Those Illusions: Update

CARL DIX: I’m a sixty-year-old black man, which means I have decades of experience with white supremacy. I remember when the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education outlawing segregation in education, Baltimore, Maryland, closed down the public swimming pools, because they saw the writing on the wall, and they’d have to integrate them, and they could not—they were not going to subject white kids to the indignity of swimming in water that had touched the bodies of black kids. That’s how thick this racism has been, and it’s continued on the way down. But that’s just something I remember from my childhood.


So I understand why people got into it, but I did see where this could go. And see, a lot of people say, “Well, look, a lot of black youth are going to get inspiration and hope from Obama being in the White House.” But then, the question I pose to them is, what will happen to that inspiration and hope when it collides with the continuing reality of white supremacy, male supremacy, imperialist, you know, overseas adventures, that remain the defining reality of America?


And see, what is coming around on this is that black youth are more and more being blamed for the situation that the system puts them in. And you look at Obama’s last two Father’s Day speeches, he gets into this thing of, you know, the youth got to pull up their pants. The absent dads got to be involved in their lives. You’ve got—the parents got to turn off the TV and make sure the kids do their homework. In other words, the onus for the youth not achieving is being put on the youth themselves and their parents. And what’s disappearing in that are the continuing obstacles that this system puts in the way of black, Latino and poor youth who want to achieve. So, in other words, the people are being blamed, and who better than Barack Obama, the first black president, to blame black youth for their plight? If George Bush does it, people would say it’s racist. But when the first black president does it, it actually draws people into it.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you share that criticism, Professor West?


CORNEL WEST: Yes, I think Brother Carl Dix is hitting the nail on the head. I think, at the same time, there’s ways in which, at the symbolic level, to break the glass ceiling at the very top of the American empire, the White House. Powerful, symbolically. Brother Carl and I are saying there’s too many brothers and sisters—red brothers and sisters on the reservations, white brothers and sisters poor working class, brown brothers and sisters in barrios, black brothers and sisters in chocolate cities—who are stuck in the basement. You’re stuck in the basement, you break the glass ceiling at the top.


The obsession is keeping track of Obama in the White House, a white house primarily built by black slaves. What about those who are still locked at the bottom, when you have policy team—neo-imperialist policy in foreign policy, neoliberal in economic policy—that’s reproducing the conditions of those stuck at the bottom across race? And at this point, you see, you can’t allow race and him being the first black president to hide and conceal the very ugly class realities of poor and working people. And that’s precisely, I think, why we’re trying to generate some motion, some momentum and some movement.


AMY GOODMAN: Do you share Carl Dix’s criticism of President Obama’s Father’s Day speeches?


CORNEL WEST: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I think that it’s quite telling that he would give personal responsibility speeches to black people, but not a lot of personal responsibility speeches to Wall Street in terms of execution. And when you actually look at the degree to which issues of accountability for poor people—but where’s the accountability when you’re bailing out these Wall Street elites, $700 billion? That’s socialism for the rich. That’s your policy. Don’t then go to these folk who are locked into dilapidated housing, decrepit school systems, many on their way to a prison-industrial complex, and talk about their fathers didn’t come through. And we know the fathers got problems. We understand that. But there are structural institutional challenges that he’s not hitting, hitting head on.


And I should say this, too, I think, in terms of style, that the Obama administration is obsessed with the wrong Lincoln. They are obsessed with the Lincoln who they think moved to the right and was trying to create bipartisan consensus with conservatives, whereas we know there’s no Lincoln without Frederick Douglass. There’s no Lincoln without Harriet Beecher Stowe. There’s no Lincoln without Wendell Phillips or Charles Sumner. That was a social movement.


Lincoln supported the slave trade when he was in the House. He supported the Fugitive Slave Act. In the first inaugural lecture he gave, he supported the first proposed Thirteenth Amendment, which said there would be slavery forever in America, the unamendable amendment. That was Lincoln. If it were not for the abolitionist movement, the courageous black and white freedom fighters, from John Brown to Douglass, who put pressure on Lincoln, we would have been dealing with a white supremacist Lincoln.


Lincoln became great, because a social movement pushed him against slavery in that regard. And Obama is looking to the wrong Lincoln. And if he doesn’t understand the greatness of Lincoln was responding to the social movements of working people and poor people, he’s going to end up with a failed presidency, with a lot of symbolic gestures, but, on the ground, everyday people, those Sly Stone called “everyday people,” suffering still.

It's Really A Lot Of Money

Under the worst of circumstances, the report said, the government's maximum exposure could total nearly $24 trillion, or $80,000 for every American.

Obama's New Style - Decently Covert

This past weekend in Buenos Aires, an American acquaintance presented me with page 9 of Saturday’s Buenos Aires Herald, the English-language daily, such that I might join the ranks of those who understood the approach of the US government to the current crisis in Honduras. Page 9 consisted of two Reuters articles, one on top of the other, with the essence of the US approach excerpted in a quote in orange print at the center of the top article: “This is part of Obama’s new style of doing things in Latin America.” How well my acquaintance had read the rest of the article was called into question by his reference to Costa Rican President Óscar Arias as Óscar Asturias.

The top article, entitled “US treads softly as region weighs in,” begins:

“Latin America was for decades seen as the United States’ ‘back yard’—a theatre where it imposed its will often at the barrel of a gun.

“But since Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was snatched from his home in his pajamas and spirited out of the country by the military on June 28, Washington has played an uncharacteristically low-key role.”

It apparently does not occur to Reuters that there is no need for gun barrels when the US is content for Zelaya to remain in his pajamas and out of the country, or that covert support for right-wing Latin American death squads might also have been described as low-key.

...The Reuters article on Honduras continues in the tradition of imbalance by asserting that “[t]he last Democrat in the White House, former President Bill Clinton, sent troops to put ousted Haitian leader Jean-Bertrand Aristide back in power in 1994,” without specifying that former Republican governments had frozen development aid to Haiti during Aristide’s subsequent presidential term—a low-key maneuver obligingly legitimated by the OAS—or addressing Aristide’s claims that he was kidnapped to Africa by the US and France in 2004.

Óscar Arias had confirmed that conservative Republicans in the US preferred Aristide’s departure to prospects of Haitian democracy and had responded negatively to Haitian rebel leader Guy Philippe’s March 2004 announcement that the country was in his hands, an announcement backed up by his supporters’ claims that they had executed opponents and by the fact that Philippe had received US military training in Ecuador. Arias’ negative response is recorded in Paul Farmer’s April 2004 article in the London Review of Books: “Nothing could more clearly prove why Haiti does not need an army than the boasting of… Philippe last week in Port-au-Prince. The Haitian army was abolished nine years ago during a period of democratic transition, precisely to prevent the country from falling back into the hands of military men.” Arias’ failure thus far to draw parallels between countries starting with H may be an effect of the fact that the current non-Republican State Department is still debating the definition of the word “military.”

The US has also still failed to freeze the bank accounts of Honduran coup instigators, which would presumably be more complicated than freezing drinking water loans to Haiti and would jeopardize American entrenchment “firmly in the background.” While not involving gun barrels, such economic maneuvers are nonetheless incompatible with antidemocratic objectives; the implication that the perceived inaction that characterizes “Obama’s new style” is somehow more benign than previous presidential styles is meanwhile offset by the fact that US government contact with Honduran coup plotters up until the day before the coup cannot be characterized as inactive.

"Conspiracies do exist"

Untouchable

Taken altogether, what all of this means is that Goldman’s profit announcement is a giant “fuck you” to the rest of the country. It is a statement of supreme privilege, an announcement that it feels no shame in taking subsidies and funneling them directly into their pockets, and moreover feels no fear of any public response. It knows that it’s untouchable and it’s not going to change its behavior for anyone. And it doesn’t matter who knows it.

What Zizek knows about Election Fraud

In light of this, a reminder of what he was writing in 2004:

Democracy – in the way the term is used today – means that, whatever electoral manipulation takes place, every political agent will unconditionally respect the results. In this sense, the US presidential elections of 2000 were, despite appearances, effectively ‘democratic’: in spite of obvious electoral manipulation, and of the absurdity of the fact that a couple of hundred votes in Florida decided who would be president, the Democratic candidate accepted his defeat. When, in the weeks of uncertainty after the election, Bill Clinton said, ‘The American people have spoken; we just don’t know what they said,’ the remark should have been taken more seriously than it was meant: even now, we don’t know the ‘true’ result – and maybe this is because there was no substantial ‘message’ behind the result.

Why The Anthrax Letters Were Forgotten

(CBC Documentary, Part one of seven)

LIVE-BLOGGING CHILD-MURDER

Sorry about the screaming all-caps, but this is an emergency:

January First: Notes from Calalini

About Me

Michael Schofield is killing his six-year-old daughter slowly and doesn't even realise it. It is obvious that he himself desperately needs help. He is getting none. And his child is being martyred while he blogs about it.

We tried everything. Positive reinforcement. Negative reinforcement. Hitting her back (I won't tell you how many people told us that all she needed was a good beating). We took all her toys away. We gave her toys away. We tried starving her. We did EVERYTHING we could to try and break her. Nothing worked.

It goes on like that forever. And it gets worse, much worse.

Worst of all, he is being assisted in his efforts by the grotesque US psychiatric profession and praised incessantly in the US media. This brutally sanctimonious claptrap appeared in the LA TImes on June 29th:

Jani's at the mercy of her mind

She is in fact at the mercy of her father and the quacks and the hacks. The diagnosis of "schizophrenia" (sic) is a sick joke.

At his blog and all over the web, comments boxes are filling up with messages of fawning, awe-struck admiration and support - for him, not for his helpless kid.

Urgent request: Does anyone one know anyone in the LA area (or elsewhere) who could intervene effectively to help this child?

She is one of millions, but her current prominence makes her a kind of test-case. She is being put through hell as we speak.

Thank you.

Glen Ford speaks on Barack Obama's selection/election at African Liberation Day 2009

Neverending Civilising Mission

"Wars, Guns and Votes is, in some ways, a darker argument," he says. "The guts of it is that the international community has been naive by denying reality and imagining that security and accountability among the countries in the bottom billion can be readily achieved by just introducing elections." Democracy is about much more than that, he says. "It's very easy to steal an election if there are no checks and balances." Like a free press? "Absolutely; that makes a big difference. But we also need some sort of international standard about what constitutes a decent election."

The EU already offers a monitoring service, but, he says: "The problem is that it's not linked to any consequences." Collier's suggestion that the developed world should be prepared to intervene more often militarily could lead to charges of neo-colonialism, I point out. There's a long pause before he responds: "The citizens of the bottom billion share the planet with us and have needs, some of which have to be met by the international community. Those who want to put up a sign saying 'Keep Out' are not generally the ordinary citizens. They are the entrenched elites who have been exploiting them. In all of these societies there are internal struggles between brave people trying to effect change and powerful vested interests opposing them. We should be supporting the strugglers for change.

Legitimacy

"The likes of [President Robert] Mugabe will call us neo-colonialists, but I have no aspirations to govern Africa. What the international community does have is legitimacy for military intervention, where necessary, through institutions like the UN. America has legitimacy, too, since the election of President Obama." Because of his African heritage? "Very much so. Africans are proud of him and see him as one of them.

"What we have seen are wild policy lurches on anything to do with security," Collier goes on. "We left Somalia without government for 15 years because 18 American soldiers were killed there. The lesson was seen to be: 'after Somalia, never intervene'. So we allowed 800,000 people to be butchered in Rwanda. Then we over-reacted the other way in Iraq. Getting it right doesn't mean going to either extreme. British troops, for instance, have done a hugely beneficial job in Sierra Leone. And I've just come back from Haiti, where 7,000 Brazilian troops are keeping the peace."

Paul Collier interviewed by an admiring Chris Arnot in The Guardian

The Peace empire keeps -

McKinney From an Israeli Prison

Goldman Sachs

Lastly, he says that the bank is “painfully conscious” of the importance of being a force for good, which I noted with amusement is not quite the same thing as saying that that bank is a force for good, or wants to be.

Israel Attacks Free Gaza Boat

Israel attacks boat, kidnaps human rights workers aboard including Cynthia McKinney, and confiscates olive trees, medical supplies and toys destined by donors for Gaza:

"The aid we were carrying is a symbol of hope for the people of Gaza, hope that the sea route would open for them, and they would be able to transport their own materials to begin to reconstruct the schools, hospitals and thousands of homes destroyed during the onslaught of "Cast Lead". Our mission is a gesture to the people of Gaza that we stand by them and that they are not alone" said fellow passenger Mairead Maguire, winner of a Noble Peace Prize for her work in Northern Ireland.

Just before being kidnapped by Israel, Huwaida Arraf, Free Gaza Movement chairperson and delegation co-coordinator on this voyage, stated that: "No one could possibly believe that our small boat constitutes any sort of threat to Israel. We carry medical and reconstruction supplies, and children's toys. Our passengers include a Nobel peace prize laureate and a former U.S. congressperson. Our boat was searched and received a security clearance by Cypriot Port Authorities before we departed, and at no time did we ever approach Israeli waters."

Arraf continued, "Israel's deliberate and premeditated attack on our unarmed boat is a clear violation of international law and we demand our immediate and unconditional release."

Twitter

What Zizek knows about Iran

Iran is the only large Arab state which not only does not diplomatically recognize Israel, but resolutely denies its right to exist as a state.

(Hat tip)

Revolution is the Main Trend in the World Today

Cornelius Cardew's Piano Music of the 1970s

Relentless

(AP)

June 18, 2008, UN soldiers gunned down Haitian mourners outside the Church - Port au Prince Cathedral - in Haiti during the funeral for Father Jean Juste in Haiti.

(Marguerite Laurent)

Twitter psyop?

Why would a news organization post a story about 3 people who JUST JOINED TWITTER hours earlier? Is that newsworthy?

Hoooo?

Baka Music

Soviet propaganda

“Thank God my husband is dead and can’t see me in a situation like this,” she says, looking down at her feet. “My old neighbor shakes her head in disbelief every time she comes to check on me.” For most of their lives spent in the Soviet era, Vorfolomejeva and her elderly neighbors only heard about the homeless in the Soviet propaganda as an example of the evils of capitalism abroad.

Stop the EXECUTION of Troy Davis

Stop the execution of Troy Davis.

Innocence Project.

Amnesty USA


Amnesty France

Reverse Nuremberg

We’ve got what amounts to a reverse Nuremberg defense, where Bush administration officials are let off the hook because they were only giving orders.

Thunk

« La classe ouvrière n’existe plus. Mais elle prend tout sur la gueule »

The working class no longer exists. But it's still taking it in the chops.

« Le communisme c’est le seul contrepoison le seul antidote le seul remède la seule alternative à la société d’exploitation au capitalisme qui jamais n’a le visage humain. Tous les damnés de la terre savent ça qui sont de plus en plus nombreux et de plus en plus damnés. Seuls les salauds ne sont pas avec eux et c’est comme ça qu’on les reconnaît. »

Communism is the only antitoxin the only antidote the only remedy the only alternative to the capitalist society of exploitation which never has a human face. All the wretched of the earth who are more and more numerous and more and more wretched know it. Only the bastards aren't with them and that's how we recognise them.

Georges Labica, Démocratie et révolution

Convenient Suicide

The accused terrorist who said he was tortured into making a false connection between al Qaeda and Iraq has died in a Libyan prison, human rights monitors said Tuesday.

Not A Spoof.

La Chinoise

The rest...

The Spring of the Zombies

Stiglitz

The Economic Homeless

For the economic homeless, the American ideal that education and hard work lead to a comfortable middle-class life has slipped out of reach. They're packing into motels, parking lots and tent cities, alternately distressed and hopeful, searching for work and praying their fortunes will change.

The Day Ronald Reagan Was Elected...

"The day Ronald Reagan was elected, this crisis was locked in as something that was going to happen, maybe not precisely on September 15 2008, but it was going to happen."

Evidence

This is exactly what affirmative action is meant to correct: People coming to the arbitrary conclusion that someone is "an idiot" despite all evidence to the contrary, except if you consider not being a white man evidence.

The weirdest bicycle since The Third Policeman

"Bosnia and Herzegovina is like a bicycle," says Lord (Paddy) Ashdown, who served as the country's UN high representative between 2002 and 2006. "If it is in constant motion, the chances of things going wrong are avoidable. As long as there is momentum. If it stops or is pedalled backwards, that is when I fear the prevalent mood becomes one of pessimism. Then there is the risk that it turns in on itself. And it has lost momentum.

Realists v. Neo-Cons

Blue corner:

...Petraeus expressed the view that the Pakistani army could survive the fall of the government of President Ali Zardari and that the army, led by Chief of Staff Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, is “superior” to the civilian government.

This statement echoed the position indicated by President Barack Obama at the Wednesday evening press conference marking his first 100 days in office. Obama said he was confident that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal would remain secure, “Primarily, initially, because the Pakistani army, I think, recognizes the hazards of those weapons falling into the wrong hands.” He added, “We’ve got strong military-to-military consultation and cooperation.”

In contrast, the American president described Zardari’s government as “very fragile” and lacking “the capacity to deliver basic services” or “gain the support and the loyalty of their people.”

Obama concluded by saying of Pakistan, “We want to respect their sovereignty, but we also recognize that we have huge strategic interests, huge national security interests in making sure that Pakistan is stable and that you don't end up having a nuclear-armed militant state.”

Red Corner:

To prevent catastrophe will require considerable American effort and unquestionably provoke resistance from many Pakistanis, often for widely differing reasons. We must strengthen pro-American elements in Pakistan's military so they can purge dangerous Islamicists from their ranks; roll back Taliban advances; and, together with our increased efforts in Afghanistan, decisively defeat the militants on either side of the border. This may mean stifling some of our democratic squeamishness and acquiescing in a Pakistani military takeover, if the civilian government melts before radical pressures. So be it.

May Day

Into the Streets May First!


Alfred Hayes


Into the streets May First!
Into the roaring Square!
Shake the midtown towers!
Shatter the downtown air!
Come with a storm of banners,
Come with an earthquake tread,
Bells, hurl out of your belfries,
Red flag, leap out your red!
Out of the shops and factories,
Comrades, these are our tools,
A song and a banner!
Roll song, from the sea of our hearts,
Banner, leap and be free;
Song and banner together,
Down with the bourgeoisie!

Sweep the big city, march forward,
The day is a barricade!
Pour forth like a second Flood!
Thunder the alps of the air!
Subways are roaring our milllons --

Comrades, into the square !!!


Alfred Hayes, May 1, 1934

AMY GOODMAN: Why would any library agree to give over their work to a private company?

BREWSTER KAHLE: It seemed like a good idea at the time.

AMY GOODMAN: Why?

BREWSTER KAHLE: Because Google was going to pay for the digitization of these books. And what they said originally is that they would—like a web search engine, they would go and index these books and then allow people to see bits and pieces, but direct people back to the libraries or direct people back to bookstores to be able to get them. What we now find through this suit is Google’s ambitions were far greater than just directing people back to where they came from; they wanted to be the library or the bookstore themselves.

AMY GOODMAN: So they will make money on these libraries?

BREWSTER KAHLE: Not only will they make money, they will be the sole organization to control access to these works.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, “control access”?

BREWSTER KAHLE: Well, if they want those books to be available to people, they can have it in their search engine and rank it high. If books are things they don’t want to have available, I don’t know, for any reason that corporations might want to do that, they can take it effectively out of the library. If they get to be the library that the next generation grows up with, then they get to decide who has access to works, and if you happen to be reading a book, they’ll know about it.

Speaking Of Swine

The Gospel of the Creole Pig by Michelange Quay

The NAFTA Flu

The so-called “swine flu” exploded because an environmental disaster simply moved (and with it, took jobs from US workers) to Mexico where environmental and worker safety laws, if they exist, are not enforced against powerful multinational corporations.

False mental constructs of borders – the kind that cause US and Mexican citizens alike to imagine a flu strain like this one invading their nations from other lands – are taking a long overdue hit by the current “swine flu” media frenzy. In this case, US-Mexico trade policy created a time bomb in Veracruz that has already murdered more than 150 Mexican citizens, and at least one child in the US, by creating a gigantic Petri dish in the form pig farms to generate bacon and ham for international sale.

None of that indicates that this flu strain was born in Mexico, but, rather, that the North American Free Trade Agreement created the optimal conditions for the flu to gestate and become, at minimum, epidemic in La Gloria and, now, Mexico City, and threatens to become international pandemic.

Welcome to the aftermath of “free trade.” Authorities now want you to grab a hospital facemask and avoid human contact until the outbreak hopefully blows over. And if you start to feel dizzy, or a flush with fever, or other symptoms begin to molest you or your children, remember this: The real name of this infirmity is “The NAFTA Flu,” the first of what may well emerge as many new illnesses to emerge internationally as the direct result of “free trade” agreements that allow companies like Smithfield Farms to escape health, safety and environmental laws.

Tell her he's a liar. Tell her he's an anti-Semite. Tell her we'll ruin his life.

Everyone involved in the dispute over William I. Robinson talks about lines being crossed.

A tenured professor of sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Robinson said that his critics have crossed lines of fairness by equating his criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, and that the faculty judicial system is crossing lines that are supposed to protect academic freedom by investigating him.

His critics say that he crossed a line of professionalism by sending e-mail to all of the students in one of his courses material about "parallel" images of Nazi and Israeli attacks. Some students view the material as anti-Semitic, and they quit the course and filed a grievance against him.

Faculty members are in the process of selecting a panel that will consider the charges against Robinson and determine whether to recommend that a standing faculty panel conduct a full investigation of the incident. While no action has been taken against him at this time, he views the inquiries as an attempt to quash criticism of Israel. Robinson is consulting with lawyers and may sue to block the coming proceedings.

At issue is an e-mail message that Robinson sent to the approximately 80 students in January in a course about sociology and globalization. The e-mail contained an an article criticizing the Israeli military's actions in Gaza. Part of the e-mail was an assemblage of photos from Nazi Germany's persecution of Jews and from Israel's actions in Gaza. Students were invited to look at the "parallel images." A message from Robinson argued that Gaza would be like "Israel's Warsaw."

For Gaza? Honestly?

Seven Jewish Children - a Play for Gaza.

Now what could Gaza want with this play I wonder?

Someone in a haloscan somewhere "was struck by how powerful and moving it was". Yes.

The crazed, positively illiterate reactions of Jacobson and Goldberg of course incite one to defend the play from their absurd, cynical, malicious comments.

And that's a pity because the piece is not only anti-Semitic (in a distinctively British philoSemitic way) but, more disturbingly, contemptuously Orientalist, Eurocentric (racist) and Imperial-apologetic. And of course a very competent piece of theatre. Engaging, moving and entertaining.

Did the British public really need yet another piece of deft kitsch of this sort, another compelling statement of the comfortingly familiar white British viewpoint which shoves Palestinians to the barely glimpsed margins of their own calamities, reduces them to silhouettes loping along the background horizon on camels and bloodied corpses flashed on television, while preferring to examine (as foil for its own righteous self) the endlessly fascinating collective psyche of an AngloAmerican-mass-culture-produced Jewish Tribe as the ultimate Type of victim-perpetrator, a compelling figure of traumatised imperialist, and to remind us that history arrived in Palestine with European Zionists in the early 20th century? “For Gaza”, yet another solemn account of how terribly some previous incarnations, less ancestors than earlier avatars of the Type, of the agents of white supremacist imperialism besieging and bombarding it once suffered? Gaza needs yet another reiteration of how really the Middle East came under European imperial domination and so remains because of some anguished parental protectiveness taken to extremes? Another acknowledgement that the path to Palestinian Liberation must lie through the therapeutic mass psychoanalysis and cure of the only true protagonist of Palestinian history: "The Jewish People", that is, generations of identically loving parents of little girls?

“For Gaza” yet another touching tale of the psychic pain and terror endured by the European overlords? “For Gaza” a play about the eternally well meaning compassionate innocent inheritor of expropriated wealth and land, a parade of little harmless helpless girl children, hiding from Cossacks, orphaned by Nazis in Europe, cherished by refusenik cousins in Israel? "For Gaza" another explanation of how all the propaganda fables under which Palestinian history is obscured - here on stage yet again - have been concocted to protect the ignorant naivety of a vulnerable little girl, to keep this innocent of genteel civilisation from being frightened? “For Gaza” yet another emphatic illustration that Palestinian suffering is endowed with what little significance it has – should it become too garish and bloody - only by the hazy disquieting reflections it leaves in the piquantly tormented psyche of this ordinary European family with its pretext children, giving rise to the familiar powerful poignant stories - so familiar they can be fully conveyed in this abbreviated way (the entire genre of Holocausterie transmitted by "don’t tell her what they did”) - that English people tell their children and their theatre audiences?

(I suppose it is what one expects of a British playwright whose Romania of 1989 hosts vampires and whose "critique" of British colonialism consists of a sex farce set in that old reliable "unspecified African country".)

Reality

Pynchon, Vineland

Justin found his father and Zoyd in the back of a pickup, watching “Say, Jim,” a half-hour sit-com based on “Star Trek,” in which all the actors were black except for the Communications Officer, a freckled white redhead named Lieutenant O’Hara. Whenever Spock came on the bridge, everybody made Vulcan hand salutes and went around high-threeing. About the time the show ended, Prairie came by, Zoyd and Flash went off looking for beer, and she and Justin settled down, semi-brother and sister, in front of the eight O’Clock Movie, Pee-wee Herman in The Robert Musil Story. It was mostly Pee-wee talking in a foreign accent, or sitting around in front of some pieces of paper with some weird-looking marker pen, and the kids’ attention kept wandering to each other. “There’s the Movie at Nine,” Justin said, looking in the listings, “Magnificent Disaster, TV movie about the ’83-’84 NBA playoffs – wasn’t that just back in the summer? Pretty quick movie.”

“They’ve been getting quicker over the years, from what I remember,” Prairie said.

“Hey Prairie, would you like to baby-sit me sometime?”

She gave him a look. “Some baby. Maybe I’ll have to kid-sit you.”

“What’s that?”

“Involves some tickling,” Prairie already headed for her new brother’s armpits and flanks, and Justin squirming even before they touched.

Out under yellow bulbs at a long weathered table, Zoyd found himself trying to help flash with the shock of meeting so many in-laws in one place, both men from time to time looking around fearfully, like unarmed visitors in a jungle clearing, as out beyond this particular patch of light Traverses and Beckers went practising on scales, working on engines, debating, talking back to the Tube, sending up gusts of laughter like ritual smoke cast to an unappeasable wind. A Traverse grandmother somewhere was warning children against the October blackberries of this coast, “They belong to the Devil, any that you eat are his property, and he don’t like blackberry thieves – he’ll come after ya.” Even sceptical adolescents weaved in her voice’s spell. “When you see those unhappy souls out by the roadside, back up the lanes, in the ruins of the old farms, wherever the briars grow thick, harvesting berries out in the clouds and rain of October, why just drive by, and don’t look back, because you’ll know where they’ve come from, and who their labor belongs to, and where they have to go back to at the close of the day.” And other grandfolks could be heard arguing the perennial question of whether the United States still lingered in a pre-fascist twilight, or whether that darkness had fallen long stupefied years ago, and the light they thought they saw was coming only from millions of Tubes all showing the same bright-colored shadows. One by one, as other voices joined in, the names began – some shouted, some accompanied by spit, the old reliable names good for hours of contention, stomach distress, and insomnia – Hitler, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Nixon, Hoover, Mafia, CIA, Reagan, Kissinger, that collection of names and their tragic interweaving that stood not constellated above in any nightwide remoteness of light, but below, diminished to the last unfaceable American secret, to be pressed, each time deeper, again and again beneath the meanest of random soles, one blackly fermenting leaf on the forest floor that nobody wanted to turn over, because of all that lived, virulent, waiting, just beneath.

Krystian Zimerman

Sunday, making his Disney Hall debut in a recital sponsored by the Philharmonic, Zimerman, who has become arguably the greatest pianist of his generation, made the surprise and shocking announcement from the stage that in protest to America's military policies overseas and particularly in Poland, he would no longer perform in the United States.

“Get your hands off my country,” he said, soft-spoken but seething. He accused the U.S. military of wanting “to control the whole world,” and made a reference to the U.S. military detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Approximately three dozen in the audience walked out, some shouting obscenities. “Yes,” he answered, “some people when they hear the word military start marching.”

Court Of Appeals: Detainees Are Not “Persons” in Guantánamo Torture Suit

Court Agrees with Obama Administration that Detainees Still Have No Constitutional Right Not to Be Tortured

April 24, 2009 Washington, D.C. – In a suit brought by British men imprisoned for two years (without charge, without trial - Q.) at Guantanamo, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals today reaffirmed its previous ruling that Guantanamo detainees lack the fundamental constitutional right not to be tortured and are not “persons” under a U.S. statute protecting religious freedom.

(...)

Last year, Judge Janice Rogers Brown, a member of the Court of Appeals panel who issued the decision today, referred to the Court’s holding that detainees are not “persons” as “a most regrettable holding in a case where plaintiffs have alleged high-level U.S. government officials treated them as less than human.” This statement is noticeably absent from Judge Brown’s substantively identical concurring opinion issued today.

The greater the destruction of wealth...

...the greater the (fictional) profits, bonuses, and stock appreciation

Sshh! Waterboarded 183 times: the "admitted planner" (sic) of 9/11

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - CIA interrogators used the waterboarding technique on Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the admitted planner of the September 11 attacks, 183 times and 83 times on another al Qaeda suspect, The New York Times said on Sunday.

One hundred and eighty-three times in one month, that is. So, does this mean they stopped as soon as Waterboarding Month was over? And does it mean they nearly drowned him only 183 times in total that month, or that they subjected him to 183 sessions, in each of which he was nearly drowned several times?

Let's not quibble. For KSM is, as Reuters and the NYT tell us, "the admitted planner of the September 11 attacks". (I thought that was the late Osama bin Laden, or rather Mohammed Atta, he of the Evil Eyes, but let's not quibble.) No doubt KSM, this quite exceptionally Bad Guy, also admitted to shooting Abe Lincoln. Who wouldn't, under the circumstances? I know I would, especially if my kids, like KSM's, were being tortured simultaneously.

Fuck it, I'd admit to being responsible for the Great Fire of London.

Fine things, admissions. And useful. Note that KSM's grotesque and utterly worthless "admission" was a major prop (in all senses of the word) of the worthless yarn issued by the grotesque 9/11 Commission, commanded by the equally grotesque Philip Zelikow, who is undoubtedly worth something to some grotesquely powerful and ruthless people.

Perhaps some fine day the opinionmakers of the Anglo-Saxon liberal left (from Cockburn to Corn to Taibbi to Monbiot to...) will finally have the minimal decency to admit, without being waterboarded, what everyone else in the world has long since noticed: that the official account of The Crime That Served to Justify Everything is an insult to the intelligence of a budgie, and that this still matters enormously, for many more reasons than one.

Much more likely, though, we shall hear not a tweet from those prominent pro- and semi-pro dissenters. They will continue to be a) prudently silent and b) very carefully and selectively ignorant, because it's safer that way, and by god they know it. (See Chomsky and Herman, passim.) So the torture of "Khalid Sheikh Mohammed" (if indeed it is he) and his children, and what this entire filthy story tells us about the Trifecta administration and its universal casus belli, will remain discreetly unmentioned and wholly unmentionable.

Meanwhile, the "trial" continues, not that you'd notice if you restricted your reading to left websites, while the Fourth Estate continues to report with a straight face.

Well, we all have our trials. It would be too easy to cite Kafka here, and anyway, Beckett sums it up better:

"Human nature. Marvellous thing."

No time for ideology sorry

WSJ:

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and then-Treasury Department chief Henry Paulson pressured Bank of America Corp. to not discuss its increasingly troubled plan to buy Merrill Lynch & Co. -- a deal that later triggered a government bailout of BofA -- according to testimony by Kenneth Lewis, the bank's chief executive.

...The Wall Street Journal previously reported, in a page-one story on Feb. 5, that Mr. Lewis agreed to proceed with the Merrill merger only after Messrs. Paulson and Bernanke said that he and his board would lose their jobs if Bank of America backed out of the deal. Mr. Lewis's testimony with the New York attorney general's office corroborates that account.

Mr. Cuomo's office says it has been unable to gather a full picture of the Fed's role in the December discussions because the Fed has invoked a regulatory privilege, allowing it to keep some documents confidential.

Mr. Lewis has previously said that he first considered backing out of the Merrill deal on Dec. 13, when he said his chief financial officer told him projected after-tax losses were "about $12 billion."

Shareholders of the Charlotte, N.C., bank voted to approve the purchase on Dec. 5, and the deal was completed on Jan. 1.

Bank of America agreed to accept $20 billion in new capital from the government and announced the injection, in conjunction with the Merrill losses, with its regularly scheduled earnings release on Jan. 20.

Mr. Lewis has since been vilified by lawmakers and shareholders for his handling of the purchase. Several investors, including TIAA-CREF, a major pension-fund manager, have said they intend to vote against his re-election as chairman. Some argued that Mr. Lewis should have informed shareholders of the potential losses at Merrill before the Jan. 1 closing of the deal.

During his testimony, Mr. Lewis described a conversation with Mr. Paulson in which the Treasury secretary made it clear that Mr. Lewis's own job was at stake. Mr. Lewis still was considering invoking his legal right to terminate the Merrill deal. Mr. Paulson was out on a bike ride when Mr. Lewis phoned to discuss the matter, according to the transcript.

"I can't recall if he said, 'We would remove the board and management if you called it [off]' or if he said 'we would do it if you intended to.' I don't remember which one it was," Mr. Lewis said. "I said, 'Hank, let's de-escalate this for a while. Let me talk to our board.' "

"It was political"

Social Media

Social Media Stories

View more presentations from Seth Goldstein.

China's New Left

Fan Jinggang, 32, Utopia's manager and a former graduate student in Marxism at Peking University, said sales of books about Mao have increased tenfold since the economic crisis began.

Helicopter String Quartet

Ancient history

The lone surviving gunman of the Mumbai attacks, Ajmal Amir Qasab, says his confession was a result of torture and thus false.

Qasab's defense lawyer, Abbas Kamzi, said Qasab had asked him to take back the confession on his behalf. Kazmi noted that the entire 'confession' was extracted through coercion and torture and as a result was not a voluntary confession and therefore had nothing to do with him.

This is while prosecutor Ujwal Nikam had described Qasab's involvement in the Mumbai attack as a plot planned in Pakistan to commit a series of attacks across India.

Background

Israel Rejects Vague US Calls for Peace Talks
The Israeli government is rebuffing mild US calls for peace talks with Palestinians toward reaching a two-state settlement. On Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Palestinians must recognize Israel as a “Jewish state” as a precondition for future talks. Palestinians have called the demand a non-starter, because it would mean not just acknowledging but legitimizing Israel’s takeover of their land and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who used to live there. Netanyahu announced the demand after meeting US envoy George Mitchell. Mitchell said the US will insist on pursuing a two-state solution.

George Mitchell: “It is in the United States’ national interest that there will be a comprehensive peace settlement in the Middle East that should include settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a two-state solution involving a Palestinian state living side by side alongside the Jewish state of Israel in peace, and hopefully stability and prosperity. And we’re going to do all we can during the rest of this visit and over the coming weeks and months to move toward that objective.”

Report: US Will Impose Two-State Settlement
The Israeli newspaper Yedioth Achronoth is reporting, meanwhile, the Obama administration is prepared to force the Israeli government to accept a two-state peace deal. An unidentified Jewish leader quoted White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel as saying, “In the next four years there is going to be a permanent status arrangement between Israel and the Palestinians on the basis of two states for two peoples, and it doesn’t matter to us at all who is prime minister.” The Obama administration has yet to outline whether the two-state solution it favors would meet minimal Palestinian rights. Previous US-backed proposals would have still left Israel in control of the large West Bank settlement blocs on Palestinian land.

US: Israel, You Must Lose! We Don't Care How You Beg! You Must And Will Lose!
Israel: Just whatever you do, d-d-d-d-don't throw me in the Briar Patch!
US: Into the Briar Patch we will throw this loser! Loser! Ha ha ha!
Israel: Oh no no, not that! Anything but that! Anything but the Briar Patch!

Winter Soldier

(Viewer discretion advised)

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

Bubbles and Illusions

...skimming the top off of asset bubbles appears to have become the leading way to get rich in these United States in the past three decades.

...how much of the apparent US productivity miracle, a miracle not shared by Europe, was a statistical illusion created by our bloated finance industry?

Trans-Europ Express

Chomsky

In fact, if you look today, it's quite striking to see the advice that the Western powers are following, the programs that they're following, and compare them to the instructions given to the third world.

(...) Indonesia had a huge financial crisis about ten years ago, and the instructions were the standard ones: "Here is what you have to do. First, pay off your debts to us. Second, privatize, so that we can then pick up your assets on the cheap. Third, raise interest rates to slow down the economy and force the population to suffer, you know, to pay us back." Those are the regular instructions the IMF is still giving them.

What do we do? Exactly the opposite. We forget about the debt, let it explode. We reduce interest rates to zero to stimulate the economy. We pour money into the economy to get even bigger debts. We don't privatize; we nationalize, except we don't call it nationalization. We give it some other name, like "bailout" or something. It's essentially nationalization without control. So we pour money into the institutions. We lectured the third world that they must accept free trade, though we accept protectionism.

Somali Pirates

Two Piracies.

"Are you or are you not a communist?"

Denial

Naked Capitalism: "KBW, a firm specializing in bank stocks, expects Wells Fargo to show $120 billion in "stress test losses", meaning losses under the assumption of a supposed worst case of recession through the first quarter of 2010 and unemployment reaching 12%."


Time: "The initial TARP may also have provided time for the new Administration to put together its widely hailed bank "stress test" program meant to determine which of the big financial institutions have dysentery and which do not. Finally, the hundreds of billions of dollars that went into the largest banks late last year allowed Secretary Geithner to produce his public/private partnership to buy toxic assets off of bank balance sheets. All of those plans, no matter how well-intentioned they may seem, are unnecessary now. Wells Fargo (WFC) indicated that it made about $3 billion in the first quarter of the year and declared its buyout of the deeply troubled Wachovia to be a success. Wells Fargo (WFC) said that the low cost of money from the government combined with a surging demand for mortgages was all the medicine that it required."

Stop Deportations Of Haitians From US

Ezili Dantò Note: Please folks, kindly call the White House Comment Line and Ask for a stop to all deportations to Haiti and a grant of work permits.

The White House is paying attention. Your call will make a DIFFERENCE. White House Comment line: 202-456-1111; FAX: 202-456-2461 (If you also fax, see sample TPS letter below) and comments@whitehouse.gov.

A legislative "solution" - that is a comprehensive immigration reform - will not get on the Congressional agenda for at least a year. Tell President Obama Haitians need the US to stop exacerbating Haiti's crisis now and that granting TPS of Defered Enforced Departure (DED) is the least that can be done RIGHT NOW. Please call the white house comment line (202-456-1111) and leave a message asking that President Obama grant TPS or DED to Haitians immediately. This concern of the Administration that an exodus from Haiti will follow is not only silly but discriminatory as others granted TPS have not had to deal with such excuses. It's a silly concern because how will this exodus happen when if Haiti had enough trees to make boats it would also have had enough trees to stop the ravages of last fall's storm floods!!!. Haiti has practically zero forest cover. So, no wood to make enough boats for such an EXODUS to occur! The few Haitian boats that do make it on the high seas are routinely intercepted by the US Coast Guard. Moreover, when President Clinton granted Haitians deferred enforced departure (DED) there was no exodus from Haiti. At the stroke of a
pen, President Obama may begin to stop exacerbating Haiti's suffering by formally stopping all deportations to Haiti, provide work permits and release all qualified deportees from ICE detention.

The White House is paying attention to the public's concern on this and the TPS issue is on their watch list and tallying sheets. Please increase our chances on this. Advocate directly to the Obama Administration by calling the White House Comment Line. Your call will make a DIFFERENCE.

White House Comment line: 202-456-1111

FAX: 202-456-2461 (See HLLN sample letter below);

e-mail-
comments@whitehouse.gov.


Sample Letter - (See also TPS Update: U.S. Resumes Deportation flights to Haiti).

The Honorable Barack Obama
President of the United States
The White House
Washington, DC 20500
Phone: 202 456-1111
Fax: 202-456-2461 | comments@whitehouse.gov

The Honorable Janet Napolitano
Secretary, Department of Homeland Security
2001 Independence Ave, SW
Washington, DC 20528
Phone: 202-282-8000
Fax: 202-282-8401
Homeland Security Comment Line: 202 282 8495

The Honorable Hillary Rodham Clinton
U.S. Secretary of State, U.S. Department of State
2201 C Street NW
Washington, DC 20520
Phone: 202-647-4000

DATE: ____, 2009


Dear President Barack Obama/ Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton / Secretary Janet Napolitano

Please designate the country of Haiti for Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for a period of 18 months with specifications to stop all deportations to Haiti.

In 2008, hurricanes and storms devastated Haiti, and presidential candidate Barack Obama stated:“I also urge the United States to work in partnership with President Rene Preval and the new Haitian government … to immediately assemble a task force on reconstruction and recovery to begin work as soon as the storms pass…Together, we can help Haiti recover from this terrible series of storms and renew efforts to bring hope and opportunity to the people of Haiti.”

Today, deportations to storm-ravage Haiti continue. When the US deports an income earner to storm-ravaged Haiti, this decreases remittances and further impoverishes family members. Diaspora remittances are the most effective and direct aid to the Haitian poor in Haiti.

In 2002 TPS was renewed for Nicaraguan and Honduran immigrants because of continuing difficulties caused by Hurricane Mitch in 1998. At this point, Haiti is in much worse shape than Central Americans were at the time. Haitians in the United States should receive equal treatment and protection. Haiti qualifies for Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and should be granted this disaster relief.

Four tropical storms and hurricanes battered Haiti during last year's harvest season, killing almost 1,000 people nationwide, decimating Haiti's agriculture and causing $1 billion in damage to irrigation, bridges and roads. Mudslides still cover entire towns. Houses are flooded. Schools have collapsed on children and people are starving. It's inhumane to deport Haitian back to Haiti under these devastating conditions, where they will find no home, no employment, no food, no personal safety and security.

TPS was established to provide protection to people who are temporarily unable to return to their homelands. Please help the people in Haiti by permitting their friends and relatives in the United States to remain here and to continue to send support to a nation in severe crisis. Please affirm the United States tradition of caring for and protecting persons in vulnerable situations by granting TPS and/or stopping all deportations through Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) or any equivalent administrative or executive ruling, with a specification to stop ALL deportations and provide work permits to Haitian nationals.

Sincerely,

Your name and contact information



_________________________________

*************

cc: Marguerite Laurent, Esq.
President, Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network (HLLN)
Phone: (203) 829-7210
P. O. Box 3573
Stamford, CT 06905
e-mail: ezilidanto@yahoo.com
www.ezilidanto.com

(William Primrose, viola)

Our drone wars also represent a new chapter in the history of assassination. Once upon a time, to be an assassin for a government was a furtive, shameful thing. In those days, of course, an assassin, if successful, took down a single person, not the targeted individual and anyone in the vicinity (or simply, if targeting intelligence proves wrong, anyone in the vicinity). No more poison-dart-tipped umbrellas, as in past KGB operations, or toxic cigars as in CIA ones -- not now that assassination has taken to the skies as an every day, all-year-round activity.

Today, we increasingly display our assassination wares with pride. To us, at least, it seems perfectly normal for assassination aerial operations to be a part of an open discussion in Washington and in the media. Consider this a new definition of "progress" in our world.

The test of a progressive policy is not private but public, not just rising income and consumption for individuals, but widening the opportunities and what Amartya Sen calls the "capabilities" of all through collective action. But that means, it must mean, public non-profit initiative, even if only in redistributing private accumulation. Public decisions aimed at collective social improvement from which all human lives should gain. That is the basis of progressive policy - not maximising economic growth and personal incomes.

Lesson 1

Threatened Glasgow schools occupied by parents

Submitted by afraser on Apr 3 2009

Parents have seized control of the closure threatened Wyndford Primary and St. Gregory's Primary Wyndford in the Maryhill area of Glasgow.

School occupations of Wyndford Primary and St. Gregory's Primary Wyndford both now running through the night.

Both schools are threatened with closure by Glasgow City Council.

An originally tense situation with police - who had threatened to storm the buildings around 6pm - has been resolved through negotiation, and the peaceful protests are being allowed to continue unharmed.

A rally in support of both schools to be held outside the school buildings (which adjoin each other) at 12 noon on Saturday 4th April.

Messages supporting the parents have been coming in from across Europe, including from the Dundee workers carrying out the Prisme Packaging factory occupation.

Heres some background from Resistance:

Plans hatched by Glasgow City Council to close 25 primary schools and nurseries have been met with fury by both parents and the wider Glasgow community. Reaction to these plans have seen thousands-strong demonstrations, roof top occupations and lock-ins as parents and the community make their anger heard.

Despite the city council, over recent years, selling off its social housing stock and passing common good property such as libraries, museums and sports facilities to private concerns, they still seem to have managed to spend £6,000,000 over-budget. Due to the council displaying the financial acumen of a jakey on giro day* they now claim that it's the city's children, and by extension its future, that has to suffer.

...

*The Anarchist Federation would like to apologise to Glasgow's colourful street drinking community for implying association with the city cooncil.

President Obama: “I will say this, that I believe that peace in the Middle East is possible. I think it will be based on two states, side by side, a Palestinian state and a Jewish state.”

From its typically conservative stance, the Department of Finance has moved to embrace a very pessimistic outlook projecting an unemployment rate of 15.5% in 2010 – up on a current level of over 11% and a projected figure of 12.6% in 2009. These figures are shocking. How many of the unemployed are at risk of becoming unemployable after years of being out of work? What about families dependent on social welfare with nobody in paid employment for prolonged periods and without the escape valve – for the foreseeable future – of emigration to the UK or the US?

The projected drop in GDP is now set at 7.7% for this year. The projected decline in GDP is increasing at a steady rate since last Autumn in each successive update of the figures. Have we seen the end of this upward slide? I think not, unfortunately. This is probably going to be the biggest (and fastest) drop in output of any advanced industrial country since World War 2. The implications for social well-being, social partnership, the state of public services, health, crime, civil unrest are profound. We should not panic but the scale of this downturn, its speed and its likely gathering impact on peoples' lives is shocking.

We are about to learn more hard lessons about the legacy of free-riding capitalism and its domestic application to Ireland in the last quarter century.

Edwina Nowlin, a poor Michigan resident, was ordered to reimburse a juvenile detention center $104 a month for holding her 16-year-old son. When she explained to the court that she could not afford to pay, Ms. Nowlin was sent to prison. The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, which helped get her out last week after she spent 28 days behind bars, says it is seeing more people being sent to jail because they cannot make various court-ordered payments.

I was starting to come to the conclusion that the plan would simply fizzle — that even though participating players would get a large put along with their free toaster, it wouldn’t be enough to raise the price they’re willing to pay to a level banks would be willing to sell at, rather than keep assets on the books at far above their true value. But once you take into account the possibility of insider deals, that all changes.

"At the heart of ancient tragedy lies individual isolation. The individual is alienated from his kin and the gods by violence and conflict. It is not a coincidence - this is what money does to you."

In the New York Times last week Ban Ki Moon noted: "Yes, Haiti remains desperately poor. It has yet to fully recover from last year's devastating hurricanes, not to mention decades of malign dictatorship. Yet we can report what President René Préval told us: 'Haiti is at a turning point.' It can slide backwards into darkness and deeper misery, sacrificing all the country's progress and hard work with the United Nations and international community. Or it can break out, into the light toward a brighter and more hopeful future."

Last August the secretary general was full of hope: "The time has come to rebuild the institutions that have been destroyed by years of neglect, corruption and violence, to strengthen them so that the State is able to deliver the services that the people need."

In his latest visit Ban said: "It is easy to visit Haiti and see only poverty. But when I visited recently with former President Bill Clinton, we saw opportunity. "My special adviser on Haiti, the Oxford University development economist Paul Collier, has worked with the government to devise a strategy. It identifies specific steps and policies to create those jobs with particular emphasis on the country's traditional strengths - the garment industry and agriculture. creating the sort of industrial 'clusters' that have come to dominate global trade.

". dramatically expanding the country's export zones, so that a new generation of textile firms can invest and do business in one place. By creating a market sufficiently large to generate economies of scale, they can drive down production costs and, once a certain threshold is crossed, spark potentially explosive growth constrained only by the size of the labour pool.

"That may seem ambitious in a country of nine million people, where 80 per cent of the population lives on less than $2 a day and half of the food is imported." Can anyone really be so ill-informed? Can anyone believe that a country of nine million poverty-stricken people living on less than $2 a day and importing half their food can generate thriving markets for anything but subsistence production? Ban Ki Moon is our new Dr Pangloss: All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.

Hold on tight to your screams!

“African Americans register at only 71.1 percent on the Equality Index – and slipping.”

Back in March of 2007, presidential candidate Barack Obama did a grave disservice to African Americans when he proclaimed that Blacks had already come 90 percent of the way on the road to racial equality. We don’t know where Obama came up with that ridiculous number, but he was way, way off the mark. According to the National Urban League’s State of Black America report, African Americans register at only 71.1 percent on the Equality Index – and slipping. Blacks fell almost half a percent further behind whites on the Equality Index between 2008 and 2009.

The Index measures Black progress, or regression, in five areas: economics, education, health, civic engagement and social justice. In only one of these categories – health – did Blacks slightly improve their relative status. And that minor blip was the result of the racial gap narrowing between Blacks and whites who share the misfortune of not having health insurance.

The general state of affairs for African Americans remains much as it has been for most of the last 40 years. "Ironically,” says the Urban League report, “even as an African American man holds the highest office in the country, African Americans remain twice as likely as whites to be unemployed, three times more likely to live in poverty and more than six times as likely to be incarcerated." That’s a very great distance from Barack Obama’s 90 percent-of-the-way nonsense.

A record 32.2 million people -- one in every 10 Americans -- received food stamps at the latest count, the government said on Thursday, a reflection of the recession now in its 16th month.

(via)

Two traders based in an office opposite RBS on Bishopsgate said they had walked across the City "to have a nice lunch and chill out". Sipping coffee after three courses and a few Marlboro Lights, they were angry that the police didn't seem to be making any arrests: "Its kicking off over in Bishopsgate", they said. "The demonstrators are goading the police and hitting them with sticks, but they are just letting them. They aren't arresting anyone."

And these two wanted to see the long arm of the law carting a few protesters away – because they had a financial interest in arrests. "I'll make money if they arrest more than 140", he said. Traders, he explained were putting spread bets on the number of arrests – with the quoted spread on Bloomberg at 130-140. They were also paying out on deaths and if more than 20 demonstrators are injured by horse charges.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Moment of Zen - Overseas Contingency Operations Budget
comedycentral.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

GROSS: Are you saying that you think Vice President Cheney is still having a chilling effect on people who might otherwise be coming forward and revealing things to you about what happened in the Bush administration?

HERSH: I’ll make it worse. I think he’s put people left. He’s put people back. They call it a stay behind. It’s sort of an intelligence term of art. When you leave a country and, you know, you’ve driven out the, you know, you’ve lost the war. You leave people behind. It’s a stay behind that you can continue to contacts with, to do sabotage, whatever you want to do. Cheney’s left a stay behind. He’s got people in a lot of agencies that still tell him what’s going on. Particularly in defense, obviously. Also in the NSA, there’s still people that talk to him. He still knows what’s going on. Can he still control policy up to a point? Probably up to a point, a minor point. But he’s still there. He’s still a presence. And again, because of the problems this administration’s having filling jobs, a lot of people who served in the Bush Cheney government, particularly even in the White House people on most sophisticated staffs are still there. You simply can’t get rid of everybody, you may not even want to. Some are professional people. But Cheney is, I would never call it admiration, but, you know, formidable, yeah, this guy. This guy is the real McCoy.

1. President Barack Obama believes a quick, negotiated bankruptcy is the most likely way for General Motors Corp. to restructure and become a competitive automaker, people familiar with the matter said.

2. ...based on estimates in the CDS market, there are about $1 trillion in CDSs betting on GM and their bonds. Any change in GM's situation, will create a rippling effect in this $1T CDS community of GM.

This week, Guantánamo!!! It was an incredible experience.

We arrived in Gitmo on Friday and stared going around the town, everybody knew Crystle and I were coming so the first thing we did was attend a big lunch and then we visited one of the bars they have in the base. We talked about Gitmo and what is was like living there. The next days we had a wonderful time, this truly was a memorable trip! We hung out with the guys from the East Coast and they showed us the boat inside and out, how they work and what they do, we took a ride around the land and it was a loooot of fun!

We also met the Military dogs, and they did a very nice demonstration of their skills. All the guys from the Army were amazing with us.

We visited the Detainees camps and we saw the jails, where they shower, how the recreate themselves with movies, classes of art, books. It was very interesting.

We took a ride with the Marines around the land to see the division of Gitmo and Cuba while they were informed us with a little bit of history.

The water in Guantánamo Bay is soooo beautiful! It was unbelievable, we were able to enjoy it for at least an hour. We went to the glass beach, and realized the name of it comes from the little pieces of broken glass from hundred of years ago. It is pretty to see all the colors shining with the sun. That day we met a beautiful lady named Rebeca who does wonders with the glasses from the beach. She creates jewelry with it and of course I bought a necklace from her that will remind me of Guantánamo Bay :)

I didn’t want to leave, it was such a relaxing place, so calm and beautiful.

“It’s just a crime the way it puts people in limbo. They first off have gone through the grief of losing their house, then they move out and find out that they still own it and have responsibility for it.”

Four wars, a Moon landing and the rebuilding of Europe: all that and more could have been paid for with the cost of the US government's proposals for saving its banking industry.

Last week's instalment of the great bailout - the government's pledge to buy up to $1tn of toxic assets in conjunction with the private sector - brings the total US rescue initiatives to $11.6tn. Only one other event in the past century has cost more than $1tn, after adjusting for inflation, and that was the second world war. Add in the cost of nine other 20th-century initiatives, from the war on terror to the New Deal, and the total is $7.5tn - less than two-thirds of the banking bailout.

The Marshall Plan, intended to rebuild Europe after the devastation of war, cost less than a hundredth of the value of the banking rescue. Add in the price of two other US economic packages - the New Deal and the Savings & Loan bailout of the 80s - and the $887bn cost is still well under a tenth of today's total.

I have yet to see a culture where truly shared values were proclaimed by fiat from above rather than forged by struggle and through consensus from below, let alone one where the primary responsibilty for tolerance rests with the most impoverished minority group that faces the most intolerance.

Phrase of the Day

Via Greenwald,

Newsweek's Evan Thomas in the magazine's cover story:

If you are of the establishment persuasion (and I am), reading Krugman makes you uneasy. You hope he's wrong, and you sense he's being a little harsh (especially about Geithner), but you have a creeping feeling that he knows something that others cannot, or will not, see. By definition, establishments believe in propping up the existing order. Members of the ruling class have a vested interest in keeping things pretty much the way they are. Safeguarding the status quo, protecting traditional institutions, can be healthy and useful, stabilizing and reassuring.But sometimes, beneath the pleasant murmur and tinkle of cocktails, the old guard cannot hear the sound of ice cracking. The in crowd of any age can be deceived by self-confidence, as Liaquat Ahamed has shown in "Lords of Finance," his new book about the folly of central bankers before the Great Depression, and David Halberstam revealed in his Vietnam War classic, "The Best and the Brightest." Krugman may be exaggerating the decay of the financial system or the devotion of Obama's team to preserving it. But what if he's right, or part right?

In 2003, thousands of American soldiers were unexpectedly uprooted from Afghanistan and sent off to fight in a long and bloody war overseas. After serving multiple tours of duty in Iraq, the vast majority of these troops said they couldn't wait to get back and have their lives return to normal.

Suppose a bank is sitting on a $10 million package of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that was put together by, say, Countrywide out of junk mortgages. Given the high proportion of fraud (and a recent Fitch study found that every package it examined was rife with financial fraud), this package may be worth at most only $2 million as defaults loom on Alt-A “liars’ loan” mortgages and subprime mortgages where the mortgage brokers also have lied in filling out the forms for hapless borrowers or witting operators taking out mortgages at far more than properties were worth and pocketing the excess.

The bank now offers $3 million to buy back this mortgage. What the hell, the more they bid, the more they get from the government. So why not bid $5 million. (In practice, friendly banks may bid for each other’s junk CDOs.) The government – that is, the hapless FDIC – puts up 85 per cent of $5 million to buy this – namely, $4,250,000. The bank only needs to put up 15 per cent – namely, $750,000.

Here’s the rip-off as I see it. For an outlay of $750,000, the bank rids its books of a mortgage worth $2 million, for which it receives $4,250,000. It gets twice as much as the junk is worth.

The more the banks holding junk mortgages pay for this toxic waste, the more the government will pay as part of its 85 per cent. So the strategy is to overpay, overpay, and overpay. Paying 15 per cent is a small price to pay for getting the government to put in 85 per cent to take the most toxic waste off your books.

Two hundred schoolchildren in Britain, some as young as 13, have been identified as potential terrorists by a police scheme that aims to spot youngsters who are "vulnerable" to Islamic radicalisation.

People living in the world's poorest communities are eating less frequently and consuming worse food as a result of the global financial crisis, according to a study of the impact of the recession in five developing nations published today.

"There is a sort of very pure democracy and self-governance at play. People are making up the rules of their cluster of tents, deciding what's permitted, just as in any sort of community," she said. "You don't want to romanticise this - it isn't camping - but there is a community, and there is a sense of helping others. We've had a series of storms here recently, and if there's somebody new who doesn't have a tent, people will take them in. It's that understanding that, you know, there's somebody worse off than I am."

Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on Thursday blamed the global economic crisis on “white people with blue eyes” and said it was wrong that black and indigenous people should pay for white people’s mistakes.