Rolling Stones
“Under My Thumb“

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How the zero-tolerance policies of “America’s Mayor” set us up for the Patriot Act and Guantanamo.

from Mother Jones Magazine
By JoAnn Wypijewski

In Miami last fall, amid news that corrupt housing authorities and developers had deprived thousands of poor people of promised homes, Ivan Martinez began projecting immense images against the walls of the luxury towers that have sprouted with wanton ambition in the footprint of demolished low-income housing. No one commissioned these images; Martinez is a guerrilla artist, an outlaw. As governments across America have imposed increasingly harsh penalties against postering, graffiti, and their requisite tools (New York has made graffiti-writing a felony in some instances, as has Ohio, convicting a man for spraying “Troops Out Now” on a highway overpass; Richmond, Virginia, threatens its citizens from the backs of buses, “Use a spray can, go to jail”), wall’size projections have developed as a fleet-footed alternative. One of Martinez’s ephemera featured a running silhouette crying, “Gentrification!!!!” Another showed a man saying, “I love downtown’s revitalization, but where are the poor people?” One night as Martinez and two friends were projecting from a moving car, police pulled them over and pointed guns at their heads. He hasn’t done a projection since.

Martinez broke no window, destroyed no property. Except through the play of evanescent light, he didn’t even “aesthetically alter” property, as some graffiti artists describe their work. No reasonable person would call him a vandal, one of those punks who elicit curses for their indecipherable scrawl. Like them, though, he made an unsanctioned claim on public space, which was enough to get a gun to his head, and shut him up.

Among a thousand political lies, one of the most durable, and lulling, is the assertion, central to a “quality of life” or “broken windows” theory of policing, that graffiti is the first link in a criminal chain that ends in murder. Hammer petty flouting of the law, the theory holds, and violent crime will decline. New York was the pioneer in this. Mayors Ed Koch and David Dinkins cracked down on graffiti writers in the 1980s and early ’90s, but it was Rudolph Giuliani who redefined quality of life in terms of a theory and practice of brute force that has since been adopted by city administrations and police departments across the land. Now the graffiti-murder continuum is widely accepted as fact. New York is officially the safest big city in the country unless one is unlucky enough to be on the receiving end of 50 shots, or 41, or a toilet plunger, from the police. It is also a strangely passive city, its political atmosphere inert. Like the midnight wheat-paster, whose posters about displacement or aids death distinguished the urban vista until the early ’90s, the dissenting slogan, the broadsheet alert to action from corner mailboxes, has largely vanished. Giuliani is running for president, and no handicapper counts his easy sacrifice of liberty to security as a political liability. He compares President Bush’s escalation of the war in Iraq to his own big-fist approach to New York, and suffers no harm for the implication of that admission: that he pursued a war on part of the city’s population while the rest of us became inured to punishment, to brakes on free expression and policing as a way of life.

read more at MOTHER JONES

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From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all.

This article appeared in the April 27, 2007 edition of “The Guardian”

Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.

They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.

As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.

Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens’ ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don’t learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of “homeland” security - remember who else was keen on the word “homeland” - didn’t raise the alarm bells it might have.

It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realize.

Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy

After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a “war footing”; we were in a “global war” against a “global caliphate” intending to “wipe out civilization”. There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. “This time,” Fein says, “there will be no defined end.”

Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler’s invocation of a communist threat to the nation’s security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the “global conspiracy of world Jewry”, on myth.

It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilization as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.

For the rest of the article and steps 2 - 10, click HERE

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Why can’t they fund their own defense???? They are not a poor nation. Oh wait, I forgot. 75% of the military aid to Israel has to be spent in the United States. More war profiteering on the part of this administration.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives has adopted a measure aimed at weaving closer U.S. and Israeli defenses against ballistic missiles of the type that could be fired by Iran.

Part of a $504 billion defense spending bill passed Thursday, the measure would redirect $205 million in Defense Department funds toward projects already underway in Israel.

It would provide $25 million more for Arrow missile co-production and integration, $45 million for a U.S.-Israeli short-range missile defense system dubbed “David’s Sling” and $135 million to buy a Theater High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, fire unit.

All three projects involve interceptors designed to shoot down ballistic missiles in the terminal phase of their flight paths.

The move was spearheaded by Rep. Duncan Hunter of California, the senior Republican on the House Armed Services Committee and a candidate for his party’s 2008 presidential nomination.

It was a last-minute addition to the Democratic-controlled House’s version of the fiscal 2008 defense authorization bill, which still awaits action in the Senate and reconciliation of any differences between the bills.

More at Reuters

To get an idea of the aid we’ve given Israel since 1949, go here.

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From CorpWatch

Halliburton Co. is one of eight companies voters can choose to be inducted to Corporate Accountability International’s Corporate Hall of Shame.

The Boston organization said Houston-based Halliburton was chosen for allegedly being “the nation’s leading war profiteer, for grossly under-delivering — and shortchanging our troops — on more than $20 billion in lucrative government contracts and for planning to move its headquarters to Dubai, enabling them to shirk paying their full share of United States taxes.”

Online polls open May 16 on the Boston organization’s Web site, www.stopcorporateabuse.org, for those who wish to cast their vote for Halliburton or the other potential inductees, which include Coca-Cola Co., ExxonMobil Corp., Ford Motor Co., Kimberly-Clark Corp., Merck & Co. Inc., Nestlé SA and Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

Corporate Accountability International, formerly Infact, is a membership organization that wages campaigns challenging alleged irresponsible and dangerous corporate actions around the world.

Voters can choose up to three nominees or can add their own nominee.

The top three vote-getters will be announced in June.

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cross posted at Post Scipts
by Tina Grazier

On April 16, a Monday, passengers aboard the last Amtrak train of the day back from the Bay Area wondered why the engine ground to a stop as it approached the I Street bridge over the Sacramento River. They didn-t know that five people stood on the tracks, gang members among them, throwing rocks at the engineer, who stopped the train. The attackers dragged him out, demanded his wallet and cell phone, then beat him senseless with a bottle and a fire extinguisher. They also attacked the train’s conductor. The engineer, with head and internal injuries, was taken to hospital. The train finally crossed the river to the Sacramento station under the control of a student conductor.

“This is lawless barbarism,” West Sacramento mayor Christopher Cabaldon told the Bee’s Tony Bizjak, but the attackers remained unidentified. ** An April 18 Associated Press story came headlined “Mob forces train to stop, assaults engineer in West Sacrament” but mentioned only a “group of people” on the tracks. That could have meant anybody, but on Thursday emerged the involvement of the Broderick Boys a criminal street gang under a court injunction by Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig, who calls the gang “domestic terrorists.”

On April 24, an appeal court tossed Reisig’s injunction, under which violent crime had decreased eight percent in the safety zone. The next day, the Bee ran a prominently featured piece of nearly 1,000 words by veteran reporters Bill Lindelof and Stephen Managnini. It turned out to be a forum for Joe Castro, 76, who described himself as proud to be a Broderick Boy, even though, he said, “I’ve never been around them when they caused any trouble.” Castro’s wife Mary said the injunction was “the worst thing that could have happened here,” stigmatizing a Latino community. Activists of La Raza Network said likewise. Neither Castro mentioned the train attack.

Bee columnist Marcos Breton also failed to mention the train attack at all in his April 29 column, “West Sac’s Gang Law was Racially Unfair.” He conceded that crime was down in the areas covered by the injunction but charged that the measure was a kind of racial profiling of “brown people.” The piece included no opinion on the fairness of the injunction from the engineer whose head the Broderick Boys had bashed in, nor from the conductor who had been beaten. The “alternative” Sacramento News & Review likewise avoided any mention of the train attack in its piece on the gang injunction against the Broderick Boys.

All told, a successful injunction against a violent gang garnered more wrath than a savage attack which Eugene Skoropowski, executive director of the Capitol Corridor train service, told the Bee was “the most horrific incident” he had seen in 40 years on the railroad.

read More at Post Scripts

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Kudos to Cornyn for calling McCain on his absence. I’ve been bitching about it for months. The guy is getting paid 160,000 to run for President. He’s missed some very important votes. But hey, maybe it’s better when he isn’t at work. He and the VP really bring a sense of class to our congress, don’t they?

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) hasn’t spent much time in the Capitol this year as he seeks the GOP presidential nomination. But one of his rare appearances this week provided a pretty salty exchange with a fellow Republican.

During a meeting Thursday on immigration legislation, McCain and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) got into a shouting match when Cornyn started voicing concerns about the number of judicial appeals that illegal immigrants could receive, according to multiple sources — both Democrats and Republicans — who heard firsthand accounts of the exchange from lawmakers who were in the room.

At a bipartisan gathering in an ornate meeting room just off the Senate floor, McCain complained that Cornyn was raising petty objections to a compromise plan being worked out between Senate Republicans and Democrats and the White House. He used a curse word associated with chickens and accused Cornyn of raising the issue just to torpedo a deal.

Things got really heated when Cornyn accused McCain of being too busy campaigning for president to take part in the negotiations, which have gone on for months behind closed doors. “Wait a second here,” Cornyn said to McCain. “I’ve been sitting in here for all of these negotiations and you just parachute in here on the last day. You’re out of line.”

McCain, a former Navy pilot, then used language more accustomed to sailors (not to mention the current vice president, who made news a few years back after a verbal encounter with Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont).

“[Expletive] you! I know more about this than anyone else in the room,” shouted McCain at Cornyn. McCain helped craft a bill in 2006 that passed the Senate but couldn’t be compromised with a House bill that was much tougher on illegal immigrants.

More at the Washington Post

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From the Washington Times:

NEW YORK, May 18 (UPI) — Lawyers who once represented Guantanamo Bay detainees have taken legal action against U.S. officials in an attempt to gain undisclosed documents.

Based on allegations that they were under surveillance while meeting with their Guantanamo Bay clients, 16 lawyers have asked a New York judge to force federal officials to hand over records of those recordings, the New York Post said Friday.

The attorneys allege that to date, officials from the Department of Justice and the National Security Administration have only shared half of those documents with them.

Papers filed in court Thursday by the Center for Constitutional Rights said the federal judge has been asked to deem the information withholding illegal and order the data’s release.

The alleged practice of eavesdropping on the nearly 380 terror suspects at the U.S. Navy base without proper warrants was first brought to light by media reports in 2005, the Post said.

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This is friggin ridiculous. Congress needs to demand his resignation. He needs to be charged with perjury and failure to respond to a congressional subpoena. The guy has got to go. Even the remaining U.S. attorneys know it.

Even as he came under renewed political pressure in Washington this week, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales faced sharp criticism from many of his own U.S. attorneys at a private meeting in San Antonio, prosecutors who were there said.

At an executive session Wednesday during the Justice Department’s annual U.S. attorneys conference, Gonzales met with most of the nation’s 93 U.S. attorneys to apologize for the controversy over the firings of nine prosecutors last year and to attempt to shore up sagging morale.

More than a dozen U.S. attorneys spoke during the morning session, most of them expressing concern to Gonzales about the scandal’s impact on their own offices and the overall image of the department, several participants said.

“People were very plainspoken,” said one U.S. attorney, who along with others interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity because the session was private. “The overwhelming majority of the comments were about the controversy and how people are still not happy in the way things were going.”

More at the Washington Post

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I’ve been waiting for this. It will be interesting to see what happens here.

The departure of Paul D. Wolfowitz as World Bank president is prompting calls around the world to revoke the traditional right of the United States to select the institution’s leader.

As the White House asserted its claim on picking Wolfowitz’s successor, aid groups and former bank officials demanded that the next president be selected not in deference to the Bush administration, but on professional merits.

Advocacy groups and development experts took aim at an unwritten rule that has for six decades governed the financial institutions created in the aftermath of World War II: The U.S. president picks the World Bank chief, and Europe selects the head of its affiliate institution, the International Monetary Fund.

“Paul Wolfowitz’s problems at the World Bank stem in part from a widespread perception that he disproportionately represents U.S. interests rather than objectives that command a global consensus,” said a letter signed this week by more than 200 people, including heads of aid organizations, and sent to the executive boards of the World Bank and the IMF. The letter called for the traditional arrangement to be “abandoned and replaced with selection procedures that reflect two key principles: transparency of process, and competence of prospective leadership without regard to national origin.”

More at the Washington Post

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from The New York Times
By JOHN LELAND

YPSILANTI, Mich. - On a recent evening, Christine Moellering, 40, sorted through the plastic laundry basket where she keeps the family bills, statements and coupons.

“The Sears one is 32.24 percent,” Ms. Moellering said, reading a credit card statement with a balance of $5,955, including $155 in monthly finance charges. The high interest rate took her by surprise. “That’s nice,” she said sarcastically.

Ms. Moellering, and her husband, Mark, 39, earn average salaries for their age (together about $66,000 a year), live in an average-priced home and have an average cost of living. But like many other households these days, they have found that their day-to-day economic life has come to depend not just on how much they earn or spend, but also on how well they shuffle what they owe among a broad array of credit cards, home equity loans and other lines of credit.

Americans spent one in seven of their take-home dollars on debt payments last year, up from one in nine in 1980. Experts say few consumers are able to calculate the true costs of such payments.

Behind closed doors, the decisions families like the Moellerings make about their debt - when to pay it off, when to shuffle it to lower-interest sources and when to let it revolve and build - can determine how much their salaries are worth. Like many others, the Moellerings have run up avoidable penalties and occasionally spent themselves into more debt or higher interest rates, even as they have tried to juggle other balances to bring down their monthly payments.

This spring they allowed a reporter to see how they struggled with these choices. Ms. Moellering’s basket recently included more unwelcome news: $2,693 due on a Visa card through her credit union, including finance charges of $25, and $13,680 on a CashBuilder Elite Visa, including a monthly finance charge of $200.

Their credit card debt came to $22,228, including $380 in monthly finance charges. Interest varied from 12.1 percent to 32.24 percent. The Moellerings also have a mortgage of $93,000 and a home equity loan balance of $68,574, at 8 percent interest.

read more at THE NEW YORK TIMES

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By MICHAEL BARBARO
from The New York Times

Naturally, something would come out about Hillary Clinton’s past. Even though it was as a board member to Wal-Mart all the way back in 1990. - JS

In 1986, Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart, had a problem. He was under growing pressure from shareholders - and his wife, Helen - to appoint a woman to the company’s 15-member board of directors.

So Mr. Walton turned to a young lawyer who just happened to be married to the governor of Arkansas, where Wal-Mart is based: Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Mrs. Clinton’s six-year tenure as a director of Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest company, remains a little known chapter in her closely scrutinized career. And it is little known for a reason. Mrs. Clinton rarely, if ever, discusses it, leaving her board membership out of her speeches and off her campaign Web site.

According to fellow board members and company executives, who have rarely discussed her role in Wal-Mart, Mrs. Clinton used her position to champion personal causes, like the need for more women in management and a comprehensive environmental program, despite being Wal-Mart’s only female director, the youngest and arguably the least experienced in business. On other topics, like Wal-Mart’s vehement anti-unionism, she was largely silent, they said.

Her experience on the Wal-Mart board, from 1986 to 1992, gave her an unusual tutorial in the ways of American business - a credential that could serve as an antidote to Republican efforts to portray her as an enemy of free markets and an advocate for big government.

But that education came via a company that the Democratic Party - and its major ally, organized labor - has turned into a political punching bag, accusing it of offering unaffordable health insurance and mistreating its workers.

read more at THE NEW YORK TIMES

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Here’s a short list of what’s happening in baseball, basketball and hockey.

Major League Baseball(whos’ in first place)

National League

Eastern Division - New York Mets (2 game lead over second place Atlanta Braves)

Central Division - Milwaukee Brewers (5.5 game lead over second place Houston Astros)

Western Division - Los Angeles Dodgers (2 game lead over second place San Diego Padres)

American League

Eastern Division - Boston Red Sox (10 game lead over second place Baltimore Orioles)

Central Division - Cleveland Indians (1 game lead over second place Detroit Tigers)

Western Division - Los Angeles Angels (3 game lead over second place Oakland Athletics)

National Basketball Association - Playoffs

Eastern Conference - Cleveland Cavaliers vs. Detroit Pistons (series starts Monday 5/21)

Western Conference - Utah Jazz vs. San Antonio Spurs (series starts Sunday 5/20)

National Hockey League - Playoffs

Eastern Conference - Ottawa Senators Vs. Buffalo Sabres (Ottawa leads series 3-1)

Western Conference - Anaheim Ducks vs. Detroit Red Wings (series tied 2-2)

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According to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, nearly 450 attempted abductions were foiled when the victims yelled, kicked, pulled away, ran away or attracted attention.(National Center for Missing & Exploited Children/By Chris Fruitrich and Sam Ward, USA TODAY)

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