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Big Lie: America Doesn't Have #1 Richest Middle-Class in the World...We're Ranked 27th!

Les Leopold, AlterNet — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:04:00 -0700

America is the richest country on Earth. We have the most millionaires, the most billionaires—and a increasingly poor "middle class."

America is the richest country on Earth. We have the most millionaires, the most billionaires and our wealthiest citizens have garnered more of the planet's riches than any other group in the world. We even have hedge fund managers who make in one hour as much as the average family makes in 21 years!

This opulence is supposed to trickle down to the rest of us, improving the lives of everyday Americans. At least that's what free-market cheerleaders repeatedly promise us.

Unfortunately, it's a lie, one of the biggest ever perpetrated on the American people.

Our middle class is falling further and further behind in comparison to the rest of the world. We keep hearing that America is number one. Well, when it comes to middle-class wealth, we're number 27.

The most telling comparative measurement is median wealth (per adult). It describes the amount of wealth accumulated by the person precisely in the middle of the wealth distribution—50 percent of the adult population has more wealth, while 50 percent has less. You can't get more middle than that.

Wealth is measured by the total sum of all our assets (homes, bank accounts, stocks, bonds etc.) minus our liabilities (outstanding loans and other debts). It the best indicator we have for individual and family prosperity. While the never-ending accumulation of wealth may be wrecking the planet, wealth also provides basic security, especially in a country like ours with such skimpy social programs. Wealth allows us to survive periods of economic turmoil. Wealth allows our children to go to college without incurring crippling debts, or to get help for the down payment on their first homes. As Billie Holiday sings, "God bless the child that's got his own."

Well, it's a sad song. As the chart below shows, there are 26 other countries with a median wealth higher than ours (and the relative reduction of U.S. median wealth has done nothing to make our economy more sustainable).

Why?

Here's a starter list:

We don't have real universal healthcare. We pay more and still have poorer health outcomes than all other industrialized countries. Should a serious illness strike, we also can become impoverished.

Weak labor laws undermine unions and give large corporations more power to keep wages and benefits down. Unions now represent less than 7 percent of all private sector workers, the lowest ever recorded.

Our minimum wage is pathetic, especially in comparison to other developed nations. (We're # 13.) Nobody can live decently on $7.25 an hour. Our poverty-level minimum wage puts downward pressure on the wages of all working people. And while we secure important victories for a few unpaid sick days, most other developed nations provide a month of guaranteed paid vacations as well as many paid sick days.

Wall Street is out of control. Once deregulation started 30 years ago, money has gushed to the top as Wall Street was free to find more and more unethical ways to fleece us.

Higher education puts our kids into debt. In most other countries higher education is practically tuition-free. Indebted students are not likely to accumulate wealth anytime soon.

It's hard to improve your station in life if you're in prison, often due to drug-related charges that don't even exist in other developed nations. In fact, we have the largest prison population in the entire world, and we have the highest percentage of minorities imprisoned. “In major cities across the country, 80% of young African Americans now have criminal records” (from Michelle Alexander's 2010 book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness).

Our tax structures favor the rich and their corporations that no longer pay their fair share. They move money to foreign tax havens, they create and use tax loopholes, and they fight to make sure the source of most of their wealth—capital gains—is taxed at low rates. Meanwhile the rest of us are pressed to make up the difference or suffer deteriorating public services.

The wealthy dominate politics. Nowhere else in the developed world are the rich and their corporations able to buy elections with such impunity.

Big Money dominates the media. The real story about how we're getting ripped off is hidden in a blizzard of BS that comes from all the major media outlets...brought to you by....

America encourages globalization of production so that workers here are in constant competition with the lower-wage workers all over the world as well as with highly automated techonologies.

Is there one cause of the middle-class collapse that rises above all others?

Yes. The International Labor organization produced a remarkable study (Global Wage Report 2012-13) that sorts out the causes of why wages have remained stagnant while elite incomes have soared. The report compares key causal explanations like declining bargaining power of unions, porous social safety nets, globalization, new technologies and financialization.

Guess which one had the biggest impact on the growing split between the 1 percent and the 99 percent?

Financialization!

What is that? Economist Gerald Epstein offers us a working definition:

"Financialization means the increasing role of financial motives, financial markets, financial actors and financial institutions in the operation of the domestic and international economies."

This includes such trends as:

The corporate change during the 1980s to make shareholder value the ultimate goal.
The deregulation of Wall Street that allowed for the creation of a vast array of new financial instruments for gambling.
Allowing private equity firm to buy companies, load them up with debt, extract enormous returns, and then kiss them goodbye.
The growth of hedge funds that suck productive wealth out of the economy.
The myriad of barely regulated world financial markets that finance the globalization of production, combined with so-called "free trade" agreements.
The increased share of all corporate profits that go to the financial sector.
The ever increasing size of too-big-to-fail banks.
The fact that many of our best students rush to Wall Street instead of careers in science, medicine or education.

In short, financialization is when making money from money becomes more important that providing real goods and services. Here's a chart that says it all. Once we unleashed Wall Street, their salaries shot up, while everyone else's stood still.

Do we still know how to fight!

The carefully researched ILO study provides further proof that Occupy Wall Street was right on the money. OWS succeeded (temporarily), in large part, because it tapped into the deep reservoir of anger toward Wall Street felt by people all over the world. We all know the financiers are screwing us.

Then why didn't OWS turn into a sustained, mass movement to take on Wall Street?

One reason it didn't grow was that the rest of us stood back in deference to the original protestors instead of making the movement our own. As a result, we didn't build a larger movement with the structures needed to take on our financial oligarchs. And until we figure out how to do just that, our nation's wealth will continue to be siphoned away.

Our hope, I believe, lies in the young people who are engaged each day in fighting for the basic human rights for all manner of working people—temp workers, immigrants, unionized, non-union, gays, lesbians, transgender—as well as those who are fighting to save the planet from environmental destruction. It's all connected.

At some point these deeply committed activists also will understand that financialization both here and abroad stands in the way of justice and puts our planet at risk. When they see the beast clearly, I am confident they will figure out how to slay it.

The sooner, the better.

70 Percent of Americans 'Emotionally Disconnected' at Work: Shocking Poll Reveals Workforce Zombieland

Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:56:00 -0700

Nearly one in five hates work so much they sabotage their employers.

If you thought that Americans who kept their jobs during the Great Recession were glad to be working, you would be dead wrong.According to a Gallup.com report, 70 percent of American workers are “emotionally disconnected” at work, with nearly one in five employees “actively disengaged.”

It's zombieland out there for the American workforce.

Gallup’s ongoing “State of the American Workforce” survey reveals that America is largely a nation of working automatons, with most people not feeling emotional ties to what they do and sizeable numbers actively seeking to sabotage their colleagues and managers.

“These latest findings indicate that 70 percent of American workers are ‘not engaged’ or ‘actively disengaged’ and are emotionally disconnected from their workplaces and less likely to be productive,” the pollers said. “Currently, 52 percent of workers are not engaged, and worse, another 18 percent are actively disengaged in their work.”

Which Americans hate their jobs the most? Educated young men appear to be the least committed to their employer, Gallup said, adding that lower-paying service sector jobs also have large percentages of alienated workers. In contrast, women are more loyal and attentive workers, as well as people who are at the beginning and end of their work lives.

“Millennials are most likely of all generations to say they will leave their jobs in the next 12 months if the job market improves,” Gallup found. “Employees with a college degree are not as likely as those with less education to report having a positive, engaging workplace experience.”

Gallup’s annual workplace survey is conducted as part of its effort to market its services to firms that are seeking to boost employee morale. Its findings haven’t changed over the past decade, with only 30 percent of Americans saying they are emotionally engaged at work. The recent Great Recession and spike in unemployment did not affect that trend.

Gallup read 12 statements to workers across the country about their work and asked for comments. The statements included, “I know what is expected of me at work,” “At work my opinions seem to count,” “I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day,” “In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise,” “Someone at work seems to care about me as a person,” and “My associates… are committed to doing quality work.”

Gallup has surveyed 25 million workers in 189 countries since the late 1990s. It describes three kinds of employes: engaged, not engaged and actively disengaged.

“Engaged employees work with passion and feel a profound connection to their company. They drive innovation and move the organization forward,” Gallup said. “Not Engaged employees are essentially ‘checked out.’ They’re sleepwalking through their workday, putting time—but not energy or passion—into their work. Actively disengaged employees aren’t just unhappy at work; they’re busy acting out their unhappiness. Every day, these workers undermine what their engaged coworkers accomplish."

Curiously, Gallup suggests that Americans in red states might be better employees than in blue states, because being emotionally engaged is key to better productivity.

Louisiana leads the country with the highest percentage of engaged workers, at 37 percent, followed closely by Oklahoma at 36 percent. South Dakota, Georgia, Arkansas, and South Carolina each have 34 percent of engaged workers. Thirty-three percent of workers are engaged in Texas, Nevada, Wyoming, Alabama, North Dakota, and Florida. At the far end of the range is Minnesota, which has the lowest number of engaged workers, at 26 percent.

“Gallup found that at the opposite end of the engagement spectrum, more than one in five (21 percent) workers in Rhode Island are actively disengaged, as are 20 percent of employees in New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New York, Michigan, Vermont, Kentucky, and Illinois. When looking at the range of actively disengaged employees, Idaho had the lowest percentage of this type of worker, at 14 percent.”

As you might expect, Gallop places the blame for a nation of alienated workers squarely on the desks of managers and executives, who never learned basic people skills to make others feel good about themselves and their work.

“Gallup’s research has found that managers are primarily responsible for their employees’ engagement levels,” the report said. “Organizations should coach managers to take an active role in building engagement plans with their employees, hold managers accountable, track their progress, and ensure they continuously focus on emotionally engaging their employees.”

Intriguingly, people who work remotely seem to be more emotionally connected to their work—or at least put in longer hours, Gallup said. “Despite not always having a manager nearby to monitor their productivity, remote workers actually log more hours at their primary job than do their on-site counterparts.”

Gallup also found that companies of less than 10 people, or teams within companies that size, have the most committed workers, “suggesting something unique and beneficial about working in a smaller, tight-knit work environment when it comes to engagement.”

The polling organization also found that employers tended to treat recent college graduates poorly, instead of making them feel valued. “Despite the benefits that the increasingly educated workforce is expected to bring to the U.S. economy, it appears that employers are doing too little to engage this influx of college graduates in their workplaces.”

Meet America’s Most Shameless Defender of the 1 Percent, Harvard Economist Greg Mankiw

Lynn Stuart Parramore, AlterNet — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 11:13:00 -0700

Is there anything Mankiw won’t say to serve plunderers and plutocrats?

It’s not really news that America’s economics departments, particularly at elite institutions, are stuffed with people whose careers are founded on protecting monied interests. But it’s pretty rare when someone just comes straight out and announces the fact.

Meet Greg Mankiw, chairman and professor of economics at Harvard, one of the most influential economists in the country. As chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, he guided the economic blundering of George W. Bush. Then in 2006, he became an adviser to Mitt Romney and steered Romney's economic positions in 2012, which included some of the most shocking expressions of classism yet heard from a presidential candidate.

Mankiw's name might not be a household word, but the tentacles of his power and influence extend into Washington, the blogosphere and the classroom, where he molds young minds through his ubiquitous textbooks and lectures (that is, when students are not walking out to protest his conservative bias and harmful agenda).

Above all, Mankiw is the self-appointed Defender in Chief of the 1 percent. How do we know this? Well, because he just published a 23-page paper called “Defending the One Percent.” It’s helpful to understand the official propaganda line in the class war, and Mankiw has laid it out in a paper that purports to determine whether income inequality requires any intervention.

Professor Mankiw begins by asking the reader to imagine a perfectly egalitarian society where the economy is totally efficient and everybody has the same amount of money. What happens, he asks, when a Steve Jobs pops up? Somebody smarter, more creative than everybody else? Suddenly Mr. Entrepreneur makes amazing things that everybody wants to buy, and now economic inequality has entered the egalitarian utopia. Is it fair to intervene and restore equality by penalizing Mr. Entrepreneur?

It must be said that this opening sally, with its clumsily constructed straw man, would not pass muster with a high school debating coach. Most of Mankiw’s opponents do not ask for perfect income equality or imagine perfect efficiency, but rather envision a playing field in which everyone has a chance to succeed and Mr. Entrepreneur has incentives to conduct his business fairly and to share some of the rewards of his efforts with the community that made them possible.Instead of forming a cartel to hold down the wages of his young engineers, as Steve Jobs did. Or colluding to fix prices, as Steve Jobs is also accused of having done. Or backdating stock options to be sure he comes out in the money. And so on.

Mankiw’s writing displays the sensibility of a young person suddenly infatuated with the writings of Ayn Rand, and in the fine tradition of Randian entrepreneur worship, he pretends that economic inequality is mostly the result of certain people being smarter and more creative than others (one brief glance at the Forbes list of the richest Americans, which is populated by quite a few trust fund babies, destroys this illusion). In a nutshell, he argues that egalitarianism in antithetical to entrepreneurialism.

Not many people would actually argue that we don’t want smart people making cool things. We do. But we also recognize that sometimes Mr.Entrepreneur, heady with his economic success, becomes greedy and starts to try to arrange things so that other entrepreneurs will not be able to compete with him. He begins to cheat and bully and set his boot on the neck of his fellow residents of Utopialand. He may even channel his brilliance into making things that don’t help his neighbor, but actually do harm, like a complicated financial product rigged to drain the bank accounts of unsuspecting citizens.

Many Americans now have personal experience with what happens when Mankiw’s vision turns into a nightmare. They’ve begun to realize that markets often don’t work the way he says they do and that our political system has not been doing enough to correct their failures and address the resulting unfairness that leaves many smart, energetic people unable to find an opportunity to fully contribute to society and demonstrate their talents. That’s why Nobel Prize-winning economist and Columbia professor Joseph Stiglitz, whose proclivity for truth-telling has alarmed his Ivy League colleagues, wrote a book called The Price of Inequality in which he points out that America, our beloved land of opportunity, “may have become more class-based than old Europe” due to gross economic unfairness.

Unlike Stiglitz, Mankiw seems to be less interested in thinking about how to correct the market’s failures than reinforcing them. Why is this?

I don’t normally like to play the psychologist, but in trying to get a sense of what kind of man could be so blinded as to fail to grasp the fundamental challenge of our time, I watched some public appearances by Mankiw on the Web. I found something very revealing—a commencement speech he gave just a few weeks ago at Chapel Hill-Chauncey Hall, a prep school in North Carolina, where one of his children has been enrolled.

The story Mankiw tells about himself to those students seems to encapsulate so much of what is wrong with the field of economics that I think it’s worth dissecting. Mankiw comes off as an affable guy who transcended his early math geek persona to become a highly regarded economic professional. The fundamental moment in his history was when his parents chose to take him out of a large public school, where he was not being properly nurtured, and send him to an elite private school in New Jersey, where he flourished. Mankiw congratulates the students at Chapel Hill-Chauncey Hall for making a similar smart “choice” to better themselves in the supportive, tight-knit community of prep school. He seems blissfully unaware that for most children, attending an elite, expensive private school is not on the menu of options. Rather, he sees the world as a place where some succeed solely because they make better choices than others, not because some people have more money with which to advance themselves.

There’s also something very telling in Mankiw’s description of his youthful enthusiasm for mathematics. He was an excellent math student in high school, but realized in college that he would make a second-rate mathematician, so he turned to economics, graduating in 1980 from Princeton and going on to study at Harvard and MIT. This was just around the time that economics was falling into a deep infatuation with mathematical models and losing the sense of itself as a social science grounded in politics, history and culture. The result has been devastating. Economists left the human world behind and entered a mechanistic paradise where their dogmatic and ultimately destructive paradigm failed to acknowledge the forces that were gathering into an economic storm worse than anything the country had seen since the Great Depression.

Slowly and fitfully, the field is now trying to reorient itself. Some economists, like Rob Johnson and his colleagues at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, are calling to reestablish economics as a broad, interdisciplinary field, open to disagreement and grounded in the humanities. Figures like Mankiw, dedicated to the old model, will stand in the way of this process. The Mankiws of the economics profession have devoted themselves to math, but they have not been steeped in the traditional values and ethics that underpin our democracy, and they consistently fail to imagine that their elegant mathematical models might not accurately depict the real world of complex human interactions and institutions.

Mankiw is not a reality-based economist, and it’s no wonder, as he has been cocooned in elite institutions since his parents pulled him out of public school as a boy. He bounced from an elite private school to elite colleges, and then landed softly at Harvard where he has been teaching for three decades. Mankiw lives in Wellesley, Massachusetts, a town in suburban Boston that is one of the wealthiest in the country. He is a defender of the 1 percent because he knows no other community, and the 1 percent has embraced and richly rewarded the insecure math geek who sat in the back of his public school classroom trying to hide behind his spectacles. How could he question them now?

Economists talk a lot about bubbles, but not enough about the kind Mankiw occupies, which so disastrously impacts his ability to contextualize his models or think clearly about the experiences of most of his fellow citizens. During Occupy, 70 students walked out of his introductory economics class in protest (the class, interestingly, was on inequality). In the New York Times, Mankiw accused the protesters of spewing platitudes and insisted that economics is not “laden with ideology.” According to his account, he watched the students walk out, and then, “After a few minutes, I resumed the class as usual.”

More recently, instead of braving the painful process of exposing the failures of prevalent economic theories, like the recently discredited work on debt and economic growth of his fellow Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, he has leapt to defend promoters of nonsense. In a blog post centered on the theme, “Hey, everybody makes mistakes,” he dismissed the seriousness of pushing shoddy economic work that was molded into austerity policies that have caused job loss, hunger and misery for millions of the Earth’s inhabitants.

With his latest paper, Mankiw defends the 1 percent as the source of all good in our economy and society, sounding much like an astronomer defending the Earth as the center of the universe. An astronomer who, if Galileo walked into his class, would look up briefly, and then, in a few minutes, resume business as usual.

Gringos on the Ayahuasca Trail ... Young Americans Are Flocking to S. America for Pychedelic Promise

Lisa Stansberry, The Fix — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:13:00 -0700

Young travelers flock to Bolivia and Peru to do hallucinogenic ayahuasca, which allegedly has spiritual, therapeutic qualities

“What do you think the shaman will say if I tell him I just want to trip balls?” Stan is a 30-something English lad who has been strolling around the hostel drunk all day, wearing nothing but a gold thong.

In defense of Stan’s outfit, it is very hot in Rurrenabaque, a pocket-sized Bolivian town at the entrance to Madidi National Park, in the upper Amazon Basin. Mosquitos as big as gumdrops whine through the humid air, joining the symphony of carimbo music and inebriated shouts pouring from the gringo bars. Rurrenabaque is at the epicenter of Bolivia’s burgeoning eco-tourism industry, with dozens of expeditions into the jungle leaving daily. But travelers often become intrigued by a different local offering: guided shamanic tours which use the hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca to prompt spiritual revelations.

Ayahuasca has featured prominently in indigenous rituals in this part of the world for centuries. It is brewed using infusions of several local plants, including the actual ayahuasca vine (Banisteriopsis caapi), which activates the psychedelic compound DMT in the other main component, Chacruna (Psychotria viridis). Additional ingredients are supposed to counteract the nausea that commonly accompanies use, but the exact mixture varies from shaman to shaman.

The process typically begins with a pre-interview, at which clients discuss their goals with the shaman. Some say they are looking for guidance, others for healing. Some, like Stan, just want to “trip balls.”

Dieter, 31, from Germany, tells me that he was seeking direction. “I wanted to know what the next step was. I waited for 10 years to try ayahuasca. Before, I wasn’t in the right 'psychosis'.”

His trip was preceded by a cleansing period of several days. The length of this period and its restrictions varies widely from company to company. Some shamans require a week’s abstinence from alcohol, drugs, sugar, caffeine and processed flour. More fly-by-night outfits—particularly prevalent in party towns like Rurrenabaque—require much less.

On the day before the ritual, Dieter and his fellow participants went hiking in the jungle. They meditated. They met as a group and discussed their intentions. They were “purified” with tobacco smoke. Then, as the shaman chanted and played various musical instruments, they each drank from a gourd containing the brew.

The name ayahuasca comes from a native Quechua word meaning “vine of the dead.” It’s a fitting moniker, as DMT—its key psychoactive ingredient—is said to replicate near-death experiences.

Diarrhea and vomiting are common. Some participants report seeing "unnatural matter" flood from all the orifices of their bodies. They are told that it is toxins being flushed from their system. “It was the most beautiful diarrhea I’ve ever had in my life,” says Dieter. “I shit for what felt like hours. It was very cleansing.”

But did he get an answer to his question, the question of direction? While almost all users report their trips as life-changing, they also struggle to find the words to describe the experience. “I got a...foretaste of how the answer will feel,” says Dieter. “It was good. I’m not interested in the short term. I want a long-term change for my life.” He plans on doing another ritual soon.

Whether ayahuasca actually produces a long-term spiritual shift is a matter for debate. Companies touting its use say that it has helped their clients with severe issues such as drug addiction and grief. Its primary benefit, claim many, is a renewed sense of connection with the universe. “My clients come back full of love, ready to make a lasting change,” says Johanna Aftales, a representative at Etnika’s Ancient Shamanic Inca Technique in Cusco, Peru.

Peru, the next stop on the “Gringo Trail” after Bolivia, is another popular destination for ayahuasca enthusiasts. Options range from the decidedly dodgy—reports of rip-offs, bad trips, pervy shamans—to the ultra-professional. The Way Inn, one lodge in Huarez, offers week-long packages that include massage and licensed counselors.

Down the street from Etnika’s, Shaman Kush shakes his head when he hears of two Swedish girls whose unpleasant experience included hallucinations of snakes writhing beneath their feet. He says their shaman is at fault for not explaining the vision properly: “Seeing the serpent is a very good thing. It represents the earth goddess Pachamama and resembles the ayahuasca vine.”

Kush is a charismatic middle-aged man with sparkling brown eyes. He has decades of experience as a spiritual guide, but even he doesn’t claim that the plant is a cure-all. “Ayahuasca opens the door,” he says. “Lasting change is up to the individual. There are other paths, such as Buddhism, which yield the same results.”

Those who do choose ayahuasca as a healing agent are well advised not to approach the process lightly. “The main potential danger is the occurrence of a psychotic breakdown. Although this is a rare possibility, it can occur,” says Dr. José Carlos Bouso, a researcher at Barcelona’s Hospital del Mar Institut d'Investigacions Mèdiques (IMIM) and a contributor to the International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research and Service. He recently published a study on the psychological impact of repeated ayahuasca use, and is quick to add that while the neuroimaging assessment conducted by his team revealed brain modification due to use, it did not reveal any brain damage or evidence of eventual toxic effects. His data is preliminary, but he believes that the brain modifications may be positive ones.

Dr. Bouso is clear that there is no scientific evidence to support claims that ayahuasca can help users heal from trauma and make positive life changes. However, there is plenty of “anecdotal evidence,” he says. “There are a lot of people that failed using standard medicines that obtained benefits from ayahuasca. They feel cured but the doctors don't trust them.”

Hermione, 26, is a bubbly, chain-smoking yoga enthusiast who fled Arizona for South America following a battle with depression last year. She recently went cold-turkey off a cocktail of SSRIs, opioid painkillers and ADHD medication that she had been taking since the age of 13.

“It’s been 10 weeks. I’ve never felt better,” she says. “I didn’t have any withdrawal symptoms and I really think that it’s because he’s [her shaman, Juan] been praying for me.” Hermione chose her shaman after interviewing with several different companies. Some refused to work with her because of her history of depression. Several alkaloids in ayahuasca act as monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MOAIs), putting users who have also used antidepressants at risk of serotonin syndrome—when too much of the feel-good chemical accumulates in the body, causing symptoms that range from shivering to seizures.

One shaman told Hermione that she would have to wait at least five months before doing the ceremony. He also told her to “Put on a bra. I don’t want to see your tits again.”

The shaman she eventually chose, Juan, emailed her information on the risks and suggested that she make up her own mind. Hermione decided that she wanted to fight. Juan agreed. “He told me: ‘You are strong. You are fighting for your life. If you don’t want to use these medications, you don’t need to. You are a warrior.’”

On Sunday May 5, after a week of cleansing, Hermione went with Juan to his apartment in Cusco and did the ritual. She was initially nervous but said that the months of communication with Juan about her history and goals made all the difference.

She gets in touch with me via webcam from her apartment in Ecuador a week later, excited to share her experience. After adjusting her microphone and holding her cat up to the camera to say hello, she begins rolling a cigarette. “Yeah, I’m still smoking," she says with a wry smile. “But I’m only using natural tobacco from now on. I decided that I don’t want any chemicals in my body, ever again.”

Hermione describes her trip as extremely intense: It featured strong hallucinations, psychic communication with people present and departed, and physical manifestations of the plant ayahuasca as the mother goddess. She repeatedly repressed nausea, only to watch the shaman vomit on her behalf—a process she described as him “purging the negative feelings.”

She revisited traumatic scenes of childhood abuse, drug addiction and rape. And she says that the plant spoke to her, telling her that those experiences were not who she was, and that she did not need to be afraid anymore. “Towards the end of the ritual I had a very clear vision of my pills, the pills I still had left, back in my backpack in the hostel,” she tells me. “And I knew that I had to get rid of them. So I asked him [Juan] if he would take them from me. And he said yes.”

Hermione’s ritual started in the early evening. She went to sleep around 4 am and woke up at 6, feeling “transparent, clean, like everyone could see through me.” She has woken up at 6 am every day since. A week later, she says that she still feels changed, energized, cleansed. She says that other people can see the difference in her. Her boyfriend dumped her yesterday and she declares complete peace with his decision.

“I’m never using any kind of medication again,” she says. And what if the depression comes back? Her brow furrows slightly. “I’m not going to let myself get low again. It wasn’t just the ayahuasca, it was deciding to fight for my life. Last year my life was—from the outside—really good. But if I had owned a gun I would be dead right now. So I ran away to South America. I had to make a change. I stopped taking medication when every doctor told me I shouldn’t. I feel amazing, and it’s getting stronger every day. Every day I remember what she [ayahuasca] and Juan told me—that I am a student of life.”

Linda Stansberry is a freelance writer and regular contributor to The Fix. She lives in Northern California.

An American City Govt. Seeks the Cruel Power to Keep People off the Streets in... Vermont?

William Boardman, Reader Supported News — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:28:00 -0700

Burlington Vt.'s city ordinance allows the immediate and arbitrary banishment of people from public streets with no due process of law and no effective appeal process.

The story from Vermont, of all places, is breathtakingly simple: the elected city council, in a bi-partisan vote, has decided to keep its law-making process secret, rather than openly address the question of whether a draconian no-trespass law it passed last winter is patently unconstitutional.

That's right, rather than explain why the law it passed is constitutional, the Burlington City Council is hiding behind lawyer-client privilege as if it - the council - were some private corporation rather than a democratically-elected local government.

The ordinance in question, the "Church Street Marketplace District Trespass Authority," passed the City Council unanimously in February 2013. The council vote followed seven public hearings at which some concerns were raised and addressed, but no controversy arose. The ordinance allows the immediate and arbitrary banishment of people from public streets with no due process of law and no effective appeal process.

Councilors with doubts about this ordinance had them assuaged, in part, by an analysis of the proposed law written by Assistant City Attorney Greg Meyer in mid-2012, assuring the council that it was within its constitutional rights to ban people from public streets and without authority to do so from the state legislature. That analysis by the city attorney's office was, and is, secret from the public.

Burlington city attorney Eileen Blackwood argues, according to Seven Days, that her office's legal analysis is protected by attorney-client privilege, in a construct where both the attorney and the "client" work for the City of Burlington. Protected by privilege, she has asserted, the legal analysis "must thus be treated as confidential."

Since the law went onto effect in March, Progressive Party members of the City Council began to have misgivings about its constitutionality. They requested - and received - permission from the city attorney to show the secret legal analysis to an outside counsel, John Franco, who served as a Burlington assistant city attorney from 1982 to 1989, when Bernie Sanders, who is now Vermont's junior U.S. senator, was mayor.

Attorney Franco produced a five-page, single-spaced analysis dated June 4, in which he concluded that "this ordinance is neither lawful nor constitutional." He has reinforced this conclusion with a three-page supplemental analysis.

Based on Franco's analysis of the ordinance, the five Progressive Party members introduced a resolution at the June 10 council meeting seeking to make the secret city attorney's office memo public.

Democrats fought the motion fiercely. Democrat Norm Blais, an attorney, made it personal, speculating irrelevantly that the resolution derived from "politicians' remorse." Blais went on to argue that "this is not a question of transparency ... [there are] sound reasons for having privileged communications with an attorney."

While attorney-client privilege is widely recognized in law, Blais made no effort to explain how it applied to this governmental situation, where Democratic mayor Miro Weinberger had made a campaign promise of greater governmental transparency.

Council member Chip Mason, also a Democrat and a lawyer, chaired the committee that held three non-controversial public hearings on the ordinance. At the council meeting he defended the "sanctity" of attorney-client privilege, calling it "not something we should be waiving."

In response to an inquiry to explain how an elected government body could be the legal equivalent of a private corporate client, Mason wrote only that: "There is no dispute that it is protected by the attorney client privilege. The City Council is the client for whom the memorandum was prepared."

The Progressives' resolution to make the secret memo public lost in an 8-5 vote, with the majority comprising all six of the council's Democrats, its only Republican, and its only Independent. The council then unanimously referred the issue to committee.

After the vote, City Attorney Blackwood offered to prepare a new legal analysis of the ordinance for public consumption. She did not explain why releasing the secret analysis wouldn't conserve public resources and be just as useful.

There is as yet no rebuttal by the city council or the city attorney's office to Attorney Franco's assessment. As it stands, unchallenged, his critique is devastating, finding that the city has acted in violation of both the Vermont Constitution and the U.S. Constitution.

Some of Franco's arguments, all of which he supports with case law citations, include:

Vermont law requires municipalities to have authorizing legislation from the state legislature before enacting a law such as the no trespass ordinance. Burlington has no such authorization, leaving the ordinance without legal authority.
Under the law, Burlington does not "own" its streets, nor does it control them except as such control is delegated by the state. The streets quite literally belong to the people and no government may legally banish people from the streets without stringent adherence to constitutional standards.
As Franco writes, "Our ordinance allows Burlington officials to issue what effectively are prior restraints on the exercise of an otherwise lawful fundamental constitutional right, and to discriminate among 'offenders' with broad and virtually unfettered discretion to banish some, but not all, offenders and for varying lengths of time. "
The city ordinance fails to set any standards for guidance in its application, enforcement, or appeal.
The ordinance violates the U.S. Constitution's requirement of due process of law. "Due process requires notice of the proposed action, notice of the City's factual basis therefore, and an opportunity to be heard before it takes effect. Our ordinance provides none of that."
The ordinance offers no effective judicial review. It contradicts and preempts several state laws. And the disposition of its penalties is left in the hands of a panel of untrained non-lawyers from whom there is no provision for further appeal.

Noam Chomsky: Obama's Policies Are Creating Terrorism Around the World

Laura Flanders, GRITtv — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 08:49:00 -0700

Video: NSA spying justified as preventing terrorism, when it is the administration's policies that are ensuring terrorism.

If ever you accused Barack Obama of fearing to offend or suffering from lack of spine, you have to hand it to him now: President Obama is acting more and more like a leader every day, one specific leader in fact: George W. Bush.

Take the recent disclosures about the National Security Agency's massive spying on the world. The data dragnet mimics the worst of the Bush administration.

It's hypocritical in the extreme to gather data in the name of preventing terrorism while the administration's own policies are creating terrorism around the world, says MIT professor emeritus, Noam Chomsky in this GRITtv exclusive interview.

Celebrate the Defeat of the Granny Bashers! Billionaire-backed Campaign Fails to Cut Social Security and Medicare

Dean Baker, Beat the Press — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 10:50:00 -0700

The Peter Peterson-inspired Campaign to Fix the Debt could not convince Americans to hurt seniors.

It isn't often that progressives in the United States have much to celebrate. After all, the news has swung between bad and worse for most of the last three decades. That is why we should be celebrating the victory over the Campaign to Fix the Debt and its efforts to cut Social Security and Medicare.

Just to remind everyone, the Campaign to Fix the Debt (CFD) is yet another Peter Peterson-inspired initiative that has as its main goal cutting and/or privatizing Social Security and Medicare. Peterson has used the billions of dollars he earned as a Wall Street investment banker and private equity fund manager to finance a whole slew of Washington-based outfits for this purpose over the last two decades.

The CFD was the biggest and boldest effort yet, incorporating funding and support from the heads of many of the largest corporations in America. It hoped to take advantage of the deficits that resulted from the collapse of the housing bubble.

The idea was to whip up hysteria over a deficit crisis. They wanted to paint a picture of out-of-control government spending that could only be addressed by major cuts to the country's two most important and popular social programs. While they got the cooperation of much of the national media, who consistently put the CFD's views and spokespeople at the center of the budget debate, the facts refused to cooperate.

First, the real scary projections of exploding deficits in the next two decades largely disappeared as the rate of health care cost growth slowed sharply. When the Congressional Budget Office and other official forecasters incorporated slower health care cost growth into their numbers, the deficits projections no longer provoked the same sort of hyper-ventilation. Slower projected health care cost growth eliminated almost 70 percent of the projected shortfall in Medicare.

Second, there were actually substantial cuts in the budget, both in 2011 and more recently as a result of the sequester. These cuts are not good news, they are hurting important programs. They also are slowing the economy and costing jobs, but they have lowered projected deficits to levels that fall within almost anyone's acceptable range.

Finally, the intellectual case for a looming debt crisis got blown out of the water because of the famous Reinhart-Rogoff Excel spreadsheet error. The uncovering of this error led to a debate that showed conclusively that there is no debt cliff at 90 percent of GDP. Furthermore, the evidence that there is causation from high debt to slower growth (as opposed to the opposite) is weak to non-existent. The idea that we were about to raise our debt to levels that would lead to a sharp falloff in growth had no basis in reality.

As a result of this turn of events, the FTD crew seem prepared to abandon ship. Maya MacGuineas, the leading spokesperson for FTD, apparently having given up on Congress, was last seen calling on Silicon Valley to use its technological prowess to disrupt the political process. And the Washington Post, which has been an open CFD cheerleader, mournfully noted the improbability of a deal involving major cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

In this case the strong support of the public for these programs -- which cuts across party and demographic lines -- overcame the power of corporate money and the political elite. When push came to shove, not enough politicians were prepared to go against the strongly held views of their constituents. And it helped that the facts were on their side.

It would be great if we could switch from defense to offense. The Wall Street financial types who brought on this economic catastrophe are richer and more politically powerful than ever. They are laughing at the Dodd-Frank financial reforms, and looking to several more decades of free "too-big-to-fail" insurance from the government. In the same vein, other major industries such as the pharmaceutical companies, the health insurance industry, and the telecommunications industry, continue to rake in record profits due to their monopoly power and government protections.

It would be great if the same people who recognized cuts to Social Security and Medicare as attacks on low- and middle-income people could also see the need to move the ball forward onto the other team's turf. This means applying the same sort of sales taxes to financial speculation that the rest of us pay when we buy clothes or shoes. It means breaking up the big banks. It means ending the abuse of patent monopolies by drug companies who push bad drugs at high prices. And it means ending abuses of market power in a number of industries.

The result will be a somewhat smaller share of the pie for those on top and a larger share for everyone else. And it will almost certainly also mean a more rapidly growing economy. The latter would especially be true if we could reverse the sequester and other pointless austerity measures.

But the move to offense is not about to happen right now. And with all the money it has available, we can't even assume the CFD effort will stay dead.

But we should take a moment to celebrate the victory we have achieved. So pick up a glass of the beverage of your choosing and drink a toast to Social Security and Medicare, to the people whose lives they have made more secure, and to the people who have worked to ensure that these programs are there for current generations and those yet to come in the decades ahead.

America the Brave New World: The United States Is Realizing the Dystopian Nightmares of Our Best Science Fiction

Andrew O'Hehir, Salon — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 15:17:00 -0700

As in Huxley, Philip Dick, and "The Matrix," we chose the simulacrum of democracy and “freedom” instead of the real things.

American society has been sliding toward the realm of dystopian science fiction — toward a nightmarish mishmash of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Philip K. Dick — since at least the early years of the Reagan administration, and arguably a lot longer than that. (Since Watergate? The Kennedy assassination? The A-bomb? Take your pick.) We may have finally gotten there. We live in a country that embodies three different dystopian archetypes at once: America is partly a panopticon surveillance-and-security state, as in Orwell, partly an anesthetic and amoral consumer wonderland, as in Huxley, and partly a grand rhetorical delusion or “spectacle,” as in Dick or “The Matrix” or certain currents of French philosophy.

Let’s step away from the brainiac analysis for a second and give full credit to the small-town Republican and war hero who warned us about what was coming, more than 50 years ago. In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower spoke gravely about “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power” that lay in the coming coalition between “the military-industrial complex” and “the scientific-technological elite.” It would require “an alert and knowledgeable citizenry,” Ike cautioned, to make sure this combination did not “endanger our liberties or democratic processes.” As we say these days: Our bad.

I can’t find any direct evidence that Eisenhower had ever read Orwell’s “1984” or Huxley’s “Brave New World,” let alone that they shaped his insights into the heretical possibility that the alternative to Soviet-style Communism might turn out to be just as bad in its own way. Ike wasn’t the country bumpkin that many East Coast intellectuals of that era assumed him to be (English was his best subject at West Point), but he favored history and biography over literature and philosophy. His dire and all too prescient vision of the American future was no doubt drawn from the cultural climate around him, so perhaps he can be said to have absorbed the Orwellian vision by osmosis and made it his own. (Intriguingly, his granddaughter Susan Eisenhower, an eminent foreign policy expert, seems aware of the connection and cites “1984” as a formative influence on her own career.)

After the recent revelations about grandiose NSA domestic surveillance campaigns, complete with PowerPoint presentations that look like material from an unreleased mid-‘90s satire by Paul Verhoeven, we learned that sales of one recent edition of Orwell’s “1984” had apparently spiked by almost 7,000 percent on Amazon. Are these facts actually connected? Are these facts even facts? There’s no way to be sure, which may illustrate how difficult it is to know or understand anything amid the onslaught of pseudo-information. Maybe our current situation (as many Twitter users observed) owes more to Franz Kafka than to Orwell.

If people are really going to read “1984,” instead of just throwing it around as a reference, that can only be a good thing. (You can also watch Michael Radford’s excellent film version, with John Hurt and Richard Burton – actually released in 1984! — online right now.) It’s a devastating novel by one of the best writers of English prose of the last century, and a work that shaped both the thinking and the vocabulary of our age. But as a predictor or manual for the age of permanent war, permanent political paralysis and Total Information Awareness (Adm. John Poindexter’s much-mocked predecessor to PRISM), it gives you only part of the story.

If the technology of the national security state has finally caught up with, and indeed surpassed, anything imagined by Orwell’s Big Brother, who must rely on two-way “telescreens” and regular old secret agents to keep tabs on every citizen, the context is almost entirely different. Writing in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Orwell imagined an indefinite combination of postwar British poverty and austerity mixed with the drab, monochromatic austerity of the Soviet Union during the worst of the Stalin years. He was also imagining the aftermath of a future world-transforming war that would be even worse than the last one. Although it’s more widely understood as a political metaphor, “1984” also points the way toward “Planet of the Apes,” “The Hunger Games” and countless other post-apocalyptic visions.

Our own society, with its endless array of electronic gizmos, opulent luxury goods and a vibrant and/or morbid pop culture capable of invading every waking moment (and the sleeping ones too), looks nothing like that. At least on its surface, it more closely resembles the pharmaceutically cushioned, caste-divided and slogan-nourished Dr. Phil superstate of Huxley’s “Brave New World,” which is built around constant distraction and consumption and in which all desire for transcendence and spirituality can be answered with chemicals. But we certainly don’t live in the atheistic, full-employment command economy envisaged by Huxley either — he was imagining an unholy technocratic union of Lenin and Henry Ford — even if many people on the right remain convinced that Barack Obama is leading us there.

For a long time, especially in the ‘80s and ‘90s, it was customary for intellectuals who addressed the differences and similarities between Orwell and Huxley to assert that “1984” had not come true and that Huxley had come closer to predicting, as Christopher Hitchens put, it the “painless, amusement-sodden, and stress-free consensus” and “blissed-out and vacant servitude” of the postmodern age. I think the best of these comes from Neil Postman’s withering assessment in the foreword to “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” a landmark work of cultural criticism published in 1985:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.

That’s wonderfully vivid writing, but almost three decades later the question doesn’t look quite so clear-cut. What I see in the paradoxical America of 2013 still looks like Huxley on the surface, with Orwell making a strong comeback underneath. Banning books has largely proven both impractical and unnecessary, as Postman says (which is not to say it doesn’t happen here and there). But as we have seen more than once recently, the government’s security forces and even more sinister pals in the private sector guard their secrets fervently, and react with fury when some of them are exposed. The truth can be kept from us and also drowned in irrelevance, and what Postman calls a trivial culture (Postman’s argument, here and elsewhere, has more than a whiff of anti-pop snobbery) can also be a captive culture.

In many respects American culture, seen from the inside, is more diverse, tolerant and interesting than ever before. Yet the American nation-state seems to be in terminal decline. It is politically ungovernable, bitterly divided by class, caste, region and ideology. The executive branch and the “military-industrial complex” have expanded exponentially since Eisenhower’s day, accumulating more and more power where it can’t be seen. Read carefully through the recent news about the NSA revelations and you can see a few tendrils of this stuff: We know more than we did two weeks ago, but there are still entire government agencies whose names and missions are unknown, and programs so secret that Congress votes to fund them without knowing what they do. On the international stage, America plays a grotesque supervillain role, blundering from nation to nation like Robocop in an endless war that has yielded only hatred and mockery. Radical Islam has always been our enemy, except when our enemy has always been Communism.

In 1946, two years before writing “1984,” Orwell wrote an essay about the new form of social organization he saw on the horizon. He predicted it would do away with private property, which didn’t happen – but if we suppose that his idea of private property meant individual autonomy and freedom from debt slavery, this starts to sound more familiar:

These people will eliminate the old capitalist class, crush the working class, and so organize society that all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands. Private property rights will be abolished, but common ownership will not be established. The new “managerial” societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centres in Europe, Asia, and America. These super-states will fight among themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the earth, but will probably be unable to conquer one another completely. Internally, each society will be hierarchical, with an aristocracy of talent at the top and a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom.

That vision of the future, so much more sober than what we’re used to calling “Orwellian,” sounds eerily like the world we actually live in (with a few doses of Ayn Rand thrown in). So far as we know, our Huxley-Orwell hybrid society emerged organically from the end of the Cold War, rather than resulting from an apocalypse or a grand plan. It’s almost a case of life imitating art, as if Earth’s rulers had selected the most effective elements from various dystopian visions and strategically blended them. But I’m not sure we can blame all this on a secret meeting of the Bilderberg Group, or some Lee Atwater ad campaign. As in “The Matrix,” we chose the simulacrum of democracy and bumper stickers about “freedom” instead of the real things. We chose to believe that our political leaders stood for something besides rival castes within the ruling elite, chose to believe that a regime of torture and secrecy and endless global warfare was a rational response to the tragedy of 9/11. We still believe those things, but our dystopia is still messy, still incoherent, still incomplete. Which means, in theory, that it can still be undone.

When Drones Guard the Pipeline: The Militarization of Our Fossil Fuels

Winona LaDuke with Frank Molley, Honor the Earth — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 14:22:00 -0700

The militarization of the energy fields is not new. It’s just more apparent when it’s in a first world country.

Someone needs to explain to me why wanting clean drinking water makes you an activist, and why proposing to destroy water with chemical warfare doesn’t make a corporation a terrorist.

I’m in South Dakota today, sort of a ground zero for the XL Keystone Pipeline, that pipeline, owned by a Canadian Corporation which will export tar sands oil to the rest of the world. This is the heart of the North American continent here. Bwaan Akiing is what we call this land-Land of the Lakota. There are no pipelines across it, and beneath it is the Oglalla Aquifer wherein lies the vast majority of the water for this region. The Lakota understand that water is life, and that there is no new water. It turns out, tar sands carrying pipelines (otherwise called “dilbit”) are sixteen times more likely to break than a conventional pipeline, and it seems that some ranchers and Native people, in a new Cowboy and Indian Alliance, are intent upon protecting that water.

This community understands the price of protecting land. And, the use of military force upon a civilian community- carrying an acute memory of the over 133,000 rounds of ammunition fired by the National Guard upon Lakota people forty years ago in the Wounded Knee standoff. That experience is coming home again, this time in Mi’gmaq territory.

Militarization of North American Oil Fields

This past week in New Brunswick, the Canadian military came out to protect oil companies. In this case, seismic testing for potential natural gas reserves by Southwestern Energy Company(SWN), a Texas based company working in the province. It’s an image of extreme energy, and perhaps the times.

SWN exercised it’s permit to conduct preliminary testing to assess resource potential for shale gas exploitation. Canadian constitutional law requires the consultation with First Nations, and this has not occurred. That’s when Elsipogtog Mi’gmaq warrior chief, John Levi, seized a vehicle containing seismic testing equipment owned by SWN. Their claim is that fracking is illegal without their permission on their traditional territory. About 65 protesters, including women and children, seized the truck at a gas station and surrounded the vehicle so that it couldn’t be removed from the parking lot. Levi says that SWN broke the law when they first started fracking “in our traditional hunting grounds, medicine grounds, contaminating our waters.” according to reporter Jane Mundy in on line Lawyers and Settlements publication. This may be just the beginning.

On June 9, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) came out en masse, seemingly to protect SWN seismic exploration crews against peaceful protesters – both native and non-Native, blocking route 126 from seismic thumper trucks. Armed with guns, paddy wagons and twist tie restraints, peaceful protestors were arrested. Four days later the protesting continued, and this time drew the attention of local military personnel. As one Mi’gmag said, “Just who is calling the shots in New Brunswick when the value of the land and water take a backseat to the risks associated with shale gas development?”

The militarization of the energy fields is not new. It’s just more apparent when it’s in a first world country, albeit New Brunswick. New Brunswick is sort of the El Salvador of Canadian provinces, if one looks at the economy, run akin to an oligarchy. New Brunswick’s Irving family empire stretches from oil and gas to media, they are the largest employer in New Brunswick and the primary proponents of the Trans Canada West to East pipeline which will bring tar sands oil to the St. Johns refinery owned by the same family. Irving is the fourth wealthiest family in Canada, the largest employer, land holder and amasses that wealth in the relatively poor province. The Saint John refinery would be a beneficiary of any natural gas fracked in the province. In general, press coverage of Aboriginal issues is sparse there at best.

Fracking proposals have come to their territory with a vengeance, and the perfect political storm has emerged- immense material poverty (seven of the ten poorest postal codes in Canada), a set of starve or sell federal agreements pushed by the Harper administration (on first nations), and extreme energy drives.

Each fracking well will take up to two-million-gallons of pristine water and transform the water into a toxic soup, full of carcinogens. The subsistence economy has been central to the Wabanaki confederacy since time immemorial, and concerns over SWN’s water contamination have come to the province. A recent Arkansas lawsuit against SWN charges the company with widespread toxic contamination of drinking water from their hydro-fracking.

Canada is the home to 75% of the worlds mining corporations, and they have tended to have relative impunity in the Canadian courts. Canadian corporations and their international subsidiaries are being protected by military forces elsewhere, and this concerns many. According to a U.K. Guardian story, a Québec Court of Appeal rejected a suit by citizens of the Democratic Republic of the Congo against Montreal-based Anvil Mining Limited for allegedly providing logistical support to the DRC army as it carried out a massacre, killing as many as 100 people in the town of Kilwa near the company's silver and copper mine. The Supreme Court of Canada later confirmed that Canadian courts had no jurisdiction over the company's actions in the DRC when it rejected the plaintiffs' request to appeal. Kairos Canada, a faith-based organization, concluded that the Supreme Court's ruling would "have broader implications for other victims of human rights abuses committed by Canadian companies and their chances of bringing similar cases to our courts".

In the meantime, back in New Brunswick, a heavily militarized RCMP came out to protect the exploration crews. Opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline has many faces, from ranchers in Nebraska and Texas who reject eminent domain takings of their land for a pipeline right of way, to the Lakota nation which walked out of State Department meetings in May in a show of firm opposition to the pipeline. All of them are facing a pipeline owned by TransCanada, a Canadian Corporation.

On a worldwide scale communities are concerned about their water. In El Salvador, more than 60% of the population relies on a single source of water. In 2009, this came down to choosing between drinking water and mining. In 2009, after immense public pressure, the country chose water. It established a moratorium on metal mining permits. Polls show that a strong majority of Salvadorans would now like a permanent ban. A testament to how things can change even in a politically challenged environment.

Up in Canada’s version of El Salvador, twelve people, both native and non were arrested, some detained and interrogated by investigators by the RCMP forces on June l4, and after a day of the federal military “making their presence” felt, the people of the region have concerns about how far Canada will go to protect fossil fuels.

Here in Bwaan Akiing, I am hoping that people who want to protect the water are treated with respect. And, I also have to hope that those 7,000 plus American owned drones aren’t coming home, omaa akiing, from elsewhere to our territories in the name of Canadian oil interests.

Video by Charles LeBlanc

Winona LaDuke is the Executive Director of Honor the Earth in White Earth Reservation, MN.

Superman Is An Immigrant, Too - Luckily He's White

Alana de Hinojosa , AlteNet — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 16:30:00 -0700

In light of the of ongoing immigration reform debate, it would be rather convenient if a superhero could fly on in and save not only the day, but our stalling immigration reform. Unfortunately, though, we don’t live in the DC Comics world – which means Marco Rubio will continue to refuse answering questions about whether he supports his own immigration bill while also demanding increased border enforcement, and GOP Congressmen will continue to call immigrants “bank robbers.”

But Define America, an organization that seeks to bring new voices into the immigration reform dialogue, is connecting our disappointing, languished immigration reform debate and the DC Comics world. And they’re doing it by summoning one of America’s most cherished superheroes: Superman.

In the spirit of Superman’s internal struggle to understand who he is and where he has come, Define America is asking Americans to send in their ‘Superman’ story, a story the organization has dubbed “The American Way.”

The campaign’s Tumblr explains why:

Born on Krypton, he came to this country with the promise of Hope – the symbol he bears on his chest. Many of our families also have a history of immigration. We share Superman’s hope and we continue his fight for truth, justice and the American Way.

Even Google’s brief description of the newly realeased movie Man of Steel highlights the same “American Way” story:

A young boy learns that he has extraordinary powers and is not of this Earth. As a young man, he journeys to discover where he came from and what he was sent here to do. But the hero in him must emerge if he is to save the world from annihilation and become the symbol of hope for all mankind.

Superman, clearly, is a fitting candidate for pro-immigration’s poster child. Even his last encounter with his parents, as their precious homeland ignites in flames, is reminiscent of the classic immigrant hope and dream: Placing him inside the small pod that will travel through space and to Earth, his parents say: “Goodbye my son, our hopes and dreams travel with you.”

“What is the hope of the immigrant than at core a promise that it would be better in America? That no matter what your situation is, it will be better [in America],” Comic-book writer Mark Waid told USA Today.

Superman’s good fortune, though, often goes unnoticed. He was extremely lucky to have landed on the predominately white-ruled U.S. as a white-skinned, human-looking alien. It would be an interesting conundrum to wonder what would have happened if the same man, with the same super-hero powers, had landed on Earth as a brown-skinned or black-skinned man, and whether he too would have been called an “illegal alien” (a term that fits white Superman much more accurately than it does undocumented immigrants).

(Oh, but of course, his writers never would have dreamt of that – it wouldn’t have made any money!)

Now imagine if this colored Superman were to land in the U.S. today. What would we think of him? My amateur guess is that there would be a serious problem with this colored man’s ‘potential terrorist’ powers (just like how so many government officials warn us of undocumented immigrants being “potential terrorists”)

Then again, he could have been born a (colored) woman, and that would have been a whole another story. (Superwoman would have had an especially hard time getting legal status in the U.S. compared to his male counterpart according to a new report.)

But, as a white and handsome Clark Kent, Superman assimilates just fine. He doesn’t even have to think about applying for any sort of lawful residency, visa or citizenship (the lucky guy!) But, today, his fantastic powers might have granted him what the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) calls an “Alien of Extraordinary Ability,” a title that allows for an immediate priority visa for residency.

But not all immigrants have these “extraordinary abilities” or powers — most are thrust into the only opportunities they have: picking strawberries, taking after the children of absent mothers and fathers, cleaning toilets and building the kinds of homes they’ll most likely never be able to enjoy. In fact, most of these immigrants aren’t allowed the opportunity to be or become “super.”

So, in endorsing a campaign that highlights a white-male ‘super’ immigrant, we face the possibility of alienating those who aren’t so ‘lucky.’ Not everyone arrives to Earth in a safety-sealed pod. Some have to cross rapid rivers, gapping mountains and deserts with scorching and freezing temperatures. And, unfortunately, many die on their way.

While the campaign has been great at raising dialogue around this complicated issue, and inviting an array of individuals to participate and tell their “American Way story,” we, as viewers, fans and participants must remember that Superman’s white skin and gender gives him a very privileged immigration experience. The campaign, therefore, needs to be approached with a vigilant eye.

It would still be nice, though, if we saw a more fitting immigrant hero fly on in and save the day (let’s shut that Marco Rubio up, please!).

Argentine Sex Workers Fight De-Humanizing Abuse with Legislation, Graffiti

Roberta Radu, The Guardian — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 20:48:00 -0700

Argentine sex worker union fights to change societal perceptions of prostitution and change laws that leave police harassment and brutality unchallenged.

On a Buenos Aires street corner, a Banksy-style graffiti shows a scantily clad woman leaning provocatively towards the edge of the building. Round the corner, the woman's hands reach out to a pushchair carrying a toddler. This, says the Argentine Prostitutes' Association (Ammar), is the reality of the sex trade in Argentina, where 87% of sex workers are single mothers.

The graffiti is part of a campaign led by Ammar, the first de facto trade union for sex workers in Latin America. For the past 19 years the group has been fighting to change the way society looks upon prostitution and make sex workers aware of their rights.

Ammar helped draft a bill due to be presented in the senate that would class sex workers as self-employed. If it becomes law, it would enable them to register with labour authorities, pay tax and get a pension.

"We wanted to show we are first of all women, mothers and breadwinners and then sex workers and that we need laws to protect us. Some of us chose this work and there should be a legal framework for it. We need it to end marginalisation and to empower us," Georgina Orellano, an Ammar activist and former sex worker said of the campaign.

Prostitution without pimps is legal in Argentina but Ammar activists believe the current legislation leaves sex workers exposed to police abuse because it does not establish any rights. Harassed by police officers at every corner, many women end up trapped by prostitution cartels that exploit them.

Given the growth of the illegal sex trade, Gustavo Vera, director of the Alameda Foundation, which campaigns against human trafficking, thinks such a law would be ineffective. In the past year, activists from his organisation have identified and closed down 140 brothels in Buenos Aires.

"Maybe a law like this would work in Sweden or Holland, but this is Argentina. Human trafficking is a serious issue and cartels are extremely powerful. I don't think there can be such a thing as prostitution by choice here," Vera said. "[Ammar] says prostitution can be a choice but is it really when financial circumstances push you into it?"

Orellano defends the right to choose because she considers herself and other women in the trade to be typical workers.

"There's an entire class that doesn't get to really choose. Does the maid or construction worker choose that job? Sex workers are no different. To put it bluntly, they use their hands to work, we use our body but we are all workers. It's not an easy choice but it's what we have to do."

Freelance journalist based in Buenos Aires. Follow her on Twitter.

9 Ways the Right’s Ayn Randian Experiment Screws Over the Young

RJ Eskow, Blog for Our Future — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 08:07:00 -0700

The decades-long assault on our core social values is on the verge of consuming its first complete generation of Americans.

Conservatives keep claiming liberals want a “cradle-to-grave nanny state.” That rhetoric has distracted us from the real social re-engineering taking place all around us. The right, along with its “centrist” collaborators, is transforming our nation into a bloodless and soulless Randian State.

Their decades-long assault on our core social values is on the verge of consuming its first complete generation of Americans. Born at the dawn of the Reagan era, Millennials were the first to be fully subjected to this all-out attack on the idea that we take care of each other in this country, and they’ll pay for it from the cradle to the grave.

Some of us are the parents of Millennials. Who’ll fight with them, and for them?

The Psychosis

The Simpsons made a running joke out of Springfield’s “Ayn Rand School for Tots,” where toddlers fend for themselves in playrooms whose signs say things like “Helping is Futile.” That’s very funny. What is happening to our country isn’t.

A successful social contract has bound us together since the FDR era. The Randian State is an effort to dismantle it, replacing our nation’s web of mutual trust and support with a lifelong helplessness and dependence on the whims and generosity of corporations and ultra-wealthy individuals.

The Randian State is built in the morally depraved mold of right-wing über-heroine Rand, who reviled the less fortunate – and even those who tried to help them – as “parasites,” while at the same time idolizing sociopathic killers.

That last statement isn’t rhetoric. It’s reporting. “He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman,” Rand wrote admiringly of child murderer and dismemberer William Edward Hickman. “He can never realize and feel ‘other people.’”

As Mark Ames points out, this echoes Rand’s description of her hero in The Fountainhead: “He was born without the ability to consider others.”

Hickman’s actions were certainly not those of a “nanny.” But, while most conservatives undoubtedly disapprove of his deeds, the glorification of sociopathic selfishness represents the mentality with which the Administration is perpetually seeking “compromise.” It has infected everything from the Beltway’s “bipartisan” consensus to the content of our national media.

Where’s Julia?

Conservatives went into rhetorical overdrive last year after the Obama campaign released an “infographic” ad called “The Life of Julia,” depicting ways Obama’s policies help women throughout their lives.

A typical reaction came from self-declared moralizer, former Reagan official, and chronic excessive gambler William Bennett. Bennett intoned that “Julia’s entire life is defined by her interactions with the state … Notably absent in her story is any relationship with a husband, family, church or community … Instead, the state has taken their place and is her primary relationship.”

That’s deceptive, of course. The presentation focused on government because it wasabout government. The Obama campaign wasn’t proposing to marry her or drive her to church. But reason rarely intrudes on such arguments. The Romney campaign quickly prepared a counter-slide show and the “socialist” debate was on.

Obama won.

Curiously, “Julia’s” story seems to have disappeared from the BarackObama.Com and Organizing For Action websites now that victory’s been achieved. Old links to it are dead, and attempts to click on this introduction only lead back to the site’s main page.

Anti-Social.

Bennett’s phrasing was drawn from conservative avatar Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher represented a radically un-American vision of life which lacks either our sense of community or our bonds of mutual trust, and which denies even the existence of society itself.

“Who is society?” demanded Thatcher. “There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families …”

Conservatives went searching for evidence that centrist Obama was really pushing cradle-to-grave socialism. The only target they could find for their faux outrage was Michelle Obama’s campaign to encourage breastfeeding, an embarrassing right-wing misfire which suggests there may be Freudian overtones to their “nanny” outrage.

Instead of pushing “cradle to grave” statism, the Administration pivoted immediately after the election to government-shrinking Grand Bargains. A “sequester” agreed to by both parties began slashing services on both ends of life. And the Administration’s attempting to end the sequester, not by calling for its straight repeal (as it should), but by offering cuts to Social Security at the later end of that “cradle to grave” span.

Come to think of it, maybe that’s why “Julia” has disappeared from the Obama website.

The Manifesto

The Randian State’s first manifesto may have been the startling document produced by Ronald Reagan’s “blue ribbon” education commission in 1983, which proposed to use schools as factories for more effectively turning Millennials – and every generation that follows – into usable raw material for corporate production.

The commission approached American education in a self-declared state of crisis, saying it was asked to address “the widespread public perception” – held by whom, exactly? – “that something is seriously remiss in our educational system.”

The sternly ideological report which resulted was called “A Nation At Risk.” Though right-wing in content, it reads like a Soviet proclamation on industrial production. Students are redefined as inputs in a system to maximize American corporate competitiveness, productivity and profits.

“History is not kind to idlers,” says the report. “We live among determined, well-educated, and strongly motivated competitors. We compete with them for international standing and markets …”

The rhetoric is hectoring and fierce:

“(T)he educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”

The “problem” was stated in terms that were both militaristic – “We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament” – and moralistic: “Our Nation’s schools and Colleges … are routinely called on to provide solutions to personal, social, and political problems that the home and other institutions either will not or cannot resolve.”

That was an assault on an idea that had been uncontroversial among Americans of all political persuasions for generations: that education can and should help children learn to participate more effectively in society. The authors had more concrete objectives in mind. Like Communist commissars plumping next year’s wheat harvest, their goal was productivity, productivity, productivity.

“Knowledge, learning, information, and skilled intelligence are the new raw materials of international commerce,” wrote the Commission. And by “raw materials,” Millennials, they meant you.

The rest of the Commission’s report is largely taken up by a) platitudes, and b) statistical studies which soon challenged aggressively. But the Randian State moved on, Millennials firmly in its maw. And while A Nation At Risk only targeted students, it soon had Americans of all ages in its sights.

Birth School Work Death

During the Thatcher years a British punk group called The Godfathers put out a song called “Birth School Work Death.” Here are nine ways the Cradle to Grave Randian State is harming Millennials in those four stages of life.

1. Prenatal Nutrition

For some the new regime began even before they were born. The Reagan Administration moved to cut nutrition funding for 600,000 pregnant women, a particularly hypocritical act for a movement which claims to be concerned about the rights of unborn children.

2. Early Childhood Nutrition

The same cuts also lowered food budgets for children in 4.6 million households, eighty-seven percent of which lived below the poverty line.

3. School lunches

The National School Lunch Act of 1946 and the Child Nutrition Act of 1966 both promoted healthy meals for America’s schoolchildren. Seems benign and even wise – unless you’re a Randian, of course. The Reagan Administration added to cuts in 1980 budget, then passed into infamy when it stated that ketchup and pickle relish could be considered “vegetables” when designing a balanced diet.

Few, if any, parents adopted this approach at the family dinner table. “Kids, finish your vegetables!” never became “Kids, finish sucking the factory produced, sugar-drenched condiments out of those little folding packets!”

4. Cutting education funds.

The Reagan Administration’s cuts to the Department of Education, some occurring under Education Secretary William Bennett, eventually totaled $19 billion.

The right has continued to mount an assault on school funding at every level ever since, from local school boards up to the state and Federal level. They’ve been joined by “centrist” Democrats like Rahm Emanuel in their efforts to demonize teachers and privatize schools.

5. Making college unaffordable.

The University of Virginia’s Miller Center conducted a study for the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education and found that “Since the mid-1980s” – roughly the start of the Millennial Generation -”the costs of higher education in America have steadily shifted from the taxpayer to the student and family.”

Median family income have risen by 147% since then, while college tuition and fees rose 439%, a tripling of education costs in real dollar terms. The impact has been greatest on lower-income families, sounding a potential death knell for social mobility.

From the New York Times: “Among the poorest families … the net cost of a year at a public university was 55 percent of median income, up from 39 percent in 1999-2000.”

6. Leaving graduates drowning in debt.

The misguided ‘privatization’ of Sallie Mae, the government’s student loan enterprise, led to a series of political and financial scandals. (See “Sallie Mae’s Jets.”) It also contributed to an explosion of student loans, many of which went to highly dubious ‘colleges’ which issued high-cost, worthless degrees. Many other students went to more legitimate institutions, but found themselves drowning in debt.

Now 7.4 million students are about to see a doubling of their interest rates unless something is done. Elizabeth Warren has proposed given them access to the Fed’s ultra-low rates for banks, while more modest proposals would keep current rates in place.

The student debt situation for Millennials would be morally unconscionable even if rates remain at current levels. Anything else is shocking to contemplate. The UPI reports today that Sen. Lamar Alexander said the President and Republicans “agree” on what should be done.

That’s not reassuring.

7. Massive unemployment.

There are 10 million unemployed young people in the United States. The official youth unemployment rate is 16.2 percent, the adjusted rate (including discouraged workers) is22.9 percent – not much better than the Eurozone’s – and the anemic ‘jobs recovery’ is even weaker for Millennials.

The crisis covers everything from high-school-age summer and after-school jobs to employment after graduation.

Studies show that youth unemployment lowers income for the rest of a person’s life. That means this crisis is urgent as well as massive. Every passing month harms the future of an entire generation. What immediate, major measures are being proposed to address this emergency?

None.

8. An increasingly inequitable, wage-stagnating economy.

When Millennials do find jobs – hopefully – they’ll enter a marketplace and economy plagued by historic levels of wage inequality and stagnation.

That’s not an accident: It’s policy.Tax rates favor inequality. Right-wing Republicans and “centrist” Democrats have savaged unions, an effective counterweight against growing inequality. And both parties have served the growing financialization of our economy (although the GOP does it with more gusto), making things worse for everybody except Wall Street.

9. Greater fear and insecurity in old age.

Now the President has proposed cutting Social Security benefits through the cynical “chained CPI.” The “Chain” is also a tax increase, but only on income below the highest level, which means it will aggravate the inequalities that are hurting the vast majority of Americans.

Every generation will suffer if it passes, including those who have already retired. But for Millennials it will be a final late-life kick from the Randian State.

A Letter to Millennials

The year was 1984. Wham! and Cyndi Lauper were topping the charts. The top movie of the year was, appropriately enough, The Terminator. And the nation was re-electing Ronald Reagan. Americans are now suffering from birth to death as a result of this triumphal year for Randians, which plunged us deeper into a red-in-tooth-and-claw world and left millions struggling with its social consequences.

As they used to say back then: Have a nice day!

Dear Millennials: We tried to stop them. We failed. We’re sorry. Now we need a party – and more importantly, a movement – that will refuse to allow the continued destruction of government’s vital role in our social fabric.

Until we do, every generation will suffer. But you, the Millennials, will continue to carry the dubious distinction of being the first generation of Americans to have been assaulted from the cradle to the grave. For your sake and everyone’s else, you must fight back.

This Father’s Day, here’s a promise: Some of us will be right there beside you.

(This piece has been edited slightly since first published, mostly to replace the awkward phrase ‘Rand-y’ with ‘Randian.’)

Why America & China's Future Plans Are Totally Nuts

James Howard Kunstler, Kunstler.com — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 12:32:00 -0700

Big plans for the future for the world's biggest economies will take them both further down the hole.

Societies periodically go insane. Fallacious memes sweep through a frightened and confused populace and bad things happen, bad choices get made. Two bad ideas in particular infect the American thought-o-sphere these days: 1) that non-cheap oil can keep all the rackets of consumerism going; 2) that we can offset all the quandaries of non-cheap oil with accounting fraud and debt creation.

These ideas present themselves in the places of greatest authority and influence. The president says “we have a hundred years of shale gas.” The Wall Street Journal says that an inflating Dow Jones index stands for a growing economy. My recent favorite came out of the increasingly demented New York Times on Saturday: Even Pessimists Feel Optimistic About the American Economy. Quoting an econ professor named Tyler Cowen from George Mason University The Times said:

The recent surge in domestic oil and gas production signals “the start of a new era of cheap energy,” he said, while less expensive online education programs could open the door to millions of people who have been priced out of more traditional academics.

That was a two-fer of stupidities since A) it ought to be self-evident that $90-a-barrel oil is not cheap oil, and B) that because of A, there’s unlikely to be lucrative employment for people who learn double-entry book-keeping on their laptops. In fact, anyone who actually learns math over the Internet must conclude that $90-a-barrel oil will crash all the supposedly normal operations of a consumer society, including the ability of oil-and-gas companies to get the capital investment necessary for further oil production.

None of these accredited morons seems to get the basic equation between available cheap energy — e.g. oil with a high energy-return-on-investment — and capital formation — the accumulation of wealth that can be deployed to produce more wealth-producing activity. That was only possible on the way up Hubbert’s curve. On the way down, alas, the relationship enters a Ponzi unwind of too many claims on excessive promises to pay. The net result is a society with a lower standard of living. Personally, I think it will go way lower, and way sooner than later.

The idea that online education is a sovereign tonic for economic vitality is just another gloss on the inane belief that technology can take the place of energy in the equation above. Tom Friedman, grand poobah, of The New York Times Op-Ed page is the cheerleader-in-chief for that meme, but it is accepted by virtually all authorities in business and politics, and their handmaidens in the academic chairs. As the American economy dissolves in an acid bath of capital scarcity and grievance, these idiots will be waiting for the next iPhone app that can power the electric grid — and thus all the new iPhones streaming out of the Apple factories of China into the hot little hands of nineteen-year-olds in Michigan taking “Macroeconomics” on the Kahn Academy website.

Speaking of China, The New York Times ran another humdinger over the weekend: China’s Great Uprooting: Moving 250 Million Into Cities that illustrates how meshugga that society is. Such are the tragic sorrows of late-blooming techno-industrialism that China is doing exactly the opposite of what the future requires — namely, destroying the basis for small-scale local food production. But, not to put too fine a point on it, China is fucked. They are simply in the hopeless zone of population overshoot and resource scarcity. There was some loose talk in thatTimes story to the effect that China will offset all its problems by colonizing Africa (and, who knows, other lands with other resources), but it will be interesting to see how it goes on the slow boat back to Shanghai with all that bok choy rotting in the hold as it plies east out of Mombasa under an ever-hotter tropical sun.

Chinese leadership apparently thinks this is the way to go. Just as the Princeton-bred American economists think that we can all migrate onto the Web and live a virtual existence on virtual wealth with virtual energy. The manifold disappointments that societies around the world face as they discover the falsity of their own memes is already leading to a lot of dangerous mischief, which is to say armed conflict. There is potential for a lot worse.

Texas Republican Says He Wants to Ban Abortion Because ... Fetuses Masturbate?

Alex Kane, AlterNet — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 06:25:00 -0700

The comments came as the House of Representatives prepared to debate a bill that would outlaw all abortions past 20 weeks of pregnancy.

A Texas Congressman has come out in favor of an extreme abortion ban because, according to him, male fetuses masturbate.

RH Reality Check’s Adele Stan reports that Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX) said that fetuses at 15-weeks “stroke their face. If they’re a male baby, they may have their hand between their legs. If they feel pleasure, why is it so hard to believe that they could feel pain?” Burgess is a former OB-GYN.

The comments came as the House of Representatives prepared to debate a bill that would outlaw all abortions past 20 weeks of pregnancy. Burgess would like to see an even earlier abortion ban, at 15 weeks.

Stan reports that the scientific study underlying the GOP’s insistence that abortions should be banned because fetuses could feel pain at 20 weeks is disputed. “Major medical bodies in the United States and the United Kingdom have refuted the claim of fetal pain before the third trimester,” Stan writes.

If it passes, the abortion bill would challenge Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in the U.S. While the bill has no chance of becoming law, it is meant to appease the Republican Party’s right-wing base.

Bank of America Whistle-blower Bombshell: “We Were Told to Lie” to Rip Off Borrowers

David Dayen, Salon — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 06:29:00 -0700

Bank of America whistle-blowers detail horrid schemes to fleece borrowers, reward staff for foreclosures.

Bank of America’s mortgage servicing unit systematically lied to homeowners, fraudulently denied loan modifications, and paid their staff bonuses for deliberately pushing people into foreclosure: Yes, these allegations were suspected by any homeowner who ever had to deal with the bank to try to get a loan modification – but now they come from six former employees and one contractor, whose sworn statements were added last week to a civil lawsuit filed in federal court in Massachusetts.

“Bank of America’s practice is to string homeowners along with no apparent intention of providing the permanent loan modifications it promises,” said Erika Brown, one of the former employees. The damning evidence would spur a series of criminal investigations of BofA executives, if we still had a rule of law in this country for Wall Street banks.

The government’s Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), which gave banks cash incentives to modify loans under certain standards, was supposed to streamline the process and help up to 4 million struggling homeowners (to date, active permanent modifications number about 870,000). In reality, Bank of America used it as a tool, say these former employees, to squeeze as much money as possible out of struggling borrowers before eventually foreclosing on them. Borrowers were supposed to make three trial payments before the loan modification became permanent; in actuality, many borrowers would make payments for a year or more, only to find themselves rejected for a permanent modification, and then owing the difference between the trial modification and their original payment. Former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner famously described HAMP as a means to “foam the runway” for the banks, spreading out foreclosures so banks could more readily absorb them.

These Bank of America employees offer the first glimpse into how they pulled it off. Employees, many of whom allege they were given no basic training on how to even use HAMP, were instructed to tell borrowers that documents were incomplete or missing when they were not, or that the file was “under review” when it hadn’t been accessed in months. Former loan-level representative Simone Gordon says flat-out in her affidavit that “we were told to lie to customers” about the receipt of documents and trial payments. She added that the bank would hold financial documents borrowers submitted for review for at least 30 days. “Once thirty days passed, Bank of America would consider many of these documents to be ‘stale’ and the homeowner would have to re-apply for a modification,” Gordon writes. Theresa Terrelonge, another ex-employee, said that the company would consistently tell homeowners to resubmit information, restarting the clock on the HAMP process.

Worse than this, Bank of America would simply throw out documents on a consistent basis. Former case management supervisor William Wilson alleged that, during bimonthly sessions called the “blitz,” case managers and underwriters would simply deny any file with financial documents that were more than 60 days old. “During a blitz, a single team would decline between 600 and 1,500 modification files at a time,” Wilson wrote. “I personally reviewed hundreds of files in which the computer systems showed that the homeowner had fulfilled a Trial Period Plan and was entitled to a permanent loan modification, but was nevertheless declined for a permanent modification during a blitz.” Employees were then instructed to make up a reason for the denial to submit to the Treasury Department, which monitored the program. Others say that bank employees falsified records in the computer system and removed documents from homeowner files to make it look like the borrower did not qualify for a permanent modification.

Senior managers provided carrots and sticks for employees to lie to customers and push them into foreclosure. Simone Gordon described meetings where managers created quotas for lower-level employees, and a bonus system for reaching those quotas. Employees “who placed ten or more accounts into foreclosure in a given month received a $500 bonus,” Gordon wrote. “Bank of America also gave employees gift cards to retail stores like Target or Bed Bath and Beyond as rewards for placing accounts into foreclosure.” Employees were closely monitored, and those who didn’t meet quotas, or who dared to give borrowers accurate information, were fired, as was anyone who “questioned the ethics … of declining loan modifications for false and fraudulent reasons,” according to William Wilson.

Bank of America characterized the affidavits as “rife with factual inaccuracies.” But they match complaints from borrowers having to resubmit documents multiple times, and getting denied for permanent modifications despite making all trial payments. And these statements come from all over the country from ex-employees without a relationship to one another. It did not result from one “rogue” bank branch.

Simply put, Bank of America didn’t want to hire enough staff to handle the crush of loan modification requests, and used these delaying tactics as a shortcut. They also pushed people into foreclosure to collect additional fees from them. And after rejecting borrowers for HAMP modifications, they would offer an in-house modification with a higher interest rate. This was all about profit maximization. “We were regularly drilled that it was our job to maximize fees for the Bank by fostering and extending delay of the HAMP modification process by any means we could,” wrote Simone Gordon in her affidavit.

It is a testament to the corruption of the federal regulatory and law enforcement apparatus that we’re only hearing evidence from inside Bank of America now, in a civil class-action lawsuit from wronged homeowners, when the behavior was so rampant for years. For example, the Treasury Department, charged with specific oversight for HAMP, didn’t sanction a single bank for failing to follow program guidelines for three years, and certainly did not uncover any of this criminal conduct. Steven Cupples, a former underwriter at Bank of America, explained in his statement how the bank falsified records to Treasury to make it look like they granted more modifications. But Treasury never investigated. Meanwhile, the Justice Department joined with state Attorneys General and other federal regulators to essentially bless this conduct in a series of weak settlements that incorporated other bank crimes as well, like “robo-signing” and submitting false documents to courts.

These affidavits, however, should return law enforcement to the case. William Wilson, the case management supervisor, alleges in his statement that this “ridiculous and immoral” conduct continued through August of 2012, when he was eventually fired for speaking up. That means Bank of America persisted with these activities for at least six months AFTER the main, $25 billion settlement to which they were a party. So state and federal regulators could sue Bank of America over this new criminal conduct, which post-dates the actions for which they released liability under the main settlement. Attorneys general in New York andFlorida have accused Bank of America of violating the terms of the settlement, but they could simply open new cases about these new deceptive practices.

They would have no shortage of evidence, in addition to the sworn affidavits. According to Theresa Terrelonge, most loan-level representatives conducted their business through email; in fact, various email communications have already been submitted under seal in the Massachusetts civil case. State Attorneys General or US Attorneys would have subpoena power to gather many more emails.

And they would have very specific targets: the ex-employees listed specific executives by name who authorized and directed the fraudulent process. “The delay and rejection programs were methodically carried out under the overall direction of Patrick Kerry, a Vice President who oversaw the entire eastern region’s loan modification process,” wrote William Wilson. Other executives mentioned by name include John Berens, Patricia Feltch and Rebecca Mairone (now at JPMorgan Chase, and already named in a separate financial fraud case). These are senior executives who, if this alleged conduct is true, should face criminal liability.

Bank accountability activists have already seized on the revelations. “This is not surprising, but absolutely sickening,” said Peggy Mears, organizer for the Home Defenders League. “Maybe finally our courts and elected officials will stand with communities over Wall Street and prosecute, and then lock up, these criminals.”

Sadly, it’s hard to raise hopes of that happening. Past experience shows that our top regulatory and law enforcement officials are primarily interested in covering for Wall Street’s crimes. These well-sourced allegations amount to an accusation of Bank of America stealing thousands of homes, and lying to the government about it. Homeowners who did everything asked of them were nevertheless pushed into foreclosure, all to fortify profits on Wall Street. There’s a clear path to punish Bank of America for this conduct. If it doesn’t result in prosecutions, it will once again confirm the sorry excuse for justice we have in America.

NYU’s Gilded Age: Students Struggle With Debt While Vacation Homes Are Lavished on the University’s Elite

Pam Martens, Russ Martens, AlterNet — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 10:41:00 -0700

The problems at NYU are emblematic of an insular institution whose Board is heavily dominated by the same Wall Street people who heaped disgrace upon their own institutions.

A review of deeds and mortgages in some of the toniest towns on the East Coast reveals that not only is New York University financing luxury Manhattan brownstones and high rise condos for its faculty and administrators out of its nonprofit coffers, it has also been secretly financing country homes for a select group. These extravagances have fallen directly on the shoulders of financially struggling students. NYU ranks fourth in Newsweek’s 2012 list of the least affordable colleges.

In September 2009, the New York Times published a remarkable exercise in inanity, profiling John Sexton, President of NYU, relaxing at his Fire Island beach house. Sexton calls his summer getaway a “rather large, wonderful house” in the interview. We learn what Sexton eats for breakfast (black coffee and yogurt), the name of his dog (Legs), how long it takes him to walk to church from the ferry (five minutes), how much weight he’s lost (30 pounds), and little else.

We don’t, for example, learn from the interview that his home on Fire Island has been financed since 1994 by several million dollars in loans from the NYU School of Law Foundation and NYU itself, according to the Suffolk County Clerk’s records.

This is not the only residence that NYU has made possible for its President. He has the use of two well appointed apartments owned by NYU in Manhattan. Sexton, who turned 70 in September, is also set to receive a length of service bonus of $2.5 million in 2015 and an annual pension of $800,000 when he retires. That pension is the equivalent of NYU taking $10 million of its assets and placing them in an immediate annuity for Sexton.

Sexton has plenty of company when it comes to getting out of the city in the summer through the generosity of NYU. Richard Tsien, Director of the NYU Neuroscience Institute, bought a house in East Fishkill, New York, 76 miles from the university, for $1,125,000 in February 2012 with $500,000 in financing from NYU. According to an online description, it’s a stone house on 7 park-like acres with a flowing stream and a functioning 12-foot water wheel.

Numerous other NYU professors have country homes financed by the NYU School of Law Foundation or NYU. Between primary residences and vacation homes, NYU and its affiliated nonprofits have an estimated $72 million to $96 million outstanding in loans to faculty and administrators. The university has acknowledged 168 loans.

These revelations come on top of other recent outrages at the university, such as the purchase of a $6.15 million condo on East 70th Street to house Robert Grossman, Dean of the NYU Medical Center. Grossman’s combined compensation at NYU as of the fiscal year ending August 31, 2011 was $3,488,960. Five other doctors at the Medical Center receive a combined total of $10.5 million in compensation.

The excesses at NYU under the presidency of John Sexton came partially to light during the Senate confirmation hearings of Jack Lew, President Obama’s pick for Treasury Secretary. As NYU’s Chief Operating Officer, Lew had received a partially forgivable mortgage loan for $1.4 million to buy a luxury home in Riverdale and “severance pay” of $685,000 – even though he had voluntarily left to join Citigroup. In testimony to the Senate, Lew said NYU provided him with an annual payment equal to the interest paid on his mortgage.

Senator Chuck Grassley, ranking member of the Committee on the Judiciary, was part of Lew’s confirmation hearings and was deeply disturbed by Lew’s opaque and grudging release of the materials requested. As a result of what he had heard in the hearing, Grassley sent a March 15, 2013 letter to NYU requesting “all loan documents for loans made to individuals from 2000 to the present,” along with a demand to know the details about whose loans were forgiven, interest reimbursed, and so forth.

It’s now three months later and according to a spokesperson for Grassley, his office still doesn’t have all the loan documents. NYU is refusing to turn over the documents, instead forcing Grassley’s aides to look at the documents in the presence of NYU lawyers and “take notes but not make copies of the documents.” The next session is scheduled for June 27, according to the spokesperson. Grassley is a Republican. Because the Democrats have majority control in the Senate, Grassley lacks subpoena power.

The NYU chapter of the American Association of University Professors has asked the New York State Attorney General’s Charities Bureau, which oversees nonprofit organizations, to probe the mushrooming mortgage scandal and other matters. The faculty at a number of schools on the campus have delivered a no-confidence vote of Sexton, with particular ire arising from his NYU 2031 plan to broadly expand NYU’s real estate footprint in Greenwich Village with vast construction projects earmarked that would disrupt neighborhood life and cost the university billions of dollars. NYU is already the second largest real estate owner in New York City, with $3.3 billion in residential and commercial holdings according to its 2010 federal tax return.

I emailed one Law Professor, Geoffrey Miller, who had a home in New Rochelle financed by the NYU School of Law Foundation, and asked why he didn’t simply use the NYU Federal Credit Union, as many other faculty have done to finance their homes. The Credit Union’s web site indicates that it offers a “full range” of home mortgage loans in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Vermont, up to a cap of $750,000. I also asked Miller if his loan was forgivable. Miller responded that he wouldn’t provide “personal financial information” over the internet. Of course, I wasn’t asking for sensitive things like account numbers or social security numbers or even dollar amounts. I was asking two very basic questions: why didn’t you use the Credit Union and was your loan forgivable.

I reached out to NYU to justify these loans under IRS rules for 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations, the structure under which both NYU and the School of Law Foundation are organized. One rule is quite specific, warning that 501(c)(3)s “must not be organized or operated for the benefit of private interests, and no part of a section 501(c)(3) organization’s net earnings may inure to the benefit of any private shareholder or individual.”

NYU spokesman, John Beckman, responded: “NYU is located in the highest cost-of-living area in the country. NYU loan programs are one part of strategy that has transformed New York University over the last several decades from a regional, largely commuter, school to one of the top ranked research universities in the world. A core tenet of the transformation was to create a cohesive, residential academic community of faculty, students, and administrators committed to and interacting in university life, including academic and extracurricular activities (and, in the case of senior administrators, where they can be available around the clock).”

But that doesn’t explain Sexton’s home 57 miles from Manhattan or Tsien’s home an hour and a half away or any of the other country homes far outside of New York City. If anything, it’s an argument against the ability to have senior administrators “available around the clock.” (Not that this is an acceptable practice under any circumstance.)

Beckman continued on the matter of country homes: “NYU loan programs, while primarily targeted for the purchase of principal residences accessible to campus, also can assist in meeting other financial needs of the accomplished faculty and senior administrators that NYU seeks to recruit and retain in a highly competitive market for such talent. NYU’s peer institutions typically also have loan programs and other housing assistance programs for faculty and senior administrators. For these reasons, NYU's loans are directly related to NYU’s exempt purposes.”

One detail on NYU’s 2010 federal tax filing raises further red flags. A little footnote reads as follows: “One highest compensated employee received compensation over a base salary based on the surplus of revenues after expenses for the IVF Faculty Practice Group.” That would seem to be in direct conflict with the IRS ruling that “no part of a section 501(c)(3) organization’s net earnings may inure to the benefit of any private shareholder or individual.”

IVF refers to in vitro fertilization, available through the NYU Medical Center’s Fertility Center. Two individuals appearing on NYU’s highest compensated individuals’ listing on the 2010 tax filing for NYU are Dr. Jamie Grifo, listed as earning $2.9 million, and Dr. Nicole Noyes, listed at $1.8 million. Both are listed as employees of the Fertility Center on its web site.

One person who is not getting financing from NYU for a country home, a city home or a multi million dollar salary is Chen Guangcheng, a blind human rights activist and lawyer who has been a fellow at NYU for the past year. Chen had escaped house arrest in China and fled to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing before arriving at NYU.

Chen released a statement Sunday night, saying he was getting the boot at NYU because of pressure from the government in China. Since the New York Post ran an article to that effect last Thursday, NYU has vehemently denied the accusation. NYU plans to open a campus in Shanghai this fall, a plan that requires the goodwill of Chinese officials. The plan has caused great controversy at NYU because of ongoing human rights abuses by the totalitarian government there. NYU’s campus in autocratic Abu Dhabi is equally contentious, with faculty charging that NYU is simply selling its brand abroad in exchange for big donations.

The problems at NYU are emblematic of an insular institution whose Board is heavily dominated by the same Wall Street people who heaped disgrace upon their own institutions. The NYU Association of American University Professors has proposed a broad new blueprint for governance at NYU. It includes faculty and student representation on the Board of Trustees, participation in selecting new presidents and provosts, the ability of faculty to have a say in any domestic or global expansion plans, and a full knowledge of the university’s fiscal affairs. When John Sexton returns from Fire Island and meets with the Board, adopting the new management model should be the first order of business.

When the Government Asks, Tech Companies Usually Turn Over User Information

Alex Kane, AlterNet — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 10:23:00 -0700

How often do technology companies hand over user information to the government? More answers to that question have come out in recent days.

Just how often do technology companies hand over user information to the government? That question has taken on renewed significance in the wake of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s disclosures. A big problem, though, is that technology companies like Facebook and Google can’t reveal many specific details about the government requests, as Mother Jones’ Dana Liebelson points out.

Snowden disclosed the existence of a program called PRISM, which, according to an NSA slide detailing the program, allowed the government “direct access” to the servers of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, and more. But the companies say that the government requests information from the companies based on a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act request, and the data is then turned over.

In the wake of this revelation, companies including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter asked the U.S. government to be allowed to release data on how much information they give over when asked. In response, the government said they could release information about the number of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) requests--but only in conjunction with information about other government agencies’ requests. In practice, this means that the information released does not reveal a whole lot about FISA requests.

Microsoft and Facebook have now released the data they are allowed to, though Google and Twitter have not and are pressing to be allowed to disclose the specific amount of FISA requests, according to Mother Jones.

This new data is in addition to information already released over the past few years by some technology companies about government requests for user information. But they can only provided limited information about what are known as national security letters--a Patriot Act-authorized demand letter to organizations or companies related to a terrorism investigation. Liebelson notes that “Google could only report that it had received as many as 999 national security letters in 2012, targeting between 1,000 and 1,999 user accounts.” Companies can’t reveal a lot about the content contained in requests turned over as a result of national security letters.

Mother Jones has some more numbers:

Last year, Google “received over 16,400 requests covering more than 31,000 user accounts from federal, state, and local authorities.”

Microsoft received 6,000-7,000 government requests for information in the second half of last year that related to 32,000 accounts.

Facebook received 9,000-10,000 government requests in the second half of last year as well, which affected 19,000 accounts.

Twitter received 1,494 government requests last year, which affected 2,093 accounts.

Those numbers include FISA requests along with state and local government requests. The companies usually hand the information over. Google granted the information to government 89% of the time; Microsoft 79% of the time; and Twitter 72% of the time. Other companies besides those have not released new data incorporating FISA requests.

In total, 64,936 users of Facebook, Google, Twitter and Microsoft were affected by government requests from July-December 2012.

7 Things to Know About the Draconian GOP Bill That Would Force Women to Birth Babies Without Brains

Tara Culp-Ressler, Think Progress — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 09:14:00 -0700

Anti-abortion zealots are getting bolder.

On Tuesday, the House of Representatives will vote on the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, a measure spearheaded by Reps. Trent Franks (R-AZ) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) that would cut off legal access to abortion services at 20 weeks after fertilization. It represents the most restrictive abortion bill to come to a vote in either chamber over the past decade. Here’s what you need to know about this attack on women’s reproductive rights — and how it fits into a broader, coordinated nationwide campaign to slowly chip away at abortion access:

1. It’s based on the scientifically-disputed theory that fetuses can feel pain before the third trimester of pregnancy.
So-called “fetal pain” measures are based on junk science that represents a minority position among medical professionals. Most doctors don’t believe that fetuses can feel pain until much later in pregnancy, after the point of viability (generally considered to be around 24 weeks), and scientific research has repeatedly confirmed this position. Nevertheless, abortion opponents have successfully stoked emotional outrage surrounding later-term abortion — particularly following the high-profile murder trial of illegal abortion provider Kermit Gosnell — by twisting the facts to make it appear that these abortions are always barbaric procedures.
2. It has sparked more controversy over Republicans’ attitudes toward rape.
The original version of Franks’ legislation did not include an exception for victims of rape or incest. Defending the lack of an exception in these cases, the Arizona congressman last week claimed that “the incidence of rape resulting in pregnancy are very low.” Franks is just the latest Republican to make an offensive comment about rape victims, and his comments inspired comparisons to former Rep. Todd Akin’s (R-MO) infamous assertion that women don’t often get pregnant from “legitimate rape” because the body “has ways of shutting that whole thing down.” Following the controversy that erupted from his statements, Franks revised the legislation at the last minute to include an exemption for survivors of rape and incest — but only if rape victims first report the sexual crime to the police, and if incest victims are minors.
3. Abortions after 20 weeks are already extremely rare, and the women who need them are usually in the most desperate of circumstances.
Although Franks claimed he didn’t need to legislate rape victims’ reproductive rights because the instances of pregnancies resulting from rape are “very low,” the instances of abortions after 20 weeks are actually much lower than that. Pregnancy results from rape anestimated 5 percent of the time, while abortions after 20 weeks represent just one percent of all abortions. The women who seek out this type of later abortion procedure tend to fall into one of two categories: the economically disadvantaged women who need to delay abortion until they can save up the money for it, and the women who discover serious fetal health issues only after their pregnancy has advanced. Criminalizing abortion after 20 weeks will force some women to give birth to fetuses with no brain function — or other types of fatal anomalies — and watch their children suffer outside of the womb during their short lives.
4. The national legislation initially started out as an abortion restriction for the women who live in Washington, DC.
Franks has repeatedly attempted to impose his anti-abortion agenda on the women living in the nation’s capitol. Because the District of Columbia does not have its own representation in Congress, lawmakers from other areas often use it as their legislative playground. Franks’ fetal pain measure failed last year, but that didn’t stop him from re-introducing it — and eventually expanding it to apply to women in every state. The Republican lawmaker said that Gosnell’s crimes compelled him to restrict abortion access not just for DC women, but for women across the entire country.

5. Even though a national ban has no chance of passing, 20-week bans are successfully advancing on the state level.
Franks’ 20-week ban is essentially dead-on-arrival in the Democratic-controlled Senate, and the President has already indicated that he will veto it if it comes to his desk. But that doesn’t mean fetal pain measures are nothing to worry about. In fact, this anti-choice strategy is successfully advancing on the state level. After Nebraska first enacted a 20-week ban on abortion in 2010, a handful of other states rushed to do the same. Now, according to the Guttmacher Institute, about 11 states have banned abortion services before the point of viability specifically based on the notion that fetuses can feel pain — and more states are currently advancing fetal pain bills. Texas isconsidering a 20-week abortion ban in its special session, and anti-choice lawmakers are hoping to rush it through. GOP-led legislatures inSouth Carolina and Wisconsin also may advance fetal pain laws in the last days of their sessions.
6. “Fetal pain” laws are unconstitutional, and state-level versions have been repeatedly blocked in court.
As increasing numbers of states have enacted 20-week abortion bans, courts have blocked several of them from taking effect. Fetal pain measures effectively narrow the window during which women may exercise their constitutional rights by moving up the cut-off for legal abortion services — a direct violation of Roe v. Wade guarantees the right to legal abortion until the point of viability. Twenty-week bans inIdaho, Georgia, and Franks’ home state of Arizona have all been blocked for this reason.
7. The anti-choice movement is growing bolder, and abortion opponents are demonstrating they’re not afraid to directly challenge Roe v. Wade.
Even though the national 20-week ban has no chance of becoming law, the fact that Republicans in the House brought it to a vote illustrates the fact that abortion opponents aren’t backing down from the fight. Over the past decade, anti-abortion Republicans have relied on an “incremental” strategy to limit abortion access, passing dozens of state-level restrictions couched in terms of “women’s health and safety” rather than attempting to ban the procedure altogether. Lawmakers used to be wary to advance stringent laws that overstep Roeand are likely be struck down in court. That’s not the case anymore. This session, state legislatures have passed increasingly harsh abortion bans — like a six-week ban in North Dakota and a 12-week ban in Arkansas — and they’ve made it clear that they want to test the boundaries of Roe v. Wade. “These laws are flying through,” Elizabeth Nash, a policy analyst for the Guttmacher Institute, told the New York Times. “The attention has really been at the state level around abortion issues. Now what you also see at the federal level is very disturbing, and it shows that abortion opponents are very emboldened.”

Will Legalizing Pot Destroy Humboldt Or Transform It into the Napa Valley of Weed?

Emily Brady, AlterNet — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 09:52:00 -0700

The marijuana capital of the world tries to figure out the future of its illicit product.

Mare Abidon had first heard about the event while listening to KMUD-FM, the community radio station. A local talk show host named Anna “Banana” Hamilton was organizing it. The flyers she posted around town advertised the event two ways: “The Post-Marijuana Prohibition Economy Forum,” and the shorthand version, which rolled off the tongue much easier: “What’s After Pot?” The accompanying art featured a pot leaf, two nude female figures wearing baseball caps, clumps of trimmed marijuana buds, and what appeared to be dollar bills with wings fluttering away.

The meeting was taking place at the Mateel Community Center in Southern Humboldt, an area of 1,200 square miles of sprawling wilderness in the far reaches of Northern California. The area used to be known as the Mateel, after the Mattole and Eel rivers that flow through it, but now, as if it were some Manhattan neighborhood, many people called it by the abbreviated term SoHum.

Over the years, SoHum, the rest of Humboldt, and neighboring Mendocino and Trinity counties had become known around the country as the Emerald Triangle, after the region’s brilliant green clandestine marijuana crop. Since the mid-1970s, outlaw farmers throughout the Triangle had been supplying America with its favorite illegal drug. What had started as a lark nearly forty years earlier had become the backbone to the county’s economy. Throughout the region, and particularly in SoHum, marijuana farming had become a way of life, one that transcended class and generations. “It’s what we do here,” people would say.

Mare herself had grown a half-dozen plants every year for decades.

But the code of silence surrounding the marijuana industry was such that, until one March evening in 2010, there had never been a public gathering in Southern Humboldt where what people did there was openly discussed.

Sure, for twenty years there was an annual hemp festival, where pot-related books and paraphernalia were sold, and for decades there had been meetings to discuss the actions of law enforcement in the community, but a public discussion about the dependence of the local economy on the black market marijuana crop had never happened before. Up until this moment, it was even considered bad form to ask what someone did for a living in the community. It was just understood.

Mare passed through the front doors of the Mateel Community Center and a giant wooden sculpture of an open hand. Inside, the stage where musicians from around the world came to play shows was empty, but the entire oak floor below was filled with a dozen long banquet tables and an army of folding chairs. On each table were handwritten place cards indicating who should sit there. There were tables for landowners, local government, medical marijuana patients, the press, “Growers,” and “Just Curious.” There was even a gray metal chair labeled “FBI.”

It was a large crowd for Southern Humboldt. Nearly two hundred people were milling about. Instead of picking a table, Mare headed for the fireplace in the back corner that was sculpted to resemble a giant redwood tree trunk and looked as though it should have a cauldron bubbling away inside it. There were other familiar faces in the crowd—neighbors and friends—and the unfamiliar. Seated at the landowners’ table was a woman with long, coppery red hair named Kym Kemp. A third-generation Humboldter, Kemp had been blogging about local marijuana culture since 2007, under the name Redheaded Blackbelt. Her blog posts ranged from photos of local wildflowers and quilts she helped stitch to links to stories about the marijuana industry and flyers of the occasional missing person. Sitting nearby was a man Mare knew named Charley Custer, who was dressed in his trademark Stetson hat and Jesus sandals. Custer had moved to Humboldt from Chicago in 1980 to write a book that he referred to as his “opus dopus.” It was, as of yet, incomplete.

Engrossed in a conversation over by the stage was the event’s mastermind, Anna “Banana” Hamilton. Hamilton was an outspoken folksinger in her sixties who hosted a monthly talk show on KMUD called Rant and Rave. She normally tooled around town in jeans and a baseball cap, but on this evening, she was dressed up, in a lavender velvet top and pearls.

The irony was that every table was now full except for the growers’ table, where only two brave souls had claimed a seat. One of them was Mare’s neighbor Syreeta Lux, a sturdy blonde who wore an enormous grin. Lux had lived in the community for decades and figured it was impossible to have a conversation about the future of the marijuana industry if growers were still invisible. It’s now or never, she figured, as she pulled her chair up to the empty table. Lux quickly waved over a friend, and wrote “medical” above the word growers, to try to get people to feel more at ease. Like Mare, she recognized many faces of friends, neighbors, and other community members in the crowd who were also growers, but still no one else joined her.

It may have seemed strange that fourteen years after California passed the nation’s first medical marijuana law, which allowed people to grow pot legally with a doctor’s recommendation, America’s most infamous marijuana growers might be hesitant to claim their heritage, but this was a community that had paid a price for its decades-long rebellion. It had endured annual government raids, and the army itself had once invaded. Then there was the lawless side of the business, the home-invasion rip-offs, and the occasional murder. For decades, to announce oneself as a grower would have been like painting a big target on one’s back. The times were indeed changing, but they didn’t change quickly in Humboldt.

The event was about to begin, and Syreeta Lux decided to take things a step further. She stood up, held the “Growers” sign high above her head, and commanded the room’s attention.

“If anyone is looking for a place to sit, there’s lots of room at our table to grow,” she announced in a loud, booming voice.

And then she grinned even wider.

From her spot by the fireplace, Mare figured she would let Syreeta represent the female growers. After years of living in the shadows, Mare had no intention of claiming a seat at that table. She had glanced around the room and realized that regardless of where people were sitting, the majority were what she called marijuana moonshiners, just like her. But when Syreeta stood up and encouraged others to join her, it was as if Mare’s feet had a mind of their own, and just like that, she found herself stepping forward. In front of her family, friends, community, elected officials, local and national media, and maybe even the FBI, Mare shuffled toward the growers’ table.

And she wasn’t the only one.

“Come on!” Syreeta Lux shouted for others to join them, and they did.

Like some kind of illicit farming coming-out ceremony, more growers stepped into the light. Eventually their numbers swelled to a few dozen, and later they had to retreat to the outdoor patio to have enough space to talk among themselves. But first, from her perch near the stage, Anna Hamilton spoke the words that everyone knew, but no one had yet dared to declare publicly.

“The legalization of marijuana will be the single most devastating economic bust in the long boom-and-bust history of Northern California, impacting local businesses, nonprofit organizations, the workforce, and county tax revenue,” she said, pausing for dramatic effect to peer at the crowd over the top of her reading glasses.

As Hamilton and everyone else knew, pot farming was not only a way of life in the region; it was the foundation of the entire economy. People had grown so dependent on the lucrative black market prices that some locals referred to marijuana’s illegality as the best government price support program in U.S. history. Prohibition and suppression create risk for growers and artificial scarcity on the market, sending prices and profit margins through the roof.

But that price support system was now at risk.

The U.S. government effectively outlawed marijuana in 1937. Though it is nontoxic and there are no recorded cases in history of anyone ever dying from overdosing on the drug, since the creation of the Controlled Substances Act in 1970 the federal government has classified marijuana as a Schedule I substance. This means the government considers pot more dangerous than cocaine or methamphetamine, with no medical value whatsoever. Many American people are of a different mind. In the late 1990s, starting with California in 1996, states began adopting medical marijuana laws. By the spring of 2010, fourteen states and Washington, D.C., had passed such laws.

These new laws, coupled with a cultural shift toward the acceptance of marijuana on a national level, brought more people into the industry and caused the price of pot on the black market gradually to decline. Marijuana was now a multi-billion-dollar industry in the Golden State, and a measure to legalize and tax it for adult recreational use had just gathered enough signatures to appear on the November ballot.

As Anna Hamilton pointed out that evening, if the measure passed, it could change everything in Humboldt.

“Every member of our society holds a stake in the consequences of legalization,” she said, as she began to point to the various tables—to the landowners, educators, members of the business community, and pot growers.

“Did I skip anyone who wants to be recognized tonight?” she asked. “Any representatives from the federal government? I see someone’s sitting in that fed chair over there. Is that just a joke?!”

Apparently it was, so Hamilton continued.

If the legalization measure passed, she predicted that the price of marijuana grown outdoors in the sun, the traditional Humboldt way, could drop from its current rate of around $2,000 a pound to as low as $500. If that happened, the effects would be catastrophic. The market would bottom out, affecting growers and everyone who worked for them, which Hamilton estimated to be between fifteen and thirty thousand people in Humboldt County alone.

In a few months’ time, the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit think tank, would release a study with a similar prediction. It estimated that the legalization of the production and distribution of marijuana in California could cause prices to drop up to 80 percent.

There was reason to worry in the room, and it wasn’t just about economic self-interest. Proceeds from marijuana had not only supported and sustained individuals in the community, but had also helped build local institutions, including a health clinic, the radio station KMUD, and the Mateel Community Center, where the evening’s conversation was taking place. Donating earnings from a plant or a pound to these nonprofits, and to the community schools and volunteer fire departments, was how for years many locals paid their “taxes.”

All this was poised to change.

“If the value of marijuana drops below a certain level,” Hamilton warned, “the state will be faced with the collapse of its rural economies. Businesses will be shuttered, the nonprofit community will be unable to provide services to suddenly displaced peoples, and the golden goose will be dead.”

She looked up at the crowd.

“We will all face this economic decline together. For the sake of our region, it is time to begin planning for this upheaval now, together.

“What will we do?” she asked.

There was dead silence.

“We have all the talent and all the answers we need right here in this room.”

Among the ideas that bubbled up that evening was an advisory panel of pot growers that would meet with local elected officials to discuss how to regulate their industry. One couple came away from the meeting inspired to form the area’s first collective to try to sell organic, artisanal Humboldt pot legally under the state’s medical model. Some audience members expressed the long-held fear that legalization would bring the corporatization of the industry and that the market would be flooded with cheap, mass-produced weed, and they wouldn’t be able to compete. Others, including a local government official, saw it as an opportunity to take advantage of Humboldt’s legendary brand. Across the country and beyond, the Humboldt County name had become deeply linked with pot.

“We’ve had this name association for thirty or forty years now,” County Supervisor Mark Lovelace remarked. “If this is a newly legitimized industry, shouldn’t we be looking at capitalizing on that?”

There was talk of creating an appellation, modeled after the world’s great wine-growing regions, to designate that local pot was Humboldt homegrown. The way Hamilton saw it, the future of the area was either “appellation or Appalachia.” Should marijuana become legal, Humboldt County could become the Napa Valley of Pot, complete with “marijuanaries,” where tourists could visit and sample the latest harvest. The business possibilities were endless: “bud and breakfasts,” where rooms overlooked fragrant green gardens; a marijuana museum, detailing the history of the area’s decades-long experiment in civil disobedience; food and pot pairings at local restaurants; and some kind of four-wheel-drive trolley service, like the limos of the Napa Valley, to cart intoxicated tourists up unpaved roads to tour the pot farms.

“I’m not dying until there’s a tasting room in Humboldt County!” a woman with a brown bob and glasses passionately declared.

She was greeted with an enthusiastic round of applause.

That evening, Mare Abidon wasn’t worried about the price of pot or how she might brand herself; instead, she was bursting with hope. She had always expected that marijuana would become legal one day, and when it did, she planned to plant big pot bushes in plain sight between the cherry trees around her deck. In fact, she’d never imagined it would take this long. She never really understood the whole War on Drugs, or why the government considered marijuana such a menace. She thought it was great medicine, and even safer than alcohol as a way to unwind at the end of the day.

With the coming legalization, Mare thought that all the jails were going to be emptied of people arrested for pot, and that she and her friends who grew it were finally going to become legitimate members of society. Much was discussed that night, but what Mare took away, what she’d always remember, was that giddy rush of emotion, the feeling of pure liberation as she stepped into the light and walked toward that growers’ table. “It was like crawling out from under a rock that I had been under for decades,” she later confessed.

But, of course, not everyone felt that way.

Nigella Lawson Apparently Choked by Her Husband in the Middle of a Restaurant -- and Nobody Stepped in to Stop It

Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 12:02:00 -0700

Society still has a long way to go.

If ever there were a woman who represented the ideal of homey perfection, it’d be Nigella Lawson. This, after all, is the woman who jokingly titled one of her cookbooks “How to Be a Domestic Goddess,” a woman whose television show “Nigella Bites” frequently ended with her triumphantly feeding an eager crowd (or just her two children).

So it came as stunning news Sunday when the Mirror’s People page published a series of photographs showing the British food writer and television personality apparently being choked by her husband Charles Saatchi during a recent lunch at Scott’s restaurant in London. In the series of photographs, the man’s hand is seen extended across a table and around Lawson’s throat. As the Mirror sensationally describes it, “At first he used only his left hand, then both. At one stage he tweaked her nose then pushed both hands in her face. Twice Nigella jerked her head backwards as if in fear.” Strangely, soon after, she reportedly kissed him on the cheek. Another photo shows her apparently crying and visibly upset, leaving the restaurant. Police are now investigating the incident but have not launched a formal investigation.

Saatchi, a renowned advertising executive and art dealer, has insisted the photographs don’t tell the true story. In a conversation with the Evening Standard, he says, “About a week ago, we were sitting outside a restaurant having an intense debate about the children, and I held Nigella’s neck repeatedly while attempting to emphasize my point. There was no grip, it was a playful tiff. The pictures are horrific but give a far more drastic and violent impression of what took place. Nigella’s tears were because we both hate arguing, not because she had been hurt. We had made up by the time we were home. The paparazzi were congregated outside our house after the story broke yesterday morning, so I told Nigella to take the kids off till the dust settled.” Hint: If you can acknowledge that you were having an “intense” argument and that during it you put your hands around a woman’s throat “to make a point,” there’s going to be a whole lot of serious question as to how “playful” your actions were, sir. Next time you’re looking for “emphasis,” try it a little further away from an artery. The 53 year-old Lawson, meanwhile, has only confirmed via a spokesman that she and two her children by her late first husband John Diamond have moved out of their London home, with no further comment. Her rep told Us this week, “We will not be commenting on the images.”

Lawson has said in the past of her marriage that “I’ll go quiet when he explodes, and then I am a nest of horrible festeringness.” And last year, Saatchi was photographed at a restaurant conspicuously clamping his hand over his wife’s mouth. Lawson, who has lavishly recalled her late mother in her books and television shows, has admitted that she would threaten,“I’m going to hit you till you cry,” and once hit her brother so hard she hurt her hand.

What exactly led to that hand around Lawson’s throat – a moment captured by a photographer skulking outside – is unknown. What is known is the conservative MP and all around dirtbag Nick Griffin quickly took the opportunity to tweet that “If I had the opportunity to squeeze Nigella Lawson, her throat wouldn’t be my first choice.” What is known is that a member of the paparazzi made money selling the images. What is known is the unbylined Mirror staff were able to find onlookers who said the incident was “utterly shocking to watch,” that Lawson “had a real look of fear on her face,” and that “He was being intimidating, threatening” and “abusive, frightening and disrespectful” – and yet they couldn’t find a single person who’d intervened in the slightest while a woman was being “attacked” in broad daylight.

What is known is that a woman who is beautiful, who is wealthy, who is successful, who is over the age of 50, can have a man reach out and grab her by the throat during an “intense” debate just as easily as a woman who is poor or young or uneducated – and that regardless of who the woman is, it’s a lot easier to find some mansplaining troll willing to laugh it off or be dismissive about it than it is to find somebody who will actually stand up and ask what the woman herself in the holy hell is going on. Or to ask simply, “Are you okay?”

That’s why organizations like Ring the Bell, which encourage men and women to speak up and speak out about violence against women, matter so much. That’s why if anything good can come of this, let it be a reminder that whether we’re in a fancy London restaurant or a trailer park or a dorm, maybe we don’t know the whole story, maybe we don’t know what’s going on between that couple arguing over there. But when it becomes physical, it’s not the time to look away, and then later primly declare how very “shocking” it all was.

Permanent Washington’s Backlash to Edward Snowden

David Sirota, AlterNet — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 15:47:00 -0700

The government officials, pundits and reporters who comprise Permanent Washington have derided Snowden and those who helped him disseminate his disclosures.

Whether in celebrity culture or in our Facebook-mediated interactions, we live in the age of the human being as a public brand. So there's nothing surprising about the reaction to this week's disclosures about the National Security Agency's unprecedented surveillance program. In our cult-of-personality society, that reaction has been predictably — and unfortunately — focused less on the agency's possible crimes against the entire country than on Edward Snowden, the government contractor who disclosed the wrongdoing.

Almost universally, the government officials, pundits and reporters who comprise Permanent Washington have derided Snowden and those who helped him disseminate his disclosures. For instance, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., bashed him for committing "treason" while Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., called for the arrest and prosecution of the journalists who broke the NSA snooping story. Likewise, establishment pundits from CNN's Jeffrey Toobin to the New York Times David Brooks loyally defended government's national security agencies by respectively assaulting Snowden as a "narcissist" and a loser who "could not successfully work his way through the institution of high school." Meanwhile, plenty of Obama loyalists — many of whom criticized the Bush administration for much less invasive surveillance — took to Twitter to berate Snowden as an attention-seeking traitor.

Though they failed to show that Snowden's disclosures endanger national security, these attacks do tell an important story — not about the whistleblower, but about America.

First and foremost, the backlash reveals that Permanent Washington doesn't work for We the People — it works to protect itself. We know this because whereas Snowden is vilified for disclosing information that's inconvenient to Permanent Washington, those who leak classified information that is advantageous to Permanent Washington are left alone.

Yes — most of those slamming Snowden expressed no outrage when the White House recently leaked Obama-glorifying information about the president's assassinations of alleged terrorists.

Same thing when it came to John Brennan. As Reuters' Jack Shafer notes, after the president's counterterrorism adviser leaked administration-defending information about a terrorist attack, "instead of being prosecuted for leaking sensitive, classified intelligence, Brennan was promoted to director of the CIA" — and few of those now complaining about Snowden expressed any outrage.

"The willingness of the government to punish leakers is inversely proportional to the leakers' rank and status, which is bad news for someone so lacking in those attributes as Edward Snowden," Shafer correctly concludes.

Of course, Permanent Washington's self-interested assaults on Snowden will inevitably find some support among the general public. The question is: why?

This gets to the second way that this week's events expose far more ugly truths about us than about Snowden.

In a democratic society, as Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald put it, "we're supposed to know virtually everything about what (government officials) do: That's why they're called public servants." That's why, until given reason not to, we should naturally sympathize with — and support protections for — whistleblowers like Snowden.

But that's the thing: Our core notions about transparency and self-governance have been under withering assault by Permanent Washington. Over time, that assault has succeeded in convincing many Americans to embrace the authoritarian view that says whistleblowers are a bigger problem than the government crimes they expose.

To understand what's wrong with that attitude, consider the critics through the prism of history.

Those castigating Snowden probably would have insisted that the biggest crime of the Vietnam War was Daniel Ellsberg publishing the Pentagon Papers. They likely would have also said that the biggest crime of Watergate was Deep Throat blowing the whistle.

It is the same authoritarian argument against Snowden today — and until we wake up to the real agenda at work, Permanent Washington will continue undermining civil liberties and America's democratic ideals in any way it can.

The New Generation of American Patriots Are the Whistlebowers Who Came of Age After 9/11

Gary Younge, The Guardian — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 11:52:00 -0700

The violation of civil liberties in the name of security has compelled many to take enormous risks in the name of patriotism.

When Darrell Anderson, 22, joined the US military he knew there was going to be a war, and he wanted to fight it. "I thought I was going to free Iraqi people," he told me. "I thought I was going to do a good thing."

Until, that is, he realised precisely what he had to do. While on patrol in Baghdad, he thought: "What are we doing here? Are we looking for weapons of mass destruction? No. Are we helping the people? No, they hate us. What are we working towards, apart from just staying alive? If this was my neighbourhood and foreign soldiers were doing this then what would I be doing?" Within a few months, he says, "I was cocking my weapon at innocent civilians without any sympathy or humanity". While home on leave he realised he was not going to be able to lead a normal life if he went back. His mum drove him to Canada, where I met him in 2006 at a picnic for war resisters in Fort Erie.

Anderson's trajectory, from uncritical patriotism to conscious disaffection and finally to conscientious dissent, is a familiar one among a generation of Americans who came of political age after 9/11. Over time, efforts to balance the myth of American freedom on which they were raised, with the reality of American power that they have been called on to monitor or operate, causes a profound dislocation in their world view. Like a meat eater in an abattoir, they are forced to confront the brutality of the world they are implicated in and recoil at their role in it – occasionally in dramatic fashion.

It is from this generation that the most recent prominent whistleblowers have emerged: Edward Snowden, 29, the former National Security Agency contractor, now on the run after passing evidence of mass snooping to the Guardian; Bradley Manning, who at 22 gave classified diplomatic and military information to WikiLeaks and now faces a court martial; the late Aaron Swartz, who by 24 was a veteran hacker when he was arrested for illegally downloading academic articles from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later took his own life; and Jeremy Hammond, 28, who is facing federal criminal charges for allegedly publicising the internal files of a private spying agency.

Just as America's military record abroad, complete with torture and "collateral damage", has helped push a section of disaffected Muslim youth across the globe towards terrorism, so the violation of civil liberties and privatisation of information has driven a number of disillusioned Americans to law-breaking dissent at home.

In a 2008 book, The Way We'll Be, US pollster John Zogby categorised this age cohort as First Globals. Tracking everything from views on gay marriage to propensity to travel, he described young Americans aged 18-29 as "the most outward-looking and accepting generation in American history". Unfazed by social diversity at home, they held more open attitudes towards the rest of the world. They were far more likely to travel abroad than others, have friends or family overseas, and to be aware of international politics. "[They] might not be more able than other age cohorts to point to Darfur on a map," argued Zogby, "but they at least know there is a Darfur, and they care what's happening there."

The perpetual war and accompanying "anti-terror" security structure after 9/11 is all this generation has ever known. And it has had a profound impact on shaping their views on US foreign policy.

In 2007, 63% (significantly higher than any other age group) disagreed with the statement "I support my country, right or wrong". In 2004, 86% thought "an imperialist power that acts on its own regardless of what the rest of the world thinks" was improper or somewhat improper, while just 3% thought the opposite. On the latter question, Zogby wrote: "No other group we studied, not Democrats nor self-described progressives, not readers of the New York Times, had a greater spread between the two extremes." It is in this context that the defiance and determination of these young people must be understood.

One could make too much of their age as a unifying factor. Since these leaks demand proficiency with new technology, those involved are bound to be younger. And older people, with families, careers and pensions, are less likely to do things they know will put them in jail or force them to flee. Moreover, for all the similarities between them, there are significant differences. Snowden contributed money to Republican libertarian Ron Paul's campaign; Hammond describes himself as an "anarchist-communist".

Yet, while each acted separately from the other, their unrepentant justifications read as though they were unconsciously working in concert. "I believe people have a right to know what governments and corporations are doing behind closed doors," wrote Hammond.

"We need to take information," wrote Swartz. "Wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world."

"This is the truth. This is what is happening," said Snowden. "You should decide whether we need to be doing this."

Manning said: "I want people to see the truth, because without information you cannot make informed decisions as a public."

They seek to liberate not land or people, but information. The state seeks to criminalise them as spies. But it wasn't treachery but patriotism (once blind, now wide-eyed, and arguably always misplaced) that brought most of them to this point. Their aim was neither to enrich themselves nor to aid a foreign power, but to make the power in which they invested much of their identity – America – more transparent, knowledgeable, accountable and honourable.

Anderson, Manning and Snowden, for example, all joined the military-security sector after Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib were in the public domain. They knew what could be done in America's name. They just never thought they would be put in a position where they would have to choose between doing it, concealing it or exposing it. Raised in the true American ideal that an individual can make a difference, they spoke up.

Forced to choose between allegiance to the flag and uniform, and loyalty to the ideals the flag is supposed to represent and the uniform is supposed to defend, they chose the latter. Their defiance stems from the fact that, in acting as they have, they don't believe they've let down America. They believe they had to act because America was letting itself down.

U.S. Supreme Court Rejects GOP Voter Supression Tactic

Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 08:40:00 -0700

Arizona’s 2004 effort to fight ‘voter fraud’ rejected.

Another relic of the Republican Party’s voter suppression arsenal was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday, when it ruled that Arizona could not require citizenship documents be added to the federal voter registration application—as opposed attesting to one’s citizenship by signing a legal oath.

The case stems from a GOP-sponsored ballot measure passed by Arizona voters in 2004 that was promoted as stopping so-called 'voter fraud.' Under this paranoid theory, people—usually Democrats—were fabricating voter registrations and repeatedly voting to steal elections. 'Voter fraud’ was a cause célèbre among the GOP, especially during the George W. Bush administration, when the White House forced the Justice Department to fire federal prosecutors who would not vigorously pursue these cases.

Needless to say, the U.S. prosecutors found, and repeated academic studies confirmed, that this kind of tampering rarely occurred and was usually caught by election officials. Typically, it only happened in the most local races, where an overzealous family member tried to help a relative where a few dozen votes might alter the outcome.

However, the political attraction of ‘policing the polls’ appealed to Republicans in many states, who often believed that Democrats could only win by cheating. As a result, many GOP-dominated states have toughened their voter I.D. laws, creating new hurdles for millions of legal and eligible voters when voter umpersonation, where it exists, is very rare.

The larger GOP strategy has always been about discouraging likely Democratic voters, especially among young people and in communities of color. Arizona’s Republicans went further than any other state by requiring that would-be voters submit citizenship documents in addition to using the federal mail-in voter registration form, which one signs under penalty of perjury.

The case has been a priority among progressive voting rights groups for years, because the mail-in federal form is what’s used in grassroots drives. Had Arizona prevailed, it would have been a tremendous change in how elections are run—akin to Florida recently passing (and then having courts throw out) penalties that made groups like the League of Women Voters stop their registration efforts during the 2012 presidential election.

The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that Arizona could not pre-empt the federal voter form by piling on additional requirements beyond those already needed to be an eligible voter: one’s age, residency, citizenship, and legal standing (not being a felon or judged by the court to be mentally unfit).

“We conclude that the fairest reading of the statute is that a state-imposed requirement of evidence of citizenship not required by the Federal Form is ‘inconsistent with’ the NVRA’s [National Voter Registration Act] mandate that States ‘accept and use’ the Federal Form,” the Majority’s opinion said. “If this reading prevails, the Elections Clause requires that Arizona’s rule give way.”

Practically speaking, states only use one voter registration application even though they conduct a mix of federal and local elections. The Supreme Court said that states could cancel a registration if they had additonal information, which is what they do now when someone is convicted of a felony or judged to be mentally incompetent.

They also said Arizona could lobby the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to revise the federal registration form. Some election lawyers said that scenario points to a new strategy for Republicans, who might seek a court order to impose proof-of-citizenship requirements because there are currently no sitting EAC members. But that angle has not yet been tried.

The decision is a victory for voting rights groups who are awaiting a much more serious ruling from the Court. The GOP has also challenged the sections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that allows the Justice Department to overrule changes in new election laws and procedures in states and counties with histories of racial discrimination.

That law allowed the DOJ to stop numerous GOP-sponsored laws in the last presidential election, from drawing new election district boundaries that prevented non-white candidates from winning, to curbs on voter registration drives—such as the Florida law, to other efforts to curtail early voting options.

The GOP’s attorneys have argued that America is now a post-racial society that doesn’t need the 1965 Voting Rights Act any more, while the party's legislators have pushed for laws like Arizona’s citizenship requirement—which clearly target communities of color. Needless to say, the party ignores this apparent contradiction.

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