"And once you have a spill, you are pretty much screwed," NOAA's Short said. That's because oil spreads on water at a rate of one-half a football field per second. Recovery can take decades.
President Obama announced late last month that he wanted to expand drilling in the Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf and the seas around Alaska. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), a longtime drilling opponent and close White House ally, maintained yesterday that Obama had not actually expanded drilling.More lies forthcoming:
"What the president was talking about was actually narrowing the drilling," Pelosi said in her weekly televised news conference. "The president was being discrete in proposing some areas for review that people might agree to. So it isn't as if the president expanded drilling. He was narrowing what the moratorium lifted. Am I clear?"
"Halliburton said it had four employees stationed on the rig at the time of the explosion, performing a variety of tasks, including cementing."
In an article addressed to the chemical industry back in 1989, James Lindheim, director of public affairs at Burson-Marsteller - one of the world's largest public relations firms - described how big business could best assuage public fears over industrial threats to the environment. He noted that when a psychiatrist deals with "irrational and distressed patients" he or she responds as a very sympathetic listener:"The whole time that his mind is telling him that he has a raving lunatic on his hands, his mouth will be telling the patient that his problems are indeed quite impressive, and that he the psychiatrist is amazed at how well the patient is coping, given the enormity of the situation... Once that bond of trust is established, true therapy can begin and factual information can be transmitted." (Quoted, Sharon Beder, Global Spin, Green Books, 1997, p.125)
Lindheim advised that "industry must convince people that it cares" in a similar way, not by giving them facts about the true risks and benefits of chemical products, but by creating "a therapeutic alliance". Industry must be "like the psychiatrist: rationally figuring out how it can help the public put things in perspective".
Lindheim omitted to mention one small difference - the goal of the psychiatrist is to improve the health of the patient; the goal of the industrial 'therapist' is to improve the health of corporate bank accounts.
The prize for the most audacious corporate "therapy" attempting to sell a climate killing company as a friend of the earth surely goes to BP and its 'beyond petroleum' campaign (apparently the lower case is more reassuring to the public). Last month, John Kenney, a creative director at an advertising agency, explained his role in BP's image transformation in the New York Times. Kenney revealed that he had initially felt inspired by the brief:
"Think of it. Going beyond petroleum. The best and brightest, at a company that can provide practically unlimited resources, trying to find newer, smarter, cleaner ways of powering the world."
Wonderful! But alas there was a problem: "they didn't go beyond petroleum. They are petroleum."
"The administration's offshore oil and gas plan proposes a thoughtful, scientifically grounded process for determining which new areas on the outer continental shelf are appropriate for exploration and development, and for assessing the potential risks and benefits of development in areas that are being explored."For business, the simple act of caring interferes with capitalistic business principles and so the pretense of caring has to be employed.
It was pretty much absolute carnage. I had never seen anybody shot by a 30-millimeter round before, and frankly don’t ever want to see that again. It almost seemed unreal, like something out of a bad B-horror movie. When these rounds hit you they kind of explode—people with their heads half-off, their insides hanging out of their bodies, limbs missing. I did see two RPGs on the scene as well as a few AK-47s.But then I heard the cries of a child. They weren’t necessarily cries of agony, but more like the cries of a small child who was scared out of her mind. So I ran up to the van where the cries were coming from. You can actually see in the scenes from the video where another soldier and I come up to the driver and the passenger sides of the van.
The soldier I was with, as soon as he saw the children, turned around, started vomiting and ran. He didn’t want any part of that scene with the children anymore.
What I saw when I looked inside the van was a small girl, about three or four years old. She had a belly wound and glass in her hair and eyes. Next to her was a boy about seven or eight years old who had a wound to the right side of the head. He was laying half on the floorboard and half on the bench. I presumed he was dead; he wasn’t moving.
Next to him was who I presumed was the father. He was hunched over sideways, almost in a protective way, trying to protect his children. And you could tell that he had taken a 30-millimeter round to the chest. I pretty much knew that he was deceased.
I grabbed the little girl and yelled for a medic. Me and the medic ran into the houses behind where the van crashed to check whether there were any other wounds. I was trying to take as much glass out of her eyes as I could. We dressed the wound and then the medic ran the girl to the Bradley. You can hear in the video where he says, “there’s nothing else I can do here; we need to evacuate the child.”
I then went back outside and went to the van. I don’t know why. I thought both of them were dead, but something told me to go back. That’s when I saw the boy move with what appeared to be a labored breath. So I stated screaming, “The boy’s alive.” I grabbed him and cradled him in my arms and kept telling him, “Don’t die, don’t die.” He opened his eyes, looked up at me. I told him, “It’s OK, I have you.” His eyes rolled back into his head, and I kept telling him, “It’s OK, I’ve got you.” I ran up to the Bradley and placed him inside.
My platoon leader was standing there at the time, and he yelled at me for doing what I did. He told me to “stop worrying about these motherfucking kids and start worrying about pulling security.” So after that I went up and pulled security on a rooftop.
The Quaker commitment to nonviolence has direct implications for the United States' failed drug war. It is a spiritual law that we become what we hate. Jesus articulated this law in the Sermon on the Mount when he admonished, "Do not react violently to the one who is evil" (Scholars' Version). The sense is clear: do not resist evil by violent means; do not let evil set the terms of your response. Applied to the drug issue, this means, "Do not resist drugs by violent methods."When we oppose evil with the same weapons that evil employs, we commit the same atrocities, violate the same civil liberties, and break the same laws as those whom we oppose. We become what we hate. Evil makes us over into its double. If one side prevails, the evil continues by virtue of having been established through the means used. This principle of mimetic opposition is abundantly illustrated in the case of the disastrous U.S. drug war.
The drug war is over, and we lost. We merely repeated the mistake of Prohibition. The harder we tried to stamp out this evil, the more lucrative we made it, and the more it spread. Our forcible resistance to evil simply augments it. An evil cannot be eradicated by making it more profitable.
[...]
The media usually portray cocaine and crack use as a black ghetto phenomenon. This is a racist caricature. There are more drug addicts among middle- and upper-class whites than any other segment of the population, and far more such occasional drug users. The typical customer is a single, white male 20-40 years old. Only 13 percent of those using illegal drugs are African American, but they constitute 35 percent of those arrested for simple possession and a staggering 74 percent of those sentenced for drug possession. It is the demand by white users that makes drugs flow. Americans consume 60 percent of the world's illegal drugs. That is simply too profitable a market to refuse.
Increasing the budget for fighting drugs is scarcely the answer. As Francis Hall, former head of the New York City Police Department¹s narcotics division, put it, "It's like Westmoreland asking Washington for two more divisions. We lost the Vietnam War with a half-million men. We¹re doing the same thing with drugs." The drug war is the United States' longest war, our domestic Vietnam.
[...]
We cannot stop drug violence with state violence. Addicts will be healed by care and compassion, not condemnation. Dealers will be curbed by a ruined world drug market, not by enforcement that simply escalates the profitability of drugs. A nonviolent, nonreactive, creative approach is needed that lets the drug empire collapse of its own deadly weight.
We have been letting our violent resistance to drugs beget the very thing we seek to destroy. When our nonviolent Quaker tradition offers an alternative to our failed drug war, shouldn't we consider trying it?
Q. Do you think that Zionism was a mistake?
A. I think the Jewish State was a mistake, yes. Obviously, it’s too late to go back. It was a mistake to drive the Indians off the American continent, but it’s too late to give it back. At the time, I thought creating Israel was a good thing, but in retrospect, it was probably the worst thing that the Jews could have done. What they did was join the nationalistic frenzy, they became privy to all of the evils that nationalism creates and became very much like the United States—very aggressive, violent and bigoted. When Jews were without a state they were internationalists and they contributed to whatever culture they were part of and produced great things. Jews were known as kindly, talented people. Now, I think, Israel is contributing to anti-Semitism. So I think it was a big mistake.
We may pollute our water supply and the air we breathe with no regard for the future; but we are systemically inseparable from the ecosystem, and the judgment of the system rebounds on us in escalating carcinogenic illnesses. A nation can behave as if it did not belong to the world-system of nations, as did Nazi Germany, and can attempt to subordinate the system to itself; but its very attempt to do so mobilizes the wrath of the nations against it and brings about its own defeat. ... Adam Smith himself acknowledged this principle of coherence when he wrote that the ultimate goal of a business is not to make a profit. The goal is the general welfare. Profit is the reward one gets for serving the general welfare.
[...]
Concern for unions and the environment are given lip service, but in fact are generally ignored. Transnational corporations have become detached from national loyalties and communities. When Europeans objected to hormone-treated beef from big U.S. beef producers, the WTO forced them to accept it. Canadians objected to carcinogenic additives in imported gasoline, but lost. Not even the U.S. is immune from WTO control. In one case, the WTO overturned a U.S. law that protected sea turtles facing extinction. The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) can give corporations control of hemispheric water supplies, the "blue gold" of the twenty-first century. It could privatize education and social security, making them inaccessible to the poor. Complaints are adjudicated by trade "representatives" who have not been elected by any elective body.
[...]
An American empire violates the most profound genius of America. Empires are simply bullies, and there is little justification for them. James K. Galbraith pronounces a warning that is ominous for our present leaders: "The problem of empires, historically, is not military defeat. It is bankruptcy. Empires do not tend to business at home, and they tend to lose out to rivals who do." Our nation needs to be called back to its highest ideals. When the skein of lies is all disentangled, perhaps we can recover some modicum of those ideals that have made our land so unique, despite its failings.
Go to http://www.americasarmy.com/ and click on "America's Army Graphic Novel" to see what age group and level of education the Pentagon is aiming for. The "novels" are 28-page comics with text bubbles over GI Joe action figures and brightly colored noise representations: "KRR-AKK", "BLAM", "RATATATAT, CHAKA CHACKA CHAK...".
Fair Play Committee Bulletin #3 (March 1, 1944)One of the 63 resisters was Ben Wakate.
"No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, nor private property be taken for public use without just compensation."
Article V Bill of Rights.
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
Article XIII Bill of Rights.
We, the Nisei have been cooperative to the unconstitutional acts that we were subjected to. If ever there was a time or cause for decisive action, IT IS NOW!
We are not afraid to go war. We would gladly sacrifice our lives to protect and uphold the principles and ideals of our country as set forth in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, for the freedom, liberty, justice, and protection of all people including Japanese Americans.
But have we been given such freedom, such liberty, such justice, such protection? NO!! Without due process of law as guaranteed by the Constitution and Bill of Rights, people were kicked out of their homes and herded like dangerous criminals into concentration camps.
AND THEN, WE ARE ORDERED TO JOIN THE ARMY IN A SEGREGATED COMBAT UNIT! Is that the American way? NO!
Thus, the members of the FPC decided that until we are restored all our rights, we feel that the present program of drafting us is unconstitutional. Therefore, WE MEMBERS OF THE FAIR PLAY COMMITTEE HEREBY REFUSE TO GO TO THE PHYSICAL EXAMINATION OR TO THE INDUCTION IF OR WHEN WE ARE CALLED.
We are not being disloyal. We are all loyal Americans fighting for JUSTICE AND DEMOCRACY RIGHT HERE AT HOME.
In short, treat us in accordance with the principles of the Constitution.
ATTENTION MEMBERS! FAIR PLAY COMMITTEE MEETING SUNDAY, MARCH 5, 2:00 P.M. BLOCK 6-30. PARENTS, BROTHERS, SISTERS, AND FRIENDS INVITED.
Tsutomu "Ben" Wakaye was born on January 2, 1913 in Honolulu, Hawai`i. The family moved to San Francisco where he studied German and Latin and graduated from Galileo High School in 1931. Wakaye then worked as an insurance salesman. Described as quiet and introverted, Wakaye loved to read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. He wanted to go to college but that was not an option during the Great Depression. So, he worked as an insurance salesman until he was expelled from his home after Pearl Harbor.
At Heart Mountain Internment Camp, Wakaye refused induction and was convicted with the first group of 63 resisters. He was brought back to federal court to stand trial a second time as one of the seven leaders accused of conspiracy to counsel draft evasion.
Wakaye said serving two years at the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, taught him one thing: "Patience."
Wakaye rejoined his family in a small basement apartment in San Francisco, where the only work he could find with his prison record was as a janitor. He died in 1952 at the age of 39 of kidney failure.
A rare specimen, Tolstoy. He held the strange idea that Jesus meant what he said. And so he taught: "Do not resist evil with evil." And: "Respect the personal integrity of each person." "Assume direct personal responsibility for the moral world which surrounds you. Never delegate your moral responsibility." "Seek out all opportunities for direct, creative ethical action." "Avoid violence, anger, the invasion of others, refuse bloodshed, and all kinds of theft and lies, covert or open -- especially in their approved and institutionalized forms."(h/t A Pinch of Salt)He wrote: "Christianity, which demands from its followers meekness, humility, kindness, forgiveness of sins and love of enemies, is incompatible with violence, which forms an indispensible condition of power."
And: "War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves."
Tolstoy, a veteran of wars himself, knew the reality of war, and how the church got caught up in the culture of war. He wanted everyone to wake up, take Jesus at his word, and set off on a new life of nonviolence, love, and peace.
"If peace has not been established, it is not because there does not exist among all people the universal desire for it," he wrote. "It is not because there is no love for peace and the abhorrence of war, but only because there exists the cunning deceit by which people have been and are persuaded that peace is impossible and war indispensable."
I wonder: in Arizona and the nearly dozen other states whose legislatures are considering similar “get tough” anti-immigration measures, are “pass laws” next?That’s the Afrikaner model, which the white majority in South Africa employed so effectively for most of the twentieth century to subjugate the black majority. The Afrikaners, too, declared such measures were necessary for the security of the state, and so on.
Or, will our American xenophobes follow the model of the Nuremberg Laws the leaders of Nazi Germany instituted against German Jews in the mid-1930s. They, too, declared those measures were necessary to protect the security of the state, reduce crime, and so on.
Perhaps our American xenophobes will suggest that all Latinos who are American citizens be issued an identifying patch they could be required to wear on their clothes whenever they’re out of their homes, so the police can more easily identify the “illegals” – to use the language of the xenophobes — among the real Americans.
Or, since drawing so directly on “foreign” models may be anathema to these measures’ proponents, perhaps they could take their inspiration from the infamous Black Codes the white-dominated state and local governments of the defeated Confederacy enacted immediately after the Civil War to limit the freedom of the region’s newly-freed blacks. Those laws bluntly expressed the conviction of their white proponents, who felt themselves surrounded by the far more numerous black population, that black Southerners were not to be accorded the rights of citizenship, for the security of the state and all.
Fundamentally, that same fear of being overwhelmed by “The Other,” especially in a time of severe economic strain, is what has stoked the racist attitudes of a segment of White America to the point of a dangerous paranoia. The publicly-elected proponents of these despicable proposals keep insisting there’s no racist sentiment behind them. But in fact racism permeates many of the letters-to-the-editor of newspapers and the e-mailed responses to online articles from ordinary citizens who favor such laws imposed on people who don’t look like them.
Their very language is loaded with words and phrases that have always constituted the lexicon of bigotry. The country is being overrun by immigrant criminals and the lazy with their multitudes of children who simply want to freeload off of government programs and impose their strange language and inferior, if not degenerate culture on “real” Americans.
This lexicon will be familiar to any black American who came of age during the civil rights years of the 1950s and 1960s. With a few modifications, those same arguments were part of the rhetorical arsenal segregationists employed to try to deny blacks full citizenship.
But, in fact, this pernicious lexicon is actually “race-neutral.” It’s available for use against any group, regardless of race, creed, color or place of national origin. Such was the case at the dawn of the 20th century when WASP grandees, intellectuals and politicians railed against the white “inconceivable aliens” pouring into the country from Ireland and southern and eastern Europe. So it is today. What its use then and now has in common is best summarized by the characterization the legal scholar Charles L. Black applied to the U.S. Supreme Court’s infamous Plessy decision: That it was a declaration in which the curves of callousness and stupidity intersected at their respective maxima.
Linda Greenhouse:I’m glad I’ve already seen the Grand Canyon.Because I’m not going back to Arizona as long as it remains a police state, which is what the appalling anti-immigrant bill that Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law last week has turned it into.
What would Arizona’s revered libertarian icon, Barry Goldwater, say about a law that requires the police to demand proof of legal residency from any person with whom they have made “any lawful contact” and about whom they have “reasonable suspicion” that “the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States?” Wasn’t the system of internal passports one of the most distasteful features of life in the Soviet Union and apartheid-era South Africa?
And in case the phrase “lawful contact” makes it appear as if the police are authorized to act only if they observe an undocumented-looking person actually committing a crime, another section strips the statute of even that fig leaf of reassurance. “A person is guilty of trespassing,” the law provides, by being “present on any public or private land in this state” while lacking authorization to be in the United States — a new crime of breathing while undocumented. The intent, according to the State Legislature, is “attrition through enforcement.”
When Reverend Jeremiah Wright spoke to Monthly Review’s sixtieth anniversary gathering in September 2009, he kept coming back to the refrain “What about the people?” If there is to be any hope of significantly improving the conditions of the vast number of the world’s inhabitants—many of whom are living hopelessly under the most severe conditions—while also preserving the earth as a livable planet, we need a system that constantly asks: “What about the people?” instead of “How much money can I make?” This is necessary, not only for humans, but for all the other species that share the planet with us and whose fortunes are intimately tied to ours.(h/t Dialogic)
We throw away a lot of stuff. In my near decade of manufacturing work, I'd say I've seen millions of dollars worth of products thrown out. Surely some of this was because of defects affecting performance. This is to be expected. But there's also a much more troubling side to the full dumpster at the end of the shift. Many of the items thrown out were perfectly functional. Because of any number of hundreds of small defects, they were simply tossed. Why? While their use value remained fine, their exchange value had dropped to the point of them being unprofitable to sell.
[...]
On "Earth Day," or any other for that matter, the market reminds us to "go green." We should buy new light bulbs, buy a new shiny car, buy new "earth friendly" appliances (as opposed to your old stuff that were total dicks to the earth), etc. The logic here is clearly muddled. Buy an "energy smart" appliance from a market driven profit junkie corporate citizen who pollutes the world more in a day than you will in your life, all in the name of "saving the earth." Capitalism is so historically rotten it provides such a small amount of actual innovation companies end up fighting aesthetically for market share and rationalizing completely preventable waste by blaming the customer's shallowness they themselves developed and nurtured through propaganda campaigns that would make Leni Riefenstahl ask "have you no decency?"
[...]
Only so much stuff can be thrown away before the shit starts piling up in front of not only my doorstep, but yours as well. I can guarantee there will be no invisible hand to clean up the mess.
Danny Dorling has been readying himself for some indignant reactions in political circles to his latest book, unequivocally titled Injustice: Why Social Inequality Persists, and published as the election campaign is in full swing.Well worth visiting is the Research Group Dorling works for: The Social and Spatial Inequalities Research Group at the University of Sheffield. They've got a good selection of materials from Dorling's lectures, presentations, and talks.
[...]Dorling, a professor of human geography at Sheffield University, and an expert on health and social inequalities, is best known for deftly taking apart seemingly impenetrable statistics and using them to shine a light on some of the starkest wealth and health disparities around the UK and globally.
[...]
He identifies five sets of beliefs – elitism, exclusion, prejudice, greed and despair – that he claims are replacing Beveridge's five social evils at the dawn of the welfare state (ignorance, want, idleness, squalor and disease), and have become so entrenched in Britain and some other affluent countries that they uphold an unjust system that perpetuates extreme inequality.
He makes a case for why each set of beliefs is propagated, how each contributes to a growing gap between rich and poor, and why they endure. He says: "The beliefs are supported by the media where stories often imply that some people are less deserving, where great City businessmen (and a few businesswomen) are lauded as superheroes, and where immigrants looking to work for a crumb of the City's bonuses are seen as scroungers."
Dorling feels that politicians of all hues should be called to account for overseeing such unprecedented rises in inequality that put us on a par with Victorian society. "In countries like Britain, people last lived lives as unequal as today, as measured by wage inequality, in 1854, when Charles Dickens was writing Hard Times," he states.
I have come to think the price of admission anywhere in the world ... is service to others. We have been indoctrinated by an earth devouring capitalist system to believe otherwise. Believe that giving only depletes. And that mankind and civilization came about through kings and warriors and "great men." But the essential glue of man the social animal has always been on cooperation and sharing. That an endless stream of elite thieves have always managed to steal the fruits of that cooperation does not matter. And the best that is in man still rests on the same fundamentals -- cooperation for the greater good of all.The Green Party of Delaware agrees! One of its ten key values says:
We must replace the cultural ethics of dominance and control with more cooperative ways of interacting. We must encourage people to care about persons outside their own group. We must promote the building of respectful, positive and responsible relationships across the lines of gender and other divisions. We must proceed with as much respect for the means as the end (the process as much as the product of our efforts). We must learn to respect the contemplative inner part of life as much as the outer activities.
Jonathan Swift identified what love of country meant to him in the sermon "Doing Good":Patriotism, as a feeling of exclusive love for one's own people, and as a doctrine of the virtue of sacrificing one's tranquillity, one's property, and even one's life, in defense of one's own people from slaughter and outrage by their enemies, was the highest idea of the period when each nation considered it feasible and just, for its own advantage, to subject to slaughter and outrage the people of other nations.
But, already some 2,000 years ago, humanity, in the person of the highest representatives of its wisdom, began to recognize the higher idea of a brotherhood of man; and that idea, penetrating man's consciousness more and more, has in our time attained most varied forms of realization. Thanks to improved means of communication, and to the unity of industry, of trade, of the arts, and of science, men are to-day so bound one to another that the danger of conquest, massacre, or outrage by a neighboring people, has quite disappeared, and all peoples (the peoples, but not the Governments) live together in peaceful, mutually advantageous, and friendly commercial, industrial, artistic, and scientific relations, which they have no need and no desire to disturb. One would think, therefore, that the antiquated feeling of patriotism—being superfluous and incompatible with the consciousness we have reached of the existence of brotherhood among men of different nationalities—should dwindle more and more until it completely disappears. Yet the very opposite of this occurs: this harmful and antiquated feeling not only continues to exist, but burns more and more fiercely.
The peoples, without any reasonable ground, and contrary alike to their conception of right and to their own advantage, not only sympathize with Governments in their attacks on other nations, in their seizures of foreign possessions, and in defending by force what they have already stolen, but even themselves demand such attacks, seizures, and defenses: are glad of them, and take pride in them. The small oppressed nationalities which have fallen under the power of the great States—the Poles, Irish, Bohemians, Finns, or Armenians—resenting the patriotism of their conquerors, which is the cause of their oppression, catch from them the infection of this feeling of patriotism—which has ceased to be necessary, and is now obsolete, unmeaning, and harmful— and catch it to such a degree that all their activity is concentrated upon it, and they, themselves suffering from the patriotism of the stronger nations, are ready, for the sake of patriotism, to perpetrate on other peoples the very same deeds that their oppressors have perpetrated and are perpetrating on them.
This occurs because the ruling classes (including not only the actual rulers with their officials, but all the classes who enjoy an exceptionally advantageous position: the capitalists, journalists, and most of the artists and scientists) can retain their position—exceptionally advantageous in comparison with that of the laboring masses—thanks only to the Government organization, which rests on patriotism. They have in their hands all the most powerful means of influencing the people, and always sedulously support patriotic feelings in themselves and in others, more especially as those feelings which uphold the Government's power are those that are always best rewarded by that power.
Every official prospers the more in his career, the more patriotic he is; so also the army man gets promotion in time of war—the war is produced by patriotism.
Patriotism and its result—wars—give an enormous revenue to the newspaper trade, and profits to many other trades. Every writer, teacher, and professor is more secure in his place the more he preaches patriotism. Every Emperor and King obtains the more fame the more he is addicted to patriotism.
But here I would not be misunderstood. By the love of our country, I do not mean loyalty to our King, for that is a duty of another nature, and a man may be very loyal, in the common sense of the word, without one grain of public good in his heart. Witness this very kingdom we live in. I verily believe, that since the beginning of the world, no nation upon earth ever shewed (all circumstances considered), such high constant marks of loyalty in all their action and behaviour as we have done; and at the same time, no people ever appeared more utterly void of what is called public spirit ... therefore, I shall think my time not ill-spent if I can persuade most and all of you who hear me, to shew the love you have for your country by endeavouring in your several situations to do all the public good you can. For I am certain persuaded that all our misfortunes arise from no other original cause than that general disregard among us to the public welfare.
Two of my bêtes noirs are Ian McEwan and Jonathan Franzen. I use them because they’re relatively easy and large targets. You know, they’re both highly praised and commercially successful writers whose work bores me beyond tears. They’re antiquarians to me. They’re entertaining the troops as the ship goes down. They’re just utterly devoted to a 1910 version of the novel, pre-James Joyce essentially. To me it’s pure nostalgia that people find such works of interest. It’s essentially an escape from the thrillingly vertiginous nature contemporary existence to retire and retreat into the cocoon of the well-made novel.
It seems to me obvious that in 20 years or less there will not be publishers. It’s hard to believe there will be these brick-and-mortar buildings, and someone will take a book, publish it, send it to a warehouse New Jersey and then to Denver on the off chance that a Denver bookstore wants three copies and when no one wants it, will mail those books back to New Jersey. It’s just a completely irrelevant model.
I love literature, but not because I love stories per se. I find nearly all the moves the traditional novel makes unbelievably predictable, tired, contrived, and essentially purposeless. I can never remember characters’ names, plot developments, lines of dialogue, details of setting. It’s not clear to me what such narratives are supposedly revealing about the human condition. I’m drawn to literature instead as a form of thinking, consciousness, wisdom-seeking. I like work that’s focused not only page by page but line by line on what the writer really cares about rather than hoping that what the writer cares about will somehow mysteriously creep through the cracks of narrative, which is the way I experience most stories and novels. Collage works are nearly always “about what they’re about”—which may sound a tad tautological—but when I read a book that I really love, I’m excited because I can feel the writer’s excitement that in every paragraph he’s manifestly exploring his subject.Sigh. Whenever I read Huckleberry Finn "what the writer cares about ... somehow mysteriously" will "creep through the cracks of narrative." I adore Twain's river-born narrative and don't understand why anyone, especially a professor of literature, would want to generalize so dismissively about older novels. Let's leave it at this, from a writer whom Shields probably admires:
Professor Ricardo Dominguez faces the possibility of losing his tenure at UCSD for implementing a computer program that targeted the website of UC President Mark Yudof.
His program, powerful enough to potentially overload and crash the website, invited over 400 participants to access the UC server and redirected several links to a 404 error page that read "There is no transparency found at the UC Office of the President."
Dominguez launched his program on March 4, "the Day of Action," as a protest against the adminstration's financial managing of the school budget and the state's handling of funding for education.
Currently, campus officials are seeking to question and investigate Dominguez. No charges have been pressed.
Supporters view his actions as a hybridization between art and nonviolent protest.
A campus rally of approximately 200 students and faculty showed up wearing surgical masks and signs to protest against the censorship of art during Dominguez's meeting with campus investigators.
We believe it is time for thoughtful men to look behind the label "pacifist," to deal fairly with the ideas and beliefs which sustain those whose approach to foreign policy begins with the rejection of reliance upon military power. We speak to the great majority of Americans who still stand opposed to war, who expect no good of armies and H-bombs. Their reluctant acceptance of a dominantly military policy has been based on the belief that military power provides the necessary security without which the constructive work that builds peace cannot be undertaken. They are for a military program because they feel they must be. "There is no alternative."We have tried to present an alternative and to set forth our reasons for believing that it offers far greater hope and involves no greater risk than our present military policy. Our effort is incomplete, but we believe it is a step toward the serious examination of a nonviolent approach to world problems. Is there a method for dealing with conflict which does not involve us in the betrayal of our own beliefs, either through acquiescence to our opponent's will or through resorting to evil means to resist him? Is there a way to meet that which threatens us, without relying on our ability to cause pain to the human being who embodies the threat?
We believe there is a way, and that it lies in the attempt to give practical demonstration to the effectiveness of love in human relations. We believe able men, pacifist and non-pacifist alike, have taken this initial insight, developed it, demonstrated it, and built understanding and support for it in field after field of human relations. In view of this, it is strange that almost no one has made a serious attempt to explore its implications in international affairs. There is now almost no place in our great universities, few lines in the budgets of our great foundations, and little space in scholarly journals, for thought and experimentation that begin with the unconditional rejection of organized mass violence and seek to think through the concrete problems of present international relations in new terms. It is time there was.
[source]In the face of the Philippines war, the greatest satirist of his time archly suggested a new American flag, with the stripes painted black, and skull and crossbones to replace the stars. His criticism wasn’t confined to the US though. Twain condemned imperialism of all stripes.
He couldn’t always find outlets for these radical ideas. Twain’s anti-war story The War Prayer went unpublished until 1923, and remained obscure until activists brought it out during protests against the Vietnam conflict.
Words being his tools of trade, he despised imperialist propaganda – in which politicians planning to invade another country “invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities…and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.” Mark Twain could have been writing about the Bush-Obama onslaught on Iraq and Afghanistan.
Twain fought for women’s suffrage, making a celebrated speech about it. He supported the labour movement, telling a union audience: “Who are the oppressors? The few: the king, the capitalist, and a handful of other overseers and superintendents. Who are the oppressed? The many: the nations of the earth; the valuable personages; the workers; they that make the bread that the soft-handed and idle eat.”
"We favor decentralized, democratic socialism guaranteeing worker-consumer control of industries, utilities, and other economic enterprises. We believe that the workers themselves should take steps to seize control of factories, mines, and shops.... We believe in realistic action against war, against imperialism, and against military or economic oppression by conquering nations, including the United States. We advocate such techniques of group resistance as demonstrations, strikes, organized civil disobedience, and underground organization where necessary. As individuals we refuse to join the armed forces, work in war industries, or buy government bonds, and we believe in campaigns urging others to do similarly. We see non-violence as a principle as well as a technique. In all action we renounce the methods of punishing, hating, or killing any fellow human beings. We believe that non-violence includes such methods as sit-down strikes and seizure of plants. We believe that revolutionary changes can only occur through direct action by the rank and file, and not by deals or reformist proposals directed to the present political and labor leadership."
Moral acts are distinguished from all other acts by the fact that they operate independently of any predictable advantage to ourselves or to others. No matter how dangerous the situation may be of a man who finds himself in the power of robbers who demand that he take part in plundering, murder, and rape, a moral person cannot take part. Is not military service the same thing? Is one not required to agree to the deaths of all those one is commanded to kill?
But how can one refuse to do what everyone does, what everyone finds unavoidable and necessary? Or, must one do what no one does and what everyone considers unnecessary or even stupid and bad? No matter how strange it sounds, this strange argument is the main one offered against those moral acts which in our times face you and every other person called up for military service. But this argument is even more incorrect than the one which would make a moral action dependent upon considerations of advantage.
If I, finding myself in a crowd of running people, run with the crowd without knowing where, it is obvious that I have given myself up to mass hysteria; but if by chance I should push my way to the front, or be gifted with sharper sight than the others, or receive information that this crowd was racing to attack human beings and toward its own corruption, would I really not stop and tell the people what might rescue them? Would I go on running and do these things which I knew to be bad and corrupt? This is the situation of every individual called up for military service, if he knows what military service means.
[source]Marx wrote that, from the point of view of labor, productivity would ideally be measured in the free time of the worker. I don’t remember any Soviet economist getting up at a Party meeting and ever saying, “Comrades, we have just achieved maximum productivity in the Volgograd Steel Factory; the 16 hour work week!” I agree with Marx; measure my productivity by how much fishing I’ve done.
And abundance? Capitalism has told us that abundance means stocked store shelves and the square footage of our house. The abundance I’m after is healthy years well lived. And that has nothing to do with access to 47 different shampoos or a new model ipod every month. Of course “abundance” and “enough” are both socially defined and “enough” can’t simply be a mathematical formula; the needs we require “enough” to satisfy are not just material. “Wants” and “needs” are not necessarily counter-posed either (as anyone with a toddler knows); capitalism tends to make us want what we do not need and need what we do not want.
BILL BLACK: Members of the Committee, thank you.You asked earlier for a stern regulator, you have one now in front of you. And we need to be blunt. You haven’t heard much bluntness in hours of testimony.
We stopped a nonprime crisis before it became a crisis in 1991 by supervisory actions.
We did it so effectively that people have forgotten that it even existed, even though it caused several hundred million dollars of losses — but none to the taxpayer. We did it by preemptive litigation, and by supervision. We broke a raging epidemic of accounting control fraud without new legislation in the period of 1984 through 1986.
Legislation would’ve been helpful, we sought legislation, but we didn’t get it. And we were able to stop that because we didn’t simply consider business as usual.
Lehman’s failure is a story in large part of fraud. And it is fraud that begins at the absolute latest in 2001, and that is with their subprime and liars’ loan operations.
Lehman was the leading purveyor of liars’ loans in the world. For most of this decade, studies of liars’ loans show incidence of fraud of 90%. Lehmans sold this to the world, with reps and warranties that there were no such frauds. If you want to know why we have a global crisis, in large part it is before you. But it hasn’t been discussed today, amazingly.
Financial institution leaders are not engaged in risk when they engage in liars’ loans — liars’ loans will cause a failure. They lose money. The only way to make money is to deceive others by selling bad paper, and that will eventually lead to liability and failure as well.
When people cheat you cannot as a regulator continue business as usual. They go into a different category and you must act completely differently as a regulator. What we’ve gotten instead are sad excuses.
The SEC: we’re told they’re only 24 people in their comprehensive program. Who decided how many people there would be in their comprehensive program? Who decided the staffing? The SEC did. To say that we only had 24 people is not to create an excuse — it’s to give an admission of criminal negligence. Except it’s not criminal, because you’re a federal employee.
In the context of the FDIC, Secretary Geithner testified today that this pushed the financial system to the brink of collapse But Chariman Bernanke testified we sent two people to be on site at Lehman. We sent fifty credit people to the largest savings and loan in America. It had 30 billion in assets. We had a whole lot less staff than the Fed does.
We forced out the CEO. We replaced the CEO. We did that not through regulation but because of our leverage as creditors. Now I ask you, who had more leverage as creditors in 2008? The Fed, as compared to the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, 19 years earlier? Incomprehensible greater leverage in the Fed, and it simply was not used.
Let’s start with the repos. We have known since the Enron in 2001 that this is a common scam, in which every major bank that was approached by Enron agreed to help them deceive creditors and investors by doing these kind of transactions.
And so what happened? There was a proposal in 2004 to stop it. And the regulatory heads — there was an inter-agency effort — killed it. They came out with something pathetic in 2006, and stalled its implication until 2007, but it ’s meaningless.
We have known for decades that these are frauds. We have known for a decade how to stop them. All of the major regulatory agencies were complicit in that statement, in destroying it. We have a self-fulfilling policy of regulatory failure
because of the leadership in this era.We have the Fed, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, finding that this is three card monty. Well what would you do, as a regulator, if you knew that one of the largest enterprises in the world, when the nation is on the brink of economic collapse, is engaged in fraud, three card monty? Would you continue business as usual?
That’s what was done. Oh they met a lot — they say “we only had a nuclear stick.” Sounds like a pretty good stick to use, if you’re on the brink of collapse of the system. But that’s not what the Fed has to do. The Fed is a central bank. Central banks for centuries have gotten rid of the heads of financial institutions. The Bank of England does it with a luncheon. The board of directors are invited. They don’t say “no.” They are sat down.
The head of the Bank of England says “we have lost confidence in the CEO of your enterprise. We believe Mr. Jones would be an effective replacement. And by 4 o’clock that day, Mr. Jones is running the place. And he has a mandate to clean up all the problems.
Instead, every day that Lehman remained under its leadership, the exposure of the American people to loss grew by hundreds of millions of dollars on average. Aurora was pumping out up to 300 billion dollars a month in liars’ loans. Losses on those are running roughly 50% to 85 cents on the dollar. It is critical not to do business as usual, to change.
We’ve also heard from Secretary Geithner and Chairman Bernanke — we couldn’t deal with these lenders because we had no authority over them. The Fed had unique authority since 1994 under HOEPA to regulate all mortgage lenders. It finally used it in 2008.
They could’ve stopped Aurora. They could’ve stopped the subprime unit of Lehman that was really a liar’s loan place as well as time went by.
(Kanjorski bangs the gavel)
Thank you very much.
We have only to examine closely the complicated mechanism of our institutions that are based upon coercion to realize that coercion and violence are contrary to human nature. The judge who has condemned according to the code, is not willing to hang the criminal with his own hands; no clerk would tear a villager from his weeping family and cast him into prison; the general or the soldier, unless he be hardened by discipline and service, will not undertake to slay a hundred Turks or Germans or destroy a village, would not, if he could help it, kill a single man. Yet all these things are done, thanks to the administrative machinery which divides responsibility for misdeeds in such a way that no one feels them to be contrary to nature.
Some make the laws, others execute them; some train men by discipline to automatic obedience; and these last, in their turn, become the instruments of coercion, and slay their kind without knowing why or to what end. But let a man disentangle himself for a moment from this complicated network, and he will readily see that coercion is contrary to his nature.
[...]
What is the law of nature? Is it to know that my security and that of my family, all my amusements and pleasures, are purchased at the expense of misery, deprivation, and suffering to thousands of human beings — by the terror of the gallows; by the misfortune of thousands stifling within prison walls; by the fear inspired by millions of soldiers and guardians of civilization, torn from their homes and besotted by discipline, to protect our pleasures with loaded revolvers against the possible interference of the famishing? Is it to purchase every fragment of bread that I put in my mouth and the mouths of my children by the numberless privations that are necessary to procure my abundance? Or is it to be certain that my piece of bread only belongs to me when I know that every one else has a share, and that no one starves while I eat?
It is only necessary to understand that, thanks to our social organization, each one of our pleasures, every minute of our cherished tranquility, is obtained by the sufferings and privations of thousands of our fellows — it is only necessary to understand this, to know what is conformable to human nature; not to our animal nature alone, but the animal and spiritual nature which constitutes man. When we once understand the doctrine of Jesus in all its bearings, with all its consequences, we shall be convinced that his doctrine is not contrary to human nature; but that its sole object is to supplant the chimerical law of the struggle against evil by violence — itself the law contrary to human nature and productive of so many evils.
[source]EMMA GOLDMAN: This is not the place to applaud or shout Hurrah for Emma Goldman. We have more serious things to talk about and some serious things to do. First of all I wish to say to you, all of you, workers, men and women from the East Side, that I regret deeply that I cannot speak to you in the language I have always spoken from this platform; that I cannot speak to you tonight in Yiddish. I shall speak English because I want those representing the State and Militarism and the Courts and Prisons to understand what I have to say. (Miss Goldman's remarks were so frequently interrupted by cheering and applause that reference to such interruptions will not be made in this report further.) I don't want them to get it secondhand. No language is ever rendered well in translation and I want them to hear what I have to say in the only language they can speak, and speak it poorly.
Friends, tomorrow morning I am sure that you will read the report that a meeting took place on the East Side attended by foreigners, by workmen, and ill-kempt, poorly washed people of the East Side--foreigners who are being jeered at the present time in this country, foreigners who are being ridiculed because they have an idea. Well, friends, if the Americans are to wait until Americans wake up the country they will have to resurrect the Indians who were killed in America and upon whose bodies this so-called democracy was established, because every other American, if you scratch him, you will find him to be an Englishman, Dutchman, Frenchman, Spaniard, a Jew and a German and a hundred and one other nationalities who sent their young men and their women to this country in the foolish belief that liberty was awaiting them at the American Harbor, Liberty holding a torch. That torch has been burning dimly in the United States for a very long time. It is because, the Goddess of Liberty is ashamed of the American people and what they have done in the name of liberty to liberty in the United States. And yet, friends, I am not sorry for the things that are happening in America today. I have come to the conclusion that every nation is like an individual, it must have its own experience and it does not accept the experience of other nations any more than you accept the experience of another individual, for if it were possible for a nation to learn by the bitter and tragic experiences of other nations America today could not be in war and America today could not have inaugurated a reign of terror which is sweeping across the country from one end to another. America had Europe before its face as an example, with all the murders and bloodshed and corpses and millions of lives lost. America had the trenches and the battlefields of the last, nearly, three years of Europe before her. America realized that this war is one of the bloodiest and most criminal wars that has ever been fought by civilized people. America had the lesson that the working people and the sons of working women are being sacrificed in the name of Kultur and they want democracy upon the battlefields of Europe, and if America had been a grown man instead of a child it would have learned the lesson that no matter how great the cause it is never great enough to sacrifice millions of people in the trenches and on the battlefield in the name of democracy or liberty.
Evidently, America has to learn a salutary lesson and it is going to pay a terrible price. It is going to shed oceans of blood, it is going to heap mountains of human sacrifices of men of this country who are able to create and produce, to whom the future belongs. They are to be slaughtered in blood and in sacrifice in the name of a thing which has never yet existed in the United States of America, in the name of democracy and liberty.
Deen: "Are you saying that it's OK to teach people that the earth is 4.5 billion years old, but it's wrong to teach them that the earth isn't 6000 years old?"Student: I was taught that the world is 6,000 years old.
De Dora: Yes. One imparts scientific knowledge. The other denies a religious idea. One is constitutional; the other is not. There is no reason for a high school biology teacher to get into denying specific religious ideas in a high school biology class.
In 2008, the median US household income was $50,300. Assuming that the person filing is the “head of household” and has two children (dependents), this means a 1040 tax bill of $4,100, which leaves about $45K in income after taxes (we’re not bothering with state taxes). I realize this is a simplistic calculation, but it’s a decent proxy for income in the US in 2008.
[...]
This analysis covers all of the basic necessities of the average American household: mortgage payments, food, energy, gas, driving expenses, and medical insurance. It also assumes that Joe:
1) Didn’t overpay for his house
2) Made a 20% down-payment of $45K on his home purchase
3) Has no debt aside from his mortgage (so no credit card debt, student loans, etc)
4) Only has one car in the family and drives 15,000 miles per year
5) Keeps his energy bill reasonable
6) Does not eat out at restaurants ever/ keeps food expenses moderate
7) Has no pets
8) Pays for health insurance but has no monthly medical expenses (unlikely with two kids)
9) Keeps his personal budget under control regarding cable TV, Internet, and the like
10) Doesn’t spoil his kids with toys, gadgets, trips to the movies, etc.
11) Doesn’t take vacations.
Suffice to say, I am assuming Joe maintains EXTREMELY conservative spending habits. Personally, I know NO ONE who meets all of the above criteria. However, even if the above assumptions applied to the average American, you’re still only looking at $100-200 in “wiggle” room for spending per month!
If Joe:
1) Overpaid on his house
2) Didn’t have a full 20% down payment
3) Owns two cars
4) Eats at restaurants
5) Splurges on heating & A/C bills
6) Has any medical expenses aside from monthly premiums…
… he is running into the red EVERY month.
Next time you hear that the government needs to cut funds for providing medical care to the children of laid-off workers, or that supplemental unemployment funds are running out, next time you hear that federal funds that are needed to fund extra teachers at your school are being cut, or that Social Security benefits need to be cut back, or the retirement age needs to be increased to 70, next time you hear that your local post office has to be shut down for lack of funds, next time you hear that Medicare benefits need to be reduced, think about that 53% of your tax payment that is going to finance the most enormous war machine the world has ever known.And ask yourself: Is this really necessary? Is this really where I want my money going?
For too long, we have lived with the “Vietnam Syndrome.” Much of that syndrome has been created by the North Vietnamese aggressors who now threaten the peaceful people of Thailand. Over and over they told us for nearly 10 years that we were the aggressors bent on imperialistic conquests. They had a plan. It was to win in the field of propaganda here in America what they could not win on the field of battle in Vietnam. As the years dragged on, we were told that peace would come if we would simply stop interfering and go home. It is time we recognized that ours was, in truth, a noble cause. A small country newly free from colonial rule sought our help in establishing self-rule and the means of self-defense against a totalitarian neighbor bent on conquest. We dishonor the memory of 50,000 young Americans who died in that cause when we give way to feelings of guilt as if we were doing something shameful, and we have been shabby in our treatment of those who returned. They fought as well and as bravely as any Americans have ever fought in any war. They deserve our gratitude, our respect, and our continuing concern. There is a lesson for all of us in Vietnam. If we are forced to fight, we must have the means and the determination to prevail or we will not have what it takes to secure the peace. And while we are at it, let us tell those who fought in that war that we will never again ask young men to fight and possibly die in a war our government is afraid to let them win.Remember, those cold-blooded killers "deserve our gratitude, our respect, and our continuing concern." They were only doing their job (murder - haha). We should not be afraid to let our military win the war in Afghanistan, even though it has dragged on for nearly ten years. Let freedom ring their necks.
What is the doom loop?Schott's Vocab:It is the unstable, crash-prone boom-bust lifestyle we have now been living for some 40 years, where a cycle of cheap financing and lax regulation leads to excess risk and credit growth followed by huge losses and bailouts. With interest rates near zero everywhere, the doom loop seems to have hit a terminal state where debt deflation and depression are the only end game unless serious reform measures are taken.
Doom LoopRobert H. Moore:
A virtueless circle in which banks take ever-greater risks to boost returns (secure in the knowledge the state will underwrite them), and governments are forced to break their promises “never again” to bankroll losses (further encouraging banks to take dangerous risks).
The “Doom Loop”Class dismissed!
New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki observes, “Before the financial crisis, the banking industry was too concentrated and clubby. And now? It’s even more so.” Our largest banks—Citigroup, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo—have actually expanded.
Surowiecki notes that these four banks “control almost forty percent of the country’s total banking deposits and two-thirds of its credit cards, and issue half of all mortgages.” Along with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, these four make up the big six combo generally regarded as “too big to fail.”
The notion of being “too big to fail” creates what Andrew Haldane, head of financial stability at the Bank of England, has dubbed America’s “doom loop.” Under current regulation, our big banks have an incentive to repeat their risky behavior. In Haldane’s view, mega banks believe they will be saved if they run into trouble—thus, we are doomed to repeat the same boom-bust-bailout cycle.
Unlike most Americans, Tolstoy did not shy away from facts. Unlike most Americans, he embraced non-violence, understanding the horrors of war. From Hadji Murad (or Hadji Murat) chapter XVII:The aoul which had been destroyed was that in which Hadji Murad had spent the night before he went over to the Russians. Sado and his family had left the aoul on the approach of the Russian detachment, and when he returned he found his saklya in ruins — the roof fallen in, the door and the posts supporting the penthouse burned, and the interior filthy. His son, the handsome bright-eyed boy who had gazed with such ecstasy at Hadji Murad, was brought dead to the mosque on a horse covered with a barka; he had been stabbed in the back with a bayonet. the dignified woman who had served Hadji Murad when he was at the house now stood over her son’s body, her smock torn in front, her withered old breasts exposed, her hair down, and she dug her hails into her face till it bled, and wailed incessantly. Sado, taking a pick-axe and spade, had gone with his relatives to dig a grave for his son. The old grandfather sat by the wall of the ruined saklya cutting a stick and gazing stolidly in front of him. He had only just returned from the apiary. The two stacks of hay there had been burnt, the apricot and cherry trees he had planted and reared were broken and scorched, and worse still all the beehives and bees had been burnt. The wailing of the women and the little children, who cried with their mothers, mingled with the lowing of the hungry cattle for whom there was no food. The bigger children, instead of playing, followed their elders with frightened eyes. The fountain was polluted, evidently on purpose, so that the water could not be used. The mosque was polluted in the same way, and the Mullah and his assistants were cleaning it out. No one spoke of hatred of the Russians. The feeling experienced by all the Chechens, from the youngest to the oldest, was stronger than hate. It was not hatred, for they did not regard those Russian dogs as human beings, but it was such repulsion, disgust, and perplexity at the senseless cruelty of these creatures, that the desire to exterminate them — like the desire to exterminate rats, poisonous spiders, or wolves — was as natural an instinct as that of self-preservation.The inhabitants of the aoul were confronted by the choice of remaining there and restoring with frightful effort what had been produced with such labor and had been so lightly and senselessly destroyed, facing every moment the possibility of a repetition of what had happened; or to submit to the Russians — contrary to their religion and despite the repulsion and contempt they felt for them. The old men prayed, and unanimously decided to send envoys to Shamil asking him for help. Then they immediately set to work to restore what had been destroyed.
