although the NDFP is not designated as terrorist, everyone knows that the CPP and NPA are the most important components of the NDFP. In the Philippines, the incitation to hatred and violence is quite deadly because the military, police and their death squads are emboldened to go on terrorist-hunting and are assured that they can abduct, torture and kill people with impunity…

The Dutch authorities have advised the Norwegian government not to give any assistance to the NDFP negotiating panel for maintaining office and staff in The Netherlands on the claim that such assistance would be for building the infrastructure of "terrorists". They have also raided the NDFP office and houses of NDFP panelists and consultants and seized documents and equipment needed in the peace negotiations.

10. Periodically the US media discuss alleged Muslim fundamentalist terrorism in the Philippines. What is the situation? In Mindanao there have been efforts at autonomy and self-determination. What has been the stand of the NDFP on these efforts? What is your take on allegations of Muslim terrorism?

The NDFP supports the Moro people's struggle for self-determination, including the right to secede from an oppressive state or opt for regional autonomy in a non-oppressive political system. The Moro people have long been oppressed by the Manila government and by local reactionary agents. They are not free in their own homeland and are victims of Christian chauvinism and discrimination. They have been deprived of their ancestral domain. They have been robbed of agricultural land as well as forest, mineral and marine resources.

The Moro people have all the right to fight for national and social liberation. The NDFP has therefore found common ground for alliance with the Moro National Liberation Front(MNLF) and subsequently with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) after the MNLF capitulated to the Ramos regime in 1996. By fighting well against their common enemy, the NDFP and the MILF gain better conditions for growing in strength and advancing in their respective struggles.

The US government and the US media exaggerate the threat of Muslim fundamentalist terrorism because they wish to promote the entry of US corporations for the purpose of plundering the rich natural resources of Mindanao, especially oil, gold and deuterium. They also wish to justify the current stationing of US military forces and eventually the basing of larger US military forces for the purpose of strategic control over Islamic countries in Southeast Asia and strategic countervailing of China and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea [North Korea] in Northeast Asia.

Like Al Qaeda, Abu Sayyaf was originally a creature of CIA and the intelligence agency of the Armed Forces of the Philippines to counteract the MNLF. It has become a bandit gang since the capitulation of MNLF. It has also been convenient for the US and Manila government to depict the Abu Sayyaf as a Muslim fundamentalist group and as an extension of the Al Qaeda, since 2001 when Bush declared Moro land as the second front in the so-called global war on terror. There are indications that the US and Philippine governments continue to arm and finance the Abu Sayyaf in order to block the advance of the MILF in Sulu and to provide the pretext for US military intervention in the Philippines.

This commentary was originally published on Alternet.org.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Bill Fletcher, Jr., is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfricaForum and co-author of Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice (University of California Press), which examines the crisis of organized labor in the USA. Click here to contact Mr. Fletcher.

The (American) Economy, Indefinite Detention and the Drums of War

2012-01-26T15:27:00.001-06:00

Keeping it Real

By Larry Pinkney

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board

“You’re not to be so blind with patriotism that you can’t face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.”

-Malcolm X [el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz]

“I’m worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel - let the wheel spin around them as it wants without taking a look at what they’re doing. I’m concerned that students not become passive acceptors of the official doctrine that’s handed down to them from the White House, the media, textbooks, teachers and preachers.”

-Howard Zinn

The corporate-controlled sham of national elections in this year of 2012 is once more upon everyday Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people in the United States.

Yes, the corporate-stream “news” media is feverishly playing its fiddle of diversion and disinformation as the raging fires of corporate hegemony, economic austerity, legalized indefinite detention of U.S. citizens, and perpetual war burn to a cinder the hopes and dreams of everyday people. Buttressed by the U.S. corporate-stream media, the political vultures of both the Democrat and Republican parties are fanning the flames with a deafening crescendo of lies, obfuscation, and more lies. The economy of this nation, for ordinary everyday people, is in a shambles, as the corporate elite continues to rake in billions upon billions of blood-drenched profit.

As the politicians lie, the everyday people of this nation and world continue to die. Contrary to government propaganda, the war in Iraq is not over; well-paid U.S. corporate mercenaries have, in large measure, simply replaced certain U.S. troops in that nation. Moreover, U.S. sponsored wars rage on in Afghanistan, Pakistan, North Africa, and elsewhere on this planet. These wars are, of course, great for the tiny bloodsucking avaricious U.S. corporate elite but horrible for the everyday people of Mother Earth. Yet, like Barack Obama’s deadly predator-drone missiles, U.S. politicians (of both parties) and the corporate-stream media drone on, spewing forth their unending poisonous, thinly veiled and self-serving repackaged vomit of war mongering propaganda.

Meanwhile, the so-called “war on terror,” which is itself a contradiction in terms, continues to enflame hatred and death around the world - all in the name of misguided, manipulated “patriotism” - under the guise of attaining some kind of always illusive, alleged “security.” The corporate-owned United States government sustains itself by active wars, the threat of wars and internal and external subterfuge.

For example, in the very name of striving for peace and security, the U.S. government is pursuing precisely the opposite in the case of Iran. The U.S. is attempting to isolate Iran’s monetary and oil revenue assets, etc., an extremely dangerous game that could lead to war, as the corporate-U.S. government well knows. This, however, is not merely about Iran, but also directly affects China and Russia, both of which are nuclear powers. For the U.S. government to demand that Iran not become a nuclear power while ignoring the fact that the nation of Israel is a nuclear power with stockpiled nuclear capability is hypocritical and insane.

It has nothing whatever to do with averting war and everything to do with corporate greed and U.S. geopolitical designs to control this planet’s natural resources. It is also a deliberate attempt to goad, bully, and provoke Iran, and by extension China and/or Russia, into a conflict with the U.S. and its puppet allies. It is a political conflict that could quickly lead to nuclear war and the concomitant annihilation of humanity on this planet.

In view of the United States’ own internal de facto corporate dictatorship, its numerous political prisoners, and its laws which provide for the indefinite detention of its own citizens without charge, trial, jury, or legal defense [i.e. the so-called National Defense Authorization Act-NDAA], etc., the United States government has absolutely no moral, ethical, or legal authority to demand Iran or any other government do anything! Only the ordinary everyday people of this nation have that right, but certainly not a U.S. corporate-government that does not even legitimately represent its people.

The actual message of the U.S. corporate-government to the world is, “do as I say, not as I do!” Ironically, it is the U.S. government itself who first unleashed the terrible nuclear genie upon humankind, and who remains a foremost nuclear power to this very day - which fact is not missed by other nations of the world. Clearly, if the U.S. government truly desired nuclear disarmament - it would lead by example. Political saber rattling and war mongering is not the example, and though it may make for effective internal U.S. political propaganda, it is a sure recipe for war. To reiterate: The corporate-owned United States government sustains itself (not its people) by active wars, the threat of wars, and internal and external subterfuge.

As millions upon millions of people in this nation become, and increasingly remain, without jobs, and home foreclosures continue unabated , corporate executives of the corporate elite lavish themselves with six and seven figure, undeserved “salaries.” Young people, unable to pay for their student loans, etc., are offered the odious “opportunity” of becoming cannon fodder in the U.S. corporate-military machine , even as giant multi-national Wall Street corporations funnel much needed U.S. jobs to so-called “Third World” nations, where the skills of the people in those nations are economically pimped, as profits abound for the U.S. multi-national corporate elite. Life sustaining pensions of seniors in this nation have been made a thing of the past by the greedy vampires of the corporate elite, and the poor and dispossessed of this nation are in increasing agony.

The farce of “democracy” and elections in this corporate owned nation has, in 2012, become self-evident. The questions remain however: What further subterfuge against everyday people will the corporate-controlled U.S. government utilize? Moreover, how much more can or will the people tolerate? Indeed, in the words of Langston Hughes, “What happens to a dream deferred?” Only the actions of and by everyday Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people collectively can and will decisively answer these questions.

There is an enormous amount of work, political education, and organizing ahead. For this nation, for humanity everywhere, and for Mother Earth herself we cannot shirk in our tasks. Each one, teach one as we carry on in this people’s struggle.

Onward, then, my sisters and brothers. Onward!

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board Member, Larry Pinkney, is a veteran of the Black Panther Party, the former Minister of Interior of the Republic of New Africa, a former political prisoner and the only American to have successfully self-authored his civil / political rights case to the United Nations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In connection with his political organizing activities in opposition to voter suppression, etc., Pinkney was interviewed in 1988 on the nationally televised PBS News Hour, formerly known as The MacNeil / Lehrer News Hour. For more about Larry Pinkney see the book, Saying No to Power: Autobiography of a 20th Century Activist and Thinker, by William Mandel [Introduction by Howard Zinn]. (Click here to read excerpts from the book.) Click here to contact Mr. Pinkney.

2012-01-26T14:48:00.001-06:00

January 26, 2012

Celebrating Slaughter

Not A Peep About The President’s Praise of Military

by LAURA FLANDERS

The grades for the president’s State of the Union are in and the critics have been kind. In fact, it’s chilling to see just how few hits the President takes for couching his entire address in unqualified celebration of the US military.

Speaking of the troops, Obama began: “At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations.”

Post-show pundits on cable news praised the president’s comfort with his Commander in Chief role but none saw fit to mention recent news of marines urinating on Afghan corpses, say, or Staff Sgt Wuterich walking free after participating in the killing of 24 unarmed men women and children in Haditha. Accompanying Obama’s next phrase, “Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example,” no one thus far has played the vile video. The critics have been kind.

The President chose to celebrate the military; the press chose not to raise a peep about the spread of militarism, yet US targets proliferate — abroad – with unmanned drones assassinating unconvicted suspects in innumerable undeclared wars. And militarism spreads at home. The 2012 National Defense Authorization Act makes indefinite military detention without charge or trial a permanent feature of the American legal system. It’s kind of the critics not to mention that – or his four-year-old pledge to close Guantanamo, and to restore the “rule of law.”

“They’re not consumed with personal ambition… They work together,” continued the president (again, speaking of the troops.) There are surely plenty of troops who would disagree. The tally is long of commanders and pigeon hawk commanders-of-commanders who’ve dodged responsibility, fingered underlings and permitted rank-and-file “bad-apples” to take the heat for US war crimes.

“Those of us who’ve been sent here to serve can learn a thing or two from the service of our troops,” the President concluded.

There are indeed things we can learn; things that many US troops have begged us to learn in fact. Namely, that war dehumanizes the killer and the killed, and that war tactics have a habit of spreading from the war zone to the home. Successive generations have told us that military recruiters lie, and that “rules of war” exist only in legal minds. (Ninety percent of casualties in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were civilians.) Troops have begged us to learn just what we are celebrating when we celebrate “winning” and war.

Clearly we have yet to learn.

LAURA FLANDERS is the host of The Laura Flanders Show coming to public television stations later this year. She was the host and founder of GRITtv.org. Follow her on Twitter: @GRITlaura.

Nuclear Iran: Bring on the Sanctions; Send in the Clowns

2012-01-26T14:47:00.000-06:00

January 26, 2012

by ROBERT FISK

Turning round a story is one of the most difficult tasks in journalism – and rarely more so than in the case of Iran. Iran, the dark revolutionary Islamist menace. Shia Iran, protector and manipulator of World Terror, of Syria and Lebanon and Hamas and Hezbollah. Ahmadinejad, the Mad Caliph. And, of course, Nuclear Iran, preparing to destroy Israel in a mushroom cloud of anti-Semitic hatred, ready to close the Strait of Hormuz – the moment the West’s (or Israel’s) forces attack.

Given the nature of the theocratic regime, the repulsive suppression of its post-election opponents in 2009, not to mention its massive pools of oil, every attempt to inject common sense into the story also has to carry a medical health warning: no, of course Iran is not a nice place. But …

Let’s take the Israeli version which, despite constant proof that Israel’s intelligence services are about as efficient as Syria’s, goes on being trumpeted by its friends in the West, none more subservient than Western journalists. The Israeli President warns us now that Iran is on the cusp of producing a nuclear weapon. Heaven preserve us. Yet we reporters do not mention that Shimon Peres, as Israeli Prime Minister, said exactly the same thing in 1996. That was 16 years ago. And we do not recall that the current Israeli PM, Benjamin Netanyahu, said in 1992 that Iran would have a nuclear bomb by 1999. That would be 13 years ago. Same old story.

In fact, we don’t know that Iran really is building a nuclear weapon. And after Iraq, it’s amazing that the old weapons of mass destruction details are popping with the same frequency as all the poppycock about Saddam’s titanic arsenal. Not to mention the date problem. When did all this start? The Shah. The old boy wanted nuclear power. He even said he wanted a bomb because “the US and the Soviet Union had nuclear bombs” and no one objected. Europeans rushed to supply the dictator’s wish. Siemens – not Russia – built the Bushehr nuclear facility.

And when Ayatollah Khomeini, Scourge of the West, Apostle of Shia Revolution, etc, took over Iran in 1979, he ordered the entire nuclear project to be closed down because it was “the work of the Devil”. Only when Saddam invaded Iran – with our Western encouragement – and started using poison gas against the Iranians (chemical components arriving from the West, of course) was Khomeini persuaded to reopen it.

All this has been deleted from the historical record; it was the black-turbaned mullahs who started the nuclear project, along with the crackpot Ahmadinejad. And Israel might have to destroy this terror-weapon to secure its own survival, to ensure the West’s survival, for democracy, etc, etc.

For Palestinians in the West Bank, Israel is the brutal, colonising, occupying power. But the moment Iran is mentioned, this colonial power turns into a tiny, vulnerable, peaceful state under imminent threat of extinction. Ahmadinejad – here again, I quote Netanyahu – is more dangerous than Hitler. Israel’s own nuclear warheads – all too real and now numbering almost 300 – disappear from the story. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards are helping the Syrian regime destroy its opponents; they might like to – but there is no proof of this.

The trouble is that Iran has won almost all its recent wars without firing a shot. George W and Tony destroyed Iran’s nemesis in Iraq. They killed thousands of the Sunni army whom Iran itself always referred to as “the black Taliban”. And the Gulf Arabs, our “moderate” friends, shiver in their golden mosques as we in the West outline their fate in the event of an Iranian Shia revolution.

No wonder Cameron goes on selling weapons to these preposterous people whose armies, in many cases, could scarcely operate soup kitchens, let alone the billions of dollars of sophisticated kit we flog them under the fearful shadow of Tehran.

Bring on the sanctions. Send in the clowns.

Robert Fisk writes for the Independent, where this column originally appeared.

The French Study: Childhood Leukemia Spikes Near Nuclear Power Plants

2012-01-26T14:44:00.003-06:00

January 26, 2012

by JOHN LAFORGE

French researchers have confirmed that childhood leukemia rates are shockingly elevated among children living near nuclear power reactors.

The “International Journal of Cancer” has published in January a scientific study establishing a clear correlation between the frequency of acute childhood leukemia and proximity to nuclear power stations. The paper is titled, “Childhood leukemia around French nuclear power plants – the Geocap study, 2002-2007.”

This devastating report promises to do for France what a set of 2008 reports did for Germany — which recently legislated a total phase-out of all its power reactors by 2022 (sooner if the Greens get their way).

The French epidemiology — conducted by a team from the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale, or INSERM, the Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire, or IRSN, and the National Register of hematological diseases of children in Villejuif, outside Paris — demonstrates during the period from 2002-2007 in France the doubling of childhood leukemia incidence: the increase is up to 2.2 among children under age five.

The researchers note that they found no mechanistic proof of cause and effect, but could identify no other environmental factor that could produce the excess cancers.

Without getting overly technical, the case-control study included the 2,753 cases of acute leukemia diagnosed in mainland France over 2002-2007, and 30,000 contemporaneous population “controls.” The children’s last addresses were geo-coded and located around France’s 19 nuclear power stations, which operate 54 separate reactors. The study used distance to the reactors and a dose-based geographic zoning, based on the estimated dose to bone marrow related to the reactors’ gaseous discharges.

All operating reactors routinely spew radioactive gases like xenon, krypton and the radioactive form of hydrogen known as tritium. These gases are allowed to be released under licenses issued by federal government agencies. Allowable limits on these radioactive poisons were suggested to governments and regulatory agencies by the giant utilities that own the reactors and by reactor operators themselves. This is because their reactors can’t even function without regularly releasing radioactive liquids and gases, releases required to control pressure, temperature and vibrations inside the gigantic systems. (See: “Routine Radioactive Releases from Nuclear Power Plants in the United States: What Are the Dangers?” from BeyondNuclear.org, 2009)

In Germany, results of the 2008 KiKK studies — a German acronym for Childhood Cancer in the Vicinity of Nuclear Power Plants — were published in both the International Journal of Cancer (Vol. 122) and the European Journal of Cancer (Vol. 44). These 25-year-long studies found higher incidences of cancers and a stronger association with reactor installations than all previous reports. The main findings were a 60 percent increase in solid cancers and a 117 percent increase in leukemia among young children living near all 16 large German nuclear facilities between 1980 and 2003. These shocking studies — along with persistent radioactive contamination of Germany from the Chernobyl catastrophe — are largely responsible for depth and breadth of anti-nuclear public opinion all across Germany.

Similar leukemia spikes have been found around U.S. reactors (European Journal of Cancer Care, Vol. 16, 2007). Researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina analyzed 17 research papers covering 136 reactor sites in the UK, Canada, France, the U.S., Germany, Japan and Spain. The incidence of leukemia in children under age 9 living close to the sites showed an increase of 14 to 21 percent, while death rates from the disease were raised by 5 to 24 percent, depending on their proximity to the nuclear facilities.

When the U.S. public owns up to the dangers of nuclear power, we too can get around to its replacement and phase-out.

John LaForge has worked on the staff of Nukewatch, a nuclear watchdog & environmental justice group in Wisconsin, since 1992 and edits is quarterly newsletter.

A Deadly Comeback: Polio in Afghanistan

2012-01-26T14:43:00.004-06:00

January 26, 2012

by CATHERINE WILKINSON, MD

Polio forever seared two images in my mind. That may account for my reaction to the story in the January 17th New York Times, “After Years of Decline, Polio Cases in Afghanistan Triple in a Year”.

There are other images, of lines of schoolchildren awaiting shots, I among them, in the 1950s. Of patients with lameness in a leg, or chronic pain years down the road, not being one of the lucky ones like me. But none is so hard to shake off as the man in the iron lung or the child found dead of asphyxiation.

When I was a little girl my father took me to see the man in the iron lung. Daddy sang and played piano in a men’s gospel group that performed God’s music for the man, brother of one of the singers. Only his head protruded from the monstrous hissing contraption.

Years later, not long out of medical school, a nurse colleague told me about the little boy whose needless death still haunted her. Jeannie had a big heart, had been a Peace Corps volunteer in Colombia. She left the hospital one night and returned the next morning to find the child dead from a power outage that shut down the ventilator forcing air into his helpless lungs.

Polio famously respects no boundaries of class or nationality. Still, its mostly under-five-years-old victims are now found exclusively in underdeveloped countries in Africa and Asia. The highly contagious disease is endemic only in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria. Cases in non-polio-endemic countries are the result of imported virus.

In 2009-2010 imported virus re-infected 23 countries previously polio-free. Angola, Chad and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have been classified as having re-established transmission, i.e., the virus has been spreading again within those countries. These developments have health officials alarmed, after decades of huge strides toward making polio the second infectious disease after smallpox to be eradicated from the planet.

Efforts to eradicate polio took flight after Jonas Salk developed the first effective vaccine in 1955. This despite years of being targeted by the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover as a suspected communist. It was in Czechoslovakia and Hungary that the first mass vaccination campaigns, using the Sabin oral vaccine, were carried out starting in 1959. Czechoslovakia had no reported polio after 1960 and Hungary was declared polio-free in 1969.

The Western Hemisphere was certified polio-free in 1994. The European Region, including all of the former republics of the Soviet Union, was polio-free as of 1999. Then, in 2009 polio re-emerged in Tajikistan, which shares a border with Afghanistan.

Pakistan ranked first in 2011 polio cases with 197 of the 643 reported worldwide. An October 17, 2011 article in the Los Angeles Times, “In Pakistan, polio vaccines cause for fear”, pays lip service to the notion that armed conflict has played a role in Pakistan bearing this distinction. The author refers to the “war against Islamic militants” along the Afghan border and to the migration of people from those areas as main factors in the difficulty of vaccinating people against polio.

The bulk of the article is devoted to the role of radical Islam in sowing irrational mistrust of the vaccines and to anti-Americanism. According to the article, anti-Americanism is fueled by the incident of the killing of 2 Pakistanis by CIA contractor Raymond Davis, and by the decision by Obama not to inform Pakistani leaders before the “US operation” against Osama bin Laden. And, of course, the phony vaccination pretext used by the CIA to gain access to Bin Laden’s compound before the raid.

Not to suggest these are insufficient explanations for anti-American sentiments, it still shocks this reader that there is no mention of the undeclared war being waged by the US against Pakistan. A war whose deadly drones have killed over 2000 Pakistanis, including 168 children in the last 7 years.

Where armed conflict exists, population displacement, malnutrition, and lack of access to health services all contribute to civilian death and suffering from all causes, including polio. Iraq, declared polio-free in 1990, began to see cases in the 90s after the Gulf War and during the sanctions.

Afghanistan was on the verge of eliminating polio in 2001 prior to the launching of the US-led war. Armed conflict has played a role in virtually all countries where polio has persisted or re-emerged. Nowhere is that more obvious than in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan’s 76 reported cases for 2011 (just revised upward to 80), the New York Times article points out, likely reflect many thousands. “Each detected case is an indicator of hundreds of ‘silent’ ones, mainly children with mild infections who become carriers.”

Although the Times article mentions “conflict” in Afghanistan and quotes Peter Crowley of UNICEF as stating that “security was a factor”, there is not one word about the US war and occupation, now in its 11th year.

President Karzai blamed the Taliban for the tripling of cases, accusing insurgents of blocking vaccination teams, a charge denied by the rebels. International health officials, reportedly shocked and alarmed by politicization of the issue, corroborated the assertion by the Taliban. Such an official went on to make the astonishingly naïve statement, perhaps a display of wishful thinking: “Health is not a political thing.”

What is one to take from such a piece in the Times? Where there is no analysis of such a peculiarly absurd statement, no mention of this longest war in US history.

Much has been written about Muslim opposition to polio vaccination, as in the LA Times, typically focusing not on concerns about safety of the oral Sabin vaccine, but about conspiracy theories. That applies to Nigeria, the third of 3 currently polio-endemic countries in the world.

In 2003 polio vaccination in Muslim northern Nigeria was halted until vaccine safety could be verified, after which, in 2004, it resumed. Despite the much written about Muslim mistrust of the West, this author has found not a single reference to the two wars being waged against Muslim countries by the US, let alone about the role of oil in those wars.

Nigeria’s oil reserve is the 7th largest in the world, and the country is the largest exporter of oil in Africa, which supplies the US with over 20% of its oil, more than that from the Middle East. Nigeria, once the supplier of millions of slaves to the US, is now its largest trading partner in sub-Saharan Africa.

To address the current and historical political factors relevant to all countries experiencing polio outbreaks, including war, colonialism, neoliberalism, imperialism, and the global economic downturn exceeds the scope of this article.

Where armed conflict exists, the strategy to combat polio, buttressed by muddled analysis such as that in the NY and LA Times articles, consists of calls for “Days of Tranquility” and safe corridors so that public health workers, often risking their lives for a pittance in compensation, can carry out vaccination campaigns. Are brief ceasefires the best we can hope for in the struggle to stop this completely preventable, devastating disease?

The tripling of polio cases in Afghanistan and its spread to many countries previously polio-free are the consequences of over 10 years of war waged by the US and its allies against Afghanistan, and of the undeclared US war against Pakistan. The stricken children will sear their images in our country’s legacy.

Dr. CATHERINE WILKERSON, MD, is a primary care physician in Michigan.

U.S. Probe of Border Attack Hardened Pakistani Suspicions

2012-01-26T14:42:00.001-06:00

January 26, 2012

"The Overarching Lack of Trust"

by GARETH PORTER

Washington DC

The Pakistani military leadership’s response to the U.S. report on its helicopter attack on two Pakistani border posts Nov. 26 assailed the credibility of the investigation by Air Force Brig. Gen. Steven Clark and expressed doubt that the attack could have been “accidental”.

The long-expected rejoinder, made public Monday, charged that 28 of its soldiers at two border bases were killed one by one long after the U.S. military had been told about the attack on a Pakistani base.

The Pakistani critique questions the claims that the U.S. did not know about the Pakistani border posts, that the combined U.S.-Afghan Special Forces unit believed it was under attack from insurgents when it called in air strikes against the two border posts, and that a series of miscommunications prevented higher echelons from stopping the attacks on the border posts.

Revelations in the Clark report – as well as what it omits – support the Pakistani contention that the U.S. investigation covered up what actually occurred before and during the attack. Information in the report suggests that the planners of the Special Forces operation the night of Nov. 25-26 may have known about the two Pakistani border posts that were attacked while feigning ignorance to the commander who had to approve the operation.

It also portrays a military organization that was not really interested in stopping the attack on the border posts even after it had been told that Pakistani military positions were under fire.

The Pakistani analysis does not repeat the assertion made by Gen. Ashfaq Nadeem, the director general for operations, in the aftermath of the attack that the coordinates of the two Pakistani border posts had been given to the U.S. military well before the incident of Nov. 25-26.

The analysis leaves no doubt, however, that the Pakistani military believed the United States was well aware of the two posts. It said each of the posts had five or six bunkers built above ground on the top of a ridge and clearly visible from Maya village about 1.5 kilometres away.

The Pakistani critique asserts that two or three U.S. aircraft had been operating in the area daily, and that U.S. intelligence had questioned Pakistani officials in the past even about changes in weaponry in its border posts.

The Pakistani military document highlights the revelation in the Clark report that Maj. Gen. James Laster, the commander of the “battlespace” in which Operation SAYAQA was to take place, had demanded that the planners of the operation “confirm the location of Pakistan’s border checkpoints”.

The most recent map of Pakistani border positions available at the time, according to the Clark report, was dated February 2011. The obvious intent of the demand by Gen. Laster was that the planners find out if there were any new border checkpoints that needed to be added to update the map.

The Clark report reveals that “pre-mission intelligence analysis” had indicated “possible border posts North and South of the Operation SAYAQA target areas….”

That intelligence was obviously relevant to Gen. Laster’s order, but those border posts did not show up on the map produced Nov. 23. The planners had decided not to check on those “possible border posts” by asking a Pakistani border liaison officer or investigating unilaterally.

The Clark report tiptoes carefully around the implications of that fact, saying the operation’s planners “did not identify any known border posts in the area of Operational SAYAQA”.

The point of requiring confirmation of a new map would presumably have been to go beyond border posts that were on the available map.

Air crews planning for the operation also knew about the “possible border posts”, according to the report, but didn’t include them in their “pre-mission planning packages”, because “they were data points outside the Operation SAYAQA area.”

U.S. investigators showed no apparent curiosity about what appears to have been the deliberate exclusion of the two new border posts from the map given to Gen. Laster.

The Pakistani critique charges that it is “not possible” that the failure to check on the Pakistani posts was “an innocent omission”.

A second point made by the Pakistani military is that the U.S. attack on its “Volcano” base by U.S. helicopter gunships continued for “as long as one hour and 24 minutes” after the U.S. side had been informed of the attack on its post.

Despite the fact that U.S. and ISAF officials had already been informed about the assault on the Pakistani bases “at multiple levels by the Pakistan side”, the Pakistani analysis charges, “every soldier in and around the posts…was individually targeted.”

The Clark report’s account of U.S. responses to being informed by Pakistani officials that their bases were under attack does nothing to allay Pakistani suspicions about the claim that the attack was unintentional.

It confirms the earlier Pakistani claim that its border liaison officer at the ISAF Regional Command East (RC-E) had informed the U.S. officers in charge of “deconfliction” with Pakistani positions on the border minutes after the attack had begun at 23:40 hours that Pakistani Frontier Force soldiers were being “engaged” by U.S.- coalition forces coming from Afghanistan.

The exchange over the news from the Pakistani officer was testy. Gen. Clark recalled in his press briefing on the report Dec. 22 that the Pakistani liaison officer had been asked where the border posts were located, and had not given the coordinates, but had responded, “Well, you know where it is because you’re shooting at them.”

Clark suggested that there was “confusion” about where the attack was taking place, but there was only one place where U.S. forces were firing at positions inside Pakistan that night, and RC-E’s border confliction cell could have easily identified that place quickly enough with one or two calls.

Neither the text of the report nor the detailed timeline in an annex show any effort to contact the Special Forces Task Force or Task Force BRONCO, which had approved the operation, about the report that they were attacking Pakistani border posts. The report offers no explanation for the absence of any action on that report, saying only that it “could not be immediately confirmed”.

Twenty minutes before the information had arrived, according to the Clark report, Task Force BRONCO told the Special Operations Task Force in the region it was still waiting to get confirmation from the Border Coordination Center for the area that there were no Pakistani troops near the operation. It added that RC-E was not tracking any PAKMIL border posts on its computerized map of the area.

The Special Operations Task Force then sent out a message system saying, “PAKMIL has been notified and confirmed no positions in area.”

In yet another suspicious episode, instead of asking the Pakistani liaison to the border coordination commission whether Pakistan had any posts or troops in the area of Operation SAYAQA, RC-E give him a general location that was 14 kilometers away from that area and asked if Pakistan had troops nearby.

The misdirection of the Pakistani liaison officer, which ensured the response that there were no Pakistani troops in the area, is explained in the Clark report as having been caused by a “misconfigured electronic map overlay”.

Asked in his press briefing why the RC-E had refused to provide precise grid coordinates under circumstances in which it was supposed to be determining whether U.S. forces were firing at Pakistani forces, Clark cited “the overarching lack of trust”.

Nearly 40 minutes after the attack on border post “Volcano” began, according to a timeline in the report, the U.S. Liaison officer to Pakistan’s 11th Corps reported to the Special Operations Task Force that U.S. helicopters and a drone had been firing on a Pakistani military post.

But the Task Force waited for at least 10 more minutes, according to the timeline, before informing the Special Forces Unit.

Meanwhile Pakistani troops were being hunted down one by one.

GARETH PORTER is an investigative historian and journalist with Inter-Press Service specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam“, was published in 2006.

E-mail to my sax / harp player - as we prepare to go a' tourin'!

2012-01-26T05:26:00.000-06:00

The Epic of Gilgamesh played a profound part in the life of Ladislaus (Lou) Bolchazy who, when he first encountered it, was a seminarian, who got into the seminarian biz as revenge upon his father who used to always curse his mother.

WELL, he finds Gilgamesh, and with all its stories, which have biblical precedents, the story converts him from a Roman Catholic Seminarian into an agnostic (if those who wrote on Sumerian clay tablets told the same stories as were told in the bible, then how could the bible be valid? .... Me thinks he was not all that hot on the idea of being a seminarian, plus, he was a horny sum-bitch). So, when he meets Marie Carducci, whose family owns LOTS of real estate in New York City, it takes him about six weeks to rebuke the cloth, and become just a student of philosophy, in which he earned a PhD, plust masters degrees in Greek, Latin, and some other stuff.

Lou carted his family around for years, working as an itinerant, vagabond Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Religion, until he reached the point in time where he realized that his professorship career path was not only going nowhere (other than round and round in circles) but imepding his wife's career in educaton. Marie too holds a PhD, in education. So they settled into Oak Park where Marie taught (and would eventually move on to Barrington, where she was a counsellor at the high school).

Meanwhile, what to do with Lou? Well, since he was no good with his hands, and knew nothing about the industry, they decided they would set up shop as a publisher of Greek and Latin student text books, as well as a quarterly publication highlighting scholarship of Eastern Europeans.

One day Lou gets a phone call from Professor Waldo Sweet of the University of Michigan, who introduces himself, and then inquires of Lou, "No doubt, Professor Bolchazy, you are familiar with my Artes Latinae (two-year self-teaching Latin program, developed under the auspices of the Encyclopedia Brittanica). The Encyclopedia Brittanica is discontinuing its publication, and now I seek a publisher. Are you interested?"

Lou lies through his teeth (they are good about doing that in Eastern Europe, plus Lou's family from Slovakia was uprooted by Hitler and the Nazis), says yes, and agrees to publish the AL program which consisted of audio cassette tapes and text books. Lou convinces Professor to give him a $75,000 (retail) inventory plus $2,000 cash. About a year later, a great discovery is made and becomes all the rage in the world of primary education: Student who study foreign languages routinely score about 30-40 points higher on their SATs than non-language students, and LATIN studetns score, an average, about 100 points higher (on both verbal AND mathematics). This finding, in conjunction with the reality that the Artes Latinae program is the only self-teaching program which is accepted by colleges and universities as fulfilling the high school language requirement, plus the explosion of the Christian fundamentalists home-schooling movement, turns AL into a VERY hot seller, and takes B-C publishing to a new level of sales.

By now, Lou and Marie have moved to Lake Barrington Shores and their office is in Wauconda. They share office space and secretarial help with the wife of Wauconda's high school art teacher, who would ultimately do the wood cuts that support the Danny Jackson translation of Gilgamesh.

Marie talked Lou into taking contract bridge lessons at the Barrington Park district, and that is how I came to meet them. Lou had never played CARDS before, much less bridge, and was the first student I had who did not know what a club was; probably didn't know what a spade was, either. Marie really enjoyed the game, and knew that to get better, one must practice, so she would routinely invite me (and a partner of my choosing) to their house for dinner and bridge. Living in LBS as they do, they are right next to the golf course, so one evening, Lou and I go out, and he is delighted to discover that I could play a little (my father was the golf professional at Streator Country Club, in Streator, Illinois, and a very successful high school golf coach at Streator, Barrington, and Glenbrook South high schools; he was also, for many years, the most determined and focused golfer I've ever seen play, and I have caddied for Byron Nelson and Andy North. I'm nost saying dad was better, but dad could start out double bogey, double bogey and then would announce, "My number's 71," and continue, starting to really get it together and fucking SHOOT 71! Earlier in January, he shot his age on two consecutive days (39-44, the 44-39!) and then BEAT his age twice more within the same week (41-41 and 42-40).

Lou really liked my class hand outs for the bridge lessons, so they ended up hiring me, with the long term project being to work in conjunction with a systems engineer from Hughes Aircraft who taught Artes Latinae at the local Junior College out in California, who one night wrote Lou a letter that would be a treasure to speed freaks everywhere. It is virtually incoherent, except for the gist, which is that Jeff (can't remember his last name) wants B-C publishers to front him $9,000 so he can take his family on a 3-month sabattical too Italy where he will write the soft-ware that will enable the conversion of AL from audio-cassette / text book format to CD-ROM / text book format. Eventually, my involvement in this project would last about 18 months, include a LOT of data entry (text that supported directly the casettes consisted of pictures, words (American English and LATIN), and sounds. Thus, every component, pictures, words, and sounds had to be identified, PLUS all the damn grammar had to be exact (except that I did some editing for clarification; there were some weak spots).

And then, tragedy - I had to proof read my own work. Oy Vey! WELL, this couldn't possibly last forever, so my mom was brought on board to help with the proofing, my dad was hired as a golf instructor to Lou, the bridge games became a distant memory, and my sister too got in on the data entry work. A real family affair! But, the Bolchazy's liked to operate in that fashion - hire people you are comfortable with socially, treat them well, pay them decently, and, not surprisingly, get some pretty talented, dedicated people working for you. Luckily, we also hired two Latinists to make the final proof readings.

A major project, but, a lot of fun.

And then, I begin to tell my sister about Gilgamesh. WELL, as you've already written - SMALL WORLD, because one day, she was in a library somewhere in Massachusettes, and turned around to encounter "The Epic of Gilgamesh" about which she had previously known nothing, but, since the forces of the universe were in and at play, she knew enough to know, "This is a book I am to read!"

Small world indeed.

Never worry about taking a while to respond. You're corresponding with the guy who has had, since June, a Doctor's note saying "Mark is fine to be his own designated payee for Social Security Supplemental Disability Insurance," and Mark has done NOTHING, nada, zip, rien, about it ... but that just means, the pot keeps growing bigger, and one day, sooner, hopefully, rather than later, there will be a couple of $1900 checks waiting for me, and with THOSE mutha fuckahs, transportation, guarnateed minimum payments to musicians and videographers kind of take care of themselves for a while.

Good luck with the job searches. As I mentioned, I'm looking to play on something like Wednesday evenings and Sunday afternoons, and hopefully those won't conflict with whatever great job you are gonna get (I feel it in my bones), and, what the hell, if we are successful enough, maybe we can become .... full time concert-fund raising musicians (there are precedents - Harry Chapin, Loreena McKinnett (http://youtu.be/e7Y-VBD0kRI). Harry donated 50% of the concert proceeds to the World Health Organization, and Loreena has built friggin' SCHOOLS.

Here's to hoping the time is right, our paths will be straightforward, that we will not sweat the little stuff, and that we'll always remember - it's ALL little stuff!

Good health, peace and blessings upon you, and upon all those you love, and unto all of them that love you.

Mark Ganzer

Wherein I cut a pompous ass a new ass hole!

2012-01-25T21:56:00.000-06:00

January 24, 2012

Reculer pour Mieux Sauter

by CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM

Behold homo sapiens lashed on the wheel of the digital social network: held frozen over a computer which is tied by a cord to a wall wherein the fiberglass cable carries the message; (No, Chris, we CHOOSE this, and yes, the fiberglass cable doth carry the message - but unto whom does it carry the message - unto far more people than we could ever communicate with IN THE MOMENT on a one-to-one basis, unless we have the advantage of being a published opinion columnist in a large metropolitan daily newspaper, OR, perhaps, a free lancer who is sometimes published at Counterpunch. WHAT IF, we have something very important to offer, to share, this in fact happens, and it happens on FaceBook, and it happens for bloggers ... now more need we be like unto a voice crying out in the wildnerness, but we can become a voice that speaks to truths that touch people's lives, that reaffirm their existence, that lets them know that they are not alone - and in this, even in loneliness / solitude, the knowing that we share something with fellow human beings, is indeed, a GREAT comfort!) staring into the lit screen, the face pale in the unnatural light; or, with head bent in the street, the appearance sullen, running fingers across the blinking object of desire. The creature is secretly harried: Constant updates are necessary, the user must tend the machine whenever and wherever possible (utter tripe - the user CHOOSES to do this ... on an "average" day, the "average" person will speak approximately 2500 words to 7.4 people ... on face book, or, at a blog, the writer will communicate with FAR mor people, touch far more lives, and, especially when the writer, the wordsmith KNOWS that his experiences, which are being freely shared, given from the heart, impelled by some universal imperative to SPEAK (or write - in Arabic, the word for both SPEAK and WRITE is the same, interesting!) – which is all the time and everywhere – and god forbid there is too long a lapse in the slipstream. On Facebook, new friends and old are counted – may they always increase in number! Some are in fact “friends,” in the now rotting sense of the word: the person who is to be confided in, who listens, cares what to listen for, knows secrets, keeps them, knows who you are to the extent that a friend can – the friend as he or she who might look into your eyes and, with affection and even love, claim to see the windows of the soul (except that no one posts SECRETS on facebook - one may post VERY personal and intimate stuff, but that is how one purges one's self of the most pernicious of demons; that is how one forgives one's self, and in the process, that is how one shows the way unto others how to forgive themselves, and how to share their worst experiences, and by sharing, unburdening one's self, we become purified, we become more involved in our community - we help others to help themselves).

As we know, however, many Facebook “friends” bear no relation to how we want to understand the term. (What chew mean "we" and "bear no relation to how we want to understand the term? Christ almighty, shortly after my mother's fatal stroke, but before the decision was made to pull the life supports, I must have received FIVE HUNDRED (if not more) well wishes and prayers from my face book community, and from my e-mailing friends, all of whom I kept advised; THE POWER OF PRAYER group (of which I am a member) is an intercessory Prayer group that was praying their hardest and damndest both for my mother, and for all of those who loved her, and were so invested in her condition ... and so afraid that she might be forever gone ... I PROMISE you, this was by far a greater outpouring for friendship and support than any I got from church or any of the community groups in which I participate face to face ... it was very much a comfort to know all the people that were praying for mom, and that were praying for us ... because THEY WERE DOING WHAT THEY COULD, and, in that situation, all you CAN do is pray!) Perhaps known to the user at work or at school in the flesh, yet they cannot be counted as real friends. Some are strangers, known only via the interface of the machine, attracted to the user by an algorithm calculating the databit “likes” and “dislikes.”

Let’s forget for a moment that Facebook is probably (why "probably"? It either is or it isn't; why don't you take the time to get an expert's opinion, or, better yet, the opinions of several experts - you see, when it comes to tapping telephones and breaking into e-mails - well, that is stuff we normally ASSUME to be private - FB, Jeez Lew Ease, for Chrissakes, it is a fucking PUBLIC WEB SITE ... everything we post there is fair game for just about anybody to see -- we post at our own risk, and if we don't realize this, we should not be permitted to drive an automobile, cash a check, or procreate) the most ingenious info-aggregator yet invented for governments to spy on citizens (FB was NOT invented for this reason; if in fact it can be used to do so, so be it; FIRE burns and destroys, and yet fire taught human kind how to tame and control fire). Forget that the citizens are willingly doing the work for the intelligence agencies in building the database (THE DATA BASE - there are dozens, scores, maybe even 100's or more data bases - there is so much fucking data out there that it is incomprhensible to human kind; literally.). I worry about the matter of efficiency in friendship. Facebook makes friendship efficient, in the manner of the assembly line, which is exactly what friendship should not be – if it is to remain human, if the friend as person is not to be degraded. Friendship is dirty. It’s difficult. It smells – it sometimes has bad breath. It’s unpredictable, and sometimes hazardous. (Jesus Christ, asshole, you're talking about FAMILY, not friends. MY friends are quite easy to take - virtually all of them are non-judgmental (this goes a long way toward making a person very attractive to me as a friend) virtually all of them willing to give a shirt off their back, who routinely perforam random acts of kindnesses, the list is endless -- if your friends are doing all this rotten stuff, I think it is safe to say, "they ain't really your friends; they are just acquaintances who get off on making you feel rotten -- dump 'em all and go live as a hermit, better yet, go live in Chicago, homeless, with NO cash for a month, or Harvard, Illinois, and then you will find out who your true friends are ... to me, it's the Mexican that picks me up while I'm walking along a very busy highway (not hitch-hiking, because it's too damn dangerous, but it's also 20 degrees out, and sleet is coming down; NOT only does he pick me up, and asks where I'm going to, he takes me to a bus stop, asks if I have enough money, and then gives me a buck to make sure I do ... now THAT is a god-damned friend and I might NEVER EVEN SEE HIM AGAIN!) The issue is about persons and about friendship defined, for if we are to take Facebook seriously, then we must recognize that the form of friendship it is promulgating will by technologic necessity reduce the nature and meaning of the friend (Christ, YOU have reduced the nature and meaning of "friend" to someone you know who fucks you over and pisses you off - if that's what ticks your clock, so be it - but that does not work for me, and I continue to make new friends DAILY, because I am unafraid to chat with a stranger - it's surprising how many of them are honored that you would speak with them, and invariably, they are VERY interesting. You see, MOST of my friends (in the sense of having known them for a long time, having shared joys and triumphs, defeats and disappointnments with, having shared meals with, having had long and intimate personal talks with -- well, MOST of these friends have LIVES, loved ones, commitments, and they DO NOT HAVE THE KIND OF TIME for me that I have for them). Personhood on the Facebook page can only go so far. It is a managed self. It is degraded personhood.

I watched my daughter in Christmas of 2010 using Facebook. I had never seen the social network machine in action. (So, from random sample, size one, you take the flying leap from the specific to the generality in a heart beat - you are a fucking RETARD, ass hole, and you should NOT be permitted to have your tripe posted on an otherwise pretty useful sight, such as Counterpunch!) Lea is 15, lives in a suburb of Paris with her mother, bored to tears like all suburban kids, and of course has perfected a Facebook personality. Many pictures of herself, and friends, at parties and events attended, and much else: commentary on this or that pop culture item of interest – musical acts for the most part, but also the usual amalgam of commodities sought after. I watched for a moment and then, abruptly, she shut it down, want me to see no more of the Facebook self. I wondered how many “friends” she had, but she wasn’t talking. (WELL, fer Chrissakes, you're an absolute judgmental ass hole who doesn't deserve to be her father, why SHOULD she answer any of your questions or let you into her world; you don't really give a fuck about her anyway, and she sure as hell does not trust you with any of this information - damn good thing you live so far apart.)

A few months later, in the springtime, she was in Utah, in the town of Moab, where I used to live and where I return every few months or so to hide out and write in a cabin I rent from a friend. Moab was once a lost little place in the desert. Today it is invaded by people like me, who want to be in a lost little place and who thereby nullify each other’s desire for solitude. (NO, ass hole, you don't want to be in a lost little place, if you did, you'd find some place other than Moab - let me suggest Union, Illinois, for example) Lea had a Blackberry, courtesy of complaining to her mother or grandmother – I never got a straight story as to who gave her the gift – but of course it had no signal at our cabin. Disconnection today is a wondrous event; it’s almost like being punched in the face. Bull shit - being punched in the face ain't NUTHIN' like being w/o connectivity. To be shut off from the global chatter, to not have to field the unending course and scrum of digital information, to be human in the primary sense of being merely person to person You're so bad at fucking person to person that your own now 16-year old daughter won't even talk with you; would rather do the ether thing with people she can't see than to attempt to have a rational "person to person" chat – this is what cabins in Utah are now apparently made for. Lea and I sat in this informational darkness and ate big American breakfasts in the morning and lazed about in the afternoon sun and read books – she with “Lord of the Flies” – and went on hikes in the long spring light, carrying extra water but no cell phones.

Still, the connection was sought, and we were both sad little addicts. (I hardly see Lisa as a sad little addict - she was willing to forgo her cell to be with you, to give you (yet) another chance at connecting on a human level - and, p.s., your job is to be FATHER, not friend, and that your daughter won't talk with you ought to be a very clear signal that you ahve FAILED her and greatly) Wherever there was wifi – at the neighbor’s house nearby the cabin, at the library in town, at the restaurants – I wanted my e-mail. And Lea looked to connect and find the latest news on Facebook. Being a hypocrite – having gathered up my own email and touched on my “friends” via the simpler (Lea would say archaic) interface – I chided her about Facebook. She didn’t laugh. This is a 15-year-old. Social connection is tragically important. (Yes, whether it be social connection in the face-to-face way, by telephone, by cell phone, by letter-writing, by blogging, by posting on face book ... these are ALL VERY VALID social connections)

Yet she admitted there was something not quite right in what Facebook asked of her. “Facebook is good,” she said, “but it’s weird too. You have to be constantly social,” she said. “But with people – with friends – you should also have” – she’s bilingual in French and English but here searched for the right word – “some kind of recule.” Recule meaning a stepping back, a moving away. (Here's a clue - you CAN step back from face book - you don't have to respond to any one, you can go invisible, you can only let certain friends know you are there .. in other words, you CAN recule!)

“Okay, recule,” I said.

“You’re not always there, you’re not always connected. You have your own experience. That’s what vacation is for. You’re apart. And then you come together and you talk, you know, face to face, and you tell everybody what happened on the vacation.” Weird indeed, Lea. You sound like a Luddite.

Would that there were more like her among the adults. Not a week goes by that people who I’d otherwise consider mindful and intelligent fail to invite me on to Facebook. Which prompts the immediate question: Why would any mindful and intelligent person be on Facebook? I have a friend in Brooklyn, admittedly a vulgarian and not much in tune with the melodies of political correctness, who considers Facebook the province of “people standing in mirrors tarting themselves up and bullshitting and mincing around. Facebook is the biggest waste of time since television.” (My question is, does this vulgarian come to his conclusions from having been on face book, or from merely having held an opinion about something he has not experienced) The man has a point. Facebook is the ideal venue of expression for a society in which narcissism, as Christopher Lasch long ago pointed out, has become the rampant personality disorder. Facebook as sociopathology, as a symptom of social disorder and disease? Perhaps.

Back in New York City, after three months of marginal grace in the cabin, I am confronted again with the mass of my fellow humanity carrying Blackberrys, SmartPhones, i-Phones, i-Pads, i-Pods – these electroplastic appendages without which modern survival is apparently impossible. (I'm on facebook, but I don't carry those other things. I might, but I'm totally disabled and have no money. Maybe I'm just lucky?) The urge is grab the things, with banzai scream, and smash them under my boot. (This indeed would be socio pathic, AND quite criminal wheter or not a symptom of disorder or disease, AND, it would be very rude and intolerant) An intolerant, and intolerable, attitude, and certainly anti-social. Still, there is something at once pitiful and repulsive – nauseating – in so many fellow human beings doing the same thing with the same electroplastic appendage hooked up to the same global network: the hand outstretched with device cupped, the eyes locked on the singular object, hooked into the Singularity. The appendage, always making some sort of rude noise demanding attention, appears to be doing the living, the leading, the looking, and the human holding it is afterthought, necessary only to point it like a divining rod to determine the next step forward. A savage dropped from the sky into the city would say it looks as if the user is servicing the machine.

I read an essay by one Damon Darlin, a “technology editor” at the New York Times, who makes the classic argument of the technocrat, the scientific manager, that the benefits of efficiency trump whatever cost to humanness imposed by new technologies. Probably a perfectly decent person, Darlin has at the same time clearly replaced his mind with a microchip. He writes how he “learned to stop worrying by loving the Smartphone.” “For most people,” he writes, “a smartphone will change their lives and most likely for the better.” And what are these “improvements”? Poor Damon is “never lost” anymore in New York, or, presumably, anywhere that he can get a signal – the machine tells him where he is. He is “never bored” – the machine entertains him. He is “never without an answer” – the machine provides the answers. He “never forgets anything” – the machine remembers. “Google,” he writes, “begins to substitute for my memory.” He writes that the Smartphone “can help us recall events in our own lives.” The machine, says Darlin, becomes “an auxiliary memory of everything I do.”

To never be lost or bored or forgetful or without answers is to be something less than human. (I spend a lot of time on facebook, but even when I'm not on facebook {"truth be told, I sometimes fall asleep on face book, so, after a while, FACEBOOK can become boring ... but, when I am out and about and traveling, to places I've never been before (or places that I've been before) .. I LOVE to ride the weekend rails, for $7.00 one can ride all seven train lines out of Chicago; one can get 60+ miles from the loop usually in less than 2 hours; one can end up in one of three different states ... and on these trains, my rail riding, I INVARIABLY strike up a conversation or two (or three or four or five) with strangers - most frequently people of color or women, or high school or college students - and maybe exactly ONE TIME did any one ever tell me to mind my own business - you see, the thing about saying something nice to someone as a conversation starter (in Chicago, there's ALWAYS the weather, and always one of the sports teams of the other to start off a conversation) is that you have a priori given that person a measure of respect, informed them that you find them worthy of your time, that you find them interesting, with something to teach you.That Darlin’s article was not satire, indeed was grimly serious, is an indicator of how far along we’ve come in the degradation of personhood to make the machine look useful. Yet his thinking is the gospel of the age. It is a demented vision of human life, a form of technology-induced insanity – accepted almost totally as the norm. (Chris, you simply gotta be one of the saddest human-looking critters I've ever read in my fucking life!)

CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM writes for Vanity Fair, GQ, Harper’s and many other magazines (oh, I see, a very serious published author person, with opinions people are willing to pay money for ... must know about what he's talking? Yes? Know? NO!, and is currently working on a book, “The United States Must End,” which advocates the dissolution of the US. (You think you're gonna end the United States by writing a book advocating just that? You ARE a friggin moron!) He can be reached at cketcham99@mindspring.com.

1 Feb, 1994: Dear Connie Craig,

2012-01-25T12:17:00.002-06:00

In couple of minutes I can write Feb. 2, because it is almost midnight. I've been sitting at this computer with a green face getting drier and harder by the minute while I tried to get from the wrong program back into the right program without calling Mark (the computer guru) but alas, I failed and threw in the sponge, so to speak. Mark bailed me out. I washed off the Mary Kay face mast that is supposed to make you look noticeably younger (several weeks ago, according to schedule) and now, at last, I am trying to get a little message off. I was delighted to see your letter on the kitchen table when I came home from work. I had been thinking about writing to your old address (from last year) but I'm glad now that I didn't. Of course I wasn't so tickled to read about our buddy Eldie and what has been happening. Dagnab, that's not the way it is supposed to be! I am so glad you had an ophthalmologist at hand -

'Last Tango in Paris' Actress Maria Schneider Has Died

2012-01-25T12:17:00.000-06:00

This seems quite a shame. She was so lovely - and she looks to have aged a lot in the intervening 38 years.
by: Tim Grierson
Maria Schneider, 1952-2011
Dominique Charriau/WireImage
When you're a young, beautiful and largely unknown actress, one of the biggest decisions you'll have to face is whether or not you're willing to appear nude in a movie that could launch your career. There's no right or wrong answer to that question -- each actress has to decide that for herself -- but in the case of Maria Schneider, whodied this morning in Paris at the age of 58, she said yes. The film was "Last Tango in Paris." And it changed her life -- for better and for worse.
The French actress was only 19 when Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci cast her in the movie opposite the much more experienced and acclaimed Marlon Brando. (He was also much older: 48.) Released at the end of 1972, "Last Tango in Paris" was an instant scandal, telling the unlikely story of two strangers -- an American widower (Brando) and an engaged French woman (Schneider) -- who meet in Paris and decide to have anonymous sexual trysts with each other in an empty apartment. (How anonymous? The widower insists that they not reveal their names or anything about themselves.) Catching the film at its premiere at the New York Film Festival, New Yorker critic Pauline Kael memorably rhapsodized in her review, declaring that "Last Tango" had "altered the face of an art form ... This is a movie people will be arguing about, I think, for as long as there are movies." Sexually explicit in a way movies never were before and have only rarely been since, "Last Tango in Paris" was really about alienation and the disconnect between sex and love, but its legacy has ended up being that it was banned throughout the world and that, yes, it contains one of the most shocking love scenes of all time. We won't show you that, but the film's original trailer gives a decent hint of the movie's libidinous, artsy trappings:

Instantly, Schneider was a star, and from all accounts she handled it very badly. For one thing, she had to contend with producers and directors who just wanted her to be nude in their projects. "Marlon was shy about his body, but nudity wasn't a problem for me in those days as I thought it was beautiful," she said in 2007. Still, "I never went naked in a movie again after 'Last Tango,' even though I was offered many such roles."
She also wasn't ready for the media attention that would come with such a naked (both physically and emotionally) part. She got into drugs, overdosing a few times. She tried to kill herself at least once.
But her fame brought her to the attention of another revered Italian director, Michelangelo Antonioni, who cast her alongside another iconic American actor, Jack Nicholson, for "The Passenger." And while some of the sexual politics of "Last Tango" haven't aged well, Antonioni's 1975 film remains pretty stunning. In it, Nicholson plays an emotionally lost journalist who assumes the identity of a dead man and starts a new life, with Schneider being the young woman he meets along the way for a journey that's as much about geography as it is about mental distance from his past.

But despite landing a major role that would help people forget about "Last Tango" some, Schneider was still very uncomfortable with celebrity, although she did move to Los Angeles around that time to find work in Hollywood. In an interview with Roger Ebert after the release of "The Passenger," she talked about her feelings regarding Southern California: "It's hard to talk to the people here. They're very shallow. All they talk about is their look, their hair and their screwing. But I love to act, and here is the place to come for the movies."
Very little came from it, however, and soon she was making European movies again. But though she kept working, her career never was the same again. Perhaps that was for the best. Even four years ago, she sounded like someone still reeling from the experience of her infamous first role. For the 35th anniversary of "Last Tango," she told a writer, "It's amazing. I've made 50 films in my career and 'Last Tango' is 35 years old, but it's still the one that everyone asks me about." She didn't seem particularly pleased with that fact -- in the same interview, she badmouthed Bertolucci. "I think Bertolucci is overrated and he never really made anything after 'Last Tango' that had the same impact," she said. "He was fat and sweaty and very manipulative ... and would do certain things to get a reaction from me."
But if she was somewhat bitter about parts of her past, she was nonetheless in a better place. She had kicked drugs. She had found love, presumably with a woman she'd been with for decades. "I was very lucky," she said in 2007. "I lost many friends to drugs, but I met someone in 1980 who helped me stop. I call this person my angel and we've been together ever since. I don't say if it's a man or a woman. That's my secret garden. I like to keep it a mystery."
For an actress who learned early in the career the dangers of leaving yourself bare, it was probably a great comfort at the end of her life to actually have some mysteries to call her own.
"Last Tango in Paris" star Maria Schneider dies: report [Reuters]
Interview with Maria Schneider [RogerEbert.com]
I felt raped by Brando [Daily Mail]

NEXT POSTWhy Hugh Jackman Eats "6,000 Calories a Day"

International Speculation and Rising Food Prices

2012-01-25T12:15:00.000-06:00

February 14, 2011

Yet Another Reason to Drop the Dollar

International Speculation and Rising Food Prices

By UMBERTO MAZZEI

Henry Kissinger once said that whoever controls food controls people. In other words, everyone surrenders when they see their children starve. That is how the U.S. government subdued the American Indians defending their lands, by exterminating the bison that provided them food and instead handing out food on reservations. The British government did the same to subdue the Boer republics in South Africa by forcing the Boer civilian population into the first concentration camps ever and letting them starve.

International cartels now use their control over the global food supply to make huge profits. There are six major corporations that control the purchase and sale of agricultural products: Cargill, Kraft, Bunge & Born, ADM (Archer Daniels Midland), Nestlé and General Mills. Food prices are set at exchanges in Chicago, New York and London.

Some countries shield their population from commodity speculation on basic foods by restricting the export of their agricultural staples until domestic demand is satisfied. This has a clear and legitimate purpose: to stabilize domestic prices and ensure supply for their own people. Domestic prices are also an uncomfortable testimony of real prices and temper full international market control over pricing.

On January 22, agriculture ministers from 50 countries met in Berlin, to examine the rise of international prices of commodities during the second half of 2010. Before the assembly, World Trade Organization (WTO) director, Pascal Lamy, earned merits with the global food cartels by attacking export restrictions. No doubt hoping that the cartels will hire him when he loses his present position, Lamy attributed the record high international prices of agricultural products to the export limits that some countries apply. His claim was a classic case of sophistry—a distortion of the truth with a false arguments.

"Export restrictions are a prime cause of current and recent surges in global food prices, and countries should find other ways to secure domestic supplies," the WTO chief said. "Export restrictions lead to panic in markets when different actors see prices rising at stellar speed," he added.

Mr. Lamy illogically ignores the fact that a sudden rise in agricultural commodity prices, as reported three weeks ago by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), cannot be attributed to controls that have always been there. Those controls, as he acknowledges, are imposed to assure supply to the population of the producing countries and, although Lamy did not say it, also to stabilize national and to an extent, international agricultural prices. This last point is very annoying to the cartels that dominate international food trade.

After attacking export restrictions, Mr. Lamy stated that exporting countries seek other ways to assure their own national supply. But here his proposals for a different approach are misleading. Lamy called for an increase in global food production, "more social safety nets, more food aid and food supplies and …humanitarian aid exempt from export restrictions."

Let's look first at the call for an increase in global food production. Countries that now must import food used to feed themselves until free trade and the export subsidies of rich countries ruined their farmers. The WTO unfairly allows subsidies in some countries and prohibits them in others. More production in countries that subsidize exports would worsen the rural crisis in the Third World.

Furthermore, high prices will not in this case spur more production because they do not obey demand, which is relatively stable, and the price increase does not reach producers. Speculators and price manipulators are the ones who profit from those sudden rises. An increase in food production to stabilize prices would be beneficial only if it happens in those countries that lost their self-sufficiency in agriculture. For that, it is necessary to eliminate export subsidies and other aids that distort agricultural prices.

Lamy also called for an increase in food aid. Food aid has historically played an important role in crippling local food production, functioning as a tool to displace and destroy local farms. There are cases in which food aid is imposed as an import quota; for example, Guatemala is forced to accept a share of "help" it does not need. Another example is Honduras, which was self-sufficient in rice before Hurricane Mitch. The natural disaster opened the gates to thousands of tons of U.S."aid" rice, subsidized at 80%. Prices tumbled and killed domestic production. Finally, the case of Haiti is now notorious because President Bill Clinton acknowledged his guilt in the destruction of Haitian agriculture by imposing U.S. food aid "manu militari" and forcing the Haitian government to obey the prescription of the IMF to lower its rice tariff from 35 % to 3%. All these experiences seem lost on Mr. Lamy.

Lamy summed up his attitude toward the challenge of rising food prices: "Globally, what we would be likely to see as a result of Doha [WTO Round] is more food being produced where this can be done more efficiently." It is very unlikely that the Doha Round will ever acomplish this goal. The Doha Round was accepted by developing countries because of the mandate to eliminate subsidies that distort agricultural prices. But negotiations are stuck because rich countries do not want to reduce their subsidies, and yet demand more openness to their exports, more concessions on intellectual property and services, and a drastic reduction in the space for national economic policies.

Food Speculation

The IMF ordered fiscal austerity for those European governments that ruined themselves by paying off the debts of private banks, but it has failed to mention the subsidies of the European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Neither does the new Republican majority in the U.S. Congress mention farm or export subsidies when they ask for public spending cuts. The problem is not subsidies but who receives them–giant food transnationals make huge profits off these subsidies. Instead of analyzing the impact of these subsides, the IMF continues to recommend austerity measures focused on removing protections against poverty at a time when there is a steep rise in food prices and unemployment.

We are seeing an increase in global impoverishment caused by practices that enrich bankers and global commodities speculators. Mr. Lamy and the members of the G-20 who accuse export restrictions for rising food prices should take a closer look at the impact of speculation and turn their attention to the means and tools that are at the bottom of the rising prices. Yet at the meeting, they pointedly did not even mention speculation.

Economic theory says that prices follow the law of supply and demand. As long as human beings have a single stomach, there cannot be a sudden increase in demand for food. We may begin to hear, as in 2008, the tale that prices rose because of grain demand to produce ethanol. The argument has been proven false as an explanation for the sudden price hikes. There was no increase in ethanol production and grain prices fell as fast as they rose without an increase on agricultural activity. It is clear that the starving and suffering of billions in 2008 was the work of greedy price speculators.

The mainstream media tends to do little research and repeats whatever comes out of the mouths of those on high. Droughts and floods are not the leading cause of spikes in global food prices. Nor are export restrictions. The spikes are the work of manipulation in commodity markets where global prices are set. The physical existence of a commodity is not even necessary to create a price, because real goods are not always bought or sold or delivered, even though their prices are listed in mercantile exchanges.

Listings are typically based on the index commodity funds, which are bets on the mercantile exchange performance of a specific agricultural commodity. Handling is coordinated between institutional brokers, financial institutions and global merchants. They bet on the rise or fall of a specific product and then manipulate the price to win the bet. To make a profit it is enough to sell options without ever actually owning an existing product somewhere. Speculators don't only make a profit when prices rise; they can also bet and make a profit when commodity prices collapse, by so-called "short selling. "

From 2006 to 2008 commodity prices rose scandalously, especially rice, wheat and corn. A tonne of rice rose from $600 in 2003 to $1,800 in 2008. After causing popular unrest in the world, prices fell as quickly as they climbed. Further proof that the cause was not supply and demand.

The current crisis looks even worse. The last FAO report states that cereals price rose 32% in the second half of 2010 and the composite price index of sugar, meat, milk, cereals and oilseeds in December exceeded 2008 levels. If speculation is left unchecked, this time there will be riots in Europe as well.

The Dollar's Role

A fundamental cause of price instability is the weakness of the dollar. A currency that has devalued 400% against gold and 60% against the Swiss franc in only four years cannot be the reference for commercial value. The dollar devaluation caused loss of purchasing power to all wages, pensions and fixed incomes in the world, but also the actual reduction of all dollar-denominated debts. Therefore, it is not admissible that the most indebted country in the world ensures the stability of values in international trade or the stability of anything.

It is a situation that has gradually gotten worse since 1971, when the United States defaulted on its debts and repudiated the gold standard. The total amount of dollars and dollar-denominated securities issued since then by the Federal Reserve and by the financial institutions supported by the Fed, surpasses the U.S. GDP and even the World Gross Product. It is a debt that cannot be paid.

The only way to obtain price stability and start a global economic recovery is to drop the dollar, assume a more rational value for reference, and discipline the operation of financial and mercantile exchanges in London, New York and Chicago. That is what the Davos gathering of international leaders should have considered, but did not. Instead they focused, as always, on recipes for maintaining their own immediate and exclusive prosperity in a starkly unequal world.

Umberto Mazzei (Umberto.mazzei@sfr.fr) is a trade analyst based in Geneva and a contributor to the CIP Americas Program www.cipamericas.org.

A Clean Break? Egypt / Turkey and Israel

2012-01-25T12:14:00.002-06:00

By ERIC WALBERG

While Egypt's revolution was very much about domestic matters -- bread and butter, corruption, repression -- its most immediate effects have been international. Not for a long time has Egypt loomed so large in the region, to both friend and foe. At least 13 of the 22 Arab League countries are now affected: Algeria, Bahrain, Djibouti, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen.

But just as powerful has been the resonance in Israel. It has no precedent for an assertive, democratic neighbour. Except for Turkey.

As the US was putting the finishing touches on NATO (established in April 1949), Turkey became the first Muslim nation to recognise Israel, in March 1949 (Iran did so a year later). Under the watchful eye of its military, Turkey and Israel had close diplomatic, economic and military relations throughout the Cold War.

The first hint of trouble was Turkey's denunciation of "Israeli oppression" of the Palestinians in 1987, but it was not until the Justice and Development Party came to power in 2002 that a strong critical voice was heard. In 2004 Turkey denounced the Israeli assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin as a "terrorist act" and Israeli policy in the Gaza Strip as "state-sponsored terrorism".

Saudi acquiescence to US-Israel hegemony is understandable because of the Saudi monarchy's total reliance on the US dollar income from its oil. As US secretary of state Henry Kissinger told Business Week after Saudi Arabia defied the US with its oil embargo in support of Egypt in the 1973 war against Israel, any more such behaviour would lead to "massive political warfare against countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran to make them risk their political stability and maybe their security if they did not cooperate".

His words were not idle. King Faisal, who had risked all to help the Egyptians and Palestinians, was assassinated shortly after that, and his act of defiance was the last peep heard from the Saudis. Or Egypt, which went on to make peace with Israel. Even as Turkey's resistance to Israel has grown hotter, Israel continued to find comfort in the accommodating nature of president Hosni Mubarak's rule, though it has been a "cold peace" between enemies.

Yes, enemies. For despite official relations and a trickle of photo ops of Egyptian-Israeli leaders shaking hands over the past three decades, 92 per cent Egyptians continued to view Israel as the enemy, according to a 2006 Egyptian government poll. Perhaps Mubarak also found maintaining good relations with Israel distasteful, but he complied with US wishes, getting the second largest US aid package (after Israel).

Current Israeli military strategy was honed in the early1980s, after the elimination of Egypt as a military threat. Two names are identified with it. Ariel Sharon announced publicly in 1981, shortly before invading Lebanon, that Israel no longer thought in terms of peace with its neighbours, but instead sought to widen its sphere of influence to the whole region "to include countries like Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and areas like the Persian Gulf and Africa, and in particular the countries of North and Central Africa". This view of Israel as a regional superpower/ bully became known as the Sharon Doctrine.

Sharon's invasion of Lebanon in 1982 followed traditional imperialism's strategy of direct invasion and co-opting of local elites, in this case a Christian one. But already this strongman policy was losing its appeal. It didn't work for Israel in Lebanon. There was always the risk of a strongman turning against his patron or being overthrown.

The more extreme version of the new Israeli game plan to make Israel the regional hegemon was Oded Yinon's "A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s". Yinon was nicknamed 'sower of discord' for his proposal to divide-and-conquer to create weak dependent statelets with some pretense of democracy, similar to the US strategy in Central America, which would fight among themselves and, if worse comes to worst and a populist leader emerges, be sabotaged easily – the Salvador Option. Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah described the Israeli policy based on Yinon in 2007 as intended to create "a region that has been partitioned into ethnic and confessional states that are in agreement with each other. This is the new Middle East."

Yinon was using as a model the Ottoman millet system where separate legal courts governed the various religious communities using Muslim Sharia, Christian Canon and Jewish Halakha laws. Lebanon would be divided into Sunni, Alawi, Christian and Druze states, Iraq divided into Sunni, Kurd and Shia states. The Saudi kingdom and Egypt would also be divided along sectarian lines, leaving Israel the undisputed master.

"Genuine coexistence and peace will reign over the land only when Arabs understand that without Jewish rule between Jordan and the sea they will have neither existence nor security." Yinon correctly observed that the existing Middle East states set up by Britain following WWI&II were unstable and consisted of sizable minorities which could be easily incited to rebel. All the Gulf states are "built upon a delicate house of sand in which there is only oil".

Following on Yinon's strategy in 1982, Richard Perle's 1996 "A Clean Break" states: "Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq – an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right."

Israeli internal security minister Avi Dichter said shortly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003: "Weakening and isolating Iraq is no less important than weakening and isolating Egypt. Weakening and isolating Egypt is done by diplomatic methods while everything is done to do achieve a complete and comprehensive isolation to Iraq. Iraq has vanished as a military force and as a united country."

According to Haaretz correspondent Aluf Benn writing on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Sharon and his cohorts "envision a domino effect, with the fall of Saddam Hussein followed by that of Israel's other enemies: Arafat, Hassan Nasrallah, Bashar Assad, the ayatollah in Iran and maybe even Muhammar Gadaffi." By presenting the US with facts-on-the-ground and using its US lobby, Israel would keep itself at the heart of American plans for the Middle East.

The invasion of Iraq was always intended as a prelude to the invasion of Iran. The Israeli logic, which is hard to fault, is that with Iraq now occupied, unstable and its inevitably pro-Iranian Shia majority asserting control, Iran has been strengthened, and that the same war plan against Iran is necessary to defeat the chief remaining regional anti-Israeli regime, which is now gathering support from not only Shia, but from Sunni opponents to the US-Israeli project throughout the Arab world. Ben Eliezer told the gathering: "They are twins, Iran and Iraq."

Despite Turkish storm clouds on the horizon, until 25 January 2011, Israel's plan was still to replace the Ottoman Turks of yore as the local imperial power. The Arab nations (prepared by British imperial divide-and-conquer and local-strongman policies) would be kept divided, weak, dependent now on Israel to ensure safe access to oil. An Israeli-style peace would break out throughout the region.

But this tangled web has unravelled. Despite the $36 billion poured into Egypt's military and Americanisation of Egypt's armed forces since the peace treaty with Israel, according to wikileaks-egypt.blogspot.com US officials complained of the "backward-looking nature of Egypt's military posture" (read: Israel is still Egypt's main enemy), that the army generals remained resistant to change and economic reforms to further dismantle central government power.

Egyptian Minister of Defence Muhammad Tantawi "has resisted any change to usage of FMF [foreign military financing] funding and has been the chief impediment to transforming the military's mission to meet emerging security threats." In plain language, Egypt's de facto head of state was criticised by the US because he refused to go along with the new US-Israeli strategy which would incorporate Egypt's defence into a broader NATO war against "asymmetric threats" (read: the "war on terror") and to acquiesce to Israel as the regional hegemon.

Mubarak was the Egyptian strongman that fit Sharon's strategy for the region. But he was overthrown in a truly unforeseen manner -- by the people. Yinon's divide-and-rule strategy -- in the case of Egypt, by inciting Muslim against Copt -- has also come to naught with the popular revolution here, one of its symbols being the crescent and cross.

There has indeed been "a clean break" with the past, but not the one foreseen by Perle. His scheme can be rephrased as: Egypt and Turkey can shape their strategic environment, in cooperation with Syria and Lebanon, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Israel. As for Dichter's hubris, it is impossible at this point to see what the future holds for Iraq, but it will not be what he had in mind. And Iran can now breathe a sigh of relief.

A year and a half ago, an Israel Navy submarine crossed the Suez Canal to the Red Sea, where it conducted an exercise, reflecting the strategic cooperation between Israel and Egypt, aimed at sending a message of deterrence to Iran. Just one week after the fall of Mubarak, the canal is being used to deliver a message of deterrence – but this time the message is for Israel, as Iranian warships cross the canal on their way to Syrian ports.

Nor are the upheavals across the Arab world at present following the sectarian scenario envisioned by Yinon. Even the Shia uprising in Bahrain is more about an oppressive neocolonial monarchy, originally imposed by the British, than about Shia-Sunni hostility.

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has expressed fears about Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood "undermining the peace treaty" which 85 per cent of Israelis approve of. But he need not fear. While Egyptians have no love for Israel, none contemplate another war against what is clearly a more powerful and ruthless neighbour.

What really hurts for the Likudniks is the new Egypt in cooperation with the new Turkey will put paid to the Sharon/ Yinon strategy for establishing Israel as the regional empire. It will have to join the comity of nations not as a ruthless bully, but as a responsible partner.

Eric Walberg writes for Al-Ahram Weekly. You can reach him at http://ericwalberg.com/

Disaster Capitalism at the Local Level

2012-01-25T12:14:00.000-06:00

Tar Sands to Toledo

By TRUDY BOND

"I am extremely pleased with the announcement that BP has given the green light for the Sunrise project in Alberta."
-- Ohio Democratic Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur

Democratic leaders in Congress are as likely to cavalierly embrace the destruction of the environment, including global warming, as readily as any of the basest congressional members of the other party. Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, who represents Northern Ohio's Ninth Congressional District, is celebrating a deal that will allow BP - yes, BP, the epitome of environmental tragedies - to retrofit their Toledo refinery so the 91-year-old facility can process heavy oil extracted from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, never bothering to tell the public of the details of her deal.

In her press release, Kaptur only said she had been in close contact with both the company (BP) and the Canadian government in recent months, as the project had been stalled, but is now "moving ahead full throttle, and that's good news for us." Clearly, Ms. Kaptur's referral to "us" doesn't include those devastated by BP's greed-compelled negligence in the deaths of people, wildlife, sea life and gulf coastal regions or the devastating effects that BP's continued greed will have on the environment and people in Alberta.

Ms. Kaptur is milk-toast and non-controversial to most. Her press releases must be read by only her constituents, if at all. That is the only explanation as to how she can get away with celebrating a pact with the devil, a pact that will bring jobs to recession-torn Toledo, one area in the country that has had no recovery since the recession.

According to a report released by the Brookings Institute, Toledo's economy "fell off a cliff and never really managed to climb back. This has been by far the worst recession, and 11 quarters from the start, there's essentially been no recovery. Our basic indicators for Toledo are much, much worse than most other areas."

Such a cataclysm for the folks of Toledo, a result of Wall Street's greed, makes Kaptur's unrealistic public comments lucrative, yet even more destructive. Kaptur told her public, "Continentally, the Alberta sands deposits hold vast potential to yield new reserves as large as two Gulfs of Mexico. This is likely to mean substantial jobs and economic development in our community for many years to come." But BP has said, "The local project is expected to generate hundreds of construction jobs but not add many jobs at the plant."

Construction is time-limited, no matter the amount of "oil" in the Alberta sands. Promising jobs while allowing BP to retrofit their refinery is only a stop-gap measure, like the junk-shot BP used to try to stop the oil flowing into the Gulf.

NIMBY

At the time BP's first attack on our planet, Kaptur was politically-correct in criticizing BP's oil spill in the Gulf, though she had voted in support of off-shore drilling. Yet she felt compelled to add a spin to highlight her protest of drilling in the Great Lakes: "To prevent a similar ecological disaster in our region, I remain a staunch supporter of the permanent ban on oil and gas exploration on the Great Lakes as crucial for protecting the sensitive environmental nature of our ecosystem." No explanation as to why "our" ecosystem is more valuable than that of the Gulf of Mexico or the Alberta boreal forests where the tar sands are located.

Would Kaptur be promoting BP's continued rape of the environment if the tar sands were in Toledo (the project would still bring jobs) and the refinery in Alberta? Naomi Klein best describes some of what is involved in harvesting oil from the tar sands of Alberta in a presentation at the TEDWomen conference:

The tar sands live under one of the last magnificent old-growth boreal forests. But the oil underneath those trees is not liquid, you can't just drill a hole and pump it out. Tar sands oil is solid, mixed into the soil.
So to get at it, you first have to get rid of the trees. Then you rip off the top soil and dig up the stuff—a process so disruptive it requires enlisting the biggest dump trucks ever built. It also requires a huge amount of water, which is then pumped into massive toxic tailings ponds. That's very bad news for local indigenous people who are facing unusually high cancer rates.
Tar sands extraction is growing so fast that the project can already be seen from space and could grow to an area roughly the size of England. This is not oil drilling. It is not even mining. It is terrestrial skinning. Vast vivid landscapes are being gutted, left monochromatic grey.
I should confess that as far as I'm concerned, this would be an abomination if it emitted not one particle of carbon. But the truth is that on average, turning that gunk into crude oil produces about 3 times more greenhouse gas pollution per barrel than it does to produce conventional crude oil in Canada.
How else to describe this but as a form of mass insanity?

Mass insanity it is. In the same news article, BP spoke of the tar sands as if they were a wholly-owned sector of BP: ". . . this sanction is a significant step in progressing BP Canada's upstream oil sands portfolio," said Stephen Willis, BP's vice president of oil sands.

From the shock of the recession, my congressional representative cheers on the destruction of the environment by an evil corporate entity, disaster capitalism at its most destructive. Mass insanity it is, even for the congresswoman.

Ms. Kaptur's office was contacted repeatedly for a comment on her position on environmental issues, and refused to respond.

Dr. Trudy Bond is a constituent in Kaptur's district, and can be reached at drtrudybond@gmail.com.

The Budget Fight Continues

2012-01-25T12:12:00.003-06:00

February 26, 2011

In defense of their bill to slash federal spending by $61 billion over the next seven months, House Republicans claim they are trying to make the economy grow and create jobs. In truth, such deep and sudden cuts could derail the recovery, without ever addressing the real sources of budget deficits — mainly explosive health care costs and incessant high-end tax cuts.

The question is whether the Obama administration and the Senate can prevail against the false rhetoric. Facts, analysis and the moral high ground all favor opponents of the measure. The aim is not to avoid difficult budget decisions, but to block the Republicans’ heedless effort while starting a reasoned budget debate.

In a recent report, economists at Goldman Sachs estimated that the House cuts would reduce economic growth by 1.5 percentage points to 2 percentage points in the second and third quarters of 2011. That would devastate employment. As a rule of thumb, each percentage point drop in growth means a loss of 1.2 million jobs.

The cuts also would be off point. All of them come from discretionary spending, a sliver of the budget that excludes the government’s biggest and fastest-growing outlays, chiefly Medicare and Medicaid. Over the past decade, Pentagon spending has accounted for almost all of the increase in discretionary outlays, with much of the rest going to homeland security, veterans benefits and the No Child Left Behind education initiative. Aside from defense, there is not a lot to cut prudently.

Which leads to the strongest argument of all against the House Republican bill — most of the cuts would be counterproductive. Annual spending on education through high school is cut by 12 percent, or nearly $6 billion (since the cuts would be squeezed into the rest of the current budget year, they are even deeper on an annualized basis).

Those cuts include reductions to Head Start that would remove 218,000 children from the program and cuts to elementary education that would hit 2,400 schools and nearly one million students. Pell Grants for college would also be cut by nearly $6 billion. Transportation investments would be cut by 9 percent, or $8.1 billion, including $2.7 billion from rail, $1 billion from highway spending and $675 million from public transit. Americorps and other community-service programs would be eliminated, although their benefit to society surely exceeds their $1.2 billion cost. Since national service programs are matched by $800 million from foundations and other sources, that would be lost, too.

The list goes on. Small businesses would be hit by a 9 percent cut, or $84 million, to the Small Business Administration. Homeowners facing foreclosure and other Americans with legal problems would be hurt by a $70 million cut to legal aid. Financial regulators would endure deep cuts that would cripple their ability to carry out the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. That’s asking for another financial crisis.

Given the need to placate House Republicans, some cuts are inevitable. Senators can turn to President Obama’s budget for 2012 as a template for cutting while preserving priorities. It’s time for leadership.

•

In coming days, at the bottom of this page, we will further explore individual penny-and-pound-foolish cuts the House Republicans want to impose, their lack of impact on the deficit and their real-world impact, often on the most vulnerable Americans.

Why Wouldn’t the Tea Party Shut It Down?

2012-01-25T12:12:00.001-06:00

February 26, 2011

By FRANK RICH

NO one remembers anything in America, especially in Washington, so the history of the Great Government Shutdown of 1995 is being rewritten with impunity by Republicans flirting with a Great Government Shutdown of 2011. The bottom line of the revisionist spin is this: that 2011 is no 1995. Should the unthinkable occur on some coming budget D-Day — or perhaps when the deadline to raise the federal debt ceiling arrives this spring — the G.O.P. is cocksure that it can pin the debacle on the Democrats.

In the right’s echo chamber, voters are seen as so fed up with deficits that they’ll put principle over temporary inconveniences — like, say, a halt in processing new Social Security applicants or veterans’ benefit checks. Who needs coddled government workers to deal with those minutiae anyway? As Mike Huckabee has cheerfully pointed out, many more federal services are automated now than in the olden days of the late 20th century. Phone trees don’t demand pensions.

Remarkably (or not) much of the Beltway press has bought the line that comparisons between then and now are superficial. Sure, Bill Clinton, like Barack Obama, was bruised by his first midterms, with his party losing the House to right-wing revolutionaries hawking the Contract With America, a Tea Party ur-text demanding balanced budgets. But after that, we’re instructed, the narratives diverge. John Boehner is no bomb-throwing diva like Newt Gingrich, whose petulant behavior inspired the famous headline “Cry Baby” in The Daily News. A crier — well, yes — but Boehner’s too conventional a conservative to foment a reckless shutdown. Obama, prone to hanging back from Congressional donnybrooks, bears scant resemblance to the hands-on Clinton, who clamored to get into the ring with Newt.

Those propagating the 2011-is-not-1995 line also assume that somehow Boehner will prevent the new G.O.P. insurgents from bringing down the government they want to bring down. But if Gingrich couldn’t control his hard-line freshman class of 73 members in 1995 — he jokingly referred to them then as “a third party” — it’s hard to imagine how the kinder, gentler Boehner will control his 87 freshmen, many of them lacking government or legislative experience, let alone the gene for compromise. In the new Congress’s short history, the new speaker has already had trouble controlling his caucus. On Friday Gingrich made Boehner’s task harder by writing a Washington Post op-ed plea that the G.O.P. stick to its guns.

The 2011 rebels are to the right of their 1995 antecedents in any case. That’s why this battle, ostensibly over the deficit, is so much larger than the sum of its line-item parts. The highest priority of America’s current political radicals is not to balance government budgets but to wage ideological warfare in Washington and state capitals alike. The relatively few dollars that would be saved by the proposed slashing of federal spending on Planned Parenthood and Head Start don’t dent the deficit; the cuts merely savage programs the right abhors. In Wisconsin, where state workers capitulated to Gov. Scott Walker’s demands for financial concessions, the radical Republicans’ only remaining task is to destroy labor’s right to collective bargaining.

That’s not to say there is no fiscal mission in the right’s agenda, both nationally and locally — only that the mission has nothing to do with deficit reduction. The real goal is to reward the G.O.P.’s wealthiest patrons by crippling what remains of organized labor, by wrecking the government agencies charged with regulating and policing corporations, and, as always, by rewarding the wealthiest with more tax breaks. The bankrupt moral equation codified in the Bush era — that tax cuts tilted to the highest bracket were a higher priority even than paying for two wars — is now a given. The once-bedrock American values of shared sacrifice and equal economic opportunity have been overrun.

In this bigger picture, the Wisconsin governor’s fawning 20-minute phone conversation with a prankster impersonating the oil billionaire David Koch last week, while entertaining, is merely a footnote. The Koch Industries political action committee did contribute to Walker’s campaign (some $43,000) and did help underwrite Tea Party ads and demonstrations in Madison. But this governor is merely a petty-cash item on the Koch ledger — as befits the limited favors he can offer Koch’s mammoth, sprawling, Kansas-based industrial interests.

Look to Washington for the bigger story. As The Los Angeles Times recently reported, Koch Industries and its employees form the largest bloc of oil and gas industry donors to members of the new House Energy and Commerce Committee, topping even Exxon Mobil. And what do they get for that largess? As a down payment, the House budget bill not only reduces financing for the Environmental Protection Agency but also prohibits its regulation of greenhouse gases.

Here again, the dollars that will be saved are minute in terms of the federal deficit, but the payoff to Koch interests from a weakened E.P.A. is priceless. The same dynamic is at play in the House’s reduced spending for the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Internal Revenue Service. and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (charged with regulation of the esoteric Wall Street derivatives that greased the financial crisis). The reduction in the deficit will be minimal, but the bottom lines for the Kochs and their peers, especially on Wall Street, will swell.

These special interests will stay in the closet next week when the Tea Partiers in the House argue (as the Gingrich cohort once did) that their only agenda is old-fashioned fiscal prudence. The G.O.P. is also banking on the presumption that Obama will bide his time too long, as he did in the protracted health care and tax-cut melees, and allow the Fox News megaphone, not yet in place in ’95, to frame the debate. Listening to the right’s incessant propaganda, you’d never know that the latest Pew survey found that Americans want to increase, not decrease, most areas of federal spending — and by large margins in the cases of health care and education.

The G.O.P. leadership faced those same headwinds from voters in ’95. As Boehner, then on the Gingrich team, told The Times in a January 1996 post-mortem, the G.O.P. had tested the notion of talking about “balancing the budget and Medicare in the same sentence” and discovered it would bring “big trouble.” Gingrich’s solution, he told The Times then, was simple: “We learned that if you talked about ‘preserving’ and ‘protecting’ Medicare, it worked.” Which it did until it didn’t — at which point the Gingrich revolution imploded.

Rather hilariously, the Republicans’ political gurus still believe that Gingrich’s ruse can work. In a manifesto titled “How the G.O.P. Can Win the Budget Battle” published in The Wall Street Journal last week, Fred Barnes of Fox News put it this way: “Bragging about painful but necessary cuts to Medicare scares people. Stressing the goal of saving Medicare won’t.” But the G.O.P. is trotting out one new political strategy this time. Current House leaders, mindful that their ’95 counterparts’ bravado backfired, constantly reiterate that they are “not looking for a government shutdown,” as Paul Ryan puts it. They seem to believe that if they repeat this locution often enough it will inoculate them from blame should a shutdown happen anyway — when, presumably, they are not looking.

Maybe, but no less an authority than Dick Armey, these days a leading Tea Party operative, thinks otherwise. Back in ’95, as a Gingrich deputy, he had been more bellicose than most in threatening a shutdown, as Bill Clinton recounts in his memoirs. But in 2006, Armey told a different story when reminiscing to an interviewer, Ryan Sager: “Newt’s position was, presidents get blamed for shutdowns, and he cited Ronald Reagan. My position was, Republicans get blamed for shutdowns. I argued that it is counterintuitive to the average American to think that the Democrat wants to shut down the government. They’re the advocates of the government. It is perfectly logical to them that Republicans would shut it down, because we’re seen as antithetical to government.”

Armey’s logic is perfect indeed, but logic is not the rage among his ideological compatriots this year. Otherwise, the Tea Party radicals might have figured out the single biggest difference between 1995 and 2011 — the state of the economy. Last time around, America was more or less humming along with an unemployment rate of 5.6 percent. This time we are still digging out of the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression, with an unemployment rate of 9 percent and oil prices on the rise. To even toy with shutting down the government in this uncertain climate is to risk destabilizing the nascent recovery, with those in need of the government safety net (including 43 million Americans on food stamps) doing most of the suffering.

Not that the gravity of this moment will necessarily stop the right from using the same playbook as last time. Still heady with hubris from the midterms — and having persuaded themselves that Gingrich’s 1995 history can’t possibly repeat itself — radical Republicans are convinced that deficit-addled voters are on their side no matter what. The president, meanwhile, is playing his cards close to his vest. Let’s hope he knows that he, not the speaker, is the player holding a full house, and that he will tell the country in no uncertain terms that much more than money is on the table.

Have You Driven a Smartphone Lately? By MAUREEN DOWD

2012-01-25T12:11:00.000-06:00

February 26, 2011

DETROIT

I’m barreling along a rural Michigan highway at 75 miles per hour in a gray Ford Taurus X when I glance down to check a number on a screen.

It can’t be more than two seconds, but when I look back up, I’m inches from plowing into a huge green truck. Panicked, I slam on the brakes.

Even though I’m in Virttex, the Ford simulator that uses virtual reality to give you the eerily real sensation that you’re flying down the highway past cars and barns, I still feel shaken.

I made the mistake of taking my eyes off the road for more than 1.5 seconds, which is the danger zone, according to technology experts at Ford headquarters.

Ford, Chrysler, Chevy and other car companies are betting on the proposition that, as long as your eyes don’t stray from the road for more than a moment, your other senses can enjoy a cornucopia of diversions on your dashboard.

I worried in a prior column that Ford cars with the elaborate and popular new “in-car connectivity” sounded like death traps. Ford Sync lets you sync up to apps, reading your Twitter feeds to you. MyFord Touch plays your iPod on demand and reads your texts to you — including emoticons — and allows you to choose one of 10 prewritten responses (“I’m on my way,” “I’m outside,” “O.K.”). It also has voice-activated 3-D navigation that allows you to merely announce “I’m hungry” or “Find Chinese restaurant.”

Your car can even help you with a bad mood by giving you ambient lighting, vibrating your seat or heating your steering wheel.

Ford executives invited me to Detroit to experience their snazzy new technology firsthand.

They are on the cusp of a system featuring the futuristic avatar Eva, the vaguely creepy face and voice of a woman on your dashboard who can read you your e-mail, update your schedule, recite articles from newspapers, guide you to the restaurant where you’re having lunch and recommend a selection from your iPod. Ford’s working on a Web browser, which would be locked while driving.

Remember when your car used to be a haven of peace from the world? Now it’s just a bigger, noisier and much more dangerously distracting smartphone.

Over lunch at Ford, Sue Cischke, a dynamic company executive, argued that even before cellphones and iPods, drivers were in danger of distraction from reaching for a briefcase or shooing away a bee.

“Telling younger people not to use a cellphone is almost like saying, ‘Don’t breathe,’ ” she said.

Given that Americans are addicted to Web access and tech toys, she said, it will never work to simply ban them. “So we’ve got to figure out how we make people safer,” she said, “and the more people can just talk to their car like they’re talking to a passenger, the more useful it would be.”

Given that, however, we’re talking about human beings who live in an A.D.D. world, wouldn’t it be safer to try to curb the addiction, rather than indulging it? Nobody thought you could get young people to pay for music after downloading it for free, either, but they do.

David Teater, a former market research consultant to auto manufacturers, lost his 12-year-old son in a distracted driving accident in Grand Rapids, Mich., seven years ago. A 20-year-old nanny driving her charge in her employer’s Hummer was so immersed in a cellphone call that she ran a red light and smashed into Teater’s wife’s Chevy Suburban. Now he works at the National Safety Council.

He says he doesn’t expect car companies — which are trying to make cars more seductive — to be arbiters of safety. “They were slow to move toward seat belts and airbags until we, the customer, said we want it,” he said. He sees the overwrought dashboards as trouble. “We can chew gum and walk, but we can’t do two cognitively demanding tasks simultaneously.”

Ray LaHood, the secretary of transportation, is livid about the dashboard bells and whistles. When he saw a Ford ad with a bubbly young woman named Kelly using the new souped-up system to gab on the phone hands-free and not paying attention to the road, he called Alan Mulally, the president and C.E.O of Ford.

“I said to him, ‘That girl looks so distracted, it belies belief that this is what you want in terms of safety,’ ” LaHood told me. “Putting entertainment centers in automobiles does not contribute to safe driving. When you’re trying to update your Facebook or put out a tweet, it’s a distraction.”

He said he would compile his own statistics, meet with car executives and use the bully pulpit. “We’ll see what the auto companies can do voluntarily and what we need to do otherwise,” he said. “I don’t think drivers should be doing any of that.”

France honors four troops killed by Afghan soldier

2012-01-25T12:08:00.000-06:00

Posted By AP On January 25, 2012

France's President Nicolas Sarkozy pays homage to the four slain soldiers killed last week in Afghanistan at the 93rd regiment of Artillery in Varces, French Alps. -AFP Photo

PARIS: President Nicolas Sarkozy on Wednesday honored four French troops shot dead by an Afghan man, a killing that rattled France’s commitment to a Nato-led war in Afghanistan unpopular among many French.

In a somber ceremony in the southeastern town of Varces, the French leader said the troops gunned down were victims of a Taliban rebel who had infiltrated a military base stationed jointly by French and Afghan forces.

"Four of our soldiers were shot in Afghanistan, victims of the most cowardly of crimes,” he said in remarks aired on French TV. "While unarmed, (and just why were your soldiers in a war zone unarmed?) they were slaughtered by a Taliban wearing the uniform of an ally’s army.”

He noted the French troops were there to train Afghan soldiers.

"We will not allow ourselves to be impressed by this barbarity … that must strengthen us even more in our determination to work for peace,” he added.

After Friday’s shootings, Sarkozy ordered a halt to French training programs for the Afghan military and threatened to withdraw French forces earlier than first planned.

But top French officials in recent days have sought to dispel concerns abroad about a possible crack in the Nato-led alliance in Afghanistan and a hasty exit by France.

Prime Minister Francois Fillon told parliament Tuesday that France is keeping to plans to withdraw 600 troops this year _ in line with a previous schedule pegged in part to a gradual US-led withdrawal by 2014.

France currently has about 3,600 troops in Afghanistan. France, the fourth-largest national contingent in the Nato-led force, has lost 92 troops since 2001. The total alliance death toll is nearly 2,560 _ mostly Americans.

French Defense Minister Gerard Longuet, who traveled to Afghanistan right after the killings, is preparing a report for Sarkozy on what happened before the French leader specifies any new plans for the drawdown.

Sarkozy, who is facing a possible re-election bid this spring, is expected to publicize his decision on Friday after hosting Afghan President Hamid Karzai for a long-scheduled meeting in Paris.

Toyota loses world’s top carmaker spot

2012-01-25T12:05:00.002-06:00

Posted By AFP On January 25, 2012

The Japanese company had been the world’s biggest carmaker since 2008 and sold 8.42 million vehicles in 2010. —File photo by Reuters

TOKYO: Toyota Motor confirmed Wednesday that its world group sales fell below the eight million mark in 2011, losing the firm its number one spot in the global carmakers’ league.

Total sales were 7.95 million units worldwide, down six per cent, Toyota said, after supply chains were disrupted by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, as well as flooding in Thailand. It also suffered from the high yen.

The Japanese company had been the world’s biggest carmaker since 2008 and sold 8.42 million vehicles in 2010.

But its 2011 figure leaves US giant General Motors, on 9.03 million sales, in top spot after it emerged from bankruptcy, with Germany’s Volkswagen in second place on 8.16 million vehicles.

Toyota’s result was also below the 8.03 million total sales recorded by an alliance between France’s Renault, Japanese firm Nissan, and Avtovaz of Russia.

Toyota’s latest yearly sales figure appeared without comment at the bottom of a company press release announcing that it was increasing its 2012 sales target within Japan by 100,000 vehicles.

Toyota officials have previously said their focus was on producing quality vehicles, and that “to be first is important, but that’s not the most important thing for us”.

Toyota brand sales, which include Lexus vehicles, were down six per cent in 2011, subsidiary Daihatsu was down seven per cent, while Hino, a smaller corporate unit, saw sales rise 14 per cent last year.

The firm now expects to sell a total of 8.58 million Toyota and Lexus vehicles worldwide in 2012, it said, an increase of 21 per cent on 2011.

The 100,000 boost in the Japan sales forecast to 1.63 million vehicles comes after the government extended tax breaks for environmentally friendly vehicles.

Whatever Israel wants, Israel gets (Just like Lola, the whore, who sold her soul to the devil - hmm, the parallels are clear - in the play Damn Yankees)

2012-01-25T12:03:00.002-06:00

Palestinian leader: Talks with Israel over

Posted By AP On January 25, 2012

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (L) speaks to the media after his meeting with Jordan's King Abdullah at the Royal Palace in Amman. -Reuters Photo

RAMALLAH: Exploratory peace talks with Israel have ended with nothing to show for them, the Palestinian president said Wednesday, pledging to consult with the Arab League about the next moves and leaving open the possibility of an extension.

After a total break of more than a year, international mediators persuaded the sides to send their negotiators to Jordan to explore the possibility of resuming peace talks. Reflecting the depth of their differences, they could not even agree on when to submit proposals.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said he would discuss the prospects with the Arab League next week, Israel wants to keep talking, and Abbas is under mounting international pressure not to walk away.

Visiting EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton is scheduled to meet separately over the next two days with Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Two officials involved in the contacts said she is trying to put together a package of Israeli incentives that would keep the Palestinians in the talks.

In the Jordanian-mediated exploratory talks, Israeli and Palestinian envoys met several times over the past month, including on Wednesday.

The Quartet of international mediators _ the US, the UN, the EU and Russia _ said last fall that it expected both sides to submit detailed proposals on borders and security arrangements, in hopes the dialogue would evolve into full-fledged peace talks.

Palestinian officials said they submitted their proposals, but that Israel did not. ”If we demarcate the borders, we can return to negotiations, but Israel does not want to do that,” Abbas said Wednesday, after talks in Jordan with Jordan’s King Abdullah II.

Israel says it has submitted a document outlining the areas that need to be discussed, but it was not characterized as a proposal.

Abbas said he would consult with the Arab League, which usually rubber stamps his decisions, on Feb. 4. This would allow for an additional nine days of diplomatic maneuvers to save the talks.

A walkout could cost the Palestinians international sympathy at a time when they seek global support for UN membership for a state in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem, the territories Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war.

Public, private campuses: House wants concerts banned (Can't you just let the kids have some fun and some loud music?)

2012-01-25T12:01:00.007-06:00

Posted By Our Staff Reporter On January 25, 2012

LAHORE, Jan 24: The Punjab Assembly on Tuesday adopted a resolution seeking a ban on ‘objectionable’ concerts in all public and private educational institutions in the province.

The resolution was moved by PML-Q’s Seemal Kamran who wanted a ban on all concerts by the educational institutions, terming them unethical.

Rana Sanaullah Khan said the resolution had been moved in reaction to a recent concert by a private institution at the Alhamra Cultural Complex where three girl students died in a stampede. He said all concerts were not unethical and he had no objection to the resolution if it contained the word “unethical concerts.”

He said the news of the event was marginalized because the institution belonged to the owners of a media house. The media would have made it an issue had there been a government institution involved, he said.

Rana was quickly obliged and the resolution was adopted by inserting the word of his choice — `objectionable’ concerts.

The house also adopted four other resolutions and kept another pending because of the absence of its mover. The fifth resolution sought to be moved by PML-Q’s Amna Ulfat about a request to the federal government to ban showing of Indian movies in Pakistan was found infructuous after the law minister said the subject had been devolved to the provinces and Punjab was adopting the relevant law.

Ms Samina Khawar Hayat’s resolution was adopted. It sought recommendation of the house to the federal government to grant blue passports to the MPAs as were being given to the MNAs and senators.

The second adopted resolution was moved by Chaudhry Zaheer, asking the provincial government to make the federal government save wastage of billions of dollars obtained as foreign loans for running Scarp tubewells.

The third adopted resolution was moved by Ms Humaira Owais Shahid which recommended the provincial government adopt population control steps, form a comprehensive related policy and allocate funds for the purpose in the next budget.

The fourth adopted resolution was moved by Chaudhry Amir Sultan Cheema, demanding proper waiting rooms for the attendants of patients in all government hospitals in the province.

The resolution which was deferred was moved by Mr Ziaullah Shah, seeking boundary walls around all graveyards in the province, and steps for curtailing theft of shrouds and the occult there.

Policeman gunned down in Orangi

2012-01-25T12:00:00.002-06:00

Posted By Our Staff Reporter On January 25, 2012

KARACHI, Jan 24: A police constable was shot dead in an Orangi Town locality in the early hours of Tuesday, police said.

They said that the incident took place in the Ghausia Baloch area within the remit of the Pakistan Bazaar police station.

They said that 31-year-old Shahid Khan was going home near Orangi Town’s Chandni Chowk on his motorcycle when armed assailants, also riding a motorbike, intercepted him and shot him upon resistance.

The victim policeman suffered a bullet wound in the chest and died on the spot.

The body was shifted to the Abbasi Shaheed Hos-pital for medico-legal formalities.

Mominabad DSP Tariq Malik said that the victim’s wallet and cellphone were missing. However, the police found a pistol in his hands, he added.

He said that it appeared that the victim policeman tried to resist a robbery bid and pulled out his pistol, but the bandits opened fired on him.

However, the police did not rule out the possi-bility that the killers took away the wallet and the cellphone to make the killing look like a robbery attempt, he added.

The DSP said that the victim had been posted in the police’s security division for the past three years at Hassan Square and was going home after his duty hours. He was father of three children.

A case (FIR 15/2012) was registered under Sections 302 (premeditated murder), 392 (punishment for robbery) and 34 (common intention) of the Pakistan Penal Code against unidentified persons on a complaint of the victim’s brother-in-law, Safeer Alam, at the Pakistan Bazaar police station.

Two ASWJ activists shot dead

2012-01-25T11:59:00.001-06:00

Posted By Our Staff Reporter On January 25, 2012

KARACHI, Jan 24: Two activists of the Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat were shot dead in the old city area on Tuesday, police said.

The killings sparked violence in the Lyari locality, where the two victims lived, in the evening as enraged people fired into the air, leaving a passer-by hit by a stray bullet dead, and set a vehicle on fire, they added.

The police said that the two ASWJ activists — 32-year-old Muhammad Ali alias Mama and 24-year-old Muhammad Noman — were coming from the city courts in a rickshaw when two assailants riding a motorcycle intercepted them and opened fire near the densely populated area of Paan Mandi within the remit of the Risala police station.

The rickshaw driver escaped unhurt. The two wounded ASWJ men were taken to the Civil Hospital Karachi, where doctors declared them dead.

The victims suffered multiple gunshot wounds in the torso and head, the police said, adding that Muhammad Ali was a resident of Memon Society in Baghdadi and Noman was a resident of Moosa Lane.

Hearing the news of the attack, a large number of ASWJ activists also reached the hospital.

Maulana Taj Hanfi, a spokesman for the ASWJ or formerly banned Sipah-i-Sahaba Pakistan, said that Muhammad Ali was working as a legal adviser for the party at the Karachi division level, while Noman was a member of the core committee.

He said that the party had been a target of the killings of its activists for a long time but this time a clear line of action to protest against the killings would be adopted.

Tension gripped Lyari when the bodies of the two victims were brought to their residences for funeral.

The police said that armed men fired into the air in Memon Society within the remit of the Baghdadi police station, where a man, later identified as Muhammad Ishaq, suffered a fatal bullet wound.

According to an initial police investigation, a stray bullet hit Mr Ishaq when enraged people resorted to firing into the air. The body was shifted to the Civil Hospital Karachi for medico-legal formalities.

A car was also set on fire on Shah Waliullah Road in Lyari.

All business and commercial activities were shut in the Baghdadi area.

Till late in the night, no case regarding the double murder was registered at the Risala police station.

The situation in the Lyari area remained tense, as no plan was announced with regard to the burial of the slain activists.

Memogate (ad nauseam)

2012-01-25T11:58:00.000-06:00

BY DAWN.COM ON 01 23RD, 2012

In the ever-changing scenario in the memogate scandal case, Mansoor Ijaz has reportedly refused to come to Pakistan and appear in court. Ijaz has based his decision on ‘unsatisfactory’ security arrangements and that the government is interfering in the security plan.

This latest development has created furore amongst politicians, diplomats, analysts and the media – as they all voice their opinion on the case.

While one cannot take away from the significance of the alleged memo, given its contents and the personnel involved – should it continue to remain the most important issue, nearly four months after it first surfaced?

Given the problems being faced by the country and its people, such as the energy crises, terrorism, street crimes, inflation, health issues – should the memogate scandal really be at the top of the agenda?

Should the government, the military, the media and all other concerned players be as concerned with the memogate as they currently are?

An open secret in Pakistan

2012-01-25T11:56:00.002-06:00

In conversation with Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy

Posted By DAWN.COM On January 24, 2012

Sharmeen Obaid on sets.

Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy is bold. She seeks stories that touch the heart and turns them into movies that break it. Having worked on subjects ranging from child abuse, violence against women, terrorism and natural disasters, Chinoy is passionate about films and views everything through a human mind and yet with the lens of her camera.

From being a brilliant journalist, to an established filmmaker, Chinoy has come a long way. After becoming the first Pakistani to win an Emmy Award, the first non-US citizen to win the Livingston Award for Young Journalist, she has now become the first Pakistani individual to earn an Oscar nomination ^[1].

Last October, Chinoy revealed that her documentary Saving Face had entered the shortlist of Best Documentary (short film) category for the Oscars.

Here, she talks to Dawn.com about the long journey to the Oscars, moments after the Oscar nominations were revealed.

What was it that motivated you to work on this subject, which continues to be neglected in the mainstream media?

The film chronicles the work of acclaimed British Pakistani plastic surgeon, Dr Mohammad Jawad as he travelled to Pakistan and performed reconstructive surgery on survivors of acid violence. There my co-director, Daniel Junge suggested that we should make a documentary on this. I was sold in an instant, since I personally feel that acid attacks are the worst form of violence, I stuck to the idea and was determined to show the world the process a woman goes through after this hideous act. I would also like to thank the women for the resilience, patience and dedication they showed throughout the filming of this documentary.

The movie is shot entirely in the Seraiki belt. How common are acid attacks in that part of the country?

The Seraiki belt is sadly the most backward and conservative area of Pakistan, where torturing women is not considered a crime.

What have your critics said about the documentary and its nomination now?

It has been released only in American cinemas and has received a great response so far. Regarding the nomination [chuckles], it has just been an hour since the nominations came out so no criticism yet.

Do you have any plans to follow the lives of these victims?

Yes we have a complete program ready for this. We will be reaching out through a nationwide program, where we will screen this documentary and encourage the victims to speak at local colleges and schools in order to spread awareness. Also, we will be working with international organisations to provide the victims with skills through training programs and there are plans to rehabilitate some of these women.

What is the status of Taboo Beauty?

Taboo Beauty has been renamed to Transgenders: Pakistan’s Open Secret and has already been screened in the UK.

When and how does the Pakistani public get to see Saving Face?

The film will be aired on March 8 by HBO, which will be followed by screening in selected cinemas across Pakistan.

Eleven Nadra officials held in mobile SIM scam

2012-01-25T11:54:00.004-06:00

Posted By DAWN.COM On January 25, 2012

Interior Minister Rehman Malik.—File Photo

KARACHI: The Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) has taken into custody 11 employees, including two officers of Nadra after a report aired on DawnNews exposed Pakistan Telecommunication Authortiy’s (PTA) incompetence in registering mechanism of mobile subscriber identity module (SIM) cards.

The report had shown how a mobile SIM was registered and activated by using particulars of Interior Minister Rehman Malik.

The interior ministry swung into action after this and rounded up five Nadra officials yesterday from different part of the country.

The agency further extended its investigation circle and today held 11 more employees of the registration authority.

In the U.S. the headline would read: Corporate criminals busy as legislators deregulate and do not do their duty, but, in Pakistan, "Criminals busy as police ignore duty"

2012-01-25T11:53:00.001-06:00

Posted By Our Correspondent On January 25, 2012 @ 5:09 am (17 hours ago) In Home > Other News,Newspaper > Islamabad | No Comments

Besides the recent robberies, the rising incidents of kidnapping for ransom are another security threat to the residents of Attock. – File Photo by Reuters

ATTOCK: Public resentment against the Attock police has been rising in the wake of a wave of crimes in the area.

In the latest incident three highway robbers looted cash and mobile phones from two local shopkeepers near Fatehjang Chowk overnight. Another citizen was robbed similarly on the Railway Road a few days earlier.

Before that, Mohammad Niaz, a resident of Attock, had been kidnapped for ransom. The kidnappers demanded Rs30 million for his release.

What infuriates the harassed local population is that police seem impervious to the situation. Recently, robbers tried to stop a medicine supplying van on the Attock-Kamra Road. However, its driver sensed the danger and sped on to escape the trap. But when Rescue 15 was called in the hope that police would pursue the criminals, nobody picked up the phone.

Besides the recent robberies, the rising incidents of kidnapping for ransom are another security threat to the residents. A few days back, a local citizen, Mohammad Niaz was abducted by the kidnappers for ransom as they demanded Rs30 million for his release, the sources revealed.

On the other hand, the police were clueless about the whereabouts of Dr Ahsan Bahadur, who was kidnapped from his residence inside THQ hospital Hazro on Jan 14, sources added.

Owing to rampant incidents of robbery, kidnapping and other street crimes, the citizens and traders feel themselves insecure even in the urban areas. Ironically, the local public representatives are also silent over serious law and order situation in the area. They demanded that the Punjab government and Inspector General of Police (IGP), Punjabshould take immediate notice of the situation so that safety of life and property of the citizens might be ensured.

On contact, District Police Officer (DPO) Dr Muhammad Akhtar Abbass said that police were aware of the crime situation and taking all measures to eliminate the criminal gangs. He said that police patrolling on the highways had been enhanced and the police had busted a six-member gang of robbers and recovered weapons from them on Tuesday.

He said that the alleged robbers were found involved in eight theft, robbery and motorcycle snatching incidents which they committed recently in and around the city. Some other disclosures were being expected from them, DPO said.

The great ethics debate III

2012-01-25T11:51:00.004-06:00

The great ethics debate III

Posted By Hosh Media On January 25, 2012 @ 2:58 pm (7 hours ago) In Blog > Media,Home > Blogs | No Comments

To attribute or not to attribute, that is part of the question. In part three, of a six-part series on ethical journalism, veteran journalist Abbas Nasir explains the perils of quoting anonymous sources and how to deal with sensitive information. View part one here ^[1] and part two here ^[2].

Quoting anonymous sources:

Tomorrow Hosh media will look at the sticky relationship between journalists and intelligence sources.

Sahar Habib Ghazi worked as a TV producer and editor in Pakistan from 2005-10 and later launched Hosh Media ^[3]. The volunteer-based organisation of bloggers and journalists recently put together a crash course on some of the stickiest ethical dilemmas journalists in Pakistan face.

The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.

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Eleven Nadra officials held in mobile SIM scam

In the U.S. the headline would read: Corporate criminals busy as legislators deregulate and do not do their duty, but, in Pakistan, "Criminals busy as police ignore duty"

The great ethics debate III