Video: Does the G8 represent a modern world economy?
Welcome, NATO, to Chicago’s police state
Bernard Harcourt writes: With Nato delegates arriving Saturday night, the City of Chicago has been turned into a police state. Courtesy of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who several months ago began implementing new draconian anti-protest measures, Chicago has gone on security lockdown. Starting early Friday night, 18 May 2012, the Chicago Police Department began shutting down – prohibiting cars, bikes, and pedestrians – miles and miles of highways and roads in the heart of Chicago to create a security perimeter around downtown and McCormick Place (where the Nato summit is being held).
Eight-foot tall, anti-scale security fencing went up all over that perimeter and downtown, including Grant Park; and the Chicago police – as well as myriad other federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, such as the FBI and the US secret service – were out in force on riot-geared horses, bikes, and patrols – batons at the ready. Philadelphia Police Department is sending over reinforcements to help out; Chicago has also asked for recruits from police departments in Milwaukee and Charlotte-Mecklenburg, NC. Meanwhile, F-16 warplanes “screamed through the skies as part of a pre-summit defense exercise” and helicopters hovered incessantly.
The Chicago Police Department has spent $1m in “riot-control equipment” in anticipation of the Nato summit. According to the Guardian, “The city of Chicago’s procurement services website shows that in March [2012] $757,657 was spent on 8,513 ‘retro-fit kits’ to be fitted to police helmets. In February [2012] 673 of the same kits, which include a face shield and ear and neck protectors, were purchased for $56,632.” Plus, the Chicago Police Department will be deploying its two, new, expensive long-range acoustic device (LRAD) sound cannons – which it bought at $20,000 a pop. These are the type of devices that were used by the Pittsburgh police to deliver high-pitched alarm tones during the G20 summit meeting there in 2009. [Continue reading…]
Divided America
In The New Geography of Jobs, Enrico Moretti writes: Menlo Park is a lively community in the heart of Silicon Valley, just minutes from Stanford University’s manicured campus and many of the Valley’s most dynamic high-tech companies. Surrounded by some of the wealthiest zip codes in California, its streets are lined with an eclectic mix of midcentury ranch houses side by side with newly built mini-mansions and low-rise apartment buildings. In 1969, David Breedlove was a young engineer with a beautiful wife and a house in Menlo Park. They were expecting their first child. Breedlove liked his job and had even turned down an offer from Hewlett-Packard, the iconic high-tech giant in the Valley. Nevertheless, he was considering leaving Menlo Park to move to a medium-sized town called Visalia. About a three-hour drive from Menlo Park, Visalia sits on a flat, dry plain in the heart of the agricultural San Joaquin Valley. Its residential neighborhoods have the typical feel of many Southern California communities, with wide streets lined with one-story houses, lawns with shrubs and palm trees, and the occasional backyard pool. It’s hot in the summer, with a typical maximum temperature in July of ninety-four degrees, and cold in the winter.
Breedlove liked the idea of moving to a more rural community with less pollution, a shorter commute, and safer schools. Menlo Park, like many urban areas at the time, did not seem to be heading in the right direction. In the end, Breedlove quit his job, sold the Silicon Valley house, packed, and moved the family to Visalia. He was not the only one. Many well-educated professionals at the time were leaving cities and moving to smaller communities because they thought those communities were better places to raise families. But things did not turn out exactly as they expected.
In 1969, both Menlo Park and Visalia had a mix of residents with a wide range of income levels. Visalia was predominantly a farming community with a large population of laborers but also a sizable number of professional, middle-class families. Menlo Park had a largely middle-class population but also a significant number of working-class and low-income households. The two cities were not identical—the typical resident of Menlo Park was somewhat better educated than the typical resident of Visalia and earned a slightly higher salary—but the differences were relatively small. In the late 1960s, the two cities had schools of comparable quality and similar crime rates, although Menlo Park had a slightly higher incidence of violent crime, especially aggravated assault. The natural surroundings in both places were attractive. While Menlo Park was close to the Pacific Ocean beaches, Visalia was near the Sierra Nevada range and Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks.
Today the two places could not be more different, but not in the way David Breedlove envisioned. The Silicon Valley region has grown into the most important innovation hub in the world. Jobs abound, and the average salary of its residents is the second highest in America. Its crime rate is low, its school districts are among the best in the state, and the air quality is excellent. Fully half of its residents have a college degree, and many have a PhD, making it the fifth best educated urban area in the nation. Menlo Park keeps attracting small and large high-tech employers, including most recently the new Facebook headquarters.
By contrast, Visalia has the second lowest percentage of college-educated workers in the country, almost no residents with a postgraduate degree, and one of the lowest average salaries in America. It is the only major city in the Central Valley that does not have a four-year college. Its crime rate is high, and its schools, structurally unable to cope with the vast number of non-English-speaking students, are among the worst in California. Visalia also consistently ranks among American cities with the worst pollution, especially in the summer, when the heat, traffic, and fumes from farm machines create the third highest level of ozone in the nation.
Not only are the two communities different, but they are growing more and more different every year. For the past thirty years, Silicon Valley has been a magnet for good jobs and skilled workers from all over the world. The percentage of college graduates has increased by two-thirds, the second largest gain among American metropolitan areas. By contrast, few high-paying jobs have been created in Visalia, and the percentage of local workers with a college degree has barely changed in thirty years—one of the worst performances in the country.
For someone like David Breedlove, a highly educated professional with solid career options, choosing Visalia over Menlo Park was a perfectly reasonable decision in 1969. Today it would be almost unthinkable. Although only 200 miles separate these two cities, they might as well be on two different planets. [Continue reading…]
Chicago 2012 and 1968
Eighteen months ago, when President Obama selected Chicago to host the 2012 NATO Summit — the first NATO summit to be held in the U.S. since 1999 — we can guess that a number of issues would have been running through his mind. He knew that by the time of the summit he would have already begun his 2012 campaign for re-election. He could have reasonably assumed that he wouldn’t be able to rely on the success of the U.S. economy as a basis for winning votes. More likely he would be shamelessly exploiting the Republican strategy of national security — presenting himself as a wartime president who voters should have more reason to trust than his untested opponent. In that context, the optics of the leader of the free world hosting an assembly of world leaders must have looked like a good opportunity for Obama to burnish his presidential image and have NATO 2012 look like some kind of global endorsement for Obama 2012.
That was before the NATO-led war in Libya — not popular among American voters — and before the birth of the Occupy movement.
In the weeks leading up to the summit, it seems like there was more concern about the risk of Chicago 2012 turning into a liability for the Obama campaign. Worst of all, from Obama’s perspective, would be if the event was turned into an icon of social unrest reminiscent of the international upheaval of 1968 and the demonstrations around the National Democratic Convention in Chicago.
The first indication that the Obama administration realized it was asking for trouble was when it made a last minute decision to shift the G8 meeting which had been scheduled to take place in Chicago right before the NATO summit. When the G8 move to Camp David was announced in March, the Associated Press reported:
It was an unusually late location change for a large and highly scripted international summit and came with little explanation from the White House. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel – the former White House chief of staff who personally lobbied President Barack Obama to hold the summit in Chicago – was informed only hours before the official announcement.
As the NATO summit approached it appears that 1968 was a topic already on the minds of Chicago’s police officers.
A few days ago, when three young men from Florida were stopped for no apparent reason than that they appeared like they could be political protesters, one police officer remarked, “You guys know all about ’68,” while another officer recounted what appeared to have been a police slogan among those clamping down on the 1968 protests: “Billy club to the fucking skull.”
It appears that the men from Florida were not only apprehended without due cause but thereafter selected as suitable targets for entrapment.
The Guardian reports: Lawyers for three protesters arrested on terrorist-related charges ahead of the Nato summit have accused police of entrapping them and encouraging an alleged bomb-making effort.
The three were arrested on Wednesday night when members of the Chicago police department battered their way into an apartment in the Bridgeport area of the city.
According to court documents released on Saturday, the three men considered targeting Barack Obama’s re-election headquarters and the home of Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel.
The Chicago police department said the men, described as self-proclaimed anarchists and members of the “Black Bloc” movement that has disrupted international gatherings in the past, were arrested on Wednesday and charged on Friday with conspiracy to commit terrorism, providing material support for terrorism and possession of an explosive incendiary device.
The three men charged were listed as Brian Church, 22, of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Jared Chase, 27, of Keene, New Hampshire, and Brent Betterly, 24, from Massachusetts.
At a hearing on Saturday bail was set at $1.5m for each of the three. Their next court appearance is on Tuesday.
Supporters of the three men disputed the charges, saying the men had come to protest at the Nato summit peacefully and that the police had confused beer-making equipment with explosives.
A lawyer for the three, Michael Deutsch, said undercover police officers had entrapped them by infiltrating the group and encouraging the bomb-making effort. The Chicago police department declined to comment on the tactics employed in the case. [Continue reading…]
Congressmen seek to lift propaganda ban
Michael Hastings reports: An amendment that would legalize the use of propaganda on American audiences is being inserted into the latest defense authorization bill, BuzzFeed has learned.
The amendment would “strike the current ban on domestic dissemination” of propaganda material produced by the State Department and the Pentagon, according to the summary of the law at the House Rules Committee’s official website.
The tweak to the bill would essentially neutralize two previous acts—the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 and Foreign Relations Authorization Act in 1987—that had been passed to protect U.S. audiences from our own government’s misinformation campaigns.
The bi-partisan amendment is sponsored by Rep. Mac Thornberry from Texas and Rep. Adam Smith from Washington State.
In a little noticed press release earlier in the week — buried beneath the other high-profile issues in the $642 billion defense bill, including indefinite detention and a prohibition on gay marriage at military installations — Thornberry warned that in the Internet age, the current law “ties the hands of America’s diplomatic officials, military, and others by inhibiting our ability to effectively communicate in a credible way.”
The bill’s supporters say the informational material used overseas to influence foreign audiences is too good to not use at home, and that new techniques are needed to help fight Al-Qaeda, a borderless enemy whose own propaganda reaches Americans online.
Critics of the bill say there are ways to keep America safe without turning the massive information operations apparatus within the federal government against American citizens. [Continue reading…]
Lunch with the FT: Cornel West
The Financial Times‘ Anna Fifield has lunch with Cornell West:
West says he lost faith in Obama when the president brought people with close ties to Wall Street and the financial crisis into his administration. West names the president’s former economic adviser Larry Summers, his current Treasury secretary Tim Geithner, and his budget chief, now chief of staff, Jack Lew.
The Obama administration has concentrated the power of both government and the financial sector, West says, in ways that have been good for banks and bad for common people. “I’m a Main Street brother and I’m very critical of all forms of concentrated power, be it in government or be it in the private sector,” he says, seeing little difference between the political parties.
Though conceding that liberals by far prefer Obama to the presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney, West describes the president’s neoliberalism – citing the deregulation of markets, social services cuts and the slashing of wages of government workers – as “morally bankrupt”.
“You’ve got some decent people there who know that the greed is running amok,” West says, referring to Gregory Smith, a former Goldman Sachs executive who wrote a highly critical opinion piece about the bank in the New York Times in March. “My brother Gregory Smith is a decent brother who says, ‘Look, this culture of greed and avarice is getting out of control. I can’t take it, my moral conscience is violated.’ We’re going to see many more people like Gregory Smith, even inside of the big banks, saying we’ve gone much too far in terms of spiritual emptiness and moral constipation.”
He believes that last year’s Occupy movement came up with a language for discussing these issues – one that will endure regardless of whether or not people are camping in public squares. “We have to come up with a democratic way of talking about it because it’s not a matter of hating oligarchs or taking revenge on the moneyed class, it’s a matter of hating injustice. That’s the [Martin Luther] King legacy.”
Video: Inside Syria — An opposition divided
Greek leftist leader Alexis Tsipras: ‘It’s a war between people and capitalism’
The Guardian reports: “I don’t believe in heroes or saviours,” says Alexis Tsipras, “but I do believe in fighting for rights … no one has the right to reduce a proud people to such a state of wretchedness and indignity.”
The man who holds the fate of the euro in his hands – as the leader of the Greek party willing to tear up the country’s €130bn (£100bn) bailout agreement – says Greece is on the frontline of a war that is engulfing Europe.
A long bombardment of “neo-liberal shock” – draconian tax rises and remorseless spending cuts – has left immense collateral damage. “We have never been in such a bad place,” he says, sleeves rolled up, staring hard into the middle distance, from behind the desk that he shares in his small parliamentary office. “After two and a half years of catastrophe, Greeks are on their knees. The social state has collapsed, one in two youngsters is out of work, there are people leaving en masse, the climate psychologically is one of pessimism, depression, mass suicides.”
But while exhausted and battle weary, the nation at the forefront of Europe’s escalating debt crisis and teetering on the edge of bankruptcy is also hardened. And, increasingly, they are looking towards Tsipras to lead their fight.
“Defeat is the battle that isn’t waged,” says the young politician who almost overnight has seen his radical left coalition party, Syriza, jump from representing fewer than 5% of Greeks to enjoying ratings of more than 25% in polls.
Video: The One Percent
Worse than Keystone
Alyssa Battistoni writes: Coal is without question our dirtiest fuel source: When burned, it dumps toxins like mercury and nitrogen oxides into the air and packs an outsize punch when it comes to carbon emissions. Since America has a lot of it, though, we’ve tended to use a lot: Historically, around half our electricity has been generated by coal combustion plants. But as a result of sustained anti-coal activism, low prices for natural gas, and new EPA regulations on power plant emissions, Americans are using a lot less coal than we used to, and the future of the sooty stuff in this country is looking dim. So the U.S. coal industry is pinning its hopes on China. While historically most of our exported coal has gone to Europe, U.S. exports to China increased 176 percent between 2009 and 2010, and that number is likely to keep rising as the Asian market for coal continues to expand. The prospect of shipping coal across the Pacific is even more appealing considering that Western states like Wyoming and Montana have vast coal reserves in the Powder River Basin, one of the largest coal deposits in the world.
But while the incentives to drastically scale up Western-mined, Asia-bound coal exports exist, the infrastructure to do so does not — at least, not yet. Coal mining companies are hoping to change that by building up to six coal export terminals in the Pacific Northwest — three apiece in Washington and Oregon — with the combined capacity to ship around 150 million short tons of coal to Asia each year. These new plans would more than double 107 million short tons of coal the U.S. exported in 2011.
But good news for the coal industry is bad news for the climate, and whether Powder Basin coal is burned here or abroad, it’ll add the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions to an already-warming atmosphere. [Continue reading…]
Drone filmmaker denied visa
Glenn Greenwald writes: Muhammad Danish Qasim is a Pakistani student at Iqra University’s Media Science and is also a filmmaker. This year, Qasim released a short film entitled The Other Side, a 20-minute narrative that “revolves around the idea of assessing social, psychological and economical effects of drones on the people in tribal areas of Pakistan.” A two-minute video trailer of the film is embedded below. The Express Tribune provided this summary of the film, including an interview with Qasim:
The Other Side revolves around a school-going child in Miranshah, the capital of North Waziristan. The child’s neighborhood gets bombed after the people of the region are suspected for some notorious activities. He ends up losing all of his loved ones during the bombing and later becomes part of an established terrorists group who exploit his loss and innocence for their own interests.
On the reasons for picking such a sensitive topic, the film-maker said, “Most of the films being made right now are based on social issues, so we picked up an issue of international importance which is the abrogation of our national space by foreign countries.”
When asked how this film on terrorism will be different from all the others that have been released since 9/11, he said, “The film takes the audience very close to the damage caused by drone attacks. I have tried my best to connect all the dots that lead to a drone attack and have shot the prevailing aftermath of such attacks in a very realistic and raw manner.”
In particular, “the film identifies the problems faced by families who have become victims of drone missiles, and it unearths the line of action which terrorist groups adopt to use victimised families for their vested interests.” In other words, it depicts the tragedy of civilian deaths, and documents how those deaths are then successfully exploited by actual Terrorists for recruitment purposes. [Continue reading…]
Syria diary
Layla Al-Zubaidi writes: ‘Welcome to Assad’s Syria,’ the signpost at the Lebanese-Syrian border still says, letting the visitor know who owns the country. The ceasefire had just been announced, but few Syrians I knew held out much hope that three hundred UN observers could keep an eye on the whole army. The journey from Beirut to Damascus by shared taxi takes less than three hours. For years I’ve come this way to visit the Syrian side of my family. It was clear that things had changed. Political talk among the passengers used to be limited to hushed complaints about the border police. The taxi drivers would stick a packet of Marlboros and a banknote into the pocket of the customs officers to speed things up. Occasionally they’d mumble an Arab proverb: ‘If you want the grapes, don’t upset the gardener.’
Once across the border, you used to hold your tongue, especially around people you didn’t know – ‘dictatorship mode’. This time a passenger joked loudly that Tefal was now making chairs for Arab presidents, to stop their arses from getting stuck. Both sides of the highway bristled with banners showing Bashar al-Assad waving to a sea of followers or raising his hands, under slogans like ‘We Say Yes to Syria.’
‘How could anyone be stupid enough to think he’d just leave like Ben-Ali or Mubarak?’ the driver asked, waving his hand dismissively. ‘The Assads’ arses are stuck to their chairs with superglue.’
When protesters began playing around with the family name, they were striking at the symbolic pillars of ‘Assad’s Syria’. Al-Assad – ‘the lion’ in Arabic – served as a symbol of strength for four decades, and monuments to father and son were surrounded with stone statues of lions. Not long after the Guardian published leaked emails in which Hadeel al-Ali, Bashar’s media consultant, affectionately wrote ‘I missed you, batta,’ to her boss, fly-posters began to appear featuring his new nickname (batta = ‘duck’). A photo of a school blackboard with a question scrawled on it circulated online: ‘Has Darwin’s theory of evolution been reversed? See the magical transformation of Bashar-the-Lion to Bashar-the-Scaredy-Cat to Bashar-the-Duck.’ A picture uploaded alongside it showed a yellow plastic duck with an innocent plastic smile and a sign round its neck that read: ‘But Bashar doesn’t represent me either!’ [Continue reading…]
How FBI entrapment is inventing ‘terrorists’ – and letting bad guys off the hook
Rick Perlstein writes: This past October, at an Occupy encampment in Cleveland, Ohio, “suspicious males with walkie-talkies around their necks” and “scarves or towels around their heads” were heard grumbling at the protesters’ unwillingness to act violently. At meetings a few months later, one of them, a 26-year-old with a black Mohawk known as “Cyco,” explained to his anarchist colleagues how “you can make plastic explosives with bleach,” and the group of five men fantasized about what they might blow up. Cyco suggested a small bridge. One of the others thought they’d have a better chance of not hurting people if they blew up a cargo ship. A third, however, argued for a big bridge – “Gotta slow the traffic that’s going to make them money” – and won. He then led them to a connection who sold them C-4 explosives for $450. Then, the night before the May Day Occupy protests, they allegedly put the plan into motion – and just as the would-be terrorists fiddled with the detonator they hoped would blow to smithereens a scenic bridge in Ohio’s Cuyahoga Valley National Park traversed by 13,610 vehicles every day, the FBI swooped in to arrest them.
Right in the nick of time, just like in the movies. The authorities couldn’t have more effectively made the Occupy movement look like a danger to the republic if they had scripted it. Maybe that’s because, more or less, they did.
The guy who convinced the plotters to blow up a big bridge, led them to the arms merchant, and drove the team to the bomb site was an FBI informant. The merchant was an FBI agent. The bomb, of course, was a dud. And the arrest was part of a pattern of entrapment by federal law enforcement since September 11, 2001, not of terrorist suspects, but of young men federal agents have had to talk into embracing violence in the first place. One of the Cleveland arrestees, Connor Stevens, complained to his sister of feeling “very pressured” by the guy who turned out to be an informant and was recorded in 2011 rejecting property destruction: “We’re in it for the long haul and those kind of tactics just don’t cut it,” he said. “And it’s actually harder to be non-violent than it is to do stuff like that.” Though when Cleveland’s NEWS Channel 5 broadcast that footage, they headlined it “Accused Bomb Plot Suspect Caught on Camera Talking Violence.”
In all these law enforcement schemes the alleged terrorists masterminds end up seeming, when the full story comes out, unable to terrorize their way out of a paper bag without law enforcement tutelage. [Continue reading…]
Imagining myself in Palestine
Randa Jarrar writes: Trouble began weeks before I boarded my flight to Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport. I had heard horror stories about a detention area there, dubbed The Arab Room, and in my anxious and neurotic style, I had emailed a dozen people—American academics and artists of Arab, Indian, Jewish, and European descent— and asked them what I was supposed to tell the immigration officers at Ben Gurion once I arrived. They all wanted to know if I was using my American passport, and I assured them that I was. The vast majority told me not to tell the officers I would be staying at my sister’s in Ramallah. They said this would cause trouble, and offered up the names of friends and family for my use. The generosity of people poured in, and I was advised to say that I was staying with this writer, or that visual artist, or this former-IDF soldier—people I had never met, but who had volunteered themselves to be my proxy hosts. A friend of mine, who is a phenomenal photojournalist, gave me her phone number and said to tell the officers I would be staying with her, and I agreed. She told me to prepare for the officers to call her themselves once I gave them her number, as this is something they are known to do.
I was so afraid of facing the guards at the airport that I had a difficult time imagining the rest of my trip. I would picture myself walking around Ramallah with my sister, or attending a concert, or visiting my aunts, or seeing the separation wall, or staying at the American Colony Hotel for an evening, and I would draw a blank. There was a wall there, too, between my thoughts and Palestine.
Growing up, my Palestinian identity was mostly tied to my father. He was the Palestinian in the family, and when we went back to the West Bank it was to see his brothers and sisters and parents. We always entered Palestine through Amman, crossing the Allenby Bridge over the river Jordan and waiting in endless inspection lines. I remember these trips dragging on through morning and midday and well into the afternoon. My father would sit quietly, and when I complained my Egyptian mother would tell me that the Israelis made it difficult for us to cross into the West Bank. She told me that they wanted us to give up, that they would prefer we never go back. “We must not let them win,” she’d said. My relationship with my Palestinian identity was cemented when I enrolled in a PLO-sponsored girls’ camp as a tween. We learned nationalistic songs and dances and created visual art that reflected our understanding of the occupation. After my family and I moved to America in 1991, my Palestinian identity shifted again, and I began to see myself as an Arab-American. My father’s fiery rants on Palestine died out when Yitzak Rabin was murdered by a Jewish-Israeli extremist. I remember my father weeping in our American wood-paneled den. He said that Rabin had been the Palestinians’ last chance.
When my sister got a job in Ramallah last year, teaching music to children, I knew I would want to visit her. I had not been to Palestine since 1993. I had planned to go back in the summer of 1996, but I was pregnant and unmarried. My parents did not want to speak to me, let alone take me with them, in such a shameful condition, to the West Bank. I never went back with family after that. I led my own life. I moved about a dozen times over the following fifteen years—an American nomad. I didn’t want to visit the West Bank and be at the mercy of family. If I ever visited, I would do so independently. When my sister moved to Ramallah she found an apartment of her own, and it had an extra room. It was the perfect time to go. My husband booked my flight, and, thrilled, I told my sister I was coming.
I felt uneasy as soon as I arrived at the gate in Philadelphia. There weren’t, as far as I could see, any other Arabs boarding US Airways flight 796 to Tel Aviv. On the airplane, I found myself surrounded by Christian missionaries and Evangelicals and observant Jewish men. The group across the aisle had their bibles out, the man sitting next to me read from a miniature Torah, and as the flight took off, I found myself reciting a verse from the Quran, almost against my will. I am an atheist, but all the praying was contagious. [Continue reading…]
The listener who made talk radio
Gideon Haigh writes: Studs Terkel was in a buoyant mood in the spring of 1963 when he welcomed Marlon Brando onto his popular Chicago radio program. He had just won the Prix Italia for his celebrated documentary of nuclear dread, Born to Live; he was shortly to record passengers on board the Freedom Train to Washington for a haunting voice montage, This Train. And notoriously taciturn Brando, promoting his new film The Ugly American, proved at first no more than averagely contrary (“I don’t understand”; “I don’t think that’s true”; “I don’t think it related to that at all”). But as Terkel continued gently to harry him, the interview took an unexpected turn.
“Now I want to ask you a question,” Brando said abruptly. “You sit and ask many questions…You have an obligation to describe some of your feelings and point of view. What is it about a particular kind of work that interests you? Why are you preoccupied with these questions? What is the nature of your furrowing out this information from all manner of people? What kind of contribution does interviewing make to you?”
There was a pause. “This is a reversal,” Terkel responded uneasily. “I don’t know.” He hemmed. He hawed. He was anxious, he said equivocally, not to be voyeuristic; he guessed he was simply curious about an artist’s concept of art. Brando was unconvinced: “When I asked you simply to describe what you feel about your work, you became tense and concerned, perhaps a little confused, unsettled. When you ask me something, I could give you a glib answer, spieling. But if I want to answer the question honestly, I have to search my mind. When asked a simple question, it’s not easy to give a simple answer.”
The moment passed — Brando was too egotistical to pursue the inquiry, Terkel sufficiently adept to deflect it. But it was a rare moment in the storied career of perhaps the most admired chronicler of the last American century, when the spotlight was turned on him, when the biter was bit. On his death in October 2008, Terkel’s fellow Chicagoan Barack Obama exalted him as a “national treasure”; The Independent deemed him “the world’s greatest interviewer”; The Guardian claimed that “to register him as ‘writer and broadcaster’ would be like calling Louis Armstrong a ‘trumpeter’ or the Empire State Building an ‘office block’.” Yet despite his compilation of Working, Hard Times, The Good War, Race and other epics of national memory, Terkel successfully threw a thick cloak over his ‘private domain’ — ironic given how dedicatedly Terkel pursued untold stories and unheard voices. This week, Chicago marks the centenary of the birth of one of its most popular sons with a schedule of celebratory events, from showcasing some of the fruits of Terkel’s 9,000 recorded interviews to rededicating a bridge named for him twenty years ago. So how might he have answered had Brando pressed him? [Continue reading…]
NDAA ruling: A victory for all of us
Chris Hedges writes: In January, attorneys Carl Mayer and Bruce Afran asked me to be the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against President Barack Obama and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta that challenged the harsh provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). We filed the lawsuit, worked for hours on the affidavits, carried out the tedious depositions, prepared the case and went to trial because we did not want to be passive in the face of another egregious assault on basic civil liberties, because resistance is a moral imperative, and because, at the very least, we hoped we could draw attention to the injustice of the law. None of us thought we would win. But every once in a while the gods smile on the damned.
U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest, in a 68-page opinion, ruled Wednesday that Section 1021 of the NDAA was unconstitutional. It was a stunning and monumental victory. With her ruling she returned us to a country where—as it was before Obama signed this act into law Dec. 31—the government cannot strip a U.S. citizen of due process or use the military to arrest him or her and then hold him or her in military prison indefinitely. She categorically rejected the government’s claims that the plaintiffs did not have the standing to bring the case to trial because none of us had been indefinitely detained, that lack of imminent enforcement against us meant there was no need for an injunction and that the NDAA simply codified what had previously been set down in the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force Act. The ruling was a huge victory for the protection of free speech. Judge Forrest struck down language in the law that she said gave the government the ability to incarcerate people based on what they said or wrote. Maybe the ruling won’t last. Maybe it will be overturned. But we and other Americans are freer today than we were a week ago. And there is something in this.
The government lawyers, despite being asked five times by the judge to guarantee that we plaintiffs would not be charged under the law for our activities, refused to give any assurances. They did not provide assurances because under the law there were none. We could, even they tacitly admitted, be subject to these coercive measures. We too could be swept away into a black hole. And this, I think, decided the case.
“At the hearing on this motion, the government was unwilling or unable to state that these plaintiffs would not be subject to indefinite detention under [Section] 1021,” Judge Forrest noted. “Plaintiffs are therefore at risk of detention, of losing their liberty, potentially for many years.”
The government has 60 days to appeal. It can also, as Mayer and Afran have urged, accept the injunction that nullifies the law. If the government appeals, the case will go to a federal appellate court. The ruling, even if an appellate court upholds it, could be vanquished in the Supreme Court, especially given the composition of that court. [Continue reading…]
The U.S. plans to attack Israel and Canada and anywhere except Buffalo
In a meeting on Tuesday, Dan Shapiro, the United States ambassador to Israel, told a closed meeting of the Israel Bar Association that the U.S. not only reserves the option to attack Iran in the event that diplomacy fails to curtail Iran’s nuclear program but that it is ready to launch such an attack.
In today’s State Department press briefing, Matt Lee from the Associated Press had the following exchange with spokesperson Victoria Nuland. Referring to a meeting between Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Israel Defence Minister Ehud Barak, Lee asked:
QUESTION: Are they going to be talking about what Ambassador Shapiro was talking about earlier this week about how the U.S. is ready to attack Iran?
MS. NULAND: Well, first of all, let me just make clear that Ambassador Shapiro’s comments were designed to reflect completely what the President has said all along, which is that even as we move forward with the P-5+1 discussions with Iran and hope that we can settle these issues through diplomacy, that we nonetheless take no option off the table.
QUESTION: Well, he went a bit further than that. He said that it’s more than just being on the table; we’re ready now. Like all it’d be —
MS. NULAND: Well, as Secretary Panetta has —
QUESTION: — a snap of the fingers and all of a sudden we’ve got missiles headed towards wherever.
MS. NULAND: Well, I think Secretary Panetta has also spoken to the fact that it is the responsibility of his building to have appropriate contingency planning. So I don’t think that should be any surprise either.
QUESTION: Okay. So in other words, this is – it should not be a surprise that he could have said this about – the ambassador could have said this about any country?
MS. NULAND: Correct.
QUESTION: Because you have contingency plans to attack any country?
MS. NULAND: Except Buffalo, New York.
QUESTION: Well, that’s not a country.
MS. NULAND: Matt, are you comforted?
Any country?
So the Pentagon has a plan to attack Israel? And Canada? And Switzerland? No wonder it’s so difficult to trim the defense budget.
I know — it’s the Pentagon’s job to plan for all possible contingencies, but Lee’s question wasn’t about the existence of the plan, it was about what Shapiro meant when he said the U.S. is “ready” to attack Iran. A plan can sit in a file — readiness involves physical actions like deployment of additional aircraft carriers to the Gulf. Is that what Shapiro was talking about? Or was he just trying to sound tough in front of his Israeli friends?
The optional state of Israel
Aside from its incompatibility with genuine democracy, one of the problems with the idea of a Jewish state is that it invests too heavily in the choice of its citizens.
As much as virtually every state is able to drum up a certain amount of nationalistic fervor among its citizenry, the foundation of loyalty behind the facade of flag waving is that for the vast majority of people they have no choice about the country they profess to love: it’s the one they were born in and have no real option to leave. The few paths of migration that do exist are defined by oppression, war, and poverty.
The chosen people are unique in this particular choice. But if becoming an Israeli can for any Jew be a choice, its chosenness — even for those born there — also makes it easier to contemplate the possibility of other choices.
Yuval Ben-Ami writes about the option of leaving Israel.
It was 2:00 AM when we arrived at St. Pancras station. 2:00 AM London time is 4:00 AM Tel Aviv time, and we were certainly still on Tel Aviv time. In a way, we were still in Tel Aviv altogether, or perhaps somewhere in between the two – in the cold sky over Bulgaria or Slovakia. The soul is said to be chasing the body when it is taken away by a jet plane. It only catches up with it several days later.
We stepped into a cab and were surprised by how roomy it was, as well as by the fact that it was driven by a lady, an uncommon sight around our own neighborhood. The air outside the cab was chilly and smelled of large trees and fried food, inside was a unique, inimitable, London cab smell. We were in an environment entirely foreign to us yet felt instantly very much at home. For an Ashkenazi Israeli, Europe will always be a home of sorts. The soul of our nation apparently hasn’t yet caught up with Zionism. It is still on its way from the grassy knolls of our grandparents’ homelands, baffled to behold us flying the other direction in Easy Jet planes.
Our longing for Europe’s mix of the familiar and the exotic grows, the more hopeless Israel’s situation becomes. The rise of fascism, the growing disregard for human rights, the gradual disappearance of our freedom of speech, all of these cause concerned young Israelis, whether Ashkenazi or otherwise, to reconsider their future on the soil of the Holy Land and look west.
Israel is losing its educated, concerned young generation to other countries, ironically: mostly to Germany. The new emigrants (let’s call them “newgoers”) are different from emigrants of decades past, termed “Descenders” in Zionist lingo, which views Israel as elevated above the rest of the world. While the descenders of the ’70s and ’80s were motivated for the most part by economic factors, the newgoers are often driven by a dread of Israeli politics and a sense that they no longer belong in Israel. It is a sense that our government gladly reinforces, mainly via supporting legislation that delegitimizes dissent.
By deliberately alienating this public, Netanyahu’s government is causing what I term a “heart-drain.” Israelis who hold a point of view that isn’t entirely tribal, who empathize with those living under the occupation or others wronged by state-sanctioned prejudice and intolerance, Israelis who take an interest in opening difficult historical questions for discussion, are encouraged to leave. If I had a penny for every time I was told to “just pack up and go,” I could buy my own flat in Pimlico.
The cab brought us the the home of the first exile, a friend who is completing his MA in London. His program is to conclude at the end of the year, but he told us he intends to stay out of Israel for another half a dozen years at least. Currently he is staying in a stately college campus in central London. The campus is made up of a single structure which encloses a serene courtyard. Its grand dining room is vaulted by a high, arched ceiling, beneath which a full English breakfast is served to students for the price of an Israeli popsicle. Its bulletin boards advertise an upcoming production of Macbeth, Its windows overlook a stately park, complete with enormous oaks and well tended paths. All in all the place looks like Epcot Center’s Hogwarts pavilion, and I mean that in a good way.
How, I thought, could I console myself for not living this guy’s life? Not only does he reside in such a graceful, calm environment, but he remains an activist by writing, informing, educating and organizing. It is likely that from from his London location, this man is making more of a difference than I do back home, while building a future for himself, somewhere that has an actual future. [Continue reading…]