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Monthly Archives: November 2011
Kasich, Koch and big-industry bucks: Why Ohio is the next fracking frontier
Truth Out reports: Fracking opponents in southern Ohio won a victory last week when the United States Forest Service (USFS) withdrew more than 3,000 acres of public lands from a federal oil and gas lease sale scheduled for December 7, 2012. The USFS announced that it needed more time to review the potential effects of fracking after receiving petitions and letters from local leaders who used the old-fashioned method of collecting signatures to catch the attention of government officials.
The fracking industry, on the other hand, has spent $747 million dollars in the past decade to lobby Congress and support politicians in states like Ohio, Michigan and New York as part of a campaign to keep fracking unregulated, according to a recent Common Cause report.
Fracking is short for horizontal hydraulic fracturing, and Ohio is the next ground zero for the rapidly expanding natural-gas drilling method, which has enraged environmentalists and provoked controversy across the country. Fracking involves injecting millions of gallons of water and chemicals – some of them toxic – into deep underground wells to break up rock and release natural gas.
Common Cause reports that fracking companies spent $2.8 million in political contributions to Ohio parties and candidates since 2001. Republican Gov. John Kasich tops the list and has received $213,519 in campaign contributions from the industry.
Additional analysis of campaign records by Truthout reveals that wealthy executives of companies connected to the natural gas industry, including billionaires William “Bill” Koch and David Koch of Koch brothers fame, funneled an additional $127,268 in personal donations through a political action committee (PAC) to support Kasich’s election in 2010.
Earlier this year, Kasich signed a law passed by Ohio’s Republican-controlled legislature allowing drilling companies to frack in state parks, a big signal to the industry that Ohio is open for business.
Banks may have illegally foreclosed on 5,000 members of the military
Think Progress reports: For months, major banks have been dealing with the fallout of the “robo-signing” scandal, following reports that the banks were improperly foreclosing on homeowners and, in many instances, falsifying paperwork that they were submitting to courts. Banks have been forced to go back and re-examine foreclosures to ensure that homeowners did not lose their homes unlawfully.
In the latest episode of this mess, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has found that banks — including Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup — may have improperly foreclosed on up to 5,000 active members of the military:
Israel — still an embarrassment to its friends
Joe Klein writes: My friend and colleague, the great war photographer Lynsey Addario, has been through a lot this year — kidnapped by the Libyans, difficult assignments in Afghanistan, Somalia and Gaza, and a much less taxing three weeks hanging with me on my annual road trip, all while pregnant… and now she has been utterly humiliated at a checkpoint by the Israeli army while on assignment for the New York Times.
Lynsey asked not to pass through the x-ray machine at the border, since she is nearly 8 months pregnant — and obviously so — but she was forced to pass through the machine 3 times while being verbally abused and then strip-searched for good measure.
This is completely outrageous, of course. It is another indication that Israel has been brutalized by its occupation of Arab territories since 1967. For those of us who feel strongly about the need for Israel to exist–especially those of us who love the place, warts and all–this incident is yet another reason to fear for Israel’s future.
There’s something not quite right about Klein’s phrasing: “Israel has been brutalized by its occupation of Arab territories since 1967.”
Israel, the eternal victim, is now the victim of its own behavior.
I doubt that this was Klein’s intention. To be more blunt and precise he should have said, Israel has brutalized itself by its occupation of Arab territories since 1967.
What Klein and Israel’s other friends still refuse to acknowledge is that this institutional brutality did not begin in 1967 but was already fully evident in 1948. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine was no accident.
Meanwhile, the New York Times itself apparently regards Addario’s treatment by Israeli soldiers as an issue more appropriately dealt with through written correspondence with Israeli officials than by giving it the weight of a front page news item (or even any page in print), nor deeming it worthy of editorial comment. (This has been its only coverage so far.)
Is this out of deference to the Palestinians? An implicit acknowledgment that the occasional affronts that foreign journalists suffer at the hands of Israelis are everyday occurrences for the population that for 44 years has lived under Israeli military rule?
Unlikely. Much more likely is that the New York Times wants to minimize the embarrassment of its friends and staff reporters in Israel.
Secret Fed loans helped banks net $13 billion
Bloomberg Markets Magazine reports: The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.
The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.
Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse.
A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger.
“When you see the dollars the banks got, it’s hard to make the case these were successful institutions,” says Sherrod Brown, a Democratic Senator from Ohio who in 2010 introduced an unsuccessful bill to limit bank size. “This is an issue that can unite the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. There are lawmakers in both parties who would change their votes now.”
Occupy economics
Nancy Folbre writes: The Occupy Wall Street movement, displaced from some key geographic locations, now enjoys a small but significant encampment among economists.
Concerns about the impact of growing economic inequality fit neatly into a larger critique of mainstream economic theory and its deep faith in the efficiency of markets.
Many unbelievers (including me) insist that we inhabit a global capitalist system rather than an efficient market. Willingness to use the C-word (capitalism) often signals concerns about a concentration of economic power that unfairly limits individual choices, undermines political democracy, generates financial and ecological crises and limits access to alternative economic ideas.
We can’t address these concerns effectively without a wider discussion of them.
Seventy Harvard students dramatized dissatisfaction with the economics profession when they walked out of Prof. Gregory Mankiw’s introductory economics class on Nov. 2, protesting, in an open letter to their instructor, that the course “espouses a specific — and limited — view of economics that we believe perpetuates problematic and inefficient systems of economic inequality in our society today.” (Professor Mankiw, a periodic contributor to the Economic View column in the Sunday Business section of The New York Times, discussed the protest in an interview with National Public Radio.)
The event prompted online discussion of conservative bias in introductory economics textbooks, including an anti-Mankiw blog set up by Daniel MacDonald, a graduate student in my own department. Prof. John Davis of the University of Amsterdam and Marquette University posted a video arguing that economic researchers, like fish, engage in herd behavior in order to minimize individual risk.
Israel divided over plan to attack Iran
Inside Story – Egypt elections special
Tahrir is not Egypt — and neither are the generals
Tony Karon writes: The message of the historic Egyptian election, which began Monday with huge crowds turning out to vote in the protest-scarred cities of Cairo and Alexandra, is a simple one: Egypt’s immediate political future will not be written in Tahrir Square, or by the revolutionaries who last week lost 40 of their comrades to violence by the security forces. But nor will the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), the junta that eased out former President Hosni Mubarak in February, be able to sustain its claim to a monopoly on decision making over the transition process. By creating a democratically elected assembly — no matter how flawed by SCAF’s arcane election laws, and how limited its mandate may be according to the junta’s plan — the election process, which may take months to complete, creates a political voice whose legitimacy to speak for Egyptians trumps that of both SCAF and Tahrir Square. And that could profoundly change the power game in the coming months.
“Egypt is not Tahrir Square,” a SCAF spokesman warned last week, vowing that the elections would go ahead despite calls from the revolutionaries that they be postponed, and that the junta immediately cede power to a civilian “government of national salvation” acceptable to the parties on the Square. The revolutionaries had even offered the job of Prime Minister to Dr. Mohammed ElBaradei, the Nobel Laureate former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency and liberal presidential candidate, who had reportedly accepted and vowed to drop his presidential bid in order to take the job.
But Tahrir Square had no real job to offer, outside of the fevered political imagination stoked by the protesters’ brave and bloody battle to hold their ground, with each new casualty deepening the protesters’ sense of their own legitimacy and claim to write their country’s future. The brutal reality, however, was that most of Cairo had stayed on the sidelines for last week’s “second revolution,” and huge numbers of Cairenes turned out to participate enthusiastically in an election widely dismissed by those on the Square as irrelevant or counterproductive.
The election turnout, alone, challenges last week’s picture of Egypt’s future being decided in the outcome of a Tahrir Square vs. SCAF showdown, each claiming popular legitimacy for its own claim to direct the post-Mubarak transition. The military claimed to represent a “silent majority” and vowed not to yield to a “slogan chanting crowd.” Those leading the Tahrir demonstrations demanded the ouster of the junta, which has essentially maintained the repressive autocratic foundation of Mubarak’s regime, insisting that power be handed to a civilian government selected from opposition political forces, and that “now is not the time for elections.”
But there were other options on offer: Last week’s protests, in fact, began as a far larger, peaceful demonstration called by the Muslim Brotherhood against the junta’s plans to entrench their own power over any new elected government. A far smaller group — led by secular liberal groups competing with both SCAF and the Brotherhood to shape the post-Mubarak agenda — remained behind to reoccupy the Square, and press their demands for a handover to a handpicked civilian government. It was the authorities’ decision to violently evict this group that touched off the latest wave of clashes.
The Muslim Brotherhood came under fierce criticism from liberal groups for failing to support the renewed occupation of Tahrir Square, with even many members of the organization questioning the leadership’s reluctance to more forcefully challenge the junta’s violent crackdown. Liberal groups accused the Brotherhood of “opportunism” for insisting that the elections go ahead, largely because it is widely expected that the Islamist movement’s Freedom and Justice Party will be the big winner at the polls. But, of course, the Brotherhood could make the same complaint against the liberals’ demand to postpone a poll in which they’re likely to be marginalized: most of the liberal parties lack a clear political identity, much less the grassroots presence and organizational machinery that the Brotherhood has built in working class communities despite decades of repression.
Israeli soldiers treat New York Times photographer like a Palestinian
After Lynsey Addario, a Pulitzer Prize-winning war photographer working for the New York Times, was forced by Israeli soldiers to pass through an X-ray machine three times in spite of her protests that it might harm her unborn child, Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner expresses shock:
The Times remains shocked at the treatment Lynsey Addario received and shocked at how long the investigation has taken since our complaint was lodged a month ago. The careless and mocking way in which she was handled should not be considered accepted security procedure.
What Bronner and everyone else knows is that there is nothing shocking about the brutal treatment Addario received — unless the shock is not at the treatment itself but the fact that it was dished out to a New York Times journalist. But Bronner makes it clear that that is not what he means. He goes on to say: “We welcome the announcement by the Defense Ministry of plans to hone that procedure.”
This is how the Times reported what happened:
In a letter to the Israeli ministry last month, Ms. Addario wrote that soldiers at the Erez Crossing in northern Gaza had treated her with “blatant cruelty” when she arrived there on Oct. 24 and asked not to have to pass through the X-ray machine. Because she was seven months pregnant at the time, she had been advised by her obstetrician to avoid exposure to radiation.
Ms. Addario had phoned an official at the border crossing in advance to make her request and had been assured that there would be no problem. When she arrived at checkpoint, however, she was told that if she did not pass through the X-ray machine, she would have to remove all of her clothes down to her underwear for a search. To “avoid the humiliation,” Ms. Addario decided to pass through the X-ray machine.
“As I passed through,” she wrote, “a handful of soldiers watched from the glass above the machine smiling triumphantly. They proceeded to say there was a ‘problem’ with the initial scan, and made me pass through two additional times as they watched and laughed from above. I expressed each time that I was concerned with the effect the radiation would have on my pregnancy.”
She added:
After three passes through the X-ray, I was then brought into a room where a woman proceeded to ask me to take off my pants. She lifted up my shirt to expose my entire body while I stood in my underwear. I asked if this was necessary after the three machine checks, and she told me it was “procedure” — which I am quite sure it is not. They were unprofessional for soldiers from any nation.
In an e-mail to The Times on Monday, the Defense Ministry wrote that, after “a deep and serious investigation into the matter of Ms. Addario’s security check last month,” it had concluded that her request to avoid the machine had not been passed on to the security officials at the checkpoint because of “faulty coordination between the parties involved.”
So it was a bureaucratic mix-up. It was a “mishap in coordination,” the ministry says and now it has “sharpened” its inspection procedures. And at the same time, a vacuous apology was offered, the Jerusalem Post reports:
“The Defense Ministry employs strict security measures in order to prevent attacks by terrorist groups. We expect people to understand this. Nevertheless, we have apologized to the New York Times and the photographer,” the statement read.
But maybe the apology should not have come from the Israeli Defense Ministry and instead should be made by the New York Times to its readers.
Why go in search of a worthless apology instead of using the incident as an opportunity to provide a graphic, first-hand report on the way Israeli soldiers abuse the civilians under their control? The Times reporters seem to have been busier writing letters to Israeli officials than doing their own jobs: reporting.
Afghanistan is a country — not a war
Everyone lives at the center of the world.
But in a world where power and resources are so unevenly distributed, it’s easy for those of us who live in the domineering West, to place everyone and everywhere else out on the periphery.
As Americans who have for so long looked at the rest of the world through the prism of war, we rarely appreciate the people and places obscured by our imperial footprint.
Afghanistan is a country that most Americans knew nothing about before 2001 and ten years later it remains largely unknown as a country — it has become this generation’s Vietnam: a country reduced to the name of an American war.
Lukas and Salome Augustin are two young German photographers and filmmakers who have put together a stunning short portrait of the people of Afghanistan. Here we see the faces at the crossroads of Asia — a place that demographically truly is the center of the world, located as it is, in closest proximity to the whole of humanity [PDF]. And instead of images of violence and oppression, we see people peacefully attending to their lives and we see the beauty which is only revealed to those who slow down enough to appreciate it.
Afghanistan – touch down in flight from Augustin Pictures on Vimeo.
© by Lukas and Salome Augustin
All rights reserved. Published here with the filmmaker’s permission. “Feel free to watch it on Vimeo, to share on Facebook, Twitter etc. but please ask for embed permission and please don’t upload the video on Youtube or any other site. Thank you!”
‘It’s time to stop the bully’: Adbusters editor Kalle Lasn on Occupy Wall Street, the Israel lobby and the New York Times
Mondoweiss interviews the founder of Adbusters: When the Occupy Wall Street protests began to attract attention in the fall, everyone wanted to know where the idea to set up a permanent protest at the heart of Manhattan’s financial district came from. The answer was the mind of Kalle Lasn, the co-editor (along with Micah White) of the anti-consumerist “culture jamming” magazine Adbusters. It was Adbusters, calling for an American “Tahrir moment,” that originally put out the call to occupy Wall Street on September 17.
But not all the attention Lasn and his magazine received was positive, though. It was the New York Times coverage of Adbusters and Lasn’s role in the Occupy movement that caused him the most grief by smearing them as anti-Semitic.
“For me, the New York Times is really important right now, because it was one of the most ugly experiences of my year, where they took a couple of quick swipes at my magazine and me personally,” Lasn told Mondoweiss in a recent phone interview. “I have such huge respect for the New York Times and I subscribe to it and I’ve been reading it every morning for the last ten years of my life.”
Now, Lasn is speaking out about the New York Times‘ refusal to print his response to two articles in the newspaper that alleged Adbusters was anti-Semitic. (Read more about the controversy here, and read this New Yorker article on the origins and future of Occupy Wall Street for more about Lasn and White.)
Mondoweiss recently caught up with Lasn for an extended interview with the sixty-nine year old activist to discuss Occupy Wall Street, Palestine, the Israel lobby and more. [Continue reading…]
The New York Times also features an article on Lasn today which includes this line: “In 2004, Adbusters published an article claiming that a large percentage of neoconservatives behind American foreign policy were Jewish.” This is a classic example of the way the New York Times subtly distorts the truth.
Lasn’s article did indeed make that claim, but to call it a claim is to suspend judgement on whether it has a factual basis. It is to say that Lasn made such an assertion but the journalist reporting it was in no position to verify or refute its validity. If there was a disputable claim it was that the 50 individuals Lasn named were indeed the most influential among the neoconservative — though Lasn himself attached the caveat that “neoconservative” is for some a badge of honor while for others an unwanted label and thus identifying who is and who is not a neoconservative is not that easy. But among those 50, Lasn pointed out that half of them are Jewish.
Now if he was pointing this out because he was conducting some kind of “Jew watch”, then he could reasonably be accused of being antisemtic. But far from doing that, he was instead asserting that the centrality that many neoconservatives give to Israel’s interests is not just coincidentally related to the fact that a disproportionate number of neoconservatives are Jews. The fact that he got attacked for pointing out a fairly obvious connection, rather than indicating that he must have had an insidious motive, much more strongly indicates how easily the neoconservatives feel threatened by anyone who highlights their ties to Israel.
Visualizing the 2012 federal discretionary budget
Egypt’s plethora of political parties
Arab League approves Syria sanctions
Does smaller government create more jobs?
The romance of remote warfare
The U.S. Air Force now recruits more pilots for drones than fighter and bomber pilots combined, says Air Force Maj. Gen. James Poss who helps oversee the Air Force’s surveillance programs.
In an interview with National Public Radio, Poss alludes to the fact that in the early years of remote warfare, piloting drones did not appeal to military recruits who saw themselves instead becoming battle-tested warriors. But as the commercial above makes clear, the Air Force is now working hard to incorporate Predators and their pilots into the combat ethos.
Unlike a person that deploys to combat, our remotely piloted aircraft force never leave combat and that’s got unique psychological stresses — you really don’t get a break. And even more jarring is you do leave your ground control station and drive home and you have to mow the lawn… The difference [with being a fighter pilot] is: you never leave the combat zone.
You sit in a reclining chair in an air-conditioned operations room in an air force base in Nevada, yet you never leave the combat zone. Why? Because combat is a state of mind?
The Pentagon always prefers sterile language — language that obscures the reality of war. Yet remote warfare really begs the question as to whether “combat” in which one combatant’s death is near certain while his opponent’s life is in no danger, is really combat at all.
In combat, each side is battling the other. Com- means together — not thousands of miles apart.
Remote extrajudicial execution would be a more accurate description for strikes that in their frequency have become “the cannon fire of this war” — though the Air Force might find it difficult recruiting executioners.
For the military, there appear to be no limits on their effort to promote the value of soldiers who can shoot without ever getting shot and can go overseas without ever leaving home.
We’ve got a predator pilot that hasn’t left the skies of South-West Asia for nine years… This captain has been sitting at Creech Air Force Base [in Nevada] flying over South-West Asia, eight to ten hours a day, five to six days a week, 52 weeks a year for the past nine years… If you want to go and talk to a world expert on Iraq or Afghanistan, maybe you don’t need to go to Iraq and Afghanistan — maybe you need to go talk to that young captain down at Creech, because they’ve been staring at that ground for the past nine years.
Thus we have a picture of the future of the U.S. military’s approach to (not) facing its adversaries: that it can learn all it needs to know through electronic imagery and it kill everyone it needs to kill without shedding a drop of blood or sweat. This will be America’s ignoble and blunt efficiency.
This vision of killing-without-combat resonates with the image of UC Davis police Lt. John Pike as he casually pepper-sprays student demonstrators. In each case the willingness to inflict suffering is directly related to the assailant’s own sense of impunity — his ability to fire without being fired upon.
There is nothing noble or brave in this approach to violence.
In Shakespeare’s Henry V, as the Battle of Agincourt is about to commence, the king addresses his men — “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers” — heavily outnumbered by the French and facing the risk of imminent slaughter.
Henry — a king who fights with his men and doesn’t simply issue commands — declares:
… he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
And crowns for convoy put into his purse;
We would not die in that man’s company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
To the extent that there is a noble dimension to warfare it is this: that those willing to kill are also willing to die. Those taking the lives of others do so knowing that just as easily they could lose their own.
Egypt’s Islamists: Betting on the ballot box
Ursula Lindsey writes: One evening a few weeks ago, the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) invited journalists to attend one of their parliamentary campaign events in Cairo’s sprawling poor neighborhood of Imbaba.
A disciplined and cheerful crowd marched along the narrow, unpaved alleys. People leaned out their windows in the tightly packed red-brick apartment blocks. While their supporters chanted upbeat political and religious slogans, the candidates stopped at the local shops and cafes to shake hands with middle-aged men.
The march was like many other ones the MB has held in previous elections. But there were also some noticeable differences: the larger-than-usual female contingent and the yellow sashes bearing the name of the organisation’s newly established Freedom and Justice Party. The lack of plainclothes security officers lurking in the background and the palpable optimism also stood out.
For months now, Islamists have made holding elections their priority. That night in Imbaba, candidate Amr Darrag told me that electoral legitimacy would give him and others the power to truly represent the people. “This will be much more powerful than the force in Tahrir Square,” he said. “Rather than having a million people rally for a certain demand, if I represent one million people I can speak for them.”
The MB, and other new Islamist groups who formed parties in the last 10 months, expect to do well in the parliamentary elections. In the 2005 elections, seen as less corrupt as those of 2010, they won about 20 percent of the parliament seats available, and in this election many observers predict that, combined, Islamist parties may win a majority. The MB in particular is well-organized, well-funded and has a regional network across the country that no other party can match.
Ever since Mubarak’s ouster there has been a note of confidence bordering on triumphalism amongst Islamist parties in Egypt. It was they who organized the anti-army demonstration in Tahrir on November 18 to reject so-called “supra-constitutional” principles. Some opposed these principles for granting the army exceptional privileges and for enshrining freedoms that, they said, might contradict Islamic principles.
“People are afraid of Islamists,” a member of the MB told me that day. “But if Islamists win, isn’t that the will of the people? We’ve tried all the other forms of government – Mubarak’s rule, socialist, capitalist rule – why not try the Brotherhood? What’s the problem?”
The following day, the army and riot police violently cleared a small sit-in from the square after a week of bloody clashes that left 44 dead and hundreds wounded, and brought tens of thousands into the streets demanding an immediate end to military rule. The Islamists’ insistence that elections are the solution to the current political crises has reportedly caused some heated internal debates, and widened the gulf of mistrust between them and their secular counterparts.