AlterNet

The Hell Known as Guantanamo Bay Has No Right to Exist

Robert Stefanicki, Inter Press Service — Tue, 21 May 2013 17:11:00 -0700

Lawyer for Guantanamo detainees Ramzi Kassem provides details about the ongoing hunger strike at the prison camp.

For more than 100 days, detainees at American detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been on hunger strike, drawing international attention back to the prison that U.S. President Barack Obama vowed during his first presidential campaign to close down.

Ramzi Kassem, associate professor of law at the City University of New York, is one of the lawyers who voluntarily defend prisoners of the “war on terror” being held at Guantanamo Bay. He currently represents seven detainees of various nationalities at Guantanamo and one at Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan.

The facility was established in January 2002 by the administration of former U.S. President George W. Bush to hold alleged enemies in the so-called global war on terror.

As pressure from the strike grew, Obama said on Apr. 30 that he would try again to close Guantanamo, despite persistent congressional opposition. “I think it is critical for us to understand that Guantanamo is not necessary to keep America safe,” the president said. “It is expensive. It is inefficient. It hurts us in terms of our international standing.”

In an interview with IPS correspondent Robert Stefanicki, Kassem described the brutal manner in which detainees are force-fed, the legal situation of the prisoners, and how the experience has been unique for him.

Q: What is the current scope of the hunger strike?

A: I was at Guantanamo on Feb. 6 this year, and on that day my client told me that the hunger strike had begun. Now even the U.S. government admits that more than 100 prisoners out of 166 are protesting.

But based on information from my clients, in reality, all of them are on strike, with the exception of those who are sick, old and “high value” detainees kept in complete isolation. The discrepancy comes from the fact that the U.S. government has a narrow definition of a hunger strike, just like it has a narrow definition of torture.

Q: Why are they protesting?

A: My client Moaz al-Alawi told me he is refusing food and drink to protest his indefinite imprisonment without charge and without fair process. This is the only way for prisoners to exercise their autonomy and dignity.

Those people were taken from their families over a decade ago. Very few have been tried or charged. Over half of Guantanamo’s current population has been approved for release by various U.S. security agencies: the CIA, FBI, and the Department of Defence.

Yet they are still in prison. One of my clients, Shaker Aamer, was cleared for release by the Bush and Obama administrations, and the UK government has been demanding his freedom for years, but he is still there, now on hunger strike.

Q: Do the prisoners have concrete demands?

A: The prisoners want Barack Obama to deliver on his promise to close the prison and send them home. Until the government takes some concrete steps in that direction, I think the hunger strike will continue. It may stop when some people are released, beginning with those cleared for release long ago.

Q: What are U.S. authorities doing to stop the protest?

A: Several prisoners are being force-fed. Force-feeding someone against his or her will is a violation of medical ethics and international law. Other prisoners in Guantanamo refuse food from their captors but accept feeding; they protest by making the U.S. military feed them by tube.

Although it is legal to feed those men, it is still illegal to do it in such a brutal way – sending five guards to take the prisoner violently, beat him up, restrain him in a chair, and tie down his arms, legs and head, so he cannot move. Then they put the tube through his nose down to the stomach. No anesthetic or lubricant.

Q: Do your clients claim innocence?

A: The fundamental concept in any legal system is that one is innocent until proven guilty. In this case you have people who have not even been charged.

At its peak, Guantanamo had 800 inmates. Now it has 166. The majority was released unilaterally by the U.S. government, not by court order.

I’ve seen several cases where the evidence did not support the accusation. When those cases were moved forward to trial level, federal judges ruled in favour of the prisoners in over 75 percent of the cases.

I am not saying that there aren’t any criminals at Guantanamo. If they are suspected criminals, they should be charged in a court of law that recognises the basic principles of fair process: presumption of innocence, no secret evidence, reliable evidence not extracted under torture.

Some families of my clients told me, “If my son or my husband did anything wrong, charge him. If he is convicted by a fair court, we would not have any objections. If you are not going to charge him, then release him.”

Q: Why is the U.S. government reluctant to bring Guantanamo detainees to court?

A: The U.S. government is reluctant because if you have torture, the case does not fly in court. All the prisoners of Guantanamo have been tortured one way or another.

Q: Are the concerns that released prisoners could return to terrorist activities justified?

A: When we say “return”, we assume that they were there. There is no proof of that. Also, there is no empirical evidence for the concern that they may engage in something wrong after release.

Even if you believe in U.S. government numbers – and I don’t – 77 percent of prisoners from Guantanamo have gone back to normal peaceful life.

Q: How is working at Guantanamo unique for a lawyer?

A: First, we have to fight for access to our clients. Then we stumble over numerous other restrictions: requirements of being a U.S. citizen, security clearance by the FBI, traveling to Cuba to meet the client.

In a normal criminal case, when given a report that the government wants to use against my client, first I would review this report with him. In Guantanamo such a report is classified, not to be shared with the client, so I have to develop the defence on my own—a big handicap.

Q: Were you surprised by recent revelations that authorities in Guantanamo listen to the conversations between prisoners and their lawyers?

A: For us it was confirmation, not a revelation. In 2005, when I first met with my clients in Guantanamo, I did not believe them when they said conversations were being recorded. But now I know my clients have always been right.

The prosecution at the military commission admitted that smoke detectors are in fact cameras and microphones. The government may not use these recordings in court against my clients, but the intelligence services are using them for whatever purposes they want.

Q: Do the lawyers at Guantanamo feel helpless?

A: We try to change the situation as much as we can. Our role is not necessarily to win in court. We have to amplify the voices of our clients to ensure they are heard by the media, NGOs and the public.

News from Guantanamo pressured the U.S. government to release prisoners. I hope this time pressure from the hunger strike will bring real change: closing Guantanamo, a place that has no right to exist.

It's Time For Israel to Apologize For the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

Mustafa Barghouthi, AlterNet — Tue, 21 May 2013 16:50:00 -0700

Saying sorry will not destroy Israel--it will be a first step towards making amends for crimes that occurred 65 years ago.

The personal accounts of Palestine’s most painful point in history, which Palestinians have been recounting for 65 years, have been confirmed time and again by UN reports, resolutions, historians and military archives. The Nakba, our catastrophe and dispossession in 1948, cannot be denied. In order to achieve peace, it is time for Israel to recognize its responsibility for this crime, as a first step towards accountability and a just solution to this conflict.

An apology will not destroy Israel. Yet, it would be a first step towards making amends for the crimes of the past, acknowledging the wrongs of the present, and creating the space needed to work towards a just and lasting peace.

Israelis are living in a state of denial. The fact that their textbooks don’t recognize the rights of the Palestinian people or the Nakba does not change the fact that we were here, are still here, and will always be here. Israelis need only to look as far as some of their most internationally-renowned historians to realize the difficult truth that, before many of them were born, the birth of their country came at the expense and suffering of another people. Benny Morris, Tom Segev, Ilan Pappé and others have challenged Israel’s traditional narrative and founding myth. They are not guided by a desire to destroy Israel but by a desire for truth. For these historians, like many people in the world, the notion that 750,000 Palestinians simply grabbed as many of their belongings as they could carry and voluntarily left their homes to live in refugee camps makes no sense.

There was nothing voluntary about this process. Hundreds were killed. Thousands were forced out at gun-point. Tens of thousands fled in fear for their lives following news of horrific massacres by Zionist militias, including in neighborhoods like Deir Yassin in Jerusalem and al-Tantoura in Haifa, where even women, children, and elderly Palestinians were not spared.

The Nakba is not just a tragic moment in history to be buried in the past or commemorated once a year. It has been an ongoing process from that time against all of the Palestinian people, through Israeli governmental policies which have led to prolonged exile, oppression and discrimination. Palestinians are physically divided; all facing different realities and fears.

The Palestinian grandfather in the West Bank fears that he will wake up to find his olive trees uprooted, his crops torched or his livestock slaughtered by Israeli settlers who live illegally on his land and enjoy protection from the Israeli military forces. His granddaughter worries about being harassed and humiliated by foreign soldiers at checkpoints. These soldiers dictate whether she can go to school or not on any given day.

The Palestinian student in East Jerusalem, distinguished from his friends, relatives and fellow countrymen in the rest of the Occupied State of Palestine by Israel’s imposed ID system, worries about going abroad to study in case he returns to find that his ID has been confiscated, no longer allowing him to return to his home country. His father fears the day when his family is forcibly evicted from their home, to make way for illegal Israeli settlements, or simply to demolish the building under the pretext of impossible bureaucratic requirements.

The Palestinian girl in Gaza, who, at the age of six, has already lived through two major military assaults on that small piece of territory, suffers the psychological damage resulting from those experiences.

The Palestinian man in Israel, living in his ancestral land yet systematically discriminated against due to nationality and religion in almost every aspect of life, worries about his children’s future in a State which insists on defining itself as Jewish.

The Palestinian grandmother, having been forced to spend her entire life in a refugee camp, wonders now whether her grandchildren will see their homeland during their lifetime.

It is time for Israel’s government to recognize its historical responsibility for causing the Nakba and the ongoing consequences of that crime, and to begin working towards justice for those whose lives were torn apart in 1948 and who remain in exile today.

Recognition does not mean denial of Israel, it means beginning a process of righting wrongs; a process which must fulfill the inalienable rights to the Palestinian people, including the implementation of Palestinian refugee rights, without which there can be no genuine or lasting peace. It all begins with one small step.

The Internet Is Slaying the Middle Class

Scott Timberg, Salon — Tue, 21 May 2013 14:53:00 -0700

In "Who Owns the Future?" Jaron Lanier examines how the Web eliminates employment and job security, along with revenues that give the economic middle stability.

Jaron Lanier is a computer science pioneer who has grown gradually disenchanted with the online world since his early days popularizing the idea of virtual reality. “Lanier is often described as ‘visionary,’ ” Jennifer Kahn wrote in a 2011 New Yorker profile, “a word that manages to convey both a capacity for mercurial insight and a lack of practical job skills.”

Raised mostly in Texas and New Mexico by bohemian parents who’d escaped anti-Semitic violence in Europe, he’s been a young disciple of Richard Feynman, an employee at Atari, a scholar at Columbia, a visiting artist at New York University, and a columnist for Discover magazine. He’s also a longtime composer and musician, and a collector of antique and archaic instruments, many of them Asian.

His book continues his war on digital utopianism and his assertion of humanist and individualistic values in a hive-mind world. But Lanier still sees potential in digital technology: He just wants it reoriented away from its main role so far, which involves “spying” on citizens, creating a winner-take-all society, eroding professions and, in exchange, throwing bonbons to the crowd.

This week sees the publication of “Who Owns the Future?,” which digs into technology, economics and culture in unconventional ways. (How is a pirated music file like a 21st century mortgage?) Lanier argues that there is little essential difference between Facebook and a digital trading company, or Amazon and an enormous bank. (“Stanford sometimes seems like one of the Silicon Valley companies.”)

Much of the book looks at the way Internet technology threatens to destroy the middle class by first eroding employment and job security, along with various “levees” that give the economic middle stability.

“Here’s a current example of the challenge we face,” he writes in the book’s prelude: “At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people. Where did all those jobs disappear? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?”

“Future” also looks at the way the creative class – especially musicians, journalists and photographers — has borne the brunt of disruptive technology.

The new book – which has drawn a rave in the New York Times — has already received a serious challenge from Evgeny Morozov in the Washington Post. The Internet-skeptic author of “To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism” challenges Lanier’s proposed solution that regular people be rewarded in micropayments when their data enriches a digital network.

But more important than Lanier’s hopes for a cure is his diagnosis of the digital disease. Eccentric as it is, “Future” is one of the best skeptical books about the online world, alongside Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows,” Robert Levine’s “Free Ride” and Lanier’s own“You Are Not a Gadget.”

We spoke to the dreadlocked, Berkeley-based author from the road, where he’s on a massive book tour.

You talk early in “Who Owns the Future?” about Kodak — about thousand of jobs being destroyed, and Instagram picking up the slack — but with almost no jobs produced. So give us a sense of how that happens and what the result is. It seems like the seed of your book in a way.

Right. Well, I think what’s been happening is a shift from the formal to the informal economy for most people. So that’s to say if you use Instagram to show pictures to your friends and relatives, or whatever service it is, there are a couple of things that are still the same as they were in the times of Kodak. One is that the number of people who are contributing to the system to make it viable is probably the same. Instagram wouldn’t work if there weren’t many millions of people using it. And furthermore, many people kind of have to use social networks for them to be functional besides being valuable. People have to, there’s a constant tending that’s done on a volunteer basis so that people can find each other and whatnot.

So there’s still a lot of human effort, but the difference is that whereas before when people made contributions to the system that they used, they received formal benefits, which means not only salary but pensions and certain kinds of social safety nets. Now, instead, they receive benefits on an informal basis. And what an informal economy is like is the economy in a developing country slum. It’s reputation, it’s barter, it’s that kind of stuff.

So instead of somebody paying money to get their photo developed, and somebody getting a part of a job, a little fragment of a job, at least, and retirement and all the other things that we’re accustomed to, it works informally now, and intangibly.

Yeah, and I remember there was this fascination with the idea of the informal economy about 10 years ago. Stewart Brand was talking about how brilliant it is that people get by in slums on an informal economy. He’s a friend so I don’t want to rag on him too much. But he was talking about how wonderful it is to live in an informal economy and how beautiful trust is and all that.

And you know, that’s all kind of true when you’re young and if you’re not sick, but if you look at the infant mortality rate and the life expectancy and the education of the people who live in those slums, you really see what the benefit of the formal economy is if you’re a person in the West, in the developed world. And then meanwhile this loss, or this shift in the line from what’s formal to what’s informal, doesn’t mean that we’re abandoning what’s formal. I mean, if it was uniform, and we were all entering a socialist utopia or something, that would be one thing, but the formal benefits are accruing at this fantastic rate, at this global record rate to the people who own the biggest computer that’s connecting all the people.

So Kodak has 140,000 really good middle-class employees, and Instagram has 13 employees, period. You have this intense concentration of the formal benefits, and that winner-take-all feeling is not just for the people who are on the computers but also from the people who are using them. So there’s this tiny token number of people who will get by from using YouTube or Kickstarter, and everybody else lives on hope. There’s not a middle-class hump. It’s an all-or-nothing society.

Right, and also I think part of what you’re saying too is that it’s still in most ways a formal economy in that the person who lost his job at Kodak still has to pay rent with old-fashioned money he or she is no longer earning. He can’t pay his rent with cultural capital that’s replaced it.

Yeah, well, people will say you can find a place to crash. People who tour right now will find a couch to crash on. But, you know, this is the difference … I’m not saying that there aren’t ever benefits, like yeah, sometimes you can find a couch. But as I put it in the book, you have to sing for your supper for every meal. The informal way of getting by doesn’t tide you over when you’re sick and it doesn’t let you raise kids and it doesn’t let you grow old. It’s not biologically real.

Actually, can we stick with photography for a second? If we go back to the 19th century, photography was kind of born as a labor-saving device, although we don’t think of it that way. One of my favorite stories, which might be apocryphal — I can’t tell you for sure that this is so, although photographers traded this story for many years. But the way the piece of folklore goes is that during the Civil War era, and a little after, the very earliest photographers would go around with a collection of photographs of people who matched a certain archetype. So they would find the photograph that most closely matched your loved one and you’d buy that because at least there would be representation a little like the person, even if it was the wrong person. And that sounds just incredibly weird to us.

And then, you know, along a similar vein at that time early audio recordings, which today would sound horrible to us, were indistinguishable between real music to people who did double blind tests and whatnot. So the thing is, why not just paint the real person, because painting was really a lot of work. It takes a long time to paint a portrait. And you have to carry around all the paints and all that, and you could just create a stack of photos and sell them. So in the beginning photography was kind of a labor saving device. And whenever you have a technological advance that’s less hassle than the previous thing, there’s still a choice to make. And the choice is, do you still get paid for doing the thing that’s easier?

People often say, well, in Rochester, N.Y. — which is a town that kind of lived on the photography business — they had a buggy whip factory that closed down with the advent of the automobile. The thing is, it’s a lot easier to deal with a car than to deal with horses. I love horses, but you know, you have to feed them, and they poop a lot, and you have to deal with their hooves. It’s a whole thing. And so you could make the argument that a transition to cars should create a world where drivers don’t get paid, because, after all, it’s fun to drive. And it is. And they’re magical.

And so there could really easily be, somebody could easily have asserted that photography is so much easier than painting and driving cars is so much easier than horses that the people who do those things — or support it –shouldn’t be paid. Working in a nice environment — if you go to Sweden and you visit the Saab factory, it’s really nice. Why should you even be paid to do anything?

We kind of made a bargain, a social contract, in the 20th century that even if jobs were pleasant people could still get paid for them. Because otherwise we would have had a massive unemployment. And so to my mind, the right question to ask is, why are we abandoning that bargain that worked so well?

Right. Well, until about the year 2000 or so, some jobs had been destroyed by new technology. This goes back to the industrial revolution and earlier. But more jobs were created than those destroyed. So what changed?

Of course jobs become obsolete. But the only reason that new jobs were created was because there was a social contract in which a more pleasant, less boring job was still considered a job that you could be paid for. That’s the only reason it worked. If we decided that driving was such an easy thing [compared to] dealing with horses that no one should be paid for it, then there wouldn’t be all of those people being paid to be Teamsters or to drive cabs. It was a decision that it was OK to have jobs that weren’t terrible.

So it wasn’t inherent in the technology. In other words, there’s nothing inherently different about digital technology or the Internet than there is with factory technology or the assembly line or these other technological shifts that have developed?

Yeah. I mean, the whole idea of a job is entirely social construct. The United States was built on slave labor. Those people didn’t have jobs, they were just slaves. The idea of a job is that you can participate in a formal economy even if you’re not a baron. That there can be, that everybody can participate in the formal economy and the benefit of having everybody participate in the formal economy, there are annoyances with the formal economy because capitalism is really annoying sometimes.

But the benefits are really huge, which is you get a middle-class distribution of wealth and clout so the mass of people can outspend the top, and if you don’t have that you can’t really have democracy. Democracy is destabilized if there isn’t a broad distribution of wealth.

And then the other thing is that if you like market capitalism, if you’re an Ayn Rand person, you have to admit that markets can only function if there are customers and customers can only come if there’s a middle hump. So you have to have a broad distribution of wealth. So there’s no reason technically for any technology to ever create a job. In other words, we could have had motor vehicles, and we could have had film cameras, we could have had all these technologies without any formal jobs. We just had a social contract in which we decided that we’d allow formal jobs in factories and in drivers and in users of cameras and creators of cameras and film.

It was all a social construct to begin with, so what changed, to get to your question, is that at the turn of the [21st] century it was really Sergey Brin at Google who just had the thought of, well, if we give away all the information services, but we make money from advertising, we can make information free and still have capitalism. But the problem with that is it reneges on the social contract where people still participate in the formal economy. And it’s a kind of capitalism that’s totally self-defeating because it’s so narrow. It’s a winner-take-all capitalism that’s not sustaining.

Well, a lot of your book is about the survival of the middle class in the digital age, the importance of a broad middle class as we move forward. You argue that the middle class, unlike the rich and the poor, is not a natural class but was built and sustained through some kind of intervention. Has that changed in the last decade or two as the digital world has grown?

Well, there’s a lot of ways. I mean, one of the issues is that in a market society, a middle class has always required some little artificial help to keep going. There’s always academic tenure, or a taxi medallion, or a cosmetology license, or a pension. There’s often some kind of license or some kind of ratcheting scheme that allows people to keep their middle-class status.

In a raw kind of capitalism there tend to be unstable events that wipe away the middle and tend to separate people into rich and poor. So these mechanisms are undone by a particular kind of style that is called the digital open network.

Music is a great example where value is copied. And so once you have it, again it’s this winner-take-all thing where the people who really win are the people who run the biggest computers. And a few tokens, an incredibly tiny number of token people who will get very successful YouTube videos, and everybody else lives on hope or lives with their parents or something.

One of the things that really annoys me is the acceptance of lies that’s so common in the current orthodoxy. I guess all orthodoxies are built on lies. But there’s this idea that there must be tens of thousands of people who are making a great living as freelance musicians because you can market yourself on social media. And whenever I look for these people – I mean when I wrote “Gadget” I looked around and found a handful – and at this point three years later, I went around to everybody I could to get actual lists of people who are doing this and to verify them, and there are more now. But like in the hip-hop world I counted them all and I could find about 50. And I really talked to everybody I could. The reason I mention hip-hop is because that’s where it happens the most right now.

So when we’re talking about the whole of the business – and these are not 50 people who are doing great. Or here’s another example. Do you know who Jenna Marbles is? She’s a super-successful YouTube star. She’s the queen of self-help videos for young women. She’s kind of a cross between Snooki and Martha Stewart or something. And she’s cool. I mean, she kind of helps girls with how to do makeup, and she’s irreverent. She’s had a billion views.

The interesting thing about it is that people advertise, “Oh, what an incredible life. She’s this incredibly lucky person who’s worked really hard.” And that’s all true. She’s in her 20s, and it’s great that she’s found this success, but what this success is that she makes maybe $250,000 a year, and she rents a house that’s worth $1.1 million in L.A.. And this is all breathlessly reported as this great success. And that’s good for a 20-year-old, but she’s at the very top of, I mean, the people at the very top of the game now and doing as well as what used to be considered good for a middle-class life. And I don’t want to dismiss that. That’s great for a 20-year-old, although in truth, in my world of engineers that wouldn’t be much. But for someone who’s out there, a star with a billion views, that’s a crazy low expectation. She’s not even in the 1 percent. For the tiny token number of people who make it to the top of YouTube, they’re not even making it into the 1 percent.

The issue is if we’re going to have a middle class anymore, and if that’s our expectation, we won’t. And then we won’t have democracy.

You mentioned a minute ago that there’s about 50 in hip-hop. What kind of estimate did you come up with for music in general?

I think in the total of music in America, there are a low number of hundreds. It’s really small. I wish all of those people my deepest blessings, and I celebrate the success they find, but it’s just not a way you can build a society.

The other problem is they would have to self-fund. This is getting back to the informal economy where you’re living in the slum or something, so you’re desperate to get out so you impress the boss man with your music skills or your basketball skills. And the idea of doing that for the whole of society is not progress. It should be the reverse. What we should be doing is bringing all the people who are in that into the formal economy. That’s what’s called development. But this is the opposite of that. It’s taking all the people from the developed world and putting them into a cycle of the developing world of the informal economy.

You say early in the book, “As much as it pains me to say so, we can survive only if we destroy the middle classes of musicians, journalists, photographers.” I guess what you seem to be saying here is the creative classis sort of the canary in the digital coal mine.

Yes. That’s precisely my point. So when people say, “Why are musicians so special? Everybody has to struggle.” And the thing is, I do think we are looking at a [sustainable] model.

We don’t realize that our society and our democracy ultimately rest on the stability of middle-class jobs. When I talk to libertarians and socialists, they have this weird belief that everybody’s this abstract robot that won’t ever get sick or have kids or get old. It’s like everybody’s this eternal freelancer who can afford downtime and can self-fund until they find their magic moment or something.

The way society actually works is there’s some mechanism of basic stability so that the majority of people can outspend the elite so we can have a democracy. That’s the thing we’re destroying, and that’s really the thing I’m hoping to preserve. So we can look at musicians and artists and journalists as the canaries in the coal mine, and is this the precedent that we want to follow for our doctors and lawyers and nurses and everybody else? Because technology will get to everybody eventually.

It wasn’t too long ago that it was unskilled people on assembly lines who answered phones or bank tellers and it’s just crept up in the decades since. You’ve mentioned a few times this sort of digital utopianism that still emanates from Silicon Valley. Where does that kind of thinking come from and why does it exist despite all the evidence to the contrary?

Well, it’s an orthodoxy now. I have 14-year-old kids who come to my talks who say, “But isn’t open source software the best thing in life? Isn’t it the future?” It’s a perfect thought system. It reminds me of communists I knew when growing up or Ayn Rand libertarians. It’s one of these things where you have a simplistic model that suggests this perfect society so you just believe in it totally. These perfect societies don’t work. We’ve already seen hyper-communism come to tears. And hyper-capitalism come to tears. And I just don’t want to have to see that for cyber-hacker culture. We should have learned that these perfect simple systems are illusions.

Speaking of politics, your concerns are often those of the political left. You’re concerned with equality and a shrinking middle class. And yet you don’t seem to consider yourself a progressive or a man of the left — why not?

I am culturally a man on the left. I get a lot of people on the left. I live in Berkeley and everything. I want to live in a world where outcomes for people are not predetermined in advance with outcomes.

The problem I have with socialist utopias is there’s some kind of committees trying to soften outcomes for people. I think that imposes models of outcomes for other people’s lives. So in a spiritual sense there’s some bit of libertarian in me. But the critical thing for me is moderation. And if you let that go too far you do end up with a winner-take-all society that ultimately crushes everybody even worse. So it has to be moderated.

I think seeking perfection in human affairs is a perfect way to destroy them. It just doesn’t work. So my own take on it is, actually another way I’ve been thinking about it lately is a balance of magisteria. “Magisteria” was the term that Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion. And I’ve been thinking that way about money and politics, or computers and politics, or computers and ethics. All of these things are magisterial, where the people who become involved in them tend to wish they could be the only ones.

Libertarians tend to think the economy can totally close its own loops, that you can get rid of government. And I ridicule that in the book. There are other people who believe that if you could get everybody to talk over social networks, if we could just cooperate, we wouldn’t need money anymore. And I recommend they try living in a group house and then they’ll see it’s not true.

My cyber-friends think if you can just come up with a perfect scheme, that some perfect digital scheme will solve all the problems. My belief is that if we deal with all of these things, they can balance out each other to prevent the worst dysfunctions of each one from happening. And at minimum if we can just have enough distribution of clout in society so it isn’t run by a tiny minority, then at the very least it gives us some room to breathe. And that’s the minimum requirement. Maybe not the ideal.

So what we have to demand of digital technology is that it not try to be a perfect system that takes over everything. That it balances the excess of the other magisteria. And that is doesn’t concentrate power too much, and if we can just get to that point, then we’ll really be fine. I’m actually modest. People have been accusing me of being super-ambitious lately, but I feel like in a way I’m the most modest person in the conversation. I’m just trying to avoid total dysfunction.

Let’s stick with politics for one more. Is there something dissonant about the fact that the greatest fortunes in human history have been created with a system developed largely by taxpayers dollars? Military research and labs at public universities. And many of the people whom the Internet has enriched have become libertarians who earnestly tell you that they are “socially liberal and fiscally conservative,” and resist progressive taxation because of it.

Yeah, no kidding. I was there. I gotta say, every little step of this thing was really funded by either the military or public research agencies. If you look at something like Facebook, Facebook is adding the tiniest little rind of value over the basic structure that’s there anyway. In fact, it’s even worse than that. The original designs for networking, going back to Ted Nelson, kept track of everything everybody was pointing at so that you would know who was pointing at your website. In a way Facebook is just recovering information that was deliberately lost because of the fetish for being anonymous. That’s also true of Google.

Near the end of the book you talk about the changes in the book business. It doesn’t sound pretty. What’s going on there and what have you learned as someone who has now written several books?

I don’t hate anything about e-books or e-book readers or tablets. There’s a lot of discussion about that, and I think it’s misplaced. The problem I have is whether we believe in the book itself.

To me a book is not just a particular file. It’s connected with personhood. Books are really, really hard to write. They represent a kind of a summit of grappling with what one really has to say. And what I’m concerned with is when Silicon Valley looks at books, they often think of them as really differently as just data points that you can mush together. They’re divorcing books from their role in personhood.

I’m quite concerned that in the future someone might not know what author they’re reading. You see that with music. You would think in the information age it would be the easiest thing to know what you’re listening to. That you could look up instantly the music upon hearing it so you know what you’re listening to, but in truth it’s hard to get to those services.

I was in a cafe this morning where I heard some stuff I was interested in, and nobody could figure out. It was Spotify or one of these … so they knew what stream they were getting, but they didn’t know what music it was. Then it changed to other music, and they didn’t know what that was. And I tried to use one of the services that determines what music you’re listening to, but it was a noisy place and that didn’t work. So what’s supposed to be an open information system serves to obscure the source of the musician. It serves as a closed information system. It actually loses the information.

So in practice you don’t know who the musician is. And I think that’s what could happen with writers. And this is what we celebrate in Wikipedia is pretending that there’s some absolute truth that can be spoken that people can approximate and that the speaker doesn’t matter. And if we start to see that with books in general – and I say if – if you look at the approach that Google has taken to the Google library project, they do have the tendency to want to move things together. You see the thing decontextualized.

I have sort of resisted putting my music out lately because I know it just turns into these mushes. Without context, what does my music mean? I make very novel sounds, but I don’t see any value in me sharing novel sounds that are decontextualized. Why would I write if people are just going to get weird snippets that are just mushed together and they don’t know the overall position or the history of the writer or anything? What would be the point in that. The day books become mush is the day I stop writing.

Let’s close with music then. You’re a longtime musician and composer. You’re a collector of obscure and archaic instruments. How does your interest in music and especially pre-modern acoustic music shape your thinking and your life as well?

Well, the original way I got into it is very personal. It’s just that my mother died when I was young, and she was a musician. My connection to her. I got involved in more and more unusual music because I didn’t want that connection to become something that was too static. It had to be constantly changing or it would become a cliché. So that’s how I got into it.

But as far as the connection to computers, the thing to me is that I’ve always been intrigued with music interface. Musical interfaces are such profoundly better user interfaces than anything we’ve done with a digital computer. They have better acuity. They create more opportunities for virtuosity. They work with the human body more profoundly, the nervous system. I mean good musical instruments. And I’ve just been intrigued by them. It made me realize that just because something is the latest, newest thing that seems like the cleverest thing we can do at the moment doesn’t make it better.

So to realize how much better musical instruments were to use as human interfaces, it helped me to be skeptical about the whole digital enterprise. Which I think helped me be a better computer scientist, actually.

Did your life as a musician show you some of the things that you ended up excavating in “Gadget” and the new book?

Sure. If you go way back I was one of the people who started the whole music-should-be-free thing. You can find the fire-breathing essays where I was trying to articulate the thing that’s now the orthodoxy. Oh, we should free ourselves from the labels and the middleman and this will be better.

I believed it at the time because it sounds better, it really does. I know a lot of these musicians, and I could see that it wasn’t actually working. I think fundamentally you have to be an empiricist. I just saw that in the real lives I know — both older and younger people coming up — I just saw that it was not as good as what it had once been. So that there must be something wrong with our theory, as good as it sounded. It was really that simple.

Here's What a Real Political Cover-up Looks Like -- Orchestrated by the Right-Wingers Who Know It Best

Robert Parry, Consortium News — Tue, 21 May 2013 14:35:00 -0700

Many lessons can be drawn from the failed October Surprise investigation of two decades ago.

Exclusive:Republicans won’t let go of their conspiracy theory about some nefarious “cover-up” in “talking points” for Ambassador Susan Rice’s TV interviews on the Benghazi attack. But they should at least have better skills for detecting a real cover-up, since they’ve had direct experience, as Robert Parry documents.

There have been nine public hearings and countless hours of commentary about the so-called Benghazi “cover-up” – really some bureaucratic back-and-forth about “talking points” for a second-tier official’s appearance on TV. But none of the outraged members of Congress or the news media seems to have any idea what a real cover-up looks like.

In 2011, I gained access to files at the George H.W. Bush library in College Station, Texas, showing how Bush’s White House reacted to allegations in 1991 that he had joined in an operation in 1980 to sabotage President Jimmy Carter’s negotiations to free 52 American hostages then held in Iran.

What those files revealed was how to run a cover-up! Its framework was set on Nov. 6, 1991, by White House Counsel C. Boyden Gray, who explained to an inter-agency strategy session how to contain and frustrate a congressional investigation into the so-called October Surprise case. The explicit goal was to insure the scandal would not hurt President Bush’s reelection hopes in 1992.

Gray’s strategy session followed by two days the White House receiving evidence from the State Department that a key fact in the October Surprise allegations had been verified. Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign director, William Casey, indeed had traveled on a mysterious trip to Madrid, just as one of the central witnesses had claimed.

The confirmation was passed along by State Department legal adviser Edwin D. Williamson, who said that among the State Department “material potentially relevant to the October Surprise allegations [was] a cable from the Madrid embassy indicating that Bill Casey was in town, for purposes unknown.” Associate White House counsel Chester Paul Beach Jr. Beach noted Williamson’s information in a “memorandum for record” dated Nov. 4, 1991.

Two days later, on Nov. 6, Gray summoned his subordinates to a meeting that laid out how to thwart the October Surprise inquiry, which was seen as a dangerous expansion of the Iran-Contra investigation. Up to that point, Iran-Contra had focused on illicit arms-for-hostage sales to Iran that President Reagan authorized in 1985-86.

As assistant White House counsel Ronald vonLembke, put it, the White House goal in 1991 was to “kill/spike this story.” To achieve that result, the Republicans coordinated the counter-offensive through Gray’s office under the supervision of associate counsel Janet Rehnquist, the daughter of the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist.

The Stakes

Gray explained the stakes at the White House strategy session. “Whatever form they ultimately take, the House and Senate ‘October Surprise’ investigations, like Iran-Contra, will involve interagency concerns – and be of special interest to the President,” Gray declared, according to minutes. [Emphasis in original.]

Among “touchstones” cited by Gray were “No Surprises to the White House, and Maintain Ability to Respond to Leaks in Real Time. This is Partisan.” White House “talking points” on the October Surprise investigation urged restricting the inquiry to 1979-80 and imposing strict time limits for issuing any findings.

“Alleged facts have to do with 1979-80 – no apparent reason for jurisdiction/subpoena power to extend beyond,”the document said. “There is no sunset provision – this could drag on like Walsh!” – a reference to Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh.

However, the key to understanding the October Surprise case was that it appeared to be a prequel to the Iran-Contra scandal, part of the same narrative. The story started with the 1980 crisis over 52 American hostages held in Iran, continuing through their release immediately after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 1981, then followed by mysterious U.S. government approval of secret arms shipments to Iran via Israel in 1981, and ultimately morphing into the Iran-Contra Affair of more arms-for-hostage deals with Iran until that scandal exploded in 1986.

The documents, which I obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request, showed that Reagan-Bush loyalists were determined to thwart any sustained investigation that might link the two scandals. The GOP counterattack included:

–Delaying the production of documents;

–Having a key witness dodge a congressional subpoena;

–Neutralizing an aggressive Democratic investigator;

–Pressuring a Republican senator to become more obstructive;

–Tightly restricting access to classified information;

–Narrowing the inquiry as it applied to alleged Reagan-Bush wrongdoing while simultaneously widening the probe to include Carter’s efforts to free the hostages;

–Mounting a public relations campaign attacking the investigation’s costs; and

–Encouraging friendly journalists to denounce the story.

Highly Effective

Ultimately, the GOP cover-up strategy proved highly effective, as Democrats grew timid and neoconservative journalists – then emerging as a powerful force in the Washington media – took the lead in decrying the October Surprise allegations as a “myth.”

The Republicans benefited, too, from a Washington press corps, which had grown weary of the complex Iran-Contra scandal. Careerist reporters in the mainstream press had learned that the route to advancement lay more in “debunking” such complicated national security scandals than in pursuing them.

It would take nearly two decades for the October Surprise cover-up to crumble with admissions by officials involved in the investigation that its exculpatory conclusions were rushed, that crucial evidence had been hidden or ignored, and that some alibis for key Republicans didn’t make any sense. [For details, see Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative.]

In the near term, however, Republicans succeeded in their well-organized cover-up. They were aided immensely by Newsweek and The New Republic, which published matching stories on their covers in mid-November 1991 claiming to have debunked the October Surprise allegations by proving that Casey could not have made the trip to Madrid in 1980.

Though Bush’s White House already had the State Department’s information contradicting the smug self-certainty of the two magazines, the administration made no effort to correct the record. Yet, even without Beach’s memorandum, there was solid evidence at the time disproving the Newsweek/New Republic debunking articles.

Both magazines had sloppily misread attendance records at a London historical conference that Casey had attended on July 28, 1980, the time frame when Iranian businessman (and CIA agent) Jamshid Hashemi had placed Casey in Madrid for a secret meeting with Iranian emissary Mehdi Karrubi.

The two magazines insisted that the attendance records showed Casey in London for a morning session of the conference, thus negating the possibility that he could have made a side trip to Madrid. However, the magazines had failed to do the necessary follow-up interviews, which would have revealed that Casey was not at the morning session on July 28. He didn’t arrive until that afternoon, leaving the “window” open for Hashemi’s account.

At PBS “Frontline,” where I was involved in the October Surprise investigation, we talked to Americans and others who had participated in the London conference. Most significantly, we interviewed historian Robert Dallek who gave that morning’s presentation to a small gathering of attendees sitting in a conference room at the British Imperial War Museum.

Dallek said he had been excited to learn that Casey, who was running Reagan’s presidential campaign, would be there. So, Dallek looked for Casey, only to be disappointed that Casey was a no-show. Other Americans also recalled Casey arriving later and the records actually indicate Casey showing up for the afternoon session.

In other words, the high-profile Newsweek-New Republic debunking of the October Surprise story had itself been debunked. However, typical of the arrogance of those publications – and our inability to draw attention to their major screw-up – the magazines never acknowledged their gross error.

Worse Than Sloppiness

I later learned that the journalistic malfeasance at Newsweek was even worse than sloppiness. Journalist Craig Unger, who had been hired by Newsweek to work on the October Surprise story, told me that he had spotted the misreading of the attendance records before Newsweek published its article and alerted the investigative team, which was personally headed by executive editor Maynard Parker.

“They told me, essentially, to fuck off,” Unger said.

During my years at Newsweek, from 1987-90, Parker had been my chief nemesis. He was considered close to prominent neocons, including Iran-Contra figure Elliott Abrams, and to Establishment Republicans, such as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Parker also was a member of banker David Rockefeller’s Council on Foreign Relations — and viewed the Iran-Contra scandal as something best shut down quickly.

Jumping to a false conclusion that would protect his influential friends would fit perfectly with what I knew of Parker. [To this day, neither Newsweek nor The New Republic has published a correction for their errors, despite the historical damage done.]

The false articles in Newsweek and The New Republic gave the White House cover-up a key advantage: Washington’s conventional wisdom crowd now assumed that the October Surprise allegations were bogus. All that was necessary was to make sure no conclusive evidence to the contrary reached the congressional investigation.

Coordination was crucial. For instance, on May 14, 1992, a CIA official ran proposed language past associate White House counsel Janet Rehnquist from then-CIA Director Robert Gates regarding the agency’s level of cooperation with Congress. By that point, the CIA, under Gates, was already months into a pattern of foot-dragging on congressional document requests.

Bush had put Gates, who was also implicated in the October Surprise case, at the CIA’s helm in fall 1991, meaning that Gates was well-positioned to stymie congressional requests for sensitive information about secret initiatives involving Bush, Gates and Donald Gregg, another CIA veteran who was linked to the scandal.

The records at the Bush library revealed that Gates and Gregg, indeed, were targets of the congressional October Surprise probe. On May 26, 1992, Rep. Lee Hamilton, chairman of the House Task Force, wrote to the CIA asking for records regarding the whereabouts of Gregg and Gates from Jan. 1, 1980, through Jan. 31, 1981, including travel plans and leaves of absence.

Withholding Documents

The persistent document-production delays finally drew a complaint from Lawrence Barcella, chief counsel to the House Task Force who wrote to the CIA on June 9, 1992, that the agency had not been responsive to three requests on Sept. 20, 1991; April 20, 1992; and May 26, 1992.

Gregg and Gates also were implicated in the broader the Iran-Contra scandal. Both were suspected of lying about their knowledge of secret sales of military hardware to Iran and clandestine delivery of weapons to Contra rebels in Nicaragua.

A ex-CIA director himself, Bush also had been caught lying in the Iran-Contra scandal when he insisted that a plane shot down over Nicaragua in 1986 while dropping weapons to the Contras had no connection to the U.S. government (when the weapons delivery had been organized by operatives close to Bush’s vice presidential office where Gregg served as national security adviser).

And, Bush falsely claimed that he was out of the “loop” on Iran-Contra decisions when later evidence showed that he was a major participant in the policy discussions. From the Bush library documents, it was apparent that the October Surprise cover-up was essentially an extension of the broader effort to contain the Iran-Contra scandal, with Bush personally involved in orchestrating both efforts.

For instance, Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh discovered in December 1992 that Bush’s White House counsel’s office, under Boyden Gray, also had delayed production of Bush’s personal notes about the arms shipments to Iran in the 1985-86 time frame.

Though Gray’s office insisted that the delay was unintentional, Walsh didn’t buy it. After all, one of Bush’s s Iran-Contra diary entries, dated July 20, 1987, described then-Secretary of State George Shultz’s detailed notes on meetings with Reagan. In the Iran-Contra report, Walsh wrote that Bush’s phrasing about Shultz’s notes suggested that the withholding of Bush’s own documents was willful.

“I found this almost inconceivable,” Bush wrote about Shultz. “Not only that he kept the notes, but that he’d turned them all over to Congress. … I would never do it. I would never surrender such documents.” Following those sentiments, Bush’s White House sought to frustrate not just Iran-Contra investigators but those assigned to examine the October Surprise issue.

Cat-and-Mouse Game

Rather than any commitment to openness regarding the October Surprise case, the documents reveal a cat-and-mouse game designed to block pursuit of the truth. Beyond dragging its heels on producing documents, the Bush administration maneuvered to keep key witnesses out of timely reach of the investigators. For instance, Gregg used his stationing as U.S. Ambassador to South Korea in 1992 to evade a congressional subpoena.

Like Gates and Bush, Gregg had been linked to secret meetings with Iranians during the 1980 campaign. When asked about those allegations by FBI polygraph operators working for Iran-Contra prosecutor Walsh, Gregg was judged to be deceptive in his denials. [See Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters, Vol. I, p. 501]

And, when it came to answering questions from Congress about the October Surprise matter, Gregg found excuses not to accept service of a subpoena.

In a June 18, 1992, cable from the U.S. Embassy in Seoul to the State Department in Washington, Gregg wrote that he had learned that Senate investigators had “attempted to subpoena me to appear on 24 June in connection with their so-called ‘October Surprise’ investigation. The subpoena was sent to my lawyer, Judah Best, who returned it to the committee since he had no authority to accept service of a subpoena. …

“If the October Surprise investigation contacts the [State] Department, I request that you tell them of my intention to cooperate fully when I return to the States, probably in September. Any other inquiries should be referred to my lawyer, Judah Best. Mr. Best asks that I specifically request you not to accept service of a subpoena if the committee attempts to deliver one to you.”

That way Gregg ensured that he was not legally compelled to testify while running out the clock on the Senate inquiry and leaving little time for the House Task Force. His strategy of delay was endorsed by Janet Rehnquist after a meeting with Best and a State Department lawyer.

In a June 24, 1992, letter to Gray, Rehnquist wrote that “at your direction, I have looked into whether Don Gregg should return to Washington to testify before the Senate Subcommittee hearings next week. … I believe we shouldNOT request that Gregg testify next week.”

The failure to effect service of the subpoena gave the Bush team an advantage, Rehnquist noted, because the Senate investigators then relented and merely “submitted written questions to Gregg, through counsel, in lieu of an appearance. …. This development provides us an opportunity to manage Gregg’s participation in October Surprise long distance.”

Rehnquist added hopefully that by the end of September 1992 “the issue may, by that time, even be dead for all practical purposes.”

Delaying Tactics

Beyond pushing the investigation later into 1992, the Republican delaying tactics also ensured that an interim House report, scheduled for the end of June, would not break any new ground that might torpedo Bush’s reelection hopes. The GOP made it a top goal to have the interim report clear Bush of allegations that he had joined a secret trip to Paris in mid-October 1980 to meet with Iranian representatives, the released documents show.

On June 24, 1992, Rehnquist prepared “talking points” for a Boyden Gray phone call with Republican Sens. Jim Jeffords of Vermont and Richard Lugar of Indiana stressing that “it must be said clearly for the record” that Bush was not in Paris. “We cannot let something this important left hanging,” Rehnquist wrote.

The key to that success was to prevent the congressional investigators from thoroughly examining Bush’s supposed alibis for the date of Oct. 19, 1980, when his account had him returning to his Washington home for a day off but when some October Surprise witnesses alleged he snuck off for a quick overnight flight to Paris to meet with Iranians.

The released records reveal that the White House had a hand in limiting what the Secret Service showed to the investigators regarding Bush’s supposed activities during the day of Oct. 19. The partially redacted Secret Service records, which were given to Congress, showed a morning trip to the Chevy Chase Country Club and an afternoon visit to a private residence.

But the redactions impeded efforts by congressional investigators to corroborate that those supposed movements by Bush actually took place. Under questioning, only one of the Secret Service agents, supervisor Leonard Tanis, had any memory of Bush’s supposed trip to the Chevy Chase Country Club. Tanis claimed that George and Barbara Bush attended a brunch with Supreme Court Justice and Mrs. Potter Stewart.

However, Barbara Bush’s records showed her going somewhere else that morning and, when questioned, Mrs. Stewart said she and her late husband did not have brunch with the Bushes. No one at the Chevy Chase club recalled the supposed brunch either. Tanis, a Bush favorite among the Secret Service detail, soon backed off his account.

With the Chevy Chase trip having verification problems, attention turned to the afternoon visit to a private residence. However, the Secret Service refused to release the name and address of the person visited, claiming that to do so would somehow endanger the agency’s protective strategies. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

Withholding a Name

What the records from the Bush library revealed, however, was that the White House was involved in keeping the name of the person secret — and that a Republican senator involved in the October Surprise inquiry was under intense pressure from the GOP to act more aggressively in Bush’s defense.

On June 24, 1992, Rehnquist wrote a memo for the file describing a meeting that she and Gray had with Sen. Terry Sanford, D-North Carolina, chairman of the subcommittee in charge of the Senate’s October Surprise inquiry, and Jeffords, the ranking Republican who was viewed as not on the GOP’s cover-up team.

The senators complained about the “GOP thrashing Jeffords,” Rehnquist wrote. “The Senators urged that we seek to stop the GOP from criticizing Sen. Jeffords’ handling of the minority interests in the investigation. They said that they were irritated by the continued GOP bashing and that it wasn’t doing any good.”

But the pummeling appears to have softened Jeffords’s readiness to ask tough questions of his fellow Republicans. Rehnquist wrote, with apparent relief, that there was “discussion concerning whether the investigators needed to see the names and addresses of private individuals whom the VP visited on a particular occasion” and the two senators “were not interested in the names and addresses of private individuals whom the VP may have visited on a particular day.”

So, the White House was spared publicly having to identify Bush’s alibi witness for the afternoon of Oct. 19, 1980.

In summer 1992, Republicans were suggesting that they wanted to protect the host’s name because Bush may have been visiting a woman friend and that the Democrats might have been hoping to stir up a sex scandal to counter some of the salacious rumors about their own nominee, Bill Clinton.

However, when Secret Service records for Barbara Bush were released they showed her going to the same unidentified residence, deflating suggestions of a sexual liaison involving her husband. The question that remained was whether George H.W. Bush actually was part of the afternoon visit or whether his wife’s day trip was used as a cover for his absence from Washington.

Without questioning the afternoon host, it was impossible to verify Bush’s alibi. Yet, in a strange alibi deal, the House Task Force agreed to clear Bush of taking a secret trip to Paris in exchange for the White House privately giving the name of Bush’s host to a small number of the congressional investigators. But they were barred from interviewing the alibi witness or releasing the name.

The peculiar arrangement – being told the name of an alibi witness but never questioning the witness – was typical of Bush’s White House imposing bizarre rules on the inquiry and the badgered investigators acquiescing. [It was not until September 2011 that I was able to pry loose the name of the “alibi witness,” Richard A. Moore, a former legal adviser to President Richard Nixon. However, by then, Moore had died.]

Contrary Evidence

The House Task Force stuck with its decision to clear Bush regarding the alleged Paris trip despite subsequent evidence suggesting that Bush, indeed, had flown to Paris and had created a false record to conceal the trip.

For instance, I informed the Task Force about contemporaneous knowledge of the Bush-to-Paris trip provided by Chicago Tribune reporter John Maclean, son of author Norman Maclean who wrote A River Runs Through It. John Maclean said a well-placed Republican source told him in mid-October 1980 about Bush taking a secret trip to Paris to meet with Iranians on the U.S. hostage issue.

After hearing this news in 1980, Maclean passed on the information to David Henderson, a State Department Foreign Service officer. Henderson recalled the date as Oct. 18, 1980, when the two met at Henderson’s Washington home to discuss another matter. (Maclean never used the information for a story, but he confirmed his knowledge after Henderson remembered the conversation when the October Surprise allegations surfaced a decade later.)

And, there was other support for the allegations of a Republican-Iranian meeting in Paris. David Andelman, the biographer for Count Alexandre deMarenches, head of France’s Service de Documentation Exterieure et de Contre-Espionage (SDECE), testified to the House Task Force that deMarenches told him that he had helped the Reagan-Bush campaign arrange meetings with Iranians on the hostage issue in summer and fall of 1980, with one meeting in Paris in October.

Andelman said deMarenches insisted that the secret meetings be kept out of his memoir because the story could otherwise damage the reputations of his friends, William Casey and George H.W. Bush.

The allegations of a Paris meeting also received support from several other sources, including pilot Heinrich Rupp, who said he flew Casey from Washington’s National Airport to Paris on a flight that left very late on a rainy night in mid-October 1980. Rupp said that after arriving at LeBourget airport outside Paris, he saw a man resembling Bush on the tarmac.

The night of Oct. 18 indeed was rainy in the Washington area. And, sign-in sheets at the Reagan-Bush headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, placed Casey within a five-minute drive of National Airport late that evening.

A well-connected French investigative reporter Claude Angeli said his sources inside the French secret service confirmed that the service provided “cover” for a meeting between Republicans and Iranians in France on the weekend of October 18-19. German journalist Martin Kilian had received a similar account from a top aide to intelligence chief deMarenches.

As early as 1987, Iran’s ex-President Bani-Sadr had made claims about such a Paris meeting, and Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe claimed to have been present outside the meeting and saw Bush, Casey, Gates and Gregg in attendance.

Russian Report

Finally, the Russian government sent a report to the House Task Force, saying that Soviet-era intelligence files contained information about Republicans holding a series of meetings with Iranians in Europe, including one in Paris in October 1980. “William Casey, in 1980, met three times with representatives of the Iranian leadership,” the Russian Report said. “The meetings took place in Madrid and Paris.”

At the Paris meeting in October 1980, “R[obert] Gates, at that time a staffer of the National Security Council in the administration of Jimmy Carter, and former CIA Director George Bush also took part,” the report said. “The representatives of Ronald Reagan and the Iranian leadership discussed the question of possibly delaying the release of 52 hostages from the staff of the U.S. Embassy in Teheran.”

The Russian Report was kept hidden by the House Task Force until I discovered it by gaining access to the Task Force’s raw files. Though the report was addressed to Hamilton, he told me in 2010 that he had never seen the report until I sent him a copy shortly before our interview. Barcella then acknowledged to me that he might not have shown Hamilton the report and may have simply filed it away in boxes of Task Force records.

The documents from the Bush library also shed light on how far the Republicans were prepared to go to protect Bush on the issue of his whereabouts on Oct. 19, 1980. The GOP members of the Task Force insisted that the one Democratic investigator who had the strongest doubts about Bush’s alibi be barred from the inquiry altogether.

The suspicions of the investigator, House Foreign Affairs Committee chief counsel Spencer Oliver, had been piqued by the false account from Secret Service supervisor Tanis. In a six-page memo, Oliver urged a closer look at Bush’s whereabouts and questioned why the Secret Service was concealing the alibi witness’ name.

“Why did the Secret Service refuse to cooperate on a matter which could have conclusively cleared George Bush of these serious allegations?” Oliver asked. “Was the White House involved in this refusal? Did they order it?”

Oliver also noted Bush’s odd behavior in raising the October Surprise issue on his own at two news conferences. “It can be fairly said that President Bush’s recent outbursts about the October Surprise inquiries and [about] his whereabouts in mid-October of 1980 are disingenuous at best,” wrote Oliver, “since the administration has refused to make available the documents and the witnesses that could finally and conclusively clear Mr. Bush.”

Well-Founded Suspicions

From Janet Rehnquist’s memo on the meeting with Jeffords and Sanford, it appears that Oliver’s suspicion was well-founded about the involvement of Bush’s White House in the decision to conceal the name of the supposed afternoon host.

Another released documents reflected how angry the Republicans were about Oliver, who also had been a dogged investigator during the congressional Iran-Contra probe in 1987. Thomas Smeeton, a former CIA officer who served as Republican staff director for the House Intelligence Committee and had been Rep. Dick Cheney’s appointee to the congressional Iran-Contra committee, sent Rehnquist a memorandum prepared for Republican members regarding Oliver.

Entitled “October Surprise – The Ubiquitous Spencer Oliver,” the memo said Republicans had “been told repeatedly that Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman [Dante] Fascell does not want his Chief Counsel, Spencer Oliver, to participate in the ‘October Surprise’ probe. Yet, we continue to get reports that he’s as active as ever. For example, the GAO [General Accounting Office], in congressional testimony last year [1991] indicated that he attended an October Surprise meeting with Senator Terry Sanford.”

Keeping Oliver off the October Surprise investigation became a high priority for the Republicans. At a midway point in the inquiry when some Democratic Task Force members asked the knowledgeable Oliver to represent them as a staff investigator, Republicans threatened a boycott unless Oliver was barred.

In a gesture of bipartisanship, Rep. Hamilton gave the Republicans the power to veto Oliver’s participation. Denied one of the few Democratic investigators with both the savvy and courage to pursue a serious investigation, the Democratic members of the Task Force retreated further into passivity.

Meanwhile, Bush’s White House kept up the pressure, restricting congressional access to key documents pertinent to the investigation. In a “top secret” memo dated June 26, 1992, to the State Department about cooperation with the October Surprise probe, National Security Council executive secretary William F. Sittmann demanded “special treatment” for NSC documents related to presidential deliberations.

Regarding the House Task Force, Sittmann recommended that only Republican counsel Richard Leon and Democratic counsel Barcella be “permitted to read relevant portions of the documents and to take notes, but that the State Department retain custody of the documents and the notes at all times.”

Though Republicans kept insisting that the October Surprise allegations were a myth, the Bush administration was going to extraordinary lengths to control the evidence.

Questioning the Cost

As early as November 1991 at White House counsel Gray’s inter-agency meeting, Gray instructed administration officials to keep track of the costs for document searches so the inquiry could be challenged as a waste of money. Again and again, the documents reveal a near obsession with the estimated costs of the probe as well as the close collaboration between Rehnquist’s office and Republican congressional staff, especially John Mackey, the minority staff director on the October Surprise Task Force.

When another Bush legal adviser, Lee Liberman, helped coordinate a P.R. attack on the cost of the October Surprise investigation, Mackey sent his business card with the note, “Lee: FYI How to hit back! Best, John”

Bush’s White House also kept close track of press stories, especially those attacking the credibility of anyone who made October Surprise allegations. That was especially true about Carter’s former NSC aide Gary Sick, whose New York Times op-ed in April 1991 had given important impetus to the long-held suspicions regarding a GOP-Iranian deal in 1980.

On May 21, 1991, President Bush dashed off a personal note to conservative columnist William Rusher, thanking him for “rallying ‘round in that article challenging Gary Sick to apologize.”

However, at least one White House official privately held a different view of Sick’s book, October Surprise. On June 23, 1992, after reading it, Ash Jain wrote a memo to Janet Rehnquist, noting that “Sick presents a seemingly compelling account of [William] Casey’s participation in secret meetings with the Iranian Government.”

In the end, the Republican “delay/filibuster strategy” proved successful. The impact of the October Surprise scandal on Campaign 1992 was minimized, although Bush still failed to win reelection. It wasn’t until December 1992 – a month after Bush lost to Bill Clinton – that the floodgates on October Surprise evidence finally began to open.

Years later, Task Force chief counsel Barcella told me that so much new evidence poured in that final month implicating the Republicans that he asked Hamilton to extend the investigation three more months. But Hamilton, recognizing how nasty the Republican reaction would be, turned down the extension request, Barcella said.

For his part, Hamilton told me that he had no recollection of Barcella’s request. Hamilton also said he had no memory of Barcella ever showing him the Russian Report which arrived in January 1993 and corroborated allegations of meetings between Iranians and Republicans in Europe, including Bush, Gates and Casey in Paris.

Despite all the evidence of Republican guilt, Hamilton and his Task Force simply signed off on a finding of Republican innocence.

Though many lessons can be drawn from the failed October Surprise investigation of two decades ago, one point that is relevant today is to understand what a real government cover-up looks like.

Austerity Kills: Crippling Economic Policies Causing Global Health Crisis

Amy Goodman, David Stuckler, Sanjay Basu , Democracy Now! — Tue, 21 May 2013 13:26:00 -0700

Economist David Stuckler and physician Sanjay Basu examine the health impacts of austerity across the globe in their new book.

The following is reprinted from the Democracy Now! interview,"Why Austerity Kills: From Greece to U.S., Crippling Economic Policies Causing Global Health Crisis."

In their new book, "The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills," economist David Stuckler and physician Sanjay Basu examine the health impacts of austerity across the globe. The authors estimate there have been more than 10,000 additional suicides and up to a million extra cases of depression across Europe and the United States since governments started introducing austerity programs in the aftermath of the economic crisis. For example, in Greece, where spending on public health has been slashed by 40 percent, HIV rates have jumped 200 percent, and the country has seen its first malaria outbreak since the 1970s. An economist and public health specialist, Stuckler is a senior research leader at Oxford University. Dr. Basu is a physician and epidemiologist who teaches at Stanford University. "Had austerity been organized like a clinical trial, it would’ve been discontinued given evidence of its deadly side effects," Stuckler says. "There is an alternative choice that we found in the historical data and through the present recessions: When we place people and their health at the center of economic recovery, it can help get our economy back on track faster and yield lasting dividends to our society."

Amy Goodman: "Early last month, a triple suicide was reported in the seaside town of Civitanova Marche, Italy. A married couple, Anna Maria Sopranzi, who was 68, and Romeo Dionisi, [who was] 62, had been struggling to live on her monthly pension of around 500 euros [around $650 a month], and had fallen behind on rent.

"Because the Italian government’s austerity budget had raised the retirement age, Mr. Dionisi, a former construction worker, became one of Italy’s esodati (exiled ones)—older workers plunged into poverty without a safety net. On April 5, he and his wife left a note on a neighbor’s car asking for forgiveness, then hanged themselves in a storage closet at home. When Ms. Sopranzi’s brother, Giuseppe [Sopranzi, who was] 73, heard the news, he drowned himself in the Adriatic."

Those are the opening lines to a startling recent article in The New York Times headlined "How Austerity Kills." The authors of the piece, David Stuckler and Dr. Sanjay Basu, have just published a new book looking at the health impacts of austerity across the globe. The authors estimate there have been more than 10,000 additional suicides and up to a million extra cases of depression across Europe and the United States since governments started introducing austerity programs in the aftermath of the economic crisis. In Greece, where spending on public health has been slashed by 40 percent, HIV rates have jumped 200 percent, and Greece has seen its first outbreak in malaria since the 1970s.

David Stuckler is an economist and public health specialist. He’s a senior research leader at Oxford University. Dr. Sanjay Basu is a physician and epidemiologist. He teaches at Stanford University. Together, they’ve written this new book, out today, called The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills—Recessions, Budget Battles, and the Politics of Life and Death.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! I’m glad you could both be together in one place, being at Stanford and being at Oxford. David, let’s begin with you. Lay out the thesis of this book.

David Stuckler: We’ve been studying how recessions affect people’s health over the past decade, looking at the Great Depression through the East Asian financial crisis, right through to the present Great Recession. And what we found is that recessions hurt. Unemployment, job loss, foreclosure, unpayable debt are risks to health. But what ultimately matters is how politicians respond. And when they make large cuts to social supports, social protections, they can turn recessions into severe epidemics.

Amy Goodman: So, explain. Give us examples in countries. I mean, this horrific story I just described of this triple suicide, the couple and then her brother. Talk about what people—what happens when policies go one way or the other.

David Stuckler: Greece is in the middle of a public health disaster, as you mentioned. To meet budget deficit reduction targets set by the so-called troika—the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and European Commission—Greece has cut its health sector by more than 40 percent. At a time when homelessness is escalating and austerity has further driven up youth unemployment, we’ve seen HIV infections jump, concentrated in injection drug users. The malaria outbreak was linked to the cut in mosquito-spraying prevention programs, creating an outbreak that’s much more costly to control than the short-term money saved by reducing the budget. Healthcare access has declined substantially. The majority of people who have lost access are pensioners who have contributed to the system their entire lives. And these are just a few of the many health effects seen in Greece, mirrored in Spain, Italy and, to some extent, the U.K. and the U.S.

Amy Goodman: We were just talking before the show about one of the suicides in Spain that became very well known. I wanted to turn to a clip. At the time, we were talking to a formerDemocracy Now! producer, María Carrión, about this case that occurred in Spain. The woman, David, was named?

David Stuckler: Amaia Egaña. It was a case of Spain’s eviction suicides. Spain has a system where when people’s homes are foreclosed, even if they default on their home, they’re still liable to pay back the debt. So people are plunged into poverty and arrears at the same time, without support. We’ve seen this trigger large rises in suicides. Spain, Italy and Greece are at the high end of increases in economic suicides.

Amy Goodman: So, Amaia Egaña was 53 years old. She jumped from a balcony to her death as she was about to be evicted. María Carrión appeared on the show to talk about Amaia’s suicide.

María Carrión: Amaia is a former city council member in a town—the town of Barakaldo in the Basque Country. And her case is especially tragic because she actually didn’t share just how bad off the situation was even with her husband. So, most people had no idea that there was a whole—there had been a repossession and an eviction process. She was so desperate and so ashamed of the situation that she jumped out of her balcony, her fourth floor apartment, as court employees came to evict her. This comes two weeks after police found a man dead in his apartment as they went in to evict him from his home after repossession.

And—but, you know, the movement to stop these evictions and repossessions has been working very hard on this for almost two years, and this is just the watershed. This has been the one situation that has actually forced government and the opposition and banks to come to the table and talk about real reform. Before this, you had these evictions taking place—500 orders every single day—silently. And thanks to the 15M movement—this is—was the Occupy movement in Spain just over a year ago—the platform against evictions was incredibly energized. And so, they have been able to stop hundreds of evictions.

But those are evictions of people who come to them and who say, you know, "My home is being repossessed. I’m facing eviction. Can you help me?" There are a lot of people like Amaia who did not do this, out of perhaps a sense of guilt or embarrassment. And so, her case is really representative and emblematic of what has gone wrong in Spain with, you know, thousands of people being left homeless after repossession and eviction.

Amy Goodman: David Stuckler, you were in Spain when Amaia killed herself.

David Stuckler: I was at a conference with the Barcelona Public Health Agency. The meeting got cut short as protests erupted onto the streets of Barcelona. People were outraged at the eviction-suicide of Amaia, at the hardship perpetuated by deep budget cuts under the Rajoy government in Spain.

Amy Goodman: On April 4, 2012, a 77-year-old retired Greek pharmacist named Dimitris Christoulas shot and killed himself near the Greek Parliament after writing a note that blamed his suicide on the economic crisis. His daughter Emi spoke at his funeral and said his act had been deeply political.

Emi Christoulas: [translated] You found it unacceptable that they were killing our freedom, our democracy, our dignity. You found it unacceptable as they tightened the harsh noose of economic austerity and apartheid around us, to the unacceptable act of surrendering our independence and the keys to the country. It was unacceptable to you that Greece did not acknowledge its children and its children did not recognize their own country. You found the bestiality of capitalism unacceptable, that it infiltrated our lives and no one tried to stop it. Then, you made your decision to become the fear, the death, the memory, the sorrow of our ruined lives.

Amy Goodman: Sanjay Basu, you have found more than 10,000 additional suicides and up to a million extra cases of depression across Europe and the United States. Since when? How did you come up with these figures?

Dr. Sanjay Basu: Right. One of the major questions we asked here: Is this inevitable during a recession? Recessions are bad times. Could this just be the recession’s effects as opposed to austerity’s effects? And so, what we did is used so-called natural experiments. We compared regions and countries since the beginning of the recession, and even beforehand, to control for people’s pre-existing conditions, pre-existing mental health and alcoholism and so forth, and also compared areas that faced the same economic shock but had different policy responses. And looking at those as comparative cases, we could find that, in fact, during recessions, inevitably suicides or alcoholism didn’t increase, but rather, it was after austerity, in particular. And controlling for other factors that could statistically explain this, austerity consistently came up as a key trigger not just for suicides, but for alcohol, stress-related heart attacks and other major causes of death.

Amy Goodman: Now, this is the key point here, is the difference—I mean, people can say, "Well, hard times lead to, you know, very painful decisions that people make."

Dr. Sanjay Basu: Mm-hmm.

Amy Goodman: But that you’re saying that even in equally difficult situations, when countries opt for another solution, the public health of that community changes.

Dr. Sanjay Basu: Correct. We can look, for example, at Iceland as a contrast. Now, Greece and Iceland are very different socially, politically and economically, but Iceland serves as a nice case in point right now. They had faced a debt at 800 percent of GDP, the largest banking crisis in history compared to the size of the economy.

Amy Goodman: When their banks failed, their three top banks failed.

Dr. Sanjay Basu: Correct, all three major banks failed. And they had invested, of course, in U.S. mortgage-backed securities. After this, the Iceland politicians decided to do something truly unique as compared to the rest of Europe. They actually put the austerity plan to a public vote. And the public voted that instead of paying off bankers’ debts immediately through public cuts, they would instead do it gradually. They would still bail out their banks, but over the course of time and with great pace towards preserving their social safety net. And indeed what Iceland ended up doing was maintaining some of the healthiest standards in the world and the highest level of happiness.

Amy Goodman: We were just joined by the Icelandic Parliamentarian Birgitta Jónsdóttir onDemocracy Now! here in New York—she had just come in from Iceland—talking about how Iceland recovered from the collapse of its banking system. A part of what the country did, as you said, was to preserve its universal healthcare system.

Birgitta Jonsdottir: Actually, everybody has the same access to health and education. So even I, as an MP, ended up in a hospital in November, and I got exactly the same treatment as the woman working in the factory or in McDonald’s or Domino’s. And I like that. I love that. I think that is so important. And so, we pay just about the same amount of taxes as U.S. taxpayers. We don’t have to live in this insurance jungle. So we just, you know—and that was actually one of the first things they wanted to slash down, the IMF—no surprise.

Amy Goodman: They preserve their healthcare system.

Dr. Sanjay Basu: Mm-hmm. And indeed she highlights one of the key issues here, which is that there’s a great misunderstanding around debts and deficits. When we face a liquidities crisis, meaning that there’s a collapse in demand in the system, we actually find, quite robustly, through peer-reviewed journals and consistent with those of our colleagues, that stimulus early on does not actually produce higher, longer-term debts, but it generates the revenue and the building of the economic cycle that allows us to pay off those longer-term debts. By contrast, these short-term cuts end up so slowing the economic cycle that we find both economic and public health devastation as a result.

Amy Goodman: After break, I want to talk about the U.S., but, David Stuckler, you said you looked at the labor policies of places like Sweden and Finland in times of recession.

David Stuckler: It’s a remarkable case study. It alludes to what Sanjay mentioned earlier. Sweden faced a large banking crisis. Unemployment jumped by more than 10 percentage points. And yet suicides fell steadily. What we learned is that when politicians managed the consequences of unemployment well, they were able to prevent a mental health crisis. The specific programs we found are called active labor market programs. These help the newly unemployed link to caseworkers, develop an action plan and return into jobs. They treat unemployment like the pandemic it is. It not only saves money on healthcare bills, but even pays for itself by helping spur economic recovery.

Amy Goodman: We’re going to talk about what choices the United States is making, with David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu. Their book is called The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills. Stay with us.

[break]

Amy Goodman: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently revealed the suicide rate in people aged 35 to 64 rose by nearly 30 percent over the past decade, to 17.6 deaths per 100,000. The biggest increase was seen for men in their fifties, where the suicide rate increased 50 percent. Overall, suicides are now a greater cause of death in the United States than car accidents.CDC Director Thomas Frieden recently spoke to PBS NewsHour.

Dr. Thomas Frieden: We don’t know what specifically is causing it, but the trend has been consistent. And, if anything, our numbers would underestimate the gravity of the problem. And, of course, even one death from suicide is a terrible tragedy, and many of them are preventable. We know that in times of financial stress, there is generally an increase in suicides. We also know that this is a generation that grew up at a time when they expected more than some have been able to achieve in their lives, and also that they’re stressed with what their kids are going through and what their parents are going through. So it’s, in some ways, the sandwich generation.

Amy Goodman: That’s CDC Director Thomas Frieden on PBS. We’re joined by David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu. They are authors of The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills. David Stuckler is a senior research leader at Oxford University, and Sanjay Basu is an assistant professor of medicine and epidemiologist at Stanford University. If you could respond, Dr. Basu, to Dr. Frieden’s comment?

Dr. Sanjay Basu:Yeah, I certainly agree with Dr. Frieden’s comment. And what we have found in our research is that these suicide rate spikes seem to correspond quite closely to state-level unemployment rates. And in particular, when we do these long-term studies that track individuals before the recession, during the recession and after, we can control for their pre-existing mental health statistically, and we find that it’s the new unemployment that seems to trigger new onset of depression and suicide, particularly among our most vulnerable, adults over 50, who, when they lose a job, are often discriminated against or have a very hard time finding new work. There’s a great deal of shame, and also it’s quite hard for our healthcare system to access those individuals, given the degree of barriers that they have, social barriers, to accessing mental healthcare.

Amy Goodman: I mean, the point for people to understand in this country is, what’s unusual for us, compared to other countries, is that when we lose our jobs, we lose our health insurance.

Dr. Sanjay Basu: Absolutely. And we do have some safety nets in the form of Medicaid, Medicare, but it’s quite true that there are some large holes in that system, as has been repeated time and time again.

Amy Goodman: During an interview on Fox News in February, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina suggested slashing healthcare to stop scheduled sequester cuts from, quote, "destroying the military."

Sen. Lindsey Graham: The commander-in-chief thought—came up with the idea of sequestration, destroying the military and putting a lot of good programs at risk. Here’s my belief. Let’s take "Obamacare" and put it on the table. You can make $86,000 a year in income and still get a government subsidy under "Obamacare." "Obamacare" is destroying healthcare in this country. People are leaving the private sector because their companies can’t afford to offer "Obamacare." If you want to look at ways to find $1.2 trillion in savings over the next decade, let’s look at "Obamacare." Let’s don’t destroy the military and just cut blindly across the board.

Amy Goodman: David Stuckler, can you respond to Senator Graham?

David Stuckler: Austerity in health is a false economy. The cliché, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, is really true. New York City officials learned this the hard way in the early 1990s, when they cut TB prevention programs by $120 million but ended up with a drug-resistant TB outbreak that cost more than $1.2 billion to control. What we found is that smart investments in public health can have a return on investment, for each dollar, of up to $3.

Amy Goodman: So, talk about the healthcare system, Dr. Sanjay Basu, how sequester fits in, and also just what Lindsey Graham was talking about, "Obamacare."

Dr. Sanjay Basu: So, I’m not a politician and—but I do analyze data. And I think, in looking comparatively among OECD countries, you see a lot of false claims about the U.S. health system. Why is it that we cost so much more and seem to be getting less? I think comparing our country to other OECD stations provides some sense of what—

Amy Goodman: You’re talking about European countries?

Dr. Sanjay Basu: European, as well as Japan, Australia and so forth. And you can see a lot of the myths by just looking at the data. So, what are the theories? The theory is, for example, maybe it’s just American obesity. Well, actually, the costs started well before American obesity and doesn’t seem to correspond actually statistically to obesity. Maybe it’s that we have an older population, but not so. Switzerland actually pays more in nursing home care. Japan has an older population, yet they still pay less while getting more in terms of health. Maybe it’s just technology. We do a lot of research and development. But, in fact, if you look at the Securities and Exchange Commission data, the R&D pharmaceutical industry, while making—

Amy Goodman: Research and development of the pharmaceutical companies.

Dr. Sanjay Basu: Sure. While they make a higher percent profit as a percentage of revenue than any other Fortune 500 industry at the moment, they actually spend almost double on marketing as compared to research and development. And while we do use more technology and we do tend to have some higher costs from technology, it doesn’t actually explain the majority of the bundle.

What you do see, on the other hand, if you just look at the raw data, is that we get more—we get more incentives in order to test the people who are covered, in order to bill more. And there’s a lot of companies making quite a bit of money on that margin. You can go to one hospital across town and be charged double or more of what another hospital has on a different side of town. But it’s not like a consumer market. If I’m in a car accident, I can’t say to the surgeon, "Hold my hand there for a moment before sewing it back on. I’m just going to go across town and compare prices for a minute."

So healthcare is a different kind of industry, in which we have what is classically called "market failure" by the Nobel Prize winner Kenneth Arrow back in the ’60s, but people ignored his work. I think what we really have is a system where we confuse inequality with choice. The majority of our costs come from common conditions in a small number of patients who have complications of diabetes, heart failure, hypertension. And we need more primary care prevention rather than paying for the ICU care.

Amy Goodman: I wanted to go back, and this is a theme you follow in The Body Economic, to the Depression. Going back to the Great Depression and the New Deal, this is President Franklin Delano Roosevelt speaking in 1933.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt:It is three months, my friends, since I have talked with the people of this country about our national problems. But during this period, many things have happened. And I am glad to say that the major part of them have greatly helped the well-being of the average citizen.

In the short space of these few months, I am convinced that at least four million have been given employment, or saying it another way, 40 percent of those seeking work have found it. That does not mean, my friends, that I am satisfied or that you are satisfied that our work has ended. We have a long way to go, but we are on the way.

We come to the relief, for a moment, of those who are in danger of losing their farms or their homes. I have publicly asked that the foreclosure on farms and cattles and homes be delayed until every mortgagor in the country has had full opportunity to take advantage of federal credit. And I make the further request that if there is any family in the United States about to lose its home or its farm, that family should telegraph at once, either to the Farm Credit Administration or the Home Loan Corporation in Washington, requesting their help.

Amy Goodman: That was President Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. I think this is going to be very interesting for a lot of people listening and watching this today. David Stuckler, the choices made then and the choices being made today?

David Stuckler: Completely different. Roosevelt took bold steps, at a time when debt was 180 percent of GDP, to boost financial relief to the newly unemployed, to save Americans from homelessness. And we’ve studied the effects of his landmark program, the New Deal, on health. And what we found is that, comparing the states, the red and blue states, that pushed it to different degrees—the blue states tended to go further with the New Deal than the red states—led to a polarization in public health outcomes across the U.S. The greater relief spending implemented under the New Deal helped reduce suicides, reduced tuberculosis and pneumonias, and was in fact the biggest and one of the most effective public health programs on U.S. soil.

Amy Goodman: When you hear politicians today saying, "We’ve got to cut 'Obamacare.' We’ve got to cut healthcare in this country," talk about what you found, what it means for the economy to invest in public health.

David Stuckler: Investing in public health is a wise choice in good times and an urgent necessity in the worst of times. Had austerity been organized like a clinical trial, it would have been discontinued, given evidence of its deadly side effects. There is an alternative choice that we found in the historical data and through the present recessions, that when we place people and their health at the center of economic recovery, it can help get our economy back on track faster and yield lasting dividends to our society.

Amy Goodman: The issue of the West Nile outbreak, can you talk about that?

Dr. Sanjay Basu: Mm-hmm. Down in Bakersfield in California, there was a suspicion about why crows were dropping from the sky and people were also showing up in hospitals. A variety of theories were posited, ranging from polio to heat stroke, but in fact it amounted to a West Nile outbreak that, through a number of our colleagues’ research, it was found that the abandoned and foreclosed homes had stagnant water in old swimming pools and in other locations that were breeding mosquitoes. And this led to a rather large West Nile outbreak. Indeed, the reason why it was discovered was something called the California Encephalitis Project, a group of public system laboratories that work in concert with the CDC. And ironically, after helping to control that outbreak, they were closed due to budget cuts.

Amy Goodman: I want to turn to the issue of drug abuse. A recent film by Vice has brought renewed attention to the drug crisis in Greece, particularly the use of the new drug called sisa. This is Haralampos Poulopoulos, head of KETHEA, the main anti-drug center in Greece.

Dr. Haralampos Poulopoulos: Sisa is a form of crystal methamphetamine. They use amphetamines and some other liquids, sometimes battery liquids, to produce this drug. It’s very dangerous for the health of the users. I think the main reason for the increase of sisa is the changes of the attitudes of drug users during the crisis. They are more self-destructive. We have 27 percent unemployment, 62 percent the young people under 25. We didn’t finish yet with the crisis. We are in the middle of the crisis.

Amy Goodman: Haralampos Poulopoulos, head of the main anti-drug center in Greece. David Stuckler, talk about that, and also relate it to here, as we wrap up.

David Stuckler: This is a devastating situation we’re seeing in Greece with a drug crisis escalating at a time when drug prevention budgets are being cut. With gaping holes in social safety nets from austerity, people are becoming desperate, turning to the means of self-harm. We’ve seen drug use and infected needles spread HIV, creating rise of more than 200 percent, leading to an epicenter of HIV/AIDS spread in Europe.

What we can learn from these mistakes, and areas where we see successes in policy, is that recessions can hurt, but austerity kills. When politicians make smart choices to protect people during hard times, it doesn’t happen at expense of recovery but can help put our societies back on track to a happier, healthier future.

Amy Goodman: And here in the United States, how that translates into policy?

David Stuckler: Currently, we’re facing and implementing a large sequester in the U.S. While it’s too early to see the full health consequences, what we are seeing is the Women, Infants, Children’s health program, which provides nutritional subsidies to women, will be forced to reduce those subsidies from 600,000 pregnant women. And that program has been linked to reducing infant mortality. We’re also seeing large cuts to public housing budgets at a time when 1.4 million homes are still in foreclosure. We are concerned that, if done rapidly and indiscriminately, that budget cuts in the U.S. could create a repeat of the disasters that we’re seeing in Europe.

Amy Goodman: Final comment, what most shocked you in writing The Body [Economic], Sanjay Basu?

Dr. Sanjay Basu: You know, coming from the public health field, we have something called the "precautionary principle," which is that when a idea or policy is controversial, we should first do whatever protects people the most. And what we’re doing is entirely the opposite. We’ve essentially had a massive untested experiment. That experiment has failed, and it sounds like it’s quite deadly, given all the data through history.

Amy Goodman: I want to thank you both for being with us. Sanjay Basu is an epidemiologist at Stanford University. David Stuckler, Oxford University. Their new book, out today, The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills—Recessions, Budget Battles, and the Politics of Life and Death.

Reprinted with permission from Democracy Now!.

NYPD Stops of (Mostly) People of Color Wrong 90 Percent of the Time: 'High Error Rate,' Judge Says

Kristen Gwynne, AlterNet — Tue, 21 May 2013 12:00:00 -0700

Closing arguments have been made in the trial over the NYPD's controversial stop-and-frisk tactic. What now?

On Monday, the major class-action lawsuit Floyd v. the City of New York challenging the NYPD's "stop-and-frisk" policy wrapped up after more than two months of testimony. Plaintiffs allege that the NYPD has routinely and systematically violated the 4th and 14th Amendment rights of New Yorkers stopped and sometimes frisked because of their race. "They laid siege to black and Latino neighborhoods over the last eight years ... making people of color afraid to leave their homes," Gretchen Hoff Varner, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said Monday.

Reasonable suspicion that a person is about to, or has committed a crime is the legal prerequisite for a stop. But nine-tenths of stops have not resulted in any further law enforcement enforcement activity, like an arrest or a summons. “What troubles me is the fact that the suspicion seems to be wrong 90 percent of the time,” presiding judge Shira Scheindlin said during closing arguments. “That’s a high error rate.”

In addition, 85% of people stopped are black or Latino, which plaintiffs say is further evidence of racial motivation. They also allege that quotas the NYPD has described as "performance standards" for "proactive policing" encourage officers to make unconstitutional stops based on race.

Earlier in the trial, NYPD officers Pedro Serrano and Adhyl Polanco testified that they were forced to meet numerical quotas for stops or face punishment. Their secretly recorded tapes reveal supervisors commanding officers to make "20-and 1" (20 summonses and 1 arrest), as well as "five 250s," or street stops, per month.

Serrano also recorded 40th Precinct’s commanding officer, Deputy Inspector Christopher McCormack, telling him to stop “the right people at the right time, the right location" adding that the "problem" was "male blacks 14 to 20, 21."

The description was echoed by others throughout the trial, who testified that those deemed suspects are young men of color. The defense categorically denies racial profiling. Rather, they said, they are simply going after the people responsible for committing crimes, who tend to be young men of color.

City attorney Heidi Grossman said during closing arguments that, "The right people are the right people about whom there is information directly connected to known crime conditions." The problem with that logic, plaintiffs said, is that a suspect description for a black youth in a "high-crime" area (which could be as large as Queens) could make any black teen in that neighborhood susceptible to a stop.

While the plaintiffs argued in summation that race has become a "proxy" for reasonable suspicion, the city claimed the race of people stopped was highly correlated with suspect descriptions.

During closing arguments, Judge Scheindlin challenged what she called the city's "circular argument."

"The fact that the stops reflect a similar percentage as the crime suspect data may show that the officers are influenced by the fact that they know in a certain area most crimes are committed by blacks," Scheindlin said. "So you may worry that they're adding race in as a reasonable suspicion factor."

Quotas

The plaintiffs alleged that a top-down policy that included the implementation of quotas or "performance standards" put pressure on police officers to make unconstitutional stops. The city argued that those speaking out against quotas are just lazy.

The defense claimed during summations that allegations of punishable quotas, which are forbidden under New York State Labor Law are a "sideshow." Heidi Grossman said that the plaintiffs presented not evidence of a city-wide quota policy, but "longstanding struggles" about "getting work done." Throughout the trial, the defense has also repeatedly invoked the language of NYPD Operations Order 52, which says that, "Department managers can and must set performance goals."

On Monday, plaintiffs attorney Jonathan Moore (with the Center for Constitutional Rights) said the trial is not just about quotas, but "pressure." A survey on the "numbers game" conducted by John Eterno of Molloy College and Eli B. Silverman of John Jay College of Criminal Justice found that retired police officers reported a four-fold increase in pressure on officers to do stops in the Bloomberg and Kelly era. During closings, Moore noted a simultaneous decrease in pressure to follow the Constitution, which he called a "lethal combination."

"More importantly this pressure does not exist we believe in a vacuum," said Moore. "The police feel pressure to get numbers in the context of an admitted strategy that targets young black and Hispanic males."

Moore referenced Sen. Eric Adams' "unrebutted" testimony that NYPD Commisioner Ray Kelly once told him he targeted young men of color "because he wanted to instill fear in them that every time that they left their homes they could be stopped by police." Moore also questioned Commissioner Ray Kelly's refusal to walk across the street from One Police Plaza and testify.

Heads in the Sand

Plaintiffs have accused the city and NYPD of adopting a "head in the sand" approach to stop-and-frisk. During closing, they cited as evidence their lack of concern with a one-tenth hit rate for stops, disparate stops for people of color, and denial of racial profiling complaints. Multiple NYPD witnesses, including former Chief of Department Joseph Esposito, had testified that they never heard complaints of racial profiling from the communities targeted by stop-and-frisk.

"To suggest that no one has complained about racial profiling or bad stops is disingenuous, in and of itself evidence of a deliberate indifference," Moore said during summation.

Helen McAleer, the commanding officer of Investigation Review for the NYPD, testified earlier in the trial that her office received very few racial profiling complaints, but also said that neither racial profiling nor stop-and-frisk complaints were matched to a code in their system. Rather, both are categorized under “general dissatisfaction.”

Plaintiffs attorney Darius Charney testified in closing arguments that, "We believe the fact that the police department does not consider something racial profiling, unless somebody uses explicitly the words 'race' or 'racial bias,' we think is a head-in-the-sand approach."

Plaintiffs also allege that constitutional violations stemming from stop-and-frisk are part of a top-down policy starting with Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Under his and Kelly's leadership, the NYPD conducted 4.4 million stops, more than a 600% increase since Bloomberg took office. The defense say the increase came from an increased focus on paperwork.

Relief

Should the judge rule in their favor, plaintiffs are calling for sweeping changes that would dramatically alter how NYPD officers are trained, supervised, and held accountable for stop-and-frisk. They requested better documentation of stops and more supervision of officers, as well as the revocation of Operations Order 52, which allows performance goals. They are also calling for an "independent monitor" to assist communication between the NYPD and the communities most affected by policing.

During closing arguments, Judge Scheindlin asked questions about the possibility of a "body-worn" camera to ensure that police officers are, indeed, following the law. She is expected to rule on Floyd, and possibly make recommendations for relief, in the next couple of months. Plaintiffs will not receive any monetary compensation.

How America's National Security Apparatus -- in Partnership With Big Corporations -- Cracked Down on Dissent

Alex Kane, AlterNet — Tue, 21 May 2013 11:53:00 -0700

A new report is an eye-opening look into how the U.S. counter-terror apparatus was used to track the Occupy movement.

Counter-terror police officers collaborated with corporate entities to combat protests. Undercover police officers monitored and tracked the Occupy movement. A right-wing corporate-backed group hired a police officer to help protect a conference. These are some of the details revealed in a new report published by the Center for Media and Democracy’s Beau Hodai, along with DBA Press. The revelations are based on government documents the group obtained.

The report, titled "Dissent or Terror: How the Nation's Counter Terrorism Apparatus, In Partnership With Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street,” is an eye-opening look into how the U.S. counter-terror apparatus was used to track the Occupy movement in 2011 and 2012 and also help protect the business entities targeted by the movement. The report specifically looks at the activities of “fusion centers,” or law enforcement entities created after 9/11 that transform local police forces into counter-terror units in partnership with federal agencies like the Department of Homeland Security. The fusion centers devoted a lot of time--to the point of “obsession,” the report notes--to monitoring the Occupy movement, particularly for any “threats” to public safety or health and to whether there were “extremists” involved in the movement.

The documents obtained for the report from government agencies reveal “a grim mosaic of ‘counter-terrorism’ agency operations and attitudes toward activists and other socially/politically-engaged citizens over the course of 2011 and 2012,” writes Hodai. He adds that these heavily-funded agencies indisputably view Occupy activists as “terrorist” threats. Additionally, Hodai writes that “this view of activists, and attendant activist monitoring/suppression, has been carried out on behalf of, and in cooperation with, some of the nation’s largest financial and corporate interests.”

Much of the report hones in on the Occupy Phoenix branch of the movement and Arizona counter-terrorism agents monitoring, tracking and cracking down on the protests.

For instance, when JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon was planning on coming to Phoenix in October 2011, a “counter-terrorism” detective employed by the Phoenix Police Department’s Homeland Security Bureau exchanged information on potential protests with a JP Morgan Chase security manager. The detective, Jennifer O’Neill, received information on Dimon’s travel plans, and then shared information about Occupy Phoenix. O’Neill said that she and another officer had tracked the online activities of Occupy protesters to find out if they were planning to protest Dimon. No plans for protest were discovered by O’Neill, who also works with the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center, otherwise known as the Arizona fusion center.

Another similar example of how corporate entities were helped by counter-terrorism units of police forces also occurred in October 2011. Then, businesses--including banks--received alerts authored by the Arizona fusion center about planned protest activities. Similar alerts to banks were given in the run-up to the November 5 day of action labeled “Bank Transfer Day,” which encouraged people to move their money from corporate banks to more local financial institutions. The Federal Bureau of Investigation also engaged in similar activity, according to the report. “The bureau had been in the business of alerting banks (and related entities) tothe planned protest activity of OWS groups as early as August of 2011.”

The extent of law enforcement-corporate cooperation has also been taken a step further by the practice of corporations or right-wing corporate backed groups hiring officers for pay to police protests.

In late November-early December 2011, the largest Occupy Phoenix action took place outside of a conference held by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporate-funded group that brings together right-wing lobbyist groups and conservative politicians to push model legislation in state legislatures. The protest was marred by police violence, with officers deploying pepper spray and pepper ball projectiles on activists and arresting 5. While the police portrayed the action as the work of violent anarchists, Hodai writes that this narrative of events had little grounding in reality.

Hodai reveals that the “tactical response unit” of officers working at the action was under the direction of Phoenix Police Department Sgt. Eric Harkins. What makes this noteworthy is that Harkins was “actually off-duty, earning $35 per hour as a private security guard employed by ALEC.” ALEC also “hired 49 active duty and 9 retired PPD officers to act as private security during the conference.” ALEC also employed off-duty police officers from Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department during another ALEC summit in May 2012.

The Center for Media and Democracy report also provides details on how police officers tracked and went undercover to monitor the Occupy movement. The report focuses on an undercover police officer who went by the name of “Saul DeLara,” who presented himself as a homeless Mexican activist. “DeLara” went to Occupy meetings and then reported back on their contents to the police.

The revelations are confirmation that, as the Center for Media and Democracy noted in a press release,”the nation's post-September 11, 2001 counter terrorism apparatus has been applied to politically engaged citizens exercising their Constitutionally-protected First Amendment rights.”

Red State Hypocrites: Inhofe and Coburn

Joan Walsh, Salon — Tue, 21 May 2013 11:46:00 -0700

Apparently, we have deserving and undeserving disasters, Oklahoma senators James Inhofe and Tom Coburn explain.

Just a week ago, Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe suggested that President Obama might be impeached over the Benghazi non-scandal. Now, Inhofe must watch as Obama declares Inhofe’s state a disaster area and promises Oklahomans “all the resources they need at their disposal.”

Inhofe, of course, believes his state deserves those resources, even though he voted down aid to Hurricane Sandy victims. On MSNBC, Chris Jansing confronted Inhofe about his calling the Sandy aid bill a “slush fund,” and the brazen right-winger insisted the two issues shouldn’t be linked.

“Let’s look at that, that was totally different,” Inhofe told Jansing. “They were getting things — for instance that was supposed to be in New Jersey, they had things in the Virgin Islands, they were fixing roads there, they were putting roofs on houses in Washington, D.C.; everyone was getting in and exploiting the tragedy taking place. That won’t happen in Oklahoma.”

Inhofe’s answer is too dishonest to fully parse. First of all, there was Sandy damage way beyond New Jersey, including in the Caribbean and in Washington, D.C., too. And Inhofe had different objections to the Sandy bill at the time. In a rambling, hard-to-follow Senate floor speech blocking Sandy aid last December, the Oklahoma conservative objected to the bill’s timing — “There’s always a lot of theater right before Christmas time … We shouldn’t be talking about it right before Christmas” — even though it was already going on two months since the storm ravaged the East Coast.

Inhofe was also exercised by the fact that the Sandy bill included what he said was $28 billion for future disasters. But the climate-change denier was particularly outraged that the bill included $3.5 billion to deal with what he called “global warming,” which led to a long rant against cap-and-trade legislation, and then his floor speech unraveled. (Interestingly, Inhofe’s own press operation put the incoherent speech up on YouTube, as though it was a proud moment for the senator.)

Oklahoma’s other GOP senator, Tom Coburn, brags that he’s going to seek tornado relief — but insist that the funding is “offset” by other cuts to the federal budget. Coburn is proud that he’s being consistent by placing the same conditions on disaster aid to his own state as he’s demanded elsewhere. Consistent, maybe — but also fundamentally cruel.

Especially in the wake of the sequester cuts, the notion that the federal budget is larded with easily eliminated spending is ludicrous. Would Coburn like to see more kids thrown out of Head Start? More seniors losing Meals on Wheels? The federal deficit is shrinking faster than at any time since just after World War II, but Coburn is going to insist that someone, somewhere, must lose their federal help so Oklahoma can get it instead.

There’s something so typical about today’s GOP in the way Inhofe can dismiss comparisons between tornado aid and Sandy aid while Coburn grandstands for his long-term demand that new spending, even on disaster relief, must be “offset” by cuts elsewhere. Meanwhile, the notion that a new disaster relief bill should include funding to cope with future disasters isn’t lauded as common sense, it’s derided as pork. Like Inhofe, Coburn objected to the Sandy bill’s including funding for future disaster relief. (It should be noted that Moore, Okla., Rep. Tom Cole, also a Republican, voted for the Sandy aid bill.)

Just as modern conservatism helped create categories of “deserving” and “undeserving” poor, we now apparently have deserving and undeserving disasters. When tragedy strikes, most Americans tend to want to pull together, but many Republicans look to pull us apart, placing their own constituents’ needs above everyone else’s.

Seattle Teachers, Students Win Historic Victory Over Standardized Testing

Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! — Tue, 21 May 2013 10:43:00 -0700

After months of protest, teachers, students and parents in Seattle have won their campaign to reject standardized tests in reading and math.

The following is a transcript originally published on Democracy Now!:

AMY GOODMAN: We end today’s show looking at the victory for teachers and students in Seattle, Washington, where, following months of protest, high schools there will no longer have to conduct standardized tests in reading and math. Superintendent José Banda says the Measures of Academic Progress, or MAP, test is now optional for high schools, but those refusing the test must find another way to gauge student performance. In January, teachers at Garfield High School began a boycott of the test, saying it was wasteful and being used unfairly to assess their performance. The boycott spread to other schools, with hundreds of teachers, students, parents participating.

For more, we go to Seattle, where we’re joined by Jesse Hagopian, a high school history teacher and union rep at Garfield High. He also served as the Black Student Union’s faculty adviser and is a founding member of Social Equality Educators.

Jesse, welcome back to Democracy Now! Talk about this victory.

JESSE HAGOPIAN: Well, thanks again for having me on the program today.

And this is really a stunning victory for us here in Seattle at Garfield High School and across the city of the high schools boycotting the test. You know, a week ago today, an announcement went out saying that the test would be optional at the high school level, and it led to an eruption of celebration at Garfield, with fist bumps and high fives of teachers and students. And we were celebrating this long struggle. You know, we were threatened with a 10-day suspension without pay, and other consequences. And this was a real vindication.

We were celebrating the fact that our students will no longer have to sit in front of the dull glow of a computer screen, looking at questions that they were never prepared for because the test was not aligned to the state-mandated curriculum. And we were celebrating because our English-language learners will no longer have to be humiliated by a test that is linguistically and culturally inappropriate for them. Our special ed students will no longer have to take a test where their IEPs, or individual education plans, will no—are not respected.

And, you know, we were celebrating, I think, too, because Washington state ranks number one in the nation in high-stakes testing. And we spend over $100 million a year on these tests. And Garfield High School teachers and teachers around Seattle who have joined the boycott of the MAP test have said that we would rather spend that $100 million on reading coaches and on tutoring programs, things that can actually help elevate our students and get them where we know they need to be.

AMY GOODMAN: Jesse Hagopian, Garfield High School didn’t start this boycott. Explain the origins of it and how it links in with other protests against high-stake testing around the country.

JESSE HAGOPIAN: Well, we’ve seen movements against high-stakes testing all over the nation, you know, from parents opting their students out of these tests across the country to the principals’ associations in New York state saying we’ve had enough of these high-stakes tests.

But I think, in a way, you’re right: Garfield didn’t start the boycott. In my view, the boycott of the MAP test really began with the elite private schools, who never give these tests. They want their students to have access to critical thinking skills and creativity. They want their students to be prepared to be leaders in the world today, and so they don’t inundate their students with these high-stakes tests like they expect to be done in the public schools. So, in that way, you could say this boycott really began of the elite schools. But, in actuality, you know, Garfield, I think, was the first school to unanimously vote, of all the faculty, "we refuse to give this test."

And it’s a real crisis, I think, for these corporate education reformers, people like Michelle Rhee, who wrote an editorial in The Seattle Times against our boycott. And I think it’s a crisis for them, because their whole system of ed reform rests on these data points, on reducing teaching and learning to a single score that they can use to close schools, like you’re seeing being proposed in Chicago and Philadelphia, that they can use these data points really to degrade education and profit from it and privatize our schools, turning them into charters. And this boycott represents a threat to their ability to reduce teaching and learning to a single score. And I think that’s why you see Michelle Rhee and these corporate education reformers so upset that we stood up to their tests and refused to give them. And I think that’s why so many teachers and parents and students across the nation are celebrating this victory, including the Garfield High School PTSA that voted unanimously to support us.

AMY GOODMAN: Jesse, can you explain what you’re coming up with in its stead?

JESSE HAGOPIAN: Yeah, I mean, it’s important to know that we are not against assessment or testing at Garfield High School or any of the boycotting schools across Seattle. What we are against is assessments that are not culturally relevant, assessments that are not aligned to our curriculum, and assessments that don’t promote the type of skills we believe are necessary in the world today.

So we actually formed a teacher work group on assessment, and we had some very dedicated teachers who took time out of their week, every week for the last couple months, to do research, to collaborate and to come up with what we would replace the MAP test with. And it’s an incredible document. People should go to scrapthemap.wordpress.com and take a look at what we would replace the MAP with, and this is assessments that are related to our curriculum, assessments that actually measure many different skills rather than just your ability to fill in a bubble A, B, C or D, assessments like performance-based assessments, what you do when you get a Ph.D. You do research; you defend that research in front of a panel of experts. And I think that can be adapted for all grade levels and all subjects. And you get at a lot of different skills that you don’t get at with the simple standardized testing. And I’m really—

AMY GOODMAN: Jesse Hagopian, we’re going to have to leave it there, but I want to thank you so much for being with us, high school history teacher, union rep at Garfield High School.

Watch: The Touching Moment a Mother Sees Her Young Son Alive and Well for the First Time Since Tornado Hit

AlterNet — Tue, 21 May 2013 10:27:00 -0700

A touching moment between a woman and young son.

The official death toll from the tornado in Oklahoma stands at 24 people, including seven children whose bodies were recovered from the Plaza Towers Elementary School. In the video below, Trenda Purcell sees her son, a student at Briarwood Elementary school, for the first time since the tornado destroyed the building.

Watch:

h/t http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2328491/I-love-The-tear-jerking-...http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2328491/I-love-The-tear-jerking-moment-mother-reunited-lost-son-Oklahoma-tornado.html?ITO=1490&ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490

Police Tase Foreclosed Upon Homeowners Protesting Criminal Bankers, Criminal Bankers Continue Facing No Repercussions

Digby, Hullabaloo — Tue, 21 May 2013 09:53:00 -0700

Why shoot peaceful protesters full of electricity in order to get them to fall to the ground in excruciating pain, dazed and compliant?

You may have heard about the protests at the DOJ by foreclosed upon homeowners demanding that Eric Holder prosecute some bankers for their criminal activity. If you haven't, you can read all about it here.

Unfortunately, I received reports last night that citizens exercising their right to peacefully protest were being casually tasered by the authorities.

This came from my friend Jason Rosenbaum, who was there:

At the start of the action, when the protesters and homeowners arrived at the south entrance of the DOJ, we were greeted by half a dozen police in tactical gear or uniforms and a metal barrier cutting off access to a small courtyard in front of the large DOJ doors. The group of protesters rallied at the barrier and the planters next to it that made up the square and homeowners slowly climbed over the barriers in an attempt to gain an audience at the DOJ and register their complaints. At that point, the police were keeping people from climbing over, but eventually the police retreated and a few homeowners and protesters made it over and sat down to occupy that space. More joined them. After about 10 minutes, as more climbed over the barrier and the crowd occupied more space, the police retreated up the few steps leading to the door, and eventually ceded the square entirely by going inside the DOJ, leaving the protesters and homeowners alone in the square. The protesters took down the barriers at that point and everyone occupied the square, complete with signs, chants, couches, tents, and the like. (There's video/photos of this on my Twitter feed, @j_ro.)

That was phase one -- for the next phase, the protest split into three groups, with one staying at the south entrance and the two others to take entrances on the north and west sides of the building. I went with the group going to the west, and we were met again by police presence at the west entrance. We pushed on through to the north entrance around the block, and again were met by police. After sitting down there for a bit and taking the intersection down the block, we were notified that our brethren needed our help back at the south entrance and we marched over.

When I got there with the crowd in my group, the police had about a dozen homeowners in plastic cuffs on the south steps and had set up a police line around the original square in front of the door. The people in my group rushed through the line to sit down with their fellow protesters and homeowners being arrested, and it was at this point that at least one officer took out his taser gun, pulled the trigger, and started using it to push back those in the crowd coming to the support of those being arrested. That's what you see in my video. As Matt noted, it was over very quickly, with protesters looking to peacefully support those who were being arrested being tased and pushed back, and those being arrested led into a police van and driven away for processing.

At this point, as the arrests were being loaded into the van, another group of about a dozen sat down inside the police barrier and as far as I know they're still there (I had to leave about an hour after the initial arrests). So there may be more arrests to come shortly.

There is nothing new about protesters gathering at government buildings. And it has never been a problem for the police to arrest protesters in an orderly fashion, even when the protesters are not cooperating by sitting down and refusing to move. This is the way civil disobedience has worked for many a moon.

Shooting protesters full of electricity in order to get them to fall to the ground in excruciating pain, dazed and compliant, however, is new. And it's completely unnecessary, not to mention contrary to our long tradition of peaceful protest. I thought this sort of thing went out with the use of firehoses and police dogs.

It happened again today, this time well captured on video:

Note the casual sadism. The young woman is surrounded by three men as she links arms with another protester. She does not appear to be in any way violent or threatening. The big man behind her holds her around the neck and whispers in her ear (who knows what he told her, but if it's the usual, he says "cooperate right now or you're going to be tased.") As a peaceful protester engaged in civil disobedience she naturally refuses. At this point, they would normally pick her up bodily and carry her to the paddy wagon. Instead, they hit her with 50,000 volts of electricity, she crumbles to the ground as her whole body is overwhelmed by pain.

And then they blithely walk away, leaving her writhing on the ground. Let's just say they were lucky she wasn't one of the thousands of people who've died from tasers. I guess they would have noticed at some point when she stopped screaming.

This makes me sick to my stomach. And that it happened on the steps of the United States Department of Justice makes me ashamed to be an American.

The woman who was tasered is named Carmen Pittman. Here's her story. I guess she just hasn't been punished enough.

6 Ways Oklahoma's GOP Senators Have Fought to Undermine Relief Funding

Rebecca Leber, Think Progress — Tue, 21 May 2013 09:16:00 -0700

Inhofe is singing a different tune now.

Oklahoma residents will now turn to government assistance for emergency disaster aid after a tornado ripped through the state on Monday, leaving dozens dead and tearing apart hundreds of buildings. But the same night that many residents lost their homes, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) told CQ Roll Callinsisted he would “absolutely” require any federal disaster aid to be offset by other budget cuts. He later clarified on Tuesday, promising, “I can assure Oklahomans that any and all available aid will bedelivered without delay.”

Both of the state’s senators, Sen. James Inhofe (R) and Coburn, however, have long worked to undermine the Federal Emergency Management Agency, even though their state heavily relies on disaster aid:

1. In September 2011, Coburn offered an amendment to offset $6.9 billion in FEMA funding.
2. Coburn voted in 2011 against funding FEMA after it ran out of money, because, in his words, funding FEMA would have been “unconscionable.” Inhofe did not vote. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid fired back at Republicans blocking a bill for necessary funding to FEMA.
3. Inhofe proposed removing grants for storm shelter programs coordinating with FEMA, and instead provide individuals with tax breaks.
4. Coburn criticized items in Sandy disaster relief such as $12.9 billion for disaster mitigiation and $366 million for Amtrak as “wasteful spending.”
5. After Hurricane Sandy, Inhofe and Coburn voted against a bill for $50.5 billion in Hurrican Sandy disaster relief.
6. Coburn demanded that $5.25 billion in FEMA grant funds bereallocated because of sequestration in April 2013.

A spokesman told the Huffington Post that Coburn has supported offsets for the Oklahoma City bombing recovery effort, which tapped funds not yet appropriated.

Oklahoma and Texas rank as the top two states in FEMA disaster declarations; combined, they account for more than a quarter of declared disasters since 2009. So it doesn’t come as a surprise that the senators have requested disaster aid for severe storms and drought, even though Coburn is willing to hold up relief with his demands.

UPDATE

On MSNBC, Inhofe argued that tornado aid for Oklahoma is “totally different” from aid for Hurricane Sandy. “Everyone was getting in and exploiting the tragedy taking place,” he said. “That won’t happen in Oklahoma.”

America's Deadly Jobs

Julie Gutman, AlterNet — Tue, 21 May 2013 08:46:00 -0700

We are letting men and women die simply by failing to afford them basic protections.

The horrific collapse last month of a Bangladeshi garment factory, which claimed the lives of 1,127 people, has sparked appropriate global outrage, with advocates, pundits and politicians calling for tougher laws to protect exploited workers in Third World countries.

While this tragedy, like many before it, seems far removed from the reality of the American workplace, it isn’t nearly as remote as we might think -- a fact eerily underscored by the deadly fertilizer plant fire in Texas that preceded the Bangladeshi catastrophe.

While the surreal quality of the Texas disaster was somewhat unique, the deaths and injuries caused by it were not. Every year thousands of American workers die on the job, and millions are injured.

The reason? Lax worker safety laws, and weak enforcement of those that do exist. Another way of putting it is that we are letting men and women die simply by failing to afford them basic protections.

It was a gruesome factory accident -- the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, which killed 146 workers -- that led to the enactment of some of the first worker safety laws in the U.S. In the two years, following the fire, the New York Legislature passed dozens of lawsto protect factory workers, setting a national precedent. During the same period, the first workers’ compensation laws were approved, providing a powerful financial incentive for employers to improve workplace safety.

In the mid-20th Century, American workers enjoyed greater protections thanks to the rise of the U.S. labor movement. At their peak in the 1950s, unions represented one third of the American workforce, and used their influence to secure new safety measures. Then in 1971 Congress created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which was charged with setting and enforcing national safety measures. In the first few decades after OSHA’s creation, U.S. workplace fatalities dropped by more than 65 percent.

Today, however, a number of forces have conspired to weaken protections for American workers. Unions represent a fragment of the workers they once did, depriving most employees of a powerful advocate. At the same time, conservatives have mounted a successful effort at the national, state and local levels to water down or eliminate worker safety laws.

They have also fought a successful ideological battle to shrink the size of government, leaving far fewer resources for the enforcement of the laws that remain. Consider this: OSHA can inspect workplaces on average once every 131 years, while state OSHAs can inspect them once every 73 years. The current level of federal and state OSHA inspectors provides one inspector for every 58,687 workers. According to a new report from Worksafe, “The current OSHA budget averages only $3.75 per worker per year. Yet a recent study estimated the costs of work-related injuries and illnesses is at least $250 billion per year.”

If you think the situation is different for workers in progressive-minded states like California, think again. In 2010, 326 workers died due to workplace-related conditions, and another 360 died in 2011. Among thetop five causes of workplace deaths in 2011were transportation-related incidents, contact with objects and equipment and exposure to harmful substances and environments.

Translation: Too many people are dying on the job, from lab workers to construction workers to waste and recycling workers. And many, many more suffer serious injury or illness. In 2011 there were nearly 450,000 workplace-related injuries and illnesses in California, including an increasing number among low-wage female workers, from maids and housekeeping cleaners to food prep workers to janitors.

In its latest report, Worksafe outlines a number of recommendations to stem the tide of workplace death and injury. It urges, among other things, the adoption of new safeguards for service and transportation workers, because previous efforts to protect workers focused largely on manufacturing and construction. It also recommended stronger measures to protect workers from retaliation for reporting hazardous conditions, and an expansion of the rights of workers and their representatives to participate in enforcement programs.

We shouldn’t have to wait for a large-scale catastrophe like the one in Bangladesh to fix the problems that are killing and injuring U.S. workers. The time to act is now.

Julie Gutman Dickinson is a partner at the union-side law firm Bush, Gottlieb, Singer, Lopez, Kohanski, Adelsetin and Dickinson, and was a former NLRB trial attorney and Senior Labor Advisor to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

US Marshals Hold Innocent Family At Gun Point, Tell Them Not to Move Even After They Realize They've Got Wrong House

Alex Kane, AlterNet — Tue, 21 May 2013 08:26:00 -0700

Four U.S. Marshals busted down the door of the wrong house and held an innocent family at gunpoint.

It was 1:45 in the morning when James and Mildred Hill went to sleep after putting their granddaughter in bed. What came next for them shocked the Hills--and now they’ve filed suit, according to a report in the Courthouse News Service. The lawsuit was sparked by four U.S. Marshals busting down their door and holding them and their granddaughter at gunpoint.

The Hills have filed suit in federal court for assault and false imprisonment at the hands of U.S. Marshals. The judge in the case has ordered that the federal government must face their claims.

Here’s how the incident went down: when James and Mildred Hill went down after hearing a loud boom, James ran down the stairs. He was greeted by four armed Marshals who pointed guns at his head and ordered him to put his hands up or be shot. The other family members woke up and also had to go through the same terrifying ordeal of having U.S. Marshals point guns at them.

The U.S. Marshals were silent about what was going on. 5 minutes after they broke into the home, though, one Marshal said: “We have the wrong house. This is not the house[.] [I]t must be next door," according to the complaint. But before going next door, they told the family not to leave or move.

Within a half an hour, the Marshals apologized for breaking down the door.

The family remained outraged, though, and filed suit in late 2012. The government tried to get the suit waved, but Judge Ronald Buckwalter denied the government’s motion. The government specifically tried to get the assault charge waived, but Buckwalter said: “The amended complaint states that the U.S. Marshals aimed their weapons at all plaintiffs. Such an action is clearly intended to cause apprehension of imminent harmful bodily contact.”

Buckwalter also dismissed the claim from the U.S. government that their actions were routine and done to ensure the safety of “innocent bystanders.” “Whether or not the behavior of the police officers was reasonable cannot be determined by the facts alleged in this amended complaint,” the judge said. “Consequently, it is inappropriate to dismiss the assault claim at this stage of the case...The facts alleged in the amended complaint, however, do not describe reasonable officer conduct...If the officers had no right to confine the Hills upon learning they were in the wrong house, they may have falsely imprisoned the family - regardless of whether or not the Marshals had an initial right to be in the house.”

How America Became a Third World Country

Mattea Kramer, Jo Comerford, TomDispatch — Tue, 21 May 2013 08:22:00 -0700

The impact of sequester down the line.

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The streets are so much darker now, since money for streetlights is rarely available to municipal governments. The national parks began closing down years ago. Some are already being subdivided and sold to the highest bidder. Reports on bridges crumbling or even collapsing are commonplace. The air in city after city hangs brown and heavy (and rates of childhood asthma and other lung diseases have shot up), because funding that would allow the enforcement of clean air standards by the Environmental Protection Agency is a distant memory. Public education has been cut to the bone, making good schools a luxury and, according to the Department of Education, two of every five students won’t graduate from high school.

It’s 2023 -- and this is America 10 years after the first across-the-board federal budget cuts known as sequestration went into effect. They went on for a decade, making no exception for effective programs vital to America’s economic health that were already underfunded, like job training and infrastructure repairs. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

Traveling back in time to 2013 -- at the moment the sequester cuts began -- no one knew what their impact would be, although nearly everyone across the political spectrum agreed that it would be bad. As it happened, the first signs of the unraveling which would, a decade later, leave the United States a third-world country, could be detected surprisingly quickly, only three months after the cuts began. In that brief time, a few government agencies, like the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), after an uproar over flight delays, requested -- and won -- special relief. Naturally, the Department of Defense, with a mere $568 billion to burn in its 2013 budget, also joined this elite list. On the other hand, critical spending for education, environmental protection, and scientific research was not spared, and in many communities the effect was felt remarkably soon.

Robust public investment had been a key to U.S. prosperity in the previous century. It was then considered a basic part of the social contract as well as of Economics 101. As just about everyone knew in those days, citizens paid taxes to fund worthy initiatives that the private sector wouldn’t adequately or efficiently supply. Roadways and scientific research were examples. In the post-World War II years, the country invested great sums of money in its interstate highways and what were widely considered the best education systems in the world, while research in well-funded government labs led to inventions like the Internet. The resulting world-class infrastructure, educated workforce, and technological revolution fed a robust private sector.

Austerity Fever

In the early years of the twenty-first century, however, a set of manufactured arguments for “austerity,” which had been gaining traction for decades, captured the national imagination. In 2011-2012, a Congress that seemed capable of doing little else passed trillions of dollars of what was then called “deficit reduction.” Sequestration was a strange and special case of this particular disease. These across-the-board cuts, instituted in August 2011 and set to kick in on January 2, 2013, were meant to be a storm cloud hanging over Congress. Sequestration was never intended to take effect, but only to force lawmakers to listen to reason -- to craft a less terrible plan to reduce deficits by a wholly arbitrary $1.2 trillion over 10 years. As is now common knowledge, they didn’t come to their senses and sequestration did go into effect. Then, although Congress could have cancelled the cuts at any moment, the country never turned back.

It wasn’t that cutting federal spending at those levels would necessarily have been devastating in 2013, though in an already weakened economy any cutbacks would have hurt. Rather, sequestration proved particularly corrosive from the start because all types of public spending -- from grants for renewable energy research and disadvantaged public schools to HIV testing -- were to be gutted equally, as if all of it were just fat to be trimmed. Even monitoring systems for possible natural disasters like river flooding or animminent volcanic eruption began to be shut down. Over time the cuts would be vast: $85 billion in the first year and $110 billion in each year after that, for more than $1 trillion in cuts over a decade on top of other reductions already in place.

Once lawmakers wrote sequestration into law they had more than a year to wise up. Yet they did nothing to draft an alternate plan and didn’t even start pointing out the havoc-to-come until just weeks before the deadline. Then they gave themselves a couple more months -- until March 1, 2013 -- to work out a deal, which they didn’t. All this is, of course, ancient history, but even a decade later, the record of folly is worth reviewing.

If you remember, they tweeted while Rome burned. Speaker of the House John Boehner, for instance, sent out dozens of tweets to say Democrats were responsible: “The president proposed sequester, had 18 mo. to prioritize cuts, and did nothing,” he typically wrote, while he no less typically did nothing. For his part, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid tweeted back: “It’s not too late to avert the damaging #sequester cuts, for which an overwhelming majority of Republicans voted.” And that became the pattern for a decade of American political gridlock, still not broken today.

Destruction Begins

March 1st came and went, so the budgetary axe began to fall.

At first, it didn’t seem so bad. Yes, the cuts weren't quite as across the board as expected. The meat industry, for example, protested because health inspector furloughs would slow its production lines, so Congress patched the problem and spared those inspectors. But meat production aside, there was a sense that the cuts might not be so bad after all.

They were to be doled out based on a formula for meeting the arbitrary target of $85 billion in reductions in 2013, and no one knew precisely what would happen to any given program. In April, more than a month after the cuts had begun, the White House issued the president’s budget proposal for the following year, an annual milestone that typically included detailed information about federal spending in the current year. But across thousands of pages of documents and tables, the new budget ignored sequestration, and so reported meaningless 2013 numbers, because even the White House couldn’t say exactly what impact these cuts would have on programs and public investment across the country.

As it happened, they didn’t have to wait long to find out. The first ripples of impact began to spread quickly indeed. Losing some government funding, cancer clinics in New Mexico and Connecticut turned away patients. In Kentucky, Oregon, and Montana, shelters for victims of domestic violence cut services. In New York, Maryland, and Alabama, public defenders were furloughed, limiting access to justice for low-income people. In Illinois and Minnesota, public school teachers were laid off. In Florida, Michigan, and Mississippi, Head Start shortened the school year, while in Kansas and Indiana, some low-income children simply lost access to the program entirely. In Alaska, a substance abuse clinic shut down. Across the country, Meals on Wheels cut four million meals for seniors in need.

Only when the FAA imposed furloughs on its air traffic controllers did public irritation threaten to boil over. Long lines and airport delays ensued, and people were angry. And not just any people -- people who had access to members of Congress. In a Washington that has gridlocked the most routine business, lawmakers moved at a breakneck pace, taking just five days to pass special legislation to solve the problem. To avoid furloughs and shorten waits for airline passengers, they allowed the FAA to spend funds that had been intended for long-term airport repairs and improvements.

Flights would leave on time -- at least until runways cracked and crumbled. (You undoubtedly remember the scandal of 2019 at Cincinnati International Airport, when a bright young candidate for Senate met her demise in a tragic landing mishap.)

And then, of course, the Pentagon asked for an exemption, too. We’re talking about the military behemoth of planet Earth, which in 2013 accounted for 40% of military spending globally, its outlays exceeding the next 10 largest militaries combined. It, too wanted a special exemption for some of its share of the cutbacks.

Meat inspectors, the FAA, and the Department of Defense enjoyed special treatment, but the rest of the nation was, as the history books recount, not so lucky. Children from middle-class and low-income families saw ever fewer resources at school, closing doors of opportunity. The young, old, and infirm found themselves with dwindling access to basic resources such as health care or even a hot dinner. Federal grants to the states dried up, and there was less money in state budgets for local priorities, from police officers to lowly streetlights.

And remember that, just as the sequestration cuts began, carbon concentration in the atmosphere breached 400 parts per million. (Climate scientists had long been warning that the level should be kept below 350 for human security.) Unfortunately, as with the groundbreaking research that led to the Internet, it takes money to do big things, and the long-term effects of cutting environmental protection, general research, and basic infrastructure meant that the U.S. government would do little to stem the extreme weather that has, in 2023, become such a part of our world and our lives.

Looking back from a country now eternally in crisis, it’s clear that a Rubicon was crossed back in 2013. There was then still a chance to reject across-the-board budget cuts that would undermine a nation built on sound public investment and shared prosperity. At that crossroads, some fought against austerity. Losing that battle, others argued for a smarter approach: close tax loopholes to raise new revenue, or reduce waste in health care, or place a tax on carbon, or cut excessive spending at the Pentagon. But too few Americans -- with too little influence -- spoke up, and Washington didn’t listen. The rest of the story, as you well know, is history.

Mattea Kramer is Research Director at National Priorities Project, where Jo Comerford is Executive Director. Both are TomDispatch regulars. They wroteA People’s Guide to the Federal Budget.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook or Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.

Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn Demands Tornado Relief Be Offset by Cuts Elsewhere

Alex Kane, AlterNet — Tue, 21 May 2013 07:06:00 -0700

Coburn’s callous position was announced as the death toll and devastation in Oklahoma was coming into full view.

Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) has consistently balked at emergency funding in the aftermath of disasters--and a powerful tornado that ripped through his home state isn’t changing that. Coburn is making headlines by insisting that any aid to his state be offset by federal spending cuts elsewhere.

CQ Roll Call’s Jennifer Scholtes reports that Coburn said he would “absolutely” demand the offsets. Coburn has also voted for cutting the amount of aid allocated to victims of Hurricane Sandy. A Coburn spokesman told the Huffington Post that the Senator “makes no apologies for voting against disaster aid bills that are often poorly conceived and used to finance priorities that have little to do with disasters.”

Coburn’s callous position was announced as the death toll and devastation in Oklahoma was coming into full view. Yesterday, a tornado tore through parts of Oklahoma City and its suburbs and flattened a hospital and two schools. The death toll currently stands at 24, with at least 240 people injured. An estimated 60 of the injured were children.

One school “was reduced to a pile of twisted metal and toppled walls,” the New York Times reports.Yahoo News! spoke to Stuart Earnest Jr., who witnessed the destruction of the Plaza Towers Elementary school. “All you could hear were screams,” he said. “The people screaming for help. And the people trying to help were also screaming.”

“Numerous neighborhoods were completely leveled,” Sgt. Gary Knight of the Oklahoma City Police Department told the Times. “Neighborhoods just wiped clean.” Emergency crews continued to search for survivors.

President Obama has declared some Oklahoma counties to be disaster areas, which allows federal funding to be start to flow to the state.

CNN reports that more storms part of the same weather patterns could hit more states, putting 53 million at risk. “Tornadoes could strike the Plains, but likely not in devastated Moore, Oklahoma, where the threat of severe weather has diminished. In the bull's-eye Tuesday are parts of north-central Texas, southeastern Oklahoma, and northern Arkansas and Louisiana, according to the National Weather Service,” the news outlet reported.

Death Toll Continues to Rise After Devastating Oklahoma Tornado

AFP — Mon, 20 May 2013 18:33:00 -0700

The Oklahoma medical examiner's office gave the latest death toll, which was carried by all the major US television networks, which said the number of fatalities was expected to rise.

WASHINGTON — At least 37 people were killed when a powerful tornado with winds of up to 200 miles (320 kilometers) per hour pulverized an Oklahoma City suburb, hitting at least two schools and wiping out blocks of homes. [Editor's note: since publication the AP has reported the death toll is at 51.]

The Oklahoma medical examiner's office gave the latest death toll, which was carried by all the major US television networks, which said the number of fatalities was expected to rise.

"Our first responders are stretched," Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett told CNN. "The state, the National Guard are going to be involved."

Reporters for KFOR-TV saw pupils as young as nine being "pulled out" of the school in Moore, a residential community of 55,000 just south of Oklahoma's state capital.

Anxious parents were being kept at a distance while search and rescue workers scrambled to free the pupils.

A second elementary school, Briarwood, was also hit but did not immediately appear to have sustained casualties. Early reports indicated that many students survived.

From its news helicopter, KFOR's cameras captured scenes of widespread destruction, with street after street of single-story homes in Moore stripped of their roofs and cars piled atop each other like toys.

Utility lines were down and gas lines exposed, triggering localized fires. The Moore Medical Center was evacuated after it sustained damage, a spokeswoman for the hospital told CNN.

The National Guard was called out to help rescue efforts.

Storm spotters estimated the wedge-shaped tornado, which struck in mid-afternoon, to be as big as two miles (3.2 kilometers) wide. It briefly dissipated, only to recycle to the east, threatening the town of Meeker.

"We anticipate that these storms are going to continue to build around Oklahoma," a grim Governor Mary Fallin told CNN, while the National Weather Service urged residents to take cover.

On Twitter, the National Weather Service gave the tornado a preliminary rating of EF-4, indicating that it packed winds of 166 to 200 miles per hour (267-322 km/h) -- more severe than a category five hurricane.

In downtown Oklahoma City, tornado sirens went off at least three times Monday afternoon, and the Interstate 35 highway -- a busy north-south artery through the American heartland -- was closed to all but emergency vehicles.

In Moore, live images from KFOR showed people wandering among the debris and even a couple of untethered horses from a local stables that somehow managed to survive the punishing storm.

"I had no idea it was coming," said a stable worker, who told how he survived the "unbearably loud" twister by taking cover in one of the stalls.

Monday's tornado followed roughly the same west-to-east track as a May 1999 twister that killed 44 people, injured hundreds more and destroyed thousands of homes in Moore and the south of Oklahoma City.

Tornadoes frequently touch down on Oklahoma's wide open plains, but the fact that Monday's twister struck a populated urban area raised fears of a high casualty toll.

Because of the hard ground, few homes are built with basements in which residents can take cover.

Oklahoma City lies well inside the so-called "Tornado Alley" stretching from South Dakota to central Texas that is particularly vulnerable to tornadoes.

On Sunday, a powerful storm system churning through the US Midwest spawned tornadoes in Iowa, Kansas and Oklahoma, destroying homes and killing at least two people, US media reported.

Fallin declared a state of emergency Sunday for 16 Oklahoma counties due to tornados, severe storms and flooding over the weekend.

In Washington, a White House official said President Barack Obama was getting updates "as information come in from the ground" and that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) stood ready to provide assistance.

"The administration continues to urge all those in affected or potentially affected areas to follow the direction of state and local officials as this severe weather continues," the official added.

Horrifying New Trend: Posting Rapes to Facebook

Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon — Mon, 20 May 2013 17:10:00 -0700

Three Chicago teens are charged with a horrible sexual assault. They allegedly posted the video on social media.

It’s yet another story of how social media can apparently become a tool for abuse — and evidence of it. But the lesson seems all wrong. In Chicago this weekend, prosecutors announced three teenaged boys will tried as adults for aggravated criminal sexual assault after allegedly raping a 12-year-old girl — and posting a video of the attack on Facebook.

Prosecutors say the girl went to the home of Scandale Fritz last December and, “after she declined his demands for sex, he raped and sodomized her,” and then “demanded the girl have sex with the other two boys” while he recorded it. Chillingly, prosecutors add that Fritz’s companion Kenneth Brown can be seen holding a gun in the video. After the incident, the girl filed a police report and was examined at a local hospital. Two days after the alleged assault, the video appeared on all three boys’ Facebook pages. Prosecutors say that Fritz has already provided “a handwritten statement to his involvement.”

This is just the latest in a demoralizing spate of stories involving sexual assault as porny entertainment. Last year, Jared Len Cruise was convicted of sexual assault in a brutal gang rape of an 11-year-old Texas girl — a crime that was recorded on a cell phone and circulated around the girl’s school. In April, 17-year-old Halifax student Rehtaeh Parsons committed suicide 18 months after allegedly being raped — and having a photo of the event distributed among her classmates. After her death, her mother wrote on her Facebook page, “Rehtaeh is gone today because of the four boys that thought that raping a 15-year-old girl was OK and to distribute a photo to ruin her spirit and reputation would be fun.” Local authorities had found “insufficient evidence to proceed with charges,” despite the fact that the image alone would be considered child porn under Canada law.

And in Steubenville, Ohio – perhaps the most infamous example — Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond were convicted in March of raping a classmate and then sharing images from the night and “hundreds of text messages from more than a dozen cell phones.” It was a collection of gleeful, callous boasting that the judge later declared “profane and ugly.”

The Chicago story is still unfolding, but here’s what is known so far: It involves a young man, who prosecutors say admits to making a video, and a 12-year-old child. Yet again, it wasn’t enough to just do something awful. It had to be documented; it had to become a trophy to be shown off. In an interview with Business Insider last month, psychology professor and sexual violence expert Dr. Rebecca Campbell noted that, “Sexual assault is a crime of power and dominance. By distributing images of the rape through social media, it’sa way of asserting dominance and power to hurt the victim over and over again.”

It’s an act of brazen aggression, and one that says the victim’s experience is just a show to be shared. That it can also become a tool of justice, evidence of a crime, seems only now to be becoming more evident. Yet whether it makes any difference in stopping assault — or merely the covering up of it — remains to be seen. When he sentenced the Steubenville rapists earlier this year, Judge Thomas Lipps warned other teens to “to have discussions about how you talk to your friends, how you record things on the social media so prevalent today.” The lesson in all of it still doesn’t seem to be about rape. Rather, it’s not to get caught bragging about it.

It's Time to Step Up and Help the Workers of Bangladesh

Jodie Gummow, AlterNet — Mon, 20 May 2013 15:52:00 -0700

A planned demonstration at Gap Inc's shareholder meeting in San Francisco aims to get Gap to sign on to fire and building safety regulations in Bangladesh.

The Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh in April, the world’s worst garment industry catastrophe which killed over 1,000 people, has sparked intensive debate over who is to blame for the devastation.

Many have pointed the finger at global corporations’ failure to provide adequate fire and building safeguards for factory workers. Such controversy has resulted in pressure upon the major retailers to sign a legally binding agreement aimed to improve conditions in the country, which to date has the support of 19 corporations.

However, only one company, PVH -- which owns brands including Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein and Van Heusen -- is American. The Gap and Walmart, two of the major producers in Bangladesh, continue to resist signing any agreement that is legally binding or enforceable. Instead, Walmart has said it will conduct its own investigations into its supplier factories.

The question that remains is what can we as consumers do to ensure that a tragedy of this magnitude does not happen again? Merely sitting back as bystanders and depending on the corporate moguls to solve a problem which has been proliferating over decades is not the answer.

As shoppers, we have an ability and opportunity to honor our values to promote the rights of workers and advocate for change in an effort to ensure that these types of disasters do not occur again. We can do this by joining and supporting a demonstration on May 21 in San Francisco at the Gap shareholder meeting to sign the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh.

Take Action, Be Vocal

According to Liana Foxvog of International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF), the most important thing that consumers can do is to get involved and provide a voice. “There are not many sources where workers rights are respected in the global garment industry so we are urging consumers to be more than just consumers and raise their voices,” she said.

Foxvog told AlterNet that it is vitally important that consumers pay attention to how companies are treating workers in Bangladesh and that global companies know that consumers will not accept unsafe practice or the repression of worker’s rights to unionize.

“Taking action is the most important step for consumers and this can be done either in the form of attending protests, writing letters to store managers and foreign companies and signing petitions,” she said.

A number of petitions calling for better working conditions in Bangladesh have been circulating since the April tragedy. The Gap “death traps” is an example of a petition instigated by ILRF which has been gaining momentum across the US and calling on consumers to take action across the country.

Foxvog argues that it’s time for companies to make a change from the past to work together on programs in agreement with global and Bangladeshi unions in order to protect workers lives and ensure safety mechanisms are in place.

Selective Shopping

As consumers, we have the power to control where and how we spend our money. There are a number of consumer shopping guides that are available in order to search for union-made clothing shops.

While an outright boycott of the industry seems like an obvious and highly desirable option, unions and activists have expressed reluctance at taking such extreme measures.

As Muhammud Yanus, Bangladeshi Nobel Peace Prize winner explains, such actions would drastically affect the social and economic future of the Bangladeshi workers.

“We cannot allow this industry to be destroyed. Rather, we have to be united as a nation to strengthen it,” Yanus said.

A less radical but equally effective approach consumers can take is to make a conscience effort to shop only at those companies that have agreed to sign the legally binding agreement to improve working conditions in Bangladesh.

Investing in corporations that support fair working rights rather than companies that are guilty of exploitation, sends a clear message to anti-union corporations such as Walmart and the Gap that consumers will not tolerate unfair labor practices and thus provide some incentive for these corporations to amend their practices.

At the end of the day, we want to generate concrete action so that corporations are pressured to undertake necessary repairs to make these factories safe. For these reasons, it is important the consumers make informed choices about where to shop.

Promote Transparency Through Social Media

Social media is a powerful tool to create change and rally support against unfair labor practices. Through social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and news blogs, consumers can increase awareness of the garment industry practices through naming and shaming those guilty of exploitation – whether it be global corporations, local governments or factory owners – while keeping the issue at the forefront.

These measures not only push those culpable in the industry toward affirmative action, but pressure corporations to disclose the locations and addresses of their manufacturers thereby promoting transparency and preventing companies from hiding behind the corporate veil.

Join Civil Action Groups

For those of us who want to get more involved, joining a civil action movement targeted at improving rights for workers is another way to make a difference.

By campaigning against anti-union companies, it is envisioned that retailers that profit from low wages in Bangladesh will be compelled by consumers to pay high prices to factories and accordingly undertake the necessary repairs in compliance with local building codes.

Such an example of civil action campaigning is evidenced by the efforts of USAS, together with human rights groups and the ILFP who will be holding a demonstration in front of the Gap shareholder meeting on May 21 in San Francisco as a means to call upon the company to sign the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh.

“The only thing that is going to change conditions in Bangladesh is companies stepping up and deciding to put money on the table to renovate the factories and include workers and their unions as part of the solution…that is why we are asking people to put pressure on the Gap,” Garrett Strain, International Campaigns Coordinator with United Students Against Sweatshops, stressed.

Do Not Turn a Blind Eye

As Angelo Young reported in the International Business Times citing a study into human behavior titled, "Sweatshop Labor Is Wrong Unless The Shoes Are Cute," a major problem with consumers is that despite our strong convictions that we do support fair labor markets, there is a huge disparity between what we say as consumers, and what we actually do.

Young argues that the more desirable an item is the more likely a consumer will cognitively disregard his moral stance on unethical labor practices thereby perpetuating its increasing demand. In this sense, a shopper is able to reconcile the bad labor practices by choosing to ignore the realities of exploitation. Therefore, it is important that we recognize and acknowledge that as consumers, we are both part of the problem and the solution.

AlterNet

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