Mr. Bush would like you to know that America does not torture.
You might hear a different story, though, if you ask the journalist Sami al-Hajj, also known as Internee #345. Al-Hajj is a Sudanese national currently being held in Guantanamo, which has been his home since being arrested by the US in December 2001. Mr. Al-Hajj is a journalist with the Al Jazeera network.
While being held in Guantanamo, Mr. Al-Hajj has been beaten, starved, and sexually tortured. Because of the physical abuse he has received at the hands of United States interrogators, he can no longer flex his knees. A doctor prescribed a special toilet seat for this condition, but officials have now removed it in order to humiliate him. According to Reporters Without Borders, Mr. Al-Hajj’s throat cancer, in remission since 1998, has returned, but he is being denied medical treatment.
It may surprise you to learn that no one thinks Mr. Al-Hajj is a terrorist. He has never been charged with terrorism. The Bush administration does not believe him to be in any way involved with terrorism or pose a risk. We know this because the administration has already promised him immediate release on one condition—if he were to spy on Al Jazeera. It is unclear how, even in a misreading of the Constitution worthy of Scalia, the United States can assert the right to detain and torture a foreign national for not being a spy.
According to Clive Stafford’s book on Guantanamo, Mr. Al-Hajj was not picked up by mistake, but rather for the express purpose of turning him into an informant against a television network Mr. Bush deemed hostile. Mr. Al-Hajj actually asked to be interrogated about what he was accused of having done.
To protest, and perhaps to end, his 6-year incarceration in this Kafkaesque nightmare, Mr. Al-Hajj is engaging in a hunger strike. The US now roughly and forcibly inserts a feeding into his nose daily and force-feeds Mr. Al-Hajj in order to avoid the embarrassment of having a Guantanamo prisoner starve to death. According to Mr. Al-Hajj’s lawyer, this tube sometimes is smeared with the blood of other Guantanamo inmates also being force fed.
This is what the United States has become.
The roots of torture in America are a deep part of our culture. Even before we were a nation, the Salem Witch Trials provided an outlet for American sexual sadists to strip, hurt, and torture women while pretending to protect the security of their neighbors. The DSM-IV defines sexual sadism as a replacement of normal sexual gratification with pleasure derived only by the infliction of pain; put simply, sexual sadists can only become aroused by cries of pain rather than passion, by hitting rather than fucking. Make no mistake about it--what happened in Abu Ghraib has deep psychological roots in our culture.
What is happening this very day in Guantanamo is part of this American sickness. Everyone else in the world see us for what we truly are; most Americans, as repressed and incurious as ever, have little idea what is being done in their name. Ask yourself this question, and answer honestly: Had you ever heard of Sami Al-Hajj before reading this?
It is all well and good to say that when those who authorized and operated Guantanamo become prisoners themselves, in US prisons facing charges with lawyers at their sides, then justice will be done. It is all well and good to say that when the cowardly judges who have abdicated their duties and their souls by deferring in every way to the evils of the Bush administration are removed from their positions and disbarred, then justice will be done.
But in reality, it is already too late. The new face of Uncle Sam is the hood of the torturer.
Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor, sees the recent American economic downturn as a long-delayed symptom of underlying economic disease afflicting this country.
Reich brilliantly explains how the upcoming tax “rebates” will do nothing to slow America’s spiraling descent into, possibly, Argentine-style economic chaos. The problem, as Reich sees it, is that we Americans have finally run out of ways to spend more than we earn.
The first problem is the decline in real wages—that is, wages adjusted for inflation. Wages have been flat over the last 35 years; although actual dollar amounts have increased, because of inflation the purchasing power of these dollars is the same as if was 35 years ago.
Compounded on this problem is the fact that average wages are falling; the "middle mark" is sliding toward the poverty end of the income scale. Thirty years ago, the median male worker in his 30’s earned 12% more than he does today. This is largely the result of the migration of high-paying manufacturing jobs, and their replacement by no-skill, no-benefit retail work.
To maintain “middle class” lifestyles amid this decay, American families have increasingly relied on women to work outside the home. This trend began in earnest in the 1970s, and resulted in a terrible personal time deficit for many women. Arlene Hochschild has written eloquently about the deleterious effects of this in her book “The Second Shift.”
Having both parents work soon became not enough in the face of declining wages, Reich writes. The next stage involved increasing working hours, both within one job and by the addition of other jobs. Americans now work 350 more hours/year than Europeans.
This trend, too, had a limit; one cannot work more hours than there are in the day. So how to maintain lifestyles in the face of declining wages? In the 1990s a trend began for large numbers of workers to take out home equity loans, using their still-mortgaged houses as collateral. This is a like taking out a new credit card to pay minimum payments on another maxed credit card. And now, of course, with the collapse of the housing market, this last aspect has hit Americans like a freight train.
Even those of us who rent are being affected; increasing numbers of apartment dwellers across the country are arriving home to find 72-hour eviction notices because their landlord cannot make minimum mortgage payments. One thing woefully lacking from proposed congressional legislation protecting home owners from foreclosure is some manner of protection to renters—who have paid on-time and in good faith, and yet through no fault of their own find themselves homeless at a few day’s notice.
This crisis is long in coming.
Since the 1960s, manufacturing in America has been in precipitous decline. There have been several plateaus—the 1990s Internet Boom, the 2000s housing boom—but the long-term trend is dismal. We are going broke.
To understanding just how bankrupt America actually is, consider our $9 trillion national debt. With a population of 300 million Americans, this $9 trillion debt saddles every man, woman, and child in America with a $30,000 payment. However, this number does not consider that we pay interest on this $9 trillion debt; this interest effectively doubles the national debt burden.
Congress can pass a balanced budget, and this would reap lower interest rates, as we saw during the Clinton years. However, even a balanced budget does not begin to pay down this vast national debt, a burden which makes balanced budgets difficult because of the interest which must be paid right now. As our interest payments balloon, the funds available for everything else the government does must inevitably suffer. Soon our federal budget will fund unnecessary wars, Social Security payments, and little else.
How did it come to this?
Just when everyone thought Mark Geragos could not possibly find a client more odious than the child molester Michael Jackson or the wife killer Scott Peterson, Geragos decided to represent Amritpal and Kulbir Dhaliwal. The reckless actions of these drunken jackasses led to the destruction of Tatiana, a beautiful 4-year old Siberian tiger.
Now that the Dhaliwal brothers have confessed to provoking the tiger who attacked them on Christmas Day, the transcripts of the 911 call from the SF Zoo shed further light into the unsavory character of these individuals.
Kulbir Dhaliwal placed the first call at 5:16 pm from in front of the cafeteria at the SF Zoo. He was apparently having an argument with the manager of the cafe:
Kulbir: I'm talking to the manager here, the stupid a- doesn't want to get me a towel ...
The towel was presumably to staunch bleeding. Of course, in Kulbir's thinking, the manager should have exposed himself and his employees at the cafeteria to the danger of a prowling tiger, despite the Zoo's policy of locking down buildings during an escape.
911: The ambulance, the police are at the front.
Kulbir: Get them out here already!
He was apparently quite impatient with the response time, which was on the order of 10 minutes. This is a fairly quick response time in SF for a life and death emergency; times in East Bay cities such as Oakland and Richmond can be twice that, and there are instances where dispatched ambulances and police do not arrive at all to crime scenes. In other words, if you live in underfunded cities such as SF or Oakland, which have about half the police force of comparable cities in other states, then you should be thankful if you can just get through to 911 without being put on hold.
911: OK, the ambulance is staging. I need you to understand. That if the ambulance people, paramedics ...
Kulbir: What do you mean? ... My brother's going to die out here!
911: I'll stay on the line with you. If the paramedics get hurt they cannot help your brother, so you need to calm down and ...
Kulbir: Send more paramedics then!
Lovely. Kulbir thinks he is a general ordering more troops into the breach, damn the danger. No one else's life matters except his brother's. It does not matter to him if a paramedic is killed as a result of his stupidity in taunting the tiger.
Kulbir: Can you fly a helicopter right here? Because I don't see no f- ambulance here.
What a sense of entitlement! He screws up and now he thinks he deserves helicopter attention.
Helicopter "Life Flights" are not usual for SF because no hospital in SF has helicopter landing facilities. Life Flights are more of an East Bay phenomenon.
These transcripts, the refusal of these brothers to cooperate with police, their documented effort to conceal what occurred that day, all speak to egomania and a prince-like expectation of entitlement.
What a pity Tatiana was not allowed time to finish her snack.
Some have said that the seriousness of the candidacy of Barack Obama is a sign that American culture is now ready to consider a black man for the post of first citizen.
Consider, however, the recent WST op-ed piece by Karl Rove. Rove criticized Obama's rhetoric, claiming that it was, "an unattractive carryover from his days playing pickup basketball at Harvard."
Or consider Andrew Cuomo's recent criticism of Obama. Cuomo stated that Obama could not "shuck and jive" his way to the White House.
Such blatantly racist statements, even from Democrats like Cuomo, should not startle us. These remarks remind me of Lenny Bruce's famous sketch, "How to Relax Your Colored Friends at Parties," in which a well-intentioned liberal, trying to "mingle" during the civil rights era, degenerates into crass stereotypes.
Clearly, we have a long way to go.
Ding-dang, y'all.
According to Perez Hilton, Britney Spears recently wrote a suicide note:
"The letter was very sad," says a friend. "It was filled with reasons why she shouldn't live, included lines from poems about death."
Wonder what it said? What literary allusions did Unfitney conjure in her thanatopsis? Well, wait no more: My secret sources have found a copy of this note! I reproduce it here:
'Sup y'all, So I'm like dead or whatev' So like Sylvia Plath wrout it rite :
The frost makes a flower,
The dew makes a star,
The dead bell, the dead bell,
Somebody's done for.
And she was all like:
The woman is perfected
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity
Flows in the scrolls of her toga
Her bare
Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over
So like when the pap-paps all take my pikture, I'm all like
I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wire.
Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.
I'm like exactly like Sylvia Plath, y'all. Here's my poetry
Gimme gimme more, gimme more
Gimme gimme more, gimme gimme more
Gimme more more
You see? That's like litachur an shit.
As my last well and testimoney, I leave all my mony and worldly posesions to Leona Helmsley's dog. Piece out, Brit Brit X(
On 18 October 2007, British police arrested the owner of TV-Links[1] and shut down his website, www.tv-links.co.uk. This popular site[2] had provided links to a variety of copyrighted programs. If one missed an episode of The Sopranos or LOST, TV-Links would have it. One could watch programs, cartoons, documentaries. Some of this material was not copyrighted; some of the material came from mainstream sites such as videos.google.com. If one didn’t feel like going out to the movies, many current releases were available. If TV-Links had actually hosted the material, then it would be in clear violation of copyright laws; however, TV-Links scrupulously avoided hosting any material, and only provided links to other websites. Many of these other websites, such as http://www.ouou.com/, are located in
The end of TV-Links brings up disturbing questions. The Internet is based on upon links of information to other information. If police action infringes upon this structure, the Internet will alter beyond recognition. Imagine a web page that had no links to any other information, for fear of being sued if one of those other sites put up copyright infringing material.
Is it a crime to merely link to information? Can a person be put in jail for making a link of his website to another page that shows content which, in its home country, is legal? Would it be illegal then to put the web address of a copyright-infringing site on a t-shirt? In a painting? Anti-Internet extremists would insist that, yes, this would be the case. The situation would be no different than a person offering information on how to kill; even if that person did not personally murder, he encouraged others to do this illegal act. This example seems extreme, but the strange reasoning of the DMCA makes committing a crime and making a few clicks on a blog equivalent in the eyes of the law.
The case of TV-Links is cause for pause among many bloggers and site owners. Imagine that you make a link to a video on YouTube. Much of the content on YouTube violates the DMCA; YouTube quickly removes infringing content that is brought to its attention, but some companies do not protest, happy for the added exposure on this site. You might imagine that if a video is allowed on YouTube, then you can make a link to it; however, under the logic of the attack on TV-Links, you are a violator as well. Will the police come knocking on your door, instead of YouTube’s?
When you make a search on Google, this search engine will return many sites that contain copyrighted material. Is Google violating the law? One might argue that the primary purpose of Google is not copyright infringement, while the primary purpose of TV-Links was copyright infringement. However, this gray distinction would require a case-by-case determination of which sites were in compliance of the law based on a fuzzy “intent” standard.
The Wayback Machine, www.archive.org/index.php, is a site that caches old website and is very useful for research. The Wayback Machine could therefore be in violation of the law if any of its cached information violated copyright law. And, in fact, The Wayback Machine had old pages of TV-Links, including the working links from that page, archived after TV-Links was shut down. For the sake of fairness, then, the operators of The Wayback Machine should have been arrested as well.
[1] Sheriff, Lucy, 2007. “TV-Links man was arrested under trademark laws.” The Register, 23 October 2007. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/23/tv_links_trademark_law/ Retrieved 27 October 2007.
[2] According to Alexa, http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?url=tv-links.co.uk, in the three months before its closure, TV-Links was ranked in the top 200 sites on the Internet, and was viewed by 0.293% of all Internet users.
Ok ... I thought I had no energy left to keep hating on BritBrit, but this video is too funny not to share. Enjoy. :)
Um, if you're easy offended, don't click on this. :)
The Iraqi Interior Ministry has just issued an order that may become the most important turning point in relations between the United States and the Maliki government. The Interior Ministry has ordered private Blackwater contractors to leave Iraq.
Why should the presence or absence of private contractors affect relations between nations? The answer lies in what Blackwater does for the United States.
Blackwater is a private security firm based in North Carolina. Founded in 1998 and composed primarily of ex-SEALS, Blackwater has worked in Iraq as the personal guards of Viceroy Paul Bremer and a number of other security details. As Jeremy Scahill has reported, Blackwater has become, in essence, a Praetorian Guard, an army within an army.
Blackwater does many things. In addition to guarding VIP;s, the mercenaries assist in the delivery of supplies into dangerous areas. It was on one of these missions that four Blackwater employees were killed, burned, and hanged from a bridge in Falluja in 2004. Blackwater was also used to defend federal buildings in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Why American troops in Iraq were deemed insufficient for such tasks, as was past procedure, has never been fully explained.
This war has used private mercenaries like no other war before it. There are almost 50,000 private security employees in Iraq, spread among 180 different companies. Blackwater is the largest. During the first Iraq War, the ratio of private contractors to soldiers was 1:60; in the current war, the ratio is 1:3.
Although Blackwater employees do not get health benefits or retirement (they are 1099 independent contractors), they are paid handsomely, between $600 to $1500 per day, seven days a week. At the high end, in other words, they're making SAG union scale. Compare this with the average pay for US Army personnel: $1500-1800 per month, or $50-$60 per day. The work is essentially the same.
Blackwater has its own guns, its own helicopters and Humvees. It is a private army for hire. And it is answerable to no one.
Blackwater employees are immune from either Iraqi or American law in the course of the jobs, per the infamous Order No. 17. They operate in a Kafkaesque legal limbo.
The legal status of operations in Iraq has always been nebulous. As Rajiv Chandrasekaran reports in one of the most important books to come out of the war, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Americans in Iraq operated in a Helleresque environment, where they could not drink alcohol or smoke indoors or lift boxes without back braces, per strictly enforced OSHA regulations, while mortar shells rained down and fires raged through buildings amid the smoke, chaos, and uncontrolled looting.
If Blackwater stays, and the Interior Ministry's order is nullified by their American masters, then the last shred of independence of the Maliki government will be ripped away. Malaki will then simply be seen as an employee of George Bush, rather than a head of state. If Blackwater leaves, this will radically change the way this war is conducted. This could be the beginning of the end.
When I was young, teachers in home economics advised me that one should budget no more than 30% of one's gross income (before taxes) on housing.
How do things stand today? Statistics just released by the Census Bureau show that in 2006, a significant portion of the US population spent more than 30% on housing.
California, not surprisingly, led the pack: Fully 52% of Californians spent more than the 30% benchmark. In fact, 22% of homeowners and 27% of renters spent more than 50% of their total income (before taxes) on housing.
The state with the lowest percentage of people spending above the 30% benchmark was, dontchaknow, North Dakota (23%), followed by West Virginia (25%).
The states with the highest percentage of people spending above the 30% benchmark were Florida (45%), New Jersey (45%), Connecticut (44%); for the western United States, Nevada came in at 46%, Washington at 40%, and Oregon and Colorado both at 39%. According to my high school home economics teachers, these states should receive failing grades.
Free market theory dictates that the high prices in these areas will affect peoples' decisions about where they live, and those of lower incomes will flock to the Midwest; this migration will lower prices on the coasts, and raise demand in the Midwest. . But the flaw in this theory is that it assumes living locations are fluid; few people are psychologically ready to shift their homes as easily as they would shift which gas station to choose. Are Californians thinking about moving back to Oklahoma, in a reverse Dustbowl migration? The idea is laughable.
What we need to realize is this: The "free market" does not follow theory in matters of housing, and we need to think about structuring our cities in different ways. Single family homes, with a detached house and large back yard, should be the rarity rather than the standard abode. At present, California is building legions of new suburban homes to meet the alleged "demand," but what is missed is that these styles of homes will remain unaffordable to the majority of people. We need a different architecture. We need to build up, not out.
I would write more, but I have to go work now to pay my rent. :)
Today's New York Times had a front-page article about efforts of the Bush administration to prevent states such as California from insuring children with medical care.
New federal regulations, released last Friday, require that certain children moving from private plans to state-sponsored programs must have at least a one-year period of uninsurance. Also, to prevent parents from trying to substitute public programs for private insurance, the Bush administration requires that copayments and premiums should be equivalent to private insurance.
These limits kick in if states wish to provide funding with the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), a law passed in 1997 to help low-income children have health care. States such as California and New York have tried to expand this coverage option to those of incomes above the federal poverty level, and herein lies the rub.
The federal poverty level for a family of four is $20,650. Everyone agrees that this number is based upon faulty calculations, and comes from an earlier era in which housing cost a much lower percentage of income, while food cost substantially higher. We're living in a different time, and the poverty level calculation now vastly understates true purchasing power. However, no president wants to be the one to revise this poverty level and produce perhaps as much as a doubling of the poverty rate under his administration. So the fiction of this poverty rate calculation continues, even though all parties know it is a fraud.
The federal poverty rate doesn't take into account the vast regional differences in the cost of living. I have some friends living in Ohio who want to move back here, but cannot sell their beautiful 3 bedroom house for their asking price of $168,000. The median housing price in the Bay Area in April 2007 was $720,000. And if you're thinking that salaries in the Bay Area compensate for this difference, their move will involve a pay cut.
New York recently tried to allow children to enroll in the CHIP if their families earned as much as 400% of the federal poverty level. While this may seem like a circumvention of the point of CHIP--helping low-income kids--the level of qualification for enrolling in CHIP is based on the fiction of the federal poverty level.
The Bush administration now wants to force any child coming from a family with an income 250% of the federal poverty level to 1) wait one year before being enrolled, and 2) pay private insurance-equivalent copayments and premiums.
As an added catch, states wishing to enroll any children above 200% of the poverty level must prove they have enrolled 95% of below 200% children in the state. Not one state has achieved this to date, and according a Professor Cindy Mann of Georgetown, no state can achieve such an unrealistically high goal. Setting these pie-in-the-sky goals, such as the fantasy in No Child Left Behind of 100% of children performing at grade level by the 2013-14 school year--even if they are developmentally delayed, even if school rooms are falling apart, while school budgets are slashed--is endemic to an administration divorced from what is mocking calls "the reality-based community."
All this is just another sordid, embarrassing episode in the long national disgrace of our health care system. This byzantine, Kafkaesque labyrinth of regulations is well-designed to do one thing: To punish sick children for being poor. What kind of a president does that, and what sort of country are we if we allow it?
