LILA RAJIVA: The Mind-Body Politic
Individuals Not Ideologies
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Archive of "Activism" Category
More Agora - Updated 3/6/2010- Stansberry Response/SEC
While googling, I stumbled on some weird material by a blogger Jennifer Lake, who seems to have gotten some facts mixed up about libertarian newsletter publisher, Agora Inc. [I've since had time to read through her archives and many of her entries are overtly anti-semitic]
“Agora Inc. was established as a publishing company in Washington D.C. in 1979 by its founders; William Bonner, Jim Dale Davidson, Porter Stansberry and Lord William Rees-Moog.
(Lila: I don’t believe Stansberry was involved in founding it…he might not even have been born would have been very young at the time; and it’s Rees-Mogg. Moog is the electronic synthesizer. Also, most people who’ve written on the subject don’t mention Rees-Mogg as a founder, except Lyndon Larouche.
Besides Larouche, the person who harps on Rees-Mogg is a minor Internet spammer and web-stalker, Tony Ryals, who apparently lost money in an investment promoted by Davidson and has spent the last five years multiple posting on the company and on anyone connected to it, and as I can testify from personal experience, most of his rants are exaggerations, distortions, disinformation, and “magical” thinking, with some much-mangled facts hidden somewhere, if you have the patience to unearth them)
(Since I wrote this, I’ve found another piece. with this information, by EIR. EIR or Executive Intelligence Review is a Larouche outfit whose macro perspective has generally been regarded as conspiracist, anti-semitic (Christopher Bollyn), and/or paranoid, although many also concede that some of its work is accurate.
I am not linking it here, although I’ve seen it cited by William Engdahl, a credible left-oriented writer, as I’m not sure whether the citation is genuine or a hoax of some kind).
“Notorious for promoting Penny Stock fraud”
(Lila: Not to defend Agora, but it promotes penny-stock and many other investments, not all of which are fraudulent by any means, unless you count any promotion of stocks to be fraudulent. Most penny-stocks in tip-sheets, frankly, are promoted in questionable ways. For that matter, a large proportion of investments of any kind, even in mainstream publications, are promoted quite questionably. Check out the government/real estate industry promotion of the housing bubble, if you disbelieve me).
“and supporting an offshore investment network, Agora has a core membership of world-traveling Libertarians who have connections at the highest levels of government and industry.
Through the illegal practice of naked short-selling, domestic Agorans function as “economic hitmen” and support “sovereign” enterprizes of all descriptions that move national and personal resources overseas to emerging markets.”
(Lila: This seems to be some kind of populist nonsense. Who exactly are “domestic Agorans” and how do they function as “economic hitmen”? I’ve never heard of naked short-selling in conjunction with Agora, but it’s certainly true that penny-stock promoters often work with naked short-sellers, through off-shore havens and exchanges like Vancouver. I know financial reporter Carol Remond has written on this, in relation to some Agora newsletters, and I’ll try to unearth the link. However, I’ve never heard any one at Agora encouraging the moving of “national resources” overseas….unless you include pointing out that employers will go where labor is cheap…..or suggesting diversification abroad)
“The primary operatives of Agora pose as financial experts and advisors, selling information over the internet that targets a variety of consumer interests including “natural health”, real estate, travel and leisure. Agora counts George Soros and known Rothschild agents among its “friends” as well as American “patriots” and “truthtellers”.
(Lila: Never heard that Soros was a friend.
(March 6, 2010): See above for research by EIR/William Engdahl)
Jim Rogers, Steve Forbes, and Marc Faber are.
As a right libertarian outfit, Agora and its original founder/s would likely not be terribly sympathetic to a pro-regulation, pro-one world government, mega currency speculator like Soros. It’s possible that one or other faction within the outfit might sympathize with Soros, but they would likely be more liberal-left in their political leanings than the outfit).
Now, I’ve been quite critical of Agora (within the limits of what you can say of a place where you once worked). I’ve noted their strident marketing hype; the SEC conviction of one of their newsletter publishers, in 2007 (a conviction that’s been appealed, and that in all fairness wasn’t a very convincing one…right guy, wrong case, is my opinion on that; you can read why at the website of UK investigative reporter, Brian Deer); the questionable histories of some of their former and current senior people (Davidson, Masterson); but in this case, Ms. Lake’s blog seems to have wandered off into fiction.
[Update: You can read the defendant’s account of what happened at The Daily Reckoning. Here is the SEC’s original case, brought in 2003 and the link to the 2007 conviction.
Update, March 9, 2010: I’m adding a link to the New York Times piece on the SEC case in 2003, which treats the case as a First Amendment issue.
That’s not entirely true either, but the case is a weak one, as I blogged before.
On the other hand, it’s also clear from reading some of the marketing literature put out by the company that the hype used by some of the newsletters, the ‘hard sell,’ walks a very fine line and often crosses it. In the case cited by Deer, some language seems fraudulent, even though Deer’s use of the term “pump” (which implies ownership of the stock by the ‘pumper’) is also not warranted by the facts he cites.
Could all this contradictory and exaggerated posting be disinformation? Could be. But why and by whom, is the question.
And, darn. “Rothschild agents”? That sounds exciting. (March 6, 2010: See EIN above, again)
Ms. Lake goes on:
“The owner/founders of Agora have invested deeply to profit from general and specific disasters like economic collapse and the Swine Flu Pandemic……
Agora Financial publishes a journal called The Daily Reckoning, editor Addison Wiggin, featuring contributions from ’staff’ such as Lew Rockwell (LewRockwell.com), Gerald Celente (Trends Research) and Dr. Ron Paul (US Congress) http://dailyreckoning.com/cast-of-characters/ This group, and the extended arms of Agora, advocate nation-building investments in developing countries that often include international projects funded by US taxpayers. Non-profit Agora Partnerships USA, for example, uses ‘micro’ venture capital and US tax-paid grants to seed entrepreneurial programs abroad and build ’sustainable economies’ for other countries. Agora Partnerships USA shares an office in Washington DC with USAID, United States Agency for International Development, and it’s TechnoServe program.
http://www.agorapartnerships.org/press/Press/press-releases/about/contact/contact-us
http://www.usaid.gov/sa/usaidsa/technoservepress.pdf
The same building hosts the Economic Research Services of the US Dept of Agriculture, it’s primary policy, financing and forecasting service for domestic and global planning. Agora appears to be well within the loop, so this is about far more than hiring a Health Ranger to gatekeep for Shangri-la.”My Comment:
Where to start, with so many mistakes?
For starters, Lew Rockwell, Gerald Celente, and Ron Paul are not staff writers for Agora.
They are libertarian columnists whose writing Agora frequently runs. The Daily Reckoning publishes material from scores of libertarian writers, sometimes without telling the writer. Drawing conclusions from that is plain silly..
Next up, as far as I can gather, Agora Partnerships has nothing to do with Agora Inc. I looked through their website carefully, and could find nothing to confirm the kind of affiliation that is charged here. The identity of the name seems to be purely coincidental. I could be mistaken, and maybe there is some hidden link. But there’s certainly no evidence for it on Ms. Lake’s blog.
(Correction: In light of the EIR/Engdahl piece, I will be doing a little more leg work on this purported association…)
Agora no doubt profits from many of the ideas or concepts it promotes. It’s been an advocate of Americans diversifying into foreign real estate for years….and it sells foreign real estate (correction: it advertises foreign real estate being sold by its affiliates and associates). But as critical as I am of the outfit, I’ve never come across anything to suggest that its libertarian ideas weren’t sincere….
Does Agora enjoy high-level government/business connections? Yes….but not the kind this blog charges, I think.
“Empire of Debt” (2005, Bonner & Wiggin) and its spin-off “IOUSA” (Wiggin & Incontrera) were promoted by the mainstream media, and specifically, by Peter Peterson and his Concord Coalition.
I’ve blogged about Peterson’s political and financial agenda more than once. The Concord Coalition seems to be a part of any bipartisan initiative about government debt you come across….
And the programs it supports are usually social-welfare busting. I’ve also noted connections between Agora and the CIA, including the employment of former CIA agents, and the appearance of former CIA director William Casey’s Colby’s name on an Agora newsletter. But it’s not unheard of for financial newsletters/ tip-sheets to use former government employees or intelligence officers to ferret out economic tips.
In fact, it stands to reason they would…corporate intelligence and state intelligence often melding seamlessly into each other.
By itself, these aren’t damning facts. And by itself, these facts are irrelevant to any public interest.
There are other facts that certainly need untangling, for those involved, and should there be a public interest, but Ms. Lake’s blog seems so wrapped up in its partisan (”economic hit-men”) obfuscations that it seems to have missed those…
Update (March 8 ) I had time to go through her archive and I found overtly anti-Semitic language about “parasites” and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in one of her posts, confirming my decision not to link the material cited by Engdahl (with the EIR byline).
(Note: her blog began only in July 2009, around the time I posted a detailed criticism of Agora that I later took down to avoid claims of defamation)
Maverick Managers Say Short the S&P, Bonds, and Goldman
A Barron´s interview with Bearing Asset Management´s Kevin Duffy and Bill Laggner, via Lew Rockwell:
“Do you see the S&P 500 retesting its lows of this year?
Duffy: It’s difficult to know. It depends on how much money gets printed. In real terms, can we get cut in half from here? We think so. S&P earnings are distorted because of accounting changes for banks and brokers; if banks were marked to market, S&P earnings next year could fall to $45 a share. Bullish sentiment is rivaling the 2007 top, and volatility has fallen dramatically. We like the VXX, an exchange-traded note that’s based on S&P 500 short-term volatility as measured by the VIX index. It’s down 67% this year, and fits into the whole idea that complacency is very high.
GATA Sues Federal Reserve For Records On Gold Manipulation
From the website of the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee, the leading activist against gold price manipulation in the market:
“GATA today brought suit against the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, seeking a court order for disclosure of the central bank’s records of its surreptitious market intervention to suppress the monetary metal’s price.”
For some of my warnings of gold price manipulation, see the following:
“Was the IMF Involved in Gold Price Manipulation?” Dissident Voice, June, 2006
“Hanky-Panky at the Counting House,” Dissident Voice, June 6, 2006
Social Media Machinations Of the Financial Press
A piece of Orwellian obfuscation by one Tom Sykes at Daily Kos *(see note at the bottom of this post) goes into the file, rip-roaring propaganda:
“I want to be clear on something up front. I think hedge-funds are a menace and should be outlawed. I think Goldman Sachs is a criminal conspiracy and its whole leadership should be indicted.
There are plenty of commentators, like Paul Krugman in the New York Times today and Matt Taibbi in his article in Rolling Stone, that have done great reporting on Goldman and on hedge funds.
But what we’re seeing is how a really odious character named Patrick Byrne is trying to hijack this issue…”
My Comment:
Byrne hijacked Taibbi? The liberals busted Goldman Sachs and naked short-selling and the hedge funds?
Aren’t Goldman Sachs and the hedge-funds the money men who funded the whole left-establishment..and wasn’t it people on the right libertarian side who busted them, and in fact called the whole financial crisis?
The libs were on the case only in 2008 when everyone was on the case and you’d have to have been blind not to notice.
This kind of revisionism makes me question the impetus behind the Rip Van Winkle awakening of the MSM on the financial crisis.
Either it shows that the MSM can’t see what’s going on in front of its collective nose, which argues that its working hypotheses are wrong (the kinder interpretation), or it shows rank dishonesty (the truer interpretation, likely).
I’d go with the first interpretation, only the hatchet job the press keeps doing on anyone from the other side of the political spectrum suggests that the second interpretation is the right one.
As I’ve repeated ad nauseum, Taibbi seems to have lifted my Goldman Sachs piece of 2006 (Money Week) as well as a bunch of other articles written in 2007-2008 (see ABOUT) . You can read it on the net and then go back and see what Taibbi wrote, only about three years after I did. (He probably pinched stuff from at least one other person as well). You will also see that I wrote more than half-a-dozen articles on Goldman after that in 2006 and 2007 (check this site). In 2008, everyone began writing about Goldman. I figure someone at Rolling Stone got worried that the population was beginning to wake up to which side really had the goods, and decided to co-opt the issue before their intellectual ineptness was too evident.
Otherwise, I’m hard pressed to explain why they don’t think they need to source and attribute correctly. They can’t all be such intellectual charlatans? Right?
As for naked short selling, Byrne has been waging that campaign since 2005.…and some others on the right, even before him. Even people who don’t think there’s an NSS hedge-fund-media conspiracy involved have long ago conceded that NSS is a problem (see this Motley Fool piece from 2005), and that it’s difficult to figure out what’s really going on, because the DTC/SEC, for example, won’t/can’t release the figures needed to assess the situation.
(Now, why would anyone think conspiracy when there’s stone-walling going on…)
Matt Taibbi basically borrowed Byrne’s argument. And having taken the argument, the establishment is now trying to discredit the person who made it first (see Ritholtz here and here, even before the Facebook brouhaha).
It’s not irrelevant that in coming to his conclusions, Ritholtz cites only the very same journalists whose credibility is shot by the evidence of their collusion with hedge-funds. That is certainly a bizarre way to report on a topic.
Mind you, this should not be taken to be an endorsement on my part of Byrne’s business practices or accounting, about which I know only what I have read. And that of course has mostly been written by his critics and critics of the NSS thesis, like Dow Jones reporter, Carol Remond.
But Remond, despite her reputation as a respected reporter on penny-stock scams, is seriously compromised in her reporting on this issue because of alleged collusion with hedge funds.
I say alleged, to be on the safe side, but to my eyes the evidence is convincing.
On the other hand, Overstock has repeated accounting problems that its foes argue are the real reason for its NSS campaign.
How serious these problems are is hard to say.
Of the two accountants who routinely denounce Byrne’s business practices in multiple postings that take up a remarkably (and suggestively) disproportionate space on their blogs, one, Sam Antar, has been convicted of one of the most extensive cases of embezzlement in recent history. Antar also claims the mantle of reformed felon without any evidence that restitution of the embezzled funds took place. He escaped prosecution only by turning in his own family. This is not a confidence-builder. Actually, there’s some evidence of further wrong-doing involving one Barry Minkow that’s also posted on the Deep Capture blog. Antar and Mankiw are practicing greenmail, according to this piece.
(Its author uses the term loosely. Greenmail, in recent US financial history, is what Michael Milken is infamous for - a type of corporate raid. And Milken is one of the central villains in the Deep Capture story of the corruption of Wall Street. Since I researched this period for a book I was planning to write on Goldman Sachs, I’m conversant enough with the subject to say with some confidence that Byrne is on the right track on this).
The other accountant who criticizes Byrne, Tracy Coenan, seems to be another ally of Antar and equally over- concerned with the accounting problems of Overstock, to the neglect of other companies.
Yet these are the only two accounting experts I see cited by Weiss.
Could there be other things wrong with Overstock?
Perhaps.
I have no way of knowing. But what I do know doesn’t so far make me think the problems are related in any way to the thesis of Deep Capture. The accounting errors don’t seem especially egregious, compared to the rest of what is going on in the market that the reform movement that Byrne spearheads is trying to tackle.
So is Deep Capture’s work discredited because of Byrne’s alleged and real problems?
No.
Overstock could very well be mismanaged and Byrne could be guilty of accounting shenanigans. That has nothing whatsoever to do with the extensive, indeed, mind-boggling, ties between supposedly neutral financial reporters and the hedge-funds that Deep Capture report on. The evidence the site has collected is shocking and undercuts any defense of the neutrality of the reporters in question (Bethany McLean, Remond, Weiss, Herb Greenberg, Roddy Boyd, etc).
To return to the media manipulation story.
After Taibbi put the two stories on Rolling Stone, Goldman and Penson came out and shot them down.
Taibbi, strangely, for a supposed target of Goldman and for all his righteous indignation over NSS, vanishes on the latter subject (NSS) and retracts parts of the former.
So what happens?
The entire Goldman argument gets reduced to “Goldman corrupted the regulators,” which works very well if you want more government and more regulators (and we are not fundamentalists on either subject). The good part of that from the point of view of the MSM is that that lets them displace the outrage on one or two figures (Rubin, for example), while using GS as a whipping-boy to funnel off popular rage from any effective overhaul/criminal prosecution, as well as to deflect it from the evidence of conspiratorial criminal activity.
(Yes, there are conspiracies, Virginia, and often the ones protesting loudly that they don’t exist are part of them…unwittingly or not).
Take this piece at Business Insider by Ritholtz, which sets up the boundaries of establishment discourse, with Taibbi and Gasparino at either end. What it does is to come down roughly “midway” between the two in a way that conveniently does nothing to change the centrist liberal establishment discourse.
(At least, that’s my take).
Now, Taibbi comes from a well-established media background, with a father who was an NBC TV man.
It’s hard to believe he doesn’t know the ethics and etiquette of sourcing. In fact, it’s downright impossible.
We’d have to conclude that
1. He was tasked with co-opting the stories for political or national security reasons.
2. Or lacks journalistic integrity, a deficiency fairly rampant these days….
3. Or wants to protect the left-liberal establishment on the issue….
4. Or some combination of the above.
Note:
*Tom Sykes is apparently a sock-puppet created by Gary Weiss, the former Forbes and Business Week reporter, at least, according to the considerable evidence amassed at Deep Capture.
Note: I have sent several mob/corruption-related articles to the Deep Capture team and consider myself a supporter of their research, which I’ve tried to link and forward to others, as well as to more generally publicize. I don’t think that prevents me from assessing the merits of their claims objectively. I don’t, for example, condone any social engineering attacks on social media sites like facebook, no matter what the legal status of such attacks is. Frankly, the work Deep Capture is doing on market/media corruption is too important for its members to get into such unworthy activities. Nor do I think bringing in personalities, family members, or even private networks of journalists is particularly important or even necessary. The point is not whether a journalist talks to or is friendly with another journalist….or even hedge-fund. The point is whether their work is significantly biased by the friendship and whether they disclose the friendship and attempt to correct for it. I appreciate a number of left and liberal writers, even when I disagree with them, because I find them intellectually honest and reasonably objective (complete objectivity being impossible as well as unnecessary). That’s not a very high standard to demand now, is it?
Support the Goldstone Report
Jewish Appeal to Support the Goldstone Report
The primary author of the recently released UN Report on Gaza, the internationally respected jurist Richard Goldstone, has been attacked by establishment voices within the Jewish community. When those within a community try to “excommunicate” and dishonor a truth-teller, it is our obligation and responsibility to speak out vehemently on their behalf and on behalf of the truth they bring.
By all accounts, Judge Goldstone, who has a deep connection to Israel, approached his task with no pre-conceptions about what he and his team would find as they investigated the circumstances and aftermath of the Israeli attack on Gaza. Goldstone is a former South African constitutional law court judge who also served as a prosecutor of the Yugoslav and Rwandan war crimes tribunals. His credentials for this task are impeccable.
For following where the truth led him and releasing a report detailing human rights abuses and violations of international law by Israel, as well as Hamas, Judge Goldstone should be applauded for his honesty and integrity. Instead, he and the report have been viciously and relentlessly attacked by many within the Jewish community.
When it comes to Israel, hard-core censorship and intimidation by those claiming to speak in the name of the Jewish people have been the order of the day. Our saying, “Three Jews–four opinions,” reflects the traditional Jewish encouragement to argue and debate. But the reality, sadly, is that diverse opinions are welcome–except when it comes to Israel.
We must hold the Israeli government and the Jewish establishment accountable for attempting to vilify a truth-teller and for suppressing the truth about Israeli government crimes against the Palestinian people. We call upon each and every one of us to speak out at every opportunity–at our community centers and synagogues, in our homes, in the street, wherever we go.
We must demand that the truth be heard and that those claiming to speak in our name stop manipulating truths that have been well-documented for years, long before the Goldstone report. We are also appalled by the Obama Administration’s reaction to the report. We call for a fair and impartial investigation of the report’s allegations by non-military institutions in Israel. Failing that, we call for an investigation by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Let us begin the New Year in the pursuit of justice.
Sincerely,
Blog Comment Policy
Here is my comment policy:
If you persistently repeat an aggressive argument in multiple comments without further evidence or logic, I will consider it flaming and delete it. If you indulge in ad hominem or obvious racial/religious/sexual/cultural bigotry, I will delete or edit your comment.
Karen de Coster on Matt Yglesias on Public School Funding…
Hmm..some flying fur:
Matt Yglesias has a blog post called “School for Rich Kids Isn’t Charity” to which Karen de Coster administers several unkindest cuts.
The gist of Yglesias’ argument is that private school tuition money should be taxed because it’s money that really ought to be going to public schools, if those varmint parents only knew their duty to the state.
Well, first, as Ms. de Coster points out, those private school parents (and everyone else) are already paying for public schools through property taxes. So what Yglesias is asking for is a punitive second tax, for the sin of opting out (with your own money) of the free goodies the state wants you to have to make you yet another dependent. A dependent who will then be a reliable vote for expansion of the state.
Ms. de Coster is a CPA who’s probably (?) never taught in a school, private or public. I have.
[Note: this seems to have come off as a brush-off. It's not meant to be. Just explaining why I think I have something to add, from anecdotal experience, to a theoretical debate].
So let me toss my two cents in.From my experience (and it’s not extensive), public schools have problems but they’re not caused by lack of money primarily For my part, I made better money teaching in a public school for troubled inner-city children than I ever did teaching in private schools. There was grant money coming to the school. Whether it was usefully spent or not I don’t know. Everyone worked, but the students came from such difficult backgrounds (routine gun fights in their neighborhood, missing parents, pervasive drug addiction, an AIDS patient in one case, malnourishment, street life with its attractions and traps, it was an uphill and probably futile task. The school folded up in three months when the funds suddenly vanished.
Private school wasn’t always much richer but it was different. One of my first jobs teaching in the US was teaching music at a private boy’s school. It was supposedly part-time but I got into the classroom at 6:30 and left only at 3:00, with my time entirely taken up by classes and prep. I was paid $4000 a semester for that. (Fortunately it was only one of three jobs I held at the time). It was probably the hardest work I ever did. There were between 20-35 rather rambunctious boys between the ages of five and 14 who didn’t take kindly to choral instruction, music theory, or my accent. One asked me with disdain why I didn’t look like Vanna White, his heroine (he was nine). Another was so disruptive I had him stand in the corner, where he created more disruption by announcing sotto voce that the art teacher was being undressed by the geography teacher, and he could see it through a hole in the wall. (There was no hole in the wall. Like Saki’s heroine, he was a specialist in romance at short notice).
He was all of five, had a tow head and a face like a cherub, but it didn’t stop him from calling everyone a “d*** face” whenever he had a chance. I finally had to talk to his mother, who received my complaints frostily. Angel-face had already told her that naughty teacher has used the word “wimp” to his preciousness (I’d jokingly told him not to be a wimp but to come up and join the rest of the band)…. which had left him too shaken, poor darling, to continue.
As for “d*** face,” she was sure he would never use such language, she said, in a tone that let me know she was sure I would…..
What I’m saying is that private school can be as tough and underpaid as any public school. And there can be just as uncooperative parents and difficult children.
Money isn’t the main problem with public schools. The problem in the inner cities is the environment in which the school and the children are forced to function; the administrators who have no conception of what’s needed; and a culture that doesn’t support learning.My high school in India was half-built and lacked running water in one of the labs. I remember sitting on sand in one class. We had no xerox machines, no computers, no type-writers or calculators in the class. There was a broken-down piano (an enormous luxury in India), old books sent to us from America for the library. We loved them for the glossy pictures, lively text and smooth pages. Our own Indian text-books were printed smudgily on cheap paper, rarely had pictures, and tended to be litanies of facts. It was in those old discarded text books that I first read about Robert Fulton and the steam ship and the duel between Burr and Hamilton. It didn’t make a difference that I read it leaning against an old pile of bricks, doodling in the sand, while a nineteen-year old, in a green sari and a huge rose in her bun, sang out the endless details of the Tree-tee of Ver-sigh-liz, while the boys tried to catch her eye.
It didn’t make a difference to our education because there was a culture of learning. The students came from households that were often struggling to pay the bills, for whom uniforms and books and lunch boxes on small middle-class Indian salaries was an enormous sacrifice. But those households placed an extremely high value on learning and accomplishment. They were largely professional or academic families. If a teacher scolded or punished us, our parents took the teacher’s side (for the most part). We didn’t have television to distract us. We had structured time to study at home. We had standards demanded from us. We had people who had a firm grasp, if not of their subject, of the role they had to play in the class room.
Matt Yglesias often has interesting things to say. But on this one, Ms. de Coster is right. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Money isn’t the central problem in public schools. I doubt that it’s even really a major problem.
Samuel Adams On Who Wins
“It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds”
– Samuel AdamsTravel Like a Libertarian….
A new piece with some travel tips at Lew Rockwell.
Here’s the opening:
“A while ago I wrote an article suggesting that for some libertarians it might be time to run.
I still think it is. But I also think your journey abroad should be reasoned and carefully planned, or it could leave you worse off, not better. Run smart, not stupid.
To help you do that, here are some things I’ve learned from years of going back and forth across the world. I’ve grouped them under four headings that express fundamental elements of a libertarian stance in the world.
Connectivity (the free market is all about communicating and persuading)
Security (libertarians should take the initiative in defending themselves)
Simplicity (less always makes for more independence)
Flexibility (don’t resist change; it’s the essence of the free market)Renouncing America in India (Comment added)
Jeff Knaebel tore up his US passport out of hatred for the state and became a stateless person wandering through the villages in India. In case you’re thinking he must be some kind of hippy, Knaebel is a former CEO of a company and an engineer trained at Cornell University.
“The one actual, real and direct action that I could take was to break the paper chains that were holding me as a slave to the Empire. I tore up my U.S. passport at the Gandhi Samadhi, Rajghat, New Delhi. Rather than arrest me, the Indian police told me that I was free to roam anywhere in India, and to call them for help if I ran into any trouble.
The great Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote, “Man is moral choice.” This is what I have been calling the Law of Moral Causation. By unilateral renunciation of my citizenship, I chose to assert my responsibility by denying that the U.S. government could act in my name and on my behalf.
Here is the quotation of a freedom fighter in Mexico which seems equally relevant to the India of today:
“Why is it necessary to kill and to die so that you should listen to Ramona, seated here beside me, tell you that Indian women want to live, want to study, want hospitals, want medicines, want schools, want food, want respect, want justice, want dignity? ~ Insurgente Marcos to President of Mexico Salinas after the cease fire in Chiapas, San Cristobal de las Casas, February 1994 (Our Word Is Our Weapon, Seven Stories Press).
I plan to continue to present to the State and to humanity the question of whether we are ready to permit a peace-loving man to exist and to move about freely, without tracking tags and permission-to-exist documents. Or have we been so thoroughly conditioned that everyone except third world villagers and tribal people is destined to live in the big surveillance sheep pens constructed by states all over the world.
Hat-tip to Lew Rockwell for running the article on his site.
My Comment
Bravo for the gesture. But as an Indian by birth I must say I wouldn’t advise any expat Indian to try this. The Indian police will treat you very differently from a vellakara (this is Tamil for ‘white man’ ). A friend of mine, a graduate of one of the Indian Institutes of Technology, spent the year after his graduation roaming India, minus “English language privilege” - i.e. he pretended he didn’t speak it. He said he saw a side of India he hadn’t experienced until then.
Besides, the cynic in me wants to know - did Knaebel dispose of his assets before this gesture….or after? And if so, how? I’m sorry if my questions seem derisive. They’re meant respectfully.
I feel the same way about some…some... elements in the “patriot” movement.
Did civil liberties and the police state work them up so much when George Bush was in power? Is it civil liberties or the thought of an African-American president that incenses some people?
I’d say in a few cases it’s the latter….
Activism: Jewish Voices for Peace Needs Your Support
From Jewish Voices for Peace:
“Upset about the inclusion of a film about Rachel Corrie at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, Koret–one of California’s largest Jewish foundations–issued a statement calling movie sponsors Jewish Voice for Peace and the American Friends Service Committee (yes, pacifist Quakers) “virulently anti-Israel, anti-Semitic groups.”
We need your support to counteract these lies.
Jewish Voice for Peace is an organization that includes Israelis, Jewish educators, rabbis, Holocaust survivors and their children and grandchildren. We’ve written extensively about the issue of anti-Semitism, and our members are an essential part of a burgeoning Jewish cultural and spiritual renaissance……. What changed? Why now?
And how is the backlash here linked to the backlash against pro-democracy activists in Israel?
We think it’s because now, the world’s attention is on settlements, and for the first time in recent memory, a US administration is creating pressure on Israel. That means that this is a historic opportunity and that we need your financial support to take full advantage of this moment….”Please go to the Jewish Voices for Peace website.
to help.More Wiki and I….
Some wiki criteria for notability:
1. The person has received a notable award or honor, or has been often nominated for them.YES - The Getabstract business book award is a major and influential international business award and the Frankfurt fair is considered one of the top book fairs in the world.
2. The person has made a widely recognized contribution that is part of the enduring historical record in his or her specific field.[7]
YES - I am a contributor to the Routlege Key Concepts Series, on the subject “Torture,” - that is, my contribution the subject is considered worthy of entry in a very influential series that defines subject areas for college students. Language of Empire is cited over several disciplines…
I made early and important contributions in the alternative press to the two most important stories in the last ten years in American politics - torture and the financial scandal.
3.. The person has created, or played a major role in co-creating, a significant or well-known work, or collective body of work, that has been the subject of an independent book or feature-length film, or of multiple independent periodical articles or reviews.
YES - MOBS, MESSIAHS, AND MARKETS has been the subject of many independent reviews and citations. So has THE LANGUAGE OF EMPIRE
4. The person has been interviewed by major media or press
YES - in several papers.
Of course, it’s not upto me how these criteria are interpreted…
FINALLY - Very relevant - the context. Last week, I wrote controversial blog posts on the Wall Street-media mafias and social media attacks, and I also criticized my co-author’s company for a two year history of mis-attribution. I believe this nomination is a result of that attribution fight.
Last week, I also went on to say a few more things, naming some extremely powerful people and revealing that I had email records to document what I was saying. Thereafter, the deletion nomination appeared [delete removed, August 7]
The first and second nominations for deletion also appeared in a political context.
Added (August 7): It’s also the case that on the wiki entry, I was able to list my articles and where they were first published. Bonner has been publishing my articles (in the book) under his sole name.
Take away my wiki and they can wipe out my contribution more easily so reviewers can’t see who wrote what so easily. They can still see it on my blog but they can attack my blog/twitter or prevent others linking it too…which they have done.Do You Own A One-Liner ? (Updated July 28)
Update: A google search and a reply from Agora tells me that both my ex and Casey are mistaken and got the line from an old movie. It is something in the public domain. It’s not an old Czech saying, as I first thought, but an old Vietnamese saying.
This is hilarious. It also makes me feel a lot better.
***
Still, it does nothing to assuage me after so many problems of attribution.A reader raises the question: Can anyone really own a one-liner?
My reply:
Yes. On several grounds.
First: Ethics
You certainly should attribute things correctly, to the best of your knowledge.…
And you should correct an attribution if you find out you’re wrong. We teach this in every first year language class in the country and kids are failed when they plagiarize.Second. Damage to the reader and the other author.
In this case, the line is a SPECIFIC MEMORABLE LINE, NOT A PHRASE.
A line of this kind is much more than a random phrase - it’s a one-liner that fixes quite complex ideas into a memorable creation - the definition of what can be copyrighted.Oscar Wilde, for example, was very famous for pinching other people’s one-liners, even though he was perfectly capable of making themselves up on his own. There’s a famous incident in which Wilde hears a friend’s funny remark and says, “I wish I’d said that..” and the friend, from whom Wilde had taken a number of such lines, responds wearily, “You will, Oscar, you will.”
Suppose I go to a village and perform Shakespeare, passing it off as my own work - of course, I have done something wrong. No one in his right mind would say otherwise.
Or, if I passed off some clever line of Johnny Carson’s as my own? I gain a reputation for wit I couldn’t sustain on my own, and MORE importantly, if it’s not Carson but some unknown comedian, I make it impossible for the original creator to use that line as his own - thus stealing his own creation from him….or making him look like a liar if he insists it’s his own.
I don’t know how anyone could argue that this isn’t fraud. It is. It’s a violation of truth -
And it’s also a fraud committed on the reader or audience. It’s not libertarian at all.Third -
There are several shades of meaning to the notion of ownership that libertarians confuse. This confusion is exactly why I find a lot of libertarian theory bunkum.
Actually, you DON’T own intellectual property in the same way you own your shoes…you own it in a MUCH STRONGER way..which is precisely what copyright law recognizes. The relationship is much more intrinsic. That is why your intellectual property is not sold in the same way as your ordinary work product. You have to consciously give it up.
You also own a dog in a different way from the way you own your shoes, don’t you?
And a woman “owns” her womb or her fetus in another way. This is an area of immense confusion, and libertarian theory is often clueless about it..Fourthly, your ownership rights are stronger when you have agreed on and have actually discussed that particular line and whether your coauthor could appropriate it or not. That is certainly both personally and professionally incorrect.
By the way, I’m not claiming I created that one-line.
I think it was coined by my ex-husband… or, possibly, one of his friends. The two of them use it all the time in their circle. It might even be a folk phrase, for all I know. I am double-checking it right now, by contacting the friend, who lives in Czechoslovakia.
I happened to quote it to Mr. Bonner and he liked it and asked if he could use it. I said no, not without attribution. He agreed. This was before the book came out.
Now, suddenly two years down the road, his business partner and close friend uses it….after a whole two years of attribution problems and promotional issues. Recently, I’ve just ignored them because I believe this endless runaround is intended to make me look foolish for objecting.
As a single incident, it doesnt matter. But as only the latest example of a whole bunch, it certainly does bother me - not least, because it’s an appalling waste of time.
I notice that plagiarism is now absolutely pandemic on the net. Even well-known historians seem to be plagiarizing (Doris Goodwin, for one).
But that’s no proof of the innocence of the action.
It’s proof of the corruption of our intellectual life.Whatever it costs, it behooves me to object, and keep objecting, when someone does something that’s the moral equivalent of pilfering..
Activism: Reclaiming Freedom
I thought the two links below needed to be visible, so I am reposting them from a comment from Non Entity for you to check out:
ObscuredTruth.com
FreeTalkLive.comAnd of course, check out the Free State project in New Hampshire.
Bee-Positive Action
A young German here in Buenos Aires alerted me to an unfolding story I’d not heard of - the decline in the bee population in the US and UK, attributed by some to the genetic modification of crops, by others to the use of pesticides. Other experts blame cell-phones. Or stress from migration.
At Natural Choices, one writer, Ladd Smith, describes the crisis:
“A topic of real concern to gardeners across the country is the recent major decline in the honeybee population. Referred to as “colony collapse disorder (CCD),” it was first reported in the U.S. in October 2006 and spread rapidly, with beekeepers reporting losses of between 50 percent to 90 percent of bees. While the exact causes are not known, there are a variety of theories, including pesticide use, migratory stress and the bees’ immune system failure.”
The article offers the following suggestions:
1. Plant a bee garden (this takes a wide variety of plants and shade)
2. Create an insectary (don’t use chemicals pesticides that kill insects)
3. Add Orchard Mason bees (non-aggressive)Monsanto’s Toxic Path in South America
Agribusiness titan Monsanto is the goliath every activist would like to slay:
Its patented Round Up brand of herbicide is ubiquitous in farmland world over, but new research suggests the product poses a danger to human health. [Note: an earlier version of this post dropped the word herbicide by accident so it read as though soy contained the chemical. I corrected it but the google cache still shows the old version in the header. Apologies. I often think I've corrected something and saved it and find that the save didn't actually take place...]
From Marie Trigona at America’s Program
“A study released by an Argentine scientist earlier this year reports that glyphosate, patented by Monsanto under the name “Round Up,” causes birth defects when applied in doses much lower than what is commonly used in soy fields.
The study was directed by a leading embryologist, Dr. Andres Carrasco, a professor and researcher at the University of Buenos Aires. In his office in the nation’s top medical school, Dr. Carrasco shows me the results of the study, pulling out photos of birth defects in the embryos of frog amphibians exposed to glyphosate. The frog embryos grown in petri dishes in the photos looked like something from a futuristic horror film, creatures with visible defects—one eye the size of the head, spinal cord deformations, and kidneys that are not fully developed.“We injected the amphibian embryo cells with glyphosate diluted to a concentration 1,500 times than what is used commercially and we allowed the amphibians to grow in strictly controlled conditions.” Dr. Carrasco reports that the embryos survived from a fertilized egg state until the tadpole stage, but developed obvious defects which would compromise their ability to live in their normal habitats.
Pointing to the color photos spread on his desk, Dr. Carrasco says, “On the side where the contaminated cell was injected you can see defects in the eye and defects in the cartilage.”
For the past 15 months, Dr. Carrasco’s research team documented embryos’ reactions to glyphosate. Embryological study is based on the premise that all vertebrate animals share a common design during the development stages. This accepted scientific premise means that the study indicates human embryonic cells exposed to glyphosate, even in low doses, would also suffer from defects.
“When a field is fumigated by an airplane, it’s difficult to measure how much glysophate remains in the body,” says Dr. Carrasco. “When you inject the embryonic cell with glysophate, you know exactly how much glysophate you are putting into the cell and you have a strict control.”
Glyphosate is the top selling herbicide in the world and is widely used on soy crops in Argentina.
Monoculture soy is grown on more than 42 million acres of fields across Argentina and sprayed with more than 44 million gallons of glyphosate annually. It is part of a technological package sold by Monsanto that includes Round Up Ready seeds GM to tolerate the herbicide glyphosate. This allows growers to fumigate directly onto the GM soy seed, killing nearby weeds without killing the crop. In the winter, crops are sprayed to kill off weeds and seeds are then planted without having to plow the soil, a process commonly referred to as “no-till farming.” Nearly, 95% of the 47 million tons of soy grown in Argentina in 2007 was genetically modified, adopting the Round Up ready technology marketed by Monsanto.The study on the top-selling agrochemical has alarmed policymakers, so much so that Dr. Carrasco has received anonymous threats and industry leaders demanded access to his laboratory immediately following the study’s release. Industry leader Monsanto wouldn’t talk to the Americas Program for this story, but in a press release on its website, the company says that “glyphosate is safe.”
My Comment:
There - the cat’s out of the bag. Now you know why I’m down here. South America has the last remaining land masses suitable for agriculture, the greatest biodiversity, the richest vegetation, the richest fauna….
No wonder one of the most predatory and rapacious corporations in the world is also here…
Libertarian Living: How Walkable Is Your Neigborhood
How walkable is your neigborhood? You can check it out here at Walkscore.com
Via Bob Sharpe´s blog, ¨Toward A Simple Life.”
More Web Abuse
OK. A new one. Shortly after my blog posts on antisemitism, the gunman, and racist language, I get an email in my inbox saying I’m subscribed to Pak Alert.
I didn’t pay any mind and didn’t click on it, thinking it was spam. Then I googled Pak Alert, which seems to be a news group. Glancing through it, I see it has the Protocols of the Elders of Zion listed….and some antisemitic language that I didn’t bother to read through since it was clear what it was.
I deleted the mail, thinking it was spam.
But then I got to thinking about how I got the mail. So I went and and checked and sure enough, someone had subscribed me to the group. That’s abuse, and I reported it twice to Google.
Wondering if someone wanted to create an embarrassing record to “prove” I was anti-Semitic, since I’d subscribed to the group.
Now, how did that happen? Did they get my password or can you just add an email without permission? No idea. I don’t frequent chat groups.
Tomorrow, I’m going through and making note of some of the things that have happened since I started writing for the web. It runs the gamut from name-calling to hacking, spamming, stalking, provocation, libel, threats, delinking articles, plagiarism, copyright infringement, personal harassment, forgery, invasion of privacy, sending out private email to public groups…….
Not complaining, merely observing the follies of my fellow men.
And wondering if they’re worth it.
What’s the Point of Dollar Devaluation?
“If all a country needed to do to achieve manufacturing supremacy and economic dominance was devalue their currency then Georgia and Bosnia would be considered paragons of economic prosperity.”
– Michael Pento, via 321 gold.
Aha. The folly of naivete. Mr. Pento’s mistake is to think that manufacturing supremacy is what our oligarchs have in mind for the US. He must be kidding.
The goal is to destroy US economic independence (let alone dominance) and subjugate it to an international cabal centering around….guess who…the oligarchs.
Over a Million Refugees in Somalia
In the news on Friday, May 22:
“Martin Bell, former BBC war correspondent and current UNICEF UK Ambassador for Humanitarian Emergencies, recently concluded a three-day trip to the north-east zone of Somali to report on the situation of children and women affected by conflict, drought, displacement and other hardships – and to shed light on UNICEF’s efforts to provide them with crucial services.
In Bossaso, one of the country’s busiest ports, Mr. Bell visited settlements for displaced people and saw firsthand the dire conditions in which they live. Displaced populations form a group of chronically vulnerable people here, lacking even the most basic social services and livelihood opportunities.
Bossaso hosts 27 camps where 40,000 people have sought refuge from other parts of the country. Over 1 million people in Somalia are internally displaced, mainly due to the conflict and insecurities in the central and southern regions..”More at Relief Web.
Doctors Without Borders/Medicins Sans Frontieres reports that more than 270,000 have fled to Northern Kenya, to camps operated by the UN High Commission for Refugees, where rations have been cut by 30% and malnutrition runs at over 22%, well above the emergency threshold. That’s driving many of the refugees back to the war-zone.
My Comment
This was sent to me by a young Somali friend, who urges everyone to help in any way they can.
Now, my focus in this blog is on mass thinking, but the organization of crowds (through state propaganda, coercion, and surveillance) has as its other face, the dis-organization of crowds in times of crisis, often state-produced crisis, such as at New Orleans during Katrina, or here. Among people on the move in large groups, refugees are probably the largest group.
What is amazing to me about crowds of refugees is that they move peacefully, giving the lie to fear-mongering imagery of masses of people overwhelming civilization. That’s the sort of imagery usually conjured up by authoritarians when discussing mass migration or mass movement of any kind.Financial Follies: Condo Builders Under Water
In the news today, AP reports:
“Multifamily construction plunged 46.1 percent to an annual rate of 90,000 units after a 23 percent fall in March. Permits for multifamily construction dropped 19.9 percent to 121,000 units. Analysts said apartment construction is being hurt by a glut of condominiums on the market and by tightening credit conditions for commercial real estate.”
My Comment
Oh, my. This made my day. Condo flippers and developers are in big trouble.
Overlook the opening of this article, with that plaintive reference to a ” modest rebound in single-family home construction in April” that “raised hopes.”
Hopes should not be raised. That’s pretty clear by now. Not unless you’re being paid to pump houses for some rash developer who ran out of buyers for his pet eye-sore. We can think of a number of things that should be raised - black flags, eyebrows, interest rates…..but not hopes.
I’ve been checking condo prices all over the world and it’s the same news. From Panama to Kuala Lumpur, from Miami to Baltimore. Commercial developers are in trouble.
If that doesn’t warm the cockles of your heart and put a smile on your face, I don’t know what will. These wretched companies drove up housing by 100-300% (and more) in some cities and literally chased people on small or fixed incomes out of places they’d been living for years.
And don’t tell me they added any real value.
In New York. construction in one building was so shoddy, the Buildings Department had to intervene. I personally inspected a condo where, when the owner kicked the wall, her foot went right through. Many of them were aesthetic monstrosities that ruined the skyline, polluted the air, and destroyed the architectural beauty of the places where they metastasized.
Now there’s a glut and the developers are losing their shirts.
Miami’s condo king, Jorge Perez, is sitting on top of a market with the biggest glut in the country. Since 2003, nearly 23000 condos were added to downtown Miami, and 33% of them remain unsold. The financial hurricane hit just when Perez, the “tropical Trump,” had opened his newest project, Icon Brickell, a boutique hotel combined with over 1,640 luxury apartments and squeezed into three towers. Only 18 units have sold so far. Perez (once estimated to have a net worth of $1.3 billion) is in big money trouble. His company, Related Group, lost $1 billion in 2008 and ran up debt of $2 billion, $700 million from Icon Brickell alone.
It just doesn’t get better than that….
Beat Up a White Kid Day [Added links]
A posting on facebook tells me that there is such a thing as “Beat Up a White Kid Day,” apparently a kind of May-day ritual.
I was astounded and first thought it must be some kind of prank, but there it is on wiki:
“However he [Judge Russo] concluded that “based on the evidence I’ve heard, May Day is reality and the evidence was overwhelming that this was an attack based on May Day and that the victim was chosen because she was white.” In drawing such a conclusion, Judge Russo suggested that white students in Cleveland’s integrated public schools have reason to fear assaults by minorities in so-called May Day attacks every May 1.”
Lila:
The judge in question was Cuyahoga juvenile court judge Russo, who was ruling on the beating up of Melissa King, a 13 year old student at Wilbur Wright Middle School in Cleveland, Ohio, on May 1, 2003, by a group of black and hispanic children. Although the immediate cause in this case was a personal vendetta, almost everyone in the case, seems to have acknowledged the reality of “Beat Up a White Kid Day.”
Since there’s been so much talk about white supremacists and their links to tax protesters and militia groups, I thought it was only right to show that such ideologies don’t rise in a vacuum. There’s plenty of hate anger to go around. [Lila: hate is misused as a word so I changed it to anger] And here’s one instance.
What was the reaction?
In Cleveland, the original story brought a flood of more than 100 letters to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, in which readers wrote that in fact this had been a May-day ritual for many years in desegregated communities and that many of them had been afraid of going to school on that day.
I’ll be retuning to this blog post to add any links to interesting aspects of the media coverage of this (or lack of it).
(And yes, I know I have two other posts I have to return to to update…bear with me).
OK. Remember Jena in Louisiana ? In 2006 a white student, Justin Barker, was attacked by six black students, setting off a case that had the whole country in a ruckus.
In this Alternet piece, a black commentator looks at Jena and sees excessive fear of young black males that leads to their being sentenced much more stiffly than whites for comp[arable crimes.
On one site. black readers' comments show that the central fact of the Jena case for them was the hanging of nooses.
That was seen by many of the whites in Jena as a prank.
For the whites the physical beating far outweighed the symbolic threat of the nooses (equivalent to cross-burning).
Here's a Counterpunch article on it that plays up that angle. But there are some interesting slants in the piece which grate on me a bit. Picking apart the language of Jena residents (who refer to "coloreds" and "our blacks") is a bit silly. Small town people without requirements to be PC in their language are going to express themselves in ways that are not as 'sensitive' as less insular society demands. This probably means nothing. And what was the need to emphasize that there was only one black person on the 9 member school board and only one black man in the 10 member parish government? Jena had a little less than 3000 people at the time. The African-American population is around 3500. That means the Af-Am percentage was at the time a bit over 10%. That means the racial make-up of the board seems quite fair, even if you subscribe to such numerical tests. [Correction: I have to go back and look at the hispanic population and find out how much of a difference to my calculations adding it would make].
But I digress. While I can find any number of articles on the Jena 6, most of them focusing on southern racism and noose hanging, I can find hardly any on Beat Up a White Kid Day. And on forums I’ve seen, the attitude is that there can be no race hatred among minorities because racism is related to power structure.
With Barack Obama now president, that leaves us with several possible positions.
One. Blacks now are part of the power-structure and can be as racist as whites.
Two. Blacks really aren’t part of the power-structure, and Obama is just a figure-head.
[In that case we need to ask who really is in power].
Three. There are many kinds of power. Opinion-making is also power.
Media Coverage:
On the Jena story, digging through links, I got an American Journalism Review piece which covers the media coverage (always the most interesting part of an American news story). The piece shows that the national media actually didn’t touch the story until 5 months later, when black bloggers and activists like Alan Sharpton had made a furor over it, and then they almost uncritically accepted the version put out by an activist called Alan Bean. The AJR piece questions Bean’s portrayal of the story, raising several points that also struck me.
Here’s a quote from AJR:
“Out of 57 stories:
Only eight stories allude to Mychal Bell’s prior criminal record….
Ten stories use the phrase “all white” to describe the jury that found Mychal Bell guilty of aggravated second-degree battery and conspiracy to commit aggravated second-degree battery. None explains why the jury was all white…..
Multiple stories describe the tree the nooses were found on as a “white tree”…… No stories question if the description is correct, and none asks students about the tree. Only the L.A. Times does not describe the tree as “white.”
Descriptions of white student Justin Barker’s medical condition vary from paper to paper and from story to story.…….. [Lila: here's a link to what is seems to be an injured Justin Barker. From the looks of it, the beating doesn't seem too bad. ]
The Washington Post, the L.A. Times and the Chicago Tribune never, in months of coverage, mention Barker’s medical bills. [Lila: the medical bills seem to be equivalent to the cost of an ambulance, ER, stitches and a bit more - roughly $12,000; again, more like injuries in a school brawl)..........
All four papers link the events in Jena multiple times, without ever explaining why they're linked............
Thirty stories quote civil rights activists, organizations or advocates. Eight stories quote Jesse Jackson; twelve quote Al Sharpton; others quote the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the NAACP. Six quote Alan Bean of Friends of Justice five of them in the Chicago Tribune.........
..... In a piece titled "How One Man Fired Up Jena 6 Case," [Jason] Whitlock wrote that the media blindly accepted Bean’s story, to the detriment of the truth. Why? Because it was easy, he says.”
Lila: To put this in perspective, consider another race-hate crime in the last two years:
The Megan Williams torture case: in which a twenty-year old black woman was held captive for several days, sexually abused, forced to eat faeces, and stabbed by six whites, according to this AP report.
One of the defendants in this case got 10-25 years for second-degree sexual assault and another got three consecutive sentences, one for 10 years for violation of civil rights and the others for 2-10 years for assault.
Put this against what Mychal Bell, the 16 year old defendant at Jena, was initially charged with. He was charged as an adult with attempted second-degree murder (Lila: surely excessive). Later, this was reduced to aggravated second-degree battery.
At his initial conviction Bell faced up to 22 years in prison. On retrial, this was reduced to simple battery and finally he served 18 months altogether.
Lila (May 6):
Well, I don’t agree with the comment that “blacks are not part of the power structure” unless you want to say the president of the USA , the AG and a number of other positions are completely devoid of power. In which case, whites haven’t been all that powerful either. I think the third position is the correct one. There are many kinds of power: there’s money power, there’s political power, there’s public opinion, there’s academic opinion, there’s moral force, there’s biological power….
We tend to focus on money power/political power to make claims about the power or lack thereof of minorities. And largely, I think that’s correct - when you’re talking about structures of law, administration and institutions where those kinds of power hold sway. But there are other realms, as I’ve indicated.
My point is our discussion of race is abysmally simple-minded. We think in slogans and in memes. And that gets echoed in real life. Ultimately, this kind of mass thinking drives real life victimization, especially in troubled times. Exactly how it does this needs to be explored.
But this post is long enough now, and I’ll leave it at that.
PS (May 6): The context that is ignored in all this is inter-racial crime, crime that is not characterized as hate-crime officially, but is felt among whites as racially motivated. But since a post on this would be lengthy and involved I’ll address it separately.
Credible Tax Protesting
For a tax-protest to be credible, the protester has to show evidence of good-faith.
Here are some points to consider:
- It’s futile to argue the constitutionality of laws that the courts themselves have repeatedly ruled are constitutional. The enforceable law is whatever the courts say it is. The law of God, natural law, morality, your personal opinions, your rabid convictions won’t count when it comes to enforcement. Sorry.
- There is a legitimate part of government - admittedly a small one - which goes toward services the citizenry receive. A good-faith tax protest would pay up that amount.
- A good-faith tax protest would not involve teaching tax-evasion methods (there’s a big difference between evading and avoiding taxes) to uninformed people that lands them in jail.
- A good-faith tax protester would not receive any services from the government, or would pay for those he’s obliged to receive from need. He might even overpay to show good faith. He might put the some of the money he owed (say, money that would have gone to war or to the bail-out) to some civic use - not because he is obliged to, but to show that his unwillingness to pay taxes doesn’t stem from venality. He might place it in a family foundation that would benefit his own family but at the same time be of use to the community. The purpose of his act is to change enough minds to change the law. Establishing his credibility is part of that.
- A good-faith tax protest would be conducted from start to finish publicly because its purpose is public - to protest the tax. A protest is a public act.
If you want to engage in counter-economics, then you should know its activities are criminal and will be so regarded. Don’t expect sympathy from the rest of the public which does pay its taxes.
Notice that the media has made a distinction between the tax-resistance of the Vietnam war era and contemporary tax resisters - emphasizing the “white supremecist” elements and scams in the latter (and doubtless there are many).
Expect most people to believe (and, unfortunately, in some cases they will be right about it) that you are just another free-loader on the system.
Check out this factsheet to see how the government views tax protesters like Irwin Schiff.
And here’s a sympathetic view of Irwin Schiff from Libertarian Republican.
My view? I don’t know Schiff’s case in detail but I’m not persuaded by his methods, though sympathetic to his aims.
My suggestion, if you really don’t want to be subject to Uncle Sam, leave the country. Drop citizenship.
A large mass of people renouncing US citizenship is the smartest, least problematic way to defund the US government.
Paul, Rockwell - Freedom Watch 2 PM EST Today
Rep Ron Paul, Daniel Hannan, Lew Rockwell, Jason Sorens, R.J. Harris, Cody Willard & Shelly Roche, Free State Project, Secession, Nationalization FREEDOM WATCH 2PM EST TODAY (Wed., Apr. 29th)! http://www.foxnews.com/strategyroom
Activism: Audit the Fed
Sign up and call your representative on this important initiative:
Support HR 1207 and S 604 - AUDIT THE FED
IMF: G-20 Fiscal Stimulus On Target
In the news:
The IMF says the G-20 fiscal stimulus will reach its 2% target.
Bloomberg reports on the figures spent so far:
“The G-20 countries will spend $820 billion on stimulus measures in 2009, up from a March estimate of $780 billion, and will spend $660 billion in 2010, the fund estimated.
The IMF also revised its forecast for budget deficits in G- 20 countries as a result of fiscal expansion. Today’s report calculates that budget deficits in the G-20 this year will increase by 5.5 percentage points of gross domestic product relative to 2007 and 5.4 percent in 2010. In March, the fund forecast a 4.7 percentage-point rise this year and a 5.1 percentage-point jump next year.
Strauss-Kahn said yesterday that governments should start to discuss “exit strategies” from the emergency spending once the crisis passes.
The fund’s estimate for financial-sector support also increased today to 32.1 percent of GDP, up more than 3 percentage points from the March estimate….”
My Comment (check back for more):
Domininique Strauss-Kahn, a member of the Socialist party and a former finance and economy minister in Lionel Jospin’s “Plural Left” government became the new managing director of the International Monetary Fund on September 2007, replacing Spain’s Rodrigo de Rato.
Interesting things to note about Strauss-Kahn:
- He’s part of the European Council on Foreign Relations, launched in October 2007 (i.e. just after DSK became IMF chief), which in an expression of pan-Europeanism in world affairs. Rubbing shoulders with DSK, according to Source Watch are such notable globalists as George Soros (Chairman of the Open Institute), Stephen Wall (Chairman of the influential PR firm Hill & Knowlton, advisor to Tony Blair), and Timothy Garton Ash (whose influential book, The Magic Lantern, cheered on the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe). Note: Hill & Knowlton was the outfit that concocted the story about Iraqi soldiers killing babies that became a provocation for the 1991 Gulf War.
- Strauss-Kahn has been linked to the financial scandal around ELF Aquitaine, a state-owned oil giant through which former President Francois Mitterand allegedly channeled money to Germany’s Christian Democrats. Strauss-Kahn’s wrong-doing was apparently less serious than some of the fraud and corruption with which other French government officials and company heads were charged (including money-laundering, influence peddling, falsification of documents, and bribery)
- Money from the ELF oil company, as well as from the Taiwan frigates scandal, passed through “unpublished accounts” at Clearstream Banking, the clearing division of Deutsche Bourse, based in Luxembourg. The ELF affair and the Taiwan frigates scandal were the two major financial scandals that hit France in the 1990s. And in both, Clearstream was a platform for money-laundering and tax evasion.
Good Friday, 2009
Reconciliation
Siegfried Sassoon, November 1918
“When you are standing at your hero’s grave,
Or near some homeless village where he died,
Remember, through your heart’s rekindling pride,
The German soldiers who were loyal and brave.
Men fought like brutes; and hideous things were done;
And you have nourished hatred harsh and blind.
But in that Golgotha perhaps you’ll find
The mothers of the men who killed your son.”John Gatto on The Bartleby Project
Thanks to Sunni Maravillosa for posting this great piece, The Bartleby Project, by John Gatto.
“The Bartleby Project
By the end of WWII, schooling had replaced education in the US, and shortly afterwards, standardized testing became the steel band holding the entire enterprise together. Test scores rather than accomplishment became the mark of excellence as early as 1960, and step by step the public was brought, through various forms of coercion including journalism, to believe that marks on a piece of paper were a fair and accurate proxy for human quality. As Alexander Solzhenitzyn, the Nobel Prize winning Russian author, said, in a Pravda article on September 18, 1988, entitled “How to Revitalize Russia:”
No road for the people [to recover from Communism] will ever be open unless the government completely gives up control over us or any aspect of our lives. It has led the country into an abyss and it does not know the way out.
Break the grip of official testing on students, parents and teachers, and we will have taken the logical first step in revitalizing education. But nobody should believe this step can be taken politically—too much money and power is involved to allow the necessary legislative action; the dynamics of our society tend toward the creation of public opinion, not any response to it. There is only one major exception to that rule: Taking to the streets. In the past half-century the US has witnessed successful citizen action many times: In the overthrow of the Jim Crow laws and attitudes; in the violent conclusion to the military action in Vietnam; in the dismissal of a sitting American president from office. In each of these instances the people led, and the government reluctantly followed. So it will be with standardized testing. The key to its elimination is buried inside a maddening short story published in 1853 by Herman Melville: “Bartleby the Scrivener.”
I first encountered “Bartleby” as a senior at Uniontown High School, where I was unable to understand what it might possibly signify. As a freshman at Cornell I read it again, surrounded by friendly associates doing the same. None of us could figure out what the story meant to communicate, not even the class instructor.
Bartleby is a human photocopy machine in the days before electro-mechanical duplication, a low-paid, low-status position in law offices and businesses. One day, without warning or explanation, Bartleby begins to exercise free will—he decides which orders he will obey and which he will not. If not, he replies, “I would prefer not to.” To an order to participate in a team-proofreading of a copy he’s just made, he announces without dramatics, “I would prefer not to.” To an order to pop around the corner to pick up mail at the post office, the same: “I would prefer not to.” He offers no emotion, no enlargement on any refusal; he prefers not to explain himself. Otherwise, he works hard at copying.
That is, until one day he prefers not to do that, either. Ever again. Bartleby is done with copying. But not done with the office which employed him to copy! You see, without the boss’ knowledge, he lives in the office, sleeping in it after others go home. He has no income sufficient for lodging. When asked to leave that office, and given what amounts to a generous severance pay for that age, he prefers not to leave—and not to take the severance. Eventually, Bartleby is taken to jail, where he prefers not to eat. In time, he sickens from starvation, and is buried in a pauper’s grave.
The simple exercise of free will, without any hysterics, denunciations, or bombast, throws consternation into social machinery—free will contradicts the management principle. Refusing to allow yourself to be regarded as a “human resource” is more revolutionary than any revolution on record. After years of struggling with Bartleby, he finally taught me how to break the chains of German Method schooling. It took a half-century for me to understand the awesome instrument each of us has through free will to defeat Germanic schooling, and to destroy the adhesive which holds it together—standardized testing…..”
by John Gatto
My Comment
I once wrote the libretto for a one-act opera about Bartleby composed by a friend of mine at Catholic University. Unlike John Gatto, I always related to Bartleby and understood it because my first education was in India.
Education in the liberal arts was terribly rote-like in India in the 1980s. Long lists of figures to memorize. Map boundaries that had to be drawn from recollection. Senseless lists of obscure kings and their completely fungible achievements. Venkatappa I built 40 highways, 500 hospitals and 35 colleges. Krishnayya III built 35 roads, 502 colleges, 25 temples. Chandravarma XX conquered the Marathas or Rajputs or whoever in 807 AD…etc., etc. Not much in the way of ideas. The whole thing was like a long catalog. Lists of the building materials (limestone, gypsum, white marble) used for various famous mosques, monuments, temples - none of which I’d ever seen, since traveling in India was difficult and expensive for middle-class families. Nehru’s Five-Year Plans, every dam and hydel project, with the exact monetary figure for each one.
We’d copy the whole thing onto a large piece of brown wrapping paper and then memorize it in sections until we could reel it off without a flaw. Some of the girls took a few - shall we say - chemical stimulants to pull off this feat. The week after our exams, we would all be flat on our backs with exhaustion, fifteen pounds lighter, and hardly any more enlightened than before our labors. The next term, we’d go back to “bunking” class (playing truant) for the first few weeks to make up for this torture.
There was also a lot of long-hand copying of notes, because photocopy machines were nonexistent in our college and books were precious when you were living in a hostel. I copied scores of T. S. Eliot poems into a long notebook. In another I copied essays about Jane Austen. We took notes copiously in the classroom, although our lecturers were often less informed about things than we were. When things got boring, the more practical girls took to crocheting long scarves or eating lunch surreptitiously.
The whole thing was calculated to destroy any intelligence or interest in the subjects we were studying. It was a long, medieval exercise in mental gymnastics.
Amazingly, many of us ended up no worse intellectually than people who had had the finest undergraduate training.
But it was in spite of what we went through, not because.
New York Times Shills For AIG
Boo-hoo. Poor AIG employees are suffering unfairly from the public outrage over executive bonuses.
Look, we know these guys aren’t the culprits. The bad guys are too powerful (Hank Greenberg & Co.) or have skipped town.
So, yes, we know that the letter writer isn’t the problem. BUT….
He and his colleagues ARE senior people who worked at AIG while rampant fraud/crime was prevalent at other divisions. Did any of them say anything or do anything about it? AIG was involved in repeated infractions of the laws, over decades - a lot of which had already been exposed to the public eye or was being prosecuted. These guys didn’t know? Give me a break. And sez who the other divisions did nothing shady? How much do we really know?
Even if they themselves didn’t do a thing wrong, in light of their company’s centrality to the whole financial crisis, they should have had enough decency to have refused their bonuses. Where’s their public spirit?
Yes, the whole bonus fracas is a distraction and purely symbolic. But symbols are important. And people are understandably outraged.
Instead, we get this rather narcissistic letter in the Times that tells a single personal story.
Dear me, senior managers at a major financial firm work 12-14 hours, do they?
So do a lot of people who don’t get that kind of compensation.
Tough. There’s a serious problem and everyone has to contribute what they can, especially the people directly involved in the crisis.
Notice how the NY Times has been playing the bonus story.
Read this story by Allen Salkin
He says AIG rage isn’t healthy - chill it, you yokels. Interesting. I checked through Mr. Salkin’s archives to find out if he’d ever commented about politics so directly. But no. The only time since 2000 Salkin ever had anything to say about politics was recently - to try to douse rage over AIG and to defend their executive salaries (you need 500k to live in New York, he says here).
Thousands of people in the financial industry were killed in the 9-11 attacks. President Bush went on a rampage in Iraq that killed thousands of US servicemen and women and mutilated tens of thousands of them, in addition to killing over a million Iraqi civilians and reducing the country to near rubble in many areas. It was, arguably, a genocide. Since the 1990s, the financial industry in New York has created huge bubbles of fraud and crime that have destroyed the life savings, income, credit, and productivity of millions of people and firms all over the globe and has set off what looks like a global depression that could last for years. Did Allen Salkin at any time tell any of the frenzied speculators, corrupt regulators, and slavering real estate salesmen who pushed all this on the public to take a yoga class and chill? Did he tell them that lying, cheating, swindling, cosmic looting and mass murder are “not healthy”? No, I don’t recall he did.
Had New York journalists been doing their duty ( a central discipline necessary for practitioners of yoga) in the past two decades, I doubt the world would be in this mess.
Selective high-mindedness isn’t reason speaking. It’s servility to power masquerading as spirituality. Don’t fall for it.
The outrage over the bonuses was a distraction, yes, but it symbolized for struggling working class and middle-income people what’s wrong in the let-them-eat-cake world of the financial elites. To treat their outrage (which was also carefully orchestrated by the administration, by the way) as simply populist feeling gone mad is strangely and suspiciously selective.
Full disclosure: Salkin called me for comments for his piece. I said roughly what I said above. He didn’t use those comments.
PS: Nice to see Karl Denninger thinks along the same lines.
I have no idea who Denninger is but his take on things is almost identical with mine (dollar contrarian, psyop-savvy).
PPS: I note that Matt Taibbi wrote a post on this same letter and posted it on Alternet the day of this blog post.
Bringing Water to Villages in Haiti
The 2008 Templeton Freedom Award winner, Deep Springs International a Pennsylvania group that coordinates the work of NGOs (which provide point-of-use water treatment technologies that are relatively inexpensive - about $3 to $80), microfinance institutes (which provide money to train the poor and to help them start businesses), and local schools and institutions (which usually don’t focus on water treatment).
Deep Springs has a number of ways you can help them, from donating, to buying items on their page, to changing your search engine to
Good Search and iGive.
Remember that gold mining is one of the worst offenders in using up water. So if you do hold physical gold (I don’t and it’s one of the reasons I don’t), remember you may be contributing to water problems in those areas and have some responsibility to help where you can.
A Call To The Plagiarized
If you are a writer, blogger, or journalist whose work has been used without attribution, distorted, plagiarized, or stolen, I would be interested in hearing from you.
All letters should include a brief description of what happened and a way to contact you.
If you post on this blog, please post anonymously and I will contact you at the email that my admin panel displays.
Leave the Police State While You Can…
“Some time between 9/11 and now America became a police state. I cannot pinpoint the tipping point because the last several years are a blur of laws and policies that were passed so quickly and in such volume that no one could track them, let alone provide analysis. Even lawmakers didn’t read what they were passing. Moreover, I am not sure how to define “a police state” as opposedto a quasi one…so pinpointing is a term of accuracy that doesn’t apply. But, like pornography, I know a police state when I see it and I see everytime I glance State-side. And the collapse of the American dollar has not even occurred yet. When that happens — and it will be as swift as the mortgage collapse — the fear and panic generated could well allow/encourage the establishment of one of the worst totalitarian states the world has seen in a developed nation.
People who value their freedom and safety should leave…if possible. Having said this, I cannot fault those who stay to be near family and friends or a business that took a decade to establish. Nor can I blame anyone who says “Hell, no!” and draws a line against surrending their freedom on the soil of their birth. Hell, I have all those urges warring within me. But I don’t think it is wise to heed them. I think it is wise to GET OUT and fight for freedom from comparative safety. Get your assets out, get your family out, get your body out of the reach of the United States government. ….”
Wendy McElroy, “Leave the police state that is America” via Sunni Maravillosa
GenV Entrepreneurs Light Up Indian Village
“One of the biggest problems faced by Indian villages is scarce electricity to power light bulbs. Electricity is provided only for a very few hours and only during day time. Hence, children are unable to study at night and have to resort to using lanterns, which can contribute to pollution related ailments.
To provide a solution, we came up with an idea of using tractor batteries as an energy source to light 9-12W CFLs. At night, the tractors are not used and they can be used to light CFLs.
One-twelfth of the battery is consumed to use 1 CFL for 4 hours. The tractor’s battery then gets recharged during day time when it runs on the fields or is used for other agricultural purposes. Thus, the net is that we are not consuming any additional power to light up the CFLs on the days that the tractor is used.
We implemented this idea successfully in 17 homes in our village and this was of great help to the students. The whole setup cost was INR 135 (for wires, DC CFL and circuit board).
The advantages of this system are:
- Reduction of pollution by using CFLs instead of bulbs and lanterns: 240,000 liters of CO2 per month and 2,450,000 kJ of heat per month.
- Improvement in academic performance of students.
- Better health for users by reducing Asthma, ENT and Eye problems.
- Cost Savings for farmers and rural students, and for the Government.
- Increased lifespan of tractor battery.”
Shailesh Upadhyay and Ujala Shankar
More here at GenV Campaigns.State Sovereignty Movement Gaining Steam
“As more governors declare their opposition to the Stimulus Bill — which is now estimated to include more than $1 trillion in unfunded mandates for the states above and beyond the initial $800 billion cost — more and more state legislators across the nation have been introducing bills to assert state sovereignty under the 10th Amendment in an effort to assert the rights of their citizens and the authority of state governments against unwarranted interference by the federal government….”
Dave Nalle, Republican Liberty Caucus, February 20, 2009
Obamanomics: Tax Job Creators, Bankroll Swindlers
“We have no problem with taxing hedge fund operators and leverageurs till they bleed from the ears, and we’ll even go along with a cap on bankers’ salaries (although we’d have preferred they be publicly flogged). But how could a plan that purports to stimulate the economy have overlooked the entrepreneurs who are the lifeblood of American prosperity? A logical answer is that the stimulus package is deliberately anti-capital, a vengeful and self-destructive act against every GOP president since Reagan. To the extent this is so, it could be a long, long time before the economy shows any signs of returning to health….”
Hampshire College’s Brave Anti-Occupation Students
“In the last 3 years I have several times declared hopefully that young people are going to lead us; and I have been premature. I did it at Columbia University in an article for New York Magazine in ‘07, I did it at Brandeis University in The American Conservative that year too. On both occasions I was blown away by the diversity of the progressive student movement on campus: that identity politics meant nothing to these kids; Jews intermingled with Muslims and Asians in a cohesive manner, and no one gave a s**t.Well now I am saying the same thing about the Hampshire divestment and betting that I will be right. This is a shot that will be heard ’round the nation. It is no wonder that Dershowitz called the students in a threatening manner as soon as they had taken the action: Dershowitz and I recognize the huge symbolic meaning of this stroke. For years divestment had been stopped dead by then-President Lawrence Summers’s attack on it at Harvard, saying it was “antisemitic in effect if not intent,” or words similar, which caused rightthinking gentile faculty to steer away from the issue like a plague. Then it was stopped among the Protestant churches by endless legal wrangling, again with the threat of being labelled antisemitic hanging over their heads.
Those Protestant churches tabled and couldn’t adopt simple measures that limited the divestment to companies doing business in the Occupation! The evil occupation, with its crazy settlers and pogroms–and that’s all the Hampshire initiative applies to, the companies that helped to kill Rachel Corrie! So let us be clear, This is a huge moral stroke. And who is responsible: not Protestant churches or Middle East Studies professors, but an organization of committed students, many of them Jews, who will not be intimidated by anyone, their own administration or Alan Dershowitz. Bless them and honor them!
A few other observations must be made. According to one of those students, in this comment on Indypendent, when Hampshire College first divested from Apartheid South Africa years ago, “the Administration did what it could to distance itself from the situation then, too, with then-President Adele Simmons calling it a ‘big non-issue.’” And today when you visit Hampshire, they brag on that hammer blow! And this will happen again. We and Hampshire will look back on the bravery and independence of Hampshire students as we look back on the bravery of the Wilmot Proviso, or of Harriet Beecher Stowe, or of Congressman Abraham Lincoln when he introduced anti-slavery legislation in Congress in 1848– in these hammer blows of free and unafraid people, others were summoned to the great task at hand!
Again: Dershowitz knows this as well as I do. He is a great advocate. He knows he must stop this now, and blacken the Hampshire initiative, so that no signal goes out to others that It is OK to do this thing. But Dershowitz is too late. The students hung up on him and laughed. Generational forces are at work. He is 70 years old and is advocating for the evil settlement program that even the American government knows is a disaster, that even Gary Ackerman, the Israel Lobby’s main man in the House, or one of them, has lately condemned as settler “pogroms” (language first employed by me, then later by Jeffrey Goldberg).
Dershowitz employed a traditional Jewish intimidation tactic, calling the Jews and reminding them of their loyalty to the Jewish family. But it didn’t work. These were Hannah-Arendt-Baruch-Spinoza Jews who feel loyalty first to the human family…”
From PhilipWeiss.org.
Comment:
Surely Jewish people aren’t the only ones who employ the “intimidation tactic of reminding people of their group loyalties”? Seems like I hear some of that from Indian friends whenever I write anything that “makes India/Indians look bad” to the West. It’s a natural concern and normally, I wouldn’t leap to the conclusion that there was “intimidation” involved at all, but knowing Dershowitz’s extremely abrasive ad hominem style of argument, there probably was in this case.
Jay Leno Plugs Barry Dyke’s “Pirates of Manhattan”
“Leno is referring to the fact that Barry Dyke predicted a major collapse of the U.S. financial system in June 2007 way before everyone else when “The Pirates of Manhattan” was first published.
Hampton, NH (PRWEB) February 5, 2009 — The Tonight Show host Jay Leno recently stated that author “Barry Dyke called it!”. Leno is referring to the fact that Barry Dyke predicted a major collapse of the U.S. financial system in June 2007 way before everyone else when “The Pirates of Manhattan” was first published….”
Comment:
Way to go, Barry! Good friend, Barry Dyke (how’s that for name-dropping?) proves that “doing it my way” works. Barry self-published and made his book a best-seller all on his own - sans major reviewers or promoters. I’m glad to be one of those who recognized how important Barry’s work was - especially on Goldman Sachs, where he beat me to the punch getting a book out. (My own writing on GS in “Mobs” got cut out for many reasons). Knowing what a hard slog it’s been for him, I couldn’t be happier to see it. The major media is finally picking up on the people who really were telling it like it is. Barry’s book was 10 years in the writing and he struggled on with it despite major personal setbacks that he describes in his introduction - everything from bankruptcy to divorce to surgery…
Check the book out at the Pirates of Manhattan website.
Global Games: Bio-tech Hype Makes Money For Agribusinesses
From the Center for Food Safety, a press release:
GENETICALLY MODIFIED CROPS FEED BIOTECH GIANTS, NOT THE POOR
Contacts: Bill Freese, Center for Food Safety, 202-547-9359 (North America); Nnimmo Bassey, Friends of the Earth Nigeria, +234 80 37 27 43 95 (Africa); Helen Holder, Friends of the Earth Europe Brussels: +32 474 857 638 (Europe)Biotech Companies Exploit Food Crisis by Raising GM Seed and Pesticide Prices, Record Profits Projected Biotech Propaganda Distracts Attention from Real Solutions for Small Farmers
Washington D.C., February 11, 2009 - A new report released today by the Center for Food Safety and Friends of the Earth International warned that genetically modified (GM) crops are benefiting biotech food giants instead of the worldís hungry population, which is projected to increase to 1.2 billion by the year 2025 due to the global food crisis.
The report explains how biotech firms like Monsanto are exploiting the dramatic rise in world grain prices that are responsible for the global food crisis by sharply increasing the prices of GM seeds and chemicals they sell to farmers, even as hundreds of millions go hungry.
The findings of the report support a comprehensive United Nationsí assessment of world agriculture ñ the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) - which in 2008 concluded that GM crops have little potential to alleviate poverty and hunger in the world. IAASTD experts recommended instead low-cost, low-input agroecological farming methods.
“GM crops are all about feeding the biotech giants, not the worldís poor,” said Nnimmo Bassey, executive director of Friends of the Earth Nigeria and chair of Friends of the Earth International.
“GM seeds and the pesticides used with them are much too expensive for Africaís small farmers. Those who promote this technology in developing countries are completely out of touch with reality,” he added.
“U.S. farmers are facing dramatic increases in the price of GM seeds and the chemicals used with them,” said Bill Freese, science policy analyst at the US-based Center for Food Safety and co-author of the report. “Farmers in any developing country that welcomes Monsanto and other biotech companies can expect the same fate - sharply rising seed and pesticide costs, and a radical decline in the availability of conventional seeds,” he added.
GM seeds cost from two to over four times as much as conventional, non-GM seeds, and the price disparity is increasing. From 80% to over 90% of the soybean, corn and cotton seeds planted in the U.S. are GM varieties. Thanks to GM trait fee increases, average U.S. seed prices for these crops have risen by over 50% in just the past two to three years.
Exploitation of the food crisis has been extremely profitable for Monsanto, by far the dominant player in GM seeds. Goldman Sachs recently projected that Monsanto’s net income (after taxes) would triple from $984 million to $2.96 billion from 2007 to 2010.
The exorbitant cost of GM seeds is not the only problem. The vast majority of GM crops are not grown by or destined for the world’s poor, but instead are soybeans and corn used to feed animals, generate biofuels, or produce highly processed food products consumed mostly in rich countries.
The report documents that nearly 90% of the global area planted GM crops in 2008 was found in just 6 countries with highly industrialized, export-oriented agricultural sectors in North and South America, with the U.S., Argentina and Brazil responsible for 80% of GM crops. The United States alone produced 50% of the world’s GM crops in 2008.
Despite more than a decade of hype, the biotechnology industry has not introduced a single GM crop with increased yield, enhanced nutrition, drought-tolerance or salt-tolerance. In fact, the biotechnology industry’s own figures show that 85% of all GM crop acreage worldwide in 2008 was planted with herbicide-tolerant crops. Herbicide-tolerant GM crops - chiefly Monsanto’s Roundup Ready varieties used with Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide - have increased overall use of chemical weed killers. Roundup prices in the U.S. have more than doubled in the past two years.
Meanwhile, biotech propaganda has obscured the huge potential of low-cost agroecological and organic techniques to increase food production and alleviate hunger in developing countries. The report mentions several such projects, such as push-pull maize farming, practiced by 10,000 farmers in east Africa. The enormously successful push-pull system controls weed and insect pests without chemicals, increases maize production, and raises the income of smallholder farmers….”
More at the Center for Food Safety
Activism: The Boston Tea Party
[Note: The Boston Tea Party's 2008-2010 program consists of the Campaign For Liberty's four points, endorsed by US Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) and presidential candidates Chuck Baldwin (Constitution Party), Cynthia McKinney (Green Party), Ralph Nader (Independent), Bob Barr (Libertarian Party) and Charles Jay, the Boston Tea Party's 2008 presidential nominee.]
1. Foreign Policy: The Iraq War must end as quickly as possible with removal of all our soldiers from the region. We must initiate the return of our soldiers from around the world, including Korea, Japan, Europe and the entire Middle East. We must cease the war propaganda, threats of a blockade and plans for attacks on Iran, nor should we re-ignite the cold war with Russia over Georgia. We must be willing to talk to all countries and offer friendship and trade and travel to all who are willing. We must take off the table the threat of a nuclear first strike against all nations.
2. Privacy: We must protect the privacy and civil liberties of all persons under US jurisdiction. We must repeal or radically change the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, and the FISA legislation. We must reject the notion and practice of torture, elimination of habeas corpus, secret tribunals, and secret prisons. We must deny immunity for corporations that spy willingly on the people for the benefit of the government. We must reject the unitary presidency, the illegal use of signing statements and excessive use of executive orders.
3. The National Debt: We believe that there should be no increase in the national debt. The burden of debt placed on the next generation is unjust and already threatening our economy and the value of our dollar. We must pay our bills as we go along and not unfairly place this burden on a future generation.
4. The Federal Reserve: We seek a thorough investigation, evaluation and audit of the Federal Reserve System and its cozy relationships with the banking, corporate, and other financial institutions. The arbitrary power to create money and credit out of thin air behind closed doors for the benefit of commercial interests must be ended. There should be no taxpayer bailouts of corporations and no corporate subsidies. Corporations should be aggressively prosecuted for their crimes and frauds.
More at The Boston Tea Party
Activism: Canadian Internet Journalist Fights Back
“This past June, then Industry Minister Jim Prentice introduced a bill on Parliament Hill that sparked debate across creative industries nationwide. Bill C-61, a reform on copyright legislation, could have potentially strangled the freedom of online journalists without them even realizing it. Fortunately, thanks to university professor, blogger and columnist Michael Geist, thousands were aware of the impending bill. When Geist heard of the proposal in December, 2007, he took to his blog, posted videos on YouTube and set up a Facebook group called Fair Copyright For Canada. Soon, Geist was everywhere, making appearances on CBC’s The Hour and TVO’s The Agenda. The bill didn’t survive with the October election, but the debate made many realize Canada needs to update its decade-old copyright legislation. And now Geist is leading the pack of journalists seeking fair copyright laws.
As writers increasingly find their print articles published online, Geist wants to clear the confusion around internet law and what it means for journalism. Legislation like C-61 would prevent journalists from effectively conducting research and news gathering, and would squelch our freedom of expression. While the government struggles to keep up with ever-evolving internet law, Geist continues to fight to protect the rights of journalists to conduct news gathering and keep the public informed. He is armed with two master’s degrees and a doctorate in law, and is the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-Commerce Law at the University of Ottawa. His technology columns appear weekly in the Toronto Star and Ottawa Citizen. As both a journalist and lawyer, Geist sees an urgent need to protect Canadians’ rights to use the internet for freedom of expression. “It’s often citizens who are performing journalistic activities who are the first and sometimes the most authentic source of information,” says Geist. “People who are engaged in [journalism] ought to enjoy the protection that journalists traditionally enjoy.” Geist sensed that online freedom was about to be seriously threatened a couple of years ago.
In fall 2007, rumours swirled around Ottawa that Prentice wanted to introduce legislation for anti-circumvention laws. Anti-circumvention prevents the circumvention of Digital Rights Management software placed on digital files (such as music or Word documents) by copyright holders. Under the copyright act, journalists are exempt from infringement under the Fair Dealing provision for the purpose of news reporting. But with the proposed legislation “everybody becomes a criminal, or at least an infringer,” says Geist, “once they seek to pick that lock…..”
More by Lori Grady at Ryerson’s Review of Journalism
Financial Follies: How To Guard The Guardians
Apropos the Satyam case in India, fund manager Atim Kabra of Frontline Strategy writes:
“We would be erring if to the cast of Raju brothers, their ‘independent directors’, the infamous auditors, the bestowers of corporate governance awards, we forget to add the collective conscience of the ‘fund managers and brokers’ who, in my opinion, had a fair inking of not all being well at Satyam. Any broker or fund manager worth his salt would have heard not only of the huge real estate parcels said to be owned by the Rajus but also of their extremely close political connections. They would have known of the phoenix like rise of Maytas and the lucrative contracts housed in these ‘Satyam Group Companies’. They would have had an understanding of the nature of real estate transactions in
India and the significant cash component which accompanies these transactions. Yet, they chose to turn a blind eye to the shenanigan, invested and traded in Satyam Computers, contributed to the enhancement of its market capitalization and ironically now profess shock at the lack of corporate governance at Satyam. While the financial community needs to introspect at its own doing and the propensity to turn a blind eye to the going ons in Corporate India, I believe that collectively, the financial community can be one of the most significant agents of change. However, I worry that by the time change is implemented and percolates down the system, the same Satyam story might have been repeated in many companies in India and Satyam most certainly would not the last one to hit the can due to accounting fraud….” Atim Kabra, with a blueprint for how to improve corporate governance.
American Food Crisis Or Sustainable Farming?
“The proposals we’re discussing would increase employment opportunities in agriculture — sustainable farming will require more “eyes per acre,” and replacing fossil-fuel energy with human energy and ecological knowledge makes good economic sense. With the reduced need for the hoe or plow, and land management relying more on fire and grazing, we draw on the naturalist instinct in nearly all of us, rather than presenting farm work as nothing but the “sweat of the brow” amid “thistles and thorns.” This will be necessary to counter the longstanding denigration of the countryside and rural communities, which has been a feature of our so-called cosmopolitan culture.We’re seeing that on a small scale now, with more young farmers staying on the land, with creative new endeavors in community-supported agriculture. People recognize that life is more than working in a small cubicle and consuming in a big-box store. People are hungry for good food, and they’re also hungry for a good life. People are ready to explore what it would mean to come home, not to a romanticized vision of the past but to a sustainable future….”
Robert Jensen, “Is America on the Brink of a Food Crisis?” at Alternet
King Is Dead….Is King’s Dream Dead Too?
From activist Lenni Brenner:
(Brenner is the author of Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (1983) among a number of other works and writes frequently for publications from the Nation to the Jewish Guardian.
DECLARATION RE DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING’S BIRTHDAY, JANUARY 19,
AND BARACK OBAMA’S INAUGURATION, JANUARY 20th.As if in celestial convergence, Martin Luther King’s birthday falls on the
eve of the inauguration of the nation’s first Black president. With the world
economy in free fall, amid spreading armed conflict, the classic question posed
from pulpits at this time – What would Dr. King do? – has never been more
urgent.January 19 and 20 are heavy with historical significance and contradiction.
Barack Obama proclaims that his presidency would be unthinkable were it not for
the civil rights struggle which King personifies. Yet he also hails John
Kennedy - who he knows criminally wiretapped King - as his role model. And is it
conceivable that King would be pleased with Obama after he broke his promise
to filibuster an electronic wiretapping bill if it included an immunity clause
for telecommunications companies that collaborated with Bush’s illegal
eavesdropping after 9/11?The New York Times correctly calls Obama’s orientation “center-right.” Never
an advocate of total withdrawal from Iraq, he called for the recruitment of
nearly 100,000 additional military, expanded war in Afghanistan, and more
aggressive US actions in Pakistan. In retaining Secretary of Defense Robert Gates
and other Republican Pentagon political appointees, Obama blurs the differences
between his foreign policy and George Bush’s. His United Nations ambassador,
Susan Rice, advocates “humanitarian” military intervention in Africa, and
Obama supports Bush’s latest US Africa Command (AFRICOM). He is silent on the
US-fomented war in Somalia.Obama is also silent re the onslaught on Gaza, even as the Israeli embassy
justified it by distributing videos of his campaign statement: “If somebody was
sending rockets into my house, where my two daughters slept at night, I’m
going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Israelis to do
the same thing.”Domestically, Obama has put his economic portfolio into the hands of Wall
Street hacks intimately associated with financial deregulation and the
plague-like spread of derivatives and other exotic “fictional capital” –- the witch’s
brew of meltdown — and backed Bush’s banker bailout.Is it difficult to project what Dr. King’s politics would be, were he alive
today? Faced with an administration committed to expansion of a military
already as costly as the combined armed forces of the rest of the planet, King
would join — indeed lead — a principled, active anti-war opposition.King called the America of his day “the greatest purveyor of violence in
the world,” and his characterization remains apt. He broke with Lyndon Johnson’s
White House, as he saw the Vietnam War obliterating the “shining moment” when
it “seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor – both black
and white – through the poverty program.” On April 4, 1967, King explained that
“America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in
rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills
and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.” Domestically, Obama’s
determination to put more military “boots on the ground” in multiplying
conflicts is an update of the “demonic destructive suction tube” King opposed.
He would doubtlessly view Obama’s military posture as “a war against the poor,”
as was LBJ’s war.Obama’s appointments have been made, his priorities amply recorded. Given
Obama’s declared politics, King would never grant a “honeymoon” season to an
incoming administration placing government economic levers in the hands of
plundering bankers diverting huge public wealth to the feeding of the dogs of war. He
became his day’s greatest “drum major” for social justice and peace, and we
have only one alternative before us. We call upon Americans and the world to
try to act now in Dr. King’s spirit and join us in opposing any and all imperial
administrations, in the media, in the voting booth and in the streets.Signatories (as of January 19, 2009)
Lenni Brenner, Pat Bryden, Tom Condit, Lenore Jean Daniels, Ph.D., Michael Dickinson, Ghassan El-Kadri, Vera Alice Vasques El-Kadri,
Dieter Elken, Per Fagereng, John W. Farley, Dermot Ferry, Glen Ford, John Glackin, Robert Glaser, Patricia Gray, David Halpin, Dove and Dolphin Charity, Norma J F Harrison, Tuma Hazou, Stanley Heller, Edward S. Herman, Tom Lacey, Ronit Lentin, David Letwin, Claran Mc Clean, Colm McGinn, David McReynolds, Chuck Mohan, Tinoush Moulaei, Liz Mulford, Judith Norman, Tolu Olorunda, Margaret Parrish, Ginger Pepper, James Petras, Millie Phillips, Karen Platt, Lila Rajiva, Roland Rance, Esther Rapoport, Mel Reeves, R. B. Riddle, Eugene E. Ruyle, Al Sargis, Tony Savin, Evalyn F. Segal, Martha Abu Shawish, Roger Sheppard, Roland Sheppard, Michael J. Smith, Kwame Somburu, William Steinsmith, Stuart Troy, C. T. Weber, Abraham Weizfeld, Derek Wharton, Jebsen & Company (Hong Kong) Ltd., Joan WileyWall Street Powerhouses Invested Alongside Madoff
“Primex Trading’s Dark Pool Operations
There has been much debate among Wall Street veterans as to why major European investment banks suffered serious damage from the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme while our biggest U.S. investment banks escaped unscathed.
For the past two decades, Wall Street watchers could count on four U.S. firms to land in the middle of every securities scandal. From Nasdaq price fixing to fake research to rigging the IPO markets to peddling toxic subprime assets, one could rest assured that Citigroup’s Smith Barney, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs would be heading the lineup. Their complete absence from the greatest Ponzi scheme in history raises the question: what did they know and when did they know it?
The answer may reside in a pentagonal structure created in 1999 to serve the interests of a Wall Street cartel.
On September 14, 1999, it was officially announced that Citigroup’s Smith Barney, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs had partnered with Bernard Madoff to compete head on with the New York Stock Exchange in a venture called Primex Trading.
Madoff had bought the rights to a new technology called Financial Auction Network (FAN) created by Christopher Keith, a 17-year veteran of technology creation at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). Mr. Keith had retired from the NYSE and started a technology think tank in lower Manhattan in the early 1990s called Exchange Lab. FAN was one of the early technology offerings and the rights to develop it were bought by Madoff. The firm that emerged was Primex Trading, a division of Primex Holdings. (Primex Holdings holds two patents and may be part of those secret Madoff assets the court won’t release to the public.)
In addition to harnessing the brains of Mr. Keith from the New York Stock Exchange, Primex hired Glen Shipway, the Executive Vice President of the over the counter stock market, Nasdaq, whose duties had included market surveillance of broker dealers like this gang of five.
The partners made a big splash in the press at the time, extolling altruistic intentions of getting better prices for their customers in an electronic version of the New York Stock Exchange. Here’s an excerpt from the New York Times on September 19, 1999:
“Primex is aiming to be an electronic version of the New York Stock Exchange. Participants will not only be able to buy and sell stocks at prevailing market prices, as they now do through many traditional and electronic exchanges, but also interact openly with one another — in effect, bargain — to find the best prices possible. ‘I think the fact four of the world’s largest securities firms have backed this system suggests that it brings something new and unique to our ability to obtain the best execution for our customers,’ said Bill Hart, a managing director in equity trading at Salomon Smith Barney.”
In reality, a very different motive was at work. One of the best kept secrets from the public is a benign sounding process on Wall Street called internalization. That’s where broker dealers like Madoff’s Primex partners match their customers’ buy and sell orders in-house rather than sending them off to the New York Stock Exchange or some other transparent stock exchange. The entities that engage in this trading process are called dark pools. (Recall that “pools” were the same secretive creatures that rigged the stock market leading up to the crash of 1929.)
While the investing public was being served up visions of Primex creating a more transparent and fairer pricing market mechanism, the goal for Madoff’s partners was to legitimize the highly questionable trading practice of internalization….”
– Pam Martens at Counterpunch.
Boycott Israel
“When I think of all the millions of dollars that people wasted on “change” I want to vomit.
Peace groups, don’t tell me to write or call these unspeakable political lowlifes. Start thinking up ways to disrupt their lives and the lives and fortunes of all the self-satisfied racists who make life hell for Palestinians.
Some suggestions:
1. Demonstrate in the Streets. Not just in front of the government buildings, but in front of Israel Bonds offices, El Al Airlines, the homes of members of Congress, and the businesses of people who give massive amounts of money to Israel. There’s a weekly picket of the Manhattan diamond store owned by Israeli settlement builder Leviev. In a city like New York there should be enough people to picket 9-5 every day it’s open. There are plenty more places to picket. In 2007 Donald Trump gave a quarter million dollars to the “Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces”. Why not demonstrate in front of his ailing Atlantic City casinos?
2. Buy a Keffiyeh. Wear a Keffiyeh. During the Holocaust the Nazis in many countries made Jews wear Jewish stars so that they could be singled out and humiliated or attacked.. According to the Yad Vashem institute in France many non-Jews won the Jewish star as an act of solidarity. According to legend the Danish King Christian X put on a Jewish star for the same reason.
Today our symbol of solidarity must the keffiyeh, the head scarf worn in different styles by Arab men and women. You could see it everywhere among the 15,000 who marched in New York City last week, a march of mostly Arab and Islamic people. It needs to be worn proudly by the “whites”, too. Wear it to work and see what conversations it starts.
3. Demand unions publicly sell their Israel Bonds. 1700 unions own Israel Bonds. Last September the head of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store was honored at a dinner of the Israel Bonds National Labor Division where $40 million was raised for the bonds in one night. See him beaming at Hillary Clinton in a picture here. How many of the members of those 1700 unions have any notion that their leaders are buying these bonds with their dues or pension money?
It’s time to play hardball. The union movement is desperate to get a card check bill passed. Word is that Obama has already decided not to make it a top priority. So it’s going to be a fight. The last thing unions want is bad publicity in a dispute with human rights and Islamic groups about their owning bonds that support an apartheid state. I love unions and have been a union member for 40 years, but enough is enough.
4. Meet up with Muslims. Muslim people in the U.S. have been arrested, demonized and demoralized since 9/11. The horror of Gaza is making U.S. Muslims furious and they’re starting to get active in the streets. A good place to work with them is through the local chapter of CAIR, the Council on American Islamic Relations. www.cair.com
5. Boycott Israeli goods. I haven’t bought as much as a Hanukah candle from Israel in years. I won’t buy a computer made with an Intel processor because Intel has a huge factory in Israel on confiscated Palestinian land. Here’s one list of Israeli products and here’s another courtesy of a site urging you to buy Israeli goods!If you need more arguments see Naomi Klein’s recent article And if a boycott is to have any effect it has to be an active boycott. Ask store owners to remove offending goods and picket the stores that stubbornly trade in the “forbidden” goods. For tips google the Jewish anti-Nazi boycott of the 30’s.
6. Boycott Israeli personalities. Not everyone of course, not Israelis who will speak out against apartheid and war crimes. (There are some Arab countries which stupidly make it a crime to deal with any Israeli!) Obviously picket any Israeli political speaker. (Screw dialogue with them.) If your college works with Israeli institutions campaign to have it stopped. Try to keep the Israeli Philharmonic or Israeli athletes out of your city. No team would ever play against a South African team during the heyday of apartheid protests.
7. The corporate media sucks, but use it as much as possible. Write letters and op-eds. If they’re not published call the editors and bug them about denying equal time. Closely monitor what the editorial page and news page publish. If they don’t cover your protests call the news desk, call or email the publisher. Ask for meetings. The Israeli embassy does it all the time. Get all the coverage you can, but at the same time raise money for your own publicity.
8. Raise money, lots of money. You gave it to stonehearted politicians. Now give it to human rights groups. Rent billboards. Put ads on buses or in college newspapers, or on internet sites. Plaster signs on walls. Run 30 second spots on cable TV. If the stations object to running a “controversial political message” announce a run for political office. Legally they have to run ads by candidates!
9. Give money to Gaza. Eventually some of it will get through. Give to the UN via UNWRA.
10. Insist the national peace coalitions act together. We have UFPJ, ANSWER and the IA Center all calling their own demonstrations. The differences in their programs are less than the length of a gnats toenail. Press them to cooperate. Insist they have open planning meetings.
11. Start thinking of ways to boycott Egypt. Their dictator Mubarak is a full partner to war crimes. By international law people being massacred have a right to flee and become refugees. Mubarak’s troops maintain the Rafah-Egypt wall and shoot and Palestinians who try to break it down. Stay away from Egypt. You can see the pyramids some other time.
12. Think of new ways to put the heat on. Try them out and publicize them. Invent Wiki-Protest.”
Stanley Heller in Counterpunch.
Several Jewish women are at the forefront of protests here in the US, according to Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now.
“Tens of thousands of people took to streets over the weekend in cities across the globe to demonstrate against Israel’s assault on Gaza. Some of the protests have been organized by Jewish groups who are speaking out against Israel’s actions. We speak with two Jewish women for peace: Dorothy Zellner, one of fifteen Jews who have signed a call for a protest in front of the Israeli consulate in New York, and Judy Rebick, who organized a sit-in comprised of Jewish Canadian women at the Israeli consulate in Toronto. “
Comment:
As a libertarian, I don’t think sanctions against a population, whether Palestinian or Israeli, are just.
But targeted boycotts are a different thing.
And the keffiyah idea is a good one.
Activism: Fight Land Cancer With Exnora
From my friend Nirmal Basu, the guiding spirit of the remarkable community environmental group, Exnora, comes a call to battle what he calls Land Cancer. Land Cancer is nothing more than the degradation and diminution of fertile land as pollution and intensive cash farming damage it and large corporations buy it up in huge tracts that they convert into housing developments. Basu has a simple but tremendously effective program for individual and community response - practice Exnora. By this he means do the simple things you can do in your own backyard, house, or even flat to green your environment.
There’s an immediate reason why you should. Food prices are set to mount seriously over the next years.
Some of his ideas:
Compost at home to make soil fertile
Use waste water in your garden
Grow a garden on your window sill…or on your terrace…..on a parapet..or on a gate
or even a water pipe
More ideas here at this Home Exnora flyer
and at the Exnora website.
I should quality this post: if things continue in the same line as they have so far, food prices are set to go up. As usual, we tend to project things in a linear fashion from our current perception of the past (itself inaccurate). It’s a form of modeling especially unsuited to predictions about large, complex groups - and there are very few things larger and more complex than the global economy - if you can even talk of it as a single entity. But that said, even if some technological advance or improvement in distribution or networking leads to lower food prices in the future- we’ll still have a greener environment, fresher air, and a more restful living space. All good things.
And no government money involved.
I came across something similar here in the US that was started by a retired engineer - Square Foot Gardening.
I plan to try my hand at it since I spend a lot of time in front of my computer. A nice box of basil, coriander, and mint on the desk makes an office decor I can live with.
Tell Senate To Reject Admiral Blair Petition
Tell The Senate To Reject Nominee Admiral Blair Who Greenlighted
GenocideTrue progressives have found various Obama appointments so far to
leave much to be desired . . . even to the point of being disturbing.
But the nomination of Admiral Dennis Blair for Director of National
Intelligence cannot be permitted to pass under any circumstances.As reported by Democracy Now, when genocidal monsters in the
Indonesian military were committing massacres in East Timor, Admiral
Blair DEFIED his orders to get them to stop, and instead gave them
encouragement to continue. He then lied to Congress about it all. No
such loose cannon with such blood on his hands can be allowed in the
new administration. The links to both these video stories can be
found on the Reject Blair Action Page below:Reject Blair Action Page: http://www.usalone.com/reject_blair.php
Director of National Intelligence requires Senate confirmation, so
please also call your Senators directly tollfree at 800-828-0498,
800-473-6711, especially if you have new Senators coming in, ask for
them by name and leave your message opposing this appointment.Free Kareem Amer
Egyptian law student and blogger Kareem Amer has been in jail 795 days for opposing his university’s gender segregation policy and criticizing Islam in articles and on his blog .
He writes:
“Freedom’s denial of restrictions does not mean that the human being has the complete freedom to do everything he is able to do. Being powerful does not mean that I am free to subjugate he who is less powerful than I am. For one of the most important principles of freedom is to not trespass on the limits of others’ freedoms; this is so that freedom will be meaningful, and not be merely a justification for the actions of those who take advantage of their power to subdue others. ……
The arrival of the individual preceded the formation of the societal organization, and this formation is what founded the law. And as is known, one of the most important functions that this organization was formed for is the protection of the rights of the individuals from degradation under the protection of the law. Therefore, it is the individual, whose arrival had preceded these legislations, who must enjoy sanctity and respect, and not the law (the follower), which is supposed to protect the rights of the individuals, not degrade these rights.”
And, more controversially, here is a sample of his criticism of Islamic extremism that some people have argued doesn’t deserve protection because it “insults Islam”:”I have seen with my own eyes the thugs as they break into our Christian brothers’ stores after the whole area of Maharram Beh was completely out of control of the government authorities, and I saw them as they ransack the contents of the store right and left, amidst cheering and shouting extremist Islamic slogans, and I saw them stealing the money from inside the drawers of the cash registers and splitting it among themselves as if it is justified by being owned by what they call the infidels and the worshippers of the cross….”
Read more of his articles here.
And here’s a site where you can sign the petition to release him from prison.
Comment:
I am not being anti-Islamic in posting this. My primary training is in American government, politics, and culture and so my criticism is usually directed at corruption and crimes that affect me here. But I need to be even-handed in criticizing other governments for the sort of things I oppose here. And I need to show solidarity with bloggers who face dire threats to their physical existence in a way people here don’t. So while I don’t know if Kareem’s portrayal of Islamic extremists attacking Christians in Egypt is accurate or not, I am comfortable with supporting his right to voice his opinion on politics and religion without restraint - the core of the First Amendment rights we in the US sometimes take for granted… and which are being eroded when government constantly encroaches on our privacy.
No More Blank Check For Israel
STATEMENT ON THE CRISIS IN GAZA
A group of New Jersey peace activists prepared an ad to appear in the Montclair Times, and we found ourselves in broad agreement with its content. We have modified the ad for use as a Campaign for Peace and Democracy sign-on statement.
In its massive military attacks on Gaza, Israel has again engaged in actions contrary to morality, international law, the cause of peace, and to the long-term best interests of the people of Israel. And, once again, the United States government has been the enabler of Israeli actions:
* The bombers that unleashed death and destruction on Gaza were U.S.-supplied F-16s.
* The attack helicopters were U.S.-supplied Apaches.
* The government that blocked international demands for an immediate cease-fire was Washington.
* And the source of more than $3 billion a year in tax-payer funded military aid to Israel has been the United States.
No country should have to face rockets fired at its citizens, and we condemn Hamas’s launching of rockets into Israeli civilian areas. But the solution is not raining bombs and missiles down on one of the most densely populated sites in the world, making massive civilian casualties inevitable, and which, apart from its immorality, guarantees only another generation of hatred towards Israel.
The solution — as the Israeli peace movement, human rights groups, and the United Nations have urged — is to lift the economic blockade imposed on Gaza and end the Occupation.
This blockade holds one and a half million Palestinian civilians hostage, and creates a horrendous humanitarian crisis. Malnutrition is rife, people have died from being denied the right to travel for medical care, and electricity and clean water are scarce. Meanwhile the 40-year Occupation not only continues, but is also strengthened by increased settlements.
We condemn the policies of our government that support the ongoing oppression and murder of the Palestinian people.
” We urge the incoming Obama administration to refuse to give Israel the U.S. blank check it has long enjoyed.
And we call on everyone to join in telling the President and Congress that we want an immediate end to U.S. military aid to Israel. We do not want our tax dollars or the leaders who speak in our names to continue supporting the attacks on the Palestinian people. …”
Sign a petition to end US military aid to Israel by the Campaign for Peace and Democracy.
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