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I Went From Selling Drugs to Studying Them -- And Found That Most of What We Assume About Drugs Is Wrong

Carl Hart, Harper Collins Publishers, Inc. — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 11:58:00 -0700

A scientist with a rough past explains how he used his life experiences to blow the lid off modern drug research.

This is the prologue to Columbia University researcher Dr. Carl Hart's explosive new book, "High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journal of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Psychology." Read a Q&A with the author here.

The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious, one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.

—James Baldwin

The straight glass pipe filled with ethereal white smoke. It was thick enough to see that it could be a good hit, but it still had the wispy quality that distinguishes crack cocaine smoke from cigarette or marijuana smoke. The smoker was thirty-nine, a black man, who worked as a street bookseller. He closed his eyes and lay back in the battered leather office chair, holding his breath to keep the drug in his lungs as long as possible. Eventually, he exhaled, a serene smile on his face, his eyes closed to savor the bliss.

About fifteen minutes later, the computer signaled that another hit was available.

“No, thanks, doc,” he said, raising his left hand slightly. He hit the space bar on the Mac in the way that he’d been trained to press to signal his choice.

Although I couldn’t know for sure whether he was getting cocaine or placebo, I knew the experiment was going well. Here was a middle-aged brother, someone most people would label a “crackhead,” a guy who smoked rock at least four to five times a week, just saying no to a legal hit of what had a good chance of being 100 percent pure pharmaceutical-grade cocaine. In the movie version, he would have been demanding more within seconds of his first hit, bug-eyed and threatening—or pleading and desperate.

Nonetheless, he’d just calmly turned it down because he preferred to receive five dollars in cash instead. He’d sampled the dose of cocaine earlier in the session: he knew what he would get for his money. At five dollars for what I later learned was a low dose of real crack cocaine, he preferred the cash.

Meanwhile, there I was, another black man, raised in one of the roughest neighborhoods of Miami, who might just as easily have wound up selling cocaine on the street. Instead, I was wearing a white lab coat and being funded by grants from the federal government to provide cocaine as part of my research into understanding the real effects of drugs on behavior and physiology. The year was 1999.

In this particular experiment, I was trying to understand how crack cocaine users would respond when presented with a choice between the drug and an “alternative reinforcer”—or another type of reward, in this case, cash money. Would anything else seem valuable to them? In a calm, laboratory setting, where the participants lived in a locked ward and had a chance to earn more than they usually could on the street, would they take every dose of crack, even small ones, or would they be selective about getting high? Would merchandise vouchers be as effective as cash in altering their behavior? What would affect their choices?

Before I’d become a researcher, these weren’t even questions that I would think to ask. These were drug addicts, I would have said. No matter what, they’d do anything to get to take as much drugs as often as possible. I thought of them in the disparaging ways I’d seen them depicted in films like New Jack City and Jungle Fever and in songs like Public Enemy’s “Night of the Living Baseheads.” I’d seen some of my cousins become shells of their former selves and had blamed crack cocaine. Back then I believed that drug users could never make rational choices, especially about their drug use, because their brains had been altered or damaged by drugs.

And the research participants I studied should have been especially driven to use drugs. They were experienced and committed crack cocaine users, who typically spent between $100 and $500 a week on it. We deliberately recruited individuals who were not seeking treatment, because we felt that it would be unethical to give cocaine to someone who had expressed an interest in quitting.

The bookseller was seated in a small, bare chamber at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital (now New York–Presbyterian) in upper Manhattan; his cocaine pipe had been lit by a nurse at his side with a lighter, who also helped monitor his vital signs during the research. I was watching him and several others in similar rooms through a one-way mirror; they knew we were observing them. And over and over, these drug users continued to defy conventional expectations.

Not one of them crawled on the floor, picking up random white particles and trying to smoke them. Not one was ranting or raving. No one was begging for more, either—and absolutely none of the cocaine users I studied ever became violent. I was getting similar results with methamphetamine users. They, too, defied stereotypes. The staff on the ward where my drug study participants lived for several weeks of tests couldn’t even distinguish them from others who were there for studies on far less stigmatized conditions like heart disease and diabetes.

To me, by that point in my career, their myth-busting behavior was no longer a surprise—no matter how odd and unlikely it may seem to many Americans raised on Drug Awareness Resistance Education (DARE) antidrug programs and “This is your brain on drugs” TV commercials. My participants’ responses—and those in the dozens of other studies we’d already run, as well as studies by other researchers around the country—had begun to expose important truths. Not just about crack cocaine and about addiction, but about the way the brain works and the way that pleasure affects human behavior. Not just about drugs, but about the way science works and about what we can learn when we apply rigorous scientific methods. This research was beginning to reveal what lies behind choice and decision-making in general and how, even when affected by drugs, it is influenced powerfully by other factors as well.

These experiments were potentially controversial, of course: the tabloids could have described me as a “taxpayer-funded pusher, giving ‘crackheads’ and ‘meth-monsters’ what they want.”

Nevertheless, I tried to keep the sensational stuff hidden in the mantle and cold language of science in my scholarly publications. I’d published dozens of papers in important journals, had been awarded prestigious fellowships and competitive grants to conduct research, and had been invited to join influential scientific committees. I cowrote a respected textbook that became the number-one text used to teach college students about drugs; I won awards for my teaching at Columbia University. But throughout my career I mainly tried to avoid controversy, fearing it might derail me from conducting the work I so loved.

Eventually, I realized that I could no longer stay silent. Much of what we are doing in terms of drug education, treatment, and public policy is inconsistent with scientific data. In order to come to terms with what I have seen in the lab and read in the scientific literature, there is nothing else to do but speak out. Using empirical data, not just personal anecdotes or speculation, I have to discuss the implications of my work outside the insulated and cautious scientific journals, which were my normal métier. Because basically, most of what we think we know about drugs, addiction, and choice is wrong. And my work—and my life—shows why.

As I monitored the people I was studying, I began to think about what had brought each of us to such different places. Why was I the one in the white coat—and not the crack cocaine smoker in the cubicle? What made us different? How did I escape the distressed neighborhoods I grew up in—and the adult lives marked by drugs, prison, violent death, and chaos that so many of my family and childhood friends have had? Why did I instead become a psychology professor at Columbia, specializing in neuropsychopharmacology? What allowed me to make such different choices?

These questions weighed on me even more heavily later in the year as I continued to conduct these experiments. Sometimes, while I watched the drug users contemplate whether to take another dose, I couldn’t help thinking about some of the choices I’d made during my youth. Marvin Gaye’s lyric from “Trouble Man” would run through my head, especially the lines about growing up under difficult circumstances, but eventually turning the tables to succeed. Usually, I tried to keep my past far behind me. But that part of my life had been called to my attention in an unavoidable and shocking way that spring.

Early one morning in March 2000, I was awakened by a loud banging on the door of my Bronx apartment. It was about 6 a.m.; I was in bed with my wife. We had a young son, Damon, who was about to turn five. Several months earlier, I had been promoted to assistant professor at Columbia. Life was good. As we say back home, I was feeling myself. But I also knew that word of my success had hit the streets of South Florida. Indeed, I’d recently received what I thought was an absurd letter from a Florida court claiming that I was the father of a sixteen-year- old boy. The pounding became more insistent.

When I opened the door, I was met by a thick-necked white guy wearing an undersized suit and displaying a badge. He handed me some official paperwork and instructed me to appear before a judge. As it turned out, the boy’s mother had actually gone ahead and filed a paternity suit. I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t even know her last name. But, in the fall of 1982, when I was fifteen and she was sixteen, we’d had a one-night stand. It started to come to me as I thought back; soon I had a vague memory of her signaling me to sneak in through her window to avoid alerting her mother that she had a visitor.

As the DNA test ultimately confirmed, I’d gotten her pregnant that night. For the next two years, prior to joining the U.S. Air Force, I’d lived in and around the Carol City neighborhood of Miami (known to hip-hop fans as the gun-and drug-filled home of rapper Rick Ross and his Carol City Cartel), but she had never even mentioned the possibility to me that I was the father of her baby boy. And I never even thought to ask, because I had engaged in this type of behavior in the past without noticeable consequences.

But that’s the abrupt way I discovered that I had a son I didn’t know—one who was being raised in the place I’d tried so hard to escape; yet another fatherless black child of a teenage mother. At first, I was enraged, horrified, and embarrassed. I thought I had at least avoided making that mistake. Here I was doing the best I could to raise the child I knew I had in a middle-class, two-parent family. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know what to do. Once I got over my initial shock, I was appalled to think about what it must have been like for my son to grow up without ever knowing his father. It really got me thinking about how I’d managed to thrive despite lacking those advantages.

I’d wanted to teach my children everything I hadn’t known as I grew up with a struggling single mother, surrounded by people whose lives were limited by their own lack of knowledge. I wanted them to go to good schools, to know how to negotiate the potential pitfalls of being black in the United States, to not have to live and die by whether they were considered “man” enough on the street. I also wanted to illustrate by my own example that bad experiences like those I had as a child aren’t the defining factor in being authentically black.

Now I had learned that one of my own children—a boy, whose name I learned was Tobias, had grown up for sixteen years in the same way I had, but without any of the hard-earned knowledge I could now offer.

Later, I’d discover as well that he’d taken the very path I feared most. He had dropped out of high school and fathered several children with different women. He had sold drugs and allegedly shot someone. What could I tell my sons about how I’d escaped from the streets? Could my experience and knowledge help change Tobias’s downward trajectory? How did I really manage to go from being one of the black kids in the auxiliary trailer for those with “learning difficulties” in elementary school to being an Ivy League professor?

Though I now regret much of this behavior, like my newfound son I’d sold drugs, I’d carried guns. I’d had my share of fun with the ladies. I’d deejayed in the skating rinks and gyms of Miami performing with rappers like Run-DMC and Luther Campbell in their early gigs, ducking when people started shooting. I’d seen the aftermath of what the police call a “drug-related” homicide up close for the first time when I was just twelve years old; I lost my first friend to gun violence as part of the same chain of events. Indeed, my cousins Michael and Anthony had stolen from their own mother, and I had attributed this abhorrent behavior to their “crack cocaine addictions.” I saw what happened as the crack first took hold in Miami’s poorest black communities. Falling for media interpretations and street myths about all of these experiences had originally misled and misdirected me. Some of that, as we shall see, may ironically have helped me at certain times. But more often, it was a distraction, one that prevented me and so many others in my community from learning how to think critically.

So how could I now in good conscience study this scourge of a drug, even offer it to my own people in the laboratory? In the grand scheme of things, what was really so different between what I was doing in my research and what was likely to get Tobias arrested on the street?

The answers lie in my story and the science, which reveal the untold truth about the real effects of drugs and the choices we make about them as a society. By exploring how these myths and social forces shaped my childhood and career, we can strip away the misinformation that actually drives so-called drug epidemics and leads us to take actions that harm the people and communities we presumably intend to help.

The Terror Con: How Keeping Americans Terrified Is Making Corporations Big Bucks

Robert Scheer, Truthdig — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 09:00:00 -0700

The name of the game is threat inflation.

For defense contractors, the government officials who write them mega checks, and the hawks in the media who cheer them on, the name of the game is threat inflation. And no one has been better at it than the folks at Booz Allen Hamilton, the inventors of the new boondoggle called cyber warfare.

That’s the company, under contract with the National Security Agency, that employed whistle-blower Edward Snowden, the information security engineer whose revelation of Booz Allen’s enormously profitable and pervasive spying on Americans now threatens the firm’s profitability and that of its parent hedge fund, the Carlyle Group.

Booz Allen, whose top personnel served in key positions at the NSA and vice versa after the inconvenient collapse of the Cold War, has been attempting to substitute terrorist for communist as the enemy of choice. A difficult switch indeed for the military-industrial complex about which Dwight Eisenhower, the general-turned-president, had so eloquently warned us.

But just when the good times for war profiteers seemed to be forever in the past, there came 9/11 and the terrorist enemy, the gift that keeps on giving, for acts of terror always will occur in a less than perfect world, serving as an ideal excuse for squandering resources, as well as our freedoms.

Just ask New York Times columnists Thomas Friedman and Bill Keller. Rising to the defense of NSA snooping on a scale never before imagined in human history, they warn us that if there was a second 9/11-type attack, we would lose all of our civil liberties, so we should be grateful for this trade-off.

“I believe that if there is one more 9/11—or worse, an attack involving nuclear material—it could lead to the end of the open society as we know it,” Friedman wrote in his June 11 column.

No nation in history has ever possessed such an imbalance of military superiority and the ability to ward off foreign threats without sacrificing its core values. Never has this country been as vulnerable to foreign attacks as when the founders approved our Constitution with its Fourth Amendment and other protections of individual sovereignty against an intrusive government. They did so out of the conviction that individual freedom makes us stronger rather than weaker as a nation. In short, they trusted in the essential wisdom of the people as opposed to the pundits who deride it.

Defending Friedman’s column, Keller wrote Sunday:

“Tom’s important point was that the gravest threat to our civil liberties is not the NSA but another 9/11-scale catastrophe that could leave a panicky public willing to ratchet up the security state, even beyond the war-on-terror excesses that followed the last big attack.”

So it’s the panicky public’s fault and not the ill-informed work of establishment journalists like Friedman, who led the charge to war with Iraq based on phony claims about terrorism.

Once again, Friedman has a misplaced faith in the work of the intelligence community. The NSA snooping was quite extensive before 9/11 and certainly in full force prior to the Boston Marathon attack, but did not prevent either event. Indeed, our much-vaunted spy agencies still have not come up with an explanation of how 19 hijackers, 15 from our ally Saudi Arabia, managed to legally enter this country and learn flying skills while under our government’s watch.

Nor have those intelligence agencies explained why the only three countries that recognized the Taliban government sponsors of al-Qaida were that same Saudi Arabia as well as our other friends in Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates. For information on the UAE connection, the NSA might check with its buddies at Booz Allen Hamilton.

As The New York Times reported Saturday: “When the United Arab Emirates wanted to create its own version of the National Security Agency, it turned to Booz Allen Hamilton to replicate the world’s largest and most powerful spy agency in the sands of Abu Dhabi. It was a natural choice: The chief architect of Booz Allen’s cyber strategy is Mike McConnell, who once led the NSA and pushed the United States into a new era of big data espionage. It was Mr. McConnell who won the blessing of the American intelligence agencies to bolster the Persian Gulf sheikdom, which helps track the Iranians.”

Tracking the Iranians, you say? But they’re not the enemies who attacked us on 9/11, and indeed they are Shiites, who were implacably hostile to the Sunni fanatics of al-Qaida. The reasoning makes sense only if you follow the money that the UAE can pay. “They are teaching everything,” one Arab official told The New York Times about Booz Allen’s staffers. “Data mining, web surveillance, all sorts of digital intelligence collection.”

How great. Now, it’s not just the government we elect but also those everywhere, even in desert emirates, that can mine our data.

“The NSA data mining,” Keller assures us, “is part of something much larger. On many fronts, we are adjusting to life in a surveillance state, relinquishing bits of privacy in exchange for the promise of other rewards.”

Behold McConnell. While director of national intelligence from 2007-09, he did much to inflate the threat of cyberterrorism; he then returned to the private sector and was rewarded with $4.1 million his first year back at Booz Allen, solving the problem he had hyped while heading the NSA. There’s a guy who knows how to play the game.

6 Unbelievable Ways the Big Banks Are Scamming You

Dave Johnson, AlterNet — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 09:43:00 -0700

Five years since the crash, the big banks continue to screw over their customers.

It is going on five years since the financial crash and three years since President Obama signed the meager Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, and the big banks are still scamming and conning and ripping off their customers. What a huge surprise.

After the financial crash, we heard about a laundry list of abuses and frauds that ranged from small things, like hidden fees, to pushing minorities into subprime loans and then switching them into more expensive mortgages at signing time, to huge things like selling trillions of dollars in complicated CDO schemes and making bets on derivatives of derivatives without having the reserves to pay off what they owed when the bets went bad.

Of course, no one at the top was prosecuted and the banks were allowed to settle a host of charges (which meant that their shareholders, not the executives who made the decisions, paid the fines). The bad behavior gave these giants a competitive advantage, driving out what good companies there were. So the costly and destructive bad behavior, schemes, cons and scams continue.

1. Falsifying Paperwork, Blitzing, Lying About Payments to Force Homeowners Into Foreclosure

This week, ProPublica released a report detailing the shocking ways that Bank of America has been pushing homeowners into foreclosure. Employees lied about documentation and falsified paperwork to force families out of their homes when these customers thought they were getting a loan modification under the government’s Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP). To make matters worse, the bank gave bonuses to employees who were able to reach monthly quotas of people they forced into foreclosure.

According to a lawsuit against Bank of America, the bank used “blitzing” twice a month to deny HAMP applications even when the homeowner had fully complied with the program’s requirements; it gave employees $500 bonuses each month they forced 10 or more homeowners into foreclosure; it intentionally ignored applications for 30 days, then declared them late and forced homeowners to reapply; it closed applications even when they knew the homeowner had met all criteria; and it canceled loan modifications because of “late payments” when the bank’s records shows that payments had been made on time.

Of course, as long as the government refuses to prosecute banks and bankers for violating laws, and instead negotiating “settlements” that require bank shareholders to pay fines, bankers will see no reason to stop this kind of activity.

2. Bank Protection “Service” Puts Consumers at “Greater Risk Of Harm”

Last week a report from the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) found that the big banks are still scamming their customers with ridiculous fees that are hugely profitable for the big banks.

Three years ago the government required banks to ask their customers if it is okay (this is called “opt-in”) before they charge them for “overdraft protection” service. CFRB has been studying how this is working out, and its report shows that customers who do not opt-in to this heavily marketed “protection” service pay much, much less in fees than those who do. In other words, agreeing to use the “protection” actually puts you at a much greater risk of incurring expenses than those who are not “protected.”

According to a McClatchy News report on a call with CFPB director Richard Cordray to discuss the report, Cordray said, "What is marketed as overdraft protection can, in some instances, put consumers at greater risk of harm.”

How much risk? People who are “heavy overdrafters” but still opt out of this service save on average more than $900 a year. But it isn’t just heavy overdrafters who are saving. According to the CFPB report “… the reduction in fees for those who did not opt in was $347 greater, on average, than for those who did opt in.” People who opt in are also more likely to lose their bank accounts, with the bank “involuntarily” closing it.

Banks have made $32 billion from these fees. So maybe this isn’t about providing a “protection” to consumers at all. As NPR puts it, "Overdraft and non-sufficient funds fees accounted for 61 percent of total consumer deposit account service charges in 2011 among the banks in the CFPB report."

3. Transaction Ordering

Not only do customers who opt-in pay more for this “protection service,” but the banks are still scamming them by causing the overdrafts that generate these fees. The CFPB report says that some banks still use “transaction ordering” to cheat customers out of additional fees. These banks post checks or debit transactions from large to small to trigger these fees. In other words if you write several small checks (or make debit card transactions) and then a big one that overdraws your account, they credit the large one first so each of the smaller transactions causes its own fee to be charged, even though those transactions occurred before the account ran out of money.

From the report, “The earlier in a sequence that an account becomes negative, the more overdraft or NSF transactions may occur.”

4. Forced Arbitration

Another big-bank scam on consumers is “forced arbitration” clauses in bank account, credit card, mortgage and other financial-service agreements. Forced arbitration clauses – also called mandatory arbitration or binding arbitration – require you to give up your legal right to take a big bank to court if it cheats or harms you. And if you don’t agree (which requires reading the entire agreement) you can’t get the account.

They way this works is that instead of being able to pursue your legal rights, you have to take your complaint to an arbitrator, and then must accept the arbitrator’s decision. The catch is that the bank gets to pick the arbitrator, and the arbitrators naturally know they’ll never work in this town again if they ever rule against the banks. So there is an inherent conflict of interest working in favor of these companies.

How is that conflict of interest working out for us? A 2007 Public Citizen report revealed that arbitrators working for the National Arbitration Forum (NAF) had ruled against consumers 94 percent of the time.

In another blow to the big banks, the CFPB is beginning to take steps to reign in forced arbitration clauses in consumer financial contracts.

The five-year-old Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act authorizes the CFPB and the Securities and Exchange Commission to regulate mandatory arbitration. The SEC is resisting implementing their part of this law, but the CFPB is conducting a survey to determine consumer awareness of forced arbitration clauses in credit card agreements. On its blog, the CFPB said the study will “explore consumer awareness of dispute resolution terms in credit card agreements. The survey will gather information about consumers’ perceptions, preferences, and assumptions related to arbitration proceedings.”

5. Marketing Refinancing That Costs People

Thom Hartmann has exposed yet another banker scheme. This time banks are marketing a mortgage refinancing that promises annual savings of more than $4,000. But the scheme really just adds more than $37,000 to the cost of a loan.

Basically, the mailer focuses on lowering monthly mortgage payments, while neglecting to mention that the borrower would end up paying a higher overall interest rate, and would be adding 10 more years to the overall length of their loan. Hartmann writes,

Back in November of 2012, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sent warning letters to around a dozen of America’s largest mortgage lenders and brokers, advising them to “clean up” potentially misleading advertisements, especially those targeting veterans and older Americans.
At the time of the CFPB’s announcement, CFPB director Richard Cordray said that, “Misrepresentations in mortgage products can deprive consumers of important information while making one of the biggest financial decisions of their lives.”

And, as we also know, deceptive mortgage advertisements like this can cause consumers to bite off more than they can chew, ultimately leading to a nationwide financial meltdown.

6. Banks Trying To Kill the CFPB

Over the years, scam after scam is exposed, and nothing has been done about it. But there is a new cop on the beat, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The CFPB’s job is to police the big banks, and protect financial consumers. Of course the big banks are trying to head this agency off at the pass.

The Republican Party and its conservative infrastructure have basically been contracted by Wall Street’s big banks to obstruct and even kill this agency. Senate Republicans have been blocking the confirmation and are still trying to obstruct the nominee to head up the agency. Republicans have been filibustering the nomination of Richard Cordray to be its director and even vowing to filibuster to keep any nominee from being confirmed to head the agency. President Obama finally made a recess appointment of Cordray in January 2012. But this recess appointment runs out at the end of the year with no end to Republican obstruction in sight.

Republicans are also trying to defund the agency. Republicans and the (billionaire, Wall Street, oil and tobacco-financed) conservative movement have also launched a propaganda campaign against the agency. Recently, at the Senate Republican Policy Committee website, "CFPB: Unaccountable and Unrestrained," claims, “A recent action by the CFPB to monitor consumer credit cards and the spending habits of millions of Americans is raising new concerns in a government suffering from a trust deficit.” In an example of how the right’s echo machine works, the Heritage Foundation echoes this attack, alleging that CFPB gathering data for reports like this one is an example of government “surveillance” on consumers, “amassing an Orwell-worthy database on all manner of spending, including … overdrafts …”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren – the person most credited with the creation of the CFPB – spoke at a Senate hearing on the CFPB last March on the role of the CFPB and Republican obstruction of the agency:

"I see nothing here but a filibuster threat against Director Cordray as an attempt to weaken the consumer agency," Warren said. "I think the delay in getting him confirmed is bad for consumers, it's bad for small banks, bad for credit unions, for anyone trying to offer an honest product in an honest market."

"The American people deserve a Congress that worries less about helping big banks," she added, "and more about helping regular people who have been cheated on mortgages, on credit cards, on student loans and on credit reports."

Don’t expect much to change until we have a government that is willing to take on these financial giants. As long as we keep seeing “settlements” with these giants instead of prosecutions, and as long as we allow big money to buy influence over our government, nothing will change.

You Won't Believe What the Food Industry Is Doing to Keep Americans Hooked on Junk

April M. Short, AlterNet — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 18:02:00 -0700

The junk food industry is getting sneakier in its tactics to entice people into consuming its concoctions.

With the exposure of troubling obesity rates, outrage over undisclosed genetically engineered wheat (and other) crops, the successful worldwide March Against Monsanto effort in May and statewide bans of GE crops that followed, the US citizenry is expanding its awareness and concern about food health. The junk food industry is responding by getting sneakier in its tactics to entice, exploit and beguile people into consuming its concoctions.

Here are a few of the most disturbing deceptions the industry is using to keep Americans hooked on its junk.

1. Branding Processed Foods to Look “Natural”

Those grill marks on your burger? Not real. They were put there by the factory, just like a pre-torn blue jean purchased at a name-brand store. Junk food companies are branding their foods to have a more natural, homemade appearance—and the painful, Orwellian doublespeak-style irony is that to do so actually requires more processing than ever.

Rather than switch to ingredients that are actually healthier and less processed, food engineers at companies with notoriously processed products—namely Kraft, Wendy’s, McDonald’s and Domino’s, among others—are responding to concerns surrounding overly processed foods with an unhealthy and deceiving facade of healthy looking foods.

Kraft Foods engineers spent two years manufacturing a Carving Board line process that would create uneven turkey slabs, and Wendy’s intentionally created curvier “natural squares” out of perfectly square beef chunks so the squares would appear less processed.

In an article titled “Food Engineers Now Making Your Burger Look Cool, Casual, Real” Gawker reported:

Similarly, the Egg White Delight McMuffin at McDonald's is going for a squiggly circle rather than the disturbingly perfect, round animal product disc that is characteristic of the Egg McMuffin. Domino's pizza churners are instructed to tweak the perfect rectangles on their "Artisan Pizzas" to achieve a natural crudeness of homemade pies.

Additionally, Gawker reports that Hillshire Brands Company—deceptively known as Hillshire Farms—is working to achieve the “wholesome” look. After customers requested a “grainer appearance” of the company’s poultry wafers, their factory processes began to dye the edges of the meat slices with caramel food coloring. According to Gawker, Hillshire’s vice president of marketing, Reggie Moore, said “it's crucial to always be adapting their food chunks to fit changing standards of appearance, as the definition of 'natural' changes from customer to customer.”

2. Marketing to Children Under Guise of Charity

Anna Lappé is a mother and food health educator, known for her work as an expert on food systems and as a sustainable food advocate. She spoke in March at TedX Manhattan on behalf of her group, Food Mythbusters, about ways to combat the fast food industry’s marketing to kids.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, childhood obesity—proven to cause diabetes and other serious health conditions—has more than doubled in the last 30 years. More than a third of children and adolescents were overweight or obese in 2010, and the numbers are increasing.

“What children are enticed to consume today has truly life-and-death consequences,” Lappé told AlterNet.

While the fast food industry reported spending less on marketing to kids to the FCC, a discerning look at the numbers in the report will show otherwise. Rather than advertise less, the industry is using sneakier, less traditional channels to market to young audiences, like social media, branded “advergaming” websites and “philanthro marketing.”

Lappé says following her TedX Mahattan talk she received an email from a concerned parent. Her third-grader’s class had taken a lunchtime field trip to McDonalds to hear from Ronald the clown about Ronald House Charities.

“The trip was under guise of charitable giving, but what it meant in effect was two third-grade classes, during the school day, going to McDonalds to eat lunch with their teachers,” Lappé says.

Lappé says that kind of under-the-radar “philanthro marketing” is a common tactic for fast food companies to reach young audiences, and points out that while it exposes kids to fast food brands, it is not reported as “marketing” to the FCC and other regulating organizations.

Food companies are also using the Internet and social media to keep in touch with youth, including some websites, like McDonalds’ Ronald.com, that are marketed to kids as young as preschool-aged.

“They're called advergames, but they're videogames embedded in websites,” says Lappé. She adds that, while marketing to kids is inherently unethical, social media marketing is worse because it is under the radar and all but unregulated.

“Children are unable to distinguish between what is entertainment, educational material, and advertising,” she says. “My particular issue with social media marketing to kids is that the technology around social media is advancing at such a fast pace—much faster than advocates can monitor it, much faster than regulators can keep up with it—so that you have this space of marketing to kids that’s increasingly unregulated.”

3. Manufacturing Addiction

It is no coincidence that so many people are obese, and despite widespread knowledge that it’s bad for you, many people continue to crave junk food. Junk food companies have got it down to a science. They are creating “feel-good food” that is manufactured to include just the right combination of the sugar, fat and salt our limbic brains love.

In his article, “The Jargon of Junk Food,” Paul McFedries breaks down the language of the junk food industry to show just how scientific and calculated the industry’s methods are for keeping people addicted.

“Processed-food companies increasingly turn to their legions of scientists to produce foods that we can’t resist,” he writes. McFedries notes that he is “indebted” to New York Times reporter Michael Moss, particularly for his fascinating new book Salt Sugar Fat, for many of the following terms:

Pillar Ingredients—Salt, sugar, and fat are the Pillar Ingredients, and the industry strategically combines the three to keep you hooked.
Bliss Point—If we crave pillar ingredients so much, why not just crank them up as much as possible? It turns out there is an optimum amount of salt, sugar, or fat the human brain likes best, and it is called the bliss point.
Mouthfeel—This is literally the way food feels inside a person’s mouth; junk food industry scientists also adjust factors like crunchiness to produce a mouthfeel that consumer most crave.
Flavor Burst—Technologists alter the size and shape of salt crystals, so that they induce a flavor burst that “can basically assault the taste buds into submission.”
Vanishing Caloric Density—Underlying all junk-food science is vanishing caloric density, which is the process by which the food melts in your mouth so quickly that the brain is fooled into thinking it is consuming fewer calories than it actually is. The packaged-food scientists want to avoid triggering sensory-specific satiety, the brain mechanism that tells a person to stop eating when it is overwhelmed by flavors. The goals are either passive overeating, which is the excessive eating of foods that are high in fat because the human body is slow to recognize the caloric content of rich foods, or auto-eating: that is, eating without thinking or without even being hungry.

Michael Moss interviewed Jeffrey Dunn, who in 2001 directed more than half of Coca-Cola’s $20 billion in annual sales as president and chief operating officer. In the New York Times article, "The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food," Moss writes:

"[Dunn] drew from the bag of tricks that he mastered in his 20 years at Coca-Cola, where he learned one of the most critical rules in processed food: The selling of food matters as much as the food itself."

Exposed: The Harrowing Impact of America's Deadly Drone War in Pakistan

Alex Kane, AlterNet — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 08:48:00 -0700

A drone strike that killed 42 people is the focus of filmmaker Robert Greenwald's new video on the American war in Pakistan.

President Barack Obama’s big speech on U.S. counter-terror policy last month promised that drone strikes were “legal,” “heavily constrained” and only carried out if there is “near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured.” But the use of the most deadly type of drone attacks calls that rhetoric into question. Known as “signature strikes,” these drone attacks are launched on groups of people who fit the “signature” of militants and terrorists but whose identities are not always known--and they constitute the bulk of strikes carried out in Pakistan, leading to civilian casualties.

Now, a new campaign launched by Brave New Foundation’s War Costs project is looking to expose the impact of “signature strikes” on civilian populations living under the threat of drones. The group has started a petition drive aimed at Congress to demand an end to those types of strikes. Brave New Foundation is partnering with a number of peace and justice groups on the campaign, including Just Foreign Policy, United National Antiwar Coalition, United for Peace and Justice and more.

“Tell Congress to move now to end these signature strikes, save innocent lives, protect America from the blowback of killing innocent civilians, and restore the rule of law,” the petition states. The campaign comes at a moment when some members of Congress are exploring ways to put limits on the Obama administration's use of drone strikes. The administration recently allowed a small number of Congressional officials to look at White House legal memos on drone attacks, though they haven't been released to the public. The Obama administration recently affirmed in a brief that the public has no right to see the Justice Department opinions laying out the legal basis for the drone war.

“Signature strikes,” contrasted with “personality strikes”--strikes that only target individual persons whose identities are known--have wreaked havoc in the Pakistani tribal areas, where America’s Central Intelligence Agency-run drone war continues. An articleby McClatchy Newspaper’s Jonathan Landay revealed that “drone operators weren’t always certain who they were killing despite the administration’s guarantees of the accuracy of the CIA’s targeting intelligence and its assertions that civilian casualties have been ‘exceedingly rare.’” The drone war in Pakistan has taken the lives of hundreds of civilians, though the exact number of civilians killed is unknown. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a London-based media organization, estimates that 411-884 Pakistani civilians have died as a result of drone attacks, while the New America Foundation puts the numbers at 258-307. At least 178 children in Pakistan and Yemen have been killed by U.S. drones, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

The Brave New Foundation campaign on “signature strikes” is also paired with a eye-opening video (watch it below) produced by Robert Greenwald, the organization’s founder. (Greenwald sits on the board of the Independent Media Institute, AlterNet’s parent organization.) The video is the result of Greenwald’s first-hand investigation into the impact of America’s drone war on Pakistan.

“In the fall of last year I traveled to Pakistan. Reports of civilian drone casualties were beginning to permeate though American news outlets, prompting myself, and Brave New Foundation, to launch a full-length documentary investigation into the claims coming out of the tribal regions,” he explained in a blog post tied to his campaign.

At the heart of the video is Greenwald’s investigation into a “signature strike” carried out on March 17, 2011 in Datta Khel, an area in the Pakistani tribal region, where America’s drone war is centered. Greenwald interviewed a number of witnesses to the strike--a crucial follow-up to previous reports of mass civilian casualties caused by this specific strike.

The strike targeted a large meeting known as a “jirga” near a bus depot in Datta Khel. “Jirgas,” as they are known in Pashto, the language spoken in the tribal areas, are meetings of tribal members where disputes are hashed out. It is the main judicial structure in tribal areas, and is a key mechanism for stability in tribal areas, as Akbar Ahmed, a former Pakistani Ambassador, told Greenwald.

As witnesses to the strike said, this “jirga” was over a dispute involving a local chromite mine. But 20 minutes after they gathered in the open space for the meeting known to local government officials, four missiles struck the group, killing an estimated 42 people--most of whom were civilians.

Jalal Manzar Khail, a 45-year-old tribal leader, witnessed the aftermath of the strike. In an interview conducted over Skype, he told AlterNet that when he received a message about the drone strike, he “rushed to the scene and when I reached there...there were all the dead bodies in pieces...It was a surprise to me. We were not expecting that the jirga be struck.” The interview was translated by Shahzad Akbar, a Pakistani lawyer who represents many civilian victims of the drone war.

The strike in Datta Khel wiped out tribal leaders, according to Khail. American officials took to the New York Times to claim that the strike targeted “a large group of heavily armed men, some of whom were clearly connected to al Qaeda and all of whom acted in a manner consistent with AQ-linked militants.” But investigations carried out by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, scholars from New York University and Stanford and Greenwald call the official U.S. account into question. While the Associated Pressreported that four Pakistani Taliban fighters were also present since “ they controlled the area and any decision made would need their approval,” Khail said that no Taliban was present. Whatever the case, Greenwald’s and Khail’s account reveal that a large number of civilians were likely killed. A recent New York Times magazine piece quotes some American officials as conceding that that Datta Khel strike was “botched,” though other officials continued to defend the strike.

“There was a great uproar after the strike. Everyone was very angry that the tribal elders had been killed,” said Khail, sitting in a chair wearing a black vest and a white shirt. “This is something they can never forgive or forget what Americans have done to them.”

The drone attack in Datta Khel had wide-ranging repercussions. One survivor showcased in the video, Ahmed Jan, said that he has “severe pain in my ears and also have psychological effects.” The strike also had consequences for the social structure in this tribal area. Khail told AlterNet that as a result of the strike, jirgas don’t take place in public anymore because “they’re fearful that they are in big numbers and they might be targeted.”

And the overall drone strike campaign has led to children not going to school because they are fearful that drones will attack, Khail said. News reports have stated that U.S. drones have attacked madrassas in the past where suspected terrorists were.

Two months after the Datta Khel “signature strike,” Obama counter-terror adviser and current CIA director John Brennan claimed that “there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop.”

Greenwald’s campaign and focus on “signature strikes” like the one that took place in Datta Khel comes as the Obama administration’s deadly drone program continues to command attention. While President Obama’s speech on drones and the U.S. “war on terror” prompted media reports that the drone war was being reined in, the promised new rules purportedly meant to restrict drone use leaves out parts of Pakistan, which is defined as an area of “active hostilities” even though Congress hasn’t explicitly authorized war to be waged in Pakistan. The Obama administration claims the authority to attack the tribal areas in Pakistan because “associated forces” of al-Qaeda reside there. Obama’s speech also didn’t herald the end of “signature strikes” in Pakistan. Instead, the CIA will continue to carry out those strikes in Pakistan, despite questions raised by international law experts as to whether they are legal. Still, the spate of drone attacks in recent months has considerably slowed.

“The Obama Administration has altered its policy towards Pakistan in rhetoric only,” wrote Greenwald in a blog post. “And as long as they continue we will see more strikes like those Datta Khel, and more innocent civilians killed. In doing so they make each of us in United States and Pakistan less safe, and less secure, as we once more attempt to kill our way to security.”

What remains to be seen is the reaction of the new Pakistani government in light of the continued drone attacks. Pakistani officials in the past have decried the campaign at the same time they gave tacit consent to drone strikes. But recently, a Pakistani court ruled that drone strikes are illegal and that Pakistan should use “force” if needed to take down drones. Shahzad Akbar, the Pakistani lawyer who translated the interview with Khail, said he held a June 6 press conference to demand that the new president, Nawaz Sharif, enforce the court ruling.

Sharif said June 5that “the chapter of daily drone attacks should stop.” The rhetoric could set up a clash with the U.S.--or it could be business as usual, with Pakistani officials criticizing the attacks while giving consent to them, since the drone campaign has also taken out enemies of the Pakistani government.

An American drone attack on Pakistan June 7 allegedly killed nine people. In response, Sharif summoned the U.S. envoy to protest the attack.

Noam Chomsky: American Government and Corporations Are at War With the American People

Fiona Harvey, The Guardian — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 11:18:00 -0700

Chomsky responds to revelations of massive NSA spying.

The actions of the US government in spying on its and other countries' citizens have been sharply criticised by Noam Chomsky, the prominent political thinker, as attacks on democracy and the people.

"Governments should not have this capacity. But governments will use whatever technology is available to them to combat their primary enemy – which is their own population," he told the Guardian.

In his first public comment on the scandal that has enveloped the US, UK and other governments, as well as internet companies such as Google and Microsoft, Chomsky said he was not overly surprised technology and corporations were being used in this way.

"This is obviously something that should not be done. But it is a little difficult to be too surprised by it," he said. "They [governments and corporations] take whatever is available, and in no time it is being used against us, the population. Governments are not representative. They have their own power, serving segments of the population that are dominant and rich."

Chomsky, who has strongly supported the Occupy movement and spoken out against the Obama administration's use of drones, warned that young people were much less shocked at being spied on and did not view it as such a problem.

"Polls in the US indicate there is generational issue here that someone ought to look into – my impression is that younger people are less offended by this than the older generation. It may have to do with the exhibitionist character of the internet culture, with Facebook and so on," he said. "On the internet, you think everything is going to be public."

Other technologies could also come to be used to spy more effectively on people, he added. "They don't want people to know what they're doing. They want to be able to use [new technology] against their own people.

"Take a look at drones, and what is developing. You will find new drone technology being used in 10 or 12 years from now. They are looking at [trying to make] tiny drones that can go in your living room, like a fly on the wall."

He praised the Guardian's revelations about the activities of the National Security Agency, and the whistleblower Ed Snowden, who has been taking refuge in Hong Kong. "We need this kind [of journalism]," he said. "We ought to know about it."

Chomsky, a much-lauded academic and professor of linguistics, gained renown as a political critic when he vocally opposed the Vietnam war. Since then, he has written dozens of books on political power, capitalism and democracy and espoused a variety of activist campaigns, most recently the Occupy movement.

The Long, Strange History of Sex Toys

Wednesday Lee Friday, Kinkly — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 10:43:00 -0700

Whether for fashion, decor, worship, or for fun,dildos are a part of human history.

Physical representations of the phallus have been around for almost as long as there have been penises. Whether for fashion, decor, worship, or for fun,dildos are a part of human history. So let's take a look at the long, strange trip dildos have taken.

In the Beginning ...

The first known dildo recovered by paleontologists dates to the Paleolithic era. Made of siltstone and polished to a high gloss, the debate rages on about whether its primary purpose was for religious ritual or personal pleasure. To my mind, this debate has more to do with puritanical paleontologists who can't conceive of a society where religion and sexuality commingle. The fact remains that dildos made of carved stone or bone were widely discovered among normal personal artifacts like combs and sewing needles. I imagine this eventually led to the invention of nightstands, and nightstand drawers.

Leave it to the Greeks and Romans to take the next leap forward. To get a feel for the time, it's important to keep in mind that Greeks and Romans were polytheists who worshiped a variation of Dionysus, god of wine and fertility. Also called Bacchus or Liber, worship of the sex god included parades through the streets, where giant phalluses were raised up like protest signs. At the end of a marital fertility parade, a maiden would come forth and crown the religious phallus with a wreath of flowers.

We also know that both male and female Romans and Greeks used dildos for pleasure. In Aristophanes' anti-war comedy "Lysistrata," women discuss using and sharing dildos while withholding sex from their partners in an effort to stop the war. Men going off to war also gave their wives so-called "olisbos" to prevent "hysteria," which was then thought to be caused by lack of sperm. Since these olisbos did not actually contain sperm, I'm not sure they'd really thought that one through.

Historically, the connection between female hysteria and dildos was something male doctors had a hard time letting go of. Romans are also thought to have invented double dildos for use in ceremony, or with a friend. The Greeks are responsible for the first use of leather or animal intestine to cover a carved penis, adding a more natural feel and a complexity of texture.

Take THAT, Silicone!

There's a funny historical rumor that it was legendary seductress Cleopatra who invented the first vibrator. Rather than being carved from wood or rock, this one consisted of a gourd hollowed out and filled with … wait for it … angry bees. If true, that might make Cleopatra the biggest risk taker in all of history. But then, what else would you expect from a people who thought crocodile dung was the best method of birth control? Although the bees make for a better story, it's more likely that Cleopatra used the same lacquered wood or stone dildos as the other ladies of her time. There is even record of Julius Caesar giving Cleo an elaborately carved, gold inlaid penis "sculpture." Whether she ever tried it out is something we'll probably never know. (Learn more about the vibrator's strange history inVibrators: Bigger and Generating More Buzz Than Ever.)

The Chinese were also considered great innovators in female masturbation. Back in the day, wealthy Chinese men were apt to have too many wives for them to service regularly. It was thought that providing penis substitutes would keep these wives faithful and prevent them from resorting to lesbianism. Ancient Chinese dildos have been discovered that were cast of bronze and other metals. Some of these were hollow and allowed liquid to be released at the appropriate time. Fancy!

In India and Persia, virgins were sought after and yet somehow reviled. You'd think the people who gave us the "Kama Sutra" would be a little more sex-positive. Blood from the hymen was thought to be unclean and best avoided by new husbands. Therefore, the local holy man would show up on the wedding night and use a large stone dildo to break the hymen. Sometimes this was done in the center of town, either in celebration or to confirm the virginity of the bride. In the story "One Thousand and One Arabian Nights," dildos are discussed as being made from gold or silver, or intricately carved and inlaid ivory.

The use of dildos remained more or less the same for a long portion of history. Some cultures didn't create dildos at all, preferring more natural items like gourds, plantains or unripe bananas. Like everything else in the Renaissance, dildos of this era were ornate, inspired and appreciated for their artistic merit. In fact, the word dildo comes from the Italian "diletto,"meaning "delight." Even as Christianity entered the scene and puritanical values gained a foothold, substitute penises were still an active industry. After all, they still had to deal with the menace of "feminine hysteria."

Hysteria, Womb Problems and Paroxysm

As the 20th century dawned and technology advanced, new materials were incorporated into the manufacture of dildos. Rubber was the hot new material for a time. Then something amazing happened. Electricity. One might argue that there's a big difference between a dildo and a vibrator, especially an early vibrator. And that's true. But when you're talking about the scourge of hysteria in females, a nod's as good as a wink to a blind bat.

It was believed that "female troubles," which ranged from headaches and fatigue to irritability and depression - could be solved through inducement of hysterical paroxysm, which you and I would call an orgasm. Hysteria was considered a "womb problem" and was the sort of thing Hippocrates referred to as "anything that made the woman troublesome to those around her." I admit, I had no idea Hippocrates was such a sexist jerk.

During medical appointments, doctors began helping women have orgasms in a very hands-on way. When the task became too time consuming, General Electric stepped in by making its fifth electrical home appliance. Yes, the vibrator was actually the fifth commercially available electric appliance, after the tea kettle, bread toaster, sewing machine and fan. These handy vibrators were designed to get those troublesome women un-hysterical, so doctors could go back to important work like inventing Viagra and curing baldness. (Now that you know that vibrators are considered appliances, be sure to ask if one is included next time you're buying a house.)

Electricity is certainly not the only modern innovation in dildo technology. The introduction of silicone was a great leap forward in the functionality of dildos used for sexual stimulation. Silicone is hypoallergenic, feels more like real skin than other non-porous materials, and does not degrade when used with water-based lubricant. Glass dildos are another way that form and function meet artistry. Modern tempering techniques result in blown glass that is thick and strong - just what most of us are looking for. Glass dildos are available in lots of different sizes in nearly infinite designs, and are also non-porous. (Yes, glass! Check out these beauties.)

We've Come a Long Way, Baby

These days, dildos are available in every variation imaginable, for every taste and experience level. Some states have actually taken the time to pass laws restricting how many dildos a person can keep at home. Try though I might, I fail to see the inherent threat of a large collection of phalluses. Ancient Rome's double-ended dildos remain popular today. Cleopatra's angry-bee-filled clitoral gourd, on the other hand, never really caught on.

Whether you're trying to cure feminine hysteria, stop the Peloponnesian war, or just enjoy a couple of orgasms, dildos have always been - and will continue to be - at your service. The best part is, getting one is a lot easier than it used be. And you won't have to carve it yourself.

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 , AlterNet — 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!).

Hairy Stockings: Latest, Wacky, Wrongheaded Product that Won't Solve Rape Culture

Homa Khaleeli, The Guardian — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 11:52:00 -0700

What we really need is a change of focus from victims of rape to perpetrators.

What would make women feel safer? For perpetrators of sexual assaults and abuse to get more than a 15-month sentence after they assault 13 women and girls? A culture where the victims of sexual crime are not blamed when they are attacked? Or would having hairy legs do it?

In the battle against rape culture some innovators seem to think that old-fashioned notions of strong legislation need a few more, bells, whistles and technological wizardry. Here are some recent ideas from around the world.

Anti-pervert stockings

Fact: women with hairy legs are never sexually harassed or assaulted. At least that seems to be the thinking behind these fetching hairy leggings, which have become a viral sensation in China. Posted on the microblogging site Weibo, they are described as "full-leg-of-hair stockings, essential for all young girls going out". Sadly, once posted in the UK, commentators were quick to point out the flaws of the inventor's cunning plan. "This is exactly the sort of thing that drives us perverts wild," wrote one.

Banning lingerie mannequins

If a fatal and exceptionally violent gang rape had left your country reeling, with protesters pouring out on to the streets to complain about a culture of impunity for rapists, who would you blame? One municipal council in India knew: shop mannequins wearing lingerie. According to aMumbai municipal council resolution they "promote rapes", and were ordered to be removed as a matter of public safety. "After all," said city councillor Ritu Tawde, "a mannequin is a replica of a woman's body." There is no news yet as to whether the council thinks scantily-clad women should also be banned.

The screaming alarm

If you think standard personal alarms are easy to ignore, the ila Duskhas a more tech-savvy approach. When you pull the chain of the device it emits "an ear-piercing 130-decibel female scream that research has shown others are more likely to respond to than a traditional alarm", according to the packaging. But when the Guardian asked the personal safety campaign group Suzy Lamplugh Trust for their thoughts on the device, they pointed out that screams just confused bystanders and that shouting instructions such as "Call the police" would work better.

Electric shock underwear

Again in India, a trio of engineering students have come up with aprototype to deter would-be attackers: a camisole that not only transmits stun-gun levels of electric shock to groping hands, but also calls the police for you. "Lawmakers take ages to come up with just laws and even after that, women are unsafe," point out the Chennai-based students behind the device. "Hence, we have initiated the idea of self-defence, which protects the women from domestic, social and workplace harassment." It's not clear whether the device would be legal or any safer than wearing a Taser in your bra.

Rape-aXe

Perhaps the most controversial anti-rape device comes courtesy of Dr Sonet Ehlers. Based in South Africa, which has been called the world's rape capital, the terrifying female condom has rows of hooks inside it, which attach themselves to a man's penis during penetration and can only be removed by a doctor. Critics have described it as a "medieval" response and although there are no reports that anyone has actually tested it, the doctor was allegedly distributing them to women working as prostitutes during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

Although these inventions are eye-catching, well intentioned, and draw attention to the fact that sexual attacks and harassment are endemic worldwide, they only highlight what we have always needed: legislation to protect women that is properly enforced, along with a change in the focus of rape prevention from the victims to the perpetrators. And you can keep your hairy stockings.

Right-Wing Immigration Foes Get Burned by Reality

Joshua Holland, AlterNet — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 07:33:00 -0700

The CBO says the Senate immigration bill would lower the deficit by $900 billion over the next 20 years.

Right-wing opponents of immigration reform expected to get a potent weapon when they requested that the Congressional Budget Office score the reforms offered by the Senate “Gang of Eight.” But it turned out to be one of those 'be careful of what you wish for' moments, when CBO projected that the Senate bill would cut the dreaded federal deficit by $197 billion over the next ten years, and $700 billion more in the decade after that.

Cheered on by the Heritage Foundation – which has been squishy on immigration reform in the past and is now trying to shore up its creds with the Tea Party set – Jeff Sessions, R-Alabama, one of the staunchest opponents of immigration reform (who only incidentally happens to be a “vile racist”) requested that the CBO analyze the impacts of the law beyond its usual 10-year window.

So they did. In addition to the positive impact on the budget, CBO says 8 million unauthorized immigrants would likely come out of the shadows (after paying $1,000 fine and jumping through some other hoops). By 2023, CBO estimates a small hit of 0.1 percent to native-born workers' wages, but says the reforms would boost native wages by 0.5 percent in 2033.

Overall, as Ezra Klein puts it:

The bill’s overall effect on the overall economy is unambiguously positive: CBO expects real GDP to increase by 3.3 percent by 2023 and by 5.4 percent in 2033. The reasoning here is a bit more complex: It’s not just that the bill would mean more workers, but that it would mean more productive workers. CBO says that the law would “lead to slightly higher productivity of both labor and capital because the increase in immigration — particularly of highly skilled immigrants — would tend to generate additional technological advancements, such as new inventions and improvements in production processes.”

Sessions was no doubt expecting a very different forecast, because it's a matter of faith in his circles that immigrants are the worst parasites among Romney's mythical 47 percent. This isn't the first time that belief has blown up in nativists' faces either. In the early 1990s, it was anti-immigrant hard-liners who pushed for the creation of the “Jordan Commission” to do a comprehensive study of immigration to the United States. And it, too, found that first and second-generation immigrants pay more in taxes than they take in services and have a net positive impact on native wages (the National Research Council study's book-length findings can be read online here).

Now comes the least surprising news you will ever hear: having requested an analysis which produced results they didn't like, the right is crying foul, and accusing the bipartisan Gang of Eight of cooking the books. “Congress Is Trying to Fool You on Immigration,” reads a headline on Heritage's site this morning. “The bill’s drafters relied on the same scoring gimmicks used by the Obamacare drafters to conceal its true cost from taxpayers and to manipulate the CBO score,” whined Sessions in a press release.

The particulars? Well, Jeff Sessions originally asked that CBO's analysis go out to 2040 instead of 2033! Also, the federal budget watchdog didn't even look at the impact on state and local budgets. (In the dry prose common to CBO analyses, they note that the legislation “would have many other effects (both negative and positive) on the budgets of state, local, and tribal governments, but CBO does not estimate the overall effects of legislation on the budgets of those governments.”)

The first point is rather silly as the very long-term budget projections everyone waves around when debating things like Social Security are about as accurate as reading tea leaves (or, if you prefer, animal guts).

The second issue is entirely valid, even if attacking CBO for not analyzing the impact on Peoria's budget isn't. In 2006, the Texas State Comptroller – a Republican – did the first comprehensive study of the fiscal impact of unauthorized immigration on a state with a very high number of foreign-born. Unfortunately, it only looked at the undocumented. And while it found some significant strain being put on local budgets (much of it from law enforcement), state-wide, “undocumented immigrants produced $1.58 billion in state revenues, which exceeded the $1.16 billion in state services they received.”

Once again, we see those pesky facts at work with their damnable liberal bias.

What's the Hold-Up? Lynne Stewart, Imprisoned Human Rights Attorney Dying Of Lung Cancer, Is Supposed to Be Freed

Kristen Gwynne, AlterNet — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 07:48:00 -0700

The warden has signed for her compassionate release. Nonetheless, her cell stays locked.

Lynne Stewart, the fearless defense attorney with a taste for representing controversial clients, is serving a ten-year prison sentence as her lung cancer spreads. Sixty pounds slimmer and losing time, Stewart was granted compasssionate release six weeks ago, but is still not free.

Stewart was convicted of on conspiracy charges for providing material support to terrorists in 2005, but she and her supporters stress that she was simply delivering a press release to a Reuters journalist, honoring her client's1st Amendment rights. In 2010, charges of perjury led her to be re-sentenced to 10 years in prison.

The seventy-three-year-old "people's lawyer" is suffering from stage four lung cancer, which has metastasized to her lymph nodes and shoulder. Her husband, 70-year-old activist Ralph Poynter, said in a press release, “Lynne has passed all of the legalities of compassionate release and qualifies for release as the bill was written. The prison warden at Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas, has signed for her release, and so has the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Charles R. Samuels. Probation officers charged with inspecting Lynne’s future residence approved her housing. All that is required by the statute of compassionate release has been done. Yet Lynne is still in jail! Every day that her release is postponed makes treatment of her cancer more difficult.”

A campaign for Steawrt's Compassionate Release kicked off with thousands of petition signatures and phone calls in early March. This Monday, her supporters held a candlelight vigil at the White House, and are trying to make sure the pressure for Lynn's release stays on. They are urging supporters to sign the petition and send a letter to Mr. Charles E. Samuels, Jr., Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons (320 First St NW, Washington, DC 25034).

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.’)

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